Israel in Europe

by G. F. Abbott

Yet, small as this colony was, it soon attracted attention. The Catholic inhabitants of that great centre of picturesque and somnolent decay were not pleased at the comparative success of their wide-awake neighbours. The animosity spread from the town to the adjacent villages. The Irish peasant, proverbially improvident and free from any comprehension of the nature of a bargain, was ready to buy from the Jewish peddler his goods, and strongly disinclined to pay for them. The goods were usually sold on the instalment system, and this, in an imaginative mind, created a pleasant illusion which, however, was rudely shattered when the day of reckoning came. Then the peasant realised that the goods were not a free gift, and bitterly resented the hardship of being made to discharge his debt. It has been stated by the Irish peasant’s advocate that over three-quarters of the civil bill processes at quarter sessions in the island were those of Jews against such unsophisticated debtors for arrears of payments for goods purchased.[284] The statement has been shown to be a romantic exaggeration on an unusually ambitious scale. In plain prose, among 1387 civil bills entered for the county and city of Limerick during the year 1903 only 31 were issued by Jews, while in the Easter sessions of 1904, out of a total number of 320 civil bills, eight only belonged to Jews.[285] None the less, it is quite conceivable that often the peddler’s anxiety to obtain his money, brought into collision with the peasant’s unwillingness to part with his, led to strained relations between the two parties. In the circumstances it was perfectly natural that the Jew should be denounced for “usury and extortion.” Irish patriots saw in this new oppressor of their innocent fellow-countrymen a kind of camp-follower of the foreign conquerors. Poor Ireland was described as a carcase whose bones were picked by the Russian and Polish jackals of what had been left on them by the Norman lion and the Anglo-Saxon wolf, and Byron was quoted with considerable effect:

So, when the lion quits his fell repast,

Next prowls the wolf, the filthy jackal last,[286]

The hatred for the creditor was soon extended to his creed. Milesian patriots, indeed, vigorously repudiated the charge of religious intolerance, protesting, as the Russians did before them, that the animosity against the Jew was “merely financial and not religious,”[287] and there seems no reason to doubt that economic distress in Ireland, as in Russia and elsewhere, had contributed its usual share to a hostility which springs from many sources. But the assertion that the prejudice was due “merely” to financial causes is amply disproved by facts. These show that the Catholic clergy was sorely scandalised at the humble prosperity of the unbelievers, and thus there was laid up a quantity of combustible material which only awaited a spark for explosion. This spark was supplied at the beginning of 1904 by Father Creagh, a holy monk of the Redemptorist Order, inspired by a religious fervour and a credulity rare in these days and gifted with great eloquence of the kind which once incited the mobs of Europe to outrages. Like many another mediaeval saint, this priest was impelled by the purest of motives—piety and patriotism—to preach a crusade against those whom his untutored conscience taught him to regard as the enemies of his people and of his God: “It would be madness for a man to nourish in his own breast a viper that might at any moment slay its benefactor with a poisonous bite. So it is madness for a people to allow an evil to grow in their midst that will eventually cause them ruin.” Thus began the preacher, and then proceeded to anathematise the Jews as usurers who enslaved the people, as sinners who rejected Jesus, as the secular persecutors of Christianity, as the monsters who “slew St. Stephen, the first martyr, and St. James the Apostle, and ever since, as often as opportunity offered, did not hesitate to shed Christian blood, and that even in the meanest and most cruel manner, as in the case of the holy martyr, St. Simon, who, though a mere child, they took and crucified out of hatred and derision towards our Lord Jesus Christ. Nowadays they dare not kidnap and slay Christian children, but they will not hesitate to expose them to a longer and even more cruel martyrdom by taking the clothes off their back and the bite out of their mouth.”[288]

Having endowed the Jew with the most diabolical character imaginable and traced to him the woes of the Catholic Church in France, the preacher concluded by exhorting his congregation to have no dealings with the people whom God had cursed. As a result of this atrocious sermon, no Jew or Jewess could stir abroad without being insulted or assaulted, and, when the priest’s exhortations reached the open country, there also, as in the city of Limerick, the Jews fell a prey to a series of brutal attacks, until the preacher, alarmed at his own success, urged his flock to desist from stoning the unbelievers but try to starve them. The good people readily obeyed. They not only ceased to deal with the Jewish peddlers, but, improving on their pastor’s precepts, refused even to pay what they owed to them for goods purchased in the past. And while Catholic customers shunned the Jewish tradesmen, Catholic tradesmen in some cases refused to sell to the Jews the necessaries of life. With the exception of two or three families, the small Jewish colony of Limerick was reduced to utter penury. People hitherto in comfortable circumstances were forced to sell the very furniture of their houses in order to buy food, while the majority of them were saved from starvation only by the charity of some Protestant gentlemen, who, however, were obliged to observe the utmost secrecy in rendering assistance for fear of drawing down upon themselves the pious wrath of the Redemptorist monks and of the six thousand brethren of the Confraternity of the Holy Family, whose fanaticism the prophet continued to inflame with his historic fictions. This state of things did not end until, public opinion being roused in England, the Government was induced to take adequate measures for the protection of the Jews against violence, and philanthropists hastened to their relief. Such was the position of the Jews in a part of Ireland in the year of grace 1904.

Meanwhile the unblessed Bill, after having been safely piloted through the stormy debate on the second reading, suffered shipwreck in the relatively calm harbour of Grand Committee. Every one of its clauses was subjected to severe criticism, until nothing was left of the essay in legislation so carefully elaborated by the Home Secretary. This catastrophe was by the advocates of the measure attributed to “the obstructive tactics to which its opponents resorted.”[289] A more philosophical explanation of the failure of the Bill, and one probably as remote from the truth, would be that the Government, yielding to the importunity of some of its followers, promised a measure which it had no power to pass and no great desire to see passed. Be that as it may, few perhaps regretted the failure of an attempt to shut out from this country all strangers indiscriminately, for no better reason than that they are poor and persecuted, thus conspiring with the very Governments whose conduct we condemn and gratuitously forswearing those traditions of freedom, tolerance, and hospitality which will probably in the estimation of future ages stand much higher than a great many things which we now value as our chief titles to the world’s respect.

These sentiments will naturally be received with derision by persons who, fortified by copious draughts of statistics, boast a healthy immunity from “sentimentality,” profess a truly primitive contempt for abstract ideas, and glory in their emancipation from “the capacity for being fascinated by magic words—such as the word ‘free.’”[290] Strong-minded persons of this type confess that “they cannot see what benefit accrues to the community by the advent of such immigrants that can possibly compensate the injury to our own people of a hard-working class.”[291] Robust thinkers of this school consider obstruction with a barrow of fruit by a poor lad an offence sufficiently serious to justify exclusion, and this, too, while they denounce the Roumanian Government’s policy as “directed to the suppression, expulsion, and political extermination of the Jews.”[292] The statistical mind has its own way of looking at things, and it is able to discern a difference in principle between “expulsion” and “exclusion” which is too subtle for the mere layman’s eye. It is, therefore, not surprising that statisticians should have continued their self-appointed mission of enlightening the world on the enormities of the foreign immigrant. The Immigration Reform Association, immediately on the defeat of the Bill, announced its determination “to continue, and, if possible, to extend its work,” and made an appeal to the public for funds.[293] The magazines continued to be filled with articles on the same melancholy topic, and a daily newspaper carefully chronicled under the standing heading “Our Foreigners Day by Day” all cases, however frivolous, which tended to bring into strong relief the foreigner’s criminality. Members of Parliament felt it to be their duty to denounce to their constituencies the Radical Party, which, by its “most persistent obstruction,” had obliged the Government to withdraw the Bill, and to ask them to demand its reintroduction.[294] In brief, no efforts were spared to influence that powerful assemblage of thoughtless dogmatists known as the reading public, and to guide that monstrous machine which, propelled by prejudice and fed by newspaper paragraphs, constitutes what we cynically call public opinion.

The Government also benevolently promised, both through its members and in the Speech from the Throne, that the Opposition would be given an early opportunity of reforming their manners with regard to the question. Naturally. For, according to the Board of Trade alien immigration returns, the number of foreigners who arrived in the United Kingdom during the twelve months which ended on December 31st, 1904, showed few signs of decline. It was, therefore, plain that the Aliens Bill was not dead; but that the same measure, or a measure conceived in the same spirit, would, unless some power hitherto undiscovered removed the grievance, be again submitted to Parliament at some future date. And this is what actually happened. On April 18, 1905, the Home Secretary brought in a new Bill which differed from its predecessor chiefly in being better adapted to the purpose for which it was intended. And yet, though the arguments by which it was supported and the object at which it aimed remained the same, it met with an entirely different reception. The public had, in the meantime, been so successfully “educated,” and the feeling in favour of legislation for the restriction of the entrance of aliens had grown so strong, that the Opposition, mindful of its party interests, refrained from opposing the measure with the vigour which it had displayed in the previous year, and the Bill, a few months afterwards, became law. ♦1905 Aug. 11♦ That being the case, it is well to form a clear idea as to the merits and the meaning of the measure.

The Aliens Act is avowedly levelled only at the criminal, the pauper, the diseased, and the prostitute. So far it is a measure unobjectionable in theory, however impracticable it may prove in application. Those charged with the execution of its provisions may, if they can, prevent the arrival of these truly undesirable immigrants. No one desires them. But this only touches the fringe of the matter. The exclusion of such immigrants affords no remedy for the congestion and competition which form the principal grounds of complaint against the alien immigrants. The bulk of these are Russian and Polish Jews and, as a class, are, by the late Government’s own admission, neither criminal, nor destitute, nor diseased, nor immoral. They are not a burden on the British tax-payer. They crowd neither the British workhouses nor the British hospitals. The evils complained of can, therefore, be remedied not by the exclusion of the few bad characters, but only by refusing an asylum on British soil to the industrious and temperate victim of Russian or Roumanian tyranny, who, when allowed the opportunity, is, in the vast majority of cases, transformed, within a few years, into a valuable British citizen. And the Act, accordingly, while professing to be directed against undesirable characters, makes no distinction whatever between the undesirable and the merely unhappy. It provides nominal protection for political refugees, it is true, but the subordinate officials, to whose discretion the matter is practically left, are empowered to prohibit from landing men and women whose sole crime is that, accustomed to a frugal life, they are willing to accept a wage which the English working man and woman refuse. Is this a cause sufficient to justify exclusion? That is the real question at issue, honestly put. The talk about criminals, paupers and prostitutes is only a disingenuous effort to clothe a selfish economic matter with a semblance of morality. It is not their vices but their virtues that render Jewish immigrants really undesirable. Is that right? The answer to this question would have been easy enough a few years ago. But now, when the whole principle of free competition is under reconsideration, the answer which the majority of Englishmen will be disposed to make to it must ultimately depend on their decision concerning that principle.

How far can the Act be fairly regarded as a symptom of anti-Semitic feeling? There can be no doubt that its authors and many of its supporters, entirely free from religious or racial prejudice themselves, intended it simply as a remedy for an economic complaint. But whatever the late Government’s intentions may have been, and whether in this matter it acted as a leader or a follower, it has in effect provided anti-aliens and anti-Semites, avowed or secret, with the very weapon which they wanted, as they showed by their eager participation in the movement which, if it did not dictate the measure, certainly assisted in its production. Again, it would be unfair and untrue to charge all, or even the bulk, of the anti-alien agitators with anti-Semitism. The great majority of them were and are animated by no special prejudice against the Jews as such, and, if they teach the masses any lesson, it is to hate and to despise all foreigners impartially. But as by far most of these foreigners who come to England happen to be Jews, it is impossible to dissociate the anti-alien from the anti-Jewish campaign. On the Continent the haters of the Jew on racial or religious grounds are few in comparison with those who persecute him from enlightened motives, economic and social. Yet we brand them all as anti-Semites, justly in the main, if somewhat loosely; for differences in motive are of little practical importance when they lead to agreement in action. In England also the few enemies of the Jew have recognised in the enemies of the undesirable alien natural allies, and the two forces, however widely they may differ in their origin, coalesce into practical anti-Semitism—a coalition which has found, as we have seen, a common vehicle of expression in the provincial patriot’s pamphlet. Other signs of anti-Semitism, in the strict sense of the term, are not wanting; the most sinister of them hitherto being the Limerick affair. It is, of course, easy to overrate the significance of these cases. It is not so easy to overlook them.