TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE JEWISH PERIL.* WE sincerely trust that The Jewish Peril : Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (London : Eyre and Spottiswoode ; 1920), of which a somewhat alarmist account appeared in the Times of last Saturday, will not carry readers off their feet, but will be studied with great care and discretion. In our opinion, the book is a piece of malignant lunacy. In the present condition of public opinion it is, however, likely to do an infinity of harm if it is allowed to go unchallenged, and if the better advisers of the public do not correct the maddening follies which can, and we fear may, be based upon an uninstructed study of this singular and most powerful though dangerous work. Bacon said truly that suspicion clouds the mind. That does not mean that one must never be suspicious. To adopt such an attitude would give carte blanche to evil. But it does mean that we must be most cautious how we indulge suspicion, for it is in itself a poison. A very exact analogy is to be found in the medical employment of poison. It is sometimes very useful, but only in small doses and under careful regulation. In this pamphlet, The Jewish Peril, we have bottlefuls of the niost dangerous poison distilled by a lunatic of genius and prescribed by a panic-stricken Muscovite of the old regime. If swallowed by the unthinking, it is likely to do enormous harm. The pamphlet was, it appears, compiled and published in 1905 by Professor S. Nilus, a minor official in one of the State Departments at Moscow. "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" are a set of half-rhetorical, half- mystic outpourings of a Jewish political dreamer and con- spirator and madman, which laid down a plan of campaign for destroying Christianity and all Christian States, and setting up, chiefly by the use of gold and bloodshed, a Universal Jewish Monarchy of the cruellest and most despotic kind. That things of this sort may be said in secret by other half-demented Jewish teachers, or may be found sequestered in other Jewish writings, is by no means improbable, for that portion of the Jewish race not engaged in money-making, or in science or philosophy, is very apt to indulge in wild social and political speculations. Here the Oriental side of the Jew comes out. Prophecies, apocalyptic rhetoric, and mystical exhortations are still the special product of the House of Israel. For example, in Disraeli's earlier writings there are many fantastic vaticinations and oracular predictions in which the Jews are glorified. Take, for instance, the magnificent vindication of the Christian Jew as a man who believes in the whole, and not merely in a portion, of the Jewish religion contained in The Life of Lard George Bentinck, or the ingenious attempts to show the non-revolutionary character of the Jews and what the world owes to them in their fight for idealism against utilitarianism to be found in that unequal but extra- ordinarily interesting work, A Vindication of the English Constitution..
One part of the Jewish race when it is unhappy and persecuted turns to money-making and makes a pretty good thing of it, if a somewhat sordid thing. The other half takes as readily in these days as in the old days to prophecy, and somewhat pathetically produces wild and distracted, and in the present case crazily wicked, imita- tions of Isaiah and Ezekiel. Considering the misery en- dured for centuries by the Russian Jews, possibly some of it deserved but the greater part entirely undeserved, who can wonder that the Jew tries to hit back in the spirit if he is deprived of the possibility of hitting back in the flesh, as he was when these "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" were written, and if he imagines, as he always has done in the agonies of persecution, a Messianic avenger—a ruler of the seed of David who shall rise and redeem his race and lead captivity captive ? If the Russian archives contain evidence that such vaticinations were carried among certain Russian Jews to the point of con- spiracy, as the writer in the Times seems to suggest, who can wonder ? But if this evidence does exist, it would be foolish to pay more attention to it than we pay to the ravings of the neurotic or the delirious or of those who have
- • We suggeet that our readers might do well, before considering our general comments in this article, to turn to our summary of the Da mohlet which appears elsewhere as a book retiew.—Zs. Spectator.
become hopelessly demoralized by ill-treatment. It is an alleviation of which the persecuted can never be deprived to hatch the world-wide conspiracies to do things which they are as incapable of doing as a set of depraved and hooligan infants are of setting fire.to a city. But though this is our view of The Jewish Peril, Heaven forbid that we should be so foolish as to suggest that there are no such things as conspiracies. As a rule, however, the strength of conspiracies varies inversely with their world-wideness and the magnitude and generality of their aims. It is the narrow, concentrated conspiracy that really matters, not the vague, mystical conspiracy which covers half the world in its operatic schemes. The chief danger indeed of the world-wide Jewish conspiracy such as that alleged to be unmasked in the Russian pamphlet—and we come now to what we confess is really a very great danger—is that of exciting and unsettling the public mind by the abominable nature of the plans set forth to destroy Christianity and civilization. Nothing unsettles the public mind more, nothing makes it riper for revolution and for political folly of all kinds, than a sense of general terror. A general panic is the most dreadful as it is the most dangerous of all human manifestations. When it once gets hold of a nation, the cry of "We are betrayed ! " means utter ruin. Those who wish to produce revolution have always realized this, and have put about or used rumours of conspiracy as the surest way to madden the nation. The cry of " Conspiracy ! "was again and again employed first by one faction and then by another during the French Revolution to produce the chaos each in turn desired. As SaintJust, himself a conspirator, noted, the Revolution was a volcano with outbursts of conspiration. The Orleanist conspirators were always inflaming men's minds by talking of plots among the Royalist conspirators. While the followers of Robespierre and Saint-Just denounced Girondist con- spiracies, they were themselves overthrown because their enemies contrived to make the people believe, probably with good cause, that the Terrorists were secretly planning to decimate France. The Revolution was indeed, as Mrs. Webster has shown us so well in her recent book on the French Revolution, a welter of conspiracies.
The worst evils from which France suffered, and especially the mad rage of people for cutting off each other's heads, were undoubtedly due to the appalling national inflamma- tion produced by the dread of conspiracies. The fear of conspiration was at once the main cause and the worst effect of the Revolution. If only the French people had been stable enough or well advised enough to clear their minds of political cant, and to keep cool even amid the talk of conspiracies, France would have escaped the greater part of ten years' agony. If we are wise we shall take this lesson to heart. While vigilant and intelligent in the true sense, while looking ahead and taking all wise precautions, we shall absolutely refuse to be frightened by Bogies, Jewish or Socialistic, or to be thrown into hysterics by the transient phantasmagoria of distracted brains. What is the remedy, what is the best way of avoiding the evils of conspiracy-mongering, and of falling into terrors over imaginary plots instead of dealing with real and active conspiracies ? In our belief, the remedy is publicity. The way to bring quiet to the public mind is not to suppress information, or alleged information, about world-wide conspiracies, but to drag them into the light. They are fungus growths which die in the light but flourish in the darkness. Therefore we agree with the Times in asking for investigation of The Jewish Peril. The Jewish com- munity will be wise in asking for and in assisting investi- gation. By this we mean, not that the Jewish com- munity should try to show that they are not attempting to overthrow the Christian religion or to produce world-wide Jewish domination, but that they should ask, like all other men under the protection of the British law, to be counted innocent if they cannot be proved guilty. They should, that is, demand an inquiry as to whether there is any truth in the accusations made against them. We admit that the present accusations are probably too vague to make an inquiry very fruitful, but at any y rate an inquiry would show—and this is the essential point—that there is no political solidarity among the Jews except the common interests of persons who are persecuted, and that there is no reason to believe that the Jews are born into fantastic conspiracy of the kind set forth in the pamphlet with which we are dealing, any more than there is truth in the idea which used to be so widely held that the Jesuits-weire engaged in perpetual plots, or, again, that the Freemasons were conspiring to overthrow the faith of Christ.
There are three major 'prejudices, with probably a modicum of truth in each, in the modern world—those against the Jews, the Jesuits, and the Freemasons. They have in turn done a very great amount of harm, but happily as a rule they counteract each other. We have indeed only discovered one man who managed to hold all three simultaneously. That man, it may amuse our readers to know, was a correspondent of the Spectator. The present writer well remembers receiving a letter from an Italian priest, who declared that the evils from which Italy was suffering were due to three causes—the Free- masons, the Jesuits, and the Jews. We cannot help thinking this a record in the heady art of conspiracy- hunting.
If we have felt it our duty to warn the country against the appalling dangers of indulging in the delirious luxury of conspiracy panics, it is necessary, here as in every form of political action, to trim the boat and avoid overloading on one aide or the other. Though it is madness to be always looking for mystic conspiracies, the -wise politician will keep his eye open to the possibilities of secret move- ments, and especially at times of political unrest. It is well to go slow about conspiracies until they fester into crimes, but we must be constantly on the look-out for the point of festering, and when it does occur we must apply at once the needful remedy, medical or surgical or both. And here let us say that though we regard with anxiety the wicked and ridiculous attempt to convict men of the Jewish faith and race of a world-wide conspiracy because such a scheme was set forth by a Russian Jew some nineteen years ago, we are by no means sure that there is not a Jewish peril, though it is of a perfectly different kind from that discovered in the pamphlet and one of a much less sensational kind. It is one which also can be met, and ought to be met, not by cruelty and injustice born of fear and folly, but by prudence and good sense. To that true Jewish peril we mean to return before long, but though it needs dealing with we cannot and will not touch it before first warning our cOuntrymen of the great danger as well as of the cruelty and baseness of letting their minds be infected by such mad talk as that set forth in The Jewish Peril. All the same, the book is a very remarkable piece of Diabolic Political Philosophy, and is well worth the careful perusal of those who can keep their heads under intellectual provocation. Much of the pamphlet is brilliant in its moral perversity and intellectual depravity.
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