The Jews. Hilaire Belloc

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      CHAPTER II

       THE DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM

       Table of Contents

      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 СКАЧАТЬ