The Jews

by Hilaire Belloc

The Jew can plead something further in extenuation of this practice. Family names did not grow up naturally with them, as with us, in the course of the Middle Ages. The Jew retained, as we long retained in the middle and lower ranks of European society, the simple habit of possessing one personal name and differentiating a man from his fellows by introducing the name of his father. Thus a Jew in the sixteenth century was Moses ben Solomon, just as the Cromwells' ancestor of the same generation was Williams ap Williams. He had not what we call a surname or family name. In the same way until varying dates, early in France and England and other Western countries, much later in Wales, Brittany, Poland and the Slav countries of the East, a man was known only by his personal name, distinguished, if that were necessary, by mentioning also the name of his father, or, in some cases, of his tribe.

Properly speaking the Jews have no surnames, and they may say with justice: "Since we were compelled to take surnames arbitrarily (which was the case in the Germanies and sometimes elsewhere as well), you cannot blame us if we attach no particular sanctity to the custom." If a Jew of plain Jewish name was compelled by alien force to take the fancy name of Flowerfield, he is surely free to change that fancy name, for which he is not responsible, to any other he chooses. There was a good reason for the Government to force a name upon him. Only thus could he be registered and his actions traced. But forced it was, and therefore, on him, not morally binding.

All this is true, but there remains an element not to be accounted for on any such pleas. There are in the experience of all of us, an experience repeated indefinitely, men who have no excuse whatsoever for a false name save that advantage of deceit. Men whose race is universally known will unblushingly adopt a false name as a mask, and after a year or two pretend to treat it as an insult if their original and true name be used in its place. This is particularly the case with the great financial families. Some, indeed, have the pride to maintain the original patronymic and refuse to change it in any of their descendants. But the great mass of them concealed their relations one with another by adopting all manner of fantastic titles, and there can be no object in such a proceeding save the object of deception. I admit it is a form of protection, and especially do I admit that in its origin it may have mainly derived from a necessity for self-protection. But I maintain that to-day the practice does nothing but harm to the Jew. There are other races which have suffered persecution, many of them, up and down the world, and we do not find in them a universal habit of this kind.

Again, who can say that the bearing of a Jewish name to-day, or at any rate in the immediate past, is or was a handicap in commerce where Occidental nations were concerned? And as for the Eastern nations, the Jews there are so sharply differentiated that a false name can be of no service merely to hide the racial character of its bearer. There must be another motive present.

The same arguments apply for and against other forms of secrecy. A man may plead that if secrecy in relationship were not maintained the dislike of Jews would lead to false accusations. The Jew is highly individual, especially in intellectual affairs. He takes his own line. He expresses his opinions with singular courage. And such individual opinions will often differ violently from those of men with whom he is most closely connected. "Why," I can understand some distinguished Jewish publicist in England saying, "should I be compromised by people knowing that such-and-such a Bolshevist in Moscow or in New York is my cousin or nephew? I am conservative in temperament; I have always served faithfully the state in which I live; I heartily disapprove of these people's views and actions. If their relationship with me were known I should fall under the common ban. That would be unjust. Therefore I keep the relationship secret."

The plea is sound, but it does not cover the ground. It is not sufficient to explain, for instance, the habit of hiding relationships between men equally distinguished and equally approved in the different societies in which they move. It does not explain why we must be left in ignorance of the fact that a man whom we are treating as the best of fellow-citizens should hide his connection with another man who is treated with equal honour in another country. There are occasions where national conflicts make the thing explicable. A Jew in England with a brother in Germany and a father at Constantinople might well be excused in 1915 for calling himself Montmorency. Yet we note that often where there is most need to hide the connection, the connection is not hidden at all. On the contrary, it is openly advertised. We all recollect the name of one Jewish financier who was most unjustly treated during the war. He had faithfully served this country and the breach of his connection with it was (to my mind at least, and I think to most people who can judge the matter) a very bad thing for Britain in the conflict. Yet there was here no change of name and no attempt to hide the connection between himself and his brother, who stood, in another capital, for the financial policy of our enemies.

Again, the Rothschilds, present in the various capitals of Europe, have never pretended to hide their mutual relationships, and no one has thought any the worse of them, nor has this open practice in any way diminished their financial power.

There must be more than necessity at work; I suggest that there is something like instinct, or, at any rate, an inherited tradition so strong that recourse to it seems natural.

Now it cannot be too forcibly emphasized that secrecy in any of these forms—working through secret societies, using false names, hiding of relationships, denying Jewish origin—specially exasperates this, our own race, among which the Jews are thrown in their dispersion. It is invariably discovered, sooner or later, and whenever it is discovered men have an angry feeling that they have been duped, even in cases where the practice is most innocent and is no more than the following of something like a ritual.