Uraturia $mti?rmtg ffitbrarg
'The search for truth even unto its innermost parts'
The gift of
Jewish Liberal Arts Club
Buffalo, New York
The National Women's Committee of Brandeis University
THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM
BY ISRAEL Z AN O WILL
Plaster Saints
Chosen People
Italian Fantasies
Ghetto Comedies
Ghetto Tragedies
Jinny the Carrier
The Melting Pot
Children of the Ghetto
The World and the Jew
The King of Schnorrers
The War God, A Play
The War for the World
The Next Religion, A Play
The Principle of Nationalities
THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM
BY
ISRAEL ZANGWILL
"England! awake! awake! awake! Jerusalem thy sister calls!"
Blake
jQeto gorfe
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1921
A.U rights reserved
Copyright, 1920 and 1921, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1921
BY WAY OF EXPLANATION
The title of this book was struck out in a letter that appeared in the London Times within a few months of the outbreak of the Great War, and though I know how little the great Jew who has just passed away would have agreed with many of its pages, I am glad to have his honoured name thus bound up with the book whose title he unwittingly inspired.
November 23rd, 1914.
To the Editor of The Times.
Sir, — The interview with Mr. Jacob Schiff reported by your Washington correspondent — the proposal for a permanent peace that shall end not only this war, but war — comes as the one gleam of light in the world's darkness. But why almost extinguish it under the head of " German Press Campaign " ? And why does he speak of Mr. Schiff's " brief for Germany " ? As one associated for many years in philanthropic work with this noblest of millionaires I should like to testify that, despite his early associations with Germany, he is one of the most patriotic Americans I have ever known. Descended from a long line of Jewish Rabbis and scholars — one of his ancestors was Chief Rabbi of the Great Synagogue, London, in the 18th century — Mr. Jacob Schiff might himself have sat to Lessing for the portrait of " Nathan der Weise," and in proposing a conference to end Prussian militarism — and every other — he speaks not as the mouthpiece of Berlin, but with the voice of Jerusalem.
Yours faithfully,
Israel Zangwill.
105657
CONTENTS
PAGE
Proem: The Quest 1
The Voice of Jerusalem 6
The Position of Judaism 137
Songs of the Synagogue 152
The Legend of the Conquering Jew 166
Shylock and other Stage Jews 238
Language and Jewish Life 254
The Territorial Solution of the Jewish Problem . . 263
The Old Clo' Man 286
The Mirage of the Jewish State 288
"Our Own": A Cry Across the Atlantic 306
The Polish- Jewish Problem 309
The Goyim 324
The People of the Abyss 327
Converted Missionaries 333
Two Josephs that Dreamed —
I. Joseph Fels -. 337
II. Joseph Jacobs 349
The Pillar of Fire 366
Epilogue: The Majesty of Armenia 367
THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM
PROEM: THE QUEST
At first I told the parlourmaid I would not see the stranger from London, so angry was I at this increasing practice of in- trusion into my rural privacy: this unheralded descent by the ill-timed train that brought beggars and bores to my door in the very middle of the luncheon hour. To aggravate matters and my righteous wrath there was no train to deport them till tea- time, unless they were jetted back with the velocity of a tennis- return, and the stroke was not easy. Thus, as the village held no place of rest, amusement, or provender, and it was the dry interval even at the foodless inn, and as violent rain-storms would maliciously coincide with these visitations, I must per- force shelter, feed and entertain my persecutors, to the destruc- tion of my working-hours. My soul was yet bitter with the memory of the gaunt, hollow-eyed lady who only the week before had profited by her opportunity to pour out for two hours on end — as if in emulation of the rain without — a tragic torrent of words, a pitiless, pitiful flow, unrelieved even by a comma, some sordid but unintelligible tale of a shell-shocked son in a lunatic asylum. The only point at all clear from her impassioned incoherence had been that not even Heaven could help her, and the wisdom of Shakespeare had been borne in on me, as so often of late :
tt
Things without remedy should be without regard."
At the best it was not easy to work with the insistent dull booming of the guns from across the Channel, that unresting reminder of civilisation in its agony of dissolution ; of millions of breaking hearts. The one compensation the war brought me — I used to tell myself grimly — was that it cut off the bulk of my callers from quartering themselves upon me for the night, for they were mainly aliens, friendly or neutral, and the coast was a " prohibited area."
The latest pilgrim bore a Polish name: I was to that extent safe. Perhaps soothed by this circumstance or some digestive process, I modified my harsh instruction to the parlourmaid.
1
THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM
The man could wait in my study. But I steeled myself against inviting him to join my meal, which for the rest was half over.
At the first glimpse of him, sitting patient in my study, deep in his book, my heart smote me. A softness emanated from his dreamy eyes, his face covered with a reddish down, his short russet beard, his neat tweed suit, his grey shirt and collar. I saw at once he was not of the tramp species, whether of the malodorous, haggard, beery type or of the genteel variety by which I used to be taken in before I noted that the boots with which it had tramped from distant towns were immaculately polished. But I was not sure that the Luftmensch species — the airman without a machine who floats like a gossamer the wide world over — was not the more troublesome to tackle. For this is a Jewish type, assertive that " all Israel are brethren," and insistent on its right to travel and study at the fraternal expense, without even preliminary consultation. My visitor was visibly of this high-handed order. Futile to ask him, " Am I my brother's keeper? " I should at the very least have to pay his fare back to London.
He began — cunningly, I thought — with some questions upon the book he was reading, which proved — ominous confirmation of my worst fears — a work of my own. I answered his queries sceptically, slipping — as soon as the maid was out of earshot — into the German he spoke more easily than English, and await- ing almost impatiently the moment of transition into finance. But there was no sign of precipitation. He had written a little German book on the Kabbalah — printed in the East End before the war — and offered me a paper-covered copy, already in- scribed to me with Oriental floridity. All this was in the formula : the only question was, would he name the price or leave it to me. But there was no light of cupidity in those gentle brown eyes : he observed mournfully that he had sent it to many Englishmen of light and leading, as well as to foreign monarchs. But not one had even acknowledged its receipt: there seemed no interest in the nature of God, or His relations to man.
Little by little, but still half-incredulous, I began to feel that this interest was the only one that appealed to him. For, as he deviously reached the purpose of his visit, it grew obvious that he was a dreamer of the Ghetto, whose inherited means from the parental pawnshop fortunately sufficed for his moderate wants — assuredly he ate no luncheon that day — and that his only hunger was for God.
2
PEOEM: THE QUEST
A life-long ponderer over the old mystic Hebrew books, he was still groping for more theologic light: even the Kabbalah had left much obscure.
" But whom then can I consult? " he demanded in despair, when I modestly disclaimed any special illumination or informa- tion. " I came to London, knowing it was the capital of the world, and that there I would find all the great Englishmen, and I took it for granted they would be glad to compare notes with me about God. But no ! I cannot get to hear of anyone who is willing or able to discuss divine philosophy. Surely you can give me the name of somebody."
My mind ran over the seven millions of Greater London, coursing to and fro like a frantic sheep-dog. " There used to be people," I murmured apologetically, with an eye on the despised Victorians of my youth. " But I really cannot think of anybody who lives in London, or even the suburbs."
" But with all your great statesmen ! " he protested.
" Divinity is not their Fach" I explained defensively. " Perhaps Mr. Balfour," I wondered, with a hopeful memory of Gifford Lectures.
" I have read him," he replied unexpectedly. " But he is not deep. What has God to do with Doubt? "
I was taken aback, and there was a pause of musing silence.
" I went to Downing Street yesterday," he avowed presently, " to ask Mr. Lloyd George to talk to me about God."
" Lloyd George ! " I echoed, startled.
" Yes," he said, simply. " He often talks as if he knew all about God. With him there is never any Doubt. I thought he might give me the light I need. And I too might be able to help him."
I stared. " But he didn't see you? "
" He did not refuse."
" You saw him ? " I gasped.
" Not yet," he replied tranquilly. " On second thoughts I did not like to ring the bell, because I thought after all he does not know me. But you will give me a letter to him."
I saw that with his saintly craft he had at last arrived at his point.
" Oh, but it is impossible ! " I cried, instinctively. " Aus- geschlossen! "
" You don't know him? " he asked, disappointed.
I admitted we were not absolutely unacquainted. But the idea of the Prime Minister of the British Empire at this su-
8
THE VOICE OF JEKUSALEM
preme crisis in world affairs — with the war going against us too just then — according an interview to an obscure individual seeking God with a German accent, seemed to me of the last fantasy. With an uneasy levity I urged that Downing Street during the war was a " prohibited area " for theology. But he would not see it. Surely God was the thing that mattered most, he insisted.
I tried to soothe his disappointment by recalling other per- sonages who might be willing to chop theology ; provincial pro- fessors, even Oxford Dons. But he said with a sigh that they would not be handy for talking to, as new difficulties presented themselves.
Embarrassed, I offered him coffee, but he refused gently. I foraged desperately in my spiritual larder, scouring its recesses for scraps of Hebrew theology from Saadia to Crescas ; showily produced the Plotinian mysticism of Ibn Gabirol (the mysteri- ous Avicebron, inspirer of Duns Scotus), whose poems I hap- pened to be translating, and somewhat placated my taskmaster by disparaging the rationalism of Maimonides in favour of that poetry and Moses Ibn Ezra's. Brightening, he recalled Bachya's proof of the Unity of God, and told me of an Arabic work on the vegetative, animal, and universal soul falsely ascribed to Bachya, in which, I learnt with surprise, the un- known mediaeval philosopher had anticipated Bergson's thesis that intellectual disturbance through cerebral injury was no proof of soul's dependence on body, inasmuch as the brain was but the medium of the soul, which could not work through a damaged instrument. But this liveliness nickered out again when he remembered that I did not live in London and was beyond his means for frequent consultation. Unless, perhaps, I would correspond !
Vehemently I pointed out that such subtleties could be solved only viva voce, demanded the Socratic method ; one could thresh out more in a quarter of an hour than in a month of letter- writing.
" That is what I say," he admitted. " As from the fire of the soul was, according to your Ibn Gabirol, the body created, so from the sparks struck out by two souls is the body of Truth created. Then I must write myself, asking Lloyd George to talk to me," he concluded with resignation.
" Useless," I warned him. " He would never see your letter."
" Never see my letter? " he repeated in naive surprise.
" No, there are barriers of secretaries between him and his
4
PROEM: THE QUEST
correspondence. Just think ! He has to direct the greatest war in all history ! "
" Is that a reason for not thinking a little about God? "
I strove to appease him with a cigarette. But he waved it austerely aside.
And when I accompanied him to the station — for thus far had my politeness grown — he was still puzzling over the immense and incredible situation that there was nobody in the metropolis of the world who could or would talk with him about the only thing that really mattered to humanity, and that in particular the man in charge of the greatest war in history would not devote an hour now and again to the study of the nature of God.
But gradually his face resumed the old brooding light.
The may and the fool's-parsley gleamed thick in the sunlit hedges, the larks trilled skywards, the cuckoo's golden phrase came glamorously pervasive, the young wheat waved green ; and as we passed through fields of daisies and buttercups we must fain skirt the crouching calves, chewing unperturbed by the drone of the guns. That sinister booming penetrated as little to my companion. The voice of Jerusalem was all he heard. Even the thwarted purpose of his pilgrimage was forgotten, and Lloyd George had passed from his ken. He was thinking only of the Eternal.
5
THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM
As I was preparing for the press this collection of my Jewish essays, gathered from every period of my working life, I received an article upon Islam from my friend, Sir Harry Johnston, with a provocative sentence specially marked. " Judaism," it ran, " had virtually dissolved into Christianity a hundred years be- fore the coming of Christ, and it is only a foolish petulance which prevents the Jews of to-day from avowing themselves followers of Christ." I retorted that the sentence was an Irish bull. Why should Christians who preceded Christ avow them- selves his followers? One might more defensibly say that it is only a foolish snobbishness that prevents his followers from avowing themselves as Jews. In this they would certainly be following him, for he notoriously proclaimed himself as one who came not to destroy the Jewish Law but to fulfil it.
Sir Harry Johnston is, however, not so wrong in regarding the Jews of the first century b.c. as having largely reached the Christian position, in so far as the adjective applies to Semitic ethics and not to the Greek metaphysics and sacramental no- tions with which the new Jewish sect entangled itself. From the account given by Josephus of the Essenes in particular, it would seem that even in its specific developments of communism and celibacy, Christianity had already made its appearance in Judaea. They were the first in the ancient world to condemn slavery. " Their example," observes Lord Acton in his essay on " Freedom in Antiquity," " testifies to how great a height religious men were able to raise their conception of society even without the succour of the New Testament." Similarly, Sir John Seeley begins his celebrated work " Ecce Homo," with the remark " The Christian Church sprang from a movement which was not begun by Christ. When he appeared upon the scene the first wave of this movement had already passed over the sur- face of the Jewish nation." This is true, even if by this move- ment we read the Hellenisation of the simple Semitic ethic or its separation from any peculiar race. Philo, a contemporary of Jesus, born nearly twenty years earlier, though his philosophy
6
THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM
of the Logos and his conception of world-proselytism were re- jected by the Jewries of his own age, was accepted by the early Christians almost as one of themselves ; and it is to the Church Fathers that we owe the preservation of the bulk of his works. Kuenen, although he regards Christianity as completely super- seding Judaism and as not traceable specifically either to Essen- ism or Philoism, is yet compelled, like Renan, to see its roots in Palestinian Judaism as a whole, and to describe the whole ethical atmosphere in Palestine as a psychological preparation for the emergence of Jesus, between whom and the shepherd Amos, eight hundred years before him, there was no incommen- surable gap. And if the essence of the Christian ethic be taken as sacrifice, or vicarious atonement, the willingness to exemplify it appears a millennium and a half earlier in Moses than in Jesus. " And it came to pass on the morrow," says the histo- rian of Exodus (Chapter XXXII., 30-32), " that Moses said unto the people, Ye have sinned a great sin : and now I will go up unto the Lord ; peradventure I shall make an atonement for your sin. And Moses returned unto the Lord, and said, Oh, this people have sinned a great sin, and have made them gods of gold. Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin ; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written." But the reply put into the Lord's mouth marks the dividing line between the creeds. " Whosoever hath sinned against me, him will I blot out of my book." Justice in fact is the essential note of Juda- ism as Love is that of Christianity. Judaism of course no more discarded Love than Christianity was able to dispense with Justice — it is merely a question of proportions — but it is this stern trumpet-sound of the Old Testament that has discon- certed all the sentimentalists who bleat about the cruel Jehovah till Zeppelins throw bombs on themselves, when they out-Herod Herod in their savage thirst for vengeance, not merely paying no attention to the Sermon on the Mount, but disregarding the warning of Jehovah: " Vengeance is Mine."
So far from the Gospels of Love and Justice being sharply divided between the two Testaments, it is but two chapters later in Exodus that we find the Jewish God defining Himself as " The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin."
But this " Christian " Jehovah refuses to forget his Jewish side, and the definition winds up : " And that will by no means
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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM
clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation."
There may be here the profound idea that God can forgive but that He cannot forget ; that is to say, He cannot undo the results of evil, which work themselves out to the third and fourth generation, however the sinners may have found forgiveness. This is not the place to delve more deeply into these spiritual subtleties. I wish merely to show what little truth there is in the current antithesis between the Old and the New Testament, when that test is applied to the Bible which is the last to which it is exposed — namely, the process of reading it.
With a curious arrogance the translators of the authorised version imported into the Old Testament by way of head-lines their dogmatic interpretation of the text, and thus started its readers with a misleading prepossession, much as newspaper articles are almost irremediably falsified by too summary head- lines. This is why — apart from the mistakes of the trans- lators — not one Christian in a million has ever really read the Old Testament. These deceptive interpolations are particu- larly concerned with dramatising the Old Testament into a con- tinuous prophecy of the coming Saviour. The line of proof is as absurd as the sense is distorted or misrendered. And yet the basic idea is sound. For the Old Testament contains, though in a jumble of strata, all the traces of the evolution from the crude psychology of primitive civilisation to that form of Jewish psychology, popularly known as Christian. It is this process of spiritualisation culminating in the soul of Jesus which is the true miracle to which the Bible testifies, and the only one as to which its testimony is convincing. The only miracle, too, which Science cannot destroy: Science, that for all its practical boons, has wrought but negatively, so far as all deeper values are concerned ; Science that, like the illuminant in Milton's Hell, is " no light but rather darkness visible." Its only contribution to real knowledge has been this revelation of our ignorance, this destruction of the cosy conceptions of Space and Time and History within which we nestled. Like a grim hand withdrawing a curtain from the window of a warm lighted room, Science has revealed the impenetrable blackness that hedges us around, the terrifying perspectives of infinity and evolution.
Amid these tenebrosities and in the din and tumult of the
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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM
age, the note of which has insidiously become that very Bis- marckian bellow which the war was professedly waged to silence, the still small voice of Jerusalem remains our only music. That accent of Reason and Love is heard at its clearest in some of the sayings of Jesus, but long centuries before it had made itself audible in the pastures of Mesopotamia and amid the hills of Palestine, and still, wherever the race of Jesus wanders, there are lips on which the ancient fiery coal is laid.
II
The soul of this w peculiar people " is best seen in the Bible, saturated from the first page of the Old Testament to the last page of the New with the aspiration for a righteous social order, and an ultimate unification of mankind. Of these ideals the race of Abraham originally conceived and still conceives itself to be the medium and missionary. Wild and rude as were the beginnings of this people, frequent as were its backslidings, and great as were — and are — its faults, this aspiration is continuous in its literature even up to the present day. There is every reason to believe that the historic texts of the Old Testament were redacted in the interests of this philosophy of history, but that pious falsification is very different from the self-glorification of all other epics. Israel appears throughout not as a hero but as a sinner who cannot rise to his role of redeemer, of " servant of the Lord " — that role of service, not dominance, for which his people was " chosen." The Talmud, the innumerable volumes of saintly Hebrew thought, the Jewish liturgy, whether in its ancient or its mediaeval strata, the " modernist " platforms of reformed American Synagogues, all echo and re-echo this conception of " the Jewish mission." As I have often said, the people of Christ has been the Christ of peoples, and this both in its apostolate and in its martyrdom. " Nathan! Nathan! Ihr seid ein Christ! " cries the friar to the old Jewish sage in Lessing's fine play. " By God, you are a Christian ! There never was a better Christian ! "
Christianity, qua its ethic of love and pity and self-sacrifice, is at bottom a question of psychology : it is the evolution of the human spirit to a plane as much transcending the natural man's, as the species homo transcends the animal. To the biologist this upward movement may be a leap in the dark — a " sport," a freak of fate or freewill — to the supernaturalist it may be a
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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM
divine impulsion. But whatever its scientific explanation, the Jews had, as Sir Harry Johnston almost perceives, reached this phase of evolution centuries before the rest of the world — it is doubtless what their prophets felt when they claimed them as a Chosen People and thus sought to deepen and strengthen this line of evolution. Thus while the incongruity of missions to the Jews, subsidised by peoples who have never yet reached the psychological plane of ancient Israel, is grotesquely obvious, the process of conversion cannot be applied even to these European stocks themselves, for they are still in the crude psychic stage of self-assertion and conquest. Their Chris- tianity was never more than an imposition from without, which then soon transformed to their own psychology. They were as little affected by their conversion as the prehistoric Celtic menhirs of the West of England, when a cross was scratched over them to adapt them to Christian use. " Est-ce qu'il y a des chretiens? " demands the freethinker in Diderot's " Entre- tien d'un philosophe," " Je n'en ai jamais vu." " Nothing can be done," wrote George Tyrrell in one of his letters, " till the Roman Curia is converted to Christianity. There is more hope of the Jews." There is indeed.
In the remarkable remonstrance to the Inquisitors of Spain and Portugal inserted by Montesquieu in the twenty-fifth book of his " Esprit des Lois," the Jewish protester displays a com- plete comprehension of real Christianity, pointing out that there is no difference between the Japanese who burn Christians and the Christians who burn Jews, and begging the Inquisitors if they cannot behave as Christians to behave at least as men. " Si vous avez cette verite" the Jew observes mordantly, " ne nous la cachez pas par la maniere dont vous nous la proposez."
In the recent war, though a Christian psychology has revealed itself here and there among the followers or products of the Church, the old Berserker psychology has been the dominating influence. It was not even always sicklied over with the pale cast of sophistication, for German thought had reverted to the Greek sophists with their doctrine of might as right, though the Allies who bettered the German instruction by an illegiti- mate blockade, still sanctimoniously preserved their lip-worship of Christ, and combining the language of Mr. Chadband with the pinchings of Mr. Quilp, continue to this day to ban their enemies from their great brotherhood of peace and righteous- ness. Even Christmas could bring no truce in the trenches
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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM
except once, when the spirit of the dead Jew suspended the savageries of the living Christians. But it was from the ranks and not from the rulers that this beautiful moment sprang, and officialdom soon descended to nip in the bud so appropriate a celebration of Christ's birthday. It even proceeded to exploit the solemn festivals of the common Church as heaven-sent opportunities for unexpected attack.
But it sufficed to have had a mother of Jewish blood, for Montaigne to become the channel of thoughts upon the Spanish conquest of Mexico which had found no expression from " the Pope, God's Vice-gerent on earth," to whom the King of Castile stood indebted for his territorial greatness. " Who," asks Montaigne, " ever enhanc'd the price of merchandize at such a rate? So many cities levell'd with the ground, so many nations exterminated, so many millions of people fallen by the edge of the sword, and the richest and most beautiful part of the world turn'd upside down, for the traffick of pearl and pepper; mechanick victories ! Never did ambition, never did animosities engage men against one another to such a degree of hostility and miserable calamity."
A semi-Jewish parentage similarly explains how Jean Bodin, though steeped in some of the superstitions of his day, was the first great political philosopher to preach tolerance and progress. He was even suspected of Judaising, such was his respect for the Old Testament and his neglect of the New, though his critics do not seem to have had the biological clue to his psychology. And his complementary in action, the great French Chancellor, Michel de l'Hopital, who practised what Bodin preached, staving off the Inquisition and keeping the peace between Christian sects, was also half a Jew. It is equally significant that the book which foresaw that a modern war would cripple Europe was written by the Russian Jew, Bloch, the inspirer of the Hague Conference, and that the only General in that war whose account of his triumphs is pene- trated throughout by loathing for the necessity for them, is the Australian Jew, Sir John Monash. " Minds are conquered not by armies, but by love and magnanimity," said Spinoza. It was no Father of the Church but the worldly-wise author of " Proverbs " who said : " If thine enemy is hungry, feed him." *
i In a letter to The Times (August 6th, 1920) Mrs. Bramwell Booth at- tributes the saying to Christ, though of course it appears only in an epistle of Paul (Romans, xii. 20), who was obviously quoting from Proverbs. It seems strange that a leader of the Salvation Army should not know the New
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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM
" The Jews," asserted the Rabbi of Venice, in 1637 — and Italy is the country in which animals notoriously have no souls — ■ " never torment, or abuse, or put to any cruel death any Brute Beast " ; it is not surprising that it was a Jew who founded the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Disraeli went too far when he said, " All is race : there is no other truth," for the culture superimposed by the environment upon the hereditary mentality is a very considerable factor of the adult psychology, and he seems to have overlooked that in the case of Western Jews this factor is equally present, varying inter alia the nationality in every country. For nationality, though often confused with race, and treated as though it sprang into existence by some divine fiat, perfect, fixed and immutable — political thinking being still in its pre-Darwinian period — is of purely psychological genesis, a product of environment. So far from nationalities being fixed, political law in the natural world is for ever creating, hybridising, or eliminating them, and all three processes are at work upon the scatterings of the vile corpus of Israel. Similarly, except perhaps among the Hottentots or other stationary savage tribes, there is no such thing as a pure race, races always being alloyed, or at least modified, by any new milieu, and according to Maurice Fishberg, the American-Jewish anthropologist, the Jew includes Teutonic, Slavonic, Turanian, Mongoloid, Negroid, Spanish, Assyrian and other types. Nevertheless, Disraeli was in advance of the thought of his time in drawing attention to the relative fixity of biological strains.
When, according to the eleventh chapter of Numbers, a young man came running to tell Moses that Eldad and Medad were prophesying in the camp, and when Joshua, then the under- ling of the Master, begged Moses to forbid them, that great man with his wonted magnanimity answered : " Enviest thou for my sake? Would God that all the Lord's people were prophets and that the Lord would put his spirit upon them ! "
If the spirit cannot be said to rest on every Israelite, there is no doubt that the same racial intuition which led to the proclamation of the unity of the universe through the one God, leads to the perception of the brotherhood of humanity under the common fatherhood, and that the faculty of dreaming mil- lennial visions of a warless world is more widespread among the people of Isaiah than among any other. This is a fact that
Testament, but the mis-attribution to Christianity of all that is best in Judaism is characteristic.
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THE VOICE OF JEKUSALEM
could be established by comparative statistics. The press- bureaus or societies of international pacifism will be found mainly directed by men and women of the race whose salutation was not " How do you do? " but " Peace to you ! " And two Jews — Professor Asser and Alfred Fried — are among the few men who have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. No one has laboured more for the Pacifist ideal than the inventor of Esperanto, the late Dr. Zamenhof, the Russo-Jewish oculist who truly strove to heal the blindness of humanity. For the unity of speech at which he laboured was to him merely the outward sign of the inner unity of mankind. If he sought to undo the curse of Babel, it was in order to bring the peace of Jerusalem. Amid the barbaric welter generated by that mili- tary ideal of which Prussia offered the supreme expression, in a planet seething and rumbling with animosities, and streaked with volcanic fires, this obscure Russian Jew managed to set myriads of every race, creed and colour, meeting in the concord of a common tongue, the very name of which brought the gospel of hope.
" That men form one universal brotherhood, that they spring from one common origin, that their individual lives, their nations and races, interbreed and blend and go on to merge again at last in one common human destiny upon this little planet amidst the stars," is, according to Mr. Wells, the conclusion which science and history alike reach by their investigations. But, as he admits, all the world-religions had reached it by inspiration and insight. This conclusion was in fact the starting-point of Hebrew literature, declaring as it did that we are all sons of Adam, and that the colour-varieties sprang equally from the sons of Noah : the moral value of the teaching is independent of its historic exactitude. In the very eagerness of the Jew to assimilate himself to every other people is the unconscious ex- pression of a sense of universal fraternity. He has served as a connecting link not only between all modern peoples, but with the vanished peoples of antiquity, the Assyrians, the Medes, the Babylonians. If the Jew Paul proved that the Hebrew word was universal, the Jews who rejected his teaching have proved the universality of the Hebrew race. Mr. Wells has pointed out that history is taught from national standpoints, to the national glory and to the total destruction of perspective. Each history is like a corridor on which many doors give, but what the people in the rooms did before they came into the
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corridor, or after they had banged the door behind them, the pupil is never shown. That is not, however, the case with the student of Jewish history. He is compelled to keep his eye on all the chambers of world-history in every period, for the Jew has lived with every people, and by his ability to share the life of them all has proved indirectly that they are all brothers. One touch of Jewry makes the whole world kin.
Ill
It does not follow, of course, that because Jews are pacifists, pacifists are Jews, or that the peace-ideal finds no prophets among the Gentiles. Even though an Oriental origin should be established for Virgil's Sibylline Eclogue, Sully and St. Pierre were French, so was Fenelon (whose " Telemaque " scarified military glory), Rousseau was Swiss, the most systematic inves- tigation of the subject came from a German, Kant, and not even political passion has yet branded President Wilson, General Smuts or Lord Robert Cecil as Jewish.1 Nevertheless, these great men are far less rooted in the national psychology than the Jewish pacifists. They are isolated trees, not a forest.
Commenting on the Amritsar Debate in Parliament, The Times told us that the House was very angry with Mr. Montagu, who, presenting to it a sharp-cut alternative — race domination or partnership — affronted with his Jewish men- tality the deepest instincts of Englishmen abhorring generalisa- tion and accustomed to move inductively. Put into plain language this means that the English motto is : Make sure of your interest and let the principle take care of itself. If this were true, then Mr. Montagu could exhibit no finer patriotism than to contribute the Jew's ethical mentality to the intellectual assets of England — quite apart from the fact that he, if any- body, will thus save India for England. He has, in fact, been doing truer Jewish work than any his relative, Sir Herbert Samuel, can accomplish in Palestine.
Addressing the Zionists on the error of precipitation or of expecting perfection at a bound, Lord Robert Cecil said : " If I may venture as a Briton to give you any advice, I will ask you to remember the great quality by which we British have achieved some success, and that is the desire that we have to make things work — not to desire perfection in a moment, but
i Lowell, however, claimed the Cecils as of Jewish origin.
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to throw our whole energy into making whatever we have to do a success in itself." Amusingly enough this is the very exhor- tation addressed to Lord Robert by his worldly-wise uncle, Mr. Balfour, and if I may venture as a Jew to give the literally noble lord any advice, it is to throw away this British side of him in favour of his prophetic Hebrew vein. The greatness of his life-work already stands compromised by his concessions to the practical. The world has been ruined by its practical men. True, nothing must be jerrybuilt, but neither will sound work- manship avail if the architect's plan is defective. If, as Lord Robert says, " Well begun is half done," it is equally true that " 111 begun is half undone." This has certainly happened with his League of Nations, which is developing with the same for- tuitousness as the British Empire, whose " success " is by no means so exemplary as Lord Robert imagines. The flaws in its planless foundation will surely undermine the whole imperi- alist structure, unless it is established afresh on that basis of partnership which Mr. Montagu urges.
It may be doubted, however, whether The Times is correct in discerning so definite a mental breach between East and West. The Labour Party seems to have no difficulty in establishing general ethical principles of foreign policy. Cobden, Bright, Morley, and Lord Courtney were not of the East, yet they steered a straight course by a priori principles. Is it not rather that the present House of Commons, elected in the flush of war-triumph, is peculiarly representative of the mentality of the mob? Far be it from me to take advantage of the implication of The Times that the only British citizens with principles for foreign politics are of Mr. Montagu's race. As little is it my wish to claim — as Dr. Stanton Coit seems to imagine I do — that no religious inspiration or ethical loftiness can be found before or outside Israel : Hellenism and Buddhism have undeniably produced noble utterances, and so has Christi- anity after the Gospels (which are, of course, exclusively Jewish). Even the much-abused Machiavelli wrote in The Prince: " There are two ways of deciding any contest, the one by laws, the other by force. The first is peculiar to men, the second to beasts." The difference between the Jewish and all other religious or ethical maxims and ideals lies, however, in the fact that they have a dynamic quality that removes them from aesthetics or contemplation into action, and that they are found more incorporated with the life of the people as a whole
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than any other ethical literature. And this can only be because they find more reflection and response in the popular psychol- ogy. The achievements of the Jews in many arts cannot sustain comparison with the greatest Gentile creations. But in kindliness the Jews stand unrivalled. It is not that they are a race of spiritual supermen — though they have produced such in Moses, Jesus and Spinoza — it is merely that the vast majority of other stocks are — as Telemaque called the grand conquerors — sub-human. Tennyson adjured mankind to —
" Move upward, working out the beast And let the ape and tiger die."
But the ape and tiger are still terribly alive, and the tiger at least is preferable in his unmixed animality. Man cannot vie with him either in beauty or strength, and if Evolution having got to the ape can get only to the inventor of poison-gas and bombs, one would rather see the world given over to tigers than to the half-breed, homo, fallen between two planes. An intel- lectual tiger, or an ape with brains, is a very dreadful climax to the process of the suns.
And this ape, be it remembered, is one whose mouth spits flame, and whose nostrils snort chlorine, who is not debarred even from wings of destruction, whose amphibious maleficence can rend and shatter from the very depths of the sea, and a touch of whose paw can overtopple towers and extinguish life leagues and leagues away.
"... A monster, then, a dream, A discord. Dragons of the prime, That tare each other in their slime, Were mellow music match'd with him."
When Le Sage made his " Diable Boiteux " boast that he was the demon who among other dubious novelties had introduced chemistry into the world, people must have wondered at the inclusion in the fiend's catalogue of so apparently elevated a branch of learning. It is now being borne in on us that chem- istry has been the supreme invention of Asmodeus, though had Le Sage been prophetic enough he would have added every department of Science, that prostitute of the intellect, who has lent herself to man's worst blood-lusts.
Beginning with genuine horror at every method of war we
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had failed to anticipate, we have now slavishly accepted every- thing, however ghastly, as a normal weapon, and have found aerial bombings in particular supplying a " felt want " in the administration of over-spacious savage territories by limited forces : military authorities, with Sir Henry Wilson smiling openly at our delusion that the last was " a war to end war," have even hinted that the disease-germ is no more illegitimate than any other instrument of war, and may be expected in the next. I recall that when I was visiting the Pasteur Institute in Paris, soon after the American war with Cuba, a horrified professor related to me how a Cuban had applied to him for such a germ. But these qualms are of the past. The fact is that civilised man at war is worse than the barbarian — cor- ruptio optimi pessima — not merely because he is so terribly more efficient, but because his suddenly generated war-mind is morbid and unbalanced in its savagery, in its delirium of spies and hidden hands, compared with the sanity of the fighting savage, who, his normal environment being danger and his normal atmosphere war, is always of the same mind, and not of two different minds — the war-mind and the peace-mind, wide as the poles asunder. The civilised war-mind is thus not merely a throw-back to the savage mind, it is a degeneration from it. Witness the respect of the South Sea Islanders for the enemy's slumbers, their chivalrous warnings of attack, as compared with the unscrupulous camouflage of modern war, and the utilisation, as I said, of even Christmas or Easter Day as the most unexpected moment for the offensive. And since we are contrasting East with West, compare the abolition of Sunday — " handing over the Lord's Day to the King " — with the proud clinging of the Pharisees to their Sabbath, their refusal to fight upon which lost them Jerusalem on two separate occasions. The " moratorium for Christianity " was defended on the ground that the war was a Crusade, and that once the Teutonic Paganism were crushed, everything would be over- whelmingly Christian. But the new world we were promised has turned out like the new clothes of Hans Andersen's nude Emperor, whose courtiers were in ecstasies over his tailor's triumphs. The world, though the Supreme Council, abetted by the practical Briton, Lord Robert Cecil, still pretends that it has a League of Nations, has lost even its last rags of decency, and the Voice of Potsdam is blatant in every capital. Even
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Mr. Winston Churchill confessed recently that " we have been transformed into a sphere which is definitely lower, from almost every point of view, than that which we had attained in the days before Armageddon."
This is indeed a significant confession from one of the pro- tagonists of the Holy War. " Never," he declares, " was a time when more complete callousness and indifference to human life and suffering was exhibited by the great community all over the world."
Mr. Massingham in The Nation correctly describing Europe to-day as " little more than a prison-house of Right," proceeds to complain that the Hungarians in Transylvania are peculiarly persecuted by the Roumanians. " This is the lot of one of the most famous of European nationalities at the hands of one of the meanest." I have no quarrel with his adjectives, but the outrages he cites, though monstrous enough, are mild compared with those inflicted by these famous Hungarians on the Jews. Mr. Israel Cohen, after a special visit to Budapest, reports that " Jews are dragged out of their houses, abused, flogged, robbed, tortured, and deported. . . . They are flogged naked until they are unconscious. . . . Some of the worst tortures have been practised in the Komarom fortress, where men have had to drink the blood from their own wounds ; others have been buried neck- deep in the earth, and others had to hold a mouse in their mouth, or to eat the hair pulled off their own chin." Never was there a Jewry more patriotic than the Hungarian, its loyal striving to Magyarise itself reached to the absurdity of cari- cature, and yet it now finds itself repudiated, harassed, done to death. " The Danube bobs with Jewish corpses " vividly observed to me a friend who knows the facts.
But pogroms against the Jews have not been confined to the defeated countries. Even in victorious countries like Poland victory was celebrated with offerings of Jewish blood, and while half the world was dancing at the Armistice, for the Jewish people as a whole it was the dance of death. Not that the Poles have proved as homicidally maniacal as was at first feared. Though wholesale massacres are preached by these beggars on horseback, the Jews have as yet been murdered in moderation. But they are boycotted, dragooned, robbed, beaten, and outlawed, and live in such a state of terror that the British Sub-Commissioner to Poland, Captain Peter Wright, says in his official report : " If I was an Orthodox Jew, long-
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bearded and black-coated, and found myself in the same train as a party of soldiers, I should travel — as even the most reverend orthodox Rabbis do — under the seat."
And perhaps even worse than the dramatic detonation of persecution, is the unlifting fog of repression, the creeping terror of anticipation. Such is the situation in Poland, the protegee of the Allied Powers, anent which Sir Stuart Samuel, the British Commissioner, has made a statement worthy of Tacitus, so pregnant is its summary of the Jewish situation in many countries. " The Jewish soldiers in Poland do their duty to their country in the certainty that their country will not do its duty by them." A grim comment indeed on the vaunted chivalry of the Pole. The very funerals of distinguished Polish Jews are not safe from hooliganism. Solomon Asch, the famous Yiddish novelist and dramatist, reports a statement made to him by the Rabbi of Vilna, which is an epitome of Jewish suffering in the Russian war-zone :
" Under the old Russian Czarist Government we suffered as Jews. When the Germans occupied Vilna we no longer suffered as Jews but as human beings,, together with the rest of the population, whom they robbed of everything. Then, when the Bolsheviki came, we suffered as bourgeois. And now that the Poles have set foot in Vilna we suffer again as Jews. But these sufferings are more horrible than anything we have as yet experienced."
It is not, however, to Vilna but to Pinsk that attaches the most monstrous Polish misdeed, though Captain Wright strangely thinks that Major C, its perpetrator, would be acquitted if brought to trial " as being within his strict rights." Heaven save us from the military mind. It is characteristic of Captain Wright to soften or explain away every Polish atroc- ity, yet one does not need to travel beyond his own report to perceive the infamousness of the episode. After telling us that the Zionist Co-operative Society of Pinsk had held a legiti- matised meeting and that some of the audience lingered chatting over the distribution of a relief fund that had come from America, Captain Wright proceeds :
" Polish soldiers and a gendarmerie who had been pressing for forced labour, and probably using this as a blackmailing pretext, entered the building and arrested and searched those present. They no doubt obtained a considerable amount of money for themselves in this search. Then they took 50 or 60 in number to the headquarters
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of Major C, and reported that they had arrested the members of an unauthorised Jewish Bolshevik meeting. Major C, who had almost at the same hour heard of a Bolshevik success near the town, and was prepared to evacuate it, gave orders for their imme- diate execution. This was done without trial of any sort and even without taking their names. One person at least of those executed had been swept into the crowd of prisoners by accident in the street. The whole incident only took two or three hours. . . . The Jewish ladies arrested, but exempted from the execution, were kept in prison without trial and enquiry. They were stripped naked and flogged. After the flogging they were made to pass naked down a passage full of Polish soldiers. The Jews arrested, but excepted from the execution, were next day led to the cemetery where those executed were buried, and made to dig their own graves, then, at the last moment, they were told they were reprieved; in fact, the gendarmerie regularly tormented the survivors.
" We were informed, but have no exact information, that the heads of this gendarmerie were subsequently found guilty of various crimes.
" The victims were respectable lower middle-class people, school teachers and such like."
But as Sir Horace Rumbold, the British Representative in Warsaw, rightly objects, the Polish- Jewish atrocities are not seen in their true Christian perspective, since the surrounding countries are worse:
" The massacres of Jews by Ukrainian peasant bands can find, in their extent and thoroughness, no parallel except in the massacres of the Armenians in the Turkish Empire. Their very completeness has tended to keep the world in ignorance of them, for towns of many inhabitants almost wholly Jewish have apparently been wiped out. Similar events have taken place outside the Ukraine proper; and all over Southern Russia, such as Hungary and Czecho- slovakia, persecutions less sanguinary perhaps, but very brutal and unjust, have also occurred in the interregnum which followed the armistice."
The butchery in the Ukraine in fact far exceeds even the Cossack horrors in Poland in the seventeenth century, or those orgies of blood which marked the passage of the Crusaders of 1096 through the Rhenish Ghettos, on that journey to the Tomb of Christ which culminated in 1099 in the burning alive of all the Jews of Jerusalem in their synagogue.
Vladimir Tiomkin, the head of Ukrainian Jewry, says of one among the many bands of robbers and assassins :
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" The Jewish population was generally left stark naked, being deprived even of their shoes and underwear. These wild beasts would put boiling water down the throats of their victims. Ears, noses, and lingers would be cut off from individuals who were fully alive. Often the body would be ripped open and the victims would at the same time be made to cry: ' Long live free Ukrainia.' "
The reports from the Ukraine are indeed so gruesome that one could wish there was exaggeration. Take, for example, the story of the pogrom that took place on February 14th in the Government of Kieff, where a band of fifty young girls was given over to a brutal soldiery. Eighty per cent, of the popu- lation were killed or wounded, and their bodies thrown to the swine, who were guarded in their meal by an armed force. At Filchin the orgies were beyond description, not a single female was left alive or unoutraged, the old men were singled out, their beards cut off and then their heads. The Rabbi gathered 125 children of the district and said to the murderers, " You are slaying the mothers and fathers, what shall we do with the children? " The soldiers made sport of this appeal and then deliberately shot seventy of the children. Later, the heads of these innocents, separated from their bodies, were placed in a huge barrel and sent as a " present " to the remaining members of the Jewish community. The detail is here too incredible to be invented, and the reporter, Dr. Bernstein-Kohn, of Kishineff, is of impeccable authority and veracity. He tells us too of forty Jews found insane in a forest, walking on all fours.
If anybody imagines that this monstrous Jew-baiting is merely one aspect of the universal convulsions of the war, let him turn back the pages of history and renew his memory of the ghastly pogroms of that Czarist Russia of which England was the political associate. Of the state of terror in Warsaw in 1906 — a state more unbearable even than its actual atroc- ities — Jacob Dinesohn, a leading Russo-Jewish novelist, who died last year, has — almost by accident — provided a vivid account.
He had received a first-class steamship ticket from the enter- prising Jewish Daily News, of New York, with the invitation to use it. In refusing, this chivalrous man of letters gave as his reason his reluctance to leave the danger-zone " of the six million Jewish souls in whose blood our red-handed government seems determined to drown the revolutionary activity in
Russia."
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" And this/' he went on, " I see day after day with my own eyes, and feel it with all my senses. And in this general terror, of what account is the individual? I feel myself merely a minute drop in the sea of blood and tears ; and my own person, believe me, has lost in my eyes its weight and value above those who are in the same danger. Besides, one becomes accustomed to anything; when you see death every minute before your eyes, you cease to fear him your- self, and are even able to outstare him. A great many of my friends have already been killed or shot almost before my own eyes, and they were as innocent and harmless as can be imagined.
' It is just Saturday a week ago that my friend, the well-known writer, J. L. Peretz, came near being an innocent sacrifice to the times. At twelve o'clock noon he started to take a walk, having been confined to the house for some time. He had not gone twenty paces from his door when a Cossack of the street patrol took the fancy to discharge his gun behind his back. The ball was so near to Peretz that it touched his cheek, leaving a red mark, and grazed his ear. The bullet that missed Peretz lodged in a fourteen-year- old Jewish boy who was standing by and crippled him for life; it was necessary to amputate the boy's arm. Regardless of this narrow escape, Peretz and I took a walk a few hours later through the same street where we met fully armed military guards who are permitted to shoot or stab whomever they please without any responsibility whatever. And this instance is by no means an exception; they happen every day in almost every street, especially in the Jewish quarter, and I have neither heard nor read of any investigation made to determine whether the murder by these soldiers is according to law or not.
1 There are people who tremble at the sight of a raw recruit, and who hide themselves under a feather bed at sight of him. Such people have our contemptuous laughter, just as now we laugh at those who tremble to step foot into the street for fear of being shot or stabbed. Just as a feather bed is no protection against a recruit with a gun and bayonet, so is the policy of ' sit at home ' no guar- antee of safety from sudden and horrible death. The Jews in Bialystok met their deaths in their homes, upon their roofs and in their cellars. With us in Warsaw, as soon as there is a talk of a pogrom we are all ready to die upon the street rather than like a rat cornered in its hole. I, myself, went to the funeral of the first seventy-one Jews killed in the Bialystok pogrom. Of the impres- sion the sight made on me I could not give you an inkling even if I wrote you a hundred letters. Again many thanks for your kind invitation which let me assure you I fully appreciate. But to make use of your steamship ticket is quite out of the question. My place is here with my people, come what may."
The Peretz, so nearly assassinated, was, be it remarked, a
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writer of genius, some of whose tales have the charm of Hans Andersen.
Note that it is not Poles murdering Jews on national or Bolshevist pretexts, but Cossacks inspired by that bureaucracy with which Bolshevism is now so unfavourably contrasted.
" Thut nichts ! der Jude wird verbrannt."
Alas ! the words that Lessing put into the mouth of the perti- nacious Patriarch of Jerusalem amount to a law of history.
Mrs. Despard, returning from Budapest, relates, among cruder horrors, the story of a beautiful boy of twelve who was flogged for refusing to spit upon the portrait of his father, a Jewish teacher. " My father is a saint," said the boy proudly.
The Jews are not all saints, but what a set of savages, these Gentile peoples, glorified by the professors of nationalism, some even enriched with new dominions and power by the Supreme Council, whose Minority Treaty they flout as shamelessly as the Supreme Council itself flouts the League of Nations. However they may harry one another's minorities, they are at one in har- rying the Jew!
Were not " Mandates " already grown farcical, one would suggest that all these barbarian peoples, so far from enjoying the " sovereign rights " which they feel attainted even by the Minority Treaty, should be put completely under ward and watch till they become civilised. But quis cwstodiat custodes? Indeed all Europe should be put under a " Mandate," and I know only one people civilised enough to exercise it. Mean- time, over half that Christian continent, the voice of Jeru- salem is only a cry in the night !
While Christian history with its countless blood-spillings and mutual burnings, that are a constituent even of its religious record, is almost insufferable in the reading to any man of sym- pathy or imagination, it is impossible, despite the sordid stains as upon old clo', to read Jewish history since the fall of Jeru- salem without being purged by pity and terror. For here no blood is shed but that of Israel, and if the epic is defaced by meanness and squalor, and if the tragedy comes not seldom from a betrayal by what is false within, there remains enough to make it an eternal epic of the triumph of the spirit. Indeed, does not even Hegel call the Jews the people of the spirit?
To interpret this voice of Jerusalem and the people that is still its natural organ, is the purpose of these essays. I have
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not sought to probe into the absolute philosophical and theo- logical significance of the phenomena under investigation. That would require another and a different book. It is the phenomena themselves that have first to be admitted, to be dis- engaged from their fabular presentation and scoured of the prejudice that obscures them.
The Jewish Viennese anthropologist, Ignaz Zollschan, chal- lenging with his book, " Das Rassenproblem," the famous thesis of Houston Chamberlain and his disciples that civilisation is a creation of the Germanic race and that the Jew is an inferior breed (Jesus being a German of Rhenish-Westphalian origin), vet remarks at the end of his brilliant work that his vindication of his race has only the value of an epitaph, since unless a terri- tory can be found for them, the Jews are destined to disappear: nevertheless he had felt it his duty in the interests of scientific decency to publish the results of his investigation.
I do not share — as will be seen from my analysis in " The Territorial Solution of the Jewish Question " — this conclusion as to the imminence or even the possibility of Judaism and the Jew disappearing, but I am at one with Dr. Zollschan in desir- ing that the subject of Jews and Judaism shall be lifted out of the mist of ignorance and bigotry into the clear light of knowl- edge.
IV
Hardly had I written these words when an American visitor brought me a work hitherto unknown to me called " The Jewish Spectre,'* published in New York in 1905 by Mr. George H. Warner, and making exactly this demand. Despite its cine- matographic title, it seems a fascinating and, for the most part, competent piece of literary and historical criticism, rather flip- pant in tone, but of obvious value in helping to depolarize the Bible and the Jew for the uninformed mind, and to bring both within the natural categories of life and literature. Mr. War- ner will have none of that unnatural halo that clings to Pales- tine, he cannot away with the Brocken figure which looms before mankind as the ancient Hebrew, nor with that fantastic or sinis- ter blurring, which makes even the contemporary Jew spectral. In clearing away the grotesqueries of Sue and Dore, Shake- speare and Marlowe, Disraeli and Dickens, and the popular press, in applying the besom of common sense to all these wan- dering Jews, usurious fiends, mysterious millionaires, press-mo-
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nopolists, and universal wire-pullers, in sweeping away all this galimatias of superstition and pseudo-romance and legendary fear, and in replacing the visionary and the fantastic by histor- ical and biological intelligibilities ; in short, in exorcising " The Jewish Spectre," and substituting the Jew of flesh and blood, even in ancient Palestine or Babylonia, Mr. Warner has done good scientific work. Unfortunately, he has not done it in a scientific spirit, but with a touch of anti-Semitism and icono- clasm which precipitates him into the opposite extreme and into an equally unmerited denigration of Jew and Judaism. In- stead of getting them into a true world-perspective he pushes them out of it again. " The Jew," he says in his vivid way, " must take his place in the scales and be weighed with the law's inexorable, sealed and certified weights, as other men are." With all my heart. Only a legal balance is exactly what our author lacks. At times he writes like those shallow radicals who can see nothing mysterious in the real, and who believe that when you have stripped away the false romance from a phe- nomenon, the phenomenon remains invariably prosaic. Seeley, in his brilliant study of " The Expansion of England," divests the Englishman of any peculiar genius for the sea or any im- perial instinct, and shows to what simple factors even the con- quest of India was due. Yet with every separate miracle ex- plained away, the total miracle of the British Empire remains, the wonder of a small island holding a fourth of the globe. So, too, when one has denuded Jewish history and literature of every shred of supernaturalism and every hull of romantic fan- tasy, the invincible race and faith remain like a Doric temple on a headland, the sublimer for the bareness. For there is a true romance as well as a false, and when you have laid the Jewish Spectre you are confronted by the Jewish Spirit.
Consider the " outline " of this history. A shepherd, born in Mesopotamia, roved to Palestine, and his descendants, after a period of slavery in Egypt, returned to Palestine as conquerors and agriculturists, there to practise the theocratic code im- posed by their leader, Moses (perhaps the noblest figure in all history), and to evolve in the course of the ages a poetic and prophetic literature of unparalleled sublimity. That union of spirituality, intellectuality and fighting power in the breed, which raised it above all ancient races except the Greek, was paid for by an excessive individualism which distracted and di- vided the State. Palestine fell before the legions of Titus.
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But two generations later her final bid for independence was so fierce that Hadrian was forced to recall his ablest general — Severus — from the less formidable task of subduing Britain, equally in revolt. Half a century before it challenged Rome, the Jewish State had produced Christianity and had thus, un- known to itself, entered on a greater career of world-conquest than any victory over Rome could have brought it. And five centuries after the destruction of Jerusalem, its wandering scions had impregnated Muhammad with the ideas of Islam. Half the world was thus won for Hebraism in outer form at least, and Disraeli could boast that Europe was divided between those who worshipped a Jew and those who worshipped a Jew- ess. The question is sometimes raised whether Jews are Euro- peans. They are more, for they have helped to make Europe.
A nucleus of the race, however, still persisted, partly by na- tionalist instinct, partly b}7 the faith that its doctrines had been adulterated by illegitimate elements and its mission was still un- accomplished, and to-day as a population of some fourteen or fifteen millions constitutes a Jewdom larger than any that its ancient conquerors had ever boasted of crushing; so large in- deed that though after 1,850 years a prospect has opened out of re-establishing its old national home, for it to re-occupy its ancient shell save through a representative minority, is phys- ically impossible.
Is there no romance here? Even the false-romantic of the Wandering Jew has a core of truth, of that legendary presenta- tion which is often truer than a string of facts, but to which Mr. Warner turns a colour-blind eye. He makes great play with the exaggerated grandeur of Solomon's Palace — " about as large as a country house at Lenox " he calculates. Oddly enough, Mr. Wells in " The Outline of History " applies the same foot-measure to Solomon's Temple — " the breadth of a small villa residence." Compared with the buildings of Phar- aoh or Sardanapalus it was trivial. As though the pilgrim to Little Easton should compare the dimensions of Easton Rec- tory — the shrine of Mr. Wells's genius — with those of Eas- ton Lodge, the home of the Earl of Warwick ! Not in the ar- chitecture of Solomon's temple lay the Jew's contribution to civilization but in its dedication to the worship of all mankind, and in the sacred tradition that the privilege of building it had been disallowed to David because he was a man of war and
had shed blood.
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Mr. Warner sneers at the Ghetto and the fuss made about it in modern literature. Well, what was the Ghetto? The ety- mology of the word remains obscure, though the word itself still denotes the quarter of Venice, the few back-canals, where the Jews once lived by law and where a number still live by habit, among sj'nagogues more numerous even than public-houses in Britain. The sacrifice of so much space to God was the more remarkable, inasmuch as congestion was the natural character- istic of a Ghetto, where births multiply and boundaries remain fixed. It was through this pressure on space that the sky- scraper arose in the city of the Doges before New York was invented. Not that the Italian altitude can vie with the Amer- ican— how indeed, shall America be out-topped? — but there were certainly in all Italy no other houses seven storeys high. Congestion was the characteristic even of the Ghetto grave- yard, as is still to be seen at Prague, where the tragic huddle of countless gravestones in every stage of decrepitude and de- facement and at every angle of declension, almost suggests a struggle for death, for a place not in the sun but in the earth.
" May he come to his place in peace," is the mystic formula pronounced as the clods rattle on the Jewish coffin. There were few places for the Jew to come to in peace, whether on the earth or beneath it, for in the very heart of Christian civiliza- tion he dared to go unarmed, and the history of the Ghetto is from more than one aspect the story of the longest and brave- est experiment that has ever been made in practical Christian- ity. Over nearly eighteen centuries the experiment has been tried, and a scientific study of the results would be an illuminat- ing contribution to history, religion, and ethics.
For whatever disintegrations, aberrations and confusions challenge the observer and the critic to-day — whatever super- stitions and fanaticisms defaced the ages of belief — the centre of the Ghetto was God, and the distinction between the layman and the " man of God " did not exist, the Rabbi being only a professor of holy lore, this title meaning merely " My Master." The Ghetto, through whatever mists of legend and broidered veils of fantasy, looked back to Sinai and forward to the Millennium, to the day when ten men of all na- tions should take hold of the skirt of a Jew, saying we will go with you, for we have heard that God is with you. In that day the Lord should be One and His Name One; men would beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into
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pruning-hooks, nation should not lift up sword against na- tion, neither should they learn war any more. Living through the " drums and tramplings " of the Roman Empire, of the Dark Ages, of the Middle Ages, of the Crusades, of the Na- poleonic wars, as he had outlived the military Empires of Assyria, Babylon, Persia and Greece, the Jew still clung to this, his national vision.
Well might Charles Lamb say the Jew was " a piece of stub- born antiquity compared to which Stonehenge was in its non- age." The Ghetto was not only a piece of antiquity, but of Oriental antiquit}^ petrified for the most part in the West. Its spiritual latitude was that of Zion, it took its time from Jeru- salem and its seasons and celebrations from Palestine. Geo- graphically it was everywhere and anywhere, but its inhabitants were at home nowhere, not even in Palestine, under the dead hand of the Turk. In this homeless home of the Ghetto dwelt — one dare not say abode, for the Wandering Jew is even to- day working out his doom — the race that supplied Christen- dom and Islam with their religions, European art with its sub- jects, Western oratory with its phrases and images, Socialism with its ideas and America with its Puritan foundations. Ven- ice herself rested almost as largely on the Ghetto as on her humble hidden wooden piles.
It may seem a far cry from these Pisgah-heights to Mr. Potash and Mr. Perlmutter or the more claye}' and earthbound of the Ghetto's denizens. But then " the soul of a people " does not inform equally all its bodies, nor is the sky-scraper all heaven-kissing roof-garden. There are the lower storeys, the basements, and even the cellars, full of the homehy, kindly life of earth and not devoid of its grossness and ugliness. And thus it was that this paradoxical people, omnipresent, yet ever in a minority, everywhere powerful, yet everywhere oppressed or abused, offered to the seeing eye such boundless aspects of ro- mance and tragedy, so many facets of sublimity or grotesquerie. An infinite irony clung round its very existence. And this existence was preserved by faith and cunning, by the spirit and the gold-piece, by humour and by lack of humour, b}T tolerance and by persecution, by a poetic and hygienic tradition, and by that desperate will-to-live already noted by the midwives of Pharaoh; a will-to-live which still subtly animates not a few a Zionists," devoid of religion and distant from Zion.
Possibly, acquaintance with the Ghetto inspired the philos-
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ophy of Durkheim — himself one of its children and even the son of a Rabbi — and there is no doubt that it is a striking illustration of the value of the clan.
In the year before the war, feverishly seeking and ensuing the wisdom of the Webbs, panting to learn from their new states- manship how to rebuild the social order, I was brought up al- most at the exordium by these amazing sentences : " What modern industrialism generation after generation destroys is the soul of the people. . . . Breathing from infancy up an at- mosphere of morbid alcoholism and sexuality, furtive larceny, and unashamed mendacity — though here and there a moral genius may survive, saddened but unscathed — the average man is morally, as well as physically, poisoned. The destitu- tion against which we protest is thus a degradation of char- acter, a spiritual demoralisation, a destruction of human per- sonality itself."
And this destitution, it appeared, was not that of " the sub- merged tenth," but the comparatively secure existence in the slums of great cities, " life on a pound a week."
Now, having known intimately many Jewish households in the slums on a pound a week or less, and in no instance seen personality destroyed or degraded, but in numberless instances accentuated and uplifted, I was driven to the alternative that either the Webbs knew nothing of life, or that life in the Ghetto differs, toto coelo, from that familiar to the Christian sociolo- gist. In favour of the latter hypothesis, I recall an appalling appeal I recently received from some East-end Mission, paint- ing the region it served as a bestial netherworld, without even the physical health of the jungle. That the Mission remained nevertheless eager to convert the few Jews of the district is one of the grim ironies of the situation.
If, then, the Webb picture of British slum-life is accurate, it would seem clear that, as a religion for the people, Judaism pans out far more practically than Christianity. Or will it be claimed that the households so luridly described have no relig- ion? In that case, since there is a deficiency other than ma- terial destitution, is not the wisdom of the Webbs tainted after all with the materialism it repudiates, if it seeks, as it does, to put all the blame upon poverty? Nay; since there is not only deficiency but surplusage — " morbid alcoholism " — is it really scientific to lump all the evils of the social order on the unequal distribution of wealth ? The temperance of the Ghetto
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is alone sufficient to account for its superiority to the sodden streets around it. But this would be only a negative virtue. It is on positive conceptions that the Ghetto rises from the social swamps around, as Venice from its malarious marsh. Living " in all the ugliness, the dirt and disorder of the mean streets," the poor Jew nevertheless contrives to surround him- self with ancient visions and prophetic splendours, which en- tirely blot out these streets as the actual mud of the gutter- snipe's nursery is blotted out in some transfiguring vision of the castle he is shaping. That the true-born Englishman, scion of the greatest Empire the world has ever seen, should have for compensation in his poverty less sense of the great- ness of his heritage and of his breed than the humble Jew who owns nationally no square inch of the earth's surface, is a paradox that has already suggested to Dr. Stanton Coit the making of a national English religion on the lines of the Jewish. Moreover, " all Israel are brethren and much of that communal- ised social conception which the Webbs are groaning and tra- vailing to impart to the West existed three thousand years ago in the Mosaic Code, even to land nationalisation. It is not because property is unequally distributed, not even because in- dividualism has its horrors, that Bolshevism has come upon us. It is because for lack of vision or for overplus of false vision the peoples have been allowed to perish. The panacea for all social evils has been sought in material factors by a leadership devoid of insight into psychological relativity, and with in- sufficient imagination to foresee the new evils that Socialism would substitute for the old, were its raging, tearing, and only half-truthful campaign successful. Labour, as John Stuart Mill told it to its face, is often mendacious. It is also not seldom slack and inefficient, apart from intoxicated, and by its piecemeal strikes in which the classes with an immediate pull, such as railwaymen and miners, extract wages beyond those of non-pivotal workers, it shows itself no less selfish than capital- ism. " My class, right or wrong," cries Mr. Robert Williams, assuming an even lower moral standpoint than the man who cries, " My country, right or wrong." But Labour, we see, is not even loyal to its class.
Far more pregnant than all the learned scribblings about Judaism is the reply of the German conscript, who, being asked
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what his religion was, replied in astonishment: " Wir haben kerne Religion. Wir sind doch Juden." The worthy Israelite was not even aware he had a religion: he was a Jew. And this equivalence of Judaism and life is a central characteristic of the religion. It led necessarily to religion pervading the home, to a domestic ritual, with the father for priest and the mother to bless the Sabbath candles. And if, as Fustel de Coulanges shows in "La Cite Antique," this feature (minus the woman's role) was common also to the Greek, the Roman, and the an- cient Hindu religion, peculiar to the " peculiar people " was the elaborate dietary, sanitary, and sex-regulative side of the religion — the glorified and sanctified sociology, under which even the most phylacteried Pharisee could not escape being a decent citizen. He might lack the spiritual poetry of a St. Francis, but at any rate he was more exploited by the spirit than exploiting it. He might not love so romantically as an Amadis de Gaul, but he transmitted an untainted physical her- itage. The results may be read in the bio-statistics of the race. Under the Lloyd George Insurance System, three and a half times as much is paid out in sick benefit funds by the Pruden- tial as by a Jewish society in the East-end. In the Russian Pale, with all its persecution, the death-rate was only half that of Christian Russia, and the proportion of talent immeasur- ably larger. Thus, over some thirty-two centuries and in al- most every environment on earth, a vast eugenic experiment has been in process, as well as a Christian. But science has only just awakened to this importance of the Ghetto as an experi- ment in sociology. The secret of Jewish longevity, of Jewish immunity from certain diseases, is at last being sought. One of the greatest practical authorities on medicine, Sir James Cantlie, is reported as testifying that we have never upset one of Moses's laws in regard to hygiene, sanitation or medical sci- ence, that all that the scientists of to-day, with their micro- scopes and text-books, did was to prove that the ancient Law- giver was right, and that we had been trying hitherto to cure disease instead of preventing it as Moses did. To the same effect is a work entitled " Moses, the Founder of Preventive Medicine," by Captain Percival Wood, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P., a doctor returned from fighting disease at the front, where he discovered the hygienic value of the Mosaic Code. Now, too, at last the marriage laws of Leviticus and the Talmudical Trac- tate that amplifies them are being studied — with admiration
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for a code that could interfere even between Beauty and the Beast. There is here a vast new field for research which has barely been touched. It may well be that the Mosaic regimen was physiologically beneficial, contributing to the longevity of the race and to its joie de vivre in the teeth of unpromising cir- cumstances. On the side issue of miscegenation valuable work on Mendelian lines has been done by Dr. Redcliffe Salaman, who finds the Jew physiologically recessive, as he certainly is psychologically in a fusion of cultures. Circumcision seems now a recognised prophylactic. But we have no studies on the value of the dietary code, as to whether for example there is any point in the prohibition of pork outside a sub-tropical country like Palestine. Dr. James Braithwaite has attributed to its absence from the dietary the comparative immunity of Jewesses from cancer of the uterus, but this appears to be a mere conjecture, based on the negative argument that there is no other apparent factor of difference. There is more sub- stance in the general recognition of the sobriety of the Jewish husband and the solicitude of the Jewish mother as the keys to the superior stamina and lower death-rate of the Jewish child. When Mr. William Hall, of Leeds, made a comparison between the Jewish children of the poorest district in Leeds and the Gen- tile children of the same quarter, so that the bad circumstances they have in common, viz., dirt, overcrowding, and city atmos- phere were eliminated, and parental care remained the only dis- tinction, it was found that, while the average Christian child of seven weighed 45 lbs. the Jewish child weighed 49 lbs., though the average Christian child of the English-speaking race, rich and poor alike, weighed only 48 lbs. That is, at seven the Jew- ish slum child weighs more than the average Christian child, even including the richest classes. At the age of twelve the av- erage Christian child, rich and poor taken together, slightly ex- ceeds in weight the Jewish slum child. Possibly because many inferior Christian specimens have been killed off. This child now weighs 77 lbs. against the Jewish slum child's 76 lbs. But if the Jewish slum child of twelve weighs 76' lbs., what does the Christian slum child weigh at that age? Only 53% lbs. Sim- ilarly, as to height, the Jewish slum child of eight to twelve is about two inches taller than the Christian slum child, and al- most as tall as the average Christian child. In the Gentile schools of Leeds there were 60 per cent, of bad teeth, in the
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Jewish schools 25 per cent. But the most extraordinary dif- ference occurs in the case of rickets.
In the Jewish schools of Leeds there was 7 per cent, of rick- ets ; in the Gentile schools 50 per cent., i. e., one child out of every two was a sufferer. This bony deterioration is intimately connected with the insufficient supply of organic phosphate of lime in the infant's milk. It is said that only 10 per cent, of Gentile mothers nurse their children at the breast, as against 90 per cent, of the Jews, the result being that while in Manches- ter in 1901, 118 Jewish infants died under one year old out of 1,000, the number of Gentile innocents to be massacred was 300. Besides the superior feeding of the Jewish child we must take into account too probably the lesser drinking of the mother. We should also add the ignorant and cruel state of public opin- ion, which up till the other day permitted women who were about to become mothers or who had just become mothers to work in factories. Drink and venereal disease are still busily engaged in turning out distorted specimens faster than Chris- tendom can set them straight again.
But this psychological superiority of the Ghetto with its physiological pendant was not achieved by a cold eugenic sys- tem. Captain Peter Wright has told us how a Polish Jew was badly mishandled by soldiers rather than let them force a piece of meat that was not hasher through his teeth; while another was cruelly beaten rather than sign his name on Saturday. One can scarcely imagine such obedience being rendered to a merely legal code. But sociology was transfigured into poetry, the professor was disguised as the prophet, and the driving- force found in the love or the fear of God. Kuno Fischer called Germany the Ego among the nations (meaning the self- conscious philosopher), but Jehuda Halevi called Israel the heart among the nations. Philosophy was always alien to the Hebrew temper, which, having a God, had no need of meta- physics. The only philosophy Israel needed was a philosophy of history, and its epic is the salvation of the world by a people chosen for service and suffering. This history and this philos- ophy, woven into the daily round by festivals and commemora- tions as into the physical life by prescriptions and by prohibi- tions, have kept alive through vicissitudes and perils innumer- able a people which had apparently exhausted and fulfilled itself in producing Christianity in Palestine.
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It was the genius of Judaism to have fused science and life in the glow of religion, and to secure obedience by the poetic concept of a tender intimacy between a divine legislator and a people chosen to exhibit to the world the pragmatic value of His laws. " With everlasting love hast Thou loved the house of Israel, Thy people ; a Law and commandments, statutes and judgments, hast Thou taught us. . . . Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who lovest Thy people Israel." Such is the sentiment translated into impassioned images by Amos in the eighth cen- tury B.C., and such is the evening benediction still uttered to- day by millions of Hebrew lips.
A " chosen people " is at bottom — as I have pointed out in my little book on the subject — only a choosing people. And the performance of this Law and these commandments, statutes and judgments, covering as they did the whole of life, produced — despite the tendency of all law to over-formality — a do- mestic ritual of singular beauty and poetry and tender and self- controlling traits of character. No demos in the world is so saturated with idealism and domestic virtue, and when, even apart from its bio-statistics, it is compared with the yet un- civilized and brutalized proletariat of Europe — from whose dictation heaven help us ! — there is sound scientific warrant for endorsing in its narrowest form its claim to be a " chosen people." To-day, as the reader has already gathered, the Ghetto is passing through one of the greatest agonies even in its own history. Six hundred thousand Jews — the same num- ber that came up out of the Egyptian bondage thirty-five cen- turies ago — have been dragging their footsore feet across Ga- licia and Russia, where army after army has laid waste their dwellings with fire and slaughter, seized their substance, and profaned their women.1 Yet always have they carried with them their scrolls of the Law.
" To some the singing of the sword was music," writes the author of " The Jewish Spectre," in a rhapsody on the virtues of the mediaeval Christian as compared with the avaricious trad- ing of the Ghetto Jew. Christendom is welcome to its sadic butchers. No Jew would deny the greatness of its art and lit-
i An appeal issued by the Jews of Paris for the Jews of old Russia points out that no less than four hundred and fifty localities in the former Rus- sian Empire, inhabited by three million Jews, have been the scenes of pillage and destruction, many of these places now existing only in name. More than one hundred thousand Jews have perished in the massacres, with more than fifty thousand wounded and mutilated, in addition to thousands of Jewesses violated.
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erature in the Middle Ages, but Mr. Warner, who makes Jew and trader synonymous, displays an exhaustive ignorance of the contributions made to science, literature and philosophy by the Jews of Spain a century or more before Dante, and of their share in the Renaissance — the real European Renais- sance — begotten by the Moorish invasion.
What particularly exacerbates Mr. Warner and his school is the Jewish claim to be the one people to reveal God to the rest of the world, as though this were a monstrous egotism. But, setting aside both the metaphysical implications and the justice of such a claim, I cannot see any egotism in sacrificing oneself to bring about the triumph of a spiritual point of view. It would have been a monstrous egotism had the Jew said he was to be worshipped; he was merely throbbing with the vital message he had to deliver, like a messenger galloping to warn a village of an advancing flood. His psychology is not different from that of other men conscious of missions, and the mystery of a " chosen people " is only part of the general mystery of genius. We do not know, for example, why the son of an Eng- lish professional cricketer sets up to be a prophet.
Here again we may dispense as freely as Spinoza with the idea of a revelation ab extra, and be content with that sort of inspiration which comes to all forms of genius from within. The ethical supremacy of the Hebrew or the uniqueness of his contribution to civilization remains undisturbed.
It is in this unwelcome supremacy, in the sullen consciousness that Christianity is after all a form of Judaism, that Mr. War- ner suggestively finds " one of the secrets of the universal ha- tred of the Jews in the history of Europe." This tendency to disparage, which we have already noticed in Sir Harry John- ston and from which, as we have seen, Mr. Warner himself is not free, constitutes the intellectual variety of anti-Semitism. "Pride and Prejudice" forbid an honest acknowledgment — even by scientists — that the world owes anything to the Jew except money. Cinderella's sister-religions will not tolerate her triumph.
VI
In the quarter of a century that has elapsed since I published the article on " The Position of Judaism " in the North Amer- ican Review, there have been such changes in thought — in my
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own doubtless as well as in that of Christians — that there are not a few passages that I should express differently to-day. More allowance would have to be made, for example, for Mod- ernist versions of Christianity, and in any case the list of con- temporary literary influences would require some modification. But beyond omitting one phrase of six words, which, though true, is in its wrong context, I have not tampered in the faintest degree with it. Were I once to begin altering, I should refrig- erate rather than recapture that first lyric rapture. It is only in youth that one can paint the wood unobscured by the trees. Moreover, the large sweep of the composition still corresponds in considerable measure to my vision of the truth as between Judaism and Christianity. Indeed, since I wrote, significant approaches have been made by Christianity — and even by seceders from it, like Mr. Wells — towards the Jewish concep- tion of the Kingdom of God on earth. Doubtless were I writ- ing the article now, I should be tempted to dwell on the supple- mentary proof which the great war has afforded of the incapac- ity of Christianity to maintain itself in the real human environ- ment, or to equate itself to life save nominally. I should be pointing to the series of antiquated Judaisms or national re- ligions of an Old Testament character into which the Church Catholic transformed itself ; if, indeed, this " local colour " of Christianity was not always latent, being merely brought into clear visibility, like a secret ink, by the fire of war. A fair- weather Christianity is as useless as a fair-weather Freedom, and unhappily, in every land boasting of either, the war re- vealed both Freedom and Christianity as of this spurious brand. This decomposition of Christendom under stress of war into spitfire nationalities has been overlooked by Kuenen, as by other historians of theological evolution, who assume that be- cause Christianity started out as universalistic, it has been able to maintain itself at that width, whereas the " Christian broth- erhood " with which " Jewish exclusiveness " is so unfavourably contrasted, has had no more verification by practice than the Sermon on the Mount. Would that in this absence of interna- tional fraternity these nations had at least produced an Amos to transfuse their tribalism with internal brotherhood !
" Truly it leaves an indelible stigma to have crucified Jesus," said Pierre Loti, shuddering at the faces of the Jews of Jerusa- lem. " Perhaps one must come here to be properly convinced of it, but it is indisputable: there is a particular sign in-
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scribed on all these foreheads, there is a seal of dishonour with which this race is marked." It was a phenomenon which I had not myself remarked in the tribes at the Wailing Wall. On the contrary, I remembered countenances as beautiful and ten- der as the Da Vinci Christ, heads as noble as those of the grey- bearded senators in the Venetian masterpieces, or the Rabbis that Rembrandt found in the birthplace of Spinoza. The stamp I had seen was the seal of sorrow and suffering, of the brooding East. But doubtless I was prejudiced: the impartial eye of the cosmopolitan amorist saw this brand of Cain even in the faces of little rosy children, " pretty perhaps, but the eyes too furtive, the attitude too sullen; already they seem con- scious of the hereditary shame."
And as a Jew who has felt the ancient crime of his people, I was not comforted to hear that it could not be shaken off: that it was stamped into our very visages. In vain I told myself that crucifixion was a Roman, not a Jewish punishment ; that the claim to be more than man — which even Loti rejects — was a blasphemy to the stern Hebrew proclaimer of the one sole God: in vain I protested that the death of Socrates was not visited on the Greeks nor of Savonarola on the Italians, nor of Joan of Arc on the English, there remained nevertheless weigh- ing upon me the long odious tradition of the centuries, the changeless Christian hate, which has turned the " Judengas- sen " into shambles and which, even as I write, is chronicling itself in fresh lines of blood in forlorn Ghettos of Galicia and the Ukraine, lost in the fog of " peace." Perhaps, I thought, recalling the greatness of this martyred Son of the Jews, it was a righteous historic Nemesis that has nailed his people on the cross for two thousand years. Justly, perhaps, do the nations spit in Shylock's face and pluck at his gaberdine.
But now, at last, from my soul the shadow is lifted. The war, so measureless in agony, has brought this at least of allevi- ation. Christendom has been put to the test as Judaea was tested, and has emerged even more shamefully. For Judaea, though it crucified Jesus, did not crucify its own doctrines. And against the crowd clamouring for the blood of Jesus we may set the crowd that saved Jeremiah even from the priests and state-prophets demanding his death: Jeremiah whose life and word proclaim, according to an eminent Christian theo- logian, " the nature and duty of true patriotism — to oppose your country's policy when it is wrong: at the peril of liberty
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and life, to set loyalty to God and justice above loyalty to King and country." And in no country of Christendom to-day have we seen the remotest public recognition of such minority patriotism ; on the contrary, we have seen it rewarded with the stone, the bullet, exile, or the prison cell. We have seen Jaures assassinated and his assassin found guiltless.
" When you are told to do something," says " The Catholic Child's Little Sermons," " imagine that you hear our Lady and St. Joseph telling the Divine Child Jesus to do the same, and consider how diligently he obeyed them and you will find it easy to be obedient." There are gentle sectarians, quiet wor- shippers, whose imagination does not find it easy to picture Jesus jetting poison-gas or charging with the ba}ronet, but not even a lifetime of noble civic activity has saved them from the fate of the burglar and the child-raper. This in Protestant England. But even in the Catholic world the very Vicar of Christ has been howled down when he breathed the beatitudes of the Master. And so, beholding the measure meted out to those who, proclaiming the eternal laws of righteousness and justice, of love and pity and chivalry, deny no divinity but that of the mob; though I am ashamed for Western civilization, I am at last reconciled to my race. For it has become clear — O grim consolation ! — that there is no nation to-dav that would not crucify Christ, and this although, unlike the ancient Jews, they have had two millenniums wherein to learn to understand him. Nay more ! Remembering who during this ghastly quinquen- nium have raised their voices to temper the frenzy and bru- tality of Christendom, I am moved to believe that we Jews are to-day the only race that would not crucify Jesus.1
VII
From a purely theological point of view the popular distinc- tion of Judaism from Christianity may be seen at a glance in the synagogue hymn, Adon Olam — the version is from my " Blind Children."
" Lord of the world, He reigned alone While yet the universe was naught. When by His will all things were wrought. Then first His sovran name was known.
i " Amid the barbaric screaming of jingo-tunes it seemed that the effec- tive Christians were the Jews." J. L. Garvin in The Observer.
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And when the All shall cease to be,
In dread lone splendour He shall reign. He was, He is, He shall remain
In glorious eternity.
For He is one, no second shares
His nature or His loneliness;
Unending and beginningless, All strength is His, all sway He bears."
This is not far removed from Herbert Spencer's " infinite and eternal energy from which all things proceed."
But the Unknowable is not the Unlovable, nor the Untrust- able, and to sink into this incomprehensible infinitude is — in the concluding stanzas of the hymn — to find deeper life. That is what Judaism adds to Herbert Spencer.
" He is the living God to save,
My Rock while sorrow's toils endure, My banner and my stronghold sure, The cup of life whene'er I crave.
I place my soul within His palm
Before I sleep as when I wake,
And, though my body I forsake, Rest in the Lord in fearless calm."
Thus the Hebrew required no mediacy by way of a human- ised aspect of a trinitarian whole ; indeed, he found the idea of vicarious atonement opposed to his virile sense of Justice.
For two thousand years he battled against the notion, agon- ised at the Stake for it, paid for his protestantism
" By the torture, prolonged from age to age, By the infamy, Israel's heritage, By the Ghetto's plague, by the garb's disgrace, By the badge of shame, by the felon's place. By the branding tool, the bloody whip, And the summons to Christian fellowship."
And now, when this aspect of his thought is at last gaining ac- ceptance or at least sympathy, the author of " The Jewish Spectre " can write as follows :
" The vital thought in the religion of Jesus has been now two thousand years struggling for existence. It is the value of the
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individual, and his direct, unalterable connection with God, between whom and himself there is no priest, middleman, or tax gatherer possible."
It is a characteristic example of the persecution of the Jew in literature. The roles are — brazenly or ignorantly — re- versed. Black is white and white is black. Nav, more! Mr. Warner goes on:
" This was not a reconstruction. It was not ' a reform within the party/ the device of timid souls; it was a revolution. The Sanhe- drim knew this; it could not kill the idea, it killed the body."
In short, the Jews killed Jesus because he taught their own doctrine of direct relation with God ! All the greater irony, then, that Jesus should have become the very intermediary that he deprecated. But of the travesty of Jewish history there is no limit, and the end is not yet. We shall yet hear that it was their ghoulish insistence on salvation by blood that made the Jews the odium of the human race. Possibly it is Mr. Ches- terton who will formulate that indictment. Already Nietzsche has accused them of foisting a lachrymose deity and an emas- culated gospel on the blonde brave conquering races. And if there are many to disparage the Jewish contribution, there are few to acknowledge it. When Lord Bryce said recently that there were only three or four great religions left in the world, and that these were being reduced to two or three, we may be sure Judaism was not in his mind for the final running, unprej- udiced and encyclopaedic as that mind is. Judaism has, in sooth, not kept pace with the age: it does not advertise. And it is handicapped by the unpopularity of the Jew. The in- tellectual anti-Semitism, which I have just noted, still calmly labels all the Old Testament virtues as " Christian " (as though before the advent of Jesus the world was a nest of vipers, and God the Father had lived utterly withdrawn, like an old cur- mudgeon who is only dragged into society at the heels of his son). The Old Testament is left alone to face the batteries of Dutch or German Bible-criticism, as if the New were immune from the shells that shatter what was always regarded as its foundation. The Vatican, with its inflexible doctrine of the Infallibility of Scripture, knows better. The sacred texts of both Testaments are the literature of the same Hebrew people, and the New is so deeply rooted in the Old that it is not pos- sible, as so many Christian theologians have attempted to do,
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to undermine the authority of the parental text without weak- ening the authority of the doctrines that drew their sustenance from it. Doubtless some of this modern Biblical criticism is itself destined to be undermined. But it does not need the dis- putable erudition of the Sherlock Holmeses of scholarship to convince the modern world that the traditional narrative of both Testaments — and still more their traditional interpreta- tion — is unacceptable. Neither religion in its orthodox shape has issued unscathed from the furnace of modern thought ; Jud- aism and Christianity alike need a new orientation, or, should we not say, a new occidentation.
Both, in fact, must now seek their authority, not in their scriptures nor in their historic setting, but in the human soul. The theory of verbal inspiration must be jettisoned: it was a meaningless conception which owed its existence to the fact that nobody ever read the Bible, even though thousands knew every word by heart. But then most people cannot even read the newspaper: that is, they are unable to seize the essence of the news of the day, or to perceive the most flagrant contradictions in the editorial thought or temper.
The whole idea of the " Bible " is un-Jewish. The Hebrews did not possess a " Bible," but sacred scriptures — " Law, Prophets, and Scribes " — all selected by the Synagogue itself from a mass of literature, much of which was set aside as apo- crypha. This makes it all the odder that the inaccuracies of the versions in European tongues should of themselves have grown sacred, and that our own revised version should still provoke resentment. In Athens in 1901 a new rendering even led to fatal riots. Such manifestations, however, show clearly that the idea of verbal inspiration is a growth due to the conse- cration of use, to a hallowing process which is not even limited to religious literature. It has attached itself almost equally to all literature that has become classical, and there are pietists who will no more have a comma or a syllable altered in Shake- speare than in the Bible. The orthodoxy of a religion may be defined as its adjustment to the average mentality, which in- variably reduces truths that are various, flexible, flowing and natural, to symmetry, homogeneity, rigidity and miraculous- ness. From this stereotyped distortion neither Judaism nor Christianity has escaped, and this moment of common percep- tion of common error would seem the Heaven-sent opportunity for common readjustment of values. But the Jewish savant
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still considers the great tragic poem of the New Testament neg- ligible, and the Christian savant is busy reducing all the Jewish concepts to Babylonian or Egyptian sources, or denying Sem- itic birth to Jesus. And yet the only fundamental quarrel be- tween the creeds is that of his divinity. Not monotheism is the ground of difference — we are all monotheists to-day, if we are not atheists or agnostics. " The central problem of natural theology," drily observes Dr. Frazer, in his preface to " The Belief in Immortality," " has narrowed itself down to the question: Is there one God or none? "
But though Christianity and Judaism agree in overriding the Persian dualism and in conceiving the force behind phenomena as personal, moral and omnipotent, they remain absolutely apart. The Church will not officially give up incarnation and mediation, and the Synagogue, though it has not infrequently and in varying guises evolved them over again as heresies, is still adamant to their reception. It still tends to ignore the reminder of Jesus that the divinity of every man is asserted in the eighty-second psalm, or even that it is enounced more primitively in the assertion of Genesis that God created man in His own image. By " His own image " is obviously meant His spiritual nature. But though at the very beginnings of Judaism Abraham is shown as summoning God before the com- mon tribunal of Reason and Justice, orthodox Judaism prefers to abase itself before an Oriental despot, to whom we are in- sects of a day (see the Synagogue Poems, " Highest Divinity " and " Laus Deo," in this volume). There is more true Judaism in the famous dying mot of Heine : " Dieu me pardonnera, c'est son metier." In this still unresolved quarrel of Church and Synagogue, both sides forget that the future will belong to the religion that first fits itself to the future.
VIII
Even Mr. Claude Montefiore, whose saintly life-work has sup- plied an eirenicon between Judaism and Christianity, as between Judaism and Hellenism, holds out no near prospect of fusion or federation between his Liberal Synagogue and the Church, or what is more practicable, between ex-Jews and ex-Christians, and despite his antagonism to Zionism and Jewish Nationalism, he shrinks from proclaiming his gospel urbi et orbi. His sect
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replaces the narrowness of Jewish nationalism by the narrow- ness of British nationalism, and his religion, swathed as it is in shreds of Jewish ritual and tatters of Hebrew tradition, still makes its appeal to the Jews alone; it even finds its readiest echo in the Ghetto north of Hyde Park. For what reason Mr. Montefiore, having evolved for himself a religion so noble and sustaining, so rational and universal, yet addresses Ins ministra- tions to the Jews exclusively, I have never been able to make out, though I often suspect that he is the greatest nationalist of us all. The old Judaism, like Catholicism, was a complete organism, with a soul and an aura of its own. Mr. Monte- fiore, under the pressure of modern thought, transforms the structure, evaporates the aroma (if not the spiritual essence), destroys all that dear intensity of concrete certitude, yet gives us no compensation for the loss in intension by an increase in extension.
But, really, it scarcely seems worth while for Judaism to go through such tragic travail of soul only to come out almost as tribal as before ; even the New Testament, that work of ex- clusively Jewish authorship, being still excluded from the Jew- ish curriculum. Mr. Montefiore, as I say, struggles against himself and his parochial followers, for at heart he obviously aspires to make the Synagogue universal, and he tries to do justice even to the Gospels. But if (as he expressly declares on p. 324 of his " Outlines of Liberal Judaism ") to the world as a whole the Bible will always continue to include the New Testament as well as the Old, how is this to be reconciled with the hope of Judaising the world? Indeed, so far as the con- tradictory passage of the next page has any meaning, his prophecy that the religion of the future " will be a developed and purified Judaism," and will cherish the New Testament, seems to accept as a fact that Judaism proper will still re- main outside the next world-religion. O lame and impotent conclusion ! only intelligible if Mr. Montefiore is really the most secret and passionate of Zionists. Mr. Montefiore seeks to evade this conclusion by pleading that the Jews have to re- main a distinct religious community " for a very long time in- deed." This is time-serving at its most literal. But what a waste of work, after destroying the old Judaism, to create merely a new Ghetto ! If the Martians were to invade the earth, men of all colours would be found fighting side by side, and the black peril and the yellow peril would be forgotten.
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So in a period when the divine, and even the ethical, are sav- agely questioned and assailed, one would rather expect theists to stand together than to let themselves be sundered by theo- logical systems equally unintelligible.
And I should have thought the line of the future for theists lay rather in coming to some understanding on the divinity of Jesus. If Christians are ready to abandon the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Atonement, in their narrow individual and episodical sense, there is no reason why Jews should not admit that the heroic tragedy of the great Galilean illumines the cos- mic problem of suffering. Has Mr. Montefiore really consid- ered the Jewish God profoundly enough? Is it absolutely necessary to make Him so perfectly happy? " The Jewish doctrine of God," he says, " is not afraid to declare that the divine perfection excludes the idea of suffering." It would be truer to say that the Jewish doctrine of God has never been thought out, perhaps because the genius of Judaism shies at schematics, and prefers the " healthy contradiction " of life. Jewish literature by no means shrinks from presenting images of a deity in distress. Genesis, vi. 6 shows Him repenting of having made man, and " grieved at His heart," and the wrath so freely attributed to Him throughout the Bible cannot be en- tirely pleasurable, however righteous. It is true that when Jewish philosophy was created — under Arabic-Aristotelean in- fluence in the tenth century — Saadia denied that God could suffer, but only at the cost of proving that we cannot attribute to Him any action or feeling whatever — a demonstration which Maimonides, two centuries later, carried to even deadlier completeness. Mr. Montefiore is no academic philosopher, but a live thinker, who rightly bases religion on experience. Whence, then, this professorial conviction that suffering would impair " the divine perfection " ? He is a model of lindKeia, but here, surely, there is more of Christophobia than of " sweet reasonableness " and objectivity. Unmanly as it may be to ac- cept vicarious suffering, to tender it is divine. And since he expressly approves George Eliot's sentiment that the highest human life is one of conscious voluntary suffering, why should the highest divine life exclude it? God is described in the Old Testament as " long-suffering." This may not quite reach to " suffering," but without some degree of rufflement in face of the persistence of sin the expression is meaningless. The Midrash, according to Rabbi Enelow, said with Isaiah, Betsar- athom lo tsar, " in the sufferings of His creatures comes suffer-
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ing to Him." Indeed, what does Mr. Montefiore mean by cry- ing, in one of his few impassioned passages, " God cares. He must care"? For "caring" already involves "care." Mr. Montefiore is fond of the phrase, " the fatherhood of God." But " fatherhood " is not a mere genealogical concept. It in- volves the anxiety, as well as the protecting love, of human fatherhood.
Mr. Coventry Patmore is the only English poet whom Mr. Montefiore quotes. But why did he not consider the father's words in the famous lines on " The Tovs " ?
" And I, with moan, Kissing away his tears, left others of my own.'
Or,
" Then, fatherly not less Than I, whom Thou hast moulded from the clay, Thou'lt leave Thy wrath, and say, 1 1 will be sorry for their childishness.' "
Indeed, we find this exact note in a Synagogue poem of the tenth century, by a Rabbi of Mainz, which is recited on the eve of the Day of Atonement : —
" He is a God who softens at our cry. ' It is my people's ignorance/ He saith."
It is a pity Mr. Montefiore does not draw more on the rich vein of Jewish mysticism, especially when one need go no further than the Prayer Book to find lines like —
" His glory is on me, and mine on Him."
An angry and even a furious God is a commonplace of the prophets — see for example the opening of " Nahum " — and a God subject to one emotion can experience another or must be reduced to a stream of tendency, or to that nullity according to which, as a German mystic put it, " God may not improperly be said to be nothing."
I am afraid Mr. Montefiore's God is too abstract for the people, and too concrete for the philosopher. Either Mr. Montefiore must define Him by negatives in the manner of Maimonides, and reduce Him to a sterile Xn, or he must boldly, and in defiance of Israel's great philosopher, go on to a certain anthropomorphism.
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No, it is not the trinitarian nature of the one God that could divide Judaism from Christianity — a conscious Absolute, as Schelling saw, involves a trinity — it is the isolated incarnation of one aspect of this trinity, under cirumstances so improb- able that the Church Calendar records its circumcision. 'Tis a piece of alleged history which Judaism primarily denies. As I have elsewhere pointed out, in so mysterious a world anything may happen, and we are not entitled to deny anything a priori. The Resurrection is no more impossible than that King Arthur or Barbarossa or even Kitchener is still alive. But improbable happenings or unintelligible concepts must rest on peculiarly weighty historic evidence, and there is no iota forthcoming. Credat Judaeus Apella, who must have been a Christian! The Resurrection, in a spiritual sense, is another matter. And if the Church instead of crucifying Christ's doctrine, had rested her case on the world's inability to destroy it, even by the Great War, she would have been infinitely stronger to-day.
If the Synagogue has perhaps erred in seeing God too tran- scendentally as a supremely wise and merciful cadi, with no troubles of His own, majestic, unruffled, and unchangeable, the Church has erred much more gravely at the other extreme in giving to the cosmic pain and passion so narrow, concrete and monopolistic a materialisation as a detachable person of a trinity, with a specific albeit superhuman biography. Apart from the S}rnagogue's rejection of vicarious atonement, its doc- trine of direct relation with God renders such an intermediary superfluous. For its monotheism is not merely arithmetical. As antistrophe on strophe there follows on " Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God, the Lord is One," the beatification of the glory of His timeless Kingdom, and the mystical imperative to ' love Him with all thy heart and all thy soul and all thy might." Here is a communion intimate enough for a neo- Platonist. Nor has the ecstasy of faith ever reached rarer heights than in the Kaddish for the dead, which contains no word of grief, nothing save adoration of the source of life, imageless and ineffable. The Old Masters may have painted Jehovah with a benevolent beard, but the Old Masters were Christians.
The notion that the original Mosaic core of the religion escaped development is a vulgar error. Just as Maimonides discarded the anthropomorphisms of the Pentateuch, so for example the law of " eye for eye " disappeared in the Gemara's
46
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demonstration that by it a blind eye-destroyer would go scot- free, and a one-eyed be over-punished. Indeed, a Hebrew satirist has pictured an angry Jehovah demanding back His law from a faithless people and recoiling in amazement before the ever-rolling waggon-loads of ponderous folios, unrecognisable, innumerable. But the line of development, if it is now tending towards recognition of the exalted place of Jesus in the long succession of Hebrew prophets, shows, as I have said, no indica- tion of acceptance of the incarnation ; on the contrary, there are, and still more markedly than I claimed in that old article in the North American Review, signs of Christianity tending back, despite itself, towards the teaching of the Synagogue. This is not to say that when Christian teachers and sects have dropped the heresy which differentiated their religion from the parent stock, they have had the grace to recant. Martineau, the Unitarian, still calls his book " The Christian Life." For Eucken, although Jesus is not divine, the " Absolute Religion " that remains after shedding the Christ story is — " Christian- ity ! " Just so, for Fichte it was the Gospel of St. John ; for Hegel — Lutheranism. For, as Disraeli said, " With words we govern men."
Probably the real difficulty of reconciling religions lies less in their tenets than in their entanglement with financial institu- tions and vested interests.
Words and institutions apart, the battle of the future is not between Judaism and Christianity, and though my thesis is still nailed up, unrefuted and irrefutable, neither twenty-five years ago, nor to-day, was it or is it my purpose to produce an absolute apologia for Judaism or an unmitigated polemic against Christianity. The difference between the two religions is merely atomic. Both are compounded of the same elements, only in different proportions. This is not to deny that the chemical result is different. But it is to affirm that their affin- ities are greater than their mutual repulsions. Their differ- ences are minor and adjustable compared with their common antagonism to atheism, polytheism, and pragmatic pluralism. This last, at w7hich William James clutched in his desperate struggles to escape from the iron ring of materialism, contains all the chaos of polytheism without even the consolation of gods. Such a universe is not even a universe ; we may become the prey of its cross-purposes, as mortals became the sport of the celes- tials in that " Free Enquiry " of Soame Jenjms, which Dr.
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Johnson derided. The mechanical universe was at least reliable and more or less malleable by man, and no one except Mr. Hardy anthropomorphised it as malicious. Mr. Hardy is, however, an Aristotle compared with the intellects that play with polytheism. Wagner's make-believe with the old German gods led inevitably to a half-belief, swelling with a sense of national ownership. (Richter once told me he felt this Teu- tonic theology through Wagner's music.) Already the charge against the Jews begins to be, not that they killed Christ, but that they, with their Christ, killed the old national gods. Chauvinism is creeping into theology, and lament for the slaughter of these innocents is becoming the dernier cri of decadence. Nietzsche calls for a new chronology (after him- self), and Judaism, after fifteen centuries of persecution for denying Jesus, now stands indicted for producing him. " La latinita," corroborates a recent Italian writer, " £ stata rovi- nata due 'volte da due visionarie, entrambi ebrei: Cristo e Carlo Marx." Two Jews, Christ and Karl Marx, have ruined Latin civilization ! And so the racial Valhallas are revisited, pil- grimages are made to the Pantheons. Mr. George Moore, crawling down strange subterranean passages, goes on his hands as well as on his knees to invoke quaint Irish deities. Mr. Maurice Hewlett is subject to epiphanies of old Greek gods and mediaeval fairies. It is the more surprising in Mr. Hewlett, who has not displayed this frivolity over politics. But these indica- tions are enough to show that no human absurdity lies finally behind us. As for morals, one thought that ethics, at least, had escaped from the confusions of theology ; but in such a mirror of the age as " Jean Christophe," nothing is more curious than the senescent musician's assumption — an assumption that reconciles him to all the Futurist morals of the young genera- tion— that there is no objective gauge of right or wrong, no standard but the individual whim. If this Pyrrhonism of to- day, naturally intensified by the ethical anarchy of the war, passes away before a new religious conception, it is difficult to see how that conception can differ fundamentally from one of the two aspects of Judaism. For if it is theistic, it is not likely to be other than monotheistic, and if it is not theistic, what remains but sociology and the service of man? " Let judgment run down as waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.5
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IX
Taken as literature and history, the Bible reveals a soul struggling through error and savage survivals, and yearning forward to world-perfection and peace, much as the world at large reveals a vital energy labouring through masses of slag and stone, or a spiritual energy beating itself against the egotism of animal life. A new and more durable " Butler's Analogy " might be written on this basis, and would be found to present interesting analogies with Mr. Wells's recent thesis of a God not omnipotent. Neither the Synagogue nor the Church, except possibly by way of the Albigenses, Cathari and suchlike sects, has yet however explored or adopted this line of thought, though it is compatible with — perhaps even implied in — any doctrine of necessary sacrifice, whether of a Christ- people or of an individual Christ. " Progress " itself implies the idea of an imperfect universe, especially if it means not a predictable progress, predetermined by Reason and Right- eousness and circumscribed by divine purpose, but, as it does to the modern mind, a pragmatic and undefined planetary adven- ture. It is unfortunate that the book in which Mr. Wells sustains his thesis is marred by a caricature of Jewish thought, and still more regrettable that his popularity should provide the semi-illiterate with half-baked knowledge. His work thus demands more attention than the unread mis judgments of the savants. " The Invisible King " — a title that seems borrowed from the first pages of Seeley's " Ecce Homo " — characterises the Jewish God as " a bickering monopolist," " a malignant and partisan deity, perpetually ' upset ' by the little things people did and contriving murder and vengeance," and extraordinarily wrathful at " this or that little dirtiness or breach of the sexual tabu," and even " burning Sodom or Gomorrah." One wonders what a God is for, if He is to say nothing about conduct, which is half of life, even if it be not Matthew Arnold's " three- fourths." Or is it that He is to concern Himself only with other people's peccadilloes, and we are to
" Compound for sins we are inclined to By damning those we have no mind to " ?
Mr. Wells ought to have remembered that the sexual tabus in an age of polygamy were not what they are now. And the
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Jehovah of Solomon and David could scarcely therefore be associated with a joyless Puritanism. Yet there were limits even to Old Testament tolerance. Sodom and Gomorrah were not burnt for trivial errors. If Isaiah's invective was aroused, it was at reactionary abominations, idolatries, and hideous cruelties :
" Are ye not children of transgression, A seed of falsehood? Yet that inflame yourselves among the terebinths under every
leafy tree, That slay the children in the valleys, Under the clefts of the rocks ? "
In the same vein Jeremiah cried : " Will ye steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear falsely, and offer unto Baal, and walk after other gods whom ye have not known, and come and stand before Me in this house, whereupon my name is called, and say : ' We are delivered,' that ye may do all these abomi- nations ? ' Complaining likewise of the child-murderers, he says : " And they have built the high places of Tophet, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire ; which I commanded not, neither came it into My mind."
These " little things " which " upset Jehovah ' ' are scarcely the way to " the Kingdom of God," of which Mr. Wells is the eloquent evangelist, and one constituent of which he specifically defines as " the progressive enlargement and development of the racial life." For, as Mr. Wells warms to his theme, we learn to our surprise that his own " Invisible King " demands nothing if not ethical service. For him clergymen are to throw up their livings, barristers their briefs. " It is plain that he can admit no divided control of the world he claims. He concedes nothing to Caesar." Evidently then " a monopolist," between whom and Jehovah there is little to choose. Samuel himself was not more jealously republican for his God, than Mr. Wells for his. " God is to be made and declared the head of the world " and even the symbols on stamps are Use-majeste. And when we learn that the future is not to democracy but theocracy, and that the trinity is doomed, we are back in the derided Old Tes- tament. The fact is, that Mr. Wells has all the " stigmata " of Hebrew prophecy — lips touched with the burning coal can in fact speak no otherwise.
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When Hebraism thus marks a man for its own, all the glib talk of reconciling it with Hellenism vanishes. For what is Thought divorced from action but Sterility, and what is Beauty but the by-product of the quest for Good, as the grace of a flower is born of its energy to live? Vanishes too all that tol- erance which Mr. Wells earlier displays — at the expense of Judaism — for " the many-handed symbols of the Hindu or the lacquered idols of China."
It is a pity that this noble book — so finely felt and written that its thought deserved a far longer gestation — should not be immune from the general incoherence of his impatient im- provisation. Mr. Wells's contributions to thought, however weighty, are merely Mr. Wells thinking aloud, and stimulating as it is to watch his cerebral processes, I am always reminded of the anecdote in my school physiology-book of the doctor who watched a patient's digestive processes through a wound in his stomach.
Mr. Wells even unconsciously accepts in principle the dietary and sexual regimen of Judaism, which in an earlier chapter is contumeliously rejected. For " the believer owes all his being, and every moment of his life to God, to keep mind and body as clean, pure, wTholesome, active, and completely at God's service, as he can. There is no scope for indulgence or dissipation in such a consecrated life." The fact that in orthodox Judaism the guidance is not left to individual ignorance does not affect the essence of the conception, which has been illustrated in contemporary life by the embargo on alcohol in America.
The sole difference between Mr. Wells's God and the ancient Hebrew's — as that God was apprehended in the best Semitic minds — is that Mr. Wells's God is finite. In His unity, invis- ibility or incorporeality, righteousness, jealousy, and unre- served and exclusive claim for service, He is identical with Je- hovah. And it is extremely interesting to witness the re-forma- tion of ancient conceptions in an ultra-modern mind. Nor is the point of difference of supreme importance, for it is merely metaphysical, and the Hebrew genius in its palmy days had — I have already pointed out — no philosophy. Sufficient to obey and adore the unknowable Creator. Philosophy whether theo- logical or atheistic is at bottom the attempt of the human intel- lect to circumscribe that which circumscribes it, and is thus a sort of Irish bull chasing its own tail. As the demi-Jew, Mon- taigne, sagely put it : " Man cannot see but with his eyes nor
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seize but with his power." When Amos in the eighth century B.C. exclaimed:
" Seek the Lord, and live — Him that maketh the Pleiades and Orion, And bringeth on the shadow of death in the morning, And darkeneth the day into night; That calleth for the waters of the sea, And poureth them out upon the face of the earth; The Lord is His name/'
the prophet could not separate his passion for righteousness from the cosmos, feeling that the same God created both. Mr. Wells, equally under the spell of a powerful emotion, and ex- pressing in language of rare beauty that conviction of sin and that sense of a mission which are common to all converts of genius from Paul and St. Augustine downwards, must needs try to rationalise his emotion (which, however, is a " surd " and cannot be rationalised). Hence his heart and his head come into conflict, for to him Nature is Fate, the veiled Being, and God but a finite struggler in the welter ; having indeed come into existence only through humanity and possessing no existence outside ourselves. Forced to choose between God's omnipo- tence and his own omniscience, Mr. Wells opts for the latter. We hear no more of " Scepticism of the Instrument."
It is the third person of the trinity — what the old Rabbis called the Ruach Hakodesh or Holy Ghost — succeeding to the throne from which the Son had already ousted the Father. Mr. Wells seems always discovering midi a quatorze heures, for this conception, even if the twelfth-century Joachim of Flora had it not in mind when he said " the Third Kingdom will be the Kingdom of the Holy Ghost," was exhaustively suggested and examined by Mill fifty years ago, not to mention its re- discovery by William James. It is a conception that deserves serious study, but it would seem from Mr. Wells's novel about " The Soul of a Bishop " that he has already " moved on." He seems kindlier to framers of Nicaean and other creeds, as though now perceiving that they, too, were but trying to rationalise surds and harmonise incompatible mysteries, the antinomies of theology, and that it is just as theologically incomprehensible to say that God is not omnipotent as to say that He is.
The Athanasian creed holds in fact no darker mystery than his hypothesis of a universe greater than God, or a God who
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would be snuffed out if mankind accidentally perished or de- stroyed itself, as is not utterly out of the question by the methods of modern warfare. Mr. Wells might almost cry with Tertullian, certum est quia impossibile est. In what magnifi- cent contrast rings the assurance of the opening words of Gen- esis : " In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." Mr. Wells is really a modern Mani, for whom Ormuzd and Ahriman are the factors of existence, and what he is break- ing himself against is the old problem of the nature of evil, and the old antinomy of whether a beneficent God could have cre- ated it. Isaiah with sublime boldness utters that " everlasting Yes " which is the keynote of Judaism.
" I am the Lord and there is none else. I form the light and create darkness. I make peace and create evil. I am the Lord."
Thus, as in that great line of Goethe,
" Ueber alien Gipfeln ist Ruh'."
It is the same note that we find in Spinoza — the mystical loving acceptance of the All as the expression of the One — or that Mr. Claude G. Montefiore repeats in his more balancing fashion :
" I can have faith that the good and wise God has his own adequate solution of evil and suffering, but that a godless world produced goodness and knowledge, reason and love — this I cannot believe at all." x
Isaiah, who, in the same chapter, is hailing Cyrus the Persian as the subduer of nations and the redeemer of Israel, was doubt- less intent on combating the dualism of Zoroaster, that pioneer of Manichaeism. It is in this spirit that Cyrus is represented as Jehovah's instrument, though the conqueror be unconscious who has girded him, and that per contra in another passage of
i Perhaps the most illuminating recent contribution to this puzzle of the ages has been made by "Wayfarer" in The Nation: "Man in war pur- sues a negative end with the greatest possible cruelty of method. Nature, on the other hand, follows a creative purpose and employs the minimum of harm necessary for its achievement." The thought seems akin to that in one of my earliest verses:
" And if the earth with endless fray is rife, Acknowledge in the universal strife The zest of this, the seed of higher, life."
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Isaiah Jehovah is asked why He allowed His servants to err from His ways and hardened their hearts. Mr. Wells, in his niggling criticism of Jehovah, urges that the true God has no scorn or hatred for those who seek Him through idols. The poet, Ibn Gabirol, proclaimed in 1050, that age of Christian intolerance — and the passage found its way into the Seph- ardic prayer-book —
" Yet is not Thy glory diminished by reason of those that worship aught beside Thee, For the yearning of them all is to draw nigh Thee. But they are like the blind,
Setting their faces forward on the King's highway, Yet still wandering from the path."
Indeed already in various passages of Deuteronomy the gods of the heathen are conceived as " allotted " to them by Jehovah, while Malachi, who stood at the cradle of Judaism proper, pro- tests that offerings throughout the world to whomsoever pre- sented are really presented to him.
It is some consolation for vacillating views to be told by Isaiah that it is this omnific Jehovah " that turneth wise men backwards and maketh their knowledge foolish," so that we may piously look forward to further volte-face from our light- ning philosopher, in the confidence that when we have watched the panorama of history passing — at cinema speed — through Mr. Wells's brain, we are destined to witness yet other exhibi- tions of his cerebration in the very act. But however much I am put off by Mr. Wells's precipitate parturition, I recognise with Swift in " A Tale of a Tub " that in the labours of the brain, as of the body, " going too long is a cause of abortion as effectual, though not so frequent, as going too short." Mr. Wells — it is the bravest deed I ever saw — has dashed off that " History of Human Error " which Mr. Casaubon was too learned ever to be delivered of. And if he is always in a jour- nalistic hurry unworthy of so great a writer, he has escaped those other darling sins of the age, pettiness or preciosity. Though the young generation which once gave him its most gorgeous epithet " dionysiac " — its O.M. — can no longer ac- claim him of its amoral crew, and the optimism of his " Outline of History " amuses, as I gather, the super-cultured denizens of " the ivory tower," that work remains a magnificent dynamic in an age not unintelligibly anaemic. While pococurantism,
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pessimism and Dadaism have not unnaturally found nourish- ment in the spectacle mankind has been making of itself, these superior souls, unless they lend a hand to the establishment of a sane civilisation, may find their ivory tower blown to the four winds by a bomb from a literal super-man in his higher plane.
Mr. Wells has written Tendenz-geschichte in the good old He- braic fashion, judging freely and reading us contemporary les- sons by way of the Punic Wars, the Athenian mob, the Roman Empire, or any old stick that comes handy to beat us withal. There is none of that artistic aloofness which has demanded the correction of Bible history by the point of view of the arraigned. There is more of the spirit of Lord Acton. To know all is not to blur all. Mr. Wells avoids that affectation which I once satirised in a mock Ode to Jezebel.
" Cultured Baalite, loyal wife,
Jezebel, Partner in a noble strife,
Jezebel. Protestant for light and sweetness 'Gainst the narrow incompleteness Of Elijah and Elisha's view of life."
In Mr. Wells's conception of all human history as the striv- ings of a young immortal to find himself, in his suggested par- allel between its blunderings and gropings and those of the in- dividual slowly reaching his true happiness and life-work, he has hit out a larger analogy than literature had yet given us. Whether it fits the facts or not, it is a great imaginative syn- thesis.
Nor ought I to complain that Mr. Wells's thought has " moved on " yet once more — it is like a muddy stream that purifies itself by force of going on — for he has now grown to understand the breadth of Jewish theology better, as well as the value of a " jealous " Jehovah. " Neither Gautama nor Lao Tse nor Confucius had any inkling of this idea of a jealous God, a God who would have * none other gods,' a God of terrible Truth, who would not tolerate any lurking belief in magic, witchcraft, or old customs, or any sacrificing to the god-king or any trifling with the stern unity of things. The intolerance of the Jewish mind did keep its essential faith clear and clean." And again : " We have already noted the want of any progres- sive idea in primitive Buddhism. In that again it contrasted
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with Judaism. The idea of a Promise gives to Judaism a qual- ity no previous or contemporary religion displayed ; it made Judaism historical and dramatic. It justified its fierce intol- erance because it pointed to an aim. . . . Because of its per- suasion of a promise and of a divine leadership to serve divine ends, it remained in comparison with Buddhism bright and ex- pectant, like a cared-for sword."
Oddly enough, it is only when contrasting Judaism with Buddhism or Hellenism or with the doctrines of Lao Tse or Confucius that Mr. Wells is able to appreciate its claims to be the one sane central religion of humanity ; when compared with Mohammedanism or Christianity it is accused of exclusiveness, of making " a racial hoard of God." He seems in Part XIV. already to have forgotten what he wrote in Part VI. of how in Babylon " 2,400 years ago the ideas of the moral unity of man- kind, of a world-peace, had come into the world," or in Part IX. apropos of Buddha that " the idea of mankind as a great Brotherhood pursuing an endless destiny under the God of Righteousness, the idea that was already dawning upon the Semitic consciousness in Babylon at this time, did not exist in his world." Before anyone talks of the Jew making " a racial hoard of God," he should read Zechariah ii. 11 : " And many nations shall join themselves to the Lord in that day, and shall be My people." And Zechariah belongs to the very epoch of the Jewish Restoration from Babylon, the birth of Judaism proper.
It is true enough that in its Dark Ages, Judaism has been exclusive, but these were the ages when it was shut in Ghettos by Christendom, and conversion to Judaism was punishable with death, both for the convert and the missionary. And in so far as the Jew is himself responsible for this narrowness, he has not so much made " a racial hoard of God " as a godly hoard of race. Lacking* the territory that automatically con- serves other races, his instinct has been to preserve himself. And if his instinct gave itself for conscious reason that he was an irreplaceable medium for truths precious to all, the reason was not so groundless. Mr. Wells who recognises how in- famously the nations have betrayed " Christian universalism " in the last war, should not single out " Jewish exclusiveness," which after all was not militant. I am afraid that it is not only re Greek history that Mr. Wells needs the correction of- fered him by Professor Murray for judging ancient peoples
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without comparing them with their co-existing peoples, much as Mark Twain's Yankee judged the Court of King Arthur. By the comparative, the only true, standard, Judaea will in some particulars surpass Greece and Rome, even the Rome of the Vatican ; not to mention the great Oriental Empires with those vast palaces beside which Solomon's was " a suburban villa."
The best thought of Judaea was never exclusive in theory. And in practice, well we know — as the greatest and narrowest living poet puts it —
" God gave all men all earth to love^ But since our hearts are small, Ordained for each one spot should prove Beloved over all."
For the Jew Judaea was beloved over all : he did not wish to be lost in the mass of mankind — has not George Eliot pointed out how many virtues draw root from " the sense of special be- longing"?— but he commended the God of Israel to all men and bade them make Him also the God of their respective Zions, as he to-day would endorse Blake's resolve to build Jerusalem " in England's green and pleasant land."
Assuredly nobody is working harder to build Jerusalem everywhere than Mr. Wells, who follows up his pained recog- nition of the national deities — the idealised England, France, or Germany — which Christendom is now engaged in worship- ping, by a passage of marvellous beauty.
<■(
Yet in the background of the consciousness of the world, waiting as the silence and moonlight wait above the flares and shouts, the hurdy-gurdies and quarrels of a village fair, is the knowledge that all mankind is one brotherhood, that God is the universal and impartial Father of mankind, and that only in that universal service can mankind find peace, or peace be found for the troubles of the individual soul ..."
The unmitigated Hebraism of this passage — the stock re- frain of the Synagogue — is repeated in the comparison with Hellenism.
" The mind of the Hebrews awoke suddenly to the endless mis- eries and disorders of life, saw that these miseries and disorders were largely due to the lawless acts of men, and concluded that salvation could come only through subduing ourselves to the service of the one God who rules heaven and earth."
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Had Mr. Wells acknowledged consistently and without reser- vations and discounts — as Huxley did — that this is the bur- den of Hebrew prophecy and the hope of Israel, the " Outline " of his history would have been still more accurately drawn. But it seems impossible for even Mr. Wells to shake off the snob- bery of modern historians who, instead of following, if in a modern interpretation, Bossuet's centralisation of Jewish his- tory, cannot bear to give pride of place to so lowly a clan, despised and rejected of men. They are like Pontius Pilate in Anatole France's story, who could not recall Jesus. Yet the Lord who was not in the rending wind of Assyria, nor in the earthquake of Babylon, nor in the fire of Rome, may be in the still small voice of Jerusalem.
X
It is in the chapter on the rise of Christianity that Mr. Wells shows himself least able to override his conscious prejudice against Judaism and his unconscious prejudice in favour of Christianity. Like most modern thinkers, he makes up for the denial of divinity to Jesus by divinising his doctrine and his life, and compensates for the repudiation of the " immaculate con- ception " of the Virgin by the acceptance of her son as immac- ulate. Similarly Renan, though he permits himself a Browning- esque analysis of the semi-illuded, semi-illuding psychology of Jesus at the moment the man of Nazareth was turning into the popularly expected Messiah, horn in Bethlehem of royal seed, yet dares to predict that no son of man will ever surpass him. Jewish thought, which impartially records the sins of Moses and David, knows no such human perfection. Tolstoi, our lat- ter-day Christian Saint, was a converted roue who still gave Gorki the impression of broadness in talk, without destroying, however, even for this sceptical modern, a strange radiation of divinity. And such storm-flecked spirituality is doubtless the general nature of religious geniuses.
The American Rabbi, Enelow, whose " Jewish View of Jesus " is the latest and not the least commendable contribution of the Synagogue to this vexed question, is as uncritical at bottom as Wells or Renan. If only Christendom will concede the human- ity of Christ, Judaea will concede his immaculacy.1 But these
i In his sermons on " The Adequacy of Judaism," Rabbi Enelow does, however, expound the inadequacy of Jesus.
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eirenica, however welcome, are no true contributions to philos- ophy or psychology, and there is more flesh and blood in Mr. Shaw's portrait of Christ as exhibited in his preface to " An- drocles," though even here the presentation of Jesus as a less' scientific Shaw tends subtly to the conventional immaculacy. And if Mr. Shaw's Jesus resembles the author of " Man and Superman," there is a suspicious similarity between Mr. Wells's own Gospel and his reading of Christ's, as though Christ too believed in a Father of limited power. Nor is there a word of admission as to the impracticability of the Sermon on the Mount, which even Bishops have recognised, or any suggestion that this unworkability of the Christian ethics may be due to their having been eschatological ; interim-ethics, as the Germans say, pending the end of the world, believed to be at hand. Christ's followers were to be " the salt of the earth," but unless the earth is to pass away soon, a world all salt might be a great salt desert. Ethics is not aesthetics, and maxims that will not work are no more useful than gold knives that cannot cut or silver pens that will not write. As Mr. Wells sees clearly enough in the case of Buddha, renunciation of or withdrawal from the world is no solution of man's life-problem, however " beautiful and consoling " these " systems of evasion," nor can sane guidance be expected from any teacher who though he has a Father in heaven has no son on earth, or who deserts him when he has one, as Buddha did. Mankind has its own way of equilibrating itself to these Brands with their insistence on all or nothing, and by combining the rejection of their wilder teachings with the apotheosis of their persons, offers a prac- tical criticism of their merits and limitations. They uphold the ideal in a large ostensive form, and humanity offers it every homage but that of adoption. And it is often not unfortunate that the adoration remains Platonic. For the inhuman is con- founded with the superhuman. It may be true that " High hopes faint on a warm hearth-stone," but as a general substi- tute for the fifth commandment the behaviour of Jesus to the future Madonna cannot be commended. It has all the ruthless logic of a Lenin. And humanity in glorifying his mother and imaging him so pertinaciously in her arms has ironically avenged her. When Mr. Wells cannily throws us as a conclu- sion : " To this day this Galilean is too much for our small hearts," I feel that here at least our hearts are larger than that of the Galilean. That Mr. Wells should thus call him a Gali-
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lean, and never once lapse into calling him a Jew, is typical, for he admires Jesus as a man after his own heart, and it is only for the Nietzscheans who repudiate him that Jesus is of the ab- horred race. Perhaps the remark which gives Mr. Wells most room to change his mind again is that " the Jews have persisted as a people while Hellenism has become a universal light for mankind." The truth surely is that Judaism has both per- sisted as a people and become a universal light through its Old and New Testament, exactly as Hellenism has done through its literature and art. Hellenism has, up to a point, also persisted as a people, and I do not doubt but that Venizelos feels his kin- ship with Pericles. Moreover, if Hellenism is such an all-suf- ficing light, why all this pother of Mr. Wells's private evangel?
It is, however, in not escaping the conventional pitfalls anent the Pharisees, that the Christian chapter of Mr. Wells's " His- tory " reads most oldfashioned. While the lower element of Jewish thought may have looked upon God as " a bargainer," or the Messianic hope as militarist, it is unfair, even in such an " Outline," to present this mentality as the exclusive antithesis to that of Jesus, who, after all, found all his disciples, apostles and reporters among his fellow-Jews. If their smaller souls misunderstood him, as Mr. Wells, like Matthew Arnold, con- tends, he was also sufficiently ambiguous in his personal claim to awaken apprehensions of blasphemy against the one sole God. It is obviously false to represent the Sadducees (in opposition to the Pharisees) as the generous sect, " ready to accept pros- elytes and so to share God and his promise with all mankind," when it was in his very rebuke to the Pharisees that Jesus said, " Ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte." Moreover does not John the Baptist confound both Sadducees and Phari- sees in a common vituperation?
After Kuenen's tribute to the Pharisees, after Wellhausen has called them " the virtuosi of religion," and Mr. Travers Herford has taught the world what it owes to them, it is dis- appointing that even a thinker of Mr. Wells's magnanimity cannot shake off early prepossessions. We shall never get the future straight until we disentangle the past without bias.
It is true that the Mosaic code has six hundred and thirteen precepts. But Hillel was a Doctor of the Law at Jerusalem un- der Herod, and his summary of them in a negatively-expressed version of the Golden Rule is well-known. Nor is the Talmud lacking in indications that it was the spirit behind them that
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was really regarded. Habakkuk, it tells us, had reduced them to one: "The just shall live by faith," while a rival Amor a taught that their final condensation was the phrase from Amos : " Seek the Lord and live." Either summary might quite well express Mr. Wells's own gospel or even that of Jesus. The inner truth of Pharisaism is that it was not less broad than its phylacteries. Their amplitude was but an overflowing of the spirit. As Captain Herbert Adler says so well of the Sab- bath of the Pharisees, it was essentially " not a thing of nega- tions. As little could it be observed by mere abstentions as a poem can be composed by the avoidance of false quantities." And he points in proof to the Synagogue Liturgy passim. On the Day of Atonement for example " the bare act of fasting is hardly referred to." Spurious Pharisees are, of course, always with us. But it is an ancient Rabbi who enumerates their six species : " Pharisee Self-seeker, Pharisee Shambler, Pharisee Reckoner (who is always balancing his heavenly pass-book), Pharisee Bent-Back, Pharisee Do-tell-me-another-Duty, and Pharisee Tremulous," while the only true Pharisee is styled " Pharisee Love-God."
XI
These six hundred and thirteen precepts of the Mosaic code, though they doubtless embrace some survivals of primitive tabus and totems, are in the main only an attempt at a prac- tical idealism, a sanctified sociology, an order in human affairs, which no one has demanded with more insistence — even unto pedantry and Philistinism — than Mr. Wells himself. In a sermon just to hand from Dr. Walter Walsh, the freest of all the advanced preachers, I find — and curiously enough in a discourse called " Radical Religious Reform " — a complaint against people who " pride themselves on their ideals — a word they are particularly fond of — but make no serious effort to get them reduced to laws of human conduct ; laws to dominate Church and State and market and factory and school." There is in fact no real contradiction between the spirit and a letter which codifies it for practical purposes and for the guidance of spiritual minors. No honest man objects to the making of laws to restrain rogues, fools, and infants. The spirit that is come of age will autonomously do what the immature spirit has to be commanded to do, as a gentleman will without thinking
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behave as etiquette books must teach the boor. The genius may play the piano to ravishment, but in common with the musical dullard he must stick to the notes of the text. The law is a minimum, like the poor rate: there is nothing to pre- vent any man from giving to the poor all he hath. Christen- dom did not realty enjoy a religion of the spirit, with nothing of the Law, and if it shed the Law at all, it was to receive it back into another department of life. The difference between it and Judaism from a practical standpoint has always seemed to me summarised in the reply of Jesus to those who enquired whether it was lawful to pay tribute to Caesar. " Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's." With a rare unanimity Matthew, Mark and Luke relate this as a dexterous retort by which Jesus evaded being caught by his foes (though there appears to be no reason why a divine personage bent on self-immolation should have exer- cised such prudence). But the reply really throws over the distinctive feature of theocracy. As Mr. Wells rightly claims, there are no things that belong to Caesar that may not equally belong to God. And so Judaism has no separate politics, civ- ics, economics, or even dietetics and hygiene. Hence the pop- ular delusion about Pharisaism or Jewish legalism. The Chris- tian imagines that it was a burden added to life as he himself lived it. But it was not added to life — it was life. It took in the whole life. What for the modern world is done by Law, Medicine, Sanitation, Philosophy, Art, etc., was done for the ancient or mediaeval Jew by his Religion. Hence the apparent superfluity of much of Mediaeval Judaism, now that the Jew holds shares in the common stock of European civilisation. Instead of the Rabbi legislating for the whole of life, there is the British Medical Association to teach hygiene, the House of Commons to regulate public duty, etc., etc. I am not certain that this specialisation is an unmixed good, it disintegrates the unity of life and makes religion a mere aspect among many others and one specially suitable, like best clothes, for highdays and holidays, though it seems an inevitable phase in the evolu- tion of civilisation. But we no more escape legalism because we give up Talmudic legalism than we escape war because we have given up chain-armour. Beside the countless pages of Black- stone and our parliamentary enactments, beside the innumerable volumes on Equity, Contracts, Bankruptcy, or Military Law, beside the libraries of leading cases and that " wilderness of
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single instances " which Tennyson bewails, Jewish law hides its diminished head. D.O.R.A. alone is bigger than the Shvl- chan Arucli. Indeed Gentile life — : or, shall we say, Gentility — is far more hide-bound than Pharisaism. The most fashion- able Jew, who prides himself on his emancipation, is as much the slave of tradition as the Ghetto zealot. I take up a pre-war book on etiquette and read:
" Cards must be left on all occasions of a formal character. A lady leaves her own and two of her husband's — one is intended for the gentleman of the house, and the other for the lady. If a call is made upon a guest staying at the house, a card is also left for her. A lady when leaving cards for her husband, must place them upon the hall table, and not leave them in the drawing-room on her depar- ture, as was the custom. Should the lady upon whom you call not be at home, you turn down one corner of the cards, which signifies that you have called personally, and on the whole family. Cards with enquiries should be left at the door; the post is a permissible channel for the transmission of these, where the distance is incon- veniently great."
This is the very language of the Rabbis. I almost hear the sing-song and see the scoop of the inverted expository thumb. What Bayswater or Kensington lady — Christian or Jewess — would have dared to infringe that?
And if the Rabbis multiplied ordinances praeter necessitatem, they were swayed not by a mechanical formalism, but by a liv- ing emotion. As the sons of a beloved father will try to under- stand and fulfil the minutest shade of his testamentary disposi- tions, so the Rabbis tried to read between the lines of the " Eth- ical Will " which the Torah was to them ; to be more legal than the Law, to give no grudging joyless service, but full measure, pressed down and running over. Though the deductive logic by which " Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother's milk " leads to the cumbrous ritual of Fleischig and Milchig, is absurd to the eye of pure reason, its mainspring was not logic but lov- ing loyalty. There is even something to be said for the " legal fictions " which, corrosive of conscience as they were, were prob- ablv meant to show that the unavoidable breach of law in a dif- ficult world did not mean repudiation of the Law. If we do not look at faiths and ideas from within, from the point of view of those who hold them, we shall never understand how beliefs, that to the impersonal reason are transparent absurdities, may yet
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be capable of a valuable regulative function when vitalised in persons. The obverse mistake is to expect persons, for whom ideas are dead, to be vitalised by them.
XII
Thus, for the Hebrew, life like its Creator, was a unity. Lord Acton strangely regards the maxim " Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's " as asserting and defining once for all the province of ecclesiastical liberty in the face of the State, while Mr. Wells understands it as meaning that prac- tically nothing could be left to Caesar. It seems to me on the contrary to surrender to Caesar a good deal that is God's, or at least to contain no definition of the rival realms. How would Lord Acton have met, for example, the Quaker objection to conscription, which Mr. Wells flippantly dismisses as skin- saving? The life of society is surely not to be thus bisected without injury, like some low organism: it cannot be divided between God and Caesar. Indeed this very reply which Jesus gave to his tempters, this apparently dexterous repartee, con- tained its own confutation. For the coin in which the tribute to Caesar was paid, bore, according to his own statement, the image of Caesar. Now this was utterly counter to the second commandment of the Decalogue. No Hebrew coin was ever stamped with an animal or human device; there is none on the shekel of the first centur}7, nor the bronze coins of Herod, nor on the brass coins of Bar Cochba. Hence in circulating such tribute-money the Jew was committing sin. We may regard the second commandment as trivial, and it has certainly lost much of its point with the diminution of idolatry, though the ikons of the Greek Church and the crucifixes and pictures of the Roman still illustrate its wisdom. But in days when the vulture and the serpent were goddesses in Egypt, and apotheosis was the conventional ending of a Caesar, the line between repre- sentation and worship was dangerously narrow. And that the worship of human gods was no shadowy sentiment or Platonic devotion to some ideal imaginatively incarnated, may be seen from the extraordinary story in Josephus of how a beautiful married woman who had refused all the overtures of a lover was persuaded by the bribed priests of the Temple of Isis to give herself to him under the illusion that he was the god, Anubis. From the same historian we know how the Jews preferred to die
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rather than tolerate the effigies of Caesar when Pontius Pilate introduced them into Jerusalem upon the ensigns, in defiance of the precaution of previous procurators to have other orna- ments upon the banners. It is true that by a strange contra- diction the annual head-tax to the Temple had to be paid not in Jewish copper coins but in silver Tyrian staters, bearing the head of the town-god Hercules, and on the reverse the Ptolemaic eagle, with the legend in Greek letters " Tyre the holy and inviolable." The paradox is resolved by sundry more or less casuistical arguments, and by the hypothesis of Theo- dore Reinach that these exact and well-alloyed coins were (once thrown into the Temple treasury) melted down into ingots. But there is no such suggestion as regards the tribute paid to Caesar, and in a conception of religion which forbade even the appearance of sin, which went so far out of its way as to pro- hibit poultry cooked in butter lest one might inadvertently seethe a hid in its mother's milk, there could be no logical place for casuistry except to add stringency to a precept. It was impossible therefore to render to God the things that were God's if one rendered to Caesar the tribute that was Caesar's. It is as if by an unfortunate symbolism, Jesus gave the very answer that demonstrated the impossibility of this partition of duties.
XIII
a
Is this Armageddon?" an old countrywoman enquired of me wistfully. She was interested less in the mighty issues of the war for her own race, than in the joyous prospect of the return of the Jews to Palestine. I assured her that all the beasts of Daniel were in the fighting line, especially that fourth beast dreadful and terrible and strong exceedingly, with great iron teeth, the beast that devoured and brake in pieces and stamped the residue wTith the feet of it; moreover that Death was on his pale horse and Hell followed with him, exactly as predicted in Revelation. Then I saw that a greater authority than I — a rural rector to whom France is indubitably the right foot of the image of Daniel — had decided that this is but the sixth vial, not the seventh, the prelude or preparation, but not Armageddon itself, and that consequently the hour of Zion is not yet. It is only in 1934? that the Jews will return to Palestine.
It must be admitted that negatively at least the rural rector
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has proved correct. As one who was " called to the colours," the blue and white colours of Zionism, a quarter of a century ago by a Viennese dramatist of whom I had never heard till he sent up his card, endorsed by the universally-known author of " Degeneration," I can see in the present regime in Palestine very little resemblance to the Jewish State which my strange visitor, dropped from the skies, invited me to help him estab- lish. In the interval between this interview in a London suburb and the processional entrance of Sir Herbert Samuel into " the Jewish National Home " — the High Commissioner taking the dais at Jerusalem in the name of George V., and his few fellow- Jews lost in the glittering mass of Arab effendis, Bedouin sheikhs with silver headgear and flowing purple robes, and Mullahs sane and splendiferous in white turbans ; of British Governors, and Major Generals, and Staff Officers and Secre- taries, and A.D.C.'s, and British Consular Kawasses in blue and gold, with silver swords and sceptres — I have made speeches innumerable, more voluminous even than my equally unpopular pleas for Female Suffrage. I can only hope all this spade- work has helped to dig the foundations of Zionism and not the grave in which, to all appearance, it is being buried alive. Only one of these speeches is to be inflicted on the reader, but in view of the present vogue of Zionism in high Anglo-Jewish circles, and the diversion of an ex-Home Secretary to its nom- inal service, it is interesting to recall that when I presided over a dinner to Dr. Herzl at the crucial moment of his leadership, at the crisis when he thought he held the Sultan's promise of Palestine if only two million pounds could be raised, a member of the Maccabaeans, the Club which was giving the dinner, wrote to me hoping that all references to Zionism would be excluded as religiously as pork, and Dr. Herzl toasted merely as a man of letters. It is the chance turning-up of an old cutting from the Daily News that has reminded me of this episode, and as the episode has now historic interest and does not, I think, figure in Mr. Sokolow's " History of Zionism," I reproduce it here :
" THE ZIONIST MOVEMENT
"wanted £2,000,000
" Dr. Herzl, the originator of the Zionist movement, was enter- tained at a dinner given on Tuesday by the Maccabaeans, a Jewish society that restricts its membership to such Jews as are ' untainted by commerce.'
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" The introduction by the Chairman, Mr. Zangwill, was brief but hearty. ' We Jews/ said he, ' have followed Dr. Herzl's amazing career with approving goodwill or admiring hostility. Something of that regard which the fiercest Imperialist has for De Wet the bitterest anti-Zionist has for Herzl . . . We Maccabaeans cannot pretend to ignore what Herzl means to the Jews; we cannot but welcome him as a Prince in Israel, who has felt his people's sorrows as Moses felt the Egyptian bondage, and who has sought to lead the slaves to the promised land. In the long centuries of Israel's exile the nation has produced great men enough . . . but Dr. Herzl is the first statesman the Jews have had since the destruction of Jeru- salem. The gospel of Herzl is not only for the poor Jews who lack bread, but for the rich Jews who lack a conviction, nay, to the world at large — a world relapsing into barbarism and dominated by mechanism — it restores the light and warmth of idealism. Never since Imperial Rome fell in its rottenness has there been an hour in which the world needed so much the inspiring spectacle of a movement, incorrupt and instinct with the noblest humanity. And it is fitting that from Zion this light should go forth.'
" Dr. Herzl responded to this eloquent interpretation of his pur- pose in admirable English. He is a tall, dark man, with pale, intellectual features, long black beard, and a fine manner. Return- ing from Constantinople and the ' extraordinary complimentary and friendly reception ' extended to him by the Sultan, he could only ask, ' Are you ready ? Are you ready to show yourself grateful for an historic succour which is being brought to you? Are you ready to stand by him who is ready to stand by you? How great, how swift is your readiness ? ' Without money — two million pounds was the sum demanded — nothing could be done. ' Even to drag iron out of the bowels of the earth gold is necessary,' said Dr. Herzl, and, judging by the tone of the gathering, he may not have to wait long for this sum. Those present included some of the finest minds in modern Jewry — Professor Vambery, Colonel Goldsmid, fresh from South Africa; Sir Francis Montefiore, Dr. Gaster, Mr. Solomon, the artist, and many others."
The exact date of this cutting does not appear on it, but at the back there is an advertisement of Irving and Ellen Terry in " Madame Sans-Gene " at the Lyceum, which, by reference to a theatrical authority, gives the year as 1901. My description of the world in this year as " a world relapsing into barbarism and dominated by mechanism " throws an interesting side-light on the current view that the globe would have been still a garden of Eden but for the Teutonic serpent. For this was not the utterance of a senile laudator temporis acti, but of an observer well on the right side of forty.
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Of course the two million pounds were not raised, the reporter had mistaken the after-dinner glow for enthusiasm: indeed a supplementary leaderette from the same organ, pinned to this report, informs the world that " the Club has officially disasso- ciated itself from the new enthusiasm." " On the other hand," adds the Daily News: " numbers of Christians, as well as Jews, who hold the prophetic interpretation of certain Hebrew Scriptures, believe that a general recolonisation of Palestine is divinely predicted, is already in progress, and is certain to be completed in due course. In the minds of those who hold it, this forecast is intimately connected with the prophecies of the Second Advent."
I have no doubt but that these Christian minds — especially now that Armageddon has been followed by some materialisa- tion of the ancient Jewish hope — will be as disappointed as the Zionists themselves with my common-sense treatment of the Palestine situation. But the Zionists have chosen to translate the glamorous Messianic legend that consoled the centuries of exile into a political programme. And as such it must be brought to the touchstone of practical politics. You cannot have a poetic licence for prose. The hard facts of geography and economics must be faced in their bare verity. You cannot wreathe them in roses, not even in roses of Sharon. Nor will it do to babble about the Prophecies ; or iterate the blessed word, Armageddon.
The Prophets are not magnified but diminished when regarded primarily as Old Moores or political tipsters. Ad- monition and criticism rather than prediction is their true essence. None of the Hebrew words for " prophet " contains the idea of forespeaking which that Greek word has unfortu- nately accentuated, to the overshadowing of all other meanings of the prophetic role. The Hebrew nabi means a mouthpiece ; roeh or clwzeh, a seer. The greatest of the Old Testament prophets, Jeremiah, has left us an almost scientific diagnosis of prophecy proper. He is mocked and derided and there is upon him the fear of even graver persecution. Nevertheless
" If I say I will not make mention of Him, Nor speak any more in His name, Then there is in my heart as it were a burning fire Shut up in my bones. And I weary myself to hold it in, But cannot."
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It is the same fire with which every reformer or social critic burns, nay which enkindles the artist to liberate at any cost his peculiar conception of his art and no other. In the words of Browning:
" Belief's fire, once in us, Makes of all else mere stuff to show itself."
If, however, we concentrate our attention upon the minor aspect of Prophecy, which consists in foreshadowing, then there are no Prophecies in the Bible awaiting fulfilment, unless it be the vision of a warless millennium. What people usually mean by the Prophecies is the prognostication of the return to Pales- tine of the Jewries now in dispersion. And that it should be imagined there is any direct allusion in the Bible to the present situation, is one of the oddest results of the petrifaction of Israel in the pages of that book. This fallacy about the Prophecies affects even cultured people who have grasped that the Bible is a national literature, not a celestial gramophone. It is this delusion which turns that great literature into a happy hunting ground for text-hunters and cranks and sec- tarians and grotesque calculators of the number of the Beast. It sometimes seems as if nobody reads the Bible except the inmates of lunatic asylums or those qualifying for residence. As I write I receive an apocalyptic communication from a rhapsodical suburban householder, whose first breathless sen- tence, which would occupy at least six pages of this book, informs me that the restoration of Palestine via England is due to the fact that the English are " God's own descendants," and that " the English language is the only one naturally spoken in the hereafter ; " statements which leave me unalarmed by his apprehension " that the long-delayed deliverance of lost souls which are fluid electricity may cause the earth to be dis- placed by tilting."
Even Lord Byron, when he wrote his " Hebrew Melodies," remarked to Nathan, the composer of their music, that the present wanderings of the Hebrew race are such a confirma- tion of the " distant prophecies which foreran them " that it is impossible to compare them and yet be an infidel. Nay, M. Sokolow himself, to whose " History of Zionism " I am indebted for this citation, boldly encourages the error and heaps up utterances from all parts of the Old Testament. But the out- standing fact about the Prophecies is that they had all come
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true five centuries before the Christian era. The comminations that began in the eighth century b.c. with Hosea and Amos were fulfilled by the exile in Babylon, and the consolations in the return to Palestine by grace of Cyrus. Babylon was not indeed destroyed as suddenly as Jeremiah's words had led the faithful sons of the captivity to expect, but it was certainly " fallen " as suddenly as he had predicted, and this conquest of the Chaldee by the Persian was the beginning of its decay. In two centuries builders were quarrying in the temple of Bel, and the city of hanging gardens had practically become " heaps, a dwelling-place for dragons, an astonishment, and an hissing without an inhabitant." It was during the troubled interval between the destruction of the Temple by Nebuchadnezzar and the beginning of the reconstruction under Cyrus, it was when Israel sat down by the rivers of Babylon and wept when he remembered Zion, that his soul, quickened as never before, pro- duced the major Prophets and the Psalmists that are his peculiar glory. It was when he hanged his harps on the willow- trees and asked how could he sing the songs of the Lord in a strange land that, in fact, he sang them most sincerely and passionately. It was then that he, for the first time, preferred Jerusalem above his chief joy. It was then that the ethical messages of the older prophets first found their real response, and that the tender mysticism by which Amos had expressed the peculiar bond between Israel and his God penetrated sweetly into the soul of the exiled captives. For this was the birth- period of Judaism proper, and of the bulk of that self-conscious literature, which first inspired and then enswathed. The very " book of the law of Moses " seems scarcely known before Ezra brought it from Babylon. It was too in the sixth century b.c. that the historical books were written, re-edited or re-coloured to constitute the epic which was to console and resurrect the people that was its theme. You may measure the greatness of the Hebrew genius by comparing the utterances of Jeremiah, Isaiah and Ezekiel in those years of national agony with the output of Maeterlinck and Verhaeren, and the other Belgian poets during the German occupation.
If the same lamentations and consolations, the same celestial menaces and reassurances which moved the contemporaries of the Hebrew prophets seem still more apposite to-day, that is only because history repeats itself. The prophets were not conscious of any world other than the ancient. But it shows their depth of insight — or of foresight, which is merely insight
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projected forwards — it proves how truly they interpreted the psychology of their race, that the same words which touched the Jews of twenty-five centuries ago, are as availing to-day, and will be perhaps no less applicable in a national catastrophe twenty-five centuries hence. But it is not enough to say that these prophets interpreted the soul of the Jew : they performed the same service for humanity at large. The Bible transcends the race that produced it, like all great literature, though none other has in the same degree carried a message to every race and grade of mankind. So universalisable is its nationalism that England has annexed the Hebrew prophecies to her own history, even as her sympathetic genius has annexed the Bible to her literature, drawing sustenance from it in the critical moments of her destiny. In Scotland the affinity with Hebraism is still more strongly marked, so much so that in trying to render in verse the essential verity of the Jew's Sabbath, I could do nothing but imitate Burns's " Cottar's Saturday Night " even to the metre, though with the Jew it is the Friday night. It would seem that though the Church, to differentiate the creeds, changed the Saturday Sabbath into the Sunday of the Lord's Day, yet the Jewish habit of beginning with the evening before — " And the evening and the morning were one day " — persisted or resurged spontaneously among the Scotch. Nor is it only nations that find inspiration in the Hebrew seers. There is no revivalist, be it of a language, a culture, or a creed, but draws hope and faith from Ezekiel's vision of the dry bones that lived again, and stood upon their feet, an exceeding great army. Prophecy is a force for its own fulfilment ; the vivid impression it produces is faith in the making, and faith moves mountains.
There are, even outside the Prophetic Books, passages so terrible in their truth that it is difficult to realise they were not meant for to-day. Take the twenty-eighth chapter of Deu- teronomy :
" And the Lord shall scatter thee among all people, from the one end of the earth even unto the other . . . And among these nations shalt thou find no ease, neither shall the sole of thv foot have rest: But the Lord shall give thee there a trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and sorrow of mind: And thy life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt fear day and night, and shalt have none assurance of thy life: In the morning thou shalt say, Would God it were even! and at even thou shalt say, Would God
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it were morning! for the fear of thine heart wherewith thou shalt fear, and for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see."
This is an exact description of the state of mind and body of the Jews in many parts of Europe at the very moment of writing. Yet the context makes it clear that the prophet of woe had in mind only local and temporal conditions, and was anathematising within a range of conception which did not include the modern world. Till they were invaded by Assyria, the Jews, isolated in body as in mind, never began to realise even the ancient world. One need only read the eleventh chapter of Isaiah with its incongruous mingling of spiritual and political triumph to see that for the prophet the Philistines and the Ammonites, Edom and Moab, were all visualised as subsisting up to the millennium, with even the discords of Ephraim and Judah awaiting their resolution on that day of world-peace and Jewish glory.
Prophecy is not then anything but a vivid sense of fact. The future is part of a curve, the other parts of which — the past and the present — are given. Some form of prophecy is compulsory upon all of us, whether we be farmers sowing seed or statesmen introducing measures, and the chief obstacle to prophecy is not the difficulty of piercing through the mist which is supposed to veil the future, but the difficulty of piercing through the mist which veils the past, and above all, the present.
XIV
But although there was nothing supernatural about the Prophets of Israel, least of all the apocalyptic ravers, nor had even the greatest extended the curve of fate so far as this year of grace, it would be falling into the opposite error to imagine that there is nothing mystic in the Zionist situation, or that there is any parallel between a resurrection of Judaea and the resurrection of, say, Poland.
Poland stood — and stands — for nothing except itself. But it is impossible to reduce to the same simplicity of race- narrowness and national pride the problem of a people which, besides producing or inspiring two other world-religions, carried with it down the ages its own religion, and fused it so intimately with the lost territorial nationality that Judaism has never been able to get free, or to resume the missionary effort which it was
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carrying on before Jesus was born. The heathen who in the day of Jewish State had grasped eagerly at Judaism could not be expected to saddle themselves with a political irredenta. They preferred to be themselves " redeemed " by Christianity.
To the tact of Jochanan ben Zakkai must be allotted the blame of this complex and indecisive situation, which has lasted to our own day, though doubtless it would not have been easy for him to reconcile the beaten Israelites to final acceptance of their defeat. The same struggle in fact is before our eyes now among the Germans, one section of whom strives to exalt Germanthum as a precious Kultur for the world, all the purer for being shredded of its vestment of material power. Joch- anan was the trimmer who preaches both Kultur and a future Weltmacht.
There is a many-sided symbolism in the dramatic picture of this shrewd Tanna escaping from Jerusalem in a coffin, what time Titus and his legions hovered at the gates of the Holy City. For Jochanan bore in his own breast the seeds of the future, saved Judaism from the fall of the Jewish State. The zealots of nationality preferred to meet the conquering Roman with grim suicide ; Jochanan founded a school at Jamnia, under the protection of Titus. That disentanglement of religion from a locale which Jesus had effected for the world at large was in a minor degree effected, a generation after him, for the Jews themselves, by the mailed hand of Titus and the insight of the prudent sage. Possibly Jochanan had already outgrown the burnt offerings which tied Judaism to the Temple ; he may have felt already that Israel's greatness was spiritual, belonged to a category of force that could not, and should not, be measured against Rome's material might. However this be, his recon- struction of the Sanhedrin, even in the absence of the hewn- stone hall of the Temple for it to meet in, and the necessary conversion of the substantial sacrifices into offerings of prayer, made the salvage of Judaism more spiritual than the original totality. The unifying centre was no longer geographical, and the Jews became " the People of the Book " in a far profounder sense than when they were the people of a soil, too. The Law was never so obeyed in Bible times as it was when the record of these times became the all-in-all.
But this transformation was not achieved in one generation, nor without violent reactions. Scarce half a century after Jochanan ben Zakkai, the great rebel, Bar Kochba (Son of a Star), beat back for a time the whole might of Rome. And in
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the monstrous regime of religious persecution by which Hadrian avenged the difficult suppression of the uprising, the transform- ation of Judaism might well have been into paganism.
Thus, although Jerusalem remained throughout the entire Christian era in the hands of foreign conquerors, the Jews always retained some sense of being colonists, whose mother city was in Asia. Some day it would be their own city again — but in God's good time, in a whirl of miracles ! Hence, except under the ephemeral inspiration of pseudo-Messiahs, Zionism was never a matter of practical politics ; it was a shadowy, poetic ideal, outside life ; a romantic reminiscence. Old men went to Jerusalem to die — not to live. Its earth was imported — but to be placed in coffins. In practice Jews have always been ardently attached to the country of their birth, and if they have seemed to remain apart, Ezra and Nehemiah are largely responsible, those zealots (more Mosaic than Moses) who stamped out marriages with other peoples, even when the strangers accepted Judaism. The very Rabbis of the Talmud could not endorse this principle, yet in practice it became the rule, and an institution, designed in the fifth century before Christ to preserve the religion, served in the Dark Ages of Christendom to preserve the race. Religion and race had, indeed, come to seem one and the same thing. And against this people, already doubly cut off from mankind, the Christian raised his material wall of separation, and created the Ghetto, even adding the death-penalty to the forces against fusion.
Nor was the transformation into mere spiritual Judaism ever effected radically. Two reactionary influences remained. Palestine still retained a certain authority over the Diaspora. Babylon, indeed, soon asserted itself as the peer of Jerusalem, and later, with the movement of history and the great teachers, the spiritual hegemony shifted to Spain, to Cairo, to Poland. But underneath all this flux Jerusalem was still the Holy City. Secondly — and here comes in Jochanan's terrible tact — the literary ritual, substituted for the literal sacrifices, did not profess to be more than a temporary necessity, and the sacred shambles, that would have been soon outgrown, remained among the ancient glories to whose restoration the stubborn national spirit clung. Rachel wept for her children, and comforted herself by the belief that they were not dead but sleeping. As little as possible was changed of a liturgy enrooted in the Holy Soil, and thus it came to pass that in the narrow, sunless, stony
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streets of European Ghettos shambling students and peddlers offered metaphorical first-fruits in ingenious lyrics, and cele- brated the ancient harvest-festival of Palestine in pious acros- tics. Never was there such an example of the dominance of the word. Life was replaced by Literature. What wonder if the love of Zion grew mainly literary, so that even the passion of a Jehuda Halevi for Palestine has been dubbed more the passion of a troubadour for a visionary mistress than a patri- otism with its roots in reality I
Fantastic and factitious though this love of Zion was, yet, supplemented by eschatological superstitions, it made Jerusalem still the mystic City of God, still the capital of the Millennium, still the symbol of Israel's misery and Israel's ultimate regenera- tion. And even before modern Zionism arose, in the Ghettos of New York and Philadelphia, the " messenger of Zion " could be met on the cable-car, going his rounds, collecting the humble cents which enabled greybeards to pore over moth-eaten Talmuds in the Holy City.
Outwardly the people that led this strange inner life was interfused, in greater or less proportion, with almost every people on the planet. We find it energising wherever our vision turns — from England to Italy, from Poland to Persia, from the Barbar}7 States to Cochin China. It lived in contact with every nation, civilised or savage ; it underwent the influence of every environment, it played a part in every history.
Two effects followed, first the transformation of Israel into detached groups, each of which was apt to take on a petty cor- porate life of its own in practical obliviousness of its larger national unity ; second the transformation of function from agricultural to commercial, in obedience to the external forces that were denying Jews land, excluding them from the guilds of labour, and restricting them to finance.
The Jews, in fact, became the middlemen of the world, as well intellectually as commercially.
This was their function in the symbiosis, as biologists phrase it ; these were the terms on which they were permitted to live for the benefit of their neighbours, and so pliantly did they adapt themselves to the service of mankind that the natural human instinct for political independence was finally atrophied. Liv- ing thus everywhere, yet denied territorial possessions any- where and therefore tied nowhere, they were turned into a race of nomads.
They became, in fact — though in a novel sense — a people
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of Commercial Travellers. But one thing must be added: the Commercial Traveller carried always amid his samples — a Bible.
And this forms the true centre, a book substituted for a geographic centre, and a condition of spirit for a point of space.
And moving round this pivot, the landless denationalised groups retain subtly their sense of constituting a people, nay, the Chosen People, and thus they win back the self-respect and dignity which the contempt of Christendom and Islam must otherwise have undermined. They remain, indeed, the conscious superiors of their persecutors, the aristocrats of faith.
For those around them seem to them given over to savage or imperfect beliefs, however noble the temples reared to other gods than the one sole unpicturable Spirit, Creator of Heaven and Earth, who has selected Israel to make known his name to the heathen. And thus, although these groups speak Spanish or French, Chinese or Dutch, Russian or Arabic, although they change their psychology and even their physical appearance in harmony with the particular environment, their religion, woven into the very texture of life by countless ceremonies and pictur- esque traditions, keeps them still unified, even as the Hebrew of the Synagogue services provides an undying lingual link.
Like loose water, then, the race — during almost the entire Christian Era — flowed easily from one country to another, moving under pressure of necessity, and running into every kind of shape forced upon it by the local configuration, everywhere reflecting different skies and other trees, and yet to itself all parts of the same water, immiscible with other streams, and all ultimately to flow to Palestine.
This is a condition from which one may easily prophesy persistence. A people that has learned to live without a country is unconquerable.
Might is baffled when opposed to the ubiquitous, the infinitely evasive. For it will never be simultaneous ; never will the com- bined peoples break into an attack upon the Jews, as at the stroke of a conductor's baton. Masses may be forcibly baptised here and there, though even that is met by crypto-Judaism. And there are always plenty of other Jews elsewhere, vigorous and prolific. Here indeed is the secret of immortality.
But there is a force that is greater than might — it is love.
Ever since the eighteenth century this force of love has been acting upon the Jewish people. With that epoch of revolution
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and its quickened sense of the human brotherhood, began the break-up of the Ghettos in Western Europe. The Jewish clans, invited outside their high walls and admitted gradually to the civic life of Christendom, permitted to de-specialise themselves from commerce, and brought into contact with modern critical thought, found themselves exposed to a double disintegration. They were undermined from within and absorbed from without. Gone — at least from those educated in the general European schools — was that naive sustaining conception of their superiority, their providential mission. The great achieve- ments of Christendom, not only in the spiritual domain, but in the realm of arts and letters, became clear to them.
The reason for their isolation seemed obsolete. The aspira- tion for Palestine was felt to be incongruous, even as a far-off religious ideal. Again it was proclaimed — by Moses Mendels- sohn this time — that Judaism is larger than a land : that its future realm must be that of spiritual conquest. But in the process of interfusion which set in, the conquest was not to Judaism. Mendelssohn's own grandchildren became Christians. That would have been well enough, had not with many the acceptance of Christianity been a weak concession to the tyranny of society, which has in no country quite ceased to penalise Judaism. For the Jew's loss of his old faith was not necessarily compensated by a new belief, and conversion — espe- cially in Germany — was more often a mark of indifference than of illumination.
But the freer the Jew is left the more he tends, if not towards Christianity, towards a broader view of it, and towards the acceptance of Christ in the Apostolic chain of Hebrew prophets. The modern Jew is a pro-Christian, only too eager to admire the ideals of whatever nation he lives amid, only too uncritical. There can be little doubt, therefore, that were the Jew left to himself and given a free run and free elbow-room, he would, in any county immune from new influxes of Jews, be practically merged with his environment in the course of a few generations.
For this consummation, however, Christendom is too unchris- tian to wait. It requires three or four generations after the first emancipation, and before these generations are up, some- thing is sure to happen to throw the Jew back upon himself in reactionary regidescence : the Dreyfus case is what Bacon calls an " ostensive instance," and the all-pervading anti-Semitism
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that has followed the Great War with its swarm of massacres in the more anarchic countries is another.
Two opposing forces are thus at work upon the Jew — the wind and the sun. The gaberdine, thrown open for a moment in the burst of heat, is buttoned tighter the next before the biting blast. Even were the sunshine as constant and ubiqui- tous as the race, this stubborn life-force might not necessarily relax before it, since there would always be local differences of temperature and local variations of resistance, and any rem- nant in any country would be sufficient to restock this eternal people.
But considering how fitful and evanescent this sunshine is at its best, how swiftly veiled by regathering clouds of prejudice — note even in free England the outcry against the alien — con- sidering, too, that the bulk of the race is still immured in the Dark Ages, it may safely be prophesied that the people whose obstinacy was already denounced by the Roman writers will long continue to persist in comparative isolation, however its religion becomes modified, as it cannot fail to be vitally modi- fied, under the influence of modern thought and freer life con- ditions.
And if this much could be predicted, even without taking account of the greatest conservative factor in modern Jewry, how much more confidently may it be predicted, when we allow for this marvellous new factor — Zionism?
For, as if indeed by a historical miracle, just as the ancient religion begins to weaken and the segregating rites, ceremonies, and dietary laws to dissolve, a new cohesive force arises to bind together the loosening atoms of Israel. Or perhaps it was always there — this sense of racial unity — perhaps it was the deep basal force of which unity of religion was only a super- ficial effect.
It is strange to consider how little the modern Jew has cared to proselytise ; how strongly he has felt that his peculiar religion was suited only to the peculiar people.
It may be, correspondingly, that Jew hatred, which formerly posed as religious and now poses as economic and social, was really always merely racial — the hatred for a superior people ; a people that whether by a climatic accident or biological sport, or whether by providential choice, divides with the ancient Greeks the hegemony of races and outdoes even the Greeks by still existing with undiminished vitality and recuperativeness.
But whatever be the true motive-power of so-called anti-
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Semitism, and whether it, or race, or religion has been the true preservative of the Jewish people, the Zionist movement com- pounded of all these three anti-septic factors — evoked by Juda?ophobia, fed by racial sympathy, and inspired by religious hopes — has come to cry halt to disintegration, to rescue at once the Jewish people from persecution and the Jewish psy- chology — with its rare spiritual products — from submer- gence in the general life.
An assertion of Jewishness from within, it has been more powerfully cohesive than even the external pressure of persecu- tion in Russia or Roumania ; it has captured the " intellectuals " by pride as well as by pity.
To-day it knits together a thousand vacillators and holds them in the brotherhood, awaiting the necessarily slow emer- gence of the " Jewish National Home " in Palestine. Waiting without working is a form of opium-eating — it has been the disease of the Jew for eighteen centuries to intoxicate himself weakly with visions of coming glory — but working while wait- ing is a noble stimulation that is already producing a renais- sance of Jewish life and letters, and helping the Jew to shuffle off the ignoble coil of the Ghetto. Already the swift develop- ment of physical manliness under new open-air conditions has brought back in the Palestine Colonies the ancient Maccabaean type.
Writing in 1903 at the invitation of the Daily Mail to explain Zionism to its readers, I pointed out that its ultimate aim was " the creation of a model state, which, set on Zion's Hill, may be a light to the peoples.
" The Jew's facile worship of Christendom," I pointed out, " has not been entirely merited by its solutions of the problems of civilisation; his moral genius is not yet outmoded or super- erogatory.
" The race which produced Moses, Isaiah and Spinoza has still other messages to speak, and cross-fertilised as it now must be by all that Christianity has achieved in the sun during its own centuries of hidden life, it will surely not flower into its third national period without bearing some new precious fruit for the human race, whose service is its highest ideal."
XV
It cannot be too clearly understood that Zionism, although its ultimate aim is religious in the largest sense of that much
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misunderstood word, is a modern political movement whose origin and methods differ toto coelo from the mystic Zionism of the past. Mr. Israel Cohen in his valuable compilation, " Jew- ish Life in Modern Times," has an eloquent passage on the pitiful waste of blood, of hope, of prayer, through the Dark Ages of Jewry had national restoration been finally surrendered as a mere fable. But this is an absolute falsification of history. The national restoration for winch the Jew prayed was insep- arable from the re-establishment of the Judaism of the Temple. The Jewish martyrs of the Middle Ages went to the stake not for the unity of Jewry, but for the unity of Jehovah. " In that day the Lord shall be One and His Name One." What would make these old Jews turn in their graves would be to read atheistic articles by Jerusalem journalists, or to witness the crusades of the young colonists of Palestine against the Holy Sabbath. Political Zionist though I am, I cannot share the intolerance for the Jews of the old type who live in Jerusalem on the subsidies of the Diaspora. I know how economically reprehensible and spiritually contemptible they are to the Grad- grinds of the European Jewries, but when I think of the blood- soused plains of Europe, I feel more strongly than ever that in these frowsy greybeards poring over their obsolete Talmuds in the airless academies of the sunless stone alleys, and hugging their worm-eaten traditions to their caftaned breasts, we have a finer type of humanity than the Prussian Junker in all his bravery, and that it pays a people better to keep up such a standing army of mystics and students than to nourish the insolence of a military caste. And if the purpose of Zionism was merely to beget another national type on the stereotyped Western pattern, it would not be worth the striving. Though the worm-eaten traditions of these caftaned ancients cannot be resurrected as they dream, yet must the true inwardness of their dream be respected.
Happily the noble allocution of Dr. Weizmann, the Zionist leader, at the laying of the foundation stone of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, like the similar oration of Sir Herbert Samuel at a banquet before his departure for Palestine, proves that the Zionist leaders are undertaking the task in this very spirit and that they mean not only Hebrew to be heard in the streets but the voice of Jerusalem.
In this " Psaume de la Terre Promise," the Jewish poet, Edmond Fleg, looks to one of Israel's sons, " un frere de Moise, un frere de Jesus/* to write the third and last Testament " sur
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le parchemin des plavnes reconquises," and, recalling the drown- ing of Egyptians that marked Israel's first passage across the Red Sea, demands that this time the waters shall close without agony in Israel's wake.
Unfortunately it is difficult to see how — under the British Government's interpretation of its promise to the Jews — any situation can be produced in Palestine remotely resembling the Restoration for which one has worked, or which the poets and the people celebrate, or which these noble programmes imply and necessitate.
XVI
To show, however, that though compelled to repudiate the political imprudence of pledging even the Jews of enemy coun- tries to England, I was ready to give the diplomacy of the Zionist leaders and the bona fides of the British politicians the benefit of the doubt, I reproduce from a Press report my speech at the great demonstration at the London Opera House on December 3, 1917, in celebration of Mr. Balfour's historic promise of " a Jewish National Home in Palestine " — a promise categorically repeated on the platform of the Opera House by Lord Robert Cecil and Sir Mark Sykes on behalf of the govern- ment. Speaking as President of the rival Jewish Territorial Organisation (the Ito) I said:
" To-day I am here not for criticism but for congratulation and co-operation. I congratulate Dr. Weizmann and M. Sokolow upon their historic achievement in the region of diplomacy. To see that this is followed by a similar achievement in the more difficult region of practice is the duty of all Israel. Particularly is it the duty of the Ito, founded as it was to procure a territory upon an auton- omous basis. For the Ito to oppose any really practicable plan for a Jewish territory would be not only treason to the Jewish people, but to its own programme. And as a first-fruit of the friendly nego- tiations with Zionism, which began in July, I am happy to be able to join with you in welcoming the sympathy of the Government with Jewish aspirations.
" But I do not come to the Government, as Lord Morley tells us the Kaiser came to him, with mock salaams and marks of Oriental obeisance, for I have long maintained that after a war for liberty and the rights of small nations, this very reparation was due to that unhappy, scattered, and divided people which has bled and suffered with all the belligerents. And as an English-born citizen I am proud that my country by this pro-Jewish manifesto has wiped out the stain of her alliance with the fallen Russian Pharaoh. But
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whatever the general Jewish gratitude for this extension of the principle of nationalities, the Jews in Turkey and other now enemy countries are as loyal to their fatherlands as we to ours, and we who stand here can have no claim to pledge the race to any Power or Powers. All we can say is that happily the vast majority are con- centrated in those allied and democratic countries with which they are in natural affinity. Particularly close is their affinity with the English. I am not referring to the theory of the Anglo-Israelites that the English are the Lost Ten Tribes, though I observe, in passing, how strange it is that while some Jews are so anxious to be accounted Englishmen, some Englishmen are so anxious to be accounted Israelites. But it is not surprising that the nation whose noble version of our Scriptures has made the Bible almost a British possession, should vibrate to Jewish national aspirations. Was it not an Englishwoman, George Eliot, who invented Zionism, and who, five years before even Pinsker, marvellously interpreted the yet unborn? Was it not England, too, that created Territorialism by the epoch-making offer of a territory in East Africa contained in that other historic letter from Lord Lansdowne? An enemy of Zionism has pointed out that Governments come and go — for my part I am glad they do — but this sympathy with the Jewish cause cannot be uprooted with any individual Government. It is a British tradition. It was a wise instinct that led to our shores the immortal founder of Zionism, Dr. Herzl; here he first delivered his message, here he established the financial institutions of his move- ment.
' But it is not only a Jewish national home that our people needs. There is the further and not less momentous principle which Jewry has of late united in demanding — equality of rights with their fellow-citizens in every country for all Jews who may be unable or unwilling to take up the new citizenship in Palestine. This prin- ciple is the more important inasmuch as, out of our thirteen or fourteen million Jews, only a small minority can possibly return to Palestine in any foreseeable period. Indeed, but for the fact that the Russian Revolution has in all probability brought freedom to the six million Jews of Russia, I should still consider Palestine an utterly inadequate territory, and Galveston as still the one gate of hope. But as things providentially are, the same programme can combine a national home for the minority in Palestine with freedom and diversity of political status for the majority without. One would have thought that such a statesmanlike solution of both as- pects of the Jewish question would find all Israel contented. But no ! the words ' Jewish National Home ' offend the patriotism of certain leading British Jews. They are so very English, you see. You will perhaps remember the escaped German officer who took up his abode in a London hotel. He spoke English perfectly, he wore immaculate English clothes, he gave a genuine London address.
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Only, instead of writing, say, ' 55, Park Lane,' he wrote ' Park Lane, 55.' And that little difference gave him away. So you may see English-born Jews, bred at English public schools and English universities, sometimes in the English public service, sometimes even married into old English families, yet betrayed as un-English by just one point — they are against the rise of that Jewish State, with which every true Englishman sympathises.
' But let us not be unfair to these British Jews. If they protest too much, yet their protestations are not without reason. A burnt child dreads the rire, and Israel has a long memory of persecution and misunderstanding. Even to-day, when our sons are dying for England, anti-Semitic organs unite with irresponsible Zion- ists to proclaim that we are no true citizens ; that here we have no abiding city. Apparently all Jews outside Palestine are to be merely protected by their consul from Jerusalem — two mil- lions, say, in Palestine protecting twelve millions outside; a small tail indeed to wag so large a dog. We Territorialists have always repudiated such political utopianism; from the first our for- mula ran ' To procure a territory upon an autonomous basis for those Jews who cannot or will not remain in the lands in which they live at present.' For those and for those only. Not for those who can or will remain in their present lands. With these there may be a spiritual connection; there cannot be a political. And to-day, when — to quote your great leader, Max Nordau — ' the period of rhetoric is over — the hour of deeds is approaching ' — I am glad to have the assurance of the Zionist leaders here that they unreservedly accept the Government's stipulation that ' nothing shall be done which may prejudice the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.' Once Zionism is established on this sound basis, not only does its formula become identical with the Ito's, but I can see no reason why all Israel should not co-operate with both organisations in developing Palestine as a Jewish National Home for those Jews who can or will go there. To diminish the risks of confusion, let Palestine be called Judaea, and let the Jews who adopt its citizenship be called Judaeans. Then all the others will remain as before, Jews — Jews of whatever political allegiance they choose. A national home in Palestine — freedom and equal rights every- where else; here surely is a platform that can unite all Israel.
" And, despite the grumbling, it is uniting them. They are all coming to you. Some, of course, are upset; the Captivity had lasted nearly 2,000 years, they had hoped it would last their time. Still, they are coming — you may even hope for Sir Francis Montefiore ! Josephus tells us that Jerusalem fell through Jewish faction; if Jewish concord could bring about its restoration, the city torn from the Turk, after exactly 400 years of that Lord of Misrule, would be already ours. For, to-day, all roads lead to Zion. This is the day of alliances. Israel, like every other people, must have allies.
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But they must be allies who come to help and not to betray. At this very moment a meeting of the Maccabaeans — probably under the inspiration of the Jewish Chronicle — is considering how to unite all parties in Palestine work. But let us be clear what that work is. It is not a mere question of Palestine immigration; it is a question of a national home on an autonomous basis. The Jewish ideal proclaims not merely Leshanah habaa bey' rushalayim (' Next year in Jerusalem ') — it says also Leshanah habaa beni chorin (' Next year, sons of Freedom'). John Hay, when told that cer- tain peoples were not fit for autonomy, replied, ' No people is fit for anything else.' I do not say this autonomy must come at a bound. Though, in my opinion, the boldest way is always the best, and responsibility is a people's best educator, yet I am prepared to make all possible concessions to circumstances and history. But un- less the Palestine colonisation is so planned that it must eventually produce the national autonomous home, I, for one, will not devote my limited strength to such a mockery of Jewish aspirations. The times are too serious and tragic for such trifling. Mount Zion is in labour. Shall it produce a mouse? No, it must produce a lion — the lion of Judah.
" I have done my best to allow for the morbid psychology of the British Jews, for the shell-shock that our unhappy history has pro- duced on their nervous system. But if Palestine comes under Brit- ain, what becomes of their apprehensions? Why the Palestine Jews can come into their very League of British Jews ! And if Palestine is neutralised or internationalised, it can never develop those military possibilities which alone make a people suspicious to its neighbours. But the most important consideration which our friends of the Right have overlooked is that everything is in the melting-pot; that the bad old world we have known is not the world we shall live in after the war; that there may even be a League of Nations. For think to what this old system of mutually hostile States has brought our planet. Saul slew his thousands and David his ten thousands, but to-day the Angel of Death does not suffice for the volume of destruction. He has commandeered all the other angels into his service — the angels of fire and the angels of air — he has conscribed the very cherubim. There is death in the heavens above and the earth beneath and the waters under the earth. The scions of civilisation shrivel up one another with spirted flames or boiling oil. Millions wander and perish — in Poland no child un- der seven has been left alive — one Serbian in every four is dead, one of every two Armenians. Thousands of women have been dis- honoured; the camps of captives, the hospitals of the wounded, are numbered by the myriad; plagues, famine and civil war ravage the peoples; the cities are full of the cripples and blinded; the whole earth groaneth and travaileth.
" If we thought that all this was only to end in the same old
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world, life would hardly be worth living. Where there is no vision, says the Biblical sage, the people perish. I say that without the vision of a League of Nations the whole world will perish. And this vision is no mere dream of poets or dilettanti. It is the sober aspiration of statesmen like Mr. Asquith, like Lord Bryce, like Lord Lansdowne, like President Wilson, like the greatest personality the war has revealed, I mean General Smuts. But this aspiration was not originated by General Smuts or his fellow-statesmen. It is the vision of our own Isaiah: ' They shall beat their swords into plough- shares and their spears into pruning hooks ; nation shall not lift sword against nation, neither shall there be war any more.' In such a world, if it emerges, would it matter if we Jews did have a single nationality, if within all these leagued nations there was this still finer core of comradeship? Even in the old bad world, Jewish fra- ternity, like every link that drew the lands together, was a blessing and not a curse. And though the new world we dream of may de- lay to come, yet the bad old world can never quite return. Seven crusades to the Holy Land have all meant massacre for the Jews ; if the Eighth Crusade is to mean Palestine for the Jews, if it is to be truly a Christian Crusade, then that very fact is a proof of a new world-order of love and justice. Why then should we Jews, the people of Isaiah, at such a turning-point in history, nourish that crude and cynical view of nationality which regards every nation as necessarily the enemy of every other? Let us rather make a great act of faith, and instead of disavowing the brotherhood of Israel let us proclaim — from our Jerusalem centre — the brotherhood of man.
" But this spiritual work is not all that calls to us. For Palestine is not like those rich southern plains on which the Hun is again descending. It is a place full of stones and fever. It is a land whose main bulk lies almost as desolate as the plains of Flanders; ruined not by German war but by Turkish peace, by centuries of neglect and misgovernment. With the depletion of the world's re- sources, and especially of the world's man-power, by this terrible war, who is to win the country for civilisation if not we Jews? Even if we had no historic connection with it, that would be a worthy mission for a people. Let me appeal therefore to the Brit- ish Jews to work with us and to work loyally. For even at the best the goal is far. Palestine is not yet ours, and even when it is, our work — despite the pioneers we shall always honour — despite even Baron Edmond de Rothschild, to whom Palestine stands eter- nally indebted — will only begin. Already under the cegis of Eng- land our young men have died there. And we mourn these heroes of our blood. But eagerly as our young men have sacrificed them- selves in Palestine for war, still more eagerly will they offer them- selves there for the labours and sacrifices of peace. That will be the true Jewish regiment.
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" This is no time, my friends, for rejoicing. Jewish legend re- bukes the Israelites for rejoicing even over the drowning of the Egyptians in the Red Sea. ' How can you sing/ God asks His praising angels, ' when my people are perishing? ' And to-day not only our enemies are perishing but our friends and brothers. But though we may not rejoice, yet amid all this unparalleled destruc- tion, when the sea is strewn with murdered leviathans, when ghastly shell-holes gape where once were pleasant pastures, when unsightly rubbish-heaps are all that is left of ancient beautiful cities, it is a happy change to look forward to our work of reconstruction, of re- generation, to our task of making the wilderness blossom as the rose, and the desert flow again with milk and honey.
" And though our goal be yet far, yet already when I recall how our small nation sustained the mailed might of all the great Empires of antiquity, how we saw our Temple in flames and were scattered like its ashes, how we endured the long night of the Middle Ages, illumined by the glare of our martyrs' fires, how but yesterday we wandered in our millions, torn between the ruthless Prussian and the pitiless Russian, yet have lived to see to-day the bloody Empire of the Czars dissolve, and the mountains of Zion glimmer on the hor- izon, already I feel we may say to the nations : Comfort ye, comfort ye, too, poor suffering peoples. Learn from the long patience of Israel that the spirit is mightier than the sword, and that the seer who foretold his people's resurrection was not less prophetic when he proclaimed also for all peoples the peace of Jerusalem "
XVII
The two formal articles devoted later in this book to the project of a Jewish State, both written subsequently to Mr. Balfour's Declaration, which closed the first stage of Zionism, will bring the reader's knowledge of the subject up to date. But some extracts here from my multifarious articles in the Dark Ages of Zionism will make clear why the glittering Zion of my peroration is already proving a mirage — that " mockery of Jewish aspiration " which despite the festal atmosphere I could not but forebode.
Thus in an article written in 1900 Zionism is desiderated for its forcing of the issue which Jochanan ben Zakkai evaded, and which has remained still in suspension.
" Apart from its political working, Zionism forces upon the Jew a question the Jew hates to face.
"Without a rallying centre, geographical or spiritual; without a Sanhedrin; without any principle of unity or of political action; without any common standpoint about the old Book; without the
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old cement of dietary laws and traditional ceremonies ; without even ghetto-walls built by his friend, the enemy; it is impossible for Israel to persist further, except by a miracle — of stupidity.
" It is a wretched thing for a people to be saved only by its per- secutors or its fools. As a religion. Judaism has still magnificent possibilities, but the time has come when it must be de-nationalised or re-nationalised."
But with the hybrid situation in a British-Arab- Jewish State the Jew will neither be nationalised nor de-nationalised, he will still go on impaling himself on both horns of a dilemma more tragic than Hamlet's alternative, and asking himself how to be and not to be. I expressed the same thought in the now extinct New Liberal Review. In an article on " The Return to Pales- tine " written nearly twenty years ago, I found the final justifi- cation of the Zionist movement in this clarification of the situation : —
" Not to re-nationalise Judaism now is for ever to de-nationalise it. There is a tide in the affairs of nations as well as of men, which omitted, ' all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.' A nation cannot perpetually divide its prayers from its practice. The crucial moment in the long life of Israel has arrived — in the slow travail of the ages and the evolution of the modern world — and the Jew stands at the parting of ways that no longer permit one foot on each. Either he must consent to be merely a member of an international religious community welcoming the whole world to Abraham's bosom, or he must at last obey the trum- pet call of Isaiah : ' Go through, go through the gates ; prepare ye the way of the people : cast up, cast up the highway : gather out the stones : lift up a standard for the people.' "
Zionism will have no such power. The poor footsore, home- less hordes cannot " go through the gates." The British Administration with its Gradgrind ideals of respectability and self-supportingness will bar them out. " Slow and sure " is the sapient motto. But desperation is a surer nation-builder than canniness and political economy. And Bacon's maxim " Delays are dangerous " is wiser than the popular adage. " The task is difficult," I wrote in the same article, " more difficult, perhaps, than any in human history — beset with more theological and political pitfalls, unique in its problem of migration. But the very greatness of the task should stimulate the most maligned of races to break the desolate monotony of this brutal modern world by the splendour of an antique idealism." (Another pre-war side-light!) And I defined this task as of an origi- nality congruous with the uniqueness of the Jew's whole history,
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for whereas motherlands had always created colonies, here colonies were to create — or rather re-create — a motherland. But alas ! the Palestine that is to be created under the " Man- date " will be — like all the other lands of Israel's sojourn — not a motherland but a stepmotherland.
The trouble comes from the large existing population, roughly classified as Arab, about 600,000 in number. If Poland protests that 14 per cent, of Jews constitute too great an alloy for a nationality to bear, how then establish a " National Home " in face of an alien 86 per cent. ? Oliver Wendell Holmes's parable of the nictitating membrane of birds, which excludes, not all light, but just as much light as the bird wishes to exclude, was never better illustrated than in the wilful myopia cultivated by official Zionism towards this aspect of its problem, and Mr. Balfour, with the same blind- ness, or the same blandness, skirted the difficulty by premising the equal rights and privileges of this population, as though this was not cancelling the very " Jewish National Home " he professed to be conceding.
xvin
Here a personal confession is necessary. Mine is not in the racial sense anima naturaliter Judaica. At the time Dr. Herzl did me the honour to beseech my services I stood at the opposite pole of thought to him. Anti-Semitism alone had made him race-conscious, and he defined himself as " a Jew by the grace of Stocker." He had drawn from the Dreyfus case — which was the inspiration of his movement — the conclusion that a settled and dignified life for the Jew would never be possible in Christendom. I, on the contrar}', had drawn from it the con- clusion that Zola was essentially a Jew and that in the organisa- tion of such lovers of justice throughout the world and in co- operation with them lay the true path of Israel, his true mission. Dr. Herzl, though an incarnation of all that is best in the Jewish type, was curiously ignorant of Judaism and content to accept a Jew as a phenomenon purely biological. If in the end I endorsed his political conception, it was partly because of sympathy with a great man who was being misprized, abused, misunderstood, and little supported, and partly because I saw there was no real contradiction between the spiritual ideal and a definite locale for it ; which locale could be at once a land of refuge for the oppressed and a working model of a socially just
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commonwealth. I set myself therefore to establish for the intelligentsia a rational basis for the movement that with the masses was instinctive. Answering the objections of the anti- Zionists who preached " the Jewish mission " without ever carrying it out, and who used it merely as a stick to beat the Zionists with ; replying also to those who professed that Zionism was a reactionary narrowness when the Jewish ideal should be international, I said in a speech made in 1903 :
" Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Stuart pretender, scribbled upon a paper preserved at Windsor: ' To live and not to live is worse than to die.' That is our position. I had rather we died, and were done with. I thank Heaven that ten tribes at least were lost. What our preachers and teachers really preach is that the mission of Israel is submission, for never do they set up our own ideal — our supposed mission of Peace and Brotherhood upon earth. Let war break out, and we are the noisiest singers of war-songs. The poor people of Kischineif tried to save themselves by putting in their windows sacred Russian images. It is our history in a nut-shell. In moments of danger we put up the flag of the enemy. And it avails nothing in the long run — the image-imitators at Kischineff were the people particularly chosen for crucifixion. But we are told Zionism is against pure Jewish principles — against the prin- ciples of our greatest prophets. Why, there never were such nation- alists as our prophets. And there never were such internationalists, either. Only they saw that internationalism must be rooted in na- tionalism, that there cannot be a brotherhood of peoples without peoples to be brothers. Before I can have a brother, there must be a ' me ' to have a brother. It takes two to make one brother.
" Nationality is the personality of peoples. When we have a country of our own, we can begin to talk brotherhood. It comes too suspiciously from a people without one. It is like a Schnorrer talk- ing socialism. The fox that lost his tail would have better per- suaded his fellow foxes of the disadvantages of a tail in the days when he had still his glorious waving brush. ' Be at the tail of the lions rather than at the head of the foxes/ said the Rabbis. Be at the tail of the nations rather than at the head of the gipsies. We stand for Peace — but a proposal of universal disarmament would have more weight coming from Germany than from Monaco. Let Park Lane preach against luxurious dinner parties, and Society may listen. But the gospel of plain living and high thinking cannot be effectively proclaimed from Rowton House by tramps cooking their own bloaters. If we want the nations to listen to us, we must first get them to respect us. To fulfil the ideals of our prophets, we must have a soil of our own; to preach them, we must have a house- top of our own; to show the world a model State, it must stand in a
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land of our own, not in a land where we must — under peril of our life or what is worse, our position in society — hang out the sacred images of our neighbours. It is not as if the anti-Zionists were really international, were really cosmopolitan. On the contrary they are narrowly national, narrowly metropolitan.
" I do not complain — it is impossible to belong to two peoples, and the Jews of each country naturally choose the people they live amid. You will say the Jews have managed for eighteen centuries to belong to two peoples. But this is a delusion. So long as they were kept in Ghettos, physical and moral, they belonged to one people, their own. As soon as they are let out of their protective prison, the stronger, larger people sucks them in, and in three gen- erations assimilates them to itself, even if they keep up the farce of marrying among themselves. It is absurd of the anti-Zionists to claim cosmopolitanism. Mr. Claude Montefiore preaches a British war-sermon: his sister, Mrs. Lucas, writes a beautiful patriotic poem, ' Mother England/ which is sung in Jewish schools. Na- tionalism is low and narrow when it is ' Mother Zion,' but when it is ' Mother England,' ah, that is another story.
' For the Jew has heart and hand, our mother England, And they both are thine to-day, Thine for life and thine for death, yea thine for ever.'
It is a fine emotion, and England deserves it of us, and our lives are at her call. But I do not find it any higher than the older senti- ment, * If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its cunning.' An old Jewish legend makes Jeremiah after the destruc- tion of the Temple see a lonely woman sitting on the top of a moun- tain, dressed in black, her hair dishevelled. ' Who will comfort me? ' she is crying. Jeremiah approaches and says, ' If thou art a ghost, begone.' She answers, 'Dost thou not know me? I am Mother Zion.' Twenty-five centuries have passed, and still she weeps over her children. But only in these latter generations has she heard herself ousted from her motherhood, has she endured the last sorrow of hearing her little ones sing of ' Mother England.' Ah, how she must puzzle her poor brain; for here she hears them singing ' Rule Britannia ' and there ' the Marseillaise,' and yonder ' Die Wacht am Rhein.' She has heard some singing all three in turn, Anglicised Alsatians. The one song it is narrow to sing is the song we sing at Zionist Meetings, the Hatikvah, the song of na- tional hope. Three things in England have the word ' National ' particularly attached to them. There is the National Bard, Shake- speare, and his prophet is Mr. Israel Gollancz ; there is the Diction- ary of National Biography, and the editor is Mr. Sidney Lee; there is the National Theatre, Drury Lane, and the manager is Mr. Arthur Collins. Jews say we could not run a country of our own,
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but I cannot believe that even in Palestine the nationalistic talents of these gentlemen would be utterly barren. For many generations only one saint's day has been added to the British calendar, and that is Primrose Day. British Imperialism was shaped by a Jew- ish politician, and I do not quite despair of our being able to pro- duce capable rulers even for a tiny territory of our own. While we say that we could not live together under Home Rule, that we are lower than the Red Indians or the Esquimaux, the ants and the bees, everybody else says : ' Good heavens ! If these people should only get together, if they should find out their own power ! ' We are supposed to be a clever race — but that is a libel. We are clever as individuals, but as a people we rank below the Hottentots. If there is one thing that an individual Jew thinks of, even more than he should, it is Tachlith — the end, the ultimate goal. ' What does it lead to? ' he asks. If there is one thing that the Jewish people have forgotten — it is Tachlith.
" Drift, drift, drift, in poverty, hunger and dirt. To fly from one country to another ; to stave off things from one day to another ! A great deal of our charity consists in sending poor people from Man- chester to London and then sending them back from London to Manchester. Our Boards of Guardians enjoy this game of shuttle- cock — it gives them a great air of activity. A country is a respon- sibility, no doubt. You may have to fight for it. But now you are conscripts to Russia, to Germany, to all the world. In the battle of Kischineff alone, your casualties, even according to the official account, were 45 killed and 424 wounded, with 700 horses and 600 shops looted. The loss of property is £500,000, which we have to make good. And though I give my mite, I give it grudgingly, be- cause it is stolen from Zionism, and because I feel the bill for dam- ages should be paid by the rich anti-Zionist Jews of St. Petersburg and Riga, the Jewish Russians. The Jewish readers of one New York paper have subscribed some £15,000 towards it — more than they have ever given to Zionism. But prevention is better than cure. Jewish money can be had for any purpose, except a Jewish purpose. A Jew, last week, offered thousands of pounds for a statue to Kosciuszko — the Polish hero of freedom. It was refused as an insolence coming from a Jew. He did not seem to think of supporting his own heroes of freedom. There is a Jewish lady in London who gives ten thousand a year to a musical institution. There is no Jew in the world who has given Zionism even a single ten thousand. But then it is so sordid to buy Palestine ! "
Not that Palestine was essential to my particular conception of Zionism. For Jerusalem, like Heaven, is more a state of mind that a place. But if Palestine was to be chosen as the objective, the movement must come to grips with reality. Pro- ceeding, I said:
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'* My friends, you cannot buy Palestine. If you had a hundred millions, you could only buy the place where Palestine once stood. Palestine itself you must re-create by labour, till it flows again with milk and honey. The country is a good country — not so good as Samuel Montagu said before he became a Baronet, not so bad as he says it is now. But it needs a great irrigation scheme. To return there needs no miracle — already a part of the population are Jews. If the Almighty Himself carried the rest of us to Palestine by a miracle, what should we gain except a free passage? In the sweat of our brow we must earn our Palestine. And, therefore, the day we get Palestine, if the most joyous, will also be the most terrible day of our movement."
This " most joyous day " has been celebrated even more up- roariously than I anticipated, but the realisation that it was also " the most terrible day of our movement " was confined to few. And the reason was that the movement had not come to grips with reality. My first stroke for Zionism a quarter of a century ago had been to insist that the Jewish Colonisation Association which administered the great legacy of Baron de Hirsch must devote itself to Palestine (and this is now largely to be done), my second was to draw up a report on "The Commercial Future of Palestine "■ — a country then veiled in pietistic clouds, but which is now at last coming under normal scientific investigation and development. But my third step on the road of reality was not taken — so far as documents easily at hand testify — till 1904, when I appear to have become fully aware of the Arab peril, and in a speech made in New York to have honestly drawn attention to it as the outstanding obstacle to Zionism.
There is, however, a difficulty from which the Zionist dares not avert his eyes, though he rarely likes to face it. Palestine proper has already its inhabitants. The pashalik of Jerusalem is already twice as thickly populated as the United States, having fifty-two souls to every square mile, and not 25 per cent, of them Jews; so we must be prepared either to drive out by the sword the tribes in pos- session as our forefathers did, or to grapple with the problem of a large alien population, mostly Mohammedan and accustomed for centuries to despise us. This is an infinitely graver difficulty than the stock anti-Zionist taunt that nobody would go to Palestine if we got it; that everybody would want to be Ambassador in Paris; a joke that rather lost its point in the Dreyfus days."
Here is the crux of the situation. But the Zionists did avert their eyes.
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In an article on " Zionism and Territorialism " that appeared in the Fortnightly Review in 1910, I find myself drawing atten- tion not only to the overwhelming presence of the Arabs, but to their hostility. As its recent flare-up is sometimes traced to my suggestion that they should be amicably bought out (though Mr. Barnes, M.P., more accurately connects it with the far- trumpeted British promise of a " Jewish National Home " in their territory), it is as well to cite from this article of a decade ago.
" Palestine, with its paltry, semi-sterile area of 10,000 square miles, is already in the possession of 600,000 Arabs and other non- Jews, so that it would require, under the most improbably prosper- ous conditions, half a century of peaceful penetration before the Jews could even be on an equality with the non-Jews. Prior to the Turkish Revolution, it is just conceivable that a Jewish Govern- ment might have ruled Palestine as a few white men rule Natal, but under the new constitution the only local autonomy possible would be Arab.
" And it is significant that an Arab candidate for Jerusalem put upon his platform the enlargement of Palestine into a vilayet, so as to include an increased Arab population. The two Arab journals in Palestine, El Emsayi and El Karmel (now defunct), were both anti- Jewish (the pen almost slips into saying, anti-Semitic). More- over, the seventy Arab deputies in the Ottoman Parliament form a league for the defence of Arab interests, so that, for example, the member for Tripoli joined in the protest against the concessions to the British steamers on the Tigris. There are no less than four Arab journals published in Cairo, El Lewan, El Moyad, El Dous- tour, and El Minbar, all labouring to promote the Renaissance of Islam, and their articles are translated by the Persian, Indian, and Tartar journals, while a group of Young Arabs in Paris, emulating the Young Turks, have likewise an organ in French. The 12,000 pupils of the most ancient seminary of El-Azhar in Cairo, hailing from all parts of the Mussulman world, contribute to spread every- where the fear lest the Jews should seize Jerusalem, that sacred city of the three hundred and fifty millions of Islam. Still fiercer is the opposition of the Arab Christians, and fiercest of all, and not least formidable, the opposition of the Ottoman Jews, whose four depu- ties in Parliament — the members for Baghdad, Salonica, Smyrna, and Constantinople — are all violently anti-Zionist."
But nothing could rouse the Zionists to cope even mentally with the situation. Their opponents had accused them of " try- ing to force the hand of Providence." In regard to the Arab problem they were certainly obnoxious to the indictment. Up
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to the very day of the Balfour pronouncement they remained blind and deaf to the difficulty. They cast their burden lazily upon the Lord.
Hence to-day we have a new Arab version of the meaning of Zionism, winch may take its place among the many curiosities of definition achieved by the Zionists to keep pace with their varying fortunes. " Zionism," runs a letter of Abn Gosh, endorsed by five Mukhtars and forty-eight sheikhs, " is the great school which the British Government has prepared for us, that the fellah may in it learn the art of agriculture and husbandry, and the source of economic power."
XIX
Although we have lately been fed with hopes that the world will be run as a commonwealth, it has always hitherto been run as a cockpit. And if humanity is to continue to live under the bad old order, the world will continue to be a cockpit. And though the Jewish ideal is to turn it into a commonwealth, the Jewish race cannot in the meantime — unless it embrace a wholly passive Christianity and subject itself voluntarily to mass-murder — escape the conditions of the cockpit, or the need of an alliance with military power.
There is no example in history of an inhabited country being acquired except by force. Adam's entry into the Garden of Eden was peaceful because there was no other man in occupa- tion. Jehovah Himself, according to the Bible, could not give the Jews Palestine without their fighting a long series of battles aganist the tribes in possession, nor did they ever conquer it wholly. It is true the naked doctrine of force is disavowed, for the whole Bible is written from the standpoint that God never acts — nor must man — on other than righteous grounds. Thus the expulsion of the natives of Palestine is ascribed to their abominations. Nevertheless without force righteousness alone cannot effect the conquest of a country. And the amount of force necessary varies with the number of its inhabitants. When the German Danes, who form the backbone of England, invaded it in the fifth century, they had to kill off most of the ancient Britons. When the Pilgrim Fathers went to America, the fighting necessary was less, though there was for generations war to the knife, or rather to the tomahawk. In my own childhood the Maoris were fighting against the whites who,
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albeit by treaty, had possessed themselves of New Zealand. A race, therefore, that desires a land of its own must — if it sets its eye on a land already inhabited — be prepared to face war.
We lost Palestine after some of the fiercest fighting in history. But the Zionists, though professedly modern, had not really lost the old mystic hope that it would be got back without force. And this though the united strength of Christendom in a series of Crusades had not availed to dispossess the Turk. But if the Zionists thus naively imagined that you could make omelettes without breaking eggs, the eggs that have already been broken in Palestine are a proof that history has not yet changed her laws. There is no way for a people once pushed out of its country to push in again unless at the point of the sword, and even this is impossible with a scattered people unless the sword is that of a powerful backer.
The only chance of reconstructing a nationality without the sword is to colonise, as the Jewish Territorial Organisation projected, an unpopulated territory. It was because I fore- saw that the Palestine problem could yield only to force that my own energies have been diverted for so many years to the quest for a comparatively unoccupied region, sufficiently large, healthy and fertile to contain the potentiality of a Jewish State.
But if Palestine is put forward as the only possible place — and " nur Palastma " has been a Zionist catchword — then there is no resource but in Realpolitik; in accommodation to the cockpit. And when the whole world had turned into one, and the Jew was fighting everywhere for everybody, and when more- over the Turkish Empire bade fair to be in the melting-pot, it did seem as if, with so much of Jewish blood being shed, the Jew might reap the same reward as races far less civilised and far less oppressed. More particularly when the cockpit was put forward as merely the preparation for the commonwealth in which mankind would henceforth live happily under " the prin- ciple of nationalities."
Wherefore, when the Great War was raging, I suggested in an address to the Fabian Society (December, 1915) that "if Britain took Palestine she could make no greater stroke of policy than to call in the Jews to regenerate it for her." But, I pointed out, their mere immigration would not be enough.
(<
It all requires a radically imaginative policy — a dealing in futures as well as in pasts by men ready to rescue human history
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from its monotonous factors of blood and gold. Napoleon, under the spell of the forty centuries that regarded him from the Pyra- mids, announced his design to restore the Jews to their land. Will England, with Egypt equally at her feet, carry out the plan she foiled Napoleon in? Had she the power and the genius to do so, a new chapter would be opened in the history of mankind, the ends of the ages would meet, and the ' tribe of the wandering foot and weary breast/ which for nineteen hundred years has prayed for Palestine some twenty times a day, would find itself on its holy soil under the aegis of the greatest Empire in the world, victorious after the greatest struggle in her history."
XX
In May, 1917, in an article in a popular magazine, I returned to the scheme of a British Palestine (which the British Govern- ment adopted that very November in a disingenuous form). It will be seen that I even named the very man who has been appointed High Commissioner.
" It is significant," I wrote, " that the Zionist movement, despite the part played by Austrian and German Jews in its inception, has always regarded England as its ' spiritual home.' In the very shadow of the Mansion House it set up its financial institution — the Jewish Colonial Trust — and here, under the seal of English Law, it organised its Statutes. And the British order and success which Dr. Herzl witnessed in Egypt convinced him that under the aegis of Britain, which alone understands to leave other races to their own Kultur, the dream of a Jewish State had the best chance of achieving substance. Peopled by a stock to whose patriotism and vigour — after two thousand years of repression — the honours lists of all the belligerent armies testify, and to whose intellectual and artistic energy the libraries, theatres, academies and senates of the world bear overwhelming witness — British Judaea, governed by a Jew already tried and tested in the service of Britain — a Her- bert Samuel, an Edwin Montagu, a Sir Lionel Abrahams, a Sir Matthew Nathan — would become not the least glorious or loyal link in that mighty chain of Imperial Britain which binds together so many races, creeds and colours.
" Unfortunately," I went on, " all human schemes have their ob- stacles and these come as usual from within as well as from without. The one serious difficulty, however, is internal. ' Give the country without a people,' magnanimously pleaded Lord Shaftesbury, ' to the people without a country.' Alas, it was a misleading mistake. The country holds 600,000 Arabs. And despite the homesickness for Zion which, beginning in the eighties and intensified by the po-
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groms, drew the intellectuals of Russian and Roumanian Jewry to Palestine and set them — in the dearth of ploughs — tearing at the sacred soil with their fingers ; despite the thirty Jewish Colonies with their picturesque nomenclature — ' The Gate of Hope/ ' The Memorial of Jacob/ ' The Watch on the Jordan/ etc., etc. — and their still more picturesque vines and orange-trees, the total area of Palestine yet acquired is not 2 per cent., nor did the Jewish population — even before the great exodus or expulsion due to the war — exceed 100,000. And even of these 100,000 the majority were old men, who went to Palestine not to live, but to die; not to work, but to weep at the ruined Wall of the Temple. This role of Palestine as a monastery is not indeed so despicable as the modern Jew too often assumes. The Jew at the Wailing Wall is a more poetic figure than the Jew on Wall Street. But he does not help to rebuild the Wall. That can only be done by a stalwart peasantry growing up on the soil. And unfortunately the soil is occupied by the Arab. Thus, unless the Jews are to begin their new life by massacring the modern Canaanites — which is out of the question — Zionism must, it would seem, remain largely moonshine. For even under constitutional government for all inhabitants, there would be, not a Jewish autonomy but an Arab autonomy. There might at best be a condominium of Arabs and Jews, but it would be fruitful in friction. In any event the Jews would be swamped and the Jewish atmosphere — the paramount object of the great experi- ment — would become less distinctive than in the Ghetto of New York.
" The only solution of this difficulty lies in the consideration that Palestine is not so much occupied by the Arabs as over-run by them. They are nomads, who have created in Palestine neither material nor spiritual values. To treat them therefore on the same basis as. say, the Belgians, would be to follow an analogy which does not exist. Politics is not all of a piece, else the very idea of giving Pal- estine to a race which is not yet there, and whose ' vested interests ' in the land are only spiritual and historic, would be a paradox. Yet this paradox appealed to that eminently practical politician, Napol- eon, and only his defeat by Britain prevented his re-settling the Jews in their old home. The whirligig of history thus presents England with the opportunity of carrying out the very plan she indirectly thwarted. Like Napoleon and the American millionaires, we must ' deal in futures.' We cannot allow the Arabs to block so valuable a piece of historic reconstruction, so romantic a reparation to the sore- ly-tried race of the Apostles. And therefore we must gently per- suade them to ' trek.' After all, they have all Arabia with its million square miles — not to mention the vast new area freed from the Turk between Syria and Mesopotamia — and Israel has not a square inch. There is no particular reason for the Arabs to cling to these few kil- ometres. ' To fold their tents ' and ' silently steal away ' is their
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proverbial habit: let them exemplify it now. The Jews will be well content to pay their travelling expenses, and to buy also — at a price fixed by the British Government — such holdings and build- ings as really have a value. Nor would the Jews be reluctant to negotiate equally with the German colonists. Not that there would not be absolute toleration of all faiths and races; with a Jewish guard of honour round the Tomb of Christ, if the holy places were not — as Dr. Herzl suggested — ' exterritorialised.' But it is obvi- ously pointless to pour water into a sieve, or a pint of wine into a gallon of oil. The Jews in Palestine, if a minority, must either dominate the majority or be dominated by it. Either alternative would be undesirable: neither would be the dream that has sweet- ened the centuries of sorrow."
XXI
When at a dark moment in the fortunes of England Mr. Balfour had at last come out with his Declaration — diplomatic to the point of meaninglessness — but acutely timed and so phrased as to play on the popular belief in the Restoration of the Jews, I set myself in a Sunday paper that counts its readers by the million to allay the emotions he had aroused, deliberately entitling my article, " The Future of Palestine," not of Zionism.
" In many Jewish and Christian circles," I wrote in March, 1918, "there is joy — and in not a few, apprehension — at the prospect of a Jewish Palestine.
" The alarm is at its keenest among Mohammedans and British Jews. But there is as yet little ground either for alarm or ecstasy.
" True, the British Government has pledged itself to support the establishment of a ' Jewish National Home ' in the Holy Land. But in the same breath it has added a proviso which practically re- duces the promise to a contradiction in terms.
"For 'nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.' It is as if the Government should give over the Savoy to a new department on condition the hotel guests should not be disturbed.
" The Jews in pre-war Palestine — and there is reason to think the ratio has even fallen — were only one in seven of the inhabit- ants; they held only 2 per cent, of the soil. The non- Jewish pop- ulation, some 600,000 in number, embraced — apart from the Ger- man colonies and the Christian missions, churches and institutions — Arabs, Syrians, Druses, Algerians, Egyptians, Bulgarians and con- siderable settlements of Moslem Circassians transplanted from Rus-
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sia by the Sultan. Of these the native Syrians, predominantly Arab by blood, are by far the most numerous.
" Some of these mutually exclusive tribes may perhaps be re- garded as semi-nomadic and not irrevocably rooted in the soil. But unless the problem of re-establishing the Jewish State is solved by bold constructive politics, Palestine, already, moreover, overlaid by the historic deposits of Christendom and Islam, cannot possibly be- come the cradle of a ' Jewish national ' life in any real political sense.
" Still less can it become a Jewish ' home.' The Jews of the world number some fourteen millions. Wales, which is three-quar- ters of the size of Palestine, and possesses mineral wealth and in- dustrial opportunities lacking in the Holy Land, provides a ' home ' for only two million inhabitants. Palestine at its zenith probably supported but three millions, and, even assuming that this number could regather and the Arabs trek in our own generation, there would still be over ten million Jews outside.
" All, therefore, that will certainly happen is that Palestine will profit by the wave of irreflective idealism known as Zionism, and that this derelict land, paralysed for four centuries by the dead hand of the Turk, will revive and blossom out again under the uncom- mercial devotion of Jewish capital and labour.
" For Palestine cannot ' pay.' And it is fortunate for the world that at a period when food production is of such paramount importance, and when the general resources are mortgaged to the regeneration of the war-ruined lands, there should exist this peculiar Jewish passion for irrigating, sanitating, canalising, populating and cultivating this feverous but once fertile area.
" Never naturally a land ' flowing with milk and honey,' Palestine will now have its ancient dams, aqueducts and hill terraces restored, its malarious marshes drained and fenced with eucalyptus, and the olive groves, so fecklessly destroyed by Arab goats and Turkish misgovernment, replanted.
" Again the green bay tree shall flourish like the wicked, there will once more be balm in Gilead, and Jericho, the Biblical ' city of palm trees,' the last of which perished in 1838, will renew its palmy days. Doubtless, too. there will be modern developments less pleasing to contemplate.
" Moreover, with the economic evolution in Jewish hands, and expressing itself doubtless by a unified Jewish currency and postal system — there were six postal systems and several chaotic curren- cies before the war — this cohesive political minority will tend to give the new Arab State a Jewish colour, while their intensified his- toric consciousness, accentuated from without by the host of ab- sentee Zionists, and from within by the streams of Jewish visitors, will co-operate to prevent them being swamped and Arabised by the maj ority.
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" Some such Zionist development of Palestine is one of the few certainties that loom through the fog of war. . . .
" While I fear that the love of Zion may be tragically blinding the Jewish people to its last chances of a real political existence on some still untenanted expanse of Canada, Brazil, Asia Minor or Si- beria, nevertheless there are aspects of Zion with which every Jew, nay, every thinking man, must sympathise. The Jewish University, projected on a site already donated near the Mount of Olives, will be a characteristic commencement for a nation of students ; while the Medical Faculty, which is to be its nucleus, is an urgent necessity in a land where trachoma and typhus are rampant, and where cleanli- ness is not next to godliness.
" Still more in keeping would be the building of a Temple of Peace to replace the discredited institution at The Hague. The ob- jection that Jerusalem is too remote is parochially European. The old geographers who placed Jerusalem at the centre of the globe were wiser.
" With our new ' orientation ' towards our brown and yellow brothers, and the new political ' occidentation ' of India and Japan, Jerusalem may well become the pivot of world-peace. The Hague Palace was an artificial structure, without traditions or reverbera- tions. In the Holy City of three great religions even diplomatists might find cynicism difficult, and our poor battered humanity might take a fresh upward impulse of faith and hope."
XXII
Even this article, however, was too optimistic, for there appears to be no intention of giving Palestine Jewry such national minima as the postal system and the currency, which I took for granted. In my speech in New York in 1904, I see that I prophetically suggested that " possibly a Conference of the Powers may one day pacify their mutual jealousies by putting us into Palestine," and warned my audience that " if the Turkish Empire is broken up, or if the Powers help us to peaceful possession, we shall not profit by the contingency unless we are united in Zionism. The car will come our way and we shall not be ready to jump on." "Who knows," I went on, " how often that car has come round in the eighteen centuries of our exile? We have missed it every time." We have missed it again this time, and who knows if it can ever come round again?
President Wilson told the Peace Conference : " We are here to see that every people in the world shall choose its own masters, and guide its own destinies, not as we wish, but as it wishes."
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Who can see in this new Palestine Jewry, ground between Arab and Briton, any real self-determination of destiny? Where in this new-fangled hypocrisy of " Mandates," which imposes France upon an " independent " Syria, kicking against the pricks, and which in Palestine dictates to Jew and Arab alike, is there room for peoples going their Wilsonian way, " unhin- dered, unthreatened, unafraid"?
There does not seem to be any time-limit in the " Mandate," any stipulation for withdrawal. This is one of the several reasons for which I could wish America had taken a mandate for Armenia. Her honest withdrawal as soon as she had put Armenia upon its feet would have been a precedent that France and England could scarcely have disregarded. It was honest, however, of Sir Herbert Samuel, in entering Palestine, not to mention " The League of Nations," but to say he came to rule in^the name of the King, and it was for the King that prayers were said in the synagogues. It had already been manifest from Lord Curzon's speech in the House of Lords that none except negative measures were to be taken to evolve a " Jewish National Home." But one must be grateful for the frankness with which Lord Curzon admitted that the factors which determined British policy were the military value of Palestine and the eco- nomic value of the Jews, apart from whom none of the existing inhabitants could regenerate Palestine. Equally candid was his explanation of the status of these regenerators — not occu- pants of a " National Home " but, as Punch summed it up, " paying guests." Lord Sydenham struck a more Pharisaical note when he gave as one of the aims of the British invasion of Palestine the desire " to rescue the people from centuries of oppression by the Turks," while the rights of the Jews rested only upon a "particularly ruthless conquest." (With this myth of the ruthless conquest of Canaan I deal in the essay, " The Legend of the Conquering Jew." ) Curiously ignoring the rights that rested on Mr. Balfour's promise, he went on to complain that " a self-constituted Zionist Commission settled down in Jerusalem under the shadow of our military protection and quite close to our barracks and began at once to interfere with the administration." And forsooth the Zionists are demanding a monopoly of public works, and trying to substitute Hebrew for Arabic I How otherwise " a Jewish National Home " is to be built up, Lord Sydenham leaves unexplained. Lord Lamington, another partaker in the Debate, though at the time of the Balfour Declaration he had appeared on the Zionist
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platform in its support, has now discovered how intricate the problem really was, and that " under the stress of war we entered into various undertakings which undoubtedly clashed with one another." I cordially agree with his criticism of the ambiguity of Mr. Balfour's Declaration and that if it did not mean the whole country was going to be under Jewish control, it meant nothing. Lord Sheffield's tirade against the scheme (like John BulVs or the Spectator's or Frederic Harrison's in the Fortnightly Review) would have carried more weight if made in " the stress of war " and before the political profit of the scheme had been reaped. Its critics conveniently forget how it stimulated American sympathy and how the Austrian and German Jews welcomed it recklessly even at the height of Hin- denburg's success. But the most ominous figure in the Debate was the Archbishop of Canterbury, who despite his appeal after the Lambeth Conference for " a rally of all spiritual forces," even those outside the Church, here threw away the opportu- nity of showing that Christianity had survived the war, nay, was content to see his country's pledge reduced to " a scrap of paper." Strange that the Church must always be in the wrong. Pope or Primate, it matters not, there is always this fatal gravitation to the lower course.
One imagines that an obscure antagonism to Judaism ani- mates the archiepiscopal bosom, possibly even a subconscious British Imperialism. The Pope's backsliding is the more regrettable since before the armistice His Holiness spoke com- fortably to Mr. Sokolow, and strove impartially, and not as a pro-German intriguer, to end the world-agony. But he, or his Jesuit forces, seem to have discovered that if the plot for the political revival of the Vatican in France is to prosper, the Pope must give up blessing the sequestration of Syrian territory to Jewry or to England. As a British publicist bluntly put it: " If ever Syria is to come under effective French control ( and upon the control of Syria depends the possibility of transport- ing Mesopotamian oil) it will be because Beirut has long been a centre of French Catholic influence."
Cardinal Bourne is not satisfied that the Jews shall be done out of their political rights only. Speaking at the National Catholic Congress at Liverpool, he urged that " even if a direct political control were definitely excluded by the British admin- istration, there was every danger of the establishment of a Zionist economic and financial domination which would be no less unacceptable in its results." It is to be feared that the
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Catholic elements in our own Foreign Office cannot be ignored in estimating the forces at work to override the Balfour Declara- tion.
In this tug of war between the Christian Powers, with the Arab pulling in a third direction, there is obviously scant chance of a real Jewish Palestine. To produce that out of the con- flicting ingredients is a task not for a statesman but a conjurer. Sir Herbert Samuel has no such thaumaturgic talent; he is a conscientious British official whom even his love for his people and the gracious Zionist romance in his own family cannot bias. The interest of England in getting her new possession developed by Jewish capital and industry is outweighed if the Arabs are antagonised too deeply, and since moreover the Jews are the Uriah Heeps and not the Oliver Twists of politics, England may safely ride roughshod over them. In placing all their hopes on a peaceful penetration, and in pretending that the Arabs can be safely submerged, the Zionists have presumed to know better than Jehovah, who protested : " But if ye will not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you ; then it shall come to pass, that those which ye let remain of them shall be pricks in your eyes, and thorns in your sides, and shall vex you in the land wherein ye dwell." Is such a home worth having ?
XXIII
I did not need to wait for Lord Curzon's speech or Sir Herbert Samuel's British-born ukases in Palestine to see that Zionism was to be betrayed. In February, 1919, I took advantage of the courteous invitation of the League of Nations Journal to expound my foreboding. And in an article entitled " Zionism and the League of Nations " I said :
" Since England, France, Italy, Japan and President Wilson — those five Great Powers — have all approved the establishment in Palestine of a ' Jewish National Home,' it follows there must still be a Jewish Nation, even though devoid of the territorial concentra- tion which anciently produced it. Yet, at the Peace Conference, the great people whose prophets more than twenty-five centuries ago preached the League of Nations, is denied the voice in the shaping thereof which, through the Emir Feisal, is accorded to its Arab neighbours in Palestine, and which is not refused even to the black republics of Haiti and Liberia. This contempt for the Jew — like the continuation of ' secret diplomacy ' at the very Conference de- signed to end it — is characteristic of humanity's tragic immaturity,
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its inability to see the better life steadily and to see it whole. But it must be admitted that Zionism has invited humiliation by its pathetic prostration to pick up the crumbs thrown it, and by the cheers which rose from every Ghetto and Judengasse, Allied or en- emy, to greet that diplomatic British declaration which Mr. Barnes, a member of the War Cabinet responsible for it — now that vic- tory is attained and the profitable imponderabilia of the Balfour proclamation have been harvested — declares to have meant no more than that the Jews of Palestine should have the same civil and re- ligious rights as all the other inhabitants of Palestine. (As if that elemental axiom needed a world-trumpeted proclamation !) It is not in fact to be Palestine for the Jews but the Jews for Palestine, or rather for the British Empire.
" It is true that years before Mr. Balfour's Declaration I had myself pressed — like the Manchester Guardian — for a British Judaea on a do ut des basis, the Jews to build up Palestine as a Jewish State on the political model of Canada or New Zealand, thus constituting a buffer State for the defence of Egypt. Such a mu- tual service creates a more solid basis for a Jewish State than Chris- tian sympathy. But to ask the Jews, in return for occupying this dangerous position, to accept only the status they could acquire with infinitely less pains in the United States, to exploit their passion for Palestine, seems to me singularly lacking in magnanimity. In the original secret treaty dividing Palestine with France and Rus- sia, the Jews were not considered at all, and they were not the gov- erning consideration even in the substituted scheme, for its primary object (as Colonel Amery of the War Cabinet Staff has admitted at a Zionist banquet) was the defence of Egypt. Nor was its militar- istic and imperialistic character altered by the disinterested sym- pathy with the Jewish problem which many great Englishmen have shown, and in which Mr. Balfour himself is not lacking. But that statesman should have addressed his Declaration, not to the Zionists, who are an international body, but to the constituents of the League of British Jews, whose Chauvinism would have co-operated with their hatred of Zionism to render them ideal political agents for a scheme as advantageous to England as it is corrosive to Zionism proper.
" If, however, the Peace Conference turns out to be more than a high comedy and a genuine League of Nations emerges from it, then President Wilson will have made Mr. Barnes' standpoint as obsolete as my own. Under the League of Nations, with its substi- tution of reason and goodwill for the rivalries of force, Egypt would need no defence, nor the Jews any protector, guardian or super- visor, other than the permanent Executive of the League, with its sword of Damocles ready to fall on any offender. The appoint- ment of a Trustee Power, whether Britain, France or America, would become superfluous. Israel could at once set up all the ma-
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chinery of Government, and from his rich human resources in every country could provide himself with a better administration than that likely to be supplied by any Trustee Power. The supposition that he would deal less reverentially with the Holy Places than the Turk is an insult. These shrines are, moreover, at bottom, Jewish. As for internal order, Israel has a soldiery of three-quarters of a mil- lion to draw from, starred with military honours at the hands of every belligerent country. For of course even ex-enemy Jews must help to re-build Palestine, which would thus become a microcosm of the new world-order.
" The claim of the Jews to Palestine does not rest merely on his- tory, but on the fact that while they are the only people on earth absolutely without a national home, Palestine is a derelict country, whose redemption needs such vast financial and labour forces that it can only ' pay ' a people with ideal interests in the soil. Its 600,000 Arabs, whose disproportionate presence is the gravest ob- stacle to the rise of the Jewish State, have created nothing there ex- cept trouble for the Jewish Colonies, and should be gradually and amicably transplanted to the Arab Kingdom, which is to be re-es- tablished next door, and with which the Jewish State would cor- dially co-operate. Race redistribution in the interests of the gen- eral world-happiness is, I take it, one of the functions of the League of Nations, and one that must be executed in many parts of Europe. It has even been suggested as the solution of the Irish question. But I had rather see an independent Palestine consisting of Arabs and Jews shouldering a common burden, than see a Palestine Jewry paralysed by tutelage and robbed by a Trustee Power of the invig- orating struggle for self-expression and self-determination."
XXIV
It will be seen that I more than suspected the Versailles Peace Conference would prove a " high comedy," but in view of the world-interests at stake I felt it should be given — as I had at first given the Balfour Declaration — the benefit of the doubt, and therefore when I was asked by Asia, the journal of the American Asiatic Society, to contribute to its special Palestine number, I wrote, in an article entitled " Before the Peace Conference " :
" With the arrival in France of President Wilson, the champion of the League of Nations, the most momentous episode in all human history begins, the true ' War for the World/ to which Armageddon has been only a prologue, and the loss of which would mean the vic- tory of Prussianism and the bankruptcy of civilisation. The whole planet is in the grip of Allied Might, and it needs but Allied Right
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to reshape all racial boundaries and international relations. Here there is no place for Secret Diplomacy. All claims and interests must be plain, provable and public, and it is in the light of the con- tentment of peoples and not in the darkness of diplomatic intrigue that the repartition must be made. In some instances, where the chaos of populations is a menace to permanent settlement, there must be mutual adjustments, even (in the gravest cases) gradual measures of race redistribution, but, given the will to Peace, there is no knot which Reason and Love cannot untie. If mankind thus builds a brotherhood, the immeasurable slaughter and suffering of the war will be redeemed, and the prophetic gospel of ancient Ju- daea will come to its own at last: ' They shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning-hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war anv more.'
" But Judaism stands to gain also a minor traditional hope from the Peace Conference: the re-possession of Palestine. And if this secondary consummation could be united with the setting up of Jerusalem as the seat of the League of Nations instead of the bank- rupt Hague, the two Hebraic dreams, the major and the minor, would be fused in one, and the Hebrew metropolis — that meeting- place of three world-religions — would become at once the centre and svmbol of the new era.
" But a Hebrew Palestine, if it is to e'xist at all, must be a reality, not a sham. Such interpretations as have hitherto been vouch- safed us of the vaunted British Declaration scarcelv seem serious. The ' Jewish National Home ' is to be a British Crown Colony with a predominantly Arab population, even if a French Syria does not lop off a considerable slice from its meagre 10,000 square miles. The power in every country, Lord Morley tells us in his ' Auto- biography,' always resides in the land-owning classes. Yet over 30,000 Arab landlords and some 600,000 fellaliin are to continue in possession of the bulk of the Holy soil. Moreover, Bethlehem and perhaps other places are to be too sacred for Jewish hands. Nor may we guard the shrines entrusted for so many centuries to the Turk, although there is no monument in Palestine, whether Christian, Jewish or Mohammedan, which is not a memorial to Jewish genius and saintliness. While the Czecho-Slovaks and the Jugo-Slavs and still other peoples scarcely known to history are to flourish on their own soil with all the apparatus of sovereignty, the greatest and longest-martyred of all the oppressed peoples — a people which has supplied no small proportion of the outstanding figures of the world-crisis, and in whose literature this whole new era finds its inspiration — is to crawl into a corner of its own land like a leper colony, warned to keep off this and to keep off that, or to keep away from this Jew and to keep away from that Jew, and repeating on its own soil the humiliations and subservience of its
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2,000 years of agony and ignominy. Such a Palestine has neither the glamour of poetry nor the practicality of prose. It is neither Jewish nor National nor a Home.
"If this is what the great Declaration meant, then it was an illu- sion and an insult. But we are entitled to assume, and the elo- quence of its Christian protagonists and their endorsement of the Hebrew University encourage us to assume, that the Declaration was neither a political manoeuvre nor a mockery of the great Jewish hope ; that it was intended to settle the great Jewish question in har- mony with the spirit of this great moment of world reconstruction, when everything is in the melting-pot and the whole ' sorry scheme of things ' that has been shattered is to be remoulded ' nearer to the heart's desire.' And hence we must suppose that this new sys- tem of creative politics will not stop short with disentangling Eu- rope, and that those amicable measures of race redistribution, which we have already seen to be an unavoidable part of a final world-set- tlement, will be carried out in Palestine as elsewhere. Thus the Arabs would gradually be settled in the new and vast Arabian Kingdom to liberate which from the Turk, Jews no less than Arabs have laid down their lives, and with which the Jewish Common- wealth would cultivate the closest friendship and co-operation. Only thus can Palestine become a ' Jewish National Home.' Only thus can Israel — with his diaspora of fourteen millions — risk be- ing told that Palestine is his country. Only thus can a final peace- ful refuge be prepared against such race hatreds as are finding bloody expression in Poland at this very moment. Only with a Jewish majority (not, of course, a Jewish totality), only with the land nationalised — and Jewish as well as Arab land must be ex- propriated with reasonable compensation — can Israel enter upon the task of building up that model State, the construction of which American Zionism, in its trustful acceptance of the Declaration, has already outlined. And it is now or never.
" Even if our object was merely to build up an ordinary common- wealth, had we, in addition to the chaos of the regathering, to con- front inter-racial friction and unrest, which indeed has already be- gun, our statesmanship would be taxed to breaking-point. If Pales- tine is to be ' safe for democracy/ a minority cannot at the outset control a majority six times its size, while if on the other hand the majority controls the minority, it could restrict our immigration and nip the ' Jewish National Home ' in the bud. In any case, the cheap vast labour-force already in existence would seriously limit the possibilities of Jewish immigration. If we boycotted this force we should be accused of worse than Polish racialism; if we used it we should be charged with exploiting it, with being merely a capitalistic class, parasites on our ' hewers of wood and drawers of water.' With three-quarters of a million soldiers in the great war, not to mention the Jewish regiments already in Palestine, on which, ac-
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cording to Colonel Patterson, the whole military movement was piv- oted, we have ample resources both for labour and order, and with a general of genius like Sir John Monash there is no need to search for a Jewish Governor'. If this is a dream, it at least follows the laws of life and politics on which all other States are established: it is the timid compromise that would be the doubtful and the dan- gerous experiment. One would have thought that this war was a sufficient object-lesson in the rankling poisons of race-hatred gener- ated between peoples pent in the same territory. No, the Jews must possess Palestine as the Arabs are to possess Arabia or the Poles Poland. Otherwise, while not abandoning the existing He- brew Colonies nor neglecting Palestine as an immigration area, Israel must look, like Jochanan ben Zakkai, for other means of continuing his chosen mission/'
XXV
We are thus back at our starting-point — Jochanan ben Zakkai and the fall of the Jewish State. Nothing is settled and Israel is still confronted with the riddle of the Sphinx.
Undoubtedly, my suggestion of amicable race-redistribution or a voluntary trek like that of the Boers from Cape Colony is literally the only " way out " of the difficulty of creating a Jewish State in Palestine, and if it is as impracticable as is generally alleged, then the whole Zionist project was a chimera, an impasse into which Britain was misled by the Zionist leaders at a time when British politicians caught at any straw, and, as Lord Lamington said, entered under stress of war into under- takings that clashed with one another. Two national homes, in a country smaller than ranches have been in South America, constitute a greater impracticability than an Arab exodus. Nor is my suggestion such an enormity as Prince Feisal pre- tends. Analogous shiftings of population have been suggested in other cases, not only in Ireland but wherever the peace treaties have left " Ulsters " — rankling matter in the wrong place, that had best be drawn off. The Poles, as I have pointed out, are claiming that the whole three millions of their Jewry should be emigrated because their nationality cannot endure an adulteration of one in seven. How then shall the Jewish nationality in Palestine grapple with an Arab nationality of seven to one? I should have no objection to an orderly migra- tion of Polish Jews from the inferno which Poland is making for them, to a less barbarous soil, though while Arab States await the Palestine Arabs on the very borders of the Holy Land,
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there is nowhere, far or near, any Jewish State to receive the Polish Jews, and they must at best be distributed about America or Russia. But do not let us over-sentimentalise, or talk as if nobody ever wandered from the beloved groves or graves of their forefathers, as if man was a limpet. The exodus of villagers to towns is a phenomenon only too frequent. The colossal streams of pre-war emigration from Europe — a million a year to America alone — are a proof that not even new conditions daunt the peasant mind. In the war we have seen millions, especially of Jews, calamitously uprooted and wandering about Europe footsore, hungry, and bleeding, everywhere expelled and nowhere welcomed. By the terms of the armistice all Germans in Turkey were compelled to emigrate at brief notice. Com- pared with such dolorous hegiras, a well-ordered emigration to a pre-arranged home amid one's kinsmen, with full compensation for values left behind, a movement organised at either end, offers no terrors compared with the conflicts and race-frictions it averts. The Arabs of Palestine might of themselves desire to withdraw from the impending pressure of Anglo-Jewish civilisa- tion, as the more fanatical Mohammedans are now beginning to trek from India to Afghanistan in connection with the Caliphate agitation. According to an Arab sheikh who has issued a pro-Zionist manifesto, the Arabs of Palestine are used to being expropriated. It has been the practice — and without compensation even — of the very Effendis who are behind the opposition to Zionism. And there is a further consideration. The Palestine which will be " The Jewish National Home " will not be the Palestine now overrun by the Arabs, any more than the Dutch polder-land is the domain of those who fished and shot over it before it was reclaimed from the sea. The whole country, to whose ruin Arab fecklessness has contributed as much as Turkish tyranny, will have to be re-created. Much of the land is stony or malarious : much is not beneficially occu- pied; freed from its cultivation by the primitive ploughs and methods of the illiterate fellahin, it could raise far more food for a hungering humanity. Thousands of the proprietors are absentee landlords, resident in Cairo or elsewhere, who would merely profiteer by the rise in land values due to Jewish indus- try. And if Lord Shaftesbury was literally inexact in describ- ing Palestine as a country without a people, he was essentially correct, for there is no Arab people living in intimate fusion with the country, utilising its resources and stamping it with a characteristic impress: there is at best an Arab encampment,
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the break-up of which would throw upon the Jews the actual manual labour of regeneration, and prevent them from ex- ploiting the fellahin, whose numbers and lower wages are more- over a considerable obstacle to the proposed immigration from Poland and other suffering Jewish centres.
If, however, the Arabs will not, as Longfellow taught us to expect, fold their tents and silently steal away, if they elect to remain in Palestine, then, as I have emphasised in my speeches, " their welfare must be as dear to us as our own." But even so, painful though the necessity be, they should come at once under a Jewish Government, and Sir Herbert Samuel should represent the Zionists rather than the British Foreign Office; the small but expansible Jewish force being backed up by Britain or the Allies, exactly as Poland or Czecho-Slovakia has been backed up. For, as I pointed out in reply to Mr. Frederic Harrison's querulous crudities in The Fortnightly Review:
" the Arabs should recognise that the road of their renewed national glory lies through Baghdad, Damascus, and Mecca, and all the vast territory freed for them from the Turks, and be content so far as Palestine is concerned to be politically submerged. The Powers which freed it and them have surely the right to ask them not to grudge the petty strip necessary for the renaissance of a still more down-trodden people."
The unearned increment of land values which would at once accrue to the landlords, the rise in wages which would come to the fellahin, and the sanitation, drainage, irrigation and af- forestation brought to the common country would be sufficient compensation for their political subordination. The San Remo Treaty provided that nothing should be done to lower their status. But that status had been one of subjection to Turkey, and they would assuredly find more liberal governors in the Jews. The last Zionist Conference voted for land-na- tionalisation, but how can the Zionists nationalise the Arab land unless they are the Government, how indeed can they work out any national ideal? Palestine will not even have a Jewish calendar !
XXVI
The reader will ask, however, since the Arab will neither sub- mit to the Jewish government nor trek ; since, rather, under the Pan-Arabic leaders a new immigration of Arabs is threatened,
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how could Britain handle the problem more fairly than she has done? The answer is that in the first place she should never have announced a solution which is no solution, and whose profit is only to her. Summoned to explain how he proposes to build up the " Jewish National Home," Mr. Balfour can do noth- ing but appeal at the Albert Hall to the Arabs of Palestine, and in the very language which I had used a week or so earlier in replying to Mr. Frederic Harrison. " Remember we have freed you from the Turk, that we are setting up Arab States in the Hedjaz and Mesopotamia," echoes Mr. Balfour. " Do not begrudge that small notch in the Arab territory being given to the people which for hundreds of years has been separated from it." But a plea to the Arabs, which is all very well from a humble penman with no power but words, becomes ridiculous in the statesman responsible for the project, in the depositary of the Allied Power, which in return for services, without which neither Svria nor Palestine could have been wrested from the Turk, undertook to shape both the Arab and the Jewish future. Mr. Balfour should have made the necessary provision for the rise of a Jewish State when he dealt with Feisal and the Arab leaders : their consent to the sequestration of this " small notch in the Arab territory " should have been stipulated in advance, at the moment when they were plunging their fists into bags of British gold; a moment immortalised for us by that invaluable, if sometimes indiscreet, institution, the cinema.
Without any provision whether for Arab emigration or Jewish administration, Palestine bids fair to remain purely a British possession, whose reconstruction is thrown upon Jewish capital and energy. Max Nordau — whose withdrawal from Zionist officialdom is significant — has shown in a brilliant anal- ysis the danger to the Suez Canal, India, and all England's interests in the near-East if the new Arabo-Syrian imperialism goes unchecked. The Jews, according to this conception, are to occupy the dangerous position of a wedge between Syrian and Egyptian discontent, " to defend the British position at the point of contact of Africa and Asia," to stand, in Mr. Wells's metaphor, amid the swirl of traffic on that old and hazardous highway where they were always being run over. But this time without the compensation of constituting a State, and, unless definite political guarantees are given, without any hope even for the future; mere pawns in an imperial game.
" Sic vos non vobis mellificatis apes"
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And, as Dr. Nordau points out too, what alternative policy had England? She could not leave Palestine to France, or give it back to Turkey. It is providential for her that the Jews are at hand to relieve her of the burden. I well remem- ber how Mr. Barnes, who is now so suspiciously concerned to whittle away the Balfour Declaration, confided to a Chris- tian friend of mine the embarrassment of the Government at the opposition of the wealthy anti-Zionist Jews. " We don't know what to do about Palestine — the Jews won't take it."
Even the Zionist Jews who do not nominally refuse Palestine believe that a minority must in no circumstances govern a ma- jority. Placed between two mad peoples, the English and the Jews, the Jews who will never take a country, and the English who will never leave one untaken, I behold the long effort to endow a landless people with a country ending in the addition of one to an Empire already possessing a quarter of the globe. Nordau, who shares the view that a minority must not govern a majority, finds the solution not in a vast Arab emigration but in a vast Jewish immigration, say half a million in a single year; a proposition in whose practicability he is the sole be- liever, just as I stand alone in the wild contention that there are occasions when a minority has a right to govern a major- ity : a phenomenon apparently unknown even in India or South Africa ! My defence of this extraordinary thesis must be briefly summarised from the many speeches which I spare the reader.
(1) Small as is the Jewish population, the British governing minority in Palestine is very much smaller.
(2) The smallness of the Jewish population, like the relative largeness of the Arab population, is transient. The very ob- ject of the scheme is to find a place for millions. Had the Jews not been a minority in Palestine, there would have been no need of special Balfourian manifestoes on their behalf; even under the Turkish constitution they would have dominated automatically. This is a scheme, as Lord Robert Cecil put it, " dealing in futures " ; what we have to look at is not the few myriads of Jews actually in Palestine, but the race of fourteen or fifteen millions from which streams of immigration are to pour. The ridiculous argument has been used that if you are to count the individuals outside Palestine, then there too the Arabs far outnumber the Jews. But these Arabs outside Pal- estine have already their national homes ; they do not need Palestine.
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(3) From Sir Herbert Samuel's speeches in Palestine, sup- plemented by the proclamation of King George V., we gather that the official plan is for a gradual evolution of the Jewish National Home, and that this evolution depends primarily on the immigration of sufficient Jews to submerge the Arab popula- tion, not however in one sudden flood, but by small and care- fully regulated streams, according to the economic conditions. But it is doubtful if " safety first " is a safe principle for the establishment of States. There is more hope in the desperate and undisciplined stampede which would ensue from the sham- bles of Europe were the Nordau scheme adopted. New his- tory is never made by efficient cabinet-ministers. It comes rather from prisons, and the Jewish future now turns more upon Jabotinsky than upon the admirable and official Samuel.1 It is obvious in anv case that even the official plan has had to do away with self-determination. For if the Arabs had their parliamentary way, the door to the Jews would be " banged, barred, and bolted." In setting up an unelective council of administration the Government is thus thwarting this menace. Not onlv is the device undemocratic, but it is illegitimate, for before the war Palestine — Arabs and Jews alike — had a dem- ocratic status, returning members to the Parliament at Con- stantinople, and to lower its status thus is against all the an- cient conventions of after-warfare, not to mention that this particular war was fought " to make the world safe for democ- racy." It is thus clear that if the " Jewish National Home " is to be built up without an Arab trek, it can only be by meth- ods strictly unconstitutional. This Mr. Balfour in his latest utterance has not denied, pleading quite in my own vein that the claim of the Jews upon Palestine is, though as peculiar as the people, no real contradiction of " the principle of self-de- termination," and that exceptional problems need exceptional handling.
In fact without force of a kind there can be no " Jewish Na- tional Home." Qui veut la fin veut les moyens. The objec- tion to the evolutionary form of force is, however, that although slow, it is not sure — indeed, the only thing sure is infinite fric- tion. If unconstitutional methods are to prevail over a long period, the nettle had best be grasped firmly at once and the
i Lloyd George is reported to have said that since Samuel went there, Palestine is the one bright spot in the world. This is something to rejoice in, even although it is not the Jewish future that is assured, but merely the future of Palestine.
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administration made Jewish forthwith, leaving the Arabs to accept by intelligent anticipation their inevitable minority status. The best observers report that the British conquest of Palestine found the Arabs ready to accept any regime, and had this malleable moment been seized, a Jewish Government could have been established with a general acquiescence in its justice. It was the delay and vacillation which followed that gave intrigue and opposition their opportunity. But it may not yet be too late.
(4) The Holy Places can be all reverentially safeguarded by Jews ; the Christian shrines by Hebrew Christians, the Moslem by Hebrew Mohammedans. Nothing would show more convinc- ingly that the Jewish State was not a reactionary return to a narrow and fanatical theocracy. Nor could there be a more significant climax and conclusion to a great and tragic era of history than a Jewish guard of honour round the tomb of Christ.
XXVII
But the friction and the bloodshed, the strife, racial and re- ligious, the intrigues and the plottings, and the bovcotting proclamations that have already aborted Zionism, show how right is the old tradition that associates the return of the Jews to Palestine with the millennium. " Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts." Had the spirit of Reason and Goodwill, which Wilson invoked, been applied, had the world turned from cockpit to commonwealth, had politics for once become religion, had in short the victorious Allies approached their problem in the spirit of their professed faith, there would have been a world-wide spiritual uplifting, and a real restoration of the Jews to Palestine would have be- come possible. For the repartition of the planet on the " prin- ciple of nationality " would have proceeded in Palestine, as everywhere else, in the new spirit; to which the Arabs, like all other peoples, would have vibrated. A great wave of peace would have flooded the world.
" Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord ? or who shall stand in his holy place? " asks the Psalmist.
" He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully."
But the Powers brought neither cleanness of hands nor pur-
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ity of heart, nor were they innocent of dark and deceitful treaties. Palestine, instead of being a sacred trust, was merely a bone over which France and England squabbled, and the sur- render of which to all-avaricious England, in common with the oil of Mosul, has been openly deplored by M. Briand.
My whole conception of an amicable Arab trek into Syria or other of the new and neighbouring Arab States, rested on the hypothesis that these States were to be set up genuinely: whereas we have seen Syria overrun by French imperialism, and just as I was formerly revolted by Prince Feisal's grasping and ungenerous pan-Arabism, so have my sympathies under- gone a revulsion in favour of this downfallen puppet of Eng- land and France.
Even now, were France willing to retire from Syria, a bar- gain could in all probability be struck by the Powers with Prince Feisal for recognising Palestine as a Jewish State. But French imperialism is still more blatant than British — is not this Erastian State, whose nuns fled from it, protector of " the Christendom of the East? " To speak of " sacred " trusts or anything sacred except sacro egoismo in such a connection would be blasphemous. Not from such a whirlpool of insane imperialisms can the calm currents of universal justice pro- ceed. Thus the ancient Rabbis who asserted the futility and even the frowardness of redemption through the medium of man, were, though they played into the hands of the otiose and inert, profounder than one realised. " Hitherto," they pointed out, " ye have been redeemed by flesh and blood, and ye have been returned again and again to servitude and exile." It is not in- deed till mankind gets the new heart and the new spirit that Ezekiel demanded of his people, it is not till the Holy Ghost moves through humanity establishing a true brotherhood of the peoples, that Israel can be redeemed in any but a piecemeal and evanescent fashion. The augurs at Rome forbore to smile when they met one another. How European statesmen are able to conduct their Conferences with so owlish a mien, still more how they can keep from winking when talking to us of these moral " Mandates," which so mysteriously correspond with their secret treaties and ambitions, is a standing marvel. They must assuredly assume in us a sancta simplicitas beyond the sucking babe's. " Were they ashamed when they had com- mitted abomination? " asked Jeremiah, speaking of those who said " Peace, peace, when there was no peace." " Nay, they were not at all ashamed, neither could they blush."
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Once upon a time there was no urgent call for thinkers to in- tervene in politics, at any rate not in the detail of politics. If the world did not always go very well, it was not heading for bankruptcy or " rattling back to barbarism." There was al- ways an opposition party to check overweening folly — the rival fools had not discovered how to retain office indefi- nitely by pooling their power. The wiser politicians might not be so profound as they seemed to their followers, but at least a Gladstone brought moral energy and a Disraeli intel- lectual force to current affairs, and the word of a Cabinet Min- ister stood at par. Nobody in my young days would have dared to stand up in Parliament, as Lord Curzon has stood up in the House of Lords, and gravely profess that the Palestine mandate was dependent for its content on the League of Na- tions (which had not conferred it) or that the Allies had agreed to recognise Syria as an independent State — under the man- date of France! With similar aplomb Mr. Bonar Law has pacified the Commons, Lord Robert Cecil included, by ex- plaining that England's promise to set up an Arab State in Syria was qualified by the proviso : " Without detriment to the interests of her Ally, France." There is nothing in Lewis Carroll more grotesque than this brazen use of the word " in- dependent " to cover practical annexation ; and it shows an insolent contempt for public opinion, which perhaps public opinion that endures the insolence deserves.
XXVIII
There is no correcting balance to be found in the bulk of the Fourth Estate. On the contrary. It is a newspaper — the Temps — that has made perhaps the most impudent state- ment of our generation. Commenting on the Emir Feisal's righteous resistance to France's " occupation " of Syria, this journal said: " The Allies did not conquer Prussian militarism to allow the development in its place of a Hedjaz militarism, which will set aflame the Arab world."
" These are the new Dark Ages," wrote Tennyson, better in- spired than he knew, " the days of the popular press." They are dark not with ignorance but with ink. The press, orig- inally created to give light, now functions to exclude it, and this artificial inspissation leaves us in a far greater fog than in the primitive days before Gutenberg's invention. Some of the Hebrew incunabula contain poems in honour of printing, which
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is glorified as the art of writing at one time with many pens. It may now be defined as the art of lying at one time with many mouths. The first Hebrew compositors were not regarded as artisans, but entitled " performers of a holy work," and this label still survives among the credulous people of Apella Judasus. Christendom has evolved the more accurate locution of the printer's devil.
An American writer enumerates the dozen foremost organs of America which have refused to insert an article of his in miti- gation of the popular view of Bolshevism. It is, he observes, " the greatest campaign of falsification in the history of man- kind." He is perhaps forgetting the antithetical glorifica- tion of the old Russia, which preceded the war. Rut the fact remains that our century has witnessed the reduction of men- dacity to a profession, and of its diffusion to a science. It is an unconscious tribute to the goodness of man's heart and the soundness of his instincts, that the truth must be hidden from him.
George Eliot inveighed against the debasement of the moral currency : to-day there is not merely debasement, there is shame- less falsification, shillings marked sovereigns, and florins farth- ings, and threepenny-bits swaggering as half-crowns, and in this currency we have to exchange our thoughts. We are liv- ing — as I said in an earlier book — in one of those eras de- scribed by Mommsen in which words no longer correspond with things. Writers whose profession it is to seek out delicacies and subtleties of vocabulary are expected to accept as equiva- lents terms grossly antithetical, and " the fell incensed points of mighty opposites " are swamped
" In the common deluge drowning old political common-sense."
The British Academy ought to give us a dictionary, defining within what limits a word may loop the loop. Meantime Slav- ery is Freedom, and Imperialism is Idealism, and Chauvinism is Christianity, and Negotiations with a Government fail to imply Recognition of it, and to divide up a country is to guarantee its integrity, and the Jews are to have a national home in a country populated by Arabs and ruled by British. It is no longer the Oscar Wildes that sound paradoxical, it is those who stand up for the simplest political morality or decency, or the simplest British ideals.
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" Milton, thou should'st be living at this hour: England hath need of thee."
The bulk of Englishmen seem to have forgotten that if their forefathers after a struggle of centuries ejected from the State preventive arrest or orders in Council, it was not from mere abstract objection to legislative fads but because without the protection of Habeas Corpus, trial by jury and free parlia- ments, no man stood safe. Bitter experience lay behind their demands, as it lies again before their descendants. All these harsh lessons will have to be learnt afresh unless Englishmen at once shake off this new stifling network of bureaucracy, as Samson shook off the green withes and new ropes of the Philis- tines. The war for freedom, while enlarging England's Em- pire and confirming her command of the seas, has turned her into a tyranny. For my part I see no satisfaction in ruling the waves if you are chained to the oar.
The poet Cowper, a Bigger Englander than Kipling, since he valued the greatness of England by its value to all humanity, boasted that the slave whose foot touched our soil was free. That freedom has been England's greatest asset on the Conti- nent. More than her wealth it gave her the leadership of the world. To-day the slave's foot would never even succeed in touching her soil. A barbed wire entanglement, bristling with Bumbles — detectives, excise men, passport functionaries, what not — would prevent his landing. And such slaves — such poor victims of Continental autocracies — whose feet did touch our soil ten or twenty years ago, are being deported without trial, without reason, under irresponsible denunciation, some- times after an internment equally monstrous, suspected yester- day of being pro-Germans and to-day badgered as Bolshevists.
I happened to come across the " Annual Register " for 1792 — the year when the French had executed their King and the Revolutionary Republic was calling on all nations to rise against their rulers. There was the same panic-stricken de- mand in Parliament for an Aliens' Bill — only this time it was to keep out the French, whose seditious emissaries might over- run the State. The British histories of the period all repre- sent the French as the most dangerous of all peoples, multi- plying in numbers, entrenched in the centre of Europe, and aim- ing at universal domination.
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XXIX
" Great men are not always wise," says Job, " nor do old men understand." But to-day the world's great men seem never wise and none of them is young enough to know better. Zola ends his novel " La Debacle " by picturing an engine driver fallen dead on his engine, while the long train of crowded car- riages goes roaring onwards into the night. On such a blind train I feel myself a helpless passenger, without the bliss of ignorance as to the driver's condition. There is even 'worse than no-guidance, there is misguidance, positive steering for collisions, as, for example, of the white and coloured races. The Japanese victory over Russia in 1905 — the cardinal event of modern history — had undermined in the overwhelming masses of the coloured peoples the illusion of some magical su- periority in the white, and thus shaken the stability of the bal- ance of colour-power. Yet France and England dared to enlist coloured troops of all sorts in the Great War and to equip them ultra-scientifically against the white man, even quarter- ing them finally in Frankfort and — as if symbolically — in Goethe's house! At the same time the grievances of the col- oured populations of the world, especially of the Africans, are neither abated nor placated. Everywhere there are rumblings and mutterings of the coming storm, and if we had the least sense of proportion we white races would abandon our jeal- ousies and rival imperialisms, precisely as the Kaiser suggested long ago in a cartoon, and run up a League of White Nations at least, before we reap the whirlwind that we have sown in wind. But in an era of cataclysms more colossal than the world has ever known, its affairs are in the hands of persons who for light and leading give us darkness and misleading, whose official statements alternate between falsehood and auda- cious nonsense, and whose policy wriggles along by devious and underground routes to obscure and catastrophic ends. It would have been a humiliation for a cause associated with eight- een centuries of prayer to owe its success to such tarnished in- struments, though the effort to do one right thing unselfishly might have served to cleanse them. That the Jewish future in Palestine should have been exposed to the sordid bargainings of such a Peace Conference is a tragedy with scarcely a re- deeming feature.
Lord Robert Cecil said at the same Zionist Demonstration at
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which Mr. Balfour sought to shuffle off his responsibility upon Arab magnanimity, that " when the history of the war came to be written, he believed that the two outstanding features would be the establishment of the national Jewish home and the crea- tion of the League of Nations. They represented the great ideals for which we fought and by which we conquered."
It is perfectly true that we conquered by means of these great ideals. But it is equally true that we have kicked away the ladders by which we mounted. Lord Robert Cecil's optimism is sublime, for at the moment it requires the eye of faith to see either a League of Nations or a Jewish National Home as a sequel of the war. Tempted of the spirit — to use a phrase of Berenson's — mankind has alas ! resisted. And the fiasco of the League is infinitely more tragic than that of Zionism, which concerns only a single people. That humanity standing at the cross-roads of history should have failed to take the turning to the right, is the saddest episode in all man's long tragic ad- venture. And with all mankind bruised and bereaved, the solic- itation to the path of peace was so unparalleled. Nor was the voice of the League's prophet vox clamantis in deserto.
Never had man born of woman such a housetop to speak from, never were so many people prepared to hear, as through a megaphone, the voice of Jerusalem, of which this great Amer- ican Puritan seemed the inspired medium.
" How art thou f alien, O Lucifer, son of the morning ! '
It was not wholly the tragedy of the honest man fallen among thieves, there was also internal weakness.
" We are betrayed by what is false within."
XXX
The alternative Woodrow Wilson set up of the world as com- monwealth or the world as cockpit was not clearly faced even by himself. "Under which King, Bezonian?" The incoher- ence of the Peace Conference was due to its trying to pay alle- giance simultaneously to both. Never in fact in human history has anything been so written about and so little thought out as the League of Nations. One imagined from certain noble and luminous utterances that at least Wilson understood it. But 'tis a wise father that knows his own child, and the complacency
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with which he carried back on the George Washington a gro- tesque changeling argues that he had no real acquaintance with the cherub he begot on the world's imagination. We have in- deed his own confession of the humorous surprise with which he suddenly realised that under his League there would be no neutrals, so that the vexed question of the Freedom of the Seas would not arise. But even this confession was a further error, for, apart from the nations excluded, the conditions of the League allow any existing member to withdraw after due no- tice, and thus to become a neutral in any wars waged by the League.
Months before he sailed for Paris, he had pontificated upon the League and upon the indispensability of its inclusion in the Peace Treaty, but his sense of papal infallibility seems unshaken even by his own avowal of his misconceptions or by the con- sciousness he can hardly escape that on the question of Peace or War he had boxed the political compass. He still stoutly maintains that " the work of the Conference squares as a whole with the principles agreed upon as the basis of peace." It is a happy and enviable temperament, but it belongs rather to the Chadbands than to the Christs.
Had President Wilson returned home heart-broken at his defeat by the dark forces of Europe, he would have been the greatest success in human history. But that he should have triumphantly waved scraps of paper from which the Four- teen Points have been practically erased, here is the true trag- edy of his downfall. It adds his own failure to the world's.
We need only compare Mr. Wilson's appraisal of the Ver- sailles achievement with that of General Smuts, who has re- placed him as humanity's hope, to measure the depth of his fall. For the voice is now that of the politician pleading that the intricate pattern of international relationship was cut too deep by historic circumstances to be ignored or reversed. The belated discovery does as little credit to Wilson, the historian, as his failure to transcend the historic obstacles did to the man of action. Just as Balfour should have secured Pales- tine by accord with the Arabs before launching his Declaration to the Jews, so before entering the war, whose issue he held in the hollow of his hand, should Wilson have bound Europe by contract to his principles and swept away the " old entangle- ments " ; especially those entanglements which he indicts — and it is a curious indictment from the man who had allied America with these Governments on account of their unmitigated right-
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eousness — as " promises which Governments had made to one another in days when Might and Right were confused." To break with past history was precisely what he had preached as the world's great need. Mankind was to take a leap in the light and to rise into a new plane of world-unity. A new heart, General Smuts reminds us, was to be given to us, no less than to our enemies, being, as we are, all members of one another. We were to be just, even to those to whom we did not wish to be just. Alas ! the Peace — especially the Austrian Peace — is less just than many a Treaty under the old order. So far from the spirit of the brotherhood of mankind pervading the Conference, the Big Four who made the Peace could hardly keep it among themselves.
Not that Mr. Wilson had forgotten his ideal. Indeed it was his undoing. Lured on by his dream and fooled to the top of his bent, he sold the Peace in exchange for the League of Nations, and was fobbed off with a simulacrum. For the League of Nations that was palmed off on him is merely a de- vice for guaranteeing the injustices of the Peace Treaty and eternalising them. Both as a bargainer and an apostle Presi- dent Wilson suffered defeat.
XXXI
Not only is the League not a League of Nations, nor the Peace Treaty a Treaty of Peace, but President Wilson's ten- aciously achieved embodiment of the first in the second was a triumph as hollow as the rest. For the whole point of the in- corporation of the League in the Peace Treaty was that the co-existence of this covenant of co-operation, this new world- order, would react enormously upon the nature of the settlement, substituting as it must goodwill for hate, and reducing racial frictions to a minimum by the world-policy of the open door and free and equal access to ports, harbours and railways. In par- ticular, boundary questions could be denuded of their signifi- cance, for the security of the individual frontier would depend not on its fortresses nor its geographical barriers but on the joint protection of the peoples.
But instead of the new world-order influencing the Peace Settlement, that Treaty is drawn up on the assumption of the constancy of the bad old world-order, and security of frontier has been pursued even to the sacrifice of the vaunted " prin- ciple of nationality." Indeed, so far from the League reacting
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on the Peace Settlement in mitigation, it is — as already indi- cated — the harshness of the Peace Settlement that has reacted on the League. In being associated with the Peace Treaty, the League of Nations has touched pitch and been defiled. Far better had the League been created in the calm of Peace.
For instead of facilitating and simplifying the Peace Settle- ment, as complicated issues are lightened the moment the parties come together in goodwill, it has added its own asym- metry and lack of principle to the cumbrous complexity of the Treaty. The two covenants have indeed been signed as one, but despite their common taint, the union remains monstrous and hybrid. The mountain in labour has produced a flitter- mouse, an uncouth and sinister bat.
It is not, in fact, a League of Nations that has been brought forth, but a League of Damnations. Despite the promise of preferential treatment to a democratised Germany, the united vengeances of England, France and America have been wreaked upon the German Republic in the concoction of the Peace terms, which involve too a protracted alliance to ensure that the con- ditions are exacted and the handicap of them never henceforth transcended. In diminishing and crippling Germany to the ut- most possible and in building up against her resurrection a barrier of new nations, revived or created, lie at once punish- ment and security. The procedure is not illegitimate. Ger- many herself admits a measure of guilt and had challenged forces by which she is abased and chastised. Nor is it im- possible that a warless world is henceforth practically secure, when finally the last cracklings of this gigantic forest-fire grow silent. Hate as well as Love, Death as well as Life, may bring Peace. The spine of Germany may be irremediably broken, and the proved colossal cost and ferocity of modern war may suffice to keep a soulless peace among her imperialist rivals, even though France celebrates her victory by the sinister sym- bolism of the Gallic cock crowing above the piled German guns in the Champs Elysees.
What is revolting, however, is the pretence that the League of Hate is a League of Love, that the disintegration of Austria and the magnification of Poland are due primarily to a rever- ence for nationality, and that a new world-order can be erected on Nemesis.
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XXXII
Wilson defined the object of his League as to keep justice between nations. That is hardly ensured by a clause like Ar- ticle X, which seeks to entail the spoils of war and render them the inalienable property of the present conquerors. The Ar- ticle in question might lead to monstrous injustices, not only against the defeated countries, but even among the present Al- lies. France, for example, might reduce her birth rate still lower, and while Belgium overflowed with a vigorous white pop- ulation seeking land in vain, the denuded soil of France might be monopolised by a small slave-owning aristocracy reposing on the industrial labours of prolific immigrants from the Franco- African Colonies. Instead of a pact to guarantee one an- other's territorial integrity, the leagued nations should have undertaken to re-adjust one another's frontiers according to the variations of populations or their economic situation.
Lord Robert Cecil claims indeed that the League recognises the case for continuous re-adjustment, though it insists that this shall be effected not by violence but by discussion and de- bate. It is true there is a provision that disputes shall be re- ferred to arbitration, but the arbitrators would surely have to recognise that such disputes cannot embrace redistribution of territories, since any diminution of boundaries has been barred for all time by Article X. Moreover were the League's object really to do justice between the nations, it would at once apply self-determination to the conquests of its own members ; Shan- tung would cease to trouble and Egypt be at rest. A British Gibraltar or a French Syria would become unthinkable. All rankling grievances thus removed and their recurrence provided against, a small common force would suffice to police the planet. But the League being not a League of Nations, but of Damna- tions, justice other than primitive cannot enter into it.
So far is this petrifaction of ancient injustices admitted, that at the last annual meeting of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, such an advocate of the League of Nations as Professor Gilbert Murray took it for granted that in for- bidding the Powers to use their black troops for their wars, the Covenant's ukase ran only over new territories. For ex- ample, France could not raise such a slave-army in the Cam- eroons. But there was nothing to prevent her from shipping her unfortunate Moors or Algerians to be murdered in her
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European disputes. Similarly, as Mr. Morel reminds us in " The Black Man's Burden," though the mandatory system is to prevail at least nominally over those portions of Africa which have been wrested from Germany, the white man is al- lowed to batten upon the negro everywhere else in that Dark Continent, unrestrained by international control.
Principles of world-control that are not retrospective in time, nor universal in space, recall the famous Pensee of Pascal: " Three degrees of latitude upset all jurisprudence. A merid- ian decides on truth ; in a few years of possession fundamental laws change ; right has its epochs . . . Plais ante justice qu'une riviere borne! Verite au deca des Pyrenees, erreur au dela."
Such piece-meal justice has, no doubt, that strong flavour of practicality beloved of Britain, and recommended by Lord Rob- ert Cecil, international ethics broadening " slowly down from precedent to precedent." But to the Semitic mind it all ap- pears like the behaviour of a gang of burglars who having divided a huge windfall of swag move into a respectable sub- urb, resolved to live honestly for the future, though not with- out subsidies from the thieves' kitchen still operating for their benefit in Seven Dials.
As for the idea that this victorious group, though it refuses to apply retrospective restoration to its own ancient spoils of war, is entitled to deal out retrospective retribution upon guilty warmakers, the best answer to this Pharisaic claim is given in the mere title of a book by an obscure Jew of Bristol : " Jus- tice versus Neutrality." The very fact that neutrality is a recognised war-status shows that there is as yet no common duty of international justice. International ethics not having been yet instituted, there is in the legal sense neither crime nor competent court. The nations are uncouth monsters, ranging at their free will as in the antediluvian age. Individ- uals may be saints, but the biological organism which they con- stitute recognises, in the last resort, no will but that of the stronger; in our corporate capacity we are demoniac. If jus- tice is to reign over these anarchic monsters, there can be no more neutrals, as Wilson belatedly discovered. Meantime, for a public incurably idealist and deceivable, the poor politicians have the burden of expressing the lawlessness of the interna- tional jungle in terms of the internal ethics, and must make Machiavelli sound like the voice of Jerusalem.
No less brazen than Wilson, Mr. Lloyd George denies that the triple agreement within the Covenant " shows a lack of faith
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in the League of Nations." " On the contrary," he urges bouncingly, " the League of Nations will be of no value unless it has the sanction behind it of strong nations, prepared at a moment's notice to stop the aggression." With such childish quibbles do the helmsmen of humanity seek to conceal the error of their courses.
There is no need at all of strong nations inside the League, so long as there are no strong nations outside. Their union is strength, and all the strength necessary. Even if the League inherits strong nations from the old order, why destroy the re- sponsibility of the whole by putting all the work on the part ? By the notorious Article X every member undertakes to pre- serve every other against aggression. Why then limit this duty to the " strong nations " or confine it to German aggres- sion? Even while the Peace Conference, which was supposed to create the world-commonwealth, was in session, a dozen aggres- sions by the smaller nationalities continued to keep the world a cockpit. Lord Robert Cecil, one of the few British statesmen who seriously desire the League, argues that this reinsurance of France outside the League does but specifically repeat an obli- gation already inherent within it. But why this duplication, this double dealing? Is not the League of Damnations rock- based enough? Is it feared that at some future date a member friendly to Germany will refuse to commit the League to a j oint attack upon her? If so, how foolish to have made a unanimous decision necessary ! That was what destroyed the old Polish Diet and incidentally Poland. Any member had only to say " Nie pozwalam " ("I won't have it ") and the proposed meas- ure collapsed, nay, the Diet itself was dissolved. But to this constitutional paralysis are all sittings of the League reduced. Seldom has a contract been made with so many loopholes. An agreement designed by a firm of shady solicitors to protect a bogus company could hardly be less binding. That America has only one vote to Britain's six is no handicap when one vote is just as powerful as six, and when Britain might even be hoist with one of her own votes.
Mr. Lloyd George, speaking at the Versailles Conference, said that he had recently visited the war-zone, and in view of the desolation and horror the thought was borne in forcibly upon him, could nations find no better way of adjusting their disputes than by force? The thought was insincere or shal- low. Were the matter in dispute between the nations the beauty of their literature or their women, the superiority of
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their culture or their agriculture, force would indeed be a ridic- ulous arbiter. But what is always in question between two peoples — disguised if at all but superficially — is precisely which is stronger, and how this dispute is to be solved other than by force I know not. As well say the heavyweight cham- pionship should be referred to arbitration. Either scrap your ideal of brute supremacy, or take it honestly into account.
XXXIII
With the mass of mankind, the fashions of their women are not more mutable than their morals and opinions. But it is im- possible for a truly great man to reverse his mentality within a few months ; and Wilson's change from indicting only the Kaiser and Junkerdom to chastising the whole German people, caught in the Allied Peace-Trap, was as violent as his change from the high temper of " too proud to fight " to the crude mil- itarism of " force, force to the utmost, force without stint or limit." Not that Wilson was alone in the delusion that — as Heine put it — God's work can be done by the Devil.
One hastens, like Figaro, to laugh in reading that old speech by Lord Grey of Fallodon in which he said : " There must be no peace except a peace which is going to ensure that the na- tions of Europe will live in the future free from the shadow of militarism, will live in the open air, and in the light of freedom."
And I have before me an American compilation called " Win the War for Permanent Peace," announced on the cover as by William Howard Taft, and the French Ambassador, and the Representatives of Great Britain, and the Secretary of the Navy, and the Spokesmen of Labour, and Governors of States, and other National Leaders. I have a sardonic satisfaction in remembering that I mocked at the mongrel species of thinker, labelling it "The Military Pacifist," and essaying to jar this fatuous chorus by an article on " The Next War." There is in fact no way of ensuring peace through war. The abandon- ment of the simple code of " peace on earth and goodwill to all men " leaves the politicians confronted with an impenetrable jungle of conflicting interests, and the law of the jungle per- petuates the jungle. Wilson's first thoughts were best.
" The Pacifists are right, but stupid," he was reported as modestly proclaiming, when on second thoughts he entered the war. " I know how to get Peace. They do not." Wilson's way of getting Peace was to stave it off for a couple of years,
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at the cost of rivers of blood and mountains of gold, then to ensue it for eight months at a Peace Conference, to the accom- paniment of twenty-three wars, and the groans of a famished and perishing Europe, and finally to end " the war against war " by a Peace against Peace. Meantime a new and separate war of classes had sprung up the whole world over, manifesting itself in not a few countries by
" Red ruin and the breaking up of Laws."
To mark the Peace he knew how to get, the American Army and Navy have been considerably increased, and in the process of getting it, his notorious land of freedom was turned into a con- script country.
The whole horrible welter is a monument to the futility of Might. Possibly, had Might been really the instrument of Right, instead of its masquerade, possibly had the sword been really the minister of the spirit, it might have shaped a less un- satisfactory world. But the fact remains that righteousness has played but a small part in the re-carving of the world, and " from the lie " — to quote Heine again — " there comes no life."
If the politicians had not already written their doom by their inability to stop the war, their success in stopping the Peace should surely move mankind to relegate their whole order to the dustheap. Democracy, if it insists only on leaders who flatter it, must go to its destruction. If the world is not to perish in its blindness, it must revert to the leadership of thinkers and men of faith. Politics, I repeat, must become religion instead of religion — at the first real call upon it — becoming politics.
From the first volume (price two guineas) of a monumental " History of the Peace Conference," now coming out in five volumes — like a great historical tragedy in five acts — I gather that we ought not to be hard on the peace-makers, for the task that confronted them — poor souls — was nothing less than the re-building of the world which they had so recklessly shattered. War-at-any-price is clearly no simple policy. One knew that to set things straight an army of writers and stu- dents had been occupied almost as long as the war had lasted, and that their historical excursuses, population-analyses, bound- ary and waterway investigations, and reconstructive proposals occupied many lorries, that President Wilson, for his part, not relying on these European presentments, travelled with four truck-loads of similar documents compiled by trusty Ameri-
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cans, and that to grapple with all these issues thousands of secretaries and typists (with special dress allowances for the sex) were mobilised, transported and congregated in vast ho- tels, and that the number of commissions, committees, and sub- committees, and the chaos of questions that came up for set- tlement, " stagger humanity." Yet the bulk of this careful preparatory work was thrown over, we are told ; the principal statesmen who had had no time during the war to work out the solutions, and who feared in any case to raise questions that might divide the Allies, fell back upon ready-made and undi- gested compromises. For never has the historical law that Al- lies always quarrel, and that Peace divides what War united, been better vindicated. They quarrel because they are united not by mutual love but by a common hatred of the enemy, and when he is done with, their own antagonism resurges. Rarely, too, are they in the war for the ideal aims they have trumpeted forth, and victory leaves them wrangling over the spoils. How can one expect them to wash their dirty linen in public? Wil- son's demand for open discussions was of an incredible naivete.
This whole business of the Peace Conference has been like the calling out of gangs of labourers to clear the roads after a ter- rible snowstorm has turned the whole country white and impas- sable. No number of men can cope with the task. But let the sun come out strongly and in a day the whole mass will be melt- ing away, not of course without floods and inconveniences here and there, but still with results infinitely more satisfactory than could be achieved by millions of spades and shovels. So, if the sun of universal love had broken through the clouds of rival racial egotisms, all those industrious commissions and congested lorries and scribbling secretaries and flapping typists and bar- gaining politicians would have been superfluous. The new world would have built itself, as a snow-bound country clears itself.
As soon as it became clear that both combatants were not un- willing to accept the new Wilsonian world-order, a truce could have been called, the blockade raised, the soldiers sent home, and a committee of neutrals set to work out the practical ap- plications of the Fourteen Points. There was no need of a Conference either of the conquerors or of the belligerents. Sci- ence and truth are independent of victors and vanquished, and ethnographical boundaries would have been better determined by unprejudiced experts. But at Versailles it soon came to be recognised that the smaller Powers could not be allowed equal-
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ity, the Plenary Conference became a formal farce and legal power was made to correspond to actual power — as if Might and not Right were in question! How indeed could one ex- pect England and France to afford equality to the Hedjaz State which they had just created, or to black Liberia? Pseudo-idealism can never face realit}\ Unlike Antaeus it per- ishes at touch of mother earth. Before babbling of the League of Nations the politicians should have denned a nation. A course of lectures at King's College on the League has, I observe, wound up with the presentation of " the doctrine of equity ' as the ultimate machinery of settlement in the differences of nations. But what exactly is a nation? I know none which does not expand and contract in history like a concertina, and the attempt to fix its compass for ever at the moment it suits you is inspired by prudence, not pacifism ! To think of bound- aries at all is to be back in the cockpit conception.
Dr. Johnson said that a man of genius could settle any ques- tion in five minutes. A man of goodwill could have settled the war in two.
With every political grievance eliminated, and Free Trade re- moving commercial disabilities, the actual frontiers or countries would become no more important than the boundaries of a British parish. For the new world-order, which even politi- cians can only postpone, rests on the conception of the world as one place, with every people contributing to run it as a whole, and all united against their only enemy — Nature.
So long as mankind refuses to accept this simple doctrine, so long will it be involved in quagmires of blood and labyrinths of hypocrisy.
XXXIV
A Peace purporting to aim at a World-Unity should obvi- ously have conserved jealously whatever embryonic unity al- ready existed upon our racked planet. But on the contrary we have sought to dissolve much that was already united, put- ting asunder what history had so painfully joined together. Almost half the Old World, for example, was integrated under the designation of Russia : and if we have not welcomed its dis- integration we have, at least, produced it and provided the principle which justifies it. Austria was an amalgam or mo- saic of peoples at peace ; we have broken it up into warring
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elements. Over large long-settled areas in more than one con- tinent we have carefully engineered chaos.
It is true that Russia was ill-governed ; but the remedy lay in improving the Government, not in disuniting the governed. Bolshevism may be good or bad, but the United States of Rus- sia would be in greater congruity with World-Peace than a swarm of conflicting nationalities ; and if the Bolshevists can succeed in re-uniting them, they will to that extent be promot- ing the larger and truer ideal. And Austria was not even ill- governed ; its peoples were joined, we used to be told, not by tyranny but by economic necessity — it was the Danubian State. And the results of disregarding economic necessity in that quarter are already tragically obvious.
An American publicist has labelled this economic collapse " the failure of Liberal idealism." But Liberal idealism can- not be aspersed because of a foolish translation of it into purely racial terms. The " principle of nationality " is obviously only one of the considerations governing the life of a State. It demands that no section of a nationality embedded in an alien State shall be crushed out : it does not demand that the world shall be symmetrically carved out into racial compartments, irrespective of whether they are capable of economic existence. Or, if it does demand it, it demands equally the supplementary principle that there shall be universal free trade. But by an impudent posse of British professors who dare not apply their principle to their own Empire (disrupting French Canada, for example, from British), the principle of nationality, which Lord Acton, the learned historian of Liberty, regarded as dangerous and reactionary, was acclaimed as sacred. Employed exclu- sively as an instrument to break up enemy territories, it added Pecksniffian unction to revenge. But the principle of nationali- ties, though not devoid of validity, can at most dictate internal freedom for peoples. It cannot prohibit their federation. But Austria delenda est — in the name of nationality Austria was to be destroyed, and by the very Treaty which prevented its Germans uniting with Germany ! 1
And to add to the paradox of this semi-disintegration of Eu-
i Reconstruction, an admirable Viennese organ, published in English, tells us that the partition of Austria has produced far more unrest and oppres- sion than prevailed under the old order, for each of the liberated national- ities now treads under foot the minorities in its own borders. As for Czecho-Slovakia, it appears that the Czechs are trampling upon the equal autonomy of the Slovaks, not to mention upon their unfortunate Ger- man subjects. In fact a spawn of smaller Austrias has been brought forth.
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rope in the interests of World-Unity, it has been achieved mainly by the intervention of America, which endured the agony of civil war rather than permit her own partition on the basis of self-determination ; the land which has been engaged for generations in melting up the quarrelsome European medley into a peaceful new type under a single flag. For this has America now poured out her blood and treasure — to keep per- petually separate the elements out of which she was constituted, each European tribe in truculent sovereignty on its own petty territory, every cock crowing on its own dunghill. In Amer- ica no State language but English is to be tolerated — one must be a " hundred-per-cent." American ; but in Europe faded tongues and half-forgotten patois will be brushed up into na- tional languages, and the traveller must needs change his idiom every few hours. Europe will presumably become more than ever a museum, where, under the curatorship of the League of Nations, old-world types will be kept in cold storage for the delectation of aeroplaning Americans.
But of course the equilibrium is too unstable to last long. To increase the number of new nations without the preliminary creation of a real League of them, was merely to multiply the chances of conflagration. It was to add new denizens to the jungle. Nor are these new creations harmonious even in them- selves. The Poles oppress the Jews, the Czechs the Slovaks, the Roumanians the Hungarians, and so ad infinitum, or at least ad nauseam. Nothing but a real League of Nations — not a League with special alliances inside it and half the na- tions outside — nothing but a League incarnating the sincere mutual goodwill of a united humanity can bring us the vision which the great seer, Tennyson, who anticipated both Zeppelins and Wilsonism, pictured as —
" Universal ocean softly washing all her warless isles."
If we obstinately will to continue the tragedy of mutual slaugh- ter for unimportant objects and childish purposes, let us have done with the comedy of pretending to league ourselves. Let us recognise that the mania for " sovereign rights " — and still more for " super-sovereign rights " — is behind the dogged refusal of the peoples to join hands, and that this, and not the defectiveness of the present League, is the real ground for the opposition in America to Wilsonism. That America should have left Europe in the lurch is a righteous nemesis upon our
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grabbing politicians. But what America wants is not a good League, but no League at all, or a nominal League with such reservations as will leave Congress a free hand. (It is only political passion that blinds her to the fact that the present League is the very League she craves.) And if America shies at a real League of Nations, it is for the same reason that Ger- many shied at it, because she cherished the hope of succeeding — peacefully by preference — to Britain's hegemony of the world. I quite admit it is not fair to ask America to surrender the reversion, if Britain will not surrender the possession, and that if the commonwealth conception is to prevail, all occu- pancy of forts or waterways, and all tariffs that make only for the defence or the ascendancy of any individual nation, must be abandoned. The world cannot be run simultaneously as a united whole and a series of hostile fractions. Britannia can- not at once rule the seas and be a member of the League of Nations. I am afraid that if she were forced to be logical, it is not " Rule Britannia " that she would cease to sing.
XXXV
This sullen resistance to the League has much in common with the super-millennial refusal of Israel to universalise the prophetic teaching and be absorbed in its diffusion. It has been suggested by a writer ignorant of human nature that if Arius had conquered at the Council of Nicasa, the Jews would have joined the Church. But there is a national will-to-live — that in the greater nations is also a will-to-dominate — which feels itself jeopardised by entering into a world-combination. In vain Paul cried : " There shall be neither Jew nor Greek." In vain the followers of Philo pressed for the practical conse- quences of his universal doctrine. Even the League of Nations proposes to respect the individual nationalities whose federation is to constitute it. But the mere fact that " Sovereign rights " are to be as restricted by the alliances of peace as they always are by the alliances of war, is sufficient to set the quills of Na- tionality bristling and the nostrils of Imperialism snorting. As if " Sovereign rights " were in any case unrestricted ! As if they were something absolute and antinomian, immune from the claims of reason or justice! As if the truer majesty were not in humble obedience to Love and Law! Even Robinson Crusoe on his island had no right to be cruel to its animal life.
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Diderot, in his article on Society in the Encyclopaedia, recalls how when some one said before Antigonus, the King of Syria, that princes were the masters, and that everything was per- mitted to them, he replied : " Yes, among barbarians : as for us, we are masters of the things prescribed by reason and hu- manity; but nothing is permitted to us but what is conform- able to justice and duty."
It is true that despite the League of Damnations, Tennyson's vision seems on the way to realisation. There is the progres- sive deadliness of war, there are the horrible new inventions waiting to be launched; inventions which have caused all the leading politicians of England to join their signatures in a frantic appeal to the public to — contribute a million pounds to the propaganda of the League ! A monumental anti-climax, indeed. If the destruction of civilisation is thus seriously looming, surely these politicians have it in their own hands to make a true League of Nations, not to mention vote a million for it in their Parliament ! The million would then be saved a hundred times over in armaments.
Fatuous, however, as is the statesmanship of our politicians, it is possible that the unbearable agonies and wholesale de- structiveness of scientific warfare may give humanity pause.
" Nothing happens to any man," said Marcus Aurelius, " which he was not formed by Nature to bear." The excellent Emperor was mistaken. So far, indeed, as Nature proper is concerned, his apophthegm is an axiom, for a species which could not endure its environment would be eliminated. But the imperial philosopher overlooked the happenings which man — in his scientific insanity — brings upon himself. Neither man nor any other creature has been formed to bear the artificial horrors which are man's creative additions to the cruelties of Nature.
" Man marks the earth with ruin — his control Stops with the shore; upon the watery plain The wrecks are all thy deed."
So wrote Byron in his famous apostrophe to the Ocean. He did not foresee the submarine. Savage tooth and claw, light- nings and foul vapours, cy clones and volcanic jets — what en- durable milieux compared with myriads of mammoth guns belch- ing and roaring pauselessly for a fortnight at a time; with gliding poison-clouds; with projected flames; with swarms of
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reeking putrefying corpses. Even earthquakes are less shat- tering than our mines.
It is as if mankind was given over to be the sport of Pros- pero:
" Go, charge my goblins that they grind their joints With dry convulsions ; shorten up their sinews With aged cramps ; and more pinch-spotted make them, Than pard, or cat o' mountain."
K
Prospero does indeed command the planet and has shaken
the strong-based promontory," opened graves, " and by the spurs plucked up the pine and cedar." Scant wonder, there- fore, if our poor sensorium, evolved only for the natural rough- and-tumble of our genial globe, collapses in this monstrous, factitious hurly-burly.
The tragic absurdity of man self-swamped by the " many in- ventions " he has " sought out " may, as I said, finally dawn upon him ; but if he is moved thereby to a League against war, it will not be for the noblest reason. Man should be moved not by what he must suffer, but by what he must inflict. The use of such weapons is an attainder to his own spiritual dignity, it is high treason to the majesty of man.
To the ignoble deterrents of war should be added the fear of bankruptcy which is the beginning of wisdom, the epidemics which war leaves in its trail, and which know no frontiers, not even those of neutrals ; the scarcity of food and raw material which it leaves prevalent over large areas, the derangement of trade and commerce resulting from the erratic exchange under which some countries cannot afford to buy and others to sell, and the social unrest arising from all these factors and from widely-diffused bereavement and lamentation.
But all these negatives are forgotten in the hot-blooded af- firmative of a new war-cry, and unless we can rely on Labour grown conscious at last of its power and duty, a more sub- stantial hope and one less sordidly grounded lies in the posi- tive development of air-travel in the years of Peace. In de- veloping this, Lord Northcliffe is his own best counteractive.
Rudyard Kipling, in his marvellous story, " With the Night Mail," reduces the " Parliament of Man " to A. B. C. He brings home to us how in the flying era (which is already upon us) the Aerial Board of Control — yclept, of course, the A. B. C. — " confirms or annuls all international arrangements " and nothing may be done that may " interfere with the traffic
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and all it implies" The Board finds " our tolerant, humor- ous, lazy little planet only too ready to shift the whole burden of public administration on its shoulders." " Transportation is Civilisation " is the motto of the age. Here speaks the in- spired seer, a Balaam blessing Peace, as if despite himself. It is not merely that air-travel will necessitate a world-Board. Its swiftness will make counties of countries and countries of con- tinents. It will make frontiers and custom-houses still more ridiculous. As Mr. Wells has pointed out, " The Sovereign States of Europe are too small for modern aerial transport." But if this network of passports and custom-houses is " likely to strangle aA7iation," it is State Sovereignty which in our prac- tical world is more likely to be strangled. At present we do " interfere with the traffic." And it is only by interference that the reduction of Europe to a unity is staved off. For States are the expression of conditions ; and the shrinkage of space through aviation and " wireless " has made these ancient kingdoms parochial. By our duties and passports we are ar- tificially bolstering up their crumbling partitions, trying to hold asunder what Science has brought together. The sooner these rotten barriers fall, the sooner we shall settle down to cultivating our planet.
But humanity has not suffered enough, and doubtless we have to undergo still grimmer experiences before our almost incor- rigible hearts are chastened, and our gun-deafened ears turned and attuned to the still small voice of Jerusalem.
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[From the North American Review, April, 1895.]
The fall of the Ghettos has left Israel dazed in the sunlight of the wider world without, his gaberdine half off and half on. If he throws it off, will he throw off his distinctiveness and fade into the common run of men ? If he keeps it on, can he keep his place in the new human brotherhood? And as he gropes, ir- resolute, he stumbles at every step amongst the ruins of the Ghetto wall against a debris of problems — not merely prob- lems of 'doxy which the Zeitgeist brings to him as well as to Christianity, but problems of racial integration and disintegra- tion, problems of transformation of sociologic function as of restoring the Jew to the soil, problems of " ceremonial " con- duct, of allegiance to the Mosaic and Rabbinic codes, problems of international politics, of immigrations and persecutions and Palestine-restorations, problems of patriotism, of fidelity to a universal Jewish citizenship, so jealous and exacting that it would even forbid intermarriage with the citizens of another country ; and all these problems are complicated by problems of compromise between the ideal and the practical. For the Jew belongs to a race as well as to a religion, and may wish to re- main in either, or both, or neither. A Jewish Robert Elsmere would have settled but the least of his problems when he de- cided to abandon the orthodox creed.
With these internal problems it is impossible to grapple here. They will probably be settled less by reason than by that large drift of things which lies outside the individual consciousness. I can only venture to suggest a few thoughts concerning the common Judaism which underlies all the j arring factions and to view this essential Judaism broadly in the light of history.
Modern philosophy, which began with Descartes, still suffers from the static introspection of the Cartesian method. We are not so thrown upon our own resources ; the Ego is not our only torch. Even if to begin de novo were possible — even if the past did not think through us — it would be foolish to neglect consciously what light the past throws upon the meaning and purpose of life. In a philosophy of history — a pressing need of the times, that is not altogether satisfied by the conception
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of evolution — Judaism would be what Bacon calls an ostensive or light-giving instance, in which normal traits usually obscure are accentuated so as to allow of facile observation. If the clue to the process of the suns is not to be picked up in the Ghetto, I know no more promising quarter in which to seek it. If the history of Israel which touches all recorded time has no dynamic significance, supplies no hint as to the destiny of hu- manity, then is Life indeed " a walking shadow," and history " a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying noth-
' 55
ing."
For the story of this little sect — the most remarkable sur- vival of the fittest known to humanity — in no way corresponds with its numbers; it is not a tale of majorities. It is a story that begins very near the beginning of history, and shows little sign of drawing to a conclusion. It is a story that has chap- ters in every country on earth, and which has borne the im- press of every period. It ranges from the highest tragedy to the lowest farce; veritably Shakespearian in its jostling of princes and scholars and clowns, rogues and heroes and sages. All men and all ages pass through it in unending procession, the stern warriors of the ancient world, the rotund burghers of the mediaeval, the prosaic citizens of the modern, and the toe of Shylock comes so near the heel of Hamlet, he galls his kibe. But, picturesque as the story is outwardly, it is mainly by its inner religious content that it claims consideration. For to the Jew the world owes its vision of God.
The religion of a race is its vision of the Good, even as its science is its vision of the True, and its art its vision of the Beautiful. Israel's vision of the Good was God ; and to his uni- fying instinct the True and the Beautiful had no separate exist- ence. Abraham — the father of Israel's race — was the first to conceive the moral God, nay, to impose his individual vision of righteousness upon his God.
" But Abraham stood yet before the Lord. And Abraham drew near and said, Wilt Thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked ? . . . That be far from Thee to do after this manner, to slay the righteous with the wicked: and that the righteous should be as the wicked, that be far from Thee. Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right? "
And Abraham's seed perpetuated this faith in a righteous God who was revealed in Israel. That oft-quoted saying of Jehuda Halevi, M Israel is among the nations as the heart
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among the limbs," will be truest if interpreted in that meta- phorical sense which makes the heart the seat of emotion. For it is the heart that sees God. The righteous God is an intui- tion, which, even if it does not contradict experience, is not reached by it. Israel first had this conception of the Creator and of His relation to a phophet-race and through it to the world. It is a unique ethical and political conception ; there is no parallel to it, nor to the documents that enshrined it, nor to the race that incarnated it. The chronicle of Israel is a record of backslidings and castigation, a religious epic whose incidents only serve to point morals, and its mightiest heroes are weak and sinful. And this conception found material realisation in a moralised state-system: in a theocracy to which nothing hu- man was alien, so that sanitation was as much a part of relig- ion as sacrifice ; in a worship of Justice and Mercy ; in an unfal- tering adoration of Right before Might that was a paradox in a Pagan world ; in a brotherhood of Israel which was to be the nucleus of the brotherhood of man. Israel planned righteous- ness as Sparta planned hardihood, or Rome conquest, or China self-conservation ; it was to be a people consecrate to consecra- tion ; through its sanctity the world was to be sanctified. Of all the ideals that nations have produced, nothing more noble, more Quixotic, can be conceived than this national idea of self- perfection as an instrument for the perfection of the world; and if, on the whole, Sancho Panza has been as much in evidence as Don Quixote, that is the inevitable tragi-comedy of human existence. To think of the course of Jewish history is to stir those thoughts that lie too deep for tears.
Among this little people Christ was born; and His teaching, more or less transformed and for a century and a half not clearly distinguished from Judaism by the Pagan world, was propagated by Jewish apostles in Egypt, Rome, and Syria, and, soon conquering the conquerors of the world, begat the Greek Church and ultimately the Roman and the Protestant Churches — this last Church a product of Christianity crossed again by the Old Testament, and in England in particular gen- erating so Hebrew a type of character that at this day the Eng- lishman is regarded throughout the Continent as the Pharisee of Europe. As a coloniser, as a " mother of nations," Eng- land smacks more of Phoenicia than of Rome, and in the making of Englands, Old and New, the Old Testament has counted for more than the New. Nine centuries earlier, this same wonderful Book, das Tagebuch Jehovahs, as Heine calls
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it, had inspired in Mohammedanism a far more potent and per- vasive creed. Through Christianity and Islam, the moral im- pulse of Judaism was communicated through the greater part of the civilised world, and each of these great religions has sent out missionaries even to those polytheistic savage races which have remained outside the great currents of history. In the very year that the Jews were expelled from Spain, a Spaniard won a new world — America — for the Jewish Bible. And from century to century, even unto this day, through the fairest regions of civilisation, the Bible, written entirely by Jews, dom- inates existence ; its vision of life moulds states and societies, its texts confront us on every hand, it is an inexhaustible treasury of themes for music and pictures. Its psalms are more pop- ular in every country than the poems of the nation's own poets. Beside this one book with its infinite editions, with all the good and ill it has done, all other national literatures seem " trifles light as air." Jerusalem, as Renan points out, is truly " a house of prayer for all nations." Equally venerated by the Jew, the Christian and the Mussulman, she is the Holy City of half mankind.
But while Christianity and Mohammedanism were thus do- ing Israel's work, what was Israel doing?
Israel was become a Protestant nation. The original Cath- olic Church of Humanity was gradually made to appear Prot- estant by the growth of a majority permeated by a belief in the divinity of Christ. Gradually there had been evolved the touching but confusing conception of the Man-God of Sorrows, taking on human attributes to bridge the gulf between Infinity and Humanity and atoning by His death for the sin in which He had caused humanity to be born. To speak of the Jews re- jecting Christ when it was the Jews who spread His gospel is a strange, popular blunder ; but the bulk of the community did re- main blind to whatever was edifying in the new conception, by whatsoever divine or mythopoetic process it arose. The loft- iest sayings of Christ were familiar to the Jews in the Rabbinic lore or in their old Testament, and though these dicta had never before been so fused as the expression of a personality, yet, on the other hand, Israel was not unaccustomed to pseudo-Mes- siahs, both before and after Christ ; moreover, the mysteries of the Incarnation and Atonement were in direct opposition to the spirit of Judaism (as they seem a needless complication of the essence of Christianity), and by abolishing the authority of the
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ritual law, Christ disturbed the sociological conception which is at the bottom of practical Judaism.
The course of Christian history did not tend to reconcile Israel to Christian conceptions. For Christianity, after emerging from a period of persecution, turned persecutor, avenging upon Judaism Christ's voluntary death for the re- demption of the world, and thus indurated Israel in its negative attitude. The development of Judaism went on side by side with that of Christianit}', for no religion has ever remained at rest, except in the eyes of its followers ignorant of its history. Movement is at once both the law and the test of life, though in every religion ossification has curiously been considered " or- thodoxy." The orthodox members of a creed are those who preserve the organism in which the change is being effected, and who constitute the hostile environment in which new ideas and ideals have to struggle for existence. Judaism, which by the ignorant Jew, no less than by the ignorant Christian, is sup- posed to have remained stereotyped since Christ, not to say since the last page of the Old Testament, has really been a liv- ing activity that has manifested its inner vitality in many shapes and forms ; and, as Dr. Schechter of Cambridge has shown in his brilliant epoch-making lectures on " Rabbinic Theology " and on " Jewish Philosophers and Mystics," in- stead of being merely a negative religion, the essence of which was unbelief in Christ and the rejection of pork, it has pro- duced legends and liturgies, sects and movements and Messiahs, poems and philosophies and ideals, and even new Cabbalistic or humanised conceptions of the Godhead. But all this has been purely internal, and only part of it has been development.
Since the rise of Islam, Judaism has had no direct influence upon the outside world. With perhaps the solitary exception of fostering, through its distinctively religious thinkers, the scholastic philosophy of the latter part of the Middle Ages, Judaism has been dead to the world for over a thousand years. Speaking broadly, if Christianity had succeeded in eliminating the Jews, the religious history of Europe would have been the same as to-day. And not only has Judaism been dead to the world, for long, wretched periods it has been dead to itself; it has remained stereotyped, immobile. Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries lie the Dark Ages of Judaism. But the miracle is that Judaism kept any spark at all — for these were the Ghetto Ages par excellence, the days of the yellow badge
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and the Dominican whip, " and the summons to Christian fel- lowship." It was life enough to have retained suspended ani- mation. Israel has had to run the gauntlet of the world, every man's hand against his, and his against no man's, and to repeat as a race the martyrdom of Christ as an individual. But what, nevertheless, becomes of the mission of Israel? How are we to reconcile the conception of a nation destined to be " God's witnesses " among the heathen, with a thousand years of unobtrusive stagnation? Well, " they also serve who only stand and wait." The mills of God grind slowly: in the eyes of the Eternal, as in the eyes of the apostles of evolution, " a thousand years are but as a day." And, in a sense, the mere obstinate survival of Israel may still be deemed a witness to " the finger of God." Moreover, the Jewish idea of a " mis- sion " is not of that fussy activity, as of Mrs. Jellyby, which Christianity connects with the word; of imposing verbal beliefs upon savages, whose vision of life is quite other. It is, in fact, the Rabbi's duty to dissuade the would-be proselyte. One may influence one's time by simply being: each righteous soul is a radiation of good. And the " saving of worlds ' is not per- haps best effected by noisy propagandism. The merit of stay- ing at home is eloquently expounded by Carlyle. The rabbis had a pregnant saying : " It is not thy business to complete the work, but neither hast thou the right to neglect it." To do one's own work well — that is the wisdom of the ages. And so, though Judaism was temporarily self-centred, it is not noth- ing for it to have consoled and uplifted a hundred generations, to have made life livable even in Ghettos. Judaism achieved sufficient triumph in surviving at all. To have actively propa- gated its negative doctrine of disbelief in Christ would have been to court annihilation. Jews did not indeed shrink from disputing theses with Christians in those mediaeval tournaments of theology, but we know that they never carried off the vic- tory. Such proselytes as they did make were burnt. One Jew, Solomon Molcho, whose family still survives in the Orient, set out, greatly daring, to convert the Pope. The Pope was stiff- necked but urbane, and it was not till Solomon broached Juda- ism to Charles V. that the poor missionary was consumed by fire. Yes, it is enough that Israel has survived, battered it may be, and stained with shame and pusillanimity ; warped by evil growths of cunning and covetousness developed in the struggle with superior forces ; distorted not infrequently by the perverse action of a religion that lent itself too easily to formalism;
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here and there, too, materialised and vulgarised by the sudden sun of prosperity ; but strong by force of standing alone, ten- acious, energetic, soberly adventurous, brilliantly intellectual, spiritual and idealistic in certain directions, domestic, civic, patriotic, infinitely adaptable, a marvellous reservoir of intellect and emotion and will and sanity, sufficient to renovate a deca- dent civilisation. The vices of Israel are on the surface, his virtues lie deep. In the language of Galton, he is a " grade " or two above normal humanity.
But this admission of a thousand years of non-influence re- quires an important modification. It is only as a religious or- ganisation that Israel has remained barren; as a race it has played a very considerable role in history, both in the gross and through the individual. Judaism may have stood still, but Israel never. As a body, Jews were the great agents of the Middle Ages — the wandering Jews, a human network of inter- communication. They carried literature and folk-lore; they brought science from Arabia to Europe by way of Spain ; they invented the mechanism of commercial exchange, and, less cred- itably, were the chief slave-dealers. Mediaeval Israel was mainly an intermediary.
It is only through isolated individuals that Israel has influ- enced the world at first hand. Through Spinoza it affected the whole course of modern philosophy ; through Ricardo it founded political economy; through Karl Marx and Lassalle it created socialism ; through its financiers and politicians it has time and again shaped European politics ; through a host of poets, sci- entists, actors, artists, musicians and journalists — of whom longum est dicere — it has been in the van of the world. To- day, in spite of two thousand years of suppression, and though but a small fraction of the population of the world, it looms large in the arts and letters and Bourses of every capital of civilisation.
But now we are confronted with the curious fact that the indi- viduals through whom Israel has influenced the world have been for the most part divorced from the body proper. They have been heretics ; caring little or nothing about " The Mission of Israel," and not immediately concerned about Righteousness. They have been " racial," not " religious," Jews, and even their race they have sometimes disavowed. Even when, as in Spinoza and Lassalle, the spirit of the ancient Prophets has broken out in them, they have not consciously connected their moral fer- vour with the mission of their race, nor recognised the signifi-
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cance of their heredity. This is indeed a shining example of the irony of history, and almost leads to the suspicion that the function of Judaism during the last thousand years has been to conserve an environment favourable to the production of great heterodox Jews. Jesus himself drew from the nursery of Juda- ism those ideals which enabled him to react against their dis- tortion in practice; and from Talmudical dialectics the Jewish mind derived the subtlety that expressed itself later through mathematicians and jurists and philosophers and chess-players; its talent for music was fostered by the fondness for melodious ministers ; by its domestic poetry and its tragic history it ac- cumulated the genius of a Heine, whose humour sprang from that pervasive cheerfulness which aided his race to survive, and which tinged even its theology with genial esprit; its adaptabil- ity, its natural mimicry of all races, fitted it for triumphs on the stage, and its enforced deference to its persecutors pre- pared it for comedy; to the prenatal power of the orthodox code the heterodox celebrities were indebted for their health, their head and their heart, and from the diaspora and the per- secution came their assertive individuality and their cosmopol- itan standpoint.
And while through the stagnation of its masses and the indif- ference of its energising units, Judaism qua religion has been a waste force in the world, by a further irony of history the bat- tle for Judaism has been fought by a thousand outsiders. The dogma which has been the key-stone of Christianity has been shaken from all sides. The divinity of Christ is practically all that Judaism denies, and there is no need to insist on the nega- tive attitude of modern thought towards this primal conception. From the ranks of Unitarianism, Theism, Agnosticism, and Atheism, the disbelief has definitely spread to Protestantism, the doctors of which are providing more or less nebulous substitutes for the concrete Christ of the every-day Christian. The litera- ture of the day is thoroughly anti-Christian, the great writers to a man do not believe in Christ. It is not only the specifically polemical writers like Mrs. Humphry Ward, it is the literary class in general. Books with distinctively Christian teaching appeal only to cliques ; the leading things of general literature are the work of men not Christians. The higher mind of the world is being fed from non-Christian sources. The great movement of the modern mind is away from the Trinity. Of the writers with European reputations, Tolstoi alone maintains even the ideals of Christianity, and Tolstoi' is accounted mad.
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In our own literature alone, the most conservative of all modern literatures, what trace of Trinitarianism is there in Browning, Swinburne, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, William Morris, George Meredith, George Eliot, Carlyle, Emerson, Hawthorne, Whitman, Lowell, Holmes, Rudyard Kipling, Stev- enson, Hardy, Howells, Henry James, Mill, Spencer, Darwin, and a score of others who do the modern man's thinking? This part of Christianity is crumbling away even while Judaism looks idly on. History and science do not corroborate the episodes on which it is founded, and the conception itself jars upon the modern mind. Its very professors are vague, and even Mr. Gladstone has made heretical approaches to the Jewish view of atonement.
And while the negative side of Judaism is thus being ap- proached by the internal movement of Christianity, so is the positive side of Judaism likewise being arrived at by the think- ers of Christendom.
By the positive side of Judaism, I mean simply the concep- tion of life which is its essence. There is more in Judaism akin to the modern spirit than there is in any other religion, for the modern spirit is really akin to that of the Old Testament. The God of the Old Testament, invisible and incorporeal and incom- prehensible, in whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turn- ing, whose thoughts are not our thoughts, nor His ways our ways, who visits the sins of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations, and who yet, on the whole, makes for righteousness and happiness, that terrible yet tender Father, who is still the God of Judaism, has more in common with the unity which we apprehend behind phenomena than the god of any other creed. The Mosaic code, if read to-day depolarized, in Wendell Holmes' phrase, as one would read a book by the newest thinker, would be found — allowance being made for the circumstance that it is a code for an agricultural people — to aim at all that is best in socialism without inter- fering with the free play of individual activity. It is practical sociology, social science applied to life so as to insure the moral and physical well-being of the race. Only it is sociology raised to religion, so that obedience is rendered, not to cold hygienic laws, but to warm religious feeling. Sociology will never gain a footing in the modern world till it is touched with emotion, and the consumptive lover will never refrain from propagating himself unless kindled by a religious conception of duty to the race.
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This Mosaic code, with its Rabbinical Commentaries, became the nucleus of a poetic domesticity that sweetened poverty and persecution ; it made Israel cohere and be one in a brotherhood of obedience, despite dispersion to the four corners of the earth. This sanctified sociology made the sensuous sacred equally with the spiritual. Judaism sanctified the sensuous, Christianity was an abolition of the sensuous. In the result Christianity succeeded only in abolishing it from religion, not from life. No priestly pitchfork has ever expelled human na- ture. Christianity has fostered an unfortunate dualism by which part of life has become secular, and religion, which should be the breath of the whole, is set in opposition to the material framework of life. The attempt to ignore the flesh and the world must defeat itself; the flesh may be brought under law, it must not be relegated to the Devil. In Judaism even san- itary arrangements are part of religion. To put away cer- tain sides of our nature, as though God were ashamed of them, is of a piece with that other dualism of "Science versus Re- ligion." The uneasy dread with which Religion regards Sci- ence is really a suspicion that the Creator is a dishonest dealer whose books will not bear auditing. Nothing is more typical of the opposed Weltanschauung en of Judaism and Christianity than their marriage services. In Christianity, marriage is a concession to the weakness of the flesh. In Judaism, it is the divinely ordained method of perpetuating the race joyfully and nobly through love. " Blessed art thou, O Lord, who makest the bridegroom to rejoice with the bride." The Christian for- mula savours of topsy-turveydom. To make the continuance of the human race merely a concession to the weakness of the human flesh is to deny the divinity of life. Christianity is a religion of death, of pessimism, as Schopenhauer saw, or at least an other-worldly religion. In practice, of course, Chris- tianity manages to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, and the dualism of its creed is paralleled by the dualism of its code in actual life. It is not only in the Hegelian logic that to be and not to be are the same. Thd Christians around us run contrary ideals with amusing simultaneity — one code for daily life, another for Church, a lachrymose liturgy followed by a fashionable parade. They eat their cake and lay it up in Heaven as well ; besides believing that it is wrong to eat cake anywhere, anyhow. Religion is outside life, as sentiment is out- side business. It is something strange and esoteric, like Greek plays and the blessed word Mesopotamia.
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For Judaism the centre of gravity is here and now. Though we were immortal, yet eternity is only a succession of to-days. The whole problem of life faces us to-day. Judaism may be a selection from nature, a moral human harmony shaped by spir- itual genius upon the desolate chaos of nature, but Christianity is a contradiction of nature. Neither is verifiable by science, but while Judaism inspires life, Christianity inspires to nega- tion of life ; valuable as a " counsel of perfection," Christian- ity can only stimulate chosen spirits, making saints of the few and hypocrites of the many. C'est magnifique mais ce n'est pas la vie. Judaism does not despise the world, it accepts it, and it says grace not only for food (as Charles Lamb complained Christianity does exclusively), but for the sight of forest and ocean. This acceptance of the world is the very note of " mod- ernity." Christianity is concerned rather with the failure and inadequacy of life. " When the Devil fell sick, etc." " Man's extremity is God's opportunity." Man's prosperity should rather be God's opportunity. He should be at the root of all joy and all work. That people should be Christians on their death-bed is of the very smallest use to the world. Christianity is individual, Judaism is communal. Israel confesses its sins in common and in public. Christianity stimulates an unhealthy egoism, a spiritual self-torture ; Judaism makes for a sane sanc- tity. It is not without significance that Max Nordau, the author of " Degeneration," who has raised the rallying cry of sanity in the face of a Europe given over to morbid literary cults, should be an Israelite. Judaism aims at influencing char- acter through conduct, Christianity at influencing conduct through emotion. Judaism builds up the moral character out of moral acts, Christianity thinks to get morality out of spor- adic spirituality. Eight out of the Ten Commandments con- cern acts ; only in the tenth and last does Judaism exhort a state of soul, " thou shalt not covet." The soul, built up on the basis of moral acts, becomes capable of moral states. If Judaism is in danger of formalism and Pharisaism, Christianity runs the risk of an empty spiritualism. In fact, Christianity — a negation of life — has never dominated and could not ever really dominate life. It has never expressed the Western vision of the Good. It has been external, not internal. The average Christian is half Jew, half pagan. You cannot get " the new heart " of the gospels to order. It must evolve from within. The Mohammedan missionaries have been more suc- cessful with savages than the Christian because they offer a re-
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ligion of acts, not impose a new view of life. Souls cannot rise above their level. It is true that in working through the figure of Christ, Christianity stands on a basis of sound psychology, for nothing affects character like character. But there must be already a latent affinity between the two characters. There is no such thing as " conversion," no sudden fire, without prior accumulation of inflammable matter.
If I were asked to sum up in one broad generalisation the intellectual tendency of Israel, I should say that it was a tend- ency to unification. The Unity of God, which is the declara- tion of the dying Israelite, is but the theological expression of this tendency. The Jewish mind runs to Unity by an instinct as harmonious as the Greek's sense of Art. It is always im- pelled to a synthetic perception of the whole. This is Israel's contribution to the world, his vision of existence. There is one God who unifies the cosmos, and one creed to which all the world will come. In science the Jewish instinct, expressing it- self for example through Spinoza, seeks for " One God, one Law, one Element " ; in aesthetics it identifies the True and the Beautiful with the Good; in Politics it will not divide Church from State, nor secular history from religious, for Israel's national joys and sorrows are at once incorporated in his re- ligion, giving rise to feasts and fasts ; in ethics it will not sun- der Soul from Body ; it will not set this life against the next, this world against another; even in theology it will not alto- gether sunder God from the humours of existence, from the comedy which leavens the creation. Unitas, unitas, omnia unitas.
Like Christianity, Judaism has the defects of its qualities. Its wisdom is the wisdom of age and the ages, not the divine discontent of youth — its sanity is sometimes overpowering, stupefying — it needs a touch of that divine insanity which leads to martyrdoms and missions, poems, and pictures, and symphonies. The young do not understand it at all, and its ministers rarely touch the true chord of its poetry. Israel has been noblest in suffering ; Jeshurun, grown fat, kicks. Despite his crude conception of the equation of merit and reward — based on the grosser texts of the Old Testament — the Jew has never shrunk from suffering for his faith; despite his pro- verbial astuteness, in his religion the Jew has made a very bad bargain.
The wider conception of unjust suffering and misery which runs through Ecclesiastes and Job, that conception of " orig-
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inal sin " and vicarious punishment which appears in " The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children's teeth are set on edge," must be woven more conspicuously into the web of Judaism ; the doctrine of reward for virtue must needs be trans- ferred from the individual to the race, as it is already in the conception of a mutually responsible brotherhood. On the side of art, Judaism may not profitably widen itself. The latter part of the second commandment, which for long centuries com- bined with his introspective intellect to withdraw the Jew from the plastic arts, has survived its function in the world. There will never be again the worship of image as deity ; though in a more subtle sense the worship of the Beautiful may replace the worship of the Good. But just as Christianity has not con- quered Judaism, so has Judaism not conquered Paganism, or rather Hellenism. But the ancient intensity of that opposi- tion of ideals, when each ideal had yet to develop itself, is no longer necessary, and to-day their prismatic hues may blend in the white light of the religion of the future, and Judaism may as unhesitatingly accept the Hellenic cult of beauty as it may com- promise with " the Christ that is to be." And, indeed, the wor- ship of beauty may well be incorporated into a religion which already says grace at first sight of spring buds — grace for a world lacking naught and containing " goodly creatures and goodly trees to give delight unto the children of men." The unifying instinct of the Jew may still identify the Beautiful with the Good ; but there is no longer need to dread the Grecian wisdom against which the Jewish poet of the Middle Ages warned his brethren; even an infusion of the Greek scientific spirit would strengthen rather than impair, while, if Judaism remains sociologic, the most modern discoveries in practical sci- ence might profitably be embodied in the religion, so that cul- pably to endanger the public health should be accounted " sin." Of the trinity of ideals, the Good is the most important; without it life is impossible, corrupt, distraught. Israel's mis- sion has been the noblest of all, its task the largest and widest ; but its only hope of influencing the future hinges on its power to absorb the culture of the day so as to bring its own pe- culiar contribution to the solution of the problems of its time, its own moral vision of the world. It must come out of the debris of the Ghetto and enrich humanity by its point of view. Israel is too apt to forget that existence is not its ideal, patri- otic pride was not its goal; its superiority was but to be the means to an end. " In thee shall all the families of the earth
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be blessed." The most useful work Israel is doing at this mo- ment is in the unnoticed form of colonisation. Wherever new lands are to be exploited there the Jew is found, pioneering, and building up states. But this function scarcely justifies his separate existence. Religions must live up to themselves if they are to continue to exist ; they must be redeemed from the leaden meaninglessness of the commonplace and transfused with real- ity and vitality. Their truths can only be proved through the lives of their followers ; for religions are not true in the sense in which scientific facts are true. They live by what is true in the appeal of their ideals, and by the organisation which they provide to link the generations. Judaism needs to live in its own spirit, true to its ardent belief in life — full-blooded, man- ifold life, life that is worth living now, or never. The drift of the higher spirits of the world seems to be towards autonomous morality, with the sense of sin superseded. For people refrain from wrong in proportion to their power of sympathy, of im- aging the consequences to others. The larger the heart, the less the wrongdoing.
" Yes, what was wanting," thought Mr. Pater's Marius, when he saw the gladiatorial brutalities, " was the heart that would make it impossible to witness all this ; and the future would be with the forces that could beget a heart like that."
This heart was the Jewish heart, and the forces of the future are still with it.
To such a creed as Judaism the verbal authenticity of its sacred book is a triviality; to such an organisation as Israel even the fall of theism would not be necessarily fatal, the energy stored up in it could still be conserved and turned to humanity's benefit. But when one thinks how this earliest of theistic creeds, this original Catholic Democratic Church of Humanity, has persisted through the ages, by which wonderful construc- tive state-craft it has built up a race of which the motto might well be Sanity, Unity, Sanctity, a race of which the lowest unit is no forlorn outcast, no atom in a " submerged tenth," but an equal member of a great historic brotherhood, a scion of the oldest of surviving civilisations, a student of sacred books, a lover of home and peace ; when one remembers how he has agon- ised — the great misunderstood of history — how his " pesti- lent heresy " has been chastised and rebuked by Popes and Crusaders, Inquisitors and Missionaries, how he has remained sublimely protestant, imperturbable amid marvellous cathe- drals and all the splendid shows of Christendom, and how
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despite all and after all he is living to see the world turning slowly back to his vision of life ; then one seems to see " the fin- ger of God," the hand of the Master-artist, behind the comedy- tragedy of existence, to believe that Israel is veritably a nation writh a mission, that there is no God but God and Israel is his prophet ; not Moses, not Christ, not Mohammed, but Israel, the race in whom God was revealed, and if whose faith and hope be a dream, it were well to abandon the search for significance in the futile and ephemeral life of man, and to look forward hope- fully to the Messiah of the cosmic catastrophe.
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SONGS OF THE SYNAGOGUE
[These translations, chosen from my contributions to " The Service of the Synagogue," by kind permission of Messrs. George Routledge and Sons, are designed to elucidate Judaism by illustrat- ing the conceptions that found their way into its orthodox liturgy, not necessarily always the highest conceptions it has produced. There is a general approximation to the metre and rhymings of the originals. The use of rhyme and metre, it may be remarked, is a comparative novelty in Hebrew. Rhyme was not introduced into Hebrew poetry before the seventh century, when it appears in the Piyyutim of Yannai. Milton calls rhyme " that barbarous inven- tion to set off lame metre " ; but there was not even metre in Hebrew then. That was not brought in till three centuries later by Dunash ben Labrat, a young poet of Baghdad origin, who probably picked it up from the Fez poets. " Such a thing hath hitherto been un- known in Israel," said Saadia, the great Gaon of Sura, when Dun- ash showed him Hebrew jigging to Arab measures.]
YIGDAL, THE RHYME OF THE THIRTEEN
ARTICLES
(Attributed to Daniel ben Judah, fourteenth century.)
(Daily Service.)
1. The living God O magnify and bless, Transcending Time and here eternally.
2. One Being, yet unique in unity ;
A mystery of Oneness measureless.
3. Lo ! form or body He has none, and man No semblance of His holiness can frame.
4. Before Creation's dawn He was the same ; The first to be, though never He began.
5. He is the world's and every creature's Lord ; His rule and majesty are manifest,
6. And through His chosen, glorious sons exprest In prophecies that through their lips are poured
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7. Yet never like to Moses rose a seer, Permitted glimpse behind the veil divine.
8. This faithful prince of God's prophetic line Received the Law of Truth for Israel's ear.
9. The Law God gave He never will amend, Nor ever by another Law replace.
10. Our secret things are spread before His face ; In all beginnings He beholds the end.
11. The saint's reward He measures to his meed; The sinner reaps the harvest of his ways.
12. Messiah He will send at end of days, And all the faithful to salvation lead.
13. God will the dead again to life restore In His abundance of almighty love.
Then blessed be His name, all names above, And let His praise resound for evermore.
HIGHEST DIVINITY
(Anonymous, mediaeval.) (New Year Service.)
Highest divinity, Throned in the firmament, Potentate paramount, Hand superdominant,
Lord of Infinity !
Highest divinity, Great in performing all, Sure in decreeing all, Stern in unbaring all,
Lord of Infinity !
Highest divinity, Speaking in holiness, 153
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Vestured in righteousness Heedful of suppliants, Lord of Infinity !
Highest divinity, Saving the children by Grace of their ancestors, Vexing their enemies,
Lord of Infinity !
Highest divinity, Time is His dwelling-place, Goodness e'erlastingly Spanning the firmament,
Lord of Infinity !
Highest divinity, Light is His robe and veil, Suns, stars, have sprung from Him ; Potent and terrible
Lord of Infinity !
Highest divinity, King of the Universe, Piercer of mysteries, Causing the dumb to speak,
Lord of Infinity !
Highest divinity, Propping, sustaining all, Slaying, surviving all, Seeing, unseen of all,
Lord of Infinity !
Highest divinity, Crowned with omnipotence, Right hand victorious, Saviour and Shelterer,
Lord of Infinity !
Highest divinity, Round Him flame cherubim, Seas shake at word of Him, 154
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Yet is His love at call, Lord of Infinity !
Highest divinity, Sleeping nor slumbering, Centre of restfulness, Awed angels chant His praise,
Lord of Infinity !
Lowly humanity, Doomed to go down to death, Grave-ward and lower still. Vain is man's heritage,
Sovran of Vanity !
Lowly humanity, Sleep is his daily end, Deep sleep his final goal. Darkness flows over him,
Sovran of Vanity !
Highest divinity, Dynast of endlessness, Timeless resplendency, Worshipped eternally,
Lord of Infinity !
UNDER THE YOKE
(Eleasau Kaur, eighth to tenth century.)
{New Year Service.)
Ah, why is the Kingdom,
The realm of glory, Cast out and no longer
Acclaimed in story ?
'Twas Bel the dragon,
The idol hollow, With lawless footsteps
We fain would follow. 155
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The mistress of kingdoms Hence holds us lowty,
Till shines renascent God's Kingdom holy.
Our home in ashes,
Our saints all scattered,
Chaldea waxeth,
In might unshattered.
She bends her bowstring, Her yoke extending;
She rends the tender, And reigns unending.
Roots fiercely plucking, Foundations baring,
She planned in secret, Performed in daring.
She broke our tent-poles, Our curtains wrested,
And drove the ploughshare Where once we nested.
She props up princedoms, And realms sustaineth,
But us she vexeth, But us she paineth.
Now swol'n with cunning, And guile sans leaven,
In regal vesture She soars to heaven.
'Gainst Thee rebelleth, High treason scheming,
Her idols vaunteth, Thy rule blaspheming.
Lo ! us Thy children She sorely tasketh, 156
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What King o'er me is? Profanely asketh.
And cries, usurping Thy sceptre lonely,
Save me no King is, I reign, I only.
Lord, far uplifted, Hurl down her glory ;
Once more be sovran Of Israel's story !
THE LORD IS KING
(Eleasar Kalir.) (New Year Service.)
The terrible sons of the mighty race
Shout in thunder the Lord is King, The angels whose figure the lightnings trace
Flame to the world that the Lord was King, And seraphs whose stature is one with Space
Proclaim that the Lord shall be King for ever. The Lord is King, the Lord was King, the Lord shall be King for ever and ever.
The rushing and undulant sons of fire
Fiercely cry that the Lord is King, The rustling legions with harp and lyre
Sweetly tell that the Lord was King, And numberless creatures in ceaseless choir
Chant that the Lord shall be King for ever. The Lord is King, the Lord was King, the Lord shall be King for ever and ever.
The bards who remember the songs of yore
Sing aloud that the Lord is King, The sages enshrouded in mystic lore
Find and proclaim that the Lord was King, And rulers of spans of the heavenly floor
Cry that the Lord shall be King for ever.
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The Lord is King, the Lord was King, the Lord shall be King for ever and ever.
The heirs of the Torah, Thy rich bequest,
Chant in joy that the Lord is King, The lordly warriors writh crown and crest
Crown thee, declaring the Lord was King, And angels in fiery garments drest
Repeat that the Lord shall be King for ever. The Lord is King, the Lord was King, the Lord shall be King for ever and ever.
Mellifluous orators trained of tongue Preach and teach that the Lord is King,
The shimmering cherubim, radiant, young, Trumpet exultant the Lord was King,
And seraphim circling have ever sung
The song that the Lord shall be King for ever.
The Lord is King, the Lord was King, the Lord shall be King for ever and ever.
Thy people in passionate worship cry
One to another the Lord is King. In awe of the marvels beneath the sky
Each explains that the Lord was King. One sound from Thy pastures ascends on high :
The chant that the Lord shall be King for ever. The Lord is King, the Lord was King, the Lord shall be King for ever and ever.
Assemblies of holiness consecrate
Thee with the cry that the Lord is King,
Innumerous myriads iterate
Only this — that the Lord was King,
And flame-flashing angels enthroned in state Echo, the Lord shall be King for ever.
The Lord is King, the Lord was King, the Lord shall be King for ever and ever.
The universe throbs with Thy pauseless praise,
Chorus eternal, the Lord is King. Thy glory is cried from the dawn of days,
Worshippers calling the Lord was King.
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And ever the Saints who shall witness Thy ways
Shall cry that the Lord shall be King for ever. The Lord is King, the Lord was King, the Lord shall be King for ever and ever.
THE HYMN OF GLORY
(Anonymous, thirteenth century.) (Eve of Atonement Service.)
I
Sweet hymns shall be my chant and woven songs For Thou art all for which my spirit longs —
To be within the shadow of Thy hand And all Thy mystery to understand.
The while Thy glory is upon my tongue, My inmost heart with love of Thee is wrung.
So though Thy mighty marvels I proclaim, 'Tis songs of love wherewith I greet Thy name.
II
I have not seen Thee, yet I tell Thy praise, Nor known Thee, yet I image forth Thy ways.
For by Thy seers' and servants' mystic speech Thou didst Thy sovran splendour darkly teach.
And from the grandeur of Thy work they drew The measure of Thy inner greatness, too.
They told of Thee, but not as Thou must be, Since from Thy work they tried to body Thee.
To countless visions did their pictures run, Behold through all the visions Thou art one.
Ill
In Thee old age and youth at once were drawn, The grey of eld, the flowing locks of dawn,
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The ancient Judge, the youthful Warrior, The Man of Battles, terrible in war,
The helmet of salvation on His head,
And by His hand and arm the triumph led,
His head all shining with the dew of light, His locks all dripping with the drops of night.
IV
I glorify Him, for He joys in me, My crown of beauty He shall ever be I
His head is like pure gold ; His forehead's flame Is graven glory of His holy name.
And with that lovely diadem 'tis graced, The coronal His people there have placed.
His hair as on the head of youth is twined, In wealth of raven curls it flows behind.
His circlet is the home of righteousness ; Ah, may He love His highest rapture less !
And be His treasured people in His hand A diadem His kingly brow to band.
By Him they were uplifted, carried, crowned, Thus honoured inasmuch as precious found.
His glory is on me, and mine on Him, And when I call, He is not far or dim.
Ruddy in red apparel, bright He glows
When He from treading Edom's wine-press goes.
Phylacteried the vision Moses viewed, The day He gazed on God's similitude.
He loves His folk ; the meek will glorify, And, shrined in prayer, draw their rapt reply.
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V
Truth is Thy primal word ; at Thy behest The generations pass — O aid our quest
For Thee, and set my host of songs on high, And let my psalmody come very nigh.
My praises as a coronal account,
And let my prayer as Thine incense mount.
Deem precious unto Thee the poor man's song As those that to Thine altar did belong.
Rise, O my blessing, to the lord of birth,
The breeding, quickening, righteous force of earth.
Do Thou receive it with acceptant nod, My choicest incense offered to my God.
And let my meditation grateful be, For all my being is athirst for Thee.
LAUS DEO
(Meshuleam ben Kalonymos, flourished at Rome or Lucca
970.)
{Day of Atonement Service.)
In the height and the depth of His burning,
Where mighty He sits on the throne, His light He unveils and His yearning
To all who revere Him alone. His promises never are broken,
His greatness all measure exceeds ; Then exalt Him who gives you for token
His marvellous deeds.
He marshals the planets unbounded,
He numbers the infinite years ; The seat of His empire is founded
More deep than the nethermost spheres ;
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He looks on the lands from His splendour : They tremble and quiver like reeds ;
Then exalt ye in lowly surrender His marvellous deeds.
The worlds He upholds in their flying, • His feet on the footstool of earth; His word hath established undying
Whatever His word brought to birth. The ruler of hosts is His title ;
Then exalt Him in worshipful creeds, Declaring in solemn recital
His marvellous deeds.
He is master of all He created,
Sublime in His circle of light ; His strength with His glory is mated,
His greatness at one with His might. So that Seraphim over Him winging,
Obeying an angel that leads, Unite in the rapture of singing
His marvellous deeds.
His renown fills the heavenly spaces,
The world He beholds to its ends. His foes, who are mine, too, He chases ;
I count all who love Him my friends. Exalted be therefore His glory,
His praises be scattered as seeds, Till all the world learns the great story,
His marvellous deeds.
But of man — ah ! the tale is another,
His counsels are evil and vain : He dwells with deceit as a brother,
And the worm is the close of his reign. Into earth he is carted and shovelled,
And who shall recount or who heeds, When above earth he strutted or grovelled,
His marvellous deeds?
Not so God ! — earth on nothing He founded, And on emptiness stretched out the sky ;
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With land the great waters He bounded, And bade all their breeds multiply.
In light He is clad as a raiment, His greatness no eulogy needs ;
Yet exalt, 'tis your only repayment, His marvellous deeds.
PRAYER FOR DEW
(Eleasar Kalir, eighth to tenth century.) {Passover Service.)
Dew, precious dew, unto Thy land forlorn ! Pour out our blessings in Thy exultation, To strengthen us with ample wine and corn And give Thy chosen city safe foundation In dew.
Dew, precious dew, the good year's crown, we wait, That earth in pride and glory may be fruited, And that the city now so desolate Into a gleaming crown may be transmuted By dew.
Dew, precious dew, let fall upon the land, From heaven's treasurv be this accorded, So shall the darkness by a beam be spanned, The faithful of Thy vineyard be rewarded With dew.
Dew, precious dew, to make the mountains sweet, The savour of Thy excellence recalling 1 Deliver us from exile, we entreat, So we may sing Thy praises, softly falling As dew.
Dew, precious dew, our granaries to fill, And us with youthful freshness to enharden ! Beloved God, uplift us at Thy will And make us as a richly-watered garden With dew. 163
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Dew, precious dew, that we our harvest reap, And guard our fatted flocks and herds from leanness J Behold our people follows Thee like sheep, And looks to Thee to give the earth her greenness With dew.
THE REJOICING OF THE LAW
(Anon. Time of the Gaonim.) (Service at end of Feast of Tabernacles.)
This Feast of the Law all your gladness display,
To-day all your homages render. What profit can lead one so pleasant a way,
What jewels can vie with its splendour? Then exult in the Law on its festival day,
The Law is our Light and Defender.
My God I will praise in a jubilant lay,
My hope in Him never surrender, His glory proclaim where His chosen sons pray,
My Rock all my trust shall engender. Then exult in the Law on its festival day,
The Law is our Light and Defender.
My heart of Thy goodness shall carol alway,
Thy praises I ever will render ; While breath is, my lips all Thy wonders shall say,
Thy truth and Thy kindness so tender. Then exult in the Law on its festival day,
The Law is our Light and Defender.
THE ANGELS CAME
(Anon. Time of the Gaonim.) (Idem — Day of Rejoicing of the Law — A Children's Festival)
The Angels came a-mustering,
A-mustering, a-mustering, The Angels came a-clustering
Around the sapphire throne. 164
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A-questioning of one another, Of one another, of one another,
A-questioning each one his brother Around the sapphire throne.
Pray who is he, and where is he, And where is he, and where is he,
Whose shining casts — so fair is he — A shadow on the throne?
Pray, who has up to heaven come,
To heaven come, to heaven come, Through all the circles seven come, To fetch the Torah down?
'Tis Moses up to heaven come, To heaven come, to heaven come,
Through all the circles seven come, To fetch the Torah down!
165
THE LEGEND OF THE CONQUERING JEW
In July, 1911, the First — and so far the last — Universal Races Congress was held at the University of London under the Presidency of Lord Weardale. The list of Officers, Council and supporters of that pioneer Congress of Fraternity, whose emblem was a hand-clasp between the Occident and the Orient, and which opened with a noble paper by a Hindoo completely anticipating President Wilson's Gospel, constitutes a roll of the greatest political and spiritual figures throughout the whole world at the start of the second decade of the twentieth century. And that precisely this period should have exhibited the greatest internecine struggle in human annals, with the most reckless reversion to barbarism in its methods that even warfare has ever witnessed, suggests uncomfortably that we are still at the mercy of what, in the old Russia, they were wont to call " the dark forces."
But this impotency of the rival forces of light — due to causes by no means beyond analysis — does not alter the fact that the fine flower of the civilisation of 1911 had arrived at the stage of at least desiring international and racial fraternity, without regard even to the colour-line. And as though to bear out the view of " the mission of Israel " maintained in my con- tribution to the discussion, the Congress of Races was organised by a Jew, and it was a Jew — Dr. Charles S. Myers, Lecturer in Experimental Psychology in the University of Cambridge — who struck the clearest note of hope by his well-substantiated thesis that there is no primitive people incapable of progress, provided only the environment be appropriately changed.
Yet at this same Congress — and, by an ironic coincidence, in immediate sequence to my own paper — a writer of the highest culture and the completest goodwill, whose subject moreover was " The Modern Conscience," put forward a view of Jewish thought and history which is a startling proof of the world's need of the pages that follow, and of such enlighten- ment as they are able to convey on the subject of Judaism or the Jews.
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II
Sir Charles Bruce, G.C.M.G., K.C.M.G., J.P., D.L., had — according to Who's Who — been educated at Harrow and had subsequently enjoyed the illumination both of an American University and a German. He had been a Professor of San- scrit at King's College, London, when I was a suckling in that city, and he had gone on to the Directorship of Public Instruc- tion in Ceylon and to a number of other important Colonial positions, including Governorships. Unlike the average edu- cated Englishman he could write in German, and he had con- tributed a work in that language to the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg. An Imperialist of the noblest kind, really believing in " The White Man's Burden," he had published high-minded books like " The True Temper of Empire," and a volume of Poems had testified to the generous effervescence of his youth. Yet this unprejudiced, widely-travelled scholar and thinker laid it down in the paper that was bound next to mine in the Congress Book — a paper marked moreover by a spacious and sympathetic outlook over all history, all religions, all races — that the Biblical stock from which I come had looked forward to " a constantly multiplied posterity which was in time to people the world, and make it the area of a civilisation of which they should have the exclusive monopoly," and that the means to this monstrous end was " a policy of extermina- tion " towards all other races.
As some such grotesque notion of the ancient Jews and their bloodthirsty Jehovah is constantly cropping up (though in less surprising environments than a Congress of Races), it may be worth while to examine it in some detail, more especially as it shadows even the modern Jews in the guise of a suspicion, real or feigned, that they too cherish the dream of exterminating or at least conquering the heathen.
ni
The policy of conquest by extermination, Sir Charles Bruce calmly tells us, is summarised in the notorious command trans- mitted to Saul through the prophet Samuel to smite Amalek and utterly destroy " both man and woman, infant and suckling, camel and ass." But if the object of this command was to make the world safe for Judaeocracy, it is not easy to see why
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the valuable cattle were included in it. As a matter of fact, the Jews sensibly spared these useful assets, besides chivalrously saving King Agag, and though this combination of the Sancho Panza and the Don Quixote cost Saul his Kingdom at the hands of an avenging divinity, yet the chastisement was merely for disobedience. There was in fact no such general policy of extermination. The policy towards the Amalekites, savage though it was, was peculiar — it was a unique historic vendetta, a long-standing feud that went back to the first days of the Exodus, when the Amalekites meanly barred the way to the Jews coming up out of the Egyptian slavery, so that " the Lord said unto Moses : Write this for a memorial in the book and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua, for I will utterly blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven." Thus the nemesis is regarded as righteous. And here we have a clue to the reading of the Bible without which the reader will go astray. For, as I have remarked in the first essav of this book, the Bible never concedes the principle of modern Prussian thinkers that brute force qua force has a legitimate place in the world. This is a valuable step upwards, though it may lead to sophis- tication of ancient records, and to contemporary hypocrisy.
Just as Kipling represents the white man's aggressiveness as his " burden," so did the writer of the Pentateuch represent the Jew's invasion of Palestine as a divine chastisement of which he was the instrument. The difference between the two glosses is all in favour of the Bible writer, since Kipling's Englishman prospers through his own overflowing virtues, while the Bible Jew prospers only through his enemy's vices. Thus the pop- ular assumption that the early part of the Bible is barbarous is mistaken; the elements with which the sacred historian had to deal were frequently savage, but they are all seen refracted through an elevated belief in the divine ordering of all phe- nomena. Bolingbroke defined history as philosophy teaching by example. Bible history is religion teaching by example.
In such a blood-feud then as that against the Amalekites, in which a righteous nemesis was supposed to demand the radical elimination of the abhorred breed, even the cattle would be accounted under the taint. But so far from this massacre of the Amalekites beinrr part of a policy of exterminating non- Jews, the very description of it shows the Jews carefully spar- ing another tribe. " Saul said to the Kenites, Go, depart, get ye down from among the Amalekites lest I destroy you with them, for ye showed kindness to all the children of Israel when
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they came up out of Egypt. So the Kenites departed from among the Amalekites."
The policy of destruction was indeed applied by the invaders of Palestine, and is explicitly enjoined in the twentieth chapter of Deuteronomy, but it is carefully based on the necessity of avoiding the contagion of the native abominations and, as one would expect, it was only directed at those tribes who occupied the actual area of " The Promised Land," — no very great area either. It was not to be applied at all to external tribes, if they surrendered peacefully, and only to their males, if they insisted on putting the issue to the sword. Barbarous as is this temper, beneath all the historian's sophistication, its object was merely to find a home for a homeless people, and compares favourably with the objects for which, even within living mem- ory, aborigines of more than one now civilised land have been eliminated by peoples already possessing vast portions of the earth. As for earlier ages, consider the x account in Green's " Short History of England " of the wiping out of the ancient Britons. " The English conquest was a sheer dispossession and slaughter of the people whom the English conquered." The fierceness of the struggle, the conquest only partially carried out after centuries of warfare, remind one vividly of the Jew in Palestine, and may be commended to the cultivators of the Anglo-Israelite legend. When at last the struggle lapsed, " Britain," writes Green, " had become England, a land that is not of Britons but of Englishmen. . . . The Briton had disappeared from the greater part of the land which had been his own, and the tongue, the religion, the laws of his English conqueror reigned without a rival from Essex to the Severn, and from the British Channel to the Firth of Forth." This was two thousand years after Joshua. Or let us take a period a thousand years later still.
" The contact which Columbus established/' says Seeley in his " Expansion of England," " being the most strange and violent which ever took place between two parts of the human family, led to a fierce struggle and furnished one of the most terrible pages to the annals of the world. But in this struggle there was no sort of equality. The American race had no more power of resisting the European than the sheep has of resisting the wolf. Even where it was numerous and had a settled polity, as in Peru, it could make no resistance; its states were crushed, the ruling families ex- tinguished and the population itself reduced to a form of slavery. Everywhere, therefore, the country fell into the hands of the immi-
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grating race, and was disposed of at its pleasure as so much plun- der. The immigrants did not merely, as in India, gradually show a great military superiority to the native race, so as in the end to subdue them, but overwhelmed them at once like a party of hunters suddenly assailing a herd of antelopes."
We learn in fact from Prescott's " Conquest of Peru " that Pizarro's conquest was a massacre, for the followers of the Inca were unarmed, unacquainted with the effects of artillery, and even with charging horses. Moreover it was treachery, for the Inca came to the fatal plaza as a guest of his white visitors. Yet Pizarro encouraged his followers with the cry that heaven was on their side — his chieftain, a Dominican friar, crucifix in hand, summoned the Indian monarch to submission to Christ and Charles V., and after the butchery, the Christian conquis- tador explained to his royal prisoner that he and his men had come into the country to proclaim the gospel, the religion of Jesus Christ, and that it was no wonder they had prevailed, when His shield was over them. The day's proceedings closed with an exhortation to his desperados to offer up thanksgivings to Providence. This, as I have said, was three thousand years after the Conquest of Canaan.
IV
The Old Testament would not be the great literature that it is, did it mirror life as less savage than we know life still to be. And if its Jews fall occasionally almost to the level of some of the races in our recent war, their brutality is mitigated by many a prescription which puts those Christian peoples to shame. For a modern evolutionary view of the rise and progress of Judaism from its crude origins, I must refer the reader to my little book on " Chosen Peoples." But it may be pointed out here how, even in the most primitive section of the Bible and apart from its general veneer of moralisation, we catch notes of chivalry and pity, to which no inconsiderable portion of Christian Europe is still deaf. Thus after the countless rapes of conquered women, with which recent history has made us so painfully familiar, it is like hearing soft music to read in Deuteronomy (xxi. 10 — 13) of the warrior's duty to the enemy woman who has aroused his lust : of the necessary marriage with its set ritual and its due delay before his passion
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could be gratified. Little enough of extermination here. Still less of a narrow matrimonial tribalism. And the Mosaic legis- lator proceeds to trace the course of the husband's duty in the event of the conquered alien woman failing to bring him the expected delight. " Then thou shalt let her go whither she will ; but thou shalt not sell her at all for money, thou shalt not deal with her as a slave, because thou hast humbled her."
Dekker described Christ as " the first true gentleman that ever breathed." It seems to me that the priority belongs to the Mosaic legislator. In the same vein are other rules for the conduct of war, the prohibition for example against destroying the enemy's necessary fruit-trees — " for is the tree of the field man that it should be besieged of thee? " (Deuteronomy xx. 19).
Best of all the war regulations of this malignant Mosaic code, and of a mansuetude to which no modern State has yet attained, is that individuals of the citizen army are to withdraw from the approaching battle. " And the officers shall speak unto the people, saying: ' What man is there that hath built a new house, and hath not dedicated it? let him go and return to his house, lest he die in the battle, and another man dedicate it. And what man is there that hath planted a vineyard, and hath not used the fruit thereof? let him go and return unto his house, lest he die in the battle, and another man use the fruit thereof. And what man is there that hath betrothed a wife, and hath not taken her? let him go and return unto his house, lest he die in the battle, and another man take her.' " In the final exemp- tion, considerateness is enforced by sagacity : " And the officers shall speak further unto the people, and they shall say : ( What man is there that is fearful and fainthearted? let him go and return unto his house, lest his brethren's heart melt as his heart.' "
Here is a shrewd psychological understanding of the dan- gerous contagion of cowardice, as well as of its probable self- conquest if given freedom of choice. The contagion of courage would then probably act upon the trembler, and the fear of confessing himself faint-hearted might nerve him to bravery. Compare this genial wisdom with the grim " Shot at dawn " of contemporary military law; with that stark brutality of the ritual of Moloch which has sent shell-shocked conscripts in their teens to a dishonoured grave. The Jewish law, at once more merciful and more intelligent, tended to produce a state of soul in the ranks resembling that of our first volunteers to
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avenge Belgium. It is the combination of universal service with freedom.
A people that could thus, thirty-five centuries ago, make militarism its slave and not its master, might well flatter itself that the Lord was with it. And even though it anticipated modern Europe in covering the ruthless dispossession of its foes by the plea of their abominable practices, it had the saving grace to tell itself: "Not for thy righteousness or for the uprightness of thy heart, dost thou go in to possess their land ; but for the wickedness of these nations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee. . . . For thou art a stiff- necked people " (Deuteronomy ix. 5, 6).
Moreover, despite the narrative in the fifteenth chapter of Samuel, even the Amalekites were not really extirpated, as we learn incidentally from the twentj'-seventh chapter of the same book, where the Amalekites figure — as alive as ever — among the tribes against whom David makes raid, leaving " neither man nor woman alive." Three chapters later these twice- annihilated Amalekites themselves make a raid and burn Ziklag and carry away all the inhabitants thereof, including a couple of David's wives. David, however, not to be balked, burst upon the revelling conquerors and " recovered all that the Amalekites had taken," and " there escaped not a man of them." Even now the Amalekites are not done for : there is literally a saving clause, for the verse proceeds : " Save four hundred young men who rode upon camels and fled." Evidently the prior reports of the " annihilation " of the Amalekites are Oriental, or shall we say "official"? They were doubtless designed to bolster up the imaginary honour of Jehovah as an efficient deity, faithful to the legendary bargain with Israel. One doubts even if Saul or David had smitten the Amalekites as ruthlessly as the official versions boasted, for was it likely in those days of blood-feuds that in that case the Amalekites, when successful in the counter-raid at Ziklag, would have merely carried off the wives, sons and daughters captured there, so that David was able to recapture them unharmed?
It needs, we have, seen, no profound scholarship, no subtle dialectic, to traverse and demolish Sir Charles Bruce's thesis: the simplest reference to his own source of evidence, the Bible, is sufficient. There was no general command or design to extir-
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pate the heathen. The conquest of Moab was indeed especially banned on the ground of the prior historical right of another branch of the clan. " Be not at enmity with Moab, neither contend with them in battle ; for I will not give thee of his land for a possession ; because I have given Ar unto the children of Lot for a possession." There may have been as much prudence as chivalry in this prohibition, for the inscription on the Moabite stone, discovered in 186'8 and now in the Louvre, reveals the Moabites as no less fanatically persuaded of the protection of their God Chemosh than the Jews of Jehovah's. Nor does the prohibition seem to have been respected when the Israelites grew stronger. But on the other hand in the cases where destruction was commanded, it was not invariably carried out ; not only because some of the tribes remained unconquerable so that the invaders had to put up with their presence, but also because in a number of instances where the natives did submit, the victors preferred to make them tributary. (See Judges, i. 28, 30, 33, 35.)
This mildness, this neglect to extirpate, is, however, inter- preted by the incurable Sir Charles Bruce as only a refinement of Jewish malignity. For lest his readers, though they might be expected not to look up the matter in the Bible, might be smitten by the doubt whether the few million Jews in Palestine could ever really have harboured such an insane hope as to eradicate — not simply conquer but eradicate — not only its autochthones but all the populations of the great Empires of antiquity into the bargain, Sir Charles Bruce explains that prisoners of war were kept alive and " adopted into the com- munity under conditions of servitude," with the Machiavellian design of enlarging Israel for his world-swallowing role; it being manifest that " the natural increase of heredity multiplied by polygamy and concubinage " would not suffice for this super- Alexandrian achievement. But where did Sir Charles Bruce find warrant for his statement that prisoners of war, male and female, were " adopted into the community under conditions of servitude "?
We have already seen how female prisoners of war fared if married by Israelites and then divorced, and a further light is thrown by Leviticus xix. 34 upon the treatment of the alien question under the Mosaic code. " If a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, }^e shall do him no wrong. The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home-born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself ; for ye were strangers in
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the land of Egypt." But if by prisoners of war Sir Charles Bruce means not the few survivors of slaughter, but whole conquered or surrendered tribes, by the adoption of whom the community fortified itself, then his language is very loose. For there is a vast difference between exacting tribute or military assistance from a tribe and reducing its individuals to servitude. And even if Israel gradually incorporated the conquered tribes and areas into his little kingdom, that is an operation elemen- tally simple, repeated ad nauseam in universal history, and car- rying no such lurid design of world-destruction. Moreover, if Israel did admit these other peoples into the heritage of the promise, it disposes of his much-denounced tribalism. The fact is, that the honesty of the Jewish historian of the Bible has been the undoing of his people. While other nations carefully avert their eyes from the shambles on which they are established, Israel, by facing life steadily, and facing it whole, has written himself down a brute, compared with these elegant peoples whose history has been tricked out by their poets, and who have carried forward in their consciousness and their literature only its most glorious aspects. Imagine if that passage in Green had formed part of the liturgy of the English church, " familiar in our mouths as household words."
VI
Great indeed is the power of the written word. Everywhere it interposes between man and the facts, between the eye and fresh personal vision. Nowhere has this obscuring power been more marked than in the blindness produced by the Bible to the most glaring phenomena in the life of the people whose epic it once constituted. It has fixed the ever-living Jew as unchange- ably as the dead Roman or the ancient Greek. It forbids his development. From the last page of the Bible to the first page of the Doar Hayom, the Jerusalem daily, he has rarely ceased to expand and create ; yet he is eternally what he once was. The Book says so. It is the museum in which he is perpetually exhibited. Because, for example, the Old Testament has no definite promise of individual immortality except in a solitary reference to Resurrection in Daniel xii. 2, it is assumed that the modern Jew has still no gospel of future life. But we know that while the Old Testament was still uncompleted, Jews, streaming back to Palestine from Persia after the second Temple was built, brought back from Zoroastrianism the doc-
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trine of post-mortem Retribution and the whole paraphernalia of Heaven and Hell. If a Jewish prayer-book or the Thirteen Articles of Maimonides were not accessible to Sir Charles Bruce, he had only to walk through a Jewish cemetery to see that the faith in resurrection is no less lively than in the neighbouring churchyard. Yet he tells us that the Jew throughout the ages has found sufficient stimulation in the im- mortality of his race. This would not matter so much if Sir Charles Bruce had not assumed likewise that the sustaining vision has been that same fantastic conception of world-dom- inance by extermination. And here we reach the really mon- strous part of Sir Charles Bruce's case. For a Jew remaining in scecula seeculorum what he was four thousand years ago — though, of course, even then he was far from realising Sir Charles Bruce's vision of him — it follows that he is still pur- suing sedulously, if subterraneously, his old game of enthroning world-Jewry on the ruins of all other civilisations ; mining what he can no longer conquer above ground, but still, like Marlowe's Tamburlaine,
""Measuring the limits of his empery By East and West, as Phoebus does his course."
Recently I was startled to see at the head of a letter in the Times the words in large capitals: "The Mosaic Law in Politics." I naturally thought it was rebuking the savage expression in European life of the Old Testament maxim: " Eye for eye, tooth for tooth " — that maxim, which has for so long replaced the New Testament mildness ; that sad Ersatz, or substitute, on which Christendom has subsisted during the war, in the course of which the world's stock of goodness has given out, like so many other precious commodities. I was mistaken. The letter referred not to the European debacle, not to our repaying barbarism by barbarism, but exclusively to the ferocity of the Jews, who were declared to be running Bolshevism in Russia, purely and simply as a means of avenging themselves upon the country that had persecuted them ; and they were begged to abandon the unique and unparalleled vengefulness of their Shylockian species ; otherwise they would be massacred.
The letter, which was signed " Verax " — by a slip of the pen, I suppose, for " Mendax " — was, of course, merely one of Lord Northcliffe's numerous devices for saving his Koltchaks and Denikins and discounting their massacres. The Mosaic maxim
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in question had been practically obsolete in Jewry before Jesus was born, and my bitter amusement at seeing it now ascribed to the only race that had outgrown it, was intensified by the remembrance that a week or two earlier the concord of a dinner party had been seriously impaired by my quarrel with a vicar's wife, who maintained stoutly that " Eye for eye, tooth for tooth " was the correct and righteous principle against the Germans, and that she was, in this instance, for the Old Dis- pensation. She seemed indeed not only to want tooth for tooth, but a whole set of teeth, and not only eye for eye, but a pair of gold eye-glasses thrown in.
But coming from a clergyman's wife, it was a piece of can- dour, of almost German candour. I say German, because it was that great Church newspaper, the Christliche Welt, which proposed at the beginning of the war a " moratorium for Christianity." To preach Christianity, said the journal, in these days of torpedoes and poison gas, was only to provoke " mocking hellish laughter."
In the more foggy mentality of Britain, it did not prove impossible to reconcile poison gas with the Holy Ghost, and a host of war-pulpiteers arose — more noxious than war- profiteers — to explain this heavenly harmony. Even now that peace is nominally made, there is scant slackening in the anti-German campaign. Yet " Verax " could speculate " whether the Law of Moses has given the Jewish character its hard and tenacious revengefulness or whether the law of Moses itself is an expression of a peculiar race-character." In truth if ever there was a code soaked in kindliness it is the Mosaic, and if ever there was a race which was forgiving to the point of flabbiness, it is the race which styles itself " the merciful, the sons of the merciful," and of which I have written :
" Faithful friends to our foemen, slaves to a scornful clique, The only Christians in Europe^ turning the other cheek."
Compare " a tooth for a tooth " with " a life for a sheep " which was British law little more than a century ago : at which period indeed no fewer than two hundred misdemeanours were punishable with death. The Jewish Sanhedrin which executed one man in seventy years was known as " the bloody Sanhedrin."
"Revenge is a kind of wild justice," says Bacon, and the canon of " eye for eye " was an attempt to remove the wildness of revenge and leave only the justice. It was not a principle of private revenge at all, but a legal maxim for the guidance of
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judges. The antithesis set up by Jesus was thus fallacious, for the individual might quite well, after his right eye had been gouged out by a brute, turn the other cheek to him as Jesus recommended, without lessening the duty of the State in the interests of order to remove the ruffian's own eye. In practice, of course, such disagreeable contingencies were extremely rare, and a money penalty soon replaced the crude operation of the text, which was even legally impracticable if, for example, the accused was blind or toothless. But the principle of exact justice laid down in the text is hardly to be questioned by a Christendom which deliberately perverted the message of Edith Cavell, one of the few Christians whom the war revealed. For " Verax " to single out " the inexorable vindictiveness " of the Jewish character in face of the prevailing Gentile psychology, demands a brazenness which the prince of liars might envy. Civilisation and Christianity are in danger, screams the Morn- ing Post in the silliest and sliest series of articles that have ever degraded British journalism. It is true. But the danger comes not from Judaism but from those Pagan or Prussian doctrines of which the Morning Post is the naked and un- ashamed exponent.
It is not unintelligible that Christendom endowed with this psychology should conceive Jewry after its own image. The Spectator cannot rid itself of the notion that though the Jewish world-plot is undeniably a mare's nest, yet individuals here and there must be driven by their sufferings to join secret societies for revenge upon the Christian. And that admirable American organ, The Christian Science Monitor, observes : " In the centuries of mental and physical anguish through which it has been the lot of the Jew to pass, slavery in Babylon, torture in the dungeons of the Inquisition, massacre from the Dniester to the Thames, it would have been strange if there had not been born, out of the madness of that suffering, Jews filled with every conceivable aspiration to rule in Christendom, or to whom no scheme of revenge could be too delirious."
If from these revealing reflections of Christian psychology we turn to the realities of Jewish psychology, we find no echo of these hypotheses in the voice of Jerusalem. Sokolow, speaking in Hebrew at a great Zionist Demonstration, said : " Our masses in Eastern Europe had been facing death in seven circles of hell. . . . For this cold murder of whole communities not Heaven itself, nor all the mercy of the angels could find pallia- tion. . . . Its horror and wicked purposefulness should have
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stunned the world and cried for vengeance. But the sentiment of vengeance is strange to the Jewish people. An undying fame is reserved for the memory of our martyrs. The tears shed over their graves will, we hope, only deepen the intensity of Jewish national consciousness, and in course of time be dried by the happiness we experience once more in having our own Home strong enough to guarantee the blessings of peace and security." This attitude of passive endurance, combined even with the note that Israel's agony is a righteous punish- ment for sin, has provoked almost to madness the great contem- porary Hebrew poet, Bialik, already stricken to the soul by the spectacle of a pogrom in his own town. With an Old Testa- ment boldness the poet makes God rage against Himself.
" No root of hatred, not a blade of vengeance, For hark, they beat the breast and cry, Ashamnu! They pray of Me forgiveness for their sin. Their sin? The sin of shadows on the wall, The sin of broken pots, or bruised worms ! What will they? Why stretch out their hands to Me? Has none a fist? And where's a thunderbolt To take revenge for all the generations, To blast the world and tear the heav'ns asunder And wreck the universe, My throne of glory ? "
When one compares the drab realities of Jewish life with the flamboyant picture of the Jew as a world-dominator whether in actuality or design, one knows not whether to laugh or weep. Yet it is this ludicrous legend, this ineffably silly travesty of the facts, that constitutes the stock-in-trade of the anti-Semitic press which, to the dishonour of British journalism, has recently sprung up in our midst, and which to parade its pretended disquiet recoils from no misrepresentation or misquotation of current Jewish thought, my own not excluded. Sir Charles Bruce is not of this gang, nor would he be as deaf as the Morning Post to all disproof. But he offers an historic sum- mary which exceeds even the extravagances of the journalists in its wildness and in its dangerous implications.
vn
" Under the operation of the cosmic law of action and reaction," he writes, " the policy (i.e., Jewry's policy of destruc- tion) was adopted in retaliation by every community with which
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it came in conflict and which it menaced with destruction or servitude. To quote the words of an illustrious member of their race —
" ' The attempt to extirpate them has been made under the most favourable auspices and on the largest scale; the most considerable means that man could command have been pertinaciously applied to this object for the longest period of recorded time. Egyptian Phar- aohs, Assyrian Kings, Roman Emperors, Scandinavian Crusaders, Gothic Princes and holy inquisitors have alike devoted their energies to the fulfilment of this common purpose. Expatriation, exile, cap- tivity, confiscation, torture on the most ingenious and massacres on the most extensive scale, a curious system of degrading customs and debasing laws which would have broken the heart of any other peo- ple, have been tried in vain.' '
Instead of being shocked by this eloquent survey of Disraeli's, Sir Charles Bruce regards all this as but " retaliation " and gives us in fact an elaborate justification of Jewish Persecution right through the ages, up till the day when what he calls " the modern conscience," ceasing to react so crudely, substituted a policy of " amalgamation " for that of " retaliation." Even now — to judge from his language — it is only the reacting force that has civilised itself, there is nothing of " modern con- science " about the Jewish force.
As history the whole passage is deplorable. Had Sir Charles Bruce confined the operation of his cosmic law of reaction to the natives of Palestine during the centuries of Israel's struggle and primacy, it would have been at least plausible. But to picture the world reacting against Israel's design of extermina- tion, its menace of "destruction and servitude," during the cen- turies when Jewry lay broken and scattered, a helpless and dis- armed minority, penned into Ghettos or Mellahs among the warrior tribes of Christendom or Islam, is too patently absurd. One must charitably suppose that our author means that perse- cution was the traditional answer to the ancient aggressiveness of Israel, and that the sins of the fathers were being visited on the children to the thirtieth and fortieth generation. " Men- aced with destruction or servitude " forsooth ! Never was there a more spiritless people than this Rabbi-ridden folk, which submitted its neck to the yoke, its garment to the badge, its cheek to the smiter (Colaphisation the jurists called the ritual box on the ear, which in some towns the leading Jews received annually on Good Friday). For after the final revolt of Bar
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Cochba against the Romans early in the second century, the Maccabaean spirit shrank into a pious resignation. The Jewish Exile was declared to be the will of God, which it was even blasphemous to struggle against, and the Jews, in a strange and unique congruity with the teachings of the prophet they rejected, turned the other cheek to the smiter and left to Caesar the things that were Caesar's, concentrating themselves in every land of the exile upon industry, domesticity and a transmuted religion, in winch realities were desiccated into metaphors, and the Temple sacrifices sublimated into prayers.
The absence of a territory of their own in which new national history could be made forced them to cling to Zion in idea, and so the religion which preserved them through the long dark centuries of dispersion was saddled with their old territorial traditions, preserving these equally in an indissoluble amalgam. Thus Palestine soil clung still about the roots of Judaism, and the old agricultural festivals continued to be observed at seasons with which, in many lands of the exile, they had no natural con- nection. The transplantation was effected only at the cost of fossilisation. Even while the tribal traits had still the potential fluidity of life, neither Greeks nor Romans could change this tenacious race. Its dispersion from Palestine merely indurated its traditions by freeing them from the possibility of common development. The religious customs defended by Josephus against Apion are still the rule of the majority. The last national victory celebrated — that of Judas Maccabaeus — is two thousand years old ; the last popular fast dates from the first century of the Christian era. The Jew agonising in Poland or the Ukraine rejoices automatically in Ins Passover of Freedom, in his exodus from Egypt. Even new traits super- imposed by their history upon fractions of the race are con- served with equal persistency. The Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 still retain a sub-loyalty to the King of Spain and speak a Spanish idiom, printed in Hebrew characters, which preserves in the Orient words vanished from the lips of actual Spaniards and to be found only in Cervantes. But in this palimpsest patriotism, the basal tradition was still Palestine. The Rabbinic opportunism, to which I have already alluded, while on the one hand keeping alive the hope that the legislation and ritual of Palestine, however gross, would come back in God's good time, went so far in the other direction as to adopt a decision of the Babylonian Talmud — "His country's law is Israel's law " as the dictator of the present. Everything in
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short — in this transitional period between the ancient glory and the Messianic era to come — was sacrificed to the ideal of mere survival. The mediaeval teacher Maimonides laid it down that to preserve life, even Judaism might be abandoned in all but its holiest minimum. Thus, under the standing menace of massacre and spoliation, arose Crypto-Jews or Marranos, who, frequently at the risk of the stake or the sword, carried on their Judaism in secret. Catholics in Spain and Portugal, Protes- tants in England, they were in Egypt or Turkey Mohammedans. Indeed, the Donmeh still flourish in Salonika and provide the Young Turks with statesmen, the Balearic Islands still shelter the Chuetas, and only half a century ago persecution produced the Yedil-al-Islam in Central Asia.1 Russia must be full of Greek Christians who have remained Jewish at heart. A few years before the war a number of Russian Jews, shut out from a University career, and seeking the lesser apostacy, became Mohammedans, only to find that for them the Trinity was the sole avenue to educational and social salvation.
Where existence could be achieved legally, yet not without social inferiority, a minor form of Crypto-Judaism was begot- ten, which prevails to-day in most lands of Jewish emancipation, among its symptoms being change of names, accentuated local patriotism, accentuated abstention from Jewish affairs and even anti-Semitism mimetically absorbed from the environment. Indeed Marranoism, both in its major and minor forms, may be regarded as an exemplification of the Darwinian theory of protective colouring. This pervasive assimilating force acts even upon the most faithful, undermining more subtly than persecution the life-conceptions so tenaciously perpetuated.
Nor till the rise of Zionism was there anywhere in the Jewish world any centripetal force to counteract these universal tendencies to dissipation. The religion is shattered into as many fragments as the race. After the fall of Jerusalem the Academy of Jabneh carried on the authoritative tradition of the Sanhedrin, and for over a thousand years Babylonia through a Gaon or religious head and an Exilarch or Prince of the Exile ruled with double sway the scattered scions of Israel.
In the later Middle Ages there was the Asefah or Synod to unify Jews under Judaism. From the middle of the sixteenth to the middle of the eighteenth century, the Waad or Council of Four Lands legislated almost autonomously in those central European regions where the mass of the Jews of the world was
1 A similar phenomenon was produced still more recently in the Soudan.
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congregated. To-day there is no centre of authority, whether religious or political. Even Zionism, judged by the " acid test " of subscriptions, has never rallied more than a minority of the race. Reform itself is infinitely individual, and little remains outside a few great centres but a chaos of dissolving views and dissolving communities, saved from disappearance by persecution and racial sympathy.
The notion, with which I shall presently deal in detail, that Jewish interests are Jesuitically federated or that Jewish finan- ciers use their power for Jewish ends is one of the most ironic of myths. No Jewish people or nation now exists, no Jews even as sectarians of a specific faith with a specific centre of author- ity such as Catholics or Wesleyans possess ; nothing but a multitude of individuals, a mob hopelessly amorphous, divided alike in religion and political destiny. Whatever unification the common work in or on Palestine may effect ultimately, there is as yet no common platform from which the Jews can be addressed, no common council to which any appeal can be made. Their only unity is negative — that unity imposed by the hostile hereditary vision of the ubiquitous Hainan. They live in symbiosis with every other people, each group surren- dered to its own local fortunes. This habit of dispersed and dependent existence has become second nature, and the Jews were the first to doubt whether the}7 could now form a polity of their own. Like Aunt Judy in " John Bull's Other Island," who declined to breakfast out of doors because the open air was " not natural," the bulk of the Jewish leaders consider a Jewish State a political perversion, and are only reconciling them- selves to the Palestine project because they have at last come to understand it is but another form of serfdom and symbiosis. There are no subjects more zealous for their adopted father- lands : indeeed they are only too patriotic. There are no Ottomans so Young-Turkish as the Turkish Jews, no Americans so spread-eagle as the American Jews, no section of Britain so Jingo as Anglo-Jewry, which even converts the Chanukkah Celebration of Maccabasan valour into a British military fes- tival. Before the war the French Jewry and the German reproduced in miniature the Franco-German rivalries and the latter even aped the aggressive Weltpolitik. All this ultra- patriotism is probably due to the fact that Jews feel consciously what the other citizens take as a matter of course; doubtless too a certain measure of Marranoism or protective mimicry enters into the ostentation. At any rate, each section of
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Jewry, wherever it is permitted entrance into the general life, invariably evolves a somewhat over-coloured version of the life in which it finds itself embedded, and fortunate must be accounted the peoples which have at hand so gifted and service- able a race, proud to wear their livery.
Yet for Sir Charles Bruce, Israel still lies glooming, like a python about to spring and envelop the world in its monstrous folds. His final word about the race, as he turns to other aspects of his ethical theme, leaves us with the stock tableau of the Jew in " dominant control over finance," with " a practical ascendency over the press of Europe, and, through these com- bined agencies, a large measure of control over the ultimate issues of peace and war."
VIII
" Beyond all question the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world," corrob- orates Mr. Winston Churchill, writing in a Sunday paper. Formidable? This disunited and pitiful horde, these homeless wanderers, a hundred and fifty thousand of whom have just been massacred in the Ukraine, these wretchedly poor and sweated masses, formidable? To whom? To what? Un- doubtedly they produce geniuses and plutocrats beyond their due average. Although they constituted but one per cent, of the German population, seven out of thirty-one " makers of modern Germany " in that popular book, " Men Around the Kaiser," were of their race. Owing to their super-normal brain-power and energy, there is this disproportionate number of Jews in every role on earth, especially those roles that are in the limelight, even literally in the limelight. They seem almost like " the fifth element " that Pope Boniface VII. called the Florentines. But the bulk of these roles will be found of an intermediary character — the Jew is occupied not in destroying Christendom but in interlinking it, making it more essentially Christian in fact. His gift of tongues, his relationship with all the lands of the exile, mark him out for this function in its various aspects of commerce and finance, journalism and crit- icism, scholarship and travel, connoisseurship and art-dealing. It was by their linguistic talents that the adventurous journeys of Arminius Vambery, Aurel Stein, Sven Hedin and Emin Pasha were made possible. If a Russian-American Jew, Berenson, is the chief authority on Italian art, and Georg Brandes, the
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Dane, is Europe's greatest critic, if Reuter initiated telegraphic news and Blowitz was the prince of foreign correspondents, if Charles Frohman was the world's greatest entrepreneur and Imre Kiralf y ran its exhibitions, all these phenomena find their explanation in the cosmopolitanism of the Jewish intelligentsia. For when the Jew grows out of his own Ghetto without narrow- ing into his neighbour's, he must necessarily possess a superior sense of perspective. Lifted to the plane of idealism, this cos- mopolitan habit of mind creates Socialism through Karl Marx and Lassalle, an international language through Dr. Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto, a prophecy of the end of war through Jean de Bloch, an International Institute of Agricul- ture through David Lubin, and a Race Congress through Dr. Felix Adler.
Even where the Jew has contributed directly to the arts, it is rarely in a specifically Jewish spirit, and the great mark he has made on the stage may not uncharitably be attributed to that same plasticity which produces his biological mimicry and enables him to assimilate to all races without fusing in any. The great comedian, says Diderot, in his well-known paradox on the type, is a creature of intellect who is not carried away by any of his assumptions. And so we find Rachel, the child of a foreign pedlar in a Paris slum, enthralling the Faubourg St. Germain and teaching it purity of diction. Sarah Bernhardt, the daughter of Dutch Jews, carries the triumph of French acting across the Atlantic. A Hungarian Jew, Ludwig Barnay, played a leading role in the theatrical history of Germany, and another, von Sonnenthal, in that of Austria. For England we have Kean, and for America Booth, to name only stars of the first magnitude, for the minor coruscations are innumerable. Recently a Yiddish-speaking actor, Mosco- vitch, who must fain study Shakespeare like a foreign classic, held London spell-bound with his Shylock. Charlie Chaplin heads the picture-world. And that there is now a Shakespeare Day in England is due to the success of two Jewish scholars — Sir Israel Gollancz and Sir Sidney Lee — in imposing their own reverential consciousness upon this casual and illiterate island.
In the other interpretative or intermediary arts we find equally that Jews flourish out of all proportion to their num- bers. They flood the concert-platforms — whether as con- ductors, singers, or performers. Joachim and Rubinstein are dead, but what a marvellous posse of living instrumentalists —
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Kreisler, Jascha Heifetz, Mischa Elman, Melsa, Zimbalist, Mark Hambourg, Rosenthall, Moiseiwitch, Benham, Irene Scharrer, Fannie Zeisler, et id genus omne, most of them infant prodigies to boot!
The lack of Jewish initiative — on the heroic scale at least — may be seen in the musicians (Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, Halevi, Cowen, Salaman, Landon Ronald, etc.) though if Schonberg be a Jew, he is certainly an exception to the melodiousness which characterises this Jewish music and which finds its gayest expression in the light operas of Offenbach, Goldmark, Oscar Straus, Leoncavallo and Sullivan. There is little of the con- quering or even the agonising Jew in these shallow rivulets. Nor is there anything epoch-making in the Jewish contribution to painting, admirable and innumerable as are the Jewish artists from Josef Israels to Max Lieberman and Klinger, and copi- ously as they are represented in every gallery and movement, ranging in England for example from the Academy with that master-craftsman, Solomon J. Solomon, to the wilder haunts of Gertler, or the half-way houses of Wolmark and Rothenstein. There is surely nothing Jewish in the one Nobel artist-prizeman, Leo Bakst. On the contrary, what the success of the Jewish artists indicates is the rapidity with which the racial tabu of living form has been outlived, and the Gentile point of view assimilated, and this is especially remarkable in the forbidden realm of sculpture in which Antokolsky reached world-fame and to which Epstein, though far from expressing Semitic sub- limity, is making one of the Jew's few creative contributions.
In the writing of plays and novels the same psychological mobility that produces the actor is turned on the creation of character. Jewish dramatists are in evidence in every country. To speak only of to-day, London has its Sutro, New York its Belasco, Paris its Bernstein, Berlin its Fulda, Vienna its Schnitzler, Holland its Heijermans, Hungary its Lengyel, Italy its Benelli. But only two have concerned themselves with Jewish life, and of these Bernstein is ignorant and Heijermans antipathetic. In other branches of literature it is the same story. In France, for example, where a Catulle Mendes, or an Armand Silvestre, with their sel gaulois, have been indistinguish- able from the Christian boulevardier, only now are real Jewish poets appearing like Andre Spire or real Jewish novelists like Jean Richard Bloch. If there is any other great Jewish novelist in the rest of Europe, and I believe there is either a Dutch or a Scandinavian, I am at least sure he is not concerned
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with the interpretation of the Jew, or the Jewish spirit. Neither is Ronetti Roman, who seems to be the greatest poet Rumania has produced. Carducci was as definitely Italian. This absence of Jewish colouring cannot be alleged of the greatest creative name in modern Jewish literature — Heine. Nevertheless even he conceived of himself as an intermediary, whose primary role was to interpret France and Germany to each other.
Jews have indeed — even to the un j aundiced eye — been playing no inconsiderable part in world-affairs, whether we look to the financiers, the Rothschilds, Cassels, Schiffs, Speyers, and Barnatos, or to the journalists (Maximilian Harden, Benedikt, " Pertinax," Sir Sidney Low, Lord Burnham, etc.), or to the politicians (Lord Reading, Edwin Montagu, Klotz, Kurt Eisner, Trotsky, Luzzatto, etc.), but with the exception of Schiff, who refused to finance the Russia of the Czar, can any one trace in their activities even as much subconscious Jewish sympathy as influenced Beaconsfield ? Can any one imagine Clemenceau's Jewish secretary, Mandel, jogging his master's elbow at the Peace Conference in favour of a Hebrew Palestine? As little as one can imagine Sir John Monash marching to Jerusalem — unless ordered by Foch — or the great Jewish chess-champions sacrificing their bishops in some obscure anti- Christian spasm.
It is in fact in the impersonal and international spheres of science, philosophy and scholarship that the race of Spinoza has won its greatest triumphs since it emerged from the Ghetto. Here the record is overwhelming. At least five of the Nobel prizes for Science have already been awarded to Jews : Albert Michelson (optics), Gabriel Lippmann (colour photography), Henri Moissan (chemistry), Dr. Barony (otology), Wilstatter (chlorophyll). In a race that for eighteen centuries has been bent over its books, parasitic on the past, this genius for observation is staggering, till one recalls Leviticus and the practical priestly supplement to the prophetic ethics. Among many other outstanding contributors to Science may be men- tioned Heinrich Herz (electro-magnetic waves, wireless teleg- raphy), Meldola (coal-tar dyes), Hertha Ayrton (electric arc), J. F. Cohn (bacteriology), Jacques Loeb (partheno- genesis), Mendeleeff (the periodic law), Lombroso (crimi- nology), Freud and Jung (psychology), Einstein (physics, new theory of Space). It is no wonder that the Presidency of our Royal Society has fallen to a Jew.
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As a physician the Jew's fame dates from Saracenic Spain, when he was the bearer of Arabian science, and the tradition that kings shall always have Jewish physicians is still unbroken. Dr. Ehrlich's recent discovery of " 606," the cure for syphilis, Dr. Haffkine's inoculation against the plague in India, and the researches of Dr. Simon Flexner, of the Rockefeller Institute, are but links in the long chain of Jewish contributions to the peculiarly international sphere of medicine ; while Max Nordau, an epitome of every Jewish talent, is also, like Maimonides and so many other Jewish thinkers, a practising physician.
Nor are the contributions to the more humanistic sciences less amazing. The names of Benfey (Sanscrit), Jules Oppert (Assyriology), Sylvester and Georg Cantor (mathematics), Breal (semantics), Salomon Reinach (universal scholarship), Asser (juristics), Hermann Cohen and Bergson (philosophy) may suffice as examples.
If the legend of the Conquering Jew meant his emergence from " that curious system of degrading customs and debasing laws " not merely not broken-hearted but able to pour forth streams of courageous vitality on every field of life and thought, " a blessing to all the families of the earth," then the legend would be true indeed. But I can readilv understand that the Gentile, seeing himself surrounded or even swamped on every hand by famous Jewish figures, should imagine a menacing cohe- sion, when there is no more solidarity among the celebrities than among those at Madame Tussaud's. And what fosters the great Jewish legend of ubiquity and omnipotence still further is the attribution of Jewishness to every notoriety of any traceable streak of Jewish blood: a method of classification which, in the case of a people scattered for two thousand years among ever}^ other in Europe, and intermarrying with all, cannot fail to justify Lowell's maxim: ChercJiez le juif. And le juif may be sought with peculiar facility in countries like Spain and Portugal, whence, as we have seen, expulsions en masse could no more drive him out than Nature could be driven out with a pitchfork, or in those intolerant regions of the East or West where he has been absorbed by Christianity or Islam, sometimes after an interval of Marranoism, or pseudo-con- version. And according to the theories of Mendelism, there is no reason why among the many throws of the dice of ancestry an individual of mixed descent should not suddenly incarnate a preponderance of the qualities of a single strain. Thus a Jewish soul may appear and energise in some powerful figure
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of Christendom. Sometimes the Christianity of the figure is merely supposititious. Even as I write, a book is published revealing that John Zoffany, the British Royal Academician, the delineator of English life, who painted Garrick and Dr. Johnson, was by origin a Bohemian Jew — a fact utterly un- known to the Jewish Encyclopaedia. The Church could not even write its own history : that was left for the Jew, Neander (David Mendel). One wonders what the tale would be both for 3resterday and to-day if every Jew wore a yellow badge and every crypto-Jew came into the open, and every half-Jew were as discoverable as the author of " Caste," or the composer of " The Mikado." To the Gentile the true Jewish problem should rather be how to keep the Jew in his midst — this rare one per cent, of mankind. The elimination of all this genius and geniality would surely not enhance the gaiety of nations. Without Disraeli would not England lose her only Saint's Day?
No wonder Mr. Daniels, the secretary of the American Navy, speaking at a Zionist gathering in the States, humor- ously threatened to bar the departure of American Jews for Palestine with a ten-inch gun.
But the miracle remains that the Gentile world has never yet seen a Jew, for behind all these cosmopolitan types which obsess its vision stand inexhaustible reserves of Jewish Jews — and the Talmudic mystic, the Hebrew-speaking sage, remains as unknown to the Western world as though he were hidden in the fastnesses of Tibet. A series of great scholars — Geiger, Zunz, Steinschneider, Schechter — has studied the immense Hebrew literature produced from age to age in these obscure Jewries. But there is a modern Hebrew literature, too, a new galaxy of poets and novelists, philosophers and humanists, who express in the ancient tongue the subtlest shades of the thought of to-day. And there is a still more copious literature in Yiddish, no less rich in men of talent and even genius, whose names have rarely reached the outside world.
But never and nowhere in all that specifically Jewish litera- ture will be found the faintest scintilla of any design, expecta- tion, or desire to subjugate the world.
IX
And if a leisured and conscientious thinker of Sir Charles Bruce's calibre and fine temper goes so grotesquely astray, what should be expected of the popular journalists, whose very pro-
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fession is to be in a hurry, to write and not to read, and to spoon-feed the mob with its own prejudices? In the days when the world resounded with denunciations and commendations of Bolshevism, and an official fog lay heavy over Russia, there came to me out of the mist the diary of a British lady who had lived in an obscure town through the thick of the Red Revolution. Unconscious of the fierce debate that was about to rage in the rest of the world over its theories or its doings, she had re- corded the petty happenings of day to day, with the dulness of a Defoe and with the same cumulative convincingness. There was just the dash of blood to show that the general run was small beer. It seemed to me infinitely precious not only for history, but for current politics, and I perused it eagerly. But on submitting it, at her request, to an experienced literary agent, I learnt that in his apprehension " editors would feel that very few of their readers would be sufficiently interested to read more than a few lines," and that " what the papers are really looking out for is something that they can make a great splash about and that will have advertising value for them " — something presumably like that description in The Times of the atrocities perpetrated by the Jewish Commissaries — horrors outdoing the ghastliest imagining of a Poe but vouched for by " Miss Inigo Jones," a lady who, the moment I questioned her bona -fides or her sanity, " softly and suddenly vanished away " like the boojum.
Populus vult decip% decipiatur. Corrupted, or perhaps only expressed, by the cinema, it cannot away with plain truth, it has no interest in ascertaining it, and if nothing sufficiently flamboyant exists, it must be invented.
That is, perhaps, explanation enough of the lurid figure cut by the Jew in the popular imagination which, whether about him or anything else, can think only in terms of melodrama. And yet something peculiarly fabular seems to attach to all treat- ment of the Hebrew. It is perhaps some dim response in the mob to the real romance of his survival, of that indestructible potency in the teeth of all the efforts recapitulated in Sir Charles Bruce's quotation from Disraeli.
In a curious play called " Es Geht Weiter," produced with success in Vienna in 1919, a knighted Jew from America ( !) who combines the multiple newspaper proprietorship of a North- cliffe with the territorial ambitions of a Cecil Rhodes, the finan- cial operations of a Rothschild and the philanthropic projects of a General Booth, turns — in the Epilogue after he has ruined
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Rome — from a street newsvendor crying the bankruptcy of his own schemes into a gigantic figure dominating the land- scape, and passes on — The Wandering Jew — to fresh incar- nations of catastrophic omnipotence.
Nothing in fact is — to believe the anti-Semite — too colossal for the Jew to have achieved. He has at once made the world- war and pulled the strings of the peace-traps. And similarly nothing is too small. Vide for example the warning given to the world last year by Dr. Hallinan, Bishop of Limerick, as to the true inwardness of the latest feminine fashions. " The new modes," wrote the learned Bishop, " are designed not by women but by men — Parisians, Jews and Freemasons — seeking to uproot Christianity by these dangerous and indecent dresses." It was Jews who murdered the Czar, an accusation actually incorporated in the British White Book, and still exploited by The Times and the reactionary Russians, despite that even the Minister of Justice under Koltchak's Government has certified " that, among the number of persons proved by the data of the preliminary enquiry to have been guilty of the assassination of the late Emperor Nicholas II. and his family, there was not any person of Jewish descent." Of course the Jews ruined Ger- many, both by overturning the Kaiser and through the Kaiser himself being a Jew. Mr. Chesterton, writing of the Irish, caustically remarks that, having for centuries been accused of religious fanaticism, they cannot now be indicted for its anti- thesis. Yet in Mr. Chesterton's own organ, The New Witness, the most paradoxical accusations against the Jew find Christian hospitality. And for the world at large, although it is as the capitalist that the Jew has been abused throughout the ages, there has been no difficulty in shifting the count to that of Bolshevism the moment a more malodorous bogey appeared on the scene. Shylock is now a Socialist, rabid to destroy all property, including his own. And it is only the other day that he was a venomous pro-German, a supporter of monarchistic militarism and Hun atrocities.
The taste for thrills and the Satanic is not limited to the malevolent and the vulgar. It victimises even the benevolent and the intelligentsia. Thus we find in Clemenceau's account of the Jews of Busk in his recently published volume, " Au Pied Du Sinai," the observation : " The Semite, so abhorred, has set out to conquer the world into which the dispersion of conquest threw him. Despised, hated, persecuted, for having imposed on us Gods of his blood, he has wished to find compensation and
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culmination in the domination of the earth. For that unheard- of task, no pain was spared, no suffering too great, no torture counted, no revenge was disdained. There is no more aston- ishing history."
There is not, indeed. Clemenceau, who speaks thus, appears in his book as a not ungenial Voltairean. What are we to expect of the orthodox mind? It is not too much to say that after centuries of scholarship and criticism, the deposit left in most Gentile brains from their nursery period remains as crude and childish as ever. That the Old Testament preaches a blood and iron Jehovah and the dominance of His one chosen people, but that, though every word of it is true, it nevertheless leads up to and was replaced by a New Testament, with quite opposite teachings and a God of universal love, who even offered Himself (or His Son, for the identities are somewhat confused) as atonement for the sins of mankind, that this God was crucified by the Jews, and that they were ever afterwards eternally cursed for enabling the scheme of salvation to go through, and providentially preserved in a quaint mixture of obloquy and opulence as a witness to its truth — such is the farrago which still constitutes the average thought of Europe. Living and moving and having their being in such a conceptual chaos, and devoid of all critical power or historical discern- ment, it is no wonder that the masses remain exposed to the wildest delusions on all other subjects, and a perpetual prey to political adventurers. The worst of it is that this farrago is only the travesty of great tragic historic and cosmic truths, and that even this caricature could have been pragmatically beneficial, had it been seized and clung to in its moral aspects as whole-heartedly as in its mystic and melodramatic, and not sur- rendered at the very moment when it could have been valuable.
Even the Blood Accusation — an obvious refraction of the Crucifixion story — persists in the fuscous mentality of the European masses, and reaps its toll of Jewish corpses when- ever — especially at Easter — a Christian child is missing or is kidnapped ad hoc by the pogrom-confectors. Presumably the unfortunate coincidence of Passover and its curious rites with Easter — the period when the peasant-brain is full of the Cru- cifixion — supplies the latent hate and distrust with a specious framework. There is a pregnant story in Shalom Aleichem's
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book, " Jewish Children," of how a Jewish and Christian child, who have gone off in loving companionship to revel for long hours in the spring-tide wood together, return to find a dreadful relief in the village Jewry and a shame-faced sullenness among the Greek-Church peasantry gathered menacingly round the Jewish house.
Almost the exact situation is reported in The Jewish Chron- icle of April 16, 1920:
" The disappearance of three Christian boys at Pizdri, near Kal- ish (Poland), led to a blood accusation panic in the townlet. De- spite the protests of the Rabbi, who declared that the Jews did not require Christian blood for Passover, the Synagogues and the resi- dences of the Rabbi, Reader, and Beadle, and a few Jewish notables were searched. In the meantime a large crowd gathered in the streets and threatened to massacre Jews. When the excitement was at its height the missing boys returned from the neighbouring vil- lage, Toporova, and the mob dispersed." The same item adds that ' a blood libel trial will soon take place at Rowno (a town in Ukraine occupied by Polish troops). A Jewess, Golda Giterman, is accused by the mother of a missing Christian girl of having killed her daughter for ritual purposes. The origin of the charge is a statement by a fortune-teller, who pointed to the widow Giterman as the author of a ritual crime. The police are favourably inclined towards the blood libel theory."
Last June a Greek girl in the service of a Jewish merchant at Constantinople disappeared, and even a blood-stained handker- chief of hers was unearthed. Fortunately her employer found her on board a steamer about to sail and brought her back, much to the disconcertment of the mob rioting round his house. Even in Palestine the ancient accusation has been attempted for political purposes. In the middle of March, 1920, murdered Arabs were found in cellars in the Jewish Colonies, and Chris- tian Arabs set up the cry of ritual murder. Fortunately the real murderers were found by the police before the massacres could start. This, of course, did not prevent the massacres later on, though another pretext had to be found.
In his Polish Report, Captain Peter Wright says :
" There is a general belief among all classes of Poles that the Jews practise ritual murder; for this there exists not the slightest evidence. It is a myth and an improbable myth. For orthodox Judaism is not a religion of mysterious rites, less so indeed than Christianity, but a highly positive, defined, legal religion. But I think this myth, strongly and widely believed as it is, is the reflec-
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tion that this antique and oriental religion casts in the minds of ordinary men."
It is not Judaism that is responsible for the reflection, but the distorting mirror of the Polish mind.1 And if " all classes of Poles " refract truth so atrociously, it is not astonishing to read that a mob at Cracow recently stormed a hospital to see the Jewish girl of ten and the devil adorned with horns and tail to which she had just given birth! Some peasants thought Christ had just been killed !
Over a quarter of a century ago the first edition of a Hamp- stead Jewish Bazaar Book contained a facetious line in the smallest of print advertising for a Christian boy. It was thought that the myth was so hopelessly mediaeval, having made no appearance in England since the Hugh of Lincoln legend in 1255, and surviving in English literature only in Chaucer's " Prioress's Tale," published a century later, that the Jews could now afford to laugh at it. More prudent heads insisted that the whole edition must be cancelled. And, we have just seen, they were absolutely right. As Oscar Wilde said to me once : " Stupidity will never die." This mock advertisement would have been hailed as the long-desired avowal of the abom- inable practice, and translated into every European language, and in Ghettos of Eastern Europe unknown even by name to the mass of cultured mankind, thousands would have agonised and died for the jest. The Beilis case, in which the whole pomp and apparatus of Russian law was brought to bear in proof of this very accusation, is fresh in all our memories, and that was twenty years later than the penning of this mock advertise- ment. Nor is this credulity merely the mentality of the masses. A suspicion that the Blood Accusation may be true after all lurks — like the suspicion of Jewish world-designs — in the most enlightened breasts. Even my friend Sir James Frazer, in his monumental work " The Golden Bough," permits himself the conjecture, partly due to the artist-scholar's delight in all such uncanny rites, that there may have been some smoke behind all this fire. And in a volume on Thomas of Monmouth's " Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich," published by the University of Cambridge, edited by that delightful Canon Jessopp, D.D., and Montague Rhodes James, Litt.D., Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, these learned and sympathetic
1 The papers Wiarus and Illustracya have published pictures of Jewish ritual murder!
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writers could not forgo an analogous allusion to the possibility of the sainted boy-martyr, William, having actually been killed by a Jew, and not accidentally but for ritual intent. " We have to take into account," they say, " the possibilities of what a mad hatred of a dominant system, or a reversion to half- forgotten practices of a darker age, might effect in the case of an ignorant Jew seven centuries back." And this in face of the knowledge they exhibit that similar accusations were made against Christians by Greeks and Romans, against heretical sects by Christians, against the Knights Templars by their con- temporaries, and even in our own day against Christian mis- sionaries by the Chinese; in the face of their knowledge that the cult of boy-martyrs brought large profits to the shrines, and that all these slanders against the Jews were the deliberate en- gines to bring about their expulsion from England, as the slan- ders against the Templars were invented to prelude the pillag- ing of their wealth, and as the case against the monasteries was heavilv blackened to facilitate their confiscation.
We have had such grandiose lessons in public lying nowadays — propaganda the wise it call — that we can appreciate bet- ter than any preceding generation that boundless credulity of the mass mind which supplies the soil for any desirable legend. Indeed our psychologists have long since explained to us that belief is the automatic result of any vivid impression, not con- tradicted at the moment by anything else. And where contra- diction is unpopular, or even treasonable, whence shall it be supplied? Euclid thought that when he had said "Which is absurd," he had settled the matter ; but the absurdity of a thing is no bar to belief in it. Did not, indeed, Tertullian say: " Certum est quia impossible est "? It is not for the fact be- hind the myth that one should look, but to the brain behind it. When the Spectator — which is now as foolishly perturbed over the legend of the Conquering Jew — many years ago challenged me to explain the secular persistence of the Blood Accusation if there was nothing at all in it, I replied that I was not an au- thority on Christian psychology.
Sir Thomas Browne in fact got hold of the right end of the stick when he prefaced his " Enquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors " by remarking that " The First and Father-cause of common Error, is, The Common infirmity of Humane Nature," by attributing the second cause to " the erroneous disposition of the people," and specifying this union of unintelligence and bad will in the particular forms of " misapprehension, fallacy,
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credulity, infirmity, adherence unto Antiquity, Tradition and Authority." As Mr. Joseph Jacobs puts it luminously in his " Jewish Contributions to Civilisation," the belief in the badness of the Jews can vanish only like the belief in witches.
It behoves anthropologists to be very sure of their ground before speculating on " half-forgotten practices of a darker age." There are no half-forgotten practices. Judaism has only too good a memory. It carried forward in its Talmud every obiter dictum of ancient Rabbinism, every triviality of ancient ritual. Of all the accusations against the Jews this is the only one of which it may be said with absolute certainty that it has not the minutest shred of justification. Yet babes unborn in Ghettos still uncreated are not improbably destined to be torn to pieces on account of it.
XI
But the Blood Accusation has become too grotesque for the more cultured anti-Semites of Western lands ; religious perse- cution, too, is out of date: hence the necessity for a more mod- ern legend of world-conquest which can be speciously rooted in the old Biblical texts, and connected with the newest political movement. To the semi-suppressed Judaeophobia of the years of peace, the liberating jingoisms of the war provided a hell- born opportunity and the pretext of Bolshevism has proved a Devil-send.
For Judaeophobia, on a well-known Freudian principle, has to find reasons for the hate that is in it ; and " Christian psy- chology," to which I referred the Spectator, is steeped in that mistrust and repugnance which German professors have tried to generalise and disguise as " Anti-Semitism." Under Jesuit ed- ucation in especial the young Christian mind is often systemat- ically poisoned. Witness the favourite children's book " Fleurs de l'Histoire," with its teaching that the Jew is compact of " treason, roguery and lies."
Sometimes, indeed, Anti-Semitism produces the very defects of Jewish character which it professes to chastise — your true vicious circle. It is saddening to say — after the honest efforts of noble-minded Christians to give the Jew the favour of a fair field — that there is no country in the world in which it is not a disadvantage to be a Jew. Max Nordau exaggerates but lit- tle in asserting that a Jew must be three times as clever as any other man to win equal success in the battle of life. " Justice
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for the Jew " has never yet been the spontaneous instinct of the masses or even of the classes. The nations have been hurried by wise legislators into codified compassion and formulated fair- dealing, but even their own laws have not completed their educa- tion. " Liberty, Equality and Fraternity " have never been more than a glow at the heart of the great and a formula on the lips of the little. Even in the universities of Europe — where, if anywhere, sweetness and light should rule — the most brilliant Jew has always been subtly and insidiously handi- capped in the competition for fellowships and professorships. To-day in Germany, Austria and Hungary the Jew's complete exclusion, even Einstein's, is menacingly demanded. While the Jew is not free from social prejudice even in England and the United States, in most other countries he lives in the shadow of a volcano, whose eruptions are irregular but inevitable. And like many other diseases, anti-Semitism is epidemic ; it flies — and with no fear of quarantine — from one country to another. Thus Sweden, which in the eighteenth century sagaciously in- vited Jews to come in and help it to prosper, has caught the general German complaint.
Whence this persistent hostility to the Jew? Can we really trace it to the factor propounded by Nietzsche or Clemenceau? But — and the evidence has been collected by Mr. Max Radin — it is found in the old Roman writers who had not yet heard of the obscure incident which, according to Anatole France, Pontius Pilate had forgotten. It is true Judaism had prose- lytised with considerable success in the classical world, and this propagandist activity evoked the satire of Horace and Juvenal, and the alarm of Strabo and Seneca. Hecataeus of Abdera, a Greek living in Egypt, described the Mosaic way of living as " inhospitable and inhuman," and shortly after, Manetho, an Egyptian priest, became so libellous on the subject of Jews that a century or two later Josephus took occasion to answer him in the course of his reply to the still more abusive Apion.
When Cicero defended Flaccus, ex-governor of Asia, against the charge, inter alia, of appropriating the shekels collected by provincial Jews for Jerusalem, the great advocate complained of the crowd of Jews in the court, and took occasion to contrast their rites and customs contemptuously with those of Rome. We see, therefore, that Judsophobia has its roots in appre- hension of alien power, especially power attached to a somewhat mysterious religion, as well as in the tyranny of majorities and the universal dislike for the unlike. After all, a race that keeps
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mainly to itself, that counts by a different calendar, and cele- brates a different series of festivals, is, when it lodges itself in other political organisms, a quasi-foreign body, and human na- ture being what it is, every field in which the Jew has thus estab- lished himself becomes a battlefield, with persecution as the equivalent for the fighting which is for every other people the price of self-maintenance.
Viewed thus philosophically, Anti-Semitism takes its place in the general order, though the fact remains that the struggle by which Israel pays for survival must be supplemented by the fighting incumbent upon him for the continuance of each and every Gentile people with which he lives in symbiosis. As, however, he is nowhere able to express his own entity as com- pletely as a Gentile people, he appears to get an inferior article at double price. The only compensation is the diminished risk of extinction that comes from being everywhere, for, as the biologists tell us, the more widely disseminated a species, the greater the chance of survival. The Jew can always move from an unsafe environment to a relatively safe, though this advan- tage is lessening with the progress of steam, petrol and elec- tricity, since the world begins to wear everywhere the same face — and that not so unlike the face of barbarism as these tri- umphs of civilisation might suggest. In so far as this antag- onism to the Jew is most prevalent in Christian countries, it may be regarded as an aspect of that secular resistance of the West to invasion from the East, which culminated in the ex- pulsion of the Moors from Spain, possibly even it is a subtle continuance of the Punic Wars ; in part the Gentile aspect of it is doubtless a survival from the Dark Ages, still fomented by the Christian prayer-book and still nourished by the dictionary with its verb " to Jew " (as a synonym for Christian chousing). There is even a certain physical repugnance to the Jewish type. And, indeed, coarsened sometimes by Moorish blood, high-liv- ing, lack of exercise, or the intermarriage of uncouth money- bags, it can be unlovely enough. And there are here and there psychical expressions, equally forbidding, not least the frequent concealment of Jewish origin. The prosperous Jew who has shaken off the culture of the Ghetto and not yet taken on mod- ern culture is one of the most disagreeable types our planet has produced; while Pharisaism, though a noble religion, is pecul- iarly liable to those perversions against which Jesus fulminated with so unchristian but so human a wrath. No scientific study of anti-Semitism can leave out these real factors, however small
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their percentage in the compound, which owes must of its sub- stance to commercial competition, industrial jealousy and the pure joy of malice.
Instead of regarding its Jews as a part of the nation and their wealth as part of the national wealth, every nation regards them as aliens and invasive and triumphant rivals. As if a country were a huge gambling den in which the gains of some of the inhabitants necessarily meant the loss of all the others ! Even in America — that conglomerate of peoples — this dis- torted view has been imported by its European constituents.
" It is for his virtues, not his vices, that the Jew is hated," maintained Dr. Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. He con- founded, perhaps, " struggle-for-life " virtues with real moral virtues. Yet of a sooth the same energy and push and busi- ness instinct which are lauded in the Anglo-Saxon, the Scots- man, or the American, are set to the bad in the Jew's account. " The poor Jew's virtues," complains Harold Frederic, a sym- pathetic observer, " are negative and unlovable." The Jew is too meek and sober. The world prefers dash and fisticuffs. In short, the Jew is too Christian.
Burke pointed out that you cannot draw an indictment against a whole people. If you are to generalise from the indi- vidual, there is no crime of which the Jewish people cannot be made guilty ; though the obverse ascription of every political virtue is strangely neglected. The Jew is contrasted not with his actual neighbours in his particular social stratum, but with an idealised Englishman, Frenchman, Teuton, etc. While the Gentile sees his own people perpendicularly in descending grades of character and wealth, he is apt to see the Jewish peo- ple horizontally. It is as if one should draw one's notion of all Englishmen from Lord Robert Cecil or Crippen. Fagin, in " Oliver Twist," is the Jew. But what Jew ever supposed that Bill Sikes was the Englishman? Long before Burke, Sir Thomas Browne, refuting " the popular tenent that Jews stink," pointed out that it is " a dangerous point to annex a constant property unto any nation." Graetz, the Jewish his- torian, ascribed to his people polarity, or the quality of produc- ing mutually opposite phenomena. But in truth this quality belongs to all peoples. Each carries in its bosom contending forces, as the party system alone suffices to prove. Burke's warning should have been enlarged into Sir Thomas Browne's. You cannot predicate anything at all, whether good or bad, that will cover a whole people. There will always be individual
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exceptions. Our crude generalisations about Prussia doubt- less did injustice to a large number of excellent Prussian paci- fists. A neutral who strayed into the artistic cafe of Berlin in the middle of the war told me the " Bohemians " were hoping Germany would lose the war in order to gain her own soul. It is only journalists and politicians who can put into phe- nomena a simplicity which is not there.
If, then, one cannot make all-inclusive statements about any people, how must this impossibility be accentuated with a peo- ple like the Jews, who have not even a territorial unity, but are in a hundred fragments, each exposed to a different political en- vironment ! It is true each race does tend to yield its peculiar spiritual fruits, despite varying milieux; one can express a peo- ple by its dominant tendency, as well as, though that seems par- adoxical, by the achievements of its minority. Just as a book ranks according to its best passages, as also by its general level, so with a people. It receives legitimately the prestige of its most brilliant sons, and is gauged likewise by its average. The range of a people is, however, considerably wider than that of a Book, which, if by a respectable writer, is hardly likely to sink anywhere into imbecility or indecency, whereas it is almost a Galtonian law that an excessive deviation to the right of a peo- ple's norm is paid for by an equal deviation to the left.
It may well be therefore that Jewry, so excessive in its gifts and misfortunes, presents extremes equally obnoxious to Gentile criticism, that the exasperating poverty of its masses is bal- anced by the vexatious opulence of its plutocrats, that the un- couth unworldliness of its scholars is adjusted by the over- shrewdness of its commercial classes and the elegance of its par- venu hostesses, that its renegades are as vulgar as its Rabbis are reactionary, that the multitude of its materialists is aggra- vated by the zealotry of its fanatics, and that its tendency to form a nation within a nation is as unpatriotic as the cosmopol- itan outlook it contributes to the Cabinets. But perhaps the deepest reason of anti-Semitism is simply that the word " Jew " exists. Nothing gratifies the mob more than to get a simple name to account for a complex phenomenon, and the word " Jew " is always at hand to explain the never-absent maladies of the body politic ; a word, moreover, admirably surcharged with historic hatred, bigotry and repugnance. The countless noble Jews in every age and clime do not seem able to reach down to the popular consciousness. Barney Barnato is a proverb, while the Baroness de Hirsch passes away practically
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unnoticed. The exhaustless munificence and impeccable finan- cial reputation of the Rothschilds are neutralised by the rigour of Isaac Gordon, the multinominal moneylender.
" Why does not the world pick out Mr. Mocatta as the typ- ical Jew instead of the flaunting, vaunting type? " asked the Jewish Chronicle in the obituary panegyric of a saintly philan- thropist. " Why should his lack of ostentation be less Jewish than the gaudy showiness of some other Jew? Why should not his reserve, his modesty, and his rectitude be regarded as typ- ically Jewish? ' The question is almost an Irish bull. Para- doxical impasse! Unless the Jew shrieks, " Walk up ! Walk up ! Behold in me the most dignified man in Creation," his quiet dignity must go unregarded.
Again, the notion that Jews form an alien section of the na- tion cannot be eradicated. They may call themselves English- men, Frenchmen, Germans, and Italians, but the question is, not what they call themselves, but what Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans and Italians call them. They may offer body and soul to their country for generation after generation, but a Goldwin Smith will arise to ask, " Can Jews be patriots ? ' And every now and then every nation will have sudden spasms of pseudo-racial self-concentration — Pan-Slavism, Pan-Hel- lenism, and other panics of Pan-ism demanding the immediate elimination of the Jew. Even in hybrid Belgium a native pol- itician explained to me before the war that the Jew did not rep- resent " true Belgic ideals." And this in Brussels, where two idioms live on opposite sides of the same street ! From time im- memorial Jews have dwelt in Algeria. We hear of them in the sixth century under the Visigothic kings. After the Spanish persecutions of 1391 Algiers was a great centre for Jewish ex- iles. Yet the parvenu French conquerors, who date only from 1830, have persecuted them as foreigners. There were Jews on the banks of the Rhine in the reign of Justinian, yet they are still quasi-alien.
The conscious pretexts for anti-Semitism vary historically in every country ; they may all be reduced to one simple syllogism. Every country has Jews, every country has evils ; therefore the Jews are the cause of the evils. Such is the crude logic of Demos and demagogues. Even the better politicians like a whipping-boy. The Jews are as good as a foreign war in averting attention from domestic troubles, and infinitely more economical. Is it profiteering that agitates the public? It is the Jews who are the profiteers. Is it the menace of Bolshe-
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vism? They are the Bolshevists. Is it the hidden hand? That hand wears heavy Jewish rings. Is it a shortage of houses? It is the Jews who have monopolised all accommoda- tion. Is it a dearth of bacon? It is the Jews who have eaten it up. Is it the awful consequences of imperialistic ambition? The Kaiser has Jewish blood. If there were no Jews they would have to be invented for the use of politicians — they are in- dispensable, the antithesis of a panacea; guaranteed to cause all evils. Is it any wonder that the aforesaid Mr. Mocatta said in a presidential address to the Anglo-Jewish Historical So- ciety : —
( The lot of the Jews is generally as sad and as trying as it was in the darkest Middle Ages. They seem to have been preserved, not only to attest the continuity of the Divine love and the majesty of the Law, but also to bear the sorrows of the world "?
XII
Two recent scurrilous books, " Jewry Ueber Alles " and " The Jewish Peril," carry in their titles this legend of the con- quering Jew. The latter work, a mass of mystical nonsense translated from the Russian and published by concerted action in various languages after being peddled in MS. round the Governments of Europe and America by notorious Russian anti-Semites as though it were a precious secret document, though it had already appeared in print in 1905, professes to reveal " the secrets of the Sanhedrim " ; but the tirades against England for drawing upon the support of the " Sanhedrim " in her universal intrigues for Empire have been prudently cut out of the English edition, for they would spoil the game. (For cutting out the whole, £10,000 was asked !)
There is no Sanhedrin now extant, no " Learned Elders of Zion " exist whose meetings can be recorded in " Protocols," and " Nilus " seeming to have discovered this by the time his book reached a third and enlarged edition in 1911, substituted for his original melodramatic mendacities the story that his documents — described in the first edition as stolen from French Freemasonry — were simply the secret reports of the Zionist Congress at Basle in 1897. Unfortunately for " Nilus," I happened to be at all the sittings of that Congress, which was the first, and which I have described in my " Dreamers of the Ghetto." Nothing could be less like the operations of a Jew-
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ish Jesuitry than this gathering, which laid the foundations of the Zionist movement and formulated its programme as " the acquisition of a publicly, legally recognised home for the Jew- ish people in Palestine." As this was an absolutely new move- ment in Jewry, initiated in spite of great public opposition by a few more or less impecunious publicists, it seems indeed a strange manifestation on the part of the secret Semitic gang that ran — and runs — all the papers, parliaments and banks of the world, and in whose iconoclastic propaganda Charles Darwin was a prominent puppet ! We have to do in fact with the forgery of a pious Russian, passionate for the Church and the Czar, edited in 1905 by an agency bent on drowning the Revolution of that year in Jewish blood. Such forgeries in- variably appear in troubled periods, they are a stock historical weapon; though rarely has a forger admitted in more Irish fashion than the author of " The Jewish Peril " that he cannot prove the authenticity of his documents, for — he gravely ex- plains — the essence of this criminal plot is secrecy ! x
It was like the journal which published the Pigott forgeries to take this grotesque fabrication seriously and thus encourage Count Reventlow and the reactionary monarchist parties in Germany, in whose platform anti-Semitism is a plank. Count Reventlow solemnly declared that he, for his part, had never credited the report that Lord Northcliffe was a Jew. The humourless Fatherland was flooded with a legend of a Jewish combination to destroy it, in which the gentle and venerable philanthropist, Jacob Schiff, figured side by side with Trotsky.
But it is impossible for even The Times to take " Nilus " seri- ously after the scathing scholarship of Mr. Lucien Wolf, who, in a letter to the Spectator, dissected the tangled threads of self-contradiction and, with a fascinating erudition, traced back the theory of the all-destroying Jew to the literature of Anti- christ that has been forged in successive centuries and in vari- ous blood-curdling shapes to explain the Lutheran Reforma- tion, the Cromwellian Revolution, the French Revolution and
i Salomon Reinach, in a characteristically learned article, points out that St. Paul himself had to complain of apocryphal letters circulated (presum- ably by the morning post) over his forged signature, that a fabricated epis- tle was attributed for theological purposes to Mani, that about 1610 a Polish ex-Jesuit drew up " Monita Secreta," imaginary immoral instructions to the disciples of St. Ignatius, which same useful forgeries were after- wards exploited by Rome against the Freemasons. To this day there is talk in France of the " Palladists," a horrible sect purely invented by the Polish ex- Jesuit, but the heads of which are now said to be Jews ! (No doubt there are also Semitic snarks and Hebrew Boojums.)
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the Revolutions of '48 as all due to that same Semitic " hidden hand." The latest version of " The Jewish Peril " appears to be largely a plagiarism from the earlier fabrication by a Ger- man named Hermann Goedsche, who had actually been dis- missed from the Prussian Postal Service for forgery, and it also borrows considerably from the pre-existing literature of the great Jewish conspiracy, e.g., Gougenot des Mousseaux's " Le Juif, le Judaisme et la Judai'sation des Peuples Chretiens."
To these contemporary forgeries may be added the imaginary speech of a Rabbi of Jaffa promising the Jews the conquest of the world (printed by Catholic newspapers in Holland), the letter to the same effect found in the pocket of a dead Bolshe- vist soldier, the utterance of the late Szamuely annexing Hun- gary as a Jewish land, the deliberations of the " Workers of Zion " at Kieff, and the circular recommending Bolshevism " disclosed " by a German paper as sent to the heads of the Alliance Israelite in Russia (a country where no branch of the Alliance exists or is permitted). There should also be noted the repetition of the libel on Zionism in the Brazol " revela- tions " that became the laughing-stock of America. Brazol had been assistant attorney for the Russian Government in the notorious Beilis case, and being in the States on Russian busi- ness, took occasion to publish a work with twenty-five apocry- phal resolutions passed by an imaginary secret sitting of the First Basle Congress. Under examination, these schemes for the Bolshevisation of the world were found to be merely clumsy reproductions of existing anti-Semitic creations in Russian, German, or Rumanian. All these forgeries are, however, but the expression of a state of mind in the public, and doubtless sometimes in the forger too, who feels more like a champion putting his truth in artistic form than a malicious liar and a deliberate cheat. Hence, the danger of these fictions does not evaporate at their exposure, for the public credulity that in- spired them persists and gives the breath of life to fresh embodi- ments of panic. For the fear, as well as the wish, is father to the thought. Note, as Renan said to Salomon Reinach, how uninventive is human malignity. " Elle tourne eternellement dans le meme cercle d* accusations." And the ascription of calamities to a " hidden hand " already hated is one of the most familiar workings of the mass-mind.
It is not even necessary that the accusation should come by the complex channel of forgery. A bouncing assertion suffices. Since I began this paper, the evidence has become overwhelm-
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ing of a world-plot worked by a little gang of exiles from Bol- shevist Russia in the favourable atmosphere of a world-concor- dat of sentiment amongst the militarist and monarchical classes of all countries, fomented by the chauvinisms of war, and find- ing vent in this same fantastic charge. According to the Pres- ident of the Independent Order B'nai B'rith, a circular entitled " Jewry Ueber Alles " has been sent out by the gang " to Amer- ican publicists and men of affairs, charging the Jew with the responsibility for the world war and with a vast conspiracy to control the economic world," and the same group " has been distributing throughout the American Legion posts a large amount of literature of the same general nature, urging ex-sol- diers to arm themselves against ' the Jewish peril.' " The lat- est manifestation comes, as I write, to lift into notoriety the unknown Dearborn Independent, the personal organ of Henry Ford, the car manufacturer, who, after visiting Germany in a Peace Ship, turned into a rabid militarist when America's own tocsin sounded. An anonymous article in this journal, en- titled " Germany's Reaction Against the Jew," brings the case against the world's whipping-boy to its comic culmination. For it declares that " the sole winners of the war were Jews." Early in the war, in my book, " The War for the World," I had predicted that the time would come when the Jews would be gibbeted as its sole starters, but even my cynical prescience did not foresee that they would grow into its sole winners. Poor Jews, whose bones bleach on every battlefield in Europe, Asia, and Africa! However, the Dearborn Independent deserves our gratitude, for, in reproducing the German case, it naturally reproduces the factor omitted from the British edition of " The Jewish Peril," and England reappears as the Jew's ally or tool in the conquest of the world. Pan-Judaea — " the only State exercising world-government, since all the other States can and may exercise national government only " — had before the war its Capital in London. Strange that I should have been born in this city and lived most of my life therein, and have never heard till this day of the " wonderfully organised All- Jewish Government " whose web radiates thence : the Government " whose fleet is the British fleet which guards from hindrance the progress of All-Jewish world-economy," and in return for which, " Pan-Judaea assures Britain an undisturbed, political and territorial world-rule," and has recently " added Palestine to British control." What was Tamburlaine with his chariot drawn by bitted and harnessed kings to His Imperial Majesty,
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Judaeus, who " is willing to entrust the government of the vari- ous strips of the world to the nationalistic Governments, and only asks to control the Governments "? It is a gesture that would have left even Bcaconsfield breathless. This marvellous Jewish Super-Government " whose citizens are unconditionally loyal, wherever they may be, and whether rich or poor," and which " can make peace or war, anarchy or order," at its own financial will, " having wreaked its revenge on anti-Semitic Ger- many, will now go forth to conquer other nations. Britain it already has."
Such is the chivalry of Germany to its Jews who, through Ballin and Rathenau, did more than any other section of its citizens to stave off the disaster which its fatuous generals and light-headed admirals brought upon it. It is, of course, these same monarchist elements that, learning and forgetting noth- ing, attribute to Jewish intrigue and purpose the Revolution which dethroned Junkerdom, and that see in their own inability to effect a counter-revolution the infallible evidence of the " hid- den hand." Poor Ballin, one remembers, committed suicide, unable to survive the literal wreck of all his hopes for his Fa- therland. But in the Junker version he apparently shot himself for joy at the revenge he had helped to wreak on Germany!
To those who know that the Jews are, as John Davidson once wrote to me, " a race of ungovernable individuals," — still further broken up by geography and history — the humour of representing them as an army of ants with but one will and purpose, is of the last extravagance. Travesty can no further go. It is the very sublime of the ridiculous I
XIII
The clue to the great Jewish conspiracy is, we have already seen, to be sought less in the nature of the accused than in the psychology of the accuser. The Jew takes on the Protean shapes created by ever-changing panic. But beneath it all lies the same apprehension of mysterious power, of uncanny suc- cess, without which the legend of the advancing conqueror would lose its thrill. And this power in the last resort is money. Not to be exfurcated even by the charge of Bolshe- vism, lies the morbid sense of the Jew's money. It is by the criminal stigmata of £.s.d. that the Jew will be known when the accusations of to-day have vanished like the dew of the morning.
Yet that other vision of the Jew as an invading pauper horde,
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a mass of swarming and sweated poverty, is the truer, though even that is ironically lurid with the same sinister aura of suc- cess, since is not the wretched Christian pushed out by the He- brew coolie?
Official Russian statistics collected by Count Pahlen's com- mission at the beginning of the century showed that 90 per cent, of the Jews in the Pale had no staple occupation and that the average possession of the Russian Jew was under five dollars. And the Russian Jew was half the Jewish race. Of the three million Jews in Poland and Galicia, Sir Stuart Samuel has just reported that " as in other countries the large maj ority of them are very poor, suffering severely from hunger and privation." Jerusalem has notoriously been a hotbed of mendicity, where a tenth of a penny sufficed to evoke a beggar's blessing. Whence then comes the singular illusion of Jewish wealth? In part it is the magnifying power of the jaundiced eye. A few Jews have always loomed golden in every great capital. Two Jews move into Park Lane, or the Faubourg St. Germain, and in the resentment at their intrusion, it is forgotten that hundreds of Christians have already been enjoying for generations the lux- ury and privilege of those abodes. An acute Christian ob- server remarked to me that in the East End of London a dis- gruntled Tommy, back from the war, passing four times a day, on his way to and from work, a shop formerly Gentile but now bearing the name of Isaacs, has the impression of four success- ful Hebrew competitors.
No, the Jewish proletariat is not a money success, though it succeeds in living where others would die, because it has had for so long to fight artificial disabilities as well as natural. And the power of surviving among hostile conditions means the power of prospering when the conditions are ameliorated. It is in America that we find the greatest aggregation of Jewish well- being, for here the conditions have been peculiarly favourable, though even here there are no Hebrew names vying in magnifi- cence with those of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Astor or Pierpont Morgan. The manufacture of millionaires from nobodies, which is a feature of American life, has been due to the bound- less field of enterprise and to the conditions of social equality which prevail in the States. In England and other old coun- tries a certain stratified social system has hitherto kept people born in the ranks strictly to their own station. The Euro- pean masses have generally accepted the idea that they were born poor and must remain poor. Farm-labourers, factory-
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hands, mechanics, they have accepted the social order in which they have found themselves as unquestioningly as a horse re- ceives the shafts between which he is placed; and European so- ciety has therefore tended to reproduce in every generation, with some small variations, the grades of wealth established by a traditional history.
" Give us, Lord, our daily rations, Bless the squire and his relations,"
has been the spirit of the European masses over centuries now growing legendary.
The Jew, however, standing outside the Feudal system by which Europe was organised, was able to escape from this point of view. He did not belong to the lower classes for the simple reason that he belonged to no class at all. He thus ignored the general notion of the hierarchy of wealth, and had the au- dacity to make money beyond his social position.
If a Barney Barnato could rise in a brief generation from Petticoat Lane to Park Lane (and from the Lane to the Lane represents the full arc of the social pendulum), if an Andrew Carnegie could develop from a penniless immigrant into a benefi- cent millionaire, it can only be because the conditions are anal- ogous. The American works in a social medium really free; the Jew in a medium in which his aloofness makes him artifi- cially free. While America is the land of adventure, the Jew is the man of adventure.
But even in America the conditions are now Europeanising themselves. As Mr. Stephen Graham, in his remarkable ar- ticle, " The Spirit of America after the War," puts it, in the very metaphor of my explanation, " a more feudal or static state of business has set in. America is more like England in this respect. Men begin to be in that state of life to which it has pleased God to call them." And millionaires, even amongst the Jews, are few. Most Jewish successes must be considered moderate. Indeed, as already suggested, all Jewish successes are moderate judged by the modern American standards. The successes of the Americans are won by great intellectual com- binations. In these, paradoxically enough, the Jew does not distinguish himself. He prefers to build up his property by an endless aggregation of the infinitely little. He grows rich like Alnaschar in the " Arabian Nights," who started with a bas- ket of glass ; except that the Arab's dream is the Jew's reality.
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With the returns from the glass he buys something larger, and goes on and on by petty stages till he ends in the palace with the slaves and concubines of the Oriental vision. And before kicking he waits till he has got whom to kick, unlike the poor day-dreamer in the story who kicks over the basket and shatters his glass and his hopes.
The characteristic habit of accumulating possibly accounts for the fact that in Jewry the men with ideas have no money, and the men with money no ideas. This was strongly brought out in the Zionist movement. The millionaires who might have been suspected of large ideas and the habit of grandiose com- binations were discovered to be of microscopic outlook, while the imaginative combinations and even the practical organisa- tions were made by men of letters and science. Men who have gone cautiously adding field to field for their own advantage are not easily able to conceive of the acquisition of a country for the general good. Even Baron Hirsch could only conceive of an Israel redeemed by being broken into still smaller frag- ments, while Baron Edmond de Rothschild began his epoch- making work in Palestine merely as a philanthropist.
Generally speaking, the man who has accumulated a fortune through years of toiling and moiling, his initial capital labori- ously saved, the man of this sober temperament is naturally not the kind to risk past and future on a grand coup. It should be added that the Jew's cautiousness is likewise probably due to uneasiness and insecurity. He would not dare adven- ture himself in political complications, or in syndicate opera- tions, notoriously opposed to the general interest. It may seem a contradiction to the contention that the Jews appear to amass riches not by coups but by the steady accumulation of small profits, that the Stock Exchanges of the world bristle with Jews. But that the stockbroker is a speculator by grand coups is a popular delusion. The stockbroker is just the per- son who does not speculate at all ; he accumulates his fortune by petty brokerage on the large and never-ending transactions of other people. Certainly there are Jewish operators on 'Change in the gambling sense, but I am not aware that they have ever controlled the market with sovereign power. On the gambling- table of the Veldt, Barney Barnato was beaten by Rhodes at the game of diamond cut diamond.
This power of achieving moderate successes, of building up gradual aggregates, indicates just the kind of financial talent which we should expect to have been developed by the unhappy
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history of the race. When the Jews were in their own land they left commerce to the Phoenicians. These Philistines it was who developed the great ports of Tyre and Sidon. But al- though enterprising Jews had always followed in the wake of commerce, and were dotted about the shores of the Mediter- ranean even before Titus took Jerusalem, the people as a whole remained, as Josephus testifies, a pastoral, agricultural, and military race. With the destruction of their centre came their almost total transformation into a commercial and industrial people, and it is curious to find that by the twelfth century Tj^re itself held Jewish shipowners and manufacturers of Ty- rian glass. And not only did they change their economic status, but post-Palestinian history forced them to be middle- men in every department. In the Dark Ages, and in those countries where the Dark Ages still reign, we find the Jew largely employed as a middleman between landlords and ten- ants, or as farmer of taxes between people and princes, between noblemen and serfs, often between Church and tithe-payer. The Jew of Poland, Hungary, Germany and Bohemia was the middleman whose duty it was to collect, to force the utmost out of an unwilling population. The profit was not to the Jew, but to the power behind the Jew. When Dickens in " Our Mu- tual Friend," figured his good Jew, Uriah, as the thumb-screw of a hidden Christian employer, Dickens was true to history, however far from true Jewish psychology the rest of the char- acter may be.
Now, a nation of middlemen cannot yield great originative conceptions in economics. Just as intellectually the mediaeval Jew found his function in translating and interpreting one na- tion to another — a role he still largely monopolises — so did he find his chief economic function in linking the scattered na- tions through the medium of " the foreign exchanges." In a well-known passage of the Spectator Addison describes the Jews as " so disseminated through all the trading parts of the world, that they are become the instruments by which the most distant nations converse with one another, and by which man- kind are knit together in a general correspondence. They are like the pegs and nails in a great building, which, although they are but little valued in themselves, are absolutely necessary to keep the whole frame together."
And certainly in the ages ere nations understood one another and one another's language and currency, and when they were, moreover, mutually suspicious and hostile, the value of a uni-
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versally dispersed fraternity as a link between the nations can- not be overrated. The Jew's operations as a middleman were facilitated by his polyglot capacity and by his possession of Hebrew or Yiddish, or Ladino (Spanish- Jewish), which made a common tongue for communities otherwise separated by space and local nationality. The absence of a country of their own, which was the cause of the existence of this diffused brother- hood, was also a factor forcing them into international deal- ings ; in many countries of the Exile they were exclusively to be found in towns, not being allowed either to own or work land, and even had property in land been permitted them, the inse- curity of tenure made it an undesirable form of property. For those in danger of banishment at brief notice possessions must be portable. Hence they preferred to deal in money and with precious jewels of small bulk. Armed with mutual interest and confidence, the Jews wove a network of commerce over the isles of the sea. An Arab geographer of the ninth century gives the name of Radanites to the Jewish merchants who carried goods and slaves between Europe and the East.
All these remarks, however, refer to that efficient minority which was able to raise itself from the mass and which alone rep- resented Jewry in the eyes of Christendom. But although, for example, every Polish nobleman had his Jewish factor, that did not enrich the mass of the Jews on his estate, who, on the con- trar}f, were mulcted by his Jewish agent. And if the Jew, by not living the life of the nations, but living in a Biblical dream- world of his own, escaped the feudal point of view with its dispiriting consequences on the fortunes of the lower classes, this peculiar aloofness prevented the dreamier section from ever facing the realities of life. A class of beggar-students and rab- bis and nondescript Bohemians was evolved, who still haunt the Ghettos of the world from New York to Jerusalem. " Luft- menschen " Nordau has ingeniously styled these airy tribes who look to miracles for their daily food, and scan the horizon for provision-bearing ravens. No people in the world possesses so many fantastic ne'er-do-wells as this nation mythically synony- mous with success. Nor does any people possess so many indi- viduals indifferent to moneymaking. General Booth expressed his surprise at finding in Sir Matthew Nathan, then the Gov- ernor of Natal, a man so markedly different in his view of money from the bulk of British officialdom. It is rather odd that a supposed anti-Semite like Mr. Belloc should have re- cently ripped up the fable of Jewish wealth and moneygrab-
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bing. " Jews as a mass," he pointed out, " were a very poor race, because the making of money was not their principal ob- ject." This is the truth. Shy lock himself preferred a pound of inedible flesh to thrice his three thousand ducats offered in court.
One of our most distinguished Christian law-lords once de- clared to me that the few persons he had known in his life who followed science, learning, art, or literature with uncommercial devotion were all Jews. And indeed of the three great Anglo- Jewish contributions to the work of the war — the camouflage system of Solomon J. Solomon, R.A., the tank of Sir Albert Stern, and the anti-gas fan of Mrs. Ayrton, all alike were marked by a disinterested and almost despairing anxiety to con- vert a slower-brained race to faith in science.
The traditional relation of the Jew to the credit system, which, according to Sombart, he invented, is vastly exaggerated. In his valuable posthumous book, " Jewish Contributions to Civ- ilisation," Joseph Jacobs carefully summed up the evidence, and there is none of any Jewish participation in its sixteenth cen- tury beginnings, which are due to Italians and Germans. The credit system was such a creation of genius, and Capitalism has in its day proved so fruitful an agency of civilisation and inter- national unification, that it is only my stern sense of justice that refuses to accept the fabular version. The Jew did indeed help to transform the economics of Europe from a barter to a money system, for being, as I have just pointed out, forbidden to hold immovable property, he was the only man whose wealth was in a wandering shape. But in so far as credit in the embryonic form of money-lending is concerned, he had not even the merit of suc- cessful competition in this matter, since the Church's interpre- tation of Luke vi. 35, prohibited Christendom from lending money at interest, and it was therefore Jewish money that had to build the great churches and abbeys of England, to finance Columbus's discovery of America or Strongbow's conquest of Ireland. The Jew was thus a precious, if paradoxical, asset in Christendom, a royal chattel rather than a citizen, a sponge to be squeezed by the King, to whom all the usurer's money es- cheated on his death — and one sees how inconvenient it was if the sponge dipped itself in holy water. Poor William Rufus had to bribe baptised Jews to return to their Judaism.
Being a Jew was thus a dangerous occupation from which there was no escape. It was dangerous because there is no bigotry like that of defalcating creditors, whose debts can be
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wiped out by wiping out the debtor, and to be anything but a financial middleman was not easy in a society where labour was organised by guilds, from which the Jew — if only because un- able to take the oaths of initiation — was excluded. In Spain under the Moors he had his own guilds, but under mediaeval Christendom, especially after the Crusades, he was driven from all crafts, and even from commerce. It was fortunate for him that he was not alone in his inglorious pursuit of interest, that the Flemings, Lombards and Florentines had begun to take a hand in money-lending — the financier, as Pinero says, is only a pawnbroker with imagination — and that the Church finally accommodated itself to this text of Luke as it had long since done to the still more difficult beginning of the same verse, " Love ye your enemies." It was fortunate, too, for the Jew that he did contrive to amass some wealth, because that was as important to him for self-defence as strength to the lion or swiftness to the hare.
The " sinews of war " supplied the place of an army.
XIV
My friend and co-worker, the late Sir Lionel Abrahams, laid it down in his last presidential address to the Jewish Historical Society of England, that " Jewish financial genius does not exist, and Jews have attained as a whole comparatively little in the way of financial and economic eminence." This is, perhaps, to exaggerate on the other side, and to ignore his own genius as Indian Financial Secretary, to which Lord Inchcape and other experts have paid tribute. Financial supermen are undoubt- edly to be found among the Jews of all countries. But he is certainly right in tracing the source of the exceptional riches of the Jew to the fact that the wealth he amassed was in coin, that almost alone in the Middle Ages the Jew had property in the shape of money. Citing an ancient document of inquiry into the movables possessed by the inhabitants of Colchester in 1301, Sir Lionel Abrahams tells us that of the three hundred and ninety inhabitants examined, only ten were found to pos- sess any money, and the largest sum found was two marks (£1, 6s. 8d.). Similarly tenants paid the lord of the manor mainly in work, cows, or poultry. The nobleman's wealth being in lands or villeins, or the merchant's in goods or ships, was not fluid. It was thus that the Gentile had to " go to the Jews " in any crisis demanding metallic money, or securities for money,
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though for example Shylock's wealth in ducats was probably in- ferior to Antonio's in argosies. Hence the delusion from which the world still suffers. It was because there was no readily available substitute for the Jews as financiers that their expul- sion from England in 1290 curiously led — as Dr. Stokes has pointed out — to the political freedom of this country. The need of ready money was constantly involving the monarchy in friction with Parliament and people, till at last Ship-money brought about its fall. The Republic in its turn brought back the Jews, Cromwell understanding their commercial importance for his expansionist policy. But it was in the Elizabethan age, when the Jews in England were like the snakes in Iceland, that England began to lay the foundations of this policy and to enter what Seeley has called " the main current of its com- merce. " And though undoubtedly Jewish finance and genius have played no small part in the establishment of the mightiest Empire the world has ever seen, especially, as Mr. Max J. Kohler has shown, by keeping its early colonies from bank- ruptcy, yet to ascribe its development, or that of the modern world in general, to a capitalistic system predominantly worked by Jews, could occur only to the anti-Semite or the myth- monger.
If " rich as a Jew " has become a popular proverb, it is be- cause the only Jews with whom the Christian needed to come into contact were the wealthy minority who financed everything, including (by way of the Crusades) their own persecutions. A cockney diner-out in restaurants might as well have imagined that all foreigners were waiters. And the locution — " to go to the Jews " — survived into the period when money had become general and money-lending had been thrown open to Christian competition. Had my Lord Tomnoddy of the Ingoldsby Leg- end " gone to the Jews " in the literal sense of the phrase, he would have found himself among the poorest inhabitants of the most congested slums in Europe.
XV
But the myth of the Jewish accumulation of power in the shape of capital does not constitute the real danger to the Jew or the real indictment. Clemenceau, though under the sway of the myth, yet refers wittily to " Venorme puissance d'Israel dans le christianisme capitaliste de nos jours." Christendom is too tainted with capitalism to accuse the Jew of it. It is not cap-
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italism for profit's sake that the world rebukes and dreads. It is capitalism for Jewry's sake. The Jew bankers of the world
— that notorious intercatenation of super-moneylenders — are engaged in the old Biblical business of exploiting the rest of mankind as the prelude to its extermination. I suppose nobody is in a better position than I to give the lie to the charge of Jewish solidarity, I, whose life has been half -wasted in the effort to bring it about, who for twenty years toiled to unite the Jewish millionaires in the quest for a Jewish State, and whose supremest triumph lay in assembling three of them, a British, a Russian and an American, in one committee-room to promote
— emigration from a Jewish centre t
Undoubtedly there are Rothschilds in London, and in Paris, and in Vienna, and perhaps still in Frankfort. But the fantas- tic idea that this concatenation of cousins holds the purse- strings of the world and is ready to plunge it into war without a qualm, so that it may finance the whirlwind and capitalise the storm, is — though it lurks in the closing allusion of Sir Charles Bruce and was actually propounded in my hearing by one of our most Liberal men of letters — only to be taken seriously because its effects are serious. One would have imagined that the discovery in the Kaiser's archives of a letter from the late Alfred de Rothschild pleading desperately for the peace of Eu- rope would have given the quietus to this myth. I well remem- ber how astonished Dr. Herzl was at discovering — when he tried to engage them in Zionism — within what a rigid ambit the Rothschilds dared move of their own initiative, how circum- scribed they felt themselves by the will of the Powers, how chau- vinistically each branch of the cousinship responded to its local Jingoism. Nor were they all so united. The late Lord Roths- child himself told me sardonically how little one of his Conti- nental cousins could be relied upon in a Jewish cause. " Use- less to ask him to contribute: What you would get wouldn't pay the cost of cleaning your boots after the journey."
As for the Press being in the hands of the Jews, let us bring this question, too, into the open. There comes to my mind a recollection of a conversation with the late Leopold de Rothschild at a moment when The Times was in low water and in the market, and had been offered to New Court. There is no organ which it would be more important to have in Jewish hands, whether for the mythical aggressive or for purely de- fensive purposes. Yet what was the temptation that appealed to the Rothschilds ? " A paper which will put in a letter, if
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decently written, upon any subject from any standpoint," cried Mr. Leopold enthusiastically, " is not that a national British asset? And is not such an asset worth preserving? " I agreed. Since those days The Times has sunk from a national to an in- dividual organ, and rarely publishes a letter not parasitic to its policies. But only to-day has the significance of that conversa- tion occurred to me.
The Rothschilds with open eyes allowed the most influential organ in the world to go to Lord Northcliffe, and thus ulti- mately to fall into the hands of an anti-Semitic editor. A quaint way indeed of conducting a world-plot ! I know only two daily papers in London of Jewish editorship or proprietor- ship, the Daily Express and the Daily Telegraphy and it is dif- ficult to decide which is the more radically British. Emma Lazarus felicitously compared the Jew in every country to the intensitive form of the Hebrew verb, and the comparison finds illustration everywhere. The very suspicion that would attach to a Jewish paper, did it favour Jews or Judaism, tends rather to drive it into injustice or anti-Semitism, and Lord Burnham's success in avoiding both is a remarkable feat. Dr. Herzl was one of the editors of the Neue Freie Presse of Vienna, and its most brilliant feuilletonist, yet never while he lived was a word about the Zionist movement allowed to appear in this powerful organ, which was soon alone in Europe in boycotting the theme.
By a strange coincidence I had barely written this paragraph when I saw that Herr Moritz Benedikt, the proprietor and edi- tor-in-chief of the Neue Freie Presse, was just dead in Vienna at the age of seventy ! " Benedikt," I was informed by The Times correspondent, " more than any other man, was responsible for the downfall of Austria." This may be quite true, for we know the fatal power of a country's leading organ, but I feel sure this sinister potency would not have been ascribed to him had he not been of the fabular race. But what policy was it that he incor- porated? It was, says The Times, "Jewish Pan-Germanism." Now Pan-Germanism we have heard of. But Jewish Pan-Ger- manism is simply a meaningless collocation of words. Unless, indeed, it means — in the sense of Emma Lazarus — an intensive Pan-Germanism, and in that sense it is not easy to see how it could conduce to Jewish ends. " He never forgave England," we read, " for escaping from the orbit of German foreign pol- icy." Evidently, then, not even England's promise to establish " a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine " could soften this rancorous Teutophile. And in truth he was an in-
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tensive Pan-German, without a spark of sympathy for the Jew- ish national idea, but super-patriotically absorbed, like most emancipated Jews, in the country of his birth. In his obituary in a Jewish nationalist organ I find the deceased characterised as " one of those zealous assimilators who mislead the Jewish masses by the mirage of European civilisation," and though " all his life the champion of liberty, equality and justice, yet for others only, and not for his brethren, whom he did not un- derstand." Nevertheless — be it marked — he does champion liberty, equality and justice, and preaches " religious freedom and the sublimity of the principles of Moses." Thus even through Benedikt speaks the voice of Jerusalem. But of the contention that this voice is raised for the peculiar political benefit of the Jews, let this greatest of all the Jewish editors of our era be the final disproof.
It may be I am rendering the Jews still weaker in destroying the myth — if it can be destroyed — of their cohesion and soli- darity. For it was that mythical might which induced the French Government to give its famous secret instruction to M. Pichon, at a moment when the war was going in favour of Ger- many, to dangle before the Jews of the world the largest pos- sible hopes as regards Palestine. The bait, we have seen, failed with Herr Benedikt. Unquestionably there is a solidarity of sentiment against Jewish persecution, and it may find incon- venient expression through Jewish journalists, but this never goes so far as action, and would even be limited as thought, if the political interest of the country demanded silence. This negative cohesion is the maximum approach that has ever been made to a Jewish Weltpolitik. No, ten thousand European papers owned and edited by Jews would not make a Jewish Press, for they would have nothing in common unless it was their anti-Jewishness. Thus " the Jewish Press " is as legen- dary as " Jewish Finance," its power over the issues of Peace and War as mythical. It is in every case individual power used for individual ends, local or Gentile.
XVI
It is true that the Jew ought to unite all these streams of power for Jewish ends, pull all these strings for both self-pro- tection and the furtherance of Jewish ideals ; and I have all my life been urging upon him to do so.
Just before the war, I issued a call, countersigned by Max
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Nordau, for an all-Jewish Congress at Basle — that sinister city of " the Elders of Zion." I urged that if only as a relig- ious sect Israel needed concerted action in face of common prob- lems and perils. It is doubtless the Gentiles' perception that this is the natural policy and what they would aim at, were they in Israel's place, that leads them on to their misunderstanding. Their apprehension of aggressive design forgets to take account not only of Israel's ethical superiority to revenge, but of the lower historical conditions that have reinforced his spiritual shrinking from it — the sixteen centuries of persecution that, ever since the Roman Empire embraced Christianity as the python embraces its victims, have sapped the Maccabaean spirit. Islam, that later-born daughter of the synagogue, was only less harsh to her mother than Christianity. That the Jew did not break under the strain is marvellous, but it would have been a miracle if he had remained unbent. It is the same pliancy which saved him from snapping in twain that has produced what has been aptly called " the Ghetto bend." Consider, for example, how the greatness of the Rothschilds was cradled: of what Ghetto they were the children. History's first word anent the Jews of Frankfort — in whose Judengasse their old gabled Stammhaus still stands — is " Hep ! Hep 1 " And the mas- sacre of the year 1241 was followed by an exodus which left the Emperor bewailing his lost revenue and nursing an obdurate grievance against his inconsiderate Christian burghers. For the Jews were his private property — servi camera — and could be lent, pledged, or farmed out like any other source of revenue. Here, indeed, was their main safety : they were as valuable as pedigree cattle. In 1349, when the ravages of the Black Death, with the inevitable accusation that the Jews had poisoned the wells, foreshadowed copious pogroms, the far-seeing Carl the Fourth hastened to pledge his Frankfort Jews to the city for some 15,000 pounds of hellers, and, despite his royal promise, left them unredeemed. Jews, not as pawnbrokers, but in pawn to a Christian city, constitute a not unamusing inversion of the conventional concept. At a later period a complex Chris- tian transaction — - wheels within wheels, or loans within mort- gages — brought the Frankfort Jews under the power of the Archbishop of Mayence, and there were pretty quarrels be- tween their various Christian proprietors. Penned in the Judengasse behind the three iron-lined gates, and badged on their garments, they lived under a coil of police regulations, much like aliens in the recent war, and in moments when the
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mob saw red, like enemy aliens. Plague and massacre, flight and optimistic return — such are throughout the ages the woof and warp of this Ghetto's story. And at the best that " curi- ous system of degrading customs and debasing laws which would have broken the heart of any other people,'' not to mention the twenty-six separate sorts of special Jew-taxes that would have broken the bank of any other people. When as late as 1814 the Frankfort Jews demanded emancipation, the great free Christian city did not scruple to remind them that they were still its unredeemed pledge.
Yet it is from this pariah population that the Rothschilds — their very name imposed by the State after the Red Shield on their old gabled home, No. 174, Jew Street — emerged to rule for a time the European money market.
It would be folly to expect them to use their power other than circumspectly. The marks of such chains are not to be effaced in a single century. Even the Zionist movement, though it was created by a Herzl, and has produced a Jabotinsky, has never risen to the heights of its great argument, is timid, undigni- fied, obsequious and unassertive. The children of the Ghetto who cowered in the cramped alleys, cut off from sun or fresh air, or spent the dreadful night, massed in the congested ceme- tery, clad in their ritual shrouds for the death-confession of sin, and passively waiting to be murdered by the mob, still suf- fer, as Herzl profoundly pointed out, from Agoraphobia, dread of an open space. An anecdote of Horace Vernet, the French painter, relates that he wandered despairingly for weeks in search of a suitable model for a beggar till one day, meeting a white-bearded, tragic-eyed friend on the Boulevard, he cried out in ecstasy : " The very man 1 " It was a Paris Rothschild. The anecdote is pregnant.
With such a subservience to the environment, whether engen- dered of subconscious fear, super-conscious circumspection or exaggerated respect, it is easy to understand how the very leaders of Zionism can disavow any aspiration for a purely Jewish State — the race that is supposed to covet the world shrinking back weakly from the opportunity of securing even a piece little larger than Wales, just as in 1904 it rejected the offer of a valuable territory in East Africa.
Had the English really been the lost Ten Tribes, the sus- picion of Israel's world-greed would have had some ground — a fourth of the globe in fact. In the words of " Rule Britan-
ma "
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" All thine shall be the subject main, And every shore it circles thine."
But for an English Colonial Governor like Sir Charles Bruce to suspect the Jews of imperialism is the last stroke of irony.1
When Goldwin Smith asked in his famous article, " Can the Jew be a Patriot? " the then Chief Rabbi, Hermann Adler, has- tened with an anxious affirmative. But the alarmed defender did not summarise the matter by pointing out that life is not logical, only psychological. However you might prove log- ically that, given his liturgical visions, the Jew could not be a patriot, the fact remained that he was only too patriotic. Na- tionality, as I have shown in my little book, " The Principle of Nationalities," is practically an effect of environment, and it is independent of race, which is hereditary and objective, whereas Nationality is acquired and subjective. There may be affinities and common expressions of race between quite different nation- alistic groups, as among the French of Quebec, of New Orleans, and of Paris, but no one supposes that three separate and an- tagonistic war-fevers would not be generated in a crisis. The Jew responds to his nationality-making environment with his habitual super-sensitiveness. Witness Disraeli, of whom Lord Salisbury said : " Zeal for the greatness of England was the passion of his life." Witness the rhapsodies of Sir John Mon- ash over Australia, whose soldiers he led to unbroken victory. Here you have a real conquering Jew, but his legend will be Australian, not Jewish, just as Primrose Day is an English, not a Jewish institution. So chauvinist is the Jew that he will not only fight and die for the country that shelters him, he will even demand Palestine for his poorer brethren if a similar sympathy is felt in his Gentile environment.
Much of the present Zionism in the wealthier circles of Anglo- Jewry has its origin in this reflected source, as well as in a patri- otic fervour for the extension of the British Empire in the East.2 It is a great pity that Governments are generally ig- norant of the merest rudiments of psychology, so that our own legislature has recently under mob clamour altered the correct
i The valuable revised version of the English Bible, issued by the Jewish Publication Society of America, observes in its preface: "The English lan- guage is, unless all signs fail, to become the current speech of the majority of the Children of Israel." This prognostication is hardly consistent with ai sense of a specifically Jewish future, much less of a physically conquering Jewish future.
2 The Jewish, Guardian actually quotes:
"'Here and here did England help me: how can I help England?' — say."
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law of nationality which determines it by residence (jus soli) into one determining it by blood (jus sanguinis) as though man were a pedigree brute and not a spirit. Presumably by this criterion a man who had lived all his life on the Continent would, if only his father was English, be accounted of British nationality.
XVII
But if thus under psychological analysis (or psycho-analysis) the case against the Jew as a capitalistic conspirator to destroy the Gentiles breaks down — for the Jew, wherever emancipated, is a passionate devotee of the national civilisation — the mystic magnification of Jewish potency and malignity finds refuge in the quite opposite charge that the Jew is the power behind Bol- shevism. The antithesis has been indeed flamboyantly accentu- ated by Mr. Austin Harrison, who, without any ill-will, but in a mere passion for the picturesque, sees the Jew as the embodi- ment of the rival forces that contest for the empire of the world. Not even Disraeli would have advanced so megalomaniacal a claim. In so far as the power of producing antithetical phe- nomena is concerned, Mr. Harrison's ascription of polarity to the race was, as we have seen, anticipated by its own historian, Graetz, and in so far as he is under the usual illusion of Jewish wealth and its peculiar exercise by Jews to control Governments, he has already been answered. It is characteristic, however, of the legendary treatment of the Jewish question that Mr. Har- rison, having to recognise Cecil Rhodes as the protagonist of modern capitalist imperialism, and Lenin as his antithesis, throws over the former a vague suspicion of Jewish blood, and actually writes of Lenin as if he were either a Jew or a Jewish tool. Perhaps he is relying on The Times, which in its " His- tory of the War " has with characteristic historical accuracy explained to the world that Lenin is a Jew named Zederblum.
But while capitalistic imperialism has no organic connection with the Jewish temperament — is it not Mr. Montagu who is showing England the path to true imperialism? — Socialism is unquestionably in harmony with the Jewish genius from the days of Moses, while internationalism is latent in Isaiah and Amos: not Socialism in any narrow schematic form of partition of property or destruction of individualism, but the conception of the national organism as one happy and righteous whole, with the world as a federation of such peaceful systems. There is
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thus to-day not so much a " new evangel " as an attempt of the Jewish soul to re-express for itself and mankind its old aspiration under the changed conditions of the modern world. The Bible, as Mr. George Hodges, Dean of the Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, reminds us in his latest work, " is a dangerous and dynamic book, radical and revolutionary, essentially democratic," which " puts all con- servatisms in peril," and " is an armoury for the forces of mili- tant progress." Disraeli was never more Jewish than when he marked in Sybil his horror of the " Two Nations " of wealth and poverty into which England, like Europe at large, was divided.
If the contention of the Jew-hating Comte de Soissons in a recent number of the Quarterly Review that the Jews are the revolutionary leaven in the modern world is false (since so many are stockish upholders of the Soissons world, and so many revolutionaries are of other races) and if it is equally false that even the rebellious Jewish minority is animated by a hatred of Christianity (since more and not less Christianity is the Jew's demand) there is no denying the role of Jews both in the con- ception of Socialism and the struggle for it. This pole of Mr. Harrison's antithesis has, therefore, more truth than the other. But in succumbing to the policy of violence as the short cut to the millennium, Trotsky has been faithless to the spirit of Judaism — that long tradition of Reason and Love. If it was a Jew who said, " The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force," he did not say it of the kingdom of heaven on earth. The red road is not the path to Zion.
Nor has it been cut out by Jews in particular. Its inhu- manly rigid straightness is the work of the Russian ideologue, Lenin. And if there is an excessive percentage of Jews among the Commissaries, it is due partly to the aforesaid disproportion of Jewish figures in everything and an}^thing, but more to the general illiteracy of Russia, the vast majority of whose popu- lation is analphabetic. Jewry produces great revolutionary leaders, as it produces great mathematicians or great actors: but its proletariat is the least revolutionary of all the prole- tariats, as is proved by its meekness in accepting revolutions imposed by the environment. Sufferance, as Shakespeare cor- rectly perceived, is the badge of the tribe.
In the genesis of the Bolshevist revolution the Jews were even conspicuous by their geographical absence. As Dr. Reuben Blank, the representative of the Petrograd Jews, sums
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it up, the first generator of Bolshevism was the fleet at Kron- stadt, into which not a single Jew was admitted ; the second was the proletariat of Petrograd, a town into which only a rare Jew could find entry. From these two centres it spread to Great Russia, where the Jews constitute less than 1 per cent, of the population.1 Victor Kopf, the Bolshevist Commissary at Berlin, complains that only one Jewish party in Russia — the Poale-Zion — welcomed Bolshevism, that the Jewish trading and shop-keeping classes are its greatest enemy, and that although they are massacred in pogroms organised by the counter-revo- lutionaries, they will not fall in with the Socialist regime.
A friend of my own, returning from Moscow, reported that the question: " Is there a God? " was raised in a public debate by Lunatscharsky, the Bolshevist Commissioner for Public Instruction. The only debater on the affirmative side was Rabbi Mase of Moscow. Not a single Russian pope, in that religious capital of Russia with its swarm of churches, dared to emulate this Jewish courage. In a letter to The Times I had ventured the above interpretation that the comparative prepon- derance of Jewish Commissaries was merely due to the Jews being an educated folk in an illiterate land. I see that Captain Peter Wright, in his official report on Poland, discussing the same question, says : —
" Bolshevism requires a vast administration and propaganda, which in turn require that men shall at least be able to read and write. But in the proletariat of Eastern Europe only the Jews pos- sess these accomplishments, and therefore the administrators and propagandists of Bolshevism must necessarily be Jews. So much so that Bolshevism appears at times to be almost purely a Jewish movement. But the Commission had the opportunity of studying it very close at hand on the Eastern frontier, and in that part of the world at least this was certainly not the case."
Indeed, the Chief of the Commission, Sir Stuart Samuel, reports that " the Bolsheviks publicly complained that only 1 per cent, of their army were Jews."
The attempt to represent Jewishness and Bolshevism as synonymous, naturally does not fall short of my own person, and persists in face of rectifications. It may be useful, there- fore, to reproduce here an extract from a speech of mine to a
i Reference to the statistics given later in this book will show that with the Jews of Poland and the Ukraine drawn off into separate polities, only 900,000 Jews now remain in Russia proper.
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meeting at the Kingsway Hall, largely Bolshevist, in May, 1919: —
" I should he no honest advocate of liberty if I endorsed the Rus- sian method of imposing Socialism by brute force; and even Social- ism proper — divorced from violence as it appears to have come in Hungary — holds grave dangers for the human spirit, however welcome be the tardy justice it does to the human body. It is mov- ing towards us so swiftly in these latter days that the question of the due boundaries between the State and the individual may be upon us sooner than any of us can foresee. And if Socialism encroaches too far upon individual liberty — and Mr. Brailsford, writing from Hun- gary, says that there is no liberty at all there — not all its loaves and fishes will save it from the soullessness attaching to all mechan- ical constructions. For the State has no life save that which comes to it from its individuals; and to stereotype for all time the life it has absorbed from any one generation is to sterilise it. The Gospels speak of a mysterious sin against the Holy Ghost. What can this be but the denial of Liberty? Our Quaker friends are right. For the Holy Ghost is the spirit which moves through all things and blows through all men; and to crib, cabin, and confine it, whether bv a British Order in Council, or the edict of a Russian or Hun- garian Soviet, is the supreme blasphemy. Our ancestors had only too great a reverence for the hermit who cut himself off from the State and its doings, but it was a sound instinct that made them realise that the life was in the man and not in the State. By us, hermits have been dragged from their mountain-tops and clapped into khaki. We have conscribed the very gypsies who live outside all States; we have constrained the consciences of the few Chris- tians among us. All this is a fatal policy. It leads to a hive, not a human civilisation. ' The strongest man/ said Ibsen, ' is he who stands most alone.' And similarly, I say the strongest State is that which lets him stand alone. Not to make the world safe for democ- racy, but to make it safe for minorities, is the true human ideal."
Mr. Bertrand Russell seems to have had to go to Russia to perceive these obvious implications of the communistic ideal when that ideal comes, not as its spiritual essence requires, from the members of the community themselves, all animated by love and brotherhood and the desire of co-operation for the common- weal, but from above by brute force. Mr. Grimstone, the schoolmaster in " Vice Versa," remarked that he would establish a spirit of unmurmuring happiness and unreasoning content- ment in his school if he had to flog every schoolboy to achieve it, and Bolshevism in its Russian caricature is only Grimstonism writ large. But in so far as the war for freedom has under-
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mined individual liberty throughout the world, in so far the gov- erning classes have themselves prepared the way for Bolshevism.
The sole fire behind all this acrid smoke is that everywhere throughout Europe, as the old autocracies fall, and careers open themselves to talent, Jews are found stepping into minis- terial or official positions. This is naturally most copiously the case with the most numerous aggregation of Jews — the Rus- sian — and the unfortunate coincidence that here the world's orthodox economic order has been reversed, provides a unique handle for the secular indictment of the Jew as the destroying devil. The only piece of luck in the business is that the head and front of the offence is a Slav. All Israel should set up a statue to Lenin for not being a Jew.
Mr. Austin Harrison's attempt to represent the contem- porary world-struggle as embodying the two polar Jewish ideals of Capitalism and Bolshevism is thus largely melodramatic. That epithet must attach also to Mr. Winston Churchill's attempt to read history by the same limelight, only with Chris- tianity in the role of Capitalism; though it is, of course, true that to the Jews is owing what Mr. Churchill describes as that " system of ethics, which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all other wisdom and learning put together." The praise of Christianity comes indeed curiously from our War Minister, nor can one alas ! claim with him that " on this system of faith there has been built out of the wreck of the Roman Empire the whole of our existing civilisation." History is not so simple as all that, especially when one considers that " this system of faith," unlike Judaism or Mohammedanism, has never been applied to prac- tical life. It has been on the contrary the first religion to divorce itself from practical politics and to breathe only eccle- siastical air. It may be that the Jews, to whom, as Mr. Churchill says, the world owes Christianity, will take back their misused and misshaped loan and proceed to utilise it for them- selves.
But correctly as Mr. Churchill recognises the provenance of Christianity, he becomes as melodramatic as Mr. Harrison when he sets up Bolshevism as its Satanic antithesis and in a passage that out-fantasies Mr. Harrison and would arride the author of " The Jewish Spectre," observes that " it would seem as if the Gospel of Christ and the Gospel of Antichrist were destined to originate among the same people and that this mystic and mys-
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terious race had been chosen for the supreme manifestations of the divine and the diabolical."
Now obviously, so far as practical life is concerned, the two manifestations are one and the same. The first principle of Bolshevism was laid down by St. Paul when he said: " If any would not work, neither should he eat." Mr. Churchill has elsewhere put the anti-Bolshevist case well, but nothing can justify such galimatias as this antithesis between Bolshevism and Christianity, of which Bolshevism has been at worst an enforced application. Perhaps in that masterly letter of Mr. Lucien Wolf's we may find the clue to this mentality. It is the old " anti-Christ " literature again, remembered or re-created in a brain that is seeing red, and seeing falsely. This perversity of vision produced Mr. Churchill's Russian policy, and the fail- ure of that policy has only distorted his vision further. To this, and not to sheer bravado, may charitably be accredited his acclamation of his instrument, Denikin, the destroyer and despiser of the Jewries along his path, as the protector of Israel. Vladimir Tiomkin, the head of Ukrainian Jewry, whom I have already quoted, testifies of this " Protector of Israel " protected by Churchill : —
" The pogroms of Denikin* $ Armies were effected under the lead- ership of the divisional commanders General Ckuro, General Mam- antov and General Progamirov. These pogroms differ from all others by virtue of their original methods which seem to have been carefully worked out beforehand. Not only was there a unity in method but all the circulars of the different commands and those which were issued by Denikin's information bureau, all bore the underlying suggestion that Jews were Bolsheviks, and Denikin's representatives abroad actually made an effort to convince the Euro- pean Governments that this libel was the truth. This was a well- organised effort to justify beforehand the massacres which were subsequently to take place. In many instances they appeared to have succeeded.
" In their nature and spirit, Denikin's pogroms, fires and murders appear to have been the most terrible. While the number of killed and violated do not appear to be comparatively large, the at- mosphere of oppression and fear which resulted from his methods were by far the most cruel. The question here is not whether 100,- 000 or 200,000 Jews were killed. The point of importance is the fact that three million Jews in Ukrainia and Southern Russia found themselves placed outside the pale of every law and in a condition where they might be exterminated to the very last soul. In every city, town and village through which Deniken's forces passed, all
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males were in the most literal sense exterminated, all women without any exceptions were violated, and no child or aged were spared. Throughout every spot that Denikin's armies touched the same red line is to be traced, the same results found. Appeals were made to Denikin, appeals were forwarded to the European Powers which were maintaining his forces, but it was as an echo in the desert, no relief or protection came from anywhere.
" Wherever Denikin's armies arrived, thev removed the Jewish members of the municipality, shut down the communal institutions, and systematically set about carrying out their work of murder and pillage. Invariably the most innocent people would be exposed to punishment."
And presumably it is the same obliquity of vision which saw in Denikin a " protector of Israel " that accounts for Mr. Churchill's inability to perceive the transformation in all social values of which he himself has been a leading agent. Was it not he who pointed out that the achievements of his Ministry of Munitions provided the best argument for State Socialism? And after he has conscribed human life remorselessly, and even recklessly, for the benefit of the State, that monstrous Leviathan of Hobbes, the conscription of labour or of property becomes a minor, not a greater expression of communism, or of universal sacrifice for the State-idol. And as a matter of fact the sanc- tity of property was destroyed by the Defence of the Realm Act, as Lord Rosebery discovered with such naive surprise. Once the may a or illusion of sacredness is dissipated, it is im- possible to reconstitute it. The freedom of the individual, of which property is only one facet, having been profaned, it was impossible to put bounds to the sacrilege. The most law-abid- ing municipalities seem now to annex empty rooms for homeless people as unscrupulously as the Government of which Mr. Churchill was a member annexed full hotels for homeless Depart- ments. And with Mr. Bonar Law placidly discussing a Capital Levy, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer already appropriat- ing over a quarter of our incomes, Mr. Churchill's prophetic fury against Bolshevism, though it is genuine, has no more truth in itself than the soap-begotten froth on the lips of the pseudo- epileptic. " The dictation of the proletariat " is already implicit in our Adult Suffrage, which Mr. Churchill helped to introduce. And if the earth is rocking and the fountains of the great deep are broken up, it is he and his peers whose " Knock-out-Blow " has brought the earthquake and the deluge. What ! Did they think they could loose tempest and pestilence
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and all the Beasts of the Apocalypse for a whole quinquennium and then with a movement of their little finger pacify the whirl- wind, and purify the plague, and call off the dragons and the ten-horned monsters? Though the masses should remain " dumb driven cattle," did the politicians who had driven them to the shambles suppose the world held no men with bigger hearts and brains than themselves, that they would be allowed to return unquestioned, uncriticised and unrestrained, but merely belaurelled and begilded, to their crude conception of life and their barbarous antiquated leadership?
Mr. Churchill, who presides at the War Office, whose whole atmosphere is the mutual mass-murder carried on between nations, and whose class, as I said in a speech, has governed Europe into a graveyard, is sincerely horrified at Lenin, whom he regards as a monster throned upon skulls, with bones for his footstool. But there is no inherent ethical difference between a war of nations and a war of classes — they are equally bar- barous — and the traditional legitimacy of military operations constitutes no more valid a defence of war than the traditional sanction of suttee or cannibalism in their respective countries constituted a vindication of these savage practices. The only possible justification of war lies in self-defence under actual brute attack, and very rarely can modern war plead this grim necessity. The attempt to precipitate the millennium by force is as reprehensible as it is futile. But it is less criminal than the sullen determination of Christendom to continue the still more murderous order of Sovereign States, united at best by a loveless League in a peace which passeth all understanding.
XVIII
Having disposed of the legendary factors in the Legend of the Conquering Jew, we are now finally in a position to seek for its core of truth.
We have seen from Sir Charles Bruce's own quotation from Disraeli that the attempt at extirpation has been made not of the heathen by the Jews, but of the Jews by the heathen. It has been like a scientific epical experiment. To repeat Dis- raeli's fine summary : —
" The attempt to extirpate them has been made under the most favourable auspices and on the largest scale; the most considerable means that man could command have been pertinaciously applied to
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this object for the longest period of recorded time. Egyptian Pharaohs, Assyrian Kings, Roman Emperors, Scandinavian Cru- saders, Gothic Princes and holy inquisitors have alike devoted their energies to the fulfilment of this common purpose. Expatriation, exile, captivity, confiscation, torture on the most ingenious and mas- sacres on the most extensive scale, a curious system of degrading customs and debasing laws which would have broken the heart of any other people, have been tried in vain."
And what has science to say to the failure of this experiment in annihilation, the experiment that is at this very moment in murderous action on a larger scale than ever before, even in the tragic generations of Israel? Whence comes this strange resisting power? It comes partly from the Jew's ubiquity but primarily from his faith — a faith which in the weakness of the flesh might seek unworthy allies in money and in mimicry to pre- serve the race that was its physical channel, but which was animated at bottom by confidence in that very extermination of the heathen which Sir Charles Bruce misapprehends. The heathen would be exterminated by ceasing to be heathen. The idolaters, polytheists and worshippers of immoral deities would accept the One God of justice and truth. In this sense the Jew did contemplate over-running and conquering the earth.
In our modern catholic sympathy with all expressions of religion, we are apt to overlook the abominations and cruelties with which most pagan cults were entwined or into which they degenerated. For the Jewish prophets, living amid these prac- tices, and seeing Israel straying after the worship of Moloch or Baal, with their human sacrifices or their sexual excesses, there was no such glamour. The very land had been defiled by these abominations and had vomited forth its inhabitants, taught the writer of " Leviticus," and so far from encouraging the Israel- ites to enlarge the promised land, he warned them lest it spue them out likewise. For, even intenser than the prophets' sense of a single divine omnipotence behind Nature and History, as against the polytheism of Greece or the dualism of Persia, was their sense that this mysterious Power was a Power not merely making for Righteousness, but demanding it. And for the uni- versal acknowledgment of this Power, Israel was — they felt — the chosen instrument.
It may be that at moments of national exaltation this ambi- tion was despiritualised into that vulgar imperialism which breaks out in all conquering peoples. But more probably the materialisation of the prophetic message occurred in moments of
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national humiliation, for it was then that, looking forward — like the Belgians under the German heel — to some wild revenge, the masses would be tempted to translate into gross dreams of domination the ghostly consolations of Isaiah or Jeremiah. And for these masses, with their inability to rise beyond the con- ception of a physically conquering Messiah, the traditional national figure of King David was at all times a nucleus for reactionary thought.
This hypothesis is borne out by the history of the Apocalyptic literature beginning with Daniel in which this dream of dom- ination is set forth most plainly. For that literature took its rise in the agonised years of the second century B.C. when the Syrian despot, Antiochus Epiphanes, was ruthlessly crushing out Judaism and imposing the worship of Zeus upon the Temple. Though Judas Maccabaeus triumphed over the tyrant, and to this day annual candles are lit in memory of this salvation, yet the memory of the murdered martyrs and the humiliation to the faith was equally deep and tenacious. A series of writings, at once sublime and grotesque, informed by the notion of the ulti- mate revenge of the righteous, testifies to the reaction of the Jewish soul. Nor was the fact that the victorious Jews soon passed under new masters, and that Judaea changed into a Roman State, calculated to dim the vision. But it should be remembered that none of these books was admitted into the canon of the Synagogue with the exception of Daniel. They were all left in the outer darkness of the " Apocrypha," and Daniel was expressly excluded from the section of the " Prophets " and lumped with the " Writings."
And even this reactionary thought of the apocalyptic writers was interfused and irradiated with the larger Messianic hope, just as this Messianic hope in its turn was never clearly divorced from the prosperity of the race that had nourished it. Political success was to be the natural outcome of religious rightness, and the accent put on each element of the indissoluble compound varied with the quality of the prophet or the believer. It was at any rate not the triumphant and profiteering nationalism of the modern Christian nation; at the lowest it was never the mere military hegemony of an Alexander or a Caesar that was visioned : the Messiah, though he was to be a conqueror and of the seed of David, was none the less to bring the Kingdom of God on earth. It was this that explains how the Jewish people — one of the smallest of antiquity — came, just eighteen and a half centuries ago, to challenge the masters of
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the world. Was it that their nationality felt itself intoler- ably oppressed, their religion flouted? But, as we see from the Gospels, Jesus moved among a reasonably free people. Oppression, exaction, there was in abundance, but not to the breaking point, and though crucifixion and martyrdom were not unfamiliar, these were probably more the outcome of the political ferment than its cause. No, the fight with Rome was — fantastic as it sounds — a fight for the hegemony of the world : a fight inspired by two centuries of apocalyptic literature, with its visions of divine intervention, of Jehovah Himself vindicating His people and their faith in Him; of the imminent advent of His Kingdom. It was the same mystic hope that animated the early Christians in that same half- century. But the Jews presumed to put it to the test of the sword. As unflinchingly as Abraham had set the knife to the throat of Isaac, or Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego had entered the fiery furnace, they sought to force the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth. After all, Judas Maccabseus had beaten back the gods of Greece that had come in the wake of the all-conquering Alexander. Why should the gods of Rome be more powerful? Already the " chosen people " had seen the passing of the empires of Egypt, Babylonia, Chaldea, Persia, Greece. It was not Israel that had destroyed them but God. The legend was of the conquering Jehovah, not the conquering Jew. His devotees were to be found increasingly among the heathen. Why should He not be given the occasion of again manifesting His material might, the occasion indeed that His honour demanded? Why should not the Roman Empire, for all its massive semblance, fade and pass like the others? The event proved the folly of trying to force the hand of Providence. The assurance of Malachi that no harm should befall his people was dismally contradicted. For the desperate revolt was broken and after one of the stubbornest sieges in history the Holy City and Temple was rased to the ground. Hundreds of the defenders were crucified, thousands left to perish of starvation, myriads sent to the mines or thrown to the beasts in the Roman arenas ; the Jewesses were sold as slaves and — such was the glut — for a mere song. Yet the rebellion still raged and it was not till two years later, in the year 72 of our era, that the last Judaean stronghold — Masada — fell ; the garrison slaying first their wives and chil- dren and then themselves. For eighteen centuries no Jew would pass under the Arch Li Rome which Titus erected to celebrate
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his triumph, with its bas-reliefs of the spoils of the Temple: the seven-branched candlestick, the golden table and the sacred trumpets.
But the Messianic hope survived even the seeming demonstra- tion that Providence was on the side of the big battalions ; to be tragically disillusioned again two centuries later when Bar Cochba, " the Son of a Star," proved only a Will o' the Wisp, and Hadrian passed the plough over Mount Zion. But even then the hope was not quenched, though the notion of conquest gradually gave place to that of a supernatural redemption, to be simultaneous with that
" One far-off divine event To which the whole creation moves."
The flickering flame was tended throughout all the Diaspora by the shadowy forms of the ancient prophets whose rhapsodies had become part of the liturgy ; by the writers who added prayers for the Return to every sacred office ; by the pious millions who in every century fasted on the ninth of Ab to commemorate the fall of Jerusalem ; by the long chain of zealots whose tears have fallen every Friday on the ruined wall of the Temple ; by the mediaeval Spanish poets who sang of Zion as of a beloved mistress ; by the old men who in every genera- tion went to die there and by the myriads who paid tribute to keep its students alive.
Nor were more active pioneers wanting to relieve with des- perate romance the eighteen centuries of waiting: Davi Alrui, the Alroy of Lord Beaconsfield, who about 1160, a thousand years after Bar Cochba, strove to lead the warlike Jews of Asia against the Moslem; Asher Lammlein, who in 1502 pro- claimed himself the forerunner of the Messiah, and induced the Jews to observe the anticipatory " year of penitence " ; David Reubeni, who in 1524 arrived from Arabia and Nubia — the mysterious Prince of Chaibar — and was honoured by the Pope and promised eight ships by the King of Portugal ; his follower, Solomon Molcho, the Cabbalist, who flashed through all lands like a mystic meteor, truly predicting flood at Rome and earth- quake at Lisbon, and dying unshaken at the stake in Mantua ; Joseph of Naxos, who, a generation later, obtained Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee from the Sultan, and planted it with mul- berry-trees ; and most amazing of all the pseudo-Messiahs, Sab- batai Zevi, whose only weapon was the Holy Name, to follow
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whom to Palestine in 1666, prosperous Jews throughout Europe wound up their affairs. New York itself has not lacked a gatherer of Israel, though Major Noah's inverted Zionism led him to see the New Jerusalem on the Niagara river. And to these heroes and mystics and megalomaniacs must be added the modern pamphleteers who have advocated the return to Palestine, the modern philanthropists from orthodox Russian Rabbis to French millionaires, who have made the Holy Land the scene of their experiments ; the Chovevi Zion Societies that have sought to repeople it with Jews ; the " Biluits " and other European enthusiasts who have torn at its soil with their fingers when spades were lacking. As early — or as late — as the twelfth century, the Restoration was turned into a dogma of the faith by Maimonides, and the thirteenth article of the creed, still daily recited, declares, eighteen hundred and fifty years after the fall of Jerusalem, unbroken trust in the Mes- siah, " however his coming be delayed." And this Messiah will, in the expectation of the masses, gather the scattered tribes from the four corners of the earth and reign in glory over them in their own land. And on that day, " the Law shall go forth from Zion and the Word of the Lord from Jerusalem."
If in modern Zionism these Apocalyptic visions have been transformed into a sober political movement, this is none the less spiritual because it looks to the right hand of the race — and not to the outstretched cloudy arm — to do the work of regeneration and regathering.
But the " survival value " of the Jew's faith in his destiny was unaffected by the exact sense in which he held it. He was confident of outliving the great Empires of antiquity, each of which in turn enfolded him with its colossal and capricious dom- inance, and already whether in the sense of their creeds or their kingdoms he has outlived them all.
" When I was last in Egypt," said Sir Herbert Samuel in the peroration of his speech at the Maccabasan banquet given to him on his departure to take up the High Commissionership of Palestine, " I saw on the monument of Menepthah what the King had caused to be written : ' Israel is wasted and his seed is brought to nothing.' That was written three thousand }Tears ago : yet Israel is alive to-day in this Hall, for the ideal endures. And our ideal is not tribal but universalistic. ' In thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.' So runs the prophecy ; and in that spirit I set out for the Holy Land of Israel."
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XIX
The mere existence of the Jew to-day has been a triumph of idealism; it marks a dissent for the sake of an idea from the dominant forces of Asiatic or European civilisation, a protes- tantism persisted in despite the ceaseless persecution of all the centuries of Pagan or Christian supremacy. The real story of " The Wandering Jew " remains, when every deduction has been made, the story of camps of idealists entrenched everywhere in enemy's country, practising (inter se at least) those Hebraic principles of human brotherhood which are now only beginning to work their way from the creed to the life of Christendom, and organising existence round the synagogue and the Tal- mudical college so democratically that the beggar considered himself the equal, if not the benefactor, of the philanthropist he helped heavenwards. The popular idea that Judaism has remained stagnant since the birth of Christianity must, as I have said, be dismissed. If Judaism had indeed died in the birth-pangs of Christianity, if it had only given the impulse to that great current of emotion which has produced Catholicism and Protestantism, stimulated Mohammedanism, and moulded the national character of the Anglo-Saxon race in Britain, Australasia, and America, it would have been revered to-day as we revere Hellenism. But the Jews, unlike the Hellenes — whose spiritual line of life theirs crossed thrice, in the creation of the Septuagint, of the Gospels, and of the Alexandrian philosophy — survived by a continuous tradition their greatest period, and, though scattered to the four corners of the earth, went on developing their old faith on its own lines, side by side with the development of Christianity, producing a wilderness of codes and commentaries, mysticisms and cabbalistic theosophies, poems and pseudo-Messianic movements, evolving unique types of character and unique racial humours, and pouring out a Hebrew literature so voluminous that the catalogue for the last century alone fills an octavo volume of one thousand pages — no bad record for a " dead race " writing in a " dead language." " De sorte que" as Bossuet said in another connection, " il n'y a pas un seul moment ou Mo'ise et sa loi n'ait ete vivante." Curiously intermingled with the picturesque panorama of the mediaeval, bringing the mystery of the Orient and the youth of the world into an atmosphere of barons and crusaders, friars and schoolmen, popes and artists, this strange race moves — or
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rather is " moved on " — across the stage of the Christian era, always fantastic and fascinating, never out of danger of pillage and massacre, always ground betwixt Church and State, always the unavowed tax-gatherers for kings and emperors, every- where forced into usury, slowly changed from the peasant warrior breed, that fought the Greeks and Romans, into a meek commercial people, forbidden by Papal bulls to deal in anything but old clo' and old iron, stunted and contorted in soul and body, bent from poring over the Law or making feigned obeis- ance to the persecutor, often clothed literally with shame as a garment, and finally shut up in Ghettos ; jet always, somehow, somewhere, rising through individuals to wealth and distinc- tion — viziers in Turkey, hidalgos in Christian Spain and Ministers of State in Saracenic, masters of the mint in Egypt, astronomers royal in Portugal, royal physicians at every court in Europe, putting forth a Maimonides in Cordova and a Spinoza in Amsterdam, and a Heine in Diisseldorf, and finally surviving (with no taints that two generations cannot efface and a vitality that ten generations cannot impair) to attempt its national renaissance in the Palestine lost eighteen and a half centuries ago, and to contribute who knows what clarified gospel to a confused world. For the stress of the centuries has exhausted neither the intellectual nor the ethical strain in the race, and while Bergson, Freud and Einstein have revolutionised modern thought, there has glimmered in every country of the Diaspora, as in France through James Darmesteter and Joseph Salvador, the dream of a new prophetic Judaism, a charac- teristic example of which has just reached me in the proposal of an obscure London Jew for " A Covenant of Goodness " with a Universal Religion and a Universal Citizenship as the path of Creative Peace. The Jews, who, even Mr. Wells admits, intro- duced into the world two thousand four hundred years ago " the idea of the moral unity of mankind and of a world-peace " begin to recognise that they must see it through.
XX
The Jews of America are up in arms because Sargent's fresco in the Boston Library depicts Judaism as an unlovely hag with bandaged eyes. In vain Sargent claims that he is but following the precedent of mediaeval cathedrals. Judaism to-day is no blind bystander. There is Jewish blood in nearly all the young
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poets who have returned from the trenches to picture to us the loathsomeness of the process by which Christendom parcels out the kingdoms of the world. It was at the hands of Jewish publicists all the world over — from the conductors of America's New Republic to the Secretary of our Labour Party's Advisory Committee on International Questions — that the brazen attempt to palm off the Paris ukases as the Wilsonian Peace- Programme met with its sternest repudiation. They knew that if ' The Tiger " was lying down with the lamb, it was only — as Dickens predicted of the lion — with the lamb inside, and they smiled bitterly at the idea of a new world-order emerging under the aegis of a tribal politician whose very sobriquet recalled the law of the jungle.
In " The Book of the Nations," an American Jewess, Miss Jessie Sampter, has poured forth in the very idiom of the Old Testament her prophetic indignation against our modern Assyrias and Babylons. At first she will not hear of nations at all, and Israel, too, shall be destroyed.
" I shall destroy the nations with their own weapons, saith the Lord.
" I shall set them upon one another because they have hated one another. And each will cry out: I have been attacked, I am inno- cent.
" Because they have pretended innocence when their hands and bowels were full of blood, and because they have called upon my name in vain, using it for war and conquest and oppression.
: This is the day, saith the Lord, which I have made. Now is the day of judgment. It is here, and you know it not. I am here among you, consuming you, and you see me not."
But as her chant goes on, she becomes aware of the blankness of a world without nations, and Israel returns — like the authoress herself — to Palestine, to become
" As a watchman between the East and the West, To turn aside the sword and to keep open the way.
" And this shall be for a sign: That the nations shall set you in your land.
" And that the sore and tired peoples will choose you as a balm of Gilead.
" And they shall say: This people is for peace and for health in a land full of fevers;
'* This is to save us from the sword, from the pestilence of oppres- sion.
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" For this is a people that has suffered in every land, wise- hearted with the sorrows of every land.
" And in your midst they will build the palace of peace. " And the temple of justice."
And in London, an obscure Yiddish writer, masking himself as " Moses, the Servant," exclaims rhapsodically : " Burn the sun on the altar of infinite love, offer the whole world as a holo- caust on the battlefield of right ! Break the rainbow in two, make of one half a bow for Amor, and of the other half a fiery sword for Justice ! "
Another American poet, Mr. Samuel Roth, has excoriated " Europe " with the same large utterance. Thus saith the Lord, he, too, dares to begin in the antique phrase, though his message is ultra-modern. And with the same sublime assurance he exclaims : " The face of Israel will shine with power when Europe will be a name difficult to remember." The voice of Jerusalem re-echoes from France, where in language of a Semitic sublimity M. Edmond Fleg in his " Le Mur des Pleurs," gives utterance to " Le Cri des Hommes," and proclaims his execra- tion for that God of Battles who would resuscitate the very dead only to renew the slaughter:
1 Sois maudit: a. ton cri, nos os ressuscites, S'entre-tuent dans le temps et dans l'eternite!"
Perhaps this is the real uneasiness of Christendom in the presence of the Jew. Israel's emancipation has served, as Stevenson said of marriage, to " domesticate the Recording Angel."
But the Jew is not content to record the crimes of Christen- dom. For him criticism is only the negative aspect of creation. He is out for victory. He will verify the legend of the Con- quering Jew. With the sword of the spirit he will extirpate the heathen. He will overrun the planet. He will bring about a holy League of Nations, a Millennium of Peace. For the words of the Babylonian Isaiah still vibrate in his soul :
" I have put My spirit upon him, He shall make the right to go forth to the nations, He shall not fail or be crushed Till he have set the right in the earth, And the isles shall wait for his teaching."
The God whose spirit is thus interpreted, the God who uses a people to make the right to go forth to the nations, and who
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through faithful followers labours to establish His Kingdom on earth, may be only a national working hypothesis, a divine dynamic. But the conception at least makes the worship of any lesser or rival God impossible, and justifies that jealousy for His service which inspired the anonymous mediaeval poet whose verses are still sung in the synagogue 1 : —
" All the world shall come to serve Thee And bless Thy glorious Name, And Thy righteousness triumphant
The islands shall acclaim, And the peoples shall go seeking
Who knew Thee not before, And the ends of earth shall praise Thee And tell Thy greatness o'er.
a
They shall build for Thee their altars,
Their idols overthrown, And their graven gods shall shame them,
As they turn to Thee alone. They shall worship Thee at sunrise,
And feel Thy Kingdom's might, And impart their understanding To those astray in night.
" They shall testify Thy greatness,
And of Thy power speak, And extol Thee, shrined, uplifted
Beyond man's highest peak, And with reverential homage, Of love and wonder born, With the ruler's crown of beauty Thy head they shall adorn.
" With the coming of Thy Kingdom The hills shall break into song, And the islands laugh exultant
That they to God belong. And all their congregations
So loud Thy praise shall sing, That the uttermost peoples, hearing, Shall hail Thee crowned King."
i From the author's version in " Service of the Synagogue," by kind per- mission of Messrs. Routledge and Son.
237
SHYLOCK AND OTHER STAGE JEWS
In some of the United States the Jews have successfully petitioned for the removal of " The Merchant of Venice " from the school curriculum. Their objection, though it would bar out some of the greatest poetry in the language, is not so unreasonable when it is remembered that as a Christian lady put it for her social class : " Shylock is the only Jew most of us know personally." Moreover, since only one or two Shake- spearean plays can figure in the scholastic repertory, there is no reason to select precisely the one which perpetuates Judaeo- phobia.
It might be added that this play is calculated to give the child as erroneous notions of Law as of the Children of Israel. I could pass over the irregular procedure by which a young lady, obviously breaking the sartorial law of sex, and armed with an untruthful introduction from an absentee judge, is allowed to officiate at once as plaintiff, pleader, preacher, arbi- trator, assessor, sentencer, and Christian conversionist. But imagine any judge in the great city of the Doges putting forth such nonsense as that if a pound of flesh is owing to you, you cannot, save on pain of death, cut less than a pound, even by the twentieth part of a scruple. More, I grant you, would be illegal. But less? A capital offence to take less than your debt? Shylock could surely have cut safely on the ca' canny side. As for Portia's brazen contention that the pound of flesh carried with it no drop of blood, any butcher could have told her the contrary. But perhaps Shakespeare's silliness was as feigned as Hamlet's madness. Perhaps he was sardonically forecasting the future of the legal profession after the passing of the Women's Enabling Act. Or, more probably, he was satirising the influence of anti-alien prejudice upon the judicial mind. The bench of England is proverbially the seat of incor- ruptible justice. Decisions have been given recently even against the Crown that recall the noblest traditions of British judicature. Nevertheless, the bench has not utterly escaped the insidious influences of war-fever and not a few anti-alien
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decisions as grotesque as Portia's have blotted its record. Englishmen cannot ponder too deeply the great saying put into Shylock's mouth by the national bard :
" If you deny me, fie upon your Law ! There is no force in the decrees of Venice."
It is a saying which entirely upsets the low-comedy concep- tion of Shylock, which has still its defenders. Indeed, with the elision of a few lines — to me of dubious authenticity — Shylock could be turned from an impossible monster into one of the finest of Shakespeare's creations.
A popular stage anecdote recounts how Macklin puzzled the critics and the crowd by playing Shylock for the first time not as a low-comedy ogre but as a human being, and how Pope closed the controversy by his pronouncement :
" This is the Jew That Shakespeare drew."
It was not, however, till the performance by Edmund Kean — who replaced the Judas-beard by a black — that the full dignity of Shakespeare's creation was revealed. And Kean was a Jew.
Of the five Shylocks I have seen, four have had more or less Jewish blood: Moscovitch (a hundred per cent.), Tree (fifty) and Bourchier and Irving (say, twenty-five each). But the fifth, whose blood is purely Scotch — Matheson Lang — was to me the most sympathetic of them all, possibly because he made his first appearance in his own house, transferring to an interior the bargain with Bassanio and Antonio, which, by stage direc- tion, occurs in " a public place." And in getting inside that house of which all previous audiences have seen only the door through which Jessica eloped, and the window through which she dropped the stolen jewels to her Christian gallant, we seemed also for the first time to see Shylock from within. As the Englishman's house was his castle, so the Jew's house was his synagogue. Here, kissed by the Princess Sabbath, the dog, in Heine's phrase, became a man. But this secret of the Ghetto was only imperfectly divined by Shakespeare, in whose days England knew no professing Jews. I would have Shylock dis- covered poring over some old Talmudic folio, or at some pictur- esque ceremony with wine cup and spice box, and Jessica holding the taper. Mr. Lang has not ventured so far as that, but he gives us Jessica flitting about the home, so that we can
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for the first time realise her flight as a tragedy for her father, not as a mere comedy for the gay Venetians.
It has been curiously overlooked that Shylock demands his " pound of flesh " only after he has been robbed of his daughter and of his treasures, and outraged in his deepest instincts by her baptism. He is now practically insane with lust for vengeance, and from that point Shylock should be played as a morbid will and a deranged intellect, with all the remorseless logic of the monomaniac. Hazlitt, according to the late Dutton Cook, described Shylock as " a man brooding over one idea." Hazlitt said exactly the opposite — such is the reliability of even the best dramatic critics — but the description misattrib- uted to him is true for the second part of the story. The opening Shylock, however, is neither a mean usurer, nor a brooding fiend, nor a pathological figure, but a deeply intel- lectual Jew, probably of Spanish origin and Spanish pride, devoted to his daughter and his dead wife. And this spiritual self-sufficiency — which Irving's too pathetic performance missed — Mr. Lang realised.
But did not then Shylock plot to trap Antonio into this mon- strous bargain, to "catch him on the hip"? My answer is, " No, he made the bargain out of a superb disdain for the money-seeking Christians." These flamboyant prodigals flouted his thrift, taunted him with usury, spat upon his gaberdine, reviled him for a " cut-throat dog." Very well, he would lend them the three thousand ducats for nothing, nay, for something less valuable than nothing, a pound of their own flesh.
It was a piece of panache as of a Cyrano de Bergerac, no deep-laid plot, but the inspiration of an ironic moment. As a plot indeed it would have been unworthy of a schoolboy, not to say a shrewd calculating financier. Antonio, to cover these three thousand ducats, had no less than four argosies out, with other " miscellaneous ventures." The chances that all these would make shipwreck were infinitesimal. Ask any marine insurance broker, enquire at Lloyd's, what was the chance of Shylock getting his pound of flesh. It was practically nil. And this without allowing for the probability of Antonio or Bassanio borrowing the money from another source, Christian or Jewish. But the audience, knowing beforehand that the wildly improbable will happen, reads the malignity of the sequel into the mere mocking contract, the ironic revenge of the Jew- dog, when the grand signors who have spat upon him must stoop to his money bags.
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And with this irony went also, so oddly is human nature com- pounded, a desire for the love and respect of these lordly Chris- tians — when has a Jew not coveted that? Shylock has cleared his bosom of the rankling tale of his wrongs — were he trapping Antonio resentment is the last thing he would have betrayed — and now he is ready for a new relation. Flattered by the friendliness of the Venetians, he even relaxes his rigid piety. He goes to supper with them, and it is while he is at supper that — by what the orthodox Jew would regard as a nemesis — the catastrophe of his daughter's abandonment falls on him. To his tragic frenzy the contract devised in irony now appears the way to vengeance. Here is a consistent characterisation, here a genuine dramatic development.
n
I am well aware that there are passages that make against this reading, which do show Shylock as a scheming devil, plan- ning for his pound of flesh in cold blood, but they are enor- mously outweighed by the passages which make the diabolical reading impossible. The fact is that the text offers us two discrepant Shylocks. But the passage upon which the case for the scheming devil mainly rests, is a long " aside " lugged in at a most improbable moment, in the very presence of Antonio and Bassanio, who were to be caught napping, and contains, more- over, the statement that Antonio lends money gratis — a state- ment which Antonio (who is supposed not to hear it) contradicts in his first speech. True, this same self-contradiction occurs earlier, but even the careless Bard of Avon would not be likely to contradict himself within the compass of a few lines. It is not impossible that the " aside " was inserted by the commercial manager (who had commissioned the play) to offset Shake- speare's unexpected humanisation of the Jew. For, as Sir Sidne}' Lee has surmised, the " Merchant of Venice " was prob- ably written to exploit the popular odium for the Jew arising from the hanging, drawing and quartering of the converted Jew, Rodrigo Lopez, the Queen's Physician, on the charge of com- plicity in a conspiracy to poison Elizabeth. Written post- haste as a topical " money-maker," at any rate produced within three months of the Jew's execution, it blessed, like Balaam, where it should have cursed, and closely though it kept to the old story or play on which it was founded, it was yet subtly
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transformed. For Shakespeare was not only the hack dramatist, he was also Shakespeare. And Shakespeare was — in the language of Novalis — " at one with nature." Though, as Carlyle said, " His great soul had to crush itself as it could into the mould of the Globe Theatre," his genius could no more tell a lie than George Washington. Moreover, as a ruthless collector of his own private debts, his subconscious sympathy went with Shylock's argumentation. Hence these discrepancies, hence these traces of an earlier type and play left crudely standing — or re-inserted managerially — in contradiction of the new Slrylock his universal humanity had evolved.
But these stumbling-blocks, though they found their way into the text printed without consultation with Shakespeare, must be boldly removed, if Shylock is to remain credible to the modern mind. Every age, it has been truly said, re-interprets the old masterpieces. It is not so important what Shakespeare meant as what he might mean to us. It is not as if the Jew's demand for a pound of flesh rested on any historic foundation. The story comes from Hindu mythology. It cropped up in England in the " Cursor Mundi," and in the old ballad of " Ser Gernutus, the Jew of Venice." Eight years before Shakespeare was born, it figured in an Italian collection, " II Pecarone." When he was fifteen, it was dramatised as " The Jew." But out of eleven versions of the story in the world's literature, four have no Jew at all. Nay, in the only version purporting to be his- toric — for it is related in Letti's History of Pope Sixtus V. — it is the Christian, " the Merchant of Rome," who demands the pound of flesh from the Jew ! The Jew as creditor only appeared in an English version at the very time the race was being banished from England. (In a Japanese version I have seen, it is not a pound but a square foot of flesh.)
With a myth so floating and mutable an artist may do what he will. It was only fastened on the Jew as all jokes are ulti- mately fathered on Punch. But that was a bad psychological blunder. The Jew was the last person the legend should have been fastened on. The Bible forbids him to cut even from the living flesh of an animal, and a man capable of cutting from a living Christian was never born of Jewish woman. He were as much a monster as the comic demon whom Macklin drove from the stage. Sufferance is the badge of all our tribe, as Shake- speare rightly divined. The Jew survives not by force but by brain-power and the " patient shrug."
Even, therefore, if Matheson Lang's Shylock did not exist in
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Shakespeare, it had to be invented. If every age re-interprets its old masterpieces, that is practically rewriting them. The recognised licence to cut Shakespeare — which subtly changes all the proportions — should be supplemented by, indeed, it requires, a complementary licence to add and readjust. Mr. Lang allowed Jessica to kiss her father's hand — Irving intro- duced the knocking at the door of the deserted home. Tree grovelled on the ground, rent his garments and poured ashes on his head; Bourchier (and probably all the others) brought back the Venetian revellers to accentuate the tragedy — it were no great transition to add a line or two of speech to all this gesture-language. But in any case Shylock must be made plausible. And that can be done only if the flight of his daughter is made the dividing line between Shylock sober and Shylock drunk for vengeance. The impossible " aside " must be eliminated — Mr. Lang merely slurs over it. Apart from its absurdity, it is a great artistic flaw, for if even before Jessica's treachery Shylock was meditating so diabolical a revenge on the heathen, the whole episode and all his sufferings become artis- tically meaningless. That is hardly the method of a master craftsman, whose every stroke has significance, whose tragedy is always cumulative.
Nor is the change that I propose the first " The Merchant of Venice " has undergone. Ever since Shylock became a serious character, the comedy of the Venetian Christians has been thrown out of focus. The new rendering deranges it still more. Impossible after Shylock's tragic exit to restore the gaiety as it was restored, or rather renewed, when the bafflement of the comic demon was but the preparation for the happy ending and the delicious poetry of the moonlit close. And yet it is not against nature that the merry Venetians, having wronged a greater soul than their own, should turn blithely and uncon- sciously to their own debonair life, that the stars should look down in their splendour on an old Jew's broken heart. Only there is an irony greater even than Shakespeare saw, ironically and nobly as he rose above the prejudice of his age.
Ill
My friend, Mr. William Poel, criticising this reading of Shy- lock, objects that Jessica (Act III. Sc. 2) testifies that even when she was with her father, she heard him tell Tubal that he
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would rather have Antonio's flesh than twenty times the value of the debt. But who can believe Jessica, the most detestable and the least Jewish character in all fiction? She is capable of saying anything to please her Christian friends. There is even less substance in Mr. Poel's further objection that Shylock was not " robbed " of Jessica, because her elopement was voluntary. As if Shylock's feeling that he had been robbed would be les- sened by a consideration like that, especially in days when daughters had no rights ! Mr. Poel's own view is that the play was written as a commercial counterblast to " The Jew of Malta " in which Marlowe " bitterly accused the Christians of lacking candour, honesty, and every Christian virtue." Shake- speare cannily desired to show " the other side of the question." But I look in vain in " The Jew of Malta " for Marlowe's indictment of the Christian. In so far as it was put in the Jew's own mouth,
" For I can see no fruits in all their faith But malice, falsehood and excessive pride " —
it would have been discounted by the audience. And per contra the sophistication with which the Christians covered their crimes would have evoked a concordant echo. We hear indeed the self-righteous accent of Bolshevism in the Christian defence.
"Barabas: Will you then steal my goods? Is theft the ground of your religion?
" Governor of Malta: No, Jew, we take particularly thine To save the ruin of a multitude : And better one want for the common good Than many perish for a private man."
This sophistication was, however, almost superfluous in view of the ogreish anti-Christianity of Barabas. A play which ends in a Jew-monster being boiled alive can hardly be called an attack on the Christians ; the venom attributed to the Jew was enough to rouse their passions to boiling point.
Moreover the hypothesis that Shakespeare's play was a com- mercial counterblast to Marlowe's has to meet the passages in which Shylock (not to mention the course of the fable) likewise exposes the unchristianity of the Christians. The fact is, as Mr. Poel admits, that " The Merchant of Venice " is " illogical and unsatisfactory as a work of art." Forced, then, to choose between Shakespeare's self-contradictions, which passages shall we eliminate to make a consistent whole?
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The method of Mr. Moscovitch was, as he told me, to play all the contradictions, leaving the onus of them on Shakespeare, it being" the duty of an actor, he observed — astonishing but admirable maxim ! — to be faithful to his author. " I grope my way like a blind man from scene to scene," he explained, and it is sufficient proof that no general view of the character is possible, without the cuts I have suggested. The part of Jessica moreover ought to be rewritten ; so heartless and dis- honest a jade could scarcely be found in a Christian household, much less in a Jewish, with its closer domesticity. Marlowe's Abigail, the daughter of Barabas, is much nearer the true psychology.
" Not for myself, but aged Barabas: Father, for thee lamenteth Abigail."
And this excellent Jewish daughter not only does not despise her father but sets herself to recapture his hidden treasure:
" Ten thousand portagues, besides great pearls Rich costly jewels and stones infinite."
It is assuredly from this couple that Shakespeare drew his less convincing twain :
"O girl! O gold! O beauty! O my bliss!"
This is the obvious source of
" My daughter ! O my ducats ! O my daughter ! '
It is equally the source of Scott's Isaac of York and of that Rebecca whose original has been sought so superfluously in living models. The contrast of the abhorred old Jew with the beautiful young Jewess, coveted of Christendom, was too artistic a trouvaille to be lightly thrown away.
IV
Barabas, menaced with the loss of his estate, yet refuses to be a " convertite." And Marlowe has no lack of other Hebraic touches. Yet it is in Shakespeare alone that we find the real differentia of the Jew as a member of society :
" I will buy with you, and sell with you, talk with you, walk with
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you, and so following; but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you."
It is odd that so obvious a point should be so absent from literature. Yet it does not appear even in " Nathan der Weise," a play which like Cumberland's " The Jew," substitutes a monster of goodness for Shakespeare's and Marlowe's mon- sters of evil. It is interesting how much more vitalised are the creations of hate than the creations of love. Cumberland's hero has not even Lessing's poetry to veil his goody-goodiness.
Doubtless Lessing's noble-minded drama will always have a place in the history of German literature and of the modern spirit. But as a piece of art the play surely does not wear well ; it is too compact of duologues, and the end, with its com- plex discoveries of literal brotherhoods, is feeble and is more suited to Boccaccio or to Shakespearean comedy than to the high theme of the human brotherhood. And the draughtsman- ship of Nathan is not specifically Jewish, even though we know he was modelled on Moses Mendelssohn. There was a side of Mendelssohn which Lessing, despite his close friendship with the sage of Berlin, could scarcely grasp. But perhaps Lessing did well to accentuate — against current prejudice and Chris- tian bigotry — the more universal attributes of the ideal Israelite : his unique tolerance, wisdom, and charity. " The righteous of all nations have a share in Paradise," says the Jewish prayer-book, and since the parable is also a character- istically Jewish method of teaching, it was true portraiture in the highest sense to put into Nathan's mouth the famous fable of the three rings, which for the rest occurs in early Rabbinic literature. But the remainder of the picture is shadowy, in the Mohammedan and Christian details, no less than in the Jewish.
And yet the period and the Court of Saladin gave Lessing the chance of introducing a magnificent figure — the mediaeval philosopher, and refugee from Spain, Maimonides, Saladin's own physician. A famous letter from this thinker of the synagogue, whose thought dominated the Middle Ages and nourished even the Dominican intellect, gives the whole Islamic environment which Lessing might have reproduced for us.
"I reside in Egypt; the King resides in Cairo, which lies about two Sabbath-day journeys from the first-named place. My duties to my King are very heavy. I am obliged to visit him every day, early in the morning; and when he or any of his children, or the in- mates of the harem, are indisposed, I dare not quit Cairo, but must
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stay, during the greater part of the day, in the palace. It also fre- quently happens that one or two of the royal officers fall sick, and then I have to attend them. As a rule, I go to Cairo very early in the day, and, even if nothing unusual happens, I do not return be- fore the afternoon, when I am almost dead with hunger; but I find the ante-chambers filled with Jews and Gentiles, with nobles and common people, awaiting my return . . ."
And what was true of Saladin's Court at Cairo must have held good for Jerusalem, then equally sealed of the great Mussulman.
It is from lack of concrete Jewish characterisation that another poetic drama, which may survive, fails to rise beyond nominal Jewishness. This is the " Herod " of Stephen Phillips, whose Jerusalem is as little of the time of Christ as Lessing's is of the era of Saladin. Towards the end of " Herod " the mob — till then indistinguishable from a Shakespearean Roman mob — recall the Lord their God, who brought them out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. What a dramatic thrill the poet has given us here : what a sense of the romance of history : of the miracle of " the peculiar people," still as entangled with the Caesars of to-day as they then were with Antony and Pompey, and as they had been with Pharaoh and Cyrus. Why did he not insist earlier upon this specific thread of colour and characterisation? It would have transfigured his whole work, and helped to give it that sense of reality which it so sorely needs. Mr. Phillips has selected away everything but the barest humanity, the essential poetry, of his theme — a form of art permissible enough, yet scarcely serving to place him with Shakespeare, or even with Rostand, as some critics of the day believed. There are more affinities with the earlier Maeterlinck.
" Herod " in some sort combines the merits of two schools of art : it unites classic form with Elizabethan ecstasy ; the unity of Space of Racine with the native wood-notes wild of the lyric poet. The poet has written beautiful lines and devised a series of ironic tableaux vivants, the best thing that wherein Herod has no lines at all. But Herod, Mariamne and Aristobulus, are merely the A, B and C of a dramatic position. Who realises for a moment that Aristobulus is High Priest, that he has any connection with the Temple ritual? It is all a poem, far beyond the average of our stage, and anybody who missed the last act of " Herod " deprived himself of a unique stage- memory. But 0 for a touch of local colour ! Jerusalem, after
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all, is a magic word. It ought not to mean the mere No Man's Land of poetry. Shakespeare had, in England at least, no opportunity of observing Jewish life, since overt Jews in England there were none. But for Stephen Phillips the material lay at hand, both corporeally and through a mass of garnered history.
But in place of the picturesqueness and variety of the truth, the comedy and colour of actual history, one gets only the rigid outlines of the pseudo-classic play. One must not make the author responsible for the immortal poster put forward by the theatre, with the prophetically dated Judaso-Roman coin of " 40 B.C."! But what a picture, had Stephen Phillips possessed a sense of history, one might have had of the Jewish world just before the coming of Christ ; the schools and doctors of the Law, the young zealots of the faith yearning to tear down the Roman eagles from the city gate, the pious and not always hypocritical Pharisees, the Sadducees with their aristocratic temper and their denial of immortality, the Essenes with their noble simplicity.
It was under Herod that the great Jewish sage, Hillel, had his being: Hillel, the announcer, if in obverse form, of " the Golden Rule " which, like most other good things, has been an- nexed by the adjective " Christian." The mere juxtaposition of the philosophical saint and the pre-Nietzschean Tetrarch, " be}^ond good and evil " would have been rarely dramatic. But there was actual contact. Before Herod left Jerusalem to present himself to Octavianus, the conqueror of Antony — the leave-taking is actually pictured in Mr. Phillips's play — he appointed this unknown Babylonian, Hillel, to be one of the Presidents of the Sanhedrin, and this appointment influenced the whole future of the religion. What a chance missed of at least making Hillel cross the scene: ay, and with him, his great rival, Shammai. These two figures, whose discussions and conflicting schools loom so large in the Talmud, would have served to supply the true atmosphere of old Jerusalem. Herod appointed Menahem to be Hillel's deputy, and Menahem was an Essene, so that through him an atmosphere, akin to that of the coming Christianity, might have wafted into the tragedy.
And apart from these heroic figures and spiritual suggestions, and the further crossing of Herod's line of life with Cleopatra's, the gallery of the monster's own household, as painted by Josephus, provides a panorama of comedy personages who could have filled the scene with a Shakespearean palpitation of
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flesh and blood. The poor homicidal despot had no easy time among all the varied results of his ten marriages, complicated by the contrariness of Ins brother Phenoras, his sister Salome, and his mother-in-law, Alexandra. The ill-natured Salome, for example, was constantly carrying tittle-tattle against Mari- amne's sons, " that they hated their father, and were continu- ally threatening, that if they once got the kingdom, they would make Herod's sons by his former wives country schoolmasters, for that the present education which was given them, and their diligence in learning, fitted them for such an employment. And as for the women, whenever they saw them adorned with their mother's clothes, they threatened that instead of their present gaudy apparel, they should be clothed in sackcloth, and confined so closely that they should not see the light of the sun."
But perhaps the poet's dodging of all true detail is inten- tional. He may have feared to wound religious susceptibilities, whether Jewish or Christian. Moreover, from the amusing anxiety of the author of the admirable pamphlet put forth at the first production by Her Majesty's Theatre, to show that Herod was not a " Biblical " person : from his grave warning that Herod was not the Herod Antipas, before whom Jesus was sent by Pilate to be tried, it is obvious that the poet felt him- self cramped by the censorship which still exercised its auto- matic objection to " Biblical " figures, and that the public which flocked to every indecent fatuous spectacle accepted the embargo as a mark of reverence. Herod is only " mentioned once " in the Gospels — even that mention, says the pamphlet (with an unconscious Irish irreverence just where it means to be most reverent), is not endorsed by Josephus. The Phari- sees, then, I suppose, were banned, because they are mentioned several times. Herod, by belonging mainly to the blank page between the Old and New Testament, became fit material for the dramatist, while had he belonged to either section his appearance on the stage would have been blasphemous. No more delicious reductio ad absurdwm of the recent English atti- tude towards the personages of Jewish History could have been conceived. To have been written about in the Bible — even if you were Ahab or Jezebel — was to be too sacred for stage presentation. This attitude marked the nadir of belief. When people believed in the Bible, they were only too anxious to see its figures in flesh and blood. Moses is the hero of the first Biblical play on record, Jesus of the second. This modern
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reverence was, and is, a mixture of ignorance and scepticism. When our mock reverence fades, or our real reverence returns, the Biblical figures will return again to the realm of the poet and the dramatist. They have never been outside the painter's. The production of " Joseph and His Brethren," undistinguished though it was, provided, let us hope, an augury of better things.
Whether the Apocrypha were ever under the same embargo as the Bible proper I do not know. But the fact that the " Judith " theme had, till Mr. Arnold Bennett took it up, appeared in England only by way of oratorio and cantata — the cantata was by Parry and the best of the three oratorios was by Arne in 1764 — suggests that a similar aroma of sanctity attached to it. Very little either of the beauty of holiness or the holiness of beauty remained after Mr. Arnold Bennett's treatment. For though he has followed the text of the ancient historical novel in many a detail and added a very clever study of a chief eunuch, he has, unfortunately, aban- doned the very ground-plan which makes the artistic value of the fable. For the Semitic story-teller pictures a beautiful woman, immersed in the gloom of widowhood and the ritual of piety, becoming suddenly inflamed at the call of patriotism into bewitching and murdering the tyrant Holofernes, and then subsiding meekly, after her desperate adventure, into her aus- tere and saintly widowhood. That is a magnificent artistic conception, and for an author of Mr. Bennett's rank to have missed it, and to have even vulgarised it by a happy ending — Judith picking up a handsome husband in the course of her adventure — would be almost incredible, were not the English stage in question — and its leading ladies.
This is the more regrettable inasmuch as the true inwardness of Judith has never been presented in art, outside the some- what unread original, the old Masters painting her only at that picturesque moment when she strides gallantly, bearing the head of Holofernes. And that head reminds one of Oscar Wilde's overrated " Salome," prohibited in 1893 by the British licenser, and produced the year after in its original French by Sarah Bernhardt. This prohibition of an indecent work on the ground that it was a Biblical subject is not unamusing and resembles the suggestion that the Prussians would have been allowed to devastate Belgium, had it not been for a certain scrap of paper. The sexual element that Oscar Wilde imported into the story owes, however, nothing to the Bible. It is a purely degenerate invention. There is as little ground in
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Matthew or Mark for the notion that Salome was in love with John the Baptist, whose head she coveted on the charger, as there is for Renan's statement in his " Vie de Jesus " that she was dissolute. Yet in the copious controversies produced both by the play and the inevitable opera, it was taken for granted that Wilde's sexually perverted conception is rooted in the text. To that extent is even the New Testament unknown to the critics. Outside the Gospels there is no warrant for attribut- ing any share in the Baptist's death either to Salome or her mother. Josephus, a contemporary of John, knows nothing of the vengeance of Herod's wife upon the prophet who denounced her for marrying her undeceased husband's brother; he is ignorant even of Salome's dancing. He ascribes the execution of John to the prudent fear of Herod Antipas lest the prophet become too powerful with the Jewish masses and lead them to rebellion. And he tells us that so revered of the Jews was John that a subsequent defeat of Herod's army was regarded as a divine chastisement for the murder.
The refusal of commensality which marks the orthodox Jew and which, as we have seen, is conspicuous by its absence from the stage Jew, is not so invariable a trait in modern as in mediaeval Jewry, and therefore our more recent dramatists are more forgivable for forgetting it. It does not figure even in " Potash and Perlmutter." Yet the mere race-Jew, void even of Zionist feeling, who is now the staple stage type, is so late and contemporary a creation of the Time-Spirit, so transitional a product, that he is almost too topical for art, certainly for any art but comedy, or for any comedy but that of transient " humours," for which posterity will need the illumination of footnotes. Yet this sort of Jew is all we see in Bernstein's grandiosely-entitled " Israel," a play which reveals only a boulevardier's ignorance of all the deeper currents of Jewish life. Heijermans, the Dutch- Jewish dramatist, comes a little closer to them in " The Ghetto," but his Ghetto is revealed only on the side on which it repels the younger generation; it is seen through hate, not love, which according to Goethe is the only true vision ; though, as I have said, love yields tamer results than hate, save in the hands of a master.
A German dramatist, Carl Rossler, has given us a more sym- pathetic treatment of the high Frankfort Jewry in his mediocre
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comedy of the Rothschild brothers, " The Five Frankforters." But it is not true to its period. First, because the five brothers — whose financial network is represented as linking Paris and Vienna, Frankfort and London and Naples — were not all thus simultaneously established; secondly, because the Rothschilds of that time were too pious to be arranging a match between a daughter of the house and a German High- ness, as the thesis of the play pretends. There is, however, some appreciation of the solidarity of Jewish family life and the domestic virtues of the old-fashioned Jewish mother, even when begilded. The setting of the play in the old Frankfort home in the quaint archaic Judengasse, that was still at the opening of the nineteenth century a compulsory quarter, is a picturesque promise which is not sustained. For no breath of the outer life of the Jew-street penetrates into these spacious salons, shut off as by golden blinds from the comedies and tragedies of this oldest and latest-enduring of German Ghettos. But the exclu- sion is more probably due to the dramatist's ignorance than to any real absence of Jewish colour in the early environment of this kind-hearted family. And the Frankfort Ghetto was up to 1830 so hedged with picturesque anachronisms — only a dozen of its couples could marry in a twelvemonth, for example, and only four doctors could minister to its six thousand swarming souls — that the artist's ignorance of the milieu he wrould paint is particularly regrettable.
With the latest Austrian fantasia on the Hebrew theme, Es Geht Weiter, I have dealt already. It is only another reading of " The Wandering Jew," a theme which curiously broke out in three London theatres in 1873, though it had never appeared in London before, and is appearing there again only this year. The " Stage Encyclopaedia " catalogues some thirty-three titles in which the syllable " Jew " figures.
In Sheridan the Jew was still the moneylender. Shaw, with more verisimilitude, makes him a doctor — for, as I have pointed out on an earlier page, medicine was from mediaeval times one of the great callings of the race, even Emperors who suspected the Jews of poisoning the wells never feeling safe without a Jewish physician. (In our own day, too, it would be difficult to find a monarch without one.) In Jerome the Jew is a bookmaker. Pinero gives us in Maldonado the amorous artistic type, descended like himself from the Spanish-Jewish hidalgos. In his " ' Mind the Paint ' Girl," we get the genial " bounder " with a pathetic passion for the green room ; and
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Clyde Fitch gave us a still more degenerate type in " The Woman in the Case." No, it cannot be said that the stage- Jew has yet shaken off his past.
Mr. Augustus Thomas seems, indeed, to have done for American Jewry what Lessing did for German Jewry, and Richard Cumberland for English Jewry, by presenting a perfect type of colourless Christian manhood as a Jew, and it seems to have been eagerly welcomed, especially by those Jews who are not a bit like it. But I have not seen this play, so must not sink into a dramatic critic. Nor have I seen " The House Next Door," a highly popular inter-marriage play in which, I understand, my own name is bandied about.
But considering the great figures that Jewry has produced within the ken of the man in the street (who even wears prim- roses in honour of one of them), it is curious that the cad and the moneylender should still practically monopolise the boards. The situation is not saved by producing a play about the actual " Disraeli," who is too individual a hero. But the stage is no- toriously not, as Hamlet conceived it, a mirror held up to na- ture, but a magic mirror reflecting types that have long since passed away. " Watch that man," I said once, pointing out the late Dr. Herzl to a famous actor-manager ; " you will one day play him." That time is not now distant. The stage incarna- tion of Mendel Beilis is, however, an instance of the stage get- ting almost ahead of life. Like his fellow-Jew Dreyfus, this victim of the Blood Accusation became a legend while still in prison, and both in melodrama and cinematography he has been exploited wherever the Ghetto boasts of a theatre. It is pleas- ant to think that the real Beilis, though a mere clerk, retired with dignity to Palestine, where he has just donated his savings to the National Fund.
Save for this allusion to the Beilis play, I have altogether omitted from this cursory survey the vast field of Yiddish and Hebrew drama, which has not the ear of the world, nor the interest attaching to the spectacle of the Jew as others see him. Of this indigenous drama it may roughly be said that it is tragic, for the Ghetto, unlike Christendom, prefers an " unhappy end- ing," and enjoys death-scenes more than love-scenes. It seems to have become so habituated to tears as to draw an emotional voluptuousness from mimic sorrow.
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LANGUAGE AND JEWISH LIFE
The Hebrew volume in honour of Sokolow's jubilee, to which this essay — in its Semitic rendering — is a contribution, af- fords, like the " Hebrew Encyclopaedia " edited by him, a strik- ing disproof of the general idea that Hebrew is an extinct lan- guage. While popular ignorance deems the Old Testament the end as well as the beginning of Hebrew literature, or has at most some vague idea of the Talmud, the scribes have never ceased writing for a moment. None keener than they to welcome the invention of Gutenberg. Myriads of volumes, pouring forth pauselessly through the ages, attest the genius and the pedan- try, the spirituality and sterility of the race. The philosophy of Maimonides, the poems of Solomon Gabirol and Jehuda Hal- evi, the mysticism of the Zohar — these would challenge atten- tion in any literature, and they are the most notable fruits of the long period when the distinction of sacred and secular was scarcely made in Hebrew literature, when every book that fell to the floor was piously kissed as it was picked up. The eight- eenth century shows Luzzatto in Italy producing poetic and allegorical drama in Occidental form, and Wessely in Germany writing the Epic of Exodus after the fashion of Klopstock. And when with the close of that century of storm the light of the outside world began to stream more fully into the Ghetto, the sacred tongue took on still stranger functions. In Ger- many Rappaport creates the scientific study of Judaism. Krochmal, a native of Brody — child of a swarming Ghetto, where the casual pilgrim sees only degeneration and dirt — re- interprets the old religion by the principles of Hegel; a Polish poet, Isaac Erter, satirises its superstitions with the vigour of a Pope or a Swift. Even more remarkable is the nineteenth century movement that curiously owed its impulse to a Hebrew translation of Eugene Sue's " Mysteries of Paris." Abraham Mapu founded the modern Hebrew novel, both in its romantic and realistic forms, and had a host of followers in both fields. Gordon, the Hebrew Byron, arose in Russia to express in nerv- ous modern Hebrew all the tragedy — the external persecution,
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the internal narrowness — of the Jewish lot. The novels of Smolensky showed Jewry its own visage and, warring equally against mediaeval pietism and modern indifference, taught the need of re-nationalisation. And in these newest applications of the old tongue it is no longer the organ of faith, but the instru- ment of revolt and reconstruction. A host of translators added the ferment of European thought to the internal disin- tegration of the Ghetto, and imported free-thinking and Social- ism. Political journalism sprang up to bring the outer world still nearer. Grub Street arose in the Ghetto, and Bohemia was taken into the Pale. If the belief that Hebrew literature ended with the Old Testament is a vulgar error, no less an error were it to imagine that it is still a Holy Literature in the sense in which holiness is synonymous with piety and ecclesias- ticism.
So marvellous a survival of an ancient language, and so un- equalled a flow of literature from Genesis to the last number of the Boar Hayom, the Daily Mail of Jerusalem, produced by a race that lost its Fatherland eighteen centuries ago, tempts one to consider the inter-relations between Israel's language and Israel's life.
II
Language is the chief index of life. As no man is dead so long as the mirror put to his lips reveals a breath, so no race is extinct so long as there comes from its lips the breath of speech. A people that speaks is not dead ; a people that is not dead speaks.
" Lend me a looking glass : If that her breath shall mist or stain the stone, Why, then she lives."
But by speech we must understand a distinctive speech, not a speech spoken by all the world. A peculiar people without a peculiar speech would be a contradiction. The literature of Israel in its widest sense comprises the contributions made by Jews to the thesaurus of the world. All alphabets and all vo- cabularies are drawn into its service. Were it figured after the fashion of that quaint mediaeval tree in the monastery of San Marco, whereof each leaf is the story of a saintly brother, it would appear an Yggdrasil overshadowing the globe, with each leaf typifying another language. There would be, for example, a Greek branch for the Gospels, and a Latin branch for the
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treatises of Spinoza; an Arabic branch for the metaphysics of Maimonides ; a German branch for the lyrics of Heine ; a French branch for the dramas of D'Ennery ; an Italian branch for the economic treatises of Luzzatti; a Danish branch for the criti- cisms of Brandes ; an English branch for the romances of Dis- raeli; a Dutch branch for the dramas of Heijermans, and so on, and so on. But these works are all obviously hybrid products, children of mixed marriages. Tempting as would be a critical discrimination of the parental factors, this section of Jewish literature must be excluded from the present survey. In 1804 Elie Halphen Halevy of Paris published a Hebrew Ode to Peace in honour of Napoleon, saviour of France. His grand- son Ludovic delighted the Boulevards with French farcical com- edies ; his great-grandson, again named Elie, publishes works on sociology. However interesting and suggestive this literary heredity, only the first Halevy, the Hebrew poet, used a tongue specifically Jewish, and affords to that extent proof of inde- pendent Jewish life. Speech, then, as a proof of a people's life, must be " peculiar " speech.
But there is another modification necessary. By speech as a proof of life is meant living speech ; that is to say, fluid speech — speech that changes with the changes of life. The Latin of the Church and of the scholars of the Middle Ages was not, perhaps, quite a dead language, but it was only a half-living language. It was confined to the learned ; its vocabulary could undergo no natural increase, no natural loss. To be wholly living, language must be rooted in the people, must be watered by the tears of the common pain and feel the sunshine of the common joy. It must be a barometer of histor}7, exquisitely sensitive, registering and recording every breath of change. The Hebrew in which Hebrew literature since the destruction of the Second Temple has been written, can for these reasons not be said to be entirely living. Hebrew had, indeed, ceased to be fully alive long before — soon after the return from the Baby- lonian exile — and by the time of Jesus Aramaic had practi- cally replaced it as a living tongue (with Greek as a lingua franca). The Scriptures needed a Targum (translation). The Talmud shows the bilingual conflict even in literature, and Aramaic has its place in the prayer-book, too. In time Ara- maic likewise died from the lips of men — Arabic and other languages took its place as a Jewish vernacular. And when Aramaic was dead it became holy too, almost as holy as He- brew, and Cabbalistic literature could be written in both, as in
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the Zohar. Hence we have the paradox that if Sokolow or Achad Ha-am can write to-day more or less in the language of Isaiah and the Psalmists it is because of the destruction of Jewish nationality, which left literature the only possession of the Jew. Had Palestine prospered like England, Hebrew would have been as archaic as Anglo-Saxon is for Englishmen. The Greeks who have remained continuouslv on the soil of Hellas speak an idiom very far removed from that of JEschylus and Thucydides, and this by sheer natural evolution, without the interference of another invasive tongue. In Palestine, in whose Jewish Colonies Hebrew has at last become a living tongue, a few centuries will remove it as far from the Hebrew of the Bible, unless Biblical Hebrew is made the standard and a dictionary like that of the French Academy compiled from it. But even so it would have to admit hundreds of new words, with which we could not dispense. The vocabulary of Neo-Hebrew already, of course, contains words and ideas of which the writers of the Bible did not dream. Of Neo-Hebrew — despite the diction- ary devoted to it by Ben Jehuda, of Jerusalem — it is difficult to say whether it has been the more alive or the more dead. It was more alive than the Hebrew or Latin of the scholars, it was dead beside the gossip of the market-place. All these new words have come to it as importations, not as natural growths; not to mention that the audacities of journalists, in adapting and transforming, substitute imposition from above for creation from below. Since — however great the number of people able to read it or even speak it — it was nowhere the sole natural medium of communication of a large community, it was not really rooted in life. It merely allowed what grew in the outside world to be grafted upon it. Hebrew, then, in spite of the synagogue liturgy and a vast literature, has never lived in the full sense between the earlier days of the Second Temple and the beginning of this century.
When the liturgical poets of the Middle Ages introduced their ingenious rhymed acrostics, their vexed and tortured word-spin- nings into the prayer-book, two-thirds of the worshippers were prevented by ignorance from understanding or criticising them. They could only devoutly pray them or sing them. And in contemplating the later non-devotional developments of Hebrew literature, the same semi-paralysis of the tongue must be borne in mind. Brilliant as was the ingenuity expended in producing modern literature in terms of the Old Testament and the Tal- mud, it remains, when all is said, the artificial sport of scholars
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and geniuses imitating the literary forms of their European environment, rather than writing from and to the heart of Israel. The fact that their books are in Hebrew must not blind us to the true nature of the contents. The work of this transi- tional period, particularly of writers like Alcharisi or Imman- uel, who were exclusively secular, is no less hybrid than that of Heine or Disraeli. Immanuel, for example, imitated his friend, Dante, besides importing the sonnet-form, while Alcharisi was inspired by the Arabic Makama (dramatic narrative) and even blended Arabic with his Hebrew. The modern masters of He- brew literature, who found their inspiration in their own race, have been for the most part despairing spirits, who saw them- selves as the last minstrels of a dying language, understanded neither of the cultured nor of the people. Dr. Nahum Slouschz, in his fascinating and instructive book, " La Renais- sance de la Litterature Hebrai'que," tells us that the death of Smolensky left Gordon hopeless and drew from him a cry of despair, which may be regarded as his own last word.
"What, in sum, is all our people and its literature? A felled giant, lying face to earth.
The whole world is Israel's sepulchre ! And his books ? The epitaph of his funeral monument."
Ill
What, then, is the language in which the real life of Israel in exile has been expressed? The answer is, the language of the particular country in which each section resided, modified by such words and locutions as expressed the difference between Jews and the rest of their fellow-citizens. These differences were mainly religious, and therefore the vast majority of these additional words and phrases were borrowed from the Hebrew ; the rest had reference to peculiar social customs. Added to Spanish, this specifically Jewish language produced Ladino. Added to German (of an earlier epoch and a less grammatical character than the classical), it produced the jargon known as Yiddish. That both of these were frequently written in He- brew characters is due to the mere accident that many Jews knew no other alphabet. The Ashkenazic communities devel- oped from within, instead of subjecting themselves, like the Se- phardim, to the common European culture. Hence it is to Yid- dish that we must look for the truest repository of specifically
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Jewish sociology. Although the wealth of emotional and sym- pathetic terms in Ladino serves to tell the tale of Jewish tender- ness in a crueller Spanish environment, Yiddish, far more than Hebrew or Neo-Hebrew, answers to our definition of a living language. The principal, if not the only, medium of communi- cation among the Jewish masses, it vibrates with their history, follows the mould of their life and thought, and colours itself with their moods. Moreover it has that truest mark of life — the power of absorbing and transforming elements from with- out. It sucks in foreign words and turns them to its own moulds as freely as French turns them to its own pronunciation.
The enormous literary and journalistic activity of Yiddish exceeds even that of Hebrew. It has its shoals of newspapers, its schools of poets, dramatists, and novelists, and even its liter- ary historiographer in Professor Leo Wiener of Harvard Uni- versity. Do we seek to learn of the Ghetto from within, Morris Rosenfeld will sing to us of its poverty and its pain. Gold- faden, Gordin, David Pinski, and a dozen others will bring its humours over the footlights; Peretz, Asch, Shalom Aleichem and a score of minor geniuses will incarnate them for our inner eye. But we scarcely need their pictures of a highly differ- entiated existence to convince us of the peculiar flavour of Jew- ish life. Yiddish is its own proof.
From Yiddish we can build up a picture of the life of the Judengasse. Subtracting from a Yiddish dictionary all Teu- tonic elements, we have a residuum which summarises the spe- cific spiritual life of the Jews of the Exile, and shows us the ideas for the sake of which they accepted, or rather courted, isolation from the European masses. Theirs was a life of rich differences from the environment, and if no other evidence of this difference remained, the Yiddish vocabulary, phrases, locu- tions, proverbs, bywords, are sufficient proof of it.
These deposits from generations of narrow but vivid life form a rich mine of entertainment and instruction, and have not failed to call into existence folklore societies for their specific study. The psychology bred by the Ghetto, the micro- scopic piety and casuistic ceremonial, the mixture of asceticism and shrewd common sense, the pervasive fun and humour, the eager commercialism that yet sustains and reveres a class of student-drones, the unique family love, the cynicism and the tenderness — all have found expression and perpetuation in these racy locutions. Types evolved nowhere else rise living from the glossary — the Shadchan, who is and is not a matri-
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monial agent ; the Badchcm, who is and is not a marriage- jester ; the Shammos, who is and is not a beadle ; the Schnorrer, who is and is not a beggar — because these humble or sordid occupa- tions are all transcended in the larger brotherhood of Israel, which makes every Jew the equal of his superiors without rob- bing him of his natural superiority to his inferiors.
There is a stor}r of a Jewish witness unable to explain to a magistrate what a Shofar was. At last, to the suggestion that it was a trumpet, he cried in glad relief, " Yes, it is a trumpet." " Then why didn't you say so? " " Because it is not a trum- pet." These shades of significance which it is impossible to render in another tongue are the truest proof of specific exist- ence. The Shofar is a ram's horn, but who thinks of it as any- thing but the solemn instrument pealing repentance to the white-shrouded figures of Atonement Day ? A Shofar is — a Shofar. If a Shofar were indeed a trumpet, no call to national life could ever be blown upon it.
IV
Language, then, is the proof of life. There can be no dif- ference of life without difference of language. The truth of this may be illustrated from less specious examples than na- tions. Every stratum of society has its own catchwords, un- known to the others and acting as shibboleths ; every university, every school, every profession has its lingo ; nay, every family has a store of special phrases due to the comedies of its own experiences, not understanded of the next-door neighbour. Every game creates its own slang; cricket, football, horse-rac- ing, golf, each has its own vocabulary, which the votaries em- ploy among themselves. Wherever, then, there is difference of life, there is difference of language.
Let us apply this test of life to the so-called emancipated Jewries, to the Jewries of the post-Ghetto period. I will take England and America, which I know best. Among the richer and more educated Jews of London, all words of a specifically Jewish character have been gradually dropped. Even the word Shule, one of the last to go, has been replaced by synagogue. The desuetude of words like " milchig " applied to food or cul- inary apparatus, words which have no English equivalent — one cannot, for example, say a " milky knife " — reveals the decay of the pious practices with which they were associated.
In the contemptuous repudiation of the jargon as vulgar, even Hebrew words have been ignorantly banned. Just as the
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rabbi assimilates in dress to the Christian clergyman, so all re- ligious terms are translated into an English which does not ex- actly express them, and in accordance with which they tend to modify themselves. When for the Hebrew " Son of the Com- mandment," to express the youth who at the age of thirteen is counted an adult with religious responsibilities, the phraseology of Confirmation is introduced, the Christian concepts tend sub- tly to gather round the Jewish ceremonial. It is not, perhaps, so much that a change of vocabulary produces a change of con- ception ; more probably the conception is already in process of transformation under the influence of the alien environment, ere the foreign word is introduced, and its adoption only defi- nitely clarifies the change already vaguely going on, even if it precipitates its rate of movement. When the Hebrew saluta- tion " Peace be to you " is abandoned for " How do you do? " or " How's business ? " we are afforded the indication that Jew- ish consciousness and ideals have been silently under transfor- mation, and that the ideas of the milieu are winning their way. Hence it is that pietists fight so frenziedly over apparent ex- ternals. Details of ritual and speech are not trifles, as the superficial imagine who call them superficial. It is true they lie on the surface, but the fanatics are sub-consciously alive to the fact that they have their roots deep in the inner life. The ob- jection to women smoking was not to women drawing in and puffing out mere smoke : it was to the inner emancipation of their psychology, of which the cigarette was only the symbol.
The Zionist movement, though rather more barren than might have been expected as regards vocabulary, has not entirely failed in its brief span of life to add its quota of evidence to the thesis, " No language, no life." " Shekel " and " shekel-payer " are not new words, but they have been transformed to an en- tirely new connotation in their application to contributions, and to voters for delegates at the Congress. " The Congress " it- self is different from any other Congress. " The Basle pro- gramme " is a phrase which has been added to every civilised language of the Old and New Worlds, and when only a few years old it had already taken on a somewhat undesirable sanc- tity, as indicating a fixed policy from which it were heretical to deviate. But more characteristic evidence of life, and the one entirely new word evolved by Zionism, was Neinsager (no- sayer), a word fashioned in the crucible of history, in that crit- ical hour when — man after man — the last Congress of Herzl's life was voting " Ay " or " No " on the question whether
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a Commission should be appointed to investigate the British offer of a territory in East Africa. The Zionist movement has thus supplied the only counteractive to the disappearance from modern Jewish life of all verbal indexes of vitality.
In American Jewry the tendency to exclude all traces of Jewish nomenclature has been pushed to its last limits. The disappearance of the words Kasher and Trepha is an exact indi- cation of the disappearance of the conceptions themselves, with the obedience to these dietary prescriptions. The Synagogue has now become the " Temple," a term which is not even abso- lutely distinctive, since Christian Science has also its Temples. I speak, of course, not of the Ghettos of New York and Chicago — for they are merely Russia and Galicia migrated to America. I speak of the real American Jewish life into which the Ghetto is sooner or later melted up. In this life the " Temple " is not even an object of frequent pilgrimage; for it has been largely supplanted by the Jewish " Club " — a word even less Jewish. It may be contended that American words like " Sunday School " are annexed by Jews and saturated with a peculiar Jewish significance, but even such words are very rare, and limited to the inevitable religious minimum, many conceptions that have no English equivalent disappearing altogether: for example, Mitzvah, Shochet, Shnodar, Havdalah, Mmyan, Seder, &c. As for social and semi-religious words like Kehillah, Par- nass, Gabbai, Gett, Yomtoudik — a clean sweep has been made of them.
Subtract from the American-Jewish dictionary all American terms, and what remains? Practically nothing. Roughly speaking, no specific Jewish language now exists in America, ergo no specific Jewish life. Very nearly the same statement is true of London. Unless, then, our test is false, we reach the undeniable conclusion that Jewish life disappears outside the Ghetto. It may have an apparent existence through Jews in- termarrying, and may thus linger on like an actor loth to leave the stage, but practically it is extinct.
A life these Jews have, indeed, not necessarily inferior to the Jewish life. But a Jewish life it is not. It is the general life of the nation whose language they spak. Scrupulously buried in the same cemetery, they have a common death. But a com- mon life — no, that they have not. Upon the clear mirror of language they produce no breath.
If Israel is to live and speak again, it can only be on a soil of his own.
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THE TERRITORIAL SOLUTION OF THE JEWISH
PROBLEM
(Fortnightly Review, April and May, 1919.)
Human life does not proceed by logic, nevertheless logic is occasionally useful. At such a crisis in the fate of Israel as the great war has brought, a clear view of the prospect is peculiarly necessary.
But clear thinking upon the Jewish question is as uncommon as upon any other human question. Even genius, rare as it is, is not quite so rare, for among all races great men appear, who impart dynamic impulses to their age. They, however, add fresh elements to its intellectual confusion, and not till time has tried their ideas can the value of their contributions be disen- tangled from the welter.
Such men of genius were the first apostles of Territorialism, Pinsker and Herzl. They saw vividly the evils of the Jewish situation and recorded their diagnosis in imperishable words. The Diaspora, they perceived, held two perils for the Jews — the external menace of anti-Semitism and the internal menace of de- Judaisation : the former ranging from massacre and eco- nomic boycott to mere social prejudice, and not to be diminished even by patriotic blood-sacrifices, rather indeed likely to aug- ment under the national self-concentration of war ; the latter ranging from secularisation or Christianisation to the mere neg- ative inability to use a common language or develop a common culture, and producing in the more emancipated countries — even when the physical atoms of Jewry still cohered — a " liv- ing corpse," a body without its soul.
That these evils were aspects of the same phenomenon — the landlessness of Israel, his ubiquitous existence and persistence as a minority — was equally clear to the pioneers of Territor- ialism. A Jewish State, they pointed out, not with cold detach- ment, but with passionate resentment — whether of the Russian pogroms, or of the Dreyfus persecution — would be free from both these menaces. Within its boundaries at least there would be neither anti-Semitism nor insidious de-Judaisation.
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And under the spell of their verbal enchantments and con- tagious emotion arose the vision of this new land of Israel, like the sight of domes and cupolas to the thirsting traveller in the desert.
So far their logic was as impeccable as their observation was accurate. It was only when they put forth this new Jewish State as a remedy for the evils actually existing here and now, a remedy that would work forthwith ; it was only when they pic- tured the Jewish State as supplanting the Diaspora, and the Diaspora as transporting and transforming itself almost over- night into the Jewish State, that their grip on reality relaxed and their logic broke down.
It was natural enough that, having realised that the evils of the Diaspora were inherent in it and could only vanish with its destruction, Herzl should sally out like a knight-errant to de- stroy it. It was natural enough for his followers to believe that they were out to destroy it. Nevertheless, the realistic vo- cabulary of Herzl — his parade of charters, companies, and banks — served but to disguise the fundamental unreality of his solution, and the glaring fallacy which he shared with Pins- ker. For the Diaspora is indestructible, except by centuries of absorption into the various national melting pots, and the heat of the solution can be provided only by " Christian love," which is rarer than radium.
In abandoning before the legions of Rome the struggle for independent political existence in favour of spiritual isolation and economic symbiosis, the Jewish race discovered the secret of immortality, if also of perpetual motion. In the Diaspora anti-Semitism will always be the shadow of Semitism. The law of dislike for the unlike will always prevail. And whereas the unlike is normally situated at a safe distance, the Jews bring the unlike into the heart of every milieu, and must thus defend a frontier-line as large as the world. The fortunes of war vary in every country, but there are perpetual tension and fric- tion even at the most peaceful points, which tend to throw back the race on itself. The drastic method of love — which, I re- peat, is the only human dissolvent — has never been tried upon the Jew as a whole, while Russia carefully conserved — even by a ring-fence — the breed she designed to destroy- But whether persecution extirpates or brotherhood melts, hate or love can never be simultaneous throughout the Diaspora, and so there will probably always be a nucleus from which to restock this eternal type.
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Even when the Jewish State was in full swing, a great Dias- pora existed, and if we Jews had only read our own literature we should have suspected that something so long-standing could not easily be swept away. " There is a certain people," said Haman unto King Ahasuerus, " scattered abroad and dispersed among the peoples in all the provinces of thy kingdom; and their laws are diverse from those of every people ; neither keep they the King's laws ; therefore it profiteth not the King to suf- fer them. If it please the King, let it be written that they be destroyed."
But if all Israel's enemies have not succeeded in destroying the Diaspora, it may well defy even his own efforts.1
i It will help the reader to keep his grip on reality if he studies the latest statistics of the Diaspora, as given on the basis of an American inquiry by the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenturns, of Berlin, in its issue of June 25th, 1920. "Poland, 3,300,000; the Ukraine, 3,300,000; United States, 3,100,000; Russia and Siberia, 900,000; Roumania, 650,000; Germany, 540,000; Hun- gary, 450,000; Great Britain and Ireland, 300,000; Austria, 300,000; Lithu- ania, 250,000; Jugoslavia, 200,000; South and Central Africa, 170,000; France, 150,000; Arabia, 130,000; Greece, 120,000; Holland, 110,000; Mo- rocco, 110,000; the Argentine, 100,000; Canada, 100,000; Turkey, 100,000; Palestine, 100,000; Australia, 20,000; other European countries, 200,000; India, Persia, and Afghanistan, 100,000; other American countries, includ- ing the Dutch, Danish, and British West Indies, 30,000. Total, 15,430,000." The number for Palestine is too high by several myriads, but, as this list seems to omit the 65,213 Jews of Tunis, and the 65,000 of Algeria given in the Jewish Year Book of London, 1919, the total does not err on the plus side. And doubtless other Jews lurk everywhere. Mr. Arnold J. Marks, F.R.G.S. writes in a lecture: "It is more than thirty years since my journeys beyond the seas commenced. It mattered not how far away from the railways my wanderings in the bush, or the high and low veldt, took me, yet among every few white men I met in the wilderness was a Jew. They say the Scotchman is everywhere. So he is in foreign countries or the Col- onies, but it is in the bank, or stores, in towns with safe and comfortable housing, that the cannie but pleasing Scot can be found. Up country the Jew beats the Scotchman easily as a world wanderer. During my numerous journeys to South Africa, and after leaving the shoals of our co-religionists settled in Johannesburg, Barberton, Bulawayo and Salisbury, I have spent weeks and months beyond the zones where neither trains ran nor horses could live, and have met the lonely, cheerful, industrious, thrifty Jew. Again, I have had similar experiences in the Australian bush. At Aden I found an ancient Jewish colony of traders — reliable and respected. Even in such an out-of-the-way place as Italian Somaliland, on the east coast of Africa, at a port named Mogadishaw, there was the Jew, and but for tenacious industry and good repute he would not have been tolerated in such a place." An illuminating illustration of the sub-ubiquity of the Jew is provided by the statistics of the Jews of India, as given by the census of 1911, published in the Bene-Israel Annual for this year. They range over every part of the Peninsula, British or native. There are, for example, 636 at Janjira in the Konkan group, 260 in the Deccan group, and the list concludes with 3,747 at Aden. There are other remnants of lost Jewish tribes hidden away in Asia and Africa; there is a warrior race of Jewish Highlanders in the Caucasus, besides many survivals of the Chazars, the great Turkish people converted to Judaism in the seventh or eighth century
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n
A story relates that Pobiedonostseff, when asked what would become of the Jews of Russia, replied : " One-third will emi- grate, one-third will be baptised, and one-third will starve." Brutal as was the utterance, it was nearer to actuality than early Territorialism. If the question were now asked, What will become of the Jews of the Diaspora? the answer — after twenty years of work upon the Jewish problem — would have to be : " Ten per cent, will emigrate to the Jewish State — if one is ever formed — 20 per cent, will be baptised or otherwise lost to Jewry, and 70 per cent, will remain in the Diaspora, wan- dering about." There is, in fact, no human means by which fourteen or fifteen million Jews, scattered through all coun- tries, can be agglomerated in a single territory under autono- mous conditions. Yet the propaganda of Pinsker and Herzl implied that this miracle was possible. They were themselves eager to live in the State that was to replace the Diaspora, they believed that the bulk of Jewry could be convinced by their reasoning and fired by their ardour, and — most naively of all — they believed that territories capable of receiving the new exodus existed at choice. And in the fervid Oriental imagina- tion of their followers, outrunning even theirs, the Ghettos of the world were transported across space to the chosen land as by some magic carpet of the Arabian Nights. To the Russian masses, who hung up the images of Herzl and Nordau in their cottages and signed petitions or greetings by the hundred thou- sand, the deliverers of Israel had appeared and the end of the Galut (the exile) was at hand. Nor were the educated classes less credulous. Emigration, immigration, colonisation, agri- culture, economics, history, folk-psychology, all were left un- studied, and the Jews never showed themselves so completely Luftmenschen as when they resolved to be at last terrestrial and territorial.
And the opponents of Territorialism were as naive as its champions. Instead of demonstrating that the re-gathering of Israel was impracticable, they vociferated that it was undesir- able. Instead of admitting that it was too good to hope for,
in South Russia. The Crimea, part of their kingdom, was known till the thirteenth century as Chazaria or Gazaria. Recent converts to Judaism also abound among the peasantry in Russia, and are so pious that many who applied to the emigration bureaus of my organisation refused to go to any other land than Palestine.
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they denounced it as reactionary and dangerous. In a panic as fantastic as the mirages of the converted, they saw the Jew- ish State springing up like Jonah's gourd, and themselves forcibly deported to it. And to-day, still untaught by experi- ence, they have raised the same hue and cry over the proposed Palestine settlement under British auspices, as though any Jew- ish State capable of accommodating the Diaspora could pos- sibly arise under the conditions imposed, or within the territory prescribed.
Ill
The unhappy fact is that Territorialism, while it can point out to the Diaspora that what is the matter with it is precisely that it is a Diaspora, can do little or nothing to mend or end it. The fathers of Territorialism drew a picture of the Jewish State, and putting it beside a photograph of the Diaspora cried, like Hamlet : " Look here upon this picture and on this." And as- suredly the counterfeit presentments of Hamlet's father and of his uncle exhibited no greater contrast — the one " wholesome," the other " like a mildew'd ear." But as little as Hamlet's wretched uncle could be transformed into his splendid sire, so lit- tle can the Diaspora be transmuted into the Jewish State. It is in a sense almost a mockery of the Jewish misery to hold up be- fore it such a picture of success and happiness. The Jewish State is something in the future — something to be generated in the w6mb of time: the Diaspora is actually here. The rise of the State would indeed affect the Diaspora, but it is as much calculated to fortify and prolong its existence as to curtail it. True, there are Jews who urge that with the future of Jewry assured in a Jewish State, with an ark and pairs provided against the Deluge, the Diaspora could afford to disappear. Like a parent who had ensured his posterity's fortunes, it would cry " Nunc dimittis." But would it? Would not the effect be the contrary? Has not the very effort to create the State re-animated the Diaspora? Would not the young crea- tion radiate back some of its vitality to the parent?
Were the Jewish State founded on a great scale, and did it become so prosperous as to draw to itself all that was vital in Jewry, there might be some hope of the Diaspora's decay. But the chances of so heroic a solution dwindle daily, and the eu- thanasia of the Diaspora could be sought more hopefully from complete indifference to Jewish affairs than from the vivifying
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activity of State-building. The fundamental fallacy of Pins- ker and Herzl lay, however, not in the notion that the rise of the State would indirectly bring about the subsidence of the Diaspora, but in the assumption that the Diaspora could be directly deported to the State.
They were perhaps misled by the success of Moses in leading the Jews out of Egypt. But, apart from the factor of Moses having Israel's God behind him and a pillar of fire before, his task was comparatively simple. He had his people compactly concentrated — he had not to collect them from the four cor- ners of the earth, divided and diversified by its languages, cus- toms, and politics, and not even united by that community of unbearable suffering which is the only goad to revolutionary change known to history. What Moses had to end was not a Diaspora, but a slavery. Territorialism, in short, should never have been put forward as a cure for the Diaspora, but as a call to new creation. It is not the administering of a nostrum to a diseased and decrepit ancient, but the begetting of a fresh young life. It summons us to cease wringing our hands over the irreparable or wailing over ruined walls, but out of our yet unexhausted seed to create a new Jewish stock in a self-gov- erning Jewish territory.
IV
Leaving the problem or malady of the Galut as humanly in- curable or insoluble, a sane Territorialism aspires only to cre- ate a new Judaea. It cannot supplant the Diaspora, it can only supplement it. But the new Judaea would be quick with the fires of youth ; to its radiant vitality even the final dropping asleep of the poor, weary old Diaspora could bring no menace; into the unknown world of the future it would carry forward that same warm humanity and sane idealism with which ancient Judaea enriched antiquity. In this one focus of Jewish life the abnormal conditions prevalent everywhere else would be re- placed by the normal. In this one milieu the Jewish child would be born as naturally Jewish as the Bristol child is born Eng- lish, the Bordeaux child French, or the Canton child Chinese. But — let us repeat — there is no alchemy by which the Dias- pora itself can be transmuted into a self-governing Israel, and we shall make no progress with the Jewish problem till we real- ise that Territorialism is as likely to prop up the Diaspora as to undermine it, and that the self-governing territory, though
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its pioneer elements and a continuous stream of subsequent im- migration will come from the Diaspora, cannot possibly receive the populations of the Ghettos, Jewries, and Jwdengassen, nay, that its first legislation must actually be to exclude an indis- criminate rush, and that its stoutest foundations will be laid in the sons born of its own soil. Thus the Diaspora would still be left to wrestle with its own problems. Whatever help the Jewish State could bring it, would be indirect, slow, and uncer- tain; even the fear that the State would bring harm rather than help, though it is an unmanly fear, is not altogether groundless in so illogical a world. But, however the State and the Diaspora might act and react upon each other, they would grow more and more unlike each other. As the Canadian- Englishman differs from the slum-born Briton, so would the Judaean Jew tend to differ from the Ghetto-Jew. The genius soli of the Jewish State could not be exported like Palestine earth or bottles of Jordan water, nor would its solution of Jew- ish questions suffice for more than local consumption. Being able to keep its day of rest on the Saturday, it would have, for example, no Sabbath problem. But how would this help the unhappy artisan of America, impaled on the dilemma of Sab- bath desecration or starvation?
These considerations do not cease to apply if the Palestine form of Territorialism is adopted. The choice of old Judaea as the terrain of the new Judsea could not alter the brute facts. But we must carefully distinguish between Zionism — which is all things to all men — and Territorialism, which is a concept definite and unchanging. The object of Zionism was, for ex- ample, defined by Mr. Sokolow at the last Zionist Congress as to bring Zion to the Diaspora ; a complete reversal of the original concept. But Territorialism is not even the Basle pro- gramme with the abstract form, Itoland, substituted for the concrete Palestine, nor if it accepted Palestine as the sphere of its operations would the breach be wholly healed. For the rift that suddenly opened out between the two parties at the so- called Uganda Conference was not a brand-new chasm made by the earthquake of the British offer; it was the exposure of an abyss which had yawned between them from the first and which had been concealed only by the common territorial objective. Zionism takes its vision and ideal from the past ; Territorialism
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places them in the future. The one looks back, the other for- ward. Zionism is not safe even from the restoration of animal sacrifices. Territorialism moves along the lines of " creative evolution." The past is our cradle, not our prison, and there is danger as well as appeal in its glamour. The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repetition. Probably no nation in the world now lives in its original habitat, and had other peoples looked backward as obstinately and slug- gishly as our own, few of the original masters of the world would still be in possession of territories. As in every period great masses of Jews have been able to settle and maintain themselves in almost every country on earth, so with a little more foresight, had they not been paralysed by a tradition of passive expecta- tion, they would long ago have built up at least one self-govern- ing centre, whether in Palestine or elsewhere. Even as it is, they have come nigh to an autonomous life in certain periods and regions. The very Pale of Russia produced a sort of sub- national life. A single city like Salonica, where the Jewish Sabbath came to prevail of itself, might have been made the nu- cleus of a commonwealth like Venice, had not all such ideas been inhibited by the superstition of a Heaven-ordained Exile, to be replaced in God's good time by a replica of ancient Judaea, com- plete from the Temple with its shambles to the last pomegran- ate tassel on the lower hem of the High Priest's robe; a vision which has no more substantiality than the popular poetic dream of restoring the primitive Golden Age, and which could at best have the value of a theatrical reproduction or a museum ex- hibit.
In the admirable little anthology which the Chief Rabbi of England has prepared for Jewish sailors and soldiers, there is cited Longfellow's sympathetic poem on " The Jewish Cemetery at Newport," expounding how the " Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind ' who lie buried there, had lived by the great tradi- tions of their people's past and seen them all reflected in the coming time. They spelt the world backward — says the poet — like a Hebrew book :
" Till life became a Legend of the Dead."
The Chief Rabbi prudently cuts the poem short here. He does not give " the conclusion of the whole matter " :
" But ah ! what once has been shall be no more. The groaning earth in travail and in pain
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Brings forth its races, but does not restore, And the dead nations never rise again."
If Longfellow erred in supposing the Jewish nation irretriev- ably dead, he was profoundly right in teaching that Time never retraces its steps. Even if Judaea is re-established in Palestine, it can never be the old Judaea over again, any more than He- brew, if it becomes again the national language, can be re- stricted to the Biblical vocabulary. Aeroplanes must now fly through Hebrew literature as well as archangels.
There is no lack of Zionists who perfectly understand this and whose outlook is as modern as the most progressive Terri- torialist could desire, but have they pondered sufficiently the profound warning of Jesus that you cannot put new wine into old bottles ? Will they not, in fact, be exploited by Jewish cler- icalism, by that ossified orthodoxy which would bind Israel for- ever to traditional theology and legendary legislation, and which the vicinity of Sinai will appear to vindicate afresh?
In a story by Mr. H. G. Wells a man hatches out the egg of an iEpyornis, the largest of extinct birds. For centuries the egg has lain hidden and preserved in the mud of Madagascar, but he brings the latent bird to life and feeds it and brings it up. At first all is charm and idyll, but in a few years the crea- ture, grown colossal and terrible, kicks and pummels its foster- father as with the foot of a cart-horse and a beak like a sledge- hammer. It is the fate that awaits all who play with the past and revive the intellectually extinct.
It is a thousand pities that the intellectual issues involved in the fate of the Jewish race were not thought out and fought out before any attempt was made to unify Israel by a cut-and-dried scheme. A Pan-Jewish Congress should have preceded the Zionist Congress. Principles and beliefs are the realities be- hind the banding together of men for specific purposes, and a race-bond is no sufficient nexus when there are such grave dif- ferences of outlook and such spiritual issues interfused. As British party politics were suspended in war, so Jewish differ- ences were laid aside by the Zionists for the common task of rebuilding Zion. But Zion is not a mere place ; to rebuild it is not like rebuilding Belgium or Serbia, and the evasion of all root questions in the interests of a sham unity will one day have to be paid for, and with heavy interest. Herzl had a glimpse of this truth when he declared that the return to Juda- ism must precede the return to Zion, but he did not follow up
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his somewhat belated discovery. His original attempt to treat the Jew as definable by physiology was a grave historic error. Not even Ezra, who reduced the conception of Israel to its low- est race-terms, treated the Jew as a mere ethnic type, for his purgation of the race was professedly in the interests of its religion.
VI
But if some extremists for race and soil have sought to dis- pense with a religious bond, others would have it overshadow everything else, and Territorialism, besides being impeded by Zionism, with its cry of " Only in Palestine," has also to meet the onset of anti-Zionism with its cry of " Only a religion."
The more rabid anti-Zionists go so far as to forget or ignore that even if Judaism has now become synonymous with a mere religion, it at least began as the religion of a peculiar people. They speak as if it were like one of the other religions, which sprang into life with a universal appeal and message to every race and colour. Judaism did, indeed, at a secondary stage of its existence, enter upon a period of propagandism, but un- fortunately, for various historical reasons, its career as a world-religion was checked, and what might have been a great river became a back-water again. It is true that proselytes have never ceased to be admitted more or less grudgingly, but even when they were sought and welcomed, they were absorbed not into a universal doctrine, but into a national system, sat- urated with historic traditions and celebrations. So that, even admitting that Judaism, not the Jewish race, has been the es- sential thought of Israel, we do not escape the conception of a national organism. And since this organism can lead only a cramped, crippled, mutilated, and disjointed life in the Dias- pora, the fact that it is but the incorporation of a religion does not obviate the need of a geographical basis for it. Those who plead that it is " only a religion," like Christianity or Islam, must first make it so. They must denude it of its national ves- ture, strip it of its peculiar chronology and historical celebra- tions, and preach it urbi et orbi; only thus will vanish even the religious necessity for Territorialism.
VII
With this contention that Judaism is " only a religion ' is connected the idea of a world-mission, and that this " Mission
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of Israel " is better served by dispersion than by concentra- tion. While the majority of the arguments against Territor- ialism spring from anaemia or ignoble fear, and are beneath con- tempt and below discussion, this setting up of a rival construc- tive policy instead of the eternal negative, this ideal of Israel as " the servant of mankind " proclaimed in the noble prophe- cies of Isaiah, cannot but evoke a glow of sympathy from every true Jew.
But if the ideal of the Jewish mission, rooted though it is in Jewish thought and tradition, really demands the dispersion of Israel, we should be driven to the paradox that if there were no Diaspora it would be necessary to create one, and that if we were still in Palestine it would be our duty to scatter from it. Missions do undoubtedly suggest migrations. Missionaries do usually go out in search of the unregenerate. Did not Jesus describe the Pharisees as compassing sea and land to make a single proselyte? How, then, can we deny that it is an ad- vantage for Israel to be everywhere on the spot? For assur- edly he is everywhere surrounded by races of inferior theology, not to say inferior civilisation ; races that, despite a veneer of apparent superiority to him, have never yet achieved his spir- itual values, nor the idea of peace to all mankind expressed in his everyday greeting.
Moreover, did Israel utilise his ubiquity to preach his ideal of human brotherhood and to stand out staunchly for his mis- sion, thus linking up the nations, the evils due to the absence of a territory would cease to count. The glow of apostolic faith and ardour would preserve the Jewish spirit in more than its pristine vitality, while anti-Semitism would be welcomed as at once the price of prophesying and the tribute which the lower pays to the higher. The nation of martyrs and pioneers would then wear persecution as a crown and welcome death as a priv- ilege. The Diaspora would either be wiped out — a glorious ending — or it would survive in prophetic splendour. And should the Great War — despite a material League of Nations — result in no spiritual improvement in the present barbarous system of international relationship, this role would clearly await us.
Unfortunately I have not detected in any of the preachers of the Jewish Mission the faintest attempt to convert their con- cept into a working reality. By a mission they seem to mean a passive expectation of a providential millennium. There may be occasions when " they also serve who only stand and wait " ;
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but that this is the sole variety of service open to a great his- toric people, and that it will suffice for the next two thousand years as it sufficed for the last, is a superstition more contempt- ible than the lowest gospel of race-Zionism.
As Territorialism is Realpolitik — a real activity for a real political and spiritual situation — it can take no account of so- lutions so purely academic. Otherwise it would gladly retire in favour of the loftier and the grander ideal of a world-mission. It solaces itself, however, with the reflection that even from a Territorial centre it would not be impossible to pursue the Jew- ish Mission. For some missions are achieved by staying at home. The Athenians abode in Athens and filled the world with thought and beauty. And so, too, the establishment of a model State, a commonwealth of social justice and spiritual dignity — if the Jews could but achieve it — would radiate inspiring impulses to all humanity.
It may perhaps be urged by the passive proclaimers of the mission that the production of model Jewish communities every- where, without any direct preachment to the heathen, would be still more educative. There would be no answer to this argu- ment did the Jewish communities represent, like the Quaker communities, a distinctive point of view. This, however, is precisely what is wanting, and the Jews, instead of standing for their own ideals, are the most fervid assimilators of the ron- ventions of the majority and the moment. Their aim, con- scious or unconscious, is not apostleship, but survival.
VIII
Piercing through all the confusion, prejudice, and cowardice of modern Jewry, the formula struck out by the Ito (the Jew- ish Territorial Organisation) at its foundation came like a ra}^ of sunlight. It was the first clear and statesmanlike con- tribution to the political solution of the Jewish question, and will be increasingly recognised as the only possible programme, even for Zionism itself, once that movement comes to grips with reality. Our formula, like Aaron's rod, must swallow all the others.
" To acquire a territory upon an autonomous basis for those Jews who cannot or will not remain m the lands in which they live at present." It is not till this formula is analysed that the complexity which underlies its seeming simplicity can be realised. There are three separate strands of thought and
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purpose. In the first place the substitution of the concrete " Jews who cannot or will not remain in the Diaspora " for that disputable political concept, " the Jewish people," cuts away sharply the greatest practical difficulty in the way of the scheme — the fear, real or imaginary, that the Jews who can and will remain in the Diaspora will be politically compromised, and their present status endangered. The autonomous basis, declared to be a sine qua non, will appertain not to Jewry at large, but simply to those who immigrate into the new terri- tory, and who have surely as much right to form a new home and a new nationality for themselves and under their own insti- tutions as had the Mormons, the Pilgrim Fathers, the French emigrants who founded Quebec, or the British sects who, within living memory, built up New Zealand.
In the second place, this limitation of the scheme to the emigrants from the Diaspora places it on a sound psycholog- ical basis. A problem exists only for those who feel it. Those Jews who will and can remain in the Diaspora prove, ipso facto, that for them the situation is not intolerable. And, thirdly, by building our State out of the best among our emigrants, we help to solve also the Jewish emigration problem, the famous Wohin. Like that village chest which, according to Oliver Goldsmith, was contrived
" A double debt to pay, A bed by night, a chest of drawers by day."
this new Jewish State is to be at once a land of self-government and a land of refuge. And it would find its first material, not in Jews solicited to emigrate, but in Jews already emigrating. At one stroke we provide a practical necessity and the luxury of an ideal. That Jewish labour-force, which, with the force of Jewish brotherhood, now goes unutilised by us, would be con- centrated on the chosen soil like a priceless irrigation current. And whereas with the existing centres of immigration the ad- vent of every additional Jew is an additional incentive to anti- Semitism, in Itoland every accession to the population, whether from within or without, would be a strengthening of the Jew and Judaism.
IX
It is not to be denied that the difficulties of such an enter- prise are colossal. But, at any rate, there is no truth in the
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parrot-cry that such a State can be founded " only in Zion " or that our people will go nowhere else. Such an assertion is not merely ideological, it is — in face of the spectacle of the wandering Jew wandering everywhere — positively brazen. The Ito has even tested the point by opening out a new immi- gration area via Galveston. Within a few years ten thousand souls were more or less happily settled in a territory they had never heard of. The bait here was bread. Could we have added also the Jewish folk-life and the Jewish Sabbath, we should have had a rush like that of Christendom to the gold- fields.
Indeed, as already pointed out, the danger is we should have too many applicants rather than too few, and these, even when not feckless and sickly, suited but rarely for agricultural pio- neering. The further danger of being swamped by " alien " immigrants, though not to be overlooked, is less grave. A ter- ritory, which had lain dormant so long and would contain no obvious opportunities of easy riches, would not suddenly seem inviting to the general immigrant, particularly if Hebrew or Yiddish were the prevailing idiom. Our popularity is not so great that people who could have the benefit of our room would rush for our company. Moreover, the tragic thinning out of man-power by the war would co-operate with the great call for reconstructive work in every country to reduce the streams of general emigration. And this same cause might make Govern- ments with sparsely-settled territories more anxious than be- fore for immigration and more amenable to a Territorial deal. For, outside of negotiation, there is no means of obtaining a Territory. The sword which Moses and Joshua wielded can- not be ours. There is no way for a Diaspora to organise an army. At most it can contribute Jewish regiments to some belligerent Power, and thus divide itself still more hopelessly. But the negotiation for a Jewish territory would demand in- finite tact and patience and the goodwill of all Israel. For the land would have to be one desirable for other white races — not a derelict tropical desert like the Northern Territory of Australia, once suggested to the Ito by the Premier, Mr. Dea- kin. And to be commensurate with the need the territory must, besides being fertile and healthy, be large enough to sustain a real Jewish commonwealth. A toy republic, like San Marino or Andorra, would be no compensation for all the sweat and travail — still less a territory that was not even autonomous. The Jewish soul can find more profitable employment for its en-
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ergies than to build a doll's house upon sand. We have already seen that the Jewish Diaspora cannot be destroyed even if the Jewish State could be created, but if the State cannot even be created, then it were folly to persist in a sham.
In so late an age of history, when every " place in the sun ' has its ferocious claimants, and earth-hunger has passed from an appetite into a greed, the prospects of discovering and ac- quiring such a territory are not rosy. Nevertheless, the Ito has put forward more than one proposition which held distinct possibilities, and had Zionism been reasonable instead of fanat- ical, Territorial instead of nebulous, the foundations of a Jew- ish State might already have been laid. Cyrenaica, indeed, to which we sent a scientific expedition, disappointed our expecta- tions ; and the negotiations for Angola, on which another ex- pedition reported more promisingly just before the war, were handicapped by the fiscal narrowness of Portuguese colonial policy. But the very existence of these hitherto unknown pos- sibilities made it probable that other opportunities had been equally overlooked.
A cartoon in a Jewish comic paper, published in New York, once represented the writer in his capacity of President of the Ito as a bachelor in quest of a bride. Four maidens stood awaiting his lordly choice — three fair enough, but one sur- passingly beautiful. This lovely creature was labelled " Zion." The others were marked " Uganda," " Angola," " Cyrenaica." Yet, with a curious want of appreciation, the suitor was turn- ing his back upon the most adorable of them all.
The cartoonist overlooked that " Zion " was not in the mar- riage market. She was, in fact, already disposed of ; a mem- ber of the Grand Signior's harem, and very jealously guarded. " Uganda " — by which, of course, was meant British East Af- rica — was at least virginal. At the time Mr. Joseph Cham- berlain made his celebrated offer of one of its plateaus to Dr. Herzl, the future of the country was embryonic. The white population settled in its vast area could not have filled a village church. And when the Ito won Mr. Chamberlain's assent to the project of converting the entire territory into a British Judaea, with a Jewish Governor, a country to be, when devel- oped, an equal member of the great family of nations which con-
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stitute the British Empire, a prospect was opened out of a really great Jewish future. But the Ito's elaborate memoran- dum on the subject remains in the archives of the British Co- lonial Office.
A further possibility investigated by the Ito was Canada, where a population smaller than that of London occupies an area nearly as large as Europe. Sir Wilfrid Laurier, then at the height of his power, said to the writer in 1907 : " You are ten years too late. Ten years ago we were begging for immigrants and would gladly have given you a tract under local autonomy to be developed into one of the States of a federal Canada. Now we have all the immigration we need and will give land only to the individual." And Lord Strathcona said the same.
" Ten years ago! " But that had been just the date of the first Basle Congress. Had Jewry really come together to take counsel, had it opened its eyes and looked round the world in- stead of shutting them and swallowing the formula stuffed into its mouth by the pre-existing Choveve Zionists ( Small Colonisa- tion Zionites), the first thing it would have perceived would have been Canada and the great healthy, fruitful spaces thereof, and it would have made instant application to the Canadian Government.
Sir Wilfrid Laurier added that if we chose to send out our men — each to make individual application for his 160 acres — and if we so planned their holdings as to produce a Jewish commonwealth, the Canadian Government would not try to thwart a scheme executed under its constitution.
But to carry out such a scheme without the glamour and pro- tection of public policy, without a charter and a flag, and in face of the Zionist clamour and the anti-Zionist outcry, did not seem feasible. Nor did the numerous perspectives tentatively explored by the Ito in Australia, Mexico, and South America seem more calculated to produce the necessary unity.
Even when the Ito put forward Mesopotamia — the primi- tive Jewish land, the cradle of the race and the conservatory of its purity, as well as the subsequent focus of Judaism for a thousand years, the seat of its most famous academies and the birthplace of the Babylonian Talmud — there was no sign of Zionist sympathy, and this though Mesopotamia came within the ambit of the official programme of Zionism, and offered a far greater possibility than Palestine of a territory on an ade- quate scale. That the Ito's project was not chimerical has been proved by the irrigation work executed on its very lines
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both by Sir William Willcocks for the Sultan and by the Brit- ish troops for their own purposes.
The fact was that the Zionists could not rise, and have not yet risen, to the conception of Territorialism. They have been at most mere Palestinians, hovering like ghosts over the grave of their past, and unable to make an act of fresh faith. This was intelligible enough in the orthodox, but that advanced Jew- ish thinkers — and the majority of the Zionist delegates had thrown over the Mosaic code — should babble equally about the irreplaceability of Palestine, is a proof of the paralysis to which centuries of oppression and superstition can reduce a people.
XI
Immense as are the difficulties in the way of Territorialism, they cannot be said to be absolutely insuperable even now ; while in the past, when new continents lay practically unpopulated, a Jewish State could have been carved out with comparative facility. The history of Israel is a story of lost opportunities. If only the exiles from Spain had followed in the wake of Co- lumbus! Even in 1825, when Major Noah conceived his pro- ject of a regathering of Israel within sound of Niagara Falls, the matter of his scheme was far less fantastic than the manner, and had the European Ghettos to which he addressed his ap- peal been sufficiently prepared by propaganda, the great city of Buffalo would by now have been Jewish, with a Jewish major- ity in New York State. When after the pogroms of the 'eighties the great stream of Jewish emigration to America be- gan, one of the few statesmanlike Jews, Judge Sulzberger, sug- gested that, instead of receiving it into the cities, it should be diverted to a sparsely-populated territory, which would then, automatically under the Constitution, evolve into a Jewish State. But the suggestion was not followed, and instead of a new member being added to the United States, practically a new Jewish Pale was built up, and a new series of Ghetto slums.
Perhaps it is even now not too late to pour a stream of Jew- ish migration upon a thinly occupied territory in America — North or South — or in Australia. There may even be, under the new Russian regime, ample territory in the vast and sparsely-settled stretches of Siberia, for Jews to build up, un- der amicable auspices, a State of their own.
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But none of these ideas can hope for a hearing at present, for by one of those unexpected happenings, which are the only certainties in history, Zionism has received from Great Britain, with the support of other Great Powers, the promise that " a Jewish National Home ' shall be established in Palestine, and while the possibility of this pro j ect is on trial the Ito naturally lays aside any rival activities, hoping even that its ends may be attainable within the same territory. Unhappily, the prospect of turning Palestine into " a territory upon an autonomous basis for those Jews who cannot or will not remain in the lands in which they live at present " is not altogether hopeful. The facts of geography and histor}T, which Zionists have always re- fused to look in the face, cannot be abolished by State procla- mations, and now that the dream bids fair to take on reality, the happiness produced by the British promise must inevitably be shadowed by these disagreeable obstacles and drawbacks.
As a territory Palestine cannot be said to be capacious, and even of its exiguous area the Syrian Christmas claim (for France) a goodly northern slice. Still, it is not too small to produce that richness and variety of life which go to make a na- tion, and now that we are aware that the accommodation of the Diaspora is no part of a sane Territorialism, we need not twit Zionism with the false hopes it once raised among the suf- fering masses of the Pale. We need only consider whether " a Jewish National Home " can be established within this area, in accordance with the promise of Great Britain.
Unfortunately, that very promise is hedged with a condi- tion which makes it practically a contradiction in terms, for "nothing shall be done which ma}r prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Pales- tine."
With her delicate relation to the Arab and her position as a Mohammedan Power, Great Britain could not easily act other- wise, nor could Jews demand any restriction of native rights so long as the tribes remain in Palestine. But as it happens that these tribes outnumber the Jews by more than six to one, it is not easy to see how (short of amicably buying out the more no- madic and loosely-rooted, and resettling them in the vast new Arab kingdom which is being set up simultaneously) Palestine can become either Jewish or national or a home. Under any system of constitutional Government there would arise an Arab national autonomy, not a Jewish. " The balance of power in a
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State," writes Lord Morley, " exists with the class that holds the balance of the land." And so far the Jews hold only £ per cent, of it. Nor can the atmosphere of Palestine — so largely saturated with Christian and Mohammedan emanations, to which incessant pilgrimages will now more than ever con- tribute — become as Jewish as a Ghetto of the Diaspora for a Territorial State on virgin soil. To adopt the image of our Yiddish cartoonist, Zion is a bride who after her divorce from Israel has been twice married to Gentiles — once to a Christian and once to a Mohammedan — and when Israel takes her back he will find his household encumbered with the litter of the two intervening menages. Such considerations, however, are still invisible to the stock Zionist on whose self-spun structures reali- ties impinge in vain, and whose Zion is as much a city of dream as that builded on celestial foundations by the popular imagina- tion yearning for the Messiah. As Don Quixote could see great armies with banners where Sancho Panza could see only flocks of sheep, so our dreamers of the Ghetto see a full national life where a sober observer can see only a few farm colonies in an overwhelmingly alien environment. And yet when theology gives place to politics, when Zionism, abandoning the dream of a heaven-wrought millennium, proclaims the manlier programme of self-achieved redemption, its first duty surely is to face polit- ical facts.
It is true that the Jews will be an intensive minority in con- trol of the economic development of the country, and that Jew- ish immigrants will have the happy sense of coming home. But, so far as the historic Palestine west of the Jordan is con- cerned, unless heroic measures are taken, which are utterly unlikely — for the Zionist leaders are resolved on the less dif- ficult policy of friendly co-operation with the Arab — nothing approaching a Jewish commonwealth can possibly grow up there, and the Zionist settlers will be lucky if, under the aegis of Britain, they can change into friendship the hitherto men- acing hostility of the native majority.
It is only in the comparatively unpopulated regions to the east of the Jordan that a sort of Hebrew Montenegro is not unattainable, though as a province without independence and as part of a miniature Austria. Under the success of Zionism not only will Israel be divided into Diaspora Jews and Palestine Jews, but Palestine Jews will themselves be divided into locally autonomous Jews, and Jews hopelessly mixed up with other
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races. Thus instead of normalising Israel's life, Zionism will make it still more abnormal. A motherland that holds only a tithe of its sons, and even those largely interblent with other peoples, will not cease to be an anomaly.
But Zionism has, of course, long given up pretending to a Territorial solution. With its shrewd policy of cutting its coat according to its cloth and changing its aim into whatever it can get, it now aspires only to a spiritual centre. This is the conception of Achad Ha-am, and it may be magnificent. But it is not Zionism. It is not the gospel of redemption preached at Basle.
It is not even intelligible. A spiritual centre, round which the Jews of the Diaspora are to group as a political nationality, which nationality is to be, however, in no contradiction with their local nationality as Englishmen, Frenchmen, or Germans — here is a conception which goes dangerously near nonsense and nonsensically near danger. Only if the whole world after the war is organised internationally will such a political broth- erhood of Israel become feasible. But otherwise such a bond is as superfluous as it is impracticable. For the disruption of the Diaspora will have been aggravated by the war. The par- tition of Russia and Austria has broken up even the solidarity of the Pale, while the threatened split of the world into a Ger- man-Russian sphere and a League of other Nations would im- port a still more fatal scission.
So long, however, as the Disapora believes in Judaism, it has no need of a spiritual centre. The Torah is its spiritual cen- tre. But if it has lost this centre, then to replace the religion which has kept the Diaspora alive nearly two thousand years, and which is a solid reality coming home to the Jew at every hour of the day, by an absentee nationalism so tenuous that another and a nearer nationalism can occupy his heart simul- taneously and claim even the sacrifice of his blood, this is a conception which could occur only to visionaries ignorant of life, or bankrupt politicians clutching at any expedient to save their faces. A " spiritual centre " in Zion may suffice to hold within its ghostly radius the first generation of absentee Zion- ists minus Judaism ; such a phantasm without either political or religious substance will not avail to keep their children Jew- ish. The young generation will crave less windy nourishment and a more solid ground for separation from the general life. No minority in history has ever sustained itself in the bosom of a majority unless fortified by a burning faith.
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XII
Assuming, however, that the Zionists will be sensible enough to adopt the Ito formula, we must confess that their prospects, poor as they are, are on the surface greater than those of Moses. For Palestine was far more densely populated in the days of the Exodus from Egypt than it is now, and although Joshua came as a victorious invader, yet victories do not always assure the dominancy of the invaders. Autochthones cannot always be all annihilated or all expelled, and they often absorb their conquerors, as the Saxons in Britain absorbed the Nor- mans. " I will not drive them out from before thee in one year," God explains to Moses, " lest the land become desolate and the beasts of the field multiply against thee. By little and little I will drive them out from before thee, until thou be in- creased and inherit the land." What an admission that the conquest and occupation of Canaan proceeded not by miracle, but by natural law! The Deity's views are obviously not or- thodox. How easily the beasts could have been kept down by Providence, and the pace of Israel's increase and settlement precipitated ! As a matter of fact, the tribes in possession re- mained largely on the soil, profiting by this breathing space to intermarry " little by little " with their invaders, and the nation that grew up in Palestine was a blend of all its races on a He- brew basis. The Biblical Palestine, like all other countries, was a melting-pot.
But such a development — and the situation is not without its irony — is unlikely in the Palestine of to-day. For, partly on account of the inevitably exaggerated race-consciousness of the pioneer Jews, but even more because of the great Diaspora behind them, they will be kept from intermarrying with the tribes in possession. They will feel members of Jewry rather than citizens of Palestine. It is the Diaspora that will keep Palestine Jewish, rather than Palestine the Diaspora. Just so the isolation of Ulster is nourished by the kindred Protestant- ism of Great Britain, and the amalgamation of Austria has been impeded by the existence beyond its frontiers of powerful aggregations of its constituent races.
The validity of this analysis, though it has been reached mainly on a priori grounds, may be illustrated by what hap- pened on the return of the Jews from Babylon. Here, too, there was a great body of Jewry behind them, though it was mainly concentrated in Babylon. And the first result was the
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super-piety by which Ezra and Nehemiah weeded out all " alien " wives, and imperilled the stability of the State by re- jecting the communion of the Samaritans. Very different is the story of the first Hebrew comers to Palestine. They did not leave behind them in Egypt a great Hebrew settlement to chain them to the past and restrain them from fusing with the new peoples they were to meet. Nay, at the very beginning of their adventure they took up a" mixed multitude " of the old peoples with them. But the Jews who emigrate to Palestine to-day will have a far more tribal mentality, and so no neo- Jewish race, no synthesis of the Semitic tribes of Palestine, is likely to be again evolved to people and possess Palestine. Hence the difficulty arising from the native tribes is greater than in ancient Palestine ; for they can neither be expelled nor absorbed. Palestine must thus become a mongrel State : at best it can become a Semitic Switzerland of which all the constit- uents will enjoy political equality — no undesirable ideal, in- deed a consummation devoutly to be wished everywhere else, but unfortunately irrelevant to the particular problem which Zion- ism started out to solve, especially as this ideal is unlikely to be achieved wherever else Jews dwell. Thus around this hy- brid centre — according to Zionist doctrine — a long series of overruled or oppressed Jewries will eternally gravitate, the Galut being perpetuated by the very movement which started out to abolish it.
It has been suspected that, though Israel has been preserved in the Galut by his religion, his religion is in reality only the mask of his invincible will to live, of which will the " hard-shell " Judaism that replaced the Jewish State was a secretion. That the race instinct has invented and is exploiting Zionism is a still more plausible hypothesis. With the diminution of faith and the relaxation of ritual a new protective device was neces- sary. Hence the prospect that Zionism, like Balaam, will bless what it came to curse, and keep alive what it came to destroy, is not so paradoxical as it seems.
Nevertheless, though the Diaspora survive, a more national kind of Jewish life may well arise east of the Jordan, and even west of it Hebrew is already becoming again a living speech. Such a resurrection — however partial — would be a valuable vindication of the power of a people to outlive its persecutors, and would add a unique and romantic chapter to history. But " the Mission of Israel " would not be furthered unless a civi- lisation higher than the normal was developed in that more com-
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pact section where Hebrew idealism would have comparatively free play. Here, then, is the true task for Zionism, and a fur- ther reason why the largest possible measure of autonomy and concentration is essential.
Since, however, the Diaspora cannot but survive the com- pletest possible triumph of Zionism — since, indeed, according to the latest gospel, its survival will be part of the triumph of Zionism — its religious problems, like its political problems, will still remain clamouring for solution. Not even by seeking refuge in Zion can Judaism escape that religious reconstruction which modern thought has long been imperatively demanding, and which the breakdown of the old order under stress of war has made inevitable for all religions alike. Indeed, a Zionism that frankly abandoned the ideal of a tribal centre for the Diaspora, and set up on Mount Zion a centre of teaching for the whole human race, would be both freer from practical diffi- culties and nearer to the essence of Judaism and Jewish history.
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THE OLD CLO' MAN
(Voices, June, 1920)
Three battered hats upon his head, And curved beneath his bag,
The ancient limps with brooding tread. Amid the city's brag.
It is a day of rocking bells
And prancing King and Court,
A day when marching music swells And alien oafs make sport.
They harry him, these Christian louts, With stones and clownish freaks,
His hand mechanic flicks the clouts Of mud from off his cheeks.
Blood trickles down his long white beard
To badge his gaberdine; He is unused to go un jeered,
Or mark the outer scene.
Nor merry banners, purple posts,
Nor blazoned floral hails, Nor hoarse huzzahing heathen hosts
Can pierce his mental veils.
The Titan City's domes and spires
As little take his eye: Her airy leagues of living wires
Her planes that taunt the sky.
The martial pageant winds within
The noble storied fane, The soaring organ notes begin
Their jubilant refrain.
A thousand flag-dressed merchant ships The river's rapture scream, 286
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They bring no shadow of eclipse To dim his pious dream.
He ponders on a Hebrew text, Long old when Rome was new,
And, like a student vaguely vext, Holds tighter to his clue.
And as the happy Gentiles bawl
The glory of their race, He flicks the giant capital
Like the mud from off his face.
Poor howling, pork-fed brutish horde That know not Israel's God,
Vain, vain, their Empire of the sword, Their ruthless ruling rod.
Their city dwindles into dust
Before Jehovah's fire, And all that mighty life and lust
Join Babylon and Tyre.
He sees her princes' skulls dug up Where stand her abbey walls,
And bats and cockatrices sup Within her palace halls:
While in some pagan city new,
Whose name none yet can know,
Still to their God and Torah true, The chosen cry " Old Clo' ! "
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THE MIRAGE OF THE JEWISH STATE
" Life caricatures our concepts," complained Dr. Herzl to me in the early days of his movement, and, indeed, History has few grimmer ironies to show than that his noble and pacific vision of the Jewish State should draw its hopes of realisation from the bloodiest war in history, or that, on the embodiment of Mr. Balfour's promise in the Turkish Peace Treaty, a Zion- ist leader in Jerusalem should have ordered the Shofar to be sounded as at the coming of the Messiah; and have thus of- ficially identified a dubious political transaction with the " one far-off divine event " for which Jewish mysticism has waited nigh two thousand years. It is only another proof of the de- moralising effects of racial egotism and political faction.
It is true that the dispossession of the Turk, the assassin of the Armenians, and the despoiler of Palestine, is a process that makes for righteousness, and the yearning of the Jewish soul to which Jehuda Halevi gave such touching expression is an emo- tion of no small spiritual potency. But, unfortunately, the disingenuous handling of the new-fangled mandatory system, the cynical flouting of the League of Nations on which it professes to depend, reduces the world again from a common- wealth to a cockpit, and in such a welter there can be for Jewry neither spiritual nor political salvation.
At first, indeed, it seemed as if the ancient belief that asso- ciated the return of the Jews to Palestine with a millennial or- der would be realised by the triumph of the Wilsonian prin- ciples. But these high-flown dreams have proved to be only the outcome of the opium with which humanity was drugged to continue its mutual butchery, and the awakening has found the patient paying as usual for intoxication by depression and K at zen jammer. That the Jews should nevertheless sing Ho- sannas might at first seem a welcome exception to the prevail- ing pessimism : as welcome an exception as the institution of a Jewish State would be to the prevailing materialism. Unhap- pily it is again the optimism of the opium-eater. The Oriental emotionalism of the race has been exploited, and rejoicings and
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rhapsodies, processions and synagogical thanksgivings which might have seemed faintly in order at the opening of the first Jewish Parliament in a Palestine regained, have been lavished throughout the ghettos and Judengassen of the world at the mere verbal prospect that England as a mandatory would es- tablish " a Jewish National Home " there, though all that was clear was that French Imperialism had been docked of part at least of the southern section of Syria, and the British Empire had been correspondingly extended and fortified by a new buf- fer-province. Of the promise to the Jews nothing was definite except its negative clauses, and nothing explicit save its limita- tions. Yet the nebulous news from San Remo sufficed to turn Jerusalem from a city of fasting and lamentation over the re- cent pogrom into a city hailing the Messiah with tuck of trumpet.
There is, indeed, much in common between these hysteric and hyperbolic manifestations and the popular frenzy that attended the career of the seventeenth century Sabbata'i Zevi, M the Turk- ish Messiah " of my " Dreamers of the Ghetto." The jubilance is even more pathetic in its prematurity and more unmanly in its abandonment than those grotesque ululations and grovel- lings on the floor witnessed at the Zionist Congress in 1903, when the mere resolution of the majority to investigate the British offer of a territory in East Africa was taken by the fanatical minority as equivalent to the " surrender " of Pal- estine.
And this epidemic of ecstasy is immeasurably more wide- spread than that delirium of grief : its ravages spare neither age nor experience. The touching faith in British benevolence and world-philanthropy is unalloyed by recollection of the pogrom which Jabotinsky accused the British military authorities of having incited, and which at the best they allowed to rage for three days against a scrupulously disarmed Jewry.1 Let us hope this incorrigible belief in Britain will melt the hearts of her politicians, and induce them to take the task of Jewish res- toration seriously in hand. It must, indeed, be a hard Parlia- mentary heart that is left untouched by this flowery exuberance
i A Jewish professor, of New York, who happened to be in Jerusalem, writes, anent the outrages of April 6th: " M. Hiramali, an agricultural ex- pert, was killed only a few steps from the British consulate, where they refused him protection, saying they had no instructions to grant it. . . . All the horrors were perpetrated by the Hebronites who were released from prison. . . . The British authorities permitted no one to leave the town. . . . We could not convince the British authorities that it was necessary to send soldiers."
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of gratitude from every land of the Exile, or unshamed by this unearned increment of benediction.
Though Cromwell, when he re-admitted the Jews to England in 1656', was swayed by millenarian notions, these would have had little force over his policy had he not perceived the value of the Jews as Intelligencers and promoters of his commercial designs. And similarly, though Mr. Lloyd George is not lack- ing in sentimental sympathy with the Zionist aspiration, we should have heard little of the " Jewish National Home " had not Palestine subserved British political aims. It was as a military barrier for the defence of Egypt that the acquisition of Palestine and its garrisoning by a Jewish self-governing pop- ulation was long urged by the Manchester Guardian, and this mutual interest — do ut des — would have constituted a sound political bargain, had not England, by a double-edged stroke of diplomacy, contrived to ear-mark Palestine for herself and gain the sympathies of world-Jewry without recognising in Israel anything but a pauper beneficiary of her idealism. Her strategy was the more wonderful inasmuch as this grandiose gesture was made at a dark moment of the war, a moment when every little counted, and when even France had secretly in- structed M. Picot to dangle before Jewry " the largest possible hopes of Palestine. " The sole credit attaching to the British Government is that of political sagacity — no small virtue indeed in these days of purblind politics, and by no means to be credited to the Zionist leaders, who from beginning to end have played the passive and impotent role of British political agents, and have now seen the much-trumpeted " Jewish National Home " whittled down to a British-Jewish High Commissioner who will naturally be as British a Governor in Palestine as he was a Home Secretary in England. Mount Zion in labour has produced the mouse I foreboded when the renaissance was her- alded, and of the Lion of Judah there is no sign. This does not prevent the Zionist leaders — as we have seen — from con- tinuing to blow the trumpet. It must be remembered in exten- uation that it is their own trumpet which they are blowing.
Mr. Frederic Harrison has urged upon the Government that " too many rash promises were made in the stress of war." Evidently, according to this casuist — a religious leader to boot — the Prussian doctrine was correct, and now that the advantages, the imponderabilia as well as the ponderabilia, of the Balfour Declaration have been reaped, it can become " a scrap of paper." But why fall back on so brutal a doctrine
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when the race to which you pay a shilling in the pound declares rapturously that you have honoured your obligation to the full? Why devote effort and brain-work to the tough problem of creating a real " Jewish National Home " in Palestine when you give such boundless satisfaction by shutting the homeless hordes of Jewry out of it? The natives are agitated and aggressive. Why embroil yourself with them to give the land to the Jews, especially when the Arabs are utterly ungrateful for your liberating them from the Turks, while the Jews will bedew with tears of gratitude the hand that binds them?
We behold in fact the curious phenomenon that at a moment when Hindoos, Egyptians and Irishmen vie with one another to shake off the British yoke, the Jews are equally frenzied to put their necks in it. They are like castaways at sea, rejoicing to be picked up even by a slaver. It is a pathetic testimony to twenty centuries of tossing on a pitiless ocean. But it is equally a proof that twenty years of Zionism have not availed to restore the sapped national dignity. The immemorial Pass- over aspiration, " Next year in Jerusalem ! " is followed in the ritual by, " Next year sons of Freedom ! " England's dole of Freedom was meagre enough, but the Jewish Oliver Twists actually ask for less, not more. The very leaders of Zionism have failed it. Children of the Russian Pale, unaccustomed to an atmosphere of freedom, and overawed by an alien official- dom, they have not varied from the Shtadlanim, the obsequious emissaries of Jewry throughout the Ghetto ages. Dr. Weiz- mann, despite his frequent visits to Palestine, brought never a word to London of the contemptuous attitude of the military authorities towards the Jews, or of their insidious attempt to burke the Balfour Declaration ; had he done so, English meet- ings of protest might have been held and the pogrom in Jeru- salem averted. Of him it may be said, as Macaulay said of Admiral Torrington in the old French war : " He shrank from all responsibility : from the responsibility of fighting, and from the responsibility of not fighting; and he succeeded in finding out a middle way which united all the inconveniences which he wished to avoid."
To this day the British Government has vouchsafed no clear explanation of Palestine Jewry's status, and though Mr. Balfour's letter carefully promises " a Jewish National Home in Palestine," the Zionists have held thanksgiving services in the synagogues for " Palestine as a Jewish National Home," while a message from Mr. Lloyd George to the Zionist Congress
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congratulates it on " the restoration to the Jewish people of their National Home." It is impossible to keep pace with these verbal juggleries, all in contradiction of one another and none in accordance with the facts.
It is urged, of course, that politics is the art of the prac- ticable, and that in accommodating itself to British policy and Arab pretensions, Zionism has shown a sensible statecraft. But the line of least resistance is neither the path of true statesman- ship nor the road of national salvation.
Under General Dj'er, Hindoos had to crawl. But under General Allenby, the Zionist leaders, with the redeeming excep- tion of Jabotinsky, have needed no crawling order. Disraeli said of O'Connell that he had committed every crime that did not require courage. Dr. Weizmann has displayed every virtue that does not require it.
Although Messrs. Lloyd George and Balfour cannot be acquitted of lethargy and levity in the whole business, they have the excuse of overwhelming preoccupations in every part of the world, and the fiasco of political Zionism would seem less due to any mala fides on their part than to the absence of national temper and creative courage in the Zionist leaders, who, belonging as they unfortunately did to cultural or agri- cultural and not to political Zionism, found themselves blinking at the vast perspectives so suddenly opened before them, and recoiled in alarm like the man in iEsop who called on Death and when Death came was taken aback. It is an historical tragedy, for wrong beginnings are almost impossible to rectify.
In short, what the dead founder of Zionism always appre- hended has come to pass. The great moment has found a small people.
n
Nothing could show the fiasco of political Zionism more clearly than the eagerness of anti-Zionists to take part in the work. Now that the national movement upon which so much enthusiasm, eloquence and money have been expended, and for which Captain Trumpeldor died, crying, " It is good to die for one's country," has dwindled to the familiar philanthropic task of immigration and colonisation under alien authority and responsibility, the communal leaders throw themselves into the work with their wonted beneficence. The danger is over, and the Messiah will not come in their time. They know better
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than to believe that trumpet. In vain the Zionists pretend that the times of Ezra and Nehemiah are returned, and the day of the Third Temple is at hand. A profound instinct, if not a reasoned analysis, reassures the pillars of the synagogue. In truth, not even the appointment of Mr. Herbert Samuel provides Judah with a Zerubbabel. There is no parallel between the two historic moments. If by the grace of Cyrus the Jewish State arose from its ashes and maintained itself for six centuries longer, though under a succession of suzerains, it was because the new order started under a Governor whose function was not to keep a balance between the various inhab- itants but to restore the Jewish supremacy, and who was not carefully labelled Persian to soothe the non-Jews. Cyrus did not talk high morality and political idealism, he did not under- stand that the same petty territory could afford a national home to two peoples. He did not make a magniloquent prom- ise to the Jews and then impose Persian law. Nor did he make the promise during the war between the Persian and Babylonian Empires, so as to seduce the Babylonian Jews from their alle- giance. With a magnanimous gesture Palestine was restored when victory was complete. Even the sacred vessels of the Temple were handed back to the returning exiles. There was no Persian bureaucracy to control their return. Their rhap- sodies were not illusionary. Harp and psaltery, cymbal and song celebrated a real home-coming.
Despite the role of espionage to which the Jews of Palestine lent themselves, and without which General Allenby's conquest would have been immeasurably more difficult (a role redeemed from ignominy only by the heroism of Sarah Aaronsohn, who though bastinadoed and tortured, shot herself rather than betray to the Arabs the headquarters of this secret service), British gratitude has so far been limited to rewarding the arch- spy and erecting a monument to the martyred girl. Of any real restoration of Palestine to the Jews there is not certain indication, and our exiles of to-day return with no assurance of even ultimate autonomy, though the women Zionists were invited by their mesmeric organisation to celebrate Redemption Week by throwing their jewels upon the altar, and all female babies born that week in the Jerusalem hospital have been named Geulah (Redemption). With a civil administration replacing the military bureaucracy under which the Hatikvah stood forbidden, the national hymn may now be sung only within closed Jewish doors; while on the Advisory Council the
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Jews are swamped by the Moslems and Christians, and all three alike by the British Government. This does not prevent the leaders from abounding in Messianic manifestoes, political, spiritual, and financial. They seem to have learnt from Disraeli that " with words we govern men."
So far from the Zionists being in a position to build up the model State they proclaim, even economic control of the coun- try is not to be secured by their Organisation or Jewry at large, except for individual concessions, from which, as from immigration and colonisation, they could scarcely have been barred, had there been no Balfour Declaration at all. A British Colony could not well exclude the race, a scion of which is Lord Chief Justice and another the Secretary for India, and which penetrated into Palestine even under the Turk. But the immigration of Jews is to be carefully restricted, and not directly by the Zionists themselves ; and when they do come in they will have to face the competition of the cheap and abun- dant Arab labour. The sole privilege of Jewry will be to supply the capital for sustaining them in their arduous begin- nings — two to three hundred pounds per immigrant on Dr. Weizmann's calculation.
We have only to compare this negation of political and eco- nomic power with the measure of autonomy offered by Joseph Chamberlain in East Africa to gauge the shrinkage in Zionism that goes with Zion. The Chamberlain concept of a British Judaea had already been nibbled down by the Foreign Office, but even the letter of Sir Charles Hill to Mr. Greenberg offers a far higher political status than that with which Dr. Weizmann has now been fobbed off in Palestine. Writing from the For- eign Office in August, 1903, Sir Charles Hill says he is instructed by Lord Lansdowne (the then Secretary for Foreign Affairs) to tell Mr. Greenberg that the Government is prepared to consider favourably a scheme, the main features of which are " the grant of a considerable area of land, the appointment of a Jewish official as the Chief of the Local Administra- tion . . . and local autonomy, conditional upon the right of His Majesty's Government to exercise general control" — in short, the establishment of a British- Jewish Crown Colony.
To Mr. Barnes, M.P., has apparently been assigned the task of defending the evisceration of the Balfourian promise, and with a brazenness to be found only in politicians, he has attrib- uted the pogrom in Palestine to that indiscreet announcement, although it was sanctioned by the Cabinet of which he was
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himself a member! But no verbal jugglery can make Mr. Balfour's letter to Lord Rothschild other than a promise of restoration of Palestine to the Jews and of the Jews to Pales- tine. It is true that this document nowhere speaks of Palestine as a Jewish National Home, but only of a Jewish National Home in Palestine, and that in holding a service of praise in the Cathedral Synagogue thanking God for the former conces- sion, the Zionists have combined mendacity with blasphemy. But although it had by then been made clear to them that Great Britain has been granted no mandate for " Palestine as the Jewish National Home," nothing can absolve Mr. Balfour from the responsibility for having promised it. For words are not the sole constituents of an utterance. The atmosphere, the " universe of discourse," also counts. And it was not merely because of the fanfaronades of the Zionists nor because of the prepossession of an ancient traditional hope that the outside world — Moslem and Christian alike — read into the Declaration the larger meaning. It was because the air was full of the resurrection of peoples, the horizon rosy with national restorations. Mr. Balfour is too old a diplomatist not to have understood in what sense his words, however guarded, would be taken. And no breath of disavowal came from him when, at a great Zionist Demonstration, members or representatives of the Government like Lord Robert Cecil or the late Sir Mark Sykes inflamed the Jewish imagination (and the Arab resentment), while Herbert Samuel was allowed to com- promise his reputation as a sober politician by declaring that next year would see Israel in Jerusalem, according to the im- memorial aspiration.
But we do not need these witnesses nor the unanimous world- Press to testify to what Mr. Balfour promised. Fortunately we have another utterance of his dated ten months later, which so far from repudiating repeats and embroiders. On Septem- ber 20th, 1918, Mr. Balfour wrote a preface to Mr. Sokolow's " History of Zionism." And from this preface it is clear that he honestly meant to restore Palestine to the Jews, though he had not been sufficiently advised of the difficulties of the task, and was relying on Dr. Weizmann's ancient argumentation in the East-Africa crisis. Remarking for example upon the " strange and unhappy " fact that the one people for whom race, religion, and territory, are uniquely inter-related should be the one people without any territory at all, the one people that has " nowhere been able to create for itself an organised
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social commonwealth," he is obviousty exposed to the implica- tion that this " organised social commonwealth " was now to be set up, even though it involved what he calls a reversal of the course of history. And he goes on : " If as I believe Zionism can be developed into a working scheme, the benefit it would bring to the Jewish people, especially perhaps to that section of it which most deserves our pity, would be great and lasting. It is not merely that large numbers of them would thus find a refuge from religious and social persecution ; but that they would bear corporate responsibilities and enjoy corporate opportunities of a kind which, from the nature of the case, they can never possess as citizens of any non-Jewish State."
Obviously then the advantages which they cannot possess in a non-Jewish State must accrue to them as citizens of a Jewish State! Even in this preface, Mr. Balfour, it will be seen, remains the politician, the airy avoider of the positive. But with all his caution he cannot avoid the affirmation that lies in negation obverted. Nor are more direct evidences wanting, though they are never wholly unscreened by hypothesis. " Those who go to Palestine will not be like those who now migrate to London or New York. They will not be animated merely by the desire to lead in happier surroundings the kind of life they formerly led in Eastern Europe. They will go in order to join a civil community which completely harmonises with their historical and religious sentiments ; a community bound to the land it inhabits by something deeper even than custom : a community whose members will suffer from no divided loyalty, nor any temptation to hate the laws under which they are forced to live. To them the material gain should be great : but surely the spiritual gain will be greater still." And answer- ing the fears of the anti-Zionists that (the italics are mine) " their ancient home having been restored to them, they would be expected to reside there," he reassures them, denying only the latter clause. He adds (and again the italics are mine) : " Everything which assimilates the national and international status of the Jews to that of other races ought to mitigate what remains of ancient antipathies : and evidently this assimilation would be promoted by giving them that which all other nations possess: a local habitation and a national home."
Finally he regards the problem in its true light, not merely as a Jewish problem, but also as a world-problem. But the cloven hoof of the anti-Semite which was displayed in his con- tribution to the East- Africa controversy, peeps out again.
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Zionism receives his support as " a serious endeavour to miti- gate the age-long miseries created for Western civilisation by the presence in its midst of a Body which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or absorb." Unless by " age-long miseries " Mr. Balfour means the spiritual miseries of hating, persecuting, and mas- sacring, by which " Western civilisation " afflicted its own soul, this is a very reprehensible statement. The Jews have brought " Western civilisation " not miseries but untold blessings. But if Mr. Balfour's Zionism is an attempt to assist " Western civilisation " to rid itself of its unwelcome foreign Body, still more clearly must he have intended offering that Body the maximum of territory and opportunity in Palestine.
But in the project as it now materialises, a mere fraction of this Body is simply to change its place of exile, and new mis- eries of race-friction are to be created. " Now you have got a start," ran Mr. Lloyd George's historic message from San Remo. " And it is up to you to make good." It cannot be too emphatically recorded that no start has been given except for colonisation and immigration, and that whatever the measure of success reached, the gain will be more to the British Empire than to Jewry. For while that Empire will be safeguarded by a new barrier for the defence of Egypt, and enriched by a loyal and industrious population that may be used for its battles, and while its derelict acquisition will be converted into a com- paratively fruitful and self-supporting colony, the Jewish problem will remain not merely untransformed but largely un- alleviated. There will be neither quantity of salvation nor quality of status. A common task unifies the workers, and thus the common concentration on Palestine will strengthen and perpetuate the Diaspora on its present lines — a dubious bless- ing indeed. In the deal with Christendom the Jew, as usual, has got the worse of the bargain.
Ill
What will be the status of a Jew who becomes a citizen of the new (or nursling) British Arab State in Palestine? Is he by nationality British, Jewish, Arab or Palestinian? He will become Palestinian, it appears. But by a strange ukase of the Supreme Council of the Allies, he may also retain his original nationality ; an arrangement which on the day — if ever it dawns — when the State reaches full-fledged independence,
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will produce a rare chaos in its constitution. In the meantime, since Palestine is supposed to be training for self-government as a ward of the League of Nations, and Britain is merely the transitory vice-guardian — Palestine citizenship except for existing British subjects carries no rights in the British Em- pire, conveys no claims to the Palmerstonian Civis romanus sum, nor any right to land in Melbourne, Montreal or London except as an alien, or even as an Asiatic ! This will not prevent the Jews of Palestine from being regarded as British by the rest of the world, while the Jewries of the Diaspora, from all of which energies and finances will be streaming towards Pales- tine, can scarcely escape being regarded as pro-British. The peril of such a situation for non-British Jews in the event of a war between England and other Powers possessing Jewish populations needs no accentuation. After our recent experi- ence of the temper and temperature of peoples at war, we know that the Jews will be fortunate if they escape with simple internment. The Jews of England hastened to form a League of British Jews to emphasise that they accepted no political loyalty to the Jewish State that seemed to be looming. But the danger to them is non-existent: it is Leagues of French or German or American Jews that the situation calls for. Still more dubious is the position of the Palestine Jews themselves in the event of the mandatory becoming involved in war. Would Palestine as a ward of the League of Nations be neutral, or would England expect the Palestinians to rally to her defence? Would they, protected by the British Empire but enjoying no privileges in it, be expected to share in its mani- fold risks? Very probably, though the dictionary defines a mandatory as one who does service without compensation. And in the unhappy contingency of war with France, would the nursling States be expected to embrace the feud of their respective mandatories, and British Palestine be involved in combat with the adjoining French Syria? Would not, in such a crisis, the Arabs of both countries join forces against both belligerents, and Jewry be slaughtered between the Moslem and the Christian? In truth, the relations of mandatories to their wards seem as shadowy as their own relations to the League of Nations. No fundamental brain-work seems vet to have been done upon the whole subject. But perhaps fundamental brain- work would reveal too clearly upon what a filmy foundation political structures have been reared, and politicians, whether Christian or Hebrew, prefer to glide along in a nebulosity
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which covers the nullity of their concepts, and conceals the precipices over which they career. The mandatory idea in fact belongs to the concept of the world as commonwealth. It cannot be applied to the world as cockpit.
The risks that will arise to foreign Jewries from their sup- posed pro-Britishism, and to Palestine Jews from their resi- dence in the unholy land of religious and political rivalries, would have been worth running, had Israel really achieved, or could he really achieve, independence there. But the autonomy that lies in numbers is a dubious and distant goal, and for gen- erations Israel falls between two stools, neither British nor non- British, neither bond nor free. At best it was doubtful whether in view of the prophetic idealism intertangled with Israel's national life, the nation could afford to owe its resurrection to opportunism and to the politicians of the blockade and the super-Bismarckian Peace. Mazzini with his flaming Repub- lican faith obstinately refused to lend himself to the monarch- ical manoeuvres of Cavour. But Cavour did achieve the Risorgimento, whereas Palestine is still irredenta. An oppor- tunism which does not even grasp its opportunity is doubly damnable — it is the bungling of Sancho Panza added to the collapse of Don Quixote. To sell one's birthright and not even get the mess of pottage!
The tragic irony of the situation is enhanced by the fact that the state of the Jewish people as a whole is immeasurably blacker than at any time even in its own tenebrous history. The world's nerves are now so blunted by the horrors in which it has wallowed that it is almost futile to draw attention to a series of massacres, expulsions, boycotts, menaces and other persecutions that outdo in their totality the miseries of any other people, the Armenians not excluded. Yet vast sums that ought to have been used for relief — and there is talk of raising twenty-five million pounds — are diverted to a project, which could demand preference only if it were a real national Redemp- tion. Whereas not only is there no Jewish State within view, but Palestine is not even permitted, or able, to receive the wretched hordes streaming to beat desperately at her gates, many of whom perish, perhaps fortunately, under the hard- ships of the route or in the wretched sailing smacks with which thev trv to cross the Black Sea or the Mediterranean. The same number of the Jewish Chronicle that contained the news of the incorporation of the Palestine project in the Turkish Peace Treaty contained on a single page the following items of
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Foreign News, the content of which I summarise under each heading.
German- Austrians Maltreat Jews
Closing of Vienna University through a riot against the Jewish students with the destruction of their furniture.
Another Ukraine Massacre
A pogrom in Podolia by the soldiers of General Bredoff's army. Thirty Jews killed, over a hundred wounded. Twenty- six Jewesses raped. Indescribable cruelties.
Riot at Kovno
Victorious Polish troops in the Ukrainian towns cut off beards of Jews and then beat them.
Deputy Farbstein Attacked
Soldiers attack him in the train. An officer recognises and saves him.
Rioting in Galicia
Jewish quarters of Cracow, Lemberg and Grodek attacked. Beards cut. Jews beaten.
Anti-Semitic Libel Exposed
Appeal of Petrograd Jewish Bolshevists to fellow-Jews to enslave the whole world, found to be a forgery printed by the pogram organisers in the Ukraine.
Vilna Yiddish Newspaper Suspended
For printing the names of the Jews killed in the last pogrom.
Jewish Exodus from Poland
A panic-stricken flight, reported in The Times. 700 to 1,000 passports applied for daily. 100,000 have received passports and are waiting to travel to the United States, where, however, their admission is doubtful.
Elections in Poland
A municipal election giving the Jews a majority, the Polish
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authorities annulled it, and arrested the Jewish leader till the elections were over.
The Alliance Israelite and the Relief for Poland
Details of subscriptions for clothes and boots for the pogrom victims and the many orphans of Eastern Galicia.
Outrages upon Hungarian Jewesses
Drunken officers and soldiers outrage interned Jewesses, rob and kill interned Jews.
Jewish Professors in Hungary Boycotted
Christian students boycott Jewish professors and lecturers. Some resign, others are advised to ask prolonged leave.
The White Terror in Hungary
700 Jews disappear without leaving trace. A Jewish mer- chant of Czech citizenship who intervenes against the ill-treat- ment of a Hungarian Jew is arrested and ends in an asylum, creeping under the table when a visitor enters.
Hungarian Rabbi Arrested
The Chief Rabbi of Szegedin arrested for a bitter speech against Hungary and the Hungarians.
Jews Protest against Hungary
Mass meeting in Vienna to protest against treatment of Jews in Hungary.
A Terrible Passover
Troops surround the Synagogue, thrash the head of the community and all the other congregants. " The soldiers seized an ailmg Jew of sixty-three years, cut his beard off, put it into grease, and compelled him to eat it."
Anti-Semitic Cruelties in Hungary
Hungarian noblemen delight to torture Jews. Count Salsz, for example, summons the family of Simon Kemoni, stabs him
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to death, and while the wife bends over the body, dances in his blood, shouting he is " very pleased to smell Jewish blood."
Jewish Civil Servants Barred
Jews dismissed and barred from the Civil Service in the Car- pathian Provinces of Czecho-Slovakia.
Expulsion of Jews from France
Many Jewish fugitives expelled by Ministry of Interior. Many only released from German prisons at armistice — police demand from them passports duly vised by the French Consul of the country from which they came — an obvious impossi- bility.
Anti-Semitic Bluff
Following an anti-Semitic Mass Meeting, an expulsion order against all " aliens " in Lower Austria aimed at the Jewish fugi- tives from the East or from the White Terror in Hungary. A bluff because no trains to transport them.
Jewish Students Excluded
The University of Graz, the capital of Styria, tries to copy Budapest University.
Recipe against Judaism
Reactionary Austrian officers and Pan-Germans stir up pop- ulation against Jews, declaring Austria must first become German so as to fight the Judaisation of the world.
An Anti-Semitic Bank
The old Austrian nobility establish a " purely Aryan " Bank of Styria, "to stem the flood from the East." The Chief Magistrate of Styria is the President — a combination de- nounced in the Arbeit er Zeitung as corrupt.
The Position of Algerian Jews
The Algerian Jews, 2,000 of whom have died in battle for France, demand the abolition of political and economic restric- tions.
The chronicle flows on to another page, for are there not
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expulsions from Bavaria, pamphlets distributed throughout Germany by the million, urging Jew-massacres, a pogrom even in Jerusalem, etc., etc.? But enough! This, be it marked, is by no means a bad page of Jewish news of the week. There is no atrocity on a colossal scale, such as ensanguines the record in other weeks. It is an average example of the continuous pogrom in action, the vast majority of the episodes in which never even find their way into print, and more than counter- balance any possible exaggeration in those recorded. Such is the background of the Zionist rejoicings. Nowhere have " the drums and tramplings " been more continuous than in the Jewish zones of Europe: towns have been taken and re-taken by the rival armies, and the Jews massacred by all. Kieff has been thus captured — to the music of Jewish death-rattles — seventeen times ! And even where Peace has slowly dawned it brings no balm to the Ghetto, for the abnormal accentuation of race-consciousness in war-time has aggravated anti-Semitism, especially in the beaten countries. England herself combines protection of the Jew in Palestine with a restiveness against " aliens " at home and a tyrannous deportation of as many as possible.
Infinitely more important and urgent, therefore, than any pseudo-Restoration to Palestine is the problem of the Diaspora. The treaty for minorities drawn up by the Peace Conference, although Poland still cynically ignores it, has set a standard of political ethics, which the world cannot afford to abate. But the question remains, shall the Jews be recognised as national minorities, or shall they simply exist as free and equal citizens of the majority-State? The latter is the form preferred by the old-established English Jews, and corresponds to the fact that national minorities do not exist in England except geographically. The other system, though it has excited apprehension as of a State within a State, is merely a similar device for self-protection, a method of organising a racially mixed State by its constituent factors ; a grouping by races instead of districts. Since none of these races demands or enjoys a separate foreign policy, fiscal system, or Parliamen- tary assembly, such a constitution appears to offer the valuable combination of variety with unity, and to present a sort of League of Nations in microcosm. It would seem the only way of doing justice to the many large racial minorities embedded amid majorities by the Peace Treaties, and were it applied to Palestine would tend more truly to produce a " Jewish National
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Home " therein, without prej udice to Arab rights, than a British or American voting system, especially if supplemented by a Ministry of Jewish Affairs, such as already exists in Lithuania and was essayed in the unstable Ukraine. In coun- tries where anti-Semitism reigns, this group system is a guar- antee that the common national Parliament will contain a proportional number of Jewish deputies. It is true the Jewish vote might without this arrangement provide as many Jewish or pro-Jewish deputies. But in practice it has been found — as recently in Poland — that the gerrymandering of the con- stituencies so as to water down Jewish majorities may leave Jewry without even the requisite number of representatives for an interpellation in the House. But however this question be decided, the intolerable conditions of Central-European Jewry will necessitate a large migration of the masses whom Palestine cannot receive, and who are already taking the ancient road to New York.
That was the path of salvation which the instinct of the masses found for itself, when the pogroms of the early 'eighties began to break up Russo-Jewish life. There lay the road to safety and opportunity. America was the only country of the world in which they could arrive in their tens of thousands with- out arousing serious prejudice. There, and there alone, for- eignness was almost the rule instead of the exception ; a score of other alien groups vied with the Jewish group and facilitated its settlement. And if the Gentiles tended to fuse less slowly in the mammoth Melting Pot, and if more obstinate Jewry found itself faced with a new synthetic anti-Semitism, yet the equal political right of the Jews already in possession tended to repress any graver manifestation, and every fresh Jew brought added safety and political strength. America was, after all, pledged to the doctrine of what Roosevelt called " the square deal." There was lacking only the ramification of the stream of Jewish immigration over the country at large, into the West of which it trickled too slowly. And this a depart- ment of the Jewish Territorial Organisation strove to precipi- tate by constituting Galveston an additional port for Jewish immigration — an attempt which Zionism in its blindness with- stood, and which was successful only to the extent of settling some ten thousand souls in the smaller Western towns as nuclei of further immigration. But the vast area thus opened up offers — if autonomy is to be set aside — a much more prac- ticable and economical outlet for the swarming, impoverished
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and tormented Jewries of Europe than can be provided by the tiny half-ruined British-Arab territory in Palestine, where the mob that asks for bread cannot be put off with a stone, how- ever holy. Unless Central Europe settles down to a security and prosperity of which there are as yet no signs, or a Russia, re-established and non-reactionary, supplies a nearer and more attractive magnet to the Polish-Jewish masses, America, whose immigration laws will inevitably be relaxed under the dearth of white labour and the need of production, will as inevitably — by whatever port of entry — resume her old place as the Jewish land of refuge.1
1 The latest statistics show 37,000 Jews arriving in New York within a, few weeks, and the majority departing to join their relatives in the West. It would thus seem that the Galveston work was more successful than one had imagined, and that, exactly as designed, the 10,000 souls planted in the West are now operating as nuclei to attract immigration from the Eastern slums.
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" OUR OWN " : A CRY ACROSS THE ATLANTIC
(Written for the Central Belief Committee of America.)
Jews of the great Republic,
Clasped to her mother-breast, Nestling so warm and peaceful
Within that bosom blest, Turn to our tortured Europe,
Hark to the myriad moan Of pinched lips, white with hunger,
That stiffen as they groan, And remember in these wan creatures runs the blood that is your own.
Their sires and yours together
Bore Spam's or Poland's scorn ; With quenchless faith in marshfires
They followed after morn. They built their house on quicksand,
Or the red volcano's cone, And every age beheld it
Engulfed or overthrown, For never in all the ages did a home remain their own.
By devastated dwellings,
By desecrated fanes, By hearth-stones, cold and crimsoned,
And slaughter-reeking lanes, Again is the Hebrew quarter
Through half of Europe known ; And crouching in the shambles,
Rachel, the ancient crone, Weeps again for her children and the fate that is her own.
No laughter rings in these ruins Save of girls to madness shamed.
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Their mothers disembowelled
Lie stark 'mid children maimed. The Shule has a great congregation
But never a psalm they drone, Shrouded in red-striped Tallesvm,
Levi huddles with Kohn ; But the blood from their bodies oozing is the blood that is your own.
Shot, some six to a bullet,
Lashed and trailed in the dust, Mutilated with hatchets
In superbestial lust — No beast can even imagine
What Christians do or condone — Surely these bear our burden
And for our sins atone, And if we hide our faces, then the guilt is as our own.
Laden with babes and bundles,
Footsore on every road, Their weary remnants wander,
With bayonets for goad. They cry : Shema' Yisroel
In tragic monotone, And if ye, Israel, hear not,
By whom shall ruth be shown? For the strength whereby God saves us is the strength that is our own.
Alas ! for the wizened infants,
Sucking at stone-dry breasts, Alas ! for the babies writhing
In the grip of plagues and pests. They are fever-stricken and famished,
They are rotten of skin and bone, Yet their mothers must die and leave them
To suffer and starve alone. And any one of these children might be your very own.
Barefoot, ragged and staring Like walkers in their sleep,
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Feeding on bark or sawdust,
The doomed processions creep ; Crawling through marsh or snowdrift
Or forest overgrown, They bear on high their Torah
Like a flag to heaven flown; They prove how great their spirit, let us prove how great our own.
At last but a naked rabble,
Clawing the dust for bread, Jabbering, wailing, whining,
Hordes of the living dead; Half apes, half ghosts, they grovel,
Nor human is their tone, Yet they are not brutes but brethren,
These wrecks of the hunger-zone, And their death-cry rings to heaven in the tongue that is your own.
Jews of the great Republic,
Who gave your sons to death, That Peace be born in Europe
And Justice draw new breath, Will ye still endure to witness
As of yore your kindred thrown To races whose souls are savage,
To tribes whose hearts are stone, Compared with the love and mercy that for ages have warmed our own?
Set your lips to the Shofar,
Waken a fiery blast, Shrill to the heathen nations
This slaughter shall be the last ! And send our old Peace-greeting
Pealing from cot to throne, Till mankind heeds the message
On the Hebrew trumpet blown, And the faith of the whole world's peoples is the faith that is our own.
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THE POLISH-JEWISH PROBLEM
The following remarkable statement was made in the Temps of April 7th, 1920, by Signor Arturo Cappa, its Warsaw Correspondent :
" A few days ago I had a conversation with M. Andrew Niemojewski, a man of superior culture, who had made a speciality of the Jewish question, and is the combined publisher and editor of the journal My si Niepodlegla, which has a circu- lation among all the classes of the population. I could not, however, withhold my sense of indignation when I heard from him the following utterances :
" ' We are now preparing a pogrom on a larger scale than the others; the last gigantic and -final pogrom. In that way we shall solve the Jewish question in Poland.9
" When I observed that it was not possible to put to death 15 per cent, of the population, and that the conscience of the whole world would rise against such a deed, he said in reply :
"'And why not? Has not the European war sacrificed millions of lives? In face of the universal Reaction Poland would come out even greater and more noble.' "
M. Niemo j ewski's sentiments throw a lurid light upon the ethical effects of the Great War for Righteousness and Free- dom. Nor are they peculiar to this " man of superior cul- ture." During the war Mr. Stephen Graham honestly warned us that such was the temper of the country which England and France proposed to redeem and re-establish, but I could not believe that it would dare to betray its savagery to its enlight- ened saviours. It had, however, better taken the measure of their morality, and by its advance in Russia it displayed its Prussian belief that success is the only touchstone now in appli- cation or regard. As for its common sense in undertaking fresh wars, this may be gauged from the fact that it has had two million cases of typhus, not to mention the exhaustion and under-feeding of the rest of the population.
There is an authoritative statement available on the condi- tion of the Jews, against whom M. Niemojewski gaily announces
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his crusade. Mr. Bernard Horwich, representative of the American Joint Distribution Committee in Poland, a distrib- utor of the twenty-five million dollars collected by the American Jewish Relief Committee, the Central Relief Committee, and the People's Relief Committee, says :
" Of the 350,000 Jews in Warsaw, one-quarter are famishing, 135,000 receive a mark a day. Persons die daily of underfeeding. Hundreds of families live on a single plate of soup each from the soup kitchen, and sometimes the soup is exhausted before the last of the queue is reached. Children of eight to ten years are so weak they have to be carried, their bones growing soft. In many houses of Warsaw bed-linen is absent, having been used up for the corpses. Children of eight to ten may be seen running around the streets at midnight, having lost all their family. One boy of thirteen had the charge of three smaller brothers and sisters. I saw eighteen per- sons living in a cold and filthy hole too bad for a dog. They have no money to emigrate."
Dr. Haim I. Davis, a major in the U. S. Red Cross Commis- sion to Poland, reported that the younger generation of Jews was virtually wiped out.
" In Warsaw," he says, " I visited the largest Jewish hospital. It had 700 beds and was trying to care for 1,100 patients, prac- tically without medicine or disinfectants of any kind. There was not even any coal to warm water for bathing the patients, for the Poles were fighting one of the other new nations for possession of the coalfields.
" While I was in the hospital a Jewish baby was born. The mother of that baby had had no food of any kind for four days. Mothers in this country can perhaps imagine the anguish of the Jewish mother who gave life to the child only to know that it must starve to death.
" This case was not the exception, but the rule. I travelled 2,000 miles in Poland, and in every city, town and village emaciated Jew- ish children piteously cried for bread. Poland is a purgatory, not made by God but by man, and in it human beings are suffering un- tellable tortures."
We may deduce that the non-Jewish population is in little better case. One may search history in vain for any record of folly equal to the fighting and persecuting policy of re-born Poland.
And in vain, too, would one search history for a sadder illustration of the demoralising effects of victory. Here is a
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nation whose tragedy has much in common with that of Israel, a nation which nobly saved its soul from the wreck of its State, which — torn into three fragments, complicated by a dias- pora — held on for a hundred and twenty years, clinging to its language and its hope of resurrection, even sent its sons as knights of freedom to fight at all the barricades of Europe for all other forlorn hopes, all other enslaved peoples. Yet the moment its liberation is achieved, it sets out — a beggar on horseback — to trample on other peoples both within and with- out its legitimate ambit, and regards any remonstrance — even from the Powers that have re-created it — as a violation of its " sovereign rights."
In 1902 a German teacher flogged little Polish children for refusing to say their prayers in German. To-day, especially in the Ukrainian provinces, Ukrainian children are maltreated for refusing to speak Polish. In 1908, at the invitation of Sienkiewicz, I joined in the general protest of European men of letters against the Prussification of German Poland by the " Hakatist " policy of placing Germans on Polish land.1 To-day, alas ! all Poland is Prussianised and in a worse sense. For what is now in process is the Polonisation of Ukrainian land. No wonder that Brandes, the most fervid appreciator of the Poles in all literature, has now recanted his rhapsodies. Required by the Peace Conference to sign a clause for the pro- tection of its minorities, Poland fretted and fumed and protested it was being treated like a Central African savage tribe. But I know no African tribe that has proposed to destroy three million fellow-citizens of ancient standing. If anywhere there was a case calling for the appointment of a Mandatory Power, and for a period of wardship, it was the country that could thus celebrate its re-birth, and whose un- bridled recklessness not only nearly destroyed itself over again, but threatened to plunge all Europe into a second great war. Never was there a more comical proclamation than that put forward by the Polish Council of National Defence when the capture of Warsaw was imminent. " The nations of the world," said the signatories, " cannot be heedless to the blood- shed which threatens to overrun not only Poland but also threatens the right of men and nations to free and independent existence." And rising to the heights of grandiose eloquence,
i The British policy of expelling settled German colonists from ex-Ger- man East Africa shows that here, as in other respects, we have copied Prus- sia and can hardly talk morality to Poland.
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" Wake up, nations of the world," they cried, " humanity, justice and truth call you! " I am reminded of a repartee in one of Sydney Grundy's plays. " I demand justice," cries the lady, and the man replies, " Madam, I will do nothing so cruel." Nobody would wish to execute full justice upon the Poles, especially when one remembers how they have been incited by the Powers that should have restrained them. They needed for their young, amorphous, and heterogeneous State a host of financiers, engineers, railway men, agricultural and other tech- nical experts. The Powers sent them Military Missions. And these Missions were not only provocative to Poland but misin- formative to the Powers, haunting as they did the officers' clubs and catching only military refractions of the situation.
II
Peoples, like books, have their fates, and history has so inter- twined the Jews and the Poles that early Polish coinage bears Hebrew inscriptions, and for centuries Poland has been the very centre of gravity for all Jewry. While the probable existence of Jews in pagan Poland rests only on legend, there is historical evidence that from about the year 1000, which may roughly stand for the date of its Christianisation, Jewish communities have flourished there, and their treatment by the Poles com- pares very favourably on the whole with what they had to endure in the rest of Christendom. In more than one era Poland was their refuge from persecution ; it was at the invita- tion of its liberal and intelligent kings and under protection of its charters that Jews flowed in to fill many blanks and niches in its economic and industrial life; it was in Poland that for three centuries they enjoyed an autonomy unknown elsewhere; here were the chief centres of Talmudical study and Cabbalistic lore, and here arose the one important heresy of modern Judaism, the joyous mysticism of the followers of " The Master of the Name," the Jewish St. Francis.
After the fall of Jerusalem, the Jews, amid obscurer or more tragic adventures, had found a tolerable home in Babylonia, and later they had flourished for a halcyon century or two in the lap of Saracenic Spain. But of all their stepmother lands it is Poland which has harboured the largest number of Jews, and in which for the last five centuries they felt most at home. Amid the raging hatred of the rest of Europe, the statesman-
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ship of the Polish kings — so much superior to that of the nobles or the populace — and the tolerance due to a dynastic marriage with religiously divergent Lithuania, combined to establish Poland as the magnet of the race. Hither the Jews poured to escape the massacres that shadowed the Crusades, and to fill the economic gap in a country consisting only of nobles and peasants. Hither in the twelfth century they car- ried their Old German language, now known as Yiddish, and here, under the autonomy of the Kahal and the Council of the Four Lands, a Jewish population greater than the population of England in the days of Elizabeth has lived for centuries under its own culture and institutions. Not, indeed, without exactions, frictions and persecutions, for the nobility, high or low, the middle classes, the clergy and the peasantry of this unpractical country were united only by their opposition to the Jew, but still with comparative content. The history of modern Jewry may almost be said to be that of Polish Jewry, for the Pale was only the share of old Poland that fell to Russia at the trisection, and into Russia proper the Jew was never allowed to penetrate, save under rare circumstances.
" By the beginning of the fourteenth century," writes the historian Dubnow, " Polish Jewry had become a big economic and social factor with which the State was bound to reckon. It was now destined to become also an independent spiritual entity, having stood for 400 years under the tutelage of the Jewish centre in Germany."
So assimilated biologically did the Jews become to their fellow-citizens in the course of this long symbiosis, that Sir Stuart Samuel found it " impossible to distinguish between the type of Jew prevailing in the Vilna-Pinsk district and that of the ordinary Russian or Tartar inhabitants." And although their life was always shadowed by blood-accusations and mas- sacres, the Polish Jews developed a love of Poland, and a patriotism quite as keen as that of the Poritz, the nobleman who thought Jewish blood too vile to be mixed with his even in battle. At all the great crises of Polish history Jews fought side by side with Poles. When in the seventeenth century the Ukrainians, aided by the Cossacks, overran Poland, with every Polish priest hung up at the high altar were hung a dog and a Jew. " Freedom shrieked when Kosciuszko fell," says Byron. But when Kosciuszko fell, a regiment of Jewish volunteers under the famous Yoselevitch covered with their bodies the road to Warsaw. In the unsuccessful rising against Russia in 1830
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another Jewish regiment took part; called, from their long beards, the Beardlings. And in the last revolt against Russia in 1863 the Jews of Warsaw on the solemn feast of the New Year prayed in synagogue for the Polish cause and sang the Polish hymn : " It is not yet over with Poland." The Poles at that time issued a proclamation to the Jews, saying : " And it shall come to pass, when, with God's help, we shall free our country from the tyranny of Russia, we shall enjoy in common the fruits of peace. You and your children shall be in unre- stricted possession of all civil rights. For the Government of the People will not inquire into faith and religion, but solely into the place of birth."
Now, after fifty-seven years, Poland is free from the tyranny of Russia and we see how she keeps her word. It is true that a Polish Professor at Cracow complains that during the recent war the Jews of Germany and Austrian Poland showed " an unhesitating and absolute loyalty to Germany and Austria " while the Poles were in sullen opposition. But in the half- century since the very name of Poland was blotted out, it can- not be expected that the Jews, born under the German and Austrian Governments, many of them of parents to whom Polish government was equally unknown, should have imbibed that Polish patriotism which the Polish children proper sucked in secretly from their elders. With the Jew, as with any other immigrant, patriotism — in the first generation at least — cannot be racial but is the result of an intelligent co-operation with the good of the State which shelters him, and I know not why the herd-instinct of the animal should be preferred to the conscious choice of human will and reason, as for instance in those Germans who emigrated to America to escape the atmos- phere of militarism.
" Seek the peace of the city where you are carried away captive" has always been the Jewish doctrine, and already at the moment of writing the Polish Jews are at their old business of fasting and prayer on behalf of Polish victory, and are issuing patriotic appeals to stand by Poland in her hour of crisis.
Another analogous allegation of the Poles in condonation of their outrages is that they got on very well with the old Polish Jews — the Polctckim — but that since the Russian Jews were driven out of many Russian towns in the 'eighties, the westward stream of immigration into Russian Poland has poured in on them a new class of Jews — the Litvakim — who brought with
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them no feeling for the Polish irredenta. This may be true — indeed the persistent hostility of Polackim and Litvakim in the London Ghetto of to-day argues that the old Polish Jews resented the newcomers as much as the Polish Christians did — but in general the Polish peasantry, when left unpoisoned by propaganda, are on the friendliest terms with the Jews, who, for their part, soon grow to love Poland. And even if the Russian Jews brought with them on arrival a Russian atmos- phere, they also brought with them considerable benefits to Polish trade. Warsaw, which received the richest contingent, began to blossom out with Polish-Russian enterprises. But neither the Polish sentiments of the older Polish Jewry nor the material boons of the new, avail to abate the anti-Jewish boy- cott which is reducing the Jewish masses to despair, or the graver persecutions by which the Poles, with complete ignor- ance of economic law, propose to drive out the three million Jews embedded in their State by the accidents of history. With a reckless levity that is rebuked even by their own sym- pathiser, Captain Wright, of the British Commission to Poland, they suppose that so ancient and all-ramifying a con- nection can be slit asunder as easily as Alexander slit the Gordian knot.
Despite the Minority Treaty, by their Sunday Closing Law they have reduced the working days of the Jew to one less than their own, and by their Aliens' Law have already disfranchised 200,000 Jews who did not register as Poles when Poland was }Tet a province of Russia I It throws an interesting light on this latter grievance that when Paris Jews originally hailing from Poland tried to register in Paris as Poles, the Polish bureaus refused to grant them certificates and allowed them to be stigmatised or interned as Germans [ Of course, when, on the other hand, the Poles were taking a census of East Galicia, where the Ukrainians outnumbered them by 350,000, they insisted on counting all the 660,000 Jews as Poles, and interned hundreds who refused the label. These statistical juggleries go far to confirm the claim of Jews to constitute a separate nationality in lands of mixed population where they are densely represented. But the present boycott of the Jews in Poland is not due to their national claim, but to their refusal at Warsaw in 1912 to elect an anti-Semitic member to the Duma. They held the voting power and could have returned a Jew, yet they were menaced with massacre unless they returned the notorious Dmowski. I remember being consulted on this
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point and advising, subject to my ignorance of local conditions, that it was humiliating enough not to be represented by a Jewish member, but that to vote for an anti-Semite would be fatal to their self-respect and that the risks must be taken. The Jews of Warsaw accordingly returned the only candidate who would pledge himself not to support an anti-Semitic policy, but although this was a Pole and a Roman Catholic, the defeated Dmowski devoted himself henceforward to a campaign of persecution. And as if his hapless country had not enough enemies on her borders and enough internal problems to con- front, she has saddled herself with this one-sided civil war, for the boycott is a form of quarrel which it takes only one to make.
The war gave the Poles the opportunity of more drastic revenge. When the Russians invaded Galicia the Poles denounced the Jews as pro-Germans, hostile to the conquerors. When the Austrians recaptured a town, the Poles denounced the Jews as pro-Russians. What wonder if £15 pogroms were reported from Poland!
These, of course, were denied. Sazonoff denied them for Russia, which was still responsible for Poland. And they were denied by England, which considered herself responsible for Russia. All who tried to prove them were accused of inventing slanders against Russia to weaken the Allies.
Well do I remember the difficulty of telling the truth about Russia in those days. Russia was then a saintly Steam Roller.
And now when we are told that the later pogroms have also had no existence, one cannot help suspecting so strange a coincidence. Unfortunately even Captain Wright's report leaves the new Poland stained with streams of innocent Jewish blood.
At the Peace Conference in 1815 Alexander of Russia pro- posed the restoration and reunion of Poland, and he had almost persuaded Prussia to agree to it. But France and England smashed up his plan. In 1916 these same two Powers were secretly leagued with Russia to hand over to her even German and Austrian Poland. To-day these friends of nationality — more especially France, which, crazed by its war-losses and its financial instability, has egged on Poland to new disaster — desire a Poland as large as possible as a buffer to keep Ger- many and Russia apart. It has been awkward for them that the most important creation of the Paris Conference — that Conference which was to make the world safe for democracy and to protect righteousness and small peoples — should have
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shown itself more barbarous than the countries out of which it has been pieced together again.
" Jews must get away from Poland," reports a recent Ameri- can visitor. And as a matter of fact they are leaving to the tune of two thousand a week, and the Polish authorities tell us a quarter of a million have applied for passports. But three millions are a tough number to emigrate, and even if it is true that the Poles are now developing commercial habits, and that the Jews are replaceable, this critical moment of economic re-birth is hardly the moment to replace them. Not in emi- gration but in co-operation lies the solution of the Polish- Jewish problem. The New Poland cannot do without her Jews, whose international network of business relationships is Poland's only hope. It is a question if even with the Jews she can keep her head above water. In 1914—15, when the Russians invaded Galicia and prohibited Jewish commerce there, the population nearly died of starvation. It is strange that Poland should fail to understand that an industrious popula- tion is a greater treasure than gold mines. A shrewd Polish Jew reassured me as to the danger of gigantic pogroms, on the ground that however the Poles might bluster they were too inefficient to do anything thoroughly or on a grand scale. It would seem that even for pogroms they would need Jewish assistance. On this point the warning of the Christian member of the Polish Commission is still graver than Sir Stuart Samuel's ! " A race planted in Poland a thousand }rears, how- ever inconvenient, cannot be eradicated without a convulsion that would be almost fatal."
Ill
Sensible as is this admonition of Captain Peter Wright's, and laudable as is the studv he has with abnormal conscientiousness given to the Polish-Jewish problem — he has even shamefacedly read German books — his report throws more light upon his own psychology than on that of the Polish Jews, and indirectly illumines the whole Jewish problem. For it reveals that at bottom Christendom feels that the Jew has no right to exist ! And the Jew, with his usual assimilativeness feels this too, and apologises for being on the planet, much as Captain Peter Wright apologises for reading German books.
In 1851, Mr. Punch was righteously indignant with the Austrian Jews because, according to a Viennese correspondent
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of the Jewish Chronicle, they would have nothing to do with the Austrian Loan until they had received the Government's assur- ance that they would be left in possession of their liberties. That they should thus provide " halters for the patriots of Hungary," on condition of being left free themselves, seemed monstrous to Mr. Punch, who, in fact, proposed the very next week that in recognition of the Sultan's services in saving Kossuth from Francis Joseph, a British three-decker should be presented by national subscription to the gallant Abdul-Med j id, and should sail up the Bosphorus, manned for the nonce by British tars.
It never occurred to Mr. Punch that the liberties of the Jews were as sacred as those of the Hungarians, and that they had a right to defend them by any legitimate means. We have seen from the Debates in the House of Lords and the asperous com- ments in sundry journals, that the acquisition of Palestine by the Jews seems almost as monstrous to Christendom as their continuing to live in countries not their own. In the same spirit Captain Wright is far more concerned for the persecut- ing Poles than for the Jews, whose grievances he was sent out to investigate. Indeed it would seem that it is the Poles who have the grievance in the fact that Jews dare to breathe the same air. Captain Wright resembles the legendary little girl who, when it was sought to move her religious emotions by a picture of Christian martyrdom, commiserated with the one poor lion who was without a Christian. To illustrate how the poor Poles are put upon, Captain Wright insinuates that Englishmen should try to imagine how they would feel if, in London as in Warsaw, every third person was a Jew ; if, more- over, the bulk of these Jews wore a costume, adopted a style of hairdressing, and spoke a dialect that were not English, added to their eccentricity by belonging to that queer sect of Judaism, the Chassidim, and refused to declare themselves of British nationality even to become field-officers. In short, the situation of a peculiar race slowly aggregated and niched for a thousand years amid another people, and blent inextricably with its life for mutual advantage, is compared to the situation that would arise were a crude alien mass to pour suddenly into England. The Jews have proved their utility to Poland or they would not be there, and the sudden demand for their expulsion is of a mediaeval barbarit}^ that no comparisons can make less mal- odorous.
Captain Wright labours to prove the Jews of Poland neither
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" European " nor " modern," as if that had anything to do with the question, or as if the Polish peasantry among whom they live and by whom their beards are plucked off, offered any more congenial society for a British officer and gentleman. Captain Wright must have a very imperfect knowledge of the races " modern Europe " harbours in its bosom, if he is so over- whelmed by the primitiveness of the Polish Jewry. The very sect of Chassidim before which he recoils as before some fan- tastic creation of Lewis Carroll, has just produced the boy chess-prodigy, Samuel Rzeschewski. It was from the Polish Jewry that have come Rubinstein and half-a-dozen musicians hardly less world-famous than Paderewski himself, and Heaven knows how many of such geniuses have been massacred off. The fact is, that just as anxious as the Poles now are to go into business, are the Jews to get out of it, to go into art, the professions, and agriculture. Their very demand for schools of their own is merely an expression of their desire to transform and raise themselves to a higher moral level, to uplift them- selves and their common country. The notion that they shirk physical work is calumnious. Eastern Europe is a-swarm with a despairing young Jewry longing to turn its hand to any- thing. Witness the Lithuanian Jews, who, driven out of the towns by the German invaders, found themselves in the deserted villages, and set to work upon the fields, even old Rabbis taking part in the novel labour.
Captain Wright tells us that the Jewish masses of Poland are " unfit for the modern economic world." The statement may be commended to the fomenters of " the legend of the Con- quering Jew." But if it is correct, then why do the Polish rage? The processes of economics will soon eliminate these undesirables. Is it necessary to precipitate their death or departure?
IV
Assuming that the Jews of Poland will neither be destroyed nor emigrated to any considerable extent, we may expect them to continue their demand for recognition as a national minority, no less than the Lithuanians and Ukrainians who are equally condemned to live under the new Polish Republic. (One won- ders, by the way, whether Captain Wright recognises the mur- derous breed of the Ukraine as " European " or " modern." ) The case of the Jews of Poland is not therefore exceptional,
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nor is there anything in this demand of theirs to make either the Polish Christians or the British and American Hebrews fulmi- nate. In Czecho-Slovakia, Lithuania, and elsewhere, the prin- ciple of a national minority has already been conceded.
I have in a previous article dealt briefly with the pros and cons of this principle, and need only add here that nations have not always been so homogeneous and uni-racial as the modern European ideal seems to demand. Austria did not do so badly by its motley ingredients ; in the " reactionary " Ottoman Empire other creeds are still allowed to live under the system of Millets, and in the darkest ages of Christendom the right of the Jew to live his own life, though he was implanted in an alien State, was never disputed, for the Christian Emperors followed the old Roman law by which Judaism was a " religio licit a," carrying with it a certain measure of internal auton- omy. But to-day patriotism seems inconceivable apart from racial and national uniformity. Switzerland proves the assumption nonsensical. Union, not uniformity, is strength. There is no reason why several peoples should not combine on economic grounds to run a territory, each submitting to gen- eral laws for common State purposes, while at the same time pursuing a cultural autonomy of its own. Such a union of hearts in fact exists in Great Britain and Wales, and the fact that in many European countries the constituents are inter- fused, instead of being more or less isolated geographically, makes still more for a common patriotism. As the wise declar- ation of the Lithuanian Diet of July 23rd, 1920, runs: " One of the most important political questions of Lithuania is that of the creation of conditions which will allow the national min- orities, while taking their full share in the building up of the State and displaying full civic loyalty, to create their own national culture. This principle was proclaimed at the time of the foundation of the State, and is incorporated in various laws and declarations."
Such a group-system is practically a league of nations in microcosm. This method is, moreover, as already shown, the best way of protecting minorities, particularly while the real League of Nations remains so shadowy. Even were the League functioning solidly, its absurd rule that decisions must be unan- imous, protects — so far as I can see — a mixed State from interference, not its minorities from persecution. For Poland, being a member of the League of Nations, could always nega- tive any measure against itself. As worked out in the Springer
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system, the recognition of a national minority merely means its right to run its own schools, charities and places of worship by a proportionate grant from the common taxes, a liaison Minister between the State and the nationality, and a pro- portional number of representatives in a parliament elected not by districts but by races.
Because the Jews are so dense in Poland, the Poles draw the deduction that they should be expelled. What vicious logic ! The true deduction is, that they have a millennial right to a share in the soil and to their own peculiar existence. Indeed, but for the preoccupation of the Jews with Palestine and of the Gentiles with Poland, a definite territorial claim might have been made for an " ethnographic Judaea." Anyhow, under a proportional representative system they would, if they consti- tute as is claimed, 14 per cent, of the population, have a right to fifty or sixty of the 400 or so seats in the Diet. Actually they began with only nine, which have now increased to eleven. And, as I have already pointed out, by gerrymandering the constituencies and throwing in the big Jewish towns with rural parishes, the Poles have almost neutralised Jewish political power. These eleven deputies have not even been able to bring forward a resolution against the pogroms because that requires fifteen signatures, and even half-a-dozen Socialists cannot be found to help them. Indeed, the Polish Socialists and the whole Polish intelligentsia — in such sad contrast with the Russian intellectuals and rebels under Czarims — are the most virulent anti-Semites ; a fact which serves to explain the para- dox that they were also the most fiery advocates of the advance on Russia, for anti-Semitism is always the obverse of Jingoism. We thus see the comparative worthlessness of political equality as an instrument of self-defence without special nationality rights. With absolute equality on paper, there are still parts of Poland where no Jew mav live.
But the main reason why modern self-respecting Jews — and the Polish Jews we suddenly perceive to be modern after all — will not masquerade under other national colours, is that the kaleidoscopic changes of the war have reduced the practice to absurdity. It was already ridiculous enough that in the Aus- trian census the Jew was compelled to declare himself Pole, Ger- man, Magyar, Ruthenian or Czech. Now that Austria is broken up, he is expected to share the nationality of the domi- nant race in his particular fragment, irrespective of his former registration. " La France, c'est ma troisieme patrie," cries a
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Jew in a French play. A Jew of Kieff, which has been taken and retaken seventeen times, would have had to be ringing the changes on Russian, Ukrainian, Pole, (not to mention Bolshe- vist and anti-Bolshevist) about once a month. Only a quick- change patriot could have kept pace with the permutations. The Jew in any city wrangled over by rival elements was thus justified by prudence as well as by humour in remaining neutral and just a Jew. When, for example, the fight for Lemberg was raging for days between the Poles and the Ukrainians, with part of the city in the hands of one combatant and part in the hands of another, the Jews of some streets would on the rival theory be Poles and of other streets Ukrainians, and if you crossed the road or called on your cousin in another quarter, you would change your nationality. Had Germany won the war, the Lembergers would all have been Austrians again. I have heard of a case in the war where the Jews would have thus changed their nationality four or five times.
No, the Jews of Poland must for the present remain what thev alwavs were in Poland — a peculiar nationality. The situation of a small and recently immigrated minority of a few hundred thousands like the Jews of England offers no analogy to that of a long-settled group counted by millions, nor is the policy suitable for the one situation suitable for the other. And the Poles must abandon their fanatical conception of the uni-racial State. The crude homogeneous form of nationality, denounced by that great Roman Catholic, Lord Acton, is indeed hardly compatible with the religion Poland holds in common with other European countries ; it is entirely inconsistent with a world bent on a League of Peoples. I can well understand the patriotic passion, which, embittered by the long pressure of alien elements from above, chafes to find, on its release, alien elements embedded in its very structure. But these do not press, they support, and to deny to others the liberty and na- tional rights one claims for oneself is to make no tactful ap- pearance at the bar of history. Nor is a homogeneous nation- ality essential to freedom or self-expression. All that is neces- sary is that the subsidiary nationalities shall be minorities. This condition is not fulfilled in Palestine where every Jew is swamped by seven or eight non-Jews, but it is fulfilled in Po- land where the Poles outnumber all other peoples. If the units of its minorities are treated on precisely the same political basis as the units of the majority, as in England, then their fusion with it — to the enrichment of the common nationality
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— is only a matter of time. And even if they are given group- representation and their cultural life is lived apart, this adul- terates the majority no more than the many other exotic influ- ences which are constantly infiltrating into all modern civilisa- tions, to their mutual benefit.
Polish culture will therefore either absorb Jewish, as English has done in England (where the contributions of a Beacons- field to politics and literature, a Jessel to law, or a Meldola to science have been incorporated with the general stock of val- ues), or will at least go unendangered by it: the national life becoming in any case the fuller for the diversity. And if the Poles at their proudest epoch found it both easy and profitable to live with the Jews at a time when these latter were a de- spised sociological element, how much much readily should they adapt themselves to symbiosis with a race now universally rec- ognised as an invaluable asset to any nation. There is not a Jew among all the Allied peoples who did not begin by wishing the new Poland the maximum possible of autonomy, territory and prosperity. And I refuse to believe that the Poles, once they have sown their neo-national wild oats, will have so little fellow-feeling for the most tragic and the longest-suffering na- tionality in history that they will try to stamp it out as the Prussians tried to stamp out Prussian Poland. That would be an irony too sad for laughter, too deep for tears. No, the near future must and will see Pole and Jew working hand in hand to build up the great new Poland, which, despite its initial imbecilities, holds not only the sympathies of humanity, but its dreams and hopes.
323
THE GOYIM
(The Venturer, October, 1920)
Beware of the Goyim, his elders told Jacob,
In the holy peace of the Sabbath candles,
They drink Jewish blood:
They are fiercer than flame,
Or than cobras acoil for the spring.
They make mock of our God and our Torah,
They rob us and spit on us,
They slaughter us more cruelly than the Shochet our cattle.
Go not outside the Ghetto.
Should your footsteps be forced to their haunts,
Walk warily, never forgetting
They are Goyim,
Foes of the faith,
Beings of darkness,
Drunkards and bullies,
Swift with the fist or the bludgeon,
Many in species, but all
Engendered of God for our sins,
And many and strange their idolatries,
But the worst of the Goyim are the creatures called Christians.
In the comforting gleam Of the two Sabbath candles
The little boy thrilled with an exquisite shudder At the words of his elders.
For the slums that enswathed with their vileness his nest, Pullulated with Christians ; Easy to recognise
By the stones and the scoffs of their young at his passing, And the oaths of their reeling adults, And the black eyes they gave to their females On Saturday nights, Preparing for Sunday.
Foul-tongued and ferocious these creatures, the worst of the Goyim,
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But Jacob grew bigger,
Outgrowing the Ghetto.
He laughed at his elders
With their cowering fears and exclusive old customs
And mechanical rites.
He worshipped the Gentiles,
No savage inferiors to Israel,
But Plato and Virgil, but Shakespeare and Shelley,
But Bach and Beethoven,
But Michael Angelo,
Dreamers and seers and diviners,
Shapers of Man, not a tribe;
Builders of beauty.
O the soul-shaking roll of the organ In their dim cathedrals And the sacred trance of the spirit In their grass-grown colleges !
Poor Ghetto's fusty lore And the drone it imagined music And the blind-alley it called the cosmos.
Hats off to the Goyim, he cried, hats off e'en in Synagogue. Great are our brethren the Goyim and the greatest of all are the Christians.
But behold him to-day,
Little Jacob once more,
Bowed small by the years and calamities,
With his tragical eyes,
The Jew's haunted eyes,
That have seen for themselves,
Seen history made
On the old Gentile formula,
Seen the slums written large
In the red fields of Europe,
And the Goyim blood-drunken,
Reeling and cursing
As on Saturday night.
Back, back, he cries, brethren.
Back to the Ghetto,
To our God of Compassion,
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To our dream of Messiah, And our old Sabbath candles !
For the others are Goyim, Who despite all their Platos, Their Shakespeares and Shelleys, Their Bachs and Beethovens, Drink human blood. Not only ours but their kinsmen's.
Pitiless fratricides,
Beings of darkness,
Foes of the faith,
Fiercer than cobras acoil for the spring :
Many in species, but all
Engendered of God for our sins,
And many and strange their idolatries,
But the worst of the Goyim are the creatures called Christians.
326
THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS
(The Menorah Journal, New York, June, 1920)
One should not look a gift-horse in the mouth, and Jakob Fingermann's new novel, " Menschen im Abgrund " (R. Lowit Verlag, Vienna and Berlin), being dedicated to the writer, might be considered immune from his criticism. Yet since the young author is anxious for my public opinion, I cannot well deprive him of it. And, indeed, his revelations are of the gravest and demand the light of day.
When Herr Fingermann first informed me of the kind of book he was writing — the tragedy of Polish Jewry during the war — I naturally prepared myself for expulsions en masse, anti-Semitic persecutions, whether pogroms or pin-pricks, eco- nomic boycotting, accusations of profiteering, charges of treachery from each and all of the invading armies in turn, in short, something like that imagined report of Sir Stuart Sam- uel, which the British Government was so suspiciously keeping back. There would at least be starvation under our blockade. But on the contrary, although of course the poor are poorer than ever, from beginning to end one's nostrils sniff with de- lectation the odours of roasted geese, delicious white rolls come hot from the oven, the samovar steams, champagne fizzes, and dance-music trips and swings. The old Chassidim go with beards unplucked and unimperilled, and in their greasy ragged caftans pore peacefully the long night through over their mys- tic folios, on which the guttering candles drop tallow, while at the expense of an opulent member of the brotherhood they feast royally on Wurst, eggs, and a bottle of Schnapps. In the wedding festivities the bride and bridesmaids (the bride- groom is, by Polish custom, conspicuous by his concealment) sit in white array, the musicians play roisterously, the Mar- schalik turns his merry and mercenary rhymes. Prosperous husbands or fathers buy sparkling jewellery for their women- kind. On the Bourse or in the coffee-houses there is brisk speculation ; in the theatres beautiful ladies in airy toilettes adorn the stage or the stage-boxes ; at the card-tables the play is high and rolls of the falling rouble pass from hand to hand.
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The only physical persecution of the Jews in the whole book is a raid upon their quarter — to bathe them for fear of spotted typhus ! It causes one of the few plaints we hear from them of the hard Jewish lot — how cheap Jewish blood is held, or Jewish dignity. Nor, although it is a war-book, is there a word directly about the fighting. And yet the whole story is one of almost unendurable tragedy, of spiritual degradation. It is the story of the people of the abyss.
It will be seen that the author has devised a ground-scheme of no ordinary subtlety. He has taken Lublin, a Polish town through which, except for the unresisted Austrian occupa- tion, the war never actually passed, though regiments were drill- ing in it for the front. And though Lublin thus remains un- touched and tranquil, a little dead-alive provincial town to which only its Jews give animation, yet the distant war reaches out a thousand arms to strangle all that is decent in it. Of the purpose of the war we hear no word; there is nothing of the glamorous rhetoric with which the British soul enswathed it. There could not in fact be a more terrific indictment of war than emanates as if unconsciously from this bland and brutal book. For although not even an enemy aeroplane hov- ers over Lublin, the nervous apprehension that its abnormal se- curity will soon be at an end drives it into the sensuous satis- faction of the moment. All is guzzling and swilling, fraudu- lence and fornication. We have the sordid effects of war with- out even its redeeming heroism.
With some of these by-products of war we have become fa- miliar even in England — the promiscuity resulting from the absence of husbands, the lessened regard for human life. But we have not reached the shamelessness of these almost public orgies in theatre-boxes or restaurants, though we may have come near them. And though doubtless there have been pecula- tion, food-smuggling, and falsification of passports, we have known nothing on such an organised basis as in Poland, where, according to our author, the Austrian officials, dressed in their little brief authority, have the time of their lives in profiting by their opportunities, and, originally men of honour, go headlong over the abyss of demoralisation.
And although the moral pestilence germinating in the distant battlefields rages most violently in the Christian quarters, yet the Jews of Lublin do not escape it, partly from their habitual assimilativeness, but mainly from the peculiar treatment dealt out to them. For here comes in the real persecution of Polish
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Jewry — a negative rather than a positive persecution — a refusal to grant to them any of the concessions or licences nec- essary to their livelihood. And if Shylock was right when he urged :
" You do take my life When you do take the means whereby I live,"
it was practically a massacre of Polish Jewry. And though the victims could escape at a price, that did but constitute a moral massacre. Sometimes indeed, in their wretched greed and baseness, the wealthy send their own wives and daughters on the criminal quest of business concessions ; but more often it is a case of sheer necessity, as Folberg, the dandified Jew, ex- presses it in a burst of sympathy. " The Austrians allow no glass of beer to be sold, no bit of bread to be baked, unless some one pays for the concession. And how does one get this? The ways are bitter. In these little towns sit military men and officials. The war is far away, they live like in Paradise, and are sated with gold and grub. They are bored and their belly is full. The Jew comes : i Give me, gracious Herr, the scrap of official paper so that I may carry on my business.' He finds deaf ears. He comes a second, a third, a fourth time. The surfeited officer laughs him to the door and waits for his des- tined victim. The Jew is in despair. His money is at the last rouble, and famine peers from every corner. He resists, re- flects, seeks some outlet — all in vain. See how the Christian business man, without any trouble, obtains concessions and contracts. The bread in the house is dwindling to the last crumb. He goes yet again to the official : * Have pity, gra- cious Herr.' ' Get out ! You Jews want to eat up the whole trade. I can do nothing . . . Oh, by the way, send your daughter here to-morrow. Perhaps in the meantime I shall think of something for you.' The Jew collapses as under the blow of a headsman. He knows now the frightful price. He suffers, sells his last rag, consumes his last crust, and neverthe- less, one night a Jewish maiden finds herself in the officer's arms. Then full soon the concession is granted. Bread and money stream into the dishonoured Jewish home."
No wonder another Jew in the book complains that the imme- morial foundations of Jewish life are being undermined. In- deed, without its domestic virtues how should Jewry stand? To quote Shylock again:
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" You take my house when you do take the prop That doth sustain my house."
One after another the personages of the story fall over the abyss on whose brink they have been hovering. And all this diseased and distorted life finds its inevitable nemesis — the lights go out, the music dies, and the dancing ; perfumed minxes perish in hospital, young soldiers take poison, beautiful women moan insanely for their slain lovers, conspirators murder of- ficials and blow out their own brains — Lublin, though it has es- caped being a battlefield, is left strewn with corpses and sui- cides.
Obviously not a cheerful book, nor one to encourage man- kind to turn away from the League of Nations. Even a Zion- ist gathering in the Herzl Club brings no balm to the wounded spirit of the critical observer, though a thousand Jews jostle to find standing room when the great Hebrew writer and orator, Brandes — a touch of historic realism this — comes to offer the conventional rhetoric. As the editor of the Morgenblatt explains cjmically to an impressed spectator, they cannot be really awakened from their apathy, or their lust of gold and gormandising; they come as to a dramatic spectacle, to get a cheap sensation. I am bound to say my own observation of many popular meetings — whether Jewish or Christian — ad- dressed by myself does not differ from that editor's. One touch of verisimilitude is, however, absent from this account of a Zionist meeting, for it appears to begin punctually.
There are characters in this grim book that are new to the lit- erature of the Ghetto. Its leading figure, Lazarewitsch, for example, a Chassid, who prays in phylacteries, and is engaged in great speculations with the rouble and undertakes grandiose illegalities to help the Polish revolutionaries, has yet a ro- mantic passion for his pretty, faithless wife, despite her modern fashionable culture, and for all his narrow pietism is built on big lines, which compel even this giddypate's reluctant admira- tion. It is not a character that I have myself encountered, nor has the author succeeded in making it comprehensible, any more than he has succeeded in making it clear whether the wife is simply a minor Messalina or is really actuated by the desire to have a child. Possibly we are to understand a subtle self- deception in accordance with the doctrines of the author's fel- low-townsman, Freud. Or perhaps writing in Vienna in days of cold and hunger, Mr. Fingermann has not quite succeeded
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in his artistic task. His forte, indeed, seems to be less in char- acter-drawing or in construction — the structure of the book is desultory and the atmosphere to some extent broken by the intrusion of a Polish revolutionary episode — than in descrip- tion. The vividness and brevity of his scenes are extraordi- nary, and if he cannot always get inside his personages, his painting of outsides is not easily matched. Whether he is showing us a bearded Jew with thumping heart and false pass- port slipping a thousand-rouble note into the gendarme's hand, at the exit from the railway station; whether we are sleighing through the snowy streets, past the grey houses, and over rough, dangerously-rutted roads ; whether he hales us into the smoky din of chaffering cafes or into the slangy society of gam- bling and womanising officers ; whether he is giving us welcome glimpses of the humours of Yiddish players or showing us angry speculators quarrelling over their joint losses; whether he is sketching the conscribed shopkeeper who will move heaven and earth to prove he is too sickly for the front, or the shrewd busi- ness man who refuses a loan to an apparently rich colleague be- cause in a cold room he sees a bead of perspiration on the would-be borrower's brow, Herr Fingermann draws in a few strokes a series of unforgettable pictures.
Even the revolutionary episode, disruptive as it is to the com- position, is wonderfully dramatic. And, like a true artist, Herr Fingermann never underlines. You have to perceive for yourself the irony of the universal longing of the Austrian of- ficers and functionaries for the glories and gaieties of Vienna — where life is one long round of concerts and cabarets, and mil- lions are made over-night. And the artist similarly desists from rubbing in the pathos or the humour of the Jewish sol- diers' jubilation when their eye catches the headline in some trumpery little journal, "Peace negotiations with Russia." They even dash off to fete the Peace! A true touch of Jewish psychology, that !
How far the picture, as a whole, stands in true proportion or correspondence with the realities of Polish-Jewish life during the war, or how far the young novelist has been carried away by righteous indignation — and the book's motto from Jere- miah provides the clue to his mood — I am unable to say ; " the fog of war " having reduced the mutual knowledge of Europe to that of the Dark Ages. But even in our Austrian Jere- miah's picture the gloom is not utterly unrelieved. Stealing through all this horror and ugliness, like a delicate and exquisite
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music heard in the pauses of a Witches' Sabbath, comes the in- terlude of Brane, the poor maiden who works her hands to the bone at the factory and in the poverty-stricken home rather than go over the abj'ss with her girl-companions, and literature has few scenes more touching than her emotion when she is wooed by an honest breadwinner. That is an episode far more moving than the death through hunger and exhaustion of her little brother — a death that comes much too suddenly and un- prepared to be convincing. Rarely touching, too, is the pic- ture of the happiness of her humble, one-roomed menage, with its dripping w^alls, its bed and its sewing-machine; such a bar- gain at three roubles a month ! " Life is beautiful," says the little journeyman tailor. " Never have Brane and I been so well off ! "
And here we see at last what the author is trying by contrast to teach us. For this is the only happiness achieved amid all that egotistic and esurient crew, unless we count the moment when the old innkeeper sings the Sabbath Zemiroth and the young Jewish officer-guest feels that the simple immemorial rit- ual makes a core of peace amid the madness of the Gentiles and their war. And the same lesson wafts from that more ironic episode upon which the story closes. The poor old Chassidim sit at night at their Seder- table ; and while their wealthy, broken-hearted brother, whose adored wife has gone over the abyss, peers in like a lost spirit at the festal lights and the quaint Passover dishes and wine-cups, these penniless white- bearded ancients intone with a yearning rapture : " Next year in Jerusalem ! "
332
CONVERTED MISSIONARIES
Mr. Leonard Woolf, the presiding genius of the Fabian Society's scheme for a League of Nations, having started a much-needed International Review to keep us informed — de- spite the newspapers — of what was going on abroad, I duly ordered the first number from my bookseller. When a small boy solemnly delivered at my rural retreat an International Re- view of Missions, I was divided between annoyance and amuse- ment. To send me this — me of all persons in the world — to whom missionaries had been anathema since childhood ; con- ceived as a sort of spiritual spider in wait for the Jewish soul and spinning a wicked web of textual sophistry to entangle it ! Indeed maturer acquaintance with missionary methods, in which the mistranslation of Isaiah was supplemented by material lures, had not enhanced my respect. These Mrs. Jellybys — it ap- * peared moreover — did not limit their attentions to the race which, having produced Jesus, might be presumed best fitted to interpret him. There was no people, however limited its brain- power, or however great and ancient its civilisation, but was equally the target of their theological assaults.
But still the conversion of a Jew was the blue ribbon of the profession. No wonder that Hebrew converts cost an average of a thousand pounds apiece, and that an effluvium of profiteer- ing hangs over both converter and convert.
II
Then there was the missionary who came to our village dur- ing the early days of the war and held forth in the Squire's garden against the grabbing ambitions of the Germans, with their desperate " Drang nach Osten " and their immoral designs against the British Empire. They actually aimed at the oil wells of Mesopotamia, and the monopoly of trade with Bagh- dad. They had a gun-boat plying around Aden and a camou- flaged fort in Palestine. This man hailed from Jerusalem, and was presumably saturated with the aroma of the sacred soil.
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Lord Salisbury's famous dictum ran : " First the missionary, then the trader, then the gun-boat," but our orator seemed an epitome of them all.
Being unexpectedly called upon to move a vote of thanks to the lecturer, I blandly advised him to change the order of his remarks in future, and instead of winding up with a eulogy of the British Empire, to begin by pointing out how much more advantageous it was to mankind at large to be governed by the humanitarian Briton than by the barbarous Teuton ; otherwise his address sounded as if Britain was in mere crude competi- tion with Germany for the very mountain-top from which the devil showed Jesus all the kingdoms of the world.
Ill
Pondering which things, I opened the Review of Missions, and turned over its pages in ironic expectation of a record of ubi- quitous futility. What was my pleasant disappointment to find that it was as much concerned with the League of Nations as the magazine which it mistakenly replaced, and to come upon passage after passage instinct with the question, admirably summed up by the editor, Mr. J. H. Oldham, " whether the mis- sionary movement if it is to live in the new world must not take a great leap forward and press into the throbbing heart and centre of the nation's life! " Mr. el. S. B. Brough, in a paper on " The Eternal Source of Missions," so eloquent and candid that it is a grief to learn that he has just died of the conven- tional epidemic, says : " The general life of the average pro- fessing Christian does not move men by its self-sacrifice, nor does it challenge conventional standards. . . . There is an un- happy amount of bite in the criticism made of us which concen- trates on our lack of truth, our lack of love, and our lack of life. We are held to be out of touch with reality in respect of God or man ; we are seen disastrously wanting in true fellowship among ourselves or with those outside our borders. . . . We require a fresh direction of impulse, a revised scale of values ; for it has been made clear to us that our normal standards dif- fer disastrously from those of God." Mr. E. Shillito, writing on " Missions and the Man of 1919," similarly admits that " the Christian Church has often turned aside from its calling," and asserts that " the hope of the world lies ... in a common- wealth of nations." " The man of 1919 " will not listen to the w cowardly " doctrine that Christ's teaching is " meant only for
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individual souls and not for nations in their commerce with one another." Dr. DifFendorfcr, an American colleague, sets forth the programme of " A Dominantly Missionary Church " that is to win the world and " uncover the world's great needs, not in terms of thcolog}' or in the cant phrases of the classroom, but in the concrete language of everyday life that all people under- stand." In his " Unoccupied Fields at the Home Base " Mr. Basil Mathews proclaims that after " the unimaginable ruin of the welter of war " we are at the turning-point " when the world will receive the trend of civilisation which will determine whether international and interracial relations are to be rooted in ri- valry, or to grow from co-operative emulation under the rule of Christ."
So great " a cloud of witnesses " puts the miracle beyond question. The missionaries have been converted to Christian- ity!
IV
And not only under the immense impact of the war have they been brought to see where the duty of the Church lies to-day, but they boldly maintain that such has been the work of its mis- sionaries in the past. They " have been a perpetual protest against any claim for Christianity that falls short of universal domination. They have denied by their witness the unjust claims of nationality " True, the assertion I have italicised is only an example of that " law of missions " which I have pointed out in my little book on " Chosen Peoples " — the tendency to see newly-conceived purposes as retrospectively in action. As a matter of fact national rivalries have often been imported into missionary effort, just as Christ himself has been uni- versally nationalised. Still, if an inaccurate, it is a noble re- interpretation of Christian missionary effort, an inspiring con- cept for the future, a recharging of a decayed battery, a linking of the Christian with the larger human hope, a revised reading that redeems " Missions " from the flavour of crankiness their official organ admits to be associated with them. With such a renewed inspiration, they might well hope to enlist the sympa- thies of more than the invalids, women, and children, from whom their present support is confessedly drawn.
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My satisfaction is not, however, untempered. Doubts in- trude. The conversion of the missionaries is somewhat belated. The war is over. It is not so difficult to be a Christian now. Unlike the devil who becomes a saint when he is sick, the mis- sionary appears to become one when the crisis is over. Still, there are a few trifles on which he may try the proverbial zeal of the convert. The war — and still more the peace — has left many opportunities for the imitatio Christi. I shall watch in hope and charity, if not in faith.
Moreover the missionary's interests still appear to be prac- tically limited to foreign captures. " Unoccupied Fields at the Home Base " does not, as one might imagine, refer to the 70 or 80 per cent, of Englishmen who, we are told, never attend a place of worship. It refers only to the minority already saved and its problem is how to stimulate these to save other souls abroad. But why the immense field lying open to them without travelling expenses is ignored, is left a Christian mys- tery. Surely Christianity, like Charity, should begin at home.
VI
And I do not like this commandeering for Christianity of that ideal of a brotherhood of nations which is common to all good men, and which was first categorically proclaimed and prophesied in the Old Testament. Still, the more I watch the tragi-comedy of the Peace Conferences, the clearer becomes the futility of politics and politicians. For to achieve what Mr. Basil Mathews calls " the reconstruction of a new and worthy world-order upon the shell-shattered ruins of our civilisation," there must be a burning missionary faith, an apostleship ready for all sacrifice. If the " Missions " will really supply this, I shall not boggle at their formula?, knowing that " The Eternal Source of Missions " is not a phonograph. In that case I will gladly haunt Mrs. Jellyby's drawing-room, enter into com- munion with the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, and even put money in the plate.
336
TWO JOSEPHS THAT DREAMED
I. Joseph Fels {Fortnightly Review, June, 1920.)
I
I had never heard of Joseph Fels until a shining-eyed little man walked into my office unannounced and unheralded, and of- fered me a hundred thousand dollars. It was in Essex Street, where Dr. Johnson had once presided over Sam's Club, that this miracle occurred. In this old-world by-way off the Thames, in an atmosphere of solicitors and sporting papers, the Jewish Territorial Organisation (yclept for short, Ito) had raised the standard of the Jewish State, and the visitor's offer was meant as a contribution to the sinews of war. Unfortunately, it is not only the propositions of Satan that have stings to them. Even angels, whose visits are so few and far between, hedge their gifts with conditions, and what Mr. Fels wanted was that the State to be brought into being should be established on a single-tax basis.
Sympathetically disposed as I was towards land-nationalisa- tion, and still more towards Ito capitalisation, I was unable to pledge the organisation to the Henry Georgian principle, be- cause it was impossible to foresee the circumstances and condi- tions under which the desired tract of territory would become attainable — if, indeed, it would become attainable at all in a world ruled by unreason and the sword. In the motto of the old Flemish painter, " not as I would, but as I can." Our first business was to obtain a territory. For Fels the first business was to single-tax it. One could not know him for a day with- out discovering that to him Henry George was Moses, and " single-tax " all the law and the prophets. " A Calvinistic preacher," says Hazlitt, " would not relinquish a single point of faith to be the Pope of Rome." Fels would not sanction private property in land to be the President of the United States ; taxation of land values was the medicine for all human ills, though when I once bantered him upon his persuasion that it was a panacea he replied with a humour as characteristic as his fervour : " I don't say it will cure in-growing toe-nails."
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It was this humour that made him bearable even to the heathen who sware not by St. George, nor held the single-tax sacred. He spoke the American language with a fund of rich and racy locutions that recalled the pungent vitality of the early Mark Twain. They added — if anything could — to the radiation he gave of absolute sincerity, and were the joy of his audiences, public or private. " I love a fanatic," said Oscar Straus to me after an hour of Joseph Fels, with whom he disagreed pro- foundly. But Joseph Fels was loved in despite of his fanati- cism as well as on account of it.
II
Nor did his fanaticism prevent his co-operation in other causes, though it prevented his absorption in them. He was in- terested in the Woman Question, and played a useful part in bailing out " suffragettes," male or female. He was of similar service in the Tchaikowsky and other troubles in Russia — in- deed, in an age when money is so rarely forthcoming at the call of the spirit, though it can be had in sackfuls for causes of recognised respectability, Fels filled a role in which it is not easy to replace him. He was the universal provider, the financier of the unprofitable, the philanthropic publicist, the handy-man of the social revolution, the Chancellor of the Exchequer of Bo- hemia. He advertised his soap, Fels-Naptha, in papers chosen not for their circulation but for their lack of it ; sweet are the uses of advertisement. He commissioned a single-tax play ; sculptures were dumped in his drawing-room. I once calcu- lated with him the annual income necessary for rescuing from the toils of poverty all the unrecognised geniuses of the day — the toll was not alarming. The people who count are easily counted. The prophets, poets, and painters, the thinkers and teachers of the world, could be supported by the State at the annual cost of one shell sent on its mission of destruction from a seventeen-inch gun. It is a splendid opening for a small cap- italist. Fels actually did subsidise geniuses of various sorts, much as Wedgwood subsidised Coleridge : possibly also charla- tans. I had the sense of his being surrounded by wild-cat schemes and schemers, as well as by men splendidly devoted to himself and the common cause. Less directly he subsidised scribes, especially of the single-tax species. A book on the creed, or in its spirit, he would buy up and circulate by the
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hundred. It is an example that as an author I warmly com- mend. Henry George's " Progress and Poverty " he of course distributed by the bushel as a missionary distributes Bibles. In my own capacity as a heathen savage I received two copies in- scribed, " It is to learn." I never got a letter from him but was surcharged with tracts, mottoes, and verses. He was my bulk- iest correspondent ; no doubt others, too, received this tuition by correspondence. As he appraised men by their soundness on the single-tax and despised some of my most admired friends, his patience towards me must have been the missionary's hope of his prey. Unless it was that his interest in the Jewish ques- tion was far deeper than he admitted even to himself.
Ill
He would have called the Ito one of his side-shows, but he never wilfully missed a committee meeting or a public gathering, and his speeches upon our platform were not infrequent. But though he never neglected the opportunity to propagate the single-tax, he could not have entertained more than a shadowy prospect of propagating it practically through a Jewish State, and if his purse was the first to open to our necessities and the last to close, it could only have been because of his increasing perception of the Jewish tragedy. He contributed liberally to the expenses of our investigation of Cyrenaica under Professor Gregory, and in Ins eagerness to hear the results he accom- panied me to Folkestone to meet the returning expedition, and keen was his disappointment to learn that that vaunted land was a dangerous desert (as the Italian Imperialists who burked our report have since found to their cost). And when it looked as if Portugal in her fear of German grabbing would concede Angola, or a stretch of it, for Jewish Colonisation, the new expedition would not have been able to set out at all had Fels not generously advanced half the initial outlay. Nor was he by any means a passive committee-man. More than once he tried to hustle a world that is not to be hustled, to poke up Colonial statesmen, to interview business men. His greatest feat on our behalf was his journey to Mexico to obtain a con- cession of territory from President Diaz. That great if not good man was more than willing to facilitate a large immigra- tion of Jewish industrial and commercial workers, but did not welcome the idea of a special territory upon an agricultural basis. It has just transpired that thirty years ago Diaz him-
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self sought to attract a large Jewish colonisation, and that he was even willing to pay the expenses of a scientific commission to investigate his offer. Our Organisation was not then in existence to educate the Jews on the necessity of a national home, and this, like many another chance in Canada and Aus- tralasia, was let slip. History does not go back on itself, and the Ito, like Germany, began to feel it had come into colonisa- tion too late.
At one time Fels thought that a tract in Paraguay, which he had secured for the purpose of obtaining an ingredient of his Fels-Naptha soap, might afford the nucleus of the desired de- velopment, while the extracting of this ingredient would afford employment to pioneer immigrants, and help the early stages of colonisation. It was a scheme that would have made both of his ends meet. I remember a long council-meeting at his house with his Paraguay agents, when we worked out the details, but Paraguay, already the scene of so many fantastic and socialis- tic experiments, has hitherto remained immune from ours. Lat- terly, Fels became enthusiastic for a Mesopotamia scheme, which I had publicly broached, but his zeal for which owed perhaps more to Zionism, and most to his wife's intuition in its favour; an intuition, he told me proudly, that had never been at fault.
IV
So far, indeed, was he beguiled into side-excursions from the high road of the single-tax that he joined the department of the Ito founded to regulate emigration in view of needs that could not await the foundation of a State. The gravitation of the Jewish masses to New York and the Eastern cities of America had produced an unhealthy congestion, and to avoid the slums and competition of these self-made Ghettos our Emigration Regulation Department set about educating the Russian masses, in the words of Horace Greeley, to " go West." They were to enter by Galveston — a port utterly unknown to the Russian Pale — and thence to be distributed over the immense region west of the Mississippi. Of the London Committee, constituted to supervise this deflection of the human current, Joseph Fels was an original member. The Committee sat in the historic building of the Rothschilds in St. Swithin's Lane, and Mr. Leo- pold de Rothschild acted as Honorary Treasurer. To Fels this alliance with the high priesthood of capitalism was some- thing of a pill, but he swallowed it bravely in view of the im-
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portance of the work. When by an unconstitutional caprice of the immigration authorities at Washington, a large batch of brawny emigrants was rejected at Galveston on the plea of " poor physique," and I travelled across the North Sea to meet the unhappy victims deported from Ellis Island — men who had sold off their homes in Russia and were now thrown back upon Europe, penniless — Fels accompanied me to Bremen and worked many hours at the task of mending all this superfluous man-made misery. He also hunted up a photographer to prove how many muscular giants the party contained, and as the emigration building — Stadt Warsaw — held likewise nu- merous other Jewish transmigrants, including half a hundred children, Fels had all the little ones photographed in a group — splendid population-stuff for the States they looked — and he bought up all the sweets in the establishment for them. But then children were always a weakness of his. " If I had a boy like yours," he said, rebuking my paternal stoicism, " I should want to have him by me all the time."
Fels would not have been Fels if he had not taken advantage of the contiguity with the late Lord Rothschild to seek an in- terview with the uncrowned King of Jewry ; not, needless to say, in any courtier spirit, but in the spirit of Catherine of Siena bearding the Pope at Avignon, or an early Quaker lady setting out to convert the Grand Turk. Whether the vices of cap- italism or the virtues of the single-tax formed the main object of this mission I never quite understood. But, knowing both my men, I had no felicitous augury of the result. For Lord Rothschild was brusque, deaf, and despotic, and Fels cheery and irrepressible. The meeting was, I gathered, brief. Lord Rothschild generally secured the last word by leaving the room abruptly, and it is unlikely that he failed to apply this skilful dialectical method on this occasion. What is certain is that Fels's opinion of peers, never very tropical, fell below freezing point. There was hardly anybody he could not call comrade or brother, but I suspect that his sense of camaraderie stopped thenceforward at Lord Rothschild.
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VI
His notion of true manhood had been formed at the feet of his neighbour, Walt Whitman, and it was " the good gray poet ' ' who inspired that general enthusiasm for humanity for which Henry George provided the special conduit. The read- ing of " Progress and Poverty " was the turning-point in his life. It was a conversion, a finding of salvation, in the fullest meaning of these terms. Thenceforth he had a creed by which to live and die. For, of course, he did not see the single-tax like a Chancellor of the Exchequer hailing a fruitful fiscal expedient, but like Abou ben Adhem (may his tribe increase !),who loved his fellow-men, and like Don Quixote out to charge against a mon- strous wrong. Henry George had in fact more to give than a dry, economic device, he was a dynamic emotional impulse against evil, a prophet even in the minor sense of predicting. Nor was his intellectual contribution to political economy at all negligible. It was concrete and business-like, or it would not have carried away a keen business man like Eels, who had his Sancho-Panza side and when another business man tried to best him felt the original sin in him leap like a tiger to the fray, much as the hero of " Les Affaires Sont Les Affaires " bristled for business-combat even over the body of his only son. The creator of Fels-Naptha was the last man in the world to be car- ried away by soft soap. Land really is — how can one deny it? — man's indispensable standing-ground; no nebulous but a very solid basis for an economic philosophy. That this na- tional necessity should be in private hands is clearly discordant with our communal thinking. (Even Stonehenge has been sold, as if so historic a stone mystery could be subject to the whim of a proprietor — in Italy or any civilised country it would be a " national monument.") That land should be taxed pecul- iarly or even gradually taxed away without compensation —
is a proposition not altogether indefensible. But Fels went much further. He had so convinced himself that private land- ownership was the sin against the Holy Ghost, and the taxation of land and all the values inherent and involved in it took on so many aspects to his imagination, that he beheld all life enriched and ameliorated by the unflinching application of his golden rule. Avenues and perspectives innumerable opened up to his vision, and with almost perverted ingenuity he would trace every social evil to its root in the monopolisation of land val-
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ues. Possibly that impassioned passage misled him in which the Master cries out : " It is this that turns the blessings of material progress into a curse. It is this that crowds human beings into noisome cellars and squalid tenement houses ; that fills prisons and brothels ; that goads men with want and con- sumes them with greed ; that robs women of grace and beauty of perfect womanhood; that takes from little children the joy and innocence of life's morning."
VII
The single-tax is, after all, only a fiscal expedient which would lessen the financial burdens of the landless, and even if it increased production and thus diminished Poverty positively as well as negatively, Poverty is, alas ! only one of the many roots of human misery, and were all the prisons, brothels, ugly women and blighted children due to it eliminated, I can imagine these phenomena persisting — if in smaller numbers — in a world of general Comfort. It was not poverty that Sodom and Gomorrah suffered from. Still Poverty is such a Giant De- spair that to despatch him at a stroke would be an achievement so massive that the single-taxers need hardly put their claim higher. But their cause suffers from under-statement as well as over-statement, for " land-values " is an unfortunate term which to the vulgar connotes mostly rent or price per acre, whereas to the true single-taxer it means likewise rent or price for tramway, railway, lighting, cable, or other concessions, and the automatic tapping by the community of these and whatso- ever other potentialities of profit are created less by the initia- tive of the individual than by the accretion of the population, no unit of which has earned the increment arising from the ag- gregation. It is a concept not easily distinguishable — in this enlarged form — from Socialism proper. But Fels drew the line at Socialism, though he shared its spirit. In view of the re- demptive efficiency of the single-tax, he thought it superfluous. In the words of the Master : " All that is necessary to social regeneration is included in the motto of those Russian patriots, sometimes called Nihilists — ' Land and Liberty ' ! "
VIII
If I occasionally rallied him on his formula-of-all-work, I was none the less aware that it is only the one-eyed who ac-
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complish anything in the world of action, and that Argus with his hundred eyes proved hopelessly inefficient at his one job of watching. If the epithet " one-eyed " displeases, let it be re- placed by " single-eyed," which carries the meaning with more dignity. Fels had no eye, for example, for the sentimental side of land, the emotional value of a meadow or an orchard to a family; to such artistic beauties as inhere in the feudal system of great estates he was blind. Burke, according to Hazlitt, thought it as absurd to reduce all mankind to the same insipid level as to destroy the inequalities of surface in a country for the benefit of agriculture and commerce. Fels thought inequal- ities that diminished agriculture and commerce not picturesque, but criminal. The great landed aristocracy of England was anathema. The English ideal of isolation was antipathetic to his American passion for foregathering. The more people enjoying and subdividing a piece of land, the merrier. What right had you to cling to an old family garden, if labourers lacked land for their cottages or the villagers plots for their potatoes? That there were imponderable land-values, by which society benefited, even though immaterially and indirectly — as through the poems and pictures and thoughts they inspired — he would not admit. There was something of an inverted Grad- grind in this remorseless pursuit of happiness for the million.
Nor did he allow sufficiently for the fact that the gospel of Henry George arose in a late and sophisticated period of civ- ilisation, when the first efforts to break in an intractable earth had already been made, and land had ceased to have its original relation with pioneer labour. It so happened that the Jewish Territorial Organisation brought him into contact with the phase of the problem that Henry George had overlooked. But even the fact that the Ito did not consider Cyrenaica worth the cost of cultivation or irrigation did not alter his sense that its land-values should be taxed. In the pioneering stage of land- development the increment is by no means unearned : it is hard- earned by danger, initiative, and capital. That at a later stage the landlord, especially in growing cities, receives a fat and disproportionate increment is a separate question, but once land has been treated as private property, transferable like any other form, society can only gradually undo what it has done.
Fels learnt no lesson either from the failure of his Essex ex- periment, " Marylands," which struck me, when I visited it, as a melancholy and expensive refutation of his theories of the small cultivator and the converted townsman. Farming is, in
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fact, an expert occupation, and the value of land qua land is absolutely nil. In Canada you may still have 160 acres for nothing or, rather, in exchange for your pioneer labour.
On the other hand, Fels did splendidly practical and suc- cessful work by his Society for the Cultivation of Waste Spaces — of which I was an otiose and absent-bodied member. That is an enterprise which, started long before the war, found imita- tion in more than one of the belligerent countries, anxious about the food supply. And, of course, in estimating his practical achievements one must not forget that Fels-Naptha has light- ened washing-day in a million homes.
IX
If Fels owed much to Walt Whitman, and more to Henry George, he had his own spiritual power welling up from his own racial founts. For was he not of the race whose prophet taught land nationalisation over three thousand years before Henry George, and whose teachers had risen — even before Jesus — from the brotherhood of Israel to the thought of the brotherhood of the nations ? It is not without significance that Christians pronounced him the best Christian they had ever known. He and I had a good chuckle together over the cor- respondent who wrote to the papers to ask what was the good of Mr. Joseph Fels trying to bring the land to the people, when alien Jews were battening upon Britain? He himself knew no blank page between the Old and New Testaments, re- garding the spiritual tradition as continuous, and doubtless at the bottom of his soul he believed it was a single-taxer that drove the money changers out of the Temple. And, in truth, did not Jesus say he was come to fulfil the law of Moses, not to destroy it? We know as a fact that the jubilee provision of the Mosaic land-laws had always been evaded. But Fels had none of the other-worldliness which often adulterates earthly goodness. He had no wish to " lay up treasure in heaven." He had no conception of future reward — even future life had been left by Henry George as a mere hope — but he wanted to see heaven here below. He wanted to see with his own eyes the Kingdom coming nearer.
Post-mortem philanthropy was his abhorrence. His money must be spent here and now ; indeed, it was only his in the sense that he had the responsibility of its spending. To denounce himself as a capitalist, fattening on the labours of his fellow-
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men, was no rhetorical figure or sensational trick. While not unconscious of the humour of his situation, and even with a cer- tain whimsical enjoyment of the disconcertment of other mem- bers of his firm, he had a genuine conviction of sin, which could be cancelled only by restoring his business profits to the world's service. He was stained with the crime of capitalism — he was grubby with earth privately owned — why should he not use his soap to wash himself clean? Hence it was that he re- duced his personal expenditure to a minimum, eschewing, for example, Pullman carriages and motor cars, and riding third- class or in omnibuses. True, he was far less rich than the ru- mour of him, but then his donations were so large, his feat in financing the single-tax movement in so many countries so unique, that people, never guessing he was giving to his utmost, thought his gifts mere crumbs from the millionaire's table. They more nearly represented the millionaire's meal. The mil- lionaire, in fact, was a myth, and even a bit of a fraud. " The more I give, the more they think I've got," he said to me once with a droll twinkle. The more he gave the less he had, and he would quite cheerfully have gone to the workhouse to ensure that the land it stood on should revert to the people.
But if his was not the charity that gives away what it does not want, neither was it the charity of cheques. " You mustn't give money and not yourself," he said. What he gave in time and work, in self-consuming zeal, was even more than he gave in money. No journey was too great to make for his ideal. He would have travelled to Tibet to educate the Grand Lama, or unflinchingly addressed Icelandic audiences in Americanese. Nor was his the charity that breeds charity. He hated sub- scriptions to perpetual palliatives ; donations that pauperised and not redeemed. Even the propping up of art and artists began to appeal less to him when he realised that his money scarcely sufficed for his central mission. The Apostle became jealous of the Maecenas, and the only time I ever saw him fly into a passion was against himself. The thought that he was letting his pockets be plucked at from every side threw him into a sudden rage. One had to support ideas, not individuals. The ideas would ultimately support the individuals. A distich conveying this moral was one of his favourite enclosures.
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Nevertheless, Joe Fels was no lover of abstractions. He was always surrounded by individuals, not all of whom clung to him for support, though he rendered friendly services to them all, from prime donne to professors, from musicians to Labour Members or masseurs. Guests of every nationality, especially the " Bohemian," and embracing equally poets and lady laun- dresses, millenarian meat-packers and vegetarians, you would always find at his house in Regent's Park — indeed, he never seemed to " live unto himself alone." And with his erratic habit of dragging one home to eat or sleep, he must have had in Mrs. Fels a housekeeper, as well as a hostess, of genius. But all his motley guests were made into one happy family, and there was always more than enough to eat, if not always enough to sleep on. All the men were his brothers and all the women his sisters, and the atmosphere of an early Christian agape pervaded these meals, eaten as if in communion.
These guests of his included some of the most distinguished persons of our time, and it is no small tribute to his fascination that with only a moderate equipment of education, with no graces of breeding, and the handicap of a soap business, he was able to attract so many diverse personalities. It was the moral core of the man, the passion of faith, which raised him to equality with them, nay, that made them his inferiors, and sometimes his conscious inferiors. Members of Parliament ac- knowledged his force and leadership. He had confabulations with Cabinet Ministers. He inspired a band of workers in a dozen countries. He was received in Spain with the honours of a prophet, nor was he without honour even in his native Amer- ica. Persons who spend huge sums to uplift themselves so- cially may note with envy at how small a money-price it is pos- sible to become a world-figure, if advertisement is the last thing you are thinking of. " To how few of those who sow the seed," writes Henry George wistfully, " is it given to see it grow, or even with certainty know that it will grow." Joseph Fels was one of the fortunate few. His death was sadly premature, but in his comparatively brief span he set in motion historic influ- ences, and he saw them begin to modify history. And he en- joyed his success. " I am having the time of my life," he told me, when the movement began to hum and his partners to be wroth. Wherein the devotees of enjoyment may read another
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lesson. But Mill has already pointed out the paradox that happiness comes not to the wilful hunter, if, indeed, it had not been pointed out long before in Galilee.
Of his domestic happiness it is not for an outsider to speak. But it may be recorded without indiscretion that he once said to me : " I saw my wife first when she was a very young girl, and I made up my mind there and then that I would marry no- body else." The two were cousins, but it is curious that they should have found each other so unerringly, for, though equally rare souls, they were supplementary rather than similar. I remember a period at which Mrs. F'els was not unreservedly a devotee of the single-tax — Female Suffrage, I imagine, ranked higher. But I remember no time at which Mr. Fels was not unreservedly a devotee of Mrs. Fels. When he parted with her in Piccadilly — to meet two hours later in Regent's Park — he took farewell as if her omnibus were a liner bearing her across the seas. It was an inspiring instance of his delicate instinct that he made her the sole and unconditioned beneficiary of his estate. All-absorbing as his passion for the single-tax was otherwise, he did not feel it had the right to absorb her. But here as often love and wisdom were one, and the abnegation of his cause proved the road to its continuance. That he died when he did, in the flush of his hope and his happiness, and did not live to see all the dreams of the ages mocked by a senseless and ineffably ghastly war, is no tragedy, so far as he was concerned. We may even rejoice that he was spared see- ing the sinister fulfilment of the prophecy of the Master: " The civilised world is trembling on the verge of a great move- ment. Either it must be a leap upwards, which will open the way to advances yet undreamed of, or it must be a plunge down- ward, which will carry us back toward barbarism." To live to see the grimmer alternative would have been agony to this man of fellow-feeling. But for the world it is tragic to be bereft of him at a period when it needs every glimmer of optimism and aspiration. And for his friends life would be a little less dark, had we still the sustainment of his sunny camaraderie, his in- domitable idealism, his breezy pugnacity, his lovable laughter. By what strange prescience was it that Henry George prefixed to the concluding chapter of his Gospel a stanza that might have been written for the passing of his chief disciple?
" The days of the nations bear no trace Of all the sunshine so far foretold;
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The cannon speaks in the teacher's place — The age is weary with work and gold, And high hopes wither, and memories wane: On hearths and altars the fires are dead; But that brave faith has not lived in vain — And this is all that our watcher said."
II. Joseph Jacobs
{In Memoriam Address to the Jewish Historical Society,
Feb. 22, 1916.)
When I was asked by Dr. Israel Abrahams to deliver an ad- dress in memory of my dear friend, Joseph Jacobs, I was well aware how much less qualified I was than himself or Mr. Lucien Wolf to appraise the life-work of so great and so many-sided a scholar. But a hurried meeting, inspired by piety for the dead, demands affection rather than exact appreciation, and Jacobs was more than an admirable Crichton, he was a prince of good fellows. And it was my privilege to stand for nearly thirty years in as close a relation to him as any other of that now historic and increasingly ghostly circle of " Wandering Jews," while it so happened that in his last passage through England in the Spring of 1914 he stayed with me both, at the Temple and in the country, and thus gave me an opportunity of re-discovering with ever fresh surprise the abounding humour as well as the encyclopaedic allusiveness of his conversation, and the gaiety and joie de mvre which neither his sixty years nor the heart-weakness he had come abroad to cure could impair. I remember introducing him to another friend of mine, also troubled with a weak heart, and they had what Jacobs called " a heart to heart talk." If it concerned itself at all with their common ailment it could not have been of a very sombre character, for this other friend, who had only seen Jacobs that once, said to me on hearing of his death : " That fountain of fun frozen ! Incredible \ " Alas ! credo quia incredible est.
But with this radiant image before me, it is impossible for me to clothe him for you in Hamlet's " inky cloak " or " customary suit of solemn black." He was bubbling over, not only with fun, but with literary projects, one of the smallest of which was a new Encyclopaedia of a quintessential nature. He did ac- tually arrange with his old friend and illustrator, J. D. Batten,
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for another volume of their famous Fairy Tales. And in his un jaded intellectual curiosity to study the new anti-Semitic wing of English letters, which had grown up so oddly during his residence in America, he got me to bring him together with Mr. Chesterton. The meeting took place at the " Cheshire Cheese," where, if the duel of Aryan and Semite came off without casual- ties, it was perhaps because I had prudently made provision in the spirit of one of the Tosaphoth of Rabbi Elchanan trans- lated by Jacobs in " The Jews of Angevin England." " It is surprising," comments the worthy Rabbi, " that in the land of the isle the Jews are lenient in the matter of drinking strong drinks of the Gentiles and along with them. . . . But perhaps as there would be great ill-feeling if they were to refrain from this, one must not be severe on them."
At a time when Keats's sad line is more than ever true, when " but to think is to be full of sorrow," it seems a superfluous tragedy that the extinction of so vivid and valuable a life should be one of the innumerable by-products of the homicidal mania which ravages the world, cheapening life and staling death. Had Jacobs not gone to Nauheim for a cure he would in all probability have been still alive, for the specialists, he wrote to me almost apologetically, considered his affection slight. He had booked his passage home via Naples. But he was caught in Germany by the mobilisation half-an-hour before the train reached the Italian frontier and he was turned out at a wayside station to shift for himself. He managed to struggle back and up to Holland, whence he crossed to England again, arriving more dead than alive, indeed not expected to live through the night. But under the kindly care of the Battens he rallied, and my last glimpse of him before he sailed back to New York was in their spacious suburban garden, alarmingly ashen-faced indeed, yet mercurial as ever, reading old volumes of Punch, and full of the side-lights thrown on the European situation by forgotten cartoons.
n
Curiously enough my very last encounter with Jacobs was — like Chesterton's first — a duel, though by correspondence, for a leader in the American Hebrew in which I recognised his hand had demolished me as a theologian — doubtless justly enough — but on the insufficient basis of my remark that our revered friend Schechter was not an infallible one. Sweeping me aside
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as old-fashioned, Jacobs asserted that the Jewish problem — the real Jewish problem of the Bible's breakdown as a verbally inspired document — had been solved by Schechter's conception of a living historic tradition and the inspiration of Catholic Israel. I wrote to point out that it was exactly this concep- tion which Schechter had repudiated. By a tragic coincidence I was writing my letter on the very Sunday of his death, and he was not destined to receive my return-shot.
But, of course, Catholic Israel was the solution which he himself favoured, which he had read into Schechter's. It was implicit in his first published, and alas ! his most brilliant and creative essay, " The God of Israel," which for the breadth of its sweep and the mingled boldness and sobriety of its con- ception is unparalleled in literature as the work of a young man of twenty-four. At an age when destruction is as natural to the thinker as to a kitten, Jacobs was laying down lines for the spiritual transit not only of Jewry but of mankind. " That generations of men have held the Bible sacred must alwa}Ts keep it sacred for us," said this astonishing young Rad- ical from Australia, who, though he thought the future was to the God of Spinoza, rejected Spinoza himself as no true Jew because he lacked " that historic sense of communion with his people's past which has been the bond that kept Judaism alive through the ages." " Some are born wise," said Balthasar Gra- cian, the pithy Spaniard, " and with this natural advantage en- ter upon their studies, with a moiety already mastered." No- body ever illustrated this aphorism more aptly than the young writer who was one day to translate it into English. What- ever we may think, we feel, he told us, what our ancestors thought, and our descendants will feel what we think. That a young man so profound and so poised, who had enjoyed the advantage of both an English and a German University, and had that further sense of the relativity of values which comes from belonging to two communities, should become a great critic was inevitable. But even the paramount position of Jacobs upon the Athenceum in the days when the position of the Athen&um was paramount, did not provide the world with an adequate equivalent for Ins powers. In a sane society, it has always seemed to me, the spiritual treasures of its members would be valued as much as coal and iron : syndicates would be established to exploit them. That so much of Jacobs's time, which was not money but treasure for the race, should have been frittered away by the res angusta domi seems to me the real
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tragedy of his fellow-citizens' career. He was, he jested — perhaps not without bitterness — one of the greatest contribu- tors to the British Museum Catalogue. And indeed from that portentous list of his works, it is not unlikely that some future German scholar will demonstrate that there must have been many Joseph Jacobses that had got confused together: if, in- deed, the list did not represent a period of eponymous clan- authorship.
Some of these works, so deftly tossed off, will surely be at- tributed to his next-door neighbour in the Jewish Encyclopedia, Joseph Jacobs, the English conjuror, known as Jacobs the Wizard; palmed off on us, to speak pat. It is said that he edited English classics by Goldsmith, Jane Austen, Thackeray, etc., etc., and translated Boccaccio. But even his hackwork, so far as I know it, his editions of texts — of Howell's " Familiar Letters," of Painter's " Palace of Pleasure," of " The Fables of Bidpai," of " JEsop," of " Barlaam and Josaphat," of " Reynard the Fox," of " Daphnis and Chloe " — provided monumental examples of efficient editorship, with introductions that were masterpieces of luminous and exhaustive survey, and notes that were not only learned but more readable than many texts. Sometimes, too, he made brilliant new suggestions, as when by correcting final Mem into the almost similar Samech he turned the fables of the Talmudic washermen (Cobsim) into those of Kybisses, the Greek fabulist. And even when the learning was not all Jacobite, even when, amid the dizzy peaks and crevasses of scholarship, he — in his own phrase — " tied himself to the latest German," the stodgy omniscience of his guide was transposed into a key of gay lucidity that made it all his own.
Sometimes, indeed, he became too flippant, as when, apropos of the seventh-century discussion whether Christ had two wills, or whether the divine and human wills fused together, as the Monotheletists maintained against the Dyotheletists, he pro- fessed himself " of the heresy of Lord Dundreary." In his effort not to impose the Teutonic tax on the reader he was peculiarly rich in analytical tables, bird's-eye views, and his- torical or genealogical trees. In his remarkable Jewish Ency- clopedia article on Spinoza he even invented a diagram, repre- senting God and Nature, Substance and Mode, etc., etc., in luminous lines and rays — a sort of Metaphysics without Tears.
A more parochial Jacobs was the reconstructor of the London
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Jewry of 1290, the pioneer in Anglo-Jewish research, who by a proverbial pact with Mr. Lucien Wolf limited his researches to the pre-Expulsion period ; the Jacobs who collaborated in the Anglo-Jewish Exhibition, and in its epoch-making catalogue, and in the foundation of this very Historical Society of which he was once President. This is also the Jacobs of that fasci- nating olla podrida, " The Jews of Angevin England," in which like a bird building a nest of straw and twigs and moss and odd trifles, Jacobs put together mouldering twelfth-century Pipe Rolls of the English Record Office with disconnected Rabbinic commentaries and museum-manuscripts into a complete working model of the old English Ghetto. We see the mediaeval Jew as he lived and moved and had his being, cut off from the State because cut off from the Church, with the King exploiting the wealth derived from the usury forbidden by the Holy Mother. It is an ironic picture, sketched by Jacobs with a reticent humour, and its truth is evident if only from its substantial accordance with the Ghetto projected anew by the Belloc- Chestertonian school. The London Jewry of 1290 he even reconstructed house by house. But no pioneer can hope to be final, and this Jacobs, like others of the clan, sometimes went wrong. That is what pioneers are for ; if they did not go wrong, nobody else would go right. I note without surprise that Jacobs's severest critic — Dr. Stokes — is also his greatest admirer. Indeed, the best testimony to the value of Jacobs's researches is conveyed by a single word in Dr. Stokes's " Studies in Anglo-Jewish History." That word occurs in the index, after the name of Joseph Jacobs : it is the word — " passim.99
Ill
There is a third Jacobs — the student of Jewish statistics, social, vital, and anthropometric. This Jacobs, who was per- haps the Dr. Jacobs, was a disciple of Galton ; he impinged on the provinces of Mendel and Lombroso, of Wundt and Fechner; he was tinged by Lazarus and Steinthal, the inventors of Folk- Psychology. He appears to have flourished mainly between 1886 and 1891. He wrote in the Journal of the Anthropo- logical Institute on the " Racial Characteristics of Modern Jews," and on " The Comparative Distribution of Jewish Talent," and he joined forces with his lifelong friend, Isidore Spielman, to study " The Comparative Anthropometry of English Jews," making many thousands of tests both in the
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West End and the East End. I remember his coming down to a Jewish school and instituting memory-tests by dictating groups of figures. His deductions from the results constitute a theory of " Prehension," which, as published in Mind, at once won a place in Psychology. I also remember his photo- graphing ten boys to turn them into a composite portrait of the Jewish type. My brother Louis, now a member of your Council, was one of the boys, and, like Aaron's rod, he appears to have swallowed up all the others, for the final type was curiously like him. Dr. Maurice Fishberg, who reproduces this composite portrait in his book in the Contemporary Science Series, entitled " The Jews " — a book, let me remark, in which you will find endless facts and figures and everything except the Jews — does not accept Dr. Jacobs's conclusion that a Jewish type exists. He adduces statistics to prove that even the notorious " Jewish nose " exists in only 13 per cent, of our race, while nearly 60 per cent, have actually Greek noses. Nor would the modern Mendelian accept Dr. Jacobs's theory of the pre- potency of the Jewish type in mixed marriages ; Dr. Redcliffe Salaman, indeed, maintains that it is a recessive type. When doctors disagree, the layman can only leave them wrangling. According to the logic of Rabbi Ishmael, when two Bible-texts disagree, a third text will always be found to reconcile them. And according to the logic of Science, when two doctors dis- agree, a third doctor will always be found to contradict both. That is how Science advances — it is a Hegelian progress by contradiction — and if Dr. Jacobs had only left his successors something to contradict, he would not have written in vain. But I am certain that here, as everywhere, positive results of his methods and outlook will remain. Even Fishberg, who denies his theories that the Jews are abnormally long-headed or big-brained, concedes that he was the first to anatyse truly the causes that determine the nature1 of Jewish occupations. It was probably this Dr. Jacobs to whom is to be attributed the elaborate article " Statistics " in the Jewish Encyclopedia, with its philosophical principles, its wealth of information both con- temporary and mediaeval, and its careful maps, showing the chief centres of Jewish population. And this Jacobs it is who appears to have written his last published article in the Ameri- can Hebrew, pointing out that Jews are now established in some sixteen hundred centres in the States.
A fourth Joseph Jacobs made his reputation as a Biblical Archaeologist. He discussed " Junior Right in Genesis," and
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demanded "Are there Totem Clans in the Old Testament?" and proffered a novel explanation of the Nethmim, the mys- terious Temple attendants mentioned in Nehemiah and Ezra. His view of early Hebrew Totemism was inspired by Maclennan and Robertson Smith. But after examining Biblical, Animal and Plant names, Exogamy, Ancestor and Animal Worship, Forbidden Food, Tattooing and Clan Crests, and the Blood Feud, he ultimately arrived at the conclusion that the evidence was insufficient to show that such primitive social clans, with kinship through the mothers and the worship of an animal or plant tattooed on the members, existed in Israel in historic times, though possibly existing among the Edomites.
There is also a separate Sephardic Jacobs, who was one of the first Jews to return to Spain, albeit only on a month's visit of exploration and exhumation among the ancient manuscripts of its libraries. From this honeymoon of scholarship he brought back copies of nearly a score of important documents and over 1,700 records. This Jacobs did for Judaso- Spanish history what his Ashkenazi fellow-Jacobs had done for Anglo-Jewish History, and his " Inquiry into the Sources of the History of the Jews of Spain " laid a foundation on which all future historians must build. The Royal Academy of Madrid hon- oured itself by making the Jewish scholar a Corresponding Member, and the Jewish scholar, in his discourse of reception, finely said : " I welcome in my election one of the many signs that Spain has learnt with regard to the Jews the highest and most difficult of all moral lessons — to forgive those we have injured." Possibly the Joseph Jacobs who translated the Spanish maximist should be classed with this Jacobs, or possibly from the raciness and pungency of the language the translation should go rather with the next group of Jacobses, the more literary series, to which belong Jacobs the critic, Jacobs the necrologist, Jacobs the historian of " Geographical Discovery ' and of " Wonder Voyages," Jacobs the historical novelist, the author of " As Others Saw Him," and, most popular of all, Jacobs the teller of fairy tales, English, Celtic, and Indian. The story-books in which he collaborated with the artist, Batten — a partnership as felicitous as that of Gilbert with Sullivan — books that delighted equally the nursery and the drawing-room, with their coda of learned notes for the edifica- tion of the study, revealed at once a great raconteur and a rare literary artist, for many of these tales were written or rewritten by himself for the nursery in defiance of the purists of folk-
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lore, who thought it sacrilegious to alter a syllable in a tradi- tional tale. But Jacobs maintained that the traditional was the transitional: the fact that a story was first heard in a certain locality was no proof that it had not come from some- where else. And so he invented an idiom for these tales that in its racy homeliness and mother-wit flouted even respectable grammar. It was the same instinct for language that served him so admirably in reviewing the Revised Version of the Bible. His little daughter, May, thought he wrote these Fairy Tales for her alone; that affords at once a charming glimpse of his domestic side and a sidelight upon popular theology. In close affinity with Jacobs the tale-teller stands the Jacobs who edited u Folk-lore," and midway between this editor and the Jewish Historian stands the Jacobs who studied " The Jewish Diffusion of Folk-Tales," or reconstructed by the same scientific methods the homely truth behind the fatal folk-tale of " Little St. Hugh of Lincoln," and the blood-legend in general. And this brings me to the Jacobs whose articles in the Times in 1882 roused all Europe against the pogroms of 1881, and brought about the Mansion House Meetings, and the Russo-Jewish Fund that by a premature optimism was wound up shortly before another series of pogroms. And this Jacobs who was the chief con- tributor to " Darkest Russia," and who seems to have been active again in 1891 and to be not unconnected with the Bibliographer of " The Jewish Question " as it asked and answered itself in a decade of pamphlets, opens out a perspec- tive of further Jacobses, practical Jacobses, innumerable, peak beyond peak, the Jacobses of the Anglo-Jewish Association, and the Board of Deputies, and the Conjoint Committee, and the Hebrew Literature Society, and the Jacobs who founded the Anglo- Jewish Year Book, and gave substance to the Jewish Chronicle. And all these are not to be confused with the American group of Jacobses whose career begins with the twentieth century, when they are seen co-operating in the Jew- ish Encyclopedia, directing the Bureau of Jewish Statistics and Research, editing the American Hebrew and the latest Jewish- American Year Book, teaching Literature and Rhetoric in the Jewish Theological Seminary, sitting on the Committee of the Jewish Publication Society and partaking as Style Editor in its new translation of the Bible, comforting Job by a Com- mentary, reviewing for the New York Times, lecturing to Jewish Ladies and Literary Circles and American Colleges, and receiv- ing the honorary degree Litt.D. from Philadelphia University.
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To trace out, inter-relate and appraise all these activities is beyond my powers. In Bulwer Lytton's posthumous novel, " The Parisians," the last fragment — curiously the most memorable passage in all his works — records how an unfor- tunate resident of Paris during the siege is finally compelled to sacrifice his pet dog to his own necessities. Wiping his mouth after the delicious meal, and pensively contemplating the bones upon his plate, he observes with rueful tenderness : " How Fido would have enjoyed those bones!" I cannot resist a similar reflection anent our lamented friend. How Jacobs would have enjoyed writing this necrology! Who else could disentangle this veritable Jewry of Jacobses, study " The Com- parative Distribution of Jewish Talent " among them, and put them all together again into a composite photograph? How he wTould have revelled in drawing up one of his famous pedi- grees of their descent and kinship !
IV
Even the literary critic who flourished in England under his name seems to resolve in twain. There was the aesthetic critic pronouncing his judgments in the grand manner, and there was the analytical critic, who, under the inspiration of his friend, R. G. Moulton, dreamed of an inductive science of criticism, which should study the text of the masters rather than presume to judge them. This Jacobs aimed at nothing less than " to reform the study of English Literature . . . rescue it from the clutches of those vapouring Oxonians, Matthew Arnold and the rest." It was a programme after the Cambridge heart, con- ceived in walks in the Madingley Road, but the only outcome seems to have been an elaborate study of " In Memoriam " — a vivisection of its plan, language and rhymes, true or false, which was akin to the Morelli method in art, but which has had no imitators for literature, except for ancient cases of disputed authorship, notably the Bible and the Shakespeare-Bacon stupidity. Personally I prefer the Oxonian manner of the other Jacobs. For criticism, though it may be a science, may also be an art — a super-art, whose subject-matter is the art- creations of others. His necrologies in the Athencewm, his handling of George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, and, mirabile dictu, John Henry Newman, are models of literary criticism, far more artistic and less scientific than he thought.
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Indeed, I know few things more artistic than his allegorical picture of the vast dis-jected work of Browning as a mansion whose " style is the Gothic with a curious infusion of Italian Renaissance." Particularly happy is the image of the suite of rooms that stands for " The Ring and the Book." " In each the same design, in itself somewhat repulsive, is repeated in mirrors of different shapes, parabolic, elliptical, concave, and the rest, distorting the image in each case, but giving, on the whole, a curious impression of realit}'." It is a metaphor that might well serve to characterise some of the later art of Henry James. Of Cardinal Newman, though he did ample justice to the saint and the leader, he observed drily : " His histories are unhistorical, his criticism is uncritical, and much of his theology is founded on his history and his criticism." As a critic, indeed, Jacobs and his friend Theodore Watts seem to have left no successors. They had world-standards, whereas there are now none at all. It is all a go-as-you-please, with publishers, if not authors, writing their own reviews, and every- thing coming out as sixpenny classics.
If, as a man of science, Jacobs was sometimes a young man in a hurry, he touched no branch of knowledge which he did not illuminate, even if only verbally. No German, for example, could ever condense the essence of paganism into the phrase, " the worship of the social bond," though every German has under his eye this paganism in practice. Nor could the preten- tiousness of the specialist be more lightly mocked than by his little dig at Professor Saintsbury, " who never seems to read a book for the first time." By taking all knowledge for his province Jacobs was able, if not to equal the specialist in any department, yet to be superior to him in general grasp and perspective. One figures Jacobs as an aeroplanist flashing over the world of knowledge, and though he frequently descended to make microscopic observations, he never gave you those observations from the ground, but always from the machine to which he had climbed back.
It was part of this universalist temper to react even against literature and science. Nearing the philosophic forties, he began to inveigh against literaturitis — authors were poor creatures : for knowledge of life one must go to nurses and grandmothers. He was about thirty-eight when he translated Balthasar Gracian's " Art of Worldly Wisdom," and half in fun but half in earnest he would produce you Sancho-Panza maxims for any emergency, some, real citations from his
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author, some, audacious improvisations. Gracian was only partly a Sancho Panza, and there was not wanting the spiritual strain of the seventeenth-century Jesuit ; how else could the translation have been dedicated to Jacobs' devoted friend, Lady Lewis? But the maxims Jacobs delighted to hurl at you were practicalities like " Know to get your price for things," " Do pleasant things yourself, unpleasant through others," or " Bet- ter mad with the rest of the world than wise alone " — a maxim1 highly popular to-day. I fear Gracian did not really help him to get his price for things, for, as he said in his preface, in explaining why men of letters have never written books of maxims, " they cannot have that interest in action and its rewards which is required for worldly success, or else they would not be able to concentrate their thoughts on things which they consider of higher import." Yet the realisation that he had reached middle-age without finding a stable financial foot- ing ma}' have contributed to that general sobering which, as the great Wordsworthian Ode puts it, comes to a man when the vision splendid of youth fades into the light of common day. Like Schopenhauer he prefixed to his version of Gracian the verse of Goethe, which declares that you must be either hammer or anvil — Amboss oder Hammer sein — and he was fond of quoting it. He must have known that his destiny was to be anvil, and that his nearest approach to the hammer was his membership of the Maccaba?ans. In that drab phase of his, Spinoza gave no comfort; he doubted whether there was anything but emptiness in his old Holy of Holies, and whether, as he puts it, life's curtain was not the picture. It was a stage in which the aimlessness of modern Judaism — its separateness for separation's sake — weighed upon him. He seemed to be waiting for his people to be worthy of its long tragedy. " If Israel have no future," he wrote in collecting the scattered essays of eighteen years, " man's past has no clue." If the Jews do not now bring about the triumph of their ideals, " the long travail of Israel through the ages has been for naught, and man must look back on his past, and forward to his future, without seeing the visible presence of God."
Solemn, tragic words ! In the very year he was writing them, a movement was arising for the realisation of the very ideal his first-written essay had glorified. But the Zionist doctrine which Jacobs had hailed as a gospel when presented by George Eliot, and the Zionist passion which he had cele- brated in Jehuda Halevi, seemed to him paltry and materialistic
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when adopted by Dr. Herzl. " I know how to kill Zionism," he said to me, when he first set eyes on the picturesque figure of its founder, " Cut off Herzl's beard ! " That was not merely Gracianism : his repugnance to Herzl was that of the profound student of Jewish problems to the man who approached them superficially as a race- Jew ; who, occupied solely with Real- politilc, was — at first at least — quite out of touch with the soul of the people or the faith. And Jacobs was not wrong in ever keeping steadfastly before the fanatics of race that a narrow interpretation of their ideal might be not a culmination but an anti-climax to Jewish history. Jacobs' own quest for a role for modern Jewry followed spiritual and not political horizons. Regarding the spiritual walls of the Ghetto as having fallen irreparably, he looked for the Jews either to diffuse the specific contributions of their ethical genius — such as the hallowing of history — or to form a nucleus for the brotherhood of the nations. He did, indeed, logically recognise the Return to Zion as an alternative, but like Ibsen's " Lady From the Sea," who longed to return across it till she was permitted to — when the yearning died — the concrete project left him cold. He was interested more in the thought of returning — with a difference — to Jesus, and taking him up into the apostolic succession of Jewish prophets. A great work he had planned upon " The Jewish Race " — a work of which, alas ! only a few chapters have been written — was to have ended, according to its Synopsis, with the sentiment: " Pity Jews have, by conduct of Christians in Middle Ages, been debarred from knowledge of life of Jesus, the noblest Jew who has lived, though not the most Jewish." The same note — that the death of the inspired Galilean Jew could no more than the Affaire Dreyfus be left a chose jugee — is struck at the end of " As Others Saw Him " : that anonymous attempt of his to re-write the Gospel story in a rationalistic Jewish setting, and with more local colour than the large method of the Gospel narrative vouchsafes. " O Jesus," writes the scribe who re-tells the story, as he sums up the conclusion of the whole matter, " why didst thou seem to care not for aught that we at Jeru- salem cared for? Why, arraigned before the appointed judges of thy people, didst thou keep silence before us, and, by thus keeping silent, share in pronouncing judgment upon thyself? We have slain thee as the Hellenes have slain Socrates their greatest, and our punishment will be as theirs. Then will Israel be even as thou wert, despised and rejected of men — a
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nation of sorrows among the nations. But Israel is greater than any of his sons, and the day will come when he will know thee as his greatest. And in that day he will say unto thee, * My sons have slain thee, O my son, and thou hast shared our guilt.' "
Not that Jacobs was enamoured of Christianity as the Chris- tians have understood it. I shall never forget his disgust when, having restored a little lost child to its parents, he was told: " Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto Me ! " "A simple, natural thing like that ! " he fumed to me. " And it has to be passed through the Christ.'' But if, as he said in his essay on " Jewish Ideals," the morality of the Christian may result in gush, " Judaism," he pointed out, " tends to confuse morality, law and custom." But there have been few finer interpretations of Judaism than he gave in this essay — I heard it originally as a lecture in the underground Essex Hall over twenty-five years ago, and it has remained stamped on my mind as vividly as some great dramatic performance. Psychology, philosophy, spirituality, knowledge of life and cities, all wTent to its making. I would give a library of abstract theology for such a remark as that the utility of religious custom is " to create a fund of tender emotion which will be at the service of the moralities." But how futile it seems to talk of spiritual psychology in our world of cave-men!
On " Jacobs, the last phase " I have already touched. That buoyant temperament had reached a stage which promised like the old age of Browning's Rabbi Ben Ezra to be
" The best of life for which the first was made."
His children were — as they say in America — " making good," and he was cultivating — he wrote me — Uart d'etre grand- pere. Theologically too he had reached repose, for as a Sem- inary Professor he had come strongly within the Schechterian orbit. But indeed the mood of spiritual disillusionment is near akin to orthodoxy, and even before he left England he had begun to urge that " logic is not logical." My retort always was that it is life which is not logical. And Jacobs' life was no more logical than mine — or yours. " We are all of us artists in life," he said in the very first line of his greatest book,
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" and very poor daubs most of us make of it." Jacobs made anything but a daub of his life, but if here and there he smudged the picture, the tout ensemble is assuredly that of a scholar and thinker who lived habitually upon an exalted plane. There was, a generation ago, no essentially nobler place in London than the little Kilburn study, overflowing with all the latest volumes of literature, philosophy and science, in which Joseph Jacobs carried on his life of plain living and high thinking, and from which he justly rebuked the push and aggressive smartness of Jewry with the advice: "Make fools of your children." For all his swagger of worldly wisdom he was at heart the Parsifal, the pure fool. When he said of his illustrator Batten, " What should I or other English children do without him? " he was speaking truly. In dedicating his just published volume — that was to be the first of a new group of six — " Europa's Fairy Tales " to " Peggy " — he says, " I have told again the fairy tales that all the mummeys of Europe have been telling their little Peggies, oh for ever so many years." Peggy was his grand-daughter, but I cannot help thinking my own little Peggy was in his mind, too, for he and she had fallen in love at first sight, and she took possession of him.
Dante placed in hell the man who was gloomy in the sweet air: by such a scale of valuations Jacobs should be placed in the seventh heaven, for neither his tribulations, deserved or undeserved, nor his scanty material reward, could ever sour him. In truth his work itself was his reward. People often speak — especially to-day — as if the thinker's life was one of less activity and less essential reality than that of the man of action. It is a gross error. The thinker is active in a world actually more real for man than that merely physical environ- ment which he shares with the animal creation, and in this world he may have as great moments and adventures as Cortez, gazing with a wild surmise,
" Silent upon a peak in Darien."
In a set of verses prefixed to Jacobs' edition of " Barlaam and Josaphat " I said, addressing him :
" O friend, who sittest young yet wise, Beneath the Bo-tree's shade, Confronting life with kindly eyes, A scholar unafraid
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To follow thought to any sea, Or back to any fount ! "
In these fearless explorations he must have had no small experi- ence of the hazards and thrills of the spirit. Not seldom he must have felt, like the Ancient Mariner, he was
" The first that ever burst Into that silent sea."
Did he however bring back from his voyages anything of lasting moment to mankind? Was there any great adventure com- mensurate with the undoubted greatness of his spirit, was there anything worthy of its compass, its insight, its many-sided knowledge, its Catholic humanity? That we shall not know till we read — if we ever shall read — his magnum opus, " European Ideals — A Study in Origins," which was to trace the genesis of the European Mind. Twenty small things there are, we know, but in literature twenty shillings do not make a
sovereign.
I had pinned my own hopes on the great work on " The Jewish Race " to the Synopsis of which I have already referred. In its bare self this Synopsis, which is divided into Two Books and Sixty-Seven Sections, and covers the whole field of Jewish life, is more instructive and illuminative than the overwhelming majority of completed books. But when I urged him to finish it, he replied by sending me the Synopsis of the rival great work, no longer giving up to the Ghetto what was meant for mankind. The new Synopsis showed a work conceived on the grand scale, in which all his gifts and knowledge could find expression and which would in a sense even absorb the Jewish opus. Dr. Israel Abrahams thinks it is largely or wholly written. If so, that vast absorbing labour would explain — and even justify — the perfunctoriness of some of his Ameri- can hackwork, work that it was tragic he should have to do at all, and which at any rate must have prevented him from keeping fully up to date with his colossal subject. For he aimed to analyse the European mind with almost chemical exactness into its Hebraic, Hellenic, and other constituents, and since he wrote his Synopsis a mass of new literature, if not new light, has been poured forth, some of it apportioning in novel ratios the Hebraic and Hellenic factors even in Chris- tianity itself. And how if — still more tragically — the weari- ness evident in his journalism and lecturing had passed into his
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book? It is comforting anyhow to see from his last signed article, " Liberalism and the Jews," in the December Menorah. that his hand had not lost its cunning nor his eye its ency- clopedic sweep. The description of Chutzpah as " iridescent impudence " is in his freshest manner. But even if this mag- num opus should fail us, we must recall his own summary of Browning: " Aspiration is achievement." If his life is destined to leave us no supremely great work, yet it was a great life, and his work as a whole leaves a great lesson.1
In the ardour of youth he was prepared to trace all philos- ophy, science, mysticism and religion to Jewish sources. But the very effort to trace them widened his outlook, and the im- pression that radiates from every book he wrote or edited, from every table or pedigree he drew up, is the brotherhood of man. The fairy tales told in Anglo-Saxon nurseries were told earlier or later to the duskier ears of little Hindoos, the japes that gladdened Slavonic firesides in a bleak world of snow brought glee and good-fellowship in the sun-kissed tents of Persia, the homilies that edified the pious Buddhist in the tinkling pagodas of Cambodia were the nutriment of Christian souls in the thatched cottages of France, the parables that enlivened the expositions of the Brahmins of Ceylon relieved equally the dull discourses of the Mullahs, mad or sane, of Nubia and Egypt, the " Chad Gadya," sung by the happy Jew on his Passover pillows, was a Volkslied in the steep cobbled streets of old German towns. The Buddha himself, Jacobs tells us, was made a Christian Saint, when only his deeds and words were known and not his name. Vain to sunder the human family by the artificial boundaries of States, religions, countries, ambitions, hatreds. Underneath and through it all goes the same flesh and blood, and the human nature that politicians drive out with
i It now appears that the article " Liberalism and the Jews " formed a chapter of a work called "Jewish Contributions to Civilisation," which seems to be a cross between the two long-projected works, "The Jewish Race: A Study of National Character" and "European Ideals: A Study in Origins." Thus these two "enchanted cigarettes" — to borrow Balzac's term for projected works — did not end altogether in smoke. But unfor- tunately, even of " Jewish Contributions to Civilisation," only one of the three volumes was left in presentable shape. Nevertheless this first vol- ume contains the quintessence of his thought and research, and includes a magnificent introductory summary, and, though it was denied the final re- vision of the master hand, yet by the sobriety and objectivity of its views and the breadth of its information, it must long remain the authority on the historic relations of Jews and Judaism to the Church, to the State, to Capital and Commerce, to Politics, and to Science and Philosophy. If it has a fault it is that of over-meekness in its exposition of the " Jewish Con- tributions to Civilisation."
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a pitchfork reasserts itself in all its divine identity with a song or a proverb. Hath not a Jew eyes, and if you prick a Chris- tian will he not bleed? It is because the work of Jacobs is saturated in every pore with this conception, that I would write for his epitaph not merely that he was a great Jew, but that he was also — and perhaps the two are really one — a great humanist.
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THE PILLAR OF FIRE
{From the Russian of Bunin.*)
We wandered through the boundless sand,
The long and burning day, A cloudy pillar led our band
Where shining pastures lay.
But now 'tis sweet to breathe — night falls,
Mirages, mists disband, Jehovah's flaming column calls
Towards the Promised Land.
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EPILOGUE: THE MAJESTY OF ARMENIA
..
9
I saw all our women and my mother torn to pieces by the monsters who disputed for possession of them," says the old Princess in " Candide," " and I was left for dead amid a heap of corpses. For three hundred leagues around similar scenes were going on — without any omission in the five prayers a day prescribed by Mahomet." It is impossible in reading the evidence as to the treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire not to be reminded of this and other episodes by which Voltaire strove to disconcert the optimism of his Pangloss — episodes which, however, seemed to transcend the licence of even satirical invention and to have no warrant in the actual facts of mediaeval history. Alas, we now know that Voltaire's imag- ination fell below, not exceeded, the diabolism of human nature at those moments when, maddened by war-lust — aggravated let us charitably admit by war-panic — it returns to that pre- historic animal nature through which the soul has slowly struggled.
From more than one area of the war-zone, from Belgium from Galicia, from Turkish Armenia, the same story has reached us : the same dread saga of the wanderings of whole populations, under the spur of massacre, rape, hunger. Little children fall like flies by the wayside, and new children are born on the march. Mothers go mad. Girls throw themselves into the rivers. Men are killed and buried like dogs. Torture becomes a commonplace. There is even cannibalism.
But Belgium had almost all the world for her friends, and the faith in restoration went before her exiles like a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Even the Jews of the Pale — torn and tossed between the alternate victors — found a helping hand, and begin to behold some faint gleam of Zion upon the political horizon. On Ararat alone no Ark can rest. For Armenia alone there is the cry without answer : " Watch- man, what of the night? "
For Armenia alone there is no " Mandatory " — she cannot find protection even in the lion's den or the eagle's nest. There is neither oil nor gold nor aught worth the cost of defending her. The nations, eager to mother more oleaginous or aureate
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territories, so eager that they will be at one another's throats rather than forgo their loving labour, here vie with one another only in their solicitousness to offer the task to America.
Sister-nations — I have been accustomed to think — the Armenians and the Jews. Both hail from sister-lands of the cradle of civilisation, both come trailing clouds of glory from the purpureal days of Persia and Babylon, both have borne the shock of the ancient and mediaeval empires and of the mili- tant migrations of their races, and both hold to their original faith; for if the one was the first preacher of Jehovah, the other was the first nation to profess Jesus. And sisters, too, in sorrow, I thought: exiled, scattered, persecuted, massacred.
Sisters in sooth, yet not equal in suffering. Hitherto, through the long centuries, the crown of martyrdom has been pre-eminently Israel's. And as, day by day during this war of ours, there came to me by dark letter or whisper the tale of her woes in the central war-zone, I said to myself : " Surely the cup is full : surely no people on earth has such a measure of gall and vinegar to drain."
But I was mistaken. One people is suffering more. That people, whose ancient realm held the legendary Eden, has now for abiding place the pit of Hell. I bow before this higher majesty of sorrow. I take the crown of thorns from Israel's head and I place it upon Armenia's.
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