Chapter XXIII: Anti-Semitism (2)

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.

Such was the genesis of English anti-Semitism. However, the bulk of the public took little or no notice of these utterances. The English people is not intellectual enough to be moved by literary theories. Its very slowness in discarding old errors is a guarantee against precipitancy in embracing new ones. But, when a grievance is presented to it in the more tangible form of a practical and mischievous fact, then the English people begins to think.

The persecution of the Jews in Russia, Roumania, Hungary, and Germany threatened to flood England with a crowd of refugees more industrious than the English workman, more frugal, and far more temperate. The consequence would have been a fall in wages. The danger was too practical to be ignored; fortunately, both for the English workman and for the Jew, it was temporarily averted by the Jewish charitable associations, which directed emigration into safer channels. But, though the immediate cause for alarm disappeared, the anti-Jewish feeling remained; and was fed by the influx of new crowds from Eastern Europe at a later period. Again the Board of Guardians, the Russo-Jewish Committee and other organisations exerted themselves strenuously to prevent the immigrants from becoming in any case a burden to the British rate-payer. With that object in view, measures were taken that those victims of oppression who remained in England should be enabled without delay to earn their own bread by that industry for which they might be best fitted; but, wherever it was possible, a home was found for them in countries less populous than England and more suitable for colonisation. At the same time, by means of representations addressed to Jewish authorities, and published in Jewish papers abroad, regarding the congested state of the British labour market, efforts were made to stem the tide of further immigration.[258] But these efforts have not proved entirely successful. So that the interminable cycle of prejudice and platitude, interrupted for a while, has again resumed its ancient course. As in the early days of the nineteenth century, so now, at the commencement of the twentieth, our libraries are slowly enriched with volumes of exquisite dulness. We are called upon to fight the old battle over again. The enemy appears under many colours; but all the legions, though they know it not, fight for the same cause. And, though their diversity is great, none of the banners are new.

First comes our ancient friend, the theologian, Bible in hand; as valiant of heart as ever, and as loud of voice. He is a worthy descendant of St. Dominic, though perhaps he would be horrified if he were told so. But History is cruel, and the records of the past remain indelible. What student of history can fail to catch the note of familiarity in our modern missionary’s oratory?

“Jesus is the Way”: saith the preacher, “Although the Jews have the law, they cannot come to God, because Jesus is the Way. Although they have the Old Testament, they do not know the truth, because Jesus is _the_ Truth and Life!” and after several sentences rich in emphasis, fervour, and capital letters, comes the old, old conclusion: “adoption and true spiritual life there is none, where Christ has not kindled it. Israel, in its present state, the Christless Israel, shows this to the whole world. Notwithstanding the great activity and energy of the religious life of the Jews, they have--we say it with great sorrow--no life indeed--what they have is all carnal--and this accounts for the phenomenon that they have not been of much spiritual use to the world since Christ’s coming. In Christ alone will Israel live again and be a blessing to the world.”[259]

So speaks the advocate of conversion. His hope in the future is as great as his forgetfulness of the past. “The great God,” he informs us with touching assurance, “is, in His providence, now rapidly preparing the way for the final and only possible solution.” Ah, my good friend, it is very natural in a Christian to believe that “true spiritual life there is none, where Christ has not kindled it,” it is very pleasant to point the finger of scorn at “Christless Israel,” it is very well to prophesy that “in Christ alone will Israel live again and be a blessing to the world.” But how are we to convince Israel that it is so? This ancient nation which, having defied the onslaughts of centuries, has lived so long, seen so much, suffered so much, and survived so much, is it likely to succumb to our timeworn arguments? Or would you advise us to bid the Jew once more choose between baptism and the stake? This argument also has been tried and found inadequate. Convert the Jews! You might as hopefully attempt to convert the Pyramids.

Thus far the apostle. Next comes the patriot--a student of statistics, sad and, so far as religious bias goes, quite sober. In tones of sepulchral solemnity he warns us that, if England is to escape the fate of the Continent, namely, “of the Jews becoming stronger, richer, and vastly more numerous; with the corresponding certainty of the press being captured” by them, “and the national life stifled by the substitution of material aims for those which, however faultily, have formed the unselfish and imperial objects of the Englishmen who have made the Empire”--if these dire calamities are to be averted, England must “abandon her secular practice of complacent acceptance of every human being choosing to settle on these shores.” Should nothing be done to check the evil, there is bound to ensue an outbreak against the race “the members of which are always in exile and strangers in the land of their adoption.”[260]

The appeal to the Empire is quite modern, although, if the author had any intelligent conception of his own case, he might have seen that Imperialism is the very last thing in the world he should have summoned to the support of his narrow Nationalism: the two things differ as widely as the author differs from Julius Caesar. If the British Empire were confined to Englishmen, it would soon cease to be an empire. Equally novel is the interpretation of our expansion as due to an unselfish zeal for somebody else’s good--the author does not state whose. But the specific charge brought against the Jewish race as one “the members of which are always in exile and strangers in the land of their adoption” is hardly worthy of the author’s originality.

The prophet objects to the Jews as not having been “of much spiritual use to the world.” It is hard to dispute the statement, because it is impossible to know the particular meaning which the prophet attaches to the word “spiritual.” His position is unassailable. The patriot, however, denounces the Jews as the promoters of “material aims,” and thereby convicts himself either of gross ignorance or of deliberate distortion of facts. What the world of thought owes to the Jews has already been described with a fulness of detail which will probably appear superfluous to most educated people. As regards the assertion that the Jew still looks upon himself as one in exile and a stranger in a foreign land, we propose to deal with it when we come to consider the attitude of the Jews towards the Zionist movement. Here it is sufficient to point out that the term “Jew” is far too wide to warrant any sweeping generalisation. There are Jews and Jews, just as there are Christians and Christians. History abundantly proves that the Jew in the past retained most of his clannishness where he was most grievously oppressed. As to modern Judaism, since the day of Moses Mendelssohn there has set in a disintegration which renders a comprehensive and confident pronouncement only possible to those who consider prejudice an adequate substitute for knowledge. But there is no necessity for such a universal pronouncement. If we want an answer to the question, “Can the Jew be a patriot?” we need only glance at the history of modern Europe. Did not Jews fight with the Germans against the French in the days of Napoleon, with the Hungarians against the Austrians in 1848, with the Austrians against the Prussians in 1866, with the Germans against the French and the French against the Germans in 1870, with the Roumanians against the Turks in 1877? Or can man express his devotion to his country in a more unambiguous manner than by dying for it? Unless, indeed, the perfidious Jew even in dying is actuated by some ulterior motive.

But why should we look further than home? In 1831 Macaulay wrote: “If the Jews have not felt towards England like children, it is because she has treated them like a step-mother.” England has ceased to treat the Jews like a step-mother. How far has England’s change of attitude towards the Jew affected the Jew’s attitude towards England? On Sunday, December 28, 1902, Lord Roberts attended a special service, at the Central Synagogue in Great Portland Street, held for Jewish members of the regular and auxiliary forces who fell in South Africa fighting for England. The day was well chosen; for on the same day is performed the annual celebration in remembrance of the warlike exploits of the Maccabees--a coincidence which disproves in a practical manner the dogmatic generalisation that “a man’s heart cannot belong to two nations,” and which shows that the English Jew, at all events, can be both a Hebrew and an Englishman: he can cherish the ideals of the past and yet live in the realities of the present. The soldiers in whose memory the ceremony was held formed a portion of a force counting more than 1,200 officers and men, who took a creditable part in the war. This number assumes new significance, when we consider that the total Hebrew population of Great Britain that year did not exceed 180,000,[261] and that with us every soldier is a volunteer. The Jew has done as much for the English mother as any of her Christian sons: he has laid down his life in defence of her cause. Moreover, to join the army, the Jew must necessarily sacrifice something besides life--something that he holds higher than life--some of his religion, and particularly the ceremonial rites, such as the dietary laws and the Sabbath. But foremost English Rabbis, like the late Simeon Singer, maintained that duty to England justified and even consecrated this sacrifice.

Nor was this most unequivocal proof of patriotism a solitary instance. For the last ten years the Feast of Dedication has been associated with a celebration for the men serving in the Regular and Auxiliary Forces. On December 13, 1903, the Rev. Francis L. Cohen, to whose initiative the custom is due, inaugurated the second decade of these celebrations at the New West-end synagogue in the presence of 38 officers and 167 men, and also a number of new Jewish officers, including a Major-General and a General. The preacher dwelt on the promptitude with which Jewish Britons responded to the call during the last war. He referred to the 127 Jews who then “gave their lives for the flag they all honoured and loved,” and announced that, as a testimony “to the pride and joy wherewith the Jews hail their privilege of sharing in the voluntary burden of their common country’s defence,” they sought to endow a trophy “to be competed for from year to year at the great annual meeting of the National Rifle Association, such as might stimulate others of their fellow-citizens to perfect themselves in the military use of that weapon which might at any moment again be required to protect the immunity of their Sovereign’s territories.”[262] The truth is that religion has long ceased to be the principal force in the composition of nations. In the present stage of the world’s development sympathy with one’s co-religionists does not exclude loyalty to one’s country, any more than loyalty to one’s country prevents hatred of one’s co-religionists in other countries.

The continuance of oppression and persecution in Eastern Europe has kept the stream of emigration flowing. As was natural, great numbers of the hunted race turned to England as to the one European country where liberty has not yet been seriously endangered by the revival of intolerance. But the welcome which they met with in this sanctuary of freedom has not been unanimous. The “Alien Invasion,” as it is termed, has roused considerable anxiety and apprehension in certain bosoms. We are told by the melancholic patriot, in a more recent and more popular publication,[263] that it is a menace to the nation, that “British right of asylum hitherto has been as profitable to the Empire as to the immigrants,” but that “it is otherwise to-day.” We are exhorted to reconsider our position, and to ask ourselves whether we are right in “permitting free import of the sweepings of foreign cities to contaminate our English life, to raise rents, and lower the standard of existence.” We are, lastly, advised to shut our doors to “undesirable aliens.” The question thus put admits of but one answer. If these aliens are undesirable, we ought not to desire them. No one would cavil with our advisers were it not that under the mask of a movement for the exclusion of “undesirable” individuals there seems to lurk in some quarters a retrogressive animosity against the Jewish race as a whole, or a wish to stir up such an animosity. The melancholic patriot opportunely reminds us that “the foreigners who settle in England are almost entirely of the Jewish race, and it is therefore impossible to discuss the question of foreign immigration without raising the Jewish question.” Thus, having thrown off the mask, he proceeds to give utterance to candid and undisguised anti-Semitism:

“The peculiarity of this race is that they refuse assimilation by intermarriage, equally with Russians in Russia, with Arabs in Tunis, or with the English in England, just as rigidly as did their ancestors refuse intermarriage with Gentiles in the days of Nehemiah.” The matter presented in this form offers the interesting point of being not new. The aloofness of the Jew has already been shown to have been the fundamental cause of his sufferings. Had the Jews not formed a “peculiar people” they would not have been made the milch-cows and the scapegoats of the nations through the ages. But it can also be shown that at the present day this is only partially true in the countries which have genuinely adopted the Jews. It is estimated that there occur far more marriages in England between Jews and Christians than between Protestants and Catholics. By the Jewish law marriage between a Jew and a proselyte is perfectly lawful. The barrier is thus, after all, one of religion rather than of race. Naturally an inclination towards such intermarriage would not prevail on either side except in comparatively rare cases. Yet the strange fact remains that such mixed marriages are at least as common in the lower as in the upper classes of Jewish society.

Besides, though the clannishness of the race in the past explains its persecution, does it excuse it? Is it an argument that a modern statesman in a free country should accept as justifying exclusion? Moreover, if the Jews really are so black as the author paints them, is it not rather unpatriotic of him to wish to see them intermarrying with us, and thus contriving “to contaminate our English life” far more effectively than they will be able to do if they continue to be a people apart? However, consistency in reasoning is not, as has already been remarked, the anti-Semite’s forte.

The oracle supplies us with seven reasons--mystic and ominous number--why “the immigration of the poorest Jews from Russia and Poland is a national evil.”

1. “They lower the Englishman’s standard of comfort, and are unduly addicted to the calling of usury.”

2. The competition is injurious to the Englishman because it is “not to determine the survival of the fittest, but to determine the survival of the fittest to exist on a herring and a piece of black bread.”

3. “They subsist contentedly on a diet which is insufficient to sustain the meat-eating Anglo-Saxon.”

4. “Their habits of huddling together under circumstances of unmentionable filth destroy the possibility of dealing with the housing question, and set at naught our municipal sanitary laws.”

5. “They lower the wages of unskilled women and unskilled labourers.”

6. “They raise rent.”

7. “They enlarge the area of the sweating system.”

The usury charge has been answered by experience and Economic Science ages ago. But the patriot contributes to the discussion quite a fresh element when he describes the Jewish immigrants as paupers and, in the same breath, as usurers. He does not deign to explain how men who, as he later asserts, are induced to leave their homes by destitution and are drawn to London by the “magnetism” of the Jewish charities, how these penniless beggars can “adopt money-lending as a means of livelihood.” If they are paupers they cannot be money-lenders, and if they are money-lenders they cannot be paupers. To starve and to lend at the same time is a feat that even a Jew is hardly capable of.

As to sweating and sanitation, these are matters for which legislation, if it is worth the name, ought to be able to devise far less drastic remedies than that proposed by statistical patriotism. The remaining reasons, when pruned of repetition and reduced to their logical dimensions, resolve themselves into this: We do not want the Jew, because he can work harder than we, for less wages than we, and can live more frugally than we. In other words, because for the purposes of the struggle for existence he is better equipped than we. He is too formidable a rival.

But on this point also the enemies of the Jew are at fatal variance. Another writer pronounces the explanation of the Jewish immigrant’s success as due to his lower standard of living and greater capacity for labouring, paradoxical. “It is,” he says, “as though one were to maintain that of two pieces of machinery the worse did most work and required less fuel.” He seeks and finds the true reason of the displacement of the English craftsman, not in the “alleged frugality of the foreign comer” or in “his readiness to do more for his money,” but in “the Jewish system of out-door poor relief ... which makes rivalry and successful competition an impossibility.” As an instance, he quotes the fact that poor children who attend the Jews’ Free School in Bell-lane are partially fed and clothed by a charitable Hebrew family. The writer, though apparently resenting even competition in philanthropy as something monstrous and dishonest, yet is charitable enough to admit that “it may be good, it may be bad; fair or unfair to other schools.”[264] One would think that schools were shops competing with one another as to which of them will attract the greatest number of customers and not disinterested institutions for the education of the community. Furthermore, one would think that the fact quoted alone ought to move good Christians to an emulation of the Jewish rival and thank him for the example of beneficence which he sets them, instead of turning that very example into a new reproach and adducing it as a reason for excluding him from the country. Finally, one would think that, instead of reviling the Jew for assisting his less fortunate co-religionists, a true patriot might be induced, in sheer rivalry, to assist his own. But what actually happens is this. We tell the Jew, “We let our own unemployed starve, and you don’t. This is not fair to our poor unemployed.” Verily, the ethics of anti-Semitism are as wonderful as its logic.

The same narrow-minded dread of the alien competitor is at the present day exhibited in South Africa. At a meeting in Cape Town on Sept. 23rd, 1904, the speakers began by denouncing the Indians as Asiatics, but they soon extended their objections to Jews, Greeks, and Italians. The Jews were accused of working on Sundays, the Greeks of keeping their shops open later than the natives, the Italians of sending large sums of money (their hardly earned savings) out of the Colony to their homes. A writer commenting on this report sensibly remarks: “Against stupidity of this sort argument fights in vain.”[265] And his opinion will be shared by most sane people in England. Yet many of these people will probably be ready to approve the exclusion of the Jewish immigrant, not seeing that what is rightly condemned as stupid intolerance in one country can hardly be justified as enlightened statesmanship in another.

Time was when thrift, extreme frugality, success in life, and clannishness were the causes of the Englishman’s hatred for the Scotch competitor, when the latter after the Union began to emigrate to the South. Those aliens were, like the Jews, accused of “herding together” and of living on little, were envied for getting on in the world, and were denounced for pushing one another on. The clamour has passed away, and no sober Englishman of to-day would dream of reviving it. Patriotic bigots in those days advised the exclusion of the Scotch “undesirable,” and had a goodly following among people who, having failed in life themselves, could not forgive the foreigner his success. “But,” as a writer on the subject pertinently asks, “would it have been well for England, even in a purely commercial point of view, if the Scotch had been legally excluded? Have not her children reaped benefits from the labours of those whom their forefathers desired to forbid the country?”[266]

To such considerations, however, our modern patriot is nobly invulnerable. He soon forgets even his seven reasons, feeble and contradictory as they are, in his Nationalist enthusiasm. The Jewish millionaire is as hateful to him as the Jewish pauper. He describes the Jews as a race gifted with indomitable cunning and an extraordinary capacity for perceiving “with lightning glance the exact moment to corner a market,” as “a powerful, exclusive and intolerant race” of experts “in the flotation of companies,” as adepts “in the art of deluding the public by the inflation of worthless securities with an artificial and effervescent value,” as a tribe whose “undue economic predominance” has been promoted by--O ye shades of King John and Torquemada--“the mild spirit of Christianity!”

To descend from the ludicrously sublime to the sublimely ludicrous: “Jewish ascendancy at Court is so conspicuous as to be the subject of incessant lamentation on the part of full-blooded Englishmen.” Surely the end of the British Empire cannot be very distant when the King goes to Newmarket “accompanied by a Jewish financier,” “is the guest of a Jewish financier,” and when, highest horror of all, “in the published names of the dinner party on the first night every one was a Jewish financier, or his relation, with the exception of the King’s aide-de-camp and the Portuguese Minister”--the latter, if not a Jew, an alien!

The patriot then warns us in tones irresistibly reminiscent of Lewis Carroll: “The time has come to speak out about this alien influence. There is danger ahead.... There are ugly rumours to the effect that wealthy members of the Jewish community have placed the King of England under undue obligations. If this be true, it is the duty of the people of England to extricate their Sovereign from the toils of the modernized version of Isaac of York. If it be untrue, there is the less reason for Jews occupying their too prominent position at Court. No sincere lover of his country can contemplate without anxiety the gradual disappearance of the old families and the ascendancy of the smart Semites who treat as trenchermen and led captains what remains of English society. The efficiency of the British nation requires the ascendancy of the Anglo-Saxon, not the Semitic, element in it. It is time to restrict the immigration of potential money-lenders from Eastern Europe.” The Jeremiad concludes with a truly ominous reminder: “In 1290 the Jews were expelled from England.”

Continental anti-Semitism can show nothing superior to these lamentations of our “full-blooded” “Anglo-Saxon.” In them we have all the hereditary features of Jew-hatred exaggerated by insular distrust of everything foreign and by provincial lack of sense of proportion or humour. This manifesto, however, despite its limitations, is a fair specimen of a kind of literature common enough on the Continent, though still rare in these backward islands. Those interested in the subject will find in the German anti-Semitic pamphlets and in the Russian Panslavist newspapers the prototypes of all the arguments, sentiments and self-contradictions of which those embodied in this lugubrious production are pale copies. But the pamphlet is more than a literary curiosity. Like the proverbial straw which, of no importance in itself, yet deserves notice as indicating the direction of the current, this product of a provincial mind is worthy of some attention as a sign of the times. Already there have been found Englishmen illiberal enough to overlook all the good points in the character of poor Jewish immigrants--their untiring industry, sobriety and self-sacrifice--and to ridicule, in supreme bad taste, the pathetic devotion which impels these wretched wanderers to seek solace for their sufferings in prayer and in the study of the Book which has been the only source of comfort to millions of their people for the last twenty centuries and to millions of our own for more than half that time.[267]

From another point of view also the pamphlet is a document, even more valuable, because more candid, than a less crude performance would have been. It forms a hyphen of connection between pure anti-Semitism--a small matter in England as yet--and another tendency entirely different in origin, far more widely spread, and shared by persons who, in other respects, have little in common with the provincial patriot. This is the tendency towards a reaction of which the anti-alien agitation is one symptom, and the clamour for protection another; both pointing to a change of sentiment in favour of the political ideals fashionable before the reign of Queen Victoria.

Until the nineteenth century England was essentially a Tory country. The few ruled the many, and their rule was based on the assumption--no doubt largely justified in those days--that the many were not fit to rule themselves. A seat in the House of Commons was virtually a family heirloom; patronage filled the Church, and favouritism controlled the army and the navy. The whole of English public life--civil, religious, and military--was under the sway of an oligarchy, and fair competition was a thing unknown. It was the reign of Protection in the broadest acceptation of the term. Then came the awakening of the masses--an awakening the first token of which had already appeared in the transference of a literary man’s homage from a noble patron to the general public--and gradually the lethargic acquiescence in the decrees of an aristocratic Providence was supplanted by healthy discontent. The fruit of this deep and slow evolution was the series of reforms which, by transferring to public opinion the power which was formerly vested in a privileged class, turned England from a pure aristocracy into a moderate kind of democracy. The rotten boroughs were swept out of existence, and, by the removal of religious disabilities, the English Parliament and the English Universities became truly representative institutions. Along with these changes came the demand for free competition in another sphere--commerce--and the agitation resulted in the repeal of the Corn Laws. In every department of life the individual claimed and, in part, obtained freedom of initiative and action. _Laissez-faire_ became the motto of the Victorian era, and the free international exchange of goods promised at last to realise the ideals of international friendship and reciprocity which the eighteenth century had preached but proved unable to practise.