THE PRESENT RELATION BETWEEN THE ENGLISH STATE AND THE JEWS
The various nations of Europe have every one of them, in the course of
their long histories, passed through successive phases towards the Jew
which I have called the tragic cycle. Each has in turn welcomed,
tolerated, persecuted, attempted to exile--often actually
exiled--welcomed again, and so forth. The two chief examples of extremes
in action, are, as I have also pointed out in an earlier part of this
book, Spain and England. Spaniards, and in particular the Spaniards of
the Kingdom of Castile, went through every phase of this cycle in its
fullest form. England passed through even greater extremes, for England
was the only country which absolutely got rid of the Jews for hundreds
of years, and England is the only country which has, even for a brief
period, entered into something like an alliance with them.
Though it is the present position of the British State--that is, the
position of official British politics towards the Jew--with which we are
concerned, it may be of service to introduce the matter by a word upon
past relations.
The Jewish element in this island, whatever it may have been during the
Roman occupation, was of small account during the Dark Ages. Things
changed at their close in the eleventh century. The Jew is the camp
follower of each new economic movement among us and that is why one
finds him in the wake of the Norman Conquest. Throughout the economic
development which it began appears the secondary rôle of the Jew. Every
one knows the mediaeval rule of Jewish Status. It was established here
as everywhere else in Christendom. The Jew was the King's; that is,
under the special protection of the State. If he were the subject of
popular attack, that attack was an attack on the King's peculiar, and
liable to speedy repression. The individual attacker was punished with
special severity because the danger of mass-movement is always great
where the populace is free to act in masses as it was throughout the
middle ages, and the necessity for preventing individual attacks from
spreading was correspondingly great. Now and then the popular feeling
got out of hand and the monarch had to deal with numbers which he could
not control; but as a rule the Jew, especially the rich Jew, enjoyed a
privileged position, both in Northern France and throughout England. The
Jew of the early Middle Ages in England was normally a well-to-do man
and often an exceedingly rich man. Then, as now, a small number of Jews
were much the richest men of their time.
He had most of the finances in his hands, and this immense privilege
(which he has lost), that he alone was allowed to practise usury. Here
we must pause a moment to define usury.
Usury then (as now) signified the receiving of interest upon
unproductive loans. It is a practice which all moralists and all
philosophers have condemned and which the Church in particular condemns.
If you lend money to a man for a productive purpose: if, for instance,
he is to buy a ship and trade with the money you advance, or to buy a
farm and grow produce, then, of course, you are perfectly free to
stipulate for a portion of the profit. But if you lend the money for a
purpose not directly productive, as, for instance, to a man in grave
necessity, or in lieu of charity, or to build such a building as a
church, which will not produce a rent, or if in any other fashion you
lend money to one who (to your knowledge) will not spend it in some
reproductive agency, then it is immoral to demand interest.
Now an exception was made in mediaeval Christendom in favour of the Jew.
He was allowed to lend money at interest, even in the most grievous
cases of necessity, and for services as unproductive as religion or war.
The only stipulation was that the moneys saved from this lucrative
practice returned to the Crown (in theory) upon the death of the
licensee. In practice no doubt a very large part remained with the
accumulator, who during his lifetime was enjoying the income he had
acquired by usury, who could give it to his heirs while still living,
and could use opportunities for secret investment, or pass it to the
custody of others throughout international Jewry. But liquid sums left
by him, the product of his usury, returned to the Crown upon his death.
This was a great advantage to the Crown, not only in protecting the Jew
from the native hostility of his alien hosts (and particularly of the
populace), but in giving him that great privilege--a monopoly.
The rate of interest was enormous. It varied from nearly 50 per cent to
over 80 per cent. When Jews lent money on security the King was party to
the safe custody of the security, and their privilege extended so far
that they were exempt from the common law, and a case between an
Englishman and his Jewish creditor could only be tried by a mixed jury
in which the Jew's own compatriots were present in equal numbers with
the English.
All during the Angevin period Jewish financial domination continued, up
to the end of the twelfth century and even into the beginning of the
thirteenth. But with the first half of the thirteenth century, for some
reason of which I have never seen a sufficient historical analysis and
of which, perhaps, the full causes have been lost, the Jewish power
began to decline very rapidly, so far as England was concerned.
And here it may be noted that the misfortunes of the Jews in any country
never begin until their financial position is shaken. As long as they
are the financial masters of the Government they are protected; but woe
to them when they begin to lose their financial power! Then there is no
longer any reason for supporting them either on the part of the
governing classes in general or of the Executive in particular. Popular
passion is let loose and disaster follows.
At any rate, the thirteenth century saw in England a rapid decline of
Jewish financial power and at the same time a rapid rise of official
animosity towards them. They got poorer and poorer as the century
proceeded. Their activities were at the same time more and more
restricted. They had lent money largely upon land and yet, in the public
interest, were at last forbidden to foreclose upon it. The final step
came when their special licence to practise usury was withdrawn by
Edward I in the earlier part of his reign; and at last, in 1290, after
increasing severities, they were all expelled the country under penalty
of death.
The unhappy people, already reduced by two generations of falling
fortune, were hurried out of the country, carrying, by permission, their
money and movables. They were protected, indeed, at the ports by the
royal officers, who even paid the passage of the indigent among them;
but they were plundered at sea and some even murdered. The murderers
were punished, but the memory of the persecution remained in the Jews'
mind and England became a natural object of their hate. The Jewish
community expelled by the English was surprisingly small, not 17,000,
and suggests the historical truth that in the Middle Ages, and indeed
until quite modern times, the Jewish community in Northern France and
England was a community of people in the main well-to-do. It so remained
until quite modern times.
There followed three and a half centuries and more during which England
was the one example in Europe of a State that would not tolerate the
Jews upon any terms whatsoever. There certainly remained throughout this
time, or at any rate visited the island, not a few of what the Jews
themselves called "Crypto-Jews," that is, Jews who outwardly deny their
nationality and practise our religion for the purpose of private gain.
These, when they could defeat the law successfully, remained within the
British seas. But their effect was slight; and the English people during
the whole of their great military advance in France, during the whole
period when their language and culture was forming, during the whole
great national episode of the Tudors and of the Reformation, formed the
one great exception out of all Europe in that the Jew remained unknown
to them and was rigorously excluded from their Commonwealth.
They returned, as everybody knows, under Cromwell. Their numbers, and
still more their wealth, increased at the end of the seventeenth century
and concomitantly with this, partly as an effect of it (but here we must
not exaggerate), a number of novel financial features appeared in the
English State each of which shows the increased power of the Jews. The
institution of the Bank, of the National Debt, of speculation in
Exchange and in the fluctuation of stock.
But the real causes of that alliance between the English and the Jews
which is seen in the late seventeenth century, which quickened
throughout the eighteenth and became so very marked in the nineteenth
century, was the cosmopolitan position of England as the leading
commercial State. This it was which led to something like identity
between the interests of Israel and the interests of Britain, an
identity which has lasted so long that now, when divergence is beginning
to appear, it still seems odd and novel to the older generation that
there should be any Jewish action which is not favourable to England.
They cannot understand what the new indifference to Jewish interests,
let alone the new hostility to them, can mean.
There were, of course, many other causes contributory to the peculiar
position which the Jew came to enjoy in modern England, a position which
he has not yet lost in external circumstance, though it is so badly
shaken morally. There was the fact that England was the Protestant power
of the West.
This religious motive played a great part. Between the Catholic Church
and the Synagogue there had been hostility from the first century. In so
far as it was possible to take sides in that quarrel it was natural for
the Protestant power to take sides against the Catholic tradition and
therefore in favour of the Jews. Again, the English were not only
Protestant, their middle classes were steeped in the reading of the Old
Testament. The Jews seemed to them the heroes of an epic and the shrines
of a religion. You will find strong relics of this attitude in
Provincial England to this day. One should add a certain national
distaste for violence, which feeling was exasperated by hearing of the
Jewish persecution abroad. One should also further add the pride which
modern Englishmen take in the feeling that their country is an asylum
for the oppressed.
Meanwhile there was not, until quite lately, any considerable body of
poor Jews in the country to excite the animosity of the populace. That
was an important negative factor in bringing the Jew within the
boundaries of the English State. But with all these factors fully
considered, it remains true that the main cause of the accidental Jewish
position in England was the cosmopolitan character of English commerce
and the essentially commercial character of the English State. As
English export and English shipping began to cover the globe, the
English financial system covered it as well. London became after
Waterloo the money market and the clearing house of the world. The
interests of the Jew as a financial dealer and the interests of this
great commercial polity approximated more and more. One may say that by
the last third of the nineteenth century they had become virtually
identical.
Every new economic enterprise of the British State appealed to the
Jewish genius for commerce and especially for negotiation in its most
abstract form--finance. Conversely, every Jewish enterprise, every new
conception of the Jew in his cosmopolitan activities (until these became
revolutionary) appealed to the English merchant and banker.
The two things dovetailed one into the other and fitted exactly, and all
subsidiary activities fitted in as well. The Jewish news agencies of the
nineteenth century favoured England in all her policy, political as well
as commercial; they opposed those of her rivals and especially those of
her enemies. The Jewish knowledge of the East was at the service of
England. His international penetration of the European governments was
also at her service--so was his secret information. With the
consolidation of the Indian Empire after the Mutiny the Jews were again
an ally from their traditional hatred of the Russian people, which
hatred has led them in our time to wreak so awful a vengeance upon their
former oppressors. The Jew might almost be called a British agent upon
the Continent of Europe, and still more in the Near and Far East, where
the economic power of England extended even more rapidly than her
political power.
And the Jew pointed to the English State as that one in which all that
his nation required of the _goyim_ was to be found. He here enjoyed a
situation the like of which he could not hope to enjoy in any other
country of the world. All antagonism to him had died down. He was
admitted to every institution in the State, a prominent member of his
nation became chief officer of the English Executive, and, an influence
more subtle and penetrating, marriages began to take place, wholesale,
between what had once been the aristocratic territorial families of this
country and the Jewish commercial fortunes.
After two generations of this, with the opening of the twentieth century
those of the great territorial English families in which there was no
Jewish blood were the exception. In nearly all of them was the strain
more or less marked, in some of them so strong that though the name was
still an English name and the traditions those of a purely English
lineage of the long past, the physique and character had become wholly
Jewish and the members of the family were taken for Jews whenever they
travelled in countries where the gentry had not yet suffered or enjoyed
this admixture.
Specially Jewish institutions, such as Freemasonry (which the Jews had
inaugurated as a sort of bridge between themselves and their hosts in
the seventeenth century), were particularly strong in Britain, and there
arose a political tradition, active, and ultimately to prove of great
importance, whereby the British State was tacitly accepted by foreign
governments as the official protector of the Jews in other countries. It
was Britain which was expected to interfere, within the measure of her
power, whenever a persecution of the Jews took place in the East of
Christendom: to support the Jewish financial energies throughout the
world, and to receive in return the benefit of that connection.
We shall have a most imperfect picture of the causes which gradually
made the Jews regard this country as their centre of action if we omit
one essential point.
England was secure.
During the whole period which saw the rise of the Jews to eminence in
this island and their ultimate alliance with its political and
commercial system, English society enjoyed a profound peace. Save for
the petty incidents of the '15 and '45 (the first of no effect south of
the border, the second ephemeral and confined to the North), no
hostilities took place upon English soil between the rebellion of
Monmouth under James II and the bombarding of London by the Germans from
the air during the late war. There has been (save for some quite
insignificant local riots) complete security for property and especially
for large property. There have been since the middle of the eighteenth
century no confiscations, and of commercial fortunes none since the
middle of the seventeenth: no invasion, no civil war, and therefore no
loot: no personal danger from violence.
Such conditions formed an environment ideal for the permanent
establishment and rooting of Jewish power, and for the organization of a
Jewish base.
The political situation reflected itself, as it always does, in
literature. The Jew began to appear in English fiction as an exalted
character, quite specially removed to his advantage from the mass of
mankind. He is already a hero in Sir Walter Scott, but the full
development was much later. You could still have a Jewish villain as
late as _Oliver Twist_, but with writers as different as Charles Reade
and George Eliot we reach a time where the Jew is impeccable. The worst
any writer dares do at the end of the process is to be silent. The best
is to flatter the Jewish type out of all knowledge. This singular
interlude was in part due to the divorce between literature and popular
feeling in the middle and latter part of the nineteenth century; at
least, it was permitted by that divorce. But the active cause of it was
the reflection of the Jew's political position upon the mind of the
educated class as expressed in its literary art.
At the same time a parallel movement appeared on the historical side of
literature. A convention arose that in the clash between the Jews and
the English of the Middle Ages the Jews were invariably right and the
English invariably wrong. Where the struggle was between the Jew and the
non-Jew abroad, the historian exceeded all bounds. The European hostile
to the Jew was a senseless monster, and the Jew hostile to the European
was a holy victim.
The whole story of Europe and of this country, in so far as it was
affected by this very considerable factor, was distorted through
suppression, and false emphasis and quite exceptional lying.
The general reader of history neither knew what part the Jewish
question had played nor the claims that could be advanced for his own
race in the conflict. And as historians live by copying one another, the
legend was established in every school and college.
At the end of the process the Jews, in proportion to their numbers, held
a power in this country beyond anything that has been seen in any other
of the world. Poland at the end of the Middle Ages, when that country
was most nearly comparable to Britain for the harbouring and support of
the Jewish people, is the only parallel, and that a remote one.
Every English Government had (and has) its quota of Jews. They had
entered the diplomatic service and the House of Lords; they swarmed in
the House of Commons, in the Universities, in all the Government offices
save the Foreign Office (and even there representatives of the Jewish
nation have recently entered); they were exceedingly powerful in the
Press: they were all-powerful in the City. No custom unsympathetic to
their race, from the duel to popular clamour, survived. They could boast
that England was not only the country where no distinction whatever was
made in practice, let alone in law, between the Jew and the native, but
that England was the only country where the Jew was always well
received, where his natural defects counted least and where his natural
abilities had most scope.
Such a state of affairs could not last. It was not natural. It was not
consonant with hidden but deep popular tradition or with popular
appetites; it corresponded only to the mood of one European community in
its wealthier classes. A divergence between the cosmopolitan financial
interests of the Jew and the particular national interests of Britain
was bound to come. War on a large scale, though it did not imperil the
country itself, was a warning of change. It appeared with the South
African campaign before the end of the century. The position of the Jew
was altered. Some dissatisfaction with his power began to stir. It was
already muttering and beginning to show itself with the rise of
commercial and maritime competition in the new German Empire which, in
its turn, had become led, upon all its commercial side, by Jews. There
was bound, I say, to be a reaction and a permanent one. While it was yet
taking place, in the heat of the Great War, before it had reached the
official world, that one of the English politicians who was best fitted
to speak for the Jews, who was most intimate with them through manifold
ties of friendship and hospitality, Mr. Arthur Balfour, was chosen to
make the famous pronouncement in favour of Zionism. It came within a
month of the great crisis of the war. Its object was to divide the
general influence of the Jews throughout the world, which had hitherto
been upon the whole opposed to the cause of the Allies, because, like
every other neutral, the Jews were more and more convinced, as the
campaigns dragged on, that the Central Empires were certain of victory.
Though this was the motive, the effect was to tie the British state yet
closer to the fortunes of Israel, for here was England pledged to
support, to defend, to act as a special protector over, the peculiar
interests of the Jews, just where those interests would most challenge
the whole of Christendom and of Islam, just where it would be most
acutely difficult to confirm Jewish claims.
The declaration in favour of Zionism, the solemn pledge of the forces of
the British State to an exceptional support of the Jew in a matter
wholly to his benefit and not in any way to that of England, coming
though it did after the climax of Jewish power had been reached and
passed, was the last stage of that long process of alliance between the
British commercial policy and its ruling classes on the one hand and the
Jews upon the other.
Already, as I have said, that alliance was morally shaken. The great
influx of poor Jews had shaken it. The mere effect of time, the
inevitable revolt of the human conscience against an unnatural pretence
and an obvious fiction, was bound to come, and was overdue. But although
the alliance was already shaken, the English State remained officially
closely interlocked with Jewry, and its last action, the demand for the
establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine, was, as has so often
happened in the story of human development, at once the term and the
turning-point of a process which had reached its conclusion; for it will
be remarked throughout history that any force is most expressive, its
manifestation of power most crude and most emphatic, in the perilous
interval _after_ its real strength has begun to decline and _before_ its
first open defeat.
But the problems presented by this experiment in Palestine merit a
separate examination. To this I will now turn.
ZIONISM