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Typos — p. 107, n. 1: Jüden [= Juden] V The Influence of the Jews Some exception is commonly taken both by the Jews, and the Liberals among the Gentiles, to the very discussion of such a subject as the Influence of the Jews. They say: "You do not discuss the influence of the Catholic, or the Mahomedan, or the Irvingite. Why pick on the Jews?" The reply to this is contained in the whole of the four preceding sections. If the influence of the Jews compels attention in a way not comparable to that exerted by the Catholic, the Mahomedan or the Irvingite, it is because the former, as their history and destiny has shown, constantly re-create among the peoples with whom they settle the same pressing and difficult problems. As a peculiar ethnic type, not normally represented to any considerable extent in European countries, and possessed of psychological qualities and of a will to ascendancy which make them conspicuous in any environment not organised on their own lines and peopled by men of their own blood, their influence inevitably attracts notice, not merely by its strangeness but also by the invariable sameness of its effects. Despite their frequent superficial morphological distinctions, there is a singular uniformity and standardization in the behaviour and activities of the Jewish communities of all countries, and the fact that in the history of the last four thousand years they have provoked remarkably similar reactions among the different peoples with whom they have come into contact is a sufficient demonstration of the regularity of their habits of mind and character, and of the latter's social expression. Possessed by a people less energetic, less ambitious, less determined, it is possible that their peculiar psychological qualities might have been overlooked, and that their influence upon the customs, institutions and policies of the nations among whom they settled might have been negligible. But correlated, as they are, with a will to ascendancy and power, probably unequalled by any other ethnic type, their peculiar psychological qualities naturally become the object of attention and study; and it is for this reason that in ancient Egypt, At bottom, the kind of influence exercised by the Jews follows necessarily from the catalogue of their own salient characteristics, as given in section 4 above. As, however, many of the more subtle consequences of these characteristics are not obvious, it may be useful to examine them with some care. 1. The Asiatic, Oriental origin of the Jew and his peculiar ethnic type being the most fundamental feature about him, it naturally has the first claim on our attention. Now, one of the strangest phenomena of modern times is the fact that in most discussions about the Jew in his relation to Western culture and institutions this consideration of his essentially Oriental character and type should almost without exception have been sedulously overlooked. It is as if the belief in the independence of mind and body, of soul and physique, had been so profoundly inculcated upon modern Man as to make it impossible for him to see the absurdity of regarding character and mental and emotional constitution as unrelated to, or unconditioned by, their physical correlatives. For if the Jew is essentially an Asiatic, then his mental and characterological features must have an Asiatic colour and quality. If he is really an Oriental, he cannot think and feel as a Westerner. But anyone reading the debates in both Houses, which preceded the various Acts providing for the Emancipation and Naturalization of aliens and Jews in England, and their admission to Parliament and to the various offices of State, must be struck by the scrupulous delicacy with which almost all the speakers avoided all but the most superficial and "personal" issues. The debate is kept aloft, soaring in philosophical altitudes, in which metaphysics and theology crowd out the more thorny problems of biology, mental science and the realities of national self-protection. Again and again, by most of the speakers, from Macaulay to the Marquess of Westminster, the question of the Emancipation of the Jews was made to appear merely one of religious views, as if Christianity and its principles alone were at stake and no other aspect of the national life involved. Not once in that least enlightened of centuries in English history did anybody appear to appreciate that a relationship might possibly exist between an ethnic type, marked, in spite Had such a thought occurred but once to any of the debaters, they must have seen that English customs and institutions could hardly retain their identity unless the type which had hitherto been responsible for them remained exclusively in control. To introduce into the administration and public life of the country a psychology correlated with another type must necessarily modify, if not imperil, those very aspects of it which theretofore had depended for their peculiar form and character on the fact that they were the social expression of Englishmen. It was not a question of whether it was "cricket" or "kindly" or "gentlemanly" to exclude the Jews with other aliens from Parliament. It was a question of whether England did or did not wish to continue her national life as an expression of her national type. As Ripley has sufficiently shown in his monumental work on "The Races of Europe", 1 the peculiarity which distinguishes the English people from their Continental neighbours is that whereas the latter are a mixture more or less proportionate of the Teutonic, the Mediterranean and Alpine races, the former were until comparatively recent times a blend of only Teutonic and Mediterranean stocks. In modern scientific jargon, then, the morphology of Englishmen cannot be divorced from the ethnic components in their ancestry. And since morphology and psychology can no longer be separated either, except by those who abide by a superstitious outlook, it follows that the character of the pure Englishman must in some obscure way, which need not be investigated here, be correlated with his morphology. But it has been seen that, at least as far as the Jews are concerned, we are confronted with an ethnic type which, according to one scholarly Jewish investigator, is a compound of the 1. Ripley, p. 365. Was it really supposed by the legislators of the nineteenth century that the introduction into English public life of an element so manifestly foreign as the Jew would leave the character of our institutions and the spirit of our customs and laws unmodified? It is not suggested here that the Jew, because of his peculiar ethnic components or of his individual type, should necessarily have been as odious to our legislators of the nineteenth century as he was to the Spanish priests of the Middle Ages. But it did not show a very deep concern about the fundamental problems connected with his admission into our public life and administration that no one should have invited Parliament to consider its possible effect upon the national life. Anyone wishing to convince himself of the levity and fantastic levels maintained by the debates should read, not only Macaulay's "Statement of the Civil Disabilities and Privations Affecting the Jews In England", 1 but also the reports of the relevant debates in both Houses. 2 He will then be able to appreciate more fully than from anything that can be said here the lamentable superficiality of most of what was thought and said on both sides. And nothing that has been thought and said since has added one iota of wisdom to the frivolities of our nineteenth-century ancestors. Maybe the Asiatic outlook, the Asiatic way of solving English problems, was thought definitely desirable by the advocate of Jewish emancipation. They may have imagined that English public business and administration could only be improved by the addition of Asiatic elements both to the electorate, the legislature, the Civil Service and the Bench. But if so, why did not they frankly come out with this plea? Why did they not declare their conviction that we needed this new element in our national life in order to carry on more successfully? Why, like mediæval prelates and monks, were they content to argue as if the one difference between Englishman and Jew was religion, and that, if the Jew undertook not to undermine Christianity, the last remaining objection to his emancipation would be removed? 1. London, 1829. 2. Hansard. Vol. XXIV. Much might be said in support of this point of view had it ever been advanced. It might have been argued, for instance — though no one did argue in this way 1 — that since the first half of last century, not only England, but her House of Commons and her House of Peers, was full of men who were not only practising Jewish methods in business, finance, general trading and manufacture, but were also convinced of the soundness of these methods, what difference could it make if the Jews themselves were represented on our public and administrative bodies? It might have been argued that since, very often, legislation merely regulates methods and practices already established by custom, how could the admission of Jews into the electorate and Parliament affect our lives, except perhaps by merely hastening a process which was in any case inevitable — namely, the legalisation of Jewish customs and usages already well established in the country? For, truth to tell, the process of change ever since the seventeenth century, whether wholly influenced or merely speeded up by the re-admission of the Jews, had been characterized chiefly by the Judaisation of the productive and business life of the country. True, certain fatal steps towards Capitalism — the institution peculiar to the Jewish genius, as Werner Sombart has so ably shown 2 — had been taken before even the Jews were readmitted. But it is legitimate to ask whether such fatal steps might not perhaps have been retraced, or whether they would have been allowed to culminate so logically and rapidly in the modern capitalistic state, had the Jews never settled in this country. In this sense, however, and in view of the fact that they had been allowed to re-settle and to help mould the life of the nation throughout the latter half of the seventeenth and the whole of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it would perhaps have seemed rather a pedantic quibble in 1830 to resist, on the score of their undesirable influence, their final elevation to power as electors, legislators and public servants. But, again, even this point of view was never stated. Had it been, the fact would have revealed a state of mind in 1. If they had, the debates might have steered a course towards a more realistic conception of the problems that had to be solved. 2. See the whole argument in Sombart. The taking of the ultimate steps which introduced the Jews as participators in, and part-controllers of, the life of the country thus really did no more than set the coping-stone to a social edifice which had already been in process of construction for over a century and a half. But it solidified and hardened the structure beyond any hope of modification, and doubtless precipitated many an extreme development which to-day we are deploring. As an Oriental, as a descendant of a race inured in the desert to an existence which, though precarious, was certainly neither industrious nor laborious, 1 and, ever since his abandonment of the nomad's life, attracted to and becoming more and more occupied in trade and general trafficking, the Jew, not only in his own community, but also as an influence outside his community, was bound to promote and cultivate precisely that kind of culture — which, for the lack of a better name, we may call "black-coated" — in which clean, easy and quick paths to wealth, or at least to self-support, are preferred to strenuous, slow and clothes-soiling paths, in which a love of the work as such, apart from the profit it brings, may be a motive for choosing and clinging to it. 2 Owing to his age-long connexion with civilization, urban life and trade, the Jew was bound to promote and develop the culture which is built upon a vast expansion of urban rather than of rural habits and occupations. For men invariably tend to choose and foster the conditions in which their peculiar mastery is best displayed. A swordsman does not choose pistols for a duel. Finally, by his congenital proclivity to traffic with the products of other men's labour rather than to be a producer himself, the Jew was bound to favour all those activities which we now know as speculating, forward buying, forestalling, regrating, and the promotion of every variety of agency and middleman function until, in the whole of the labour and products of the nation he influenced, there was nothing that remained immune from the "rake-off" of the purchaser with the capital to anticipate a demand. In the preceding section it was shown how inaccurate is the ascription of the Jew's predilection in favour of trade, financial activities and mere profit or margin-taking, by means of every 1. Sombart goes so far as to say that Capitalism springs naturally from the shepherd and nomadic life, not from the agricultural (p. 343). 2. Sombart argues that the Jew is by nature incapable of liking anything for itself. He says: "He is for ever asking, what for, what will it bring? Cui bono? His greatest interest is always in the result of a thing, not in the thing itself" (p. 265). Nor is the knowledge which made the establishment of this fact possible a thing of yesterday. It was accessible to Cromwell, to the legislators of the Restoration, and to all those who, in both Houses, were entrusted by the nation to examine the question of the Jews in England after 1830. And yet it was completely ignored, and everybody acted as if our present-day culture, which has undoubtedly been developed largely under Jewish influence, were the consummation most desirable for England. 1 The asperities of the Manchester School and its régime were but a practical application of the accepted principle of converting — even the flesh and blood of infants if necessary — into profit. Although born Englishmen in vast numbers were inextricably involved in this grisly traffic in white slaves (thousands of whom were mere children), to which only the noble efforts of the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury and Michael Thomas Sadler (both Tories) ultimately put an end comparatively late in the nineteenth century, it can hardly be denied that, both in the philosophy of laisser-faire and the practical exponents of it, there was nothing fundamentally foreign to the time-honoured methods of the typical Jewish businessman, or to the spirit which the increasing influence of Jewish finance and trading morality had spread in England. "Politically", says Sombart, "he (the Jew) is an individualist", 2 and it was extreme individualism, with its slogan sauve qui peut, in a ruthless struggle of everyone against his neighbour, which was responsible for the worst excesses of nineteenth-century Industrialism. One of the outstanding features in the growth of modern Capitalism has been the gradual transformation of the notion of property as involving privilege plus duty and responsibility into a notion of property as free and devoid of any responsibility whatsoever. In fact, it is impossible to conceive of modern Capitalism as not forestalled by this significant transmutation of values. Property, as involving privilege plus obligation and responsibility, presupposed certain ties and stakes in the land, certain relations to dependents, assistants and equals, and certain obligations to the community as a whole for its incessant contribution to all forms of property, which were possible only 1. Nobody reading Werner Sombart, checked by the Jewish writer Dr. Ruppin, can possibly perceive any mystery in this culmination. 2. Sombart, p. 263. Before thus modifying it, no one, however, once paused to consider whether property as such could possibly continue to be defended or justified. Apart from the Jew's ancestral inability to understand the gregarious view of property, the desire naturally was to divorce it from obligation and responsibility, particularly that kind of obligation which was implicit in the ancient usages of the country, and which prescribed duties that none but a man of property with a certain traditional status could discharge. What did it matter if, by divorcing it from such obligations, property must cease from having any meaning? Thus, all notion of responsibility and duty which, from the beginning of settled life in England, had been inseparable from ownership, was allowed to drop out of the institution of property, as if for all the world such a modification made no difference to its odour, its philosophic justification and its function in the theory of the English realm. It was a change eminently favourable to the Jew as a congenital particularist and a free-lance aspirant for property and power in a foreign land. And although in the history of the divorce of Property from Obligation, as a development of Capitalism, certain fatal steps were undoubtedly taken before the resettlement of the Jews in England, it would be daring wholly to exclude Jewish influence from the drastic reforms which secured the establishment of free and irresponsible ownership (really a contradiction in terms) after the Grand Rebellion, and which ultimately culminated in the institution which we know as modern Capitalism. In its very first principle, this new institution harboured the seed of its own ruin; for, since in order to be free, property had abandoned its only philosophic and political justification, and propertied people consented to a cash payment discharging all their duties; and since, moreover, the traditionally accepted measure in the relationship of ownership to duty tended to become entirely lost after ownership was divorced from its time-honoured usages in this country, it necessarily followed that the cash payment became an arbitrary tax which, at any moment, might be increased even to the point of confiscation. The fact that this is exactly the state of affairs which, as has been seen, existed in England with regard to the Jews, for Since, however, the only philosophic justification of property has been abandoned not only by a section of the nation (in the Middle Ages, the Jews), but also by all property owners, the alternative to confiscation is no longer a change over to the more reputable callings which Edward I. offered the Jews early in his reign, but a new institution on a national scale, i.e., the abandonment of property itself. Thus the road has been cleared for the ultimate transition from modern Capitalism, or Judaised property (everybody a money-lender), to Communism, i.e., the inevitable culmination of the national Judaisation of property, in which confiscation becomes a national cry. In this way, a point is reached when the only barrier between Capitalism and Communism (which, as institutions, can be shown philosophically to be equally ridiculous) is the avidity of the propertied classes to preserve what they can from confiscation. That is why, in ages like the present, the only active Conservatism to be found consists in that kind of political outlook which wishes to secure "Safety First" for bank deposits and bank balances. Now, in following the decline of property down to its present indefensible position, it is, as we have seen, impossible not to inculpate to a very great extent both the Jew and his inveterate habits of mind. And if to-day we see the Jew everywhere advocating and even anticipating the next logical move in the only line of development which he can understand — the merging of Capitalism into Communism — it is probably due merely to the fact that, with his proverbially quick wits (especially in regard to economic trends), he has inevitably perceived the hopelessness of the wreck his methods have made of the Western institution of property, and now wishes to pilot the dilapidated hulk into a dock where he can hope to continue to survive and function, if only in the guise of a despotic bureaucrat. Certainly, no enlightened Jew with whom we have discussed present trends has ever revealed the slightest doubt that Capitalism is waning to its end. And if, in the inevitable cataclysm, power is only to be retained by sponsoring and The relation between Capitalism, Liberalism and Judaism has been sufficiently demonstrated by Werner Sombart. What Sombart fails to point out, however, is the incredible blindness of all those, whether in Germany, France or England, who failed to foresee the only culmination which could result from the radical substitution of the free-lance, independent and, as it were, Bedouin conception of property for the Western, socialized and functional conception. And what no one who took part in the fateful debates of 1834 saw, was that the choice of ways and means, the framing of a national policy, could not, in the conditions that then prevailed, and cannot even now, be divorced from the type of man who chooses and who frames, and therefore that the intervention of the Jew in the control of the national destiny must mean the abandonment of all hope of preserving the nation's identity. It may have been no one's wish to preserve the nation's identity or to preserve any definite meaning for the epithet "English". If that is so, however, the title "Conservative" has for the last hundred years been meaningless and spurious. In the confidence it has sought to inspire in the nation it has been a fraud. 2. The fact, moreover, that in England after the resettlement the Jew was in the position of a stranger aspiring to power in a society already organized to a great extent upon the aristocratic and hereditary principle, meant that his one form of power — Money — found itself opposed, or at least limited, by other kinds of power which, besides having no necessary basis in money alone, were inaccessible to money as such. These other kinds of power were Gentile aristocratic lineage, Gentile aristocratic privilege, hereditary honours and functions, all of which could not be bought, had no market price, and belonged to a political system and a constitution which would need to be transformed and if necessary wrecked, if these forms of power were to be released to merely affluent candidates for their possession. Thus, if in such a society the Jew was to persist in his ambition to acquire power that had no insuperable limitations, it meant that, willy-nilly, he must give the weight of his support in influence and money to all those tendencies in the land which were aiming at destroying these peculiar and Whether the political incompetence of the occupants of these seats of power, or their stupidity or their gross neglect of their duties played into the hands of those elements in the nation which were anxious to displace them is a question which need not be gone into here. Suffice it to say that, from the most humble squire to the most exalted member of the nobility, there were throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a sufficiently high proportion of unworthy men of privilege and power in the country abundantly to equip the arsenal of any section of the nation which happened to be determined upon their destruction. But what is important is the fact that, no matter how virtuous or efficient they might have been, and no matter how exemplary might have seemed their administration and their leadership in the eyes of the masses, the Jew could not logically have acted otherwise than he did; for he was by the very nature of his position committed to siding with their political critics and opponents. Fundamentally, there is no reason — no fact in the past history of the Jews — which would justify us in assuming that, had the privileged rulers of this country satisfied all the demands of the nation, the Jews, as inveterate strangers, knowing only their own ethnic and spiritual solidarity, would have allowed the efficient performance of their functions by the privileged classes to weigh against the more pressing desideratum of opening up all avenues to power for themselves. Hence, throughout the latter part of the eighteenth and the whole of the nineteenth centuries, two movements aiming at the reform of the House of Lords — to mention no other modifications of the national political structure — ran side by side. On the one hand, there was a steady crescendo of denigration levelled at the hereditary principle, and, on the other, a tendency to lower the prestige of the Upper House by making money alone a means of access to it. The younger Pitt openly promoted the latter movement, and, in spite of George III.'s protests, flooded the Lords with his creations. By 1801 the number of newly created or promoted peers who were selected chiefly because of their wealth and their support of the Government was 140, and there is no doubt that as a result the Upper House became "inferior in ability and devotion to its legislative duties than the small assembly of earlier days". 1 This policy was persisted in throughout the 1. "The Political History of England." Vol. X., p. 282. Meanwhile, all through the century, the hereditary principle, which as a ground for an attack on the Peers had steadily grown ever less and less relevant, came more and more into prominence as a butt for the Radicals who, conveniently overlooking the preponderatingly elective nature of the assembly, continued to assail hereditary privilege because, in dealing with the masses, this was the form of criticism which generated most warmth and most resentment. Early in the nineteenth century, by a curious coincidence which requires some explanation, the same publicist who wrote a "Defence of Usury" had also attacked the constitution as being "aristocracy-ridden", 1 and if by 1911, after a propaganda campaign which for fraudulent misrepresentation surpassed anything of the kind in history, and in which the landed nobility were persistently represented to the people as their only real oppressors and parasites, the Parliament Act virtually removed the House of Lords from any functional position of importance in the constitution, it was because there had been no rest, no pause, in the steady advance of Radical anti-Lordism from the day of Bentham onwards, and because the peers had largely forfeited their claims to respect and honour by abandoning the only course which would have justified their privileges — to wit, an efficient and conscientious performance of their functions. Now, the whole of this anti-peer campaign was supported and directed by the Liberals and their extreme Left Wing, and it was on the side of the Liberals that the English Jews necessarily ranged themselves. Disraeli, in one of the most ingenious and misleading essays on the Jews to be found in literature, says: "All the tendencies of the Jewish race are conservative. Their bias is to religion, property, and natural aristocracy; and it should be the interest of statesmen that this bias of a great race should be encouraged and their energies and creative powers enlisted in the cause of existing society." 2 He then goes on to say that if they cease to be Conservative, if they turn from Conservatism to Radicalism, it is only because of persecution. They side with revolution only "because they wish to destroy that ungrateful Christendom which owes 1. Jeremy Bentham: "The Catechism of Parliamentary Reform" (1817). 2. "Biography of Bentinck", pp. 487–498. But in this passage Disraeli entirely overlooks what it has been our object to point out — that even where persecution is entirely non-existent, as it was in Germany before the War, in France before the Revolution, and in England throughout the nineteenth century, the Jews are bound to be on the side of Liberalism and the Radical ideology, because in Western Europe, where civilization was, before the late nineteenth century, still based to a great extent on hereditary and aristocratic privilege and obligation, there were whole spheres of power from which the Jew as a stranger was naturally excluded. Pari passu with this decline in the prestige and power of the peerage, another charge was also in progress, which consisted in a persistent assault on honours and titles, and the conversion of such stigmata of prestige into purchasable commodities. What Pitt had done in the Lords at the end of the eighteenth century became more or less the rule in regard to all honours and titles inside and outside its walls throughout the nineteenth century. And by the dawn of the twentieth, the sale of honours had become such an accepted and conventional practice with the administrations on both sides of the Lower Chamber, that when, soon after the Great War, a particularly unsavoury person and scandal suddenly came to the notice of the country in connexion with this traffic, there was not a political party in the nation whose hands were sufficiently clean to investigate the whole matter and bring the real delinquents to justice. Thus wealth had, in the space of a century and a half, become the only honour, title and source of prestige — a culmination which, whether consciously envisaged by the Jews or not, was singularly favourable to their position. And although nobody who knows the history of the movements and influences which led first to the loss of credit and then to the loss of power by the Lords, and at the same time inaugurated the purchase of honours and titles, would argue that it was wholly Jewish, or wholly due to Jewish influence, the fact remains that wherever the Jew becomes prominent and powerful, or wishes to become so, such factors in the national life of the country of his adoption — aristocratic lineage, privilege, honours, titles and functions — generally tend to become denigrated and ultimately to acquire their market price. 1. "Biography of Bentinck", pp. 497, 498. Nor is this tendency on the part of the Jews confined to their recent history. There is every reason to suppose that in their pursuit of power in ancient Rome they adopted a similar policy, regardless of the welfare of the country in which they found themselves, and when Mommsen speaks of Judaism as "an effective leaven of national decomposition", he is referring to Rome and to a phenomenon not unlike that which has been examined above. Count Franz de Champagny speaks of their "counting for a great deal in the affairs of the city" 1 — i.e., Rome before Nero — and he adds: "Do not let us imagine, therefore, that the Jewish community in the Roman Empire before Nero was either obscure, poor, sparse, timid or vegetating in the shade. On the contrary, in spite of the hatred and mockery of certain sections of the population, it was insolent, proud and cunning. It was deficient neither in numbers, wealth, solidarity, efficiency, truculence nor promptness to require an affront." 2 Dr. Oesterley, discussing the same subject, says: "The poor Jews, importunate though they might be, were a nuisance rather than a serious annoyance. Far worse were the well-to-do Jews in the eyes of the Romans; for their innate pushfulness made their ubiquitous presence very distasteful." 3 He also points out how, when the Jews appeared in the public baths, they would "seek to get the best places" and bring themselves everywhere "into evidence". 4 The history of the Roman procurators in Palestine and the frequency with which they were recalled for disciplinary reasons, or punished and disgraced, is a sufficient testimony to the power of the Jews on the spot, 5 and when we hear that both Cicero and Seneca were terrified of Jewish influence in 1. Champagny, p. 94: "Ils passaient pour beaucoup dans les affaires de la cité." 2. Ibid., p. 95: "Ne nous figurons donc pas la population juive de l'empire roman, avant la règne de Néron, comme une population obscure, pauvre, peu nombreuse, timide, végétant dans l'ombre. Elle était bien plutôt, malgré la haine et les railleries de quelques uns, insolente et fière, en m�me temps que rusée. Ni le nombre, ni l'argent, ni l'habileté, ni le verbe haut et la main prompte, ne lui faisaient défaut." 3. Oesterley. Vol. II., p. 416. 4. Ibid., p. 417. 5. On this point see Mommsen (Vol. V., p. 418) who, when speaking of the influence and solidarity of the Jews in ancient Rome, says: "How clearly . . . the Jews even then kept together as fellow-countrymen is shown by the remark of an author of the period, that it was dangerous for a governor to offend the Jews in his province, because he might then certainly reckon on being hissed after his return by the populace of the capital." The occasion on which Cicero expressed his fear of the Jews is so interesting, and presents such a strangely vivid parallel to much that is happening in these times, that it is worth describing. Cicero was engaged in 59 B.C. in defending Lucius Valerius Flaccus, who, besides having to answer certain charges of which he was probably guilty, had fallen foul of the Jews in a province of Asia to which he been appointed as administrator. Apparently he had, quite justifiably, and in keeping with his duties as a Roman administrator, prohibited the Jews from carrying out of his province the gold which they used to collect annually throughout the Empire for the Temple at Jerusalem. He had not appropriated this gold, but merely seized it and remitted it to Rome, as he conceived it his duty to do, and among the charges against his client which Cicero had to meet, some of which were more serious, this was one. When, however, Cicero came to that part of the defence which dealt with the question of the Jewish money, his manner and speech suddenly became extraordinarily cautious. In the first place, turning to Publius Lælius, who was impeaching Flaccus, he complained that the cause should have been pleaded "near the steps of Aurelius", where the mob, and particularly the Jewish mob, was wont to collect, and said: "It is on account of this charge, Lælius, that this place and that mob have been selected by you. You know how numerous that crowd is, how great its unanimity, and of what weight it is in the popular assemblies." Then, turning to the judges, he added: "I will speak in a low voice, just so as to let the judges hear. For men are not wanting who would be glad to excite that people against me and against every man; and I will not assist them and enable them to do so more easily." In the course of his speech, he said certain unkind things about the Jews, for instance, that "to despise the multitude of Jews, which at times was most unruly in the assemblies, in defence of the interests of the republic, was an act of the greatest wisdom". 1 But what better proof could we have of the power the Jews then wielded in Rome than Cicero's opening remarks and his 1. "The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero" (translated by C. D. Yonge, B.A., London, 1883, p. 445). Seneca is another thoughtful and cultivated Roman who appears also to have recognized and deplored the power of the Jews in Rome, for Augustine quotes him in the "De Civitate Dei" as having said of them: "When, meanwhile, the customs of that most accursed nation have gained such strength that they have been now received in all lands, the conquered have given laws to the conquerors." 2 This statement by a Roman of the first century A.D., that the conquered race was becoming a powerful influence in the empire of its conquerors, was repeated some four centuries later by Rutilius Numantianus, who, writing about 417 A.D., expressed his regret that the Roman conquest should ever have driven the Jews from Judea, and added that now "the virus creeps through the veins, and the conquered nation overcomes its conquerors". 3 The perfectly similar efforts of the Jews to acquire power in the modern world, however, and the success with which they have met, is proudly admitted and even extolled by Jewish writers themselves, and would have been called to our notice by them, even had the modern world failed to notice it. Thus, the Jewish writer Simon Wolf, writing as long ago as 1888, was able to say of the Jews: "We all know that the first bankers of the world — Rothschilds — are Jews; we know they control not only the money market, but also the political destiny of the European world . . . The Press of Europe is mostly controlled by Jews; the leading editors are Jews." 4 These facts are not denied to-day by anyone who is tolerably well-informed. Wherever an important strategic position is to be found, from which opinion, and political and financial interests, can be controlled, there Jews will be discovered in a far higher proportion than among the rest of the population, and the fact that this is not a mere accident, but an end deliberately and consciously pursued, is revealed by a speech delivered by the Jew Moses Montefiori before an assembly of Rabbis at Cracow as long ago as 1840, in which, rebuking them for their ineffective methods, he said: "What are you 1. Graetz. Vol. I., p. 476. 2. "The City of God" (translated by Rev. Marcus Dods, M.A., Edinburgh, 1871. Bk. VI., 11). 3. "Itinerarum." I., V., 381. 4. Op. cit., pp. 37–39. Reviewing the literature on the influence and power of the Jews in the Roman Empire, there seems to be no ground for doubting that, had there been such a thing as a large and highly organized Press in ancient Rome, the Jews would have been found in preponderating numbers on the staffs of all the large dailies and weeklies. But if we conclude that, as in ancient Rome, so in the modern Western world, the Jews are everywhere striving for and acquiring power, it is essential, in order to understand the phenomenon, to appreciate the nature of this striving. And, in this matter, we must carefully review and bear in mind everything that has been said in the previous sections. For if we are satisfied that in all classes of society to-day there is a tendency to value all things in terms of money and financial profit, to behave as if there were nothing more respectable than to live the artificial existence of urban and non-productive middlemen, and generally to exalt what can be merely ephemeral in the life of the country, we must carefully consider our position. And since, as we have seen, this tendency now exists irrespective of the presence of the Jews or their influence, it seems justifiable to take such steps to resist or neutralize it as are implied in a wholesale transmutation of values. 3. The Asiatic origin of the Jew, his knowledge and his feelings of strangeness in all the countries into which he has wandered since the Roman Dispersion, especially those of north-western Europe from whose population he is most conspicuously differentiated, 2 have inevitably induced him to exert all his powers in every possible way to weaken or break down the national barriers which either recognized, provided against, or emphasized his own and any other foreign element. It has been seen that the Jew tends by his origins to be democratic in spirit and Liberal in outlook. 1. "Die Ausbeutung der Christlichen Konfessionen und Politischen Parteien Durch die Jüden", by Franz Kayser (Münster in Westfl., 1895, p. 36). 2. The Jewish writer, Dr. Ruppin, frankly admits this. He says (Vol. I., p. 6): "It was only when the Jew came in contact with the northern European, so different from himself in type, that the peculiarity of the Jewish nature received the background from which it stood sharply out." True, he will be careful not to attack the institutions of Guy Fawkes' Day, or the Lord Mayor's Show. For, provided most Englishmen are simple-minded enough to suppose that their ancient institutions are being sufficiently safeguarded by the annual burning in effigy of a Papist, and by an obsolete and quite unessential pageant, even if many more essential and precious features of the national life should have disappeared completely, why should anyone trouble to tamper with these harmless historical heirlooms? He will also take care not to attack the ritual and ceremonies of Parliament and the Throne. But again, he will be making an insignificant concession, so long as Englishmen are sleepy enough to imagine that while there may be un-English, although "native", elements in both Houses, among the Ministers of the Crown and at the very foot of the Throne, the mere regalia and "panache" of parliamentary life and of the Constitution amply suffice to preserve the ancient character of these institutions. Thus the Jew becomes a militant Liberal, not out of any hostility to what is ancient per se — on the contrary! he is often the most ardent advocate of the merely Wardour Street and Fancy Dress Ball aspect of a people's venerable institutions. Like the Liberal, he opposes the latter only to make all paths free. And since it is the purely Wardour Street and Fancy Hence the universal association of the Jew with Liberal tendencies! Hence, too, when it comes to fighting European Conservatism or Nationalism, his complete oblivion of his own people's fits of Conservatism in the remote past. What Ezra did in Jerusalem in 485 B.C., what Nehemiah did in that same city in 445 B.C., is conveniently forgotten, if it is a matter of ridiculing the action of a Tory like the Earl of Malmesbury in opposing the Bill to repeal the civil disabilities of the Jews, or if it is important that the National Socialists of Germany should be refuted and ridiculed. On the other hand, when it is a matter of a Jew trying to get himself accepted as a power by the Conservatives of his time, nobody could speak in a manner more persuasive and eloquent about the fundamental principles now actuating German National Socialism than Disraeli himself. Listen to him on the question of the equality of mankind. "They [the Jews] are a living and most striking evidence of the falsity of that pernicious doctrine of modern times, the equality of man . . . the natural equality of man now in vogue, and taking the form of cosmopolitan fraternity, is a principle which, were it possible to act on it, would deteriorate the great races and destroy all the genius of the world. What would be the consequence on the great Anglo-Saxon republic, for example, were its citizens to secede from their sound principle of reserve, and mingle with their negro and coloured populations? In the course of time they would become so deteriorated that their States would probably be re-conquered and regained by the aborigines whom they expelled and who would then by their superiors. But though nature will never ultimately permit this theory of natural equality to be practised, the preaching of this dogma has already caused much mischief, and may occasion more. The native tendency of the Jewish race, who are justly proud of their blood, is against the doctrine of the equality of man." 1 How different are the arguments of Jewry to-day, when Hitler's influence threatens to kindle anti-Semitic conflagrations in the other countries of Europe! Now, with the Liberal backing of enlightenment in the form of books like "We Europeans", the argument turns in favour of the 1. "Biography of Bentinck", pp. 496, 497. This may be perfectly natural and inevitable and only human, all-too-human. It does, however, constitute them a disruptive or disintegrating force within the body of any nation among whom they settle, and the fact that this tendency of their influence is not a novelty, or a manifestation only of their life in the States of modern Europe, is shown by Mommsen, who, in his "History of Rome", makes the important and very ominous statement that "even in the ancient world Judaism was an effective leaven of cosmopolitanism and of national decomposition". 1 Their influence, therefore, tends to impoverish and weaken all local tradition, national character and national identity where these happen to be at all resistant to alien invasion. And since these factors are integrating forces, it follows that extreme Jewish Liberalism atomizes a population, turns each man into an isolated individual, and ultimately culminates in a State bordering on anarchy in which, at the turn of an eyebrow, anarchy becomes a fact. The functional ties which join class to class, like articulating members of a body, and make each class feel the advantage it derives from the social hierarchy — a condition which, in a sound society, is one of the most harmonizing and binding of the social factors — naturally perish when ownership loses its essential obligations and leadership is deprived of its national personnel. The typical society, or lack of society, of the bedouin, with his obligations to no man, his canvas or hide shelter and his other property all wholly his own, and his liberty to move hither and thither without severing any ties, thus becomes revived. But it becomes revived in a community 1. Mommsen. Vol. V., p. 419. Meanwhile, the nation and the people of a country that have suffered these changes may, owing to their city banquets, their handing of the Keys of the City to the reigning Sovereign, their beefeaters, their pageants, their national anniversaries, their monuments, and their many heirlooms and art treasures, imagine they have retained the reality of a world that has preserved its ancient usages. They may still fancy they live in "good old" England. But, at bottom, the nation is really unrecognizable. The age-long rake-off of the transformed ruling or possessing classes — whether Jews or Englishmen — who have considered profit rather than service, quick and clean sources of income rather than production, has left the people and their soil not only disintegrated but exhausted. Everywhere in plant, animal and human being there are signs of generations of ruthless exploitation, systematic devitalization. The people no longer even care for the greatness on which their ancestors squandered their blood and treasure. They are no longer interested in their own ascendancy, in maintaining their own strength against the world. So incapable have the majority become of any self-assertion or productive work requiring initiative and spirit that even the production of their own entertainment is a thing of the past, and the practice of passively receiving entertainment or of having some distracting or diverting process performed upon them, preferably while they are sitting in a chair, has become a national addiction and habit. Meanwhile, the whole of Western civilization marches steadily on towards Communism, and it is difficult to repress the impulse to inquire whether that too may not be merely a device or substitute for moving on to some fresh oasis or pasture, where docile flocks of sheep will continue to maintain their bureaucratic masters in idleness. |
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