The Jews

by Hilaire Belloc

That impression has been greatly weakened by the recent revolutionary activity of the Jew surging up from the depths, appearing upon the surface, and producing the great upheaval in Russia, and the attempted upheavals elsewhere. But though the new Jewish revolutionary movement has shaken the old insistence on Jewish wealth it is hard to eradicate it. It has been present throughout the ages, and will remain at the back of people's minds perhaps for ever, because the few Jews who do concentrate on piling up great fortunes concentrate on that task so entirely. Yet the impression is false and is the fruitful cause of the worst misunderstandings.

For the Jews are not a rich nation, and the very fact that they stand in the popular mind—and especially in the mind of rich people in times of corruption—for wealth, is an example of the way in which they are misunderstood and of the way in which injustice to the Jew arises.

The Jews are a poor nation. An enemy would say that they were poor because they did not work, but this again would be an injustice, because the Jew works exceedingly hard and has often in the past and does still in many places work hard, not only in negotiation and commerce but with his hands.

We see the Jews in the Middle Ages monopolizing important manual occupations in some districts—dyeing and shipbuilding, for instance. And there are many parts of Eastern Europe where they work upon the land to-day.

The Jews are a poor nation because they are an alien nation and because their activities are for the most part condemned to working against the grain, in a society which is not their own. But that they are a poor nation is not only true but abundantly evident to any one who has travelled and watched their various settlements with any sympathy.

Now that they have arrived in such great numbers in the West people are beginning to appreciate this. We have already seen how, a lifetime ago, when the Jews of the West (I mean especially in France and England and America) were a small number of merchants and financiers, the great wealth of a very small number among them was not counterbalanced in our experience by the exceeding poverty of the mass. But to-day we can see for ourselves how true it is that, once you get below the exceptional fortunes and a comparatively small middle-class, the Jewish nation is no more than millions of exceedingly poor families.

Those who have watched them outside the West, those who have seen them in their great eastern communities where the bulk of the race still resides, in the Marches of Russia, will abundantly agree. It helps us to understand the Jewish problem if we grasp the fact that a great part of the Jewish complaint against us is precisely this poverty to which the bulk of the Jews are condemned. It is all very well to sneer at the Jewish complaint of persecution and oppression and to cite ironically, whenever it arises, the immense fortunes of a few families like the Rothschilds and the Sassoons, the Monds, the Samuels and the rest. From the point of view of the average Jew that is not the way the thing looks at all. What he notices, and notices rightly, is that he has no part in that well-distributed, solid, permanent, inherited wealth which is the mark of a healthy European community.

Further (a most important point already touched on in passing), these great fortunes are ephemeral.

In the European nations you have a mass of great fortunes far larger in number, and even in total, than the Jewish financial fortunes. But those great fortunes have been in the past and are still, wherever our society is healthy, permanent. They run through European history in the shape of the great families, in the shape of the nobility.