FOOTNOTE:[1]Except, of course, an outlawed member. The case of Dr. Levy turned out of this country by his compatriots in the Government for having written unfavourably of the Moscow Jews will be fresh in every one's memory.
[1]Except, of course, an outlawed member. The case of Dr. Levy turned out of this country by his compatriots in the Government for having written unfavourably of the Moscow Jews will be fresh in every one's memory.
[1]Except, of course, an outlawed member. The case of Dr. Levy turned out of this country by his compatriots in the Government for having written unfavourably of the Moscow Jews will be fresh in every one's memory.
THE POSITION OF THE JEWS IN ENGLAND
The various nations of Europe have every one of them, in the course of their long histories, passed through successive phases towards the Jew which I have called the tragic cycle. Each has in turn welcomed, tolerated, persecuted, attempted to exile—often actually exiled—welcomed again, and so forth. The two chief examples of extremes in action, are, as I have also pointed out in an earlier part of this book, Spain and England. Spaniards, and in particular the Spaniards of the Kingdom of Castile, went through every phase of this cycle in its fullest form. England passed through even greater extremes, for England was the only country which absolutely got rid of the Jews for hundreds of years, and England is the only country which has, even for a brief period, entered into something like an alliance with them.
Though it is the present position of the British State—that is, the position of official British politics towards the Jew—with which we are concerned, it may be of service to introduce the matter by a word upon past relations.
The Jewish element in this island, whatever it may have been during the Roman occupation, was of small account during the Dark Ages. Things changed at their close in the eleventh century. The Jew is the camp follower of each new economic movement among us and that is why one finds him in the wake of the Norman Conquest. Throughout the economic development which it began appears the secondary rôle of the Jew. Every one knows the mediaeval rule of Jewish Status. It was established here as everywhere else in Christendom. The Jew was the King's; that is, under the special protection of the State. If he were the subject of popular attack, that attack was an attack on the King's peculiar, and liable to speedy repression. The individual attacker was punished with special severity because the danger of mass-movement is always great where the populace is free to act in masses as it was throughout the middle ages, and the necessity for preventing individual attacks from spreading was correspondingly great. Now and then the popular feeling got out of hand and the monarch had to deal with numbers which he could not control; but as a rule the Jew, especially the rich Jew, enjoyed a privileged position, both in Northern France and throughout England. The Jew of the early Middle Ages in England was normally a well-to-do man and often an exceedingly rich man. Then, as now, a small number of Jews were much the richest men of their time.
He had most of the finances in his hands, and this immense privilege (which he has lost), that he alone was allowed to practise usury. Here we must pause a moment to define usury.
Usury then (as now) signified the receiving of interest upon unproductive loans. It is a practice which all moralists and all philosophers have condemned and which the Church in particular condemns. If you lend money to a man for a productive purpose: if, for instance, he is to buy a ship and trade with the money you advance, or to buy a farm and grow produce, then, of course, you are perfectly free to stipulate for a portion of the profit. But if you lend the money for a purpose not directly productive, as, for instance, to a man in grave necessity, or in lieu of charity, or to build such a building as a church, which will not produce a rent, or if in any other fashion you lend money to one who (to your knowledge) will not spend it in some reproductive agency, then it is immoral to demand interest.
Now an exception was made in mediaeval Christendom in favour of the Jew. He was allowed to lend money at interest, even in the most grievous cases of necessity, and for services as unproductive as religion or war. The only stipulation was that the moneys saved from this lucrative practice returned to the Crown (in theory) upon the death of the licensee. In practice no doubt a very large part remained with the accumulator, who during his lifetime was enjoying the income he had acquired by usury, who could give it to his heirs while still living, and could use opportunities for secret investment, or pass it to the custody of others throughout international Jewry. But liquid sums left by him, the product of his usury, returned to the Crown upon his death. This was a great advantage to the Crown, not only in protecting the Jew from the native hostility of his alien hosts(and particularly of the populace), but in giving him that great privilege—a monopoly.
The rate of interest was enormous. It varied from nearly 50 per cent to over 80 per cent. When Jews lent money on security the King was party to the safe custody of the security, and their privilege extended so far that they were exempt from the common law, and a case between an Englishman and his Jewish creditor could only be tried by a mixed jury in which the Jew's own compatriots were present in equal numbers with the English.
All during the Angevin period Jewish financial domination continued, up to the end of the twelfth century and even into the beginning of the thirteenth. But with the first half of the thirteenth century, for some reason of which I have never seen a sufficient historical analysis and of which, perhaps, the full causes have been lost, the Jewish power began to decline very rapidly, so far as England was concerned.
And here it may be noted that the misfortunes of the Jews in any country never begin until their financial position is shaken. As long as they are the financial masters of the Government they are protected; but woe to them when they begin to lose their financial power! Then there is no longer any reason for supporting them either on the part of the governing classes in general or of the Executive in particular. Popular passion is let loose and disaster follows.
At any rate, the thirteenth century saw in England a rapid decline of Jewish financial power and at the same time a rapid rise of official animosity towards them. They got poorer and pooreras the century proceeded. Their activities were at the same time more and more restricted. They had lent money largely upon land and yet, in the public interest, were at last forbidden to foreclose upon it. The final step came when their special licence to practise usury was withdrawn by Edward I in the earlier part of his reign; and at last, in 1290, after increasing severities, they were all expelled the country under penalty of death.
The unhappy people, already reduced by two generations of falling fortune, were hurried out of the country, carrying, by permission, their money and movables. They were protected, indeed, at the ports by the royal officers, who even paid the passage of the indigent among them; but they were plundered at sea and some even murdered. The murderers were punished, but the memory of the persecution remained in the Jews' mind and England became a natural object of their hate. The Jewish community expelled by the English was surprisingly small, not 17,000, and suggests the historical truth that in the Middle Ages, and indeed until quite modern times, the Jewish community in Northern France and England was a community of people in the main well-to-do. It so remained until quite modern times.
There followed three and a half centuries and more during which England was the one example in Europe of a State that would not tolerate the Jews upon any terms whatsoever. There certainly remained throughout this time, or at any rate visited the island, not a few of what the Jews themselves called "Crypto-Jews," that is, Jews who outwardly deny their nationality and practise our religion for the purpose of private gain. These,when they could defeat the law successfully, remained within the British seas. But their effect was slight; and the English people during the whole of their great military advance in France, during the whole period when their language and culture was forming, during the whole great national episode of the Tudors and of the Reformation, formed the one great exception out of all Europe in that the Jew remained unknown to them and was rigorously excluded from their Commonwealth.
They returned, as everybody knows, under Cromwell. Their numbers, and still more their wealth, increased at the end of the seventeenth century and concomitantly with this, partly as an effect of it (but here we must not exaggerate), a number of novel financial features appeared in the English State each of which shows the increased power of the Jews. The institution of the Bank, of the National Debt, of speculation in Exchange and in the fluctuation of stock.
But the real causes of that alliance between the English and the Jews which is seen in the late seventeenth century, which quickened throughout the eighteenth and became so very marked in the nineteenth century, was the cosmopolitan position of England as the leading commercial State. This it was which led to something like identity between the interests of Israel and the interests of Britain, an identity which has lasted so long that now, when divergence is beginning to appear, it still seems odd and novel to the older generation that there should be any Jewish action which is not favourable to England. They cannot understand what the new indifference to Jewishinterests, let alone the new hostility to them, can mean.
There were, of course, many other causes contributory to the peculiar position which the Jew came to enjoy in modern England, a position which he has not yet lost in external circumstance, though it is so badly shaken morally. There was the fact that England was the Protestant power of the West.
This religious motive played a great part. Between the Catholic Church and the Synagogue there had been hostility from the first century. In so far as it was possible to take sides in that quarrel it was natural for the Protestant power to take sides against the Catholic tradition and therefore in favour of the Jews. Again, the English were not only Protestant, their middle classes were steeped in the reading of the Old Testament. The Jews seemed to them the heroes of an epic and the shrines of a religion. You will find strong relics of this attitude in Provincial England to this day. One should add a certain national distaste for violence, which feeling was exasperated by hearing of the Jewish persecution abroad. One should also further add the pride which modern Englishmen take in the feeling that their country is an asylum for the oppressed.
Meanwhile there was not, until quite lately, any considerable body of poor Jews in the country to excite the animosity of the populace. That was an important negative factor in bringing the Jew within the boundaries of the English State. But with all these factors fully considered, it remains true that the main cause of the accidental Jewish position in England was the cosmopolitancharacter of English commerce and the essentially commercial character of the English State. As English export and English shipping began to cover the globe, the English financial system covered it as well. London became after Waterloo the money market and the clearing house of the world. The interests of the Jew as a financial dealer and the interests of this great commercial polity approximated more and more. One may say that by the last third of the nineteenth century they had become virtually identical.
Every new economic enterprise of the British State appealed to the Jewish genius for commerce and especially for negotiation in its most abstract form—finance. Conversely, every Jewish enterprise, every new conception of the Jew in his cosmopolitan activities (until these became revolutionary) appealed to the English merchant and banker.
The two things dovetailed one into the other and fitted exactly, and all subsidiary activities fitted in as well. The Jewish news agencies of the nineteenth century favoured England in all her policy, political as well as commercial; they opposed those of her rivals and especially those of her enemies. The Jewish knowledge of the East was at the service of England. His international penetration of the European governments was also at her service—so was his secret information. With the consolidation of the Indian Empire after the Mutiny the Jews were again an ally from their traditional hatred of the Russian people, which hatred has led them in our time to wreak so awful a vengeance upon their former oppressors. The Jew might almost be called a British agentupon the Continent of Europe, and still more in the Near and Far East, where the economic power of England extended even more rapidly than her political power.
And the Jew pointed to the English State as that one in which all that his nation required of thegoyimwas to be found. He here enjoyed a situation the like of which he could not hope to enjoy in any other country of the world. All antagonism to him had died down. He was admitted to every institution in the State, a prominent member of his nation became chief officer of the English Executive, and, an influence more subtle and penetrating, marriages began to take place, wholesale, between what had once been the aristocratic territorial families of this country and the Jewish commercial fortunes.
After two generations of this, with the opening of the twentieth century those of the great territorial English families in which there was no Jewish blood were the exception. In nearly all of them was the strain more or less marked, in some of them so strong that though the name was still an English name and the traditions those of a purely English lineage of the long past, the physique and character had become wholly Jewish and the members of the family were taken for Jews whenever they travelled in countries where the gentry had not yet suffered or enjoyed this admixture.
Specially Jewish institutions, such as Freemasonry (which the Jews had inaugurated as a sort of bridge between themselves and their hosts in the seventeenth century), were particularly strong in Britain, and there arose a political tradition, active, and ultimately to prove of great importance,whereby the British State was tacitly accepted by foreign governments as the official protector of the Jews in other countries. It was Britain which was expected to interfere, within the measure of her power, whenever a persecution of the Jews took place in the East of Christendom: to support the Jewish financial energies throughout the world, and to receive in return the benefit of that connection.
We shall have a most imperfect picture of the causes which gradually made the Jews regard this country as their centre of action if we omit one essential point.
England was secure.
During the whole period which saw the rise of the Jews to eminence in this island and their ultimate alliance with its political and commercial system, English society enjoyed a profound peace. Save for the petty incidents of the '15 and '45 (the first of no effect south of the border, the second ephemeral and confined to the North), no hostilities took place upon English soil between the rebellion of Monmouth under James II and the bombarding of London by the Germans from the air during the late war. There has been (save for some quite insignificant local riots) complete security for property and especially for large property. There have been since the middle of the eighteenth century no confiscations, and of commercial fortunes none since the middle of the seventeenth: no invasion, no civil war, and therefore no loot: no personal danger from violence.
Such conditions formed an environment ideal for the permanent establishment and rooting of Jewish power, and for the organization of a Jewish base.
The political situation reflected itself, as it always does, in literature. The Jew began to appear in English fiction as an exalted character, quite specially removed to his advantage from the mass of mankind. He is already a hero in Sir Walter Scott, but the full development was much later. You could still have a Jewish villain as late asOliver Twist, but with writers as different as Charles Reade and George Eliot we reach a time where the Jew is impeccable. The worst any writer dares do at the end of the process is to be silent. The best is to flatter the Jewish type out of all knowledge. This singular interlude was in part due to the divorce between literature and popular feeling in the middle and latter part of the nineteenth century; at least, it was permitted by that divorce. But the active cause of it was the reflection of the Jew's political position upon the mind of the educated class as expressed in its literary art.
At the same time a parallel movement appeared on the historical side of literature. A convention arose that in the clash between the Jews and the English of the Middle Ages the Jews were invariably right and the English invariably wrong. Where the struggle was between the Jew and the non-Jew abroad, the historian exceeded all bounds. The European hostile to the Jew was a senseless monster, and the Jew hostile to the European was a holy victim.
The whole story of Europe and of this country, in so far as it was affected by this very considerable factor, was distorted through suppression, and false emphasis and quite exceptional lying.
The general reader of history neither knewwhat part the Jewish question had played nor the claims that could be advanced for his own race in the conflict. And as historians live by copying one another, the legend was established in every school and college.
At the end of the process the Jews, in proportion to their numbers, held a power in this country beyond anything that has been seen in any other of the world. Poland at the end of the Middle Ages, when that country was most nearly comparable to Britain for the harbouring and support of the Jewish people, is the only parallel, and that a remote one.
Every English Government had (and has) its quota of Jews. They had entered the diplomatic service and the House of Lords; they swarmed in the House of Commons, in the Universities, in all the Government offices save the Foreign Office (and even there representatives of the Jewish nation have recently entered); they were exceedingly powerful in the Press: they were all-powerful in the City. No custom unsympathetic to their race, from the duel to popular clamour, survived. They could boast that England was not only the country where no distinction whatever was made in practice, let alone in law, between the Jew and the native, but that England was the only country where the Jew was always well received, where his natural defects counted least and where his natural abilities had most scope.
Such a state of affairs could not last. It was not natural. It was not consonant with hidden but deep popular tradition or with popular appetites; it corresponded only to the mood of one European community in its wealthier classes. A divergencebetween the cosmopolitan financial interests of the Jew and the particular national interests of Britain was bound to come. War on a large scale, though it did not imperil the country itself, was a warning of change. It appeared with the South African campaign before the end of the century. The position of the Jew was altered. Some dissatisfaction with his power began to stir. It was already muttering and beginning to show itself with the rise of commercial and maritime competition in the new German Empire which, in its turn, had become led, upon all its commercial side, by Jews. There was bound, I say, to be a reaction and a permanent one. While it was yet taking place, in the heat of the Great War, before it had reached the official world, that one of the English politicians who was best fitted to speak for the Jews, who was most intimate with them through manifold ties of friendship and hospitality, Mr. Arthur Balfour, was chosen to make the famous pronouncement in favour of Zionism. It came within a month of the great crisis of the war. Its object was to divide the general influence of the Jews throughout the world, which had hitherto been upon the whole opposed to the cause of the Allies, because, like every other neutral, the Jews were more and more convinced, as the campaigns dragged on, that the Central Empires were certain of victory.
Though this was the motive, the effect was to tie the British state yet closer to the fortunes of Israel, for here was England pledged to support, to defend, to act as a special protector over, the peculiar interests of the Jews, just where those interests would most challenge the whole of Christendomand of Islam, just where it would be most acutely difficult to confirm Jewish claims.
The declaration in favour of Zionism, the solemn pledge of the forces of the British State to an exceptional support of the Jew in a matter wholly to his benefit and not in any way to that of England, coming though it did after the climax of Jewish power had been reached and passed, was the last stage of that long process of alliance between the British commercial policy and its ruling classes on the one hand and the Jews upon the other.
Already, as I have said, that alliance was morally shaken. The great influx of poor Jews had shaken it. The mere effect of time, the inevitable revolt of the human conscience against an unnatural pretence and an obvious fiction, was bound to come, and was overdue. But although the alliance was already shaken, the English State remained officially closely interlocked with Jewry, and its last action, the demand for the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine, was, as has so often happened in the story of human development, at once the term and the turning-point of a process which had reached its conclusion; for it will be remarked throughout history that any force is most expressive, its manifestation of power most crude and most emphatic, in the perilous intervalafterits real strength has begun to decline andbeforeits first open defeat.
But the problems presented by this experiment in Palestine merit a separate examination. To this I will now turn.
ZIONISM
The question of Zionism has been discussed from every possible aspect save one, and that one is the only factor which relates to the thesis of this book.
It has been argued, as a purely Jewish matter; there has been debate upon its justice or injustice among the Jews themselves, as to its advantage or disadvantage to their race; debate among the various non-Jewish forces concerned as to the advantage or disadvantage it would be to them; debate upon the rights and wrongs of the native population among which the Jews might find a home; debate as to whether that home should be in Palestine or elsewhere—and so on.
All these discussions avoid the ultimate issue. Some of them, of course, are of evident importance within the Jewish community, but so far as the essential problem we are discussing in this book is concerned, they do not apply. The one question which is at issue from the point of view of our thesis is this:—
Whether the Zionist experiment will tend to increase or to relax the strain created by the presence of the Jew in the midst of a non-Jewish world.
That, and that only, is our concern, and from that point of view we may examine the theory ofZionism which has now emerged into an attempted practice.
First let us consider its necessary general implications: the implications which Zionism involves, no matter where or how the experiment were tried.
The Zionist theory is that Israel would benefit if of its many millions (some twelve millions, counting those of the partly Jewish fringe, who are sufficiently Jewish to make one with the race) a core—say a tenth—were to have a fixed territorial "city," a country of their own, a habitation. This country, wherever it might be chosen, should be, as far as possible, a purely Jewish State: "as Jewish," one of its exponents has said, "as England is English."
Now, suppose the place chosen were (to-day we may say "had been") an empty or almost undeveloped country, and supposing the Jews had found that their own people could bear the expense of reaching that place with sufficient capital, and of colonizing it in large numbers. Supposing a small State of a million to a million and a half inhabitants to be thus formed, to be wholly Jewish in character, and independent in the fullest sense. The question immediately arises:Would the Jews throughout the world be:—
(a)permitted to regard themselves as citizens of that State?(b)regarded in any case as citizens of that State, whether they willed or no, and registered as such, with or without the consent of the registered person?
(a)permitted to regard themselves as citizens of that State?
(b)regarded in any case as citizens of that State, whether they willed or no, and registered as such, with or without the consent of the registered person?
If not, what would be the status of the Jew outside this territorial unit, which he had chosen to be much more than a symbol of his national unity—its actual seat and establishment?
That is the question which, so far as I have watched the discussion, everybody hesitates to face; yet that is the question which will have to be faced sooner or later as the main political crux of the whole affair.
Observe that there is no question of establishing a State wherein the whole or even the great mass of the Jewish people shall reside. No one would repudiate such an idea more vigorously than the chief pioneers of Zionism. The great mass of Jews would, of course, ridicule it as impracticable and refuse it as extremely undesirable. They live and they desire to live following their present interests in the nations among whom they are dispersed. They live and they desire to live the semi-nomadic life, the international life, which has become theirs by every tradition, and which one might now almost call instinctive in them. Also the greater part of them desire to pursue those careers which go with such a life, especially the careers of negotiation and of intermediary work. They not only feel the advantage of such a position, they also feel a need and appetite for such a condition.
Whatever form Zionism might have taken before it appeared in its present experimental form, whatever was said of the theory in the past,this pointwas always capital:
The Jews as a nation would remain as they were, moving among all the peoples. The new Zion was to be no more than a fixed rallying point, an established but small territorial nationhood, which should do no more than proclaim their unity. It follows, therefore, necessarily, that the great mass of Jews, outside the territorial settlement, would have, after such a settlement had been formed, to obtain adefinition of their political character. What is that definition to be?
I think myself the Jews would answer: "It is to be precisely what it is to-day, or, rather, what it has been in the Occidental nations during the past generation." That is, the Jew is to be regarded as the full national in the nation in which he happens to be for the time. Nothing shall debar him from any position whatever in that nation. He shall be regarded in exactly the same light as all the other citizens, and, conversely, he shall obtain no privilege. In countries where there is conscription, for instance, he shall be a conscript like anybody else; where a nation in which he happens to find himself goes to war, he shall be compelled to risk his life for it like any other citizen. If he happens a year or two before the war to have settled in the enemy's country, then he shall be equally compelled to fight for the enemy against his former country. He shall in every respect be regarded, by a legal fiction, as identical with the community in which he happens to be settled for the moment,but at the same time he is to have some special relation with the Jewish State.
He and he alone is to be (certainly in practice and, of right, in legal decisions) eligible for admission to that city, for office in it. His opinion is to count in the conduct of that State, wherever he may personally be placed in the world. He is to regard himself—indeed that is inevitable from the definition of the new State—as personally allied to it, if not a member of it. He cannot dissociate himself from its fortunes nor be indifferent to its success or failure. He must in effect beloyalto it. He owes it allegiance of a moral kind. He willnecessarily be in much the same position as are men of Irish descent in the Colonies, in England, and in the United States, to the surviving and now increasing remnant of their race which has clung to its native land. But in the particular case of the Jew this allegiance will not diminish with time. It will remain ever vivacious. The race, as its individual components pass from one country to another, will make one body, generation after generation, with the fixed polity settled in the New Zion. That certainly is the ideal, as I hear it expressed on every side in conversation and in writing by the Jews who support it.
Well, if the ideal is left in that condition (and it is admitted to be in practice in that condition), it will result in a grievous prejudice to the Jewish people, and will be a source of more permanent evil to them than any other policy they could have undertaken. It will emphasize that very point of dual allegiance which it must be their object to soften if the Jewish problem is to be solved.
The existence of a Zionist State will bring into relief the separate character of the Jew. The Jewish nation will no longer be able to depend for one of its defences upon the indifference or the ignorance still widely present among its hosts. Whereas before the experiment was attempted, many of those hosts could forget the difference between him and them, many had no experience of it and many remarked it without its affecting their attitude towards the Jew; after the experiment has been put in practice there must necessarily be a change.
To give a concrete instance, no one could in his anger say to a Jew, "You disturb our repose;you are an alien element in our community; you must leave it." For if he meant that, he was at the same time condemning his victim to universal exile. But once an established national State exists, once you have in the world a considerable number—say a million and a half Jews—who are not the nationals of any other nation, but are the citizens of a Jewish nation with a known locality, an organized State,thenthe suggestion of exile changes its meaning. The opponent of the Jew is now able to say: "Go back to your own country," and you may be very certain that hewillsay that unless some other solution than the legal fiction of full citizenship in one country and of moral allegiance to another is dropped.
The presence of the new Zion will do for the Jewish people what a frame does for a picture. It will not be universal to them; it will not cover the whole field of Jewish activity. It will be but a fraction of the whole. But it will inevitably emphasize the separation, the individual and alien character of the whole. It will concentrate attention upon all those things which the nineteenth century—in what I have called "the Liberal solution"—carefully put in the background and tried to forget. It will militate against an honest solution which would recognize the completely distinct character of the Jew and yet refuse to subject them to any indignity or suffering on that account.
There is more than this. The various nations, taken as a whole—the Roumanians as a whole, the Poles as a whole, the French, the Italians, the English as a whole—take up very different attitudes at any one time toward Israel, and in each the attitude varies from generation to generation;there is always, at any one time of history, including our own time, a certain number of national units which are openly hostile to the Jew, regretting his presence among them, restricting his activities and determined, above all, to separate him, by a sharp legal definition if possible, at any rate by universal social practice, from the rest of the community.
Now these hostile peoples cannot possibly be prevented from using the weapon put into their hands by the existence of a new Zion, with the implications I have just defined. It is difficult enough even now for the countries where Jewish finance controls the politicians (and these are still the most powerful countries) to restrain the anti-Jewish feelings in the lesser nations. It is only done by elaborate rules which are imperfectly obeyed and which are felt in these smaller nations to be imposed by alien interference with their domestic rights. The protection by the French, English and American Governments of what are called by a euphemism "national minorities"—which means, of course, everywhere the Jews—is a perilous affair, and one which can only be carried out most imperfectly even as it is. But the one foundation for that task, the one argument which its promoters appeal to, is the fact that the "national minority"—that is, the Jews present in a hostile community—can plead universal exile.
If you turn them out in order to suppress them, they can only leave for another country. They have none of their own to go to. Or again, if your treatment of the Jews is harsher than that of your neighbour, you are virtually directing a Jewish emigration over your neighbour's borders, and tothat your neighbour has a right to object. But once an independent Jewish seat is established, this argument falls to the ground. It is no replythento tell these nations that the new Jewish State cannot contain the whole Jewish race. It will answer that it is not concerned with the whole Jewish race but only with its own section of that race.
Further, it will of course always be to the interest of those who desire to be rid of the Jewish element in their midst to argue that the Jewish State could be more peopled and that there is plenty of room for more citizens. Again, those hostile to the Jews in their midst can say: "Very well. Since there is no room for the whole mass of our Jews in your new State, we will not deal with the whole mass; allow us to suggest that such and such individuals shall leave our State, where they are not wanted, and shall go to their own." And they would pick out the Jews whose exile would most weaken the Jewish community in their midst.
In the present state of affairs, with the Cabinets of Rome, Washington, London and Paris still heavily influenced by Jewish finance, they have, for the moment, a military force behind them sufficient to impose their orders in some measure upon the reluctant nations of Eastern Europe and in some measure to create an artificial protection for the Jews there. Even if this protection were to last another generation (which is unlikely), the presence of Zionism, interpreted in the sense I have just quoted, would be enough to undermine its work. On any change in the situation, in case of any conflict between these Western powers, or of any change by one or more of them in its attitudetowards the Jews, Zionism, thus interpreted, would be the ruin of the Jews in the Centre and East of Europe. The danger is of such great practical importance that it ought to be the very first matter for discussion. It is only our acquired habit of falsehood and secrecy upon the Jewish problem which has thrust it in the background. In the nature of things it must come to the front, and it would be far better to have the lines of some solution laid down before it becomes insistent.
What are those lines to be?
Their general character is clear enough.
Whether it be of advantage or no to have a purely Jewish State (I mean whether it be of advantage to Israel or no) may be safely left to the Jews themselves to discuss. But one thing is certain: if they decide in favour of its continuance, then they must decide also in favour of some form of recognition for the purely Jewish nationality of the Jewsoutsidethat State.
Thus only will the situation become open and therefore innocuous. If they try under the new conditions to maintain the old fiction that a Jew is at the same time a Jew and yet not a Jew, that he can be at the same time a Jew and an Englishman, or a Jew and a Russian, or a Jew and an Italian, they will be trying to maintain it under conditions quite other than those of the past, and under conditions where the falsehood will break down in practice.
Suppose you were to make such recognition partly voluntary, and leave it to the Jew wherever he might be to claim or not to claim his nationality as a Jew; to be regarded, if he so willed, as a national of the Jewish nation in Zion, or as a nationalof the people among whom he happened to be living for the moment. You may say that under this purely voluntary system (which would, I suppose, be more just) very few would choose for Zion. The great majority would like to go on under the old fiction. That is certainly true of the West; but would it be true of the East? Would it be true of either East or West in a moment of persecution? I think it would not. Even if it be true of the East to-day, it certainly would not be true of any body of Jews suffering there, in the future, any degree of molestation.
But apart from that: Supposing but a small minority availed themselves of this voluntary form of recognition, supposing only a small minority to claim Jewish nationality as defined in the terms of the Zionist State, there would still be the contrast between those who had thus publicly proclaimed themselves nationals of Zion and those who hung back. In other words, short of a general admitted maintenance of the old fiction (of which Zionism more than any other force must accelerate the breakdown), you must have, through Zionism, an accelerated tendency to treating Jews throughout the world as being, whether without the New Zionist State or within it, a separate people. And they are a separate people, they cannot be other. My whole plea is that this truth should be recognized and acted upon; for if it is shirked or denied it will take its revenge. Reality always takes its revenge upon unreal pretence.
There remains in connection with Zionism another consideration which is also of importance, though of a very different kind. Is the new Jewish State to rely upon its own military strength and its ownpolice—though perhaps guaranteed (for what that may be worth) by international agreement—or is it to be a protected State occupied, defended and policed by the strength and fighting qualities of some other kind of men, not Jews—Englishmen, Frenchmen or what not?
As we know, the particular solution attempted, the particular Zionism of which the experiment is now being made in Palestine, plumps for thesecondsolution. The protection of Jews from natives is to be undertaken by a garrison of Englishmen. It plumps for this solution under conditions as adverse as they well can be. The present experiment is, as we noted at the end of the last chapter, not an independent Jewish State, national, guaranteed, standing in its own strength; but aprotectedState; and that State protected by one nation: Great Britain. The new Zion does not depend for its internal peace, for its establishment against highly hostile forces, for the ex-propriation of the local landowners, for the keeping of the peace between local elements highly hostile to itself, upon Jewish soldiers and Jewish courage. It depends upon British soldiers, British organization and British sacrifice. Those who have promoted the Zionist experiment have deliberately chosen the very worst moment for such a folly.
Granted that whoever was to be the Protector he must be a friendly Protector, no worse solution could have been devised. A little nation is always morally guaranteed in its independence, if only by the balance of the greater nations. The violation of the neutrality of Belgium offers nothing of a rule; on the contrary, it was an odious exception. And an exception it would have been just as muchif the neutrality had not been officially guaranteed under Prussia's own hand. The smaller nations, of which the modern world is full, will have, we may be very certain, a long lease of life. The larger nations envy but applaud their security and happiness. They will not be allowed to disappear. The same, I think, would be true of the Jewish national seat, could it be established, inhabited wholly or mainly by men of the Jewish race, religion and culture; presenting to the world the same aspect as does, for instance, Denmark to-day. But to depend for its establishment upon the superior power, upon the military and financial sacrifice, of another and totally different people, is a challenge and a provocation. It is the building of the pyramid upwards from its apex. It is an experiment in the most unstable of unstable equilibriums.
The matter is, of course, being discussed everywhere from the point of view of Great Britain, and nowhere more eagerly than among those who have to do the policing and the armed protection. But we are not here concerned with the ill effects such a situation must have on Great Britain—effects so ill that the experiment as a merely British Protectorate is bound to break down—we are rather concerned with the effect it may have upon the Jews themselves. No great nation will sacrifice its foreign policy, will admit a point of acute weakness, simply to please the Jews. Sooner or later such a nation is bound to say: "Wecannot sacrifice our interests to yours. Look after yourselves." And that is where the peril to the Jews of this system, a protectorate, comes in.
If there were any reason to suppose a natural alliance between the British Army and the Jews;if we could imagine British officers and men taking a natural pleasure in ousting the Arab and making way for the Jew, it would be another matter. If there were something in the nature of things which made that alliance permanent and stable, if the Jews were a fully accepted part of the British Commonwealth as are, for instance, the Scots or the Welsh, some permanent arrangement might be possible. But they are nothing of the sort. The position is wholly unnatural. It cannot last. And if it cannot last with the British connection, how should it last with any other? How shall the transition be made from a British Protectorate to another protectorate? Or how, seeing what violent hatreds have already been roused by the mere beginnings of the experiment, shall the conflict which makes the protectorate necessary be avoided?
So far the dislike of the position, which is very far-reaching, and already very deep in England, is a passive dislike. No English soldier has yet been killed; there has been but little necessity, as yet, to repress the Arab and create hostility, though even what little necessity there has been was odious to the troops concerned. But things cannot remain in that state. The conflict is inevitable. When the conflict comes the feeling which has hitherto been passive will become active. People will not tolerate the loss of sons and brothers in a quarrel which is none of theirs, which cannot possibly strengthen the British State; which, if anything, must weaken it; which is felt to be precarious and ephemeral, and which will be undertaken against those with whom British sympathy naturally lies, and in favour of those with whom the averagesoldier and citizen—unlike the professional politician—has no ties and no sympathy.
The matter can be very plainly put thus:
If a Zionist experiment is necessary, or advisable, then let it be made in such a fashion that it can be dependent upon Jewish police and a Jewish army alone. Let it not rely upon a foreign protectorate, which will not last long, which is a weakness to the directing power, and which creates a false position.
If it be answered that the Jews are not capable of producing such an army or such a police, that they would inevitably be defeated and oppressed by the hostile and more warlike majority among whom they would find themselves, then let them make the experiment elsewhere. But it is certain that the present form of the new Protectorate is the most perilous form which could have been chosen for it, so far as the Jews themselves are concerned. I appeal confidently to the near future to confirm this judgment.
From one most poignant aspect of the matter which we all have in mind I deliberately abstain—I mean the effect of the experiment upon Christian and Mohammedan feelings throughout the world of an attempt to establish Jewish control over the Holy Places. I abstain because of the emotions aroused by it, which are violent and universal, and are of the sort I have deliberately determined, as my Preface has informed the reader, to keep out of this essay. Things indeed are not yet at the point of open quarrel in this most perilous of all the results of Zionism. We must trust for a solution before it is too late, but that solution will not be reached if we select for discussion matters uponwhich there can be no agreement, and on which there is now aroused the most passionate feeling.
Still, though I abstain from discussing that point, I would beg the Jewish readers of this my book to bear it in mind. If they believe the religious emotions to be dead in the modern world, or even to be lessening, they may find themselves terribly disillusioned.
I also refrain from making comment here—I have made it strongly enough elsewhere—upon the strange selection made by the Jews for their first ruler of the Arabs and Christians in Palestine. I will do no more than to say that a desire to shield the less worthy specimens of one's race is natural and even praiseworthy. One may even take a certain glory in that one is able to protect them from outsiders. But to give them too great a prominence is a mistake, and it is indeed deplorable that of the whole world of Jews—from crowds of Jews eminent in administration, and political science, known for their upright dealing and blameless careers—Mr. Balfour's Jewish advisers (whoever they were) should have pitched on the author of the Marconi contract and the spokesman of the famous declaration in the House of Commons that no politician had touched Marconi shares.
* * * * *
OUR DUTY
The solution which I propose, which I believe could be made stable, and which I further believe is the only stable one, demands a greater, a more necessary effort upon our side than upon that of our guests.
It is the average man who must do his duty in the matter, and it is upon him that the responsibility will fall, if we take up once again that wretched sequence of ill-ease, persecution, reaction, which has marked so many centuries.
We are the vast majority, we are the organism within which this small minority moves. We are, or could be if we chose, the makers of our own laws, and we are certainly the makers of our own political moods.
I know it is the custom to throw all the responsibility upon the other side, to be perpetually devising instruments for their guidance which soon become instruments for their oppression, and in general to imagine a problem wherein the part of the European is purely negative and all the work has to be done by the Jewish stranger.
That attitude is not only false but grossly undignified. When men accuse some one weaker than themselves of interference with, and even ofacquiring power over, them they condemn themselves. It is in the main our fault if an equilibrium has so rarely been reached in all these sixty generations of debate. For however alien, however irritant the foreign body be, it is we who have in our hands the solvent of that irritant and of relieving the strain which it causes.
Here let me recall at the risk of repetition (for repetition is necessary to lucidity in such arguments) the logical process with which I opened this essay. I say that the vast majority, the fixed race through which in fluid and nomadic form Israel goes moving from century to century, is not free to discharge its responsibility by any one of those attempted solutions which I have condemned. No man, I trust, will have the cynicism to say that mere persecution, let alone its horrible extreme, is or should be a solution. No man can predict the same of exile either. No man can discharge our responsibility by pretending that any solution arrived at must be for our good alone and may disregard that of those who live among us.
It is a statement one hears frequently enough that the masters of house have alone to decide what shall be done under their roof: that the interloper, the alien element, has no standing and no right to complain of whatever measures may be taken for the protection of the household. The thing so put sounds plausible. It is essentially false. It is comparable to the argument applied to private property—that because private property is a right, and that because a man "may do what he likes with his own," therefore he may use it to the manifest hurt of others. Moreover, the analogy is false; for when a man is talking of "the master of thehouse" having the right in his household to decide its own way of living and of treating its guests, he is considering a very small unit in a great community; his household in the whole nation: a little body which, if it discharge or in any other way deal with something alien to itself, will inflict no great injury upon that foreign body, since there is all the world for it to turn to outside. But in the relations between the Jew and Christendom, or the Jew and Islam, the parallel fails. It is precisely because there is no "outside" to which the exile can turn that a duty is imposed on us.
It is true indeed that when a small and alien minority assumes to dictate the policy of the rest, to regard its own advantages alone and subordinate to those advantages the life of all, the claim is grotesque and must be disallowed. But we should remember upon the other side that it is only by exaggerating its claim that a minority can live at all. It is only by fierce insistence upon its right to survive that its survival is guaranteed. We can arrive at justice in this matter by the process of putting ourselves in the shoes of those in relation to whom we propose to act.
Put yourself in the shoes of the Jew and ask how this doctrine of "doing what one likes with one's own" and being "the master of one's own household" would look to you.
A public example which very rightly made a stir a few months before this book was published, may serve as text. A learned and distinguished Jew, Dr. Oscar Levy, a man who was an asset to any community, was turned out of the country under circumstances which many of my readers will recall. He pleaded with perfect justice that asa Jew such an exile left him homeless; that the original country of which he was nominally a citizen (under the broken-down fiction that Jews can be Germans, or Austrians, or what not, and cease to be themselves) would not have him; that his interests, his livelihood had attached him to this country; he had never hidden his true nationality nor changed his name, nor used any of those subterfuges which, even when excusable, are dangerous and contemptible in so many of his compatriots. There was no conceivable reason why such rigour should be used against this man, save indeed that he was a Jew.
Put yourself in his shoes and see how the thing looks. There is no nation to which you could have returned: there is no society to receive you as a member of it. You are not permitted to remain in the atmosphere with which you have grown familiar, in the surroundings which have become those of your later life, and your consonance with which it is too late for you to change. Could there be a grosser cruelty or a grosser injustice? It is the very core of the whole problem thatsomewherethe Jew must be harboured, and therefore to some one of us the question must be put, "Will you harbour him, and if so upon what terms?" If each man answer, "No, I will not," then all collectively become oppressors. It is no answer to say, "These men are not of us, and therefore they may conspire against us," or "Their interests are divergent from ours and therefore may and do clash with ours." All that is granted. That is merely stating the problem, not solving it. What do we say in daily life of men who merely state their grievances, harp upon them, and make no effort to put them right?What do we think of men who perpetually complain of something naturally weaker than themselves, make no effort to understand its necessities and attempt only to rid themselves of the nuisance without considering reciprocal duty and mutual relations? The same should we think of those who so act towards the Jewish community in our midst which, for all its domination and exaggerated modern power, is ultimately at our mercy, far weaker than we are in numbers and situation. Without further elaboration of what should be an obvious political and moral principle, let us consider our part in the task.
It consists, I conceive, in two very different determinations: two very different but allied lines of conduct to which we must pledge ourselves. The first, until recently the most difficult, is the determination to speak of the Jewish people as openly, as continuously, with as much interest, with as close an examination as we speak of any other foreign body with which we are brought in contact.
The second, which will perhaps be the more difficult duty to practise in the future, will be to avoid, in the individual public recognition of those with whom we must live, all futile anger and all mere reaction. I mean by mere reaction, blind reaction. The instinctive thrusting back against a thing which presses on us, the uncalculated and animal return blow, the consequences of which, either to ourselves or to others, are not weighed when it is delivered; the futile complaint, the futile rage, the futile cruelty.
Unless those two duties are undertaken together, unless the determination to practise both be ofequal weight, the solution I propose will fail. To discuss the problem presented by the presence of the Jewish people, to talk of them as one would of any other, openly and frankly, to interest oneself in their history and in their present doings: all this is only to aggravate the trouble if we use that open dealing for the purpose of doing them a hurt, or if, in the course of it, we allow ourselves (merely from irritation or contrast, from the sense which all must have of opposition to things alien) to react against them without consideration of the immediate and ultimate consequences not only to themselves but to us.
Conversely, the determination to regard their interests and to avoid every possible occasion of conflict, to hold a just measure with them, is quite useless if we falsify the whole relation by secrecy and false convention.
The moment that comes in, there comes in with it a secret dissatisfaction with oneself and with the whole situation. The position is falsified, the seed of animosity greatly stimulated, the danger of mutual contempt made inevitable.
Now let us look at these two branches of what we have to do in the matter, and see what difficulties lie in the way.
In the way of frankly recognizing, examining, taking an open interest in the Jewish minority in our midst there lie three very powerful obstacles. First the inherited convention of polite society; secondly, and much the most powerful, fear; and thirdly, the very reputable desire to avoid offence.
The first of these, the fear of convention, has many roots—the necessity for harmony in a leisuredlife, that is, the desire to avoid friction even at the expense of truth, the mere momentum of a quiet habit, the fear of misunderstanding which may come from one side casting ridicule upon the other, which may offend the person whom we have misunderstood, or make us ridiculous in his eyes and those of our audience.
There is also, of course, as a cause, more powerful than any other, the force which lies behind all convention, the force which makes a man take off his hat in a church, which forbids his walking without boots in the street on the driest day, that is, the pressure of general practice. But the thing to realize is that in this form—I mean as distinct from any feeling of fear or of charity—the thing is a convention and a convention only. Difficult as it is to break with conventions, unlessthisconvention is broken once and for all, the Jewish problem remains with us unsolved and growing in acuteness and peril.
You can meet an Irishman and discuss with him the conditions of his nation. You can ask an Italian when he was last in Italy, or congratulate a Frenchman upon his acquisition of your tongue or tell him that it is difficult for him to understand your own customs: but a convention arose under the Liberal fiction—to which I have devoted so much space in the earlier part of this book—that to do any of these very natural things in the case of a Jew is monstrous. Your audience is shocked if you ask some learned Jew at a public table a question upon his national literature or history. It is a solecism to refer to his nationality at all, save perhaps now and then in terms of foolish praise—in nine times out of ten praise not to the point andnot desired by its recipient. And even praise must be approached most gingerly. You may not ask a Jew in London, however keen your desire for information, whether he had cousins in Lithuania or Galicia who have told him of the conditions of those distressed countries. You may not ask him when his family came to England, nor, if he be a recent arrival, what he thinks of the country. The whole thing istaboo.
More than this: you must, you are expected (or were until quite recently expected) to emphasize in a most extravagant manner the complete identity of your Jewish guest with the people among whom he lives. I do not take offence if some chance acquaintance, noting my French name, talks to me about France, and is interested in my experience as a conscript long ago in that country. Mr. Redmond did not feel himself insulted when those he met in London discussed Irish matters with him, from the most acute difficulty in politics, to the most general allusion to the Abbey Theatre. The editor of an Italian review visiting England is not shocked if you ask him when he left Florence, nor are those around you horrified at the ill-breeding of your question. But in the matter of the Jew there stands this convention cutting you off from any such straightforward and simple way of dealing with a fellow-being. That convention, I say, must be broken down if we are to get any results at all and to establish a permanent peace.
The thing was not, of course, entirely irrational in origin. No custom is. It was to be excused upon several grounds.
First, there was the fact that many people were known to cherish so strong an hostility to Jews thatto emphasize the Jewish character of anyone present might awaken that hostility.
Then there was the peculiar rapid transition both of Jewish movements and of Jewish fortunes. In the case I have suggested, of asking a London Jew whether he had relatives in Galicia or Lithuania, you might be stumbling upon relations much poorer than himself in the East End of London; or, again, you might seem to be emphasizing the nomadic character of the race and thereby also emphasizing the contrast between it and our own.
But much the strongest excuse for the convention was the well-founded idea that its exercise pleased the Jews themselves. Men avoided direct mention of Jewish nationality because it was felt that such direct mention was almost an insult. It was a thing which the Jew in whose presence you found yourself desired to have kept in the background; and though we might not understand why he desired it, yet we respected his desire as we do that of anyone with whom we wish to preserve harmonious relations. Most men, for instance, are indifferent upon, say, the matter of smoking. Most men are quite at their ease when they are asked whether they smoke or not, and if they do, whether they prefer this or that brand of tobacco. But now and then one comes across a man who, from some accident of training (as, for instance, a man whose mother brought him up to think smoking a mortal sin), does not like to have it alluded to.
I myself know the case of a man of the highest culture and of considerable social position to whom you may not say anything about pigs either inconnection with farming or in connection with food; for his sympathies are Mohammedan. In these exceptional cases, when we know of our guest's particular desire, we yield to it for the sake of harmony and of right living. So is it in this matter of the former convention against alluding to Jewish nationality or Jewish interests in any form. Whether the Jews were wise or not to cherish that convention, as they undoubtedly did, does not concern this part of my argument. I am talking of our duty and not of theirs. But I say that unless the convention is softened and at last dissolved, nothing can be done. Both parties should know that it only does harm. It renders stilted and absurd all our relations; it fosters that suspicion of secrecy which I have insisted upon as the chief irritant in those relations, and it creates a feeling of exception, of oddity, which is the very worst service that could be rendered to the Jews themselves.
Some little time ago the convention went so far that even a mention, a neutral—nay, a laudatory mention, of anything Jewish in a general company led to an immediate awkwardness. Men looked over their shoulders, women gave downward glances right and left. A sort of hunt began, to see whether anyone present could possibly in any remote connection be offended by the monstrous deed. If a man said, "What a poet Heine was and how thoroughly Jewish is his irony!" and said it in a room full of people, the adjective "Jewish" acted like a pistol shot—could anything be more absurd! Yet so it was.
But the point I make is not against the absurdity of this convention but against its peril.It is an obstacle to all right handling of what is becoming daily a more and more insistent and acute difficulty.
It is obvious that the getting rid of such a convention is not to be effected by violent methods, nor immediately. But our duty is to accelerate its decline and, within reason, to enlarge every opportunity for treating the Jewish nationality precisely as one treats any other. I mean precisely as one treats any other in conversation or in writing. We all know the insane type which loves to break convention merely because it is a convention, and we shall certainly have to be on our guard against this sort of person in the near future, as this particular convention begins to break down. But without encouraging such eccentricities there is ample room for an increasing ease in the recognition of what after all we know to be reality, a reality which requires open discussion for the good of us all. The danger is lest even this merely conventional obstacle should by too long a resistance dam up forces which tend to break it down and therefore lest, when it is pulled down, we should admit the other extreme of licence, with its opportunity for insult and damage. That is what has happened in the case of other much more reasonable Victorian conventions, and we must not have it happen in the case of the convention which for so long forbade us to admit that a Jew was a Jew or to take any open interest, when he was present, in the things which he himself thinks the most interesting of all.
And if anyone shall answer that convention is necessary, lest on its decline open hostility should follow, I can only say that this is to despair of any equitable solution at all. But my whole thesisin this book is that such a solution need not yet be despaired of.
There is one more thing to be said in this matter of the oldtaboo. However long it may linger in the small educated class, it has gone for ever among the populace, and it is the popular instinct we shall have mainly to deal with in the difficult times ahead of us.
The populace in this country talks upon Jewish matters with a frankness which would astonish the drawing-rooms, and has so talked upon them for a generation past—ever since the great novel influx of poor Jews began to pour into our towns. It not only talks thus openly to and of Jews upon its own level, but it is thoroughly alive to the presence and power of Jews in government. Those who think that a continuance of the convention can put off the necessity for a solution would be disillusioned if they would spend a few days east of Aldgate, and mix with their fellow-citizens there.
Allied to this obstacle of convention is the very real obstacle of charity.
Now we are here dealing not with a positive charity but with a negative one and with a form of charity uncommonly like slackness.
The man who honestly thinks that any allusion to Jewish races in contemporary art, history or letters in the presence of a Jew is offensive and therefore to be avoided, from goodness of heart,and who also practises the same virtue where any other foreigner is concernedis rare indeed. There are such men, for men of exceptional goodness coupled with exceptional stupidity are to be found. But the excuse of charity as it is generally put forward is not wholly ingenuous. Where it is ingenuous ourreply to-day must be that even at the risk of occasional ill-ease, the danger of offence must be risked; for unless we risk it there is increasing peril of a much greater offence against justice. For whatever reason open discussion is burked, even for the reason of charity, we only put off the evil day, and charity so used may be compared to the charity which refuses to take action in any other critical problem of increasing gravity. The charity which hesitates to control the supplies of a spendthrift, or to wage a defensive war in a just cause, or to defend an oppressed man at the risk of quarrelling with his oppressor, is a charity misdirected.
But, as I have said, with much the greater part of men who plead this motive the plea is, if they would only examine their own consciences, found to be false. And the test of its falsity will be apparent when the convention slackens. When it is no longer conventional to avoid all mention of Jews, how many will remain silent merely from the love of their fellow-men? One might go further and say that when the convention has gone, any need for this kind of charity will go with it. There is an exception, of course, in the case of the man whose dislike of Jews is so violent that he fears himself if he gives any rein to his tongue. That mania is exceptional; but where it is found certainly its victim will do well to keep silence. If a man cannot mention the Hebrew alphabet without a sneer, or the economics of Ricardo without betraying his ill feeling for Ricardo's lineage, then certainly he had better hold his tongue when Jews are there. So, too, a Frenchman who raves against the English had far better not discuss the BritishConstitution or the genius of Newton in any society where an Englishman may be present.
There remains the chief obstacle—that of fear.
There is no doubt that the strongest force still restraining an expression of hostility to the Jew is fear.
In a sense, of course, there is a "fear" of breaking convention—but that is fear only in metaphor. I mean not this, but the very real dread of consequences: the feeling that an expression of hostility to Jewish power may bring definite evils on the individual guilty of it, and a panic lest those evils should fall upon him. How strong this feeling is, anyone can testify who has explored, as I have, this most insistent of modern political ills; and doubtless the greater part of my non-Jewish readers will recall examples to the point.
It is a fear of two consequences, social and economic, and even of both combined. Men dread lest hostility to the Jew Domination should bring them into the grip of some unknown but suspected world-wide power—some would call it a conspiracy—which can destroy the individual who shall be so rash as to challenge it. Some perhaps have gone to the length—the insane length—of reading the word "destroy" in its literal sense and of fearing for their lives. Such an illusion is laughable. But very many more are affected by the reasonable conception that they will have against them, if they provoke it, an intelligent, combined action which they cannot meet because there is no organization upon their side: because it is international; because there is behind it a great intensity of feeling; because through finance it controls the political machines of all the nations, because it is all-powerful in the Press—and so forth.
They dread, I say, the social consequences. They also (and that with more definition and more sense) dread the economic consequences. They recognize (they also exaggerate) the grip of the Jew over finance. They conceive that if they speak they will be dragged down, their enterprises ruined, their credit dissolved. And that is the most powerful instrument which can be brought to bear. When supernatural motives disappear the strongest motive remaining after appetite is avarice; and avarice is more universal than appetite and more continuous. Nor is it only avarice which is at work here, but also the respectable desire for security. There are to-day innumerable men who would express publicly on Jews what they continually express in private, but who conceal their feelings for fear that their salaries may be lost or their modest enterprises wrecked, their investments lowered, and their position ruined. Above them are a lesser number, equally convinced that their large fortunes would be in peril were they so to act.