Israel in Europe

by G. F. Abbott

Italy and Greece have declined to listen to the new creed of intolerance. There are few Jews in those countries. Besides, both the Italians and the Greeks, though sensitively attached to their national ideals, have too keen a sense of proportion, and the Greeks, at all events, too much commercial ability to entertain any jealousy of the Jew.

England has not failed in this, as in former ages, to follow, after a lukewarm and sluggish fashion, the Continental evolution of the feeling towards the Jew. In popular literature and art the Jew had never ceased to figure as an object of derision and repugnance. What reader of Dickens need be reminded of the execrable Mr. Fagin, trainer of juvenile criminals and tormentor of poor Oliver Twist, or of Cruikshank’s portrait of that and other Israelites? But these pleasant creations, however grossly they may sin against truth, were as innocent of any deliberate intention to stir up a hatred against the Jew as Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s personifications of evil in the characters of Shylock and Barabas. The taint of malignant anti-Semitism made its first unmistakable appearance in England during the Eastern Crisis of 1876–1878. A Jew was then Prime Minister, and that Jew opposed the pro-Bulgarian policy of the Liberal party. To that party the conflict between the Sultan and his Christian subjects was then, as it still is, a conflict between the Cross and the Crescent, between Europe and Asia, between Aryanism and Semitism. What mattered to the Liberal politicians that Islam, in point of fact, since its first missionary zeal spent itself many centuries ago in Asia and Africa, has never tried, and does not want, to kill Christianity? What mattered to them that Christianity, in point of history, is a Semitic creed, and in its original Eastern form nearer to Islam than to the product of the Western temperament which passes under the same name? What mattered to them that the Turks, after five or six centuries of constant marriage to women of the subject races, have, ethnographically speaking, become more European than the Bulgarians, who, in point of blood, are more Turkish than the modern Turks? What mattered to them that the Turks are not Semites at all? What mattered to the opponents of the Jew that the doctrine of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire had been promulgated before Disraeli left school, and that his Eastern policy of a regenerated Turkey was a policy evolved by as good Christians as themselves long before Disraeli became a power in the land—by men like the Duke of Wellington and Sir Stratford Canning—and carried on by contemporary diplomatists and statesmen like Lord Salisbury, Sir Henry Layard, and Sir Henry Elliot? These are mere facts. The Liberal party wanted broad principles and a euphonious war-cry. Disraeli was opposed to Russia’s ambition, and Disraeli was a Jew. What could be easier than to connect the two things? The enemy of Russia was an enemy of Christianity, of Aryanism, of Europe. If any doubt was possible, it could easily be dispelled by a reference to Disraeli’s romances. There, as elsewhere, in season and out of season, Disraeli preached the greatness of his persecuted race with a sincerity, a courage and a consistency which, in the eyes of the neutral student, form the noblest trait in his character; in the eyes of a political opponent, the most conclusive proof of his Jewish hostility to Christianity. Accordingly, we find Mr. Gladstone, in 1876, confiding to the sympathetic ear of his friend, the Duke of Argyll, the following philosophical reflection: “I have a strong suspicion that Dizzy’s crypto-Judaism has had to do with his policy: the Jews of the East bitterly hate the Christians, who have not always used them well.”[250]

At the same time other politicians vented their prejudice against the Jews, and against Disraeli’s “Jewish aims” in various books,[251] pamphlets, speeches and articles, while soon after, when the eloquent tongue was for ever silenced, and the man who had bent Europe to his will was no longer able to defend himself, reverend ecclesiastics took pains to trace, with an enthusiasm and an acumen worthy of a less ignoble task, the origin and development of the great statesman’s “deceitfulness,” of his “political dishonesty,” of his “disregard of morality in the pursuit of personal ambition,” of his “theological and political scepticism,” of his “jealousy for the spiritual and intellectual supremacy of the Semitic race,” and the rest of his virtues, from his early home education under his Jewish sceptic of a father and his vulgar Jewess of a mother, through his school life, his apprenticeship in a solicitor’s office, the various stages of his literary and political career, up to the moment of his death. It was, however, pointed out with an air of charitable patronage not unamusing, when the relative magnitude of the author and the subject of the criticism is considered, that “it would be harsh and unfair to judge him by our ordinary standard of political morality,” for “Mr. Disraeli started on his public career with little or no furniture of moral or religious principles of any kind.”[252] The writer repeated the favourite explanation of Disraeli’s opposition to Gladstone’s Eastern policy, namely, that it arose from the fact that “the ‘bag and baggage’ policy cut rudely across his cherished convictions respecting the ‘Semitic principle.’ The Turks, indeed,” the learned theologian naïvely observes, “do not belong to the Semitic race; but their theocratic polity is the product of a Semitic brain, and was, therefore, sacred in the eyes of Lord Beaconsfield.”[253] In the writer’s opinion Disraeli’s dearest ideal, when it was not his own pre-eminence, was the pre-eminence of the Jewish nation, his whole career being a compound of selfishness and Semitism.

While chivalrous theologians made these interesting post-mortem investigations into the character of the champion of Semitism, learned professors made equally interesting studies in the character of anti-Semitism. And while the former denounced that representative of the race as one who had made “self-aggrandisement the one aim of his life,” the latter endeavoured to justify the conduct of its enemies on the ground of Hebrew “tribalism,” “materialism,” “opportunism,” “cosmopolitanism,” and other vices ending in —ism.[254]

As these charges are still brought against the Jews by their enemies in England, it may be not irrelevant to answer some of them once for all. No one with a biographical dictionary on his book-shelf requires to be told that the Jewish people, far from specialising in material aims, has never shirked its due share in the world’s intellectual work, though it has seldom been accorded its due share of the world’s recognition. Look wheresoever we like, in science, art, music, philosophy, letters, politics, we everywhere find the Jew generously contributing to the common fund of human knowledge. From Higher Criticism, which was initiated by a Jew in the third century, and Comparative Philology, also originated by a Jew in the ninth, through Spinoza’s philosophical work in the seventeenth, and Mendelssohn’s in the eighteenth, down to the psychological labours of Steinthal, who died in 1892—to mention only a few of the best known names—we find proofs which speak for themselves, and abundantly refute the calumny that the Jews are a race of mere money-mongers and money-grabbers. In the Dark Ages the conditions under which Israel was doomed to live were by no means favourable to the development of spiritual qualities. Mediaeval Europe, as a rule, did not allow more than three outlets to Hebrew activity. The Jew could only become a merchant, a financier, or a physician, and in all these three professions he achieved the distinction to which his superiority entitled him. Imaginative by nature, cosmopolitan by necessity, a reasoner and a linguist by education, with all his faculties sharpened by persecution, and all his passions disciplined by adversity, the Jew could not but assert himself among his narrow-minded and ignorant contemporaries. Accordingly we find the mediaeval Jew foremost in Medicine, Commerce, and Finance. As to medicine, enough has already been said. As to commerce, the supremacy of the Jews has never been disputed. Their financial pre-eminence is equally recognised. But it is not often recalled that the Jews, in order to facilitate the transmission of their wealth amidst the violence and extortions of the Middle Ages, were the first to invent the admirable system of paper currency—an invention which, Alison the historian asserts, had it been made earlier, might have averted the downfall of the Western Roman Empire. But, apart from chrematistic pursuits, even in the Middle Ages the Jews, prevented by persecution and social isolation from tying themselves permanently to any particular country, and forced to lead a nomad existence, used their opportunities of travel not only for the purpose of commerce, but also for the transmission of knowledge. Thus, consciously or not, the mediaeval Jew became the great middleman by whose agency what learning there was found its way from country to country. In Spain, before the holy war against the race deprived it of the conditions necessary for the development of its genius, we have seen the Jews distinguishing themselves in literature, scholastic philosophy, science, and diplomacy. After their expulsion the Spanish exiles influenced the culture of the countries over which they spread in many ways; Baruch Spinoza being only the greatest star in a great constellation. Even in England, where few of those refugees contrived to penetrate, we find their spiritual influence in King James’s translation of the Bible, which in many places bears the traces of David Kimchi’s Commentary.[255]

The place of Israel in the mediaeval world has been described with equal justness and eloquence by Lecky: “While those around them were grovelling in the darkness of besotted ignorance; while juggling miracles and lying relics were themes on which almost all Europe was expatiating; while the intellect of Christendom, enthralled by countless persecutions, had sunk into a deadly torpor, in which all love of inquiry and all search for truth were abandoned, the Jews were still pursuing the path of knowledge, amassing learning, and stimulating progress, with the same unflinching constancy that they manifested in their faith. They were the most skilful physicians, the ablest financiers, and among the most profound philosophers; while they were only second to the moderns in the cultivation of natural science, they were also the chief interpreters to Western Europe of Arabian learning.”[256]

In modern Europe also we have seen how varied and how beneficial has, since their emancipation, been the activity of the Jews in other than financial departments. In face of these facts how ineffably ridiculous seems the anti-Semite’s homily on “A Jew of the Coheleth type” who “pursues gain with an undivided soul, whereas the soul of the Christian or the Idealist is divided,” and his calm, self-sufficient pronouncement that “much of the best Christian and Idealist intellect is entirely given to objects quite different from gain or power.” The remark, of course, is true in so far as the two “types” are concerned. But, unless the writer means to make the astounding assertion that, other conditions being identical, the one type is peculiar to the Jews, and the other to the Christians—that the ordinary Jew is born a materialist, and the ordinary Christian an Idealist,—his statement is pointless. It becomes worse than pointless when he proceeds to emphasise the “compact organisation” of Jewish, as contrasted with the “loose texture” of Christian society, and to proclaim that “in this respect the Gentile, instead of starting fair, is handicapped in the race.”[257] The only logical inference to be drawn from these premisses is that the balance must be redressed by oppressing the Jew. But the author shrinks from drawing that inference. Mediaeval and Continental anti-Semites have been more consistent and courageous.

Such was the genesis of English anti-Semitism. However, the bulk of the public took little or no notice of these utterances. The English people is not intellectual enough to be moved by literary theories. Its very slowness in discarding old errors is a guarantee against precipitancy in embracing new ones. But, when a grievance is presented to it in the more tangible form of a practical and mischievous fact, then the English people begins to think.

The persecution of the Jews in Russia, Roumania, Hungary, and Germany threatened to flood England with a crowd of refugees more industrious than the English workman, more frugal, and far more temperate. The consequence would have been a fall in wages. The danger was too practical to be ignored; fortunately, both for the English workman and for the Jew, it was temporarily averted by the Jewish charitable associations, which directed emigration into safer channels. But, though the immediate cause for alarm disappeared, the anti-Jewish feeling remained; and was fed by the influx of new crowds from Eastern Europe at a later period. Again the Board of Guardians, the Russo-Jewish Committee and other organisations exerted themselves strenuously to prevent the immigrants from becoming in any case a burden to the British rate-payer. With that object in view, measures were taken that those victims of oppression who remained in England should be enabled without delay to earn their own bread by that industry for which they might be best fitted; but, wherever it was possible, a home was found for them in countries less populous than England and more suitable for colonisation. At the same time, by means of representations addressed to Jewish authorities, and published in Jewish papers abroad, regarding the congested state of the British labour market, efforts were made to stem the tide of further immigration.[258] But these efforts have not proved entirely successful. So that the interminable cycle of prejudice and platitude, interrupted for a while, has again resumed its ancient course. As in the early days of the nineteenth century, so now, at the commencement of the twentieth, our libraries are slowly enriched with volumes of exquisite dulness. We are called upon to fight the old battle over again. The enemy appears under many colours; but all the legions, though they know it not, fight for the same cause. And, though their diversity is great, none of the banners are new.

First comes our ancient friend, the theologian, Bible in hand; as valiant of heart as ever, and as loud of voice. He is a worthy descendant of St. Dominic, though perhaps he would be horrified if he were told so. But History is cruel, and the records of the past remain indelible. What student of history can fail to catch the note of familiarity in our modern missionary’s oratory?