Welcome to Part Ten of our current Tale for Our Time - The City without Jews, a satire by Hugo Bettauer that cost the author his life.
In tonight's episode Leo attempts to explain the slough of despond into which a deJewed Vienna has fallen:
"Ladies and gentlemen," continued Leo, smiling, "it really makes no difference whether one likes the Jews or not. The yeast that is used in the making of bread has a horrible taste—but bread cannot be made without it. We must look at the Jews in a similar light. Yeast—not very pleasant by itself, and harmful in excessive quantities—but indispensable, in the right proportion, for our daily bread. And I think your bread is refusing to rise for lack of yeast."
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear Part Ten of our tale simply by clicking here and logging-in.
You can enjoy The City without Jews episode by episode, night by night, twenty minutes before you lower your lamp. Or, alternatively, do feel free to binge-listen: you can find all the earlier installments here. Mark Shere, a First Week Founding Member of The Mark Steyn Club, says:
Another great choice, Mark. Thank you.
However, Mr Shere is neither a lamp-lowerer nor a binge-listener but a leaper-ahead. So he's already galloped on to this episode:
I think it's in your next installment. I've been reading ahead, and I hope you will comment on the 'yeast' metaphor offered by the hero. I find it poignant. That's the extent of the toleration that the book requests.
Well, that's because the yeast passage is delivered by a Viennese Jew pretending to be a Parisian Catholic in order to change the way a crowd of unhappy Austrians think about things. More generally, it is important to remember that everyone in the novel is from the day before yesterday, when it was considered entirely normal to prefer the company of one's own kind. So nobody went around droning "diversity is our strength" - although one could make a better argument for it in the case of the Habsburg Empire than with, say, today's Sweden.
Second, the analogy only works with Jews - because, unlike Christianity or Islam, Judaism is not a universalist religion. So Jews can play the part of the yeast. It doesn't work with Islam as the yeast - as today's demographically overwhelmed Viennese are discovering.
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