CONCERNING THE JEWS
“I hear you are going to Georgia,” said Mr. Macdonald to me as we
sipped our coffee in the hotel breakfast room one morning in Geneva.
I had heard nothing about an expedition to Georgia and expressed my
surprise. “Well, I happen to know that arrangements are on foot for
a delegation from the Second International to visit that country and
that we shall be amongst those invited to go. Will you accept?” he
continued, lighting his pipe and rising to go.
My first impulse was to say no. I had been home from Russia barely four
months. Anything remotely connected with the Russia I had seen had not
the faintest attraction for me, and the Caucasus was only recently
a part of the great Russian Empire, and enjoyed an independence of
doubtful quality and stability. Apart from all that, the journey was
frightening, not because of its dangers, which were real but not known,
but because of its fatigues, which were numerous and foreseen.
When Tseretelli, the handsome and distinguished Georgian who represents
his country in Paris so ably, and whose revolutionary career during the
old regime in Russia included several years of solitary confinement,
approached me with a cordial invitation to visit his country, instead
of refusing I took a day on the hills on the French side of Geneva to
think about it and promised a definite answer on the following day.
A Polish fellow-delegate, K. Czapsritski, came with me, and I told him
of the scheme. He neither spoke nor understood English, and my German
was negligible; but we contrived to understand each other in a curious
mixture of French and German. When I spoke of the Georgian enterprise
he waxed suddenly warm and eloquent.
“Why don’t you come to Poland, comrade? You go everywhere--to
Petrograd, Moscow, Berlin, Vienna, Paris, Geneva, but never to Warsaw
or Cracow. Why not? We need you in Poland more than they need you in
Tiflis. Surely Poland has as good a claim as Georgia?” I had praised
the hills by which we were surrounded. “We have beautiful mountains in
Poland, far more beautiful than these,” he said, waving his arm in the
direction of the Alps, shimmering in the mists of a summer morning.
“Our mountains are wild and solemn. And very, very beautiful”--his
voice grew tender. “Come to Poland and read Heine in the Polish hills.”
I had brought a copy of Heine’s shorter poems with me, and we had read
them together at a wayside inn where we called for coffee. I shall
remember that little inn for another reason, not so happy. The last
time I saw my friend Mary MacArthur in the flesh was when she flashed
past that tiny inn in her automobile, on her way to Italy in a restless
search for health, never found.
“But the Labour Party has already sent a delegation to Poland along
with other Socialist nationals, Mr. Tom Shaw, M.P.----”
“Yes, yes,” he interrupted, “it is true. But we want more to come. We
want a woman to come. We should like you to come. Our condition is very
bad. We need help and we need understanding. We think the world does
not like us very much.”
“But why do you say that? Some of us are inclined to think that Poland
is the spoilt darling of the Entente. Surely France, at least, likes
you very much!” I said, with a quizzical look at his dark, rather heavy
good-natured Jewish face. He appeared to be a well-educated specimen
of his race with the broad forehead and developed cranium of so many
intellectual Jews. He was certainly very widely read in Polish, French
and German literature.
“But perhaps you fear the Bolsheviks?” I ventured, inquiringly. “I
gather from the newspapers that Trotsky’s generals are massing their
troops for a triumphal entry into Warsaw.”
“Trotsky will never enter Warsaw,” said my colleague confidently. “I
do not believe we have anything to fear from the Bolsheviks. There are
very few of them in Poland, practically none amongst the peasants; and
the Socialists of the towns are very largely Social Democrats.”
“But your fellow-countrymen in this city, to whom I spoke last night,
do not think with you on this matter”--and I mentioned the names of
a group of Polish exiles in Geneva whose chief preoccupation of mind
was the almost certainty that Poland was about to be overrun by the
armies of Russia. “They are very nervous and anxious. They imagine that
British Labour has more power than it really has, and are trying to
get permission from the French Government to travel by Paris to London
in order to interest the British working-class leaders in their side
of the story. And they are quite right,” I added, “for Labour will one
day be all-powerful in England, and at the present moment the British
Labour Movement is convinced, rightly or wrongly, that the heavier
share of the blame for this fighting belongs to the Poles. They believe
the Poles began it by attacking the Russians.”
I made this statement to M. Gavronsky of the Polish Legation in
Switzerland, and he promptly retorted that it was not true.
“But it is not enough that I go home and say to British Labour that it
is not true the Poles began it. I must have positive proof of this if I
am to do you any good.”
“Well, I can give it to you,” said M. Gavronsky. “But I should like to
go to London myself and give it to the Labour leaders personally. It
is, of course, very difficult to apportion the blame in any conflict,
to say who began it and when it began. The raids upon the homes of
the Polish peasants by the ravenous Russian troops, who stole all the
food and clothing they could lay their hands on, burnt the farms where
there was any show of resistance, and ill treated the women were the
beginning of the trouble. Very properly the peasants hit back when
they could. If your people call this resistance to Bolshevik violence
beginning the war, there is nothing more to be said. But I don’t. I
admire them for it. What do you suppose Englishmen would have done in
the same place? The same thing, of course. I have lived in England. I
know them. But”--and here he sprang to his feet and began pacing up and
down the room, his handsome face distorted with rage--“the most awful
thing these damned Bolsheviks have done is the ill treatment of our
prisoners. The brutes have sent Polish officers back to their camps
mutilated in the most horrible fashion. That we shall never forget nor
forgive.”
To what extent these charges and counter-charges of horrible atrocities
are true I am not able to say. They are made by every army in Europe
against its enemies. I can speak with definiteness only of those things
I have seen, and with confidence only of what I have heard from those
witnesses whose calm and dispassionate judgment and power to sift and
weigh evidence I know; whose cool blood gives their testimony a certain
value. But there was no doubt whatever in the mind of this ardent young
Polish patriot and supporter of Pilsudski that the most awful outrages
had been perpetrated upon Polish soldiers helpless in the hands of
their enemies.
M. Gavronsky is related to the great Polish family, the Radziwills.
Despite his aristocratic birth and connexions he is, I am convinced,
a man of genuinely democratic sympathies. He is very English in
appearance, tall and fair and fresh-complexioned. He speaks English
better than most Englishmen. He joins to a delightful boyishness and
engaging frankness the elegant manners of a finished specimen of our
race. At his request and that of his friends, I introduced him to Mr.
Sidney Webb and Mr. J. R. Macdonald, and left him to make upon these
two such impression as he could.
Soon after this the situation on the Russo-Polish front completely
changed, to the astonishment of the whole world. Warsaw forgot its
follies and rose like one man to resist the invaders. The failure of
supplies and the breakdown of discipline caused the Russian armies to
be driven back. Warsaw broke into a mad riot of joy. The restraining
influence of the Allies, whose experience of Russia had developed
a certain wisdom in them, saved the jubilant Poles from the stupid
blunder of a vindictive pursuit. Some sort of a peace treaty has been
patched up between them; but like every other peace treaty made during
the last two and a half years it is scarcely likely to prove worth the
paper it is written upon.
I asked my companion of the hills to tell me more about Poland.
“The trouble with you Poles is that you will not stop fighting. You
are everywhere looked upon as the _enfant terrible_ of Europe. Your
ridiculously disproportionate army of 600,000 men not only keeps your
naturally rich country poor, but is a disturbing factor to the whole
of Europe. Of course,” I said hastily, not wishing to hurt, “I know
quite well that, as a Social Democrat, you are personally hostile to
all militarist enterprises. I say what I have said because I am really
sorry for the unpopularity which Poland will bring upon herself when
it is discovered whose restlessness it is which is preventing Europe
from settling down. You are helping the opinion to grow that the
small nation is a big nuisance whatever may be said of the theory of
self-determination.” He grinned understandingly, and continued his
interesting talk.
Poland’s lot during these years of war has been a particularly sad one.
Her plight has at times been terrible. Her fields have been trampled
by three armies: the Russian Imperial, the Russian Bolshevik and the
German. Whole villages have been razed to the ground. People have
died by the roadside in tens of thousands, of hunger, cold and fever.
Flights of refugees and cruel evacuations have cost the country untold
lives. I was told by a British General, concerned himself with the
evacuation of one Polish city, a frightful story which he knew to be
true, and one of many equally horrible and equally true.
The weather was intensely cold with the unimaginable cold of Poland
in winter. Food was difficult to get and clothing almost impossible.
The evacuation was conducted on foot, in open carts without springs
or in slow railway trains without any heat. A young mother and father
with three small children were amongst the travellers in one of these
trains. The cold snow and bitter wind blew in through the broken
windows. The children sobbed with cold and hunger. As the train crawled
miserably on the sobs became pitiful moans for water. Soon the moans
of two of them stopped altogether. They were frozen dead to the seats!
The train stopped at a tiny station. To save the last child the frantic
mother leapt out of the train for water and, returning, had the agony
of seeing husband and child and corpses carried away from her by the
rapidly vanishing train. She shrieked aloud. They arrested her for
being without a passport. She was conveyed to the police station,
raving. Some days later she died, quite mad.
The soil of Poland is very rich. If her armies could be disbanded and
set to work upon the fields, Poland could very speedily feed not only
her own starving children but millions of other children also. When
one of the organizations for relief heard from the beautiful Princess
Sapieha the story of the appalling suffering of Poland’s children, the
wholly sympathetic committee, whilst promising help, felt bound to
point out that it was like pouring money into a sieve to send it to a
country for ever challenging the fortunes of war. It is, alas! French
policy which is responsible for the militarist spirit and the military
adventures of Poland. French officers train the regiments. French
soldiers fill the cafés and theatres. French promises keep the people
happy. It is the fashion now in Poland to worship the French and to
imitate them. But the day will come when Poland, along with the rest of
Europe, will discover to its infinite cost that the evil of militarism
is just as menacing and corroding to civilization when dressed in the
uniform of a French General as in that of a Prussian Guard.
* * * * *
Russia and Poland are popularly conceived to be the pivot and centre of
what is called the Jewish problem in Europe. The outrageous anti-Jewish
propaganda which is being conducted all over the world is a disgrace
to our modern civilization. There is a certain reasonable explanation
of it, so far as the people of Central Europe are concerned, in
the paralysing fear of Bolshevism which possesses them, invariably
associated with the Jews. It is astounding how many otherwise perfectly
intelligent human beings believe Bolshevism to be an emanation from
the Jewish brain. Trotsky is a Jew, Radek is a Jew, Zinoviev is a
Jew, Balabanova is a Jew, Bela Kun is a Jew, therefore all Jews are
Bolshevik and all Bolsheviks are Jews; which is absurd! As a matter
of fact, only two out of the seventeen or eighteen members of the
Bolshevik Cabinet at the time of the British Labour delegation’s visit
to Russia were Jews. The most commanding personality in Russia at this
hour is not a Jew. He is, if anything distinctive, a Tartar.
“I like your book ‘Through Bolshevik Russia’ very much indeed,” has
been said to me over and over again, “but you are too kind to the
Bolsheviks. Surely you are aware that the whole Russian business is
part of a Jewish conspiracy hatched in New York with the idea of
getting possession of the whole world, in order that the Jews may
be revenged upon mankind for the things they have suffered in every
country since the beginning of the Christian era?”
“Rubbish,” I have said with more force than politeness. “Surely you
know that nursery-maids since the beginning of time have frightened
little children with bogey stories of just this sort. Don’t be a
child”; this to a pale and agitated young man who accompanied me home
from one of my meetings, and scarcely knew how to contain himself for
horror of the thing he believed.
“But,” he continued excitedly, “there’s Trotsky in Russia, Bela Kun in
Hungary, Adler in Austria, Shinwell on the Clyde; there was Liebknecht
in Germany, Holst----”
“Stop, for Heaven’s sake!” I interrupted. “Before you go any farther
I want to tell you that I know personally both Shinwell and Adler.
Shinwell is no more a Bolshevik than you are. The biggest Bolshevik
in this country comes from South Wales, and he is made of lath and
plaster. A lion on the platform, he roars as gently as a sucking dove
when negotiating with the employers. You need have no fear of him.
I hear he has been found wanting by his fellow-Bolsheviks and his
resignation has been called for. As for Adler, he is one of the most
courageous of living men, and has saved Austria from the Bolshevism
that for a time captured Hungary. Liebknecht is not a Jew.”
“Well, you can’t deny that there are a million and a quarter Jews in
New York and that the East End of London is full of them.”
“But they are not necessarily Bolshevik,” I replied. “The rich Jew
is rarely, if ever, a Bolshevik. He is like the rich Gentile, he has
too much to lose. The rich Jew is not only an anti-Bolshevik; he is
sometimes anti-Jew! That is, he loses his sense of Jewish nationality
in his citizen’s pride in his adopted country.”
“Henry Ford doesn’t take so easy a view of it as you do. He is putting
up a great fight against the Jews in Detroit. What about Italy? What
about Ireland?”--here his voice fell to a fearful whisper--“Sinn Fein,
you understand? De Valera is a Portuguese Jew.”
“How do you know that?” I had heard this wild story before and had
made careful inquiries in Ireland. It was denied amidst shrieks of
hilarity. But if it were true it would have had no terrors for me.
“Lord Alfred Douglas----” he began; but I stopped him, tired of it all
at last.
“Then that is all?” I queried. “_Plain English_ and, it may be, the
_Morning Post_ is your authority for all this nonsense? Here is where
you forge your mighty weapons?” He nodded. “Well, I happen to like
the _Morning Post_. I like its brutalities. I admire its consistency.
It delivers frontal attacks upon its enemies. It makes no pretence of
friendship it does not feel. It is as full of vices as most newspapers,
but you know where you have it. There is no flirting with the thing
it hates. It is against every political principle I stand for; abuses
like a fishwife everything I cherish. It fills me with blind fury on
occasion. But it does not cook its news and--well, I like it. But
beware of its prejudices in estimating any cause it attacks.”
I paused to ponder whether the _Morning Post_ would welcome an
unsolicited testimonial of this particular sort, and then continued.
“Some newspapers and many men and women have certainly allowed their
judgment to be clouded by their prejudice over this question of
Bolshevism. To associate Communism with the Jews is also as serviceable
to their commercial jealousies as it is to their racial antagonisms.
And Bolshevism is only the inevitable throw-up of four years of the
most terrible war that ever was waged. I know people in Europe, men
of wide culture and of high social standing, who actually profess to
believe that it was not the German Kaiser, nor the Austrian Emperor,
nor the Junkers, nor the militarists, nor the capitalists, nor the
stupid, ignorant millions of deceived and tormented people who caused
the war. It was the Jews! The whole wicked business was conceived in
the Ghetto! Can raving anti-Semitism go farther?”
“But surely there must be something in it when such people as you
describe, men of good brain and fine character, hate the Jews? Why, the
whole world is beginning to be up in arms against them. The whole world
cannot be wrong. There is something in it.”
“There is exactly this much in it and no more,” I said, picking up a
notorious anti-Semitic journal and reading slowly, “‘De Valera’s mother
was an Irishwoman, and, _judging from the wonderful organizing ability
he possesses, his father must have been a Jew_!’ What do you think of
that for evidence? Judging from the wonderful organizing ability he
possesses Mr. Lloyd George’s father must have been a Jew; yet I am sure
he was a very much respected Welsh Nonconformist. Judging from the
wonderful organizing ability she possesses Miss Pankhurst’s father must
have been a Jew; yet I know he was a much esteemed Gentile lawyer of
Manchester. The thing is absurd.”
Prejudice was too strong. He left me, unconvinced. But it is simply
incredible how many sane people build up a case against a person or a
race on evidence as worthless as that which I have just quoted.
The Hungarian Communist Jew, Szamuely, has been proved to have been
guilty of frightful atrocities. It is alleged he killed for the joy
of killing. He hanged people with his own hand for the pleasure of
witnessing the better their dying agonies. He was a madman and a
pervert. He finally shot himself; but the Hungarian White Terror has
paid this pervert the compliment of imitating him. It has visited upon
thousands of miserable Jews of the poorer sort, innocent of crime,
the most hideous punishment for this madman’s deeds, and a campaign
against the whole Jewish race is employing certain Hungarians of my
acquaintance abroad in a manner highly destructive of their reputation
for sanity.
The popular argument against the Jew is one of crafty exploitation.
It runs something like this. The Jew shopkeeper charges extortionate
prices for his goods. He cruelly sweats his workpeople. He watches and
waits for the misfortunes of his neighbours to trap them into his power
by the offer of loans at extortionate rates of interest. They toil and
slave to be rid of their debt. They cannot shake it off. He exploits
them for life. He robs the heir of his patrimony and the children of
their bread. And all because he hates the Christian. He has even been
known to steal Christian children and sacrifice them at the Feast of
the Passover. The story is good enough to excite a pogrom anyhow!
I know of no more striking case than that of the Jews, and the things
which are said against them, illustrative of the fact that two and two
do not always make four. In other words, the fact is not always the
truth. It takes more than a statement of fact to make a statement of
truth. An unsympathetic statement of the strictest accuracy as to fact
may leave the same impression as the most calculated lie.
The fundamental facts of the controversy about the Jew are at
least two: Firstly, the success of the Jew is due to good habits
and an inherited gift of intellect. Secondly, the objectionable
characteristics of the Jew are the direct consequence of persecution.
Consider the circumstances of his life in those Central European
countries where Jews abound. The land system of Poland, for example,
is the fundamental cause of the misery, not only of the Jews, but of
the entire peasant population. A Galician village is ofttimes a very
nightmare of filth and poverty. The peasants have not the heart to
improve their lot. Improvements on their farms are not paid for. There
is no fixity of tenure. Rents are high, and are exacted with great
severity to supply the needs of gay landlords dancing in Paris or Rome.
* * * * *
Alcohol is a State monopoly in Poland. It used to be in Russia. It
is a valued source of revenue to many European Governments. Who is
to manage this highly important Government industry? The peasants
are slow, ignorant and unreliable. They drink heavily. The Jews do
not drink. A drunken Jew is a thing unknown. The very words are a
contradiction in terms. It is a temperate and sober race. The Jews must
manage the liquor shops. To the Jews are given a very large proportion
of these positions in the interests of the State, and not because of
any partiality to the Jew. The drink-shop in a village very naturally
becomes the village store. The Jew is the storekeeper.
“We had to cease giving soap to the peasants in Czecho-Slovakia,
although they needed it so badly, because they would sell it to the Jew
for vodka,” said the lovely Countess Dŏbrenszky.
“Why not prohibit the sale of vodka?” I suggested. She smiled and shook
her head. “It could never be done.”
As the servant of the State the Jew is expected to encourage the sale
of drink in those countries where it is a State monopoly, and it is
easy to see how everything else follows.
The second of the two bottom facts of the Jewish side of the
controversy is the undoubted hatred and envy by the Gentile of
the superior Jewish intelligence, particularly in commerce, but
as certainly in everything else. Nothing can keep the Jewish race
from excelling. Ages of ancient wrong could not do it. Present-day
oppression cannot do it. In some countries still the Jew is not allowed
to own land. In others, Rumania for example, he is not permitted to
enter the profession of lawyer, doctor, or teacher. In the old Russia
he might not go to the Universities. In Poland he can exempt himself
from army service and consequently is denied citizenship. Cruel as it
all seems, and is, there is an underlying instinct of self-preservation
at the foundation of it, for, given equal chances in the race of life,
the Jew will ofttimes leave the Gentile laggard far behind.
In the early ’forties an enterprising statesman of Vienna began to
train young Jews in journalism, and now all the important papers of
Vienna are run by Jews. Since the opening of new doors to them in
Germany they have dominated the artistic professions in Berlin, and
have contributed overwhelmingly to the intellectual life of Germany.
The greatest continental authority on Shakespeare, Professor Leon
Kellner, is a Jew. Professor Einstein is a Jew, Professor Ehrlich
is a Jew. These two great scientists are distinguished in a host of
learned Jewish men of science. Maximilian Harden, eminent journalist,
is a Jew. Max Reinhardt, composer, is a Jew. The list of famous living
Jews is too long to be given in full. In England they distinguish
themselves chiefly in politics--Lord Reading, Viceroy of India, Sir
Herbert Samuel, High Commissioner in Palestine. And the Jews are
dominant in the Socialist politics of Europe, not because of any deep
and treacherous design against humanity they possess, but for precisely
the reason they are dominant in other spheres, because of their good
brains, logical minds, keen perceptions and rare artistic abilities.
If the economic domination of the world by the Jews should come to
pass it will be in no small measure due to the historic fact of the
persecution and exclusion which have necessitated to a great extent the
expression of the rich mental life of the race along one narrow channel
for two thousand years; and it will be due in some degree to the
comparative self-indulgence and contempt for hard intellectual labour
of the Gentile section of the world community.
This excursion into Poland, and the question of the Jews which the
discussion of Poland always invites, has postponed for several pages
the trip to Georgia. I had the intention to go to Warsaw this month,
but a charming young Pole, a lovely girl of twenty, has come to stay
with me for some months. Her cousin tells me she is Poland in epitome
and advises me to stay at home! Wanda is still too young to be other
than a fervid nationalist and patriot. She is full of the poetry and
romance of things, and the love of dainty dresses. She is filled with
the vague longings and sadness of youth, and likes the autumn better
than the spring, which is exactly as it should be in sentimental
twenty. My only trouble with my guest is one of race and upbringing. I
have an unconquerable and brutal British habit of saying “yes” when I
mean “yes.” She says “yes” when she means “no,” because to her it is
polite and proper to say the thing you imagine you are wanted to say.
The consequence is that I am in danger of killing her by dragging her
from her books over the hills and dales of an English countryside, to
put roses into the pale cheeks, and a bright light into the grey eyes
which have seen too much of sorrow and suffering for one so young and
fair.