The Jews

by Hilaire Belloc

The elimination of an alien body may take three forms. It may take a frankly hostile form—elimination by destruction. It may take a form, also hostile but less hostile—elimination by expulsion. It may take a third form, an amicable one (and that far the most commonly found in the natural process of physical nature and of society)—elimination by absorption; the alien body becomes an indistinguishable part of the organism in which it was originally a source of disturbance and is lost in it. These three ways sum up the first method, the method of elimination.

The second method, if elimination shall prove impossible or undesirable, is that of segregation; and this again may be of two kinds—hostile and amicable. We may segregate the alien element without regard to its own ends or desires: the segregation of it being upon a plan framed solely from the point of view of the organism invaded, and the reduction of the strain or friction it creates effected by the mere cutting of it off from all avenues through which it can affect its host.

But we may also segregate the alien irritant by an action which takes full account of the thing segregated as well as of the organism segregating it, and considers the good of both parties. In this second and amicable policy the word segregation (which has a bad connotation) may be replaced by the word recognition.

This book has been written under the conception that all solutions of the Jewish problem other than this last are either impracticable, or bad in morals, or both.

It is written to advocate a policy wherein the Jews on their side shall openly recognize their wholly separate nationality and we on ours shall equally recognize that separate nationality, treat it without reserve as an alien thing, and respect it as a province of society outside our own.

It is written under the conviction that any attitude which falls short of this policy or is very different from it will now soon breed disaster.

The solution by way of destruction is not only abominable in morals but has proved futile in practice. It has been the constant temptation of angry popular masses in the past, when the Jewish problem has come to a head not once but a thousand times in various parts of our civilization during the last twenty centuries. From the pitiless massacres of Cyrenaica in the second century to the latest murders in the Ukraine that solution has been attempted and has failed. It has invariably left behind it a dreadful inheritance of hatred upon the one side and of shame upon the other. It has been condemned by every man whose judgment is worth considering and especially by the great moral teachers of Christendom. It is, indeed, hardly a policy at all, for it is blind. It is a gesture of mere exasperation and not a final gesture at that.

The second form of elimination—expulsion—though theoretically sustainable (for a community has a right to organize its own life and no aliens therein have a claim to modify that life or to disturb it), is none the less in practice, and as regards this particular problem, only one degree less odious than the first. It means inevitably a mass of individual injustice, as well as common spoliation and every other hardship. It is almost impossible to dissociate it from violence and ill deeds of all kinds. It leaves behind it almost as strong an inheritance, if not of shame on the one side, at any rate of rancour upon the other, as does the first. And what condemns it finally is that it is not, and cannot be, complete.

For it is in the nature of the Jewish problem that this solution is only attempted at moments and in places where the strength of the Jews has declined; and this invariably means their corresponding strength in some other quarter.

A particular society attempting this solution of expulsion may succeed for a time so far as itself is concerned, but that inevitably means the reception of the exiled body by another district, and, sooner or later, the return of the force which it was hoped to be rid of. The greatest historical example of this is, of course, the action of the English. The English alone of all Christian nations did adopt this solution in its entirety. A strong national kingship, a government highly organized for its time, an insular position and a singular unanimity of national purpose promoted the expulsion of the Jews from England at the end of the thirteenth century; for more than three and a half centuries that expulsion was maintained, and England alone of the various divisions of Christendom was in theory free of the alien element and nearly as free in practice as it was in theory.