Museum of Jewish Crimes
...in solemn memory of the tens of millions of Aryan victims of Jewish persecution

Exhibit 1(i): Quotations Baring the Invidious & Destructive Nature of the Jew


Mencken and the Jews

The Jews could be put down very plausibly as the most unpleasant race ever heard of.

As commonly encountered, they lack many of the qualities that mark the civilized man: courage, dignity, incorruptibility, ease, confidence. They have vanity without pride, voluptuousness without taste, and learning without wisdom. Their fortitude, such as it is, is wasted upon puerile objects, and their charity is mainly only a form of display. Yet these same Jews, from time immemorial, have been the chief dreamers of the human race, and beyond all comparison its greatest poets. It was Jews who wrote the magnificent poems called the Psalms, the Song of Solomon, and the Books of Job and Ruth; it was Jews who set platitudes to deathless music in Proverbs; and it was Jews who gave us the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount, the incomparable ballad of the Christ Child, and the twelfth chapter of Romans. I incline to believe that the scene recounted in John VIII, 3-11, is the most poignant drama ever written in the world, as the Song of Solomon is unquestionably the most moving love song, and the Twenty-third Psalm the greatest of hymns. All these transcendent riches Christianity inherits from a little tribe of sedentary Bedouins, so obscure and unimportant that secular history scarcely knows them. No heritage of modern man is richer and none has made a more brilliant mark upon human thought, not even the legacy of the Greeks.

All this, of course, may prove either one of two things: that the Jews, in their heyday, were actually superior to all the great peoples who disdained them, or that poetry is only a minor art. My private inclination is to embrace the latter hypothesis, but I do not pause to argue the point....

From Fred C. Hobson's biography of HLM, Mencken: A Life

The reason many of the notes would be deleted from Minority Report when it was later published (in fact would remain unpublished to this day in the Mencken Room of the Enoch Pratt Free Library) is that they were, even by Mencken's standards, vituperative indeed. Particularly explosive were those dealing with his old enemy Roosevelt and, predictably for the Mencken of the 1940s, with Jews. He was harsher here than he had been even in the secrecy of the diary, and what was remarkable was not only the rancorous tone of his remarks against Jews but their sheer volume. As well as repeating his old accusations that Jews "howl[ed] too much," "succumb[ed] to all sorts of hooey," "incline[d] toward communism," and possessed an "extraordinary lack of tact," he added new charges. Jews were "the most intolerant people on earth," had "never been fully civilized," and held to a "sharp, unyielding separateness...based on their assertive racial egotism." Jews asked others "to believe that Jahweh chose them above all other peoples [and] to believe He passed over a long series of enormously superior people and concentrated all his favor upon a petty tribe of Bedouins." And finally he charged, "The rage of the Jews against anti-Semitism is often only a thin veneer of anti-Goyism. They both hate and disdain the Goy."

These were the observations of the post-1939 Mencken, made mainly in the mid-1940s, and again they represented the private, not the public, Mencken of the war years. Even while he was writing such invective, he was maintaining his close friendship with Knopf, seeing other Jewish friendds such as Abraham Cahan, and getting along better with George Jean Nathan than he had in two decades. He was also increasingly sensitive to the charge of anti-Semitism leveled against him, and he attempted in some small measure to combat it. When in 1945 and 1946 he revised his Treatise on the Gods for a new edition, he carefully eliminated his 1930 statement "The Jews could be put down very plausibly as the most unpleasant race ever heard of." Although he had gone on in the earlier edition to praise Jewish poets and thinkers, that single sentence had been used too often against him. (p. 477)

Mencken hired from Harvard jew Charles Angoff, and was this way repaid:

... Knopf sold over 20,000 copies of Minority Report in a few months, the book appeared on the New York Times best-seller list in June and July, and the ghost of Mencken had only begun its long and contentious life. Readers "will refuse to believe," Julian Boyd wrote in a protracted discussion in the Times, "that the vast bin from which these thoughts were culled has become empty."

That bin was to be raided for still another book a few months later -- A Carnival of Buncombe (edited by Malcolm Moos), a collection of Mencken's writing on American politics from 1920 to 1936. In the following two years, as three more collections of his work appeared, newspapers were speaking of a "Mencken revival." But the voice in the Mencken chorus that was to reverberate most loudly during that period was not the author's own or those of his champions but rather that of his longtime detractor Charles Angoff [a jew]. Only a month after Minority Report appeared, less than five months after Mencken's death, Angoff produced -- in ghoulish fashion, it seemed to the subject's friends -- the book that Mencken had known was coming: it was that full measure of revenge that his Mercury "slave" had been waiting twenty years to exact. H.L. Mencken: A Portrait from Memory repeated the charges Angoff had earlier brought -- that Mencken was an inferior thinker, critic, and philologist -- and it added a great many more besides. While Mencken lived, Angoff had hesitated to accuse him of anti-Semitism. Now he not only leveled that charge but accused him as well of pettiness, mean-spiritedness, betrayal of friends, and general misanthropy: "Mencken most often despised people." Claiming to have known his boss better "than almost anyone else" between 1925 and 1935, he painted a picture of a man despicable in nearly every aspect.

Mencken's friends, Knopf in particular, were furious. Angoff was an "unbelievable swine," he wrote Arthur Schlesinger, and he had written an "obscene" book. Even those reviewers who were not friends or supporters of Mencken recognized the animosity of Angoff's "mean...book," his "posthumous biting...of the hand that fed him." It was not that Angoff was wrong in all particulars, although his gossipy tone and feeble attempts, twenty-five years later, to quote Mencken verbatim compromised his credibility. It was rather that the purpose of his writing was so obviously vengeance. (p. 537)

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