The Jews

by Hilaire Belloc

In point of fact the Jew has collectively a power to-day, in the white world, altogether excessive. It is not only an excessive power, it is inevitably a corporate power and, therefore, a semi-organized power. It is not only excessive and in the main organized, it was, until the recent reaction began, a rapidly increasing power—and most people believe it to be still increasing. To that the whole world outside the Jewish community will testify.

The criterion by which we may judge whether any form of power is irritant to those whom it affects is not the testimony of those who exercise the power, but the testimony of those over whom it is exercised. There never was a tyranny in the world, not even one of those personal tyrannies (which have been so much more highly organized and so much more direct than this power of the Jews), there never has been a despotism in history, which would not tell you that it was accidental, or necessary, or, in any case, innocent of any motive of oppression. And history universally replies: "To judge that, you must ask those who felt the pressure; not those who exercised it."

Now those who feel the pressure in the matter we are now examining are unanimous. They differ in the degree of their resentment from those to whom the thing is so intolerable that they are already in active revolt against it, to those who feel it merely as a distant though an approaching discomfort. But everybody feels it in some degree. It is a universal sensation running throughout the nerves of the modern world and it is growing too fast in degree and extent to be ignored.

I have already quoted the effect upon those hundreds of educated men taken into the temporary Civil service during the late war, when they found, holding the locked gate of one monopoly after another, the international Jew. His control of finance needs no discussion. If the individual banker or financier is not aware of it, the most of those who are affected are acutely aware of it. Men exaggerate in giving it a sort of conscious personality, but they certainly do not exaggerate when they point to its effects. The Jew must remember, what it may be difficult for him to accept and what is certainly true, that not only is his domination very bitterly resented but that his presence in any position of control whatsoever is odious to the race among which he moves. Everybody feels that about any form of alien control, much more do they feel it about that form which they instinctively know to be most alien of all. Every one has noticed this control exercised in the form of keeping silence upon what it was to the disadvantage of Israel to have known; in the form of the advertising of what it was to the advantage of Israel to have advertised; in the form of the giving and withholding of credit; in the form of attack in the Press against nations with whom Israel had a quarrel and the defence in the Press of those (they have now almost disappeared) upon whom Israel, in the immediate past, relied for defence. And everybody has discovered—what is not unjust, indeed, what is inevitable, but what is none the less a source of exasperation—the solidarity of the Jewish race where the interests of any member of it were concerned.[1]

But if the thing were felt everywhere as acutely and as consciously as it is felt in special groups to-day—as it is felt, for instance, in one particular section of English opinion already represented in the Press, is felt in a wider section of French opinion, and in a still wider section of Polish opinion—then the matter would be simple. We could then say that an issue of the clearest kind had arisen, and forbid a small alien minority to decide the destinies of those among whom it lives and of whom it is not. The answer would be obvious, and the only difficulty would be how the Jewish control might be lessened without grievous injustice to innocent individuals.

But the thing is not so felt. It is modified, as I have said, by the varying degrees of intensity in which it is recognized and by the other international forces which come into play.

If we consider the varying political traditions and the varying international forces, if we examine the world's national groups, we shall find something like this: In the vast body of Russia a position most paradoxical. For years the Jew was everywhere openly attacked and hated in those parts of the Russian Empire where he was allowed to live in large numbers. These were nowhere within Russia proper but upon the western outskirts of that empire, within what was once the old Polish kingdom and largely within what is now the restored Republic of Poland. But the Russian traditional antagonism to the Jew changed in a few weeks of chaos to something not opposite but novel and different. The Russian allowed a prodigious revolution to be made by the Jews, he accepted the loot of that revolution which the Jew secured to him; he has submitted wholly in the towns, partly in the country, to a tyranny exercised by Jews ever since that complete reversal of his national history, now four years old.

The external political power of what was once the Russian Empire has disappeared. The Jews have killed it. But the great mass of Russian humanity remains strongly affected by this curious change. Where popular instinct works untrammelled the old and violent passionate antagonism between the Russian and the Jew survives. You see it in the hotch potch of the Ukraine, the inhabitants of which, in spite of all theories, are of Russian race and tradition, and the central town of which is the sacred region of Russia as a member of Christendom. There, for all the Jewish Committees with large towns under their complete control, there have been repeated revolts. But in the greater part of European Russia at least, and in much of what was once the Asiatic Empire, the Jews hold what is left of the Executive government.

So far as we can judge from the very imperfect accounts which reach us (for nowhere is the weapon of secrecy more ruthlessly used), the mass of the Russians, that is, the peasantry, are in two minds. To the action of the Jewish despotism in the town they are indifferent, but to his early attempts against themselves they were bitterly opposed. They have suffered at his hands and they thought him a tyrant. But the Jew seems to have dropped this interference and the Russian soil to have settled down as a peasant proprietary. On the other hand, it was a revolution guided by those same Jewish Committees which secured the peasant in the possession of his land. The Russian peasant has always regarded the land as his own. He had, I understand, regarded that odd, pedantic measure, "The Liberation of the Serfs," as only another name for the robbing him of his land; and when the organization of Russian society dissolved in the strain of war, he poured over the great estates and took back what he thought was his own.