The Jews

by Hilaire Belloc

The present situation cannot last indefinitely. It is already uncertain even here, in England; it has reached further stages on the road to ruin elsewhere. But if the Jew sees the peril in time, and appreciates the nature of that change, the beginnings of which we have all seen and which is proceeding at so great a pace, then relations can be established out of which (later) formal rules, acceptable to both parties, should proceed. And in that case it would be, I repeat, the gravest of errors to initiate new positive laws and a new status before a foundation had been prepared by the re-establishment of honest relations; and that can only be done by a frank admission of reality, by the open and continual admission everywhere that Israel is a nation apart, is not, and cannot be, of us, and shall not be confounded with ourselves.

There is great temptation to delay, because the acuteness of the problem is not felt here as yet, among the well-to-do, and still more because it differs in different communities. The peril seems still far distant from us, though it may be at the very door of our neighbours. Routine, the inheritance of the immediate past, the false security produced by the conventions of that past, may well tempt those who dislike the effort of a change to shirk that change. But I would ask any intelligent and thoughtful Jew who still thinks he can rely upon the false position of the nineteenth century whether the same forces are there to support him to-day as were present then?

Take a particular example. In Poland and in Roumania the old fiction has been temporarily imposed by force. The Jew, who in both these countries is felt to be more alien than any other foreign European could be, is imposed upon the Government and society of each country by the Western Governments as a full citizen. The strain here is immensely aggravated because it arose not from the nature of society but from the action of outsiders; the English, the French, the American Governments (but particularly the American and the English) have erected in Eastern Europe this unstable, unjust and artificial state of affairs. It cannot last, for it is unreal.

The communities in question may make no laws which recognize the Jew; alternatively, the door is open for oppression: and the moment the hated foreign interference weakens, oppression will come.

Well, when under the pressure of a real social difficulty and a crucial one, the unreal settlement is torn up, by the passing of new laws recognizing the Jew (but harshly, and under no agreement with him) or by actual hostility, does the Jew in his heart of hearts think that he would have the same support from the West now as he would have had thirty years ago? He knows very well he would not.

Thirty years ago you would have got from all the traditional Liberalism of France, from the great bulk of its governing class and the whole of its academic organization, from what was then the solid and still respected body of old Republicans, an immediate answer to the Jewish appeal. In England that answer would have been unanimous and enthusiastic. You would have had torrents of leading articles, great public meetings, Cabinet Ministers speechifying all over the place in the sacred cause of toleration. Every one knows that to-day the appeal of the Eastern Jews, though it might still be supported officially, would be received by the public with indifference. Ten years hence it may be received with derision.

Or take another example. Let us suppose—it is highly probable—that the Zionist experiment breaks down, that Englishmen refuse to have their soldiers' lives risked in a quarrel which is not their own and refuse to support out of their inordinate taxation a top-heavy colony which gives them no advantage and concerns them not at all. On the breakdown of that experiment, should it come soon, would there still be the support for its re-establishment that you would have had even ten years ago? There certainly would not. Ten years hence it is probable enough that you would get, not indifference to such re-establishment, but the most active hostility. All over the world the stream has turned in the same direction.

Unfortunately the effect of that change has been to excite hatred rather than a desire for a settlement and to move men towards blind action rather than towards a reasoned examination of the difficulty. That is why the thing seems to me urgent, although there are still large areas of Western society in which its urgency is masked and half forgotten.

When I say "urgent" I mean that this my essay, which is to-day still to the point, and the solution recommended in which is still feasible, may very well, within the lifetime of its writer, become old-fashioned out of all recognition. The peaceful settlement here proposed with deliberate vagueness and softness of outline may seem in a few years as out of date, as unreal through the intervening change, as do to-day the old tags about the purity of parliamentary life and the seriousness of party politics.

My solution may appear at the end of this generation as mildly inapplicable to the acute situation then arisen between the Jews and ourselves as appear to-day the old debates on the very tentative demand for Home Rule in the '80's. Let us act as soon as possible and settle the thing while there is yet time. For in the swirl and rapids of the modern world, which grow not less as towards a calm, but more intense as towards a cataract, every great debate takes on with every year a stronger form, a nearer approach to conflict; and none more than the immemorial debate, still unconcluded, between Islam and Christendom and the Beni-Israel.