The Jews

by Hilaire Belloc

Another character which is affiliated to this first leading character of the Jew would seem to be the lucidity of his thought. The Jew's argument is never muddled. That is one of his prime assets not only in all discussion but in all action. It is also, if a cause of strength, a cause of the enmity he arouses: or (to use my milder term) of the "friction."

For an exactly constructed process of reasoning, from which there is no escape, has in it (for those less capable of it) something of the bully. A man may feel the conclusion to be false: perhaps he knows it to be false. He lacks the power to express his reasons. He may not know how to state the principles which his adversary has left out of account, or when to bring them into discussion, and he feels the iron logic offered to him like a pistol presented at the head of his better judgment. But for strength and for weakness also, lucidity is the mark of the Jew's mind. He carries that lucidity into the smallest details of whatever he may perform.

One must add to all this a certain intensity of action which is very noticeable and which again is a cause of friction between himself and those about him. Hear a Jew speaking, especially a Jew speaking upon the revolutionary platform, and note the high voltage at which the current is working. The energy which he uses is not the energy of a large flame but of a well-directed blow-pipe: a stream of heat. He is wholly absorbed, not in his own expression, but in actively penetrating the mind of his hearers. And here again is that difference in quality to which I have alluded. One might say indifferently that the Jew is never eloquent or that he is always eloquent when he speaks upon things that possess his soul. He is not eloquent in our fashion; but he is at any rate astonishingly effective in his own.

The Jew has this other characteristic which has become increasingly noticeable in our own time, but which is probably as old as the race: and that is a corporate capacity for hiding or for advertising at will: a power of "pushing" whatever the whole race desires advanced, or of suppressing what the whole race desires to suppress. And this also, however legitimately used, is a cause of friction.

Men get the feeling of a swarm in the presence of such action. They also get the feeling of being tricked: and it breeds bad blood.

In the aspect of the deliberate use of secrecy I shall deal with this character in my next chapter, for I think in that aspect it is a particular cause of friction which can be eliminated. But the general capacity and instinct of the Jew for corporate action in the "booming" of what he wants "boomed" and the "soft pedalling" of what he wants "soft pedalled" is ineradicable. It will always remain a permanent irritant in its effect upon those to whom it is applied. The best proof of it is that after the most violent "boom," after the talents of some particular Jew, or the scientific discovery of another, or the misfortunes of another, or the miscarriage of justice against another, has been shouted at us, pointed and iterated until we are all deafened, there comes an inevitable reaction, and the same men who were half hypnotized into the desired mood are nauseated with it and refuse a repetition of the dose.

The converse is true. Men who find that some important matter has been suppressed, some bad scandal in the State or some trick in commerce because Jewry desired it to be suppressed, are soon on the alert. They will not suffer the operation as quietly the second time as they did the first. Indeed they tend if anything to grow too suspicious. Anyhow, in both cases this ineradicable racial habit, a cause perhaps of Jewish survival and certainly an element of Jewish strength, is also a cause of acute friction between them and us.

But a mere category of this kind is, as I have said, useless to explain the fundamental quality, the hidden root, of the ceaseless conflict between the very soul of the Jew and the soul of the society around him. All these points are but manifestations of some profound, some subterranean power for contrast, the value of which we cannot grasp, but the effects of which are only too apparent. And there remains in the minds of those who most rely upon this race and of those who most suspect them the sense of an impassable gulf between them and ourselves. It is the recognition, the admission of such a contrast, the telling of the truth about it, the working upon it as a necessary condition, which must form the foundation for any solution at which we can arrive.

* * * * *

There is one feature in the European's attitude towards the Jews which must be specially dealt with, and that is the false impression that the friction between us and them is in the main a quarrel with their wealth.