OUR DUTY
The solution which I propose, which I believe could be made stable, and
which I further believe is the only stable one, demands a greater, a
more necessary effort upon our side than upon that of our guests.
It is the average man who must do his duty in the matter, and it is upon
him that the responsibility will fall, if we take up once again that
wretched sequence of ill-ease, persecution, reaction, which has marked
so many centuries.
We are the vast majority, we are the organism within which this small
minority moves. We are, or could be if we chose, the makers of our own
laws, and we are certainly the makers of our own political moods.
I know it is the custom to throw all the responsibility upon the other
side, to be perpetually devising instruments for their guidance which
soon become instruments for their oppression, and in general to imagine
a problem wherein the part of the European is purely negative and all
the work has to be done by the Jewish stranger.
That attitude is not only false but grossly undignified. When men accuse
some one weaker than themselves of interference with, and even of
acquiring power over, them they condemn themselves. It is in the main
our fault if an equilibrium has so rarely been reached in all these
sixty generations of debate. For however alien, however irritant the
foreign body be, it is we who have in our hands the solvent of that
irritant and of relieving the strain which it causes.
Here let me recall at the risk of repetition (for repetition is
necessary to lucidity in such arguments) the logical process with which
I opened this essay. I say that the vast majority, the fixed race
through which in fluid and nomadic form Israel goes moving from century
to century, is not free to discharge its responsibility by any one of
those attempted solutions which I have condemned. No man, I trust, will
have the cynicism to say that mere persecution, let alone its horrible
extreme, is or should be a solution. No man can predict the same of
exile either. No man can discharge our responsibility by pretending that
any solution arrived at must be for our good alone and may disregard
that of those who live among us.
It is a statement one hears frequently enough that the masters of house
have alone to decide what shall be done under their roof: that the
interloper, the alien element, has no standing and no right to complain
of whatever measures may be taken for the protection of the household.
The thing so put sounds plausible. It is essentially false. It is
comparable to the argument applied to private property--that because
private property is a right, and that because a man "may do what he
likes with his own," therefore he may use it to the manifest hurt of
others. Moreover, the analogy is false; for when a man is talking of
"the master of the house" having the right in his household to decide
its own way of living and of treating its guests, he is considering a
very small unit in a great community; his household in the whole nation:
a little body which, if it discharge or in any other way deal with
something alien to itself, will inflict no great injury upon that
foreign body, since there is all the world for it to turn to outside.
But in the relations between the Jew and Christendom, or the Jew and
Islam, the parallel fails. It is precisely because there is no "outside"
to which the exile can turn that a duty is imposed on us.
It is true indeed that when a small and alien minority assumes to
dictate the policy of the rest, to regard its own advantages alone and
subordinate to those advantages the life of all, the claim is grotesque
and must be disallowed. But we should remember upon the other side that
it is only by exaggerating its claim that a minority can live at all. It
is only by fierce insistence upon its right to survive that its survival
is guaranteed. We can arrive at justice in this matter by the process of
putting ourselves in the shoes of those in relation to whom we propose
to act.
Put yourself in the shoes of the Jew and ask how this doctrine of "doing
what one likes with one's own" and being "the master of one's own
household" would look to you.
A public example which very rightly made a stir a few months before this
book was published, may serve as text. A learned and distinguished Jew,
Dr. Oscar Levy, a man who was an asset to any community, was turned out
of the country under circumstances which many of my readers will recall.
He pleaded with perfect justice that as a Jew such an exile left him
homeless; that the original country of which he was nominally a citizen
(under the broken-down fiction that Jews can be Germans, or Austrians,
or what not, and cease to be themselves) would not have him; that his
interests, his livelihood had attached him to this country; he had never
hidden his true nationality nor changed his name, nor used any of those
subterfuges which, even when excusable, are dangerous and contemptible
in so many of his compatriots. There was no conceivable reason why such
rigour should be used against this man, save indeed that he was a Jew.
Put yourself in his shoes and see how the thing looks. There is no
nation to which you could have returned: there is no society to receive
you as a member of it. You are not permitted to remain in the atmosphere
with which you have grown familiar, in the surroundings which have
become those of your later life, and your consonance with which it is
too late for you to change. Could there be a grosser cruelty or a
grosser injustice? It is the very core of the whole problem that
_somewhere_ the Jew must be harboured, and therefore to some one of us
the question must be put, "Will you harbour him, and if so upon what
terms?" If each man answer, "No, I will not," then all collectively
become oppressors. It is no answer to say, "These men are not of us, and
therefore they may conspire against us," or "Their interests are
divergent from ours and therefore may and do clash with ours." All that
is granted. That is merely stating the problem, not solving it. What do
we say in daily life of men who merely state their grievances, harp upon
them, and make no effort to put them right? What do we think of men who
perpetually complain of something naturally weaker than themselves, make
no effort to understand its necessities and attempt only to rid
themselves of the nuisance without considering reciprocal duty and
mutual relations? The same should we think of those who so act towards
the Jewish community in our midst which, for all its domination and
exaggerated modern power, is ultimately at our mercy, far weaker than we
are in numbers and situation. Without further elaboration of what should
be an obvious political and moral principle, let us consider our part in
the task.
It consists, I conceive, in two very different determinations: two very
different but allied lines of conduct to which we must pledge ourselves.
The first, until recently the most difficult, is the determination to
speak of the Jewish people as openly, as continuously, with as much
interest, with as close an examination as we speak of any other foreign
body with which we are brought in contact.
The second, which will perhaps be the more difficult duty to practise in
the future, will be to avoid, in the individual public recognition of
those with whom we must live, all futile anger and all mere reaction. I
mean by mere reaction, blind reaction. The instinctive thrusting back
against a thing which presses on us, the uncalculated and animal return
blow, the consequences of which, either to ourselves or to others, are
not weighed when it is delivered; the futile complaint, the futile rage,
the futile cruelty.
Unless those two duties are undertaken together, unless the
determination to practise both be of equal weight, the solution I
propose will fail. To discuss the problem presented by the presence of
the Jewish people, to talk of them as one would of any other, openly and
frankly, to interest oneself in their history and in their present
doings: all this is only to aggravate the trouble if we use that open
dealing for the purpose of doing them a hurt, or if, in the course of
it, we allow ourselves (merely from irritation or contrast, from the
sense which all must have of opposition to things alien) to react
against them without consideration of the immediate and ultimate
consequences not only to themselves but to us.
Conversely, the determination to regard their interests and to avoid
every possible occasion of conflict, to hold a just measure with them,
is quite useless if we falsify the whole relation by secrecy and false
convention.
The moment that comes in, there comes in with it a secret
dissatisfaction with oneself and with the whole situation. The position
is falsified, the seed of animosity greatly stimulated, the danger of
mutual contempt made inevitable.
Now let us look at these two branches of what we have to do in the
matter, and see what difficulties lie in the way.
In the way of frankly recognizing, examining, taking an open interest in
the Jewish minority in our midst there lie three very powerful
obstacles. First the inherited convention of polite society; secondly,
and much the most powerful, fear; and thirdly, the very reputable desire
to avoid offence.
The first of these, the fear of convention, has many roots--the
necessity for harmony in a leisured life, that is, the desire to avoid
friction even at the expense of truth, the mere momentum of a quiet
habit, the fear of misunderstanding which may come from one side casting
ridicule upon the other, which may offend the person whom we have
misunderstood, or make us ridiculous in his eyes and those of our
audience.
There is also, of course, as a cause, more powerful than any other, the
force which lies behind all convention, the force which makes a man take
off his hat in a church, which forbids his walking without boots in the
street on the driest day, that is, the pressure of general practice. But
the thing to realize is that in this form--I mean as distinct from any
feeling of fear or of charity--the thing is a convention and a
convention only. Difficult as it is to break with conventions, unless
_this_ convention is broken once and for all, the Jewish problem remains
with us unsolved and growing in acuteness and peril.
You can meet an Irishman and discuss with him the conditions of his
nation. You can ask an Italian when he was last in Italy, or
congratulate a Frenchman upon his acquisition of your tongue or tell him
that it is difficult for him to understand your own customs: but a
convention arose under the Liberal fiction--to which I have devoted so
much space in the earlier part of this book--that to do any of these
very natural things in the case of a Jew is monstrous. Your audience is
shocked if you ask some learned Jew at a public table a question upon
his national literature or history. It is a solecism to refer to his
nationality at all, save perhaps now and then in terms of foolish
praise--in nine times out of ten praise not to the point and not
desired by its recipient. And even praise must be approached most
gingerly. You may not ask a Jew in London, however keen your desire for
information, whether he had cousins in Lithuania or Galicia who have
told him of the conditions of those distressed countries. You may not
ask him when his family came to England, nor, if he be a recent arrival,
what he thinks of the country. The whole thing is _taboo_.
More than this: you must, you are expected (or were until quite recently
expected) to emphasize in a most extravagant manner the complete
identity of your Jewish guest with the people among whom he lives. I do
not take offence if some chance acquaintance, noting my French name,
talks to me about France, and is interested in my experience as a
conscript long ago in that country. Mr. Redmond did not feel himself
insulted when those he met in London discussed Irish matters with him,
from the most acute difficulty in politics, to the most general allusion
to the Abbey Theatre. The editor of an Italian review visiting England
is not shocked if you ask him when he left Florence, nor are those
around you horrified at the ill-breeding of your question. But in the
matter of the Jew there stands this convention cutting you off from any
such straightforward and simple way of dealing with a fellow-being. That
convention, I say, must be broken down if we are to get any results at
all and to establish a permanent peace.
The thing was not, of course, entirely irrational in origin. No custom
is. It was to be excused upon several grounds.
First, there was the fact that many people were known to cherish so
strong an hostility to Jews that to emphasize the Jewish character of
anyone present might awaken that hostility.
Then there was the peculiar rapid transition both of Jewish movements
and of Jewish fortunes. In the case I have suggested, of asking a London
Jew whether he had relatives in Galicia or Lithuania, you might be
stumbling upon relations much poorer than himself in the East End of
London; or, again, you might seem to be emphasizing the nomadic
character of the race and thereby also emphasizing the contrast between
it and our own.
But much the strongest excuse for the convention was the well-founded
idea that its exercise pleased the Jews themselves. Men avoided direct
mention of Jewish nationality because it was felt that such direct
mention was almost an insult. It was a thing which the Jew in whose
presence you found yourself desired to have kept in the background; and
though we might not understand why he desired it, yet we respected his
desire as we do that of anyone with whom we wish to preserve harmonious
relations. Most men, for instance, are indifferent upon, say, the matter
of smoking. Most men are quite at their ease when they are asked whether
they smoke or not, and if they do, whether they prefer this or that
brand of tobacco. But now and then one comes across a man who, from some
accident of training (as, for instance, a man whose mother brought him
up to think smoking a mortal sin), does not like to have it alluded to.
I myself know the case of a man of the highest culture and of
considerable social position to whom you may not say anything about pigs
either in connection with farming or in connection with food; for his
sympathies are Mohammedan. In these exceptional cases, when we know of
our guest's particular desire, we yield to it for the sake of harmony
and of right living. So is it in this matter of the former convention
against alluding to Jewish nationality or Jewish interests in any form.
Whether the Jews were wise or not to cherish that convention, as they
undoubtedly did, does not concern this part of my argument. I am talking
of our duty and not of theirs. But I say that unless the convention is
softened and at last dissolved, nothing can be done. Both parties should
know that it only does harm. It renders stilted and absurd all our
relations; it fosters that suspicion of secrecy which I have insisted
upon as the chief irritant in those relations, and it creates a feeling
of exception, of oddity, which is the very worst service that could be
rendered to the Jews themselves.
Some little time ago the convention went so far that even a mention, a
neutral--nay, a laudatory mention, of anything Jewish in a general
company led to an immediate awkwardness. Men looked over their
shoulders, women gave downward glances right and left. A sort of hunt
began, to see whether anyone present could possibly in any remote
connection be offended by the monstrous deed. If a man said, "What a
poet Heine was and how thoroughly Jewish is his irony!" and said it in a
room full of people, the adjective "Jewish" acted like a pistol
shot--could anything be more absurd! Yet so it was.
But the point I make is not against the absurdity of this convention but
against its peril. It is an obstacle to all right handling of what is
becoming daily a more and more insistent and acute difficulty.
It is obvious that the getting rid of such a convention is not to be
effected by violent methods, nor immediately. But our duty is to
accelerate its decline and, within reason, to enlarge every opportunity
for treating the Jewish nationality precisely as one treats any other. I
mean precisely as one treats any other in conversation or in writing. We
all know the insane type which loves to break convention merely because
it is a convention, and we shall certainly have to be on our guard
against this sort of person in the near future, as this particular
convention begins to break down. But without encouraging such
eccentricities there is ample room for an increasing ease in the
recognition of what after all we know to be reality, a reality which
requires open discussion for the good of us all. The danger is lest even
this merely conventional obstacle should by too long a resistance dam up
forces which tend to break it down and therefore lest, when it is pulled
down, we should admit the other extreme of licence, with its opportunity
for insult and damage. That is what has happened in the case of other
much more reasonable Victorian conventions, and we must not have it
happen in the case of the convention which for so long forbade us to
admit that a Jew was a Jew or to take any open interest, when he was
present, in the things which he himself thinks the most interesting of
all.
And if anyone shall answer that convention is necessary, lest on its
decline open hostility should follow, I can only say that this is to
despair of any equitable solution at all. But my whole thesis in this
book is that such a solution need not yet be despaired of.
There is one more thing to be said in this matter of the old _taboo_.
However long it may linger in the small educated class, it has gone for
ever among the populace, and it is the popular instinct we shall have
mainly to deal with in the difficult times ahead of us.
The populace in this country talks upon Jewish matters with a frankness
which would astonish the drawing-rooms, and has so talked upon them for
a generation past--ever since the great novel influx of poor Jews began
to pour into our towns. It not only talks thus openly to and of Jews
upon its own level, but it is thoroughly alive to the presence and power
of Jews in government. Those who think that a continuance of the
convention can put off the necessity for a solution would be
disillusioned if they would spend a few days east of Aldgate, and mix
with their fellow-citizens there.
Allied to this obstacle of convention is the very real obstacle of
charity.
Now we are here dealing not with a positive charity but with a negative
one and with a form of charity uncommonly like slackness.
The man who honestly thinks that any allusion to Jewish races in
contemporary art, history or letters in the presence of a Jew is
offensive and therefore to be avoided, from goodness of heart, _and who
also practises the same virtue where any other foreigner is concerned_
is rare indeed. There are such men, for men of exceptional goodness
coupled with exceptional stupidity are to be found. But the excuse of
charity as it is generally put forward is not wholly ingenuous. Where it
is ingenuous our reply to-day must be that even at the risk of
occasional ill-ease, the danger of offence must be risked; for unless we
risk it there is increasing peril of a much greater offence against
justice. For whatever reason open discussion is burked, even for the
reason of charity, we only put off the evil day, and charity so used may
be compared to the charity which refuses to take action in any other
critical problem of increasing gravity. The charity which hesitates to
control the supplies of a spendthrift, or to wage a defensive war in a
just cause, or to defend an oppressed man at the risk of quarrelling
with his oppressor, is a charity misdirected.
But, as I have said, with much the greater part of men who plead this
motive the plea is, if they would only examine their own consciences,
found to be false. And the test of its falsity will be apparent when the
convention slackens. When it is no longer conventional to avoid all
mention of Jews, how many will remain silent merely from the love of
their fellow-men? One might go further and say that when the convention
has gone, any need for this kind of charity will go with it. There is an
exception, of course, in the case of the man whose dislike of Jews is so
violent that he fears himself if he gives any rein to his tongue. That
mania is exceptional; but where it is found certainly its victim will do
well to keep silence. If a man cannot mention the Hebrew alphabet
without a sneer, or the economics of Ricardo without betraying his ill
feeling for Ricardo's lineage, then certainly he had better hold his
tongue when Jews are there. So, too, a Frenchman who raves against the
English had far better not discuss the British Constitution or the
genius of Newton in any society where an Englishman may be present.
There remains the chief obstacle--that of fear.
There is no doubt that the strongest force still restraining an
expression of hostility to the Jew is fear.
In a sense, of course, there is a "fear" of breaking convention--but
that is fear only in metaphor. I mean not this, but the very real dread
of consequences: the feeling that an expression of hostility to Jewish
power may bring definite evils on the individual guilty of it, and a
panic lest those evils should fall upon him. How strong this feeling is,
anyone can testify who has explored, as I have, this most insistent of
modern political ills; and doubtless the greater part of my non-Jewish
readers will recall examples to the point.
It is a fear of two consequences, social and economic, and even of both
combined. Men dread lest hostility to the Jew Domination should bring
them into the grip of some unknown but suspected world-wide power--some
would call it a conspiracy--which can destroy the individual who shall
be so rash as to challenge it. Some perhaps have gone to the length--the
insane length--of reading the word "destroy" in its literal sense and of
fearing for their lives. Such an illusion is laughable. But very many
more are affected by the reasonable conception that they will have
against them, if they provoke it, an intelligent, combined action which
they cannot meet because there is no organization upon their side:
because it is international; because there is behind it a great
intensity of feeling; because through finance it controls the political
machines of all the nations, because it is all-powerful in the
Press--and so forth.
They dread, I say, the social consequences. They also (and that with
more definition and more sense) dread the economic consequences. They
recognize (they also exaggerate) the grip of the Jew over finance. They
conceive that if they speak they will be dragged down, their enterprises
ruined, their credit dissolved. And that is the most powerful instrument
which can be brought to bear. When supernatural motives disappear the
strongest motive remaining after appetite is avarice; and avarice is
more universal than appetite and more continuous. Nor is it only avarice
which is at work here, but also the respectable desire for security.
There are to-day innumerable men who would express publicly on Jews what
they continually express in private, but who conceal their feelings for
fear that their salaries may be lost or their modest enterprises
wrecked, their investments lowered, and their position ruined. Above
them are a lesser number, equally convinced that their large fortunes
would be in peril were they so to act.
The characteristic of all this feeling is two-fold. In the first place,
as would seem to be the case with convention, though in a much greater
degree, it dams up and enormously increases the latent force of anger
against Jewish power both real and imaginary. It is like the piling up
of a head of water when a river valley is obstructed, or like the
introducing of resistance into an electric current. The suppression of
resentment, though that suppression is the act of the men who themselves
feel the resentment and not directly of their opponents, is a fierce
irritant and accounts for the high pressure at which attack escapes when
once it is loosened.
I speak only of hostility and of attack, for it is in these least
rational examples that the strength of the thing is to be found. But it
applies also to mere discussion. There is hardly anyone to-day who does
not desire to discuss as an urgent political problem the present
position, the present power, the present disabilities, the present
claims of Israel. But for one that will openly discuss these things
there are ten who, in varying degrees, forbid themselves so plain a
freedom of speech in dread of what consequences might follow. It has,
like all panic, a ridiculous element. It is informed by the most absurd
illusions; it suffers from grotesque imaginings and phantasms. In some
this dread of the Jewish power has very plainly passed the line which
divides the stable from the unstable mind and even the sane from the
insane. But it is none the less a formidable element in our problem.
This obstacle, much more than that of convention, bears a character of
rigidity. It works for a certain time, then it breaks down and releases
a flood.
That is why the first expressions of hostility in our time were so
exaggerated and ill-proportioned. That is why so many of them were
plainly mad. This very character of exaggeration, this very wildness in
proportion, rendered those against whom the attack was delivered more
contemptuous of it than they should have been.
The forerunners of the present movement--I mean, of the movement hostile
to Israel--were not calculated to excite the respect of their opponent
or even to carry with them the men on their own side. They lacked that
"common" sense which is the first quality of leadership. For the power
of leadership implies a soul in common with those who are led. The
enthusiast can lead permanently, but the extravagant man never for long.
I say that these first attacks were on that account despised: they were
unduly despised by those whom they menaced.
There lay in reserve behind all the exaggeration and wildness a great
bulk of very different opinion; the opinion of men normal in their
appreciation of values and of proportion, not given to "seeing things,"
fully in touch with reality; men who know that they have hitherto only
been silent through the action of fear, who despise themselves on that
account and who are the more ready to act. For the sense of fear not
only degrades but angers: at least in our race. The European who admits
to himself that he has restrained an instinct not from religion, nor
from a general sense of right, but from cowardice, is always angry with
himself and awaits the moment when he can take his own revenge upon his
own past and clear himself of reproach in his own eyes.
Herein lies the peril to Israel of such a state of affairs. But with
that I am not here concerned. I am only concerned with its effect upon
ourselves. So long as we degrade ourselves, so long as we humiliate
ourselves by our own cowardice, so long as we shirk all reasonable
discussion, let alone all expression of hostility because we dread the
consequences at the hands of our opponents, so long there are present in
rising intensity two evil things: first, the postponement of the right
solution; secondly, the turning of a reasoned policy into mere hatred
with all the consequences that flow from such evil emotion.
The longer we maintain whatever remains of that barrier to free speech
(happily it is already crumbling) the longer do we produce the two fatal
results of postponing justice and of creating enmity. The destruction of
that barrier, the ridding of ourselves of fear in the matter, is, as is
always the case in the exercising of this unmanly thing, a matter for
individual effort. As the proverb goes, "Some one must bell the cat,"
which is another way of saying that if each man waits upon his
neighbour, things will only grow worse and worse.
It is for each in his place, before it is too late, to approach the
Jewish problem and to discuss it openly; to preface that discussion by a
frank interest and a general expression upon all those things in the
minority which directly concern its relations with the majority; to deal
with the Jewish nation exactly as one would with any other.
It used to be a dictum in those who pleaded a lifetime ago for the open
criticism of Scripture, that "the Bible should be approached like any
other book."[2] The result is not of good augury to my present argument
and I rather dread the parallel; but since the phrase is well known I
will use it as a model. It is time, I say, to be rid of treating the
Jewish nation as something closed, mysterious and secret. Let us treat
it "like any other nation." It is no wonder if men, moved by nothing but
a blind hatred, feel some hesitation upon the consequence of that
hatred. But I am convinced that if we on our side get rid of this absurd
modern fear, take the Jew in his right proportions, rid our mind of
exaggeration in his regard--especially of the conception of some inhuman
ability capable of conducting a plot of diabolical ingenuity and
magnitude--we shall be met from the other side.
The Jews are not the only force which is international nor the only
international force the dread of which has disturbed men's judgments.
They are not the only international force which has some degree of
organization and cohesion. If you desire to vent your active dislike of
the Scotch or of the Irish you must be prepared for a certain amount of
Scotch or Irish hostility. You will come across something of an
organization and suffer accordingly; but if you cherish the conception
of a vast subterranean force, Scotch or Irish, watching you with a
malignant power and capable of your destruction, you are, I think, out
of the real world.
If you desire to vent your active dislike of the Catholic Church you
will find ubiquitous opposition. But if you conclude from this that you
are at grips with a monster then you are out of touch with reality.
So it is, surely, with this dread of the Jewish power, which has sullied
so many men's minds, postponed the right discussion of the problem and
nourished ill-ease everywhere. If we simply act as though that dread
were despicable like any other dread, and turned to perfectly open
discussion of the whole affair, even to an open expression of hostility
where hostility is deserved, we shall be the better for it. In any case
it is our duty to ourselves as well as to the State to get rid of fear
in the business, for until we are rid of it no advance towards a
solution can be made.
FOOTNOTE:
[2] I beg leave to introduce an anecdote. An undergraduate once said to
Dr. Jowett, the Master of Balliol, "I take up the Gospels and treat them
as an ordinary book." The Master answered: "Did you not find them a very
extraordinary book?" So it will prove, I think, with the fascination of
Israel.
THEIR DUTY