The World's Scapegoat
An Enemy of the People : Anti-Semitism. By James Parkes. (Penguin 9d.) " It will not be possible to say how many Jews there are in the world until we know more accurately the figures of the Nazi massacres throughout Europe, from Western France to Eastern Poland and the Ukraine. In 1939, there were altogether about sixteen million. Since
1939 it is known that more than four million have perished un- naturally, by starvation, disease, and murder in every terrible form." THIS is the background to Mr. James Parkes' quite admirable study of the manufacture of anti-Semitism as a political weapon against every form of liberalism. For this, as he makes abundantly clear, with chapter and verse, is, in fact, how it has come to be. Everywhere, the Jews are a minority. Certain quite normal psychological reactions follow from that fact ; he analyses them with great acuteness and fairness in his 5th chapter ; they present a groundwork, which propa- ganda can easily exploit. The exploitation started, in the form in which we have seen it developed with appalling virtuosity, in 1879, with Bismarck, who, although he had no hostility to the Jews, found in anti-Semitism " a most useful means of attacking the progressives." Bismarck's lesson was soon taken up, and bettered, in Austria ; Tsarism gave the whole apparatus a powerful push, with the anti- Jewish pogroms of 1881 which caused vast numbers of Eastern Jews to flee from Russia to Central Europe. From Russia again came the first full employment of the vast tissue of fabricated " evidence " of a Jewish plot and " revelation " of horrifying Jewish practices, of which the outstanding example is the so-called " Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Of this farrago Mr. Parkes gives a finally docu- mented exposure ; the horrifying thing about it is that anybody was ever taken in.
The Nazis, of course, were not taken in ; like Bismarck, but with infinitely greater thoroughness and ruthlessness, they used what came to hand. It is well that the reader should register and ponder on the vast and subtle ramifications of their use of it, as set out, with sober restraint, by Mr. Parkes. It is even more important that he should ponder the effect of their world-wide activity. For while "Of any
concerted Jewish world plot there is no evidence whatever . . an anti-Jewish world plot existed openly in the years from 1933 to 1939." This plot has had results. Not only has it caused the death of millions of Jews and imposed sufferings on millions more of which we can hardly bear to think. It has made the whole world Jew- conscious, and left a heritage of the most dangerous kind in the far- reaching infection of minds which imagine themselves to be clear of any taint of prejudice.
This is, I think, the most important aspect of a highly significant little book. A poison has been manufactured, and injected into all our veins. The Jewish community has suffered ; it is suffering from " an intolerable nervous exhaustion." Let anyone read page 138 of this book without shame, if he can. The non-Jewish communities of the world have been made artificially Jew-conscious ; in that undoubted fact lies a danger to the peoples everywhere which they can only overcome if they are realistically aware of it : of what it is and why it is. To that enlightenment Mr. Parkes has made a precious contribution. He apologises, somewhere, for not bringing a particular point into a short work. He need not do so. He writes extremely well ; his facts are beautifully marshalled ; he is scrupulously fair and candid ; he holds the total attention of the reader from first page to
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