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, becausehe 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, Germans 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 nonexistent. 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 everyway 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 pronounced 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 nineteenthcentury policy would have broken down as completely 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 characteristic 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 indistinguishable 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 Englishman in the Civil Service of India was exactlythe 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;thenit 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 hewere, although a friend, something separate, not to be admitted to certain functions of my community, 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 administration 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 contradictions. 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 oldpolicy. 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, andat the same timeeach of the individuals composing it treated as though they werenotmembers 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 purchased 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 withflaming 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! But they had not letusalone. I ask myself, sometimes, 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 responsethenin 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 suchspeech. 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 citizenship 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, and 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 sentimental solution and a savage reaction against it:the reaction of 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 experiment 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 problem, 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 appreciate 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
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 tantamount 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 solution therefore is only to be discovered in some policy which will permanently relieve the strainand 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 presence 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 inimical to 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 beinginterfered with, guided, run against their will; that a power is present which acts either with indifference 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 example 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 double 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 suchthat 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 cosmopolitan 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 fortunes 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 anyof 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 anonymous 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 manifestlyto 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 Rome 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 correspondents of the various great newspapers, the most prominent example being Opper, a BohemianJew, who concealed his origin under the false name of "de Blowitz," and for years acted as Paris correspondent forThe 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 extravagancies 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 everywhere 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 community 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 couldnot be without its effect upon the memory of their contemporaries.
There next appeared a series of direct international 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 civilization 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 promoted 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.
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 movement, 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 connected, 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, thepersecutions 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 increasing 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 thesocialistmovement. 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.
After Karl Marx came a crowd of his compatriots, 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 continually 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 greatdifficulty 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 overwhelming 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.
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. Reconciliation was in the air ... when, in the very heat of the struggle, came that factor, incalculably important, which now rules all the rest; I mean the factor of what is calledBolshevism.
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 explosion, 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 wasaJewish movement, 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 imputation 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 directionof the proletarian revolt against capitalist conditions, 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 throughout the world. It was they, more than any others, who insisted on a clear-cut solution upon the lines which their 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 organization of socialism by Jewswhile 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 oneinfluence 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 Russian State, ill-equipped for modern war, had passed during the end of the year 1916 through a strain which it had found intolerable. Russian 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 1918 to the present day. In the towns the freely-elected Parliament was repudiated and a "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" was declared. The workshops were in future to be run by Committees, in the Russian "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 dissolved armies to their homes.
In practice, of course, what was set up was no proletarian Government, still less anything soimpossible and contradictory in terms as a "dictatorship" of proletarians. The thing was called "The Republic 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 innumerable 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 themselves and their troops and of their dependants inthe 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 volunteered 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 presumed, 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 production 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 theircompatriots 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 propagandist, ideal running through the whole of their action—the desire to spread Communism far beyond the boundaries of what had once been the Russian 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 sentiment of revenge against that which had persecuted their people in the past. They cannot but, in the destroying of Russia, have mixed with a desire to advantage the individual Russian 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 Russian Royal family—father, mother and girls, and the unfortunate sickly heir, the only boy. Further, it is impossible, with Jewish Committees thus in control of the Russian treasury and of Russian means of communication, that they should not have had some sympathy with theircompatriots 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 throughout 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 Bolshevism, 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 Westminster.
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 ofthe 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 enterprise, who had to do in whatever capacity with the running of the great banks or with the international 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 oldsecrecy, 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 Russian 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 Russian 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 strong boxes 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 Russian 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 Russian 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.
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 Timbuctoo. 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; thedanger 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
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 leadership 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 Christian 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 comparatively small number of men who were hammering away steadily at the Jewish problem, trying toprovoke its discussion, and insisting on its importance, were mainly concerned with quite another aspect of Jewish activity—the aspect of international finance as controlled by Jews. Before that aspect had assumed its modern gravity the reproach 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 Incarnation 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 Roman Empire, perpetually in rebellion against it and guilty of massacring other Roman 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 degraded among his fellow-beings. He might not ride through the gate of a town, but had to dismount. 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,now grumbling through long periods of uncertain peace, now boiling over in all the evils of persecution—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,generalcauses for it, by which I mean those causes which are always present and are ineradicable. 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. Therewould 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)to possess certain abstract qualities and defects, but that in their case each quality or defect has a special character, a special nationaltimbrewhich 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 cowardice 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 unpopular with that majority and running a risk the whole time of physical violence? You find Jewsadopting 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 intermittent torture, spoliation and violent death? The thing so stated is ridiculous, and it is clear that those who make such an accusation are confounding 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 ortimbreof 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 Nîmes, through which, at the time, a body of troops was passing. The café 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. Hecame into this café 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 different. 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 ofavarice by his enemies they are reading into him that vice in a form of whichtheyknow themselves capable, whichtheythemselves practise, whichtheyfully understand, but whichhenever 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 invariably 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 accumulation. 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 accumulation 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, "Ransome," 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;that there was always distance. But not often that they were treated meanly. Just the other way. There has usually been present aspontaneousgenerosity. 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 proportion 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 ofkind. 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 scalemoregenerous—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 ofavarice. Indeed the general accusation of avarice fails: andthatis why it is a sort of standing jest permitted even where the Jews are most powerful. It 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.
But it is clear that in all this there are examples of whatin 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 different colour and taste in the quality or defect concerned. It isthatwhich offends. It isthatwhich 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 patriotic 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 farsuperior 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 oftimbre, 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.