Bismarck and the Forces of Reaction
ALL these tendencies, which may roughly be summed up as the Counter-Revolution, found a home in victorious Prussia and a voice in Otto von Bismarck, its representative statesman. As we have seen, his views on the nature of the State had been influenced in his formative period by F. J. Stahl, and his socialistic sympathies may possibly have been aroused by Ferdinand Lassalle, but he was of too independent a character to submit much to external influences, and the tendencies he represented, Junkertum and Militarism, were entirely opposed to Jewish Liberalism. For some fifteen years he found it convenient to work with the National Liberal party, to which all German Jews belonged, and among whose leaders the most prominent were two Jews, Eduard Lasker and Ludwig Bamberger. But in 1878 he broke with the party and let loose the forces of "Anti-Semitism" as a means of discrediting them. The movement, thus encouraged by Bismarck, soon spread to Austria and was transformed in Russia into the pogroms of 1881. In France the Royalists and Jesuits conceived hopes of reviving the Church-State and adopted anti-Semitism as a means of discrediting not alone Jews but also Protestants and other opponents of Catholicism. Their adherents, the French nobility, were especially embittered against the Jews by the bankruptcy of the Union Générale, a banking establishment in which all their money had been placed in the hope of wresting the control of French finance from the hands of the Rothschilds. Their chief hope lay in getting control of the General Staff, by filling its posts with young men of noble birth, trained by Jesuits. In order to attain this they schemed to remove all Jews and Protestants from the Staff and thought they had found a rare chance in their perverse persecution of Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Their scheme recoiled on their own heads, and the final result of the Dreyfus Affaire was to break the alliance of clericalism and militarism, at least in France.
The Dreyfus Affaire was specially significant as bringing into play, at one time, all the forces that have given vitality to anti-Semitism. The New Nationalism, based not on Country but on Race and fostered by chauvinistic anthropologists as well as historians; the revived Church spirit, which sees in the National Church not so much the guardian of Christian truth as a spiritual bond of national unity; the New Collectivism which sees in capitalism the chief anti-social force, and the revived militaristic spirit which glorifies war as the regenerator of the nation; all these movements combine to regard the Jew—considered as alien, infidel, capitalist, and pacificist—as the representative enemy. All the reactionary forces regard a revival of the medieval Church-State as both the means and the end of their strivings, and naturally find the position of the Jew, both theoretically and practically, one of the chief stumbling-blocks in their way.
Church-State versus Welfare-State
IT remains to be seen whether the ideals of religious and political liberty, which have been gained through so much blood and tears, will be preserved intact against the rising forces of the Reaction and Counter-Revolution which are, at bottom, an attempt at a revival of the Church-Empire. The slogan "One God, one king, one people," has again been raised, and armies that are nations in arms are in movement to the cry. Anti-Semitism is largely the result of this reaction, and while it is dominant in the councils of certain nations Jews must once more take up their rôle of martyrs to the wider truth. Nowadays however they do not fight alone, and it is scarcely possible that in Western Europe and in lands dominated by Western European ideals they can be reinterned into their ghetti. But the Colossus of the North still retains the medieval ideal of the Church-Empire, and while that controls Russian State policy Jews will have to suffer, in All the Russias, indignities and disabilities from which they have been freed in the lands of true civilization and religious liberty.
The ideal of the unified Church-State has been shattered by the assaults of modern criticism and the growth of true religious liberty. But the conception of all the citizens of a compact territory animated by the same ideals still retains its attraction; only the unification nowadays is with regard to the goal rather than to the roads that lead to it. In other words, the Welfare-State (interpreting Welfare as spiritual as well as material) is taking the place of the Church-State of the Middle Ages and of Reformation times. What then is to become of the separate churches or religious bodies which are found in profusion in modern States? That is the sole ecclesiastical problem which the modern statesman has to face. Except among the extreme parties, such as the Ultramontagnes, the obvious solution would seem to be that given by the modern Federal constitution in which each State (in this case Church) has a corporate life of its own over which it has autonomous control, except in any case where this conflicts with the general Federal ideals. The Jewish Synagogue may rightly claim its place among these churches within the State as having its part in promoting the general welfare.
The Rôle of the Jews in European Progress
OWING to their medieval disabilities Jews, though sharing as we have seen in the higher life and in the commerce of Europe, were yet kept in a kind of enclave in each of the European nations, and thus acted, both intellectually and economically, as a separate body with distinctive tendencies caused by their isolation and disabilities. Accordingly we are able to estimate roughly the part taken by the Jews as a body in the various movements which have made European civilization what it is to-day. In all these movements (except possibly one, the French Revolution) the Jews have contributed towards European culture while sharing in it themselves. Their monotheistic views and liturgic practices were the foundation of the medieval Church, both in creed and deed. By their connection with their brethren in the East and their tolerated existence, both in Islam and in Christendom, they helped towards that transmission of Oriental thought, science and commerce, which had so large an influence on the Middle Ages and led on to the Renaissance and the Reform, in both of which movements Jews had their direct part to play. So, too, in the struggle for religious liberty and in the different stages of toleration which lay at the root of political liberty, Jews had their part to play, and when freed from their shackles by the French Revolution took a leading rôle both in Nineteenth Century Liberalism and in the Collectivism which has now replaced it.
But when fully emancipated, Jews no longer acted in the European world of ideas collectively but as individuals, often choosing opposite ideals and in most cases applying the talents thus let free to objects apart from the general political or religious movements of the time. Great as has been the influence of Jews in their collective capacity on the development of European thought and culture up to the present day, it is possible that their influence as individuals, during the past fifty years, has been even more extensive though less discernible, owing to the absence of any general direction to Jewish intellectuality.
