ABSTRACT
In 1848 a twenty-nine year old Englishwoman named Mary Ann Evans, infuriated by the idea of “race fellowship” among Jews that she thought she detected in Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Coningsby, told a friend that she was “almost ready to echo Voltaire’s vituperation. I bow to the supremacy of Hebrew poetry, but much of their early mythology and almost all their history, is utterly revolting. Their stock has produced a Moses and a Jesus but Moses was impregnated with Egyptian philosophy, and Jesus is venerated and adored by us only for that wherein he transcended or resisted Judaism…. Everything specifically Jewish is of a low grade.” This being so, she could even ruminate about how “Extermination … seems to be the law for inferior races,” including “even the Hebrew caucasian.” 1
