by Henry Ford

(Reprinted from the 21 May 1921 Issue of the house journal of the Ford Motor Co., the Dearborn Independent and slightly edited by Raymond Bray to eliminate the numerous uses of "which" for "that" in the original.)

The Jewish Question exists wherever Jews appear, says 'Theodor Herzl, because they bring it with them. It is not their numbers that create the Question, for there is in almost every country a larger number of other aliens than of Jews. It is not their much-boasted ability, for it is now coming to be understood that, give the Jew an equal start and hold him to the rules of the game, and he is not smarter than anyone else; indeed, in one great class of Jews the zeal is quenched when opportunity for intrigue is removed.

The Jewish Question is not in the number of Jews who here reside, not in the American's jealousy of the Jew's success, certainly not in any objection to the Jew's entirely unobjectionable Mosaic religion; it is in something else, and that something else is the fact that Jewish influence on the life of the country where Jews dwell; in the United States it is the Jewish influence on American life.

That the Jews exert an influence, they themselves loudly proclaim. One is permitted to think that they really claim a stronger influence than they possess, especially in those higher regions where excellent and determinative influences have been at work. The Jews claim, indeed, that the fundamentals of the United States are Jewish and not Christian, and that the entire history of this country should be rewritten to make proper acknowledgment of the prior glory due to Judah. If the question of influence rested entirely on the Jewish claim, there would be no occasion for doubt; they claim it all. But it is kindness to hold them to the facts; it is also more clearly explanatory of conditions in our country. If they insist that they "gave us our Bible" and "gave us our God" and "gave us our religion," as they do over and over again with nauseating superciliousness throughout all their polemic publications—not a single one of these claims being true—they must not grow impatient and profane while we complete the list of the real influences the have set at work in American life.

It is not the Jewish people but the Jewish idea, and the people only as vehicles of the idea, that is the point at issue. As it was Prussianism and not the German people that was the objective in the recent war, so in this investigation of the Jewish Question, it is Jewish influence and the Jewish Idea that is being discovered and defined.

The Jews are propagandists. This was originally their mission. But they were to propagate the central tenet of their religion. This they failed to do. By failing in this they, according to their own Scriptures failed everywhere. They are now without a mission of blessing. Few of their leaders even claim a spiritual mission. But the mission idea is still with them in a degenerate form; it represents the grossest materialism of the day; it has become a means of sordid acquisition instead of a channel of service.

The essence of the Jewish Idea in its influence on the labor world is the same as in all other departments—the destruction of real values in favor of fictitious values. The Jewish philosophy of money is not to "make money," but to "get money." The distinction between these two is fundamental. That explains Jews being "financiers" instead of "captains of industry." It is the difference between "getting" and "making."

The creative, constructive type of mind has an affection for the thing it is doing. The non-Jewish worker formerly chose the work he liked best. He did not change his employment easily, because there was a bond between him and the kind of work he had chosen. Nothing else was so attractive to him. He would rather draw a little less money and do what he liked to do, than a little more and do what irked him. The "maker" is always thus influenced by his liking.

Not so the "getter." It doesn't matter what he does, so long as the income is satisfactory. He has no illusions, sentiments or affections on the side of work. It is the "geld" that counts. He has no attachment for the things he makes, for he doesn't make any; he deals in the things that other men make and regards solely on the side of their money-drawing value. "The joy of creative labor" is nothing to him, not even an intelligible saying.

Now, previous to the advent of Jewish socialistic and subversive ideas, the predominant thought in the labor world was to "make" things and thus "make" money. There was a pride among mechanics. Men who made things were a sturdy, honest race because they dealt with ideas of skill and quality, and their very characters were formed by the satisfaction of having performed useful functions in society. They were the Makers. And society was solid as long as they were solid. Men made shoes as exhibitions of their skill. Farmers raised crops for the inherent love of crops, not with reference to far-off money-markets. Everywhere The Job was the main thing and the rest was incidental.

The only way to break down this strong safeguard of society—a laboring class of sturdy character—was to sow other ideas among it; and the most dangerous of all the ideas sown was that which substituted "get" for "make." With the required manipulation of the money and food markets, enough pressure could be brought to bear on the ultimate consumers to give point to the idea of "get," and it was not long before the internal relations of American business were totally upset, with Jews at the head of the banking system, and Jews at the head of both the conservative and radical elements of the Labor Movement, AND, most potent of all, the Jewish Idea sowed through the minds of workingmen. What idea? The old idea of "get" instead of "make."

The idea of "get" is a vicious, anti-social and destructive idea when held alone; but when held in company with "make" and as second in importance, it is legitimate and constructive. As soon as a man or a class is inoculated with the strictly Jewish Idea of "getting"—("getting mine;" "getting while the getting is good;" "honestly if you can, dishonestly if you must—but get it"—all of which are notes of this treasonable philosophy), the very cement of society loses its adhesiveness and begins to crumble. The great myth and fiction of Money has been forced into the place of real things, and the second step of the drama can thus be opened up.

Jewish influence on the thought of the working men of the United States, as well as on the thought of business and professional men, has been bad, thoroughly bad. This is not manifested in a division between "capital" and "labor," for there are no such separate elements; there is only the executive and operating departments of American business. The real division is between the Jewish idea of "get" and the Anglo-Saxon idea of "make," and at the present time the Jewish idea has been successful enough to have caused an upset.

All over the United States, in many branches of trade, Communist colleges are maintained, officered and taught by Jews. Those so-called colleges exist in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Rochester, Pittsburgh, New York, Philadelphia, and other cities, the whole intent being to put all American labor on a "get" basis, which must prove the economic damnation of the country. And that, apparently, is the end sought, as in Russia.

Until Jews can show that the infiltration of foreign Jews and the Jewish Idea into the American labor movement has made for the betterment in character and estate, in citizenship and economic statesmanship, of the American workingman, the charge of being an alien, destructive and treasonable influence will have to stand.

The last place the uninstructed observer would look for traces of Jewish influence is in the Christian church, yet if he fails to look there he will miss much. If the libraries of our theological seminaries were equipped with complete files of Jewish literary effort in the United States during the past 15 years, and if theological students were required to read these Jewish utterances, there would be less silly talk and fewer "easy marks" for Jewish propaganda in the American pulpit. For the next 25 years every theological seminary should support a chair for the study of Modern Jewish Influence and the Protocols. The fiction that the Jews are an Old Testament people faithful to the Mosaic law would then be exploded, and timid Christians would no longer superstitiously hesitate to speak the truth about them because of that sadly misinterpreted text: "I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee."

There is a mission for the pulpit to liberate the Church from what the New Testament Scriptures call "the fear of the Jews."

The pulpit has also the mission of liberating the Church from the error, that Judah and Israel are synonymous. The reading of the Scriptures that confuse the tribe of Judah with Israel, and that interpret every mention of Israel as signifying the Jews, is at the root of more than one-half the confusion and division traceable in Christian doctrinal statements.

The Jews are not "The Chosen People," though practically the entire Church has succumbed to the propaganda that declares them to be.

The Jewish tinge of thought has of late years overspread many Christian statements, and the uninstructed clergy have proved more and more amenable to Jewish suggestion.

The flaccid condition of the Church, so much deplored by spokesmen who had regard for her inner life, was brought about not by "science," not by "scholarship," not by the "increase of light and learning"—for none of these things are antagonistic even to incomplete statements of truth—but by Jewish-German higher criticism.

The defenders of the faith have fought long and valiantly against the inroads made by the so-called Higher Criticism, but were sadly incapacitated in their defense, because they did not see that its origin and purpose were Jewish. It was not Christian; it was not German; it was Jewish. It is almost wholly discounted today in the practical life of the church, but it still adheres to the darker corners of the colleges, along with the Red Bolshevism that is taking root there under Jewish influences.

Let the Christian minister who wishes to know the source of Jewish influence in the church look over the names of the more notorious "German" Higher Critics of the Bible, and consider their race. Add to them one Frenchman, an atheist and a Jew, and you have modern "liberal" sources very complete:

Wellhausen Kuehue

Strauss Hitzig

Ewald Renan

It s perfectly in keeping with the Jewish World Program that this destructive influence should be sent out under Jewish auspices, and it is perfectly in keeping with non-Jewish trustfulness to accept the thing without looking at its source. A great many so called "liberals" played the Jewish game for a time; they are now coming back to the old citadel that stood in its own strength and without their patronage while the fever of Higher Criticism raged.

The church is now victim of a second attack against her, in the rampant Socialism and Sovietism that have been thrust upon her in the name of flabby and unmoral theories of "brotherhood" and in an appeal to her "fairness. The church has been made to believe that she is a forum for discussion and not a high place for annunciation. She has been turned from a Voice into an echo of jangling cries. Jews have actually invaded, in person and in program, hundreds of American churches, with their subversive and impossible social ideals, and at last became so cocksure of their domination of the situation that they were met with the inevitable check.

Clergymen ought to know that seven-eighths of the economic mush they speak from the pulpit is prepared by Jewish professors of political economy and revolutionary leaders. They should be informed that the economic thought has been so completely Judaized by means of a deliberate and masterly plan of camouflaged propaganda, that the mass thought of the crowd (which is the thought mostly echoed in "popular" pulpits and editorials) is more Jewish than Jewry itself holds.

The Jew has got hold of the church in doctrine, in liberalism, so-called, and in the feverish and feeble sociological diversions of many pulpits and adult classes.

If there is any place where a straight study of the Jewish Question should be made, with the Bible always in hand as the authoritative textbook, it is in the modern church that is unconsciously giving allegiance to a mass of Jewish propaganda.

It is not reaction that is counseled here; it is progress along constructive paths, the paths of our forefathers, the Anglo-Saxons, who have to this day been the World-Builders, the Makers of cities and commerce and continents; and not the Jews who have never been builders or pioneers, who have never peopled the wilderness, but who move in upon the labors of other men. They are not to be blamed for not being Builders and Pioneers, perhaps; they are to be blamed for claiming all the rights of pioneers; but even then, perhaps, their blame ought not to be so great as the blame that rests upon the sons of the Anglo-Saxons for rejecting the straightforward Building of their fathers, and taking up with the doubtful ideas of Judah.

Colleges are being constantly invaded by the Jewish Idea. The sons of the Anglo-Saxon are being attacked in their very heredity. The sons of the Builders, the Makers, are being subverted to the philosophy of the destroyers. Young men in the first exhilarating months of intellectual freedom are being seized with promissory doctrines, the source and consequences of which they do not see. There is a natural rebelliousness of youth, which promises progress; there is a natural venturesomeness to play free with ancient faiths, both of which are ebullitions of the spirit and significant of dawning mental virility. It is during the periods when these adolescent expansions are in process that the youth is captured by influences that deliberately lie in wait for him in the colleges. True, in after years a large portion come to their senses sufficiently to be able "to sit on the fence and see themselves go by," and they come back to sanity. They find that "free love" doctrines make exhilarating club topics, but that the Family--the old-fashioned loyalty of one man and one woman to each other and their children--is the basis, not only of society, but of all personal character and progress. They find that Revolution, while a delightful subject for fiery debates and an excellent stimulant to the feeling of supermanlikeness, is nevertheless not the process of progress.

And, too, they come at length to see that the Stars and Stripes and the Free Republic are better far than the Red Star and Soviet sordidness.

When a Supreme Court Justice addressed one of the greater American Universities, a student came to him after the lecture and said: "It gave me do much pleasure to hear your lectures, for they were the first kindly words I have heard said about our government since the commencement of my university career."

For years the secular magazines have been carrying articles on the question, "What Is Wrong With the Colleges?" The answer is perfectly clear to those who can discern Jewish influence in American life.

The trouble with the colleges has progressed along precisely the same lines that have been described above in connection with the churches. First, Jewish higher criticism in the destruction of young man 's sense of respect for the ancient foundations; second, Jewish revolutionary social doctrines. The two always go together. They cannot live apart. They are the fulfillment of the Protocol's program to split non-Jewish society by means of ideas.

It is idle to attack the "unbelief" of college students, idle to attack their "radicalism"—these are always the qualities of immaturity. But it is not idle to show that social radicalism ("radicalism" being a very good word very sadly misused) and antagonism to the religious sanctions of the moral law, both come from the same source. Over the fountain of Revolutionism and Anti-Christian belief place the descriptive and definitive term "Jewish," and let the sons of the Anglo-Saxons learn from what waters they are drinking. That source is not Mosaic, but Jewish--there is a world of difference between them.

The central groups of Red philosophers in every university is a Jewish group, with often enough a "Gentile front" in the shape of a deluded professor. Some of these professors are in the pay of outside Red organizations. There are Intercollegiate Socialist Societies, swarming with Jews and Jewish influences, and toting Jewish professors around the country, addressing medics and lits and even the Divinity schools, under the patronage of the best civic and university auspices. Student lecture courses are fine pasture for this propaganda. Inter-collegiate Liberal Leagues are established everywhere, the purpose evidently being to give students the thrill of believing that they are taking part in the beginning of a great new movement, comparable to the winning of Independence or the Abolition of slavery. As stein parties gradually cease as a college diversion, Red conferences will come in; it is part of the effervescence of youth.

The revolutionary forces that head up in Jewry rely very heavily on the respectability that is given their movement by the adhesion of students and a few professors. It was so in Russia--everyone knows what the name, "student" eventually came to signify in that country. And as the result, while Sovietists are glorifying the "success" of the Revolution, men like Maxim Gorky are sending out appeals for food to prevent the intelligentsia from starving to death.

The Jewish Chatauqua, which works exclusively in colleges and universities, together with Bolshevism in art, science, religion, economics and sociology, are driving straight through the Anglo-Saxon traditions and landmarks of our race of students. And these are ably assisted by professors and clergymen whose thinking has been dislocated and poisoned by Jewish subversive influences in theology and sociology.

What to do about it? Simply identify the source and nature of the influence that has overrun our colleges. Let the students know that their choice is between the Anglo-Saxons and the Tribe of Judah. Let the students decide, in making up their allegiance, whether they will follow the Builders or those who seek to tear down.

It is not a case for argument. Radicalism and religious indifferentism are states of mind. Normal men usually grow out of them in good time. Others are caught and held to the end. But the treatment is not argument.

The only absolute antidote to the Jewish influence is to call college students back to a pride of race. We often speak of the Fathers as if they were the few who happened to affix their signatures to a great document that marked a new era of liberty. The Fathers were the men of the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic race. The men who came across Europe with civilization in their blood and in their destiny; the men who crossed the Atlantic and set up civilization on a bleak and rock-bound coast; the men who drove west to California and north to Alaska; the men who peopled Australia and seized the gates of the world at Suez, Gibralter and Panama; the men who opened the tropics and subdued the artics--Anglo-Saxon men, who have given form to every government and a livelihood to every people and an ideal to every century. They got neither their God nor their religion from Judah, nor yet their speech nor their creative genius--they are the Ruling People, Chosen throughout the centuries to Master the world, by Building it ever better and better and not by breaking it down.

Into the camp of this race, among the sons of the rulers, comes a people that has no civilization to point to, no aspiring religion, no universal speech, no great achievement in any realm but the realm of "get," cast out of every land that gave them hospitality, and these people endeavor to tell the sons of the Saxons what is needed to make the world what it ought to be.

If our sins in college follow this counsel of dark rebellion and destruction, it is because they do not know whose sons they are, of what race they are the scions.

Let there be free speech to the limit in our universities and free intercourse of ideas, but let Jewish thought be labeled Jewish, and let our sons know the racial secret.

The warning has already gone out through the colleges. The system of procedure is already fully known. An how simple it is:

First, you secularize the public schools--"secularize" is the precise word the Jews use for the process. You prepare the mind of the public school child by enforcing the rule that no mention shall ever be made to indicate that culture or patriotism is in any way connected with the deeper principles of the Anglo-Saxon religion. Keep it out, every sight and sound of it! Keep out also every word that will aid any child to identify the Jewish race.

Then, when you have thus prepared the soil, you can go into the universities and colleges and enter upon the double program of pouring contempt on all the Christian landmarks, at the same time filling the void with Jewish revolutionary ideas.

The influence of the common people is driven out of the public schools, where common people's influence can go; but Jewish influence is allowed to run rampant in the higher institutions where the common people's influence cannot go.

Secularize the public schools, and you can then Judaize the universities.

This is the "liberalism" that Jewish spokesman so much applaud. In labor unions, in church, in university, it has tinctured the principles of work, faith, and society. This will not be denied, because the proof of it is too thickly written over Jewish activities and utterances. Indeed, it is in exerting these very influences that Jewry convinces itself it is fulfilling its "mission" to the world. The capitalism attacked is non-Jewish capitalism; the orthodoxy attacked is Christian orthodoxy; the society attacked is the Anglo-Saxon form of society, all of which by their destruction would redound to the glory of Judaism.

The list could be extended--the influence of the Jewish idea on Anglo-Saxon sports and pleasure, on the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic idea of patriotism, on the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic conception of the learned professions; the influence of the Jewish idea runs down through every department of life.

"Well," one very badly deluded Anglo-Saxon editor, wrapped up in Jewish advertising contracts, was heard to say, "if the Jews can get away with it, then they have a right to." It is a variant of the "answer" of Jewish origin, which runs thus: "How can a paltry 3,000,000 run the 100,000,000 of the rest of us? Nonsense!"

Yet, let it be agreed; if the Jewish idea is the stronger, if the Jewish ability is greater, let them conquer; let Anglo-Saxon principles and Anglo-Saxon power go down in ruins before the Tribe of Judah. But first let the two ideas struggle under their own banners; let it be a fair struggle. It is not a fair fight when in the movies, in the public schools, in the Judaized churches, in the universities, the Anglo-Saxon idea is kept away from Anglo Saxons on the plea that it is "sectarian" or "clannish" or something else. It is not a fair fight when Jewish ideas are offered as Anglo-Saxon ideas, because offered under Anglo-Saxon auspices. Let the heritage of our Anglo-Saxon-Celtic fathers have free course among their Anglo-Saxon-Celtic sons, and the Jewish idea can never triumph over it, in university forum or in the marts of trade. The Jewish idea never triumphs until first the people over whom it triumphs are denied the nurture of their native culture.

Judah has begun the struggle. Judah has made the invasion. Let it come. Let no man fear it. But let every man insist that the fight be fair. Let college students and leaders of thought know that the objective is the regnancy of the ideas and the race that have built all the civilization we see and that promise all the civilization of the future; let them also know that the attacking force is Jewish.