THE DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM
I have stated the Problem. There is friction between the two races--the
Jews in their dispersion and those among whom they live. This friction
is growing acute. It has led invariably in the past (and consequently
may lead now) to the most fearful consequences, terrible for the Jew but
evil also for us. Therefore that the problem is immediate, practical and
grave. Therefore a solution is imperative.
But I may be--and indeed I shall be--met at the outset by the denial
that any such problem exists. Such was the attitude of all our immediate
past; such is the attitude of many of the best men to-day on both sides
of the gulf which separates Israel from our world.
I must meet this objection before going further, for if it be sound, if
indeed there is no problem (save what may be created by ignorance or
malice), then no solution is demanded. All we have to do is to enlighten
the ignorant and to repress the malicious: the ignorant, who imagine
there is an alien Jewish nation among them, the malicious, who treat as
though they were alien, men who are, in fact, exactly like ourselves and
normal fellow-citizens.
I do not here allude to the great mass of convention, hypocrisy and fear
which pretends ignorance of a truth it well knows. I am speaking of the
sincere conviction, still present in many--particularly those of the
older generation--that no Jewish problem exists.
It is honestly denied by a certain type of mind that there is any such
thing as a Jewish nation; there can therefore be no friction between it
and its hosts: the thing is a delusion. Let us examine that mind and see
whether the illusion is on our side or no.
It was the attitude familiar to the nineteenth century, and agreeable to
that one of its political moods in which it found itself best satisfied:
the negative attitude of leaving the Jewish nation unrecognized; of
creating a fiction of single citizenship to replace the reality of dual
allegiance; of calling a Jew a full member of whatever society he
happened to inhabit during whatever space of time he happened to sojourn
there in his wanderings across the earth. That was the attitude
agreeable on the political side to everything which called itself
"modern thought." Such was the doctrine proposed by the great men of the
French Revolution. Such was the attitude accepted almost
enthusiastically by Liberal England, that is, by all the dominant public
life of England during the Victorian period. Such was the policy which
once obtained universal favour throughout the whole of our Western
civilization. That was the attitude which the West actually attempted to
impose upon Eastern States, and the last effect of its rapidly-declining
credit is to be found in certain clauses of the Treaty of Versailles:
for that attitude is still the official attitude of all our governments.
In the Treaty of Versailles and the other treaties following the Great
War the Jews of Eastern Europe were put under a sort of special
protection, but not in a straightforward and positive fashion. The word
"Jew" was never blurted out--it was replaced by the word "minority"--but
the intention was obvious. The underlying implication was: "We, the
Western governments, say there is no Jewish problem. The idea of a
Jewish nation is a delusion and the conception of the Jew as something
different from a Pole or a Rumanian is a mania. If you in the East are
still benighted in this matter, at any rate we will prevent your
ignorance or obsession from leading you to persecution." The same men
who made these declarations proceeded to erect a brand-new
highly-distinct Jewish state in Palestine, with the threat behind it of
ruthlessly suppressing a _majority_ by the use of Western arms.
Both actions were the consequence of that confused position I have just
defined (history will call it the _last_ example), which, though much
weakened in public opinion, was still honestly taken for granted by
_some_ of the Parliamentarians who framed the Treaty, and was certainly
felt to be of personal advantage to _all_: the position that there is no
Jewish nation when the admission of it may inconvenience the Jew, but
very much of a Jewish nation when it can advantage him.
Those who defended this position did so from various standpoints; but
these may all be regarded as so many degrees in a certain way of looking
at the Jewish people. It was till lately the attitude of the majority of
educated Frenchmen, Englishmen and Italians. It was, so to speak, the
_official_ political attitude of Western Europe with its parliamentary
governments and other corresponding institutions.
The most extreme form of this opinion was to be found in people who
spoke of the Jew as nothing other than a citizen with a particular
religion. A state would be dominantly Catholic or Protestant, but it
would contain smaller religious bodies, eager minorities, for which a
place had to be found, side by side with the more or less indifferent
majority. Catholic France had a five per cent and wealthy Huguenot
minority. Protestant England had a seven per cent and poor Catholic
minority. Protestant Holland had a large minority--more than a third--of
Catholics, and so forth. It had become odious to nineteenth century
thought that religious differences (which it regarded as nothing more
than shades of doubtfully-held private opinion) should be the concern of
the State. A large number of people thought of the Jews, not as a race,
but only as a religion; and regarding all religion thus, they concluded
that it could involve no diminution of citizenship.
At the other end of the scale you had public men who fully appreciated
the ultimate difficulties which would certainly arise from this
inconclusive settlement of the matter. These regarded the Jews as a
quite distinct nationality, and even as a nationality likely to clash
with the national needs of its hosts; they would even (in private)
express their hostility towards that nationality. None the less, they
thought it must be treated in public life as though it did not exist.
These men were most emphatic in their private letters and
conversation--that the Jewish problem was _not_ a religious but a
national one. Nevertheless (they said) it was necessary _to-day_ to mask
that problem by a fiction and to _pretend_ that the Jew was just like
everybody else save for his religion. All other solutions (they said)
demanded a knowledge of history and of Europe not to be expected of the
public at large; again, the Jews were so powerful that if _they_ desired
the fiction to be supported they must be humoured. At any rate, recourse
must be had, in our time at least, to this make-believe.
To the new and already antagonistic attitude towards the Jews now rising
so strongly everywhere throughout Western Europe (which is in part a
reaction from the nineteenth century position), this old-fashioned way
of denying the Jewish race or ignoring its existence by a fiction
appears morally odious, and we wonder to-day why it commanded universal
support. It involved a falsehood, of course, often a conscious
falsehood; and it was also undignified; for there appears to our
generation something as grotesque in denying the existence of the Jewish
nation as in denying our own. But that the fiction was maintained
sincerely, and that the grotesque and undignified side of it went
unperceived, we can assure ourselves in a few moments' converse with any
one of that older generation which maintained it and still represents it
among us.
It might have continued to flourish for yet another generation, at any
rate among the leading classes of this commercial community, but for two
new developments which broke it down, each development the result of so
large a toleration. The first was the growth of numbers, the second of
influence. What made that old falsehood glaring and that old grotesque
apparent was the enormous increase throughout all the West of the Jewish
poor, accompanied by the enormous increase of the power exercised by the
Jewish rich in public affairs. Men grew angry at finding themselves
pledged to a pretence that Jews were not, when their presence was
everywhere unavoidable, in the streets, and in the offices of
government. The fiction was possible when a very few financiers, mixed
with and lost in the polite world, were alone concerned. It became
impossible in the face of the vast new ghettoes of London, Manchester,
Bradford, Glasgow, and the formidable and growing list of Jewish and
half-Jewish Ministers, Viceroys, ambassadors, dictators of policy.
This contempt for and irritation with what I have called the nineteenth
century attitude, the Liberal attitude, was already apparent before the
end of that century. It was muttering during the South African war in
England and the Dreyfus case in France; it became vocal in the first
years of this century, especially in connection with parliamentary
scandals; with the Bolshevist rising in 1917 it became clamorous. It
will certainly grow. We already have a formidable minority prepared to
act against the interest of the Jew. It will in all probability become,
and that shortly, a majority. It may appear at any moment, on some
critical occasion, on some new provocation, as an overwhelming flood of
exasperated opinion.
All the more does it behove us to treat the old-fashioned neutrality and
fiction fairly; to examine it even with a bias in its favour; to set
down all that can be said in its defence before we reject it, as I think
we must now all reluctantly reject it. I say "reluctantly"; for after
all it was the fixed mood of our fathers, who did great things: we feel
their reproach when we abandon it, and there are still present with us
very many of our elders to whom our new anxiety is abhorrent.
We must remember in the first place that the treating of the Jew in the
West as no Jew at all, but a plain citizen like the rest, worked well
enough for a time. One might almost say that there was no Jewish problem
consciously present to the mind of the average educated Englishman or
Frenchman, Italian, or even western German, between, say, the years 1830
and 1890. A very small body of Jews in England and France, in Italy and
the rest of the West, were vaguely associated with wealth in the popular
mind; a large proportion of them were distinguished for public work of
various kinds; many of them with beneficence. The presence of such men
could not conceivably lead to political difficulties--or at least, so it
then seemed. The stories of persecution that came through from Eastern
Europe, even examples of friction between great bodies of Jews there and
the natives of the States where they happened to find themselves, were
received in the West with disgust as the aberrations of imperfectly
civilized people.
Even in the valley of the Rhine, where the Jew was more numerous and
better known "in bulk," the convention of the more civilized West was
accepted. The doctrines, the abstraction of the French Revolution in
this matter had prevailed.
Here any reader with an historical sense will at once point out that the
space of time I have just quoted--1830 to 1890--is ridiculously short.
Any treatment of a very great political problem, centuries old, which
works for only sixty years and then begins to break down is no
settlement at all. But I would reply that this period was especially a
time in which historical perspective was lost. Men, even highly educated
men, in the nineteenth century, greatly exaggerated the foreground of
the historical picture.
You may note this in any school manual of the period, where all the four
centuries of our Roman foundation are compressed into a few sentences,
the dark ages into a few pages, the whole vast story of the Middle Ages
themselves into a few chapters; where the mass of the work is invariably
given to the last three centuries, while of these the nineteenth is
regarded as equal in importance to all the rest put together.
This false historical perspective is apparent in every other department
of their political thought. For instance, although capitalism, huge
national debts, the anonymity of financial action and the rest of it,
did not begin to flourish fully until after the first third of the
nineteenth century, and though anyone might (one would think) have been
able to discover the exceedingly unstable character of that society, yet
our fathers took it for granted as an eternal state of things. Your
Victorian man with £100,000 in railway stock thought his family
immutably secure in a comfortable income, and what he thought about
capitalism he thought also about his newly-developed anonymous press,
his national frontiers, his tolerance of this, his intolerance of that,
his parliaments and all the rest of it. It is no wonder if, under such a
false sense of permanence and security, he lost historical perspective
in this other and graver matter we are here discussing.
But apart from the argument that what I have called the nineteenth
century or Liberal attitude towards the Jews worked well for its little
day (at least, in Western Europe), there is also the fact that under
special circumstances something very like it has worked well for much
longer periods in the past. Take, for example, the position of the Jews
in such a town as Amsterdam. The reception of a Jew as a citizen exactly
like others, though he was present in very large numbers, the fiction
denying his separate nationality, has held for generations in that
community and it has procured peace and apparent contentment upon both
sides. And what is true to this day of Amsterdam has been true in the
past for long periods in the life of many another commercial and
cosmopolitan society: that of Venice, notably, and, in a large measure,
that of Rome; in that of Frankfort, of Lyons, and of a hundred cities at
special times. It was true of all Poland for generations.
One might add to the list indefinitely, but always with the
uncomfortable knowledge, as one wrote, that the experiment invariably
broke down in the long run.
Again, there was to be advanced for this Liberal attitude of the
nineteenth century the very powerful argument that while to one party in
the issue, the Englishman, the Frenchman, the Italian, etc., it seemed
well enough and certainly did no harm, it was highly acceptable to the
other. The Jew as a rule not only accepted but welcomed this particular
way of dealing with what _he_ at any rate has always known to be a very
grave problem indeed. For the Jew has a racial memory beyond all other
men. The arrangement seemed to give him all the security of which his
racial history (a thing of which every Jew is acutely conscious) had
made him ardently desirous. I think we should add (though the phrase
would be quarrelled with by many modern people) that this fiction
satisfied the Jew's sense of _justice_. For it is no small part of the
problem we are examining that the Jew does really feel such special
treatment to be his due. Without it he feels handicapped. He is, in his
own view, only saved from the disadvantage of a latent hostility when he
is thus protected, and he is therefore convinced that the world owes him
this singular privilege of full citizenship in any community where he
happens for the moment to be, while at the same time retaining full
citizenship in his own nation.
Now, if in any conflict an arrangement seems workable enough to one
party and is actually acclaimed by the other, it is not lightly to be
disregarded.
If, for instance, a man and his tenant quarrel about the tenure of a
field upon a very long lease, the tenant caring little about nominal
ownership but very much about his inviolable tenure, the landlord quite
agreeable to a very long lease but keen on retaining the titular
ownership, that quarrel can be easily settled. One could give any name
to the tenant's position other than the name of "owner," yet satisfy all
his practical demands. A rough parallel exists between such a position
and the attempt at a settlement which marked the nineteenth century.
What the Jew wanted was not the proud privilege of being called an
Englishman, a Frenchman, an Italian, or a Dutchman. To this he was
completely indifferent (for his pride lay in being a Jew, his loyalty
was to his own, and what is more, he might at any moment fold up his
tent and go off to another country for good). What the Jew wanted was
not the feeling that he was just like the others--that would have been
odious to him--what he wanted was _security_; it is what every human
being craves for and what he of all men most lacked: the power to feel
safe in the place where one happens to be. On the other hand, his hosts
had not yet found any practical inconvenience in granting this demand.
They did not know the historical argument against it, or they thought it
worthless, because they thought the past barbarous and no model for
their own action. So a compromise was arrived at, the fiction was
solidly established, and the Jew, though remaining a Jew, became a
German in Hamburg, a Frenchman in Paris, an American in New York, as he
wandered from place to place, and for a long lifetime no one felt
himself much the worse for the false convention.
The next argument in favour of this policy was the fact that it drew
upon a number of ideas, each one of which at some time or another had
been taken for granted by our ancestors in each one of their numerous
(but unsuccessful) attempts to deal with the problem after their own
fashion.
For instance, a modern objector says: "What rubbish to treat Jews as
though they merely represented a religion! We all know they represent a
_nation_!" But all manner of legislation in the past, even in times and
places where the difference between Jews and Europeans was most marked,
has perpetually fallen back upon that very point of religion alone.
Over and over again you find it the test of policy: in early, and again
in fifteenth century Spain, under Charlemagne's rule in Gaul, in early
mediaeval England, at Byzantium, and to this day in Eastern parts where
the Jew is subject to perpetual interference. Exception was in all these
made for the Jew who abandoned his religion. His nation was left
unmentioned.
It is pertinent to quote such a simple and recent example as the body of
Prussian officers, now happily extinct. It was a standing rule in the
smarter Prussian regiments (I believe in nearly all) that no Jew could
get his commission. The Prussian system left the granting of
commissions, in practice, to the existing members of the regimental
staff; they treated their mess as a Club and they blackballed Jews. But
they would admit _baptized_ Jews, and did so in considerable numbers.
Was the Jew less of a Jew in race through his baptism? Throughout all
the centuries that religious criterion, which the modern reformer cries
out against as a piece of humbug and a mask for the real political
problem, has been the criterion taken. It is true that the modern
solution did not attempt a religious segregation. On the contrary, the
Liberal thought of the nineteenth century held all such segregation in
abhorrence; but it had this in common with the older fashion, that it
made religion the point of interest, and to that extent masked the more
real point of nationality and allegiance.
Lord Palmerston, making his famous speech on the sanctity of a Greek
Jew's bedstead, and insisting that the said Greek Jew was an English
citizen; Lord Palmerston carefully avoiding the word "Jew" and
pretending throughout his speech that the Greek Jew in question was as
much an Englishman as himself, was in a very different mood from a
Spanish fifth-century Bishop admitting a Jew to Office on condition of
his conversion. Yet the two had this in common, that neither regarded
the Jew as the member of another nation, but each (for very different
reasons) as no more than the member of a religion.
To Palmerston, this Greek Jew about whose bedstead he made his famous
speech, and onto whose bedstead hangs to this day the phrase "Civus
Romanus Sum," was above all a fellow-citizen. He may have seemed to
Palmerston a doubtful sort of Englishman because his home was Greece,
but he certainly did not seem doubtful because he happened to be a Jew.
Palmerston would have thought that only a matter of private opinion, and
would no more have regarded a Jew as an alien on account of this private
opinion than he would have regarded as alien a fellow-Member of the
House of Commons who preferred roast mutton to boiled.
Take, again, another aspect of the nineteenth century liberal idea: the
recognition of citizenship. You have had that over and over again in the
attempted solutions of the past. It was the very essence of the Roman
method. For though the Government of the Roman Empire was much too
concerned with realities and with enduring work to accept any fiction in
the matter, or to pretend in practice that the Jew was not a Jew;
though, on the contrary, the Romans recognized at once the gulf between
the Jews and themselves, and recognized it not only by their cruelty to
the Jew but also by the privileges they granted him; yet it was always
their policy to admit _citizenship_ as the primary distinction. The Jew
who could claim that he was a full Roman citizen was, in the eyes of a
Roman Tribunal, much more important in that capacity than in his social
capacity as Jew. His "point," as we should say in our modern slang, was
his citizenship, not his Judaism. So, I say, this solution has for a
further argument the fact that in one part or another it is in touch
with the various attempts our race has made in the past to solve the
problem.
There is yet another argument strongly in favour of the Liberal fiction
which was attempted in the immediate past, and thought to have been
successfully established. It is the consonance of that fiction with the
whole body of modern custom and law, with the whole mass of modern
economic and social habit.
We travel so much, we mix so much, our economic activities are at once
so complicated, so interlocked, and (unhappily) for the most part so
secret, that any other way of meeting the Jews would have seemed--at any
rate if it had appeared in the shape of a positive law--a monstrous
anachronism. A man must meet his friends' friends and treat them as a
normal part of the general society in which he moves. As the Jew
permeated the society of the West everywhere (small though his numbers
were in the West), as he everywhere intermarried with Europeans of the
wealthier class, to insist in his presence upon his separate nationality
would have been odious; it would have been like making a guest feel out
of place in one's home.
What is more, to by far the greater part of the wealthier and governing
classes of the Western States the difference of race was so far masked
that it had almost come to be forgotten. Sometimes a shock would revive
it. An English squire would find, for instance, that a relation of his
by marriage, whose Jewish name and descent he had never bothered about,
was cousin to, and in close connection with, a person of a totally
different name--an Oriental name--mixed up in some conspiracy, say,
against the Russian State. Or he would learn with surprise that a
learned University man with whom he had recently dined was the uncle of
a socialist agitator in Vienna. But the shock would be a passing one,
and the old mood of security would return.
With the growth of plutocracy the anomaly of treating Jews as
individuals separate from the rest of the community increased. The most
important men in control of international finance were admittedly
Jewish. The Jew's international position made him always useful and
often necessary in the vast international economic undertakings of our
time. The anonymity which had come to be taken for granted throughout
modern capitalism made it seem absurd or impossible, always highly
unusual, and probably futile, to search for a separate Jewish element in
any particular undertaking.
There is one last argument for this Liberal policy, which has a strong
practical value, though it is exceedingly dangerous to use it in the
defence of that policy because it cuts both ways. It is the argument
that the Jew ought to be thus treated as a citizen exactly like the rest
and given no position either of privilege or disability, because he
does, as a fact, mould himself so very rapidly to his environment.
When men say--as they are beginning to do--that a Jew is as different
from ourselves as a Chinaman, or a negro, or an Esquimaux, and ought
therefore to be treated as belonging to a separate body from our own,
the answer is that the Jew is nothing of the kind. Indeed, he becomes,
after a short sojourn among Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans or Americans,
so like his hosts on the surface that he is, to many, indistinguishable
from them; and that is one of the main facts in the problem.
That is the real reason why to the majority of the middle classes in the
nineteenth century, in Western countries, the Jewish problem was
nonexistent. Were you to say it of any other race--negroes, for
instance, or Chinamen--it would sound incredible; but we know it in
practice to be true, that a Jew will pass his life in, say, three
different communities in turn, _and in each the people who have met him
will testify that he seemed just like themselves_.
I have known a case in point which would amuse my non-Jewish readers but
perhaps offend my Jewish readers were I to present it in detail. I shall
cite it therefore without names, because I desire throughout this book
to keep to the rule whereby alone it can be of service, that nothing
offensive to either party shall be introduced; but it is typical and can
be matched in the experience of many.
The case was that of the father of a man in English public life. He
began life with a German name in Hamburg. He was a patriotic citizen of
that free city, highly respected and in every way a Hamburger, and the
Hamburg men of that generation still talk of him as one of themselves.
He drifted to Paris before the Franco-German War, and, there, was an
active Parisian, familiar with the life of the Boulevards and full of
energy in every patriotic and characteristically French pursuit; notably
he helped to recruit men during the national catastrophe of 1870-71.
Everybody who met him in this phase of his life thought of him and
talked of him as a Frenchman.
Deciding that the future of France was doubtful after such a defeat, he
migrated to the United States, and there died. Though a man of some
years when he landed, he soon appeared in the eyes of the Americans with
whom he associated to be an American just like themselves. He acquired
the American accent, the American manner, the freedom and the restraints
of that manner. In every way he was a characteristic American.
In Hamburg his German name had been pronounced after the German fashion.
In France, where German names are common, he retained it, but had it
pronounced in French fashion. On reaching the United States it was
changed to a Scotch name which it distantly resembled, and no doubt if
he had gone to Japan the Japanese would be telling us that they had
known him as a worthy Japanese gentleman of great activity in national
affairs and bearing the honoured name of an ancient Samurai family.
The nineteenth century attitude almost entirely depended upon this
marvellous characteristic in the Jews which differentiates them from all
the rest of mankind. Had that characteristic power of superficial
mutation been absent, the nineteenth century policy would have broken
down as completely as the corresponding Northern policy towards the
negro broke down in the United States. Had the Jew been as conspicuous
among us, as, say, a white man is among Kaffirs, the fiction would have
broken down at once. As it was, all who adopted that policy, honestly or
dishonestly, were supported by this power of the Jew to conform
externally to his temporary surroundings.
The man who consciously adopted the nineteenth century Liberal policy
towards the Jews as a mere political scheme, knowing full well the
dangers it might develop; the man only half conscious of the existence
of those dangers; and the man who had never heard of them but took it
for granted that the Jew was a citizen just like himself, with an
exceptional religion--each of those three men had in common, aiding the
schemes of the one, supporting the illusion of the other, the amazing
fact that a Jew takes on with inexplicable rapidity the colour of his
environment. That unique characteristic was the support of the Liberal
attitude and was at the same time its necessary condition.
The fiction that a man of obviously different type and culture and race
is the same as ourselves, may be practical for purposes of law and
government, but cannot be maintained in general opinion. A conspiracy or
illusion attempting, for instance, to establish the Esquimaux in
Greenland as indistinguishable from the Danish officials of the
Settlement, would fail through ridicule. Equally ridiculous would be the
pretence that because they were both subjects of the same Crown an
Englishman in the Civil Service of India was exactly the same sort of
person as a Sikh soldier. But with the Jews you have the startling truth
that, while the fundamental difference goes on the whole time and is
perhaps deeper than any other of the differences separating mankind into
groups; while he is, within, and through all his ultimate character,
above all things a Jew; yet in the superficial and most immediately
apparent things he is clothed in the very habit of whatever society he
for the moment inhabits.
I say that this might seem to many the last and strongest argument in
favour of the old-fashioned Liberal policy, but I repeat that it is a
dangerous argument, for it cuts both ways. If a food which disagrees
with you looks exactly like another kind of food which suits you, you
might use the likeness as an argument for eating either sort of food
indifferently. You might say: "It is silly to try to distinguish; one
must admit, on looking at them, that they are the same thing"; but it
would turn out after dinner a very bad practical policy.
There is indeed one last argument which to me, personally, and I suppose
to most of my readers, is stronger than all the rest, for it is the
argument from morals.
If the Liberal attitude of the nineteenth century had proved a stable
one, omitting that element in it which is a falsehood and therefore a
factor of instability, one could retain the rest; _then_ it would
satisfy two appetites common to all men--appetite for justice and the
appetite for charity.
Here is a man, a neighbour present in the midst of my society. I put him
to inconvenience if I treat him as an alien. I like him; I regard him as
a friend. To treat such a man as though he were, although a friend,
something separate, not to be admitted to certain functions of my
community, offends the heart, as it also offends the sense of justice.
Such a man may possess a great talent for, say, administration. Like all
men possessed of a great talent, he must exercise it. You maim him if
you do not allow him to exercise it. A rule forbidding him to take part
in the administration of the society in which he finds himself, or even
a feeling hindering him in such activities, creates, not only in him,
but in those who are his hosts, a sense of injustice; and if it were
possible to adopt a policy wherein the separate character of the Jew
should be always in abeyance, so that he could be at the same time an
Englishman and yet not an Englishman, or a Frenchman and yet not a
Frenchman, then we should have a settlement which all good men ought to
accept.
Unfortunately that solution is false because, like many appeals to a
virtuous instinct, it is sentimental. We call "sentimental" a policy or
theory which attempts to reconcile contradictions. The sentimental man
will equally abhor crime and its necessary punishment; disorder and an
organized police. He likes to think of human life as though it did not
come to an end. He likes to read of the passion of love without its
concomitant of sexual conflict. He likes to read and think of great
fortunes accumulated without avarice, cunning or theft. He likes to
imagine an impossible world of mutually exclusive things. It makes him
comfortable.
Now we commit the fault of the sentimental man (the gravest of practical
faults in politics) when we cling at this late date to a continuance of
the old policy. You cannot have your cake and eat it too, you cannot at
the same time have present in the world this ubiquitous fluid, yet
closely organized Jewish community, and _at the same time_ each of the
individuals composing it treated as though they were _not_ members of
the nation which makes them all they are. You cannot at the same time
treat a whole as one thing and its component parts as another. If you
do, you are building on contradiction and you will, like everybody who
builds on contradiction, run up against disaster.
* * * * *
I am minded to give the reader another anecdote (again taking care, I
hope, to suppress all names and dates to prevent identification, which
might irritate my Jewish readers or too greatly interest their
opponents). As a younger man it was my constant pastime to linger at the
bar of the House of Lords and listen to what went on there. I shall
always remember one occasion when an aged Jew, who had begun life in
very humble circumstances, had accumulated a great fortune and had
purchased his peerage like any other, rose to speak in connection with a
resolution or with a bill dealing with "aliens"--the hypocrisy of the
politician, and the popular ferment against the rush of Jewish
immigrants into the East End between them gave rise to that
non-committal name. This old gentleman very rightly pushed all such
humbug aside. He knew perfectly well that the policy was aimed at "his
people"--and he called them "my people." He knew perfectly well that the
proposed change would introduce interference with their movement and
would subject them to humiliation. He spoke with flaming patriotism,
and I was enthralled by the intensity, vigour and sincerity of his
appeal. It was a very fine performance and, incidentally (considering
what the man was!), it illustrated the vast difference between his
people and my own. For a life devoted to accumulating wealth, which
would have killed nobler instincts in any one of us, had evidently
seemed to him quite normal and left him with every appetite of justice
and of love of nation unimpaired. He clinched that fine speech with the
cry, "What our people want is to be let alone." He said it over and over
again. I am sure that in the audience which listened to him, all the
older men felt a responsive echo to that appeal. It was the very
doctrine in which they had been brought up and the very note of the
great Victorian Liberal era, with its national triumphs in commerce and
in arms.
Well, within a very few years the younger members of that very man's
family came out in Parliamentary scandal after scandal, appearing all in
sequence one after the other--a sort of procession. They had been let
alone right enough! But they had not let _us_ alone. I ask myself,
sometimes, How would it sound if some years hence any one of those
descendants--having by that time been given his peerage (for they are
rich men and all of them in professional politics)--should return to
that cry of his ancestor and ask to be "let alone"? There would be no
response _then_ in the breasts of the contemporaries who might hear him.
Manners will so much have changed in this regard that he would be
interrupted. But I do not think that my hypothetical descendant of that
rich old Jew is likely to make any such speech. I think that when the
time comes for making it, the whole idea of "letting alone" will be
quite dead.
I have quoted this old man's speech with no invidious intention but only
as an actual example of the way in which the "letting alone" of this
great question breaks down. I am as familiar as any Jewish reader of
mine with names that have dignified public life in the past, Jewish
names, Jewish peers: and I recall in particular the honoured name of
Lord Herschell to the friendship between whose nearest and my own I
preserve a grateful and sacred memory.
* * * * *
But to return to the failure of the sentimental argument.
The sentimental argument fails because it involves contradictions--that
is, incompatibility of fact.
Even if one had not this strictly rational principle to guide one, there
is the whole of history to guide one. It is true that the pretence of
common citizenship has worked now for a shorter, now for a longer,
period, but never indefinitely. You always come at last to a smash. The
Jew is welcomed in mediaeval Poland; he comes in vast numbers; all goes
well. Then the inevitable happens and the Jew and the Pole stand apart
as enemies, each accusing the other of injustice, the one crying out
that he is persecuted, the other that the State is in danger by alien
activity within. Spain alternatively pursued this policy, and its
opposite; the whole history of Spain--the original seat of Jewish
influence in Europe after the general exile--is a history of alternating
attempts at the sentimental solution and a savage reaction against it:
the reaction of the man, who, fighting for his life, strikes out
violently in terror of death. That is the history not only of Spain but
of every other country at one time or another.
Indeed, we have before our very eyes to-day the beginning of exactly
such a reaction in the West of Europe and the United States of America,
and it is the presence of that reaction which has caused this book to be
written. The attempt at a Liberal solution has already failed in our
hands; if it had not failed there would be no more to be said, or, at
any rate, we could postpone the discussion until the actual difficulty
began. But we have only to look around us to see that, after these few
years, this one lifetime, during which the experiment has flourished in
the highest part of civilization, it is already breaking down.
Everywhere the old questions are being asked, everywhere the old
complaints are being raised, everywhere the old perils are reappearing.
We must seek some solution, for if we fail to find it we know from the
past what tragedies are in store for us both. There is a problem, a most
direct and urgent problem. Once it is recognized, a solution of it is
necessarily demanded.
But it is not enough to show that the mere denial of the existence of
that problem--the old nineteenth century Liberal policy--was false and
bound to break down. It is just as necessary, if we appreciate how
practical and immediate the problem is, to state it and illustrate it
from contemporary events. It is not enough to show that the attempted
Liberal policy has failed. One must also, before trying to discover a
solution, analyse the nature of the problem as it presents itself at the
moment, and that is what I propose to do in the next chapter.
THE PRESENT PHASE OF THE PROBLEM