Written by one of America's most famous Jewish pornographers, this work provides a shocking and insightful account of Jewish attitudes towards Gentiles.
Samuel Roth first embraced Judaism and Zionism, but later blamed other Jews for his financial and legal troubles--which landed him in jail. He became so embittered with this treatment at the hands of his co-religionists that he wrote this book which he said exposed their underhanded dealings with the Gentile world.
Written by one of America's most famous Jewish pornographers, this work provides a shocking and insightful account of Jewish attitudes towards Gentiles.
Samuel Roth first embraced Judaism and Zionism, but later blamed other Jews for his financial and legal troubles--which landed him in jail. He became so embittered with this treatment at the hands of his co-religionists that he wrote this book which he said exposed their underhanded dealings with the Gentile world.
The engrossing narrative starts with the origin of Jewish behaviour, which Roth identifies as coming from the Old Testament/Talmud. Using specific examples (such as the Jewish patriarch Abraham's pimping of his wife Sarah to blackmail neighbouring Gentile tribes into handing over their possessions), Roth claims that such behavioural patterns are repeated to the present day.
This behaviour, Roth says, is founded in a Jewish belief that all the world's possessions belong to them by divine right. He then discusses the effect of Jews in law, media, medicine, prostitution, literature, arts, and much more. Also included is a fascinating section on the vow-breaking Kol Nidre prayer.
Roth also includes detailed sections on his own experiences at being swindled, and concludes that anti-semitism is always a reaction to Jewish behaviour, and not the product of some irrational disposition on the part of Gentiles, as is so often claimed.
He explains his own position in this way: "I don't think I ever shared the Jewish contempt for the goyim, which is part and parcel of all Jewish psychology."
This is the first full unexpurgated edition to be published since this book's original publication. It contains all seventeen chapters (including the appendix) and all seventeen original illustrations by John Conrad.
About the author: Polish-born Jew Samuel Roth (1893-1974) emigrated to America with his family at the age of four. By the 1920s he was an established poet, with his work published in some major literary outlets. At the same time, he began publishing erotica, most famously a pirated version of D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, which, although tame by present-day standards, landed Roth in jail on pornography charges. Later, he began publishing real pornography and was repeatedly arrested and jailed, eventually serving around nine years behind bars all told. His last great court case, which took place in 1957 (Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476), redefined the Constitutional test for determining what constitutes obscene material unprotected by the First Amendment and became a template for the liberalizing First Amendment decisions of the 1960s.
