The Jews

by Hilaire Belloc

They miss the mark because they attempt to express in terms of one category what should be expressed in terms of another. They are doing what a man does when he compares two pictures by their outline while in point of fact their interest lies in colour, or when he affirms something of a tune the fundamental point of which something is not the air at all but the instruments upon which it is played: as who should say that "God save the King" was "shrill" because he heard it played on a penny whistle or "booming" because he heard it played on a violoncello. The real point to note is not that the Jews appear to us (or we to them) to possess certain abstract qualities and defects, but that in their case each quality or defect has a special character, a special national timbre which it lacks in ours.

Thus you will hear the Jews arraigned by their enemies for three such vices as cowardice, avarice and treason—to take three of the commonest accusations. You examine their actions and you find innumerable instances of the highest courage, the greatest generosity and the most devoted loyalty: but courage, generosity and loyalty of a Jewish kind, directed to Jewish ends, and stamped with a highly distinctive Jewish mark.

The man who accuses the Jews of cowardice means that they do not enjoy a fight of his kind, nor a fight fought after his fashion. All he has discovered is that the courage is not shown under the same circumstances, nor for the same ends, nor in the same mode. But if the word courage means anything, he cannot on reflection deny it to actions of which one could make an endless catalogue even from contemporary experience alone. Is it cowardice in a young man to sacrifice his life deliberately for the sake of his own people? Did that young Jew show cowardice who killed the Russian Prime Minister, the antagonist of his people, after the first revolution following on the Russo-Japanese war? Was it cowardice to walk up in a crowded theatre, surrounded by all the enemies of his race, and shoot their chief in their midst? Is it cowardice to stand up against the vast alien majority, and to do so over and over again, perhaps through a whole lifetime, insisting on things that are grossly unpopular with that majority and running a risk the whole time of physical violence? You find Jews adopting that attitude all over Europe. Can one think it is cowardice which has permitted the individuals of this nation to maintain their tradition unbroken through two thousand years of intermittent torture, spoliation and violent death? The thing so stated is ridiculous, and it is clear that those who make such an accusation are confounding their own form of courage with courage as a universal attribute.

They think that because Jews show courage under other circumstances and in another way from themselves, corresponding to another appetite, as it were, therefore it is no longer courage: to think like that is to confess yourself very limited.

I can testify, myself, to any number of courageous acts which I have seen performed by Jews. I am not alluding to acts of courage in warfare, of which there is ample evidence, but to acts of a sort in which our race would not have shown the same quality or timbre of courage. I will cite one case.

Rather more than twenty years ago, when feeling on the Dreyfus case was at its height and when the feeling of the French Army in particular was at white heat, I happened to be in the town of Nîmes, through which, at the time, a body of troops was passing. The café in which I sat was filled with young sergeants. There were hardly any civilians present beside myself. There came into the place an elderly Jew, very short in stature, highly marked with the physical characteristics of his race, an unmistakable Jew. He was somewhat bent under the weight of his years, with fiery eyes and a singularly vibrating intonation of voice. He was selling broadsheets of the most violent kind, all of them insults against the Army. He came into this café with the sheets in his hand so that all could see the large capital letters of the headlines, and slowly went round the assembly ironically offering them to the lads in uniform with their swords at their side, for they were of the cavalry.

Every one knows the French temper on such occasions—a complete silence which may at any moment be transformed into something very different. One sergeant after another politely waved him aside and passed him on. He went round the whole lot of them, gazing into their faces with his piercing eyes, wearing the whole time an ironical smile of insult, describing at intervals the nature of his goods, and when he had done that he went out unharmed.

It was an astonishing sight. I have seen many others as astonishing and as vivid, but for courage I have never seen it surpassed. Here was a man, old and feeble, the member of a very small minority which he knew to be hated, and particularly hated by the people whom he challenged. Because he held one of his own people to be injured, he took this tremendous risk and went through this self-imposed task with a sort of pleasure in that risk. You may call it insolence, offensiveness, what you will: but you cannot deny it the title of courage. It was courage of the very highest quality.

I repeat: you may see evidence of that sort of courage in Jewish action throughout the world and in every age. You have the beginning of it in the Siege of Jerusalem; to-morrow, if the fear which we now all entertain should unhappily prove well founded, we shall see it again upon the same scale.

Take avarice. When the Jew is accused of avarice by his enemies they are reading into him that vice in a form of which they know themselves capable, which they themselves practise, which they fully understand, but which he never practises in their fashion. The Jew is adventurous with his money. He is a speculator, a trader. He is also a man who thinks of it in exact terms. He is never romantic about it. But he is almost invariably generous in the use of it. Our race, when it yields to the vice of avarice, is close, secretive, uncharitable. He is pitiless and sly in accumulation. He is vociferous in his insistence upon the exact terms of an agreed compact. He is also tenacious in the pursuit of anything which he has set out on, the accumulation of money among the rest. He is almost fanatical in his appetite for success in whatever he has undertaken, the accumulation of money among the rest. But to say that the money, once accumulated, is not generously used, is nonsense. There is not one of us who could not cite at once a dozen examples of Jewish generosity upon a scale which makes us ashamed.