PROBLEMS OF ZIONISM.
[To THE EDITOR or THE " Speornos."] am more familiar with Mr. Belloo's views on the Jewish question than he is with mine, for he is unaware that the poem he cites from the Venturer (or, rather, from the ill- tempered exposition of it in the New Age) is part of my new book. Had he read that book he would have found, from the chapter on the Jews of Poland, that I agree, nay, urge, they should be treated as a separate nationality. This is because they are a solid group of millions. The arrangement is imprac- ticable in a country like Great Britain, where they are under one per cent. of the population. De minimie non carat le.r. Where Mr. Belloc is ridiculously retrograde, however, is in his notion that such separate nationality must carry 'with it. "'disabilities and privileges." He seems quite ignorant of the Minority Clauses by which the League of Nation. has sought 'to guarantee the equal rights Of all the lesser nationalities in those multi-racial States which his fellow Catholics, Lord Acton, regarded as far more Christian and much more vital- ized than uni-racial States. Moreover, in the modern world nationality is mutable—Mr. Belloo has, I believe, changed his teen—and 'how does he •propose to prevent a Jew, or all the Jews, from opting into the majority nationality? It could only be by legislation directed uniquely against the Jewish race—the Ghetto again, in short. I have myself—artistically- raised the question whether the Jews were wise to leave the Ghetto. But that is their own affair, just as becoming an Englishman was Mr. Belloc's or Mr. Henry James's. There is a Jewish problem, but it does not concern Mr. Belloc, and I would respectfully suggest to him to mind his own business. His fellow-fantast, Mr. Chesterton, would revive the Jewish badge and have English Jews dressed as Arabs. Apart from climatic considerations I am perfectly ready to dress as an Arab—I believe I look better in robes—but, then, Barrie should be dressed in o kilt. Shaw would *ear green, and Mr. Belloc himself the flowing ties of the Latin quarter. As for my poem. it is inaccurate to 'say that I call all his race cobras, &is. It is no one race that is thus scarified, and the poem is a dramatic presentation of a Jew's psychological evolution, at one point of which " the heathen " figure to him not as cobras, but as " Dreamers and seers and diviners, Shapers of Man, not a tribe, Builders of beauty!
And the poem is an expression of religion, not race, and should remind Christendom of the crucifixion of its own ideal. That it proves my incompatibility with the English race, what strange logic! Do Mr. Belloo's girdings at popular politics prove racial discrepancy? Was Jeremiah no Jew, Voltaire no Frenchman, or Ruskin no Englishman? Might one not as justly argue that Lord Reading's perfect expression of the 'conventional view of England and the war proves the absolute congruity of the two races? No doubt Mr. Belloc's system would have prevented Lord Reading from saving the finances of England. But for a nation not to utilize its Jewish genius in high polities is like refusing to use its coal or iron. In truth, there is more sense in Mr. Belloo's nonsense rhymes 'than in his view of the Jewish question.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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