# Great Russia/Chapter 15

​CHAPTER XV
THE PROBLEM OF THE RUSSIAN JEW
I
EVEN more important, even more urgent than the problem of Poland is the problem of Israel. And, unfortunately, the two problems cannot be solved separately. The Kingdom of Poland and the Kingdom of Israel are one for political purposes as well as for economic purposes. Not only do Poland and Lithuania, which once formed part of Greater Poland, include within their boundaries the great majority of the Russian Jews—nearly five millions-but the future of the Pole is indissolubly bound up with the future of the Jew. They must prosper or decline together. It is impossible to liberate the one without also liberating the other. It is idle to speak of the resurrection of Poland and at the same time to maintain the Hebrew population in perpetual bondage. You cannot erect in Poland a free self-governing State, and at the same time exclude from that State the ​most enterprising, the most intelligent, the wealthiest section of the community.
Not only is the Jewish problem the most important and the most urgent of all Russian political problems, it is also the most difficult. Russian reactionaries invariably assume that it concerns Russia alone. Unfortunately it concerns the whole wide world. It is impossible to discuss the position of the Jew in the Empire of the Tsar apart from his position in Europe and America. Nor is it possible to understand the present legal status of the Jew without recalling the outstanding facts of Jewish history. The following brief analysis is, therefore, indispensable to a clear intelligence of the question.
II
The Kingdom of Israel is the most ancient kingdom in the world, and withal the most universal and the most exclusive, the most powerful and the most perplexing. The annals of the Jews go back to the dawn of human history, and their records constitute the sacred literature of all Christian nations. They are dispersed over the habitable globe. They were dispersed before the birth of Christ. The ​Greek geographer, Strabo, for instance, mentions that there was not a city in the world of Greece and Rome in which there was not to be found a Jewish colony.
No other people surpass them in versatility and vitality. They adapt themselves to every form of civilization, but they refuse themselves to be assimilated. They preserve their rites and customs, and retain their pride of birth as the chosen people. For over two thousand years they have been persecuted, but they emerge from every persecution more powerful than ever, and their power is everywhere resented and everywhere resisted. They are a distracting problem to the philosopher, and their contradictions are bewildering. They are intensely tribal, yet they are cosmopolitan and ubiquitous. They are worshippers of Mammon, yet no people has such a passion for ideals. They are in turn extravagantly rich and miserably poor, insolently proud and abjectly cringing. They are now on the side of the oppressor, now heralds of revolt.
III
Most misstatements and prejudices about the Jew arise from the fundamental ​misstatement and assumption that the Jews are a distinct race, one of the few pure races in history. To the Philosemite, they are a superior race. Beaconsfield, in a famous chapter of his "Life of Lord George Bentinck," extols the Jews as the aristocracy of mankind. On the other hand, by the Antisemite, the Jew is branded with irredeemable inferiority. According to Houston Stewart Chamberlain the Jews must ever be an inferior type, and especially are they morally inferior to the Aryan. They can never be assimilated. This idea, systematized in the famous thesis of Gobineau on the "Equality of the Races," has been reduced to absurdity in Chamberlain's striking work "The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century." The distinguished German Imperialist informs us that the Jews are pre-eminently a servile people, and he draws, amongst many other conclusions, the startling inference that Christ was not a Jew, but an Aryan.
I confess that I have little sympathy with this new fetish of race. It is true that, both through intermarriage and social segregation, the Jews retain certain physical Jewish characteristics, such as the aquiline nose. But mixed marriages with Christians have for generations ​blended the type. Mixed marriages in the capital of the German Empire, where anti-Jewish sentiment still prevails, have increased to 25 per cent. And even if we admit that there still exists a definite Jewish type, that does not prove the unity and fixity of the Jewish race. Even as there exists a Jewish type, so there exists a British type, a French type, and a Russian type. Yet it would be absurd to say that there exists one British race, one French race, one Russian race, and it is equally absurd to say that there exists one pure Jewish race. The Jews have themselves recognized two main racial types—the aristocratic dolichocephalic type of the Sephardim of Spain and Portugal, and the democratic brachycephalic type of the Aohkenarim of Poland and Russia. But, as a matter of fact, there are not two Jewish types, there are fifty. Anyone who has travelled amongst the Jewries of the world (and I have visited every important ghetto in Africa and Asia, in America and Europe) must have been bewildered by the variety of physical types. And without visiting the ghettos of the world, anyone who will take the trouble to look at the two hundred striking photographs in Dr. Fischberg's fascinating ​volume will be equally convinced of the fact. In the opinion of an eminent Jewish thinker, Bernard Lazare, the Jewish type has not varied less, but has varied more, than any other racial type. And the reason is obvious: as the result of the diaspora, or dispersion, the Jews have been subjected more continuously and more widely than any other nation to different surroundings, and the life of the Jews in such entirely different surroundings as Morocco and the Caucasus, Salonica and London, Jerusalem and New York, must of necessity have resulted, in the course of centuries, in the most divergent racial types.
IV
The truth is that the unity and continuity of the Jew is not physical, it is moral. The Jews are not a race, they are a nation. Wherever they have gone, they have remained a nation. We are too apt to forget that a nation is not a geographical expression. The Poles are a nation, and are not contained within geographical limits. Nor does a nation imply a common origin or blood relationship. The United States and the Russian Empire are made ​up of a score of different races. Nor does a nation even imply community of language, for the German-speaking Alsatians were, and still are, passionately French in sentiment, even as the French-Canadians have become loyal British citizens. No; a nation is a collective political aggregate, it is a moral personality. It is bound together by common religious ideals, by common institutions, by common traditions, by common loves and hatreds, and, most of all perhaps, by the memories of common glories and common sufferings. The bonds which hold a nation together are sentimental and spiritual, and no nation has ever been welded together by stronger moral and spiritual bonds than the Jewish nation—bonds so strong, indeed, that the Jews have remained a State within a State, and that the members of the ghettos all over the world have remained denizens of the same ideal commonwealth.
V
The Jews are a prolific race, and they have always obeyed the Biblical command, "increase and multiply." Of late years the Jewish birth-rate has fallen considerably, but that decrease is more than compensated by the decrease in ​infant mortality. It is difficult to get reliable statistics, but there are probably more than twelve millions of Jews in both hemispheres.
Their geographical distribution brings out some striking facts. In the first place, the majority of Jews are congregated in large towns. Of the two million American Jews, nearly one million are settled in New York City. This is, of course, partly due to the fact that the Jews have generally been divorced from agricultural pursuits. It is also due to the gregarious instinct of a weak and persecuted people.
In the second place, the bulk of the Jews still live within the limits of the ancient kingdom of Poland (see map facing page 153). Whereas the Jewish population of Palestine is only sixty thousand, the Jewish population in Greater Poland is over five millions; that is to say, for every Jew living in Palestine there are nearly a hundred Jews living in Poland. Poland, therefore, must be considered as the geographical centre of Israel. In Poland they are still living under the old conditions. They still retain their picturesque costumes, and still keep their old customs. They still live shut up in their ghettos, they still speak their Yiddish ​language, a savoury mixture of German and Hebrew. Of the many strange paradoxes in the romantic history of Israel not the least strange is this, that the Jewish nation should have found a home and refuge in that desolate and remote corner of Eastern Europe once ruled by the Jesuits, and that the destiny of the Jews should have become so closely associated with the fate of a Catholic people, which, like the Jews, has only an ideal existence; which, like the Jews, has been oppressed and suppressed, and which, like the Jews, has asserted its vitality in the face of economic degradation and political martyrdom.
VI
A few essential facts emerge from the most cursory analysis of statistical data, and from the most superficial observation of present-day social and political conditions, and those facts emphatically contradict some widespread assumptions about the Jews.
The first current assumption is that the Jews as a nation are rich. As a matter of fact, the enormous majority of the Jews are wretchedly poor, the enormous majority are a proletariate exploited and sweated by ruthless capitalists. ​Nothing could exceed the misery and squalor of the ghetto of Old Warsaw, unless it be the ghetto of New York.
The second assumption is that the bulk of the Jews have now received equal political rights, and that the persecution of ages has at last come to a close. As a matter of fact, the enormous majority of Jews still suffer from civil and political disabilities. It is only in Anglo-Saxon communities that they have attained to political equality. But even there their position is uncertain, and in the United States there are already clear indications of a rise of anti-Semitism. As for France, the recent formidable epidemic of anti-Semitism and the terrible crisis of the Dreyfus affair clearly show how precarious the condition of the Jews still remains, even under the most favourable conditions. In Germany no Jew before this war could hold a commission in the army or hold a post in the diplomatic service, and they are shut out from the higher ranks of the Civil Service.
But it is especially to the north-east of Europe, inhabited by two-thirds of the Jewish population of the world, that we must look to form a true idea of the present position of the ​Jews. In Roumania they are denied the right of citizenship, notwithstanding the solemn pledges of the Treaty of Berlin inserted by Lord Beaconsfield. In Russia they are still subjected to mediæval oppression. They are periodically expelled and systematically massacred. Jew "baiting" is a political Russian sport, and "pogroms," or organized massacres, are resorted to by the black hundreds with the complicity of the Russian Government whenever the reactionary parties find themselves in a difficulty.
VII
In the course of their tragic history the Jewish nation have revealed certain striking peculiarities which distinguish them from all others. Morally, they are presumably neither better nor worse than other communities. If their morality is inferior in their relations to alien nations, on the other hand their tribal and domestic morality is probably higher. They are sober and thrifty, industrious and charitable. Intellectually, they are one of the most gifted peoples of the world. The Jewish mind has been developed in the hard school of persecution. All through the severe struggle for life ​to which they have been subjected intellect, cunning, shrewdness, were the only weapons that could be opposed to the brutal force of their Christian enemies. Nor ought we to forget that their wandering habits, their linguistic attainments, their world-wide experience, must needs have broadened their outlook, and must have predestined them for their special function as intellectual middlemen and interpreters. Every educated Jew knows half a dozen languages, has travelled in a dozen countries, in each of which he has probably a family connexion. The Jews have always respected intellect and ability. Like the Christian nations, they have had their conflicts between philosophy and theology, between the letter and the spirit. Readers of Mr. Zangwill's "Children of the Ghetto" and "Dreamers of the Ghetto" know that they have had their Obscurantists in the Talmudists and the Kabbalists. They have persecuted their Spinozas and their Mendelssohns. But seldom with the Jews have ideas been at a discount. They may worship money greatly, but they worship intellect more, with the result that in the specifically intellectual professions, in medicine, in law, and in science, the proportion of distinguished Jews is much ​larger than that of Christians. In journalism they have attained a redoubtable position; they may be said to control the world's Press, and through the Press they control public opinion and public policy.
Keen and subtle as the Jewish intellect has been, and occasionally powerfully constructive, from the days of Spinoza to the days of Bergson, it was, perhaps, to be expected that they should be even more successful in destruction than in construction. As has been pointed out by a French critic, Monsieur Muret, the Jews have ever been heralds of revolt. In Slav countries they have played a conspicuous part in the revolutionary movement. Even in Germany they have been in the forefront of progressive politics. The German Socialists have produced leading men of action, like Liebknecht and Bebel, but practically all the thinking heads of the social democracy have been Israelites—Lassalle and Marx, Engels and Singer, Kautsky, and Bernstein.
VIII
Of all the peculiar Jewish characteristics, the capacity for finance is the most conspicuous. Almost from the beginning of the diaspora the ​Jews have been the moneylenders and usurers of the world. And it is because of their propensity to usury as much as for their national exclusivism that they have drawn upon themselves the hatred of the community.
Of course, the Jews argue, and rightly argue, that they have been compelled to become the cosmopolitan moneylenders, simply because they have been systematically debarred by Christian intolerance from any other profession. They could not be agriculturists, because they were not allowed to own land, because land in the Middle Ages was only held by military tenure. They could not be artizans, because they could not be admitted to the semi-religious trade guilds and corporations. They could not be soldiers, because they were not allowed into the army on equal conditions.
But there is a further plea of justification which may be adduced by the Jews. The ultimate reason why the Jew became the inevitable broker was the fact that moneylending was strictly forbidden to Christians, both by the Canon Law and the Civil Law. The Roman Catholic Church, acting on the counsel of perfection contained in Luke vi, 35, prohibited all lending out of money at any interest ​whatsoever. To lend money to the necessitous was a work of piety, hence the origin of the "Mont de Piété," or public gratuitous pawnshop, which even to-day still retains the spirit of the original institution, and which is peculiar to Roman Catholic countries. The Roman Catholic Church took the heroic and quixotic policy of branding all acceptance of interest as usury. It was a suicidal policy, for it paralyzed the trade of the Middle Ages. It proved an impossible policy, because the Catholic precept had to be constantly infringed, and it was violated even by Bishops and Popes. Popes were compelled to appeal to Jewish usurers in their financial need, as they were compelled to appeal to Jewish physicians in their physical need. Whole libraries of casuistical treatises were written trying to relax the original Catholic precept, and to reconcile it with the practical requirements of the day. The final result was that, first, the Jews and, later on, the Lombards and Cahorsins obtained the monopoly of European finance. The Mediæval Church reasoned with regard to the Jewish moneylender as the modern State reasons with regard to the prostitute. We are told that prostitution is an inevitable evil. Therefore some women must be set ​apart, and their infamous but necessary trade must be regulated. Similarly, moneylending is an inevitable evil; therefore some people the Jews must be allowed to practise it. But their odious business must be strictly controlled, and they must be periodically deprived of part of their spoils.
IX
Mediæval intolerance has gone. Religious persecution and religious wars have ceased. Yet the Jewish problem remains as acute as ever. Politically, it remains as acute because the national exclusivism of the circumsized people still survives. The Jews still consider themselves as exiles in the land where they choose to settle. Economically, the Jewish problem is even more acute than ever, because the enormous development of national and international finance has given to the Jewish people opportunities which they never had before.
National exclusivism and international finance, and not religious intolerance, are the root causes of anti-Semitism, and as long as those causes are operative the effect will remain. As long as the Jews constitute distinct colonies ​within the community, as long as the Jews specialize in the predatory and parasitic activities of finance, so long shall we witness outbursts of anti-Semitic feeling.
But signs are not wanting that far-reaching changes are taking place. Intermarriages between Jews and Christians have, as we pointed out, enormously developed in recent years; so rapidly, indeed, have they developed that Professor Ruppin, in his recent striking book, announces the impending absorption of the Jewish people. On the other hand, the exploitation of capitalism is threatened by the universal advance of Socialism and the awakening of the social conscience. With the decrease of the omnipotence of capitalism the power of the Jews will also decrease. It has been said that the Jew is a microbe which only attacks unsound constitutions, but which is harmless to healthy constitutions. This much is true, that the Jew is not a cause, but a result. It is the bad constitution of the body politic which develops the bad qualities of the Jew. The Jews cannot be held responsible for the tyranny of modern capitalism, even though they have profited by it. On the contrary, no writers have denounced ​more fiercely than Jewish writers the iniquity of modern conditions.
With the breakdown of Jewish national exclusivism, with the dawn of social justice, the last vestiges of anti-Semitism will probably disappear, and the Jewish problem will solve itself.
X
But the Jewish problem cannot solve itself in other parts of the world as long as it has not found a solution in Russia, which is the new Palestine, which is the very heart and centre of Israel. The Jewish problem cannot solve itself as long as five million Hebrews remain the victims of a most odious mediæval oppression. Unfortunately, in the course of the last twenty years, the position of the Jew in Russia has not become better, rather has it become worse. The Jew is still cooped up within that huge Polish ghetto called the "Pale." He is still forbidden access to the land. He is still tracked by the police and periodically decimated by organized massacre. And the pogroms are becoming more frequent and more savage. He is still forbidden entrance to the Civil Service. He is still largely excluded ​from the Liberal Professions, only from 5 to 7 per cent. of Jews being allowed into the Russian Gymnasia and the Universities. The Jew has had no share in the partial political enfranchisement which followed the Russo-Japanese War, and he is suffering throughout the present war more than any other nation, more even than the martyred Belgians and Serbians.
XI
The greatest religious philosopher and political leader the Russian race has produced, the Catholic Vladimir Soloviov, has put in a nutshell the arguments in favor of the Jews:
"Poland presents a remarkable phenomenon. The social elements there are represented by separate nationalities. The Russians constitute the agricultural population of the villages. The Upper Class is constituted by Poles. The Industrial population of the towns by Hebrews. If the Hebrews, not only under favourable but generally under most unfavourable circumstances, manage to establish a firm hold in the cities of Western Russia, that simply proves that they are more capable than the Russian peasant or the Polish nobility to constitute an industrial class. If, on the other hand, such an ​industrial class in every country instead of helping the agricultural population is found to live at their expense, it is not to be wondered at that the Hebrews, wherever they constitute the whole industrial class, should also appear as the exploiters of the people. It is not they who created such a situation. They were schooled too long in the school of the Polish nobility which equally oppressed both the Jews and the Polish serfs. But quite apart from the Polish nobility, is not the selfish oppression of one class over the others the universal rule of social life in the whole of Europe? If our peasants suffered from the oppression of the Jews, who only exist by virtue of the helpless social economic situation of those peasants, that situation was not caused by the Hebrews. The needy peasant goes to the Jew simply because his own people refuse to help him. And if the Jews who assist the peasant exploit him, they do not do so because they are Jews, but because they have obtained the monopoly of national finance which is entirely based on the exploitation of the people. The evil is not due to the Jew, nor to finance, but to the immoral supremacy of finance, and that supremacy was ​not created by the Jews. It is not the Jew who separated the provinces of political economy from that of morality and religion. It is civilized Europe which, having based political economy on impious and inhuman principles, reproaches the Jew because they follow their principles."
XII
The worst of the present legislation against the Jew is that it defeats its purpose. It is not only odious; it is gratuitous. It is futile. It is politically insane. We are told that the Jew must be denied access to the land for the protection of the helpless moujik, but the present legislation by preventing the Jew from owning land, from becoming an independent farmer, makes him instead a constant menace to the independent farmer, dooms him to the odious profession of a usurer and a publican. The Jew may not own land, but he may lend money at usurer's interest to the peasant who owns the land, and may thus have the peasant and landowner at his mercy.
We are told that if the Jew were admitted in any large numbers to the Liberal Professions, ​he would in a short time invade every career to the detriment of the Russian born. That assumption is a gratuitous insult to the intelligence and the ability of the Russian people. It is an admission that a Russian doctor, a Russian lawyer, a Russian engineer have no chance in any fair competition with the Hebrew. I cannot believe that the Russian is so hopelessly inferior to the Hebrew. I do not dread competition for the Russian. I believe, on the contrary, that all that the Russian people want is competition and not Government protection. Competition with the Jew, so far from being detrimental to the Russian, will awaken his dormant capacities. One explanation of the present arbitrary legislation, and that is probably one reason why it is being retained, is that it gives both the police and the bureaucracy unlimited opportunities of graft. It is an open secret that the regulations which restrict to the proportion of 5 to 7 per cent. the admission of the Jew to the Higher Government Schools, are being constantly evaded, and that wealthy Jews by paying a sufficient bribe to the authorities can always secure admission.
XIII
We are further told that the Jew must not be given the same civil rights as the Russian, because even when he becomes naturalized he remains an alien. But the present legislation only succeeds in making him an irresponsible enemy of Russia, whilst at the same time keeping him settled in huge numbers in one of the most vital parts of the Empire, like a festering wound in the Russian body politic.
If it be really true that the Jew is a hostile alien, and that he can never be assimilated, then the logical policy for the Government would be to expel that alien even as Louis XIV expelled the Huguenots, even as the Spaniards expelled the Moors. But the existing legislation inflicts a maximum of suffering without producing any political result.
We are finally told that even as the Russian people must be protected by depriving the Jew of civil rights, so the Russian State must be protected by depriving the Jew of political rights. For the Jew is a Revolutionist, an Anarchist and no Government could be carried on if he were conceded full political rights. ​But here, again, the present legislation entirely defeats its purpose. It only makes the Jew into a passionate opponent of the existing Government. If it be difficult to govern with the Jew, it is impossible to govern with the Jew as an irreconcilable enemy. For even the strongest Russian Government is not a match for the Jew. For the Jew is able to use against the Government all the driving power of hatred and revenge, all the resources of a subtle intellect, all the power of the Press, and he also has the power of turning against the established authorities the two most potent forces in the world—international finance and international opinion, as the allies are finding out to their cost.
XIV
There is only one solution to the Jewish problem, and that is a complete reversal of the old policy of intolerance and inequality and iniquity, an uncompromising acceptance of the principle that liberty with all its risks and perils is preferable to protection with all its false security.
That solution is imperative not only in the interests of the Jew but in the interests of the ​Russian people, and in the interests of political freedom generally. A political freedom which would be doled out to some sections of the people and withheld from others, a freedom of the Press which would be granted to some papers and refused to others, a religious toleration which would be conceded to the Catholics and refused to the Jews or the Armenians will not work. There is a limit to political contradiction, even in a land of contrasts such as Russia. The Russian bureaucracy and the Russian Church must give up their traditional policy of racial and religious antagonism, or they will inevitably revert to the evil of their ways.
And let us hear no more of the feeble argument that the Russian people have perfectly legitimate grievances against the Jews, that they have old scores to pay off. I know they have. It would have been a miracle, indeed, if the degrading legislation imposed for centuries upon the inmates of the ghetto and the ghastly persecution they have suffered had not left its mark on the Hebrew race. But what have a thousand legitimate grievances to do with the concession of political rights? In so far as the Jews act dishonourably in private life, they ​must be prepared to pay the penalty, and no State can protect them against the contempt or the hatred of the community. But the retaliation of individuals for injustice done in private life cannot be allowed to the Government. The argument of revenge or retribution is therefore entirely irrelevant. To indulge in a spirit of vindictiveness is not a duty of the State. The State is not a Corsican community organized for vendetta, it is not even an instrument of moral retaliation. Its function is not to dispense retributive justice. The one primary and essential duty of a State is to secure equal and civil rights to all its citizens, and the Russian State of to-morrow will have to discharge that duty to all the members of the Hebrew race.