In addition to the people, there is also the "populace," something
standing outside of social classes and outside of culture, and united
by the dark sense of hatred against everything surpassing its
understanding and defenceless against brute force. I speak of the
populace which thus defines itself in the words of Pushkin, our great
poet, who himself suffered so cruelly from the aristocratic populace:
"We are insidious and shameless,
Ungrateful, faint-hearted and wicked;
At heart we are cold, sterile eunuchs,
Traducers, born to slavery."
It is mainly this populace that is the bearer of the brute principles,
such as anti-Semitism.
The Jews are defenceless, and this is especially dangerous for them in
the conditions of Russian life. Dostoyevsky, who knew the Russian soul
so well, pointed out repeatedly that defencelessness arouses in it a
sensuous inclination to cruelty and crime. In late years there have
appeared in Russia quite a few people who have been taught to think
that they are the finest of the wheat, and that their enemy is the
stranger, above all--the Jew.
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