The Vexing 'Jewish Question': A Nineteenth-Century Scholar's View
By Goldwin Smith
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Although today it is considered tactless if not hateful to speak openly of a "Jewish question," the often thorny matter of relations between Jews and non-Jews in society is a real issue that has bedeviled countless governments and scholars for centuries. In the following essay, a prominent British scholar tackles this issue with a forthrightness, perceptiveness and courage that is all too rare among academics in our own day.
The author is Goldwin Smith (1823-1910), a prominent 19th-century educator, historian and author. He was educated at Oxford University, where he became regius professor of modern history in 1858. Moving to the United States in 1868, he joined the faculty of Cornell University as a professor of English literature and Constitutional History. He moved to Toronto in 1871, where he continued to write prolifically until his death.
A "classic liberal," Smith was ardently pro-democratic, anti-imperialist and anti-militaristic. An enemy of slavery and an admirer of Abraham Lincoln, he championed the cause of the North during the American Civil War. His booklet, Does the Bible Sanction American Slavery? (1863) had considerable impact on public opinion in Britain. As a life-long supporter of "Anglo-Saxon" unity, he worked for close ties between Britain, the United States and Canada.
According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1957 edition), Smith's "principal historical writings -- The United Kingdom: a Political History (1899), and The United States: an Outline of Political History (1893) -- make no claim to original research, but are remarkable examples of terse and brilliant narrative." The Columbia Encyclopedia (second edition) says that he "earned a position of great respect in the United States, Canada and Great Britain for his educational and social work." Among the available profiles of his life is a biography by Elisabeth Wallace, Goldwin Smith: Victorian Liberal (Univ. of Toronto Press, 1957).
The following essay, originally entitled "The Jewish Question," is reprinted here from the second, revised edition of his book, Essays on Questions of the Day, published in 1894 by Macmillan (New York and London), and reprinted in 1972 by Books for Libraries Press (Freeport, New York).
In this bold sketch, Smith shows that the "Jewish Question" has persisted since ancient times -- over many centuries and in diverse cultures. His observations and presentation of facts point up parallel problems in own era.
He establishes that horrific and much-publicized accounts of anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian empire during the 1880s were grossly exaggerated, and debunks the widely accepted charge that these anti-Jewish outbursts were rooted in religious bigotry and intolerance.
The recurring friction between Jews and non-Jews through the ages, Smith persuasively argues, is due primarily not to the defects or iniquities of non-Jews, but rather is a lamentable but nevertheless quite understandable reaction to Jewish behavior. The most galling features of this behavior, he contends, are rooted in the distinctively tribalistic character of the Jewish religion as laid out in the Talmud and the Old Testament.
As a solution to this seemingly interminable problem, Smith proposes that Jews should "de-nationalize" themselves by renouncing Jewish tribalism and particularism. In other words, he urges comprehensive Jewish assimilation into society -- a "solution" to the "Jewish question" that is also implicit in traditional American liberalism.
In the following reprint, information originally provided by Smith in footnotes has been incorporated into the text in parentheses. Subheads have been added between paragraphs, and some explanatory words have been added to the text in brackets. A few portions have been deleted, as shown by ellipses.
-- Mark Weber
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Jewish ascendancy and the anti-Semitic movement provoked by it form an important feature of the European situation, and are beginning to excite attention in America. Mr. Arnold White, Baron Hirsch's commissioner, says, in a plea for the Russian Jews ("The Truth about the Russian Jew," Contemporary Review, May 1892), that "almost without exception the press throughout Europe is in Jewish hands, and is largely produced by Jewish brains;" that "international finance is captive to Jewish energy and skill;" that in England the fall of the Barings has left the house of Rothschild alone in its supremacy; and that in every line the Jews are fast becoming our masters. Wind and tide, in a money-loving age, are in favor of the financial race.
At the same time the anti-Semitic movement gains ground. From Russia, Germany, Austria, and the Danubian Principalities, it spreads to the Ionian Islands; it has broken out in France; symptoms of it have appeared even in the United States. Yet there is a persistent misapprehension of the real nature of the agitation. It is assumed that the quarrel is religious. The anti-Semites are supposed to be a party of fanatics renewing the persecutions to which the Jews were exposed on account of their faith in the dark ages, and every one who, handling the question critically, fails to show undivided sympathy with the Israelites is set down as a religious persecutor. The Jews naturally foster this impression, and, as Mr. Arnold White tells us, the press of Europe is in their hands.
Pogroms in Russia
In 1880, anti-Semitic disturbances broke out in Russia. A narrative of them entitled "The Persecution of the Jews in Russia," was put forth (in 1881) by the Jewish community in England as an appeal to the British heart. In that narrative the Russian Christians were charged with having committed the most fiendish atrocities on the most enormous scale. A tract of country equal in area to the British Islands and France combined had, it was averred, been the scene of horrors theretofore perpetrated only in times of war. Men had been ruthlessly murdered, tender infants had been dashed on the stones or roasted alive in their own homes, married women had been made the prey of a brutal lust which had in many cases caused their death, and young girls had been violated in sight of their relatives by soldiers who should have been guardians of their honor. Whole streets inhabited by Jews had been razed, and the Jewish quarters of towns had been systematically fired.
In one place, Elizabethgrad [or Elizavetgrad, now Kirovohrad, Ukraine], 30 Jewesses at once had been outraged, two young girls in dread of violation had thrown themselves from the windows, and an old man, who was attempting to save his daughter from a fate worse than death, had been flung from the roof, while 20 soldiers proceeded to work their will on the maiden. This was a specimen of atrocities which had been committed over the whole area. The most atrocious charge of all was that against the Christian women of Russia, who were accused of assisting their friends to violate the Jewesses by holding the victims down, their motive being, as the manifesto suggests, jealousy of the superiority of the Jewesses in dress. The government was charged with criminal sympathy, the local authorities generally with criminal inaction, and some of the troops with active participation.
The British heart responded to the appeal. Great public meetings were held, at one of which the Archbishop of Canterbury, with a Roman Cardinal, as the representative of religious liberty in general, and especially of opposition to Jew-burning, at his side, denounced the persecuting bigotry of the Russian Christians. Indignant addresses were largely signed. Russia was accused of re-enacting the worst crimes of the Middle Ages. It was taken for granted on all sides that religious fanaticism was the cause of the riots.
Exaggerated Accounts
Russia, as usual, was silent. But the British government directed its consuls at the different points to report upon the facts. The reports composed two Blue Books, in which, as very few probably took the pains to look into them, the unpopular truth lies buried (Correspondence Respecting the Treatment of Jews in Russia, Nos. 1 and 2, 1882, 1883).
Those who did read them learned, in the first place, that though the riots were deplorable and criminal, the Jewish account was in most cases exaggerated, and in some to an extravagant extent. The damage to Jewish property at Odessa, rated in the Jewish account at 1,137,381 rubles, or, according to their higher estimates, 3,000,000 rubles, was rated, Consul-General Stanley tells us, by a respectable Jew on the spot at 50,000 rubles, while the Consul-General himself rates it at 20,000. At Elizabethgrad, instead of whole streets being razed to the ground, only one hut had been unroofed. It appeared that few Jews, if any, had been intentionally killed, though some died of injuries received in the riots. There were conflicts between the Jews who defended their houses and the rioters.
The outrages on women, by which public indignation in England had been most fiercely aroused, and of which, according to the Jewish accounts, there had been a frightful number, no less than 30 in one place and 25 in another, appeared, after careful inquiries by the consuls, to have been very rare. This is the more remarkable because the riots commonly began with the sacking of the gin shops, which were kept by the Jews, so that the passions of the mob must have been inflamed by drink. The horrible charge brought in the Jewish manifesto against the Russian women, of having incited men to outrage Jewesses and held the Jewesses down, is found to be utterly baseless. The charge of roasting children alive also falls to the ground. So does the charge of violating a Jew's wife and then setting fire to his house. The Jewish manifesto states that a Jewish innkeeper was cooped in one of his own barrels and cast into the Dnieper. This turns out to be a fable, the village which was the alleged scene of it being ten miles from the Dnieper and near no other river of consequence.
The Russian peasant, Christian though he may be, is entitled to justice. As a rule, while ignorant and often intemperate, he is good-natured. There was much brutality in his riot, but fiendish atrocity there was not, and if he struck savagely, perhaps he had suffered long. For the belief that the mob was "doing the will of the Tsar," in other words, that the government was at the bottom of the rising, there does not appear to have been a shadow of foundation. The action of the authorities was not in all cases equally prompt. In some cases it was culpably slack. At Warsaw the commandant held back, though as Lord Granville, the British ambassador, bears witness, his motive for hesitation was humanity. But many of the rioters were shot down or bayoneted by the troops, hundreds were flogged, some were imprisoned, and some were sent to Siberia. That any of the military took part in the riots seems to be a fiction. It was not likely that the Russian government, menaced as it is by revolutionary conspiracy, would encourage insurrection.
People of the upper class, who fancied that in the agitation they saw the work of Socialists, though they might dislike the Jews, would hardly sympathize with the rioters. Efforts were made by the government to restore Jewish property, and handsome sums were subscribed for the relief of the sufferers. Yet those who, while they heartily condemned outrage, were willing to accept proof that the Christian men and women of Russia had not behaved like demons, were saluted as modern counterparts of Haman by an eminent Rabbi, who, if the objects of his strictures had cared to retort, might have been asked whether the crucifixion of Haman's ten sons and the slaughter of 75,000 of the enemies of Israel in one day, which, after the lapse of so many centuries, the feast of Purim still joyously commemorates, were not horrors as great as any which have been shown to have actually occurred at Odessa or Elizabethgrad.
Cause of the Troubles
The most important part of the evidence given in the consuls' reports, however, is that which relates to the cause of the troubles. At Warsaw, where the people are Roman Catholics, there appears to have been a certain amount of passive sympathy with the insurgents on religious grounds. But everywhere else the concurrent testimony of the consuls is that the source of the agitation was economical and social, not religious. Bitterness produced by the exactions of the Jew, envy of his wealth, irritation at the display of it in such things as the fine dresses of his women, jealousy of his ascendancy, combined in the lowest of the mob with the love of plunder, were the motives of the people for attacking him, not hatred of his faith. Vice-Consul Wagstaff, who seems to have paid particular attention to the question and made the most careful inquiry, after paying a tribute to the sober, laborious, thrifty character and the superior intelligence of the Jew, and ascribing to these his increasing monopoly of commerce, proceeds (in Correspondence Respecting the Treatment of Jews in Russia, No. 1, 1882, pp. 11, 12):
It is chiefly as brokers or middlemen that the Jews are so prominent. Seldom a business transaction of any kind takes place without their intervention, and from both sides they receive compensation. To enumerate some of their other occupations, constantly denounced by the public: they are the principal dealers in spirits; keepers of "vodka" (drinking) shops and houses of ill-fame; receivers of stolen goods; illegal pawnbrokers and usurers. A branch they also succeed in is as government contractors. With their knowledge of handling money, they collude with unscrupulous officials in defrauding the State to vast amounts annually. In fact, the malpractices of some of the Jewish community have a bad influence on those whom they come in contact with.
It must, however, be said that there are many well educated, highly respectable, and honorable Jews in Russia, but they form a small minority. This class is not treated upon in this paper. They thoroughly condemn the occupations of their lower brethren, and one of the results of the late disturbances is noticed in the movement at present amongst the Jews. They themselves acknowledge the abuses practised by some of their own members, and suggest remedial measures to allay the irritation existing among the working classes.
Another thing the Jews are accused of is that there exists among them a system of boycotting; they use their religion for business purposes. This is expressed by the words "koul," or "kagal," and "kherim." For instance, in Bessarabia, the produce of a vineyard is drawn for by lot, and falls, say to Jabob Levy; the other Jews of the district cannot compete with Levy, who buys the wine at his own price. In the leasing by auction of government and provincial lands, it is invariably a Jew who outbids the others and afterwards re-lets plots to the peasantry at exorbitant prices. Very crying abuses of farming out land have lately come to light and greatly shocked public opinion. Again, where estates are farmed by Jews, it is distressing to see the pitiable condition in which they are handed over on the expiration of the lease. Experience also shows they are very bad colonists.
Their fame as usurers is well known. Given a Jewish recruit with a few rubles' capital, it can be worked out, mathematically, what time it will take him to become the money-lender of his company or regiment, from the drummer to the colonel. Take the case of a peasant: if he once gets into the hands of this class, he is irretrievably lost. The proprietor, in his turn, from a small loan gradually mortgages and eventually loses his estate. A great deal of landed property in south Russia has of late years passed into the hands of the Israelites, but principally into the hands of intelligent and sober peasants.
From first to last, the Jew has his hand in everything. He advances the seed for sowing, which is generally returned in kind -- quarters for bushels. As harvest time comes round, money is required to gather in the crops. This is sometimes advanced on hard conditions; but the peasant has no choice; there is no one to lend him money, and it is better to secure something than to lose all. Very often the Jew buys the whole crop as it stands in the field on his own terms. It is thus seen that they themselves do not raise agricultural products, but they reap the benefits of others' labor, and steadily become rich, while proprietors are gradually getting ruined. In their relation to Russia they are compared to parasites that have settled on a plant not vigorous enough to throw them off, and which is being sapped of its vitality.
The peasants, the vice-consul tells us, often say, when they look at the property of a Jew, "That is my blood." In confirmation of his view he cites the list of demands formulated by the peasants and laid before a mixed committee of inquiry into the causes of the disorder. These demands are all economical or social, with the exception of the complaint that Russian girls in Jewish service forget their religion and with it lose their morals. Everything, in short, seems to bear out the statement of the Russian Minister of the Interior, in a manifesto given in the Blue Book, that "the movement had its main cause in circumstances purely economical;" provided that to "economical" we add "social," and include all that is meant by the phrase "hatred of Jewish usurpation," used in another document.
Vice-Consul Harford, at Sebastopol, is in contact with the Jews of the Crimea, who, he says, are of a superior order, while some of them are not Talmudic Jews, but belong to the mild and Scriptural sect of the Karaites (Correspondence Respecting the Treatment of Jews in Russia, No. 2, 1883, p. 17) He says that in his quarter all goes well:
The spirit of antagonism that animates the Russian against the Jew is, in my opinion, in no way to be traced to the difference of creed. In this part of Russia, where we have more denominations of religion than in any other part, I have never, during a residence of 14 years, observed the slightest indication or sectarianism in any class. The peasant, though ignorant and superstitious, is so entirely free from bigotry that even the openly displayed contempt of the fanatical Mohammedan [Muslim] Crim Tartar for the rites and ceremonies of the Russian Church fails to excite in him the slightest feeling of personal animosity; his own feeling with regard to other religions is perfect indifference; he enters a mosque or synagogue just as he would enter a theatre, and regards the ceremony in much the same manner that an English peasant would, neither knowing nor caring to know whether they worshipped God or the moon.
As it is evident from this that race and creed are to the minds of the peasantry of no more consequence than they would be to a Zulu, the only conclusion is that the antipathy is against the usurer, and as civilization can only be expected to influence the rising generation of Russian peasantry, the remedy rests with the Jew, who, if he will not refrain from speculating (in lawless parts of the Empire) on ignorance and drunkenness, must be prepared to defend himself and his property from the certain and natural result of such a policy.
An Official Russian View
All this confirms the statement of M. Pierre Botkine, Secretary of the Russian Legation in Washington, who, writing in the Century Magazine (Feb. 1893), says:
Replying to the accusation against Russia in the matter of an alleged religious intolerance, I must first point out a great error I have repeatedly encountered here. The promulgation of the laws and regulations against [that is, enforcing] the laws is being generally ascribed in America to persecution on the part of the Orthodox Church. But the Hebrew question in Russia is neither religious nor political; it is purely an economical and administrative question. The actual meaning of the anti-Semitic measures prescribed by our government is not animosity to the religion of the Jews; neither are those measures a deliberate hunting down of the feeble by the powerful; they are an effort to relieve the Empire of the injurious struggle against those particular traits of Hebrew character that were obstructing the progress of our people along their own line of natural development. It may be said in general, that the anti-Semitic movement in Russia is a demonstration by the non-Hebrew part of the population against tendencies of Hebrews which have characterized them the world over, and to which they adhere in Russia.
The Hebrew, as we know him in Russia, is "the eternal Jew." Without a country of his own, and, as a rule, without any desire to become identified with the country he for the time inherits, he remains, as for hundreds of years he has been, morally unchangeable and without a faculty for adapting himself to sympathy with the people of the race which surrounds him. He is not homogeneous with us in Russia; he does not feel or desire solidarity with us. In Russia he remains a guest only -- a guest from long ago, and not an integral part of the community. When these guests without affinity became too many in Russia, when in serious localities their numbers were found injurious to the welfare and the prosperity of our own people as a whole, when they had grown into many wide-spreading ramifications of influence and power, and abused their opportunities as traders with or lenders of money to the poor -- when, in a word, they became dangerous and prejudicial to our people -- is there anything revolting or surprising in the fact that our government found it necessary to restrict their activity? We did not expel the Jews from the Empire, as is often mistakenly charged, though we did restrict their rights as to localities of domicile and as to kinds of occupations ... Is it just that those who have never had to confront such a situation should blame us for those measures?
Whatever may be said against the restrictions as to residence and occupation laid on the Jews in Russia, from the point of view of policy or humanity, it seems certain that their aim is economical and social, not religious. They fall under the same head with measures taken by the people of the United States to guard their nationality and their character against the invasion of the Chinese. There is apparently no expulsion of Jews from the provinces of Russia which were originally their chief settlements, and which they have hitherto been permitted by law to inhabit. They are only forbidden to spread and extend their financial operations over the rest of the Empire.
The Role of the Russian Orthodox Church
Persecution is not the tendency of the Russian or of the Church to which he belongs. The Eastern Church, while it has been superstitious and somewhat torpid, has been tolerant, and, compared with other orthodox churches, free from the stain of persecution. It has not been actively proselytizing, nor sent forth crusaders, unless the name of crusades can be given to the wars with the Turks, the main motive for which, though the pretext may have been religious, probably has been territorial ambition, and which were certainly not crusades when waged by Catherine, the patroness of Diderot and the correspondent of Voltaire. This is the more remarkable because the Russians had a struggle for their land with the Tartars like that which Spain had with the Moors.
Arthur P. Stanley, D.D., in his Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church (3rd ed., p. 35) dilates upon this characteristic of the Eastern Christians. He says that "a respectful reverence for every manifestation of religious feeling has withheld them from violent attacks on the rights of conscience and led them to extend a kindly patronage to forms of faith most removed from their own;" and he notices that the great philosophers of antiquity are honored by portraits in their churches as heralds of the gospel.
Sir D. Mackenzie Wallace, M.A., who is the best authority, while he admits the inferiority of the Russian priests in education, testifies (in Russia, pp. 58, 59) to their innocence of persecution, saying that "if they have less learning, culture, and refinement than the Roman Catholic priesthood, they have at the same time infinitely less fanaticism, less spiritual pride, and less intolerance toward the adherents of other faiths." The educated classes he represents as generally indifferent to theological questions. The peasantry are superstitious and blindly attached to their own faith, which they identify with their nationality; but they think it natural and right that a man of a different nationality should have a different religion. In Nizhnii-Novgorod, the city of the great fair, the Mahometan [Muslim] Mosque or the Armenian church and the Orthodox cathedral stand side by side. (See Hare's Studies in Russia, p. 360.) At one end of a village is the church, at the other the mosque, and the Mahometan spreads his prayer carpet on the deck of a steamer full of Orthodox Russians.
The ecclesiastical constitution of Russia is incompatible with religious equality, and therefore with full religious liberty. The Tsar is practically, though not theoretically, head of the Church as well as of the State; the commander of Holy Russia as a Caliph is the Commander of the Faithful. In the interest rather of national unity than of religious orthodoxy he restrains dissent. But it is against innovation and schism within the pale of the State Church rather than against misbelief that his power has been exerted. Some Tsars, such as Peter the Great and the Tsarina Catherine II, have been Liberals, and have patronized merit without regard to creed. Nicholas was full of orthodox sentiment and in all things a martinet, yet Sir Mackenzie Wallace has a pleasant anecdote of his commending the Jewish sentinel at his door who conscientiously refused to respond to the Tsar's customary salutation on Easter Day. No Tsar, however bigoted, has been guilty of such persecution as Philip II. of Spain, Ferdinand of Austria, or Louis XIV [of France]. Russia has had no Inquisition.
That the Jews have had liberty of worship and education, the existence of 6,319 synagogues and of 77 Jewish schools supported by the [Russian] State, besides 1,165 private and communal schools, seems clearly to prove. (See Statesman's Year-Book, 1891, pp. 854-856.) It does not seem to be alleged that any attempt has been made by the government at forcible conversion. Whatever may have been the harshness or even cruelty of the measures which it has taken to confine the Jews to their original districts and prevent their spreading over its dominions, its object appears to have been to protect the people against economical oppression and preserve the national character from being sapped by an alien influence, not to suppress the Jewish religion. The law excluding the Jews from Great Russia in fact belongs to the same category as the law of the United States excluding the Chinese.
Jews in the Roman Empire
That Christian fanaticism at all events was not the sole source of the unpopularity of the Jews might have been inferred from the fact that the relation was no better between the Jew and the heathen races during the period of declining polytheism, when religious indifference prevailed and beneath the vast dome of the Roman Empire the religions of many nations slept and moldered side by side. Gibbon, well qualified to speak, for he was himself a citizen of the Roman Empire in sentiment, after narrating the massacres committed by the Jews on the Gentiles in Africa and Cyprus, has expressed in flamboyant phrase the hatred of the Roman world for the Jews, whom he designates as the "implacable enemies, not only of the Roman government but of human kind." (Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chap. xiv.)
Tacitus speaks of the Jews as enemies of all races but their own (adversus omnes alios hostile odium, in Histories, V, v), and Juvenal, in a well-known passage, speaks of them as people who would not show a wayfarer his road or guide the thirsty to a spring if he were not of their own faith. Those who maintain that there is nothing in the character, habits, or disposition of the Jew to provoke antipathy have to bring the charge of fanatical prejudice not only against the Russians or against Christendom, but against mankind.
Central Europe
In Germany, in Austria, in Roumania, in all the countries of Europe where this deplorable contest of races is going on, the cause of quarrel appears to be fundamentally the same. It appears to be economical and social, not religious, or religious only in a secondary degree. Mr. S. Baring-Gould, M.A. (in Germany, Present and Past, Vol. I, pp. 114, 127), tells us that in Germany "there is scarce a village without some Jews in it, who do not cultivate land themselves, but lie in wait like spiders for the failing Bauer." A German who knew the peasantry well said to Mr. Gould that "he doubted whether there were a happier set of people under the sun;" but he added, after a pause, "so long as they are out of the clutch of the Jew."
Of the German, as well as of the Russian, it may be said that he is not a religious persecutor. If persecution of a sanguinary or atrocious kind has sullied his annals, the arm of it was the house of Austria, with its Spanish connection, and the head was the world-roving Jesuit. In the case of Hungary, Mr. John Paget, who is a Liberal and advocates a Liberal policy towards the Jews, says (in Hungary and Translyvania, Vol. I, p. 136): "The Jew is no less active in profiting by the vices and necessities of the peasant than by those of the noble. As sure as he gains a settlement in a village the peasantry become poor." "In Austrian Poland," says a Times reviewer, "the worst of the peasant's sluggish content is that it has given him over to the exactions of the Jews." "The Jews," he adds, "are in fact the lords of the country." They are lords not less alien to the people than the Norman was to the Saxon, and perhaps not always more merciful, though in their hands is the writ of ejection instead of the conqueror's sword.
If we cross the Mediterranean the same thing meets us. In Joseph Thomson's Travels in the Atlas and Southern Morocco (pp. 418, 419) we read:
As money-lenders the Jews are as maggots and parasites, aggravating and feeding on the diseases of the land. I do not know, for my part, which exercises the greatest tyranny and oppression, the Sultan or the Jew -- the one the embodiment of the foulest misgovernment, the other the essence of a dozen Shylocks, demanding, ay, and getting, not only his pound of flesh, but also the blood and nerves. By his outrageous exactions the Sultan drives the Moor into the hands of the Jew, who affords him a temporary relief by lending him the necessary money on incredibly exorbitant terms. Once in the money-lender's clutches, he rarely escapes till he is squeezed dry, when he is either thrown aside, crushed and ruined, or cast into a dungeon, where, fettered and starved, he is probably left to die a slow and horrible death.
To the position of the Jews in Morocco it would be difficult to find a parallel. Here we have a people alien, despised, and hated, actually living in the country under immeasurably better conditions than the dominant race, while they suck, and are assisted to suck, the very lifeblood of their hosts. The aim of every Jew is to toil not, neither to spin, save the coils which as money-lender he may weave for the entanglement of his necessitous victims.
In the United States
Even if we cross the Atlantic we find the same phenomenon. Mr. Frederick Law Olmstead, in his Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom (2nd ed., pp. 252, 253), says:
A swarm of Jews has within the last ten years settled in nearly every Southern town, many of them men of no character, opening cheap clothing and trinket shops, ruining or driving out of business many of the old retailers, and engaging in an unlawful trade with the simple negroes, which is found very profitable.
And again (pp. 321, 322):
If his [the planter's] first crop proves a bad one he must borrow money of the Jews at New Orleans to pay his first note. They will sell him this on the best terms they can, often at not less than 25 per cent per annum.
In Across the Plains (p. 100), Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson says of the Jews in San Francisco:
Jew storekeepers have already learned the advantage to be gained from this [unlimited credit]; they lead on the farmer into irretrievable indebtedness, and keep him ever after as their bond-slave hopelessly grinding in the mill. So the whirligig of time brings in its revenges, and except that the Jew knows better than to foreclose, you may see Americans bound in the same chains with which they themselves had formerly bound the Mexicans.
These passages were not intended by the writers, nor are they here cited, as general pictures of the Jews, or as pictures of Jews exclusively. In the last, American sharp practice is included. The passages are cited as indications of the real source of the antagonism tending to show that it is economical not religious.
A Dawning Awareness
Light dawned on the writer's mind touching this question when he had been listening with sympathy to speeches in the British House of Commons on the anti-Semitic movement in Roumania, where, as in Russia, the number of Jews is particularly large and the feeling against them is proportionately intense. The Jewish member who appealed to the government on the subject, and the Minister who rose in response to the appeal, had both of them assumed that it was a case of religious persecution, and the Minister especially had dwelt on the mischievous influence of ecclesiastics; with how little justice, so far as the priests of the Eastern Church are oncerned, we have already seen.
The debate over, the writer was accosted by his friend, the late Dr. Humphry Sandwith, distinguished for his share in the defense of Kars [in Northeast Turkey] against the Russians, who knew the Danubian Principalities well. Dr. Sandwith said that the speakers had been entirely mistaken; that religion was not the motive of the agitation; that neither the people nor their priests were given to persecution; that the government had granted aid to a synagogue; but that Jewish usurers got the simple-minded peasants into their toils and sold them out of their homesteads till the peasants would bear it no longer, and an outbreak ensued. Dr. Sandwith, being a thorough-going Liberal, would have been the last man to palliate religious persecution.
Medieval Religious Sensitivities
It is doubtful whether, even in the Middle Ages, the quarrel was not less religious and more economical or social than is supposed. That was the age of religious intolerance; Christian heretics, such as the Albigenses, were persecuted with fully as much cruelty as the Jews. Jews who had ventured to settle in the Catholic communities for the sake of gain, braved the same sort of peril which would have been braved by an enterprising trader who had thrust himself into Japan during its close period. But as a rule, though they were hated, they were not persecuted; they were tolerated and allowed to build their synagogues and worship God in their own way. They were regarded, not like heretics, as religious traitors, but as religious aliens. Their religious blindness, as well as their penal homelessness, was viewed as the act of God. They were privileged in misbelief.
Aquinas expressly lays it down that they are to be tolerated as a useful testimony borne, though by adversaries, to the truth of Christianity (Summa Theologica, Secunda Secundae, Quaest. X, Art. xi). It is not true that the great Doctor of the Middle Ages sanctions the forcible conversion of the children of Jews. He raises the question and decides it in the negative (Summa Theologica, Secunda Secundae, Art. xii). An argument stated by him only to be set aside has been taken for his conclusion. In the Corpus Juris Canoniei it is laid down that Jews shall not be baptized against their will or inclination, since enforced baptism does not make a Christian. Their persons are to be secure from violence, their graves from spoliation, their customary rights from invasion, their festivals from interruption, their servants from abduction, their cemeteries from profanation (Decret. Greg., Lib. V, Tit. vi).
During the Crusades
By the kings, and notably by the Angevin [Plantagenet] kings of England, the Jews were protected as the agents of royal extortion, sucking by usury the money from the people which was afterwards squeezed out of the usurer by the king. Of the common people it is not, so far as we can see, the tendency to persecute on account of religion, however superstitious they may be. It is rather by the possessors of ecclesiastical power and wealth, by Archbishops of Toledo and Prince Bishops of Germany, whom dissent threatens with dispossession, or by kings like Philip II and Louis XIV, under priestly influence, that the engines of persecution are set at work. At the time of the Crusades, Christian fanaticism being excited to frenzy, there were dreadful massacres of Jews, and forced conversions, though no reliance can be placed on the figures of medieval chroniclers, who set down at random 20,000 victims slain, or 200,000 forced conversions.
The Jew at that time was odious not only as a misbeliever in the midst of the Christian camp, whose presence would turn from it the countenance of God, but as a suspected friend and ally at heart of the Oriental power. The Jews must have foreseen the storm, and might have escaped by flight, but they were perhaps tempted by the vast harvest afforded them in the general sale of possessions by the Crusaders to buy equipments, while by that traffic their unpopularity was increased. In ordinary times the main causes of the hatred of the Jews among the common people appear to have been usury and a social arrogance, which was particularly galling on the part of the alien and the enemy of Christ. In the riots the people made for the place in which the Jewish bonds were kept. At York, the scene of the worst anti-Jewish riot in England, the chronicler tells us there were two Jews, Benedict and Joce, who had built in the middle of the city houses like palaces, where they dwelt like princes of their own people and tyrants of the Christians, keeping almost royal state, and exercising harsh tyranny against those whom they oppressed with their usuries. The usury was grinding and ruthless.
In the Chronicle of Jocelin de Brakelond we see how rapidly a debt of 27 pounds, owed to a Jew, grew to 880. Jews at Oxford were forbidden by edict to take more than 43 per cent. So it was generally. Political economy will say that this was justifiable, in the circumstances perhaps useful, and the penalty due to the Christian superstition which made the lending of money at interest an unholy and therefore a perilous trade. Nevertheless, it was hateful, at least sure to engender hate. The Lombards and Cahorsins, who, when the Jews were for a time driven from the field, took up the business, incurred the same hatred, though in their case there was no religious or social feeling to aggravate the unpopularity of the trade. A Spanish Chancellor describes the Jews as the bloodsuckers of the afflicted people, as men who exact fifty per cent, eighty, a hundred, and through whom the land is desolate, their hard hearts being callous to tears and groans, and their ears deaf to petitions for delay. (See The History of the Jews from the War with Rome to the Present Time, by Rev. H. C. Adams, M.A., p. 245) ...
Usury Double Standard and Ostenatious Wealth
The law of the Jews themselves, be it observed, proscribes usury in the case of a tribal brother, permitting it in the case of a stranger. "Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of victuals, usury of anything that is lent upon usury: unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury: that the Lord thy God may bless thee in all that thou settest thine hand to in the land whither thou goest to possess it" (Deuteronomy 23: 19, 20). The Jew, then, on the subject of usury is not less superstitious than the Christian. In truth the Christian superstition may be said to have been derived from the Jewish law. In practicing usury on the Christians among whom he dwelt the Jew showed that he regarded them not as brethren but as strangers.
The Jews in the Middle Ages after all were not so maltreated as to prevent them from amassing what was for that time enormous wealth. Of this they appear in those days, as they sometimes do in these, to have made ostentatious and, in the eyes of natives and Christians, especially if they had been victims of extortion, offensive use. A Cortes in Portugal, in 1481, complained of Jewish luxury and display, of Jews who rode splendidly caparisoned [ornamentally covered] horses, wore silk doublets [ornamented jackets], carried jewel-hilted swords, and entered churches where they mocked the worship. Jewish haughtiness seems sometimes even to have indulged in insults to the popular religion. At Oxford it mocks the miracles of St. Frydeswide before her votaries, assaults a religious procession, and tramples on the cross. At Lynn the Jews attack a church to drag out a convert from Judaism to Christianity, for whose blood they thirsted, and the people of the place are half afraid to resist them, knowing that they are protected by the king.
Besides their usury, the Jews were suspected of clipping the coin. Their function as the middlemen of royal rapacity must have been most odious, not least when they handled for the king Church estates which he had wrongfully taken into his hands. In expelling them from England, Edward I, the best of kings, no doubt thought that he was doing a good deed, while his people were unquestionably grateful. The worthy Abbot Samson, of St. Edmondbury, in the same way earned the gratitude of the people of that place by ridding it of the Jews. The clearest, as well as the most terrible, case of persecution of the Jews for religion was in Spain, and there, it must be remembered, when the Jew was burned, the Christian suspected of heresy was burned at his side.
Jew and Muslim
Even in Spain it is not easy to say how much was hatred of religion, how much was hatred of race. For centuries the Spanish Christians had struggled for the land with Islam, and the history of Spain had been one long Crusade. The Jew was identified with Islam. A Jewish writer, Lady Magnus, in her history of her race (About the Jews Since Bible Times, pp. 195-197), says:
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