The Jews. Hilaire Belloc

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ