Do you believe that one can change lice into fleas by pouring water on them?” “I don’t believe it.” “I don’t, either, and for me it is a sight as melancholy as it is ridiculous…. I have seen on the street in Berlin old daughters of Israel wearing long crosses at their throats, crosses that were longer than their noses and reached to their navels; in their hands they held a Protestant hymn book, and they spoke of the splendid sermon they had just heard in Trinity Church…. Even more repellent to me was the sight of dirty bearded Jews who came out of their Polish cloaca in order to be solicited for heaven by the Conversion Society in Berlin, and preached Christianity in their mumbling dialect and stank so horribly. It would in any case be desirable if one were to baptize that sort of Polish lice-folk not with ordinary water but with eau de Cologne.” “In the house of the hanged,” I interrupted him, “one does not talk about ropes, my dear doctor.” —Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne: A Memorial At the dawn of the twentieth century, when Theodor Herzl drew up his vision for the Jewish future in Palestine, he included a withering portrait of the European Jews he was hoping to transform.
