THE JEWS
BY THE SAME AUTHOR t
EUROPE AND THE FAITH
" Mr. Belloc has developed a side
of history which is a wholesome
antidote to self-satisfied Angli-
canism; and he has produced a
brilliant and burningly sincere
historical essay which sweeps his
reader along. It is certainly the
best book he has written." The
Church Times.
THE OLD ROAD
With Illustrations by William
Hyde, a Map and Route Guides.
New Edition.
THE STAKE STREET
A Monograph. With Illustrations
by William Hyde, and Maps.
THE JEWS
By HILAIRE BELLOC
CONSTABLE & COMPANY, LIMITED
LONDON BOMBAY SYDNEY
First Published 193*
Sicond Impression 1922
I
To
MISS RUBY GOLDSMITH
MY SECRETARY FOR MANY YEARS AT KING'S
LAND AND THE BEST AND MOST INTIMATE OF
OUR JEWISH FRIENDS, TO WHOM MY
FAMILY AND I WILL ALWAYS OWE
A DEEP DEBT OF GRATITUDE
493001
PREFACE
THE object of this book is more modest, I fear,
than that of much which has appeared upon that
vital political matter, the relation between the
Jews and the nations around them.
It does not propose any detailed, still less, any
positive legal solution to what has become a press-
ing problem, nor does it pretend to any complete
solution of it. It is no more than a suggestion
that any attempt to solve this problem ought to
follow certain general lines which are essentially
different from those attempted in Western Europe
during the time immediately preceding our own.
I suggest that, if the present generation in both
parties to the discussion, the Jews and ourselves,
will drop convention and make a principle of
discussing the problem in terms of reality, we shall
automatically approach a right solution.
We have but to tell the truth in the place of the
falsehoods of the last generation. Therefore, of
the three principles upon which this essay reposes,
the principle that concealment must come to an end
seems to me more important than the principle of
mutual recognition, or even the principle of mutual
respect. For it may well be that my judgment is
at fault in the matter of Jewish national conscious-
ness ; it may well be that I exaggerate it, and it
vii
viii PREFACE
is certain that one party to a debate cannot be
possessed of the full knowledge required for its
settlement; the other side must be heard. But
neither my judgment nor the judgment of any man
can be at fault on the value of truth and the
ultimate evil consequences of trying to build upon
a lie.
The English reader (less, I think, the American)
will often find in my sentences a note that will
seem to him fantastic. ] The quarrel is already
acute here in London, but it has not here approached
the limits which it has reached long ago elsewhere ;
and a man accustomed to the quieter air in which
all public affairs have, until recently, been debated
in this country, may smile at what will seem to
him odd and exaggerated fears. To this I would
reply that the book has been written not only in
the light of English, but of a general, experience.
I will bargain that were it put into the hands of a
jury chosen from the various nationalities of Europe
and the United States it would be found too mod-
erate in its estimate of the peril it postulates. I
would further ask the reader, who may not have
appreciated how rapidly the peril approaches, to
consider the distance traversed in the last few
years. It is not very long since a mere discussion
of the Jewish question in England was impossible.
It is but a few years since the mere admission of it
appeared abnormal. The truth is that this ques-
tion is not one which we open or close at will in
any European nation. It is imposed successively
upon one nation after another by the force of
things. It is this force of things, this necessity
for national well-being, and for the warding off of
disorder, which has thrust the Jewish question
PREFACE ix
to-day upon a society still reluctant to consider it
and still hoping it may return to its old neglect.
It cannot so return.
I will conclude by asking my Jewish, as well as
my non- Jewish, readers to observe that I have left
out every personal allusion and every element of
mere recrimination. I have carefully avoided the
mention of particular examples in public life of the
friction between the Jews and ourselves and even
examples drawn from past history. With these I
could often have strengthened my argument, and
I Tvould certainly have made my book a great deal
more readable. I have left out everything of the
kind because, though one can always rouse interest
in this way, it excites enmity between the opposing
parties. Since my object is to reduce that enmity,
which has already become dangerous, I should be
insincere indeed if from mere purpose of enlivening
this essay I had stooped to exasperate feeling.
I could have made the book far stronger as a
piece of polemic and indefinitely more amusing
as a piece of record, but I have not written it as a
piece of polemic or as a piece of record. I have
written it as an attempt at justice.
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
THE THESIS OP THIS BOOK 3
The Jews are an alien body within the society they
inhabit hence irritation and friction a problem is
presented by the strains thus set up the solution of
that problem is urgently necessary.
An alien body in any organism is disposed of in one
of two ways : elimination and segregation.
Elimination may be by destruction, by excretion or
by absorption in the case of the Jews the first is abomin-
able and, further, has failed the second means exile :
it has also failed the third, absorption, the most pro-
bable and most moral, has failed throughout the past,
though having everything in its favour.
There remains segregation, which may be of two
forms : hostile to, or careless of, the alien body, or friendly
to it and careful of its good in this latter form it may
best be called Recognition. The first kind of segregation
has often been attempted in history it has been par-
tially successful over long periods but has always left
behind it a sense of injustice and has not really solved
the problem also it has always failed in the end.
The true solution is in the second kind of segregation,
that is, recognition on both sides of a separate Jewish
nationality.
CHAPTER II
THE DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM . . . . .17
In the immediate past the problem was shirked in
Western Europe by a mere denial of its existence some
were honestly ignorant of the existence of a Jewish
xi
xii CONTENTS
PAGE
nation some thought the difference one of religion
only more admitted the existence of a separate nation
but thought a convenient fiction, that it did not exist,
necessary to the modern state.
This ignorance or fiction has broken down in our own
time partly through the necessary reaction of truth
against any falsehood partly through the increasing
numbers of the Jews in Western countries more through
the great increase of their power.
Yet, though this old " Liberal " fiction about the
Jews is dead, having proved unworkable in the face of
fact, it had something to be said for it it secured peace
for a while it chose models from the past and it was
based on a certain truth, to wit, that the Jew takes on
very rapidly the superficial characters of the nation in
which he happens for the time to be living moreover it
was desired by the Jews themselves example of the
old Jewish Peer and his claim "to be let alone "
practical proof of the failure in his case.
At any rate the old " Liberal " fiction is now quite
useless the problem is admitted and must be solved.
CHAPTER III
THE PRESENT PHASE OF THE PROBLEM ... 43
The Jewish problem, present throughout history, has
assumed a particular character to-day it is the char-
acter of a sharp reaction against the old pretence that
Jews were identical with the nations in which they
happened to live it first took the form of irritation
only it was suddenly exasperated in a very high degree
by the Jewish revolution in Russia but long before
this the increasing power of Jews in public life, the anti-
Semitic writing on the Continent, the Dreyfus agitation,
the South African War, and the Jewish leadership of
Socialism had prepared the wayThe situation on the
outbreak of the Great War Bolshevism a short
description to be expanded in a later chapter Bolshe-
vism is a Jewish movement, but not a movement of the.
Jewish race as a whole its particular effect was to
release criticism of Jewish power which had hitherto
been silent from fear of, or sympathy with, Capitalism.
Men hesitated to attack the Jews as financiers because
the stability of society and of their own fortunes was
bound up with finance but when a body of Jews also
CONTENTS xiii
PAGE
appeared as the active enemies of existing society and of
private fortune, the restraint was removed since the
Bolshevist movement open (and hostile) discussion of
the Jewish problem has become universal.
CHAPTER IV
THE GENERAL CAUSES OP FRICTION .... 69
The strain between Jewry and its hosts in Islam and
Christendom much older than any modern cause can
account for the true causes are both general and par-
ticular I call those general which are ineradicable and
proceed from the contrasting natures of the tw6 races,
particular those which depend upon the will on either
side and can be modified to the advantage of both.
The general cause of friction being a contrast in funda-
mental character, we note that the common accusations
brought against Jews are false, as are the common praises
given him by those not of the race. In each case what has
to be noted is not a series of virtues or vices special to
the Jew, but the racial character or tone of each quality.
These examined the Jewish courage examples
the Jewish generosity the strength of Jewish patriotism
the consequent indifference to our national feelings
accusations arising therefrom, especially in time of war
the Jewish power of concentration of eloquence the
Jewish tendency to " push " a Jewish success and hide
a Jewish failure or danger the evil effects of this ten-
dency in our mutual relations.
The poverty of the Jewish people false effect produced
by a few great Jewish fortunes the instability of these
cringing of wealthy Europeans to Jewish money-dealers
dependence of our politicians on wealthy Jews evil
effect of this in the attempt to regulate domestic affairs
of Eastern Europe.
The ill effect of the partially Jewish financial monopoly
especially with Parliamentary corruption as pro-
nounced as it is to-day.
CHAPTER V
THE SPECIAL CAUSES OP FRICTION .... 99
I have called " Special " causes of Friction those
which are remedial at will by either party they would
xiv CONTENTS
PAGE
seem to be, on the Jewish side, the habit of secrecy and
the habit of expressing a sense of superiority on our
side a disingenuousness and unintelligence in our treat-
ment of Jews and a lack of charity.
The deplorable Jewish habit of secrecy the use of
false names examples excuses for same not adequate
a regular code of such names which deceive us but can
be decoded by fellow Jews.
The expression of superiority by the Jew our states-
manship has never sufficiently allowed for it examples
of this expression Jewish interference in our religion
or national quarrels and other departments which are
alien to Jewish interests on the other hand this quality
has been a preservation of the race the Jew should
note the corresponding sense of superiority on our side
even the poor hack-writer, if he be of European blood,
feels himself superior to the Jewish millionaire.
CHAPTER VI
THE CAUSE OF FRICTION UPON OUR SIDE . . .123
This department of our inquiry often neglected
through an error it is presumed that, because we are
the hosts and the Jew alien to us, no responsibility falls
on us this error forgets that the Jew is permanently
with us and that every permanent human relation
involves responsibility.
The first cause of friction on our side is disingenuous-
ness in our dealings with the Jew examples of this
we conceal from the Jew our real feelings we deceive
him the richer classes who intermarry with Jews and
enter into business partnership with them especially
to blame the populace more straightforward this
deceiving of the Jew Reaves him troubled when the quarrel
comes to a head he has not heard what is said behind
his back.
Disingenuousness in our suppression of the Jewish
problem in history gross examples of it in contemporary
life and particularly in the popular press Jews called
" Russians," " Germans," anything but what they are.
Unintelligence a second cause of friction example :
our treatment of Jewish immigration we hate it, yet
allow it because we dare not give it its right name
unintelligent treatment of the Jew in fiction unintelli-
gence in our astonishment at his international position
CONTENTS xv
PAGE
example of the cabinet minister's cousin who got into
trouble.
Last cause, lack of charity people won't put them-
selves in the shoes of the Jew and see how things look
from his side we do not (as we should) mix with Jews
of every class and address their societies Summary
A warning against the idea that the friction between the
Jews and ourselves is unimportant it has bred catas-
trophe in the past and may in the future.
CHAPTER VII
THE ANTI-SEMITE . . . . . . . 145
Error of neglecting to study Anti-Semitism on account
of its extravagance it is a most significant thing, how-
ever ill-balanced character of the Anti-Semite he does
not recognize a Jewish problem to be solved but only a
Jewish race to be hated this hatred his whole motive
his self-contradictions his delusion his strength the
press still on the whole boycotts the Anti-Semitic move-
ment but it is growing prodigiously its great power
of documentation its vast accumulation of evidence
effect this will have when it comes out.
The Jews met Anti-Semitism by nothing but ridicule
this weapon insufficient and bound to fail their enemies
have countered it by accumulating facts the latter a
much stronger weapon so long as the erroneous Jewish
policy of secrecy is maintained.
Danger to the Jews of the Anti-Semitic movement
(1) because of its intensity (2) because of its formidable
accumulation of evidence, which cannot be permanently
suppressed (3) and most important, because it is
allied to a now widespread and more moderate, but very
hostile, feeling, to which it acts as spear-head.
CHAPTER VIII
BOLSHEVISM 167
The revolution in Russia will be the historical point of
departure whence will date the renewed hostility to the
Jew in Western Europe.
Examination of that revolution it was (as said in
Chapter III) " a Jewish movement, but not a movement
of the Jewish race : " importance of this distinction
xvi CONTENTS
PAOB
unfortunately the two different terms " Jewish race "
and " a Jewish movement " are confused in the popular
mind.
The Revolution not the result of an accident or of a
universal plot element of racial revenge the Jew not
a revolutionary special character of the Russian situa-
tion Industrial Capitalism, the great evil of our time,
there recent and weak therefore open to special attack
an international evil the only two international
forces applicable were the Jews and the Catholic Church
why the Catholic Church cannot directly attack indus-
trial Capitalism why the Jew who happens to be opposed
to it can and does directly attack it neither our instinct
for property nor our Nationalism an obstacle in his
case.
Grave perils to the Jew arise from his identification
with Bolshevism the more reason to meet these perils
by a sane treatment of the Jewish problem.
CHAPTER IX
THE POSITION IN THE WORLD AS A WHOLE . . 189
*
The Jewish problem varies (1) according to the extent
to which Jews have acquired control and domination in
various places; (2) according to the tradition of each
community in approaching the problem; (3) according to
the strength in each community of the four international
forces, which are the Catholic Church, Islam, Industrial
Capitalism, and the Socialist revolt against this last.
T~~ The individual Jew does not feel that he is in a position
I of control or even that he is interfering with his hosts
/ yet that is the universal complaint against him it is a
L corporate or collective power more and more resented.
The position in Russia repeated in the Marches of
Russia and Roumania and Poland in Central Europe
in Occidental Europe Ireland an exception.
The position in v/he United States Mr. Ford and the
great effect of his action.
The Western tradition more favourable to the Jews
than the Eastern problem of the Jews and Islam
position of the Catholic Church effect of Industrial
Capitalism and of its converse, Socialism, upon the
problem.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER X
PAGE
THE POSITION OF THE JEWS IN ENGLAND . . . 215
England has gone to both extremes with the Jew.
The Jew in the Roman time and in the Middle Ages
his monopoly of Usury in early Middle Ages The
exile of all English Jews under Edward I their return
under Cromwell followed by a growing alliance between
the English State and the Jews largely due to cosmo-
politan commercial interests of Britain also to common
hostility towards the Catholic Church aided by great
wealth and security of this country in the later nine-
teenth century the Jews, in spite of their small numbers,
colour every English institution, especially the Univer-
sities and the House of Commons the interests of the
two races began to diverge before the Great War none
the less a formal alliance maintained through the control
of the politicians by Jewish finance its culmination in *N
the attempt to form an Anglo- Judaic state in Palestine.^/
CHAPTER XI
ZIONISM 231
The chief interest of the Zionist experiment lies in its
reaction upon the international position of the Jew
yet that point is not yet discussed what will be the
effect of the experiment on the position of Jews outside
Palestine, necessarily the vast majority of the race ?
an inevitable alternative either the Jews lose their
international position through loss of the fiction that
they are not a nation or the Zionist experiment breaks
down effect especially in Eastern Europe.
Special effect of the experiment on Great Britain
difficulty of maintaining sacrifice for purely Jewish
interests which now clash with British unpopularity
of such sacrifice inevitable grave error of first appoint-
ment to the headship of the New State unworthiness of
the politician chosen for that position.
CHAPTER XII
OUR DUTY 249
This but a consequence of the conditions established in
Chapters IV, V and VI our double duty of mixing with
xviii CONTENTS
PAGE
the Jews and of recognizing their separate nationality
necessity of openly admitting this separate nationality
in conversation and social habits in spite of difficulties
opposed by convention in this the wealthier classes
should follow the lead of the populace folly and danger
of Fear in this matter the fear of Jewish power a
degrading and exasperating thing to the European
delay makes it worse our plain duty is to recognize
this alien nation, to respect it, and to treat it frankly as
we do every nationality other than one's own.
CHAPTER XIII
THEIR DUTY 271
Only a brief mention for interference or advice in
domestic concerns of Jewry would be an impertinence
but it is clear that all specially Jewish institutions favour
the right policy for which I plead those already in
existence schools, newspapers, Jewish societies all
increase of these institutions should be welcome, because
they emphasize and make clear the separate nationality
of the Jew.
CHAPTER XIV
VARIOUS THEORIES 277
This chapter is a digression on the various theories on the
Jewish race and its fortunes which have arisen in history
and some of which are still present.
The theory that reconciliation is impossible its
attachment to the idea of a special curse or blessing.
The theory of a mysterious necessary alliance between
Israel and Britain its most extravagant forms.
The theory that the Jews are the necessary flux of
Europe, without which our energies would decline
note on the intellectual independence of the Jew and
on his original effect on our thought demand for a
Jewish history of Europe and Islam combined.
The theory that the Jewish problem is domestic only
and no concern of ours its error, since the relations are
mutual
The two theories of the Jew as a malignant enemy
of our innocent selves, and of our malignant enmity
CONTENTS xix
PAGE
against the innocent and martyred Jew both erroneous.
The theory that the Jewish problem is now solving
itself by absorption this theory false and due to a
misunderstanding of history and a neglect of acute
modern and recent differentiation Mr. Ford's epigram
on " the melting-pot."
Fantastic theory that no Jewish national type exists !
CHAPTER XV
CONCLUSION. HABIT OR LAW ? 301
Granted that the solution I advance (a full recog-
nition of separate nationality) is the just solution, should
it be expressed in law ? Not, I think, until it has first
appeared in our morals and social conventions to begin
with laws and regulations on our side would inevitably
breed oppression but the suggestion of separate insti-
tutions coming from the Jewish side should be welcomed
urgency of a settlement modern quarrels are growing
fiercer, not less but for my part I say, "Peace to
Israel"
THE THESIS OF THIS BOOK
CHAPTER I
THE THESIS OF THIS BOOK
IT is the thesis of this book that the continued
presence of the Jewish nation intermixed with
other nations alien to it presents a permanent
problem of the gravest character : that the wholly
different culture, tradition, race and religion of
Europe make Europe a permanent antagonist to
Israel, and that the recent and rapid intensification
of that antagonism gives to the discovery of a
solution immediate and highly practical impor-
tance.
For if the quarrel is allowed to rise unchecked
and to proceed unappeased, we shall come, unex-
pectedly and soon, upon one of these- tragedies
which have marked for centuries the relations
between this peculiar nation and ourselves.
The Jewish problem is one to which no true
parallel can be found, for the historical and social
phenomenon which has produced it is unique. It
is a problem which cannot be shirked, as the last
generation both of Jews and of their hosts attempted
to shirk it. It is a problem which cannot be
avoided, nor even lessened (as can some social
problems), by an healing effect of time: for it is
increasing before our eyes. It must be met and
dealt with openly and now.
3
4 THE JEWS
That problem is the problem of reducing or
accommodating the strain produced by the presence
of an alien body within any organism. The alien
body sets up strains, or, to change the metaphor,
produces a friction, which is evil both to itself and
to the organism which it inhabits. The problem
is, how to relax those strains for good and to set
things permanently at their ease again.
There are two ways to such a desirable end.
The first is by the elimination of what is alien.
The second is by its segregation. There is no other
way.
The elimination of an alien body may take three
forms. It may take a frankly hostile form elimina-
tion by destruction. It may take a form, also
hostile but less hostile elimination by expulsion.
It may take a third form, an amicable one (and
that far the most commonly found in the natural
process of physical nature and of society) elimina-
tion by absorption; the alien body becomes an
indistinguishable part of the organism in which it
was originally a source of disturbance and is lost
in it. .These three ways sum up the first method,
the method of elimination.
The second method, if elimination shall prove
impossible or undesirable, is that of segregation;
and this again may be of two kinds hostile and
amicable. We may segregate the alien element
without regard to its own ends or desires: the
segregation of it being upon a plan framed solely
from the point of view of the organism invaded,
and the reduction of the strain or friction it creates
effected by the mere cutting of it off from all avenues
through which it can affect its host.
But we may also segregate the alien irritant by
THE THESIS OF THIS BOOK 5
an action which takes full account of the thing
segregated as well as of the organism segregating
it, and considers the good of both parties. In this
second and amicable policy the word segregation
(which has a bad connotation) may be replaced
by the word recognition.
This book has been written under the conception
that all solutions of the Jewish problem other than
this last are either impracticable, or bad in morals,
or both.
It is written to advocate a policy wherein the
Jews on their side shall openly recognize their
wholly separate nationality and we on ours shall
equally recognize that separate nationality, treat
it without reserve as an alien thing, and respect it
as a province of society outside our own.
It is written under the conviction that any
attitude which falls short of this policy or is very
different from it will now soon breed disaster.
The solution by way of destruction is not only
abominable in morals but has proved futile in
practice. It has been the constant temptation of
angry popular masses in the past, when the Jewish
problem has come to a head not once but a
thousand times in various parts of our civilization
during the last twenty centuries. From the pitiless
massacres of Cyrenaica in the second century to
the latest murders in the Ukraine that solution has
been attempted and has failed. It has invariably
left behind it a dreadful inheritance of hatred upon
the one side and of shame upon the other. It has
been condemned by every man whose judgment is
worth considering and especially by the great moral
teachers of Christendom. It is, indeed, hardly a
policy at all, for it is blind. It is a gesture of
6 THE JEWS
mere exasperation and not a final gesture at that.
The second form of elimination expulsion
though theoretically sustainable (for a community
has a right to organize its own life and no aliens
therein have a claim to modify that life or to disturb
it), is none the less in practice, and as regards this
particular problem, only one degree less odious than
the first. It means inevitably a mass of individual
injustice, as well as common spoliation and every
other hardship. It is almost impossible to dis-
sociate it from violence and ill deeds of all kinds.
It leaves behind it almost as strong an inheritance,
if not of shame on the one side, at any rate of
rancour upon the other, as does the first. And
what condemns it finally is that it is not, and cannot
be, complete.
For it is in the nature of the Jewish problem that
this solution is only attempted at moments and in
places where the strength of the Jews has declined ;
and this invariably means their corresponding
strength in some other quarter.
A particular society attempting this solution of
expulsion may succeed for a time so far as itself
is concerned, but that inevitably means the recep-
tion of the exiled body by another district, and,
sooner or later, the return of the force which it was
hoped to be rid of. The greatest historical example
of this is, of course, the action of the English. The
English alone of all Christian nations did adopt
this solution in its entirety. A strong national
kingship, a government highly organized for its
time, an insular position and a singular unanimity
of national purpose promoted the expulsion of the
Jews from England at the end of the thirteenth
century ; for more than three and a half centuries
THE THESIS OF THIS BOOK 7
that expulsion was maintained, and England alone
of the various divisions of Christendom was in
theory free of the alien element and nearly as free
in practice as it was in theory.
But, as we all know, in the long run the experi-
ment broke down. The Jews were readmitted in
the middle of the seventeenth century, and nowhere
have they come to greater strength than in the
very nation which attempted this solution of the
problem with such drastic thoroughness five hun-
dred years ago. None of the other parallel attempts
up and down Europe were of the same thoroughness
as the English attempt. Their failure came, there-
fore, more quickly. But such failure would seem in
any case to be inevitable. Quite apart, therefore,
from the moral objection which attaches to it,
there is the practical experience that a solution is
not to be found upon such lines.
Lastly, there is elimination by absorption. This
would obviously be the most gentle, as it is the
most evident, of all methods. It is further a normal
and most usual method of nature herself when a
living organism has to deal with disturbance excited
by the presence of an alien body. So natural and
so obvious is it that it has been taken by many
men of excellent judgment upon both sides as a
matter of course. It has been taken for granted
that if absorption has not taken place in the past
it has only been due to an ill-will artificially nour-
ished and maintained against the Jews on our side,
or by the unreasoning exclusiveness of the Jews on
theirs.
Even to-day, in spite of a vast increase during
our own generation, both in the public appreciation
of the problem and in its immediate gravity, there
8 THE JEWS
are very many men who still regard absorption as
the natural end of the affair. These, though
d winding, are still numerous upon the non- Jewish
side ; upon the other, the Jewish side, they are, I
think, a very small body.j For I note that even those
Jews who think absorption will come, admit it
with regret, and certainly the vast majority
would insist with pride upon the certain survival
of Israel.
But here again I maintain that we have the index
of history against us. In point of fact absorption
has not taken place. It has had a better chance
than any corresponding case can show : ample time
in which to work, wide dispersion, constant inter-
marriage, long periods of tolerant friendship for
the Jew, and even at times his ascendancy. If
ever there were conditions under which one might
imagine that the larger body would absorb the
smaller, they were those of Christendom acting
intimately for centuries, in relation with Jewry.
Nation after nation has absorbed larger, intensely
hostile minorities: the Irish, their successive
invaders; the British, the pirates of the fifth
and eighth centuries and the French of three cen-
turies more ; the northern Gauls, their auxiliaries ;
the Italians, the Lombards ; the Greeks, the Slav ;
the Dacian has absorbed even the Mongol : but the
Jew has remained intact.
However we explain this mystically or in
whatever other fashion we cannot deny its truth.
It is true of the Jews, and of the Jews alone, that
they alone have maintained, whether through
the special action of Providence or through some
general biological or social law of which we are
ignorant, an unfailing entity and an equally unfail-
THE THESIS OF THIS BOOK 9
ing differentiation between themselves and the
society through which they ceaselessly move.
It is not true that conditions in the past differed
from present conditions sufficiently to account
for so strange a story. There have been genera-
tions and even centuries (not co- incident indeed
throughout the world, but applying now to one
country, now to another) where every oppor-
tunity for absorption existed ; yet that absorption
has never taken place. There was every chance
in Spain at one moment, in Poland at another,
but there was the best chance of all in the short
but brilliant period of Liberal policy which has
dominated Western Europe during the last three
generations. That policy has had the fullest
play : it has left the Jews not only unabsorbed, but
more differentiated than ever, and the political
problem they present more insistent by far than
it was a century ago.
The thing might have come where there was a
chaos of peoples, as in pagan Alexandria in the
four centuries from 200 B.C . to 200 A. D. , or in modern
New York. It might have come where there was
a particularly friendly attitude, as in mediaeval
Poland or modern England. It might even have
come, paradoxically, through the very persecution
and strain of times and places where the Jews
suffered the most hostile treatment: for their
absorption might have been achieved under pres-
sure though it had failed to be achieved under
attraction. As a fact it has never come. It has
never proved possible. The continuous absorp-
tion of outlying fractions, a process continually
going on wherever the Jewish nation is present,
has not affected the mass of the problem at all.
,0
THE JEWS
\
The body as a whole has remained separate, differ-
entiated, with a strong identity of its own under
all conditions and in all places, and the a priori
reasoning, by which men come to think this solu-
tion reasonable, is nullified by an experience appar-
ent throughout history. That experience is wholly
against any such solution. It cannot be.
There remains, then, only the solution of segre-
gation; a word which (I repeat) I use in a com-
pletely neutral manner though it has unhappily
obtained in this and other issues a bad connotation.
Segregation, as I have said, may be of two kinds.
It may be hostile, a sort of static expulsion: a
putting aside of the alien body without regard to
that body's needs, desires or claims; the build-
ing of a fence round it, as it were, solely with the
object of defending the organism which reacts
against invasion, and suffers from the presence
within it of something different from itself.
Or it may take an amicable form and may be a
mutual arrangement: a recognition, with mutual
advantage, of a reality which is unavoidable by
either party.
The first of these apparent solutions has been
attempted over and over again throughout history.
It has had long periods of partial success, but never
any period of complete success ; for it has invari-
ably left behind it a sense of injustice upon the
Jewish side and of moral ill-ease upon the other.
There remains, I take it, no practical or perma-
nent solution but the last. It is to this conclusion
that my essay is meant to lead. If the Jewish
nation comes to express its own pride and patriot-
ism openly, and equally openly to admit the neces-
sary limitations imposed by that expression ; if we
THE THESIS OF THIS BOOK 11
on our side frankly accept the presence of thi^i
nation as a thing utterly different from ourselves;
but with just as good a right to existence as we
have ; if we renounce our pretences in the matter ;
if we talk of and recognize the Jewish people freely
and without fear as a separate body ; if upon both
sides the realities of the situation are admitted,
with the consequent and necessary definitions
which those realities imply, we shall have peace/
The advantage both parties the small but
intense Jewish minority, the great non-Jewish
majority in the midst of which that minority acts
would discover in such an arrangement is mani-
fest. If it could be maintained as I think it
could be maintained the problem would be
permanently solved. At any rate, if it cannot be
solved in that way it certainly cannot be solved
in any other, and if we do not get peace by this
avenue, then we are doomed to the perpetual
recurrence of those persecutions which have
marred the history of Europe since the first con-
solidation of the Roman Empire.
It has been a series of cycles invariably follow-
ing the same steps. The Jew comes to an alien
society, at first in small numbers. He thrives.
His presence is not resented. He is rather treated
as a friend. Whether from mere contrast in type
what I have called "friction" or from some
apparent divergence between his objects and those
of his hosts, or through his increasing numbers,
he creates (or discovers) a growing animosity. He
resents it. He opposes his hosts. They call
themselves masters in their own house. The
Jew resists their claim. It comes to violence.
It is always the same miserable sequence.
12 THE JEWS
First a welcome ; then a growing, half- conscious
ill- ease; next a culmination in acute ill- ease;
lastly catastrophe and disaster ; insult, persecution,
even massacre, the exiles flying from the place
of persecution into a new district where the Jew
is hardly known, where the problem has never
existed or has been forgotten. He meets again
with the largest hospitality. There follows here
also, after a period of amicable interfusion, a
growing, half- conscious ill- ease, which next becomes
acute and leads to new explosions, and so on,
in a fatal round.
If we are to stop that wheel from its perpetual
and tragic turning, there seems to be no method
save that for which I plead.
The opposition to it is diverse and formidable
but can everywhere be reduced upon analysis to
some form of falsehood. This falsehood takes
the shape of denying the existence of the problem,
of remaining silent upon it, or of pretending
friendly emotions in public commerce which are
belied by every phrase and gesture admitted in
private. Or it takes the shape of defining the
problem in false terms, in proclaiming it essen-
tially religious whereas it is essentially national.
Worst of all, it may be that very modern kind of
falsehood, a statement of the truth accompanied
by a statement of its contradiction, like the precious
modern lie that one can be a patriot and at the
same tune international. In the case of the Jews,
this particular modern lie takes the shape of admit-
ting that they are wholly alien to us and different
from us, of talking of them as such and even writing
of them as such, and yet, in another connection,
talking and writing of them as though no such
THE THESIS OF THIS BOOK 13
violent contrast were present. That pretence of
reconciling contradictions is the lie in the soul.
Its punishment is immediate, for those who indulge
it are blinded.
All opposition that ever I have met to the solu-
tion here proposed is an opposition sprung from
the spirit of untruth ; and if there were no other
argument in favour of an honest and moral settle-
ment of the dispute, the one argument based on
Truth would, I think, be sufficient. It is a social j
truth that there is a Jewish nation, alien to us and |
therefore irritant. It is a moral truth that expul-
sion and worse are remedies to .be avoided. It
is an historical truth that those solutions have
always ultimately failed ; the recognition of those
three truths alone will set us right.
Such is the main thesis of this book, but it
needs an addition if its full spirit is to be appre-
hended, and that addition I have attempted to
express in the last chapter.
If the solution I propose be the right solution,
it yet remains to be determined whether it should
first take the form of new laws from which a new
spirit may be expected to grow, or first take the
form of a new spirit and practice from which new
laws shall spring. The order is of essential import-
ance ; for to mistake it, to reverse the true sequence
of cause and effect, is the prime cause of failure
in all social reform.
As will be seen by those who have the patience
to read to the end of my book, I have, in its last
pages, pleaded strongly for the second policy. It
would be impossible to frame in our society, and
in face of the rapidly rising tide of antagonism
against the Jews, new laws that would not lead
14 THE JEWS
to injustice. But if it be possible to create an
atmosphere wherein the Jews are spoken of openly,
and they in their turn admit, define, and accept
the consequences of a separate nationality in our
midst, then, such a spirit once established, laws
and regulations consonant to it will naturally follow.
But I am convinced that the reversing of this
process would only lead first to confusion and next
to disaster, both for Israel and for ourselves.
THE DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM
CHAPTER II
THE DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM
I HAVE stated the Problem. There is friction
between the two races the Jews in their dispersion v
and those among whom they live. This friction
is growing acute. It has led invariably in the
past (and consequently may lead now) to the most
fearful consequences, terrible for the Jew but
evil also for us. Therefore that the problem is
immediate, practical and grave. Therefore a solu-
tion is imperative.
But I may be and indeed I shall be met at
the outset by the denial that any such problem
exists. Such was the attitude of all our immedi-
ate past; such is the attitude of many of the
best men to-day on both sides of the gulf which
separates Israel from our world.
I must meet this objection before going further,
for if it be sound, if indeed there is no problem
(save what may be created by ignorance or malice),
then no solution is demanded. All we have to
do is to enlighten the ignorant and to repress the
malicious : the ignorant, who imagine there is an
alien Jewish nation among them, the malicious, who
treat as though they were alien, men who are, in fact,
exactly like ourselves and normal fellow- citizens.
I do not here allude to the great mass of conven-
tion, hypocrisy and fear which pretends ignorance
17 C
18 THE JEWS
of a truth it well knows. I am speaking of the
sincere conviction, still present in many particu-
larly those of the older generation that no Jewish
problem exists.
It is honestly denied by a certain type of mind
that there is any such thing as a Jewish nation ;
there can therefore be no friction between it and
its hosts : the thing is a delusion. Let us examine
that mind and see whether the illusion is on our
side or no.
It was the attitude familiar to the nineteenth
century, and agreeable to that one of its political
moods in which it found itself best satisfied : the
negative attitude of leaving the Jewish nation
unrecognized; of creating a fiction of single
citizenship to replace the reality of dual allegiance ;
of calling a Jew a full member of whatever society
he happened to inhabit during whatever space of
time he happened to sojourn there in his wanderings
across the earth. That was the attitude agreeable
on the political side to everything which called
itself " modern thought." Such was the doc-
trine proposed by the great men of the French
Revolution. Such was the attitude accepted
almost enthusiastically by Liberal England, that
is, by all the dominant public life of England
during the Victorian period. Such was the policy
which once obtained universal favour throughout
the whole of our Western civilization. That was
the attitude which the West actually attempted
to impose upon Eastern States, and the last
effect of its rapidly-declining credit is to be found
in certain clauses of the Treaty of Versailles:
for that attitude is still the official attitude of all
our governments.
THE DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 19
In the Treaty of Versailles and the other treaties
following the Great War the Jews of Eastern Europe
were put under a sort of special protection, but not
in a straightforward and positive fashion. The
word "Jew" was never blurted out it was
replaced by the word " minority " but the inten-
tion was obvious. The underlying implication
was : " We, the Western governments, say there
is no Jewish problem. The idea of a Jewish nation
is a delusion and the conception of the Jew as
something different from a Pole or a Rumanian
is a mania. If you in the East are still benighted
in this matter, at any rate we will prevent your
ignorance or obsession from leading you to persecu-
tion." The same men who made these declarations
proceeded to erect a brand-new highly- distinct
Jewish state in Palestine, with the threat behind
it of ruthlessly suppressing a majority by the
use of Western arms.
Both actions were the consequence of that con-
fused position I have just defined (history will
call it ihelast example), which, though much weak-
ened in public opinion, was still honestly taken
for granted by some of the Parliamentarians who
framed the Treaty, and was certainly felt to be
of personal advantage to all : the position that
there is no Jewish nation when the admission of
it may inconvenience the Jew, but very much of
a Jewish nation when it can advantage him.
Those who defended this position did so from
various standpoints ; but these may all be regarded
as so many degrees in a certain way of looking at
the Jewish people. It was till lately the attitude
of the majority of educated Frenchmen, English-
men and Italians. It was, so to speak, the official
20 THE JEWS
political attitude of Western Europe with its
parliamentary governments and other correspond-
ing institutions.
The most extreme form of this opinion was to
be found in people who spoke of the Jew as nothing
other than a citizen with a particular religion. A
state would be dominantly Catholic or Protestant,
but it would contain smaller religious bodies, eager
minorities, for which a place had to be found, side
by side with the more or less indifferent majority.
Catholic France had a five per cent and wealthy
Huguenot minority. Protestant England had a
seven per cent and poor Catholic minority. Protes-
tant Holland had a large minority more than a
third of Catholics, and so forth. It had become
odious to nineteenth century thought that religious
differences (which it regarded as nothing more than
shades of doubtfully -held private opinion) should
be the concern of the State. A large number of
people thought of the Jews, not as a race, but only
as a religion ; and regarding all religion thus, they
concluded that it could involve no diminution of
citizenship.
At the other end of the scale you had public
men who fully appreciated the ultimate difficulties
which would certainly arise from this inconclusive
settlement of the matter. These regarded the
Jews as a quite distinct nationality, and even as
a nationality likely to clash with the national
needs of its hosts; they would even (in private)
express their hostility towards that nationality.
None the less, they thought it must be treated in
public life as though it did not exist. These men
were most emphatic in their private letters and
conversation that the Jewish problem was not a
THE DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 21
religious but a national one. Nevertheless (they
said) it was necessary to-day to mask that problem
by a fiction and to pretend that the Jew was just
like everybody else save for his religion. All
other solutions (they said) demanded a knowledge
of history and of Europe not to be expected of the
public at large ; again, the Jews were so powerful
that if they desired the fiction to be supported they
must be humoured. At any rate, recourse must
be had, in our time at least, to this make-believe.
To the new and already antagonistic attitude
towards the Jews now rising so strongly everywhere
throughout Western Europe (which is in part a
reaction from the nineteenth century position),
this old-fashioned way of denying the Jewish race
or ignoring its existence by a fiction appears
morally odious, and we wonder to-day why it
commanded universal support. It involved a
falsehood, of course, often a conscious falsehood;
and it was also undignified; for there appears to
our generation something as grotesque in denying
the existence of the Jewish nation as in denying
our own. But that the fiction was maintained
sincerely, and that the grotesque and undignified
side of it went unperceived, we can assure ourselves
in a few moments' converse with any one of that
older generation which maintained it and still
represents it among us.
It might have continued to flourish for yet
another generation, at any rate among the leading
classes of this commercial community, but for two
new developments which broke it down, each
development the result of so large a toleration.
The first was the growth of numbers, the second of
influence. What made that old falsehood glaring
22 THE JEWS
and that old grotesque apparent was the enormous
increase throughout all the West of the Jewish
poor, accompanied by the enormous increase of the
power exercised by the Jewish rich in public affairs.
Men grew angry at finding themselves pledged to
a pretence that Jews were not, when their presence
was everywhere unavoidable, in the streets, and
in the offices of government. The fiction was
possible when a very few financiers, mixed with
and lost in the polite world, were alone concerned.
It became impossible in the face of the vast new
ghettoes of London, Manchester, Bradford, Glas-
gow, and the formidable and growing list of Jewish
and half -Jewish Ministers, Viceroys, ambassadors,
dictators of policy.
This contempt for and irritation with what I
have called the nineteenth century attitude, the
Liberal attitude, was already apparent before the
end of that century. It was muttering during
the South African war in England and the Dreyfus
case in France ; it became vocal in the first years
of this century, especially in connection with
parliamentary scandals ; with the Bolshevist rising
in 1917 it became clamorous. It will certainly
grow. We already have a formidable minority
prepared to act against the interest of the Jew.
It will in all probability become, and that shortly,
a majority. It may appear at any moment, on
some critical occasion, on some new provocation,
as an overwhelming flood of exasperated opinion.
All the more does it behove us to treat the
old-fashioned neutrality and fiction fairly; to
examine it even with a bias in its favour; to set
down all that can be said in its defence before we
reject it, as I think we must now all reluctantly
THE DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 23
reject it. I say "reluctantly"; for after all it
was the fixed mood of our fathers, who did great
things: we feel their reproach when we abandon
it, and there are still present with us very many of
our elders to whom our new anxiety is abhorrent.
We must remember in the first place that the
treating of the Jew in the West as no Jew at all,
but a plain citizen like the rest, worked well enough
for a time. One might almost say that there was
no Jewish problem consciously present to the
mind of the average educated Englishman or
Frenchman, Italian, or even western German, /
between, say, the years 1830 and 1890. A very
small body of Jews in England and France, in
Italy and the rest of the West, were vaguely
associated with wealth in the popular mind; a
large proportion of them were distinguished for
public work of various kinds ; many of them with
beneficence. The presence of such men could
not conceivably lead to political difficulties or at
least, so it then seemed. The stories of persecution
that came through from Eastern Europe, even
examples of friction between great bodies of Jews
there and the natives of the States where they
happened to find themselves, were received in the
West with disgust as the aberrations of imperfectly
civilized people.
Even in the valley of the Rhine, where the Jew
was more numerous and better known " in bulk,"
the convention of the more civilized West was
accepted. The doctrines, the abstraction of the
French Revolution in this matter had prevailed.
Here any reader with an historical sense will at
once point out that the space of time I have just
quoted 1830 to 1890 is ridiculously short. Any
24 THE JEWS
treatment of a very great political problem,
centuries old, which works for only sixty years
and then begins to break down is no settlement
at all. But I would reply that this period was
especially a time in which historical perspective
was lost. Men, even highly educated men, in the
nineteenth century, greatly exaggerated the fore-
ground of the historical picture.
You may note this in any school manual of the
Eeriod, where all the four centuries of our Eoman
mndation are compressed into a few sentences,
the dark ages into a few pages, the whole vast
story of the Middle Ages themselves into a few
chapters ; where the mass of the work is invariably
given to the last three centuries, while of these
the nineteenth is regarded as equal in importance
to all the rest put together.
This false historical perspective is apparent in
every other department of their political thought.
For instance, although capitalism, huge national
debts, the anonymity of financial action and the
rest of it, did not begin to flourish fully until after
the first third of the nineteenth century, and though
anyone might (one would think) have been able
to discover the exceedingly unstable character of
that society, yet our fathers took it for granted as
an eternal state of things. Your Victorian man
with 100,000 in railway stock thought his family
immutably secure in a comfortable income, and
what he thought about capitalism he thought also
about his newly- developed anonymous press, his
national frontiers, his tolerance of this, his intoler-
ance of that, his parliaments and all the rest of it.
It is no wonder if, under such a false sense of
permanence and security, he lost historical per-
THE DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 25
spective in this other and graver matter we are
here discussing.
But apart from the argument that what I have
called the nineteenth century or Liberal attitude
towards the Jews worked well for its little day
(at least, in Western Europe), there is also the
fact that under special circumstances something
very like it has worked well for much longer periods
in the past. Take, for example, the position of
the Jews in such a town as Amsterdam. The
reception of a Jew as a citizen exactly like others,
though he was present in very large numbers, the
fiction denying his separate nationality, has held
for generations in that community and it has
procured peace and apparent contentment upon
both sides. And what is true to this day of Amster-
dam has been true in the past for long periods
in the life of many another commercial and
cosmopolitan society: that of Venice, notably,
and, in a large measure, that of Rome ; in that of
Frankfort, of Lyons, and of a hundred cities at special
times. It was true of all Poland for generations.
One might add to the list indefinitely, but
always with the uncomfortable knowledge, as one
wrote, that the experiment invariably broke down
in the long run.
Again, there was to be advanced for this Liberal
attitude of the nineteenth century the very powerful
argument that while to one party in the issue, the
Englishman, the Frenchman, the Italian, etc., it
seemed well enough and certainly did no harm, it
was highly acceptable to the other. The Jew as a
rule not only accepted but welcomed this particular
way of dealing with what lie at any rate has always
known to be a very grave problem indeed. For
26 THE JEWS
the Jew has a racial memory beyond all other
men. The arrangement seemed to give him all
the security of which his racial history (a thing of
which every Jew is acutely conscious) had made
him ardently desirous. I think we should add
(though the phrase would be quarrelled with by
many modern people) that this fiction satisfied
ri,e J /j w's sen?^ ** justice. For it is no small part
of the problem we are examining that the Jew does
really feel such special treatment to be his due.
Without it he feels handicapped. He is, in his
own view, only saved from the disadvantage of a
latent hostility when he is thus protected, and he
is therefore convinced that the world owes him
I this singular privilege of full citizenship in any
' community where he happens for the moment to
be, while at the same time retaining full citizenship
i in his own nation.
Now, if in any conflict an arrangement seems work-
able enough to one party and is actually acclaimed
by the other, it is not lightly to be disregarded.
If, for instance, a man and his tenant quarrel
about the tenure of a field upon a very long lease,
the tenant caring little about nominal ownership
but very much about his inviolable tenure, the
landlord quite agreeable to a very long lease but
keen on retaining the titular ownership, that
quarrel can be easily settled. One could give any
name to the tenant's position other than the name
of " owner," yet satisfy all his practical demands.
A rough parallel exists between such a position
and the attempt at a settlement which marked the
nineteenth century.
What the Jew wanted was not the proud privilege
of being called an Englishman, a Frenchman, an
THE DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 27
Italian, or a Dutchman. To this he was completely
indifferent (for his pride lay in being a Jew, his
loyalty was to his own, and what is more, he might
at any moment fold up his tent and go off to
another country for good). What the Jew wanted
was not the feeling that he was just like the others
that would have been odious to him what he
wanted was security ; it is what every human being
craves for and what he of all men most lacked:
the power to feel safe in the place where one happens
to be. On the other hand, his hosts had not yet
found any practical inconvenience in granting
this demand. They did not know the historicai
argument against it, or they thought it worthless,
because they thought the past barbarous and no
model for their own action. So a compromise
was arrived at, the fiction was solidly established,
and the Jew, though remaining a Jew, became
a German in Hamburg, a Frenchman in Paris, an
American in New York, as he wandered from place
to place, and for a long lifetime no one felt himself
much the worse for the false convention.
The next argument in favour of this policy was
the fact that it drew upon a number of ideas, each
one of which at some time or another had been
taken for granted by our ancestors in each one of
their numerous (but unsuccessful) attempts to
deal with the problem after their own fashion.
For instance, a modern objector says: " What
rubbish to treat Jews as though they merely
represented a religion ! We all know they represent
a nation \ " But all manner of legislation in the
past, even in times and places where the difference
between Jews and Europeans was most marked,
has perpetually fallen back upon that very point
28 THE JEWS
of religion alone. Over and over again you find
it tlie test of policy : in early, and again in fifteenth
century Spain, under Charlemagne's rule in Gaul,
in early mediaeval England, at Byzantium, and
to this day in Eastern parts where the Jew is
subject to perpetual interference. Exception was
in all these made for the Jew who abandoned his
religion. His nation was left unmentioned.
It is pertinent to quote such a simple and recent
example as the body of Prussian officers, now
happily extinct. It was a standing rule in the
smarter Prussian regiments (I believe in nearly
all) that no Jew could get his commission. The
Prussian system left the granting of commissions,
in practice, to the existing members of the regi-
mental staff; they treated their mess as a Club
and they blackballed Jews. But they would admit
baptized Jews, and did so in considerable numbers.
Was the Jew less of a Jew in race through his
baptism? Throughout all the centuries that
religious criterion, which the modern reformer
cries out against as a piece of humbug and a mask
for the real political problem, has been the criterion
taken. It is true that the modern solution did
not attempt a religious segregation. On the
contrary, the Liberal thought of the nineteenth
century held all such segregation in abhorrence ;
but it had this in common with the older fashion,
that it made religion the point of interest, and to
that extent masked the more real point of nation-
ality and allegiance.
Lord Palmerston, making his famous speech
on the sanctity of a Greek Jew's bedstead, and
insisting that the said Greek Jew was an English
citizen ; Lord Palmerston carefully avoiding the
THE DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 29
word "Jew" and pretending throughout his
speech that the Greek Jew in question was as
much an Englishman as himself, was in a very
different mood from a Spanish fifth- century Bishop
admitting a Jew to Office on condition of his
conversion. Yet the two had this in common, that
neither regarded the Jew as the member of another
nation, but each (for very different reasons) as no
more than the member of a religion.
To Palmerston, this Greek Jew about whose
bedstead he made his famous speech, and on to
whose bedstead hangs to this day the phrase
" Civis Romanus Sum," was above all a fellow-
citizen. He may have seemed to Palmerston a
doubtful sort of Englishman because his home was
Greece, but he certainly did not seem doubtful
because he happened to be a Jew. Palmerston
would have thought that only a matter of private
opinion, and would no more have regarded a Jew
as an alien on account of this private opinion than
he would have regarded as alien a fellow- Member
of the House of Commons who preferred roast
mutton to boiled.
Take, again, another aspect of the nineteenth
century liberal idea : the recognition of citizenship.
You have had that over and over again in the
attempted solutions of the past. It was the very
essence of the Roman method. For though the
Government of the Roman Empire was much too
concerned with realities and with enduring work to
accept any fiction in the matter, or to pretend in
practice that the Jew was not a Jew ; though, on the
contrary, the Romans recognized at once the gulf
between the Jews and themselves, and recognized
it not only by their cruelty to the Jew but also by
30 THE JEWS
the privileges they granted him ; yet it was always
their policy to admit citizenship as the primary
distinction. The Jew who could claim that he was
a full Roman citizen was, in the eyes of a Roman
Tribunal, much more important in that capacity
han in his social capacity as Jew. His " point,"
'-s we should say in our modern slang, was his
citizenship, not his Judaism. So, I say, this
solution has for a further argument the fact that
in one part or another it is in touch with the various
attempts our race has made in the past to solve
the problem.
There is yet another argument strongly in favour
of the Liberal fiction which was attempted in the
immediate past, and thought to have been success-
fully established. It is the consonance of that
fiction with the whole body of modern custom and
law, with the whole mass of modern economic and
social habit.
We travel so much, we mix so much, our economic
activities are at once so complicated, so interlocked,
and (unhappily) for the most part so secret, that
any other way of meeting the Jews would have
seemed at any rate if it had appeared in the shape
of a positive law a monstrous anachronism. A
man must meet his friends' friends and treat them
as a normal part of the general society in which
he moves. As the Jew permeated the society of
the West everywhere (small though his numbers
were in the West), as he everywhere intermarried
with Europeans of the wealthier class, to insist in
his presence upon his separate nationality would
have been odious ; it would have been like making
a guest teel out of place in one's home.
What is more, to by far the greater part of the
THE DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 31
wealthier and governing classes of the Western
States the difference of race was so far masked
that it had almost come to be forgotten. Some-
times a shock would revive it. An English squire
would find, for instance, that a relation of his by
marriage, whose Jewish name and descent he had
never bothered about, was cousin to, and in close
connection with, a person of a totally different
name an Oriental name mixed up in some
conspiracy, say, against the Russian State. Or he
would learn with surprise that a learned University
man with whom he had recently dined was the
uncle of a socialist agitator in Vienna. But the
shock would be a passing one, and the old mood
of security would return.
With the growth of plutocracy the anomaly of
treating Jews as individuals separate from the
rest of the community increased. The most
important men in control of international finance
were admittedly Jewish. The Jew's international
position made him always useful and often
necessary in the vast international economic
undertakings of our time. The anonymity which
had come to be taken for granted throughout
modern capitalism made it seem absurd or
impossible, always highly unusual, and probably
futile, to search for a separate Jewish element in
any particular undertaking.
There is one last argument for this Liberal policy,
which has a strong practical value, though it is
exceedingly dangerous to use it in the defence of
that policy because it cuts both ways. It is the
argument that the Jew ought to be thus treated
as a citizen exactly like the rest and given no
position either of privilege or disability, because
32 THE JEWS
he does, as a fact, mould himself so very rapidly
to his environment.
When men say as they are beginning to do
that a Jew is as different from ourselves as a
Chinaman, or a negro, or an Esquimaux, and ought
therefore to be treated as belonging to a separate
body from our own, the answer is that the Jew is
nothing of the kind. Indeed, he becomes, after a
short sojourn among Englishmen, Frenchmen, Ger-
mans or Americans, so like his hosts on the surface
that he is, to many, indistinguishable from them ;
and that is one of the main facts in the problem.
That is the real reason why to the majority of
the middle classes in the nineteenth century, in
Western countries, the Jewish problem was non-
existent. Were you to say it of any other race
negroes, for instance, or Chinamen it would
sound incredible; but we know it in practice to
be true, that a Jew will pass his life in, say, three
different communities in turn, and in each the
people who have met him will testify that he seemed
just like themselves.
I have known a case in point which would amuse
my non- Jewish readers but perhaps offend my
Jewish readers were I to present it in detail. I
shall cite it therefore without names, because I
desire throughout this book to keep to the rule
whereby alone it can be of service, that nothing
offensive to either party shall be introduced ; but
it is typical and can be matched in the experience
of many.
The case was that of the father of a man in
English public life. He began life with a German
name in Hamburg. He was a patriotic citizen
of that free city, highly respected and in every
THE DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 33
way a Hamburger, and the Hamburg men of that
generation still talk of him as one of themselves.
He drifted to Paris before the Franco- German
War, and, there, was an active Parisian, familiar
with the life of the Boulevards and full of energy
in every patriotic and characteristically French
pursuit ; notably he helped to recruit men during
the national catastrophe of 1870-71. Everybody
who met him in this phase of his life thought of
him and talked of him as a Frenchman.
Deciding that the future of France was doubtful
after such a defeat, he migrated to the United
States, and there died. Though a man of some
years when he landed, he soon appeared in the
eyes of the Americans with whom he associated to be
an American just like themselves. He acquired
the American accent, the American manner, the
freedom and the restraints of that manner. In
every way he was a characteristic American.
In Hamburg his German name had been pro-
nounced after the German fashion. In France,
where German names are common, he retained it,
but had it pronounced in French fashion. On
reaching the United States it was changed to a
Scotch name which it distantly resembled, and
no doubt if he had gone to Japan the Japanese
would be telling us that they had known him as
a worthy Japanese gentleman of great activity in
national affairs and bearing the honoured name of
an ancient Samurai family.
The nineteenth century attitude almost entirely
depended upon this marvellous characteristic in
the Jews which differentiates them from all the
rest of mankind. Had that characteristic power
of superficial mutation been absent, the nineteenth
34 THE JEWS
century policy would have broken down as com-
pletely as the corresponding Northern policy
towards the negro broke down in the United
States. Had the Jew been as conspicuous among
us, as, say, a white man is among Kaffirs, the
fiction would have broken down at once. As it
was, all who adopted that policy, honestly or
dishonestly, were supported by this power of the
Jew to conform externally to his temporary
surroundings.
The man who consciously adopted the nineteenth
century Liberal policy towards the Jews as a mere
political scheme, knowing full well the dangers it
might develop ; the man only half conscious of
the existence of those dangers ; and the man who
had never heard of them but took it for granted
that the Jew was a citizen just like himself, with
an exceptional religion each of those three men
had in common, aiding the schemes of the one,
supporting the illusion of the other, the amazing
fact that a Jew takes on with inexplicable rapidity
the colour of his environment. That unique charac-
teristic was the support of the Liberal attitude and
was at the same time its necessary condition.
The fiction that a man of obviously different type
and culture and race is the same as ourselves, may
be practical for purposes of law and government,
but cannot be maintained in general opinion. A
conspiracy or illusion attempting, for instance, to
establish the Esquimaux in Greenland as in-
distinguishable from the Danish officials of the
Settlement, would fail through ridicule. Equally
ridiculous would be the pretence that because they
were both subjects of the same Crown an English-
man in the Civil Service of India was exactly
THE DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 35
the same sort of person as a Sikh soldier. But with
the Jews you have the startling truth that, while
the fundamental difference goes on the whole
time and is perhaps deeper than any other of the
differences separating mankind into groups;
while he is, within, and through all his ultimate
character, above all things a Jew; yet in the
superficial and most immediately apparent things
he is clothed in the very habit of whatever society
he for the moment inhabits.
I say that this might seem to many the last and
strongest argument in favour of the old-fashioned
Liberal policy, but I repeat that it is a dangerous
argument, for it cuts both ways. If a food which
disagrees with you looks exactly like another
kind of food which suits you, you might use the
likeness as an argument for eating either sort of
food indifferently. You might say: "It is silly
to try to distinguish ; one must admit, on looking at
them, that they are the same thing "; but it would
turn out after dinner a very bad practical policy.
There is indeed one last argument which to me,
personally, and I suppose to most of my readers,
is stronger than all the rest, for it is the argument
from morals.
If the Liberal attitude of the nineteenth century
had proved a stable one, omitting that element in
it which is a falsehood and therefore a factor
of instability, one could retain the rest; then it
would satisfy two appetites common to all men
appetite for justice and the appetite for charity.
Here is a man, a neighbour present in the midst
of my society. I put him to inconvenience if I
treat him as an alien. I like him ; I regard him
as a friend. To treat such a man as though he
36 THE JEWS
were, although, a friend, something separate, not
to be admitted to certain functions of my com-
munity, offends the heart, as it also offends the
sense of justice. Such a man may possess a great
talent for, say, administration. Like all men
possessed of a great talent, he must exercise it.
You maim him if you do not allow him to exercise
it. A rule forbidding him to take part in the admin-
istration of the society in which he finds himself,
or even a feeling hindering him in such activities,
creates, not only in him, but in those who are his
hosts, a sense of injustice ; and if it were possible
to adopt a policy wherein the separate character
of the Jew should be always in abeyance, so that
he could be at the same time an Englishman and
yet not an Englishman, or a Frenchman and yet
not a Frenchman, then we should have a settlement
which all good men ought to accept.
Unfortunately that solution is false because,
like many appeals to a virtuous instinct, it is
sentimental. We call " sentimental " a policy
or theory which attempts to reconcile contra-
dictions. The sentimental man will equally abhor
crime and its necessary punishment; disorder
and an organized police. He likes to think of
human life as though it did not come to an end.
He likes to read of the passion of love without its
concomitant of sexual conflict. He likes to read
and think of great fortunes accumulated without
avarice, cunning or theft. He likes to imagine an
impossible world of mutually exclusive things.
It makes him comfortable.
Now we commit the fault of the sentimental man
(the gravest of practical faults in politics) when we
cling at this late date to a continuance of the old
THE DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 37
policy. You cannot have your cake and eat it
too, you cannot at the same time have present in
the world this ubiquitous fluid, yet closely organized
Jewish community, and at the same time each of the
individuals composing it treated as though they
were not members of the nation which makes
them all they are. You cannot at the same time
treat a whole as one thing and its component
parts as another. If you do, you are building on
contradiction and you will, like everybody who
builds on contradiction, run up against disaster.
*****
I am minded to give the reader another anecdote
(again taking care, I hope, to suppress all names
and dates to prevent identification, which might
irritate my Jewish readers or too greatly interest
their opponents). As a younger man it was my
constant pastime to linger at the bar of the House
of Lords and listen to what went on there. I shall
always remember one occasion when an aged Jew,
who had begun life in very humble circumstances,
had accumulated a great fortune and had pur-
chased his peerage like any other, rose to speak
in connection with a resolution or with a bill
dealing with "aliens" the hypocrisy of the
politician, and the popular ferment against the
rush of Jewish immigrants into the East End
between them gave rise to that non-committal
name. This old gentleman very rightly pushed
all such humbug aside. He knew perfectly well
that the policy was aimed at " his people" and
he called them " my people." He knew perfectly
well that the proposed change would introduce
interference with their movement and would
subject them to humiliation. He spoke with
38 THE JEWS
flaming patriotism, and I was enthralled by the
intensity, vigour and sincerity of his appeal. It
was a very fine performance and, incidentally
(considering what the man was !),it illustrated the
vast difference between his people and my own.
For a life devoted to accumulating wealth, which
would have killed nobler instincts in any one of
us, had evidently seemed to him quite normal and
left him with every appetite of justice and of love
of nation unimpaired. He clinched that fine
speech with the cry, " What our people want is
to be let alone." He said it over and over again.
I am sure that in the audience which listened to
him, all the older men felt a responsive echo to that
appeal. It was the very doctrine in which they
had been brought up and the very note of the great
Victorian Liberal era, with its national triumphs
in commerce and in arms.
Well, within a very few years the younger
members of that very man's family came out in
Parliamentary scandal after scandal, appearing
all in sequence one after the other a sort of
procession. They had been let alone right enough !
I But they had not let us alone. I ask myself, some-
times, How would it sound if some years hence
any one of those descendants having by that
time been given his peerage (for they are rich
men and all of them in professional politics)
should return to that cry of his ancestor and ask
to be " let alone " ? There would be no response
then in the breasts of the contemporaries who
might hear him. Manners will so much have
changed in this regard that he would be interrupted.
But I do not think that my hypothetical descendant
of that rich old Jew is likely to make any such
THE DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 39
speech. I think that when the time comes for
making it, the whole idea of " letting alone" will
be quite dead.
I have quoted this old man's speech with no
invidious intention but only as an actual example
of the way in which the " letting alone " of this
great question breaks down. I am as familiar as
any Jewish reader of mine with names that have
dignified public life in the past, Jewish names,
Jewish peers : and I recall in particular the honoured
name of Lord Herschell, to the friendship between
whose nearest and my own I preserve a grateful
and sacred memory.
But to return to the failure of the sentimental
argument.
*****
The sentimental argument fails because it involves
contradictions that is, incompatibility of fact.
Even if one had not this strictly rational principle
to guide one, there is the whole of history to guide
one. It is true that the pretence of common citizen-
ship has worked now for a shorter, now for a longer,
period, but never indefinitely. You always come
at last to a smash. The Jew is welcomed in
mediaeval Poland ; he comes in ^vast numbers ;
all goes well. Then the inevitable happens and
the Jew and the Pole stand apart as enemies,
each accusing the other of injustice, the one
crying out that he is persecuted, the other that the
State is in danger by alien activity within. Spain
alternatively pursued this policy, ana its opposite :
the whole history of Spain the original seat of
Jewish influence in Europe after the general exile
is a history of alternating attempts at the senti-
mental solution and a savage reaction against it:
40 THE JEWS
the reaction o'f the man, who, fighting for his life,
strikes out violently in terror of death. That is
the history not only of Spain but of every other
country at one time or another.
Indeed, we have before our very eyes to-day the
beginning of exactly such a reaction in the West
of Europe and the United States of America, and
it is the presence of that reaction which has caused
this book to be written. The attempt at a Liberal
solution has already failed in our hands; if it
had not failed there would be no more to be said,
or, at any rate, we could postpone the discussion
until the actual difficulty began. But we have
only to look around us to see that, after these few
years, this one lifetime, during which the experi-
ment has flourished in the highest part of civilization,
it is already breaking down. Everywhere the old
questions are being asked; everywhere the old
complaints are being raised, everywhere the old
perils are reappearing. We must seek some solution,
for if we fail to find it we know from the past what
tragedies are in store for us both. There is a prob-
lem, a most direct and urgent problem. Once it is
recognized, a solution of it is necessarily demanded.
But it is not enough to show that the mere denial
of the existence of that problem the old nineteenth
century Liberal policy was false and bound to
break down. It is just as necessary, if we appre-
ciate how practical and immediate the problem is,
to state it and illustrate it from contemporary
events. It is not enough to show that the attempted
Liberal policy has failed. One must also, before
trying to discover a solution, analyse the nature
of the problem as it presents itself at the moment,
and that is what I propose to do in the next chapter.
THE PRESENT PHASE OF THE
PROBLEM
CHAPTER III
THE PRESENT PHASE OF THE PROBLEM
I SAID in my last that the old solution of ignoring
or denying the Jewish problem was bound to break
down and had broken down, and this was tanta-
mount to saying that the problem persists. But I
said one must go farther and state the full nature
of that problem as it stands at this moment before
one could attempt a practical solution.
It is not enough to say that a person who imagines
himself immortal and immune from disease is, as
a fact, dangerously ill, and that the break- down
of his health has disproved his theory. One must
go on to find out exactly what is the matter with
him, and, if possible, what the cure for the trouble
may be.
The Jewish problem in its larger sense I have
defined in the first chapter of this book, and that
as I think every one defines it, including all the
many Jews who have discussed the matter. It is
the presence within one political organism of
another political organism at friction with it : the
strains set up by such an unnatural state of affairs ;
the risk of disaster to the lesser body and of hurt
to both if it remain unremedied. The true solu-
tion therefore is only to be discovered in some
policy which will permanently relieve the strain
43
44 THE JEWS
and re- establish normal relations. The end of such
a solution should be the functioning, as far as
possible, of both parties, at their ease and without
disturbance one to the other.
But this general statement of the problem that
it is the presence to each party of an alien body
and the consequent irritation and friction on each
is not enough. We must pursue it more closely
and develop it in greater detail, describing how
the friction and the irritation are increasing :
insisting that they have even become a menace.
Then only can we set out to discover as far as
possible by analysis what exact character the
disease bears and why it is of this character. Only
after all this can we explore a remedy.
When we look round the modern world, say the
last twenty years, we discover, in widely separate
places, and among very different interests, and
inhabiting the most diverse characters, the pre-
sence of what is for many a new political feeling :
it runs from irritation to exasperation, from
grumbling to invective ; it is everywhere directed
against the Jews. One activity after another, in
which the Jews are variously in the right or in the
wrong, or indifferent, has aroused hostility in
varying degrees but increasing and though the
danger- spots are still, as I have said, dissociated
in the main, yet they are beginning to coalesce
and to form large areas inimicalto Israel.
It is objected of the Jew in finance, in industry,
in commerce where he is ubiquitous and powerful
out of all proportion to his numbers that he seeks,
and has already almost reached, dominion. It is
objected that he acts everywhere against the
interests of his hosts; that these are being inter-
PRESENT PHASE OF THE PROBLEM 45
f ered with, guided, run against their will ; that a
power is present which acts either with in-
difference to what we love or in active opposition
to what we love. Notably is it said to be
indifferent to, or in active opposition against,
our national feelings, our religious traditions,
and the general culture and morals of Christendom
which we have inherited and desire to preserve :
that power is Israel.
These feelings grew as one example after another
of the Jewish strength, the Jewish cohesion,
arrived to feed them. How violent they were to
become might be seen by taking as a special ex-
ample their extreme form, called" Anti-Semitism."
When we come, later in this book, to examine that
modern phenomenon, we shall find it to be not only
a proof of the insistence and gravity of the problem
we are trying to solve, but also some explanation of
its nature.
Upon a world thus already exasperated, and in
some large sections exasperated to the point of
unreason for the anti-Semitic drive was, and is,
full of unreason there suddenly fell the doublet
effect 'of the Bolshevist revolution: a revolution'
which struck both at the benevolent who would
hear no harm of the Jews, and those who had
hitherto shielded or obeyed them as identified
only with the interests of large Capital. It was a
blow in flank under which staggered both the
supporters of Jewish neutrality and the dependants
upon Jewish finance.
The old Liberal policy still officially held the
field ; but when this shattering explosion came it
compelled attention. Bolshevism stated the Jewish
problem with a violence and an insistence such
46 THE JEWS
that it could no longer be denied either by the
blindest fanatic or the most resolute liar.
Such was, in its largest lines, the recent historical
sequence leading up to the state of affairs we now
find. Let us trace that sequence in more detail
and from a little farther back.
A lifetime ago, when the Liberal policy was
founded and when conditions were favourable to
its establishment, the populace might still nourish
its traditional antagonism to the Jew, but in the
West of Europe his numbers were very limited
(only a few thousand in France and England
combined, and hardly as many in Italy).
He belonged for the most part to the classes that
did not come into direct competition with the poor
of the large towns. From the countrysides he
was absent. He had not attempted to govern his
hosts as a politician, nor, in any large measure, to
indoctrinate them through the Press. The rapid
decline of religion at that time broke down one
barrier, and the transformation of the governing
classes from the old territorial Lords to the modern
plutocracy broke down another. The convention
that the Jew was indistinguishable from the
citizens of the country in which he happened to live,
or, at any rate, from that in which he had last lived,
was further fostered by the break-up of that cosmo*
politan aristocratic society which had marked the
eighteenth century, and which could note and
register the movements of prominent individuals
from nation to nation. The new industrial for-
tunes and the new international finance both
contributed to the same end, while the Jew also
began to compete successfully in every one of the
liberal professions without as yet dominating any
PKESENT PHASE OF THE PROBLEM 47
of them. No conflicts had arisen between the
Jewish race and the national interests of any
European people, with the exception perhaps of
the Poles ; and these were subject and silenced.
Throughout all this time, from the years after
Waterloo to the years immediately succeeding the
defeat of the French in 1870-71, the weight and
position of the Jew in Western civilization increased
out of all knowledge and yet without shock,
and almost without attracting attention. They
entered the Parliaments everywhere, the English
Peerage as well, and the Universities in very large
numbers. A Jew became Prime Minister of Great
Britain, another a principal leader of the Italian
resurrection ; another led the opposition to Napoleon
III. They were present in increasing numbers
in the chief institutions of every country. They
began to take positions as fellows of every important
Oxford and Cambridge college; they counted
heavily in the national literatures; Browning
and Arnold families, for instance, in England ;
Mazzini in Italy. They came for the first time
into European diplomacy. The armies and navies
alone were as yet untouched by their influence.
Strains of them were even present in the reigning
families. The institution of Freemasonry (with
which they are so closely allied and all the ritual
of which is Jewish in character) increased very
rapidly and very greatly. The growth of an
anonymous Press and of an increasingly anony-
mous commercial system further extended their
power.
It is an illusion to believe that all this great
change was Jewish in origin. The Jew did not
create it, he floated upon it, but it worked manifestly
48 THE JEWS
to his advantage, and we find him at the end of it
represented on the governing institutions of Western
Europe fifty or one hundredfold more than was
his due in proportion to his numbers. The Jews
intermarried everywhere with the leading families
and, before any sign that a turn of the tide had taken
place, they had already achieved that position in
which they are now being assailed and to oust them
from which such strong efforts are preparing.
Perhaps the first event which cut across this
unbroken ascent was the defeat of the French in
1870-1. Not that its effects were immediate in
this field, but that a nation defeated is the more
likely to raise a grievance, real or imaginary; in
seeking a cause for social misfortunes following on
its military disasters, it will naturally fix upon an
international rather than a national one, and
blame its alien population rather than its own.
Moreover, the date of the French defeat was also
the date on which was overthrown the temporal
power of the Papacy. In this also the Jews had
played their part. It gave them the opportunity
to play a still greater part in the immediate future
of the new Italy. Within a few years Eome was
to see a Jewish Mayor who supported with all his
might the unchristianizing of the city and especially
of its educational system.
One small but significant factor in the whole
business of these 70' s and early 80' s the beginning
of the last quarter of the nineteenth century
was the rise to monopoly of the Jewish international
news agents, among which Reuters was prominent,
and the presence of Jews as international corre-
j spondents of the various great newspapers, the
most prominent example being Opper, a Bohemian
PEESENT PHASE OF THE PROBLEM 49
Jew, who concealed his origin under the false name
of " de Blowitz," and for years acted as Paris
correspondent ioiThe Times, a paper in those days
of international influence.
The first expression of the reaction that was at
hand was to be found in sundry definitely anti-
Semitic writings appearing in Germany and France,
most noticeable in the latter country.
Their effect was at first slight, though they had the
high advantage of extensive documentation. The
great majority of educated men shrugged their
shoulders and passed such things by as the extrav-
agancies of fanatics; but these fanatics none
the less laid the foundation of future action by
the quotation of an immense quantity of facts
which could not but remain in the mind even of
those who were most contemptuous of the new
propaganda. In these books special insistence was
laid upon exposing what the Jews themselves call
" crypto- Judaism" that is, the presence every-
where throughout Western Europe of men in
important public positions who passed for English,
French or what not, but were really Jews.
In many cases (I have already quoted the poet
Browning and the distinguished family of Arnold)
these people were not hiding their religion but
had simply drifted from the original Jewish com-
munity of which their ancestors had been members,
but in most others there was more or less present
an element of conscious secrecy. It was evidently
the object of those who produced the literature I
am describing to attack that secrecy in particular
and to undo its effects ; and, as I have said, even
where their fanaticism was most ridiculed, the
vast array of facts which they marshalled could
50 THE JEWS
not be without its effect upon the memory of their
contemporaries.
There next appeared a series of direct inter-
national actions undertaken by Jewish finance,
the most important of which, of course, was the
drawing of Egypt into the European system, and
particularly into the system of Great Britain.
Of more effect upon public opinion was the
excitement of the Dreyfus case in France and,
immediately afterwards, of the South African War,
in England.
The characteristic of the Dreyfus case was not
the discussion upon the guilt or innocence of the
unfortunate man from whom it takes its title, but
the immense international clamour with which it
was surrounded. This local affair was made an
affair of the whole world, and men took as passionate
an interest in it in the remotest corners of civiliza-
tion as though they had been the principals actually
engaged.
Such a phenomenon could not but astonish the
mass of onlookers who had hitherto not given the
Jewish question a thought, and when there was
added to it the great ordeal of the South African
War, openly and undeniably provoked and pro-
moted by Jewish interests in South Africa, when
that war was so unexpectedly prolonged and proved
so unexpectedly costly in blood and treasure, a
second element was added to the growing feeling,
not yet, indeed, of antagonism to Jewish power
(half cultured France was Dreyfusard, and much
more than half England favoured the Boer War at
its origin) , but of interest in the Jewish question,
of curiosity, on the part of the average citizen,
who had not hitherto heard of it.
PKESENT PHASE OF THE PROBLEM 51
The original minority which had begun to oppose
Jewish power, with their extreme left wing of Anti-
Semites, and their core of men whose quarrel was
rather with the financial control of the modern
world than with any racial problem, tended to
grow. As always happens with a growing move-
ment, events appeared to suit themselves to that
growth and to promote it.
The Panama scandals in the French Parliament
had already fed the movement in France. The
later Parliamentary scandals in England, Marconi
and the rest, afforded so astonishing a parallel to
Panama that the similarity was of universal
comment. They might have passed as isolated
things a generation before. They were now con-
nected, often unjustly, with the uneasy sense of a
general financial conspiracy. They were, at any
rate, connected with an atmosphere essentially
Jewish in character.
Meanwhile there had already begun one of those
great migratory movements of the Jews which
have diversified history for two thousand years
and which are almost always the prelude to each
new disturbance in the equilibrium of the Jews
and each new resuscitation of the Jewish problem
in its most acute form.
The great reservoir of the Jewish race was, of
course, that country of Poland which had so nobly
succoured the Jews during the persecutions of the
late Middle Ages. Poland had made itself an
asylum for all the Jews who cared to go to it, and
was now, after the infamous partition inaugurated
by Prussia, still the home of something like half
the Jews of the world. The hatred of the Jews
entertained by all classes of Russians, the persecu-
52 THE JEWS
tions they suffered from the fact that Russia, since
the partition, governed that part of Poland where
they were most numerous, started the new exodus.
The movement was a westerly one, mainly to the
United States, but there also arose in connection
with it a novel growth of great ghettoes in the
English industrial towns, more particularly in
London, while New York was slowly transformed
from a city as free of Jewish population as London
and Paris had been in the past, to one in which a
good third or more of its inhabitants became either
entirely Jewish or partly Jewish.
This vast immigration, which was in full swing
just before the outbreak of the great war, and
which was adding so active a leaven to the increas-
ing ferment, which had even planted the beginnings
of a ghetto in Paris and which was affecting the
whole of the West, was supplemented by one more
factor of the first importance.
Modern capitalism, by which the Jew had so
largely benefited, but which he did not originate
and in which prominent, though few, Jewish
names, were so immixed, had for its counterpart
and reaction the socialist movement. This, again,
the Jews did not originate, nor at first direct;
but it rapidly fell more and more under their
control. The family of Mordecai (who had
assumed the name of Marx) produced in Karl a
most powerful exponent of that theory. Though
he did no more than copy and follow his non-
Jewish instructors (especially Louis Blanc, a
Franco- Scot of genius), he presented in complete
form the full theory of Socialism, economic, social,
and, by implication, religious; for he postulated
Materialism.
PRESENT PHASE OF THE PROBLEM 53
After Karl Marx came a crowd of his compat-
riots, who led the industrial proletariat in rebellion
against the increasing power of the capitalist
system, and began to organize a determined revolt.
Before the Great War one could say that the
whole of the Socialist movement, so far as its
staff and direction were concerned, was Jewish;
and while it took this purely economic form in
the West, in the East in the Russian Empire
it took a political form as well, and the growing
revolutionary force in that Empire was equally
Jewish in direction and driving power.
Such was the situation on the eve of the Great
War. Men were beginning to be thoroughly alive
to what was meant by the Jewish problem. The
old security was dispelled for ever; but as yet
only a minority, though now a large one, was
prepared to deal with that problem and to discuss
it openly. All that was official, and particularly
the Press, with its vast influence, had as yet
refused in any department to face the realities of
the position. The convention forbidding public
allusion to the Jewish question was still very
strong. On the surface it seemed as though
the old Liberal policy still stood firm and,
indeed, unshakeable. The Jews were in every
place of 'vantage : they taught in the Universities
of all Europe; they were everywhere in the
Press ; ' everywhere in finance. They were con-
tinually to be found in the highest places of
Government and in the chanceries of Christendom
they had acquired a dominant power which none
could question. But the challenge against this
unnatural position necessarily worked against
great odds, it remained private and had great
54 THE JEWS
difficulty in finding expression. None the less, it
extended, and by 1914 had become serious.
The immeasurable catastrophe of the war
with which the Jews had nothing to do and which
their more important financial representatives did
all they could to prevent fell upon Europe. It
seemed at first as though, in the face of that over-
whelming tragedy, what had been so rapidly
growing I mean the debate and conflict upon
Jewish claims would be silenced. The Jews
were found fighting gallantly in all the armies.
Their services were generously acknowledged,
though the cruel ambiguity of their situation was
hardly realized. Considering that they had no
national interest in the fight, it must have seemed
to them a mere insanity, crucifying their nation
to no purpose. For Zangwill put the matter well
indeed when he said that those who eagerly and
spontaneously joined the first recruiting (and
these were numerous) did so " for the honour of
Israel." The sacrifice was not without fruit. In
its presence many a complaint was silenced and
much was revealed which, but for it, would have
remained unprobed. The Christian family in its
bereavement saw at its side a Jewish neighbour
who had lost his son in what was no concern of his
race; the Christian priest witnessed the agony of
the young Jewish soldier. The defender of the
Western nations saw at his side not only the Jewish
conscript (who should never have been called) but
the Jewish volunteer. Thus, the first to enlist
from the United States was a Jew, later promoted,
whom I had the pleasure and honour of meeting
on Mangin's staff at Mayence. I hope he may
see these lines.
PEESENT PHASE OF THE PEOBLEM 55
It looked as though in the presence of such
a suffering, which the Jews shared with us, the
growing quarrel between them and ourselves would
be appeased. Men who had been prominent not
only for their discussion of the Jewish problem,
but for their direct and open antagonism to
Jewish power and even to the most legitimate of
Jewish claims, were now compelled to silence.
Eeconciliation was in the air ... when, in the
very heat of the struggle, came that factor, in-
calculably important, which now rules all the
rest ; I mean the factor of what is called Bolshevism.
This new Jewish movement changed the whole
face of things and, coming on the top of the rest,
has transformed the problem for all our generation.
Henceforth it was to be discussed quite openly.
Henceforth it could only become, more and more,
the chief problem of politics and give rise to that
menacing situation upon a solution of which
depends the security of our future.
For the Bolshevist movement, or rather explo-
sion, was Jewish.
That truth may be so easily confused with a
falsehood that I must, at the outset, make it exact
and clear.
The Bolshevist Movement was a Jewish move-
ment, but not a movement of the Jewish race as
a whole. Most Jews were quite extraneous to it ;
very many indeed, and those of the most typical,
abhor it; many actively combat it. The impu-
tation of its evils to the Jews as a whole is a grave
injustice and proceeds from a confusion of thought
whereof I, at any rate, am free.
With so much said let me return to the affair.
What is called " Labour," that is, the direction
56 THE JEWS
of the proletarian revolt against capitalist condi-
tions, had, as we have seen, been directed in the
main by the Jew. His energy, his international
quality, his devotion to a set scheme, prevailed.
All this was not peculiar to Russia but present
throughout the industrialized areas of the West.
By the word " directed" I do not mean any
conscious plan. I mean that the Jews, with their
perpetual movement from country to country,
with their natural indifference to national feeling
as a force counteracting class feeling, with their
lucid thought and their passion for deduction, with
their tenacity and intellectual industry, had
naturally become the chief exponents and the
most able leaders. .They formed, above all, the
cement binding the movement together through-
out the world. It was they, more than any others,
who insisted on a clear-cut solution upon the lines
whichitieir, compatriot Karl Marx had copied from
his greater European contemporaries, and made
definite in his famous book on Capital.
But there was all the difference in the world
between this intellectual leadership, this organiza-
tion of socialism by Jews while Socialism still
remained a mere theory, and the control and actual
management of it in a great State when it passed
from theory to practice.
The words "social revolution" were still but
words in 1914 and men did not take them too
seriously. But when in 1917 a socialist revolution
was accomplished suddenly at one blow, in one
great State, and when its agents, directors and
masters were seen to be a close corporation of Jews
with only a few non- Jewish hangers-on (each
of these controlled by the Jews through one
PEESENT PHASE OF THE PEOBLEM 57
influence or another), it was quite another matter.
The thing had become actual. The menace to
national traditions and to the whole Christian
ethic of property was immediate. More important
than all, so far as the Jewish problem is concerned,
many who had remained silent upon it on account
of convention, avarice or fear, were now compelled
to speak. From that moment, in early '17, it
became the chief political problem of our time:
coincident with, intimately mixed with, but in all
its implications superior to, the great economic
quarrel on to which it was now grafted.
The story may be briefly told. The Eussian
State, ill- equipped for modern war, had passed
during the end of the year 1916 through a strain
which it had found intolerable. Eussian Society,
after the mortal losses sustained, was upon the eve
of dissolution, and the formidable revolutionary
movement which had for years left its direction
and organization in Jewish hands broke out, for
the third time in our generation: but this time
successfully.
After rapidly accelerating phases it settled into
the situation which has endured from the early
part of 191 8 to the present day. In the towns the
freely- elected Parliament was repudiated and a
:c Dictatorship of the Proletariat" was declared.
The workshops were in future to be run by Com-
mittees, in the Eussian " Soviets," and similar
organizations were to control agriculture in the
villages, where the peasants had already seized
the land and were streaming back from the dis-
solved armies to their homes.
In practice, of course, what was set up was no
proletarian Government, still less anything so
58 THE JEWS
impossible and contradictory in terms as a
" dictatorship" of proletarians. The thing was
called " The Eepublic of the Workmen and
Peasants." It was, in fact, nothing of the sort. It
was the pure despotism of a clique, the leaders of
which had been specially launched upon Russia
under German direction in order to break down
any chance of a revival of Russian military power,
and all those leaders, without exception, were Jews,
or held by the Jews through their domestic
relations, and all that followed was done directly
under the orders of Jews, the most prominent of
whom was one Braunstein, who disguised himself
under the assumed name of Trotsky. A terror
was set up, under which were massacred innumer-
able Russians of the governing classes, so that the
whole framework of the Russian State disappeared.
Among these, of course, must specially be noted
great numbers of the clergy, against whom the
Jewish revolutionaries had a particular grudge.
A clean sweep was made of all the old social
organization, and under the despotism of this
Jewish clique the old economic order was reversed.
Food and all necessities were controlled (in the
towns) and rationed, the manual labourer receiving
the largest share; and none any share unless he
worked at the orders of the new masters.
The agricultural land was in theory nationalized,
but in practice the Jewish Committees of the towns
were unable to enforce their rule over it, and it
reverted to the natural condition of peasant
ownership. But the Jewish Committees of the
towns were strong enough to raid great areas of
agricultural production for the support of them-
selves and their troops and of their dependants in
PEESENT PHASE OF THE PROBLEM 59
the cities, who had come close to starvation through
the breakdown of the social system.
What followed later is of common knowledge:
the attempts at counter-revolution, led by scattered
Russians and other military leaders, all failed
because the peasants believed that their newly-
acquired farms were at stake and eagerly volun-
teered to defend them, the greatly increased
misery of the towns, the slow decline of industrial
production (in spite of the most rigid despotism,
enforcing conscript labour), and the general
deliquescence of society.
If the motives of the men who thus brought the
whole of a Christian State into ruins within a few
weeks were analysed, we should, it is to be pre-
sumed, discover something of this sort: their
main motive was the pursuit of the political and
economic ideals of which they were the spokesmen
and which already so many of their compatriots,
the Jews, throughout the rest of Europe, had
espoused communism so far as property was
concerned ; the Marxian doctrine of socialist pro-
duction and distribution; the Socialist doctrine
imposed by arbitrary and despotic arrangements,
favouring those who had in the past been least
favoured. In this economic and political group of
motives the leading motive was probably enough,
the doctrine of Communism in which these men,
for the most part, sincerely believed.
To this must be added an equally sincere hatred
of national feeling, save, of course, where the
Jewish nation was concerned. The conception
of a Russian national feeling seemed to these new
leaders ridiculous, as, indeed, the conception of a
national feeling must seem ridiculous to their
60 THE JEWS
compatriots everywhere; or, if not ridiculous,
subsidiary to the more important motives of
individual advantage and to the righting of such
immediate wrongs as the individual may feel.
The Christian religion they naturally attacked, for
it was abhorrent to their social theory.
They also had a certain crusading, or propa-
gandist, ideal running through the whole of their
action the desire to spread Communism far
beyond the boundaries of what had once been the
Eussian State. It is this which has led them to
intrigue throughout Central, and even in Western,
Europe, in favour of revolution.
Though these were the main motives, other
motives must also have been present.
It is impossible that Committees consisting of
Jews and suddenly finding themselves thus in
control of such new powers, should not have
desired to benefit their fellows. It is equally
impossible that they should have forgone a senti-
ment of revenge against that which had persecuted
their people in the past. They cannot but, in
the destroying of Eussia, have mixed with a
desire to advantage the individual Eussian poor
the desire to take vengeance upon the national
tradition as a whole; it has even been said but
denied, and I know not where the truth lies that
Jews were among those guilty of the worst incident
which we now know in all its revolting details the
murder of the Eussian Eoyal family father, mother
and girls, and the unfortunate sickly heir, the only
boy. Further, it is impossible, with Jewish Commit-
tees thus in control of the Eussian treasury and of
Eussian means of communication, that they should
not have had some sympathy with their com-
PRESENT PHASE OF THE PEOBLEM 61
patriots who were so largely in control of Western
finance. However sincere their detestation of
capitalism (for probably in most of them the
opinion is held sincerely enough), it is in the nature
of things that one of their blood and kind should,
however misguided they may think him, appeal to
them more than one of ours. And it is this which
explains the half alliance which you find through-
out the world between the Jewish financiers on
the one hand and the Jewish control of the Russian
revolution on the other. It is this which explains
the half-heartedness of the defence against Bol-
shevism, the perpetual commercial protest, the
continued negotiations, the recognition of the
Soviet by our politicians, the clamour of" Labour "
in favour of German Jewish industrialism and
against Poland : all that has taken place wherever
Jewish finance is powerful, particularly at West-
minster.
But, be this as it may, the tremendous explosion
which we call Bolshevism brought the discussion
of the Jewish problem to a head. The two forces
which had hitherto held back the discussion of that
problem were that Liberal fiction which had ruled
for more than a generation, according to which it
was indecent even to mention the word Jew, or to
suggest that there was any difference between the
Jew and those who harboured him ; and, secondly,
the fact that the Jews were erroneously regarded
by most of the well-to-do people in the West
that is, by most of those who had the control of
the Press and therefore of all public expression
as so controlling wealth that they were at once the
natural guardians of property and so placed that
an attack upon them jeopardized the wealth of
62 THE JEWS
the critic. The man who had gone into the City,
or who had his life spent upon the Bourse in Paris,
or who was negotiating any great capitalist enter-
prise, who had to do in whatever capacity with
the running of the great banks or with the inter-
national means of communication by sea and land,
even the man who got his precarious living by
writing each and all had hitherto felt that a
public silence upon the Jewish problem was
necessary to his private welfare.
Those who recognized the gravity of the problem
had hitherto been moved by fear to be silent upon
it, at least in public, though in private they were
often voluble enough. Those who recognized it
in a lesser degree had also been affected by
the same fear. Lastly, you had the large class
who were under no necessity for restraint, whether
from fear or any other cause, but who were quite
content to leave things as they were so long as they
received their regular salary or dividends, and who
were profoundly convinced that any interference
with the Jew would imperil those dividends or
that salary.
The Jewish Bolshevist movement put an end to
that state of mind. The people who had hitherto
been silent through avarice, convention, or fear,
now found themselves between an upper and a
nether millstone. Hitherto they had at least
believed that to keep silence was to secure or to
advance their economic position. Now they found,
suddenly risen upon the flank of that position, a new
and formidable Jewish force determined upon the
destruction of property. There was no longer any
reason to keep silent. There was a growing need
to speak. And though the old habit, the old
PEESENT PHASE OF THE PROBLEM 63
secrecy, was still strong upon them, the necessity
for combating Jewish Bolshevism was stronger
still. All over Europe the Jewish character of the
movement became more and more apparent. The
leaders of Communism everywhere proclaimed
that truth by adopting the asinine policy of
pretending that the revolution was Eussian and
national; they attempted far too late to hide
the Jewish origins of its creators and directors,
and made a childish effort to pretend that the
Eussian names so innocently put forward were
genuine, when the real names were upon every
tongue. Yet at the same time they were receiving
money and securities of the victims through Jewish
agents, jewels stripped from the dead or rifled from
the strongboxes of murdered men and women. In
one specific instance the promise of a subsidy to a
Communist paper in London was traced to this
source; it was proved that the Englishman
involved was a mere puppet and that the Jewish
connections of the family through marriage were
the true agents in the transaction. In another
a Trade Deputation was pompously announced
under Eussian names, which turned out upon
inspection to consist, as to its first member, of a
man engaged all his life in the service of a Jewish
firm, as to the other, of a Jew who was actually
the brother-in-law of Braunstein ! The diplomatic
agent nominated and partially accepted by the
British Government to represent the new authority
of the Eussian towns was again a Jew, Finkelstein,
the nephew by marriage of a prominent Jew in this
country. He passed under the name of Litvinoff.
So it was throughout the whole movement, in every
capital and in every great industrial town.
64 THE JEWS
We must not neglect the very obvious truth that
in all this there was ample fuel for the flame. The
industrial proletariat throughout the world was
equally disgusted and equally ready for revolt.
The leadership of the movement may be Jewish
but its current was not created by the Jew. To
imagine that is to fall into the most childish errors
of the " Anti-Semite." The stream of influence
arose from the sufferings and the burning sense of
injustice which industrial capitalism had imposed
on the dispossessed mass of wage earners. They
were (and are) naturally indifferent as to
whether those whom they hope may be their
saviours come from Palestine, Muscovy or Tim-
buctoo. They are interested in economic freedom :
in the doctrine of socialism and in its results, not in
the personality of those who guide them.
Their position is comprehensible enough : but my
point is, that the directing minority of Western
European capitalism which had hitherto been
silent upon the Jewish problems from the motives
I have described were now released; they were
free to speak their mind, and began to speak it.
The volume of their protest cannot but increase.
The cat, as the expression goes, is out of the bag,
or, to put it in more dignified language, the debate
will now never more be silenced. It is admitted
that the revolutionary leadership is mainly
Jewish. It is recognized as clearly now as it has
long been recognized that international finance was
mainly Jewish ; and even those who would tolerate
silence upon the one peril will certainly not tolerate
it upon the other.
The danger is, indeed, not over. The debate
will take place that is no peril, but a good; the
PRESENT PHASE OF THE PROBLEM 65
danger is rather that, as restraint is gradually
removed, the natural antagonism to the Jewish
race, felt by nearly all those who are not of it and
among whom it lives, may take an irrational and
violent form, and that we may be upon the brink
of yet one more of those catastrophes, of those
tragedies, of those disasters which have marked
the history of Israel in the past.
To avert this, to discover some solution of the
problem while there is yet time, to prevent deeds
which would bring us to shame and that small
minority among us to suffering, should be the
object of every honest man.
THE GENERAL CAUSES OF
FRICTION
CHAPTER IV
THE GENERAL CAUSES OF FRICTION
THE immediate cause of the new gravity apparent
in the Jewish problem is the Revolution in Russia.
The completely new feature of open discussion now
attaching to it (a thing which would have seemed
incredible in England twenty years ago) is the leader-
ship the Jews have assumed in the economic quarrel
of the proletariat against capitalism.
Most people, therefore, on being asked the cause
of friction between the Jews and their hosts at this
moment will reply (in England, at least) that it lies
in the anti- social propaganda now running loose
throughout Industrial Europe. " Our quarrel with
the Jews," you will hear from a hundred different
sources, " is that they are conspiring against Chris-
tian civilization, and in particular against our own
country, under the form of social revolutionaries."
Such a reply, though it is the almost universal
reply of the moment in this country, is most
imperfect.
The friction between the Jews and the nations
among which they are dispersed is far older, far
more profound, far more universal. For a whole
generation before the present crisis arose, the com-
paratively small number of men who were hammer-
ing away steadily at the Jewish problem, trying to
69
70 THE JEWS
provoke its discussion, and insisting on its import-
ance, were mainly concerned with quite another
aspect of Jewish activity the aspect of inter-
national finance as controlled by Jews. Before
that aspect had assumed its modern gravity the re-
proach against the Jews was that their international
position warred against our racial traditions and
our patriotisms. Before that again there had been
the reproach of a different religion and particularly
of their antagonism to the doctrine of the Incarna-
tion and all that flowed from that doctrine. And
there had been even, before that great quarrel, the
reproach that they were bad citizens within the
pagan Eoman Empire, perpetually in rebellion
against it and guilty of massacring other Eoman
citizens.
In another civilization than ours, in that of
Islam, another set of reproaches had arisen, or
rather another species of contempt and oppression.
After long periods of peace there would come, in
particular regions, the most violent oppression.
Within the last few years, for instance, a Jew in
Morocco was treated as though he was hardly
human. He had to turn his face to the wall when
any magnate was passing by. He had to dress in a
Particular manner to mark him off as something
egraded among his fellow-beings. He might not
ride through the gate of a town, but had to dis-
mount. There were twenty actions normal to
civic life in the Moroccan city which were forbidden
to the Jew.
All this is as much as to say that the friction
between the Jews and those among whom they
live is always present, and has always been present,
now latent, now rising furiously to the surface,
THE GENEEAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 71
now grumbling through long periods of uncertain
peace, now boiling over in all the evils of persecu-
tion which is as much as to say that this friction
between Jew and non-Jew, while finding different
excuses for its action on different occasions, has
been a force permanently at work everywhere and
at all times.
What is the cause of it ? What is its nature ?
The matter is very difficult to approach, because
we are not dealing with things susceptible of positive
proof. You can prove from historical record that
the thing has existed. You can show its terrible
effects, ceaselessly recurrent throughout all our
history. But it is another matter to analyse the
unseen forces which produce it, and any such
analysis can be no more than an attempt.
I take it that the causes of this friction, with
all its lamentable results, are of two kinds. There
are, first, general causes for it, by which I mean those
causes which are always present and are ineradic-
able. Their effort may be summed up in the truth
that the whole texture of the Jewish nation, their
corporate tradition, their social mind, is at issue
with the people among whom they live. There
are, next, special causes, by which I mean social
actions and expressions which lead to friction and
could be modified, the two chief of which are the
use of secrecy by the Jews as a method of action
and the open expression of superiority over his
neighbours which the Jew cannot help feeling but
is wrong to emphasize.
I will deal with these in their order, and first
consider the general causes ; though I must admit
at the outset that a mere summary of them is no
sufficient explanation of the phenomenon. There
72 THE JEWS
would seem to be something more profound and
even more mysterious about it. For it will be
universally conceded that, while the closest intimacy
and respect is possible between individuals of the
two opposing races, the moment you come to great
groups, and especially to the popular instinct in
the matter, the gravest friction is apparent. It
is an issue too deep than to be accounted for
by mere differences of temper. It is as though
there were some inward force filling men on either
side, not indeed with necessary hostility it is
against any such necessity that all this book is
written but certainly with conflicting ends.
It is first to be noted that most of the accusations
made against the Jews by their enemies and most
of the very proper rebuttals of those accusations
advanced by the Jews and their defenders, miss
the mark because they attempt to put in abstract
form what is really something highly concrete.
And this is equally true of the praise bestowed
upon the Jews, of the special virtues ascribed to
them and of the denials of these virtues.
They miss the mark because they attempt to
express in terms of one category what should be
expressed in terms of another. They are doing
what a man does when he compares two pictures
by their outline while in point of fact their interest
lies in colour, or when he affirms something of a
tune the fundamental point of which something is
not the air at all but the instruments upon which
it is played : as who should say that " God save
the King " was " shrill " because he heard it played
on a penny whistle or " booming " because he heard
it played on a violoncello. The real point to note
is not that the Jews appear to us (or we to them)
THE GENERAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 73
to possess certain abstract qualities and defects,
but that in their case each quality or defect has a
special character, a special national timbre which it
lacks in ours.
Thus you will hear the Jews arraigned by their
enemies for three such vices as cowardice, avarice
and treason to take three of the commonest
accusations. You examine their actions and you
find innumerable instances of the highest courage,
the greatest generosity and the most devoted
loyalty : but courage, generosity and loyalty of a
Jewish kind, directed to Jewish ends, and stamped
with a highly distinctive Jewish mark.
The man who accuses the Jews of cowardice
means that they do not enjoy a fight of his kind,
nor a fight fought after his fashion. All he has
discovered is that the courage is not shown under
the same circumstances, nor for the same ends, nor
in the same mode. But if the word courage means
anything, he cannot on reflection deny it to actions
of which one could make an endless catalogue even
from contemporary experience alone. Is it cowar-
dice in a young man to sacrifice his life deliberately
for the sake of his own people ? Did that young
Jew show cowardice who killed the Russian Prime
Minister, the antagonist of his people, after the first
revolution following on the Russo-Japanese war ?
/Was it cowardice to walk up in a crowded theatre,
surrounded by all the enemies of his race, and shoot
their chief in their midst ? Is it cowardice to
stand up against the vast alien majority, and to
do so over and over again, perhaps through a whole
lifetime, insisting on things that are grossly un-
popular with that majority and running a risk the
whole time of physical violence ? You find Jews
74 THE JEWS
adopting that attitude all over Europe. Can one
think it is cowardice which has permitted the
individuals of this nation to maintain their tradition
unbroken through two thousand years of inter-
mittent torture, spoliation and violent death?
The thing so stated is ridiculous, and it is clear
that those who make such an accusation are con-
founding their own form of courage with courage
as a universal attribute.
They think that because Jews show courage
under other circumstances and in another way from
themselves, corresponding to another appetite, as
it were, therefore it is no longer courage : to think
like that is to confess yourself very limited.
I can testify, myself, to any number of courageous
acts which I have seen performed by Jews. I am
not alluding to acts of courage in warfare, of which
there is ample evidence, but to acts of a sort in
which our race would not have shown the same
quality or timbre of courage. I will cite one case.
Rather more than twenty years ago, when feeling
on the Dreyfus case was at its height and when
the feeling of the French Army in particular was
at white heat, I happened to be in the town of
Nimes, through which, at the time, a body of
troops was passing. The cafe in which I sat was
filled with young sergeants. There were hardly
any civilians present beside myself. There came
into the place an elderly Jew, very short in stature,
highly marked with the physical characteristics of
his race, an unmistakable Jew. He was somewhat
bent under the weight of his years, with fiery eyes
and a singularly vibrating intonation of voice.
He was selling broadsheets of the most violent
kind, all of them insults against the Army. He
THE GENERAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 75
came into this cafe with the sheets in his hand so
that all could see the large capital letters of the
headlines, and slowly went round the assembly
ironically offering them to the lads in uniform with
their swords at their side, for they were of the
cavalry.
Every one knows the French temper on such
occasions a complete silence which may at any
moment be transformed into something very dif-
ferent. One sergeant after another politely waved
him aside and passed him on. He went round the
whole lot of them, gazing into their faces with his
piercing eyes, wearing the whole time an ironical
smile of insult, describing at intervals the nature
of his goods, and when he had done that he went
out unharmed.
It was an astonishing sight. I have seen many
others as astonishing and as vivid, but for courage
I have never seen it surpassed. Here was a man,
old and feeble, the member of a very small minority
which he knew to be hated, and particularly hated
by the people whom he challenged. Because he
held one of his own people to be injured, he took
this tremendous risk and went through this self-
imposed task with a sort of pleasure in that risk.
You may call it insolence, offensiveness, what you
will : but you cannot deny it the title of courage.
It was courage of the very highest quality.
I repeat : you may see evidence of that sort of
courage in Jewish action throughout the world and
in every age. You have the beginning of it in the
Siege of Jerusalem ; to-morrow, if the fear which
we now all entertain should unhappily prove well
founded, we shall see it again upon the same scale.
Take avarice. When the Jew is accused of
76 THE JEWS
avarice by his enemies they are reading into him
that vice in a form of which they know themselves
capable, which they themselves practise, which
they fully understand, but which he never practises
in their fashion. The Jew is adventurous with his
money. He is a speculator, a trader. He is also
a man who thinks of it in exact terms. He is
never romantic about it. But he is almost invari-
ably generous in the use of it. Our race, when it
yields to the vice of avarice, is close, secretive,
uncharitable. He is pitiless and sly in accumula-
tion. He is vociferous in his insistence upon the
exact terms of an agreed compact. He is also
tenacious in the pursuit of anything which he has
set out on, the accumulation of money among the
rest. He is almost fanatical in his appetite for
success in whatever he has undertaken, the accumu-
lation of money among the rest. But to say that the
money, once accumulated, is not generously used,
is nonsense. There is not one of us who could not
cite at once a dozen examples of Jewish generosity
upon a scale which makes us ashamed.
Nor is it true to say that this generosity has
ostentation for its root, or, as it is called, " Han-
some," either. Though a love of magnificence is
certainly a great passion in the Jewish character,
it does not account for the most of his generosity.
It is a generosity which extends to all manner of
private relations, and if you will take the testimony
of those who have been in the service of the Jews
and are not Jews themselves, that testimony is
almost universally in favour of their employers, if
those employers be men of large means.
They will tell you that they felt humiliated in
serving a Jew ; that the relations were never easy ;
THE GENERAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 77
that there was always distance. But not often that
they were treated meanly. Just the other way.
There has usually been present a spontaneous gener-
osity. The same argument applies to the cry of
" Ransome." It is true that some of the more
scandalous Jewish fortunes have thrown up defences
against public anger by the return of a small pro-
portion in the shape of public endowments : it is
an action and a motive not peculiar to them. But
that does not explain the mass of private and
unheard benefaction to which we can all testify
and which is as common with the middle- class Jew
as with the wealthy. It is here as in the matter
of courage a question of kind. Those of our people
who happen to be generous (they are rare) do not
calculate. They often forget or confuse the sums
they have made away with, as though it were mere
extravagance. The Jew knows the exact extent
of his sacrifice, its proportion to his total means.
Is he then less generous ? By no means. He is,
in scale more generous but in a different fashion.
It might be argued that this generosity of the
Jew is a consequence of the way in which he regards
money. It comes and goes with him because he
is a speculator and a wanderer. It has been said
that no great Jewish fortune is ever permanent ;
that none of these millionaires ever founded a
family. This is not quite true ; but it is true that
considering the long list of great Jewish fortunes
which have marked the whole progress of our
civilization it is astonishing how few have taken
root. But though this conception of money may
be an element in the generosity of the Jew it does
not fully explain it, and at any rate that generosity
is there, and contradicts flatly the accusation of
78 THE JEWS
avarice. Indeed the general accusation of avarice
fails : and that is why it is a sort of standing jest
fermitted even where the Jews are most powerful,
b is a jest they themselves do not resent because
they know it to be beside the mark.
The accusation of treason is on the same footing
save that it is even more " to one side" than
the others quoted. There is no race which has
produced so few traitors. It is not treason in the
Jew to be international. It is not treason in the
Jew to work now for one interest among those who
are not of his people, now for another. He can
only be charged with treason when he acts against
the interests of Israel, and there is no nation nor
ever has been one in which the national solidarity
was greater or national weakness in the shape of
traitors less. Indeed, that is the very accusation
their enemies make against them; that they are
too homogeneous; that they hold too much
together and are too fierce in self-defence ; and you
cannot have that accusation coupled with an
accusation of treason. What is true is that the
Jew lends himself to one non- Jewish group in its
action against another. He will serve France
against the Germans, or the Germans against
France, and he will do so indifferently as a resident
in the country he benefits or the country he wounds :
for he is indifferent to either. The moment war
breaks out the intelligence departments of both
sides rely upon the Jew : and they rely upon him
not only on account of his indifference to nationalism
but also on account of his many languages, his
travel, the presence of his relations in the enemy
country. And this is true not only of war but of
armed peace.
THE GENERAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 79
But it is clear that in all this there are examples
of what in us , would be treason. In him such actions
are not treasons, for he does not betray Israel.
But they all have an atmosphere repellent to us.
They are things which if we did them ( or when we
do them) degrade us. They do not degrade the
Jew.
One might continue the list of such accusations
indefinitely, and in every one you would find that
the root of the quarrel is not the presence of a
particular defect but the presence of a difference in
circumstances, temperament, character: a dif-
ferent colour and taste in the quality or defect
concerned. It is that which offends. It is that
which causes the misunderstandings and which
leads to the tragedies.
While this is true of the accusations made against
the Jewish people it is unfortunately equally true
of the corresponding qualities which they and their
defenders advance in the rebuttal. The Jew is
essentially patriotic : that is true. But not patri-
otic to our ends or in our way. He is essentially
self-respecting. But not self-respecting to our
ends or in our way. A personal obligation which
he cannot meet, a personal and intimate contract
in which he may default, especially to one of his own
people, is abhorrent to the Jew ; but not in our
way. He has not our shame of bankruptcy for
instance, but much more than our shame of personal
borrowing. Drunkenness, a vice most offensive to
human dignity, is with him the rarest vice : with
us the commonest. But our sense of dignity in
repose he has not, nor does he feel our sense of
injured dignity in mummery. His tenacity, which
all know and all in a sense admire and which is far
80 THE JEWS
superior to our own, is also a narrower tenacity,
or at any rate a tenacity of a different kind. He
will follow one end where we will follow many.
His wonderful loyalty to all family relations we
know: but we do not appreciate it because it is
outside our own circle. Even his intellectual gifts,
which are less affected by this matter of timbre,
have something alien to us in them. They are
undeniable but we feel them to be used for other
ends than ours : they are coldly used when ours
are used enthusiastically: they are used with
intensity when we use them with carelessness.
If we leave the controversial field and concern
ourselves with an appreciation of Jewish qualities,
apart from our like or dislike of them and apart
from their difference in intimate texture, as it were,
from our own, they may be summarized I think
as follows:
The Jew concentrates upon one matter. He does
not disperse his mind. And this concentration
carries with it strength and weakness. It has been
said in connection with it (all such terms are
metaphorical) that his mind is not elastic. But
this is a great element in his success. I have
noticed that the Jew having once taken up a
particular task shows an indifference to other
tasks which, from our standpoint, is marvellous.
How many instances could not one cite of two
Jewish brothers, the one occupied in finance, the
other in science, or the one in politics, the other in
music, and how clearly do we see in those instances
the complete indifference of the Jew to things
outside the province he has undertaken! How
remarkable in our eyes is his resistance to any
temptation which might lead him away from his
THE GENERAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 81
end. The Jew who is devoted to science, for
instance, remains completely indifferent to its
opportunities for enrichment. The Jew who is
devoted to philosophy (and what great names he
can show in this sphere throughout the centuries !)
lives in poverty and is perfectly content so to live.
The Jew devoted to any particular ideal of social
change devotes himself entirely to that, and ends
his task often more powerful, hardly ever more
wealthy, nearly always much poorer than when he
began it. Above all he refuses to be distracted
for a moment from his goal.
Another character which is affiliated to this first
leading character of the Jew would seem to be the
lucidity of his thought. The Jew's argument is
never muddled. That is one of his prime assets
not only in all discussion but in all action. It is
also, if a cause of strength, a cause of the enmity
he arouses: or (to use my milder term) of the
" friction."
For an exactly constructed process of reasoning,
from which there is no escape, has in it (for those
less capable of it) something of the bully. A man
may feel the conclusion to be false: perhaps he
knows it to be false. He lacks the power to express
his reasons. He may not know how to state the
principles which his adversary has left out of account,
or when to bring them into discussion, and he feels
the iron logic offered to him like a pistol presented
at the head of his better judgment. But for
strength and for weakness also, lucidity is the mark
of the Jew's mind. He carries that lucidity into
the smallest details of whatever he may perform.
One must add to all this a certain intensity of
action which is very noticeable and which again is a
82 THE JEWS
cause of friction between himself and those about
him. Hear a Jew speaking, especially a Jew
speaking upon the revolutionary platform, and note
the high voltage at which the current is working.
The energy which he uses is not the energy of a
large flame but of a well-directed blow- pipe: a
stream of heat. He is wholly absorbed, not in his
own expression, but in actively penetrating the
mind of his hearers. And here again is that dif-
ference in quality to which I have alluded. One
might say indifferently that the Jew is never
eloquent or that he is always eloquent when he
speaks upon things that possess his soul. He is not
eloquent in our fashion; but he is at any rate
astonishingly effective in his own.
The Jew has this other characteristic which has
become increasingly noticeable in our own time,
but which is probably as old as the race : and that
is a corporate capacity for hiding or for advertis-
ing at will: a power of " pushing" whatever the
whole race desires advanced, or of suppressing what
the whole race desires to suppress. And this also,
however legitimately used, is a cause of friction.
Men get the feeling of a swarm in the presence
of such action. They also get the feeling of being
tricked: and it breeds bad blood.
In the aspect of the deliberate use of secrecy I
shall deal with this character in my next chapter,
for I think in that aspect it is a particular cause of
friction which can be eliminated. But the general
capacity and instinct of the Jew for corporate action
in the " booming" of what he wants " boomed"
and the " soft pedalling" of what he wants " soft
pedalled " is ineradicable. It will always remain a
permanent irritant in its effect upon those to whom
THE GENERAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 83
it is applied. The best proof of it is that after the
most violent " boom," after the talents of some
particular Jew, or the scientific discovery of another,
or the misfortunes of another, or the miscarriage of
justice against another, has been shouted at us,
pointed and iterated until we are all deafened, there
comes an inevitable reaction, and the same men who
were half hypnotized into the desired mood are
nauseated with it and refuse a repetition of the
dose.
The converse is true. Men who find that some
important matter has been suppressed, some bad
scandal in the State or some trick in commerce
because Jewry desired it to be suppressed, are soon
on the alert. They will not suffer the operation as
quietly the second time as they did the first.
Indeed they tend if anything to grow too suspicious.
Anyhow, in both cases this ineradicable racial
habit, a cause perhaps of Jewish survival and
certainly an element of Jewish strength, is also a
cause of acute friction between them and us.
But a mere category of this kind is, as I have
said, useless to explain the fundamental quality,
the hidden root, of the ceaseless conflict between the
very soul of the Jew and the soul of the society
around him. All these points are but manifesta-
tions of some profound, some subterranean power
for contrast, the value of which we cannot grasp,
but the effects of which are only too apparent. And
there remains in the minds of those who most rely
upon this race and of those who most suspect them
the sense of an impassable gulf between them and
ourselves. It is the recognition, the admission of
such a contrast, the telling of the truth about it,
the working upon it as a necessary condition, which
84 THE JEWS
must form the foundation for any solution at which
we can arrive.
*****
There is one feature in the European's attitude
towards the Jews which must be specially dealt
with, and that is the false impression that the
friction between us and them is in the main a
quarrel with their wealth.
That impression has been greatly weakened by
the recent revolutionary activity of the Jew surging
up from the depths, appearing upon the surface,
and producing the great upheaval in Russia, and
the attempted upheavals elsewhere. But though
the new Jewish revolutionary movement has
shaken the old insistence on Jewish wealth it is
hard to eradicate it. It has been present through-
out the ages, and will remain at the back of people's
minds perhaps for ever, because the few Jews who
do concentrate on piling up great fortunes concen-
trate on that task so entirely. Yet the impression
is false and is the fruitful cause of the worst mis-
understandings.
For the Jews are not a rich nation, and the very
fact that they stand in the popular mind and
especially in the mind of rich people in times
of corruption for wealth, is an example of the
way in which they are misunderstood and of the
way in which injustice to the Jew arises.
The Jews are a poor nation. An enemy would
say that they were poor because they did not
work, but this again would be an injustice, because
the Jew works exceedingly hard and has often in
the past and does still in many places work hard,
not only in negotiation and commerce but with
his hands.
THE GENERAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 85
We see the Jews in the Middle Ages monopolizing
important manual occupations in some districts
dyeing and shipbuilding, for instance. And
there are many parts of Eastern Europe where
they work upon the land to-day.
The Jews are a poor nation because they are an
alien nation and because their activities are for
the most part condemned to working against the
grain, in a society which is not their own. But
that they are a poor nation is not only true but
abundantly evident to any one who has travelled
and watched their various settlements with any
sympathy.
Now that they have arrived in such great
numbers in the West people are beginning to
appreciate this. We have already seen how, a
lifetime ago, when the Jews of the West (I mean
especially in France and England and America)
were a small number of merchants and financiers,
the great wealth of a very small number among
them was not counterbalanced in our experience
by the exceeding poverty of the mass. But to-day
we can see for ourselves how true it is that, once
you get below the exceptional fortunes and a
comparatively small middle- class, the Jewish nation
is no more than millions of exceedingly poor
families.
Those who have watched them outside the West,
those who have seen them in their great eastern
communities where the bulk of the race still resides,
in the Marches of Russia, will abundantly agree.
It helps us to understand the Jewish problem if
we grasp the fact that a great part of the Jewish
complaint against us is precisely this poverty to
which the bulk of the Jews are condemned. It is
86 THE JEWS
all very well to sneer at the Jewish complaint of
persecution and oppression and to cite ironically,
whenever it arises, the immense fortunes of a few
families like the Kothschilds and the Sassoons,
the Monds, the Samuels and the rest. From the
point of view of the average Jew that is not the
way the thing looks at all. What he notices, and
notices rightly, is that he has no part in that well-
distributed, solid, permanent, inherited wealth
which is the mark of a healthy European com-
munity.
Further (a most important point already touched
on in passing), these great fortunes are ephemeral.
In the European nations you have a mass of
great fortunes far larger in number, and even in
total, than the Jewish financial fortunes. But
those great fortunes have been in the past and are
still, wherever our society is healthy, permanent.
They run through European history in the shape
of the great families, in the shape of the nobility.
The great territorial families in this country
have been wealthy for centuries and remain in
established wealth, and the same is in the main
true of the great Italian families, it is obviously
true of the great German families, and, in spite of
the great changes of the last century and a half,
it is still largely true of the old French families.
It is not true of the Jewish families. The vast
Jewish fortunes which have marked history rise
suddenly and melt again almost as suddenly. A
Jew will begin in some very small way as a
pawnbroker in Liverpool, for instance, or a very
small bookseller in Frankfort. You will find his
son a great banker, his grandson so wealthy as to
command politics for a generation, and then (if you
THE GENEEAL CAUSES OF FKICTION 87
will watch the process in the past to take a modern
unfinished instance is of course misleading) at last,
and soon, the name disappears again, and disappears
for ever.
Jewish fortunes of the early Middle Ages in
England? They were all ruined before the end
of the thirteenth century. Whom have you repre-
senting the later great Jewish fortunes on the
Rhine, the fortunes of the sixteenth century and
the early seventeenth ? They have utterly gone.
Who have you left representing the considerable
Jewish houses of Medieval Venice ? of Genoa ? of
Rome ?
The causes of this rapid fluctuation are many.
They all attach to the peculiar position, as well as
to the peculiar character, of the Jew. We find
them partly in the passion for speculation which
the Jewish intelligence naturally harbours. We
find them still more, I think, in the instinctive
opposition to the Jew which his alien surroundings
perpetually arouse.
It is, however, important to remember this last
point. From our point of view the Jew, when he
does get rich, seems to get much too rich and to
get rich much too quickly, and he exercises far
too much power through his wealth ; for we think
of him the whole time as an alien with no right to
any position. But the Jew sees it in a very different
light. In his point of view his effort to accumulate
wealth is always heavily handicapped. When he
succeeds he only succeeds through his own tenacity
and the patriotic co-operation of his fellows, and
he always holds his new-found wealth on an insecure
tenure. What looks to us like the breakdown of a
88 THE JEWS
Jewish fortune through speculation, seems to the Jew
the fatal recurrent result of unending opposition.
In connection with the illusion of a wealthy
Jewish race, you have, of course, the matter which
I briefly mentioned above, the connection between
our wealthier, and therefore governing classes, and
the Jewish wealth of the moment. A great part
of the illusion, as I have said, is due to the fact
that the gentry of every epoch come into contact
with the Jew only as a rich man, and it is the
capital modern vice of our own gentry, their passion
for mere wealth and their subservience to it, which
has largely accounted for this dangerous misunder-
standing.
Look around you in Western Europe to-day and
see what people mean by this story of Jewish
wealth. See who the people are that allude con-
tinually to it and spread the idea of it. They are
the rich Europeans, who, in their subservience to
crude wealth, in their habit of gauging everything
by that wealth and of submitting to almost any
indignity for the purpose of obtaining more wealth,
marry their daughters to Jews, serve Jewish
interests, and, while perpetually sneering at the
Jew behind his back, call him to his face by his
most intimate name and make the most of his
hospitality. Which of them ever knows a middle-
class Jew, let alone a poor Jew? Why, most -of
them are actually ignorant of the fact that this
mass of poor Jews exists at all ! They serve the
Jew when he is wealthy and only when he is
wealthy. They envy him basely as a wealthy
man and only as a wealthy man. They prostitute
their dignity, they sell their fellow-Europeans, not
from any genuine affection for the Jewish race
THE GENEEAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 89
indeed there is no class in the community, closely
intermixed with the Jews as they are, which feel
the friction more than the gentry but simply
from a thirst for money, which they happen to find
held in great masses by a few Jewish families.
It is most noticeable that other aspects of Jewish
activity remain unused by the wealthy class, the
gentry and therefore by the State. Whether it
would be wise to use them or not is another matter.
At any rate, the motive for leaving them unused
is the fact that they are not connected with wealth.
The Jewish intelligence which might so often have
served the policy of a Statesman is largely left
unused. The cosmopolitan position of the Jew
when it is used is used for little more than spying ;
and that profound force, the historical memory of
the Jew, is neglected almost altogether. With this
neglect goes a natural and evil result, the failure
on the part of the European governing classes,
especially to-day, to safeguard the community
against the troubles which are bound to arise from
the clashing of interests between the Jews and
the people among whom they dwell.
It may sound paradoxical, but it is true, that if
the Statesmen of Europe, and the hereditary
families of the European nations who still take so
much part in the conduct of those nations, had
thought less of the Jewish money power and more
of the Jews as a whole they would have benefited
both parties in a very different fashion. We have
seen the artificial protection of the Jews of Eastern
Europe because individual Statesmen have been
subservient to the commands of very rich individual
Jewish bankers. But the thing has been done
blunderingly. It has served only to anger the
90 THE JEWS
independent nationalities of the East, notably the
Poles, the Roumanians and the Hungarians who
have experience of the difficulties inseparable from
an alien minority. Our politicians have treated the
whole affair externally and mechanically,merely
obeying orders without trying to understand.
The ultimate result of such interference by our
Western politicians is unhappily certain. The
last state of the Jews in Eastern Europe will be
worse than the first. Their sufferings will be
greater than in the past, and that because, instead
of acting from attempted comprehension and
sympathetic comprehension of the Jewish difficul-
ties the politicians, who have acted as the servants
of a few wealthy Jews, have merely obeyed the
orders of these rich men and have done so with the
secret reluctance that always accompanies self-
surrender to a wage.
Is it not apparent, as we look through history,
that the permanent power of the Jew or, at any
rate, the celebrity of his nation is utterly distinct
from those chance accumulations of wealth which
a few individuals owe to the national passion for
speculation and a cosmopolitan position ?
One after another the striking Jewish names of
history are the names of Jews who have ardently
pursued some moral or intellectual thesis; most
of them I had nearly said all of them were poor
men, and for the most part men deliberately poor
because they preferred, as it is in the Jewish nature
to prefer, the immediate work in hand to any other
consideration.
It is these names that remain and are permanent
and are the glory of the Jewish race.
THE GENERAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 91
There is one aspect of this Jewish wealth which
I hesitate whether to put among the general or
among the particular causes of the friction between
that nation and its hosts.
It falls certainly among the general causes in
the sense that it is connected with the Jewish
character as a whole and not with any special
method in that character's action. It is connected,
I mean, with their very nature, and they cannot
change that nature. On the other hand, it might
be put among the particular causes on account of
its quite modern and probably ephemeral char-
acter: it is, as it were, a particular cause of the
friction proceeding from the general causes of
character just enumerated, and this cause of friction
is the presence of Jewish MONOPOLY.
It is an exceedingly dangerous point in the
present situation. I do not think that the Jews
have a sufficient appreciation of the risk they are
running by its development. There is already
something like a Jewish monopoly in high finance.
There is a growing tendency to Jewish monopoly
over the stage for instance, the fruit trade in
London, and to a great extent the tobacco trade.
There is the same element of Jewish monopoly in
the silver trade, and in the control of various other
metals, notably lead, nickel, quicksilver. What
is most disquieting of all, this tendency to monopoly
is spreading like a disease. One province after
another falls under it and it acts as a most powerful
irritant. It will perhaps prove the immediate
cause of that explosion against the Jews which we
all dread and which the best of us, I hope, are
trying to avert.
It applies, of course, to a tiny fraction of the
92 THE JEWS
Jewish race as a whole. One could put the Jews
who control lead, nickel 3 mercury and the rest into
one small room : nor would that room contain very
pleasant specimens of their race. You could get
the great Jewish bankers who control international
finance round one large dinner table, and I know
dinner tables which have seen nearly all of them
at one time or another. These monopolists, in
strategic positions of universal control are an
insignificant handful of men out of the millions of
Israel, just as the great fortunes we have been
discussing attach to an insignificant proportion
of that race. Nevertheless, this claim to an
exercise of monopoly brings hatred upon the Jews
as a whole.
The thing is deservedly hated because it is
exceedingly unnatural and exceedingly tyrannical.
It would be tyrannical even for one of our own
people to hold us up in the supply of things essential
to us. It is intolerable in a people alien to us.
When we come to discuss, in the next chapter,
the unfortunate use of secrecy by the Jews (the
most potent, perhaps, of the particular causes
which have lead them into their present peril) we
shall better understand another odious feature in
this modern monopoly of control, which is the
way in which it spreads underground and out of
sight leaving the world in general ignorant that
this, that and the other individual Jew is its master
in the matter of some essential thing which he
controls.
To put it plainly, these monopolies must be put
an end to.
Before the Great War there was only one of
which Europe as a whole was conscious, and that
THE GENERAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 93
was the financial monopoly. Yet here the mono-
poly was far less perfect than in the case of the
metals. The Great War brought thousands upon
thousands of educated men (who took up public
duties as temporary officials) up against the
staggering secret they had never suspected the
complete control exercised over things absolutely
necessary to the nation's survival by half a dozen
Jews, who were completely indifferent as to whether
we or the enemy should emerge alive from the
struggle.
Incidentally, the wealth of these few and very
wealthy Jews has been scandalously increased
through the war on this very account. And at
the moment in which I write the French press,
which has a longer experience in the free discussion
of the Jewish question than any other, is exposing
the abominable increase in value of the Rothschild's
lead mines, an increase mainly due to the use of
lead for the killing of men.
But lead is only one of the monopolies, as I
have said. A whole group already exists and the
extension of the system is going on as rapidly as
an epidemic. Not only must it cease before any
solution of the Jewish question can be attempted,
but the process must be reversed. If the various
national Cabinets do not interfere to protect these
monopolies, then good-bye to any attempt at
justice for the Jew. In the legitimate anger against
a few pitiful dozens among the worst specimens
of the nation, Israel as a whole will be sacrificed.
There is in this formation of monopolies, as in
the more reputable activities of the nation, even
in its more justly famous activities, even in its
glories, that element of racial character which is
94 THE JEWS
never absent from any Jewish action. And that
is why I have put the point, modern and ephemeral
as it is, among the general causes of trouble.
The reason these general monopolies are formed
by Jews is that the Jew is international, tenacious
and determined upon reaching the very end of his
task. He is not satisfied in any trade until that
trade is, as far as possible, under his complete
control, and he has for the extension of that control
the support of his brethren throughout the world.
He has at the same time the international know-
ledge and international indifference which further
aid his efforts.
*****
But even were the quite recent monopolies in
metal and other trades taken, as they ought to be
taken, from these few alien masters of them, there
would remain that partial monopoly (it is not
at all a complete monopoly) which a few Jews
have exercised not only to-day, but recurrently
throughout history, over the highest finance:
that is, over the credit of the nations, and therefore
to-day, as never before, over the whole field of the
world's industry.
Should that partial financial monopoly remain
unconnected it will produce a sufficient hostility
against the Jews to precipitate, of itself, the next
general attack upon them.
It may be argued that this fear is groundless
because the control has now lasted for a long time.
It has lasted a lifetime even in its present hardly
complete form : and it is secure because its opera-
tions are removed from general observation, and
because it is mixed up with the interests of all
the wealthier classes.
THE GENERAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 95
I am afraid these arguments will not hold.
Although the Jewish control of finance is not a
thing which touches the public at large, yet all
educated men down to a comparatively low stratum
of society are fully aware of it, and every man who
is aware of it resents it. It is resented almost as
much by the mass of poor Jews as by the non- Jews,
but in a different way.
Again, although this financial monopoly does not
directly affect the economic life of the private
citizen, he is beginning to understand more and
more how it indirectly affects it. It affects him,
for instance, through his patriotism. He will not
submit to be told that, in order to suit the con-
venience of these alien bankers, he must forgo the
rights of victory and allow some enemy whom he
has justly chastised to escape the consequences of
that chastisement. Still more urgently will he
deny the right of the Jewish bankers to interfere
with the national reparation due to him for damage
wantonly done in the course of hostilities.
Again, international finance does not live
separate from private activities. It touches at last
a mass of individual enterprises, and through those
individual enterprises its action is questioned and
examined by a host of private citizens.
Yet again, the Jews who thus control international
finance are at work in many other capacities. For
instance, some of them stand behind those great
Industrial Insurance schemes which are so detest-
able to the mass of the people. Action against
these may arise any moment. If such action
comes one may be certain that the individual
attacked will be remembered in his capacity of
international financier quite as much as in his
96 THE JEWS
capacity of a battener upon the lapsed premiums
of the poor. Sooner or later the character of
this monopoly, to which men of a lifetime ago
were indifferent through ignorance but of which
to-day all the educated part of the community
is aware and deeply resents, will be appreciated
and equally resented at a lower level still. When
society is sufficiently filled with indignation against
it, then the explosion will come. If that explosion
only affected the rich Jews immediately concerned
no one would much regret it. There would be
little harm done. But the trouble is that it will
almost certainly affect the whole nation to which
those individuals belong.
I may be told that to put an end to this state
of affairs is impossible so long as parliamentary
government, with its profound corruption, endures ;
that the only force capable of dealing with the
plutocratic evil of alien monopoly upon this scale
is a king; and that a king we have not, among
modern nations. To which I answer that the
parliamentary system will not last for ever. It is
already in active dissolution among ourselves, and
badly hit elsewhere. The king may not be so far
off as people think him to be.
At any rate, in one way or another the thing will
cease, and will probably cease in violence. The
danger is that if it ceases in violence a vast number
of innocent will be involved with the guilty.
THE SPECIAL CAUSES OF
FRICTION
CHAPTER V
THE SPECIAL CAUSES OF FKICTION
THERE are two special forces upon the Jewish
side which nourish and exasperate the inevitable
friction between the Jewish race and its hosts.
It will be well to deal with these before passing
to the corresponding forces upon our side. For to
find a remedy it is necessary to diagnose the disease.
The two main Jewish forces which exasperate
and maintain the sense of friction between the
Jews and their hosts are first of all the Jewish
reliance upon secrecy, and, secondly, the Jewish
expression of superiority.
1. THE JEWISH RELIANCE UPON SECRECY
It has unfortunately now become a habit for
so many generations, that it has almost passed into
an instinct throughout the Jewish body, to rely
upon the weapon of secrecy. Secret societies,
a language kept as far as possible secret, the use
of false names in order to hide secret movements,
secret relations between various parts of the Jewish
body: all these and other forms of secrecy have
become the national method. It is a method to
be deplored, not because its indignity and false-
hood degrade the Jew that is not our affair
but rather on account of the ill- effects this policy
99
100 THE JEWS .
produces on our mutual relations. It feeds and
intensifies the antagonism already excited by
racial contrast.
But before we go further it is essential to be just ;
for no one understands anything if he attacks it
unjustly.
The Jewish habit of secrecy the assumption
of false names and the pretence of non- Jewish
origin in individuals, the concealment of relation-
ships and the rest of it have presumably sprung
from the experience of the race. Let a man put
himself in the place of the Jew and he will see
how sound the presumption is. A race scattered,
persecuted, often despised, always suspected and
nearly always hated by those among whom it
moves, is constrained by something like physical
force to the use of secret methods.
Take the particular trick of false names. It
seems to us particularly odious. We think when
we show our contempt for those who use this
subterfuge that we are giving them no more than
they deserve. It is a meanness which we associate
with criminals and vagabonds ; a piece of crawling
and sneaking. We suspect its practisers of desir-
ing to hide something which would bring them
into disgrace if it were known, or of desiring to
over- reach their fellows in commerce by a form of
falsehood.
But the Jew has other and better motives.
As one of their community said to me with great
force, when I discussed the matter with him many
years ago at a City dinner, " When we work under
our own nmes you abuse us as Jews. When we
work under your names you abuse us as forgers."
The Jew has often felt himself so handicapped
THE SPECIAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 101
if lie declared himself, that he was half forced, or
at any rate grievously tempted, to a piece of base-
ness which was never a temptation for us. Surely
all this carefully arranged code of assumed patro-
nymics (Stanley for Solomon, Curzon for Cohen,
Sinclair for Slezinger, Montague for Moses, Benson
for Benjamin, etc., etc.) had its root in that.
The Jew can plead something further in extenua-
tion of this practice. Family names did not grow
up naturally with them, as with us, in the course
of the Middle Ages. The Jew retained, as we long
retained in the middle and lower ranks of European
society, the simple habit of possessing one personal
name and differentiating a man from his fellows
by introducing the name of his father. Thus a
Jew in the sixteenth century was Moses ben
Solomon, just as the Cromwells' ancestor of the
same generation was Williams ap Williams. He
had not what we call a surname or family name.
In the same way until varying dates, early in
France and England and other Western countries,
much later in Wales, Brittany, Poland and the
Slav countries of the East, a man was known only
by his personal name, distinguished, if that were
necessary, by mentioning also the name of his
father, or, in some cases, of his tribe.
Properly speaking the Jews have no surnames,
and they may say with justice : " Since we were
compelled to take surnames arbitrarily (which was
the case in the Germanies and sometimes else-
where as well), you cannot blame us if we attach
no particular sanctity to the custom." If a Jew
of plain Jewish name was compelled by alien force
to take the fancy name of Flowerfield, he is surely
free to change that fancy name, for which he is
102 THE JEWS
not responsible, to any other he chooses. There
was a good reason for the Government to force
a name upon him. Only thus could he be regis-
tered and his actions traced. But forced it was,
and therefore, on him, not morally binding.
All this is true, but there remains an element not
to be accounted for on any such pleas. There are
in the experience of all of us, an experience repeated
indefinitely, men who have no excuse whatsoever
for a false name save that advantage of deceit.
Men whose race is universally known will unblush-
ingly adopt a false name as a mask, and after a
year or two pretend to treat it as an insult if their
original and true name be used in its place. This
is particularly the case with the great financial
families. Some, indeed, have the pride to main-
tain the original patronymic and refuse to change
it in any of their descendants. But the great mass
of them concealed their relations one with another
by adopting all manner of fantastic titles, and
there can be no object in such a proceeding save
the object of deception. I admit it is a form of
protection, and especially do I admit that in its
origin it may have mainly derived from a necessity
for self -protection. But I maintain that to-day
the practice does nothing but harm to the Jew.
There are other races which have suffered persecu-
tion, many of them, up and down the world, and
we do not find in them a universal habit of this
kind.
Again, who can say that the bearing of a Jewish
name to-day, or at any rate in the immediate past,
is or was a handicap in commerce where Occidental
nations were concerned ? And as for the Eastern
nations, the Jews there are so sharply differentiated
THE SPECIAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 103
that a false name can be of no service merely to
hide the racial character of its bearer. There
must be another motive present.
The same arguments apply for and against other
forms of secrecy. A man may plead that if secrecy
in relationship were not maintained the dislike of
Jews would lead to false accusations. The Jew
is highly individual, especially in intellectual affairs.
He takes his own line. He expresses his opinions
with singular courage. And such individual opin-
ions will often differ violently from those of men
with whom he is most closely connected. " Why,"
I can understand some distinguished Jewish publi-
cist in England saying, " should I be compro-
mised by people knowing that such-and-such a
Bolshevist in Moscow or in New York is my cousin
or nephew ? I am conservative in temperament ;
I have always served faithfully the state in which
I live; I heartily disapprove of these people's
views and actions. If their relationship with me
were known I should fall under the common ban.
That would be unjust. Therefore I keep the
relationship secret."
The plea is sound, but it does not cover the
ground. It is not sufficient to explain, for instance,
the habit of hiding relationships between men
equally distinguished and equally approved in
the different societies in which they move. It
does not explain why we must be left in ignorance
of the fact that a man whom we are treating as
the best of fellow-citizens should hide his connection
with another man who is treated with equal honour
in another country. There are occasions where
national conflicts make the thing explicable. A
Jew in England with a brother in Germany and a
104 THE JEWS
father at Constantinople might well be excused
in 1915 for calling himself Montmorency. Yet
we note that often where there is most need to
hide the connection, the connection is not hidden
at all. On the contrary, it is openly advertised.
We all recollect the name of one Jewish financier
who was most unjustly treated during the war.
He had faithfully served this country and the
breach of his connection with it was (to my mind
at least, and I think to most people who can judge
the matter) a very bad thing for Britain in the
conflict. Yet there was here no change of name
and no attempt to hide the connection between
himself and his brother, who stood, in another
capital, for the financial policy of our enemies.
Again, the Eothschilds, present in the various
capitals of Europe, have never pretended to hide
their mutual relationships, and no one has thought
any the worse of them, nor has this open practice
in any way diminished their financial power.
There must be more than necessity at work;
I suggest that there is something like instinct,
or, at any rate, an inherited tradition so strong
that recourse to it seems natural.
Now it cannot be too forcibly emphasized that
secrecy in any of these forms working through
secret societies, using false names, hiding of relation-
ships, denying Jewish origin specially exasperates
this, our own race, among which the Jews are
thrown in their dispersion. It is invariably dis-
covered, sooner or later, and whenever it is dis-
covered men have an angry feeling that they have
been duped, even in cases where the practice is
most innocent and is no more than the following
of something like a ritual.
THE SPECIAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 105
I doubt whether the Jews have any idea how
strongly this force works against them. If a man
were to say " my name is so-and-so; my father
was born at such-and-such a place in Galicia ; my
brother is still there in such-and-such a business"
if he told us all that, he would not suffer
upon our appreciating later on that members of
his family abroad were connected with move-
ments we disapproved: no, not even with a
Government in active hostility to our own. Every-
body knows the international position of the
Jew. Everybody knows that he cannot avoid
that position. Everybody makes allowances for
it. And I conceive that the abandonment of this
habit of secrecy is not only possible but would
be very greatly to the advantage of the whole
race.
Perhaps its most absurd form (not its most
dangerous form) is the secrecy maintained by
distinguished men with regard to their Jewish
ancestors. They and their Jewish relations often
suppress it altogether or, at best, touch on it rarely
and obscurely. Why should they act thus ?
Take the case of two men at random out of hun-
dreds whose names are universally known and
by most people respected, the name of Charles
Kingsley, the writer, and the name of Moss-Booth,
the founder of the Salvation Army. Here are
two men who in very different fields played a great
part in English life and who both owed their
genius and nearly all their physical appearance
to Jewish mothers. I should haye thought it to
the advantage of the Jewish race and of the indi-
viduals concerned that this fact should be widely
known. The literary abilities of Charles Kingsley,
106 THE JEWS
the organizing and other abilities of Booth are
not lessened in people's eyes, but, if anything,
enhanced, by a knowledge of their true lineage.
Yet the mention of that lineage is treated as though
it were a sort of insult. I have heard it wrung
out in some passionate plea for the Jewish race
as a proof that they are not devoid of abilities,
but never generally published.
Surely it would be more sensible to emphasize
in every possible case the Jewish or partially
Jewish origin of men who distinguished themselves,
and thus to show under what a debt Europeans
stand to the Jewish blood. To treat the matter
as a sort of sacred labyrinth, as a mysterious
temple into which one may now and then be
allowed to peep is ridiculous. The Jews cannot
have their cake and eat it too. If it is surely
it must be in their eyes a matter for pride to
belong to blood which they hold to be superior
and to a tradition of such immense antiquity,
then it cannot be at the same time a matter of
insult. Yet the convention is desperately main-
tained by the Jews themselves. If a man tells
me that he hates the English, and in reply I say,
" That's because you are an Irishman," he does
not fly at my throat. He takes it as a matter of
course that the history of the English government
in Ireland excuses his expression. So far from
being insulted at being called an Irishman he would
be insulted if you said he was not an Irishman.
And so it is with many another nationality which
has suffered oppression and persecution. I can
find no rational basis for a contrary policy in the
case of the Jews. Moreover the habit does this
further harm: it makes men ascribe a Jewish
THE SPECIAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 107
character to anything they dislike, and thus extends
undeservedly the odium against the race.
A foreign movement against one's nation, an
unpopular public figure, a detested doctrine, are
labelled " Jewish" and the field of hate, already
perilously wide, is broadened indefinitely. It is
useless to say, " The Jews do not admit the connec-
tion, the names are not Jewish, there is no overt
Jewish element." He answers, " Jews never do
admit such connection ; Jews admittedly hide
under false names ; Jewish action never is overt."
And as things are, until they change there is no
denying what he says. His judgment may be as
wild as you will ( I have heard Sinn Feiners called
Jews !), but, so long as this wretched habit of secrecy
is maintained, there is no correcting that judgment.
A universal suspicion is engendered and spreads.
Meanwhile the same vice drags into publicity
every ill-sounding Jewish act and name and leaves
in obscurity the honoured names and useful public
actions of Jewry. For a false name, like a forgery,
advertises itself.
It is not always recognized in this connection
that the Jewish " booms," which are so fruitful
a cause of exasperation, depend on this same policy
of concealment and on that account add to the
volume of anger as each new trick is discovered.
Not that the objects of these world- wide cam-
paigns are unworthy of attention. The Jewish
actor, or film- star, or writer or scientist selected is
usually talented; the victim of injustice whose
case is advertised on the big drum has often a
genuine grievance. But that the notice demanded
is out of all proportion and that its dependence
on Jewish organization is always kept hidden.
108 THE JEWS
So much for the element of secret action. A
great deal more might be written upon it, but
there are two reasons against enlarging thereon.
First, a full discussion would take up far
too much of my space; secondly, it would tend
to add what I particularly wish to avoid in these
pages, I mean emphasis upon the errors of the
Jew. It would continue a quarrel, our whole object
in which is to find peace.
2. THE EXPRESSION OF SUPERIORITY BY THE JEW
This is a very different matter. The mere
sense of superiority is not something in which any
special policy can be recommended, because it
is there and cannot be remedied. It is part of
the whole position. But it is possible to restrain
its expression. For that purpose it is of value
to define it, to put it upon record and to estimate
its effect upon our issue.
The Jew individually feels himself superior to
his non- Jewish contemporary and neighbour of
whatever race, and particularly of our race ;
the Jew feels his nation immeasurably superior
to any other human community, and particularly
to our modern national communities in Europe.
The frank statement of so simple and funda-
mental a truth is rarely made. It will sound,
I fear, shocking in many ears. To many others
it will sound not so much shocking as comic,
and to many more stupefying.
The idea that the Jew should think himself
our superior is something so incomprehensible
to us that we forget the existence of the feeling.
If it be constantly reiterated, for the purpose
of dealing with this great political difficulty, it
THE SPECIAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 109
is perhaps reluctantly admitted, but still held as
sort of abnormal, bewildering truth. I contend
that the forgetfulness of that truth, the attempt
to solve the problem without that truth remaining
constant and fixed in the mind of the statesman,
is in a very large measure the cause of our failure
in the past; and that the way the Jew openly
acts upon it in gesture, tone, manner, social
assertion, is a very important factor in the quarrel
between his race and ours.
Consider the attitude of statesmanship in the
past towards this vital conflict. In every such atti-
tude I think the Jewish conviction of superiority
has been omitted.
For the attitudes taken up by European states-
men in the past towards the alien Jewish element
in their midst have always been one of three sorts :
(1) Either they have acted as though there were
no Jewish nation, as though the Jew were merely
a private citizen like any other who happened
to have peculiar opinions and customs of his own
but who was not substantially different from the
men around him.
(2) Or they have attempted to suppress, or to
expel, or to destroy the Jew with ignominy and
violence.
(3) Or, while recognizing the existence of the
Jewish nation as something separate from their
own fellow-nationals whom they have to admin-
istrate, the statesmen have tried to arrive at
equilibrium by a sort of pact in which Jewish
separateness was recognized, but under conditions
of disability.
Now in all these three methods there is absent
all recognition of the Jewish feeling of superiority.
110 THE JEWS
In the first it is obviously lacking because the
whole idea of a Jewish nation is absent. It is
equally obviously lacking from the second method,
that of persecution: the persecutor instinctively
acts as though the Jew felt himself to be an inferior.
In the third method it is also absent, not in theory
but in practice. For the statesmen who have
acted thus in the past have not attempted to give
the Jews a separate status only, they have in point
of fact nearly always given them an inferior status.
By so doing they have exasperated the Jewish
national sentiment.
For instance, certain nations have treated Jews
as a separate people, as aliens, by forbidding them
untrammelled residence, and enforcing registration.
But when it came to taxation or freedom from
military service, then there was no special recog-
nition of the Jew.
There is indeed a fourth attitude which has
occasionally appeared in history when States
have been in active decline or have fallen into
the hands of base and weak men, and that is the
exaggerated flattery and support of a few power-
ful wealthy Jews by administrators who were
bribed or cowed. We are suffering from that
to-day. But these exceptional cases (they have
always led to national disaster) do not form a
true category of Statesmanship in the matter.
Nor is there even in those who thus actually advan-
tage a few Jews above their own fellow-citizens,
and give them special prominence and power, so
much a recognition of the Jewish sense of superiority
as a secret hatred of their Jewish masters.
Bitter as is everywhere the secret attack on the
Jews by those who have subjected themselves for
THE SPECIAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 111
gain or publicity, it is nowhere so bitter as in the
private speech of the politicians.
It would seem in the presence of so many failures
in policy, and all these failures having in common
the non- recognition of this Jewish feeling, that
success can never be obtained unless we fully
allow for it. I submit that there will never be
peace between any Jewish alien minority and the
community within which it may happen to reside
until those who administrate that community
fully accept, and studiously avoid the exaspera-
tion of, this state of the Jewish mind.
In statesmanship, as in every other form of
human activity, exact definition is of the first
importance. We must distinguish at the outset
between this Jewish sense of superiority and any
real superiority. The statesman is not concerned
with the Tightness or wrongness of the Jewish
attitude. It may be a most absurd illusion, or
it may be a most profound vision. He has nothing
to do with that. Having made up his mind that
the small and quite alien minority must be tolerated
and must be allowed to live as happily as possible
in the midst of a community from which it so
profoundly differs, his next duty is to know thor-
oughly the nature of the material upon which he
is acting and with which he has to deal.
He may smile at the Jewish sense of superiority ;
he may even be privately indignant; but he
must be quite sure that it is a permanent part of the
nation with which he has to settle. It will never
be removed. The Jew in the East End of London,
the poorest of the poor, feels himself the superior
of the magistrate before whom he is hauled, of the
policeman who keeps order in the streets, and
112 THE JEWS
immensely the superior of the simple- faced soldiers
and sailors, whose trade is the most typical of our
own race. He even feels himself the superior of
those whom he better understands the negotia-
tors: the people who live by cunning. The
expression of our faces, our gesture, our manner;
the very fact that our minds, less acute, are also
broader, confirms his feeling.
This fixed idea of superiority which appears in
every phrase and implication, is taken for granted
by the Jew. It is felt, I say, by the poorest and
most oppressed, the least rich and the most unfor-
tunate of the Jewish people in our midst. Unfor-
tunately and this is the crux it proceeds to
unrestrained expression. It is this which is so
violently resented. It is this which aggravates
the quarrel. It is this which must be kept in
control if we are to have peace; not the sense
of superiority, that is ineradicable, but the expres-
sion of it. It appears, as we all know, with extra-
ordinary emphasis in the action and manner of
the few very wealthy Jews with whom the directing
classes of the nation are better acquainted. But
whether he be a rich man suffering only from alien
and hostile surroundings, or a poor man suffering
from all the lowering forces of squalor, of destitu-
tion and of contempt, the Jew feels himself the
potential master of his hosts and shows it. He
reposes in the same confidence as was felt by
Disraeli when he said: "The Jew cannot be
absorbed ; it is not possible for a superior race to
be absorbed by an inferior." But unfortunately
he does not only repose on that foundation; he
also acts upon it, and that is intolerable.
We must, I say, allow for this feeling in any
THE SPECIAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 113
settlement we make; we have also to study its
consequences. Otherwise we shall be baffled by
phenomena which would seem inexplicable. But
we need not allow for on the contrary, we should
actively condemn an open attitude of Jewish
contempt for ourselves.
Here are some consequences of this open
expression of superiority consequences which we
all discover to-day in the relations between the
Jewish people and ourselves and which are leading
us into a situation very dangerous for them and
for us.
First, you have that familiar handling of Euro-
pean things by the Jew, which is continually stirring
the wrath of the European and as continually
leaving the Jew in wonderment what possible
harm he can have done. Thus, the Jew will
write of our religion, taking for granted that it
is folly, and will marvel that we are offended.
He will appear in our national discussions, not
only giving advice, but attempting to direct policy,
and will be puzzled to discover that his indifference
to national feeling is annoying. He will postulate
the Jewish temperament as something which,
if different from ours, must, whether we like it or
not, be thrust upon us.
He acts in all these things as every one acts
instinctively in the presence of those whom they
take for granted to be inferiors, and when men
talk of the " Jewish insolence," or the " Jewish
sneer," they imply that attitude. We are wrong
if we take these things as calculated insult. The
action of the Jew, in so far as it proceeds from
this sense of superiority, is no more calculated and
no more deliberately hostile than are our own actions
114 THE JEWS
whenever we find ourselves in relations which
those whom we think inferior to ourselves. But
we are right to point them out, to resent them,
to reprove them, and, if it became necessary, to
end them.
The Jewish problem will never be solved unless
we make allowances for the sense of superiority,
take it for granted as an unavoidable evil, and
restrain our indignation in its presence ; but
neither will it be solved if we permit its more and
more open expression.
Another consequence of this attitude : The Jew,
on account of it, makes no effort to get into touch
with the mass of the race in the midst of which
he may happen to be living. He is content to
remain separate from it, and thinks he cannot
help remaining separate from them. And he
shows it. He consents to associate with the elite,
with those who direct, with those who have some
special sort of function, but it seems to him a waste
of time to attempt communion with the rest.
And he shows it. That is what Renan meant
when he said that the Jews were the least demo-
cratic of all people. Renan, who was supported
by Jewish money and lived, while he was doing
his best work, dependent on a Jewish publisher;
Renan, who was so fascinated by the history of
Israel, and who decided himself to become a
scholar in all Hebraic things, understood the Jew
not at all. His judgments upon them are invari-
ably superficial and to one side of the truth ; the
judgments of a foreigner an admiring foreigner
but not a sympathetic foreigner. And when he
said that the Jews were not democratic he was,
instead of passing a judgment upon an intimate
THE SPECIAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 115
political instinct of the Jewish people, simply
noting an external phenomenon. For the Jews
are, as a fact, strongly democratic no nation more
so in their national relations among themselves;
they only appear undemocratic to us because they
openly look down on us among whom they live.
Another form taken by that open expression of
the sense of superiority among the Jews: It
lends to all their actions in our State a certain
assurance and solidity which vastly strengthens
their power of resistance, no doubt, but also pro-
vokes their misfortunes. The religious interpreter
of history might say that they had been specially
endowed with this sense by Providence because
Providence intended them to survive as a national
unit miraculously, in the face of every disability ;
to remain themselves for 2,000 years under condi-
tions which would have destroyed any other
people in perhaps a century: and yet intended
to suffer. The rationalist will say that the expres-
sion of a sense of superiority, and the power of resist-
ance that accompanies it are but different names
for the same thing; that but for the presence of
that expression of superiority the resistance could
not have succeeded, but for the resistance there
could have been no persecution ; that there was
no design in the matter, only the chance presence
of a particular quality which has produced its
necessary and logical effect. But whichever be
the true explanation, the historical fact remains,
that this sense of superiority produced an open
and overweening expression of it whenever the
Jews have been free to give vent to their feelings,
and that while it has had, as one great consequence,
the strengthening of the identity, permanence,
116 THE JEWS
survival of the Jewish people, it has also had,
for another great consequence, their recurrent
oppression following on every period of freedom.
There is one last thing to be said, which it is
almost impossible to say without the danger of
giving pain and therefore of confusing the problem
and making the solution more difficult. But it
must be said, because, if we shirk it, the problem
is confused the more. It is this: While it is
undoubtedly true, and will always be true, that
a Jew feels himself the superior of his hosts, it is
also true that his hosts feel themselves immeasur-
ably superior to the Jew. We can only arrive at
a just and peaceable solution of our difficulties by
remembering that the Jew, to whom we have
given special and alien status in the Common-
wealth, is all the while thinking of himself as our
superior. But on his side the Jew must recognize,
however unpalatable to him the recognition may
be, that those among whom he is living and whose
inferiority he takes for granted, on their side regard
him as something much less than themselves.
That statement, I know, will be as stupefying to
the Jew as its converse is stupefying to us. It
will seem as extraordinary, as incredible, and all
the rest of it ; but it is true, and it is a permanent
truth. Unless the Jews recognize that truth
the trouble will go on indefinitely. There is no
European so mean in fortune or so base in
character as not to feel himself altogether the
superior of any Jew, however wealthy, however
powerful, and (I am afraid I must add) however
good. True, virtue has a superiority of its own
which cannot be hidden, and the cruel, or the
treacherous, or the debauched European cannot
THE SPECIAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 117
but feel himself morally inferior to a Jew who is
just, self -governed, merciful, generous, and the
rest of it. But we know how it is with national
feelings. The type is stronger for us than the
individual; and while we may recognize certain
superior characteristics in the individual, we are
thinking all the while of the race, of the communal
form, and contrasting our own with the alien
form to the disadvantage of the latter.
So difficult is it for the Jew to appreciate this
factor in the problem that his lack of appreciation
has been almost as great a cause of difficulty in
the past as the same lack upon our side. We
seem to him insolent when, in our own eyes, we
are merely acting normally as superiors.
What emotion does it not create, I wonder, in
some Jewish merchant or money-dealer who has
purchased a high directing place in our plutocracy
when he discovers from the gesture, the tone,
the expression of some chance poor Englishman,
perhaps no more than an embarrassed hack writer,
a clear feeling of superiority? Must it not seem
to him mere insolence? ' What possible claim"
(he will say within himself) " has thisgroy, and a poor
unsuccessful goy at that, to treat me as though
I were less than he ! I, who am worth millions,
who am ruling and doing what I will with his own
national leaders, who dispose of his State very much
as I choose, and who belong to that nation which
is wholly above all others, the Jewish people ? "
Everywhere the Jew discovers the consequences
of this feeling, even though that feeling be to him
so incomprehensible that he can hardly admit its
existence.
Well, whether he likes to admit it or not, it is
118 THE JEWS
there. Individual Jews may be flattered for the
sake of their wealth or because of the fear of them,
in which a commercial community stands. Such
Jews as mistake the current printed word which
they read for the spoken words they never hear
may fall into the error of thinking that this sense
of superiority on our part did not exist. They
must be warned, if ever the problem is to be solved,
that it does.
In their case, just as in ours, a right solution can
only be arrived at by the frank admission that the
feeling is there and by the fixed knowledge that,
whether the feeling be an illusion or represent a
reality, it will not change ; but also by a repression
of it in our mutual relations.
We may add to our summary of this subtle but
profound cause of disturbance the further truth
that a paradox of the sort is to be found, though
perhaps less emphasized, in every other political
problem. The diplomat resident in a foreign
capital has to consider not only his own certitude
that his hosts are inferior, but their certitude
of their own superiority to him and his. The
general in the field may be certain of his mastery
over an opponent, but if that opponent is as yet
undefeated he will do ill to forget that he is matched
by a confidence equal to his own. Still more does
the negotiator in commerce act upon this principle
and recognize it, or at least if he fails to do so, he
invites disaster. For when the commercial man
is occupied in overreaching his neighbour, his
chances of success very largely depend upon his
treating that neighbour as though he really
were what he believes himself to be. He may
be dealing with a stupid and vain man easily
THE SPECIAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 119
to be overmatched and impoverished, but if he lets
it appear that he regards his proposed victim as a
vain and stupid man, then he will miss his bargain.
In general, there is no success over others, nor
even (which is much more necessary), any permanent
arrangement possible with others, unless we know,
allow for, and act upon the self- judgment of others,
however wrong we may believe that self- judgment
to be.
It is clear that in this conflict between the Jew
and, let us say, the European (for it is between
the Jew and the white Occidental race that our
present problem lies, though the same problem
arises with all other races among whom the Jew
may find himself), both parties cannot be right.
A being superior to the race of man and looking
on our petty quarrels might be able to decide
which of the two opponents were nearer reality,
and whether we are the better justified in our
contempt of the Jew or the Jew in his contempt of
us. But in working out our own solution without
the aid of such guidance, there is no rule but for
both parties to take for granted what each regards
as an illusion in the other ; to restrain its expression
for the sake of reaching a settlement ; and in the
settlement they arrive at, to admit as a factor
necessarily and permanently present what each
still secretly regards as a folly, but an incurable
folly, in the other.
The alternative to such self-restraint is a falling
back into the old circle of submission, consequent
anger accompanied by shame and violence, and
these followed by remorse.
THE CAUSE OF FRICTION
UPON OUR SIDE
CHAPTER VI
THE CAUSE OF FRICTION UPON OUR SIDE
HAVING concluded a brief review of the causes of
friction upon the Jewish side, we must turn to the
cause of friction upon our own.
At first sight it might seem that the task was
superfluous. Action and reaction are equal and
opposite. If you have shown why A irritates B,
you have also presumably shown why B irritates
A. Or again, if you regard an alien minority in
a community as an irritant (which it nearly always
is and which it certainly is in the case of the
Jews), you have, it would seem, sufficiently defined
the position and need not trouble to examine what
part the irritated play in the matter. What is
parasitical at the worst preys upon the general
body, at the best disturbs it. The general body
would appear passive. It has no part in the business
but to react against the cause of the disturbance
and if possible get rid of it. As that cause is
none of its making, one need not seek for any
responsibility on its side.
The house is ours: the Jew is an intruder (an
objector may say), and there is an end of it.
But the situation is not as simple as that. Quite
apart from the fact that the Jew will certainly not
allow such a description of his activity, there is
123
124 THE JEWS
the obvious truth that where you are dealing with
two human factors, that is, with two factors which
have a common nature and therefore common
duties, you are also dealing with two known and
analysable organic things. You are also dealing
with two sets of wills, and these wills we know to
be free, in spite of sophists. A man and a group
of men can do well or ill, both absolutely, and
relatively to some particular question in hand;
and no group of men can escape responsibility
in relation to any other group with which it is in
contact. It is certain that we play a part ourselves
in this quarrel between us and the Jews. It is
a part which is in a measure inevitable, because it
proceeds in a measure from the mere contrast
between two racial characters. But there is a
remaining part which can be remedied by the action
of the will.
Though we cannot change that element which is
inherent in our nature any more than the Jews
can change theirs, yet an understanding of it makes
all the difference; and we can certainly change
those elements which are inherent in our wills.
The proof of this is that in the long story of the
relations between the two races, there have been,
in various times and places, those exceptional
chapters of calm to which I have alluded on an
earlier page, and these could not have been main-
tained had not the causes of friction been modified
on either side, but especially upon ours.
All that cause of friction which arises from the
mere contrast of character may be set down very
briefly. It is included in what has just been said
on the general causes, the difference in nature
between the Jews and ourselves. If their form of
CAUSE OF FRICTION UPON OUR SIDE 125
courage, their form of generosity, their form of
loyalty is, as it is, of a different quality from ours ;
if their defects show the same difference of quality
or colour ; if we perpetually feel, as we do feel,, the
friction caused by this contrast, so do they, pre-
sumably, feel a corresponding friction in their
dealings with us. We shall neither of us be able
to change that state of affairs. We must admit it,
and we must try to understand its nature.
Above all, we must not take it for granted that
a difference from ourselves is in itself an evil in
another. That is a point to be insisted upon.
When we are dealing with inanimate nature, or
with unintelligent animate nature, we do not
ascribe motive, for there is no motive to ascribe.
A man does not go about with bitterness in his
heart against wasps, though the purpose of the
wasp is very different from the purpose of the man
and their interests clash. He does not call the
wasp wicked, nor, save as a relief to his feelings,
give it moral names. He does not condemn the
wasp. Still less does he condemn all wasps, or
anything else in nature around him that works
against his interest. But when he has to deal with
other human beings, man at once begins to ascribe
a motive. He must do so, because he knows that
motive is the spring of all human action, includ-
ing his own. When that motive differs from his,
contrasts with his and is therefore in any degree
inimical to his, he is inclined to ascribe an evil
motive. All that is a truism as old as the hills.
If you have not to live with those who thus differ
from you there is no great harm done, but if you
have to accept them as part of your life, it
is a different matter. It is then essential
126 THE JEWS
to the order of the State that this illusion of
directly antagonistic motive should be watched
and restrained.
But all this concerns rather our duty in the matter
than the mere cause of friction.
The first cause of friction is that contrast which
is the same whether we describe it from the aliens'
point of view, as has just been done, or from our
own.
The causes of friction which lie within the pro-
vince of the will, and which are, therefore, directly
a matter for reform, are of another kind. The first
of them undoubtedly is our disingenuousness in our
dealings with the Jew.
This disingenuousness extends from our daily habit
to our treatment of history. It is more deep-rooted
than most people are aware of, more widespread
than those who are aware of it like to admit. It
affects our relations with the Jews just as much
when we are attempting to defend their position
in the State as when we attack them. Indeed, I
think it affects our relations more when we are
trying to defend them than when we attack them.
The only two kinds of men who show perfect
candour in their dealings with the Jews are the
completely ignorant dupe who can hardly tell a
Jew when he sees one and who accepts as a reality
the old fiction of there being no difference except a
difference of religion (which he has been taught to
think unimportant) and the person called an " Anti-
Semite."
Both these types certainly say what they think.
That is why in their heart of hearts the Jews are
grateful to both, although both are intellectually
contemptible. The Jew feels, I think, when he
CAUSE OF FRICTION UPON OUR SIDE 127
meets either of these types, " At any rate I know
where I am." But the great bulk of men, especially
among the more cultivated, are grossly disingenuous
in all their dealings with the Jews. It is the great
fault of our side which corresponds to the fault of
secrecy upon theirs. And when you have allowed
for routine, for the necessities of social intercourse,
for convention and the rest, it remains a deliberately
conceived moral evil.
A man and his friend meet in the street a
Jew whom they know; they exchange ordinary
civilities with him; they pass on. The moment
his back is turned each comments to his companion
upon the Jewish character of the man they have
just left, and almost invariably to his disadvantage.
Now to blame this way of going on does not imply
that when you meet your Jewish acquaintance you
are to offend him by saying to his face the kind of
things you say behind his back; that would be a
monstrous piece of cynicism and, in practice, insane.
We do not act thus in any relation of life. But it
does mean that in the attitude, the gesture, the
tone of the voice, we play a deliberately false part
in our relations with Jews, which we do not play
in our relations with any other people. A peculiar
pretence, a pretence only practised with Jews, is
elaborately maintained. There is no allusion to
or admission of our real attitude, our sense of con-
trast. We therefore suffer an unnatural strain;
and we relieve of the strain immediately after-
wards by an exaggeration of the contrast we have
pretended to ignore. It is blameworthy in a special
degree because it is peculiar to that one case. If
we admitted the Jew as a Jew, talked to him of
the things that were uppermost in his mind and
128 THE JEWS
in ours, and treated him as we treat any other
foreigner in our midst, there would have been no
harm done. As it is the lie has done a double
harm to him and to us. To us by an exasperation
which is entirely our own fault, to him by deceiving
him as to his true position.
The Jews who mix with the wealthiest classes
to-day, especially in London, have no true idea of
their real position in the eyes of their guests ; and
the fault is with their guests.
I have cited an obvious daily example, but it is
the least important, for it is passing and shallow.
This disingenuousness spreads to relations more
permanent. A man goes into business with a Jew,
accepts him as a partner, works with him constantly
and yet nourishes in his heart a disloyalty to that
relationship. It is a phenomenon of constant
recurrence and it poisons the relations between the
two races. If a man is prepared to enter into one
of these permanent relations with another man who
differs fundamentally from himself in tradition and
human character, he must face the consequences.
One of those consequences, if he is to remain an
honest man, is the acceptation of the position with
all that it implies. He cannot have the advantage
as he hopes to have it of the Jewish sobriety, the
Jewish tenacity, the Jewish lucidity of thought, the
Jewish international relationships, the Jewish
opportunity of advancement through the aid of his
fellows, and at the same time secretly indulge in a
contempt and dislike for his companion, and relieve
that suppressed feeling in his absence. Yet that is
what men are doing daily throughout the business
world.
Listen to the conversation of such a man as,
CAUSE OF FRICTION UPON OUR SIDE 129
having thus engaged in intimate commercial
relationship with the Jew, falls upon misfortune.
He spends the rest of his life denouncing the Jews
as a race and his own companion in misfortune in
particular. He has no right to do it. It is undig-
nified ; it is puerile, but, worst of all, it is unjust.
He presumably knew what he was doing when he
entered into what could not but be a difficult
relationship. The consequences of that relationship
he should accept whether they turn out well for
him or ill.
We find something perhaps even worse to note
in the attitude of those who are successful in their
business through an alliance with the Jew. For in
this case gratitude should be added to justice,
and that gratitude is very rarely shown. On the
contrary, the non- Jewish partner is for ever in
a mood of complaint about his share. He is
perpetually in a grievance that he has been over-
reached, or that he has been bullied, or that he has
been robbed, save in those very rare cases where
the success is so overwhelming, the fortunes so
rapid, that there is no room for a grudge. In
almost every other case that I have come across
there is that element of recrimination behind the
Jew's back even under conditions of success.
I know very well what can be said upon the other
side. It can be said that what I have called upon
a former page the " ruthlessness " of the Jew in
commercial relations, as well as his tenacity and
all the rest, make the contest unequal ; that in a
partnership between Jew and non- Jew the non- Jew
is, as a fact, often overreached and is, as a fact,
often left (as the pretty vocabulary of modern
commerce has it) " in the cart." But pray why did
130 THE JEWS
the non- Jew enter into the alliance at all ? Was
it not precisely in order that he should benefit, if
he could, by those very qualities which he later
denounces ? He expected that those qualities
which make for the success of the Jew in commerce
would also benefit himself. He knew that there
must always be a certain amount of competition,
even within such an alliance. He backed himself
to watch his own interests under conditions which
he knew perfectly well when he entered into them.
He has not a leg to stand upon in quarrelling with
the results of the relationship, for in so doing he
is merely quarrelling with his own judgment and,
for the matter of that, his own plot.
If a man cannot tolerate the contrast between the
Jewish race and our own, or if he regards that race
as possessing energies which will invariably defeat
him in the competition of commerce, then let him
keep away from a Jewish alliance altogether. It
is the simplest plan. But to immix himself with
the Jewish commercial activity and then to grumble
at the results is despicable.
All this is worse, of course, when one is dealing
with relations even closer than those of commerce,
Those relations are numerous in the modern world,
and disingenuousness in them takes the worst
possible form. Men, especially of the wealthier
classes of the gentry, will make the closest friends of
Jews with the avowed purpose of personal advant-
age. They think the friendship will help them to
great positions in the State, or to the advancement
of private fortune, or to fame. In that calcu-
lation they are wise. For the Jew has to-day
exceptional power in all these things. They there-
fore have the Jew continually at their tables, they
CAUSE OF FRICTION UPON OUR SIDE 131
stay continually under the Jew's roof. In all the
relations of life they are as intimate as friends can
be. Yet they relieve the strain which such an
unnatural situation imposes by a standing sneer at
their Jewish friends in their absence. One may say
of such men (and they are to-day an increasing
majority among our rich) that the falsity of their
situation has got on their nerves. It has become a
sort of disease with them ; and I am very certain
that when the opportunity comes, when the public
reaction against Jewish power rises, clamorous,
insistent and open, they will be among the first to
take their revenge. It is abominable, but it is true.
And this truth applies not only to friendships,
it even applies to marriages. Marriage between
Christian and Jew is, in that rank, an affair of
interest, and the bitterness the relation breeds is
excessive.
This disingenuousness, then lack of candour on
the part of our race in its dealings with the Jew
a vice particularly rife among the wealthy and
middle classes (far less common among the poor),
extends, as I have said, to history. We dare not,
or will not teach in our history books the plain facts
of the relations between our own race and the Jews.
We throw the story of these relations, which are
among the half-dozen leading factors of history,
right into the background even when we do mention
it. In what they are taught of history the school-
boy and the undergraduate come across no more
than a line or two upon those relations. The
teacher cannot be quite silent upon the expulsion
of the Jews under Edward I or upon their return
under Cromwell. A man cannot read the history
of the Roman Empire without hearing of the Jei
132 THE JEWS
war. A man cannot read the Constitutional
History of England without hearing of the special
economic position of Jews under the Mediaeval
Crown. But the vastness of the subject, its
permanent and insistent character throughout two
thousand years; its great episodes; its general
effect all that is deliberately suppressed.
How many people, for instance, of those who
profess a good knowledge of the Roman Empire,
even in its details, are aware, let alone have
written upon the tremendous massacres and counter-
massacres of Jews and Europeans, the mass of
edicts alternately protecting and persecuting Jews ;
the economic position of the Jew, especially in the
later empire ; the character of the dispersion ?
There took place in Cyprus and in the Libyan
cities under Hadrian a Jewish movement against
the surrounding non- Jewish society far exceeding
in violence the late wreckage of Russia, which
to-day fills all our thoughts. The massacres were
wholesale and so were the reprisals. The Jews
killed a quarter of a million of the people of Cyprus
alone, and the Roman authorities answered with a
repression which was a pitiless war.
One might pile up instances indefinitely. The
point is, that the average educated man has never
been allowed to hear of them. What a factor the
Jew was in that Roman State from which we all
spring, how he survived its violent antagonism to
him and his antagonism to it ; the special privilege
whereby he was excepted from a worship of its
gods ; his handling of its finances all the intimate
parallel which it affords to later times is left in
silence. The average educated man who has been
taught, even in some fullness, his Roman History,
CAUSE OF FRICTION UPON OUR SIDE 133
leaves that study with the impression that the Jews
(if he had noticed them at all) are but an insig-
nificant detail in the story.
So it is with history more recent and even con-
temporaneous. In the history of the nineteenth
century it is outrageous. The special character of
the Jew, his actions through the Secret Societies
and in the various revolutions of foreign States, his
rapid acquisition of power through finance, political
and social, especially in this country all that is left
out. It is an exact parallel to the disingenuousness
which we note in social relations. The same man
who shall have written a monograph upon some point
of nineteenth century history and left his readers
in ignorance of the Jewish elements in the story
will regale you in private with a dozen anecdotes :
such-and-such a man was a Jew; such-and-such a
man was half a Jew ; another was controlled in his
policy by a Jewish mistress; the go-between in
such-and-such a negotiation was a Jew ; the Jewish
blood in such-and-such a family came in thus and
thus And so forth : but not a word of it on the
printed page !
This deliberate falsehood equally applies to
contemporary record. The newspaper reader is
deceived so far as it is still possible to deceive him
with the most shameless lies. " Abraham
Cohen, a Pole"; " M. Mosevitch, a distinguished
Roumanian" ; " Mr. Schiff, and other representa-
tive Americans" ; " M. Bergson with his typically
French lucidity"; " Maximilian Harden, always
courageous in his criticism of his own people" (his
own being the German) . . . and the rest of the
rubbish. It is weakening, I admit, but it has not
yet ceased,
134 THE JEWS
Now this form of falsehood corrodes, of course,
the souls of those who indulge in it. But that does
not concern the matter of this book. Where it
comes in as a cause of friction between the two races,
and a removable cause of friction, is in the effect
it has upon the Jewish conception of their position
in our society. It falsifies that conception alto-
gether. It produces in the Jew a false sense of
security and a completely distorted phantasm of the
way in which he is really received in our society.
The more this disingenuousness is practised the
more the surprise which follows upon its discovery
and the more legitimate the bitterness and hatred
which that surprise occasions in those of whom we
are the hosts. It is not only true of this country ;
it is true of every other country in which the Jew
has been harboured and for a time protected.
Invariably he has complained that his awakening
was rude, that he was bewildered by what seemed to
him a novel and inexplicable feeling against him;
that he had thought he was among friends and
found himself suddenly among treacherous enemies.
All this would have been saved to others in the past,
and will be saved to ourselves in the near future, if
this pestilent habit of falsehood were eliminated.
Disingenuousness is, on our side, the first main
cause of the friction between the two races.
The second main cause of friction upon our side
is the unintelligence of our dealing with the Jews.
That unintelligence is allied, of course, to the dis-
ingenuousness of which I have spoken ; but it is a
separate thing none the less, and we can learn from
the Jews its opposite, for their dealings with us are
always intelligent. They know what they are
driving at in those relations, though they often
CAUSE OF FRICTION UPON OUR SIDE 135
misunderstand the material with which they deal.
But we, over and over again, would seem not even
to know what we are driving at.
What could be more unintelligent, for instance,
than the special forms of courtesy with which the
Jew is treated ? I am not talking of the elaborate,
false friendship which I have just dealt with under
the head of disingenuousness, but of the genuine
attempts at courtesy towards this alien people
the courtesy expressed by those who have no
intimate relations with them, and do not desire to
have intimate relations with them. It is almost
invariably, in those who commonly avoid the Jews,
a courtesy which expresses patronage on the surface
of it. It may be compared with the courtesy that
rich men show to poor men as offensive a thing as
there is in the world.
And how unintelligent is our dealing with any
particular Jewish problem; for instance, the
problem of Jewish immigration ! We mask it
under false names, calling it " the alien question,"
" Russian immigration." " the influx of undesir-
ables from Eastern and Central Europe," and any
number of other timorous equivalents. The process
is one of cowardly falsehood, but the falsehood is
not more remarkable than the stupidity, for no
one is taken in and least of all the Jews them-
selves.
This unintelligence extends to many another
field. How unintelligent are the efforts of the
writers who would, as it were, make amends to the
Jews for former persecution by putting imaginary
Jew heroes into their books. In this particular we
offend less than did our fathers of the Victorian
period. Dickens' offence was grave. He disliked
136 THE JEWS
Jews instinctively; when he wrote of a Jew
according to his inclination he made him out a
criminal. Hearing that he must make amends
for this action, he introduced a Jew who is like
nothing on earth & sort of compound of an Arab
Sheik and a Family Bible picture from the Old
Testament, and the whole embroidered on an
utterly non- Jewish a purely English character.
How unintelligent are the various defences of the
Jew by the non- Jew, even with the best intentions !
You will hear people tell you solemnly, as a sort of
revelation, that there are kindly, witty Jews, Jews
who are good prize-fighters or good fencers. I well
remember one old gentleman who tried hard to
convince me (as though I needed convincing) that
there were Jews who had taste. He said to me, " I
do not myself go into Jewish houses, but my son
does, and he assures me that much of the decoration
is in good taste." How unintelligent is the idea
that because a man's motives are not open and
because he has not the same reasons for serving the
State that you have, therefore he is to be perpetually
under suspicion ! How still more unintelligent is
the conception that, although he is alien, yet you
cannot use him in certain special services for the
State.
This unintelligence is specially apparent in the
treatment of the Jew in his international relations.
i The Jew is a nomad, the non- Jew a man with a
! fixed habitation. The Englishman, the Frenchman
and the rest are perpetually approaching the Jew
as though he also had a fixed habitation. We seem
never to be able to get over the shock of surprise
when we learn that a particular Jew abroad is the
cousin, or nephew, or brother of another Jew with a
CAUSE OF FRICTION UPON OUR SIDE 137
different name in England, or with another Jew with
yet another name in Pinsk or San Francisco. Yet,
surely, this is of the very essence of the Jewish
Sosition. We ought to take it for granted that the
ew is thus nomadic, international, spread all over
the world, migratory, as we take the same thing for
granted in birds of passage. To adopt the attitude
which we almost invariably do and to feel a shock
of surprise when we discover what must in the
nature of things be the most regular feature in the
civic situation of the Jew, is to fall into that most
stupid of all stupid errors, the reading of oneself
into others.
I remember the horror and scandal with which
men whispered their discovery that a man with a
German name, who had got into trouble a few years
ago, was the first cousin of a Cabinet Minister. Why
not ? They seemed to be struck all of a heap by
the dreadful revelation that the names borne by
Jews were not always their original names, that
rich and important men often have poor rela-
tions, and that poor relations often get embar-
rassed.
In terms of their own society the thing would
have been simple enough. They would have felt
no surprise to hear that some man of our own race,
who had made a rapid fortune and purchased a
political position, suffered from a disreputable
relative, also of our own race. But because in the
case of the Jew there were the two unusual elements
of a foreign name and distant origin, they were
bewildered. They even thought it in some way
specially scandalous. They had not appreciated the
material with which they were dealing, and that is
the mark of unintelligence. But the cream of unin-
138 THE JEWS
telligence, the form in which unintelligent treatment
of him most exasperates the Jew, is undoubtedly
that typical, that ceaseless case of the man who is
perpetually crying out against Israel, and purpos-
ing nothing the man who nourishes a sterile
grievance ; who has not even the clarity or vigour to
attempt suppression; who would be horrified at
persecution, almost equally horrified at any breach
of convention, and yet continues to cry out against
a state of affairs which he does nothing to put right
and for which he has not even a theoretic solution.
The last of the main causes of friction between
the Jews and ourselves is lack of charity, and that
in the simplest form of refusing to go half way to
meet the Jew, and of refusing to put ourselves in
the shoes of the Jew so as to understand his position
in our society and his attitude towards it. It is a
universal fault just as common in those who daily
associate with, live off, and fawn upon Jews
as in those who keep aloof from them. It never
seems to occur to anyone on our side who has to
deal with the Jewish problem, to make the imagin-
ative effort required. And yet we have the parallel
ready to our hands. The Jew feels among us, only
with far greater intensity, what we feel when we are
resident in a foreign country a sense of exile> a
sense of irritation against alien things, merely
because they are alien; a great desire for com-
panionship and for understanding, yet a great
indifference to the fate of those among whom he
finds himself ; an added attachment, not, indeed,
to his territorial home, for he has none, but to his
nation. If we could perpetually bear in mind
that parallel, the friction on our side would be
greatly modified.
CAUSE OF FKICTION UPON OUR SIDE 139
There are many Jewish societies which ask
nothing better than to have occasional addresses
from non-Jews. Those addresses are given, those
Societies are visited, but not nearly as much as they
should be.
There is a great Jewish literature I mean a great
mass of books dealing specially with the Jew's
position from the Jew's own point of view. It is
not read or known. I may be told that the fault
of all this is largely that of the Jews themselves on
account of their use of secrecy. I do not think the
objection applies. With all his use of secrecy the
Jew is there present among us for us to approach,
if we will, and to understand as best we can. And I
say that the approach is not made.
It is an effort, of course. No one knows it better
than I; for on more than one occasion when I
have addressed a Jewish audience I have found
myself the ob j ect of very severe language. But it is
an effort which every one ought to make who admits
that there is a Jewish problem at all, and it is an
effort very rarely made. It is not only an effort
because it involves the crossing of a gulf, it is also
an effort because we find this alien thing in many
ways repugnant to us. Yet people make that
effort for the purposes of the State continually
where other races are concerned. It is far more
important that they should make it where the Jews
are concerned. For those other alien races,
administrated for the moment by officials of our
own race, will not permanently be so administered.
The relations between them and us are for a brief
time, and they are relations that constantly change.
The Jew is with us always ; and the type of contact
between his race and ours will remain much the
140 THE JEWS
same through an indefinitely long future as they
have through so very long a past.
Here, then, is the summary, as I see it, of the
causes of friction between the two races.
First, a general cause, which lies in the con-
trasting nature of the two and upon the irritant
effect of that contrast. This cause is not to be
eliminated, though its effects may be modified.
It is a profound contrast and a sharp irritant con-
stant in its activity. The essential is to recognize
its real nature, not to give to it general terms of
faults and vices, but to appreciate the difference of
quality involved : above all, not to tell lies about it
and pretend it is not present.
Secondly, as to special causes of friction I
mean causes which on their side, as on ours, can be,
if not eliminated, at any rate modified I suggest
that the most prominent are: 1. The sense of
superiority which, though it cannot be destroyed,
can at least be checked in expression and which,
by a pretty irony, is equally strong upon both sides.
2. The use of secrecy by the Jews themselves;
partly as a weapon of defence, partly as a method of
action, always to be deplored, and of a nature
particularly exasperating to our temperament.
3. Upon our side, a persistent disingenuous-
ness in our treatment of this minority. Unintelli-
gence in their treatment: the whole made
worse by an indifference or lack of charity, a
refusal to make the effort necessary for meeting and
understanding as well as we can the race which
must always be with us and which is yet so different
from our own.
CAUSE OF FRICTION UPON OUR SIDE 141
Now these causes of friction permanently present
tend to produce what I have called the tragic
cycle: welcome of a Jewish colony, then ill- ease,
followed by acute ill- ease, followed by persecution,
exile and even massacre. This followed, naturally,
by a reaction and the taking up of the process all
over again.
In our own time we have seen, quite lately, the
succession of the second to the first of these stages ;
we have passed from welcome to ill- ease. That pas-
sage threatens a further passage from the second to
the third ; from the third to the terrible conclusion.
We feel quite secure to-day from the last
extreme of this cycle. We are certain it will never
come to persecution: that is still inconceivable.
But it is not inconceivable everywhere: and no
society is free from change. Some now alive may
live to see riots even in this quiet polity and worse
in newer or less settled states.
Such a catastrophe is to be avoided by every
effort in our power and a solution to the problem
presented must imperatively be sought. But in
passing we should note, for the consideration of
those who may doubt the acuteness of the problem
and the immediate practical necessity for a solution,
the presence of a phenomenon which amply proves
that it is acute and that the solution is necessary.
That phenomenon is the presence to-day of a new
type, the Anti-Semite, the man to whom all the
Jews are abhorrent.
It is a phenomenon which has increased pro-
digiously; its rate of increase is accelerating, and as
a warning of the peril, as a proof of its magnitude,
I propose to examine that phenomenon closely in
my next chapter.
THE ANTI-SEMITE
CHAPTER VII
THE ANTI-SEMITE
To understand any problem one must study not
only its real factors as they appear to a reasonable
man who sees the whole affair steadily ; one must
also understand the insanities and distortions the
problem has provoked, for they singularly illus-
trate its character and force.
It is not enough to consider only the actual in
any difficulty to be solved, it is necessary also to
consider the imaginary; because the legend or
illusion is a direct product of the truth and shows
how the truth has acted on other minds.
Thus a caricature brings out what we uncon-
sciously know to be present in any personality,
emphasizes it, and though false in its exaggeration,
forbids us to forget it in the future. Thus any
extreme, no matter how false its lack of proportion,
is of the highest value to judgment.
In a practical problem of politics there is another
most weighty reason for examining extreme and
distorted opinion : which is, that in politics we deal
not only with real things but with the liking or
disliking of these things by living men: their
exaggerated or ill-informed affection or repulsion.
All statesmanship lies in the apprehension of enthu-
siasm and indifference.
145 L
146 THE JEWS
Now there are in this great political problem
presented by the Jewish race in our midst two
extremes. One we have already studied: it is the
extreme folly of falsehood, of pretending that the
problem is not there.
That extreme was an almost universal folly in
the immediate past, especially in this country. It
is now abandoned by all of our generation save a
few people of an official sort, and these will not
long maintain an attitude outworn and already
ridiculous.
But the other extreme remains to be studied. It
is, in our society, quite a recent phenomenon, though
it has gained very great strength in recent years
and is increasing alarmingly. It is the extreme of
hatred. It is the extreme manifested by those who
have but one motive in their action towards the
Jewish race, and that motive a mere desire for its
elimination. It implies that there is no peace
possible between the two races ; no reasoned political
solution. It relies upon nothing but antagonism.
It is already very strong, and its adherents believe
themselves to be on the eve of a sort of blundering
triumph.
Every one who desires to deal with this grave
political matter practically, that is, to establish a
permanent policy, will be much more concerned
with the extreme here examined than with the
other extreme, which ignores the problem altogether.
For this new extreme of active hatred is flourishing ;
that other, older extreme no longer functions.
The near future will have to deal, in practical
politics, not only with the problem presented by
the Jews as an alien power within the State, but
(what will probably prove a more difficult matter)
THE ANTI-SEMITE 147
with the hater of the Jew, who is claiming, and
rapidly achieving, power on his side. The type is
as old as the problem ; it is two thousand years old.
But it waxes and wanes. Its modem name of
" Anti-Semite" is as ridiculous in derivation as it is
ludicrous in form. It is partly of German academic
origin and partly a newspaper name, vulgar as one
would expect it to be from such an origin, and also
as falsely pedantic as one would expect, but the
exasperated mood of which it is a label is very
real.
I say the word " Anti-Semite" is vulgar and
pedantic : that I think will be universally admitted.
It is also nonsensical. The antagonism to the Jews
has nothing to do with any supposed " Semitic "
race which probably does not exist any more than
do many other modern hypothetical abstractions,
and which, anyhow, does not come into the matter.
The Anti-Semite is not a man who hates the modern
Arabs or the ancient Carthaginians. He is a man
who hates Jews.
However, we must accept the word because it has
become currency, and go on to the more essential
matter of discovering how those to whom it applies
are moved, what the result of their action would
be if ( or when) they could act freely ; and, most
important of all, of what they are a sign.
The Anti- Semite is a man marked by two main
characters. In the first place he hates the Jews in
themselves. His motive is not a hatred of their
presence in our society. His motive is not the
hatred of concealment, falsehood, hypocrisy, corrup-
tion and all the other incidental evils of that false
position. These things, indeed, irritate him, but
they are not his leading motive. His leading motive
148 THE JEWS
is a hatred of the Jewish people. He is in intense
reaction against this alien thing which he perceives
to have acquired so much power in his society. The
way in which it has exercised this power especially
exasperates him. But he will remain a hater of the
Jewish nation when they are despised, insignificant,
and neglected, and he will remain a hater of it even
if there be then attached to its position no accidents
of secrecy, falsehood and financial corruption. The
type increases rapidly when Jews have power : it
becomes almost universal when they begin to abuse
that power. It dwindles as that power declines.
But it is always the same and is an index of peril.
The Anti-Semite is a man who wants to get rid of
the Jews. He is filled with an instinctive feeling in
the matter. He detests the Jew as a Jew, and would
detest him wherever he found him. The evidences
of such a state of mind are familiar to us all. The
Anti-Semite admires, for instance, a work of art;
on finding its author to be a Jew it becomes dis-
tasteful to him though the work remains exactly
what it was before. The Anti-Semite will confuse
the action of any particular Jew with his general
odium for the race. He will hardly admit high
talents in his adversaries, or if he admits them he
will always see in their expression something
distorted and unsavoury.
When an accusation is made against a Jew he
cannot adopt the judicial attitude any more than
could that other extremist, the humbug who denies
the Jewish problem altogether. Just as that other
person, now passing out of our lives, would not admit
a Jew to be guilty under the most glaring evidence
and was particularly unable to admit guilt in a
Jew who might be wealthy ; just as he proclaimed
THE ANTI-SEMITE 149
the Jews as a whole impeccable, so does the Anti-
Semite approach every Jew with a presumption of
his probable guilt, so does he exaggerate this pre-
judice when he has to deal with a wealthy Jew, and
so does he consider the whole Jewish race in the
lump as probably guilty of pretty well any charge
brought against it.
The contrast was very well seen in the Dreyfus
case, when the old type of extremist was still strong.
He would not look at the evidence against Dreyfus,
he would not, if he could help it, mention his race.
All he knew was that Dreyfus was and must in the
nature of things be innocent and that all the diverse
men who testified against him were wicked con-
spirators. The new type of extremist, then but
rising and not yet master, would not listen to the
strong evidence in Dreyfus' favour, refused to re-
examine the case after the chief witness had been
found guilty of forgery, made up his mind that
Dreyfus was necessarily guilty and was convinced
that all his supporters were dupes or knaves.
The mere fact that the Jews exist, let alone that
they are powerful, poisons life for such a man. He
is led by his lop-sided enthusiasm into the most
ridiculous errors. In this country every name of
German origin at once suggests a Jew to him. Every
financial operation, especially if it be of doubtful
morality, must certainly have a Jew behind it;
wherever a number of partners, Jewish and non-
Jewish, are engaged in some bad work (as, for
instance, in one of our innumerable Parliamentary
scandals), a Jew must always for this sort of person
be the prime mover and the evil genius of the whole.
As is the case with every other mania, this mania
rapidly obscures the general vision of its victim.
150 THE JEWS
His prejudices soon lose proportion altogether. He
comes to see the Jew in everything and everywhere,
and to accept confidently propositions which he
would himself see to be contradictory, could he give
a moment's quiet thought to the matter.
Thus I have heard on all sides in the last few
years these strange assertions proceeding from the
same source, yet obviously incompatible one with
the other : That modern scepticism was Jewish in
its origin; that modern superstition, our modern
necromancy and crystal gazing and all the rest of
it, was Jewish in its origin ; that the evils of demo-
cracy are all Jewish in their origin ; that the evil
of tyrannical government, in Prussia, for instance,
was Jewish in its origin ; that the pagan perversions
of bad modern art were Jewish in their origin ; that
the puerility of bad church furniture was due to
Jewish dealers ; that the Great War was the product
of Jewish armament firms ; that the anti- patriotic
appeals which weakened the allied armies came from
Jewish sources and so on. It is indeed true that
there is a Jewish quality in all these diverse and
contradictory things where a Jew mixes in them ;
just as there is a Scotch, or French, or English
quality when a Scot, a Frenchman, or an English-
man is the agent. But to ascribe the whole boiling
to the Jew, and to make him the conscious origin of
all, is a contradiction in terms.
The Anti-Semite is a man so absorbed in his
subject that he at last looses interest in any matter,
unless he can give it some association with his
delusion, for delusion it is.
In a sense, of course, this state of mind is a sort
of compliment to the Jewish nation. If such a
preoccupation with them be not amicable it is at
THE ANTI-SEMITE
151
least intense, and those against whom it is directed
may well regard it as a proof of their importance in
the world. But that aspect of the phenomenon is
not consoling for the future of either of us the
Jew who now nervously awaits attack, and we who
desire to forestall and prevent such attack.
The Anti-Semite is very much more numerous
and very much more powerful than might be ima-
gined from the reading of the daily press ; for the
press is still, for the most part, under the convention
of ignoring the Jewish problem and under the terror
of the financial results which might follow from a
discussion of it. His universal activity is not yet
to be read of in the great newspapers ; but in con-
versation and in the practice of daily life we hear
of it everywhere.
And here I may digress upon a modern feature
which applies to all political problems and therefore
to this Jewish problem among others. The great
movements of our tinre have never originated in the
press of the great cities. They rise and store up
their energies in political cliques, in popular gather-
ings, and spoken rumours long before they appear
in this main instrument for the spreading of news.
That is because the press of our great cities is con-
trolled by very few men, whose object is not the
discussion of public affairs, still less the giving of
full information to their fellow- citizens, but the
piling up of private fortune. As these men are not,
as a rule, educated men, nor particularly concerned
with the fortunes of the State, nor capable of under-
standing from the past what the future may be,
they will never take up a great movement until it is
forced upon them. On the contrary, they will waste
energy in getting up false excitement upon insig-
152 THE JEWS
nificant matters where they feel safe, and even in
using their instruments for the advertisement of
their own insignificant lives. In all this, the
modern press of our great cities differs very
greatly from the press of a lifetime ago. It
was not always owned by educated men, but it
was conducted by highly educated men, who were
given a free hand. It therefore concerned itself
with problems of real importance and it debated
upon either side real contrasts of opinion upon those
matters. This modern press of ours does none of
these things ; but precisely because it is so reluctant
to express real emotion it does, when the emotion is
forced upon it, let it out in a flood. Just as it would
not tell the truth when a thing was growing, so when
it reaches an extreme it will not exercise restraint.
On the contrary, if the " stunt" be an exciting
one, it will push it (once it has made up its mind to
talk of it at all) in the most extreme form and to the
last pitch of violence.
We have seen that plainly enough in the mon-
strous expressions of foreign policy during the last
ten years, and we have seen it in the abominable
hounding of individuals to which that same press
has lent itself.
Now in the matter of Anti-Semitic feeling we shall
have, I think, exactly the same phenomenon re-
peated. That feeling is now ubiquitous. It is spread-
ing with an alarming rapidity, and the increase
of its intensity is even more remarkable than the
increase in the numbers of its adherents. Sooner
or later and fairly soon I imagine the press will
give it voice. When it does, it will give it voice, we
may be certain, in the most extreme, the most
passionate, the most irrational form and when
THE ANTI-SEMITE 153
that happens, in a field where passion is already so
wild> God help its victims !
The Anti-Semitic passion, largely based though
it is on imaginary things, has adopted one method
of action highly practical. It is a method of action
closely in touch with reality, and productive of
formidable results. I mean its compiling of docu-
ments. It has here noted, all over Europe and
America, with exactitude, and continues to put upon
record, everything which can be said to the detriment
of its victims.
It discovered at its origin, presented as a barrier
against it, the Jewish weapon of secrecy. The folly
of the Jews in using such a weapon was never better
shown, for of all defences it is the easiest to break
down. The Anti-Semites countered at once by
making every inquiry, by collecting their informa-
tion, by finding out and exposing the true names
hidden under the mask of false ones, by detecting
and registering the relationships between men who
pretended ignorance one of the other ; it ferreted
all through the ramifications of anonymous finance
and invariably caught the Jew who was behind the
great industrial insurance schemes, the Jew who
was behind such and such a metal monopoly, the
Jew who was behind such and such a news agency,
the Jew who financed such and such a politician.
That formidable library of exposure spreads daily,
and when the opportunity for general publication
is given there will be no answer to it.
It is the greatest mistake in the world to regard
the Anti-Semite in the vast numerical strength he
has now attained all over our civilization as wholly
unpractical and therefore negligible, as a man who
cannot construct a formidable plan of action simply
154 THE JEWS
because he has lost his sense of values. While the
movement was growing the method of meeting it
was always that of ridicule. It was a false method.
The strength of Anti-Semitism was and is based not
only on intensity of feeling, but also on industry,
an industry very accurate in its methods. The
Anti-Semitic pamphlets, newspapers and books,
which the great daily press is so careful to boycott,
form by now a mass of information upon the whole
Jewish problem which is already overwhelming and
still mounting up : and all of it hostile to the Jews.
You will not find in it, of course, any material for
the Defendant's Brief, but as a dossier for the Prose-
cution it is astonishing in extent and accuracy and
correlation.
Now it is to be remembered in this connection
that the human mind is influenced by documenta-
tion in a special manner. The exact citation of
demonstrable things with chapter and verse con-
vinces as can no other method, and the Anti-Semite
is ready with such citation on a very large scale
indeed, at the first moment when a general pub-
licity, now denied, shall be granted to it.
Moreover, this reliance of the Jew upon the
futility of the Anti-Semitic propaganda omits one
very important feature. The Anti-Semitic group
is built up of men differing greatly in experience, in
judgment and policy. Aid it is built up of strata
differing greatly in the intensity of their hatred. It
includes many a man with administrative experi-
ence, many a man of great business capacity, of
acquired fortune, of talent in affairs. It in-
cludes men with a thorough knowledge of European
THE ANTI-SEMITE 155
diplomacy ; it includes men (in great numbers) with
the literary gift of expression for persuading their
fellows. Not only is this true, but, as I have said,
it includes a large " right wing " which, because they
are more restrained in expression than the rest, will
exercise a greater weight ; men who are not at all
blinded by their hatred, though hatred has become
their chief motive; men who retain full capacity
for organizing a plan of action and for carrying it
out. It is true that there is a definite line which
divides the Anti-Semite from the rest of those who
are attempting to solve the Jewish problem. It is
the line dividing those whose motive is peace from
those whose motive is antagonism. It is the line
dividing those whose object is action, against the
Jew, and those whose object is a settlement. But
on the Anti-Semitic side of that line that is, among
those whose determination is to suppress and elimi-
nate Jewish influence to the extreme of their power
there are now very many more than the original
enthusiasts who created the movement.
The Jews should further remember that to-day
every one outside their own community is potentially
an Anti-Semite. Not every one, perhaps not even
yet a majority, at least in the directing and wealthier
classes, is other than friendly or indifferent to the.
Jews, but there has grown up in every one not a Jew i
something of reaction against the Jewish power. It
requires but an accident to change this from the
latent and slight thing it is in most men to an angry
passion. I have noticed that among the most
violent of Anti-Semites are those who had passed
some considerable portion of their early manhood
in ignorance of the whole problem. These come
across a Jew unexpectedly in some relation hostile
156 THE JEWS
to them they lose money through some Jewish
financial operation, or they connect, for the first
time, in middle age, several misfortunes of theirs
with a common element of Jewish action, or they
find Jews mixed up in some attack on their
country : thenceforward they become and remain
unrepentant Anti-Semites.
The dupe, when he discovers he has been duped,
is dangerous, and there is even a considerable cate-
gory of those who have suffered nothing, even by
accident, at the hand of the Jew, yet who, when they
discover what the Jewish power is, feel they have
been played with, and grow angry at the trickery.
It has been and will be with Anti-Semitism as
with all movements. When they begin they are
ridiculed. As they grow they come to be feared
and boycotted ; but of those that are successful it
may be justly said that the moment of success
begins when they turn the corner and from a fad
become a fashion.
It is still (doubtfully) the fashion to separate one-
self from the Anti-Semitic movement. You still
hear men, when they write or speak upon the Jewish
problem, no matter with what hostility to the Jew,
excuse themselves as a rule at the beginning of their
remarks by saying, " I am no Anti-Semite." For
some flavour of the old ridicule still attaches to the
name. But fashions change rapidly and the new
fashion which comes in to support a growing thing,
when it does arrive, arrives in a flood.
We can all of us remember the time when the
talk of nationalization, the old State Socialist talk,
was the talk of a few faddists who were everywhere
ridiculed and despised. To-day it is the fashion ;
and the practice of State control, State support,
THE ANTI-SEMITE 157
the universality of State action, is such that it is
those who oppose it who are now the faddists and
the cranks.
We can all of us remember the day when, in the
United States, a prohibitionist was a faddist, and a
very unpopular faddist at that. We have seen
fashion catch him up with a vengeance.
We can all of us remember the day when the
supporters of women's suffrage in England were a
very small group of faddists indeed : we know what
has happened there !
The forces driving men towards the Anti-Semitic
camp are far stronger than the forces acting upon
these old hobbies of women's suffrage, of prohibition
and the rest. They are personal, intimate forces
arising from the strongest racial instincts and the
most bitter individual memories of financial loss,
subjection, national dishonour.
For instance, any German to-day to whom you
may talk of his great disaster will answer by telling
you that it is due to the Jews : that the Jews are
preying upon the fallen body of the State ; that the
Jews are " rats in the Reich." For one man that
blames the old military authorities for the misfor-
tunes following the war, twenty blame the Jews,
though these were the architects of the former Ger-
man prosperity, and among them were found a
larger proportion of opponents of the war than in
any other section of the Emperor's subjects. That
is but one example ; you will find it repeated in one
form or another in almost every other polity of the
modern world.
The Anti-Semite has become a strong political
figure. It is a great and dangerous error at this
moment to think his policy is futile. It is a policy
an
158 THE JEWS
of action, and a policy which may proceed from pi
to execution before we know it.
There used to be quoted years ago and I have
myself quoted it with approval a famous question
put by a close and reasonable observer of public
affairs upon the Continent, to the most prominent
of Continental Anti-Semites in that day. The
question was this : " If you had unlimited power in
this matter, what would you do ? " The implied
answer was that the Anti-Semite could do nothing.
He could not make a law which would segregate the
Jews for they could escape that law by mixing with
those around them. He could not make a law
exiling them ; for, first, it would be impossible to
define them ; secondly, even if that were possible,
those defined would not be received elsewhere.
What could he do ? The implication was, I say,
that he could do nothing ; he was supposed, in the
presence of that question, to admit his futility.
Unfortunately we now know that he can do some-
thing. The Anti- Semite can persecute, he can
attack. With a sufficient force behind him he can
destroy. In much of this destruction he would have,
in a present state of feeling and in most countries,
the mass of public opinion behind him. He could
begin with a widespread examination of Jewish
wealth and its origins and an equally widespread
confiscation. He could use the dread of such con-
fiscation as a weapon for compelling the divulgence
of Jewish origins where a man desired to conceal
them. He could do this not only in the case of the
wealthy men, but, through the terror of wealthy
men, over the whole field of the Jewish community.
He could introduce registration and with it a segre-
gation of the Jews. Inspired as he would be by no
THE ANTI-SEMITE 159
desire for a settlement agreeable to them, but
solely for a settlement agreeable to himself, he could
aim at that harsh settlement, and even though he
might not reach his goal, it is not pleasant to
envisage what he might do on his way to it.
But even though the Anti-Semite fail to acquire
full power, there remain attached to his great
increase in numbers and intensity of feeling the
prime questions, " What is the meaning of the
thing ? Why has it arisen ? Why is it spreading ?
What are the forces nourishing it ? "
These are the main questions which those who
regret the presence of such a passion in the body
politic, which those who are alarmed about it, which
those who, like the Jews themselves, must, if they
are to avoid a catastrophe, defend themselves against
it, would do well to answer. There has not been as
yet sufficient time to answer those questions fully
or to appreciate this great reaction in its entirety,
but we can already judge it in part. The Anti-
Semitic movement is essentially a reaction against
the abnormal growth in Jewish power, and the new
strength of Anti-Semitism is largely due to the Jews
themselves.
When this angry enthusiasm re- arose in its modern
form, first in Germany, then spreading to France,
next appearing, and now rapidly growing, in Eng-
land, it was novel and confined to small cliques. The
truths which it enunciated were then as unfamiliar
as the false values on which it also reposed. That
universal policy of the Jews against which it is part
of my thesis to argue, a policy natural but none the
less erroneous, the policy of secrecy, the policy of
hiding, at once took advantage of what was absurd
in the novelty of Anti-Semitism. The Jew, in spite
160 THE JEWS
of his age-long experience of menace and active
hostility, in spite of his knowledge of what this
sort of spirit had effected in the past, did not come
out into the open. He did not act against the new
attack with open indignation, still less with open
argument, as he should have done. He took
advantage of its absurdity, at its beginnings, in the
eyes of the general public. He used all his endea-
vours to make the word " Anti-Semitic " a label for
something hopelessly ridiculous, a subject for mere
laughter, a matter which no reasonable man should
for a moment consider seriously.
For something between a dozen and twenty years
this policy was successful. The method though less
and less firmly established as time went on, has not
yet quite failed. None the less that policy was
very ill-advised. It was used not only to ridicule
the Anti-Semite, but what was quite illegitimate,
quite irrational (and bound in the long run to be
fatal), it was used to prevent all discussion of the
Jewish question, though that question was increas-
ing every day in practical importance and clamour-
ing to be decided.
It was the instinctive policy with the mass of the
Jewish nation, a deliberate policy with most of its
leaders, not only to use ridicule against Anti-Semi-
tism but to label as " Anti-Semitic " any discussion
of the Jewish problem at all, or, for that matter, any
information even on the Jewish problem. It was
used to prevent, through ridicule, any statement of
any fact with regard to the Jewish race save a few
conventional compliments or a few conventional
and harmless jests.
If a man alluded to the presence of a Jewish
financial power in any region for instance, in India
THE ANTI-SEMITE
161
he was an Anti-Semite. If lie interested himself
in the peculiar character of Jewish philosophical
discussions, especially in matters concerning
religion, he was an Anti- Semite. If the emigrations
of the Jewish masses from country to country, the
vast modern invasion of the United States, for
instance (which has been organized and controlled
like an army on the march), interested him as an
historian, he could not speak of it under pain of
being called an Anti-Semite. If he exposed a
financial swindler who happened to be a Jew, he
was an Anti-Semite. If he exposed a group of Par-
liamentarians taking money from the Jews, he was
an Anti-Semite. If he did no more than call a Jew
a Jew, he was an Anti-Semite. The laughter which
the name used to provoke was most foolishly used
to support nothing nobler or more definitive than
this wretched policy of concealment. Anyone with
judgment could have told the Jews, had the Jews
cared to consult such an one, that their pusillani-
mous policy was bound to fail. It was but a
postponement of the evil day.
You cannot long confuse interest with hatred,
the statement of plain and important truths with
mania, the discussion of fundamental questions with
silly enthusiasm, for the same reason that you can-
not long confuse truth with falsehood. Sooner or
later people are bound to remark that the defendant
seems curiously anxious to avoid all investigation
of his case. The moment that is generally observed,
the defence is on the way to failure.
I say it was a fatal policy ; but it was deliberately
undertaken by the Jews and they are now suffering
from its results. As a consequence you have all
over Europe a mass of plain men who so far from
162 THE JEWS
being scared off from discussing the Jewish problem
by this false ridicule are more determined than ever
to thrash it out in the open and to get it settled upon
rational and final lines.
That would perhaps be no great harm in itself.
It would merely mean that a false policy had failed,
and that proper frank and loyal discussion would
succeed all this hushing up and boycott. Unfortu-
nately the false policy had other and much worse
consequences. It exasperated men who had already
begun to interest themselves in the political dis-
cussion and who would not tolerate undeserved
ridicule. It heaped up a world of determined oppo-
sition to the Jews. It is not exactly that the Anti-
Semite has already won or even is as yet certainly
on his way to winning, but he now has his chance
of winning. Whereas, some few years ago, he had
the tide against him, he is now, through the fault
of the Jews themselves, at its turn. He now
finds himself on an extreme wing, it is true, but
attached to a very large body which is already
strongly biassed against the Jews, dislikes their
presence among us, and is determined to act against
them, not only where they still have great power,
but also where that power is visibly declining, and
even where they are in danger.
It must not be forgotten, as we survey this grow-
ing menace, that a policy which reaches no finality
is not on that account futile. It must not be for-
gotten that in the minds of many men (one might
say in the minds of most men) during periods of
excitement, a policy of repression, though always
failing to reach finality, may still be continuous:
it may become a habit and may endure indefinitely
in the vast suffering of its victims. The Jews have
THE ANTI-SEMITE 163
seen that happen in many a small nationality other
than their own. They have seen, no doubt, that
continued repression acting in an atmosphere of
equally continuous rebellion has usually in the long
run failed, but they must admit that the mainte-
nance of such repression, with all its accompaniments
of moral and physical torture, confiscation, exile
and all the rest, has often been a policy long drawn
out. It has been drawn out in some cases for
centuries. It is not true that, because a policy does
not aim at a complete settlement, therefore it can-
not be undertaken and vigorously pursued. It can.
Time and again a hostile force has attempted to
eliminate opposition, or even contrast, and to elimin-
ate it by every instrument, including massacre itself.
Sometimes, very rarely, it has succeeded. Usually
it has, in the long run, failed. But in the great
majority of cases it has at any rate continued long
after its failure was apparent. That is the danger
which menaces from the phenomenon I have
examined in this chapter. It would be madness in
the Jews to neglect that phenomenon. It is now so
strong in numbers, intensity of conviction, and
passion that it menaces their whole immediate
future in our civilization. Its ultimate causes we
have explored. Its immediate cause, the cause of its
sudden development and present startling growth,
we have seen to be the Jewish action in Russia, and
to this, which I have already touched upon in my
third chapter, where I sketched the sequence of
events leading up to the present situation, I will
next turn, in order to make a more detailed examina-
tion of it. For undoubtedly it is the sudden appear-
ance of Jewish Bolshevism that has brought things
, to their present crisis.
BOLSHEVISM
//A
W
CHAPTER VIII
BOLSHEVISM
THE Bolshevist explosion, which will appear in
history I think as the point of departure from
which shall date the new attitude of the Western
nations towards the Jews, is not only a field in
which we can study the evil effect of secrecy,
but one in which we can analyse all the various
forces which tend to bring Israel into such cease-
less conflict with the society around it.
It merits, therefore, a very special examination,
both as an opportunity for the study of our sub-
ject and as a turning-point of the first moment in
history.
Why did a Jewish organization thus attempt
to transform society ? Why did it use the methods
which we know it used ? Why was that particular
venue chosen ? What aim had the actors in
view ? What measure of success did they hope
to achieve ? By what method do they propose
to extend their influence ? When we can answer
those questions we shall have gone far to discovering
the almost fatal causes of conflict between this
peculiar nation and those among whom they move.
The answers usually given to these questions
by the avowed enemies of the Jewish race are
always inadequate and often false. When they
167
168 THE JEWS
contain an element of truth (which they often do)
that truth is quite insufficient to account for the full
phenomena. But the accretions of falsehood and
exaggeration render the whole thing inexplicable -
indeed, these explanations of the Kussian revolu-
tion are very good specimens of the way in which
the European so misunderstands the Jew that he
imputes to him powers which neither he nor any
other poor mortal can ever exercise.
Thus we are asked to believe that this political
upheaval was part of one highly- organized plot
centuries old, the agents of which were millions
of human beings all pledged to the destruction
of our society and acting in complete discipline
under a few leaders superhumanly wise ! The thing
is nonsense on the face of it. Men have no capacity
for acting in this fashion. They are far too limited,
far too diverse.
Moreover, the motive is completely lacking.
Why merely destroy and why, if your object is
merely to destroy, manifest such wide differences
in your aims ? One may say justly that there
is always a tendency to reaction against alien
surroundings, and in so far as that reaction is
intense and effective it is destructive of those
surroundings. One may point out that such
reaction in the case of the Jews, as in the case of
all other alien bodies, is in the main unconscious
and instinctive. All that is true enough ; but the
conception of a vast age-long plot, culminating
in the contemporary Russian affair, will not hold
water, any more than will the corresponding halluci-
nation which led men to believe that the French
revolution (a thing utterly different in kind from
the Russian) was the mere outward expression
BOLSHEVISM
of a strictly disciplined secret body. In the case
of the French Revolution everything was put down
(by the forerunners of to-day's Anti-Semitic
enthusiasts) to the secret agency of The Order of
Templars acting unweariedly through six centuries,
and finally bringing down the French monarchy.
In the case, of course, of the Bolshevist anarchy
a still longer range is given to the final result:
for "Templars" read " Jews," and for "600"
read " 2,000 " years. It is all smoke.
More serious is the statement that this combina-
tion of Jews for the destruction of the old Russian
society was an act of racial revenge. There is a
great element of truth in that. There is no doubt
that the greater part of the Jews who took over
power in the Russian cities four years ago felt an
appetite for revenge against the old Russian State
comparable to that felt by any oppressed people
against their oppressors. Probably it was more
intense even than any other example that could
be quoted. We are all witnesses to the way in
which the Russian people, religion, and govern-
ment, and particularly the person and office of
the Emperor were attacked and decried by the
Jews in Western Europe, of the way in which the
Jews ceaselessly conspired against the Russian
State, and of the brutal repression to which they
were subject. When you release a force of hatred
so violent it may run to any length. That sudden
release, that sudden opportunity for satisfying
the thirst for vengeance, must explain a very large
part of what followed. But even that does not
account for the whole. It would account for mere
massacre and mere chaos. It would not account
for the attempts rather pitiful attempts at
170 THE JEWS
construction and for the obviously designed system
of direction which has continued on the same lines
since the Jews first assumed power and is still
fully manifest after nearly five years of that power.
Still less is it sufficient to say that the Jew is
everywhere the organizer and leader of revolution
and that we only see him at work in Russia with
greater vigour and thoroughness because the oppor-
tunity is there greater.
The Jew is not everywhere a revolutionary. He
is everywhere discontented with a society alien to
him : that is natural and inevitable. But he does
not exercise his power invariably, or even ordinarily,
towards the oversetting of an established social
order by which, incidentally, he often largely
benefits.
You do not find the Jew in history perpetually
leading the innumerable revolts which citizens in
the mass make against the privileged or the superior
conditions of the minority. He has sometimes
benefited by these movements in the past ; more
often suffered. We often find individual Jews
sympathizing with the revolutionary side, but
we also find many individual Jews sympathizing
with the other. The Jew is not, in the history
of Europe, the prime agent of revolution : quite
the contrary. The great acts of violence,
successful and unsuccessful, which have marked
our society from the agrarian troubles of pagan
Rome to the French Revolution, the land war
in Ireland, the Chartist Movement in London,
or whatever modern movement you will, have
appealed much more to the fighting instincts and
political traditions of our race than they have to
the Jews. They are marked everywhere by an
BOLSHEVISM
171
attitude towards property and patriotism which
are the very opposite of the Jews' characteristics.
The Revolutions of the past were for the better
distribution of property and for the betterment
of the State. Often they were openly undertaken
because patriotism had been offended by defeat
in war and because the Nation was thought to
be betrayed. Usually they were jingo and always
for distribution of wealth.
It is the unique mark of the Russian revolution
and of its attempted extension elsewhere that it
repudiates patriotism and the division of property.
In that, it differs from all others ; and it is markedly,
obviously, Jewish. But why had the Jews a
chance of action in Russia which they lacked else-
where ?
What were the special characters in the Russian
opportunity which made the Jew the creator of the
whole movement ?
There are, I take it, three main factors present
in this case peculiarly suitable to the Jewish effort.
In the first place, this revolution fell upon, and was
directed towards, a particular social phenomenon
in which that profound instinct in the European,
the desire for settled property, had decayed. It fell
upon the state of affairs called Industrial Capitalism,
the chief mark of which is the destruction in the
mass subjected to it (or, at any rate, the atrophying)
of that essential part of the European soul owner-
ship. The Jew is, undoubtedly, unable to sym-
pathize with us in that central core of our civic
instincts. He has never understood the European
sense of property and I doubt if he ever will.
But in Russia Industrial Capitalism was quite
new. The resentment against it was keen. The
172 THE JEWS
victims were the sons of peasants, or had them-
selves been born peasants, so that this proletarian
mass in the Russian towns, though less than a
tenth of the whole nation, was peculiarly open to
propaganda against its masters. And an attack
successfully conducted, on that weakest point of
modern Capitalism, might easily succeed and then
spread to neighbouring industrialized centres in
Poland, Germany, and so westward.
Now the attack on this inter national phenomenon,
an attack directed against Industrial Capitalism,
required an international force. It needed men
who had international experience and were ready
with an international formula.
There are two, and only two, organized inter-
national forces in Europe to-day with a soul and
identity in them. One is the Catholic Church,
and the other is Jewry. But the Catholic Church,
for reasons which I will discuss in a moment,
cannot and never will directly attack industrial
capitalism. It will undoubtedly attack that system
in flank and indirectly destroy it in the long run
wherever the Faith has a strong hold upon masses
of people. But it will not and cannot directly
attack it. The Jew, on the other hand, is free to
attack it precisely because our sense of property
means nothing to him, is to him something strange,
and even, I think, comic. Further, the Jew was
present, he was on the spot. The Church was not.
Of the two international forces present, therefore,
the Jews alone could act.
Here I must digress and say why the other great
international force, the Catholic Church, has not
been able and will never be able to attack Indus-
trial Capitalism as a whole and directly, though,
BOLSHEVISM
173
as I have said, it acts indirectly as a solvent of
this evil andx will destroy it wherever society
remains Catholic. The Catholic Church, not only
in its abstract doctrine, but acting as the expres-
sion of our European civilization, is profoundly
attached to the conception of private property.
It makes the family the unit of the State and it
perceives that the freedom of the family is most
secure where the family owns. It perceives, as
do all Europeans, instinctively or explicitly, that
property is the correlative of freedom, or, at any
rate, of that only kind of freedom which we
Europeans care to have : that it is the safeguard
of spiritual health (the mark of which is humour),
of breadth and diversity in action, of elasticity in
the State, of permanence in institutions. Pro-
perty, as widely distributed as possible, but sacred
as a principle, is an inevitable social accompaniment
of Catholicism.
Apart from this, it is also a definite feature of
Catholic doctrine to deny that private property
is immoral. No Catholic can say that private
property is immoral without cutting himself off
from the Communion of the Church, any more
than he can say that the authority in the State
is immoral. He cannot be a communist in abstract
morals any more than he can be an anarchist.
Now Industrial Capitalism is a disease of pro-
perty. It is the monstrous state of affairs in which
a very few men derive their vast advantage from
the corresponding fact that most men whom they
exploit do not own.
But it remains true that the sheet-anchor of
Capitalism is a sense of ownership in the mass as
well as in the privileged few. The only moral
174 THE JEWS
force remaining to Industrial Capitalism, the only
spiritual tie which prevents its dissolution, is this
admission by the European mind that property is
a right even property in a diseased and exaggerated
form.
The whole of the operations of Industrial Capital-
ism rely upon the sanctity of property and the
sanctity of contract which develops from the
sanctity of property. And whenever society loses
this sense, industrial capitalism will fall into chaos.
The Church cannot deny that one moral principle.
Its action will always be towards the dissolution
of the great accumulations promoted by capitalism.
It always will work indirectly for the establish-
ment of well-divided property, an ideal defined
by the voice of its great modern Pope, Leo XIII,
who explicitly states it in his Rerum Novarum.
But the Church can never take the short cut of
destroying Industrial Capitalism root and branch
and at once, by erecting against it the doctrine of
Communism or (as many people call diluted Com-
munism) " Socialism." It never can do so in
theory, and still less will it ever do so in practice.
A Catholic society will always tend to be a society
of owners: with all the elements of co-operation,
with the Guild, with masses of corporate property
attached to the State or connected with the city,
with the college, with the corporation. For without
such corporate property in a State, property is
never well founded.
The Jew has neither that political instinct in
his national tradition nor a religious doctrine
supporting and expressing such an instinct. The
same thing in him which makes him a speculator
and a nomad blinds him to, and makes him
BOLSHEVISM 175
actually contemptuous of, the European sense of
property. When therefore we have reached, through
Industrial Capitalism, or any other social disease,
a state of affairs in which the practical denial of
property is possible because the mass of men have
lost the desire for it, and when the repudiation of
property offers an immediate solution for intolerable
evils, then the Jew can appear at once as a leader.
One must find in such a movement an inter-
national leader because the disease is international,
and still more because the proposed cure of that
disease, through Communism, must be international
if it is to succeed. A Communist society may
stand apart from the general society of owners in
other countries, but if it is to succeed in competition
with them it must convert them to its own creed.
The Jew took international action for granted.
He took the narrow and false economic view of
property that it was a mere institution to be
modified indefinitely, and, if necessary, abolished.
He had an obvious opportunity for leadership
accorded to him when international action against
property was demanded. Again, our national
sense, patriotism, which is incomprehensible to
the Jew save on the false analogy of his own
peculiar nomadic and tribal patriotism, is a check
upon Comnnnism, and, indeed, against revolution
of any kind. The process of thought in the
patriotic citizen largely unconscious but none the
less efficacious is somewhat as follows:
" I cannot function save as a citizen of my /
nation, and, what is more, that nation made me
what I am. It is my creator in a sense and so
has authority over me. I must even give up my
life in its defence if necessary, because but for its
176 THE JEWS
existence I and those like me could not be. My
happiness, my freedom of individual action, my
self-expression are all bound up with the existence
of the civic unit of which I am a part. If something
which appears to me good in the abstract, or which
apparently will procure for me a material good,
involves danger to that civic unit, I must forego
the good, regarding the continued existence and
strength of my people as a greater good to which
the lesser should be sacrificed."
That, I say roughly, is the expression of the
patriotic instinct in the European man. That
is what he has felt for many and many a great
State in the past and for every polity to which he
has ever belonged; that is what he feels to-day
for his country.
The Jew has the same feeling, of course, for his
Israel, but since that nation is not a collection of
human beings, inhabiting one place and living
by traditions rooted in its soil, since it has not a
strong, visible, external form, his patriotism is
necessarily of a different complexion. It has
different connotations and our patriotism seems
negligible to him.
The implied fallacies current in the modern
industrial revolutionary formulae, in such phrases
as " What does it matter to the working man
whether he is exploited by a German or an English
master ? " or, again, " Why should the individual
Tom Smith be sacrificed for an abstraction called
England?" or again, "Nationalism is the great
obstacle to the full development of humanity"
all that sort of thing, which we feel by instinct and
can, if it is necessary, prove by reason to be non-
sense in our case, sounds, in Jewish ears, as very
BOLSHEVISM 177
good sense indeed. For in his case these things
involve no fallacies at all; they apply to him
vividly and exactly. Why should the Jew be
sacrificed for England ? In what way is England,
or France, or Ireland, or any other nation necessary
to him ? Again, is it not obvious in his eyes that
these terms, " France, Ireland, England, Russia,"
are but abstractions ? The real thing in his eyes
when he thinks of us, is the individual and his certain
needs, especially his physical and material needs;
because upon these there can be no doubt; upon
these all are agreed ; these are visible and tangible.
"England," "France," "Poland" are whimsies.
It is true that if you were to put his special case
to the Jew with similar force and say, " No Jew
should run any risk for Israel," " no Jew should
suffer any inconvenience by trying to help a fellow
Jew in distress," " the idea of Israel is a vague
abstraction all that counts is the individual Jew
and especially his physical requirements" ; if you
said that sort of thing you would be offending
the most profound instincts of Jewish patriotism and
you would, in fact, clash with the overt and covert
action of the Jews throughout the world. But
the Jew would answer that, as his was an inter-
national polity, the argument applying to our
national polity did not apply to him; that his
feelings, though analogous to ours, were of a different
kind, and that, at any rate, he cannot sacrifice a
fine idea of his like Communism for our provincial
and local habit, called by us Europeans " the love
of our country."
There is more than this in the business.
Even those truths which we know to be truths
have little effect upon us, unless they enter into
N
178 THE JEWS
the practice of our lives. There are, no doubt, a
number of Jews who would admit at once the
truth of any nationalist statement made by a
European. When a Frenchman, or an Englishman,
or a Russian says to him, " My first duty is to my
people; I must keep them strong as well as in
being and I must sacrifice my interests to theirs
when it is necessary," there are many Jews who
would answer: " You are quite right. The theory
is sound. Man can only function as a part of a
particular society," and so forth ; but it is one thing
to recognize a truth and another thing to experience
it in one's bones, as it were, and these truths,
even where he is admitting them, are truths
indifferent to the Jew.
Therefore when, as in the particular case of
Russia, a national feeling stood in the way of an
abstract ideal, it seemed the most natural thing
in the world to the Jew that the national obstacle
should go to the wall in order that his ideal of
Communism might triumph.
There lay behind this great change in the Russian
towns, and the capture of what remains of Russian
government by the Jewish Committees, a force
most positive. It was the sense of social justice,
the indignation against indefensible evils.
That sense of social justice, that indignation
against indefensible modern evils, we all feel.
There may be men among the wealthier classes
of Western Europe who are so ignorant of the past,
or so stupid, that they do honestly believe Industrial
Capitalism to be an inevitable and even perhaps
a good thing. But such men must be very rare.
Not only must they be rare, but they cannot have
any wide social experience. A man has only got
BOLSHEVISM
179
to live the life of tlie poor in the great industrial
cities for a day to see the enormity of the wrong
that has to be righted. There are, of course, not
a few but many thousands of individuals who try
to find arguments for Industrial Capitalism, either
because they benefit themselves through the system
and are the richer by it, or because they are the
hired servants of those who so benefit> and of
this kind are the writers in the capitalist press.
But all these, who are hired advocates, or advocates
with a direct proprietary interest in the continuance
of the modern disease, may be neglected ; for they
are not in good faith. They are not really arguing
that the thing is good in itself, they are only trying
to find arguments as lawyers do for something
which they have to defend and which in their
hearts they admit is evil ; or to the evil of which
they are indifferent so long as it gives them a
disproportionate share of material enjoyment.
We must add to these the sincere man who will
admit the domination of Industrial Capitalism
because he honestly believes that, bad as it is, it
is now become inevitable and that to tamper with
it would bring the whole State into anarchy.
" Such as it is," he would say, " the structure of
our society now depends upon it. We may palliate
its evils, we may try very gradually to transform
its worst features. But in its essence it must remain
as it is, or our last state will be worse than our
first."
Of this kind are those who argue that any social
experiment antagonistic to Industrial Capitalism,
if pushed sufficiently far, would result in famine
and chaos and even physical evils far worse than
the physical evils which the mass of men have to
180 THE JEWS
suffer in the great towns which capitalism has
produced.
Apart from these categories, the masses of men, I
say, to-day are convinced that Industrial Capi-
talism is an evil, an evil of the grossest sort;
an evil of a sort unknown to the greater part of
human history and unknown to-day in the greater
part of the human race ; an evil which those peas-
ant societies, or societies of well- divided property
throughout Europe, are happy to have escaped;
and an evil from which we, who are caught in it,
are trying to escape as best we may.
In that modifying phrase " as best we may " lies
the crux, for the great mass of Europeans feel
that any attack on Industrial Capitalism which
denies the nation its supreme place, or which
impedes the superior task of keeping the nation
strong and wealthy, is barred; they also feel
instinctively that any attack which denies the
general right of private property and the value of
that institution to the healthy conduct of our
affairs is also barred. The great mass of our race,
when faced by the problem of Industrial Capitalism,
feel that it has to be solved in some way that will
neither destroy property nor the nation through
which the individual alone can function.
But this, which is true of the great mass of our
race, is not true of the Jews. Therefore they were
able, in the case of the Kussian Kevolution, to go
straight for their object, and that object was (apart
from the obvious object of revenge, of love of power,
and the rest) the destruction of an economic
inequality.
These Jews who have destroyed what we knew
as Russia were undoubtedly possessed of a political
BOLSHEVISM 181
ideal : the ideal of Communism. No doubt many
individuals among them (all ultimately) would
prefer the good of Israel to the good of any Russian.
No doubt the wreaking of vengeance upon former
oppressors was strong, as also the appetite for
destroying a general and a national sentiment
alien to them and even repulsive to them; but
there remains, as a positive motive behind the
whole affair, the ideal of Communism. The Jews
alone of the forces present were capable of heartily
entertaining that ideal, and were free of all obstacles
against the achievement of it the obstacle of
patriotism, the obstacle of religion, the obstacle
of the sense of property.
These considerations, I take it, are what explains
the Jewish character of the upheaval in the East,
with its destruction of the Russian nation, its
enormous experiments in social economy, its inevit-
able impoverishment of the State as a whole, its
enthusiastic support by the minority which accepts
its doctrine.
Those very few men and women who have been
witnesses of the Jewish experiment in Russia
(excluding those engaged in propaganda upon one
side or the other) give us a picture which is much I
what we should have expected of the situation.
It seems that the great mass of the nation has
affirmed the instinct of private property with the
greatest vigour, and that some nine- tenths of the
Russians have settled down upon the land to which
they always claimed ownership and in which their
sense of ownership is more fierce than ever. In the
towns the unnatural system unnatural because
it opposes all our instincts as Europeans works
more and more slackly as the original system of
182 THE JEWS
terror weakens. For it is clear that Communism
needs a despot, and the active rule of a despot is
necessarily short: it is a system incapable of
transition and therefore of duration.
The perfectly explicable but deplorable exercise
of vengeance by the Jews has been directed against
what we euphemistically term the governing
directing classes, who have been massacred whole-
sale and whose remnants are subjected to perpetual
persecution.
The productivity of the industrial masses has
naturally sunk to a very low level, because under
Communism it can only work through something
like military discipline, and work done under
those conditions is on a much lower productive
level than free work.
But the real interest in the Jewish revolution in
Russia, to which is now permanently affixed the
name of Bolshevist (which is nothing more than
the Russian for "whole-hogger"), Lies in these
two points: first, the continued propaganda of
Communism throughout the world (which propa-
ganda in organization and direction is in the hands
of Jewish agents) ; secondly, and much more impor-
tant, the effect of the Jewish revolution in producing
hostility to the Jews throughout the world.
I say this second fact is much more important
because it is the more real and the more enduring.
You will never make a Communist of the highly-
civilized, tenacious, intelligent and humorous Occi-
dental European. You will no more make a Com-
munist of him than you will make him walk on all
fours or permanently abjure the use of good liquor.
You may get middle-class faddists to accept Com-
munism as a mere creed, and of course you can easily
BOLSHEVISM 183
get exasperated men, ground down by capitalism,
to accept any theory, any system, which promises
them relief. But you will not get Communism
working in men who boast the old European blood,
in the descendants of those who created our past
and its monuments. They will certainly preserve
their traditions and their character. Though the
peril must be combated, and is being successfully
combated everywhere, it is not a peril of great
magnitude to the West.
The other effect of the Jewish revolution in
Russia the peril into which it has put the Jews
themselves is permanent and is of the first magni-
tude. I know no way to meet it except to explain
why that revolution was almost necessarily a Jewish
revolution, to emphasize the sincerity of the Jews
who have led it, to exculpate them as far as possible,
and, at any rate, to shield their unfortunate com-
patriots abroad from the consequences of what
was certainly a very bad piece of tactics so far as
the future of this people was concerned.
We ought, I think, not to nourish a new and
special hostility against the Jew on account of
what he has done in Russia, but, on the contrary,
to excuse him, especially because he is a Jew.
We ought, as it seems to me, to say: " He had
reasons for action and excuse for action which men
of our race would not have had, and though we
must prevent that action from spreading, we must
not allow what seemed quite natural under the
circumstances to the Jew to warp our attempted
solution of the Jewish problem. We ought to
work for its solution as impartially and as soberly as
though the provocation of Bolshevism had never
been given,"
184 THE JEWS
That sounds an extreme thing to say, and I fear
it will be ridiculed by most of those who (as they
tell us) have had their eyes opened by the Bolshevist
explosion and who are now confirmed enemies of
the Jewish people. But though it sound fantastic,
I am convinced that it is a right attitude. To
lose one's judgment on a permanent problem
through panic or heat, to forget the elements of
such a problem merely because it has been presented
to us suddenly in an acute form, is the negation
of reason. As well might a man who is dealing
with the problem of fermented liquor, and trying
to get people to use it rationally, let his judgment
be overcome by a case of delirium tremens and rush
thereupon into some scheme of prohibition. The
very test which distinguishes good statesmanship
from bad is the power to keep one's head under
provocations like these; to maintain a midcHe
course and to aim at whatever solution our reason
tells us to be just under normal circumstances.
We who saw the gravity of the Jewish problem
long before the recognition of it was general, and
who studied it under calmer conditions for many
years, have a right to be heard now: now that the
tide is making against these people and that the
fear of anarchy threatens to turn men's heads.
We were long blamed for attacking the Jews,
we are already blamed for defending them. It
is a proof that our attitude is well grounded and
unaffected by fashion.
The Bolshevist revolution will not last. Its
Jewish character was inevitable. It had a side to it
of Jewish enthusiasm for a sort of incorporeal
justice, and, in any case, it ought not to be allowed
to deflect us from a conclusion which the much
BOLSHEVISM 185
larger lines of history and all general considerations
of reason impose.
Our conclusion, as I have said, is a recognition
and protection of the Jewish nation as something
quite different from ourselves and yet necessarily
inhabiting our society. Such a full recognition
leaves us fore- armed against the tendency in the
Jew (which we cannot avoid) to forget our national
feelings and to misconceive our sense of ownership.
It would render impossible the conspiracies and
the vengeance which have destroyed Eussia, and
I believe that had the former Eussian Government
treated the Jews as I say they should be treated,
it would be in power to-day.
THE POSITION IN THE WORLD
AS A WHOLE
CHAPTER IX
THE POSITION IN THE WORLD AS A
WHOLE
THE danger of the Jewish nation in the world
to-day may be summed up in this phrase:
" The Jews are obtaining control and we will
not be controlled by them."
That is the simplest formula, and the one which
would be immediately subscribed to by the whole
mass of those outside the Jewish community who
are alive to the question at all. Being the simplest
form of the truth, it needs, when applied to a highly
complex situation, detailed modification.
This modification proceeds from three sources :
First, the extent of the Jewish control and the
extent of the resentment against that control vary
very largely from one community to another.
Secondly, the civic tradition of each community
in its treatment of the Jewish question also differs
from that of every other, though these various
traditions fall into certain fairly well-defined groups.
Thirdly, the position is modified according to
the presence, in varying degrees of strength in
different communities, of certain international
forces even more powerful than the Jews themselves.
The four principal of the international forces are :
189
190 THE JEWS
(1) The Catholic Church;
(2) Islam;
( 3) The forces of international Capitalism ; and
(4) The international reaction against it of the
industrial proletariat.
We must in the first line of this inquiry make an
important premise. The fact from which we
proceed, namely, the uneasy feeling that the Jews
are getting control and the determination not to
tolerate that control, will be denied by the Jews
themselves. It is denied sincerely I have entered
upon too many discussions with them and heard
too many of their protestations to doubt that;
and if the denial were valid, not only the particular
survey I propose in this chapter, but the whole
of the argument of this book, would fail. For if
there is a Jewish question to-day, and if it is present
in the acute form in which we all know it to be
present, it is not due merely to the contrast and
friction between the Jews and their hosts, but
especially to this feeling of domination.
But the Jewish belief in this matter is not valid,
sincerely as it is held. To the great majority of
Jews it will, of course, seem common-sense. What
has the unfortunate poor Jew in the slums of our
great cities to do with controlling the modern
world ? How in his eyes can the phrase have any
meaning at all? If you pass from him to the
comparatively small Jewish middle class, you would
hear a denial almost equally vigorous. The Jewish
scientist will tell you that he is concerned with his
researches and laughs at the idea of interfering
with his neighbours; the Jewish historian that
he is concerned with his documents, that nothing
is further from his thoughts than interfering with
POSITION IN WORLD AS A WHOLE 191
people outside his trade; the little Jewish shop-
keeper will tell you that he is in active competition
with his non- Jewish neighbours and by no means
always successful in that competition ; the Jewish
lawyer will tell you that he is concerned with the
system of law in which he happens to be immersed
the Napoleonic Code, the English Common Law
or what not and that any idea of his personally
wanting to control the vast non- Jewish majority
among whom he lives is moonshine : and so it is.
The great Jewish banker, though he is fully
aware of his power, would tell you that in his
daily business he comes up against forces to which
he is subject, and has competitors who are at the
best neutral, and more commonly hostile, to Israel;
and even the man who is to-day more powerful
if that be possible than the Jewish banker, I
mean the Jewish monopolist, and especially the
Jewish monopolist in metal, though he would be
extremely annoyed to have the extent of his control
exposed, will feel that it is due to his superior
abilities and in no way designed for mastery.
All these individual replies are true ; but if you
make of them a composite and general reply, if you
put it as a reply of all Israel to all the world outside,
crying, " I have no desire for supremacy; I never
act in such a fashion that my domination can be
felt or shall increase; the motive is not present,
even subconsciously, among my people " then that
general reply would be false.
| In point of fact the Jew has collectively a power
i to-day, in the white world, altogether excessive.
It is not only an excessive power, it is inevitably
a corporate power and, therefore, a semi- organized
power. It is not only excessive and in the main
192 THE JEWS
organized, it was, until the recent reaction began,
a rapidly increasing power and most people
believe it to be still increasing. To that the whole
world outside the Jewish community will testify.
The criterion by which we may judge whether
any form of power is irritant to those whom it
affects is not the testimony of those who exercise
the power, but the testimony of those over whom
it is exercised. There never was a tyranny in the
world, not even one of those personal tyrannies
(which have been so much more highly organized
and so much more direct than this power of the
Jews) , there never has been a despotism in history,
which would not tell you that it was accidental, or
necessary, or, in any case, innocent of any motive of
oppression. And history universally replies : "To
judge that, you must ask those who felt the pressure ;
not those who exercised it."
Now those who feel the pressure in the matter
we are now examining are unanimous. They differ
in the degree of their resentment from those to
whom the thing is so intolerable that they are
already in active revolt against it, to those who
feel it merely as a distant though an approaching
discomfort. But everybody feels it in some degree.
It is a universal sensation running throughout the
nerves of the modern world and it is growing too
fast in degree and extent to be ignored.
I have already quoted the effect upon those
hundreds of educated men taken into the temporary
Civil service during the late war, when they found,
holding the locked gate of one monopoly after
another, the international Jew. His control of
finance needs no discussion. If the individual
banker or financier is not aware of it, the most of
POSITION IN WORLD AS A WHOLE 193
those who are affected are acutely aware of it.
Men exaggerate in giving it a sort of conscious
personality, but they certainly do not exaggerate
when they point to its effects. The Jew must
remember, what it may be difficult for him to accept
and what is certainly true, that not only is his domi-
nation very bitterly resented but that his presence
in any position of control whatsoever is odious to
the race among which he moves. Everybody feels
that about any form of alien control, much more
do they feel it about that form which they instinc-
tively know to be most alien of all. Every one
has noticed this control exercised in the form of
keeping silence upon what it was to the disadvan-
tage of Israel to have known ; in the form of the
advertising of what it was to the advantage of Israel
to have advertised ; in the form of the giving and
withholding of credit; in the form of attack in
the Press against nations with whom Israel had a
quarrel and the defence in the Press of those (they
have now almost disappeared) upon whom Israel,
in the immediate past, relied for defence. And
everybody has discovered what is not unjust,
indeed, what is inevitable, but what is none the
less a source of exasperation the solidarity of the
Jewish race where the interests of any member of
it were concerned. 1
But if the thing were felt everywhere as acutely
and as consciously as it is felt in special groups
to-day as it is felt, for instance, in one particular
section of English opinion already represented in the
1 Except, of course, an outlawed member. The case of
Dr. Levy turned out of this country by his compatriots in
the Government for having written unfavourably of the Moscow
Jews will be fresh in every one's memory.
O
194 THE JEWS
Press, is felt in a wider section of French opinion
and in a still wider section of Polish opinion then
the matter would be simple. We could then say
that an issue of the clearest kind had arisen, and
forbid a small alien minority to decide the destinies
of those among whom it lives and of whom it is
not. The answer would be obvious, and the only
difficulty would be how the Jewish control might
be lessened without grievous injustice to innocent
individuals.
But the thing is not so felt. It is modified, as
I have said, by the varying degrees of intensity
in which it is recognized and by the other inter-
national forces which come into play.
If we consider the varying political traditions
and the varying international forces, if we examine
the world's national groups, we shall find something
like this: In the vast body of Russia a position
most paradoxical. For years the Jew was every-
where openly attacked and hated in those parts
of the Russian Empire where he was allowed to
live in large numbers. These were nowhere within
Russia proper but upon the western outskirts of
that empire, within what was once the old Polish
kingdom and largely within what is now the restored
Republic of Poland. But the Russian traditional
antagonism to the Jew changed in a few weeks of
chaos to something not opposite but novel and
different. The Russian allowed a prodigious revolu-
tion to be made by the Jews, he accepted the loot
of that revolution which the Jew secured to him ;
he has submitted wholly in the towns, partly in
the country, to a tyranny exercised by Jews ever
since that complete reversal of his national history,
now four years old.
POSITION IN WORLD AS A WHOLE 195
The external political power of what was once
the Russian Empire has disappeared. The Jews
have killed it. But the great mass of Russian
humanity remains strongly affected by this curious
change. Where popular instinct works untram-
melled the old and violent passionate antagonism
between the Russian and the Jew survives. You
see it in the hotch potch of .the Ukraine, the
inhabitants of which, in spite of all theories, are of
Russian race and tradition, and the central town
of which is the sacred region of Russia as a member
of Christendom. There, for all the Jewish Com-
mittees with large towns under their complete
control, there have been repeated revolts. But
in the greater part of European Russia at least,
and in much of what was once the Asiatic Empire,
the Jews hold what is left of the Executive
government.
So far as we can judge from the very imperfect
accounts which reach us (for nowhere is the weapon
of secrecy more ruthlessly used), the mass of the
Russians, that is, the peasantry, are in two minds.
To the action of the Jewish despotism in the town
they are indifferent, but to his early attempts
against themselves they were bitterly opposed.
They have suffered at his hands and they thought
him a tyrant. But the Jew seems to have dropped
this interference and the Russian soil to have settled
down as a peasant proprietary. On the other
hand, it was a revolution guided by those same
Jewish Committees which secured the peasant in
the possession of his land. The Russian peasant
has always regarded the land as his own. He
had, I understand, regarded that odd, pedantic
measure, " The Liberation of the Serfs," as only
196 THE JEWS
another name for the robbing him of his land;
and when the organization of Kussian society dis-
solved in the strain of war, he poured over the great
estates and took back what he thought was his
own.
For the strange Jewish conception of Commun-
ism, a million miles removed from our European
racial instincts and our high civilized traditions, the
Russian peasant could have nothing but a bewil-
dered contempt. None the less he was conscious
that the Jewish revolution had permitted him, if
not to take the land (he did that himself), at least
to hold it ; and the revolution is indistinguishable
from the Jewish control of the towns.
Within the towns, again (our information is
most imperfect and I can only piece together what
eye-witnesses have told me), although the Jew is,
of course, individually hated, yet his control does
stand for certain things which the mass of the
people still support. He organized the resentment
of the poor against the rich. He erected before
their eyes the pleasing spectacle of a social revenge.
He carried out, fairly consistently, his Communist
programme, one aspect at least of which is practical
enough; for the man that works with his hands
finds that he is as well, or better, fed out of the
meagre common stock, than those who were once
his masters.
In general I think it true to say that the Jewish
control over Christians, if, in a way, stronger in
what was once the Russian Empire than anywhere
else, is also there least resented. I do not say
it would not be resented if it were to excite action
again against the peasants, but we cannot forget
that the peasants were eager to fight for the new
POSITION IN WORLD AS A WHOLE 197
Russian regime because they identified it with
their new property in land. The situation is absurd
enough. Men in hundreds of thousands willing to
fight for Communist masters because by so doing
they believe they can secure themselves in an
absolute form of property ! But that is what the
" red" army was.
In that belt of nations, vague in boundary,
which used to constitute the Marches of the East
and which now stand between what was once the
Russian Empire and the Germanies, the position
would seem to be this.
There are in these countries everywhere a very
large proportion of Jews. The largest by far are in
Lithuania and Galicia, where, of whole towns, from
a third to a half and sometimes up to two- thirds,
of the ^population are Jewish. Very large also
is the proportion within the admitted frontiers of
modern Poland; very large in Roumania, and
considerable in Hungary.
In all these countries the Jewish problem is
something quite different from what it is farther
West. The Jews are in these countries admittedly
a separate nation. Even as I write I hear the
complaint, sounding strange in our Western ears,
proffered by the Polish Jews who have been appeal-
ing to the West against what they claim to be the
oppressive practice of writing them down as Poles !
In Roumania for two generations it has been the
fixed principle of the State, now latent, now overt,
but always acted upon in social practice, that the
Jew is not a Roumanian at all and cannot be one.
Of course he cannot be one really, any more than
he can be an Englishman, or a Frenchman, or an
Irishman. (Fancy a Jew an Irishman!) But I
198 THE JEWS
mean, not even one by fiction or by convention.
In Poland the greater part of these people have a
different language and all of them have a different
social custom and a different life from the world
around them. In Hungary, where the numerical
pressure of the Jew is less, there is, of course, a
most lively memory of the attempted revolution
under Cohen in 1918, the massacres of Hungarians,
the setting up of an ephemeral Bolshevism and the
necessity of its suppression. In Bohemia the
pressure is far less and in the Balkan States south of
the Danube and the Drave. It is only present as
a pressure of numbers in the group of States which
lie between the Baltic and the Black Sea South
and North and between the Russian people and the
German people East and West.
When we come to Occidental Europe, in which
must be included, though it is hardly a true part
of it, Germany beyond the Elbe; when we come
to the Scandinavian countries, to France, Britain,
Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the Low Countries,
the problem changes. The numerical proportion
of Jews sinks enormously. Fairly large in one or
two Dutch towns, it is almost insignificant in
Scandinavia, and though we have had into the
great English towns and to some extent into the
northern French towns (particularly Paris) a
considerable recent influx of Jews, yet the total
number of these people in the West remains far,
far smaller than the great masses of the East of
Europe. The same is still more true of Italy, and,
in spite of the absorption of a great deal of Jewish
blood in the past, of Spain.
But while the numerical proportion of Jews in
these western countries is much smaller, and while
POSITION IN WORLD AS A WHOLE 199
therefore the peril of Jewish domination is very
different in form from what it is farther East, it is
clearly marked. It is exercised primarily through
finance; next through the sceptical Universities,
the anonymous Press and the corrupt Parliaments,
and, lastly, in a more general form, by the presence
of institutions which greatly favour the rise of the
Jew in competition with his hosts ; each favours
international knowledge ; each favours anonymity ;
each still favours the old Liberal nonsense which
called itself " toleration " and was really an indiffer-
ence to that most fundamental of all social motives
religion save, of course, where an exception
is made to permit attack upon the Catholic
Church.
Under influence of this sort, both sincere and
hypocritical, both generous and mean, the Jew
acquired in all the larger communities, and especially
in France, Italy, Germany and England, a power
out of all proportion to his numbers, and I may add,
without, I hope, offending any Jewish reader, out
of proportion to his abilities; certainly out of
proportion to any right of his to interfere in
our affairs. It was a Jew who produced the
divorce laws in France, the Jew who nourished
anti- clericalism everywhere in that country and
also in Italy ; the Jew who called in the forces of
Occidental nations to protect his compatriots in
the' East, and the Jew whose spirit has so largely
permeated the Universities and the Press.
Ireland is an exception. In Ireland the Jew
(outside the little industrial corner in the north-east)
is nobody. And here it must be remarked that
the migrations of the Jew which give him numbers
here for a time and afterwards numbers elsewhere.
200 THE JEWS
in places where previously he had not been known ;
which give him influence here for a time, and sees
it followed by the decline of that influence, do not
seem to obey any law which we can trace, and
are certainly not the product of any conscious
action. It is one of the strangest phenomena in
history, this odd, spasmodic flood movement of
the Jewish race. Is it concerned with commerce ?
That is one element undoubtedly; that is what
explains the exploitation of England by Jews after
the Conquest, of Spain in the later Middle Ages,
of the Valley of the Rhine ; but then, why not other
commercial centres as an attraction ? Venice was
not one, though the Jew was well tolerated there ;
nor was Paris after the early Middle Ages, and while
some of the Dutch towns formed such centres of
attraction the Belgian towns did not.
Was it asylum ? That would account, of course,
for the great influx of Jews into mediaeval Poland,
but then why not into eighteenth century England ?
Why not until very late in the nineteenth century ?
England, which gave the Jews a more complete
civic position than he could find anywhere else
in the world, was not invaded by them. Why these
very recent influxes into the United States, which
has for now a century and a half been perfectly
open by its Constitution, and was by all its civic
tradition an ideal asylum for the Jews ? Until
quite recent times the Jew was hardly known
there, and to this day he is not known outside a
few great cities.
No. There would seem to be no law, or at least
no discoverable law, for this mysterious movement,
the ebb and flow of Israel but that is a digres-
sion. To return to the national situations.
POSITION IN WORLD AS A WHOLE 201
If we leave the Old World and turn to the United
States, we find a novel condition of affairs still in
process of development and very puzzling to the
foreign observer. I do not pretend to analyse it
completely in a few lines, nor even accurately,
for I am dependent upon the observation of others,
and the United States are so utterly different from
us that we have difficulty, in following their con-
temporary history; but something of this sort
would seem to be passing there.
In the United States the Jews were present, till
the last few years, in numbers even smaller in
proportion to the population than their numbers
in France, England and Italy, far smaller than their
numbers in what was formerly the German Empire.
In the agricultural part of America, which is still,
I believe, one half of the population, the Jew was
almost unknown. You find him here and there,
as a lawyer or a storekeeper, but that world was
not familiar with him any more than our English
country- sides are familiar with him to-day. With
the growth of the great industrial towns, of course,
the Jew came, but he was still no " feature in the
landscape." There was a certain social prejudice
against him among the wealthier classes in the
East, and this is very important the truth was
always told about him. There was in America no
convention the Jew was always recognized as a
Jew and there was never any of the nonsense we
had over here of pretending that he was something
else.
Of that phenomenon of which the history of
Europe is full, which is so marked in the eastern
202 . THE JEWS
counties to-day and which is beginning to rise in
the West, there is nothing traceable in the early
and middle nineteenth century, nor even till the
close of it, in the United States.
Then came the change. It is a change which
has taken place in the lifetime of men much younger
than myself. It is a change, I am told, most marked
since I last visited the United States more than
twenty years ago. A regular and organized Jewish
emigration began to pour in, especially from the
Baltic. It flooded New York, where it now forms
probably a third of the population; it created
Ghettoes in most of the large Northern industrial
towns, and all the phenomena we associate in
Europe with these movements began to show them-
selves. There was the growth of the financial
monopoly and of monopolies in particular trades.
There was the clamour for toleration in the form
of "neutralizing" religious teaching in schools;
there was the appearance of the Jewish revolution-
ary and of the Jewish critic in every tradition of
Christian life. The Jews went also as they usually
do to the heart of things, and the Executive was
attacked. The last and apparently the most
unpopular of the presidents, Mr. Wilson, seems to
have been wholly in their hands. Anonymity in the
Press came, of course. A very marked example of
it is a journal called The New Republic, which,'
though it has but a small proportion of Jewish
writers upon it, and though its capital is (I believe)
not Jewish, is yet to all intents and purposes the
organ of the Jewish intellectuals, always joins in
the boycott of any news unfavourable to European
Jews, always joins in the clamour for anything
favourable to them, and in general adheres to the
POSITION IN WOELD AS A WHOLE 203
Jewish side, like the Humanite in Paris, or, let us
say, The New Statesman in England.
But the novel presence in the United States of
this phenomenon with which in the west of Europe
we have now been familiar for a long time, provides
a more direct and a very different kind of reaction
from what it has among us. This reaction against
Jewish powers was not (to use a Stock Exchange
metaphor) "sticky." There was no hesitation;
there were no uneasy patches of silence. The
Jewish question was discussed from the moment
it was first felt and to-day it is discussed beyond
all others. Of political topics I have found it the
first in the conversation of the Americans who
have visited Europe since the War and with whom
I have discussed the affairs of their country. It
ranges, as that reaction always does, from the wildest
Anti-Semitism to strong and open defence of
the Jewish position, not only by Jews but by the
very small minority of their admirers outside the
Jewish community, especially among the wealthy.
The characteristic of the whole thing in the United
States is that it is only just beginning. It is capable
of becoming one of those sudden growths of which
the past history of the Republic has made us
familiar, and indeed it is too early yet to judge, even
on the largest lines, what forms it may not take.
It is enough to say that there is behind the reaction
against the Jew in that country a growing intensity
of feeling with which we, as yet, in Western Europe,
for all the advance we have made in the matter,
are unfamiliar. If a test be required, contrast
the silence about the Jews in '96, during Bryan's
great attack upon the gold standard, with the work
of Mr. Ford and all that he stands for to-day!
204 THE JEWS
The rest of the world is either of Islam or heathen.
In the heathen world, so far, the Jew has little
place. He has a strong grip on India, of course,
but only through the British Kaj, not through the
native population; and in China, except as a
quasi- European merchant, he has no power at all;
neither has he over the strong and organized
nationality of Japan.
Such are the degrees, very roughly, of the
problem ; such the differences of its quality in the
various national groups to-day. Of these the two
most interesting states of the problem by far, be-
cause they are changing with the greatest rapidity,
are found in France, in England and in the United
States.
I have said that the second modifying condition
was the difference of civic traditions of the various
nations. Here again you have a differentiation
from East to West. But within it a differentiation,
ultimately due to religion, from North to South.
In Russia there was never any tradition of keeping
silence upon the Jew, or of respecting the Jew
at all. He was, until the recent revolution,
the national enemy, and there was the end of it.
Similarly in Poland, Eoumania and the vaguer
populations of their borders, and even in the old
Hungary, the Jew was talked of openly as belonging
to a separate nationality and, on the whole, a
hostile one.
But as one got west another spirit emerged,
another tradition. It was " the thing" to treat
the Jew as a citizen. This fashion was weaker in
the Germanies than in the Low Countries, France,
or England ; it was everywhere present west of the
Elbe.
POSITION IN WORLD AS A WHOLE 205
It was a tradition flowing from two sources:
the commercial and protestant England of the
seventeenth century, the sceptical France of the
eighteenth. The Jew (according to this spirit)
merited special protection and special respect. He
must be protected and respected even in his passion
for secrecy; so that at last the mere mention of
his existence in the cultivated and directing classes
of the west became something of an oddity.
From this spirit proceeded the Liberal fiction or
convention which I dealt with in the second chapter
of this book. It was clinched, it was given per-
manent form, by the enthusiasm and severe doc-
trine of the French Republicans, which arose at a
moment when Israel was regarded as a religion
and its national quality was forgotten. Since all
religion was thought to be dying, since, further, an
enthusiasm had arisen against almost any religion
which exercised civic power (notably the Catholic
Church), this Jewish religion, formerly regarded as
inimical to the State, or at any rate separate from
it, was naturally accorded a special privilege. That
strange system arose, the death of which we are
now watching after its brief life of somewhat more
than a century, whereby the Jew was permitted
to wear the mask of nationalities other than his
own, and to function everywhere as though he were
a citizen, not of Israel, but of the nation in which
he chanced to find himself.
Against this attitude arose at last the powerful
plea of nationalism. In England, as we shall see
in the next chapter, this plea was less strong than
elsewhere, because the interests of international
Jewish finance and of British commerce were for
so long nearly identical. In Italy, where the Jew
206 THE JEWS
was naturally closely connected with the nationalist
movement on account of its antagonism to the
Papacy, national feeling clashed little with the
anomaly of the Jew. But in France, especially
after the'def eat of 1 870, the contrast became stronger
and stronger, just as it is strengthening to-day in
Germany after the defeat of 1918.
It was that clash between the " city" of Israel
and the other "cities" in which we Europeans
function, to which allusion has been made on a
former page. It would be very convenient, no
doubt, to the " City " of Israel if all other " cities "
disappeared and left an open field for Jewish
operations. But they do not propose to disappear ;
and though our devotion to them may seem inexplic-
able to the Jew, he must accept it as a permanent
force ; for the patriotism of the European will not
weaken.
In the United States this Liberal tradition or
convention, this conception that the Jew must be
treated as a full citizen, was far stronger even than
it was in the West of Europe. It was in the- very
soul of the Constitution, and, what is more impor-
tant, in the very soul of the people. For such a
spirit was nourished not only in doctrine but in
practice by the appearance, in vast quantities, of
immigrants from many different countries, all of
whom were absorbed in and merged by the Ameri-
can spirit. If ever there was a field in which the
false conception that a Jew could be a Jew and
at the same time the full citizen of another nation,
that field was the United States of America. Yet
it is there that the problem is now reaching its
most acute form ; and the reason is that side by
side with this strong civic tradition there goes a
POSITION IN WOELD AS A WHOLE 207
complete freedom of speech and a very active
public opinion. The reality became too much for
theory and the Jew was recognized as something
apart. He will never fall into the background
again.
There remain to be considered the international
forces which modify this general truth that the
quarrel with the Jew is a quarrel with his increasing
control over our affairs.
Those international forces are Religion Islam
and the Catholic Church the force of Modern
Capitalism, and the Reaction against that force of
the Industrial Proletariat, the Reaction summed up
in the term Socialism. All four are international.
The position of the Jew in Islam can be simply
defined. In Islam he is treated with less method
and therefore with less continued oppression than
in Christendom, but always and permanently as
something base and inferior, save in a few rare
moments when he has the favour of particular
rulers or is necessary to some special society, or
is admired in a moment of intellectual brilliance.
Normally the Jew in Islam is an outcast. I
know very well that the game is played of pretend-
ing that Islam is in some way kinder to him than
we are. It is but a game : the playing of one party
against another of Islam against Christendom
by Israel, which is of neither. In Islam his superior
position in Christendom is equally famed. History
is too strong for such pretences. All the history of
Islam, all the social spirit of Islam, to which there
are countless witnesses to-day, give the same verdict
about the general treatment of the Jew in that
society.
So it was in independent Islam. But Islam,
208 THE JEWS
politically controlled to-day by the Western Chris-
tian powers, is another matter. Under that un-
stable state of affairs (no one can say how long it
will last ; the conflict between Islam and Christen-
dom seems eternal and the rise and fall of that tide
is indefinitely successive) the problem takes on
quite another shape. France and England appear
in Islam as the artificial supporters of the Jew.
Until quite lately it was the French who bore
the worst odium of this in the eyes of the Moham-
medans. Under the French the Jews in North
Africa were often given a special, a superior position,
which was an insult to every Mohammedan and
which is still an insult to him. It is the weakest
point of the French regime. In Algeria the Ghetto
Jew may vote. The Arab may not. Even in
Morocco, where things have been done more wisely
than in Algiers, the difficulty is felt. How are
you to treat a Jew differently in Morocco from the
way in which he is treated in France ? He is
common to the two countries. If you treat him as
if he were French, and therefore a member of the
governing power, what of the pride of those lords
of the Atlas and of Fez?
In the vastly larger field of Mohammedan control
exercised by Britain, which, directly and indirectly,
is ten times that of France, there was until lately less
of this friction ; but the tables have been turned,
and to-day it is Britain which stands to the Moham-
medan as the thruster-in of the Jew. It began
with the support of Jewish finance in Egypt; it
went on with the extended control over Indian
commerce 'by Jews; it continued in the control
of Indian currency by Jews. It has ended in the
grotesque appointment to the Indian Viceroyalty
POSITION IN WORLD AS A WHOLE 209
and the extraordinary experiment of Palestine.
To-day, at the moment in which I write, there
is no doubt on the matter whatsoever : From Rabat
on the Atlantic to the Bay of Bengal, the Western
Powers are regarded as the agents of a Jewish
intrusion which is intolerable to Islam. And
whereas the chief blame lay, until quite a few
years ago, upon the French, to-day it lies upon
the British Government.
* * * * *
The role of the Catholic Church in the debate
between the Jews and Christendom is the most
discussed, the worst understood, of any point
connected with the general problem. But it is
capable of simple definition. Wherever the Catho-
lic Church is powerful, and in proportion as it is
powerful, the traditional principles of the civiliza-
tion of which it is the soul and guardian will always
be upheld. One of these principles is the sharp
distinction between the Jew and ourselves. The
Rationalist would say that this distinction was
racial, and that it only found religious expression
on account of its racial reality. His opponent
would say that the origin of the quarrel was mainly
religious ; that it was a difference in religious tradi-
tion which formed the contrast between the Jew
and Christendom. The former can cite as evidence
the violent original contrast between the Roman
Empire and the Jew, the latter the truth that
religion, philosophy, is the formative force in
every human society.
But whichever theory you adopt, the fact is there.
The Catholic Church is the conservator of an age-
long European tradition, and that tradition will
never compromise with the fiction that a Jew can
210 THE JEWS
be other than a Jew. Wherever the Catholic
Church has power, and in proportion to its power,
the Jewish problem will be recognized to the full.
On the other hand, there never has been and
never will be, or can be, admission by Catholic
morals of warfare against the Jew. Those morals
are plain. That doctrine has been defined over and
over again and acted upon throughout history. If
indirect hostilities are opened against the majority
by a minority in its midst, they may be repressed
and punished. Still more important, insincere and
pretended conversion, used as a cloak, may be
repressed and punished. But though a com-
munity has the right to determine its own life,
and (if it think it possible) even to eliminate (with
justice, not with cruelty, violence or injustice in
any form) an alien, a hostile minority; yet that
minority has its own right to live, if not there,
then elsewhere. It has its right once it is rooted
and traditional to its own convictions, to its
own tradition. If you allow it to live among you,
you must allow it to live its own life save where
that life threatens yours. The Catholic Church will
always maintain reality, including the reality of that
sharp distinction between the Jew and his hosts.
The opponent of the Catholic Church will tend,
other things being equal, to support the Jew,
because, under that distinction, the Jew may find
himself ill at ease. The whole Protestant tradition
of the North was for more than 300 years favour-
able to the Jew, partly indeed on account of its
reliance upon the Jewish Scriptures, its absorption
in the inspired Jewish folk-lore, but more because
the alliance with the Jew was an alliance against the
Catholic Church. Strong traces of that spirit still
POSITION IN WORLD AS A WHOLE 211
remain. What has warred against it has been the
sheer necessity in every country, Catholic or
Protestant, Liberal or anti- Liberal, to preserve
society against what each began to feel as a disrup-
tive and an alien domination.
There remain the two novel forces Modern
Capitalism, and, protesting against it, its victim,
the Modern Industrial Proletariat.
A few years ago anyone would have said that
the opposition to the Jew was an opposition to
capitalism alone; the Jew was the representative
of capitalism, and Jewish finance was the particular
aspect of Jewish power in which that power was
universally hated. But we have seen all that
change. To-day the strongest force against the
Jew is on the other side. It is mainly aroused, not
by the fear of capitalist forces, but by the fear of
revolutionary forces.
I make bold to say that when the feeling against
the Jew comes to the point of action, the Jew will
necessarily, and in self-defence, fall back upon the
leadership of the proletariat against industrial
capitalism. He will he must, from mere instinct,
quite apart from calculation use the line of cleav-
age which divides a society hostile to him. He will
rely on the line of cleavage driven by the vast
modern quarrel between the few possessors in the
modern industrial world and their victims, the
exploited millions.
So put, the opportunity of the Jew, if he be driven
to extremities to raise an army in his defence,
seems a great opportunity enough. It would
seem easy for him to deflect all animosity against
himself into animosity against the rich safe-
guarding, of course (as he has done in Russia),
212 THE JEWS
the Jewish rich. But we must remember three
formidable conditions which weaken that oppor-
tunity.
The first condition is this : The industrial millions
are still quite a small minority and will probably
in the future be an even smaller minority of the
civilized white world. The war dealt them a heavy
blow. The fact that the industrial proletariat is
a town population, and therefore less and less
productive, is another cause of weakness; their
decline in health another. The fact that indus-
trial capitalism depends upon the machine being
kept going, and that its serfs are less and less will-
ing to keep the machine going, is another.
Secondly, the area (and that is important)
occupied by industrial capitalism is but a very
small area of the surface of the civilized world.
Thirdly, the revolt of the Industrial Proletariat,
if the Jews provoke it, will be short-lived. Either
it will be defeated, or after destroying its masters
it will, under Jewish leadership, destroy its own
powers of production, as in Russia.
When the fury is exhausted, in a very short
time the Jewish problem will reappear.
The proletarian battle may rage intensely, but it
will be far from universal, and will not be sufficient,
I think, to distract mankind from that other cross-
problem of Jew and non- Jew, to which his attention
is being more and more steadily directed.
THE POSITION OF THE JEWS IN
ENGLAND
CHAPTER X
THE PRESENT RELATION BETWEEN THE
ENGLISH STATE AND THE JEWS
THE various nations of Europe have every one
of them, in the course of their long histories, passed
through successive phases towards the Jew which
I have called the tragic cycle. Each has in turn
welcomed, tolerated, persecuted, attempted to
exile often actually exiled welcomed again, and
so forth. The two chief examples of extremes
in action, are, as I have also pointed out in an
earlier part of this book, Spain and England.
Spaniards, and in particular the Spaniards of the
Kingdom of Castile, went through every phase of
this cycle in its fullest form. England passed
through even greater extremes, for England
was the only country which absolutely got rid of
the Jews for hundreds of years, and England is
the only country which has, even for a brief period,
entered into something like an alliance with
them.
Though it is the present position of the British
State that is, the position of official British
politics towards the Jew with which we are con-
cerned, it may be of service to introduce the matter
by a word upon past relations.
215
216 THE JEWS
The Jewish element in this island, whatever it
may have been during the Roman occupation, was
of small account during the Dark Ages. Things
changed at their close in the eleventh century,
The Jew is the camp follower of each new economic
movement among us and that is why one finds him
in the wake of the Norman Conquest. Throughout
the economic development which it began appears
the secondary role of the Jew. Every one knows
the mediaeval rule of Jewish Status. It was
established here as everywhere else in Christendom.
The Jew was the King's; that is, under the special
protection of the State. If he were the subject
of popular attack, that attack was an attack on
the King's peculiar, and liable to speedy repression.
The individual attacker was punished with special
severity because the danger of mass- movement is
always great where the populace is free to act in
masses as it was throughout the middle ages, and
the necessity for preventing individual attacks
from spreading was correspondingly great. Now
and then the popular feeling got out of hand and
the monarch had to deal with numbers which he
could not control; but as a rule the Jew, especi-
ally the rich Jew, enjoyed a privileged position,
both in Northern France and throughout England.
The Jew of the early Middle Ages in England
was normally a well-to-do man and often an
exceedingly rich man. Then, as now, a small
number of Jews were much the richest men of
their time.
He had most of the finances in his hands, and
this immense privilege (which he has lost), that he
alone was allowed to practise usury. Here we
must pause a moment to define usury.
POSITION OF JEWS IN ENGLAND 217
Usury then (as now) signified the receiving of
interest upon unproductive loans. It is a practice
which all moralists and all philosophers have
condemned and which the Church in particular
condemns. If you lend money to a man for a
' productive purpose : if, for instance, he is to buy
a ship and trade with the money you advance,
or to buy a farm and grow produce, then, of course,
you are perfectly free to stipulate for a portion of
the profit. But if you lend the money for a purpose
not directly productive, as, for instance, to a
man in grave necessity, or in lieu of charity, or
to build such a building as a church, which will
not produce a rent, or if in any other fashion you
lend money to one who (to your knowledge) will
not spend it in some reproductive agency, then it
is immoral to demand interest.
Now an exception was made in mediaeval Christ-
endom in favour of the Jew. He was allowed to
lend money at interest, even in the most grievous
cases of necessity, and for services as unproductive
as religion or war. The only stipulation was that
the moneys saved from this lucrative practice
returned to the Crown (in theory) upon the death
of the licensee. In practice no doubt a very
large part remained with the accumulator, who
during his lifetime was enjoying the income he had
acquired by usury, who could give it to his heirs
while still living, and could use opportunities for
secret investment, or pass it to the custody of
others throughout international Jewry. But liquid
sums left by him, the product of his usury, returned
to the Crown upon his death. This was a great
advantage to the Crown, not only in protecting
the Jew from the native hostility of his alien hosts
218 THE JEWS
(and particularly of the populace), but in giving
him that great privilege a monopoly.
The rate of interest was enormous. It varied
from nearly 50 per cent to over 80 per cent. When
Jews lent money on security the King was party
to the safe custody of the security, and their privi-
lege extended so far that they were exempt from
the common law, and a case between an English-
man and his Jewish creditor could only be tried
by a mixed jury in which the Jew's own com-
patriots were present in equal numbers with the
English.
All during the Angevin period Jewish financial
domination continued, up to the end of the twelfth
century and even into the beginning of the thir-
teenth. But with the first half of the thirteenth
century, for some reason of which I have never
seen a sufficient historical analysis and of which,
perhaps, the full causes have been lost, the Jewish
power began to decline very rapidly, so far as
England was concerned.
And here it may be noted that the misfortunes
of the Jews in any country never begin until their
financial position is shaken. As long as they are
the financial masters of the Government they are
protected ; but woe to them when they begin to
lose their financial power ! Then there is no longer
any reason for supporting them either on the part of
the governing classes in general or of the Executive
in particular. Popular passion is let loose and
disaster follows.
At any rate, the thirteenth century saw in
England a rapid decline of Jewish financial power
and at the same time a rapid rise of official ani-
mosity towards them. They got poorer and poorer
POSITION OF JEWS IN ENGLAND 219
as the century proceeded. Their activities were
at the same time more and more restricted. They
had lent money largely upon land and yet, in the
public interest, were at last forbidden to foreclose
upon it. The final step came when their special
licence to practise usury was withdrawn by Edward
I in the earlier part of his reign ; and at last, in
1290, after increasing severities, they were all
expelled the country under penalty of death.
The unhappy people, already reduced by two
generations of falling fortune, were hurried out of
the country, carrying, by permission, their money
and movables. They were protected, indeed, at
the ports by the royal officers, who even paid the
passage of the indigent among them; but they
were plundered at sea and some even murdered.
The murderers were punished, but the memory
of the persecution remained in the Jews' mind and
England became a natural object of their hate.
The Jewish community expelled by the English
was surprisingly small, not 17,000, and suggests the
historical truth that in the Middle Ages, and indeed
until quite modern times, the Jewish community
in Northern France and England was a community
of people in the main well-to-do. It so remained
until quite modern times.
There followed three and a half centuries and
more during which England was the one example
in Europe of a State that would not tolerate the
Jews upon any terms whatsoever. There cer-
tainly remained throughout this time, or at any
rate visited the island, not a few of what the Jews
themselves called " Crypto- Jews," that is, Jews
who outwardly deny their nationality and practise
our religion for the purpose of private gain. These,
220 THE JEWS
when they could defeat the law successfully, re-
mained within the British seas. But their effect was
slight; and the English people during the whole
of their great military advance in France, during
the whole period when their language and culture
was forming, during the whole great national
episode of the Tudors and of the Eeformation,
formed the one great exception out of all Europe
in that the Jew remained unknown to them and
was rigorously excluded from their Common-
wealth.
They returned, as everybody knows, under
Cromwell. Their numbers, and still more their
wealth, increased at the end of the seventeenth
century and concomitantly with this, partly as
an effect of it (but here we must not exaggerate),
a number of novel financial features appeared in
the English State each of which shows the increased
power of the Jews. The institution of the Bank,
of the National Debt, of speculation in Exchange
and in the fluctuation of stock.
But the real causes of that alliance between
the English and the Jews which is seen in the
late seventeenth century, which quickened through-
out the eighteenth and became so very marked
in the nineteenth century, was the cosmopolitan
position of England as the leading commercial
State. This it was which led to something like
identity between the interests of Israel and the
interests of Britain, an identity which has lasted
so long that now, when divergence is beginning
to appear, it still seems odd and novel to the older
generation that there should be any Jewish action
which is not favourable to England. They cannot
understand what the new indifference to Jewish
POSITION OF JEWS IN ENGLAND 221
interests, let alone the new hostility to them, can
mean.
There were, of course, many other causes con-
tributory to the peculiar position which the Jew
came to enjoy in modern England, a position
which he has not yet lost in external circumstance,
though it is so badly shaken morally. There was
the fact that England was the Protestant power
of the West.
This religious motive played a great part.
Between the Catholic Church and the Synagogue
there had been hostility from the first century.
In so far as it was possible to take sides in that
quarrel it was natural for the Protestant power
to take sides against the Catholic tradition and
therefore in favour of the Jews. Again, the
English were not only Protestant, their middle
classes were steeped in the reading of the Old
Testament. The Jews seemed to them the heroes
of an epic and the shrines of a religion. You will
find strong relics of this attitude in Provincial
England to this day. One should add a certain
national distaste for violence, which feeling was
exasperated by hearing of the Jewish persecution
abroad. One should also further add the pride
which modern Englishmen take in the feeling
that their country is an asylum for the oppressed.
Meanwhile there was not, until quite lately, any
considerable body of poor Jews in the country to
excite the animosity of the populace. That was
an important negative factor in bringing the Jew
within the boundaries of the English State. But
with all these factors fully considered, it remains
true that the main cause of the accidental Jewish
position in England was the cosmopolitan char-
222 THE JEWS
acter of English commerce and the essentially
commercial character of the English State. As
English export and English shipping began to
cover the globe, the English financial system covered
it as well. London became after Waterloo the
money market and the clearing house of the
world. The interests of the Jew as a financial
dealer and the interests of this great commercial
polity approximated more and more. One may
say that by the last third of the nineteenth cen-
tury they had become virtually identical.
Every new economic enterprise of the British
State appealed to the Jewish genius for commerce
and especially for negotiation in its most abstract
form finance. Conversely, every Jewish enter-
prise, every new conception of the Jew in his
cosmopolitan activities (until these became revolu-
tionary) appealed to the English merchant and
banker.
The two things dovetailed one into the other
and fitted exactly, and all subsidiary activities
fitted in as well. The Jewish news agencies of
the nineteenth century favoured England in all
her policy, political as well as commercial ; they
opposed those of her rivals and especially those of
her enemies. The Jewish knowledge of the East
was at the service of England. His international
penetration of the European governments was
also at her service so was his secret information.
With the consolidation of the Indian Empire
after the Mutiny the Jews were again an ally from
their traditional hatred of the Russian people,
which hatred has led them in our time to wreak
so awful a vengeance upon their former oppressors.
The Jew might almost be called a British agent
POSITION OF JEWS IN ENGLAND 223
upon the Continent of Europe, and still more in the
Near and Far East, where the economic power
of England extended even more rapidly than her
political power.
And the Jew pointed to the English State as
that one in which all that his nation required of the
goyim was to be found. He here enjoyed a situa-
tion the like of which he could not hope to enjoy
in any other country of the world. All antagonism
to him had died down. He was admitted to every
institution in the State, a prominent member
of his nation became chief officer of the English
Executive, and, an influence more subtle and pene-
trating, marriages began to take place, wholesale,
between what had once been the aristocratic
territorial families of this country and the Jewish
commercial fortunes.
After two generations of this, with the opening of
the twentieth century those of the great territorial
English families in which there was no Jewish
blood were the exception. In nearly all of them
was the strain more or less marked, in some of them
so strong that though the name was still an English
name and the traditions those of a purely English
lineage of the long past, the physique and charac-
ter had become wholly Jewish and the members
of the family were taken for Jews whenever they
travelled in countries where the gentry had not
yet suffered or enjoyed this admixture.
Specially Jewish institutions, such as Freemasonry
(which the Jews had inaugurated as a sort of
bridge between themselves and their hosts in the
seventeenth century), were particularly strong in
Britain, and there arose a political tradition, active,
and ultimately to prove of great importance,
224 THE JEWS
whereby the British State was tacitly accepted
by foreign governments as the official protector
of the Jews in other countries. It was Britain
which was expected to interfere, within the measure
of her power, whenever a persecution of the Jews
took place in the East of Christendom : to support
the Jewish financial energies throughout the world,
and to receive in return the benefit of that con-
nection.
We shall have a most imperfect picture of the
causes which gradually made the Jews regard
this country as their centre of action if we omit one
essential point.
England was secure.
During the whole period which saw the rise of
the Jews to eminence in this island and their
ultimate alliance with its political and commercial
system, English society enjoyed a profound peace.
Save for the petty incidents of the '15 and '45
(the first of no effect south of the border, the second
ephemeral and confined to the North), no hostilities
took place upon English soil between the rebellion
of Monmouth under James II and the bombarding
of London by the Germans from the air during the
late war. There has been (save for some quite
insignificant local riots) complete security for
property and especially for large property. There
have been since the middle of the eighteenth
century no confiscations, and of commercial for-
tunes none since the middle of the seventeenth :
no invasion, no civil war, and therefore no loot:
no personal danger from violence.
Such conditions formed an environment ideal for
the permanent establishment and rooting of Jewish
power, and for the organization of a Jewish base.
POSITION OP JEWS IN ENGLAND 225
The political situation reflected itself, as it
always does, in literature. The Jew began to
appear in English fiction as an exalted character,
quite specially removed to his advantage from
the mass of mankind. He is already a hero in
Sir Walter Scott, but the full development was
much later. You could still have a Jewish villain as
late as Oliver Twist, but with writers as different
as Charles Keade and George Eliot we reach a
time where the Jew is impeccable. The worst
any writer dares do at the end of the process is
to be silent. The best is to flatter the Jewish
type out of all knowledge. This singular inter-
lude was in part due to the divorce between litera-
ture and popular feeling in the middle and latter
part of the nineteenth century; at least, it was
permitted by that divorce. But the active cause
of it was the reflection of the Jew's political posi-
tion upon the mind of the educated class as ex-
pressed in its literary art.
At the same time a parallel movement appeared
on the historical side of literature. A convention
arose that in the clash between the Jews and the
English of the Middle Ages the Jews were invari-
ably right and the English invariably wrong.
Where the struggle was between the Jew and the
non- Jew abroad, the historian exceeded all bounds.
The European hostile to the Jew was a senseless
monster, and the Jew hostile to the European was
a holy victim.
The whole story of Europe and of this country,
in so far as it was affected by this very considerable
factor, was distorted through suppression, and
false emphasis and quite exceptional lying.
The general reader of history neither knew
226 THE JEWS
what part the Jewish question had played nor the
claims that could be advanced for his own race in
the conflict. And as historians live by copying
one another, the legend was established in every
school and college.
At the end of the process the Jews, in proportion
to their numbers, held a power in this country
beyond anything that has been seen in any other
of the world. Poland at the end of the Middle Ages,
when that country was most nearly comparable
to Britain for the harbouring and support of the
Jewish people, is the only parallel, and that a
remote one.
Every English Government had (and has) its
quota of Jews. They had entered the diplomatic
service and the House of Lords ; they swarmed in
the House of Commons, in the Universities, in
all the Government offices save the Foreign Office
(and even there representatives of the Jewish
nation have recently entered) ; they were exceed-
ingly powerful in the Press: they were all-power-
ful in the City. No custom unsympathetic to their
race, from the duel to popular clamour, survived.
They could boast that England was not only the
country where no distinction whatever was made in
practice, let alone in law, between the Jew and
the native, but that England was the only country
where the Jew was always well received, where
his natural defects counted least and where his
natural abilities had most scope.
Such a state of affairs could not last. It was not
natural. It was not consonant with hidden but
deep popular tradition or with popular appetites;
it corresponded only to the mood of one European
community in its wealthier classes. A divergence
POSITION OF JEWS IN ENGLAND 227
between the cosmopolitan financial interests of the
Jew and the particular national interests of Britain
was bound to come. War on a large scale, though
it did not imperil the country itself, was a warning
of change. It appeared with the South African
campaign before the end of the century. The
position of the Jew was altered. Some dissatisfac-
tion with his power began to stir. It was already
muttering and beginning to show itself with the
rise of commercial and maritime competition in
the new German Empire which, in its turn, had
become led, upon all its commercial side, by Jews.
There was bound, I say, to be a reaction and a
permanent one. While it was yet taking place,
in the heat of the Great War, before it had reached
the official world, that one of the English politicians
who was best fitted to speak for the Jews, who was
most intimate with them through manifold ties of
friendship and hospitality, Mr. Arthur Balfour, was
chosen to make the famous pronouncement in
favour of Zionism. It came within a month of
the great crisis of the war. Its object was to divide
the general influence of the Jews throughout the
world, which had hitherto been upon the whole
opposed to the cause of the Allies, because,
like every other neutral, the Jews were more
and more convinced, as the campaigns dragged
on, that the Central Empires were certain of
victory.
Though this was the motive, the effect was to tie
the British state yet closer to the fortunes of Israel,
for here was England pledged to support, to defend,
to act as a special protector over, the peculiar
interests of the Jews, just where those interests
would most challenge the whole of Christendom
228 THE JEWS
and of Islam, just where it would be most acutely
difficult to confirm Jewish claims.
The declaration in favour of Zionism, the solemn
pledge of the forces of the British State to an
exceptional support of the Jew in a matter wholly
to his benefit and not in any way to that of England,
coming though it did after the climax of Jewish
power had been reached and passed, was the last
stage of that long process of alliance between the
British commercial policy and its ruling classes on
the one hand and the Jews upon the other.
Already, as I have said, that alliance was morally
shaken. The great influx of poor Jews had shaken
it. The mere effect of time, the inevitable revolt
of the human conscience against an unnatural pre-
tence and an obvious fiction, was bound to come,
and was overdue. But although the alliance
was already shaken, the English State remained
officially closely interlocked with Jewry, and its
last action, the demand for the establishment of
a Jewish State in Palestine, was, as has so often
happened in the story of human development, at
once the term and the turning-point of a process
which had reached its conclusion; for it will be
remarked throughout history that any force is
most expressive, its manifestation of power most
crude and most emphatic, in the perilous interval
after its real strength has begun to decline and before
its first open defeat.
But the. problems presented by this experiment
in Palestine merit a separate examination. To
this I will now turn.
ZIONISM
CHAPTER XI
ZIONISM
THE question of Zionism has been discussed from
every possible aspect save one, and that one is the
only factor which relates to the thesis of this book.
It has been argued, as a purely Jewish matter ;
there has been debate upon its justice or injustice
among the Jews themselves, as to its advantage or
disadvantage to their race; debate among the
various non- Jewish forces concerned as to the
advantage or disadvantage it would be to them;
debate upon the rights and wrongs of the native
population among which the Jews might find a
home ; debate as to whether that home should be
in Palestine or elsewhere and so on.
All these discussions avoid the ultimate issue.
Some of them, of course, are of evident importance
within the Jewish community, but so far as the
essential problem we are discussing in this book is
concerned, they do not apply. The one question
which is at issue from the point of view of our
thesis is this:
Whether the Zionist experiment will tend to increase
or to relax the strain created by the presence of the
Jew in the midst of a non-Jewish world.
That, and that only, is our concern, and from
that point of view we may examine the theory of
231
232 THE JEWS
Zionism which has now emerged into an attempted
practice.
First let us consider its necessary general implica-
tions: the implications which Zionism involves,
no matter where or how the experiment were tried.
The Zionist theory is that Israel would benefit if
of its many millions (some twelve millions, counting
those of the partly Jewish fringe, who are sufficiently
Jewish to make one with the race) a core say a
tenth were to have a fixed territorial " city." a
country of their own, a habitation. This country,
wherever it might be chosen, should be, as far as
possible, a purely Jewish State : "as Jewish," one
of its exponents has said, " as England is English."
Now, suppose the place chosen were (to-day we
may say " had been") an empty or almost unde-
veloped country, and supposing the Jews had found
that their own people could bear the expense of
reaching that place with sufficient capital, and of
colonizing it in large numbers. Supposing a small
State of a million to a million and a half inhabitants
to be thus formed, to be wholly Jewish in character,
and independent in the fullest sense. The question
immediately arises : Would the Jews throughout the
world be :
(a) permitted to regard themselves as citizens of
that State ?
(b) regarded in any case as citizens of that
State, whether they willed or no, and regis-
tered as such, with or without the consent of
the registered person ?
If not, what would be the status of the Jew outside
this territorial unit, which he had chosen to be
much more than a symbol of his national unity-
its actual seat and establishment ?
ZIONISM 233
That is the question which, so far as I have
watched the discussion, everybody hesitates to
face ; yet that is the question which will have to
be faced sooner or later as the main political crux
of the whole affair.
Observe that there is no question of establishing
a State wherein the whole or even the great mass
of the Jewish people shall reside. No one would
repudiate such an idea more vigorously than the
chief pioneers of Zionism. The great mass of Jews
would, of course, ridicule it as impracticable and
refuse it as extremely undesirable. They live and
they desire to live following their present interests
in the nations among whom they are dispersed.
They live and they desire to live the semi- nomadic
life, the international life, which has become theirs
by every tradition, and which one might now almost
call instinctive in them. Also the greater part of
them desire to pursue those careers which go with
such a life, especially the careers of negotiation
and of intermediary work. They not only feel the
advantage of such a position, they also feel a need
and appetite for such a condition.
Whatever form Zionism might have taken before
it appeared in its present experimental form, what-
ever was said of the th'eory in the past, this point
was always capital:
The Jews as a nation would remain as they were,
moving among all the peoples. The new Zion was
to be no more than a fixed rallying point, an estab-
lished but small territorial nationhood, which should
do no more than proclaim their unity. It follows,
therefore, necessarily, that the great mass of Jews,
outside the territorial settlement, would have, after
such a settlement had been formed, to obtain a
234 THE JEWS
definition of their political character. What is
that definition to be ?
I think myself the Jews would answer: " It is
to be precisely what it is to-day, or, rather, what
it has been in the Occidental nations during the
past generation." That is, the Jew is to be regarded
as the full national in the nation in which he hap-
pens to be for the time. Nothing shall debar him
from any position whatever in that nation. He
shall be regarded in exactly the same light as all
the other citizens, and, conversely, he shall obtain
no privilege. In countries where there is conscrip-
tion, for instance, he shall be a conscript like any-
body else ; where a nation in which he happens to
find himself goes to war, he shall be compelled to
risk his life for it like any other citizen. If he
happens a year or two before the war to have
settled in the enemy's country, then he shall be
equally compelled to fight for the enemy against
his former country. He shall in every respect be
regarded, by a legal fiction, as identical with the
community in which he happens to be settled for
the moment, but at the same time he is to have
some special relation with the Jewish State.
He and he alone is to be (certainly in practice
and, of right, in legal decisions) eligible for admis-
sion to that city, for office in it. His opinion is to
count in the conduct of that State, wherever he
may personally be placed in the world. He is to
regard himself indeed that is inevitable from the
definition of the new State as personally allied
to it, if not a member of it. He cannot dissociate
himself from its fortunes nor be indifferent to its
success or failure. He must in effect be loyal to it.
He owes it allegiance of a moral kind. He will
ZIONISM 235
necessarily be in much the same position as are
men of Irish descent in the Colonies, in England,
and in the United States, to the surviving and now
increasing remnant of their race which has clung
to its native land. But in the particular case of
the Jew this allegiance will not diminish with time.
It will remain ever vivacious. The race, as its
individual components pass from one country to
another, will make one body, generation after
generation, with the fixed polity settled in the
New Zion. That certainly is the ideal, as I hear
it expressed on every side in conversation and in
writing by the Jews who support it.
Well, if the ideal is left in that condition (and
it is admitted to be in practice in that condition),
it will result in a grievous prejudice to the Jewish
people, and will be a source of more permanent
evil to them than any other policy they could have
undertaken. It will emphasize that very point
of dual allegiance which it must be their object to
soften if the Jewish problem is to be solved.
The existence of a Zionist State will bring into
relief the separate character of the Jew. The
Jewish nation will no longer be able to depend for
one of its defences upon the indifference or the
ignorance still widely present among its hosts.
Whereas before the experiment was attempted,
many of those hosts could forget the difference
between him and them, many had no experience
of it and many remarked it without its affecting
their attitude towards the Jew ; after the experi-
ment has been put in practice there must necessarily
be a change.
To give a concrete instance, no one could in
his anger say to a Jew, " You disturb our repose ;
236 THE JEWS
you are an alien element in our community; you
must leave it." For if he meant that, he was at the
same time condemning his victim to universal exile.
But once an established national State exists, once
you have in the world a considerable number say
a million and a half Jews who are not the nationals
of any other nation, but are the citizens of a Jewish
nation with a known locality, an organized State,
then the suggestion of exile changes its meaning.
The opponent of the Jew is now able to say : " Go
back to your own country," and you may be very
certain that he will say that unless some other
solution than the legal fiction of full citizenship in
one country and of moral allegiance to another is
dropped.
The presence of the new Zion will do for the
Jewish people what a frame does for a picture. It
will not be universal to them; it will not cover
the whole field of Jewish activity. It will be but
a fraction of the whole. But it will inevitably
emphasize the separation, the individual and alien
character of the whole. It will concentrate atten-
tion upon all those things which the nineteenth
century in what I have called " the Liberal solu-
tion carefully put in the background and tried to
forget. It will militate against an honest solution
which would recognize the completely distinct
character of the Jew and yet refuse to subject
them to any indignity or suffering on that account .
There is more than this. The various nations,
taken as a whole the Koumanians as a whole,
the Poles as a whole, the French, the Italians, the
English as a whole take up very different attitudes
at any one time toward Israel, and in each the
attitude varies from generation to generation;
ZIONISM 237
there is always, at any one time of history, includ-
ing our own time, a certain number of national
units which are openly hostile to the Jew, regret-
ting his presence among them, restricting his
activities and determined, above all, to separate
him, by a sharp legal definition if possible, at any
rate by universal social practice, from the rest of
the community.
Now these hostile peoples cannot possibly be
prevented from using the weapon put into their
hands by the existence of a new Zion, with the
implications I have just defined. It is difficult
enough even now for the countries where Jewish
finance controls the politicians (and these are still
the most powerful countries) to restrain the anti-
Jewish feelings in the lesser nations. It is only
done by elaborate rules which are imperfectly
obeyed and which are felt in these smaller nations
to be imposed by alien interference with their
domestic rights. The protection by the French,
English and American Governments of what are
called by a euphemism " national minorities"
which means, of course, every where the Jews is a
perilous affair, and one which can only be carried
out most imperfectly even as it is. But the one
foundation for that task, the one argument which
its promoters appeal to, is the fact that the
" national minority " that is, the Jews present
in a hostile community can plead universal exile.
If you turn them out in order to suppress them,
they can only leave for another country. They
have none of their own to go to. Or again, if your
treatment of the Jews is harsher than that of your
neighbour, you are virtually directing a Jewish
emigration over your neighbour's borders, and to
238 THE JEWS
that your neighbour has a right to object. But
once an independent Jewish seat is established,
this argument falls to the ground. It is no reply
then to tell these nations that the new Jewish State
cannot contain the whole Jewish race. It will
answer that it is not concerned with the whole
Jewish race but only with its own section of that
race.
Further, it will of course always be to the interest
of those who desire to be rid of the Jewish element
in their midst to argue that the Jewish State could
be more peopled and that there is plenty of room
for more citizens. Again, those hostile to the Jews
in their midst can say : " Very well. Since there
is no room for the whole mass of our Jews in your
new State, we will not deal with the whole mass ;
allow us to suggest that such and such individuals
shall leave our State, where they are not wanted,
and shall go to their own." And they would pick
out the Jews whose exile would most weaken the
Jewish community in their midst.
In the present state of affairs, with the Cabinets
of Rome, Washington, London and Paris still
heavily influenced by Jewish finance, they have,
for the moment, a military force behind them
sufficient to impose their orders in some measure
upon the reluctant nations of Eastern Europe and
in some measure to create an artificial protection
for the Jews there. Even if this protection were
to last another generation (which is unlikely), the
presence of Zionism, interpreted in the sense I have
just quoted, would be enough to undermine its
work. On any change in the situation, in case of
any conflict between these Western powers, or of
any change by one or more of them in its attitude
ZIONISM 239
towards the Jews, Zionism, thus interpreted, would
be the ruin of the Jews in the Centre and East of
Europe. The danger is of such great practical
importance that it ought to be the very first matter
for discussion. It is only our acquired habit of
falsehood and secrecy upon the Jewish problem
which has thrust it in the background. In the
nature of things it must come to the front, and it
would be far better to have the lines of some solution
laid down before it becomes insistent.
What are those lines to be ?
Their general character is clear enough.
Whether it be of advantage or no to have a purely
Jewish State (I mean whether it be of advantage
to Israel or no) may be safely left to the Jews them-
selves to discuss. But one thing is certain : if they
decide in favour of its continuance, then they must
decide also in favour of some form of recognition
for the purely Jewish nationality of the Jews outside
that State.
Thus only will the situation become open and
therefore innocuous. If they try under the new
conditions to maintain the old fiction that a Jew
is at the same time a Jew and yet not a Jew, that
he can be at the same time a Jew and an English-
man, or a Jew and a Russian, or a Jew and an Italian,
they will be trying to maintain it under conditions
quite other than those of the past, and under con-
ditions where the falsehood will break down in
practice.
Suppose you were to make such recognition
partly voluntary, and leave it to the Jew wherever
he might be to claim or not to claim his nationality
as a Jew; to be regarded, if he so willed, as a
national of the Jewish nation in Zion, or as a national
240 THE JEWS
of tie people among whom he happened to be living
for the moment. You may say that under this
purely voluntary system (which would, I suppose,
be more just) very few would choose for Zion.
The great majority would like to go on under the
old fiction. That is certainly true of the West;
but would it be true of the East? Would it be
true of either East or West in a moment of persecu-
tion ? I think it would not. Even if it be true
of the East to-day, it certainly would not be
true of any body of Jews suffering there, in the
future, any degree of molestation.
But apart from that: Supposing but a small
minority availed themselves of this voluntary form
of recognition, supposing only a small minority to
claim Jewish nationality as defined in the terms of
the Zionist State, there would still be the contrast
between those who had thus publicly proclaimed
themselves nationals of Zion and those who hung
back. In other words, short of a general admitted
maintenance of the old fiction (of which Zionism
more than any other force must accelerate the
breakdown), you must have, through Zionism, an
accelerated tendency to treating Jews throughout
the world as being, whether without the New Zion-
ist State or within it, a separate people. And
they are a separate people, they cannot be other.
My whole plea is that this truth should be recog-
nized and acted upon; for if it is shirked or
denied it will take its revenge. Reality always
takes its revenge upon unreal pretence.
There remains in connection with Zionism another
consideration which is also of importance, though
of a very different kind. Is the new Jewish State
to rely upon its own military strength and its own
ZIONISM 241
police though perhaps guaranteed (for what that
may be worth) by international agreement or is it
to be a protected State occupied, defended and
policed by the strength and fighting qualities of
some other kind of men, not Jews Englishmen,
Frenchmen or what not ?
As we know, the particular solution attempted,
the particular Zionism of which the experiment is
now being made in Palestine, plumps for the second
solution. The protection of Jews from natives is
to be undertaken by a garrison of Englishmen. It
plumps for this solution under conditions as adverse
as they well can be. The present experiment is,
as we noted at the end of the last chapter, not an
independent Jewish State, national, guaranteed,
standing in its own strength ; but a protected State ;
and that State protected by one nation : Great
Britain. The new Zion does not depend for its
internal peace, for its establishment against highly
hostile forces, for the ex-propriation of the local
landowners, for the keeping of the peace between
local elements highly hostile to itself, upon
Jewish soldiers and Jewish courage. It depends
upon British soldiers, British organization and
British sacrifice. Those who have promoted the
Zionist experiment have deliberately chosen the
very worst moment for such a folly.
Granted that whoever was to be the Protector
he must be a friendly Protector, no worse solution
could have been devised. A little nation is always
morally guaranteed in its independence, if only by
the balance of the greater nations. The violation
of the neutrality of Belgium offers nothing of a
rule ; on the contrary, it was an odious exception.
And an exception it would have been just as much
242 THE JEWS
if the neutrality had not been officially guaranteed
under Prussia's own hand. The smaller nations,
of which the modern world is full, will have, we
may be very certain, a long lease of life. The larger
nations envy but applaud their security and happi-
ness. They will not be allowed to disappear. The
same, I think, would be true of the Jewish national
seat, could it be established, inhabited wholly or
mainly by men of the Jewish race, religion and
culture; presenting to the world the same aspect
as does, for instance, Denmark to-day. But to
depend for its establishment upon the superior
power, upon the military and financial sacrifice, of
another and totally different people, is a challenge
and a provocation. It is the building of the pyramid
upwards from its apex. It is an experiment in the
most unstable of unstable equilibriums.
The matter is, of course, being discussed every-
where from the point of view of Great Britain, and
nowhere more eagerly than among those who have
to do the policing and the armed protection. But
we are not here concerned with the ill effects such a
situation must have on Great Britain effects so
ill that the experiment as a merely British Protec-
torate is bound to break down we are rather con-
cerned with the effect it may have upon the Jews
themselves. No great nation will sacrifice its
foreign policy, will admit a point of acute weakness,
simply to please the Jews. Sooner or later such a
nation is bound to say: " We cannot sacrifice our
interests to yours. Look after yourselves." And
that is where the peril to the Jews of this system,
a protectorate, comes in.
If there were any reason to suppose a natural
alliance between the British Army and the Jews ;
ZIONISM 243
if we could imagine British officers and men taking
a natural pleasure in ousting the Arab and making
way for the Jew, it would be another matter. If
there were something in the nature of things which
made that alliance permanent and stable, if the
Jews were a fully accepted part of the British
Commonwealth as are, for instance, the Scots or
the Welsh, some permanent arrangement might be
possible. But they are nothing of the sort. The
position is wholly unnatural. It cannot last. And
if it cannot last with the British connection, how
should it last with any other? How shall the
transition be made from a British Protectorate
to another protectorate ? Or how, seeing what
violent hatreds have already been roused by the
mere beginnings of the experiment, shall the con-
flict which makes the protectorate necessary be
avoided ?
So far the dislike of the position, which is very
far-reaching, and already very deep in England,
is a passive dislike. No English soldier has yet
been killed ; there has been but little necessity, as
yet, to repress the Arab and create hostility, though
even what little necessity there has been was odious
to the troops concerned. But things cannot remain
in that state. The conflict is inevitable. When
the conflict comes the feeling which has hitherto
been passive will become active. People will not
tolerate the loss of sons and brothers in a quarrel
which is none of theirs, which cannot possibly
strengthen the British State ; which, if anything,
must weaken it ; which is felt to be precarious and
ephemeral, and which will be undertaken against
those with whom British sympathy naturally lies,
and in favour of those with whom the average
244 THE JEWS
soldier and citizen unlike the professional politi-
cian has no ties and no sympathy.
The matter can be very plainly put thus:
If a Zionist experiment is necessary, or advisable,
then let it be made in such a fashion that it can be
dependent upon Jewish police and a Jewish army
alone. Let it not rely upon a foreign protectorate,
which will not last long, which is a weakness to
the directing power, and which creates a false
position.
If it be answered that the Jews are not capable
of producing such an army or such a police, that
they would inevitably be defeated and oppressed
by the hostile and more warlike majority among
whom they would find themselves, then let them
make the experiment elsewhere. But it is certain
that the present form of the new Protectorate is
the most perilous form which could have been
chosen for it, so far as the Jews themselves are
concerned. I appeal confidently to the near future
to confirm this judgment.
From one most poignant aspect of the matter
which we all have in mind I deliberately abstain
I mean the effect of the experiment upon Christian
and Mohammedan feelings throughout the world
of an attempt to establish Jewish control over the
Holy Places. I abstain because of the emotions
aroused by it, which are violent and universal, and
are of the sort I have deliberately determined, as
my Preface has informed the reader, to keep out of
this essay. Things indeed are not yet at the point
of open quarrel in this most perilous of all the
results of Zionism. We must trust for a solution
before it is too late, but that solution will not be
reached if we select for discussion matters upon
ZIONISM 245
which there can be no agreement, and on which
there is now aroused the most passionate feeling.
Still, though I abstain from discussing that point, I
would beg the Jewish readers of this my book to bear
it in mind. If they believe the religious emotions
to be dead in the modern world, or even to be lessen-
ing, they may find themselves terribly disillusioned.
I also refrain from making comment here I have
made it strongly enough elsewhere upon the
strange selection made by the Jews for their first
ruler of the Arabs and Christians in Palestine. I
will do no more than to say that a desire to shield
the less worthy specimens of one's race is natural
and even praiseworthy. One may even take a
certain glory in that one is able to protect them
from outsiders. But to give them too great a
prominence is a mistake, and it is indeed deplorable
that of the whole world of Jews from crowds of
Jews eminent in administration, and political science,
known for their upright dealing and blameless
careers Mr. Balfour's Jewish advisers (whoever
they were) should have pitched on the author of
the Marconi contract and the spokesman of the
famous declaration in the House of Commons that
no politician had touched Marconi shares.
OUR DUTY
CHAPTER XII
OUR DUTY
THE solution which I propose, which I believe
could be made stable, and which I further believe
is the only stable one, demands a greater, a more
necessary effort upon our side than upon that of
our guests.
It is the average man who must do his duty in
the matter, and it is upon him that the responsibility
will fall, if we take up once again that wretched
sequence of ill- ease, persecution, reaction, which has
marked so many centuries.
We are the vast majority, we are the organism
within which this small minority moves. We are,
or could be if we chose, the makers of our own
laws, and we are certainly the makers of our own
political moods.
I know it is the custom to throw all the respon-
sibility upon the other side, to be perpetually
devising instruments for their guidance which soon
become instruments for their oppression, and in
general to imagine a problem wherein the part
of the European is purely negative and all the work
has to be done by the Jewish stranger.
That attitude is not only false but grossly undig-
nified. When men accuse some one weaker than
themselves of interference with, and even of
249
250 THE JEWS
acquiring power over, them they condemn them-
selves. It is in the main our fault if an equilibrium
has so rarely been reached in all these sixty genera-
tions of debate. For however alien, however
irritant the foreign body be, it is we who have in
our hands the solvent of that irritant and of relieving
the strain which it causes.
Here let me recall at the risk of repetition (for
repetition is necessary to lucidity in such argu-
ments) the logical process with which I opened this
essay. I say that the vast majority, the fixed race
through which in fluid and nomadic form Israel
goes moving from century to century, is not free to
discharge its responsibility by any one of those
attempted solutions which I have condemned.
No man, I trust, will have the cynicism to say that
mere persecution, let alone its horrible extreme, is
or should be a solution. No man can predict the
same of exile either. No man can discharge our
responsibility by pretending that any solution
arrived at must be for our good alone and may
disregard that of those who live among us.
It is a statement one hears frequently enough
that the masters of house have alone to decide what
shall be done under their roof : that the interloper,
the alien element, has no standing and no right to
complain of whatever measures may be taken for
the protection of the household. The thing so
put sounds plausible. It is essentially false. It is
comparable to the argument applied to private
property that because private property is a right,
and that because a man " may do what he likes
with his own," therefore he may use it to the mani-
fest hurt of others. Moreover, the analogy is false ;
for when a man is talking of " the master of the
OUE DUTY 251
house " having the right in his household to decide
its own way of living and of treating its guests, he
is considering a very small unit in a great com-
munity; his household in the whole nation: a
little body which, if it discharge or in any other way
deal with something alien to itself, will inflict no
great injury upon that foreign body, since there is
all the world for it to turn to outside. But in the
relations between the Jew and Christendom, or the
Jew and Islam, the parallel fails. It is precisely
because there is no " outside" to which the exile
can turn that a duty is imposed on us.
It is true indeed that when a small and alien
minority assumes to dictate the policy of the rest,
to regard its own advantages alone and subordinate
to those advantages the life of all, the claim is
grotesque and must be disallowed. But we should
remember upon the other side that it is only by
exaggerating its claim that a minority can live at
all. It is only by fierce insistence upon its right
to survive that its survival is guaranteed. We can
arrive at justice in this matter by the process of
putting ourselves in the shoes of those in relation
to whom we propose to act.
Put yourself in the shoes of the Jew and ask how
this doctrine of " doing what one likes with one's
own" and being " the master of one's own house-
hold" would look to you.
A public example which very rightly made a
stir a few months before this book was published,
may serve as text. A learned and distinguished
Jew, Dr. Oscar Levy, a man who was an asset to
any community, was turned out of the country
under circumstances which many of my readers
will recall. He pleaded with perfect justice that as
252 THE JEWS
a Jew such an exile left him homeless ; that the
original country of which he was nominally a
citizen (under the broken-down fiction that Jews
can be Germans, or Austrians, or what not, and
cease to be themselves) would not have him ; that
his interests, his livelihood had attached him to this
country ; he had never hidden his true nationality
nor changed his name, nor used any of those subter-
fuges which, even when excusable, are dangerous
and contemptible in so many of his compatriots.
There was no conceivable reason why such rigour
should be used against this man, save indeed that
he was a Jew.
Put yourself in his shoes and see how the thing
looks. There is no nation to which you could have
returned: there is no society to receive you as a
member of it. You are not permitted to remain
in the atmosphere with which you have grown
familiar, in the surroundings which have become
those of your later life, and your consonance with
which it is too late for you to change. Could there
be a grosser cruelty or a grosser injustice ? It is
the very core of the whole problem that somewhere
the Jew must be harboured, and therefore to some
one of us the question must be put, " Will you
harbour him, and if so upon what terms ? " If each
man answer, " No, I will not," then all collectively
become oppressors. It is no answer to say, " These
men are not of us, and therefore they may conspire
against us," or " Their interests are divergent from
ours and therefore may and do clash with ours."
All that is granted. That is merely stating the
problem, not solving it. What do we say in daily
life of men who merely state their grievances, harp
upon them, and make no effort to put them right ?
i
OUR DUTY 253
What do we think of men who perpetually complain
of something naturally weaker than themselves,
make no effort to understand its necessities and
attempt only to rid themselves of the nuisance
without considering reciprocal duty and mutual
relations ? The same should we think of those who
so act towards the Jewish community in our midst
which, for all its domination and exaggerated
modern power, is ultimately at our mercy, far
weaker than we are in numbers and situation.
Without further elaboration of what should be an
obvious political and moral principle, let us consider
our part in the task.
It consists, I conceive, in two very different
determinations : two very different but allied lines
of conduct to which we must pledge ourselves.
The first, until recently the most difficult, is the
determination to speak of the Jewish people as
openly, as continuously, with as much interest,
with as close an examination as we speak of any
other foreign body with which we are brought in
contact.
The second, which will perhaps be the more
difficult duty to practise in the future, will be to
avoid, in the individual public recognition of those
with whom we must live, all futile anger and all
mere reaction. I mean by mere reaction, blind
reaction. The instinctive thrusting back against
a thing which presses on us, the uncalculated and
animal return blow, the consequences of which,
either to ourselves or to others, are not weighed
when it is delivered; the futile complaint, the
futile rage, the futile cruelty.
Unless those two duties are undertaken together,
unless the determination to practise both be of
254 THE JEWS
equal weight, the solution I propose will fail. To
discuss the problem presented by the presence of
the Jewish people, to talk of them as one would of
any other, openly and frankly, to interest oneself
in their history and in their present doings: all
this is only to aggravate the trouble if we use that
open dealing for the purpose of doing them a hurt,
or if, in the course of it, we allow ourselves (merely
from irritation or contrast, from the sense which
all must have of opposition to things alien) to react
against them without consideration of the immedi-
ate and ultimate consequences not only to them-
selves but to us.
Conversely, the determination to regard their
interests and to avoid every possible occasion of
conflict, to hold a just measure with them, is quite
useless if we falsify the whole relation by secrecy
and false convention.
The moment that comes in, there comes in with
it a secret dissatisfaction with oneself and with
the whole situation. The position is falsified, the
seed of animosity greatly stimulated, the danger
of mutual contempt made inevitable.
Now let us look at these two branches of what
we have to do in the matter, and see what difficulties
lie in the way.
In the way of frankly recognizing, examining,
taking an open interest in the Jewish minority in
our midst there lie three very powerful obstacles.
First the inherited convention of polite society;
secondly, and much the most powerful, fear ; and
thirdly, the very reputable desire to avoid
offence.
The first of these, the fear of convention, has
many roots the necessity for harmony in a leisured
OUR DUTY 255
life, that is, the desire to avoid friction even at the
expense of truth, the mere momentum of a quiet
habit, the fear of misunderstanding which may
come from one side casting ridicule upon the other,
which may offend the person whom we have mis-
understood, or make us ridiculous in his eyes and
those of our audience.
There is also, of course, as a cause, more powerful
than any other, the force which lies behind all
convention, the force which makes a man take off
his hat in a church, which forbids his walking with-
out boots in the street on the driest day, that is,
the pressure of general practice. But the thing to
realize is that in this form I mean as distinct from
any feeling of fear or of charity the thing is a
convention and a convention only. Difficult as it
is to break with conventions, unless this convention
is broken once and for all, the Jewish problem
remains with us unsolved and growing in acuteness
and peril.
You can meet an Irishman and discuss with him
the conditions of his nation. You can ask an
Italian when he was last in Italy, or congratulate a
Frenchman upon his acquisition of your tongue or
tell him that it is difficult for him to understand
your own customs : but a convention arose under
the Liberal fiction to which I have devoted so
much space in the earlier part of this book that to
do any of these very natural things in the case of a
Jew is monstrous. Your audience is shocked if you
ask some learned Jew at a public table a question
upon his national literature or history. It is a
solecism to refer to his nationality at all, save
perhaps now and then in terms of foolish praise
in nine times out of ten praise not to the point and
256 THE JEWS
not desired by its recipient. And even praise must
be approached most gingerly. You may not ask
a Jew in London, however keen your desire for
information, whether he had cousins in Lithuania
or Galicia who have told him of the conditions of
those distressed countries. You may not ask him
when his family came to England, nor, if he be a
recent arrival, what he thinks of the country. The
whole thing is taboo.
More than this : you must, you are expected (or
were until quite recently expected) to emphasize
in a most extravagant manner the complete identity
of your Jewish guest with the people among whom
he lives. I do not take offence if some chance
acquaintance, noting my French name, talks to me
about France, and is interested in my experience
as a conscript long ago in that country. Mr.
Eedmond did not feel himself insulted when those
he met in London discussed Irish matters with him,
from the most acute difficulty in politics, to the
most general allusion to the Abbey Theatre. The
editor of an Italian review visiting England is not
shocked if you ask him when he left Florence, nor
are those around you horrified at the ill- breeding of
your question. But in the matter of the Jew there
stands this convention cutting you off from any
such straightforward and simple way of dealing
with a fellow-being. That convention, I say, must
be broken down if we are to get any results at all
and to establish a permanent peace.
The thing was not, of course, entirely irrational
in origin. No custom is. It was to be excused
upon several grounds.
First, there was the fact that many people were
known to cherish so strong an hostility to Jews that
OUR DUTY 257
to emphasize the Jewish character of anyone
present might awaken that hostility.
Then there was the peculiar rapid transition both
of Jewish movements and of Jewish fortunes. In
the case I have suggested, of asking a London Jew
whether he had relatives in Galicia or Lithuania,
you might be stumbling upon relations much
poorer than himself in the East End of London ;
or, again, you might seem to be emphasizing the
nomadic character of the race and thereby also
emphasizing the contrast between it and our
own.
But much the strongest excuse for the convention
was the well-founded idea that its exercise pleased
the Jews themselves. Men avoided direct mention
of Jewish nationality because it was felt that such
direct mention was almost an insult. It was a
thing which the Jew in whose presence you foun
yourself desired to have kept in the background ;
and though we might not understand why he
desired it, yet we respected his desire as we do that
of anyone with whom we wish to preserve har-
monious relations. Most men, for instance, are
indifferent upon, say, the matter of smoking. Most
men are quite at their ease when they are asked
whether they smoke or not, and if they do, whether
they prefer this or that brand of tobacco. But now
and then one comes across a man who, from some
accident of training (as, for instance, a man
whose mother brought him up to think smoking
a mortal sin), does not like to have it alluded
to.
I myself know the case of a man of the highest
culture and of considerable social position to whom
you may not say anything about pigs either in
258 THE JEWS
connection with farming or in connection with food ;
for his sympathies are Mohammedan. In these
exceptional cases, when we know of our guest's
particular desire, we yield to it for the sake of
harmony and of right living. So is it in this matter
of the former convention against alluding to Jewish
nationality or Jewish interests in any form.
Whether the Jews were wise or not to cherish that
convention, as they undoubtedly did, does not
concern this part of my argument. I am talking
of our duty and not of theirs. But I say that
unless the convention is softened and at last dis-
solved, nothing can be done. Both parties should
know that it only does harm. It renders stilted
and absurd all our relations; it fosters that
suspicion of secrecy which I have insisted upon as
the chief irritant in those relations, and it creates a
feeling of exception, of oddity, which is the very
worst service that could be rendered to the Jews
themselves.
Some little time ago the convention went so far
that even a mention, a neutral nay, a laudatory
mention, of anything Jewish in a general company
led to an immediate awkwardness. Men looked
over oheir shoulders, women gave downward glances
right and left. A sort of hunt began, to see whether
anyone present could possibly in any remote
connection be offended by the monstrous deed.
If a man said, " What a poet Heine was and how
thoroughly Jewish is his irony ! " and said it in a
room full of people, the adjective " Jewish" acted
like a pistol shot- could anything be more absurd !
Yet so it was.
But the point I make is not against the
absurdity of this convention but against its peril.
OUR DUTY 259
It is an obstacle to all right handling of what is
becoming daily a more and more insistent and
acute difficulty.
It is obvious that the getting rid of such a con-
vention is not to be effected by violent methods, nor
immediately. But our duty is to accelerate its
decline and, within reason, to enlarge every oppor-
tunity for treating the Jewish nationality precisely
as one treats any other. I mean precisely as one
treats any other in conversation or in writing. We
all know the insane type which loves to break con-
vention merely because it is a convention, and we
shall certainly have to be on our guard against this
sort of person in the near future, as this particular
convention begins to break down. But without
encouraging such eccentricities there is ample room
for an increasing ease in the recognition of what
after all we know to be reality, a reality which
requires open discussion for the good of us all. The
danger is lest even this merely conventional obstacle
should by too long a resistance dam up forces which
tend to break it down and therefore lest, when it is
pulled down, we should admit the other extreme of
licence, with its opportunity for insult and damage.
That is what has happened in the case of other much
more reasonable Victorian conventions, and we
must not have it happen in the case of the conven-
tion which for so long forbade us to admit that a
Jew was a Jew or to take any open interest, when he
was present, in the things which he himself thinks
the most interesting of all.
And if anyone shall answer that convention is
necessary, lest on its decline open hostility should
follow, I can only say that this is to despair of
any equitable solution at all. But my whole thesis
260 THE JEWS
in this book is that such a solution need not yet
be despaired of.
There is one more thing to be said in this matter
of the old taboo. However long it may linger in the
small educated class, it has gone for ever among
the populace, and it is the popular instinct we shall
have mainly to deal with in the difficult times ahead
of us.
The populace in this country talks upon Jewish
matters with a frankness which would astonish the
drawing-rooms, and has so talked upon them for a
generation past ever since the great novel influx
of poor Jews began to pour into our towns. It not
only talks thus openly to and of Jews upon its own
level, but it is thoroughly alive to the presence and
power of Jews in government. Those who think
that a continuance of the convention can put off
the necessity for a solution would be disillusioned
if they would spend a few days east of Aldgate,
and mix with their fellow- citizens there.
Allied to this obstacle of convention is the very
real obstacle of charity.
Now we are here dealing not with a positive
charity but with a negative one and with a form of
charity uncommonly like slackness.
The man who honestly thinks that any allusion
to Jewish races in contemporary art, history or
letters in the presence of a Jew is offensive and
therefore to be avoided, from goodness of heart, and
who also practises the same virtue where any other
foreigner is concerned is rare indeed. There are
such men, for men of exceptional goodness coupled
with exceptional stupidity are to be found. But the
excuse of charity as it is generally put forward is
not wholly ingenuous. "Where it is ingenuous our
OUR DUTY 261
reply to-day must be that even at the risk of
occasional ill- ease, the danger of offence must be
risked; for unless we risk it there is increasing
peril of a much greater offence against justice.
For whatever reason open discussion is burked, even
for the reason of charity, we only put off the evil
day, and charity so used may be compared to the
charity which refuses to take action in any other
critical problem of increasing gravity. The charity
which hesitates to control the supplies of a spend-
thrift, or to wage a defensive war in a just cause,
or to defend an oppressed man at the risk of
quarrelling with his oppressor, is a charity mis-
directed.
But, as I have said, with much the greater part
of men who plead this motive the plea is, if they
would only examine their own consciences, found to
be false. And the test of its falsity will be apparent
when the convention slackens. When it is no
longer conventional to avoid all mention of Jews,
how many will remain silent merely from the love
of their fellow-men ? One might go further and
say that when the convention has gone, any need
for this kind of charity will go with it. There is
an exception, of course, in the case of the man
whose dislike of Jews is so violent that he fears
himself if he gives any rein to his tongue. That
mania is exceptional ; but where it is found certainly
its victim will do well to keep silence. If a man
cannot mention the Hebrew alphabet without a
sneer, or the economics of Ricardo without betray-
ing his ill feeling for Ricardo' s lineage, then
certainly he had better hold his tongue when Jews
are there. So, too, a Frenchman who raves against
the English had far better not discuss the British
262 THE JEWS
Constitution or the genius of Newton in any society
where an Englishman may be present.
There remains the chief obstacle that of fear.
There is no doubt that the strongest force still re-
straining an expression of hostility to the Jew is fear.
In a sense, of course, there is a " fear " of breaking
convention but that is fear only in metaphor.
I mean not this, but the very real dread of con-
sequences : the feeling that an expression of
hostility to Jewish power may bring definite evils
on the individual guilty of it, and a panic lest those
evils should fall upon him. How strong this feeling
is, anyone can testify who has explored, as I have,
this most insistent of modern political ills; and
doubtless the greater part of my non- Jewish readers
will recall examples to the point.
It is a fear of two consequences, social and
economic, and even of both combined. Men dread
lest hostility to the Jew Domination should bring
them into the grip of some unknown but suspected
world- wide power some would call it a conspiracy
which can destroy the individual who shall be
so rash as to challenge it. Some perhaps have
gone to the length the insane length of reading
the word "destroy" in its literal sense and of
fearing for their lives. Such an illusion is laughable.
But very many more are affected by the reasonable
conception that they will have against them, if they
provoke it, an intelligent, combined action which
they cannot meet because there is no organization
upon their side: because it is international;
because there is behind it a great intensity of
feeling; because through finance it controls the
political machines of all the nations, because it is
all-powerful in the Press and so forth.
OUR DUTY 263
They dread, I say, the social consequences. They
also (and that with more definition and more sense)
dread the economic consequences. They recognize
(they also exaggerate) the grip of the Jew over
finance. They conceive that if they speak they will
be dragged down, their enterprises ruined, their
credit dissolved. And that is the most powerful
instrument which can be brought to bear. When
supernatural motives disappear the strongest
motive remaining after appetite is avarice; and
avarice is more universal than appetite and more
continuous. Nor is it only avarice which is at
work here, but also the respectable desire for
security. There are to-day innumerable men who
would express publicly on Jews what they con-
tinually express in private, but who conceal their
feelings for fear that their salaries may be lost or
their modest enterprises wrecked, their investments
lowered, and their position ruined. Above them
are a lesser number, equally convinced that their
large fortunes would be in peril were they so to act.
The characteristic of all this feeling is two-
fold. In the first place, as would seem to be the
case with convention, though in a much greater
degree, it dams up and enormously increases the
latent force of anger against Jewish power both
real and imaginary. It is like the piling up of a
head of water when a river valley is obstructed, or
like the introducing of resistance into an electric
current. The suppression of resentment, though
that suppression is the act of the men who them-
selves feel the resentment and not directly of their
opponents, is a fierce irritant and accounts for the
high pressure at which attack escapes when once
it is loosened.
264 THE JEWS
I speak only of hostility and of attack, for it is
in these least rational examples that the strength
of the thing is to be found. But it applies also to
mere discussion. There is hardly anyone to-day
who does not desire to discuss as an urgent political
problem the present position, the present power,
the present disabilities, the present claims of Israel.
But for one that will openly discuss these things
there are ten who, in varying degrees, forbid them-
selves so plain a freedom of speech in dread of what
consequences might follow. It has, like all panic,
a ridiculous element. It is informed by the most
absurd illusions ; it suffers from grotesque imagin-
ings and phantasms. In some this dread of the
Jewish power has very plainly passed the line which
divides the stable from the unstable mind and even
the sane from the insane. But it is none the less
a formidable element in our problem. This
obstacle, much more than that of convention, bears
a character of rigidity. It works for a certain
time, then it breaks down and releases a flood.
That is why the first expressions of hostility in
our time were so exaggerated and ill- proportioned.
That is why so many of them were plainly mad.
This very character of exaggeration, this very
wildness in proportion, rendered those against
whom the attack was delivered more contemptuous
of it than they should have been.
The forerunners of the present movement I
mean, of the movement hostile to Israel were not
calculated to excite the respect of their opponent
or even to carry with them the men on their own
side. They lacked that " common" sense which is
the first quality of leadership. For the power of
leadership implies a soul in common with those
OUR DUTY 265
who are led. The enthusiast can lead permanently,
but the extravagant man never for long.
I say that these first attacks were on that account
despised: they were unduly despised by those
whom they menaced.
There lay in reserve behind all the exaggeration
and wildness a great bulk of very different opinion ;
the opinion of men normal in their appreciation
of values and of proportion, not given to " seeing
things," fully in touch with reality ; men who know
that they have hitherto only been silent through
the action of fear, who despise themselves on that
account and who are the more ready to act. For
the sense of fear not only degrades but angers:
at least in our race. The European who admits to
himself that he has restrained an instinct not from
religion, nor from a general sense of right, but from
cowardice, is always angry with himself and awaits
the moment when he can take his own revenge
upon his own past and clear himself of reproach
in his own eyes.
Herein lies the peril to Israel of such a state of
affairs. But with that I am not here concerned.
I am only concerned with its effect upon ourselves.
So long as we degrade ourselves, so long as we
humiliate ourselves by our own cowardice, so long
as we shirk all reasonable discussion, let alone all
expression of hostility because we dread the con-
sequences at the hands of our opponents, so long
there are present in rising intensity two evil things :
first, the postponement of the right solution ;
secondly, the turning of a reasoned policy into mere
hatred with all the consequences that flow from
such evil emotion.
The longer we maintain whatever remains of that
266 THE JEWS
barrier to free speech (happily it is already crumb-
ling) the longer do we produce the two fatal results
of postponing justice and of creating enmity. The
destruction of that barrier, the ridding of ourselves
of fear in the matter, is, as is always the case in
the exercising of this unmanly thing, a matter for
individual effort. As the proverb goes, " Some one
must bell the cat," which is another way of saying
that if each man waits upon his neighbour, things
will only grow worse and worse.
It is for each in his place, before it is too late, to
approach the Jewish problem and to discuss it
openly ; to preface that discussion by a frank interest
and a general expression upon all those things
in the minority which directly concern its relations
with the majority; to deal with the Jewish nation
exactly as one would with any other.
It used to be a dictum in those who pleaded a
lifetime ago for the open criticism of Scripture, that
" the Bible should be approached like any other
book." l The result is not of good augury to my
present argument and I rather dread the parallel ;
but since the phrase is well, known I will use it as a
model. It is time, I say, to be rid of treating the
Jewish nation as something closed, mysterious and
secret. Let us treat it f ' like any other nation. ' ' It
is no wonder if men, moved by nothing but a blind
hatred, feel some hesitation upon the consequence
of that hatred. But I am convinced that if we on
our side get rid of this absurd modern fear, take the
1 I beg leave to introduce an anecdote. An undergraduate
once said to Dr. Jowett, the Master of Balliol, " I take up
the Gospels and treat them as an ordinary book." The
Master answered : " Did you not find them a very extra-
ordinary book ? " So it will prove, I think, with the fascina-
tion of Israel.
OUR DUTY 267
Jew in his right proportions, rid our mind of
exaggeration in his regard especially of the con-
ception of some inhuman ability capable of conduct-
ing a plot of diabolical ingenuity and magnitude
we shall be met from the other side.
The Jews are not the only force which is inter-
national nor the only international force the dread
of which has disturbed men's judgments. They
are not the only international force which has some
degree of organization and cohesion. If you desire
to vent your active dislike of the Scotch or of the
Irish you must be prepared for a certain amount
of Scotch or Irish hostility. You will come across
something of an organization and suffer accord-
ingly ; but if you cherish the conception of a vast
subterranean force, Scotch or Irish, watching you
with a malignant power and capable of your destruc-
tion, you are, I think, out of the real world.
If you desire to vent your active dislike of the
Catholic Church you will find ubiquitous opposi-
tion. But if you conclude from this that you are
at grips with a monster then you are out of touch
with reality.
So it is, surely, with this dread of the Jewish
power, which has sullied so many men's minds,
postponed the right discussion of the problem and
nourished ill-ease everywhere. If we simply
act as though that dread were despicable like any
other dread, and turned to perfectly open discussion
of the whole affair, even to an open expression of
hostility where hostility is deserved, we shall be
the better for it. In any case it is our duty to
ourselves as well as to the State to get rid of fear
in the business, for until we are rid of it no
advance towards a solution can be made.
THEIR DUTY
CHAPTER XIII
THEIR DUTY
WHERE positive causes have been found for an
evil it is obvious that the cure of that evil consists
in the removal of the causes, in so far as they can
be removed.
In the particular case of the friction between the
Jewish community and their hosts the causes of
that friction are the foolish and dangerous habit of
secrecy and the irritating expression of superiority.
The causes the Jew can remove if he will. The
matter is in his own hands : we can do nothing :
he can do everything.
But beyond this negative duty which is incum-
bent upon the Jews if they would achieve a peaceful
issue of the perils which menace their future, there
is a positive action also incumbent upon them.
They must foster, they must even propose, institu-
tions which will the better mark them off from a
society not their own and restore to them the dignity
of a nation. I shall in the last chapter of this
book contend that the policy leading to a solution
must repose not upon direct laws of our own imagin-
ing, not upon reactions which will almost certainly
prove oppressive, and almost certainly be evaded,
but upon a general spirit recognizing the separate
nationality of the Jews. But though this is true of
271
272 THE JEWS
every Christian Western State in which they find
themselves, it is not true of their own nation.
They on their side may well come forward with
propositions which they have the capacity for
making, because they will know how to frame them
(as we cannot) after a fashion consistent with their
own dignity and their own tradition. There is a
beginning of such things already present in the
Jewish schools, the Jewish guardians and the con-
siderable separate organization which the Jews
have openly set up for their community in this
country. These beginnings have but to be extended.
Those who are openly hostile to Jews will say
that any proposals coming from their side will con-
ceal a trap. " This people " (they say) " will always
suggest things which will seem innocent enough and
apparently do no more than define their position
plainly for the future ; but we shall find ourselves
caught in an obligation and the Jews more our
masters than ever. They will,' ' say these ob j ectors,
"remain as they are to-day, and while they claim
every privilege as a separate community, they will
also insist upon the full citizenship which is incom-
patible with this attitude. We shall find that,
whatever institutions we ask them to frame, those
institutions will work not only in their favour but
also heavily against us."
I doubt it. The special Jewish institutions
already at work have no such effect. On the con-
trary, they already relieve the strain. One of those
institutions, for instance, is the Jewish press : the
newspapers specially devoted to Jewish interests
and acting as spokesmen for Jewish ideas. They
are not always as polite as they might be. I have
had myself at times to lodge a complaint against the
THEIE DUTY 273
way in which they have treated sincere efforts for
the settlement of our difficulties and an honest
attempt at finding a way out. They have left a
handle to their enemies sometimes by too insistent
or, as those enemies would call it, too arrogant a
claim, and they do write now and then as though we,
the vast majority, had no rights and the only thing
worth considering was the advancement of their own
people.
But,, after all, it would be absurd to expect
anything else. A small minority vigorously fighting
its own hand must exaggerate its claim; an organism
defending itself against very heavy pressure from
without cannot but appear aggressive, and I shall
always maintain that the presence of an openly
Jewish institution speaking for Jewish interests, no
matter how insistently, is an excellent thing. It
presents a healthy contrast with the converse
attempt to present Jewish arguments under the
cover of neutrality, and to spread Jewish ideas
anonymously through what are very far from
being neutral agents.
If I be asked what institutions I have in mind I
can only repeat that it is for the Jews themselves
to make the first proposal, but I suggest an
extension of the system, which is already present in
embryo, whereby disputes between Jews shall be
arbitrated before a Jewish tribunal. Not only its
extension but its confirmation at the request of the
Jews themselves, might be a good thing. It would
also not be a bad thing if some time hence when
things were ripe for the change disputes between
Jews and non- Jews could be tried in Courts where
the special character of such disputes, the distinctive
difference between them and disputes between the
274 THE JEWS
fellow- citizens of the country in which they live,
should come before tribunals of a mixed character.
To attempt this to-day would, of course, be a very
new departure in procedure, indeed a revolutionary
one ; and there is no prospect of it for a long while ;
but with the growing number among us, and the
growing influence, of Jews it will, I think, when it
does come at last, be of advantage to both parties.
It would be fatal if it were imposed upon them. It
would not be accepted. It would not work. But if
it were suggested by the Jewish community spon-
taneously, and started and developed by them, it
would succeed. And it would add a great deal to the
relief already experienced for the functioning of the
other institutions I have mentioned.
There is little more to be said under this head.
Apart from the duty of open dealing and this
specific policy of fostering separate institutions we
have no claim to press.
All the main part of the mutual Duty is on our
side. Therefore have I given it the space it seems to
deserve and confined to no more than these few
lines correlative suggestions for those who, after all,
are not responsible to us for their actions and may
properly resent the airing of our views on the do-
mestic details of their alien organization.
VARIOUS THEORIES
CHAPTER XIV
VARIOUS THEORIES
BEFORE approaching my conclusion it may be well
to review certain subsidiary theories which I have
not hitherto touched in my discussion, because they
stand apart from its argument.
There is a whole group of historical and other
theories upon the position of the Jews which either
imply that there is no problem, or if there is one that
it cannot be solved, or even that if there is a problem
it is of a sort that does not need solution, because
that solution would be of no practical value.
There come in the first place those theories upon
the international position of the Jews which are
frankly non- rational, and which vary from those
which may be defended with some show of reason
iioin the history of the past, to those which are
wholly imaginary. None of these, even though
some one of them should be true, can find much
place here because none lends itself to discussion.
Thus there is the conception of a curse; the
conception that Israel must, until its conversion,
suffer a perpetual pilgrimage and perpetual hos-
tility. It is a statement bound up with that other
popular prophecy that in the last days Israel will be
reconciled with the Universal Church. Those who
have these ideas at the back of their minds (they are
277
278 THE JEWS
more numerous than modern thought would like to
admit), at heart despair of any solution, and would
not attempt to urge it with any hope of success.
They say, " The thing is fated and must continue."
But even they, I think, must admit that just as
philosophy admits a paradox of determination and
free will, so political effort must admit a paradox of
foreseen failures and our duty, in spite of them, to
aim at a political good.
Whether it be indeed true or not, that recon-
ciliation is impossible and that in the long run the
quarrel must drag itself out, it is certainly pro-
foundly immoral to look on at the spectacle with no
attempt to ameliorate its evils.
There is again the theory (which I mention in
passing and leave to its adherents) that the British
and the Jews are in some way mysteriously allied by
Providence, so that any solution which does not give
the fullest satisfaction to Israel (no matter at what
cost to poor Japhet) is treason. These people
mystically regard Britain as the handmaid of Jewry,
and there is a section of them who further regard
their fellow-countrymen as the ten lost tribes. I
have in my library some specimens of their litera-
ture.
There is an opposite and, to me, detestable theory
(but I must mention it because it exists), that the
antagonism hitherto found perpetually, whether
latent or active, between this people and the world
about them is the use of the one as a necessary and
divine oppressor of the other. To those who hold
such a theory I can only reply that two can play
at that game, and it certainly absolves those whom
they would oppress from any obligation whatever of
seeking a solution on their side. If a man thinks he
VARIOUS THEORIES 279
can do harm to Israel wantonly, without suffering
the reproaches of his own conscience, he is in error ;
and I confess that were I free (as I am not in a book
of discussion and argument) to indulge in mere
affirmation I should be inclined to say that those
who set out with this remarkable object in view will
catch a Tartar.
There is the opposite theory that a special and
Divine protection is still exercised, not only for the
preservation of the Jews but for judgment upon
their enemies. That theory, I think, lies at the back
of many a Jewish action in history and of much
Jewish policy to-day. Non- rational, religious in
origin, it is, I fancy, to very many of the race which
has suffered so much, a consolation and a support.
Now all these non- rational theories (I use the
word without any bad connotation: the non-
rational what is often inaccurately called the
mystical attitude towards any problem may well
be more practical than the rational approach to it)
I leave on one side as improper to rational discussion.
I have heard it maintained, again, by both parties
to this debate, that the presence of an alien force,
migratory, intense, full of tradition, experience and
cohesion, was essential to the height and the activity
of our own civilization.
These are not content to discover individual
instances of Jewish excellence in the mass around
them, or to extend the renown of individual Jewish
genius. They are rather concerned with the general
proposition that some such flux is necessary to the
full action of a high and diverse culture. They tell
us that but for the Jew the civilization of Europe
would have grown torpid, would have settled into a
fixed groove, incapable of change and of creative
280 THE JEWS
progress. The Jew, by this theory, is regarded as a
sort of activating principle, who, whether as an
irritant at the worst, or an inspiration at the best,
keeps all our European life agog, and is necessary to
its continuous business. These also incline to see
the Jew at the origin of every great movement in
European thought. They see him indirectly pro-
ducing the vast transformation of the Eoman Em-
pire from a pagan, not indeed to a Jew but to a
Christian, that is (in their eyes) to an Oriental mood.
They see the Jew at the root of the great revolu-
tionary philosophy which springs from the eleventh
century and reaches its culmination in the great
scholastics of the thirteenth. They insist upon the
name of Averroes (Ibn Roshd), the philosopher of
the twelfth century, the Kadi of Cordova : the
exponent of Aristotle, the expositor whom the
Jews preserved : upon the great Moses ben Maimon,
our Maimonides. These also put Nicolas de Lyra
at the root of the Reformation: " Si Lyra non
lyr asset Luther non saltasset." But I may remind
them that the Jewish character of this man is at
least doubtful, that he was of the religious Orders of
Christendom.
These also will certainly and with some reason
ascribe to Jewish influence the great economic
revolution of the seventeenth century, which has
been followed by so vast an extension of wealth and
of population, though hardly of human happiness.
Now for all this there is certainly something to
be said as an aspect of historical truth. How far
it may be extended to cover, as its exponents would
make it cover, the whole historical field, may be
debated, but I would ask my readers to consider
what change we should have seen in the develop-
VARIOUS THEORIES 281
ment of Europe if by some magical instrument
Jewish influence had been upon some one date
removed. It is a theory fascinating, in a way
applicable, and arresting. It is, at any rate, not
nonsense.
It is particularly true that something in
the continuous exercise of analysis by the Jewish
intelligence perpetually moves European intelli-
gence to action The great disputations of the
Early Middle Ages were, largely, either directly
disputations with Jews or disputations provoked by
the intellectual attitude of the Jew; and the Jew,
in the famous name of Spinoza, stands at the origin
of that merely natural, that Lucretian interpreta-
tion of the world which continued through Des-
cartes to its great expansion in the present day.
You find that element in economics as you do in
philosophy, in political science as you do in econo-
mics; and, talking of economics, it must not be
forgotten that the greatest name at the foundation
of modern economic science is the name of a Jew,
Ricardo, while the most prominent name in the
development of its most prominent direct applica-
tion is also a Jewish name the name of Karl Marx.
It is not without significance that any one of these
names recalls, side by side with its Jewish origin,
an aloofness from the general community of the
Jews. That community, I think it is fair to say,
abandoned Spinoza; Ricardo and, I believe, Karl
Marx were alien to the national religion, and the
latter married out of his people and exercised his
enormous influence extraneously to the blood from
which his family sprang. For though it is true that
the direction, the staff of Communism is Jewish, yet
ite convinced adherents are in the mass of our blood.
282 THE JEWS
And in that connection I am reminded of another
theory or fact attaching to the history of Israel,
which is that the intellectual independence of the
Jew has been as marked throughout the ages as his
solidarity. There are many, I know, of that nation
who regard such exceptions as vagaries and almost
condemn them as traitors ; yet they are no small
asset to the reputation of their people and their
names, however much they may be repudiated by
their compatriots, shed lustre upon the whole body
from which they sprang. These include (let it be
remembered) not only the" sceptical" philosophers,
not^only the materialists, but also those extra-
ordinary exceptions who have lent the vigour, the
tenacity and the lustre of the Jewish intellect to the
service of the Catholic Church. I make bold to say
that in no one of the Faith has there been more
devotion than in those who, like Eatisbonne (and
he was but one among many), have put such
qualities at the service of what they have dis-
covered to be alone divine. A cynic might add
St. Paul, but, for that matter, the whole origin of
the Church was intermixed with the intense indivi-
dual efforts of such men.
In this connection also every wise man will admit
that there is no greater error than to exaggerate the
consciousness of Jewish action whether the error
proceed from those who admire or who detest it.
To hear their modern opponents talk one might
imagine that the Jewish people formed a small
club of which every member knew every other while
each worked in the unison of a disciplined body.
That aberration I have dealt with more than once
upon former pages. The truth is that no nation on
earth presents so many surprising exceptions to
VARIOUS THEORIES 283
its general action as does this nation, and that no
nation on earth, when it moves in one general
direction, as it often does, is actuated by a common
motive less conscious. We who stand outside the
Jewish body may mark its cohesion, and will mark
it, I hope, to its honour; but its own members
complain rather of its lack of cohesion. I have
heard them complain I know not how often of
the way in which the wealthier Jews left their
society for that of an alien body, sneered at the
general body of Israel, and remained indifferent to
the common cry of the race. It is this unconscious-
ness in action, this frequent replacement of motive
by instinct which accounts for what all observers
have noticed, especially in times of persecution. I
mean the bewilderment of the oppressed at the
action of their oppressors.
I remember once listening to a most eloquent
speech delivered in the course of a debate in which,
with that long recollection which is characteristic
of his people, an Israelite passionately declaimed the
gratitude of that people to St. Bernard who saved
their remnant upon the Rhine from the popular
fury. I remember also how another in a debate
(for I have attended many such up and down the
country and have heard from as many aspects as
possible what the Jewish attitude towards us is)
stated simply, in reply to my description of the
Jewish financial position in this country after the
Conquest : ' Your cathedral and your abbeys
and even your castles were built with our money."
The phrase was significant of the way in which
what the English community of the time regarded
as a tolerated abuse, those fortunes which they
never thought of as Jewish at all, but as moneys
284 THE JEWS
temporarily unjustly wrung from the people at
large, were regarded in contemporary Jewry as
private property legitimately acquired, held in full
possession.
I could wish in this connection that some learned
Jew would produce a History of Europe from the
point of view of his people: a short textbook, I
mean, intended for our consumption; to show us
ourselves from a standpoint very different from our
own. It may be that such a book exists. I am
certain it would be more useful than those indirect
attacks (for they are attacks) upon the Christian
tradition which pretend to a spirit of impartiality
but are none the less hostile to that tradition in
every line. I would much rather read the story
of Europe as it was seen by a practising Jewish
scholar than a so-called impartial and agnostic
account which grotesquely represents the Church
as something external to the body of Europe and
even inimical to it.
In this connection also we should have (what now
we lack), and that is a conspectus of the Jewish
action over Christendom and Islam combined.
We are aware of the tolerance, or rather favour,
displayed to their Jewish subjects by the Moham-
medans of Spain. It was neither universal nor
continuous. What we do not sufficiently hear,
what we have to piece together from chance
allusions, is the connection between the Moorish
Jews, before and during the Reconquista, and their
fellows to the north.
Before I leave these cursory and sporadic notes
on what I have called the " theories" upon our
problem, I should mention one which would unhap-
pily seem to have acquired widespread support
VARIOUS THEORIES
285
to-day and which is surely the least satisfactory of
all even less satisfactory than the now dying
fiction which pretended that the Jewish nation
was not present in our midst, but consisted only
of a mass of individuals already absorbed by their
alien surroundings. I mean the theory that it is
possible to continue in a sort of simmering atmo-
sphere of partial repression, with the Jew treated
as something alien and hostile, yet his presence
unceasingly tolerated. That would seem to be
the imperfect conclusion implied, if not stated, in
a hundred modern pamphlets and discussions, the
authors of which repudiate the name of Anti-
Semite though they sympathize apparently with
action even less logical than the politics of the
Anti- Semite. There is no such equilibrium possible,
even if its establishment were as moral as it is in
fact immoral. If a frank solution be not found,
nothing firm can be established. All we shall be
establishing will be a violent and successive fluctua-
tion. It is impossible to maintain an attitude
permanently hostile to one's neighbour, yet count
on that hostility remaining permanently repressed.
You fall inevitably along the slope of such a ten-
dency into those excesses which it should be our
whole object to condemn, to foresee and to prevent.
You cannot continue, as so many modern men
seem, from their conversation, to wish, with political
equality on the one side and a living spirit of enmity
upon the other. You cannot get peace by giving
a mere legal definition to the status of a minority,
which is also necessarily your neighbour, and
refusing a social action consonant with the legal
definition. If you try to do that you are trying
to do two things, one of which will destroy the
286 THE JEWS
other. No one can doubt which will be victorious
in a conflict between a living sentient motive and
a mere definition in public law.
One attitude towards the question which I have
heard fairly often in the mouths of Jews and seen
in their writings is something like this : " Our
affairs have nothing to do with people outside our
nation. This discussion of what you call ' the
Jewish problem' is an impertinence upon your
part. There is a Jewish problem indeed, but it is a
domestic problem, and we request you (with some
asperity) to mind your own business."
If this attitude were sound, the search for what
I have called a solution, though it might satisfy
the intelligence, would be a breach of civic morals.
In the same way it would be a breach of civic
morals for me to work out a solution for the quarrel
between Mr. Jones and his mother-in-law, neither
of whom I have ever met and with whom I have no
relations, and then to press this solution upon the
contending parties. But the flaw in this attitude
is that the problem is essentially one involving two
parties, the Jews and the non- Jews. The problem
we are attempting to solve is a problem expressed
in terms of both. Some would even say that there
is hardly a domestic question within the Jewish
nation which does not have its reaction upon
society outside it, and which it is not the business of
that society outside to inquire into. That would
be pressing things rather far. But the main
problem is intimately concerned with both parties
and as much with the one as with the other. It is
true, indeed, that the consequences of a false solu-
tion, or of shirking the solution altogether, would
be more acute for the Jew than for us; but we
VARIOUS THEORIES 287
should both suffer, and even on our side the suffering
would be grievous.
Even if there were no question of suffering in
the ordinary sense of the term, there would still be
the question of justice. The Jews who resent a
statement of the problem and an attempt at solving
it are not doing their own people any good and are
at the same time denying us the right of putting
our own affairs in order, which denial is, of course,
intolerable : for the position of the Jews in our great
States and in Islamic society is something which
those States and that society have to determine.
They cannot leave it in the air. To some conclusion
they must come, and soon, and on the nature of
that conclusion depends their peace.
Two theories, proceeding from very different
states of mind, the opposite each of the other, but
each exclusive of any solution, spring from the root
idea that there is something inexorably malignant
in the relations between the Jew and his surround-
ings. In the one form this takes the shape of
affirming that the unfortunate Jew is invariably
ill-treated by his wicked hosts and always will be
so ill- treated. In the other it takes the form of
saying that the wicked Jew will always be con-
spiring and trying to hurt his good, kind hosts and
always will be so conspiring. In either case it is
no good trying to find a solution, for it is affirmed
that the quarrel is in the nature of things. People
will say to one, " Why attempt to change something
which cannot be changed ? Why talk of your
material as something other than what it is ?
Cats will always quarrel with dogs, and if you
want to avoid a quarrel the only thing to do is to
keep the dogs and cats of your household apart."
288 THE JEWS
It is precisely because I do not believe either
form of this idea to be true that I have sought for a
solution. I do not believe either form of doctrine
to be true because the evidence is against it. That
evidence is to my hand and can be examined by
my own unaided powers, as it can be examined
by any other person in our modern society. I
cannot recollect one single case in all the hundreds
of Jews I have come across not one in the score
whom I can count as intimates who showed any
sign of this malignant hatred. I have heard many
outbursts of exasperation which, when we think of
the past, are natural enough ; but of some persis-
tent and evil desire to hurt those among whom they
live, some instinctive desire unconnected with past
suffering, and acting as a sort of instinct, I have
seen no trace. If such were to be discovered in
some exceptional Jew out of a large acquaintance I
should conclude that it might be true of a small
minority, but common sense and common experience
are sufficient to show that it does not affect the
mass.
Of the causes of friction, even of acute friction,
which I have enumerated in former pages, there is
the habit of secrecy, there is the mutual contempt,
arising in each from a sense of superiority over the
other ; there is the quarrel between what is national
and what is international, between what is of us
and what is alien. There are, in a word, plenty of
elements suggesting accidental antagonism, but of
intrinsic antagonism there is no evidence there is
no evidence, I mean, that the Jews would still
desire to destroy a society in which they found
themselves at their ease.
And, if we examine ourselves, we shall be equally
VARIOUS THEORIES 289
convinced that there is no corresponding desire
upon our side to do a wrong to the Jew. We also are
exasperated by the memory of insult in moments
of quarrel, of international action opposing our
national interests and of friction between what is
native and what is alien ; but that is a very different
thing from permanent and necessary antagonism.
I know very well what is called " modern thought "
gives to the unconscious part of man a large place
and reduces, as much as it can, the field of reason.
I cannot agree with it. It seems to me that man
is essentially rational; and his political relations
can be arranged consonantly with his conscious
morals and his conscious logic.
At any rate, if they cannot, there is an end of
all statesmanship and of all useful political action
even in details.
Next, there are the two converse attitudes
towards the question which certainly are affecting,
the one an increasing audience upon our side and
the other perhaps an interested though but secret
audience upon the other; I mean those two con-
verse theories whereby, on the one side, there is the
Messianic idea of the Jew ultimately controlling
the world, on the other an extreme dread ol that
idea and a belief that it is being actively pursued
to the destruction of our institutions and religion.
I can understand that, with the traditions of
his race behind him and with the tone of their
sacred writings in his ears, a Jew should lean in
some degree to such a conception, or at any rate
that some Jews should lean towards it. Certainly
in face of the ridiculously exaggerated power of
the Jews in recent times (it is now declining, for
secrecy was of its essence and it has now been
u
290 THE JEWS
brought into the arena of open discussion) it was
natural that men should fall into the exaggeration
of panic. They saw the Jew, a tiny fraction of most
communities, not more than a twentieth of any
community, exercising a power quite out of pro-
portion to his numbers or, indeed, to his ability ;
and they saw that power directed towards ends
which were Jewish ends and therefore hostile or
indifferent to the rest of mankind. But my
reason for rejecting not only exaggerations of this
idea but its fundamental implication is that it
seems to me practically impossible. It connotes
abilities upon the Jewish side, a continuous will
upon the Jewish side, both of which are obviously
absent. And you have only to look at history
to see that long before things come to anything
like a struggle for supremacy it is the Jew who
suffers most from the suspicion of holding such a
design, not we. Indeed, that is one of the important
elements in the dangerous situation which has
been created to-day.
That large and greatly increasing body of men
who so fear Jewish domination, and are vigorously
reacting against the Jews under the influence
of that fear, are much more likely to end with
injustice to the Jew than with subservience to
him. It is from this atmosphere that the great
misfortunes of the past have arisen. It is of the
essence of any solution that this mood should be
exorcised upon the one side as upon the other.
There is another theory which I have read of in
more than one learned Jewish treatise and which
has been repeated (after Jewish authors themselves
had launched it) by many non- Jewish societies and
historians, to the effect that the very survival of
VARIOUS THEORIES
291
the Jews, their very existence as a separate com-
munity, was due to conditions common in the past,
now disappeared, and that therefore the present
difficulties can safely be left to time.
This is, of course, to make the general assertion
that the Jewish race can be absorbed, and that
absorption is the solution. That conclusion I
summarily rejected in the earlier pages of this book
on the historical ground that it has had the most
favourable circumstances for success and yet has
always failed. But in the particular case stated
it has an argument of its own and one needing
very special examination: it is this:
Those who defend this theory tell us that however
favourable the opportunities for absorption were in
the past they are nothing to the opportunities of
the present and the future, and that therefore the
argument from history fails. In the past (they
tell us) the Jews were exclusive and even made of
their exclusiveness a religion. They on their side
mixed as little as possible with the world around
them and we on our side maintained that exclusion
by an equal insistence upon the difference between
ourselves and them. We had in those days, it is
maintained, a religion based upon the Incarnation
and therefore abhorrent to the Jew ; that religion
is dead or dying, and with it the tendency to exclu-
sion from outside has disappeared ; while on the
Jewish side there is also a great weakening of the
old religious bond, less of the old Messianic dogma,
and on both sides the enormous melting-pot * that
makes for absorption with an intensity and rapidity
1 I borrow the metaphor from Mr. Zangwill, who applied
it to New York particularly. I apply it to the whole modern
industrial world.
u*
292 THE JEWS
quite unknown in the past. It was one thing to
absorb the Jew when it took a month to go as an
ordinary traveller from London to Borne, it is
another thing when it takes three days. It was
one thing to absorb the Jew when in the greater
part of cases there was a bar to the mixing of the
races, based upon the nerves of religion, it is quite
another thing to absorb the Jew when those most
powerful of emotional forces have disappeared
and so forth.
Now the reasons which bring me to reject this
theory are two- fold.
In the first place, I think it exaggerates the
contrast between the past and the present. In the
second place, I know that in the actual world before
me and precisely under those conditions where the
fusion, the action of the " melting-pot," ought to
be most complete, the most violent reaction against
absorption is to be observed.
As to the contrast between the past and the
present, I think it is based upon an imperfect
apprehension of what our past has been. It comes
of that "telescoping up" of history to which I
alluded in another connection in my second chapter.
The long story of our race between the Roman
occupation of Judaea and the modern local and
ephemeral industrial phase of the great modern
towns is not divided into two chapters, the strange
past and the comprehensible present. It is much
of a muchness. The constant developments which
astonish us to-day in physical science, for instance,
are not more remarkable than the vast new develop-
ments in architecture and philosophy which marked
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The dis-
turbance of thought which may be called " modern
VAEIOUS THEOEIES
293
scepticism" is not anything like so important
a spiritual change as that tremendous revolution
which we call the conversion of the Roman Empire.
The area of scepticism is not larger to-day than it
has been in many special periods of the past. The
feeling of strong religious emotion which forbids
this or that action is still present among us, some-
times attached to its older objects, sometimes (as
in the craze for prohibition) to some novel object.
The indifference which you will find to the parti-
cular religious barrier between Jew and non-Jew
is not peculiar to our times. It has come and gone
in the past ; after a wave of such indifference you
have had a wave of the most acute reaction, and I
think you are observing a wave of such reaction
to-day.
Nor do I see how the rapidity of mere physical
communications affects the matter, nor even how
the volume of emigration affects the matter. You
can get a million Jews from Lithuania to New
York a distance of 5,000 miles in less time than
you could get a million Jews from the Valley of
the Rhine into Poland some centuries ago; but
the million Jews seem to remain Jews just the
same under modern conditions as they did in the
past. Indeed, the toleration of Jews, the friendly
reception of them, and therefore the opportunities
for their absorption were indefinitely greater in
mediaeval Poland than they are in modern America.
It seems to me that the whole of this part of the
argument is based upon that prevalent view of
history which comes from reading our little modern
text-books : and our little modern text- books are
very rubbishy. It is a view which comes from
that absurd emphasis upon whatever is contempo-
294 THE JEWS
rary. The modern advance of physical science is
regarded as having totally changed the world
inwardly as well as outwardly. We have only to
look at the modern world and to compare it with
any two distant, special periods we know, to
discover that the difference between any pair of
these three is equally striking. In many ways
the modern world is much more like the world
of the Antonines than it is like the world of Innocent
the Great. In many ways the world of Innocent
the Great is much more like the Roman Empire
than the modern world. In many ways the world
of Innocent the Great and our world have more
in common than either has with the pagan Eoman
Empire. The general lesson is, therefore, that our
time, with all its remarkable specialities, is but one
specimen out of a great number equally individual,
and certainly there is nothing in it either of religious
scepticism breaking down old religious barriers or
of rapidity of communication, or of any other
fundamental factor, which specially suggests the
absorption of the Jew.
For instance, the Jews mixed much more readily,
on a much more equal footing and with far less
friction among the Mohammedans at particular
periods during the Islamic occupation of Spain
than they do even in England to-day. Yet they
were not absorbed there, any more than they were
absorbed in Poland. They were not absorbed
into that older, tolerant, very denationalized pagan
Roman world where they so often had full civic
rights and where they even manipulated, as they
manipulate to-day, the finances of the community.
As for the decay of exclusiveness on their part, I
see no sign of it. For this exclusiveness proceeds
VARIOUS THEORIES
295
not so much from a particular observance which
may relax at one period and tighten up at another,
as from an invariable national tradition which
fluctuates in intensity but never sinks so low as
to jeopardize the continuance of the people.
If we turn from argument to observation, the
falsity of the theory stares us in the face. We
have but to take one point, where the metaphor
of the " melting-pot" most applies (and to which
it was originally applied), the city of New York.
What has been the effect of this great influx of
Jews into New York, this turning of New York
into a city a third Jewish under our eyes and in
so short a space of time ? As we all know, the
effect has been the uprising, in that once indifferent
atmosphere, of such a feeling against the Jews as
would appal us did we see it in the Old World.
It is red hot. It is an intense reaction expressing
itself with greater and greater violence every day ;
and the spirit of that reaction cannot be better
expressed than in a phrase which we owe, I think,
to Mr. Ford and his famous propaganda against
the Jews, through his paper the " Dearborn Inde-
pendent. " " It is all very well to talk of the melting-
pot," says he, "but so far from the Jews melting
in that pot, it looks as though they wanted to melt
the pot itself."
There you have, in New York, if anywhere, an
opportunity for the theory of absorption to prove
itself. You have present in the field a score of
different races, including great masses of a race
so utterly different from our^s as the negro. You
have a certain small proportion of Chinamen and
you have of European stocks an indefinite variety
most of them in large numbers. You have not
296 THE JEWS
only in local establishments or even only in civic
theory, but in actual practice in enthusiastic
practice a complete equality and a positive pride
in the reception of no matter what elements of
immigration, in the certitude that all can rapidly
be moulded into the American form. Most of these
elements were absorbed, and absorbed rapidly;
where they were not absorbed there was at least
peace between them. Then arrives the Jew and
a totally new situation at once appears. A situa-
tion of challenge, of provocation, of admitted
exclusion, of violent debate and even of clamour:
but no sign of absorption. In presence of all the
elements that should make for absorption, difference
and hatred between Jew and non-Jew is growing
in New York with the vitality of a tropical plant.
There is yet another theory which, if it were not
widely held and if it had not been advanced by
so many Jews themselves, I should leave aside as
something comic, something unfit for serious dis-
cussion. But it has been advanced and it must be
met. It is no less than the theory that there are
no such people as the Jews, that the whole thing
is illusion.
This monstrous affirmation is based, I need
hardly say, upon what is called a " scientific "
examination of the affair : for that word " scientific "
has come to be associated with every kind of
unreason. Men, especially Jewish men, have been
found to affirm most solemnly that they had
measured skulls, taken sections of hair, catalogued
the colours of eyes, established facial angles, ana-
lysed blood, and applied I know not how many other
tricks, with the result that no Jewish type could
be discovered ! People who can reason thus do
VARIOUS THEORIES 297
not seem to appreciate the fundamental quarrel
between nominalism and realism, or to have heard
of the old philosophic joke on the definition of
" a thing."
We know a horse to be a horse, an apple to be
an apple, a Chinaman to be a Chinaman, or a Jew
to be a Jew by some process on which philosophers
can debate, but upon the virtue of which no sane
man doubts and upon the right action of which
we base all our lives. The chemist may tell me that
the chemical analysis of a lump of coal gives the
same result as the chemical analysis of a diamond,
to which any man capable of using his reason at
all will reply that upon a very large number of
other lines of analysis, colour, touch, combustibility,
hardness and softness, economic value, prevalence
(and so on indefinitely), the two are not the same.
No analysis is complete, and if we had made no
conscious analysis at all, we could still perceive
at once that a lump of coal is not a diamond.
It is just the same with these pseudo- scientific
attempts to disprove obvious truth. They pullu-
late and they are all equally ridiculous because
they deduce from insufficient data. The existence
and differentiation of the Jewish people as a race
ethnically and as a nation politically is as much
a fact as the existence of coal or diamonds. They
are a nation politically because they act as a nation,
because their individual members feel and exercise
a corporate function. We know them to be a
separate race because we can see that they are.
When you meet a Jew, whether you are his enemy
or his friend, you meet a Jew. He has a certain
expression, a certain manner, certain physical
characteristics which you may not be able to analyse
298 THE JEWS
at the moment you see him, but which give you the
impression and the certitude that you are dealing
with a particular thing, to wit, the Jewish race.
It is true, of course, that the type, like all general
types, fades off at the edges, and there will always
be cases where you may be in doubt of whether
you are dealing with a Jew or with a non-Jew,
but there is a marked central type round which
the Jewish racial type is built up. That is as
certain as that there is a Mongolian type, or a
negroid type, and so forth.
I do not take the objection very seriously. I
only note it because it has been made, and may
crop up in the course of any discussion on this
grave political issue.
HABIT OR LAW?
CHAPTER XV
HABIT OR LAW ?
IF it be true that the friction between the Jew and
the civilization in which he lives is aggravated by
his habit of secrecy and by our disingenuousness,
by his expression of a sense of superiority which
galls us, and on our side by a lack of charity and
of intelligence in dealing with him, it would follow
that no solution can be more than approximate:
that whatever arrangement be come to the con-
trast will remain, and with it a certain latent
friction, which always accompanies contrast.
But there is between a simmering of that kind
and the active boiling of the question to-day (with
the threat of its boiling over) all the difference in
the world. But even though the solution be imper-
fect, it might be reasonably stable: we might at
least have peace, though not friendship. It further
follows from the elements of the problem that the
solution lies along the lines of either party modify-
ing whatever in its action is an irritant to the other ;
whatever, that is, can be modified by the will, and
is not mixed up with something ineradicable.
The Jew cannot help feeling superior, but he
can help the expression of that superiority at any
rate he can modify such expression. He can cer-
tainly, though it be at a great expense of tradition
301
302 THE JEWS
and habit, get rid of that pestilent pseudo- defence
of secrecy which poisons all the relations between
him and ourselves. We on our side can drop what
is the converse of that secrecy, the disingenuousness,
the lack of candour, into which we are fallen in
our relations with the Jew. That cannot but mean
a great breach with our tradition and with habit
also, but the advantage is worth the sacrifice. We
can (it must be the work of each individual, it
cannot be a corporate work) approach the Jew with
more respect and yet with more frequency. We
can, I think, advance by many degrees from the
lack of charity we now show, even if we despair of
living in real intimacy with a people so different in
their deepest qualities from ourselves.
Personally, I am not sure that such closer
intimacy might not be established ; I have never
found any difficulty in reaching and retaining
intimate acquaintance with the Jews of my own
circle but I may have been fortunate. I know
that with most of my fellows it is not so, and per-
haps the Jew will always remain to the mass of
those about him something strange and unapproach-
able, and I fear, repulsive. But there is no reason,
why we should mix with that hesitation in our
relations an element of indifference, still less of
contempt, still less, again, of cruelty.
I repeat the formula for a solution: it is
recognition and respect.
Recognition is here no more than the telling of
the truth: there is a Jewish nation. Jews are
citizens of that nation ; and recognition means not
only the telling of this truth on special occasions
but the use of it as a regular habit in our relations
on both sides.
HABIT OR LAW? 303
This statement is, upon any just analysis of the
Jewish question, so obvious and so simple, that it
needs neither insistence upon it nor development.
Its plain statement is sufficient. But there attaches
to a solution so determined a much more active
and complicated question, upon the uncertainty
of which not only this reform but many another
has made shipwreck. The question must be
answered rightly, because, if we answer it wrongly,
the whole scheme fails.
The question is this : Should the social habit,
the general method in writing and speaking and in
all relations, precede in this case the institutional
action, legal changes, constitutional definitions ?
Or should the legal changes, the new institutions,
the constitutional definitions come first ?
To decide rightly is of great moment, for this
reason, that a wrong decision may destroy all the
effect of goodwill.
In my judgment the wrong decision would be
that which would give precedence to legal change,
to new definitions, to new institutions, and attempt
out of them to build a new spirit. I take it that
this reversal of the true order would make all
stable peace impossible.
It must be admitted, of course, that changes
suggested by the Jews themselves, the development
of their own institutions, a voluntary segregation of
their community in other fields than those in which
they have already effected that segregation, stand
in another category. These new and definitely
Jewish institutions we should always welcome.
But the attempt at framing public regulations,
which are to defend the community as a whole
against an alien minority, when that minority must
304 THE JEWS
live with one permanently and as a regular feature
of the life of the community, invariably tends to
oppression, if such regulations are made the first
steps in a settlement instead of being left, as they
should be, to the last. Any separatist legislation
should arise naturally out of a long practice and
full recognition of the Jews as a separate people
and of the accompaniment of that recognition with
respect. If the advance is made on our side, the
Jew may refuse any such bargain. He may dig
his heels in and insist, as many another privileged
class has insisted before him, that he will continue
to enjoy all that he has ever enjoyed, that he will
continue his demand for a dual allegiance, that he
will insist on the very fullest recognition as a Jew,
and at the same time on what is fatal to such
recognition, the fullest recognition as a member of
our own community.
If he does that (and there are those who tell us
he will certainly do so, and will refuse all reform),
then the community will be compelled to legislate
in spite of him. It will be perilous for him and
for us ; it may even be the beginning of grievous
trouble for both, but it will be inevitable. It will
appear in a mass of legislation all over Europe,
which will affect this country with the rest.
The present situation cannot last indefinitely.
It is already uncertain even here, in England ; it
has reached further stages on the road to ruin
elsewhere. But if the Jew sees the peril in time,
and appreciates the nature of that change, the
beginnings of which we have all seen and which is
proceeding at so great a pace, then relations can
be established out of which (later) formal rules,
acceptable to both parties, should proceed. And in
HABIT OR LAW? 305
that case it would be, I repeat, the gravest of errors
to initiate new positive laws and a new status
before a foundation had been prepared by the
re- establishment of honest relations; and that can
only be done by a frank admission of reality, by
the open and continual admission everywhere
that Israel is a nation apart, is not, and cannot
be, of us, and shall not be confounded with our 1
selves.
There is great temptation to delay, because the
acuteness of the problem is not felt here as yet,
among the well-to-do, and still more because it
differs in different communities. The peril seems
still far distant from us, though it may be at the
very door of our neighbours. Routine, the inherit-
ance of the immediate past, the false security
produced by the conventions of that past, may well
tempt those who dislike the effort of a change to
shirk that change. But I would ask any intelligent
and thoughtful Jew who still thinks he can rely
upon the false position of the nineteenth century
whether the same forces are there to support him
to-day as were present then ?
Take a particular example. In Poland and in
Roumania the old fiction has been temporarily im-
posed by force. The Jew, who in both these countries
is felt to be more alien than any other foreign
European could be, is imposed upon the Govern-
ment and society of each country by the Western
Governments as a full citizen. The strain here is
immensely aggravated because it arose not from the
nature of society but from the action of outsiders ;
the Ei glish. the French, the American Govern-
ments (but particularly the American and the
English) have erected in Eastern Europe this
306 THE JEWS
unstable, unjust and artificial state of aflairs.
It cannot last, for it is unreal.
The communities in question may make no laws
which recognize the Jew; alternatively, the door
is open for oppression : and the moment the hated
foreign interference weakens, oppression will come.
Well, when under the pressure of a real
social difficulty and a crucial one, the unreal settle-
ment is torn up, by the passing of new laws
recognizing the Jew (but harshly, and under no
agreement with him) or by actual hostility, does
the Jew in his heart of hearts think that he would
have the same support from the West now as he
would have had thirty years ago ? He knows very
well he would not.
Thirty years ago you would have got from all
the traditional Liberalism of France, from the
great bulk of its governing class and the whole of
its academic organization, from what was then the
solid and still respected body of old Republicans,
an immediate answer to the Jewish appeal. In
England that answer would have been unanimous
and enthusiastic. You would have had torrents
of leading articles, great public meetings, Cabinet
Ministers speechifying all over the place in the
sacred cause of toleration. Every one knows that
to-day the appeal of the Eastern Jews, though it
might still be supported officially, would be received
by the public with indifference. Ten years hence
it may be received with derision.
Or take another example. Let us suppose it
is highly probable that the Zionist experiment
breaks down, that Englishmen refuse to have their
soldiers' lives risked in a quarrel which is not their
own and refuse to support out of their inordinate
HABIT OR LAW? 307
taxation a top-heavy colony which gives them
no advantage and concerns them not at all. On
the breakdown of that experiment, should it come
soon, would there still be the support for its re-
establishment that you would have had even ten
years ago? There certainly would not. Ten
years hence it is probable enough that you would
get, not indifference to such re- establishment, but
the most active hostility. All over the world the
stream has turned in the same direction.
Unfortunately the effect of that change has been
to excite hatred rather than a desire for a settle-
ment and to move men towards blind action rather
than towards a reasoned examination of the diffi-
culty. That is why the thing seems to me urgent,
although there are still large areas of Western society
in which its urgency is masked and half forgotten.
When I say " urgent " I mean that this my
essay, which is to-day still to the point, and the
solution recommended in which is still feasible,
may very well, within the lifetime of its writer,
become old-fashioned out of all recognition. The
peaceful settlement here proposed -with deliberate
vagueness and softness of outline may seem in a few
years as out of date, as unreal through the interven-
ing change, as do to-day the old tags about the
purity of parliamentary life and the seriousness
of party politics.
My solution may appear at the end of this genera-
tion as mildly inapplicable to the acute situation
then arisen between the Jews and ourselves as
appear to-day the old debates on the very tentative
demand for Home Rule in the '80's. Let us act
as soon as possible and settle the thing while there
is yet time. For in the swirl and rapids of the
308 THE JEWS
modern world, which grow not less as towards
a calm, but more intense as towards a cataract,
every great debate takes on with every year
a stronger form, a nearer approach to conflict;
and none more than the immemorial debate, still
unconcluded, between Islam and Christendom and
the Beni- Israel.
But for my part, I say, " Peace be to Israel."
Printed in Gnat Britain by Butler & Tanner, Promt and London.
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