I. Preface to the Original Work.
The author of this book is a Christian and a Frenchman. As a Christian, he is one of those who believe that a spirit of intolerance is repugnant to Christianity, and nothing appears to him less consistent with the Gospel than race-hatred. Be it a war of races or a war of classes, popular jealousy can never screen itself behind the robe of Christ. Be it Aryan or Semitic, a nation should never purchase its salvation at the cost of another's rights.
As a Frenchman, the author is one of those who are convinced that France ought to remain true to her traditions of justice and liberty. They are the only glory and the only wealth which the fortunes of war cannot wrest from her. The more severe the trials that she has undergone, the more menacing the dangers that await her, the more essential is it to her honor that she should remain herself and not belie, in the eyes of the nations, those great ideas which she was the first to proclaim. To abjure them would be not only an act of apostasy, but a forfeiture of her place in history. A France that should stoop, more than a century after 1789, to abridge religious and civil liberty and to establish among her inhabitants distinctions based upon name or birth, would no longer be the France that the world has thus far known.
The inheritance of the Revolution, which we have come to regard with so much reverence, may possibly include rash postulates and exaggerated inferences that tend to intoxicate, almost to madness, a people infatuated with its title of sovereign; but surely neither religious liberty nor civil equality is likely to produce such effects; neither the one nor the other can have any tendency to turn the people's heads; and, after having been the first to preach these principles to Europe, France will not disavow them now, when, thanks to our propaganda or our example, they have conquered almost all the countries of both hemispheres. On others be the shame of such a recantation!
Anti-Semitism is consistent with neither the principles nor the genius of our nation. It came to us from the outside, from countries which have neither our spirit nor our traditions. It came to us from across the Rhine, from old Germany, always ready for religious quarrels, and always imbued with the spirit of caste; from new Germany, all inflated with race-pride and scornful of whatever is not Teutonic.
Anti-Semitism may be traced also to Russia, to that huge and shapeless Russia, which, with its steppes and forests, has remained isolated from the great currents of modern life; to holy, Orthodox Russia, half Oriental, half Asiatic, which endeavors to find its national unity in its religious unity, and which regards the Catholic and the Lutheran with little more favor than the Israelite; to that autocratic Russia, which differs from us in all its institutions, as well as in all its conditions, be they economic, political, religious or social. Whatever sympathy we may feel with the Slavonic mind or the Russian spirit, the Russians, who so often emulated us, would be greatly surprised to see us copying them; as well might one propose to the Czar to model the government of his moujiks and cossacks on that of the French Republic.
Men of my age, who have grown up under the Second Empire and in the worship of liberty—it was fashionable then among the young—have witnessed many distressing sights. How often was the lie given to our youthful faith in right and justice! How many truths which we thought established forever were again called into question by the selfish passions or the ignorant claims of new generations! How many of the conquests won by reason and liberty were we unable to maintain against the encroachments of power or the delusions of political sophistry! Popular rights trodden under foot in the name of the principle of nationality, everywhere heralded as a principle of emancipation; European states transformed, for half a century, into entrenched camps and separated once more from each other by custom-house barriers and ramparts of prejudice almost as high as the Wall of China; freedom of thought and religious toleration cynically overridden or hypercritically evaded by those very political parties that professed to be their champions; laws passed to the detriment of special persons; decrees of exile or confiscation promulgated in the name of liberty, within so-called free countries and by self-styled liberals; appeals to secular power, demands for legal restriction, for paternalism, addressed to the government by all manner of clashing interests and passions. And all this, not only in Eastern Russia, buried neck-deep in the Middle Ages or rather in the ancien régime, but in the West, in France, in Germany, among nations said to be the most advanced of ancient Europe. Oh, how old she is, this ancient Europe, and how difficult it is for her to slough her skin and regain her youth! What an effort it is for her to strip off her old prejudices and practices and clothe herself in the spirit of a new age!
And this new age, the age that we have so ardently invoked, what will it bring us and how will it fulfil its boasted promises? To judge by the methods and the teachings extolled by those who proclaim themselves its representatives, this new age is in great danger of reviving the worst practices of the past. Men who boast of being the pioneers of the future openly praise deeds of absolutism, and smile sanctimoniously at legal brutalities borrowed from the ancien régime by the jurists of the Revolution. Visions of the future and mediæval prejudices; Utopias conceived by dreamers deluded with misty ideals and belated memories of a superannuated past; unceasing race-competition and ever-recurring class jealousies, all these have become confused and entangled in the minds of the learned as well as in those of the masses. And something of all this is contained in anti-Semitism; something of the old and of the new, of the far-off Middle Ages and of visionary socialism, of reactionary instincts and of revolutionary passions; and it is because of this that anti-Semitism finds an echo in such different quarters, from the drawing-rooms of society to the grog-shop of the working-man.
Let us confess it once again: we have presumed too much on reason, and relied too confidently on civilization. This brilliant civilization, which inspires our idlers with such ludicrous pride, is often shallow and unsound, even in the most advanced countries of the continent. In our proudest capitals it is barely thicker than a light veneer, underneath whose surface, if we scratch it ever so little, we shall find all the ignorance and savagery of the ages that we deem barbarous. Thus, in Paris, Vienna and Berlin, the close of our century suffers the disgrace of seeing measures of proscription and confiscation advocated by people who are really good-natured and ordinarily harmless.
It must not be inferred from what has been said that the complaints of the anti-Semites are wholly imaginary. By no means. Whether they attack our private or our public morals and customs, many of their complaints are but too well founded. Abroad, as well as at home, and most especially, perhaps, in our republic France, they are right, these noisy anti-Semites, in loudly denouncing certain governmental methods, certain practices which seem about to take root in the life of modern nations. Anti-Semitism may have been, in its time, a protest, on the part of public conscience, against culpable concessions of men in office, against the venality of politicians, and the domination, at once mysterious and contemptuous, of stock-jobbing interlopers. Despite its excesses and outrages, anti-Semitism is within its rightful province when it assails the worship of money, the scandalous barter of political influences, and the shameless exploitation of the people by the men whom they have elected; or, again, when it unmasks the hypocritical intolerance of inconsistent free-thinkers, who have erected irreligion and corruption into a method of government.
Modern society is ailing indeed, more ailing that the most honest anti-Semite imagines. The error of anti-Semitism lies in its misapprehension of the origin and the seat of the evil. It sees, or is willing to see, but one of the symptoms, and it calls this symptom the cause of the disease. Anti-Semitism is essentially "simple-minded," in the literal sense of the word. It fails to grasp the complexity of social phenomena. But this failure, which should prove its ruin, is largely the cause of its success with the masses, who in their simplicity are always carried away by that which they deem simple.
Even if the Jews had all the vices and all the power which the hatred of their enemies sees fit to ascribe to them, it were none the less childish to discover in a handful of Semites the source of the evils that afflict modern society.
It is not true that, in order to restore it to health, we need but to eliminate the Semite, as the surgeon's knife eradicates a cyst or a malignant excrescence. The extent and gravity of the evil are of a different nature. The evil is in ourselves, in our blood, in the very marrow of our bones. To cure us, it will not be enough to remove a foreign body from our flesh. Though every Jew be banished from French soil, though Israel be swept from the face of Europe, France would be not one whit more healthy, nor Europe in any better state. The first condition of a cure is a knowledge of the nature of one's malady. Now, anti-Semitism deceives us; it blinds us to our condition by trying to make us believe that the cause of the evil is external, instead of internal. There is no more dangerous error. We are afflicted with an internal trouble, due to our constitution and our entire mode of living; and the anti-Semites insist upon telling us, over and over again, that it is but a superficial ailment, brought on by chance, and foreign to our race and blood. Even when they boast of exposing our secret wounds, they misconstrue their nature; consequently, instead of furnishing a cure for them, they are in great danger of inflaming them still more.
Such will be, I doubt not, the feeling of every reader who is sufficiently thoughtful and independent to base his opinions upon reflection, and not upon the antipathies of the mob. Anti-Semitism, even when most justified in its complaints, is mistaken as to the source of our evils. It would be easy for me to prove this conclusively, could I, in this volume, have treated of finance, capital, and the ascendancy of the stock-exchange. Unfortunately, I have been obliged, for the present, to omit a part of my subject—that which in these days of subserviency to material interests so completely engrosses the public mind—the money question. I had intended at first to devote one or two chapters to it. But this money-question has assumed so prominent a place in our democratic society; it so easily takes the lead everywhere, it is so complex, and so liable to give rise to confusion, that it seemed to me worthy of separate treatment. Therefore this volume will be followed by another, in which I shall attempt to define the role played by money among the nations of to-day. On that occasion I shall take up again some of the views set forth in my book on Papacy, Socialism, and Democracy. There may, perhaps, seem to be no connection between these two subjects. That is a mistake, for anti-Semitism, too, is a social question. And as for myself, in studying the influence of the Jew and of modern Israel, as well as in examining the teachings of the Pope on socialism and democracy, I have always the same object in view: religious liberty and social peace. Caritas et Pax, such is ever my motto; and, if I mistake not, it is a Christian motto, not unbecoming a Frenchman.