“But these visions are all wrong,” will you reply.... “Look where they have led the world to. Think, that they have now had a fair trial of 3,000 years’ standing. How much longer are you going to recommend them to us and to inflict them upon us? And how do you propose to get us out of the morass into which you have launched us, if you do not change the path upon which you have led the world so disastrously astray?”
To this question I have only one answer to give, and it is this: “You are right.” This reproach of yours, which—I feel it for certain—is at the bottom of your anti-Semitism, is only too well justified, and upon this common ground I am quite willing to shake hands with you and defend you against any accusation of promoting Race Hatred: If you are anti-Semite, I, the Semite, am an anti-Semite too, and a much more fervent one than even you are.... We (Jews) have erred, my friend, we have most grievously erred. And if there was truth in our error 3,000, 2,000, nay, 100 years ago, there is now nothing but falseness and madness, a madness that will produce an even greater misery and an even wider anarchy. I confess it to you, openly and sincerely, and with a sorrow, whose depth and pain an ancient Psalmist, and only he, could moan into this burning universe of ours.... We who have posed as the saviours of the world, we who have even boasted of having given it “the” Saviour, we are today nothing else but the world’s seducers, its destroyers, its incendiaries, its executioners.... We who have promised to lead you to a new Heaven, we have finally succeeded in landing you into a new Hell.... There has been no progress, least of all moral progress.... And it is just our Morality, which has prohibited all real progress, and—what is worse—which even stands in the way of every future and natural reconstruction in this ruined world of ours.... I look at this world, and I shudder at its ghastliness; I shudder all the more as I know the spiritual authors of all this ghastliness....