The Jews

by Hilaire Belloc

Listen to the conversation of such a man as, having thus engaged in intimate commercial relationship with the Jew, falls upon misfortune. He spends the rest of his life denouncing the Jews as a race and his own companion in misfortune in particular. He has no right to do it. It is undignified; it is puerile, but, worst of all, it is unjust. He presumably knew what he was doing when he entered into what could not but be a difficult relationship. The consequences of that relationship he should accept whether they turn out well for him or ill.

We find something perhaps even worse to note in the attitude of those who are successful in their business through an alliance with the Jew. For in this case gratitude should be added to justice, and that gratitude is very rarely shown. On the contrary, the non-Jewish partner is for ever in a mood of complaint about his share. He is perpetually in a grievance that he has been overreached, or that he has been bullied, or that he has been robbed, save in those very rare cases where the success is so overwhelming, the fortunes so rapid, that there is no room for a grudge. In almost every other case that I have come across there is that element of recrimination—behind the Jew's back—even under conditions of success.

I know very well what can be said upon the other side. It can be said that what I have called upon a former page the "ruthlessness" of the Jew in commercial relations, as well as his tenacity and all the rest, make the contest unequal; that in a partnership between Jew and non-Jew the non-Jew is, as a fact, often overreached and is, as a fact, often left (as the pretty vocabulary of modern commerce has it) "in the cart." But pray why did the non-Jew enter into the alliance at all? Was it not precisely in order that he should benefit, if he could, by those very qualities which he later denounces? He expected that those qualities which make for the success of the Jew in commerce would also benefit himself. He knew that there must always be a certain amount of competition, even within such an alliance. He backed himself to watch his own interests under conditions which he knew perfectly well when he entered into them. He has not a leg to stand upon in quarrelling with the results of the relationship, for in so doing he is merely quarrelling with his own judgment and, for the matter of that, his own plot.

If a man cannot tolerate the contrast between the Jewish race and our own, or if he regards that race as possessing energies which will invariably defeat him in the competition of commerce, then let him keep away from a Jewish alliance altogether. It is the simplest plan. But to immix himself with the Jewish commercial activity and then to grumble at the results is despicable.

All this is worse, of course, when one is dealing with relations even closer than those of commerce. Those relations are numerous in the modern world, and disingenuousness in them takes the worst possible form. Men, especially of the wealthier classes of the gentry, will make the closest friends of Jews with the avowed purpose of personal advantage. They think the friendship will help them to great positions in the State, or to the advancement of private fortune, or to fame. In that calculation they are wise. For the Jew has to-day exceptional power in all these things. They therefore have the Jew continually at their tables, they stay continually under the Jew's roof. In all the relations of life they are as intimate as friends can be. Yet they relieve the strain which such an unnatural situation imposes by a standing sneer at their Jewish friends in their absence. One may say of such men (and they are to-day an increasing majority among our rich) that the falsity of their situation has got on their nerves. It has become a sort of disease with them; and I am very certain that when the opportunity comes, when the public reaction against Jewish power rises, clamorous, insistent and open, they will be among the first to take their revenge. It is abominable, but it is true.

And this truth applies not only to friendships, it even applies to marriages. Marriage between Christian and Jew is, in that rank, an affair of interest, and the bitterness the relation breeds is excessive.

This disingenuousness, then—lack of candour on the part of our race in its dealings with the Jew—a vice particularly rife among the wealthy and middle classes (far less common among the poor), extends, as I have said, to history. We dare not, or will not teach in our history books the plain facts of the relations between our own race and the Jews. We throw the story of these relations, which are among the half-dozen leading factors of history, right into the background even when we do mention it. In what they are taught of history the schoolboy and the undergraduate come across no more than a line or two upon those relations. The teacher cannot be quite silent upon the expulsion of the Jews under Edward I or upon their return under Cromwell. A man cannot read the history of the Roman Empire without hearing of the Jewish war. A man cannot read the Constitutional History of England without hearing of the special economic position of Jews under the Mediaeval Crown. But the vastness of the subject, its permanent and insistent character throughout two thousand years; its great episodes; its general effect—all that is deliberately suppressed.

How many people, for instance, of those who profess a good knowledge of the Roman Empire, even in its details, are aware, let alone have written upon the tremendous massacres and counter-massacres of Jews and Europeans, the mass of edicts alternately protecting and persecuting Jews; the economic position of the Jew, especially in the later empire; the character of the dispersion?

There took place in Cyprus and in the Libyan cities under Hadrian a Jewish movement against the surrounding non-Jewish society far exceeding in violence the late wreckage of Russia, which to-day fills all our thoughts. The massacres were wholesale and so were the reprisals. The Jews killed a quarter of a million of the people of Cyprus alone, and the Roman authorities answered with a repression which was a pitiless war.

One might pile up instances indefinitely. The point is, that the average educated man has never been allowed to hear of them. What a factor the Jew was in that Roman State from which we all spring, how he survived its violent antagonism to him and his antagonism to it; the special privilege whereby he was excepted from a worship of its gods; his handling of its finances—all the intimate parallel which it affords to later times is left in silence. The average educated man who has been taught, even in some fullness, his Roman History, leaves that study with the impression that the Jews (if he had noticed them at all) are but an insignificant detail in the story.