Goyim Quotes

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While the Zionists try to make the rest of the World believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim. It doesn't even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organisation for their international world swindler, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks. It is a sign of their rising confidence and sense of security that at a time when one section is still playing the German, French-man, or Englishman, the other with open effrontery comes out as the Jewish race.
Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
God forbid the goyim think ladies who work the street are human beings! God forbid the goyim think that Jewish ladies love each other as human beings!
Paula Vogel (Indecent)
There is so much information in one Hebrew word that translators are hard pressed to decide how much information should be cut. Since the first official translation (the Septuagint), Jewish translators advocated translating Hebrew (for outsiders) at the 'story' level. pg viii
Michael Ben Zehabe (Song of Songs: The Book for Daughters)
Note to goyim readers: not every Jew who grew up in Brooklyn was rich. And as long as I’m on it, here’s another note: fuck you. That’s all. Whether or not you assumed we were rich, if you’re a goyim, fuck you. But keep reading, and tell your friends to buy the book.
Gilbert Gottfried
NO ONE GETS OUT OF CHILDHOOD ALIVE. It's not the first time I've said that. But among the few worthy bon mots I've gotten off in sixty-seven years, that and possibly one other may be the only considerations eligible for carving on my tombstone. (The other one is the one entrepreneurs have misappropriated to emboss on buttons and bumper stickers: The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity. (I don't so much mind that they pirated it, but what does honk me off is that they never get it right. They render it dull and imbecile by phrasing it thus: "The two most common things in the universe are..." (Not things, you insensate gobbets of ambulatory giraffe dung, elements! Elements is funny, things is imprecise and semi-guttural. Things! Geezus, when will the goyim learn they don't know how to tell a joke.
Harlan Ellison
It is indispensable for us to undermine all faith, to tear out of the mind of the "goyim" the very principle of god-head and the spirit, and to put in its place arithmetical calculations and material needs
Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion
One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the children of Israel continue to suffer? My grandmother Dodo thought it was because the goyim were jealous. The seder for Passover (which is a shame-faced simulacrum of a Hellenic question-and-answer session, even including the wine) tells the children that it's one of those things that happens to every Jewish generation. After the Shoah or Endlösung or Holocaust, many rabbis tried to tell the survivors that the immolation had been a punishment for 'exile,' or for insufficient attention to the Covenant. This explanation was something of a flop with those whose parents or children had been the raw material for the 'proof,' so for a time the professional interpreters of god's will went decently quiet. This interval of ambivalence lasted until the war of 1967, when it was announced that the divine purpose could be discerned after all. How wrong, how foolish, to have announced its discovery prematurely! The exile and the Shoah could now both be understood, as part of a heavenly if somewhat roundabout scheme to recover the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other pieces of biblically mandated real estate. I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind. (They are almost as repellent, in their combination of arrogance, masochism, and affected false modesty, as Edith Stein's 'offer' of her life to expiate the regrettable unbelief in Jesus of her former fellow Jews.) The sage Jews are those who have put religion behind them and become in so many societies the leaven of the secular and the atheist.
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
It was hard to listen to Goldwater and realize that a man could be half Jewish and yet sometimes appear twice as dense as the normal Gentile.
I.F. Stone
The goyim are a curious people," Malpesh once said to me, before he had discovered who and what I was. "Not curious that they want to know things," he clarified, "curious that they don't.
Peter Manseau (Songs for the Butcher's Daughter)
If karma were true then with seven billion people on this planet, all learning their karmic lessons, we would notice a definite improvement in the morality with every passing year. Well, have you noticed the world getting better? Isn’t it in fact in a terrible state, and getting worse? If anything, we seem to be subject to anti-karma … good deeds get punished, evil is rewarded, and no one learns their lessons!
Ranty McRanterson (Freedumb and Dumbocracy: Libertarians, Dogs, Goyim, the Internet, and Last Men)
Shimmel: “NEVER TRUST THE GOYIM. They are just like these other weird dangerous people, Messianic Jews! How dare Jews become “Christian-like”, Messianic? We should cherem (ban) them from every aspect of Jewish life. And we must strip them of every Jewish privilege!
Sipporah Joseph (Teacher of Counsel (Spirit Tales #3))
Tacked above the Girardi sink is a picture of Jesus Christ floating up to Heaven in a pink nightgown. How disgusting can human beings be! The Jews I despise for their narrow-mindedness, their self-righteousness, the incredibly bizarre sense that these cave men who are my parents and relatives have somehow gotten of their superiority – but when it comes to tawdriness and cheapness, to beliefs that would shame even a gorilla, you simply cannot top the goyim. What kind of base and brainless schmucks are these people to worship somebody who, number one, never existed, and number two, if he did, looking as he does in that picture, was without a doubt The Pansy of Palestine.
Philip Roth (Portnoy’s Complaint)
The outrage, the disgust inspired in my parents by the gentiles, was beginning to make some sense: the goyim pretended to be something special, while we were actually their moral superiors. And what made us superior was precisely the hatred and the disrespect they lavished so willingly upon us! Only what about the hatred we lavished upon them?
Philip Roth (Portnoy's Complaint (Vintage Blue))
The purpose of the, “Illuminati,” is to divide the non-Jews through political, economic, social, and religious means. The plan is for the opposing sides of the goyim (non-Jews) to be armed whilst incidents are to be provided in order for them to: fight amongst themselves; destroy national governments; destroy religious institutions; and eventually destroy each other.
Andrew Carrington Hitchcock (The Synagogue Of Satan - Updated, Expanded, And Uncensored)
They didn’t get him up there to talk to Jews. They didn’t buy him off for that. Don’t you understand?” Alvin asked, fiery now with what he took to be the underlying truth. “He’s up there talking to the goyim—he’s giving the goyim all over the country his personal rabbi’s permission to vote for Lindy on Election Day. Don’t you see, Uncle Herman, what they got the great Bengelsdorf to do? He just guaranteed Roosevelt’s defeat!
Philip Roth (The Plot Against America)
What the hell is going on!” my father began to shout. “What the hell did he do that for? That stupid speech! Does he think that one single Jew is now going to go out and vote for this anti-Semite because of that stupid, lying speech? Has he completely lost his mind? What does this man think he is doing?” “Koshering Lindbergh,” Alvin said. “Koshering Lindbergh for the goyim.” “Koshering what?” my father said, exasperated with Alvin’s seemingly speaking sarcastic nonsense at a moment of so much confusion. “Doing what?” “They didn’t get him up there to talk to Jews. They didn’t buy him off for that. Don’t you understand?” Alvin asked, fiery now with what he took to be the underlying truth. “He’s up there talking to the goyim—he’s giving the goyim all over the country his personal rabbi’s permission to vote for Lindy on Election Day. Don’t you see, Uncle Herman, what they got the great Bengelsdorf to do? He just guaranteed Roosevelt’s defeat!
Philip Roth (The Plot Against America)
Even as the handsome man answered, Aaron felt his mind skid like an automobile on black ice, felt his point of view shift so that he was looking down at all this, not accepting what would happen next but knowing what would happen, feeling—in his total inability to change one second of the past or future—the incredible, total unrelenting wave of helplessness that a hundred generations of Jews had felt before him, felt at the lip of the oven, felt at the door to the showers, felt while watching the flames rise from the old cities and while listening to the shouts of the goyim rise in ferocity and nearness.
Dan Simmons (Carrion Comfort)
An Irishman tried to convert me to belief in Christ; he would repeat, over and over, the goyim's saying: All roads lead to Rome. At night, my delirium would grow fat upon that metaphor: I sensed that the world was a labyrinth, impossible to escape— for all roads, even if they pretended to lead north or south, returned finally to Rome, which was also the rectangular prison where my brother lay dying, and which was also the Villa Triste-le-Roy. During those nights, I swore by the god that sees with two faces, and by all the gods of fever and of mirrors, to weave a labyrinth around the man who had imprisoned my brother. I have woven it, and it has stood firm: its materials are a dead heresiologue, a compass, an eighthcentury cult, a Greek word, a dagger, the rhombuses of a paint factory....
Jorge Luis Borges
Hartung tells of a horrifying study by the Israeli psychologist George Tamarin. Tamarin presented to more than a thousand Israeli schoolchildren, aged between eight and fourteen, the account of the battle of Jericho in the book of Joshua:   Joshua said to the people, ‘Shout; for the LORD has given you the city. And the city and all that is within it shall be devoted to the LORD for destruction . . . But all silver and gold, and vessels of bronze and iron, are sacred to the LORD; they shall go into the treasury of the LORD.’ . . . Then they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the sword . . . And they burned the city with fire, and all within it; only the silver and gold, and the vessels of bronze and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the LORD.   Tamarin then asked the children a simple moral question: ‘Do you think Joshua and the Israelites acted rightly or not?’ They had to choose between A (total approval), B (partial approval) and C (total disapproval). The results were polarized: 66 per cent gave total approval and 26 per cent total disapproval, with rather fewer (8 per cent) in the middle with partial approval. Here are three typical answers from the total approval (A) group:   In my opinion Joshua and the Sons of Israel acted well, and here are the reasons: God promised them this land, and gave them permission to conquer. If they would not have acted in this manner or killed anyone, then there would be the danger that the Sons of Israel would have assimilated among the Goyim.   In my opinion Joshua was right when he did it, one reason being that God commanded him to exterminate the people so that the tribes of Israel will not be able to assimilate amongst them and learn their bad ways.   Joshua did good because the people who inhabited the land were of a different religion, and when Joshua killed them he wiped their religion from the earth.   The justification for the genocidal massacre by Joshua is religious in every case. Even those in category C, who gave total disapproval, did so, in some cases, for backhanded religious reasons. One girl, for example, disapproved of Joshua’s conquering Jericho because, in order to do so, he had to enter it:   I think it is bad, since the Arabs are impure and if one enters an impure land one will also become impure and share their curse.   Two others who totally disapproved did so because Joshua destroyed everything, including animals and property, instead of keeping some as spoil for the Israelites:   I think Joshua did not act well, as they could have spared the animals for themselves.   I think Joshua did not act well, as he could have left the property of Jericho; if he had not destroyed the property it would have belonged to the Israelites.   Once again the sage Maimonides, often cited for his scholarly wisdom, is in no doubt where he stands on this issue: ‘It is a positive commandment to destroy the seven nations, as it is said: Thou shalt utterly destroy them. If one does not put to death any of them that falls into one’s power, one transgresses a negative commandment, as it is said: Thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth!
Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)
One might think that Protestants, who had been persecuted so viciously for their heresies against Catholic doctrines, would take a dim view of the idea of persecuting heretics, but no. In his 65,000-word treatise On the Jews and Their Lies, Martin Luther offered the following advice on what Christians should do with this “rejected and condemned people”: First, . . . set fire to their synagogues or schools and . . . bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them.... Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed.... Third, I advise that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing, and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them.... Fourth, I advise that their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb.... Fifth, I advise that safe-conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews.... Sixth, I advise that usury be prohibited to them, and that all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them and put aside for safekeeping. Seventh, I recommend putting a flail, an ax, a hoe, a spade, a distaff, or a spindle into the hands of young, strong Jews and Jewesses and letting them earn their bread in the sweat of their brow, as was imposed on the children of Adam (Gen. 3[:19]). For it is not fitting that they should let us accursed Goyim toil in the sweat of our faces while they, the holy people, idle away their time behind the stove, feasting and farting, and on top of all, boasting blasphemously of their lordship over the Christians by means of our sweat. Let us emulate the common sense of other nations . . . [and] eject them forever from the country.35 At
Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined)
news hour after hour. The news is Shepsie’s life, and the news is terrible, and so it affects how he thinks, and this is the decision he came up with.” “The man came up with the decision,” my mother said, “because he is informed.” “I am also informed,” he said sharply. “I am no less informed—I have just reached a different conclusion. Don’t you understand that these anti-Semitic bastards want us to run away? They want to get the Jews so fed up with everything,” he told her, “that they leave for good, and then the goyim will have this wonderful country all to themselves. Well, I have a better idea. Why don’t they leave? The whole bunch of them—why don’t they all go live under their Führer in Nazi Germany? Then we will have a wonderful country! Look, Shepsie can do whatever he thinks is right, but we aren’t going anywhere. There is still a Supreme Court in this country. Thanks to Franklin Roosevelt, it is a liberal Supreme Court, and it is there to look after our rights. There is Justice Douglas. There is Justice Frankfurter. There is Justice Murphy and Justice Black. They are there to uphold the law. There are still good men in this country. There is Roosevelt, there is Ickes, there is Mayor La Guardia. In November there is a congressional election. There is still the ballot box and people can still vote without anybody telling them what to do.” “And what will they vote for?” my mother asked, and immediately answered herself. “The American people will vote,” she said, “and the Republicans will be even stronger.” “Quiet. Try to keep your voice down, will you? When November comes,” he told her, “we’ll find out the results, and there’ll be time then to decide what to do.” “And if there isn’t time?” “There will be. Please, Bess,” he said, “this cannot go on every night.” And his was the last word, though it
Philip Roth (The Plot Against America)
Within minutes, I received a response with punctuation I had never seen before. “Hello (((Weisman))),” wrote “CyberTrump.” Nothing more. Just that. I was sitting at my desk at work. I had some time on my hands as an editor at the Times, since my responsibilities then centered on domestic policy—economics, the environment, poverty—and with the nation consumed in this strange presidential campaign, not a lot of policy making was going on. “Care to explain?” I answered, intuiting that my last name in those triple parentheses must somehow denote my Jewish faith. “What, ho, the vaunted Ashkenazi intelligence, hahaha!” “CyberTrump” came back. “It’s a dog whistle, fool. Belling the cat for my fellow goyim.” With the cat belled, the horde followed. What I didn’t know was that I had unwittingly exposed what was known in the alt-right as “echoes,” those three parentheses that practitioners of online harassment wrapped around Jewish-sounding names on social media. Unbeknown to, well, just about everyone, alt-right anti-Semites had created a Google plug-in that could be used to search double or triple parentheses, since ordinary search engines do not pick up punctuation marks. Haters would slap these “echoes” around Jewish-sounding names of people online they wanted to target. Once a target was “belled,” the alt-right anti-Semitic mob could download the innocuous-sounding Coincidence Detector plug-in from the Google Chrome store, track down targets like heat-seeking missiles, then swarm. “You’ve all provoked us. You’ve been doing it for decades—and centuries even—and we’ve finally had enough,” declared Andrew Anglin, the creator and mastermind of the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer. “Challenge has been accepted.” And swarm they did.
Jonathan Weisman ((((Semitism))): Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump)
Burrow down a millimeter beneath this argument, and it is easy to see that unlike European anti-Semites, their American brethren very much do hate Jews per se and do not try very hard to hide it or cloak it in academic argument. They have resurfaced all the stereotypes of Nazi iconography, which in turn was built on centuries of hate: the Jew is both shiftless, cowardly, and weak, and duplicitous, manipulative, and all-powerful. As with more ancient strains of anti-Semitism, the new breed insists that Jews are responsible for their own oppression. The alt-right is fond of asking the classic “When did you stop beating your wife” question over and over and over. “Quick question,” “Darrell Lampshade” (charming, right?) asked me. “Why have Jews been kicked out of so many countries if they never did anything wrong? Please answer!” And now that Jews have their own country, they should go there and leave the United States to the white people who valiantly claimed it long before it was cluttered by the mongrel races. One of the memes of the alt-right is the notion that a fifth column of duplicitous Jews is constantly urging the United States on to war on Israel’s behalf, that the beautiful white male fruits of true America will fight and die in the sands of the Middle East on behalf of the cowardly Jew. “We got the goyim to fight for us as usual. It’s amazing how they haven’t driven us back to the desert yet!” “Abraham Moshe Fuxman” once tweeted at me. “A point @jonathanweisman has no interest in acknowledging,” responded “Pax Trumpiana.” “He loves war as long as he’s spilling goyim blood.” Israel, so it goes, should fight for itself, and the Jews orchestrating war should do so from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, not Washington and New York.
Jonathan Weisman ((((Semitism))): Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump)
networking (which is “schmoozing” for goyim)
Guy Kawasaki (The Art of the Start 2.0: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything)
Upsherin He was three when he had his first haircut, upsherin it is called, from the Yiddish, ‘to shear off’. Until then the goyim would compliment the boy’s mother saying, ’What a beautiful girl you have!’ His mom would half-smile to endorse the approval, avoiding eye contact with the gentile, lest she be accused of immodesty or, chas v'shalom, flirtation. His hair was fleeced in a five clear-cut buzzings like a sheep in a shearing contest at the Iowa State Fair. Now the boy can look forward to growing his payot, long sidelocks that hang in curls or ringlets, which Hashem will use to pull His righteous sons to Heaven.
Beryl Dov
Someone who dressed in an immodest fashion was trying to be like the goyim, who cared only for their bodies and neglected their souls.
Eishes Chayil (Hush)
If you had asked Saul of Tarsus, before the meeting on the road to Damascus, where Israel’s story and God’s story came together, the two natural answers would have been Temple (the place at the heart of the promised land where God had promised to live) and Torah (the word of God spoken into, and determinative of, Israel’s national life). The Temple indicated that Israel’s God desired to live in the midst of his people; the Torah, that he would address his people with his life-transforming word. Saul now came to see that both these answers pointed beyond themselves to Jesus and of course to the spirit. In this new world (this too became axiomatic for Paul’s mature thought and thematic for his public career) it mattered that Israel’s God was indeed the One God of the whole world. A tight-knit orthodox Jewish community in the midst of a bustling, philosophically minded pagan city must have been a fascinating place to start thinking all this through. At first glance, Israel’s scriptures might seem to demand that Israel stay separate from the nations, the goyim. The pagans, like the Moabite women sent to seduce the Israelites in the desert, would lead them astray. They should stay separate. But look again, and you will see, not least in the Psalms, not least in the royal predictions of Psalms and prophets alike, that when Israel’s true king arrives, he will be the king not only of Israel, but also of the whole world. Saul, in Tarsus, must have reflected on what it would mean for Psalm 2 to come true, where the One God says to the true king:
N.T. Wright (Paul: A Biography)
Cuban American scholar Justo L. González helps us grasp the magnificence of our inheritance: There is beauty, and joy, and fullness, in many people coming together, out of every tribe and nation and people and language. . . . The vision which John the Jew has is a vision of a Gentile church, a church where the Gentiles, the nations, ta ethne, the goyim, will come and take their place right next to the tribes of Israel, and all together will claim the ancient promise made to the people of Israel, that they would be a kingdom of priests. That is a vision sweet as honey, for it shows the fullness of the mercy of God.
Derwin L. Gray (How to Heal Our Racial Divide: What the Bible Says, and the First Christians Knew, about Racial Reconciliation)
Goodrich concluded by explaining that the so-called “good war” was “not only a travesty for the German people, but for almost everyone involved, excluding the very few at the top who profited greatly from the conflict.” Europe lost tens of millions of her bravest and brightest in an insane fratricidal conflict. The Allies defeated Germany so that Jews could run our banks, media, governments, and corporations, brainwash our children to hate themselves, flood our lands with hostile invaders, and enslave us as their goyim. They are already planning and enacting another hellstorm in all white countries using their radicalized Bolshevik foot soldiers. We must learn from history, reclaim control of our nations, our identity
John Friend
Do not leave the people to think.
Catherine II
However, Hashem saw that if they remained in the Babylonian exile they would have assimilated among the goyim and would have completely left the religion – for they had already intermarried with the nations and forgotten their language and their Torah.
Chananya Weissman (Go Up Like a Wall)
Though Yoav wasn’t quite able yet to discriminate between weekends and weekdays, American goyim and American Jews—Israel took off Fridays and Saturdays, the States took off Saturdays, Sundays, and apparently the rest of the summer.
Joshua Cohen (Moving Kings)
Are dogs the most mistreated, tortured animals on earth? Not by animal experimenters … but by dog “lovers”. Are the dogs’ owners monsters? Haven’t dogs simply been bred to become “living dolls” for human beings? Can you imagine a less natural animal than a dog? It used to be a wolf. Not anymore. It has been removed from nature. What natural function does it have or serve? None at all. What’s the point of a dog? It’s there purely to be company and entertainment for emotionally crippled human beings devoid of the capacity to think.
Ranty McRanterson (Freedumb and Dumbocracy: Libertarians, Dogs, Goyim, the Internet, and Last Men)
You can be sure that the elite want to promote the liberal position as much as possible – because they can never be toppled by liberals. Liberals have been bred by the elite to be bland, banal, comfortable Last Men and Ignavi. The elite fear only the radicals – because the radicals are prepared to get their hands dirty. Why are there no statues of Robespierre? Because the elite despise him above all others, and they have succeeded in making the world ashamed of and disgusted by radicals. Like everything else, there are good radicals and bad radicals, but without radicals nothing ever changes. Why are the elite still in charge after destroying the world’s economy? Because they themselves are radicals (bad radicals), and they can never be toppled by weak liberals who’d rather go shopping than protesting.
Ranty McRanterson (Freedumb and Dumbocracy: Libertarians, Dogs, Goyim, the Internet, and Last Men)
Facebook has an enormous commercial incentive to keep growing its subscriber base. Naturally, it doesn’t want to offend any subscribers, existing or prospective, so its capitalist imperative is to make Facebook as bland, banal and inoffensive as possible – like all other capitalist products seeking to maximize profits. In which case, what’s the point? It’s just another vehicle of dumbed down, anti-intellectual, anodyne, narcotic, sedated capitalism, frying people’s brains with endless junk and “bread and circuses”. This is exactly how the Old World Order operates: bullying, censoring, attacking free thinking, generating endless “Last Men”, with no chests and no fire in their bellies.
Ranty McRanterson (Freedumb and Dumbocracy: Libertarians, Dogs, Goyim, the Internet, and Last Men)
During the more than half a millennium when Catholics were using the university to develop theology, metaphysics, physics and eventually the sciences that led to the industrial revolution, scholarship for Jews meant studying the Talmud, which meant among other things, learning how to cheat the goyim in business transactions and then justify those practices with a veneer of pious rationalization. This is not my opinion; it is the verdict of Heinrich Graetz, the father of Jewish historiography,
E. Michael Jones (The Jews and Moral Subversion)
had also become the familiar given, the necessary condition of life, viewed with a mixture of friendliness and, yes, condescension. They were simply the goyim, the routine term, still used today, for all Gentiles short of aristocratic status. Sometimes they were — in an inversion of “our Jews” — “our goyim.” And although Poles and Jews retained their spiritual separateness, their daily culture — habits, language, cooking, ordinary aesthetics — inevitably intermingled and influenced each other. They lived in similarly constructed wooden houses. Some of the gorgeous wooden synagogues of Polish towns and villages were decorated with Polish folk motifs. Yiddish was permeated by Polish vocabulary: shmata for rag, czajnik for kettle, paskudny for odious, among many others. The peasants picked up Yiddish words, and Jewish themes appeared in their proverbs. Even today, people in Brańsk say, “It’s as noisy as a cheder”, or “She’s dressed as for a Jewish wedding” — meaning, dressed ostentatiously. We no longer know whether the origins of chicken soup were Jewish or Polish. And then there was the music. Each village had its Jewish musicians, to whom everyone was willing to listen. People from Brańsk still remember the Jewish fiddlers and klezmer bands that played at Polish weddings. Their melodies combined Jewish and Gypsy and Polish and Russian influences — that vivid, energetic, melancholy mix that is the Eastern European equivalent of the blues. And surely if they played like that, moving their audiences to dancing and to tears, then their souls must have caught something of the genius loci — the tune, the temper, the spirit of the place. But toward the end of the nineteenth century, the balance began once again ineluctably to shift. In the Yizkor Book, several revealing details suggest new winds, new currents. Perhaps the most important changes were caused by sudden migrations, both inward and outward. The influx of new immigrants began after the assassination of the liberal Tsar Alexander II in 1881, an event followed by a wave of pogroms and other anti-Semitic persecutions within the Russian Pale. In the aftermath, tens of thousands of Jews, known as Litvaks — so named because most of them came from Lithuania or from parts of Belarus commonly called Lithuania in those days — fled to the Polish territories to seek refuge.
Eva Hoffman (Shtetl)