Hilaire Belloc: The Jews

Notes on Belloc’s Life
Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) was born near Paris; a typical brief biography says ‘his mother settled in Sussex’ in 1878—leaving the implications unclear. In 1892—that is, at an age when most university men had graduated—he entered Balliol and won ‘1st Class in Honour History Schools’. He became something like a professional Roman Catholic, and seems to have been a lifelong believer in such things as the ‘Fall of Man’ and ‘Hell’ and ‘Keys to Heaven’. His Survivals and New Arrivals (1929) shows that he believed the Catholic Church was unlike any other institution, and had remained unchanged over the period of its existence, which he dated from ‘Jesus Christ’. As with many intensively-propagandised persons, he could never bring himself to investigate his own elements and axioms. My personal belief, unsupported by documentary evidence, is that he hoped to become something like a reverse Martin Luther, reconquering England for the Faith after a period of persecution. He is Eurocentric, as I suppose is necessary for any convinced Roman Catholic.
      His political ideal was a vaguely-defined ‘agrarian distributist’ society, perhaps based on France—he liked the idea of a robust, but not too bright, self-sufficient peasantry, who however wouldn’t mind paying a percentage to support their very own bishop, and with the Church holding a ‘special position’ in education. He had a perhaps characteristically Catholic attitude to war, having little objection to wiping out defenceless people. (‘Whatever happens we have got/ The Maxim gun, and they have not.’—I try to minimise other people's quotations; the Maxim gun quotation is accurate, but is spoken by a character living in Africa called Blood, who is not intended to be Belloc. The poem is The Modern Traveller, 1898, drawings by BTB.)
      Belloc disliked ‘industrial capitalism’, and considered places like Huddersfield an ultimate horror, so it’s not clear where this weaponry was supposed to come from: possibly he thought village blacksmiths could make it. I suspect his dislike was mainly of factory chimneys; I doubt if he appreciated technology sufficiently to anticipate possibilities of electrical power.
      He thought candlelight was natural. He had interesting things to say about sailing and tides and winds. He wrote on sea power and the Romans entering southern England. He liked people to sing at their meals.
      Belloc became a British subject in 1902, perhaps to enter Parliament. He stood as a Liberal in 1906, but I’m not sure if he was elected. His writings betray considerable distaste for that institution (Mr Clutterbuck’s Election, 1908; A Change in the Cabinet, 1909; The Party System (with C Chesterton) 1911) but I could never quite work out what his objections were.
      Belloc had little grasp of science—on p. 297 of The Jews Belloc painstakingly points out that diamond and coal are not the same; somewhere else he says that alcohol in the chemical sense doesn’t exist. But he did at least have a theory of science, namely, that it was all a matter of measurement. According to H G Wells, Roman Catholics ‘are quite ready to believe Mr. Belloc when he tells them, with that buoyant assurance of his, that Darwin was inspired by the ambition to abolish God in the universe.’
      His theory of politics seems rather primitive, too; he was incapable or impatient of analysing detail, seeing events in terms of dictators, great leaders, and so on. The questions of how and why people were made to follow dictators didn’t interest him. He had little interest in the details of finance beyond noting that money exists and that France had large stocks of gold at that time. He noted Jews had something like a monopoly of finance, but seems not to have noticed the USA Federal Reserve. Unfortunately, he had no idea how mechanised warfare with modern technology and credit could yield huge profits; his whole picture of war was therefore heroic and nostalgic and chivalrous, rather than a matter of labour and chemistry and lethal machinery and unscrupulous secret long-term rackets
      When did Belloc become Jew-aware in today's sense?—apparently after the First World War. One of his books, The French Revolution, does not have Jews, Rothschild, or Walter Scott in the index; the book is undated, at least in what looks like the popular version, but Goodreads says 1911. Worryingly, at the very start Belloc writes 'the history ... of the Revolution can be followed in any one of a hundred text-books'. Unfortunately, Belloc is one of these types who can't bear to think he had to be told things. As far as I know there's not much clue as to how he began to dip his toe into Jew commentary.
      I've left that paragraph, immediately above, unchanged. But I noticed that Eye-Witness is stated to have published six articles in late 1911 on ‘The Jewish Question’. The headings are similar to those in his books.

J.B. Morton's Hilaire Belloc (first published 1912, but updated; my edition is by the Catholic Book Club) presents Belloc as perpetually poor, but restless and tough. He tramped his way across the USA searching for the love of his life, stopping at farm places and staying in exchange for sketching the people. He was constantly correcting proofs. He sang at meals, with the right people—some of his singing is recorded. He liked the countryside and its inns, especially in France, as they once were. Morton is thin on detail; I expect Belloc inherited money for King's Land, his house. Belloc liked midnight Mass, and I'd guess could explain each step in that symbolic ritual, as explained by theologians rather than power historians.

Belloc’s writings   [Back to start]
      His books included The Old Road (which influenced Alfred Watkins, the inventor or discoverer of leys), children’s poems, a public dispute with H G Wells over history, two books on the First World War, novels and verse, and at least thirty history books, written in an unfashionable style like a Roman Catholic Macaulay interspersed with French proverbs in over-literal English. (The flavour is like Hercule Poirot's theatrical speech). They often present a continental view which is censored out of the English-speaking world. His narrative prose-cum-poetry style was parodied very effectively by Max Beerbohm in A Christmas Garland.
      The Eye-Witness (1908) is fiction, in (I counted) 27 parts, each a dramatised story to illustrate a time in history: Julius Caesar's invasion of Britain, Marcus Aurelius in 179 A.D., 'one of the worst enemies of the faith', East Anglia and barbarian tribes in 370 A.D. Up to British politics under Balfour, in 1906. Surprisingly, the word 'Jew' only appears once, and that as a Christian about to be martyred. Patient people might like Belloc's short stories as a guide to Roman Catholic views of history before the First World War. Mostly battles, guns, barricades, heroic deeds, there is little on plans, cunning, exploitation of superstition.
      Belloc started a newspaper, or newssheet, rather confusingly (now) also called the Eye-Witness. I found no copies online. Writers have been listed as G. K. Chesterton, Maurice Baring, E. C. Bentley, H. G. Wells, G. B. Shaw, J. S. Philimore, Desmond McCarthy, F. Y. Eccles, Katherine Tynan and others; Belloc hated the 'anonymous press'. It sounds not well thought out: very liberal, hating a few rich families, hating 'corruption', and always supporting pay rises for the workers. Judging by what I've read, they had no idea of Jewish machinations and war-mongering.
      And, of interest here, he wrote The Jews, first published by Constable in London in 1922, reprinted five years later, then reprinted in 1937 with a new introductory chapter (in a different, smaller, face, numbered with Roman numerals) looking at the Spanish Civil War, the Third Reich, and Zionism and the Arab Revolt. This book has ensured Belloc has been censored, like his contemporary McCabe. To take some random examples: Louis Golding in The Jewish Problem (1938, Penguin) makes no mention of Belloc, though he must have known of him. An American Catholic book by Charles McFadden, The Philosophy of Communism (1939; reprinted 1963) omits him. Warrant for Genocide (Norman Cohn) omits him, as he omits Iustinus Pranaitis, though these deserve a place in ‘myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy’. Biographies of other literary figures down to the present day, when they discuss Belloc, omit this book. Here's my review of A. N. Wilson on Hilaire Belloc.
      Belloc's 1928 novel Belinda is the only novel known to me with explicit reference to the ruination of English wealthy families by Rothschild in 1815. I can't find a downloadable version online—perhaps for that reason. Belloc's novel, from internal evidence of fathers and grandfathers, must be set about the mid-1800s, and may have been intended as a rival to Pride and Prejudice. I've linked here to a relevant passage in the novel; there may be more. Belloc could find no publisher, and had it printed privately.
      Poor Belloc is even censored by Catholics: an online version of The Great Heresies (1938) has chapter 2 omitted, though this is slightly concealed by omission of the chapter numbers in the contents. I would guess it contained praise of the ‘strong new movements’ in Italy and Germany.
      Survivals and New Arrivals (1929, 1933, 1939, & perhaps later) is Belloc's summary of attacks against Catholicism ("Roman" is an 'offensive adjunct') in 1929, listed according to their novelty, the 'Main Opposition' being sandwiched between Survivals and New Arrivals, and consisting of Nationalism, Anti-Clericalism, and The "Modern Mind". There is nothing in it about Jews, not even in the USSR; I presume he was warned off. (My copy is a 'Unicorn Books' paperback, published in London by Sheed & Ward). Nationalism was encouraged by Jews, as soon as they realised they could make money from wars. French nationalism, and later Italian and German nationalisms, must have had that aim. Belloc absorbed the attitude; he said nothing against the 'Great War'. The 'Great Patriotic War' of Jews in the USSR is a particularly malformed example.

The Jews   [Back to start]
    The Jews is interesting for several reasons:

1. Introductory Note: Belloc writes in a mannered style, which is not signposted; he has no bullet-points or clear paragraph titles, so that much of the time the reader is never quite certain where he/she is, or how much Belloc's point will drag on.
2. Belloc’s religious views make him take rival religions seriously. Note that he didn’t regard Russia as Catholic: it was a ‘vast sea of Orthodox culture.’ He is objective enough not to believe only in religious blocs: he firmly believes in patriotic nationalisms (though this seems at odds with Catholic theory). I don't think he ever regarded conversion as a tactic to try to unify tribal and other groups, something perhaps carried from the Civis Romanus sum attitude. He generally takes the side of France against Germany or Prussia. In fact he became a supporter of the ‘strong and healthy movements’, i.e. Fascism, in Italy and Spain, though not what he describes as the odd racist people in Berlin. The race attitude must have been taken from Roman Catholicism; he had no idea about the genetics of races.
3. Belloc suppresses, or doesn’t know of, the Khazar idea, maybe because of the official belief that modern Jews have Biblical connections. He thought mediaeval Poland 'welcomed the Jews' in vast numbers, obviously with a 'diaspora' in mind.
4. Surprisingly, Belloc says nothing whatsoever of actual Jewish beliefs! Perhaps he couldn’t bring himself to read up on the subject; and in any case he regarded Yiddish or Hebrew as 'a language kept as far as possible secret'. He was unimpressed by such apparently outlandish issues as the Illuminati, but was well aware that Freemasons had Jewish connections.
5. Belloc lists dislikeable characteristics which he attributes to Jews. These include secrecy (but what about the Vatican?) and money-making as a soul-destroying activity, and the Jewish tendency to monopoly (and yet one can’t help recalling that, for example, the Pope gave exclusive rights of exploitation to Spain and Portugal). There is little evidence or documentation in this book. In fact, Belloc specifically states that he avoids giving names, in order to avoid offence. This is tiresome for a modern reader, as Belloc continually refers to scandals, frauds, members of the House of Lords, and then-current events, many of which are now difficult to identify.
       Belloc also lists dislikeable characteristics of ‘gentiles’, most of them forms of dishonesty or hypocrisy.
6. The Russian Revolution. Belloc, unlike most authors down to the present day, takes the explicit view that Russia was ruled by a clique of Jews, and is willing to say so. It was a coup d'état by Jews.
7. Unlike most modern Jew investigators, Belloc repeatedly states that Jews were aloof from the 'Great War'. Most writers now assume Jews wanted war in Europe, and financed all the different sides, mainly through the US Federal Reserve, though German money and Russian money were significant. My best guess is that Belloc loved France and could not bear to think the war with Germany was choreographed by Jews. His references to Dreyfus show the same bias, assuming the events were natural. He overestimated France's sovereignty, just as simple patriotic Britons had no idea of hidden powers. He never mentioned the 'anti-Semitism' of the Kaiser.
8. Belloc comments in passing on Other historical events, for example the multiple expulsions of Jews, the population of Jews in Poland, the manufacture of German surnames (rather like computer-manufactured names of small limited companies now) and the effects of Jews on British legislation. Unfortunately, Belloc hardly ever gives evidence or sources, beyond a rare mention of Josephus. (He may simply not have had time—he wrote 150 books). He was aware of Cromwell, and the real or supposed impoverishment of Britons in the 18th century, but isn't aware of (for example) Jews in the USA, in slavery, or even flooding into New York. Belloc did not at the time appreciate the Balfour Declaration of a 'Jewish homeland' in Palestine—he naively praises the first man to enlist when the USA entered World War 1, a Jew, imagining this was to help France.
    
9. Note on surnames: The audio file https://big-lies.org/science-revisionism/fred-leuchter-with-jan-lamprecht-life-story.mp3 starting at about 24:24 is Fred Leuchter talking about his life when young.

   "[Boston, Russians, Poles, disgusting...] ... I got to junior high school. ... I switched to Latin and German. The teacher I had was an American woman. She was a substitute teacher because the teacher that was supposed to be teaching the class was a Jew. ... apparently ... from the old country he must have been a displaced person, what we called a DP. Anyway, I go through September through to the first week in February and the teacher is a substitute and she eventually leaves because the Jewish gentleman... Dr Ascherman his name was. He came back to teach this German class. ...
         The first day he was in there, he went around the class. I didn't realize it, but there was some significance to my name because as in a lot of societies certain names are used by some people and certain names aren't used by these people. And I guess there aren't many Jews who have the name Leuchter. At any rate he's going around the room probably a good half the class are Jewish. He says, OK, where's the boy with the real German name? Hey, I'm sitting here, what do I know? Fred the dunce. I'm sitting in the room and he repeats himself. Where's the boy with the real German name? I dunno he's talking to me. And he screams at the top of his lungs "LEUCHTER STAND UP" Oh boy. So I stood up. He was just plain nasty to me. So I went up after the class and I spoke with him and I asked him what's going on here. In front of what was left of the class which was probably three-quarters of it hadn't left the room yet he went up one side of me and down the other side of me and called me every vile name he could think of in both English and German. I mean, he swore at me, he called me - I'm not eve gonna repeat what he said - but the point, was here I am my first year a high school I'm getting sworn at by someone I don't even understand why. ... [and more about Ascherman. the school board, etc]"

   Leuchter seems not to have learned to recognise some manufactured Jewish names. Belloc's examples are: Flowerfield (Blumenfeld) and Stanley for Solomon, Curzon for Cohen, Sinclair for Slezinger, Montague for Moses, Benson for Benjamin. More recently we have Silverstein [silver + stone], Lipstadt [Something like mouth + town] and Goldman Sachs [one of each type, I think]

10. The taboo nature of the subject. Belloc had a touching faith in the ability of people to withstand (non-Catholic) propaganda: he thought his book had helped ‘let the cat out of the bag’ and that discussion on the subject had become much more open; I suspect he hoped his book would become a big-seller. Of course, if this free discussion ever happened, it certainly did not continue—Bertrand Russell is a perfect example of an intellectual clamming up firmly and permanently on this issue. Belloc thought twelve to twenty years was about the maximum length of time for which enquiry could be fended off by stereotyped accusations of anti-Semitism.
11. His predictions and antidotes are of some interest. He did not forecast US support for Israel, though he did predict turbulence and difficulties. He is unaware of oil as an issue (there is no mention of it anywhere, though there is in later books). He disavows any pretence at suggesting legal or other solutions, and his suggestions are not very clear, though he pins most of his faith on open discussion (and perhaps seems to be implying some sort of apartheid). However, one of his main claims is that the ‘gentiles’ themselves are at greatly at fault for not being honest.

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Extracts from ‘The Jews’, with Notes:—   [Back to start]The Jews has an analytical table of contents, which I haven’t included. The quotations below are all intended to be as in the original, including spelling, punctuation, italicisation and capitalisation, though I may have made some errors. (Belloc’s writing appears in several web compilations, where the quotations are usually roughly right, but not exactly). I’ve included page numbers, since as far as I can tell each edition must have had the same numbering. The book was not indexed. It was published in London by Constable & Company; I don’t know whether there were overseas editions. The copyright presumably is either with Belloc’s heirs or assigns, or with whichever companies bought out Constable. I’m assuming my extracts come within the as ‘fair dealing’ provisions. My notes are in square brackets followed by RW; other square brackets contain space-saving rearrangements of Belloc’s own words.

Dedication   [Back to start]

[Here's ‘Lady Strange’ on Simanovich, secretary of Rasputin: ‘... the "Jewish secretary" seems to be recurrent throughout the nineteenth century in all aristocratic and religious circles.
    This is not a coincidence, but the conscious infiltration (and neutralization) of organizations that might represent a danger to jewry . The same modus operandi with Jewish wives and prostitutes placed among elite men.
    This is how these Jewish "secretaries" are always found where they were least likely to be: with Legitimist noble ladies in France, with Princes or counter-revolutionary politicians (often anti-semites!), with high-ranked clergymen ... Then, "comme par hasard", all reactionary movements abort, moral and financial scandals break out ... quarrels, suicides, duels occur ...
    And it's still true today: traditionalist Catholics in France (on the way to extinction) have a Jew as their treasurer. It's perfectly legitimate, isn't it, to choose your treasurer from the worst enemies of traditional Catholicism—what could go wrong? ... now the trad Caths in France are the fiercest opponents of anti-Semitism and revisionism, and were the most heinous in condemning Mgr Williamson.
    When will non-Jews finally understand? If Europeans are ever to regain control of their destiny, they will have to educate their future elites about the modus operandi (always the same) of their eternal enemy.]

Preface   [Back to start]
[Belloc wrote a short preface, on the modest object of his book. In effect there are three principles:
- Concealment by Jews about Jews is to end
- There’s a need to ward off disorder
- There are no personal or recriminating allusions in the book
—RW]

INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER (1937)   [Back to start]
[Belloc has a new introduction of about 32 pages, intended to update his book. I won’t spend much time on it. He looks at three main issues, all part of what he calls The European Revolution, presumably based on his interpretation of Marx. "Jewish Communism" is heard everywhere in conversation, though not in the Press—Belloc thought Jewish censorship operated through placing adverts; he didn't understand press and radio control. For that matter, Belloc discusses Jew opposition to 'Capitalism' without noticing they support Jewish finance. :-
      1. Spanish Civil War (Belloc doesn’t give it a name. He’s pro-Franco, and says Franco uses no propaganda. It’s a religious war). Belloc says nothing of metal ores and other resources in Spain (Rio Tinto?) although he does appreciate facts about landowning, peasantry, and hard peasant work—The land reconquered from the Moors ... was confiscated to the Crowns ... but ... not redistributed to the peasantry.
      2. Third Reich and its race beliefs, which Belloc thinks absurd, I think on simple theological grounds. He thinks it’s unfair to break implicit contract with Jews who have (e.g.) embarked on career of medicine, by saying, now you can’t practice. He contrasts this with Poland, with many more Jews—Belloc claims the Poles were more tolerant but rather absurdly doesn’t take into account the political activities of Jews in Poland. Belloc said of Nazi Germany, and the idea of Jews preying on the fallen body of the State, “rats in the Reich”, that for one man that blamed the old military command for misfortunes during the war [sic; it was the outcome that mattered!—RW], twenty blamed the Jews, ‘though these were the architects of former German prosperity and among them were found a larger proportion of opponents of the war than in any other section of the Emperor’s subjects...’
      Belloc seems to know nothing of Bela Kun in Hungary, and 'Communist' Bavaria, and other wreckages. In particular, he takes all the stuff on persecution of Jews at face value, though very possibly it was propagandist, and after all propaganda had ruled since 1914. He was anti-German in Europe, and pro-Jewish, and never faced the possibility that secret Jewish events were driving European history in 1836/37.
      3. Zionism. (And the Arab Revolt—1935-6, which seems to have been not much, and one would guess was staged indirectly by Jews anyway). Much emphasis on Jerusalem and its supposed significance. And a lot on Damascus being identical with Syria. And the horrid Moslems—Belloc had no idea that Muslims were set up by Jews a millennium or so in the past.
      Belloc doesn't consider the possibility of moving Jews to Birobidzhan or Madagascar, and generally fails to suggest anything. —RW]

I THE THESIS OF THIS BOOK 3   [Back to start]
P. 4: ‘The elimination of an alien body may take three forms. It may take a frankly hostile form... destruction. [or, less hostile] expulsion. [Or] ... an amicable one, elimination by absorption.’ [Belloc wanted open recognition of the idea of Jews as a wholly separate nationality, treated as an alien thing, respected ‘it as a province of society outside our own’.]

P. 5: ‘From the pitiless massacres of Cyrenaica in the second century to the latest murders in the Ukraine that solution [destruction] has been attempted and has failed.’

II THE DENIAL OF THE PROBLEM 17   [Back to start]
[Belloc looks at the 19th century liberal attitude, and such things as citizenship. Also the small numbers of Jews in western Europe-RW]

Pp. 32ish:

Pp. 37-38:       ‘.. I am minded to give the reader another anecdote (again taking care, I hope, to suppress all names and dates to prevent identification, which might irritate my Jewish readers or too greatly interest their opponents). [But doesn’t this conflict with Belloc’s wanting greater openness?—RW] As a younger man it was my constant pastime to linger at the bar of the House of Lords and listen to what went on there. I shall always remember one occasion when an aged Jew, who had begun life in very humble circumstances, had accumulated a great fortune and had purchased his peerage like any other, rose to speak in connection with a resolution or with a bill dealing with “aliens”—the hypocrisy of the politician, and the popular ferment against the rush of Jewish immigrants into the East End between them gave rise to that non-committal name. This old gentleman very rightly pushed all such humbug aside. He knew very well that the policy was aimed against “his people”—and he called them “my people”. He knew perfectly well that the proposed change would introduce interference with their movement and would subject them to humiliation. He spoke with flaming patriotism, and I was enthralled by the intensity, vigour and sincerity of his appeal. It was a very fine performance and, incidentally (considering what the man was!), it illustrated the vast difference between his people and my own. For a life devoted to accumulating wealth, which would have killed nobler instincts in any one of us, had evidently seemed to him quite normal and left him with every appetite of justice and of love of nation unimpaired. He clinched that fine speech with the cry, “What our people want is to be let alone.” He said it over and over again. I am sure that in the audience which listened to him, all the older men felt a responsive echo to that appeal. It was the very doctrine in which they had been brought up and the very note of the great Victorian Liberal era, with its national triumphs in commerce and in arms.
      Well, within a very few years the younger members of that very man’s family came out in Parliamentary scandal after scandal, appearing all in sequence one after the other—a sort of procession. They had been let alone right enough! But they had not let us alone. ..’
      [This might, or might not, be Sir Edward Speyer, whose baronetcy was revoked. Times Dec 4th 1921, ‘on account of his unlawful communicating and trading with the enemy during the war’. (This info from Thorkelson writing in 1937)—RW]

East End about 1900. Whitechapel Road and Commercial Road East are two of the principal roads. Note that there is some evidence that ‘Jack the Ripper’, who murdered in this area, may have lived there too. A Jew in fact has been identified as ‘Jack the Ripper’, with some evidence that the police were reluctant to prosecute. It’s not difficult to imagine a village immigrant carrying out such murders; it’s also not difficult to imagine the police taking no action about the deaths of a few women.     An analogous situation has applied for years with Islam.

III THE PRESENT PHASE OF THE PROBLEM 43   [Back to start]
[Well, not quite; it’s Belloc’s history up to about 1920. He charts his view of the rise of awareness of Jews. The climax being Bolshevism which Belloc thought encouraged people to speak freely on the subject for the first time—RW]

Pp. 47-55:       ‘Throughout all this time, from the years after Waterloo to the years immediately succeeding the defeat of the French in 1870-71, the weight and position of the Jew in western civilization increased.. almost without attracting attention. They entered the Parliaments everywhere, the English Peerage as well, and the Universities in very large numbers. [Belloc's introduction singles out Universities and House of Commons: 'the Jews, in spite of their small numbers, colour every English institution, especially the Universities and the House of Commons'. London University was specifically founded with Jews in mind, possibly financed for that reason, thogh Bellod does not discuss this in detail - RW] A Jew became Prime Minister of Great Britain, another a principal leader of the Italian insurrection; another led the opposition to Napoleon III. ... They began to take positions as fellows of every important Oxford and Cambridge college; they counted heavily in the national literatures; Browning and Arnold families, for instance, in England; Mazzini in Italy. They came for the first time into European diplomacy. The armies and navies alone were.. untouched. Strains of them were even present in the reigning families. Freemasonry (with which they are so closely allied and all the ritual of which is Jewish in character) increased.. The growth of an anonymous Press [Belloc often refers with distaste to the 'anonymous press' (along with sceptical universities, and corrupt parliaments). Presumably he thought that identification of authors made their biases clear. All leading articles in The Times, for example, were and still are anonymous. As a contrast, The Fortnightly Review (founded 1865, and in fact later coming out monthly) accepted only signed contributions.—RW] and.. increasingly anonymous commercial system further extended their power.
      ...
      Perhaps the first event which cut across this unbroken ascent was the defeat of the French in 1870-1. ... also the date on which was overthrown the temporal power of the Papacy. ... Within a few years Rome had a Jewish mayor...
      One small but significant factor ... was the rise to monopoly of the Jewish international news agents.. Reuters.., and the presence of Jews as correspondents, [e.g.] ... Opper, a Bohemian Jew... under the false name of “de Blowitz” ... Paris correspondent for The Times...
      The first expression of the reaction ... was ... sundry definitely anti-Semitic writings.. most noticeable in [France]...
      .... special insistence was laid upon exposing.. “crypto-Judaism”..
      There next appeared a series of direct international actions undertaken by Jewish finance, the most important of which.. was the drawing of Egypt into the European system...[Belloc writes of Jewish finance in Egypt, Indian commerce, Indian currency and Indian Viceroyalty, and Western powers regarded ‘from Rabat on the Atlantic to the Bay of Bengal’, as agents of a Jewish intrusion intolerable to Islam—RW]
      Of more effect upon public opinion was the excitement of the Dreyfus case in France and, immediately afterwards, of the South African War, in England. [Belloc doesn’t discuss Dreyfus!-RW]
      .. the great ordeal of the South African War, openly and undeniably provoked and promoted by Jewish interests [this must refer to Alfred Beit—RW] in South Africa, when that war was so unexpectedly prolonged and proved so unexpectedly costly in blood and treasure, ...
      The Panama scandals in the French Parliament.. [and] in England, Marconi and the rest, afforded so astonishing a parallel that the similarity was of universal comment. ...
      Meanwhile there had already begun one of those great migratory movements of the Jews...
      .. Russia, since the partition, governed that part of Poland where they were most numerous... The movement was a westerly one, mainly to the United States.. [Belloc doesn’t comment on the rise of railways and steam ships, despite their importance here-RW] .. New York was slowly transformed..
      ...
      Modern capitalism.. had for its counterpart and reaction the socialist movement. This, again, the Jews did not originate, nor at first direct; but it rapidly fell more and more under their control. The family of Mordecai (who had assumed the name of Marx) produced in Karl a most powerful exponent of that theory. Though he did no more than copy and follow his non-Jewish instructors (especially Louis Blanc, a Franco-Scot of genius), he presented in complete form the full theory of Socialism, economic, social, and, by implication, religious; for he postulated Materialism.
      ...
      Before the Great War one could say that the whole of the Socialist movement, so far as its staff and direction were concerned, was Jewish;...
      Such was the situation of the eve of the Great War. ...
      The immeasurable catastrophe of the war—with which the Jews had nothing to do and which their more important financial representatives did all they could to prevent—fell upon Europe. ...
      ... Reconciliation was in the air. . . When, in the very heat of the struggle, came... Bolshevism. [Which was a Jewish movement.] ...’

Pp. 57-59 [Belloc discusses social revolution as theory, then 1916 strains within Russia; followed by revolution ‘for the third time in our generation; this time successfully.’]
      .. In the towns the freely-elected was Parliament repudiated and a “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” was declared. ...
      In practice, of course, "The Republic of the Workmen and Peasants" ... was ... the pure despotism of a clique, the leaders.. specially launched upon Russia under German direction... All without exception were Jews or held by the Jews through their domestic relations. ... A terror was set up, under which were massacred innumerable Russians of the governing classes. .. great numbers of the clergy... Food and all necessities were controlled (in the towns) and rationed, the manual labourer receiving the largest share;...
      ... the Jewish Committees of the towns were unable to enforce their rule over [agricultural land, though strong enough to raid great areas. ...]
      .. the peasants believed that their newly-acquired farms were at take and eagerly volunteered to defend them...’

P. 60:       ‘It is impossible that Committees consisting of Jews and suddenly finding themselves thus in control of such new powers, should not have desired to benefit their fellows. It is equally impossible that they should have foregone a sentiment of revenge against that which had persecuted their people in the past. They cannot but, in the destroying of Russia, have mixed with a desire to advantage the individual Russian poor the desire to take vengeance upon the national tradition... [.. murder of the Russian Royal family] ... Further, it is impossible.. that they could not have had some sympathy with their compatriots who were so largely in control of Western finance. ... And it is this which explains the half alliance which you find throughout the world between the Jewish financiers.. and the Jewish control of the Russian revolution. It is this which explains the half-heartedness of the defence against Bolshevism, the perpetual commercial protest, the continued negotiations, the recognition of the Soviet by our politicians, the clamour of “Labour” in favour of German Jewish industrialism and against Poland...’

P. 63: ‘.. All over Europe the Jewish character.. became more and more apparent. .. they made a childish effort to pretend that the Russian names .. put forward were genuine.. Yet at the same time they were receiving money and securities of the victims through Jewish agents, jewels stripped from the dead or rifled from the strong boxes of murdered men and women. ... a Trade Deputation was pompously announced under Russian names, which turned out upon inspection to consist, as its first member, of a man engaged all his life in the services of a Jewish firm, as to the other.. A Jew who was actually the brother-in-law of Braunstein! [Trotsky.] The diplomatic agent.. was again a Jew, Finkelstein, the nephew by marriage of a prominent Jew in this country. He passed under the name of Litvinoff. ..’

Belloc believed Bolshevism had at last ‘brought the discussion of the Jewish problem to a head’. 64: ‘The cat.. is out of the bag.. the debate will now never more be silenced.’ He clearly thought in 1920 (and presumably still in 1937, with his revised book) that the ‘Jewish problem’ would be thoroughly talked about, and regarded his book as part of this process.       In fact, he was wrong, by a margin wider than he probably could have guessed. Eighty years after his book was published, I doubt whether a single university department anywhere in the world pays any attention to this subject.       [Left] G D H Cole & M I Cole The Intelligent Man's Review of Europe To-day (1933). Published by Victor Gollancz. A typical book described as left-wing. It has almost nothing on Jews (which in view of the date ought to be remarkable).       [Left] A hefty tome edited by Robert Maxwell, based on The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia (1962). What does it say about Jews and the USSR? No prize offered for the correct guess.       [Right] Ronald W Clark's biography Lenin: The Man Behind the Mask (1988). There is exactly one index entry for 'Jewry'—RW

IV THE GENERAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 69   [Back to start]
[Belloc tries to show ‘the whole texture of the Jewish nation.. is at issue with the people among whom they live.’ This is not a very satisfactory chapter, as for one thing there’s not much evidence about life in (e.g.) medieval Poland or Spain, from which to generalise. Belloc thinks for example that ‘The Jew concentrates upon one matter.’
      And although it doesn’t really fit in, he adds interesting economic material—RW]

Pp. 82-3: [Section on ‘booming’, or what’s now usually called hype, follows:—RW]
      ‘The Jew has this other characteristic which has become increasingly noticeable in our own time, but which is probably as old as the race: and that is a corporate capacity for hiding or for advertising at will: a power of “pushing” whatever the whole race desires advanced, or of suppressing what the whole race desires to suppress. .. the general capacity and instinct of the Jew for corporate action in the “booming” or “soft pedalling” of what he wants “soft pedalled” is ineradicable. It will always remain a permanent irritant. The best proof of it is that after the most violent “boom,” after the talents of some particular Jew, or the scientific discovery of another, or the misfortunes of another, or the miscarriage of justice against another, has been shouted at us, pointed and iterated until we are all deafened, there comes an inevitable reaction, and the same men who were half hypnotized into the desired mood are nauseated with it and refuse a repetition of the dose.’
      [Belloc adds later, p. 107:] ‘It is not always recognized in this connection that the Jewish “booms,” which are so fruitful a cause of exasperation, depend on this same policy of concealment and on that account add to the volume of anger as each new trick is discovered.
      Not that the objects of these world-wide campaigns are unworthy of attention. The Jewish actor, or film-star, or writer or scientist selected is usually talented; the victim of injustice whose case is advertised on the big drum has often a genuine grievance. But that the notice demanded is out of all proportion and that its dependence [sc. is] on Jewish organization is always kept hidden.’ [Charlie Chaplin and Einstein?—RW]

Pp. 91-94: [Belloc’s account of monopolies. I think I’ve included all his examples. I’ve put an important passage in bold face (not in the original)—RW]
      ‘There is one aspect of this Jewish wealth which I hesitate whether to put among the general or among the particular causes of friction between that nation and its hosts.
      .. this cause of friction is the presence of Jewish MONOPOLY.
      It is an exceedingly dangerous point in the present situation. I do not think that the Jews have a sufficient appreciation of the risk they are running by its development. There is already something like a Jewish monopoly in high finance. There is a growing tendency to Jewish monopoly over the stage for instance, the fruit trade in London, and to a great extent the tobacco trade. There is the same element of Jewish monopoly on the silver trade, and in the control of various other metals, notably lead, nickel, quicksilver. .. this tendency to monopoly is spreading like a disease. ...
      It applies, of course, to a tiny fraction of the Jewish race as a whole. One could put the Jews who control lead, nickel, mercury and the rest into one small room: nor would that room contain very pleasant specimens of their race. You could get the great Jewish bankers who control international finance round one large dinner table, and I know diner tables which have seen nearly all of them at one time or another. These monopolists, in strategic positions of universal control are an insignificant handful of men out of the millions of Israel, just as the great fortunes we have been discussing attach to an insignificant proportion of that race. Nevertheless, this claim to an exercise of monopoly brings hatred upon the Jews as a whole.
      ...
      To put it plainly, these monopolies must be put an end to.
      Before the Great War there was only one of which Europe as a whole was conscious, and that was the financial monopoly. Yet here the monopoly was far less perfect than in the case of the metals. The Great War brought thousands upon thousands of educated men (who took up public duties as temporary officials) up against the staggering secret they had never suspected—the complete control exercised over things absolutely necessary to the nation’s survival by half a dozen Jews, who were completely indifferent as to whether we or the enemy should emerge alive from the struggle.
      Incidentally, the wealth of these few and very wealthy Jews has been scandalously increased through the war on this very account. And at the moment in which I write the French press, which has a longer experience in the free discussion of the Jewish question than any other, is exposing the abominable increase in value of the Rothschild’s lead mines, an increase mainly due to the use of lead for the killing of men. [My emphasis—RW]
      ...
      The reason these general monopolies are formed by Jews is that the Jew is international, tenacious and determined upon reaching the very end of his task. He is not satisfied in any trade until that trade is, as far as possible, under his complete control, and he has for the extension of that control the support of his brethren throughout the world. He has at the same time the international knowledge and international indifference which further aid his efforts.
      But even were the quite recent monopolies in metal and other trades taken, as they ought to be taken, from these few alien masters of them, there would remain that partial monopoly... which a few Jews have exercised not only today, but recurrently throughout history, over the highest finance; that is, over the credit of the nations, and therefore today, as never before, over the whole field of the world’s industry.
      [There is more in this vein. But Belloc gives no evidence; nor does he attempt to situate these things within the entire economic framework. A quite interesting book by J M Cohen, The Life Of Ludwig Mond 1839-1909 (1956) has descriptions of interlocking Jewish constructive influence in Germany and its French-speaking parts, and England, Holland and other places, as is the moving into English society (e.g. they bought a large house from the Stanleys of Alderley). There’s background on the small ‘German’ states (I think they weren’t recognised as ‘German’ at the time) and their armies, laws, attitude to Jews, influence of Napoleon, etc. Interesting also for placing of factories, typically in northern England. Mond (I presume) suggested the Mustapha Mond in Huxley’s Brave New World. There’s possibly something here to support Belloc’s claim that Jews were found to control one raw material after another. Irritatingly, despite apparently having access to all papers of Mond, Cohen is coy about Mond’s money. Mond seems to have been ahead of Belloc in the sense that he was ‘prescient’ about the Middle-East, Zionism and the use of Haifa to safeguard oil pipelines (if this is in fact true)—RW]

V THE SPECIAL CAUSES OF FRICTION 99   [Back to start]
[Belloc has two subtitles: 1. THE JEWISH RELIANCE UPON SECRECY, 2. THE EXPRESSION OF SUPERIORITY BY THE JEW—RW]

Pp. 99-101:       ‘It has unfortunately now become a habit for so many generations, that it has almost passed into an instinct throughout the Jewish body, to rely upon the weapon of secrecy. Secret societies, a language kept as far as possible secret, the use of false names in order to hide secret movements, secret relations between various parts of the Jewish body: all these and other forms of secrecy have become the national method. It is a method to be deplored...
      ...
      Take the particular trick of false names. It seems to us particularly odious. We think when we show our contempt for those who use this subterfuge that we are giving them no more than they deserve. It is a meanness which we associate with criminals and vagabonds; a piece of crawling and sneaking. We suspect its practisers of desiring to hide something...
      But the Jew has other and better motives. [Belloc gives an account of false names: Stanley for Solomon, Curzon for Cohen, Sinclair for Slezinger, Montague for Moses, Benson for Benjamin.
      And an account of the compulsory imposition, according to Belloc, of Germanic surnames of the Flowerfield or Shutlips type, which seem to have been manufactured like off-the-shelf business names or computer company passwords. Belloc expresses no opinion on the authenticity of such surnames as Cohen and Levy.
      Belloc says in effect that, with persecution, and with imposed names, Jews can’t be blamed for attaching ‘no particular sanctity to the custom’. Belloc seems naive here: he's aware Jews in the Russian coup d'état killed, stole, and robbed, but doesn't seem to project this backwards. For example in the Napoleonic era, many small principalities and towns were simply robbed by Napoleon's troops. Any beneficiary would have a strong motive to hide his identity—RW].
      All this is true, but.. There are in the experience of all of us, an experience repeated indefinitely, men who have no excuse whatsoever for a false name save the advantage of deceit. Men whose race is universally known, will unblushingly adopt a false name as a mask, and after a year or two pretend to treat it as an insult if their original and true name be used in its place. ...’

P. 105:       ‘Perhaps in its most absurd form (not its most dangerous form) is the secrecy maintained by distinguished men with regard to their Jewish ancestors. They and their Jewish relations often suppress it altogether or, at best, touch on it rarely and obscurely. Why should they act thus? Take the case of two men at random out of hundreds whose names are universally known and by most people respected, the name of Charles Kingsley, the writer, and the name of Moss-Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army. .. both owed their genius and nearly all their physical appearance to Jewish mothers. I should have thought it to the advantage of the Jewish race and of the individuals concerned that this fact should be widely known. .. Yet the mention of that lineage is treated as though it were a sort of insult. I have heard it wrung out in some passionate plea for the Jewish race as a proof that they are not devoid of abilities, but never generally published.’ [NB: Belloc though giving no evidence seems to assume (p. 136) Jewish abilities are low; cp. my piece on Cecil Roth, attempting to show the opposite—RW]

Pp. 106-107:       ‘.. the habit does further harm: it makes men ascribe a Jewish character to everything they dislike...
      A foreign movement against one’s nation, an unpopular public figure, a detested doctrine, are labelled “Jewish” and the field of hate, already perilously wide, is broadened indefinitely. It is useless to say, “The Jews do not admit the connection, the names are not Jewish, there is no overt Jewish element.” He answers, “Jews never do admit such connection; Jews admittedly hide under false names; Jewish action never is overt.” And—as things are, until they change—there is no denying what he says. His judgment may be as wide as you will (I have heard Sinn Feiners called Jews!), but, so long as this wretched habit of secrecy in maintained, there is no correcting that judgment. ..’

[There are twelve pages on the ‘expression of superiority’; here are a few remarks:—RW]

Pp. 108-110:       ‘The Jew individually feels himself superior to the non-Jewish contemporary and neighbour of whatever race, and particularly of our race; the Jew feels his nation immeasurably superior to any other human community, and particularly to our modern national communities in Europe.
      The frank statement of so simple and fundamental a truth is rarely made. It will sound, I fear, shocking to many ears. To many others it will sound not so much shocking as comic, and to many more stupefying.
      The idea that the Jew should think himself our superior is something so incomprehensible to us that we forget the existence of the feeling. ..
      ...
      For the attitudes taken up by European statesmen in the past... have always been one of three sorts:—
      (1) .. as though the Jew were merely a private citizen like any other...
      (2) Or they have attempted to suppress, or to expel, or to destroy the Jew...
      (3) Or.. they have tried.. a sort of pact in which Jewish separateness was recognized, but under conditions of disability.
      ...
      Now in all these three methods there is absent all recognition of the Jewish feeling of superiority. ...
      there is indeed a fourth attitude ... when States have been in active decline or fallen into the hands of base and weak men, and that is the exaggerated flattery and support of a few powerful wealthy Jews by administrators who were bribed or cowed. We are suffering from that to-day. But these exceptional cases (they have always led to national disaster) do not form a true category of Statesmanship...’

P. 116:       ‘... But on his side the Jew must recognize, however unpalatable to him the recognition may be, that those among whom he is living and whose inferiority he takes for granted, on their side regards him as something much less than themselves.
      This statement, I know, will be as stupefying to the Jew as its converse is stupefying to us. It will seem as extraordinary, as incredible, and all the rest of it; but it is true... There is no European so mean in fortune or so base in character as not to feel himself altogether the superior of any Jew, however wealthy, however powerful, and (I am afraid I must add) however good. ...’

VI THE CAUSE OF FRICTION ON OUR SIDE 123   [Back to start]
[Belloc in fact has (p.140) essentially just one cause ‘upon our side’, ‘a persistent disingenuous in our treatment of this minority.. a refusal to make the effort necessary for meeting and understanding..’ Belloc has an interesting passage on the falsification of history (and news), mostly by omission—RW]

Pp. 130-133:       ‘ ... All this is worse, of course, when one is dealing with relations even closer than those of commerce. Those relations are numerous in the modern world, and disingenuousness in them takes the worst possible form. Men, especially of the wealthier classes of the gentry, will make the closest friends of Jews with the avowed purpose of personal advantage. They think the friendship will help them to great positions in the State, or to the advancement of private fortune, or to fame. In that calculation they are wise. For the Jew has to-day exceptional power in all these things. They therefore have the Jew continually at their tables, they stay continually under the Jew’s roof. In all the relations of life they are as intimate as friends can be. Yet they relieve the strain which such an unnatural situation imposes by a standing sneer at their Jewish friends in their absence. One may say of such men (and they are today an increasing majority among our rich) that the falsity of their situation has got on their nerves. It has become a sort of disease with them; and I am very certain that when the opportunity comes, when the public reaction against Jewish power rises, clamorous, insistent and open, they will be among the first to take their revenge. It is abominable, but it is true.
      ...
      This disingenuousness, then—lack of candour on the part of our race in its dealings with the Jew—a vice particularly rife among the wealthy and middle classes (far less common among the poor), extends, as I have said, to history. We dare not, or will not teach in our history books the plain facts of the relations between our own race and the Jews. We throw the story of these relations, which are among the half-dozen leading factors of history, right into the background even when we do mention it. In what they are taught of history the school-boy and the undergraduate come across no more than a line or two upon those relations. The teacher cannot be quite silent upon the expulsion of the Jews under Edward I or upon their return under Cromwell. A man cannot read the history of the Roman Empire without hearing of the Jewish war. A man cannot read the Constitutional History of England without hearing of the special economic position of Jews under the Mediaeval Crown. But the vastness of the subject, its permanent and insistent character throughout two thousand years; its great episodes; its general effect—all that is deliberately suppressed.
      How many people, for instance, of those who profess a good knowledge of the Roman Empire, even in its details, are aware, let alone have written upon the tremendous massacres and counter-massacres of Jews and Europeans, the mass of edicts alternately protecting and persecuting Jews; the economic position of the Jew, especially in the later empire; the character of the dispersion?
      There took place in Cyprus and in the Libyan cities under Hadrian a Jewish movement against the surrounding non-Jewish society far exceeding in violence the late wreckage of Russia, which to-day fills all our thoughts. The massacres were wholesale and so were the reprisals. The Jews killed a quarter of a million of the people of Cyprus alone, and the Roman authorities answered with a repression which was a pitiless war.
      One might pile up instances indefinitely. The point is, that the average educated man has never been allowed to hear of them. What a factor the Jew was in that Roman State from which we all spring, how he survived its violent antagonism to him and his antagonism to it; the special privilege whereby he was excepted from a worship of its gods; his handling of its finance—all the intimate parallel which it affords to later times is left in silence. The average educated man who has been taught, even in some fullness, his Roman History, leaves that study with the impression that the Jews (it he had noticed them at all) are but an insignificant detail in the story.
      So it is with history more recent and even contemporaneous. In the history of the nineteenth century it is outrageous. The special character of the Jew, his actions through the Secret Societies and in the various revolutions of foreign States, his rapid acquisition of power through finance, political and social, especially in this country [i.e. Britain-RW]—all that is left out. It is an exact parallel to the disingenuousness which we note in social relations. The same man who shall have written a monograph upon some point of nineteenth century history and left his readers in ignorance of the Jewish elements in the story will regale you in private with a dozen anecdotes: such-and-such a man was a Jew; such-and-such a man was half a Jew; another was controlled in his policy by a Jewish mistress; the go-between in such-and-such a negotiation was a Jew; the Jewish blood in such-and-such a family came in thus and thus—And so forth: but not a word of it on the printed page!
      This deliberate falsehood equally applies to contemporary record. The newspaper reader is deceived—so far as it is still possible to deceive him—with the most shameless lies “Abraham Cohen, a Pole”; “M. Mosevitch, a distinguished Roumanian”; “Mr. Schiff, and other representative Americans”; “M. Bergson with his typically French lucidity”; “Maximilian Harden, always courageous in his criticism of his own people” (his own being the German) . . . and the rest of the rubbish. It is weakening, I admit, but it has not yet ceased.
      ...’

P. 135:       ‘And how unintelligent is our dealing with any particular Jewish problem; for instance, the problem of Jewish immigration! We mask it under false names, calling it "the alien question," "Russian immigration." "the influx of undesirables from Eastern and Central Europe," and any number of other timorous equivalents. ...’

VII THE ANTI-SEMITE 145   [Back to start]
      147: ‘.. The modern name of “Anti-Semite” is as ridiculous in derivation as it is ludicrous in form. It is partly of German academic origin and partly a newspaper name, vulgar as one would expect it to be from such an origin, and also as falsely pedantic as one would expect, but the exasperated mood of which it is a label is very real.
      I say the word “Anti-Semite” is vulgar and pedantic: that I think will be universally admitted. It is also nonsensical. The antagonism to the Jews has nothing to do with any supposed “Semitic” race—which probably does not exist any more than do many other modern hypothetical abstractions, and which, anyhow, does not come into the matter. The Anti-Semite is not a man who hates the modern Arabs or the ancient Carthaginians. He is a man who hates the Jews.
      However, we must accept the word because it has become currency... [More, describing Anti-Semites as opposite of writers who think Jews do no wrong]

[Page 150. Belloc on ‘strange assertions proceeding from’ Anti-Semites: that modern scepticism, the modern superstition of necromancy—I think Belloc must mean table rapping, mediums, and Ouija boards—and crystal gazing, evils of democracy, Prussian tyrannical government, pagan perversions of bad modern art, puerility of bad church furniture, Great War and Jewish armament firms, anti-patriotic appeals etc attributed to Jews, Belloc thinks not credibly—RW]

P. 153: ‘... by finding out and exposing the true names hidden under false ones, by detecting and registering the relationships between men who pretended ignorance one of the other; it ferreted through the ramifications of anonymous finance and invariably caught the Jew who was behind the great industrial insurance schemes, the Jew who was behind such and such a metal monopoly, the Jew who was behind such and such a news agency, the Jew who financed such and such a politician. The formidable library of exposure spreads daily...’

P. 158:       ‘... [Continental Anti-Semite was asked]: “If you had unlimited power in the matter, what would you do?” The implied answer was that the Anti-Semite could do nothing. We now know he can persecute, he can attack... he could begin with a widespread examination of Jewish wealth and its origins and an equally widespread confiscation...’

Pp. 159-161: ‘... The Anti-Semitic movement is essentially a reaction against the abnormal growth in Jewish power, and the new strength of Anti-Semitism is largely due to the Jews themselves.
      When this angry enthusiasm re-arose in its modern form, first in Germany, then spreading to France, next appearing, and now rapidly growing, in England, it was novel and confined to small cliques. The truths which it enunciated were then as unfamiliar as the false values on which it reposed. That universal policy of the Jews against which it is part of my thesis to argue, a policy natural but none the less erroneous, the policy of secrecy, the policy of hiding, at once took advantage of what was absurd in the novelty of Anti-Semitism. The Jew, in spite of his age-long experience of menace and active hostility, in spite of his knowledge of what this sort of spirit had effected in the past, did not come out into the open. He did not act against the new attack with open indignation, still less with open argument, as he should have done. He took advantage of its absurdity, at its beginnings, in the eyes of the general public. He used all his endeavours to make the word “Anti-Semitic” a label for something hopelessly ridiculous, a subject for mere laughter, a matter which no reasonable man should for a moment consider seriously.
      For something between a dozen and twenty years this policy was successful. The method though less and less firmly established as time went on, has not yet quite failed. None the less that policy was very ill-advised. It was used not only to ridicule the Anti-Semite, but what was quite illegitimate, quite irrational (and bound in the long run to be fatal), it was used to prevent all discussion of the Jewish question, though that question was increasing every day in practical importance and clamouring to be decided.
      It was the instinctive policy with the mass of the Jewish nation, a deliberate policy with most of its leaders, not only to use ridicule against Anti-Semitism but to label as “anti-Semitic” any discussion of the Jewish problem at all, or, for that matter, any information even on the Jewish problem. It was used to prevent, through ridicule, any statement of any fact with regard to the Jewish race save a few conventional compliments or a few conventional and harmless jests.
      If a man alluded to the presence of a Jewish financial power in any region—for instance, in India—he was an anti-Semite. If he interested himself in the peculiar character of Jewish philosophical discussions, especially in matters concerning religion, he was an Anti-Semite. If the emigrations of the Jewish masses from country to country, the vast modern invasion of the United States, for instance (which has been organized and controlled like an army on the march), interested him as an historian, he could not speak of it under pain of being called an Anti-Semite. If he exposed a financial swindler who happened to be a Jew, he was an Anti-Semite. If he exposed a group of Parliamentarians taking money from the Jews, he was called an Anti-Semite. If he did no more than call a Jew a Jew, he was an Anti-Semite. The laughter which the name used to provoke was most foolishly used to support nothing nobler or more definitive than this wretched policy of concealment. Anyone with judgment could have told the Jews, had the Jews cared to consult such a one, that their pusillanimous policy was bound to fail. It was but a postponement of the evil day.
      You cannot long confuse interest with hatred, the statement of plain and important truths with mania, the discussion of fundamental questions with silly enthusiasm, for the same reason that you cannot long confuse truth with falsehood. Sooner or later people are bound to remark that the defendant seems curiously anxious to avoid all investigation of his case. The moment that is generally observed, the defence is on the way to failure.
      .. I say it was a fatal policy; but it was deliberately undertaken by the Jews and they are now suffering from its results. ...’

VIII BOLSHEVISM 167   [Back to start]
[This chapter, one would think, ought to have been included in III The Present Phase of the Problem, the second half of which looks at Bolshevism.
      It’s not a very satisfactory chapter, as Belloc is unaware of the origins of ‘Jews’ around southern Russia, and doesn’t examine the prehistory of the Revolution, even minimising the part played by deaths of the First World War. (He does notice there are: in Lithuania and Galicia, one-third to two-thirds Jews in towns. With considerable numbers in Ukraine, Romania, modern Poland, Hungary. In Bohemia, less. Less in the Balkan states south of the Danube and Drave.—Presumably he thought they migrated from the Middle East.)
      Bolshevik means ‘Whole-hogger’.
      He spends some time on conspiracy theories. And on the ‘appetite for revenge against the old Russian State comparable to that felt by any oppressed people against their oppressors’—though without supporting evidence of this claimed fact. Belloc looks at revolts generally, and concludes Jews were hardly ever involved. So why did they have ‘a chance of action in Russia which they lacked elsewhere?’ He says he isolates three factors, which I’ve tried to illustrate with my choice of quotations, but it’s difficult to make sense of exactly what he’s claiming, particularly the absence of feeling for property.
      Belloc has an interesting passage on nationalism, as opposed by Jews, except for themselves.
      And he finishes with a warning note on over-reacting—RW]

Pp. 170ff.:       ‘You do not find the Jew in history perpetually leading the innumerable revolts which citizens in the mass make against the privileged or the superior conditions of the minority. He has sometimes benefited by these movements in the past; more often suffered. ... The great acts of violence, successful and unsuccessful... from the agrarian troubles of pagan Rome to the French Revolution, the land war in Ireland, the Chartist Movement in London, ... have appealed much more to the fighting instincts and political traditions of our race than they have to the Jews. [Note added Dec 2017—Belloc belongs to the stage of revisionism which had no idea of the parts played by Jews in 1066, in the Middle Ages, in the French Revolution, in the Russian and other aristocracies; and he does not distinguish finance, as control of money itself, from capitalism-RW] ...’

Pp. 171ff:       ‘What were the special characters in the Russian opportunity which made the Jew the creator of the whole movement?
      There are, I take it, three main factors in this case peculiarly suitable to the Jewish effort.
      In the first place, this revolution fell upon.. Industrial Capitalism, the chief mark of which is the destruction [or atrophy] in the mass subjected to it.. of that essential part of the European soul—ownership. ...
      Now the attack.. against Industrial Capitalism required an international force. It needed men who had international experience and were ready with an international formula. ..
      ...
      Of the two interactional forces present, therefore, the Jews alone could act. [The other being the Catholic Church. Belloc quotes Rerum Novarum of Leo XIII on this, and claims that a ‘society of owners’, and the ‘sanctity of property’, with ‘well-divided property’, are part of the ‘European soul’.]
      The Jew has neither that political instinct in his national tradition nor a religious doctrine supporting and expressing such an instinct. [I.e. of ‘well founded property’.] The same thing in him which makes him a speculator and a nomad makes him actually contemptuous of, the European sense of property. ... [this, I think is Belloc’s second factor—RW]
      ... Again, our national sense, patriotism, which is incomprehensible to the Jew save on the false analogy of his own peculiar nomadic and tribal patriotism, is a check upon Communism, and indeed, against revolution of any kind. ...’ [This is Belloc’s third and last factor—RW]

Pp. 176-178: [Nationalism:]       ‘The Jew has the same feeling, of course, for his Israel, but since that nation is not a collection of human beings, inhabiting one place and living by traditions rooted in its soil, his patriotism is necessarily of a different complexion. It has different connotations and our patriotism seems negligible to him.
      The implied fallacies current in the modern industrial revolutionary formulae, in such phrases as “What does it matter to the working man whether he is exploited by a German or an English master?” or, again, “Why should the individual Tom Smith be sacrificed for an abstraction called England?” or again, “Nationalism is the great obstacle to the full development of humanity"—all that sort of thing, which we feel by instinct and can, if it is necessary, prove by reason to be nonsense in our case, sound, in Jewish ears, as very good sense indeed. For in his case these things involve no fallacies at all; they apply to him vividly and exactly. Why should the Jew be sacrificed for England? In what way is England, or France, or Ireland, or any other nation necessary to him? Again, is it not obvious in his eyes that these terms, “France, Ireland, England, Russia,” are but abstractions? The real thing in his eyes when he thinks of us is the individual and his certain needs, especially his physical and material needs; because upon these there can be no doubt; upon these all are agreed; these are visible and tangible. “England,” “France,” “Poland” are whimsies.
      It is true that if you were to put his special case to the Jew with similar force and say, “No Jew should run any risk for Israel,” “No Jew should suffer any inconvenience by trying to help a fellow Jew in distress,” “The idea of Israel is a vague abstraction—all that counts is the individual Jew and especially his physical requirements”; if you said that sort of thing you would be offending the most profound instincts of Jewish patriotism and you would, in fact, clash with the overt and covert action of the Jews throughout the world. But the Jew would answer that, as his was an international polity, the argument applying to our national polity did not apply to him; that his feelings, though analogous to ours, were of a different kind, and that, at any rate, he cannot sacrifice a fine idea of his like Communism for our provincial and local habit, “the love of our country.”
      ... When a Frenchman, or Englishman, or Russian says “My first duty is to my people; I must keep them strong as well as in being and I must sacrifice my interests to theirs when it is necessary” there are many Jews who would answer: “You are quite right. The theory is sound. Man can only function as part of a particular society” and so forth. But it is one thing to believe a theory... quite another to feel it in one’s bones, as it were,...
      Therefore when, as in the particular case of Russia, a national feeling stood in the way of an abstract ideal, it seemed the most natural thing on the world to the Jew that the national obstacle should go to the wall in order that his ideal of Communism might triumph.
      There lay behind this great change in the Russian towns, and capture of what remains of the Russian government by the Jewish committees, a force most positive. It was the sense of social justice, the indignation against indefensible evils. ...’

Pp. 178-182:       [Belloc discusses ‘Industrial Capitalism’ and indefensible modern evils, though without saying exactly what he means. This sense of social justice is the positive force, says Belloc:]
      ... men of the wealthier classes... so ignorant of the past, so stupid... do honestly believe Industrial Capitalism to be a good thing... must be very rare... cannot have wide social experience... live the life of the poor in the great industrial cities for a day to see the enormity of the wrong that has to be righted.
      ...
      ... The Jews alone of the forces present were capable of heartily entertaining that ideal, and were free of all obstacles against the achievement of it—the obstacle of patriotism, the obstacle of religion, the obstacle of the sense of property.
      These considerations, I take it, are what explains the Jewish character of the upheaval in the East, with its destruction of the Russian nation, its enormous experiments in social economy, its inevitable impoverishment of the State as a whole, its enthusiastic support by the minority which accepts its doctrine. ...
      ...

      It seems that the great mass of the nation has affirmed the instinct of private property with the greatest vigour, and that some nine-tenths of the Russians have settled down upon the land to which they always claimed ownership and in which their sense of ownership is more fierce than ever. In the towns the unnatural system—unnatural because it opposes all our instincts as Europeans—works more and more slackly as the original system of terror weakens. For it is clear that Communism needs a despot, and the active rule of a despot is necessarily short: it is a system incapable of transition and therefore of duration.
      The perfectly explicable but deplorable exercise of vengeance by the Jews has been directed against what we euphemistically term the governing directing classes, who have been massacred wholesale and whose remnants are subjected to perpetual persecution. ...’

Pp. 183-5:       ‘We ought, I think, not to nourish a new and special hostility against the Jew on account of what he has done in Russia, but on the contrary to excuse him...
      That sounds an extreme thing to say... But though it sound fantastic, I am convinced that it is a right attitude. To lose one’s judgment on a permanent problem through panic or heat.. is the negation of reason. As well might a man who is dealing with the problem of fermented liquor... let his judgment be overcome by a case of delirium tremens...
      ...
      Our conclusion.. is a recognition and protection of the Jewish nation as something quite different from ourselves and yet necessarily inhibiting our society. Such a full recognition leaves us fore-armed against the tendency in the Jew (which we cannot avoid) to forget our national feelings and to misconceive our sense of ownership. It would render impossible the conspiracies and the vengeance which have destroyed Russia, and I believe that had the former Russian Government treated the Jews as I say they should be treated, it would be in power to-day.’

IX THE POSITION IN THE WORLD AS A WHOLE 189   [Back to start]
[Belloc surveys the Jewish populations in the world. He thinks the four international forces are the Catholic Church, Islam, Industrial Capitalism, and the Socialist [sic] revolt against this last.’—RW]

P. 191:       ‘In point of fact the Jew has collectively a power today in the white world altogether excessive... it is inevitably a corporate power, and a semi-organised power...’

P. 193: [Belloc mentions Oscar Levy, (and pp. 251-2) ‘turned out of this country by his compatriots in the Government for having written unfavourably of the Moscow Jews...’—RW]

P. 194:       ‘... the Russian allowed a prodigious revolution to be made by the Jews, he accepted the loot of the revolution... he has submitted wholly in the towns, partly in the country, to a tyranny exercised by Jews ever since that complete reversal of his national history, now four years old.’

Pp. 195-6:       ‘The Russian peasant regarded that odd, pedantic measure, “The Liberation of the Serfs” as only another name for robbing him of his land... during the war he poured over the great estates and took back what he thought was his own. ...
      ...
      .. The situation is absurd enough. Men in hundreds of thousands willing to fight for Communist masters because.. they believe they can secure themselves in an absolute form of property! But that is what the “red” army was. ...’

201ff: [Jews in USA: New York and ghettoes, financial monopoly growth and in trades, Jews critical of religion. ‘Wilson seems to have been wholly in their hands’. Anonymous press. The New Republic ‘.. though it has but a small proportion of Jewish writers upon it, and though its capital is (I believe) not Jewish, is yet to all intents and purposes the organ of Jewish intellectuals, always joins in the boycott of any news unfavourable to European Jews... and in general adheres to the Jewish side, like the Humanité in Paris, or, let us say, The New Statesman in England.
      .. There was no hesitation; there were no uneasy patches of silence. The Jewish question was discussed [in the USA] from the moment it was first felt..’ [says Belloc, who however also seems to say the exact opposite: 203: ‘.. contrast the silence about the Jews in [18]’96, during Bryan’s great attack upon the gold standard, with the work of Mr. Ford and all that he stands for to-day!’]

P. 209: [The West regarded as intruders of Jews by the Islamic world. First the French; now the British. Remember this was written about 1920—RW]

X THE POSITION OF THE JEWS IN ENGLAND 215   [Back to start]
[NOTE: Belloc hints at the idea of Jews as collaborators with whatever powers were around, with a constant shift to new sources—William the Conqueror, other kings, Polish landowners, British Empire, and Germany illustrate the sort of things.
      (The US empire, which in its modern form postdates Belloc’s book, isn’t in here, of course).
      Belloc however doesn’t speculate on causes or reasons. For example, [1] in the case of activities like tax-collecting, it makes sense to employ aliens who won’t necessarily sympathise with the collectees—on the same principle as using alien troops in wars of conquest. [2] It’s possible that something as simple as number notation was part of the clue to Jewish finance; almost anything would have been better than Roman numerals. But even such simple speculations as this are currently taboo—RW]

Pp. 222-3: ‘... London became after Waterloo the money market and the clearing house of the world. The interests of the Jew as a financial dealer and the interests of this great commercial polity approximated more and more. One may say that by the last third of the nineteenth century they had become virtually identical.
      Every new economic enterprise of the British state appealed to the Jewish genius for commerce and especially for negotiation in its most abstract form—finance. Conversely, every Jewish enterprise, every new conception of the Jew in his cosmopolitan activities (until these became revolutionary) appealed to the English merchant and banker.
      The two things dovetailed one into the other and fitted exactly, and all subsidiary activities fitted in as well. The Jewish news agencies of the nineteenth century favored England in all her policy, political as well as commercial; they opposed those of her rivals and especially of her enemies. The Jewish knowledge of the East was at the service of England. His international penetration of the European governments was also at her service—so was his secret information. With the consolidation of the Indian Empire after the Mutiny the Jews were again an ally from their traditional hatred of the Russian people, which hatred has led them in our time to wreak so awful a vengeance upon their former oppressors. The Jew might almost be called a British agent upon the Continent of Europe, and still more in the Near and Far East, where the economic power of England extended even more rapidly than her political power.
      And the Jew pointed to the English state as that one in which all that his nation required of the goyim was to be found. He here enjoyed a situation the like of which he could not hope to enjoy in any other country of the world. All antagonism to him had died down. He was admitted to every institution in the State, a prominent member of his nation became chief officer of the English executive, and, an influence more subtle and penetrating, marriages began to take place, wholesale, between what had once been the aristocratic territorial families of this country and the Jewish commercial fortunes.
      After two generations of this, with the opening of the twentieth century those of the great territorial English families in which there was no Jewish blood were the exception. In nearly all of them was the strain more or less marked, in some of them so strong that though the name was still an English name and the tradition those of a purely English lineage of the long past, the physique and character had become wholly Jewish and the members of the family were taken for Jews whenever they travelled in countries where the gentry had not yet suffered or enjoyed this admixture.
      ...
      Specially Jewish institutions, such as Freemasonry (which the Jews had inaugurated as a sort of bridge between themselves and their hosts in the seventeenth century), were particularly strong in Britain, and there arose a political tradition, active, and ultimately to prove of great importance, whereby the British State was tacitly accepted by foreign governments as the official protector of the Jews in other countries. [Belloc unfortunately gives no evidence about Freemasonry. Other examples of this irritating deficit include his remarks on law, where he states that (in England) all legal customs which Jews didn’t like were done away with, for example hue and cry; in France, ‘A Jew was responsible for the divorce laws’. And so on—RW]
      ...
      England was secure.’
     
     
225:       ‘The political situation reflected itself, as it always does, in literature. The Jew began to appear in English fiction as an exalted character, quite specially removed to his advantage from the mass of mankind. He is already a hero in Sir Walter Scott, .. You could still have a Jewish villain as late as Oliver Twist, but with writers as different as Charles Reade and George Eliot we reach a time where the Jew is impeccable. ... The active cause [of this literary convention] was the reflection of the Jew’s political position upon the mind of the educated class...
      ...
      A convention arose that in the clash between the Jews and the English of the Middle Ages the Jews were invariably right and the English invariably wrong. Where the struggle was between the Jew and the non-Jew abroad, the historian exceeded all bounds. The European hostile to the Jews was a senseless monster, and the Jew hostile to the European was a holy victim.
      The whole story.. was distorted through suppression, and false emphasis and quite exceptional lying. .. And as historians live by copying one another, the legend was established in every school and college.
      .. the Jews.. held a power in this country beyond anything.. Poland at the end of the Middle Ages,.. is the only parallel..
      .. Government.. House of Lords.. House of Commons.. Universities.. Government Offices save the Foreign Office (and even there...) .. powerful in the Press.. all-powerful in the City. No custom unsympathetic to their race, from the duel to popular clamour, survived. .. no distinction whatever..’

227: [Balfour Declaration. Belloc was aware ‘that we promised the Arabs their country if they would help us against the Turks. We then broke our promise.’—we being the secret negotiators during the First World War. However, Belloc missed the importance of Balfour vis-à-vis the USA:] ‘.. in the heat of the Great War.. one of the English politicians who was best fitted to speak for the Jews... Mr. Arthur Balfour was chosen to make the famous pronouncement in favour of Zionism. It came within a month of the great crisis of the war. Its object was to divide the general influence of the Jews throughout the world, which had hitherto been upon the whole opposed to the cause of the Allies, because, like every other neutral, then Jews were more and more convinced.. that the Central Empires were certain of victory.
      .. the effect was to tie the British state yet closer to the fortunes of Israel, ...
      The declaration in favour of Zionism, the solemn pledge.. coming.. after the climax of Jewish power had been reached and passed, was the last stage of that long process of alliance..’

XI ZIONISM 231   [Back to start]
[Belloc didn’t like Zionism; the general view was that it would involve a small state of 1.5 million or so, not the entire Jewish population. And this would put Jewishness in a ‘picture frame’; from then on, any cause of friction could be met with the demand that Jews get out. He also considered defence. He didn’t anticipate the importance of oil; he didn’t foresee US involvement.
      One of his concerns was the feelings of some non-Jews over their holy places in Palestine—RW]

XII OUR DUTY 249   [Back to start]
[Long account by Belloc of the desirability of open discussion, investigation and recognition. He thought the cowardice of the opposite policy was ‘degrading’ and likely to cause ‘exasperation’—RW]

P. 263: ‘.. They recognize (they also exaggerate) the grip of the Jew over finance. They conceive that if they speak they will be dragged down, their enterprises ruined, their credit dissolved. And that is the most powerful instrument which can be brought to bear. When supernatural motives disappear the strongest motive remaining after appetite is avarice; ... There are to-day innumerable men who would express publicly on Jews what they continually express in private, but who conceal their feelings for fear that their salaries may be lost or their modest enterprises wrecked, their investments lowered, and their position ruined. Above them are a lesser number, equally convinced that their large fortunes would be in peril were they so to act. ..’

XIII THEIR DUTY 271   [Back to start]
[This is by far the shortest chapter! Belloc thinks Jews should abate their arrogance; he also supports Jewish newspapers, schools etc. on the grounds it makes their views known. He thought (over a long period) that disputes between Jews and non-Jews should be heard by mixed juries—RW]

XIV VARIOUS THEORIES 277   [Back to start]
[Belloc puts together a miscellany of odd ideas, including the Anglo-Israel theory that the English are a lost tribe of Israel—RW]

Pp. 279ff: ‘.. They tell us that but for the Jew the civilization of Europe would have grown torpid... The Jew, by this theory, is regarded as a sort of activating principle.. They see him indirectly producing the vast transformation of the Roman Empire from a pagan, not indeed to a Jew but to a Christian, that is (in their eyes) to an Oriental mood. They see the Jew at the root of the great revolution in philosophy which springs from the eleventh century and reaches its culmination in the great scholastics of the thirteenth. They insist upon the name of Averroës (Ibn Roshd), the philosopher of the twelfth century, the Kadi of Kordova: The exponent of Aristotle, the expositor—whom the Jews preserved: upon the great Moses ben Maimon, our Maimonides. These also put Nicolas de Lyra at the root of the Reformation: “Si Lyra non lyrasset Luther non saltasset.” But I may remind them that the Jewish character of this man is at least doubtful...’ [More on Spinoza, Ricardo, Marx—RW]

P. 283: ‘.. in reply to my description of the Jewish financial position in this country [England] after the Conquest: “Your cathedral and your abbeys and even your castles were built with our money.” The phrase was significant of the way in which what the English community of the time regarded as a tolerated abuse, those fortunes which they never thought of as Jewish at all, but as moneys temporarily unjustly wrung from the people at large, were regarded in contemporary Jewry as private property legitimately acquired, held in full possession. [Note: Belloc says he often spoke to Jewish groups, with the object of finding out what they thought—RW]
      I could wish .. that some learned Jew would produce a History of Europe from the point of view of his people: ...’

P. 286: [Looks at the it’s none-of-your-business theory]
Pp. 292/295: [Looks at but rejects the melting-pot idea of Zangwill. And Henry Ford on Jews looking as though they want to melt the pot itself]

XV CONCLUSION: HABIT OR LAW? 301   [Back to start]
[Belloc says his suggestion, of discussion and recognition, ought to be put into force urgently. Modern quarrels are growing fiercer.]

P.308:       But for my part, I say, “Peace be to Israel.” [End]

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Added 2013: Appendix 1: extract from Benjamin Ginsberg's The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (1999?) confirms the factual material of Belloc as regards 19th century Britain. I'm copying this extract from Internet; I don't know if Ginsberg looked at violent crime, drug and sex trafficking, fraud, subversion, intellectual corruption, and the slow insertion into the public mind of alleged national characteristic, notably of Germany and Russia.

--- START OF EXTRACT FROM BENJAMIN GINSBERG'S THE FATAL EMBRACE: JEWS AND THE STATE --- In Britain, Jews did not figure in the creation of the liberal state. [Note: 'liberal' in the traditional sense of free trade, laissez faire, freedom of movement, all with traditional assumptions; not the modern American usage-RW] However, Jewish politicians, publishers, and financiers helped to strengthen the liberal regime and expand its popular base between the Crimean War and the First World War. During the mid- and late nineteenth centuries, British Jews achieved considerable wealth, status, and political influence. The Rothschilds were one of the most important banking families in Britain. Other important Jewish financiers included the Sassoons, the Cassels, the de Hirsch family, and the Semons. By the First World War, though Jews constituted only 1% of the total population of Britain, 23% of Britain's non-landed millionaires were of Jewish origin.

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Jews also came to be a major factor in British journalism. The Reuters News Agency, founded by Paul Julius Reuter (whose name was originally Israel Beer Josaphat) in 1848, was the chief purveyor of information on world events to the entire British press and, at times, the government as well. The Sassoons owned and edited the Sunday Times, Harry Marks founded the Financial Times, and Sir Alfred Mond controlled the English Review. Jews were especially important in the popular press. The Daily Telegraph, controlled by the Levy Lawson family, was London's first penny newspaper and, in the 1870s, had a circulation of just under 200,000. The Telegraph appealed mainly to middle- and working-class audience and specialized in sensational coverage of both domestic and foreign events. Harry Oppenheim had a major interest in another mass circulation daily, the London Daily News. Sir Alfred Mond published the Westminster Gazette, a paper that provided its popular audience with dramatic coverage of the exploits of British military forces in the far-flung reaches of the empire.

During the same period of time, a number of Jews served as members of Parliament and rose to positions of considerable influence in the British government. Obviously, the most notable example is Benjamin Disraeli, a converted Jew who served twice as prime minister between 1868 and 1880, and along with William Gladstone was the dominant figure in British politics in the late nineteenth century. Other prominent Jewish politicians in the pre-World War I era include G. J. Goschen, who served as chancellor of the exchequer from 1887 to 1892; Farrer Herschell, who was lord chancellor in 1886 and again in 1892-1895; Sir George Jessel, solicitor general from 1871 to 1873; Rufus Isaacs, who served as solicitor general in 1910, attorney general from 1910 to 1913, and Lord Chief Justice in 1913; and Edwin Samuel Montague, who served as under-secretary of state for India.

These Jewish political and business elites helped to consolidate the liberal regime in Britain by reconciling conservative forces to democratic politics and by expanding the resources and popular base of the British state. The key figure in this process was Benjamin Disraeli.

In addition, Disraeli helped to fashion an imperialist program that, in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, bound together the aristocracy and the military and administrative establishments with segments of the financial community, the press, and the middle class in a coalition that would support his efforts to strengthen the British state. The Disraeli government's policy of imperial expansion in India, the Middle East, and Africa yielded important political and economic benefits for the participants in this coalition.

Jewish financiers and newspaper publishers were important participants in this coalition. In the late nineteenth century, more than one-fourth of all British capital was invested overseas. Long-established financial interests invested primarily in North America and Australia where property owners could rely upon the protection of local laws and authorities. New banking houses, a number of them Jewish, were more heavily invested in the Middle East, India, Asia, and Africa where local laws and authorities offered little security for foreign property. Here, British investors had to depend upon the protection of their own government and its military forces. This dependence gave Jewish financiers a stake in the creation of a strong national government able and willing to project its power throughout the world.

Jewish financial and business interests were important participants in the imperialist enterprise. For example, the Indian railroad network that the Sassoons helped to finance was closely integrated into the imperial administration, and Julius Reuter's wire service functioned as the command and control mechanism of the colonial government. Upon occasion, the British government also turned to Jewish banking houses to finance imperial expansion. Disraeli's purchase of the Suez Canal in 1878, for example, was made possible by Henry Oppenheim's extensive contacts in Egypt and a four million pound loan from Lionel Rothschild. The role played by Jewish capital in the creation of Britain's nineteenth-century empire was not lost on its critics. In his classic work, which became the basis of Lenin's theory of imperialism, J.A. Hobson argued that 'men of a single and peculiar race, who have behind them centuries of financial experience,' formed 'the central ganglion of international capitalism.'

This theme also was prominent in the work of Goldwyn Smith, a noted scholar and opponent of Disraeli's imperialist policies. Smith frequently charged that the Disraeli government's foreign policies were motivated more by Jewish than British interests.

For its part, the Jewish-owned popular press worked to rally public support for the government's imperialist endeavors. The press depicted the conquest and subjugation of foreign territories as a great adventure. Generals like Kitchener and Gordon were portrayed as heroic figures. Journalists captured the popular imagination with accounts of the exploits of British forces in faraway lands.

The Reuters news service was particularly important in popularizing imperialism. Reuter's specialized in the collection and dissemination of news from the furthest outposts of the empire. Its dispatches, upon which all British newspapers came to rely, emphasized the positive, 'civilizing' aspects of British colonial administration and military campaigns. The steady diet of campaigns, battles, and raids in Reuter's dispatches, along with news of the more mundane details of colonial rule, maintained popular interest in the empire and made it an accepted part of British life. The British popular press, like its American counterpart during the Spanish-American War, discovered that exciting tales of empire building gave an enormous boost to circulation and revenues.

--- END OF EXTRACT FROM BENJAMIN GINSBERG'S THE FATAL EMBRACE: JEWS AND THE STATE ---

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Added 2017: Appendix 2: Chapter XIII from Gilbert Keith Chesterton's The New Jerusalem (published 1920; it's possible Chesterton's book suggested Belloc's fuller discussion. (Belloc and Chesterton were close friends and both Roman Catholic.)

There is an attitude for which my friends and I were for a long period rebuked and even reviled; and of which at the present period we are less likely than ever to repent. It was always called Anti-Semitism; but it was always much more true to call it Zionism. At any rate it was much nearer to the nature of the thing to call it Zionism, whether or no it can find its geographical concentration in Zion. The substance of this heresy was exceedingly simple. It consisted entirely in saying that Jews are Jews; and as a logical consequence that they are not Russians or Roumanians or Italians or Frenchmen or Englishmen. During the war the newspapers commonly referred to them as Russians; but the ritual wore so singularly thin that I remember one newspaper paragraph saying that the Russians in the East End complained of the food regulations, because their religion forbade them to eat pork. My own brief contact with the Greek priests of the Orthodox Church in Jerusalem did not permit me to discover any trace of this detail of their discipline; and even the Russian pilgrims were said to be equally negligent in the matter. The point for the moment, however, is that if I was violently opposed to anything, it was not to Jews, but to that sort of remark about Jews; or rather to the silly and craven fear of making it a remark about Jews. But my friends and I had in some general sense a policy in the matter; and it was in substance the desire to give Jews the dignity and status of a separate nation. We desired that in some fashion, and so far as possible, Jews should be represented by Jews, should live in a society of Jews, should be judged by Jews and ruled by Jews. I am an Anti-Semite if that is Anti-Semitism. It would seem more rational to call it Semitism.

Of this attitude, I repeat, I am now less likely than ever to repent. I have lived to see the thing that was dismissed as a fad discussed everywhere as a fact; and one of the most menacing facts of the age. I have lived to see people who accused me of Anti-Semitism become far more Anti-Semitic than I am or ever was. I have heard people talking with real injustice about the Jews, who once seemed to think it an injustice to talk about them at all. But, above all, I have seen with my own eyes wild mobs marching through a great city, raving not only against Jews, but against the English for identifying themselves with the Jews. I have seen the whole prestige of England brought into peril, merely by the trick of talking about two nations as if they were one. I have seen an Englishman arriving in Jerusalem with somebody he had been taught to regard as his fellow countryman and political colleague, and received as if he had come arm-in-arm with a flaming dragon. So do our frosty fictions fare when they come under that burning sun.

Twice in my life, and twice lately, I have seen a piece of English pedantry bring us within an inch of an enormous English peril. The first was when all the Victorian historians and philosophers had told us that our German cousin was a cousin german and even germane; something naturally near and sympathetic. That also was an identification; that also was an assimilation; that also was a union of hearts. For the second time in a few short years, English politicians and journalists have discovered the dreadful revenge of reality. To pretend that something is what it is not is business that can easily be fashionable and sometimes popular. But the thing we have agreed to regard as what it is not will always abruptly punish and pulverise us, merely by being what it is. For years we were told that the Germans were a sort of Englishman because they were Teutons; but it was all the worse for us when we found out what Teutons really were. For years we were told that Jews were a sort of Englishman because they were British subjects. It is all the worse for us now we have to regard them, not subjectively as subjects, but objectively as objects; as objects of a fierce hatred among the Moslems and the Greeks. We are in the absurd position of introducing to these people a new friend whom they instantly recognise as an old enemy. It is an absurd position because it is a false position; but it is merely the penalty of falsehood.

Whether this Eastern anger is reasonable or not may be discussed in a moment; but what is utterly unreasonable is not the anger but the astonishment; at least it is our astonishment at their astonishment. We might believe ourselves in the view that a Jew is an Englishman; but there was no reason why they should regard him as an Englishman, since they already recognised him as a Jew. This is the whole present problem of the Jew in Palestine; and it must be solved either by the logic of Zionism or the logic of purely English supremacy and, impartiality; and not by what seems to everybody in Palestine a monstrous muddle of the two. But of course it is not only the peril in Palestine that has made the realisation of the Jewish problem, which once suffered all the dangers of a fad, suffer the opposite dangers of a fashion. The same journalists who politely describe Jews as Russians are now very impolitely describing certain Russians who are Jews. Many who had no particular objection to Jews as Capitalists have a very great objection to them as Bolshevists. Those who had an innocent unconsciousness of the nationality of Eckstein, even when he called himself Eckstein, have managed to discover the nationality of Braunstein, even, when he calls, himself Trotsky. And much of this peril also might easily have been lessened, by the simple proposal to call men and things by their own names.

I will confess, however, that I have no very full sympathy with the new Anti-Semitism which is merely Anti-Socialism. There are good, honourable and magnanimous Jews of every type and rank, there are many to whom I am greatly attached among my own friends in my own rank; but if I have to make a general choice on a general chance among different types of Jews, I have much more sympathy with the Jew who is revolutionary than the Jew who is plutocratic. In other words, I have much more sympathy for the Israelite we are beginning to reject, than for the Israelite we have already accepted. I have more respect for him when he leads some sort of revolt, however narrow and anarchic, against the oppression of the poor, than when he is safe at the head of a great money-lending business oppressing the poor himself. It is not the poor aliens, but the rich aliens I wish we had excluded. I myself wholly reject Bolshevism, not because its actions are violent, but because its very thought is materialistic and mean. And if this preference is true even of Bolshevism, it is ten times truer of Zionism. It really seems to me rather hard that the full storm of fury should have burst about the Jews, at the very moment when some of them at least have felt the call of a far cleaner ideal; and that when we have tolerated their tricks with our country, we should turn on them precisely when they seek in sincerity for their own.

But in order to judge this Jewish possibility, we must understand more fully the nature of the Jewish problem. We must consider it from the start, because there are still many who do not know that there is a Jewish problem. That problem has its proof, of course, in the history of the Jew, and the fact that he came from the East. A Jew will sometimes complain of the injustice of describing him as a man of the East; but in truth another very real injustice may be involved in treating him as a man of the West. Very often even the joke against the Jew is rather a joke against those who have made the joke; that is, a joke against what they have made out of the Jew. This is true especially, for instance, of many points of religion and ritual. Thus we cannot help feeling, for instance, that there is something a little grotesque about the Hebrew habit of putting on a top-hat as an act of worship. It is vaguely mixed up with another line of humour, about another class of Jew, who wears a large number of hats; and who must not therefore be credited with an extreme or extravagant religious zeal, leading him to pile up a pagoda of hats towards heaven. To Western eyes, in Western conditions, there really is something inevitably fantastic about this formality of the synagogue. But we ought to remember that we have made the Western conditions which startle the Western eyes. It seems odd to wear a modern top-hat as if it were a mitre or a biretta; it seems quainter still when the hat is worn even for the momentary purpose of saying grace before lunch. It seems quaintest of all when, at some Jewish luncheon parties, a tray of hats is actually handed round, and each guest helps himself to a hat as a sort of hors d'oeuvre. All this could easily be turned into a joke; but we ought to realise that the joke is against ourselves. It is not merely we who make fun of it, but we who have made it funny. For, after all, nobody can pretend that this particular type of head-dress is a part of that uncouth imagery "setting painting and sculpture at defiance" which Renan remarked in the tradition of Hebrew civilisation. Nobody can say that a top-hat was among the strange symbolic utensils dedicated to the obscure service of the Ark; nobody can suppose that a top-hat descended from heaven among the wings and wheels of the flying visions of the Prophets. For this wild vision the West is entirely responsible. Europe has created the Tower of Giotto; but it has also created the topper. We of the West must bear the burden, as best we may, both of the responsibility and of the hat. It is solely the special type and shape of hat that makes the Hebrew ritual seem ridiculous. Performed in the old original Hebrew fashion it is not ridiculous, but rather if anything sublime. For the original fashion was an oriental fashion; and the Jews are orientals; and the mark of all such orientals is the wearing of long and loose draperies. To throw those loose draperies over the head is decidedly a dignified and even poetic gesture. One can imagine something like justice done to its majesty and mystery in one of the great dark drawings of William Blake. It may be true, and personally I think it is true, that the Hebrew covering of the head signifies a certain stress on the fear of God, which is the beginning of wisdom, while the Christian uncovering of the head suggests rather the love of God that is the end of wisdom. But this has nothing to do with the taste and dignity of the ceremony; and to do justice to these we must treat the Jew as an oriental; we must even dress him as an oriental.

I have only taken this as one working example out of many that would point to the same conclusion. A number of points upon which the unfortunate alien is blamed would be much improved if he were, not less of an alien, but rather more of an alien. They arise from his being too like us, and too little like himself. It is obviously the case, for instance, touching that vivid vulgarity in clothes, and especially the colours of clothes, with which a certain sort of Jews brighten the landscape or seascape at Margate or many holiday resorts. When we see a foreign gentleman on Brighton Pier wearing yellow spats, a magenta waistcoat, and an emerald green tie, we feel that he has somehow missed certain fine shades of social sensibility and fitness. It might considerably surprise the company on Brighton Pier, if he were to reply by solemnly unwinding his green necktie from round his neck, and winding it round his head. Yet the reply would be the right one; and would be equally logical and artistic. As soon as the green tie had become a green turban, it might look as appropriate and even attractive as the green turban of any pilgrim of Mecca or any descendant of Mahomet, who walks with a stately air through the streets of Jaffa or Jerusalem. The bright colours that make the Margate Jews hideous are no brighter than those that make the Moslem crowd picturesque. They are only worn in the wrong place, in the wrong way, and in conjunction with a type and cut of clothing that is meant to be more sober and restrained. Little can really be urged against him, in that respect, except that his artistic instinct is rather for colour than form, especially of the kind that we ourselves have labelled good form.

This is a mere symbol, but it is so suitable a symbol that I have often offered it symbolically as a solution of the Jewish problem. I have felt disposed to say: let all liberal legislation stand, let all literal and legal civic equality stand; let a Jew occupy any political or social position which he can gain in open competition; let us not listen for a moment to any suggestions of reactionary restrictions or racial privilege. Let a Jew be Lord Chief justice, if his exceptional veracity and reliability have clearly marked him out for that post. Let a Jew be Archbishop of Canterbury, if our national religion has attained to that receptive breadth that would render such a transition unobjectionable and even unconscious. But let there be one single-clause bill; one simple and sweeping law about Jews, and no other. Be it enacted, by the King's Most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal and the Commons in Parliament assembled, that every Jew must be dressed like an Arab. Let him sit on the Woolsack, but let him sit there dressed as an Arab. Let him preach in St. Paul's Cathedral, but let him preach there dressed as an Arab. It is not my point at present to dwell on the pleasing if flippant fancy of how much this would transform the political scene; of the dapper figure of Sir Herbert Samuel swathed as a Bedouin, or Sir Alfred Mond gaining a yet greater grandeur from the gorgeous and trailing robes of the East. If my image is quaint my intention is quite serious; and the point of it is not personal to any particular Jew. The point applies to any Jew, and to our own recovery of healthier relations with him. The point is that we should know where we are; and he would know where he is, which is in a foreign land.

This is but a parenthesis and a parable, but it brings us to the concrete controversial matter which is the Jewish problem. Only a few years ago it was regarded as a mark of a blood-thirsty disposition to admit that the Jewish problem was a problem, or even that the Jew was a Jew. Through much misunderstanding certain friends of mine and myself have persisted in disregarding the silence thus imposed; but facts have fought for us more effectively than words. By this time nobody is more conscious of the Jewish problem than the most intelligent and idealistic of the Jews. The folly of the fashion by which Jews often concealed their Jewish names, must surely be manifest by this time even to those who concealed them. To mention but one example of the way in which this fiction falsified the relations of everybody and everything, it is enough to note that it involved the Jews themselves in a quite new and quite needless unpopularity in the first years of the war. A poor little Jewish tailor, who called himself by a German name merely because he lived for a short time in a German town, was instantly mobbed in Whitechapel for his share in the invasion of Belgium. He was cross-examined about why he had damaged the tower of Rheims; and talked to as if he had killed Nurse Cavell with his own pair of shears. It was very unjust; quite as unjust as it would be to ask Bethmann-Hollweg why he had stabbed Eglon or hewn Agag in pieces. But it was partly at least the fault of the Jew himself, and of the whole of that futile and unworthy policy which had led him to call himself Bernstein when his name was Benjamin.

In such cases the Jews are accused of all sorts of faults they have not got; but there are faults that they have got. Some of the charges against them, as in the cases I have quoted concerning religious ritual and artistic taste, are due merely to the false light in which they are regarded. Other faults may also be due to the false position in which they are placed. But the faults exist; and nothing was ever more dangerous to everybody concerned than the recent fashion of denying or ignoring them. It was done simply by the snobbish habit of suppressing the experience and evidence of the majority of people, and especially of the majority of poor people. It was done by confining the controversy to a small world of wealth and refinement, remote from all the real facts involved. For the rich are the most ignorant people on earth, and the best that can be said for them, in cases like these, is that their ignorance often reaches the point of innocence.

I will take a typical case, which sums up the whole of this absurd fashion. There was a controversy in the columns of an important daily paper, some time ago, on the subject of the character of Shylock in Shakespeare. Actors and authors of distinction, including some of the most brilliant of living Jews, argued the matter from the most varied points of view. Some said that Shakespeare was prevented by the prejudices of his time from having a complete sympathy with Shylock. Some said that Shakespeare was only restrained by fear of the powers of his time from expressing his complete sympathy with Shylock. Some wondered how or why Shakespeare had got hold of such a queer story as that of the pound of flesh, and what it could possibly have to do with so dignified and intellectual a character as Shylock. In short, some wondered why a man of genius should be so much of an Anti-Semite, and some stoutly declared that he must have been a Pro-Semite. But all of them in a sense admitted that they were puzzled as to what the play was about. The correspondence filled column after column and went on for weeks. And from one end of that correspondence to the other, no human being even so much as mentioned the word "usury." It is exactly as if twenty clever critics were set down to talk for a month about the play of Macbeth, and were all strictly forbidden to mention the word "murder."

The play called The Merchant of Venice happens to be about usury, and its story is a medieval satire on usury. It is the fashion to say that it is a clumsy and grotesque story; but as a fact it is an exceedingly good story. It is a perfect and pointed story for its purpose, which is to convey the moral of the story. And the moral is that the logic of usury is in its nature at war with life, and might logically end in breaking into the bloody house of life. In other words, if a creditor can always claim a man's tools or a man's home, he might quite as justly claim one of his arms or legs. This principle was not only embodied in medieval satires but in very sound medieval laws, which set a limit on the usurer who was trying to take away a man's livelihood, as the usurer in the play is trying to take away a man's life. And if anybody thinks that usury can never go to lengths wicked enough to be worthy of so wild an image, then that person either knows nothing about it or knows too much. He is either one of the innocent rich who have never been the victims of money-lenders, or else one of the more powerful and influential rich who are money-lenders themselves.

All this, I say, is a fact that must be faced, but there is another side to the case, and it is this that the genius of Shakespeare discovered. What he did do, and what the medieval satirist did not do, was to attempt to understand Shylock; in the true sense to sympathise with Shylock the money-lender, as he sympathised with Macbeth the murderer. It was not to deny that the man was an usurer, but to assert that the usurer was a man. And the Elizabethan dramatist does make him a man, where the medieval satirist made him a monster. Shakespeare not only makes him a man but a perfectly sincere and self-respecting man. But the point is this: that he is a sincere man who sincerely believes in usury. He is a self-respecting man who does not despise himself for being a usurer. In one word, he regards usury as normal. In that word is the whole problem of the popular impression of the Jews. What Shakespeare suggested about the Jew in a subtle and sympathetic way, millions of plain men everywhere would suggest about him in a rough and ready way. Regarding the Jew in relation to his ideas about interest, they think either that he is simply immoral; or that if he is moral, then he has a different morality. There is a great deal more to be said about how far this is true, and about what are its causes and excuses if it is true. But it is an old story, surely, that the worst of all cures is to deny the disease.

To recognise the reality of the Jewish problem is very vital for everybody and especially vital for Jews. To pretend that there is no problem is to precipitate the expression of a rational impatience, which unfortunately can only express itself in the rather irrational form of Anti-Semitism. In the controversies of Palestine and Syria, for instance, it is very common to hear the answer that the Jew is no worse than the Armenian. The Armenian also is said to be unpopular as a money-lender and a mercantile upstart; yet the Armenian figures as a martyr for the Christian faith and a victim of the Moslem fury. But this is one of those arguments which really carry their own answer. It is like the sceptical saying that man is only an animal, which of itself provokes the retort, "What an animal!" The very similarity only emphasises the contrast. Is it seriously suggested that we can substitute the Armenian for the Jew in the study of a world-wide problem like that of the Jews? Could we talk of the competition of Armenians among Welsh shop-keepers, or of the crowd of Armenians on Brighton Parade? Can Armenian usury be a common topic of talk in a camp in California and in a club in Piccadilly? Does Shakespeare show us a tragic Armenian towering over the great Venice of the Renascence? Does Dickens show us a realistic Armenian teaching in the thieves' kitchens of the slums? When we meet Mr. Vernon Vavasour, that brilliant financier, do we speculate on the probability of his really having an Armenian name to match his Armenian nose? Is it true, in short, that all sorts of people, from the peasants of Poland to the peasants of Portugal, can agree more or less upon the special subject of Armenia? Obviously it is not in the least true; obviously the Armenian question is only a local question of certain Christians, who may be more avaricious than other Christians. But it is the truth about the Jews. It is only half the truth, and one which by itself would be very unjust to the Jews. But it is the truth, and we must realise it as sharply and clearly as we can. The truth is that it is rather strange that the Jews should be so anxious for international agreements. For one of the few really international agreements is a suspicion of the Jews.

A more practical comparison would be one between the Jews and gipsies; for the latter at least cover several countries, and can be tested by the impressions of very different districts. And in some preliminary respects the comparison is really useful. Both races are in different ways landless, and therefore in different ways lawless. For the fundamental laws are land laws. In both cases a reasonable man will see reasons for unpopularity, without wishing to indulge any task for persecution. In both cases he will probably recognise the reality of a racial fault, while admitting that it may be largely a racial misfortune. That is to say, the drifting and detached condition may be largely the cause of Jewish usury or gipsy pilfering; but it is not common sense to contradict the general experience of gipsy pilfering or Jewish usury. The comparison helps us to clear away some of the cloudy evasions by which modern men have tried to escape from that experience. It is absurd to say that people are only prejudiced against the money methods of the Jews because the medieval church has left behind a hatred of their religion. We might as well say that people only protect the chickens from the gipsies because the medieval church undoubtedly condemned fortune-telling. It is unreasonable for a Jew to complain that Shakespeare makes Shylock and not Antonio the ruthless money-lender; or that Dickens makes Fagin and not Sikes the receiver of stolen goods. It is as if a gipsy were to complain when a novelist describes a child as stolen by the gipsies, and not by the curate or the mothers' meeting. It is to complain of facts and probabilities. There may be good gipsies; there may be good qualities which specially belong to them as gipsies; many students of the strange race have, for instance, praised a certain dignity and self-respect among the women of the Romany. But no student ever praised them for an exaggerated respect for private property, and the whole argument about gipsy theft can be roughly repeated about Hebrew usury. Above all, there is one other respect in which the comparison is even more to the point. It is the essential fact of the whole business, that the Jews do not become national merely by becoming a political part of any nation. We might as well say that the gipsies had villas in Clapham, when their caravans stood on Clapham Common.

But, of course, even this comparison between the two wandering peoples fails in the presence of the greater problem. Here again even the attempt at a parallel leaves the primary thing more unique. The gipsies do not become municipal merely by passing through a number of parishes, and it would seem equally obvious that a Jew need not become English merely by passing through England on his way from Germany to America. But the gipsy not only is not municipal, but he is not called municipal. His caravan is not immediately painted outside with the number and name of 123 Laburnam Road, Clapham. The municipal authorities generally notice the wheels attached to the new cottage, and therefore do not fall into the error. The gipsy may halt in a particular parish, but he is not as a rule immediately made a parish councillor. The cases in which a travelling tinker has been suddenly made the mayor of an important industrial town must be comparatively rare. And if the poor vagabonds of the Romany blood are bullied by mayors and magistrates, kicked off the land by landlords, pursued by policemen and generally knocked about from pillar to post, nobody raises an outcry that they are the victims of religious persecution; nobody summons meetings in public halls, collects subscriptions or sends petitions to parliament; nobody threatens anybody else with the organised indignation of the gipsies all over the world. The case of the Jew in the nation is very different from that of the tinker in the town. The moral elements that can be appealed to are of a very different style and scale. No gipsies are millionaires.

In short, the Jewish problem differs from anything like the gipsy problem in two highly practical respects. First, the Jews already exercise colossal cosmopolitan financial power. And second, the modern societies they live in also grant them vital forms of national political power. Here the vagrant is already as rich as a miser and the vagrant is actually made a mayor. As will be seen shortly, there is a Jewish side of the story which leads really to the same ending of the story; but the truth stated here is quite independent of any sympathetic or unsympathetic view of the race in question. It is a question of fact, which a sensible Jew can afford to recognise, and which the most sensible Jews do very definitely recognise. It is really irrational for anybody to pretend that the Jews are only a curious sect of Englishmen, like the Plymouth Brothers or the Seventh Day Baptists, in the face of such a simple fact as the family of Rothschild. Nobody can pretend that such an English sect can establish five brothers, or even cousins, in the five great capitals of Europe. Nobody can pretend that the Seventh Day Baptists are the seven grandchildren of one grandfather, scattered systematically among the warring nations of the earth. Nobody thinks the Plymouth Brothers are literally brothers, or that they are likely to be quite as powerful in Paris or in Petrograd as in Plymouth.

The Jewish problem can be stated very simply after all. It is normal for the nation to contain the family. With the Jews the family is generally divided among the nations. This may not appear to matter to those who do not believe in nations, those who really think there ought not to be any nations. But I literally fail to understand anybody who does believe in patriotism thinking that this state of affairs can be consistent with it. It is in its nature intolerable, from a national standpoint, that a man admittedly powerful in one nation should be bound to a man equally powerful in another nation, by ties more private and personal even than nationality. Even when the purpose is not any sort of treachery, the very position is a sort of treason. Given the passionately patriotic peoples of the west of Europe especially, the state of things cannot conceivably be satisfactory to a patriot. But least of all can it conceivably be satisfactory to a Jewish patriot; by which I do not mean a sham Englishman or a sham Frenchman, but a man who is sincerely patriotic for the historic and highly civilised nation of the Jews.

For what may be criticised here as Anti-Semitism is only the negative side of Zionism. For the sake of convenience I have begun by stating it in terms of the universal popular impression which some call a popular prejudice. But such a truth of differentiation is equally true on both its different sides. Suppose somebody proposes to mix up England and America, under some absurd name like the Anglo-Saxon Empire. One man may say, "Why should the jolly English inns and villages be swamped by these priggish provincial Yankees?" Another may say, "Why should the real democracy of a young country be tied to your snobbish old squirarchy?" But both these views are only versions of the same view of a great American: "God never made one people good enough to rule another."

The primary point about Zionism is that, whether it is right or wrong, it does offer a real and reasonable answer both to Anti-Semitism and to the charge of Anti-Semitism. The usual phrases about religious persecution and racial hatred are not reasonable answers, or answers at all. These Jews do not deny that they are Jews; they do not deny that Jews may be unpopular; they do not deny that there may be other than superstitious reasons for their unpopularity. They are not obliged to maintain that when a Piccadilly dandy talks about being in the hands of the Jews he is moved by the theological fanaticism that prevails in Piccadilly; or that when a silly youth on Derby Day says he was done by a dirty Jew, he is merely conforming to that Christian orthodoxy which is one of the strict traditions of the Turf. They are not, like some other Jews, forced to pay so extravagant a compliment to the Christian religion as to suppose it the ruling motive of half the discontented talk in clubs and public-houses, of nearly every business man who suspects a foreign financier, or nearly every working man who grumbles against the local pawn-broker. Religious mania, unfortunately, is not so common. The Zionists do not need to deny any of these things; what they offer is not a denial but a diagnosis and a remedy. Whether their diagnosis is correct, whether their remedy is practicable, we will try to consider later, with something like a fair summary of what is to be said on both sides. But their theory, on the face of it, is perfectly reasonable. It is the theory that any abnormal qualities in the Jews are due to the abnormal position of the Jews. They are traders rather than producers because they have no land of their own from which to produce, and they are cosmopolitans rather than patriots because they have no country of their own for which to be patriotic. They can no more become farmers while they are vagrant than they could have built the Temple of Solomon while they were building the Pyramids of Egypt. They can no more feel the full stream of nationalism while they wander in the desert of nomadism than they could bathe in the waters of Jordan while they were weeping by the waters of Babylon. For exile is the worst kind of bondage. In insisting upon that at least the Zionists have insisted upon a profound truth, with many applications to many other moral issues. It is true that for any one whose heart is set on a particular home or shrine, to be locked out is to be locked in. The narrowest possible prison for him is the whole world.

It will be well to notice briefly, however, how the principle applies to the two Anti-Semitic arguments already considered. The first is the charge of usury and unproductive loans, the second the charge either of treason or of unpatriotic detachment. The charge of usury is regarded, not unreasonably, as only a specially dangerous development of the general charge of uncreative commerce and the refusal of creative manual exercise; the unproductive loan is only a minor form of the unproductive labour. It is certainly true that the latter complaint is, if possible, commoner than the former, especially in comparatively simple communities like those of Palestine. A very honest Moslem Arab said to me, with a singular blend of simplicity and humour, "A Jew does not work; but he grows rich. You never see a Jew working; and yet they grow rich. What I want to know is, why do we not all do the same? Why do we not also do this and become rich?" This is, I need hardly say, an over-simplification. Jews often work hard at some things, especially intellectual things. But the same experience which tells us that we have known many industrious Jewish scholars, Jewish lawyers, Jewish doctors, Jewish pianists, chess-players and so on, is an experience which cuts both ways. The same experience, if carefully consulted, will probably tell us that we have not known personally many patient Jewish ploughmen, many laborious Jewish blacksmiths, many active Jewish hedgers and ditchers, or even many energetic Jewish hunters and fishermen. In short, the popular impression is tolerably true to life, as popular impressions very often are; though it is not fashionable to say so in these days of democracy and self-determination. Jews do not generally work on the land, or in any of the handicrafts that are akin to the land; but the Zionists reply that this is because it can never really be their own land. That is Zionism, and that has really a practical place in the past and future of Zion.

Patriotism is not merely dying for the nation. It is dying with the nation. It is regarding the fatherland not merely as a real resting-place like an inn, but as a final resting-place, like a house or even a grave. Even the most Jingo of the Jews do not feel like this about their adopted country; and I doubt if the most intelligent of the Jews would pretend that they did. Even if we can bring ourselves to believe that Disraeli lived for England, we cannot think that he would have died with her. If England had sunk in the Atlantic he would not have sunk with her, but easily floated over to America to stand for the Presidency. Even if we are profoundly convinced that Mr. Beit or Mr. Eckstein had patriotic tears in his eyes when he obtained a gold concession from Queen Victoria, we cannot believe that in her absence he would have refused a similar concession from the German Emperor. When the Jew in France or in England says he is a good patriot he only means that he is a good citizen, and he would put it more truly if he said he was a good exile. Sometimes indeed he is an abominably bad citizen, and a most exasperating and execrable exile, but I am not talking of that side of the case. I am assuming that a man like Disraeli did really make a romance of England, that a man like Dernburg did really make a romance of Germany, and it is still true that though it was a romance, they would not have allowed it to be a tragedy. They would have seen that the story had a happy ending, especially for themselves. These Jews would not have died with any Christian nation.

But the Jews did die with Jerusalem. That is the first and last great truth in Zionism. Jerusalem was destroyed and Jews were destroyed with it, men who cared no longer to live because the city of their faith had fallen. It may be questioned whether all the Zionists have all the sublime insanity of the Zealots. But at least it is not nonsense to suggest that the Zionists might feel like this about Zion. It is nonsense to suggest that they would ever feel like this about Dublin or Moscow. And so far at least the truth both in Semitism and Anti-Semitism is included in Zionism.

It is a commonplace that the infamous are more famous than the famous. Byron noted, with his own misanthropic moral, that we think more of Nero the monster who killed his mother than of Nero the noble Roman who defeated Hannibal. The name of Julian more often suggests Julian the Apostate than Julian the Saint; though the latter crowned his canonisation with the sacred glory of being the patron saint of inn-keepers. But the best example of this unjust historical habit is the most famous of all and the most infamous of all. If there is one proper noun which has become a common noun, if there is one name which has been generalised till it means a thing, it is certainly the name of Judas. We should hesitate perhaps to call it a Christian name, except in the more evasive form of Jude. And even that, as the name of a more faithful apostle, is another illustration of the same injustice; for, by comparison with the other, Jude the faithful might almost be called Jude the obscure. The critic who said, whether innocently or ironically, "What wicked men these early Christians were!" was certainly more successful in innocence than in irony; for he seems to have been innocent or ignorant of the whole idea of the Christian communion. Judas Iscariot was one of the very earliest of all possible early Christians. And the whole point about him was that his hand was in the same dish; the traitor is always a friend, or he could never be a foe. But the point for the moment is merely that the name is known everywhere merely as the name of a traitor. The name of Judas nearly always means Judas Iscariot; it hardly ever means Judas Maccabeus. And if you shout out "Judas" to a politician in the thick of a political tumult, you will have some difficulty in soothing him afterwards, with the assurance that you had merely traced in him something of that splendid zeal and valour which dragged down the tyranny of Antiochus, in the day of the great deliverance of Israel.

Those two possible uses of the name of Judas would give us yet another compact embodiment of the case for Zionism. Numberless international Jews have gained the bad name of Judas, and some have certainly earned it. If you have gained or earned the good name of Judas, it can quite fairly and intelligently be affirmed that this was not the fault of the Jews, but of the peculiar position of the Jews. A man can betray like Judas Iscariot in another man's house; but a man cannot fight like Judas Maccabeus for another man's temple. There is no more truly rousing revolutionary story amid all the stories of mankind, there is no more perfect type of the element of chivalry in rebellion, than that magnificent tale of the Maccabee who stabbed from underneath the elephant of Antiochus and died under the fall of that huge and living castle. But it would be unreasonable to ask Mr. Montagu to stick a knife into the elephant on which Lord Curzon, let us say, was riding in all the pomp of Asiatic imperialism. For Mr. Montagu would not be liberating his own land; and therefore he naturally prefers to interest himself either in operations in silver or in somewhat slower and less efficient methods of liberation. In short, whatever we may think of the financial or social services such as were rendered to England in the affair of Marconi, or to France in the affair of Panama, it must be admitted that these exhibit a humbler and more humdrum type of civic duty, and do not remind us of the more reckless virtues of the Maccabees or the Zealots. A man may be a good citizen of anywhere, but he cannot be a national hero of nowhere; and for this particular type of patriotic passion it is necessary to have a patria. The Zionists therefore are maintaining a perfectly reasonable proposition, both about the charge of usury and the charge of treason, if they claim that both could be cured by the return to a national soil as promised in Zionism.

Unfortunately they are not always reasonable about their own reasonable proposition. Some of them have a most unlucky habit of ignoring, and therefore implicitly denying, the very evil that they are wisely trying to cure. I have already remarked this irritating innocence in the first of the two questions; the criticism that sees everything in Shylock except the point of him, or the point of his knife. How in the politics of Palestine at this moment this first question is in every sense the primary question. Palestine has hardly as yet a patriotism to be betrayed; but it certainly has a peasantry to be oppressed, and especially to be oppressed as so many peasantries have been with usury and forestalling. The Syrians and Arabs and all the agricultural and pastoral populations of Palestine are, rightly or wrongly, alarmed and angered at the advent of the Jews to power; for the perfectly practical and simple reason of the reputation which the Jews have all over the world. It is really ridiculous in people so intelligent as the Jews, and especially so intelligent as the Zionists, to ignore so enormous and elementary a fact as that reputation and its natural results. It may or may not in this case be unjust; but in any case it is not unnatural. It may be the result of persecution, but it is one that has definitely resulted. It may be the consequence of a misunderstanding; but it is a misunderstanding that must itself be understood. Rightly or wrongly, certain people in Palestine fear the coming of the Jews as they fear the coming of the locusts; they regard them as parasites that feed on a community by a thousand methods of financial intrigue and economic exploitation. I could understand the Jews indignantly denying this, or eagerly disproving it, or best of all, explaining what is true in it while exposing what is untrue. What is strange, I might almost say weird, about the attitude of some quite intelligent and sincere Zionists, is that they talk, write and apparently think as if there were no such thing in the world.

I will give one curious example from one of the best and most brilliant of the Zionists. Dr. Weizmann is a man of large mind and human sympathies; and it is difficult to believe that any one with so fine a sense of humanity can be entirely empty of anything like a sense of humour. Yet, in the middle of a very temperate and magnanimous address on "Zionist Policy," he can actually say a thing like this, "The Arabs need us with our knowledge, and our experience and our money. If they do not have us they will fall into the hands of others, they will fall among sharks." One is tempted for the moment to doubt whether any one else in the world could have said that, except the Jew with his strange mixture of brilliancy and blindness, of subtlety and simplicity. It is much as if President Wilson were to say, "Unless America deals with Mexico, it will be dealt with by some modern commercial power, that has trust-magnates and hustling millionaires." But would President Wilson say it? It is as if the German Chancellor had said, "We must rush to the rescue of the poor Belgians, or they may be put under some system with a rigid militarism and a bullying bureaucracy." But would even a German Chancellor put it exactly like that? Would anybody put it in the exact order of words and structure of sentence in which Dr. Weizmann has put it? Would even the Turks say, "The Armenians need us with our order and our discipline and our arms. If they do not have us they will fall into the hands of others, they will perhaps be in danger of massacres." I suspect that a Turk would see the joke, even if it were as grim a joke as the massacres themselves. If the Zionists wish to quiet the fears of the Arabs, surely the first thing to do is to discover what the Arabs are afraid of. And very little investigation will reveal the simple truth that they are very much afraid of sharks; and that in their book of symbolic or heraldic zoology it is the Jew who is adorned with the dorsal fin and the crescent of cruel teeth. This may be a fairy-tale about a fabulous animal; but it is one which all sorts of races believe, and certainly one which these races believe.

But the case is yet more curious than that. These simple tribes are afraid, not only of the dorsal fin and dental arrangements which Dr. Weizmann may say (with some justice) that he has not got; they are also afraid of the other things which he says he has got. They may be in error, at the first superficial glance, in mistaking a respectable professor for a shark. But they can hardly be mistaken in attributing to the respectable professor what he himself considers as his claims to respect. And as the imagery about the shark may be too metaphorical or almost mythological, there is not the smallest difficulty in stating in plain words what the Arabs fear in the Jews. They fear, in exact terms, their knowledge and their experience and their money. The Arabs fear exactly the three things which he says they need. Only the Arabs would call it a knowledge of financial trickery and an experience of political intrigue, and the power given by hoards of money not only of their own but of other peoples. About Dr. Weizmann and the true Zionists this is self-evidently unjust; but about Jewish influence of the more visible and vulgar kind it has to be proved to be unjust. Feeling as I do the force of the real case for Zionism, I venture most earnestly to implore the Jews to disprove it, and not to dismiss it. But above all I implore them not to be content with assuring us again and again of their knowledge and their experience and their money. That is what people dread like a pestilence or an earthquake; their knowledge and their experience and their money. It is needless for Dr. Weizmann to tell us that he does not desire to enter Palestine like a Junker or drive thousands of Arabs forcibly out of the land; nobody supposes that Dr. Weizmann looks like a Junker; and nobody among the enemies of the Jews says that they have driven their foes in that fashion since the wars with the Canaanites. But for the Jews to reassure us by insisting on their own economic culture or commercial education is exactly like the Junkers reassuring us by insisting on the unquestioned supremacy of their Kaiser or the unquestioned obedience of their soldiers. Men bar themselves in their houses, or even hide themselves in their cellars, when such virtues are abroad in the land.

In short the fear of the Jews in Palestine, reasonable or unreasonable, is a thing that must be answered by reason. It is idle for the unpopular thing to answer with boasts, especially boasts of the very quality that makes it unpopular. But I think it could be answered by reason, or at any rate tested by reason; and the tests by consideration. The principle is still as stated above; that the tests must not merely insist on the virtues the Jews do show, but rather deal with the particular virtues which they are generally accused of not showing. It is necessary to understand this more thoroughly than it is generally understood, and especially better than it is usually stated in the language of fashionable controversy. For the question involves the whole success or failure of Zionism. Many of the Zionists know it; but I rather doubt whether most of the Anti-Zionists know that they know it. And some of the phrases of the Zionists, such as those that I have noted, too often tend to produce the impression that they ignore when they are not ignorant. They are not ignorant; and they do not ignore in practice; even when an intellectual habit makes them seem to ignore in theory. Nobody who has seen a Jewish rural settlement, such as Rishon, can doubt that some Jews are sincerely filled with the vision of sitting under their own vine and fig-tree, and even with its accompanying lesson that it is first necessary to grow the fig-tree and the vine.

The true test of Zionism may seem a topsy-turvy test. It will not succeed by the number of successes, but rather by the number of failures, or what the world (and certainly not least the Jewish world) has generally called failures. It will be tested, not by whether Jews can climb to the top of the ladder, but by whether Jews can remain at the bottom; not by whether they have a hundred arts of becoming important, but by whether they have any skill in the art of remaining insignificant. It is often noted that the intelligent Israelite can rise to positions of power and trust outside Israel, like Witte in Russia or Rufus Isaacs in England. It is generally bad, I think, for their adopted country; but in any case it is no good for the particular problem of their own country. Palestine cannot have a population of Prime Ministers and Chief Justices; and if those they rule and judge are not Jews, then we have not established a commonwealth but only an oligarchy. It is said again that the ancient Jews turned their enemies into hewers of wood and drawers of water. The modern Jews have to turn themselves into hewers of wood and drawers of water. If they cannot do that, they cannot turn themselves into citizens, but only into a kind of alien bureaucrats, of all kinds the most perilous and the most imperilled. Hence a Jewish state will not be a success when the Jews in it are successful, or even when the Jews in it are statesmen. It will be a success when the Jews in it are scavengers, when the Jews in it are sweeps, when they are dockers and ditchers and porters and hodmen. When the Zionist can point proudly to a Jewish navvy who has not risen in the world, an under-gardener who is not now taking his ease as an upper-gardener, a yokel who is still a yokel, or even a village idiot at least sufficiently idiotic to remain in his village, then indeed the world will come to blow the trumpets and lift up the heads of the everlasting gates; for God will have turned the captivity of Zion.

Zionists of whose sincerity I am personally convinced, and of whose intelligence anybody would be convinced, have told me that there really is, in places like Rishon, something like a beginning of this spirit; the love of the peasant for his land. One lady, even in expressing her conviction of it, called it "this very un-Jewish characteristic." She was perfectly well aware both of the need of it in the Jewish land, and the lack of it in the Jewish race. In short she was well aware of the truth of that seemingly topsy-turvy test I have suggested; that of whether men are worthy to be drudges. When a humorous and humane Jew thus accepts the test, and honestly expects the Jewish people to pass it, then I think the claim is very serious indeed, and one not lightly to be set aside. I do certainly think it a very serious responsibility under the circumstances to set it altogether aside. It is our whole complaint against the Jew that he does not till the soil or toil with the spade; it is very hard on him to refuse him if he really says, "Give me a soil and I will till it; give me a spade and I will use it." It is our whole reason for distrusting him that he cannot really love any of the lands in which he wanders; it seems rather indefensible to be deaf to him if he really says, "Give me a land and I will love it." I would certainly give him a land or some instalment of the land, (in what general sense I will try to suggest a little later) so long as his conduct on it was watched and tested according to the principles I have suggested. If he asks for the spade he must use the spade, and not merely employ the spade, in the sense of hiring half a hundred men to use spades. If he asks for the soil he must till the soil; that is he must belong to the soil and not merely make the soil belong to him. He must have the simplicity, and what many would call the stupidity of the peasant. He must not only call a spade a spade, but regard it as a spade and not as a speculation. By some true conversion the urban and modern man must be not only on the soil, but of the soil, and free from our urban trick of inventing the word dirt for the dust to which we shall return. He must be washed in mud, that he may be clean.

How far this can really happen it is very hard for anybody, especially a casual visitor, to discover in the present crisis. It is admitted that there is much Arab and Syrian labour employed; and this in itself would leave all the danger of the Jew as a mere capitalist. The Jews explain it, however, by saying that the Arabs will work for a lower wage, and that this is necessarily a great temptation to the struggling colonists. In this they may be acting naturally as colonists, but it is none the less clear that they are not yet acting literally as labourers. It may not be their fault that they are not proving themselves to be peasants; but it is none the less clear that this situation in itself does not prove them to be peasants. So far as that is concerned, it still remains to be decided finally whether a Jew will be an agricultural labourer, if he is a decently paid agricultural labourer. On the other hand, the leaders of these local experiments, if they have not yet shown the higher materialism of peasants, most certainly do not show the lower materialism of capitalists. There can be no doubt of the patriotic and even poetic spirit in which many of them hope to make their ancient wilderness blossom like the rose. They at least would still stand among the great prophets of Israel, and none the less though they prophesied in vain.

I have tried to state fairly the case for Zionism, for the reason already stated; that I think it intellectually unjust that any attempt of the Jews to regularise their position should merely be rejected as one of their irregularities. But I do not disguise the enormous difficulties of doing it in the particular conditions Of Palestine. In fact the greatest of the real difficulties of Zionism is that it has to take place in Zion. There are other difficulties, however, which when they are not specially the fault of Zionists are very much the fault of Jews. The worst is the general impression of a business pressure from the more brutal and businesslike type of Jew, which arouses very violent and very just indignation. When I was in Jerusalem it was openly said that Jewish financiers had complained of the low rate of interest at which loans were made by the government to the peasantry, and even that the government had yielded to them. If this were true it was a heavier reproach to the government even than to the Jews. But the general truth is that such a state of feeling seems to make the simple and solid patriotism of a Palestinian Jewish nation practically impossible, and forces us to consider some alternative or some compromise. The most sensible statement of a compromise I heard among the Zionists was suggested to me by Dr. Weizmann, who is a man not only highly intelligent but ardent and sympathetic. And the phrase he used gives the key to my own rough conception of a possible solution, though he himself would probably, not accept that solution.

Dr. Weizmann suggested, if I understood him rightly, that he did not think Palestine could be a single and simple national territory quite in the sense of France; but he did not see why it should not be a commonwealth of cantons after the manner of Switzerland. Some of these could be Jewish cantons, others Arab cantons, and so on according to the type of population. This is in itself more reasonable than much that is suggested on the same side; but the point of it for my own purpose is more particular. This idea, whether it correctly represents Dr. Weizmann's meaning or no, clearly involves the abandonment of the solidarity of Palestine, and tolerates the idea of groups of Jews being separated from each other by populations of a different type. Now if once this notion be considered admissible, it seems to me capable of considerable extension. It seems possible that there might be not only Jewish cantons in Palestine but Jewish cantons outside Palestine, Jewish colonies in suitable and selected places in adjacent parts or in many other parts of the world. They might be affiliated to some official centre in Palestine, or even in Jerusalem, where there would naturally be at least some great religious headquarters of the scattered race and religion. The nature of that religious centre it must be for Jews to decide; but I think if I were a Jew I would build the Temple without bothering about the site of the Temple. That they should have the old site, of course, is not to be thought of; it would raise a Holy War from Morocco to the marches of China. But seeing that some of the greatest of the deeds of Israel were done, and some of the most glorious of the songs of Israel sung, when their only temple was a box carried about in the desert, I cannot think that the mere moving of the situation of the place of sacrifice need even mean so much to that historic tradition as it would to many others. That the Jews should have some high place of dignity and ritual in Palestine, such as a great building like the Mosque of Omar, is certainly right and reasonable; for upon no theory can their historic connection be dismissed. I think it is sophistry to say, as do some Anti-Semites, that the Jews have no more right there than the Jebusites. If there are Jebusites they are Jebusites without knowing it. I think it sufficiently answered in the fine phrase of an English priest, in many ways more Anti-Semitic than I: "The people that remembers has a right." The very worst of the Jews, as well as the very best, do in some sense remember. They are hated and persecuted and frightened into false names and double lives; but they remember. They lie, they swindle, they betray, they oppress; but they remember. The more we happen to hate such elements among the Hebrews the more we admire the manly and magnificent elements among the more vague and vagrant tribes of Palestine, the more we must admit that paradox. The unheroic have the heroic memory; and the heroic people have no memory.

But whatever the Jewish nation might wish to do about a national shrine or other supreme centre, the suggestion for the moment is that something like a Jewish territorial scheme might really be attempted, if we permit the Jews to be scattered no longer as individuals but as groups. It seems possible that by some such extension of the definition of Zionism we might ultimately overcome even the greatest difficulty of Zionism, the difficulty of resettling a sufficient number of so large a race on so small a land. For if the advantage of the ideal to the Jews is to gain the promised land, the advantage to the Gentiles is to get rid of the Jewish problem, and I do not see why we should obtain all their advantage and none of our own. Therefore I would leave as few Jews as possible in other established nations, and to these I would give a special position best described as privilege; some sort of self-governing enclave with special laws and exemptions; for instance, I would certainly excuse them from conscription, which I think a gross injustice in their case. [Footnote: Of course the privileged exile would also lose the rights of a native.] A Jew might be treated as respectfully as a foreign ambassador, but a foreign ambassador is a foreigner. Finally, I would give the same privileged position to all Jews everywhere, as an alternative policy to Zionism, if Zionism failed by the test I have named; the only true and the only tolerable test; if the Jews had not so much failed as peasants as succeeded as capitalists.

There is one word to be added; it will be noted that inevitably and even against some of my own desires, the argument has returned to that recurrent conclusion, which was found in the Roman Empire and the Crusades. The European can do justice to the Jew; but it must be the European who does it. Such a possibility as I have thrown out, and any other possibility that any one can think of, becomes at once impossible without some idea of a general suzerainty of Christendom over the lands of the Moslem and the Jew. Personally, I think it would be better if it were a general suzerainty of Christendom, rather than a particular supremacy of England. And I feel this, not from a desire to restrain the English power, but rather from a desire to defend it. I think there is not a little danger to England in the diplomatic situation involved; but that is a diplomatic question that it is neither within my power or duty to discuss adequately. But if I think it would be wiser for France and England together to hold Syria and Palestine together rather than separately, that only completes and clinches the conclusion that has haunted me, with almost uncanny recurrence, since I first saw Jerusalem sitting on the hill like a turreted town in England or in France; and for one moment the dark dome of it was again the Templum Domini, and the tower on it was the Tower of Tancred.

Anyhow with the failure of Zionism would fall the last and best attempt at a rationalistic theory of the Jew. We should be left facing a mystery which no other rationalism has ever come so near to providing within rational cause and cure. Whatever we do, we shall not return to that insular innocence and comfortable unconsciousness of Christendom, in which the Victorian agnostics could suppose that the Semitic problem was a brief medieval insanity. In this as in greater things, even if we lost our faith we could not recover our agnosticism. We can never recover agnosticism, any more than any other kind of ignorance. We know that there is a Jewish problem; we only hope that there is a Jewish solution. If there is not, there is no other. We cannot believe again that the Jew is an Englishman with certain theological theories, any more than we can believe again any other part of the optimistic materialism whose temple is the Albert Memorial. A scheme of guilds may be attempted and may be a failure; but never again can we respect mere Capitalism for its success. An attack may be made on political corruption, and it may be a failure; but never again can we believe that our politics are not corrupt. And so Zionism may be attempted and may be a failure; but never again can we ourselves be at ease in Zion. Or rather, I should say, if the Jew cannot be at ease in Zion we can never again persuade ourselves that he is at ease out of Zion. We can only salute as it passes that restless and mysterious figure, knowing at last that there must be in him something mystical as well as mysterious; that whether in the sense of the sorrows of Christ or of the sorrows of Cain, he must pass by, for he belongs to God.

CONCLUSION
To have worn a large scallop shell in my hat in the streets of London might have been deemed ostentatious, to say nothing of carrying a staff like a long pole; and wearing sandals might have proclaimed rather that I had not come from Jerusalem but from Letchworth, which some identify with the New Jerusalem descending out of heaven from God. Lacking such attributes, I passed through South England as one who might have come from Ramsgate or from anywhere; and the only symbol left to me of my pilgrimage was a cheap ring of metal coloured like copper and brass. For on it was written in Greek characters the word "Jerusalem," and though it may be less valuable than a brass nail, I do not think you can buy it in the Strand. All those enormous and everlasting things, all those gates of bronze and mosaics of purple and peacock colouring, all those chapels of gold and columns of crimson marble, had all shrivelled up and dwindled down to that one small thread of red metal round my finger. I could not help having a feeling, like Aladdin, that if I rubbed the ring perhaps all those towers would rise again. And there was a sort of feeling of truth in the fancy after all. We talk of the changeless East; but in one sense the impression of it is really rather changing, with its wandering tribes and its shifting sands, in which the genii of the East might well build the palace or the paradise of a day. As I saw the low and solid English cottages rising around me amid damp delightful thickets under rainy skies, I felt that in a deeper sense it is rather we who build for permanence or at least for a sort of peace. It is something more than comfort; a relative and reasonable contentment. And there came back on me like a boomerang a rather indescribable thought which had circled round my head through most of my journey; that Christendom is like a gigantic bronze come out of the furnace of the Near East; that in Asia is only the fire and in Europe the form. The nearest to what I mean was suggested in that very striking book Form and Colour, by Mr. March Philips. When I spoke of the idols of Asia, many moderns may well have murmured against such a description of the ideals of Buddha or Mrs. Besant. To which I can only reply that I do know a little about the ideals, and I think I prefer the idols. I have far more sympathy with the enthusiasm for a nice green or yellow idol, with nine arms and three heads, than with the philosophy ultimately represented by the snake devouring his tail; the awful sceptical argument in a circle by which everything begins and ends in the mind. I would far rather be a fetish worshipper and have a little fun, than be an oriental pessimist expected always to smile like an optimist. Now it seems to me that the fighting Christian creed is the one thing that has been in that mystical circle and broken out of it, and become something real as well. It has gone westward by a sort of centrifugal force, like a stone from a sling; and so made the revolving Eastern mind, as the Franciscan said in Jerusalem, do something at last.

Anyhow, although I carried none of the trappings of a pilgrim I felt strongly disposed to take the privileges of one. I wanted to be entertained at the firesides of total strangers, in the medieval manner, and to tell them interminable tales of my travels. I wanted to linger in Dover, and try it on the citizens of that town. I nearly got out of the train at several wayside stations, where I saw secluded cottages which might be brightened by a little news from the Holy Land. For it seemed to me that all my fellow-countrymen must be my friends; all these English places had come much closer together after travels that seemed in comparison as vast as the spaces between the stars. The hop-fields of Kent seemed to me like outlying parts of my own kitchen garden; and London itself to be really situated at London End. London was perhaps the largest of the suburbs of Beaconsfield. By the time I came to Beaconsfield itself, dusk was dropping over the beechwoods and the white cross-roads. The distance seemed to grow deeper and richer with darkness as I went up the long lanes towards my home; and in that distance, as I drew nearer, I heard the barking of a dog.

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Hilaire Belloc: The Jews. ©Rae West 2000   First uploaded 2000-08-05   A few bits added to the introduction 2013-03-15   Illustrative extract added 2013-08-11   Note on name changing by Jews after thefts 2013-12-06   Link to online archive copy of 'The Jews' added 2013-12-06   Chesterton chapter 2017-12-08 from mention in The Occidental Observer   Eye Witness notes 2018-07-03 French Rev comment 2018-07-17 Some biog stuff 2019-08-18 A few things 8 May 2020 | 4 March 2021: added note at the start on European history and Jews as noticed by Belloc | 31 Aug 2021 a few points at the start
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