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 hisend. 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 heknowsit 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 acause of friction between himself and those about him. Hear a Jew speaking, especially a Jew speaking upon the revolutionary platform, and note thehigh voltageat 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 difference 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 advertising 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 whomit 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 manifestations 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, whichmust form the foundation for any solution at which we can arrive.
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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 throughout 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 concentrate on that task so entirely. Yet the impression is false and is the fruitful cause of the worst misunderstandings.
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.
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 theyarea 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 isall 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 Rothschilds 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 community.
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 thenobility.
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 youwill 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.
Whom have you representing to-day the few great Jewish fortunes of the early Middle Ages in England? They were all ruined before the end of the thirteenth century. Whom have you representing 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 aJewish 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 Jewonlyas 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 misunderstanding.
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 continually 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—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 theindependent 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 difficulties 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 saidallof 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.
* * * * *
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 character: 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 JewishMonopoly.
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 theJewish race as a whole. One could put the Jews who control lead, nickel, 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 thatwas the financial monopoly. Yet here the monopoly 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 isnever 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 knowledge 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 uncorrected 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 operations are removed from general observation, and because it is mixed up with the interests of all the wealthier classes.
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 convenience 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 detestable 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 hiscapacity 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
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 falsehood degrade the Jew—that is not our affair—but rather on account of the ill-effects this policyproduces 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 relationships 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 desiring 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 names you abuse us as Jews. When we work underyournames you abuse us as forgers." The Jew has often felt himself so handicappedif he declared himself, that he was half forced, or at any rate grievously tempted, to a piece of baseness which was never a temptation for us. Surely all this carefully arranged code of assumed patronymics (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 extenuation 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 elsewhere 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 isnot 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 registered 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 unblushingly 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 maintain 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 persecution, 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 differentiatedthat 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 opinions will often differ violently from those of men with whom he is most closely connected. "Why," I can understand some distinguished Jewish publicist in England saying, "should I be compromised 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 afather 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 Rothschilds, 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 relationships, denying Jewish origin—specially exasperates this, our own race, among which the Jews are thrown in their dispersion. It is invariably discovered, sooner or later, and whenever it is discovered 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.
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 movements we disapproved: no, not even with a Government in active hostility to our own. Everybody 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 hundreds 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 have thought it to the advantage of the Jewish race and of the individuals concerned that this fact should be widely known. The literary abilities of Charles Kingsley,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 maintained 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 Jewishcharacter 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 connection, 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 neverisovert." 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 campaigns 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.
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 meresenseof 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 fundamental 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, itis 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 attitude I think the Jewish conviction of superiority has been omitted.
For the attitudes taken up by European statesmen 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 administrate, 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.
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 aseparatestatus only, they have in point of fact nearly always given them aninferiorstatus. 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,thenthere was no special recognition 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 powerful 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 ofStatesmanshipin the matter. Nor is there even in those who thus actually advantage 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 forgain 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 exasperation 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 rightness 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 thoroughly 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, andimmensely 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 negotiators: 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 unfortunate of the Jewish people in our midst. Unfortunately—and this is the crux—it proceeds tounrestrained 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 expression of it. It appears, as we all know, with extraordinary 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 destitution 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 alsoactsupon it, and that is intolerable.
We must, I say, allow for this feeling in anysettlement 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 European 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 actionswhenever we find ourselves in relations with 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 theélite, 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 democratic 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 invariably 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 intimatepolitical 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 provokes 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 conditions which would have destroyed any other people in perhaps a century: and yet intended to suffer. The rationalist will say that the expression of a sense of superiority, and the power of resistance 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,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 immeasurably 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 Commonwealth, 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, ontheirside 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 cannotbut 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 thisgoy, and a poor unsuccessfulgoyat that, to treatmeas 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 isthere. 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 itdoes.
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 easilyto 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