The Jews

by Hilaire Belloc

The great territorial families in this country have been wealthy for centuries and remain in established wealth, and the same is in the main true of the great Italian families, it is obviously true of the great German families, and, in spite of the great changes of the last century and a half, it is still largely true of the old French families. It is not true of the Jewish families. The vast Jewish fortunes which have marked history rise suddenly and melt again almost as suddenly. A Jew will begin in some very small way—as a pawnbroker in Liverpool, for instance, or a very small bookseller in Frankfort. You will find his son a great banker, his grandson so wealthy as to command politics for a generation, and then (if you will watch the process in the past—to take a modern unfinished instance is of course misleading) at last, and soon, the name disappears again, and disappears for ever.

Whom have you representing to-day the few great Jewish fortunes of the early Middle Ages in England? They were all ruined before the end of the thirteenth century. Whom have you representing the later great Jewish fortunes on the Rhine, the fortunes of the sixteenth century and the early seventeenth? They have utterly gone. Who have you left representing the considerable Jewish houses of Medieval Venice? of Genoa? of Rome?

The causes of this rapid fluctuation are many. They all attach to the peculiar position, as well as to the peculiar character, of the Jew. We find them partly in the passion for speculation which the Jewish intelligence naturally harbours. We find them still more, I think, in the instinctive opposition to the Jew which his alien surroundings perpetually arouse.

It is, however, important to remember this last point. From our point of view the Jew, when he does get rich, seems to get much too rich and to get rich much too quickly, and he exercises far too much power through his wealth; for we think of him the whole time as an alien with no right to any position. But the Jew sees it in a very different light. In his point of view his effort to accumulate wealth is always heavily handicapped. When he succeeds he only succeeds through his own tenacity and the patriotic co-operation of his fellows, and he always holds his new-found wealth on an insecure tenure. What looks to us like the breakdown of a Jewish fortune through speculation, seems to the Jew the fatal recurrent result of unending opposition.

In connection with the illusion of a wealthy Jewish race, you have, of course, the matter which I briefly mentioned above, the connection between our wealthier, and therefore governing classes, and the Jewish wealth of the moment. A great part of the illusion, as I have said, is due to the fact that the gentry of every epoch come into contact with the Jew only as a rich man, and it is the capital modern vice of our own gentry, their passion for mere wealth and their subservience to it, which has largely accounted for this dangerous misunderstanding.

Look around you in Western Europe to-day and see what people mean by this story of Jewish wealth. See who the people are that allude continually to it and spread the idea of it. They are the rich Europeans, who, in their subservience to crude wealth, in their habit of gauging everything by that wealth and of submitting to almost any indignity for the purpose of obtaining more wealth, marry their daughters to Jews, serve Jewish interests, and, while perpetually sneering at the Jew behind his back, call him to his face by his most intimate name and make the most of his hospitality. Which of them ever knows a middle-class Jew, let alone a poor Jew? Why, most of them are actually ignorant of the fact that this mass of poor Jews exists at all! They serve the Jew when he is wealthy and only when he is wealthy. They envy him basely as a wealthy man and only as a wealthy man. They prostitute their dignity, they sell their fellow-Europeans, not from any genuine affection for the Jewish race—indeed there is no class in the community, closely intermixed with the Jews as they are, which feel the friction more than the gentry—but simply from a thirst for money, which they happen to find held in great masses by a few Jewish families.

It is most noticeable that other aspects of Jewish activity remain unused by the wealthy class, the gentry—and therefore by the State. Whether it would be wise to use them or not is another matter. At any rate, the motive for leaving them unused is the fact that they are not connected with wealth. The Jewish intelligence which might so often have served the policy of a Statesman is largely left unused. The cosmopolitan position of the Jew when it is used is used for little more than spying; and that profound force, the historical memory of the Jew, is neglected almost altogether. With this neglect goes a natural and evil result, the failure on the part of the European governing classes, especially to-day, to safeguard the community against the troubles which are bound to arise from the clashing of interests between the Jews and the people among whom they dwell.

It may sound paradoxical, but it is true, that if the Statesmen of Europe, and the hereditary families of the European nations who still take so much part in the conduct of those nations, had thought less of the Jewish money power and more of the Jews as a whole they would have benefited both parties in a very different fashion. We have seen the artificial protection of the Jews of Eastern Europe because individual Statesmen have been subservient to the commands of very rich individual Jewish bankers. But the thing has been done blunderingly. It has served only to anger the independent nationalities of the East, notably the Poles, the Roumanians and the Hungarians who have experience of the difficulties inseparable from an alien minority. Our politicians have treated the whole affair externally and mechanically, merely obeying orders without trying to understand.

The ultimate result of such interference by our Western politicians is unhappily certain. The last state of the Jews in Eastern Europe will be worse than the first. Their sufferings will be greater than in the past, and that because, instead of acting from attempted comprehension and sympathetic comprehension of the Jewish difficulties the politicians, who have acted as the servants of a few wealthy Jews, have merely obeyed the orders of these rich men and have done so with the secret reluctance that always accompanies self-surrender to a wage.

Is it not apparent, as we look through history, that the permanent power of the Jew or, at any rate, the celebrity of his nation is utterly distinct from those chance accumulations of wealth which a few individuals owe to the national passion for speculation and a cosmopolitan position?