Certainly the article contained enough to create enmity on the part of the Jews. It opened with an assertion that one has an involuntary and inexplicable revulsion of feeling towards the Jews; that, as a people, there is something objectionable in them, their person repellant, and manner obnoxious. Now when it is remembered that Wagner’s daily visitor during his first sojourn in Paris was Dessauer, a Jew, that the man who brought about his own death for love of Wagner was a Jew, and that the music-publisher Schlesinger, his friend, was also a Jew, it will be confessed that this was a startling charge to come from him. I must add that Wagner always insisted it was not a personal question, and pointed out that some of his staunchest friends were Jews.
Then he further asserted, in the “Judaism” pamphlet, that it mattered not among what European people the Jew lived, he was always a foreigner, and our wish was to have nothing to do with him. This, again, was surprising, for Wagner was not slow to admit the loyalty of the people of Shiloh to the government of the country in which they were domiciled, and there is no doubt they are eminently patriotic, calling themselves by the name of the country in which they live. Indeed, it cannot be contended that the Jews are one nation; they are many.
Wagner’s antipathy towards the Hebrew people was, he felt, partly inherited by him as a German. He knew them to be observant, discerning, energetic, and ambitious, yet he could not put away from him an instinctive feeling of repugnance, and could not understand why the “Musical World” and the London press should so severely flagellate him because of his attitude towards the Jews. He found the Semitic race regarded here in an entirely different manner from what it was in Germany. Here it was much the same as in France. Civil disabilities had been removed, and the Israelites had proved themselves as great patriots as English Christians, one, Mr. Solomons, filling the post of alderman of the city of London at the time Wagner was here. This Mr. Solomons had been, with others of his co-religionists, previously elected a member of Parliament, and Wagner used often to express his wonder how a man waiting for the advent of the Messiah could sit in a house of Gentiles. Wagner marvelled, too, how the citizens of London could permit the Jews to amass such a large proportion of the wealth of the country, but he soon came to admit the force of the argument, that special laws having been enacted against them, preventing the acquisition of land, denying them the professions, and restricting them to certain trades, it was unreasonable, after having driven them to mean occupations, to reproach them for not having embraced honourable professions. I pointed out to him that in bygone centuries, when the Germans were barbarians, this much-despised people had produced poets, men of letters, statesmen, historians, and philosophers, all, too, of such brilliant genius as would add lustre to any galaxy of modern luminaries. He was struck by this, and, as his bent was art, fully admitted the poetic fancy and genius of the harpist David, the imagination of Solomon, and other of the old Hebraic writers.