<persName ref="http://d-nb.info/gnd/101222548">Julius Stettenheim</persName>, The Jew-Eater. Hope You Like It!, <placeName ref="http://vocab.getty.edu/tgn/7005289">Hamburg</placeName> <date when="1862">1862</date> Richard S. Levy Institute for the History of the German Jewsredaktion@juedische-geschichte-online.net
Beim Schlump 83, 20144 Hamburg

With the kind permission of State Archive Hamburg.

jgo:source-120

Staatsarchiv Hamburg, B-StAHH, Bibliothek, A 762/7 Kapsel 01.

Julius StettenheimHamburgJune 1862Staatsarchiv HamburgB-StAHH, Bibliothek, A 762/7 Kapsel 01. EnglishSource:Textdeu Mad Spook in a Summer Night’s Dream. I lay asleep. Night was not quite Cast away, day had not yet broken … Then came Nightmare, the dream god’s rude son, His great heaviness weighed down upon my breast. I saw the world in a shape so strange, As chance alone could transform it: The Jew now ruled, with iron force, The Christian was in every land oppressed. “Christian” was made a dirty word, The Christian nose tweaked by every pushy beggar, What and how he spoke, it was derided. From state service was he banned, shoved back into haggling. The king was named Cohn, the minister Bär, The cloistered rabi was something great, On Shabbos the tribunal and the town hall stood empty, And all Leipzig called out: Hail! Herr Moses. Then it crossed my mind, me a democrat In a Jew-Parliament, must justify myself And in speech and writing give this Little Christian state within-the-state a right good scolding. Thus I held forth, we are great, you are small, We are the true humans, you are heathens And yet would be our equals, Well then, get circumcised and don’t resist it. What is the why and wherefore? Just look at America Where you seized the blacks and sold them? Did you not in Madrid and for the glory of God Light the funeral pyre for heretics? Forget you St. Bartholomew’s Night? Who stoked the holy Temple into flames? Who were the murderers in Damascus? And who bled us so heartlessly on the rack? Who shot Blum? Who swore on Leipzig’s field the sacred oath? Who then broke it? In Holstein, spoke you not of blood-money? For what cause do bones lie bleaching in the Crimea? Everyone and all the world know this, Between you and us there must stand a barrier, Never can you be our equals – Lest you dissolve your state and report for circumcision! What a fool! What an ass I am! I forgot That we too are mired in sins. I would be presumptuous to claim innocence, Once having looked at our woeful past; I am an ass to remain silent about what all know, That I torment the children for their fathers’ sins When every nation that ever existed Can number its days by bloodshed and injustice. Alas, I said all this, it was now a reality, I spoke, I wrote, and shamelessly had it printed, And what happened?...I became a laughing-stock, The others shouted: That guy is simply nuts! Whereupon I woke up. From my pillow drenched in sweat, I launched the stinging missiles at him, Who, with tables turned, Unloaded so laughable a farce upon us!