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THE CHARACTER OF THE JEW BOOKS

Being, A Defence of The Natural Innocence of Man, Against Kings and Priests or Tyrants and Impostors

BY PHILANTHROPOS

London:
PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY R. CARLILE, 55, FLEET STREET.

1821.

Price Twopence.

THE CHARACTER OF THE JEW BOOKS

Justice is due to all men; it is a gem that sheds a brilliant radiance upon the tyrant and the slave, upon the rich and the poor; Justice is in the moral world what the sun is in the physical, one illuminates the intellectual, the other the terrestrial system. By the standard of justice measure the rulers of the earth; try their actions, calculate their characters, weigh their governments in the balance of justice; when analyzed by this test and found unalloyed, grant unmeasured praise; if deficient, if tyranny, villainy, bigotry and cruelty preponderate, condemn them, and consign them to the execration of all mankind. Notwithstanding the exertions of Philosophy, and the undaunted perseverance ofa few men, barbarity, cupidity and bigotry, generally prevail; the numerous devotees, the thronged congregation of rogues, slaves, and fools at the shrine of avarice, too frequently paralyze the efforts of liberal men; mean, pitiful, despicable traffic, has introduced mercantile ideas, and consequentlythis nation of hucksters estimates merit in money. The rich assume to be privileged, and unceasingly condemn and revile the industrious poor, as being vicious, immeasurably criminal, and abandoned to every moral offence: regardless of themselves, their families, their society, and their souls; let us enquire if those charges are just, if the poor are degenerated, if they have abandoned themselves to contempt, to degradation, to confinement, and to death;let us endeavour to ascertain if the laws of nature are changed, let its endeavour to ascertain if the precepts of reason are revoked, let us endeavour to ascertain if death is preferred to life. The poor are the most numerous, the most industrious, and the most useful part of society; should this portion, this staple part, this lever of the nation be so deserving of contempt, of execration, and of condemnation, as some puny-minded, rickety-headed fools would have us believe, much might be feared for the continued indissolubility of the nation; such as have monopolized the labour of the poor, and enjoy the rank of the privileged rich, incessantly insist that severe laws, vindictive tortures, and daily sanguinary executions would insure tranquility endangered, preserve religion scoffed, suppress blasphemy encouraged, strengthen monarchies loathed, despised, scorned, hated and execrated. The passions of distrust, revenge, fear, hatred, malice and cruelty distract the rich, that thrive by treachery, hypocrisy, tyranny and rapacity; conscious of turpitude, stung by remorse, alarmed for the safety of ill-gotten gains, the robbers and impostors are afraid the people will claim a restitution of rights and property.

In investigating the origin of crime perhaps it will appear that the robbery and hypocrisy of King, and Priests, and Peers, have been the exciting cause, the immoderate agents, the operative principle, that called into action the criminal intention imputed to the poor; if such is proved, could any thing be more cruel, more shocking, more outrageous of common decency, than for the rich and privileged robbers, usurpers and impostors, to accuse the people of crimes they have been parties to, that they have promoted by rapine, encouraged by example; crimes that they may in effect have committed, for Kings and Peers and Priests unblushingly practise trades of fraud, imposition, and rapine, their titles admit their separation from men; experience proves they have inclination and capacity for any degree of villainy, the worst, the vilest, and the most detestable of men can invent; no disgrace can move, no contempt can stagger, no scorn can lower such as pollute the sanctuaries of the Church and Throne, as certain places are called.

Survey man from his origin, from his birth, from his infancy, he enters the word without reflection, without will, without ideas; his mind can be formed, it can be moulded, it can be directed at pleasure; his ideas, his expressions, his actions, his life, are the result of his, education; his infancy, adolescence, his manhood, and his old age, are the consequence of his instruction; without internal or innate idea, without any indigenous or spontaneous mind he was nothing but from without: he has no ideas, no conceptions, but such as result from external impressions; if deficient organization has deprived him of sight, he knows nothing of colours; of hearing, nothing of sounds; of both, he is an idiot.

If a male child is shut up in a dungeon and fed through a chink, from twelve months old, he would know nothing beyond his cell, nothing further than its walls; he would know nothing of Kings, or Priests, or Peers, or prayers, or tithes, or taxes, or blasphemy; he would know nothing beyond softness and hardness, roughness and smoothness, heat and cold; he would know nothing beyond experience, nothing but by examination, and could have no conception of any thing beyond his hearing, seeing, touching, tasting and smelling; he would only have conception of such things as would be produced by a combination of his few ideas; even the man in the world without information knows nothing about the superstition of Mahomet, of Zoroaster, of Brahma, and anOld Jew; the child in the dungeon would know nothing of the cruelty ofJew Moses, the licentious ferocity of David, or the amiable gallantry of Solomon; he would know nothing about the incest, the polygamy and murder of the Jew fellows, he would knew nothing beyond simple sensations; let the experiment be continued, let the subject be placed in another situation, let him be taken at ten years of age from his dungeon and placed in a disused cell unfrequented by any person but his keeper, his instructor, his director, a monk and a eunuch; let his keeper be directed to teach him nothing but theJew Books, let all his information, let all his ideas, let all his impressions be from those famous books of law, of morality, and of religion; he will be taught that incest, adultery, fornication, hypocrisy, drunkenness, perjury, indecent exposure of women, rapine, and assassinations, are acts of religion, inculcated, enforced, patronized and practised, by Jew Kings and Jew Prophets, the chosen people of God; the subject could think of nothing but what resulted from his education, nothing but what was consistent with his theory; he could not speak of colours never seen, describe the people never known, prefer nations never heard of. Arrived under those exclusive impressions at puberty, sexual organization would be developed, a new ardour, a new stimulus, a new inclination would act. His mind would be filled with assassinations, with butcheries, with seductions and with debaucheries; now prepared, now surcharged with religious precepts, let him enter the world; his mind, his impressions, his actions would be formed upon the most sacred models, such as Moses, David and Solomon; he would be religiously prepossessed in favour of fraud, perjury, hypocrisy, incest, lust, perfidy and homicide; impressed with experience, impregnated with religion, with Jew Morality and sacred gibberish, he would act according to his experience, to his education, to his religion, and to his God; now set at liberty, impelled by his passions, irritated by opposition to his lust, his avarice, or his petulancy, he would, acting consistently and religiously, commit a rape, a robbery, or a murder, and offend againsthuman laws or the laws of reason, and not those of religion; it would avail nothing even among Kings, Priests and Peers, to plead the injunctions, the precepts, the examples, and the dignity of Moses, of Abraham, of Lot, of Isaac, of David, or of Solomon; suppose he is under sentence of death, who brought him into that situation? Is he to blame, is he the architect of his case, is he the cause of his fate, is he the author of his misfortunes, is human nature to be blotted by such affairs, is he to be censured, execrated, and despised? Oh no! he is the victim of iniquity, the martyr of wrong impressions, of wrong education and of bigotry, he acted according to his education, to his religion and to his experience; instruction in falsehood, in error, and in injustice has been the cause, and the blame could only be annexed to the authors of fallacious principles, interested bigots, and venal hypocrites. Any one instructed to follow practically the horrid dogmas set forth in theJew Books would soon reach the gallows, would be soon covered with crimes, would be soon consigned to infamy, and the dignity of human nature would be traduced, would be vilified, would be denounced by every silly fool, every fanatical quack, every ignorant pretender to legislation, and every Arch-hypocrite would call aloud for vengeance upon the seduced.

Man knows nothing of his infancy, he knows nothing but what he is taught, of the combination of ideas he has imbibed, consequently such as teach are answerable for the crimes, when the principles of education are false, and such are Kings, Priests and Legislators.

Impostors unnecessarily make, religion an important feature in men's education, the people are obliged to hear, to read, told to reflect upon some ignorant, illiterate, confused, and cabalisticalJew Books*, as these books contain false, cruel; lying, bloody and obscene stories, and hold up, as religious and moral, most indecent examples of lechery and murder, so they are very improper, very dangerous books to put into the hands of the uneducated and of children. TheJew Books will debauch the wife, seduce the maid, brutalize and mislead the son; the beastly maxims they inculcate, have been protected by the superstitious ignorance, and unreflecting barbarity of former venal bigoted Parliaments, whose ignorance would now disgrace the awl, or the spade; the intelligence of the age, however deficient, scorns the Gothic superstition of our forefathers; the hypocrites endeavour to enforce the jargon by the perversion of law, by the halter, by the torch, and by the sword; the intellectual dwarfs are laughed at when they call for everlasting wrath, and vow eternal perdition; anathemas, eliminations, and maledictions are ridiculed, as well as the rogue or fool that raves in the pulpit for his bread; where reason has not spread her rubies, false doctrines are dangerous; impressed upon vacant minds with such terrific emphasis and sordid assiduity, the youth and unsuspecting are corrupted; false doctrines are instilled into vacant minds, which are the precursors of crime.Eclat is given to the cruelties, of Moses, the lewd butcheries of David, and the amours of Solomon; the Jew Books say, "God approves such acts," and such heroes are said to be men after God's own heart: the statutes, blasphemously of course, proscribe such royal adventures. Either the statutes, are irreverend and impious, or the Jew Book is irreverend; law, religion, reason, and the Bible are the opposites of each other, so that the supporters of what is now called law, are the destroyers of the Jew Books; the destroyers of the Jew Books are statute lawyers, or blasphemers, as reasoners are termed in ant phraseology. Rare inconsistency!

* Sometimes called Bibles and Testaments.

Man is the creature of the instruction received; intellectual impressions form his motives of action, he is necessitated to direct his life according to those impressions; the mind is moulded like clay by the potter, carved like marble by the sculptor; as the Jew Books contain the religion and morals of children, and as they are cruel, wicked, and vindictive, so children have criminal propensities excited by their existence; first impressions are adulterated, early habits are poisoned, and future life impregnated with villainy.

So far from criminality being occasioned by neglect of Bible reading, as the ignorant, sordid hypocrite pretends, if it was more read, and education less mixed, men would be more debased, more perfidious, and more sanguinary. It is a matter of fact, it is known by experience, that since Bible Societies have been instituted, and Bible circulation widened, crimes have increased; the people have been more cruel, more brutal, more sanguinary, and more vindictive; the human mind has been poisoned, all the feelings of philanthropy have been blighted; if such gibberish should extend, the intelligence of the human mind will retrograde, and its element, a reign of Gothic ignorance predominate, omit the Bible part of education, and there will be fewer prostitutes, fewer debauchees, fewer perjurers, fewer tyrants, and fewer murderers; it is this part of education that pollutes and contaminates the essence of charity, and mildews all the flowers of intellectual cultivation; this is the source of the present barbarous schemes of government, idolized by rogues, and allowed by fools; the Jew Books are the prolific origin of the cruelty, the treachery, the avarice, and bloody-mindedness of Kings, Peers and Priests, and all thecoterie of impostors; they collect, they coalesce, they conspire to mislead, to dupe, to rule, to rob and degrade an unsuspecting and innocent people; a spontaneous course, a common object, a fellow feeling, bind together the plunderers and oppressors of mankind. If the people were instructed in morality, in justice, and in equity, they would see the robbery, the oppression, the intolerance, and villainy of Kings, Priests and Peers; if intelligence lead the people to see injustice, a spontaneous breath would remove it, and regal and sacked impostors cease to oppress; morality and justice should be the fundamental principles of education, then would men annihilate the baneful despotisms of Kings, and Priests; they would no longer support, no longer vindicate, no longer permit to exist, the canting slothful hypocrisy of voracious privileged impostors; such villains devour the produce of other men's toil, laugh at what themselves profess, without care, except to propagate and to continue, the simplicity, the ignorance, credulity and superstition, of a devoted, a plundered and inoffensive people; how can men listen to the precepts, or be persuaded by, the example of impostors, who spend their lives in licentiousness, in debauchery, in fornication, in drunkenness, and in sacred swindling? If men follow the example of impostors, abounding in nothing but infamy, they cease to have claims as citizens upon society, they forfeit every claim to credit, to justice, and the laws; they are the pests, the terror, and the disgrace of each other. The impostors demand the people to pay attention to the Jew Books, because the Jew Books recommend tribute and tithes; this code of the hypocrites is calculated to advance the intolerance of despots, and rapacity of priests; if the people followed some Scripture examples, and adopted as perfection the models preached up by the priests, they would be daily conspiring against Kings or tyrants, slaying their brothers, sleeping with their fathers' wives, debauching their sisters and daughters? in short, there would, be nothing but adultery, licentiousness, perjury, conspiracy, cruelty, perfidy, and murder; all those crimes would be the consequence of adhesion to the Jew Books; yet if the people do act like Jew-Book heroes, if they do commit any one crime, if either avarice or delusion excite to violence, they are accused of not having the fear of God before their eyes, of not having attended to thetithe-catching advice of Priests, and their books; but of being actuated by irreligious, profane, blasphemous, and diabolical motives; the dogmas of Priests and the Laws constantly dash, and while reason suffers thetithe-eating corporation to exist, legislation must be necessarily imperfect; it is impossible for the people to follow the law and the Bible; notwithstanding the suspicion of the Priests, the laws will act in contradiction to the Bible.

Men are the creatures of education, they act consistently with what they are taught; impostors and fools promulgating false principles are amenable to reason, and they should be to laws made by the whole of the people; men are criminal in consequence of a fallacious education adopted by regal and religious impostors, with a view of reaping other meu's harvests; the object is firstly, to debase, to enslave, to degrade the mind, and secondly, to plunder the victim; such scoundrels constantly preach up the deficiency of human nature, that more authority may be granted to those earthly saviours; a nation governed by Kings and Priests must be always in a state, of barbarism, of shameful indifference, and of crime; such nations are inhabited by an inferior race of men, when it may be presumed only a few scintillations of Philosophy have reached; States governed by Kings and Priests show the sun of reason is still below the horizon; if human nature is criminal in appearance, it is not so in fact, such cases are confounded with the errors of educators, which are instilled into man from the moment of his birth; if he is ever revengeful, vindictive, and sanguinary, attribute it to the licensed villains that blot the face, of the earth; reflect upon this you pampered; you bloated impostors, who riot upon the poor man's industry; you hypocrites, who carouse upon the sweat of his brow, and who sack the spoil of the criminal your rapacity has created;Tyrants and impostors! remember you are splendid at the expence of honesty, pain, disease and death; Give the people justice, and they will be laborious; if they are laborious, they must have plenty; and if they have plenty, they will be honest; men are naturally innocent, passive and pacific; false information and injustice are the sources of violence and crime; remember this, you corporate impostors and tyrants, and correct your own errors before you brand the innocent with infamy. Cast the beams out of your own eyes before you shed your acrimonious calumny upon the virtuous and the just.