To the Editor:

A letter from M. S. Abramsky in your October 1990 issue [Letters from Readers] contains a seriously mutilated quotation from H. L. Mencken’s Treatise on the Gods concerning what the Sage of Baltimore describes as “the lush and lovely poetry of the Bible.” The quotation cited by Mr. Abramsky begins, “The Jews could be put down very plausibly as the most unpleasant race ever heard of, . . .” and goes on from there. But directly following the quoted passage, in the same paragraph, Mencken continues:

Yet these same Jews, from time immemorial, have been the chief dreamers of the human race, and beyond all comparison its greatest poets. . . . No heritage of modern man is richer and none has made a more brilliant mark on human thought, not even the legacy of the Greeks. All this, of course, may prove either one of two things: that the Jews, in their heyday, were actually superior to all the great people who disdained them, or that poetry is only a minor art. My private inclination is to embrace the latter hypothesis, but I do not pause to argue the point.

Maynard Kniskern
Monroeville, Alabama