The Jews

by Hilaire Belloc

Allied to this obstacle of convention is the very real obstacle of charity.

Now we are here dealing not with a positive charity but with a negative one and with a form of charity uncommonly like slackness.

The man who honestly thinks that any allusion to Jewish races in contemporary art, history or letters in the presence of a Jew is offensive and therefore to be avoided, from goodness of heart, and who also practises the same virtue where any other foreigner is concerned is rare indeed. There are such men, for men of exceptional goodness coupled with exceptional stupidity are to be found. But the excuse of charity as it is generally put forward is not wholly ingenuous. Where it is ingenuous our reply to-day must be that even at the risk of occasional ill-ease, the danger of offence must be risked; for unless we risk it there is increasing peril of a much greater offence against justice. For whatever reason open discussion is burked, even for the reason of charity, we only put off the evil day, and charity so used may be compared to the charity which refuses to take action in any other critical problem of increasing gravity. The charity which hesitates to control the supplies of a spendthrift, or to wage a defensive war in a just cause, or to defend an oppressed man at the risk of quarrelling with his oppressor, is a charity misdirected.

But, as I have said, with much the greater part of men who plead this motive the plea is, if they would only examine their own consciences, found to be false. And the test of its falsity will be apparent when the convention slackens. When it is no longer conventional to avoid all mention of Jews, how many will remain silent merely from the love of their fellow-men? One might go further and say that when the convention has gone, any need for this kind of charity will go with it. There is an exception, of course, in the case of the man whose dislike of Jews is so violent that he fears himself if he gives any rein to his tongue. That mania is exceptional; but where it is found certainly its victim will do well to keep silence. If a man cannot mention the Hebrew alphabet without a sneer, or the economics of Ricardo without betraying his ill feeling for Ricardo's lineage, then certainly he had better hold his tongue when Jews are there. So, too, a Frenchman who raves against the English had far better not discuss the British Constitution or the genius of Newton in any society where an Englishman may be present.

There remains the chief obstacle—that of fear.

There is no doubt that the strongest force still restraining an expression of hostility to the Jew is fear.

In a sense, of course, there is a "fear" of breaking convention—but that is fear only in metaphor. I mean not this, but the very real dread of consequences: the feeling that an expression of hostility to Jewish power may bring definite evils on the individual guilty of it, and a panic lest those evils should fall upon him. How strong this feeling is, anyone can testify who has explored, as I have, this most insistent of modern political ills; and doubtless the greater part of my non-Jewish readers will recall examples to the point.

It is a fear of two consequences, social and economic, and even of both combined. Men dread lest hostility to the Jew Domination should bring them into the grip of some unknown but suspected world-wide power—some would call it a conspiracy—which can destroy the individual who shall be so rash as to challenge it. Some perhaps have gone to the length—the insane length—of reading the word "destroy" in its literal sense and of fearing for their lives. Such an illusion is laughable. But very many more are affected by the reasonable conception that they will have against them, if they provoke it, an intelligent, combined action which they cannot meet because there is no organization upon their side: because it is international; because there is behind it a great intensity of feeling; because through finance it controls the political machines of all the nations, because it is all-powerful in the Press—and so forth.

They dread, I say, the social consequences. They also (and that with more definition and more sense) dread the economic consequences. They recognize (they also exaggerate) the grip of the Jew over finance. They conceive that if they speak they will be dragged down, their enterprises ruined, their credit dissolved. And that is the most powerful instrument which can be brought to bear. When supernatural motives disappear the strongest motive remaining after appetite is avarice; and avarice is more universal than appetite and more continuous. Nor is it only avarice which is at work here, but also the respectable desire for security. There are to-day innumerable men who would express publicly on Jews what they continually express in private, but who conceal their feelings for fear that their salaries may be lost or their modest enterprises wrecked, their investments lowered, and their position ruined. Above them are a lesser number, equally convinced that their large fortunes would be in peril were they so to act.