Israel in Europe

by G. F. Abbott

Other Liberal orators followed, some of whom described the Bill as an example of panic legislation, and others as partly prompted by an agitation directed against the Jews. Among the latter was Mr. Trevelyan, who remarked that the measure aimed almost as much at those who managed to prosper as at those who were poverty-stricken, and that all the evidence went to prove that the great mass of these aliens were sober and industrious people who in the long run became good citizens. He maintained that among many people outside the House there was a frankly anti-Semitic movement which he dreaded and deplored, and that this petty and evil step was in exactly the same direction as that in which the Governments of Russia and Roumania had been going.

The long debate ended with a division, in which the amendment was negatived by a Government majority of 124, and the Bill was read a second time. But its triumph was far from being assured by this victory. Outside the House there was as much divergence of opinion on the merits of the measure, its scope, and its probable effects as there was inside, and the rival parties spared no pains to present the motives of their adversaries in the least flattering colours. Thus, while the advocates of the Bill denounced the opposition to it as “a net constructed with the primary purpose of catching votes,”[273] its opponents derided it as “an attempt on the part of the Government to gratify a small but noisy section of their supporters, and to purchase a little popularity in the constituencies by dealing harshly with a number of unfortunate aliens who have no votes.”[274]

The English Jews were not left unmoved by the fresh calamity which threatened their suffering brethren. As early as May, 1903, while the Royal Commission was still carrying on its investigations, Mr. Israel Zangwill, at a mass meeting of Zionists, foretold the recommendations of the Commission, and expressed the fear that the exclusion of undesirable aliens might prove only the beginning of worse things. “The Jews came over to England with the Conqueror,” he said, “but all their services to him and his successors did not prevent their expulsion two and a quarter centuries later. He did not wish to be an alarmist, but nobody who had been caught in a crowd of mafficking hooligans could doubt the possibility of anti-Jewish riots even in London.”[275] And when, a year later, the speaker’s prediction as to the result of the Commission’s work was fulfilled, he again, at another Zionist meeting, said that England “was catching the epidemic which rages everywhere against the Jew.”[276] This statement was reported to Mr. Balfour, who replied that “he believed it to be quite untrue,” declaring that “the Aliens Bill is designed to protect the country, not against the Jew, but against the undesirable alien, quite irrespective of his nationality or his creed. I should regard the rise and growth of any anti-Semitic feeling in this country as a most serious national misfortune.”[277] In a letter to The Times Mr. Zangwill reiterated his assertion, and, while absolving Mr. Balfour himself from anti-Semitism, he insisted that the Aliens Bill was inspired by anti-Semites—a statement which he once more repeated emphatically in the course of an interview with a newspaper representative.[278]

Nor was the indignation confined to Jews only. Speaking at the annual meeting of the British Jews’ Society in Exeter Hall the Rev. Peter Thomson declared that the Jew had been rather a blessing to the East-end than otherwise, and, as the best testimony of this, he quoted the Chairman of the City of London Brewery Company, who had lamented that the dividends had gone down because of the immigration of the Jews into the district where their public houses were situated, concluding that he himself had no blessing for the Aliens Bill.[279]

A few days later (May 19) a deputation of the Jewish community sought an interview with the Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Home Affairs and through Lord Rothschild, who introduced it, drew attention to the clauses of the Bill which would press harshly and unjustly on the numerous Jewish immigrants into this country, pointing out that the investigations of the Royal Commission had proved that the advent of the aliens was not a source of disadvantage, but of benefit to England, that the increase of the alien population was insignificant when compared with that of America, and that the Bill provided no machinery for the exclusion of the really undesirable, such as existed in America, but proposed to establish in this country a loathsome system of Police interference and espionage. The deputation further offered on behalf of the Jewish community to enter into a bond that the Jewish immigrants admitted should not become a public charge during the first two years of their residence, and to assist the authorities in excluding criminals who might be of the Jewish persuasion.

The Under-Secretary thanked the deputation for the very moderate tone in which they had set forth their case, disavowed any intention on the part of the Government to encourage anti-Semitic feeling in England, said that all, from the Prime Minister downwards, recognised the debt which England owed to the Jews, admitted that those members of the race who came here were both healthy and law-abiding, but, he maintained, the Bill sought to exclude the diseased, bad characters, and the destitute.

These assurances, however, failed to reassure the Jews. Many of them continued to apprehend danger; a few even began to regard expulsion as not improbable in the future. This fear has found a voice in literature. In a novel[280] published while the fate of the Aliens hung in the balance, the Jews are banished from England by a wicked Home Secretary, and then are brought back again, because “England can not get along without Jewish money and Jewish brains.” The expulsion is, of course, hardly more convincing than the reason given for the restoration. The authoress, herself, in the preface, describes her book as “a story of the impossible,” but she considers that “a warning—even in the form of fiction—may not be out of place.” The danger may be imaginary and the warning rather premature; none the less, the book bears witness to a genuine feeling of alarm. Such a book could not have been written a generation ago.

Mr. Balfour was, no doubt, quite sincere in repudiating any anti-Semitic bias on his own part and on the part of his immediate followers. The idea of a cultured English gentleman of the present day actuated by religious or racial rancour is too grotesque to be seriously entertained for a moment, and it is further disproved, if disproof were needed, by the attempt which, as will be narrated in the sequel, the Conservative Government, in true Imperial spirit, made to provide a home in a British possession for those Jews whose presence it deemed undesirable in the United Kingdom. Another proof that Jew-hatred is not yet sufficiently powerful in this country to imperil the peace of the Jews was furnished, about the same time, by one of our most distinguished prelates, Bishop Welldon, who in a sermon preached at Westminster Abbey on Good Friday, 1904, exhorted his hearers to an imitation of Christ’s example, and to a practical demonstration of their faith by contributing to the East London Jews’ Fund: “That was,” he said, “the best return they could make for the crucifixion of their Lord and Master. The Jews gave him strife, and encompassed his death; we gave them sanctuary and kindness, and without one word of reproach. They gratefully acknowledged the noble citizenship of Jews in all parts of the world. In return they offered them on this anniversary day of our Lord’s Passion what was to Christians the holiest, dearest examples of the life and character of the Crucified Redeemer.”[281] In the following year the Bishop of Stepney issued an appeal in connexion with Holy Week and Good Friday on behalf of the East London Fund for the Jews. The thoughts of the season, he said, would be incomplete unless they gave a place to those “whose rejection of their own Messiah has been one of the great tragedies of history.” There are more than 100,000 Jews in East London parishes, and in some parishes they form the majority of the population. Following the method suggested some time ago by the Upper House of Convocation, the diocese of London treats the East-end Jews as neighbours and parishioners, and by the tact and patience of the fund’s workers “the barrier of prejudice, built up by long years of persecution at the hands of Christians, is being rapidly removed.”[282] While such sentiments prevail in England, the Jews need not fear for their liberties.

Yet, that the apprehensions of the Jews and of all friends of freedom are not wholly unjustified, that Sir Charles Dilke and those who agree with him in suspecting that anti-Semitic prejudice is not so uncommon in the Kingdom at large as it is among the upper ranks, are not the victims of a hypochondriacal dread of phantoms, was demonstrated with deplorable opportuneness by an event which even a temperate pessimist cannot but regard as a rude and practical version of the creed which is elsewhere preached in a more refined form. While Mr. Akers-Douglas at Westminster was giving the finishing touches to his prescription for the Alien complaint, the people of Limerick were actually trying remedies of a more drastic and homely nature.

The Jews had hitherto been conspicuous in Ireland chiefly by their absence. With the exception of Dublin and Belfast, the island knew the Jew from hearsay only, and his name was to the ordinary Irishman what it was to the Englishman in the days of Gower and Chaucer—a symbol for a vile abstraction. In 1871 there were only six Jews in Cork, two in Limerick and one in Waterford. But of late years persecution on the Continent has forced some of its victims to seek an asylum in Ireland as in England, though to a much smaller degree. The increase in the Jews’ numbers, slight though it was, proved sufficient to arouse a feeling of alarm and suspicion among the ignorant masses both in the towns and in the open country. Craftsmen, tradesmen, ploughmen, and clergymen, all began to look with jealousy upon the clever, thrifty, and infidel new-comers from beyond the sea. This was especially the case at Limerick, where lately had sprung up a diminutive colony of thirty-five Jewish families, which was by the Chief Secretary for Ireland described as a “well-conducted section of the community, engaged for the most part in small trades, and dependent for their livelihood on the goodwill of their customers.”[283]