Julius Brass

"This is power politics," Julius Brass explained it to James Tyrone. (They still talked together sometimes.) "I don't look like a Jew. I'm tow-haired and light-skinned and pug-nosed and freckle-faced. I'm an Anglo if there ever was one. And since my father changed the name from Messing to Brass we don't even sound Jewish. The kids don't recognize hardly any of us as Jews. But they know the niggers when they see them. And they know the Catholics because they go to the Catholic schools. It's you or us, kid. Hey, am I glad it's you!" Hiram Brass, the father of Julius, had much the same attitude. He made money out of the thing. "A klan robe and hood sells for fifty dollars," he told Francis Tyrone, "and I can get them made for two dollars and a half each. There have been ten thousand of them sold in Tulsa already, and that's only a start on the market. I don't sell all of them, of course, but I sell more than a third of them. Why, I've sold four hundred and fifty robes and hoods for horses, and they go for two hundred and fifty dollars each and cost me seven dollars. I tell you that there's money to be made out of the klan thing." — In a Green Tree

"No, no, no," Julius Brass took exception to one of the items. "These things are not comparable at all. One of them was a borning, not an enslaving. Free Israel was born, created, out of chaos. We have it on the word of William B. Ziff and other reputable historians and observers that the Palestinian Arabs were the lowest form of human life on Earth." — In a Green Tree

Arnold Stein and Julius Brass are Lafferty’s most fully developed Jewish characters, with his most extensive representation of Jewish Zionism centered on Julius. This post compiles key information about the character for reference in future posts.