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AAARGHin English -- AAARGHen francais Preceding-- Following
by Bernard LAZARE Chapter Fourteen THE ECONOMIC CAUSES OF ANTISEMITISMAFTER being assailed as a Semite, as a stranger, as a revolutionist,as an enemy to Christianity, the Jew is attacked as a factor in economicaffairs. This has been the case ever since the dispersion. Already beforeour era the Romans and the Greeks were jealous of the privileges which permittedthe Jews to carry on trade under more favourable conditions than the restof the people,243 and during the Middle Ages the usurer was hated as muchas, if not more than, the murderer of Christ.244 The condition of the Jewswas changed at the end of the eighteenth century; and so favourable wasthe change to them that it tended to confirm, if not to increase, the feelingof antipathy with which they were regarded. Economic antisemitism to-dayis stronger than it ever was, for the reason that to-day, more than ever,the Jew appears powerful and rich. Formerly he was not seen: he remainedhidden in his Ghetto, far from Christian eyes. He had but one care, to concealhis wealth, that wealth of which tradition regarded him as the gatherer,and not the proprietor. The day he was freed from his disabilities, theday the restrictions put to his activities fell away, the Jew showed himselfin public. Indeed, he showed himself with ostentation. He wished, aftercenturies of imprisonment, after years of oppression, to appear a man; andhe had the naive vanity of the savage. That was his way of re-acting uponcenturies of humiliation. On the eve of the French Revolution, they sawhim humble, timid, an object of general contempt, exposed to insult andinjury. They found him after the tempest, free, liberated from every constraint,and from a slave, become a master. Such a rapid exaltation was offensive.People were affronted by the wealth which the Jews had now attained theright to pile up, and recourse was had at once to the old accusation ofthe fathers, the charge that the Jew was an enemy to society. The wealthof the Jew, it was said, is gained at the expense of the Christian. It isacquired [164] through deception, through fraud, through oppression, byall means and principally by detestable means. This is what I shall callthe moral charge of the antisemites, and it may be summed up thus: the Jewis more dishonest than the Christian ; he is entirely unscrupulous, a strangerto loyalty and candour. Is this charge well founded? It was true and still is true in all thosecountries where the Jew is kept outside of society; where he receives onlythe traditional Talmudic education; where he is exposed to persecution,to insult, and to oppression; where people refuse to recognize in him thedignity and the independence of the human being. The moral condition ofthe Jew is due partly to himself, and partly to exterior circumstances.His soul has been moulded by the law which he imposed on himself, and thelaw which has been forced upon him. Throughout the centuries he lived twicea slave: he was the bondman of the law, and the bondman of everyone. Hewas a pariah, but a pariah whom teachers and guides united to keep in astate of servitude more complete than the ancient bondage of Egypt. Fromwithout, a thousand restrictions impeded his way, arrested his development,restrained his activity; within, he was confronted by an elaborate systemof prohibitions. Outside the Ghetto, he experienced the constraint of thelaw; within the Ghetto, he suffered the oppression of the Talmud. If heattempted to escape from the one, a thousand punishments awaited him; ifhe ventured to depart from the other, he exposed himself to the Cherem,that awful excommunication which left him alone to the world. It would havebeen vain to attack these two hostile powers boldly; and therefore the Jewattempted to triumph over them by guile. Both forms of oppression developedin him the instinct of cunning. He attained to an unequaled talent for diplomacy,to a subtlety rarely found. His natural finesse increased, but it was employedfor base purposes -- to deceive a tyrannical God and despotic rulers.The Talmud and anti-Judaic legislation united to corrupt the Jew to hisvery depths. Impelled by his teachers, on the one hand, by hostile legislationon the other, by many social causes besides,245 to the exclusive occupationof commerce and of usury, the Jew became degraded. The pursuit of wealthceaselessly prosecuted, debauched him, weakened the voice of consciencewithin him, taught him habits of fraud. In this war of self-preservationwhich he was forced to carry on against the world and against the secularand [165] religious law, he could conquer only by intrigue, and the unhappywretch, given over to humiliations, to insults, forced to bow his head underblows and curses and persecution, could avenge himself on his enemies, histormentors, his executioners only by guile. Robbery and bad faith becamehis weapons; they were the only weapons of which he could possibly makeuse, and therefore he exerted himself to elaborate them, to sharpen them,and to conceal them. When the walls of the Ghetto were overthrown, the Jew, such as he hadbeen made by the Talmud and the legislative and social restrictions imposedupon him, did not change all at once. Upon the morrow of the Revolutionhe lived just as he had lived upon its eve, nor did he alter his customs,his manners, and, above all, his spirit, as quickly as his condition inlife had been altered. Liberated, he retained the soul of a slave, thatsoul which he is losing day by day as one by one the memories of his degradationare disappearing. I have already shown how in the course of time the bourgeoisie foundin the Jew a powerful and marvelously endowed ally. During long centuries,while society was still plunged in the barbarism of the Middle Ages, theJew, the trader of old, well armed, well provided with a fine mental equipment,and rich in the possession of ages of experience, was either the representativeof capital as employed in commerce and in usury, or else aided in its creation.Nevertheless, these forms of capital did not attain their greatest influenceuntil the labour of centuries had prepared the way for their dominationand had transformed them into industrial and bonded capital. To accomplishthis, capital needed those two great movements, the Crusades and the discoveryof America, followed by the manifold colonial enterprises of Spain, of Portugal,of the Netherlands, of England, and of France, all the activity, in fact,of the age of commercial development. It needed the establishment of publiccredit and the rise of great banking institutions. It needed the rise ofmanufactures and the scientific discoveries which brought about the inventionand the perfection of machinery. It needed all the elaborate legislationlooking towards the restriction of the labourer's rights and wages, untilthe moment came when the proletariat was deprived even of the right of association;it needed all that and many other causes besides, causes historic, religiousand moral, in order to make present-day society what it is. [166] Thosewho maintain that the Jews are the sole cause of the present state of thingssucceed only in establishing their own absurdly marvelous ignorance. Of course, as I have just said, the part played by the Jews in the developmentof modern society, was important, but its true character is very littleknown, or, at least, very imperfectly known, and that especially to theantisemites. It is not to this very elementary knowledge of the economichistory of the Jews that antisemitism must be attributed. Our knowledgeof the Jews since their emancipation is more complete; in France, underthe Restoration and the July Monarchy, they stood at the head of the financialand industrial enterprise, and were among the founders of the great canal,railway and insurance companies. In Germany their activity was exceedinglygreat. They were at the bottom of all the legislation favourable to thecarrying on of banking and exchange, the practice of usury and speculation.It was they who profited by the abolition, in 1867, of the ancient lawslimiting the rate of interest. They were active in bringing about the enactmentof the law of June 1870, which exempted stock companies from governmentsupervision. After the Franco-German War, they were among the boldest speculators,and at a time when German capitalists were carried away by a passion forthe creation of industrial combinations, they acted a no less importantpart than had the Jews of France, from 1830 to 1848.246 Their activity persisteduntil the financial panic of 1873, when the country squires and the smalltraders who had been ruined by the excesses of this Gründer Periode(the era of promoters) in which the Jew had played the most important part,gave themselves up to the most violent antisemitism, such, indeed, as proceedsonly from injured interests. Once the important part played by the Jews of this period had been proven,and, indeed, their importance was undeniable, people proceeded to the conclusionthat the Jew was the possessor of capital par excellence. This becamean added cause of hatred against him. The Jews, it was asserted, held everything,and the word Jew, after having been a synonym for knave, malefactor andusurer, came to be used as equivalent to rich. Every Jew is a capitalist;such is the common belief. The error of course is deep. There remain, about two million Jews in Western Europe and in the UnitedStates, who may be said to belong to the middle [167] class. Of these twomillions, however, it must be admitted that if they were of very littleimportance a hundred years ago, they are of very great importance to-day.Through their wealth, through their education, through their relations toone another, they occupy a place far out of proportion to their numbers.Compared with the general body of the population they are but a handful,and yet their position in life is such that they are to be seen everywhere,and in number seem to be legion. It is true that we must avoid the commonerror of comparing them with the total population of any country, inasmuchas they do not generally live outside of towns, but confine themselves tothe cities where they play a correspondingly important part. If we wouldarrive at some exact statistical basis we must compare them to the Christianpopulation of their own class, that is, to the bourgeoisie of commerce,industry and finance. And yet even when we reduce the comparison to thesetwo factors, the Jew versus the bourgeoisie, it is still in favour of theJew. Wherefore, then, this preponderance ? Some Jews are in the habit ofascribing their economic supremacy to their intellectual superiority. Thisboast of Jewish superiority is not altogether true, or, at least, requiresexplanation. In the present bourgeois society, which is founded upon theexploitation of capital and upon exploitation by capital, where the powerof wealth is supreme, where stock-jobbing and speculation are all-powerful,the Jew is certainly better equipped for success than any other body. Thoughhe may have been degraded by his exclusive devotion to commerce throughthe ages, his experience has nevertheless endowed him with certain qualitieswhich have become of surpassing value in the new organization of society.He is cold and calculating, supple and energetic, persevering and patient,clear and exact, qualities which he has inherited all from his ancestors,the money changers and traders of mediaeval times. When he devotes himselfto commerce or to finance, he naturally profits by the education which hisancestors have undergone through centuries, an education which has renderedhim, perhaps, not more suited for certain pursuits as his vanity suggests,but certainly more adaptable to them. In the present industrial struggle,he is better endowed, man for man -- I am speaking in general terms -- than his competitors, and all things being equal, he must succeed becauseof his superior equipment. He has no need to make use of fraud, or, at least,to make more use of it than his neighbours, since his [l68] personal andinherited qualities are sufficient to assure him the victory. Still the possession of such personal gifts is not sufficient to explainthe preponderance of the Jews. Among the Christians, too, there are ancientmerchant families; a section of the bourgeoisie has inherited qualitiesvery similar to those of the Jews, and therefore it would seem, should beable to challenge the Jews successfully. The answer is that there are other,farther reaching causes, arising both from the nature of the Jew and fromthe character of modern society. Bourgeois society is based entirely uponcompetition between man and man in the field of the daily necessities oflife. It affords us the spectacle of individuals fighting bitterly one againstthe other, of isolated units stubbornly disputing the victory and makinguse of their own individual resources. In this state of society Darwin'sprinciple of the struggle of life dominates. This spirit governs the actionsof every man, and tacitly it is recognized that victory ought to belongto the strongest, to him, that is, who is best equipped, whose body andwhose spirit are most perfectly adjusted to the social conditions of existence.If we conceive, then, in the midst of such a community, based upon egoisticaction, associations of citizens strongly organized and gifted, animatedfor many centuries by the spirit of common action, and knowing by instinctand experience, the advantages which they may derive from union, it is certainthat such organizations by directing their activity towards the same endas that pursued by the scattered individuals around them will possess suchan advantage in the struggle as to assure them an easy victory. This isjust the role which is being played by the Jews of the middle class in modernsociety. They are desirous of winning the same prizes of life as the Christian;they enter the same field of battle; they have the same ambitions; theyare just as keen, just as greedy, just as hungry for wealth, just as foreignto any form of justice that is not the justice of their caste, or that doesnot defend them against the classes they hold in subjection; they are, tosum up, just as immoral at bottom as the Christian in the sense that theyconsider only the advantages which they may obtain for themselves, and thatthe sole ambition of their lives is the acquisition of material goods, ofwhich each hopes and strives to obtain the maximum. But in this daily struggle,the Jew, who, personally, as we have already seen, is better endowed thanhis competitors, increases his [169] advantage by uniting with his co-religionistspossessed of similar virtues, and thus augments his powers by acting incommon with his brethren; the inevitable result being that they out-distancetheir rivals in the pursuit of any common end. In the midst of a disunitedmiddle class, whose members are engaged in a perpetual struggle againstone another, the Jews stand united as one. This is the secret of their success.Their solidarity is all the stronger in that it goes so far back. Its veryexistence is denied, and yet it is undeniable. The links in the chain havebeen forged in the course of ages until the flight of centuries has mademan unconscious of their existence. It is worth our while to see how thisbond of union was formed and how it was perpetuated. Jewish solidarity dates from the Dispersion. Jewish emigrants and coloniststook up their residence in foreign countries, and wherever they made theirhome they constituted a distinct society. Their communities centered aroundtheir houses of prayer, which they built in every town where they formeda nucleus. Everywhere they possessed numerous important privileges (seeChapters II and III.). The Diasporoi were invaluable allies of the Greeksin carrying on the work of eastern colonization, and strangely enough theJews who adopted Hellenism, assisted in turn in Hellenizing the East. Asa recompense they were allowed to retain their national homogeneity, togetherwith full powers of self-government. This was the case in Alexandria, inAntioch, in Asia Minor, and in the Greek cities of Ionia. In almost everycity they constituted corporations at the head of which was an ethnarchor patriarch, who, with the assistance of a council of leaders and a specialtribunal, &laqno;exercised all the powers of civil authority and of justice.The synagogues were "veritable small republics." They were, inaddition, the centres of religious and public life. The Jews came togetherin their synagogues, not only to listen to the reading of the Law, but alsofor the discussion of their private affairs and for the purpose of exchangingviews upon the general course of events. All the synagogues were closelyconnected in a vast federation which included within its scope the entireancient world, progressing parallel with the expansion of the Macedonianpower and Hellenistic civilization. They communicated with one another bymessengers and kept one another in constant touch with events, the knowledgeof which was likely to prove useful. In every city the Jewish traveler couldcount upon the aid of the community; [170] when he arrived as an immigrantor as a settler, he was received as a brother, succoured in his need andassisted in his designs, he was permitted to take up his home wherever hedesired and he enjoyed the protection of the community which put all itsresources at his disposal. He did not come as a stranger bound upon a difficultconquest, but as one well equipped and with protectors, friends, and brothersby his side. Throughout Asia Minor, the Archipelago, Cyrenaica and Egypt,a Jew might travel in perfect security; everywhere he was treated as a guest,everywhere he proceeded straight to the house of prayer, where he was sureto find a welcome. The Essenes carried on their propaganda in the same manner.They, too, created their little social centres, little associations in thevery heart of the Jewish communities, and in this fashion they traveledfrom city to city, at their own free will taking no thought of the morrow. At Rome, where they lived in considerable numbers,247 the Jews were asfirmly united as in the cities of the Orient. "They are bound togetherby indissoluble bonds by the ties of loving sympathy," says Tacitus.248Thanks to their solidarity, they had acquired at Rome, as in Alexandria,such power that political parties feared them and sought their support."You know," says Cicero,249 "how great is the multitude ofthe Jews, how firm their union and their sympathy, how striking their politicalskill and their sway over the crowd in the assemblies." When the Roman Empire fell, when the barbarian hosts invaded the ancientworld, and triumphant Catholicism entered upon its career of expansion,the Jewish communities did not change. They were still powerful organismsand the activity of their common life was such as to lend them great powersof resistance. In the midst of the universal upheaval they preserved theirreligious and social unity, two inseparable bonds to which they owe theirprosperity. The members of the Jewish synagogues drew still more closelytogether. It was owing to this mutual support that they suffered nothingfrom the great changes that were going on about them. For some time, evenafter the Gothic and German kingdoms had been established Jewish communitiespreserved a certain degree of self-government. They were placed under aspecial jurisdiction and in the midst of those new societies they constitutedveritable trading corporations in which none of the ancient solidarity waswanting. In proportion as the nations became more hostile to the [171] Jews,in proportion as persecution and oppressive legislation increased, theirsolidarity increased. The external and internal forces which tended to imprisonthe Jews within the narrow circumference of their Ghettoes, only servedto foster the spirit of union among them. Isolated from the world, theyonly tightened the bonds which held them together. Their common life nourishedthe desire for, and the need of, fraternal action. In other words, the Ghettoesdeveloped the spirit of Jewish solidarity. In addition, the synagogues hadsucceeded in preserving their authority, so that while the Jews were subjectto the harsh laws of king and of emperor, they had also a government oftheir own, councils of elders, and tribunals, to whose decisions they submitted.Their general synods forbade, in fact, any Jew under the pain of anathema,from citing a fellow Jew before a Christian tribunal.250 Everything drovethem to unity in those long years of horror and cruelty known as the MiddleAges. Had they been disunited they would have suffered still more. By commonaction they could defend themselves the more easily and escape some of thecalamities that threatened them without end. In the eleventh century a Rabbinicalsynod at Worms, forbade a Jewish landlord to rent out his house, occupiedby a Jew, to a Gentile without the consent of the tenant251 and a councilof the twelfth century forbade a Jew, under the pain of anathema, to bringa fellow Jew before a Christian tribunal. The Jewish community, or Kahal,made use of a powerful weapon against those who proved themselves lackingin the spirit of solidarity; it struck them with anathema and pronouncedagainst them the Cherem Hakahal (the ban of the community) . In this manner, the action of time, the influence of hostile legislationand of religious persecution, and the need for mutual defense, have intensifiedthe feeling of fellowship among the Jews. In our own day the powerful institutionof the Kahal exerts its influence wherever the Jew is subjected to a rigorousregime, and even the reformed Jew, who has broken away from the narrow restrictionsof the synagogue, and yields no obedience to the will of the community)has not forgotten the spirit of solidarity.252 Once having acquired thesentiment of union and fostered it by the habit of ages, they could notget rid of it in getting rid of their faith. It had become a social instinct,and social instincts, slowly formed, are slow to disappear. A Jew will alwaysobtain assistance from his [172] co-religionists, provided he be found faithfulto the ties of Jewish brotherhood; but, if on the contrary, he prove hostileto the sentiment of Jewish unity, he will meet with nothing but hostility.The Jew, even though he may have departed from the synagogue, is still amember of the Jewish free-masonry,253 of the Jewish clique, if you will. United, then, by the strongest feelings of solidarity, the Jews can easilyhold their own in this disjointed and anarchic society of ours. If the millionsof Christians by whom they are surrounded were to substitute this same principleof co-operation for that of individual competition, the importance of theJew would immediately be destroyed. The Christian, however, will not adoptsuch a course, and the Jew must inevitably, I will not say dominate, thefavourite expression of the antisemites, but certainly possess the advantageover others, and exercise that supremacy against which the antisemites inveigh,without being able to destroy it, seeing that its reason lies not only inthe middle class among the Jews, but in the Christian bourgeoisie as well. If we keep in mind, then, this conception of Jewish fellowship and thefact that the Jews at present, constitute an organized minority, we arenot unjust in concluding that antisemitism is, in part, a mere struggleamong the rich, a contest among the possessors of capital. In truth, itis the capitalist, the merchant, the manufacturer, the financier, amongthe Christians, who feels himself injured by the Jews, and not the Christianproletariat, who suffer no more from the class of Jewish employers thanfrom their Christian masters; less, indeed, if we consider that in a caselike this, where numbers count, the entrepreneur class among the Jews bycomparison with the Christians amounts to little. This will explain whyantisemitism is essentially the sentiment of the middle classes, and whyit is so rarely met with, except in the form of a vague prejudice amongthe mass of the peasants and the working classes. This war within the ranks of capital does not reveal itself after thesame fashion; it presents rather two aspects, according as it arises fromthe hostility between the landowning class and the capitalist class in thenarrower sense, or from competition within the industrial class itself. The agrarian capitalist, in his contest against the captain of industry,has embraced antisemitism, because to the territorial [173] lord, the Jewis the representative of commercial and industrial capitalism. For thisreason, in Germany, the Agrarian Protectionists, are bitter enemies of theJews, who are among the most conspicuous champions of free trade. By instinctand self-interest the Jews are opposed to the physiocratic theory whichwould vest political power only in the owners of land; they maintain ratherthe theory of modern industrialism, which makes political power go handin hand with industrial development. Jews and Agrarians both are probablyunconscious, as individuals, of the part they are playing in the economicstruggle, but their mutual hatred comes from this source, nevertheless.The man of the lower middle class, the small tradesman whom speculationhas probably ruined has much clearer ideas of why he is an antisemite. Heknows that reckless speculation, with its attendant panics, has been hisbane, and for him, the most formidable jugglers of capital, the most dangerousspeculators are the Jews; which, indeed, is very true. Those even whosedownfall has not been caused by speculation, ascribe their misfortunes indirectlyto this cause which has destroyed a great part of the industrial and commercialcapital of the world. But here, as everywhere, they make the Jew responsiblefor a state of things, of which he is far from being the sole cause. The other form of economic antisemitism is more simple. It arises fromthe direct competition between Jewish and Christian brokers, manufacturers,and merchants. The Christian capitalist, acting for the most part, independentlyof his fellows, when confronted by the harmonious, if not united, oppositionof the Jewish capitalists, finds himself necessarily at a disadvantage,and in the daily struggle for life frequently succumbs to his adversaries.He, therefore, suffers directly, from the rise of Jewish manufacturers andmerchants. Hence his extreme animosity against the Jews, and the desireto break the power of his fortunate rivals. This is the most violent, themost bitter of all the manifestations of antisemitism, because it is theexpression of the sentiments of those who feel themselves injured in theirpersonal interests. This prejudice against the Jews has prevailed to the present day, secret,instinctive rather than deliberate, and acquired by heredity. People stillfeel an intense bitterness against the deicides, and glance with no favourableeye at their riches, for they still find it difficult to understand howthis tribe of miscreants and murderers, doomed to perdition, can legitimatelybe the owners of wealth. [174] The belief is still held that the Jew cannotacquire wealth without plundering the sons of the soil -- every ownerof land looking upon himself as its child. If economic antisemitism thereforemust be regarded as the manifestation of a struggle within the ranks ofcapital, we must not forget, too, that it is an outcome of the oppositionbetween national and foreign wealth. FOOTNOTES 243 Chap. ii. 244 Chap. v. 245 Chap. v. 246 Otto Glagau, loc. cit. 247 E. Renan estimates the number of Jews in Rome at the time of Neroat from twenty to thirty thousand (L'Antechrist, p. 7, note 2). 248 Hist. v. 5. 249 Pro Flacco, xxviii. 250 These synods frequently met after the twelfth century, and constitutedthe first general assemblies of the Rabbis since the closing of the Talmud.Jacob Tam (Rabbenu Tam), the founder of the school of Tossafists,was the first to bring about the reunion of such assemblies, for the purpose,undoubtedly, of considering means of common resistance to persecution. 251 Jost, Geschichte der Juden, Berlin, 1820, Vol. 2. 252 The Alliance Israelite Universelle, founded in 1860 by AdolpheCremieux, and numbering at present more than thirty thousand members, hasserved only to foster the fraternal spirit among the Jews. The aims of theAlliance are to ameliorate the intellectual and moral conditionsof the Jews in the Orient by the establishment of schools, to take measuresfor their relief from oppression, and to bring about their complete emancipation. 253 I am not speaking, of course, of Masonic lodges, but use the wordFree Masonry in the broad meaning of the term. Preceding You have downloaded this document at <http://www.vho.org/aaargh/engl/BLantisem14.html> This text is chapter 14 of the English translation of L'Antisémitisme,son histoire et ses causes, by Bernard LAZARE (real name: Lazare BERNARD),first published in Paris in 1894, several times republished, lastly by thepublishing house La Vieille Taupe (= the Old Mole) in 1982, reprinted in1985, ISBN 2-903279-09-8. The book is still on sale and may be ordered fromthe publisher, BP 98, 75224 Paris cedex 05, France. We believe it costs80 F (around 15 US$) This republication triggered a controversy which isdocumented in a booklet later published by Les Editions de la Différence,Contre l'antisémitisme, Histoire d'une polémque, Paris,1983, 127 p. This material will be displayed with the French text of Lazare. The original French text will be soon available. Check at <http://www.vho.org/aaargh/fran/fran.html> WARNING An English translation, under the title Antisemitism,Ist History and Causes, appeared in London in 1967, by Britons PublishingCompany. No name is given for the translator. In fact, this is more an adaptationthan a proper translation. Paragraphs are quite often abridged and sometimesaltogether suppressed. Serious students should refer to the French originaltext. Nevertheless, as this book provides a glimpse into an epochal reflexionon antisemtism, we follow this text and do not interfere with the translationitself. A US edition was later done on this English publication: Universityof Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebraska, 1995, 208 pages. pbk $10. We thank the Australian friend who lent us this rare anddeeply thought book. This text has been computerized, displayed on the Net,and forwarded to you as a tool for educational purpose, further research,on a non commercial and fair use basis, by the International Secretariatof the Association des Anciens Amateurs de Récits de Guerre et d'Holocauste(AAARGH) in 1997. The E-mail of the Secretariat is <aaargh@abbc.com> Interested readers are kindly requested to consider buyingthe book from the publisher, which is handier to read as a book on paper.In order to survive, books must be produced and sold by publishers. We see the act of displaying a written document on Internetas the equivalent of displaying the said document on the shelves of a libraryopen to the public. It costs us a modicum of labor and money. 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