The Jews

by Hilaire Belloc

At the same time a parallel movement appeared on the historical side of literature. A convention arose that in the clash between the Jews and the English of the Middle Ages the Jews were invariably right and the English invariably wrong. Where the struggle was between the Jew and the non-Jew abroad, the historian exceeded all bounds. The European hostile to the Jew was a senseless monster, and the Jew hostile to the European was a holy victim.

The whole story of Europe and of this country, in so far as it was affected by this very considerable factor, was distorted through suppression, and false emphasis and quite exceptional lying.

The general reader of history neither knew what part the Jewish question had played nor the claims that could be advanced for his own race in the conflict. And as historians live by copying one another, the legend was established in every school and college.

At the end of the process the Jews, in proportion to their numbers, held a power in this country beyond anything that has been seen in any other of the world. Poland at the end of the Middle Ages, when that country was most nearly comparable to Britain for the harbouring and support of the Jewish people, is the only parallel, and that a remote one.

Every English Government had (and has) its quota of Jews. They had entered the diplomatic service and the House of Lords; they swarmed in the House of Commons, in the Universities, in all the Government offices save the Foreign Office (and even there representatives of the Jewish nation have recently entered); they were exceedingly powerful in the Press: they were all-powerful in the City. No custom unsympathetic to their race, from the duel to popular clamour, survived. They could boast that England was not only the country where no distinction whatever was made in practice, let alone in law, between the Jew and the native, but that England was the only country where the Jew was always well received, where his natural defects counted least and where his natural abilities had most scope.

Such a state of affairs could not last. It was not natural. It was not consonant with hidden but deep popular tradition or with popular appetites; it corresponded only to the mood of one European community in its wealthier classes. A divergence between the cosmopolitan financial interests of the Jew and the particular national interests of Britain was bound to come. War on a large scale, though it did not imperil the country itself, was a warning of change. It appeared with the South African campaign before the end of the century. The position of the Jew was altered. Some dissatisfaction with his power began to stir. It was already muttering and beginning to show itself with the rise of commercial and maritime competition in the new German Empire which, in its turn, had become led, upon all its commercial side, by Jews. There was bound, I say, to be a reaction and a permanent one. While it was yet taking place, in the heat of the Great War, before it had reached the official world, that one of the English politicians who was best fitted to speak for the Jews, who was most intimate with them through manifold ties of friendship and hospitality, Mr. Arthur Balfour, was chosen to make the famous pronouncement in favour of Zionism. It came within a month of the great crisis of the war. Its object was to divide the general influence of the Jews throughout the world, which had hitherto been upon the whole opposed to the cause of the Allies, because, like every other neutral, the Jews were more and more convinced, as the campaigns dragged on, that the Central Empires were certain of victory.

Though this was the motive, the effect was to tie the British state yet closer to the fortunes of Israel, for here was England pledged to support, to defend, to act as a special protector over, the peculiar interests of the Jews, just where those interests would most challenge the whole of Christendom and of Islam, just where it would be most acutely difficult to confirm Jewish claims.

The declaration in favour of Zionism, the solemn pledge of the forces of the British State to an exceptional support of the Jew in a matter wholly to his benefit and not in any way to that of England, coming though it did after the climax of Jewish power had been reached and passed, was the last stage of that long process of alliance between the British commercial policy and its ruling classes on the one hand and the Jews upon the other.

Already, as I have said, that alliance was morally shaken. The great influx of poor Jews had shaken it. The mere effect of time, the inevitable revolt of the human conscience against an unnatural pretence and an obvious fiction, was bound to come, and was overdue. But although the alliance was already shaken, the English State remained officially closely interlocked with Jewry, and its last action, the demand for the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine, was, as has so often happened in the story of human development, at once the term and the turning-point of a process which had reached its conclusion; for it will be remarked throughout history that any force is most expressive, its manifestation of power most crude and most emphatic, in the perilous interval after its real strength has begun to decline and before its first open defeat.

But the problems presented by this experiment in Palestine merit a separate examination. To this I will now turn.