Even more ominous than these specific cases is the slow formation in the British Isles of an atmosphere favourable to the dissemination of any illiberal epidemic whose germs may chance to grow at home or to be imported from abroad. Narrow nationalism is daily becoming more aggressive, more unscrupulous, and more unashamed of itself. Public opinion is daily showing a more ready acquiescence in the sacrifice of the claims of man to the claims of the Englishman—this is called patriotism—and of the claims of right to the claims of policy—this is called Imperialism. Patriotism is a noble sentiment, and the imperial is a noble ideal. But nobler than either patriotism or Imperialism are justice and freedom. With these the love of country and the love of Empire are things for which one may well be content to live and happy to die. Without them they are merely fair masks for things whose real names are worship of self, worship of pelf, the deification of brute force, low lust of conquest abroad, which sooner or later leads to slavery at home; substitution of the little and the local for the great and the eternal. It is a gradual approximation towards that standard of conduct which has turned Germany from a high school of humanistic culture into a barrack, and which threatens to turn England from a school of political liberty into a shop. A ledger is a respectable book enough, but an indifferent substitute for a moral code. And we seem to take pride in quoting the ledger and in ridiculing the moral code.
The whole controversy in Parliament and in the press on the Alien question is an illustration of this attitude. In vain you will seek amid the conflicting arguments for any clear apprehension of the principle involved. The same politicians and publicists who denounced the late Government for endeavouring to exclude the undesired alien from England, denounced it also for not excluding the undesired alien from South Africa. The same calumnies from which they defended the Jew they themselves would level at the Chinaman, and while they appealed to the ideal of freedom in order to stigmatise the Government’s attempts to protect the native of England against competition, they anathematised that Government for not protecting the native of South Africa against similar competition; objecting not so much to the conditions under which the yellow man was imported as to the colour of his skin. Even the most liberal of our public men are apt to use the terms “white man” or “alien” in a manner which shows that they are far from being proof against the prejudices which they condemn in others. At no other time, perhaps, has more painfully been demonstrated the ominous absence of consistent principle from British statesmanship. The two political parties, devoid of any sincere faith in the maxims which they profess, are ready to deny one day what they may defend the next, and to exchange creeds at a moment’s notice for a moment’s gain. In such a state of the national temper and of political morality anti-Semitism would find only too congenial a soil. The present writer, after a careful study of the whole history of the modern movement against the Jews, cannot but concur with those who maintain that the seeds of anti-Semitism are already amongst us. These seeds may still lie too deep for germination, but there are sufficient reasons to fear that in England, as on the Continent, any accident may, sooner or later, bring them near the surface and aërate them into life. The day on which this may happen will be a black day not for the Jews only.
The meaning of anti-Semitism, as it prevails abroad, can be read by the light of its results. By their actions thou shalt know them. But the actions of the anti-Semites, deplorable as they are, are less deplorable than the social conditions which they illustrate. Anti-Semitism is a movement retrogressive in a twofold sense. Retrogressive inasmuch as it shows that the current of European humanism is flowing backwards, and retrogressive inasmuch as it has actually checked the gradual and voluntary assimilation of the Jew. It is a resurrection of the mediaeval monster of intolerance with a fresh face, and its effects are those which attended mediaeval persecution.
Among the worst Jews it has brought back to life the class of vulgar apostates which had vanished with the emancipation of the race—lineal descendants of those renegades who in the Dark Ages poisoned the shafts of persecution, who slandered their own race, befouled the nest in which they had been nursed, reviled their own God, and treated their own brethren with a contempt which none deserved more richly than themselves. Such a specimen of reversion to a type which one had fondly imagined to be extinct is the editor of a well-known French journal, than whom no one distinguished himself more unenviably in the anti-Dreyfus campaign. He was only one of many Jews who, ashamed of their despised race, strive to conceal the guilt of their origin by joining the ranks of its most rabid foes, and who, by their excessive zeal, betray what they would fain disguise. Readers of M. Anatole France’s Histoire Contemporaine will remember the exquisite portraits of Hebrew anti-Semites, such as Madame de Bonmont—“une dame catholique, mais d’origine juive”—her brother Wallstein, M. Worms-Clavelin, the prefect, and, above all, the prefect’s wife, who educated her daughter in a Catholic convent, and who “a garni avec les chapes magnifiques et vénérables de Saint-Porchaire ces sortes de meubles appelés vulgairement poufs.”
Among the best Jews it has brought about a reaction against the ideals established by Mendelssohn’s teaching. It has originated a call back to orthodoxy, to narrowness, to exclusiveness. Israel at the present day is essentially a religious brotherhood; anti-Semitism forces it to become once more a nation. Even those Jews who in time of prosperity might feel inclined to quit the Synagogue, are in the day of adversity driven back to it from a sense of chivalry. Persecution strengthens the feeling of fraternity, and the liberal instincts of the individual are sacrificed for the sake of the community, as in the days of old. But, if separatism is fatal to the Jews themselves, it is hardly a blessing to humanity at large. From the other point of view, the Gentile, anti-Semitism is not less an evil. Disraeli once said that “Providence would deal good or ill fortune to nations according as they dealt well or ill by the Jews.”[295] The saying, when stripped of its quasi-apocalyptic garb, will be found to conceal a great truth in it. Hatred towards the Jew has always abounded whenever and wherever barbarism has abounded. The amount of anti-Semitism in a country has generally been proportionate to the amount of bigotry, mental depravity, and moral callousness it contained. That so many now are willing to advocate anti-Semitism marks the precarious and superficial character of our civilisation.
I have already said that I consider anti-Semitism as a proof and an illustration of a tendency to turn back the hand on the dial. It is a coincidence, not perhaps wholly devoid of significance, that the age which has witnessed the revival of Jew-hatred is also the age of revived mediaevalism under other aspects—art, literature, and religion. The step from Romanticism to Romanism is a very short one. Indeed, the two things may be regarded as only two different manifestations of one mental disposition: the disposition to a mediaeval interpretation of life and its problems. More significant still are the attempts made in these days to whitewash the great tyrants of the past whose principles reason and experience have taught us to abhor. Most significant circumstance of all, the apologists of the Inquisition, whom the sarcasms of the eighteenth century had shamed into silence, and Napoleon’s cannon cowed into feigned toleration, have, within the last thirty years, taken heart again, and ventured to abuse that liberty of speech which they owe to the triumph of Rationalism by preaching the cause of Obscurantism. Learned Jesuits and Benedictines in many parts of Europe have, since 1875, not only publicly acknowledged and defended the abominations of the Holy Office, but actually expressed an undisguised longing for its restoration to the power of roasting every one who dares to think for himself.[296] That they may succeed is a fear which even the most fantastic of pessimists would feel unable to cherish. But their mere existence forms in itself a considerable check on too sanguine optimism.
CHAPTER XXIV
ZIONISM
The persecution of the Jews in Russia, their oppression in Roumania and the revival of the old prejudice against them in Western Europe during the last quarter of the nineteenth century have, as has been pointed out, arrested the gradual denationalisation of Judaism, which had commenced in the latter part of the eighteenth under Mendelssohn’s impulse, and, in proportion as they have widened the hostility between Jew and Gentile, they have tended to tighten the links of sympathy between the Jews scattered in various parts of the world. Under the benign influence of persecution Jewish patriotism has again blazed up into flame. This sentiment has found a practical expression in many movements set on foot for the relief and rescue of the suffering race. One movement of the kind, prompted by the anti-Jewish agitation in Russia and the resuscitation of the blood accusation against the Jews of the Near East in the ’fifties, resulted in the birth of a society the object of which it is to watch over the interests of the Jews in the countries where they are exposed to danger, to protect them against persecution, to promote their material welfare, and to encourage their intellectual development. This is the Alliance Israélite Universelle, founded in Paris, in 1860. Its funds are derived from thousands of subscribers all over the world, and its work is carried on by branch establishments in many countries. The educational activity of the Alliance is especially directed to the Near East and the coast of North Africa—Bulgaria, Turkey in Europe and Asia, Persia, Egypt, Tripoli, Tunis, Algeria, Morocco. In all these countries it maintains numerous schools at an annual expense which in 1903 amounted to 1,200,000 francs. In connection with the Alliance there was established, in 1871, in London the Anglo-Jewish Association, and in Vienna the Israelitische Allianz, whose principal aim is the elevation of the Jews of Galicia. It was mainly through these societies that the cause of the Roumanian Jews was advocated in 1872 and that the members of the Congress of Berlin, in 1878, were induced to take the ineffectual steps already described for the improvement of the condition of the Jews in Roumania and Servia. Foremost among these, and many other organisations for the succour of Jewish victims of persecution, stands Baron Hirsch’s gigantic fund of £9,000,000 for the settlement of emigrants in new countries.
But all these efforts can only be described as palliatives. They aim simply at a temporary alleviation of the sufferings of Israel; they do not attempt to provide a radical remedy for the evil. The only remedies that history points out as worthy of the name are either assimilation of the Jews in various countries to the Gentiles among whom they dwell, or separation from the latter, geographical as well as political. The first alternative, as we have seen, has from time to time appeared within a certain distance of partial realisation, reaching its nearest approach in the years following on the emancipation of the race under the influence of the broad principles of humanitarianism which reigned during the latter half of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Whether this approach would ever have developed into a general absorption of the Jews is a speculative question which admits of more answers than one. The fact that is of greater value to the historian is that such a development was checked by the reaction already described under the name of anti-Semitism. Hence the other remedy has come more and more to the front under the name of Zionism.
The movement combines in itself two aims, a practical and a sentimental one. Its practical aim is to provide a solution of the Jewish problem by bringing about the geographical and political separation of the Jews from the Gentiles. Its sentimental aim is to satisfy the traditional attachment of the Jews to the land of their origin. In neither of its two aims can the movement, under its modern aspect, claim to be original. Attempts to restore the Jewish State, in some form or other, have repeatedly been made in the past. In the middle of the sixteenth century—the age of the Ghetto—Tiberias was proposed by a Jew as the seat of a new Jewish State. In the middle of the seventeenth—the age of Sabbataï Zebi—three more schemes of the kind were advocated: one for a settlement of the Jews in the Dutch West Indies, another for their emigration to Dutch Guiana, and a third recommended French Guiana. In the middle of the eighteenth century South America was again proposed, and North America in the middle of the nineteenth. But none of these proposals succeeded in evoking any enthusiasm among the Jews. On the contrary, the orthodox Jews—and such are the majority of Eastern European Jews—led by their Rabbis, strenuously opposed the last suggestion of emigration to America which was made by their more advanced brethren of the West; and the plan perished still-born.