Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Chesterton Arthur Kenneth
Title : Apotheosis of the jew
Year : 1937

Link download : Chesterton_Arthur_Kenneth_-_Apotheosis_of_the_jew.zip

(From British Union Quarterly, April/June 1937, pp. 45-54.) Some years ago I was present at a pantomime in which an incredibly dirty and unkempt beggar haunted one scene after another, receiving condescending kindness from the heroine, but from everybody else the disdain which his state appeared to warrant. Then, when the crisis of the play arrived, with the hero in direst need, there was a blinding flash which consumed the beggar's rags and revealed him, bright-eyed, marcelhaired, and in a suit of glittering armor, as no less a personage than our patron Saint—St. George for Merrie England. Gazing at the heroic figure thus disclosed I saw that his smug countenance was beyond all question Jewish. Here, expressed in unconscious symbolism, was indeed the apotheosis of the Jew. Not only was the symbolism in some ways spiritually true, it was almost physically true, in that when the Jew arrives in the new land of his opportunity it is very often in rags that he comes, and before he reaches the magnificence of his apotheosis, becoming more flamboyantly English than the English, or German than the German, there is often not merely one flash of fire to consume his rags and complete the metamorphosis, but the flashes of many fires, even more meticulously planned than in the pantomime. More important, however, is the spiritual significance of the allegory, because it actually is a fact that Jewish mentality is fittingly expressed by the symbols of the beggar's rags and gilded, paper maché suits of armor. In such coverings one would expect an inferiority complex to drape itself; in alternating moods donning one or the other as it shuffles or struts upon the stage of life. And the entire tragedy of the Jew—a tragedy no less sad because of its insufferable effects on the rest of mankind—is due to his devastating sense of inferiority, his subconscious awareness that he is always, and under all circumstances, the supreme bounder and the eternal parvenu. Because of this terrible knowledge that is aroused in him a compensatory itch to dominate the world, to which purpose he dedicates the whole of his effort. ...