Selections of Édouard Drumont’s Writings on the Jews

Édouard Adolphe Drumont (3 May 1844 – 5 February 1917) was a French journalist, Catholic polemicist, and politician. He is best remembered as the author of La France juive (1886), the most widely read antisemitic work of nineteenth-century France, which sold more than 100,000 copies in its first year and went through over a hundred editions. He subsequently founded and edited the daily newspaper La Libre Parole (1892–1910) and served as a Deputy in the Chamber of Deputies for Algiers from 1898 to 1902. His biographer Grégoire Kauffmann places Drumont squarely within the counter-revolutionary tradition of Louis Veuillot and anti-modern Catholicism. Drumont’s antisemitism synthesised three strands: the traditional Catholic theology of the “Christ-killers,” a hostility to finance capitalism, and nascent racial theory. Of these, the theological strand — rooted in the Adversus Judaeos tradition — was the animating core of his life’s work.

The passages reproduced below are drawn exclusively from three primary works: La France juive (1886), La Fin d’un monde (1889), and Le Testament d’un antisémite (1891). The first is cited from Wikisource and Archive.org; the latter two are cited from the Google-digitized texts available at the Internet Archive and verified from the uploaded primary source files. They bear on the following themes of the Adversus Judaeos tradition: the Deicide and the perpetual enmity of the Jewish people toward Christ; the Talmud‘s blasphemies against Christ and provisions against Christians; supersessionism and the Rabbinical rejection of the true Messiah; the theological basis of Jewish domination-ideology; the anti-Zionist dimension of Drumont’s Catholicism; and the Jewish war against the Cross and the Church. All translations from the French are made directly from the primary texts cited below. No word has been added or altered.


I. The Deicide and the Undying Hatred of Christ

La France juive, Tome Second, Livre Sixième, Chapitre III (1886)

(Wikisource: La France juive/Livre Sixième/III/1)

“Nothing has changed for them; they hate Christ in 1886 as they hated him in the days of Tiberius Augustus; they heap upon him the same outrages. To flog the crucifix on Good Friday, to desecrate hosts, to defile holy images — such is the great joy of the Jew in the Middle Ages; such is his great joy today. Formerly he attacked the bodies of children; today it is their souls he is after, through atheist instruction; he used to make them bleed, now he poisons them — which is the better?”


“The outburst of invective, of coarseness, of violence against Christ, the Virgin, the Church, the Clergy, answers in fact to no real feeling among the population; it is wholly artificial; it is organized by the Jews with the same skill they bring to organizing, through their newspapers, a current of false public opinion around a financial affair.”


“On Good Friday of each year, the Jews gathered at Maieur Schaub’s to burlesque the Passion of Christ and to flog the crucifix. We witness analogous scenes every year, only, the Jews being the masters, they take place in broad daylight.”


La France juive, Tome Premier, Livre Premier (1886)

(Wikisource: La France juive/Livre Premier)

“They believed that he [Gambetta] would rid them of that Christ whom they hate as they hated him on the day they crucified him.”


“The Jews of the Portuguese rite, as is well known, claim to have settled in Spain in the most remote antiquity: they reject with horror all solidarity with the deicides; they even maintain that the Jews inhabiting Toledo wrote to their brethren in Jerusalem to dissuade them from committing so great a crime.”


La Fin d’un monde (1889), Introduction

(Internet Archive: lafindunmondetu00drumgoog, pp. xvi–xvii)

“It is the Jew, once again, with that terrible hatred which does not blaze up, and which, even when sated, scarcely puts a flash of rapid happiness into those moist gazelle-eyes of the Semite, so expressive and so sad — it is the eternal parody, the Black Mass celebrated no longer on the heath in the Middle Ages, but on the ruins of fallen palaces and burned-out châteaux — the Black Mass with its impious jests, the sign of the cross made with the left hand, the Gospel read backwards or laid upon the haunches of a sorceress.”


“With the instinct of his hatred for all that has inspired our respect and our enthusiasm, with his need to blaspheme, this race possesses incontestably a peculiar gift for seizing the grotesque side of every moving and beautiful thing.”


II. The Talmud: Its Blasphemies Against Christ and the Virgin

La France juive, Tome Premier, Livre Deuxième, Chapitre I (1886)

(Wikisource: La France juive/Livre Deuxième/I)

“All facilities were given to the Jews to defend themselves, and they did so with skill and courage. They were none the less compelled to acknowledge that the Talmud contained prescriptions contrary not only to every Christian society but to every civilised society. In that book, examined with care, assertions were found graver still than those cited by M. Noël Valois. It was seen, not without horror, that Jesus Christ is plunged in hell, in ever-boiling mire; that the Blessed Virgin conceived her divine Son as the result of adultery committed with a soldier named Pandara; that churches are cesspits; that preachers are barking dogs.”


Le Testament d’un antisémite (1891), p. 424

(Internet Archive: letestamentduna01drumgoog, p. 424)

“The Virgin is covered in filth. Everything that concerns her is, moreover, the development of an abject calumny of the Talmud, which I have already branded, and which shows us the Virgin as a procuress and gotten with child by a soldier named Panther.”


Le Testament d’un antisémite (1891), p. 407

(Internet Archive: letestamentduna01drumgoog, p. 407)

“It is indeed the Talmud, which announces that it is a good omen to dream of excrement.”


III. The Talmud: Its Legal Provisions Against Christians

La France juive, Édition populaire (Palmé, 1885)

(Wikisource: Page 545)

“One can imagine a Christian arriving before one of these Jews! What satisfaction he will feel at being able to apply his own code! What a malicious smile will light his face when he can ruin some poor goy by putting into practice the precepts given by Rabbi Ismaël in the Talmud, in the tractate Baba Kamina, chapter Ha Gozel (The Robber): ‘If a Christian and an Israelite come before you for a dispute, if you can make the Israelite win his case according to Jewish law, do so, and say to the Christian: Such is our legislation; or, according to Christian law, make the Israelite win and say to the Christian: Such is your legislation. If, on the contrary, you cannot make the Israelite win in one way or another, resort against the Christian to tricks and fraud.'”


“Hundreds of facts demonstrate what hatred animates these Jewish magistrates against Christ and those who adore him.”


La France juive, Tome Premier, Livre Premier (1886)

(Wikisource: Livre Premier; p. 373)

“The right of the Jew to oppress others is part of his religion; it is for him an article of faith; it is announced on every line of the Bible and the Talmud. ‘Thou shalt govern,’ say the Psalms of David (Ps. 2), ‘thou shalt govern the other peoples, whom thou shalt subdue with a rod of iron; thou shalt break them as the potter breaks a vessel.’ ‘He shall consume the nations little by little before you in portions,’ says Deuteronomy, ‘for you could not exterminate them all at once, lest the beasts of the earth multiply too greatly. He will deliver their kings into your hands. You shall destroy even their name. Nothing shall be able to resist you.’ Against the Christian, the Gentile, the goy (singular goy, plural goym), all means are good. The Talmud contains, in this respect, assertions that our Deputies, so touchy in theology, would take good care not to bring to the tribune, on pain of having the windows of the Jewish banks where they draw their salaries slammed in their faces.”


“Is it not written in the Talmud that the Jew is a man and that those who are not Jews are of the seed of cattle? Does not Deuteronomy, verse 11 of chapter vi, say: Jehovah thy God will give thee houses full of all good things which thou hast not built?”


Le Testament d’un antisémite (1891), pp. 95–96

(Internet Archive: letestamentduna01drumgoog, pp. 95–96)

“He remains faithful — and this is to his credit — to the religion of his own fathers; he only combats the religion of our fathers. In this, the municipal councillor is, moreover, in the logic of the Jew: ‘You are, as the Talmud teaches, of the seed of cattle. You have no need of religion, but I am of the race chosen by Jehovah and I have need of it. You are born, you couple, you die like beasts — that is perfectly fine; but I insist that the representative of God intervene in all the important acts of my life.'”


“That is always Aurélien Scholl’s saying, when he was an antisemite: ‘The Jews are freethinkers… in other people’s religion.'”


IV. The Talmud and the Courts: Jerusalem and Byzantium United Against Christendom

La Fin d’un monde (1889), pp. 462–463

(Internet Archive: lafindunmondetu00drumgoog, pp. 462–463)

“M. Zadoc-Khan, in a pamphlet — Slavery According to the Bible and the Talmud — explained what the present Justice is: ‘This admirable Roman civil code,’ he writes, ‘which has inspired so many modern legislators, was bound to appeal to the subtle and penetrating mind of the authors of the Talmud.’ And indeed, Byzantium and Jerusalem now fraternise at the Palace of Justice, under the auspices of Masonry: these two dead cities have taken living Paris. The Pharisee and the jurist of the late Empire, who were made to understand one another, have found each other again after centuries and are working in concert. The gross cunning of the Jew is complemented by the astuteness of the Greek. The subtleties of the Talmud have been grafted upon the chicaneries of the Byzantine rhetoricians. The tractate Baba Kamina or the tractate Ha Gozel has been engrafted upon the Digest. The learned glosses in which the children of Israel learned to deceive the Goy have been added to the fallacious commentaries, to the artful distinctions of the scribes of the Praetorium who quibbled over the Pandects. R. Higa the Great, bar Kippara or bar Bethera are authorities equal to those of Tribonian. The Tosaphists of the Ghetto operate alongside the Sophists of imperial Rome. The toga and the taleth have coupled, and the gown of the counsellor reveals the Miszonophet of the Cohen-Hagadol.”


“All these people understand one another admirably: they go in the morning to the same Synagogue, in the afternoon to the same tribunal, and in the evening to the same brothel.”


V. Supersessionism: The Rabbinical Rejection of the True Messiah

La France juive, Tome Premier, Livre Premier (1886)

(Wikisource: p. 150)

“Soon, even while giving the most singular interpretations to the Messianic prophecies, and computing in a thousand ways the prediction of Daniel on the period of the seventy weeks of years, they arrive at despair. The Rabbis then devote to anathema any man who would henceforth speak of the appearance of the Messiah. ‘All the times that were fixed for the coming of the Messiah are past,’ says Rabbi Rava. ‘Accursed be those who compute the times of the Messiah,’ declares the Babylonian Talmud. ‘May their bones be broken,’ adds Rabbi Yohanan.”


La France juive, Tome Premier, Livre Deuxième, Chapitre II (1886)

(Wikisource: La France juive/Livre Deuxième/II)

“‘Every Catholic who becomes Protestant,’ said Alexandre Weill, ‘takes a step toward Judaism.’ It would be more accurate to say: every Protestant is half a Jew. Protestantism served as a bridge for the Jews to enter, not yet into society, but into humanity. The Bible, relegated to the second rank in the Middle Ages, took its place nearer the Gospels; the Old Testament was placed beside the New. Behind the Bible appeared the Talmud.”


“It is he [the Jew] who is at work in the immense workshop of blasphemy of the great Emperor Frederick and the princes of Swabia or Aragon: it is he who forges all that murderous arsenal of reasoning and irony which he will bequeath to the sceptics of the Renaissance, to the freethinkers of the grand siècle; and the sarcasm of Voltaire is but the last, resonant echo of a word murmured six centuries earlier in the shadow of the ghetto, and earlier still, at the time of Celsus and Origen, at the very cradle of the religion of Christ.”


VI. The Reign of Christ Versus the Reign of Judaism

La Fin d’un monde (1889), pp. 110–111

(Internet Archive: lafindunmondetu00drumgoog, pp. 110–111)

“The hatred and envy that are everywhere today were then rare in this noble land of France. Christianity had created in us such treasures of faith, devotion, and self-abnegation that French society remained believing and generous long after it had lost its religious habits. It required the reign of the Jews, the vile campaigns of their newspapers, the triumph of Freemasonry, Gambetta, Opportunism, Grévy, Wilson, the present Republic — in a word — to destroy all ideal in souls. The people of that time, who had not yet been perverted, knew that it was Christianity which had transformed the earth and brought fraternity and love to the world.”


Christus vincit, Christus imperat, Christus regnat. Christ commands, he reigns, he is victorious. [Exergue of the coinage of the kings of France in the 12th century.]”


“What are your dogmas, so religious, of liberty, equality, and fraternity? It is the Gospel becoming the Code, religion becoming social law, Christ incarnating himself as the People. And you, Christians, what is your Gospel, so democratic and popular? It is the living law of liberty, equality, and love. What is Christ, if not the Redeemer of the weak and the poor, the Saviour of nations? What is the Church, if not a holy republic, in which everything is accorded to devotion by election, nothing to heredity or fortune?”


Le Testament d’un antisémite (1891), pp. 201–202

(Internet Archive: letestamentduna01drumgoog, pp. 201–202)

“It is the consequence of the abandonment by the new Church of all the doctrines of the Fathers of the Church on lending at interest, on money-working — that is to say, gain without labour; it is the consequence of the Church’s adherence to the Jewish system. From the day when the Church rehabilitated usury, which it had combated for fifteen centuries, the social reign of Christianity was terminated and the reign of Judaism began. Proudhon, with his terrible power as a logician, discerned very clearly that the crux of the question was there.”


VII. The Jewish War Against the Cross and Against the Church

La France juive, Tome Second, Livre Sixième, Chapitre III (1886)

(Wikisource: La France juive/Livre Sixième/III/1)

“Hypocritical among Freemasons and Protestants, and exaggerated above all by that servility which drives certain men always to side with the stronger, religious persecution takes on, with the Jews, a character of peculiar bitterness. Nothing has changed for them; they hate Christ in 1886 as they hated him in the days of Tiberius Augustus; they cover him with the same outrages.”


“Exalted by this triumph, he [the Jewish prefect Hendlé] becomes furious when he again finds before him that crucifix which he so hates. One day, however, he comes up against a resolute man, such as there are unfortunately too few of in our epoch. To replace a removed crucifix, M. Augé, mayor of Hermanville, goes himself to buy at Dieppe a magnificent Christ, and on 7 October 1882, has it placed with the following inscription: This Christ was placed in the communal school of Hermanville following a subscription made by the mayor, the municipal council, and the entire population, unanimously.


“At the bar of justice we again find the Jew faithful to his hatred of Christ. We saw him formerly striving to rid himself of the More judaico oath, protesting that he wished to be distinguished in nothing from his fellow Frenchmen, that he wanted to enter the collectivity; from the moment he is in it, it is to create scandal.”


La Fin d’un monde (1889), p. 335

(Internet Archive: lafindunmondetu00drumgoog, p. 335)

“Today the dashing gentlemen are, for the most part, in league with every Mordecai and every Lévy in creation, and leave it to the small people to take care of defending Christ, the Church, and France.”


Le Testament d’un antisémite (1891), p. 248

(Internet Archive: letestamentduna01drumgoog, p. 248)

“‘It is infamous… absolutely infamous… Those holy Daughters of Charity… There is the ballet… In hatred of Christ… What lovely legs… That Mauri has the devil in her body… Bravo, Mauri!…’ All decadences resemble one another; all are summed up in two words: Histrionism — Hypocrisy.”


Le Testament d’un antisémite (1891), p. 239

(Internet Archive: letestamentduna01drumgoog, p. 239)

“As she passes, the millionairess throws a word to her wretched sisters and that word is a protestation of contempt for the religion of Christ, for the religion of Saint Geneviève and of Joan of Arc.”


VIII. The Martyrs of the Deicide: Ritual Murder and Papal Confirmation

Le Testament d’un antisémite (1891), pp. 328–329

(Internet Archive: letestamentduna01drumgoog, pp. 328–329)

“The question is whether the facts related by the Abbé Desportes, after the Bollandists and other ecclesiastical writers, are true or false — whether it is accurate that the Jews slaughtered Christian children in hatred of Christ and that, after a rigorous examination, these children were canonised by Popes.”


“The brief of Pope Benedict XIV is explicit on this point. After recalling the names of various martyrs of the Molochist sacrifice, he adds: ‘In acting in this manner, we have done no more than follow the model left us by our predecessor, Sixtus V. In the year 1485, a child of Trent, who had not yet reached the age of three years, the Blessed Simon, was killed by Jews with the utmost barbarity.’ […] Sixtus V, in the year 1588, issued a brief to grant the celebration of the Mass and the proper Office… in honour of the Blessed Simon… [it having been established] that he had been slaughtered by the Jews in hatred of the Christian faith.


IX. Freemasonry as an Emanation of Talmudic Judaism

Le Testament d’un antisémite (1891), pp. 399–400

(Internet Archive: letestamentduna01drumgoog, pp. 399–400)

“The Israelites themselves acknowledge — which is in any case undeniable — the Jewish origin of Freemasonry. In the Annuaire des Archives israélites, for the year of the world 5651, a well-known scholar, M. Schwab, published a very interesting article on this subject. In invoking the testimony of the Talmud and of the Rabbi Pinhus b. Yair, M. Schwab demonstrates that Freemasonry is copied in its smallest details from the organisation of the Essenes.”


X. The Talmud Examined at the Council of Paris Under Saint Louis

La France juive, Tome Premier, Livre Deuxième, Chapitre I (1886)

(Wikisource: La France juive/Livre Deuxième/I)

“All facilities were given to the Jews to defend themselves, and they did so with skill and courage. They were none the less compelled to acknowledge that the Talmud contained prescriptions contrary not only to every Christian society but to every civilised society.”


“He [Saint Louis] wished to know, finally, what was the evil principle that determined the Jews to make themselves the object of the hatred of all. At the request of Pope Gregory IX, whose attention had likewise been drawn to this point, he had the Talmud examined in a solemn assembly presided over by Guillaume d’Auvergne, to which the Rabbis were invited to attend. It was in Paris, in the beginning of summer (24 June 1240). The court of Saint Louis, presided that day by Queen Blanche, had swelled with a considerable number of clerics and prelates belonging to the neighbouring dioceses.”


La France juive, Tome Premier, Livre Deuxième, Chapitre II (1886)

(Wikisource: La France juive/Livre Deuxième/II)

“Charged with examining the Talmud, he [Reuchlin] found nothing reprehensible in the outrages it contained against Christianity. The trial of the Talmud became a European affair. The Paris Faculty occupied itself with this question during forty-seven sessions and showed itself, like all France of that era, resolutely anti-Jewish in condemning Reuchlin. In 1520, the very year when Luther burned the papal bull at Wittenberg, the first edition of the Talmud was printed at Venice.”


XI. Anti-Zionism: The Alliance Israélite and the Monetary Pre-Zionist Programme

La Fin d’un monde (1889), p. 85 n.

(Internet Archive: lafindunmondetu00drumgoog, p. 85 fn.)

“One has just received in Vienna, we are told by L’Intransigeant of 17 August 1887, the first coins struck in Paris by the Jewish communities established in Palestine and guaranteed by the Alliance israélite universelle. These coins are in bronze. Their value is that of a piastre, a half-piastre, a quarter-piastre. On the reverse are engraved Hebrew characters. On the face a number with this inscription: A.I.U. (Alliance israélite universelle).”


XII. Anti-Zionism: The Messianic Claim Anathematised by the Rabbis Themselves

La France juive, Tome Premier, Livre Premier (1886)

(Wikisource: p. 150)

“Soon, even while giving the most singular interpretations to the Messianic prophecies, and computing in a thousand ways the prediction of Daniel on the period of the seventy weeks of years, they arrive at despair. The Rabbis then devote to anathema any man who would henceforth speak of the appearance of the Messiah. ‘All the times that were fixed for the coming of the Messiah are past,’ says Rabbi Rava. ‘Accursed be those who compute the times of the Messiah,’ declares the Babylonian Talmud. ‘May their bones be broken,’ adds Rabbi Yohanan.”


XIII. The Catholic Social Order: Christ Versus Mammon

La France juive, Introduction (1886)

(Internet Archive: La France juive.pdf, pp. 5–7)

“Today, thanks to the Jew, money — to which the Christian world attached only a secondary importance and assigned only a subordinate role — has become all-powerful. The capitalist power concentrated in a small number of hands governs at its pleasure the entire economic life of peoples, enslaves labour, and gorges itself on iniquitous gains acquired without toil.”


“Saint John Chrysostom had risen against the idle and greedy agent who, without labour, wishes to realise odious gains. ‘What is more unreasonable,’ he had said, ‘than to sow without earth, without rain, without a plough? So all those who give themselves to this damnable agriculture reap from it only tares, which shall be cast into eternal flames. Let us cut off these monstrous births of gold and silver; let us stifle this execrable fecundity.'”


“This credit, Saint Thomas Aquinas wished to be Christian and not Jewish; he meant it to be an aid given by one brother to another, and not an exploitation, a means of cruelly oppressing those who have nothing and of despoiling those who have a little and wish to have more without taking the trouble to earn it.”


La Fin d’un monde (1889), p. 31

(Internet Archive: lafindunmondetu00drumgoog, p. 31)

“Our good and holy mother the Church, charged by Our Lord Jesus Christ to be a visible Providence on earth and to organise everything for the best, had still, as long as she was able, softened in practice the execution of the law of God. Gentle guide of souls, as well as vigilant housekeeper in temporal things, she would never have permitted labour to take on the character of odious and barbarous exploitation that it has today.”


Le Testament d’un antisémite (1891), p. 27

(Internet Archive: letestamentduna01drumgoog, p. 27)

“These pages seem like a commentary on what the Fathers of the Church have written on the execrable power of money. In this village, everything dies under the breath of this property without duties that the Revolution has created.”


XIV. The Theological Enmity: The Jewish People as the Eternal Enemy of Christendom

La France juive, Tome Second, Livre Sixième (Édition populaire, 1885)

(Wikisource: La France Juive (édition populaire)/Livre 6/Chapitre 2)

“In any case, the hatred of Christ, of the Christian, of the Crucifix, of the religious, has remained as keen as ever.”


“The bloody sacrifice, we repeat, though it proceeds from the Jew‘s aversion for the goy, though it was encouraged by certain books of the Kabbalah and perhaps even by certain passages of the Talmud, has nothing in common with Mosaic law; it represents a crisis, a phase in the life of this strange people, which changed its orientation so often — the warrior and patriotic phase in its resistance to the Romans; the conspiratorial phase in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries with the Templars; the dark and sanguinary phase after the failure of those attempts; the phase of withdrawal in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the Masonic phase in the eighteenth century; the socialist, financial, cosmopolitan phase in the nineteenth century. In any case, the hatred of Christ, of the Christian, of the Crucifix, of the religious, has remained as keen as before.”


Le Testament d’un antisémite (1891), p. 322

(Internet Archive: letestamentduna01drumgoog, p. 322)

“It is more a matter of physiology than religious history — a species of ethnic neurosis, one of the most striking manifestations of atavism, making revive, in the Jew proscribed across the earth, the voluptuousness of blood proper to the Semite, the taste for those human sacrifices which the Prophets had so much difficulty in extirpating from ancient Israel.”


La Fin d’un monde (1889), p. 222

(Internet Archive: lafindunmondetu00drumgoog, p. 222)

“Are they not the ones who dishonour the august name of Christ from whom you have taken your own?”


XV. The Clergy’s Failure to Resist the Jewish Conquest

La Fin d’un monde (1889), p. 352

(Internet Archive: lafindunmondetu00drumgoog, p. 352)

“The French clergy, it must be said, was not equal to what was expected of it; it did not know how to extend its hand to the workers who came so spontaneously to Christ; it disappointed the hopes of all those men enamoured of progress and justice, who hoped that the Church, as in the first centuries, was about to place itself at the head of the efforts at social renewal.”



Sources

All passages are drawn directly from the following primary sources, all in the public domain. Translations from the French are the compiler’s own, made directly from the primary texts below. No word has been added or altered.


Primary Texts

1. La France juive, 2 vols. (Paris: Marpon & Flammarion, 1886)


2. La Fin d’un monde : étude psychologique et sociale (Paris: Albert Savine, 1889)


3. Le Testament d’un antisémite (Paris: E. Dentu, 1891)


Secondary Sources