The Jews. Hilaire Belloc

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      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. СКАЧАТЬ