T111 CAUSES OF THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.
"WrE scarcely wonder that many excellent people still believe V, that the persecutions of the Jews are, so to speak, arranged by Providence ; that their expulsions are instigated by God, to keep them dispersed ; that they are, in fact, still fulfill- ing an unhappy, mysterious, and preordained destiny. There is something not easily explained in a liability to outbursts of popular hatred which has endured so many centuries, and be- come visible among so many widely-separated races, professing so many different religions. The German of to-day is as unlike the mediaeval German in religious ideas as he is in knowledge and in costume, but he is just as ready, if he has only a chance, to fly at a Jew's throat. All history is full of the records of popular outbreaks against a people who, of all peoples, give the least overt occasion for them ; who are not conquerors, not aristocrats in politics, not law-breakers, not in the least separate as regards ordinary social moralities, from the people among whom they dwell, who are, in fact, curiously receptive, and so capable of assimilation, that there are no Germans so German, no French so French, no Italians so Italian, as the Jews of those three countries. The Jews do not offend the moral instincts of the nations. They hold, we believe, as an abstract theory, that polygamy is allow- able, wherever civilisation admits of it, but they do not practise it ; and for the rest, they obey the Commandments quite as well as their neighbours. That they should have been periodi- cally attacked in all ages, and in Mahommedan as well as Christian countries—some of the worst massacres they have suffered have been due to Mahommedans—is a very singular fact, the popular explanations of which are not entirely con- vincing. It is very often said that their creed is hated, and of course, there have been times and places in which that was true ; but it has never been true universally, and is not true now. The cultivated classes in Germany and Russia, who hate Jews, now hold religious opinions hardly distin- guishable from theirs ; and the populace in most European countries cares little about creeds which do not proselytise. In most parts of Europe outside Ireland, Catholics and Protestants get along easily enough, and nowhere do we hear of popular outrage, though we do sometimes of social dis- abilities, inflicted on infidels, Unitarians, or people professedly of no religion. The German Socialists, whose anti-religious aggres- siveness annoys all Christians, are not objects of mob attack, any more than the Mormons in Wales. The anti-Jewish spirit is supposed to be strongest in Roumania of all countries in Europe, but the Roumanians make no rushes at the Gipsies, though they are 200,000 in number, are distinguishable at a glance, are avowed heathens, and are accused by travellers of many immoral practices. We have ourselves attributed much of the hostility expressed to the Jews in Russia to their distinctive dress, but many other sections of the community, for instance, the upper class, the Tartar merchants, and the sailors, are just as much marked out from the mass of the population by separate costume, and excite no indigna- tion. Travellers say it is all matter of occupation, that the Jews in Eastern Europe are driven or betake themselves to illegal or infamous trades ; that in especial, they lend money at usury, sell spirits, and keep brothels ; but those are causes for the displeasure of the Government, of the better orders, or of moralists, not of the mob. The populace do not attack Christian usurers, Christian publicans are distinctly popular, and Christian brothel-keepers are hardly put down by the police, and not at all by the populations. To assign those reasons as explanations would be to attribute to mobs virtues they do not possess, even if the outbursts were unknown in Germany, where Jews occupy every position, except that of tillers of the ground, and where they are hated, though they have in most places abandoned every vestige of separate costume. Their tribal separateness, and idea of themselves as a special people, with a tribal God, or rather a God with some exceptional and covenanted relation to- wards their tribe only, is, says Mr. Goldwin Smith, an offence; and so, no doubt, it is, to the cultivated. But then is it to the mob ? Do Germans and Russians really care much about separatist theories, or want to marry Jewesses, or associate with Jews ? The Jews will not marry out of their own community, but on the Conti- nent, and notably in Germany, neither will the nobles, who are very numerous, and full of the pride of exclusiveness, but whose houses are not wrecked. The Americans and the Irish, often so bitter against Jews, are not annoyed by Quakers, who are very nearly as exclusive, and make their exclusiveness more visible. Nor do we feel clear that it is the manner of the Jews which provokes the mob, for while the Jews in Slav countries are universally servile, in Germany they are accused of universal insolence, and are hated in both countries about equally.
The truth is, modern Jews suffer from these outbreaks, from three causes, which are not precisely faults of their own, which are permanent, and which, until they mix with the populations so as to lose their identity, are irremediable. In the first place, they are foreigners in Europe, and foreigners who, as the popular instinct, rather than any knowledge, tells the people, are foreigners from another continent, and not another State. Cultivated Jews, for some unintelligible reason--for Asia has as much right to exist as Europe, and has done, perhaps, more for humanity, St. Paul, after all, being more useful than George Stephenson—dislike to be reminded of this, and have an idea that they can lose themselves among people who discern the Jewish strain and family to the fourth generation. The fact, nevertheless, exists, and is the cardinal fact of the situation. The Jews everywhere are foreigners, and in Europe, Asiatic foreigners, separated from the people by lines which, though sometimes
indefinable, are ineffaceable. Moreover, the majority of them take no pains to efface them, but remain, in their marriage laws, their ceremonial laws, their laws of diet, and, in Russia, their dress, separate and Asiatic. The European populace everywhere dislike and distrust foreigners, and especially foreigners widely distinct in race, with an antipathy which is at once unreasonable, and to Christians immoral, but which is incurable, so long as the ground of offence exists. The Americans, after a hundred years, retain their antipathy to the Negro, who holds the same faith as themselves, and will not put up with the Chinese, who has the attraction of entire freedom from prejudices, and extraordinary efficiency in business. The common people do not hate the Jews for their creed, their dress, or their ceremonies, but for their foreignership, Asiatic foreignership, which those things bring perpetually before their eyes. Then these foreigners, though not specially distinguished for intellectual power,—the Je,vs though often distinguished in literature, are seven millions, and have not in modern times originated, invented, or discovered much, in pro- portion to their numbers—possess in a high degree the faculty of accumulation. Every race has its useful power, or it could not survive, and this is theirs everywhere outside Palestine, where they seem never to grow rich. In our modern society, this faculty has suddenly become the one which confers power; and naturally, power in the hands of foreigners not liked for themselves, excites, first, burning jealousy, and then wrath. The populations feel as if their wealth were being taken away from them by intruders, and in one respect they are right. The Jews do not contribute their share to the general reservoir of means. We do not attribute this to them as a fault, any more than we attribute the absence of architecture among Semitic races to them as a fault, but still, it increases the popular dislike. No Jew produces anything, ploughs, or mines, or builds, or adds to the general wealth of the world. What he does is to distribute adroitly, levying toll in the process, and the world therefore seems no richer for him. A project has been talked of this week for sending half-a-million or so of Jews from Russia to America, there to colonise a settle- ment. They would not remain a year in that settlement, and during that year would import all their food. They were husbandmen once, diggers, ploughers, vine-dressers ; but it took the stern Mosaic Law to bind them to the soil, and since the Dispersion they have utterly lost the art. Granted a large and visible tribe of Asiatic foreigners, prospering in all dis- tributing departments of life, exempt from suffering by bad harvests, and adding nothing apparent to national wealth, and we have explanation enough for the hatred of ill-educated and jealous millions. The situation is no justification of the hate —there can, for Christians, be no justification for hatred towards a people—but it is an explanation.
Even then, the periodical character of these outbreaks remains to be explained. The feeling against the Jews is certainly inter- mittent, and as the Jews always exist and never change, those intermissions are not the least singular features of the narrative. Why do Germans and Russians leave off killing Jews, when they have once begun, and leave off sometimes for generations ? We confess that puzzle is one for which we can offer no solu- tion whatever, any more than we can for the fact that in France
all hatred and distrust of the Jews seems, since the Revolution, to have died finally away, till the Jews rise to the Cabinet as 'readily as Frenchmen, and the Republic entrusts the safety of its most important expedition—that to Tunis—to a Jew General, General Lambert, who is, we see, claimed as still avowedly be- longing to the Synagogue. IF the mobs repent, why do not they keep repentant; if they do not repent, why do they not keep on attacking ?
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