The Jews

by Hilaire Belloc

Still less is it sufficient to say that the Jew is everywhere the organizer and leader of revolution and that we only see him at work in Russia with greater vigour and thoroughness because the opportunity is there greater.

The Jew is not everywhere a revolutionary. He is everywhere discontented with a society alien to him: that is natural and inevitable. But he does not exercise his power invariably, or even ordinarily, towards the oversetting of an established social order by which, incidentally, he often largely benefits.

You do not find the Jew in history perpetually leading the innumerable revolts which citizens in the mass make against the privileged or the superior conditions of the minority. He has sometimes benefited by these movements in the past; more often suffered. We often find individual Jews sympathizing with the revolutionary side, but we also find many individual Jews sympathizing with the other. The Jew is not, in the history of Europe, the prime agent of revolution: quite the contrary. The great acts of violence, successful and unsuccessful, which have marked our society from the agrarian troubles of pagan Rome to the French Revolution, the land war in Ireland, the Chartist Movement in London, or whatever modern movement you will, have appealed much more to the fighting instincts and political traditions of our race than they have to the Jews. They are marked everywhere by an attitude towards property and patriotism which are the very opposite of the Jews' characteristics. The Revolutions of the past were for the better distribution of property and for the betterment of the State. Often they were openly undertaken because patriotism had been offended by defeat in war and because the Nation was thought to be betrayed. Usually they were jingo and always for distribution of wealth.

It is the unique mark of the Russian revolution and of its attempted extension elsewhere that it repudiates patriotism and the division of property. In that, it differs from all others; and it is markedly, obviously, Jewish. But why had the Jews a chance of action in Russia which they lacked elsewhere?

What were the special characters in the Russian opportunity which made the Jew the creator of the whole movement?

There are, I take it, three main factors present in this case peculiarly suitable to the Jewish effort.

In the first place, this revolution fell upon, and was directed towards, a particular social phenomenon in which that profound instinct in the European, the desire for settled property, had decayed. It fell upon the state of affairs called Industrial Capitalism, the chief mark of which is the destruction in the mass subjected to it (or, at any rate, the atrophying) of that essential part of the European soul—ownership. The Jew is, undoubtedly, unable to sympathize with us in that central core of our civic instincts. He has never understood the European sense of property and I doubt if he ever will.

But in Russia Industrial Capitalism was quite new. The resentment against it was keen. The victims were the sons of peasants, or had themselves been born peasants, so that this proletarian mass in the Russian towns, though less than a tenth of the whole nation, was peculiarly open to propaganda against its masters. And an attack successfully conducted, on that weakest point of modern Capitalism, might easily succeed and then spread to neighbouring industrialized centres in Poland, Germany, and so westward.

Now the attack on this international phenomenon, an attack directed against Industrial Capitalism, required an international force. It needed men who had international experience and were ready with an international formula.

There are two, and only two, organized international forces in Europe to-day with a soul and identity in them. One is the Catholic Church, and the other is Jewry. But the Catholic Church, for reasons which I will discuss in a moment, cannot and never will directly attack industrial capitalism. It will undoubtedly attack that system in flank and indirectly destroy it in the long run wherever the Faith has a strong hold upon masses of people. But it will not and cannot directly attack it. The Jew, on the other hand, is free to attack it precisely because our sense of property means nothing to him, is to him something strange, and even, I think, comic. Further, the Jew was present, he was on the spot. The Church was not.