The Jews

by Hilaire Belloc

The rest of the world is either of Islam or heathen. In the heathen world, so far, the Jew has little place. He has a strong grip on India, of course, but only through the British Raj, not through the native population; and in China, except as a quasi-European merchant, he has no power at all; neither has he over the strong and organized nationality of Japan.

Such are the degrees, very roughly, of the problem; such the differences of its quality in the various national groups to-day. Of these the two most interesting states of the problem by far, because they are changing with the greatest rapidity, are found in France, in England and in the United States.

I have said that the second modifying condition was the difference of civic traditions of the various nations. Here again you have a differentiation from East to West. But within it a differentiation, ultimately due to religion, from North to South. In Russia there was never any tradition of keeping silence upon the Jew, or of respecting the Jew at all. He was, until the recent revolution, the national enemy, and there was the end of it. Similarly in Poland, Roumania and the vaguer populations of their borders, and even in the old Hungary, the Jew was talked of openly as belonging to a separate nationality and, on the whole, a hostile one.

But as one got west another spirit emerged, another tradition. It was "the thing" to treat the Jew as a citizen. This fashion was weaker in the Germanies than in the Low Countries, France, or England; it was everywhere present west of the Elbe.

It was a tradition flowing from two sources: the commercial and protestant England of the seventeenth century, the sceptical France of the eighteenth. The Jew (according to this spirit) merited special protection and special respect. He must be protected and respected even in his passion for secrecy; so that at last the mere mention of his existence in the cultivated and directing classes of the west became something of an oddity.

From this spirit proceeded the Liberal fiction or convention which I dealt with in the second chapter of this book. It was clinched, it was given permanent form, by the enthusiasm and severe doctrine of the French Republicans, which arose at a moment when Israel was regarded as a religion and its national quality was forgotten. Since all religion was thought to be dying, since, further, an enthusiasm had arisen against almost any religion which exercised civic power (notably the Catholic Church), this Jewish religion, formerly regarded as inimical to the State, or at any rate separate from it, was naturally accorded a special privilege. That strange system arose, the death of which we are now watching after its brief life of somewhat more than a century, whereby the Jew was permitted to wear the mask of nationalities other than his own, and to function everywhere as though he were a citizen, not of Israel, but of the nation in which he chanced to find himself.

Against this attitude arose at last the powerful plea of nationalism. In England, as we shall see in the next chapter, this plea was less strong than elsewhere, because the interests of international Jewish finance and of British commerce were for so long nearly identical. In Italy, where the Jew was naturally closely connected with the nationalist movement on account of its antagonism to the Papacy, national feeling clashed little with the anomaly of the Jew. But in France, especially after the defeat of 1870, the contrast became stronger and stronger, just as it is strengthening to-day in Germany after the defeat of 1918.

It was that clash between the "city" of Israel and the other "cities" in which we Europeans function, to which allusion has been made on a former page. It would be very convenient, no doubt, to the "City" of Israel if all other "cities" disappeared and left an open field for Jewish operations. But they do not propose to disappear; and though our devotion to them may seem inexplicable to the Jew, he must accept it as a permanent force; for the patriotism of the European will not weaken.

In the United States this Liberal tradition or convention, this conception that the Jew must be treated as a full citizen, was far stronger even than it was in the West of Europe. It was in the very soul of the Constitution, and, what is more important, in the very soul of the people. For such a spirit was nourished not only in doctrine but in practice by the appearance, in vast quantities, of immigrants from many different countries, all of whom were absorbed in and merged by the American spirit. If ever there was a field in which the false conception that a Jew could be a Jew and at the same time the full citizen of another nation, that field was the United States of America. Yet it is there that the problem is now reaching its most acute form; and the reason is that side by side with this strong civic tradition there goes a complete freedom of speech and a very active public opinion. The reality became too much for theory and the Jew was recognized as something apart. He will never fall into the background again.