Israel in Europe

by G. F. Abbott

What is this dreadful Nationalism? It is a reversion to a primitive type of patriotism—the narrow feeling which makes men regard all those who live in the same place, or who speak the same language, or who are supposed to be descended from a common ancestor, as brethren; all others as foreigners and potential foes. This feeling in its crudest form is purely a family-feeling, in the worst sense of the term. It grows into a larger allegiance to the tribe, then to the race, and that in its turn develops into the broad patriotism which manifests itself now as Imperialism, now as Catholicism.

There is yet a third form of patriotism—the purest and noblest of all: loyalty to common intellectual ideals. The Greeks attained to this lofty conception, and an Athenian orator, in enumerating his country’s claims to the admiration of mankind, dwells with just pride on this product of its civilisation. Athens, he says, “has made the name of the Hellenes to be no longer a name of race, but one of mind, so that Hellenes should be called those who share in our culture rather than in our nature.”[229] Isocrates in making this statement, however, gave utterance to a dream of his own rather than to a feeling common among his countrymen. The Macedonian Empire strove to convert that philosophical dream into a political fact. Alexander and his successors studded Asia with Greek theatres, Greek schools, Greek gymnasia, and the East was covered with a veneer of pseudo-Hellenic civilisation. But their success was only partial, superficial and ephemeral. The intellectual unity could not go deep and therefore did not last long. The barriers—social, religious and racial—which separated the Hellene from the Barbarian proved insuperable; and the Isocratean ideal of a nationality based on community of intellectual aims remained an ideal. Hellenism demanded a degree of mental development to which mankind has never yet attained. Hence its failure as a political bond. This was not the case with Imperialism and Catholicism. They both appealed to more elementary and therefore less rare qualities in man. Hence their success. Rome achieved more than Greece because she aimed at less.

The Roman Empire represented the first, the Roman Church the second variety of this broad patriotism. Civis Romanus was a title which united in a common allegiance the Italian and the Greek, the Jew and the Egyptian, the Spaniard, the Briton and the Gaul. Catholic Rome inherited the imperial feeling of Pagan Rome, but dressed it in a religious form. The dictatorship of the Caesars was divided between the Christian Emperor and the Pope: the former inheriting their political power, the latter the spiritual and moral. Charlemagne wielded the authority of an Imperator Romanus, his papal contemporary that of a Pontifex Maximus. Then came the decay and fall of the Carlovingian fabric; and, gradually, the Papacy built up a spiritual empire with the débris of the secular. All Catholics were subjects of that Empire. In the Middle Ages Europe presented a picture of wonderful uniformity in sentiments, ideals, customs, political and social institutions. All countries, like so many coins issued from one mint, seemed to be cast in the same mould, stamped with the same effigy and adorned with the same legend. National consciousness was in the Middle Ages practically non-existent, or, if it did exist, in the later centuries, it was obscured by the religious sentiment. As in modern Islam we find Arabs, Persians, Indians, Malays, Chinese, Syrians, Egyptians, Berbers, Moors, Turks, Albanians—nations differing widely in origin and language—united by the ties of a common creed, so in mediaeval Christendom we find English, Scotch, French, Italian, German and Spanish knights all forming one vast brotherhood. The reader of Froissart cannot fail to notice this community of feeling and the marvellous ease with which gentlemen from all those nations made themselves at home in one another’s countries. The chronicler himself, in his style and mental attitude, supplies a striking example of this cosmopolitanism. By the mediaeval Christian, as by the modern Mohammedan, the human race was divided into two halves: true believers and others. The universal acceptance of Latin as the medium of communication was another token and bond of brotherhood among the Christians of mediaeval Europe, as the use of Arabic, as a sacred tongue, is a token and a bond of brotherhood among the Mohammedans of the present day.

This feeling of international patriotism, which found its highest development and expression in the Crusades, began to fade as soon as Catholic faith began to decay. Disintegration followed both in the Church and in the State. Loyalty to one ideal and to one authority was gradually superseded by local and later by racial patriotism. Various political units succeeded to the Unity of mediaeval Europe, the vernaculars ousted the Latin language from its position as the one vehicle of thought, and the old cosmopolitan universities of Paris and Bologna were replaced by national institutions. Since the fifteenth century nationalism has been growing steadily, but in the eighteenth its growth was to some extent checked by humanitarianism. The great thinkers of that age extolled the freedom and the perfection of the individual as the highest aim of culture, describing exclusive attachment to one’s country and race as a characteristic of a comparatively barbarous state of society: a remnant of aboriginal ancestor-worship. Nationalism, accordingly, did not reach its adolescence until the nineteenth century. Then the zeal for peace was eclipsed by the splendour of the French exploits in war, and the doctrine of universal freedom was forgotten in Napoleon’s efforts at universal dominion. These efforts aroused in every country which Napoleon attacked a passionate protest which resulted in successful revolt. But the triumph was won at a tremendous cost. Each nation in proportion to its sense of what was due to itself was oblivious of what was due to others. The principles of the brotherhood of men and of universal toleration were denied, the narrow jealousies of race which the philosophers of the preceding century had driven from the realm of culture were re-installed, and Nationalism—arrogant, intemperate, and intolerant—arose on the ruins of Humanitarianism. This evolution, or revolution, has added a new element in social troubles, and has brought into being a new set of ideas.

For the last hundred years ethnographical theory has dominated the civilised world and its destinies as theological dogma had done during the Middle Ages. Consciously or not, the idea of race directs the policy of nations, inspires their poetry, and tinges their philosophy with the same prejudice as religion did formerly. Aryan and non-Aryan have become terms conveying all but the odious connotation of Christian and infidel; and in place of the spiritual we have adopted a scientific mythology. The fiction of our Aryan origin has flattered us into the benevolent belief of our mental superiority over the Mongol, and of our moral superiority over the Semite. To dispute this tenet is to commit sacrilege. But even within the bosom of this imaginary Aryan fold there are schisms: so-called Celtic, Germanic, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, and Slavonic sects, divided against one another by the phantom barriers of ethnographical speculation as frantically as in older days Christendom was divided by the metaphysical figments of Arian, Manichaean, Nestorian, and what not. In the name of race are now done as many great deeds and as many great follies are committed as were once in the name of God. The worship of race has, as the worship of the Cross had done before, given birth to new Crusades which have equalled the old in the degree to which they have disturbed the peace and agitated the minds of men, and in the violence of the passions which they have excited. Nationalism more than any other cause has helped to bring discredit upon the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity—to prove the eighteenth century dream of world-wide peace a glorious impossibility—and to show the enormous chasm which still gapes between the aspirations of a few thinkers and the instincts of the masses.

Though common to all European countries, the creed of the age found articulate exposition first in Germany, and gave rise to various academic doctrines which attempted to account for the genesis and evolution of Nationalism in scientific or pseudo-scientific terms. But names do not alter facts. Ethnographical speculations are in this case mainly interesting as having supplied a plausible explanation for the rise of anti-Semitism. Those who are able to see through new guises, and to detect what old things they conceal, know that anti-Semitism is little more than a new Protean manifestation of Jew-hatred. Divested of its academic paraphernalia, the movement is revealed in all its venerable vulgarity—a hoary-headed abomination long since excommunicated by the conscience of civilised mankind.

This reactionary movement began in Eastern Germany and Austria. In those countries the Jews are very numerous,[230] very wealthy, and very influential. Both countries are famous as hot-beds of racial fanaticism. In Germany Nationalism was begotten of the independence secured by the Thirty Years’ War in the seventeenth century, was nursed by the patriotic preachers and poets of the eighteenth, was invigorated by the wars for emancipation from Napoleon’s rule, and was educated by Hegel and his disciples. The Jews in Germany, as elsewhere, are the one element which declines to be fused in the nationalist crucible. Their international connections help them to overstep the barriers of country. Their own racial consciousness, fostered by the same writers, is at least as intense as that of the Germans; but it does not coincide with any geographical entity. They are, therefore, regarded as a cosmopolitan tribe—“everywhere and nowhere at home.” They are distinct not only as a race, but as a sect, and as a class. Accordingly, the reaction against tolerance includes in its ranks clerics and Christian Socialists, aristocrats, as well as Nationalists, that is, the enemies of dissent and the enemies of wealth, as well as the enemies of the alien and the enemies of the upstart. And the term “Jew” is used in a religious or a racial sense according to the speaker. In both Germany and Austria we saw that the philosophical gospel of social liberty was very slowly applied to practical politics, and that, even when it had been accepted, it was subject to reactions. When Jewish manumission was finally accomplished, the Jews by their genius filled a much larger place in the sphere of national life than was deemed proportional to their numbers. And this undue preponderance, rendered all the easier by the superior cohesion of the Jewish over the German social system, was further accentuated by specialisation. The Jews, whose training in Europe for centuries, owing partly to their own racial instincts and Rabbinical teaching, but chiefly to the conditions imposed upon them from outside, had been of a peculiar kind, showed these peculiarities by their choice of fields of activity. They abstained from the productive and concentrated their efforts to the intellectual, financial, and distributive industries of the countries of which they became enfranchised citizens. Jews flooded the Universities, the Academies, the Medical Profession, the Civil Service, and the Bar. Many of the judges, and nearly one-half of the practising lawyers of Germany, are said to be Jews. Jews came forth as authors, journalists, and artists. Above all, Jews, thanks to the hereditary faculty for accumulation fostered in them during the long period when money-dealing was the one pursuit open to them, asserted themselves as financiers. It is impossible to move anywhere in Berlin or Vienna without seeing the name of Israel written in great letters of gold not only over the shops, but over the whole face of German life. Success awakened jealousy, and economic distress—due to entirely different causes—stimulated it. What if the competition was fair? What if the Jews were distinguished by their peaceful and patriotic attitude? What if they supplied the least proportion of criminals and paupers? What if German freedom had been bought partially with Jewish blood, and German unity achieved by the help of Jewish brains and Jewish money?

The landed gentry, richer in ancestors than in money or intelligence, had every reason to envy the Jew’s wealth, and much reason to dislike the Jew’s ostentatious display of it. They could not respect in the Jew a gifted arrivé. They saw in him a vulgar parvenu—one who by his “subversive Mephistophelian endowment, brains,” demolishes the fences of creed and caste, and invades the highest and most exclusive circles, thus acting as a solvent in society. If he is wise, the proud nobleman of narrow circumstances makes his pride compensate for his poverty, and magnanimously despises the luxuries which he cannot procure. If, as more often happens, he is foolish, he enters into a rivalry of vanity with the upstart, and the result is a mortgaged estate—mortgaged most likely to his rival. In either case, he can have little love for the opulent and clever interloper. The animosity of the aristocracy is shared by the middle classes, and for analogous reasons. The German professional man, and more especially his wife, resents his Jewish colleague’s comparative luxury as a personal affront. The excessive power of money in modern society, and the consequent diminution of the respect once paid to blood or learning, naturally enable the Jewish banker to succeed where the poor baron fails; and the Jewish professor or doctor, though many of these latter are poor enough, to outshine his Christian competitor. This excessive power of money is due to causes far deeper than the enfranchisement of the Jews. It is the normal result of Germany’s modern development. The influence of the nobles depended largely on their domains of land; and when industries arose to compete with agriculture, the importance of land necessarily declined. At the same time, industry and commerce began, with Germany’s expansion, to divert more and more the attention of the intelligent from the path of academic distinction—once the only path to honour open to the ambitious burgher—into that of material prosperity. Chrematistic enterprise has introduced a new social standard, and an aristocracy of wealth has come to supplant the old aristocracies of birth and erudition. This social revolution, through which every country in the world has passed and has to pass, was unhesitatingly ascribed to the Jew, who was thus accused of having created the conditions, which in reality he had only exploited.

If from the aristocratic and the cultured classes we turn to the rural population, we find similar causes yielding similar results. In the German country districts it is objected to the Jews not cultivating the land themselves, but lying in wait for the failing farmer: “Everywhere,” says an authority, “the peasant proprietor hated the Jew,” and he proceeds to sketch the peasant tragedy of which that hatred was the consequence. The land had to be mortgaged to pay family claims; the owner had recourse to the ubiquitous and importunate money-lender; the money-lender, whose business it is to trade upon the necessity of the borrower, took advantage of the latter’s distress, and extorted as much as he could. “The Jew grew fat as the Gentile got lean. A few bad harvests, cattle-plague, or potato-disease, and the wretched peasant, clinging with the unreasonable frantic love of a faithful animal to its habitat, had, in dumb agony, to see his farm sold up, his stock disposed of, and the acres he had toiled early and late to redeem, and watered by the sweat of his stubborn brow, knocked down by the Jewish interloper to the highest bidder.”[231] In the Austrian country districts it is urged that the presence of the Jew is synonymous with misery; his absence with comparative prosperity. In Hungary, the late M. Elisée Reclus—the famous author of the Nouvelle Géographie Universelle—informs us, “The rich magnate goes bankrupt, and it is almost always a Jew who acquires the encumbered property,” and another witness adds: “The Jew is no less active in profiting by the vices and necessities of the peasant than by those of the noble.” In Galicia, especially, we are told that the land is rapidly passing into the hands of the Jews, and that many a former proprietor is now reduced to work as a day-labourer in his own farm for the benefit of a Jewish master. All this is an absurdly exaggerated version of facts in themselves sad enough. The Jews as a whole are by no means a wealthy community, and the gainers by the supposed exploitation are the few, not the many. And if, as is the case, the condition of affairs in agricultural states is bad, who is to blame? Wherever there is agrarian depression there are sure to be money-lenders enough and Shylocks too many. It does not appear that Christian money-lenders have ever been more tender-hearted than their Jewish confrères. Why then set down to the Jew, as a Jew, what is the common and inevitable attribute of his profession? The ruin of the borrower does not justify the slaughter of the lender. Philanthropists would be better employed if, instead of bewailing in mournful diatribes the woes of the bankrupt peasant and inveighing against the cruelty of his oppressor, combined to establish agricultural banks where the farmer could obtain money at less exorbitant interest. This measure, and measures like this, not slaughter and senile lamentation, would be a remedy consonant both with the nature of the evil and with the dictates of civilisation and justice. Until something of the sort is done, it is worse than futile to demand that dealers in money, any more than dealers in corn, cotton, or cheese, should work from altruistic motives. But nothing rational is ever attempted. Instead, everywhere the nobles ruined by their own improvidence and extravagance, the peasants by their rustic incompetence, and both by the exactions of a wasting militarism, complain of the extortion of the Jewish usurers. It was inevitable that the old-world monster of Jew-hatred, never really dead, should have raised its hoary head again. All the elements of an anti-Jewish movement were present. The only thing that lacked was opportunity. The deficiency was not long in being supplied.

The Franco-German war and the achievement of German unity fanned the flame of patriotism. As in the time of Napoleon the First, so in that of Napoleon III., a great national danger created a strong fellow-feeling between the different members of the German race; a great national triumph stirred up an enthusiasm for the Empire which was indulged in at the cost of individual liberty. Despotism throve on the exuberance of nationalism. The Germans were led back from the constitutional and democratic ideals of 1848 to an ultra-monarchic servility which made it possible for the present Kaiser’s grandfather a few years after, prompted by Bismarck, to assert openly the ridiculous old claim to divine right. Thus the ground was prepared for any anti-alien and anti-liberal agitation. Other causes came to accelerate the movement. The war had involved enormous pecuniary and personal sacrifices. The extraordinary success, instead of satisfying, stimulated German ambition. It aroused an extravagant financial optimism and self-confidence. Germany, intoxicated with military victory, was still thirsting for aggrandisement of a different kind. Economy was cast to the winds, and a fever of wild speculation seized on all classes of the community. Companies were floated, and swallowed up the superfluous capital of the great as well as the savings of the humble. Sanguine expectation was the temper of the day. Berlin would vie with Paris in elegance and with London in suburban comfort, and every one of its citizens would be a millionaire!