This is a very different matter. The mere sense of superiority is not something in which any special policy can be recommended, because it is there and cannot be remedied. It is part of the whole position. But it is possible to restrain its expression. For that purpose it is of value to define it, to put it upon record and to estimate its effect upon our issue.
The Jew individually feels himself superior to his non-Jewish contemporary and neighbour of whatever race, and particularly of our race; the Jew feels his nation immeasurably superior to any other human community, and particularly to our modern national communities in Europe.
The frank statement of so simple and fundamental a truth is rarely made. It will sound, I fear, shocking in many ears. To many others it will sound not so much shocking as comic, and to many more stupefying.
The idea that the Jew should think himself our superior is something so incomprehensible to us that we forget the existence of the feeling. If it be constantly reiterated, for the purpose of dealing with this great political difficulty, it is perhaps reluctantly admitted, but still held as sort of abnormal, bewildering truth. I contend that the forgetfulness of that truth, the attempt to solve the problem without that truth remaining constant and fixed in the mind of the statesman, is in a very large measure the cause of our failure in the past; and that the way the Jew openly acts upon it in gesture, tone, manner, social assertion, is a very important factor in the quarrel between his race and ours.
Consider the attitude of statesmanship in the past towards this vital conflict. In every such attitude I think the Jewish conviction of superiority has been omitted.
For the attitudes taken up by European statesmen in the past towards the alien Jewish element in their midst have always been one of three sorts:—
(1) Either they have acted as though there were no Jewish nation, as though the Jew were merely a private citizen like any other who happened to have peculiar opinions and customs of his own but who was not substantially different from the men around him.
(2) Or they have attempted to suppress, or to expel, or to destroy the Jew with ignominy and violence.
(3) Or, while recognizing the existence of the Jewish nation as something separate from their own fellow-nationals whom they have to administrate, the statesmen have tried to arrive at equilibrium by a sort of pact in which Jewish separateness was recognized, but under conditions of disability.
Now in all these three methods there is absent all recognition of the Jewish feeling of superiority.