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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

ISRAEL ZANGWILL

"England! awake! awake! awake!
Jerusalem thy sister calls!"

Blake

jQeto gorfe

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1921

A.U rights reserved

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 :

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.

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.

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-

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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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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.

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

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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.

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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.

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

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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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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.

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."

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

THE VOICE OF JEEUSALEM

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

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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

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

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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.'

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

" 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."

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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-

THE VOICE OF JEKUSALEM

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."

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.

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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,

87.

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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,

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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:

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

'* 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

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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,

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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."

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-

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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-

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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.

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

" 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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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."

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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THE POSITION OF JUDAISM

[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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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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THE VOICE OP JERUSALEM

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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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THE VOICE OF JEEUSALEM

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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,
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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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,
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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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.
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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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,
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THE VOICE OP JERUSALEM

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 VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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.)

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.

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 VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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.

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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.
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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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.
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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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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.

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.

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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."

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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.

" 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.

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.

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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.

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

" 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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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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THE VOICE OP JERUSALEM

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.

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.

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.

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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.

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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.

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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 VOICE OP JERUSALEM

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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-

259

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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.

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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THE VOICE OP JERUSALEM

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.

262

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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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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.

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.

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.

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.

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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.

285

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,
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THE VOICE OP JERUSALEM

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' ! "

287

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

288

THE VOICE OP JERUSALEM

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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.

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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.

305

" 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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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.

308

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.

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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?

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

— 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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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 VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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

328

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

" 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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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

331

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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.

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.

333

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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

334>

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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!

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.

335

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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.

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 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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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.

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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.

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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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THE VOICE OF JEKUSALEM

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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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THE VOICE OF JEEUSALEM

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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.

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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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THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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 VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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.

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 !

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,

361

THE VOICE OF JEKUSALEM

" 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

S62

THE VOICE OP JERUSALEM

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

36S

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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."

364>

THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM

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.

365

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.

366

EPILOGUE: THE MAJESTY OF ARMENIA

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

367

THE VOICE OF JEKUSALEM

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.

PEINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OS" AMERICA

368

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Zangwill, Israel,

The voice of Jerusalem,

1921.

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