The Jews

by Hilaire Belloc

Thus there is the conception of a curse; the conception that Israel must, until its conversion, suffer a perpetual pilgrimage and perpetual hostility. It is a statement bound up with that other popular prophecy that in the last days Israel will be reconciled with the Universal Church. Those who have these ideas at the back of their minds (they are more numerous than modern thought would like to admit), at heart despair of any solution, and would not attempt to urge it with any hope of success. They say, "The thing is fated and must continue." But even they, I think, must admit that just as philosophy admits a paradox of determination and free will, so political effort must admit a paradox of foreseen failures and our duty, in spite of them, to aim at a political good.

Whether it be indeed true or not, that reconciliation is impossible and that in the long run the quarrel must drag itself out, it is certainly profoundly immoral to look on at the spectacle with no attempt to ameliorate its evils.

There is again the theory (which I mention in passing and leave to its adherents) that the British and the Jews are in some way mysteriously allied by Providence, so that any solution which does not give the fullest satisfaction to Israel (no matter at what cost to poor Japhet) is treason. These people mystically regard Britain as the handmaid of Jewry, and there is a section of them who further regard their fellow-countrymen as the ten lost tribes. I have in my library some specimens of their literature.

There is an opposite and, to me, detestable theory (but I must mention it because it exists), that the antagonism hitherto found perpetually, whether latent or active, between this people and the world about them is the use of the one as a necessary and divine oppressor of the other. To those who hold such a theory I can only reply that two can play at that game, and it certainly absolves those whom they would oppress from any obligation whatever of seeking a solution on their side. If a man thinks he can do harm to Israel wantonly, without suffering the reproaches of his own conscience, he is in error; and I confess that were I free (as I am not in a book of discussion and argument) to indulge in mere affirmation I should be inclined to say that those who set out with this remarkable object in view will catch a Tartar.

There is the opposite theory that a special and Divine protection is still exercised, not only for the preservation of the Jews but for judgment upon their enemies. That theory, I think, lies at the back of many a Jewish action in history and of much Jewish policy to-day. Non-rational, religious in origin, it is, I fancy, to very many of the race which has suffered so much, a consolation and a support.

Now all these non-rational theories (I use the word without any bad connotation: the non-rational—what is often inaccurately called the mystical—attitude towards any problem may well be more practical than the rational approach to it) I leave on one side as improper to rational discussion.

I have heard it maintained, again, by both parties to this debate, that the presence of an alien force, migratory, intense, full of tradition, experience and cohesion, was essential to the height and the activity of our own civilization.

These are not content to discover individual instances of Jewish excellence in the mass around them, or to extend the renown of individual Jewish genius. They are rather concerned with the general proposition that some such flux is necessary to the full action of a high and diverse culture. They tell us that but for the Jew the civilization of Europe would have grown torpid, would have settled into a fixed groove, incapable of change and of creative progress. The Jew, by this theory, is regarded as a sort of activating principle, who, whether as an irritant at the worst, or an inspiration at the best, keeps all our European life agog, and is necessary to its continuous business. These also incline to see the Jew at the origin of every great movement in European thought. They see him indirectly producing the vast transformation of the Roman Empire from a pagan, not indeed to a Jew but to a Christian, that is (in their eyes) to an Oriental mood. They see the Jew at the root of the great revolutionary philosophy which springs from the eleventh century and reaches its culmination in the great scholastics of the thirteenth. They insist upon the name of Averroës (Ibn Roshd), the philosopher of the twelfth century, the Kadi of Cordova: the exponent of Aristotle, the expositor—whom the Jews preserved: upon the great Moses ben Maimon, our Maimonides. These also put Nicolas de Lyra at the root of the Reformation: "Si Lyra non lyrasset Luther non saltasset." But I may remind them that the Jewish character of this man is at least doubtful, that he was of the religious Orders of Christendom.

These also will certainly and with some reason ascribe to Jewish influence the great economic revolution of the seventeenth century, which has been followed by so vast an extension of wealth and of population, though hardly of human happiness.

Now for all this there is certainly something to be said as an aspect of historical truth. How far it may be extended to cover, as its exponents would make it cover, the whole historical field, may be debated, but I would ask my readers to consider what change we should have seen in the development of Europe if by some magical instrument Jewish influence had been upon some one date removed. It is a theory fascinating, in a way applicable, and arresting. It is, at any rate, not nonsense.