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Digitized for Microsoft Corporation 
by the Internet Archive in 2007. 

From University of Toronto. 

May be used for non-commercial, personal, research, 
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May not be indexed in a commercial service. 





BY THE SAME AUTHOR: 


EUROPE AND THE FAITH 

" Mr. Belloc has developed a side 
of history which is a wholesome 
antidote to self-satisfied Angli¬ 
canism; and he has produced a 
brilliant and bumingly sincere 
historical essay which sweeps his 
reader along. It is certainly the 
best book he has written .”—The 
Church Times. 

THE OLD ROAD 

With Illustrations by William 
Hyde, a Map and Route Guides. 
New Edition. 

THE STANE STREET 

A Monograph. With Illustrations 
by William Hyde, and Maps. 



I 


THE JEWS 

By HILAIRE BELLOC 


.‘?in^ ,i 7 dVw 


« 


CONSTABLE & COMPANY, LIMITED 
LONDON BOMBAY SYDNEY 



Fir at Published igi« 
Second Impression 19aa 



To 

MISS RUBY GOLDSMITH 

MY SECRETARY FOR MANY YEARS AT KING’S 
LAND AND THE BEST AND MOST INTIMATE OF 
OUR JEWISH FRIENDS, TO WHOM MY 
FAMILY AND I WILL ALWAYS OWE 
A DEEP DEBT OF GRATITUDE 




PREFACE 

The object of this book is more modest, I fear, 
than that of much which has appeared upon that 
vital political matter, the relation between the 
Jews and the nations around them. 

It does not propose any detailed, still less, any 
positive legal solution to what has become a press¬ 
ing problem, nor does it pretend to any complete 
solution of it. It is no more than a suggestion 
that any attempt to solve this problem ought to 
follow certain general lines which are essentially 
different from those attempted in Western Europe 
during the time immediately preceding our own. 
I suggest that, if the present generation in both 
parties to the discussion, the Jews and ourselves, 
will drop convention and make a principle of 
discussing the problem in terms of reality, we shall 
automatically approach a right solution. 

We have but to tell the truth in the place of the 
falsehoods of the last generation. Therefore, of 
the three principles upon which this essay reposes, 
the principle that concealment must come to an end 
seems to me more important than the principle of 
mutual recognition, or even the principle of mutual 
respect. For it may well be that my judgment is 
at fault in the matter of Jewish national conscious¬ 
ness ; it may well be that I exaggerate it, and it 

vii 


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1 4^5 

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PREFACE 


viii 

is certain that one party to a debate cannot be 
possessed of the full knowledge required for its 
settlement; the other side must be heard. But 
neither my judgment nor the judgment of any man 
can be at fault on the value of truth and the 
ultimate evil consequences of trying to build upon 
a lie. 

The English reader (less, I think, the American) 
will often find in my sentences a note that will 
seem to him fantastic. The quarrel is already 
acute here in London, but it has not here approached 
the limits which it has reached long ago elsewhere; 
and a man accustomed to the quieter air in which 
all public affairs have, until recently, been debated 
in this country, may smile at what will seem to 
him odd and exaggerated fears. To this I would 
reply that the book has been written not only in 
the light of English, but of a general, experience. 
I wall bargain that were it put into the hands of a 
jury chosen from the various nationalities of Europe 
and the United States it would be found too mod¬ 
erate in its estimate of the peril it postulates. I 
would further ask the reader, who may not have 
appreciated how rapidly the peril approaches, to 
consider the distance traversed in the last few 
years. It is not very long since a mere discussion 
of the Jewish question in England was impossible. 
It is but a few years since the mere admission of it 
appeared abnormal. The truth is that this ques¬ 
tion is not one which we open or close at will in 
any European nation. It is imposed successively 
upon one nation after another by the force of 
things. It is this force of things, this necessity 
for national well-being, and for the warding off of 
disorder, which has thrust the Jewish question 



PREFACE 


ix 


to-day upon a society still reluctant to consider it 
and still hoping it may return to its old neglect. 
It cannot so return. 

I will conclude by asking my Jewish, as well as 
my non-Jewish, readers to observe that I have left 
out every personal allusion and every element of 
mere recrimination. I have carefully avoided the 
mention of particular examples in public life of the 
friction between the Jews and ourselves and even 
examples drawn from past history. With these I 
could often have strengthened my argument, and 
I would certainly have made my book a great deal 
more readable. I have left out everything of the 
kind because, though one can always rouse interest 
in this way, it excites enmity between the opposing 
parties. Since my object is to reduce that enmity, 
which has already become dangerous, I should be 
insincere indeed if from mere purpose of enlivening 
this essay I had stooped to exasperate feeling. 

I could have made the book far stronger as a 
piece of polemic and indefinitely more amusing 
as a piece of record, but I have not written it as a 
piece of polemic or as a piece of record. I have 
written it as an attempt at justice. 




CONTENTS 

PAGE 

CHAPTER I 

The Thesis of this Book. 3 

The Jews are an alien body within the society they 
inhabit—hence irritation and friction—a problem is 
presented by the strains thus set up—the solution of 
that problem is urgently necessary. 

An alien body in any organism is disposed of in one 
of two ways: elimination and segregation. 

Elimination may be by destruction, by excretion or 
by absorption—in the case of the Jews the first is abomin¬ 
able and, further, has failed—the second means exile : 
it has also failed—the third, absorption, the most pro¬ 
bable and most moral, has failed throughout the past, 
though having everything in its favour. 

There remains segregation, which may be of two 
forms: hostile to, or careless of, the alien body, or friendly 
to it and careful of its good—in this latter form it may 
best be called Recognition. The first kind of segregation 
has often been attempted in history—it has been par¬ 
tially successful over long periods—but has always left 
behind it a sense of injustice and has not really solved 
the problem—also it has always failed in the end. 

The true solution is in the second kind of segregation, 
that is, recognition on both sides of a separate Jewish 
nationality. 


CHAPTER II 

The Denial of the Problem ..... 17 

In the immediate past the problem was shirked in 
Western Europe by a mere denial of its existence—some 
were honestly ignorant of the existence of a Jewish 

xi 



CONTENTS 


xii 


nation—some thought the difference one of religion 
only—more admitted the existence of a separate nation 
but thought a convenient fiction, that it did not exist, 
necessary to the modem state. 

This ignorance or fiction has broken down in our own 
time—partly through the necessary reaction of truth 
against any falsehood—partly through the increasing 
numbers of the Jews in Western countries—more through 
the great increase of their power. 

Yet, though this old “ Liberal ” fiction about the 
Jews is dead, having proved unworkable in the face of 
fact, it had something to be said for it—it secured peace 
for a while—it chose models from the past—and it was 
based on a certain truth, to wit, that the Jew takes on 
very rapidly the superficial characters of the nation in 
which he happens for the time to be living—moreover it 
was desired by the Jews themselves—example of the 
old Jewish Peer and his claim “ to be let alone ”— 
practical proof of the failure in his case. 

At any rate the old “ Liberal ” fiction is now quite 
useless—the problem is admitted and must be solved. 

CHAPTER III 

The Present Phase of the Problem 

The Jewish problem, present throughout history, has 
assumed a particular character to-day—it is the char¬ 
acter of a sharp reaction against the old pretence that 
Jews were identical with the nations in which they 
happened to five—-it first took the form of irritation 
only—it was suddenly exasperated in a very high degree 
by the Jewish revolution in Russia—but long before 
this the increasing power of Jews in public life, the anti- 
Semitic writing on the Continent, the Dreyfus agitation, 
the South African War, and the Jewish leadership of 
Socialism had prepared the way—The situation on the 
outbreak of the Great War—Bolshevism—a short 
description to be expanded in a later chapter—Bolshe¬ 
vism is a Jewish movement, but not a movement of the 
Jewish race as a whole —its particular effect was to 
release criticism of Jewish power which had hitherto 
been silent from fear of, or sympathy with, Capitalism. 

Men hesitated to attack the Jews as financiers because 
the stability of society and of their own fortunes'was 
bound up with finance—but when a body of Jews also 



CONTENTS 


xiii 


PAGE 

appeared as the active enemies of existing society and of 
private fortune, the restraint was removed—since the 
Bolshevist movement open (and hostile) discussion of 
the Jewish problem has become universal. 

CHAPTER IV 

The General Causes of Friction .... 69 

The strain between Jewry and its hosts in Islam and 
Christendom much older than any modem cause can 
account for—the true causes are both general and par¬ 
ticular—I call those general which are ineradicable and 
proceed from the contrasting natures of the two races, 
particular those which depend upon the will on either 
side and can be modified to the advantage of both. 

The general cause of friction being a contrast in funda¬ 
mental character, we note that the common accusations 
brought against Jews are false, as are the common praises 
given him by those not of the race.—In each case what has 
to be noted is not a series of virtues or vices special to 
the Jew, but the racial character or tone of each quality. 

These examined—the Jewish courage—examples— 
the Jewish generosity—the strength of Jewish patriotism 
—the consequent indifference to our national feelings— 
accusations arising therefrom, especially in time of war— 
the Jewish power of concentration—of eloquence—the 
Jewish tendency to “ push ” a Jewish success and hide 
a Jewish failure or danger—the evil effects of this ten¬ 
dency in our mutual relations. 

The poverty of the Jewish people—false effect produced 
by a few great Jewish fortunes—the instability of these— 
cringing of wealthy Europeans to Jewish money-dealers 
—dependence of our politicians on wealthy Jews—evil 
effect of this in the attempt to regulate domestic affairs 
of Eastern Europe. 

The ill effect of the partially Jewish financial monopoly 
—especially with Parliamentary corruption as pro¬ 
nounced as it is to-day. 


CHAPTER V 

The Special Causes of Friction .... 99 

I have called “ Special ” causes of Friction those 
which are remedial at will by either party—-they would 


I 



xiv 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 

seem to be, on the Jewish side, the habit of secrecy and 
the habit of expressing a sense of superiority—on our 
side a disingenuousness and unintelligence in our treat¬ 
ment of Jews and a lack of charity. 

The deplorable Jewish habit of secrecy—the use of 
false names—examples—excuses for same not adequate 
—a regular code of such names which deceive us but can 
be decoded by fellow Jews. 

The expression of superiority by the Jew—our states¬ 
manship has never sufficiently allowed for it—examples 
of this expression—Jewish interference in our religion— 
or national quarrels—and other departments which are 
alien to Jewish interests—on the other hand this quality 
has been a preservation of the race—the Jew should 
note the corresponding sense of superiority on our side— 
even the poor hack-writer, if he be of European blood, 
feels himself superior to the Jewish millionaire. 

CHAPTER VI 

The Cause of Friction upon our Side . . . 123 

This department of our inquiry often neglected 
through an error—it is presumed that, because we are 
the'hosts and the Jew alien to us, no responsibility falls 
on us—this error forgets that the Jew is permanently 
with us and that every permanent human relation 
involves responsibility. 

The first cause of friction on our side is disingenuous- 
ness in our dealings with the Jew—examples of this— 
we conceal from the Jew our real feelings—we deceive 
him—the richer classes who intermarry with Jews and 
enter into business partnership with them especially 
to blame—the populace more straightforward—this 
deceiving of the Jew leaves him troubled when the quarrel 
comes to a head—he has not heard what is said behind 
his back. 

Disingenuousness in our suppression of the Jewish 
problem in history—gross examples of it in contemporary 
life and particularly in the popular press—Jews called 
“ Russians," “ Germans," anything but what they are. 

Unintelligence a second cause of friction—example: 
our treatment of Jewish immigration—we hate it, yet 
allow it because we dare not give it its right name- 
unintelligent treatment of the Jew in fiction—unintelli¬ 
gence in our astonishment at his international position— 



CONTENTS 


XV 


PAGE 

example of the cabinet minister’s cousin who got into 
trouble. 

Last cause, lack of charity—people won’t put them¬ 
selves in the shoes of the Jew and see how things look 
from his side—we do not (as we should) mix with Jews 
of every class and address their societies—Summary— 

A warning against the idea that the friction between the 
Jews and ourselves is unimportant—it has bred catas¬ 
trophe in the past and may in the future. 

CHAPTER VII 


The Anti-Semite. 145 

Error of neglecting to study Anti-Semitism on account 
of its extravagance—it is a most significant thing, how¬ 
ever ill-balanced—character of the Anti-Semite—he does 
not recognize a Jewish problem to be solved but only a 
Jewish race to be hated—this hatred his whole motive— 
his self-contradictions—his delusion—his strength—the 
press still on the whole boycotts the Anti-Semitic move¬ 
ment—but it is growing prodigiously—its great power 
of documentation —its vast accumulation of evidence— 
effect this will have when it comes out. 

The Jews met Anti-Semitism by nothing but ridicule— 
this weapon insufficient and bound to fail—their enemies 
have countered it by accumulating facts —the latter a 
much stronger weapon so long as the erroneous Jewish 
polioy of secrecy is maintained. 

Danger to the Jews of the Anti-Semitic movement— 

(1) because of its intensity—(2) beoause of its formidable 
accumulation of evidence, which cannot be permanently 
suppressed—(3) and most important, because it is 
allied to a now widespread and more moderate, but very 
hostile, feeling, to which it acts as spear-head. 

CHAPTER VIII 


Bolshevism.167 

The revolution in Russia will be the historical point of 
departure whence will date the renewed hostility to the 
Jew in Western Europe. 

Examination of that revolution—it was (as said in 
Chapter III) “ a Jewish movement, but. not a movement 
of the Jewish race:" importance of this distinction— 



XVI 


CONTENTS 


unfortunately the two different terms “ Jewish race ” 
and “ a Jewish movement" are confused in the popular 
mind. 

The Revolution not the result of an accident or of a 
universal plot—element of racial revenge—the Jew not 
a revolutionary—-special character of the Russian situar 
tion—Industrial Capitalism, the great evil of our time, 
there recent and weak—therefore open to special attack 
—an international evil—the only two international 
forces applicable were the Jews and the Catholic Church 
—why the Catholic Church cannot directly attack indus¬ 
trial Capitalism—why the Jew who happens to be opposed 
to it can and does directly attack it—neither our instinct 
for property nor our Nationalism an obstacle in his 
case. 

Grave perils to the Jew arise from his identification 
with Bolshevism—the more reason to meet these perils 
by a sane treatment of the Jewish problem. 


CHAPTER IX 

The Position in the World as a Whole 

The Jewish problem varies (1) according to the extent 
to which Jews have acquired control and domination in 
various places; (2) according to the tradition of each 
community in approaching the problem; (3) according to 
the strength in each community of the four international 
forces, which are the Catholic Church, Islam, Industrial 
Capitalism, and the Socialist revolt against this last. 

The individual Jew does not feel that he is in a position 
of oontrol or even that he is interfering with his hosts— 
yet that is the universal complaint against him—it is a 
corporate or collective power—more and more resented. 

The position in Russia—repeated—in the Marches of 
Russia and Roumania and Poland—in Central Europe— 
in Occidental Europe—Ireland an exception. 

The position in the United States—Mr. Ford and the 
great effect of his action. 

The Western tradition more favourable to the Jews 
than the Eastern—problem of the Jews and Islam— 
position of the Catholic Church—effect of Industrial 
Capitalism and of its converse, Socialism, upon the 
problem. 



/ 


CONTENTS 


xrii 

CHAPTER X 


PAGE 

The Position of the Jews in England . 

. 

. 215 


England has gone to both extremes with the Jew. 

The Jew in the Roman time and in the Middle Ages 
—his monopoly of Usury in early Middle Ages—The 
exile of all English Jews under Edward I —their return 
under Cromwell—followed by a growing alliance between 
the English State and the Jews—largely due to cosmo¬ 
politan commercial interests of Britain—also to common 
hostility towards the Catholic Church—aided by great 
wealth and security of this country—in the later nine¬ 
teenth century the Jews, in spite of their small numbers, 
colour every English institution, especially the Univer¬ 
sities and the House of Commons—the interests of the 
two races began to diverge before the Great War—none 
the less a formal alliance maintained through the control 
of the politicians by Jewish finance—its culmination in 
the attempt to form an Anglo-Judaic state in Palestine. 

CHAPTER XI 

Zionism.231 

The chief interest of the Zionist experiment lies in its 
reaction upon the international position of the Jew— 
yet that point is not yet discussed—what will be the 
effect of the experiment on the position of Jews outside 
Palestine, necessarily the vast majority of the race ?— 
an inevitable alternative—either the Jews lose their 
international position through loss of the fiction that 
they are not a nation—or the Zionist experiment breaks 
down—effect especially in Eastern Europe. 

Special effect of the experiment on Great Britain— 
difficulty of maintaining sacrifice for purely Jewish 
interests—which now clash with British—unpopularity 
of such sacrifice inevitable—grave error of first appoint¬ 
ment to the headship of the New State—unworthiness of 
the politician chosen for that position. 

CHAPTER XII 

Our Duty.249 

This but a consequence of the conditions established in 
Chapters IV, V and VI—our double duty of mixing with 


CONTENTS 


xviii 


PAGE 

the Jews and of recognizing their separate nationality— 
necessity of openly admitting this separate nationality 
in conversation and social habits—in spite of difficulties 
opposed by convention—in this the wealthier classes 
should follow the lead of the populace—folly and danger 
of Fear in this matter—the fear of Jewish power a 
degrading and exasperating thing to the European— 
delay makes it worse—our plain duty is to recognize 
this alien nation, to respect it, and to treat it frankly as 
we do every nationality other than one’s own. 


CHAPTER XIII 


Their Duty.271 

Only a brief mention—for interference or advice in 
domestic concerns of Jewry would be an impertinence— 
but it is clear that all specially Jewish institutions favour 
the right policy 7 for which I plead-—those already in 
existence—schools, newspapers, Jewish societies—all 
increase of these institutions should be welcome, because 
they emphasize and make clear the separate nationality 
of the Jew. 


CHAPTER XIV 

Various Theories. 277 

This chapter is a digression on the various theories on the 
Jewish race and its fortunes which have arisen in history 
and some of which are still present. 

The theory that reconciliation is impossible—its 
attachment to the idea of a special curse or blessing. 

The theory of a mysterious necessary alliance between 
Israel and Britain—its most extravagant forms. 

The theory that the Jews are the necessary flux of 
Europe, without which our energies would decline— 
note on the intellectual independence of the Jew and 
on his original effect on our thought—demand for a 
Jewish history of Europe and Islam combined. 

The theory that the Jewish problem is domestic only 
and no concern of ours—its error, since the relations are 
mutual. 

The two theories of the Jew as a malignant enemy 
of our innocent selves, and of our malignant enmity 



CONTENTS 


XIX 


PAGE 

against the innocent and martyred Jew—both erroneous. 

The theory that the Jewish problem is now solving 
itself by absorption—this theory false and due to a 
misunderstanding of history and a neglect of acute 
modern and recent differentiation—Mr. Ford’s epigram 
on “ the melting-pot." 

Fantastic theory that no Jewish national type exists ! 

CHAPTER XV 

Conclusion. Habit or Law ?. 301 

Granted that the solution I advance (a full recog¬ 
nition of separate nationality) is the just solution, should 
it be expressed in law ?—Not, I think, until it has first 
appeared in our morals and social conventions—to begin 
with laws and regulations on our side would inevitably 
breed oppression—but the suggestion of separate insti¬ 
tutions coming from the Jewish side should be welcomed 
—urgency of a settlement—modern quarrels are growing 
fiercer, not less—but for my part I say, “ Peace to 
Israel." 







CHAPTER I 

THE THESIS OF THIS BOOK 

It is the thesis of this book that the continued 
presence of the Jewish nation intermixed with 
other nations alien to it presents a permanent 
problem of the gravest character: that the wholly 
different culture, tradition, race and religion of 
Europe make Europe a permanent antagonist to 
Israel, and that the recent and rapid intensification 
of that antagonism gives to the discovery of a 
solution immediate and highly practical impor¬ 
tance. 

For if the quarrel is allowed to rise ■ unchecked 
and to proceed unappeased, we shall come, unex¬ 
pectedly and soon, upon one of these tragedies 
which have marked for centuries the relations 
between this peculiar nation and ourselves. 

The Jewish problem is one to which no true 
parallel can be found, for the historical and social 
phenomenon which has produced it is unique. It 
is a problem which cannot be shirked, as the last 
generation both of Jews and of their hosts attempted 
to shirk it. It is a problem which cannot be 
avoided, nor even lessened (as can some social 
problems), by an healing effect of time: for it is 
increasing before our eyes. It must be met and 
dealt with openly and now. 

3 



4 


THE JEWS 


That problem is the problem of reducing or 
accommodating the strain produced by the presence 
of an alien body within any organism. The alien 
body sets up strains, or, to change the metaphor, 
produces a friction, which is evil both to itself and 
to the organism which it inhabits. The problem 
is, how to relax those strains for good and to set 
things permanently at their ease again. 

There are two ways to such a desirable end. 

The first is by the elimination of what is alien. 
The second is by its segregation. There is no other 
way. 

The elimination of an alien body may take three 
forms. It may take a frankly hostile form—elimina¬ 
tion by destruction. It may take a form, also 
hostile but less hostile—elimination by expulsion. 
It may take a third form, an amicable one (and 
that far the most commonly found in the natural 
process of physical nature and of society)—elimina¬ 
tion by absorption; the alien body becomes an 
indistinguishable part of the organism in which it 
was originally a source of disturbance and is lost 
in it. These three ways sum up the first method, 
the method of elimination. 

The second method, if elimination shall prove 
impossible or undesirable, is that of segregation; 
and this again may be of two kinds—hostile and 
amicable. We may segregate the alien element 
without regard to its own ends or desires: the 
segregation of it being upon a plan framed solely 
from the point of view of the organism invaded, 
and the reduction of the strain or friction it creates 
effected by the mere cutting of it off from all avenues 
through which it can affect its host. 

But we may also segregate the alien irritant by 



THE THESIS OF THIS BOOK 5 

an action which takes full account of the thing 
segregated as well as of the organism segregating 
it, and considers the good of both parties. In this 
second and amicable policy the word segregation 
(which has a bad connotation) may be replaced 
by the word recognition. 

This book has been written under the conception 
that all solutions of the Jewish problem other than 
this last are either impracticable, or bad in morals, 
or both. 

It is written to advocate a policy wherein the 
Jews on their side shall openly recognize their 
wholly separate nationality and we on ours shall 
equally recognize that separate nationality, treat 
it without reserve as an alien thing, and respect it 
as a province of society outside our own. 

It is written under the conviction that any 
attitude which falls short of this policy or is very 
different from it will now soon breed disaster. 

The solution by way of destruction is not only 
abominable in morals but has proved futile in 
practice. It has been the constant temptation of 
angry popular masses in the past, when the Jewish 
problem has come to a head not once but a 
thousand times in various parts of our civilization 
during the last twenty centuries. From the pitiless 
massacres of Cyrenaica in the second century to 
the latest murders in the Ukraine that solution has 
been attempted and has failed. It has invariably 
left behind it a dreadful inheritance of hatred upon 
the one side and of shame upon the other. It has 
been condemned by every man whose judgment is 
worth considering and especially by the great moral 
teachers of Christendom. It is, indeed, hardly a 
policy at all, for it is blind. It is a gesture of 



6 


THE JEWS 


mere exasperation and not a final gesture at that. 

The second form of elimination—expulsion— 
though theoretically sustainable (for a community 
has a right to organize its own life and no aliens 
therein have a claim to modify that life or to disturb 
it), is none the less in practice, and as regards this 
particular problem, only one degree less odious than 
the first. It means inevitably a mass of individual 
injustice, as well as common spoliation and every 
other hardship. It is almost impossible to dis¬ 
sociate it from violence and ill deeds of all kinds. 
It leaves behind it almost as strong an inheritance, 
if not of shame on the one side, at any rate of 
rancour upon the other, as does the first. And 
what condemns it finally is that it is not, and cannot 
be, complete. 

For it is in the nature of the Jewish problem that 
this solution is only attempted at moments and in 
places where the strength of the Jews has declined; 
and this invariably means their corresponding 
strength in some other quarter. 

A particular society attempting this solution of 
expulsion may succeed for a time so far as itself 
is concerned, but that inevitably means the recep¬ 
tion of the exiled body by another district, and, 
sooner or later, the return of the force which it was 
hoped to be rid of. The greatest historical example 
of this is, of course, the action of the English. The 
English alone of all Christian nations did adopt 
this solution in its entirety. A strong national 
kingship, a government highly organized for its 
time, an insular position and a singular unanimity 
of national purpose promoted the expulsion of the 
Jews from England at the end of the thirteenth 
century; for more than three and a half centuries 



THE THESIS OF THIS ROOK 7 

that expulsion was maintained, and England alone 
of the various divisions of Christendom was in 
theory free of the alien element and nearly as free 
in practice as it was in theory. 

But, as we all know, in the long run the experi¬ 
ment broke down. The Jews were readmitted in 
the middle of the seventeenth century, and nowhere 
have they come to greater strength than in the 
very nation which attempted this solution of the 
problem with such drastic thoroughness five hun¬ 
dred years ago. None of the other parallel attempts 
up and down Europe were of the same thoroughness 
as the English attempt. Their failure came, there¬ 
fore, more quickly. But such failure would seem in 
any case to be inevitable. Quite apart, therefore, 
from the moral objection which attaches to it, 
there is the practical experience that a solution is 
not to be found upon such lines. 

Lastly, there is elimination by absorption. This 
would obviously be the most gentle, as it is the 
most evident, of all methods. It is further a normal 
and most usual method of nature herself when a 
living organism has to deal with disturbance excited 
by the presence of an alien body. So natural and 
so obvious is it that it has been taken by many 
men of excellent judgment upon both sides as a 
matter of course. It has been taken for granted 
that if absorption has not taken place in the past 
it has only been due to an ill-will artificially nour¬ 
ished and maintained against the Jews on our side, 
or by the unreasoning exclusiveness of the Jews on 
theirs. 

Even to-day, in spite of a vast increase during 
our own generation, both in the public appreciation 
of the problem and in its immediate gravity, there 



8 


THE JEWS 


are very many men who still regard absorption as 
the natural end of the affair. These, though 
dwindling, are still numerous upon the non-Jewish 
side; upon the other, the Jewish side, they are, I 
think, a very small body. For I note that even those 
Jews who think absorption will come, admit it 
with regret, and certainly the vast majority 
would insist with pride upon the certain survival 
of Israel. 

But here again I maintain that we have the index 
of history against us. In point of fact absorption 
has not taken place. It has had a better chance 
than any corresponding case can show: ample time 
in which to work, wide dispersion, constant inter¬ 
marriage, long periods of tolerant friendship for 
the Jew, and even at times his ascendancy. If 
ever there were conditions under which one might 
imagine that the larger body would absorb the 
smaller, they were those of Christendom acting 
intimately for centuries, in relation with Jewry. 
Nation after nation has absorbed larger, intensely 
hostile minorities: the Irish, their successive 
invaders; the British, the pirates of the fifth 
and eighth centuries and the French of three cen¬ 
turies more; the northern Gauls, their auxiliaries; 
the Italians, the Lombards; the Greeks, the Slav; 
the Dacian has absorbed even the Mongol: but the 
Jew has remained intact. 

However we explain this—mystically or in 
whatever other fashion—we cannot deny its truth. 
It is true of the Jews, and of the Jews alone, that 
they alone have maintained, whether through 
the special action of Providence or through some 
general biological or social law of which we are 
ignorant, an unfailing entity and an equally unfail- 



THE THESIS OF THIS BOOK 9 

mg differentiation between themselves and the 
society through which they ceaselessly move. 

It is not true that conditions in the past differed 
from present conditions sufficiently to account 
for so strange a story. There have been genera¬ 
tions and even centuries (not co-incident indeed 
throughout the world, but applying now to one 
country, now to another) where every oppor¬ 
tunity for absorption existed; yet that absorption 
has never taken place. There was every chance 
in Spain at one moment, in Poland at another, 
but there was the best chance of all in the short 
but brilliant period of Liberal policy which has 
dominated Western Europe during the last three 
generations. That policy has had the fullest 
play: it has left the Jews not only unabsorbed, but 
more differentiated than ever, and the political 
problem they present more insistent by far than 
it was a century ago. 

The thing might have come where there was a 
chaos of peoples, as in pagan Alexandria in the 
four centuries from200B.c.to 200 a.d., or inmodem 
New York. It might have come where there was 
a particularly friendly attitude, as in mediaeval 
Poland or modem England. It might even have 
come, paradoxically, through the very persecution 
and strain of times and places where the Jews 
suffered the most hostile treatment: for their 
absorption might have been achieved under pres¬ 
sure though it had failed to be achieved under 
attraction. As a fact it has never come. It has 
never proved possible. The continuous absorp¬ 
tion of outlying fractions, a process continually 
going on wherever the Jewish nation is present, 
has not affected the mass of the problem at all. 



10 


THE JEWS 


The body as a whole has remained separate, differ¬ 
entiated, with a strong identity of its own under 
all conditions and in all places, and the a priori 
reasoning, by which men come to think this solu¬ 
tion reasonable, is nullified by an experience appar¬ 
ent throughout history. That experience is wholly 
against any such solution. It cannot be. 

There remains, then, only the solution of segre¬ 
gation; a word which (I repeat) I use in a com¬ 
pletely neutral manner though it has unhappily 
obtained in this and other issues a bad connotation. 

Segregation, as I have said, may be of two kinds. 
It may be hostile, a sort of static expulsion: a 
putting aside of the alien body without regard to 
that body’s needs, desires or claims; the build¬ 
ing of a fence round it, as it were, solely with the 
object of defending the organism which reacts 
against invasion, and suffers from the presence 
within it of something different from itself. 

Or it may take an amicable form and may be a 
mutual arrangement: a recognition, with mutual 
advantage, of a reality which is unavoidable by 
either party. 

The first of these apparent solutions has been 
attempted over and over again throughout history. 
It has had long periods of partial success, but never 
any period of complete success; for it has invari¬ 
ably left behind it a sense of injustice upon the 
Jewish side and of moral ill-ease upon the other. 

There remains, I take it, no practical or perma¬ 
nent solution but the last. It is to this conclusion 
that my essay is meant to lead. If the Jewish 
nation comes to express its own pride and patriot¬ 
ism openly, and equally openly to admit the neces¬ 
sary limitations imposed by that expression ; if we 



I 


THE THESIS OF THIS BOOK 11 

on our side frankly accept the presence of this 
nation as a thing utterly different from ourselves, 
but with just as good a right to existence as we 
have; if we renounce our pretences in the matter; 
if we talk of and recognize the Jewish people freely 
and without fear as a separate body; if upon both 
sides the realities of the situation are admitted, 
with the consequent and necessary definitions 
which those realities imply, we shall have peace. 

The advantage both parties—the small but 
intense Jewish minority, the great non-Jewish 
majority in the midst of which that minority acts 
—would discover in such an arrangement is mani¬ 
fest. If it could be maintained—as I think it 
could be maintained—the problem would be 
permanently solved. At any rate, if it cannot be 
solved in that way it certainly cannot be solved 
in any other, and if we do not get peace by this 
avenue, then we are doomed to the perpetual 
recurrence of those persecutions which have 
marred the history of Europe since the first con¬ 
solidation of the Roman Empire. 

It has been .a series of cycles invariably follow¬ 
ing the same steps. The Jew comes to an alien 
society, at first in small numbers. He thrives. 
His presence is not resented. He is rather treated 
as a friend. Whether from mere contrast in type— 
what I have called “friction”—or from some 
apparent divergence between his objects and those 
of his hosts, or through his increasing numbers, 
he creates (or discovers) a growing animosity. He 
resents it. He opposes his hosts. They call 
themselves masters in their own house. The 
Jew resists their claim. It comes to violence. 

It is always the same miserable sequence. 



12 


THE JEWS 


First a welcome; then a growing, half-conscious 
ill-ease; next a culmination in acute ill-ease; 
lastly catastrophe and disaster; insult, persecution, 
even massacre, the exiles flying from the place 
of persecution into a new district where the Jew 
is hardly known, where the problem has never 
existed or has been forgotten. He meets again 
with the largest hospitality. There follows here 
also, after a period of amicable interfusion, a 
growing, half-conscious ill-ease, which next becomes 
acute and leads to new explosions, and so on, 
in a fatal round. 

If we are to stop that wheel from its perpetual 
and tragic turning, there seems to be no method 
save that for which I plead. 

The opposition to it is diverse and formidable 
but can everywhere be reduced upon analysis to 
some form of falsehood. This falsehood takes 
the shape of denying the existence of the problem, 
of remaining silent upon it, or of pretending 
friendly emotions in public commerce which are 
belied by every phrase and gesture admitted in 
private. Or it takes the shape of defining the 
problem in false terms, in proclaiming it essen¬ 
tially religious whereas it is essentially national. 
Worst of all, it may be that very modem kind of 
falsehood, a statement of the truth accompanied 
by a statement of its contradiction, like the precious 
modern lie that one can be a patriot and at the 
same time international. In the case of the Jews, 
this particular modern lie takes the shape of admit¬ 
ting that they are wholly alien to us and different 
from us, of talking of them as such and even writing 
of them as such, and yet, in another connection, 
talking and writing of them as though no such 



THE THESIS OF THIS BOOK 13 

violent contrast were present. That pretence of 
reconciling contradictions is the lie in the soul. 
Its punishment is immediate, for those who indulge 
it are blinded. 

All opposition that ever I have met to the solu- / 
tion here proposed is an opposition sprung from 
the spirit of untruth; and if there were no other 
argument in favour of an honest and moral settle¬ 
ment of the dispute, the one argument based on 
Truth would, I think, be sufficient. It is a social 
truth that there is a Jewish nation, alien to us and 
therefore irritant. It is a moral truth that expul¬ 
sion and worse are remedies to be avoided. It 
is an historical truth that those solutions have 
always ultimately failed; the recognition of those 
three truths alone will set us right. 

Such is the main thesis of this book, but it 
needs an addition if its full spirit is to be appre¬ 
hended, and that addition I have attempted to 
express in the last chapter. 

If the solution I propose be the right solution, 
it yet remains to be determined whether it should 
first take the form of new laws from which a new 
spirit may be expected to grow, or first take the 
form of a new spirit and practice from which new 
laws shall spring. The order is of essential import¬ 
ance ; for to mistake it, to reverse the true sequence 
of cause and effect, is the prime cause of failure 
in all social reform. 

As will be seen by those who have the patience 
to read to the end of my book, I have, in its last 
pages, pleaded strongly for the second policy. It 
would be impossible to frame in our society, and 
in face of the rapidly rising tide of antagonism 
against the Jews, new laws that would not lead 



14 


THE JEWS 


to injustice. But if it be possible to create an 
atmosphere wherein the Jews are spoken of openly, 
and they in their turn admit, define, and accept 
the consequences of a separate nationality in our 
midst, then, such a spirit once established, laws 
and regulations consonant to it will naturally follow. 

But I am convinced that the reversing of this 
process would only lead first to confusion and next 
to disaster, both for Israel and for ourselves. 



THE DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 




CHAPTER II 


THE DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM ’ 

I have stated the Problem. There is friction 
between the two races—the Jews in their dispersion 
and those among whom they live. This friction 
is growing acute. It has led invariably in the 
past (and consequently may lead now) to the most 
fearful consequences, terrible for the Jew but 
evil also for us. Therefore that the problem is 
immediate, practical and grave. Therefore a solu¬ 
tion is imperative. 

But I may be—and indeed I shall be—met at 
the outset by the denial that any such problem 
exists. Such was the attitude of all our immedi¬ 
ate past; such is the attitude of many of the 
best men to-day on both sides of the gulf which 
separates Israel from our world. 

I must meet this objection before going further, 
for if it be sound, if indeed there is no problem 
(save what may be created by ignorance or malice), 
then no solution is demanded. All we have to 
do is to enlighten the ignorant and to repress the 
malicious: the ignorant, who imagine there is an 
alien Jewish nation among them, the malicious, who 
treat as though they were alien, men who are, in fact, 
exactly like ourselves and normal fellow-citizens. 

I do not here allude to the great mass of conven¬ 
tion, hypocrisy and fear which pretends ignorance 

17 c 


18 


THE JEWS 


of a truth, it well knows. I am speaking of the 
sincere conviction, still present in many—particu¬ 
larly those of the older generation—that no Jewish 
problem exists. 

It is honestly denied by a certain type of mind 
that there is any such thing as a Jewish nation; 
there can therefore be no friction between it and 
its hosts: the thing is a delusion. Let us examine 
that mind and see whether the illusion is on our 
side or no. 

It was the attitude familiar to the nineteenth 
century, and agreeable to that one of its political 
moods in which it found itself best satisfied: the 
negative attitude of leaving the Jewish nation 
unrecognized; of creating a fiction of single 
citizenship to replace the reality of dual allegiance; 
of calling a Jew a full member of whatever society 
he happened to inhabit during whatever space of 
time he happened to sojourn there in his wanderings 
across the earth. That was the attitude agreeable 
on the political side to everything which called 
itself “ modern thought.” Such was the doc¬ 
trine proposed by the great men of the French 
Revolution. Such was the attitude accepted 
almost enthusiastically by Liberal England, that 
is, by all the dominant public life of England 
during the Victorian period. Such was the policy 
which once obtained universal favour throughout 
the whole of our Western civilization. That was 
the attitude which the West actually attempted 
to impose upon Eastern States, and the last 
effect of its rapidly-declining credit is to be found 
in certain clauses of the Treaty of Versailles: 
for that attitude is still the official attitude of all 
our governments. 



THE DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 19 


In the Treaty of Versailles and the other treaties 
following the Great War the Jews of Eastern Europe 
were put under a sort of special protection, but not 
in a straightforward and positive fashion. The 
word “ Jew ” was never blurted out—it was 
replaced by the word “ minority ”—but the inten¬ 
tion was obvious. The underlying implication 
was: “ We, the Western governments, say there 
is no Jewish problem. The idea of a Jewish nation 
is a delusion and the conception of the Jew as 
something different from a Pole or a Rumanian 
is a mania. If you in the East are still benighted 
in this matter, at any rate we will prevent your 
ignorance or obsession from leading you to persecu¬ 
tion.” The same men who made these declarations 
proceeded to erect a brand-new highly-distinct 
Jewish state in Palestine, with the threat behind 
it of ruthlessly suppressing a majority by the 
use of Western arms. 

Both actions were the consequence of that con¬ 
fused position I have just defined (history will 
call it the last example), which, though much weak¬ 
ened in public opinion, w r as still honestly taken 
for granted by some of the Parliamentarians who 
framed the Treaty, and was certainly felt to be 
of personal advantage to all: the position that 
there is no Jewish nation when the admission of 
it may inconvenience the Jew, but very much of 
a Jewish nation when it can advantage him. 

Those who defended this position did so from 
various standpoints; but these may all be regarded 
as so many degrees in a certain way of looking at 
the Jewish people. It was till lately the attitude 
of the majority of educated Frenchmen, English¬ 
men and Italians. It was, so to speak, the official 



20 


THE JEWS 


political attitude of Western Europe with its 
parliamentary governments and other correspond¬ 
ing institutions. 

The most extreme form of this opinion was to 
be found in people who spoke of the Jew as nothing 
other than a citizen with a particular religion. A 
state would be dominantly Catholic or Protestant, 
but it would contain smaller religious bodies, eager 
minorities, for which a place had to be found, side 
by side with the more or less indifferent majority. 
Catholic France had a five per cent and wealthy 
Huguenot minority. Protestant England had a 
seven per cent and poor Catholic minority. Protes¬ 
tant Holland had a large minority—more than a 
third—of Catholics, and so forth. It had become 
odious to nineteenth century thought that religious 
differences (which it regarded as nothing more than 
shades of doubtfully-held private opinion) should 
be the concern of the State. A large number of 
people thought of the Jews, not as a race, but only 
as a religion ; and regarding all religion thus, they 
concluded that it could involve no diminution of 
citizenship. 

At the other end of the scale you had public 
men who fully appreciated the ultimate difficulties 
which would certainly arise from this inconclusive 
settlement of the matter. These regarded the 
Jews as a quite distinct nationality, and even as 
a nationality likely to clash with the national 
needs of its hosts; they would even (in private) 
express their hostility towards that nationality. 
None the less, they thought it must be treated in 
public life as though it did not exist. These men 
were most emphatic in their private letters and 
conversation—that the Jewish problem was not a 



THE DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 21 

religious but a national one. Nevertheless (they 
said) it was necessary to-day to mask that problem 
by a fiction and to pretend that the Jew was just 
like everybody else save for his religion. All 
other solutions (they said) demanded a knowledge 
of history and of Europe not to be expected of the 
public at large; again, the Jews were so powerful 
that if they desired the fiction to be supported they 
must be humoured. At any rate, recourse must 
be had, in our time at least, to this make-believe. 

To the new and already antagonistic attitude 
towards the Jews now rising so strongly everywhere 
throughout Western Europe (which is in part a 
reaction from the nineteenth century position), 
this old-fashioned way of denying the Jewish race 
or ignoring its existence by a fiction appears 
morally odious, and we wonder to-day why it 
commanded universal support. It involved a 
falsehood, of course, often a conscious falsehood; 
and it was also undignified; for there appears to 
our generation something as grotesque in denying 
the existence of the Jewish nation as in denying 
our own. But that the fiction was maintained 
sincerely, and that the grotesque and undignified 
side of it went unperceived, we can assure ourselves 
in a few moments’ converse with any one of that 
older generation which maintained it and still 
represents it among us. 

It might have continued to flourish for yet 
another generation, at any rate among the leading 
classes of this commercial community, but for two 
new developments which broke it down, each 
development the result of so large a toleration. 
The first was the growth of numbers, the second of 
influence. What made that old falsehood glaring 



22 


THE JEWS 


and that old grotesque apparent was the enormous 
increase throughout all the West of the Jewish 
poor, accompanied by the enormous increase of the 
power exercised by the Jewish rich in public affairs. 
Men grew angry at finding themselves pledged to 
a pretence that Jews were not, when their presence 
was everywhere unavoidable, in the streets, and 
in the offices of government. The fiction was 
possible when a very few financiers, mixed with 
and lost in the polite world, were alone concerned. 
It became impossible in the face of the vast new 
ghettoes of London, Manchester, Bradford, Glas¬ 
gow, and the formidable and growing list of Jewish 
and half-Jewish Ministers, Viceroys, ambassadors, 
dictators of policy. 

This contempt for and irritation with what I 
have called the nineteenth century attitude, the 
Liberal attitude, was already apparent before the 
end of that century. It was muttering during 
the South African war in England and the Dreyfus 
case in France ; it became vocal in the first years 
of this century, especially in connection with 
parliamentary scandals ; with the Bolshevist rising 
in 1917 it became clamorous. It will certainly 
grow. We already have a formidable minority 
prepared to act against the interest of the Jew. 
It will in all probability become, and that shortly, 
a majority. It may appear at any moment, on 
some critical occasion, on some new provocation, 
as an overwhelming flood of exasperated opinion. 

All the more does it behove us to treat the 
old-fashioned neutrality and fiction fairly; to 
examine it even with a bias in its favour; to set 
down all that can be said in its defence before we 
reject it, as I think we must now all reluctantly 



THE DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 23 

reject it. I say “ reluctantly ” ; for after all it 
was the fixed mood of our fathers, who did great 
things: we feel their reproach when we abandon 
it, and there are still present with us very many of 
our elders to whom our new anxiety is abhorrent. 

We must remember in the first place that the 
treating of the Jew in the West as no Jew at all, 
but a plain citizen like the rest, worked well enough 
for a time. One might almost say that there was 
no Jewish problem consciously present to the 
mind of the average educated Englishman or 
Frenchman, Italian, or even western German, 
between, say, the years 1830 and 1890. A very 
small body of Jews in England and France, in 
Italy and the rest of the West, were vaguely 
associated with wealth in the popular mind; a 
large proportion of them were distinguished for 
public work of various kinds; many of them with 
beneficence. The presence of such men could 
not conceivably lead to political difficulties—or at 
least, so it then seemed. The stories of persecution 
that came through from Eastern Europe, even 
examples of friction between great bodies of Jews 
there and the natives of the States where they 
happened to find themselves, were received in the 
West with disgust as the aberrations of imperfectly 
civilized people. 

Even in the valley of the Rhine, where the Jew 
was more numerous and better known “ in bulk,” 
the convention of the more civilized West was 
accepted. The doctrines, the abstraction of the 
French Revolution in this matter had prevailed. 

Here any reader with an historical sense will at 
once point out that the space of time I have just 
quoted—1830 to 1890—is ridiculously short. Any 



24 


THE JEWS 


treatment of a very great political problem, 
centuries old, which works for only sixty years 
and then begins to break down is no settlement 
at all. But I would reply that this period was 
especially a time in which historical perspective 
was lost. Men, even highly educated men, in the 
nineteenth century, greatly exaggerated the fore¬ 
ground of the historical picture. 

You may note this in any school manual of the 
period, where all the four centuries of our Roman 
foundation are compressed into a few sentences, 
the dark ages into a few pages, the whole vast 
story of the Middle Ages themselves into a few 
chapters; where the mass of the work is invariably 
given to the last three centuries, while of these 
the nineteenth is regarded as equal in importance 
to all the rest put together. 

This false historical perspective is apparent in 
every other department of their political thought. 
For instance, although capitalism, huge national 
debts, the anonymity of financial action and the 
rest of it, did not begin to flourish fully until after 
the first third of the nineteenth century, and though 
anyone might (one would think) have been able 
to discover the exceedingly unstable character of 
that society, yet our fathers took it for granted as 
an eternal state of things. Your Victorian man 
with £100,000 in railway stock thought his family 
immutably secure in a comfortable income, and 
what he thought about capitalism he thought also 
about his newly-developed anonymous press, his 
national frontiers, his tolerance of this, his intoler¬ 
ance of that, his parliaments and all the rest of it. 
It is no wonder if, under such a false sense of 
permanence and security, he lost historical per- 



THE DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 25 

spective in this other and graver matter we are 
here discussing. 

But apart from the argument that what I have 
called the nineteenth century or Liberal attitude 
towards the Jews worked well for its little day 
(at least, in Western Europe), there is also the 
fact that under special circumstances something 
very like it has worked well for much longer periods 
in the past. Take, for example, the position of 
the Jews in such a town as Amsterdam. The 
reception of a Jew as a citizen exactly like others, 
though he was present in very large numbers, the 
fiction denying his separate nationality, has held 
for generations in that community and it has 
procured peace and apparent contentment upon 
both sides. And what is true to this day of Amster¬ 
dam has been true in the past for long periods 
in the life of many another commercial and 
cosmopolitan society: that of Venice, notably, 
and, in a large measure, that of Rome ; in that of 
Frankfort, of Lyons, and of a hundred cities at special 
times. It was true of all Poland for generations. 

One might add to the list indefinitely, but 
always with the uncomfortable knowledge, as one 
wrote, that the experiment invariably broke down 
in the long run. 

Again, there was to be advanced for this Liberal 
attitude of the nineteenth century the very powerful 
argument that while to one party in the issue, the 
Englishman, the Frenchman, the Italian, etc., it 
seemed well enough and certainly did no harm, it 
was highly acceptable to the other. The Jew as a 
rule not only accepted but welcomed this particular 
way of dealing with what he at any rate has always 
known to be a very grave problem indeed. For 



26 


THE JEWS 


the Jew has a racial memory beyond all other 
men. The arrangement seemed to give him all 
the security of which his racial history (a thing of 
which every Jew is acutely conscious) had made 
him ardently desirous. I think we should add 
(though the phrase would be quarrelled with by 
many modern people) that this fiction satisfied 
the Jew’s sense of justice. For it is no small part 
of the problem we are examining that the Jew does 
really feel such special treatment to be his due. 
Without it he feels handicapped. He is, in his 
own view, only saved from the disadvantage of a 
latent hostility when he is thus protected, and he 
is therefore convinced that the world owes him 
this singular privilege of full citizenship in any 
community where he happens for the moment to 
be, while at the same time retaining full citizenship 
in his own nation. 

Now, if in any conflict an arrangement seems work¬ 
able enough to one party and is actually acclaimed 
by the other, it is not lightly to be disregarded. 

If, for instance, a man and his tenant quarrel 
about the tenure of a field upon a very long lease, 
the tenant caring little about nominal ownership 
but very much about his inviolable tenure, the 
landlord quite agreeable to a very long lease but 
keen on retaining the titular ownership, that 
quarrel can be easily settled. One could give any 
name to the tenant’s position other than the name 
of “ owner,” yet satisfy all his practical demands. 
A rough parallel exists between such a position 
and the attempt at a settlement which marked the 
nineteenth century. 

What the Jew wanted was not the proud privilege 
of being called an Englishman, a Frenchman, an 



THE DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 27 


Italian, or a Dutchman. To this he was completely 
indifferent (for his pride lay in being a Jew, his 
loyalty was to his own, and what is more, he might 
at any moment fold up his tent and go off to 
another country for good). What the Jew wanted 
was not the feeling that he was just like the others 
—that would have been odious to him—what he 
wanted was security ; it is what every human being 
craves for and what he of all men most lacked: 
the power to feel safe in the place where one happens 
to be. On the other hand, his hosts had not yet 
found any practical inconvenience in granting 
this demand. They did not know the historical 
argument against it, or they thought it worthless, 
because they thought the past barbarous and no 
model for their own action. So a compromise 
was arrived at, the fiction was solidly established, 
and the Jew, though remaining a Jew, became 
a German in Hamburg, a Frenchman in Paris, an 
American in New York, as he wandered from place 
to place, and for a long lifetime no one felt himself 
much the worse for the false convention. 

The next argument in favour of this policy was 
the fact that it drew upon a number of ideas, each 
one of which at some time or another had been 
taken for granted by our ancestors in each one of 
their numerous (but unsuccessful) attempts to 
deal with the problem after their own fashion. 

For instance, a modern objector says: “ What 
rubbish to treat Jews as though they merely 
represented a religion! We all know they represent 
a nation ! ” But all manner of legislation in the 
past, even in times and places where the difference 
between Jews and Europeans was most marked, 
has perpetually fallen back upon that very point 



28 


THE JEWS 


of religion alone. Over and over again you find 
it the test of policy: in early, and again in fifteenth 
century Spain, under Charlemagne’s rule in Gaul, 
in early mediaeval England, at Byzantium, and 
to this day in Eastern parts where the Jew is 
subject to perpetual interference. Exception was 
in all these made for the Jew who abandoned his 
religion. His nation was left unmentioned. 

It is pertinent to quote such a simple and recent 
example as the body of Prussian officers, now 
happily extinct. It was a standing rule in the 
smarter Prussian regiments (I believe in nearly 
all) that no Jew could get his commission. The 
Prussian system left the granting of commissions, 
in practice, to the existing members of the regi¬ 
mental staff; they treated their mess as a Club 
and they blackballed Jews. But they would admit 
baptized Jews, and did so in considerable numbers. 
Was the Jew less of a Jew in race through his 
baptism ? Throughout all the centuries that 
religious criterion, which the modern reformer 
cries out against as a piece of humbug and a mask 
for the real political problem, has been the criterion 
taken. It is true that the modem solution did 
not attempt a religious segregation. On the 
contrary, the Liberal thought of the nineteenth 
century held all such segregation in abhorrence; 
but it had this in common with the older fashion, 
that it made religion the point of interest, and to 
that extent masked the more real point of nation¬ 
ality and allegiance. 

Lord Palmerston, making his famous speech 
on the sanctity of a Greek Jew’s bedstead, and 
insisting that the said Greek Jew was an English 
citizen; Lord Palmerston carefully avoiding the 



THE DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 29 

word “Jew” and pretending throughout his 
speech that the Greek Jew in question was as 
much an Englishman as himself, was in a very 
different mood from a Spanish fifth-century Bishop 
admitting a Jew to Office on condition of his 
conversion. Yet the two had this in common, that 
neither regarded the Jew as the member of another 
nation, but each (for very different reasons) as no 
more than the member of a religion. 

To Palmerston, this Greek Jew about whose 
bedstead he made his famous speech, and on to 
whose bedstead hangs to this day the phrase 
“ Civis Romanus Sum,” was above all a fellow- 
citizen. He may have seemed to Palmerston a 
doubtful sort of Englishman because his home was 
Greece, but he certainly did not seem doubtful 
because he happened to be a Jew. Palmerston 
would have thought that only a matter of private 
opinion, and would no more have regarded a Jew 
as an alien on account of this private opinion than 
he would have regarded as alien a fellow-Member 
of the House of Commons who preferred roast 
mutton to boiled. 

Take, again, another aspect of the nineteenth 
century liberal idea: the recognition of citizenship. 
You have had that over and over again in the 
attempted solutions of the past. It was the very 
essence of the Roman method. For though the 
Government of the Roman Empire was much too 
concerned with realities and with enduring work to 
accept any fiction in the matter, or to pretend in 
practice that the Jew was not a Jew; though, on the 
contrary, the Romans recognized at once the gulf 
between the Jews and themselves, and recognized 
it not only by their cruelty to the Jew but also by 



30 


THE JEWS 


the privileges they granted him; yet it was always 
their policy to admit citizenship as the primary 
distinction. The Jew who could claim that he was 
a full Homan citizen was, in the eyes of a Roman 
Tribunal, much more important in that capacity 
than in his social capacity as Jew. His “ point,” 
as we should say in our modern slang, was his 
citizenship, not his Judaism. So, I say, this 
solution has for a further argument the fact that 
in one part or another it is in touch with the various 
attempts our race has made in the past to solve 
the problem. 

There is yet another argument strongly in favour 
of the Liberal fiction which was attempted in the 
immediate past, and thought to have been success¬ 
fully established. It is the consonance of that 
fiction with the whole body of modern custom and 
law, with the whole mass of modern economic and 
social habit. 

We travel so much, we mix so much, our economic 
activities are at once so complicated, so interlocked, 
and (unhappily) for the most part so secret, that 
any other way of meeting the Jews would have 
seemed—at any rate if it had appeared in the shape 
of a positive law—a monstrous anachronism. A 
man must meet his friends’ friends and treat them 
as a normal part of the general society in which 
he moves. As the Jew permeated the society of 
the West everywhere (small though his numbers 
were in the West), as he everywhere intermarried 
with Europeans of the wealthier class, to insist in 
his presence upon his separate nationality would 
have been odious; it would have been like making 
a guest feel out of place in one’s home. 

What is more, to by far the greater part of the 



THE DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 31 


wealthier and governing classes of the Western 
States the difference of race was so far masked 
that it had almost come to be forgotten. Some¬ 
times a shock would revive it. An English squire 
would find, for instance, that a relation of his by 
marriage, whose Jewish name and descent he had 
never bothered about, was cousin to, and in close 
connection with, a person of a totally different 
name—an Oriental name—mixed up in some 
conspiracy, say, against the Russian State. Or he 
would learn with surprise that a learned University 
man with whom he had recently dined was the 
uncle of a socialist agitator in Vienna. But the 
shock would be a passing one, and the old mood 
of security would return. 

With the growth of plutocracy the anomaly of 
treating Jews as individuals separate from the 
rest of the community increased. The most 
important men in control of international finance 
were admittedly Jewish. The Jew’s international 
position made him always useful and often 
necessary in the vast international economic 
undertakings of our time. The anonymity which 
had come to be taken for granted throughout 
modern capitalism made it seem absurd or 
impossible, always highly unusual, and probably 
futile, to search for a separate Jewish element in 
any particular undertaking. 

There is one last argument for this Liberal policy, 
which has a strong practical value, though it is 
exceedingly dangerous to use it in the defence of 
that policy because it cuts both ways. It is the 
argument that the Jew ought to be thus treated 
as a citizen exactly like the rest and given no 
position either of privilege or disability, because 



32 


THE JEWS 


he does, as a fact, mould himself so very rapidly 
to his environment. 

When men say—as they are beginning to do— 
that a Jew is as different from ourselves as a 
Chinaman, or a negro, or an Esquimaux, and ought 
therefore to be treated as belonging to a separate 
body from our own, the answer is that the Jew is 
nothing of the kind. Indeed, he becomes, after a 
short sojourn among Englishmen, Frenchmen, Ger¬ 
mans or Americans, so like his hosts on the surface 
that he is, to many, indistinguishable from them; 
and that is one of the main facts in the problem. 

That is the real reason why to the majority of 
the middle classes in the nineteenth century, in 
Western countries, the Jewish problem was non¬ 
existent. Were you to say it of any other race 
—negroes, for instance, or Chinamen—it would 
sound incredible; but we know it in practice to 
be true, that a Jew will pass his life in, say, three 
different communities in turn, and in each the 
people who have met him will testify that he seemed 
just like themselves. 

I have known a case in point which would amuse 
my non-Jewish readers but perhaps offend my 
Jewish readers were I to present it in detail. I 
shall cite it therefore without names, because I 
desire throughout this book to keep to the rule 
whereby alone it can be of service, that nothing 
offensive to either party shall be introduced; but 
it is typical and can be matched in the experience 
of many. 

The case was that of the father of a man in 
English public life. He began life with a German 
name in Hamburg. He was a patriotic citizen 
of that free city, highly respected and in every 



THE DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 33 

way a Hamburger, and the Hamburg men of that 
generation still talk of him as one of themselves. 

He drifted to Paris before the Franco-German 
War, and, there, was an active Parisian, familiar 
with the life of the Boulevards and full of energy 
in every patriotic and characteristically French 
pursuit; notably he helped to recruit men during 
the national catastrophe of 1870-71. Everybody 
who met him in this phase of his life thought of 
h im and talked of him as a Frenchman. 

Deciding that the future of France was doubtful 
after such a defeat, he migrated to the United 
States, and there died. Though a man of some 
years when he landed, he soon appeared in the 
eyes of the Americans with whom he associated to be 
an American just like themselves. He acquired 
the American accent, the American manner, the 
freedom and the restraints of that manner. In 
every way he was a characteristic American. 

In Hamburg his German name had been pro¬ 
nounced after the German fashion. In France, 
where German names are common, he retained it, 
but had it pronounced in French fashion. On 
reaching the United States it was changed to a 
Scotch name which it distantly resembled, and 
no doubt if he had gone to Japan the Japanese 
would be telling us that they had known him as 
a worthy Japanese gentleman of great activity in 
national affairs and bearing the honoured name of 
an ancient Samurai family. 

The nineteenth century attitude almost entirely 
depended upon this marvellous characteristic in 
the Jews which differentiates them from all the 
rest of mankind. Had that characteristic power 
of superficial mutation been absent, the nineteenth 

D 



34 


THE JEWS 


century policy would have broken down as com¬ 
pletely as the corresponding Northern policy 
towards the negro broke down in the United 
States. Had the Jew been as conspicuous among 
us, as, say, a white man is among Kaffirs, the 
fiction would have broken down at once. As it 
was, all who adopted that policy, honestly or 
dishonestly, were supported by this power of the 
Jew to conform externally to his temporary 
surroundings. 

The man who consciously adopted the nineteenth 
century Liberal policy towards the Jews as a mere 
political scheme, knowing full well the dangers it 
might develop; the man only half conscious of 
the existence of those dangers; and the man who 
had never heard of them but took it for granted 
that the Jew was a citizen just like himself, with 
an exceptional religion-—each of those three men 
had in common, aiding the schemes of the one, 
supporting the illusion of the other, the amazing 
fact that a Jew takes on with inexplicable rapidity 
the colour of his environment. That unique charac¬ 
teristic was the support of the Liberal attitude and 
was at the same time its necessary condition. 

The fiction that a man of obviously different type 
and culture and race is the same as ourselves, may 
be practical for purposes of law and government, 
but cannot be maintained in general opinion. A 
conspiracy or illusion attempting, for instance, to 
establish the Esquimaux in Greenland as in¬ 
distinguishable from the Danish officials of the 
Settlement, would fail through ridicule. Equally 
ridiculous would be the pretence that because they 
were both subjects of the same Crown an English¬ 
man in the Civil Service of India was exactly 



THE DENIAL OF THE PKOBLEM 35 

the same sort of person as a Sikh soldier. But with 
the Jews you have the startling truth that, while 
the fundamental difference goes on the whole 
time and is perhaps deeper than any other of the 
differences separating mankind into groups; 
while he is, within, and through all his ultimate 
character, above all things a Jew; yet in the 
superficial and most immediately apparent things 
he is clothed in the very habit of whatever society 
he for the moment inhabits. 

I say that this might seem to many the last and 
strongest argument in favour of the old-fashioned 
Liberal policy, but I repeat that it is a dangerous 
argument, for it cuts both ways. If a food which 
disagrees with you looks exactly like another 
kind of food which suits you, you might use the 
likeness as an argument for eating either sort of 
food indifferently. You might say: “It is silly 
to try to distinguish; one must admit, on looking at 
them, that they are the same thing ” ; but it would 
turn out after dinner a very bad practical policy. 

There is indeed one last argument which to me, 
personally, and I suppose to most of my readers, 
is stronger than all the rest, for it is the argument 
from morals. 

If the Liberal attitude of the nineteenth century 
had proved a stable one, omitting that element in 
it which is a falsehood and therefore a factor 
of instability, one could retain the rest; then it 
would satisfy two appetites common to all men— 
appetite for justice and the appetite for charity. 

Here is a man, a neighbour present in the midst 
of my society. I put him to inconvenience if I 
treat him as an alien. I like him; I regard him 
as a friend. To treat such a man as though he 



36 


THE JEWS 


were, although a friend, something separate, not 
to be admitted to certain functions of my com¬ 
munity, offends the heart, as it also offends the 
sense of justice. Such a man may possess a great 
talent for, say, administration. Like all men 
possessed of a great talent, he must exercise it. 
You maim him if you do not allow him to exercise 
it. A rule forbidding him to take part in the admin¬ 
istration of the society in which he finds himself, 
or even a feeling hindering him in such activities, 
creates, not only in him, but in those who are his 
hosts, a sense of injustice; and if it were possible 
to adopt a policy wherein the separate character 
of the Jew should be always in abeyance, so that 
he could be at the same time an Englishman and 
yet not an Englishman, or a Frenchman and yet 
not a Frenchman, then we should have a settlement 
which all good men ought to accept. 

Unfortunately that solution is false because, 
like many appeals to a virtuous instinct, it is 
sentimental. We call “sentimental” a policy 
or theory which attempts to reconcile contra¬ 
dictions. The sentimental man will equally abhor 
crime and its necessary punishment; disorder 
and an organized police. He likes to think of 
human life as though it did not come to an end. 
He likes to read of the passion of love without its 
concomitant of sexual conflict. He likes to read 
and think of great fortunes accumulated without 
avarice, cunning or theft. He likes to imagine an 
impossible world of mutually exclusive things. 
It makes him comfortable. 

Now we commit the fault of the sentimental man 
(the gravest of practical faults in politics) when we 
cling at this late date to a continuance of the old 



THE DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 37 

policy. You cannot have your cake and eat it 
too, you cannot at the same time have present in 
the world this ubiquitous fluid, yet closely organized 
Jewish community, and at the same time each of the 
individuals composing it treated as though they 
were not members of the nation which makes 
them all they are. You cannot at the same time 
treat a whole as one thing and its component 
parts as another. If you do, you are building on 
contradiction and you will, like everybody who 
builds on contradiction, run up against disaster. 

I am minded to give the reader another anecdote 
(again taking care, I hope, to suppress all names 
and dates to prevent identification, which might 
irritate my Jewish readers or too greatly interest 
their opponents). As a younger man it was my 
constant pastime to linger at the bar of the House 
of Lords and listen to what went on there. I shall 
always remember one occasion when an aged Jew, 
who had begun life in very humble circumstances, 
had accumulated a great fortune and had pur¬ 
chased his peerage like any other, rose to speak 
in connection with a resolution or with a bill 
dealing with “ aliens ”—the hypocrisy of the 
politician, and the popular ferment against the 
rush of Jewish immigrants into the East End 
between them gave rise to that non-committal 
name. This old gentleman very rightly pushed 
all such humbug aside. He knew perfectly well 
that the policy was aimed at “ his people”—and 
he called them “ my people.” He knew perfectly 
well that the proposed change would introduce 
interference with their movement and would 
subject them to humiliation. He spoke with 



38 


THE JEWS 


flaming patriotism, and I was enthralled by the 
intensity, vigour and sincerity of his appeal. It 
was a very fine performance and, incidentally 
(considering what the man was !),it illustrated the 
vast difference between his people and my own. 
For a life devoted to accumulating wealth, which 
would have killed nobler instincts in any one of 
us, had evidently seemed to him quite normal and 
left him with every appetite of justice and of love 
of nation unimpaired. He clinched that fine 
speech with the cry, “ What our people want is 
to be let alone.” He said it over and over again. 
I am sure that in the audience which listened to 
him, all the older men felt a responsive echo to that 
appeal. It was the very doctrine in which they 
had been brought up and the very note of the great 
Victorian Liberal era, with its national triumphs 
in commerce and in arms. 

Well, within a very few years the younger 
members of that very man’s family came out in 
Parliamentary scandal after scandal, appearing 
all in sequence one after the other—a sort of 
procession. They had been let alone right enough! 
But they had not let us alone. I ask myself, some¬ 
times, How would it sound if some years hence 
any one of those descendants—having by that 
time been given his peerage (for they are rich 
men and all of them in professional politics)— 
should return to that cry of his ancestor and ask 
to be “ let alone ” ? There would be no response 
then in the breasts of the contemporaries who 
might hear him. Manners will so much have 
changed in this regard that he would be interrupted. 
But I do not think that my hypothetical descendant 
of that rich old Jew is likely to make any such 



THE DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 39 

speech. I think that when the time comes for 
making it, the whole idea of “ letting alone ” will 
be quite dead. 

I have quoted this old man’s speech with no 
invidious intention but only as an actual example 
of the way in which the “ letting alone” of this 
great question breaks down. I am as familiar as 
any Jewish reader of mine with names that have 
dignified public life in the past, Jewish names, 
Jewish peers: and I recall in particular the honoured 
name of Lord Herschell, to the friendship between 
whose nearest and my own I preserve a grateful 
and sacred memory. 

But to return to the failure of the sentimental 
argument. 

The sentimental argument fails because it involves 
contradictions—that is, incompatibility of fact. 

Even if one had not this strictly rational principle 
to guide one, there is the whole of history to guide 
one. It is true that the pretence of common citizen¬ 
ship has worked now for a shorter, now for a longer, 
period, but never indefinitely. You always come 
at last to a smash. The Jew is welcomed in 
mediaeval Poland; he comes in vast numbers; 
all goes well. Then the inevitable happens and 
the Jew and the Pole stand apart as enemies, 
each accusing the other of injustice, the one 
crying out that he is persecuted, the other that the 
State is in danger by alien activity within. Spain 
alternatively pursued this policy, and its opposite ; 
the whole history of Spain—the original seat of 
Jewish influence in Europe after the general exile— 
is a history of alternating attempts at the senti¬ 
mental solution and a savage reaction against it; 



40 


THE JEWS 


the reaction of the man, who, fighting for his life, 
strikes out violently in terror of death. That is 
the history not only of Spain but of every other 
country at one time or another. 

Indeed, we have before our very eyes to-day the 
beginning of exactly such a reaction in the West 
of Europe and the United States of America, and 
it is the presence of that reaction which has caused 
this book to be written. The attempt at a Liberal 
solution has already failed in our hands; if it 
had not failed there would be no more to be said, 
or, at any rate, we could postpone the discussion 
until the actual difficulty began. But we have 
only to look around us to see that, after these few 
years, this one lifetime, during which the experi¬ 
ment has flourished in the highest part of civilization, 
it is already breaking down. Everywhere the old 
questions are being asked; everywhere the old 
complaints are being raised, everywhere the old 
perils are reappearing. We must seek some solution, 
for if we fail to find it we know from the past what 
tragedies are in store for us both. There is a prob¬ 
lem, a most direct and urgent problem. Once it is 
recognized, a solution of it is necessarily demanded. 

But it is not enough to show that the mere denial 
of the existence of that problem—the old nineteenth 
century Liberal policy—was false and bound to 
break down. It is just as necessary, if we appre¬ 
ciate how practical and immediate the problem is, 
to state it and illustrate it from contemporary 
events. It is not enough to show that the attempted 
Liberal policy has failed. One must also, before 
trying to discover a solution, analyse the nature 
of the problem as it presents itself at the moment, 
and that is what I propose to do in the next chapter. 










CHAPTER III 

THE PRESENT PHASE OP THE PROBLEM 

I said in my last that the old solution of ignoring 
or denying the Jewish problem was bound to break 
down and had broken down, and this was tanta¬ 
mount to saying that the problem persists. But I 
said one must go farther and state the full nature 
of that problem as it stands at this moment before 
one could attempt a practical solution. 

It is not enough to say that a person who imagines 
himself immortal and immune from disease is, as 
a fact, dangerously ill, and that the break-down 
of his health has disproved his theory. One must 
go on to find out exactly what is the matter with 
him, and, if possible, what the cure for the trouble 
may be. 

The Jewish problem in its larger sense I have 
defined in the first chapter of this book, and that 
as I think every one defines it, including all the 
many Jews who have discussed the matter. It is 
the presence within one political organism of 
another political organism at friction with it: the 
strains set up by such an unnatural state of affairs; 
the risk of disaster to the lesser body and of hurt 
to both if it remain unremedied. The true solu¬ 
tion therefore is only to be discovered in some 
policy which will permanently relieve the strain 

43 



44 


THE JEWS 


and re-establish normal relations. The end of such 
a solution should be the functioning, as far as 
possible, of both parties, at their ease and without 
disturbance one to the other. 

But this general statement of the problem—that 
it is the presence to each party of an alien body 
and the consequent irritation and friction on each 
—is not enough. We must pursue it more closely 
and develop it in greater detail, describing how 
the friction and the irritation are increasing: 
insisting that they have even become a menace. 
Then only can we set out to discover as far as 
possible by analysis what exact character the 
disease bears and why it is of this character. Only 
after all this can we explore a remedy. 

When we look round the modern world, say the 
last twenty years, we discover, in widely separate 
places, and among very different interests, and 
inhabiting the most diverse characters, the pre¬ 
sence of what is for many a new political feeling: 
it runs from irritation to exasperation, from 
grumbling to invective; it is everywhere directed 
against the Jews. One activity after another, in 
which the Jews are variously in the right or in the 
wrong, or indifferent, has aroused hostility in 
varying degrees—but increasing—and though the 
danger-spots are still, as I have said, dissociated 
in the main, yet they are beginning to coalesce 
and to form large areas inimical to Israel. 

It is objected of the Jew in finance, in industry, 
in commerce—where he is ubiquitous and powerful 
out of all proportion to his numbers—that he seeks, 
and has already almost reached, dominion. It is 
objected that he acts everywhere against the 
interests of his hosts; that these are being inter- 



PRESENT PHASE OF THE PROBLEM 45 


fered with, guided, run against their will; that a 
power is present which acts either with in¬ 
difference to what we love or in active opposition 
to what we love. Notably is it said to be 
indifferent to, or in active opposition against, 
our national feelings, our religious traditions, 
and the general culture and morals of Christendom 
which we have inherited and desire to preserve: 
that power is Israel. 

These feelings grew as one example after another 
of the Jewish strength, the Jewish cohesion, 
arrived to feed them. How violent they were to 
become might be seen by taking as a special ex¬ 
ample their extreme form, called “ Anti-Semitism.” 
When we come, later in this book, to examine that 
modern phenomenon, we shall find it to be not only 
a proof of the insistence and gravity of the problem 
we are trying to solve, but also some explanation of 
its nature. 

Upon a world thus already exasperated, and in 
some large sections exasperated to the point of 
unreason—for the anti-Semitic drive was, and is, 
full of unreason—there suddenly fell the double 
effect of the Bolshevist revolution: a revolution 
which struck both at the benevolent who would 
hear no harm of the Jews, and those who had 
hitherto shielded or obeyed them as identified 
only with the interests of large Capital. It was a 
blow in flank under which staggered both the 
supporters of Jewish neutrality and the dependants 
upon Jewish finance. 

The old Liberal policy still officially held the 
field; but when this shattering explosion came it 
compelled attention. Bolshevism stated the Jewish 
problem with a violence and an insistence such 



46 


THE JEWS 


that it could no longer be denied either by the 
blindest fanatic or the most resolute liar. 

Such was, in its largest lines, the recent historical 
sequence leading up to the state of affairs we now 
find. Let us trace that sequence in more detail 
and from a little farther back. 

A lifetime ago, when the Liberal policy was 
founded and when conditions were favourable to 
its establishment, the populace might still nourish 
its traditional antagonism to the Jew, but in the 
West of Europe his numbers were very limited 
(only a few thousand in France and England 
combined, and hardly as many in Italy). 

He belonged for the most part to the classes that 
did not come into direct competition with the poor 
of the large towns. From the countrysides he 
was absent. He had not attempted to govern his 
hosts as a politician, nor, in any large measure, to 
indoctrinate them through the Press. The rapid 
decline of religion at that time broke down one 
barrier, and the transformation of the governing 
classes from the old territorial Lords to the modern 
plutocracy broke down another. The convention 
that the Jew was indistinguishable from the 
citizens of the country in which he happened to live, 
or, at any rate, from that in which he had last lived, 
was further fostered by the break-up of that cosmo¬ 
politan aristocratic society which had marked the 
eighteenth century, and which could note and 
register the movements of prominent individuals 
from nation to nation. The new industrial for¬ 
tunes and the new international finance both 
contributed to the same end, while the Jew also 
began to compete successfully in every one of the 
liberal professions without as yet dominating any 



PRESENT PHASE OF THE PROBLEM 47 

of them. No conflicts had arisen between the 
Jewish race and the national interests of any 
European people, with the exception perhaps of 
the Poles; and these were subject and silenced. 

Throughout all this time, from the years after 
Waterloo to the years immediately succeeding the 
defeat of the French in 1870-71, the weight and 
position of the Jew in Western civilization increased 
out of all knowledge and yet without shock, 
and almost without attracting attention. They 
entered the Parliaments everywhere, the English 
Peerage as well, and the Universities in very large 
numbers. A Jew became Prime Minister of Great 
Britain, another a principal leader of the Italian 
resurrection; another led the opposition to Napoleon 
III. They were present in increasing numbers 
in the chief institutions of every country. They 
began to take positions as fellows of every important 
Oxford and Cambridge college; they counted 
heavily in the national literatures; Browning 
and Arnold families, for instance, in England; 
Mazzini in Italy. They came for the first time 
into European diplomacy. The armies and navies 
alone were as yet untouched by their influence. 
Strains of them were even present in the reigning 
families. The institution of Freemasonry (with 
which they are so closely allied and all the ritual 
of which is Jewish in character) increased very 
rapidly and very greatly. The growth of an 
anonymous Press and of an increasingly anony¬ 
mous commercial system further extended their 
power. 

It is an illusion to believe that all this great 
change was Jewish in origin. The Jew did not 
create it, he floated upon it, but it worked manifestly 



48 


THE JEWS 


to his advantage, and we find him at the end of it 
represented on the governing institutions of Western 
Europe fifty or one hundredfold more than was 
his due in proportion to his numbers. The Jews 
intermarried everywhere with the leading families 
and, before any sign that a turn of the tide had taken 
place, they had already achieved that position in 
which they are now being assailed and to oust them 
from which such strong efforts are preparing. 

Perhaps the first event which cut across this 
unbroken ascent was the defeat of the French in 
1870-1. Not that its effects were immediate in 
this field, but that a nation defeated is the more 
likely to raise a grievance, real or imaginary; in 
seeking a cause for social misfortunes following on 
its military disasters, it will naturally fix upon an 
international rather than a national one, and 
blame its alien population rather than its own. 
Moreover, the date of the French defeat was also 
the date on which was overthrown the temporal 
power of the Papacy. In this also the Jews had 
played their part. It gave them the opportunity 
to play a still greater part in the immediate future 
of the new Italy. Within a few years Rome was 
to see a Jewish Mayor who supported with all his 
might the unchristianizing of the city and especially 
of its educational system. 

One small but significant factor in the whole 
business of these 70’s and early 80’s—the beginning 
of the last quarter of the nineteenth century— 
was the rise to monopoly of the Jewish international 
news agents, among which Reuters was prominent, 
and the presence of Jews as international corre¬ 
spondents of the various great newspapers, the 
most prominent example being Opper, a Bohemian 



PRESENT PHASE OF THE PROBLEM 49 


Jew, who concealed his origin under the false name 
of “ de Blowitz,” and for years acted as Paris 
correspondent ioxThe Times, a, paper in those days 
of international influence. 

The first expression of the reaction that was at 
hand was to be found in sundry definitely anti- 
Semitic writings appearing in Germany and France, 
most noticeable in the latter country. 

Their effect was at first slight, though they had the 
high advantage of extensive documentation. The 
great majority of educated men shrugged their 
shoulders and passed such things by as the extrav¬ 
agancies of fanatics; but these fanatics none 
the less laid the foundation of future action by 
the quotation of an immense quantity of facts 
which could not but remain in the mind even of 
those who were most contemptuous of the new 
propaganda. In these books special insistence was 
laid upon exposing what the Jews themselves call 
“ crypto-Judaism”—that is, the presence every¬ 
where throughout Western Europe of men in 
important public positions who passed for English, 
French or what not, but were really Jews. 

In many cases (I have already quoted the poet 
Browning and the distinguished family of Arnold) 
these people were not hiding their religion but 
had simply drifted from the original Jewish com¬ 
munity of which their ancestors had been members, 
but in most others there was more or less present 
an element of conscious secrecy. It was evidently 
the object of those who produced the literature I 
am describing to attack that secrecy in particular 
and to undo its effects; and, as I have said, even 
where their fanaticism was most ridiculed, the 
vast array of facts which they marshalled could 


50 THE JEWS 

not be without its effect upon the memory of their 
contemporaries. 

There next appeared a series of direct inter¬ 
national actions undertaken by Jewish finance, 
the most important of which, of course, was the 
drawing of Egypt into the European system, and 
particularly into the system of Great Britain. 

Of more effect upon public opinion was the 
excitement of the Dreyfus case in France and, 
immediately afterwards, of the South African War, 
in England. 

The characteristic of the Dreyfus case was not 
the discussion upon the guilt or innocence of the 
unfortunate man from whom it takes its title, but 
the immense international clamour with which it 
was surrounded. This local affair was made an 
affair of the whole world, and men took as passionate 
an interest in it in the remotest corners of civiliza¬ 
tion as though they had been the principals actually 
engaged. 

Such a phenomenon could not but astonish the 
mass of onlookers who had hitherto not given the 
Jewish question a thought, and when there was 
added to it the great ordeal of the South African 
War, openly and undeniably provoked and pro¬ 
moted by Jewish interests in South Africa, when 
that war was so unexpectedly prolonged and proved 
so unexpectedly costly in blood and treasure, a 
second element was added to the growing feeling, 
not yet, indeed, of antagonism to Jewish power 
(half cultured France was Dreyfusard, and much 
more than half England favoured the Boer War at 
its origin), but of interest in the Jewish question, 
of curiosity, on the part of the average citizen, 
who had not hitherto heard of it. 



PRESENT PHASE OF THE PROBLEM 51 


The original minority which had begun to oppose 
Jewish power, with their extreme left wing of Anti- 
Semites, and their core of men whose quarrel was 
rather with the financial control of the modern 
world than with any racial problem, tended to 
grow. As always happens with a growing move¬ 
ment, events appeared to suit themselves to that 
growth and to promote it. 

The Panama scandals in the French Parliament 
had already fed the movement in France. The 
later Parliamentary scandals in England, Marconi 
and the rest, afforded so astonishing a parallel to 
Panama that the similarity was of universal 
comment. They might have passed as isolated 
things a generation before. They were now con¬ 
nected, often unjustly, with the uneasy sense of a 
general financial conspiracy. They were, at any 
rate, connected with an atmosphere essentially 
Jewish in character. 

Meanwhile there had already begun one of those 
great migratory movements of the Jews which 
have diversified history for two thousand years 
and which are almost always the prelude to each 
new disturbance in the equilibrium of the Jews 
and each new resuscitation of the Jewish problem 
in its most acute form. 

The great reservoir of the Jewish race was, of 
course, that country of Poland which had so nobly 
succoured the Jews during the persecutions of the 
late Middle Ages. Poland had made itself an 
asylum for all the Jews who cared to go to it, and 
was now, after the infamous partition inaugurated 
by Prussia, still the home of something like half 
the Jews of the world. The hatred of the Jews 
entertained by all classes of Russians, the persecu- 



52 


THE JEWS 


tions they suffered from the fact that Russia, since 
the partition, governed that part of Poland where 
they were most numerous, started the new exodus. 
The movement was a westerly one, mainly to the 
United States, but there also arose in connection 
with it a novel growth of great ghettoes in the 
English industrial towns, more particularly in 
London, while New York was slowly transformed 
from a city as free of Jewish population as London 
and Paris had been in the past, to one in which a 
good third or more of its inhabitants became either 
entirely Jewish or partly Jewish. 

This vast immigration, which was in full swing 
just before the outbreak of the great war, and 
which was adding so active a leaven to the increas¬ 
ing ferment, which had even planted the beginnings 
of a ghetto in Paris and which was affecting the 
whole of the West, was supplemented by one more 
factor of the first importance. 

Modern capitalism, by which the Jew had so 
largely benefited, but which he did not originate 
and in which prominent, though few, Jewish 
names, were so immixed, had for its counterpart 
and reaction the socialist movement. This, again, 
the Jews did not originate, nor at first direct; 
but it rapidly fell more and more under their 
control. The family of Mordecai (who had 
assumed the name of Marx) produced in Karl a 
most powerful exponent of that theory. Though 
he did no more than copy and follow his non- 
Jewish instructors (especially Louis Blanc, a 
Franco-Scot of genius), he presented in complete 
form the full theory of Socialism, economic, social, 
and, by implication, religious; for he postulated 
Materialism. 



PRESENT PHASE OF THE PROBLEM 53 

After Karl Marx came a crowd of his compat¬ 
riots, who led the industrial proletariat in rebellion 
against the increasing power of the capitalist 
system, and began to organize a determined revolt. 

Before the Great War one could say that the 
whole of the Socialist movement, so far as its 
staff and direction were concerned, was Jewish; 
and while it took this purely economic form in 
the West, in the East—in the Russian Empire— 
it took a political form as well, and the growing 
revolutionary force in that Empire was equally 
Jewish in direction and driving power. 

Such was the situation on the eve of the Great 
War. Men were beginning to be thoroughly alive 
to what was meant by the Jewish problem. The 
old security was dispelled for ever; but as yet 
only a minority, though now a large one, was 
prepared to deal with that problem and to discuss 
it openly. All that was official, and particularly 
the Press, with its vast influence, had as yet 
refused in any department to face the realities of 
the position. The convention forbidding public 
allusion to the Jewish question was still very 
strong. On the surface it seemed as though 
the old Liberal policy still stood firm and, 
indeed, unshakeable. The Jews were in every 
place of ’vantage: they taught in the Universities 
of all Europe; they were everywhere in the 
Press; everywhere in finance. They were con¬ 
tinually to be found in the highest places of 
Government and in the chanceries of Christendom 
they had acquired a dominant power which none 
could question. But the challenge against this 
unnatural position necessarily worked against 
great odds, it remained private and had great 



54 


THE JEWS 


difficulty in finding expression. None the less, it 
extended, and by 1914 had become serious. 

The immeasurable catastrophe of the war— 
with which the Jews had nothing to do and which 
their more important financial representatives did 
all they could to prevent—fell upon Europe. It 
seemed at first as though, in the face of that over¬ 
whelming tragedy, what had been so rapidly 
growing—I mean the debate and conflict upon 
Jewish claims—would be silenced. The Jews 
were found fighting gallantly in all the armies. 
Their services were generously acknowledged, 
though the cruel ambiguity of their situation was 
hardly realized. Considering that they had no 
national interest in the fight, it must have seemed 
to them a mere insanity, crucifying their nation 
to no purpose. For Zangwill put the matter well 
indeed when he said that those who eagerly and 
spontaneously joined the first recruiting (and 
these were numerous) did so “ for the honour of 
Israel.” The sacrifice was not without fruit. In 
its presence many a complaint was silenced and 
much was revealed which, but for it, would have 
remained unprobed. The Christian family in its 
bereavement saw at its side a Jewish neighbour 
who had lost his son in what was no concern of his 
race; the Christian priest witnessed the agony of 
the young Jewish soldier. The defender of the 
Western nations saw at his side not only the Jewish 
conscript (who should never have been called) but 
the Jewish volunteer. Thus, the first to enlist 
from the United States was a Jew, later promoted, 
whom I had the pleasure and honour of meeting 
on Mangin’s staff at Mayence. I hope he may 
see these lines. 



PRESENT PHASE OF THE PROBLEM 55 


It looked as though in the presence of such 
a suffering, which the Jews shared with us, the 
growing quarrel between them and ourselves would 
be appeased. Men who had been prominent not 
only for their discussion of the Jewish problem, 
but for their direct and open antagonism to 
Jewish power and even to the most legitimate of 
Jewish claims, were now compelled to silence. 
Reconciliation was in the air . . . when, in the 
very heat of the struggle, came that factor, in¬ 
calculably important, which now rules all the 
rest ; I mean the factor of what is called Bolshevism. 

This new Jewish movement changed the whole 
face of things and, coming on the top of the rest, 
has transformed the problem for all our generation. 

Henceforth it was to be discussed quite openly. 
Henceforth it could only become, more and more, 
the chief problem of politics and give rise to that 
menacing situation upon a solution of which 
depends the security of our future. 

For the Bolshevist movement, or rather explo¬ 
sion, was Jewish. 

That truth may be so easily confused with a 
falsehood that I must, at the outset, make it exact 
and clear. 

The Bolshevist Movement was a Jewish move¬ 
ment, but not a movement of the Jewish race as 
a whole. Most Jews were quite extraneous to it; 
very many indeed, and those of the most typical, 
abhor it; many actively combat it. The impu¬ 
tation of its evils to the Jews as a whole is a grave 
injustice and proceeds from a confusion of thought 
whereof I, at any rate, am free. 

With so much said let me return to the affair. 

What is called “ Labour,” that is, the direction 



56 


THE JEWS 


of the proletarian revolt against capitalist condi¬ 
tions, had, as we have seen, been directed in the 
main by the Jew. His energy, his international 
quality, his devotion to a set scheme, prevailed. 
All this was not peculiar to Russia but present 
throughout the industrialized areas of the West. 

By the word “ directed ” I do not mean any 
conscious plan. I mean that the Jews, with their 
perpetual movement from country to country, 
with their natural indifference to national feeling 
as a force counteracting class feeling, with their 
lucid thought and their passion for deduction, with 
their tenacity and intellectual industry, had 
naturally become the chief exponents and the 
most able leaders. They formed, above all, the 
cement binding the movement together through¬ 
out the world. It was they, more than any others, 
who insisted on a clear-cut solution upon the lines 
which their compatriot Ivarl Marx had copied from 
his greater European contemporaries, and made 
definite in his famous book on Capital. 

But there was all the difference in the world 
between this intellectual leadership, this organiza¬ 
tion of socialism by Jews while Socialism still 
remained a mere theory, and the control and actual 
management of it in a great State when it passed 
from theory to practice. 

The words “.social revolution” were still but 
words in 1914 and men did not take them too 
seriously. But when in 1917 a socialist revolution 
was accomplished suddenly at one blow, in one 
great State, and when its agents, directors and 
masters were seen to be a close corporation of Jews 
with only a few non-Jewish hangers-on (each 
of these controlled by the Jews through one 


PRESENT PHASE OF THE PROBLEM 57 

influence or another), it was quite another matter. 
The thing had become actual. The menace to 
national traditions and to the whole Christian 
ethic of property was immediate. More important 
than all, so far as the Jewish problem is concerned, 
many who had remained silent upon it on account 
of convention, avarice or fear, were now compelled 
to speak. From that moment, in early ’17, it 
became the chief political problem of our time: 
coincident with, intimately mixed with, but in all 
its implications superior to, the great economic 
quarrel on to which it was now grafted. 

The story may be briefly told. The Russian 
State, ill-equipped for modern war, had passed 
during the end of the year 1916 through a strain 
which it had found intolerable. Russian Society, 
after the mortal losses sustained, was upon the eve 
of dissolution, and the formidable revolutionary 
movement which had for years left its direction 
and organization in Jewish hands broke out, for 
the third time in our generation: but this time 
successfully. 

After rapidly accelerating phases it settled into 
the situation which has endured from the early 
part of 1918 to the present day. In the towns the 
freely-elected Parliament was repudiated and a 
“Dictatorship of the Proletariat” was declared. 
The workshops were in future to be run by Com¬ 
mittees, in the Russian “ Soviets,” and similar 
organizations were to control agriculture in the 
villages, where the peasants had already seized 
the land and were streaming back from the dis¬ 
solved armies to their homes. 

In practice, of course, what was set up was no 
proletarian Government, still less anything so 



58 


THE JEWS 


impossible and contradictory in terms as a 
“ dictatorship” of proletarians. The thing was 
called “ The Republic of the Workmen and 
Peasants.” It was, in fact, nothing of the sort. It 
was the pure despotism of a clique, the leaders of 
which had been specially launched upon Russia 
under German direction in order to break down 
any chance of a revival of Russian military power, 
and all those leaders, without exception, were Jews, 
or held by the Jews through their domestic 
relations, and all that followed was done directly 
under the orders of Jews, the most prominent of 
whom was one Braunstein, who disguised himself 
under the assumed name of Trotsky. A terror 
was set up, under which were massacred innumer¬ 
able Russians of the governing classes, so that the 
whole framework of the Russian State disappeared. 
Among these, of course, must specially be noted 
great numbers of the clergy, against whom the 
Jewish revolutionaries had a particular grudge. 
A clean sweep was made of all the old social 
organization, and under the despotism of this 
Jewish clique the old economic order was reversed. 
Food and all necessities were controlled (in the 
towns) and rationed, the manual labourer receiving 
the largest share; and none any share unless he 
worked at the orders of the new masters. 

The agricultural land was in theory nationalized, 
but in practice the Jewish Committees of the towns 
were unable to enforce their rule over it, and it 
reverted to the natural condition of peasant 
ownership. But the Jewish Committees of the 
towns were strong enough to raid great areas of 
agricultural production for the support of them¬ 
selves and their troops and of their dependants in 



PRESENT PHASE OF THE PROBLEM 59 


the cities, who had come close to starvation through 
the breakdown of the social system. 

What followed later is of common knowledge: 
the attempts at counter-revolution, led by scattered 
Russians and other military leaders, all failed 
because the peasants believed that their newly- 
acquired farms were at stake and eagerly volun¬ 
teered to defend them, the greatly increased 
misery of the towns, the slow decline of industrial 
production (in spite of the most rigid despotism, 
enforcing conscript labour), and the general 
deliquescence of society. 

If the motives of the men who thus brought the 
whole of a Christian State into ruins within a few 
weeks were analysed, we should, it is to be pre¬ 
sumed, discover something of this sort: their 
main motive was the pursuit of the political and 
economic ideals of which they were the spokesmen 
and which already so many of their compatriots, 
the Jews, throughout the rest of Europe, had 
espoused—communism so far as property was 
concerned; the Marxian doctrine of socialist pro¬ 
duction and distribution; the Socialist doctrine 
imposed by arbitrary and despotic arrangements, 
favouring those who had in the past been least 
favoured. In this economic and political group of 
motives the leading motive was probably enough, 
the doctrine of Communism in which these men, 
for the most part, sincerely believed. 

To this must be added an equally sincere hatred 
of national feeling, save, of course, where the 
Jewish nation was concerned. The conception 
of a Russian national feeling seemed to these new 
leaders ridiculous, as, indeed, the conception of a 
national feeling must seem ridiculous to their 



60 


THE JEWS 


compatriots everywhere; or, if not ridiculous, 
subsidiary to the more important motives of 
individual advantage and to the righting of such 
immediate wrongs as the individual may feel. 
The Christian religion they naturally attacked, for 
it was abhorrent to their social theory. 

They also had a certain crusading, or propa¬ 
gandist, ideal running through the whole of their 
action—the desire to spread Communism far 
beyond the boundaries of what had once been the 
Russian State. It is this which has led them to 
intrigue throughout Central, and even in Western, 
Europe, in favour of revolution. 

Though these were the main motives, other 
motives must also have been present. 

It is impossible that Committees consisting of 
Jews and suddenly finding themselves thus in 
control of such new powers, should not have 
desired to benefit their fellows. It is equally 
impossible that they should have forgone a senti¬ 
ment of revenge against that which had persecuted 
their people in the past. They cannot but, in 
the destroying of Russia, have mixed with a 
desire to advantage the individual Russian poor 
the desire to take vengeance upon the national 
tradition as a whole; it has even been said—but 
denied, and I know not where the truth lies—that 
Jews were among those guilty of the worst incident 
which we now know in all its revolting details—the 
murder of the Russian Royal family—father, mother 
and girls, and the unfortunate sickly heir, the only 
boy. Further, it is impossible, with Jewish Commit¬ 
tees thus in control of the Russian treasury and of 
Russian means of communication, that they should 
not have had some sympathy with their com- 



PRESENT PHASE OF THE PROBLEM 61 


patriots who were so largely in control of Western 
finance. However sincere their detestation of 
capitalism (for probably in most of them the 
opinion is held sincerely enough), it is in the nature 
of things that one of their blood and kind should, 
however misguided they may think him, appeal to 
them more than one of ours. And it is this which 
explains the half alliance which you find through¬ 
out the world between the Jewish financiers on 
the one hand and the Jewish control of the Russian 
revolution on the other. It is this which explains 
the half-heartedness of the defence against Bol¬ 
shevism, the perpetual commercial protest, the 
continued negotiations, the recognition of the 
Soviet by our politicians, the clamour of “ Labour ” 
in favour of German Jewish industrialism and 
against Poland: all that has taken place wherever 
Jewish finance is powerful, particularly at West¬ 
minster. 

But, be this as it may, the tremendous explosion 
which we call Bolshevism brought the discussion 
of the Jewish problem to a head. The two forces 
which had hitherto held back the discussion of that 
problem were that Liberal fiction which had ruled 
for more than a generation, according to which it 
was indecent even to mention the word Jew, or to 
suggest that there was any difference between the 
Jew and those who harboured him; and, secondly, 
the fact that the Jews were erroneously regarded 
by most of the well-to-do people in the West— 
that is, by most of those who had the control of 
the Press and therefore of all public expression— 
as so controlling wealth that they were at once the 
natural guardians of property and so placed that 
an attack upon them jeopardized the wealth of 



62 


THE JEWS 


the critic. The man who had gone into the City, 
or who had his life spent upon the Bourse in Paris, 
or who was negotiating any great capitalist enter¬ 
prise, who had to do in whatever capacity with 
the running of the great banks or with the inter¬ 
national means of communication by sea and land, 
even the man who got his precarious living by 
writing—each and all had hitherto felt that a 
public silence upon the Jewish problem was 
necessary to his private welfare. 

Those who recognized the gravity of the problem 
had hitherto been moved by fear to be silent upon 
it, at least in public, though in private they were 
often voluble enough. Those who recognized it 
in a lesser degree had also been affected by 
the same fear. Lastly, you had the large class 
who were under no necessity for restraint, whether 
from fear or any other cause, but who were quite 
content to leave things as they were so long as they 
received their regular salary or dividends, and who 
were profoundly convinced that any interference 
with the Jew would imperil those dividends or 
that salary. 

The Jewish Bolshevist movement put an end to 
that state of mind. The people who had hitherto 
been silent through avarice, convention, or fear, 
now found themselves between an upper and a 
nether millstone. Hitherto they had at least 
believed that to keep silence was to secure or to 
advance their economic position. Now they found, 
suddenly risen upon the flank of that position, a new 
and formidable Jewish force determined upon the 
destruction of property. There was no longer any 
reason to keep silent. There was a growing need 
to speak. And though the old habit, the old 


iSOft 



PRESENT PHASE OF THE PROBLEM 63 


secrecy, was still strong upon them, the necessity 
for combating Jewish Bolshevism was stronger 
still. All over Europe the Jewish character of the 
movement became more and more apparent. The 
leaders of Co m munism everywhere proclaimed 
that truth by adopting the asinine policy of 
pretending that the revolution was Russian and 
national; they attempted—far too late—to hide 
the Jewish origins of its creators and directors, 
and made a childish effort to pretend that the 
Russian names so innocently put forward were 
genuine, when the real names were upon every 
tongue. Yet at the same time they were receiving 
money and securities of the victims through Jewish 
agents, jewels stripped from the dead or rifled from 
the strong boxes of murdered men and women. In 
one specific instance the promise of a subsidy to a 
Communist paper in London was traced to this 
source; it was proved that the Englishman 
involved was a mere puppet and that the Jewish 
connections of the family through marriage were 
the true agents in the transaction. In another 
a Trade Deputation was pompously announced 
under Russian names, which turned out upon 
inspection to consist, as to its first member, of a 
man engaged all his life in the service of a Jewish 
firm, as to the other, of a Jew who was actually 
the brother-in-law of Braunstein ! The diplomatic 
agent nominated and partially accepted by the 
British Government to represent the new authority 
of the Russian towns was again a Jew, Finkelstein, 
the nephew by marriage of a prominent Jew in this 
country. He passed under the name of Litvinoff. 
So it was throughout the whole movement, in every 
capital and in every great industrial town. 



64 


THE JEWS 


We must not neglect the very obvious truth that 
in all this there was ample fuel for the flame. The 
industrial proletariat throughout the world was 
equally disgusted and equally ready for revolt. 
The leadership of the movement may be Jewish 
but its current was not created by the Jew. To 
imagine that is to fall into the most childish errors 
of the “ Anti-Semite.” The stream of influence 
arose from the sufferings and the burning sense of 
injustice which industrial capitalism had imposed 
on the dispossessed mass of wage earners. They 
were (and are) naturally indifferent as to 
whether those whom they hope may be their 
saviours come from Palestine, Muscovy or Tim- 
buctoo. They are interested in economic freedom: 
in the doctrine of socialism and in its results, not in 
the personality of those who guide them. 

Their position is comprehensible enough: but my 
point is, that the directing minority of Western 
European capitalism which had hitherto been 
silent upon the Jewish problems from the motives 
I have described were now released; they were 
free to speak their mind, and began to speak it. 
The volume of their protest cannot but increase. 
The cat, as the expression goes, is out of the bag, 
or, to put it in more dignified language, the debate 
will now never more be silenced. It is admitted 
that the revolutionary leadership is mainly 
Jewish. It is recognized as clearly now as it has 
long been recognized that international finance was 
mainly Jewish; and even those who would tolerate 
silence upon the one peril will certainly not tolerate 
it upon the other. 

The danger is, indeed, not over. The debate 
will take place—that is no peril, but a good; the 


ized by Microsoft ® 



PRESENT PHASE OF THE PROBLEM 65 

danger is rather that, as restraint is gradually- 
removed, the natural antagonism to the Jewish 
race, felt by nearly all those who are not of it and 
among whom it lives, may take an irrational and 
violent form, and that we may be upon the brink 
of yet one more of those catastrophes, of those 
tragedies, of those disasters which have marked 
the history of Israel in the past. 

To avert this, to discover some solution of the 
problem while there is yet time, to prevent deeds 
which would bring us to shame and that small 
minority among us to suffering, should be the 
object of every honest man. 


F 



T 


THE GENERAL CAUSES OF 
FRICTION 






CHAPTER IV 

THE GENERAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 

The immediate cause of the new gravity apparent 
in the Jewish problem is the Revolution in Russia. 
The completely new feature of open discussion now 
attaching to it (a thing which would have seemed 
incredible in England twenty years ago) is the leader¬ 
ship the Jews have assumed in the economic quarrel 
of the proletariat against capitalism. 

Most people, therefore, on being asked the cause 
of friction between the Jews and their hosts at this 
moment will reply (in England, at least) that it lies 
in the anti-social propaganda now running loose 
throughout Industrial Europe. “ Our quarrel with 
the Jews,” you will hear from a hundred different 
sources, “ is that they are conspiring against Chris¬ 
tian civilization, and in particular against our own 
country, under the form of social revolutionaries.” 

Such a reply, though it is the almost uni versal 
reply of the moment in this country, is most 
imperfect. 

The friction between the Jews and the nations 
among which they are dispersed is far older, far 
more profound, far more universal. For a whole 
generation before the present crisis arose, the com¬ 
paratively small number of men who were hammer¬ 
ing away steadily at the Jewish problem, trying to 

69 



70 


THE JEWS 


provoke its discussion, and insisting on its import¬ 
ance, were mainly concerned with quite another 
aspect of Jewish activity—the aspect of inter¬ 
national finance as controlled by Jews. Before 
that aspect had assumed its modern gravity the re¬ 
proach against the Jews was that their international 
position warred against our racial traditions and 
our patriotisms. Before that again there had been 
the reproach of a different religion and particularly 
of their antagonism to the doctrine of the Incarna¬ 
tion and all that flowed from that doctrine. And 
there had been even, before that great quarrel, the 
reproach that they were bad citizens within the 
pagan Roman Empire, perpetually in rebellion 
against it and guilty of massacring other Roman 
citizens. 

In another civilization than ours, in that of 
Islam, another set of reproaches had arisen, or 
rather another species of contempt and oppression. 
After long periods of peace there would come, in 
particular regions, the most violent oppression. 
Within the last few years, for instance, a Jew in 
Morocco was treated as though he was hardly 
human. He had to turn his face to the wall when 
any magnate was passing by. He had to dress in a 
particular manner to mark him off as something 
degraded among his fellow-beings. He might not 
ride through the gate of a town, but had to dis¬ 
mount. There were twenty actions normal to 
civic life in the Moroccan city which were forbidden 
to the Jew. 

All this is as much as to say that the friction 
between the Jews and those among whom they 
live is always present, and has always been present, 
now latent, now rising furiously to the surface, 



THE GENERAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 71 


now grumbling through long periods of uncertain 
peace, now boiling over in all the evils of persecu¬ 
tion—which is as much as to say that this friction 
between Jew and non-Jew, while finding different 
excuses for its action on different occasions, has 
been a force permanently at work everywhere and 
at all times. 

What is the cause of it ? What is its nature ? 

The matter is very difficult to approach, because 
we are not dealing with things susceptible of positive 
proof. You can prove from historical record that 
the thing has existed. You can show its terrible 
effects, ceaselessly recurrent throughout all our 
history. But it is another matter to analyse the 
unseen forces which produce it, and any such 
analysis can be no more than an attempt. 

I take it that the causes of this friction, with 
all its lamentable results, are of two kinds. There 
are, first, general causes for it, by which I mean those 
causes which are always present and are ineradic¬ 
able. Their effort may be summed up in the truth 
that the whole texture of the Jewish nation, their 
corporate tradition, their social mind, is at issue 
with the people among whom they live. There 
are, next, special causes, by which I mean social 
actions and expressions which lead to friction and 
could be modified, the two chief of which are the 
use of secrecy by the Jews as a method of action 
and the open expression of superiority over his 
neighbours which the Jew cannot help feeling but 
is wrong to emphasize. 

I will deal with these in their order, and first 
consider the general causes ; though I must admit 
at the outset that a mere summary of them is no 
sufficient explanation of the phenomenon. There 


72 


THE JEWS 


would seem to be something more profound and 
even more mysterious about it. For it will be 
universally conceded that, while the closest intimacy 
and respect is possible between individuals of the 
two opposing races, the moment you come to great 
groups, and especially to the popular instinct in 
the matter, the gravest friction is apparent. It 
is an issue too deep than to be accounted for 
by mere differences of temper. It is as though 
there were some inward force filling men on either 
side, not indeed with necessary hostility—it is 
against any such necessity that all this book is 
written—but certainly with conflicting ends. 

It is first to be noted that most of the accusations 
made against the Jews by their enemies and most 
of the very proper rebuttals of those accusations 
advanced by the Jews and their defenders, miss 
the mark because they attempt to put in abstract 
form what is really something highly concrete. 
And this is equally true of the praise bestowed 
upon the Jews, of the special virtues ascribed to 
them and of the denials of these virtues. 

They miss the mark because they attempt to 
express in terms of one category what should be 
expressed in terms of another. They are doing 
what a man does when he compares two pictures 
by their outline while in point of fact their interest 
lies in colour, or when he affirms something of a 
tune the fundamental point of which something is 
not the air at all but the instruments upon which 
it is played: as who should say that “ God save 
the King ” was “ shrill ” because he heard it played 
on a penny whistle or “ booming ” because he heard 
it played on a violoncello. The real point to note 
is not that the Jews appear to us (or we to them) 


THE GENERAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 73 


to possess certain abstract qualities and defects, 
but that in their case each quality or defect has a 
special character, a special national timbre which it 
lacks in ours. 

Thus you will hear the Jews arraigned by their 
enemies for three such vices as cowardice, avarice 
and treason—to take three of the commonest 
accusations. You examine their actions and you 
find innumerable instances of the highest courage, 
the greatest generosity and the most devoted 
loyalty: but courage, generosity and loyalty of a 
Jewish kind, directed to Jewish ends, and stamped 
with a highly distinctive Jewish mark. 

The man who accuses the Jews of cowardice 
means that they do not enjoy a fight of his kind, 
nor a fight fought after his fashion. All he has 
discovered is that the courage is not shown under 
the same circumstances, nor for the same ends, nor 
in the same mode. But if the word courage means 
anything, he cannot on reflection deny it to actions 
of which one could make an endless catalogue even 
from contemporary experience alone. Is it cowar¬ 
dice in a young man to sacrifice his life deliberately 
for the sake of his own people ? Did that young 
Jew show cowardice who killed the Russian Prime 
Minister, the antagonist of his people, after the first 
revolution following on the Russo-Japanese war ? 
Was it cowardice to walk up in a crowded theatre, 
surrounded by all the enemies of his race, and shoot 
their chief in their midst? Is it cowardice to 
stand up against the vast alien majority, and to 
do so over and over again, perhaps through a whole 
lifetime, insisting on things that are grossly un¬ 
popular with that majority and running a risk the 
whole time of physical violence? You find Jews 



74 


THE JEWS 


adopting that attitude all over Europe. Can one 
think it is cowardice which has permitted the 
individuals of this nation to maintain their tradition 
unbroken through two thousand years of inter¬ 
mittent torture, spoliation and violent death ? 
The thing so stated is ridiculous, and it is clear 
that those who make such an accusation are con¬ 
founding their own form of courage with courage 
as a universal attribute. 

They think that because Jews show courage 
under other circumstances and in another way from 
themselves, corresponding to another appetite, as 
it were, therefore it is no longer courage: to think 
like that is to confess yourself very limited. 

I can testify, myself, to any number of courageous 
acts which I have seen performed by Jews. I am 
not alluding to acts of courage in warfare, of which 
there is ample evidence, but to acts of a sort in 
which our race would not have shown the same 
quality or timbre of courage. I will cite one case. 

Rather more than twenty years ago, when feeling 
on the Dreyfus case was at its height and when 
the feeling of the French Army in particular was 
at white heat, I happened to be in the town of 
Nimes, through which, at the time, a body of 
troops was passing. The cafe in which I sat was 
filled with young sergeants. There were hardly 
any civilians present beside myself. There came 
into the place an elderly Jew, very short in stature, 
highly marked with the physical characteristics of 
his race, an unmistakable Jew. He was somewhat 
bent under the weight of his years, with fiery eyes 
and a singularly vibrating intonation of voice. 
He was selling broadsheets of the most violent 
kind, all of them insults against the Army. He 



THE GENERAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 75 


came into this cafe with the sheets in his hand so 
that all could see the large capital letters of the 
headlines, and slowly went round the assembly 
ironically offering them to the lads in uniform with 
their swords at their side, for they were of the 
cavalry. 

Every one knows the French temper on such 
occasions—a complete silence which may at any 
moment be transformed into something very dif¬ 
ferent. One sergeant after another politely waved 
him aside and passed him on. He went round the 
whole lot of them, gazing into their faces with his 
piercing eyes, wearing the whole time an ironical 
smile of insult, describing at intervals the nature 
of his goods, and when he had done that he went 
out unharmed. 

It was an astonishing sight. I have seen many 
others as astonishing and as vivid, but for courage 
I have never seen it surpassed. Here was a man, 
old and feeble, the member of a very small minority 
which he knew to be hated, and particularly hated 
by the people whom he challenged. Because he 
held one of his own people to be injured, he took 
this tremendous risk and went through this self- 
imposed task with a sort of pleasure in that risk. 
You may call it insolence, offensiveness, what you 
will: but you cannot deny it the title of courage. 
It was courage of the very highest quality. 

I repeat: you may see evidence of that sort of 
courage in Jewish action throughout the world and 
in every age. You have the beginning of it in the 
Siege of Jerusalem; to-morrow, if the fear which 
we now all entertain should unhappily prove well 
founded, we shall see it again upon the same scale. 

Take avarice. When the Jew is accused of 



76 


THE JEWS 


avarice by bis enemies they are reading into him 
that vice in a form of which they know themselves 
capable, which they themselves practise, which 
they fully understand, but which he never practises 
in their fashion. The Jew is adventurous with his 
money. He is a speculator, a trader. He is also 
a man who thinks of it in exact terms. He is 
never romantic about it. But he is almost invari¬ 
ably generous in the use of it. Our race, when it 
yields to the vice of avarice, is close, secretive, 
uncharitable. He is pitiless and sly in accumula¬ 
tion. He is vociferous in his insistence upon the 
exact terms of an agreed compact. He is also 
tenacious in the pursuit of anything which he has 
set out on, the accumulation of money among the 
rest. He is almost fanatical in his appetite for 
success in whatever he has undertaken, the accumu¬ 
lation of money among the rest. But to say that the 
money, once accumulated, is not generously used, 
is nonsense. There is not one of us who could not 
cite at once a dozen examples of Jewish generosity 
upon a scale which makes us ashamed. 

Nor is it true to say that this generosity has 
ostentation for its root, or, as it is called, “ Ban- 
some,” either. Though a love of magnificence is 
certainly a great passion in the Jewish character, 
it does not account for the most of his generosity. 
It is a generosity which extends to all manner of 
private relations, and if you will take the testimony 
of those who have been in the service of the Jews 
and are not Jews themselves, that testimony is 
almost universally in favour of their employers, if 
those employers be men of large means. 

They will tell you that they felt humiliated in 
serving a Jew; that the relations were never easy; 


THE GENERAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 77 


that there was always distance. Bnt not often that 
they were treated meanly. Just the other way. 
There has usually been present a spontaneous gener¬ 
osity. The same argument applies to the cry of 
“ Ransome.” It is true that some of the more 
scandalous Jewish fortunes have thrown up defences 
against public anger by the return of a small pro¬ 
portion in the shape of public endowments: it is 
an action and a motive not peculiar to them. But 
that does not explain the mass of private and 
unheard benefaction to which we can all testify 
and which is as common with the middle-class Jew 
as with the wealthy. It is here as in the matter 
of courage a question of hind. Those of our people 
who happen to be generous (they are rare) do not 
calculate. They often forget or confuse the sums 
they have made away with, as though it were mere 
extravagance. The Jew knows the exact extent 
of his sacrifice, its proportion to his total means. 
Is he then less generous ? By no means. He is, 
in scale more generous—but in a different fashion. 

It might be argued that this generosity of the 
Jew is a consequence of the way in which he regards 
money. It comes and goes with him because he 
is a speculator and a wanderer. It has been said 
that no great Jewish fortune is ever permanent ; 
that none of these millionaires ever founded a 
family. This is not quite true; but it is true that 
considering the long list of great Jewish fortunes 
which have marked the whole progress of our 
civilization it is astonishing how few have taken 
root. But though this conception of money may 
be an element in the generosity of the Jew it does 
not fully explain it, and at any rate that generosity 
is there, and contradicts flatly the accusation of 


itize 




78 


THE JEWS 


avarice. Indeed the general accusation of avarice 
fails: and that is why it is a sort of standing jest 
permitted even where the Jews are most powerful. 
It is a jest they themselves do not resent because 
they know it to be beside the mark. 

The accusation of treason is on the same footing 
—save that it is even more “ to one side” than 
the others quoted. There is no race which has 
produced so few traitors. It is not treason in the 
Jew to be international. It is not treason in the 
Jew to work now for one interest among those who 
are not of his people, now for another. He can 
only be charged with treason when he acts against 
the interests of Israel, and there is no nation nor 
ever has been one in which the national solidarity 
was greater or national weakness in the shape of 
traitors less. Indeed, that is the very accusation 
their enemies make against them; that they are 
too homogeneous; that they hold too much 
together and are too fierce in self-defence; and you 
cannot have that accusation coupled with an 
accusation of treason. What is true is that the 
Jew lends himself to one non-jewish group in its 
action against another. He will serve France 
against the Germans, or the Germans against 
France, and he will do so indifferently as a resident 
in the country he benefits or the country he wounds : 
for he is indifferent to either. The moment war 
breaks out the intelligence departments of both 
sides rely upon the Jew: and they rely upon him 
not only on account of his indifference to nationalism 
but also on account of his many languages, his 
travel, the presence of his relations in the enemy 
country. And this is true not only of war but of 
armed peace. 


THE GENERAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 79 


But it is clear that in all this there are examples 
of what in us, would be treason. In him such actions 
are not treasons, for he does not betray Israel. 
But they all have an atmosphere repellent to us. 
They are things which if we did them (or when we 
do them) degrade us. They do not degrade the 
Jew. 

One might continue the list of such accusations 
indefinitely, and in every one you would find that 
the root of the quarrel is not the presence of a 
particular defect but the presence of a difference in 
circumstances, temperament, character: a dif¬ 
ferent colour and taste in the quality or defect 
concerned. It is that which offends. It is that 
which causes the misunderstandings and which 
leads to the tragedies. 

While this is true of the accusations made against 
the Jewish people it is unfortunately equally true 
of the corresponding qualities which they and their 
defenders advance in the rebuttal. The Jew is 
essentially patriotic: that is true. But not patri¬ 
otic to our ends or in our way. He is essentially 
self-respecting. But not self-respecting to our 
ends or in our way. A personal obligation which 
he cannot meet, a personal and intimate contract 
in which he may default, especially to one of his own 
people, is abhorrent to the Jew; but not in our 
way. He has not our shame of bankruptcy for 
instance, but much more than our shame of personal 
borrowing. Drunkenness, a vice most offensive to 
human dignity, is with him the rarest vice: with 
us the commonest. But our sense of dignity in 
repose he has not, nor does he feel our sense of 
in ured dignity in mummery. His tenacity, which 
all know and all in a sense admire and which is far 



80 


THE JEWS 


superior to our own, is also a narrower tenacity, 
or at any rate a tenacity of a different kind. He 
will follow one end where we will follow many. 
His wonderful loyalty to all family relations we 
know: but we do not appreciate it because it is 
outside our own circle. Even his intellectual gifts, 
which are less affected by this matter of timbre, 
have something alien to us in them. They are 
undeniable but we feel them to be used for other 
ends than ours: they are coldly used when ours 
are used enthusiastically: they are used with 
intensity when we use them with carelessness. 

If we leave the controversial field and concern 
ourselves with an appreciation of Jewish qualities, 
apart from our like or dislike of them and apart 
from their difference in intimate texture, as it were, 
from our own, they may be summarized I think 
as follows: — 

The Jew concentrates upon one matter. He does 
not disperse his mind. And this concentration 
carries with it strength and weakness. It has been 
said in connection with it (all such terms are 
metaphorical) that his mind is not elastic. But 
this is a great element in his success. I have 
noticed that the Jew having once taken up a 
particular task shows an indifference to other 
tasks which, from our standpoint, is marvellous. 
How many instances could not one cite of two 
Jewish brothers, the one occupied in finance, the 
other in science, or the one in politics, the other in 
music, and how clearly do we see in those instances 
the complete indifference of the Jew to things 
outside the province he has undertaken! How 
remarkable in our eyes is his resistance to any 
temptation which might lead him away from his 


THE GENERAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 81 


end. The Jew who is devoted to science, for 
instance, remains completely indifferent to its 
opportunities for enrichment. The Jew who is 
devoted to philosophy (and what great names he 
can show in this sphere throughout the centuries!) 
lives in poverty and is perfectly content so to live. 
The Jew devoted to any particular ideal of social 
change devotes himself entirely to that, and ends 
his task often more powerful, hardly ever more 
wealthy, nearly always much poorer than when he 
began it. Above all he refuses to' be distracted 
for a moment from his goal. 

Another character which is affiliated to this first 
leading character of the Jew would seem to be the 
lucidity of his thought. The Jew’s argument is 
never muddled. That is one of his prime assets 
not only in all discussion but in all action. It is 
also, if a cause of strength, a cause of the enmity 
he arouses: or (to use my milder term) of the 
“ friction.” 

For an exactly constructed process of reasoning, 
from which there is no escape, has in it (for those 
less capable of it) something of the bully. A man 
may feel the conclusion to be false: perhaps he 
knows it to be false. He lacks the power to express 
his reasons. He may not know how to state the 
principles which his adversary has left out of account, 
or when to bring them into discussion, and he feels 
the iron logic offered to him like a pistol presented 
at the head of his better judgment. But for 
strength and for weakness also, lucidity is the mark 
of the Jew’s mind. He carries that lucidity into 
the smallest details of whatever he may perform. 

One must add to all this a certain intensity of 
action which is very noticeable and which again is a 

G 



82 


THE JEWS 


cause of friction between himself and those about 
him. Hear a Jew speaking, especially a Jew 
speaking upon the revolutionary platform, and note 
the high voltage at which the current is working. 
The energy which he uses is not the energy of a 
large flame but of a well-directed blow-pipe: a 
stream of heat. He is wholly absorbed, not in his 
own expression, but in actively penetrating the 
mind of his hearers. And here again is that dif¬ 
ference in quality to which I have alluded. One 
might say indifferently that the Jew is never 
eloquent or that he is always eloquent when he 
speaks upon things that possess his soul. He is not 
eloquent in our fashion; but he is at any rate 
astonishingly effective in his own. 

The Jew has this other characteristic which has 
become increasingly noticeable in our own time, 
but which is probably as old as the race: and that 
is a corporate capacity for hiding or for advertis¬ 
ing at will: a power of “ pushing” whatever the 
whole race desires advanced, or of suppressing what 
the whole race desires to suppress. And this also, 
however legitimately used, is a cause of friction. 

Men get the feeling of a swarm in the presence 
of such action. They also get the feeling of being 
tricked: and it breeds bad blood. 

In the aspect of the deliberate use of secrecy I 
shall deal with this character in my next chapter, 
for I think in that aspect it is a particular cause of 
friction which can be eliminated. But the general 
capacity and instinct of the Jew for corporate action 
in the “ booming” of what he wants “ boomed” 
and the “ soft pedalling” of what he wants “ soft 
pedalled ” is ineradicable. It will always remain a 
permanent irritant in its effect upon those to whom 



THE GENERAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 83 


it is applied. The best proof of it is that after the 
most violent “ boom,” after the talents of some 
particular Jew, or the scientific discovery of another, 
or the misfortunes of another, or the miscarriage of 
justice against another, has been shouted at us, 
pointed and iterated until we are all deafened, there 
comes an inevitable reaction, and the same men who 
were half hypnotized into the desired mood are 
nauseated with it and refuse a repetition of the 
dose. 

The converse is true. Men who find that some 
important matter has been suppressed, some bad 
scandal in the State or some trick in commerce 
because Jewry desired it to be suppressed, are soon 
on the alert. They will not suffer the operation as 
quietly the second time as they did the first. 
Indeed they tend if anything to grow too suspicious. 
Anyhow, in both cases this ineradicable racial 
habit, a cause perhaps of Jewish survival and 
certainly an element of Jewish strength, is also a 
cause of acute friction between them and us. 

But a mere category of this kind is, as I have 
said, useless to explain the fundamental quality, 
the hidden root, of the ceaseless conflict between the 
very soul of the Jew and the soul of the society 
around him. All these points are but manifesta¬ 
tions of some profound, some subterranean power 
for contrast, the value of which we cannot grasp, 
but the effects of which are only too apparent. And 
there remains in the minds of those who most rely 
upon this race and of those who most suspect them 
the sense of an impassable gulf between them and 
ourselves. It is the recognition, the admission of 
such a contrast, the telling of the truth about it, 
the working upon it as a necessary condition, which 



84 THE JEWS 

must form the foundation for any solution at which 
we can arrive. 

There is one feature in the European’s attitude 
towards the Jews which must be specially dealt 
with, and that is the false impression that the 
friction between us and them is in the main a 
quarrel with their wealth. 

That impression has been greatly weakened by 
the recent revolutionary activity of the Jew surging 
up from the depths, appearing upon the surface, 
and producing the great upheaval in Russia, and 
the attempted upheavals elsewhere. But though 
the new Jewish revolutionary movement has 
shaken the old insistence on Jewish wealth it is 
hard to eradicate it. It has been present through¬ 
out the ages, and will remain at the back of people’s 
minds perhaps for ever, because the few Jews who 
do concentrate on piling up great fortunes concen¬ 
trate on that task so entirely. Yet the impression 
is false and is the fruitful cause of the worst mis¬ 
understandings. 

Eor the Jews are not a rich nation, and the very 
fact that they stand in the popular mind—and 
especially in the mind of rich people in times 
of corruption—for wealth, is an example of the 
way in which they are misunderstood and of the 
way in which injustice to the Jew arises. 

The Jews are a poor nation. An enemy would 
say that they were poor because they did not 
work, but this again would be an injustice, because 
the Jew works exceedingly hard and has often in 
the past and does still in many places work hard, 
not only in negotiation and commerce but with 
his hands. 



THE GENERAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 85 


We see the Jews in the Middle Ages monopolizing 
important manual occupations in some districts 
—dyeing and shipbuilding, for instance. And 
there are many parts of Eastern Europe where 
they work upon the land to-day. 

The Jews are a poor nation because they are an 
alien nation and because their activities are for 
the most part condemned to working against the 
grain, in a society which is not their own. But 
that they are a poor nation is not only true but 
abundantly evident to any one who has travelled 
and watched their various settlements with any 
sympathy. 

Now that they have arrived in such great 
numbers in the West people are beginning to 
appreciate this. We have already seen how, a 
lifetime ago, when the Jew T s of the West (I mean 
especially in France and England and America) 
were a small number of merchants and financiers, 
the great wealth of a very small number among 
them was not counterbalanced in our experience 
by the exceeding poverty of the mass. But to-day 
we can see for ourselves how true it is that, once 
you get below the exceptional fortunes and a 
comparatively small middle-class, the Jewish nation 
is no more than millions of exceedingly poor 
families. 

Those who have watched them outside the West, 
those who have seen them in their great eastern 
communities where the bulk of the race still resides, 
in the Marches of Russia, will abundantly agree. 
It helps us to understand the Jewish problem if 
we grasp the fact that a great part of the Jewish 
complaint against us is precisely this poverty to 
which the bulk of the Jews are condemned. It is 



86 


THE JEWS 


all very well to sneer at the Jewish complaint of 
persecution and oppression and to cite ironically, 
whenever it arises, the immense fortunes of a few 
families like the 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 com¬ 
munity. 

Further (a most important point already touched 
on in passing), these great fortunes are ephemeral. 

In the European nations you have a mass of 
great fortunes far larger in number, and even in 
total, than the Jewish financial fortunes. But 
those great fortunes have been in the past and are 
still, wherever our society is healthy, permanent. 
They run through European history in the shape 
of the great families, in the shape of the nobility. 

The great territorial families in this country 
have been wealthy for centuries and remain in 
established wealth, and the same is in the main 
true of the great Italian families, it is obviously 
true of the great German families, and, in spite of 
the great changes of the last century and a half, 
it is still largely true of the old French families. 
It is not true of the Jewish families. The vast 
Jewish fortunes which have marked history rise 
suddenly and melt again almost as suddenly. A 
Jew will begin in some very small way—as a 
pawnbroker in Liverpool, for instance, or a very 
small bookseller in Frankfort. You will find his 
son a great banker, his grandson so wealthy as to 
command politics for a generation, and then (if you 


THE GENERAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 87 

will watch the process in the past—to take a modern 
unfinished instance is of course misleading) at last, 
and soon, the name disappears again, and disappears 
for ever. 

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 repre¬ 
senting the later great Jewish fortunes on the 
Rhine, the fortunes of the sixteenth century and 
the early seventeenth ? They have utterly gone. 
Who have you left representing the considerable 
Jewish houses of Medieval Venice ? of Genoa ? of 
Rome ? 

The causes of this rapid fluctuation are many. 
They all attach to the peculiar position, as well as 
to the peculiar character, of the Jew. We find 
them partly in the passion for speculation which 
the Jewish intelligence naturally harbours. We 
find them still more, I think, in the instinctive 
opposition to the Jew which his alien surroundings 
perpetually arouse. 

It is, however, important to remember this last 
point. From our point of view the Jew, when he 
does get rich, seems to get much too rich and to 
get rich much too quickly, and he exercises far 
too much power through his wealth; for we think 
of him the whole time as an alien with no right to 
any position. But the Jew sees it in a very different 
light. In his point of view his effort to accumulate 
wealth is always heavily handicapped. When he 
succeeds he only succeeds through his own tenacity 
and the patriotic co-operation of his fellows, and 
he always holds his new-found wealth on an insecure 
tenure. What looks to us like the breakdown of a 



88 


THE JEWS 


Jewish fortune through speculation,seems to the Jew 
the fatal recurrent result of unending opposition. 

In connection with the illusion of a wealthy 
Jewish race, you have, of course, the matter which 
I briefly mentioned above, the connection between 
our wealthier, and therefore governing classes, and 
the Jewish wealth of the moment. A great part 
of the illusion, as I have said, is due to the fact 
that the gentry of every epoch come into contact 
with the Jew only as a rich man, and it is the 
capital modern vice of our own gentry, their passion 
for mere wealth and their subservience to it, which 
has largely accounted for this dangerous misunder¬ 
standing. 

Look around you in Western Europe to-day and 
see what people mean by this story of Jewish 
wealth. See who the people are that allude con¬ 
tinually to it and spread the idea of it. They are 
the rich Europeans, who, in their subservience to 
crude wealth, in their habit of gauging everything 
by that wealth and of submitting to almost any 
indignity for the purpose of obtaining more wealth, 
marry their daughters to Jews, serve Jewish 
interests, and, while perpetually sneering at the 
Jew behind his back, call him to his face by his 
most intimate name and make the most of his 
hospitality. Which of them ever knows a middle- 
class Jew, let alone a poor Jew? Why, most of 
them are actually ignorant of the fact that this 
mass of poor Jews exists at all! They serve the 
Jew when he is wealthy and only when he is 
wealthy. They envy him basely as a wealthy 
man and only as a wealthy man. They prostitute 
their dignity, they sell their fellow-Europeans, not 
from any genuine affection for the Jewish race— 



THE GENERAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 89 


indeed there is no class in the community, closely 
intermixed with the Jews as they are, which feel 
the friction more than the gentry—but simply 
from a thirst for money, which they happen to find 
held in great masses by a few Jewish families. 

It is most noticeable that other aspects of Jewish 
activity remain unused by the wealthy class, the 
gentry—and therefore by the State. Whether it 
would be wise to use them or not is another matter. 
At any rate, the motive for leaving them unused 
is the fact that they are not connected with wealth. 
The Jewish intelligence which might so often have 
served the policy of a Statesman is largely left 
unused. The cosmopolitan position of the Jew 
when it is used is used for little more than spying; 
and that profound force, the historical memory of 
the Jew, is neglected almost altogether. With this 
neglect goes a natural and evil result, the failure 
on the part of the European governing classes, 
especially to-day, to safeguard the community 
against the troubles which are bound to arise from 
the clashing of interests between the Jews and 
the people among whom they dwell. 

It may sound paradoxical, but it is true, that if 
the Statesmen of Europe, and the hereditary 
families of the European nations who still take so 
much part in the conduct of those nations, had 
thought less of the Jewish money power and more 
of the Jews as a whole they would have benefited 
both parties in a very different fashion. We have 
seen the artificial protection of the Jews of Eastern 
Europe because individual Statesmen have been 
subservient to the commands of very rich individual 
Jewish bankers. But the thing has been done 
blunderingly. It has served only to anger the 



90 


THE JEWS 


independent nationalities of the East, notably the 
Poles, the Roumanians and the Hungarians who 
have experience of the difficulties inseparable from 
an alien minority. Our politicians have treated the 
whole affair externally and mechanically,merely 
obeying orders without trying to understand. 

The ultimate result of such interference by our 
Western politicians is unhappily certain. The 
last state of the Jews in Eastern Europe will be 
worse than the first. Their sufferings will be 
greater than in the past, and that because, instead 
of acting from attempted comprehension and 
sympathetic comprehension of the Jewish difficul¬ 
ties the politicians, who have acted as the servants 
of a few wealthy Jews, have merely obeyed the 
orders of these rich men and have done so with the 
secret reluctance that always accompanies self¬ 
surrender to a wage. 

Is it not apparent, as we look through history, 
that the permanent power of the Jew or, at any 
rate, the celebrity of his nation is utterly distinct 
from those chance accumulations of wealth which 
a few individuals owe to the national passion for 
speculation and a cosmopolitan position ? 

One after another the striking Jewish names of 
history are the names of Jews who have ardently 
pursued some moral or intellectual thesis; most 
of them—I had nearly said all of them—were poor 
men, and for the most part men deliberately poor 
because they preferred, as it is in the Jewish nature 
to prefer, the immediate work in hand to any r other 
consideration. 

It is these names that remain and are permanent 
and are the glory of the Jewish race. 



THE GENERAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 91 


There is one aspect of this Jewish wealth which 
I hesitate whether to put among the general or 
among the particular causes of the friction between 
that nation and its hosts. 

It falls certainly among the general causes in 
the sense that it is connected with the Jewish 
character as a whole and not with any special _ 
method in that character’s action. It is connected, Vr 
I mean, with their very nature, and. they cannot 
change'tKa^naturer -On the other hand, it might 
be put'among the particular causes on account of 
its quite modern and probably ephemeral char¬ 
acter: it is, as it were, a particular cause of the 
friction proceeding from the general causes of 
character just enumerated, and this cause of friction 
is the presence of Jewish Monopoly. 

It is an exceedingly dangerous point in the 
present situation. I do not think that the Jews 
have a sufficient appreciation of the risk they are 
running by its development. There is already 
something like a Jewish monopoly in high finance. 
There is a growing tendency to Jewish monopoly 
over the stage for instance, the fruit trade in 
London, and to a great extent the tobacco trade. 
There is the same element of Jewish monopoly in 
the silver trade, and in the control of various other 
metals, notably lead, nickel, quicksilver. What 
is most disquieting of all, this tendency to monopoly 
is spreading like a disease. One province after 
another falls under it and it acts as a most powerful 
irritant. It will perhaps prove the immediate 
cause of that explosion against the Jews which we 
all dread and which the best of us, I hope, are 
trying to avert. 

It applies, of course, to a tiny fraction of the 


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C^s. uUutiuli - AW ; iU /J, 

^ ^duHflu a it+n - a Autl 
ojjzu. tut 1% 


92 


THE JEWS 


Jewish 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 that 



THE GENERAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 93 


was the financial monopoly. Yet here the mono¬ 
poly was far less perfect than in the case of the 
metals. The Great War brought thousands upon 
thousands of educated men (who took up public 
duties as temporary officials) up against the 
staggering secret they had never suspected—the 
complete control exercised over things absolutely 
necessary to the nation’s survival by half a dozen 
Jews, who were completely indifferent as to whether 
we or the enemy should emerge alive from the 
struggle. 

Incidentally, the wealth of these few and very 
wealthy Jews has been scandalously increased 
through the war on this very account. And at 
the moment in which I write the French press, 
which has a longer experience in the free discussion 
of the Jewish question than any other, is exposing 
the abominable increase in value of the Rothschild’s 
lead mines, an increase mainly due to the use of 
lead for the killing of men. 

But lead is only one of the monopolies, as I 
have said. A whole group already exists and the 
extension of the system is going on as rapidly as 
an epidemic. Not only must it cease before any 
solution of the Jewish question can be attempted, 
but the process must be reversed. If the various 
national Cabinets do not interfere to protect these 
monopolies, then good-bye to any attempt at 
j ustice for the Jew. In the legitimate anger against 
a few pitiful dozens among the worst specimens 
of the nation, Israel as a whole will be sacrificed. 

There is in this formation of monopolies, as in 
the more reputable activities of the nation, even 
in its more justly famous activities, even in its 
glories, that element of racial character which is 



94 


THE JEWS 


never absent from any Jewish action. And that 
is why I have put the point, modem and ephemeral 
as it is, among the general causes of trouble. 

The reason these general monopolies are formed 
by Jews is that the Jew is international, tenacious 
and determined upon reaching the very end of his 
task. He is not satisfied in any trade until that 
trade is, as far as possible, under his complete 
control, and he has for the extension of that control 
the support of his brethren throughout the world. 
He has at the same time the international know¬ 
ledge and international indifference which further 
aid his efforts. 

But even were the quite recent monopolies in 
metal and other trades taken, as they ought to be 
taken, from these few alien masters of them, there 
would remain that partial monopoly (it is not 
at all a complete monopoly) which a few Jews 
have exercised not only to-day, but recurrently 
throughout history, over the highest finance: 
that is, over the credit of the nations, and therefore 
to-day, as never before, over the whole field of the 
world’s industry. 

Should that partial financial monopoly remain 
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 opera¬ 
tions are removed from general observation, and 
because it is mixed up with the interests of all 
the wealthier classes. 



THE GENERAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 95 


I am afraid these arguments will not hold. 
Although the Jewish control of finance is not a 
thing which touches the public at large, yet all 
educated men down to a comparatively low stratum 
of society are fully aware of it, and every man who 
is aware of it resents it. It is resented almost as 
much by the mass of poor Jews as by the non-Jews, 
but in a different way. 

Again, although this financial monopoly does not 
directly affect the economic life of the private 
citizen, he is beginning to understand more and 
more how it indirectly affects it. It affects him, 
for instance, through his patriotism. He will not 
submit to be told that, in order to suit the con¬ 
venience of these alien bankers, he must forgo the 
rights of victory and allow some enemy whom he 
has justly chastised to escape the consequences of 
that chastisement. Still more urgently will he 
deny the right of the Jewish bankers to interfere 
with the national reparation due to him for damage 
wantonly done in the course of hostilities. 

Again, international finance does not live 
separate from private activities. It touches at last 
a mass of individual enterprises, and through those 
individual enterprises its action is questioned and 
examined by a host of private citizens. 

Yet again, the Jews who thus control international 
finance are at work in many other capacities. For 
instance, some of them stand behind those great 
Industrial Insurance schemes which are so detest¬ 
able to the mass of the people. Action against 
these may arise any moment. If such action 
comes one may be certain that the individual 
attacked will be remembered in his capacity of 
international financier quite as much as in his 



96 


THE JEWS 


capacity of a battener upon the lapsed premiums 
of the poor. Sooner or later the character of 
this monopoly, to which men of a lifetime ago 
were indifferent through ignorance but of which 
to-day all the educated part of the community 
is aware and deeply resents, will be appreciated 
and equally resented at a lower level still. When 
society is sufficiently filled with indignation against 
it, then the explosion will come. If that explosion 
only affected the rich Jews immediately concerned 
no one would much regret it. There would be 
little harm done. But the trouble is that it will 
almost certainly affect the whole nation to which 
those individuals belong. 

I may be told that to put an end to this state 
of affairs is impossible so long as parliamentary 
government, with its profound corruption, endures; 
that the only force capable of dealing with the 
plutocratic evil of alien monopoly upon this scale 
is a king; and that a king we have not, among 
modern nations. To which I answer that the 
parliamentary system will not last for ever. It is 
already in active dissolution among ourselves, and 
badly hit elsewhere. The king may not be so far 
off as people think him to be. 

At any rate, in one way or another the thing will 
cease, and will probably cease in violence. The 
danger is that if it ceases in violence a vast number 
of innocent will be involved with the guilty. 



THE SPECIAL CAUSES OF 
FRICTION 



• 



CHAPTER V 


THE SPECIAL CAUSES OF 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 false¬ 
hood degrade the Jew—that is not our affair— 
but rather on account of the ill-effects this policy 



100 


THE JEWS 


produces on our mutual relations. It feeds and 
intensifies the antagonism already excited by 
racial contrast. 

But before we go further it is essential to be just; 
for no one understands anything if he attacks it 
unjustly. 

The Jewish habit of secrecy—the assumption 
of false names and the pretence of non-Jewish 
origin in individuals, the concealment of relation¬ 
ships and the rest of it—have presumably sprung 
from the experience of the race. Let a man put 
himself in the place of the Jew and he will see 
how sound the presumption is. A race scattered, 
persecuted, often despised, always suspected and 
nearly always hated by those among whom it 
moves, is constrained by something like physical 
force to the use of secret methods. 

Take the particular trick of false names. It 
seems to us particularly odious. We think when 
we show our contempt for those who use this 
subterfuge that we are giving them no more than 
they deserve. It is a meanness which we associate 
with criminals and vagabonds; a piece of crawling 
and sneaking. We suspect its practisers of desir¬ 
ing to hide something which would bring them 
into disgrace if it were known, or of desiring to 
over-reach their fellows in commerce by a form of 
falsehood. 

But the Jew has other and better motives. 
As one of their community said to me with great 
force, when I discussed the matter with him many 
years ago at a City dinner, “ When we work under 
our own nmes you abuse us as Jews. When we 
work under your names you abuse us as forgers.” 
The Jew has often felt himself so handicapped 



THE SPECIAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 101 


if he declared himself, that he was half forced, or 
at any rate grievously tempted, to a piece of base¬ 
ness which was never a temptation for us. Surely 
all this carefully arranged code of assumed patro¬ 
nymics (Stanley for Solomon, Curzon for Cohen, 
Sinclair for Slezinger, Montague for Moses, Benson 
for Benjamin, etc., etc.) had its root in that. 

The Jew can plead something further in extenua¬ 
tion of this practice. Family names did not grow 
up naturally with them, as with us, in the course 
of the Middle Ages. The Jew retained, as we long 
retained in the middle and lower ranks of European 
society, the simple habit of possessing one personal 
name and differentiating a man from his fellows 
by introducing the name of his father. Thus a 
Jew in the sixteenth century was Moses ben 
Solomon, just as the Cromwells’ ancestor of the 
same generation was Williams ap Williams. He 
had not what we call a surname or family name. 
In the same way until varying dates, early in 
France and England and other Western countries, 
much later in Wales, Brittany, Poland and the 
Slav countries of the East, a man was known only 
by his personal name, distinguished, if that were 
necessary, by mentioning also the name of his 
father, or, in some cases, of his tribe. 

Properly speaking the Jews have no surnames, 
and they may say with justice: “ Since we were 
compelled to take surnames arbitrarily (which was 
the case in the Germanies and sometimes else¬ 
where as well), you cannot blame us if we attach 
no particular sanctity to the custom.” If a Jew 
of plain Jewish name was compelled by alien force 
to take the fancy name of Flowerfield, he is surely 
free to change that fancy name, for which he is 



102 


THE JEWS 


not responsible, to any other he chooses. There 
was a good reason for the Government to force 
a name upon him. Only thus could he be regis¬ 
tered and his actions traced. But forced it was, 
and therefore, on him, not morally binding. 

All this is true, but there remains an element not 
to be accounted for on any such pleas. There are 
in the experience of all of us, an experience repeated 
indefinitely, men who have no excuse whatsoever 
for a false name save that advantage of deceit. 
Men whose race is universally known will unblush- 
ingly adopt a false name as a mask, and after a 
year or two pretend to treat it as an insult if their 
original and true name be used in its place. This 
is particularly the case with the great financial 
families. Some, indeed, have the pride to main¬ 
tain the original patronymic and refuse to change 
it in any of their descendants. But the great mass 
of them concealed their relations one with another 
by adopting all manner of fantastic titles, and 
there can be no object in such a proceeding save 
the object of deception. I admit it is a form of 
protection, and especially do I admit that in its 
origin it may have mainly derived from a necessity 
for self-protection. But I maintain that to-day 
the practice does nothing but harm to the Jew. 
There are other races which have suffered persecu¬ 
tion, many of them, up and down the world, and 
we do not find in them a universal habit of this 
kind. 

Again, who can say that the bearing of a Jewish 
name to-day, or at any rate in the immediate past, 
is or was a handicap in commerce where Occidental 
nations were concerned ? And as for the Eastern 
nations, the Jews there are so sharply differentiated 



THE SPECIAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 103 


that a false name can be of no service merely to 
hide the racial character of its bearer. There 
must be another motive present. 

The same arguments apply for and against other 
forms of secrecy. A man may plead that if secrecy 
in relationship were not maintained the dislike of 
Jews would lead to false accusations. The Jew 
is highly individual, especially in intellectual affairs. 
He takes his own line. He expresses his opinions 
with singular courage. And such individual opin¬ 
ions will often differ violently from those of men 
with whom he is most closely connected. “ Why,” 
I can understand some distinguished Jewish publi¬ 
cist in England saying, “ should I be compro¬ 
mised by people knowing that such-and-such a 
Bolshevist in Moscow or in New York is my cousin 
or nephew ? I am conservative in temperament; 
I have always served faithfully the state in which 
I live; I heartily disapprove of these people’s 
views and actions. If their relationship with me 
were known I should fall under the common ban. 
That would be unjust. Therefore I keep the 
relationship secret.” 

The plea is sound, but it does not cover the 
ground. It is not sufficient to explain, for instance, 
the habit of hiding relationships between men 
equally distinguished and equally approved in 
the different societies in which they move. It 
does not explain why we must be left in ignorance 
of the fact that a man whom we are treating as 
the best of fellow-citizens should hide his connection 
with another man who is treated with equal honour 
in another country. There are occasions where 
national conflicts make the thing explicable. A 
Jew in England with a brother in Germany and a 



104 


THE JEWS 


father.at Constantinople might well be excused 
in 1915 for calling himself Montmorency. Yet 
we note that often where there is most need to 
hide the connection, the connection is not hidden 
at all. On the contrary, it is openly advertised. 
We all recollect the name of one Jewish financier 
who was most unjustly treated during the war. 
He had faithfully served this country and the 
breach of his connection with it was (to n.y 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 relation¬ 
ships, denying Jewish origin—specially exasperates 
this, our own race, among which the Jews are 
thrown in their dispersion. It is invariably dis¬ 
covered, sooner or later, and whenever it is dis¬ 
covered men have an angry feeling that they have 
been duped, even in cases where the practice is 
most innocent and is no more than the following 
of something like a ritual. 



THE SPECIAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 105 


I doubt whether the Jews have any idea how 
strongly this force works against them. If a man 
were to say “ my name is so-and-so; my father 
was bom at such-and-such a place in Galicia; my 
brother is still there in such-and-such a business ” 
—if he told us all that, he would not suffer 
upon our appreciating later on that members of 
his family abroad were connected with move¬ 
ments we disapproved: no, not even with a 
Government in active hostility to our own. Every¬ 
body knows the international position of the 
Jew. Everybody knows that he cannot avoid 
that position. Everybody makes allowances for 
it. And I conceive that the abandonment of this 
habit of secrecy is not only possible but would 
be very greatly to the advantage of the whole 
race. 

Perhaps its most absurd form (not its most 
dangerous form) is the secrecy maintained by 
distinguished men with regard to their Jewish 
ancestors. They and their Jewish relations often 
suppress it altogether or, at best, touch on it rarely 
and obscurely. Why should they act thus ? 
Take the case of two men at random out of hun¬ 
dreds whose names are universally known and 
by most people respected, the name of Charles 
Kingsley, the writer, and the name of Moss-Booth, 
the founder of the Salvation Army. Here are 
two men who in very different fields played a great 
part in English life and who both owed their 
genius and nearly all their physical appearance 
to Jewish mothers. I should have thought it to 
the advantage of the Jewish race and of the indi¬ 
viduals concerned that this fact should be widely 
known. The literary abilities of Charles Kingsley, 



106 


THE JEWS 


the organizing and other abilities of Booth are 
not lessened in people’s eyes, but, if anything, 
enhanced, by a knowledge of their true lineage. 
Yet the mention of that lineage is treated as though 
it were a sort of insult. I have heard it wrung 
out in some passionate plea for the Jewish race 
as a proof that they are not devoid of abilities, 
but never generally published. 

Surely it would be more sensible to emphasize 
in every possible ease the Jewish or partially 
Jewish origin of men who distinguished themselves, 
and thus to show under what a debt Europeans 
stand to the Jewish blood. To treat the matter 
as a sort of sacred labyrinth, as a mysterious 
temple into which one may now and then be 
allowed to peep is ridiculous. The Jews cannot 
have their cake and eat it too. If it is—surely 
it must be—in their eyes a matter for pride to 
belong to blood which they hold to be superior 
and to a tradition of such immense antiquity, 
then it cannot be at the same time a matter of 
insult. Yet the convention is desperately main¬ 
tained by the Jews themselves. If a man tells 
me that he hates the English, and in reply I say, 
“ That’s because you are an Irishman,” he does 
not fly at my throat. He takes it as a matter of 
course that the history of the English government 
in Ireland excuses his expression. So far from 
being insulted at being called an Irishman he would 
be insulted if you said he was not an Irishman. 
And so it is with many another nationality which 
has suffered oppression and persecution. I can 
find no rational basis for a contrary policy in the 
case of the Jews. Moreover the habit does this 
further harm: it makes men ascribe a Jewish 



THE SPECIAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 107 

character to anything they dislike, and thus extends 
undeservedly the odium against the race. 

A foreign movement against one’s nation, an 
unpopular public figure, a detested doctrine, are 
labelled “ Jewish ” and the field of hate, already 
perilously wide, is broadened indefinitely. It is 
useless to say, “ The Jews do not admit the connec¬ 
tion, the names are not Jewish, there is no overt 
Jewish element.” He answers, “ Jews never do 
admit such connection; Jews admittedly hide 
under false names ; Jewish action never is overt.” 
And—as things are, until they change—there is no 
denying what he says. His judgment may be as 
wild as you will (I have heard Sinn Feiners called 
Jews !), but, so long as this wretched habit of secrecy 
is maintained, there is no correcting that judgment. 
A universal suspicion is engendered and spreads. 

Meanwhile the same vice drags into publicity 
every ill-sounding Jewish act and. name and leaves 
in obscurity the honoured names and useful public 
actions of Jewry. For a false name, like a forgery, 
advertises itself. 

It is not always recognized in this connection 
that the Jewish “ booms,” which are so fruitful 
a cause of exasperation, depend on this same policy 
of concealment and on that account add to the 
volume of anger as each new trick is discovered. 

Not that the objects of these wo rid-wide cam¬ 
paigns are unworthy of attention. The Jewish 
actor, or film-star, or writer or scientist selected is 
usually talented; the victim of injustice whose 
case is advertised on the big drum has often a 
genuine grievance. But that the notice demanded 
is out of all proportion and that its dependence 
on Jewish organization is always kept hidden. 



108 


THE JEWS 


So much for the element of secret action. A 
great deal more might be written upon it, but 
there are two reasons against enlarging thereon. 
First, a full discussion would take up far 
too much of my space; secondly, it would tend 
to add what I particularly wish to avoid in these 
pages, I mean emphasis upon the errors of the 
Jew. It would continue a quarrel, our whole object 
in which is to find peace. 

2. The Expression of Superiority by the Jew 

This is a very different matter. The mere 
sense of superiority is not something in which any 
special policy can be recommended, because it 
is there and cannot be remedied. It is part of 
the whole position. But it is possible to restrain 
its expression. For that purpose it is of value 
to define it, to put it upon record and to estimate 
its effect upon our issue. 

The Jew individually feels himself superior to 
his non-Jewish contemporary and neighbour of 
whatever race, and particularly of our race; 
the Jew feels his nation immeasurably superior 
to any other human community, and particularly 
to our modern national communities in Europe. 

The frank statement of so simple and funda¬ 
mental a truth is rarely made. It will sound, 
I fear, shocking in many cars. To many others 
it will sound not so much shocking as comic, 
and to many more stupefying. 

The idea that the Jew should think himself 
our superior is something so incomprehensible 
to us that we forget the existence of the feeling. 
If it be constantly reiterated, for the purpose 
of dealing with this great political difficulty, it 



THE SPECIAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 109 

is perhaps reluctantly admitted, but still held as 
sort of abnormal, bewildering truth. I contend 
that the forgetfulness of that truth, the attempt 
to solve the problem without that truth remaining 
constant and fixed in the mind of the statesman, 
is in a very large measure the cause of our failure 
in the past; and that the way the Jew openly 
acts upon it in gesture, tone, manner, social 
assertion, is a very important factor in the quarrel 
between his race and ours. 

Consider the attitude of statesmanship in the 
past towards this vital conflict. In every such atti¬ 
tude I think the Jewish conviction of superiority 
has been omitted. 

For the attitudes taken up by European states¬ 
men in the past towards the alien Jewish element 
in their midst have always been one of three sorts :— 

(1) Either they have acted as though there were 
no Jewish nation, as though the Jew were merely 
a private citizen like any other who happened 
to have peculiar opinions and customs of his own 
but who was not substantially different from the 
men around him. 

(2) Or they have attempted to suppress, or to 
expel, or to destroy the Jew with ignominy and 
violence. 

(3) Or, while recognizing the existence of the 
Jewish nation as something separate from their 
own fellow-nationals whom they have to admin¬ 
istrate, the statesmen have tried to arrive at 
equilibrium by a sort of pact in which Jewish 
separateness was recognized, but under conditions 
of disability. 

Now in all these three methods there is absent 
all recognition of the Jewish feeling of superiority. 



no 


THE JEWS 


In the first it is obviously lacking because the 
whole idea of a Jewish nation is absent. It is 
equally obviously lacking from the second method, 
that of persecution: the persecutor instinctively 
acts as though the Jew felt himself to be an inferior. 
In the third method it is also absent, not in theory 
but in practice. For the statesmen who have 
acted thus in the past have not attempted to give 
the Jews a separate status only, they have in point 
of fact nearly always given them an inferior status. 
By so doing they have exasperated the Jewish 
national sentiment. 

For instance, certain nations have treated Jews 
as a separate people, as aliens, by forbidding tlnjm 
untrammelled residence, and enforcing registration. 
But when it came to taxation or freedom from 
military service, then there was no special recog¬ 
nition of the Jew. 

There is indeed a fourth attitude which has 
occasionally appeared in history when States 
have been in active decline or have fallen into 
the hands of base and weak men, and that is the 
exaggerated flattery and support of a few power¬ 
ful wealthy Jews by administrators who were 
bribed or cowed. We are suffering from that 
to-day. But these exceptional cases (they have 
always led to national disaster) do not form a 
true category of Statesmanship in the matter. 
Nor is there even in those who thus actually advan¬ 
tage a few Jews above their own fellow-citizens, 
and give them special prominence and power, so 
much a recognition of the Jewish senseof superiority 
as a secret hatred of their Jewish masters. 

Bitter as is everywhere the secret attack on the 
Jews by those who have subjected themselves for 


THE SPECIAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 111 

gain or publicity, it is nowhere so bitter as in the 
private speech of the politicians. 

It would seem in the presence of so many failures 
in policy, and all these failures having in common 
the non-recognition of this Jewish feeling, that 
success can never be obtained unless we fully 
allow for it. I submit that there will never be 
peace between any Jewish alien minority and the 
community within which it may happen to reside 
until those who administrate that community 
fully accept, and studiously avoid the exaspera¬ 
tion of, this state of the Jewish mind. 

In statesmanship, as in every other form of 
human activity, exact definition is of the first 
importance. We must distinguish at the outset 
between this Jewish sense of superiority and any 
real superiority. The statesman is not concerned 
with the 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 thor¬ 
oughly the nature of the material upon which he 
is acting and with which he, has to deal. 

He may smile at the Jewish sense of superiority; 
he may even be privately indignant; but he 
must be quite sure that it is a permanent part of the 
nation with which he has to settle. It will never 
be removed. The Jew in the East End of London, 
the poorest of the poor, feels himself the superior 
of the magistrate before whom he is hauled, of the 
policeman who keeps order in the streets, and 



112 


THE JEWS 


immensely the superior of the simple-faced soldiers 
and sailors, whose trade is the most typical of our 
own race. He even feels himself the superior of 
those whom he better understands—the negotia¬ 
tors : the people who live by cunning. The 
expression of our faces, our gesture, our manner; 
the very fact that our minds, less acute, are also 
broader, confirms his feeling. 

This fixed idea of superiority which appears in 
every phrase and implication, is taken for granted 
by the Jew. It is felt, I say, by the poorest and 
most oppressed, the least rich and the most unfor¬ 
tunate of the Jewish people in our midst. Unfor¬ 
tunately—and this is the crux—it proceeds to 
unrestrained expression. It is this which is so 
violently resented. It is this which aggravates 
the quarrel. It is this which must be kept in 
control if we are to have peace; not the sense 
of superiority, that is ineradicable, but the expres¬ 
sion of it. It appears, as we all know, with extra¬ 
ordinary emphasis in the action and manner of 
the few very wealthy Jews with whom the directing 
classes of the nation are better acquainted. But 
whether he be a rich man suffering only from alien 
and hostile surroundings, or a poor man suffering 
•from all the lowering forces of squalor, of destitu¬ 
tion and of contempt, the Jew feels himself the 
potential master of his hosts and shows it. He 
reposes in the same confidence as was felt by 
Disraeli when he said: “The Jew cannot be 
absorbed; it is not possible for a superior race to 
be absorbed by an inferior.” But unfortunately 
he does not only repose on that foundation; he 
also acts upon it, and that is intolerable. 

We must, I say, allow for this feeling in any 



THE SPECIAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 113 


settlement we make; we have also to study its 
consequences. Otherwise we shall be baffled by 
phenomena which would seem inexplicable. But 
we need not allow for—on the contrary, we should 
actively condemn—an open attitude of Jewish 
contempt for ourselves. 

Here are some consequences of this open 
expression of superiority—consequences which we 
all discover to-day in the relations between the 
Jewish people and ourselves and which are leading 
us into a situation very dangerous for them and 
for us. 

First, you have that familiar handling of Euro¬ 
pean things by the Jew, which is continually stirring 
the wrath of the European and as continually 
leaving the Jew in wonderment what possible 
harm he can have done. Thus, the Jew will 
write of our religion, taking for granted that it 
is folly, and will marvel that we are offended. 
He will appear in our national discussions, not 
only giving advice, but attempting to direct policy, 
and will be puzzled to discover that his indifference 
to national feeling is annoying. He will postulate 
the Jewish temperament as something which, 
if different from ours, must, whether we like it or 
not, be thrust upon us. 

He acts in all these things as every one acts 
instinctively in the presence of those whom they 
take for granted to be inferiors, and when men 
talk of the “ Jewish insolence,” or the “ Jewish 
sneer,” they imply that attitude. We are wrong 
if we take these things as calculated insult. The 
action of the Jew, in so far as it proceeds from 
this sense of superiority, is no more calculated and 
no more deliberately hostile than are our own actions 



114 


THE JEWS 


whenever we find ourselves in relations which 
those whom we think inferior to ourselves. But 
we are right to point them out, to resent them, 
to reprove them, and, if it became necessary, to 
end them. 

The Jewish problem will never be solved unless 
we make allowances for the sense of superiority, 
take it for granted as an unavoidable evil, and 
restrain our indignation in its presence; but 
neither will it be solved if we permit its more and 
more open expression. 

Another consequence of this attitude: The Jew, 
on account of it, makes no effort to get into touch 
with the mass of the race in the midst of which 
he may happen to be living. He is content to 
remain separate from it, and thinks he cannot 
help remaining separate from them. And he 
shows it. He consents to associate with the elite, 
with those who direct, with those who have some 
special sort of function, but it seems to him a waste 
of time to attempt communion with the rest. 
And he shows it. That is what Renan meant 
when he said that the Jews were the least demo¬ 
cratic of all people. Renan, who was supported 
by Jewish money and lived, while he was doing 
his best work, dependent on a Jewish publisher; 
Renan, who was so fascinated by the history of 
Israel, and who decided himself to become a 
scholar in all Hebraic things, understood the Jew 
not at all. His judgments upon them are invari¬ 
ably superficial and to one side of the truth; the 
judgments of a foreigner—an admiring foreigner 
but not a sympathetic foreigner. And when he 
said that the Jews were not democratic he was, 
instead of passing a judgment upon an intimate 



THE SPECIAL CAUSES OP FRICTION 115 


political instinct of the Jewish people, simply 
noting an external phenomenon. For the Jews 
are, as a fact, strongly democratic—no nation more 
so—in their national relations among themselves; 
they only appear undemocratic to us because they 
openly look down on us among whom they live. 

Another form taken by that open expression of 
the sense of superiority among the Jews: It 
lends to all their actions in our State a certain 
assurance and solidity which vastly strengthens 
their power of resistance, no doubt, but also pro¬ 
vokes their misfortunes. The religious interpreter 
of history might say that they had been specially 
endowed with this sense by Providence because 
Providence intended them to survive as a national 
unit miraculously, in the face of every disability; 
to remain themselves for 2,000 years under condi¬ 
tions which would have destroyed any other 
people in perhaps a century: and yet intended 
to suffer. The rationalist will say that the expres¬ 
sion of a sense of superiority, and the power of resist¬ 
ance that accompanies it are but different names 
for the same thing; that but for the presence of 
that expression of superiority the resistance could 
not have succeeded, but for the resistance there 
could have been no persecution; that there was 
no design in the matter, only the chance presence 
of a particular quality which has produced its 
necessary and logical effect. But whichever be 
the true explanation, the historical fact remains, 
that this sense of superiority produced an open 
and overweening expression of it whenever the 
Jews have been free to give vent to their feelings, 
and that while it has had, as one great consequence, 
the strengthening of the identity, permanence, 



116 


THE JEWS 


survival of the Jewish people, it has also had, 
for another great consequence, their recurrent 
oppression following on every period of freedom. 

There is one last thing to be said, which it is 
almost impossible to say without the danger of 
giving pain and therefore of confusing the problem 
and making the solution more difficult. But it 
must be said, because, if we shirk it, the problem 
is confused the more. It is this: While it is 
undoubtedly true, and will always be true, that 
a Jew feels himself the superior of his hosts, it is 
also true that his hosts feel themselves immeasur¬ 
ably superior to the Jew. We can only arrive at 
a just and peaceable solution of our difficulties by 
remembering that the Jew, to whom we have 
given special and alien status in the Common¬ 
wealth, is all the while thinking of himself as our 
superior. But on his side the Jew must recognize, 
however unpalatable to him the recognition may 
be, that those among whom he is living and whose 
inferiority he takes for granted, on their side regard 
him as something much less than themselves. 

That statement, I know, will be as stupefying to 
the Jew as its converse is stupefying to us. It 
will seem as extraordinary, as incredible, and all 
the rest of it; but it is true, and it is a permanent 
truth. Unless the Jews recognize that truth 
the trouble will go on indefinitely. There is no 
European so mean in fortune or so base in 
character as not to feel himself altogether the 
superior of any Jew, however wealthy, however 
powerful, and (I am afraid I must add) however 
good. True, virtue has a superiority of its own 
which cannot be hidden, and the cruel, or the 
treacherous, or the debauched European cannot 



THE SPECIAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 117 

but feel himself morally inferior to a Jew who is 
just, self-governed, merciful, generous, and the 
rest of it. But we know how it is with national 
feelings. The type is stronger for us than the 
individual; and while we may recognize certain 
superior characteristics in the individual, we are 
thinking all the while of the race, of the communal 
form, and contrasting our own with the alien 
form, to the disadvantage of the latter. 

So difficult is it for the Jew to appreciate this 
factor in the problem that his lack of appreciation 
has been almost as great a cause of difficulty in 
the past as the same lack upon our side. We 
seem to him insolent when, in our own eyes, we 
are merely acting normally as superiors. 

What emotion does it not create, I wonder, in 
some Jewish merchant or money-dealer who has 
purchased a high directing place in our plutocracy 
when he discovers from the gesture, the tone, 
the expression of some chance poor Englishman, 
perhaps no more than an embarrassed hack writer, 
a clear feeling of superiority ? Must it not seem 
to him mere insolence ? “ What possible claim ” 
(he will say within himself) “ has this< 70 ?/, and a poor 
unsuccessful goy at that, to treat me as though 
I were less than he! I, who am worth millions, 
who am ruling and doing what I will with his own 
national leaders, who dispose of his State very much 
as I choose, and who belong to that nation which 
is wholly above all others, the Jewish people ? ” 
Everywhere the Jew discovers the consequences 
of this feeling, even though that feeling be to him 
so incomprehensible that he can hardly admit its 
existence. 

Well, whether he likes to admit it or not, it is 



118 


THE JEWS 


there. Individual Jews may be flattered for the 
sake of their wealth or because of the fear of them, 
in which a commercial community stands. Such 
Jews as mistake the current printed word which 
they read for the spoken words they never hear 
may fall into the error of thinking that this sense 
of superiority on our part did not exist. They 
must be warned, if ever the problem is to be solved, 
that it does. 

In their case, just as in ours, a right solution can 
only be arrived at by the frank admission that the 
feeling is there and by the fixed knowledge that, 
whether the feeling be an illusion or represent a 
reality, it will not change; but also by a repression 
of it in our mutual relations. 

We may add to our summary of this subtle but 
profound cause of disturbance the further truth 
that a paradox of the sort is to be found, though 
perhaps less emphasized, in every other political 
problem. The diplomat resident in a foreign 
capital has to consider not only his own certitude 
that his hosts are inferior, but their certitude 
of their own superiority to him and his. The 
general in the field may be certain of his mastery 
over an opponent, but if that opponent is as yet 
undefeated he will do ill to forget that he is matched 
by a confidence equal to his own. Still more does 
the negotiator in commerce act upon this principle 
and recognize it, or at least if he fails to do so, he 
invites disaster. For when the commercial man 
is occupied in overreaching his neighbour, his 
chances of success very largely depend upon his 
treating that neighbour as though he really 
were what he believes himself to be. He may 
be dealing with a stupid and vain man easily 



THE SPECIAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 119 


to be overmatched and impoverished, but if he lets 
it appear that he regards his proposed victim as a 
vain and stupid man, then he will miss his bargain. 

In general, there is no success over others, nor 
even (which is much more necessary), any permanent 
arrangement possible with others, unless we know, 
allow for, and act upon the self-judgment of others, 
however wrong we may believe that self-judgment 
to be. 

It is clear that in this conflict between the Jew 
and, let us say, the European (for it is between 
the Jew and the white Occidental race that our 
present problem lies, though the same problem 
arises with all other races among whom the Jew 
may find himself), both parties cannot be right. 
A being superior to the race of man and looking 
on our petty quarrels might be able to decide 
which of the two opponents were nearer reality, 
and whether we are the better justified in our 
contempt of the Jew or the Jew in his contempt of 
us. But in working out our own solution without 
the aid of such guidance, there is no rule but for 
both parties to take for granted what each regards 
as an illusion in the other; to restrain its expression 
for the sake of reaching a settlement; and in the 
settlement they arrive at, to admit as a factor 
necessarily and permanently present what each 
still secretly regards as a folly, but an incurable 
folly, in the other. 

The alternative to such self-restraint is a falling 
back into the old circle of submission, consequent 
anger accompanied by shame and violence, and 
these followed by remorse. 




THE CAUSE OF FRICTION 
UPON OUR SIDE 



CHAPTER VI 


THE CAUSE OF FRICTION UPON OUR SIDE 

Having concluded a brief review of the causes of 
friction upon the Jewish side, we must turn to the 
cause of friction upon our own. 

At first sight it might seem that the task was 
superfluous. Action and reaction are equal and 
opposite. If you have shown why A irritates B, 
you have also presumably shown why B irritates 
A. Or again, if you regard an alien minority in 
a community as an irritant (which it nearly always 
is and which it certainly is in the case of the 
Jews), you have, it would seem, sufficiently defined 
the position and need not trouble to examine what 
part the irritated play in the matter. What is 
parasitical at the worst preys upon the general 
body, at the best disturbs it. The general body 
would appear passive. It has no part in the business 
but to react against the cause of the disturbance 
and if possible get rid of it. As that cause is 
none of its making, one need not seek for any 
responsibility on its side. 

The house is ours: the Jew is an intruder (an 
objector may say), and there is an end of it. 

But the situation is not as simple as that. Quite 
apart from the fact that the Jew will certainly not 
allow such a description of his activity, there is 

123 



124 


THE JEWS 


the obvious truth that where you are dealing with 
two human factors, that is, with two factors which 
have a common nature and therefore common 
duties, you are also dealing with two known and 
analysable organic things. You are also dealing 
with two sets of wills, and these wills we know to 
be free, in spite of sophists. A man and a group 
of men can do well or ill, both absolutely, and 
relatively to some particular question in hand; 
and no group of men can escape responsibility 
in relation to any other group with which it is in 
contact. It is certain that we play a part ourselves 
in this quarrel between us and the Jews. It is 
a part which is in a measure inevitable, because it 
proceeds in a measure from the mere contrast 
between two racial characters. But there is a 
remaining part which can be remedied by the action 
of the will. 

Though we cannot change that element which is 
inherent in our nature any more than the Jews 
can change theirs, yet an understanding of it makes 
all the difference; and we can certainly change 
those elements which are inherent in our wills. 

The proof of this is that in the long story of the 
relations between the two races, there have been, 
in various times and places, those exceptional 
chapters of calm to which I have alluded on an 
earlier page, and these could not have been main¬ 
tained had not the causes of friction been modified 
on either side, but especially upon ours. 

All that cause of friction which arises from the 
mere contrast of character may be set down very 
briefly. It is included in what has just been said 
on the general causes, the difference in nature 
between the Jews and ourselves. If their form of 


rose 



CAUSE OF FRICTION UPON OUR SIDE 125 

courage, their form of generosity, their form of 
loyalty is, as it is, of a different quality from ours ; 
if their defects show the same difference of quality 
or colour; if we perpetually feel, as we do feel, the 
friction caused by this contrast, so do they, pre¬ 
sumably, feel a corresponding friction in their 
dealings with us. We shall neither of us be able 
to change that state of affairs. We must admit it, 
and we must try to understand its nature. 

Above all, we must not take it for granted that 
a difference from ourselves is in itself an evil in 
another. That is a point to be insisted upon. 
When we are dealing with inanimate nature, or 
with unintelligent animate nature, we do not 
ascribe motive, for there is no motive to ascribe. 
A man does not go about with bitterness in his 
heart against wasps, though the purpose of the 
wasp is very different from the purpose of the man 
and their interests clash. He does not call the 
wasp wicked, nor, save as a relief to his feelings, 
give it moral names. He does not condemn the 
wasp. Still less does he condemn all wasps, or 
anything else in nature around him that works 
against his interest. But when he has to deal with 
other human beings, man at once begins to ascribe 
a motive. He must do so, because he knows that 
motive is the spring of all human action, includ¬ 
ing his own. When that motive differs from his, 
contrasts with his and is therefore in any degree 
inimical to his, he is inclined to ascribe an evil 
motive. All that is a truism as old as the hills. 

If you have not to live with those who thus differ 
from you there is no great harm done, but if you 
have to accept them as part of your life, it 
is a different matter. It is then essential 



126 


THE JEWS 


to the order of the State that this illusion of 
directly antagonistic motive should be watched 
and restrained. 

But all this concerns rather our duty in the matter 
than the mere cause of friction. 

The first cause of friction is that contrast which 
is the same whether we describe it from the aliens’ 
point of view, as has just been done, or from our 
own. 

The causes of friction which lie within the pro¬ 
vince of the will, and which are, therefore, directly 
a matter for reform, are of another kind. The first 
of them undoubtedly is our disingenuousness in our 
dealings with the Jew. 

This disingenuousness extends from our daily habit 
to our treatment of history. It is more deep-rooted 
than most people are aware of, more widespread 
than those who are aware of it like to admit. It 
affects our relations with the Jews just as much 
when we are attempting to defend their position 
in the State as when we attack them. Indeed, I 
think it affects our relations more when we are 
trying to defend them than when we attack them. 
The only two kinds of men who show perfect 
candour in their dealings with the Jews are the 
completely ignorant dupe who can hardly tell a 
Jew when he sees one and who accepts as a reality 
the old fiction of there being no difference except a 
difference of religion (which he has been taught to 
think unimportant) and the person called an “ Anti- 
Semite.” 

Both these types certainly say what they think. 
That is why in their heart of hearts the Jews are 
grateful to both, although both are intellectually 
contemptible. The Jew feels, I think, when he 



CAUSE OE FRICTION UPON OUR SIDE 127 


meets either of these types, “ At any rate I know 
where I am.” But the great bulk of men, especially 
among the more cultivated, are grossly disingenuous 
in all their dealings with the Jews. It is the great 
fault of our side which corresponds to the fault of 
secrecy upon theirs. And when you have allowed 
for routine, for the necessities of social intercourse, 
for convention and the rest, it remains a deliberately 
conceived moral evil. 

A man and his friend meet in the street a 
Jew whom they know; they exchange ordinary 
civilities with him; they pass on. The moment 
his back is turned each comments to his companion 
upon the Jewish character of the man they have 
' just left, and almost invariably to his disadvantage. 

Now to blame this way of going on does not imply 
that when you meet your Jewish acquaintance you 
are to offend him by saying to his face the kind of 
things you say behind his back; that would be a 
monstrous piece of cynicism and, in practice, insane. 
We do not act thus in any relation of life. But it 
does mean that in the attitude, the gesture, the 
tone of the voice, we play a deliberately false part 
in our relations with Jews, which we do not play 
in our relations with any other people. A peculiar 
pretence, a pretence only practised with Jews, is 
elaborately maintained. There is no allusion to 
or admission of our real attitude, our sense of con¬ 
trast. We therefore suffer an unnatural strain; 
and we relieve of the strain immediately after¬ 
wards by an exaggeration of the contrast we have 
pretended to ignore. It is blameworthy in a special 
degree because it is peculiar to that one case. If 
we admitted the Jew as a Jew, talked to him of 
the things that were uppermost in his mind and 



128 


THE JEWS 


in ours, and treated him as we treat any other 
foreigner iq our midst, there would have been no 
harm done. As it is the lie has done a double 
harm—to him and to us. To us by an exasperation 
which is entirely our own fault, to him by deceiving 
him as to his true position. 

The Jews who mix with the wealthiest classes 
to-day, especially in London, have no true idea of 
their real position in the eyes of their guests; and 
the fault is with their guests. 

I have cited an obvious daily example, but it is 
the least important, for it is passing and shallow. 
This disingenuousness spreads to relations more 
permanent. A man goes into business with a Jew, 
accepts him as a partner, works with him constantly 
and yet nourishes in his heart a disloyalty to that 
relationship. It is a phenomenon of constant 
recurrence and it poisons the relations between the 
two races. If a man is prepared to enter into one 
of these permanent relations with another man who 
differs fundamentally from himself in tradition and 
human character, he must face the consequences. 
One of those consequences, if he is to remain an 
honest man, is the acceptation of the position with 
all that it implies. He cannot have the advantage 
—as he hopes to have it—of the Jewish sobriety, the 
Jewish tenacity, the Jewish lucidity of thought, the 
Jewish international relationships, the Jewish 
opportunity of advancement through the aid of his 
fellows, and at the same time secretly indulge in a 
contempt and dislike for his companion, and relieve 
that suppressed feeling in his absence. Yet that is 
what men are doing daily throughout the business 
world. 

Listen to the conversation of such a man as, 



CAUSE OF FRICTION UPON OUR SIDE 129 

having thus engaged in intimate commercial 
relationship with the Jew, falls upon misfortune. 
He spends the rest of his life denouncing the Jews 
as a race and his own companion in misfortune in 
particular. He has no right to do it. It is undig¬ 
nified ; it is puerile, but, worst of all, it is unjust. 
He presumably knew what he was doing when he 
entered into what could not but be a difficult 
relationship. The consequ ences of that relationship 
he should accept whether they turn out well for 
him or ill. 

We find something perhaps even worse to note 
in the attitude of those who are successful in their 
business through an alliance with the Jew. For in 
this case gratitude should be added to justice, 
and that gratitude is very rarely shown. On the 
contrary, the non-Jewish partner is for ever in 
a mood of complaint about his share. He is 
perpetually in a grievance that he has been over¬ 
reached, or that he has been bullied, or that he has 
been robbed, save in those very rare cases where 
the success is so overwhelming, the fortunes so 
rapid, that there is no room for a grudge. In 
almost every other case that I have come across 
there is that element of recrimination—behind the 
Jew’s back—even under conditions of success. 

I know very well what can be said upon the other 
side. It can be said that what I have called upon 
a former page the “ ruthlessness” of the Jew in 
commercial relations, as well as his tenacity and 
all the rest, make the contest unequal; that in a 
partnership between Jew and non-Jew the non-Jew 
is, as a fact, often overreached and is, as a fact, 
often left (as the pretty vocabulary of modern 
commerce has it) “ in the cart.” But pray why did 

K 



180 


THE JEWS 


the non-Jew enter into the alliance at all ? Was 
it not precisely in order that he should benefit, if 
he could, by those very qualities which he later 
denounces ? He expected that those qualities 
which make for the success of the Jew in commerce 
would also benefit himself. He knew that there 
must always be a certain amount of competition, 
even within such an alliance. He backed himself 
to watch his own interests under conditions which 
he knew perfectly well when he entered into them. 
He has not a leg to stand upon in quarrelling with 
the results of the relationship, for in so doing he 
is merely quarrelling with his own judgment and, 
for the matter of that, his own plot. 

If a man cannot tolerate the contrast between the 
Jewish race and our own, or if he regards that race 
as possessing energies which will invariably defeat 
him in the competition of commerce, then let him 
keep away from a Jewish alliance altogether. It 
is the simplest plan. But to immix himself with 
the Jewish commercial activity and then to grumble 
at the results is despicable. 

All this is worse, of course, when one is dealing 
with relations even closer than those of commerce. 
Those relations are numerous in the modern world, 
and disingenuousness in them takes the worst 
possible form. Men, especially of the wealthier 
classes of the gentry, will make the closest friends of 
Jews with the avowed purpose of personal advant¬ 
age. They think the friendship will help them to 
great positions in the State, or to the advancement 
of private fortune, or to fame. In that calcu¬ 
lation they are wise. For the Jew has to-day 
exceptional power in all these things. They there¬ 
fore have the Jew continually at their tables, they 



CAUSE OF FRICTION UPON OUR SIDE 131 

stay continually under the Jew’s roof. In all the 
relations of life they are as intimate as friends can 
be. Yet they relieve the strain which such an 
unnatural situation imposes by a standing sneer at 
their Jewish friends in their absence. One may say 
of such men (and they are to-day an increasing 
majority among our rich) that the falsity of their 
situation has got on their nerves. It has become a 
sort of disease with them; and I am very certain 
that when the opportunity comes, when the public 
reaction against Jewish power rises, clamorous, 
insistent and open, they will be among the first to 
take their revenge. It is abominable, but it is true. 

And this truth applies not only to friendships, 
it even applies to marriages. Marriage between 
Christian and Jew is, in that rank, an affair of 
interest, and the bitterness the relation breeds is 
excessive. 

This disingenuousness, then—lack of candour on 
the part of our race in its dealings with the Jew— 
a vice particularly rife among the wealthy and 
middle classes (far less common among the poor), 
extends, as I have said, to history. We dare not, 
or will not teach in our history books the plain facts 
of the relations between our own race and the Jews. 
We throw the story of these relations, which are 
among the half-dozen leading factors of history, 
right into the background even when we do mention 
it. In what they are taught of history the school¬ 
boy and the undergraduate come across no more 
than a line or two upon those relations. The 
teacher cannot be quite silent upon the expulsion 
of the Jews under Edward I or upon their return 
under Cromwell. A man cannot read the history 
of the Roman Empire without hearing of the Jewish 



132 


THE JEWS 


war. A man cannot read the Constitutional 
History of England without hearing of the special 
economic position of Jews under the Mediaeval 
Crown. But the vastness of the subject, its 
permanent and insistent character throughout two 
thousand years; its great episodes; its general 
effect—all that is deliberately suppressed. 

How many people, for instance, of those who 
profess a good knowledge of the Roman Empire, 
even in its details, are aware, let alone have 
written upon the tremendous massacres and counter¬ 
massacres of Jews and Europeans, the mass of 
edicts alternately protecting and persecuting Jews; 
the economic position of the Jew, especially in the 
later empire; the character of the dispersion ? 

There took place in Cyprus and in the Libyan 
cities under Hadrian a Jewish movement against 
the surrounding non-Jewish society far exceeding 
in violence the late wreckage of Russia, which 
to-day fills all our thoughts. The massacres were 
wholesale and so were the reprisals. The Jews 
killed a quarter of a million of the people of Cyprus 
alone, and the Roman authorities answered with a 
repression which was a pitiless war. 

One might pile up instances indefinitely. The 
point is, that the average educated man has never 
been allowed to hear of them. What a factor the 
Jew was in that Roman State from which we all 
spring, how he survived its violent antagonism to 
him and his antagonism to it; the special privilege 
whereby he was excepted from a worship of its 
gods; his handling of its finances—all the intimate 
parallel which it affords to later times is left in 
silence. The average educated man who has been 
taught, even in some fullness, his Roman History, 


icrosoft 



CAUSE OF FRICTION UPON OUR SIDE 133 


leaves that study with the impression that the Jews 
(if he had noticed them at all) are but an insig¬ 
nificant detail in the story. 

So it is with history more recent and even con¬ 
temporaneous. In the history of the nineteenth 
century it is outrageous. The special character of 
the Jew, his actions through the Secret Societies 
and in the various revolutions of foreign States, his 
rapid acquisition of power through finance, political 
and social, especially in this country—all that is left 
out. It is an exact parallel to the disingenuousness 
which we note in social relations. The same man 
who shall have written a monograph upon some point 
of nineteenth century history and left his readers 
in ignorance of the Jewish elements in the story 
will regale you in private with a dozen anecdotes: 
such-and-such a man was a Jew; such-and-such a 
man was half a Jew; another was controlled in his 
policy by a Jewish mistress; the go-between in 
such-and-such a negotiation was a Jew; the Jewish 
blood in such-and-such a family came in thus and 
thus—And so forth: but not a word of it on the 
printed page! 

This deliberate falsehood equally applies to 
contemporary record. The newspaper reader is 
deceived—so far as it is still possible to deceive him 
—with the most shameless lies. “ Abraham 
Cohen, a Pole”; “M. Mosevitch, a distinguished 
Roumanian” ; “ Mr. Schiff, and other representa¬ 
tive Americans” ; “ M. Bergson with his typically 
French lucidity”; “Maximilian Harden, always 
courageous in his criticism of his own people” (his 
own being the German) . . . and the rest of the 
rubbish. It is weakening, I admit, but it has not 
yet ceased. 



134 


THE JEWS 


Now this form of falsehood corrodes, of course, 
the souls of those who indulge in it. But that does 
not concern the matter of this book. Where it 
comes in as a cause of friction between the two races, 
and a removable cause of friction, is in the effect 
it has upon the Jewish conception of their position 
in our society. It falsifies that conception alto¬ 
gether. It produces in the Jew a false sense of 
security and a completely distorted phantasm of the 
way in which he is really received in our society. 
The more this disingenuousness is practised the 
more the surprise which follows upon its discovery 
and the more legitimate the bitterness and hatred 
which that surprise occasions in those of whom we 
are the hosts. It is not only true of this country; 
it is true of every other country in which the Jew 
has been harboured and for a time protected. 
Invariably he has complained that his awakening 
was rude, that he was bewildered by what seemed to 
him a novel and inexplicable feeling against him; 
that he had thought he was among friends and 
found himself suddenly among treacherous enemies. 
All this would have been saved to others in the past, 
and will be saved to ourselves in the near future, if 
this pestilent habit of falsehood were eliminated. 

Disingenuousness is, on our side, the first main 
cause of the friction between the two races. 

The second main cause of friction upon our side 
is the unintelligence of our dealing with the Jews. 
That unintelligence is allied, of course, to the dis¬ 
ingenuousness of which I have spoken; but it is a 
separate thing none the less, and we can learn from 
the Jews its opposite, for their dealings with us are 
always intelligent. They know what they are 
driving at in those relations, though they often 



CAUSE OF FRICTION UPON OUR SIDE 135 

misunderstand the material with which they deal. 
But we, over and over again, would seem not even 
to know what we are driving at. 

What could be more unintelligent, for instance, 
than the special forms of courtesy with which the 
Jew is treated ? I am not talking of the elaborate, 
false friendship which I have just dealt with under 
the head of disingenuousness, but of the genuine 
attempts at courtesy towards this alien people— 
the courtesy expressed by those who have no 
intimate relations with them, and do not desire to 
have intimate relations with them. It is almost 
invariably, in those who commonly avoid the Jews, 
a courtesy which expresses patronage on the surface 
of it. It may be compared with the courtesy that 
rich men show to poor men—as offensive a thing as 
there is in the world. 

And how unintelligent is our dealing with any 
particular Jewish problem; for instance, the 
problem of Jewish immigration! We mask it 
under false names, calling it “ the alien question,” 
“ Russian immigration,” “ the influx of undesir¬ 
ables from Eastern and Central Europe,” and any 
number of other timorous equivalents. The process 
is one of cowardly falsehood, but the falsehood is 
not more remarkable than the stupidity, for no 
one is taken in and least of all the Jews them¬ 
selves. 

This unintelligence extends to many another 
field. How unintelligent are the efforts of the 
writers who would, as it were, make amends to the 
Jews for former persecution by putting imaginary 
Jew heroes into their books. In this particular we 
offend less than did our fathers of the Victorian 
period. Dickens’ offence was grave. He disliked 



136 


THE JEWS 


Jews instinctively; when he wrote of a Jew 
according to his inclination he made him out a 
criminal. Hearing that he must make amends 
for this action, he introduced a Jew who is like 
nothing on earth—a sort of compound of an Arab 
Sheik and a Family Bible picture from the Old 
Testament, and the whole embroidered on an 
utterly non-Jewish—a purely English character. 

How unintelligent are the various defences of the 
Jew by the non-Jew, even with the best intentions ! 
You will hear people tell you solemnly, as a sort of 
revelation, that there are kindly, witty Jews, Jews 
who are good prize-fighters or good fencers. I well 
remember one old gentleman who tried hard to 
convince me (as though I needed convincing) that 
there were Jews who had taste. He said to me, “ I 
do not myself go into Jewish houses, but my son 
does, and he assures me that much of the decoration 
is in good taste.” How unintelligent is the idea 
that because a man’s motives are not open and 
because he has not the same reasons for serving the 
State that you have, therefore he is to be perpetually 
under suspicion! How "till more unintelligent is 
the conception that, although he is alien, yet you 
cannot use him in certain special services for the 
State. 

This unintelligence is specially apparent in the 
treatment of the Jew in his international relations. 
The Jew is a nomad, the non-Jew a man with a 
fixed habitation. The Englishman, the Frenchman 
and the rest are perpetually approaching the Jew 
as though he also had a fixed habitation. We seem 
never to be able to get over the shock of surprise 
when we learn that a particular Jew abroad is the 
cousin, or nephew, or brother of another Jew with a 



CAUSE OF FRICTION UPON OUR SIDE 137 


different name in England, or with another Jew with 
yet another name in Pinsk or San Francisco. Yet, 
surely, this is of the very essence of the Jewish 
position. We ought to take it for granted that the 
Jew is thus nomadic, international, spread all over 
the world, migratory, as we take the same thing for 
granted in birds of passage. To adopt the attitude 
which we almost invariably do and to feel a shock 
of surprise when we discover what must in the 
nature of things be the most regular feature in the 
civic situation of the Jew, is to fall into that most 
stupid of all stupid errors, the reading of oneself 
into others. 

I remember the horror and scandal with which 
men whispered their discovery that a man with a 
German name, who had got into trouble a few years 
ago, was the first cousin of a Cabinet Minister. Why 
not ? They seemed to be struck all of a heap by 
the dreadful revelation that the names borne by 
Jews were not always their original names, that 
rich and important men often have poor rela¬ 
tions, and that poor relations often get embar¬ 
rassed. 

In terms of their own society the thing would 
have been simple enough. They would have felt 
no surprise to hear that some man of our own race, 
who had made a rapid fortune and purchased a 
political position, suffered from a disreputable 
relative, also of our own race. But because in the 
case of the Jew there were the two unusual elements 
of a foreign name and distant origin, they were 
bewildered. They even thought it in some way 
specially scandalous. They had not appreciated the 
material with which they were dealing, and that is 
the mark of unintelligence. But the cream of unin- 



138 


THE JEWS 


telligence, the form in which unintelligent treatment 
of him most exasperates the Jew, is undoubtedly 
that typical, that ceaseless case of the man who is 
perpetually crying out against Israel, and purpos¬ 
ing nothing—the man who nourishes a sterile 
grievance; who has not even the clarity or vigour to 
attempt suppression; who would be horrified at 
persecution, almost equally horrified at any breach 
of convention, and yet continues to cry out against 
a state of affairs which he does nothing to put right 
and for which he has not even a theoretic solution. 

The last of the main causes of friction between 
the Jews and ourselves is lack of charity, and that 
in the simplest form of refusing to go half way to 
meet the Jew, and of refusing to put ourselves in 
the shoes of the Jew so as to understand his position 
in our society and his attitude towards it. It is a 
universal fault just as common in those who daily 
associate with, live off, and fawn upon Jews 
as in those who keep aloof from them. It never 
seems to occur to anyone on our side who has to 
deal with the Jewish problem, to make the imagin¬ 
ative effort required. And yet we have the parallel 
ready to our hands. The Jew feels among us, only 
with far greater intensity, what we feel when we are 
resident in a foreign country—a sense of exile, a 
sense of irritation against alien things, merely 
because they are alien; a great desire for com¬ 
panionship and for understanding, yet a great 
indifference to the fate of those among whom he 
finds himself; an added attachment, not, indeed, 
to his territorial home, for he has none, but to his 
nation. If we could perpetually bear in mind 
that parallel, the friction on our side would be 
greatly modified. 


CAUSE OF FRICTION UPON OUR SIDE 139 

There are many Jewish societies which ask 
nothing better than to have occasional addresses 
from non-Jews. Those addresses are given, those 
Societies are visited, but not nearly as much as they 
should be. 

There is a great Jewish literature—I mean a great 
mass of books dealing specially with the Jew’s 
position from the Jew’s own point of view. It is 
not read or known. I may be told that the fault 
of all this is largely that of the Jews themselves on 
account of their use of secrecy. I do not think the 
objection applies. With all his use of secrecy the 
Jew is there present among us for us to approach, 
if we will, and to understand as best we can. And I 
say that the approach is not made. 

It is an effort, of course. No one knows it better 
than I; for on more than one occasion when I 
have addressed a Jewish audience I have found 
myself the obj ect of very severe language. But it is 
an effort which every one ought to make who admits 
that there is a Jewish problem at all, and it is an 
effort very rarely made. It is not only an effort 
because it involves the crossing of a gulf, it is also 
an effort because we find this alien thing in many 
ways repugnant to us. Yet people make that 
effort for the purposes of the State continually 
where other races are concerned. It is far more 
important that they should make it where the Jews 
are concerned. For those other alien races, 
administrated for the moment by officials of our 
own race, will not permanently be so administered. 
The relations between them and us are for a brief 
time, and they are relations that constantly change. 
The Jew is with us always; and the type of contact 
between his race and ours will remain much the 



140 


THE JEWS 


same through an indefinitely long future as they 
have through so very long a past. 

* * * * * 

Here, then, is the summary, as I see it, of the 
causes of friction between the two races. 

First, a general cause, which lies in the con¬ 
trasting nature of the two and upon the irritant 
effect of that contrast. This cause is not to be 
eliminated, though its effects may be modified. 
It is a profound contrast and a sharp irritant con¬ 
stant in its activity. The essential is to recognize 
its real nature, not to give to it general terms of 
faults and vices, but to appreciate the difference of 
quality involved: above all, not to tell lies about it 
and pretend it is not present. 

Secondly, as to special causes of friction—I 
mean causes which on their side, as on ours, can be, 
if not eliminated, at any rate modified—I suggest 
that the most prominent are: 1. The sense of 
superiority which, though it cannot be destroyed, 
can at least be checked in expression and which, 
by a pretty irony, is equally strong upon both sides. 

2. The use of secrecy by the Jews themselves; 
partly as a weapon of defence, partly as a method of 
action, always to be deplored, and of a nature 
particularly exasperating to our temperament. 

3. Upon our side, a persistent disingenuous¬ 
ness in our treatment of this minority. Unintelli¬ 
gence in their treatment: the whole made 
worse by an indifference or lack of charity, a 
refusal to make the effort necessary for meeting and 
understanding as well as we can the race which 
must always be with us and which is yet so different 
from our own. 



CAUSE OF FRICTION UPON OUR SIDE 141 


Now these causes of friction permanently present 
tend to produce what I have called the tragic 
cycle: welcome of a Jewish colony, then ill-ease, 
followed by acute ill-ease, followed by persecution, 
exile and even massacre. This followed, naturally, 
by a reaction and the taking up of the process all 
over again. 

In our own time we have seen, quite lately, the 
succession of the second to the first of these stages; 
we have passed from welcome to ill- ease. That pas¬ 
sage threatens a further passage from the second to 
the third; from the third to the terrible conclusion. 

We feel quite secure to-day from the last 
extreme of this cycle. We are certain it will never 
come to persecution: that is still inconceivable. 
But it is not inconceivable everywhere: and no 
society is free from change. Some now alive may 
live to see riots even in this quiet polity and worse 
in newer or less settled states. 

Such a catastrophe is to be avoided by every 
effort in our power and a solution to the problem 
presented must imperatively be sought. But in 
passing we should note, for the consideration of 
those who may doubt the acuteness of the problem 
and the immediate practical necessity for a solution, 
the presence of a phenomenon which amply proves 
that it is acute and that the solution is necessary. 
That phenomenon is the presence to-day of a new 
type, the Anti-Semite, the man to whom all the 
Jews are abhorrent. 

It is a phenomenon which has increased pro¬ 
digiously ; its rate of increase is accelerating, and as 
a warning of the peril, as a proof of its magnitude, 
I propose to examine that phenomenon closely in 
my next chapter. 








CHAPTER VII 


THE ANTI-SEMITE 

To understand any problem one must study not 
only its real factors as they appear to a reasonable 
man who sees the whole affair steadily; one must 
also understand the insanities and distortions the 
problem has provoked, for they singularly illus¬ 
trate its character and force. 

It is not enough to consider only the actual in 
any difficulty to be solved, it is necessary also to 
consider the imaginary; because the legend or 
illusion is a direct product of the truth and shows 
how the truth has acted on other minds. 

Thus a caricature brings out what we uncon¬ 
sciously know to be present in any personality, 
emphasizes it, and though false in its exaggeration, 
forbids us to forget it in the future. Thus any 
extreme, no matter how false its lack of proportion, 
is of the highest value to judgment. 

In a practical problem of politics there is another 
most weighty reason for examining extreme and 
distorted opinion: which is, that in politics we deal 
not only with real things but with the liking or 
disliking of these things by living men: their 
exaggerated or ill-informed affection or repulsion. 
All statesmanship lies in the apprehension of enthu¬ 
siasm and indifference. 



146 


THE JEWS 


Now there are in this great political problem 
presented by the Jewish race in our midst two 
extremes. One we have already studied: it is the 
extreme folly of falsehood, of pretending that the 
problem is not there. 

That extreme was an almost universal folly in 
the immediate past, especially in this country. It 
is now abandoned by all of our generation save a 
few people of an official sort, and these will not 
long maintain an attitude outworn and already 
ridiculous. 

But the other extreme remains to be studied. It 
is, in our society, quite a recent phenomenon, though 
it has gained very great strength in recent years 
and is increasing alarmingly. It is the extreme of 
hatred. It is the extreme manifested by those who 
have but one motive in their action towards the 
Jewish race, and that motive a mere desire for its 
elimination. It implies that there is no peace 
possible between the two races; no reasoned political 
solution. It relies upon nothing but antagonism. 
It is already very strong, and its adherents believe 
themselves to be on the eve of a sort of blundering 
triumph. 

Every one who desires to deal with this grave 
political matter practically, that is, to establish a 
permanent policy, will be much more concerned 
with the extreme here examined than with the 
other extreme, which ignores the problem altogether. 
For this new extreme of active hatred is flourishing; 
that other, older extreme no longer functions. 

The near future will have to deal, in practical 
politics, not only with the problem presented by 
the Jews as an alien power within the State, but 
(what will probably prove a more difficult matter) 



THE ANTI-SEMITE 


147 


with the hater of the Jew, who is claiming, and 
rapidly achieving, power on his side. The type is 
as old as the problem; it is two thousand years old. 
But it waxes and wanes. Its modern name of 
“ Anti-Semite” is as ridiculous in derivation as it is 
ludicrous in form. It is partly of German academic 
origin and partly a newspaper name, vulgar as one 
would expect it to be from such an origin, and also 
as falsely pedantic as one would expect, but the 
exasperated mood of which it is a label is very 
real. 

I say the word “ Anti-Semite” is vulgar and 
pedantic: that I think will be universally admitted. 
It is also nonsensical. The antagonism to the Jews 
has nothing to do with any supposed “ Semitic” 
race—which probably does not exist any more than 
do many other modern hypothetical abstractions, 
and which, anyhow, does not come into the matter. 
The Anti-Semite is not a man who hates the modern 
Arabs or the ancient Carthaginians. He is a man 
who hates Jews. 

However, we must accept the word because it has 
become currency, and go on to the more essential 
matter of discovering how those to whom it applies 
are moved, what the result of their action would 
be if (or when) they could act freely; and, most 
important of all, of what they are a sign. 

The Anti-Semite is a man marked by two main 
characters. In the first place he hates the Jews in 
themselves. His motive is not a hatred of their 
presence in our society. His motive is not the 
hatred of concealment, falsehood, hypocrisy, corrup¬ 
tion and all the other incidental evils of that false 
position. These things, indeed, irritate him, but 
they are not his leading motive. His leading motive 



148 


THE JEWS 


is a hatred of the Jewish people. He is in intense 
reaction against this alien thing which he perceives 
to have acquired so much power in his society. The 
way in which it has exercised this power especially 
exasperates him. But he will remain a hater of the 
Jewish nation when they are despised, insignificant, 
and neglected, and he will remain a hater of it even 
if there be then attached to its position no accidents 
of secrecy, falsehood and financial corruption. The 
type increases rapidly when Jews have power: it 
becomes almost universal w T hen they begin to abuse 
that power. It dwindles as that power declines. 
But it is always the same and is an index of peril. 

The Anti-Semite is a man who wants to get rid of 
the Jews. He is filled with an instinctive feeling in 
the matter. He detests the Jew as a Jew, and would 
detest him wherever he found him. The evidences 
of such a state of mind are familiar to us all. The 
Anti-Semite admires, for instance, a work of art; 
on finding its author to be a Jew it becomes dis¬ 
tasteful to him though the work remains exactly 
what it was before. The Anti-Semite will confuse 
the action of any particular Jew with his general 
odium for the race. He will hardly admit high 
talents in his adversaries, or if he admits them he 
will always see in their expression something 
distorted and unsavoury. 

When an accusation is made against a Jew he 
cannot adopt the judicial attitude any more than 
could that other extremist, the humbug who denies 
the Jewish problem altogether. Just as that other 
person, now passing out of our lives, would not admit 
a Jew to be guilty under the most glaring evidence 
and was particularly unable to admit guilt in a 
Jew who might be wealthy; just as he proclaimed 


osoft 



THE ANTI-SEMITE 


149 


the Jews as a whole impeccable, so does the Anti- 
Semite approach every Jew with a presumption of 
his probable guilt, so does he exaggerate this pre¬ 
judice when he has to deal with a wealthy Jew, and 
so does he consider the whole Jewish race in the 
lump as probably guilty of pretty well any charge 
brought against it. 

The contrast was very well seen in the Dreyfus 
case, when the old type of extremist was still strong. 
He would not look at the evidence against Dreyfus, 
he would not, if he could help it, mention his race. 
All he knew was that Dreyfus was and must in the 
nature of things be innocent and that all the diverse 
men who testified against him were wicked con¬ 
spirators. The new type of extremist, then but 
rising and not yet master, would not listen to the 
strong evidence in Dreyfus’ favour, refused to re¬ 
examine the case after the chief witness had been 
found guilty of forgery, made up his mind that 
Dreyfus was necessarily guilty and was convinced 
that all his supporters were dupes or knaves. 

The mere fact that the Jews exist, let alone that 
they are powerful, poisons life for such a man. He 
is led by his lop-sided enthusiasm into the most 
ridiculous errors. In this country every name of 
German origin at once suggests a Jew to him. Every 
financial operation, especially if it be of doubtful 
morality, must certainly have a Jew behind it; 
wherever a number of partners, Jewish and non- 
Jewish, are engaged in some bad work (as, for 
instance, in one of our innumerable Parliamentary 
scandals), a Jew must always for this sort of person 
be the prime mover and the evil genius of the whole. 

As is the case with every other mania, this mania 
rapidly obscures the general vision of its victim. 



150 


THE JEWS 


His prejudices soon lose proportion altogether. He 
comes to see the Jew in everything and everywhere, 
and to accept confidently propositions which he 
would himself see to be contradictory, could he give 
a moment’s quiet thought to the matter. 

Thus I have heard on all sides in the last few 
years these strange assertions proceeding from the 
same source, yet obviously incompatible one with 
the other: That modern scepticism was Jewish in 
its origin; that modern superstition, our modern 
necromancy and crystal gazing and all the rest of 
it, was Jewish in its origin; that the evils of demo¬ 
cracy are all Jewish in their origin; that the evil 
of tyrannical government, in Prussia, for instance, 
was Jewish in its origin; that the pagan perversions 
of bad modern art were J ewish in their origin; that 
the puerility of bad church furniture was due to 
J ewish dealers; that the Great War was the product 
of Jewish armament firms; that the anti-patriotic 
appeals which weakened the allied armies came from 
Jewish sources—and so on. It is indeed true that 
there is a Jewish quality in all these diverse and 
contradictory things where a Jew mixes in them; 
just as there is a Scotch, or French, or English 
quality when a Scot, a Frenchman, or an English¬ 
man is the agent. But to ascribe the whole boiling 
to the Jew, and to make him the conscious origin of 
all, is a contradiction in terms. 

The Anti-Semite is a man so absorbed in his 
subject that he at last looses interest in any matter, 
unless he can give it some association with his 
delusion, for delusion it is. 

In a sense, of course, this state of mind is a sort 
of compliment to the Jewish nation. If such a 
preoccupation with them be not amicable it is at 


ten 



THE ANTI-SEMITE 


151 


least intense, and those against whom it is directed 
may well regard it as a proof of their importance in 
the world. But that aspect of the phenomenon is 
not consoling for the future of either of us—the 
Jew who now nervously awaits attack, and we who 
desire to forestall and prevent such attack. 

The Anti-Semite is very much more numerous 
and very much more powerful than might be ima¬ 
gined from the reading of the daily press ; for the 
press is still, for the most part, under the convention 
of ignoring the Jewish problem and under the terror 
of the financial results which might follow from a 
discussion of it. His universal activity is not yet 
to be read of in the great newspapers; but in con¬ 
versation and in the practice of daily life we hear 
of it everywhere. 

And here I may digress upon a modern feature 
which applies to all political problems and therefore 
to this Jewish problem among others. The great 
movements of our time have never originated in the 
press of the great cities. They rise and store up 
their energies in political cliques, in popular gather¬ 
ings, and spoken rumours long before they appear 
in this main instrument for the spreading of news. 
That is because the press of our great cities is con¬ 
trolled by very few men, whose object is not the 
discussion of public affairs, still less the giving of 
full information to their fellow-citizens, but the 
piling up of private fortune. As these men are not, 
as a rule, educated men, nor particularly concerned 
with the fortunes of the State, nor capable of under¬ 
standing from the past what the future may be, 
they will never take up a great movement until it is 
forced upon them. On the contrary, they will waste 
energy in getting up false excitement upon insig- 



152 


THE JEWS 


nificant matters where they feel safe, and even in 
using their instruments for the advertisement of 
their own insignificant lives. In all this, the 
modern press of our great cities differs very 
greatly from the press of a lifetime ago. It 
was not always owned by educated men, but it 
was conducted by highly educated men, who were 
given a free hand. It therefore concerned itself 
with problems of real importance and it debated 
upon either side real contrasts of opinion upon those 
matters. This modern press of ours does none of 
these things; but precisely because it is so reluctant 
to express real emotion it does, when the emotion is 
forced upon it, let it out in a flood. Just as it would 
not tell the truth when a thing w T as growing, so when 
it reaches an extreme it will not exercise restraint. 
On the contrary, if the “ stunt” be an exciting 
one, it will push it (once it has made up its mind to 
talk of it at all) in the most extreme form and to the 
last pitch of violence. 

We have seen that plainly enough in the mon¬ 
strous expressions of foreign policy during the last 
ten years, and w T e have seen it in the abominable 
hounding of individuals to which that same press 
has lent itself. 

Now in the matter of Anti-Semitic feeling we shall 
have, I think, exactly the same phenomenon re¬ 
peated. That feeling is now ubiquitous. It is spread¬ 
ing with an alarming rapidity, and the increase 
of its intensity is even more remarkable than the 
increase in the numbers of its adherents. Sooner 
or later—and fairly soon I imagine—the press will 
give it voice. When it does, it will give it voice, we 
may be certain, in the most extreme, the most 
passionate, the most irrational form and when 



THE ANTI-SEMITE 153 

that happens, in a field where passion is already so 
wild, God help its victims! 

The Anti-Semitic passion, largely based though 
it is on imaginary things, has adopted one method 
of action highly practical. It is a method of action 
closely in touch with reality, and productive of 
formidable results. I mean its compiling of docu¬ 
ments. It has here noted, all over Europe and 
America, with exactitude, and continues to put upon 
record, everything which can be said to the detriment 
of its victims. 

It discovered at its origin, presented as a barrier 
against it, the Jewish weapon of secrecy. The folly 
of the Jews in using such a weapon was never better 
shown, for of all defences it is the easiest to break 
down. The Anti-Semites countered at once by 
making every inquiry, by collecting their informa¬ 
tion, by finding out and exposing the true names 
hidden under the mask of false ones, by detecting 
and registering the relationships between men who 
pretended ignorance one of the other ; it ferreted 
all through the ramifications of anonymous finance 
and invariably caught the Jew who was behind the 
great industrial insurance schemes, the Jew who 
was behind such and such a metal monopoly, the 
Jew who was behind such and such a news agency, 
the Jew who financed such and such a politician. 
That formidable library of exposure spreads daily, 
and when the opportunity for general publication 
is given there will be no answer to it. 

It is the greatest mistake in the world to regard 
the Anti-Semite in the vast numerical strength he 
has now attained all over our civilization as wholly 
unpractical and therefore negligible, as a man who 
cannot construct a formidable plan of action simply 



154 


THE JEWS 


because be has lost bis sense of values. While the 
movement was growing the method of meeting it 
was always that of ridicule. It was a false method. 
The strength of Anti-Semitism was and is based not 
only on intensity of feeling, but also on industry, 
an industry very accurate in its methods. The 
Anti-Semitic pamphlets, newspapers and books, 
which the great daily press is so careful to boycott, 
form by now a mass of information upon the whole 
Jewish problem which is already overwhelming and 
still mounting up: and all of it hostile to the Jews. 
You will not find in it, of course, any material for 
the Defendant’s Brief, but as a dossier for the Prose¬ 
cution it is astonishing in extent and accuracy and 
correlation. 

Now it is to be remembered in this connection 
that the human mind is influenced by documenta¬ 
tion in a special manner. The exact citation of 
demonstrable things with chapter and verse con¬ 
vinces as can no other method, and the Anti-Semite 
is ready with such citation on a very large scale 
indeed, at the first moment when a general pub¬ 
licity, now denied, shall be granted to it. 

Moreover, this reliance of the Jew upon the 
futility of the Anti-Semitic propaganda omits one 
very important feature. The Anti-Semitic group 
is built up of men differing greatly in experience, in 
judgment and policy. And it is built up of strata 
differing greatly in the intensity of their hatred. It 
includes many a man with administrative experi¬ 
ence, many a man of great business capacity, of 
acquired fortune, of talent in affairs. It in¬ 
cludes men with a thorough knowledge of European 



THE ANTI-SEMITE 


155 


diplomacy; it includes men (in great numbers) with 
the literary gift of expression for persuading their 
fellows. Not only is this true, but, as I have said, 
it includes a large “ right wing ” which, because they 
are more restrained in expression than the rest, will 
exercise a greater weight; men who are not at all 
blinded by their hatred, though hatred has become 
their chief motive; men who retain full capacity 
for organizing a plan of action and for carrying it 
out. It is true that there is a definite line which 
divides the Anti-Semite from the rest of those who 
are attempting to solve the Jewish problem. It is 
the line dividing those whose motive is peace from 
those whose motive is antagonism. It is the line 
dividing those whose object is action, against the 
Jew, and those whose object is a settlement. But 
on the Anti-Semitic side of that line—that is, among 
those whose determination is to suppress and elimi¬ 
nate Jewish influence to the extreme of their power 
—-there are now very many more than the original 
enthusiasts who created the movement. 

The Jews should further remember that to-day 
every one outside their own community is potentially 
an Anti-Semite. Not every one, perhaps not even 
yet a majority, at least in the directing and wealthier 
classes, is other than friendly or indifferent to the 
Jews, but there has grown up in every one not a Jew 
something of reaction against the Jewish power. It 
requires but an accident to change this from the 
latent and slight thing it is in most men to an angry 
passion. I have noticed that among the most 
violent of Anti-Semites are those who had passed 
some considerable portion of their early manhood 
in ignorance of the whole problem. These come 
across a Jew unexpectedly in some relation hostile 



156 


THE JEWS 


to them—they lose money through some Jewish 
financial operation, or they connect, for the first 
time, in middle age, several misfortunes of theirs 
with a common element of Jewish action, or they 
find Jews mixed up in some attack on their 
country: thenceforward they become and remain 
unrepentant Anti-Semites. 

The dupe, when he discovers he has been duped, 
is dangerous, and there is even a considerable cate¬ 
gory of those who have suffered nothing, even by 
accident, at the hand of the Jew, yet who, when they 
discover what the Jewish power is, feel they have 
been played with, and grow angry at the trickery. 

It has been and will be with Anti-Semitism as 
with all movements. When they begin they are 
ridiculed. As they grow they come to be feared 
and boycotted ; but of those that are successful it 
may be justly said that the moment of success 
begins when they turn the corner and from a fad 
become a fashion. 

It is still (doubtfully) the fashion to separate one¬ 
self from the Anti-Semitic movement. You still 
hear men, when they write or speak upon the Jewish 
problem, no matter with what hostility to the Jew, 
excuse themselves as a rule at the beginning of their 
remarks by saying, “I am no Anti-Semite.” For 
some flavour of the old ridicule still attaches to the 
name. But fashions change rapidly and the new 
fashion winch comes in to support a growing thing, 
when it does arrive, arrives in a flood. 

We can all of us remember the time when the 
talk of nationalization, the old State Socialist talk, 
was the talk of a few faddists who were everywhere 
ridiculed and despised. To-day it is the fashion; 
and the practice of State control, State support, 



THE ANTI-SEMITE 


157 


the universality of State action, is such that it is 
those who oppose it who are now the faddists and 
the cranks. 

We can all of us remember the day when, in the 
United States, a prohibitionist was a faddist, and a 
very unpopular faddist at that. We have seen 
fashion catch him up with a vengeance. 

We can all of us remember the day when the 
supporters of women’s suffrage in England were a 
very small group of faddists indeed: we know what 
has happened there! 

The forces driving men towards the Anti-Semitic 
camp are far stronger than the forces acting upon 
these old hobbies of women’s suffrage, of prohibition 
and the rest. They are personal, intimate forces 
arising from the strongest racial instincts and the 
most bitter individual memories of financial loss, 
subjection, national dishonour. 

For instance, any German to-day to whom you 
may talk of his great disaster will answer by telling 
you that it is due to the Jews: that the Jews are 
preying upon the fallen body of the State; that the 
Jews are “ rats in the Reich.” For one man that 
blames the old military authorities for the misfor¬ 
tunes following the war, twenty blame the Jews, 
though these were the architects of the former Ger¬ 
man prosperity, and among them were found a 
larger proportion of opponents of the war than in 
any other section of the Emperor’s subjects. That 
is but one example; you will find it repeated in one 
form or another in almost every other polity of the 
modem world. 

The Anti-Semite has become a strong political 
figure. It is a great and dangerous error at this 
moment to think his policy is futile. It is a policy 



158 


THE JEWS 


of action, and a policy which may proceed from plan 
to execution before we know it. 

There used to be quoted years ago—and I have 
myself quoted it with approval—a famous question 
put by a close and reasonable observer of public 
affairs upon the Continent, to the most prominent 
of Continental Anti-Semites in that day. The 
question was this: “ If you had unlimited power in 
this matter, what would you do ? ” The implied 
answer was that the Anti-Semite could do nothing. 
He could not make a law which would segregate the 
Jews for they could escape that law by mixing with 
those around them. He could not make a law 
exiling them; for, first, it would be impossible to 
define them; secondly, even if that were possible, 
those defined would not be received elsewhere. 
What could he do ? The implication was, I say, 
that he could do nothing; he was supposed, in the 
presence of that question, to admit his futility. 

Unfortunately we now know that he can do some¬ 
thing. The Anti-Semite can persecute, he can 
attack. With a sufficient force behind him he can 
destroy. In much of this destruction he would have, 
in a present state of feeling and in most countries, 
the mass of public opinion behind him. He could 
begin with a widespread examination of Jewish 
wealth and its origins and an equally widespread 
confiscation. He could use the dread of such con¬ 
fiscation as a weapon for compelling the divulgence 
of Jewish origins where a man desired to conceal 
them. He could do this not only in the case of the 
wealthy men, but, through the terror of wealthy 
men, over the whole field of the Jewish community. 
He could introduce registration and with it a segre¬ 
gation of the Jews. Inspired as he would be by no 


THE ANTI-SEMITE 


159 


desire for a settlement agreeable to them, but 
solely for a settlement agreeable to himself, he could 
aim at that harsh settlement, and even though he 
might not reach his goal, it is not pleasant to 
envisage what he might do on his way to it. 

But even though the Anti-Semite fail to acquire 
full power, there remain attached to his great 
increase in numbers and intensity of feeling the 
prime questions, “ What is the meaning of the 
thing ? Why has it arisen ? Why is it spreading ? 
What are the forces nourishing it ? ” 

These are the main questions which those who 
regret the presence of such a passion in the body 
politic, which those who are alarmed about it, which 
those who, like the Jews themselves, must, if they 
are to avoid a catastrophe, defend themselves against 
it, would do well to answer. There has not been as 
yet sufficient time to answer those questions fully 
or to appreciate this great reaction in its entirety, 
but we can already judge it in part. The Anti- 
Semitic movement is essentially a reaction against 
the abnormal growth in Jewish power, and the new 
strength of Anti-Semitism is largely due to the Jews 
themselves. 

When this angry enthusiasm re- arose in its modern 
form, first in Germany, then spreading to France, 
next appearing, and now rapidly growing, in Eng¬ 
land, it was novel and confined to small cliques. The 
truths which it enunciated were then as unfamiliar 
as the false values on which it also reposed. That 
universal policy of the Jews against which it is part 
of my thesis to argue, a policy natural but none the 
less erroneous, the policy of secrecy, the policy of 
hiding, at once took advantage of what was absurd 
in the novelty of Anti-Semitism. The Jew, in spite 



160 


THE JEWS 


of his age-long experience of menace and active 
hostility, in spite of his knowledge of what this 
sort of spirit had effected in the past, did not come 
out into the open. He did not act against the new 
attack with open indignation, still less with open 
argument, as he should have done. He took 
advantage of its absurdity, at its beginnings, in the 
eyes of the general public. He used all his endea¬ 
vours to make the word “ Anti-Semitic ” a label for 
something hopelessly ridiculous, a subject for mere 
laughter, a matter which no reasonable man should 
for a moment consider seriously. 

For something between a dozen and twenty years 
this policy was successful. The method though less 
and less firmly established as time went on, has not 
yet quite failed. None the less that policy was 
very ill-advised. It was used not only to ridicule 
the Anti-Semite, but what was quite illegitimate, 
quite irrational (and bound in the long run to be 
fatal), it was used to prevent all discussion of the 
Jewish question, though that question was increas¬ 
ing every day in practical importance and clamour¬ 
ing to be decided. 

It was the instinctive policy with the mass of the 
Jewish nation, a deliberate policy with most of its 
leaders, not only to use ridicule against Anti-Semi¬ 
tism but to label as “ Anti-Semitic ” any discussion 
of the Jewish problem at all, or, for that matter, any 
information even on the Jewish problem. It was 
used to prevent, through ridicule, any statement of 
any fact with regard to the Jewish race save a few 
conventional compliments or a few conventional 
and harmless jests. 

If a man alluded to the presence of a Jewish 
financial power in any region—for instance, in India 



THE ANTI-SEMITE 


161 


—lie was an Anti-Semite. If he interested himself 
in the peculiar character of Jewish philosophical 
discussions, especially in matters concerning 
religion, he was an Anti- Semite. If the emigrations 
of the Jewish masses from country to country, the 
vast modern invasion of the United States, for 
instance (which has been organized and controlled 
like an army on the march), interested him as an 
historian, he could not speak of it under pain of 
being called an Anti-Semite. If he exposed a 
financial swindler who happened to be a Jew, he 
was an Anti-Semite. If he exposed a group of Par¬ 
liamentarians taking money from the Jews, he was 
an Anti-Semite. If he did no more than call a Jew 
a Jew, he was an Anti- Semite. The laughter which 
the name used to provoke was most foolishly used 
to support nothing nobler or more definitive than 
this wretched policy of concealment. Anyone with 
judgment could have told the Jews, had the Jews 
cared to consult such an one, that their pusillani¬ 
mous policy was bound to fail. It was but a 
postponement of the evil day. 

You cannot long confuse interest with hatred, 
the statement of plain and important truths with 
mania, the discussion of fundamental questions with 
silly enthusiasm, for the same reason that you can¬ 
not long confuse truth with falsehood. Sooner or 
later people are bound to remark that the defendant 
seems curiously anxious to avoid all investigation 
of his case. The moment that is generally observed, 
the defence is on the way to failure. 

I say it was a fatal policy; but it was deliberately 
undertaken by the Jews and they are now suffering 
from its results. As a consequence you have all 
over Europe a mass of plain men who so far from 

M 



162 


THE JEWS 


being scared off from discussing the Jewish problem 
by this false ridicule are more determined than ever 
to thrash it out in the open and to get it settled upon 
rational and final lines. 

That would perhaps be no great harm in itself. 
It would merely mean that a false policy had failed, 
and that proper frank and loyal discussion would 
succeed all this hushing up and boycott. Unfortu¬ 
nately the false policy had other and much worse 
consequences. It exasperated men who had already 
begun to interest themselves in the political dis¬ 
cussion and who would not tolerate undeserved 
ridicule. It heaped up a world of determined oppo¬ 
sition to the Jews. It is not exactly that the Anti- 
Semite has already won or even is as yet certainly 
on his way to winning, but he now has his chance 
of winning. Whereas, some few years ago, he had 
the tide against him, he is now, through the fault 
of the Jews themselves, at its turn. He now 
finds himself on an extreme wing, it is true, but 
attached to a very large body which is already 
strongly biassed against the Jews, dislikes their 
presence among us, and is determined to act against 
them, not only where they still have great power, 
but also where that power is visibly declining, and 
even where they are in danger. 

It must not be forgotten, as we survey this grow¬ 
ing menace, that a policy which reaches no finality 
is not on that account futile. It must not be for¬ 
gotten that in the minds of many men (one might 
say in the minds of most men) during periods of 
excitement, a policy of repression, though always 
failing to reach finality, may still be continuous: 
it may become a habit and may endure indefinitely 
in the vast suffering of its victims. The Jews have 



THE ANTI-SEMITE 


163 


seen that happen in many a small nationality other 
than their own. They have seen, no doubt, that 
continued repression acting in an atmosphere of 
equally continuous rebellion has usually in the long 
run failed, but they must admit that the mainte¬ 
nance of such repression, with all its accompaniments 
of moral and physical torture, confiscation, exile 
and all the rest, has often been a policy long drawn 
out. It has been drawn out in some cases for 
centuries. It is not true that, because a policy does 
not aim at a complete settlement, therefore it can¬ 
not be undertaken and vigorously pursued. It can. 
Time and again a hostile force has attempted to 
eliminate opposition, or even contrast, and to elimin¬ 
ate it by every instrument, including massacre itself. 
Sometimes, very rarely, it has succeeded. Usually 
it has, in the long run, failed. But in the great 
majority of cases it has at any rate continued long 
after its failure was apparent. That is the danger 
which menaces from the phenomenon I have 
examined in this chapter. It would be madness in 
the Jews to neglect that phenomenon. It is now so 
strong in numbers, intensity of conviction, and 
passion that it menaces their whole immediate 
future in our civilization. Its ultimate causes we 
have explored. Its immediate cause, the cause of its 
sudden development and present startling growth, 
we have seen to be the Jewish action in Russia, and 
to this, which I have already touched upon in my 
third chapter, where I sketched the sequence of 
events leading up to the present situation, I will 
next turn, in order to make a more detailed examina¬ 
tion of it. For undoubtedly it is the sudden appear¬ 
ance of Jewish Bolshevism that has brought things 
to their present crisis. 



BOLSHEVISM 




CHAPTER VIII 


BOLSHEVISM 

The Bolshevist explosion, which will appear in 
history I think as the point of departure from 
which shall date the new attitude of the Western 
nations towards the Jews, is not only a field in 
which we can study the evil effect of secrecy, 
but one in which we can analyse all the various 
forces which tend to bring Israel into such cease¬ 
less conflict with the society around it. 

It merits, therefore, a very special examination, 
both as an opportunity for the study of our sub¬ 
ject and as a turning-point of the first moment in 
history. 

Why did a Jewish organization thus attempt 
to transform society ? Why did it use the methods 
which we know it used ? Why was that particular 
venue chosen ? What aim had the actors in 
view ? What measure of success did they hope 
to achieve ? By what method do they propose 
to extend their influence ? When we can answer 
those questions we shall have gone far to discovering 
the almost fatal causes of conflict between this 
peculiar nation and those among whom they move. 

The answers usually given to these questions 
by the avowed enemies of the Jewish race are 
always inadequate and often false. When they 

167 


168 


THE JEWS 


contain an element of truth (which they often do) 
that truth is quite insufficient to account for the full 
phenomena. But the accretions of falsehood and 
exaggeration render the whole thing inexplicable— 
indeed, these explanations of the Russian revolu¬ 
tion are very good specimens of the way in which 
the European so misunderstands the Jew that he 
imputes to him powers which neither he nor any 
other poor mortal can ever exercise. 

Thus we are asked to believe that this political 
upheaval was part of one highly-organized plot 
centuries old, the agents of which were millions 
of human beings all pledged to the destruction 
of our society and acting in complete discipline 
under a few leaders superhumanly wise ! The thing 
is nonsense on the face of it. Men have no capacity 
for acting in this fashion. They are far too limited, 
far too diverse. 

Moreover, the motive is completely lacking. 
Why merely destroy and why, if your object is 
merely to destroy, manifest such wide differences 
in your aims ? One may say justly that there 
is always a tendency to reaction against alien 
surroundings, and in so far as that reaction is 
intense and effective it is destructive of those 
surroundings. One may point out that such 
reaction in the case of the Jews, as in the case of 
all other alien bodies, is in the main unconscious 
and instinctive. All that is true enough; but the 
conception of a vast age-long plot, culminating 
in the contemporary Russian affair, will not hold 
water, any more than will the corresponding halluci¬ 
nation which led men to believe that the French 
revolution (a thing utterly different in kind from 
the Russian) was the mere outward expression 



BOLSHEVISM 


169 


of a strictly disciplined secret body. In the case 
of the French Revolution everything was put down 
(by the forerunners of to-day’s Anti-Semitic 
enthusiasts) to the secret agency of The Order of 
Templars acting unweariedly through six centuries, 
and finally bringing down the French monarchy. 
In the case, of course, of the Bolshevist anarchy 
a still longer range is given to the final result: 
for “Templars” read “Jews,” and for “ 600” 
read “ 2,000 ” years. It is all smoke. 

More serious is the statement that this combina¬ 
tion of Jews for the destruction of the old Russian 
society was an act of racial revenge. There is a 
great element of truth in that. There is no doubt 
that the greater part of the Jews who took over 
power in the Russian cities four years ago felt an 
appetite for revenge against the old Russian State 
comparable to that felt by any oppressed people 
against their oppressors. Probably it was more 
intense even than any other example that could 
be quoted. We are all witnesses to the way in 
which the Russian people, religion, and govern¬ 
ment, and particularly the person and office of 
the Emperor—were attacked and decried by the 
Jews in Western Europe, of the way in which the 
Jews ceaselessly conspired against the Russian 
State, and of the brutal repression to which they 
were subject. When you release a force of hatred 
so violent it may run to any length. That sudden 
release, that sudden opportunity for satisfying 
the thirst for vengeance, must explain a very large 
part of what followed. But even that does not 
account for the whole. It would account for mere 
massacre and mere chaos. It would not account 
for the attempts—rather pitiful attempts—at 



170 


THE JEWS 


construction and for the obviously designed system 
of direction which has continued on the same lines 
since the Jews first assumed power and is still 
fully manifest after nearly five years of that power. 

Still less is it sufficient to say that the Jew is 
everywhere the organizer and leader of revolution 
and that we only see him at work in Russia with 
greater vigour and thoroughness because the oppor¬ 
tunity is there greater. 

The Jew is not everywhere a revolutionary. He 
is everywhere discontented with a society alien to 
him: that is natural and inevitable. But he does 
not exercise his power invariably, or even ordinarily, 
towards the oversetting of an established social 
order by which, incidentally, he often largely 
benefits. 

You do not find the Jew in history perpetually 
leading the innumerable revolts which citizens in 
the mass make against the privileged or the superior 
conditions of the minority. He has sometimes 
benefited by these movements in the past; more 
often suffered. We often find individual Jews 
sympathizing with the revolutionary side, but 
we also find many individual Jews sympathizing 
with the other. The Jew is not, in the history 
of Europe, the prime agent of revolution: quite 
the contrary. The great acts of violence, 
successful and unsuccessful, which have marked 
our society from the agrarian troubles of pagan 
Rome to the French Revolution, the land war 
in Ireland, the Chartist Movement in London, 
or whatever modern movement you will, have 
appealed much more to the fighting instincts and 
political traditions of our race than they have to 
the Jews. They are marked everywhere by an 



BOLSHEVISM 


171 


attitude towards property and patriotism which 
are the very opposite of the Jews’ characteristics. 
The Revolutions of the past were for the better 
distribution of property and for the betterment 
of the State. Often they were openly undertaken 
because patriotism had been offended by defeat 
in war and because the Nation was thought to 
be betrayed. Usually they were jingo and always 
for distribution of wealth. 

It is the unique mark of the Russian revolution 
and of its attempted extension elsewhere that it 
repudiates patriotism and the division of property. 
In that, it differs from all others; and it is markedly, 
obviously, Jewish. But why had the Jews a 
chance of action in Russia which they lacked else¬ 
where ? 

What were the special characters in the Russian 
opportunity which made the Jew the creator of the 
whole movement ? 

There are, I take it, three main factors present 
in this case peculiarly suitable to the Jewish effort. 

In the first place, this revolution fell upon, and was 
directed towards, a particular social phenomenon 
in which that profound instinct in the European, 
the desire for settled property, had decayed. It fell 
upon the state of affairs called Industrial Capitalism, 
the chief mark of which is the destruction in the 
mass subjected to it (or, at any rate, the atrophying) 
of that essential part of the European soul—owner¬ 
ship. The Jew is, undoubtedly, unable to sym¬ 
pathize with us in that central core of our civic 
instincts. He has never understood the European 
sense of property and I doubt if he ever will. 

But in Russia Industrial Capitalism was quite 
new. The resentment against it was keen. The 


172 


THE JEWS 


victims were the sons of peasants, or had them¬ 
selves been bom peasants, so that this proletarian 
mass in the Russian towns, though less than a 
tenth of the whole nation, was peculiarly open to 
propaganda against its masters. And an attack 
successfully conducted, on that weakest point of 
modern Capitalism, might easily succeed and then 
spread to neighbouring industrialized centres in 
Poland, Germany, and so westward. 

Now the attack on this international phenomenon, 
an attack directed against Industrial Capitalism, 
required an international force. It needed men 
who had international experience and were ready 
with an international formula. 

There are two, and only two, organized inter¬ 
national forces in Europe to-day with a soul and 
identity in them. One is the Catholic Church, 
and the other is Jewry. But the Catholic Church, 
for reasons which I will discuss in a moment, 
cannot and never will directly attack industrial 
capitalism. It will undoubtedly attack that system 
in flank and indirectly destroy it in the long run 
wherever the Faith has a strong hold upon masses 
of people. But it will not and cannot directly 
attack it. The Jew, on the other hand, is free to 
attack it precisely because our sense of property 
means nothing to him, is to him something strange, 
and even, I think, comic. Further, the Jew was 
present, he was on the spot. The Church was not. 

Of the two international forces present, therefore, 
the Jews alone could act. 

Here I must digress and say why the other great 
international force, the Catholic Church, has not 
been able—and will never be able—to attack Indus¬ 
trial Capitalism as a whole and directly, though, 


?so 



BOLSHEVISM 


173 


as I have said, it acts indirectly as a solvent of 
this evil and will destroy it wherever society 
remains Catholic. The Catholic Church, not only 
in its abstract doctrine, but acting as the expres¬ 
sion of our European civilization, is profoundly 
attached to the conception of private property. 
It makes the family the unit of the State and it 
perceives that the freedom of the family is most 
secure where the family owns. It perceives, as 
do all Europeans, instinctively or explicitly, that 
property is the correlative of freedom, or, at any 
rate, of that only kind of freedom which we 
Europeans care to have: that it is the safeguard 
of spiritual health (the mark of which is humour), 
of breadth and diversity in action, of elasticity in 
the State, of permanence in institutions. Pro¬ 
perty, as widely distributed as possible, but sacred 
as a principle, is an inevitable social accompaniment 
of Catholicism. 

Apart from this, it is also a definite feature of 
Catholic doctrine to deny that private property 
is immoral. No Catholic can say that private 
property is immoral without cutting himself off 
from the Communion of the Church, any more 
than he can say that the authority in the State 
is immoral. He cannot be a communist in abstract 
morals any more than he can be an anarchist. 

Now Industrial Capitalism is a disease of pro¬ 
perty. It is the monstrous state of affairs in which 
a very few men derive their vast advantage from 
the corresponding fact that most men whom they 
exploit do not own. 

But it remains true that the sheet-anchor of 
Capitalism is a sense of ownership in the mass as 
well as in the privileged few. The only moral 


174 


THE JEWS 


force remaining to Industrial Capitalism, the only 
spiritual tie which prevents its dissolution, is this 
admission by the European mind that property is 
a right—even property in a diseased and exaggerated 
form. 

The whole of the operations of Industrial Capital¬ 
ism rely upon the sanctity of property and the 
sanctity of contract which develops from the 
sanctity of property. And whenever society loses 
this sense, industrial capitalism will fall into chaos. 
The Church cannot deny that one moral principle. 
Its action will always be towards the dissolution 
of the great accumulations promoted by capitalism. 
It always will work indirectly for the establish¬ 
ment of well-divided property, an ideal defined 
by the voice of its great modern Pope, Leo XIII, 
who explicitly states it in his Rerum Novarum. 
But the Church can never take the short cut of 
destroying Industrial Capitalism root and branch 
and at once, by erecting against it the doctrine of 
Communism or (as many people call diluted Com¬ 
munism) “ Socialism.” It never can do so in 
theory, and still less will it ever do so in practice. 
A Catholic society will always tend to be a society 
of owners: with all the elements of co-operation, 
with the Guild, 'with masses of corporate property 
attached to the State or connected with the city, 
with the college, with the corporation. For without 
such corporate property in a State, property is 
never well founded. 

The Jew has neither that political instinct in 
his national tradition nor a religious doctrine 
supporting and expressing such an instinct. The 
same thing in him which makes him a speculator 
and a nomad blinds him to, and makes him 



BOLSHEVISM 


175 


actually contemptuous of, the European sense of 
property. When therefore we have reached, through 
Industrial Capitalism, or any other social disease, 
a state of affairs in which the practical denial of 
property is possible because the mass of men have 
lost the desire for it, and when the repudiation of 
property offers an immediate solution for intolerable 
evils, then the Jew can appear at once as a leader. 

One must find in such a movement an inter¬ 
national leader because the disease is international, 
and still more because the proposed cure of that 
disease, through Communism, must be international 
if it is to succeed. A Communist society may 
stand apart from the general society of owners in 
other countries, but if it is to succeed in competition 
with them it must convert them to its own creed. 

The Jew took international action for granted. 
He took the narrow and false economic view of 
property—that it was a mere institution to be 
modified indefinitely, and, if necessary, abolished. 
He had an obvious opportunity for leadership 
accorded to him when international action against 
property was demanded. Again, our national 
sense, patriotism, which is incomprehensible to 
the Jew save on the false analogy of his own 
peculiar nomadic and tribal patriotism, is a check 
upon Communism, and, indeed, against revolution 
of any kind. The process of thought in the 
patriotic citizen—largely unconscious but none the 
less efficacious—is somewhat as follows: 

“ I cannot function save as a citizen of my 
nation, and, what is more, that nation made me 
what I am. It is my creator in a sense and so 
has authority over me. I must even give up my 
life in its defence if necessary, because but for its 


176 


THE JEWS 


existence I and those like me could not be. My 
happiness, my freedom of individual action, my 
self-expression are all bound up with the existence 
of the civic unit of which I am a part. If something 
which appears to me good in the abstract, or which 
apparently will procure for me a material good, 
involves danger to that civic unit, I must forego 
the good, regarding the continued existence and 
strength of my people as a greater good to which 
the lesser should be sacrificed.” 

That, I say roughly, is the expression of the 
patriotic instinct in the European man. That 
is what he has felt for many and many a great 
State in the past and for every polity to which he 
has ever belonged; that is what he feels to-day 
for his country. 

The Jew has the same feeling, of course, for his 
Israel, but since that nation is not a collection of 
human beings, inhabiting one place and living 
by traditions rooted in its soil, since it has not a 
strong, visible, external form, his patriotism is 
necessarily of a different complexion. It has 
different connotations and our patriotism seems 
negligible to him. 

The implied fallacies current in the modern 
industrial revolutionary formulae, in such phrases 
as “ What does it matter to the working man 
whether he is exploited by a German or an English 
master ? ” or, again, “ Why should the individual 
Tom Smith be sacrificed for an abstraction called 
England ? ” or again, “ Nationalism is the great 
obstacle to the full development of humanity”— 
all that sort of thing, which we feel by instinct and 
can, if it is necessary, prove by reason to be non¬ 
sense in our case, sounds, in Jewish ears, as very 



BOLSHEVISM 


177 


good sense indeed. For in his case these things 
involve no fallacies at all; they apply to him 
vividly and exactly. Why should the Jew be 
sacrificed for England ? In what way is England, 
or France, or Ireland, or any other nation necessary 
to him ? Again, is it not obvious in his eyes that 
these terms, “ France, Ireland, England, Russia,” 
are but abstractions ? The real thing in his eyes 
when he thinks of us, is the individual and his certain 
needs, especially his physical and material needs; 
because upon these there can be no doubt; upon 
these all are agreed; these are visible and tangible. 
“England,” “France,” “Poland” are whimsies. 

It is true that if you were to put his special case 
to the Jew with similar force and say, “No Jew 
should run any risk for Israel,” “no Jew should 
suffer any inconvenience by trying to help a fellow 
Jew in distress,” “ the idea of Israel is a vague 
abstraction—all that counts is the individual Jew 
and especially his physical requirements ” ; if you 
said that sort of thing you would be offending 
the most profound instincts of Jewish patriotism and 
you would, in fact, clash with the overt and covert 
action of the Jews throughout the world. But 
the Jew would answer that, as his was an inter¬ 
national polity, the argument applying to our 
national polity did not apply to him; that his 
feelings, though analogous to ours, were of a different 
kind, and that, at any rate, he cannot sacrifice a 
fine idea of his like Communism for our provincial 
and local habit, called by us Europeans “ the love 
of our country.” 

There is more than this in the business. 
Even those truths which we know to be truths 
have little effect upon us, unless they enter into 



178 


THE JEWS 


the practice of our lives. There are, no doubt, a 
number of Jews who would admit at once the 
truth of any nationalist statement made by a 
European. When a Frenchman, or an Englishman, 
or a Eussian says to him, “ My first duty is to my 
people; I must keep them strong as well as in 
being and I must sacrifice my interests to theirs 
when it is necessary,” there are many Jews who 
would answer: “ You are quite right. The theory 
is sound. Man can only function as a part of a 
particular society,” and so forth; but it is one thing 
to recognize a truth and another thing to experience 
it in one’s bones, as it were, and these truths, 
even where he is admitting them, are truths 
indifferent to the Jew. 

Therefore when, as in the particular case of 
Eussia, a national feeling stood in the way of an 
abstract ideal, it seemed the most natural thing 
in the world to the Jew that the national obstacle 
should go to the wall in order that his ideal of 
Communism might triumph. 

There lay behind this great change in the Eussian 
towns, and the capture of what remains of Eussian 
government by the Jewish Committees, a force 
most positive. It was the sense of social justice, 
the indignation against indefensible evils. 

That sense of social justice, that indignation 
against indefensible modern evils, we all feel. 
There may be men among the wealthier classes 
of Western Europe who are so ignorant of the past, 
or so stupid, that they do honestly believe Industrial 
Capitalism to be an inevitable and even perhaps 
a good thing. But such men must be very rare. 
Not only must they be rare, but they cannot have 
any wide social experience. A man has only got 



BOLSHEVISM 


179 


to live the life of the poor in the great industrial 
cities for a day to see the enormity of the wrong 
that has to be righted. There are, of course, not 
a few but many thousands of individuals who try 
to find arguments for Industrial Capitalism, either 
because they benefit themselves through the system 
and are the richer by it, or because they are the 
hired servants of those who so benefit—and of 
this kind are the writers in the capitalist press. 
But all these, who are hired advocates, or advocates 
with a direct proprietary interest in the continuance 
of the modern disease, may be neglected; for they 
are not in good faith. They are not really arguing 
that the thing is good in itself, they are only trying 
to find arguments as lawyers do for something 
which they have to defend and which in their 
hearts they admit is evil; or to the evil of which 
they are indifferent so long as it gives them a 
disproportionate share of material enjoyment. 

We must add to these the sincere man who will 
admit the domination of Industrial Capitalism 
because he honestly believes that, bad as it is, it 
is now become inevitable and that to tamper with 
it would bring the whole State into anarchy. 
“ Such as it is,” he would say, “ the structure of 
our society now depends upon it. We may palliate 
its evils, we may try very gradually to transform 
its worst features. But in its essence it must remain 
as it is, or our last state will be worse than our 
first.” 

Of this kind are those who argue that any social 
experiment antagonistic to Industrial Capitalism, 
if pushed sufficiently far, would result in famine 
and chaos and even physical evils far worse than 
the physical evils which the mass of men have to 



180 THE JEWS 

suffer in the great towns which capitalism has 
produced. 

Apart from these categories, the masses of men, I 
say, to-day are convinced that Industrial Capi¬ 
talism is an evil, an evil of the grossest sort; 
an evil of a sort unknown to the greater part of 
human history and unknown to-day in the greater 
part of the human race; an evil which those peas¬ 
ant societies, or societies of well-divided property 
throughout Europe, are happy to have escaped; 
and an evil from which we, who are caught in it, 
are trying to escape as best we may. 

In that modifying phrase “ as best we may ” lies 
the crux, for the great mass of Europeans feel 
that any attack on Industrial Capitalism which 
denies the nation its supreme place, or which 
impedes the superior task of keeping the nation 
strong and wealthy, is barred; they also feel 
instinctively that any attack which denies the 
general right of private property and the value of 
that institution to the healthy conduct of our 
affairs is also barred. The great mass of our race, 
when faced by the problem of Industrial Capitalism, 
feel that it has to be solved in some way that will 
neither destroy property nor the nation through 
which the individual alone can function. 

But this, which is true of the great mass of our 
race, is not true of the Jews. Therefore they were 
able, in the case of the Russian Revolution, to go 
straight for their object, and that object was (apart 
from the obvious object of revenge, of love of power, 
and the rest) the destruction of an economic 
inequality. 

These Jews who have destroyed what we knew 
as Russia were undoubtedly possessed of a political 



BOLSHEVISM 


181 


ideal: the ideal of Communism. No doubt many 
individuals among them (all ultimately) would 
prefer the good of Israel to the good of any Russian. 
No doubt the wreaking of vengeance upon former 
oppressors was strong, as also the appetite for 
destroying a general and a national sentiment 
alien to them and even repulsive to them; but 
there remains, as a positive motive behind the 
whole affair, the ideal of Communism. The Jews 
alone of the forces present were capable of heartily 
entertaining that ideal, and were free of all obstacles 
against the achievement of it—the obstacle of 
patriotism, the obstacle of religion, the obstacle 
of the sense of property. 

These considerations, I take it, are what explains 
the Jewish character of the upheaval in the East, 
with its destruction of the Russian nation, its 
enormous experiments in social economy, its inevit¬ 
able impoverishment of the State as a whole, its 
enthusiastic support by the minority which accepts 
its doctrine. 

Those very few men and women who have been 
witnesses of the Jewish experiment in Russia 
(excluding those engaged in propaganda upon one 
side or the other) give us a picture which is much 
what we should have expected of the situation. 

It seems that the great mass of the nation has 
affirmed the instinct of private property with the 
greatest vigour, and that some nine-tenths of the 
Russians have settled down upon the land to which 
they always claimed ownership and in which their 
sense of ownership is more fierce than ever. In the 
towns the unnatural system—unnatural because 
it opposes all our instincts as Europeans—works 
more and more slackly as the original system of 




t 


182 THE JEWS 

terror weakens. For it is clear that Communism 
needs a despot, and the active rule of a despot is 
necessarily short: it is a system incapable of 
transition and therefore of duration. 

The perfectly explicable but deplorable exercise 
of vengeance by the Jews has been directed against 
what we euphemistically term the governing 
directing classes, who have been massacred whole¬ 
sale and whose remnants are subjected to perpetual 
persecution. 

The productivity of the industrial masses has 
naturally sunk to a very low level, because under 
Communism it can only work through something 
like military discipline, and work done under 
those conditions is on a much lower productive 
level than free work. 

But the real interest in the. Jewish revolution in 
Russia, to which is now permanently affixed the 
name of Bolshevist (which is nothing more than 
the Russian for “whole-hogger”), lies in these 
two points: first, the continued propaganda of 
Communism throughout the world (which propa¬ 
ganda in organization and direction is in the hands 
of Jewish agents); secondly, and much more impor¬ 
tant, the effect of the Jewish revolution in producing 
hostility to the Jews throughout the world. 

I say this second fact is much more important 
because it is the more real and the more enduring. 
You will never make a Communist of the highly- 
civilized, tenacious, intelligent and humorous Occi¬ 
dental European. You will no more make a Com¬ 
munist of him than you will make him walk on all 
fours or permanently abjure the use of good liquor. 
You may get middle-class faddists to accept Com¬ 
munism as a mere creed, and of course you can easily 


soft 



BOLSHEVISM 


183 


get exasperated men, ground down by capitalism, 
to accept any theory, any system, which promises 
them relief. But you will not get Communism 
working in men who boast the old European blood, 
in the descendants of those who created our past 
and its monuments. They will certainly preserve 
their traditions and their character. Though the 
peril must be combated, and is being successfully 
combated everywhere, it is not a peril of great 
magnitude to the West. 

The other effect of the Jewish revolution in 
Russia—the peril into which it has put the Jews 
themselves —is permanent and is of the first magni¬ 
tude. I know no way to meet it except to explain 
why that revolution was almost necessarily a Jewish 
revolution, to emphasize the sincerity of the Jews 
who have led it, to exculpate them as far as possible, 
and, at any rate, to shield their unfortunate com¬ 
patriots abroad from the consequences of what 
was certainly a very bad piece of tactics so far as 
the future of this people was concerned. 

We ought, I think, not to nourish a new and 
special hostility against the Jew on account of 
what he has done in Russia, but, on the contrary, 
to excuse him, especially because he is a Jew. 
We ought, as it seems to me, to say: “ He had 
reasons for action and excuse for action which men 
of our race would not have had, and though we 
must prevent that action from spreading, we must 
not allow what seemed quite natural under the 
circumstances to the Jew to warp our attempted 
solution of the Jewish problem. We ought to 
work for its solution as impartially and as soberly as 
though the provocation of Bolshevism had never 
been given,” 


184 


THE JEWS 


That sounds an extreme thing to say, and I fear 
it will be ridiculed by most of those who (as they 
tell us) have had their eyes opened by the Bolshevist 
explosion and who are now confirmed enemies of 
the Jewish people. But though it sound fantastic, 
I am convinced that it is a right attitude. To 
lose one’s judgment on a permanent problem 
through panic or heat, to forget the elements of 
such a problem merely because it has been presented 
to us suddenly in an acute form, is the negation 
of reason. As well might a man who is dealing 
with the problem of fermented liquor, and trying 
to get people to use it rationally, let his judgment 
be overcome by a case of delirium tremens and rush 
thereupon into some scheme of prohibition. The 
very test which distinguishes good statesmanship 
from bad is the power to keep one’s head under 
provocations like these; to maintain a middle 
course and to aim at whatever solution our reason 
tells us to be just under normal circumstances. 
We who saw the gravity of the Jewish problem 
long before the recognition of it was general, and 
who studied it under calmer conditions for many 
years, have a right to be heard now: now that the 
tide is making against these people and that the 
fear of anarchy threatens to turn men’s heads. 

We were long blamed for attacking the Jews, 
we are already blamed for defending them. It 
is a proof that our attitude is well grounded and 
unaffected by fashion. 

The Bolshevist revolution will not last. Its 
Jewish character was inevitable. It had a side to it 
of Jewish enthusiasm for a sort of incorporeal 
justice, and, in any case, it ought not to be allowed 
to deflect us from a conclusion which the much 



BOLSHEVISM 185 

larger lines of history and all general considerations 
of reason impose. 

Our conclusion, as I have said, is a recognition 
and protection of the Jewish nation as something 
quite different from ourselves and yet necessarily 
inhabiting our society. Such a full recognition 
leaves us fore-armed against the tendency in the 
Jew (which we cannot avoid) to forget our national 
feelings and to misconceive our sense of ownership. 
It would render impossible the conspiracies and 
the vengeance which have destroyed Russia, and 
I believe that had the former Russian Government 
treated the Jews as I say they should be treated, 
it would be in power to-day. 



THE POSITION IN THE WORLD 
AS A WHOLE 



CHAPTER IX 

THE POSITION IN THE WORLD AS A 
WHOLE 

The danger of the Jewish nation in the world 
to-day may be summed up in this phrase:— 

“ The Jews are obtaining control and we will 
not be controlled by them.” 

That is the simplest formula, and the one which 
would be immediately subscribed to by the whole 
mass of those outside the Jewish community who 
are alive to the question at all. Being the simplest 
form of the truth, it needs, when applied to a highly 
complex situation, detailed modification. 

This modification proceeds from three sources:— 

First, the extent of the Jewish control and the 
extent of the resentment against that control vary 
very largely from one community to another. 

Secondly, the civic tradition of each community 
in its treatment of the Jewish question also differs 
from that of every other, though these various 
traditions fall into certain fairly well-defined groups. 

Thirdly, the position is modified according to 
the presence, in varying degrees of strength in 
different communities, of certain international 
forces even more powerful than the Jews themselves. 
The four principal of the international forces are:— 

189 


190 


THE JEWS 


(1) The Catholic Church; 

(2) Islam; 

(3) The forces of international Capitalism; and 

(4) The international reaction against it of the 
industrial proletariat. 

We must in the first line of this inquiry make an 
important premise. The fact from which we 
proceed, namely, the uneasy feeling that the Jews 
are getting control and the determination not to 
tolerate that control, will be denied by the Jews 
themselves. It is denied sincerely—I have entered 
upon too many discussions with them and heard 
too many of their protestations to doubt that; 
and if the denial were valid, not only the particular 
survey I propose in this chapter, but the whole 
of the argument of this book, would fail. For if 
there is a Jewish question to-day, and if it is present 
in the acute form in which we all know it to be 
present, it is not due merely to the contrast and 
friction between the Jews and their hosts, but 
especially to this feeling of domination. 

But the Jewish belief in this matter is not valid, 
sincerely as it is held. To the great majority of 
Jews it will, of course, seem common-sense. What 
has the unfortunate poor Jew in the slums of our 
great cities to do with controlling the modern 
world ? How in his eyes can the phrase have any 
meaning at all? If you pass from him to the 
comparatively small Jewish middle class, you would 
hear a denial almost equally vigorous. The Jewish 
scientist will tell you that he is concerned with his 
researches and laughs at the idea of interfering 
with his neighbours; the Jewish historian that 
he is concerned with his documents, that nothing 
is further from his thoughts than interfering with 



POSITION IN WORLD AS A WHOLE 191 


people outside his trade; the little Jewish shop¬ 
keeper will tell you that he is in active competition 
with his non-Jewish neighbours and by no means 
always successful in that competition; the Jewish 
lawyer will tell you that he is concerned with the 
system of law in which he happens to be immersed 
—the Napoleonic Code, the English Common Law 
or what not—and that any idea of his personally 
wanting to control the vast non-Jewish majority 
among whom he lives is moonshine: and so it is. 

The great Jewish banker, though he is fully 
aware of his power, would tell you that in his 
daily business he comes up against forces to which 
he is subject, and has competitors who are at the 
best neutral, and more commonly hostile, to Israel; 
and even the man who is to-day more powerful— 
if that be possible—than the Jewish banker, I 
mean the Jewish monopolist, and especially the 
Jewish monopolist in metal, though he would be 
extremely annoyed to have the extent of his control 
exposed, will feel that it is due to his superior 
abilities and in no way designed for mastery. 

All these individual replies are true; but if you 
make of them a composite and general reply, if you 
put it as a reply of all Israel to all the world outside, 
crying, “ I have no desire for supremacy; I never 
act in such a fashion that my domination can be 
felt or shall increase; the motive is not present, 
even subconsciously, among my people ”—then that 
general reply would be false. 

In point of fact the Jew has collectively a power 
to-day, in the white world, altogether excessive. 
It is not only an excessive power, it is inevitably 
a corporate power and, therefore, a semi-organized 
power. It is not only excessive and in the main 



192 


THE JEWS 


organized, it was, until the recent reaction began, 
a rapidly increasing power—and most people 
believe it to be still increasing. To that the whole 
world outside the Jewish community will testily. 

The criterion by which we may judge whether 
any form of power is irritant to those whom it 
affects is not the testimony of those who exercise 
the power, but the testimony of those over whom 
it is exercised. There never was a tyranny in the 
world, not even one of those personal tyrannies 
(which have been so much more highly organized 
and so much more direct than this power of the 
Jews), there never has been a despotism in history, 
which would not tell you that it was accidental, or 
necessary, or, in any case, innocent of any motive of 
oppression. And history universally replies: “To 
judge that, you must ask those who felt the pressure; 
not those who exercised it.” 

Now those who feel the pressure in the matter 
we are now examining are unanimous. They differ 
in the degree of their resentment from those to 
whom the thing is so intolerable that they are 
already in active revolt against it, to those who 
feel it merely as a distant though an approaching 
discomfort. But everybody feels it in some degree. 
It is a universal sensation running throughout the 
nerves of the modern world and it is growing too 
fast in degree and extent to be ignored. 

I have already quoted the effect upon those 
hundreds of educated men taken into the temporary 
Civil service during the late war, when they found, 
holding the locked gate of one monopoly after 
another, the international Jew. His control of 
finance needs no discussion. If the individual 
banker or financier is not aware of it, the most of 


POSITION IN WORLD AS A WHOLE 193 


those who are aflected are acutely aware of it. 
Men exaggerate in giving it a sort of conscious 
personality, but they certainly do not exaggerate 
when they point to its effects. The Jew must 
remember, what it may be difficult for him to accept 
and what is certainly true, that not only is his domi¬ 
nation very bitterly resented but that his presence 
in any position of control whatsoever is odious to 
the race among which he moves. Everybody feels 
that about any form of alien control, much more 
do they feel it about that form which they instinc¬ 
tively know to be most alien of all. Every one 
has noticed this control exercised in the form of 
keeping silence upon what it was to the disadvan¬ 
tage of Israel to have known; in the form of the 
advertising of what it was to the advantage of Israel 
to have advertised; in the form of the giving and 
withholding of credit; in the form of attack in 
the Press against nations with whom Israel had a 
quarrel and the defence in the Press of those (they 
have now almost disappeared) upon whom Israel, 
in the immediate past, relied for defence. And 
everybody has discovered—what is not unjust, 
indeed, what is inevitable, but what is none the 
less a source of exasperation—the solidarity of the 
Jewish race where the interests of any member of 
it were concerned. 1 

But if the thing were felt everywhere as acutely 
and as consciously as it is felt in special groups 
to-day—as it is felt, for instance, in one particular 
section of English opinion already represented in the 

1 Except, of course, an outlawed member. The case of 
Dr. Levy turned out of this country by his compatriots in 
the Government for having written unfavourably of the Moscow 
Jews will be fresh in every one’s memory. 


o 


194 


THE JEWS 


Press, is felt in a wider section of French opinion, 
and in a still wider section of Polish opinion—then 
the matter would be simple. We could then say 
that an issue of the clearest kind had arisen, and 
forbid a small alien minority to decide the destinies 
of those among whom it lives and of whom it is 
not. The answer would be obvious, and the only 
difficulty would be how the Jewish control might 
be lessened without grievous injustice to innocent 
individuals. 

But the thing is not so felt. It is modified, as 
I have said, by the varying degrees of intensity 
in which it is recognized and by the other inter¬ 
national forces which come into play. 

If we consider the varying political traditions 
and the varying international forces, if we examine 
the world’s national groups, we shall find something 
like this: In the vast body of Russia a position 
most paradoxical. For years the Jew was every¬ 
where openly attacked and hated in those parts 
of the Russian Empire where he was allowed to 
live in large numbers. These were nowhere within 
Russia proper but upon the western outskirts of 
that empire, within what was once the old Polish 
kingdom and largely within what is now the restored 
Republic of Poland. But the Russian traditional 
antagonism to the Jew changed in a few weeks of 
chaos to something not opposite but novel and 
different. The Russian allowed a prodigious revolu¬ 
tion to be made by the Jews, he accepted the loot 
of that revolution which the Jew secured to him; 
he has submitted wholly in the towns, partly in 
the country, to a tyranny exercised by Jews ever 
since that complete reversal of his national history, 
now four years old. 



POSITION IN WORLD AS A WHOLE 195 


The external political power of what was once 
the Russian Empire has disappeared. The Jews 
have killed it. But the great mass of Russian 
humanity remains strongly affected by this curious 
change. Where popular instinct works untram¬ 
melled the old and violent passionate antagonism 
between the Russian and the Jew survives. You 
see it in the hotch potch of the Ukraine, the 
inhabitants of which, in spite of all theories, are of 
Russian race and tradition, and the central town 
of which is the sacred region of Russia as a member 
of Christendom. There, for all the Jewish Com¬ 
mittees with large towns under their complete 
control, there have been repeated revolts. But 
in the greater part of European Russia at least, 
and in much of what was once the Asiatic Empire, 
the Jews hold what is left of the Executive 
government. 

So far as we can judge from the very imperfect 
accounts which reach us (for nowhere is the weapon 
of secrecy more ruthlessly used), the mass of the 
Russians, that is, the peasantry, are in two minds. 
To the action of the Jewish despotism in the town 
they are indifferent, but to his early attempts 
against themselves they were bitterly opposed. 
They have suffered at his hands and they thought 
him a tyrant. But the Jew seems to have dropped 
this interference and the Russian soil to have settled 
down as a peasant proprietary. On the other 
hand, it was a revolution guided by those same 
Jewish Committees which secured the peasant in 
the possession of his land. The Russian peasant 
has always regarded the land as his own. He 
had, I understand, regarded that odd, pedantic 
measure, “ The Liberation of the Serfs,” as only 



196 


THE JEWS 


another name for the robbing him of his land; 
and when the organization of Russian society dis¬ 
solved in the strain of war, he poured over the great 
estates and took back what he thought was his 
own. 

For the strange Jewish conception of Commun¬ 
ism, a million miles removed from our European 
racial instincts and our high civilized traditions, the 
Russian peasant could have nothing but a bewil¬ 
dered contempt. None the less he was conscious 
that the Jewish revolution had permitted him, if 
not to take the land (he did that himself), at least 
to hold it; and the revolution is indistinguishable 
from the Jewish control of the towns. 

Within the towns, again (our information is 
most imperfect and I can only piece together what 
eye-witnesses have told me), although the Jew is, 
of course, individually hated, yet his control does 
stand for certain things which the mass of the 
people still support. He organized the resentment 
of the poor against the rich. He erected before 
their eyes the pleasing spectacle of a social revenge. 
He carried out, fairly consistently, his Communist 
programme, one aspect at least of which is practical 
enough; for the man that works with his hands 
finds that he is as well, or better, fed out of the 
meagre common stock, than those who were once 
his masters. 

In general I think it true to say that the Jewish 
control over Christians, if, in a way, stronger in 
what was once the Russian Empire than anywhere 
else, is also there least resented. I do not say 
it would not be resented if it were to excite action 
again against the peasants, but we cannot forget 
that the peasants were eager to fight for the new 



POSITION IN WORLD AS A WHOLE 197 


Russian regime because they identified it with 
their new property in land. The situation is absurd 
enough. Men in hundreds of thousands willing to 
fight for Communist masters because by so doing 
they believe they can secure themselves in an 
absolute form of property! But that is what the 
“ red” army was. 

In that belt of nations, vague in boundary, 
which used to constitute the Marches of the East 
and which now stand between what was once the 
Russian Empire and the Germanies, the position 
would seem to be this. 

There are in these countries everywhere a very 
large proportion of Jews. The largest by far are in 
Lithuania and Galicia, where, of whole towns, from 
a third to a half and sometimes up to two-thirds, 
of the population are Jewish. Very large also 
is the proportion within the admitted frontiers of 
modern Poland; very large in Roumania, and 
considerable in Hungary. 

In all these countries the Jewish problem is 
something quite different from what it is farther 
West. The Jews are in these countries admittedly 
a separate nation. Even as I write I hear the 
complaint, sounding strange in our Western ears, 
proffered by the Polish Jews who have been appeal¬ 
ing to the West against what they claim to be the 
oppressive practice of writing them down as Poles ! 
In Roumania for two generations it has been the 
fixed principle of the State, now latent, now overt, 
but always acted upon in social practice, that the 
Jew is not a Roumanian at all and cannot be one. 
Of course he cannot be one really, any more than 
he can be an Englishman, or a Frenchman, or an 
Irishman. (Fancy a Jew an Irishman!) But I 



198 


THE JEWS 


mean, not even one by fiction or by convention. 
In Poland the greater part of these people have a 
different language and all of them have a different 
social custom and a different life from the world 
around them. In Hungary, where the numerical 
pressure of the Jew is less, there is, of course, a 
most lively memory of the attempted revolution 
under Cohen in 1918, the massacres of Hungarians, 
the setting up of an ephemeral Bolshevism and the 
necessity of its suppression. In Bohemia the 
pressure is far less and in the Balkan States south of 
the Danube and the Drave. It is only present as 
a pressure of numbers in the group of States which 
lie between the Baltic and the Black Sea South 
and North and between the Russian people and the 
German people East and West. 

When we come to Occidental Europe, in which 
must be included, though it is hardly a true part 
of it, Germany beyond the Elbe; when we come 
to the Scandinavian countries, to France, Britain, 
Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the Low Countries, 
the problem changes. The numerical proportion 
of Jews sinks enormously. Fairly large in one or 
two Dutch towns, it is almost insignificant in 
Scandinavia, and though we have had into the 
great English towns and to some extent into the 
northern French towns (particularly Paris) a 
considerable recent influx of Jews, yet the total 
number of these people in the West remains far, 
far smaller than the great masses of the East of 
Europe. The same is still more true of Italy, and, 
in spite of the absorption of a great deal of Jewish 
blood in the past, of Spain. 

But while the numerical proportion of Jews in 
these western countries is much smaller, and while 



POSITION IN WORLD AS A WHOLE 199 


therefore the peril of Jewish domination is very 
different in form from what it is farther East, it is 
clearly marked. It is exercised primarily through 
finance; next through the sceptical Universities, 
the anonymous Press and the corrupt Parliaments, 
and, lastly, in a more general form, by the presence 
of institutions which greatly favour the rise of the 
Jew in competition with his hosts; each favours 
international knowledge; each favours anonymity; 
each still favours the old Liberal nonsense which 
called itself “ toleration ” and was really an indiffer¬ 
ence to that most fundamental of all social motives 
—religion—save, of course, where an exception 
is made to permit attack upon the Catholic 
Church. 

Under influence of this sort, both sincere and 
hypocritical, both generous and mean, the Jew 
acquired in all the larger communities, and especially 
in France, Italy, Germany and England, a power 
out of all proportion to his numbers, and I may add, 
without, I hope, offending any Jewish reader, out 
of proportion to his abilities; certainly out of 
proportion to any right of his to interfere in 
our affairs. It was a Jew who produced the 
divorce laws in France, the Jew who nourished 
anti-clericalism everywhere in that country and 
also in Italy; the Jew who called in the forces of 
Occidental nations to protect his compatriots in 
the East, and the Jew whose spirit has so largely 
permeated the Universities and the Press. 

Ireland is an exception. In Ireland the Jew 
(outside the little industrial corner in the north- east) 
is nobody. And here it must be remarked that 
the migrations of the Jew which give him numbers 
here for a time and afterwards numbers elsewhere, 



200 


THE JEWS 


in places where previously he had not been known; 
which give him influence here for a time, and sees 
it followed by the decline of that influence, do not 
seem to obey any law which we can trace, and 
are certainly not the product of any conscious 
action. It is one of the strangest phenomena in 
history, this odd, spasmodic flood movement of 
the Jewish race. Is it concerned with commerce ? 
That is one element undoubtedly; that is what 
explains the exploitation of England by Jews after 
the Conquest, of Spain in the later Middle Ages, 
of the Valley of the Rhine; but then, why not other 
commercial centres as an attraction ? Venice was 
not one, though the Jew was well tolerated there; 
nor was Paris after the early Middle Ages, and while 
some of the Dutch towns formed such centres of 
attraction the Belgian towns did not. 

Was it asylum ? That would account, of course, 
for the great influx of Jews into mediaeval Poland, 
but then why not into eighteenth century England ? 
Why not until very late in the nineteenth century ? 
England, which gave the Jews a more complete 
civic position than he could find anywhere else 
in the world, was not invaded by them. Why these 
very recent influxes into the United States, which 
has for now a century and a half been perfectly 
open by its Constitution, and was by all its civic 
tradition an ideal asylum for the Jews ? Until 
quite recent times the Jew was hardly known 
there, and to this day he is not known outside a 
few great cities. 

No. There would seem to be no law, or at least 
no discoverable law, for this mysterious movement, 
the ebb and flow of Israel—but that is a digres¬ 
sion. To return to the national situations. 



POSITION IN WORLD AS A WHOLE 201 


If we leave the Old World and turn to the United 
States, we find a novel condition of affairs still in 
process of development and very puzzling to the 
foreign observer. I do not pretend to analyse it 
completely in a few lines, nor even accurately, 
for I am dependent upon the observation of others, 
and the United States are so utterly different from 
us that we have difficulty in following their con¬ 
temporary history; but something of this sort 
would seem to be passing there. 

In the United States the Jews were present, till 
the last few years, in numbers even smaller in 
proportion to the population than their numbers 
in France, England and Italy, far smaller than their 
numbers in what was formerly the German Empire. 
In the agricultural part of America, which is still, 
I believe, one half of the population, the Jew was 
almost unknown. You find him here and there, 
as a lawyer or a storekeeper, but that world was 
not familiar with him any more than our English 
country-sides are familiar with him to-day. With 
the growth of the great industrial towns, of course, 
the Jew came, but he was still no “ feature in the 
landscape.” There was a certain social prejudice 
against him among the wealthier classes in the 
East, and—this is very important —the truth was 
always told about him. There was in America no 
convention—the Jew was always recognized as a 
Jew and there -was never any of the nonsense we 
had over here of pretending that he was something 
else. 

Of that phenomenon of which the history of 
Europe is full, which is so marked in the eastern 


202 


THE JEWS 


counties to-day and which is beginning to rise in 
the West, there is nothing traceable in the early 
and middle nineteenth century, nor even till the 
close of it, in the United States. 

Then came the change. It is a change which 
has taken place in the lifetime of men much younger 
than myself. It is a change, I am told, most marked 
since I last visited the United States more than 
twenty years ago. A regular and organized Jewish 
emigration began to pour in, especially from the 
Baltic. It flooded New York, where it now forms 
probably a third of the population; it created 
Ghettoes in most of the large Northern industrial 
towns, and all the phenomena we associate in 
Europe with these movements began to show them¬ 
selves. There was the growth of the financial 
monopoly and of monopolies in particular trades. 
There was the clamour for toleration in the form 
of “ neutralizing ” religious teaching in schools; 
there was the appearance of the Jewish revolution¬ 
ary and of the Jewish critic in every tradition of 
Christian life. The Jews went also—as they usually 
do—to the heart of things, and the Executive was 
attacked. The last and apparently the most 
unpopular of the presidents, Mr. Wilson, seems to 
have been wholly in their hands. Anonymity in the 
Press came, of course. A very marked example of 
it is a journal called The New Republic, which, 
though it has but a small proportion of Jewish 
writers upon it, and though its capital is (I believe) 
not Jewish, is yet to all intents and purposes the 
organ of the Jewish intellectuals, always joins in 
the boycott of any news unfavourable to European 
Jews, always joins in the clamour for anything 
favourable to them, and in general adheres to the 



POSITION IN WORLD AS A WHOLE 203 


Jewish side, like the Humanite in Paris, or, let us 
say, The New Statesman in England. 

But the novel presence in the United States of 
this phenomenon with which in the west of Europe 
we have now been familiar for a long time, provides 
a more direct and a very different kind of reaction 
from what it has among us. This reaction against 
Jewish powers was not (to use a Stock Exchange 
metaphor) “ sticky.” There was no hesitation; 
there were no uneasy patches of silence. The 
Jewish question was discussed from the moment 
it was first felt and to-day it is discussed beyond 
all others. Of political topics I have found it the 
first in the conversation of the • Americans who 
have visited Europe since the War and with whom 
I have discussed the affairs of their country. It 
ranges, as that reaction always does, from the wildest 
Anti-Semitism to strong and open defence of 
the Jewish position, not only by Jews but by the 
very small minority of their admirers outside the 
Jewish community, especially among the wealthy. 
The characteristic of the whole thing in the United 
States is that it is only j ust beginning. It is capable 
of becoming one of those sudden growths of which 
the past history of the Republic has made us 
familiar, and indeed it is too early yet to judge, even 
on the largest lines, what forms it may not take. 
It is enough to say that there is behind the reaction 
against the Jew in that country a growing intensity 
of feeling with which we, as yet, in Western Europe, 
for all the advance we have made in the matter, 
are unfamiliar. If a test be required, contrast 
the silence about the Jews in ’96, during Bryan’s 
great attack upon the gold standard, with the work 
of Mr. Ford and all that he stands for to-day! 



204 


THE JEWS 


The rest of the world is either of Islam or heathen. 
In the heathen world, so far, the Jew has little 
place. He has a strong grip on India, of course, 
but only through the British Raj, not through the 
native population; and in China, except as a 
quasi-European merchant, he has no power at all; 
neither has he over the strong and organized 
nationality of Japan. 

Such are the degrees, very roughly, of the 
problem; such the differences of its quality in the 
various national groups to-day. Of these the two 
most interesting states of the problem by far, be¬ 
cause they are changing with the greatest rapidity, 
are found in France, in England and in the United 
States. 

I have said that the second modifying condition 
was the difference of civic traditions of the various 
nations. Here again you have a differentiation 
from East to West. But within it a differentiation, 
ultimately due to religion, from North to South. 
In Russia there was never any tradition of keeping 
silence upon the Jew, or of respecting the Jew 
at all. He was, until the recent revolution, 
the national enemy, and there was the end of it. 
Similarly in Poland, Roumania and the vaguer 
populations of their borders, and even in the old 
Hungary, the Jew was talked of openly as belonging 
to a separate nationality and, on the whole, a 
hostile one. 

But as one got west another spirit emerged, 
another tradition. It was “ the thing” to treat 
the Jew as a citizen. This fashion was weaker in 
the Germanies than in the Low Countries, France, 
or England; it was everywhere present west of the 
Elbe. 


POSITION IN WORLD AS A WHOLE 205 


It was a tradition flowing from two sources: 
the commercial and protestant England of the 
seventeenth century, the sceptical France of the 
eighteenth. The Jew (according to this spirit) 
merited special protection and special respect. He 
must be protected and respected even in his passion 
for secrecy; so that at last the mere mention of 
his existence in the cultivated and directing classes 
of the west became something of an oddity. 

From this spirit proceeded the Liberal fiction or 
convention which I dealt with in the second chapter 
of this book. It was clinched, it was given per¬ 
manent form, by the enthusiasm and severe doc¬ 
trine of the French Republicans, which arose at a 
moment when Israel was regarded as a religion 
and its national quality was forgotten. Since all 
religion was thought to be dying, since, further, an 
enthusiasm had arisen against almost any religion 
which exercised civic power (notably the Catholic 
Church), this Jewish religion, formerly regarded as 
inimical to the State, or at any rate separate from 
it, was naturally accorded a special privilege. That 
strange system arose, the death of which we are 
now watching after its brief life of somewhat more 
than a century, whereby the Jew was permitted 
to wear the mask of nationalities other than his 
own, and to function everywhere as though he were 
a citizen, not of Israel, but of the nation in which 
he chanced to find himself. 

Against this attitude arose at last the powerful 
plea of nationalism. In England, as we shall see 
in the next chapter, this plea was less strong than 
elsewhere, because the interests of international 
Jewish finance and of British commerce were for 
so long nearly identical. In Italy, where the Jew 


206 


THE JEWS 


was naturally closely connected with the nationalist 
movement on account of its antagonism to the 
Papacy, national feeling clashed little with the 
anomaly of the Jew. But in France, especially 
after the[def eat of 1870, the contrast became stronger 
and stronger, just as it is strengthening to-day in 
Germany after the defeat of 1918. 

It was that clash between the “ city” of Israel 
and the other “ cities ” in which we Europeans 
function, to which allusion has been made on a 
former page. It would be very convenient, no 
doubt, to the “ City ” of Israel if all other “ cities ” 
disappeared and left an open field for Jewish 
operations. But they do not propose to disappear; 
and though our devotion to them may seem inexplic¬ 
able to the Jew, he must accept it as a permanent 
force; for the patriotism of the European will not 
weaken. 

In the United States this Liberal tradition or 
convention, this conception that the Jew must be 
treated as a full citizen, was far stronger even than 
it was in the West of Europe. It was in the very 
soul of the Constitution, and, what is more impor¬ 
tant, in the very soul of the people. For such a 
spirit was nourished not only in doctrine but in 
practice by the appearance, in vast quantities, of 
immigrants from many different countries, all of 
whom were absorbed in and merged by the Ameri¬ 
can spirit. If ever there was a field in which the 
false conception that a Jew could be a Jew and 
at the same time the full citizen of another nation, 
that field was the United States of America. Yet 
it is there that the problem is now reaching its 
most acute form; and the reason is that side by 
side with this strong civic tradition there goes a 


POSITION IN WORLD AS A WHOLE 207 


complete freedom of speech and a very active 
public opinion. The reality became too much for 
theory and the Jew was recognized as something 
apart. He will never fall into the background 
again. 

There remain to be considered the international 
forces which modify this general truth that the 
quarrel with the Jew is a quarrel with his increasing 
control over our affairs. 

Those international forces are Religion—Islam 
and the Catholic Church—the force of Modern 
Capitalism, and the Reaction against that force of 
the Industrial Proletariat, the Reaction summed up 
in the term Socialism. All four are international. 

The position of the Jew in Islam can be simply 
defined. In Islam he is treated with less method 
and therefore with less continued oppression than 
in Christendom, but always and permanently as 
something base and inferior, save in a few rare 
moments when he has the favour of particular 
rulers or is necessary to some special society, or 
is admired in a moment of intellectual brilliance. 

Normally the Jew in Islam is an outcast. I 
know very well that the game is played of pretend¬ 
ing that Islam is in some way kinder to him than 
we are. It is but a game: the playing of one party 
against another—of Islam against Christendom— 
by Israel, which is of neither. In Islam his superior 
position in Christendom is equally famed. History 
is too strong for such pretences. All the history of 
Islam, all the social spirit of Islam, to which there 
are countless witnesses to-day, give the same verdict 
about the general treatment of the Jew in that 
society. 

So it was in independent Islam. But Islam, 



208 


THE JEWS 


politically controlled to-day by the Western Chris¬ 
tian powers, is another matter. Under that un¬ 
stable state of affairs (no one can say how long it 
will last; the conflict between Islam and Christen¬ 
dom seems eternal and the rise and fall of that tide 
is indefinitely successive) the problem takes on 
quite another shape. France and England appear 
in Islam as the artificial supporters of the Jew. 

Until quite lately it was the French who bore 
the worst odium of this in the eyes of the Moham¬ 
medans. Under the French the Jews in North 
Africa were often given a special, a superior position, 
which was an insult to every Mohammedan and 
which is still an insult to him. It is the weakest 
point of the French regime. In Algeria the Ghetto 
Jew may vote. The Arab may not. Even in 
Morocco, where things have been done more wisely 
than in Algiers, the difficulty is felt. How are 
you to treat a Jew differently in Morocco from the 
way in which he is treated in France? He is 
common to the two countries. If you treat him as 
if he were French, and therefore a member of the 
governing power, what of the pride of those lords 
of the Atlas and of Fez ? . 

In the vastly larger field of Mohammedan control 
exercised by Britain, which, directly and indirectly, 
is ten times that of France, there was until lately less 
of this friction; but the tables have been turned, 
and to-day it is Britain which stands to the Moham¬ 
medan as the thruster-in of the Jew. It began 
with the support of Jewish finance in Egypt; it 
went on with the extended control over Indian 
commerce by Jews; it continued in the control 
of Indian currency by Jews. It has ended in the 
grotesque appointment to the Indian Viceroyalty 



POSITION IN WORLD AS A WHOLE 209 

and the extraordinary experiment of Palestine. 

To-day, at the moment in which I write, there 
is no doubt on the matter whatsoever: From Rabat 
on the Atlantic to the Bay of Bengal, the Western 
Powers are regarded as the agents of a Jewish 
intrusion which is intolerable to Islam. And 
whereas the chief blame lay, until quite a few 
years ago, upon the French, to-day it lies upon 

the British Government. 

* * * * * 

The role of the Catholic Church in the debate 
between the Jews and Christendom is the most 
discussed, the worst understood, of any point 
connected with the general problem. But it is 
capable of simple definition. Wherever the Catho¬ 
lic Church is powerful, and in proportion as it is 
powerful, the traditional principles of the civiliza¬ 
tion of which it is the soul and guardian will always 
be upheld. One of these principles is the sharp 
distinction between the Jew and ourselves. The 
Rationalist would say that this distinction was 
racial, and that it only found religious expression 
on account of its racial reality. His opponent 
would say that the origin of the quarrel was mainly 
religious; that it was a difference in religious tradi¬ 
tion which formed the contrast between the Jew 
and Christendom. The former can cite as evidence 
the violent original contrast between the Roman 
Empire and the Jew, the latter the truth that 
religion, philosophy, is the formative force in 
every human society. 

But whichever theory you adopt, the fact is there. 
The Catholic Church is the conservator of an age¬ 
long European tradition, and that tradition will 
never compromise with the fiction that a Jew can 



210 


THE JEWS 


be other than a Jew. Wherever the Catholic 
Church has power, and in proportion to its power, 
the Jewish problem will be recognized to the full. 

On the other hand, there never has been and 
never will be, or can be, admission by Catholic 
morals of warfare against the Jew. Those morals 
are plain. That doctrine has been defined over and 
over again and acted upon throughout history. If 
indirect hostilities are opened against the majority 
by a minority in its midst, they may be repressed 
and punished. Still more important, insincere and 
pretended conversion, used as a cloak, may be 
repressed and punished. But though a com¬ 
munity has the right to determine its own life, 
and (if it think it possible) even to eliminate (with 
justice, not with cruelty, violence or injustice in 
any form) an alien, a hostile minority; yet that 
minority has its own right to live, if not there, 
then elsewhere. It has its right—once it is rooted 
and traditional—to its own convictions, to its 
own tradition. If you allow it to live among you, 
you must allow it to live its own life save where 
that life threatens yours. The Catholic Church will 
always maintain reality, including the reality of that 
sharp distinction between the Jew and his hosts. 

The opponent of the Catholic Church will tend, 
other things being equal, to support the Jew, 
because, under that distinction, the Jew may find 
himself ill at ease. The whole Protestant tradition 
of the North was for more than 300 years favour¬ 
able to the Jew, partly indeed on account of its 
reliance upon the Jewish Scriptures, its absorption 
in the inspired Jewish folk-lore, but more because 
the alliance with the Jew was an alliance against the 
Catholic Church. Strong traces of that spirit still 



POSITION IN WOELD AS A WHOLE 211 


remain. What has warred against it has been the 
sheer necessity in every country, Catholic or 
Protestant, Liberal or anti-Liberal, to preserve 
society against what each began to feel as a disrup¬ 
tive and an alien domination. 

There remain the two novel forces—Modern 
Capitalism, and, protesting against it, its victim, 
the Modern Industrial Proletariat. 

A few years ago anyone would have said that 
the opposition to the Jew was an opposition to 
capitalism alone; the Jew was the representative 
of capitalism, and Jewish finance was the particular 
aspect of Jewish power in which that power was 
universally hated. But we have seen all that 
change. To-day the strongest force against the 
Jew is on the other side. It is mainly aroused, not 
by the fear of capitalist forces, but by the fear of 
revolutionary forces. 

I make bold to say that when the feeling against 
the Jew comes to the point of action, the Jew will 
necessarily, and in self-defence, fall back upon the 
leadership of the proletariat against industrial 
capitalism. He will—he must, from mere instinct, 
quite apart from calculation—use the line of cleav¬ 
age which divides a society hostile to him. He will 
rely on the line of cleavage driven by the vast 
modern quarrel between the few possessors in the 
modern industrial world and their victims, the 
exploited millions. 

So put, the opportunity of the Jew, if he be driven 
to extremities to raise an army in his defence, 
seems a great opportunity enough. It would 
seem easy for him to deflect all animosity against 
himself into animosity against the rich—safe¬ 
guarding, of course (as he has done in Eussia), 


212 


THE JEWS 


the Jewish rich. But we must remember three 
formidable conditions which weaken that oppor¬ 
tunity. 

The first condition is this: The industrial millions 
are still quite a small minority and will probably 
in the future be an even smaller minority of the 
civilized white world. The war dealt them a heavy 
blow. The fact that the industrial proletariat is 
a town population, and therefore less and less 
productive, is another cause of weakness; their 
decline in health another. The fact that indus¬ 
trial capitalism depends upon the machine being 
kept going, and that its serfs are less and less will¬ 
ing to keep the machine going, is another. 

Secondly, the area (and that is important) 
occupied by industrial capitalism is but a very 
small area of the surface of the civilized world. 

Thirdly, the revolt of the Industrial Proletariat, 
if the Jews provoke it, will be short-lived. Either 
it will be defeated, or after destroying its masters 
it will, under Jewish leadership, destroy its own 
powers of production, as in Russia. 

When the fury is exhausted, in a very short 
time the Jewish problem will reappear. 

The proletarian battle may rage intensely, but it 
will be far from universal, and will not be sufficient, 
I think, to distract mankind from that other cross¬ 
problem of Jew and non-Jew, to which his attention 
is being more and more steadily directed. 



THE POSITION OF THE JEWS IN 
ENGLAND 



CHAPTER X 


THE PRESENT RELATION BETWEEN THE 
ENGLISH STATE AND THE JEWS 

The various nations of Europe have every one 
of them, in the course of their long histories, passed 
through successive phases towards the Jew which 
I have called the tragic cycle. Each has in turn 
welcomed, tolerated, persecuted, attempted to 
exile—often actually exiled—welcomed again, and 
so forth. The two chief examples of extremes 
in action, are, as I have also pointed out in an 
earlier part of this book, Spain and England. 
Spaniards, and in particular the Spaniards of the 
Kingdom of Castile, went through every phase of 
this cycle in its fullest form. England passed 
through even greater extremes, for England 
was the only country which absolutely got rid of 
the Jews for hundreds of years, and England is 
the only country which has, even for a brief period, 
entered into something like an alliance with 
them. 

Though it is the present position of the British 
State—that is, the position of official British 
politics towards the Jew—with which we are con¬ 
cerned, it may be of service to introduce the matter 
by a word upon past relations. 

215 


216 


THE JEWS 


The Jewish element in this island, whatever it 
may have been during the Roman occupation, was 
of small account during the Dark Ages. Things 
changed at their close in the eleventh century. 
The Jew is the camp follower of each new economic 
movement among us and that is why one finds him 
in the wake of the Norman Conquest. Throughout 
the economic development which it began appears 
the secondary role of the Jew. Every one knows 
the mediaeval rule of Jewish Status. It was 
established here as everywhere else in Christendom. 
The Jew was the King’s; that is, under the special 
protection of the State. If he were the subject 
of popular attack, that attack was an attack on 
the King’s peculiar, and liable to speedy repression. 
The individual attacker was punished with special 
severity because the danger of mass-movement is 
always great where the populace is free to act in 
masses as it was throughout the middle ages, and 
the necessity for preventing individual attacks 
from spreading was correspondingly great. Now 
and then the popular feeling got out of hand and 
the monarch had to deal with numbers which he 
could not control; but as a rule the Jew, especi¬ 
ally the rich Jew, enjoyed a privileged position, 
both in Northern France and throughout England. 
The Jew of the early Middle Ages in England 
was normally a well-to-do man and often an 
exceedingly rich man. Then, as now, a small 
number of Jews were much the richest men of 
their time. ' 

He had most of the finances in his hands, and 
this immense privilege (which he has lost), that he 
alone was allowed to practise usury. Here we 
must pause a moment to define usury. 



POSITION OP JEWS IN ENGLAND 217 


Usury then (as now) signified the receiving of 
interest upon unproductive loans. It is a practice 
which all moralists and all philosophers have 
condemned and which the Church in particular 
condemns. If you lend money to a man for a 
productive purpose: if, for instance, he is to buy 
a ship and trade with the money you advance, 
or to buy a farm and grow produce, then, of course, 
you are perfectly free to stipulate for a portion of 
the profit. But if you lend the money for a purpose 
not directly productive, as, for instance, to a 
man in grave necessity, or in lieu of charity, or 
to build such a building as a church, which will 
not produce a rent, or if in any other fashion you 
lend money to one who (to your knowledge) will 
not spend it in some reproductive agency, then it 
is immoral to demand interest. 

Now an exception was made in mediaeval Christ¬ 
endom in favour of the Jew. He was allowed to 
lend money at interest, even in the most grievous 
cases of necessity, and for services as unproductive 
as religion or war. The only stipulation was that 
the moneys saved from this lucrative practice 
returned to the Crown (in theory) upon the death 
of the licensee. In practice no doubt a very 
large part remained with the accumulator, who 
during his lifetime was enjoying the income he had 
acquired by usury, who could give it to his heirs 
while still living, and could use opportunities for 
secret investment, or pass it to the custody of 
others throughout international Jewry. But liquid 
sums left by him, the product of his usury, returned 
to the Crown upon his death. This was a great 
advantage to the Crown, not only in protecting 
the Jew from the native hostility of his alien hosts 


218 


THE JEWS 


(and particularly of the populace), but in giving 
him that great privilege—a monopoly. 

The rate of interest was enormous. It varied 
from nearly 50 per cent to over 80 per cent. When 
Jews lent money on security the King was party 
to the safe custody of the security, and their privi¬ 
lege extended so far that they were exempt from 
the common law, and a case between an English¬ 
man and his Jewish creditor could only be tried 
by a mixed jury in which the Jew’s own com¬ 
patriots were present in equal numbers with the 
English. 

All during the Angevin period Jewish financial 
domination continued, up to the end of the twelfth 
century and even into the beginning of the thir¬ 
teenth. But with the first half of the thirteenth 
century, for some reason of which I have never 
seen a sufficient historical analysis and of which, 
perhaps, the full causes have been lost, the Jewish 
power began to decline very rapidly, so far as 
England was concerned. 

And here it may be noted that the misfortunes 
of the Jews in any country never begin until their 
financial position is shaken. As long as they are 
the financial masters of the Government they are 
protected; but woe to them when they begin to 
lose their financial power ! Then there is no longer 
any reason for supporting them either on the part of 
the governing classes in general or of the Executive 
in particular. Popular passion is let loose and 
disaster follows. 

At any rate, the thirteenth century saw in 
England a rapid decline of Jewish financial power 
and at the same time a rapid rise of official ani¬ 
mosity towards them. They got poorer and poorer 


POSITION OF JEWS IN ENGLAND 219 


as the century proceeded. Their activities were 
at the same time more and more restricted. They 
had lent money largely upon land and yet, in the 
public interest, were at last forbidden to foreclose 
upon it. The final step came when their special 
licence to practise usury was withdrawn by Edward 
I in the earlier part of his reign; and at last, in 
1290, after increasing severities, they were all 
expelled the country under penalty of death. 

The unhappy people, already reduced by two 
generations of falling fortune, were hurried out of 
the country, carrying, by permission, their money 
and movables. They were protected, indeed, at 
the ports by the royal officers, who even paid the 
passage of the indigent among them; but they 
were plundered at sea and some even murdered. 
The murderers were punished, but the memory 
of the persecution remained in the Jews’ mind and 
England became a natural object of their hate. 
The Jewish community expelled by the English 
was surprisingly small, not 17,000, and suggests the 
historical truth that in the Middle Ages, and indeed 
until quite modern times, the Jewish community 
in Northern France and England was a community 
of people in the main well-to-do. It so remained 
until quite modern times. 

There followed three and a half centuries and 
more during which England was the one example 
in Europe of a State that would not tolerate the 
Jews upon any terms whatsoever. There cer¬ 
tainly remained throughout this time, or at any 
rate visited the island, not a few of what the Jews 
themselves called “ Crypto-Jews,” that is, Jews 
who outwardly deny their nationality and practise 
our religion for the purpose of private gain. These, 


220 


THE JEWS 


when they could defeat the law successfully, re¬ 
mained within the British seas. But their effect was 
slight; and the English people during the whole 
of their great military advance in France, during 
the whole period when their language and culture 
was forming, during the whole great national 
episode of the Tudors and of the Reformation, 
formed the one great exception out of all Europe 
in that the Jew remained unknown to them and 
was rigorously excluded from their Common¬ 
wealth. 

They returned, as everybody knows, under 
Cromwell. Their numbers, and still more their 
wealth, increased at the end of the seventeenth 
century and concomitantly with this, partly as 
an effect of it (but here we must not exaggerate), 
a number of novel financial features appeared in 
the English State each of which shows the increased 
power of the Jews. The institution of the Bank, 
of the National Debt, of speculation in Exchange 
and in the fluctuation of stock. 

But the real causes of that alliance between 
the English and the Jews which is seen in the 
late seventeenth century, which quickened through¬ 
out the eighteenth and became so very marked 
in the nineteenth century, was the cosmopolitan 
position of England as the leading commercial 
State. This it was which led to something like 
identity between the interests of Israel and the 
interests of Britain, an identity which has lasted 
so long that now, when divergence is beginning 
to appear, it still seems odd and novel to the older 
generation that there should be any Jewish action 
which is not favourable to England. They cannot 
understand what the new indifference to Jewish 



POSITION OF JEWS IN ENGLAND 221 


interests, let alone the new hostility to them, can 
mean. 

There were, of course, many other causes con¬ 
tributory to the peculiar position which the Jew 
came to enjoy in modern England, a position 
which he has not yet lost in external circumstance, 
though it is so badly shaken morally. There was 
the fact that England was the Protestant power 
of the West. 

This religious motive played a great part. 
Between the Catholic Church and the Synagogue 
there had been hostility from the first century. 
In so far as it was possible to take sides in that 
quarrel it was natural for the Protestant power 
to take sides against the Catholic tradition and 
therefore in favour of the Jews. Again, the 
English were not only Protestant, their middle 
classes were steeped in the reading of the Old 
Testament. The Jews seemed to them the heroes 
of an epic and the shrines of a religion. You will 
find strong relics of this attitude in Provincial 
England to this day. One should add a certain 
national distaste for violence, which feeling was 
exasperated by hearing of the Jewish persecution 
abroad. One should also further add the pride 
which modern Englishmen take in the feeling 
that their country is an asylum for the oppressed. 

Meanwhile there was not, until quite lately, any 
considerable body of poor Jews in the country to 
excite the animosity of the populace. That was 
an important negative factor in bringing the Jew 
within the boundaries of the English State. But 
with all these factors fully considered, it remains 
true that the main cause of the accidental Jewish 
position in England was the cosmopolitan char- 



222 


THE JEWS 


acter of English commerce and the essentially 
commercial character of the English State. As 
English export and English shipping began to 
cover the globe, the English financial system covered 
it as well. London became after Waterloo the 
money market and the clearing house of the 
world. The interests of the Jew as a financial 
dealer and the interests of this great commercial 
polity approximated more and more. One may 
say that by the last third of the nineteenth cen¬ 
tury they had become virtually identical. 

Every new economic enterprise of the British 
State appealed to the Jewish genius for commerce 
and especially for negotiation in its most abstract 
form—finance. Conversely, every Jewish enter¬ 
prise, every new conception of the Jew in his 
cosmopolitan activities (until these became revolu¬ 
tionary) appealed to the English merchant and 
banker. 

The two things dovetailed one into the other 
and fitted exactly, and all subsidiary activities 
fitted in as well. The Jewish news agencies of 
the nineteenth century favoured England in all 
her policy, political as well as commercial; they 
opposed those of her rivals and especially those of 
her enemies. The Jewish knowledge of the East 
was at the service of England. His international 
penetration of the European governments was 
also at her service—so was his secret information. 
With the consolidation of the Indian Empire 
after the Mutiny the Jews were again anally from 
their traditional hatred of the Russian people, 
which hatred has led them in our time to wreak 
so awful a vengeance upon their former oppressors. 
The Jew might almost be called a British agent 



POSITION OF JEWS IN ENGLAND 223 


upon the Continent of Europe, and still more in the 
Near and Far East, where the economic power 
of England extended even more rapidly than her 
political power. 

And the Jew pointed to the English State as 
that one in which all that his nation required of the 
goyim was to be found. He here enjoyed a situa¬ 
tion the like of which he could not hope to enjoy 
in any other country of the world. All antagonism 
to him had died down. He was admitted to every 
institution in the State, a prominent member 
of his nation became chief officer of the English 
Executive, and, an influence more subtle and pene¬ 
trating, marriages began to take place, wholesale, 
between what had once been the aristocratic 
territorial families of this country and the Jewish 
commercial fortunes. 

After two generations of this, with the opening of 
the twentieth century those of the great territorial 
English families in which there was no Jewish 
blood were the exception. In nearly all of them 
was the strain more or less marked, in some of them 
so strong that though the name was still an English 
name and the traditions those of a purely English 
lineage of the long past, the physique and charac¬ 
ter had become wholly Jewish and the members 
of the family were taken for Jews whenever they 
travelled in countries where the gentry had not 
yet suffered or enjoyed this admixture. 

Specially Jewish institutions, such as Freemasonry 
(which the Jews had inaugurated as a sort of 
bridge between themselves and their hosts in the 
seventeenth century), were particularly strong in 
Britain, and there arose a political tradition, active, 
and ultimately to prove of great importance, 


224 


THE JEWS 


whereby the British State was tacitly accepted 
by foreign governments as the official protector 
of the Jews in other countries. It was Britain 
which was expected to interfere, within the measure 
of her power, whenever a persecution of the Jews 
took place in the East of Christendom: to support 
the Jewish financial energies throughout the world, 
and to receive in return the benefit of that con¬ 
nection. 

We shall have a most imperfect picture of the 
causes which gradually made the Jews regard 
this country as their centre of action if we omit one 
essential point. 

England was secure. 

During the whole period which saw the rise of 
the Jews to eminence in this island and their 
ultimate alliance with its political and commercial 
system, English society enjoyed a profound peace. 
Save for the petty incidents of the ’15 and ’45 
(the first of no effect south of the border, the second 
ephemeral and confined to the North), no hostilities 
took place upon English soil between the rebellion 
of Monmouth under James II and the bombarding 
of London by the Germans from the air during the 
late war. There has been (save for some quite 
insignificant local riots) complete security for 
property and especially for large property. There 
have been since the middle of the eighteenth 
century no confiscations, and of commercial for¬ 
tunes none since the middle of the seventeenth: 
no invasion, no civil war, and therefore no loot: 
no personal danger from violence. 

Such conditions formed an environment ideal for 
the permanent establishment and rooting of Jewish 
power, and for the organization of a Jewish base. 



POSITION OF JEWS IN ENGLAND 225 


The political situation reflected itself, as it 
always does, in literature. The Jew began to 
appear in English fiction as an exalted character, 
quite specially removed to his advantage from 
the mass of mankind. He is already a hero in 
Sir Walter Scott, but the full development was 
much later. You could still have a Jewish villain as 
late as Oliver Twist, but with writers as different 
as Charles 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 inter¬ 
lude was in part due to the divorce between litera¬ 
ture and popular feeling in the middle and latter 
part of the nineteenth century; at least, it was 
permitted by that divorce. But the active cause 
of it was the reflection of the Jew’s political posi¬ 
tion upon the mind of the educated class as ex¬ 
pressed in its literary art. 

At the same time a parallel movement appeared 
on the historical side of literature. A convention 
arose that in the clash between the Jews and the 
English of the Middle Ages the Jews were invari¬ 
ably right and the English invariably wrong. 
Where the struggle was between the Jew and the 
non-Jew abroad, the historian exceeded all bounds. 
The European hostile to the Jew was a senseless 
monster, and the Jew hostile to the European was 
a holy victim. 

The whole story of Europe and of this country, 
in so far as it was affected by this very considerable 
factor, was distorted through suppression, and 
false emphasis and quite exceptional ly ing . 

The general reader of history neither knew 

0 


226 


THE JEWS 


what part the Jewish question had played nor the 
claims that could be advanced for his own race in 
the conflict. And as historians live by copying 
one another, the legend was established in every 
school and college. 

At the end of the process the Jews, in proportion 
to their numbers, held a power in this country 
beyond anything that has been seen in any other 
of the world. Poland at the end of the Middle Ages, 
when that country was most nearly comparable 
to Britain for the harbouring and support of the 
Jewish people, is the only parallel, and that a 
remote one. 

Every English Government had (and has) its 
quota of Jews. They had entered the diplomatic 
service and the House of Lords; they swarmed in 
the House of Commons, in the Universities, in 
all the Government offices save the Foreign Office 
(and even there representatives of the Jewish 
nation have recently entered); they were exceed¬ 
ingly powerful in the Press: they were all-power¬ 
ful in the City. No custom unsympathetic to their 
race, from the duel to popular clamour, survived. 
They could boast that England was not only the 
country where no distinction whatever was made in 
practice, let alone in law, between the Jew and 
the native, but that England w r as the only country 
where the Jew was always well received, where 
his natural defects counted least and where his 
natural abilities had most scope. 

Such a state of affairs could not last. It was not 
natural. It was not consonant with hidden but 
deep popular tradition or with popular appetites; 
it corresponded only to the mood of one European 
community in its wealthier classes. A divergence 



POSITION OF JEWS IN ENGLAND 227 


between the cosmopolitan financial interests of the 
Jew and the particular national interests of Britain 
was bound to come. War on a large scale, though 
it did not imperil the country itself, was a warning 
of change. It appeared with the South African 
campaign before the end of the century. The 
position of the Jew was altered. Some dissatisfac¬ 
tion with his power began to stir. It was already 
muttering and beginning to show itself with the 
rise of commercial and maritime competition in 
the new German Empire which, in its turn, had 
become led, upon all its commercial side, by Jews. 
There was bound, I say, to be a reaction and a 
permanent one. While it was yet taking place, 
in the heat of the Great War, before it had reached 
the official world, that one of the English politicians 
who was best fitted to speak for the Jews, who was 
most intimate with them through manifold ties of 
friendship and hospitality, Mr. Arthur Balfour, was 
chosen to make the famous pronouncement in 
favour of Zionism. It came within a month of 
the great crisis of the war. Its object was to divide 
the general influence' of the Jews throughout the 
world, which had hitherto been upon the whole 
opposed to the cause of the Allies, because, 
like every other neutral, the Jews were more 
and more convinced, as the campaigns dragged 
on, that the Central Empires were certain of 
victory. 

Though this was the motive, the effect was to tie • 
the British state yet closer to the fortunes of Israel, 
for here was England pledged to support, to defend, 
to act as a special protector over, the peculiar 
interests of the Jews, just where those interests 
would most challenge the whole of Christendom 


228 


THE JEWS 


and of Islam, just where it would be most acutely 
difficult to confirm Jewish claims. 

The declaration in favour of Zionism, the solemn 
pledge of the forces of the British State to an 
exceptional support of the Jew in a matter wholly 
to his benefit and not in any way to that of England, 
coming though it did after the climax of Jewish 
power had been reached and passed, was the last 
stage of that long process of alliance between the 
British commercial policy and its ruling classes on 
the one hand and the Jews upon the other. 

Already, as I have said, that alliance was morally 
shaken. The great influx of poor Jews had shaken 
it. The mere effect of time, the inevitable revolt 
of the human conscience against an unnatural pre¬ 
tence and an obvious fiction, was bound to come, 
and was overdue. But although the alliance 
was already shaken, the English State remained 
officially closely interlocked with Jewry, and its 
last action, the demand for the establishment of 
a Jewish State in Palestine, was, as has so often 
happened in the story of human development, at 
once the term and the turning-point of a process 
which had reached its conclusion; for it will be 
remarked throughout history that any force is 
most expressive, its manifestation of power most 
crude and most emphatic, in the perilous interval 
after its real strength has begun to decline and before 
its first open defeat. 

But the problems presented by this experiment 
in Palestine merit a separate examination. To 
this I will now turn. 


ZIONISM 




CHAPTER XI 
ZIONISM 

The question of Zionism has been discussed from 
every possible aspect save one, and that one is the 
only factor which relates to the thesis of this book. 

It has been argued, as a purely Jewish matter; 
there has been debate upon its justice or injustice 
among the Jews themselves, as to its advantage or 
disadvantage to their race; debate among the 
various non-Jewish forces concerned as to the 
advantage or disadvantage it would be to them; 
debate upon the rights and wrongs of the native 
population among which the Jews might find a 
home; debate as to whether that home should be 
in Palestine or elsewhere—and so on. 

All these discussions avoid the ultimate issue. 
Some of them, of course, are of evident importance 
within the Jewish community, but so far as the 
essential problem we are discussing in this book is 
concerned, they do not apply. The one question 
which is at issue from the point of view of our 
thesis is this:— 

Whether the Zionist experiment will tend to increase 
or to relax the strain created by the presence of the 
Jew in the midst of a non-Jewish world. 

That, and that only, is our concern, and from 
that point of view we may examine the theory of 

231 


232 


THE JEWS 


Zionism which has now emerged into an attempted 
practice. 

First let us consider its necessary general implica¬ 
tions: the implications which Zionism involves, 
no matter where or how the experiment were tried. 

The Zionist theory is that Israel would benefit if 
of its many millions (some twelve millions, counting 
those of the partly Jewish fringe, who are sufficiently 
Jewish to make one with the race) a core—say a 
tenth—were to have a fixed territorial “ city,” a 
country of their own, a habitation. This country, 
wherever it might be chosen, should be, as far as 
possible, a purely Jewish State: “ as Jewish,” one 
of its exponents has said, “ as England is English.” 

Now, suppose the place chosen were (to-day we 
may say “ had been”) an empty or almost unde¬ 
veloped country, and supposing the Jews had found 
that their own people could bear the expense of 
reaching that place with sufficient capital, and of 
colonizing it in large numbers. Supposing a small 
State of a million to a million and a half inhabitants 
to be thus formed, to be wholly Jewish in character, 
and independent in the fullest sense. The question 
immediately arises: Would the Jews throughout the 
world he :—- 

(a) 'permitted to regard themselves as citizens of 

that State ? 

(b) regarded in any case as citizens of that 

State , whether they willed or no , and regis¬ 
tered as such, with or without the consent of 
the registered person ? 

If not, what would be the status of the Jew outside 
this territorial unit, which he had chosen to be 
much more than a symbol of his national unity— 
its actual seat and establishment ? 



ZIONISM 


233 


That is the question which, so far as I have 
watched the discussion, everybody hesitates to 
face ; yet that is the question which will have to 
be faced sooner or later as the main political crux 
of the whole affair. 

Observe that there is no question of establishing 
a State wherein the whole or even the great mass 
of the Jewish people shall reside. No one would 
repudiate such an idea more vigorously than the 
chief pioneers of Zionism. The great mass of Jews 
would, of course, ridicule it as impracticable and 
refuse it as extremely undesirable. They live and 
they desire to live following their present interests 
in the nations among whom they are dispersed. 
They live and they desire to live the semi-nomadic 
life, the international life, which has become theirs 
by every tradition, and which one might now almost 
call instinctive in them. Also the greater part of 
them desire to pursue those careers which go with 
such a life, especially the careers of negotiation 
and of intermediary work. They not only feel the 
advantage of such a position, they also feel a need 
and appetite for such a condition. 

Whatever form Zionism might have taken before 
it appeared in its present experimental form, what¬ 
ever was said of the theory in the past, this point 
was always capital: 

The Jews as a nation would remain as they were, 
moving among all the peoples. The new Zion was 
to be no more than a fixed rallying point, an estab¬ 
lished but small territorial nationhood, which should 
do no more than proclaim their unity. It follows, 
therefore, necessarily, that the great mass of Jews, 
outside the territorial settlement, would have, after 
such a settlement had been formed, to obtain a 



234 


THE JEWS 


definition of their political character. What is 
that definition to be ? 

I think myself the Jews would answer: “ It is 
to be precisely what it is to-day, or, rather, what 
it has been in the Occidental nations during the 
past generation.” That is, the Jew is to be regarded 
as the full national in the nation in which he hap¬ 
pens to be for the time. Nothing shall debar him 
from any position whatever in that nation. He 
shall be regarded in exactly the same light as all 
the other citizens, and, conversely, he shall obtain 
no privilege. In countries where there is conscrip¬ 
tion, for instance, he shall be a conscript like any¬ 
body else; where a nation in which he happens to 
find himself goes to war, he shall be compelled to 
risk his life for it like any other citizen. If he 
happens a year or two before the war to have 
settled in the enemy’s country, then he shall be 
equally compelled to fight for the enemy against 
his former country. He shall in every respect be 
regarded, by a legal fiction, as identical with the 
community in which he happens to be settled for 
the moment, but at the same time he is to have 
some special relation with the Jewish State. 

He and he alone is to be (certainly in practice 
and, of right, in legal decisions) eligible for admis¬ 
sion to that city, for office in it. His opinion is to 
count in the conduct of that State, wherever he 
may personally be placed in the world. He is to 
regard himself—indeed that is inevitable from the 
definition of the new State—as personally allied 
to it, if not a member of it. He cannot dissociate 
himself from its fortunes nor be indifferent to its 
success or failure. He must in effect be loyal to it. 
He owes it allegiance of a moral kind. He will 



ZIONISM 


235 


necessarily be in much the same position as are 
men of Irish descent in the Colonies, in England, 
and in the United States, to the surviving and now 
increasing remnant of their race which has clung 
to its native land. But in the particular case of 
the Jew this allegiance will not diminish with time. 
It will remain ever vivacious. The race, as its 
individual components pass from one country to 
another, will make one body, generation after 
generation, with the fixed polity settled in the 
New Zion. That certainly is the ideal, as I hear 
it expressed on every side in conversation and in 
writing by the Jews who support it. 

Well, if the ideal is left in that condition (and 
it is admitted to be in practice in that condition), 
it will result in a grievous prejudice to the Jewish 
people, and will be a source of more permanent 
evil to them than any other policy they could have 
undertaken. It will emphasize that very point 
of dual allegiance which it must be their object to 
soften if the Jewish problem is to be solved. 

The existence of a Zionist State will bring into 
relief the separate character of the Jew. The 
Jewish nation will no longer be able to depend for 
one of its defences upon the indifference or the 
ignorance still widely present among its hosts. 
Whereas before the experiment was attempted, 
many of those hosts could forget the difference 
between him and them, many had no experience 
of it and many remarked it without its affecting 
their attitude towards the Jew; after the experi¬ 
ment has been put in practice there must necessarily 
be a change. 

To give a concrete instance, no one could in 
his anger say to a Jew, “You disturb our repose; 


236 


THE JEWS 


you are an alien element in our community; you 
must leave it.” For if lie meant that, he was at the 
same time condemning his victim to universal exile. 
But once an established national State exists, once 
you have in the world a considerable number—say 
a million and a half Jews—who are not the nationals 
of any other nation, but are the citizens of a Jewish 
nation with a known locality, an organized State, 
then the suggestion of exile changes its meaning. 
The opponent of the Jew is now able to say: “ Go 
back to your own country,” and you may be very 
certain that he will say that unless some other 
solution than the legal fiction of full citizenship in 
one country and of moral allegiance to another is 
dropped. 

The presence of the new Zion will do for the 
Jewish people what a frame does for a picture. It 
will not be universal to them; it will not cover 
the whole field of Jewish activity. It will be but 
a fraction of the whole. But it will inevitably 
emphasize the separation, the individual and alien 
character of the whole. It will concentrate atten¬ 
tion upon all those things which the nineteenth 
century—in what I have called “ the Liberal solu¬ 
tion—carefully put in the background and tried to 
forget. It will militate against an honest solution 
which w r ould 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; 



ZIONISM 


237 


there is always, at any one time of history, includ¬ 
ing our own time, a certain number of national 
units which are openly hostile to the Jew, regret¬ 
ting his presence among them, restricting his 
activities and determined, above all, to separate 
him, by a sharp legal definition if possible, at any 
rate by universal social practice, from the rest of 
the community. 

Now these hostile peoples cannot possibly be 
prevented from using the weapon put into their 
hands by the existence of a new Zion, with the 
implications I have just defined. It is difficult 
enough even now for the countries where Jewish 
finance controls the politicians (and these are still 
the most powerful countries) to restrain the anti- 
Jewish feelings in the lesser nations. It is only 
done by elaborate rules which are imperfectly 
obeyed and which are felt in these smaller nations 
to be imposed by alien interference with their 
domestic rights. The protection by the French, 
English and American Governments of what are 
called by a euphemism “national minorities”— 
which means, of course,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 to 


238 


THE JEWS 


that your neighbour has a right to object. But 
once an independent Jewish seat is established, 
this argument falls to the ground. It is no reply 
then to tell these nations that the new Jewish State 
cannot contain the whole Jewish race. It will 
answer that it is not concerned with the whole 
Jewish race but only with its own section of that 
race. 

Further, it will of course always be to the interest 
of those who desire to be rid of the Jewish element 
in their midst to argue that the Jewish State could 
be more peopled and that there is plenty of room 
for more citizens. Again, those hostile to the Jews 
in their midst can say: “ Very well. Since there 
is no room for the whole mass of our Jews in your 
new State, we will not deal with the whole mass; 
allow us to suggest that such and such individuals 
shall leave our State, where they are not wanted, 
and shall go to their own.” And they would pick 
out the Jews whose exile would most weaken the 
Jewish community in their midst. 

In the present state of affairs, with the Cabinets 
of Borne, Washington, London and Paris still 
heavily influenced by Jewish finance, they have, 
for the moment, a military force behind them 
sufficient to impose their orders in some measure 
upon the reluctant nations of Eastern Europe and 
in some measure to create an artificial protection 
for the Jews there. Even if this protection were 
to last another generation (which is unlikely), the 
presence of Zionism, interpreted in the sense I have 
just quoted, would be enough to undermine its 
work. On any change in the situation, in case of 
any conflict between these Western powers, or of 
any change by one or more of them in its attitude 


ZIONISM 


239 


towards the Jews, Zionism, thus interpreted, would 
be the ruin of the Jews in the Centre and East of 
Europe. The danger is of such great practical 
importance that it ought to be the very first matter 
for discussion. It is only our acquired habit of 
falsehood and secrecy upon the Jewish problem 
which has thrust it in the background. In the 
nature of things it must come to the front, and it 
would be far better to have the lines of some solution 
laid down before it becomes insistent. 

What are those lines to be ? 

Their general character is clear enough. 

Whether it be of advantage or no to have a purely 
Jewish State (I mean whether it be of advantage 
to Israel or no) may be safely left to the Jews them¬ 
selves to discuss. But one thing is certain : if they 
decide in favour of its continuance, then they must 
decide also in favour of some form of recognition 
for the purely Jewish nationality of the Jews outside 
that State. 

Thus only will the situation become open and 
therefore innocuous. If they try under the new 
conditions to maintain the old fiction that a Jew 
is at the same time a Jew and yet not a Jew, that 
he can be at the same time a Jew and an English¬ 
man, or a Jew and a Russian, or a Jew and an Italian, 
they will be trying to maintain it under conditions 
quite other than those of the past, and under con¬ 
ditions where the falsehood will break down in 
practice. 

Suppose you were to make such recognition 
partly voluntary, and leave it to the Jew wherever 
he might be to claim or not to claim his nationality 
as a Jew; to be regarded, if he so willed, as a 
national of the Jewish nation in Zion, or as a national 



240 


THE JEWS 


of 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 persecu¬ 
tion ? I think it would not. Even if it be true 
of the East to-day, it certainly would not be 
true of any body of Jews suffering there, in the 
future, any degree of molestation. 

But apart from that; Supposing but a small 
minority availed themselves of this voluntary form 
of recognition, supposing only a small minority to 
claim Jewish nationality as defined in the terms of 
the Zionist State, there would still be the contrast 
between those who had thus publicly proclaimed 
themselves nationals of Zion and those who hung 
back. In other words, short of a general admitted 
maintenance of the old fiction (of which Zionism 
more than any other force must accelerate the 
breakdown), you must have, through Zionism, an 
accelerated tendency to treating Jews throughout 
the world as being, whether without the New Zion¬ 
ist State or within it, a separate people. And 
they are a separate people, they cannot be other. 
My whole plea is that this truth should be recog¬ 
nized and acted upon; for if it is shirked or 
denied it will take its revenge. Reality always 
takes its revenge upon unreal pretence. 

There remains in connection with Zionism another 
consideration which is also of importance, though 
of a very different kind. Is the new Jewish State 
to rely upon its own military strength and its own 


ZIONISM 


241 


police—though perhaps guaranteed (for what that 
may be worth) by international agreement—or is it 
to be a protected State occupied, defended and 
policed by the strength and fighting qualities of 
some other kind of men, not Jews—Englishmen, 
Frenchmen or what not? 

As we know, the particular solution attempted, 
the particular Zionism of which the experiment is 
now being made in Palestine, plumps for the second 
solution. The protection of Jews from natives is 
to be undertaken by a garrison of Englishmen. It 
plumps for this solution under conditions as adverse 
as they well can be. The present experiment is, 
as we noted at the end of the last chapter, not an 
independent Jewish State, national, guaranteed, 
standing in its own strength ; but a protected State; 
and that State protected by one nation: Great 
Britain. The new Zion does not depend for its 
internal peace, for its establishment against highly 
hostile forces, for the ex-propriation of the local 
landowners, for the keeping of the peace between 
local elements highly hostile to itself, upon 
Jewish soldiers and Jewish courage. It depends 
upon British soldiers, British organization and 
British sacrifice. Those who have promoted the 
Zionist experiment have deliberately chosen the 
very worst moment for such a folly. 

Granted that whoever was to be the Protector 
he must be a friendly Protector, no worse solution 
could have been devised. A little nation is always 
morally guaranteed in its independence, if only by 
the balance of the greater nations. The violation 
of the neutrality of Belgium offers nothing of a 
rule; on the contrary, it was an odious exception. 
And an exception it would have been just as much 

R 



242 


THE JEWS 


if the neutrality had not been officially guaranteed 
under Prussia’s own hand. The smaller nations, 
of which the modern world is full, will have, we 
may be very certain, a long lease of life. The larger 
nations envy but applaud their security and happi¬ 
ness. They w r ill not be allowed to disappear. The 
same, I think, would be true of the Jewish national 
seat, could it be established, inhabited wholly or 
mainly by men of the Jewish race, religion and 
culture; presenting to the world the same aspect 
as does, for instance, Denmark to-day. But to 
depend for its establishment upon the superior 
power, upon the military and financial sacrifice, of 
another and totally different people, is a challenge 
and a provocation. It is the building of the pyramid 
upwards from its apex. It is an experiment in the 
most unstable of unstable equilibriums. 

The matter is, of course, being discussed every¬ 
where from the point of view of Great Britain, and 
nowhere more eagerly than among those who have 
to do the policing and the armed protection. But 
we are not here concerned with the ill effects such a 
situation must have on Great Britain—effects so 
ill that the experiment as a merely British Protec¬ 
torate is bound to break down—we are rather con¬ 
cerned with the effect it may have upon the Jews 
themselves. No great nation will sacrifice its 
foreign policy, will admit a point of acute weakness, 
simply to please the Jews. Sooner or later such a 
nation is bound to say: “We cannot sacrifice our 
interests to yours. Look after yourselves.” And 
that is where the peril to the Jews of this system, 
a protectorate, comes in. 

If there were any reason to suppose a natural 
alliance between the British Army and the Jews; 


ZIONISM 


243 


if we could imagine British officers and men taking 
a natural pleasure in ousting the Arab and making 
way for the Jew, it would be another matter. If 
there were something in the nature of things which 
made that alliance permanent and stable, if the 
Jews were a fully accepted part of the British 
Commonwealth as are, for instance, the Scots or 
the Welsh, some permanent arrangement might be 
possible. But they are nothing of the sort. The 
position is wholly unnatural. It cannot last. And 
if it cannot last with the British connection, how 
should it last with any other ? How shall the 
transition be made from a British Protectorate 
to another protectorate? Or how, seeing what 
violent hatreds have already been roused by the 
mere beginnings of the experiment, shall the con¬ 
flict which makes the protectorate necessary be 
avoided ? 

So far the dislike of the position, which is very 
far-reaching, and already very deep in England, 
is a passive dislike. No English soldier has yet 
been killed; there has been but little necessity, as 
yet, to repress the Arab and create hostility, though 
even what little necessity there has been was odious 
to the troops concerned. But things cannot remain 
in that state. The conflict is inevitable. When 
the conflict comes the feeling which has hitherto 
been passive will become active. People will not 
tolerate the loss of sons and brothers in a quarrel 
which is none of theirs, which cannot possibly 
strengthen the British State; which, if anything, 
must weaken it; which is felt to be precarious and 
ephemeral, and which will be undertaken against 
those with whom British sympathy naturally lies, 
and in favour of those with whom the average 


244 


THE JEWS 


soldier and citizen—unlike the professional politi¬ 
cian—has no ties and no sympathy. 

The matter can be very plainly put thus: 

If a Zionist experiment is necessary, or advisable, 
then let it be made in such a fashion that it can be 
dependent upon Jewish police and a Jewish army 
alone. Let it not rely upon a foreign protectorate, 
which will not last long, which is a weakness to 
the directing power, and which creates a false 
position. 

If it be answered that the Jews are not capable 
of producing such an army or such a police, that 
they would inevitably be defeated and oppressed 
by the hostile and more warlike majority among 
whom they would find themselves, then let them 
make the experiment elsewhere. But it is certain 
that the present form of the new Protectorate is 
the most perilous form which could have been 
chosen for it, so far as the Jews themselves are 
concerned. I appeal confidently to the near future 
to confirm this judgment. 

From one most poignant aspect of the matter 
which we all have in mind I deliberately abstain— 
I mean the effect of the experiment upon Christian 
and Mohammedan feelings throughout the world 
of an attempt to establish Jewish control over the 
Holy Places. I abstain because of the emotions 
aroused by it, which are violent and universal, and 
are of the sort I have deliberately determined, as 
my Preface has informed the reader, to keep out of 
this essay. Things indeed are not yet at the point 
of open quarrel in this most perilous of all the 
results of Zionism. We must trust for a solution 
before it is too late, but that solution will not be 
reached if we select for discussion matters upon 



ZIONISM 


245 


which there can be no agreement, and on which 
there is now aroused the most passionate feeling. 

Still, though I abstain from discussing that point, I 
would beg the Jewish readers of this my book to bear 
it in mind. If they believe the religious emotions 
to be dead in the modem world, or even to be lessen¬ 
ing, they may find themselves terribly disillusioned. 

I also refrain from making comment here—I have 
made it strongly enough elsewhere—upon the 
strange selection made by the Jews for their first 
ruler of the Arabs and Christians in Palestine. I 
will do no more than to say that a desire to shield 
the less worthy specimens of one’s race is natural 
and even praiseworthy. One may even take a 
certain glory in that one is able to protect them 
from outsiders. But to give them too great a 
prominence is a mistake, and it is indeed deplorable 
that of the whole world of Jews—from crowds of 
Jews eminent in administration, and political science, 
known for their upright dealing and blameless 
careers—Mr. Balfour’s Jewish advisers (whoever 
they were) should have pitched on the author of 
the Marconi contract and the spokesman of the 
famous declaration in the House of Commons that 
no politician had touched Marconi shares. 




OUR DUTY 



CHAPTER XII 


OUR DUTY 

The solution which. I propose, which I believe 
could be made stable, and which I further believe 
is the only stable one, demands a greater, a more 
necessary effort upon our side than upon that of 
our guests. 

It is the average man who must do his duty in 
the matter, and it is upon him that the responsibility 
will fall, if we take up once again that wretched 
sequence of ill-ease, persecution, reaction, which has 
marked so many centuries. 

We are the vast majority, we are the organism 
within which this small minority moves. We are, 
or could be if we chose, the makers of our own 
laws, and we are certainly the makers of our own 
political moods. 

I know it is the custom to throw all the respon¬ 
sibility upon the other side, to be perpetually 
devising instruments for their guidance which soon 
become instruments for their oppression, and in 
general to imagine a problem wherein the part 
of the European is purely negative and all the work 
has to be done by the Jewish stranger. 

That attitude is not only false but grossly undig¬ 
nified. When men accuse some one weaker than 
themselves of interference with, and even of 

249 


250 


THE JEWS 


acquiring power over, them they condemn them¬ 
selves. It is in the main our fault if an equilibrium 
has so rarely been reached in all these sixty genera¬ 
tions of debate. For however alien, however 
irritant the foreign body be, it is we who have in 
our hands the solvent of that irritant and of relieving 
the strain which it causes. 

Here let me recall at the risk of repetition (for 
repetition is necessary to lucidity in such argu¬ 
ments) the logical process with which I opened this 
essay. I say that the vast majority, the fixed race 
through which in fluid and nomadic form Israel 
goes moving from century to century, is not free to 
discharge its responsibility by any one of those 
attempted solutions which I have condemned. 
No man, I trust, will have the cynicism to say that 
mere persecution, let alone its horrible extreme, is 
or should be a solution. No man can predict the 
same of exile either. No man can discharge our 
responsibility by pretending that any solution 
arrived at must be for our good alone and may 
disregard that of those who live among us. 

It is a statement one hears frequently enough 
that the masters of house have alone to decide what 
shall be done under their roof: that the interloper, 
the alien element, has no standing and no right to 
complain of whatever measures may be taken for 
the protection of the household. The thing so 
put sounds plausible. It is essentially false. It is 
comparable to the argument applied to private 
property—that because private property is a right, 
and that because a man “ may do what he likes 
with his own,” therefore he may use it to the mani¬ 
fest hurt of others. Moreover, the analogy is false ; 
for when a man is talking of “ the master of the 


/ 


OUR DUTY 


251 


house ” having the right in his household to decide 
its own way of living and of treating its guests, he 
is considering a very small unit in a great com¬ 
munity; his household in the whole nation: a 
little body which, if it discharge or in any other way 
deal with something alien to itself, will inflict no 
great injury upon that foreign body, since there is 
all the world for it to turn to outside. But in the 
relations between the Jew and Christendom, or the 
Jew and Islam, the parallel fails. It is precisely 
because there is no “ outside ” to which the exile 
can turn that a duty is imposed on us. 

It is true indeed that when a small and alien 
minority assumes to dictate the policy of the rest, 
to regard its own advantages alone and subordinate 
to those advantages the life of all, the claim is 
grotesque and must be disallowed. But we should 
remember upon the other side that it is only by 
exaggerating its claim that a minority can live at 
all. It is only by fierce insistence upon its light 
to survive that its survival is guaranteed. We can 
arrive at justice in this matter by the process of 
putting ourselves in the shoes of those in relation 
to whom we propose to act. 

Put yourself in the shoes of the Jew and ask how 
this doctrine of “ doing what one likes with one’s 
own” and being “ the master of one’s own house¬ 
hold” would look to you. 

A public example which very rightly made a 
stir a few months before this book was published, 
may serve as text. A learned and distinguished 
Jew, Dr. Oscar Levy, a man who was an asset to 
any community, was turned out of the country 
under circumstances which many of my readers 
will recall. He pleaded with perfect justice that as 


252 


THE JEWS 


a Jew such an exile left him homeless; that the 
original country of which he was nominally a 
citizen (under the broken-down fiction that Jews 
can be Germans, or Austrians, or what not, and 
cease to be themselves) would not have him; that 
his interests, his livelihood had attached him to this 
country ; he had never hidden his true nationality 
nor changed his name, nor used any of those subter¬ 
fuges which, even when excusable, are dangerous 
and contemptible in so many of his compatriots. 
There was no conceivable reason why such rigour 
should be used against this man, save indeed that 
he was a Jew. 

Put yourself in his shoes and see how the thing 
looks. There is no nation to which you could have 
returned: there is no society to receive you as a 
member of it. You are not permitted to remain 
in the atmosphere with which you have grown 
familiar, in the surroundings which have become 
those of your later life, and your consonance with 
which it is too late for you to change. Could there 
be a grosser cruelty or a grosser injustice ? It is 
the very core of the whole problem that somewhere 
the Jew must be harboured, and therefore to some 
one of us the question must be put, “ Will you 
harbour him, and if so upon what terms ? ” If each 
man answer, “ No, I will not,” then all collectively 
become oppressors. It is no answer to say, “ These 
men are not of us, and therefore they may conspire 
against us,” or “ Their interests are divergent from 
ours and therefore may and do clash with ours.” 
All that is granted. That is merely stating the 
problem, not solving it. What do we say in daily 
life of men who merely state their grievances, harp 
upon them, and make no effort to put them right ? 


OUR DUTY 


253 


What do we think of men who perpetually complain 
of something naturally weaker than themselves, 
make no effort to understand its necessities and 
attempt only to rid themselves of the nuisance 
without considering reciprocal duty and. mutual 
relations ? The same should we think of those who 
so act towards the Jewish community in our midst 
which, for all its domination and exaggerated 
modern power, is ultimately at our mercy, far 
weaker than we are in numbers and situation. 
Without further elaboration of what should be an 
obvious political and moral principle, let us consider 
our part in the task. 

It consists, I conceive, in two very different 
determinations: two very different but allied lines 
of conduct to which we must pledge ourselves. 
The first, until recently the most difficult, is the 
determination to speak of the Jewish people as 
openly, as continuously, -with as much interest, 
with as close an examination as we speak of any 
other foreign body with which we are brought in 
contact. 

The second, which will perhaps be the more 
difficult duty to practise in the future, will be to 
avoid, in the individual public recognition of those 
with whom we must live, all futile anger and all 
mere reaction. I mean by mere reaction, blind 
reaction. The instinctive thrusting back against 
a thing which presses on us, the uncalculated and 
animal return blow, the consequences of which, 
either to ourselves or to others, are not weighed 
when it is delivered; the futile complaint, the 
futile rage, the futile cruelty. 

Unless those two duties are undertaken together, 
unless the determination to practise both be of 



254 


THE JEWS 


equal weight, the solution I propose will fail. To 
discuss the problem presented by the presence of 
the Jewish people, to talk of them as one would of 
any other, openly and frankly, to interest oneself 
in their history and in their present doings: all 
this is only to aggravate the trouble if we use that 
open dealing for the purpose of doing them a hurt, 
or if, in the course of it, we allow ourselves (merely 
from irritation or contrast, from the sense which 
all must have of opposition to things alien) to react 
against them without consideration of the immedi¬ 
ate and ultimate consequences not only to them¬ 
selves but to us. 

Conversely, the determination to regard their 
interests and to avoid every possible occasion of 
conflict, to hold a just measure with them, is quite 
useless if we falsify the whole relation by secrecy 
and false convention. 

The moment that comes in, there comes in with 
it a secret dissatisfaction with oneself and with 
the whole situation. The position is falsified, the 
seed of animosity greatly stimulated, the danger 
of mutual contempt made inevitable. 

Now let us look at these two branches of what 
we have to do in the matter, and see what difficulties 
lie in the way. 

In the way of frankly recognizing, examining, 
taking an open interest in the Jewish minority in 
our midst there lie three very powerful obstacles. 
First the inherited convention of polite society; 
secondly, and much the most powerful, fear; and 
thirdly, the very reputable desire to avoid 
offence. 

The first of these, the fear of convention, has 
many roots—the necessity for harmony in a leisured 


OUR DUTY 


255 


life, that is, the desire to avoid friction even at the 
expense of truth, the mere momentum of a quiet 
habit, the fear of misunderstanding which may 
come from one side casting ridicule upon the other, 
which may offend the person whom we have mis¬ 
understood, or make us ridiculous in his eyes and 
those of our audience. 

There is also, of course, as a cause, more powerful 
than any other, the force which lies behind all 
convention, the force which makes a man take off 
his hat in a church, which forbids his walking with¬ 
out boots in the street on the driest day, that is, 
the pressure of general practice. But the thing to 
realize is that in this form—I mean as distinct from 
any feeling of fear or of charity—the thing is a 
convention and a convention only. Difficult as it 
is to break with conventions, unless this convention 
is broken once and for all, the Jewish problem 
remains with us unsolved and growing in acuteness 
and peril. 

You can meet an Irishman and discuss with him 
the conditions of his nation. You can ask an 
Italian when he was last in Italy, or congratulate a 
Frenchman upon his acquisition of your tongue or 
tell him that it is difficult for him to understand 
your own customs: but a convention arose under 
the Liberal fiction—to which I have devoted so 
much space in the earlier part of this book—that to 
do any of these very natural things in the case of a 
Jew is monstrous. Your audience is shocked if you 
ask some learned Jew at a public table a question 
upon his national literature or history. It is a 
solecism to refer to his nationality at all, save 
perhaps now and then in terms of foolish praise— 
in nine times out of ten praise not to the point and 



256 


THE JEWS 


not desired by its recipient. And even praise must 
be approached most gingerly. You may not ask 
a Jew in London, however keen your desire for 
information, whether he had cousins in Lithuania 
or Galicia who have told him of the conditions of 
those distressed countries. You may not ask him 
when his family came to England, nor, if he be a 
recent arrival, what he thinks of the country. The 
whole thing is taboo. 

More than this: you must, you are expected (or 
were until quite recently expected) to emphasize 
in a most extravagant manner the complete identity 
of your Jewish guest with the people among whom 
he lives. I do not take offence if some chance 
acquaintance, noting my French name, talks to me 
about France, and is interested in my experience 
as a conscript long ago in that country. Mr. 
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 yoii horrified at the ill-breeding of 
your question. But in the matter of the Jew there 
stands this convention cutting you off from any 
such straightforward and simple way of dealing 
with a fellow-being. That convention, I say, must 
be broken down if we are to get any results at all 
and to establish a permanent peace. 

The thing was not, of course, entirely irrational 
in origin. No custom is. It was to be excused 
upon several grounds. 

First, there was the fact that many people were 
known to cherish so strong an hostility to Jews that 


OUK DUTY 


257 


to emphasize the Jewish character of anyone 
present might awaken that hostility. 

Then there was the peculiar rapid transition both 
of Jewish movements and of Jewish fortunes. In 
the case I have suggested, of asking a London Jew 
whether he had relatives in Galicia or Lithuania, 
you might be stumbling upon relations much 
poorer than himself in the East End of London; 
or, again, you might seem to be emphasizing the 
nomadic character of the race and thereby also 
emphasizing the contrast between it and our 
own. 

But much the strongest excuse for the convention 
was the well-founded idea that its exercise pleased 
the Jews themselves. Men avoided direct mention 
of Jewish nationality because it was felt that such 
direct mention was almost an insult. It was a 
thing which the Jew in whose presence you 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 har¬ 
monious relations. Most men, for instance, are 
indifferent upon, say, the matter of smoking. Most 
men are quite at their ease when they are asked 
whether they smoke or not, and if they do, whether 
they prefer this or that brand of tobacco. But now 
and then one comes across a man who, from some 
accident of training (as, for instance, a man 
whose mother brought him up to think smoking 
a mortal sin), does not like to have it alluded 
to. 

I myself know the case of a man of the highest 
culture and of considerable social position to whom 
you may not say anything about pigs either in 



258 


THE JEWS 


connection with farming or in connection with food; 
for his sympathies are Mohammedan. In these 
exceptional cases, when we know of our guest’s 
particular desire, we yield to it for the sake of 
harmony and of right living. So is it in this matter 
of the former convention against alluding to Jewish 
nationality or Jewish interests in any form. 
Whether the Jews were wise or not to cherish that 
convention, as they undoubtedly did, does not 
concern this part of my argument. I am talking 
of our duty and not of theirs. But I say that 
unless the convention is softened and at last dis¬ 
solved, nothing can be done. Both parties should 
know that it only does harm. It renders stilted 
and absurd all our relations; it fosters that 
suspicion of secrecy which I have insisted upon as 
the chief irritant in those relations, and it creates a 
feeling of exception, of oddity, which is the very 
worst service that could be rendered to the Jews 
themselves. 

Some little time ago the convention went so far 
that even a mention, a neutral—nay, a laudatory 
mention, of anything Jewish in a general company 
led to an immediate awkwardness. Men looked 
over 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. 



OUR DUTY 


259 


It is an obstacle to all right handling of what is 
becoming daily a more and more insistent and 
acute difficulty. 

It is obvious that the getting rid of such a con¬ 
vention is not to be effected by violent methods, nor 
immediately. But our duty is to accelerate its 
decline and, within reason, to enlarge every oppor¬ 
tunity for treating the Jewish nationality precisely 
as one treats any other. I mean precisely as one 
treats any other in conversation or in writing. We 
all know the insane type which loves to break con¬ 
vention merely because it is a convention, and we 
shall certainly have to be on our guard against this 
sort of person in the near future, as this particular 
convention begins to break down. But without 
encouraging such eccentricities there is ample room 
for an increasing ease in the recognition of what 
after all we know to be reality, a reality which 
requires open discussion for the good of us all. The 
danger is lest even this merely conventional obstacle 
should by too long a resistance dam up forces which 
tend to break it down and therefore lest, when it is 
pulled down, we should admit the other extreme of 
licence, with its opportunity for insult and damage. 
That is what has happened in the case of other much 
more reasonable Victorian conventions, and we 
must not have it happen in the case of the conven¬ 
tion which for so long forbade us to admit that a 
Jew was a Jew or to take any open interest, when he 
was present, in the things which he himself thinks 
the most interesting of all. 

And if anyone shall answer that convention is 
necessary, lest on its decline open hostility should 
follow, I can only say that this is to despair of 
any equitable solution at all. But my whole thesis 



260 THE JEWS 

in this book is that such a solution need not yet 
be despaired of. 

There is one more thing to be said in this matter 
of the old taboo. However long it may linger in the 
small educated class, it has gone for ever among 
the populace, and it is the popular instinct we shall 
have mainly to deal with in the difficult times ahead 
of us. 

The populace in this country talks upon Jewish 
matters with a frankness which would astonish the 
drawing-rooms, and has so talked upon them for a 
generation past—ever since the great novel influx 
of poor Jews began to pour into our towns. It not 
only talks thus openly to and of Jews upon its own 
level, but it is thoroughly alive to the presence and 
power of Jews in government. Those who think 
that a continuance of the convention can put off 
the necessity for a solution would be disillusioned 
if they would spend a few days east of Aldgate, 
and mix with their fellow-citizens there. 

Allied to this obstacle of convention is the very 
real obstacle of charity. 

Now we are here dealing not with a positive 
charity but with a negative one and with a form of 
charity uncommonly like slackness. 

The man who honestly thinks that any allusion 
to Jewish races in contemporary art, history or 
letters in the presence of a Jew is offensive and 
therefore to be avoided, from goodness of heart, and 
who also ’practises the same virtue where any other 
foreigner is concerned is rare indeed. There are 
such men, for men of exceptional goodness coupled 
with exceptional stupidity are to be found. But the 
excuse of charity as it is generally put forward is 
not wholly ingenuous. Where it is ingenuous our 


OUR DUTY 


261 


reply to-day must be that even at the risk of 
occasional ill-ease, the danger of offence must be 
risked; for unless we risk it there is increasing 
peril of a much greater offence against justice. 
For whatever reason open discussion is burked, even 
for the reason of charity, we only put off the evil 
day, and charity so used may be compared to the 
charity which refuses to take action in any other 
critical problem of increasing gravity. The charity 
which hesitates to control the supplies of a spend¬ 
thrift, or to wage a defensive war in a just cause, 
or to defend an oppressed man at the risk of 
quarrelling with his oppressor, is a charity mis¬ 
directed. 

But, as I have said, with much the greater part 
of men who plead this motive the plea is, if they 
would only examine their own consciences, found to 
be false. And the test of its falsity will be apparent 
when the convention slackens. When it is no 
longer conventional to avoid all mention of Jews, 
how many will remain silent merely from the love 
of their fellow-men ? One might go further and 
say that when the convention has gone, any need 
for this kind of charity will go with it. There is 
an exception, of course, in the case of the man 
whose dislike of Jews is so violent that he fears 
himself if he gives any rein to his tongue. That 
mania is exceptional; but where it is found certainly 
its victim will do well to keep silence. If a man 
cannot mention the Hebrew alphabet without a 
sneer, or the economics of Ricardo without betray¬ 
ing his ill feeling for Ricardo’s lineage, then 
certainly he had better hold his tongue when Jews 
are there. So, too, a Frenchman who raves against 
the English had far better not discuss the British 



262 


THE JEWS 


Constitution or the genius of Newton in any society 
where an Englishman may be present. 

There remains the chief obstacle—that of fear. 

There is no doubt that the strongest force still re¬ 
straining an expression of hostility to the Jew is fear. 

In a sense, of course, there is a “ fear ” of breaking 
convention—but that is fear only in metaphor. 
I mean not this, but the very real dread of con¬ 
sequences : the feeling that an expression of 
hostility to Jewish power may bring definite evils 
on the individual guilty of it, and a panic lest those 
evils should fall upon him. How strong this feeling 
is, anyone can testify who has explored, as I have, 
this most insistent of modern political ills; and 
doubtless the greater part of my non-Jewish readers 
will recall examples to the point. 

It is a fear of two consequences, social and 
economic, and even of both combined. Men dread 
lest hostility to the Jew Domination should bring 
them into the grip of some unknown but suspected 
world-wide power—some would call it a conspiracy 
—which can destroy the individual who shall be 
so rash as to challenge it. Some perhaps have 
gone to the length—the insane length—of reading 
the word “destroy” in its literal sense and of 
fearing for their lives. Such an illusion is laughable. 
But very many more are affected by the reasonable 
conception that they will have against them, if they 
provoke it, an intelligent, combined action which 
they cannot meet because there is no organization 
upon their side: because it is international; 
because there is behind it a great intensity of 
feeling; because through finance it controls the 
political machines of all the nations, because it is 
all-powerful in the Press—and so forth. 



OUR DUTY 


263 


They dread, I say, the social consequences. They 
also (and that with more definition and more sense) 
dread the economic consequences. They recognize 
(they also exaggerate) the grip of the Jew over 
finance. They conceive that if they speak they will 
be dragged down, their enterprises ruined, their 
credit dissolved. And that is the most powerful 
instrument which can be brought to bear. When 
supernatural motives disappear the strongest 
motive remaining after appetite is avarice; and 
avarice is more universal than appetite and more 
continuous. Nor is it only avarice which is at 
work here, but also the respectable desire for 
security. There are to-day innumerable men who 
would express publicly on Jews what they con¬ 
tinually express in private, but who conceal their 
feelings for fear that their salaries may be lost or 
their modest enterprises wrecked, their investments 
lowered, and their position ruined. Above them 
are a lesser number, equally convinced that their 
large fortunes would be in peril were they so to act. 

The characteristic of all this feeling is two¬ 
fold. In the first place, as would seem to be the 
case with convention, though in a much greater 
degree, it dams up and enormously increases the 
latent force of anger against Jewish power both 
real and imaginary. It is like the piling up of a 
head of water when a river valley is obstructed, or 
like the introducing of resistance into an electric 
current. The suppression of resentment, though 
that suppression is the act of the men who them¬ 
selves feel the resentment and not directly of their 
opponents, is a fierce irritant and accounts for the 
high pressure at which attack escapes when once 
it is loosened. 



264 


THE JEWS 


I speak only of hostility and of attack, for it is 
in these least rational examples that the strength 
of the thing is to be found. But it applies also to 
mere discussion. There is hardly anyone to-day 
who does not desire to discuss as an urgent political 
problem the present position, the present power, 
the present disabilities, the present claims of Israel. 
But for one that will openly discuss these things 
there are ten who, in varying degrees, forbid them¬ 
selves so plain a freedom of speech in dread of what 
consequences might follow. It has, like all panic, 
a ridiculous element. It is informed by the most 
absurd illusions; it suffers from grotesque imagin¬ 
ings and phantasms. In some this dread of the 
Jewish power has very plainly passed the line which 
divides the stable from the unstable mind and even 
the sane from the insane. But it is none the less 
a formidable element in our problem. This 
obstacle, much more than that of convention, bears 
a character of rigidity. It works for a certain 
time, then it breaks down and releases a flood. 

That is why the first expressions of hostility in 
our time were so exaggerated and ill-proportioned. 
That is why so many of them were plainly mad. 
This very character of exaggeration, this very 
wildness in proportion, rendered those against 
whom the attack was delivered more contemptuous 
of it than they should have been. 

The forerunners of the present movement—I 
mean, of the movement hostile to Israel—were not 
calculated to excite the respect of their opponent 
or even to carry with them the men on their own 
side. They lacked that “ common” sense which is 
the first quality of leadership. For the power of 
leadership implies a soul in common with those 


OUR DUTY 


265 


who are led. The enthusiast can lead permanently, 
but the extravagant man never for long. 

I say that these first attacks were on that account 
despised: they were unduly despised by those 
whom they menaced. 

There lay in reserve behind all the exaggeration 
and wildness a great bulk of very different opinion; 
the opinion of men normal in their appreciation 
of values and of proportion, not given to “ seeing 
things,” fully in touch with reality; men who know 
that they have hitherto only been silent through 
the action of fear, who despise themselves on that 
account and who are the more ready to act. For 
the sense of fear not only degrades but angers: 
at least in our race. The European who admits to 
himself that he has restrained an instinct not from 
religion, nor from a general sense of right, but from 
cowardice, is always angry with himself and awaits 
the moment when he can take his own revenge 
upon his own past and clear himself of reproach 
in his own eyes. 

Herein lies the peril to Israel of such a state of 
affairs. But with that I am not here concerned. 
I am only concerned with its effect upon ourselves. 
So long as we degrade ourselves, so long as we 
humiliate ourselves by our own cowardice, so long 
as we shirk all reasonable discussion, let alone all 
expression of hostility because we dread the con¬ 
sequences at the hands of our opponents, so long 
there are present in rising intensity two evil things: 
first, the postponement of the right solution; 
secondly, the turning of a reasoned policy into mere 
hatred with all the consequences that flow from 
such evil emotion. 

The longer we maintain whatever remains of that 



266 


THE JEWS 


barrier to free speech (happily it is already crumb¬ 
ling) the longer do we produce the two fatal results 
of postponing justice and of creating enmity. The 
destruction of that barrier, the ridding of ourselves 
of fear in the matter, is, as is always the case in 
the exercising of this unmanly thing, a matter for 
individual effort. As the proverb goes, “ Some one 
must bell the cat,” which is another way of saying 
that if each man waits upon his neighbour, things 
will only grow worse and worse. 

It is for each in his place, before it is too late, to 
approach the Jewish problem and to discuss it 
openly; to preface that discussion by a frank interest 
and a general expression upon all those things 
in the minority which directly concern its relations 
with the majority; to deal with the Jewish nation 
exactly as one would with any other. 

It used to be a dictum in those who pleaded a 
lifetime ago for the open criticism of Scripture, that 
“ the Bible should be approached like any other 
book.” 1 The result is not of good augury to my 
present argument and I rather dread the parallel; 
but since the phrase is well, known I will use it as a 
model. It is time, I say, to be rid of treating the 
Jewish nation as something closed, mysterious and 
secret. Let us treat it “like any other nation.” It 
is no wonder if men, moved by nothing but a blind 
hatred, feel some hesitation upon the consequence 
of that hatred. But I am convinced that if we on 
our side get rid of this absurd modern fear, take the 

1 I beg leave to introduce an anecdote. An undergraduate 
once said to Dr. Jowett, the Master of Balliol, “ I take up 
the Gospels and treat them as an ordinary book.” The 
Master answered : “ Did you not find them a very extra¬ 
ordinary book 1 ” So it will prove, I think, with the fascina¬ 
tion of Israel. 



OUR DUTY 


267 


Jew in his right proportions, rid our mind of 
exaggeration in his regard—especially of the con¬ 
ception of some inhuman ability capable of conduct¬ 
ing a plot of diabolical ingenuity and magnitude— 
we shall be met from the other side. 

The Jews are not the only force which is inter¬ 
national nor the only international force the dread 
of which has disturbed men’s judgments. They 
are not the only international force which has some 
degree of organization and cohesion. If you desire 
to vent your active dislike of the Scotch or of the 
Irish you must be prepared for a certain amount 
of Scotch or Irish hostility. You will come across 
something of an organization and suffer accord¬ 
ingly ; but if you cherish the conception of a vast 
subterranean force, Scotch or Irish, watching you 
with a malignant power and capable of your destruc¬ 
tion, you are, I think, out of the real world. 

If you desire to vent your active dislike of the 
Catholic Church you will find ubiquitous opposi¬ 
tion. But if you conclude from this that you are 
at grips with a monster then you are out of touch 
with reality. 

So it is, surely, with this dread of the Jewish 
power, which has sullied so many men’s minds, 
postponed the right discussion of the problem and 
nourished ill-ease everywhere. If we simply 
act as though that dread were despicable like any 
other dread, and turned to perfectly open discussion 
of the whole affair, even to an open expression of 
hostility where hostility is deserved, we shall be 
the better for it. In any case it is our duty to 
ourselves as well as to the State to get rid of fear 
in the business, for until we are rid of it no 
advance towards a solution can be made. 




THEIR DUTY 




CHAPTER XIII 


THEIR DUTY 

Where positive causes have been found for an 
evil it is obvious that the cure of that evil consists 
in the removal of the causes, in so far as they can 
be removed. 

In the particular case of the friction between the 
Jewish community and their hosts the causes of 
that friction are the foolish and dangerous habit of 
secrecy and the irritating expression of superiority. 
The causes the Jew, can remove if he will. The 
matter is in his own hands: we can do nothing: 
he can do everything. 

But beyond this negative duty which is incum¬ 
bent upon the Jews if they would achieve a peaceful 
issue of the perils which menace their future, there 
is a positive action also incumbent upon them. 
They must foster, they must even propose, institu¬ 
tions which will the better mark them off from a 
society not their own and restore to them the dignity 
of a nation. I shall in the last chapter of this 
book contend that the policy leading to a solution 
must repose not upon direct laws of our own imagin¬ 
ing, not upon reactions which will almost certainly 
prove oppressive, and almost certainly be evaded, 
but upon a general spirit recognizing the separate 
nationality of the Jews. But though this is true of 

271 



272 


THE JEWS 


every Christian Western State in which they find 
themselves, it is not true of their own nation. 
They on their side may well come forward with 
propositions which they have the capacity for 
making, because they will know how to frame them 
(as we cannot) after a fashion consistent with their 
own dignity and their own tradition. There is a 
beginning of such things already present in the 
Jewish schools, the Jewish guardians and the con¬ 
siderable separate organization which the Jews 
have openly set up for their community in this 
country. These beginnings have but to be extended. 

Those who are openly hostile to Jews will say 
that any proposals coming from their side will con¬ 
ceal a trap. “ This people ” (they say) “ will always 
suggest things which will seem innocent enough and 
apparently do no more than define their position 
plainly for the future; but we shall find ourselves 
caught in an obligation and the Jews more our 
masters than ever. They will,” say these objectors, 
“remain as they are to-day, and while they claim 
every privilege as a separate community, they will 
also insist upon the full citizenship which is incom¬ 
patible with this attitude. We shall find that, 
whatever institutions we ask them to frame, those 
institutions will work not only in their favour but 
also heavily against us.” 

I doubt it. The special Jewish institutions 
already at work have no such effect. On the con¬ 
trary, they already relieve the strain. One of those 
institutions, for instance, is the Jewish press: the 
newspapers specially devoted to Jewish interests 
and acting as spokesmen for Jewish ideas. They 
are not always as polite as they might be. I have 
had myself at times to lodge a complaint against the 


THEIR DUTY 


273 


way in which they have treated sincere efforts for 
the settlement of our difficulties and an honest 
attempt at finding a way out. They have left a 
handle to their enemies sometimes by too insistent 
or, as those enemies would call it, too arrogant a 
claim, and they do write now and then as though we, 
the vast majority, had no rights and the only thing 
worth considering was the advancement of their own 
people. 

But. after all, it would be absurd to expect 
anything else. A small minority vigorously fighting 
its own hand must exaggerate its claim; an organism 
defending itself against very heavy pressure from 
without cannot but appear aggressive, and I shall 
always maintain that the presence of an openly 
Jewish institution speaking for Jewish interests, no 
matter how insistently, is an excellent thing. It 
presents a healthy contrast with the converse 
attempt to present Jewish arguments under the 
cover of neutrality, and to spread Jewish ideas 
anonymously through what are very far from 
being neutral agents. 

If I be asked what institutions I have in mind I 
can only repeat that it is for the Jews themselves 
to make the first proposal, but I suggest an 
extension of the system, which is already present in 
embryo, whereby disputes between Jews shall be 
arbitrated before a Jewish tribunal. Not only its 
extension but its confirmation at the request of the 
Jews themselves, might be a good thing. It would 
also not be a bad thing if—some time hence when 
things were ripe for the change—disputes between 
Jews and non-Jews could be tried in Courts where 
the special character of such disputes, the distinctive 
difference between them and disputes between the 



274 


THE JEWS 


fellow-citizens of the country in which they live, 
should come before tribunals of a mixed character. 
To attempt this to-day would, of course, be a very 
new departure in procedure, indeed a revolutionary 
one; and there is no prospect of it for a long while; 
but with the growing number among us, and the 
growing influence, of Jews it will, I think, when it 
does come at last, be of advantage to both parties. 
It would be fatal if it were imposed upon them. It 
would not be accepted. It would not work. But if 
it were suggested by the Jewish community spon¬ 
taneously, and started and developed by them, it 
would succeed. And it would add a great deal to the 
relief already experienced for the functioning of the 
other institutions I have mentioned. 

There is little more to be said under this head. 
Apart from the duty of open dealing and this 
specific policy of fostering separate institutions we 
have no claim to press. 

All the main part of the mutual Duty is on our 
side. Therefore have I given it the space it seems to 
deserve and confined to no more than these few 
lines correlative suggestions for those who, after all, 
are not responsible to us for their actions and may 
properly resent the airing of our views on the do¬ 
mestic details of their alien organization. 





CHAPTER XIV 
VARIOUS THEORIES 

Before approaching my conclusion it may be well 
to review certain subsidiary theories which I have 
not hitherto touched in my discussion, because they 
stand apart from its argument. 

There is a whole group of historical and other 
theories upon the position of the Jews which either 
imply that there is no problem, or if there is one that 
it cannot be solved, or even that if there is a problem 
it is of a sort that does not need solution, because 
that solution would be of no practical value. 

There come in the first place those theories upon 
the international position of the Jews which are 
frankly non-rational, and which vary from those 
which may be defended with some show of reason 
from the history of the past, to those which are 
wholly imaginary. None of these, even though 
some one of them should be true, can find much 
place here because none lends itself to discussion. 

Thus there is the conception of a curse; the 
conception that Israel must, until its conversion, 
suffer a perpetual pilgrimage and perpetual hos¬ 
tility. It is a statement bound up with that other 
popular prophecy that in the last days Israel will be 
reconciled with the Universal Church. Those who 
have these ideas at the back of their minds (they are 

277 





278 THE JEWS 

more numerous than modern thought would like to 
admit), at heart despair of any solution, and would 
not attempt to urge it with any hope of success. 
They say, “ The thing is fated and must continue.” 
But even they, I think, must admit that just as 
philosophy admits a paradox of determination and 
free will, so political effort must admit a paradox of 
foreseen failures and our duty, in spite of them, to 
aim at a political good. 

Whether it be indeed true or not, that recon¬ 
ciliation is impossible and that in the long run the 
quarrel must drag itself out, it is certainly pro¬ 
foundly immoral to look on at the spectacle with no 
attempt to ameliorate its evils. 

There is again the theory (which I mention in 
passing and leave to its adherents) that the British 
and the Jews are in some way mysteriously allied by 
Providence, so that any solution which does not give 
the fullest satisfaction to Israel (no matter at what 
cost to poor Japhet) is treason. These people 
mystically regard Britain as the handmaid of Jewry, 
and there is a section of them who further regard 
their fellow- countrymen as the ten lost tribes. I 
have in my library some specimens of their litera¬ 
ture. 

There is an opposite and, to me, detestable theory 
(but I must mention it because it exists), that the 
antagonism hitherto found perpetually, whether 
latent or active, between this people and the world 
about them is the use of the one as a necessary and 
divine oppressor of the other. To those who hold 
such a theory I can only reply that two can play 
at that game, and it certainly absolves those whom 
they would oppress from any obligation whatever of 
seeking a solution on their side. If a man thinks he 


gitized by Microsoft ® 


VARIOUS THEORIES 279 

can do harm to Israel wantonly, without suffering 
the reproaches of his own conscience, he is in error; 
and I confess that were I free (as I am not in a book 
of discussion and argument) to indulge in mere 
affirmation I should be inclined to say that those 
who set out with this remarkable object in view will 
catch a Tartar. 

There is the opposite theory that a special and 
Divine protection is still exercised, not only for the 
preservation of the Jews but for judgment upon 
their enemies. That theory, I think, lies at the back 
of many a Jewish action in history and of much 
Jewish policy to-day. Non-rational, religious in 
origin, it is, I fancy, to very many of the race which 
has suffered so much, a consolation and a support. 

Now all these non-rational theories (I use the 
word without any bad connotation: the non- 
rational—what is often inaccurately called the 
mystical—attitude towards any problem may well 
be more practical than the rational approach to it) 
I leave on one side as improper to rational discussion. 

I have heard it maintained, again, by both parties 
to this debate, that the presence of an alien force, 
migratory, intense, full of tradition, experience and 
cohesion, was essential to the height and the activity 
of our own civilization. 

These are not content to discover individual 
instances of Jewish excellence in the mass around 
them, or to extend the renown of individual Jewish 
genius. They are rather concerned with the general 
proposition that some such flux is necessary to the 
full action of a high and diverse culture. They tell 
us that but for the Jew the civilization of Europe 
would have grown torpid, would have settled into a 
fixed groove, incapable of change and of creative 



280 


THE JEWS 


progress. The Jew, by this theory, is regarded as a 
sort of activating principle, who, whether as an 
irritant at the worst, or an inspiration at the best, 
keeps all our European life agog, and is necessary to 
its continuous business. These also incline to see 
the Jew at the origin of every great movement in 
European thought. They see him indirectly pro¬ 
ducing the vast transformation of the Roman Em¬ 
pire from a pagan, not indeed to a Jew but to a 
Christian, that is (in their eyes) to an Oriental mood. 
They see the Jew at the root of the great revolu¬ 
tionary philosophy which springs from the eleventh 
century and reaches its culmination in the great 
scholastics of the thirteenth. They insist upon the 
name of Averroes (Ibn Roshd), the philosopher of 
the twelfth century, the Kadi of Cordova: the 
exponent of Aristotle, the expositor—whom the 
Jews preserved: upon the great Moses ben Maimon, 
our Maimonides. These also put Nicolas de Lyra 
at the root of the Reformation: “ Si Lyra non 
lyrasset Luther non saltasset .” But I may remind 
them that the Jewish character of this man is at 
least doubtful, that he was of the religious Orders of 
Christendom. 

These also will certainly and with some reason 
ascribe to Jewish influence the great economic 
revolution of the seventeenth century, which has 
been followed by so vast an extension of wealth and 
of population, though hardly of human happiness. 

Now for all this there is certainly something to 
be said as an aspect of historical truth. How far 
it may be extended to cover, as its exponents would 
make it cover, the whole historical field, may be 
debated, but I would ask my readers to consider 
what change we should have seen in the develop- 


VARIOUS THEORIES 281 

ment of Europe if by some magical instrument 
Jewish influence had been upon some one date 
removed. It is a theory fascinating, in a way 
applicable, and arresting. It is, at any rate, not 
nonsense. 

It is particularly true that something in 
the continuous exercise of analysis by the Jewish 
intelligence perpetually moves European intelli¬ 
gence to action—The great disputations of the 
Early Middle Ages were, largely, either directly 
disputations with Jews or disputations provoked by 
the intellectual attitude of the Jew; and the Jew, 
in the famous name of Spinoza, stands at the origin 
of that merely natural, that Lucretian interpreta¬ 
tion of the world which continued through Des¬ 
cartes to its great expansion in the present day. 
You find that element in economics as you do in 
philosophy, in political science as you do in econo¬ 
mics; and, talking of economics, it must not be 
forgotten that the greatest name at the foundation 
of modern economic science is the name of a Jew, 
Ricardo, while the most prominent name in the 
development of its most prominent direct applica¬ 
tion is also a Jewish name—the name of Karl Marx. 

It is not without significance that any one of these 
names recalls, side by side with its Jewish origin, 
an aloofness from the general community of the 
Jews. That community, I think it is fair to say, 
abandoned Spinoza; Ricardo and, I believe, Karl 
Marx were alien to the national religion, and the 
latter married out of his people and exercised his 
enormous influence extraneously to the blood from 
which his family sprang. For though it is true that 
the direction, the staff of Communism is Jewish, yet 
ite convinced adherents are in the mass of our blood. 



282 


THE JEWS 


And in that connection I am reminded of another 
theory or fact attaching to the history of Israel, 
which is that the intellectual independence of the 
Jew has been as marked throughout the ages as his 
solidarity. There are many, I know, of that nation 
who regard such exceptions as vagaries and almost 
condemn them as traitors; yet they are no small 
asset to the reputation of their people and their 
names, however much they may be repudiated by 
their compatriots, shed lustre upon the whole body 
from which they sprang. These include (let it be 
remembered) not only the “ sceptical” philosophers, 
not only the materialists, but also those extra¬ 
ordinary exceptions who have lent the vigour, the 
tenacity and the lustre of the Jewish intellect to the 
service of the Catholic Church. I make bold to say 
that in no one of the Faith has there been more 
devotion than in those who, like Ratisbonne (and 
he was but one among many), have put such 
qualities at the service of what they have dis¬ 
covered to be alone divine. A cynic might add 
St. Paul, but, for that matter, the whole origin of 
the Church was intermixed with the intense indivi¬ 
dual efforts of such men. 

In this connection also every wise man will admit 
that there is no greater error than to exaggerate the 
consciousness of Jewish action whether the error 
proceed from those who admire or who detest it. 
To hear their modern opponents talk one might 
imagine that the Jewish people formed a small 
club of which every member knew every other while 
each worked in the unison of a disciplined body. 
That aberration I have dealt with more than once 
upon former pages. The truth is that no nation on 
earth presents so many surprising exceptions to 


zee 



VARIOUS THEORIES 


283 


its general action as does this nation, and that no 
nation on earth, when it moves in one general 
direction, as it often does, is actuated by a common 
motive less conscious. We who stand outside the 
Jewish body may mark its cohesion, and will mark 
it, I hope, to its honour; but its own members 
complain rather of its lack of cohesion. I have 
heard them complain—I know not how often—of 
the way in which the wealthier Jews left their 
society for that of an alien body, sneered at the 
general body of Israel, and remained indifferent to 
the common cry of the race. It is this unconscious¬ 
ness in action, this frequent replacement of motive 
by instinct which accounts for what all observers 
have noticed, especially in times of persecution. I 
mean the bewilderment of the oppressed at the 
action of their oppressors. 

I remember once listening to a most eloquent 
speech delivered in the course of a debate in which, 
with that long recollection which is characteristic 
of his people, an Israelite passionately declaimed the 
gratitude of that people to St. Bernard who saved 
their remnant upon the Rhine from the popular 
fury. I remember also how another in a debate 
(for I have attended many such up and down the 
country and have heard from as many aspects as 
possible what the Jewish attitude towards us is) 
stated simply, in reply to my description of the 
Jewish financial position in this country after the 
Conquest: “ Your cathedral and your abbeys 

and even your castles were built with our money.” 
The phrase was significant of the way in which 
what the English community of the time regarded 
as a tolerated abuse, those fortunes which they 
never thought of as Jewish at all, but as moneys 



284 


THE JEWS 


temporarily unjustly wrung from the people at 
large, were regarded in contemporary Jewry as 
private property legitimately acquired, held in full 
possession. 

I could wish in this connection that some learned 
Jew would produce a History of Europe from the 
point of view of his people: a short textbook, I 
mean, intended for our consumption; to show us 
ourselves from a standpoint very different from our 
own. It may be that such a book exists. I am 
certain it would be more useful than those indirect 
attacks (for they are attacks) upon the Christian 
tradition which pretend to a spirit of impartiality 
but are none the less hostile to that tradition in 
every line. I would much rather read the story 
of Europe as it was seen by a practising Jewish 
scholar than a so-called impartial and agnostic 
account which grotesquely represents the Church 
as something external to the body of Europe and 
even inimical to it. 

In this connection also we should have (what now 
we lack), and that is a conspectus of the Jewish 
action over Christendom and Islam combined. 
We are aware of the tolerance, or rather favour, 
displayed to their Jewish subjects by the Moham¬ 
medans of Spain. It was neither universal nor 
continuous. What we do not sufficiently hear, 
what we have to piece together from chance 
allusions, is the connection between the Moorish 
Jews, before and during the Reconquista, and their 
fellows to the north. 

Before I leave these cursory and sporadic notes 
on what I have called the “theories” upon our 
problem, I should mention one which would unhap¬ 
pily seem to have acquired widespread support 



VARIOUS THEORIES 


285 


to-day and which is surely the least satisfactory of 
all—even less satisfactory than the now dying 
fiction which pretended that the Jewish nation 
was not present in our midst, but consisted only 
of a mass of individuals already absorbed by their 
alien surroundings. I mean the theory that it is 
possible to continue in a sort of simmering atmo¬ 
sphere of partial repression, with the Jew treated 
as something alien and hostile, yet his presence 
unceasingly tolerated. That would seem to be 
the imperfect conclusion implied, if not stated, in 
a hundred modem pamphlets and discussions, the 
authors of which repudiate the name of Anti- 
Semite though they sympathize apparently with 
action even less logical than the politics of the 
Anti- Semite. There is no such equilibrium possible, 
even if its establishment were as moral as it is in 
fact immoral. If a frank solution be not found, 
nothing firm can be established. All we shall be 
establishing will be a violent and successive fluctua¬ 
tion. It is impossible to maintain an attitude 
permanently hostile to one’s neighbour, yet count 
on that hostility remaining permanently repressed. 
You fall inevitably along the slope of such a ten¬ 
dency into those excesses which it should be our 
whole object to condemn, to foresee and to prevent. 

You cannot continue, as so many modern men 
seem, from their conversation, to wish, with political 
equality on the one side and a living spirit of enmity 
upon the other. You cannot get peace by giving 
a mere legal definition to the status of a minority, 
which is also necessarily your neighbour, and 
refusing a social action consonant with the legal 
definition. If you try to do that you are trying 
to do two things, one of which will destroy the 



286 


THE JEWS 


otter. No one can doubt which will be victorious 
in a conflict between a living sentient motive and 
a mere definition in public law. 

One attitude towards the question which I have 
heard fairly often in the mouths of Jews and seen 
in their writings is something like this: “ Our 
affairs have nothing to do with people outside our 
nation. This discussion of what you call ‘ the 
Jewish problem ’ is an impertinence upon your 
part. There is a Jewish problem indeed, but it is a 
domestic problem, and we request you (with some 
asperity) to mind your own business.” 

If this attitude were sound, the search for what 
I have called a solution, though it might satisfy 
the intelligence, would be a breach of civic morals. 
In the same way it would be a breach of civic 
morals for me to work out a solution for the quarrel 
between Mr. Jones and his mother-in-law, neither 
of whom I have ever met and with whom I have no 
relations, and then to press this solution upon the 
contending parties. But the flaw in this attitude 
is that the problem is essentially one involving two 
parties, the Jews and the non-Jews. The problem 
we are attempting to solve is a problem expressed 
in terms of both. Some would even say that there 
is hardly a domestic question within the Jewish 
nation which does not have its reaction upon 
society outside it, and which it is not the business of 
that society outside to inquire into. That would 
be pressing things rather far. But the main 
problem is intimately concerned with both parties 
and as much with the one as with the other. It is 
true, indeed, that the consequences of a false solu¬ 
tion, or of shirking the solution altogether, would 
be more acute for the Jew than for us; but we 



VARIOUS THEORIES 


287 


should both suffer, and even on our side the suffering 
would be grievous. 

Even if there were no question of suffering in 
the ordinary sense of the term, there would still be 
the question of justice. The Jews who resent a 
statement of the problem and an attempt at solving 
it are not doing their own people any good and are 
at the same time denying us the right of putting 
our own affairs in order, which denial is, of course, 
intolerable: for the position of the Jews in our great 
States and in Islamic society is something which 
those States and that society have to determine. 
They cannot leave it in the air. To some conclusion 
they must come, and soon, and on the nature of 
that conclusion depends their peace. 

Two theories, proceeding from very different 
states of mind, the opposite each of the other, but 
each exclusive of any solution, spring from the root 
idea that there is something inexorably malignant 
in the relations between the Jew and his surround¬ 
ings. In the one form this takes the shape of 
affirming that the unfortunate Jew is invariably 
ill-treated by his wicked hosts and always will be 
so ill-treated. In the other it takes the form of 
saying that the wicked Jew will always be con¬ 
spiring and trying to hurt his good, kind hosts and 
always will be so conspiring. In either case it is 
no good trying to find a solution, for it is affirmed 
that the quarrel is in the nature of things. People 
will say to one, “ Why attempt to change something 
which cannot be changed ? Why talk of your 
material as something other than what it is ? 
Cats will always quarrel with dogs, and if you 
want to avoid a quarrel the only thing to do is to 
keep the dogs and cats of your household apart.” 



288 


THE JEWS 


It is precisely because I do not believe either 
form of this idea to be true that I have sought for a 
solution. I do not believe either form of doctrine 
to be true because the evidence is against it. That 
evidence is to my hand and can be examined by 
my own unaided powers, as it can be examined 
by any other person in our modern society. I 
cannot recollect one single case in all the hundreds 
of Jews I have come across—not one in the score 
whom I can count as intimates—who showed any 
sign of this malignant hatred. I have heard many 
outbursts of exasperation which, when we think of 
the past, are natural enough; but of some persis¬ 
tent and evil desire to hurt those among whom they 
live, some instinctive desire unconnected with past 
suffering, and acting as a sort of instinct, I have 
seen no trace. If such were to be discovered in 
some exceptional Jew out of a large acquaintance I 
should conclude that it might be true of a small 
minority, but common sense and common experience 
are sufficient to show that it does not affect the 
mass. 

Of the causes of friction, even of acute friction, 
which I have enumerated in former pages, there is 
the habit of secrecy, there is the mutual contempt, 
arising in each from a sense of superiority over the 
other; there is the quarrel between what is national 
and what is international, between what is of us 
and what is alien. There are, in a word, plenty of 
elements suggesting accidental antagonism, but of 
intrinsic antagonism there is no evidence—there is 
no evidence, I mean, that the Jews would still 
desire to destroy a society in which they found 
themselves at their ease. 

And, if we examine ourselves, we shall be equally 



VARIOUS THEORIES 


289 


convinced that there is no corresponding desire 
upon our side to do a wrong to the Jew. We also are 
exasperated by the memory of insult in moments 
of quarrel, of international action opposing our 
national interests and of friction between what is 
native and what is alien; but that is a very different 
thing from permanent and necessary antagonism. 
I know very well what is called “ modern thought ” 
gives to the unconscious part of man a large place 
and reduces, as much as it can, the field of reason. 
I cannot agree with it. It seems to me that man 
is essentially rational; and his political relations 
can be arranged consonantly with his conscious 
morals and his conscious logic. 

At any rate, if they cannot, there is an end of 
all statesmanship and of all useful political action 
even in details. 

Next, there are the two converse attitudes 
towards the question which certainly are affecting, 
the one an increasing audience upon our side and 
the other perhaps an interested though but secret 
audience upon the other; I mean those two con¬ 
verse theories whereby, on the one side, there is the 
Messianic idea of the Jew ultimately controlling 
the world, on the other an extreme dread of that 
idea and a belief that it is being actively pursued 
to the destruction of our institutions and religion. 

I can understand that, with the traditions of 
his race behind him and with the tone of their 
sacred writings in his ears, a Jew should lean in 
some degree to such a conception, or at any rate 
that some Jews should lean towards it. Certainly 
in face of the ridiculously exaggerated power of 
the Jews in recent times (it is now declining, for 
secrecy was of its essence and it has now been 

u 




290 


THE JEWS 


brought into the arena of open discussion) it was 
natural that men should fall into the exaggeration 
of panic. They saw the Jew, a tiny fraction of most 
communities, not more than a twentieth of any 
community, exercising a power quite out of pro¬ 
portion to his numbers or, indeed, to his ability; 
and they saw that power directed towards ends 
which were Jewish ends and therefore hostile or 
indifferent to the rest of mankind. But my 
reason for rejecting not only exaggerations of this 
idea but its fundamental implication is that it 
seems to me practically impossible. It connotes 
abilities upon the Jewish side, a continuous will 
upon the Jewish side, both of which are obviously 
absent. And you have only to look at history 
to see that long before things come to anything 
like a struggle for supremacy it is the Jew who 
suffers most from the suspicion of holding such a 
design, not we. Indeed, that is one of the important 
elements in the dangerous situation which has 
been created to-day. 

That large and greatly increasing body of men 
who so fear Jewish domination, and are vigorously 
reacting against the Jews under the influence 
of that fear, are much more likely to end with 
injustice to the Jew than with subservience to 
him. It is from this atmosphere that the great 
misfortunes of the past have arisen. It is of the 
essence of any solution that this mood should be 
exorcised upon the one side as upon the other. 

There is another theory which I have read of in 
more than one learned Jewish treatise and which 
has been repeated (after Jewish authors themselves 
had launched it) by many non-Jewish societies and 
historians, to the effect that the very survival of 



VARIOUS THEORIES 


291 


the Jews, their very existence as a separate com¬ 
munity, was due to conditions common in the past, 
now disappeared, and that therefore the present 
difficulties can safely be left to time. 

This is, of course, to make the general assertion 
that the Jewish race can be absorbed, and that 
absorption is the solution. That conclusion I 
summarily rejected in the earlier pages of this book 
on the historical ground that it has had the most 
favourable circumstances for success and yet has 
always failed. But in the particular case stated 
it has an argument of its own and one needing 
very special examination: it is this:— 

Those who defend this theory tell us that however 
favourable the opportunities for absorption were in 
the past they are nothing to the opportunities of 
the present and the future, and that therefore the 
argument from history fails. In the past (they 
tell us) the Jews were exclusive and even made of 
their exclusiveness a religion. They on their side 
mixed as little as possible with the world around 
them and we on our side maintained that exclusion 
by an equal insistence upon the difference between 
ourselves and them. We had in those days, it is 
maintained, a religion based upon the Incarnation 
and therefore abhorrent to the Jew; that religion 
is dead or dying, and with it the tendency to exclu¬ 
sion from outside has disappeared; while on the 
Jewish side there is also a great weakening of the 
old religious bond, less of the old Messianic dogma, 
and on both sides the enormous melting-pot 1 that 
makes for absorption with an intensity and rapidity 

1 I borrow the metaphor from Mr. Zangwill, who applied 
it to New York particularly. I apply it to the whole modem 
industrial world. 

u* 



292 


THE JEWS 


quite unknown in the past. It was one thing to 
absorb the Jew when it took a month to go as an 
ordinary traveller from London to Rome, it is 
another thing when it takes three days. It was 
one thing to absorb the Jew when in the greater 
part of eases there was a bar to the mixing of the 
races, based upon the nerves of religion, it is quite 
another thing to absorb the Jew when those most 
powerful of emotional forces have disappeared— 
and so forth. 

Now the reasons which bring me to reject this 
theory are two-fold. 

In the first place, I think it exaggerates the 
contrast between the past and the present. In the 
second place, I know that in the actual world before 
me and precisely under those conditions where the 
fusion, the action of the “ melting-pot,” ought to 
be most complete, the most violent reaction against 
absorption is to be observed. 

As to the contrast between the past and the 
present, I think it is based upon an imperfect 
apprehension of what our past has been. It comes 
of that “telescoping up” of history to which I 
alluded in another connection in my second chapter. 

The long story of our race between the Roman 
occupation of Judsea and the modern local and 
ephemeral industrial phase of the great modern 
towns is not divided into two chapters, the strange 
past and the comprehensible present. It is much 
of a muchness. The constant developments which 
astonish us to-day in physical science, for instance, 
are not more remarkable than the vast new develop¬ 
ments in architecture and philosophy which marked 
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The dis¬ 
turbance of thought which may be called “ modern 



VARIOUS THEORIES 


293 


scepticism” is not anything like so important 
a spiritual change as that tremendous revolution 
which we call the conversion of the Roman Empire. 
The area of scepticism is not larger to-day than it 
has been in many special periods of the past. The 
feeling of strong religious emotion which forbids 
this or that action is still present among us, some¬ 
times attached to its older objects, sometimes (as 
in the craze for prohibition) to some novel object. 
The indifference which you will find to the parti¬ 
cular religious barrier between Jew and non-Jew 
is not peculiar to our times. It has come and gone 
in the past; after a wave of such indifference you 
have had a wave of the most acute reaction, and I 
think you are observing a wave of such reaction 
to-day. 

Nor do I see how the rapidity of mere physical 
communications affects the matter, nor even how 
the volume of emigration affects the matter. You 
can get a million Jews from Lithuania to New 
York—a distance of 5,000 miles—in less time than 
you could get a million Jews from the Valley of 
the Rhine mto Poland some centuries ago; but 
the million Jews seem to remain Jews just the 
same under modern conditions as they did in the 
past. Indeed, the toleration of Jews, the friendly 
reception of them, and therefore the opportunities 
for their absorption were indefinitely greater in 
mediaeval Poland than they are in modern America. 
It seems to me that the whole of this part of the 
argument is based upon that prevalent view of 
history which comes from reading our little modern 
text-books: and our little modern text-books are 
very rubbishy. It is a view which comes from 
that absurd emphasis upon whatever is contempo- 



294 


THE JEWS 


rary. The modern advance of physical science is 
regarded as having totally changed the world 
inwardly as well as outwardly. We have only to 
look at the modern world and to compare it with 
any two distant, special periods we know, to 
discover that the difference between any pair of 
these three is equally striking. In many ways 
the modern world is much more like the world 
of the Antonines than it is like the world of Innocent 
the Great. In many ways the world of Innocent 
the Great is much more like the Roman Empire 
than the modern world. In many ways the world 
of Innocent the Great and our world have more 
in common than either has with the pagan Roman 
Empire. The general lesson is, therefore, that our 
time, with all its remarkable specialities, is but one 
specimen out of a great number equally individual, 
and certainly there is nothing in it either of religious 
scepticism breaking down old religious barriers or 
of rapidity of communication, or of any other 
fundamental factor, which specially suggests the 
absorption of the Jew. 

For instance, the Jews mixed much more readily, 
on a much more equal footing and with far less 
friction among the Mohammedans at particular 
periods during the Islamic occupation of Spain 
than they do even in England to-day. Yet they 
were not absorbed there, any more than they were 
absorbed in Poland. They were not absorbed 
into that older, tolerant, very denationalized pagan 
Roman world where they so often had full civic 
rights and where they even manipulated, as they 
manipulate to-day, the finances of the community. 

As for the decay of exclusiveness on their part, I 
see no sign of it. For this exclusiveness proceeds 



VARIOUS THEORIES 


295 


not so much from a particular observance which 
may relax at one period and tighten up at another, 
as from an invariable national tradition which 
fluctuates in intensity but never sinks so low as 
to jeopardize the continuance of the people. 

If we turn from argument to observation, the 
falsity of the theory stares us in the face. We 
have but to take one point, where the metaphor 
of the “ melting-pot” most applies (and to which 
it was originally applied), the city of New York. 
What has been the effect of this great influx of 
Jews into New York, this turning of New York 
into a city a third Jewish under our eyes and in 
so short a space of time ? As we all know, the 
effect has been the uprising, in that once indifferent 
atmosphere, of such a feeling against the Jews as 
would appal us did we see it in the Old World. 
It is red hot. It is an intense reaction expressing 
itself with greater and greater violence every day; 
and the spirit of that reaction cannot be better 
expressed than in a phrase which we owe, I think, 
to Mr. Ford and his famous propaganda against 
the Jews, through his paper the “ Dearborn Inde¬ 
pendent.” ;! It is all very well to talk of the melting- 
pot,” says he, “but so far from the Jews melting 
in that pot, it looks as though they wanted to melt 
the pot itself. ” 

There you have, in New York, if anywhere, an 
opportunity for the theory of absorption to prove 
itself. You have present in the field a score of 
different races, including great masses of a race 
so utterly different from ours as the negro. You 
have a certain small proportion of Chinamen and 
you have of European stocks an indefinite variety 
—most of them in large numbers. You have not 



296 


THE JEWS 


only in local establishments or even only in civic 
theory, but in actual practice—in enthusiastic 
practice—a complete equality and a positive pride 
in the reception of no matter what elements of 
immi gration, in the certitude that all can rapidly 
be moulded into the American form. Most of these 
elements were absorbed, and absorbed rapidly; 
where they were not absorbed there was at least 
peace between them. Then arrives the Jew and 
a totally new situation at once appears. A situa¬ 
tion of challenge, of provocation, of admitted 
exclusion, of violent debate and even of clamour: 
but no sign of absorption. In presence of all the 
elements that should make for absorption, difference 
and hatred between Jew and non-Jew is growing 
in New York with the vitality of a tropical plant. 

There is yet another theory which, if it were not 
widely held and if it had not been advanced by 
so many Jews themselves, I should leave aside as 
something comic, something unfit for serious dis¬ 
cussion. But it has been advanced and it must be 
met. It is no less than the theory that there are 
no such people as the Jews, that the whole thing 
is illusion. 

This monstrous affirmation is based, I need 
hardly say, upon what is called a “ scientific ” 
examination of the affair: for that word “ scientific ” 
has come to be associated with every kind of 
unreason. Men, especially Jewish men, have been 
found to affirm most solemnly that they had 
measured skulls, taken sections of hair, catalogued 
the colours of eyes, established facial angles, ana¬ 
lysed blood, and applied I know not how many other 
tricks, with the result that no Jewish type could 
be discovered! People who can reason thus do 



VARIOUS THEORIES 297 

not seem to appreciate the fundamental quarrel 
between nominalism and realism, or to have heard 
of the old philosophic joke on the definition of 
“ a thing.” 

We know a horse to be a horse, an apple to be 
an apple, a Chinaman to be a Chinaman, or a Jew 
to be a Jew by some process on which philosophers 
can debate, but upon the virtue of which no sane 
man doubts and upon the right action of which 
we base all our lives. The chemist may tell me that 
the chemical analysis of a lump of coal gives the 
same result as the chemical analysis of a diamond, 
to which any man capable of using his reason at 
all will reply that upon a very large number of 
other lines of analysis, colour, touch, combustibility, 
hardness and softness, economic value, prevalence 
(and so on indefinitely), the two are not the same. 
No analysis is complete, and if we had made no 
conscious analysis at all, we could still perceive 
at once that a lump of coal is not a diamond. 

It is just the same with these pseudo-scientific 
attempts to disprove obvious truth. They pullu¬ 
late and they are all equally ridiculous because 
they deduce from insufficient data. The existence 
and differentiation of the Jewish people as a race 
ethnically and as a nation politically is as much 
a fact as the existence of coal or diamonds. They 
are a nation politically because they act as a nation, 
because their individual members feel and exercise 
a corporate function. We know them to be a 
separate race because we can see that they are. 
When you meet a Jew, whether you are his enemy 
or his friend, you meet a Jew. He has a certain 
expression, a certain manner, certain physical 
characteristics which you may not be able to analyse 



298 


THE JEWS 


at the moment you see him, but which give you the 
impression and the certitude that you are dealing 
with a particular thing, to wit, the Jewish race. 
It is true, of course, that the type, like all general 
types, fades off at the edges, and there will always 
be cases where you may be in doubt of whether 
you are dealing with a Jew or with a non-Jew, 
but there is a marked central type round which 
the Jewish racial type is built up. That is as 
certain as that there is a Mongolian type, or a 
negroid type, and so forth. 

I do not take the objection very seriously. I 
only note it because it has been made, and may 
crop up in the course of any discussion on this 
grave political issue. 






CHAPTER XV 


HABIT OR LAW ? 

Ip it be true that the friction between the Jew and 
the civilization in which he lives is aggravated by 
his habit of secrecy and by our disingenuousness, 
by his expression of a sense of superiority which 
galls us, and on our side by a lack of charity and 
of intelligence in dealing with him, it would follow 
that no solution can be more than approximate: 
that whatever arrangement be come to the con¬ 
trast will remain, and with it a certain latent 
friction, which always accompanies contrast. 

But there is between a simmering of that kind 
and the active boiling of the question to-day (with 
the threat of its boiling over) all the difference in 
the world. But even though the solution be imper¬ 
fect, it might be reasonably stable: we might at 
least have peace, though not friendship. It further 
follows from the elements of the problem that the 
solution lies along the lines of either party modify¬ 
ing whatever in its action is an irritant to the other; 
whatever, that is, can be modified by the will, and 
is not mixed up with something ineradicable. 

The Jew cannot help feeling superior, but he 
can help the expression of that superiority—at any 
rate he can modify such expression. He can cer¬ 
tainly, though it be at a great expense of tradition 

301 


302 


THE JEWS 


and habit, get rid of that pestilent pseudo-defence 
of secrecy which poisons all the relations between 
him and ourselves. We on our side can drop what 
is the converse of that secrecy, the disingenuousness, 
the lack of candour, into which we are fallen in 
our relations with the Jew. That cannot but mean 
a great breach with our tradition and with habit 
also, but the advantage is worth the sacrifice. We 
can (it must be the work of each individual, it 
cannot be a corporate work) approach the Jew with 
more respect and yet with more frequency. We 
can, I think, advance by many degrees from the 
lack of charity we now show, even if we despair of 
living in real intimacy with a people so different in 
their deepest qualities from ourselves. 

Personally, I am not sure that such closer 
intimacy might not be established; I have never 
found any difficulty in reaching and retaining 
intimate acquaintance with the Jews of my own 
circle—but I may have been fortunate. I know 
that with most of my fellows it is not so, and per¬ 
haps the Jew will always remain to the mass of 
those about him something strange and unapproach¬ 
able, and I fear, repulsive. But there is no reason, 
why we should mix with that hesitation in our 
relations an element of indifference, still less of 
contempt, still less, again, of cruelty. 

I repeat the formula for a solution: it is 
recognition and respect. 

Recognition is here no more than the telling of 
the truth: there is a Jewish nation. Jews are 
citizens of that nation; and recognition means not 
only the telling of this truth on special occasions 
but the use of it as a regular habit in our relations 
on both sides. 



HABIT OR LAW? 


303 


This statement is, upon any just analysis of the 
Jewish question, so obvious and so simple, that it 
needs neither insistence upon it nor development. 
Its plain statement is sufficient. But there attaches 
to a solution so determined a much more active 
and complicated question, upon the uncertainty 
of which not only this reform but many another 
has made shipwreck. The question must be 
answered rightly, because, if we answer it wrongly, 
the whole scheme fails. 

The question is this: Should the social habit, 
the general method in writing and speaking and in 
all relations, precede in this case the institutional 
action, legal changes, constitutional definitions? 
Or should the legal changes, the new institutions, 
the constitutional definitions come first ? 

To decide rightly is of great moment, for this 
reason, that a wrong decision may destroy all the 
effect of goodwill. 

In my judgment the wrong decision would be 
that which would give precedence to legal change, 
to new definitions, to new institutions, and attempt 
out of them to build a new spirit. I take it that 
this reversal of the true order would make all 
stable peace impossible. 

It must be admitted, of course, that changes 
suggested by the Jews themselves, the development 
of their own institutions, a voluntary segregation of 
their community in other fields than those in which 
they have already effected that segregation, stand 
in another category. These new and definitely 
Jewish institutions we should always welcome. 
But the attempt at framing public regulations, 
which are to defend the community as a whole 
against an alien minority, when that minority must 



304 


THE JEWS 


live with one permanently and as a regular feature 
of the life of the community, invariably tends to 
oppression, if such regulations are made the first 
steps in a settlement instead of being left, as they 
should be, to the last. Any separatist legislation 
should arise naturally out of a long practice and 
full recognition of the Jews as a separate people 
and of the accompaniment of that recognition with 
respect. If the advance is made on our side, the 
Jew may refuse any such bargain. He may dig 
his heels in and insist, as many another privileged 
class has insisted before him, that he will continue 
to enjoy all that he has ever enjoyed, that he will 
continue his demand for a dual allegiance, that he 
will insist on the very fullest recognition as a Jew, 
and at the same time on what is fatal to such 
recognition, the fullest recognition as a member of 
our own community. 

If he does that (and there are those who tell us 
he will certainly do so, and will refuse all reform), 
then the community will be compelled to legislate 
in spite of him. It will be perilous for him and 
for us; it may even be the beginning of grievous 
trouble for both, but it will be inevitable. It will 
appear in a mass of legislation all over Europe, 
which will affect this country with the rest. 

The present situation cannot last indefinitely. 
It is already uncertain even here, in England; it 
has reached further stages on the road to ruin 
elsewhere. But if the Jew sees the peril in time, 
and appreciates the nature of that change, the 
beginnings of which we have all seen and which is 
proceeding at so great a pace, then relations can 
be established out of which (later) formal rules, 
acceptable to both parties, should proceed. And in 



HABIT OR LAW? 


305 


that case it would be, I repeat, the gravest of errors 
to initiate new positive laws and a new status 
before a foundation had been prepared by the 
re-establishment of honest relations; and that can 
only be done by a frank admission of reality, by 
the open and continual admission everywhere 
that Israel is a nation apart, is not, and cannot 
be, of us, and shall not be confounded with our¬ 
selves. 

There is great temptation to delay, because the 
acuteness of the problem is not felt here as yet, 
among the well-to-do, and still more because it 
differs in different communities. The peril seems 
still far distant from us, though it may be at the 
very door of our neighbours. Routine, the inherit¬ 
ance of the immediate past, the false security 
produced by the conventions of that past, may well 
tempt those who dislike the effort of a change to 
shirk that change. But I would ask any intelligent 
and thoughtful Jew who still thinks he can rely 
upon the false position of the nineteenth century 
whether the same forces are there to support him 
to-day as were present then ? 

Take a particular example. In Poland and in 
Roumania the old fiction has been temporarily im¬ 
posed by force. The Jew, who in both these countries 
is felt to be more alien than any other foreign 
European could be, is imposed upon the Govern¬ 
ment and society of each country by the Western 
Governments as a full citizen. The strain here is 
immensely aggravated because it arose not from the 
nature of society but from the action of outsiders; 
the English, the French, the American Govern¬ 
ments 51 (but "particularly the American and the 
English) have erected in Eastern Europe this 



306 


THE JEWS 


unstable, unjust and artificial state of affairs. 
It cannot last, for it is unreal. 

The communities in question may make no laws 
which recognize the Jew; alternatively, the door 
is open for oppression: and the moment the hated 
foreign interference weakens, oppression will come. 

Well, when under the pressure of a real 
social difficulty and a crucial one, the unreal settle¬ 
ment is torn up, by the passing of new laws 
recognizing the Jew (but harshly, and under no 
agreement with him) or by actual hostility, does 
the Jew in his heart of hearts think that he would 
have the same support from the West now as he 
would have had thirty years ago ? He knows very 
well he would not. 

Thirty years ago you would have got from all 
the traditional Liberalism of France, from the 
great bulk of its governing class and the whole of 
its academic organization, from what was then the 
solid and still respected body of old Republicans, 
an immediate answer to the Jewish appeal. In 
England that answer would have been unanimous 
and enthusiastic. You would have had torrents 
of leading articles, great public meetings, Cabinet 
Ministers speechifying all over the place in the 
sacred cause of toleration. Every one knows that 
to-day the appeal of the Eastern Jews, though it 
might still be supported officially, would be received 
by the public with indifference. Ten years hence 
it may be received with derision. 

Or take another example. Let us suppose—it 
is highly probable—that the Zionist experiment 
breaks down, th#t Englishmen refuse to have their 
soldiers’ lives risked in a quarrel which is not their 
own and refuse to support out of their inordinate 



HABIT OR LAW? 


307 


taxation a top-heavy colony which gives them 
no advantage and concerns them not at all. On 
the breakdown of that experiment, should it come 
soon, would there still be the support for its re¬ 
establishment that you would have had even ten 
years ago ? There certainly would not. Ten 
years hence it is probable enough that you would 
get, not indifference to such re-establishment, but 
the most active hostility. All over the world the 
stream has turned in the same direction. 

Unfortunately the effect of that change has been 
to excite hatred rather than a desire for a settle¬ 
ment and to move men towards blind action rather 
than towards a reasoned examination of the diffi¬ 
culty. That is why the thing seems to me urgent, 
although there are still large areas of Western society 
in which its urgency is masked and half forgotten. 

When I say “ urgent ” I mean that this my 
essay, which is to-day still to the point, and the 
solution recommended in which is still feasible, 
may very well, within the lifetime of its writer, 
become old-fashioned out of all recognition. The 
peaceful settlement here proposed with deliberate 
vagueness and softness of outline may seem in a few 
years as out of date, as unreal through the interven¬ 
ing change, as do to-day the old tags about the 
purity of parliamentary life and the seriousness 
of party politics. 

My solution may appear at the end of this genera¬ 
tion as mildly inapplicable to the acute situation 
then arisen between the Jews and ourselves as 
appear to-day the old debates on the very tentative 
demand for Home Rule in the ’ 80 ’s. Let us act 
as soon as possible and settle the thing while there 
is yet time. For in the swirl and rapids of the 



308 


THE JEWS 


modem world, which grow not less as towards 
a calm, but more intense as towards a cataract, 
every great debate takes on with every year 
a stronger form, a nearer approach to conflict; 
and none more than the immemorial debate, still 
unconcluded, between Islam and Christendom and 
the Beni-Israel. 

But for my part, I say, “ Peace be to Israel.” 


Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner, Frome and London. 





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Belloc, Hilaire, 

The Jews 











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