The Jews

by Hilaire Belloc

I know it is the custom to throw all the responsibility upon the other side, to be perpetually devising instruments for their guidance which soon become instruments for their oppression, and in general to imagine a problem wherein the part of the European is purely negative and all the work has to be done by the Jewish stranger.

That attitude is not only false but grossly undignified. When men accuse some one weaker than themselves of interference with, and even of acquiring power over, them they condemn themselves. It is in the main our fault if an equilibrium has so rarely been reached in all these sixty generations of debate. For however alien, however irritant the foreign body be, it is we who have in our hands the solvent of that irritant and of relieving the strain which it causes.

Here let me recall at the risk of repetition (for repetition is necessary to lucidity in such arguments) the logical process with which I opened this essay. I say that the vast majority, the fixed race through which in fluid and nomadic form Israel goes moving from century to century, is not free to discharge its responsibility by any one of those attempted solutions which I have condemned. No man, I trust, will have the cynicism to say that mere persecution, let alone its horrible extreme, is or should be a solution. No man can predict the same of exile either. No man can discharge our responsibility by pretending that any solution arrived at must be for our good alone and may disregard that of those who live among us.

It is a statement one hears frequently enough that the masters of house have alone to decide what shall be done under their roof: that the interloper, the alien element, has no standing and no right to complain of whatever measures may be taken for the protection of the household. The thing so put sounds plausible. It is essentially false. It is comparable to the argument applied to private property—that because private property is a right, and that because a man "may do what he likes with his own," therefore he may use it to the manifest hurt of others. Moreover, the analogy is false; for when a man is talking of "the master of the house" having the right in his household to decide its own way of living and of treating its guests, he is considering a very small unit in a great community; his household in the whole nation: a little body which, if it discharge or in any other way deal with something alien to itself, will inflict no great injury upon that foreign body, since there is all the world for it to turn to outside. But in the relations between the Jew and Christendom, or the Jew and Islam, the parallel fails. It is precisely because there is no "outside" to which the exile can turn that a duty is imposed on us.

It is true indeed that when a small and alien minority assumes to dictate the policy of the rest, to regard its own advantages alone and subordinate to those advantages the life of all, the claim is grotesque and must be disallowed. But we should remember upon the other side that it is only by exaggerating its claim that a minority can live at all. It is only by fierce insistence upon its right to survive that its survival is guaranteed. We can arrive at justice in this matter by the process of putting ourselves in the shoes of those in relation to whom we propose to act.

Put yourself in the shoes of the Jew and ask how this doctrine of "doing what one likes with one's own" and being "the master of one's own household" would look to you.

A public example which very rightly made a stir a few months before this book was published, may serve as text. A learned and distinguished Jew, Dr. Oscar Levy, a man who was an asset to any community, was turned out of the country under circumstances which many of my readers will recall. He pleaded with perfect justice that as a Jew such an exile left him homeless; that the original country of which he was nominally a citizen (under the broken-down fiction that Jews can be Germans, or Austrians, or what not, and cease to be themselves) would not have him; that his interests, his livelihood had attached him to this country; he had never hidden his true nationality nor changed his name, nor used any of those subterfuges which, even when excusable, are dangerous and contemptible in so many of his compatriots. There was no conceivable reason why such rigour should be used against this man, save indeed that he was a Jew.

Put yourself in his shoes and see how the thing looks. There is no nation to which you could have returned: there is no society to receive you as a member of it. You are not permitted to remain in the atmosphere with which you have grown familiar, in the surroundings which have become those of your later life, and your consonance with which it is too late for you to change. Could there be a grosser cruelty or a grosser injustice? It is the very core of the whole problem that somewhere the Jew must be harboured, and therefore to some one of us the question must be put, "Will you harbour him, and if so upon what terms?" If each man answer, "No, I will not," then all collectively become oppressors. It is no answer to say, "These men are not of us, and therefore they may conspire against us," or "Their interests are divergent from ours and therefore may and do clash with ours." All that is granted. That is merely stating the problem, not solving it. What do we say in daily life of men who merely state their grievances, harp upon them, and make no effort to put them right? What do we think of men who perpetually complain of something naturally weaker than themselves, make no effort to understand its necessities and attempt only to rid themselves of the nuisance without considering reciprocal duty and mutual relations? The same should we think of those who so act towards the Jewish community in our midst which, for all its domination and exaggerated modern power, is ultimately at our mercy, far weaker than we are in numbers and situation. Without further elaboration of what should be an obvious political and moral principle, let us consider our part in the task.

It consists, I conceive, in two very different determinations: two very different but allied lines of conduct to which we must pledge ourselves. The first, until recently the most difficult, is the determination to speak of the Jewish people as openly, as continuously, with as much interest, with as close an examination as we speak of any other foreign body with which we are brought in contact.

The second, which will perhaps be the more difficult duty to practise in the future, will be to avoid, in the individual public recognition of those with whom we must live, all futile anger and all mere reaction. I mean by mere reaction, blind reaction. The instinctive thrusting back against a thing which presses on us, the uncalculated and animal return blow, the consequences of which, either to ourselves or to others, are not weighed when it is delivered; the futile complaint, the futile rage, the futile cruelty.