We have followed the fortunes of the Jewish people from the moment of its first contact with the nations of the West to the last quarter of the nineteenth century. We have seen that this contact was from the beginning marked by mutual antipathy, enfeebled at times, invigorated at others, always present. Some Jewish writers have endeavoured to show that the hatred of the Gentile towards the Jew in the Middle Ages was an artificial creation due entirely to the efforts of the Catholic Church; that it flowed from above, and that the masses of Christendom, when not incited by the classes, were most amicably disposed towards Israel. This view is hardly tenable. It is inconceivable that the Church, or any other authority, could have succeeded so well in kindling the conflagrations which we have witnessed, if the fuel were not ready to be kindled. It is also a view contrary to the recorded facts. We have seen in the earlier Middle Ages popular prejudice spontaneously manifesting itself in the insults and injuries which were heaped upon the Jews, and restrained with difficulty by the princes and prelates of Europe. In the time of the Crusades also it was not St. Bernard who fanned the fury of the mob against the Jews of the Rhine, but an obscure monk. The exhortations of the saint were disregarded; but the harangues of the fanatic found an eager audience, simply because they were in accord with popular feeling. During the same period bishops and burgomasters strove to save the victims, in vain.

Again, the persecution of the Spanish Jews in the fifteenth century would never have attained the dimensions which it did attain, were it not for the deep-rooted animosity which the bulk of the Spanish people nourished against them. Castile was then the home of chivalry and charity. The pretensions of the Pope to interfere in the affairs of the kingdom had met with scornful opposition on the part of the Castilian nobles. Three centuries before an Aragonese monarch had given away his life in defence of the persecuted heretics of Provence. Less than two centuries before Aragon was one of the few countries that refused to comply with the joint request of Philip the Fair of France and Pope Clement V. to persecute the Knights Templars. At the time when the Inquisition was established in Spain both Castile and Aragon were hailing the revival of culture. Under Ferdinand and Isabella, as well as in the subsequent reigns, the Castilians and the Aragonese vigorously resisted an institution so contrary to the principles of freedom dear to them. Nor was in Spain the danger of dissension sufficiently great to justify recourse to so terrible an instrument of concord. The Spaniards less than any other people had reason to sacrifice liberty of conscience for the sake of political conquest. It is, therefore, highly improbable that the Holy Office would ever have gained a firm footing in Spain, but for the fact that its way was paved by the popular prejudice against the Jews and the Moors, and its success assured by the persecution of those races. Though the Spaniards hated the Inquisition bitterly, they hated the Semites more bitterly still; and of the two the Jew more bitterly than the Moor.

We have also seen that neither the Renaissance nor the Reformation, both movements directly or indirectly hostile to the Church, brought any amelioration to the lot of the Jew. In every country Jew-hatred existed as the product of other than ecclesiastical influences. Here and there, under exceptionally favourable conditions, the Jews may have been tolerated; they were not loved. This negative attitude was liable to be at any moment converted into active hostility. All that the Church did was to turn the feeling to account, to intensify and to sanctify it. Lastly, we have seen that the emancipation of the Jews did not come about until the end of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth century—a period no longer of protest against the Church, but one of rebellion against all the prejudices of all the ages. It was not until the gospel of humanity, in its broadest sense, was accepted that the secular clamour against the Jewish portion of the human race was silenced; and even then not without difficulty. But, though the plant of anti-Judaism was cut at the root, the root remained, and it was destined in our own day to put forth a new shoot.

Writers have expended much ingenuity in defining the origin and the nature of modern anti-Semitism. Some regard it as a resuscitation of mediaeval religious bigotry; others as the latest manifestation of the old struggle between Europe and Asia; a third school, rejecting both those theories, interprets it as a purely political question arising from the social and economic conditions created by the emancipation of the Jews; while a fourth sect have attempted to show that the modern revival is “the fruit of a great ethnographical and political error.” Those who see in anti-Semitism nothing but a revival of mediaeval religious rancour ignore the conflict between Jew and Gentile before the rise of the Mediaeval Church, or even before the rise of Christianity. Those who explain it as a purely racial struggle forget the Crusades and the Inquisition and the superstitious horror of usury. Those who interpret it simply as a question of modern European politics disregard both those periods of history. Finally, whatever may be said of crude ethnographical theories and of nebulous nationalist creeds, it would be doing them too much honour to suppose that they are the real causes of anti-Semitism. Men do not slaughter their fellow-men for the mere sake of an abstract hypothesis, though priests may. All these things do nothing but give a name and a watchword to a movement born of far less ethereal parents. In our day the political activity which has used anti-Semitism as an instrument has only done what clerical activity had done in the past. It has availed itself of a force not of its own creation. The fact is that every human action is the result of manifold motives. The complexity of the motives is not diminished by the multitude of the actors. There is a strong temptation to simplify matters by singling out one of those motives and ignoring the rest. But, though truth is always simple, simplicity need not always be true. There may be new things under the sun. Anti-Semitism, however, is not one of them. Its roots lie deep in the past.

Viewed, then, in the light of two thousand years’ recorded experience, modern anti-Semitism appears to be neither religious, nor racial, nor economical in its origin and character. It is all three, and something more. We find in it all the motives which led to the persecution of the Jews in the past. In antiquity the struggle was chiefly due to racial antagonism, in the Middle Ages chiefly to religious antagonism, in the nineteenth century we might expect it to assume chiefly a nationalist garb. But, as in antiquity religious antipathy was blended with racial hatred, as in the Middle Ages economic rivalry accentuated religious bigotry, so in our time religious, racial, and economic reasons have contributed to the movement in various degrees according to the peculiar conditions, material and moral, prevailing in each country where anti-Semitism has found an echo. If it were possible to unite all these causes in one general principle, it would be this: every age has its own fashionable cult, which for the time being overshadows all other cults, gives a name to the age, explains its achievements, and extenuates its crimes. Every age has found in the Jew an uncompromising dissenter and a sacrificial victim. The cult par excellence of the nineteenth century is Nationalism.

What is this dreadful Nationalism? It is a reversion to a primitive type of patriotism—the narrow feeling which makes men regard all those who live in the same place, or who speak the same language, or who are supposed to be descended from a common ancestor, as brethren; all others as foreigners and potential foes. This feeling in its crudest form is purely a family-feeling, in the worst sense of the term. It grows into a larger allegiance to the tribe, then to the race, and that in its turn develops into the broad patriotism which manifests itself now as Imperialism, now as Catholicism.

There is yet a third form of patriotism—the purest and noblest of all: loyalty to common intellectual ideals. The Greeks attained to this lofty conception, and an Athenian orator, in enumerating his country’s claims to the admiration of mankind, dwells with just pride on this product of its civilisation. Athens, he says, “has made the name of the Hellenes to be no longer a name of race, but one of mind, so that Hellenes should be called those who share in our culture rather than in our nature.”229 Isocrates in making this statement, however, gave utterance to a dream of his own rather than to a feeling common among his countrymen. The Macedonian Empire strove to convert that philosophical dream into a political fact. Alexander and his successors studded Asia with Greek theatres, Greek schools, Greek gymnasia, and the East was covered with a veneer of pseudo-Hellenic civilisation. But their success was only partial, superficial and ephemeral. The intellectual unity could not go deep and therefore did not last long. The barriers—social, religious and racial—which separated the Hellene from the Barbarian proved insuperable; and the Isocratean ideal of a nationality based on community of intellectual aims remained an ideal. Hellenism demanded a degree of mental development to which mankind has never yet attained. Hence its failure as a political bond. This was not the case with Imperialism and Catholicism. They both appealed to more elementary and therefore less rare qualities in man. Hence their success. Rome achieved more than Greece because she aimed at less.

The Roman Empire represented the first, the Roman Church the second variety of this broad patriotism. Civis Romanus was a title which united in a common allegiance the Italian and the Greek, the Jew and the Egyptian, the Spaniard, the Briton and the Gaul. Catholic Rome inherited the imperial feeling of Pagan Rome, but dressed it in a religious form. The dictatorship of the Caesars was divided between the Christian Emperor and the Pope: the former inheriting their political power, the latter the spiritual and moral. Charlemagne wielded the authority of an Imperator Romanus, his papal contemporary that of a Pontifex Maximus. Then came the decay and fall of the Carlovingian fabric; and, gradually, the Papacy built up a spiritual empire with the débris of the secular. All Catholics were subjects of that Empire. In the Middle Ages Europe presented a picture of wonderful uniformity in sentiments, ideals, customs, political and social institutions. All countries, like so many coins issued from one mint, seemed to be cast in the same mould, stamped with the same effigy and adorned with the same legend. National consciousness was in the Middle Ages practically non-existent, or, if it did exist, in the later centuries, it was obscured by the religious sentiment. As in modern Islam we find Arabs, Persians, Indians, Malays, Chinese, Syrians, Egyptians, Berbers, Moors, Turks, Albanians—nations differing widely in origin and language—united by the ties of a common creed, so in mediaeval Christendom we find English, Scotch, French, Italian, German and Spanish knights all forming one vast brotherhood. The reader of Froissart cannot fail to notice this community of feeling and the marvellous ease with which gentlemen from all those nations made themselves at home in one another’s countries. The chronicler himself, in his style and mental attitude, supplies a striking example of this cosmopolitanism. By the mediaeval Christian, as by the modern Mohammedan, the human race was divided into two halves: true believers and others. The universal acceptance of Latin as the medium of communication was another token and bond of brotherhood among the Christians of mediaeval Europe, as the use of Arabic, as a sacred tongue, is a token and a bond of brotherhood among the Mohammedans of the present day.

This feeling of international patriotism, which found its highest development and expression in the Crusades, began to fade as soon as Catholic faith began to decay. Disintegration followed both in the Church and in the State. Loyalty to one ideal and to one authority was gradually superseded by local and later by racial patriotism. Various political units succeeded to the Unity of mediaeval Europe, the vernaculars ousted the Latin language from its position as the one vehicle of thought, and the old cosmopolitan universities of Paris and Bologna were replaced by national institutions. Since the fifteenth century nationalism has been growing steadily, but in the eighteenth its growth was to some extent checked by humanitarianism. The great thinkers of that age extolled the freedom and the perfection of the individual as the highest aim of culture, describing exclusive attachment to one’s country and race as a characteristic of a comparatively barbarous state of society: a remnant of aboriginal ancestor-worship. Nationalism, accordingly, did not reach its adolescence until the nineteenth century. Then the zeal for peace was eclipsed by the splendour of the French exploits in war, and the doctrine of universal freedom was forgotten in Napoleon’s efforts at universal dominion. These efforts aroused in every country which Napoleon attacked a passionate protest which resulted in successful revolt. But the triumph was won at a tremendous cost. Each nation in proportion to its sense of what was due to itself was oblivious of what was due to others. The principles of the brotherhood of men and of universal toleration were denied, the narrow jealousies of race which the philosophers of the preceding century had driven from the realm of culture were re-installed, and Nationalism—arrogant, intemperate, and intolerant—arose on the ruins of Humanitarianism. This evolution, or revolution, has added a new element in social troubles, and has brought into being a new set of ideas.

For the last hundred years ethnographical theory has dominated the civilised world and its destinies as theological dogma had done during the Middle Ages. Consciously or not, the idea of race directs the policy of nations, inspires their poetry, and tinges their philosophy with the same prejudice as religion did formerly. Aryan and non-Aryan have become terms conveying all but the odious connotation of Christian and infidel; and in place of the spiritual we have adopted a scientific mythology. The fiction of our Aryan origin has flattered us into the benevolent belief of our mental superiority over the Mongol, and of our moral superiority over the Semite. To dispute this tenet is to commit sacrilege. But even within the bosom of this imaginary Aryan fold there are schisms: so-called Celtic, Germanic, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, and Slavonic sects, divided against one another by the phantom barriers of ethnographical speculation as frantically as in older days Christendom was divided by the metaphysical figments of Arian, Manichaean, Nestorian, and what not. In the name of race are now done as many great deeds and as many great follies are committed as were once in the name of God. The worship of race has, as the worship of the Cross had done before, given birth to new Crusades which have equalled the old in the degree to which they have disturbed the peace and agitated the minds of men, and in the violence of the passions which they have excited. Nationalism more than any other cause has helped to bring discredit upon the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity—to prove the eighteenth century dream of world-wide peace a glorious impossibility—and to show the enormous chasm which still gapes between the aspirations of a few thinkers and the instincts of the masses.

Though common to all European countries, the creed of the age found articulate exposition first in Germany, and gave rise to various academic doctrines which attempted to account for the genesis and evolution of Nationalism in scientific or pseudo-scientific terms. But names do not alter facts. Ethnographical speculations are in this case mainly interesting as having supplied a plausible explanation for the rise of anti-Semitism. Those who are able to see through new guises, and to detect what old things they conceal, know that anti-Semitism is little more than a new Protean manifestation of Jew-hatred. Divested of its academic paraphernalia, the movement is revealed in all its venerable vulgarity—a hoary-headed abomination long since excommunicated by the conscience of civilised mankind.

This reactionary movement began in Eastern Germany and Austria. In those countries the Jews are very numerous,230 very wealthy, and very influential. Both countries are famous as hot-beds of racial fanaticism. In Germany Nationalism was begotten of the independence secured by the Thirty Years’ War in the seventeenth century, was nursed by the patriotic preachers and poets of the eighteenth, was invigorated by the wars for emancipation from Napoleon’s rule, and was educated by Hegel and his disciples. The Jews in Germany, as elsewhere, are the one element which declines to be fused in the nationalist crucible. Their international connections help them to overstep the barriers of country. Their own racial consciousness, fostered by the same writers, is at least as intense as that of the Germans; but it does not coincide with any geographical entity. They are, therefore, regarded as a cosmopolitan tribe—“everywhere and nowhere at home.” They are distinct not only as a race, but as a sect, and as a class. Accordingly, the reaction against tolerance includes in its ranks clerics and Christian Socialists, aristocrats, as well as Nationalists, that is, the enemies of dissent and the enemies of wealth, as well as the enemies of the alien and the enemies of the upstart. And the term “Jew” is used in a religious or a racial sense according to the speaker. In both Germany and Austria we saw that the philosophical gospel of social liberty was very slowly applied to practical politics, and that, even when it had been accepted, it was subject to reactions. When Jewish manumission was finally accomplished, the Jews by their genius filled a much larger place in the sphere of national life than was deemed proportional to their numbers. And this undue preponderance, rendered all the easier by the superior cohesion of the Jewish over the German social system, was further accentuated by specialisation. The Jews, whose training in Europe for centuries, owing partly to their own racial instincts and Rabbinical teaching, but chiefly to the conditions imposed upon them from outside, had been of a peculiar kind, showed these peculiarities by their choice of fields of activity. They abstained from the productive and concentrated their efforts to the intellectual, financial, and distributive industries of the countries of which they became enfranchised citizens. Jews flooded the Universities, the Academies, the Medical Profession, the Civil Service, and the Bar. Many of the judges, and nearly one-half of the practising lawyers of Germany, are said to be Jews. Jews came forth as authors, journalists, and artists. Above all, Jews, thanks to the hereditary faculty for accumulation fostered in them during the long period when money-dealing was the one pursuit open to them, asserted themselves as financiers. It is impossible to move anywhere in Berlin or Vienna without seeing the name of Israel written in great letters of gold not only over the shops, but over the whole face of German life. Success awakened jealousy, and economic distress—due to entirely different causes—stimulated it. What if the competition was fair? What if the Jews were distinguished by their peaceful and patriotic attitude? What if they supplied the least proportion of criminals and paupers? What if German freedom had been bought partially with Jewish blood, and German unity achieved by the help of Jewish brains and Jewish money?

The landed gentry, richer in ancestors than in money or intelligence, had every reason to envy the Jew’s wealth, and much reason to dislike the Jew’s ostentatious display of it. They could not respect in the Jew a gifted arrivé. They saw in him a vulgar parvenu—one who by his “subversive Mephistophelian endowment, brains,” demolishes the fences of creed and caste, and invades the highest and most exclusive circles, thus acting as a solvent in society. If he is wise, the proud nobleman of narrow circumstances makes his pride compensate for his poverty, and magnanimously despises the luxuries which he cannot procure. If, as more often happens, he is foolish, he enters into a rivalry of vanity with the upstart, and the result is a mortgaged estate—mortgaged most likely to his rival. In either case, he can have little love for the opulent and clever interloper. The animosity of the aristocracy is shared by the middle classes, and for analogous reasons. The German professional man, and more especially his wife, resents his Jewish colleague’s comparative luxury as a personal affront. The excessive power of money in modern society, and the consequent diminution of the respect once paid to blood or learning, naturally enable the Jewish banker to succeed where the poor baron fails; and the Jewish professor or doctor, though many of these latter are poor enough, to outshine his Christian competitor. This excessive power of money is due to causes far deeper than the enfranchisement of the Jews. It is the normal result of Germany’s modern development. The influence of the nobles depended largely on their domains of land; and when industries arose to compete with agriculture, the importance of land necessarily declined. At the same time, industry and commerce began, with Germany’s expansion, to divert more and more the attention of the intelligent from the path of academic distinction—once the only path to honour open to the ambitious burgher—into that of material prosperity. Chrematistic enterprise has introduced a new social standard, and an aristocracy of wealth has come to supplant the old aristocracies of birth and erudition. This social revolution, through which every country in the world has passed and has to pass, was unhesitatingly ascribed to the Jew, who was thus accused of having created the conditions, which in reality he had only exploited.

If from the aristocratic and the cultured classes we turn to the rural population, we find similar causes yielding similar results. In the German country districts it is objected to the Jews not cultivating the land themselves, but lying in wait for the failing farmer: “Everywhere,” says an authority, “the peasant proprietor hated the Jew,” and he proceeds to sketch the peasant tragedy of which that hatred was the consequence. The land had to be mortgaged to pay family claims; the owner had recourse to the ubiquitous and importunate money-lender; the money-lender, whose business it is to trade upon the necessity of the borrower, took advantage of the latter’s distress, and extorted as much as he could. “The Jew grew fat as the Gentile got lean. A few bad harvests, cattle-plague, or potato-disease, and the wretched peasant, clinging with the unreasonable frantic love of a faithful animal to its habitat, had, in dumb agony, to see his farm sold up, his stock disposed of, and the acres he had toiled early and late to redeem, and watered by the sweat of his stubborn brow, knocked down by the Jewish interloper to the highest bidder.”231 In the Austrian country districts it is urged that the presence of the Jew is synonymous with misery; his absence with comparative prosperity. In Hungary, the late M. Elisée Reclus—the famous author of the Nouvelle Géographie Universelle—informs us, “The rich magnate goes bankrupt, and it is almost always a Jew who acquires the encumbered property,” and another witness adds: “The Jew is no less active in profiting by the vices and necessities of the peasant than by those of the noble.” In Galicia, especially, we are told that the land is rapidly passing into the hands of the Jews, and that many a former proprietor is now reduced to work as a day-labourer in his own farm for the benefit of a Jewish master. All this is an absurdly exaggerated version of facts in themselves sad enough. The Jews as a whole are by no means a wealthy community, and the gainers by the supposed exploitation are the few, not the many. And if, as is the case, the condition of affairs in agricultural states is bad, who is to blame? Wherever there is agrarian depression there are sure to be money-lenders enough and Shylocks too many. It does not appear that Christian money-lenders have ever been more tender-hearted than their Jewish confrères. Why then set down to the Jew, as a Jew, what is the common and inevitable attribute of his profession? The ruin of the borrower does not justify the slaughter of the lender. Philanthropists would be better employed if, instead of bewailing in mournful diatribes the woes of the bankrupt peasant and inveighing against the cruelty of his oppressor, combined to establish agricultural banks where the farmer could obtain money at less exorbitant interest. This measure, and measures like this, not slaughter and senile lamentation, would be a remedy consonant both with the nature of the evil and with the dictates of civilisation and justice. Until something of the sort is done, it is worse than futile to demand that dealers in money, any more than dealers in corn, cotton, or cheese, should work from altruistic motives. But nothing rational is ever attempted. Instead, everywhere the nobles ruined by their own improvidence and extravagance, the peasants by their rustic incompetence, and both by the exactions of a wasting militarism, complain of the extortion of the Jewish usurers. It was inevitable that the old-world monster of Jew-hatred, never really dead, should have raised its hoary head again. All the elements of an anti-Jewish movement were present. The only thing that lacked was opportunity. The deficiency was not long in being supplied.

The Franco-German war and the achievement of German unity fanned the flame of patriotism. As in the time of Napoleon the First, so in that of Napoleon III., a great national danger created a strong fellow-feeling between the different members of the German race; a great national triumph stirred up an enthusiasm for the Empire which was indulged in at the cost of individual liberty. Despotism throve on the exuberance of nationalism. The Germans were led back from the constitutional and democratic ideals of 1848 to an ultra-monarchic servility which made it possible for the present Kaiser’s grandfather a few years after, prompted by Bismarck, to assert openly the ridiculous old claim to divine right. Thus the ground was prepared for any anti-alien and anti-liberal agitation. Other causes came to accelerate the movement. The war had involved enormous pecuniary and personal sacrifices. The extraordinary success, instead of satisfying, stimulated German ambition. It aroused an extravagant financial optimism and self-confidence. Germany, intoxicated with military victory, was still thirsting for aggrandisement of a different kind. Economy was cast to the winds, and a fever of wild speculation seized on all classes of the community. Companies were floated, and swallowed up the superfluous capital of the great as well as the savings of the humble. Sanguine expectation was the temper of the day. Berlin would vie with Paris in elegance and with London in suburban comfort, and every one of its citizens would be a millionaire!

Then came the terrible crash. The bubble burst, and the magnificent day-dreams were dispelled by misery. A succession of bad harvests, and the rapid increase in American corn competition, by impoverishing the agricultural class, added to the general depression. The disillusioned public wanted a victim whereupon to vent its wrath. Those who promoted the companies had to suffer for the folly of those who were ruined by their failure. A great many of the former, by selling out at the right moment, rose to affluence. The discontented public, naturally enough, noticing these large fortunes in the midst of the general wreck, jumped to the conclusion that the few had enriched themselves by robbing the many. “Exposures” followed, and among the implicated financiers there were found many Jews. It was then in order to fill Jewish pockets that the heroes of Germany had bled on the battlefield, and the burghers of Germany had been bled at home! The nationalist ideal of Germany for the Germans, then, was to lead to a Germany for the Israelites! All those trials had been endured and all those triumphs achieved in order to deliver up the Fatherland to an alien and infidel race—a race with which neither the intellect nor the heart of Germany has any affinity or sympathy! This was the cry of anguish that succeeded to the paeans of self-glorification, and those nationalists who uttered these sentiments forgot that their very nationalism had been largely created and fostered by Jewish thinkers. They also forgot that it was a Jewish statesman, Lasker, who, at the cost of all personal and party interests and of his popularity, had alone had the courage to expose in the Prussian Chamber the evils of extravagant speculation, in 1873, and to urge both the public and the Government to turn back, while there was yet time, from the road to ruin which they pursued. But it has been well said: “Who would think of gratitude when a scapegoat is required?”

A tongue was given to the popular indignation in a pamphlet by an obscure German journalist, Wilhelm Marr by name, who seized the opportunity of attaining to fame and fortune by a plentiful effusion of his anti-Jewish venom. The work anathematized the Jews not only as blood-sucking leeches, but as enemies of the Germanic race, and as forming a distinct and self-centred solecism in German national life. The Coryphaeus was ably supported by a crowd hitherto mute. The opponents of industrial and the opponents of religious liberalism, men of rank, men of letters, and high ecclesiastics joined in the chorus, and another “black day” (July 30, 1878) was added to the Jewish calendar. In Adolph Stöcker, a Christian Socialist and court preacher, and a staunch Conservative in the Prussian Diet, the new crusade found its Peter the Hermit. He was the first man of position to preach from the pulpit and to declare in the press that Hebrew influence in the State was disastrous to the Christian section of the community, that Semitic preponderance was fatal to the Teutonic race. As though the printing presses of Germany were only waiting for the signal, a whole library of anti-Semitic literature was rapidly produced, and as rapidly consumed. Some of the most popular journals opened their columns to the campaign, Jewish journalists opposed violence with violence, and the feud daily assumed larger dimensions, until by the end of 1879 it had spread and raged over the whole of the empire.

“It is not right that the minority should rule over the majority,” cried some. Others accused the Jews, loosely and without adducing any proofs, of forming a freemasonry and of always placing the interests of their brethren above those of the country. That there was some kind of systematic co-operation among the Jews seems probable. It is also probable that there was a certain degree of truth in the charge of “clandestine manipulation of the press” for the purpose of shielding even Jews unworthy of protection. But for this the Germans had only themselves to thank. By attacking the Jews as a tribe they stimulated the tribal feeling among them. The social isolation to which they condemned the Jew intensified his gift of reciprocity. To the German Christians the Jew, however patriotic and unexceptionable he may be as a citizen, as a man is a Jew—an alien, an infidel, an upstart, a parasite. His genius is said to be purely utilitarian, his religion externally an observance of empty forms, essentially a worship of the golden calf, and worldly success his highest moral ideal. German professors analysed the Jewish mind and found it Semitic, German theologians sought for the Jewish soul and could find none. Both classes, agreeing in nothing else, concurred in denouncing the Jew as a sinister creature, strangely wanting in spiritual qualities—a being whose whole existence, devoid of faith of any kind, revolves between his cash-book and the book of the Law. Perhaps the most remarkable consequence of all was the growth of an anti-Semitic school of exegesis of the Old Testament.

These, then, were the grievances of the orthodox: the Jew’s want of religious feeling. Free-thinkers denounced him for a superabundance of that very feeling. Stöcker, with unctuous smartness, said, “the creed of the Jews stands on the blank page between the Old and the New Testament.” Duhring ponderously objected to “the tenacity with which the inherited religious manner of viewing things is rooted in the Jewish mind.” These charges, mutually exclusive though they were, were gladly espoused by those who only needed some theory whereby to dignify their spite. The Jew’s own foibles—his arrogance and love of display—supplied that minimum of excuse which has ever been deemed sufficient for persecution. The Jews, said their accusers, hold in their hands the golden key which opens all doors, and flourish it insolently before their less fortunate neighbours. They have killed the ancient simplicity and frugality of German life by their ostentatious luxury, and corrupted German idealism by their inordinate pursuit of material comfort. German idealism has been killed by nationalism and militarism. But, of course, no German patriot can be expected to see this. What, however, surprises one is that it does not seem to have occurred to those who denounce the Jew as the promoter of materialism that they have the remedy in their own hands. Let them cease to worship mammon, and mammon’s ministers will be discredited. As it is, they inveigh against the Jew for enjoying the very things which they themselves hunger after. In Germany, as elsewhere, Christian panegyrists of plain living and high thinking would perhaps like the Jewish millionaire better if they resembled him less.

Prince Bismarck, in the prosecution of his great political object of a united Germany had courted the support of the Liberal party, which, on its side, was not unwilling to help a man who, no matter how anti-Liberal his domestic policy might be, was, in the main, the hierophant of the German nation’s aspirations. Thus, in 1866, there came into being the National Liberal Party. Their position was, however, a false one, as their support of Bismarck and their Liberal tendencies could not be reconciled for a long time. But, while the alliance lasted, the Liberals were instrumental in introducing many legislative measures in the direction of progress, including certain reforms as to banking and commerce. These innovations gave offence to several classes of the population, and the fact that one of the leaders of the National Liberal Party, Lasker, and a great many of its members were Jews, was a brilliant opportunity for the reactionary elements.232 The Conservatives caught at the opportunity for discrediting the obnoxious reforms by describing them as deliberately intended to serve the interests of the Jews. Prince Bismarck, now hostile to a party for which he had no further use, transferred the weight of his political and personal influence to their adversaries and tried to lure the extreme Conservatives and Catholics, as well as the working classes, by invigorating the anti-Jewish agitation. The organs of these three parties were filled with diatribes against the Jews, and in October, 1879, the first anti-Jewish society was founded in Berlin and Dresden, with the object “to unite all non-Jewish Germans of all persuasions, all parties, all stations, into one common league, which, setting aside all separate interests, all political differences, shall strive, with all earnestness and diligence for the one end viz., to save our German fatherland from becoming completely Judaised, and render residence in it supportable to the posterity of the aborigines.”233 In accordance with this patriotic programme the society christened itself “The Anti-Semitic League,” partly because there was a sound of learning in the word and partly to make it clear that the race, and not merely the religion, of the Jew had aroused animosity.234 Prince Bismarck on being interrogated about the movement is said to have answered, “As a Minister of State, I condemn it; but as a Prussian, as a German, as a Christian, as a man, I cannot help but approve of it.” This speech, when compared with the speaker’s utterances of thirty years before,235 affords sufficiently painful evidence of the long stride which German statesmanship had taken backwards.

Thus the pedantry of the schools joined hands with the prejudice of the streets, social and political interests combined with national vanity, economic jealousy, scientific sophistry, and religious bigotry to bring into being a movement so utterly incongruous with modern, and especially with German, ideas.

In 1880 and 1881 the warfare continued with systematized vigour and increasing violence. Judenhetze, under its less vulgar name, became a virulent epidemic. Both Catholic and Lutheran clerics, mortally hostile in everything else, joined forces against the common enemy, and vied with each other in their efforts to gain the goodwill of the Christian Socialists. The Social Democrats were the only party to denounce the anti-Semitic agitation and to take under their protection the persecuted people; an attitude which earned them the sincere detestation of the ultra-Conservatives. Herr Marr, the great anti-Jewish pamphleteer, however, devoted a whole masterpiece to the demonstration of the fact that the Social Democrats, whom he elegantly called “red mice,” were in every way to be preferred to the Jewish “golden rats.” But the movement, none the less, continued progressing. Meetings were held at which the “Semites” were furiously attacked. The members of the “German” League passed solemn resolutions to eschew all intercourse, social or commercial, with the enemies of the Teutonic race, and Herr Stöcker and his followers, in their zeal for “the strengthening of the Christian Germanic spirit,” presented a petition to the Prussian Chambers, praying:

“That immigration of foreign Jews into Germany might have some restrictions placed upon it.

“That the Jews might be excluded from all posts of supreme authority, and that in courts of justice a certain limitation of their power be instituted.

“That Christian schools, though used by Jewish scholars, should remain distinctively Christian, and that Jewish teachers only be employed where the nature of the subject taught renders it desirable.

“That a census or report of the Jewish population be forthwith prepared.”236

The anti-Semitic Leagues, though disapproving of violence in their manifestoes, in practice were only too ready to encourage the most sordid passions and the basest prejudices of the poor and ignorant masses, so that, while anti-Semitism led to stormy scenes in the Prussian Diet, it translated itself into more stormy riots outside. Pamphlets and duels were the order of the day among the upper classes, sanguinary encounters between the Jewish and German mobs among the lower. The Liberals protested, the Crown Prince Frederick tried to save the Jews from this dastardly persecution, and the movement was publicly denounced by many distinguished Germans, such as Virchow and Mommsen, as a subversion of the principles of humanitarianism promulgated by German philosophy, as a blasphemy against German ideals, and as a stain on German civilisation. But Jew-baiting was not checked before many thousands of Jews were compelled to leave their country—the country to which they gave Mendelssohn the philosopher and Mendelssohn the composer, Heine and Börne, Offenbach and Auerbach, Ense, Ewald, Jacoby, and a host of other great men, including Lasker, who a few years before had done his utmost to avert the financial catastrophe for which his co-religionists now suffered.

A German who has played an active part in his country’s history from 1848 onwards does not hesitate to ascribe “the disgraceful orgies of the Jews’ Chace, begun on a large scale at Berlin on the New Year’s night of 1880–81,” to Prince Bismarck’s direct inspiration. “There was evidently,” he says, writing not long after those events, “more method in those ugly rushes and riots than may be generally suspected.... The German citizens of Hebrew origin, or of the Mosaic faith, belong, in their great majority, to the Liberal and Radical camp. Several of them have achieved the most honourable prominence in the progressive parties to which they attached themselves. The great statesman whose ideal is his own Dictatorship under cover of the King’s personal Government, finding these popular leaders of Semitic blood as stumbling-blocks in his path, did not scruple to dally coquettishly with the organisers and approvers of the Jews’ Hunt. An underhand alliance was struck up, in old Roman fashion, between out-and-out partisans of Caesarism and certain shady leaders of a misguided rabble. A Court Preacher, Stöcker, acted as the go-between and spiritual head of the crusade. The same man is now in the German Parliament a chief exponent of this cross-breed between princely absolutism and professed philanthropic care for the multitude.”237

Soon, however, a discrepancy became apparent between the leaders of the nationalist and the leaders of the religious and economic forces. While anti-Semites, strictly so called, clamoured for a revival of the ancient disabilities which doomed the Jew to political servitude and social ostracism, the Christian Socialists were not prepared to go so far. This moderation was partly due to the fact that the anti-Semites had manifested symptoms of wishing to include Christianity in their denunciation of Judaism as a Semitic creed—a tendency which, of course, could inspire no sympathy in orthodox theologians and Court Preachers. The schism was temporarily healed in 1886: but it was reopened three years later. However, this divergence of views did not affect the rank and file of the anti-Jewish agitators. They cared little for intellectual theories; but were frankly actuated by the blind and unreasoning instincts of their mediaeval ancestors. Again the populace found allies among the impecunious and the unscrupulous, who supplied it with food for its credulity, and among the Catholic clergy, who inflamed its fanaticism. The mediaeval charge of ritual murder was once more revived, and it led to the destruction of Jewish houses and the burning of Jewish synagogues.

Prince Bismarck’s retirement, in 1890, and the abandonment of his anti-Liberal programme did not mend matters. The Conservatives endeavoured to gain the popular ear by coming forth as the champions of national unity and of the Christian faith, and by denouncing the Jews as the enemies of both. ♦1892♦ This change of attitude brought about a reconciliation with the nationalist anti-Semites, whose rabid programme was fully accepted. And now the two sections united brought to bear all their strength against the Jews. Christianity and stupidity, respectability and sansculottism, were found marshalled in one compact phalanx as in the days of yore. In the autumn of 1893 a Bill was brought into the German Diet, asking that the Talmud should be subjected to an official examination, and it was seriously proposed that the old Commission appointed for that purpose by the Emperor Maximilian at the instigation of Pfefferkorn at the beginning of the sixteenth century should be roused from its sleep of ages. But the alliance was too grotesque to be effective. The saner section of the Conservatives was shocked at the unprincipled tactics and the excessive fury of their allies, and, though the lower orders of their supporters in the country were not troubled by such delicacy, yet the extreme anti-Semitic party lost, through its own extravagance, much of its influence among the educated. Herr Stöcker was expelled from Court, and soon after from the ranks of the Conservative party. The Catholics also were shamed into breaking all connection with the scandalous demagogues, and thus the anti-Semitic distemper, though still an element of discord in the Reichstag, has ceased to be an element of danger—for the present. But, if the paroxysm is over, the disease is not cured. Indeed, individual anti-Semites still display a degree of fervour that would have done credit to Herr Marr himself on the hey-day of his frenzy. The leader of these loyal Jew-haters is Count Puckler, whose speeches are sold in the streets of Berlin, and read by many Germans with profound approval. All that is needed is some encouragement from above, and then we may again see many volunteering to translate the prophet’s visions into deeds of blood.

From Germany Anti-Semitism found its way to the neighbouring states. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire politicians and publicists caught the rabies and spread it without delay. As early as 1880 an attempt was made to establish in Hungary an anti-Semitic league after the German pattern, and, though the healthier and more enlightened portion of the nation was loth to forget the liberal traditions of the past and the services rendered by the Jews in the struggle for Hungarian independence, the obscurantist elements among the people and the aristocracy, in the Church and the official classes,—the vulgar high and low—were not disinclined to listen to the dictates of bigotry and superstition. An opportunity for a declaration of the latent prejudice offered in 1881, when a Catholic Professor of Hebrew gravely accused the Jews of secretly holding the destruction of the Gentiles as a religious tenet; the ritual murder of Christians being only one method for carrying out this moral obligation. Despite exposure and open repudiation, the worthy Professor’s utterances tallied so well with preconceived ideas that the prehistoric fiction found many eager believers. ♦1882♦ The disappearance of a Christian girl from a Hungarian village in the next year strengthened the belief and led to brutal outrages on the Jews at Buda-Pesth, Zala and elsewhere, the riots being only quelled by the proclamation of martial law. This measure, as was natural, was turned into an instrument of attack on the Liberal Government, already unpopular, as sheltering the enemies of mankind. An inquiry was instituted into the alleged murder, many Jews were arrested, and evidence was manufactured. But in the trial which ensued the plot was stripped of all its shameful vestments of perjury, forgery, and intimidation, and the prisoners were acquitted.

While the anti-Semites were covering themselves with contempt and ridicule in Hungary, in Austria the movement attained serious dimensions. The campaign, begun with occasional pamphlets, followed the development of German anti-Semitism. In Austria, as in Germany, Liberalism had been undermined by that worst form of racial intolerance known as Christian Socialism, which was and is nothing but the old spirit of clerical reaction masquerading in the guise of anti-Semitic prejudice and pseudo-democratic demagogy.238 In Austria, as in Germany, the operations were conducted by two bodies of men—the racial and the religious enemies of the Jew. The two bodies met on the common ground of objection to the Jews’ acquiring land. The anti-Semites proper did not like to see the land falling into the hands of non-Austrians, and the Christian Socialists objected to its falling into the hands of infidel financiers. The agitation was gradually organised, and in 1882 two leagues were formed in Vienna. Austrian, like German, anti-Semitism was immediately exploited for party purposes. Many politicians, though themselves free from anti-Semitic prejudice, were ready to adopt a cause which promised to add to their own strength or to weaken their opponents. They, therefore, loudly preached a doctrine which they despised, excited passions which they did not share, and advocated principles which in all probability they would have shrunk from acting upon. Thus the support of the anti-Semitic leagues was solicited by the Radical Nationalists on one hand, and by the Liberal Government on the other. The Nationalists being less insincere in their prejudices, won the victory which they deserved, and the coalition between them and the Christian Socialists derived additional strength from the anti-clerical policy of the Liberal party, which compelled many Catholics who had hitherto stood aloof, to join the ranks of anti-Semitism. ♦1892♦ Henceforth the agitation was conducted under the auspices of the Roman Church. The clerical press disseminated the seed in the cafés, and the priests fulminated against the Jews from the pulpit. The time-dishonoured charge of ritual murder was not forgotten, and the Hungarian Upper House, in 1894, rejected the Liberal Bill which placed Judaism on a footing of equality with other denominations.

The Liberals had succeeded in offending both the Radical Nationalists and the Clericals. They offended the former by advocating Jewish rights, and the latter by combating the tyranny of the Church. The alliance between those two enemies of Liberalism was, in 1895, blessed by the Pope, who hoped to gain over, or at least to control, the Radicals by drawing closer the bonds which united them with the Clericals. The Vatican, disappointed in the long-cherished hope of recovering its temporal power by the help of the Catholic monarchs, was induced to court the democracy. Thus the spiritual tribunal which has always taken its stand on the lofty platform of obedience to authority, in the pursuance of secular ends did not hesitate to lend its sanction to the advocates of violence and revolt. The anti-Jewish agitation, hallowed by the Vicar of Christ, carried all before it. The anti-Semites secured a vast majority in the Municipal Council of Vienna, notwithstanding the opposition on the part of the Emperor, who dissolved the council twice, only to be met each time with an even greater anti-Semitic triumph; and in the Parliamentary Elections of 1897 the allied powers of Radical Nationalism and Clericalism secured a strong position in the Austrian Reichsrath. This was the meridian of anti-Semitic popularity in Austria. But here, as in Germany, the unseemly and unnatural coalition between rabid Nationalism and respectable Clericalism could not last long, and, while it lasted, could command but little respect. Three years afterwards the General Election showed a decline of public confidence in the allies, and many of the Radical Nationalists deserted the ranks to form an independent and anti-Clerical party, while, on the other hand, the Vatican thought it expedient to withdraw its sanction from the Christian Socialists.

Austro-Hungarian anti-Semitism, however, though much weakened, is not dead, and it would be taking too sanguine a view of human nature and human intelligence to hope that the prejudices, the passions, and the sophisms which have led to the recrudescence of Jew-hatred will not assert themselves again. In point of fact, there are ample signs to confirm this pessimistic forecast. On October 21, 1904, the Diet of Lower Austria witnessed a scene which a spectator pronounced “unparalleled for vulgarity and demagogic impudence even in this country of crazy Parliamentarism.” The anti-Semitic and Christian Socialist parties, which still command an overwhelming majority both in the Diet and in the Vienna Municipal Council, had organised a torch-light procession in honour of the sixtieth birthday of Dr. Lueger, the anti-Semite Burgomaster of Vienna. The Premier instructed the police to prohibit the demonstration. Thereupon the outraged worshippers of the great hero of Christian Socialism brought in a motion in which they accused the Premier of having yielded to Jewish pressure and to the terrorism of the Social Democrats, the champions of the Jews, and of “having thereby given proof of shameful cowardice.” The motion was carried amid loud acclamations in honour of Dr. Lueger who, on his followers asserting that the reason for the Government’s attitude was “the jealousy caused in the highest circles by the Burgomaster’s popularity,” modestly assured the House that “he was not jealous of the Emperor and repudiated the supposition that he envied the reverence and affection which surrounded the Monarch’s person.” At the end of the sitting Dr. Lueger was enthusiastically cheered in the streets, while a Social Democratic Deputy was insulted and spat upon.239 This demagogue, who by the volume of his voice, the character of his wit and the extent of his power over the Viennese mob, recalls vividly the Cleon of Aristophanes, a year later warned the Austrian Jews openly and with impunity that the Kishineff tragedy might repeat itself in Vienna. Even more recently twenty thousand Christian Socialists, Clericals and anti-Semites, headed and inflamed by Dr. Lueger, made a violent demonstration outside the Hungarian Delegation building, as a protest against the policy of the “Judaeo-Magyars.”240 Within a week of this outburst Dr. Lueger, in company with Herr Schneider, a militant anti-Semite Deputy, paid a visit to Bucharest, where he was fêted by all classes of Roumanian society, from the King downwards: a glorification of this arch-enemy of the Jews as significant as it is natural in a country where Jew-hatred is at its height. Clearly, Austrian anti-Semitism is anything but dead.

The reply of the Austrian Jews to the anti-Semites is characteristic of the movement. Hitherto they had been content to identify themselves politically with their Christian compatriots. But the continued antipathy on the part of the latter has recently forced them to adopt a purely Jewish attitude. On the initiative of the Jewish representatives of Galicia in the Reichsrath and in the Galician Diet, the Jews of that province have resolved to create a Jewish organisation for the defence of the political rights and economic interests of their community.241 Thus modern Jew-haters foster by their own efforts the very tribalism which they condemn, just as their mediaeval ancestors compelled the Jews to adopt money-lending as a profession and then denounced them for so doing.

In France the power of the Jews since the establishment of the Third Republic increased steadily, and their number was to some extent swelled by the arrival of brethren driven by anti-Semitism out of Germany. Yet, as late as 1881 a writer felt justified in stating that “the effervescence of a certain feeling against the Jews is apparent in almost all the large states of the world with the single exception perhaps of France.”242 This comparative immunity from the general delirium, however, was not to last much longer. Nationalism, clericalism, and economic jealousy in France, as elsewhere, were at work, and demagogues ready to make use of these forces were not wanting.

Ernest Renan, in 1882, aimed some of his delicately-pointed shafts of irony at “the modern Israelite with whom our great commercial towns of Europe have become acquainted during the last fifty years.... How careless he shows himself of a paradise mankind has accepted upon his word; with what ease he accommodates himself to all the folds of modern civilisation; how quickly he is freed from all dynastic and feudal prejudice; and how can he enjoy a world he has not made, gather the fruits of a field he has not tilled, supplant the blockhead who persecutes him, or make himself necessary to the fool who despises him. It is for him, you would think, that Clovis and his Franks fought, that the race of Capet unfolded its policy of a thousand years, that Philip Augustus conquered at Bouvines and Condé at Rocroi!... He who overturned the world by his faith in the kingdom of God believes now in wealth only.”243 That Renan, the high-priest of Idealism, should feel aggrieved at the materialism of the modern representative of his beloved Semitic race is not surprising. It is, however, surprising that the Jew, who has so often been persecuted for his obstinate adherence to his traditions and for his detachment from his surroundings, should be taken to task by Renan for the ease with which “he accommodates himself to all the folds of modern civilisation.” Either Renan is right or the anti-Semites. One and the same body of men cannot very well be both obdurate and accommodating. It is, however, the Jew’s special privilege to be denounced by one half of the world for the possession of a certain quality, and by the other half for the lack of it. Consistency has never been a marked characteristic of Jew-haters, and, perhaps, it is not reasonable to expect it from men under the spell of so engrossing a pastime as the excommunication of their fellows.

Of course, Renan himself, his mellifluous mockery notwithstanding, was the very antithesis of a Jew-hater. Nationalism had no greater enemy and Liberalism no warmer champion than Renan. He never tired of asserting that ethnographical facts possessed only a scientific importance, and were devoid of all political significance.244 So far as the Jews were concerned, he proclaimed with enthusiasm the services rendered by them to the cause of civilisation and progress in the past, and emphatically expressed his conviction that they were destined to render equally brilliant services in the future: “Every Jew,” he said, “is essentially a Liberal, while the enemies of Judaism, examined closely, will be found to be, in general, the enemies of the modern spirit. This,” he added, “applies especially to the French Jews, such as they have been made by the Revolution; but I am persuaded that every country which will repeat the experiment, renounce State religion, secularise the civil life, and establish the equality of all the citizens before the law, will arrive at the same result and will find as excellent patriots in the Jewish creed as in other creeds.” “The work of the nineteenth century,” he declared on another occasion, “is to demolish all the ghettos, and I do not congratulate those who elsewhere seek to rebuild them.”245

But at the very moment, when Renan was giving utterance to these noble sentiments, there was preparing in his own country an agitation precisely similar to that which had “elsewhere sought to rebuild the ghettos.”

The slumbering prejudice against the Jew was in France first awakened by the Panama scandals, and immediately afterwards there was formed in Paris a union with the object of freeing the country from the financial tyranny of Jews and other non-Catholics and foreigners. The Vatican, ever on the alert, saw in the movement an opportunity of strengthening the clerical interest in a state which had so sadly neglected its traditional rôle of the Pope’s champion, and from an eldest daughter of the Church had turned into its bitterest enemy. The Pope, therefore, bestowed upon the union his blessing. ♦1882♦ But the institution after a brief career ended in a bankruptcy from which not even Papal prayers could save it. Like Julius Caesar’s spirit, however, the union even after its dissolution continued to harass its rivals. Its failure, attributed to the machinations of the Jews, put fresh life into the anti-Semitic agitation. Publicists interpreted the popular feeling and gratified the national amour propre by describing in sombre colours the pernicious influence of the Jewish plutocracy on the life of France, and by tracing to that influence the undeniable immorality of French society.246 The discomfiture of that brilliant and weak adventurer, Boulanger, brought about, as it was, chiefly by the efforts of a Jewish journalist of German extraction and connections, drew down upon the Jews, and especially upon foreign Jews, the wrath of General Boulanger’s supporters. An anti-Semitic League was founded in Paris, with branches in the provinces. The Royalists and the Nationalists, the warriors of the Church and the warriors of the army, the desperate defenders of lost causes, who had nothing more to lose, and the zealots for new causes, who had as yet everything to win, all rallied round the standard of anti-Semitism, which derived additional popularity and glory from the alliance of France with Russia, the persecutrix of Israel. ♦1892♦ Soon after an anti-Semitic journal made its appearance in Paris, and its columns were filled with scandals, scented out with truly inquisitorial diligence, and with attacks on Jewish officers. Anti-Jewish feeling daily grew in bitterness, the term “Juif” came to be accepted as a synonym for variety of villainy, and the position of the Jewish officers in the French army became intolerable, till the ferment culminated in the arrest and conviction of Captain Dreyfus. ♦1894♦

All the prejudices and passions of the past and all the conflicting interests of the present were now gathered up into a storm almost unparalleled in the history of contemporary Europe. The most popular newspapers vied with each other in pandering to the lowest feelings and most ignorant prejudices of the vulgarest classes of the French nation. From one end of France to the other nothing was heard but execrations of the Jewish traitor. The modern Frenchman was not unwilling to forgive the Jew his supposed enmity to Christianity, but what patriot could forgive him his supposed treachery to the French army? The hatred of the race, expressed with eloquent virulence in Parliament and in the press, found even more vigorous expression with dynamite, ♦1895♦ and an attempt was made to blow up the Rothschild Bank in Paris. Meanwhile the Captain’s friends worked with untiring earnestness, patience, and ability to establish his innocence. A series of disclosures ensued; the public, led by the late M. Zola, Colonel Picquart, and other advocates of justice, began to feel qualms on the subject, and the demand for a revision of the trial grew daily louder. By this time the Dreyfus affair had been drawn into the mad vortex of party politics, and this accounts for the extent and depth of an agitation hardly intelligible when viewed in relation to the comparatively small number of French Jews.247 To be or not to be revised, that was the question, and upon the answer the rival parties staked their reputations and their political ideals. The Liberals defended Dreyfus not so much because they believed him to be innocent, as because he was attacked by the Clericals. The Clericals, on the other hand, denounced the Dreyfusards as enemies of their country and of its army—the Christian Faith was tactfully kept in the background—a distinguished Academician wrote a book on Nationalism in which he analysed Zola’s genius and character, and proved to his own satisfaction, and to the satisfaction of thousands of readers, that Zola was not a Frenchman.

But in the midst of all this clamour, riot, vilification and assault, the demand for a revision continued persistently to gain ground, and the Liberals, representing the sanest and healthiest element in the Republic, finally prevailed. ♦1898♦ The new trial at Rennes brought to light the forgeries and perjuries by which the conviction of the Jewish captain had been secured. None the less, the sentence was not revoked. The verdict of the new court-martial was an attempt to save judicial appearances by finding the prisoner guilty, and to save justice by recommending him to mercy. Dreyfus was restored to his family, but not to his honour. However, public opinion both in France and abroad had forestalled the verdict of the Court by acquitting the prisoner of the crime and by pitying in him the victim of a foul conspiracy. Nationalism, Clericalism, Royalism, and all the legions of anti-Semitism received a severe blow by the triumph of the Dreyfusards; but, though their star was no longer at its zenith, it had not yet set. The agitation in favour of a complete reversal of Captain Dreyfus’ sentence continued, and the demand for a new revision of the case was pronounced by the Nationalists as a fresh development of the “anti-national” policy of the Liberals, and as a conspiracy on their part for the purpose of inflicting a new humiliation on the Army by constraining it to proclaim the innocence of a man it had twice condemned as a traitor. A joint manifesto, bearing the signatures of the Patriotic League, the National Anti-Semitic Federation, and the French Socialist Party, was issued appealing to the French public “to frustrate the efforts of the occult Sectarians, Internationalists, and financial powers.”248

At the same time anti-Semitic sentiments found applauding audiences in the French theatres, as was shown in December, 1903, by the success at the Paris Gymnase of Le Retour de Jérusalem—a play which flattered the feelings of the audience by dwelling on the familiar points of the anti-Semitic creed: the Jews’ clannishness, their readiness to help their own co-religionists, their sans patrie; and justified its prejudices by emphasising that natural incompatibility of temperament which is supposed to doom Jew and Gentile to everlasting alienation. Nevertheless, the wiser section of the French people carried the day in the end. ♦1906 July 12–13♦ The Court of Cassation, the highest tribunal in France, after two years’ examination, quashed the verdict of the Rennes court-martial, declaring that there never was any foundation for any of the charges brought against Captain Dreyfus. The French Government thereupon submitted to Parliament a Bill providing for the complete rehabilitation of all the victims of the conspiracy. The Bill was passed by an overwhelming majority. Captain Dreyfus was promoted to the rank of Major and presented with the Cross of the Legion of Honour, Col. Picquart was made a Brigadier-General, the remains of M. Zola were transferred to the Pantheon, and in the gallery of the Senate were erected busts of the two Senators who first stood out in favour of the innocence of Dreyfus. Thus France wiped out the stain on its national character, and the drama which had agitated the world for twelve years came to a happy end. This end, however, satisfactory as it is, must be regarded as a victory of justice due to special political causes rather than as a proof of a revolution of the popular attitude towards the Jews, or as a guarantee against a recrudescence of French anti-Semitism in the future. The “Jewish Peril” is one of those evil spirits which are in the habit of vanishing and re-appearing from time to time, always with a fresh face and changed garb, but always the same.

The Jewish Question from France passed to the French colony of Algeria. In 1870 an Act, known as the Crémieux Decree, enfranchised the Jewish inhabitants of the colony en masse. For twenty-five years the measure excited little or no protest. But, as a result of the anti-Jewish agitation in the mother country, it suddenly became the subject on which elections were passionately fought and the barrier that divided local politicians into two opposite parties: Judaisants and Anti-Juifs. A Commission appointed to inquire into this sudden revulsion of feeling, reported that the alleged reasons were “usury” and the unwillingness of the Jews to assimilate themselves to the French. Usury, it was recognised by sensible Frenchmen, is inevitable in a country still in the Algerian stage of economic development. Moreover, the official inquiry proved that all the Jews are not usurers, and that all the usurers are not Jews; that, in fact, the mass of the Jewish inhabitants of Algeria are very poor.249 None the less, these allegations bring into vivid relief the essential antiquity of modern anti-Semitism.

The modern version of Jew-hatred, as was only natural, was welcomed in both Roumania and Russia. Both countries are still mediaeval in most respects; but the foreign doctrine of Nationalism, concealing, as it does, a very old instinct under a new euphemistic name, presented nothing incongruous with indigenous bigotry. Economic considerations deepened the bitter feeling against the Jew, as has been narrated.

Italy and Greece have declined to listen to the new creed of intolerance. There are few Jews in those countries. Besides, both the Italians and the Greeks, though sensitively attached to their national ideals, have too keen a sense of proportion, and the Greeks, at all events, too much commercial ability to entertain any jealousy of the Jew.

England has not failed in this, as in former ages, to follow, after a lukewarm and sluggish fashion, the Continental evolution of the feeling towards the Jew. In popular literature and art the Jew had never ceased to figure as an object of derision and repugnance. What reader of Dickens need be reminded of the execrable Mr. Fagin, trainer of juvenile criminals and tormentor of poor Oliver Twist, or of Cruikshank’s portrait of that and other Israelites? But these pleasant creations, however grossly they may sin against truth, were as innocent of any deliberate intention to stir up a hatred against the Jew as Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s personifications of evil in the characters of Shylock and Barabas. The taint of malignant anti-Semitism made its first unmistakable appearance in England during the Eastern Crisis of 1876–1878. A Jew was then Prime Minister, and that Jew opposed the pro-Bulgarian policy of the Liberal party. To that party the conflict between the Sultan and his Christian subjects was then, as it still is, a conflict between the Cross and the Crescent, between Europe and Asia, between Aryanism and Semitism. What mattered to the Liberal politicians that Islam, in point of fact, since its first missionary zeal spent itself many centuries ago in Asia and Africa, has never tried, and does not want, to kill Christianity? What mattered to them that Christianity, in point of history, is a Semitic creed, and in its original Eastern form nearer to Islam than to the product of the Western temperament which passes under the same name? What mattered to them that the Turks, after five or six centuries of constant marriage to women of the subject races, have, ethnographically speaking, become more European than the Bulgarians, who, in point of blood, are more Turkish than the modern Turks? What mattered to them that the Turks are not Semites at all? What mattered to the opponents of the Jew that the doctrine of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire had been promulgated before Disraeli left school, and that his Eastern policy of a regenerated Turkey was a policy evolved by as good Christians as themselves long before Disraeli became a power in the land—by men like the Duke of Wellington and Sir Stratford Canning—and carried on by contemporary diplomatists and statesmen like Lord Salisbury, Sir Henry Layard, and Sir Henry Elliot? These are mere facts. The Liberal party wanted broad principles and a euphonious war-cry. Disraeli was opposed to Russia’s ambition, and Disraeli was a Jew. What could be easier than to connect the two things? The enemy of Russia was an enemy of Christianity, of Aryanism, of Europe. If any doubt was possible, it could easily be dispelled by a reference to Disraeli’s romances. There, as elsewhere, in season and out of season, Disraeli preached the greatness of his persecuted race with a sincerity, a courage and a consistency which, in the eyes of the neutral student, form the noblest trait in his character; in the eyes of a political opponent, the most conclusive proof of his Jewish hostility to Christianity. Accordingly, we find Mr. Gladstone, in 1876, confiding to the sympathetic ear of his friend, the Duke of Argyll, the following philosophical reflection: “I have a strong suspicion that Dizzy’s crypto-Judaism has had to do with his policy: the Jews of the East bitterly hate the Christians, who have not always used them well.”250

At the same time other politicians vented their prejudice against the Jews, and against Disraeli’s “Jewish aims” in various books,251 pamphlets, speeches and articles, while soon after, when the eloquent tongue was for ever silenced, and the man who had bent Europe to his will was no longer able to defend himself, reverend ecclesiastics took pains to trace, with an enthusiasm and an acumen worthy of a less ignoble task, the origin and development of the great statesman’s “deceitfulness,” of his “political dishonesty,” of his “disregard of morality in the pursuit of personal ambition,” of his “theological and political scepticism,” of his “jealousy for the spiritual and intellectual supremacy of the Semitic race,” and the rest of his virtues, from his early home education under his Jewish sceptic of a father and his vulgar Jewess of a mother, through his school life, his apprenticeship in a solicitor’s office, the various stages of his literary and political career, up to the moment of his death. It was, however, pointed out with an air of charitable patronage not unamusing, when the relative magnitude of the author and the subject of the criticism is considered, that “it would be harsh and unfair to judge him by our ordinary standard of political morality,” for “Mr. Disraeli started on his public career with little or no furniture of moral or religious principles of any kind.”252 The writer repeated the favourite explanation of Disraeli’s opposition to Gladstone’s Eastern policy, namely, that it arose from the fact that “the ‘bag and baggage’ policy cut rudely across his cherished convictions respecting the ‘Semitic principle.’ The Turks, indeed,” the learned theologian naïvely observes, “do not belong to the Semitic race; but their theocratic polity is the product of a Semitic brain, and was, therefore, sacred in the eyes of Lord Beaconsfield.”253 In the writer’s opinion Disraeli’s dearest ideal, when it was not his own pre-eminence, was the pre-eminence of the Jewish nation, his whole career being a compound of selfishness and Semitism.