The Jews. Hilaire Belloc

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

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