While chivalrous theologians made these interesting post-mortem investigations into the character of the champion of Semitism, learned professors made equally interesting studies in the character of anti-Semitism. And while the former denounced that representative of the race as one who had made “self-aggrandisement the one aim of his life,” the latter endeavoured to justify the conduct of its enemies on the ground of Hebrew “tribalism,” “materialism,” “opportunism,” “cosmopolitanism,” and other vices ending in —ism.254

As these charges are still brought against the Jews by their enemies in England, it may be not irrelevant to answer some of them once for all. No one with a biographical dictionary on his book-shelf requires to be told that the Jewish people, far from specialising in material aims, has never shirked its due share in the world’s intellectual work, though it has seldom been accorded its due share of the world’s recognition. Look wheresoever we like, in science, art, music, philosophy, letters, politics, we everywhere find the Jew generously contributing to the common fund of human knowledge. From Higher Criticism, which was initiated by a Jew in the third century, and Comparative Philology, also originated by a Jew in the ninth, through Spinoza’s philosophical work in the seventeenth, and Mendelssohn’s in the eighteenth, down to the psychological labours of Steinthal, who died in 1892—to mention only a few of the best known names—we find proofs which speak for themselves, and abundantly refute the calumny that the Jews are a race of mere money-mongers and money-grabbers. In the Dark Ages the conditions under which Israel was doomed to live were by no means favourable to the development of spiritual qualities. Mediaeval Europe, as a rule, did not allow more than three outlets to Hebrew activity. The Jew could only become a merchant, a financier, or a physician, and in all these three professions he achieved the distinction to which his superiority entitled him. Imaginative by nature, cosmopolitan by necessity, a reasoner and a linguist by education, with all his faculties sharpened by persecution, and all his passions disciplined by adversity, the Jew could not but assert himself among his narrow-minded and ignorant contemporaries. Accordingly we find the mediaeval Jew foremost in Medicine, Commerce, and Finance. As to medicine, enough has already been said. As to commerce, the supremacy of the Jews has never been disputed. Their financial pre-eminence is equally recognised. But it is not often recalled that the Jews, in order to facilitate the transmission of their wealth amidst the violence and extortions of the Middle Ages, were the first to invent the admirable system of paper currency—an invention which, Alison the historian asserts, had it been made earlier, might have averted the downfall of the Western Roman Empire. But, apart from chrematistic pursuits, even in the Middle Ages the Jews, prevented by persecution and social isolation from tying themselves permanently to any particular country, and forced to lead a nomad existence, used their opportunities of travel not only for the purpose of commerce, but also for the transmission of knowledge. Thus, consciously or not, the mediaeval Jew became the great middleman by whose agency what learning there was found its way from country to country. In Spain, before the holy war against the race deprived it of the conditions necessary for the development of its genius, we have seen the Jews distinguishing themselves in literature, scholastic philosophy, science, and diplomacy. After their expulsion the Spanish exiles influenced the culture of the countries over which they spread in many ways; Baruch Spinoza being only the greatest star in a great constellation. Even in England, where few of those refugees contrived to penetrate, we find their spiritual influence in King James’s translation of the Bible, which in many places bears the traces of David Kimchi’s Commentary.255

The place of Israel in the mediaeval world has been described with equal justness and eloquence by Lecky: “While those around them were grovelling in the darkness of besotted ignorance; while juggling miracles and lying relics were themes on which almost all Europe was expatiating; while the intellect of Christendom, enthralled by countless persecutions, had sunk into a deadly torpor, in which all love of inquiry and all search for truth were abandoned, the Jews were still pursuing the path of knowledge, amassing learning, and stimulating progress, with the same unflinching constancy that they manifested in their faith. They were the most skilful physicians, the ablest financiers, and among the most profound philosophers; while they were only second to the moderns in the cultivation of natural science, they were also the chief interpreters to Western Europe of Arabian learning.”256

In modern Europe also we have seen how varied and how beneficial has, since their emancipation, been the activity of the Jews in other than financial departments. In face of these facts how ineffably ridiculous seems the anti-Semite’s homily on “A Jew of the Coheleth type” who “pursues gain with an undivided soul, whereas the soul of the Christian or the Idealist is divided,” and his calm, self-sufficient pronouncement that “much of the best Christian and Idealist intellect is entirely given to objects quite different from gain or power.” The remark, of course, is true in so far as the two “types” are concerned. But, unless the writer means to make the astounding assertion that, other conditions being identical, the one type is peculiar to the Jews, and the other to the Christians—that the ordinary Jew is born a materialist, and the ordinary Christian an Idealist,—his statement is pointless. It becomes worse than pointless when he proceeds to emphasise the “compact organisation” of Jewish, as contrasted with the “loose texture” of Christian society, and to proclaim that “in this respect the Gentile, instead of starting fair, is handicapped in the race.”257 The only logical inference to be drawn from these premisses is that the balance must be redressed by oppressing the Jew. But the author shrinks from drawing that inference. Mediaeval and Continental anti-Semites have been more consistent and courageous.

Such was the genesis of English anti-Semitism. However, the bulk of the public took little or no notice of these utterances. The English people is not intellectual enough to be moved by literary theories. Its very slowness in discarding old errors is a guarantee against precipitancy in embracing new ones. But, when a grievance is presented to it in the more tangible form of a practical and mischievous fact, then the English people begins to think.

The persecution of the Jews in Russia, Roumania, Hungary, and Germany threatened to flood England with a crowd of refugees more industrious than the English workman, more frugal, and far more temperate. The consequence would have been a fall in wages. The danger was too practical to be ignored; fortunately, both for the English workman and for the Jew, it was temporarily averted by the Jewish charitable associations, which directed emigration into safer channels. But, though the immediate cause for alarm disappeared, the anti-Jewish feeling remained; and was fed by the influx of new crowds from Eastern Europe at a later period. Again the Board of Guardians, the Russo-Jewish Committee and other organisations exerted themselves strenuously to prevent the immigrants from becoming in any case a burden to the British rate-payer. With that object in view, measures were taken that those victims of oppression who remained in England should be enabled without delay to earn their own bread by that industry for which they might be best fitted; but, wherever it was possible, a home was found for them in countries less populous than England and more suitable for colonisation. At the same time, by means of representations addressed to Jewish authorities, and published in Jewish papers abroad, regarding the congested state of the British labour market, efforts were made to stem the tide of further immigration.258 But these efforts have not proved entirely successful. So that the interminable cycle of prejudice and platitude, interrupted for a while, has again resumed its ancient course. As in the early days of the nineteenth century, so now, at the commencement of the twentieth, our libraries are slowly enriched with volumes of exquisite dulness. We are called upon to fight the old battle over again. The enemy appears under many colours; but all the legions, though they know it not, fight for the same cause. And, though their diversity is great, none of the banners are new.

First comes our ancient friend, the theologian, Bible in hand; as valiant of heart as ever, and as loud of voice. He is a worthy descendant of St. Dominic, though perhaps he would be horrified if he were told so. But History is cruel, and the records of the past remain indelible. What student of history can fail to catch the note of familiarity in our modern missionary’s oratory?

“Jesus is the Way”: saith the preacher, “Although the Jews have the law, they cannot come to God, because Jesus is the Way. Although they have the Old Testament, they do not know the truth, because Jesus is the Truth and Life!” and after several sentences rich in emphasis, fervour, and capital letters, comes the old, old conclusion: “adoption and true spiritual life there is none, where Christ has not kindled it. Israel, in its present state, the Christless Israel, shows this to the whole world. Notwithstanding the great activity and energy of the religious life of the Jews, they have—we say it with great sorrow—no life indeed—what they have is all carnal—and this accounts for the phenomenon that they have not been of much spiritual use to the world since Christ’s coming. In Christ alone will Israel live again and be a blessing to the world.”259

So speaks the advocate of conversion. His hope in the future is as great as his forgetfulness of the past. “The great God,” he informs us with touching assurance, “is, in His providence, now rapidly preparing the way for the final and only possible solution.” Ah, my good friend, it is very natural in a Christian to believe that “true spiritual life there is none, where Christ has not kindled it,” it is very pleasant to point the finger of scorn at “Christless Israel,” it is very well to prophesy that “in Christ alone will Israel live again and be a blessing to the world.” But how are we to convince Israel that it is so? This ancient nation which, having defied the onslaughts of centuries, has lived so long, seen so much, suffered so much, and survived so much, is it likely to succumb to our timeworn arguments? Or would you advise us to bid the Jew once more choose between baptism and the stake? This argument also has been tried and found inadequate. Convert the Jews! You might as hopefully attempt to convert the Pyramids.

Thus far the apostle. Next comes the patriot—a student of statistics, sad and, so far as religious bias goes, quite sober. In tones of sepulchral solemnity he warns us that, if England is to escape the fate of the Continent, namely, “of the Jews becoming stronger, richer, and vastly more numerous; with the corresponding certainty of the press being captured” by them, “and the national life stifled by the substitution of material aims for those which, however faultily, have formed the unselfish and imperial objects of the Englishmen who have made the Empire”—if these dire calamities are to be averted, England must “abandon her secular practice of complacent acceptance of every human being choosing to settle on these shores.” Should nothing be done to check the evil, there is bound to ensue an outbreak against the race “the members of which are always in exile and strangers in the land of their adoption.”260

The appeal to the Empire is quite modern, although, if the author had any intelligent conception of his own case, he might have seen that Imperialism is the very last thing in the world he should have summoned to the support of his narrow Nationalism: the two things differ as widely as the author differs from Julius Caesar. If the British Empire were confined to Englishmen, it would soon cease to be an empire. Equally novel is the interpretation of our expansion as due to an unselfish zeal for somebody else’s good—the author does not state whose. But the specific charge brought against the Jewish race as one “the members of which are always in exile and strangers in the land of their adoption” is hardly worthy of the author’s originality.

The prophet objects to the Jews as not having been “of much spiritual use to the world.” It is hard to dispute the statement, because it is impossible to know the particular meaning which the prophet attaches to the word “spiritual.” His position is unassailable. The patriot, however, denounces the Jews as the promoters of “material aims,” and thereby convicts himself either of gross ignorance or of deliberate distortion of facts. What the world of thought owes to the Jews has already been described with a fulness of detail which will probably appear superfluous to most educated people. As regards the assertion that the Jew still looks upon himself as one in exile and a stranger in a foreign land, we propose to deal with it when we come to consider the attitude of the Jews towards the Zionist movement. Here it is sufficient to point out that the term “Jew” is far too wide to warrant any sweeping generalisation. There are Jews and Jews, just as there are Christians and Christians. History abundantly proves that the Jew in the past retained most of his clannishness where he was most grievously oppressed. As to modern Judaism, since the day of Moses Mendelssohn there has set in a disintegration which renders a comprehensive and confident pronouncement only possible to those who consider prejudice an adequate substitute for knowledge. But there is no necessity for such a universal pronouncement. If we want an answer to the question, “Can the Jew be a patriot?” we need only glance at the history of modern Europe. Did not Jews fight with the Germans against the French in the days of Napoleon, with the Hungarians against the Austrians in 1848, with the Austrians against the Prussians in 1866, with the Germans against the French and the French against the Germans in 1870, with the Roumanians against the Turks in 1877? Or can man express his devotion to his country in a more unambiguous manner than by dying for it? Unless, indeed, the perfidious Jew even in dying is actuated by some ulterior motive.

But why should we look further than home? In 1831 Macaulay wrote: “If the Jews have not felt towards England like children, it is because she has treated them like a step-mother.” England has ceased to treat the Jews like a step-mother. How far has England’s change of attitude towards the Jew affected the Jew’s attitude towards England? On Sunday, December 28, 1902, Lord Roberts attended a special service, at the Central Synagogue in Great Portland Street, held for Jewish members of the regular and auxiliary forces who fell in South Africa fighting for England. The day was well chosen; for on the same day is performed the annual celebration in remembrance of the warlike exploits of the Maccabees—a coincidence which disproves in a practical manner the dogmatic generalisation that “a man’s heart cannot belong to two nations,” and which shows that the English Jew, at all events, can be both a Hebrew and an Englishman: he can cherish the ideals of the past and yet live in the realities of the present. The soldiers in whose memory the ceremony was held formed a portion of a force counting more than 1,200 officers and men, who took a creditable part in the war. This number assumes new significance, when we consider that the total Hebrew population of Great Britain that year did not exceed 180,000,261 and that with us every soldier is a volunteer. The Jew has done as much for the English mother as any of her Christian sons: he has laid down his life in defence of her cause. Moreover, to join the army, the Jew must necessarily sacrifice something besides life—something that he holds higher than life—some of his religion, and particularly the ceremonial rites, such as the dietary laws and the Sabbath. But foremost English Rabbis, like the late Simeon Singer, maintained that duty to England justified and even consecrated this sacrifice.

Nor was this most unequivocal proof of patriotism a solitary instance. For the last ten years the Feast of Dedication has been associated with a celebration for the men serving in the Regular and Auxiliary Forces. On December 13, 1903, the Rev. Francis L. Cohen, to whose initiative the custom is due, inaugurated the second decade of these celebrations at the New West-end synagogue in the presence of 38 officers and 167 men, and also a number of new Jewish officers, including a Major-General and a General. The preacher dwelt on the promptitude with which Jewish Britons responded to the call during the last war. He referred to the 127 Jews who then “gave their lives for the flag they all honoured and loved,” and announced that, as a testimony “to the pride and joy wherewith the Jews hail their privilege of sharing in the voluntary burden of their common country’s defence,” they sought to endow a trophy “to be competed for from year to year at the great annual meeting of the National Rifle Association, such as might stimulate others of their fellow-citizens to perfect themselves in the military use of that weapon which might at any moment again be required to protect the immunity of their Sovereign’s territories.”262 The truth is that religion has long ceased to be the principal force in the composition of nations. In the present stage of the world’s development sympathy with one’s co-religionists does not exclude loyalty to one’s country, any more than loyalty to one’s country prevents hatred of one’s co-religionists in other countries.

The continuance of oppression and persecution in Eastern Europe has kept the stream of emigration flowing. As was natural, great numbers of the hunted race turned to England as to the one European country where liberty has not yet been seriously endangered by the revival of intolerance. But the welcome which they met with in this sanctuary of freedom has not been unanimous. The “Alien Invasion,” as it is termed, has roused considerable anxiety and apprehension in certain bosoms. We are told by the melancholic patriot, in a more recent and more popular publication,263 that it is a menace to the nation, that “British right of asylum hitherto has been as profitable to the Empire as to the immigrants,” but that “it is otherwise to-day.” We are exhorted to reconsider our position, and to ask ourselves whether we are right in “permitting free import of the sweepings of foreign cities to contaminate our English life, to raise rents, and lower the standard of existence.” We are, lastly, advised to shut our doors to “undesirable aliens.” The question thus put admits of but one answer. If these aliens are undesirable, we ought not to desire them. No one would cavil with our advisers were it not that under the mask of a movement for the exclusion of “undesirable” individuals there seems to lurk in some quarters a retrogressive animosity against the Jewish race as a whole, or a wish to stir up such an animosity. The melancholic patriot opportunely reminds us that “the foreigners who settle in England are almost entirely of the Jewish race, and it is therefore impossible to discuss the question of foreign immigration without raising the Jewish question.” Thus, having thrown off the mask, he proceeds to give utterance to candid and undisguised anti-Semitism:

“The peculiarity of this race is that they refuse assimilation by intermarriage, equally with Russians in Russia, with Arabs in Tunis, or with the English in England, just as rigidly as did their ancestors refuse intermarriage with Gentiles in the days of Nehemiah.” The matter presented in this form offers the interesting point of being not new. The aloofness of the Jew has already been shown to have been the fundamental cause of his sufferings. Had the Jews not formed a “peculiar people” they would not have been made the milch-cows and the scapegoats of the nations through the ages. But it can also be shown that at the present day this is only partially true in the countries which have genuinely adopted the Jews. It is estimated that there occur far more marriages in England between Jews and Christians than between Protestants and Catholics. By the Jewish law marriage between a Jew and a proselyte is perfectly lawful. The barrier is thus, after all, one of religion rather than of race. Naturally an inclination towards such intermarriage would not prevail on either side except in comparatively rare cases. Yet the strange fact remains that such mixed marriages are at least as common in the lower as in the upper classes of Jewish society.

Besides, though the clannishness of the race in the past explains its persecution, does it excuse it? Is it an argument that a modern statesman in a free country should accept as justifying exclusion? Moreover, if the Jews really are so black as the author paints them, is it not rather unpatriotic of him to wish to see them intermarrying with us, and thus contriving “to contaminate our English life” far more effectively than they will be able to do if they continue to be a people apart? However, consistency in reasoning is not, as has already been remarked, the anti-Semite’s forte.

The oracle supplies us with seven reasons—mystic and ominous number—why “the immigration of the poorest Jews from Russia and Poland is a national evil.”

1. “They lower the Englishman’s standard of comfort, and are unduly addicted to the calling of usury.”

2. The competition is injurious to the Englishman because it is “not to determine the survival of the fittest, but to determine the survival of the fittest to exist on a herring and a piece of black bread.”

3. “They subsist contentedly on a diet which is insufficient to sustain the meat-eating Anglo-Saxon.”

4. “Their habits of huddling together under circumstances of unmentionable filth destroy the possibility of dealing with the housing question, and set at naught our municipal sanitary laws.”

5. “They lower the wages of unskilled women and unskilled labourers.”

6. “They raise rent.”

7. “They enlarge the area of the sweating system.”

The usury charge has been answered by experience and Economic Science ages ago. But the patriot contributes to the discussion quite a fresh element when he describes the Jewish immigrants as paupers and, in the same breath, as usurers. He does not deign to explain how men who, as he later asserts, are induced to leave their homes by destitution and are drawn to London by the “magnetism” of the Jewish charities, how these penniless beggars can “adopt money-lending as a means of livelihood.” If they are paupers they cannot be money-lenders, and if they are money-lenders they cannot be paupers. To starve and to lend at the same time is a feat that even a Jew is hardly capable of.

As to sweating and sanitation, these are matters for which legislation, if it is worth the name, ought to be able to devise far less drastic remedies than that proposed by statistical patriotism. The remaining reasons, when pruned of repetition and reduced to their logical dimensions, resolve themselves into this: We do not want the Jew, because he can work harder than we, for less wages than we, and can live more frugally than we. In other words, because for the purposes of the struggle for existence he is better equipped than we. He is too formidable a rival.

But on this point also the enemies of the Jew are at fatal variance. Another writer pronounces the explanation of the Jewish immigrant’s success as due to his lower standard of living and greater capacity for labouring, paradoxical. “It is,” he says, “as though one were to maintain that of two pieces of machinery the worse did most work and required less fuel.” He seeks and finds the true reason of the displacement of the English craftsman, not in the “alleged frugality of the foreign comer” or in “his readiness to do more for his money,” but in “the Jewish system of out-door poor relief ... which makes rivalry and successful competition an impossibility.” As an instance, he quotes the fact that poor children who attend the Jews’ Free School in Bell-lane are partially fed and clothed by a charitable Hebrew family. The writer, though apparently resenting even competition in philanthropy as something monstrous and dishonest, yet is charitable enough to admit that “it may be good, it may be bad; fair or unfair to other schools.”264 One would think that schools were shops competing with one another as to which of them will attract the greatest number of customers and not disinterested institutions for the education of the community. Furthermore, one would think that the fact quoted alone ought to move good Christians to an emulation of the Jewish rival and thank him for the example of beneficence which he sets them, instead of turning that very example into a new reproach and adducing it as a reason for excluding him from the country. Finally, one would think that, instead of reviling the Jew for assisting his less fortunate co-religionists, a true patriot might be induced, in sheer rivalry, to assist his own. But what actually happens is this. We tell the Jew, “We let our own unemployed starve, and you don’t. This is not fair to our poor unemployed.” Verily, the ethics of anti-Semitism are as wonderful as its logic.

The same narrow-minded dread of the alien competitor is at the present day exhibited in South Africa. At a meeting in Cape Town on Sept. 23rd, 1904, the speakers began by denouncing the Indians as Asiatics, but they soon extended their objections to Jews, Greeks, and Italians. The Jews were accused of working on Sundays, the Greeks of keeping their shops open later than the natives, the Italians of sending large sums of money (their hardly earned savings) out of the Colony to their homes. A writer commenting on this report sensibly remarks: “Against stupidity of this sort argument fights in vain.”265 And his opinion will be shared by most sane people in England. Yet many of these people will probably be ready to approve the exclusion of the Jewish immigrant, not seeing that what is rightly condemned as stupid intolerance in one country can hardly be justified as enlightened statesmanship in another.

Time was when thrift, extreme frugality, success in life, and clannishness were the causes of the Englishman’s hatred for the Scotch competitor, when the latter after the Union began to emigrate to the South. Those aliens were, like the Jews, accused of “herding together” and of living on little, were envied for getting on in the world, and were denounced for pushing one another on. The clamour has passed away, and no sober Englishman of to-day would dream of reviving it. Patriotic bigots in those days advised the exclusion of the Scotch “undesirable,” and had a goodly following among people who, having failed in life themselves, could not forgive the foreigner his success. “But,” as a writer on the subject pertinently asks, “would it have been well for England, even in a purely commercial point of view, if the Scotch had been legally excluded? Have not her children reaped benefits from the labours of those whom their forefathers desired to forbid the country?”266

To such considerations, however, our modern patriot is nobly invulnerable. He soon forgets even his seven reasons, feeble and contradictory as they are, in his Nationalist enthusiasm. The Jewish millionaire is as hateful to him as the Jewish pauper. He describes the Jews as a race gifted with indomitable cunning and an extraordinary capacity for perceiving “with lightning glance the exact moment to corner a market,” as “a powerful, exclusive and intolerant race” of experts “in the flotation of companies,” as adepts “in the art of deluding the public by the inflation of worthless securities with an artificial and effervescent value,” as a tribe whose “undue economic predominance” has been promoted by—O ye shades of King John and Torquemada—“the mild spirit of Christianity!”

To descend from the ludicrously sublime to the sublimely ludicrous: “Jewish ascendancy at Court is so conspicuous as to be the subject of incessant lamentation on the part of full-blooded Englishmen.” Surely the end of the British Empire cannot be very distant when the King goes to Newmarket “accompanied by a Jewish financier,” “is the guest of a Jewish financier,” and when, highest horror of all, “in the published names of the dinner party on the first night every one was a Jewish financier, or his relation, with the exception of the King’s aide-de-camp and the Portuguese Minister”—the latter, if not a Jew, an alien!

The patriot then warns us in tones irresistibly reminiscent of Lewis Carroll: “The time has come to speak out about this alien influence. There is danger ahead.... There are ugly rumours to the effect that wealthy members of the Jewish community have placed the King of England under undue obligations. If this be true, it is the duty of the people of England to extricate their Sovereign from the toils of the modernized version of Isaac of York. If it be untrue, there is the less reason for Jews occupying their too prominent position at Court. No sincere lover of his country can contemplate without anxiety the gradual disappearance of the old families and the ascendancy of the smart Semites who treat as trenchermen and led captains what remains of English society. The efficiency of the British nation requires the ascendancy of the Anglo-Saxon, not the Semitic, element in it. It is time to restrict the immigration of potential money-lenders from Eastern Europe.” The Jeremiad concludes with a truly ominous reminder: “In 1290 the Jews were expelled from England.”

Continental anti-Semitism can show nothing superior to these lamentations of our “full-blooded” “Anglo-Saxon.” In them we have all the hereditary features of Jew-hatred exaggerated by insular distrust of everything foreign and by provincial lack of sense of proportion or humour. This manifesto, however, despite its limitations, is a fair specimen of a kind of literature common enough on the Continent, though still rare in these backward islands. Those interested in the subject will find in the German anti-Semitic pamphlets and in the Russian Panslavist newspapers the prototypes of all the arguments, sentiments and self-contradictions of which those embodied in this lugubrious production are pale copies. But the pamphlet is more than a literary curiosity. Like the proverbial straw which, of no importance in itself, yet deserves notice as indicating the direction of the current, this product of a provincial mind is worthy of some attention as a sign of the times. Already there have been found Englishmen illiberal enough to overlook all the good points in the character of poor Jewish immigrants—their untiring industry, sobriety and self-sacrifice—and to ridicule, in supreme bad taste, the pathetic devotion which impels these wretched wanderers to seek solace for their sufferings in prayer and in the study of the Book which has been the only source of comfort to millions of their people for the last twenty centuries and to millions of our own for more than half that time.267

From another point of view also the pamphlet is a document, even more valuable, because more candid, than a less crude performance would have been. It forms a hyphen of connection between pure anti-Semitism—a small matter in England as yet—and another tendency entirely different in origin, far more widely spread, and shared by persons who, in other respects, have little in common with the provincial patriot. This is the tendency towards a reaction of which the anti-alien agitation is one symptom, and the clamour for protection another; both pointing to a change of sentiment in favour of the political ideals fashionable before the reign of Queen Victoria.

Until the nineteenth century England was essentially a Tory country. The few ruled the many, and their rule was based on the assumption—no doubt largely justified in those days—that the many were not fit to rule themselves. A seat in the House of Commons was virtually a family heirloom; patronage filled the Church, and favouritism controlled the army and the navy. The whole of English public life—civil, religious, and military—was under the sway of an oligarchy, and fair competition was a thing unknown. It was the reign of Protection in the broadest acceptation of the term. Then came the awakening of the masses—an awakening the first token of which had already appeared in the transference of a literary man’s homage from a noble patron to the general public—and gradually the lethargic acquiescence in the decrees of an aristocratic Providence was supplanted by healthy discontent. The fruit of this deep and slow evolution was the series of reforms which, by transferring to public opinion the power which was formerly vested in a privileged class, turned England from a pure aristocracy into a moderate kind of democracy. The rotten boroughs were swept out of existence, and, by the removal of religious disabilities, the English Parliament and the English Universities became truly representative institutions. Along with these changes came the demand for free competition in another sphere—commerce—and the agitation resulted in the repeal of the Corn Laws. In every department of life the individual claimed and, in part, obtained freedom of initiative and action. Laissez-faire became the motto of the Victorian era, and the free international exchange of goods promised at last to realise the ideals of international friendship and reciprocity which the eighteenth century had preached but proved unable to practise.

We now seem to be entering on a new chapter in our history. It looks as though the Liberal current which has carried the nation thus far has spent its force, and the counter-current is asserting itself. The House of Commons still is an assembly of popular representatives, but it has lost much of its power for good or evil, and much of the respect which was once paid to it. Laissez-faire is only mentioned to be derided, the principle of free competition is openly assailed, internationalism is branded as cosmopolitanism and appeals to humanity as proofs of morbid sentimentality; while protection is confidently advocated in commerce and industry. How has this change of sentiment come about? One of its causes may be found in the growth of the Imperial idea. The history of all nations shows that national expansion, though often achieved by individual enterprise, can only be maintained by organised effort, by concentration of power in a few hands, and by a proportionate diminution of individual freedom. Democracy and Empire have never flourished together. That the one may prosper, the other must perish. For this reason we find the true democrat necessarily what is now called amongst us a Little Englander; the true Imperialist as necessarily a dictator. The anti-democratic reaction in England was inevitable, owing partly to the expansion of Greater Britain itself, and partly to the development of other countries on Imperialist and despotic lines. For it is now less possible than ever for England to develop uninfluenced by the example of her neighbours. And the example set by those neighbours, as has been shown, is narrow and militant nationalism in their relations with foreigners, and with regard to domestic matters despotism and centralisation. But the growth of this inevitable reaction has in England been accelerated by other and more specific causes.

For a generation after the establishment of Free Trade England enjoyed an unparalleled prosperity—an unchallenged commercial and industrial supremacy. The British flag commanded the seas over which British fleets carried the products of British labour to the four corners of the earth, and the British traveller abroad made himself unpopular and ridiculous by patronising Mont Blanc and by looking superciliously down upon all who had not the good fortune to be born British. Those were the proud days in which Lord Palmerston described Prussia as a country of “d——d professors,” and Matthew Arnold wrote his parable of the young Englishman and the upset perambulator.

But this undisputed sovereignty could not last for ever. Europe recovered from the devastating cataclysm which had left England alone unscathed. The heaps of ruins with which the Napoleonic wars had strewn the Continent were replaced by new edifices. Young states arose out of the ashes of the old ones, and a new life chased away the shadows of death. All these renovated countries, having once set their houses in comparative order, began to look abroad for expansion. Germany proved with marvellous quickness that she could produce other things than “d——d professors”; France likewise; not to mention the smaller countries of Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and Switzerland. On the other side of the Atlantic also the American Republic emerged from the ordeal of her Civil War with renewed vigour, which soon displayed itself in commercial and industrial activity. The upshot of this perfectly natural revolution was that England found herself degraded from an autocratic mistress of the world’s trade to the position of one among many competitors. We saw with surprise and dismay that we were no longer the models and the despair of others. Then our Olympian complacency gave place to nervous anxiety, and our arrogant self-sufficiency was succeeded by serious scepticism concerning the titles on which our former estimate of ourselves rested. We ceased to brag of our own “unparalleled progress,” and began to watch more and more carefully the progress achieved by others. We acquired the habit of asking ourselves how is it that the monopoly which we had foolishly regarded as our inalienable birthright was slipping from our hands; whence sprang this rapid development of countries which until the last half-century were in their commercial and industrial infancy; how came it to pass that nations which until yesterday were content to copy us slavishly or to admire us passively are to-day rivalling us so successfully? This inquiry led to the discovery that the foreigner’s progress arose from superior intelligence, better education, greater adaptability, and other advantages of a similar nature. We came to the conclusion that, unless we rouse ourselves to strenuous exertion, we shall be left behind in the race. This conviction has already found a most laudable expression in the earnest efforts made in every part of England to revise and to improve our commercial and industrial methods and by special education to qualify ourselves for the struggle under the new conditions. So far our loss of the monopoly has proved a blessing in disguise, for it has aroused that spirit of manly emulation to which undisputed supremacy is fatal. But, unfortunately, the same consciousness of our altered position relatively to the rest of the world has also aroused a spirit of an entirely different kind. Many among us—too intelligent to ignore the changed state of things, not intelligent enough to diagnose the real cause of the change—have come to the conclusion that our competitors owe their success to those very fiscal and administrative fetters which we had discarded as obsolete, and that if we wish to save ourselves from ultimate defeat we must adopt their antiquated systems. Freedom, they say, means anarchy, and victory is only possible by discipline, organisation, centralisation. Individualism is hostile to efficiency. The democratic ideal is out of date. At the same time, the cult of humanitarianism has been driven out by the cult of nationalism.

As might have been foreseen by anyone who has watched the march of events with some comprehension of their meaning, the cry for protection was accompanied by the demand for the exclusion of alien immigrants. The sequence was logical and unavoidable. If it is to our profit to exclude the products of foreign labour by prohibitive duties, it is in the same way to our profit to exclude the foreign labourer. The two things, whether viewed from the economic point of view, the political, or the psychological, are indissolubly connected. They both are one expression of the twofold tendencies towards despotism and nationalism—control over the individual and hostility to the foreigner—reaction against free competition on the one hand and against internationalism on the other. Lukewarm or unintelligent pleaders for the one policy may oppose the other. But that the two demands are only two manifestations of one and the same principle is proved by the fact that, in their most uncompromising form, they are defended by the same advocates. At a meeting of the members of an East-end club which the late Home Secretary addressed on Dec. 7, 1903, a resolution, approving of the new trade policy was moved by Mr. D. J. Morgan, M.P., and was seconded by Major Evans Gordon, M.P., both prominent champions of the anti-alien cause. A protectionist writer on the subject of foreign immigration into England concludes his study of the problem with the following illuminating remarks: “Strong rivals, devoid of sentimentality and of the capacity for being fascinated by magic words—such as the word ‘free’—are striving to thrust us from our position. It is full time for us to abandon our long-played rôle of philanthropist among nations, and so to order our affairs, social and economic, that we reap as much advantage as possible and foreign nations as little. And one of these things to be altered is the free entry of foreigners into England.”268

As the numbers of foreign immigrants and the numbers of native unemployed went on steadily increasing, the outcry against the former went on steadily gaining in volume and vigour, and at last cohered into a definite campaign which, as might have been expected from the nature of the case, included in its ranks not only the friends of their own country, but the enemies of every other; not only aggressive Protectionists, but also philosophical Revisionists; not only the advocates of the British labourer, but also the adversaries of the Jew.

The first authoritative alarm of the Alien Peril was sounded in January, 1902, when Mr. Balfour, in the course of the debate on the Speech from the Throne, pointed out that, owing to America’s adoption of severer measures against alien immigration, England would be receiving even more immigrants than before. Not long afterwards a Royal Commission was appointed to inquire into the matter, and, after forty-nine public sittings, in which the evidence of one hundred and seventy-five witnesses was received, came to the conclusion that, although “it has not been proved that there is any serious direct displacement of skilled English labour,” “the continuous stream of fresh arrivals produces a glut in the unskilled labour market.”269 Five out of the seven members recommended the exclusion of certain classes of immigrants, who were pronounced “undesirable” either on account of their character or owing to the economic position of the districts in which they settled in great numbers, and expressed the hope that the legislature would act on their recommendation.

Both objections—moral and economic—had been anticipated outside the Commission. On one occasion a London magistrate, in sentencing a foreign thief to six months’ hard labour, availed himself of the opportunity for stating that “the case fully illustrated how desirable and necessary it was to check the unwelcome invasion of alien criminals. At present,” he said, “the dregs of foreign countries flowed incessantly into hospitable England, and within a few days were engaged in committing all sorts of offences. The sooner Parliament framed laws to prohibit the landing of these undesirables the better.”270 Such cases, and cases far less serious, accompanied by similar comments from the bench, became matters of daily occurrence. So unpopular did foreigners become that their exclusion would be urged because some of them at times obstructed thoroughfares with their wheel barrows, thus wasting the valuable time of the Police Courts and disturbing the equanimity of the Metropolitan constables. One day, for example, a Russian lad was brought up at the City Summons Court for causing obstruction with a barrow of fruit. Sir Henry Knight, the Magistrate, imposed on the offender a fine of two shillings, and, with admirable sense of proportion, improved the occasion as follows: “We must have these people stopped from being dumped down upon us. It is abominable!”271

On February 16, 1903, was formed an Immigration Reform Association, with the object of enlightening the public in general and legislators in particular on the alien question by means of pamphlets widely distributed among Members of Parliament and other speakers, as well as among working-class organisations. The information thus liberally supplied emphasised the connection of foreign immigrants with crime and vice, described the economic evils which result from the inflow of resourceless aliens and from their competition with the native labourers, and dwelt with especial minuteness on the overcrowding of certain districts of East London and the consequent dispossession of the native working population by the invaders. Towards the end of the same year (Dec. 7, 1903), Mr. Akers-Douglas, the Home Secretary, addressing the members of an East-end London Club, discoursed, amid great applause, on “the dumping of undesirable aliens,” quoting statistics to show how rapidly their numbers grew, and how the grievances of overcrowding, of crime and of competition grew with them, and concluding with the assurance that the Government was seriously contemplating stringent measures for checking the evil in time. A few months later (March 29, 1904) the Home Secretary redeemed his promise by bringing in a Bill “to make provision with respect to the Immigration of Aliens, and other matters incidental thereto.”272

In introducing this Bill Mr. Akers-Douglas took pains to persuade the House that the proposed measures were not directed against aliens as aliens, but against aliens as undesirables, and then proceeded to describe the evils, already mentioned, which the Bill was intended to remedy. Sir Charles Dilke protested against the measure on the ground that the majority of the aliens who came to this country, and who would be struck by the Bill, were the helpless victims of political and religious persecution. He affirmed that the native tradespeople had no grievance against foreign labourers, because they were able to absorb the comparatively small number of the latter by making them into good trade unionists. He disputed the figures quoted by the Home Secretary, asserting, on the strength of the Census and of the Royal Commission’s own Report, that the number of foreigners in this country all told was a mere drop in the ocean, and infinitely smaller than the number of foreigners resident in almost every other civilised country—in fact, that many more destitute Britons emigrated from the United Kingdom than destitute aliens came into it. The speaker next pointed out that the Bill would be used to exclude from England people whom afterwards we should be ashamed to have excluded. This measure, he said, had it been enforced at the time of the Paris Commune, would certainly have excluded many of the most distinguished exiles who arrived here in a state of starvation and whose return was afterwards welcomed by France with every expression of gratitude to this country for having maintained them—men like Dalou, one of the greatest sculptors of modern times, like the brothers Reclus, and many of the greatest scientists to whom we had been proud to give hospitality, or men like Prince Peter Kropotkin, who arrived in England stripped of every particle of his property by the Russian Government and was welcomed by the people of this country. The Russian Jews, against whom the heaviest allegations were made, inhabited Stepney and some portions of the East-end, and there were some in Manchester and Leeds. Of these some 20,000 were engaged in the tailoring industry, some 3500 in cabinet-making, and some 3000 in the boot and shoe trade. These were the whole of the people against whom this agitation was directed. The speaker had seen the broken-down prisoners from the “pale” sent for political reasons across Siberia. Those men were not the dangerous persons they were represented to be, miserable as might be their condition when they came here. They were not of a stock inferior to our own; and their stock, when it mixed with our own in the course of years, he believed, went rather to improve than to deteriorate the British race.

Leave was then given to bring in the Bill, which was read a first time. A month later (April 25, 1904) the Bill stood for second reading in the House of Commons and gave rise to a long and lively debate which lasted through the afternoon and evening sittings. In the course of the debate, the measure was discussed in all its aspects, was strenuously attacked by one party and defended as strenuously by the other. Sir Charles Dilke was again foremost in the fray. He moved an amendment “that this House, holding that the evils of low-priced alien labour can best be met by legislation to prevent sweating, desires to assure itself, before assenting to the Aliens Bill, that sufficient regard is had in the proposed measure to the retention of the principle of asylum for the victims of persecution.” This amendment the mover supported by an eloquent speech in which, having once more traversed the Home Secretary’s statistics, and once more reminded the House that these immigrants against whom the measure was directed were the victims of persecution for their religion—people whose friends had been burnt alive and hunted from their homes to death—finally expressed his conviction that behind this measure, not in the House, of course, but in the country, there was kindled an anti-Jewish feeling, warning those members of the Conservative party who participated in this agitation that they had raised a devil which they would find it very difficult to lay.

This statement, naturally enough, provoked many contradictions; but the speaker, in reply, justly asserted that the fact was patent to all readers of the newspapers which supported the Bill.

Other Liberal orators followed, some of whom described the Bill as an example of panic legislation, and others as partly prompted by an agitation directed against the Jews. Among the latter was Mr. Trevelyan, who remarked that the measure aimed almost as much at those who managed to prosper as at those who were poverty-stricken, and that all the evidence went to prove that the great mass of these aliens were sober and industrious people who in the long run became good citizens. He maintained that among many people outside the House there was a frankly anti-Semitic movement which he dreaded and deplored, and that this petty and evil step was in exactly the same direction as that in which the Governments of Russia and Roumania had been going.

The long debate ended with a division, in which the amendment was negatived by a Government majority of 124, and the Bill was read a second time. But its triumph was far from being assured by this victory. Outside the House there was as much divergence of opinion on the merits of the measure, its scope, and its probable effects as there was inside, and the rival parties spared no pains to present the motives of their adversaries in the least flattering colours. Thus, while the advocates of the Bill denounced the opposition to it as “a net constructed with the primary purpose of catching votes,”273 its opponents derided it as “an attempt on the part of the Government to gratify a small but noisy section of their supporters, and to purchase a little popularity in the constituencies by dealing harshly with a number of unfortunate aliens who have no votes.”274

The English Jews were not left unmoved by the fresh calamity which threatened their suffering brethren. As early as May, 1903, while the Royal Commission was still carrying on its investigations, Mr. Israel Zangwill, at a mass meeting of Zionists, foretold the recommendations of the Commission, and expressed the fear that the exclusion of undesirable aliens might prove only the beginning of worse things. “The Jews came over to England with the Conqueror,” he said, “but all their services to him and his successors did not prevent their expulsion two and a quarter centuries later. He did not wish to be an alarmist, but nobody who had been caught in a crowd of mafficking hooligans could doubt the possibility of anti-Jewish riots even in London.”275 And when, a year later, the speaker’s prediction as to the result of the Commission’s work was fulfilled, he again, at another Zionist meeting, said that England “was catching the epidemic which rages everywhere against the Jew.”276 This statement was reported to Mr. Balfour, who replied that “he believed it to be quite untrue,” declaring that “the Aliens Bill is designed to protect the country, not against the Jew, but against the undesirable alien, quite irrespective of his nationality or his creed. I should regard the rise and growth of any anti-Semitic feeling in this country as a most serious national misfortune.”277 In a letter to The Times Mr. Zangwill reiterated his assertion, and, while absolving Mr. Balfour himself from anti-Semitism, he insisted that the Aliens Bill was inspired by anti-Semites—a statement which he once more repeated emphatically in the course of an interview with a newspaper representative.278

Nor was the indignation confined to Jews only. Speaking at the annual meeting of the British Jews’ Society in Exeter Hall the Rev. Peter Thomson declared that the Jew had been rather a blessing to the East-end than otherwise, and, as the best testimony of this, he quoted the Chairman of the City of London Brewery Company, who had lamented that the dividends had gone down because of the immigration of the Jews into the district where their public houses were situated, concluding that he himself had no blessing for the Aliens Bill.279

A few days later (May 19) a deputation of the Jewish community sought an interview with the Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Home Affairs and through Lord Rothschild, who introduced it, drew attention to the clauses of the Bill which would press harshly and unjustly on the numerous Jewish immigrants into this country, pointing out that the investigations of the Royal Commission had proved that the advent of the aliens was not a source of disadvantage, but of benefit to England, that the increase of the alien population was insignificant when compared with that of America, and that the Bill provided no machinery for the exclusion of the really undesirable, such as existed in America, but proposed to establish in this country a loathsome system of Police interference and espionage. The deputation further offered on behalf of the Jewish community to enter into a bond that the Jewish immigrants admitted should not become a public charge during the first two years of their residence, and to assist the authorities in excluding criminals who might be of the Jewish persuasion.

The Under-Secretary thanked the deputation for the very moderate tone in which they had set forth their case, disavowed any intention on the part of the Government to encourage anti-Semitic feeling in England, said that all, from the Prime Minister downwards, recognised the debt which England owed to the Jews, admitted that those members of the race who came here were both healthy and law-abiding, but, he maintained, the Bill sought to exclude the diseased, bad characters, and the destitute.

These assurances, however, failed to reassure the Jews. Many of them continued to apprehend danger; a few even began to regard expulsion as not improbable in the future. This fear has found a voice in literature. In a novel280 published while the fate of the Aliens hung in the balance, the Jews are banished from England by a wicked Home Secretary, and then are brought back again, because “England can not get along without Jewish money and Jewish brains.” The expulsion is, of course, hardly more convincing than the reason given for the restoration. The authoress, herself, in the preface, describes her book as “a story of the impossible,” but she considers that “a warning—even in the form of fiction—may not be out of place.” The danger may be imaginary and the warning rather premature; none the less, the book bears witness to a genuine feeling of alarm. Such a book could not have been written a generation ago.

Mr. Balfour was, no doubt, quite sincere in repudiating any anti-Semitic bias on his own part and on the part of his immediate followers. The idea of a cultured English gentleman of the present day actuated by religious or racial rancour is too grotesque to be seriously entertained for a moment, and it is further disproved, if disproof were needed, by the attempt which, as will be narrated in the sequel, the Conservative Government, in true Imperial spirit, made to provide a home in a British possession for those Jews whose presence it deemed undesirable in the United Kingdom. Another proof that Jew-hatred is not yet sufficiently powerful in this country to imperil the peace of the Jews was furnished, about the same time, by one of our most distinguished prelates, Bishop Welldon, who in a sermon preached at Westminster Abbey on Good Friday, 1904, exhorted his hearers to an imitation of Christ’s example, and to a practical demonstration of their faith by contributing to the East London Jews’ Fund: “That was,” he said, “the best return they could make for the crucifixion of their Lord and Master. The Jews gave him strife, and encompassed his death; we gave them sanctuary and kindness, and without one word of reproach. They gratefully acknowledged the noble citizenship of Jews in all parts of the world. In return they offered them on this anniversary day of our Lord’s Passion what was to Christians the holiest, dearest examples of the life and character of the Crucified Redeemer.”281 In the following year the Bishop of Stepney issued an appeal in connexion with Holy Week and Good Friday on behalf of the East London Fund for the Jews. The thoughts of the season, he said, would be incomplete unless they gave a place to those “whose rejection of their own Messiah has been one of the great tragedies of history.” There are more than 100,000 Jews in East London parishes, and in some parishes they form the majority of the population. Following the method suggested some time ago by the Upper House of Convocation, the diocese of London treats the East-end Jews as neighbours and parishioners, and by the tact and patience of the fund’s workers “the barrier of prejudice, built up by long years of persecution at the hands of Christians, is being rapidly removed.”282 While such sentiments prevail in England, the Jews need not fear for their liberties.

Yet, that the apprehensions of the Jews and of all friends of freedom are not wholly unjustified, that Sir Charles Dilke and those who agree with him in suspecting that anti-Semitic prejudice is not so uncommon in the Kingdom at large as it is among the upper ranks, are not the victims of a hypochondriacal dread of phantoms, was demonstrated with deplorable opportuneness by an event which even a temperate pessimist cannot but regard as a rude and practical version of the creed which is elsewhere preached in a more refined form. While Mr. Akers-Douglas at Westminster was giving the finishing touches to his prescription for the Alien complaint, the people of Limerick were actually trying remedies of a more drastic and homely nature.

The Jews had hitherto been conspicuous in Ireland chiefly by their absence. With the exception of Dublin and Belfast, the island knew the Jew from hearsay only, and his name was to the ordinary Irishman what it was to the Englishman in the days of Gower and Chaucer—a symbol for a vile abstraction. In 1871 there were only six Jews in Cork, two in Limerick and one in Waterford. But of late years persecution on the Continent has forced some of its victims to seek an asylum in Ireland as in England, though to a much smaller degree. The increase in the Jews’ numbers, slight though it was, proved sufficient to arouse a feeling of alarm and suspicion among the ignorant masses both in the towns and in the open country. Craftsmen, tradesmen, ploughmen, and clergymen, all began to look with jealousy upon the clever, thrifty, and infidel new-comers from beyond the sea. This was especially the case at Limerick, where lately had sprung up a diminutive colony of thirty-five Jewish families, which was by the Chief Secretary for Ireland described as a “well-conducted section of the community, engaged for the most part in small trades, and dependent for their livelihood on the goodwill of their customers.”283

Yet, small as this colony was, it soon attracted attention. The Catholic inhabitants of that great centre of picturesque and somnolent decay were not pleased at the comparative success of their wide-awake neighbours. The animosity spread from the town to the adjacent villages. The Irish peasant, proverbially improvident and free from any comprehension of the nature of a bargain, was ready to buy from the Jewish peddler his goods, and strongly disinclined to pay for them. The goods were usually sold on the instalment system, and this, in an imaginative mind, created a pleasant illusion which, however, was rudely shattered when the day of reckoning came. Then the peasant realised that the goods were not a free gift, and bitterly resented the hardship of being made to discharge his debt. It has been stated by the Irish peasant’s advocate that over three-quarters of the civil bill processes at quarter sessions in the island were those of Jews against such unsophisticated debtors for arrears of payments for goods purchased.284 The statement has been shown to be a romantic exaggeration on an unusually ambitious scale. In plain prose, among 1387 civil bills entered for the county and city of Limerick during the year 1903 only 31 were issued by Jews, while in the Easter sessions of 1904, out of a total number of 320 civil bills, eight only belonged to Jews.285 None the less, it is quite conceivable that often the peddler’s anxiety to obtain his money, brought into collision with the peasant’s unwillingness to part with his, led to strained relations between the two parties. In the circumstances it was perfectly natural that the Jew should be denounced for “usury and extortion.” Irish patriots saw in this new oppressor of their innocent fellow-countrymen a kind of camp-follower of the foreign conquerors. Poor Ireland was described as a carcase whose bones were picked by the Russian and Polish jackals of what had been left on them by the Norman lion and the Anglo-Saxon wolf, and Byron was quoted with considerable effect: