Document: Richard Wagner, "Judaism in Music" (1850)


Source: Louis Snyder, (ed.), Documents of German History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1958), pp. 192-3.

It is necessary for us to explain the involuntary repugnance we possess for the nature and personality of the Jews.... According to the present constitution of the world, the Jew in truth is already more than emancipate: He rules, and will rule, as long as Money remains the power before which all our doings and our dealing lose their force.... The public art taste has been brought between the busy fingers of the Jews, who reside over an art bazaar.... The Jew's outward appearance always has something disagreeably foreign about it....

The Jew speaks the language of the nation in whose midst he dwells from generation to generation, but he always speaks it as an alien. Our whole European art and civilization have remained to the Jew a foreign tongue. In this speech, this art, the Jew can only after-speak and after-patch -- cannot truly make a poem of his words, an art work of his doings. In the peculiarities of Semitic pronunciation, the first thing that strikes our ear as quite outlandish and unpleasant, in the Jew's production of the voice sounds, is a creaking, squeaking, buzzing snuffle.... The Jew who is innately incapable of announcing himself to us artistically through either his outward appearance or his speech, and least of all through his singing, has, nevertheless, been able in the widest-spread of modern art varieties, to wit, in Music, to reach the rulership of public taste.... Control over money through usury has led the Jews to power, for modern culture is accessible to none but the well-to-do....

The Jews have never produced a true poet. [Heinrich Heine] reached the point where he duped himself into a poet, and was rewarded by his versified lies being set to music by our own composers. He was the conscience of Judaism, just as Judaism is the evil conscience of our modern civilization.