THE POSITION IN THE WORLD AS A WHOLE
The danger of the Jewish nation in the world to-day may be summed up in
this phrase:--
"The Jews are obtaining control and we will not be controlled by them."
That is the simplest formula, and the one which would be immediately
subscribed to by the whole mass of those outside the Jewish community
who are alive to the question at all. Being the simplest form of the
truth, it needs, when applied to a highly complex situation, detailed
modification.
This modification proceeds from three sources:--
First, the extent of the Jewish control and the extent of the resentment
against that control vary very largely from one community to another.
Secondly, the civic tradition of each community in its treatment of the
Jewish question also differs from that of every other, though these
various traditions fall into certain fairly well-defined groups.
Thirdly, the position is modified according to the presence, in varying
degrees of strength in different communities, of certain international
forces even more powerful than the Jews themselves. The four principal
of the international forces are:--
(1) The Catholic Church;
(2) Islam;
(3) The forces of international Capitalism; and
(4) The international reaction against it of the industrial proletariat.
We must in the first line of this inquiry make an important premise. The
fact from which we proceed, namely, the uneasy feeling that the Jews are
getting control and the determination not to tolerate that control, will
be denied by the Jews themselves. It is denied sincerely--I have entered
upon too many discussions with them and heard too many of their
protestations to doubt that; and if the denial were valid, not only the
particular survey I propose in this chapter, but the whole of the
argument of this book, would fail. For if there is a Jewish question
to-day, and if it is present in the acute form in which we all know it
to be present, it is not due merely to the contrast and friction between
the Jews and their hosts, but especially to this feeling of domination.
But the Jewish belief in this matter is not valid, sincerely as it is
held. To the great majority of Jews it will, of course, seem
common-sense. What has the unfortunate poor Jew in the slums of our
great cities to do with controlling the modern world? How in his eyes
can the phrase have any meaning at all? If you pass from him to the
comparatively small Jewish middle class, you would hear a denial almost
equally vigorous. The Jewish scientist will tell you that he is
concerned with his researches and laughs at the idea of interfering with
his neighbours; the Jewish historian that he is concerned with his
documents, that nothing is further from his thoughts than interfering
with people outside his trade; the little Jewish shopkeeper will tell
you that he is in active competition with his non-Jewish neighbours and
by no means always successful in that competition; the Jewish lawyer
will tell you that he is concerned with the system of law in which he
happens to be immersed--the Napoleonic Code, the English Common Law or
what not--and that any idea of his personally wanting to control the
vast non-Jewish majority among whom he lives is moonshine: and so it is.
The great Jewish banker, though he is fully aware of his power, would
tell you that in his daily business he comes up against forces to which
he is subject, and has competitors who are at the best neutral, and more
commonly hostile, to Israel; and even the man who is to-day more
powerful--if that be possible--than the Jewish banker, I mean the Jewish
monopolist, and especially the Jewish monopolist in metal, though he
would be extremely annoyed to have the extent of his control exposed,
will feel that it is due to his superior abilities and in no way
designed for mastery.
All these individual replies are true; but if you make of them a
composite and general reply, if you put it as a reply of all Israel to
all the world outside, crying, "I have no desire for supremacy; I never
act in such a fashion that my domination can be felt or shall increase;
the motive is not present, even subconsciously, among my people"--then
that general reply would be false.
In point of fact the Jew has _collectively_ a power to-day, in the white
world, altogether excessive. It is not only an excessive power, it is
inevitably a _corporate_ power and, therefore, a semi-organized power.
It is not only excessive and in the main organized, it was, until the
recent reaction began, a rapidly increasing power--and most people
believe it to be still increasing. To that the whole world outside the
Jewish community will testify.
The criterion by which we may judge whether any form of power is
irritant to those whom it affects is not the testimony of those who
exercise the power, but the testimony of those over whom it is
exercised. There never was a tyranny in the world, not even one of those
personal tyrannies (which have been so much more highly organized and so
much more direct than this power of the Jews), there never has been a
despotism in history, which would not tell you that it was accidental,
or necessary, or, in any case, innocent of any motive of oppression. And
history universally replies: "To judge _that_, you must ask those who
felt the pressure; not those who exercised it."
Now those who feel the pressure in the matter we are now examining are
unanimous. They differ in the degree of their resentment from those to
whom the thing is so intolerable that they are already in active revolt
against it, to those who feel it merely as a distant though an
approaching discomfort. But everybody feels it in some degree. It is a
universal sensation running throughout the nerves of the modern world
and it is growing too fast in degree and extent to be ignored.
I have already quoted the effect upon those hundreds of educated men
taken into the temporary Civil service during the late war, when they
found, holding the locked gate of one monopoly after another, the
international Jew. His control of finance needs no discussion. If the
individual banker or financier is not aware of it, the most of those
who are affected are acutely aware of it. Men exaggerate in giving it a
sort of conscious personality, but they certainly do not exaggerate when
they point to its effects. The Jew must remember, what it may be
difficult for him to accept and what is certainly true, that not only is
his domination very bitterly resented but that his presence in any
position of control whatsoever is odious to the race among which he
moves. Everybody feels that about any form of alien control, much more
do they feel it about that form which they instinctively know to be most
alien of all. Every one has noticed this control exercised in the form
of keeping silence upon what it was to the disadvantage of Israel to
have known; in the form of the advertising of what it was to the
advantage of Israel to have advertised; in the form of the giving and
withholding of credit; in the form of attack in the Press against
nations with whom Israel had a quarrel and the defence in the Press of
those (they have now almost disappeared) upon whom Israel, in the
immediate past, relied for defence. And everybody has discovered--what
is not unjust, indeed, what is inevitable, but what is none the less a
source of exasperation--the solidarity of the Jewish race where the
interests of any member of it were concerned.[1]
But if the thing were felt everywhere as acutely and as consciously as
it is felt in special groups to-day--as it is felt, for instance, in one
particular section of English opinion already represented in the Press,
is felt in a wider section of French opinion, and in a still wider
section of Polish opinion--then the matter would be simple. We could
then say that an issue of the clearest kind had arisen, and forbid a
small alien minority to decide the destinies of those among whom it
lives and of whom it is not. The answer would be obvious, and the only
difficulty would be how the Jewish control might be lessened without
grievous injustice to innocent individuals.
But the thing is not so felt. It is modified, as I have said, by the
varying degrees of intensity in which it is recognized and by the other
international forces which come into play.
If we consider the varying political traditions and the varying
international forces, if we examine the world's national groups, we
shall find something like this: In the vast body of Russia a position
most paradoxical. For years the Jew was everywhere openly attacked and
hated in those parts of the Russian Empire where he was allowed to live
in large numbers. These were nowhere within Russia proper but upon the
western outskirts of that empire, within what was once the old Polish
kingdom and largely within what is now the restored Republic of Poland.
But the Russian traditional antagonism to the Jew changed in a few weeks
of chaos to something not opposite but novel and different. The Russian
allowed a prodigious revolution to be made by the Jews, he accepted the
loot of that revolution which the Jew secured to him; he has submitted
wholly in the towns, partly in the country, to a tyranny exercised by
Jews ever since that complete reversal of his national history, now four
years old.
The external political power of what was once the Russian Empire has
disappeared. The Jews have killed it. But the great mass of Russian
humanity remains strongly affected by this curious change. Where popular
instinct works untrammelled the old and violent passionate antagonism
between the Russian and the Jew survives. You see it in the hotch potch
of the Ukraine, the inhabitants of which, in spite of all theories, are
of Russian race and tradition, and the central town of which is the
sacred region of Russia as a member of Christendom. There, for all the
Jewish Committees with large towns under their complete control, there
have been repeated revolts. But in the greater part of European Russia
at least, and in much of what was once the Asiatic Empire, the Jews hold
what is left of the Executive government.
So far as we can judge from the very imperfect accounts which reach us
(for nowhere is the weapon of secrecy more ruthlessly used), the mass of
the Russians, that is, the peasantry, are in two minds. To the action of
the Jewish despotism in the town they are indifferent, but to his early
attempts against themselves they were bitterly opposed. They have
suffered at his hands and they thought him a tyrant. But the Jew seems
to have dropped this interference and the Russian soil to have settled
down as a peasant proprietary. On the other hand, it was a revolution
guided by those same Jewish Committees which secured the peasant in the
possession of his land. The Russian peasant has always regarded the land
as his own. He had, I understand, regarded that odd, pedantic measure,
"The Liberation of the Serfs," as only another name for the robbing him
of his land; and when the organization of Russian society dissolved in
the strain of war, he poured over the great estates and took back what
he thought was his own.
For the strange Jewish conception of Communism, a million miles removed
from our European racial instincts and our high civilized traditions,
the Russian peasant could have nothing but a bewildered contempt. None
the less he was conscious that the Jewish revolution had permitted him,
if not to take the land (he did that himself), at least to hold it; and
the revolution is indistinguishable from the Jewish control of the
towns.
Within the towns, again (our information is most imperfect and I can
only piece together what eye-witnesses have told me), although the Jew
is, of course, individually hated, yet his control does stand for
certain things which the mass of the people still support. He organized
the resentment of the poor against the rich. He erected before their
eyes the pleasing spectacle of a social revenge. He carried out, fairly
consistently, his Communist programme, one aspect at least of which is
practical enough; for the man that works with his hands finds that he is
as well, or better, fed out of the meagre common stock, than those who
were once his masters.
In general I think it true to say that the Jewish control over
Christians, if, in a way, stronger in what was once the Russian Empire
than anywhere else, is also there least resented. I do not say it would
not be resented if it were to excite action again against the peasants,
but we cannot forget that the peasants were eager to fight for the new
Russian regime because they identified it with their new property in
land. The situation is absurd enough. Men in hundreds of thousands
willing to fight for Communist masters because by so doing they believe
they can secure themselves in an absolute form of property! But that is
what the "red" army was.
In that belt of nations, vague in boundary, which used to constitute the
Marches of the East and which now stand between what was once the
Russian Empire and the Germanies, the position would seem to be this.
There are in these countries everywhere a very large proportion of Jews.
The largest by far are in Lithuania and Galicia, where, of whole towns,
from a third to a half and sometimes up to two-thirds, of the population
are Jewish. Very large also is the proportion within the admitted
frontiers of modern Poland; very large in Roumania, and considerable in
Hungary.
In all these countries the Jewish problem is something quite different
from what it is farther West. The Jews are in these countries admittedly
a separate nation. Even as I write I hear the complaint, sounding
strange in our Western ears, proffered by the Polish Jews who have been
appealing to the West against what they claim to be the oppressive
practice of writing them down as Poles! In Roumania for two generations
it has been the fixed principle of the State, now latent, now overt, but
always acted upon in social practice, that the Jew is not a Roumanian at
all and cannot be one. Of course he cannot be one really, any more than
he can be an Englishman, or a Frenchman, or an Irishman. (Fancy a Jew an
Irishman!) But I mean, not even one by fiction or by convention. In
Poland the greater part of these people have a different language and
all of them have a different social custom and a different life from the
world around them. In Hungary, where the numerical pressure of the Jew
is less, there is, of course, a most lively memory of the attempted
revolution under Cohen in 1918, the massacres of Hungarians, the setting
up of an ephemeral Bolshevism and the necessity of its suppression. In
Bohemia the pressure is far less and in the Balkan States south of the
Danube and the Drave. It is only present as a pressure of numbers in the
group of States which lie between the Baltic and the Black Sea South and
North and between the Russian people and the German people East and
West.
When we come to Occidental Europe, in which must be included, though it
is hardly a true part of it, Germany beyond the Elbe; when we come to
the Scandinavian countries, to France, Britain, Italy, Spain,
Switzerland and the Low Countries, the problem changes. The numerical
proportion of Jews sinks enormously. Fairly large in one or two Dutch
towns, it is almost insignificant in Scandinavia, and though we have had
into the great English towns and to some extent into the northern French
towns (particularly Paris) a considerable recent influx of Jews, yet the
total number of these people in the West remains far, far smaller than
the great masses of the East of Europe. The same is still more true of
Italy, and, in spite of the absorption of a great deal of Jewish blood
in the past, of Spain.
But while the numerical proportion of Jews in these western countries is
much smaller, and while therefore the peril of Jewish domination is
very different in _form_ from what it is farther East, it is clearly
marked. It is exercised primarily through finance; next through the
sceptical Universities, the anonymous Press and the corrupt Parliaments,
and, lastly, in a more general form, by the presence of institutions
which greatly favour the rise of the Jew in competition with his hosts;
each favours international knowledge; each favours anonymity; each still
favours the old Liberal nonsense which called itself "toleration" and
was really an indifference to that most fundamental of all social
motives--religion--save, of course, where an exception is made to permit
attack upon the Catholic Church.
Under influence of this sort, both sincere and hypocritical, both
generous and mean, the Jew acquired in all the larger communities, and
especially in France, Italy, Germany and England, a power out of all
proportion to his numbers, and I may add, without, I hope, offending any
Jewish reader, out of proportion to his abilities; certainly out of
proportion to any right of his to interfere in our affairs. It was a Jew
who produced the divorce laws in France, the Jew who nourished
anti-clericalism everywhere in that country and also in Italy; the Jew
who called in the forces of Occidental nations to protect his
compatriots in the East, and the Jew whose spirit has so largely
permeated the Universities and the Press.
Ireland is an exception. In Ireland the Jew (outside the little
industrial corner in the north-east) is nobody. And here it must be
remarked that the migrations of the Jew which give him numbers here for
a time and afterwards numbers elsewhere, in places where previously he
had not been known; which give him influence here for a time, and sees
it followed by the decline of that influence, do not seem to obey any
law which we can trace, and are certainly not the product of any
conscious action. It is one of the strangest phenomena in history, this
odd, spasmodic flood movement of the Jewish race. Is it concerned with
commerce? That is one element undoubtedly; that is what explains the
exploitation of England by Jews after the Conquest, of Spain in the
later Middle Ages, of the Valley of the Rhine; but then, why not other
commercial centres as an attraction? Venice was not one, though the Jew
was well tolerated there; nor was Paris after the early Middle Ages, and
while some of the Dutch towns formed such centres of attraction the
Belgian towns did not.
Was it asylum? That would account, of course, for the great influx of
Jews into mediaeval Poland, but then why not into eighteenth century
England? Why not until very late in the nineteenth century? England,
which gave the Jews a more complete civic position than he could find
anywhere else in the world, was not invaded by them. Why these very
recent influxes into the United States, which has for now a century and
a half been perfectly open by its Constitution, and was by all its civic
tradition an ideal asylum for the Jews? Until quite recent times the Jew
was hardly known there, and to this day he is not known outside a few
great cities.
No. There would seem to be no law, or at least no discoverable law, for
this mysterious movement, the ebb and flow of Israel--but that is a
digression. To return to the national situations.
If we leave the Old World and turn to the United States, we find a
novel condition of affairs still in process of development and very
puzzling to the foreign observer. I do not pretend to analyse it
completely in a few lines, nor even accurately, for I am dependent upon
the observation of others, and the United States are so utterly
different from us that we have difficulty in following their
contemporary history; but something of this sort would seem to be
passing there.
* * * * *
In the United States the Jews were present, till the last few years, in
numbers even smaller in proportion to the population than their numbers
in France, England and Italy, far smaller than their numbers in what was
formerly the German Empire. In the agricultural part of America, which
is still, I believe, one half of the population, the Jew was almost
unknown. You find him here and there, as a lawyer or a storekeeper, but
that world was not familiar with him any more than our English
country-sides are familiar with him to-day. With the growth of the great
industrial towns, of course, the Jew came, but he was still no "feature
in the landscape." There was a certain social prejudice against him
among the wealthier classes in the East, and--this is very
important--_the truth was always told about him_. There was in America
no convention--the Jew was always recognized as a Jew and there was
never any of the nonsense we had over here of pretending that he was
something else.
Of that phenomenon of which the history of Europe is full, which is so
marked in the eastern counties to-day and which is beginning to rise in
the West, there is nothing traceable in the early and middle nineteenth
century, nor even till the close of it, in the United States.
Then came the change. It is a change which has taken place in the
lifetime of men much younger than myself. It is a change, I am told,
most marked since I last visited the United States more than twenty
years ago. A regular and organized Jewish emigration began to pour in,
especially from the Baltic. It flooded New York, where it now forms
probably a third of the population; it created Ghettoes in most of the
large Northern industrial towns, and all the phenomena we associate in
Europe with these movements began to show themselves. There was the
growth of the financial monopoly and of monopolies in particular trades.
There was the clamour for toleration in the form of "neutralizing"
religious teaching in schools; there was the appearance of the Jewish
revolutionary and of the Jewish critic in every tradition of Christian
life. The Jews went also--as they usually do--to the heart of things,
and the Executive was attacked. The last and apparently the most
unpopular of the presidents, Mr. Wilson, seems to have been wholly in
their hands. Anonymity in the Press came, of course. A very marked
example of it is a journal called _The New Republic_, which, though it
has but a small proportion of Jewish writers upon it, and though its
capital is (I believe) not Jewish, is yet to all intents and purposes
the organ of the Jewish intellectuals, always joins in the boycott of
any news unfavourable to European Jews, always joins in the clamour for
anything favourable to them, and in general adheres to the Jewish side,
like the _Humanité_ in Paris, or, let us say, _The New Statesman_ in
England.
But the novel presence in the United States of this phenomenon with
which in the west of Europe we have now been familiar for a long time,
provides a more direct and a very different kind of reaction from what
it has among us. This reaction against Jewish powers was not (to use a
Stock Exchange metaphor) "sticky." There was no hesitation; there were
no uneasy patches of silence. The Jewish question was discussed from the
moment it was first felt and to-day it is discussed beyond all others.
Of political topics I have found it the first in the conversation of the
Americans who have visited Europe since the War and with whom I have
discussed the affairs of their country. It ranges, as that reaction
always does, from the wildest Anti-Semitism to strong and open defence
of the Jewish position, not only by Jews but by the very small minority
of their admirers outside the Jewish community, especially among the
wealthy. The characteristic of the whole thing in the United States is
that it is only just beginning. It is capable of becoming one of those
sudden growths of which the past history of the Republic has made us
familiar, and indeed it is too early yet to judge, even on the largest
lines, what forms it may not take. It is enough to say that there is
behind the reaction against the Jew in that country a growing intensity
of feeling with which we, as yet, in Western Europe, for all the advance
we have made in the matter, are unfamiliar. If a test be required,
contrast the silence about the Jews in '96, during Bryan's great attack
upon the gold standard, with the work of Mr. Ford and all that he stands
for to-day!
The rest of the world is either of Islam or heathen. In the heathen
world, so far, the Jew has little place. He has a strong grip on India,
of course, but only through the British Raj, not through the native
population; and in China, except as a quasi-European merchant, he has no
power at all; neither has he over the strong and organized nationality
of Japan.
Such are the degrees, very roughly, of the problem; such the differences
of its quality in the various national groups to-day. Of these the two
most interesting states of the problem by far, because they are changing
with the greatest rapidity, are found in France, in England and in the
United States.
I have said that the second modifying condition was the difference of
civic traditions of the various nations. Here again you have a
differentiation from East to West. But within it a differentiation,
ultimately due to religion, from North to South. In Russia there was
never any tradition of keeping silence upon the Jew, or of respecting
the Jew at all. He was, until the recent revolution, the national enemy,
and there was the end of it. Similarly in Poland, Roumania and the
vaguer populations of their borders, and even in the old Hungary, the
Jew was talked of openly as belonging to a separate nationality and, on
the whole, a hostile one.
But as one got west another spirit emerged, another tradition. It was
"the thing" to treat the Jew as a citizen. This fashion was weaker in
the Germanies than in the Low Countries, France, or England; it was
everywhere present west of the Elbe.
It was a tradition flowing from two sources: the commercial and
protestant England of the seventeenth century, the sceptical France of
the eighteenth. The Jew (according to this spirit) merited special
protection and special respect. He must be protected and respected even
in his passion for secrecy; so that at last the mere mention of his
existence in the cultivated and directing classes of the west became
something of an oddity.
From this spirit proceeded the Liberal fiction or convention which I
dealt with in the second chapter of this book. It was clinched, it was
given permanent form, by the enthusiasm and severe doctrine of the
French Republicans, which arose at a moment when Israel was regarded as
a religion and its national quality was forgotten. Since all religion
was thought to be dying, since, further, an enthusiasm had arisen
against almost any religion which exercised civic power (notably the
Catholic Church), this Jewish religion, formerly regarded as inimical to
the State, or at any rate separate from it, was naturally accorded a
special privilege. That strange system arose, the death of which we are
now watching after its brief life of somewhat more than a century,
whereby the Jew was permitted to wear the mask of nationalities other
than his own, and to function everywhere as though he were a citizen,
not of Israel, but of the nation in which he chanced to find himself.
Against this attitude arose at last the powerful plea of nationalism. In
England, as we shall see in the next chapter, this plea was less strong
than elsewhere, because the interests of international Jewish finance
and of British commerce were for so long nearly identical. In Italy,
where the Jew was naturally closely connected with the nationalist
movement on account of its antagonism to the Papacy, national feeling
clashed little with the anomaly of the Jew. But in France, especially
after the defeat of 1870, the contrast became stronger and stronger,
just as it is strengthening to-day in Germany after the defeat of 1918.
It was that clash between the "city" of Israel and the other "cities" in
which we Europeans function, to which allusion has been made on a former
page. It would be very convenient, no doubt, to the "City" of Israel if
all other "cities" disappeared and left an open field for Jewish
operations. But they do not propose to disappear; and though our
devotion to them may seem inexplicable to the Jew, he must accept it as
a permanent force; for the patriotism of the European will not weaken.
In the United States this Liberal tradition or convention, this
conception that the Jew must be treated as a full citizen, was far
stronger even than it was in the West of Europe. It was in the very soul
of the Constitution, and, what is more important, in the very soul of
the people. For such a spirit was nourished not only in doctrine but in
practice by the appearance, in vast quantities, of immigrants from many
different countries, all of whom were absorbed in and merged by the
American spirit. If ever there was a field in which the false conception
that a Jew could be a Jew and at the same time the full citizen of
another nation, that field was the United States of America. Yet it is
there that the problem is now reaching its most acute form; and the
reason is that side by side with this strong civic tradition there goes
a complete freedom of speech and a very active public opinion. The
reality became too much for theory and the Jew was recognized as
something apart. He will never fall into the background again.
There remain to be considered the international forces which modify this
general truth that the quarrel with the Jew is a quarrel with his
increasing control over our affairs.
Those international forces are Religion--Islam and the Catholic
Church--the force of Modern Capitalism, and the Reaction against that
force of the Industrial Proletariat, the Reaction summed up in the term
Socialism. All four are international.
The position of the Jew in Islam can be simply defined. In Islam he is
treated with less method and therefore with less continued oppression
than in Christendom, but always and permanently as something base and
inferior, save in a few rare moments when he has the favour of
particular rulers or is necessary to some special society, or is admired
in a moment of intellectual brilliance.
Normally the Jew in Islam is an outcast. I know very well that the game
is played of pretending that Islam is in some way kinder to him than we
are. It is but a game: the playing of one party against another--of
Islam against Christendom--by Israel, which is of neither. In Islam his
superior position in Christendom is equally famed. History is too strong
for such pretences. All the history of Islam, all the social spirit of
Islam, to which there are countless witnesses to-day, give the same
verdict about the general treatment of the Jew in that society.
So it was in independent Islam. But Islam, politically controlled
to-day by the Western Christian powers, is another matter. Under that
unstable state of affairs (no one can say how long it will last; the
conflict between Islam and Christendom seems eternal and the rise and
fall of that tide is indefinitely successive) the problem takes on quite
another shape. France and England appear in Islam as the artificial
supporters of the Jew.
Until quite lately it was the French who bore the worst odium of this in
the eyes of the Mohammedans. Under the French the Jews in North Africa
were often given a special, a superior position, which was an insult to
every Mohammedan and which is still an insult to him. It is the weakest
point of the French regime. In Algeria the Ghetto Jew may vote. The Arab
may not. Even in Morocco, where things have been done more wisely than
in Algiers, the difficulty is felt. How are you to treat a Jew
differently in Morocco from the way in which he is treated in France? He
is common to the two countries. If you treat him as if he were French,
and therefore a member of the governing power, what of the pride of
those lords of the Atlas and of Fez?
In the vastly larger field of Mohammedan control exercised by Britain,
which, directly and indirectly, is ten times that of France, there was
until lately less of this friction; but the tables have been turned, and
to-day it is Britain which stands to the Mohammedan as the thruster-in
of the Jew. It began with the support of Jewish finance in Egypt; it
went on with the extended control over Indian commerce by Jews; it
continued in the control of Indian currency by Jews. It has ended in the
grotesque appointment to the Indian Viceroyalty and the extraordinary
experiment of Palestine.
To-day, at the moment in which I write, there is no doubt on the matter
whatsoever: From Rabat on the Atlantic to the Bay of Bengal, the Western
Powers are regarded as the agents of a Jewish intrusion which is
intolerable to Islam. And whereas the chief blame lay, until quite a few
years ago, upon the French, to-day it lies upon the British Government.
* * * * *
The rôle of the Catholic Church in the debate between the Jews and
Christendom is the most discussed, the worst understood, of any point
connected with the general problem. But it is capable of simple
definition. Wherever the Catholic Church is powerful, and in proportion
as it is powerful, the traditional principles of the civilization of
which it is the soul and guardian will always be upheld. One of these
principles is the sharp distinction between the Jew and ourselves. The
Rationalist would say that this distinction was racial, and that it only
found religious expression on account of its racial reality. His
opponent would say that the origin of the quarrel was mainly religious;
that it was a difference in religious tradition which formed the
contrast between the Jew and Christendom. The former can cite as
evidence the violent original contrast between the Roman Empire and the
Jew, the latter the truth that religion, philosophy, is the formative
force in every human society.
But whichever theory you adopt, the fact is there. The Catholic Church
is the conservator of an age-long European tradition, and that tradition
will never compromise with the fiction that a Jew can be other than a
Jew. Wherever the Catholic Church has power, and in proportion to its
power, the Jewish problem will be recognized to the full.
On the other hand, there never has been and never will be, or can be,
admission by Catholic morals of warfare against the Jew. Those morals
are plain. That doctrine has been defined over and over again and acted
upon throughout history. If indirect hostilities are opened against the
majority by a minority in its midst, they may be repressed and punished.
Still more important, insincere and pretended conversion, used as a
cloak, may be repressed and punished. But though a community has the
right to determine its own life, and (if it think it possible) even to
eliminate (with justice, not with cruelty, violence or injustice in any
form) an alien, a hostile minority; yet that minority has its own right
to live, if not there, then elsewhere. It has its right--once it is
rooted and traditional--to its own convictions, to its own tradition. If
you allow it to live among you, you must allow it to live its own life
save where that life threatens yours. The Catholic Church will always
maintain reality, including the reality of that sharp distinction
between the Jew and his hosts.
The opponent of the Catholic Church will tend, other things being equal,
to support the Jew, because, under that distinction, the Jew may find
himself ill at ease. The whole Protestant tradition of the North was for
more than 300 years favourable to the Jew, partly indeed on account of
its reliance upon the Jewish Scriptures, its absorption in the inspired
Jewish folk-lore, but more because the alliance with the Jew was an
alliance against the Catholic Church. Strong traces of that spirit
still remain. What has warred against it has been the sheer necessity
in every country, Catholic or Protestant, Liberal or anti-Liberal, to
preserve society against what each began to feel as a disruptive and an
alien domination.
There remain the two novel forces--Modern Capitalism, and, protesting
against it, its victim, the Modern Industrial Proletariat.
A few years ago anyone would have said that the opposition to the Jew
was an opposition to capitalism alone; the Jew was the representative of
capitalism, and Jewish finance was the particular aspect of Jewish power
in which that power was universally hated. But we have seen all that
change. To-day the strongest force against the Jew is on the other side.
It is mainly aroused, not by the fear of capitalist forces, but by the
fear of revolutionary forces.
I make bold to say that when the feeling against the Jew comes to the
point of action, the Jew will necessarily, and in self-defence, fall
back upon the leadership of the proletariat against industrial
capitalism. He will--he must, from mere instinct, quite apart from
calculation--use the line of cleavage which divides a society hostile to
him. He will rely on the line of cleavage driven by the vast modern
quarrel between the few possessors in the modern industrial world and
their victims, the exploited millions.
So put, the opportunity of the Jew, if he be driven to extremities to
raise an army in his defence, seems a great opportunity enough. It would
seem easy for him to deflect all animosity against himself into
animosity against the rich--safeguarding, of course (as he has done in
Russia), the Jewish rich. But we must remember three formidable
conditions which weaken that opportunity.
The first condition is this: The industrial millions are still quite a
small minority and will probably in the future be an even smaller
minority of the civilized white world. The war dealt them a heavy blow.
The fact that the industrial proletariat is a town population, and
therefore less and less productive, is another cause of weakness; their
decline in health another. The fact that industrial capitalism depends
upon the machine being kept going, and that its serfs are less and less
willing to keep the machine going, is another.
Secondly, the area (and that is important) occupied by industrial
capitalism is but a very small area of the surface of the civilized
world.
Thirdly, the revolt of the Industrial Proletariat, if the Jews provoke
it, will be short-lived. Either it will be defeated, or after destroying
its masters it will, under Jewish leadership, destroy its own powers of
production, as in Russia.
When the fury is exhausted, in a very short time the Jewish problem will
reappear.
The proletarian battle may rage intensely, but it will be far from
universal, and will not be sufficient, I think, to distract mankind from
that other cross-problem of Jew and non-Jew, to which his attention is
being more and more steadily directed.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] Except, of course, an outlawed member. The case of Dr. Levy turned
out of this country by his compatriots in the Government for having
written unfavourably of the Moscow Jews will be fresh in every one's
memory.
THE POSITION OF THE JEWS IN ENGLAND