The Jews

by Hilaire Belloc

That, I say roughly, is the expression of the patriotic instinct in the European man. That is what he has felt for many and many a great State in the past and for every polity to which he has ever belonged; that is what he feels to-day for his country.

The Jew has the same feeling, of course, for his Israel, but since that nation is not a collection of human beings, inhabiting one place and living by traditions rooted in its soil, since it has not a strong, visible, external form, his patriotism is necessarily of a different complexion. It has different connotations and our patriotism seems negligible to him.

The implied fallacies current in the modern industrial revolutionary formulæ, in such phrases as "What does it matter to the working man whether he is exploited by a German or an English master?" or, again, "Why should the individual Tom Smith be sacrificed for an abstraction called England?" or again, "Nationalism is the great obstacle to the full development of humanity"—all that sort of thing, which we feel by instinct and can, if it is necessary, prove by reason to be nonsense in our case, sounds, in Jewish ears, as very good sense indeed. For in his case these things involve no fallacies at all; they apply to him vividly and exactly. Why should the Jew be sacrificed for England? In what way is England, or France, or Ireland, or any other nation necessary to him? Again, is it not obvious in his eyes that these terms, "France, Ireland, England, Russia," are but abstractions? The real thing in his eyes when he thinks of us, is the individual and his certain needs, especially his physical and material needs; because upon these there can be no doubt; upon these all are agreed; these are visible and tangible. "England," "France," "Poland" are whimsies.

It is true that if you were to put his special case to the Jew with similar force and say, "No Jew should run any risk for Israel," "no Jew should suffer any inconvenience by trying to help a fellow Jew in distress," "the idea of Israel is a vague abstraction—all that counts is the individual Jew and especially his physical requirements"; if you said that sort of thing you would be offending the most profound instincts of Jewish patriotism and you would, in fact, clash with the overt and covert action of the Jews throughout the world. But the Jew would answer that, as his was an international polity, the argument applying to our national polity did not apply to him; that his feelings, though analogous to ours, were of a different kind, and that, at any rate, he cannot sacrifice a fine idea of his like Communism for our provincial and local habit, called by us Europeans "the love of our country."

There is more than this in the business. Even those truths which we know to be truths have little effect upon us, unless they enter into the practice of our lives. There are, no doubt, a number of Jews who would admit at once the truth of any nationalist statement made by a European. When a Frenchman, or an Englishman, or a Russian says to him, "My first duty is to my people; I must keep them strong as well as in being and I must sacrifice my interests to theirs when it is necessary," there are many Jews who would answer: "You are quite right. The theory is sound. Man can only function as a part of a particular society," and so forth; but it is one thing to recognize a truth and another thing to experience it in one's bones, as it were, and these truths, even where he is admitting them, are truths indifferent to the Jew.

Therefore when, as in the particular case of Russia, a national feeling stood in the way of an abstract ideal, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to the Jew that the national obstacle should go to the wall in order that his ideal of Communism might triumph.

There lay behind this great change in the Russian towns, and the capture of what remains of Russian government by the Jewish Committees, a force most positive. It was the sense of social justice, the indignation against indefensible evils.

That sense of social justice, that indignation against indefensible modern evils, we all feel. There may be men among the wealthier classes of Western Europe who are so ignorant of the past, or so stupid, that they do honestly believe Industrial Capitalism to be an inevitable and even perhaps a good thing. But such men must be very rare. Not only must they be rare, but they cannot have any wide social experience. A man has only got to live the life of the poor in the great industrial cities for a day to see the enormity of the wrong that has to be righted. There are, of course, not a few but many thousands of individuals who try to find arguments for Industrial Capitalism, either because they benefit themselves through the system and are the richer by it, or because they are the hired servants of those who so benefit—and of this kind are the writers in the capitalist press. But all these, who are hired advocates, or advocates with a direct proprietary interest in the continuance of the modern disease, may be neglected; for they are not in good faith. They are not really arguing that the thing is good in itself, they are only trying to find arguments as lawyers do for something which they have to defend and which in their hearts they admit is evil; or to the evil of which they are indifferent so long as it gives them a disproportionate share of material enjoyment.

We must add to these the sincere man who will admit the domination of Industrial Capitalism because he honestly believes that, bad as it is, it is now become inevitable and that to tamper with it would bring the whole State into anarchy. "Such as it is," he would say, "the structure of our society now depends upon it. We may palliate its evils, we may try very gradually to transform its worst features. But in its essence it must remain as it is, or our last state will be worse than our first."

Of this kind are those who argue that any social experiment antagonistic to Industrial Capitalism, if pushed sufficiently far, would result in famine and chaos and even physical evils far worse than the physical evils which the mass of men have to suffer in the great towns which capitalism has produced.