CHAPTER XXIII

ANTI-SEMITISM

WE have followed the fortunes of the Jewish people from the moment of

its first contact with the nations of the West to the last quarter of

the nineteenth century. We have seen that this contact was from the

beginning marked by mutual antipathy, enfeebled at times, invigorated

at others, always present. Some Jewish writers have endeavoured to

show that the hatred of the Gentile towards the Jew in the Middle Ages

was an artificial creation due entirely to the efforts of the Catholic

Church; that it flowed from above, and that the masses of Christendom,

when not incited by the classes, were most amicably disposed towards

Israel. This view is hardly tenable. It is inconceivable that the

Church, or any other authority, could have succeeded so well in

kindling the conflagrations which we have witnessed, if the fuel were

not ready to be kindled. It is also a view contrary to the recorded

facts. We have seen in the earlier Middle Ages popular prejudice

spontaneously manifesting itself in the insults and injuries which were

heaped upon the Jews, and restrained with difficulty by the princes and

prelates of Europe. In the time of the Crusades also it was not St.

Bernard who fanned the fury of the mob against the Jews of the Rhine,

but an obscure monk. The exhortations of the saint were disregarded;

but the harangues of the fanatic found an eager audience, simply

because they were in accord with popular feeling. During the same

period bishops and burgomasters strove to save the victims, in vain.

Again, the persecution of the Spanish Jews in the fifteenth century

would never have attained the dimensions which it did attain, were

it not for the deep-rooted animosity which the bulk of the Spanish

people nourished against them. Castile was then the home of chivalry

and charity. The pretensions of the Pope to interfere in the affairs

of the kingdom had met with scornful opposition on the part of the

Castilian nobles. Three centuries before an Aragonese monarch had given

away his life in defence of the persecuted heretics of Provence. Less

than two centuries before Aragon was one of the few countries that

refused to comply with the joint request of Philip the Fair of France

and Pope Clement V. to persecute the Knights Templars. At the time

when the Inquisition was established in Spain both Castile and Aragon

were hailing the revival of culture. Under Ferdinand and Isabella, as

well as in the subsequent reigns, the Castilians and the Aragonese

vigorously resisted an institution so contrary to the principles

of freedom dear to them. Nor was in Spain the danger of dissension

sufficiently great to justify recourse to so terrible an instrument

of concord. The Spaniards less than any other people had reason to

sacrifice liberty of conscience for the sake of political conquest.

It is, therefore, highly improbable that the Holy Office would ever

have gained a firm footing in Spain, but for the fact that its way was

paved by the popular prejudice against the Jews and the Moors, and its

success assured by the persecution of those races. Though the Spaniards

hated the Inquisition bitterly, they hated the Semites more bitterly

still; and of the two the Jew more bitterly than the Moor.

We have also seen that neither the Renaissance nor the Reformation,

both movements directly or indirectly hostile to the Church, brought

any amelioration to the lot of the Jew. In every country Jew-hatred

existed as the product of other than ecclesiastical influences. Here

and there, under exceptionally favourable conditions, the Jews may

have been tolerated; they were not loved. This negative attitude was

liable to be at any moment converted into active hostility. All that

the Church did was to turn the feeling to account, to intensify and to

sanctify it. Lastly, we have seen that the emancipation of the Jews did

not come about until the end of the eighteenth and the middle of the

nineteenth century--a period no longer of protest against the Church,

but one of rebellion against all the prejudices of all the ages. It was

not until the gospel of humanity, in its broadest sense, was accepted

that the secular clamour against the Jewish portion of the human race

was silenced; and even then not without difficulty. But, though the

plant of anti-Judaism was cut at the root, the root remained, and it

was destined in our own day to put forth a new shoot.

Writers have expended much ingenuity in defining the origin and the

nature of modern anti-Semitism. Some regard it as a resuscitation of

mediaeval religious bigotry; others as the latest manifestation of the

old struggle between Europe and Asia; a third school, rejecting both

those theories, interprets it as a purely political question arising

from the social and economic conditions created by the emancipation

of the Jews; while a fourth sect have attempted to show that the

modern revival is “the fruit of a great ethnographical and political

error.” Those who see in anti-Semitism nothing but a revival of

mediaeval religious rancour ignore the conflict between Jew and Gentile

before the rise of the Mediaeval Church, or even before the rise of

Christianity. Those who explain it as a purely racial struggle forget

the Crusades and the Inquisition and the superstitious horror of usury.

Those who interpret it simply as a question of modern European politics

disregard both those periods of history. Finally, whatever may be said

of crude ethnographical theories and of nebulous nationalist creeds,

it would be doing them too much honour to suppose that they are the

real causes of anti-Semitism. Men do not slaughter their fellow-men for

the mere sake of an abstract hypothesis, though priests may. All these

things do nothing but give a name and a watchword to a movement born

of far less ethereal parents. In our day the political activity which

has used anti-Semitism as an instrument has only done what clerical

activity had done in the past. It has availed itself of a force not of

its own creation. The fact is that every human action is the result of

manifold motives. The complexity of the motives is not diminished by

the multitude of the actors. There is a strong temptation to simplify

matters by singling out one of those motives and ignoring the rest.

But, though truth is always simple, simplicity need not always be true.

There may be new things under the sun. Anti-Semitism, however, is not

one of them. Its roots lie deep in the past.

Viewed, then, in the light of two thousand years’ recorded experience,

modern anti-Semitism appears to be neither religious, nor racial, nor

economical in its origin and character. It is all three, and something

more. We find in it all the motives which led to the persecution of the

Jews in the past. In antiquity the struggle was chiefly due to racial

antagonism, in the Middle Ages chiefly to religious antagonism, in the

nineteenth century we might expect it to assume chiefly a nationalist

garb. But, as in antiquity religious antipathy was blended with racial

hatred, as in the Middle Ages economic rivalry accentuated religious

bigotry, so in our time religious, racial, and economic reasons have

contributed to the movement in various degrees according to the

peculiar conditions, material and moral, prevailing in each country

where anti-Semitism has found an echo. If it were possible to unite

all these causes in one general principle, it would be this: every age

has its own fashionable cult, which for the time being overshadows all

other cults, gives a name to the age, explains its achievements, and

extenuates its crimes. Every age has found in the Jew an uncompromising

dissenter and a sacrificial victim. The cult _par excellence_ of the

nineteenth century is Nationalism.

What is this dreadful Nationalism? It is a reversion to a primitive

type of patriotism--the narrow feeling which makes men regard all those

who live in the same place, or who speak the same language, or who

are supposed to be descended from a common ancestor, as brethren; all

others as foreigners and potential foes. This feeling in its crudest

form is purely a family-feeling, in the worst sense of the term. It

grows into a larger allegiance to the tribe, then to the race, and

that in its turn develops into the broad patriotism which manifests

itself now as Imperialism, now as Catholicism.

There is yet a third form of patriotism--the purest and noblest of all:

loyalty to common intellectual ideals. The Greeks attained to this

lofty conception, and an Athenian orator, in enumerating his country’s

claims to the admiration of mankind, dwells with just pride on this

product of its civilisation. Athens, he says, “has made the name of

the Hellenes to be no longer a name of race, but one of mind, so that

Hellenes should be called those who share in our culture rather than

in our nature.”[229] Isocrates in making this statement, however,

gave utterance to a dream of his own rather than to a feeling common

among his countrymen. The Macedonian Empire strove to convert that

philosophical dream into a political fact. Alexander and his successors

studded Asia with Greek theatres, Greek schools, Greek gymnasia, and

the East was covered with a veneer of pseudo-Hellenic civilisation.

But their success was only partial, superficial and ephemeral. The

intellectual unity could not go deep and therefore did not last long.

The barriers--social, religious and racial--which separated the Hellene

from the Barbarian proved insuperable; and the Isocratean ideal of a

nationality based on community of intellectual aims remained an ideal.

Hellenism demanded a degree of mental development to which mankind has

never yet attained. Hence its failure as a political bond. This was

not the case with Imperialism and Catholicism. They both appealed to

more elementary and therefore less rare qualities in man. Hence their

success. Rome achieved more than Greece because she aimed at less.

The Roman Empire represented the first, the Roman Church the second

variety of this broad patriotism. _Civis Romanus_ was a title which

united in a common allegiance the Italian and the Greek, the Jew and

the Egyptian, the Spaniard, the Briton and the Gaul. Catholic Rome

inherited the imperial feeling of Pagan Rome, but dressed it in a

religious form. The dictatorship of the Caesars was divided between

the Christian Emperor and the Pope: the former inheriting their

political power, the latter the spiritual and moral. Charlemagne

wielded the authority of an Imperator Romanus, his papal contemporary

that of a Pontifex Maximus. Then came the decay and fall of the

Carlovingian fabric; and, gradually, the Papacy built up a spiritual

empire with the _débris_ of the secular. All Catholics were subjects

of that Empire. In the Middle Ages Europe presented a picture of

wonderful uniformity in sentiments, ideals, customs, political and

social institutions. All countries, like so many coins issued from

one mint, seemed to be cast in the same mould, stamped with the same

effigy and adorned with the same legend. National consciousness was

in the Middle Ages practically non-existent, or, if it did exist, in

the later centuries, it was obscured by the religious sentiment. As

in modern Islam we find Arabs, Persians, Indians, Malays, Chinese,

Syrians, Egyptians, Berbers, Moors, Turks, Albanians--nations differing

widely in origin and language--united by the ties of a common creed,

so in mediaeval Christendom we find English, Scotch, French, Italian,

German and Spanish knights all forming one vast brotherhood. The

reader of Froissart cannot fail to notice this community of feeling

and the marvellous ease with which gentlemen from all those nations

made themselves at home in one another’s countries. The chronicler

himself, in his style and mental attitude, supplies a striking example

of this cosmopolitanism. By the mediaeval Christian, as by the

modern Mohammedan, the human race was divided into two halves: true

believers and others. The universal acceptance of Latin as the medium

of communication was another token and bond of brotherhood among the

Christians of mediaeval Europe, as the use of Arabic, as a sacred

tongue, is a token and a bond of brotherhood among the Mohammedans of

the present day.

This feeling of international patriotism, which found its highest

development and expression in the Crusades, began to fade as soon as

Catholic faith began to decay. Disintegration followed both in the

Church and in the State. Loyalty to one ideal and to one authority

was gradually superseded by local and later by racial patriotism.

Various political units succeeded to the Unity of mediaeval Europe,

the vernaculars ousted the Latin language from its position as the

one vehicle of thought, and the old cosmopolitan universities of

Paris and Bologna were replaced by national institutions. Since the

fifteenth century nationalism has been growing steadily, but in the

eighteenth its growth was to some extent checked by humanitarianism.

The great thinkers of that age extolled the freedom and the perfection

of the individual as the highest aim of culture, describing exclusive

attachment to one’s country and race as a characteristic of a

comparatively barbarous state of society: a remnant of aboriginal

ancestor-worship. Nationalism, accordingly, did not reach its

adolescence until the nineteenth century. Then the zeal for peace

was eclipsed by the splendour of the French exploits in war, and the

doctrine of universal freedom was forgotten in Napoleon’s efforts

at universal dominion. These efforts aroused in every country which

Napoleon attacked a passionate protest which resulted in successful

revolt. But the triumph was won at a tremendous cost. Each nation in

proportion to its sense of what was due to itself was oblivious of what

was due to others. The principles of the brotherhood of men and of

universal toleration were denied, the narrow jealousies of race which

the philosophers of the preceding century had driven from the realm of

culture were re-installed, and Nationalism--arrogant, intemperate, and

intolerant--arose on the ruins of Humanitarianism. This evolution, or

revolution, has added a new element in social troubles, and has brought

into being a new set of ideas.

For the last hundred years ethnographical theory has dominated the

civilised world and its destinies as theological dogma had done

during the Middle Ages. Consciously or not, the idea of race directs

the policy of nations, inspires their poetry, and tinges their

philosophy with the same prejudice as religion did formerly. Aryan and

non-Aryan have become terms conveying all but the odious connotation

of Christian and infidel; and in place of the spiritual we have

adopted a scientific mythology. The fiction of our Aryan origin has

flattered us into the benevolent belief of our mental superiority over

the Mongol, and of our moral superiority over the Semite. To dispute

this tenet is to commit sacrilege. But even within the bosom of this

imaginary Aryan fold there are schisms: so-called Celtic, Germanic,

Latin, Anglo-Saxon, and Slavonic sects, divided against one another by

the phantom barriers of ethnographical speculation as frantically as

in older days Christendom was divided by the metaphysical figments of

Arian, Manichaean, Nestorian, and what not. In the name of race are now

done as many great deeds and as many great follies are committed as

were once in the name of God. The worship of race has, as the worship

of the Cross had done before, given birth to new Crusades which have

equalled the old in the degree to which they have disturbed the peace

and agitated the minds of men, and in the violence of the passions

which they have excited. Nationalism more than any other cause has

helped to bring discredit upon the principles of liberty, equality, and

fraternity--to prove the eighteenth century dream of world-wide peace

a glorious impossibility--and to show the enormous chasm which still

gapes between the aspirations of a few thinkers and the instincts of

the masses.

Though common to all European countries, the creed of the age found

articulate exposition first in Germany, and gave rise to various

academic doctrines which attempted to account for the genesis and

evolution of Nationalism in scientific or pseudo-scientific terms. But

names do not alter facts. Ethnographical speculations are in this case

mainly interesting as having supplied a plausible explanation for the

rise of anti-Semitism. Those who are able to see through new guises,

and to detect what old things they conceal, know that anti-Semitism

is little more than a new Protean manifestation of Jew-hatred.

Divested of its academic paraphernalia, the movement is revealed in

all its venerable vulgarity--a hoary-headed abomination long since

excommunicated by the conscience of civilised mankind.

This reactionary movement began in Eastern Germany and Austria. In

those countries the Jews are very numerous,[230] very wealthy, and

very influential. Both countries are famous as hot-beds of racial

fanaticism. In Germany Nationalism was begotten of the independence

secured by the Thirty Years’ War in the seventeenth century, was

nursed by the patriotic preachers and poets of the eighteenth, was

invigorated by the wars for emancipation from Napoleon’s rule, and was

educated by Hegel and his disciples. The Jews in Germany, as elsewhere,

are the one element which declines to be fused in the nationalist

crucible. Their international connections help them to overstep the

barriers of country. Their own racial consciousness, fostered by the

same writers, is at least as intense as that of the Germans; but it

does not coincide with any geographical entity. They are, therefore,

regarded as a cosmopolitan tribe--“everywhere and nowhere at home.”

They are distinct not only as a race, but as a sect, and as a class.

Accordingly, the reaction against tolerance includes in its ranks

clerics and Christian Socialists, aristocrats, as well as Nationalists,

that is, the enemies of dissent and the enemies of wealth, as well

as the enemies of the alien and the enemies of the upstart. And the

term “Jew” is used in a religious or a racial sense according to the

speaker. In both Germany and Austria we saw that the philosophical

gospel of social liberty was very slowly applied to practical politics,

and that, even when it had been accepted, it was subject to reactions.

When Jewish manumission was finally accomplished, the Jews by their

genius filled a much larger place in the sphere of national life than

was deemed proportional to their numbers. And this undue preponderance,

rendered all the easier by the superior cohesion of the Jewish over

the German social system, was further accentuated by specialisation.

The Jews, whose training in Europe for centuries, owing partly to

their own racial instincts and Rabbinical teaching, but chiefly to

the conditions imposed upon them from outside, had been of a peculiar

kind, showed these peculiarities by their choice of fields of activity.

They abstained from the productive and concentrated their efforts

to the intellectual, financial, and distributive industries of the

countries of which they became enfranchised citizens. Jews flooded the

Universities, the Academies, the Medical Profession, the Civil Service,

and the Bar. Many of the judges, and nearly one-half of the practising

lawyers of Germany, are said to be Jews. Jews came forth as authors,

journalists, and artists. Above all, Jews, thanks to the hereditary

faculty for accumulation fostered in them during the long period when

money-dealing was the one pursuit open to them, asserted themselves

as financiers. It is impossible to move anywhere in Berlin or Vienna

without seeing the name of Israel written in great letters of gold not

only over the shops, but over the whole face of German life. Success

awakened jealousy, and economic distress--due to entirely different

causes--stimulated it. What if the competition was fair? What if the

Jews were distinguished by their peaceful and patriotic attitude? What

if they supplied the least proportion of criminals and paupers? What if

German freedom had been bought partially with Jewish blood, and German

unity achieved by the help of Jewish brains and Jewish money?

The landed gentry, richer in ancestors than in money or intelligence,

had every reason to envy the Jew’s wealth, and much reason to dislike

the Jew’s ostentatious display of it. They could not respect in the Jew

a gifted _arrivé_. They saw in him a vulgar _parvenu_--one who by his

“subversive Mephistophelian endowment, brains,” demolishes the fences

of creed and caste, and invades the highest and most exclusive circles,

thus acting as a solvent in society. If he is wise, the proud nobleman

of narrow circumstances makes his pride compensate for his poverty, and

magnanimously despises the luxuries which he cannot procure. If, as

more often happens, he is foolish, he enters into a rivalry of vanity

with the upstart, and the result is a mortgaged estate--mortgaged most

likely to his rival. In either case, he can have little love for the

opulent and clever interloper. The animosity of the aristocracy is

shared by the middle classes, and for analogous reasons. The German

professional man, and more especially his wife, resents his Jewish

colleague’s comparative luxury as a personal affront. The excessive

power of money in modern society, and the consequent diminution of the

respect once paid to blood or learning, naturally enable the Jewish

banker to succeed where the poor baron fails; and the Jewish professor

or doctor, though many of these latter are poor enough, to outshine

his Christian competitor. This excessive power of money is due to

causes far deeper than the enfranchisement of the Jews. It is the

normal result of Germany’s modern development. The influence of the

nobles depended largely on their domains of land; and when industries

arose to compete with agriculture, the importance of land necessarily

declined. At the same time, industry and commerce began, with Germany’s

expansion, to divert more and more the attention of the intelligent

from the path of academic distinction--once the only path to honour

open to the ambitious burgher--into that of material prosperity.

Chrematistic enterprise has introduced a new social standard, and

an aristocracy of wealth has come to supplant the old aristocracies

of birth and erudition. This social revolution, through which every

country in the world has passed and has to pass, was unhesitatingly

ascribed to the Jew, who was thus accused of having created the

conditions, which in reality he had only exploited.

If from the aristocratic and the cultured classes we turn to the rural

population, we find similar causes yielding similar results. In the

German country districts it is objected to the Jews not cultivating

the land themselves, but lying in wait for the failing farmer:

“Everywhere,” says an authority, “the peasant proprietor hated the

Jew,” and he proceeds to sketch the peasant tragedy of which that

hatred was the consequence. The land had to be mortgaged to pay family

claims; the owner had recourse to the ubiquitous and importunate

money-lender; the money-lender, whose business it is to trade upon the

necessity of the borrower, took advantage of the latter’s distress,

and extorted as much as he could. “The Jew grew fat as the Gentile

got lean. A few bad harvests, cattle-plague, or potato-disease, and

the wretched peasant, clinging with the unreasonable frantic love of

a faithful animal to its habitat, had, in dumb agony, to see his farm

sold up, his stock disposed of, and the acres he had toiled early and

late to redeem, and watered by the sweat of his stubborn brow, knocked

down by the Jewish interloper to the highest bidder.”[231] In the

Austrian country districts it is urged that the presence of the Jew is

synonymous with misery; his absence with comparative prosperity. In

Hungary, the late M. Elisée Reclus--the famous author of the _Nouvelle

Géographie Universelle_--informs us, “The rich magnate goes bankrupt,

and it is almost always a Jew who acquires the encumbered property,”

and another witness adds: “The Jew is no less active in profiting by

the vices and necessities of the peasant than by those of the noble.”

In Galicia, especially, we are told that the land is rapidly passing

into the hands of the Jews, and that many a former proprietor is now

reduced to work as a day-labourer in his own farm for the benefit of a

Jewish master. All this is an absurdly exaggerated version of facts in

themselves sad enough. The Jews as a whole are by no means a wealthy

community, and the gainers by the supposed exploitation are the few,

not the many. And if, as is the case, the condition of affairs in

agricultural states is bad, who is to blame? Wherever there is agrarian

depression there are sure to be money-lenders enough and Shylocks too

many. It does not appear that Christian money-lenders have ever been

more tender-hearted than their Jewish _confrères_. Why then set down

to the Jew, as a Jew, what is the common and inevitable attribute of

his profession? The ruin of the borrower does not justify the slaughter

of the lender. Philanthropists would be better employed if, instead

of bewailing in mournful diatribes the woes of the bankrupt peasant

and inveighing against the cruelty of his oppressor, combined to

establish agricultural banks where the farmer could obtain money at

less exorbitant interest. This measure, and measures like this, not

slaughter and senile lamentation, would be a remedy consonant both

with the nature of the evil and with the dictates of civilisation

and justice. Until something of the sort is done, it is worse than

futile to demand that dealers in money, any more than dealers in corn,

cotton, or cheese, should work from altruistic motives. But nothing

rational is ever attempted. Instead, everywhere the nobles ruined by

their own improvidence and extravagance, the peasants by their rustic

incompetence, and both by the exactions of a wasting militarism,

complain of the extortion of the Jewish usurers. It was inevitable

that the old-world monster of Jew-hatred, never really dead, should

have raised its hoary head again. All the elements of an anti-Jewish

movement were present. The only thing that lacked was opportunity. The

deficiency was not long in being supplied.

The Franco-German war and the achievement of German unity fanned

the flame of patriotism. As in the time of Napoleon the First, so

in that of Napoleon III., a great national danger created a strong

fellow-feeling between the different members of the German race; a

great national triumph stirred up an enthusiasm for the Empire which

was indulged in at the cost of individual liberty. Despotism throve

on the exuberance of nationalism. The Germans were led back from the

constitutional and democratic ideals of 1848 to an ultra-monarchic

servility which made it possible for the present Kaiser’s grandfather

a few years after, prompted by Bismarck, to assert openly the

ridiculous old claim to divine right. Thus the ground was prepared

for any anti-alien and anti-liberal agitation. Other causes came to

accelerate the movement. The war had involved enormous pecuniary and

personal sacrifices. The extraordinary success, instead of satisfying,

stimulated German ambition. It aroused an extravagant financial

optimism and self-confidence. Germany, intoxicated with military

victory, was still thirsting for aggrandisement of a different kind.

Economy was cast to the winds, and a fever of wild speculation seized

on all classes of the community. Companies were floated, and swallowed

up the superfluous capital of the great as well as the savings of the

humble. Sanguine expectation was the temper of the day. Berlin would

vie with Paris in elegance and with London in suburban comfort, and

every one of its citizens would be a millionaire!

Then came the terrible crash. The bubble burst, and the magnificent

day-dreams were dispelled by misery. A succession of bad harvests, and

the rapid increase in American corn competition, by impoverishing the

agricultural class, added to the general depression. The disillusioned

public wanted a victim whereupon to vent its wrath. Those who promoted

the companies had to suffer for the folly of those who were ruined by

their failure. A great many of the former, by selling out at the right

moment, rose to affluence. The discontented public, naturally enough,

noticing these large fortunes in the midst of the general wreck, jumped

to the conclusion that the few had enriched themselves by robbing the

many. “Exposures” followed, and among the implicated financiers there

were found many Jews. It was then in order to fill Jewish pockets that

the heroes of Germany had bled on the battlefield, and the burghers

of Germany had been bled at home! The nationalist ideal of Germany

for the Germans, then, was to lead to a Germany for the Israelites!

All those trials had been endured and all those triumphs achieved in

order to deliver up the Fatherland to an alien and infidel race--a

race with which neither the intellect nor the heart of Germany has any

affinity or sympathy! This was the cry of anguish that succeeded to

the paeans of self-glorification, and those nationalists who uttered

these sentiments forgot that their very nationalism had been largely

created and fostered by Jewish thinkers. They also forgot that it was a

Jewish statesman, Lasker, who, at the cost of all personal and party

interests and of his popularity, had alone had the courage to expose in

the Prussian Chamber the evils of extravagant speculation, in 1873, and

to urge both the public and the Government to turn back, while there

was yet time, from the road to ruin which they pursued. But it has been

well said: “Who would think of gratitude when a scapegoat is required?”

A tongue was given to the popular indignation in a pamphlet by an

obscure German journalist, Wilhelm Marr by name, who seized the

opportunity of attaining to fame and fortune by a plentiful effusion

of his anti-Jewish venom. The work anathematized the Jews not only

as blood-sucking leeches, but as enemies of the Germanic race, and

as forming a distinct and self-centred solecism in German national

life. The Coryphaeus was ably supported by a crowd hitherto mute. The

opponents of industrial and the opponents of religious liberalism,

men of rank, men of letters, and high ecclesiastics joined in the

chorus, and another “black day” (July 30, 1878) was added to the Jewish

calendar. In Adolph Stöcker, a Christian Socialist and court preacher,

and a staunch Conservative in the Prussian Diet, the new crusade found

its Peter the Hermit. He was the first man of position to preach from

the pulpit and to declare in the press that Hebrew influence in the

State was disastrous to the Christian section of the community, that

Semitic preponderance was fatal to the Teutonic race. As though the

printing presses of Germany were only waiting for the signal, a whole

library of anti-Semitic literature was rapidly produced, and as rapidly

consumed. Some of the most popular journals opened their columns to the

campaign, Jewish journalists opposed violence with violence, and the

feud daily assumed larger dimensions, until by the end of 1879 it had

spread and raged over the whole of the empire.

“It is not right that the minority should rule over the majority,”

cried some. Others accused the Jews, loosely and without adducing any

proofs, of forming a freemasonry and of always placing the interests of

their brethren above those of the country. That there was some kind

of systematic co-operation among the Jews seems probable. It is also

probable that there was a certain degree of truth in the charge of

“clandestine manipulation of the press” for the purpose of shielding

even Jews unworthy of protection. But for this the Germans had only

themselves to thank. By attacking the Jews as a tribe they stimulated

the tribal feeling among them. The social isolation to which they

condemned the Jew intensified his gift of reciprocity. To the German

Christians the Jew, however patriotic and unexceptionable he may be

as a citizen, as a man is a Jew--an alien, an infidel, an upstart, a

parasite. His genius is said to be purely utilitarian, his religion

externally an observance of empty forms, essentially a worship of

the golden calf, and worldly success his highest moral ideal. German

professors analysed the Jewish mind and found it Semitic, German

theologians sought for the Jewish soul and could find none. Both

classes, agreeing in nothing else, concurred in denouncing the Jew as

a sinister creature, strangely wanting in spiritual qualities--a being

whose whole existence, devoid of faith of any kind, revolves between

his cash-book and the book of the Law. Perhaps the most remarkable

consequence of all was the growth of an anti-Semitic school of exegesis

of the Old Testament.

These, then, were the grievances of the orthodox: the Jew’s want of

religious feeling. Free-thinkers denounced him for a superabundance

of that very feeling. Stöcker, with unctuous smartness, said, “the

creed of the Jews stands on the blank page between the Old and the

New Testament.” Duhring ponderously objected to “the tenacity with

which the inherited religious manner of viewing things is rooted in

the Jewish mind.” These charges, mutually exclusive though they were,

were gladly espoused by those who only needed some theory whereby to

dignify their spite. The Jew’s own foibles--his arrogance and love of

display--supplied that minimum of excuse which has ever been deemed

sufficient for persecution. The Jews, said their accusers, hold in

their hands the golden key which opens all doors, and flourish it

insolently before their less fortunate neighbours. They have killed the

ancient simplicity and frugality of German life by their ostentatious

luxury, and corrupted German idealism by their inordinate pursuit of

material comfort. German idealism has been killed by nationalism and

militarism. But, of course, no German patriot can be expected to see

this. What, however, surprises one is that it does not seem to have

occurred to those who denounce the Jew as the promoter of materialism

that they have the remedy in their own hands. Let them cease to

worship mammon, and mammon’s ministers will be discredited. As it

is, they inveigh against the Jew for enjoying the very things which

they themselves hunger after. In Germany, as elsewhere, Christian

panegyrists of plain living and high thinking would perhaps like the

Jewish millionaire better if they resembled him less.

Prince Bismarck, in the prosecution of his great political object

of a united Germany had courted the support of the Liberal party,

which, on its side, was not unwilling to help a man who, no matter

how anti-Liberal his domestic policy might be, was, in the main, the

hierophant of the German nation’s aspirations. Thus, in 1866, there

came into being the National Liberal Party. Their position was,

however, a false one, as their support of Bismarck and their Liberal

tendencies could not be reconciled for a long time. But, while the

alliance lasted, the Liberals were instrumental in introducing many

legislative measures in the direction of progress, including certain

reforms as to banking and commerce. These innovations gave offence

to several classes of the population, and the fact that one of the

leaders of the National Liberal Party, Lasker, and a great many of its

members were Jews, was a brilliant opportunity for the reactionary

elements.[232] The Conservatives caught at the opportunity for

discrediting the obnoxious reforms by describing them as deliberately

intended to serve the interests of the Jews. Prince Bismarck, now

hostile to a party for which he had no further use, transferred the

weight of his political and personal influence to their adversaries

and tried to lure the extreme Conservatives and Catholics, as well

as the working classes, by invigorating the anti-Jewish agitation.

The organs of these three parties were filled with diatribes against

the Jews, and in October, 1879, the first anti-Jewish society was

founded in Berlin and Dresden, with the object “to unite all non-Jewish

Germans of all persuasions, all parties, all stations, into one common

league, which, setting aside all separate interests, all political

differences, shall strive, with all earnestness and diligence for the

one end viz., to save our German fatherland from becoming completely

Judaised, and render residence in it supportable to the posterity of

the aborigines.”[233] In accordance with this patriotic programme the

society christened itself “The Anti-Semitic League,” partly because

there was a sound of learning in the word and partly to make it clear

that the race, and not merely the religion, of the Jew had aroused

animosity.[234] Prince Bismarck on being interrogated about the

movement is said to have answered, “As a Minister of State, I condemn

it; but as a Prussian, as a German, as a Christian, as a man, I cannot

help but approve of it.” This speech, when compared with the speaker’s

utterances of thirty years before,[235] affords sufficiently painful

evidence of the long stride which German statesmanship had taken

backwards.

Thus the pedantry of the schools joined hands with the prejudice of

the streets, social and political interests combined with national

vanity, economic jealousy, scientific sophistry, and religious bigotry

to bring into being a movement so utterly incongruous with modern, and

especially with German, ideas.

In 1880 and 1881 the warfare continued with systematized vigour and

increasing violence. _Judenhetze_, under its less vulgar name, became

a virulent epidemic. Both Catholic and Lutheran clerics, mortally

hostile in everything else, joined forces against the common enemy,

and vied with each other in their efforts to gain the goodwill of

the Christian Socialists. The Social Democrats were the only party

to denounce the anti-Semitic agitation and to take under their

protection the persecuted people; an attitude which earned them the

sincere detestation of the ultra-Conservatives. Herr Marr, the great

anti-Jewish pamphleteer, however, devoted a whole masterpiece to the

demonstration of the fact that the Social Democrats, whom he elegantly

called “red mice,” were in every way to be preferred to the Jewish

“golden rats.” But the movement, none the less, continued progressing.

Meetings were held at which the “Semites” were furiously attacked. The

members of the “German” League passed solemn resolutions to eschew all

intercourse, social or commercial, with the enemies of the Teutonic

race, and Herr Stöcker and his followers, in their zeal for “the

strengthening of the Christian Germanic spirit,” presented a petition

to the Prussian Chambers, praying:

“That immigration of foreign Jews into Germany might have some

restrictions placed upon it.

“That the Jews might be excluded from all posts of supreme authority,

and that in courts of justice a certain limitation of their power be

instituted.

“That Christian schools, though used by Jewish scholars, should remain

distinctively Christian, and that Jewish teachers only be employed

where the nature of the subject taught renders it desirable.

“That a census or report of the Jewish population be forthwith

prepared.”[236]

The anti-Semitic Leagues, though disapproving of violence in their

manifestoes, in practice were only too ready to encourage the most

sordid passions and the basest prejudices of the poor and ignorant

masses, so that, while anti-Semitism led to stormy scenes in the

Prussian Diet, it translated itself into more stormy riots outside.

Pamphlets and duels were the order of the day among the upper classes,

sanguinary encounters between the Jewish and German mobs among the

lower. The Liberals protested, the Crown Prince Frederick tried to save

the Jews from this dastardly persecution, and the movement was publicly

denounced by many distinguished Germans, such as Virchow and Mommsen,

as a subversion of the principles of humanitarianism promulgated by

German philosophy, as a blasphemy against German ideals, and as a stain

on German civilisation. But Jew-baiting was not checked before many

thousands of Jews were compelled to leave their country--the country

to which they gave Mendelssohn the philosopher and Mendelssohn the

composer, Heine and Börne, Offenbach and Auerbach, Ense, Ewald, Jacoby,

and a host of other great men, including Lasker, who a few years before

had done his utmost to avert the financial catastrophe for which his

co-religionists now suffered.

A German who has played an active part in his country’s history from

1848 onwards does not hesitate to ascribe “the disgraceful orgies of

the Jews’ Chace, begun on a large scale at Berlin on the New Year’s

night of 1880–81,” to Prince Bismarck’s direct inspiration. “There was

evidently,” he says, writing not long after those events, “more method

in those ugly rushes and riots than may be generally suspected.... The

German citizens of Hebrew origin, or of the Mosaic faith, belong, in

their great majority, to the Liberal and Radical camp. Several of them

have achieved the most honourable prominence in the progressive parties

to which they attached themselves. The great statesman whose ideal is

his own Dictatorship under cover of the King’s personal Government,

finding these popular leaders of Semitic blood as stumbling-blocks in

his path, did not scruple to dally coquettishly with the organisers

and approvers of the Jews’ Hunt. An underhand alliance was struck

up, in old Roman fashion, between out-and-out partisans of Caesarism

and certain shady leaders of a misguided rabble. A Court Preacher,

Stöcker, acted as the go-between and spiritual head of the crusade.

The same man is now in the German Parliament a chief exponent of this

cross-breed between princely absolutism and professed philanthropic

care for the multitude.”[237]

Soon, however, a discrepancy became apparent between the leaders of

the nationalist and the leaders of the religious and economic forces.

While anti-Semites, strictly so called, clamoured for a revival of the

ancient disabilities which doomed the Jew to political servitude and

social ostracism, the Christian Socialists were not prepared to go so

far. This moderation was partly due to the fact that the anti-Semites

had manifested symptoms of wishing to include Christianity in their

denunciation of Judaism as a Semitic creed--a tendency which, of

course, could inspire no sympathy in orthodox theologians and Court

Preachers. The schism was temporarily healed in 1886: but it was

reopened three years later. However, this divergence of views did not

affect the rank and file of the anti-Jewish agitators. They cared

little for intellectual theories; but were frankly actuated by the

blind and unreasoning instincts of their mediaeval ancestors. Again the

populace found allies among the impecunious and the unscrupulous, who

supplied it with food for its credulity, and among the Catholic clergy,

who inflamed its fanaticism. The mediaeval charge of ritual murder was

once more revived, and it led to the destruction of Jewish houses and

the burning of Jewish synagogues.

Prince Bismarck’s retirement, in 1890, and the abandonment of his

anti-Liberal programme did not mend matters. The Conservatives

endeavoured to gain the popular ear by coming forth as the champions

of national unity and of the Christian faith, and by denouncing the

Jews as the enemies of both. ♦1892♦ This change of attitude brought

about a reconciliation with the nationalist anti-Semites, whose

rabid programme was fully accepted. And now the two sections united

brought to bear all their strength against the Jews. Christianity and

stupidity, respectability and sansculottism, were found marshalled

in one compact phalanx as in the days of yore. In the autumn of

1893 a Bill was brought into the German Diet, asking that the Talmud

should be subjected to an official examination, and it was seriously

proposed that the old Commission appointed for that purpose by the

Emperor Maximilian at the instigation of Pfefferkorn at the beginning

of the sixteenth century should be roused from its sleep of ages. But

the alliance was too grotesque to be effective. The saner section of

the Conservatives was shocked at the unprincipled tactics and the

excessive fury of their allies, and, though the lower orders of their

supporters in the country were not troubled by such delicacy, yet

the extreme anti-Semitic party lost, through its own extravagance,

much of its influence among the educated. Herr Stöcker was expelled

from Court, and soon after from the ranks of the Conservative party.

The Catholics also were shamed into breaking all connection with the

scandalous demagogues, and thus the anti-Semitic distemper, though

still an element of discord in the Reichstag, has ceased to be an

element of danger--for the present. But, if the paroxysm is over, the

disease is not cured. Indeed, individual anti-Semites still display

a degree of fervour that would have done credit to Herr Marr himself

on the hey-day of his frenzy. The leader of these loyal Jew-haters is

Count Puckler, whose speeches are sold in the streets of Berlin, and

read by many Germans with profound approval. All that is needed is some

encouragement from above, and then we may again see many volunteering

to translate the prophet’s visions into deeds of blood.

From Germany Anti-Semitism found its way to the neighbouring states.

In the Austro-Hungarian Empire politicians and publicists caught the

rabies and spread it without delay. As early as 1880 an attempt was

made to establish in Hungary an anti-Semitic league after the German

pattern, and, though the healthier and more enlightened portion of

the nation was loth to forget the liberal traditions of the past

and the services rendered by the Jews in the struggle for Hungarian

independence, the obscurantist elements among the people and the

aristocracy, in the Church and the official classes,--the vulgar high

and low--were not disinclined to listen to the dictates of bigotry

and superstition. An opportunity for a declaration of the latent

prejudice offered in 1881, when a Catholic Professor of Hebrew gravely

accused the Jews of secretly holding the destruction of the Gentiles

as a religious tenet; the ritual murder of Christians being only

one method for carrying out this moral obligation. Despite exposure

and open repudiation, the worthy Professor’s utterances tallied so

well with preconceived ideas that the prehistoric fiction found many

eager believers. ♦1882♦ The disappearance of a Christian girl from a

Hungarian village in the next year strengthened the belief and led to

brutal outrages on the Jews at Buda-Pesth, Zala and elsewhere, the

riots being only quelled by the proclamation of martial law. This

measure, as was natural, was turned into an instrument of attack on the

Liberal Government, already unpopular, as sheltering the enemies of

mankind. An inquiry was instituted into the alleged murder, many Jews

were arrested, and evidence was manufactured. But in the trial which

ensued the plot was stripped of all its shameful vestments of perjury,

forgery, and intimidation, and the prisoners were acquitted.

While the anti-Semites were covering themselves with contempt and

ridicule in Hungary, in Austria the movement attained serious

dimensions. The campaign, begun with occasional pamphlets, followed

the development of German anti-Semitism. In Austria, as in Germany,

Liberalism had been undermined by that worst form of racial intolerance

known as Christian Socialism, which was and is nothing but the old

spirit of clerical reaction masquerading in the guise of anti-Semitic

prejudice and pseudo-democratic demagogy.[238] In Austria, as in

Germany, the operations were conducted by two bodies of men--the

racial and the religious enemies of the Jew. The two bodies met on

the common ground of objection to the Jews’ acquiring land. The

anti-Semites proper did not like to see the land falling into the hands

of non-Austrians, and the Christian Socialists objected to its falling

into the hands of infidel financiers. The agitation was gradually

organised, and in 1882 two leagues were formed in Vienna. Austrian,

like German, anti-Semitism was immediately exploited for party

purposes. Many politicians, though themselves free from anti-Semitic

prejudice, were ready to adopt a cause which promised to add to their

own strength or to weaken their opponents. They, therefore, loudly

preached a doctrine which they despised, excited passions which they

did not share, and advocated principles which in all probability

they would have shrunk from acting upon. Thus the support of the

anti-Semitic leagues was solicited by the Radical Nationalists on one

hand, and by the Liberal Government on the other. The Nationalists

being less insincere in their prejudices, won the victory which they

deserved, and the coalition between them and the Christian Socialists

derived additional strength from the anti-clerical policy of the

Liberal party, which compelled many Catholics who had hitherto stood

aloof, to join the ranks of anti-Semitism. ♦1892♦ Henceforth the

agitation was conducted under the auspices of the Roman Church. The

clerical press disseminated the seed in the cafés, and the priests

fulminated against the Jews from the pulpit. The time-dishonoured

charge of ritual murder was not forgotten, and the Hungarian Upper

House, in 1894, rejected the Liberal Bill which placed Judaism on a

footing of equality with other denominations.

The Liberals had succeeded in offending both the Radical Nationalists

and the Clericals. They offended the former by advocating Jewish

rights, and the latter by combating the tyranny of the Church. The

alliance between those two enemies of Liberalism was, in 1895,

blessed by the Pope, who hoped to gain over, or at least to control,

the Radicals by drawing closer the bonds which united them with the

Clericals. The Vatican, disappointed in the long-cherished hope of

recovering its temporal power by the help of the Catholic monarchs,

was induced to court the democracy. Thus the spiritual tribunal which

has always taken its stand on the lofty platform of obedience to

authority, in the pursuance of secular ends did not hesitate to lend

its sanction to the advocates of violence and revolt. The anti-Jewish

agitation, hallowed by the Vicar of Christ, carried all before it.

The anti-Semites secured a vast majority in the Municipal Council of

Vienna, notwithstanding the opposition on the part of the Emperor, who

dissolved the council twice, only to be met each time with an even

greater anti-Semitic triumph; and in the Parliamentary Elections of

1897 the allied powers of Radical Nationalism and Clericalism secured

a strong position in the Austrian Reichsrath. This was the meridian

of anti-Semitic popularity in Austria. But here, as in Germany,

the unseemly and unnatural coalition between rabid Nationalism and

respectable Clericalism could not last long, and, while it lasted,

could command but little respect. Three years afterwards the General

Election showed a decline of public confidence in the allies, and many

of the Radical Nationalists deserted the ranks to form an independent

and anti-Clerical party, while, on the other hand, the Vatican thought

it expedient to withdraw its sanction from the Christian Socialists.

Austro-Hungarian anti-Semitism, however, though much weakened, is

not dead, and it would be taking too sanguine a view of human nature

and human intelligence to hope that the prejudices, the passions,

and the sophisms which have led to the recrudescence of Jew-hatred

will not assert themselves again. In point of fact, there are ample

signs to confirm this pessimistic forecast. On October 21, 1904, the

Diet of Lower Austria witnessed a scene which a spectator pronounced

“unparalleled for vulgarity and demagogic impudence even in this

country of crazy Parliamentarism.” The anti-Semitic and Christian

Socialist parties, which still command an overwhelming majority

both in the Diet and in the Vienna Municipal Council, had organised

a torch-light procession in honour of the sixtieth birthday of Dr.

Lueger, the anti-Semite Burgomaster of Vienna. The Premier instructed

the police to prohibit the demonstration. Thereupon the outraged

worshippers of the great hero of Christian Socialism brought in a

motion in which they accused the Premier of having yielded to Jewish

pressure and to the terrorism of the Social Democrats, the champions

of the Jews, and of “having thereby given proof of shameful cowardice.”

The motion was carried amid loud acclamations in honour of Dr. Lueger

who, on his followers asserting that the reason for the Government’s

attitude was “the jealousy caused in the highest circles by the

Burgomaster’s popularity,” modestly assured the House that “he was not

jealous of the Emperor and repudiated the supposition that he envied

the reverence and affection which surrounded the Monarch’s person.”

At the end of the sitting Dr. Lueger was enthusiastically cheered

in the streets, while a Social Democratic Deputy was insulted and

spat upon.[239] This demagogue, who by the volume of his voice, the

character of his wit and the extent of his power over the Viennese mob,

recalls vividly the Cleon of Aristophanes, a year later warned the

Austrian Jews openly and with impunity that the Kishineff tragedy might

repeat itself in Vienna. Even more recently twenty thousand Christian

Socialists, Clericals and anti-Semites, headed and inflamed by Dr.

Lueger, made a violent demonstration outside the Hungarian Delegation

building, as a protest against the policy of the “Judaeo-Magyars.”[240]

Within a week of this outburst Dr. Lueger, in company with Herr

Schneider, a militant anti-Semite Deputy, paid a visit to Bucharest,

where he was fêted by all classes of Roumanian society, from the

King downwards: a glorification of this arch-enemy of the Jews as

significant as it is natural in a country where Jew-hatred is at its

height. Clearly, Austrian anti-Semitism is anything but dead.

The reply of the Austrian Jews to the anti-Semites is characteristic

of the movement. Hitherto they had been content to identify themselves

politically with their Christian compatriots. But the continued

antipathy on the part of the latter has recently forced them to adopt a

purely Jewish attitude. On the initiative of the Jewish representatives

of Galicia in the Reichsrath and in the Galician Diet, the Jews

of that province have resolved to create a Jewish organisation for

the defence of the political rights and economic interests of their

community.[241] Thus modern Jew-haters foster by their own efforts the

very tribalism which they condemn, just as their mediaeval ancestors

compelled the Jews to adopt money-lending as a profession and then

denounced them for so doing.

In France the power of the Jews since the establishment of the Third

Republic increased steadily, and their number was to some extent

swelled by the arrival of brethren driven by anti-Semitism out of

Germany. Yet, as late as 1881 a writer felt justified in stating

that “the effervescence of a certain feeling against the Jews is

apparent in almost all the large states of the world with the single

exception perhaps of France.”[242] This comparative immunity from the

general delirium, however, was not to last much longer. Nationalism,

clericalism, and economic jealousy in France, as elsewhere, were at

work, and demagogues ready to make use of these forces were not wanting.

Ernest Renan, in 1882, aimed some of his delicately-pointed shafts of

irony at “the modern Israelite with whom our great commercial towns

of Europe have become acquainted during the last fifty years.... How

careless he shows himself of a paradise mankind has accepted upon

his word; with what ease he accommodates himself to all the folds of

modern civilisation; how quickly he is freed from all dynastic and

feudal prejudice; and how can he enjoy a world he has not made, gather

the fruits of a field he has not tilled, supplant the blockhead who

persecutes him, or make himself necessary to the fool who despises him.

It is for him, you would think, that Clovis and his Franks fought,

that the race of Capet unfolded its policy of a thousand years, that

Philip Augustus conquered at Bouvines and Condé at Rocroi!... He who

overturned the world by his faith in the kingdom of God believes now

in wealth only.”[243] That Renan, the high-priest of Idealism, should

feel aggrieved at the materialism of the modern representative of his

beloved Semitic race is not surprising. It is, however, surprising that

the Jew, who has so often been persecuted for his obstinate adherence

to his traditions and for his detachment from his surroundings, should

be taken to task by Renan for the ease with which “he accommodates

himself to all the folds of modern civilisation.” Either Renan is right

or the anti-Semites. One and the same body of men cannot very well be

both obdurate and accommodating. It is, however, the Jew’s special

privilege to be denounced by one half of the world for the possession

of a certain quality, and by the other half for the lack of it.

Consistency has never been a marked characteristic of Jew-haters, and,

perhaps, it is not reasonable to expect it from men under the spell of

so engrossing a pastime as the excommunication of their fellows.

Of course, Renan himself, his mellifluous mockery notwithstanding,

was the very antithesis of a Jew-hater. Nationalism had no greater

enemy and Liberalism no warmer champion than Renan. He never tired

of asserting that ethnographical facts possessed only a scientific

importance, and were devoid of all political significance.[244] So

far as the Jews were concerned, he proclaimed with enthusiasm the

services rendered by them to the cause of civilisation and progress

in the past, and emphatically expressed his conviction that they were

destined to render equally brilliant services in the future: “Every

Jew,” he said, “is essentially a Liberal, while the enemies of Judaism,

examined closely, will be found to be, in general, the enemies of the

modern spirit. This,” he added, “applies especially to the French Jews,

such as they have been made by the Revolution; but I am persuaded

that every country which will repeat the experiment, renounce State

religion, secularise the civil life, and establish the equality of all

the citizens before the law, will arrive at the same result and will

find as excellent patriots in the Jewish creed as in other creeds.”

“The work of the nineteenth century,” he declared on another occasion,

“is to demolish all the ghettos, and I do not congratulate those who

elsewhere seek to rebuild them.”[245]

But at the very moment, when Renan was giving utterance to these

noble sentiments, there was preparing in his own country an agitation

precisely similar to that which had “elsewhere sought to rebuild the

ghettos.”

The slumbering prejudice against the Jew was in France first awakened

by the Panama scandals, and immediately afterwards there was formed in

Paris a union with the object of freeing the country from the financial

tyranny of Jews and other non-Catholics and foreigners. The Vatican,

ever on the alert, saw in the movement an opportunity of strengthening

the clerical interest in a state which had so sadly neglected its

traditional _rôle_ of the Pope’s champion, and from an eldest daughter

of the Church had turned into its bitterest enemy. The Pope, therefore,

bestowed upon the union his blessing. ♦1882♦ But the institution after

a brief career ended in a bankruptcy from which not even Papal prayers

could save it. Like Julius Caesar’s spirit, however, the union even

after its dissolution continued to harass its rivals. Its failure,

attributed to the machinations of the Jews, put fresh life into the

anti-Semitic agitation. Publicists interpreted the popular feeling

and gratified the national _amour propre_ by describing in sombre

colours the pernicious influence of the Jewish plutocracy on the life

of France, and by tracing to that influence the undeniable immorality

of French society.[246] The discomfiture of that brilliant and weak

adventurer, Boulanger, brought about, as it was, chiefly by the efforts

of a Jewish journalist of German extraction and connections, drew down

upon the Jews, and especially upon foreign Jews, the wrath of General

Boulanger’s supporters. An anti-Semitic League was founded in Paris,

with branches in the provinces. The Royalists and the Nationalists,

the warriors of the Church and the warriors of the army, the desperate

defenders of lost causes, who had nothing more to lose, and the zealots

for new causes, who had as yet everything to win, all rallied round

the standard of anti-Semitism, which derived additional popularity

and glory from the alliance of France with Russia, the persecutrix of

Israel. ♦1892♦ Soon after an anti-Semitic journal made its appearance

in Paris, and its columns were filled with scandals, scented out with

truly inquisitorial diligence, and with attacks on Jewish officers.

Anti-Jewish feeling daily grew in bitterness, the term “Juif” came to

be accepted as a synonym for variety of villainy, and the position of

the Jewish officers in the French army became intolerable, till the

ferment culminated in the arrest and conviction of Captain Dreyfus.

♦1894♦

All the prejudices and passions of the past and all the conflicting

interests of the present were now gathered up into a storm almost

unparalleled in the history of contemporary Europe. The most popular

newspapers vied with each other in pandering to the lowest feelings and

most ignorant prejudices of the vulgarest classes of the French nation.

From one end of France to the other nothing was heard but execrations

of the Jewish traitor. The modern Frenchman was not unwilling to

forgive the Jew his supposed enmity to Christianity, but what patriot

could forgive him his supposed treachery to the French army? The hatred

of the race, expressed with eloquent virulence in Parliament and in the

press, found even more vigorous expression with dynamite, ♦1895♦ and

an attempt was made to blow up the Rothschild Bank in Paris. Meanwhile

the Captain’s friends worked with untiring earnestness, patience, and

ability to establish his innocence. A series of disclosures ensued; the

public, led by the late M. Zola, Colonel Picquart, and other advocates

of justice, began to feel qualms on the subject, and the demand for

a revision of the trial grew daily louder. By this time the Dreyfus

affair had been drawn into the mad vortex of party politics, and this

accounts for the extent and depth of an agitation hardly intelligible

when viewed in relation to the comparatively small number of French

Jews.[247] To be or not to be revised, that was the question, and

upon the answer the rival parties staked their reputations and their

political ideals. The Liberals defended Dreyfus not so much because

they believed him to be innocent, as because he was attacked by the

Clericals. The Clericals, on the other hand, denounced the Dreyfusards

as enemies of their country and of its army--the Christian Faith was

tactfully kept in the background--a distinguished Academician wrote a

book on Nationalism in which he analysed Zola’s genius and character,

and proved to his own satisfaction, and to the satisfaction of

thousands of readers, that Zola was not a Frenchman.

But in the midst of all this clamour, riot, vilification and assault,

the demand for a revision continued persistently to gain ground, and

the Liberals, representing the sanest and healthiest element in the

Republic, finally prevailed. ♦1898♦ The new trial at Rennes brought

to light the forgeries and perjuries by which the conviction of the

Jewish captain had been secured. None the less, the sentence was

not revoked. The verdict of the new court-martial was an attempt

to save judicial appearances by finding the prisoner guilty, and

to save justice by recommending him to mercy. Dreyfus was restored

to his family, but not to his honour. However, public opinion both

in France and abroad had forestalled the verdict of the Court by

acquitting the prisoner of the crime and by pitying in him the victim

of a foul conspiracy. Nationalism, Clericalism, Royalism, and all the

legions of anti-Semitism received a severe blow by the triumph of the

Dreyfusards; but, though their star was no longer at its zenith, it

had not yet set. The agitation in favour of a complete reversal of

Captain Dreyfus’ sentence continued, and the demand for a new revision

of the case was pronounced by the Nationalists as a fresh development

of the “anti-national” policy of the Liberals, and as a conspiracy on

their part for the purpose of inflicting a new humiliation on the Army

by constraining it to proclaim the innocence of a man it had twice

condemned as a traitor. A joint manifesto, bearing the signatures of

the Patriotic League, the National Anti-Semitic Federation, and the

French Socialist Party, was issued appealing to the French public “to

frustrate the efforts of the occult Sectarians, Internationalists, and

financial powers.”[248]

At the same time anti-Semitic sentiments found applauding audiences in

the French theatres, as was shown in December, 1903, by the success at

the Paris Gymnase of _Le Retour de Jérusalem_--a play which flattered

the feelings of the audience by dwelling on the familiar points of

the anti-Semitic creed: the Jews’ clannishness, their readiness to

help their own co-religionists, their _sans patrie_; and justified its

prejudices by emphasising that natural incompatibility of temperament

which is supposed to doom Jew and Gentile to everlasting alienation.

Nevertheless, the wiser section of the French people carried the day in

the end. ♦1906 July 12–13♦ The Court of Cassation, the highest tribunal

in France, after two years’ examination, quashed the verdict of the

Rennes court-martial, declaring that there never was any foundation

for any of the charges brought against Captain Dreyfus. The French

Government thereupon submitted to Parliament a Bill providing for the

complete rehabilitation of all the victims of the conspiracy. The Bill

was passed by an overwhelming majority. Captain Dreyfus was promoted to

the rank of Major and presented with the Cross of the Legion of Honour,

Col. Picquart was made a Brigadier-General, the remains of M. Zola were

transferred to the Pantheon, and in the gallery of the Senate were

erected busts of the two Senators who first stood out in favour of the

innocence of Dreyfus. Thus France wiped out the stain on its national

character, and the drama which had agitated the world for twelve years

came to a happy end. This end, however, satisfactory as it is, must be

regarded as a victory of justice due to special political causes rather

than as a proof of a revolution of the popular attitude towards the

Jews, or as a guarantee against a recrudescence of French anti-Semitism

in the future. The “Jewish Peril” is one of those evil spirits which

are in the habit of vanishing and re-appearing from time to time,

always with a fresh face and changed garb, but always the same.

The Jewish Question from France passed to the French colony of

Algeria. In 1870 an Act, known as the Crémieux Decree, enfranchised

the Jewish inhabitants of the colony _en masse_. For twenty-five years

the measure excited little or no protest. But, as a result of the

anti-Jewish agitation in the mother country, it suddenly became the

subject on which elections were passionately fought and the barrier

that divided local politicians into two opposite parties: _Judaisants_

and _Anti-Juifs_. A Commission appointed to inquire into this sudden

revulsion of feeling, reported that the alleged reasons were “usury”

and the unwillingness of the Jews to assimilate themselves to the

French. Usury, it was recognised by sensible Frenchmen, is inevitable

in a country still in the Algerian stage of economic development.

Moreover, the official inquiry proved that all the Jews are not

usurers, and that all the usurers are not Jews; that, in fact, the mass

of the Jewish inhabitants of Algeria are very poor.[249] None the less,

these allegations bring into vivid relief the essential antiquity of

modern anti-Semitism.

The modern version of Jew-hatred, as was only natural, was welcomed in

both Roumania and Russia. Both countries are still mediaeval in most

respects; but the foreign doctrine of Nationalism, concealing, as it

does, a very old instinct under a new euphemistic name, presented

nothing incongruous with indigenous bigotry. Economic considerations

deepened the bitter feeling against the Jew, as has been narrated.

Italy and Greece have declined to listen to the new creed of

intolerance. There are few Jews in those countries. Besides, both the

Italians and the Greeks, though sensitively attached to their national

ideals, have too keen a sense of proportion, and the Greeks, at all

events, too much commercial ability to entertain any jealousy of the

Jew.

England has not failed in this, as in former ages, to follow, after

a lukewarm and sluggish fashion, the Continental evolution of the

feeling towards the Jew. In popular literature and art the Jew had

never ceased to figure as an object of derision and repugnance. What

reader of Dickens need be reminded of the execrable Mr. Fagin, trainer

of juvenile criminals and tormentor of poor Oliver Twist, or of

Cruikshank’s portrait of that and other Israelites? But these pleasant

creations, however grossly they may sin against truth, were as innocent

of any deliberate intention to stir up a hatred against the Jew as

Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s personifications of evil in the characters

of Shylock and Barabas. The taint of malignant anti-Semitism made its

first unmistakable appearance in England during the Eastern Crisis of

1876–1878. A Jew was then Prime Minister, and that Jew opposed the

pro-Bulgarian policy of the Liberal party. To that party the conflict

between the Sultan and his Christian subjects was then, as it still

is, a conflict between the Cross and the Crescent, between Europe and

Asia, between Aryanism and Semitism. What mattered to the Liberal

politicians that Islam, in point of fact, since its first missionary

zeal spent itself many centuries ago in Asia and Africa, has never

tried, and does not want, to kill Christianity? What mattered to them

that Christianity, in point of history, is a Semitic creed, and in

its original Eastern form nearer to Islam than to the product of the

Western temperament which passes under the same name? What mattered to

them that the Turks, after five or six centuries of constant marriage

to women of the subject races, have, ethnographically speaking, become

more European than the Bulgarians, who, in point of blood, are more

Turkish than the modern Turks? What mattered to them that the Turks

are not Semites at all? What mattered to the opponents of the Jew

that the doctrine of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire had been

promulgated before Disraeli left school, and that his Eastern policy

of a regenerated Turkey was a policy evolved by as good Christians as

themselves long before Disraeli became a power in the land--by men

like the Duke of Wellington and Sir Stratford Canning--and carried on

by contemporary diplomatists and statesmen like Lord Salisbury, Sir

Henry Layard, and Sir Henry Elliot? These are mere facts. The Liberal

party wanted broad principles and a euphonious war-cry. Disraeli was

opposed to Russia’s ambition, and Disraeli was a Jew. What could be

easier than to connect the two things? The enemy of Russia was an enemy

of Christianity, of Aryanism, of Europe. If any doubt was possible,

it could easily be dispelled by a reference to Disraeli’s romances.

There, as elsewhere, in season and out of season, Disraeli preached

the greatness of his persecuted race with a sincerity, a courage and a

consistency which, in the eyes of the neutral student, form the noblest

trait in his character; in the eyes of a political opponent, the most

conclusive proof of his Jewish hostility to Christianity. Accordingly,

we find Mr. Gladstone, in 1876, confiding to the sympathetic ear of his

friend, the Duke of Argyll, the following philosophical reflection: “I

have a strong suspicion that Dizzy’s crypto-Judaism has had to do with

his policy: the Jews of the East _bitterly_ hate the Christians, who

have not always used them well.”[250]

At the same time other politicians vented their prejudice against the

Jews, and against Disraeli’s “Jewish aims” in various books,[251]

pamphlets, speeches and articles, while soon after, when the eloquent

tongue was for ever silenced, and the man who had bent Europe to his

will was no longer able to defend himself, reverend ecclesiastics took

pains to trace, with an enthusiasm and an acumen worthy of a less

ignoble task, the origin and development of the great statesman’s

“deceitfulness,” of his “political dishonesty,” of his “disregard of

morality in the pursuit of personal ambition,” of his “theological

and political scepticism,” of his “jealousy for the spiritual and

intellectual supremacy of the Semitic race,” and the rest of his

virtues, from his early home education under his Jewish sceptic of a

father and his vulgar Jewess of a mother, through his school life,

his apprenticeship in a solicitor’s office, the various stages of his

literary and political career, up to the moment of his death. It was,

however, pointed out with an air of charitable patronage not unamusing,

when the relative magnitude of the author and the subject of the

criticism is considered, that “it would be harsh and unfair to judge

him by our ordinary standard of political morality,” for “Mr. Disraeli

started on his public career with little or no furniture of moral

or religious principles of any kind.”[252] The writer repeated the

favourite explanation of Disraeli’s opposition to Gladstone’s Eastern

policy, namely, that it arose from the fact that “the ‘bag and baggage’

policy cut rudely across his cherished convictions respecting the

‘Semitic principle.’ The Turks, indeed,” the learned theologian naïvely

observes, “do not belong to the Semitic race; but their theocratic

polity is the product of a Semitic brain, and was, therefore, sacred

in the eyes of Lord Beaconsfield.”[253] In the writer’s opinion

Disraeli’s dearest ideal, when it was not his own pre-eminence,

was the pre-eminence of the Jewish nation, his whole career being a

compound of selfishness and Semitism.

While chivalrous theologians made these interesting _post-mortem_

investigations into the character of the champion of Semitism, learned

professors made equally interesting studies in the character of

anti-Semitism. And while the former denounced that representative of

the race as one who had made “self-aggrandisement the one aim of his

life,” the latter endeavoured to justify the conduct of its enemies

on the ground of Hebrew “tribalism,” “materialism,” “opportunism,”

“cosmopolitanism,” and other vices ending in --ism.[254]

As these charges are still brought against the Jews by their enemies

in England, it may be not irrelevant to answer some of them once for

all. No one with a biographical dictionary on his book-shelf requires

to be told that the Jewish people, far from specialising in material

aims, has never shirked its due share in the world’s intellectual

work, though it has seldom been accorded its due share of the world’s

recognition. Look wheresoever we like, in science, art, music,

philosophy, letters, politics, we everywhere find the Jew generously

contributing to the common fund of human knowledge. From Higher

Criticism, which was initiated by a Jew in the third century, and

Comparative Philology, also originated by a Jew in the ninth, through

Spinoza’s philosophical work in the seventeenth, and Mendelssohn’s in

the eighteenth, down to the psychological labours of Steinthal, who

died in 1892--to mention only a few of the best known names--we find

proofs which speak for themselves, and abundantly refute the calumny

that the Jews are a race of mere money-mongers and money-grabbers. In

the Dark Ages the conditions under which Israel was doomed to live

were by no means favourable to the development of spiritual qualities.

Mediaeval Europe, as a rule, did not allow more than three outlets to

Hebrew activity. The Jew could only become a merchant, a financier,

or a physician, and in all these three professions he achieved the

distinction to which his superiority entitled him. Imaginative by

nature, cosmopolitan by necessity, a reasoner and a linguist by

education, with all his faculties sharpened by persecution, and all his

passions disciplined by adversity, the Jew could not but assert himself

among his narrow-minded and ignorant contemporaries. Accordingly we

find the mediaeval Jew foremost in Medicine, Commerce, and Finance.

As to medicine, enough has already been said. As to commerce, the

supremacy of the Jews has never been disputed. Their financial

pre-eminence is equally recognised. But it is not often recalled that

the Jews, in order to facilitate the transmission of their wealth

amidst the violence and extortions of the Middle Ages, were the first

to invent the admirable system of paper currency--an invention which,

Alison the historian asserts, had it been made earlier, might have

averted the downfall of the Western Roman Empire. But, apart from

chrematistic pursuits, even in the Middle Ages the Jews, prevented by

persecution and social isolation from tying themselves permanently to

any particular country, and forced to lead a nomad existence, used

their opportunities of travel not only for the purpose of commerce, but

also for the transmission of knowledge. Thus, consciously or not, the

mediaeval Jew became the great middleman by whose agency what learning

there was found its way from country to country. In Spain, before the

holy war against the race deprived it of the conditions necessary for

the development of its genius, we have seen the Jews distinguishing

themselves in literature, scholastic philosophy, science, and

diplomacy. After their expulsion the Spanish exiles influenced the

culture of the countries over which they spread in many ways; Baruch

Spinoza being only the greatest star in a great constellation. Even

in England, where few of those refugees contrived to penetrate,

we find their spiritual influence in King James’s translation of

the Bible, which in many places bears the traces of David Kimchi’s

Commentary.[255]

The place of Israel in the mediaeval world has been described with

equal justness and eloquence by Lecky: “While those around them were

grovelling in the darkness of besotted ignorance; while juggling

miracles and lying relics were themes on which almost all Europe

was expatiating; while the intellect of Christendom, enthralled by

countless persecutions, had sunk into a deadly torpor, in which all

love of inquiry and all search for truth were abandoned, the Jews

were still pursuing the path of knowledge, amassing learning, and

stimulating progress, with the same unflinching constancy that they

manifested in their faith. They were the most skilful physicians, the

ablest financiers, and among the most profound philosophers; while they

were only second to the moderns in the cultivation of natural science,

they were also the chief interpreters to Western Europe of Arabian

learning.”[256]

In modern Europe also we have seen how varied and how beneficial has,

since their emancipation, been the activity of the Jews in other

than financial departments. In face of these facts how ineffably

ridiculous seems the anti-Semite’s homily on “A Jew of the Coheleth

type” who “pursues gain with an undivided soul, whereas the soul of the

Christian or the Idealist is divided,” and his calm, self-sufficient

pronouncement that “much of the best Christian and Idealist intellect

is entirely given to objects quite different from gain or power.” The

remark, of course, is true in so far as the two “types” are concerned.

But, unless the writer means to make the astounding assertion that,

other conditions being identical, the one type is peculiar to the

Jews, and the other to the Christians--that the ordinary Jew is born

a materialist, and the ordinary Christian an Idealist,--his statement

is pointless. It becomes worse than pointless when he proceeds to

emphasise the “compact organisation” of Jewish, as contrasted with

the “loose texture” of Christian society, and to proclaim that “in

this respect the Gentile, instead of starting fair, is handicapped in

the race.”[257] The only logical inference to be drawn from these

premisses is that the balance must be redressed by oppressing the Jew.

But the author shrinks from drawing that inference. Mediaeval and

Continental anti-Semites have been more consistent and courageous.