THE PROBLEM OF ZIONISM
There is an attitude for which my friends and I were for a long period
rebuked and even reviled; and of which at the present period we are
less likely than ever to repent. It was always called Anti-Semitism;
but it was always much more true to call it Zionism. At any rate
it was much nearer to the nature of the thing to call it Zionism,
whether or no it can find its geographical concentration in Zion.
The substance of this heresy was exceedingly simple. It consisted
entirely in saying that Jews are Jews; and as a logical consequence
that they are not Russians or Roumanians or Italians or Frenchmen
or Englishmen. During the war the newspapers commonly referred to them
as Russians; but the ritual wore so singularly thin that I remember
one newspaper paragraph saying that the Russians in the East End
complained of the food regulations, because their religion forbade
them to eat pork. My own brief contact with the Greek priests
of the Orthodox Church in Jerusalem did not permit me to discover
any trace of this detail of their discipline; and even the Russian
pilgrims were said to be equally negligent in the matter.
The point for the moment, however, is that if I was violently opposed
to anything, it was not to Jews, but to that sort of remark about Jews;
or rather to the silly and craven fear of making it a remark about Jews.
But my friends and I had in some general sense a policy in the matter;
and it was in substance the desire to give Jews the dignity
and status of a separate nation. We desired that in some fashion,
and so far as possible, Jews should be represented by Jews, should live
in a society of Jews, should be judged by Jews and ruled by Jews.
I am an Anti-Semite if that is Anti-Semitism. It would seem more
rational to call it Semitism.
Of this attitude, I repeat, I am now less likely than ever to repent.
I have lived to see the thing that was dismissed as a fad discussed
everywhere as a fact; and one of the most menacing facts of the age.
I have lived to see people who accused me of Anti-Semitism
become far more Anti-Semitic than I am or ever was.
I have heard people talking with real injustice about the Jews,
who once seemed to think it an injustice to talk about them
at all. But, above all, I have seen with my own eyes wild mobs
marching through a great city, raving not only against Jews,
but against the English for identifying themselves with the Jews.
I have seen the whole prestige of England brought into peril,
merely by the trick of talking about two nations as if they were one.
I have seen an Englishman arriving in Jerusalem with somebody he had
been taught to regard as his fellow countryman and political colleague,
and received as if he had come arm-in-arm with a flaming dragon.
So do our frosty fictions fare when they come under that burning sun.
Twice in my life, and twice lately, I have seen a piece of English
pedantry bring us within an inch of an enormous English peril.
The first was when all the Victorian historians and philosophers
had told us that our German cousin was a cousin german
and even germane; something naturally near and sympathetic.
That also was an identification; that also was an assimilation;
that also was a union of hearts. For the second time in a few
short years, English politicians and journalists have discovered
the dreadful revenge of reality. To pretend that something is what it
is not is business that can easily be fashionable and sometimes popular.
But the thing we have agreed to regard as what it is not will always
abruptly punish and pulverise us, merely by being what it is.
For years we were told that the Germans were a sort of Englishman
because they were Teutons; but it was all the worse for us when we
found out what Teutons really were. For years we were told that Jews
were a sort of Englishman because they were British subjects.
It is all the worse for us now we have to regard them,
not subjectively as subjects, but objectively as objects;
as objects of a fierce hatred among the Moslems and the Greeks.
We are in the absurd position of introducing to these people
a new friend whom they instantly recognise as an old enemy.
It is an absurd position because it is a false position; but it
is merely the penalty of falsehood.
Whether this Eastern anger is reasonable or not may be discussed
in a moment; but what is utterly unreasonable is not the anger but
the astonishment; at least it is our astonishment at their astonishment.
We might believe ourselves in the view that a Jew is an Englishman;
but there was no reason why they should regard him as
an Englishman, since they already recognised him as a Jew.
This is the whole present problem of the Jew in Palestine;
and it must be solved either by the logic of Zionism or the logic
of purely English supremacy and, impartiality; and not by what
seems to everybody in Palestine a monstrous muddle of the two.
But of course it is not only the peril in Palestine that has made
the realisation of the Jewish problem, which once suffered all
the dangers of a fad, suffer the opposite dangers of a fashion.
The same journalists who politely describe Jews as Russians are
now very impolitely describing certain Russians who are Jews.
Many who had no particular objection to Jews as Capitalists
have a very great objection to them as Bolshevists. Those who
had an innocent unconsciousness of the nationality of Eckstein,
even when he called himself Eckstein, have managed to discover
the nationality of Braunstein, even, when he calls, himself Trotsky.
And much of this peril also might easily have been lessened,
by the simple proposal to call men and things by their own names.
I will confess, however, that I have no very full sympathy with
the new Anti-Semitism which is merely Anti-Socialism. There are good,
honourable and magnanimous Jews of every type and rank, there are many
to whom I am greatly attached among my own friends in my own rank;
but if I have to make a general choice on a general chance among
different types of Jews, I have much more sympathy with the Jew
who is revolutionary than the Jew who is plutocratic. In other words,
I have much more sympathy for the Israelite we are beginning to reject,
than for the Israelite we have already accepted. I have more respect
for him when he leads some sort of revolt, however narrow and anarchic,
against the oppression of the poor, than when he is safe at the head
of a great money-lending business oppressing the poor himself.
It is not the poor aliens, but the rich aliens I wish we had excluded.
I myself wholly reject Bolshevism, not because its actions
are violent, but because its very thought is materialistic and mean.
And if this preference is true even of Bolshevism, it is ten times
truer of Zionism. It really seems to me rather hard that the full
storm of fury should have burst about the Jews, at the very moment
when some of them at least have felt the call of a far cleaner ideal;
and that when we have tolerated their tricks with our country,
we should turn on them precisely when they seek in sincerity
for their own.
But in order to judge this Jewish possibility, we must understand
more fully the nature of the Jewish problem. We must consider it
from the start, because there are still many who do not know that
there is a Jewish problem. That problem has its proof, of course,
in the history of the Jew, and the fact that he came from the East.
A Jew will sometimes complain of the injustice of describing
him as a man of the East; but in truth another very real
injustice may be involved in treating him as a man of the West.
Very often even the joke against the Jew is rather a joke against
those who have made the joke; that is, a joke against what they
have made out of the Jew. This is true especially, for instance,
of many points of religion and ritual. Thus we cannot help feeling,
for instance, that there is something a little grotesque about
the Hebrew habit of putting on a top-hat as an act of worship.
It is vaguely mixed up with another line of humour, about another
class of Jew, who wears a large number of hats; and who must not
therefore be credited with an extreme or extravagant religious zeal,
leading him to pile up a pagoda of hats towards heaven.
To Western eyes, in Western conditions, there really is something
inevitably fantastic about this formality of the synagogue.
But we ought to remember that we have made the Western conditions
which startle the Western eyes. It seems odd to wear a modern top-hat
as if it were a mitre or a biretta; it seems quainter still when the hat
is worn even for the momentary purpose of saying grace before lunch.
It seems quaintest of all when, at some Jewish luncheon parties,
a tray of hats is actually handed round, and each guest helps
himself to a hat as a sort of _hors d'oeuvre_. All this could
easily be turned into a joke; but we ought to realise that the joke
is against ourselves. It is not merely we who make fun of it,
but we who have made it funny. For, after all, nobody can
pretend that this particular type of head-dress is a part of that
uncouth imagery "setting painting and sculpture at defiance"
which Renan remarked in the tradition of Hebrew civilisation.
Nobody can say that a top-hat was among the strange symbolic utensils
dedicated to the obscure service of the Ark; nobody can suppose
that a top-hat descended from heaven among the wings and wheels
of the flying visions of the Prophets. For this wild vision the West
is entirely responsible. Europe has created the Tower of Giotto;
but it has also created the topper. We of the West must bear
the burden, as best we may, both of the responsibility and of the hat.
It is solely the special type and shape of hat that makes the Hebrew
ritual seem ridiculous. Performed in the old original Hebrew
fashion it is not ridiculous, but rather if anything sublime.
For the original fashion was an oriental fashion; and the Jews
are orientals; and the mark of all such orientals is the wearing
of long and loose draperies. To throw those loose draperies
over the head is decidedly a dignified and even poetic gesture.
One can imagine something like justice done to its majesty
and mystery in one of the great dark drawings of William Blake.
It may be true, and personally I think it is true, that the Hebrew
covering of the head signifies a certain stress on the fear of God,
which is the beginning of wisdom, while the Christian uncovering
of the head suggests rather the love of God that is the end of wisdom.
But this has nothing to do with the taste and dignity of the ceremony;
and to do justice to these we must treat the Jew as an oriental;
we must even dress him as an oriental.
I have only taken this as one working example out of many that
would point to the same conclusion. A number of points upon
which the unfortunate alien is blamed would be much improved
if he were, not less of an alien, but rather more of an alien.
They arise from his being too like us, and too little like himself.
It is obviously the case, for instance, touching that vivid vulgarity
in clothes, and especially the colours of clothes, with which a certain
sort of Jews brighten the landscape or seascape at Margate or many
holiday resorts. When we see a foreign gentleman on Brighton Pier
wearing yellow spats, a magenta waistcoat, and an emerald green tie,
we feel that he has somehow missed certain fine shades of social
sensibility and fitness. It might considerably surprise the company
on Brighton Pier, if he were to reply by solemnly unwinding his
green necktie from round his neck, and winding it round his head.
Yet the reply would be the right one; and would be equally logical
and artistic. As soon as the green tie had become a green turban,
it might look as appropriate and even attractive as the green turban
of any pilgrim of Mecca or any descendant of Mahomet, who walks
with a stately air through the streets of Jaffa or Jerusalem.
The bright colours that make the Margate Jews hideous are no brighter
than those that make the Moslem crowd picturesque. They are only worn
in the wrong place, in the wrong way, and in conjunction with a type
and cut of clothing that is meant to be more sober and restrained.
Little can really be urged against him, in that respect,
except that his artistic instinct is rather for colour than form,
especially of the kind that we ourselves have labelled good form.
This is a mere symbol, but it is so suitable a symbol that I have
often offered it symbolically as a solution of the Jewish problem.
I have felt disposed to say: let all liberal legislation stand,
let all literal and legal civic equality stand; let a Jew occupy any
political or social position which he can gain in open competition;
let us not listen for a moment to any suggestions of reactionary
restrictions or racial privilege. Let a Jew be Lord Chief justice,
if his exceptional veracity and reliability have clearly marked
him out for that post. Let a Jew be Archbishop of Canterbury,
if our national religion has attained to that receptive
breadth that would render such a transition unobjectionable
and even unconscious. But let there be one single-clause bill;
one simple and sweeping law about Jews, and no other.
Be it enacted, by the King's Most Excellent Majesty, by and with
the advice of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal and the Commons in
Parliament assembled, that every Jew must be dressed like an Arab.
Let him sit on the Woolsack, but let him sit there dressed as an Arab.
Let him preach in St. Paul's Cathedral, but let him preach there
dressed as an Arab. It is not my point at present to dwell on
the pleasing if flippant fancy of how much this would transform
the political scene; of the dapper figure of Sir Herbert Samuel
swathed as a Bedouin, or Sir Alfred Mond gaining a yet greater
grandeur from the gorgeous and trailing robes of the East.
If my image is quaint my intention is quite serious; and the point
of it is not personal to any particular Jew. The point applies
to any Jew, and to our own recovery of healthier relations with him.
The point is that we should know where we are; and he would know
where he is, which is in a foreign land.
This is but a parenthesis and a parable, but it brings us to
the concrete controversial matter which is the Jewish problem.
Only a few years ago it was regarded as a mark of a blood-thirsty
disposition to admit that the Jewish problem was a problem,
or even that the Jew was a Jew. Through much misunderstanding certain
friends of mine and myself have persisted in disregarding the silence
thus imposed; but facts have fought for us more effectively than words.
By this time nobody is more conscious of the Jewish problem
than the most intelligent and idealistic of the Jews. The folly
of the fashion by which Jews often concealed their Jewish names,
must surely be manifest by this time even to those who concealed them.
To mention but one example of the way in which this fiction
falsified the relations of everybody and everything, it is enough
to note that it involved the Jews themselves in a quite new
and quite needless unpopularity in the first years of the war.
A poor little Jewish tailor, who called himself by a German name merely
because he lived for a short time in a German town, was instantly
mobbed in Whitechapel for his share in the invasion of Belgium.
He was cross-examined about why he had damaged the tower of Rheims;
and talked to as if he had killed Nurse Cavell with his own pair
of shears. It was very unjust; quite as unjust as it would be to ask
Bethmann-Hollweg why he had stabbed Eglon or hewn Agag in pieces.
But it was partly at least the fault of the Jew himself,
and of the whole of that futile and unworthy policy which had led
him to call himself Bernstein when his name was Benjamin.
In such cases the Jews are accused of all sorts of faults
they have not got; but there are faults that they have got.
Some of the charges against them, as in the cases I have quoted
concerning religious ritual and artistic taste, are due merely
to the false light in which they are regarded. Other faults
may also be due to the false position in which they are placed.
But the faults exist; and nothing was ever more dangerous to everybody
concerned than the recent fashion of denying or ignoring them.
It was done simply by the snobbish habit of suppressing the experience
and evidence of the majority of people, and especially of the majority
of poor people. It was done by confining the controversy to a small
world of wealth and refinement, remote from all the real facts involved.
For the rich are the most ignorant people on earth, and the best
that can be said for them, in cases like these, is that their
ignorance often reaches the point of innocence.
I will take a typical case, which sums up the whole of this
absurd fashion. There was a controversy in the columns
of an important daily paper, some time ago, on the subject
of the character of Shylock in Shakespeare. Actors and authors
of distinction, including some of the most brilliant of living Jews,
argued the matter from the most varied points of view.
Some said that Shakespeare was prevented by the prejudices
of his time from having a complete sympathy with Shylock.
Some said that Shakespeare was only restrained by fear of the powers
of his time from expressing his complete sympathy with Shylock.
Some wondered how or why Shakespeare had got hold of such a queer
story as that of the pound of flesh, and what it could possibly have
to do with so dignified and intellectual a character as Shylock.
In short, some wondered why a man of genius should be so much
of an Anti-Semite, and some stoutly declared that he must
have been a Pro-Semite. But all of them in a sense admitted
that they were puzzled as to what the play was about.
The correspondence filled column after column and went on for weeks.
And from one end of that correspondence to the other, no human
being even so much as mentioned the word "usury." It is exactly
as if twenty clever critics were set down to talk for a month about
the play of Macbeth, and were all strictly forbidden to mention
the word "murder."
The play called _The Merchant of Venice_ happens to be about usury,
and its story is a medieval satire on usury. It is the fashion
to say that it is a clumsy and grotesque story; but as a fact it
is an exceedingly good story. It is a perfect and pointed story
for its purpose, which is to convey the moral of the story. And the
moral is that the logic of usury is in its nature at war with life,
and might logically end in breaking into the bloody house of life.
In other words, if a creditor can always claim a man's tools or a
man's home, he might quite as justly claim one of his arms or legs.
This principle was not only embodied in medieval satires but in very
sound medieval laws, which set a limit on the usurer who was trying
to take away a man's livelihood, as the usurer in the play is trying
to take away a man's life. And if anybody thinks that usury can
never go to lengths wicked enough to be worthy of so wild an image,
then that person either knows nothing about it or knows too much.
He is either one of the innocent rich who have never been the victims
of money-lenders, or else one of the more powerful and influential
rich who are money-lenders themselves.
All this, I say, is a fact that must be faced, but there is another side
to the case, and it is this that the genius of Shakespeare discovered.
What he did do, and what the medieval satirist did not do, was to attempt
to understand Shylock; in the true sense to sympathise with Shylock
the money-lender, as he sympathised with Macbeth the murderer.
It was not to deny that the man was an usurer, but to assert
that the usurer was a man. And the Elizabethan dramatist does
make him a man, where the medieval satirist made him a monster.
Shakespeare not only makes him a man but a perfectly
sincere and self-respecting man. But the point is this:
that he is a sincere man who sincerely believes in usury.
He is a self-respecting man who does not despise himself
for being a usurer. In one word, he regards usury as normal.
In that word is the whole problem of the popular impression of the Jews.
What Shakespeare suggested about the Jew in a subtle and sympathetic way,
millions of plain men everywhere would suggest about him in a
rough and ready way. Regarding the Jew in relation to his ideas
about interest, they think either that he is simply immoral;
or that if he is moral, then he has a different morality.
There is a great deal more to be said about how far this is true,
and about what are its causes and excuses if it is true.
But it is an old story, surely, that the worst of all cures is
to deny the disease.
To recognise the reality of the Jewish problem is very vital for
everybody and especially vital for Jews. To pretend that there is no
problem is to precipitate the expression of a rational impatience,
which unfortunately can only express itself in the rather irrational
form of Anti-Semitism. In the controversies of Palestine and Syria,
for instance, it is very common to hear the answer that the Jew is no
worse than the Armenian. The Armenian also is said to be unpopular
as a money-lender and a mercantile upstart; yet the Armenian figures
as a martyr for the Christian faith and a victim of the Moslem fury.
But this is one of those arguments which really carry their own answer.
It is like the sceptical saying that man is only an animal,
which of itself provokes the retort, "What an animal!"
The very similarity only emphasises the contrast. Is it seriously
suggested that we can substitute the Armenian for the Jew in
the study of a world-wide problem like that of the Jews? Could we
talk of the competition of Armenians among Welsh shop-keepers,
or of the crowd of Armenians on Brighton Parade? Can Armenian usury
be a common topic of talk in a camp in California and in a club
in Piccadilly? Does Shakespeare show us a tragic Armenian towering
over the great Venice of the Renascence? Does Dickens show us
a realistic Armenian teaching in the thieves' kitchens of the slums?
When we meet Mr. Vernon Vavasour, that brilliant financier, do we
speculate on the probability of his really having an Armenian name
to match his Armenian nose? Is it true, in short, that all sorts
of people, from the peasants of Poland to the peasants of Portugal,
can agree more or less upon the special subject of Armenia? Obviously it
is not in the least true; obviously the Armenian question is only
a local question of certain Christians, who may be more avaricious
than other Christians. But it is the truth about the Jews.
It is only half the truth, and one which by itself would be very unjust
to the Jews. But it is the truth, and we must realise it as sharply
and clearly as we can. The truth is that it is rather strange
that the Jews should be so anxious for international agreements.
For one of the few really international agreements is a suspicion
of the Jews.
A more practical comparison would be one between the Jews
and gipsies; for the latter at least cover several countries,
and can be tested by the impressions of very different districts.
And in some preliminary respects the comparison is really useful.
Both races are in different ways landless, and therefore in
different ways lawless. For the fundamental laws are land laws.
In both cases a reasonable man will see reasons for unpopularity,
without wishing to indulge any task for persecution.
In both cases he will probably recognise the reality of a racial fault,
while admitting that it may be largely a racial misfortune.
That is to say, the drifting and detached condition may be largely
the cause of Jewish usury or gipsy pilfering; but it is not common sense
to contradict the general experience of gipsy pilfering or Jewish usury.
The comparison helps us to clear away some of the cloudy evasions
by which modern men have tried to escape from that experience.
It is absurd to say that people are only prejudiced against the money
methods of the Jews because the medieval church has left behind a hatred
of their religion. We might as well say that people only protect
the chickens from the gipsies because the medieval church undoubtedly
condemned fortune-telling. It is unreasonable for a Jew to complain
that Shakespeare makes Shylock and not Antonio the ruthless money-lender;
or that Dickens makes Fagin and not Sikes the receiver of stolen goods.
It is as if a gipsy were to complain when a novelist describes a child
as stolen by the gipsies, and not by the curate or the mothers' meeting.
It is to complain of facts and probabilities. There may be good gipsies;
there may be good qualities which specially belong to them as gipsies;
many students of the strange race have, for instance, praised a
certain dignity and self-respect among the women of the Romany.
But no student ever praised them for an exaggerated respect
for private property, and the whole argument about gipsy theft can
be roughly repeated about Hebrew usury. Above all, there is one
other respect in which the comparison is even more to the point.
It is the essential fact of the whole business, that the Jews do not
become national merely by becoming a political part of any nation.
We might as well say that the gipsies had villas in Clapham,
when their caravans stood on Clapham Common.
But, of course, even this comparison between the two wandering peoples
fails in the presence of the greater problem. Here again even the attempt
at a parallel leaves the primary thing more unique. The gipsies do
not become municipal merely by passing through a number of parishes,
and it would seem equally obvious that a Jew need not become English
merely by passing through England on his way from Germany to America.
But the gipsy not only is not municipal, but he is not called municipal.
His caravan is not immediately painted outside with the number and name
of 123 Laburnam Road, Clapham. The municipal authorities generally
notice the wheels attached to the new cottage, and therefore do not
fall into the error. The gipsy may halt in a particular parish,
but he is not as a rule immediately made a parish councillor.
The cases in which a travelling tinker has been suddenly made
the mayor of an important industrial town must be comparatively rare.
And if the poor vagabonds of the Romany blood are bullied by mayors
and magistrates, kicked off the land by landlords, pursued by policemen
and generally knocked about from pillar to post, nobody raises
an outcry that _they_ are the victims of religious persecution;
nobody summons meetings in public halls, collects subscriptions
or sends petitions to parliament; nobody threatens anybody else
with the organised indignation of the gipsies all over the world.
The case of the Jew in the nation is very different from
that of the tinker in the town. The moral elements that can
be appealed to are of a very different style and scale.
No gipsies are millionaires.
In short, the Jewish problem differs from anything like the gipsy
problem in two highly practical respects. First, the Jews already
exercise colossal cosmopolitan financial power. And second,
the modern societies they live in also grant them vital forms of national
political power. Here the vagrant is already as rich as a miser
and the vagrant is actually made a mayor. As will be seen shortly,
there is a Jewish side of the story which leads really to the same
ending of the story; but the truth stated here is quite independent
of any sympathetic or unsympathetic view of the race in question.
It is a question of fact, which a sensible Jew can afford to recognise,
and which the most sensible Jews do very definitely recognise.
It is really irrational for anybody to pretend that the Jews
are only a curious sect of Englishmen, like the Plymouth Brothers
or the Seventh Day Baptists, in the face of such a simple fact
as the family of Rothschild. Nobody can pretend that such
an English sect can establish five brothers, or even cousins,
in the five great capitals of Europe. Nobody can pretend that the
Seventh Day Baptists are the seven grandchildren of one grandfather,
scattered systematically among the warring nations of the earth.
Nobody thinks the Plymouth Brothers are literally brothers,
or that they are likely to be quite as powerful in Paris or in
Petrograd as in Plymouth.
The Jewish problem can be stated very simply after all.
It is normal for the nation to contain the family.
With the Jews the family is generally divided among the nations.
This may not appear to matter to those who do not believe in nations,
those who really think there ought not to be any nations.
But I literally fail to understand anybody who does believe in patriotism
thinking that this state of affairs can be consistent with it.
It is in its nature intolerable, from a national standpoint,
that a man admittedly powerful in one nation should be bound
to a man equally powerful in another nation, by ties more private
and personal even than nationality. Even when the purpose is not
any sort of treachery, the very position is a sort of treason.
Given the passionately patriotic peoples of the west of Europe especially,
the state of things cannot conceivably be satisfactory to a patriot.
But least of all can it conceivably be satisfactory to a Jewish patriot;
by which I do not mean a sham Englishman or a sham Frenchman,
but a man who is sincerely patriotic for the historic and highly
civilised nation of the Jews.
For what may be criticised here as Anti-Semitism is only the negative
side of Zionism. For the sake of convenience I have begun by stating
it in terms of the universal popular impression which some call
a popular prejudice. But such a truth of differentiation is equally
true on both its different sides. Suppose somebody proposes to mix up
England and America, under some absurd name like the Anglo-Saxon Empire.
One man may say, "Why should the jolly English inns and villages
be swamped by these priggish provincial Yankees?" Another may say,
"Why should the real democracy of a young country be tied to your
snobbish old squirarchy?" But both these views are only versions
of the same view of a great American: "God never made one people
good enough to rule another."
The primary point about Zionism is that, whether it is right or wrong,
it does offer a real and reasonable answer both to Anti-Semitism
and to the charge of Anti-Semitism. The usual phrases about
religious persecution and racial hatred are not reasonable answers,
or answers at all. These Jews do not deny that they are Jews;
they do not deny that Jews may be unpopular; they do not deny that there
may be other than superstitious reasons for their unpopularity.
They are not obliged to maintain that when a Piccadilly dandy talks
about being in the hands of the Jews he is moved by the theological
fanaticism that prevails in Piccadilly; or that when a silly youth on
Derby Day says he was done by a dirty Jew, he is merely conforming to that
Christian orthodoxy which is one of the strict traditions of the Turf.
They are not, like some other Jews, forced to pay so extravagant
a compliment to the Christian religion as to suppose it the ruling
motive of half the discontented talk in clubs and public-houses,
of nearly every business man who suspects a foreign financier,
or nearly every working man who grumbles against the local
pawn-broker. Religious mania, unfortunately, is not so common.
The Zionists do not need to deny any of these things;
what they offer is not a denial but a diagnosis and a remedy.
Whether their diagnosis is correct, whether their remedy
is practicable, we will try to consider later, with something
like a fair summary of what is to be said on both sides.
But their theory, on the face of it, is perfectly reasonable.
It is the theory that any abnormal qualities in the Jews are due
to the abnormal position of the Jews. They are traders rather
than producers because they have no land of their own from
which to produce, and they are cosmopolitans rather than patriots
because they have no country of their own for which to be patriotic.
They can no more become farmers while they are vagrant than they
could have built the Temple of Solomon while they were building
the Pyramids of Egypt. They can no more feel the full stream
of nationalism while they wander in the desert of nomadism than
they could bathe in the waters of Jordan while they were weeping
by the waters of Babylon. For exile is the worst kind of bondage.
In insisting upon that at least the Zionists have insisted upon
a profound truth, with many applications to many other moral issues.
It is true that for any one whose heart is set on a particular
home or shrine, to be locked out is to be locked in.
The narrowest possible prison for him is the whole world.
It will be well to notice briefly, however, how the principle
applies to the two Anti-Semitic arguments already considered.
The first is the charge of usury and unproductive loans, the second
the charge either of treason or of unpatriotic detachment.
The charge of usury is regarded, not unreasonably, as only
a specially dangerous development of the general charge of
uncreative commerce and the refusal of creative manual exercise;
the unproductive loan is only a minor form of the unproductive labour.
It is certainly true that the latter complaint is, if possible,
commoner than the former, especially in comparatively simple
communities like those of Palestine. A very honest Moslem Arab
said to me, with a singular blend of simplicity and humour, "A Jew
does not work; but he grows rich. You never see a Jew working;
and yet they grow rich. What I want to know is, why do we not
all do the same? Why do we not also do this and become rich?"
This is, I need hardly say, an over-simplification. Jews often
work hard at some things, especially intellectual things.
But the same experience which tells us that we have known many industrious
Jewish scholars, Jewish lawyers, Jewish doctors, Jewish pianists,
chess-players and so on, is an experience which cuts both ways.
The same experience, if carefully consulted, will probably tell us
that we have not known personally many patient Jewish ploughmen,
many laborious Jewish blacksmiths, many active Jewish hedgers
and ditchers, or even many energetic Jewish hunters and fishermen.
In short, the popular impression is tolerably true to life,
as popular impressions very often are; though it is not fashionable
to say so in these days of democracy and self-determination. Jews
do not generally work on the land, or in any of the handicrafts
that are akin to the land; but the Zionists reply that this is
because it can never really be their own land. That is Zionism,
and that has really a practical place in the past and future of Zion.
Patriotism is not merely dying for the nation. It is dying
with the nation. It is regarding the fatherland not merely
as a real resting-place like an inn, but as a final resting-place,
like a house or even a grave. Even the most Jingo of the Jews
do not feel like this about their adopted country; and I doubt
if the most intelligent of the Jews would pretend that they did.
Even if we can bring ourselves to believe that Disraeli lived
for England, we cannot think that he would have died with her.
If England had sunk in the Atlantic he would not have sunk with her,
but easily floated over to America to stand for the Presidency.
Even if we are profoundly convinced that Mr. Beit or Mr. Eckstein
had patriotic tears in his eyes when he obtained a gold concession
from Queen Victoria, we cannot believe that in her absence he would
have refused a similar concession from the German Emperor.
When the Jew in France or in England says he is a good patriot
he only means that he is a good citizen, and he would put it
more truly if he said he was a good exile. Sometimes indeed
he is an abominably bad citizen, and a most exasperating and
execrable exile, but I am not talking of that side of the case.
I am assuming that a man like Disraeli did really make a romance
of England, that a man like Dernburg did really make a romance
of Germany, and it is still true that though it was a romance,
they would not have allowed it to be a tragedy. They would have
seen that the story had a happy ending, especially for themselves.
These Jews would not have died with any Christian nation.
But the Jews did die with Jerusalem. That is the first and
last great truth in Zionism. Jerusalem was destroyed and Jews
were destroyed with it, men who cared no longer to live because
the city of their faith had fallen. It may be questioned whether
all the Zionists have all the sublime insanity of the Zealots.
But at least it is not nonsense to suggest that the Zionists
might feel like this about Zion. It is nonsense to suggest
that they would ever feel like this about Dublin or Moscow.
And so far at least the truth both in Semitism and Anti-Semitism
is included in Zionism.
It is a commonplace that the infamous are more famous than the famous.
Byron noted, with his own misanthropic moral, that we think more
of Nero the monster who killed his mother than of Nero the noble
Roman who defeated Hannibal. The name of Julian more often suggests
Julian the Apostate than Julian the Saint; though the latter crowned
his canonisation with the sacred glory of being the patron saint
of inn-keepers. But the best example of this unjust historical
habit is the most famous of all and the most infamous of all.
If there is one proper noun which has become a common noun,
if there is one name which has been generalised till it means a thing,
it is certainly the name of Judas. We should hesitate perhaps to call
it a Christian name, except in the more evasive form of Jude.
And even that, as the name of a more faithful apostle, is another
illustration of the same injustice; for, by comparison with the other,
Jude the faithful might almost be called Jude the obscure.
The critic who said, whether innocently or ironically, "What wicked
men these early Christians were!" was certainly more successful
in innocence than in irony; for he seems to have been innocent or
ignorant of the whole idea of the Christian communion. Judas Iscariot
was one of the very earliest of all possible early Christians.
And the whole point about him was that his hand was in the same dish;
the traitor is always a friend, or he could never be a foe.
But the point for the moment is merely that the name is known
everywhere merely as the name of a traitor. The name of Judas nearly
always means Judas Iscariot; it hardly ever means Judas Maccabeus.
And if you shout out "Judas" to a politician in the thick of a political
tumult, you will have some difficulty in soothing him afterwards,
with the assurance that you had merely traced in him something
of that splendid zeal and valour which dragged down the tyranny
of Antiochus, in the day of the great deliverance of Israel.
Those two possible uses of the name of Judas would give us yet another
compact embodiment of the case for Zionism. Numberless international
Jews have gained the bad name of Judas, and some have certainly
earned it. If you have gained or earned the good name of Judas,
it can quite fairly and intelligently be affirmed that this was not
the fault of the Jews, but of the peculiar position of the Jews.
A man can betray like Judas Iscariot in another man's house;
but a man cannot fight like Judas Maccabeus for another man's temple.
There is no more truly rousing revolutionary story amid all the stories
of mankind, there is no more perfect type of the element of chivalry
in rebellion, than that magnificent tale of the Maccabee who stabbed
from underneath the elephant of Antiochus and died under the fall
of that huge and living castle. But it would be unreasonable to ask
Mr. Montagu to stick a knife into the elephant on which Lord Curzon,
let us say, was riding in all the pomp of Asiatic imperialism.
For Mr. Montagu would not be liberating his own land; and therefore
he naturally prefers to interest himself either in operations in silver
or in somewhat slower and less efficient methods of liberation.
In short, whatever we may think of the financial or social services
such as were rendered to England in the affair of Marconi, or to France
in the affair of Panama, it must be admitted that these exhibit
a humbler and more humdrum type of civic duty, and do not remind
us of the more reckless virtues of the Maccabees or the Zealots.
A man may be a good citizen of anywhere, but he cannot be a national
hero of nowhere; and for this particular type of patriotic passion
it is necessary to have a _patria_. The Zionists therefore are
maintaining a perfectly reasonable proposition, both about the charge
of usury and the charge of treason, if they claim that both could
be cured by the return to a national soil as promised in Zionism.
Unfortunately they are not always reasonable about their own
reasonable proposition. Some of them have a most unlucky habit
of ignoring, and therefore implicitly denying, the very evil
that they are wisely trying to cure. I have already remarked
this irritating innocence in the first of the two questions;
the criticism that sees everything in Shylock except the point of him,
or the point of his knife. How in the politics of Palestine at this
moment this first question is in every sense the primary question.
Palestine has hardly as yet a patriotism to be betrayed; but it
certainly has a peasantry to be oppressed, and especially to be
oppressed as so many peasantries have been with usury and forestalling.
The Syrians and Arabs and all the agricultural and pastoral populations
of Palestine are, rightly or wrongly, alarmed and angered at the advent
of the Jews to power; for the perfectly practical and simple
reason of the reputation which the Jews have all over the world.
It is really ridiculous in people so intelligent as the Jews,
and especially so intelligent as the Zionists, to ignore so enormous
and elementary a fact as that reputation and its natural results.
It may or may not in this case be unjust; but in any case it
is not unnatural. It may be the result of persecution, but it
is one that has definitely resulted. It may be the consequence
of a misunderstanding; but it is a misunderstanding that must itself
be understood. Rightly or wrongly, certain people in Palestine
fear the coming of the Jews as they fear the coming of the locusts;
they regard them as parasites that feed on a community by a
thousand methods of financial intrigue and economic exploitation.
I could understand the Jews indignantly denying this, or eagerly
disproving it, or best of all, explaining what is true in it while
exposing what is untrue. What is strange, I might almost say weird,
about the attitude of some quite intelligent and sincere Zionists,
is that they talk, write and apparently think as if there were no
such thing in the world.
I will give one curious example from one of the best and most
brilliant of the Zionists. Dr. Weizmann is a man of large mind
and human sympathies; and it is difficult to believe that any one
with so fine a sense of humanity can be entirely empty of anything
like a sense of humour. Yet, in the middle of a very temperate
and magnanimous address on "Zionist Policy," he can actually
say a thing like this, "The Arabs need us with our knowledge,
and our experience and our money. If they do not have us they
will fall into the hands of others, they will fall among sharks."
One is tempted for the moment to doubt whether any one else
in the world could have said that, except the Jew with his strange
mixture of brilliancy and blindness, of subtlety and simplicity.
It is much as if President Wilson were to say, "Unless America deals
with Mexico, it will be dealt with by some modern commercial power,
that has trust-magnates and hustling millionaires." But would
President Wilson say it? It is as if the German Chancellor had said,
"We must rush to the rescue of the poor Belgians, or they may be put
under some system with a rigid militarism and a bullying bureaucracy."
But would even a German Chancellor put it exactly like that?
Would anybody put it in the exact order of words and structure of
sentence in which Dr. Weizmann has put it? Would even the Turks say,
"The Armenians need us with our order and our discipline and our arms.
If they do not have us they will fall into the hands of others, they will
perhaps be in danger of massacres." I suspect that a Turk would see
the joke, even if it were as grim a joke as the massacres themselves.
If the Zionists wish to quiet the fears of the Arabs, surely the
first thing to do is to discover what the Arabs are afraid of.
And very little investigation will reveal the simple truth that they
are very much afraid of sharks; and that in their book of symbolic
or heraldic zoology it is the Jew who is adorned with the dorsal fin
and the crescent of cruel teeth. This may be a fairy-tale about
a fabulous animal; but it is one which all sorts of races believe,
and certainly one which these races believe.
But the case is yet more curious than that. These simple tribes
are afraid, not only of the dorsal fin and dental arrangements
which Dr. Weizmann may say (with some justice) that he has not got;
they are also afraid of the other things which he says he has got.
They may be in error, at the first superficial glance,
in mistaking a respectable professor for a shark.
But they can hardly be mistaken in attributing to the respectable
professor what he himself considers as his claims to respect.
And as the imagery about the shark may be too metaphorical
or almost mythological, there is not the smallest difficulty in
stating in plain words what the Arabs fear in the Jews. They fear,
in exact terms, their knowledge and their experience and their money.
The Arabs fear exactly the three things which he says they need.
Only the Arabs would call it a knowledge of financial trickery
and an experience of political intrigue, and the power given
by hoards of money not only of their own but of other peoples.
About Dr. Weizmann and the true Zionists this is self-evidently unjust;
but about Jewish influence of the more visible and vulgar kind
it has to be proved to be unjust. Feeling as I do the force
of the real case for Zionism, I venture most earnestly
to implore the Jews to disprove it, and not to dismiss it.
But above all I implore them not to be content with assuring us again
and again of their knowledge and their experience and their money.
That is what people dread like a pestilence or an earthquake;
their knowledge and their experience and their money.
It is needless for Dr. Weizmann to tell us that he does not desire
to enter Palestine like a Junker or drive thousands of Arabs forcibly
out of the land; nobody supposes that Dr. Weizmann looks like a Junker;
and nobody among the enemies of the Jews says that they have driven
their foes in that fashion since the wars with the Canaanites.
But for the Jews to reassure us by insisting on their own economic
culture or commercial education is exactly like the Junkers
reassuring us by insisting on the unquestioned supremacy of
their Kaiser or the unquestioned obedience of their soldiers.
Men bar themselves in their houses, or even hide themselves
in their cellars, when such virtues are abroad in the land.
In short the fear of the Jews in Palestine, reasonable or unreasonable,
is a thing that must be answered by reason. It is idle for the unpopular
thing to answer with boasts, especially boasts of the very quality
that makes it unpopular. But I think it could be answered by reason,
or at any rate tested by reason; and the tests by consideration.
The principle is still as stated above; that the tests must
not merely insist on the virtues the Jews do show, but rather
deal with the particular virtues which they are generally accused
of not showing. It is necessary to understand this more thoroughly
than it is generally understood, and especially better than it
is usually stated in the language of fashionable controversy.
For the question involves the whole success or failure of Zionism.
Many of the Zionists know it; but I rather doubt whether most of
the Anti-Zionists know that they know it. And some of the phrases
of the Zionists, such as those that I have noted, too often tend
to produce the impression that they ignore when they are not ignorant.
They are not ignorant; and they do not ignore in practice;
even when an intellectual habit makes them seem to ignore in theory.
Nobody who has seen a Jewish rural settlement, such as Rishon,
can doubt that some Jews are sincerely filled with the vision
of sitting under their own vine and fig-tree, and even with its
accompanying lesson that it is first necessary to grow the fig-tree
and the vine.
The true test of Zionism may seem a topsy-turvy test.
It will not succeed by the number of successes, but rather
by the number of failures, or what the world (and certainly
not least the Jewish world) has generally called failures.
It will be tested, not by whether Jews can climb to the top
of the ladder, but by whether Jews can remain at the bottom;
not by whether they have a hundred arts of becoming important,
but by whether they have any skill in the art of remaining insignificant.
It is often noted that the intelligent Israelite can rise to positions
of power and trust outside Israel, like Witte in Russia or Rufus Isaacs
in England. It is generally bad, I think, for their adopted country;
but in any case it is no good for the particular problem of their
own country. Palestine cannot have a population of Prime Ministers
and Chief Justices; and if those they rule and judge are not Jews,
then we have not established a commonwealth but only an oligarchy.
It is said again that the ancient Jews turned their enemies
into hewers of wood and drawers of water. The modern Jews have
to turn themselves into hewers of wood and drawers of water.
If they cannot do that, they cannot turn themselves into citizens,
but only into a kind of alien bureaucrats, of all kinds
the most perilous and the most imperilled. Hence a Jewish
state will not be a success when the Jews in it are successful,
or even when the Jews in it are statesmen. It will be a success
when the Jews in it are scavengers, when the Jews in it are sweeps,
when they are dockers and ditchers and porters and hodmen.
When the Zionist can point proudly to a Jewish navvy who has _not_
risen in the world, an under-gardener who is not now taking his ease
as an upper-gardener, a yokel who is still a yokel, or even a village
idiot at least sufficiently idiotic to remain in his village,
then indeed the world will come to blow the trumpets and lift
up the heads of the everlasting gates; for God will have turned
the captivity of Zion.
Zionists of whose sincerity I am personally convinced,
and of whose intelligence anybody would be convinced, have told
me that there really is, in places like Rishon, something like a
beginning of this spirit; the love of the peasant for his land.
One lady, even in expressing her conviction of it, called it "this
very un-Jewish characteristic." She was perfectly well aware both of
the need of it in the Jewish land, and the lack of it in the Jewish race.
In short she was well aware of the truth of that seemingly topsy-turvy
test I have suggested; that of whether men are worthy to be drudges.
When a humorous and humane Jew thus accepts the test, and honestly
expects the Jewish people to pass it, then I think the claim
is very serious indeed, and one not lightly to be set aside.
I do certainly think it a very serious responsibility under the
circumstances to set it altogether aside. It is our whole complaint
against the Jew that he does not till the soil or toil with the spade;
it is very hard on him to refuse him if he really says, "Give me
a soil and I will till it; give me a spade and I will use it."
It is our whole reason for distrusting him that he cannot really love
any of the lands in which he wanders; it seems rather indefensible to be
deaf to him if he really says, "Give me a land and I will love it."
I would certainly give him a land or some instalment of the land,
(in what general sense I will try to suggest a little later) so long
as his conduct on it was watched and tested according to the principles
I have suggested. If he asks for the spade he must use the spade,
and not merely employ the spade, in the sense of hiring half a hundred
men to use spades. If he asks for the soil he must till the soil;
that is he must belong to the soil and not merely make the soil
belong to him. He must have the simplicity, and what many would
call the stupidity of the peasant. He must not only call a spade
a spade, but regard it as a spade and not as a speculation.
By some true conversion the urban and modern man must be not
only on the soil, but of the soil, and free from our urban trick
of inventing the word dirt for the dust to which we shall return.
He must be washed in mud, that he may be clean.
How far this can really happen it is very hard for anybody,
especially a casual visitor, to discover in the present crisis.
It is admitted that there is much Arab and Syrian labour employed;
and this in itself would leave all the danger of the Jew
as a mere capitalist. The Jews explain it, however, by saying
that the Arabs will work for a lower wage, and that this is
necessarily a great temptation to the struggling colonists.
In this they may be acting naturally as colonists, but it is none
the less clear that they are not yet acting literally as labourers.
It may not be their fault that they are not proving themselves to
be peasants; but it is none the less clear that this situation in itself
does not prove them to be peasants. So far as that is concerned,
it still remains to be decided finally whether a Jew will be an
agricultural labourer, if he is a decently paid agricultural labourer.
On the other hand, the leaders of these local experiments,
if they have not yet shown the higher materialism of peasants,
most certainly do not show the lower materialism of capitalists.
There can be no doubt of the patriotic and even poetic spirit in which
many of them hope to make their ancient wilderness blossom like the rose.
They at least would still stand among the great prophets of Israel,
and none the less though they prophesied in vain.
I have tried to state fairly the case for Zionism, for the reason
already stated; that I think it intellectually unjust that any attempt
of the Jews to regularise their position should merely be rejected
as one of their irregularities. But I do not disguise the enormous
difficulties of doing it in the particular conditions Of Palestine.
In fact the greatest of the real difficulties of Zionism is that it
has to take place in Zion. There are other difficulties, however,
which when they are not specially the fault of Zionists are
very much the fault of Jews. The worst is the general impression
of a business pressure from the more brutal and businesslike type
of Jew, which arouses very violent and very just indignation.
When I was in Jerusalem it was openly said that Jewish financiers
had complained of the low rate of interest at which loans were made
by the government to the peasantry, and even that the government
had yielded to them. If this were true it was a heavier reproach
to the government even than to the Jews. But the general truth
is that such a state of feeling seems to make the simple and solid
patriotism of a Palestinian Jewish nation practically impossible,
and forces us to consider some alternative or some compromise.
The most sensible statement of a compromise I heard among the Zionists
was suggested to me by Dr. Weizmann, who is a man not only highly
intelligent but ardent and sympathetic. And the phrase he used
gives the key to my own rough conception of a possible solution,
though he himself would probably, not accept that solution.
Dr. Weizmann suggested, if I understood him rightly, that he did
not think Palestine could be a single and simple national territory
quite in the sense of France; but he did not see why it should not
be a commonwealth of cantons after the manner of Switzerland.
Some of these could be Jewish cantons, others Arab cantons,
and so on according to the type of population. This is in itself
more reasonable than much that is suggested on the same side;
but the point of it for my own purpose is more particular.
This idea, whether it correctly represents Dr. Weizmann's meaning
or no, clearly involves the abandonment of the solidarity
of Palestine, and tolerates the idea of groups of Jews being
separated from each other by populations of a different type.
Now if once this notion be considered admissible, it seems to me
capable of considerable extension. It seems possible that there
might be not only Jewish cantons in Palestine but Jewish cantons
outside Palestine, Jewish colonies in suitable and selected
places in adjacent parts or in many other parts of the world.
They might be affiliated to some official centre in Palestine,
or even in Jerusalem, where there would naturally be at least some
great religious headquarters of the scattered race and religion.
The nature of that religious centre it must be for Jews to decide;
but I think if I were a Jew I would build the Temple without
bothering about the site of the Temple. That they should
have the old site, of course, is not to be thought of;
it would raise a Holy War from Morocco to the marches of China.
But seeing that some of the greatest of the deeds of Israel were done,
and some of the most glorious of the songs of Israel sung,
when their only temple was a box carried about in the desert,
I cannot think that the mere moving of the situation of the place
of sacrifice need even mean so much to that historic tradition
as it would to many others. That the Jews should have some high
place of dignity and ritual in Palestine, such as a great building
like the Mosque of Omar, is certainly right and reasonable;
for upon no theory can their historic connection be dismissed.
I think it is sophistry to say, as do some Anti-Semites,
that the Jews have no more right there than the Jebusites.
If there are Jebusites they are Jebusites without knowing it.
I think it sufficiently answered in the fine phrase of an English priest,
in many ways more Anti-Semitic than I: "The people that remembers
has a right." The very worst of the Jews, as well as the very best,
do in some sense remember. They are hated and persecuted and
frightened into false names and double lives; but they remember.
They lie, they swindle, they betray, they oppress; but they remember.
The more we happen to hate such elements among the Hebrews the more
we admire the manly and magnificent elements among the more vague
and vagrant tribes of Palestine, the more we must admit that paradox.
The unheroic have the heroic memory; and the heroic people
have no memory.
But whatever the Jewish nation might wish to do about a national shrine
or other supreme centre, the suggestion for the moment is that something
like a Jewish territorial scheme might really be attempted, if we permit
the Jews to be scattered no longer as individuals but as groups.
It seems possible that by some such extension of the definition of Zionism
we might ultimately overcome even the greatest difficulty of Zionism,
the difficulty of resettling a sufficient number of so large a race
on so small a land. For if the advantage of the ideal to the Jews
is to gain the promised land, the advantage to the Gentiles is to get
rid of the Jewish problem, and I do not see why we should obtain
all their advantage and none of our own. Therefore I would leave
as few Jews as possible in other established nations, and to these
I would give a special position best described as privilege;
some sort of self-governing enclave with special laws and exemptions;
for instance, I would certainly excuse them from conscription,
which I think a gross injustice in their case. [Footnote: Of course
the privileged exile would also lose the rights of a native.]
A Jew might be treated as respectfully as a foreign ambassador,
but a foreign ambassador is a foreigner. Finally, I would give
the same privileged position to all Jews everywhere, as an alternative
policy to Zionism, if Zionism failed by the test I have named;
the only true and the only tolerable test; if the Jews had not
so much failed as peasants as succeeded as capitalists.
There is one word to be added; it will be noted that inevitably
and even against some of my own desires, the argument has returned
to that recurrent conclusion, which was found in the Roman Empire
and the Crusades. The European can do justice to the Jew;
but it must be the European who does it. Such a possibility
as I have thrown out, and any other possibility that any one can
think of, becomes at once impossible without some idea of a general
suzerainty of Christendom over the lands of the Moslem and the Jew.
Personally, I think it would be better if it were a general
suzerainty of Christendom, rather than a particular supremacy
of England. And I feel this, not from a desire to restrain
the English power, but rather from a desire to defend it.
I think there is not a little danger to England in the diplomatic
situation involved; but that is a diplomatic question that it
is neither within my power or duty to discuss adequately.
But if I think it would be wiser for France and England together
to hold Syria and Palestine together rather than separately,
that only completes and clinches the conclusion that has haunted me,
with almost uncanny recurrence, since I first saw Jerusalem
sitting on the hill like a turreted town in England or in France;
and for one moment the dark dome of it was again the Templum Domini,
and the tower on it was the Tower of Tancred.
Anyhow with the failure of Zionism would fall the last
and best attempt at a rationalistic theory of the Jew.
We should be left facing a mystery which no other rationalism has
ever come so near to providing within rational cause and cure.
Whatever we do, we shall not return to that insular innocence and
comfortable unconsciousness of Christendom, in which the Victorian
agnostics could suppose that the Semitic problem was a brief
medieval insanity. In this as in greater things, even if we lost
our faith we could not recover our agnosticism. We can never
recover agnosticism, any more than any other kind of ignorance.
We know that there is a Jewish problem; we only hope that there
is a Jewish solution. If there is not, there is no other.
We cannot believe again that the Jew is an Englishman with certain
theological theories, any more than we can believe again any other part
of the optimistic materialism whose temple is the Albert Memorial.
A scheme of guilds may be attempted and may be a failure;
but never again can we respect mere Capitalism for its success.
An attack may be made on political corruption, and it may be a failure;
but never again can we believe that our politics are not corrupt.
And so Zionism may be attempted and may be a failure;
but never again can we ourselves be at ease in Zion.
Or rather, I should say, if the Jew cannot be at ease in Zion we
can never again persuade ourselves that he is at ease out of Zion.
We can only salute as it passes that restless and mysterious figure,
knowing at last that there must be in him something mystical as well
as mysterious; that whether in the sense of the sorrows of Christ
or of the sorrows of Cain, he must pass by, for he belongs to God.
CONCLUSION
To have worn a large scallop shell in my hat in the streets of London
might have been deemed ostentatious, to say nothing of carrying a staff
like a long pole; and wearing sandals might have proclaimed rather
that I had not come from Jerusalem but from Letchworth, which some
identify with the New Jerusalem descending out of heaven from God.
Lacking such attributes, I passed through South England as one
who might have come from Ramsgate or from anywhere; and the only
symbol left to me of my pilgrimage was a cheap ring of metal
coloured like copper and brass. For on it was written in Greek
characters the word "Jerusalem," and though it may be less valuable
than a brass nail, I do not think you can buy it in the Strand.
All those enormous and everlasting things, all those gates of bronze
and mosaics of purple and peacock colouring, all those chapels of gold
and columns of crimson marble, had all shrivelled up and dwindled
down to that one small thread of red metal round my finger.
I could not help having a feeling, like Aladdin, that if I
rubbed the ring perhaps all those towers would rise again.
And there was a sort of feeling of truth in the fancy after all.
We talk of the changeless East; but in one sense the impression
of it is really rather changing, with its wandering tribes and its
shifting sands, in which the genii of the East might well build
the palace or the paradise of a day. As I saw the low and solid
English cottages rising around me amid damp delightful thickets
under rainy skies, I felt that in a deeper sense it is rather
we who build for permanence or at least for a sort of peace.
It is something more than comfort; a relative and reasonable contentment.
And there came back on me like a boomerang a rather indescribable
thought which had circled round my head through most of my journey;
that Christendom is like a gigantic bronze come out of the furnace
of the Near East; that in Asia is only the fire and in Europe
the form. The nearest to what I mean was suggested in that
very striking book _Form and Colour_, by Mr. March Philips.
When I spoke of the idols of Asia, many moderns may well have murmured
against such a description of the ideals of Buddha or Mrs. Besant.
To which I can only reply that I do know a little about the ideals,
and I think I prefer the idols. I have far more sympathy with
the enthusiasm for a nice green or yellow idol, with nine arms
and three heads, than with the philosophy ultimately represented
by the snake devouring his tail; the awful sceptical argument
in a circle by which everything begins and ends in the mind.
I would far rather be a fetish worshipper and have a little fun,
than be an oriental pessimist expected always to smile like an optimist.
Now it seems to me that the fighting Christian creed is the one
thing that has been in that mystical circle and broken out of it,
and become something real as well. It has gone westward by a sort
of centrifugal force, like a stone from a sling; and so made
the revolving Eastern mind, as the Franciscan said in Jerusalem,
do something at last.
Anyhow, although I carried none of the trappings of a pilgrim I felt
strongly disposed to take the privileges of one. I wanted to be
entertained at the firesides of total strangers, in the medieval manner,
and to tell them interminable tales of my travels. I wanted to linger
in Dover, and try it on the citizens of that town. I nearly got
out of the train at several wayside stations, where I saw secluded
cottages which might be brightened by a little news from the Holy Land.
For it seemed to me that all my fellow-countrymen must be my friends;
all these English places had come much closer together after travels
that seemed in comparison as vast as the spaces between the stars.
The hop-fields of Kent seemed to me like outlying parts of my own
kitchen garden; and London itself to be really situated at London End.
London was perhaps the largest of the suburbs of Beaconsfield.
By the time I came to Beaconsfield itself, dusk was dropping
over the beechwoods and the white cross-roads. The distance seemed
to grow deeper and richer with darkness as I went up the long
lanes towards my home; and in that distance, as I drew nearer,
I heard the barking of a dog.