PROFESSOR FRAZER

Otautau Standard and Wallace County Chronicle, Volume IX, Issue 452, 13 January 1914, Page 7

PROFESSOR FRAZER

In a letter to the editor of ' The Times ' Professor Frazer, of Cambridge, writes: — From your issue of to-day (November 9) I learn, that a passage m my book 'The Scapegoat' has. beei; quoted by a Russian paper, the 'Two-headed Eagle,' for the purpose of lending color to the accusations of ritual murder which m certain quarters are now levelled against the Jewish people iv Russia. The editor of the 'Two-headed Eagle', can hardly have quoted the passage from my book m full, or his readers would have seen that, while I discuss hypothetically the possibility of an occasional crime instigated by superstition among the dregs of the Jewish as of the Christian population, I stigmatise such accusations against the Jewish people as "a monstrous injustice," and speak of all the charges of ritual murder as most probably " mere idle calumnies, the baneful fruit of bigotry, ignorance, and malice." That is my deliberate and considered opinion ; and as the editor of tho 'Two-headed Eagle' appears to attach some weight to my judgment, I will tell him what I think of the attempts 'which he and other organs of public opinion aro now making m Russia to stir up prejudice against the Jews by the spread of such vile calumnies. I think that the concoc- , tion and diffusion of these slanders are the blackest of crimes, that they dishonor tho nation which applauds them and the religion m the name of which they are perpetrated.