THE INTELLIGENT MAN'S GUIDE TO JEW-BAITING

by GEORGE SACKS

LONDON VICTOR GOLLANCZ LTD 1935

CONTENTS

I MAKE NO APOLOGY for adding another book to the long list which the study of anti-Semitism has inspired. For one thing, the greater part of what has been written forms no real contribution to the subject and, for another, I hold that the relations between Jews and non-Jews are an acid test of the stability of political institutions. Anti-Semitism is not just a quaint aberration of the human intellect. It has its roots in social structure, and an examination of its peculiarities sheds a great deal of light on the pathology of modern society. To relegate the whole affair to the intellectual dust-heap of semi-mysticism and to explain it on grounds of instinctive prejudice is to stultify one's self. There is no problem in race relationship which cannot yield to rational observation and scientific consideration.

If, after a dispassionate survey, the conclusion is reached that Jew and Gentile are inherently incapable of resolving their differences—that, in other words, there are ingrained characteristics in one or both of the contestants that make it impossible for them to live together

in peace—then race suicide for the Jews, as the smaller group, becomes logically the only way of escape from a hostile world. Driven to this despairing conclusion, one Jewish writer, Mr. L. B. Namier, has seriously discussed the advisability of rigid birth control for Jews, so that their "determined exit" may rid the world of an irreconcilable element. It is to disprove the necessity for such extravagance that this study has been undertaken.

Recent events in Germany have served to focus attention on the problem of the Jews and have been responsible, among other things, for a number of ill-informed treatises on the subject. If the Nazi antics have done nothing else, they have made the rest of the world uncomfortably aware that a Jewish question does exist. It would be wrong, however, to lay undue emphasis on happenings in Germany, for that would be encouraging the view that they were merely the bizarre accompaniments of an otherwise conventional revolution, whereas, in reality, they are part and parcel of a world process.

In his book, The Jew To-day, Mr. Sidney Dark expresses the view that "there is no universal anti-Jewish feeling in the world." Anti-Semitism, he maintains, is alien to British national character, and certainly it was the fashion up to recent times to decry talk of

There are, at the time this book is being written, three separate Fascist groups in England. Two of these, in reply to a questionnaire, have declared their uncompromising hostility towards Jews. Sir Oswald Mosley's group alone professes to have no anti-Semitic bias. It is interesting to note in this connection that, shortly after his visit to Oxford, a Fascist branch was formed; about the same time, perhaps by

A great deal of what may be termed sub-rosa anti-Semitism undoubtedly exists in England. It is unusual to find a reference to a Jewish character in English fiction which is not in the Shylock tradition. It is the rarest thing to

find a Hebraic character presented in a normal light. Englishmen may well be forgiven if they imagine that all Jews have hooked noses, curled oily hair, lisp, wear enormous diamonds in their shirt-fronts, and periodically burn down their business premises. No one who appreciates the power of the printed word can dismiss this as frivolous. If you go on insisting long enough that all Jews are wealthy, their gains ill-gotten by battening on meek Gentiles, you have gone a long way towards establishing an ineradicable impression that these are characteristics of the Jew. The invocation of the blessed word "Einstein" in reply makes as little impression as the word Mesopotamia in similar circumstances.

Anti-Semitism need not confine itself to bludgeonings of Jews, or to starving them slowly out of the economic life of a country. It is as potently expressed in social barriers erected against admission to clubs and in difficulties raised against occupation of privileged positions. In Great Britain and in the Dominions it is true to say that a Jew will not receive a public appointment on equal merits with a non-Jew. There are hospitals in London, some of them heavily endowed with Jewish money, where every effort is made to keep Jews from positions as house surgeons and from staff appointments.

"I was at Islington," writes Mr. H. J.

Mr. Dark prefers to believe that hatred of the Jew can find no place in English life. Because most of the distinguished Jews whom he has met do not appear to have suffered any disability by reason of their Judaism, he assumes that dislike and suspicion of the Jew scarcely exist. A rapid survey of the position of modern Jewry suffices, however, to show that

what is present in England in lesser degree prevails throughout the world where Jews are congregated in appreciable numbers.

Mr. Mencken, whose case is an interesting one to students of the pathology of the thought process, very nearly precipitated a minor riot recently when, in writing of the Jews, he said: "The Jews could be put down very plausibly as the most unpleasant race ever heard of. As commonly encountered they lack most of the qualities that make the civilised man: courage, dignity, incorruptibility, ease, confidence. They have vanity without pride, voluptuousness without taste, and learning without wisdom. Their fortitude, such as it is, is wasted upon puerile objects and their charity is mainly only a form of display."

Zangwill looked upon America as a country presenting the most favourable conditions for a gigantic experiment in mass-assimilation. These pious aspirations of a gradual absorption of the Jew into the conglomeration of races which mingled in pioneer America, and their fusion

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The intensity of feeling against the Jew in Germany has astonished most observers, even those who have endeavoured to whitewash the Nazi crudities as regrettable but inevitable accompaniments of a revolutionary upheaval. The problem in Germany involves not only the very existence of 600,000 people, but, by its repercussions, the dignity and self-respect of 16 million others spread over the globe.

Austria has been the scene of much virulent anti-Semitism, and the resistance offered to the spread of Nazi doctrines in Austria has not extended to the protection of its Jews. The group once headed by the late Dr. Dollfuss holds views similar to the Germans on the subject of Jews, and restrictions against admission of Jewish students to universities have long been in existence. The recent civil war has emphasised the precarious position of Austrian Jews. Already Jewish doctors and Jews engaged in official positions have been dismissed, even though many of these had no connection with the hated Social-Democratic Party.

Central Europe in general is no haven of refuge for the Jew. Rumania, Bulgaria, and Serbia have had an unenviable notoriety for virulent anti-Semitism these many years.

France, the first country to emancipate the Jew, has been by comparison remarkably free from anti-Semitism since the World War. Apart from the journals of the late M. Coty, there has been little exploitation of anti-Semitism for political purposes. The Dreyfus Affair, involved as it was in the war between the clericals and anti-clericals, never really represented such deep feeling as has been exemplified in Germany from 1870 onwards. France, of course, suffered little from unemployment, and the post-war economic crisis

has, up to comparatively recent times, left her untouched. Now that the depression is beginning at last to affect the franc, and unemployment is increasing, we may predict with confidence that anti-Semitism will not be long in following these symptoms of economic distress. German refugees have been welcomed, but in time they will inevitably be accused of taking the bread from French workers' mouths. It requires no great prophetic instinct to forecast protests to the Government and demands for increasing the immigration restrictions.

The position in the Dominions may be said to resemble that in England. In Canada, anti-Semitism expresses itself mainly in social discrimination and the sporadic posting on walls of anti-Jewish posters. There are no legal disabilities, though immigration restrictions, aimed mainly against Jews, are in force.

Russia, since the Revolution, is almost entirely free from anti-Semitism. The Jewish religion is discouraged officially and the Zionist movement has been outlawed, but the Jews, as a racial minority, suffer little, if any, discrimination by contrast with the non-Jewish population. They have had territory offered them for the establishment of autonomous Jewish republics, and they have been encouraged to gravitate into agriculture and industry on equal terms with other Russians.

Nowhere, then, except possibly in Soviet Russia, is the Jew persona grata. The intensity of feeling fluctuates, but there exists, and has existed for centuries, a deep-rooted prejudice against him which no honest observer can deny. The poorest contribution one can make towards the solution of a problem is to pretend that it does not exist. And if most writers on this subject have not gone as far as this, at least they have nearly always succeeded in conveying the impression that Jew-baiting is a relic of the past and occurs to-day only in those countries where a medieval outlook persists. This view is wrong. Like many other outworn credos, anti-Semitism may be dusted, cleaned, dressed up in new clothes, and foisted on an unsuspecting world as the latest thing in world

It is an interesting puzzle, this age-long feud. So much has been written in an effort to explain it that it seems almost presumptuous to venture on another attempt. But I believe that it can and must be done.

No book on the Jews has ever been written which does not go through the same dreary formula of recounting the charges made against them and refuting them one by one. Philo in his Legatio ad Gaium, and Josephus in Contra Apionem, led the way. Their apologetics differ in no way from those of Le Roi Beaulieu, Lazare, or from the latest opus by Mr. Sidney Dark. Each examines the points of grievance against the Jew and then proceeds to show either that there is no foundation in fact for them, or that, if they exist, the fault lies with Gentiles in shaping the Jew into a mould which makes him depart from accepted standards.

from thoughts of guile and of cheating the simple-minded Gentile; you may obtain testimonials for them from thousands of great and influential people; nothing will avail you. It is infinitely easier by propaganda to persuade the human animal to hate than to love, and much easier to accuse than to defend.

This should not be taken to mean that anti-Semitism is explained as an expression of the illogical human mind. When a man is duped by a Scotchman, he does not as a rule develop a deep complex against Scotchmen, nor, when a Scotchman confers a favour on him, does he translate this into terms of affection for the whole race. The analysis must go deeper.

Many attempts have been made to find a broad dividing-line between the Jew and his neighbour. Friends and enemies alike have tried to show that some basic incompatibility between the two peoples makes it impossible for them to live together in amity. Where these observers have differed has been in their analysis of what constitutes the dividing barrier.

Maurice Samuel and Ludwig Lewisohn, two modern Jewish writers, hold that there exists in the Jewish temperament a fundamental difference in outlook and mental horizon which makes it the antithesis of the dominant world outlook. Their contention, in short, is that Jewish values differ wholly from those of the Gentile, and that this clash of ultimate aspirations makes for hostility between them. For example, Samuel argues that the Jews look upon war with a horror that is not shared generally by Gentiles. To the latter the pagan love of games and sport finds expression in

Dr. Cecil Roth, the eminent Jewish historian, stressing this aspect, is reported as saying: "The Jews stood out as the protestants who had saved the world from the curse of uniformity... they still had their function to stand up as the champions of the free exercise of the human intellect. It might be that it was due to the passion for righteousness which they were told the Jew had. But he thought it was due more to the fact that the Jew, though he was willing to obey authority, was not constantly able to give implicit trust to authority. He questioned the basis of it even if he obeyed it.... The survival of Judaism might conceivably mean even now the survival of European culture, and the survival of the civilisation of the world as they know it" (Jewish Chronicle, March 23rd, 1934, p. 19).

This point of view is held fairly widely. A similar, if not quite so superficial, train of thought runs through the works of Achad Ha'am, and has been enunciated at varying

intervals by many Jewish writers from Philo down to Josef Kastein in his recent History and Destiny of the Jews. Renan appears to have come to the same conclusion.

Mr. Belloc is convinced that only by segregating the two dissimilar elements can peace come to Israel. Even Karl Marx believed that the people from whom he had sprung were an alien group in society. "We therefore perceive in Judaism," he wrote, "a general pervading anti-social element, which has been carried to its highest point by the historical development, in which Jews in this bad relation have zealously co-operated—a point at which it must necessarily dissolve itself. The emancipation of the Jews, in its last significance, is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism" (Selected Essays: "The Jewish Question").

Hitler, on the other hand, borrowing his ideas from earlier German authors, interprets the dividing-line differently. Jewish values, according to him, deviate from those of the Gentile in that the Jew is incapable of comprehending the sacred ties of blood and race. The Jew is essentially international, and can have no real appreciation of the ideals which animate the "Aryan." The historic significance of racial destiny, of exalted patriotism, are emotions which no Jew can genuinely feel. It is this which makes him totally alien in mind

from other peoples and renders him the enemy of their institutions. His destructive influence in national life is due to a cynical cosmopolitanism and a lack of sympathy with the aim of groups which regard race as the most important element in life. Hitler goes further. He decorates his theory with an enumeration of the evil characteristics of the Jew, in which every conceivable vice, every crime which the human mind is capable of planning, is laid at his door. With this latter portion of his argument I am not concerned. It forms his own contribution to the subject. I am interested only in the specific accusation that the Jew is inherently incapable of understanding "Aryan" views on race.

Mr. Dark, in the book from which I have already quoted, gives a different version of the cleavage between Jewish and Gentile worlds. In his opinion all conflicts, past and present, between opposing groups have been a struggle between the flamboyant and the drab. The theory is beautifully simple. What were the factors involved in the French Revolution? It was a revolution of the drab against the decadent flamboyant! The revolution of 1848? Simplicity itself. A revolt of the drab! The overthrow of the Paris Commune? Merely the final conquest of power by the drab. What, then, is the essential feature of the Austrian

anti-Semitism, like the poor, must continue to be a feature of life until the struggle between flamboyant and drab ends in the final victory of the drab.

corrective to the more hurried life of the majority. According to this view, the essential feature of Jewish thought is that it sets up a standard of moral values which the rest of the world cannot afford to lose.

himself of Jewish influence. The implication is that such influence in both instances is recognised as being antagonistic to the national life of Germans and Russians.

In one form or another all generalisations on the Jew have their origin in this belief of a fundamental cleavage. And since it is as easy to bring statistics to prove that Jews have made valuable contributions to civilisation as it is to prove that some of the most unpleasant desperadoes in history have been Jews, the interpretation of this cleavage results in the most diverse opinions as to its effect. It is futile, then, to attempt to answer all the complaints, frivolous or otherwise, that have been made against Jews. No sooner is it established, for instance, that there never has been a Jewish plot to dominate the world, and that the "protocols of Zion" is an impudent forgery, than somebody discovers that the Communist movement is Jewish. It is impossible to keep pace with the constantly changing aspect of the case against the Jew.

Nor is it necessary to enter into all the devious by-paths into which an examination of the argument against the Jew would lead us. If all its manifestations are due to prejudice, such prejudice is based in the last analysis on this conception of a material and spiritual gulf separating Jewry from Christendom.

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Now it is essential to realise that whether such a gulf really exists is immaterial. What does matter is whether the belief that it exists is universally held. And on that point, I think, there can be no doubt. I have shown that not only Gentiles, but Jews as well, subscribe to this view. And behind all the minor stupidities which encumber the problem looms this idea of two groups with diverging ideals and different values—a conception which, as I have indicated, goes back to the remotest antiquity.

But since ideas do not take shape in men's minds out of the realm of pure metaphysics, but have a definite relationship to reality (which is merely the philosophic way of saying that there is no smoke without fire), it becomes necessary to enquire into the history of the social relationship between Jews and Gentiles for an explanation of the prevalence of this belief.

of this cleavage, many Jews and Gentiles have advocated wholesale assimilation for ending the hostility which is said to flow from it. I propose in the next chapter to discuss the theory of assimilation more fully.

In his latest dream of a world to come, Mr. H. G. Wells has something to say of the position of the Jews in that world. "There had been a widespread belief in the tenacity and solidarity of Judaism. The Jews had been able to keep themselves a people apart, eating peculiar food and following distinctive religious practices, a nation within a nation, in every State in the world. They had been a perpetual irritant to statesmen, a breach in the collective solidarity everywhere. They had played a peculiar in-and-out game of social relationship. One could never tell whether a Jew was being a citizen or whether he was just being a Jew. They married, they traded preferentially. They had their own standards of behaviour. Wherever they abounded their peculiarities aroused bitter resentment.

"It might have been supposed that a people so widely dispersed would have developed a cosmopolitan mentality and formed a convenient linking organisation for many world purposes, but their special culture of isolation was so intense that this they neither did nor

Mr. Wells was at one time President of the World Alliance for Combating Anti-Semitism, but it would seem that the membership of this organisation does not necessarily connote an intelligent appreciation of the Jewish problem. Mr. Wells, in 1934, says what Hecatæus, Appolonius, Molo, Apion and Philostratus, Juvenal and Tacitus, said over two thousand years ago. Philostratus wrote that "people who do not share with others their table, their libations, their prayers, their sacrifices, are further removed from us than Susa or Bactria or even furthest India." In voicing his irritation against the clannishness of Jews, Mr. Wells is a lineal descendant of Haman, who charged them with being a people governed by laws "diverse from all people: neither keep they the King's laws: therefore it is not for the King's profit to suffer them."

Mr. Wells may appropriately be described as a classic example of a man in a hurry. It is his impatience with reality that makes him the super-idealist of his age. An incorrigible Utopian, his remedy for this problem, as for all other problems which have engaged his attention, is Utopian. Let us translate Mr. Wells's "educating the Jews out of their oddity and racial egotism" into practical terms. If, having seen the light, the whole corporate body of Jews decided that in complete assimilation

Superficially, of course, this nonconformity of the Jews makes the problem peculiarly susceptible to facile generalisation. Mr. Wells is at one with many liberal-minded observers, who, seeing in the exclusiveness of the Jews a weapon for their enemies, dispose of the whole question by arbitrarily demanding their complete absorption in the dominant race. They are strengthened in their belief of Jewish

Apparently, then, the trouble is that the Jew wants to remain different. But, as Dr. Weizmann himself says, the German Jew did not want to remain different as soon as conditions allowed him not to be different. There is no terrific urge for survival in the Jew. Grant him civic freedom and a measure of liberty and you get a state of affairs where the German Jew cannot realise why he is being persecuted. The

trouble is not that the Jew wants to remain different. It is that he is forced to remain different, and the Polish Jew controversy, which has been used by both Zionists and anti-Semites, displays clearly the cause of this inverted reasoning.

This question of the desire of the Jew to

Now, one might say that this process, which, if it means anything at all, certainly does not indicate a strong "will for differentiation," is one that applies only to an inferior type of Jew—the backslider—and that it is not typical of the upright and uncompromising Jew who wants to retain his identity. Nobody who is

familiar with the way in which Jewry—English, French, and American—was developing prior to the recent débâcle will support this. Naturally the process is not a uniform one. In some cases the religious tie is hard to break. In others the concentration of Jews in a given area may be so great, comparatively, that public opinion prevents "backsliding."

Einstein writes: "The assimilation of the Jews to the European nations among whom they lived, in language, in customs, and, to some extent, even in the form of religious organisation, could not eradicate the feeling of a lack of kinship between them and those among whom they lived. . . . This lack of kinship is referable to the law of the conservation of energy. Nationalities do not want to be fused. . . ." (About Zionism). Just previous to this, however, he has written: "Until two years ago I lived in Switzerland, and during my stay there I did not realise my Judaism. There was nothing that called forth any Jewish sentiments in me. When I moved to Berlin, all that changed. There I realised the difficulties with which so many Jews are confronted."

Now this does not prove that Einstein is wrong and the assimilationists right. It merely proves that the social sciences call for exact thinking and reasoned intelligence as much as

do physics and mathematics. And perhaps, also, it adds point to the remarks I have made elsewhere on the subject of professors. The "will for differentiation" is accentuated only by persecution and social and legal discrimination. This is why the German situation and the rise of anti-Semitic movements in other parts has stiffened the resistance to absorption and created in Jews the world over a feeling of comradeship in misfortune, a desire to remain apart, and a horror of assimilation.

Exaggeration of national consciousness is a reflection of material considerations. It does not arise as a fixed idea or plan in the realm of pure thought. And if it is a reflection of material considerations, it cannot change until these material considerations change. "Educating the Jews out of it" is impractical unless, prior to that, conditions are created which are favourable to the changed outlook.

Assimilation as the cure is no new suggestion. True, it was more fashionable thirty years ago. But the cosmopolitan mind still hankers after this panacea of wholesale hara-kari. Mr. Shaw on more than one occasion has offered the kindly advice to the Jews of intermarriage as the readiest solution of their difficulties. I wonder what he would think of the man who suggested as the solution of poverty the intermarriage of the poor and the rich?

The disappearance of a group of people as a distinct entity, their merging into homogeneity with the other groups, demands certain essential prerequisites. First, there must be a similarity of customs, of tradition, of language, and, as a rule, of religion. Second, there must be intermarriage and, above all, the weaker group must not be too numerous and must be isolated from affiliation with their racial origins. If a constant infiltration of new, unassimilated individuals occurs, the absorptive process is bound to be hindered.

Assimilation, then, is divided into two parts. We may talk of an assimilation of culture, by which is meant the process whereby the stranger adopts the language, the customs, the occupations, and the loyalties of his host. This kind of assimilation, however, is not enough. There must be wholesale intermarriage; and of these two factors the latter is the greater. In actual fact, assimilation of culture and assimilation by intermarriage has existed amongst Jews since they first appeared in history. It exists now, and will inevitably continue to do so. Why, then, have the Jews persisted as a separate group, a nation within a nation? Their story is not an unrelieved one of suffering and persecution, even if their histories read as if it were. They were settled in Spain for nearly a thousand years. During

obvious. The adoption of new languages, new customs, new traditions, new loyalties, and, above all, new religions, when the group involved is numerically large, must take many years to complete itself. In countries like Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, where the number of Jews has always been insignificant, this process of blending and ultimate disappearance is now almost complete. In modern Italy there is hardly a single Jewish family that is not related by intermarriage to Gentile Italians (Fishberg). The early Jewish settlers in South Africa were well on the way to obliteration as a separate body until the mass immigration which followed the discovery of gold and diamonds brought many thousands of Jews into the country.

It is easy to see one reason for their separation, then, in the constant increase of their numbers by mass immigration from less kindly disposed countries, a factor which tends to negative the assimilation already proceeding and to cast the lurid light of publicity on a process which needs a kind of unawareness to make it successful. Thus, Mr. J. F. W. Thelwell, Commercial Counsellor to His Majesty's Embassy at Berlin, in a report issued by the Department of Overseas Trade, writes: "The Jews are regarded by the National Socialists as an alien race whose admixture with Aryan

It is obvious that wholesale assimilation is not

feasible now, for the same reason that it never really was feasible, once the Jews were dispersed. If the 16 million Jews in the world to-day could be transported to one country where there were, say, 100 million of another nationality, and they were allowed to live together peacefully for several hundred years, it might be possible to predict their ultimate disappearance in the dominant race. But no such possibility exists. If determined efforts had been made to crush them out of existence simultaneously and synchronously, or if they had been treated with toleration and kindness over a sufficiently long period wherever they had settled, there would have been no Jews by now and no Jewish question. But no such world Utopia ever appeared. The Jewish battle is fought on too large a front.

Fundamentally the cry for uniformity is a dishonest one, because it is not founded on reality. Strangely enough, it emanates from the very people who base their objections to the Socialist State on the deadening uniformity which they imagine it would entail. They object to nationalism and Zionism—which is the Jewish echo of nationalism—on the ground that it emphasises the differences that keep people apart, and they object to the classless society, because, in their opinion, it would reduce the individual to a cypher.

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The resistance to absorption comes from both sides. We see this in the laws of the Jews forbidding intermarriage, and in the long list of decrees issued by the Church at various intervals on similar lines. If such resistance depends on mutual antagonism, as it undoubtedly must, surely the logical method of dealing with the problem consists in reconciling these differences rather than in reiterating the demand for absorption. No sane person would really like to see a standardised world, with everyone reduced to a dead level of sameness. At the present stage of civilisation the task which faces us is how to retain the characteristics of a "diversity of creatures" without creating thereby a situation in which diversity is translated into intolerance and enmity.

It is because this essential prerequisite has never been dealt with practically that assimilation, such as it was, has been a hopeless failure. The German Jews, who imagined that it was necessary only to marry Germans, and to outvie them in their devotion to things German, have had a rude awakening. The Spanish Jews, who believed that their difficulties would be solved by becoming Christians, were equally disillusioned. Is there any clearer proof that the foundations of anti-Semitism do not rest on the exclusiveness of the Jews nor on the denial of the Christian God?

The race which the Jew has run in his search for oblivion appears to be never-ending. There is always a new hurdle to negotiate. His religion was different. He attempted to discard it. His patriotism was suspect. Very well, he became ultra-patriotic and waved the flags of his hosts. And now he is told that his blood is incompatible. He is told that Semitic blood and "Aryan" blood cannot mix. Here is a poser indeed. For, short of a gigantic experiment in blood-transfusion (always providing that "Aryan" donors prove amenable), there seems no way in which he can take this hurdle. The development of the latest obstacle which the Jew is being asked to surmount, however, is one that demands fuller discussion.

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When Lincoln spoke about fooling all the people all of the time, he was not allowing for the popular Press and the power of the printed word. To many people the printed word has the sanction which priestly incantations possessed in the dark ages. Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in the pseudo-scientific fantasies of writers on racial hygiene—a cult which has assumed significant proportions in temporarily crazy Germany. Their pedantic generalisations have bemused not only a group of people who should have known better, but have lent spurious authority to legislation by politicians who could not have been expected to know any better. These witch-doctors of science find in the magic of print the sanctions which their tribal predecessors derived from the inability of their followers to penetrate their pretensions and impostures.

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with an "Aryan" people whom his papers were labelling "Huns" not so many years ago.

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Is there anything in the doctrine of racial superiority? Let me state, as clearly as I can, what research and study have established. Whilst we have definite and clear proof that physical characteristics are heritable, there is no proof at all that mental qualities are hereditarily transmitted. A group of people

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It is possible to breed a race of blue-eyed, tall blonds, though the enormous amount of race mixture which has taken place makes this unlikely, but it is quite impossible to predict that they will all prove fit to carry on the traditions of European civilisation in art, science, and literature.

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If you fancied blonds, and desired your race to be exclusively blue-eyed and fair-haired, and if you saw to it that your experimental station was run on the same lines as racing

^<sup>1 Genetic character of head form is not clearly proved. It is now known to be affected by environment.

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We arrive, then, at this situation: if we desire an intelligent race, a race of healthy people, with cultivated, eager minds, we must cease to rant of racial purity and concentrate on the material considerations in which these objects may be achieved. We must see to it that children get good food, that their teachers have open, honest, and trained minds, and

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with each other, where the differences are obviously connected not only with material advantages and disadvantages resulting from conditions, climate, soil, and mineral wealth, but with traditions, customs, religion, taboos, conventions, and prejudices. A little goodwill might seem more fitting in treating these complicated questions than the attitude adopted by some of the modern race propagandists."

In the second place, few people are aware of

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Certain schools are more susceptible to this weakness than others. Long ago, Porson, the Greek scholar, said that German philosophers dive deeper and come up muddier than anyone else; and, if this does not hold generally, it applies with great force to the race of philosophers who have debased, and are debasing, the sacred traditions of science. "The chief difference between these hereditymongers and the Ku Klux Klan is the difference between kid gloves and a nightgown—they have the same ethics" (Dorsey). When one thinks of the professors of "racial hygiene" who are being employed by the Hitler régime to corrupt the minds of unfortunate German children, it is enough to make one despair for the future of their country.

In a way, the respect which the average man has for the specialised worker is responsible for a great deal of harm. The reverence for the printed word is such that the harassed layman

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may well be forgiven for thinking that there must be something in it if Professor So-and-So and Professor Such-and-Such both say the same thing, especially if they say it often enough. And then it is much easier to be persuaded that all your troubles are due to an influx into your country of strange people than to believe that they may be due to exploitation by your own kith and kin. It is gratifying to be assured of your immense superiority over alien races, even if at times you are inclined to wonder wistfully why the alien seems to prosper and you do not.

And so you applaud when your worried politicians apply immigration restrictions and the world is made safe for you. And, when this does not serve to bring prosperity, you sit back and decide that perhaps you were mistaken. In the meantime, thousands of people have had their homes broken up, have been harried and bullied, and have had deeply etched in their consciousness (since most of them understand the process as little as you do) a sense of shame and inferiority, which becomes progressively harder to eradicate.

One further aspect must be examined. I have said that there is no pure race. The Jews do not constitute a pure race. It is unnecessary to go digging in old churchyards to discover whether Hitler and Goebbels have Jewish

blood. It would be difficult for them to have avoided it. Karl Kautsky in his book, Are the Jews a Race? devotes much energy to proving that there is nothing which justifies the anti-Semite in declaring that the Jews are a race apart, an alien group dissimilar physically and mentally to their "Aryan" neighbours. Fishberg gives many anthropological data in support of the same thesis. The enraged Mr. Belloc points out that these observers would have us believe that no such person as a Jew exists, that he is a figment of the imagination, but that we have only to walk into the street to see a Jew and to recognise him as such.

Which brings me to make an important observation. There are many who look like Jews but who are not Jews, and on this point Mr. Belloc is wrong and Kautsky and Fishberg right. But the crucial fact is that if you are convinced a man is a Jew you will behave towards him as if he were a Jew. It makes no difference whether a given individual is a Jew or not. If you are under the impression that he is one, you will react to him as if he were a Jew. And so whether the Jews are a pure race or not is of little significance. What does matter is your attitude to the Jew. In other words, the Jews are a race because others consider them a race, and in this Mr. Belloc is right and Messrs. Kautsky and Fishberg wrong.

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a bad name and he will answer to that name.

"Race as a constituent element in nationality is a purely subjective emotion; a view already hinted at by Seeley when, in his analysis of nationality, he gave as one of its united forces community of race, or rather the belief in the community of race.' The effects of a belief are not dependent upon its validity; and none can deny that this belief, like others equally false, has been productive, and is still productive to-day, of the most far-reaching results" (John Oakesmith, Race and Nationality, p. 50).

So whether the Jews are a race or not is merely of academic importance. The observable fact is that they are regarded by the groups amongst whom they dwell as a different group with different traditions, different customs, and possibly a different outlook on life. They are regarded as an alien, inassimilable group, and, although they lack the political status which sets the seal on sovereign nations, they must nevertheless be regarded as a separate nation, with all the political and cultural problems inherent in a nationality. Their national problem is complicated further in that there is no area in the world in which they can give political expression to their national independence. We arrive, then, at the paradoxical situation that, contrary to historic precedent, the claims of

PERCENTERS, AND SUCH-LIKE

the nationalist Jew have been willingly conceded, even forced on him by his neighbours. Those Jews who, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, hoped to get themselves accepted as nationals, but religious dissentients, in the country in which they dwelt, were doomed to disappointment in a world which was just discovering that its future political progress must be based on a conception of independent national States. Before we can assess the importance of this status to the Jew we shall have to discuss in some detail the historical significance of nationality and nationalism, and how it affects his destiny.

There is probably no more urgent problem facing civilisation to-day than the status of nationalism. From the academic excursions of historians it has emerged as a popular political battle-cry. It is not so long ago that the word "nationality" was associated in the minds of most people with the cool, impersonal demands for information embodied in passports. To-day the air resounds with the demands of clamant nationalities for a place in the sun.

It is a commonplace that no social phenomenon can be studied without regard to its economic background, and in this respect the problem of nationalism is no exception. Some writers have not hesitated to describe it as a vague, imponderable emotion, incapable of logical analysis. We cannot, however, begin to understand its manifestations and potentialities until we are ready to shake off all theological bias, and discuss it as an ideological reflection of the material basis of society. We shall discover that there is no call for metaphysical hair-splitting if we recognise that in nationalism we have a form of traditional loyalty to

Up to the fifteenth century, nationalism was unknown. Before that the interests of workmen, tradesmen, peasants, and even of feudal nobility were centred in the cities. Men would fight, not for their country, but for their city-states, and, when kings waged war, they had to depend, not upon the spontaneous loyalty of their subjects, but upon mercenaries, and contributions of serfs from the feudal chiefs who nominally rendered homage to their sovereign. Thus what we would term civil wars to-day were frequent enough occurrences in feudal Europe. It is a tribute to the growth of nationalism that such civil wars are now regarded with as much horror in public life as incest in private life.

There were, of course, no interests which bound the people of one city-state to another—except the tie of the Church. And this tie was used whenever concerted action became necessary. Just as the slogan for war to-day is based on an appeal to a common nationalism, so in the medieval wars the slogan was based on an appeal to a common religion. And it was precisely because such appeal was tenuous that concerted action—as, for example, in the Crusades—generally ended unsuccessfully.

But with the growth of a merchant class, and

The revived interest in Roman law, which emphasised the sacred character of private property, was followed by a religious revolution,

which established the right of the individual and individual conscience against the authority of the feudal Church. The Reformation and Protestantism, to which it gave birth, cut the last tie which might hold the people of various nations together.

So was born nationalism. And so came the national language—of which I shall have more to say. When the economic transformation had crystallised into a stable system, national literature sprang up. Poets sang of their country's glory. The liberating effect of capitalism on the feudal State brought new countries into the orbit of the European world. Trade expanded, and with it men's vision of the world. The sum of human knowledge increased. National patriotism was kindled. National flags were unfurled. Religion, ethics, politics, law, took their cue from the altered state of society—the centralising tendency in the national spirit.

The materialistic interpretation of history implies that the social, political, ethical, and legal structure of society is based fundamentally on its economic foundations. But it has been emphasised time and again that this superstructure of ideas persists long after its material basis demands a completely new ethical, political, social, and legal code. It is as if an individual in his adolescence were to continue to wear the clothes of his infancy.

This form of government probably meets with the approval of the majority of the Italian people. There is no possible way at the moment by which we can verify this. The interesting point to us, however, is that the philosophical basis of Fascism is only just beginning to be formulated. Only now are we being regaled with treatises from the professors explaining the ideology of Fascism. I want to emphasise that the description of what Fascism is, what it purports to be, what it hopes to do, and why it is a heaven-sent solution of our difficulties, is emerging from Mussolini and the inevitable flat-footed professors years after the revolution which brought it into being. The tomfoolery of the Corporate State is only now being advanced to justify the floggings and administration of castor oil which inaugurated the birth of Fascism in Italy.

The Italians who fought for, and supported, Mussolini in his assumption of the dictatorship knew nothing, and were told nothing, of Corporate States. Instead, they were inflated by mob-oratory, with a mixture of stale Socialism and nationalistic blather as to Italy's greatness and inevitable destiny. The German imitation shows the same features. There is the same blend of distorted Socialism and drunken national fervour. If Hitler lasts, we may be sure of one thing: we shall be overwhelmed with a

spate of learned treatises from solemn German professors explaining, in incredibly long and unintelligible books, the philosophic and constructive basis of German Fascism. And nobody will be more surprised than Hitler when he realises the deep erudition and philosophic probings into the structure of the State with which he must have whiled away his time painting on his ladder in Vienna.

Violent changes in the structure of society arise, then, from dissatisfaction with the existing state of things. The chaotic and illunderstood movements which gave birth to these changes are rationalised at a later stage. What we have to grasp firmly is that such rationalisations may later give philosophic sanction to a system long after it has become unworkable. To continue with the illustration. Thousands of simple, honest people are prepared to die, and in all probability will die, for what in their opinion Fascism represents, long after its shallow pretensions and its negation of promise have become apparent even to leaderwriters of The Times. The Corporate States as the intellectual façade for gangster rule will have emerged as the hollow mockery it is, long before its credulous dupes have ceased to offer their lives in its defence.

It is perfectly clear that, in the main, millions of soldiers killed in the Great War offered up their lives from no motives of personal advancement. The German soldier did not consciously fight for increased trade and an increase in his wages any more than did

the Allied soldier. He fought because he was told that the enemies of his country wanted to enslave him, to occupy his country and to take away its possessions and its greatness. In each warring country the instruments of propaganda, the Church, the Press, public speakers, and politicians, all battered unceasingly at the collective mind, beseeching, imploring, and stamping indelibly on its collective consciousness the outstanding fact that defeat meant national ruin, slavery, and oppression, and that victory meant vindication, freedom from alien rule, and individual liberty. Yet it is a saddening platitude to say now that the war was the result of national rivalries, national aggrandisements, national jealousies based fundamentally on a primitive desire for wealth, territories, and industrial supremacy.

Sir Norman Angell maintains that such policies cannot have economic roots, that capitalists are not such fools as to believe that international wars will increase their trade or their industrial supremacy, because it is obvious that the last war did not benefit any nation commercially. Therefore, he reiterates, economic gain is not the motivating factor. It is merely the irrational human mind which is to blame, and it is only by educating this irrational human mind that we can free ourselves from its logical results.

"Plainly it is not first of all a problem of economics, of men following what they believe to be their interest. These millions of young-sters are not in the least interested in their economic warfare, their comfort and security; the danger of the breakdown of civilisation would be less if they were. They are moved by values and considerations that are not economic, and we must take them into account."

"Even with a nationality, economic interests are not always identical, yet such divergence

of economic interest does not in any way tend to disintegrate the nationality. Who is not familiar with the situation in certain countries, where the industrial section of the population is aggressively eager for tariff protection, whilst the agricultural element is bitterly opposed to it? Although such dissimilarity of economic interests may be the subject-matter of the most acrimonious political battles within the State, the members of the nationality, or nationalities, comprising the State do not become estranged from each other, or sundered on the lines of such divergence of interests."

These are classic examples of examining a problem by standing on one's head to survey it. First as to Mr. Joseph. Whose economic interests are represented in modern Governments? Those of manufacturers, industrialists, big landowners, or those of workers, agricultural labourers, and petty tradesmen? And when it comes to a clash between these interests, which of them is represented as in the nation's interest? "Divergence of economic interest does not in any way tend to disintegrate the nationality," he writes. But in point of fact it does. Witness all revolutionary wars, culminating in the most recent one—the Austrian Civil War. And do not riots in the agrarian areas of the United States indicate angry resentment with the industrial East? Does this

"Some of the bourgeoisie," writes Carlton Hayes, in what is perhaps the sanest book ever written on nationalism, "particularly bourgeois politicians, made a very interesting discovery about the phenomenon of nationalism. They found that the masses, when brought under its spell, not only were less inclined to criticise their leaders, but also were disposed to accept the status quo in economic matters. On the multitudes nationalism could be made to act as a sort of laughing-gas. If a labourer could be induced to take a long, deep breath of it he would feel quite exhilarated, and for a time, at any rate, he would forget about overwork and underpay in factory, field, or mine, and lose the reality of his own squalid habitation in the dream of national greatness. A sustained inhalation of nationalism, as in time of national election or international war, might even

deaden the noise of Socialists, anarchists, and other apostles of social revolution or economic unrest."

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forces are kept static by those in whose interest it is to keep them static. Sir Norman Angell is really expressing impatience because these contradications are not perceived by the class which is exploited to keep them static.

"Not until it is realised that economics can only come second or third, and that factors of ethics and race must come first, will there be understanding of the causes of the present unhappiness, or a possibility of discovering means and methods of curing it." These words are from the pen of that profound philosopher, Adolf Hitler. There is no greater proof of the success which attends organised propaganda than the career of this humourless simulacrum of a national leader. He has placed on record his estimate of the gullibility of the masses. What a striking comment on this gullibility is the fact that a great nation has succumbed to a doctrine which preaches the supremacy of the aristocratic principle in life, and finds itself led by a Hitler!

The Germans and Italians are told that economics comes second or even third—the race must come first. This is the new religion. In point of fact, it is the old religion masquerading as the new. The wretchedly paid worker, in factory or mine, is told that what comes first is the struggle of his race for supremacy, not his own personal struggle for security, just as his

ancestor was told that a Supreme Being had ordained his poverty and the wealth of his feudal lord. Observe that this race, which he must venerate now as he did his God, consists of blonds, brunettes, workmen, manufacturers, tramps, millionaires, peasants, atheists, religious maniacs, people with bad digestions and good, geniuses and mental defectives. This motley collection must be united in aim. They now have a mission. They are all members of a great race superior to other races.

Article 1 of the Italian Charter of Labour, issued in April 1927, states: "The Italian nation is an organism possessing a purpose, a life, and instruments of action superior to, though possessed by, the individuals, or groups of individuals, who compose it. The nation is a moral, political, and economic unit integrally embodied in the Fascist State." Here is an exact analogy between the attributes of God and that of the nation, even to the Trinity—moral, political, and economic unity.

According to this view, each and every individual is expected to have as much stake in the glory of his country as his neighbour. The miner earning two pounds a week in the Rhondda Valley must prostrate himself to this jealous God of Nationalism equally with the great landowner who draws royalties from the coal seams on his property. And, when his

nation goes to war, he must defend with his life the hovel in which he lives, as well as the estate of his landlord, for does he not share in the glory and traditions of his race? Do not the poets, painters, and scientists of his country belong to him as well as to his exploiter?

It is easy, too easy, to sneer at nationalism. From being a liberating force it has enslaved humanity. It makes the British coal-miner see as his brother, not the German coal-miner who sweats underground for as wretched a pittance, but the British mine-owner. It blinds the British farmer, struggling for a living from the soil, to the fact that the American farmer is facing the same uncertainties, crushed in the same way by debt burdens, and saddled similarly with a host of parasitic middlemen.

Nationalism in capitalist countries implies an inherent faith in the importance of nationality, a belief that civilisation is best served through the competitive activities of nations in the fields of industry, science, art, literature, and music. It connotes a feeling of superiority and an exaltation of power of one nation over another. It shows itself in the fostering of patriotism, and in its basest form exploits the idea of a pure race which in some way is ordained by God, or the Cosmic Force, as the only fit one to bear the torch of civilisation. Carried to its logical conclusion, and in keeping

with its philosophy, it justifies the conquest and subordination of "inferior" peoples. It has been the ethical justification of slavery in America and Africa, of serfdom in medieval Europe and Russia, and it is used even to this day to justify intervention by so-called civilised races in Manchuria and Africa.

Bound up in the intangible content of nationalism is the urge of national traditions, national customs, and a national language. No national movement is complete without a language question. Witness Hebrew in Palestine, Gaelic in Ireland, Afrikaans in South Africa, and the language difficulties in Belgium, Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, etc.

When we contemplate the use to which the average specimen of homo sapiens puts his language we may wonder faintly what all the pother is about. The novels of the late Mr. Edgar Wallace, the leaders of the Daily Mail and Daily Express, the masterpieces of Hollywood, the crooning of theme-songs over the wireless, the process of eating and drinking interspersed with amorous interludes and the begetting of young, the exchange of the current dirty story, the discussion on the relative merits of different makes of motor-cars—all these would sound equally profound and significant in English or in Hindustani. It seems unnecessary to dig up Gaelic, Hebrew, and Afrikaans

merely to play Gaelic, Hebrew, and Afrikaans variations on the above themes. The detached observer, faced with the passionate declamations of the language enthusiasts, the modern resurrection-men, confronted with the loud and incessant propaganda, which would have him believe that the masses yearn for their neglected languages more than for anything else in the world, may be forgiven if he politely represses a snigger. Nevertheless, it has to be faced. The language racket is in full swing. All over the world new discordant noises jar on sensitive ears, and philologists are happily engaged in finding local equivalents for necking, petting, gasoline, gangster, and carboxyhæmoglobin. The new Tower of Babel is being built, and only the faithful are to be entrusted with its building.

"Before the development of political nationalism in modern times, speech was simply the natural means of expression, not an instrument of policy. The people spoke a dialect that bound them, not with the State and its pursuit of power, but with the home and village; the State and science employed a supra-national language scarcely spoken by any people. It is modern nationalism that raised the popular speech to the language of literature and the State. Fichte made the intimate connection between nationality and language the starting-point

of this theory of nationalism. In the State of the nineteenth century, which had become what it never had been before—the highest form of organisation of the nation, which identified itself with the State—the national language became a constitutional function, the means of the will of the nation to dominance. Where the State embraced several peoples there now developed an oppression, unknown until then, of the other peoples by the nation that identified itself with the State; this nation's dominance in the State found expression in the position given to its language.

"The laws concerning the use of the official language in Czecho-Slovakia or Poland, which figure so prominently in the constitutional law of these countries, depress the minority peoples—through the subordinate position given to their language—to citizens of an inferior class, deprive them of many otherwise natural rights, and hit them in the most sensitive place. The struggle for the privileged position of the official language in administration and justice, in school and in parliament, is the favourite scene of the orgies of nationalism. It is over this question that the national zeal of the minority populations flares up, that the struggle for the right and the prestige of peoples is waged, that the national element of the language of the people is turned into a hotly contested political instrument.

But in capitalist countries nationalism is a religion, and even to question the sanctity of language or traditions, or to suggest that culture may mean something which depends upon bread and butter, is like impugning the credentials of the Pope.

The groups which comprise a nationalist movement in any country present fairly constant features. At the head is a small band of fanatical leaders. They are passionately sincere; and nationalism replaces for them that devoted love of religion which in previous ages

would have made them inquisitors. Quite frequently, indeed, they are ministers of religion. As a rule they are stern, unbending, humourless, just as religious fanatics rarely show a sense of humour. These few individuals, like other religious counterparts, are so extreme in their views that they make even their followers uncomfortable at times. They burn with religious zeal. Their motives are honest as a rule, and free from thought of personal and material gain, and when eventually the movement succeeds and they are given positions of authority, they are helpless in the grip of the second group.

The second section comprises the lawyers and leaders of commerce: the traders, manufacturers, well-to-do farmers, and professional classes, who see in a nationalist movement the possibility of lucrative openings—diplomatic posts, appointments to the Army and Navy and to the Civil Service, tariffs, and so on. It is this group which exploits a nationalist movement mercilessly.

The third group—factory workers, small salaried classes, shop assistants, farm labourers, and petty tradesmen—forms the largest numerically. They go to meetings and lectures, where they are subjected to mob oratory, mob enthusiasm, even as their forbears listened with open mouths to religious leaders. They fight and die for nationalism, and, when they

are "free and independent," they remain slaves to the same economic forces. The enemy is not recognised as clearly as before. They are now a "united nation," and it takes much longer to make them realise that exploitation is as uncomfortable for them under the domination of their own people as it was under foreign rule.

To nationalists the nation has a destiny—a corporate, spiritual existence as real as the vision of God to the mystic. Consider for a moment the reality behind the image. You gather a group of individuals of all shapes and sizes, of all kinds and morals, short-headed, long-headed, divided into classes with conflicting interests, and you endow them with some mystic, spiritual destiny, some eternal purpose. Their survival as a group takes on sacred sanctions; their flags, their anthems, their uniforms, all embody some mysterious force which would appear to defy analysis.

No wonder Sir Norman Angell is puzzled by the strange faces which nationalism wears; that he is reduced to saying that what "men desire as the fruit of political effort is so subject to violent changes (usually the result of suggestion acting upon the semi-conscious or unconscious) that what we will die for in January we become indifferent about in December.

"In view, therefore, of the ever-changing

thought on this subject. What appears to be a piece of theoretical and academic reasoning results in an attitude of mind which faces the necessity for radical change and revolution with misgivings, doubts, and hesitations.

form these clashes assume, and whether they achieve their object in the transference of power, are unpredictable, and depend, in the long run, on such accidental factors as leadership, the degree of knowledge and wisdom in the contesting classes. All these considerations make it impossible to forecast how soon, and in what manner, the new class attains its ascendancy. And, whatever one may say of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, none of these ever pretended to be political astrologers or rivals to Old Moore, except in the very broadest manner.

Sir Norman Angell says economic interests and class war can have nothing to do with the motivating force of men's actions, because, if they did, they would not use methods calculated to lose the very things for which they are struggling. And it is this fundamental mistake of confusing cause and effect which leads him into his intellectual morass. For it is a morass. Once you deny the vital significance of the economic background (and I emphasise again and again the word vital) and fall back on the complexities of the results of "suggestion acting upon the semi-conscious or unconscious [sic]" for your explanation, then you are doomed to the intellectual position of a sane man fallen among lunatics—a rational creature surrounded by illogical and irrational animals, you are left in the position that you can have no

change, you cannot hope to achieve a regeneration until you have educated the vast majority of mankind to your way of thinking. And, in point of fact, this is the position of most harassed liberals. They sigh helplessly when confronted with the futilities of the present day, and their only panacea is education! education! And so Sir Norman Angell wastes his splendid talents in dispelling illusions which persist as realities.

He can never have read his Engels: "What all these fellows lack is dialectic. They see only cause here, only effect there. They do not see that all this method of viewing things results in bare abstractions; that in the real world such metaphysical polar opposites exist only in crucial situations; that the whole great process develops itself in the form of reciprocal action—of very unequal forces, to be sure, but in which the economic movement is far and away the strongest, most primary and decisive. They do not see that here nothing is absolute and everything relative. For them Hegel has never existed."

The cynical, worldly wise critics of social revolutionaries sometimes concede the validity of such an analysis. They fall back on the argument that we believe what we wish to believe, and make our arguments suit our beliefs. "You, who wish to see the world a

different place, with comfort, cleanliness, and security for all, fashion for yourselves a political creed with arguments to match, and call it Communism. I, who like the world as it is, with its contrasts of joy and despair, its high lights and its grey drabness, am violently opposed to what seems to me the sameness, the orderliness, and the bleakness of your world; and I talk of the menace of Communism and its evil growth." So run the arguments. We rationalise our instincts.

"If this is so," say such critics, "what is the use of anything? Why enter into the fights and struggles of the market-place? Let us, like wise men, enjoy what we can, live our lives pleasantly as we can (such critics usually are able to lead pleasant lives), ignoring the pandemonium of the mob." Let us suppose that they are right—that we think as it pleases us to think—that, in other words, what suits our book becomes transformed by rationalisation into a system of philosophy which justifies us in holding on to it. What is this, then, but another proof of materialist motives colouring our mode of thought?

And is the Communist not right when he regards the seeming liberal as a greater danger than the confirmed reactionary? For, on the above argument, worthy liberals like Sir Norman Angell, Sir Arthur Salter, or Mr. John

The argument, of course, is not as nonsensical as it sounds. It is true that only the inexorable logic of economic breakdown will breed a desire for change in most people, but it is unlikely that we shall ever be exhorted by the Daily Mail and Daily Express to take off our hats to Russia—not, at all events, whilst these pillars of Empire continue to pay a dividend.

First, the emergence of nationalism as a political question of the first magnitude has created for the Jew a complication comparable only to the birth of Christianity. The new religion has served to emphasise his strangeness, his demarcation from the rest of the world, as effectively as did the coming of the older religion. It has given his enemies a new weapon. From being the infidel, he is now the

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internationalist. And to be suspected of internationalism is almost as bad as to be suspected of being involved in the white-slave traffic. To the ardent nationalist a man holding internationalist views is akin to some sort of spiritual eunuch—an anæmic nondescript with ink in his veins instead of red blood.

Secondly, as if in answer to such accusations, the Jew is now developing his own national consciousness. It is in accentuation of his own nationalism that he seeks salvation, and it is to that development which we must now turn.

From what has been said in the previous chapter, it ought not to occasion any surprise that the Jews did not begin to consider the territorial implications of nationalism until the middle of the nineteenth century. Zionist writers date their nationalistic yearnings from the dim, remote past, but, apart from pious aspiration and sporadic settlement in the Holy Land by occasional fugitives in search of a final resting-place on holy soil, no real corporate action occurred until the eighties of the last century.

Zionist historians are almost all unanimous in declaring that the exacerbation of anti-Semitism which occurred at that time in Germany, Russia, and Eastern Europe was responsible for its inception. A little reflection will show that this reason for the growth of the Zionist ideal is historically false. If persecution in itself bred a desire for territorial isolation, we should have had a Jewish State years ago, since anti-Semitism has existed for centuries. "The history of Israel is a story of lost opportunities," wrote Zangwill. There were many periods in their chequered history when it

would have been feasible for Jews to erect their own State, even in Palestine. Joseph Nasi, Duke of Naxos, attempted to found a Jewish settlement in Tiberias, which had been granted him by his friend and patron, the Sultan of Turkey, not many years after the expulsion from Spain. But the scheme came to nothing.

It was the growth of nationalism in their neighbours which really converted the formal "next year in Palestine" of the prayer-book into practical designs on the homeland. The emancipation of the Balkan countries from Turkish domination, the growth of Russian nationalism and Pan-Slavism, could not but have its effect on thoughtful Jews. Nationalism, as I have pointed out, is of recent growth (much more recent in Eastern Europe), and Zionism, as a manifestation of nationalism, is a logical extension of that nationalism which gave it birth.

The most eloquent of the "practicals" was Achad Ha'am (Asher Ginzburg), who must be regarded as the philosopher of the modern

Jewish nationalist movement. For him the historic mission of the Jew is to keep steadily before the world that uncompromising spirit of pure reason and absolute justice characteristic of the Hebrew prophets. He regards Hebraism as a philosophy which inspires its followers to a striving after the unattainable ideals of absolute truth and absolute justice. For him, then, Zionism means the establishment of a centre of Jewish thought where the Hebrew genius can translate this philosophy into practical form for civilisation. He insists on Palestine as the centre, on soil which nourished Moses, Isaiah, and Amos, holding that the twin forces of assimilation and persecution render such a flowering of genuine culture impossible in exile.

This philosophy is, of course, purely idealistic in character. To the dialectic materialist such notions of absolute truth and absolute justice are fantastic. Truth and justice are relative notions measured by such standards as are available at any given period, and to assume that it is exclusively a function of the Hebraic mind to supply such standards sounds suspiciously like a philosophic rationalisation of a belief in a Chosen People. Whether it is enunciated by a thinker and philosopher like Achad Ha'am, or by such nationalist swashbucklers as Maurice Samuel and Ludwig Lewisohn, the

effect is not so far removed from that of the "Aryan" pseudo-philosophers as one might imagine. Since, however, the majority of Zionists readily accepted this view of the Jewish mission, the slow upbuilding of a Jewish community, with the development of Hebrew as a national language, became a much more practical undertaking than interviewing Turkish sultans and obtaining charters. Hence those who believed in the spiritual mission of Israel, rather than in the transference of Jews who were unwelcome in one country to a country of their own, became known as the "practicals."

I have said that the Balfour Declaration perforce made all Zionists "practicals," because the creation of a purely Jewish State in Palestine is now regarded as only a remote possibility. That Declaration, and its subsequent interpretations, has resulted in Zionism becoming largely a Jewish mission to the Arabs. If many Jews have benefited from Zionism, a larger number of Arabs have benefited equally, and at no expense to themselves. Such momentum as the Jewish revival of Palestine has given to the renaissance of its Arab population must inevitably continue to re-vitalise and re-populate this section of its community.

For Jewish writers, then, to talk of Palestine

being to the Jews what Ireland is to the Irish is to ignore the fact that, in Ireland, the Irish are not in the minority, and that, save for Ulster and the fast diminishing Anglo-Irish Protestant group, Ireland is not, and never has been, faced with the problem of a group differing in religion, economic standards, and education which, Sinbad-like, an active minority is to carry on its back.

There is a mass of Zionist literature and propaganda available differing in no way in its claims from that of any nationalist literature. The religious enthusiasm and hope engendered by the Balfour Declaration have been damped a great deal by the limitations and restrictions imposed by the Mandatory Power in the interests of the Arabs, who have caught the nationalist fever themselves. It is true that most Zionists declare that Zionism by itself cannot solve the Jewish problem, but there is no doubt that the movement is held up as the one constructive and corporate effort which Jews are able to make themselves towards its elucidation. It must be our task to see in what way this object can be achieved.

Everybody is agreed—even the most fanatic of Zionists—that Palestine cannot become the national home of even the majority of the 16 million Jews spread over the world. Dr. Ruppin, in a sanguine estimate, forecasts a

population of half a million by 1943 in Palestine, allowing for natural increase. "Three per cent of world Jewry would live in Palestine, forming about 30 per cent of its population." So that, in an appraisal of Zionism, due consideration must be given not only to the small group in Palestine, but to the overwhelming majority in other countries. If the number of Jews in Palestine grows, it grows equally in the Dispersion.

created by Jewish capital should benefit Jewish workmen, and that they should be paid wages required to secure the minimum standard of a civilised existence. Their demands have been successful in industry, and to a great extent in the plantation-colonies, even where the employers could have obtained non-Jewish labour at lower wages.

"Propaganda for Jewish produce will not work in export trade, and it will be hard to solve the problem of how the claim of the Jewish workman to an adequate wage is to be reconciled with the rules of free competition in a capitalist world. A partial solution may be found, possibly, by the Jewish workmen adapting themselves to the conditions of the country, and by an extension of co-operatives reducing their cost of living, so that, with lower money wages, real wages may yet remain at the same level."

As Zukerman points out, the Zionist movement at one time did show signs of constructive planning on a collectivist basis. The experiments in land communes were a success before kolkhoz became a fashionable word. But there can be no doubt that for a long time to come the social and economic structure of Palestine will be identical with that of other capitalist countries. A cross-section of the Palestinian population now, or for years to come, would show society divided into classes: a financial and land-owning oligarchy, a middle-class stratum comprising petty traders, rentiers, and professional men, and an industrial and agricultural proletariat.

Achad Ha'am's dream will assume reality. "Palestine will be a national spiritual centre of Judaism to which all Jews will turn with

affection, and which will bind all Jews together; a centre of study and learning, of language and literature, of bodily work and spiritual purification; a true miniature of the people of Israel as it ought to be, so that every Hebrew in the Diaspora will think it a privilege to behold just once 'the centre of Judaism,' and, when he returns home, will say to his friends: 'If you wish to see the genuine type of a Jew, whether it be a rabbi or a scholar or writer, a farmer or an artist or business man, then go to Palestine and you will see it.'"

Now this show-window notion of Zionism, if one may term it so, is one that crops up regularly in Zionist writings. We are to see in Palestine really Jewish agricultural labourers and Jewish landowners. Jewish manufacturers and live Jewish workmen, honest-to-God Jewish politicians and Jewish railway porters. In short, Palestine is to reveal to the world something which nobody need ever have doubted—that the Jews could create a State in which all the anomalies and contradictions of capitalist civilisation could be reproduced. Thus one good Zionist is reported to have said, in a lecture, that he did not mind very much the strife between the Labour Party and the Revisionists (Jewish Fascists), for these divisions made Jewish life interesting and more attractive. The smug satisfaction with which

Herein lies the strongest criticism of the Zionist movement. Awakened late to the illusion that in super-nationalism lies the cure of all their ills, the Jews arrive on parade, dishevelled and out of breath, to find that the show is nearly over. It will be small consolation to the Jewish worker in Palestine when he discovers that his exploiter is a Jewish employer. Nor, when Jewish capital creates its reservoir of unemployed, as it inevitably must, will the unemployed Jew regard his plight with resignation because he is now starving on Jewish soil. And if he comforts himself with the thought that at least he is free from pogroms, his own Jewish Fascist movement will soon enough repair that deficiency.

"Unbelievable as it may sound," writes Zukerman, "a Zionist Hitler movement, fully rigged out, except for Hitler's anti-Semitism, is actually in existence now in Palestine, in Poland, and in most European countries. Its members parade in brown shirts, drill in preparation for some imaginary war; engage in strike-breaking; foster a bellicose attitude

"We are the strongest of all the non-Socialist parties within the Zionist movement," states Mr. Vladimir Jabotinsky, the leader of the Revisionist faction, "and we are the only party in which the suffering Jewish middle class, the backbone of the nation, believes. Within the next few years we shall become the leading force in Zionism."

The Jewish Chronicle of March 16th, 1934,

"The magistrate, in pronouncing sentence, remarked that he made it so severe because the authorities were determined to put a stop to these frequent disputes and clashes.

"At Rehoboth a number of Brith Trumpeldorites are reported to have been injured, and two Labourites have been arrested, following a clash between the two groups over their respective claims to employment. Brith

Trumpeldorites had started work on a building there, which, it was alleged, was an infringement of an agreement made by the contractors to engage their workers through the union.

"Here also the Revisionists are continuing

work under police protection.

"Six Labourites were arrested for obstructing the police and refusing to disperse. They were taken to Acre Gaol, together with ten of the Moatzat Avodim leaders of Hedera, who have refused to pay their fines. They will probably be bailed out pending an appeal.

unsuccessful."

We may now arrive at some estimate of the spiritual emanation likely to issue from a social order mimicking in every respect the political, social, and economic structure of other capitalist countries. For observe that your Zionist claims that in the establishment of a national home in Palestine, in the wedding of a people to its ancient soil, lie the potentialities of a great spiritual regeneration which is to revive the drooping courage and national pride of the exiled Jew. An awe-inspired world is to be shown that the Jew can once again stagger it with products of his genius comparable to the Bible and Christianity. From the loins of the Jewish State will spring such achievements as

It is the fashion to-day to talk of national art, national culture, and national literature when, in point of fact, art, culture, and literature are rapidly being internationalised. The problems with which the French philosopher deals are similar to those of his German colleague. The life which the American novelist records differs only in detail from that of his readers in England, France, or Germany. Your Yiddish or Hebrew writer reflects his own order of society as much as does the Spanish or Japanese writer, and if the order of society in a Hebrew State is the same as in any other State, his art or culture will have no peculiar virtue, except that it is transcribed into Hebrew. The only experimental deviations in art to-day are, significantly enough, Russian. I shall have more to say on this elsewhere.

We may discount largely the optimism of the nationalists who hope to use Palestine as a means of demonstrating what Jewish genius and Jewish art can show when rooted in its own soil. There is no reason to assume that the products of Jewish genius will multiply when

it is transplanted to Palestine. There is a quality of obstinacy in genius which makes it unamenable alike to the methods of the forcing-house and the rigours of oppression.

How will Palestine affect the millions of Jews who will not, or cannot, be accommodated

there? Zionists maintain that in the building up of Palestine lies a corporate task, which will serve as the cement binding together Jews, who, with the decay of religion, were fast being lost to Judaism through assimilation. Such a concrete task will not only stay the disintegrating forces of assimilation, but will act as a constant reminder to Jews of their racial identity, and will bolster up their national consciousness and national pride. The achievements of Jews in Palestine will create respect in the minds of their enemies, and so lessen anti-Semitism. Palestine will give the Jews a voice in international politics and enable them to defend Jewish interests elsewhere.

We may deal with the last argument first. The achievements of the Japanese in building up, in a short period, a mighty State, complete with all modern appurtenances, such as an army and navy, compare very favourably with the Herculean efforts of the Jewish pioneers. Yet in spite of this the Japanese Government cannot prevent its nationals from being excluded everywhere but from Brazil. Immigration restrictions on Japanese are much more severe than on Jews. All the might and power of Japan have been unable to mitigate the dislike and fear with which other nations view Japanese intrusion.

It is obvious that, unless anti-Semitism is tackled at its roots, Zionism, and the success of

the Jews in Palestine, will do nothing to prevent anti-Jewish feeling in other countries.

A spiritual centre might serve if anti-Semitism were due to a lack of spirituality in Jews. A Zionist State would be impotent in the face of such a convulsion as the German outburst. "A spiritual centre," wrote Zangwill some time ago, "round which the Jews of the Diaspora are to group as a political nationality, which nationality, however, is to be in no contradiction with their local nationality as Englishmen, Frenchmen, or Germans, is a conception which goes dangerously near nonsense, and nonsensically near danger."

As to Zionism acting as a force against assimilatory disintegration of Jews, it has been abundantly shown that the only factors which negative the forces of assimilation are those of persecution and anti-Semitism, allied to the length of time which assimilation requires. The whole tendency of Jewish history has been towards assimilation where and when conditions have been favourable. Even the growth of the Zionist ideal has been due to the exacerbation of anti-Semitic feeling. It stands to reason, then, that the increase or retardation of assimilation depends to a large extent on what happens in the countries of the Dispersion, rather than upon what occurs in Palestine.

Thus Dr. Weizmann writes: "That the

As the political and economic status of the Jew in Palestine becomes enhanced, and when sufficient momentum has been given to the country by the charitable impetus of years, a situation will develop when the Jews outside Palestine will no longer be required to render aid. Palestine must, as time goes on, become

less and less dependent on the efforts of Jews in America, South Africa, Poland, and England. When that time comes, there will inevitably be a loosening of the ties which bind the land of Israel to Jews elsewhere. It is true that at present Hebrew schools, Jewish cultural societies, and Jewish communal work are binding factors among Jews outside Palestine. Largely these enthusiasms are whipped up at frequent intervals by visits from distinguished Zionists on a collecting campaign. In between, interest languishes. The German débâcle has intensified these manifestations of national differentiation. And, if anti-Semitism grows in Europe, there is no doubt at all that the will to Jewishness will become accentuated.

Let us assume that it does—that the argument as to the binding force of Zionism is sound. We shall have a situation where the Jewish minorities in each country outside Palestine will build for themselves invisible ghetto walls, behind which they will accentuate their Jewishness, their traditions, their customs, their languages, their schools, and their religious institutions. It is to be assumed that they will, in addition, require the ruling classes of the countries in which they dwell to grant them civic equality and to yield to them those rights and privileges which are freely granted to other citizens. There is absolutely

I have discussed Zionism, assuming, throughout, the existence of an established Jewish State, and ignoring the hesitant policy of the

Mandatory Power and dissensions with the Arabs. Both factors must have an important bearing on the attainment of that ideal. A Jewish State cannot exist in vacuo, particularly when such a State is small and powerless. It must be subject to the repercussions of the policy of greater nations. The success of a national policy is bound up with the ultimate fate of nationalism elsewhere. Under the most favourable circumstances such a State must continue to be a pawn in the game of international intrigue. How much more so when it has still to tread the thorny path of the achievement of sovereign independence?

We are driven to the conclusion that, despite the assertions of Zionists, Palestine can in no way affect the welfare and national well-being of Jews elsewhere. Economic and racial differentiation may continue to intensify race-consciousness in them, but no one will maintain that race-consciousness so engendered can in any way be regarded as dignified, or as resting on a healthy basis.

I have said in a previous chapter that the case for anti-Semitism in all its ramifications rests on a belief that a fundamental clash of values separates Jew from Gentile. I indicated that the foundations for this belief must be sought in the social relations that existed between them in the past. The possibility of resolving an age-long struggle can lie only in a proper evaluation of this relationship; for, if there is a fallacy in this conviction of a barrier, it must be based on a contradiction in the social symbiosis of Jew and Gentile. We must search for factor, or factors, which upset the smooth rhythm in the development of mutual harmony.

One of the most notable characteristics of anti-Semitism is its cyclical character. Jews arrive in a country. They experience no disability. More troop in. Hostility is aroused which grows until it culminates in expulsion, or segregation, and the march is on to another country.

Now, it is obvious that when a cycle of events is repeated many times, in many countries, at periods separated from each other by many

years, and going back to the remotest antiquity, that some common denominator must be present. A group manifestation such as this which extends over thousands of years is bound to show variations—local and temporal—but in the main its constant features must rest on a constant factor. It is my thesis that this constant factor is the class-war.

What do we mean by the "class-war"? The words have become so hackneyed, they sound so much a cliché of Hyde Park, that they convey no sense of reality. Nobody can seriously deny that for the vast majority of mankind the pressing problem of all times has been to procure bread for themselves and their dependants, and to safeguard their material existence. The main aim has been economic security. At this juncture someone is sure to interject that other motives have entered into men's desire—his spiritual yearnings, for example, a striving for the Infinite or the contemplation of human destiny. I do not deny this. Nevertheless, the irrefutable fact remains that the primary basic aim is the satisfaction of such mundane requirements as hunger, thirst, and protection from the elements. For most men this has been the mainspring of their lives.

This contention is so trite that we constantly forget its implications. It is so obvious that we persistently ignore it. Yet no social study is

founded on reality that does not base itself on the struggle for material welfare. Poverty may be bearable, but economic insecurity, the haunting anxiety of unemployment, and uncertainty as to the future of himself and his dependants, not only robs a man of dignity, but destroys his sense of values. I cannot lay sufficient emphasis on this cardinal point. There have been many exceptional men and women who have ignored material considerations and have scorned to base their lives upon them, but mankind in the mass has been ruled by motives which, in the last analysis, are bound up with the primitive struggle for existence.

It is quite true that under special circumstances material considerations may be ignored for varying periods. I have stated elsewhere that patriotic emotion may blind a whole people to their own interests. But even here there is a breaking-point. Patriotism is not proof, for example, against an economic blockade. Poverty and starvation, the results of such a blockade, swept the German Emperor away and forced his generals to sue for peace. Religious beliefs, too, may act as a damper on revolutionary attempts to upset a social order, but not for long. Religion, patriotism, moral indignation, all succumb eventually to the inexorable logic of material hardship.

The gravest factor in economic unrest is the contrast between poverty and wealth. It is possible to envisage a community resigned to poverty and privation if all its members suffer equally. The struggle that exists will be mainly a struggle against the forces of Nature. The

very real hardship endured by the Russians in the consummation of their Five-Year Plan was unaccompanied by any signs of mass dissatisfaction. Such violence as showed itself was directed against the kulak class, whose standard of life was higher than that of the masses. The spectacle of a minority living in comfort while the rest starve sooner or later leads to riots and revolution. You may bull-dose the starving by an appeal to their patriotism or the blessings of ultimate reward, and for a time you will be successful.

But—and this is a very important but—patience is liable to be strained very much sooner where the contrasting class is alien. A German worker, resigned to his poverty and wretchedness, may not be aroused by the sight of his well-fed employer driving past in an expensive limousine; but let the car be filled with a hook-nosed Semitic family and his indignation will know no bounds. It is unlikely that he will say: "An economic system which allows this man so much and me so little is evil, and must be destroyed." He is much more likely to join the nearest Storm-Troop detachment. And what is true for the worker applies with equal force to the petty trader and to the man with a profession.

social phenomenon which has been troubling the world for thousands of years. If this appears to be an over-simplification of the matter, we may console ourselves with the reflection that there are few social problems which do not rest on the same foundation.

If any, reading this, imagine my thesis is that the Jews are a blameless, misunderstood, and impeccable race, and that the sins of omission and commission of which they are accused exist purely in the imagination of their enemies, they will have misread me. I have tried throughout this book to emphasise that we are what we are largely as a result of our environment. Nobody but a Nazi numskull denies this. You may "condition" a race as Pavlov "conditions" his dogs. And if by persecution and obloquy, by hatred and contempt, by exclusion and restrictions, you force the Jew into habits, customs, and economic avenues which are the natural corollary of

such treatment, you will very probably produce a people varying mentally, morally, and physically from your own standards.

It is one of the difficulties which Jews, in studying the forces which make for anti-Semitism, rarely face. They are too apt to regard world history as a sequence of events in which they feature as the principals and the rest as supers. Their judgment of an event is coloured by its influence on Jewish history. In doing so they make a mistake which is common to all races. And so we rarely find Jewish writers and historians surveying the Jewish struggle for emancipation and self-expression as a phase in the general struggle of mankind to free itself from poverty, cruelty, and oppression.

Any attempt to discuss the Jewish question which is not based on a study of the social contacts of Jew and Gentile is bound to lead to futilities. A case in point is to be found in a recently published book, The Jew at Bay, which purports to be an analysis of the problem. I mention it here because it is a fair indication of the intellectual measure of such books. It contains a number of unoriginal generalisations. The Jew is this and the Jew is that. He is never an engine-driver. He never commands a battleship. He eats too much. He overdresses. An inventory of his virtues and

The depressing fact remains that it is the rarest thing to find the problem discussed intelligently. From the crazed anti-Semite, who rationalises his hate in a thousand tortuous ways, to the good-hearted, muddled liberal who hates cruelty and unkindness, but whitewashes

ΙĐ

"The question of the capacity of the Jews for emancipation," wrote Karl Marx (Selected Essays: "The Jewish Question"), "is from our standpoint transformed into the question: What particular social element has to be overcome in order to abolish Judaism? For the capacity for emancipation of the modern Jew is the relation of Judaism to the emancipation of the modern world. This relation is

necessarily disclosed by the special position of Judaism in the modern subjugated world.

"Let us consider the real worldly Jews, not the Sabbath Jews. We will not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but we will look for the secret of religion in the real Jew. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical needs, egotism. What is the secular cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his secular God? Money.

"Very well. Emancipation from huckstering and from money, and, therefore, from real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our epoch

"An organisation of society which would abolish the fundamental conditions of huck-stering, and, therefore the possibility of huck-stering, would render the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would dissolve like a mist in the real vital air of society."

Karl Marx was born a Jew. It is quite certain that throughout his life he gave little thought to what is known as the Jewish question. (How he would have writhed if he had been told that the gospel of Marxism was contaminated by the Jewish spirit!) To him the Jews were an unpleasant race, "hucksters and usurers," and their struggle an unimportant facet of life. Yet he could have found no better proof of the validity of historical materialism than in the

study of the problem of the Jew. So closely does anti-Semitism correspond to economic crises that it is possible to study the economic vicissitudes of a country by studying the history of its Jews. The Jew is the index of class unrest. He is the thermometer of the body politic. An exacerbation of anti-Semitism in a country indicates that all is not well as surely as does a rise of temperature in an ailing patient.

of tempo. Some extraneous factor must be acting to negative it. I shall show in another chapter that outbreaks of violent anti-Semitism have been synchronous with violent stages of the class-war; that what I have referred to as the rhythmicity of anti-Semitism corresponds to the rhythmicity of the class-war, and that the constant factor lies in this and in nothing else.

dislike of an individual into that of a whole group cannot have its origin except in a group reason. "Cause and effect are eternally changing places," wrote Engels, "so that what is effect here and now will be cause there and then, and vice-versa." It is true that many of the facets of anti-Semitism are not equally illuminated by the economic motive. They have to be viewed from all angles to be seen in true perspective.

But how else can we explain the emergence of anti-Semitic movements in countries such as England, and some of the Dominions, where every Jew had thought the ghost of Jew-hatred laid? Is it coincidence that a universal slump endangering the economic security of millions exists at the same time? I have pointed out that class antagonism finds its clearest expression in times of economic depression, when the stability of political institutions is strained to its utmost. It is a verifiable fact that it is precisely during such periods that popular movements against Jews reach their zenith.

The magnitude of the world crisis may be gauged by the emergence of anti-Semitic movements in all countries.

Germany, the cockpit of the class-war, has inevitably become the scene of the most violent anti-Jewish orgies, just as the deathstruggle of feudalism in pre-war Poland and

Russia was accompanied by outrageous treatment of their Jews.

Certain qualifying statements must be made. When Fascism came to Italy there was some attempt at an anti-Semitic movement, but on the whole the Italian eruption has been noticeably free from Jew-baiting. At first sight this would seem to be a contradiction of our theory. If we remember, however, that there are only 30,000 Jews in Italy among a population of 40 million Italians, and that there is hardly a Jewish family in Italy which cannot claim Gentile relations, the reason for the apparent contradiction becomes obvious.

Poland, on the other hand, with a large proportion of unassimilated Jews, might have been expected to show a greater reaction than it has. But it is difficult to see how, short of a revival of pogroms, it would be possible for any depression to worsen the lot of the Polish Jew. Even Nazi Germany has stopped short of official pogroms. The world has changed, in spite of what is sometimes said, and it is more expedient for a modern State to transform a national minority into helots than to wipe it out by pogroms. The Polish situation however, has revealed one pleasing spectacle: a virulently anti-Semitic country being forced to reproach another for its ill treatment of Jews because they happen to be Polish nationals.

In general, then, the situation in which Jews find themselves to-day bears out the contention that the curves of anti-Semitism and economic conflict approximate each other. Surveying the modern scene, it is obvious that any development of harmony which might have been taking place between Jew and Gentile is bound to be retarded by the contemporary phase of the class-war. Any consciousness of a gulf between them is certain to be intensified.

An examination of the social relations between Jew and Gentile brings us to the conclusion that the idea of the two, being irrevocably separate from one another, depends for its growth and perpetuation on periodic crises arising in the transformation of the economic structure of the world. It is quite obvious that this notion is not startlingly new. Most superficial observers have been content before now to put anti-Semitism down to what is called "economic jealousy." But this is usually said without any clear idea of its implications. The argument is used mainly in the sense that the supposed wealth of all Jews is resented. There is never any suggestion as to why it is resented, and why hostility should react equally on Jews without money. The popular idea that every Jewish pedlar ends his days in Park Lane is clearly absurd.

The feeling that the Jew is the antithesis of

It is because of this that the stock arguments of the anti-Semite amount to nonsense. How is it possible to reconcile the statement that all Jews are Communists with the fact that the

finance capitalist and the petty bourgeois have full representation among them? And that the main grievance of German Jews against Hitler is that he has not allowed them to join the National Socialist Party? The converse of the statement that Jews are Communists—Communists are Jews—is just as patently absurd. For, in this case, the animus is not so much against Jews as against Communism. To discredit Communism the epithet Jewish is applied to it, again with the object of emphasising it as a theory of life which is alien to the rest of European civilisation. If Communism made its appeal solely to Jews, upholders of the capitalist régime might sleep soundly.

We shall get no further if we assume, with Hitler, that the Jew does not react to class stimuli in the same way as the Gentile. Under the stress of national difficulties Jews may respond temporarily as a corporate body, but to suggest that there is always a unity of purpose and design among them is merely to give way to the kind of stupidity which pictures every Chinaman as a member of a secret society, pledged to the overthrow of white domination—a nightmarish view, fed on a surfeit of cheap novels and cheaper films.

If we could picture the Jews remaining in undisturbed possession of their original home throughout the vicissitudes of the last twenty

centuries, if that country had evolved into the modern national State, it is reasonable to assume that there would exist no anti-Semitism as we know it to-day. The dispersion of so many members of one race, divorced from their national home, has no parallel in history. This is why the problem of the Jew is essentially the problem of the stranger to the herd. It is his apparent differentiation from the herd which makes him the mirror of the troubles of the herd

Constant contact with strange cultures makes Jews conspicuous wherever they go. They are persecuted in Poland and they flock to America, carrying with them the habits and customs of the Polish ghettos. They take with them their accents, their wretched poverty, and an immense desire to better their circumstances. They swarm into the big cities, since they have been debarred from the land for centuries. When their numbers are sufficiently large to present a marked contrast in their ways and customs to those of hundred-per-cent Americans, they give rise to a restrained anti-Semitism, which at crucial periods may flare up into unbridled persecution.

appears to be a mystery, it becomes clear that if 100,000 proletarian Americans were transplanted over a period of twenty years to a few big towns in Poland, there would undoubtedly be a similar reaction against them. It is not because they are Jews that no country can put up with more than one or two per cent of them, but because they are regarded as strangers. And the reason is that up to now there has been only one country which has so moulded its economic life that it can accommodate strangers. If Nature abhors a vacuum, mankind almost universally abhors a stranger.

The life history of a mass movement against Jews is easily reconstructed. It can be built up step by step. There are no marked differences in essential features between its characteristics in the Middle Ages and in modern times. First there is a period of economic stress; harvests fail, a pestilence devastates the countryside, or a war leaves in its train poverty and unemployment. Antagonism between the ruling classes and the starving masses develops. It is noticed that a number of Jews appear to be unaffected by the prevailing hard times. In the back street the cry arises: "We are being exploited for the benefit of the Jews." The movement gains momentum. Old stories are retold. Someone rediscovers the "Protocols of Zion," or its more ancient equivalent, the "blood ritual

people whose hospitality he abuses. Does this absolve the wretchedly poor, sweated Jewish labourers in Polish and Lithuanian ghettos? Jews form an uncouth swarming mass of sweated labour, lowering the standard of wages and swindling their way to success through unfair competition, corruption, and shady commercial transactions. Does this protect the Jewish scientist, littérateur, artist, or musician from being deprived of his livelihood? The Jew is a Communist, aiding and abetting revolution. Does this make the Jewish capitalist popular?

Make your way through the whole gamut of accusation and counter-accusation. Is there any light shed on the problem? But do away with the sanctions of private property and anti-Semitism disappears like morning mist before the sun. What clearer proof do we need?

No study of anti-Semitism is complete which ignores the reaction against the Jew in Germany. Indeed, it is the Nazi treatment of the Jewish minority in Germany which has brought the Jewish question into the limelight once again, and has caused Governments in most other countries to revise their attitude to the Jew and to Jewish immigration.

A great deal of the discussion as to the whys and wherefores of German anti-Semitism has centred round a fruitless examination of German mentality. We are told that the German prefers uniformity, loves authority, discipline, and regimentation, and has no natural affinity for these democratic institutions which are supposed to be the heritage of the Anglo-Saxon and French peoples. Many Jews, not unreasonably, in the teeth of the hurricane of hate and poisonous propaganda against them, which the Nazis have loosed over the world, believe today that the majority of Germans remain barbarians, uncivilised and incapable of tolerating deviations from their norm.

All this, of course, is nonsense. To generalise about Germans is as unprofitable as it is to

generalise about Jews. There is nothing inherent in the physical and mental make-up of the German which renders him incapable of treating a Jew fairly. We shall have to look elsewhere for an explanation of the loathing and hatred of the Jew which has shaken Germany like some elemental fury.

The growth of an industrial and financial oligarchy ruling over a middle class, and an agricultural and industrial proletariat replacing the feudal structure, was no sooner completed than it was subjected to the corroding influence of an imperialist war and the subsequent emergence of inevitable class conflicts. Germany and, to a lesser extent, Austria were the only modern European countries with large Jewish populations which had to face these economic upheavals. Both France and England had passed through these phases—England more slowly than France—but neither of them was presented with the problem of an alien minority in its midst claiming equal privileges and rights of citizenship in such numbers as in Germany or Austria.

The historical inevitability of the emergence of anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria was preordained. The character of the Germans is a side-issue, and has no relevance to the facts. Englishmen and Frenchmen faced with such a situation would have reacted similarly, as, in point of fact, they show signs of doing. The point must be reiterated. The political and economic changes in Germany, almost kaleidoscopic in nature, occurred in a country which contained a comparatively large Jewish population concentrated mainly in the few large towns which set the political pace. These

changes benefited the Jew greatly. From a state of affairs where he was herded in ghettos, kept out of guilds, and forbidden to own land, he emerged half blinded into the sun of economic and political freedom. As entrepreneur, financier, and free-lance trader he found the bourgeois State eminently suited to his financial and and commercial training. It was not long before the contrast of a hitherto despised caste rising to heights of unexampled prosperity and influence brought its inevitable sequel. Already, in 1870, we see the emergence of an anti-Semitic party, opposed to "Jewish domination."

This fear of "alien domination," of the advancement of the stranger, is a constant feature in anti-Semitism. I have shown it to be a natural accompaniment of the system of private property, and Germany offers a remarkable confirmation of this view. The Jewish scapegoat, or "whipping-boy," so beloved of liberal commentators, has its origin in the fact that it is much easier to recognise an exploiter when he is a stranger than when he is of your own kith and kin.

Once popular feeling has been roused and all the potentialities appear for using anti-Semitism as a pawn in the political game, it would be asking too much to expect politicians not to exploit it. There is no clearer example of this than in the attitude of Sir Oswald Mosley and his group of Blackshirts. It is quite

^<sup>1 This prediction has now been abundantly vindicated. Refer, e.g., to Mosley's speech at the Albert Hall on Sunday, October 28th, 1934.

distinguished men in all branches of learning, as well as of Jews who "dominate" commerce, are blind to the fact that the competitive struggle affects not only the economics of petty trading, but that of the peddling of bourgeois culture. Time and again we have to emphasise that technical perfection in science or the arts is no criterion of broad-minded tolerance, nor can it provide the cachet of authority to social behaviour or social pronouncements. Indeed, when a professor of physics, or a lecturer in economics, issues an authoritative statement on something which is outside the sphere of his subject, it is usually time to reach for the salt-cellar.

There is no point in repeating the history of the anti-Semitic movement in Germany of the late nineteenth century. The crash of 1873, and the depression which followed and lasted for seven or eight years, was succeeded by several boom periods. These boom periods gave the quietus to the more virulent political movements. But it is important to recognise that the eddies of such popular revulsions of feeling persist for a long time after the original storm has spent itself. It is largely thus that anti-Semitism perpetuates itself. The curve of anti-Semitism may drop, but the momentum given it is sufficient to carry it through a period of comparative peace. If the rulers of Germany

were to experience a change of heart tomorrow, and to return the Jews their privileges and rights, it would still take years for the bitter memories of the present strife to be erased. The Jews, with recollections of their treatment, would remain suspicious and fearful, and the non-Jews would not be able to forget readily the poisonous lying propaganda instilled into them. And so it has been with all previous anti-Semitic outbursts.

Anti-Jewish feeling, then, has existed beneath the surface in Germany to a much more marked degree than in England or France, though in the case of the latter country the Dreyfus Affair was indication enough of the resentment with which the clericals regarded the encroachment of Jews. But it was the German defeat in the Great War, and the social upheavals consequent upon it, which brought the simmering dislike of the Jew to the boiling-point in that country.

It was only in the soil of a country racked by the miseries of inflation, blockade, and war, where the masses starved and the few exploiters flourished, that the crazy propaganda of the Nazis could take root. With the best will in the world, no sensible, intelligent individual can read Hitler's book, My Struggle, without a feeling of amazement that such colossal ignorance, such malignant stupidity, could ever take hold

Some such feeling of wonderment must be responsible for the activities of the "white-washers." There is no period in history which cannot show a group of writers and thinkers who have been eager to whitewash the evil deeds of usurpers and tyrants. The Nazi accession to power has afforded the usual spectacle of a number of objective spectators who, because they cannot understand the reasons for such intensity of hate, feel that there must be some justification for it. Apart from the muddled leader-writers and literary hacks who by instinct like to keep one foot in each camp, a number of earnest and well-meaning journalists and visitors to Germany see in Hitlerism now something which no intelligent observer saw in the days when the Nazis were an irresponsible rabble.

book will show that hatred of the Jew is the philosophic corner-stone of National "Socialism." These whitewashers do not see that if Hitler restored their rights to the Jews he would betray himself to the German nation as an impostor. They are blind to the fact that, even if they wanted to do so, Goering, Goebbels, and the rest do not dare to treat the Jews with elementary justice, for if they did they would be conceding the main point in the programme that gave them power.

It is interesting to contrast the anxiety of the respectable newspapers of the world to search for signs of constructive statesmanship among the leaders of the Nazi movement with their prophecies some years ago of the decay of the party because of unintelligent leadership. Let Hitler mouth some of the well-worn tags of diplomacy, such as that "Germany loves her neighbours and desires peace—but peace with security," and they heave a sigh of relief and murmur that, after all, Hitler is learning restraint and wisdom. How little restraint and wisdom such minds as his are able to absorb they will soon learn to their cost.

The Nazi treatment of German Jews has ceased to be front-page news. The Jewish communities in other countries are engaged in licking the wounds of their brothers in distress, even if the attitude they assume is rather

like that of a mother who scolds an injured child who has disobeyed her. (There is something tragic in the analogy between German Jewry and a venturesome child, for, as everyone knows, that community has gone furthest along the path to assimilation.) But if the Press of the world has forgotten their plight, and other countries turn a deaf ear to their protests, this does not mean that conditions have changed appreciably. The return to helotry is being quietly and systematically carried out.

It is obvious that neither the elimination of the Jew from the German picture nor even the extermination of all German Jews will solve the economic problem and class conflicts of the German State. When the German masses awake, disillusioned, from their dream to find that the new régime is unable to give them that security and freedom which Nazidom has promised them, when they realise that the new State is merely another reflection of the power of the great industrialists and bankers to rule their lives, then will come the real trial of strength. It will be a struggle in which it will not be possible to trail the red herring of Jewish domination across their path. Long before that happens it is possible that their rulers will have made the political gambler's last throw—war. It is not for nothing that Goering says: "The tramp of a single disciplined formation is worth

more than the choicest speech in Parliament, and the march-step of a formation has now become the march-step of a nation. When grave times come again—and they will come—Potsdam must form an iron backbone."

What has happened in Germany is a clear illustration of my general thesis. A glance at the official literature issued for foreign consumption by the Nazi propagandists shows that they regard their case against the Jews as amply proved when they produce statistics which show Jews predominating in commerce, the arts, and the professions out of all proportion to their numbers in the general population. This complaint of Jewish domination is one that is common to all ages, and yet it is explicable only on the assumption of an underlying conception of the Jew as a stranger.

In the next chapter I shall endeavour to show that what is true in Germany to-day has been equally true of Jews in all their wanderings of the past.

Some years after the war, Mr. Hilaire Belloc wrote a book on the Jews in which he propounded a solution to the Jewish problem. Since Mr. Belloc's social insight is such that he could envisage the Russian Revolution as a Jewish plot to transform Russian society as revenge for the persecution which the race had endured, it is perhaps unreasonable to expect from him any clear analysis of what really constitutes the Jewish problem. Much of what is logical in his book is vitiated by this species of medieval obsession.

In one of his lucid moments he talks of Jewish persecution as a "series of cycles invariably following the same step. The Jew comes to an alien society at first in small numbers. He thrives. His presence is not resented. He is rather treated as a friend. Whether from mere contrast in type—what I have called friction—or from some apparent divergence between his objects and those of his hosts, or through his increasing numbers, he creates (or discovers) a growing animosity. He resents it. He opposes his hosts. They call themselves masters in their

own house. The Jew resists their claim. It comes to violence. It is always the same miserable sequence. First the welcome; then the growing half-conscious ill-ease; next the culmination in acute ill-ease; lastly catastrophe and disaster; insult, persecution, even massacre; the exiles flying from the place of persecution into a new district where the Jew is hardly known; where the problem has never existed or has been forgotten. He meets again with the largest hospitality. There follows here also, after a period of amicable interfusion, a growing half-conscious ill-ease, which next becomes acute and leads to new explosions and so on in a fatal round."

It is this "tragic cycle," as he calls it, which eludes and baffles most observers. There is an easy tendency to give it a mystical explanation, amongst Jews and non-Jews alike. Let us endeavour to place this puzzle in its correct historical perspective. Let us compare this struggle of an alien people for existence among hostile forces with the simultaneous struggle for the emergence of a new social order, in which the world could provide peace and security to all its creatures instead of to a select few; because it is against this background that the history of the Jews must be studied. That is where it belongs, and only in that framework does the picture take on coherence. The destiny of

Israel has been shaped by the material conditions under which it existed, and by no mystical force. It is a man-made problem, with a man-made solution.

enough—and more so in modern times the Jew has been no stranger, but an active participant in the struggle for social justice. Throughout his chequered history the same factor in varying shape and guise has operated.

situation. The little country was a cockpit of clashing empires, the Belgium of the ancient world. And it is not surprising that thousands of Jews should have sought peace in countries further removed from the rivalries of warring kings and generals. Solomon's partnership with Hiram of Tyre in maritime trade brought many Jews into contact with other countries, and the lure of trade sent many more far afield from their homeland. Philo gives the Jewish population in the Nile valley in his time as a quarter of a million. In Mesopotamia and Northern Syria, in every corner of Africa and Asia, there were large communities.

The dispersion of the Jews, then, dates much further back than A.D. 70. And it is in this dispersion that we see the ultimate reason for their survival, just as in their dispersion to-day we recognise the same forces at work in preserving their identity. It is a fundamental error to assume that this wandering of the Jew was a constant process. Throughout the whole period of history the Jews took root for centuries before they were forced to migrate. The "tragic cycle" revolves very slowly. As a result, one marked feature of Jewish life presents itself to the historian. There might be active persecution of the Jews in one area, but simultaneously another Jewish community far removed would be flourishing.

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very exclusiveness which the non-Jew resents is the inevitable result of the Jew's desire not to be exclusive. The Jew has survived because conditions have conspired to make him survive. In the long view, he has survived because of geography and economics.

But now there began to emerge a new factor which, in the course of time, was to emphasise the Jew more and more as the stranger and

outcast. Christianity in its inception, as has been reiterated time and again, was a religion of the poor based on equality, not only in the sight of God, but in material things. Every reliable commentator on the early Christians records that they led a life completely divorced from the life of the people around them, and that their worldly possessions were shared alike. "And all that believed were together and had all things common; and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all, according as every man had need" (Acts of the Apostles ii. 44, 45). "And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and soul: and not one of them said that aught of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common" (Acts iv. 32).

It is not surprising that the dominant pagan and Jewish religions, which had by now become the philosophical expressions of the sanctity of private property, should have felt themselves fundamentally opposed to Christianity. The ridicule and contempt which the wealthy classes among Jews and pagans poured upon Christianity were not merely expressions of dislike for a new religious dogma, but of hostility to a social system which threatened the security of riches and possession. Dean Inge heaps scorn upon the suggestion that the early Christians of that period bear any resemblance

realistically the demarcation of the Jew. From then on, the eternal see-saw began for the Jew. Up to the period of the second destruction of the Temple the vicissitudes of the Jewish State were those of any other petty State. Wars, civil wars, internecine struggles—all these were common enough in the history of that period. The trials and tribulations of the Jews were not experienced qua Jews, but as the inhabitants of an opposing State. For them the special tragedy of A.D. 70 lay in the fact that the Jewish State had been destroyed, but not the Jews.

The world was faced now with the problem of accommodating a homeless people of considerable numbers (estimated at 4,500,000), widely spread, with traditions, customs, language, and literature differing from that of the people amongst whom they dwelt. In essence that is what distinguishes the history of the Jews from all other conquered tribes of antiquity. No other nation, race, or group had to undergo a similar experience. The world was not ripe for the solution which Ezekiel had propounded: "Ye shall divide the land... and it shall come to pass, that ye shall divide it by lot for an inheritance unto you and to the strangers who sojourn among you... they shall be unto you as the homeborn among the children of Israel; they shall have inheritance with you among the tribes of Israel" (xlvii.

13-22). The Jews had not taken their lesson to heart, and now that the boot was on the other foot they were to find that the "aliens" were not disposed to hearken to the prophet.

the Council passed an edict forbidding new Christians to hold any public offices. The envenomed wording of the edict, Sentencia Estatuto, demonstrated clearly that the animosity sprang from more than a religious difference. It had become a genuine race hatred."

Then, as now, embracing the true faith could not save the Jew. It might have solved the problem for a few scattered individuals, but wholesale baptism could not have emancipated the Jewish race. The Inquisition and the Expulsion forty years later become explicable only in the light of the foregoing. Here is one of the most significant periods in Jewish history, which illuminates both questions which we set out to answer. The struggle between feudalism and a rising merchant class had resulted in a victory for the former—but it was a victory that was won only because in this case the virile element of the merchant class consisted of Marranos and Jews.

Observe that the expulsion from Spain affected other known Jewish communities elsewhere. Stragglers drifted into every possible haven of refuge—into Navarre, into Portugal (where four years later all Jews were expelled), into Africa, into Naples, into Holland, Turkey, Germany, Crete, and even into the Papal States. Everywhere they went they brought

with them the dread possibility of a similar fate to the settled Jewish communities. Everywhere they served to emphasise the precarious security of the Jew in an alien surrounding, just as to a smaller extent their expulsion from England and France two hundred years previously had brought to the Jews of Flanders, Lorraine, Burgundy, Dauphiné, and Provence the same realisation. The cumulative effect of each dispersion was to increase the resistance to absorption, and, more important still, to drive home the lesson that only by standing together as a community could the individual Jew obtain some protection for himself, his family, and his worldly possessions.

The Middle Ages represent the formative period of the modern Jew. The social ferment which was the motive power of the Crusades, coloured as it was by the romantic ideology of a religious war, brought the Jews into prominence as a definite factor in the life of Western Europe. Prior to that, their struggles were mainly on Asiatic soil. But with the eleventh century began the drawn-out struggle against feudalism. In that struggle against the chains of a decaying order, as in the modern struggle, the Jews were to bear the heat and burden of the day. They had become the principal visible agents of the money economy. To the impoverished common people and to the chivalry, they,

Misery and unhappiness in Germany induced migration to Poland and Lithuania at the end of the thirteenth century. It is frequently forgotten that the much-despised Polish and Lithuanian Jew is in reality by ancestry a German Jew. To the student of social

behaviour, nothing illustrates more forcibly the effect of environment in moulding the character of a people than the contrast between those German Jews who migrated to medieval Poland and those who remained.

If we contrast their lot with that of the Jews in Spain under Moslem rule, when Arab and Jewish cultures flowered so freely and so harmoniously together, we may perceive how greatly their material background affects the destiny of the Jews. It was a time of great

prosperity, when commerce flourished and when the highly lucrative slave-trade was in its heyday. Arab and Jew plied similar trades. The feudal system had no real counterpart in Moslem history. As a nation of traders, there was no incompatibility for Arabs between feudal institutions and a merchant class, which threatened the stability of these institutions. The Arab was tolerant towards Christians and Jews, and the two peoples had more in common then than they have now, for at that time neither had developed the modern disease of nationalism. The animosities which had stirred the former rulers of Spain, the Visigoths, were thus not felt by their successors.

Similarly, the Jews who settled in Holland as fugitives from Spain after the Expulsion found their lot an easy one, cast in the prosperous atmosphere of developing maritime trade and commerce and of Holland's colonial expansion. To this day the Dutch Jew, in a country which has escaped most of the economic upheavals of her neighbours, knows little anti-Semitism in its cruder forms.

The fourteenth century, with its social revolutionary struggles—the Jacquerie in France and the Peasants' Revolts in England, Germany, and Flanders left its mark on Jewish history. The Black Death had aggravated social and economic discontent, and for this the Jews

were blamed—just as to-day there is no conceivable catastrophe in which the anti-Semite does not detect the Jewish hand. Exploitation by the nobles, severity of taxation, filching of the common land, at last roused the peasantry to rebellion, and, as in modern times, there were not wanting astute rulers who could lay the blame on the Jew. It was the Jew who caused the plague and the misery of the poor, for is it not always easier to see the enemy in human form rather than in a system? Is it not surprising, therefore, that this period, a period of storm and strife which affected the poor of all countries, should see an enormous accentuation of hatred for the Jew. In a riot at Prague in 1389, 3,000 Jews were destroyed; and this was typical of what occurred sporadically throughout the whole century.

The fifteenth century was characterised by a series of heretical Socialist movements throughout Europe. The Hussite wars, although national and religious on the surface, were definitely the first indications of the separate interests of a rising middle class, and exploited workers and peasants. The Communist Taborite colony of workers, handicraftsmen, and peasants was crushed finally only by the overwhelming force of a crusade instigated by the supporters of a feudal system rotten to the core. In this social cataclysm the Jews played

The Reformation in the next century, and with it the infant beginnings of the national State and the first stirrings of nationalism, brought little comfort to the Jew wholly unable to find a niche in the welter of peoples who were beginning to crystallise into nations. These

By the end of the eighteenth century and

beginning of the nineteenth the feudal system had collapsed over the greater part of Europe. The age of Voltaire, Rousseau, Adam Smith, and Goethe should on the face of things have brought relief to the Jews, and in a great measure it did. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic era did away with the visible walls of the ghetto. The Jews who were told that they were aiding Jewish emancipation in fighting for the Revolution were being deceived, just as the poor and oppressed were deceived. The bourgeois State emerged with the bourgeoisie wholly triumphant. There were to be pickings for some Jews, but no more liberty, equality, or fraternity than for the common people who had fought the battles of the Revolution. The Jew, like the poor, received an instalment of liberty.

I have set out to show that the basic cause of anti-Semitism may be explained by the economic and geographic state of the Jew, and not by the fundamental, inherent make-up of either Jew or Gentile. If I have exaggerated these factors, it is because enough stress has not been laid on the material lot of the Jew, as an explanation of the development of the problem. That other factors have entered I shall not attempt to deny, but they are externals to the main thesis. The relentless struggle of man to adapt himself to his economic

environment has spelt ruthless cruelty and oppression to his fellow-creatures. Not the least of the sufferers have been the Jews.

I have dealt with the general aspect in one chapter, and have attempted an analysis of the present situation in Germany in another. In this short review I have endeavoured to show that the crises in the history of the Jews have been synchronous with crises arising in the course of social evolution.

In science, when a theory is propounded, experimental proof of its validity is necessary, and convincing proof is achieved only when control experiments are available. In the social sciences it is scarcely ever possible to have control experiments. It is not often that human groups can be subjected to tests such as are made in the laboratory. But, fortunately, my thesis that anti-Semitism, with all its concomitant emotional and sentimental excrescences, is fundamentally an economic problem, can be subjected to experimental proof. That proof, as convincing as any test-tube demonstration, is there for all to see. It is this factual verification of the theory which we must now examine.

That the Jews suffered most should not blind us to the fact that Russia had to deal with

many other racial minorities inhabiting the Empire, and that the drive for homogeneity and the creation of a united Russian nation implied hardship and oppression for them as well. It was perhaps the dispersion of the Jews and their access to European Foreign Offices that made the Jewish voice heard above the clamour of the conflicting elements which were being subjected to the process of Russianisation. To Jew and Gentile alike the periodic pogroms which scandalised European civilisation from 1880 onwards were strange phenomena explicable only on the assumption that the Russian people were inherently barbaric and that the blessings of culture and traditions of freedom had somehow passed by Russia, just as to-day the German war on the Jew is regarded by myopic observers as a manifestation of Teutonic savagery.

By the Partition of Poland, Russia added one million Polish Jews to her population. The

restrictions and persecutions which had been the lot of these Jews had had two effects. They had converted them into urban petty traders, typical middlemen. Excluded from agriculture, they nevertheless dealt in the products of agriculture. They bought and sold whatever they could. The middleman has never been popular with the primary producer, and when he is a Jew his popularity does not increase. In the larger towns Jews were, for the most part, small innkeepers, moneylenders, dealers in second-hand goods, and artisans—tailors, cigarette-makers, and cobblers. The charge of parasitism was levelled against them, and, as usual, the parasites were criticised, but not the system which produced parasitism. Hence frequent recriminations and even riots.

Russia had to deal with a million such Jews, as well as millions of rebellious Poles, Finns, Letts, and countless other dissenting minorities. It was the peculiar position of the Jews which made it possible for her treatment of them to be especially brutal and inhumane. As middlemen

in a predominantly agricultural country it was possible to encompass their ruin without disturbing noticeably the economic fabric of the country. As members of a dissenting religion it was possible, in a priest-ridden country, to use them as scapegoats for the increasing discontent of an impoverished peasantry, and, as non-nationals of a country which was beginning to be infected with nationalism, to point to them as "unassimilable aliens" disturbing to its national unity.

In their liberal moments even the Russian rulers saw that in these factors lay the vulnerability of the Jew to popular hatred and contempt. At varying intervals sporadic attempts were made to overcome them. Thus, in 1801, under Alexander I, the pale was extended. (The pale of settlement had been created by Catherine, and, by restricting the entrance of Jews into merchant and artisan guilds, compelled them to live in certain districts only.) Jews were encouraged to become agriculturists, but, since no provision was made to transplant and train them as such, very few availed themselves of the opportunity. All schools were opened to them, and they could buy crown lands. It was an attempt to make the Jew enter "productive" enterprise. Great efforts also were made to convert them to Christianity, and Nicholas I endeavoured still further to break

down the separation of Jews by increasing the facilities for secular education. His son, Alexander II, in an effort to stem the tide of general discontent which was threatening to break down his autocratic régime, freed 40 million serfs and granted increased privileges to the Jews.

But the revolutionary movement, which the archaic feudalism of Russia had brought into being, refused to be placated by the grudging concessions of the Tsar. The liberation of landless serfs had created an even more acute problem. The policy of liberalism proving inadequate, it was replaced by more restrictions and further persecutions. In 1881, Alexander II was assassinated; and his son, and, after him, his grandson Nicholas II, carried on the traditions of repression.

Up to 1914 there was no country in the world where the Jew was hated more than in Russia.

What is the position in Russia twenty years after the outbreak of the Great War? Different observers come back from Russia with different interpretations of the success or failure of Communism. One records its imminent collapse, another the inception of a new age. But one feature of life in Russia remains unchallenged. There is no anti-Semitism. The

little that exists is fast dying out. The Jew is free to move where he wills. His access to schools and universities is not restricted by reason of his race. He is encouraged and helped to find employment in agriculture, industry, and commerce.

in Russia is free from that form of social discrimination which the emancipated Jew of Europe and America feels to-day—that social snobbery which makes even the Jewish millionaire fear the snigger of his Gentile butler. He is free from the nightmare of physical torment and social ostracism. And if we say he is not free from Communist bureaucracy, that he is not free to support the establishment of a nationalist bourgeois State, at least he shares these disabilities in common with all Russians. If his standard of living is lower than that of Jews in capitalist countries, it is no lower than that of other Russians, or, if it is, it is not because he is a Jew.

In the short space of twenty years, from being a veritable hell for Jews, Russia has become a country where they can face their neighbours untroubled by any thoughts of inferiority. From the degraded status of the Tsarist régime to perfect equality is surely an amazing transformation. It is not to be forgotten that this change took place, and is taking place, at a time when the position of the emancipated Jew elsewhere was, and is, being challenged. There is not a country in Europe where to-day strong factions are not demanding his exclusion from public life. What is it that has effected this transformation? There has been no great religious revival, no resurgence

To understand the status of the Jew in Russia to-day it is necessary to know something of the Communist theory with regard to nationalism.

Lenin was a realist above all things. He disagreed profoundly with the internationalists. And in the end his view prevailed. There are, in Russia, over 160 national groups, widely dissimilar in language, customs, traditions, and level of cultural attainments: the Jews form only one national minority; so that the problem of nationalities was exceedingly important

fulfilment of nationhood for its own sake, for the sake of its sublimity and its historic mission" (Hans Kohn).

Other countries have before now conceded national freedom on paper. In England and America to-day the Jew has complete civic freedom. His language rights are assured. He may educate his children in his own language if he chooses. He may live in an almost completely Jewish atmosphere, as far as it is possible to create such an atmosphere where another culture is dominant. But no measure of legal freedom has rendered him persona grata in his environment, nor has it done much to ease the hostility of his neighbours. In the Press and in the national literature he is held up to slight and ridicule, and is always conscious that the freedom he possesses is not his by alienable right, but by condescension of his hosts.

National minority rights were conceded to the smaller groups of Austria, Poland,

Rumania, and other countries by the treaties of Versailles and St. Germain. These pledges were never honoured, because the treaties could not change the contempt and dislike which the inhabitants of these countries had for the Jew—feelings which, in the last analysis, depended upon economic differences and the competitive struggle.

The nationalism which capitalist countries engender leads to war. The nationalism which Socialism encourages leads to co-operation and world peace. Capitalist nationalism is static. In it the dominance of private property leads to a scramble for markets, for spheres of influence, and so to international wars and anarchy. Socialist nationalism is dynamic. It recognises nationalism as a transient phase in human development, and seeks to exploit no subject race. Capitalist nationalism cannot afford to give unfettered freedom to minority groups. Socialist nationalism regards it as its bounden duty to do so from motives of self-preservation. For only when all sections of the people are convinced of the necessity for Socialism can there be peace within the borders of a country.

Freedom, then, is not enough. The breakdown of national hatreds must be preceded by the breakdown of class antagonism. Only Socialism and the classless society can achieve this.

In practice the policy of the Soviets is to encourage the growth of national languages and literature. In the case of many backward nations, their language had to be resuscitated and a literature created. The purpose of this was to train members of these groups in Socialist principles, and to grant them full educational facilities so that their own people could gain access to administrative and economic posts. There could thus be no undermining of the economic condition, no dominance of the non-Russian peoples by the more advanced and powerful groups. No minor nationality was to be exploited by a ruling nation. And so there could be no cry in Russia of Jewish domination any more than the Jew could maintain that he was being differentiated against.

Kohn writes: "The Soviet Government has no desire at all for the assimilation or the extinction of the Jewish people. It envisages in the future a Jewish, Yiddish-speaking people, as vigorous and as thoroughly imbued with the Communist idea as Russians or Tartars or Buriats. But the Jewish people of the Union must be entirely dissociated from Judaism; instruction in the Hebrew language and the perpetuation of Jewish religious culture as it has been developed through more than three thousand years, forming and giving outward

expression to the characteristic spirit of the Jewish people, are forbidden. The Jewish people is thus cut off entirely from the success of its culture... only the popular elements of the existing national cultures, unassociated with traditional religion and close to the life of the masses, are to be retained and interwoven with the new uniform Socialist culture... All peoples of the Soviet Union are entirely equal in rights and in consideration. But free in their political form and in their development they are not. They are free only within the narrow limits permitted by a Socialist Soviet Republic."

These objections are raised in all seriousness by many Jews as well as by Dr. Kohn. It is the argument used by Zionists in contrasting their work in Palestine with that of the Soviets in Russia. They desire cultural continuity with the past, and any State which, in their opinion, cuts Jewry off from its cultural heritage is not allowing complete freedom to the Jew. Such freedom, they maintain, can only be achieved in a State where the specific spirit of Jewish culture is allowed to flower freely. And it is only in the historic contact with the Jewish past which Palestine affords that this cultural continuity is able to enhance the specific Jewish qualities which have enriched the world. Among Jews to-day such criticism constitutes

the real objection against the practice of the Communist State. To the ardent Jewish youth, inspired by nationalism, Communism spells death and decay for the Jewish race. The spellbinders of Zionism have the centre of the stage, and it is Zionism which they hold out as the salvation of Jewish national values.

First as to the "cultural heritage of the past." There is no stronger influence in the Jewish past than the voice of the prophets. To any Jew acquainted with his own history there is no prouder boast he can make than that he belongs to the people of the Book. The Jew gave the Bible to the world, and the message of his prophets, though largely ignored, is its most enduring contribution. And the message is not unlike the message of Karl Marx. If "cultural heritage" meant anything, all Jews would be Socialists, as would all Christians if the tradition of Christianity really shaped their lives.

But essentially what these objections ignore is the dialectic process in Nature, the changing character of human institutions. To Jewish nationalists, as to all other nationalists, there is something permanent in national divisions, each nation outdoing the other in throwing off cultural contributions to the rest of the world. Each nation, in this conception, lives in a watertight compartment, and altruistically

keeps other benighted nations supplied with the by-products of its peculiar genius. There must be an anchorage to the past; culture must be rooted in tradition, and tradition must guard and shape future development. It would be an evil day indeed for Jews if other nations looked to the guidance of past tradition and custom for their treatment of Jews!

of their race can produce, and remain oblivious of the universal values which have been given to the world by other peoples.

Now, as to the learning of Hebrew. In their attitude to nationalism the Soviets allow each group the freest and fullest use of its own language. Courts of law, schools, and all official literature are conducted in the language

from learning Hebrew or talking Hebrew—but he cannot expect official cognisance of the language, nor is any effort made to teach it in the schools.

If freedom for the Jew implies freedom to dabble in practices which, if conceded to other national groups, would lead speedily to the disintegration of the U.S.S.R., he would indeed be exchanging the shadow for the substance. For the destruction of Communism would mean a return of the Jew to the rôle which he played in pre-Communist Russia. I know that there are those who believe that persecution with the retention of national ideals is preferable to freedom without it. Can one not hear the fervid Zionist say, "Better that the nation should die than that it should lose its soul"? But I think the Russian Jews might at least be consulted before they are asked to choose death as an alternative.

appear to be strangely unmoved by the clamour raised by Zionists and orthodox religious Jewry about their spiritual decay.

Above all, one never hears in Russia those silly, sententious words: the Jewish problem. There is no Jewish problem. There is no Jewish question; not because there are no Jews, but because at last a man may be a Jew without constraint or offence. Despite the talk of assimilation through mixed marriage, there were still two and three-quarter million Russian Jews in 1933—an increase of 200,000 since 1926.

And if, in the long run (and, from the nature of things, it will have to be a very long run), the "characteristic spirit" of Jewry dies out, will that in itself not add further proof that there is no "characteristic spirit" of Jewry? For if the characteristic spirit dies out in a new environment, may not what is regarded as the "characteristic spirit" itself be the product of previous economic environment?

The fact of the matter is, of course, that all such complaints as to lack of freedom under Communism are not based on rational thought. They are rationalisations of an instinctive hankering after the old gods. At heart these nationalists are reactionary. For them the past has a romantic halo. They see only the purple patches, and not the grey drabness which

Fundamentally the "Jewish problem" is an economic one. Other phases of anti-Semitism are side-issues. They are incidental to the main source of the trouble

I THINK I have shown that the Jewish problem, whatever it may have been in the past, is linked up to-day with the problem of national differences. Even Hitler concedes freedom of worship to the German Jews, and universal baptism would not ensure the removal of the "Aryan" paragraph. The emphasis now is not on the blood of the Lamb, but on that of His disciples.

If the handling of the question of nationalism and national minorities is of paramount importance to the Jew, it has equal significance for the non-Jew, and consequently an examination of contemporary policy with regard to it is of more than academic interest. The three dominant systems of government, Democracy, Fascism, and Communism, display a marked contrast in their appraisal of the question.

"The British Empire," writes Professor Carlton Hayes, "in so far as its self-governing dominions is concerned, is a federation of nationalities and national States, in which divergent local and national differences are not altogether incompatible with the claims of

a unifying patriotism." Which is true, of course, of those portions of the Empire which have achieved national autonomy by virtue of their own aggressive nationalism. But it leaves untouched the unsatisfied national needs of millions of natives who have been left to the tender mercies of a dominant nationalism, which exploits them as mercilessly as imperialism exploited them in the past.

The movement for the self-government of India has been obstructed as long as was decently possible. In a burst of candour the late Lord Brentford (Sir William Joynson-Hicks) said: "We did not conquer India for the benefit of the Indians. I know in missionary circles it is said that we conquered India to raise the level of the Indians. This is cant. We conquered India as an outlet for the goods of Great Britain. We conquered India by the sword, and by the sword we should hold it. I am interested in missionary work of that kind, but I am not such a hypocrite as to say that we hold India for the Indians. We hold it as the finest outlet for British goods in general and for Lancashire cotton goods in particular."

It is true that the position is seldom stated with such brutal frankness. Kipling, singing the glory of the British Raj, is far removed from thoughts of cotton goods; but sober realists like Mr. Winston Churchill and Lord

Lloyd know well enough that, once India governs itself, tariffs will keep out British goods; and the Indian Civil Service, the Indian Army, and the Indian Medical Service will be manned by Indians. Indian self-government will come, not as a willing gift from British democracy, but because conquest by the sword is not proof against an economic boycott.

Nor when Indian self-government is achieved will it solve the problem of national minorities in India. The depressed castes will find that Indian manufacturers, Indian landowners, and an Indian petty bourgeoisie can keep them in a condition of inferior national status as effectively as the alien British. Pace Professor Carlton Hayes—the East African negro, the Singalese, and the South African Bantu have still a long path to tread before they may be said to have attained full national freedom within the British Empire.

France exploits her colonists as successfully as do other colonial powers. Periodic unrest in Morocco is almost as frequent as on the North-West Frontier of India.

In Czecho-Slovakia the Slovaks, who form 15 per cent of the population, are discriminated against by the Czechs; 68 per cent of the emigrants from Czecho-Slovakia are Slovaks. In Belgium the Flemish, German, and French

elements are constantly at loggerheads. In Bessarabia, the Rumanians rule the native element with an iron hand.

America, the melting-pot, is the scene of much national squabbling. Far from being a homogeneous nation, forged from its many immigrants, there is much ill feeling and social discrimination against Poles, Italians, and Jews—all the elements, in fact, which excited the ire of the Ku Klux Klan, and are anathema to such ultra-patriotic bodies as the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution. America's negro citizens, far from having achieved the dignity of equality of status, are not even assured of ordinary justice.

"Democracy," then, has no contribution to make towards the solution of national differences. The League of Nations, now the League of some Nations, created by "democratic" States, has been unable to protect Manchuria from its military occupation by Japan. The fourth All-European Congress of Minorities, subsidiary to the League, passed the following resolution: "Forty million people belonging to the National Minorities are losing confidence in the League of Nations as a guardian of minority rights; to date the League, because of the methods it applies, has done nothing to effect a solution of the 'Minorities problem.'"

The theory of the democratic State acting as the guardian of less advanced nations, until such time as they are fit to govern themselves, amounts in practice to the retention of power until wars of liberation, political agitation, passive resistance and economic boycotts succeed in shaking off the benevolent protectors.

This is what the modern "democratic" State has to offer, though it is probably a task of supererogation to enquire into its management of nationalism, since the demise of democracy is announced on all sides to be near at hand. It is to the new doctrine of government—Fascism—which we must turn for enlightenment on this twentieth-century problem.

Fascism, even in its mildest form, is bound up with the theory of race supremacy. Tucked away somewhere in all Fascist declarations of faith there is insistence on the importance of race. There is a narrow, rigid exclusiveness even in the Austrian and Italian varieties which bodes ill for minor groups. In Germany, of course, this theory of race has been raised to the dizzy heights of a national religion. Legally, in that country, full citizenship is conceded only to the members of a "bloodgroup," which earnest professors are now endeavouring, not without difficulty, to define. The doctrines of Spengler, who is regarded as a representative German philosopher, find

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expression in the most intoxicated nationalist ravings. "The Celtic German race," he writes, "is the most strong-willed the world has ever seen, and to be Prussian is to be healthy and of sound instinct. Germany is the decisive country of the world . . . because the German people are young enough to undertake, to define, to mould the problems of world development while other peoples have become too old and stiff to do anything but stay on the defensive."

It is fairer, perhaps, to assess the actual achievements of Fascism in this field than to judge it by its theoretic programme.

Poland contains national minorities comprising about 40 per cent of its inhabitants. A number of districts are inhabited chiefly by Ukrainians, White Russians, and Germans; they have no national rights. "The land of the Ukrainian and White Russian peasants has been expropriated and divided among the Polish militarists. From 1920 to 1925 the Ukrainians lost 2,607 schools. Out of 1,000 Ukrainian students, only 79 can attend schools conducted in their own language; 921 are compelled to attend either Polish or two-language schools. In 1925, 84 per cent of all the schools in the Ukraine were Polish.... It has been proven that 200,000 hectares of the cultivated land in Eastern Galicia and Poland

have been handed over to Polish colonists. Polish agricultural unions received 79 million zloties during the current year, while the Ukrainian unions, whose number is close to 3,000, received nothing " (Rysakoff).

Italy exploits the Southern Tyrolese and Slavonians and deprives them of their national identity. Japan's exploits in Manchuria are recent history. The announcement of her intention to hold herself responsible for "order" in China, and her warning to the rest of the world to leave China alone, show clearly enough that she regards the unfortunate country as her own preserve.

Poland and Germany have unenviable records in their treatment of Jewish minorities. Polish Jews are subjected to discriminatory laws, are cordially disliked and correspondingly treated. We need not again dwell on Germany's treatment of her Jews.

We have recently been given an indication of how Fascism proposes to do away with the

There remain the possibilities in the Socialist State. I have shown that in Russia the granting of full national rights has meant more than the mere right to use a national language, and equality in the sight of the law. Backward nationalities have been developed in their

economic as well as their cultural status, in recognition of the fact that unless each national unit has full control of its own destiny, and is not exploited by another, there can be no talk of national independence.

There have been signs in Russia that with an acceleration in the development of nationalism some of the Soviet Republics desire to break away from the Federation of Republics, and to develop into bourgeois States. This has been due to the fact that the permeation of Communist theory has not kept pace with economic and cultural development. Advanced nationalities have shown impatience at being tied to more backward groups, and a strong body of opinion within the Communist Party looks with disapproval upon what they call pandering to bourgeois nationalism. Thus far, however, the policy of Lenin is being faithfully carried out.

The fear that national cultures will be swamped by an international culture in the Socialist State is best answered in the words of Stalin: "In reality the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the building of Socialism in the U.S.S.R., is the period in which national culture, Socialist in content and national in form, flourishes. Apparently they don't understand that the development of national cultures must proceed with redoubled

This is sufficient answer to those who think that the policy in Russia of building Socialism in one country, once it has achieved economic independence, may give rise to Russian chauvinism and Russian aggression. Such criticisms lose sight of the fact that Russia comprises within its frontiers not one, but one hundred and sixty-seven, nations. Within Soviet Russia, in other words, there is a League of Nations, much more genuinely a league than the League whose headquarters is at Geneva. Many of these groups have racial affinities with peoples outside Russia—Germans, Mohammedans, Jews, Ukrainians, and White Russians.

It is unlikely that the immediate future will show the various elements making up Russia to-day blended into a grey, amorphous mass, indistinguishable from each other by their cultural output. A great deal of nonsense has been written on the factors which influence the specific characters in national culture. I have previously quoted Mr. Bernard Joseph. Here

"There is in each nationality a tendency to emphasise and act according to those manifestations of individuals or collective life of the national group which are characteristic of it, and are the result of its accumulated teachings and traditions. The Englishman will be primarily concerned with getting things done. The Frenchman will primarily seek to prepare an intellectual plan of action relating to the

matter in hand. Culture gives to the nationality a distinct individuality which every member of the group seeks to emulate; in the process he is drawn closer to the remaining members.

It is difficult to observe the decencies of argument when one is confronted with such generalisations. When a writer maintains that all Russians, or the majority of Russians, are

morose; that all Norwegians, or the majority of Norwegians, are silent; that Spanish art is individual because the majority of Spaniards are individualists; that the French are primarily intellectual in all things; and that national cultures from these observations must be pre-eminently, intrinsically, and quintessentially immutable, one is left searching anxiously for parliamentary language in which to express one's disagreement. The assertion that there is only one localised area for each nation or race in the world in which it can express its corporate spirit is one that has only to be made for its incongruity to be established. Jewish culture need not cease to be individual in a Socialist country. Its features will, in all probability, change, but they need not necessarily become drab.

I think there can be no question that, of the three systems of government—Democracy, Fascism, and Communism—the only one that holds any hope of a peaceful solution for the conflicting claims of nationalism, for national minorities, and for Jews is the Socialist State.

stories of their international strength, can no more ensure the coming of Socialism than the Eskimos. And it is true that the coming of Socialism appears sometimes to be as long delayed as the coming of the Messiah. Nevertheless, a few practical results do emerge from this analysis.

If Socialism does not become the dominant political system of the world, the alternative, very conceivably, will be a series of devastating international wars in which even the stronghold of Socialism, Russia, will disappear. If civilisation crumbles, the fate of the Jews becomes of academic importance only, though I sometimes picture the survivors of such a world catastrophe meeting in solemn conclave to decide how they are to rid themselves of Jewish domination, and an equally solemn gathering of Jewish survivors elsewhere passing resolutions of protest!

It is difficult to see how, under any other scheme of things, the world can contain a variegated group of nations who will live harmoniously with each other. If the analysis of the reasons for anti-Semitism proves it to rest on class conflicts, the solution of the problem must be found in the classless society.

However pessimistic our attitude may be as to the advent of Socialism, one thing is certain: Socialism will come before the Messiah. Even in England the happy day must arrive when an assembled committee formed of Sir Stafford Cripps, Mr. Harold Laski, Mr. G. D. H. Cole, and Sir Norman Angell finally succeed in persuading Sir Ernest Benn to record his vote for Socialism. With parliamentary democracy triumphant, the millennium will not be long delayed. We may yet see it officially welcomed in a speech by Mr. Ramsay MacDonald.

Of infinitely greater significance in this

Each Jew must learn that it is only in a clear appraisal of the whole of life that his own individual life takes on any significance. To imagine that a small section of the world's inhabitants can expect to gain security and

freedom without allying itself to the numberless millions who must achieve the same object is a flightier essay in idealism than a belief in the coming of a Messiah.

I do not mean by this that the Jew should pretend that he is not a Jew. Few sights are less edifying than those members of the race who exhibit pained countenances when they are reminded that they are Jews. It may be that Heine was right when he said that Judaism was not a religion but a misfortune, but to construe this into justification for a feeling of inferiority is despicable. Being a Jew should not absolve a man from the necessity of criticising the world he lives in, nor should such criticism be ignored because it is made by a Jew. The inner peace which the Jew of an earlier period derived from an implicit faith in his religion can be replaced to-day only by a clear understanding of the forces which shape human destiny.

For Jews the implications of this analysis of anti-Semitism are evident. They are no less clear for non-Jews. If every Jew and Jewess in the world were destroyed, the motivating force responsible for anti-Semitism would still remain. The demand for uniformity is in itself a symptom of social disease. The desire for the familiar is an expression of the insecurity of a world in which man is pitted against man.

We shall understand and welcome individual and group variations only when we need no longer fear them. It is not faith in God we need so much as faith in man.

I repeat that anti-Semitism is an index of class unrest. Its appearance in the life of a people is a clear indication of the necessity for an overhaul of their social institutions.

It is a warning sign which, if ignored, means not only the discomfiture of Jews, but stagnation in the life of non-Jews. When Dean Inge warns anti-Semites that the Jews have stood by the graves of all their oppressors, he is thinking in terms of Divine revenge. But this is a misconception. The material greatness of Spain deteriorated, not because she provoked Divine anger in expelling her Jews, but because in ridding herself of them she destroyed a bourgeois element which was hated because it was in conflict with the established order, though it subsequently transformed the structure of other European States. Feudalism triumphed, but only at the cost of the subsequent decay and isolation of Spain.

hatred of Jews was a warning signal. It is not because they love Jews that the Communists in Russia regard an outbreak of anti-Semitism as a serious calamity, but because they recognise it as a symptom of a graver underlying disease.

THE END