The Tradition of Judaism, Part VI. Selected Quotes about the Jewish People

For the LORD Almighty will care for his flock, the people of Judah, and make them like a proud horse in battle. From Judah will come the cornerstone, from them the tent peg, from them the battle bow, from them every ruler.

- Zechariah 10:3-4

Selected Quotes about the Jewish People

For the Jewish impact on humanity has been protean. In antiquity they were the great innovators in religion and morals. In the Dark Ages and early medieval Europe they were still an advanced people transmitting scarce knowledge and technology. Gradually they were pushed from the van and fell behind, by the end of the eighteenth century, they were seen as a bedraggled and obscurantist rearguard in the march of civilized humanity. But then came an astonishing second burst of creativity. Breaking out of the ghettos, they once more transformed human thinking, this time in the secular sphere. Much of the mental furniture of the modern world too is of Jewish fabrication.

- Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews

When over long periods of human history I scrutinized the activity of the Jewish people, suddenly there arose up in me the fearful question whether inscrutable Destiny, perhaps for reasons unknown to us poor mortals, did not, with eternal and immutable resolve, desire the final victory of this little nation.

- Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf

The Ten Commandments have lost their validity…Conscience is a Jewish invention. It is a blemish like circumcision.

- Adolph Hitler

A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die!

- Philip Roth

The time is at hand when the wearing of a prayer shawl and skullcap will not bar a man from the White House, unless, of course, the man is Jewish.

- Jules Farber

In Jewish history there are no coincidences.

- Elie Wiesel

Why do Jewish men die before their wives? They want to.

- Henny Youngman

President Obama Prays at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem

I'm Jewish. I don't work out. If God had wanted us to bend over, He would have put diamonds on the floor.

- Joan Rivers

I marvel at the resilience of the Jewish people. Their best characteristic is their desire to remember. No other people has such an obsession with memory.

- Elie Wiesel

Even if you are Catholic, if you live in New York you're Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you are going to be goyish even if you are Jewish.

- Lenny Bruce

Mankind, East and West, Christian and Muslim, accepted the Jewish conviction that there is only one G-d. Today it is polytheism that is so difficult to understand, that is so unthinkable.

- T.R. Grover, The Ancient World

Israel’s great achievement, so apparent that mention of it is almost trite, was Monotheism. It was an achievement that transformed subsequent history….One may raise the question whether any other single contribution from whatever source since human culture emerged from the stone age has had the far reaching effect upon history that Israel in this regard has exerted both through the mediums of Christianity and Islam and directly through the world of Jewish thinkers themselves

- The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, by H. and H. A. Frankfort

One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.

- Rabbi Yaacov Perrin

Why do Jewish divorces cost so much? They're worth it.

- Henny Youngman

Why do Jewish men die before their wives? They want to.

- Henny Youngman

I'm a religious man. I am Jewish but I believe in all religions. I believe in God and see him as an old man with a big white beard and pray to him every day for a few minutes.

- Uri Geller

People ask how can a Jewish kid from the Bronx do preppy clothes? Does it have to do with class and money? It has to do with dreams.

- Ralph Lauren

Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.

- Susan Sontag

May the LORD God bless you in the name of St. Judah