Preface

Chapter I. The Thesis of This Book

Chapter II. The Denial of the Problem

Chapter III. The Present Phase of the Problem

Chapter IV. The General Cause of Friction

Chapter V. The Special Causes of Friction

Chapter VI. The Cause of Friction Upon Our Side

Chapter VII. The Anti-semite

Chapter VIII. Bolshevism

Chapter IX. The Position in the World as a Whole

Chapter X. The Present Relation Between the English State and the Jews

Chapter XI. Zionism

Chapter XII. Our Duty

Chapter XIII. Their Duty

Chapter XIV. Various Theories

Chapter XV. Habit or Law?

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The object of this book is more modest, I fear, than that of much which has appeared upon that vital political matter, the relation between the Jews and the nations around them.

It does not propose any detailed, still less, any positive legal solution to what has become a pressing problem, nor does it pretend to any complete solution of it. It is no more than a suggestion that any attempt to solve this problem ought to follow certain general lines which are essentially different from those attempted in Western Europe during the time immediately preceding our own. I suggest that, if the present generation in both parties to the discussion, the Jews and ourselves, will drop convention and make a principle of discussing the problem in terms of reality, we shall automatically approach a right solution.

We have but to tell the truth in the place of the falsehoods of the last generation. Therefore, of the three principles upon which this essay reposes, the principle that concealment must come to an end seems to me more important than the principle of mutual recognition, or even the principle of mutual respect. For it may well be that my judgment is at fault in the matter of Jewish national consciousness; it may well be that I exaggerate it, and it is certain that one party to a debate cannot be possessed of the full knowledge required for its settlement; the other side must be heard. But neither my judgment nor the judgment of any man can be at fault on the value of truth and the ultimate evil consequences of trying to build upon a lie.

The English reader (less, I think, the American) will often find in my sentences a note that will seem to him fantastic. The quarrel is already acute here in London, but it has not here approached the limits which it has reached long ago elsewhere; and a man accustomed to the quieter air in which all public affairs have, until recently, been debated in this country, may smile at what will seem to him odd and exaggerated fears. To this I would reply that the book has been written not only in the light of English, but of a general, experience. I will bargain that were it put into the hands of a jury chosen from the various nationalities of Europe and the United States it would be found too moderate in its estimate of the peril it postulates. I would further ask the reader, who may not have appreciated how rapidly the peril approaches, to consider the distance traversed in the last few years. It is not very long since a mere discussion of the Jewish question in England was impossible. It is but a few years since the mere admission of it appeared abnormal. The truth is that this question is not one which we open or close at will in any European nation. It is imposed successively upon one nation after another by the force of things. It is this force of things, this necessity for national well-being, and for the warding off of disorder, which has thrust the Jewish question to-day upon a society still reluctant to consider it and still hoping it may return to its old neglect. It cannot so return.

I will conclude by asking my Jewish, as well as my non-Jewish, readers to observe that I have left out every personal allusion and every element of mere recrimination. I have carefully avoided the mention of particular examples in public life of the friction between the Jews and ourselves and even examples drawn from past history. With these I could often have strengthened my argument, and I would certainly have made my book a great deal more readable. I have left out everything of the kind because, though one can always rouse interest in this way, it excites enmity between the opposing parties. Since my object is to reduce that enmity, which has already become dangerous, I should be insincere indeed if from mere purpose of enlivening this essay I had stooped to exasperate feeling.

I could have made the book far stronger as a piece of polemic and indefinitely more amusing as a piece of record, but I have not written it as a piece of polemic or as a piece of record. I have written it as an attempt at justice.

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It is the thesis of this book that the continued presence of the Jewish nation intermixed with other nations alien to it presents a permanent problem of the gravest character: that the wholly different culture, tradition, race and religion of Europe make Europe a permanent antagonist to Israel, and that the recent and rapid intensification of that antagonism gives to the discovery of a solution immediate and highly practical importance.

For if the quarrel is allowed to rise unchecked and to proceed unappeased, we shall come, unexpectedly and soon, upon one of these tragedies which have marked for centuries the relations between this peculiar nation and ourselves.

The Jewish problem is one to which no true parallel can be found, for the historical and social phenomenon which has produced it is unique. It is a problem which cannot be shirked, as the last generation both of Jews and of their hosts attempted to shirk it. It is a problem which cannot be avoided, nor even lessened (as can some social problems), by an healing effect of time: for it is increasing before our eyes. It must be met and dealt with openly and now.

That problem is the problem of reducing or accommodating the strain produced by the presence of an alien body within any organism. The alien body sets up strains, or, to change the metaphor, produces a friction, which is evil both to itself and to the organism which it inhabits. The problem is, how to relax those strains for good and to set things permanently at their ease again.

There are two ways to such a desirable end.

The first is by the elimination of what is alien. The second is by its segregation. There is no other way.

The elimination of an alien body may take three forms. It may take a frankly hostile form—elimination by destruction. It may take a form, also hostile but less hostile—elimination by expulsion. It may take a third form, an amicable one (and that far the most commonly found in the natural process of physical nature and of society)—elimination by absorption; the alien body becomes an indistinguishable part of the organism in which it was originally a source of disturbance and is lost in it. These three ways sum up the first method, the method of elimination.

The second method, if elimination shall prove impossible or undesirable, is that of segregation; and this again may be of two kinds—hostile and amicable. We may segregate the alien element without regard to its own ends or desires: the segregation of it being upon a plan framed solely from the point of view of the organism invaded, and the reduction of the strain or friction it creates effected by the mere cutting of it off from all avenues through which it can affect its host.

But we may also segregate the alien irritant by an action which takes full account of the thing segregated as well as of the organism segregating it, and considers the good of both parties. In this second and amicable policy the word segregation (which has a bad connotation) may be replaced by the word recognition.

This book has been written under the conception that all solutions of the Jewish problem other than this last are either impracticable, or bad in morals, or both.

It is written to advocate a policy wherein the Jews on their side shall openly recognize their wholly separate nationality and we on ours shall equally recognize that separate nationality, treat it without reserve as an alien thing, and respect it as a province of society outside our own.

It is written under the conviction that any attitude which falls short of this policy or is very different from it will now soon breed disaster.

The solution by way of destruction is not only abominable in morals but has proved futile in practice. It has been the constant temptation of angry popular masses in the past, when the Jewish problem has come to a head not once but a thousand times in various parts of our civilization during the last twenty centuries. From the pitiless massacres of Cyrenaica in the second century to the latest murders in the Ukraine that solution has been attempted and has failed. It has invariably left behind it a dreadful inheritance of hatred upon the one side and of shame upon the other. It has been condemned by every man whose judgment is worth considering and especially by the great moral teachers of Christendom. It is, indeed, hardly a policy at all, for it is blind. It is a gesture of mere exasperation and not a final gesture at that.

The second form of elimination—expulsion—though theoretically sustainable (for a community has a right to organize its own life and no aliens therein have a claim to modify that life or to disturb it), is none the less in practice, and as regards this particular problem, only one degree less odious than the first. It means inevitably a mass of individual injustice, as well as common spoliation and every other hardship. It is almost impossible to dissociate it from violence and ill deeds of all kinds. It leaves behind it almost as strong an inheritance, if not of shame on the one side, at any rate of rancour upon the other, as does the first. And what condemns it finally is that it is not, and cannot be, complete.

For it is in the nature of the Jewish problem that this solution is only attempted at moments and in places where the strength of the Jews has declined; and this invariably means their corresponding strength in some other quarter.

A particular society attempting this solution of expulsion may succeed for a time so far as itself is concerned, but that inevitably means the reception of the exiled body by another district, and, sooner or later, the return of the force which it was hoped to be rid of. The greatest historical example of this is, of course, the action of the English. The English alone of all Christian nations did adopt this solution in its entirety. A strong national kingship, a government highly organized for its time, an insular position and a singular unanimity of national purpose promoted the expulsion of the Jews from England at the end of the thirteenth century; for more than three and a half centuries that expulsion was maintained, and England alone of the various divisions of Christendom was in theory free of the alien element and nearly as free in practice as it was in theory.

But, as we all know, in the long run the experiment broke down. The Jews were readmitted in the middle of the seventeenth century, and nowhere have they come to greater strength than in the very nation which attempted this solution of the problem with such drastic thoroughness five hundred years ago. None of the other parallel attempts up and down Europe were of the same thoroughness as the English attempt. Their failure came, therefore, more quickly. But such failure would seem in any case to be inevitable. Quite apart, therefore, from the moral objection which attaches to it, there is the practical experience that a solution is not to be found upon such lines.

Lastly, there is elimination by absorption. This would obviously be the most gentle, as it is the most evident, of all methods. It is further a normal and most usual method of nature herself when a living organism has to deal with disturbance excited by the presence of an alien body. So natural and so obvious is it that it has been taken by many men of excellent judgment upon both sides as a matter of course. It has been taken for granted that if absorption has not taken place in the past it has only been due to an ill-will artificially nourished and maintained against the Jews on our side, or by the unreasoning exclusiveness of the Jews on theirs.

Even to-day, in spite of a vast increase during our own generation, both in the public appreciation of the problem and in its immediate gravity, there are very many men who still regard absorption as the natural end of the affair. These, though dwindling, are still numerous upon the non-Jewish side; upon the other, the Jewish side, they are, I think, a very small body. For I note that even those Jews who think absorption will come, admit it with regret, and certainly the vast majority would insist with pride upon the certain survival of Israel.

But here again I maintain that we have the index of history against us. In point of fact absorption has not taken place. It has had a better chance than any corresponding case can show: ample time in which to work, wide dispersion, constant intermarriage, long periods of tolerant friendship for the Jew, and even at times his ascendancy. If ever there were conditions under which one might imagine that the larger body would absorb the smaller, they were those of Christendom acting intimately for centuries, in relation with Jewry. Nation after nation has absorbed larger, intensely hostile minorities: the Irish, their successive invaders; the British, the pirates of the fifth and eighth centuries and the French of three centuries more; the northern Gauls, their auxiliaries; the Italians, the Lombards; the Greeks, the Slav; the Dacian has absorbed even the Mongol: but the Jew has remained intact.

However we explain this—mystically or in whatever other fashion—we cannot deny its truth. It is true of the Jews, and of the Jews alone, that they alone have maintained, whether through the special action of Providence or through some general biological or social law of which we are ignorant, an unfailing entity and an equally unfailing differentiation between themselves and the society through which they ceaselessly move.

It is not true that conditions in the past differed from present conditions sufficiently to account for so strange a story. There have been generations and even centuries (not co-incident indeed throughout the world, but applying now to one country, now to another) where every opportunity for absorption existed; yet that absorption has never taken place. There was every chance in Spain at one moment, in Poland at another, but there was the best chance of all in the short but brilliant period of Liberal policy which has dominated Western Europe during the last three generations. That policy has had the fullest play: it has left the Jews not only unabsorbed, but more differentiated than ever, and the political problem they present more insistent by far than it was a century ago.

The thing might have come where there was a chaos of peoples, as in pagan Alexandria in the four centuries from 200 B.C. to 200 A.D., or in modern New York. It might have come where there was a particularly friendly attitude, as in mediaeval Poland or modern England. It might even have come, paradoxically, through the very persecution and strain of times and places where the Jews suffered the most hostile treatment: for their absorption might have been achieved under pressure though it had failed to be achieved under attraction. As a fact it has never come. It has never proved possible. The continuous absorption of outlying fractions, a process continually going on wherever the Jewish nation is present, has not affected the mass of the problem at all. The body as a whole has remained separate, differentiated, with a strong identity of its own under all conditions and in all places, and the a priori reasoning, by which men come to think this solution reasonable, is nullified by an experience apparent throughout history. That experience is wholly against any such solution. It cannot be.

There remains, then, only the solution of segregation; a word which (I repeat) I use in a completely neutral manner though it has unhappily obtained in this and other issues a bad connotation.

Segregation, as I have said, may be of two kinds. It may be hostile, a sort of static expulsion: a putting aside of the alien body without regard to that body's needs, desires or claims; the building of a fence round it, as it were, solely with the object of defending the organism which reacts against invasion, and suffers from the presence within it of something different from itself.

Or it may take an amicable form and may be a mutual arrangement: a recognition, with mutual advantage, of a reality which is unavoidable by either party.

The first of these apparent solutions has been attempted over and over again throughout history. It has had long periods of partial success, but never any period of complete success; for it has invariably left behind it a sense of injustice upon the Jewish side and of moral ill-ease upon the other.

There remains, I take it, no practical or permanent solution but the last. It is to this conclusion that my essay is meant to lead. If the Jewish nation comes to express its own pride and patriotism openly, and equally openly to admit the necessary limitations imposed by that expression; if we on our side frankly accept the presence of this nation as a thing utterly different from ourselves, but with just as good a right to existence as we have; if we renounce our pretences in the matter; if we talk of and recognize the Jewish people freely and without fear as a separate body; if upon both sides the realities of the situation are admitted, with the consequent and necessary definitions which those realities imply, we shall have peace.

The advantage both parties—the small but intense Jewish minority, the great non-Jewish majority in the midst of which that minority acts—would discover in such an arrangement is manifest. If it could be maintained—as I think it could be maintained—the problem would be permanently solved. At any rate, if it cannot be solved in that way it certainly cannot be solved in any other, and if we do not get peace by this avenue, then we are doomed to the perpetual recurrence of those persecutions which have marred the history of Europe since the first consolidation of the Roman Empire.

It has been a series of cycles invariably following the same steps. The Jew comes to an alien society, at first in small numbers. He thrives. His presence is not resented. He is rather treated as a friend. Whether from mere contrast in type—what I have called "friction"—or from some apparent divergence between his objects and those of his hosts, or through his increasing numbers, he creates (or discovers) a growing animosity. He resents it. He opposes his hosts. They call themselves masters in their own house. The Jew resists their claim. It comes to violence.

It is always the same miserable sequence. First a welcome; then a growing, half-conscious ill-ease; next a culmination in acute ill-ease; lastly catastrophe and disaster; insult, persecution, even massacre, the exiles flying from the place of persecution into a new district where the Jew is hardly known, where the problem has never existed or has been forgotten. He meets again with the largest hospitality. There follows here also, after a period of amicable interfusion, a growing, half-conscious ill-ease, which next becomes acute and leads to new explosions, and so on, in a fatal round.

If we are to stop that wheel from its perpetual and tragic turning, there seems to be no method save that for which I plead.

The opposition to it is diverse and formidable but can everywhere be reduced upon analysis to some form of falsehood. This falsehood takes the shape of denying the existence of the problem, of remaining silent upon it, or of pretending friendly emotions in public commerce which are belied by every phrase and gesture admitted in private. Or it takes the shape of defining the problem in false terms, in proclaiming it essentially religious whereas it is essentially national. Worst of all, it may be that very modern kind of falsehood, a statement of the truth accompanied by a statement of its contradiction, like the precious modern lie that one can be a patriot and at the same time international. In the case of the Jews, this particular modern lie takes the shape of admitting that they are wholly alien to us and different from us, of talking of them as such and even writing of them as such, and yet, in another connection, talking and writing of them as though no such violent contrast were present. That pretence of reconciling contradictions is the lie in the soul. Its punishment is immediate, for those who indulge it are blinded.

All opposition that ever I have met to the solution here proposed is an opposition sprung from the spirit of untruth; and if there were no other argument in favour of an honest and moral settlement of the dispute, the one argument based on Truth would, I think, be sufficient. It is a social truth that there is a Jewish nation, alien to us and therefore irritant. It is a moral truth that expulsion and worse are remedies to be avoided. It is an historical truth that those solutions have always ultimately failed; the recognition of those three truths alone will set us right.

Such is the main thesis of this book, but it needs an addition if its full spirit is to be apprehended, and that addition I have attempted to express in the last chapter.

If the solution I propose be the right solution, it yet remains to be determined whether it should first take the form of new laws from which a new spirit may be expected to grow, or first take the form of a new spirit and practice from which new laws shall spring. The order is of essential importance; for to mistake it, to reverse the true sequence of cause and effect, is the prime cause of failure in all social reform.

As will be seen by those who have the patience to read to the end of my book, I have, in its last pages, pleaded strongly for the second policy. It would be impossible to frame in our society, and in face of the rapidly rising tide of antagonism against the Jews, new laws that would not lead to injustice. But if it be possible to create an atmosphere wherein the Jews are spoken of openly, and they in their turn admit, define, and accept the consequences of a separate nationality in our midst, then, such a spirit once established, laws and regulations consonant to it will naturally follow.

But I am convinced that the reversing of this process would only lead first to confusion and next to disaster, both for Israel and for ourselves.

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I have stated the Problem. There is friction between the two races—the Jews in their dispersion and those among whom they live. This friction is growing acute. It has led invariably in the past (and consequently may lead now) to the most fearful consequences, terrible for the Jew but evil also for us. Therefore that the problem is immediate, practical and grave. Therefore a solution is imperative.

But I may be—and indeed I shall be—met at the outset by the denial that any such problem exists. Such was the attitude of all our immediate past; such is the attitude of many of the best men to-day on both sides of the gulf which separates Israel from our world.

I must meet this objection before going further, for if it be sound, if indeed there is no problem (save what may be created by ignorance or malice), then no solution is demanded. All we have to do is to enlighten the ignorant and to repress the malicious: the ignorant, who imagine there is an alien Jewish nation among them, the malicious, who treat as though they were alien, men who are, in fact, exactly like ourselves and normal fellow-citizens.

I do not here allude to the great mass of convention, hypocrisy and fear which pretends ignorance of a truth it well knows. I am speaking of the sincere conviction, still present in many—particularly those of the older generation—that no Jewish problem exists.

It is honestly denied by a certain type of mind that there is any such thing as a Jewish nation; there can therefore be no friction between it and its hosts: the thing is a delusion. Let us examine that mind and see whether the illusion is on our side or no.

It was the attitude familiar to the nineteenth century, and agreeable to that one of its political moods in which it found itself best satisfied: the negative attitude of leaving the Jewish nation unrecognized; of creating a fiction of single citizenship to replace the reality of dual allegiance; of calling a Jew a full member of whatever society he happened to inhabit during whatever space of time he happened to sojourn there in his wanderings across the earth. That was the attitude agreeable on the political side to everything which called itself "modern thought." Such was the doctrine proposed by the great men of the French Revolution. Such was the attitude accepted almost enthusiastically by Liberal England, that is, by all the dominant public life of England during the Victorian period. Such was the policy which once obtained universal favour throughout the whole of our Western civilization. That was the attitude which the West actually attempted to impose upon Eastern States, and the last effect of its rapidly-declining credit is to be found in certain clauses of the Treaty of Versailles: for that attitude is still the official attitude of all our governments.

In the Treaty of Versailles and the other treaties following the Great War the Jews of Eastern Europe were put under a sort of special protection, but not in a straightforward and positive fashion. The word "Jew" was never blurted out—it was replaced by the word "minority"—but the intention was obvious. The underlying implication was: "We, the Western governments, say there is no Jewish problem. The idea of a Jewish nation is a delusion and the conception of the Jew as something different from a Pole or a Rumanian is a mania. If you in the East are still benighted in this matter, at any rate we will prevent your ignorance or obsession from leading you to persecution." The same men who made these declarations proceeded to erect a brand-new highly-distinct Jewish state in Palestine, with the threat behind it of ruthlessly suppressing a majority by the use of Western arms.

Both actions were the consequence of that confused position I have just defined (history will call it the last example), which, though much weakened in public opinion, was still honestly taken for granted by some of the Parliamentarians who framed the Treaty, and was certainly felt to be of personal advantage to all: the position that there is no Jewish nation when the admission of it may inconvenience the Jew, but very much of a Jewish nation when it can advantage him.

Those who defended this position did so from various standpoints; but these may all be regarded as so many degrees in a certain way of looking at the Jewish people. It was till lately the attitude of the majority of educated Frenchmen, Englishmen and Italians. It was, so to speak, the official political attitude of Western Europe with its parliamentary governments and other corresponding institutions.

The most extreme form of this opinion was to be found in people who spoke of the Jew as nothing other than a citizen with a particular religion. A state would be dominantly Catholic or Protestant, but it would contain smaller religious bodies, eager minorities, for which a place had to be found, side by side with the more or less indifferent majority. Catholic France had a five per cent and wealthy Huguenot minority. Protestant England had a seven per cent and poor Catholic minority. Protestant Holland had a large minority—more than a third—of Catholics, and so forth. It had become odious to nineteenth century thought that religious differences (which it regarded as nothing more than shades of doubtfully-held private opinion) should be the concern of the State. A large number of people thought of the Jews, not as a race, but only as a religion; and regarding all religion thus, they concluded that it could involve no diminution of citizenship.

At the other end of the scale you had public men who fully appreciated the ultimate difficulties which would certainly arise from this inconclusive settlement of the matter. These regarded the Jews as a quite distinct nationality, and even as a nationality likely to clash with the national needs of its hosts; they would even (in private) express their hostility towards that nationality. None the less, they thought it must be treated in public life as though it did not exist. These men were most emphatic in their private letters and conversation—that the Jewish problem was not a religious but a national one. Nevertheless (they said) it was necessary to-day to mask that problem by a fiction and to pretend that the Jew was just like everybody else save for his religion. All other solutions (they said) demanded a knowledge of history and of Europe not to be expected of the public at large; again, the Jews were so powerful that if they desired the fiction to be supported they must be humoured. At any rate, recourse must be had, in our time at least, to this make-believe.

To the new and already antagonistic attitude towards the Jews now rising so strongly everywhere throughout Western Europe (which is in part a reaction from the nineteenth century position), this old-fashioned way of denying the Jewish race or ignoring its existence by a fiction appears morally odious, and we wonder to-day why it commanded universal support. It involved a falsehood, of course, often a conscious falsehood; and it was also undignified; for there appears to our generation something as grotesque in denying the existence of the Jewish nation as in denying our own. But that the fiction was maintained sincerely, and that the grotesque and undignified side of it went unperceived, we can assure ourselves in a few moments' converse with any one of that older generation which maintained it and still represents it among us.

It might have continued to flourish for yet another generation, at any rate among the leading classes of this commercial community, but for two new developments which broke it down, each development the result of so large a toleration. The first was the growth of numbers, the second of influence. What made that old falsehood glaring and that old grotesque apparent was the enormous increase throughout all the West of the Jewish poor, accompanied by the enormous increase of the power exercised by the Jewish rich in public affairs. Men grew angry at finding themselves pledged to a pretence that Jews were not, when their presence was everywhere unavoidable, in the streets, and in the offices of government. The fiction was possible when a very few financiers, mixed with and lost in the polite world, were alone concerned. It became impossible in the face of the vast new ghettoes of London, Manchester, Bradford, Glasgow, and the formidable and growing list of Jewish and half-Jewish Ministers, Viceroys, ambassadors, dictators of policy.

This contempt for and irritation with what I have called the nineteenth century attitude, the Liberal attitude, was already apparent before the end of that century. It was muttering during the South African war in England and the Dreyfus case in France; it became vocal in the first years of this century, especially in connection with parliamentary scandals; with the Bolshevist rising in 1917 it became clamorous. It will certainly grow. We already have a formidable minority prepared to act against the interest of the Jew. It will in all probability become, and that shortly, a majority. It may appear at any moment, on some critical occasion, on some new provocation, as an overwhelming flood of exasperated opinion.

All the more does it behove us to treat the old-fashioned neutrality and fiction fairly; to examine it even with a bias in its favour; to set down all that can be said in its defence before we reject it, as I think we must now all reluctantly reject it. I say "reluctantly"; for after all it was the fixed mood of our fathers, who did great things: we feel their reproach when we abandon it, and there are still present with us very many of our elders to whom our new anxiety is abhorrent.

We must remember in the first place that the treating of the Jew in the West as no Jew at all, but a plain citizen like the rest, worked well enough for a time. One might almost say that there was no Jewish problem consciously present to the mind of the average educated Englishman or Frenchman, Italian, or even western German, between, say, the years 1830 and 1890. A very small body of Jews in England and France, in Italy and the rest of the West, were vaguely associated with wealth in the popular mind; a large proportion of them were distinguished for public work of various kinds; many of them with beneficence. The presence of such men could not conceivably lead to political difficulties—or at least, so it then seemed. The stories of persecution that came through from Eastern Europe, even examples of friction between great bodies of Jews there and the natives of the States where they happened to find themselves, were received in the West with disgust as the aberrations of imperfectly civilized people.

Even in the valley of the Rhine, where the Jew was more numerous and better known "in bulk," the convention of the more civilized West was accepted. The doctrines, the abstraction of the French Revolution in this matter had prevailed.

Here any reader with an historical sense will at once point out that the space of time I have just quoted—1830 to 1890—is ridiculously short. Any treatment of a very great political problem, centuries old, which works for only sixty years and then begins to break down is no settlement at all. But I would reply that this period was especially a time in which historical perspective was lost. Men, even highly educated men, in the nineteenth century, greatly exaggerated the foreground of the historical picture.

You may note this in any school manual of the period, where all the four centuries of our Roman foundation are compressed into a few sentences, the dark ages into a few pages, the whole vast story of the Middle Ages themselves into a few chapters; where the mass of the work is invariably given to the last three centuries, while of these the nineteenth is regarded as equal in importance to all the rest put together.

This false historical perspective is apparent in every other department of their political thought. For instance, although capitalism, huge national debts, the anonymity of financial action and the rest of it, did not begin to flourish fully until after the first third of the nineteenth century, and though anyone might (one would think) have been able to discover the exceedingly unstable character of that society, yet our fathers took it for granted as an eternal state of things. Your Victorian man with £100,000 in railway stock thought his family immutably secure in a comfortable income, and what he thought about capitalism he thought also about his newly-developed anonymous press, his national frontiers, his tolerance of this, his intolerance of that, his parliaments and all the rest of it. It is no wonder if, under such a false sense of permanence and security, he lost historical perspective in this other and graver matter we are here discussing.

But apart from the argument that what I have called the nineteenth century or Liberal attitude towards the Jews worked well for its little day (at least, in Western Europe), there is also the fact that under special circumstances something very like it has worked well for much longer periods in the past. Take, for example, the position of the Jews in such a town as Amsterdam. The reception of a Jew as a citizen exactly like others, though he was present in very large numbers, the fiction denying his separate nationality, has held for generations in that community and it has procured peace and apparent contentment upon both sides. And what is true to this day of Amsterdam has been true in the past for long periods in the life of many another commercial and cosmopolitan society: that of Venice, notably, and, in a large measure, that of Rome; in that of Frankfort, of Lyons, and of a hundred cities at special times. It was true of all Poland for generations.

One might add to the list indefinitely, but always with the uncomfortable knowledge, as one wrote, that the experiment invariably broke down in the long run.

Again, there was to be advanced for this Liberal attitude of the nineteenth century the very powerful argument that while to one party in the issue, the Englishman, the Frenchman, the Italian, etc., it seemed well enough and certainly did no harm, it was highly acceptable to the other. The Jew as a rule not only accepted but welcomed this particular way of dealing with what he at any rate has always known to be a very grave problem indeed. For the Jew has a racial memory beyond all other men. The arrangement seemed to give him all the security of which his racial history (a thing of which every Jew is acutely conscious) had made him ardently desirous. I think we should add (though the phrase would be quarrelled with by many modern people) that this fiction satisfied the Jew's sense of justice. For it is no small part of the problem we are examining that the Jew does really feel such special treatment to be his due. Without it he feels handicapped. He is, in his own view, only saved from the disadvantage of a latent hostility when he is thus protected, and he is therefore convinced that the world owes him this singular privilege of full citizenship in any community where he happens for the moment to be, while at the same time retaining full citizenship in his own nation.

Now, if in any conflict an arrangement seems workable enough to one party and is actually acclaimed by the other, it is not lightly to be disregarded.

If, for instance, a man and his tenant quarrel about the tenure of a field upon a very long lease, the tenant caring little about nominal ownership but very much about his inviolable tenure, the landlord quite agreeable to a very long lease but keen on retaining the titular ownership, that quarrel can be easily settled. One could give any name to the tenant's position other than the name of "owner," yet satisfy all his practical demands. A rough parallel exists between such a position and the attempt at a settlement which marked the nineteenth century.

What the Jew wanted was not the proud privilege of being called an Englishman, a Frenchman, an Italian, or a Dutchman. To this he was completely indifferent (for his pride lay in being a Jew, his loyalty was to his own, and what is more, he might at any moment fold up his tent and go off to another country for good). What the Jew wanted was not the feeling that he was just like the others—that would have been odious to him—what he wanted was security; it is what every human being craves for and what he of all men most lacked: the power to feel safe in the place where one happens to be. On the other hand, his hosts had not yet found any practical inconvenience in granting this demand. They did not know the historical argument against it, or they thought it worthless, because they thought the past barbarous and no model for their own action. So a compromise was arrived at, the fiction was solidly established, and the Jew, though remaining a Jew, became a German in Hamburg, a Frenchman in Paris, an American in New York, as he wandered from place to place, and for a long lifetime no one felt himself much the worse for the false convention.

The next argument in favour of this policy was the fact that it drew upon a number of ideas, each one of which at some time or another had been taken for granted by our ancestors in each one of their numerous (but unsuccessful) attempts to deal with the problem after their own fashion.

For instance, a modern objector says: "What rubbish to treat Jews as though they merely represented a religion! We all know they represent a nation!" But all manner of legislation in the past, even in times and places where the difference between Jews and Europeans was most marked, has perpetually fallen back upon that very point of religion alone. Over and over again you find it the test of policy: in early, and again in fifteenth century Spain, under Charlemagne's rule in Gaul, in early mediaeval England, at Byzantium, and to this day in Eastern parts where the Jew is subject to perpetual interference. Exception was in all these made for the Jew who abandoned his religion. His nation was left unmentioned.

It is pertinent to quote such a simple and recent example as the body of Prussian officers, now happily extinct. It was a standing rule in the smarter Prussian regiments (I believe in nearly all) that no Jew could get his commission. The Prussian system left the granting of commissions, in practice, to the existing members of the regimental staff; they treated their mess as a Club and they blackballed Jews. But they would admit baptized Jews, and did so in considerable numbers. Was the Jew less of a Jew in race through his baptism? Throughout all the centuries that religious criterion, which the modern reformer cries out against as a piece of humbug and a mask for the real political problem, has been the criterion taken. It is true that the modern solution did not attempt a religious segregation. On the contrary, the Liberal thought of the nineteenth century held all such segregation in abhorrence; but it had this in common with the older fashion, that it made religion the point of interest, and to that extent masked the more real point of nationality and allegiance.

Lord Palmerston, making his famous speech on the sanctity of a Greek Jew's bedstead, and insisting that the said Greek Jew was an English citizen; Lord Palmerston carefully avoiding the word "Jew" and pretending throughout his speech that the Greek Jew in question was as much an Englishman as himself, was in a very different mood from a Spanish fifth-century Bishop admitting a Jew to Office on condition of his conversion. Yet the two had this in common, that neither regarded the Jew as the member of another nation, but each (for very different reasons) as no more than the member of a religion.

To Palmerston, this Greek Jew about whose bedstead he made his famous speech, and onto whose bedstead hangs to this day the phrase "Civus Romanus Sum," was above all a fellow-citizen. He may have seemed to Palmerston a doubtful sort of Englishman because his home was Greece, but he certainly did not seem doubtful because he happened to be a Jew. Palmerston would have thought that only a matter of private opinion, and would no more have regarded a Jew as an alien on account of this private opinion than he would have regarded as alien a fellow-Member of the House of Commons who preferred roast mutton to boiled.

Take, again, another aspect of the nineteenth century liberal idea: the recognition of citizenship. You have had that over and over again in the attempted solutions of the past. It was the very essence of the Roman method. For though the Government of the Roman Empire was much too concerned with realities and with enduring work to accept any fiction in the matter, or to pretend in practice that the Jew was not a Jew; though, on the contrary, the Romans recognized at once the gulf between the Jews and themselves, and recognized it not only by their cruelty to the Jew but also by the privileges they granted him; yet it was always their policy to admit citizenship as the primary distinction. The Jew who could claim that he was a full Roman citizen was, in the eyes of a Roman Tribunal, much more important in that capacity than in his social capacity as Jew. His "point," as we should say in our modern slang, was his citizenship, not his Judaism. So, I say, this solution has for a further argument the fact that in one part or another it is in touch with the various attempts our race has made in the past to solve the problem.

There is yet another argument strongly in favour of the Liberal fiction which was attempted in the immediate past, and thought to have been successfully established. It is the consonance of that fiction with the whole body of modern custom and law, with the whole mass of modern economic and social habit.

We travel so much, we mix so much, our economic activities are at once so complicated, so interlocked, and (unhappily) for the most part so secret, that any other way of meeting the Jews would have seemed—at any rate if it had appeared in the shape of a positive law—a monstrous anachronism. A man must meet his friends' friends and treat them as a normal part of the general society in which he moves. As the Jew permeated the society of the West everywhere (small though his numbers were in the West), as he everywhere intermarried with Europeans of the wealthier class, to insist in his presence upon his separate nationality would have been odious; it would have been like making a guest feel out of place in one's home.

What is more, to by far the greater part of the wealthier and governing classes of the Western States the difference of race was so far masked that it had almost come to be forgotten. Sometimes a shock would revive it. An English squire would find, for instance, that a relation of his by marriage, whose Jewish name and descent he had never bothered about, was cousin to, and in close connection with, a person of a totally different name—an Oriental name—mixed up in some conspiracy, say, against the Russian State. Or he would learn with surprise that a learned University man with whom he had recently dined was the uncle of a socialist agitator in Vienna. But the shock would be a passing one, and the old mood of security would return.

With the growth of plutocracy the anomaly of treating Jews as individuals separate from the rest of the community increased. The most important men in control of international finance were admittedly Jewish. The Jew's international position made him always useful and often necessary in the vast international economic undertakings of our time. The anonymity which had come to be taken for granted throughout modern capitalism made it seem absurd or impossible, always highly unusual, and probably futile, to search for a separate Jewish element in any particular undertaking.

There is one last argument for this Liberal policy, which has a strong practical value, though it is exceedingly dangerous to use it in the defence of that policy because it cuts both ways. It is the argument that the Jew ought to be thus treated as a citizen exactly like the rest and given no position either of privilege or disability, because he does, as a fact, mould himself so very rapidly to his environment.

When men say—as they are beginning to do—that a Jew is as different from ourselves as a Chinaman, or a negro, or an Esquimaux, and ought therefore to be treated as belonging to a separate body from our own, the answer is that the Jew is nothing of the kind. Indeed, he becomes, after a short sojourn among Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans or Americans, so like his hosts on the surface that he is, to many, indistinguishable from them; and that is one of the main facts in the problem.

That is the real reason why to the majority of the middle classes in the nineteenth century, in Western countries, the Jewish problem was nonexistent. Were you to say it of any other race—negroes, for instance, or Chinamen—it would sound incredible; but we know it in practice to be true, that a Jew will pass his life in, say, three different communities in turn, and in each the people who have met him will testify that he seemed just like themselves.

I have known a case in point which would amuse my non-Jewish readers but perhaps offend my Jewish readers were I to present it in detail. I shall cite it therefore without names, because I desire throughout this book to keep to the rule whereby alone it can be of service, that nothing offensive to either party shall be introduced; but it is typical and can be matched in the experience of many.

The case was that of the father of a man in English public life. He began life with a German name in Hamburg. He was a patriotic citizen of that free city, highly respected and in every way a Hamburger, and the Hamburg men of that generation still talk of him as one of themselves.

He drifted to Paris before the Franco-German War, and, there, was an active Parisian, familiar with the life of the Boulevards and full of energy in every patriotic and characteristically French pursuit; notably he helped to recruit men during the national catastrophe of 1870–71. Everybody who met him in this phase of his life thought of him and talked of him as a Frenchman.

Deciding that the future of France was doubtful after such a defeat, he migrated to the United States, and there died. Though a man of some years when he landed, he soon appeared in the eyes of the Americans with whom he associated to be an American just like themselves. He acquired the American accent, the American manner, the freedom and the restraints of that manner. In every way he was a characteristic American.

In Hamburg his German name had been pronounced after the German fashion. In France, where German names are common, he retained it, but had it pronounced in French fashion. On reaching the United States it was changed to a Scotch name which it distantly resembled, and no doubt if he had gone to Japan the Japanese would be telling us that they had known him as a worthy Japanese gentleman of great activity in national affairs and bearing the honoured name of an ancient Samurai family.

The nineteenth century attitude almost entirely depended upon this marvellous characteristic in the Jews which differentiates them from all the rest of mankind. Had that characteristic power of superficial mutation been absent, the nineteenth century policy would have broken down as completely as the corresponding Northern policy towards the negro broke down in the United States. Had the Jew been as conspicuous among us, as, say, a white man is among Kaffirs, the fiction would have broken down at once. As it was, all who adopted that policy, honestly or dishonestly, were supported by this power of the Jew to conform externally to his temporary surroundings.

The man who consciously adopted the nineteenth century Liberal policy towards the Jews as a mere political scheme, knowing full well the dangers it might develop; the man only half conscious of the existence of those dangers; and the man who had never heard of them but took it for granted that the Jew was a citizen just like himself, with an exceptional religion—each of those three men had in common, aiding the schemes of the one, supporting the illusion of the other, the amazing fact that a Jew takes on with inexplicable rapidity the colour of his environment. That unique characteristic was the support of the Liberal attitude and was at the same time its necessary condition.

The fiction that a man of obviously different type and culture and race is the same as ourselves, may be practical for purposes of law and government, but cannot be maintained in general opinion. A conspiracy or illusion attempting, for instance, to establish the Esquimaux in Greenland as indistinguishable from the Danish officials of the Settlement, would fail through ridicule. Equally ridiculous would be the pretence that because they were both subjects of the same Crown an Englishman in the Civil Service of India was exactly the same sort of person as a Sikh soldier. But with the Jews you have the startling truth that, while the fundamental difference goes on the whole time and is perhaps deeper than any other of the differences separating mankind into groups; while he is, within, and through all his ultimate character, above all things a Jew; yet in the superficial and most immediately apparent things he is clothed in the very habit of whatever society he for the moment inhabits.

I say that this might seem to many the last and strongest argument in favour of the old-fashioned Liberal policy, but I repeat that it is a dangerous argument, for it cuts both ways. If a food which disagrees with you looks exactly like another kind of food which suits you, you might use the likeness as an argument for eating either sort of food indifferently. You might say: "It is silly to try to distinguish; one must admit, on looking at them, that they are the same thing"; but it would turn out after dinner a very bad practical policy.

There is indeed one last argument which to me, personally, and I suppose to most of my readers, is stronger than all the rest, for it is the argument from morals.

If the Liberal attitude of the nineteenth century had proved a stable one, omitting that element in it which is a falsehood and therefore a factor of instability, one could retain the rest; then it would satisfy two appetites common to all men—appetite for justice and the appetite for charity.

Here is a man, a neighbour present in the midst of my society. I put him to inconvenience if I treat him as an alien. I like him; I regard him as a friend. To treat such a man as though he were, although a friend, something separate, not to be admitted to certain functions of my community, offends the heart, as it also offends the sense of justice. Such a man may possess a great talent for, say, administration. Like all men possessed of a great talent, he must exercise it. You maim him if you do not allow him to exercise it. A rule forbidding him to take part in the administration of the society in which he finds himself, or even a feeling hindering him in such activities, creates, not only in him, but in those who are his hosts, a sense of injustice; and if it were possible to adopt a policy wherein the separate character of the Jew should be always in abeyance, so that he could be at the same time an Englishman and yet not an Englishman, or a Frenchman and yet not a Frenchman, then we should have a settlement which all good men ought to accept.

Unfortunately that solution is false because, like many appeals to a virtuous instinct, it is sentimental. We call "sentimental" a policy or theory which attempts to reconcile contradictions. The sentimental man will equally abhor crime and its necessary punishment; disorder and an organized police. He likes to think of human life as though it did not come to an end. He likes to read of the passion of love without its concomitant of sexual conflict. He likes to read and think of great fortunes accumulated without avarice, cunning or theft. He likes to imagine an impossible world of mutually exclusive things. It makes him comfortable.

Now we commit the fault of the sentimental man (the gravest of practical faults in politics) when we cling at this late date to a continuance of the old policy. You cannot have your cake and eat it too, you cannot at the same time have present in the world this ubiquitous fluid, yet closely organized Jewish community, and at the same time each of the individuals composing it treated as though they were not members of the nation which makes them all they are. You cannot at the same time treat a whole as one thing and its component parts as another. If you do, you are building on contradiction and you will, like everybody who builds on contradiction, run up against disaster.

* * * * *

I am minded to give the reader another anecdote (again taking care, I hope, to suppress all names and dates to prevent identification, which might irritate my Jewish readers or too greatly interest their opponents). As a younger man it was my constant pastime to linger at the bar of the House of Lords and listen to what went on there. I shall always remember one occasion when an aged Jew, who had begun life in very humble circumstances, had accumulated a great fortune and had purchased his peerage like any other, rose to speak in connection with a resolution or with a bill dealing with "aliens"—the hypocrisy of the politician, and the popular ferment against the rush of Jewish immigrants into the East End between them gave rise to that non-committal name. This old gentleman very rightly pushed all such humbug aside. He knew perfectly well that the policy was aimed at "his people"—and he called them "my people." He knew perfectly well that the proposed change would introduce interference with their movement and would subject them to humiliation. He spoke with flaming patriotism, and I was enthralled by the intensity, vigour and sincerity of his appeal. It was a very fine performance and, incidentally (considering what the man was!), it illustrated the vast difference between his people and my own. For a life devoted to accumulating wealth, which would have killed nobler instincts in any one of us, had evidently seemed to him quite normal and left him with every appetite of justice and of love of nation unimpaired. He clinched that fine speech with the cry, "What our people want is to be let alone." He said it over and over again. I am sure that in the audience which listened to him, all the older men felt a responsive echo to that appeal. It was the very doctrine in which they had been brought up and the very note of the great Victorian Liberal era, with its national triumphs in commerce and in arms.

Well, within a very few years the younger members of that very man's family came out in Parliamentary scandal after scandal, appearing all in sequence one after the other—a sort of procession. They had been let alone right enough! But they had not let us alone. I ask myself, sometimes, How would it sound if some years hence any one of those descendants—having by that time been given his peerage (for they are rich men and all of them in professional politics)—should return to that cry of his ancestor and ask to be "let alone"? There would be no response then in the breasts of the contemporaries who might hear him. Manners will so much have changed in this regard that he would be interrupted. But I do not think that my hypothetical descendant of that rich old Jew is likely to make any such speech. I think that when the time comes for making it, the whole idea of "letting alone" will be quite dead.

I have quoted this old man's speech with no invidious intention but only as an actual example of the way in which the "letting alone" of this great question breaks down. I am as familiar as any Jewish reader of mine with names that have dignified public life in the past, Jewish names, Jewish peers: and I recall in particular the honoured name of Lord Herschell to the friendship between whose nearest and my own I preserve a grateful and sacred memory.

* * * * *

But to return to the failure of the sentimental argument.

The sentimental argument fails because it involves contradictions—that is, incompatibility of fact.

Even if one had not this strictly rational principle to guide one, there is the whole of history to guide one. It is true that the pretence of common citizenship has worked now for a shorter, now for a longer, period, but never indefinitely. You always come at last to a smash. The Jew is welcomed in mediaeval Poland; he comes in vast numbers; all goes well. Then the inevitable happens and the Jew and the Pole stand apart as enemies, each accusing the other of injustice, the one crying out that he is persecuted, the other that the State is in danger by alien activity within. Spain alternatively pursued this policy, and its opposite; the whole history of Spain—the original seat of Jewish influence in Europe after the general exile—is a history of alternating attempts at the sentimental solution and a savage reaction against it: the reaction of the man, who, fighting for his life, strikes out violently in terror of death. That is the history not only of Spain but of every other country at one time or another.

Indeed, we have before our very eyes to-day the beginning of exactly such a reaction in the West of Europe and the United States of America, and it is the presence of that reaction which has caused this book to be written. The attempt at a Liberal solution has already failed in our hands; if it had not failed there would be no more to be said, or, at any rate, we could postpone the discussion until the actual difficulty began. But we have only to look around us to see that, after these few years, this one lifetime, during which the experiment has flourished in the highest part of civilization, it is already breaking down. Everywhere the old questions are being asked, everywhere the old complaints are being raised, everywhere the old perils are reappearing. We must seek some solution, for if we fail to find it we know from the past what tragedies are in store for us both. There is a problem, a most direct and urgent problem. Once it is recognized, a solution of it is necessarily demanded.

But it is not enough to show that the mere denial of the existence of that problem—the old nineteenth century Liberal policy—was false and bound to break down. It is just as necessary, if we appreciate how practical and immediate the problem is, to state it and illustrate it from contemporary events. It is not enough to show that the attempted Liberal policy has failed. One must also, before trying to discover a solution, analyse the nature of the problem as it presents itself at the moment, and that is what I propose to do in the next chapter.

Table of Contents

I said in my last that the old solution of ignoring or denying the Jewish problem was bound to break down and had broken down, and this was tantamount to saying that the problem persists. But I said one must go farther and state the full nature of that problem as it stands at this moment before one could attempt a practical solution.

It is not enough to say that a person who imagines himself immortal and immune from disease is, as a fact, dangerously ill, and that the break-down of his health has disproved his theory. One must go on to find out exactly what is the matter with him, and, if possible, what the cure for the trouble may be.

The Jewish problem in its larger sense I have defined in the first chapter of this book, and that as I think every one defines it, including all the many Jews who have discussed the matter. It is the presence within one political organism of another political organism at friction with it: the strains set up by such an unnatural state of affairs; the risk of disaster to the lesser body and of hurt to both if it remain unremedied. The true solution therefore is only to be discovered in some policy which will permanently relieve the strain and re-establish normal relations. The end of such a solution should be the functioning, as far as possible, of both parties, at their ease and without disturbance one to the other.

But this general statement of the problem—that it is the presence to each party of an alien body and the consequent irritation and friction on each—is not enough. We must pursue it more closely and develop it in greater detail, describing how the friction and the irritation are increasing: insisting that they have even become a menace. Then only can we set out to discover as far as possible by analysis what exact character the disease bears and why it is of this character. Only after all this can we explore a remedy.

When we look round the modern world, say the last twenty years, we discover, in widely separate places, and among very different interests, and inhabiting the most diverse characters, the presence of what is for many a new political feeling: it runs from irritation to exasperation, from grumbling to invective; it is everywhere directed against the Jews. One activity after another, in which the Jews are variously in the right or in the wrong, or indifferent, has aroused hostility in varying degrees—but increasing—and though the danger-spots are still, as I have said, dissociated in the main, yet they are beginning to coalesce and to form large areas inimical to Israel.

It is objected of the Jew in finance, in industry, in commerce—where he is ubiquitous and powerful out of all proportion to his numbers—that he seeks, and has already almost reached, dominion. It is objected that he acts everywhere against the interests of his hosts; that these are being interfered with, guided, run against their will; that a power is present which acts either with indifference to what we love or in active opposition to what we love. Notably is it said to be indifferent to, or in active opposition against, our national feelings, our religious traditions, and the general culture and morals of Christendom which we have inherited and desire to preserve: that power is Israel.

These feelings grew as one example after another of the Jewish strength, the Jewish cohesion, arrived to feed them. How violent they were to become might be seen by taking as a special example their extreme form, called "Anti-Semitism." When we come, later in this book, to examine that modern phenomenon, we shall find it to be not only a proof of the insistence and gravity of the problem we are trying to solve, but also some explanation of its nature.

Upon a world thus already exasperated, and in some large sections exasperated to the point of unreason—for the anti-Semitic drive was, and is, full of unreason—there suddenly fell the double effect of the Bolshevist revolution: a revolution which struck both at the benevolent who would hear no harm of the Jews, and those who had hitherto shielded or obeyed them as identified only with the interests of large Capital. It was a blow in flank under which staggered both the supporters of Jewish neutrality and the dependants upon Jewish finance.

The old Liberal policy still officially held the field; but when this shattering explosion came it compelled attention. Bolshevism stated the Jewish problem with a violence and an insistence such that it could no longer be denied either by the blindest fanatic or the most resolute liar.

Such was, in its largest lines, the recent historical sequence leading up to the state of affairs we now find. Let us trace that sequence in more detail and from a little farther back.

A lifetime ago, when the Liberal policy was founded and when conditions were favourable to its establishment, the populace might still nourish its traditional antagonism to the Jew, but in the West of Europe his numbers were very limited (only a few thousand in France and England combined, and hardly as many in Italy).

He belonged for the most part to the classes that did not come into direct competition with the poor of the large towns. From the countrysides he was absent. He had not attempted to govern his hosts as a politician, nor, in any large measure, to indoctrinate them through the Press. The rapid decline of religion at that time broke down one barrier, and the transformation of the governing classes from the old territorial Lords to the modern plutocracy broke down another. The convention that the Jew was indistinguishable from the citizens of the country in which he happened to live, or, at any rate, from that in which he had last lived, was further fostered by the break-up of that cosmopolitan aristocratic society which had marked the eighteenth century, and which could note and register the movements of prominent individuals from nation to nation. The new industrial fortunes and the new international finance both contributed to the same end, while the Jew also began to compete successfully in every one of the liberal professions without as yet dominating any of them. No conflicts had arisen between the Jewish race and the national interests of any European people, with the exception perhaps of the Poles; and these were subject and silenced.

Throughout all this time, from the years after Waterloo to the years immediately succeeding the defeat of the French in 1870–71, the weight and position of the Jew in Western civilization increased out of all knowledge and yet without shock, and almost without attracting attention. They entered the Parliaments everywhere, the English Peerage as well, and the Universities in very large numbers. A Jew became Prime Minister of Great Britain, another a principal leader of the Italian resurrection; another led the opposition to Napoleon III. They were present in increasing numbers in the chief institutions of every country. They began to take positions as fellows of every important Oxford and Cambridge college; they counted heavily in the national literatures; Browning and Arnold families, for instance, in England; Mazzini in Italy. They came for the first time into European diplomacy. The armies and navies alone were as yet untouched by their influence. Strains of them were even present in the reigning families. The institution of Freemasonry (with which they are so closely allied and all the ritual of which is Jewish in character) increased very rapidly and very greatly. The growth of an anonymous Press and of an increasingly anonymous commercial system further extended their power.

It is an illusion to believe that all this great change was Jewish in origin. The Jew did not create it, he floated upon it, but it worked manifestly to his advantage, and we find him at the end of it represented on the governing institutions of Western Europe fifty or one hundredfold more than was his due in proportion to his numbers. The Jews intermarried everywhere with the leading families and, before any sign that a turn of the tide had taken place, they had already achieved that position in which they are now being assailed and to oust them from which such strong efforts are preparing.

Perhaps the first event which cut across this unbroken ascent was the defeat of the French in 1870–1. Not that its effects were immediate in this field, but that a nation defeated is the more likely to raise a grievance, real or imaginary; in seeking a cause for social misfortunes following on its military disasters, it will naturally fix upon an international rather than a national one, and blame its alien population rather than its own. Moreover, the date of the French defeat was also the date on which was overthrown the temporal power of the Papacy. In this also the Jews had played their part. It gave them the opportunity to play a still greater part in the immediate future of the new Italy. Within a few years Rome was to see a Jewish Mayor who supported with all his might the unchristianizing of the city and especially of its educational system.

One small but significant factor in the whole business of these 70's and early 80's—the beginning of the last quarter of the nineteenth century—was the rise to monopoly of the Jewish international news agents, among which Reuters was prominent, and the presence of Jews as international correspondents of the various great newspapers, the most prominent example being Opper, a Bohemian Jew, who concealed his origin under the false name of "de Blowitz," and for years acted as Paris correspondent for The Times, a paper in those days of international influence.

The first expression of the reaction that was at hand was to be found in sundry definitely anti-Semitic writings appearing in Germany and France, most noticeable in the latter country.

Their effect was at first slight, though they had the high advantage of extensive documentation. The great majority of educated men shrugged their shoulders and passed such things by as the extravagancies of fanatics; but these fanatics none the less laid the foundation of future action by the quotation of an immense quantity of facts which could not but remain in the mind even of those who were most contemptuous of the new propaganda. In these books special insistence was laid upon exposing what the Jews themselves call "crypto-Judaism"—that is, the presence everywhere throughout Western Europe of men in important public positions who passed for English, French or what not, but were really Jews.

In many cases (I have already quoted the poet Browning and the distinguished family of Arnold) these people were not hiding their religion but had simply drifted from the original Jewish community of which their ancestors had been members, but in most others there was more or less present an element of conscious secrecy. It was evidently the object of those who produced the literature I am describing to attack that secrecy in particular and to undo its effects; and, as I have said, even where their fanaticism was most ridiculed, the vast array of facts which they marshalled could not be without its effect upon the memory of their contemporaries.

There next appeared a series of direct international actions undertaken by Jewish finance, the most important of which, of course, was the drawing of Egypt into the European system, and particularly into the system of Great Britain.

Of more effect upon public opinion was the excitement of the Dreyfus case in France and, immediately afterwards, of the South African War, in England.

The characteristic of the Dreyfus case was not the discussion upon the guilt or innocence of the unfortunate man from whom it takes its title, but the immense international clamour with which it was surrounded. This local affair was made an affair of the whole world, and men took as passionate an interest in it in the remotest corners of civilization as though they had been the principals actually engaged.

Such a phenomenon could not but astonish the mass of onlookers who had hitherto not given the Jewish question a thought, and when there was added to it the great ordeal of the South African War, openly and undeniably provoked and promoted by Jewish interests in South Africa, when that war was so unexpectedly prolonged and proved so unexpectedly costly in blood and treasure, a second element was added to the growing feeling, not yet, indeed, of antagonism to Jewish power (half cultured France was Dreyfusard, and much more than half England favoured the Boer War at its origin), but of interest in the Jewish question, of curiosity, on the part of the average citizen, who had not hitherto heard of it.

The original minority which had begun to oppose Jewish power, with their extreme left wing of Anti-Semites, and their core of men whose quarrel was rather with the financial control of the modern world than with any racial problem, tended to grow. As always happens with a growing movement, events appeared to suit themselves to that growth and to promote it.

The Panama scandals in the French Parliament had already fed the movement in France. The later Parliamentary scandals in England, Marconi and the rest, afforded so astonishing a parallel to Panama that the similarity was of universal comment. They might have passed as isolated things a generation before. They were now connected, often unjustly, with the uneasy sense of a general financial conspiracy. They were, at any rate, connected with an atmosphere essentially Jewish in character.

Meanwhile there had already begun one of those great migratory movements of the Jews which have diversified history for two thousand years and which are almost always the prelude to each new disturbance in the equilibrium of the Jews and each new resuscitation of the Jewish problem in its most acute form.

The great reservoir of the Jewish race was, of course, that country of Poland which had so nobly succoured the Jews during the persecutions of the late Middle Ages. Poland had made itself an asylum for all the Jews who cared to go to it, and was now, after the infamous partition inaugurated by Prussia, still the home of something like half the Jews of the world. The hatred of the Jews entertained by all classes of Russians, the persecutions they suffered from the fact that Russia, since the partition, governed that part of Poland where they were most numerous, started the new exodus. The movement was a westerly one, mainly to the United States, but there also arose in connection with it a novel growth of great ghettoes in the English industrial towns, more particularly in London, while New York was slowly transformed from a city as free of Jewish population as London and Paris had been in the past, to one in which a good third or more of its inhabitants became either entirely Jewish or partly Jewish.

This vast immigration, which was in full swing just before the outbreak of the great war, and which was adding so active a leaven to the increasing ferment, which had even planted the beginnings of a ghetto in Paris and which was affecting the whole of the West, was supplemented by one more factor of the first importance.

Modern capitalism, by which the Jew had so largely benefited, but which he did not originate and in which prominent, though few, Jewish names, were so immixed, had for its counterpart and reaction the socialist movement. This, again, the Jews did not originate, nor at first direct; but it rapidly fell more and more under their control. The family of Mordecai (who had assumed the name of Marx) produced in Karl a most powerful exponent of that theory. Though he did no more than copy and follow his non-Jewish instructors (especially Louis Blanc, a Franco-Scot of genius), he presented in complete form the full theory of Socialism, economic, social, and, by implication, religious; for he postulated Materialism.

After Karl Marx came a crowd of his compatriots, who led the industrial proletariat in rebellion against the increasing power of the capitalist system, and began to organize a determined revolt.

Before the Great War one could say that the whole of the Socialist movement, so far as its staff and direction were concerned, was Jewish; and while it took this purely economic form in the West, in the East—in the Russian Empire—it took a political form as well, and the growing revolutionary force in that Empire was equally Jewish in direction and driving power.

Such was the situation on the eve of the Great War. Men were beginning to be thoroughly alive to what was meant by the Jewish problem. The old security was dispelled for ever; but as yet only a minority, though now a large one, was prepared to deal with that problem and to discuss it openly. All that was official, and particularly the Press, with its vast influence, had as yet refused in any department to face the realities of the position. The convention forbidding public allusion to the Jewish question was still very strong. On the surface it seemed as though the old Liberal policy still stood firm and, indeed, unshakeable. The Jews were in every place of 'vantage: they taught in the Universities of all Europe; they were everywhere in the Press; everywhere in finance. They were continually to be found in the highest places of Government and in the chanceries of Christendom they had acquired a dominant power which none could question. But the challenge against this unnatural position necessarily worked against great odds, it remained private and had great difficulty in finding expression. None the less, it extended, and by 1914 had become serious.

The immeasurable catastrophe of the war—with which the Jews had nothing to do and which their more important financial representatives did all they could to prevent—fell upon Europe. It seemed at first as though, in the face of that overwhelming tragedy, what had been so rapidly growing—I mean the debate and conflict upon Jewish claims—would be silenced. The Jews were found fighting gallantly in all the armies. Their services were generously acknowledged, though the cruel ambiguity of their situation was hardly realized. Considering that they had no national interest in the fight, it must have seemed to them a mere insanity, crucifying their nation to no purpose. For Zangwill put the matter well indeed when he said that those who eagerly and spontaneously joined the first recruiting (and these were numerous) did so "for the honour of Israel." The sacrifice was not without fruit. In its presence many a complaint was silenced and much was revealed which, but for it, would have remained unprobed. The Christian family in its bereavement saw at its side a Jewish neighbour who had lost his son in what was no concern of his race; the Christian priest witnessed the agony of the young Jewish soldier. The defender of the Western nations saw at his side not only the Jewish conscript (who should never have been called) but the Jewish volunteer. Thus, the first to enlist from the United States was a Jew, later promoted, whom I had the pleasure and honour of meeting on Mangin's staff at Mayence. I hope he may see these lines.

It looked as though in the presence of such a suffering, which the Jews shared with us, the growing quarrel between them and ourselves would be appeased. Men who had been prominent not only for their discussion of the Jewish problem, but for their direct and open antagonism to Jewish power and even to the most legitimate of Jewish claims, were now compelled to silence. Reconciliation was in the air … when, in the very heat of the struggle, came that factor, incalculably important, which now rules all the rest; I mean the factor of what is called Bolshevism.

This new Jewish movement changed the whole face of things and, coming on the top of the rest, has transformed the problem for all our generation.

Henceforth it was to be discussed quite openly. Henceforth it could only become, more and more, the chief problem of politics and give rise to that menacing situation upon a solution of which depends the security of our future.

For the Bolshevist movement, or rather explosion, was Jewish.

That truth may be so easily confused with a falsehood that I must, at the outset, make it exact and clear.

The Bolshevist Movement was a Jewish movement, but not a movement of the Jewish race as a whole. Most Jews were quite extraneous to it; very many indeed, and those of the most typical, abhor it; many actively combat it. The imputation of its evils to the Jews as a whole is a grave injustice and proceeds from a confusion of thought whereof I, at any rate, am free.

With so much said let me return to the affair.

What is called "Labour," that is, the direction of the proletarian revolt against capitalist conditions, had, as we have seen, been directed in the main by the Jew. His energy, his international quality, his devotion to a set scheme, prevailed. All this was not peculiar to Russia but present throughout the industrialized areas of the West.

By the word "directed" I do not mean any conscious plan. I mean that the Jews, with their perpetual movement from country to country, with their natural indifference to national feeling as a force counteracting class feeling, with their lucid thought and their passion for deduction, with their tenacity and intellectual industry, had naturally become the chief exponents and the most able leaders. They formed, above all, the cement binding the movement together throughout the world. It was they, more than any others, who insisted on a clear-cut solution upon the lines which their compatriot Karl Marx had copied from his greater European contemporaries, and made definite in his famous book on Capital.

But there was all the difference in the world between this intellectual leadership, this organization of socialism by Jews while Socialism still remained a mere theory, and the control and actual management of it in a great State when it passed from theory to practice.

The words "social revolution" were still but words in 1914 and men did not take them too seriously. But when in 1917 a socialist revolution was accomplished suddenly at one blow, in one great State, and when its agents, directors and masters were seen to be a close corporation of Jews with only a few non-Jewish hangers-on (each of these controlled by the Jews through one influence or another), it was quite another matter. The thing had become actual. The menace to national traditions and to the whole Christian ethic of property was immediate. More important than all, so far as the Jewish problem is concerned, many who had remained silent upon it on account of convention, avarice or fear, were now compelled to speak. From that moment, in early '17, it became the chief political problem of our time: coincident with, intimately mixed with, but in all its implications superior to, the great economic quarrel on to which it was now grafted.

The story may be briefly told. The Russian State, ill-equipped for modern war, had passed during the end of the year 1916 through a strain which it had found intolerable. Russian Society, after the mortal losses sustained, was upon the eve of dissolution, and the formidable revolutionary movement which had for years left its direction and organization in Jewish hands broke out, for the third time in our generation: but this time successfully.

After rapidly accelerating phases it settled into the situation which has endured from the early part of 1918 to the present day. In the towns the freely-elected Parliament was repudiated and a "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" was declared. The workshops were in future to be run by Committees, in the Russian "Soviets," and similar organizations were to control agriculture in the villages, where the peasants had already seized the land and were streaming back from the dissolved armies to their homes.

In practice, of course, what was set up was no proletarian Government, still less anything so impossible and contradictory in terms as a "dictatorship" of proletarians. The thing was called "The Republic of the Workmen and Peasants." It was, in fact, nothing of the sort. It was the pure despotism of a clique, the leaders of which had been specially launched upon Russia under German direction in order to break down any chance of a revival of Russian military power, and all those leaders, without exception, were Jews, or held by the Jews through their domestic relations, and all that followed was done directly under the orders of Jews, the most prominent of whom was one Braunstein, who disguised himself under the assumed name of Trotsky. A terror was set up, under which were massacred innumerable Russians of the governing classes, so that the whole framework of the Russian State disappeared. Among these, of course, must specially be noted great numbers of the clergy, against whom the Jewish revolutionaries had a particular grudge. A clean sweep was made of all the old social organization, and under the despotism of this Jewish clique the old economic order was reversed. Food and all necessities were controlled (in the towns) and rationed, the manual labourer receiving the largest share; and none any share unless he worked at the orders of the new masters.

The agricultural land was in theory nationalized, but in practice the Jewish Committees of the towns were unable to enforce their rule over it, and it reverted to the natural condition of peasant ownership. But the Jewish Committees of the towns were strong enough to raid great areas of agricultural production for the support of themselves and their troops and of their dependants in the cities, who had come close to starvation through the breakdown of the social system.

What followed later is of common knowledge: the attempts at counter-revolution, led by scattered Russians and other military leaders, all failed because the peasants believed that their newly-acquired farms were at stake and eagerly volunteered to defend them, the greatly increased misery of the towns, the slow decline of industrial production (in spite of the most rigid despotism, enforcing conscript labour), and the general deliquescence of society.

If the motives of the men who thus brought the whole of a Christian State into ruins within a few weeks were analysed, we should, it is to be presumed, discover something of this sort: their main motive was the pursuit of the political and economic ideals of which they were the spokesmen and which already so many of their compatriots, the Jews, throughout the rest of Europe, had espoused—communism so far as property was concerned; the Marxian doctrine of socialist production and distribution; the Socialist doctrine imposed by arbitrary and despotic arrangements, favouring those who had in the past been least favoured. In this economic and political group of motives the leading motive was probably enough, the doctrine of Communism in which these men, for the most part, sincerely believed.

To this must be added an equally sincere hatred of national feeling, save, of course, where the Jewish nation was concerned. The conception of a Russian national feeling seemed to these new leaders ridiculous, as, indeed, the conception of a national feeling must seem ridiculous to their compatriots everywhere; or, if not ridiculous, subsidiary to the more important motives of individual advantage and to the righting of such immediate wrongs as the individual may feel. The Christian religion they naturally attacked, for it was abhorrent to their social theory.

They also had a certain crusading, or propagandist, ideal running through the whole of their action—the desire to spread Communism far beyond the boundaries of what had once been the Russian State. It is this which has led them to intrigue throughout Central, and even in Western, Europe, in favour of revolution.

Though these were the main motives, other motives must also have been present.

It is impossible that Committees consisting of Jews and suddenly finding themselves thus in control of such new powers, should not have desired to benefit their fellows. It is equally impossible that they should have forgone a sentiment of revenge against that which had persecuted their people in the past. They cannot but, in the destroying of Russia, have mixed with a desire to advantage the individual Russian poor the desire to take vengeance upon the national tradition as a whole; it has even been said—but denied, and I know not where the truth lies—that Jews were among those guilty of the worst incident which we now know in all its revolting details—the murder of the Russian Royal family—father, mother and girls, and the unfortunate sickly heir, the only boy. Further, it is impossible, with Jewish Committees thus in control of the Russian treasury and of Russian means of communication, that they should not have had some sympathy with their compatriots who were so largely in control of Western finance. However sincere their detestation of capitalism (for probably in most of them the opinion is held sincerely enough), it is in the nature of things that one of their blood and kind should, however misguided they may think him, appeal to them more than one of ours. And it is this which explains the half alliance which you find throughout the world between the Jewish financiers on the one hand and the Jewish control of the Russian revolution on the other. It is this which explains the half-heartedness of the defence against Bolshevism, the perpetual commercial protest, the continued negotiations, the recognition of the Soviet by our politicians, the clamour of "Labour" in favour of German Jewish industrialism and against Poland: all that has taken place wherever Jewish finance is powerful, particularly at Westminster.

But, be this as it may, the tremendous explosion which we call Bolshevism brought the discussion of the Jewish problem to a head. The two forces which had hitherto held back the discussion of that problem were that Liberal fiction which had ruled for more than a generation, according to which it was indecent even to mention the word Jew, or to suggest that there was any difference between the Jew and those who harboured him; and, secondly, the fact that the Jews were erroneously regarded by most of the well-to-do people in the West—that is, by most of those who had the control of the Press and therefore of all public expression—as so controlling wealth that they were at once the natural guardians of property and so placed that an attack upon them jeopardized the wealth of the critic. The man who had gone into the City, or who had his life spent upon the Bourse in Paris, or who was negotiating any great capitalist enterprise, who had to do in whatever capacity with the running of the great banks or with the international means of communication by sea and land, even the man who got his precarious living by writing—each and all had hitherto felt that a public silence upon the Jewish problem was necessary to his private welfare.

Those who recognized the gravity of the problem had hitherto been moved by fear to be silent upon it, at least in public, though in private they were often voluble enough. Those who recognized it in a lesser degree had also been affected by the same fear. Lastly, you had the large class who were under no necessity for restraint, whether from fear or any other cause, but who were quite content to leave things as they were so long as they received their regular salary or dividends, and who were profoundly convinced that any interference with the Jew would imperil those dividends or that salary.

The Jewish Bolshevist movement put an end to that state of mind. The people who had hitherto been silent through avarice, convention, or fear, now found themselves between an upper and a nether millstone. Hitherto they had at least believed that to keep silence was to secure or to advance their economic position. Now they found, suddenly risen upon the flank of that position, a new and formidable Jewish force determined upon the destruction of property. There was no longer any reason to keep silent. There was a growing need to speak. And though the old habit, the old secrecy, was still strong upon them, the necessity for combating Jewish Bolshevism was stronger still. All over Europe the Jewish character of the movement became more and more apparent. The leaders of Communism everywhere proclaimed that truth by adopting the asinine policy of pretending that the revolution was Russian and national; they attempted—far too late—to hide the Jewish origins of its creators and directors, and made a childish effort to pretend that the Russian names so innocently put forward were genuine, when the real names were upon every tongue. Yet at the same time they were receiving money and securities of the victims through Jewish agents, jewels stripped from the dead or rifled from the strong boxes of murdered men and women. In one specific instance the promise of a subsidy to a Communist paper in London was traced to this source; it was proved that the Englishman involved was a mere puppet and that the Jewish connections of the family through marriage were the true agents in the transaction. In another a Trade Deputation was pompously announced under Russian names, which turned out upon inspection to consist, as to its first member, of a man engaged all his life in the service of a Jewish firm, as to the other, of a Jew who was actually the brother-in-law of Braunstein! The diplomatic agent nominated and partially accepted by the British Government to represent the new authority of the Russian towns was again a Jew, Finkelstein, the nephew by marriage of a prominent Jew in this country. He passed under the name of Litvinoff. So it was throughout the whole movement, in every capital and in every great industrial town.

We must not neglect the very obvious truth that in all this there was ample fuel for the flame. The industrial proletariat throughout the world was equally disgusted and equally ready for revolt. The leadership of the movement may be Jewish but its current was not created by the Jew. To imagine that is to fall into the most childish errors of the "Anti-Semite." The stream of influence arose from the sufferings and the burning sense of injustice which industrial capitalism had imposed on the dispossessed mass of wage earners. They were (and are) naturally indifferent as to whether those whom they hope may be their saviours come from Palestine, Muscovy or Timbuctoo. They are interested in economic freedom: in the doctrine of socialism and in its results, not in the personality of those who guide them.

Their position is comprehensible enough: but my point is, that the directing minority of Western European capitalism which had hitherto been silent upon the Jewish problems from the motives I have described were now released; they were free to speak their mind, and began to speak it. The volume of their protest cannot but increase. The cat, as the expression goes, is out of the bag, or, to put it in more dignified language, the debate will now never more be silenced. It is admitted that the revolutionary leadership is mainly Jewish. It is recognized as clearly now as it has long been recognized that international finance was mainly Jewish; and even those who would tolerate silence upon the one peril will certainly not tolerate it upon the other.

The danger is, indeed, not over. The debate will take place—that is no peril, but a good; the danger is rather that, as restraint is gradually removed, the natural antagonism to the Jewish race, felt by nearly all those who are not of it and among whom it lives, may take an irrational and violent form, and that we may be upon the brink of yet one more of those catastrophes, of those tragedies, of those disasters which have marked the history of Israel in the past.

To avert this, to discover some solution of the problem while there is yet time, to prevent deeds which would bring us to shame and that small minority among us to suffering, should be the object of every honest man.

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