tat NEW HEP ! HEP ! T HE novel desire to
persecute the Jews which is spreading so fast through Europe, and which will produce grave political consequences, is marked by some new and some unexpected features. In the first place, it is much more general than it was. The Jews have been persecuted in turn by every nation, including our own ; but sharp persecution, the kind which threatens life and property, has usually broken out in one nation at a time. Now the whole Continent persecutes. It is, we believe, literally true that while Jews everywhere rise to the top of all professions except the naval, there is no country in Europe except England, certainly no large country, where the race, as a race, does not feel that it is in imme- diate and most serious danger. Even in France, where Jews are under no disabilities, and where the great mass of the population hold a creed almost indistin- guishable from their own, the Dreyfus case so excited the people that a rising against them which would have been marked by both plunder and slaughter was, and for that matter still is, imminently probable. Tens of thousands declare that France is betrayed by a. Jew Syndicate, and Extremists inquire, even in the Chamber, whether the French Government is or is not guided in the last resort by Jew moneylenders who are anti-French. In Austria the moment the mob rises for any cause whatever it attacks Jews ; they are not safe even in Vienna; in Prague they are despoiled, and even murdered, like Germans, while, unlike Germans, they are not protected by the soldiery. In Germany a. powerful party makes of their expulsion its shibboleth, and but that the bureaucracy insists on external order, no Jew house, even in Berlin, would be safe for a week from pillage. In Roumania when they are assaulted the police will not interfere, Jews are prohibited from ri enteng the common schools, and they are permitted to practise some trades only on condition of a servility which popular writers then hold up to the general disgust. In Russia they are treated as a slave race, penned up in assigned districts (the old Ghetto policy) where they almost starve, and they are liable in all villages to those dreadful outbreaks of peasant rage in which the kindly Slav occasionally reveals his close relation to uncivilised man. In Italy the fierce popular dislike has not yet produced outbreaks, but the Jew is hardly safe in all quarters ; while throughout the Christian States of the Balkan he is regarded as a sort of miscreant tolerated -bile he pays. Among the administrative classes, Ministers of State included, the old theory that the Jews should be protected as useful producers of revenue seems to have grown weak, while—and this is the greatest change of all—the Liberals have, in practice, ceased to plead their cause. The Liberals, in fact, are courting the masses, and the masses, in addition to their old prejudice, which was partly religious and partly racial, have acquired the new idea that capitalists are their enemies, and that of all capitalists the Jews, because they live for the most part by distribution, and, like all men with quick brains and sensitive nerves, avoid hard manual labour, are the richest, the most arrogant, and the most offensive. We believe that everywhere outside England the Jews find it useless to apply for charity except to their own people, and that although they are everywhere subject to the conscription, and die in the ranks in rather remarkable numbers, there is no country where a Jew officer can rely on being promoted as readily as if he were a Christian. And this, although the average Jew, contrary to the usual impression, is nowhere a practical cosmopolitan, but is apt to sympathise keenly, in some countries even violently, with the people among whom his lot is thrown. The genuine popular feeling everywhere is for his expulsion, and as expulsion could only be effected by terrorism, we are seriously inclined to believe that the twentieth century may yet witness a massacre which will recall the days of Peter the Hermit. It would occur in some places to-morrow if the Jews fought,—the real reason, and not want of courage, why they prefer endurance to open and dogged self-defence. They are in Europe only five millions against two hundred, and they cannot forget the fact.
The new hatred, which is far deeper than when, in 1878, George Eliot published " Theophrastus Such," with its eloquent but forgotten appeal on behalf of the race, is the more remarkable because of its contrast with the new spirit of the age, which, in theory at all events, tends towards a regime of " love." The nations are believed to have become gentler, and in some departments of life—e.g., the entire disuse of judicial torture—the belief is certainly well founded. Religious bigotry has in a. marked manner died away, and, moreover, the Continental world tends toward Theism,—that is, towards the very doctrine of which the Jews for ages upon ages alone upheld the torch. The horror of the foreigner qua foreigner has almost disappeared, all the peoples tolerating, if they do not like, all visitors who are white and who speak in any intelligible tongue. The old jealousy of " parts," that is, of intellectual rapidity, which was once infinitely stronger than the literary class of to-day could be induced to believe, has died away or confined itself—a very curious fact—to a section of the upper and middle classes, many of whom remain proud of their stolidity and mental slowness. The world, in fact, though far from gentle, has become distinctly gentler, and brutality is no longer confounded with manliness ; but the change, which is saving thousands of the inefficient, and in great physicians' opinion lowering the vital force of whole sections of society, has brought no comfort or protection to the Jew. That he gives some provocations is undeniable ; but the marvel remains that he gives only the same provocations as other people, upon whom they are not visited. He is so law-abiding that his fondness for law is constantly brought against him as a reproach. He marries only among his own people, but so on the Continent do all the aristocratic castes. He wears east of Vienna a special costume, but so in half the countries of Europe, and specially in France, do a large proportion of those who live by labour. He retains Asiatic ideas about food, but his ideas only bind him to abstinences ; and unlike the European in Asia, he eats nothing which inspires the populace with disgust. He has no " ways " which are shocking, for though he will not admit, cannot with his history admit, that polygamy is a crime condemned by that earliest revelation, the birth-equality in the number of the sexes, he has in Europe and America given up the practice. He makes money whenever he can, but so does everybody else in every race ; while if " the poor " as a corporation have moral claims, where is there poverty like that of the Jew majority, who do not even possess what every other nation except the Parsee possesses, the great estate which we call a eountry ? That the Jew is insolent in prosperity is often true, but in what respect does his insolence differ from that of multitudes who
are allowed to walk about swelling in all cities without anybody bespattering them with mud. There is, in fact, no visible reason for the new persecution of the Jew, except the reason which has been pleaded ever since the days of Vespasian : that he is a Jew and ought, therefore, to be sent away.
What is the remedy for a situation which is a disgrace to Europe ? We have none to suggest, because we only believe in one, which will not be accepted. When all the Christian Churches plead for the Jew as they plead for all other men who are unjustly oppressed, the Jews will be safe ; but in a generation which has complacently endured the massacre of the Armenians for the offence of being Christians we can have little hope that that course will be immediately followed. The other remedies sug- gested are all useless. "Improve the laws," says one ; but it is not the laws, but the execution of the laws of which Jews have to complain. " Let them give up their separate- ness," says another ; but they will not do it, any more than the aristocratic castes will, and as their separateness has its roots in history, and has lasted three thousand years, it is ridiculous to make of it a moral offence. " Let them work," says a third ; but what Jew attempts, if he has no money, to live by loafing, or where is the really poor Jew who shirks working for fourteen hours a day ? Our East End does not snarl at the Jew for his laziness but for his industry. " Let them," says a fourth, " all turn Christians ; " but that excellent advice might be applied without results to most French townsmen, to many Germans, and, we even fear, to one or two among our own seething population. And finally, it is recommended that they should all be restored to Palestine. Palestine is theirs, of course, by a title older than ours to Britain, and better than that of any other race to the land it occupies ; but Palestine would not hold the half of them, and if that half went back, the remainder would in twenty years be as numerous, as poor, as objectionable, and as infamously treated as ever. The great facts of history are not alterable to suit the dreams of philanthropists ; and one of the biggest of them is that the Hebrew race never changes and is unchangeable. It is, and it will remain, as it was in the days of the Pharaohs, whom, as Lord Beaconsfield said, " it saw and survived," the most separate and the earthiest of all races, with the highest power of throwing up men of spiritual genius and mental grandeur. There is one earthly hope of justice for the Jew, and but one, and that is that the Christian races of Europe shall embrace the doctrines of Christ.
Previous page
