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 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM
 
 BY 
 ISRAEL Z A NO WILL 
 
 Plaster Saints 
 
 Chosen People 
 
 Italian Fantasies 
 
 Ghetto Comedies 
 
 Ghetto Tragedies 
 
 Jinny the Carrier 
 
 The Melting Pot 
 
 Children of the Ghetto 
 
 The World and the Jew 
 
 The King of Schnorrers 
 
 The War God, A Play 
 
 The War for the World 
 
 The Xext Religion, A Play 
 
 The Principle of Nationalities
 
 THE 
 VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 BY 
 
 ISRAEL ZANGWILL 
 
 "England! awake! awake! awake! 
 Jerusalem thy sister calls!" 
 
 Blake 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 1921 
 
 All rights reserved
 
 Copyright, 1920 and 1921, 
 By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Set up and eleetrotyped. Published February, 1921
 
 BY WAY OF EXPLANATION 
 
 The title of this book was struck out in a letter that appeared 
 in the London Times within a few months of the outbreak of 
 the Great War, and though I know how little the great Jew who 
 has just passed away would have agreed with many of its pages, 
 I am glad to have his honoured name thus bound up with the 
 book whose title he unwittingly inspired. 
 
 November 23rd, 1914. 
 
 To the Editor of The Times. 
 
 Sir, — The interview with Mr. Jacob Schiff reported by your 
 Washington correspondent — the proposal for a permanent 
 peace that shall end not only this war, but war — comes as the 
 one gleam of light in the world's darkness. But why almost 
 extinguish it under the head of " German Press Campaign " ? 
 And why does he speak of Mr. Schiff's " brief for Germany " ? 
 As one associated for many years in philanthropic work with 
 this noblest of millionaires I should like to testify that, despite 
 his early associations with Germany, he is one of the most 
 patriotic Americans I have ever known. Descended from a 
 long line of Jewish Rabbis and scholars — one of his ancestors 
 was Chief Rabbi of the Great Synagogue, London, in the 18th 
 century — Mr. Jacob SchifF might himself have sat to Lessing 
 for the portrait of " Nathan der Weise," and in proposing a 
 conference to end Prussian militarism — and every other — he 
 speaks not as the mouthpiece of Berlin, but with the voice of 
 Jerusalem. 
 
 Yours faithfully, 
 
 Israel Zangwill.
 
 IKI 
 
 VK 
 
 D5 
 
 HI 
 
 £3 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Proem: The Quest 1 
 
 The Voice of Jerusalem 6 
 
 The Position of Judaism 137 
 
 Songs of the Synagogue 152 
 
 The Legend of the Conquering Jew 166 
 
 Shylock and other Stage Jews 238 
 
 Language and Jewish Life 254 
 
 The Territorial Solution of the Jewish Problem . . 263 
 
 The Old Clo' Man 286 
 
 The Mirage of the Jewish State 288 
 
 "Our Own": A Cry Across the Atlantic 306 
 
 The Polish-Jewish Problem 309 
 
 The Goyim 324 
 
 The People of the Abyss 327 
 
 Converted Missionaries 333 
 
 Two Josephs that Dreamed — 
 
 I. Joseph Fels 337 
 
 II. Joseph Jacobs 349 
 
 The Pillar of Fire 366 
 
 Epilogue: The Majesty of Armenia 367
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 PROEM: THE QUEST 
 
 At first I told the parlourmaid I would not see the stranger 
 from London, so angry was I at this increasing practice of in- 
 trusion into my rural privacy: this unheralded descent by the 
 ill-timed train that brought beggars and bores to my door in the 
 very middle of the luncheon hour. To aggravate matters and 
 my righteous wrath there was no train to deport them till tea- 
 time, unless they were jetted back with the velocity of a tennis- 
 return, and the stroke was not easy. Thus, as the village held 
 no place of rest, amusement, or provender, and it was the dry 
 interval even at the foodless inn, and as violent rain-storms 
 would maliciously coincide with these visitations, I must per- 
 force shelter, feed and entertain my persecutors, to the destruc- 
 tion of my working-hours. My soul was yet bitter with the 
 memory of the gaunt, hollow-eyed lady who only the week 
 before had profited by her opportunity to pour out for two 
 hours on end — as if in emulation of the rain without — a tragic 
 torrent of words, a pitiless, pitiful flow, unrelieved even by a 
 comma, some sordid but unintelligible tale of a shell-shocked 
 son in a lunatic asylum. The only point at all clear from her 
 impassioned incoherence had been that not even Heaven could 
 help her, and the wisdom of Shakespeare had been borne in on 
 me, as so often of late: 
 
 " Things without remedy should be without regard." 
 
 At the best it was not easy to work with the insistent dull 
 booming of the guns from across the Channel, that unresting 
 reminder of civilisation in its agony of dissolution ; of millions of 
 breaking hearts. The one compensation the war brought me — 
 I used to tell myself grimly — was that it cut off the bulk of my 
 callers from quartering themselves upon me for the night, for 
 they were mainly aliens, friendly or neutral, and the coast was a 
 " prohibited area." 
 
 The latest pilgrim bore a Polish name: I was to that extent 
 safe. Perhaps soothed by this circumstance or some digestive 
 process, I modified my harsh instruction to the parlourmaid. 
 
 1
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 The man could wait in my study. But I steeled myself against 
 inviting him to join my meal, which for the rest was half over. 
 
 At the first glimpse of him, sitting patient in my study, deep 
 in his book, my heart smote me. A softness emanated from his 
 dreamy eyes, his face covered with a reddish down, his short 
 russet beard, his neat tweed suit, his grey shirt and collar. I 
 saw at once he was not of the tramp species, whether of the 
 malodorous, haggard, beery type or of the genteel variety by 
 which I used to be taken in before I noted that the boots with 
 which it had tramped from distant towns were immaculately 
 polished. But I was not sure that the Luftmensch species — 
 the airman without a machine who floats like a gossamer the 
 wide world over — was not the more troublesome to tackle. For 
 this is a Jewish type, assertive that " all Israel are brethren," 
 and insistent on its right to travel and study at the fraternal 
 expense, without even preliminary consultation. My visitor 
 was visibly of this high-handed order. Futile to ask him, " Am 
 I my brothers keeper? " I should at the very least have to 
 pay his fare back to London. 
 
 He began — cunningly, I thought — with some questions upon 
 the book he was reading, which proved — ominous confirmation 
 of my worst fears — a work of my own. I answered his queries 
 sceptically, slipping — as soon as the maid was out of earshot — 
 into the German he spoke more easily than English, and await- 
 ing almost impatiently the moment of transition into finance. 
 But there was no sign of precipitation. He had written a little 
 German book on the Kabbalah — printed in the East End before 
 the war — and offered me a paper-covered copy, already in- 
 scribed to me with Oriental floridity. All this was in the 
 formula : the only question was, would he name the price or leave 
 it to me. But there was no light of cupidity in those gentle 
 brown eyes : he observed mournfully that he had sent it to 
 many Englishmen of light and leading, as well as to foreign 
 monarchs. But not one had even acknowledged its receipt: 
 there seemed no interest in the nature of God, or His relations 
 to man. 
 
 Little by little, but still half-incredulous, I began to feel that 
 this interest was the only one that appealed to him. For, as he 
 deviously reached the purpose of his visit, it grew obvious that he 
 was a dreamer of the Ghetto, whose inherited means from the 
 parental pawnshop fortunately sufficed for his moderate wants 
 — assuredly he ate no luncheon that day — and that his only 
 hunger was for God. 
 
 2
 
 PROEM: THE QUEST 
 
 A life-long ponderer over the old mystic Hebrew books, he was 
 still groping for more theologic light: even the Kabbalah had 
 left much obscure. 
 
 " But whom then can I consult? " he demanded in despair, 
 when I modestly disclaimed any special illumination or informa- 
 tion. " I came to London, knowing it was the capital of the 
 world, and that there I would find all the great Englishmen, and 
 I took it for granted they would be glad to compare notes with 
 me about God. But no ! I cannot get to hear of anyone who is 
 willing or able to discuss divine philosophy. Surely you can 
 give me the name of somebody." 
 
 My mind ran over the seven millions of Greater London, 
 coursing to and fro like a frantic sheep-dog. " There used to 
 be people," I murmured apologetically, with an eye on the 
 despised Victorians of my youth. " But I really cannot think 
 of anybody who lives in London, or even the suburbs." 
 
 " But with all your great statesmen ! " he protested. 
 
 " Divinity is not their Fach" I explained defensively. 
 " Perhaps Mr. Balfour," I wondered, with a hopeful memory 
 of Gifford Lectures. 
 
 " I have read him," he replied unexpectedly. " But he is not 
 deep. What has God to do with Doubt? " 
 
 I was taken aback, and there was a pause of musing silence. 
 " I went to Downing Street yesterday," he avowed presently, 
 " to ask Mr. Lloyd George to talk to me about God." 
 " Lloyd George ! " I echoed, startled. 
 
 " Yes," he said, simply. " He often talks as if he knew all 
 about God. With him there is never any Doubt. I thought he 
 might give me the light I need. And I too might be able to help 
 him." 
 
 I stared. " But he didn't see you? " 
 " He did not refuse." 
 " You saw him ? " I gasped. 
 
 " Not yet," he replied tranquilly. " On second thoughts I 
 did not like to ring the bell, because I thought after all he does 
 not know me. But you will give me a letter to him." 
 
 I saw that with his saintly craft he had at last arrived at his 
 point. 
 
 " Oh, but it is impossible ! " I cried, instinctively. " Aus- 
 geschlossen! " 
 
 " You don't know him? " he asked, disappointed. 
 I admitted we were not absolutely unacquainted. But the 
 idea of the Prime Minister of the British Empire at this su- 
 
 8
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 preme crisis in world affairs — with the war going against us too 
 just then — according an interview to an obscure individual 
 seeking God with a German accent, seemed to me of the last 
 fantasy. With an uneasy levity I urged that Downing Street 
 during the war was a " prohibited area " for theology. But 
 he would not see it. Surely God was the thing that mattered 
 most, he insisted. 
 
 I tried to soothe his disappointment by recalling other per- 
 sonages who might be willing to chop theology ; provincial pro- 
 fessors, even Oxford Dons. But he said with a sigh that they 
 would not be handy for talking to, as new difficulties presented 
 themselves. 
 
 Embarrassed, I offered him coffee, but he refused gently. I 
 foraged desperately in my spiritual larder, scouring its recesses 
 for scraps of Hebrew theology from Saadia to Crescas ; showily 
 produced the Plotinian mysticism of Ibn Gabirol (the mysteri- 
 ous Avicebron, inspirer of Duns Scotus), whose poems I hap- 
 pened to be translating, and somewhat placated my taskmaster 
 by disparaging the rationalism of Maimonides in favour of that 
 poetry and Moses Ibn Ezra's. Brightening, he recalled 
 Bachya's proof of the Unity of God, and told me of an Arabic 
 work on the vegetative, animal, and universal soul falsely 
 ascribed to Bachya, in which, I learnt with surprise, the un- 
 known mediaeval philosopher had anticipated Bergson's thesis 
 that intellectual disturbance through cerebral injury was no 
 proof of soul's dependence on body, inasmuch as the brain was 
 but the medium of the soul, which could not work through a 
 damaged instrument. But this liveliness flickered out again 
 when he remembered that I did not live in London and was 
 beyond his means for frequent consultation. Unless, perhaps, 
 I would correspond ! 
 
 Vehemently I pointed out that such subtleties could be solved 
 only viva voce, demanded the Socratic method ; one could thresh 
 out more in a quarter of an hour than in a month of letter- 
 writing. 
 
 " That is what I say," he admitted. " As from the fire of the 
 soul was, according to your Ibn Gabirol, the body created, so 
 from the sparks struck out by two souls is the body of Truth 
 created. Then I must write myself, asking Lloyd George to 
 talk to me," he concluded with resignation. 
 
 " Useless," I warned him. "lie would never see your letter." 
 
 " Never see my letter? " he repeated in naive surprise. 
 
 " No, there are barriers of secretaries between him and his 
 
 4
 
 PROEM: THE QUEST 
 
 correspondence. Just think! He has to direct the greatest 
 war in all history ! " 
 
 " Is that a reason for not thinking a little about God? " 
 
 I strove to appease him with a cigarette. But he waved it 
 austerely aside. 
 
 And when I accompanied him to the station — for thus far had 
 my politeness grown — he was still puzzling over the immense and 
 incredible situation that there was nobody in the metropolis of 
 the world who could or would talk with him about the only thing 
 that really mattered to humanity, and that in particular the 
 man in charge of the greatest war in history would not devote an 
 hour now and again to the study of the nature of God. 
 
 But gradually his face resumed the old brooding light. 
 
 The may and the fool's-parsley gleamed thick in the sunlit 
 hedges, the larks trilled skywards, the cuckoo's golden phrase 
 came glamorously pervasive, the young wheat waved green ; and 
 as we passed through fields of daisies and buttercups we must 
 fain skirt the crouching calves, chewing unperturbed by the 
 drone of the guns. That sinister booming penetrated as little 
 to my companion. The voice of Jerusalem was all he heard. 
 Even the thwarted purpose of his pilgrimage was forgotten, 
 and Lloyd George had passed from his ken. He was thinking 
 only of the Eternal.
 
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 As I was preparing for the press this collection of my Jewish 
 essays, gathered from every period of my working life, I received 
 an article upon Islam from my friend, Sir Harry Johnston, with 
 a provocative sentence specially marked. " Judaism," it ran, 
 " had virtually dissolved into Christianity a hundred years be- 
 fore the coming of Christ, and it is only a foolish petulance 
 which prevents the Jews of to-day from avowing themselves 
 followers of Christ." I retorted that the sentence was an Irish 
 bull. Why should Christians who preceded Christ avow them- 
 selves his followers? One might more defensibly say that it is 
 only a foolish snobbishness that prevents his followers from 
 avowing themselves as Jews. In this they would certainly be 
 following him, for he notoriously proclaimed himself as one who 
 came not to destroy the Jewish Law but to fulfil it. 
 
 Sir Harry Johnston is, however, not so wrong in regarding 
 the Jews of the first century b.c. as having largely reached the 
 Christian position, in so far as the adjective applies to Semitic 
 ethics and not to the Greek metaphysics and sacramental no- 
 tions with which the new Jewish sect entangled itself. From 
 the account given by Josephus of the Essenes in particular, it 
 would seem that even in its specific developments of communism 
 and celibacy, Christianity had already made its appearance in 
 Juda?a. They were the first in the ancient world to condemn 
 slavery. " Their example," observes Lord Acton in his essay 
 on " Freedom in Antiquity," " testifies to how great a height 
 religious men were able to raise their conception of society even 
 without the succour of the New Testament." Similarly, Sir 
 John Seeley begins his celebrated work " Ecce Homo," with the 
 remark " The Christian Church sprang from a movement which 
 was not begun by Christ. When he appeared upon the scene 
 the first wave of this movement had already passed over the sur- 
 face of the Jewish nation." This is true, even if by this move- 
 ment we read the Hellcnisation of the simple Semitic erhic or its 
 separation from any peculiar race. Philo, a contemporary of 
 Jesus, born nearly twenty years earlier, though his philosophy 
 
 6
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 of the Logos and his conception of world-proselytism were re- 
 jected by the Jewries of his own age, was accepted by the early 
 Christians almost as one of themselves ; and it is to the Church 
 Fathers that we owe the preservation of the bulk of his works. 
 Kuenen, although he regards Christianity as completely super- 
 seding Judaism and as not traceable specifically either to Essen- 
 ism or Philoism, is yet compelled, like Renan, to see its roots 
 in Palestinian Judaism as a whole, and to describe the whole 
 ethical atmosphere in Palestine as a psychological preparation 
 for the emergence of Jesus, between whom and the shepherd 
 Amos, eight hundred years before him, there was no incommen- 
 surable gap. And if the essence of the Christian ethic be taken 
 as sacrifice, or vicarious atonement, the willingness to exemplify 
 it appears a millennium and a half earlier in Moses than in 
 Jesus. " And it came to pass on the morrow," says the histo- 
 rian of Exodus (Chapter XXXIL, 30-32), "that Moses said 
 unto the people, Ye have sinned a great sin : and now I will go up 
 unto the Lord ; peradventure I shall make an atonement for your 
 sin. And Moses returned unto the Lord, and said, Oh, this 
 people have sinned a great sin, and have made them gods of gold. 
 Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin ; and if not, blot me, I pray 
 thee, out of thy book which thou hast written." But the reply 
 put into the Lord's mouth marks the dividing line between the 
 creeds. " Whosoever hath sinned against me, him will I blot 
 out of my book." Justice in fact is the essential note of Juda- 
 ism as Love is that of Christianity. Judaism of course no more 
 discarded Love than Christianity was able to dispense with 
 Justice — it is merely a question of proportions — but it is this 
 stern trumpet-sound of the Old Testament that has discon- 
 certed all the sentimentalists who bleat about the cruel Jehovah 
 till Zeppelins throw bombs on themselves, when they out-Herod 
 Herod in their savage thirst for vengeance, not merely paying 
 no attention to the Sermon on the Mount, but disregarding the 
 warning of Jehovah : " Vengeance is Mine." 
 
 So far from the Gospels of Love and Justice being sharply 
 divided between the two Testaments, it is but two chapters later 
 in Exodus that we find the Jewish God defining Himself as " The 
 Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering and 
 abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, 
 forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin." 
 
 But this " Christian " Jehovah refuses to forget his Jewish 
 side, and the definition winds up : " And that will by no means 
 
 7
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the 
 children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to 
 the fourth generation." 
 
 There may be here the profound idea that God can forgive 
 but that He cannot forget ; that is to say, He cannot undo the 
 results of evil, which work themselves out to the third and fourth 
 generation, however the sinners may have found forgiveness. 
 This is not the place to delve more deeply into these spiritual 
 subtleties. I wish merely to show what little truth there is in 
 the current antithesis between the Old and the New Testament, 
 when that test is applied to the Bible which is the last to which 
 it is exposed — namely, the process of reading it. 
 
 With a curious arrogance the translators of the authorised 
 version imported into the Old Testament by way of head-lines 
 their dogmatic interpretation of the text, and thus started its 
 readers with a misleading prepossession, much as newspaper 
 articles are almost irremediably falsified by too summary head- 
 lines. This is why — apart from the mistakes of the trans- 
 lators — not one Christian in a million has ever really read the 
 Old Testament. These deceptive interpolations are particu- 
 larly concerned with dramatising the Old Testament into a con- 
 tinuous prophecy of the coming Saviour. The line of proof is 
 as absurd as the sense is distorted or misrendered. And yet 
 the basic idea is sound. For the Old Testament contains, 
 though in a jumble of strata, all the traces of the evolution 
 from the crude psychology of primitive civilisation to that form 
 of Jewish psychology, popularly known as Christian. It. is this 
 process of spiritualisation culminating in the soul of Jesus 
 which is the true miracle to which the Bible testifies, and the 
 only one as to which its testimony is convincing. The only 
 miracle, too, which Science cannot destroy : Science, that for 
 all its practical boons, has wrought but negatively, so far as all 
 deeper values are concerned ; Science that, like the illuminant 
 in Milton's Hell, is " no light but rather darkness visible." Its 
 only contribution to real knowledge has been this revelation of 
 our ignorance, this destruction of the cosy conceptions of Space 
 and Time and History within which we nestled. Like a grim 
 hand withdrawing a curtain from the window of a warm lighted 
 room, Science has revealed the impenetrable blackness that 
 hedges us around, the terrifying perspectives of infinity and 
 evolution. 
 
 Amid these tenebrosities and in the din and tumult of the 
 
 8
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 age, the note of which has insidiously become that very Bis- 
 marckian bellow which the war was professedly waged to silence, 
 the still small voice of Jerusalem remains our only music. That 
 accent of Reason and Love is heard at its clearest in some of the 
 sayings of Jesus, but long centuries before it had made itself 
 audible in the pastures of Mesopotamia and amid the hills of 
 Palestine, and still, wherever the race of Jesus wanders, there 
 are lips on which the ancient fiery coal is laid. 
 
 II 
 
 The soul of this " peculiar people " is best seen in the Bible, 
 saturated from the first page of the Old Testament to the last 
 page of the New with the aspiration for a righteous social 
 order, and an ultimate unification of mankind. Of these ideals 
 the race of Abraham originally conceived and still conceives 
 itself to be the medium and missionary. Wild and rude as were 
 the beginnings of this people, frequent as were its backslidings, 
 and great as were — and are — its faults, this aspiration is 
 continuous in its literature even up to the present day. There 
 is every reason to believe that the historic texts of the Old 
 Testament were redacted in the interests of this philosophy of 
 history, but that pious falsification is very different from the 
 self-glorification of all other epics. Israel appears throughout 
 not as a hero but as a sinner who cannot rise to his role of 
 redeemer, of " servant of the Lord " — that role of service, not 
 0^mmaace*.lor .which. _ his people was " chosen." The Talmud, 
 the innumerable volumes of saintly Hebrew thought, the Jewish 
 liturgy, whether in its ancient or its medieval strata, the 
 " modernist " platforms of reformed American Synagogues, all 
 echo and re-echo this conception of " the Jewish mission." As 
 I have often said, the people of Christ has been the Christ of 
 peoples, and this both in its apostolate and in its martyrdom. 
 " Nathan! Nathan! Ihr seid ein Christ! " cries the friar to the 
 old Jewish sage in Lessing's fine play. " By God, you are a 
 Christian ! There never was a better Christian ! " 
 
 Christianity, qua its ethic of love and pity and self-sacrifice, 
 is at bottom a question of psychology: it is the evolution of the 
 human spirit to a plane as much transcending the natural man's, 
 as the species homo transcends the animal. To the biologist 
 this upward movement may be a leap in the dark — a " sport," 
 a freak of fate or freewill — to the supernaturalist it may be a 
 
 9
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 divine impulsion. But whatever its scientific explanation, the 
 Jews had, as Sir Harry Johnston almost perceives, reached this 
 phase of evolution centuries before the rest of the world — it is 
 doubtless what their prophets felt when they claimed them as a 
 Chosen People and thus sought to deepen and strengthen this 
 line of evolution. Thus while the incongruity of missions to the 
 Jews, subsidised by peoples who have never yet reached the 
 psychological plane of ancient Israel, is grotesquely obvious, 
 the process of conversion cannot be applied even to these 
 European stocks themselves, for they are still in the crude 
 psychic stage of self-assertion and conquest. Their Chris- 
 tianity was never more than an imposition from without, which 
 then soon transformed to their own psychology. They were 
 as little affected by their conversion as the prehistoric Celtic 
 menhirs of the West of England, when a cross was scratched 
 over them to adapt them to Christian use. " Est-ce qu'il y a 
 des Chretiens? " demands the freethinker in Diderot's " Entre- 
 tien d'un philosophe," " Je n'en ai jamais vu." " Nothing can 
 be done," wrote George Tyrrell in one of his letters, " till the 
 Roman Curia is converted to Christianity. There is more hope 
 of the Jews." There is indeed. 
 
 In the remarkable remonstrance to the Inquisitors of Spain 
 and Portugal inserted by Montesquieu in the twenty-fifth book 
 of his " Esprit des Lois," the Jewish protester displays a com- 
 plete comprehension of real Christianity, pointing out that 
 there is no difference between the Japanese who burn Christians 
 and the Christians who burn Jews, and begging the Inquisitors 
 if they cannot behave as Christians to behave at least as men. 
 " Si vous avez cette verite," the Jew observes mordantly, " ne 
 nous la cachez pas par la maniere dont vous nous la proposes." 
 In the recent war, though a Christian psychology has revealed 
 itself here and there among the followers or products of the 
 Church, the old Berserker psychology has been the dominating 
 influence. It was not even always sicklied over with the pale 
 cast of sophistication, for German thought had reverted to the 
 Greek sophists with their doctrine of might as right, though 
 the Allies who bettered the German instruction by an illegiti- 
 mate blockade, still sanctimoniously preserved their lip-worship 
 of Christ, and combining the language of Mr. Chadband with 
 the pinchings of Mr. Quilp, continue to this day to ban their 
 enemies from their great brotherhood of peace and righteous- 
 ness. Even Christmas could bring no truce in the trenches 
 
 10
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 except once, when the spirit of the dead Jew suspended the 
 savageries of the living Christians. But it was from the ranks 
 and not from the rulers that this beautiful moment sprang, and 
 officialdom soon descended to nip in the bud so appropriate a 
 celebration of Christ's birthday. It even proceeded to exploit 
 the solemn festivals of the common Church as heaven-sent 
 opportunities for unexpected attack. 
 
 But it sufficed to have had a mother of Jewish blood, for 
 Montaigne to become the channel of thoughts upon the Spanish 
 conquest of Mexico which had found no expression from " the 
 Pope, God's Vice-gerent on earth," to whom the King of Castile 
 stood indebted for his territorial greatness. " Who," asks 
 Montaigne, " ever enhanc'd the price of merchandize at such a 
 rate? So many cities levell'd with the ground, so many nations 
 exterminated, so many millions of people fallen by the edge of 
 the sword, and the richest and most beautiful part of the world 
 turn'd upside down, for the traffick of pearl and pepper; 
 mechanick victories ! Never did ambition, never did animosities 
 engage men against one another to such a degree of hostility 
 and miserable calamity." 
 
 A semi-Jewish parentage similarly explains how Jean Bodin, 
 though steeped in some of the superstitions of his day, was the 
 first great political philosopher to preach tolerance and 
 progress. He was even suspected of Judaising, such was his 
 respect for the Old Testament and his neglect of the New, 
 though his critics do not seem to have had the biological clue to 
 his psychology. And his complementary in action, the great 
 French Chancellor, Michel de l'Hopital, who practised what 
 Bodin preached, staving off the Inquisition and keeping the 
 peace between Christian sects, was also half a Jew. It is 
 equally significant that the book which foresaw that a modern 
 war would cripple Europe was written by the Russian Jew, 
 Bloch, the inspirer of the Hague Conference, and that the only 
 General in that war whose account of his triumphs is pene- 
 trated throughout by loathing for the necessity for them, is the 
 Australian Jew, Sir John Monash. " Minds are conquered not 
 by armies, but by love and magnanimity," said Spinoza. It was 
 no Father of the Church but the worldly-wise author of 
 " Proverbs " who said : " If thine enemy is hungry, feed him." * 
 
 i In a letter to The Times (August 6th, 1920) Mrs. Bramwell Booth at- 
 tributes the saying to Christ, though of course it appears only in an epistle 
 of Paul (Romans, xii. 20), who was obviously quoting from Proverbs. It 
 seems strange that a leader of the Salvation Army should not know the New 
 
 11
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 " The Jews," asserted the Rabbi of Venice, in 1637 — and Italy 
 is the country in which animals notoriously have no souls — 
 " never torment, or abuse, or put to any cruel death any Brute 
 Beast " ; it is not surprising that it was a Jew who founded the 
 Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. 
 
 Disraeli went too far when he said, " All is race : there is no 
 other truth," for the culture superimposed by the environment 
 upon the hereditary mentality is a very considerable factor of 
 the adult psychology, and he seems to have overlooked that in 
 the case of Western .Jews this factor is equally present, varying 
 inter alia the nationality in every country. For nationality, 
 though often confused with race, and treated as though it 
 sprang into existence by some divine fiat, perfect, fixed and 
 immutable — political thinking being still in its pre-Darwinian 
 period — is of purely psychological genesis, a product of 
 environment. So far from nationalities being fixed, political 
 law in the natural world is for ever creating, hybridising, or 
 eliminating them, and all three processes are at work upon the 
 scatterings of the vile corpus of Israel. Similarly, except 
 perhaps among the Hottentots or other stationary savage 
 tribes, there is no such thing as a pure race, races always being 
 alloyed, or at least modified, by any new milieu, and according 
 to Maurice Fishberg, the American-Jewish anthropologist, 
 the Jew includes Teutonic, Slavonic, Turanian, Mongoloid, 
 Negroid, Spanish, Assyrian and other types. Nevertheless, 
 Disraeli was in advance of the thought of his time in drawing 
 attention to the relative fixity of biological strains. 
 
 When, according to the eleventh chapter of Numbers, a 
 young man came running to tell Moses that Eldad and Medad 
 were prophesying in the camp, and when Joshua, then the under- 
 ling of the Master, begged Moses to forbid them, that great 
 man with his wonted magnanimity answered : " Enviest thou 
 for my sake? Would God that all the Lord's people were 
 prophets and that the Lord would put his spirit upon them ! " 
 
 If the spirit cannot be said to rest on every Israelite, there 
 is no doubt that the same racial intuition which led to the 
 proclamation of the unity of the universe through the one God, 
 leads to the perception of the brotherhood of humanity under 
 the common fatherhood, and that the faculty of dreaming mil- 
 lennial visions of a warless world is more widespread among the 
 people of Isaiah than among any other. This is a fact that 
 
 Testament, but the mis-attribution to Christianity of all that is best in 
 Judaism is characteristic. 
 
 12
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 could be established by comparative statistics. The press- 
 bureaus or societies of international pacifism will be found 
 mainly directed by men and women of the race whose salutation 
 was not " How do you do ? " but " Peace to you ! " And two 
 Jews — Professor Asser and Alfred Fried — are among the few 
 men who have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. No one 
 has laboured more for the Pacifist ideal than the inventor of 
 Esperanto, the late Dr. Zamenhof, the Russo-Jewish oculist 
 who truly strove to heal the blindness of humanity. For the 
 unity of speech at which he laboured was to him merely the 
 outward sign of the inner unity of mankind. If he sought to 
 undo the curse of Babel, it was in order to bring the peace of 
 Jerusalem. Amid the barbaric welter generated by that mili- 
 tary ideal of which Prussia offered the supreme expression, in a 
 planet seething and rumbling with animosities, and streaked 
 with volcanic fires, this obscure Russian Jew managed to set 
 myriads of every race, creed and colour, meeting in the concord 
 of a common tongue, the very name of which brought the gospel 
 of hope. 
 
 " That men form one universal brotherhood, that they spring 
 from one common origin, that their individual lives, their nations 
 and races, interbreed and blend and go on to merge again at last 
 in one common human destiny upon this little planet amidst the 
 stars," is, according to Mr. Wells, the conclusion which science 
 and history alike reach by their investigations. But, as he 
 admits, all the world-religions had reached it by inspiration and 
 insight. This conclusion was in fact the starting-point of 
 Hebrew literature, declaring as it did that we are all sons of 
 Adam, and that the colour-varieties sprang equally from the 
 sons of Noah : the moral value of the teaching is independent of 
 its historic exactitude. In the very eagerness of the Jew to 
 assimilate himself to every other people is the unconscious ex- 
 pression of a sense of universal fraternity. He has served as a 
 connecting link not only between all modern peoples, but with 
 the vanished peoples of antiquity, the Assyrians, the Medes, the 
 Babylonians. If the Jew Paul proved that the Hebrew word 
 was universal, the Jews who rejected his teaching have proved 
 the universality of the Hebrew race. Mr. Wells has pointed 
 out that history is taught from national standpoints, to the 
 national glory and to the total destruction of perspective. 
 Each history is like a corridor on which many doors give, but 
 what the people in the rooms did before they came into the 
 
 13
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 corridor, or after they had banged the door behind them, the 
 pupil is never shown. That is not, however, the case with the 
 student of Jewish history. He is compelled to keep his eye on 
 all the chambers of world-history in every period, for the Jew 
 has lived with every people, and by his ability to share the life 
 of them all has proved indirectly that they are all brothers. 
 One touch of Jewry makes the whole world kin. 
 
 Ill 
 
 It does not follow, of course, that because Jews are pacifists, 
 pacifists are Jews, or that the peace-ideal finds no prophets 
 among the Gentiles. Even though an Oriental origin should be 
 established for Virgil's Sibylline Eclogue, Sully and St. Pierre 
 were French, so was Fenelon (whose " Telemaque " scarified 
 military glory), Rousseau was Swiss, the most systematic inves- 
 tigation of the subject came from a German, Kant, and not 
 even political passion has yet branded President Wilson, 
 General Smuts or Lord Robert Cecil as Jewish. 1 Nevertheless, 
 these great men are far less rooted in the national psychology 
 than the Jewish pacifists. They are isolated trees, not a forest.' 
 
 Commenting on the Amritsar Debate in Parliament, The 
 Times told us that the House was very angry with Mr. 
 Montagu, who, presenting to it a sharp-cut alternative — race 
 domination or partnership — affronted with his Jewish men- 
 tality the deepest instincts of Englishmen abhorring generalisa- 
 tion and accustomed to move inductively. Put into plain 
 language this means that the English motto is : Make sure of 
 your interest and let the principle take care of itself. If this 
 were true, then Mr. Montagu could exhibit no finer patriotism 
 than to contribute the Jew's ethical mentality to the intellectual 
 assets of England — quite apart from the fact that he, if any- 
 body, will thus save India for England. He has, in fact, been 
 doing truer Jewish work than any his relative, Sir Herbert 
 Samuel, can accomplish in Palestine. 
 
 Addressing the Zionists on the error of precipitation or of 
 expecting perfection at a bound, Lord Robert Cecil said: " If 
 I may venture as a Briton to give you any advice, I will ask you 
 to remember the great quality by which we British have 
 achieved some success, and that is the desire that we have to 
 make things work — not to desire perfection in a moment, but 
 
 i Lowell, however, claimed the Cecils as of Jewish origin. 
 
 14
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 to throw our whole energy into making whatever we have to do 
 a success in itself." Amusingly enough this is the very exhor- 
 tation addressed to Lord Robert by his worldly-wise uncle, Mr. 
 Balfour, and if I may venture as a Jew to give the literally noble 
 lord any advice, it is to throw away this British side of him in 
 favour of his prophetic Hebrew vein. The greatness of his 
 life-work already stands compromised by his concessions to the 
 practical. The world has been ruined by its practical men. 
 True, nothing must be jerrybuilt, but neither will sound work- 
 manship avail if the architect's plan is defective. If, as Lord 
 Robert says, " Well begun is half done," it is equally true that 
 " 111 begun is half undone." This has certainly happened with 
 his League of Nations, which is developing with the same for- 
 tuitousness as the British Empire, whose " success " is by no 
 means so exemplary as Lord Robert imagines. The flaws in 
 its planless foundation will surely undermine the whole imperi- 
 alist structure, unless it is established afresh on that basis of 
 partnership which Mr. Montagu urges. 
 
 It may be doubted, however, whether The Times is correct in 
 discerning so definite a mental breach between East and West. 
 The Labour Party seems to have no difficulty in establishing 
 general ethical principles of foreign policy. Cobden, Bright, 
 Morley, and Lord Courtney were not of the East, yet they 
 steered a straight course by a priori principles. Is it not 
 rather that the present House of Commons, elected in the flush 
 of war-triumph, is peculiarly representative of the mentality 
 of the mob? Far be it from me to take advantage of the 
 implication of The Times that the only British citizens with 
 principles for foreign politics are of Mr. Montagu's race. As 
 little is it my wish to claim — as Dr. Stanton Coit seems to 
 imagine I do — that no religious inspiration or ethical loftiness 
 can be found before or outside Israel : Hellenism and Buddhism 
 have undeniably produced noble utterances, and so has Christi- 
 anity after the Gospels (which are, of course, exclusively 
 Jewish). Even the much-abused Machiavelli wrote in The 
 Prince: " There are two ways of deciding any contest, the 
 one by laws, the other by force. The first is peculiar to men, 
 the second to beasts." The difference between the Jewish and 
 all other religious or ethical maxims and ideals lies, however, in 
 the fact that they have a dynamic quality that removes them 
 from aesthetics or contemplation into action, and that they are 
 found more incorporated with the life of the people as a whole 
 
 15
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 than any other ethical literature. And this can only be because 
 they find more reflection and response in the popular psychol- 
 ogy. The achievements of the Jews in many arts cannot 
 sustain comparison with the greatest Gentile creations. But m 
 kindliness the Jews stand unrivalled. It is not that they are a 
 race of spiritual supermen — though they have produced such 
 in Moses, Jesus and Spinoza — it is merely that the vast 
 majority of other stocks are — as Telemaque called the grand 
 conquerors — sub-human. Tennyson adjured mankind to — 
 
 " Move upward, working out the beast 
 And let the ape and tiger die." 
 
 But the ape and tiger are still terribly alive, and the tiger at 
 least is preferable in his unmixed animality. Man cannot vie 
 with him either in beauty or strength, and if Evolution having 
 got to the ape can get only to the inventor of poison-gas and 
 bombs, one would rather see the world given over to tigers than 
 to the half-breed, homo, fallen between two planes. An intel- 
 lectual tiger, or an ape with brains, is a very dreadful climax 
 to the process of the suns. 
 
 And this ape, be it remembered, is one whose mouth spits 
 flame, and whose nostrils snort chlorine, who is not debarred 
 even from wings of destruction, whose amphibious maleficence 
 can rend and shatter from the very depths of the sea, and a 
 touch of whose paw can overtopple towers and extinguish life 
 leagues and leagues away. 
 
 "... A monster, then, a dream, 
 A discord. Dragons of the prime, 
 That tare each other in their slime, 
 Were mellow music match'd with him." 
 
 When Le Sage made his " Diable Boiteux " boast that he was 
 the demon who among other dubious novelties had introduced 
 chemistry into the world, people must have wondered at the 
 inclusion in the fiend's catalogue of so apparently elevated a 
 branch of learning. It is now being borne in on us that chem- 
 istry has been the supreme invention of Asmodeus, though had 
 Le Sage been prophetic enough he would have added every 
 department of Science, that prostitute of the intellect, who has 
 lent herself to man's worst blood-lusts. 
 
 Beginning with genuine horror at every method of war we 
 
 16
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 had failed to anticipate, we have now slavishly accepted every- 
 thing, however ghastly, as a normal weapon, and have found 
 aerial bombings in particular supplying a " felt want " in the 
 administration of over-spacious savage territories by limited 
 forces: military authorities, with Sir Henry Wilson smiling 
 openly at our delusion that the last was " a war to end war," 
 have even hinted that the disease-germ is no more illegitimate 
 than any other instrument of war, and may be expected in the 
 next. I recall that when I was visiting the Pasteur Institute 
 in Paris, soon after the American war with Cuba, a horrified 
 professor related to me how a Cuban had applied to him for 
 such a germ. But these qualms are of the past. The fact is 
 that civilised man at war is worse than the barbarian — cor- 
 ruptio optimi pessima — not merely because he is so terribly 
 more efficient, but because his suddenly generated war-mind is 
 morbid and unbalanced in its savagery, in its delirium of spies 
 and hidden hands, compared with the sanity of the fighting 
 savage, who, his normal environment being danger and his 
 normal atmosphere war, is always of the same mind, and not 
 of two different minds — the war-mind and the peace-mind, wide 
 as the poles asunder. The civilised war-mind is thus not 
 merely a throw-back to the savage mind, it is a degeneration 
 from it. Witness the respect of the South Sea Islanders for 
 the enemy's slumbers, their chivalrous warnings of attack, as 
 compared with the unscrupulous camouflage of modern war, and 
 the utilisation, as I said, of even Christmas or Easter Day as 
 the most unexpected moment for the offensive. And since we 
 are contrasting East with West, compare the abolition of 
 Sunday — " handing over the Lord's Day to the King " — with 
 the proud clinging of the Pharisees to their Sabbath, their 
 refusal to fight upon which lost them Jerusalem on two separate 
 occasions. The " moratorium for Christianity " was defended 
 on the ground that the war was a Crusade, and that once the 
 Teutonic Paganism were crushed, everything would be over- 
 whelmingly Christian. But the new world we were promised 
 has turned out like the new clothes of Hans Andersen's nude 
 Emperor, whose courtiers were in ecstasies over his tailor's 
 triumphs. The world, though the Supreme Council, abetted by 
 the practical Briton, Lord Robert Cecil, still pretends that it 
 has a League of Nations, has lost even its last rags of decency, 
 and the Voice of Potsdam is blatant in every capital. Even 
 
 17
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 Mr. Winston Churchill confessed recently that " we have been 
 transformed into a sphere which is definitely lower, from almost 
 every point of view, than that which we had attained in the days 
 before Armageddon." 
 
 This is indeed a significant confession from one of the pro- 
 tagonists of the Holy War. " Never," he declares, " was a 
 time when more complete callousness and indifference to human 
 life and suffering was exhibited by the great community all 
 over the world." 
 
 Mr. Massingham in The Nation correctly describing Europe 
 to-day as " little more than a prison-house of Right," proceeds 
 to complain that the Hungarians in Transylvania are peculiarly 
 persecuted by the Roumanians. " This is the lot of one of the 
 most famous of European nationalities at the hands of one of 
 the meanest." I have no quarrel with his adjectives, but the 
 outrages he cites, though monstrous enough, are mild compared 
 with those inflicted by these famous Hungarians on the Jews. 
 Mr. Israel Cohen, after a special visit to Budapest, reports that 
 " Jews are dragged out of their houses, abused, flogged, robbed, 
 tortured, and deported. . . . They are flogged naked until they 
 are unconscious. . . . Some of the worst tortures have been 
 practised in the Komarom fortress, where men have had to drink 
 the blood from their own wounds ; others have been buried neck- 
 deep in the earth, and others had to hold a mouse in their 
 mouth, or to eat the hair pulled off their own chin." Never 
 was there a Jewry more patriotic than the Hungarian, its loyal 
 striving to Magyarise itself reached to the absurdity of cari- 
 cature, and yet it now finds itself repudiated, harassed, done to 
 death. " The Danube bobs with Jewish corpses " vividly 
 observed to me a friend who knows the facts. 
 
 But pogroms against the Jews have not been confined to the 
 defeated countries. Even in victorious countries like Poland 
 victory was celebrated with offerings of Jewish blood, and while 
 half the world was dancing at the Armistice, for the Jewish 
 people as a w r hole it was the dance of death. Not that the 
 Poles have proved as homicidally maniacal as was at first 
 feared. Though wholesale massacres are preached by these 
 beggars on horseback, the Jews have as yet been murdered in 
 moderation. But they are boycotted, dragooned, robbed, 
 beaten, and outlawed, and live in such a state of terror that the 
 British Sub-Commissioner to Poland, Captain Peter Wright, 
 says in his official report : " If I was an Orthodox Jew, long- 
 
 18
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 bearded and black-coated, and found myself in the same train 
 as a party of soldiers, I should travel — as even the most 
 reverend orthodox Rabbis do — under the seat." 
 
 And perhaps even worse than the dramatic detonation of 
 persecution, is the unlifting fog of repression, the creeping 
 terror of anticipation. Such is the situation in Poland, the 
 protegee of the Allied Powers, anent which Sir Stuart Samuel, 
 the British Commissioner, has made a statement worthy of 
 Tacitus, so pregnant is its summary of the Jewish situation in 
 many countries. " The Jewish soldiers in Poland do their duty 
 to their country in the certainty that their country will not do 
 its duty by them." A grim comment indeed on the vaunted 
 chivalry of the Pole. The very funerals of distinguished Polish 
 Jews are not safe from hooliganism. Solomon Asch, the 
 famous Yiddish novelist and dramatist, reports a statement 
 made to him by the Rabbi of Vilna, which is an epitome of 
 Jewish suffering in the Russian war-zone : 
 
 " Under the old Russian Czarist Government we suffered as Jews. 
 When the Germans occupied Vilna we no longer suffered as Jews 
 but as human beings, together with the rest of the population, whom 
 they robbed of everything. Then, when the Bolsheviki came, we 
 suffered as bourgeois. And now that the Poles have set foot in 
 Vilna we suffer again as Jews. But these sufferings are more 
 horrible than anything we have as yet experienced." 
 
 It is not, however, to Vilna but to Pinsk that attaches the 
 most monstrous Polish misdeed, though Captain Wright 
 strangely thinks that Major C, its perpetrator, would be 
 acquitted if brought to trial " as being within his strict rights." 
 Heaven save us from the military mind. It is characteristic of 
 Captain Wright to soften or explain away every Polish atroc- 
 ity, yet one does not need to travel beyond his own report to 
 perceive the infamousness of the episode. After telling us that 
 the Zionist Co-operative Society of Pinsk had held a legiti- 
 matised meeting and that some of the audience lingered chatting 
 over the distribution of a relief fund that had come from 
 America, Captain Wright proceeds : 
 
 " Polish soldiers and a gendarmerie who had been pressing for 
 forced labour, and probably using this as a blackmailing pretext, 
 entered the building and arrested and searched those present. They 
 no doubt obtained a considerable amount of money for themselves in 
 this search. Then they took 50 or 60 in number to the headquarters 
 
 19
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 of Major C, and reported that they had arrested the members of 
 an unauthorised Jewish Bolshevik meeting. Major C, who had 
 almost at the same hour heard of a Bolshevik success near the 
 town, and was prepared to evacuate it, gave orders for their imme- 
 diate execution. This was done without trial of any sort and even 
 without taking their names. One person at least of those executed 
 had been swept into the crowd of prisoners by accident in the street. 
 The whole incident only took two or three hours. . . . The Jewish 
 ladies arrested, but exempted from the execution, were kept in 
 prison without trial and enquiry. They were stripped naked and 
 flogged. After the flogging they were made to pass naked down a 
 passage full of Polish soldiers. The Jews arrested, but excepted 
 from the execution, were next day led to the cemetery where those 
 executed were buried, and made to dig their own graves, then, at 
 the last moment, they were told they were reprieved ; in fact, the 
 gendarmerie regularly tormented the survivors. 
 
 " We were informed, but have no exact information, that the heads 
 of this gendarmerie were subsequently found guilty of various 
 crimes. 
 
 " The victims were respectable lower middle-class people, school 
 teachers and such like." 
 
 But as Sir Horace Rumbold, the British Representative in 
 Warsaw, rightly objects, the Polish- Jewish atrocities are not 
 seen in their true Christian perspective, since the surrounding 
 countries are worse: 
 
 " The massacres of Jews by Ukrainian peasant bands can find, in 
 their extent and thoroughness, no parallel except in the massacres of 
 the Armenians in the Turkish Empire. Their very completeness 
 has tended to keep the world in ignorance of them, for towns of 
 many inhabitants almost wholly Jewish have apparently been wiped 
 out. Similar events have taken place outside the Ukraine proper; 
 and all over Southern Russia, such as Hungary and Czecho- 
 slovakia, persecutions less sanguinary perhaps, but very brutal and 
 unj ust, have also occurred in the interregnum which followed the 
 armistice." 
 
 The butchery in the Ukraine in fact far exceeds even the 
 Cossack horrors in Poland in the seventeenth century, or those 
 orgies of blood which marked the passage of the Crusaders of 
 1096 through the Rhenish Ghettos, on that journey to the 
 Tomb of Christ which culminated in 1099 in the burning alive 
 of all the Jews of Jerusalem in their synagogue. 
 
 Vladimir Tiomkin, the head of Ukrainian Jewry, says of one 
 among the many bands of robbers and assassins: 
 
 20
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 " The Jewish population was generally left stark naked, being 
 deprived even of their shoes and underwear. These wild beasts 
 would put boiling water down the throats of their victims. Ears, 
 noses, and fingers would be cut off from individuals who were fully 
 alive. Often the body would be ripped open and the victims would 
 at the same time be made to cry : ' Long live free Ukrainia.' " 
 
 The reports from the Ukraine are indeed so gruesome that one 
 could wish there was exaggeration. Take, for example, the 
 story of the pogrom that took place on February 14th in the 
 Government of Kieff, where a band of fifty young girls was 
 given over to a brutal soldiery. Eighty per cent, of the popu- 
 lation were killed or wounded, and their bodies thrown to the 
 swine, who were guarded in their meal by an armed force. At 
 Filchin the orgies were beyond description, not a single female 
 was left alive or unoutraged, the old men were singled out, their 
 beards cut off and then their heads. The Rabbi gathered 125 
 children of the district and said to the murderers, " You are 
 slaying the mothers and fathers, what shall we do with the 
 children? " The soldiers made sport of this appeal and then 
 deliberately shot seventy of the children. Later, the heads of 
 these innocents, separated from their bodies, were placed in a 
 huge barrel and sent as a " present " to the remaining members 
 of the Jewish community. The detail is here too incredible to 
 be invented, and the reporter, Dr. Bernstein-Kohn, of Kishineff, 
 is of impeccable authority and veracity. He tells us too of 
 forty Jews found insane in a forest, walking on all fours. 
 
 If anybody imagines that this monstrous Jew-baiting is 
 merely one aspect of the universal convulsions of the war, let 
 him turn back the pages of history and renew his memory of 
 the ghastly pogroms of that Czarist Russia of which England 
 was the political associate. Of the state of terror in Warsaw 
 in 1906 — a state more unbearable even than its actual atroc- 
 ities — Jacob Dinesohn, a leading Russo-Jewish novelist, who 
 died last year, has — almost by accident — provided a vivid 
 account. 
 
 He had received a first-class steamship ticket from the enter- 
 prising Jewish Daily News, of New York, with the invitation to 
 use it. In refusing, this chivalrous man of letters gave as his 
 reason his reluctance to leave the danger-zone " of the six 
 million Jewish souls in whose blood our red-handed government 
 seems determined to drown the revolutionary activity in 
 Russia." 
 
 21
 
 THE VOICE OP JEEUSALEM 
 
 " And this," he went on, " I see day after day with my own eyes, 
 and feel it with all my senses. And in this general terror, of wliat 
 account is the individual? I feel myself merely a minute drop in 
 the sea of blood and tears ; and my own person, believe me, has lost 
 in my eyes its weight and value above those who are in the same 
 danger. Besides, one becomes accustomed to anything; when you 
 see death every minute before your eyes, you cease to fear him your- 
 self, and are even able to outstare him. A great many of my 
 friends have already been killed or shot almost before my own eyes, 
 and they were as innocent and harmless as can be imagined. 
 
 " It is just Saturday a week ago that my friend, the well-known 
 writer, J. L. Peretz, came near being an innocent sacrifice to the 
 times. At twelve o'clock noon he started to take a walk, having 
 been confined to the house for some time. He had not gone twenty 
 paces from his door when a Cossack of the street patrol took the 
 fancy to discharge his gun behind his back. The ball was so near 
 to Peretz that it touched his cheek, leaving a red mark, and grazed 
 his ear. The bullet that missed Peretz lodged in a fourteen-year- 
 old Jewish boy who was standing by and crippled him for life; it 
 was necessary to amputate the boy's arm. Regardless of this 
 narrow escape, Peretz and I took a walk a few hours later through 
 the same street where we met fully armed military guards who are 
 permitted to shoot or stab whomever they please without any 
 responsibility whatever. And this instance is by no means an 
 exception; they happen every day in almost every street, especially 
 in the Jewish quarter, and I have neither heard nor read of any 
 investigation made to determine whether the murder by these 
 soldiers is according to law or not. 
 
 " There are people who tremble at the sight of a raw recruit, and 
 who hide themselves under a feather bed at sight of him. Such 
 people have our contemptuous laughter, just as now we laugh at 
 those who tremble to step foot into the street for fear of being shot 
 or stabbed. Just as a feather bed is no protection against a recruit 
 with a gun and bayonet, so is the policy of ' sit at home ' no guar- 
 antee of safety from sudden and horrible death. The Jews in 
 Bialystok met their deaths in their homes, upon their roofs and in 
 their cellars. With us in Warsaw, as soon as there is a talk of a 
 pogrom we are all ready to die upon the street rather than like a rat 
 cornered in its hole. I, myself, went to the funeral of the first 
 seventy-one Jews killed in the Bialystok pogrom. Of the impres- 
 sion the sight made on me I could not give you an inkling even if I 
 wrote you a hundred letters. Again many thanks for your kind 
 invitation which let me assure you I fully appreciate. But to make 
 use of your steamship ticket is quite out of the question. My place 
 is here with my people, come what may." 
 
 The Peretz, so nearly assassinated, was, be it remarked, a 
 
 22
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 writer of genius, some of whose tales have the charm of Hans 
 Andersen. 
 
 Note that it is not Poles murdering Jews on national or 
 Bolshevist pretexts, but Cossacks inspired by that bureaucracy 
 with which Bolshevism is now so unfavourably contrasted. 
 
 " Thut nichts ! der Jude wird verbrannt." 
 
 Alas ! the words that Lessing put into the mouth of the perti- 
 nacious Patriarch of Jerusalem amount to a law of history. 
 
 Mrs. Despard, returning from Budapest, relates, among 
 cruder horrors, the story of a beautiful boy of twelve who was 
 flogged for refusing to spit upon the portrait of his father, a 
 Jewish teacher. " My father is a saint," said the boy proudly. 
 
 The Jews are not all saints, but what a set of savages, these 
 Gentile peoples, glorified by the professors of nationalism, some 
 even enriched with new dominions and power by the Supreme 
 Council, whose Minority Treaty they flout as shamelessly as the 
 Supreme Council itself flouts the League of Nations. However 
 they may harry one another's minorities, they are at one in har- 
 rying the Jew ! 
 
 Were not " Mandates " already grown farcical, one would 
 suggest that all these barbarian peoples, so far from enjoying 
 the " sovereign rights " which they feel attainted even by the 
 Minority Treaty, should be put completely under ward and 
 watch till they become civilised. But quis cwstodiat custodes? 
 Indeed all Europe should be put under a " Mandate," and I 
 know only one people civilised enough to exercise it. Mean- 
 time, over half that Christian continent, the voice of Jeru- 
 salem is only a cry in the night ! 
 
 While Christian history with its countless blood-spillings and 
 mutual burnings, that are a constituent even of its religious 
 record, is almost insufferable in the reading to any man of sym- 
 pathy or imagination, it is impossible, despite the sordid stains 
 as upon old clo', to read Jewish history since the fall of Jeru- 
 salem without being purged by pity and terror. For here no 
 blood is shed but that of Israel, and if the epic is defaced by 
 meanness and squalor, and if the tragedy comes not seldom 
 from a betrayal by what is false within, there remains enough to 
 make it an eternal epic of the triumph of the spirit. Indeed, 
 does not even Hegel call the Jews the people of the spirit? 
 
 To interpret this voice of Jerusalem and the people that is 
 still its natural organ, is the purpose of these essays. I have 
 
 23
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 not sought to probe into the absolute philosophical and theo- 
 logical significance of the phenomena under investigation. 
 That would require another and a different book. It is the 
 phenomena themselves that have first to be admitted, to be dis- 
 engaged from their fabular presentation and scoured of the 
 prejudice that obscures them. 
 
 The Jewish Viennese anthropologist, Ignaz Zollschan, chal- 
 lenging with his book, " Das Rassenproblem," the famous thesis 
 of Houston Chamberlain and his disciples that civilisation is a 
 creation of the Germanic race and that the Jew is an inferior 
 breed (Jesus being a German of Rhenish-Westphalian origin), 
 yet remarks at the end of his brilliant work that his vindication 
 of his race has only the value of an epitaph, since unless a terri- 
 tory can be found for them, the Jews are destined to disappear: 
 nevertheless he had felt it his duty in the interests of scientific 
 decency to publish the results of his investigation. 
 
 I do not share — as will be seen from my analysis in " The 
 Territorial Solution of the Jewish Question " — this conclusion 
 as to the imminence or even the possibility of Judaism and the 
 Jew disappearing, but I am at one with Dr. Zollschan in desir- 
 ing that the subject of Jews and Judaism shall be lifted out of 
 the mist of ignorance and bigotry into the clear light of knowl- 
 edge. 
 
 IV 
 
 Hardly had I written these words when an American visitor 
 brought me a work hitherto unknown to me called " The Jewish 
 Spectre," published in New York in 1905 by Mr. George H. 
 Warner, and making exactly this demand. Despite its cine- 
 matographic title, it seems a fascinating and, for the most part, 
 competent piece of literary and historical criticism, rather flip- 
 pant in tone, but of obvious value in helping to depolarize the 
 Bible and the Jew for the uninformed mind, and to bring both 
 within the natural categories of life and literature. Mr. War- 
 ner will have none of that unnatural halo that clings to Pales- 
 tine, he cannot away with the Brocken figure which looms before 
 mankind as the ancient Hebrew, nor with that fantastic or sinis- 
 ter blurring, which makes even the contemporary Jew spectral. 
 In clearing away the grotesqueries of Sue and Dore, Shake- 
 speare and Marlowe, Disraeli and Dickens, and the popular 
 press, in applying the besom of common sense to all these wan- 
 dering Jews, usurious fiends, mysterious millionaires, press-mo- 
 
 24
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 nopolists, and universal wire-pullers, in sweeping away all this 
 galimatias of superstition and pseudo-romance and legendary 
 fear, and in replacing the visionary and the fantastic by histor- 
 ical and biological intelligibilities ; in short, in exorcising " The 
 Jewish Spectre," and substituting the Jew of flesh and blood, 
 even in ancient Palestine or Babylonia, Mr. Warner has done 
 good scientific work. Unfortunately, he has not done it in a 
 scientific spirit, but with a touch of anti-Semitism and icono- 
 clasm which precipitates him into the opposite extreme and into 
 an equally unmerited denigration of Jew and Judaism. In- 
 stead of getting them into a true world-perspective he pushes 
 them out of it again. " The Jew," he says in his vivid way, 
 " must take his place in the scales and be weighed with the law's 
 inexorable, sealed and certified weights, as other men are." 
 With all my heart. Only a legal balance is exactly what our 
 author lacks. At times he writes like those shallow radicals 
 who can see nothing mysterious in the real, and who believe that 
 when you have stripped away the false romance from a phe- 
 nomenon, the phenomenon remains invariably prosaic. Seeley, 
 in his brilliant study of " The Expansion of England," divests 
 the Englishman of any peculiar genius for the sea or any im- 
 perial instinct, and shows to what simple factors even the con- 
 quest of India was due. Yet with every separate miracle ex- 
 plained away, the total miracle of the British Empire remains, 
 the wonder of a small island holding a fourth of the globe. So, 
 too, when one has denuded Jewish history and literature of 
 every shred of supernaturalism and every hull of romantic fan- 
 tasy, the invincible race and faith remain like a Doric temple on 
 a headland, the sublimer for the bareness. For there is a true 
 romance as well as a false, and when you have laid the Jewish 
 Spectre you are confronted by the Jewish Spirit. 
 
 Consider the " outline " of this history. A shepherd, born 
 in Mesopotamia, roved to Palestine, and his descendants, after a 
 period of slavery in Egypt, returned to Palestine as conquerors 
 and agriculturists, there to practise the theocratic code im- 
 posed by their leader, Moses (perhaps the noblest figure in all 
 history), and to evolve in the course of the ages a poetic and 
 prophetic literature of unparalleled sublimity. That union of 
 spirituality, intellectuality and fighting power in the breed, 
 which raised it above all ancient races except the Greek, was 
 paid for by an excessive individualism which distracted and di- 
 vided the State. Palestine fell before the legions of Titus. 
 
 25
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 But two generations later her final bid for independence was so 
 fierce that Hadrian was forced to recall his ablest general — 
 Severus — from the less formidable task of subduing Britain, 
 equally in revolt. Half a century before it challenged Rome, 
 the Jewish State had produced Christianity and had thus, un- 
 known to itself, entered on a greater career of world-conquest 
 than any victory over Rome could have brought it. And five 
 centuries after the destruction of Jerusalem, its wandering 
 scions had impregnated Muhammad with the ideas of Islam. 
 Half the world was thus won for Hebraism in outer form at 
 least, and Disraeli could boast that Europe was divided between 
 those who worshipped a Jew and those who worshipped a Jew- 
 ess. The question is sometimes raised whether Jews are Euro- 
 peans. They are more, for they have helped to make Europe. 
 
 A nucleus of the race, however, still persisted, partly by na- 
 tionalist instinct, partly by the faith that its doctrines had been 
 adulterated by illegitimate elements and its mission was still un- 
 accomplished, and to-day as a population of some fourteen or 
 fifteen millions constitutes a Jewdom larger than any that its 
 ancient conquerors had ever boasted of crushing; so large in- 
 deed that though after 1,850 years a prospect has opened out 
 of re-establishing its old national home, for it to re-occupy its 
 ancient shell save through a representative minority, is phys- 
 ically impossible. 
 
 Is there no romance here? Even the false-romantic of the 
 Wandering Jew has a core of truth, of that legendary presenta- 
 tion which is often truer than a string of facts, but to which 
 Mr. Warner turns a colour-blind eye. He makes great play 
 with the exaggerated grandeur of Solomon's Palace — " about 
 as large as a country house at Lenox " he calculates. Oddly 
 enough, Mr. Wells in " The Outline of History " applies the 
 same foot-measure to Solomon's Temple — " the breadth of a 
 small villa residence." Compared with the buildings of Phar- 
 aoh or Sardanapalus it was trivial. As though the pilgrim to 
 Little Easton should compare the dimensions of Easton Rec- 
 tory — the shrine of Mr. Wells's genius — with those of Eas- 
 ton Lodge, the home of the Earl of Warwick ! Not in the ar- 
 chitecture of Solomon's temple lay the Jew's contribution to 
 civilization but in its dedication to the worship of all mankind, 
 and in the sacred tradition that the privilege of building it had 
 been disallowed to David because he was a man of war and 
 
 had shed blood. 
 
 26
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 Mr. Warner sneers at the Ghetto and the fuss made about it 
 in modern literature. Well, what was the Ghetto? The ety- 
 mology of the word remains obscure, though the word itself still 
 denotes the quarter of Venice, the few back-canals, where the 
 Jews once lived by law and where a number still live by habit, 
 among synagogues more numerous even than public-houses in 
 Britain. The sacrifice of so much space to God was the more 
 remarkable, inasmuch as congestion was the natural character- 
 istic of a Ghetto, where births multiply and boundaries remain 
 fixed. It was through this pressure on space that the sky- 
 scraper arose in the city of the Doges before New York was 
 invented. Not that the Italian altitude can vie with the Amer- 
 ican — how indeed, shall America be out-topped? — but there 
 were certainly in all Italy no other houses seven storeys high. 
 Congestion was the characteristic even of the Ghetto grave- 
 yard, as is still to be seen at Prague, where the tragic huddle 
 of countless gravestones in every stage of decrepitude and de- 
 facement and at every angle of declension, almost suggests a 
 struggle for death, for a place not in the sun but in the earth. 
 " May he come to his place in peace," is the mystic formula 
 pronounced as the clods rattle on the Jewish coffin. There 
 were few places for the Jew to come to in peace, whether on the 
 earth or beneath it, for in the very heart of Christian civiliza- 
 tion he dared to go unarmed, and the history of the Ghetto is 
 from more than one aspect the story of the longest and brave- 
 est experiment that has ever been made in practical Christian- 
 ity. Over nearly eighteen centuries the experiment has been 
 tried, and a scientific study of the results would be an illuminat- 
 ing contribution to history, religion, and ethics. 
 
 For whatever disintegrations, aberrations and confusions 
 challenge the observer and the critic to-day — whatever super- 
 stitions and fanaticisms defaced the ages of belief — the 
 centre of the Ghetto was God, and the distinction between 
 the layman and the " man of God " did not exist, the Rabbi 
 being only a professor of holy lore, this title meaning 
 merely " My Master." The Ghetto, through whatever mists of 
 legend and broidered veils of fantasy, looked back to Sinai and 
 forward to the Millennium, to the day when ten men of all na- 
 tions should take hold of the skirt of a Jew, saying we will go 
 with you, for we have heard that God is with you. In that 
 day the Lord should be One and His Name One; men would 
 beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into 
 
 27
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 pruning-hooks, nation should not lift up sword against na- 
 tion, neither should they learn war any more. Living through 
 the " drums and tramplings " of the Roman Empire, of the 
 Dark Ages, of the Middle Ages, of the Crusades, of the Na- 
 poleonic wars, as he had outlived the military Empires of 
 Assyria, Babylon, Persia and Greece, the Jew still clung to this, 
 his national vision. 
 
 Well might Charles Lamb say the Jew was " a piece of stub- 
 born antiquity compared to which Stonchenge was in its non- 
 age." The Ghetto was not only a piece of antiquity, but of 
 Oriental antiquity, petrified for the most part in the West. Its 
 spiritual latitude was that of Zion, it took its time from Jeru- 
 salem and its seasons and celebrations from Palestine. Geo- 
 graphically it was everywhere and anywhere, but its inhabitants 
 were at home nowhere, not even in Palestine, under the dead 
 hand of the Turk. In this homeless home of the Ghetto dwelt 
 — one dare not say abode, for the Wandering Jew is even to- 
 day working out his doom — the race that supplied Christen- 
 dom and Islam with their religions, European art with its sub- 
 jects, Western oratory with its phrases and images, Socialism 
 with its ideas and America with its Puritan foundations. Ven- 
 ice herself rested almost as largely on the Ghetto as on her 
 humble hidden wooden piles. 
 
 It may seem a far cry from these Pisgah-hcights to Mr. 
 Potash and Mr. Perlmuttcr or the more clayey and earthbound 
 of the Ghetto's denizens. But then " the soul of a people " 
 does not inform equally all its bodies, nor is the sky-scraper all 
 heaven-kissing roof-garden. There are the lower storeys, the 
 basements, and even the cellars, full of the homely, kindly life 
 of earth and not devoid of its grossness and ugliness. And 
 thus it was that this paradoxical people, omnipresent, yet ever 
 in a minority, everywhere powerful, yet everywhere oppressed 
 or abused, offered to the seeing eye such boundless aspects of ro- 
 mance and tragedy, so many facets of sublimity or grotesquerie. 
 An infinite irony clung round its very existence. And this 
 existence was preserved by faith and cunning, by the spirit and 
 the gold-piece, by humour and by lack of humour, by tolerance 
 and by persecution, by a poetic and hygienic tradition, and by 
 that desperate will-to-live already noted by the midwivea of 
 Pharaoh; a will-to-live which still subtly animates not a few 
 " Zionists," devoid of religion and distant from Zion. 
 
 Possibly, acquaintance with the Ghetto inspired the philos- 
 
 28
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 ophy of Durkheim — himself one of its children and even the 
 son of a Rabbi — and there is no doubt that it is a striking 
 illustration of the value of the clan. 
 
 In the year before the war, feverishly seeking and ensuing the 
 wisdom of the Webbs, panting to learn from their new states- 
 manship how to rebuild the social order, I was brought up al- 
 most at the exordium by these amazing sentences : " What 
 modern industrialism generation after generation destroys is 
 the soul of the people. . . . Breathing from infancy up an at- 
 mosphere of morbid alcoholism and sexuality, furtive larceny, 
 and unashamed mendacity — though here and there a moral 
 genius may survive, saddened but unscathed — the average 
 man is morally, as well as physically, poisoned. The destitu- 
 tion against which we protest is thus a degradation of char- 
 acter, a spiritual demoralisation, a destruction of human per- 
 sonality itself." 
 
 And this destitution, it appeared, was not that of " the sub- 
 merged tenth," but the comparatively secure existence in the 
 slums of great cities, " life on a pound a week." 
 
 Now, having known intimately many Jewish households in 
 the slums on a pound a week or less, and in no instance seen 
 personality destroyed or degraded, but in numberless instances 
 accentuated and uplifted, I was driven to the alternative that 
 either the Webbs knew nothing of life, or that life in the Ghetto 
 differs, toto ccelo, from that familiar to the Christian sociolo- 
 gist. In favour of the latter hypothesis, I recall an appalling 
 appeal I recently received from some East-end Mission, paint- 
 ing the region it served as a bestial netherworld, without even 
 the physical health of the jungle. That the Mission remained 
 nevertheless eager to convert the few Jews of the district is one 
 of the grim ironies of the situation. 
 
 If, then, the Webb picture of British slum-life is accurate, it 
 would seem clear that, as a religion for the people, Judaism 
 pans out far more practically than Christianity. Or will it be 
 claimed that the households so luridly described have no relig- 
 ion? In that case, since there is a deficiency other than ma- 
 terial destitution, is not the wisdom of the Webbs tainted after 
 all with the materialism it repudiates, if it seeks, as it does, 
 to put all the blame upon poverty? Nay; since there is not 
 only deficiency but surplusage — " morbid alcoholism " — is it 
 really scientific to lump all the evils of the social order on the 
 unequal distribution of wealth? The temperance of the Ghetto 
 
 29
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 is alone sufficient to account for its superiority to the sodden 
 streets around it. But this would be only a negative virtue. 
 It is on positive conceptions that the Ghetto rises from the 
 social swamps around, as Venice from its malarious marsh. 
 Living " in all the ugliness, the dirt and disorder of the mean 
 streets," the poor Jew nevertheless contrives to surround him- 
 self with ancient visions and prophetic splendours, which en- 
 tirely blot out these streets as the actual mud of the gutter- 
 snipe's nursery is blotted out in some transfiguring vision of 
 the castle he is shaping. That the true-born Englishman, 
 scion of the greatest Empire the world has ever seen, should 
 have for compensation in his poverty less sense of the great- 
 ness of his heritage and of his breed than the humble Jew who 
 owns nationally no square incli of the earth's surface, is a 
 paradox that has already suggested to Dr. Stanton C'oit the 
 making of a national English religion on the lines of the Jewish. 
 Moreover, " all Israel are brethren and much of that communal- 
 ised social conception which the Webbs are groaning and tra- 
 vailing to impart to the West existed three thousand years ago 
 in the Mosaic Code, even to land nationalisation. It is not 
 because property is unequally distributed, not even because in- 
 dividualism has its horrors, that Bolshevism has come upon us. 
 It is because for lack of vision or for overplus of false vision 
 the peoples have been allowed to perish. The panacea for all 
 social evils has been sought in material factors by a leadership 
 devoid of insight into psychological relativity, and with in- 
 sufficient imagination to foresee the new evils that Socialism 
 would substitute for the old, were its raging, tearing, and only 
 half-truthful campaign successful. Labour, as John Stuart 
 Mill told it to its face, is often mendacious. It is also not 
 seldom slack and inefficient, apart from intoxicated, and by its 
 piecemeal strikes in which the classes with an immediate pull, 
 such as railwaymen and miners, extract wages beyond those of 
 non-pivotal workers, it shows itself no less selfish than capital- 
 ism. " My class, right or wrong," cries Mr. Robert Williams, 
 assuming an even lower moral standpoint than the man who 
 cries, " My country, right or wrong." But Labour, we see, 
 is not even loyal to its class. 
 
 Far more pregnant than all the learned scribblings about 
 Judaism is the reply of the German conscript, who, being asked 
 
 SO
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 what his religion was, replied in astonishment: " Wir haben 
 keine Religion. Wir sind doch Juden." The worthy Israelite 
 was not even aware he had a religion : he was a Jew. And this 
 equivalence of Judaism and life is a central characteristic of 
 the religion. It led necessarily to religion pervading the home, 
 to a domestic ritual, with the father for priest and the mother 
 to bless the Sabbath candles. And if, as Fustel de Coulanges 
 shows in "La Cite Antique," this feature (minus the woman's 
 role) was common also to the Greek, the Roman, and the an- 
 cient Hindu religion, peculiar to the " peculiar people " was 
 the elaborate dietary, sanitary, and sex-regulative side of the 
 religion — the glorified and sanctified sociology, under which 
 even the most phylacteried Pharisee could not escape being a 
 decent citizen. He might lack the spiritual poetry of a St. 
 Francis, but at any rate he was more exploited by the spirit 
 than exploiting it. He might not love so romantically as an 
 Amadis de Gaul, but he transmitted an untainted physical her- 
 itage. The results may be read in the bio-statistics of the race. 
 Under the Lloyd George Insurance System, three and a half 
 times as much is paid out in sick benefit funds by the Pruden- 
 tial as by a Jewish society in the East-end. In the Russian 
 Pale, with all its persecution, the death-rate was only half that 
 of Christian Russia, and the proportion of talent immeasur- 
 ably larger. Thus, over some thirty-two centuries and in al- 
 most every environment on earth, a vast eugenic experiment has 
 been in process, as well as a Christian. But science has only 
 just awakened to this importance of the Ghetto as an experi- 
 ment in sociology. The secret of Jewish longevity, of Jewish 
 immunity from certain diseases, is at last being sought. One 
 of the greatest practical authorities on medicine, Sir James 
 Cantlie, is reported as testifying that we have never upset one 
 of Moses's laws in regard to hygiene, sanitation or medical sci- 
 ence, that all that the scientists of to-day, with their micro- 
 scopes and text-books, did was to prove that the ancient Law- 
 giver was right, and that we had been trying hitherto to cure 
 disease instead of preventing it as Moses did. To the same 
 effect is a work entitled " Moses, the Founder of Preventive 
 Medicine," by Captain Percival Wood, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P., 
 a doctor returned from fighting disease at the front, where he 
 discovered the hygienic value of the Mosaic Code. Now, too, 
 at last the marriage laws of Leviticus and the Talmudical Trac- 
 tate that amplifies them are being studied — with admiration 
 
 31
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 for a code that could interfere even between Beauty and the 
 Beast. There is here a vast new field for research which has 
 barely been touched. It may well be that the Mosaic regimen 
 was physiologically beneficial, contributing to the longevity of 
 the race and to its joie de vivre in the teeth of unpromising cir- 
 cumstances. On the side issue of miscegenation valuable work 
 on Mendelian lines has been done by Dr. RedclifFe Salaman, 
 who finds the Jew physiologically recessive, as he certainly is 
 psychologically in a fusion of cultures. Circumcision seems 
 now a recognised prophylactic. But we have no studies on the 
 value of the dietary code, as to whether for example there is 
 any point in the prohibition of pork outside a sub-tropical 
 country like Palestine. Dr. James Braithwaite has attributed 
 to its absence from the dietary the comparative immunity of 
 Jewesses from cancer of the uterus, but this appears to be a 
 mere conjecture, based on the negative argument that there is 
 no other apparent factor of difference. There is more sub- 
 stance in the general recognition of the sobriety of the Jewish 
 husband and the solicitude of the Jewish mother as the keys to 
 the superior stamina and lower death-rate of the Jewish child. 
 When Mr. William Hall, of Leeds, made a comparison between 
 the Jewish children of the poorest district in Leeds and the Gen- 
 tile children of the same quarter, so that the bad circumstances 
 they have in common, viz., dirt, overcrowding, and city atmos- 
 phere were eliminated, and parental care remained the only dis- 
 tinction, it was found that, while the average Christian child of 
 seven weighed 45 lbs. the Jewish child weighed 49 lbs., though 
 the average Christian child of the English-speaking race, rich 
 and poor alike, weighed only 48 lbs. That is, at seven the Jew- 
 ish slum child weighs more than the average Christian child, 
 even including the richest classes. At the age of twelve the av- 
 erage Christian child, rich and poor taken together, slightly ex- 
 ceeds in weight the Jewish slum child. Possibly because many 
 inferior Christian specimens have been killed off. This child 
 now weighs 77 lbs. against the Jewish slum child's 76 lbs. But 
 if the Jewish slum child of twelve weighs 76' lbs., what does the 
 Christian slum child weigh at that age? Only 53% lbs. Sim- 
 ilarly, as to height, the Jewish slum child of eight to twelve is 
 about two inches taller than the Christian slum child, and al- 
 most as tall as the average Christian child. In the Gentile 
 schools of Leeds there were 60 per cent, of bad teeth, in the 
 
 32
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 Jewish schools 25 per cent. But the most extraordinary dif- 
 ference occurs in the case of rickets. 
 
 In the Jewish schools of Leeds there was 7 per cent, of rick- 
 ets ; in the Gentile schools 50 per cent., i. e., one child out of 
 every two was a sufferer. This bony deterioration is intimately 
 connected with the insufficient supply of organic phosphate of 
 lime in the infant's milk. It is said that only 10 per cent, of 
 Gentile mothers nurse their children at the breast, as against 
 90 per cent, of the Jews, the result being that while in Manches- 
 ter in 1901, 118 Jewish infants died under one year old out of 
 1,000, the number of Gentile innocents to be massacred was 300. 
 Besides the superior feeding of the Jewish child we must take 
 into account too probably the lesser drinking of the mother. 
 We should also add the ignorant and cruel state of public opin- 
 ion, which up till the other day permitted women who were 
 about to become mothers or who had just become mothers to 
 work in factories. Drink and venereal disease are still busily 
 engaged in turning out distorted specimens faster than Chris- 
 tendom can set them straight again. 
 
 But this psychological superiority of the Ghetto with its 
 physiological pendant was not achieved by a cold eugenic sys- 
 tem. Captain Peter Wright has told us how a Polish Jew was 
 badly mishandled by soldiers rather than let them force a piece 
 of meat that was not hasher through his teeth; while another 
 was cruelly beaten rather than sign his name on Saturday. 
 One can scarcely imagine such obedience being rendered to a 
 merely legal code. But sociology was transfigured into poetry, 
 the professor was disguised as the prophet, and the driving- 
 force found in the love or the fear of God. Kuno Fischer 
 called Germany the Ego among the nations (meaning the self- 
 conscious philosopher), but Jehuda Halevi called Israel the 
 heart among the nations. Philosophy was always alien to the 
 Hebrew temper, which, having a God, had no need of meta- 
 physics. The only philosophy Israel needed was a philosophy 
 of history, and its epic is the salvation of the world by a people 
 chosen for service and suffering. This history and this philos- 
 ophy, woven into the daily round by festivals and commemora- 
 tions as into the physical life by prescriptions and by prohibi- 
 tions, have kept alive through vicissitudes and perils innumer- 
 able a people which had apparently exhausted and fulfilled itself 
 in producing Christianity in Palestine. 
 
 S3
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 It was the genius of Judaism to have fused science and life 
 in the glow of religion, and to secure obedience by the poetic 
 concept of a tender intimacy between a divine legislator and a 
 people chosen to exhibit to the world the pragmatic value of 
 His laws. "With everlasting love hast Thou loved the house 
 of Israel, Thy people ; a Law and commandments, statutes and 
 judgments, hast Thou taught us. . . . Blessed art Thou, O 
 Lord, who lovest Thy people Israel." Such is the sentiment 
 translated into impassioned images by Amos in the eighth cen- 
 tury b.c, and such is the evening benediction still uttered to- 
 day by millions of Hebrew lips. 
 
 A " chosen people " is at bottom — as I have pointed out in 
 my little book on the subject — only a choosing people. And 
 the performance of this Law and these commandments, statutes 
 and judgments, covering as they did the whole of life, produced 
 — despite the tendency of all law to over-formality — a do- 
 mestic ritual of singular beauty and poetry and tender and self- 
 controlling traits of character. No demos in the world is so 
 saturated with idealism and domestic virtue, and when, even 
 apart from its bio-statistics, it is compared with the yet un- 
 civilized and brutalized proletariat of Europe — from whose 
 dictation heaven help us ! — there is sound scientific warrant 
 for endorsing in its narrowest form its claim to be a " chosen 
 people." To-day, as the reader has already gathered, the 
 Ghetto is passing through one of the greatest agonies even in 
 its own history. Six hundred thousand Jews — the same num- 
 ber that came up out of the Egyptian bondage thirty-five cen- 
 turies ago — have been dragging their footsore feet across Ga- 
 licia and Russia, where army after army has laid waste their 
 dwellings with fire and slaughter, seized their substance, and 
 profaned their women. 1 Yet always have they carried with 
 them their scrolls of the Law. 
 
 " To some the singing of the sword was music," writes the 
 author of " The Jewish Spectre," in a rhapsody on the virtues 
 of the mediaeval Christian as compared with the avaricious trad- 
 ing of the Ghetto Jew. Christendom is welcome to its sadic 
 butchers. No Jew would deny the greatness of its art and lit- 
 
 i An appeal issued by the Jews of Paris for the Jews of old Russia points 
 out that no less than four hundred and fifty localities in the former Rus- 
 sian Empire, inhahited by three million Jews, have been the scenes of pillage 
 and destruction, many of these places now existing only in name. More 
 than one hundred thousand Jews nave perished in the massacres, with more 
 than fifty thousand wounded and mutilated, in addition to thousands of 
 Jewesses violated. 
 
 34,
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 erature in the Middle Ages, but Mr. Warner, who makes Jew 
 and trader synonymous, displays an exhaustive ignorance of 
 the contributions made to science, literature and philosophy by 
 the Jews of Spain a century or more before Dante, and of 
 their share in the Renaissance — the real European Renais- 
 sance — begotten by the Moorish invasion. 
 
 What particularly exacerbates Mr. Warner and his school 
 is the Jewish claim to be the one people to reveal God to the 
 rest of the world, as though this were a monstrous egotism. 
 But, setting aside both the metaphysical implications and the 
 justice of such a claim, I cannot see any egotism in sacrificing 
 oneself to bring about the triumph of a spiritual point of view. 
 It would have been a monstrous egotism had the Jew said he 
 was to be worshipped; he was merely throbbing with the vital 
 message he had to deliver, like a messenger galloping to warn a 
 village of an advancing flood. His psychology is not different 
 from that of other men conscious of missions, and the mystery 
 of a " chosen people " is only part of the general mystery of 
 genius. We do not know, for example, why the son of an Eng- 
 lish professional cricketer sets up to be a prophet. 
 
 Here again we may dispense as freely as Spinoza with the 
 idea of a revelation ab extra, and be content with that sort of 
 inspiration which comes to all forms of genius from within. 
 The ethical supremacy of the Hebrew or the uniqueness of his 
 contribution to civilization remains undisturbed. 
 
 It is in this unwelcome supremacy, in the sullen consciousness 
 that Christianity is after all a form of Judaism, that Mr. War- 
 ner suggestively finds " one of the secrets of the universal ha- 
 tred of the Jews in the history of Europe." This tendency to 
 disparage, which we have already noticed in Sir Harry John- 
 ston and from which, as we have seen, Mr. Warner himself is 
 not free, constitutes the intellectual variety of anti-Semitism. 
 "Pride and Prejudice" forbid an honest acknowledgment — 
 even by scientists — that the world owes anything to the Jew 
 except money. Cinderella's sister-religions will not tolerate 
 her triumph. 
 
 VI 
 
 In the quarter of a century that has elapsed since I published 
 the article on " The Position of Judaism " in the North Amer- 
 ican Review, there have been such changes in thought — in my 
 
 35
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 own doubtless as well as in that of Christians — that there are 
 not a few passages that I should express differently to-day. 
 More allowance would have to be made, for example, for Mod- 
 ernist versions of Christianity, and in any case the list of con- 
 temporal^ literary influences would require some modification. 
 But beyond omitting one phrase of six words, which, though 
 true, is in its wrong context, I have not tampered in the faintest 
 degree with it. Were I once to begin altering, I should refrig- 
 erate rather than recapture that first lyric rapture. It is only 
 in youth that one can paint the wood unobscured by the trees. 
 Moreover, the large sweep of the composition still corresponds 
 in considerable measure to my vision of the truth as between 
 Judaism and Christianity. Indeed, since I wrote, significant 
 approaches have been made by Christianity — and even by 
 seceders from it, like Mr. Wells — towards the Jewish concep- 
 tion of the Kingdom of God on earth. Doubtless were I writ- 
 ing the article now, I should be tempted to dwell on the supple- 
 mentary proof which the great war has afforded of the incapac- 
 ity of Christianity to maintain itself in the real human environ- 
 ment, or to equate itself to life save nominally. I should be 
 pointing to the series of antiquated Judaisms or national re- 
 ligions of an Old Testament character into which the Church 
 Catholic transformed itself; if, indeed, this "local colour" of 
 Christianity was not always latent, being merely brought into 
 clear visibility, like a secret ink, by the fire of war. A fair- 
 weather Christianity is as useless as a fair-weather Freedom, 
 and unhappily, in every land boasting of either, the war re- 
 vealed both Freedom and Christianity as of this spurious brand. 
 This decomposition of Christendom under stress of war into 
 spitfire nationalities has been overlooked by Kuenen, as by 
 other historians of theological evolution, who assume that be- 
 cause Christianity started out as universalistic, it has been able 
 to maintain itself at that width, whereas the " Christian broth- 
 erhood " with which " Jewish exclusiveness " is so unfavourably 
 contrasted, has had no more verification by practice than the 
 Sermon on the Mount. Would that in this absence of interna- 
 tional fraternity these nations had at least produced an Amos 
 to transfuse their tribalism with internal brotherhood! 
 
 " Truly it leaves an indelible stigma to have crucified Jesus," 
 said Pierre Loti, shuddering at the faces of the Jews of Jerusa- 
 lem. " Perhaps one must come here to be properly convinced 
 of it, but it is indisputable : there is a particular sign in- 
 
 36
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 scribed on all these foreheads, there is a seal of dishonour with 
 which this race is marked." It was a phenomenon which I had 
 not myself remarked in the tribes at the Wailing Wall. On 
 the contrary, I remembered countenances as beautiful and ten- 
 der as the Da Vinci Christ, heads as noble as those of the grey- 
 bearded senators in the Venetian masterpieces, or the Rabbis 
 that Rembrandt found in the birthplace of Spinoza. The 
 stamp I had seen was the seal of sorrow and suffering, of the 
 brooding East. But doubtless I was prejudiced: the impartial 
 eye of the cosmopolitan amorist saw this brand of Cain even in 
 the faces of little rosy children, " pretty perhaps, but the eyes 
 too furtive, the attitude too sullen; already they seem con- 
 scious of the hereditary shame." 
 
 And as a Jew who has felt the ancient crime of his people, I 
 was not comforted to hear that it could not be shaken off: that 
 it was stamped into our very visages. In vain I told myself 
 that crucifixion was a Roman, not a Jewish punishment ; that 
 the claim to be more than man — which even Loti rejects — 
 was a blasphemy to the stern Hebrew proclaimer of the one sole 
 God: in vain I protested that the death of Socrates was not 
 visited on the Greeks nor of Savonarola on the Italians, nor of 
 Joan of Arc on the English, there remained nevertheless weigh- 
 ing upon me the long odious tradition of the centuries, the 
 changeless Christian hate, which has turned the " Judengas- 
 sen " into shambles and which, even as I write, is chronicling 
 itself in fresh lines of blood in forlorn Ghettos of Galicia and 
 the Ukraine, lost in the fog of " peace." Perhaps, I thought, 
 recalling the greatness of this martyred Son of the Jews, it 
 was a righteous historic Nemesis that has nailed his people on 
 the cross for two thousand years. Justly, perhaps, do the 
 nations spit in Shylock's face and pluck at his gaberdine. 
 
 But now, at last, from my soul the shadow is lifted. The 
 war, so measureless in agony, has brought this at least of allevi- 
 ation. Christendom has been put to the test as Judaea was 
 tested, and has emerged even more shamefully. For Judaea, 
 though it crucified Jesus, did not crucify its own doctrines. 
 And against the crowd clamouring for the blood of Jesus we 
 may set the crowd that saved Jeremiah even from the priests 
 and state-prophets demanding his death: Jeremiah whose life 
 and w r ord proclaim, according to an eminent Christian theo- 
 logian, " the nature and duty of true patriotism — to oppose 
 your country's policy when it is wrong: at the peril of liberty 
 
 37
 
 THE VOICE OP JERUSALEM 
 
 and life, to set loyalty to God and justice above loyalty to 
 King and country." And in no country of Christendom to-day 
 have we seen the remotest public recognition of such minority 
 patriotism ; on the contrary, we have seen it rewarded with the 
 stone, the bullet, exile, or the prison cell. We have seen Jaures 
 assassinated and his assassin found guiltless. 
 
 " When you are told to do something," says " The Catholic 
 Child's Little Sermons," " imagine that you hear our Lady and 
 St. Joseph telling the Divine Child Jesus to do the same, and 
 consider how diligently he obeyed them and you will find it 
 easy to be obedient." There are gentle sectarians, quiet wor- 
 shippers, whose imagination does not find it easy to picture 
 Jesus jetting poison-gas or charging with the bayonet, but not 
 even a lifetime of noble civic activity has saved them from the 
 fate of the burglar and the child-raper. This in Protestant 
 England. But even in the Catholic world the very Vicar of 
 Christ has been howled down when he breathed the beatitudes of 
 the Master. And so, beholding the measure meted out to those 
 who, proclaiming the eternal laws of righteousness and justice, 
 of love and pity and chivalry, deny no divinity but that of the 
 mob; though I am ashamed for Western civilization, I am at 
 last reconciled to my race. For it has become clear — O grim 
 consolation! — that there is no nation to-day that would not 
 crucify Christ, and this although, unlike the ancient Jews, they 
 have had two millenniums wherein to learn to understand him. 
 Nay more! Remembering who during this ghastly quinquen- 
 nium have raised their voices to temper the frenzy and bru- 
 tality of Christendom, I am moved to believe that we Jews are 
 to-day the only race that would not crucify Jesus. 1 
 
 VII 
 
 From a purely theological point of view the popular distinc- 
 tion of Judaism from Christianity may be seen at a glance in 
 the synagogue hymn, Adon Oleum — the version is from my 
 " Blind Children." 
 
 " Lord of the world, He reigned alone 
 While yet the universe was naught. 
 When by His will all things were wrought. 
 Then first His sovran name was known. 
 
 i " Amid the barbaric Bcreaming of .jinpo-tunes it seemed that the effec- 
 tive Christians were the Jews." J. L. Garvin in The Observer. 
 
 38
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 And when the All shall cease to be, 
 
 In dread lone splendour He shall reign. 
 He was, He is, He shall remain 
 
 In glorious eternity. 
 
 For He is one, no second shares 
 
 His nature or His loneliness; 
 
 Unending and beginningless, 
 All strength is His, all sway He bears." 
 
 This is not far removed from Herbert Spencer's " infinite and 
 eternal energy from which all things proceed." 
 
 But the Unknowable is not the Unlovable, nor the Untrust- 
 able, and to sink into this incomprehensible infinitude is — in 
 the concluding stanzas of the hymn — to find deeper life. 
 That is what Judaism adds to Herbert Spencer. 
 
 He is the living God to save, 
 
 My Rock while sorrow's toils endure, 
 
 My banner and my stronghold sure, 
 The cup of life whene'er I crave. 
 
 I place my soul within His palm 
 
 Before I sleep as when I wake, 
 
 And, though my body I forsake, 
 Rest in the Lord in fearless calm." 
 
 Thus the Hebrew required no mediacy by way of a human- 
 ised aspect of a trinitarian whole ; indeed, he found the idea of 
 vicarious atonement opposed to his virile sense of Justice. 
 
 For two thousand years he battled against the notion, agon- 
 ised at the Stake for it, paid for his protestantism 
 
 " By the torture, prolonged from age to age, 
 By the infamy, Israel's heritage, 
 By the Ghetto's plague, by the garb's disgrace, 
 By the badge of shame, by the felon's place, 
 By the branding tool, the bloody whip, 
 And the summons to Christian fellowship." 
 
 And now, when this aspect of his thought is at last gaining ac- 
 ceptance or at least sympathy, the author of " The Jewish 
 Spectre " can write as follows : 
 
 " The vital thought in the religion of Jesus has been now two 
 thousand years struggling for existence. It is the value of the 
 
 39
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 individual, and his direct, unalterable connection with God, between 
 whom and himself there is no priest, middleman, or tax gatherer 
 possible." 
 
 It is a characteristic example of the persecution of the Jew 
 in literature. The roles are — brazenly or ignorantly — re- 
 versed. Black is white and white is black. Nay, more! Mr. 
 Warner goes on: 
 
 " This was not a reconstruction. It was not ' a reform within the 
 party,' the device of timid souls ; it was a revolution. The Sanhe- 
 drim knew this; it could not kill the idea, it killed the body." 
 
 In short, the Jews killed Jesus because he taught their own 
 doctrine of direct relation with God ! All the greater irony, 
 then, that Jesus should have become the very intermediary that 
 he deprecated. But of the travesty of Jewish history there is 
 no limit, and the end is not yet. We shall yet hear that it was 
 their ghoulish insistence on salvation by blood that made the 
 Jews the odium of the human race. Possibly it is Mr. Ches- 
 terton who will formulate that indictment. Already Nietzsche 
 has accused them of foisting a lachrymose deity and an emas- 
 culated gospel on the blonde brave conquering races. And if 
 there are many to disparage the Jewish contribution, there are 
 few to acknowledge it. When Lord Bryce said recently that 
 there were only three or four great religions left in the world, 
 and that these were being reduced to two or three, we may be 
 sure Judaism was not in his mind for the final running, unprej- 
 udiced and encyclopaedic as that mind is. Judaism has, in 
 sooth, not kept pace with the age: it does not advertise. And 
 it is handicapped by the unpopularity of the Jew. The in- 
 tellectual anti-Semitism, which I have just noted, still calmly 
 labels all the Old Testament virtues as " Christian " (as though 
 before the advent of Jesus the world was a nest of vipers, and 
 God the Father had lived utterly withdrawn, like an old cur- 
 mudgeon who is only dragged into society at the heels of his 
 son). The Old Testament is left alone to face the batteries of 
 Dutch or German Bible-criticism, as if the New were immune 
 from the shells that shatter what was always regarded as its 
 foundation. The Vatican, with its inflexible doctrine of the 
 Infallibility of Scripture, knows better. The sacred texts of 
 both Testaments are the literature of the same Hebrew people, 
 and the New is so deeply rooted in the Old that it is not pos- 
 sible, as so many Christian theologians have attempted to do, 
 
 40
 
 THE VOICE OF JEEUSALEM 
 
 to undermine the authority of the parental text without weak- 
 ening the authority of the doctrines that drew their sustenance 
 from it. Doubtless some of this modern Biblical criticism is 
 itself destined to be undermined. But it does not need the dis- 
 putable erudition of the Sherlock Holmeses of scholarship to 
 convince the modern world that the traditional narrative of 
 both Testaments — and still more their traditional interpreta- 
 tion — is unacceptable. Neither religion in its orthodox shape 
 has issued unscathed from the furnace of modern thought ; Jud- 
 aism and Christianity alike need a new orientation, or, should 
 we not say, a new occidentation. 
 
 Both, in fact, must now seek their authority, not in their 
 scriptures nor in their historic setting, but in the human soul. 
 The theory of verbal inspiration must be jettisoned: it was a 
 meaningless conception which owed its existence to the fact that 
 nobody ever read the Bible, even though thousands knew every 
 word by heart. But then most people cannot even read the 
 newspaper: that is, they are unable to seize the essence of the 
 news of the day, or to perceive the most flagrant contradictions 
 in the editorial thought or temper. 
 
 The whole idea of the " Bible " is un-Jewish. The Hebrews 
 did not possess a " Bible," but sacred scriptures — " Law, 
 Prophets, and Scribes " — all selected by the Synagogue itself 
 from a mass of literature, much of which was set aside as apo- 
 crypha. This makes it all the odder that the inaccuracies of 
 the versions in European tongues should of themselves have 
 grown sacred, and that our own revised version should still 
 provoke resentment. In Athens in 1901 a new rendering even 
 led to fatal riots. Such manifestations, however, show clearly 
 that the idea of verbal inspiration is a growth due to the conse- 
 cration of use, to a hallowing process which is not even limited 
 to religious literature. It has attached itself almost equally 
 to all literature that has become classical, and there are pietists 
 who will no more have a comma or a syllable altered in Shake- 
 speare than in the Bible. The orthodoxy of a religion may be 
 defined as its adjustment to the average mentality, which in- 
 variably reduces truths that are various, flexible, flowing and 
 natural, to symmetry, homogeneity, rigidity and miraculous- 
 ness. From this stereotyped distortion neither Judaism nor 
 Christianity has escaped, and this moment of common percep- 
 tion of common error would seem the Heaven-sent opportunity 
 for common readjustment of values. But the Jewish savant 
 
 41
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 still considers the great tragic poem of the New Testament neg- 
 ligible, and the Christian savant is busy reducing all the Jewish 
 concepts to Babylonian or Egyptian sources, or denying Sem- 
 itic birth to Jesus. And yet the only fundamental quarrel be- 
 tween the creeds is that of his divinity. Not monotheism is 
 the ground of difference — we are all monotheists to-day, if 
 we are not atheists or agnostics. " The central problem of 
 natural theology," drily observes Dr. Frazer, in his preface to 
 " The Belief in Immortality," " has narrowed itself down to 
 the question: Is there one God or none? " 
 
 But though Christianity and Judaism agree in overriding the 
 Persian dualism and in conceiving the force behind phenomena 
 as personal, moral and omnipotent, they remain absolutely 
 apart. The Church will not officially give up incarnation and 
 mediation, and the Synagogue, though it has not infrequently 
 and in varying guises evolved them over again as heresies, is 
 still adamant to their reception. It still tends to ignore the 
 reminder of Jesus that the divinity of every man is asserted 
 in the eighty-second psalm, or even that it is enounced more 
 primitively in the assertion of Genesis that God created man 
 in His own image. By " His own image " is obviously meant 
 His spiritual nature. But though at the very beginnings of 
 Judaism Abraham is shown as summoning God before the com- 
 mon tribunal of Reason and Justice, orthodox Judaism prefers 
 to abase itself before an Oriental despot, to whom we arc in- 
 sects of a day (see the Synagogue Poems, " Highest Divinity " 
 and " Laus Deo," in this volume). There is more true Judaism 
 in the famous dying mot of Heine: " Dieu me pardonnera, 
 e'est son metier." In this still unresolved quarrel of Church 
 and Synagogue, both sides forget that the future will belong 
 to the religion that first fits itself to the future. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Even Mr. Claude Montefiore, whose saintly life-work has sup- 
 plied an eirenicon between Judaism and Christianity, as between 
 Judaism and Hellenism, holds out no near prospect of fusion or 
 federation between his Liberal Synagogue and the Church, or 
 what is more practicable, between ex-Jews and ex-Christians, 
 and despite his antagonism to Zionism and Jewish Nationalism, 
 he shrinks from proclaiming his gospel urbi et orbi. His sect 
 
 42
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 replaces the narrowness of Jewish nationalism by the narrow- 
 ness of British nationalism, and his religion, swathed as it is in 
 shreds of Jewish ritual and tatters of Hebrew tradition, still 
 makes its appeal to the Jews alone; it even finds its readiest 
 echo in the Ghetto north of Hyde Park. For what reason Mr. 
 Montefiore, having evolved for himself a religion so noble and 
 sustaining, so rational and universal, yet addresses his ministra- 
 tions to the Jews exclusively, I have never been able to make 
 out, though I often suspect that he is the greatest nationalist 
 of us all. The old Judaism, like Catholicism, was a complete 
 organism, with a soul and an aura of its own. Mr. Monte- 
 fiore, under the pressure of modern thought, transforms the 
 structure, evaporates the aroma (if not the spiritual essence), 
 destroys all that dear intensity of concrete certitude, yet gives 
 us no compensation for the loss in intension by an increase in 
 extension. 
 
 But, really, it scarcely seems worth while for Judaism to go 
 through such tragic travail of soul only to come out almost as 
 tribal as before; even the New Testament, that work of ex- 
 clusively Jewish authorship, being still excluded from the Jew- 
 ish curriculum. Mr. Montefiore, as I say, struggles against 
 himself and his parochial followers, for at heart he obviously 
 aspires to make the Synagogue universal, and he tries to do 
 justice even to the Gospels. But if (as he expressly declares 
 on p. 324 of his " Outlines of Liberal Judaism ") to the world 
 as a whole the Bible will always continue to include the New 
 Testament as well as the Old, how is this to be reconciled with 
 the hope of Judaising the world? Indeed, so far as the con- 
 tradictory passage of the next page has any meaning, his 
 prophecy that the religion of the future " will be a developed 
 and purified Judaism," and will cherish the New Testament, 
 seems to accept as a fact that Judaism proper will still re- 
 main outside the next world-religion. O lame and impotent 
 conclusion ! only intelligible if Mr. Montefiore is really the most 
 secret and passionate of Zionists. Mr. Montefiore seeks to 
 evade this conclusion by pleading that the Jews have to re- 
 main a distinct religious community " for a very long time in- 
 deed." This is time-serving at its most literal. But what a 
 waste of work, after destroying the old Judaism, to create 
 merely a new Ghetto ! If the Martians were to invade the 
 earth, men of all colours would be found fighting side by side, 
 and the black peril and the yellow peril would be forgotten. 
 
 43
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 So in a period when the divine, and even the ethical, are sav- 
 agely questioned and assailed, one would rather expect theists 
 to stand together than to let themselves be sundered by theo- 
 logical systems equally unintelligible. 
 
 And I should have thought the line of the future for theists 
 lay rather in coming to some understanding on the divinity of 
 Jesus. If Christians are ready to abandon the doctrines of the 
 Incarnation and the Atonement, in their narrow individual and 
 episodical sense, there is no reason why Jews should not admit 
 that the heroic tragedy of the great Galilean illumines the cos- 
 mic problem of suffering. Has Mr. Montefiore really consid- 
 ered the Jewish God profoundly enough? Is it absolutely 
 necessary to make Him so perfectly happy? " The Jewish 
 doctrine of God," he says, " is not afraid to declare that the 
 divine perfection excludes the idea of suffering." It would 
 be truer to say that the Jewish doctrine of God has never 
 been thought out, perhaps because the genius of Judaism shies 
 at schematics, and prefers the " healthy contradiction " of life. 
 Jewish literature by no means shrinks from presenting images 
 of a deity in distress. Genesis, vi. 6 shows Him repenting of 
 having made man, and " grieved at His heart," and the wrath 
 so freely attributed to Him throughout the Bible cannot be en- 
 tirely pleasurable, however righteous. It is true that when 
 Jewish philosophy was created — under Arabic-Aristotelean in- 
 fluence in the tenth century — Saadia denied that God could 
 suffer, but only at the cost of proving that we cannot attribute 
 to Him any action or feeling whatever — a demonstration 
 which Maimonides, two centuries later, carried to even deadlier 
 completeness. Mr. Montefiore is no academic philosopher, but 
 a live thinker, who rightly bases religion on experience. 
 Whence, then, this professorial conviction that suffering would 
 impair " the divine perfection "? He is a model of iirieUeia, but 
 here, surely, there is more of Christophobia than of " sweet 
 reasonableness " and objectivity. Unmanly as it may be to ac- 
 cept vicarious suffering, to tender it is divine. And since he 
 expressly approves George Eliot's sentiment that the highest 
 human life is one of conscious voluntary suffering, why should 
 the highest divine life exclude it? God is described in the Old 
 Testament as " long-suffering." This may not quite reach 
 to " suffering," but without some degree of rufflement in face of 
 the persistence of sin the expression is meaningless. The 
 Midrash, according to Rabbi Enelow, said with Isaiah, Betsar- 
 athom lo tsar, " in the sufferings of His creatures comes suffer- 
 
 44
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 ing to Him." Indeed, what does Mr. Montefiore mean by cry- 
 ing, in one of his few impassioned passages, " God cares. He 
 must care"? For "caring" already involves "care." Mr. 
 Montefiore is fond of the phrase, " the fatherhood of God." 
 But " fatherhood " is not a mere genealogical concept. It in- 
 volves the anxiety, as well as the protecting love, of human 
 fatherhood. 
 
 Mr. Coventry Patmore is the only English poet whom Mr. 
 Montefiore quotes. But why did he not consider the father's 
 words in the famous lines on " The Toys " ? 
 
 " And I, with moan, 
 Kissing away his tears, left others of my own." 
 
 Or, 
 
 " Then, fatherly not less 
 Than I, whom Thou hast moulded from the clay, 
 Thou'lt leave Thy wrath, and say, 
 ' I will be sorry for their childishness.' " 
 
 Indeed, we find this exact note in a Synagogue poem of the 
 tenth century, by a Rabbi of Mainz, which is recited on the eve 
 of the Day of Atonement : — 
 
 " He is a God who softens at our cry. 
 ' It is my people's ignorance/ He saith." 
 
 It is a pity Mr. Montefiore does not draw more on the rich 
 vein of Jewish mysticism, especially when one need go no further 
 than the Prayer Book to find lines like — 
 
 " His glory is on me, and mine on Him." 
 
 An angry and even a furious God is a commonplace of the 
 prophets — see for example the opening of " Nahum " — and a 
 God subject to one emotion can experience another or must be 
 reduced to a stream of tendency, or to that nullity according to 
 which, as a German mystic put it, " God may not improperly 
 be said to be nothing." 
 
 I am afraid Mr. Montefiore's God is too abstract for the 
 people, and too concrete for the philosopher. Either Mr. 
 Montefiore must define Him by negatives in the manner of 
 Maimonides, and reduce Him to a sterile X n , or he must boldly, 
 and in defiance of Israel's great philosopher, go on to a certain 
 anthropomorphism. 
 
 45
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 No, it is not the trinitarian nature of the one God that could 
 divide Judaism from Christianity — a conscious Absolute, as 
 Schelling saw, involves a trinity — it is the isolated incarnation 
 of one aspect of this trinity, under cirumstances so improb- 
 able that the Church Calendar records its circumcision. 'Tis a 
 piece of alleged history which Judaism primarily denies. As I 
 have elsewhere pointed out, in so mysterious a world anything 
 may happen, and we are not entitled to deny anything a priori. 
 The Resurrection is no more impossible than that King Arthur 
 or Barbarossa or even Kitchener is still alive. But improbable 
 happenings or unintelligible concepts must rest on peculiarly 
 weighty historic evidence, and there is no iota forthcoming. 
 Credat Judacus April a, who must have been a Christian ! The 
 Resurrection, in a spiritual sense, is another matter. And if 
 the Church instead of crucifying Christ's doctrine, had rested 
 her case on the world's inability to destroy it, even by the Great 
 War, she would have been infinitely stronger to-day. 
 
 If the Synagogue has perhaps erred in seeing God too tran- 
 scendentally as a supremely wise and merciful cadi, with no 
 troubles of His own, majestic, unruffled, and unchangeable, the 
 Church has erred much more gravely at the other extreme in 
 giving to the cosmic pain and passion so narrow, concrete and 
 monopolistic a materialisation as a detachable person of a 
 trinity, with a specific albeit superhuman biography. Apart 
 from the Synagogue's rejection of vicarious atonement, its doc- 
 trine of direct relation with God renders such an intermediary 
 superfluous. For its monotheism is not merely arithmetical. 
 As antistrophe on strophe there follows on " Hear, O Israel, 
 the Lord thy God, the Lord is One," the beatification of the 
 glor\ r of His timeless Kingdom, and the mystical imperative to 
 "love Him with all thy heart and all thy soul and all thy 
 might." Here is a communion intimate enough for a neo- 
 Platomst. Nor has the ecstasy of faith ever reached rarer 
 heights than in the Kaddish for the dead, which contains no 
 word of grief, nothing save adoration of the source of life, 
 imageless and ineffable. The Old Masters may have painted 
 Jehovah with a benevolent beard, but the Old Masters were 
 Christians. 
 
 The notion that the original Mosaic core of the religion 
 escaped development is a vulgar error. Just as Maimonides 
 discarded the anthropomorphisms of the Pentateuch, so for 
 example the law of " eye for eye " disappeared in the Gemara's 
 
 46
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 demonstration that by it a blind eye-destroyer would go scot- 
 free, and a one-eyed be over-punished. Indeed, a Hebrew 
 satirist has pictured an angry Jehovah demanding back His law 
 from a faithless people and recoiling in amazement before the 
 ever-rolling waggon-loads of ponderous folios, unrecognisable, 
 innumerable. But the line of development, if it is now tending 
 towards recognition of the exalted place of Jesus in the long 
 succession of Hebrew prophets, shows, as I have said, no indica- 
 tion of acceptance of the incarnation; on the contrary, there 
 are, and still more markedly than I claimed in that old article in 
 the North American Review, signs of Christianity tending back, 
 despite itself, towards the teaching of the Synagogue. This is 
 not to say that when Christian teachers and sects have dropped 
 the heresy which differentiated their religion from the parent 
 stock, they have had the grace to recant. Martineau, the 
 Unitarian, still calls his book " The Christian Life." For 
 Eucken, although Jesus is not divine, the " Absolute Religion " 
 that remains after shedding the Christ story is — " Christian- 
 ity ! " Just so, for Fichte it was the Gospel of St. John ; for 
 Hegel — Lutheranism. For, as Disraeli said, " With words we 
 govern men." 
 
 Probably the real difficulty of reconciling religions lies less in 
 their tenets than in their entanglement with financial institu- 
 tions and vested interests. 
 
 Words and institutions apart, the battle of the future is not 
 between Judaism and Christianity, and though my thesis is still 
 nailed up, unrefuted and irrefutable, neither twenty-five years 
 ago, nor to-day, was it or is it my purpose to produce an 
 absolute apologia for Judaism or an unmitigated polemic 
 against Christianity. The difference between the two religions 
 is merely atomic. Both are compounded of the same elements, 
 only in different proportions. This is not to deny that the 
 chemical result is different. But it is to affirm that their affin- 
 ities are greater than their mutual repulsions. Their differ- 
 ences are minor and adjustable compared with their common 
 antagonism to atheism, polytheism, and pragmatic pluralism. 
 This last, at which William James clutched in his desperate 
 struggles to escape from the iron ring of materialism, contains 
 all the chaos of polytheism without even the consolation of gods. 
 Such a universe is not even a universe ; we may become the prey 
 of its cross-purposes, as mortals became the sport of the celes- 
 tials in that " Free Enquiry " of Soame Jenyns, which Dr. 
 
 47
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 Johnson derided. The mechanical universe was at least reliable 
 and more or less malleable by man, and no one except Mr. 
 Hardy anthropomorphised it as malicious. Mr. Hardy is, 
 however, an Aristotle compared with the intellects that play 
 with polytheism. Wagner's make-believe with the old German 
 gods led inevitably to a half-belief, swelling with a sense of 
 national ownership. (Richter once told me he felt this Teu- 
 tonic theology througli Wagner's music.) Already the charge 
 against the Jews begins to be, not that they killed Christ, but 
 that they, with their Christ, killed the old national gods. 
 Chauvinism is creeping into theology, and lament for the 
 slaughter of these innocents is becoming the dernier cri of 
 decadence. Nietzsche calls for a new chronology (after him- 
 self), and Judaism, after fifteen centuries of persecution for 
 denying Jesus, now stands indicted for producing him. " La 
 latinita," corroborates a recent Italian writer, " e stata rovi- 
 nata due volte da due visionarie, entrambi ebrei: Cristo e Carlo 
 Marx." Two Jews, Christ and Karl Marx, have ruined Latin 
 civilization! And so the racial Valhallas are revisited, pil- 
 grimages are made to the Pantheons. Mr. George Moore, 
 crawling down strange subterranean passages, goes on his hands 
 as well as on his knees to invoke quaint Irish deities. Mr. 
 Maurice Hewlett is subject to epiphanies of old Greek gods and 
 mediaeval fairies. It is the more surprising in Mr. Hewlett, who 
 has not displayed this frivolity over politics. But these indica- 
 tions are enough to show that no human absurdity lies finally 
 behind us. As for morals, one thought that ethics, at least, had 
 escaped from the confusions of theology ; but in such a mirror 
 of the age as " Jean Christophe," nothing is more curious than 
 the senescent musician's assumption — an assumption that 
 reconciles him to all the Futurist morals of the young genera- 
 tion — that there is no objective gauge of right or wrong, no 
 standard but the individual whim. If this Pyrrhonism of to- 
 dav, naturally intensified by the ethical anarchy of the war, 
 passes away before a new religious conception, it is difficult to 
 see how that conception can differ fundamentally from one of 
 the two aspects of .Judaism. For if it is theistic, it is not likely 
 to be other than monotheistic, and if it is not theistic, what 
 remains but sociology and the service of man? " Let judgment 
 run down as waters and righteousness as a mighty stream." 
 
 48
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 IX 
 
 Taken as literature and history, the Bible reveals a soul 
 struggling through error and savage survivals, and yearning 
 forward to world-perfection and peace, much as the world at 
 large reveals a vital energy labouring through masses of slag 
 and stone, or a spiritual energy beating itself against the 
 egotism of animal life. A new and more durable " Butler's 
 Analogy " might be written on this basis, and would be found 
 to present interesting analogies with Mr. Wells's recent thesis 
 of a God not omnipotent. Neither the Synagogue nor the 
 Church, except possibly by way of the Albigenses, Cathari and 
 suchlike sects, has yet however explored or adopted this line of 
 thought, though it is compatible with — perhaps even implied 
 in — any doctrine of necessary sacrifice, whether of a Christ- 
 people or of an individual Christ. " Progress " itself implies 
 the idea of an imperfect universe, especially if it means not a 
 predictable progress, predetermined by Reason and Right- 
 eousness and circumscribed by divine purpose, but, as it does to 
 the modern mind, a pragmatic and undefined planetary adven- 
 ture. It is unfortunate that the book in which Mr. Wells 
 sustains his thesis is marred by a caricature of Jewish thought, 
 and still more regrettable that his popularity should provide 
 the semi-illiterate with half-baked knowledge. His work thus 
 demands more attention than the unread mis judgments of the 
 savants. " The Invisible King " — a title that seems borrowed 
 from the first pages of Seeley's " Ecce Homo " — characterises 
 the Jewish God as " a bickering monopolist," " a malignant and 
 partisan deity, perpetually ' upset ' by the little things people 
 did and contriving murder and vengeance," and extraordinarily 
 wrathful at " this or that little dirtiness or breach of the sexual 
 tabu," and even " burning Sodom or Gomorrah." One wonders 
 what a God is for, if He is to say nothing about conduct, which 
 is half of life, even if it be not Matthew Arnold's " three- 
 fourths." Or is it that He is to concern Himself only with 
 other people's peccadilloes, and we are to 
 
 " Compound for sins we are inclined to 
 By damning those we have no mind to " ? 
 
 Mr. Wells ought to have remembered that the sexual tabus in 
 an age of polygamy were not what they are now. And the 
 
 49
 
 THE VOICE OP JERUSALEM 
 
 Jehovah of Solomon and David could scarcely therefore be 
 associated with a joyless Puritanism. Yet there were limits 
 even to Old Testament tolerance. Sodom and Gomorrah were 
 not burnt for trivial errors. If Isaiah's invective was aroused, 
 it was at reactionary abominations, idolatries, and hideous 
 cruelties: 
 
 " Are ye not children of transgression, 
 A seed of falsehood? 
 Yet that inflame yourselves among the terebinths under every 
 
 leafy tree, 
 That slay the children in the valleys, 
 Under the clefts of the rocks ? " 
 
 In the same vein Jeremiah cried: " Will ye steal, murder, and 
 commit adultery, and swear falsely, and offer unto Baal, and 
 walk after other gods whom ye have not known, and come and 
 stand before Me in this house, whereupon my name is called, 
 and say : * We are delivered,' that ye may do all these abomi- 
 nations?" Complaining likewise of the child-murderers, he 
 says : " And they have built the high places of Tophet, which 
 is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and 
 their daughters in the fire ; which I commanded not, neither 
 came it into My mind." 
 
 These " little things " which " upset Jehovah " are scarcely 
 the way to " the Kingdom of God," of which Mr. Wells is the 
 eloquent evangelist, and one constituent of which he specificall} r 
 defines as " the progressive enlargement and development of the 
 racial life." For, as Mr. Wells warms to his theme, we learn 
 to our surprise that his own " Invisible King " demands nothing 
 if not ethical service. For him clergymen are to throw up their 
 livings, barristers their briefs. " It is plain that he can admit 
 no divided control of the world he claims. He concedes nothing 
 to Caesar." Evidently then " a monopolist," between whom and 
 Jehovah there is little to choose. Samuel himself was not more 
 jealously republican for his God, than Mr. Wells for his. 
 " God is to be made and declared the head of the world " and 
 even the symbols on stamps are Use-iuajcstc. And when we 
 learn that the future is not to democracy but theocracy, and 
 that the trinity is doomed, we arc back in the derided Old Tes- 
 tament. The fact is, that Mr. Wells has all the " stigmata " 
 of Hebrew prophecy — lips touched with the burning coal can 
 in fact speak no otherwise. 
 
 50
 
 THE VOICE OF JEKUSALEM 
 
 When Hebraism thus marks a man for its own, all the glib 
 talk of reconciling it with Hellenism vanishes. For what is 
 Thought divorced from action but Sterility, and what is Beauty 
 but the by-product of the quest for Good, as the grace of a 
 flower is born of its energy to live? Vanishes too all that tol- 
 erance which Mr. Wells earlier displays — at the expense of 
 Judaism — for " the many-handed symbols of the Hindu or 
 the lacquered idols of China." 
 
 It is a pity that this noble book — so finely felt and written 
 that its thought deserved a far longer gestation — should not 
 be immune from the general incoherence of his impatient im- 
 provisation. Mr. Wells's contributions to thought, however 
 weighty, are merely Mr. Wells thinking aloud, and stimulating 
 as it is to watch his cerebral processes, I am always reminded of 
 the anecdote in my school physiology-book of the doctor who 
 watched a patient's digestive processes through a wound in his 
 stomach. 
 
 Mr. Wells even unconsciously accepts in principle the dietary 
 and sexual regimen of Judaism, which in an earlier chapter is 
 contumeliously rejected. For " the believer owes all his being, 
 and every moment of his life to God, to keep mind and body as 
 clean, pure, wholesome, active, and completely at God's service, 
 as he can. There is no scope for indulgence or dissipation in 
 such a consecrated life." The fact that in orthodox Judaism 
 the guidance is not left to individual ignorance does not affect 
 the essence of the conception, which has been illustrated in 
 contemporary life by the embargo on alcohol in America. 
 
 The sole difference between Mr. Wells's God and the ancient 
 Hebrew's — as that God was apprehended in the best Semitic 
 minds — is that Mr. Wells's God is finite. In His unity, invis- 
 ibility or incorporeality, righteousness, jealousy, and unre- 
 served and exclusive claim for service, He is identical with Je- 
 hovah. And it is extremely interesting to witness the re-forma- 
 tion of ancient conceptions in an ultra-modern mind. Nor is 
 the point of difference of supreme importance, for it is merely 
 metaphysical, and the Hebrew genius in its palmy days had — I 
 have already pointed out — no philosophy. Sufficient to obey 
 and adore the unknowable Creator. Philosophy whether theo- 
 logical or atheistic is at bottom the attempt of the human intel- 
 lect to circumscribe that which circumscribes it, and is thus a 
 sort of Irish bull chasing its own tail. As the demi-Jew, Mon- 
 taigne, sagely put it : " Man cannot see but with his eyes nor 
 
 51
 
 THE VOICE OP JERUSALEM 
 
 seize but with his power." When Amos in the eighth century 
 b.c. exclaimed: 
 
 " Seek the Lord, and live — 
 Him that maketh the Pleiades and Orion, 
 And bringeth on the shadow of death in the morning, 
 And darkeneth the day into night; 
 That calleth for the waters of the sea, 
 And poureth them out upon the face of the earth; 
 The Lord is His name," 
 
 the prophet could not separate his passion for righteousness 
 from the cosmos, feeling that the same God created both. Mr. 
 Wells, equally under the spell of a powerful emotion, and ex- 
 pressing in language of rare beauty that conviction of sin and 
 that sense of a mission which are common to all converts of 
 genius from Paul and St. Augustine downwards, must needs try 
 to rationalise his emotion (which, however, is a " surd " and 
 cannot be rationalised). Hence his heart and his head come 
 into conflict, for to him Nature is Fate, the veiled Being, and 
 God but a finite struggler in the welter ; having indeed come into 
 existence only through humanity and possessing no existence 
 outside ourselves. Forced to choose between God's omnipo- 
 tence and his own omniscience, Mr. Wells opts for the latter. 
 We hear no more of " Scepticism of the Instrument." 
 
 It is the third person of the trinity — what the old Rabbis 
 called the Ruach Hakodesh or Holy Ghost — succeeding to the 
 throne from which the Son had already ousted the Father. 
 Mr. Wells seems always discovering midi a quatorze heures, for 
 this conception, even if the twelfth-century Joachim of Flora 
 had it not in mind when he said " the Third Kingdom will be 
 the Kingdom of the Holy Ghost," was exhaustively suggested 
 and examined by Mill fifty years ago, not to mention its re- 
 discovery by William James. It is a conception that deserves 
 serious study, but it would seem from Mr. Wells's novel about 
 " The Soul of a Bishop " that he has already " moved on." He 
 seems kindlier to framers of Nicasan and other creeds, as though 
 now perceiving that they, too, were but trying to rationalise 
 surds and harmonise incompatible mysteries, the antinomies of 
 theology, and that it is just as theologically incomprehensible 
 to say that God is not omnipotent as to say that He is. 
 
 The Athanasian creed holds in fact no darker mystery than 
 his hypothesis of a universe greater than God, or a God who 
 
 52
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 would be snuffed out if mankind accidentally perished or de- 
 stroyed itself, as is not utterly out of the question by the 
 methods of modern warfare. Mr. Wells might almost cry with 
 Tertullian, certum est quia impossibile est. In what magnifi- 
 cent contrast rings the assurance of the opening words of Gen- 
 esis : " In the beginning God created the heaven and the 
 earth." Mr. Wells is really a modern Mani, for whom Ormuzd 
 and Ahriman are the factors of existence, and what he is break- 
 ing himself against is the old problem of the nature of evil, and 
 the old antinomy of whether a beneficent God could have cre- 
 ated it. Isaiah with sublime boldness utters that " everlasting 
 Yes " which is the keynote of Judaism. 
 
 " I am the Lord and there is none else. 
 I form the light and create darkness. 
 I make peace and create evil. 
 I am the Lord." 
 
 Thus, as in that great line of Goethe, 
 
 " Ueber alien Gipfeln ist Ruh'." 
 
 It is the same note that we find in Spinoza — the mystical 
 loving acceptance of the All as the expression of the One — or 
 that Mr. Claude G. Montefiore repeats in his more balancing 
 fashion: 
 
 " I can have faith that the good and wise God has his own 
 adequate solution of evil and suffering, but that a godless world 
 produced goodness and knowledge, reason and love — this I cannot 
 believe at all." 1 
 
 Isaiah, who, in the same chapter, is hailing Cyrus the Persian 
 as the subduer of nations and the redeemer of Israel, was doubt- 
 less intent on combating the dualism of Zoroaster, that pioneer 
 of Manichasism. It is in this spirit that Cyrus is represented 
 as Jehovah's instrument, though the conqueror be unconscious 
 who has girded him, and that per contra in another passage of 
 
 i Perhaps the most illuminating recent contribution to this puzzle of the 
 ages has been made by "Wayfarer" in The Nation: "Man in war pur- 
 sues a negative end with the greatest possible cruelty of method. Nature, 
 on the other hand, follows a creative purpose and employs the minimum of 
 harm necessary for its achievement." The thought seems akin to that in 
 one of my earliest verses: 
 
 " And if the earth with endless fray is rife, 
 Acknowledge in the universal strife 
 The zest of this, the seed of higher, life." 
 53
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 Isaiah Jehovah is asked why He allowed His servants to err 
 from His ways and hardened their hearts. Mr. Wells, in his 
 niggling criticism of Jehovah, urges that the true God has no 
 scorn or hatred for those who seek Him through idols. The 
 poet, Ibn Gabirol, proclaimed in 1050, that age of Christian 
 intolerance — and the passage found its way into the Seph- 
 ardic prayer-book — 
 
 " Yet is not Thy glory diminished by reason of those that 
 worship aught beside Thee, 
 For the yearning of them all is to draw nigh Thee. 
 But they are like the blind, 
 
 Setting their faces forward on the King's highway, 
 Yet still wandering from the path." 
 
 Indeed already in various passages of Deuteronomy the gods 
 of the heathen are conceived as " allotted " to them by Jehovah, 
 while Malachi, who stood at the cradle of Judaism proper, pro- 
 tests that offerings throughout the world to whomsoever pre- 
 sented are really presented to him. 
 
 It is some consolation for vacillating views to be told by 
 Isaiah that it is this omnific Jehovah " that turneth wise men 
 backwards and maketh their knowledge foolish," so that we 
 may piously look forward to further volte-face from our light- 
 ning philosopher, in the confidence that when we have watched 
 the panorama of history passing — at cinema speed — through 
 Mr. Wells's brain, we are destined to witness yet other exhibi- 
 tions of his cerebration in the very act. But however much I 
 am put off by Mr. Wells's precipitate parturition, I recognise 
 with Swift in " A Tale of a Tub " that in the labours of the 
 brain, as of the body, " going too long is a cause of abortion 
 as effectual, though not so frequent, as going too short." Mr. 
 Wells — it is the bravest deed I ever saw — has dashed off 
 that " History of Human Error " which Mr. Casaubon was too 
 learned ever to be delivered of. And if he is always in a jour- 
 nalistic hurry unworthy of so great a writer, he has escaped 
 those other darling sins of the age, pettiness or preciosity. 
 Though the young generation which once gave him its most 
 gorgeous epithet " dionysiac " — its O.M. — can no longer ac- 
 claim him of its amoral crew, and the optimism of his " Outline 
 of History " amuses, as I gather, the super-cultured denizens 
 of " the ivory tower," that work remains a magnificent dynamic 
 in an age not unintelligibly anaemic. While pococurantism, 
 
 54
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 pessimism and Dadaism have not unnaturally found nourish- 
 ment in the spectacle mankind has been making of itself, these 
 superior souls, unless they lend a hand to the establishment of a 
 sane civilisation, may find their ivory tower blown to the four 
 winds by a bomb from a literal super-man in his higher plane. 
 
 Mr. Wells has written Tendenz-geschichte in the good old He- 
 braic fashion, judging freely and reading us contemporary les- 
 sons by way of the Punic Wars, the Athenian mob, the Roman 
 Empire, or any old stick that comes handy to beat us withal. 
 There is none of that artistic aloofness which has demanded 
 the correction of Bible history by the point of view of the 
 arraigned. There is more of the spirit of Lord Acton. To 
 know all is not to blur all. Mr. Wells avoids that affectation 
 which I once satirised in a mock Ode to Jezebel. 
 
 " Cultured Baalite, loyal wife, 
 
 Jezebel, 
 Partner in a noble strife, 
 
 Jezebel. 
 Protestant for light and sweetness 
 'Gainst the narrow incompleteness 
 Of Elijah and Elisha's view of life." 
 
 In Mr. Wells's conception of all human history as the striv- 
 ings of a young immortal to find himself, in his suggested par- 
 allel between its blunderings and gropings and those of the in- 
 dividual slowly reaching his true happiness and life-work, he 
 has hit out a larger analogy than literature had yet given us. 
 Whether it fits the facts or not, it is a great imaginative syn- 
 thesis. 
 
 Nor ought I to complain that Mr. Wells's thought has 
 " moved on " yet once more — it is like a muddy stream that 
 purifies itself by force of going on — for he has now grown to 
 understand the breadth of Jewish theology better, as well as 
 the value of a " jealous " Jehovah. " Neither Gautama nor 
 Lao Tse nor Confucius had any inkling of this idea of a jealous 
 God, a God who would have ' none other gods,' a God of terrible 
 Truth, who would not tolerate any lurking belief in magic, 
 witchcraft, or old customs, or any sacrificing to the god-king 
 or any trifling with the stern unity of things. The intolerance 
 of the Jewish mind did keep its essential faith clear and clean." 
 And again : " We have already noted the want of any progres- 
 sive idea in primitive Buddhism. In that again it contrasted 
 
 55
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 with Judaism. The idea of a Promise gives to Judaism a qual- 
 ity no previous or contemporary religion displayed; it made 
 Judaism historical and dramatic. It justified its fierce intol- 
 erance because it pointed to an aim. . . . Because of its per- 
 suasion of a promise and of a divine leadership to serve divine 
 ends, it remained in comparison with Buddhism bright and ex- 
 pectant, like a cared-for sword." 
 
 Oddly enough, it is only when contrasting Judaism with 
 Buddhism or Hellenism or with the doctrines of Lao Tse or 
 Confucius that Mr. Wells is able to appreciate its claims to be 
 the one sane central religion of humanity ; when compared with 
 Mohammedanism or Christianity it is accused of exclusiveness, 
 of making " a racial hoard of God." He seems in Part XIV. 
 already to have forgotten what he wrote in Part VI. of how in 
 Babylon " 2,400 years ago the ideas of the moral unity of man- 
 kind, of a world-peace, had come into the world," or in Part 
 IX. apropos of Buddha that " the idea of mankind as a great 
 Brotherhood pursuing an endless destiny under the God of 
 Righteousness, the idea that was already dawning upon the 
 Semitic consciousness in Babylon at this time, did not exist in 
 his world." Before anyone talks of the Jew making " a racial 
 hoard of God," he should read Zechariah ii. 11 : " And many 
 nations shall join themselves to the Lord in that day, and shall 
 be My people." And Zechariah belongs to the very epoch of 
 the Jewish Restoration from Babylon, the birth of Judaism 
 proper. 
 
 It is true enough that in its Dark Ages, Judaism has been 
 exclusive, but these were the ages when it was shut in Ghettos 
 by Christendom, and conversion to Judaism was punishable 
 with death, both for the convert and the missionary. And in so 
 far as the Jew is himself responsible for this narrowness, he 
 has not so much made " a racial hoard of God " as a godly 
 hoard of race. Lacking the territory that automatically con- 
 serves other races, his instinct has been to preserve himself. 
 And if his instinct gave itself for conscious reason that he was 
 an irreplaceable medium for truths precious to all, the reason 
 was not so groundless. Mr. Wells who recognises how in- 
 famously the nations have betrayed "Christian universalism " 
 in the last war, should not single out " Jewish exclusiveness," 
 which after all was not militant. I am afraid that it is not 
 only re Greek history that Mr. Wells needs the correction of- 
 fered him by Professor Murray for judging ancient peoples 
 
 56
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 without comparing them with their co-existing peoples, much as 
 Mark Twain's Yankee judged the Court of King Arthur. By 
 the comparative, the only true, standard, Judaea will in some 
 particulars surpass Greece and Rome, even the Rome of the 
 Vatican ; not to mention the great Oriental Empires with those 
 vast palaces beside which Solomon's was " a suburban villa." 
 
 The best thought of Judam was never exclusive in theory. 
 And in practice, well we know — as the greatest and narrowest 
 living poet puts it — 
 
 " God gave all men all earth to love, 
 But since our hearts are small, 
 Ordained for each one spot should prove 
 Beloved over all." 
 
 For the Jew Judasa was beloved over all : he did not wish to be 
 lost in the mass of mankind — has not George Eliot pointed out 
 how many virtues draw root from " the sense of special be- 
 longing"? — but he commended the God of Israel to all men 
 and bade them make Him also the God of their respective Zions, 
 as he to-day would endorse Blake's resolve to build Jerusalem 
 " in England's green and pleasant land." 
 
 Assuredly nobody is working harder to build Jerusalem 
 everywhere than Mr. Wells, who follows up his pained recog- 
 nition of the national deities — the idealised England, France, 
 or Germany — which Christendom is now engaged in worship- 
 ping, by a passage of marvellous beauty. 
 
 " Yet in the background of the consciousness of the world, waiting 
 as the silence and moonlight wait above the flares and shouts, the 
 hurdy-gurdies and quarrels of a village fair, is the knowledge that 
 all mankind is one brotherhood, that God is the universal and 
 impartial Father of mankind, and that only in that universal service 
 can mankind find peace, or peace be found for the troubles of the 
 individual soul . . ." 
 
 The unmitigated Hebraism of this passage — the stock re- 
 frain of the Synagogue — is repeated in the comparison with 
 Hellenism. 
 
 " The mind of the Hebrews awoke suddenly to the endless mis- 
 eries and disorders of life, saw that these miseries and disorders 
 were largely due to the lawless acts of men, and concluded that 
 salvation could come only through subduing ourselves to the service 
 of the one God who rules heaven and earth." 
 
 57
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 Had Mr. Wells acknowledged consistently and without reser- 
 vations and discounts — as Huxley did — that this is the bur- 
 den of Hebrew prophecy and the hope of Israel, the " Outline " 
 of his history would have been still more accurately drawn. 
 But it seems impossible for even Mr. Wells to shake off the snob- 
 bery of modern historians who, instead of following, if in a 
 modern interpretation, Bossuet's centralisation of Jewish his- 
 tory, cannot bear to give pride of place to so lowly a clan, 
 despised and rejected of men. They are like Pontius Pilate in 
 Anatole France's story, who could not recall Jesus. Yet the 
 Lord who was not in the rending wind of Assyria, nor in the 
 earthquake of Babylon, nor in the fire of Rome, may be in the 
 still small voice of Jerusalem. 
 
 X 
 
 It is in the chapter on the rise of Christianity that Mr. Wells 
 shows himself least able to override his conscious prejudice 
 against Judaism and his unconscious prejudice in favour of 
 Christianity. Like most modern thinkers, he makes up for the 
 denial of divinity to Jesus by divinising his doctrine and his life, 
 and compensates for the repudiation of the " immaculate con- 
 ception " of the Virgin by the acceptance of her son as immac- 
 ulate. Similarly Renan, though he permits himself a Browning- 
 esque analysis of the semi-illuded, semi-illuding psychology of 
 Jesus at the moment the man of Nazareth was turning into the 
 popularly expected Messiah, bom in Bethlehem of royal seed, 
 yet dares to predict that no son of man will ever surpass him. 
 Jewish thought, which impartially records the sins of Moses 
 and David, knows no such human perfection. Tolstoi, our lat- 
 ter-day Christian Saint, was a converted roue who still gave 
 Gorki the impression of broadness in talk, without destroying, 
 however, even for this sceptical modern, a strange radiation of 
 divinity. And such storm-flecked spirituality is doubtless the 
 general nature of religious geniuses. 
 
 The American Rabbi, Endow, whose " Jewish View of Jesus " 
 is the latest and not the least commendable contribution of the 
 Synagogue to this vexed question, is as uncritical at bottom as 
 Wells or Renan. If only Christendom will concede the human- 
 ity of Christ, Judam will concede his immaculacy. 1 But these 
 
 i In his sermons on " The Adequacy of Judaism," Rabbi Enelow does, 
 however, expound the inadequacy of Jesus. 
 
 58
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 eirenica, however welcome, are no true contributions to philos- 
 ophy or psychology, and there is more flesh and blood in Mr. 
 Shaw's portrait of Christ as exhibited in his preface to " An- 
 drocles," though even here the presentation of Jesus as a less 
 scientific Shaw tends subtly to the conventional immaculacy. 
 And if Mr. Shaw's Jesus resembles the author of " Man and 
 Superman," there is a suspicious similarity between Mr. Wells's 
 own Gospel and his reading of Christ's, as though Christ too 
 believed in a Father of limited power. Nor is there a word of 
 admission as to the impracticability of the Sermon on the 
 Mount, which even Bishops have recognised, or any suggestion 
 that this unworkability of the Christian ethics may be due to 
 their having been eschatological ; interim-ethics, as the Germans 
 say, pending the end of the world, believed to be at hand. 
 Christ's followers were to be " the salt of the earth," but unless 
 the earth is to pass away soon, a world all salt might be a great 
 salt desert. Ethics is not aesthetics, and maxims that will not 
 work are no more useful than gold knives that cannot cut or 
 silver pens that will not write. As Mr. Wells sees clearly 
 enough in the case of Buddha, renunciation of or withdrawal 
 from the world is no solution of man's life-problem, however 
 " beautiful and consoling " these " systems of evasion," nor can 
 sane guidance be expected from any teacher who though he 
 has a Father in heaven has no son on earth, or who deserts 
 him when he has one, as Buddha did. Mankind has its own way 
 of equilibrating itself to these Brands with their insistence on 
 all or nothing, and by combining the rejection of their wilder 
 teachings with the apotheosis of their persons, offers a prac- 
 tical criticism of their merits and limitations. They uphold 
 the ideal in a large ostensive form, and humanity offers it every 
 homage but that of adoption. And it is often not unfortunate 
 that the adoration remains Platonic. For the inhuman is con- 
 founded with the superhuman. It may be true that " High 
 hopes faint on a warm hearth-stone," but as a general substi- 
 tute for the fifth commandment the behaviour of Jesus to the 
 future Madonna cannot be commended. It has all the ruthless 
 logic of a Lenin. And humanity in glorifying his mother and 
 imaging him so pertinaciously in her arms has ironically 
 avenged her. When Mr. Wells cannily throws us as a conclu- 
 sion : " To this day this Galilean is too much for our small 
 hearts," I feel that here at least our hearts are larger than that 
 of the Galilean. That Mr. Wells should thus call him a Gali- 
 
 59
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 lean, and never once lapse into calling him a Jew, is typical, for 
 he admires Jesus as a man after his own heart, and it is only for 
 the Nietzscheans who repudiate him that Jesus is of the ab- 
 horred race. Perhaps the remark which gives Mr. Wells most 
 room to change his mind again is that " the Jews have persisted 
 as a people while Hellenism has become a universal light for 
 mankind." The truth surely is that Judaism has both per- 
 sisted as a people and become a universal light through its Old 
 and New Testament, exactly as Hellenism has done through its 
 literature and art. Hellenism has, up to a point, also persisted 
 as a people, and I do not doubt but that Venizelos feels his kin- 
 ship with Pericles. Moreover, if Hellenism is such an all-suf- 
 ficing light, why all this pother of Mr. Wells's private evangel? 
 
 It is, however, in not escaping the conventional pitfalls anent 
 the Pharisees, that the Christian chapter of Mr. Wells's " His- 
 tory " reads most oldfashioned. While the lower clement of 
 Jewish thought may have looked upon God as " a bargainer," 
 or the Messianic hope as militarist, it is unfair, even in such an 
 " Outline," to present this mentality as the exclusive antithesis 
 to that of Jesus, who, after all, found all his disciples, apostles 
 and reporters among his fellow-Jews. If their smaller souls 
 misunderstood him, as Mr. Wells, like Matthew Arnold, con- 
 tends, he was also sufficiently ambiguous in his personal claim to 
 awaken apprehensions of blasphemy against the one sole God. 
 It is obviously false to represent the Sadducees (in opposition 
 to the Pharisees) as the generous sect, " ready to accept pros- 
 elytes and so to share God and his promise with all mankind," 
 when it was in his very rebuke to the Pharisees that Jesus said, 
 " Ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte." Moreover 
 does not John the Baptist confound both Sadducees and Phari- 
 sees in a common vituperation? 
 
 After Kuenen's tribute to the Pharisees, after Wellhausen 
 has called them " the virtuosi of religion," and Mr. Travers 
 Herford has taught the world Avhat it owes to them, it is dis- 
 appointing that even a thinker of Mr. Wells's magnanimity 
 cannot shake off early prepossessions. We shall never get the 
 future straight until wc disentangle the past without bias. 
 
 It is true that the Mosaic code has six hundred and thh'tccn 
 precepts. But Hillel was a Doctor of the Law at Jerusalem un- 
 der Herod, and his summary of them in a negatively-expressed 
 version of the Golden Rule is well-known. Nor is the Talmud 
 lacking in indications that it was the spirit behind them that 
 
 60
 
 THE VOICE OF JEKUSALEM 
 
 was really regarded. Habakkuk, it tells us, had reduced them 
 to one: "The just shall live by faith," while a rival Amora 
 taught that their final condensation was the phrase from Amos : 
 " Seek the Lord and live." Either summary might quite well 
 express Mr. Wells's own gospel or even that of Jesus. The 
 inner truth of Pharisaism is that it was not less broad than 
 its phylacteries. Their amplitude was but an overflowing of 
 the spirit. As Captain Herbert Adler says so well of the Sab- 
 bath of the Pharisees, it was essentially " not a thing of nega- 
 tions. As little could it be observed by mere abstentions as a 
 poem can be composed by the avoidance of false quantities." 
 And he points in proof to the Synagogue Liturgy passim. On 
 the Day of Atonement for example " the bare act of fasting is 
 hardly referred to." Spurious Pharisees are, of course, always 
 with us. But it is an ancient Rabbi who enumerates their six 
 species : " Pharisee Self-seeker, Pharisee Shambler, Pharisee 
 Reckoner (who is always balancing his heavenly pass-book), 
 Pharisee Bent-Back, Pharisee Do-tell-me-another-Duty, and 
 Pharisee Tremulous," while the only true Pharisee is styled 
 " Pharisee Love-God." 
 
 XI 
 
 These six hundred and thirteen precepts of the Mosaic code, 
 though they doubtless embrace some survivals of primitive 
 tabus and totems, are in the main only an attempt at a prac- 
 tical idealism, a sanctified sociology, an order in human affairs, 
 which no one has demanded with more insistence — even unto 
 pedantry and Philistinism — than Mr. Wells himself. In a 
 sermon just to hand from Dr. Walter Walsh, the freest of all 
 the advanced preachers, I find — and curiously enough in a 
 discourse called " Radical Religious Reform " — a complaint 
 against people who " pride themselves on their ideals — a word 
 they are particularly fond of — but make no serious effort to 
 get them reduced to laws of human conduct; laws to dominate 
 Church and State and market and factory and school." There 
 is in fact no real contradiction between the spirit and a letter 
 which codifies it for practical purposes and for the guidance of 
 spiritual minors. No honest man objects to the making of 
 laws to restrain rogues, fools, and infants. The spirit that is 
 come of age will autonomously do what the immature spirit has 
 to be commanded to do, as a gentleman will without thinking 
 
 61
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 behave as etiquette books must teach the boor. The genius 
 may play the piano to ravishment, but in common with the 
 musical dullard he must stick to the notes of the text. The 
 law is a minimum, like the poor rate: there is nothing to pre- 
 vent any man from giving to the poor all he hath. Christen- 
 dom did not really enjoy a religion of the spirit, with nothing 
 of the Law, and if it shed the Law at all, it was to receive it 
 back into another department of life. The difference between 
 it and Judaism from a practical standpoint has always seemed 
 to me summarised in the reply of Jesus to those who enquired 
 whether it was lawful to pay tribute to Caesar. " Render unto 
 Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that 
 are God's." With a rare unanimity Matthew, Mark and Luke 
 relate this as a dexterous retort by which Jesus evaded being 
 caught by his foes (though there appears to be no reason why 
 a divine personage bent on self-immolation should have exer- 
 cised such prudence). But the reply really throws over the 
 distinctive feature of theocracy. As Mr. Wells rightly claims, 
 there are no things that belong to Caesar that may not equally 
 belong to God. And so Judaism has no separate politics, civ- 
 ics, economics, or even dietetics and hygiene. Hence the pop- 
 ular delusion about Pharisaism or Jewish legalism. The Chris- 
 tian imagines that it was a burden added to life as he himself 
 lived it. But it was not added to life — it teas life. It took in 
 the whole life. What for the modern world is done by Law, 
 Medicine, Sanitation, Philosophy, Art, etc., was done for the 
 ancient or mediaeval Jew by his Religion. Hence the apparent 
 superfluity of much of Mediaeval Judaism, now that the Jew 
 holds shares in the common stock of European civilisation. 
 Instead of the Rabbi legislating for the whole of life, there is 
 the British Medical Association to teach hygiene, the House of 
 Commons to regulate public duty, etc., etc. I am not certain 
 that this specialisation is an unmixed good, it disintegrates the 
 unity of life and makes religion a mere aspect among many 
 others and one specially suitable, like best clothes, for highdays 
 and holidays, though it seems an inevitable phase in the evolu- 
 tion of civilisation. But we no more escape legalism because we 
 give up Talmudic legalism than we escape war because we have 
 <^i\«n up chain-armour. Beside the countless pages of Black- 
 stone and our parliamentary enactments, beside the innumerable 
 volumes on Equity, Contracts, Bankruptcy, or Military Law, 
 beside the libraries of leading cases and that " wilderness of 
 
 62
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 single instances " which Tennyson bewails, Jewish law hides its 
 diminished head. D.O.R.A. alone is bigger than the Shul- 
 chan Aruch. Indeed Gentile life — - or, shall we say, Gentility 
 — is far more hide-bound than Pharisaism. The most fashion- 
 able Jew, who prides himself on his emancipation, is as much the 
 slave of tradition as the Ghetto zealot. I take up a pre-war 
 book on etiquette and read: 
 
 " Cards must be left on all occasions of a formal character. A 
 lady leaves her own and two of her husband's — one is intended for 
 the gentleman of the house, and the other for the lady. If a call is 
 made upon a guest staying at the house, a card is also left for her. 
 A lady when leaving cards for her husband, must place them upon 
 the hall table, and not leave them in the drawing-room on her depar- 
 ture, as was the custom. Should the lady upon whom you call not 
 be at home, you turn down one corner of the cards, which signifies 
 that you have called personally, and on the whole family. Cards 
 with enquiries should be left at the door; the post is a permissible 
 channel for the transmission of these, where the distance is incon- 
 veniently great." 
 
 This is the very language of the Rabbis. I almost hear the 
 sing-song and see the scoop of the inverted expository thumb. 
 What Bayswater or Kensington lady — Christian or Jewess — 
 would have dared to infringe that? 
 
 And if the Rabbis multiplied ordinances praeter nee es sit at em, 
 they were swayed not by a mechanical formalism, but by a liv- 
 ing emotion. As the sons of a beloved father will try to under- 
 stand and fulfil the minutest shade of his testamentary disposi- 
 tions, so the Rabbis tried to read between the lines of the " Eth- 
 ical Will " which the Torah was to them ; to be more legal than 
 the Law, to give no grudging joyless service, but full measure, 
 pressed down and running over. Though the deductive logic 
 by which " Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother's milk " 
 leads to the cumbrous ritual of Fleischig and Milchig, is absurd 
 to the eye of pure reason, its mainspring was not logic but lov- 
 ing loyalty. There is even something to be said for the " legal 
 fictions " which, corrosive of conscience as they were, were prob- 
 ably meant to show that the unavoidable breach of law in a dif- 
 ficult world did not mean repudiation of the Law. If we do not 
 look at faiths and ideas from within, from the point of view of 
 those who hold them, we shall never understand how beliefs, that 
 to the impersonal reason are transparent absurdities, may yet 
 
 63
 
 THE VOICE OP JERUSALEM 
 
 be capable of a valuable regulative function when vitalised in 
 persons. The obverse mistake is to expect persons, for whom 
 ideas are dead, to be vitalised by them. 
 
 XII 
 
 Thus, for the Hebrew, life like its Creator, was a unity. 
 Lord Acton strangely regards the maxim " Render unto Caesar 
 the things that are Caesar's " as asserting and denning once 
 for all the province of ecclesiastical liberty in the face of the 
 State, while Mr. Wells understands it as meaning that prac- 
 tically nothing could be left to Caesar. It seems to me on the 
 contrary to surrender to Caesar a good deal that is God's, or 
 at least to contain no definition of the rival realms. How 
 would Lord Acton have met, for example, the Quaker objection 
 to conscription, which Mr. Wells flippantly dismisses as skin- 
 saving? The life of society is surely not to be thus bisected 
 without injury, like some low organism: it cannot be divided 
 between God and Caesar. Indeed this very reply which Jesus 
 gave to his tempters, this apparently dexterous repartee, con- 
 tained its own confutation. For the coin in which the tribute 
 to Caesar was paid, bore, according to his own statement, the 
 image of Caesar. Now this was utterly counter to the second 
 commandment of the Decalogue. No Hebrew coin was ever 
 stamped with an animal or human device ; there is none on the 
 shekel of the first century, nor the bronze coins of Herod, nor 
 on the brass coins of Bar Cochba. Hence in circulating such 
 tribute-money the Jew was committing sin. We may regard 
 the second commandment as trivial, and it has certainly lost 
 much of its point with the diminution of idolatry, though the 
 ikons of the Greek Church and the crucifixes and pictures of 
 the Roman still illustrate its wisdom. But in days when the 
 vulture and the serpent were goddesses in Egypt, and apotheosis 
 was the conventional ending of a Caesar, the line between repre- 
 sentation and worship was dangerously narrow. And that the 
 worship of human gods was no shadowy sentiment or Platonic 
 devotion to some ideal imaginatively incarnated, may be seen 
 from the extraordinary story in Josephus of how a beautiful 
 married woman who had refused all the overtures of a lover was 
 persuaded by the bribed priests of the Temple of Isis to give 
 herself to him under the illusion that he was the god, Anubis. 
 From the same historian we know how the Jews preferred to die 
 
 64
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 rather than tolerate the effigies of Caesar when Pontius Pilate 
 introduced them into Jerusalem upon the ensigns, in defiance of 
 the precaution of previous procurators to have other orna- 
 ments upon the banners. It is true that by a strange contra- 
 diction the annual head-tax to the Temple had to be paid not 
 in Jewish copper coins but in silver Tyrian staters, bearing 
 the head of the town-god Hercules, and on the reverse the 
 Ptolemaic eagle, with the legend in Greek letters " Tyre the 
 holy and inviolable." The paradox is resolved by sundry more 
 or less casuistical arguments, and by the hypothesis of Theo- 
 dore Reinach that these exact and well-alloyed coins were (once 
 thrown into the Temple treasury) melted down into ingots. 
 But there is no such suggestion as regards the tribute paid to 
 Caesar, and in a conception of religion which forbade even the 
 appearance of sin, which went so far out of its way as to pro- 
 hibit poultry cooked in butter lest one might inadvertently 
 seethe a kid in its mother's milk, there could be no logical place 
 for casuistry except to add stringency to a precept. It was 
 impossible therefore to render to God the things that were 
 God's if one rendered to Caesar the tribute that was Caesar's. 
 It is as if by an unfortunate symbolism, Jesus gave the very 
 answer that demonstrated the impossibility of this partition of 
 duties. 
 
 XIII 
 
 "Is this Armageddon?" an old countrywoman enquired of 
 me wistfully. She was interested less in the mighty issues of 
 the war for her own race, than in the joyous prospect of the 
 return of the Jews to Palestine. I assured her that all the 
 beasts of Daniel were in the fighting line, especially that fourth 
 beast dreadful and terrible and strong exceedingly, with great 
 iron teeth, the beast that devoured and brake in pieces and 
 stamped the residue w r ith the feet of it; moreover that Death 
 was on his pale horse and Hell followed with him, exactly as 
 predicted in Revelation. Then I saw that a greater authority 
 than I — a rural rector to whom France is indubitably the 
 right foot of the image of Daniel — had decided that this is 
 but the sixth vial, not the seventh, the prelude or preparation, 
 but not Armageddon itself, and that consequently the hour of 
 Zion is not yet. It is only in 1934 that the Jews will return 
 to Palestine. 
 
 It must be admitted that negatively at least the rural rector 
 
 65
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 has proved correct. As one who was " called to the colours," 
 the blue and white colours of Zionism, a quarter of a century 
 ago by a Viennese dramatist of whom I had never heard till he 
 sent up his card, endorsed by the universally-known author of 
 " Degeneration," I can see in the present regime in Palestine 
 very little resemblance to the Jewish State which my strange 
 visitor, dropped from the skies, invited me to help him estab- 
 lish. In the interval between this interview in a London suburb 
 and the processional entrance of Sir Herbert Samuel into " the 
 Jewish National Home " — the High Commissioner taking the 
 dais at Jerusalem in the name of George V., and his few fellow- 
 Jews lost in the glittering mass of Arab effendis, Bedouin 
 sheikhs with silver headgear and flowing purple robes, and 
 Mullahs sane and splendiferous in white turbans ; of British 
 Governors, and Major Generals, and Staff Officers and Secre- 
 taries, and A.D.C.'s, and British Consular Kawasses in blue and 
 gold, with silver swords and sceptres — I have made speeches 
 innumerable, more voluminous even than my equally unpopular 
 pleas for Female Suffrage. I can only hope all this spade- 
 work has helped to dig the foundations of Zionism and not the 
 grave in which, to all appearance, it is being buried alive. Only 
 one of these speeches is to be inflicted on the reader, but in 
 view of the present vogue of Zionism in high Anglo-Jewish 
 circles, and the diversion of an ex-Home Secretary to its nom- 
 inal service, it is interesting to recall that when I presided over 
 a dinner to Dr. Herzl at the crucial moment of his leadership, 
 at the crisis when he thought he held the Sultan's promise of 
 Palestine if only two million pounds could be raised, a member 
 of the Maccaba?ans, the Club which was giving the dinner, 
 wrote to me hoping that all references to Zionism would be 
 excluded as religiously as pork, and Dr. Herzl toasted merely 
 as a man of letters. It is the chance turning-up of an old 
 cutting from the Daily Neves that has reminded me of this 
 episode, and as the episode has now historic interest and does 
 not, I think, figure in Mr. Sokolow's " History of Zionism," I 
 reproduce it here : 
 
 " THE ZIONIST MOVEMENT 
 
 " WANTED £2,000,000 
 
 " Dr. Herzl, the originator of the Zionist movement, was enter- 
 tained at a dinner given on Tuesday by the Maccabaeans, a Jewish 
 society that restricts its membership to such Jews as are ' untainted 
 by commerce.' 
 
 66
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 " The introduction by the Chairman, Mr. Zangwill, was brief but 
 hearty. ' We Jews/ said he, ' have followed Dr. Herzl's amazing 
 career with approving goodwill or admiring hostility. Something of 
 that regard which the fiercest Imperialist has for De Wet the 
 bitterest anti-Zionist has for Herzl . . . We Maccabaeans cannot 
 pretend to ignore what Herzl means to the Jews; we cannot but 
 welcome him as a Prince in Israel, who has felt his people's sorrows 
 as Moses felt the Egyptian bondage, and who has sought to lead the 
 slaves to the promised land. In the long centuries of Israel's exile 
 the nation has produced great men enough . . . but Dr. Herzl is 
 the first statesman the Jews have had since the destruction of Jeru- 
 salem. The gospel of Herzl is not only for the poor Jews who lack 
 bread, but for the rich Jews who lack a conviction, nay, to the 
 world at large — a world relapsing into barbarism and dominated 
 by mechanism — it restores the light and warmth of idealism. 
 Never since Imperial Rome fell in its rottenness has there been an 
 hour in which the world needed so much the inspiring spectacle of a 
 movement, incorrupt and instinct with the noblest humanity. And 
 it is fitting that from Zion this light should go forth.' 
 
 " Dr. Herzl responded to this eloquent interpretation of his pur- 
 pose in admirable English. He is a tall, dark man, with pale, 
 intellectual features, long black beard, and a fine manner. Return- 
 ing from Constantinople and the ' extraordinary complimentary 
 and friendly reception ' extended to him by the Sultan, he could 
 only ask, ' Are you ready ? Are you ready to show yourself grateful 
 for an historic succour which is being brought to you? Are you 
 ready to stand by him who is ready to stand by you? How great, 
 how swift is your readiness ? ' Without money — two million 
 pounds was the sum demanded — nothing could be done. ' Even 
 to drag iron out of the bowels of the earth gold is necessary,' said 
 Dr. Herzl, and, judging by the tone of the gathering, he may not 
 have to wait long for this sum. Those present included some of 
 the finest minds in modern Jewry — Professor Vambery, Colonel 
 Goldsmid, fresh from South Africa; Sir Francis Montefiore, Dr. 
 Gaster, Mr. Solomon, the artist, and many others." 
 
 The exact date of this cutting does not appear on it, but at 
 the back there is an advertisement of Irving and Ellen Terry in 
 " Madame Sans-Gene " at the Lyceum, which, by reference to a 
 theatrical authority, gives the year as 1901. My description 
 of the world in this year as " a world relapsing into barbarism 
 and dominated by mechanism " throws an interesting side-light 
 on the current view that the globe would have been still a garden 
 of Eden but for the Teutonic serpent. For this was not the 
 utterance of a senile laudator temporis acti, but of an observer 
 well on the right side of forty. 
 
 67
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 Of course the two million pounds were not raised, the reporter 
 had mistaken the after-dinner glow for enthusiasm: indeed a 
 supplementary leaderette from the same organ, pinned to this 
 report, informs the world that " the Club has officially disasso- 
 ciated itself from the new enthusiasm." " On the other hand," 
 adds the Daily News: " numbers of Christians, as well as Jews, 
 who hold the prophetic interpretation of certain Hebrew 
 Scriptures, believe that a general recolonisation of Palestine is 
 divinely predicted, is already in progress, and is certain to be 
 completed in due course. In the minds of those who hold it, 
 this forecast is intimately connected with the prophecies of the 
 Second Advent." 
 
 I have no doubt but that these Christian minds — especially 
 now that Armageddon has been followed by some materialisa- 
 tion of the ancient Jewish hope — will be as disappointed as 
 the Zionists themselves with my common-sense treatment of the 
 Palestine situation. But the Zionists have chosen to translate 
 the glamorous Messianic legend that consoled the centuries of 
 exile into a political programme. And as such it must be 
 brought to the touchstone of practical politics. You cannot 
 have a poetic licence for prose. The hard facts of geography 
 and economics must be faced in their bare verity. You cannot 
 wreathe them in roses, not even in roses of Sharon. Nor will 
 it do to babble about the Prophecies; or iterate the blessed 
 word, Armageddon. 
 
 The Prophets are not magnified but diminished when 
 regarded primarily as Old Moores or political tipsters. Ad- 
 monition and criticism rather than prediction is their true 
 essence. None of the Hebrew words for " prophet " contains 
 the idea of forespeaking which that Greek word has unfortu- 
 nately accentuated, to the overshadowing of all other meanings 
 of the prophetic role. The Hebrew nabi means a mouthpiece ; 
 roeh or chozeh, a seer. The greatest of the Old Testament 
 prophets, Jeremiah, has left us an almost scientific diagnosis 
 of prophecy proper. He is mocked and derided and there is 
 upon him the fear of even graver persecution. Nevertheless 
 
 " If I say I will not make mention of Him, 
 Nor speak any more in His name, 
 Then there is in my heart as it were a burning fire 
 Shut up in my bones. 
 And I weary myself to hold it in, 
 But cannot." 
 
 68
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 It is the same fire with which every reformer or social critic 
 burns, nay which enkindles the artist to liberate at any cost his 
 peculiar conception of his art and no other. In the words of 
 Browning: 
 
 " Belief's fire, once in us, 
 Makes of all else mere stuff to show itself." 
 
 If, however, we concentrate our attention upon the minor 
 aspect of Prophecy, which consists in foreshadowing, then there 
 are no Prophecies in the Bible awaiting fulfilment, unless it be 
 the vision of a warless millennium. What people usually mean 
 by the Prophecies is the prognostication of the return to Pales- 
 tine of the Jewries now in dispersion. And that it should be 
 imagined there is any direct allusion in the Bible to the present 
 situation, is one of the oddest results of the petrifaction of 
 Israel in the pages of that book. This fallacy about the 
 Prophecies affects even cultured people who have grasped that 
 the Bible is a national literature, not a celestial gramophone. 
 It is this delusion which turns that great literature into a 
 happy hunting ground for text-hunters and cranks and sec- 
 tarians and grotesque calculators of the number of the Beast. 
 It sometimes seems as if nobody reads the Bible except the 
 inmates of lunatic asylums or those qualifying for residence. 
 As I write I receive an apocalyptic communication from a 
 rhapsodical suburban householder, whose first breathless sen- 
 tence, which would occupy at least six pages of this book, 
 informs me that the restoration of Palestine via England is due 
 to the fact that the English are " God's own descendants," 
 and that " the English language is the only one naturally 
 spoken in the hereafter ; " statements which leave me unalarmed 
 by his apprehension " that the long-delayed deliverance of lost 
 souls which are fluid electricity may cause the earth to be dis- 
 placed by tilting." 
 
 Even Lord Byron, when he wrote his " Hebrew Melodies," 
 remarked to Nathan, the composer of their music, that the 
 present wanderings of the Hebrew race are such a confirma- 
 tion of the " distant prophecies which foreran them " that it is 
 impossible to compare them and yet be an infidel. Nay, M. 
 Sokolow himself, to whose " History of Zionism " I am indebted 
 for this citation, boldly encourages the error and heaps up 
 utterances from all parts of the Old Testament. But the out- 
 standing fact about the Prophecies is that they had all come 
 
 69
 
 THE VOICE OP JERUSALEM 
 
 true five centuries before the Christian era. The comminations 
 that began in the eighth century b.c. with Hosea and Amos 
 were fulfilled by the exile in Babylon, and the consolations in 
 the return to Palestine by grace of Cyrus. Babylon was not 
 indeed destroyed as suddenly as Jeremiah's words had led the 
 faithful sons of the captivity to expect, but it was certainly 
 " fallen " as suddenly as he had predicted, and this conquest of 
 the Chaldee by the Persian was the beginning of its decay. In 
 two centuries builders were quarrying in the temple of Bel, and 
 the city of hanging gardens had practically become " heaps, a 
 dwelling-place for dragons, an astonishment, and an hissing 
 without an inhabitant." It was during the troubled interval 
 between the destruction of the Temple by Nebuchadnezzar and 
 the beginning of the reconstruction under Cyrus, it was when 
 Israel sat down by the rivers of Babylon and wept when he 
 remembered Zion, that his soul, quickened as never before, pro- 
 duced the major Prophets and the Psalmists that are his 
 peculiar glory. It was when he hanged his harps on the willow- 
 trees and asked how could he sing the songs of the Lord in a 
 strange land that, in fact, he sang them most sincerely and 
 passionately. It was then that he, for the first time, preferred 
 Jerusalem above his chief joy. It was then that the ethical 
 messages of the older prophets first found their real response, 
 and that the tender mysticism by which Amos had expressed the 
 peculiar bond between Israel and his God penetrated sweetly 
 into the soul of the exiled captives. For this was the birth- 
 period of Judaism proper, and of the bulk of that self-conscious 
 literature, which first inspired and then enswathed. The very 
 " book of the law of Moses " seems scarcely known before Ezra 
 brought it from Babylon. It was too in the sixth century b.c. 
 that the historical books were written, re-edited or re-coloured 
 to constitute the epic which was to console and resurrect the 
 people that was its theme. You may measure the greatness of 
 the Hebrew genius by comparing the utterances of Jeremiah, 
 Isaiah and Ezekiel in those years of national agony with the 
 output of Maeterlinck and Verhaeren, and the other Belgian 
 poets during the German occupation. 
 
 If the same lamentations and consolations, the same celestial 
 menaces and reassurances which moved the contemporaries of 
 the Hebrew prophets seem still more apposite to-day, that is 
 only because history repeats itself. The prophets were not 
 conscious of any world other than the ancient. But it shows 
 their depth of insight — or of foresight, which is merely insight 
 
 70
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 projected forwards — it proves how truly they interpreted the 
 psychology of their race, that the same words which touched 
 the Jews of twenty-five centuries ago, are as availing to-day, 
 and will be perhaps no less applicable in a national catastrophe 
 twenty-five centuries hence. But it is not enough to say that 
 these prophets interpreted the soul of the Jew : they performed 
 the same service for humanity at large. The Bible transcends 
 the race that produced it, like all great literature, though none 
 other has in the same degree carried a message to every race 
 and grade of mankind. So universalisable is its nationalism 
 that England has annexed the Hebrew prophecies to her own 
 history, even as her sympathetic genius has annexed the Bible 
 to her literature, drawing sustenance from it in the critical 
 moments of her destiny. In Scotland the affinity with Hebraism 
 is still more strongly marked, so much so that in trying to 
 render in verse the essential verity of the Jew's Sabbath, I 
 could do nothing but imitate Burns's " Cottar's Saturday 
 Night " even to the metre, though with the Jew it is the Friday 
 night. It would seem that though the Church, to differentiate 
 the creeds, changed the Saturday Sabbath into the Sunday of 
 the Lord's Day, yet the Jewish habit of beginning with the 
 evening before — " And the evening and the morning were one 
 day " — persisted or resurged spontaneously among the Scotch. 
 Nor is it only nations that find inspiration in the Hebrew seers. 
 There is no revivalist, be it of a language, a culture, or a creed, 
 but draws hope and faith from Ezekiel's vision of the dry bones 
 that lived again, and stood upon their feet, an exceeding great 
 army. Prophecy is a force for its own fulfilment ; the vivid 
 impression it produces is faith in the making, and faith moves 
 mountains. 
 
 There are, even outside the Prophetic Books, passages so 
 terrible in their truth that it is difficult to realise they were not 
 meant for to-day. Take the twenty-eighth chapter of Deu- 
 teronomy : 
 
 " And the Lord shall scatter thee among all people, from the 
 one end of the earth even unto the other . . . And among these 
 nations shalt thou find no ease, neither shall the sole of thy foot 
 have rest: But the Lord shall give thee there a trembling heart, 
 and failing of eyes, and sorrow of mind: And thy life shall hang 
 in doubt before thee; and thou shalt fear day and night, and shalt 
 have none assurance of thy life: In the morning thou shalt say, 
 Would God it were even! and at even thou shalt say, Would God 
 
 71
 
 THE VOICE OP JERUSALEM 
 
 it were morning! for the fear of thine heart wherewith thou shalt 
 fear, and for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see." 
 
 This is an exact description of the state of mind and body of 
 the Jews in many parts of Europe at the very moment of 
 writing. Yet the context makes it clear that the prophet of 
 woe had in mind only local and temporal conditions, and was 
 anathematising within a range of conception which did not 
 include the modern world. Till they were invaded by Assyria, 
 the Jews, isolated in body as in mind, never began to realise 
 even the ancient world. One need only read the eleventh 
 chapter of Isaiah with its incongruous mingling of spiritual 
 and political triumph to see that for the prophet the Philistines 
 and the Ammonites, Edom and Moab, were all visualised as 
 subsisting up to the millennium, with even the discords of 
 Ephraim and Judah awaiting their resolution on that day of 
 world-peace and Jewish glory. 
 
 Prophecy is not then anything but a vivid sense of fact. 
 The future is part of a curve, the other parts of which — the 
 past and the present — are given. Some form of prophecy is 
 compulsory upon all of us, whether we be farmers sowing seed 
 or statesmen introducing measures, and the chief obstacle to 
 prophecy is not the difficulty of piercing through the mist which 
 is supposed to veil the future, but the difficulty of piercing 
 through the mist which veils the past, and above all, the present. 
 
 XIV 
 
 But although there was nothing supernatural about the 
 Prophets of Israel, least of all the apocalyptic ravers, nor had 
 even the greatest extended the curve of fate so far as this year 
 of grace, it. would be falling into the opposite error to imagine 
 that there is nothing mystic in the Zionist situation, or that 
 there is any parallel between a resurrection of Judaea and the 
 resurrection of, say, Poland. 
 
 Poland stood — and stands — for nothing except itself. 
 But it is impossible to reduce to the same simplicity of race- 
 narrowness and national pride the problem of a people which, 
 besides producing or inspiring two other world-religions, carried 
 with it down the ages its own religion, and fused it so intimately 
 with the lost territorial nationality that Judaism has never been 
 able to get free, or to resume the missionary effort which it was 
 
 72
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 carrying on before Jesus was born. The heathen who in the 
 day of Jewish State had grasped eagerly at Judaism could not 
 be expected to saddle themselves with a political irredenta. 
 They preferred to be themselves " redeemed " by Christianity. 
 
 To the tact of Jochanan ben Zakkai must be allotted the 
 blame of this complex and indecisive situation, which has lasted 
 to our own day, though doubtless it would not have been easy 
 for him to reconcile the beaten Israelites to final acceptance of 
 their defeat. The same struggle in fact is before our eyes now 
 among the Germans, one section of whom strives to exalt 
 Germanthum as a precious Kultur for the world, all the purer 
 for being shredded of its vestment of material power. Joch- 
 anan was the trimmer who preaches both Kultur and a future 
 Weltmacht. 
 
 There is a many-sided symbolism in the dramatic picture of 
 this shrewd Tcmna escaping from Jerusalem in a coffin, what 
 time Titus and his legions hovered at the gates of the Holy City. 
 For Jochanan bore in his own breast the seeds of the future, 
 saved Judaism from the fall of the Jewish State. The zealots 
 of nationality preferred to meet the conquering Roman with 
 grim suicide ; Jochanan founded a school at Jamnia, under the 
 protection of Titus. That disentanglement of religion from a 
 locale which Jesus had effected for the world at large was in a 
 minor degree effected, a generation after him, for the Jews 
 themselves, by the mailed hand of Titus and the insight of the 
 prudent sage. Possibly Jochanan had already outgrown the 
 burnt offerings which tied Judaism to the Temple ; he may have 
 felt already that Israel's greatness was spiritual, belonged to a 
 category of force that could not, and should not, be measured 
 against Rome's material might. However this be, his recon- 
 struction of the Sanhedrin, even in the absence of the hewn- 
 stone hall of the Temple for it to meet in, and the necessary 
 conversion of the substantial sacrifices into offerings of prayer, 
 made the salvage of Judaism more spiritual than the original 
 totality. The unifying centre was no longer geographical, and 
 the Jews became " the People of the Book " in a far profounder 
 sense than when they were the people of a soil, too. The Law 
 was never so obeyed in Bible times as it was when the record of 
 these times became the all-in-all. 
 
 But this transformation was not achieved in one generation, 
 nor without violent reactions. Scarce half a century after 
 Jochanan ben Zakkai, the great rebel, Bar Kochba (Son of a 
 Star), beat back for a time the whole might of Rome. And in 
 
 73
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 the monstrous regime of religious persecution by which Hadrian 
 avenged the difficult suppression of the uprising, the transform- 
 ation of Judaism might well have been into paganism. 
 
 Thus, although Jerusalem remained throughout the entire 
 Christian era in the hands of foreign conquerors, the Jews 
 always retained some sense of being colonists, whose mother city 
 was in Asia. Some day it would be their own city again — but 
 in God's good time, in a whirl of miracles! Hence, except 
 under the ephemeral inspiration of pseudo-Messiahs, Zionism 
 was never a matter of practical politics ; it was a shadowy, 
 poetic ideal, outside life; a romantic reminiscence. Old men 
 went to Jerusalem to die — not to live. Its earth was 
 imported — but to be placed in coffins. In practice Jews have 
 always been ardently attached to the country of their birth, 
 and if they have seemed to remain apart, Ezra and Nehemiah 
 are largely responsible, those zealots (more Mosaic than Moses) 
 who stamped out marriages with other peoples, even when the 
 strangers accepted Judaism. The very Rabbis of the Talmud 
 could not endorse this principle, yet in practice it became the 
 rule, and an institution, designed in the fifth century before 
 Christ to preserve the religion, served in the Dark Ages of 
 Christendom to preserve the race. Religion and race had, 
 indeed, come to seem one and the same thing. And against this 
 people, already doubly cut off from mankind, the Christian 
 raised his material wall of separation, and created the 
 Ghetto, even adding the death-penalty to the forces against 
 fusion. 
 
 Nor was the transformation into mere spiritual Judaism 
 ever effected radically. Two reactionary influences remained. 
 Palestine still retained a certain authority over the Diaspora. 
 Babylon, indeed, soon asserted itself as the peer of Jerusalem, 
 and later, with the movement of history and the great teachers, 
 the spiritual hegemony shifted to Spain, to Cairo, to Poland. 
 But underneath all this flux Jerusalem was still the Holy City. 
 Secondly — and here comes in Jochanan's terrible tact — the 
 literary ritual, substituted for the literal sacrifices, did not 
 profess to be more than a temporary necessity, and the sacred 
 shambles, that would have been soon outgrown, remained among 
 the ancient glories to whose restoration the stubborn national 
 spirit clung. Rachel wept for her children, and comforted 
 herself by the belief that they were not dead but sleeping. As 
 little as possible was changed of a liturgy enrooted in the Holy 
 Soil, and thus it came to pass that in the narrow, sunless, stony 
 
 74
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 streets of European Ghettos shambling students and peddlers 
 offered metaphorical first-fruits in ingenious lyrics, and cele- 
 brated the ancient harvest-festival of Palestine in pious acros- 
 tics. Never was there such an example of the dominance of 
 the word. Life was replaced by Literature. What wonder if 
 the love of Zion grew mainly literary, so that even the passion 
 of a Jehuda Halevi for Palestine has been dubbed more the 
 passion of a troubadour for a visionary mistress than a patri- 
 otism with its roots in reality ! 
 
 Fantastic and factitious though this love of Zion was, yet, 
 supplemented by eschatological superstitions, it made Jerusalem 
 still the mystic City of God, still the capital of the Millennium, 
 still the symbol of Israel's misery and Israel's ultimate regenera- 
 tion. And even before modern Zionism arose, in the Ghettos of 
 New York and Philadelphia, the " messenger of Zion " could be 
 met on the cable-car, going his rounds, collecting the humble 
 cents which enabled greybeards to pore over moth-eaten 
 Talmuds in the Holy City. 
 
 Outwardly the people that led this strange inner life was 
 interfused, in greater or less proportion, with almost every 
 people on the planet. We find it energising wherever our vision 
 turns — from England to Italy, from Poland to Persia, from 
 the Barbary States to Cochin China. It lived in contact with 
 every nation, civilised or savage ; it underwent the influence of 
 every environment, it played a part in every history. 
 
 Two effects followed, first the transformation of Israel into 
 detached groups, each of which was apt to take on a petty cor- 
 porate life of its own in practical obliviousness of its larger 
 national unity; second the transformation of function from 
 agricultural to commercial, in obedience to the external forces 
 that were denying Jews land, excluding them from the guilds of 
 labour, and restricting them to finance. 
 
 The Jews, in fact, became the middlemen of the world, as 
 well intellectually as commercially. 
 
 This was their function in the symbiosis, as biologists phrase 
 it ; these were the terms on which they were permitted to live for 
 the benefit of their neighbours, and so pliantly did they adapt 
 themselves to the service of mankind that the natural human 
 instinct for political independence was finally atrophied. Liv- 
 ing thus everywhere, yet denied territorial possessions any- 
 where and therefore tied nowhere, they were turned into a race 
 of nomads. 
 
 They became, in fact — though in a novel sense — a people 
 
 75
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 of Commercial Travellers. But one thing must be added: the 
 Commercial Traveller carried always amid his samples — a 
 Bible. 
 
 And this forms the true centre, a book substituted for a 
 geographic centre, and a condition of spirit for a point of 
 space. 
 
 And moving round this pivot, the landless denationalised 
 groups retain subtly their sense of constituting a people, nay, 
 the Chosen People, and thus they win back the self-respect and 
 dignity which the contempt of Christendom and Islam must 
 otherwise have undermined. They remain, indeed, the conscious 
 superiors of their persecutors, the aristocrats of faith. 
 
 For those around them seem to them given over to savage or 
 imperfect beliefs, however noble the temples reared to other 
 gods than the one sole unpicturable Spirit, Creator of Heaven 
 and Earth, who has selected Israel to make known his name to 
 the heathen. And thus, although these groups speak Spanish 
 or French, Chinese or Dutch, Russian or Arabic, although they 
 change their psychology and even their physical appearance in 
 harmony with the particular environment, their religion, woven 
 into the very texture of life by countless ceremonies and pictur- 
 esque traditions, keeps them still unified, even as the Hebrew of 
 the Synagogue services provides an undying lingual link. 
 
 Like loose water, then, the race — during almost the entire 
 Christian Era — flowed easily from one country to another, 
 moving under pressure of necessity, and running into every kind 
 of shape forced upon it by the local configuration, everywhere 
 reflecting different skies and other trees, and yet to itself all 
 parts of the same water, immiscible with other streams, and all 
 ultimately to flow to Palestine. 
 
 This is a condition from which one may easily prophesy 
 persistence. A people that has learned to live without a 
 country is unconquerable. 
 
 Might is baffled when opposed to the ubiquitous, the infinitely 
 evasive. For it will never be simultaneous ; never will the com- 
 bined peoples break into an attack upon the Jews, as at the 
 stroke of a conductor's baton. Masses may be forcibly baptised 
 here and there, though even that is met by crypto-Judaism. 
 And there are always plenty of other Jews elsewhere, vigorous 
 and prolific. Here indeed is the secret of immortality. 
 
 But there is a force that is greater than might — it is love. 
 Ever since the eighteenth century this force of love has been 
 acting upon the Jewish people. With that epoch of revolution 
 
 76
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 and its quickened sense of the human brotherhood, began the 
 break-up of the Ghettos in Western Europe. The Jewish clans, 
 invited outside their high walls and admitted gradually to the 
 civic life of Christendom, permitted to de-specialise themselves 
 from commerce, and brought into contact with modern critical 
 thought, found themselves exposed to a double disintegration. 
 They were undermined from within and absorbed from without. 
 Gone — at least from those educated in the general European 
 schools — was that naive sustaining conception of their 
 superiority, their providential mission. The great achieve- 
 ments of Christendom, not only in the spiritual domain, but in 
 the realm of arts and letters, became clear to them. 
 
 The reason for their isolation seemed obsolete. The aspira- 
 tion for Palestine was felt to be incongruous, even as a far-off 
 religious ideal. Again it was proclaimed — by Moses Mendels- 
 sohn this time — that Judaism is larger than a land : that its 
 future realm must be that of spiritual conquest. But in the 
 process of interfusion which set in, the conquest was not to 
 Judaism. Mendelssohn's own grandchildren became Christians. 
 That would have been well enough, had not with many the 
 acceptance of Christianity been a weak concession to the 
 tyranny of society, which has in no country quite ceased to 
 penalise Judaism. For the Jew's loss of his old faith was not 
 necessarily compensated by a new belief, and conversion — espe- 
 cially in Germany — was more often a mark of indifference than 
 of illumination. 
 
 But the freer the Jew is left the more he tends, if not towards 
 Christianity, towards a broader view of it, and towards the 
 acceptance of Christ in the Apostolic chain of Hebrew 
 prophets. The modern Jew is a pro-Christian, only too eager 
 to admire the ideals of whatever nation he lives amid, only too 
 uncritical. There can be little doubt, therefore, that were the 
 Jew left to himself and given a free run and free elbow-room, 
 he would, in any country immune from new influxes of Jews, be 
 practically merged with his environment in the course of a few 
 generations. 
 
 For this consummation, however, Christendom is too unchris- 
 tian to wait. It requires three or four generations after the 
 first emancipation, and before these generations are up, some- 
 thing is sure to happen to throw the Jew back upon himself in 
 reactionary regidescence : the Dreyfus case is what Bacon calls 
 an " ostensive instance," and the all-pervading anti-Semitism 
 
 77
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 that has followed the Great War with its swarm of massacres in 
 the more anarchic countries is another. 
 
 Two opposing forces are thus at work upon the Jew — the 
 wind and the sun. The gaberdine, thrown open for a moment 
 in the burst of heat, is buttoned tighter the next before the 
 biting blast. Even were the sunshine as constant and ubiqui- 
 tous as the race, this stubborn life-force might not necessarily 
 relax before it, since there would always be local differences of 
 temperature and local variations of resistance, and any rem- 
 nant in any country would be sufficient to restock this eternal 
 people. 
 
 But considering how fitful and evanescent this sunshine is at 
 its best, how swiftly veiled by regathering clouds of prejudice — 
 note even in free England the outcry against the alien — con- 
 sidering, too, that the bulk of the race is still immured in the 
 Dark Ages, it may safely be prophesied that the people whose 
 obstinacy was already denounced by the Roman writers will 
 long continue to persist in comparative isolation, however its 
 religion becomes modified, as it cannot fail to be vitally modi- 
 fied, under the influence of modern thought and freer life con- 
 ditions. 
 
 And if this much could be predicted, even without taking 
 account of the greatest conservative factor in modern Jewry, 
 how much more confidently may it be predicted, when we allow 
 for this marvellous new factor — Zionism? 
 
 For, as if indeed by a historical miracle, just as the ancient 
 religion begins to weaken and the segregating rites, ceremonies, 
 and dietary laws to dissolve, a new cohesive force arises to bind 
 together the loosening atoms of Israel. Or perhaps it was 
 always there — this sense of racial unity — perhaps it was the 
 deep basal force of which unity of religion was only a super- 
 ficial effect. 
 
 It is strange to consider how little the modern Jew has cared 
 to proselytise ; how strongly he has felt that his peculiar religion 
 was suited only to the peculiar people. 
 
 It may be, correspondingly, that Jew hatred, which formerly 
 posed as religious and now poses as economic and social, was 
 really always merely racial — the hatred for a superior people; 
 a people that whether by a climatic accident or biological sport, 
 or whether by providential choice, divides with the ancient 
 Greeks the hegemony of races and outdoes even the Greeks by 
 still existing with undiminished vitality and recuperativeness. 
 But whatever be the true motive-power of so-called anti- 
 
 78
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 Semitism, and whether it, or race, or religion has been the true 
 preservative of the Jewish people, the Zionist movement com- 
 pounded of all these three anti-septic factors — evoked by 
 Judaeophobia, fed by racial sympathy, and inspired by religious 
 hopes — has come to cry halt to disintegration, to rescue at 
 once the Jewish people from persecution and the Jewish psy- 
 chology — with its rare spiritual products — from submer- 
 gence in the general life. 
 
 An assertion of Jewishness from within, it has been more 
 powerfully cohesive than even the external pressure of persecu- 
 tion in Russia or Roumania ; it has captured the " intellectuals " 
 by pride as well as by pity. 
 
 To-day it knits together a thousand vacillators and holds 
 them in the brotherhood, awaiting the necessarily slow emer- 
 gence of the " Jewish National Home " in Palestine. Waiting 
 without working is a form of opium-eating — it has been the 
 disease of the Jew for eighteen centuries to intoxicate himself 
 weakly with visions of coming glory — but working while wait- 
 ing is a noble stimulation that is already producing a renais- 
 sance of Jewish life and letters, and helping the Jew to shuffle 
 off the ignoble coil of the Ghetto. Already the swift develop- 
 ment of physical manliness under new open-air conditions has 
 brought back in the Palestine Colonies the ancient Maccabaean 
 type. 
 
 Writing in 1903 at the invitation of the Daily Mail to 
 explain Zionism to its readers, I pointed out that its ultimate 
 aim was " the creation of a model state, which, set on Zion's 
 Hill, may be a light to the peoples. 
 
 " The Jew's facile worship of Christendom," I pointed out, 
 " has not been entirely merited by its solutions of the problems 
 of civilisation; his moral genius is not yet outmoded or super- 
 erogatory. 
 
 " The race which produced Moses, Isaiah and Spinoza has 
 still other messages to speak, and cross-fertilised as it now must 
 be by all that Christianity has achieved in the sun during its 
 own centuries of hidden life, it will surely not flower into its 
 third national period without bearing some new precious fruit 
 for the human race, whose service is its highest ideal." 
 
 XV 
 
 It cannot be too clearly understood that Zionism, although 
 its ultimate aim is religious in the largest sense of that much 
 
 79
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 misunderstood word, is a modern political movement whose 
 origin and methods differ toto ccclo from the mystic Zionism of 
 the past. Mr. Israel Cohen in his valuable compilation, " Jew- 
 ish Life in Modern Times," has an eloquent passage on the 
 pitiful waste of blood, of hope, of prayer, through the Dark 
 Ages of Jewry had national restoration been finally surrendered 
 as a mere fable. But this is an absolute falsification of history. 
 The national restoration for which the Jew prayed was insep- 
 arable from the re-establishment of the Judaism of the Temple. 
 The Jewish martyrs of the Middle Ages went to the stake not 
 for the unity of Jewry, but for the unity of Jehovah. " In 
 that day the Lord shall be One and His Name One." What 
 would make these old Jews turn in their graves would be to read 
 atheistic articles by Jerusalem journalists, or to witness the 
 crusades of the young colonists of Palestine against the Holy 
 Sabbath. Political Zionist though I am, I cannot share the 
 intolerance for the Jews of the old type who live in Jerusalem 
 on the subsidies of the Diaspora. I know how economically 
 reprehensible and spiritually contemptible they are to the Grad- 
 grinds of the European Jewries, but when I think of the blood- 
 soused plains of Europe, I feel more strongly than ever that in 
 these frowsy greybeards poring over their obsolete Talmuds in 
 the airless academies of the sunless stone alleys, and hugging 
 their worm-eaten traditions to their caftancd breasts, we have 
 a finer type of humanity than the Prussian Junker in all his 
 bravery, and that it pays a people better to keep up such a 
 standing army of mystics and students than to nourish the 
 insolence of a military caste. And if the purpose of Zionism 
 was merely to beget another national type on the stereotyped 
 Western pattern, it would not be worth the striving. Though 
 the worm-eaten traditions of these caftancd ancients cannot be 
 resurrected as they dream, yet must the true inwardness of their 
 dream be respected. 
 
 Happily the noble allocution of Dr. Wcizmann, the Zionist 
 leader, at the laying of the foundation stone of the Hebrew 
 University in Jerusalem, like the similar oration of Sir Herbert 
 Samuel at a banquet before his departure for Palestine, proves 
 that the Zionist leaders are undertaking the task in this very 
 spirit and that they mean not only Hebrew to be heard in the 
 streets but the voice of Jerusalem. 
 
 In this " Psaume de la Terre Promise," the Jewish poet, 
 Edmond Fleg, looks to one of Israel's sons, " un frere de Mo'ise, 
 un frere de Jesus" to write the third and last Testament " sur 
 
 80
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 le parchemin des plaines reconquises," and, recalling the drown- 
 ing of Egyptians that marked Israel's first passage across the 
 Red Sea, demands that this time the waters shall close without 
 agony in Israel's wake. 
 
 Unfortunately it is difficult to see how — under the British 
 Government's interpretation of its promise to the Jews — any 
 situation can be produced in Palestine remotely resembling the 
 Restoration for which one has worked, or which the poets and 
 the people celebrate, or which these noble programmes imply 
 and necessitate. 
 
 XVI 
 
 To show, however, that though compelled to repudiate the 
 political imprudence of pledging even the Jews of enemy coun- 
 tries to England, I was ready to give the diplomacy of the 
 Zionist leaders and the bona fides of the British politicians the 
 benefit of the doubt, I reproduce from a Press report my speech 
 at the great demonstration at the London Opera House on 
 December 3, 1917, in celebration of Mr. Balfour's historic 
 promise of " a Jewish National Home in Palestine " — a promise 
 categorically repeated on the platform of the Opera House by 
 Lord Robert Cecil and Sir Mark Sykes on behalf of the govern- 
 ment. Speaking as President of the rival Jewish Territorial 
 Organisation (the Ito) I said: 
 
 " To-day I am here not for criticism but for congratulation and 
 co-operation. I congratulate Dr. Weizmann and M. Sokolow upon 
 their historic achievement in the region of diplomacy. To see that 
 this is followed by a similar achievement in the more difficult region 
 of practice is the duty of all Israel. Particularly is it the duty 
 of the Ito, founded as it was to procure a territory upon an auton- 
 omous basis. For the Ito to oppose any really practicable plan for 
 a Jewish territory would be not only treason to the Jewish people, 
 but to its own programme. And as a first-fruit of the friendly nego- 
 tiations with Zionism, which began in July, I am happy to be able 
 to join with you in welcoming the sympathy of the Government with 
 Jewish aspirations. 
 
 " But I do not come to the Government, as Lord Morley tells us 
 the Kaiser came to him, with mock salaams and marks of Oriental 
 obeisance, for I have long maintained that after a war for liberty 
 and the rights of small nations, this very reparation was due to that 
 unhappy, scattered, and divided people which has bled and suffered 
 with all the belligerents. And as an English-born citizen I am 
 proud that my country by this pro-Jewish manifesto has wiped out 
 the stain of her alliance with the fallen Russian Pharaoh. But 
 
 81
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 whatever the general Jewish gratitude for this extension of the 
 principle of nationalities, the Jews in Turkey and other now enemy 
 countries are as loyal to their fatherlands as we to ours, and we who 
 stand here can have no claim to pledge the race to any Power or 
 Powers. All we can say is that happily the vast majority are con- 
 centrated in those allied and democratic countries with which they 
 are in natural affinity. Particularly close is their affinity with the 
 English. I am not referring to the theory of the Anglo-Israelites 
 that the English are the Lost Ten Trihes, though I observe, in 
 passing, how strange it is that while some Jews are so anxious to be 
 accounted Englishmen, some Englishmen are so anxious to be 
 accounted Israelites. But it is not surprising that the nation whose 
 noble version of our Scriptures has made the Bible almost a British 
 possession, should vibrate to Jewish national aspirations. Was it 
 not an Englishwoman, George Eliot, who invented Zionism, and 
 who, five years before even Pinsker, marvellously interpreted the 
 yet unborn? Was it not England, too, that created Territorialism 
 by the epoch-making offer of a territory in East Africa contained 
 in that other historic letter from Lord Lansdowne? An enemy of 
 Zionism has pointed out that Governments come and go — for my 
 part I am glad they do — but this sympathy with the Jewish cause 
 cannot be uprooted with any individual Government. It is a British 
 tradition. It was a wise instinct that led to our shores the 
 immortal founder of Zionism, Dr. Herzl; here he first delivered his 
 message, here he established the financial institutions of his move- 
 ment. 
 
 " But it is not only a Jewish national home that our people needs. 
 There is the further and not less momentous principle which Jewry 
 has of late united in demanding — equality of rights with their 
 fellow-citizens in every country for all Jews who may be unable 
 or unwilling to take up the new citizenship in Palestine. This prin- 
 ciple is the more important inasmuch as, out of our thirteen or 
 fourteen million Jews, only a small minority can possibly return to 
 Palestine in any foreseeable period. Indeed, but for the fact that 
 the Russian Revolution has in all probability brought freedom to 
 the six million Jews of Russia, I should still consider Palestine an 
 utterly inadequate territory, and Galveston as still the one gate of 
 hope. But as things providentially are, the same programme can 
 combine a national home for the minority in Palestine with freedom 
 and diversity of political status for the majority without. One 
 would have thought that such a statesmanlike solution of both as- 
 pects of the Jewish question would find all Israel contented. But 
 no ! the words ' Jewish National Home ' offend the patriotism of 
 certain leading British Jews. They are so very English, you see. 
 You will perhaps remember the escaped German officer who took up 
 his abode in a London hotel. He spoke English perfectly, he wore 
 immaculate English clothes, he gave a genuine London address. 
 
 82
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 Only, instead of writing, say, ' 55, Park Lane/ he wrote ' Park 
 Lane, 55.' And that little difference gave him away. So you may 
 see English-born Jews, bred at English public schools and English 
 universities, sometimes in the English public service, sometimes even 
 married into old English families, yet betrayed as un-English by 
 just one point — they are against the rise of that Jewish State, with 
 which every true Englishman sympathises. 
 
 " But let us not be unfair to these British Jews. If they protest 
 too much, yet their protestations are not without reason. A burnt 
 child dreads the fire, and Israel has a long memory of persecution 
 and misunderstanding. Even to-day, when our sons are dying 
 for England, anti-Semitic organs unite with irresponsible Zion- 
 ists to proclaim that we are no true citizens ; that here we have 
 no abiding city. Apparently all Jews outside Palestine are to 
 be merely protected by their consul from Jerusalem — two mil- 
 lions, say, in Palestine protecting twelve millions outside; a 
 small tail indeed to wag so large a dog. We Territorialists have 
 always repudiated such political utopianism; from the first our for- 
 mula ran ' To procure a territory upon an autonomous basis for 
 those Jews who cannot or will not remain in the lands in which they 
 live at present.' For those and for those only. Not for those who 
 can or will remain in their present lands. With these there may be 
 a spiritual connection; there cannot be a political. And to-day, 
 when — to quote your great leader, Max Nordau — 'the period of 
 rhetoric is over — the hour of deeds is approaching ' — I am glad to 
 have the assurance of the Zionist leaders here that they unreservedly 
 accept the Government's stipulation that ' nothing shall be done 
 which may prejudice the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews 
 in any other country.' Once Zionism is established on this sound 
 basis, not only does its formula become identical with the Ito's, but I 
 can see no reason why all Israel should not co-operate with both 
 organisations in developing Palestine as a Jewish National Home 
 for those Jews who can or will go there. To diminish the risks of 
 confusion, let Palestine be called Judaea, and let the Jews who adopt 
 its citizenship be called Judaeans. Then all the others will remain 
 as before, Jews — Jews of whatever political allegiance they choose. 
 A national home in Palestine — freedom and equal rights every- 
 where else; here surely is a platform that can unite all Israel. 
 
 " And, despite the grumbling, it is uniting them. They are all 
 coming to you. Some, of course, are upset; the Captivity had lasted 
 nearly 2,000 years, they had hoped it would last their time. Still, 
 they are coming — you may even hope for Sir Francis Montefiore ! 
 Josephus tells us that Jerusalem fell through Jewish faction; if 
 Jewish concord could bring about its restoration, the city torn from 
 the Turk, after exactly 400 years of that Lord of Misrule, would be 
 already ours. For, to-day, all roads lead to Zion. This is the day 
 of alliances. Israel, like every other people, must have allies. 
 
 83
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 But they must be allies who come to help and not to betray. At 
 this very moment a meeting of the Maccabaeans — probably under 
 the inspiration of the Jewish Chronicle — is considering how to 
 unite all parties in Palestine work. But let us be clear what that 
 work is. It is not a mere question of Palestine immigration; it is a 
 question of a national home on an autonomous basis. The Jewish 
 ideal proclaims not merely Leshanah liabaa bey'rushalayim (' Next 
 year in Jerusalem') — it says also Leshanah habaa beni chorin 
 (' Next year, sons of Freedom '). John Hay, when told that cer- 
 tain peoples were not fit for autonomy, replied, ' No people is fit 
 for anything else.' I do not say this autonomy must come at a 
 bound. Though, in my opinion, the boldest way is always the best, 
 and responsibility is a people's best educator, yet I am prepared to 
 make all possible concessions to circumstances and history. But un- 
 less the Palestine colonisation is so planned that it must eventually 
 produce the national autonomous home, I, for one, will not devote 
 my limited strength to such a mockery of Jewish aspirations. The 
 times are too serious and tragic for such trifling. Mount Zion is in 
 labour. Shall it produce a mouse? No, it must produce a lion — 
 the lion of Judah. 
 
 " I have done my best to allow for the morbid psychology of the 
 British Jews, for the shell-shock that our unhappy history has pro- 
 duced on their nervous system. But if Palestine comes under Brit- 
 ain, what becomes of their apprehensions? Why the Palestine 
 Jews can come into their very League of British Jews! And if 
 Palestine is neutralised or internationalised, it can never develop 
 those military possibilities which alone make a people suspicious 
 to its neighbours. But the most important consideration which our 
 friends of the Right have overlooked is that everything is in the 
 melting-pot; that the bad old world we have known is not the world 
 we shall live in after the war; that there may even be a League of 
 Nations. For think to what this old system of mutually hostile 
 States has brought our planet. Saul slew his thousands and David 
 his ten thousands, but to-day the Angel of Death does not suffice 
 for the volume of destruction. He has commandeered all the other 
 angels into his service — the angels of fire and the angels of air — 
 he has conscribed the very cherubim. There is death in the heavens 
 above and the earth beneath and the waters under the earth. The 
 scions of civilisation shrivel up one another with spirted flames or 
 boiling oil. .Millions wander and perish — in Poland no child un- 
 der seven has been left alive — one Serbian in every four is dead, 
 one of every two Armenians. Thousands of women have been dis- 
 honoured; the camps of captives, the hospitals of the wounded, are 
 numbered by the myriad ; plagues, famine and civil war ravage the 
 peoples; the cities are full of the cripples and blinded; the whole 
 earth groaneth and travaileth. 
 
 " If we thought that all this was only to end in the same old 
 
 84
 
 THE VOICE OP JEKUSALEM 
 
 world, life would hardly be worth living. Where there is no vision, 
 says the Biblical sage, the people perish. I say that without the 
 vision of a League of Nations the whole world will perish. And 
 this vision is no mere dream of poets or dilettanti. It is the sober 
 aspiration of statesmen like Mr. Asquith, like Lord Bryce, like Lord 
 Lansdowne, like President Wilson, like the greatest personality the 
 war has revealed, I mean General Smuts. But this aspiration was 
 not originated by General Smuts or his fellow-statesmen. It is the 
 vision of our own Isaiah: ' They shall beat their swords into plough- 
 shares and their spears into pruning hooks ; nation shall not lift 
 sword against nation, neither shall there be war any more.' In such 
 a world, if it emerges, would it matter if we Jews did have a single 
 nationality, if within all these leagued nations there was this still 
 finer core of comradeship? Even in the old bad world, Jewish fra- 
 ternity, like every link that drew the lands together, was a blessing 
 and not a curse. And though the new world we dream of may de- 
 lay to come, yet the bad old world can never quite return. Seven 
 crusades to the Holy Land have all meant massacre for the Jews ; if 
 the Eighth Crusade is to mean Palestine for the Jews, if it is to be 
 truly a Christian Crusade, then that very fact is a proof of a new 
 world-order of love and justice. Why then should we Jews, the 
 people of Isaiah, at such a turning-point in history, nourish that 
 crude and cynical view of nationality which regards every nation as 
 necessarily the enemy of every other? Let us rather make a great 
 act of faith, and instead of disavowing the brotherhood of Israel let 
 us proclaim — from our Jerusalem centre — the brotherhood of 
 man. 
 
 " But this spiritual work is not all that calls to us. For Palestine 
 is not like those rich southern plains on which the Hun is again 
 descending. It is a place full of stones and fever. It is a land 
 whose main bulk lies almost as desolate as the plains of Flanders ; 
 ruined not by German war but by Turkish peace, by centuries of 
 neglect and misgovernment. With the depletion of the world's re- 
 sources, and especially of the world's man-power, by this terrible 
 war, who is to win the country for civilisation if not we Jews? 
 Even if we had no historic connection with it, that would be a 
 worthy mission for a people. Let me appeal therefore to the Brit- 
 ish Jews to work with us and to work loyally. For even at the 
 best the goal is far. Palestine is not yet ours, and even when it is, 
 our work — despite the pioneers we shall always honour — despite 
 even Baron Edmond de Rothschild, to whom Palestine stands eter- 
 nally indebted — will only begin. Already under the oegis of Eng- 
 land our young men have died there. And we mourn these heroes 
 of our blood. But eagerly as our young men have sacrificed them- 
 selves in Palestine for war, still more eagerly will they offer them- 
 selves there for the labours and sacrifices of peace. That will be 
 the true Jewish regiment. 
 
 85
 
 THE VOICE OP JEKUSALEM 
 
 " This is no time, my friends, for rejoicing. Jewish legend re- 
 bukes the Israelites for rejoicing even over the drowning of the 
 Egyptians in the Red Sea. ' How can you sing,' God asks His 
 praising angels, ' when my people are perishing? ' And to-day not 
 only our enemies are perishing but our friends and brothers. But 
 though we may not rejoice, yet amid all this unparalleled destruc- 
 tion, when the sea is strewn with murdered leviathans, when ghastly 
 shell-holes gape where once were pleasant pastures, when unsightly 
 rubbish-heaps are all that is left of ancient beautiful cities, it is a 
 happy change to look forward to our work of reconstruction, of re- 
 generation, to our task of making the wilderness blossom as the rose, 
 and the desert flow again with milk and honey. 
 
 " And though our goal be yet far, yet already when I recall how 
 our small nation sustained the mailed might of all the great Empires 
 of antiquity, how we saw our Temple in flames and were scattered 
 like its ashes, how we endured the long night of the Middle Ages, 
 illumined by the glare of our martyrs' fires, how but yesterday we 
 wandered in our millions, torn between the ruthless Prussian and the 
 pitiless Russian, yet have lived to see to-day the bloody Empire of 
 the Czars dissolve, and the mountains of Zion glimmer on the hor- 
 izon, already I feel we may say to the nations : Comfort ye, comfort 
 ye, too, poor suffering peoples. Learn from the long patience of 
 Israel that the spirit is mightier than the sword, and that the seer 
 who foretold his people's resurrection was not less prophetic when 
 he proclaimed also for all peoples the peace of Jerusalem" 
 
 XVII 
 
 The two formal articles devoted later in this book to the 
 project of a Jewish State, both written subsequently to Mr. 
 Balfour's Declaration, which closed the first stage of Zionism, 
 will bring the reader's knowledge of the subject up to date. 
 But some extracts here from my multifarious articles in the 
 Dark Ages of Zionism will make clear why the glittering Zion 
 of my peroration is already proving a mirage — that " mockery 
 of Jewish aspiration " which despite the festal atmosphere I 
 could not but forebode. 
 
 Thus in an article written in 1900 Zionism is desiderated for 
 its forcing of the issue which Jochanan ben Zakkai evaded, and 
 which has remained still in suspension. 
 
 " Apart from its political working, Zionism forces upon the Jew a 
 question the Jew hates to face. 
 
 " Without a rallying centre, geographical or spiritual; without a 
 Sanhedrin; without any principle of unity or of political action; 
 without any common standpoint about the old Book; without the 
 
 86
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 old cement of dietary laws and traditional ceremonies ; without even 
 ghetto-walls built by his friend, the enemy; it is impossible for 
 Israel to persist further, except by a miracle — of stupidity. 
 
 " It is a wretched thing for a people to be saved only by its per- 
 secutors or its fools. As a religion. Judaism has still magnificent 
 possibilities, but the time has come when it must be de-nationalised 
 or re-nationalised." 
 
 But with the hybrid situation in a British-Arab-Jewish State 
 the Jew will neither be nationalised nor de-nationalised, he will 
 still go on impaling himself on both horns of a dilemma more 
 tragic than Hamlet's alternative, and asking himself how to be 
 and not to be. I expressed the same thought in the now extinct 
 New Liberal Review. In an article on " The Return to Pales- 
 tine " written nearly twenty years ago, I found the final justifi- 
 cation of the Zionist movement in this clarification of the 
 situation : — 
 
 " Not to re-nationalise Judaism now is for ever to r/e-nationalise 
 it. There is a tide in the affairs of nations as well as of men, which 
 omitted, ' all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in 
 miseries.' A nation cannot perpetually divide its prayers from its 
 practice. The crucial moment in the long life of Israel has arrived 
 — in the slow travail of the ages and the evolution of the modern 
 wor ld — an d the Jew stands at the parting of ways that no longer 
 permit one foot on each. Either he must consent to be merely a 
 member of an international religious community welcoming the 
 whole world to Abraham's bosom, or he must at last obey the trum- 
 pet call of Isaiah : ' Go through, go through the gates ; prepare ye 
 the way of the people : cast up, cast up the highway : gather out the 
 stones: lift up a standard for the people.' " 
 
 Zionism will have no such power. The poor footsore, home- 
 less hordes cannot " go through the gates." The British 
 Administration with its Gradgrind ideals of respectability and 
 self-supportingness will bar them out. " Slow and sure " is the 
 sapient motto. But desperation is a surer nation-builder than 
 canniness and political economy. And Bacon's maxim " Delays 
 are dangerous " is wiser than the popular adage. " The task 
 is difficult," I wrote in the same article, " more difficult, perhaps, 
 than any in human history — beset with more theological and 
 political pitfalls, unique in its problem of migration. But the 
 very greatness of the task should stimulate the most maligned 
 of races to break the desolate monotony of this brutal modern 
 world by the splendour of an antique idealism." (Another 
 pre-war side-light!) And I defined this task as of an origi- 
 nality congruous with the uniqueness of the Jew's whole history, 
 
 87
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 for whereas motherlands had always created colonies, here 
 colonies were to create — or rather re-create — a motherland. 
 But alas ! the Palestine that is to be created under the " Man- 
 date " will be — like all the other lands of Israel's sojourn — 
 not a motherland but a stcpmotherland. 
 
 The trouble conies from the large existing population, 
 roughly classified as Arab, about 600,000 in number. If 
 Poland protests that 14 per cent, of Jews constitute too great 
 an alloy for a nationality to bear, how then establish a 
 " National Home " in face of an alien 86 per cent. ? Oliver 
 Wendell Holmes's parable of the nictitating membrane of 
 birds, which excludes, not all light, but just as much light as 
 the bird wishes to exclude, was never better illustrated than in 
 the wilful myopia cultivated by official Zionism towards this 
 aspect of its problem, and Mr. Balfour, with the same blind- 
 ness, or the same blandness, skirted the difficulty by premising 
 the equal rights and privileges of this population, as though 
 this was not cancelling the very " Jewish National Home " he 
 professed to be conceding. 
 
 XVHI 
 
 Here a personal confession is necessary. Mine is not in the 
 racial sense anima naturaUter Judaica. At the time Dr. Herzl 
 did me the honour to beseech my services I stood at the opposite 
 pole of thought to him. Anti-Semitism alone had made him 
 race-conscious, and he defined himself as " a Jew by the grace 
 of Stocker." He had drawn from the Dreyfus case — which 
 was the inspiration of his movement — the conclusion that a 
 settled and dignified life for the Jew would never be possible in 
 Christendom. I, on the contrary, had drawn from it the con- 
 clusion that Zola was essentially a Jew and that in the organisa- 
 tion of such lovers of justice throughout the world and in co- 
 operation with them lay the true path of Israel, his true mission. 
 Dr. Herzl, though an incarnation of all that is best in the 
 Jewish type, was curiously ignorant of Judaism and content to 
 accept a Jew as a phenomenon purely biological. If in the end 
 I endorsed his political conception, it was partly because of 
 sympathy with a great man who was being misprized, abused, 
 misunderstood, and little supported, and partly because I saw 
 there was no real contradiction between the spiritual ideal and a 
 definite locale for it; which locale could be at once a land of 
 refuge for the oppressed and a working model of a socially just 
 
 88
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 commonwealth. I set myself therefore to establish for the 
 intelligentsia a rational basis for the movement that with the 
 masses was instinctive. Answering the objections of the anti- 
 Zionists who preached " the Jewish mission " without ever 
 carrying it out, and who used it merely as a stick to beat the 
 Zionists with ; replying also to those who professed that Zionism 
 was a reactionary narrowness when the Jewish ideal should be 
 international, I said in a speech made in 1903 : 
 
 " Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Stuart pretender, scribbled upon a 
 paper preserved at Windsor : ' To live and not to live is worse than 
 th die.' That is our position. I had rather we died, and were 
 done with. I thank Heaven that ten tribes at least were lost. 
 What our preachers and teachers really preach is that the mission 
 of Israel is submission, for never do they set up our own ideal — our 
 supposed mission of Peace and Brotherhood upon earth. Let war 
 break out, and we are the noisiest singers of war-songs. The poor 
 people of Kischineff tried to save themselves by putting in their 
 windows sacred Russian images. It is our history in a nut-shell. 
 In moments of danger we put up the flag of the enemy. And it 
 avails nothing in the long run — the image-imitators at Kischineff 
 were the people particularly chosen for crucifixion. But we are 
 told Zionism is against pure Jewish principles — against the prin- 
 ciples of our greatest prophets. Why, there never were such nation- 
 alists as our prophets. And there never were such internationalists, 
 either. Only they saw that internationalism must be rooted in na- 
 tionalism, that there cannot be a brotherhood of peoples without 
 peoples to be brothers. Before I can have a brother, there must be 
 a ' me ' to have a brother. It takes two to make one brother. 
 
 " Nationality is the personality of peoples. When we have a 
 country of our own, we can begin to talk brotherhood. It comes too 
 suspiciously from a people without one. It is like a Schnorrer talk- 
 ing socialism. The fox that lost his tail would have better per- 
 suaded his fellow foxes of the disadvantages of a tail in the days 
 when he had still his glorious waving brush. ' Be at the tail of the 
 lions rather than at the head of the foxes/ said the Rabbis. Be at 
 the tail of the nations rather than at the head of the gipsies. We 
 stand for Peace — but a proposal of universal disarmament would 
 have more weight coming from Germany than from Monaco. Let 
 Park Lane preach against luxurious dinner parties, and Society may 
 listen. But the gospel of plain living and high thinking cannot be 
 effectively proclaimed from Rowton House by tramps cooking their 
 own bloaters. If we want the nations to listen to us, we must first 
 get them to respect us. To fulfil the ideals of our prophets, we 
 must have a soil of our own ; to preach them, we must have a house- 
 top of our own ; to show the world a model State, it must stand in a 
 
 89
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 land of our own, not in a land where we must — under peril of our 
 life or what is worse, our position in society — hang out the sacred 
 images of our neighbours. It is not as if the anti-Zionists were 
 really international, were really cosmopolitan. On the contrary 
 they arc narrowly national, narrowly metropolitan. 
 
 " I do not complain — it is impossible to belong to two peoples, 
 and the Jews of each country naturally choose the people they live 
 amid. You will say the Jews have managed for eighteen centuries 
 to belong to two peoples. But this is a delusion. So long as they 
 were kept in Ghettos, physical and moral, they belonged to one 
 people, their own. As soon as they are let out of their protective 
 prison, the stronger, larger people sucks them in, and in three gen- 
 erations assimilates them to itself, even if they keep up the farce of 
 marrying among themselves. It is absurd of the anti-Zionists to 
 claim cosmopolitanism. Mr. Claude Montefiore preaches a British 
 war-sermon: his sister, Mrs. Lucas, writes a beautiful patriotic 
 poem, ' Mother England,' which is sung in Jewish schools. Na- 
 tionalism is low and narrow when it is ' Mother Zion,' but when it 
 is ' Mother England,' ah, that is another story. 
 
 ' For the Jew has heart and hand, our mother England, 
 And they both are thine to-day. 
 Thine for life and thine for death, yea thine for ever.' 
 
 It is a fine emotion, and England deserves it of us, and our lives are 
 at her call. But I do not find it any higher than the older senti- 
 ment, ' If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its 
 cunning.' An old Jewish legend makes Jeremiah after the destruc- 
 tion of the Temple see a lonely woman sitting on the top of a moun- 
 tain, dressed in black, her hair dishevelled. ' Who will comfort 
 me? ' she is crying. Jeremiah approaches and says, ' If thou art a 
 ghost, begone.' She answers, 'Dost thou not know me? I am 
 Mother Zion.' Twenty-five centuries have passed, and still she 
 weeps over her children. But only in these latter generations has 
 she heard herself ousted from her motherhood, has she endured the 
 last sorrow of hearing her little ones sing of ' Mother England.' 
 Ah, how she must puzzle her poor brain; for here she hears them 
 singing ' Rule Britannia ' and there ' the Marseillaise,' and yonder 
 ' Die Wacht am R lit in.' She has heard some singing all three in 
 turn, Anglicised Alsatians. The one song it is narrow to sing is the 
 song we sing at Zionist Meetings, the Hatikvah, the song of na- 
 tional hope. Three things in England have the word ' National ' 
 particularly attached to them. There is the National Bard, Shake- 
 speare, and his prophet is Mr. Israel Gollancz; there is the Diction- 
 ary of National Biography, .and the editor is Mr. Sidney Lee; there 
 is the National Theatre. Drury Lane, and the manager is Mr. 
 Arthur Collins. Jews say we could not run a country of our own, 
 
 90
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 but I cannot believe that even in Palestine the nationalistic talents 
 of these gentlemen would be utterly barren. For many generations 
 only one saint's day has been added to the British calendar, and 
 that is Primrose Day. British Imperialism was shaped by a Jew- 
 ish politician, and I do not quite despair of our being able to pro- 
 duce capable rulers even for a tiny territory of our own. While we 
 say that we could not live together under Home Rule, that we are 
 lower than the Red Indians or the Esquimaux, the ants and the bees, 
 everybody else says: ' Good heavens! If these people should only 
 get together, if they should find out their own power ! ' We are 
 supposed to be a clever race — but that is a libel. We are clever 
 as individuals, but as a people we rank below the Hottentots. If 
 there is one thing that an individual Jew thinks of, even more than 
 he should, it is Tachlith — the end, the ultimate goal. ' What does 
 it lead to? ' he asks. If there is one thing that the Jewish people 
 have forgotten — it is Tachlith. 
 
 " Drift, drift, drift, in poverty, hunger and dirt. To fly from one 
 country to another ; to stave off" things from one day to another ! A 
 great deal of our charity consists in sending poor people from Man- 
 chester to London and then sending them back from London to 
 Manchester. Our Boards of Guardians enjoy this game of shuttle- 
 cock — it gives them a great air of activity. A country is a respon- 
 sibility, no doubt. You may have to fight for it. But now you are 
 conscripts to Russia, to Germany, to all the world. In the battle 
 of KischinefF alone, your casualties, even according to the official 
 account, were 45 killed and 424 wounded, with 700 horses and 600 
 shops looted. The loss of property is £500,000, which we have to 
 make good. And though I give my mite, I give it grudgingly, be- 
 cause it is stolen from Zionism, and because I feel the bill for dam- 
 ages should be paid by the rich anti-Zionist Jews of St. Petersburg 
 and Riga, the Jewish Russians. The Jewish readers of one New 
 York paper have subscribed some £15,000 towards it — more than 
 they have ever given to Zionism. But prevention is better than 
 cure. Jewish money can be had for any purpose, except a Jewish 
 purpose. A Jew, last week, offered thousands of pounds for a 
 statue to Kosciuszko — the Polish hero of freedom. It was refused 
 as an insolence coming from a Jew. He did not seem to think of 
 supporting his own heroes of freedom. There is a Jewish lady in 
 London who gives ten thousand a year to a musical institution. 
 There is no Jew in the world who has given Zionism even a single 
 ten thousand. But then it is so sordid to buy Palestine ! " 
 
 Not that Palestine was essential to my particular conception 
 of Zionism. For Jerusalem, like Heaven, is more a state of 
 mind that a place. But if Palestine was to be chosen as the 
 objective, the movement must come to grips with reality. Pro- 
 ceeding, I said: 
 
 91
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 " My friends, you cannot buy Palestine. If you had a hundred 
 millions, you could only buy the place where Palestine once stood. 
 Palestineitself you must re-create by labour, till it flows again with 
 milk and honey! The country is a good country — not so good as 
 Samuel Montagu said before he became a Baronet, not so bad as he 
 says it is now. But it needs a great irrigation scheme. To return 
 there needs no miracle — already a part of the population are Jews. 
 If the Almighty Himself carried the rest of us to Palestine by a 
 miracle, what should we gain except a free passage? In the sweat 
 of our brow we must earn our Palestine. And, therefore, the day 
 we get Palestine, if the most joyous, will also be the most terrible 
 day of our movement." 
 
 This " most joyous day " has been celebrated even more up- 
 roariously than I anticipated, but the realisation that it was 
 also " the most terrible day of our movement " was confined to 
 few. And the reason was that the movement had not come to 
 grips with reality. My first stroke for Zionism a quarter of a 
 century ago had been to insist that the Jewish Colonisation 
 Association which administered the great legacy of Baron de 
 Hirsch must devote itself to Palestine (and this is now largely 
 to be done), my second was to draw up a report on "The 
 Commercial Future of Palestine " — a country then veiled in 
 pietistic clouds, but which is now at last coming under normal 
 scientific investigation and development. But my third step on 
 the road of reality was not taken — so far as documents easily 
 at hand testify — till 1904, when I appear to have become fully 
 aware of the Arab peril, and in a speech made in New York to 
 have honestly drawn attention to it as the outstanding obstacle 
 to Zionism. 
 
 " There is, however, a difficulty from which the Zionist dares not 
 avert his eyes, though he rarely likes to face it. Palestine proper 
 has already its inhabitants. The pashalik of Jerusalem is already 
 twice as thickly populated as the United States, having fifty-two 
 souls to every square mile, and not 25 per cent, of them Jews; so we 
 must be prepared either to drive out by the sword the tribes in pos- 
 session as our forefathers did, or to grapple with the problem of a 
 large alien population, mostly Mohammedan and accustomed for 
 centuries to despise us. This is an infinitely graver difficulty than 
 the stock anti-Zionist taunt that nobody would go to Palestine if we 
 got it; that everybody would want to be Ambassador in Paris; a 
 joke that rather lost its point in the Dreyfus days." 
 
 Here is the crux of the situation. But the Zionists did avert 
 
 their eyes. 
 
 92
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 In an article on " Zionism and Territorialism " that appeared 
 in the Fortnightly Review in 1910, I find myself drawing atten- 
 tion not only to the overwhelming presence of the Arabs, but 
 to their hostility. As its recent flare-up is sometimes traced to 
 my suggestion that they should be amicably bought out (though 
 Mr. Barnes, M.P., more accurately connects it with the far- 
 trumpeted British promise of a " Jewish National Home " in 
 their territory), it is as well to cite from this article of a 
 decade ago. 
 
 " Palestine, with its paltry, semi-sterile area of 10,000 square 
 miles, is already in the possession of 600,000 Arabs and other non- 
 Jews, so that it would require, under the most improbably prosper- 
 ous conditions, half a century of peaceful penetration before the 
 Jews could even be on an equality with the non-Jews. Prior to the 
 Turkish Revolution, it is just conceivable that a Jewish Govern- 
 ment might have ruled Palestine as a few white men rule Natal, 
 but under the new constitution the only local autonomy possible 
 would be Arab. 
 
 " And it is significant that an Arab candidate for Jerusalem put 
 upon his platform the enlargement of Palestine into a vilayet, so as 
 to include an increased Arab population. The two Arab journals 
 in Palestine, El Emsayi and El Karmel (now defunct), were both 
 anti- Jewish (the pen almost slips into saying, anti-Semitic). More- 
 over, the seventy Arab deputies in the Ottoman Parliament form a 
 league for the defence of Arab interests, so that, for example, the 
 member for Tripoli joined in the protest against the concessions to 
 the British steamers on the Tigris. There are no less than four 
 Arab journals published in Cairo, El Lewan, El Moyad, El Dous- 
 tour, and El Minbar, all labouring to promote the Renaissance of 
 Islam, and their articles are translated by the Persian, Indian, and 
 Tartar journals, while a group of Young Arabs in Paris, emulating 
 the Young Turks, have likewise an organ in French. The 12,000 
 pupils of the most ancient seminary of El-Azhar in Cairo, hailing 
 from all parts of the Mussulman world, contribute to spread every- 
 where the fear lest the Jews should seize Jerusalem, that sacred city 
 of the three hundred and fifty millions of Islam. Still fiercer is the 
 opposition of the Arab Christians, and fiercest of all, and not least 
 formidable, the opposition of the Ottoman Jews, whose four depu- 
 ties in Parliament — the members for Baghdad, Salonica, Smyrna, 
 and Constantinople — are all violently anti-Zionist." 
 
 But nothing could rouse the Zionists to cope even mentally 
 with the situation. Their opponents had accused them of " try- 
 ing to force the hand of Providence." In regard to the Arab 
 problem they were certainly obnoxious to the indictment. Up
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 to the very day of the Balfour pronouncement they remained 
 blind and deaf to the difficulty. They cast their burden lazily 
 upon the Lord. 
 
 Hence to-day we have a new Arab version of the meaning of 
 Zionism, which may take its place among the many curiosities 
 of definition achieved by the Zionists to keep pace with their 
 varying fortunes. " Zionism," runs a letter of Abn Gosh, 
 endorsed by five Mukhtars and forty-eight sheikhs, " is the great 
 school which the British Government has prepared for us, that 
 the fellah may in it learn the art of agriculture and husbandry, 
 and the source of economic power." 
 
 XIX 
 
 Although we have lately been fed with hopes that the world 
 will be run as a commonwealth, it has always hitherto been run 
 as a cockpit. And if humanity is to continue to live under the 
 bad old order, the world will continue to be a cockpit. And 
 though the Jewish ideal is to turn it into a commonwealth, the 
 Jewish race cannot in the meantime — unless it embrace a 
 wholly passive Christianity and subject itself voluntarily to 
 mass-murder — escape the conditions of the cockpit, or the need 
 of an alliance with military power. 
 
 There is no example in history of an inhabited country being 
 acquired except by force. Adam's entry into the Garden of 
 Eden was peaceful because there was no other man in occupa- 
 tion. Jehovah Himself, according to the Bible, could not give 
 the Jews Palestine without their fighting a long series of battles 
 aganist the tribes in possession, nor did they ever conquer it 
 wholly. It is true the naked doctrine of force is disavowed, 
 for the whole Bible is written from the standpoint that God 
 never acts — nor must man — on other than righteous grounds. 
 Thus the expulsion of the natives of Palestine is ascribed to 
 their abominations. Nevertheless without force righteousness 
 alone cannot effect the conquest of a country. And the amount 
 of force necessary varies with the number of its inhabitants. 
 When the German Danes, who form the backbone of England, 
 invaded it in the fifth century, they had to kill oft" most of the 
 ancient Britons. When the Pilgrim Fathers went to America, 
 the fighting necessary was less, though there was for generations 
 war to the knife, or rather to the tomahawk. In my own 
 childhood the Maoris were fighting against the whites who, 
 
 94
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 albeit by treaty, had possessed themselves of New Zealand. A 
 race, therefore, that desires a land of its own must — if it sets 
 its eye on a land already inhabited — be prepared to face war. 
 We lost Palestine after some of the fiercest fighting in history. 
 But the Zionists, though professedly modern, had not really lost 
 the old mystic hope that it would be got back without force. 
 And this though the united strength of Christendom in a series 
 of Crusades had not availed to dispossess the Turk. But if the 
 Zionists thus naively imagined that you could make omelettes 
 without breaking eggs, the eggs that have already been broken 
 in Palestine are a proof that history has not yet changed her 
 laws. There is no way for a people once pushed out of its 
 country to push in again unless at the point of the sword, and 
 even this is impossible with a scattered people unless the sword 
 is that of a powerful backer. 
 
 The only chance of reconstructing a nationality without the 
 sword is to colonise, as the Jewish Territorial Organisation 
 projected, an unpopulated territory. It was because I fore- 
 saw that the Palestine problem could yield only to force that my 
 own energies have been diverted for so many years to the quest 
 for a comparatively unoccupied region, sufficiently large, 
 healthy and fertile to contain the potentiality of a Jewish State. 
 But if Palestine is put forward as the only possible place — 
 and " nur Palastma " has been a Zionist catchword — then 
 there is no resource but in Realpolitik; in accommodation to the 
 cockpit. And when the whole world had turned into one, and 
 the Jew was fighting everywhere for everybody, and when more- 
 over the Turkish Empire bade fair to be in the melting-pot, it 
 did seem as if, with so much of Jewish blood being shed, the Jew 
 might reap the same reward as races far less civilised and far 
 less oppressed. More particularly when the cockpit was put 
 forward as merely the preparation for the commonwealth in 
 which mankind would henceforth live happily under " the prin- 
 ciple of nationalities." 
 
 Wherefore, when the Great War was raging, I suggested in 
 an address to the Fabian Society (December, 1915) that "if 
 Britain took Palestine she could make no greater stroke of 
 policy than to call in the Jews to regenerate it for her." But, 
 I pointed out, their mere immigration would not be enough. 
 
 " It all requires a radically imaginative policy — a dealing in 
 futures as well as in pasts by men ready to rescue human history 
 
 95
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 from its monotonous factors of blood and gold. Napoleon, under 
 the spell of the forty centuries that regarded him from the Pyra- 
 mids, announced his design to restore the Jews to their land. Will 
 England, with Egypt equally at her feet, carry out the plan she 
 foiled Napoleon in? Had she the power and the genius to do so, 
 a new chapter would be opened in the history of mankind, the ends 
 of the ages would meet, and the ' tribe of the wandering foot and 
 weary breast/ which for nineteen hundred years has prayed for 
 Palestine some twenty times a day, would find itself on its holy soil 
 under the aegis of the greatest Empire in the world, victorious after 
 the greatest struggle in her history." 
 
 XX 
 
 In May, 1917, in an article in a popular magazine, I returned 
 to the scheme of a British Palestine (which the British Govern- 
 ment adopted that very November in a disingenuous form). It 
 will be seen that I even named the very man who has been 
 appointed High Commissioner. 
 
 " It is significant," I wrote, " that the Zionist movement, despite 
 the part played by Austrian and German Jews in its inception, has 
 always regarded England as its ' spiritual home.' In the very 
 shadow of the Mansion House it set up its financial institution — 
 the Jewish Colonial Trust — and here, under the seal of English 
 Law, it organised its Statutes. And the British order and success 
 which Dr. Herzl witnessed in Egypt convinced him that under the 
 aegis of Britain, which alone understands to leave other races to 
 their own Kultur, the dream of a Jewish State had the best chance 
 of achieving substance. Peopled by a stock to whose patriotism and 
 vigour — after two thousand years of repression — the honours 
 lists of all the belligerent armies testify, and to whose intellectual 
 and artistic energy the libraries, theatres, academies and senates of 
 the world bear overwhelming witness — British Judaea, governed by 
 a Jew already tried and tested in the service of Britain — a Her- 
 bert Samuel, an Edwin Montagu, a Sir Lionel Abrahams, a Sir 
 Matthew Nathan — would become not the least glorious or loyal 
 link in that mighty chain of Imperial Britain which binds together 
 so many races, creeds and colours. 
 
 " Unfortunately," I went on, " all human schemes have their ob- 
 stacles and these "come as usual from within as well as from without. 
 The one serious difficulty, however, is internal. ' Give the country 
 without a people,' magnanimously pleaded Lord Shaftesbury, ' to 
 the people without a country.' Alas, it was a misleading mistake. 
 The country holds 600,000 Arabs. And despite the homesickness 
 for Zion which, beginning in the eighties and intensified by the po- 
 
 06
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 groms, drew the intellectuals of Russian and Roumanian Jewry to 
 Palestine and set them — in the dearth of ploughs — tearing at the 
 sacred soil with their fingers ; despite the thirty Jewish Colonies 
 with their picturesque nomenclature — ' The Gate of Hope,' ' The 
 Memorial of Jacob/ ' The Watch on the Jordan,' etc., etc. — and 
 their still more picturesque vines and orange-trees, the total area 
 of Palestine yet acquired is not 2 per cent., nor did the Jewish 
 population — even before the great exodus or expulsion due to the 
 war — exceed 100,000. And even of these 100,000 the majority 
 were old men, who went to Palestine not to live, but to die; not to 
 work, but to weep at the ruined Wall of the Temple. This role of 
 Palestine as a monastery is not indeed so despicable as the modern 
 Jew too often assumes. The Jew at the Wailing Wall is a more 
 poetic figure than the Jew on Wall Street. But he does not help to 
 rebuild the Wall. That can only be done by a stalwart peasantry 
 growing up on the soil. And unfortunately the soil is occupied by 
 the Arab. Thus, unless the Jews are to begin their new life by 
 massacring the modern Canaanites — which is out of the question — 
 Zionism must, it would seem, remain largely moonshine. For even 
 under constitutional government for all inhabitants, there would be, 
 not a Jewish autonomy but an Arab autonomy. There might at 
 best be a condominium of Arabs and Jews, but it would be fruitful 
 in friction. In any event the Jews would be swamped and the 
 Jewish atmosphere — the paramount object of the great experi- 
 ment — would become less distinctive than in the Ghetto of New 
 York. 
 
 " The only solution of this difficulty lies in the consideration that 
 Palestine is not so much occupied by the Arabs as over-run by them. 
 They are nomads, who have created in Palestine neither material 
 nor spiritual values. To treat them therefore on the same basis as, 
 say, the Belgians, would be to follow an analogy which does not 
 exist. Politics is not all of a piece, else the very idea of giving Pal- 
 estine to a race which is not yet there, and whose ' vested interests ' 
 in the land are only spiritual and historic, would be a paradox. Yet 
 this paradox appealed to that eminently practical politician, Napol- 
 eon, and only his defeat by Britain prevented his re-settling the Jews 
 in their old home. The whirligig of history thus presents England 
 with the opportunity of carrying out the very plan she indirectly 
 thwarted. Like Napoleon and the American millionaires, we must 
 ' deal in futures.' We cannot allow the Arabs to block so valuable a 
 piece of historic reconstruction, so romantic a reparation to the sore- 
 ly-tried race of the Apostles. And therefore we must gently per- 
 suade them to ' trek.' After all, they have all Arabia with its million 
 square miles — not to mention the vast new area freed from the Turk 
 between Syria and Mesopotamia — and Israel has not a square inch. 
 There is no particular reason for the Arabs to cling to these few kil- 
 ometres. ' To fold their tents ' and ' silently steal away ' is their 
 
 97
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 proverbial habit: let them exemplify it now. The Jews will be well 
 content to pay their travelling expenses, and to buy also — at a 
 price fixed by the British Government — such holdings and build- 
 ings as really have a value. Nor would the Jews be reluctant to 
 negotiate equally with the German colonists. Not that there would 
 not be absolute toleration of all faiths and races; with a Jewish 
 guard of honour round the Tomb of Christ, if the holy places were 
 not — as Dr. Herzl suggested — ' exterritorialised.' But it is obvi- 
 ously pointless to pour water into a sieve, or a pint of wine into a 
 gallon of oil. The Jews in Palestine, if a minority, must either 
 dominate the majority or be dominated by it. Either alternative 
 would be undesirable: neither would be the dream that has sweet- 
 ened the centuries of sorrow." 
 
 XXI 
 
 When at a dark moment in the fortunes of England Mr. 
 Balfour had at last come out with his Declaration — diplomatic 
 to the point of meaninglessness — but acutely timed and so 
 phrased as to play on the popular belief in the Restoration of 
 the Jews, I set myself in a Sunday paper that counts its readers 
 by the million to allay the emotions he had aroused, deliberately 
 entitling my article, " The Future of Palestine," not of 
 Zionism. 
 
 " In many Jewish and Christian circles," I wrote in March, 1918, 
 "there is joy — and in not a few, apprehension — at the prospect 
 of a Jewish Palestine. 
 
 " The alarm is at its keenest among Mohammedans and British 
 Jews. But there is as yet little ground either for alarm or ecstasy. 
 
 " True, the British Government has pledged itself to support the 
 establishment of a ' Jewish National Home ' in the Holy Land. 
 But in the same breath it has added a proviso which practically re- 
 duces the promise to a contradiction in terms. 
 
 " For ' nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and 
 religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.' 
 It is as if the Government should give over the Savoy to a new 
 department on condition the hotel guests should not be disturbed. 
 
 " The Jews in pre-war Palestine — and there is reason to think 
 the ratio has even fallen — were only one in seven of the inhabit- 
 ants ; they held only 2 per cent, of the soil. The non-Jewish pop- 
 ulation, some 600,000 in number, embraced — apart from the Ger- 
 man colonies and the Christian missions, churches and institutions — 
 Arabs. Syrians, Druses, Algerians, Egyptians, Bulgarians and con- 
 siderable settlements of Moslem Circassians transplanted from Rus- 
 
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 sia by the Sultan. Of these the native Syrians, predominantly 
 Arab by blood, are by far the most numerous. 
 
 " Some of these mutually exclusive tribes may perhaps be re- 
 garded as semi-nomadic and not irrevocably rooted in the soil. But 
 unless the problem of re-establishing the Jewish State is solved by 
 bold constructive politics, Palestine, already, moreover, overlaid by 
 the historic deposits of Christendom and Islam, cannot possibly be- 
 come the cradle of a ' Jewish national ' life in any real political 
 sense. 
 
 " Still less can it become a Jewish ' home.' The Jews of the 
 world number some fourteen millions. Wales, which is three-quar- 
 ters of the size of Palestine, and possesses mineral wealth and in- 
 dustrial opportunities lacking in the Holy Land, provides a ' home ' 
 for only two million inhabitants. Palestine at its zenith probably 
 supported but three millions, and, even assuming that this number 
 could regather and the Arabs trek in our own generation, there 
 would still be over ten million Jews outside. 
 
 " All, therefore, that will certainly happen is that Palestine will 
 profit by the wave of irreflective idealism known as Zionism, and that 
 this derelict land, paralysed for four centuries by the dead hand 
 of the Turk, will revive and blossom out again under the uncom- 
 mercial devotion of Jewish capital and labour. 
 
 " For Palestine cannot ' pay.' And it is fortunate for the 
 world that at a period when food production is of such paramount 
 importance, and when the general resources are mortgaged to the 
 regeneration of the war-ruined lands, there should exist this peculiar 
 Jewish passion for irrigating, sanitating, canalising, populating and 
 cultivating this feverous but once fertile area. 
 
 " Never naturally a land ' flowing with milk and honey,' Palestine 
 will now have its ancient dams, aqueducts and hill terraces restored, 
 its malarious marshes drained and fenced with eucalyptus, and the 
 olive groves, so fecklessly destroyed by Arab goats and Turkish 
 misgovernment, replanted. 
 
 " Again the green bay tree shall flourish like the wicked, there 
 will once more be balm in Gilead, and Jericho, the Biblical ' city of 
 palm trees,' the last of which perished in 1838, will renew its palmy 
 days. Doubtless, too, there will be modern developments less 
 pleasing to contemplate. 
 
 " Moreover, with the economic evolution in Jewish hands, and 
 expressing itself doubtless by a unified Jewish currency and postal 
 system — there were six postal systems and several chaotic curren- 
 cies before the war — this cohesive political minority will tend to 
 give the new Arab State a Jewish colour, while their intensified his- 
 toric consciousness, accentuated from without by the host of ab- 
 sentee Zionists, and from within by the streams of Jewish visitors, 
 will co-operate to prevent them being swamped and Arabised by the 
 majority. 
 
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 " Some such Zionist development of Palestine is one of the few 
 certainties that loom through the fog of war. . . . 
 
 " While I fear that the love of Zion may be tragically blinding 
 the Jewish people to its last chances of a real political existence on 
 some still untenanted expanse of Canada, Brazil, Asia Minor or Si- 
 beria, nevertheless there are aspects of Zion with which every Jew, 
 nay, every thinking man, must sympathise. The Jewish University, 
 projected on a site already donated near the Mount of Olives, will 
 be a characteristic commencement for a nation of students; while the 
 Medical Faculty, which is to be its nucleus, is an urgent necessity in 
 a land where trachoma and typhus are rampant, and where cleanli- 
 ness is not next to godliness. 
 
 " Still more in keeping would be the building of a Temple of 
 Peace to replace the discredited institution at The Hague. The ob- 
 jection that Jerusalem is too remote is parochially European. The 
 old geographers who placed Jerusalem at the centre of the globe 
 were wiser. 
 
 " With our new ' orientation ' towards our brown and yellow 
 brothers, and the new political ' occidentation ' of India and Japan, 
 Jerusalem may well become the pivot of world-peace. The Hague 
 Palace was an artificial structure, without traditions or reverbera- 
 tions. In the Holy City of three great religions even diplomatists 
 might find cynicism difficult, and our poor battered humanity might 
 take a fresh upward impulse of faith and hope." 
 
 XXII 
 
 Even this article, however, was too optimistic, for there 
 appears to be no intention of giving Palestine Jewry such 
 national minima as the postal system and the currency, which I 
 took for granted. In my speech in New York in 1904, I see 
 that I prophetically suggested that " possibly a Conference of 
 the Powers may one day pacify their mutual jealousies by 
 putting us into Palestine," and warned my audience that " if 
 the Turkish Empire is broken up, or if the Powers help us to 
 peaceful possession, we shall not profit by the contingency unless 
 we are united in Zionism. The car will come our way and w r e 
 shall not be ready to jump on." "Who knows," I went on, 
 " how often that car has come round in the eighteen centuries 
 of our exile? We have missed it every time." We have missed 
 it again this time, and who knows if it can ever come round 
 again? 
 
 President Wilson told the Peace Conference: " We are here 
 to see that every people in the world shall choose its own masters, 
 and guide its own destinies, not as we wish, but as it wishes." 
 
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 Who can see in this new Palestine Jewry, ground between Arab 
 and Briton, any real self-determination of destiny? Where in 
 this new-fangled hypocrisy of " Mandates," which imposes 
 France upon an " independent " Syria, kicking against the 
 pricks, and which in Palestine dictates to Jew and Arab alike, 
 is there room for peoples going their Wilsonian way, " unhin- 
 dered, unthreatened, unafraid " ? 
 
 There does not seem to be any time-limit in the " Mandate," 
 any stipulation for withdrawal. This is one of the several 
 reasons for which I could wish America had taken a mandate 
 for Armenia. Her honest withdrawal as soon as she had put 
 Armenia upon its feet would have been a precedent that France 
 and England could scarcely have disregarded. It was honest, 
 however, of Sir Herbert Samuel, in entering Palestine, not to 
 mention " The League of Nations," but to say he came to rule 
 in the name of the King, and it was for the King that prayers 
 were said in the synagogues. It had already been manifest from 
 Lord Curzon's speech in the House of Lords that none except 
 negative measures were to be taken to evolve a " Jewish National 
 Home." But one must be grateful for the frankness with which 
 Lord Curzon admitted that the factors which determined 
 British policy were the military value of Palestine and the eco- 
 nomic value of the Jews, apart from whom none of the existing 
 inhabitants could regenerate Palestine. Equally candid was 
 his explanation of the status of these regenerators — not occu- 
 pants of a " National Home " but, as Punch summed it up, 
 " paying guests." Lord Sydenham struck a more Pharisaical 
 note when he gave as one of the aims of the British invasion of 
 Palestine the desire " to rescue the people from centuries of 
 oppression by the Turks," while the rights of the Jews rested 
 only upon a "particularly ruthless conquest." (With this 
 myth of the ruthless conquest of Canaan I deal in the essay, 
 " The Legend of the Conquering Jew." ) Curiously ignoring 
 the rights that rested on Mr. Balfour's promise, he went on to 
 complain that " a self-constituted Zionist Commission settled 
 down in Jerusalem under the shadow of our military protection 
 and quite close to our barracks and began at once to interfere 
 with the administration." And forsooth the Zionists are 
 demanding a monopoly of public works, and trying to substitute 
 Hebrew for Arabic ! How otherwise " a Jewish National 
 Home " is to be built up, Lord Sydenham leaves unexplained. 
 Lord Lamington, another partaker in the Debate, though at the 
 time of the Balfour Declaration he had appeared on the Zionist 
 
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 platform in its support, has now discovered how intricate the 
 problem really was, and that " under the stress of war we 
 entered into various undertakings which undoubtedly clashed 
 with one another." I cordially agree with his criticism of the 
 ambiguity of Mr. Balfour's Declaration and that if it did not 
 mean the whole country was going to be under Jewish control, 
 it meant nothing. Lord Sheffield's tirade against the scheme 
 (like John Bull's or the Spectator's or Frederic Harrison's in 
 the Fortnightly Review) would have carried more weight if made 
 in " the stress of war " and before the political profit of the 
 scheme had been reaped. Its critics conveniently forget how it 
 stimulated American sympathy and how the Austrian and 
 German Jews welcomed it recklessly even at the height of Hin- 
 denburg's success. But the most ominous figure in the Debate 
 was the Archbishop of Canterbury, who despite his appeal after 
 the Lambeth Conference for " a rally of all spiritual forces," 
 even those outside the Church, here threw away the opportu- 
 nity of showing that Christianity had survived the war, nay, 
 was content to see his country's pledge reduced to " a scrap of 
 paper." Strange that the Church must always be in the 
 wrong. Pope or Primate, it matters not, there is always this 
 fatal gravitation to the lower course. 
 
 One imagines that an obscure antagonism to Judaism ani- 
 mates the archiepiscopal bosom, possibly even a subconscious 
 British Imperialism. The Pope's backsliding is the more 
 regrettable since before the armistice His Holiness spoke com- 
 fortably to Mr. Sokolow, and strove impartially, and not as a 
 pro-German intriguer, to end the world-agony. But he, or his 
 Jesuit forces, seem to have discovered that if the plot for the 
 political revival of the Vatican in France is to prosper, the 
 Pope must give up blessing the sequestration of Syrian territory 
 to Jewry or to England. As a British publicist bluntly put it: 
 " If ever Syria is to come under effective French control (and 
 upon the control of Syria depends the possibility of transport- 
 ing Mesopotamian oil) it will be because Beirut has long been a 
 centre of French Catholic influence." 
 
 Cardinal Bourne is not satisfied that the Jews shall be done 
 out of their political rights only. Speaking at the National 
 Catholic Congress at Liverpool, he urged that " even if a direct 
 political control were definitely excluded by the British admin- 
 istration, there was every danger of the establishment of a 
 Zionist economic and financial domination which would be no 
 less unacceptable in its results." It is to be feared that the 
 
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 Catholic elements in our own Foreign Office cannot be ignored in 
 estimating the forces at work to override the Balfour Declara- 
 tion. 
 
 In this tug of war between the Christian Powers, with the 
 Arab pulling in a third direction, there is obviously scant chance 
 of a real Jewish Palestine. To produce that out of the con- 
 flicting ingredients is a task not for a statesman but a conjurer. 
 Sir Herbert Samuel has no such thaumaturgic talent; he is a 
 conscientious British official whom even his love for his people 
 and the gracious Zionist romance in his own family cannot 
 bias. The interest of England in getting her new possession 
 developed by Jewish capital and industry is outweighed if the 
 Arabs are antagonised too deeply, and since moreover the Jews 
 are the Uriah Heeps and not the Oliver Twists of politics, 
 England may safely ride roughshod over them. In placing all 
 their hopes on a peaceful penetration, and in pretending that 
 the Arabs can be safely submerged, the Zionists have presumed 
 to know better than Jehovah, who protested : " But if ye will 
 not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you ; then 
 it shall come to pass, that those which ye let remain of them 
 shall be pricks in your eyes, and thorns in your sides, and shall 
 vex you in the land wherein ye dwell." Is such a home worth 
 having? 
 
 XXIII 
 
 I did not need to wait for Lord Curzon's speech or Sir 
 Herbert Samuel's British-born ukases in Palestine to see that 
 Zionism was to be betrayed. In February, 1919, I took 
 advantage of the courteous invitation of the League of Nations 
 Journal to expound my foreboding. And in an article entitled 
 " Zionism and the League of Nations " I said : 
 
 " Since England, France, Italy, Japan and President Wilson — 
 those five Great Powers — have all approved the establishment in 
 Palestine of a ' Jewish National Home,' it follows there must still 
 be a Jewish Nation, even though devoid of the territorial concentra- 
 tion which anciently produced it. Yet, at the Peace Conference, the 
 great people whose prophets more than twenty-five centuries ago 
 preached the League of Nations, is denied the voice in the shaping 
 thereof which, through the Emir Feisal, is accorded to its Arab 
 neighbours in Palestine, and which is not refused even to the black 
 republics of Haiti and Liberia. This contempt for the Jew — like 
 the continuation of ' secret diplomacy ' at the very Conference de- 
 signed to end it — is characteristic of humanity's tragic immaturity, 
 
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 its inability to see the better life steadily and to see it whole. But 
 it must be admitted that Zionism has invited humiliation by its 
 pathetic prostration to pick up the crumbs thrown it, and by the 
 cheers which rose from every Ghetto and Judengasse, Allied or en- 
 emy, to greet that diplomatic British declaration which Mr. Barnes, 
 a member of the War Cabinet responsible for it — now that vic- 
 tory is attained and the profitable imponderabilia of the Balfour 
 proclamation have been harvested — declares to have meant no more 
 than that the Jews of Palestine should have the same civil and re- 
 ligious rights as all the other inhabitants of Palestine. (As if that 
 elemental axiom needed a world-trumpeted proclamation!) It is 
 not in fact to be Palestine for the Jews but the Jews for Palestine, 
 or rather for the British Empire. 
 
 " It is true that years before Mr. Balfour's Declaration I had 
 myself pressed — like the Manchester Guardian — for a British 
 Judaja on a do ut des basis, the Jews to build up Palestine as a 
 Jewish State on the political model of Canada or New Zealand, thus 
 constituting a buffer State for the defence of Egypt. Such a mu- 
 tual service creates a more solid basis for a Jewish State than Chris- 
 tian sympathy. But to ask the Jews, in return for occupying this 
 dangerous position, to accept only the status they could acquire with 
 infinitely less pains in the United States, to exploit their passion 
 for Palestine, seems to me singularly lacking in magnanimity. In 
 the original secret treaty dividing Palestine with France and Rus- 
 sia, the Jews were not considered at all, and they were not the gov- 
 erning consideration even in the substituted scheme, for its primary 
 object (as Colonel Amery of the War Cabinet Staff has admitted at 
 a Zionist banquet) was the defence of Egypt. Nor was its militar- 
 istic and imperialistic character altered by the disinterested sym- 
 pathy with the Jewish problem which many great Englishmen have 
 shown, and in which Mr. Balfour himself is not lacking. But that 
 statesman should have addressed his Declaration, not to the Zionists, 
 who are an international body, but to the constituents of the League 
 of British Jews, whose Chauvinism would have co-operated with 
 their hatred of Zionism to render them ideal political agents for a 
 scheme as advantageous to England as it is corrosive to Zionism 
 proper. 
 
 " If, however, the Peace Conference turns out to be more than a 
 high comedy and a genuine League of Nations emerges from it, 
 then President Wilson will have made Mr. Barnes' standpoint as 
 obsolete as my own. Under the League of Nations, with its substi- 
 tution of reason and goodwill for the rivalries of force, Egypt would 
 need no defence, nor the Jews any protector, guardian or super- 
 visor, other than the permanent Executive of the League, with its 
 sword of Damocles ready to fall on any offender. The appoint- 
 ment of a Trustee Power, whether Britain, France or America, 
 would become superfluous. Israel could at once set up all the ma- 
 
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 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 chinery of Government, and from his rich human resources in every 
 country could provide himself with a better administration than that 
 likely to be supplied by any Trustee Power. The supposition that 
 he would deal less reverentially with the Holy Places than the Turk 
 is an insult. These shrines are, moreover, at bottom, Jewish. As 
 for internal order, Israel has a soldiery of three-quarters of a mil- 
 lion to draw from, starred with military honours at the hands of 
 every belligerent country. For of course even ex-enemy Jews must 
 help to re-build Palestine, which would thus become a microcosm of 
 the new world-order. 
 
 " The claim of the Jews to Palestine does not rest merely on his- 
 tory, but on the fact that while they are the only people on earth 
 absolutely without a national home, Palestine is a derelict country, 
 whose redemption needs such vast financial and labour forces that 
 it can only ' pay ' a people with ideal interests in the soil. Its 
 600,000 Arabs, whose disproportionate presence is the gravest ob- 
 stacle to the rise of the Jewish State, have created nothing there ex- 
 cept trouble for the Jewish Colonies, and should be gradually and 
 amicably transplanted to the Arab Kingdom, which is to be re-es- 
 tablished next door, and with which the Jewish State would cor- 
 dially co-operate. Race redistribution in the interests of the gen- 
 eral world-happiness is, I take it, one of the functions of the League 
 of Nations, and one that must be executed in many parts of Europe. 
 It has even been suggested as the solution of the Irish question. 
 But I had rather see an independent Palestine consisting of Arabs 
 and Jews shouldering a common burden, than see a Palestine Jewry 
 paralysed by tutelage and robbed by a Trustee Power of the invig- 
 orating struggle for self-expression and self-determination." 
 
 XXIV 
 
 It will be seen that I more than suspected the Versailles 
 Peace Conference would prove a " high comedy," but in view of 
 the world-interests at stake I felt it should be given — as I had 
 at first given the Balfour Declaration — the benefit of the 
 doubt, and therefore when I was asked by Asia, the journal of 
 the American Asiatic Society, to contribute to its special 
 Palestine number, I wrote, in an article entitled " Before the 
 Peace Conference " : 
 
 " With the arrival in France of President Wilson, the champion of 
 the League of Nations, the most momentous episode in all human 
 history begins, the true ' War for the World,' to which Armageddon 
 has been only a prologue, and the loss of which would mean the vic- 
 tory of Prussianism and the bankruptcy of civilisation. The whole 
 planet is in the grip of Allied Might, and it needs but Allied Right 
 
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 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 to reshape all racial boundaries and international relations. Here 
 there is no place for Secret Diplomacy. All claims and interests 
 must be plain, provable and public, and it is in the light of the con- 
 tent nunt of peoples and not in the darkness of diplomatic intrigue 
 that the repartition must be made. In some instances, where the 
 chaos of populations is a menace to permanent settlement, there 
 must be mutual adjustments, even (in the gravest cases) gradual 
 measures of race redistribution, but, given the will to Peace, there is 
 no knot which Reason and Love cannot untie. If mankind thus 
 builds a brotherhood, the immeasurable slaughter and suffering of 
 the war will be redeemed, and the prophetic gospel of ancient Ju- 
 deea will come to its own at last: ' They shall beat their swords 
 into ploughshares and their spears into pruning-hooks. Nation 
 shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war 
 any more.' 
 
 " But Judaism stands to gain also a minor traditional hope from 
 the Peace Conference: the re-possession of Palestine. And if this 
 secondary consummation could be united with the setting up of 
 Jerusalem as the seat of the League of Nations instead of the bank- 
 rupt Hague, the two Hebraic dreams, the major and the minor, 
 would be fused in one, and the Hebrew metropolis — that meeting- 
 place of three world-religions — would become at once the centre 
 and symbol of the new era. 
 
 " But a Hebrew Palestine, if it is to exist at all, must be a reality, 
 not a sham. Such interpretations as have hitherto been vouch- 
 safed us of the vaunted British Declaration scarcely seem serious. 
 The ' Jewish National Home ' is to be a British Crown Colony with 
 a predominantly Arab population, even if a French Syria does not 
 lop off a considerable slice from its meagre 10,000 square miles. 
 The power in every country, Lord Morley tells us in his ' Auto- 
 biography,' always resifles in the land-owning classes. Yet over 
 30,000 Arab landlords and some 600,000 fellahin are to continue 
 in possession of the bulk of the Holy soil. Moreover, Bethlehem 
 and perhaps other places are to be too sacred for Jewish hands. 
 Nor may we guard the shrines entrusted for so many centuries to 
 the Turk, although there is no monument in Palestine, whether 
 Christian, Jewish or Mohammedan, which is not a memorial to 
 Jewish genius and saintliness. While the Czecho-Slovaks and the 
 Jugo-Slavs and still other peoples scarcely known to history are to 
 flourish on their own soil with all the apparatus of sovereignty, the 
 greatest and longest-martyred of all the oppressed peoples — a 
 people which has supplied no small proportion of the outstanding 
 figures of the world-crisis, and in whose literature this whole new 
 era finds its inspiration — is to crawl into a corner of its own land 
 like a leper colony, warned to keep off this and to keep off that, or 
 to keep away from this Jew and to keep away from that Jew, and 
 repeating on its own soil the humiliations and subservience of its 
 
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 THE VOICE OF JEKUSALEM 
 
 2,000 years of agony and ignominy. Such a Palestine has neither 
 the glamour of poetry nor the practicality of prose. It is neither 
 Jewish nor National nor a Home. 
 
 " If this is what the great Declaration meant, then it was an illu- 
 sion and an insult. But we are entitled to assume, and the elo- 
 quence of its Christian protagonists and their endorsement of the 
 Hebrew University encourage us to assume, that the Declaration 
 was neither a political manoeuvre nor a mockery of the great Jewish 
 hope; that it was intended to settle the great Jewish question in har- 
 mony with the spirit of this great moment of world reconstruction, 
 when everything is in the melting-pot and the whole ' sorry scheme 
 of things ' that has been shattered is to be remoulded ' nearer to 
 the heart's desire.' And hence we must suppose that this new sys- 
 tem of creative politics will not stop short with disentangling Eu- 
 rope, and that those amicable measures of race redistribution, which 
 we have already seen to be an unavoidable part of a final world-set- 
 tlement, will be carried out in Palestine as elsewhere. Thus the 
 Arabs would gradually be settled in the new and vast Arabian 
 Kingdom to liberate which from the Turk, Jews no less than Arabs 
 have laid down their lives, and with which the Jewish Common- 
 wealth would cultivate the closest friendship and co-operation. 
 Only thus can Palestine become a ' Jewish National Home.' Only 
 thus can Israel — with his diaspora of fourteen millions — risk be- 
 ing told that Palestine is his country. Only thus can a final peace- 
 ful refuge be prepared against such race hatreds as are finding 
 bloody expression in Poland at this very moment. Only with a 
 Jewish majority (not, of course, a Jewish totality), only with the 
 land nationalised — and Jewish as well as Arab land must be ex- 
 propriated with reasonable compensation — can Israel enter upon 
 the task of building up that model State, the construction of which 
 American Zionism, in its trustful acceptance of the Declaration, has 
 already outlined. And it is now or never. 
 
 " Even if our object was merely to build up an ordinary common- 
 wealth, had we, in addition to the chaos of the regathering, to con- 
 front inter-racial friction and unrest, which indeed has already be- 
 gun, our statesmanship would be taxed to breaking-point. If Pales- 
 tine is to be ' safe for democracy,' a minority cannot at the outset 
 control a majority six times its size, while if on the other hand the 
 maj ority controls the minority, it could restrict our immigration and 
 nip the ' Jewish National Home ' in the bud. In any case, the 
 cheap vast labour-force already in existence would seriously limit the 
 possibilities of Jewish immigration. If we boycotted this force we 
 should be accused of worse than Polish racialism; if we used it we 
 should be charged with exploiting it, with being merely a capitalistic 
 class, parasites on our ' hewers of wood and drawers of water.' 
 With three-quarters of a million soldiers in the great war, not to 
 mention the Jewish regiments already in Palestine, on which, ac- 
 
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 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 cording to Colonel Patterson, the whole military movement was piv- 
 oted, we have ample resources both for labour and order, and with 
 a general of genius like Sir John Monash there is no need to search 
 for a Jewish Governor. If this is a dream, it at least follows the 
 laws of life and politics on which all other States are established: 
 it is the timid compromise that would be the doubtful and the dan- 
 gerous experiment. One would have thought that this war was a 
 sufficient object-lesson in the rankling poisons of race-hatred gener- 
 ated between peoples pent in the same territory. No, the Jews 
 must possess Palestine as the Arabs are to possess Arabia or the 
 Poles Poland. Otherwise, while not abandoning the existing He- 
 brew Colonies nor neglecting Palestine as an immigration area, 
 Israel must look, like Jochanan ben Zakkai, for other means of 
 continuing his chosen mission." 
 
 XXV 
 
 We are thus back at our starting-point — Jochanan ben 
 Zakkai and the fall of the Jewish State. Nothing is settled and 
 Israel is still confronted with the riddle of the Sphinx. 
 
 Undoubtedly, my suggestion of amicable race-redistribution 
 or a voluntary trek like that of the Boers from Cape Colony is 
 literally the only " way out " of the difficulty of creating a 
 Jewish State in Palestine, and if it is as impracticable as is 
 generally alleged, then the whole Zionist project was a chimera, 
 an impasse into which Britain was misled by the Zionist leaders 
 at a time when British politicians caught at any straw, and, as 
 Lord Lamington said, entered under stress of war into under- 
 takings that clashed with one another. Two national homes, 
 in a country smaller than ranches have been in South America, 
 constitute a greater impracticability than an Arab exodus. 
 Nor is my suggestion such an enormity as Prince Fcisal pre- 
 tends. Analogous shiftings of population have been suggested 
 in other cases, not only in Ireland but wherever the peace 
 treaties have left " Ulsters " — rankling matter in the wrong 
 place, that had best be drawn off. The Poles, as I have pointed 
 out, are claiming that the whole three millions of their Jewry 
 should be emigrated because their nationality cannot endure an 
 adulteration of one in seven. How then shall the Jewish 
 nationality in Palestine grapple with an Arab nationality of 
 seven to one? I should have no objection to an orderly migra- 
 tion of Polish Jews from the inferno which Poland is making for 
 them, to a less barbarous soil, though while Arab States await 
 the Palestine Arabs on the very borders of the Holy Land, 
 
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 there is nowhere, far or near, any Jewish State to receive the 
 Polish Jews, and they must at best be distributed about America 
 or Russia. But do not let us over-sentimentalise, or talk as if 
 nobody ever wandered from the beloved groves or graves of their 
 forefathers, as if man was a limpet. The exodus of villagers to 
 towns is a phenomenon only too frequent. The colossal streams 
 of pre-war emigration from Europe — a million a year to 
 America alone — are a proof that not even new conditions 
 daunt the peasant mind. In the war we have seen millions, 
 especially of Jews, calamitously uprooted and wandering about 
 Europe footsore, hungry, and bleeding, everywhere expelled and 
 nowhere welcomed. By the terms of the armistice all Germans 
 in Turkey were compelled to emigrate at brief notice. Com- 
 pared with such dolorous hegiras, a well-ordered emigration to 
 a pre-arranged home amid one's kinsmen, with full compensation 
 for values left behind, a movement organised at either end, 
 offers no terrors compared with the conflicts and race-frictions 
 it averts. The Arabs of Palestine might of themselves desire to 
 withdraw from the impending pressure of Anglo-Jewish civilisa- 
 tion, as the more fanatical Mohammedans are now beginning 
 to trek from India to Afghanistan in connection with the 
 Caliphate agitation. According to an Arab sheikh who has 
 issued a pro-Zionist manifesto, the Arabs of Palestine are used 
 to being expropriated. It has been the practice — and without 
 compensation even — of the very Effendis who are behind the 
 opposition to Zionism. And there is a further consideration. 
 The Palestine which will be " The Jewish National Home " 
 will not be the Palestine now overrun by the Arabs, any more 
 than the Dutch polder-land is the domain of those who fished 
 and shot over it before it was reclaimed from the sea. The 
 whole country, to whose ruin Arab fecklessness has contributed 
 as much as Turkish tyranny, will have to be re-created. Much 
 of the land is stony or malarious : much is not beneficially occu- 
 pied; freed from its cultivation by the primitive ploughs and 
 methods of the illiterate fell ohm, it could raise far more food 
 for a hungering humanity. Thousands of the proprietors are 
 absentee landlords, resident in Cairo or elsewhere, who would 
 merely profiteer by the rise in land values due to Jewish indus- 
 try. And if Lord Shaftesbury was literally inexact in describ- 
 ing Palestine as a country without a people, he was essentially 
 correct, for there is no Arab people living in intimate fusion 
 with the country, utilising its resources and stamping it with a 
 characteristic impress : there is at best an Arab encampment, 
 
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 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 the break-up of which would throw upon the Jews the actual 
 manual labour of regeneration, and prevent them from ex- 
 ploiting the fdlahin, whose numbers and lower wages are more- 
 over a considerable obstacle to the proposed immigration from 
 Poland and other suffering Jewish centres. 
 
 If, however, the Arabs will not, as Longfellow taught us to 
 expect, fold their tents and silently steal away, if they elect to 
 remain in Palestine, then, as I have emphasised in my speeches, 
 " their welfare must be as dear to us as our own." But even so, 
 painful though the necessity be, they should come at once under 
 a Jewish Government, and Sir Herbert Samuel should represent 
 the Zionists rather than the British Foreign Office ; the small 
 but expansible Jewish force being backed up by Britain or the 
 Allies, exactly as Poland or Czecho-Slovakia has been backed 
 up. For, as I pointed out in reply to Mr. Frederic Harrison's 
 querulous crudities in The Fortnightly Review: 
 
 " the Arabs should recognise that the road of their renewed national 
 glory lies through Baghdad, Damascus, and Mecca, and all the vast 
 territory freed for them from the Turks, and be content so far as 
 Palestine is concerned to be politically submerged. The Powers 
 which freed it and them have surely the right to ask them not to 
 grudge the petty strip necessary for the renaissance of a still more 
 down-trodden people." 
 
 The unearned increment of land values which would at once 
 accrue to the landlords, the rise in wages which would come to 
 the fellah in, and the sanitation, drainage, irrigation and af- 
 forestation brought to the common country would be sufficient 
 compensation for their political subordination. The San 
 Ptemo Treaty provided that nothing should be done to lower 
 their status. But that status had been one of subjection to 
 Turkey, and they would assuredly find more liberal governors 
 in the Jews. The last Zionist Conference voted for land-na- 
 tionalisation, but how can the Zionists nationalise the Arab 
 land unless they are the Government, how indeed can they work 
 out any national ideal? Palestine will not even have a Jewish 
 calendar! 
 
 XXVI 
 
 The reader will ask, however, since the Arab will neither sub- 
 mit to the Jewish government nor trek; since, rather, under the 
 Pan-Arabic leaders a new immigration of Arabs is threatened, 
 
 110
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 how could Britain handle the problem more fairly than she has 
 done? The answer is that in the first place she should never 
 have announced a solution which is no solution, and whose profit 
 is only to her. Summoned to explain how he proposes to build 
 up the "Jewish National Home," Mr. Balfour can do noth- 
 ing but appeal at the Albert Hall to the Arabs of Palestine, 
 and in the very language which I had used a week or so earlier 
 in replying to Mr. Frederic Harrison. " Remember we have 
 freed you from the Turk, that we are setting up Arab States in 
 the Hedjaz and Mesopotamia," echoes Mr. Balfour. " Do not 
 begrudge that small notch in the Arab territory being given to 
 the people which for hundreds of years has been separated from 
 it." But a plea to the Arabs, which is all very well from a 
 humble penman with no power but words, becomes ridiculous 
 in the statesman responsible for the project, in the depositary 
 of the Allied Power, which in return for services, without which 
 neither Syria nor Palestine could have been wrested from the 
 Turk, undertook to shape both the Arab and the Jewish future. 
 Mr. Balfour should have made the necessary provision for the 
 rise of a Jewish State when he dealt with Feisal and the Arab 
 leaders : their consent to the sequestration of this " small notch 
 in the Arab territory " should have been stipulated in advance, 
 at the moment when they were plunging their fists into bags of 
 British gold; a moment immortalised for us by that invaluable, 
 if sometimes indiscreet, institution, the cinema. 
 
 Without any provision whether for Arab emigration or 
 Jewish administration, Palestine bids fair to remain purely a 
 British possession, whose reconstruction is thrown upon Jewish 
 capital and energy. Max Nordau — whose withdrawal from 
 Zionist officialdom is significant — has shown in a brilliant anal- 
 ysis the danger to the Suez Canal, India, and all England's 
 interests in the near-East if the new Arabo-Syrian imperialism 
 goes unchecked. The Jews, according to this conception, are 
 to occupy the dangerous position of a wedge between Syrian 
 and Egyptian discontent, " to defend the British position at 
 the point of contact of Africa and Asia," to stand, in Mr. 
 Wells's metaphor, amid the swirl of traffic on that old and 
 hazardous highway where they were always being run over. 
 But this time without the compensation of constituting a State, 
 and, unless definite political guarantees are given, without any 
 hope even for the future ; mere pawns in an imperial game. 
 
 " Sic vos non vobis mellificatis apes." 
 Ill
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 And, as Dr. Nordau points out too, what alternative policy 
 had England? She could not leave Palestine to France, or 
 give it back to Turkey. It is providential for her that the 
 Jews are at hand to relieve her of the burden. I well remem- 
 ber how Mr. Barnes, who is now so suspiciously concerned to 
 whittle away the Balfour Declaration, confided to a Chris- 
 tian friend of mine the embarrassment of the Government at 
 the opposition of the wealthy anti-Zionist Jews. " We don't 
 know what to do about Palestine — the Jews won't take it." 
 
 Even the Zionist Jews who do not nominally refuse Palestine 
 believe that a minority must in no circumstances govern a ma- 
 jority. Placed between two mad peoples, the English and the 
 Jews, the Jews who will never take a country, and the English 
 who will never leave one untaken, I behold the long effort to 
 endow a landless people with a country ending in the addition 
 of one to an Empire already possessing a quarter of the globe. 
 Nordau, who shares the view that a minority must not govern 
 a majority, finds the solution not in a vast Arab emigration 
 but in a vast Jewish immigration, say half a million in a single 
 year; a proposition in whose practicability he is the sole be- 
 liever, just as I stand alone in the wild contention that there 
 are occasions when a minority has a right to govern a major- 
 ity: a phenomenon apparently unknown even in India or South 
 Africa! My defence of this extraordinary thesis must be 
 briefly summarised from the many speeches which I spare the 
 reader. 
 
 (1) Small as is the Jewish population, the British governing 
 minority in Palestine is very much smaller. 
 
 (2) The smallness of the Jewish population, like the relative 
 largeness of the Arab population, is transient. The very ob- 
 ject of the scheme is to find a place for millions. Had the 
 Jews not been a minority in Palestine, there would have been 
 no need of special Balfourian manifestoes on their behalf; even 
 under the Turkish constitution they would have dominated 
 automatically. This is a scheme, as Lord Robert Cecil put it, 
 " dealing in futures " ; what we have to look at is not the few 
 myriads of Jews actually in Palestine, but the race of fourteen 
 or fifteen millions from which streams of immigration are to 
 pour. The ridiculous argument has been used that if you are 
 to count the individuals outside Palestine, then there too the 
 Arabs far outnumber the Jews. But these Arabs outside Pal- 
 estine have already their national homes; they do not need 
 Palestine. 
 
 112
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 (3) From Sir Herbert Samuel's speeches in Palestine, sup- 
 plemented by the proclamation of King George V., we gather 
 that the official plan is for a gradual evolution of the Jewish 
 National Home, and that this evolution depends primarily on 
 the immigration of sufficient Jews to submerge the Arab popula- 
 tion, not however in one sudden flood, but by small and care- 
 fully regulated streams, according to the economic conditions. 
 But it is doubtful if " safety first " is a safe principle for the 
 establishment of States. There is more hope in the desperate 
 and undisciplined stampede which would ensue from the sham- 
 bles of Europe were the Nordau scheme adopted. New his- 
 tory is never made by efficient cabinet-ministers. It comes 
 rather from prisons, and the Jewish future now turns more 
 upon Jabotinsky than upon the admirable and official Samuel. 1 
 It is obvious in any case that even the official plan has had to 
 do away with self-determination. For if the Arabs had their 
 parliamentary way, the door to the Jews would be " banged, 
 barred, and bolted." In setting up an unelective council of 
 administration the Government is thus thwarting this menace. 
 Not onlv is the device undemocratic, but it is illegitimate, for 
 before the war Palestine — Arabs and Jews alike — had a dem- 
 ocratic status, returning members to the Parliament at Con- 
 stantinople, and to lower its status thus is against all the an- 
 cient conventions of after-warfare, not to mention that this 
 particular war was fought " to make the world safe for democ- 
 racy." It is thus clear that if the " Jewish National Home " 
 is to be built up without an Arab trek, it can only be by meth- 
 ods strictly unconstitutional. This Mr. Balfour in his latest 
 utterance has not denied, pleading quite in my own vein that 
 the claim of the Jews upon Palestine is, though as peculiar as 
 the people, no real contradiction of " the principle of self-de- 
 termination," and that exceptional problems need exceptional 
 handling. 
 
 In fact without force of a kind there can be no " Jewish Na- 
 tional Home." Qui veut la fin veut les moyens. The objec- 
 tion to the evolutionary form of force is, however, that although 
 slow, it is not sure — indeed, the only thing sure is infinite fric- 
 tion. If unconstitutional methods are to prevail over a long 
 period, the nettle had best be grasped firmly at once and the 
 
 i Lloyd George is reported to have said that since Samuel went there, 
 Palestine is the one bright spot in the world. This is something to rejoice 
 in, even although it is not the Jewish future that is assured, but merely the 
 future of Palestine. 
 
 113
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 administration made Jewish forthwith, leaving the Arabs to 
 accept by intelligent anticipation their inevitable minority 
 status. The best observers report that the British conquest of 
 Palestine found the Arabs ready to accept any regime, and had 
 this malleable moment been seized, a Jewish Government could 
 have been established with a general acquiescence in its justice. 
 It was the delay and vacillation which followed that gave 
 intrigue and opposition their opportunity. But it may not yet 
 be too late. 
 
 (4) The Holy Places can be all reverentially safeguarded by 
 Jews ; the Christian shrines by Hebrew Christians, the Moslem 
 by Hebrew Mohammedans. Nothing would show more convinc- 
 ingly that the Jewish State was not a reactionary return to a 
 narrow and fanatical theocracy. Nor could there be a more 
 significant climax and conclusion to a great and tragic era of 
 history than a Jewish guard of honour round the tomb of 
 Christ. 
 
 XXVII 
 
 But the friction and the bloodshed, the strife, racial and re- 
 ligious, the intrigues and the plottings, and the bovcotting 
 proclamations that have already aborted Zionism, show how 
 right is the old tradition that associates the return of the 
 Jews to Palestine with the millennium. " Not by might, nor 
 by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts." Had 
 the spirit of Reason and Goodwill, which Wilson invoked, been 
 applied, had the world turned from cockpit to commonwealth, 
 had politics for once become religion, had in short the victorious 
 Allies approached their problem in the spirit of their professed 
 faith, there would have been a world-wide spiritual uplifting, 
 and a real restoration of the Jews to Palestine would have be- 
 come possible. For the repartition of the planet on the " prin- 
 ciple of nationality " would have proceeded in Palestine, as 
 everywhere else, in the new spirit; to which the Arabs, like all 
 other peoples, would have vibrated. A great wave of peace 
 would have flooded the world. 
 
 " Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand 
 in his holy place? " asks the Psalmist. 
 
 " He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted 
 up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully." 
 
 But the Powers brought neither cleanness of hands nor pur- 
 
 114.
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 ity of heart, nor were they innocent of dark and deceitful 
 treaties. Palestine, instead of being a sacred trust, was merely 
 a bone over which France and England squabbled, and the sur- 
 render of which to all-avaricious England, in common with the 
 oil of Mosul, has been openly deplored by M. Briand. 
 
 My whole conception of an amicable Arab trek into Syria or 
 other of the new and neighbouring Arab States, rested on the 
 hypothesis that these States were to be set up genuinely: 
 whereas we have seen Syria overrun by French imperialism, 
 and just as I was formerly revolted by Prince Feisal's grasping 
 and ungenerous pan-Arabism, so have my sympathies under- 
 gone a revulsion in favour of this downfallen puppet of Eng- 
 land and France. 
 
 Even now, were France willing to retire from Syria, a bar- 
 gain could in all probability be struck by the Powers with 
 Prince Feisal for recognising Palestine as a Jewish State. But 
 French imperialism is still more blatant than British — is not 
 this Erastian State, whose nuns fled from it, protector of " the 
 Christendom of the East? " To speak of " sacred " trusts or 
 anything sacred except sacro egoismo in such a connection 
 would be blasphemous. Not from such a whirlpool of insane 
 imperialisms can the calm currents of universal justice pro- 
 ceed. Thus the ancient Rabbis who asserted the futility and 
 even the f rowardness of redemption through the medium of man, 
 were, though they played into the hands of the otiose and inert, 
 profounder than one realised. " Hitherto," they pointed out, 
 " ye have been redeemed by flesh and blood, and ye have been 
 returned again and again to servitude and exile." It is not in- 
 deed till mankind gets the new heart and the new spirit that 
 Ezekiel demanded of his people, it is not till the Holy Ghost 
 moves through humanity establishing a true brotherhood of the 
 peoples, that Israel can be redeemed in any but a piecemeal and 
 evanescent fashion. The augurs at Rome forbore to smile 
 when they met one another. How European statesmen are able 
 to conduct their Conferences with so owlish a mien, still more 
 how they can keep from winking when talking to us of these 
 moral " Mandates," which so mysteriously correspond with 
 their secret treaties and ambitions, is a standing marvel. They 
 must assuredly assume in us a sane t a simplicitas beyond the 
 sucking babe's. " Were they ashamed when they had com- 
 mitted abomination? " asked Jeremiah, speaking of those who 
 said " Peace, peace, when there was no peace." " Nay, they 1 
 were not at all ashamed, neither could they blush." 
 
 115
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 Once upon a time there was no urgent call for thinkers to in- 
 tervene in politics, at any rate not in the detail of politics. If 
 the world did not always go very well, it was not heading for 
 bankruptcy or " rattling back to barbarism." There was al- 
 ways an opposition party to check overweening folly — the 
 rival fools had not discovered how to retain office indefi- 
 nitely by pooling their power. The wiser politicians might 
 not be so profound as they seemed to their followers, but at 
 least a Gladstone brought moral energy and a Disraeli intel- 
 lectual force to current affairs, and the word of a Cabinet Min- 
 ister stood at par. Nobody in my young days would have 
 dared to stand up in Parliament, as Lord Curzon has stood up 
 in the House of Lords, and gravely profess that the Palestine 
 mandate was dependent for its content on the League of Na- 
 tions (which had not conferred it) or that the Allies had agreed 
 to recognise Syria as an independent State — under the man- 
 date of France! With similar aplomb Mr. Bonar Law has 
 pacified the Commons, Lord Robert Cecil included, by ex- 
 plaining that England's promise to set up an Arab State in 
 Syria was qualified by the proviso : " Without detriment to 
 the interests of her Ally, France." There is nothing in Lewis 
 Carroll more grotesque than this brazen use of the word " in- 
 dependent " to cover practical annexation ; and it shows an 
 insolent contempt for public opinion, which perhaps public 
 opinion that endures the insolence deserves. 
 
 XXVIII 
 
 There is no correcting balance to be found in the bulk of 
 the Fourth Estate. On the contrary. It is a newspaper — 
 the Temps — that has made perhaps the most impudent state- 
 ment of our generation. Commenting on the Emir Feisal's 
 righteous resistance to France's " occupation " of Syria, this 
 journal said: " The Allies did not conquer Prussian militarism 
 to allow the development in its place of a Hedjaz militarism, 
 which will set aflame the Arab world." 
 
 " These are the new Dark Ages," wrote Tennyson, better in- 
 spired than he knew, " the days of the popular press." They 
 are dark not with ignorance but with ink. The press, orig- 
 inally created to give light, now functions to exclude it, and 
 this artificial inspissation leaves us in a far greater fog than in 
 the primitive days before Gutenberg's invention. Some of the 
 Hebrew incunabula contain poems in honour of printing, which 
 
 116
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 is glorified as the art of writing at one time with many pens. 
 It may now be defined as the art of lying at one time with many 
 mouths. The first Hebrew compositors were not regarded as 
 artisans, but entitled " performers of a holy work," and this 
 label still survives among the credulous people of Apella 
 Judasus. Christendom has evolved the more accurate locution 
 of the printer's devil. 
 
 An American writer enumerates the dozen foremost organs of 
 America which have refused to insert an article of his in miti- 
 gation of the popular view of Bolshevism. It is, he observes, 
 " the greatest campaign of falsification in the history of man- 
 kind." He is perhaps forgetting the antithetical glorifica- 
 tion of the old Russia, which preceded the war. But the fact 
 remains that our century has witnessed the reduction of men- 
 dacity to a profession, and of its diffusion to a science. It is 
 an unconscious tribute to the goodness of man's heart and the 
 soundness of his instincts, that the truth must be hidden from 
 him. 
 
 George Eliot inveighed against the debasement of the moral 
 currency : to-day there is not merely debasement, there is shame- 
 less falsification, shillings marked sovereigns, and florins farth- 
 ings, and threepenny-bits swaggering as half-crowns, and in 
 this currency we have to exchange our thoughts. We are liv- 
 ing — as I said in an earlier book — in one of those eras de- 
 scribed by Mommsen in which words no longer correspond with 
 things. Writers whose profession it is to seek out delicacies 
 and subtleties of vocabulary are expected to accept as equiva- 
 lents terms grossly antithetical, and " the fell incensed points 
 of mighty opposites " are swamped 
 
 " In the common deluge drowning old political common-sense." 
 
 The British Academy ought to give us a dictionary, defining 
 within what limits a word may loop the loop. Meantime Slav- 
 ery is Freedom, and Imperialism is Idealism, and Chauvinism is 
 Christianity, and Negotiations with a Government fail to imply 
 Recognition of it, and to divide up a country is to guarantee 
 its integrity, and the Jews are to have a national home in a 
 country populated by Arabs and ruled by British. It is no 
 longer the Oscar Wildes that sound paradoxical, it is those who 
 stand up for the simplest political morality or decency, or the 
 simplest British ideals. 
 
 117
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 " Milton, thou should'st be living at this hour: 
 England hath need of thee." 
 
 The bulk of Englishmen seem to have forgotten that if their 
 forefathers after a struggle of centuries ejected from the State 
 I inventive arrest or orders in Council, it was not from mere 
 abstract objection to legislative fads but because without the 
 protection of Habeas Corpus, trial by jury and free parlia- 
 ments, no man stood safe. Bitter experience lav behind their 
 demands, as it lies again before their descendants. All these 
 harsh lessons will have to be learnt afresh unless Englishmen 
 at once shake off this new stifling network of bureaucracy, as 
 Samson shook off" the green withes and new ropes of the Philis- 
 tines. The war for freedom, while enlarging England's Em- 
 pire and confirming her command of the seas, has turned her 
 into a tyranny. Eor my part I see no satisfaction in ruling 
 the waves if you are chained to the oar. 
 
 The poet Cowper, a Bigger Englander than Kipling, since he 
 valued the greatness of England by its value to all humanity, 
 boasted that the slave whose foot touched our soil was free. 
 That freedom has been England's greatest asset on the Conti- 
 nent. More than her wealth it gave her the leadership of the 
 world. To-day the slave's foot would never even succeed in 
 touching her soil. A barbed wire entanglement, bristling with 
 Bumbles — detectives, excise men, passport functionaries, what 
 not — would prevent his landing. And such slaves — such 
 poor victims of Continental autocracies — - whose feet did touch 
 our soil ten or twenty years ago, are being deported without 
 trial, without reason, under irresponsible denunciation, some- 
 times after an internment equally monstrous, suspected yester- 
 day of being pro-Germans and to-day badgered as Bolshevists. 
 
 I happened to come across the " Annual Register " for 1792 
 — the year when I he French had executed their King and the 
 Revolutionary Republic was calling on all nations to rise 
 against their rulers. There was the same panic-stricken de- 
 mand in Parliament for an Aliens' Bill — only this time it was 
 to keep out the French, whose seditious emissaries might over- 
 run the State. The British histories of the period all repre- 
 sent the French as the most dangerous of all peoples, multi- 
 plying in numbers, entrenched in the centre of Europe, and aim- 
 ing at universal domination. 
 
 118
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 XXIX 
 
 " Great men are not always wise," says Job, " nor do old men 
 understand." But to-day the world's great men seem never 
 wise and none of them is young enough to know better. Zola 
 ends his novel " La Debacle " by picturing an engine driver 
 fallen dead on his engine, while the long train of crowded car- 
 riages goes roaring onwards into the night. On such a blind 
 train I feel myself a helpless passenger, without the bliss of 
 ignorance as to the driver's condition. There is even worse 
 than no-guidance, there is misguidance, positive steering for 
 collisions, as, for example, of the white and coloured races. 
 The Japanese victory over Russia in 1905 — the cardinal event 
 of modern history — had undermined in the overwhelming 
 masses of the coloured peoples the illusion of some magical su- 
 periority in the white, and thus shaken the stability of the bal- 
 ance of colour-power. Yet France and England dared to enlist 
 coloured troops of all sorts in the Great War and to equip 
 them ultra-scientifically against the white man, even quarter- 
 ing them finally in Frankfort and — as if symbolically — in 
 Goethe's house! At the same time the grievances of the col- 
 oured populations of the world, especially of the Africans, are 
 neither abated nor placated. Everywhere there are rumblings 
 and mutterings of the coming storm, and if we had the least 
 sense of proportion we white races would abandon our jeal- 
 ousies and rival imperialisms, precisely as the Kaiser suggested 
 long ago in a cartoon, and run up a League of White Nations 
 at least, before we reap the whirlwind that we have sown in 
 wind. But in an era of cataclysms more colossal than the 
 world has ever known, its affairs are in the hands of persons 
 who for light and leading give us darkness and misleading, 
 whose official statements alternate between falsehood and auda- 
 cious nonsense, and whose policy wriggles along by devious and 
 underground routes to obscure and catastrophic ends. It 
 would have been a humiliation for a cause associated with eight- 
 een centuries of prayer to owe its success to such tarnished in- 
 struments, though the effort to do one right thing unselfishly 
 might have served to cleanse them. That the Jewish future in 
 Palestine should have been exposed to the sordid bargainings 
 of such a Peace Conference is a tragedy with scarcely a re- 
 deeming feature. 
 
 Lord Robert Cecil said at the same Zionist Demonstration at 
 
 119
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 which Mr. Balfour sought to shuffle off his responsibility upon 
 Arab magnanimity, that " when the history of the war came to 
 be written, lie believed bhat the two outstanding features would 
 be the establishment of the national Jewish home and the crea- 
 tion of the League of Nations. They represented the great 
 ideals for which we fought and by which we conquered." 
 
 It is perfectly true that we conquered by means of these great 
 ideals. But it is equally true that we have kicked away the 
 ladders by which we mounted. Lord Robert Cecil's optimism is 
 sublime, for at the moment it requires the eye of faith to see 
 either a League of Nations or a Jewish National Home as a 
 sequel of the war. Tempted of the spirit — to use a phrase 
 of Berenson's — mankind has alas ! resisted. And the fiasco of 
 the League is infinitely more tragic than that of Zionism, which 
 concerns only a single people. That humanity standing at the 
 cross-roads of history should have failed to take the turning to 
 the right, is the saddest episode in all man's long tragic ad- 
 venture. And with all mankind bruised and bereaved, the solic- 
 itation to the path of peace was so unparalleled. Nor was the 
 voice of the League's prophet vox clamantis in deserto. 
 
 Never had man born of woman such a housetop to speak 
 from, never were so many people prepared to hear, as through 
 a megaphone, the voice of Jerusalem, of which this great Amer- 
 ican Puritan seemed the inspired medium. 
 
 " How art thou fallen, O Lucifer, son of the morning! " 
 
 It was not wholly the tragedy of the honest man fallen among 
 thieves, there was also internal weakness. 
 
 " We are betrayed by what is false within." 
 
 XXX 
 
 The alternative Woodrow Wilson set up of the world as com- 
 monwealth or the world as cockpit was not clearly faced even 
 by himself. "Under which King, Bezonian?" The incoher- 
 ence of the Peace Conference was due to its trying to pay alle- 
 giance simultaneously to both. Never in fact in human history 
 has anything been so written about and so little thought out as 
 the League of Nations. One imagined from certain noble and 
 luminous utterances that at least Wilson understood it. But 
 'tis a wise father that knows his own child, and the complacency 
 
 120
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 with which he carried back on the George Washington a gro- 
 tesque changeling argues that he had no real acquaintance with 
 the cherub he begot on the world's imagination. We have in- 
 deed his own confession of the humorous surprise with which 
 he suddenly realised that under his League there would be no 
 neutrals, so that the vexed question of the Freedom of the Seas 
 would not arise. But even this confession was a further error, 
 for, apart from the nations excluded, the conditions of the 
 League allow any existing member to withdraw after due no- 
 tice, and thus to become a neutral in any wars waged by the 
 League. 
 
 Months before he sailed for Paris, he had pontificated upon 
 the League and upon the indispensability of its inclusion in the 
 Peace Treaty, but his sense of papal infallibility seems unshaken 
 even by his own avowal of his misconceptions or by the con- 
 sciousness he can hardly escape that on the question of Peace 
 or War he had boxed the political compass. He still stoutly 
 maintains that " the work of the Conference squares as a 
 whole with the principles agreed upon as the basis of peace." 
 It is a happy and enviable temperament, but it belongs rather 
 to the Chadbands than to the Christs. 
 
 Had President Wilson returned home heart-broken at his 
 defeat by the dark forces of Europe, he would have been the 
 greatest success in human history. But that he should have 
 triumphantly waved scraps of paper from which the Four- 
 teen Points have been practically erased, here is the true trag- 
 edy of his downfall. It adds his own failure to the world's. 
 
 We need only compare Mr. Wilson's appraisal of the Ver- 
 sailles achievement with that of General Smuts, who has re- 
 placed him as humanity's hope, to measure the depth of his 
 fall. For the voice is now that of the politician pleading that 
 the intricate pattern of international relationship was cut too 
 deep by historic circumstances to be ignored or reversed. The 
 belated discovery does as little credit to Wilson, the historian, 
 as his failure to transcend the historic obstacles did to the 
 man of action. Just as Balfour should have secured Pales- 
 tine by accord with the Arabs before launching his Declaration 
 to the Jews, so before entering the war, whose issue he held in 
 the hollow of his hand, should Wilson have bound Europe by 
 contract to his principles and swept away the " old entangle- 
 ments " ; especially those entanglements which he indicts — and 
 it is a curious indictment from the man who had allied America 
 with these Governments on account of their unmitigated right- 
 
 121
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 eousness — as " promises which Governments had made to one 
 another in days when Might and Right were confused." To 
 break with past history was precisely what he had preached as 
 the world's great need. Mankind was to take a leap in the 
 light and to rise into a new plane of world-unity- A new heart, 
 General Smuts reminds us, was to be given to us, no less than 
 to our enemies, being, as we are, all members of one another. 
 We were to be just, even to those to whom we did not wish to 
 be just. Alas! the Peace — especially the Austrian Peace — 
 is less just than many a Treaty under the old order. So far 
 from the spirit of the brotherhood of mankind pervading the 
 Conference, the Big Four who made the Peace could hardly keep 
 it among themselves. 
 
 Not that Mr. Wilson had forgotten his ideal. Indeed it was 
 his undoing. Lured on by his dream and fooled to the top 
 of his bent, he sold the Peace in exchange for the League of 
 Nations, and was fobbed off with a simulacrum. For the 
 League of Nations that was palmed off on him is merely a de- 
 vice for guaranteeing the injustices of the Peace Treaty and 
 eternalising them. Both as a bargainer and an apostle Presi- 
 dent Wilson suffered defeat. 
 
 XXXI 
 
 Not only is the League not a League of Nations, nor the 
 Peace Treaty a Treaty of Peace, but President Wilson's ten- 
 aciously achieved embodiment of the first in the second was a 
 triumph as hollow as the rest. For the whole point of the in- 
 corporation of the League in the Peace Treaty was that the 
 co-existence of this covenant of co-operation, this new world- 
 order, would react enormously upon the nature of the settlement, 
 substituting as it must goodwill for hate, and reducing racial 
 frictions to a minimum by the world-policy of the open door and 
 free and equal access to ports, harbours and railways. In par- 
 ticular, boundary questions could be denuded of their signifi- 
 cance, for the security of the individual frontier would depend 
 not on its fortresses nor its geographical barriers but on the 
 joint protection of the peoples. 
 
 But instead of the new world-order influencing the Peace 
 Settlement, that Treaty is drawn up on the assumption of the 
 constancy of the bad old world-order, and security of frontier 
 has been pursued even to the sacrifice of the vaunted " prin- 
 ciple of nationality." Indeed, so far from the League reacting 
 
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 on the Peace Settlement in mitigation, it is — as already indi- 
 cated — the harshness of the Peace Settlement that has reacted 
 on the League. In being associated with the Peace Treaty, the 
 League of Nations has touched pitch and been defiled. Far 
 better had the League been created in the calm of Peace. 
 
 For instead of facilitating and simplifying the Peace Settle- 
 ment, as complicated issues are lightened the moment the 
 parties come together in goodwill, it has added its own asym- 
 metry and lack of principle to the cumbrous complexity of the 
 Treaty. The two covenants have indeed been signed as one, 
 but despite their common taint, the union remains monstrous 
 and hybrid. The mountain in labour has produced a flitter- 
 mouse, an uncouth and sinister bat. 
 
 It is not, in fact, a League of Nations that has been brought 
 forth, but a League of Damnations. Despite the promise of 
 preferential treatment to a democratised Germany, the united 
 vengeances of England, France and America have been wreaked 
 upon the German Republic in the concoction of the Peace terms, 
 which involve too a protracted alliance to ensure that the con- 
 ditions are exacted and the handicap of them never henceforth 
 transcended. In diminishing and crippling Germany to the ut- 
 most possible and in building up against her resurrection a 
 barrier of new nations, revived or created, lie at once punish- 
 ment and security. The procedure is not illegitimate. Ger- 
 many herself admits a measure of guilt and had challenged 
 forces by which she is abased and chastised. Nor is it im- 
 possible that a warless world is henceforth practically secure, 
 when finally the last cracklings of this gigantic forest-fire grow 
 silent. Hate as well as Love, Death as well as Life, may bring 
 Peace. The spine of Germany may be irremediably broken, 
 and the proved colossal cost and ferocity of modern war may 
 suffice to keep a soulless peace among her imperialist rivals, 
 even though France celebrates her victory by the sinister sym- 
 bolism of the Gallic cock crowing above the piled German guns 
 in the Champs Elysees. 
 
 What is revolting, however, is the pretence that the League 
 of Hate is a League of Love, that the disintegration of Austria 
 and the magnification of Poland are due primarily to a rever- 
 ence for nationality, and that a new world-order can be erected 
 on Nemesis. 
 
 12S
 
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 XXXII 
 
 Wilson defined the object of his League as to keep justice 
 between nations. That is hardly ensured by a clause like Ar- 
 ticle X, which seeks to entail the spoils of war and render them 
 the inalienable property of the present conquerors. The Ar- 
 ticle in question might lead to monstrous injustices, not only 
 against the defeated countries, but even among the present Al- 
 lies. France, for example, might reduce her birth rate still 
 lower, and while Belgium overflowed with a vigorous white pop- 
 ulation seeking land in vain, the denuded soil of France might be 
 monopolised by a small slave-owning aristocracy reposing on 
 the industrial labours of prolific immigrants from the Franco- 
 African Colonies. Instead of a pact to guarantee one an- 
 other's territorial integrity, the leagued nations should have 
 undertaken to re-adjust one another's frontiers according to 
 the variations of populations or their economic situation. 
 
 Lord Robert Cecil claims indeed that the League recognises 
 the case for continuous re-adjustment, though it insists that 
 this shall be effected not by violence but by discussion and de- 
 bate. It is true there is a provision that disputes shall be re- 
 ferred to arbitration, but the arbitrators would surely have to 
 recognise that such disputes cannot embrace redistribution of 
 territories, since any diminution of boundaries has been barred 
 for all time by Article X. Moreover were the League's object 
 really to do justice between the nations, it would at once apply 
 self-determination to the conquests of its own members ; Shan- 
 tung would cease to trouble and Egypt be at rest. A British 
 Gibraltar or a French Syria would become unthinkable. All 
 rankling grievances thus removed and their recurrence provided 
 against, a small common force would suffice to police the planet. 
 But the League being not a League of Nations, but of Damna- 
 tions, justice other than primitive cannot enter into it. 
 
 So far is this petrifaction of ancient injustices admitted, that 
 at the last annual meeting of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines 
 Protection Society, such an advocate of the League of Nations 
 as Professor Gilbert Murray took it for granted that in for- 
 bidding the Powers to use their black troops for their wars, 
 the Covenant's ukase ran only over new territories. For ex- 
 ample, France could not raise such a slave-army in the Cam- 
 eroons. But there was nothing to prevent her from shipping 
 her unfortunate Moors or Algerians to be murdered in her 
 
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 European disputes. Similarly, as Mr. Morel reminds us in 
 " The Black Man's Burden," though the mandatory system is 
 to prevail at least nominally over those portions of Africa 
 which have been wrested from Germany, the white man is al- 
 lowed to batten upon the negro everywhere else in that Dark 
 Continent, unrestrained by international control. 
 
 Principles of world-control that are not retrospective in time, 
 nor universal in space, recall the famous Pensee of Pascal: 
 " Three degrees of latitude upset all jurisprudence. A merid- 
 ian decides on truth; in a few years of possession fundamental 
 laws change; right has its epochs . . . Plaisante justice qu'une 
 riviere borne! Verite au deca des Pyrenees, erreur au dela." 
 
 Such piece-meal justice has, no doubt, that strong flavour of 
 practicality beloved of Britain, and recommended by Lord Rob- 
 ert Cecil, international ethics broadening " slowly down from 
 precedent to precedent." But to the Semitic mind it all ap- 
 pears like the behaviour of a gang of burglars who having 
 divided a huge windfall of swag move into a respectable sub- 
 urb, resolved to live honestly for the future, though not with- 
 out subsidies from the thieves' kitchen still operating for their 
 benefit in Seven Dials. 
 
 As for the idea that this victorious group, though it refuses 
 to apply retrospective restoration to its own ancient spoils of 
 war, is entitled to deal out retrospective retribution upon guilty 
 warmakers, the best answer to this Pharisaic claim is given in 
 the mere title of a book by an obscure Jew of Bristol : " Jus- 
 tice versus Neutrality." The very fact that neutrality is a 
 recognised war-status shows that there is as yet no common 
 duty of international justice. International ethics not having 
 been yet instituted, there is in the legal sense neither crime 
 nor competent court. The nations are uncouth monsters, 
 ranging at their free will as in the antediluvian age. Individ- 
 uals may be saints, but the biological organism which they con- 
 stitute recognises, in the last resort, no will but that of the 
 stronger; in our corporate capacity we are demoniac. If jus- 
 tice is to reign over these anarchic monsters, there can be no 
 more neutrals, as Wilson belatedly discovered. Meantime, for 
 a public incurably idealist and deceivable, the poor politicians 
 have the burden of expressing the lawlessness of the interna- 
 tional jungle in terms of the internal ethics, and must make 
 Machiavelli sound like the voice of Jerusalem. 
 
 No less brazen than Wilson, Mr. Lloyd George denies that 
 the triple agreement within the Covenant " shows a lack of faith 
 
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 in the League of Nations." " On the contrary," he urges 
 bouncingly, " the League of Nations will be of no value unless 
 it has the sanction behind it of strong nations, prepared at a 
 moment's notice to stop the aggression." With such childish 
 quibbles do the helmsmen of humanity seek to conceal the error 
 of their courses. 
 
 There is no need at all of strong nations inside the League, so 
 long as there are no strong nations outside. Their union is 
 strength, and all the strength necessary. Even it' the League 
 inherits strong nations from the old order, why destroy the re- 
 sponsibility of the whole by putting all the work on the part? 
 By the notorious Article X ever}* member undertakes to pre- 
 serve every other against aggression. Why then limit this 
 duty to the " strong nations " or confine it to German aggres- 
 sion? Even while the Peace Conference, which was supposed to 
 create the world-commonwealth, was in session, a dozen aggres- 
 sions by the smaller nationalities continued to keep the world a 
 cockpit. Lord Robert Cecil, one of the few British statesmen 
 who seriously desire the League, argues that this reinsurance of 
 France outside the League does but specifically repeat an obli- 
 gation already inherent within it. But why this duplication, 
 this double dealing? Is not the League of Damnations rock- 
 based enough? Is it feared that at some future date a member 
 friendly to Germany will refuse to commit the League to a joint 
 attack upon her? If so, how foolish to have made a unanimous 
 decision necessary ! That was what destroyed the old Polish 
 Diet and incidentally Poland. Any member had only to say 
 " X/r pozwalam " (" I won't have it ") and the proposed meas- 
 ure collapsed, nay, the Diet itself was dissolved. But to this 
 constitutional paralysis are all sittings of the League reduced. 
 Seldom has a contract been made with so many loopholes. An 
 agreement designed by a firm of shady solicitors to protect a 
 bogus company could hardly be less binding. That America 
 has only one vote to Britain's six is no handicap when one vote 
 is just as powerful as six, and when Britain might even be hoist 
 with one of her own votes. 
 
 Mr. Lloyd George, speaking at the Versailles Conference, 
 said that he had recently visited the war-zone, and in view of 
 the desolation and horror the thought was borne in forcibly 
 upon him, could nations find no better way of adjusting their 
 disputes than by force? The thought was insincere or shal- 
 low. Were the matter in dispute between the nations the 
 beauty of their literature or their women, the superiority of 
 
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 their culture or their agriculture, force would indeed be a ridic- 
 ulous arbiter. But what is always in question between two 
 peoples — disguised if at all but superficially — is precisely 
 which is stronger, and how this dispute is to be solved other 
 than by force I know not. As well say the heavyweight cham- 
 pionship should be referred to arbitration. Either scrap your 
 ideal of brute supremacy, or take it honestly into account. 
 
 XXXIII 
 
 With the mass of mankind, the fashions of their women are 
 not more mutable than their morals and opinions. But it is im- 
 possible for a truly great man to reverse his mentality within 
 a few months; and Wilson's change from indicting only the 
 Kaiser and Junkerdom to chastising the whole German people, 
 caught in the Allied Peace-Trap, was as violent as his change 
 from the high temper of " too proud to fight " to the crude mil- 
 itarism of " force, force to the utmost, force without stint or 
 limit." Not that Wilson was alone in the delusion that — as 
 Heine put it — God's work can be done by the Devil. 
 
 One hastens, like Figaro, to laugh in reading that old speech 
 by Lord Grey of Fallodon in which he said : " There must be 
 no peace except a peace which is going to ensure that the na- 
 tions of Europe will live in the future free from the shadow of 
 militarism, will live in the open air, and in the light of freedom." 
 
 And I have before me an American compilation called " Win 
 the War for Permanent Peace," announced on the cover as by 
 William Howard Taft, and the French Ambassador, and the 
 Representatives of Great Britain, and the Secretary of the 
 Navy, and the Spokesmen of Labour, and Governors of States, 
 and other National Leaders. I have a sardonic satisfaction in 
 remembering that I mocked at the mongrel species of thinker, 
 labelling it "The Military Pacifist," and essaying to jar this 
 fatuous chorus by an article on " The Next War." There is 
 in fact no way of ensuring peace through war. The abandon- 
 ment of the simple code of " peace on earth and goodwill to all 
 men " leaves the politicians confronted with an impenetrable 
 jungle of conflicting interests, and the law of the jungle per- 
 petuates the jungle. Wilson's first thoughts were best. 
 
 " The Pacifists are right, but stupid," he was reported as 
 modestly proclaiming, when on second thoughts he entered the 
 war. " I know how to get Peace. They do not." Wilson's 
 way of: getting Peace was to stave it off for a couple of years, 
 
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 at the cost of rivers of blood and mountains of gold, then to 
 ensue it for eight months at a Peace Conference, to the accom- 
 paniment of twenty-three wars, and the groans of a famished 
 and perislung Europe, and finally to end " the war against 
 war " by a Peace against Peace. Meantime a new and separate 
 war of classes had sprung up the whole world over, manifesting 
 itself in not a few countries by 
 
 " Red ruin and the breaking up of Laws." 
 
 To mark the Peace he knew how to get, the American Army and 
 Navy have been considerably increased, and in the process of 
 getting it, his notorious land of freedom was turned into a con- 
 script country. 
 
 The whole horrible welter is a monument to the futility of 
 Might. Possibly, had Might been really the instrument of 
 Right, instead of its masquerade, possibly had the sword been 
 really the minister of the spirit, it might have shaped a less un- 
 satisfactory world. But the fact remains that righteousness 
 has played but a small part in the re-carving of the world, 
 and " from the lie " — to quote Heine again — " there comes no 
 life." 
 
 If the politicians had not already written their doom by their 
 inability to stop the war, their success in stopping the Peace 
 should surely move mankind to relegate their whole order to the 
 dustheap. Democracy, if it insists only on leaders who flatter 
 it, must go to its destruction. If the world is not to perish in 
 its blindness, it must revert to the leadership of thinkers and 
 men of faith. Politics, I repeat, must become religion instead 
 of religion — at the first real call upon it — becoming politics. 
 
 From the first volume (price two guineas) of a monumental 
 " History of the Peace Conference," now coming out in five 
 volumes — like a great historical tragedy in five acts — I 
 gather that we ought not to be hard on the peace-makers, for 
 the task that confronted them — poor souls — was nothing less 
 than the re-building of the world which they had so recklessly 
 shattered. War-at-any-pricc is clearly no simple policy. One 
 knew that to set things straight an army of writers and stu- 
 dents had been occupied almost as long as the war had lasted, 
 and that i heir historical excursuses, population-analyses, bound- 
 ary and waterway investigations, and reconstructive proposals 
 occupied many lorries, that President Wilson, for his part, not 
 relying on these European presentments, travelled with four 
 truck-loads of similar documents compiled by trusty .Ameri- 
 
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 cans, and that to grapple with all these issues thousands of 
 secretaries and typists (with special dress allowances for the 
 sex) were mobilised, transported and congregated in vast ho- 
 tels, and that the number of commissions, committees, and sub- 
 committees, and the chaos of questions that came up for set- 
 tlement, " stagger humanity." Yet the bulk of this careful 
 preparatory work was thrown over, we are told; the principal 
 statesmen who had had no time during the war to work out the 
 solutions, and who feared in any case to raise questions that 
 might divide the Allies, fell back upon ready-made and undi- 
 gested compromises. For never has the historical law that Al- 
 lies always quarrel, and that Peace divides what War united, 
 been better vindicated. They quarrel because they are united 
 not by mutual love but by a common hatred of the enemy? and 
 when he is done with, their own antagonism resurges. Rarely, 
 too, are they in the war for the ideal aims they have trumpeted 
 forth, and victory leaves them wrangling over the spoils. How 
 can one expect them to wash their dirty linen in public? Wil- 
 son's demand for open discussions was of an incredible naivete. 
 
 This whole business of the Peace Conference has been like the 
 calling out of gangs of labourers to clear the roads after a ter- 
 rible snowstorm has turned the whole country white and impas- 
 sable. No number of men can cope with the task. But let the 
 sun come out strongly and in a day the whole mass will be melt- 
 ing away, not of course without floods and inconveniences here 
 and there, but still with results infinitely more satisfactory than 
 could be achieved by millions of spades and shovels. So, if the 
 sun of universal love had broken through the clouds of rival 
 racial egotisms, all those industrious commissions and congested 
 lorries and scribbling secretaries and flapping typists and bar- 
 gaining politicians would have been superfluous. The new 
 world would have built itself, as a snow-bound country clears 
 itself. 
 
 As soon as it became clear that both combatants were not un- 
 willing to accept the new Wilsonian world-order, a truce could 
 have been called, the blockade raised, the soldiers sent home, 
 and a committee of neutrals set to work out the practical ap- 
 plications of the Fourteen Points. There was no need of a 
 Conference either of the conquerors or of the belligerents. Sci- 
 ence and truth are independent of victors and vanquished, and 
 ethnographical boundaries would have been better determined 
 by unprejudiced experts. But at Versailles it soon came to be 
 recognised that the smaller Powers could not be allowed equal- 
 
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 ity, the Plenary Conference became a formal farce and legal 
 power was made to correspond to actual power — as if Might 
 and not Right were in question! How indeed could one ex- 
 pect England and France to afford equality to the Hedjaz 
 State which they had just created, or to black Liberia? 
 Pseudo-idealism can never face reality. Unlike Antaeus it per- 
 ishes at touch of mother earth. Before babbling of the League 
 of Nations the politicians should have defined a nation. A 
 course of lectures at King's College on the League has, I observe, 
 wound up with the presentation of " the doctrine of equity " 
 as the ultimate machinery of settlement in the differences of 
 nations. But what exactly is a nation? I know none which 
 does not expand and contract in history like a concertina, and 
 the attempt to fix its compass for ever at the moment it suits 
 you is inspired by prudence, not pacifism! To think of bound- 
 aries at all is to be back in the cockpit conception. 
 
 Dr. Johnson said that a man of genius could settle any ques- 
 tion in five minutes. A man of goodwill could have settled the 
 war in two. 
 
 With every political grievance eliminated, and Free Trade re- 
 moving commercial disabilities, the actual frontiers or countries 
 would become no more important than the boundaries of a 
 British parish. For the new world-order, which even politi- 
 cians can only postpone, rests on the conception of the world 
 as one place, with every people contributing to run it as a 
 whole, and all united against their only enemy — Nature. 
 
 So long as mankind refuses to accept this simple doctrine, 
 so long will it be involved in quagmires of blood and labyrinths 
 of hypocrisy. 
 
 XXXIV 
 
 A Peace purporting to aim at a World-Unity should obvi- 
 ouslv have conserved jealously whatever embryonic unity al- 
 ready existed upon our racked planet. But on the contrary 
 we have sought to dissolve much that was already united, put- 
 ting asunder what history had so painfully joined together. 
 Almost, half the Old World, for example, was integrated under 
 the designation of Russia; and if we have not welcomed its dis- 
 integration we have, at least, produced it and provided the 
 principle which justifies it. Austria was an amalgam or mo- 
 saic of peoples at peace: we have broken it up into warring 
 
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 elements. Over large long-settled areas in more than one con- 
 tinent we have carefully engineered chaos. 
 
 It is true that Russia was ill-governed ; but the remedy lay 
 in improving the Government, not in disuniting the governed. 
 Bolshevism may be good or bad, but the United States of Rus- 
 sia would be in greater congruity with World-Peace than a 
 swarm of conflicting nationalities ; and if the Bolshevists can 
 succeed in re-uniting them, they will to that extent be promot- 
 ing the larger and truer ideal. And Austria was not even ill- 
 governed; its peoples were joined, we used to be told, not by 
 tyranny but by economic necessity — it was the Danubian 
 State. And the results of disregarding economic necessity in 
 that quarter are already tragically obvious. 
 
 An American publicist has labelled this economic collapse 
 " the failure of Liberal idealism." But Liberal idealism can- 
 not be aspersed because of a foolish translation of it into purely 
 racial terms. The " principle of nationality " is obviously 
 only one of the considerations governing the life of a State. It 
 demands that no section of a nationality embedded in an alien 
 State shall be crushed out : it does not demand that the world 
 shall be symmetrically carved out into racial compartments, 
 irrespective of whether they are capable of economic existence. 
 Or, if it does demand it, it demands equally the supplementary 
 principle that there shall be universal free trade. But by an 
 impudent posse of British professors who dare not apply their 
 principle to their own Empire (disrupting French Canada, for 
 example, from British), the principle of nationality, which Lord 
 Acton, the learned historian of Liberty, regarded as dangerous 
 and reactionary, was acclaimed as sacred. Employed exclu- 
 sively as an instrument to break up enemy territories, it added 
 Pecksniffian unction to revenge. But the principle of nationali- 
 ties, though not devoid of validity, can at most dictate internal 
 freedom for peoples. It cannot prohibit their federation. But 
 Austria delenda est — in the name of nationality Austria was 
 to be destroyed, and by the very Treaty which prevented its 
 Germans uniting with Germany I x 
 
 And to add to the paradox of this semi-disintegration of Eu- 
 
 i Reconstruction, an admirable Viennese organ, published in English, tells 
 us that the partition of Austria has produced far more unrest and oppres- 
 sion than prevailed under the old order, for each of the liberated national- 
 ities now treads under foot the minorities in its own borders. As for 
 Czecho-Slovakia, it appears that the Czechs are trampling upon the equal 
 autonomy of the Slovaks, not to mention upon their unfortunate Ger- 
 man subjects. In fact a spawn of smaller Austrias has been brought forth. 
 
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 rope in the interests of World-Unity, it lias been achieved 
 mainly by the intervention of America, which endured the agony 
 of civil war rather than permit her own partition on the basis 
 of self-determination; the land which has been engaged for 
 generations in melting up the quarrelsome European medley 
 into a peaceful new type under a single flag. Eor this has 
 America now poured out her blood and treasure — to keep per- 
 petually separate the elements out of which she was constituted, 
 each European tribe in truculent sovereignty on its own petty 
 territory, every cock crowing on its own dunghill. In Amer- 
 ica no State language but English is to be tolerated — one must 
 be a " hundred-per-cent." American ; but in Europe faded 
 tongues and half-forgotten patois will be brushed up into na- 
 tional languages, and the traveller must needs change his idiom 
 every few hours. Europe will presumably become more than 
 ever a museum, where, under the curatorship of the League of 
 Nations, old-world types will be kept in cold storage for the 
 delectation of aeroplaning Americans. 
 
 But of course the equilibrium is too unstable to last long. 
 To increase the number of new nations without the preliminary 
 creation of a real League of them, was merely to multiply the 
 chances of conflagration. It was to add new denizens to the 
 jungle. Nor are these new creations harmonious even in them- 
 selves. The Poles oppress the Jews, the Czechs the Slovaks, 
 the Roumanians the Hungarians, and so ad infinitum, or at 
 least ad nauseam. Nothing but a real League of Nations — 
 not a League with special alliances inside it and half the na- 
 tions outside — nothing but a League incarnating the sincere 
 mutual goodwill of a united humanity can bring us the vision 
 which the great seer, Tennyson, who anticipated both Zeppelins 
 and Wilsonism, pictured as — 
 
 " Universal ocean softly washing all her warless isles." 
 
 If we obstinately will to continue the tragedy of mutual slaugh- 
 ter for unimportant objects and childish purposes, let us have 
 done with the comedy of pretending to league ourselves. Let 
 us recognise that the mania for " sovereign rights " — and 
 still more for " super-sovereign rights " — is behind the dogged 
 refusal of the peoples to join hands, and that this, and not the 
 defectiveness of the present League, is the real ground for the 
 opposition in America to Wilsonism. That America should 
 have left Europe in the lurch is a righteous nemesis upon our 
 
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 grabbing politicians. But what America wants is not a good 
 League, but no League at all, or a nominal League with such 
 reservations as will leave Congress a free hand. (It is only 
 political passion that blinds her to the fact that the present 
 League is the very League she craves.) And if America shies at 
 a real League of Nations, it is for the same reason that Ger- 
 many shied at it, because she cherished the hope of succeeding 
 — peacefully by preference — to Britain's hegemony of the 
 world. I quite admit it is not fair to ask America to surrender 
 the reversion, if Britain will not surrender the possession, and 
 that if the commonwealth conception is to prevail, all occu- 
 pancy of forts or waterways, and all tariffs that make only for 
 the defence or the ascendancy of any individual nation, must 
 be abandoned. The world cannot be run simultaneously as a 
 united whole and a series of hostile fractions. Britannia can- 
 not at once rule the seas and be a member of the League of 
 Nations. I am afraid that if she were forced to be logical, 
 it is not " Rule Britannia " that she would cease to sing. 
 
 XXXV 
 
 This sullen resistance to the League has much in common 
 with the super-millennial refusal of Israel to universalise the 
 prophetic teaching and be absorbed in its diffusion. It has 
 been suggested by a writer ignorant of human nature that if 
 Arius had conquered at the Council of Nicasa, the Jews would 
 have joined the Church. But there is a national will-to-live — 
 that in the greater nations is also a will-to-dominate — which 
 feels itself jeopardised by entering into a world-combination. 
 In vain Paul cried : " There shall be neither Jew nor Greek." 
 In vain the followers of Philo pressed for the practical conse- 
 quences of his universal doctrine. Even the League of Nations 
 proposes to respect the individual nationalities whose federation 
 is to constitute it. But the mere fact that " Sovereign rights " 
 are to be as restricted by the alliances of peace as they always 
 are by the alliances of war, is sufficient to set the quills of Na- 
 tionality bristling and the nostrils of Imperialism snorting. 
 As if " Sovereign rights " were in any case unrestricted ! As 
 if they were something absolute and antinomian, immune from 
 the claims of reason or justice! As if the truer majesty were 
 not in humble obedience to Love and Law! Even Robinson 
 Crusoe on his island had no right to be cruel to its animal life. 
 
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 Diderot, in his article on Society in the Encyclopaedia, recalls 
 how when some one said before Antigonus, the King of Syria, 
 that princes were the masters, and that everything was per- 
 mitted to them, he replied : " Yes, among barbarians : as for 
 us, we are masters of the things prescribed by reason and hu- 
 manity ; but nothing is permitted to us but what is conform- 
 able to justice and duty." 
 
 It is true that despite the League of Damnations, Tennyson's 
 vision seems on the way to realisation. There is the progres- 
 sive deadliness of war, there are the horrible new inventions 
 waiting to be launched ; inventions which have caused all the 
 leading politicians of England to join their signatures in a 
 frantic appeal to the public to — contribute a million pounds 
 to the propaganda of the League ! A monumental anti-climax, 
 indeed. If the destruction of civilisation is thus seriously 
 looming, surely these politicians have it in their own hands to 
 make a true League of Nations, not to mention vote a million 
 for it in their Parliament ! The million would then be saved 
 a hundred times over in armaments. 
 
 Fatuous, however, as is the statesmanship of our politicians, 
 it is possible that the unbearable agonies and wholesale de- 
 structiveness of scientific warfare may give humanity pause. 
 
 " Nothing happens to any man," said Marcus Aurelius, 
 " which he was not formed by Nature to bear." The excellent 
 Emperor was mistaken. So far, indeed, as Nature proper is 
 concerned, his apophthegm is an axiom, for a species which 
 could not endure its environment would be eliminated. But the 
 imperial philosopher overlooked the happenings which man — 
 in his scientific insanity — brings upon himself. Neither man 
 nor any other creature has been formed to bear the artificial 
 horrors which are man's creative additions to the cruelties of 
 Nature. 
 
 " Man marks the earth with ruin — his control 
 Stops with the shore; upon the watery plain 
 The wrecks are all thy deed." 
 
 So wrote Byron in his famous apostrophe to the Ocean. He 
 did not foresee the submarine. Savage tooth and claw, light- 
 nings and foul vapours, cyclones and volcanic jets — what en- 
 durable milieux compared with myriads of mammoth guns belch- 
 ing and roaring pauselessly for a fortnight at a time; with 
 gliding poison-clouds; with projected flames; with swarms of 
 
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 reeking putrefying corpses. Even earthquakes are less shat- 
 tering than our mines. 
 
 It is as if mankind was given over to be the sport of Pros- 
 pero: 
 
 " Go, charge my goblins that they grind their joints 
 With dry convulsions ; shorten up their sinews 
 With aged cramps ; and more pinch-spotted make them, 
 Than pard, or cat o' mountain." 
 
 Prospero does indeed command the planet and has shaken 
 " the strong-based promontory," opened graves, " and by the 
 spurs plucked up the pine and cedar." Scant wonder, there- 
 fore, if our poor sensorium, evolved only for the natural rough- 
 and-tumble of our genial globe, collapses in this monstrous, 
 factitious hurly-burly. 
 
 The tragic absurdity of man self-swamped by the " many in- 
 ventions " he has " sought out " may, as I said, finally dawn 
 upon him ; but if he is moved thereby to a League against war, 
 it will not be for the noblest reason. Man should be moved not 
 by what he must suffer, but by what he must inflict. The use of 
 such weapons is an attainder to his own spiritual dignity, it is 
 high treason to the majesty of man. 
 
 To the ignoble deterrents of war should be added the fear of 
 bankruptcy which is the beginning of wisdom, the epidemics 
 which war leaves in its trail, and which know no frontiers, not 
 even those of neutrals ; the scarcity of food and raw material 
 which it leaves prevalent over large areas, the derangement of 
 trade and commerce resulting from the erratic exchange under 
 which some countries cannot afford to buy and others to sell, 
 and the social unrest arising from all these factors and from 
 widely-diffused bereavement and lamentation. 
 
 But all these negatives are forgotten in the hot-blooded af- 
 firmative of a new war-cry, and unless we can rely on Labour 
 grown conscious at last of its power and duty, a more sub- 
 stantial hope and one less sordidly grounded lies in the posi- 
 tive development of air-travel in the years of Peace. In de- 
 veloping this, Lord Northcliffe is his own best counteractive. 
 
 Rudyard Kipling, in his marvellous story, " With the Night 
 Mail," reduces the "Parliament of Man" to A. B. C. He 
 brings home to us how in the flying era (which is already upon 
 us) the Aerial Board of Control — yclept, of course, the A. 
 B. C. — " confirms or annuls all international arrangements " 
 and nothing may be done that may " interfere with the traffic 
 
 135
 
 THE VOICE OP JERUSALEM 
 
 and all it implies." The Board finds " our tolerant, humor- 
 ous, lazy little planet only too read} r to shift the whole burden 
 of public administration on its shoulders." " Transportation 
 is Civilisation " is the motto of the age. Here speaks the in- 
 spired seer, a Balaam blessing Peace, as if despite himself. It 
 is not merely that air-travel will necessitate a world-Board. Its 
 swiftness will make counties of countries and countries of con- 
 tinents. It will make frontiers and custom-houses still more 
 ridiculous. As Mr. Wells has pointed out, " The Sovereign 
 States of Europe are too small for modern aerial transport." 
 But if this network of passports and custom-houses is " likely 
 to strangle aviation," it is State Sovereignty which in our prac- 
 tical world is more likely to be strangled. At present we do 
 " interfere with the traffic." And it is only by interference 
 that the reduction of Europe to a unity is staved off. For 
 States are the expression of conditions ; and the shrinkage of 
 space through aviation and " wireless " has made these ancient 
 kingdoms parochial. By our duties and passports we are ar- 
 tificially bolstering up their crumbling partitions, trying to 
 hold asunder what Science has brought together. The sooner 
 these rotten barriers fall, the sooner we shall settle down to 
 cultivating our planet. 
 
 But humanity has not suffered enough, and doubtless we have 
 to undergo still grimmer experiences before our almost incor- 
 rigible hearts are chastened, and our gun-deafened ears turned 
 and attuned to the still small voice of Jerusalem. 
 
 136
 
 THE POSITION OF JUDAISM 
 
 [From the North American Review, April, 1895.] 
 
 The fall of the Ghettos has left Israel dazed in the sunlight 
 of the wider world without, his gaberdine half off and half on. 
 If he throws it off, will he throw off his distinctiveness and fade 
 into the common run of men? If he keeps it on, can he keep his 
 place in the new human brotherhood? And as he gropes, ir- 
 resolute, he stumbles at every step amongst the ruins of the 
 Ghetto wall against a debris of problems — not merely prob- 
 lems of 'doxy which the Zeitgeist brings to him as well as to 
 Christianity, but problems of racial integration and disintegra- 
 tion, problems of transformation of sociologic function as of 
 restoring the Jew to the soil, problems of " ceremonial " con- 
 duct, of allegiance to the Mosaic and Rabbinic codes, problems 
 of international politics, of immigrations and persecutions and 
 Palestine-restorations, problems of patriotism, of fidelity to a 
 universal Jewish citizenship, so jealous and exacting that it 
 would even forbid intermarriage with the citizens of another 
 country ; and all these problems are complicated by problems of 
 compromise between the ideal and the practical. For the Jew 
 belongs to a race as well as to a religion, and may wish to re- 
 main in either, or both, or neither. A Jewish Robert Elsmere 
 would have settled but the least of his problems when he de- 
 cided to abandon the orthodox creed. 
 
 With these internal problems it is impossible to grapple here. 
 They will probably be settled less by reason than by that large 
 drift of things which lies outside the individual consciousness. 
 I can only venture to suggest a few thoughts concerning the 
 common Judaism which underlies all the j arring factions and to 
 view this essential Judaism broadly in the light of history. 
 
 Modern philosophy, which began with Descartes, still suffers 
 from the static introspection of the Cartesian method. We are 
 not so thrown upon our own resources ; the Ego is not our only 
 torch. Even if to begin de novo were possible — even if the 
 past did not think through us — it would be foolish to neglect 
 consciously what light the past throws upon the meaning and 
 purpose of life. In a philosophy of history — a pressing need 
 of the times, that is not altogether satisfied by the conception 
 
 137
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 of evolution — Judaism would be what Bacon calls an ostensive 
 or light-giving instance, in which normal traits usually obscure 
 are accentuated so as to allow of facile observation. If the 
 clue to the process of the suns is not to be picked up in the 
 Ghetto, I know no more promising quarter in which to seek it. 
 If the history of Israel which touches all recorded time has no 
 dynamic significance, supplies no hint as to the destiny of hu- 
 manity, then is Life indeed " a walking shadow," and history " a 
 tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying noth- 
 ing." 
 
 For the story of this little sect — the most remarkable sur- 
 vival of the fittest known to humanity — in no way corresponds 
 with its numbers; it is not a tale of majorities. It is a story 
 that begins very near the beginning of history, and shows little 
 sign of drawing to a conclusion. It is a story that has chap- 
 ters in every country on earth, and which has borne the im- 
 press of every period. It ranges from the highest tragedy to 
 the lowest farce; veritably Shakespearian in its jostling of 
 princes and scholars and clowns, rogues and heroes and sages. 
 All men and all ages pass through it in unending procession, the 
 stern warriors of the ancient world, the rotund burghers of the 
 mediaeval, the prosaic citizens of the modern, and the toe of 
 Shylock comes so near the heel of Hamlet, he galls his kibe. 
 But, picturesque as the story is outwardly, it is mainly by its 
 inner religious content that it claims consideration. For to 
 the Jew the world owes its vision of God. 
 
 The religion of a race is its vision of the Good, even as its 
 science is its vision of the True, and its art its vision of the 
 Beautiful. Israel's vision of the Good was God ; and to his uni- 
 fying instinct the True and the Beautiful had no separate exist- 
 ence. Abraham — the father of Israel's race — was the first 
 to conceive the moral God, nay, to impose his individual vision 
 of righteousness upon his God. 
 
 " But Abraham stood yet before the Lord. And Abraham drew 
 near and said, Wilt Thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked? 
 . . . That be far from Thee to do after this manner, to slay the 
 righteous with the wicked: and that the righteous should he as the 
 wicked, that be far from Thee. Shall not the Judge of all the earth 
 do right? " 
 
 And Abraham's seed perpetuated this faith in a righteous 
 God who was revealed in Israel. That oft-quoted saying of 
 Jehuda Halevi, " Israel is among the nations as the heart 
 
 138
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 among the limbs," will be truest if interpreted in that meta- 
 phorical sense which makes the heart the seat of emotion. For 
 it is the heart that sees God. The righteous God is an intui- 
 tion, which, even if it does not contradict experience, is not 
 reached by it. Israel first had this conception of the Creator 
 and of His relation to a phophet-race and through it to the 
 world. It is a unique ethical and political conception; there is 
 no parallel to it, nor to the documents that enshrined it, nor to 
 the race that incarnated it. The chronicle of Israel is a record 
 of backslidings and castigation, a religious epic whose incidents 
 only serve to point morals, and its mightiest heroes are weak 
 and sinful. And this conception found material realisation in 
 a moralised state-system: in a theocracy to which nothing hu- 
 man was alien, so that sanitation was as much a part of relig- 
 ion as sacrifice ; in a worship of Justice and Mercy ; in an unfal- 
 tering adoration of Right before Might that was a paradox in 
 a Pagan world ; in a brotherhood of Israel which was to be the 
 nucleus of the brotherhood of man. Israel planned righteous- 
 ness as Sparta planned hardihood, or Rome conquest, or China 
 self-conservation ; it was to be a people consecrate to consecra- 
 tion; through its sanctity the world was to be sanctified. Of 
 all the ideals that nations have produced, nothing more noble, 
 more Quixotic, can be conceived than this national idea of self- 
 perfection as an instrument for the perfection of the world; 
 and if, on the whole, Sancho Panza has been as much in evidence 
 as Don Quixote, that is the inevitable tragi-comedy of human 
 existence. To think of the course of Jewish history is to stir 
 those thoughts that lie too deep for tears. 
 
 Among this little people Christ was born; and His teaching, 
 more or less transformed and for a century and a half not 
 clearly distinguished from Judaism by the Pagan world, was 
 propagated by Jewish apostles in Egypt, Rome, and Syria, 
 and, soon conquering the conquerors of the world, begat the 
 Greek Church and ultimately the Roman and the Protestant 
 Churches — this last Church a product of Christianity crossed 
 again by the Old Testament, and in England in particular gen- 
 erating so Hebrew a type of character that at this day the Eng- 
 lishman is regarded throughout the Continent as the Pharisee 
 of Europe. As a coloniser, as a " mother of nations," Eng- 
 land smacks more of Phoenicia than of Rome, and in the 
 making of Englands, Old and New, the Old Testament has 
 counted for more than the New. Nine centuries earlier, this 
 same wonderful Book, das Tagebuch Jehovahs, as Heine calls 
 
 139
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 it, had inspired in Mohammedanism a far more potent and per- 
 vasive creed. Through Christianity and Islam, the moral im- 
 pulse of Judaism was communicated through the greater part 
 of the civilised world, and each of these great religions has sent 
 out missionaries even to those polytheistic savage races which 
 have remained outside the great currents of history. In the 
 very year that the Jews were expelled from Spain, a Spaniard 
 won a new world — America — for the Jewish Bible. And 
 from century to century, even unto this day, through the fairest 
 regions of civilisation, the Bible, written entirely by Jews, dom- 
 inates existence ; its vision of life moulds states and societies, its 
 texts confront us on every hand, it is an inexhaustible treasury 
 of themes for music and pictures. Its psalms are more pop- 
 ular in every country than the poems of the nation's own poets. 
 Beside this one book with its infinite editions, with all the good 
 and ill it has done, all other national literatures seem " trifles 
 light as air." Jerusalem, as Renan points out, is truly " a 
 house of prayer for all nations." Equally venerated by the 
 Jew, the Christian and the Mussulman, she is the Holy City of 
 half mankind. 
 
 But while Christianity and Mohammedanism were thus do- 
 ing Israel's work, what was Israel doing? 
 
 Israel was become a Protestant nation. The original Cath- 
 olic Church of Humanity was gradually made to appear Prot- 
 estant by the growth of a majority permeated by a belief in 
 the divinity of Christ. Gradually there had been evolved the 
 touching but confusing conception of the Man-God of Sorrows, 
 taking on human attributes to bridge the gulf between Infinity 
 and Humanity and atoning by His death for the sin in which 
 He had caused humanity to be born. To speak of the Jews re- 
 jecting Christ when it was the Jews who spread His gospel is a 
 strange, popular blunder ; but the bulk of the community did re- 
 main blind to whatever was edifying in the new conception, by 
 whatsoever divine or mythopoetic process it arose. The loft- 
 iest sayings of Christ were familiar to the Jews in the Rabbinic 
 lore or in their old Testament, and though these dicta had never 
 before been so fused as the expression of a personality, yet, on 
 the other hand, Israel was not unaccustomed to pseudo-Mes- 
 siahs, both before and after Christ ; moreover, the mysteries of 
 the Incarnation and Atonement were in direct opposition to the 
 spirit of Judaism (as they seem a needless complication of the 
 essence of Christianity), and by abolishing the authority of the 
 
 140
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 ritual law, Christ disturbed the sociological conception which is 
 at the bottom of practical Judaism. 
 
 The course of Christian history did not tend to reconcile 
 Israel to Christian conceptions. For Christianity, after 
 emerging from a period of persecution, turned persecutor, 
 avenging upon Judaism Christ's voluntary death for the re- 
 demption of the world, and thus indurated Israel in its negative 
 attitude. The development of Judaism went on side by side 
 with that of Christianity, for no religion has ever remained at 
 rest, except in the eyes of its followers ignorant of its history. 
 Movement is at once both the law and the test of life, though in 
 every religion ossification has curiously been considered " or- 
 thodoxy." The orthodox members of a creed are those who 
 preserve the organism in which the change is being effected, and 
 who constitute the hostile environment in which new ideas and 
 ideals have to struggle for existence. Judaism, which by the 
 ignorant Jew, no less than by the ignorant Christian, is sup- 
 posed to have remained stereotyped since Christ, not to say 
 since the last page of the Old Testament, has really been a liv- 
 ing activity that has manifested its inner vitality in many 
 shapes and forms ; and, as Dr. Schechter of Cambridge has 
 shown in his brilliant epoch-making lectures on " Rabbinic 
 Theology " and on " Jewish Philosophers and Mystics," in- 
 stead of being merely a negative religion, the essence of which 
 was unbelief in Christ and the rejection of pork, it has pro- 
 duced legends and liturgies, sects and movements and Messiahs, 
 poems and philosophies and ideals, and even new Cabbalistic or 
 humanised conceptions of the Godhead. But all this has been 
 purely internal, and only part of it has been development. 
 
 Since the rise of Islam, Judaism has had no direct influence 
 upon the outside world. With perhaps the solitary exception 
 of fostering, through its distinctively religious thinkers, the 
 scholastic philosophy of the latter part of the Middle Ages, 
 Judaism has been dead to the world for over a thousand years. 
 Speaking broadly, if Christianity had succeeded in eliminating 1 
 the Jews, the religious history of Europe would have been the 
 same as to-day. And not only has Judaism been dead to the 
 world, for long, wretched periods it has been dead to itself; it 
 has remained stereotyped, immobile. Between the fifteenth and 
 eighteenth centuries lie the Dark Ages of Judaism. But the 
 miracle is that Judaism kept any spark at all — for these were 
 the Ghetto Ages par excellence, the days of the yellow badge 
 
 141
 
 THE VOICE OP JERUSALEM 
 
 and the Dominican whip, " and the summons to Christian fel- 
 lowship." It was life enough to have retained suspended ani- 
 mation. Israel has had to run the gauntlet of the world, 
 every man's hand against his, and his against no man's, and 
 to repeat as a race the martyrdom of Christ as an individual. 
 But what, nevertheless, becomes of the mission of Israel? 
 How are we to reconcile the conception of a nation destined to 
 be " God's witnesses " among the heathen, with a thousand 
 years of unobtrusive stagnation ? Well, " they also serve who 
 only stand and wait." The mills of God grind slowly: in the 
 eyes of the Eternal, as in the eyes of the apostles of evolution, 
 " a thousand years are but as a day." And, in a sense, the 
 mere obstinate survival of Israel may still be deemed a witness 
 to " the finger of God." Moreover, the Jewish idea of a " mis- 
 sion " is not of that fussy activity, as of Mrs. Jellyby, which 
 Christianity connects with the word ; of imposing verbal beliefs 
 upon savages, whose vision of life is quite other. It is, in fact, 
 the Rabbi's duty to dissuade the would-be proselyte. One may 
 influence one's time by simply being: each righteous soul is a 
 radiation of good. And the " saving of worlds " is not per- 
 haps best effected by noisy propagandism. The merit of stay- 
 ing at home is eloquently expounded by Carlyle. The rabbis 
 had a pregnant saying : " It is not thy business to complete the 
 work, but neither hast thou the right to neglect it." To do 
 one's own work well — that is the wisdom of the ages. And 
 so, though Judaism was temporarily self-centred, it is not noth- 
 ing for it to have consoled and uplifted a hundred generations, 
 to have made life livable even in Ghettos. Judaism achieved 
 sufficient triumph in surviving at all. To have actively propa- 
 gated its negative doctrine of disbelief in Christ would have 
 been to court annihilation. Jews did not indeed shrink from 
 disputing theses with Christians in those mediaeval tournaments 
 of theology, but we know that they never carried off the vic- 
 tory. Such proselytes as they did make were burnt. One Jew, 
 Solomon Molcho, whose family still survives in the Orient, set 
 out, greatly daring, to convert the Pope. The Pope was stiff- 
 necked but urbane, and it was not till Solomon broached Juda- 
 ism to Charles V. that the poor missionary was consumed by fire. 
 Yes, it is enough that Israel has survived, battered it may be, 
 and stained with shame and pusillanimity ; warped by evil 
 growths of cunning and covetousness developed in the struggle 
 with superior forces ; distorted not infrequently by the perverse 
 action of a religion that lent itself too easily to formalism; 
 
 142
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 here and there, too, materialised and vulgarised by the sudden 
 sun of prosperity ; but strong* by force of standing alone, ten- 
 acious, energetic, soberly adventurous, brilliantly intellectual, 
 spiritual and idealistic in certain directions, domestic, civic, 
 patriotic, infinitely adaptable, a marvellous reservoir of intellect 
 and emotion and will and sanity, sufficient to renovate a deca- 
 dent civilisation. The vices of Israel are on the surface, his 
 virtues lie deep. In the language of Galton, he is a " grade " 
 or two above normal humanity. 
 
 But this admission of a thousand years of non-influence re- 
 quires an important modification. It is only as a religious or- 
 ganisation that Israel has remained barren; as a race it has 
 played a very considerable role in history, both in the gross and 
 through the individual. Judaism may have stood still, but 
 Israel never. As a body, Jews were the great agents of the 
 Middle Ages — the wandering Jews, a human network of inter- 
 communication. They carried literature and folk-lore; they 
 brought science from Arabia to Europe by way of Spain ; they 
 invented the mechanism of commercial exchange, and, less cred- 
 itably, were the chief slave-dealers. Mediaeval Israel was 
 mainly an intermediary. 
 
 It is only through isolated individuals that Israel has influ- 
 enced the world at first hand. Through Spinoza it affected the 
 whole course of modern philosophy ; through Ricardo it founded 
 political economy; through Karl Marx and Lassalle it created 
 socialism ; through its financiers and politicians it has time and 
 again shaped European politics ; through a host of poets, sci- 
 entists, actors, artists, musicians and journalists — of whom 
 longum est dicere — it has been in the van of the world. To- 
 day, in spite of two thousand years of suppression, and though 
 but a small fraction of the population of the world, it looms 
 large in the arts and letters and Bourses of every capital of 
 civilisation. 
 
 But now we are confronted with the curious fact that the indi- 
 viduals through whom Israel has influenced the world have been 
 for the most part divorced from the body proper. They have 
 been heretics ; caring little or nothing about " The Mission of 
 Israel," and not immediately concerned about Righteousness. 
 They have been " racial," not " religious," Jews, and even their 
 race they have sometimes disavowed. Even when, as in Spinoza 
 and Lassalle, the spirit of the ancient Prophets has broken out 
 in them, they have not consciously connected their moral fer- 
 vour with the mission of their race, nor recognised the signifi- 
 
 143
 
 THE VOICE OP JERUSALEM 
 
 cance of their heredity. This is indeed a shining example of the 
 irony of history, and almost leads to the suspicion that the 
 function of Judaism during the last thousand years has been to 
 conserve an environment favourable to the production of great 
 heterodox Jews. Jesus himself drew from the nursery of Juda- 
 ism those ideals which enabled him to react against their dis- 
 tortion in practice; and from Talmudical dialectics the Jewish 
 mind derived the subtlety that expressed itself later through 
 mathematicians and jurists and philosophers and chess-players; 
 its talent for music was fostered by the fondness for melodious 
 ministers; by its domestic poetry and its tragic history it ac- 
 cumulated the genius of a Heine, whose humour sprang from 
 that pervasive cheerfulness which aided his race to survive, and 
 which tinged even its theology with genial esprit; its adaptabil- 
 ity, its natural mimicry of all races, fitted it for triumphs on 
 the stage, and its enforced deference to its persecutors pre- 
 pared it for comedy ; to the prenatal power of the orthodox 
 code the heterodox celebrities were indebted for their health, 
 their head and their heart, and from the diaspora and the per- 
 secution came their assertive individuality and their cosmopol- 
 itan standpoint. 
 
 And while through the stagnation of its masses and the indif- 
 ference of its energising units, Judaism qua religion has been a 
 waste force in the world, by a further irony of history the bat- 
 tle for Judaism has been fought by a thousand outsiders. The 
 dogma which has been the key-stone of Christianity has been 
 shaken from all sides. The divinity of Christ is practically all 
 that Judaism denies, and there is no need to insist on the nega- 
 tive attitude of modern thought towards this primal conception. 
 From the ranks of Unitarianism, Theism, Agnosticism, and 
 Atheism, the disbelief has definitely spread to Protestantism, the 
 doctors of which are providing more or less nebulous substitutes 
 for the concrete Christ of the every-day Christian. The litera- 
 ture of the day is thoroughly anti-Christian, the great writers 
 to a man do not believe in Christ. It is not only the specifically 
 polemical writers like Mrs. Humphry Ward, it is the literary 
 class in general. Books with distinctively Christian teaching 
 appeal only to cliques; the leading things of general literature 
 are the work of men not Christians. The higher mind of the 
 world is being fed from non-Christian sources. The great 
 movement of the modern mind is away from the Trinity. Of 
 the writers with European reputations, Tolstoi alone maintains 
 even the ideals of Christianity, and Tolstoi is accounted mad. 
 
 144
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 In our own literature alone, the most conservative of all 
 modern literatures, what trace of Trinitarianism is there in 
 Browning, Swinburne, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, William 
 Morris, George Meredith, George Eliot, Carlyle, Emerson, 
 Hawthorne, Whitman, Lowell, Holmes, Rudyard Kipling, Stev- 
 enson, Hardy, Howells, Henry James, Mill, Spencer, Darwin, 
 and a score of others who do the modern man's thinking? This 
 part of Christianity is crumbling away even while Judaism looks 
 idly on. History and science do not corroborate the episodes 
 on which it is founded, and the conception itself jars upon the 
 modern mind. Its very professors are vague, and even Mr. 
 Gladstone has made heretical approaches to the Jewish view of 
 atonement. 
 
 And while the negative side of Judaism is thus being ap- 
 proached by the internal movement of Christianity, so is the 
 positive side of Judaism likewise being arrived at by the think- 
 ers of Christendom. 
 
 jBy the positive side of Judaism, I mean simply the concep- 
 tion of life which is its essence. There is more in Judaism akin 
 to the modern spirit than there is in any other religion, for the 
 modern spirit is really akin to that of the Old Testament. The 
 God of the Old Testament, invisible and incorporeal and incom- 
 prehensible, in whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turn- 
 ing, whose thoughts are not our thoughts, nor His ways our 
 ways, who visits the sins of the fathers upon the children to the 
 third and fourth generations, and who yet, on the whole, makes 
 for righteousness and happiness, that terrible yet tender 
 Father, who is still the God of Judaism, has more in common 
 with the unity which we apprehend behind phenomena than 
 the god of any other creed. The Mosaic code, if read to-day 
 depolarized, in Wendell Holmes' phrase, as one would read a 
 book by the newest thinker, would be found — allowance being 
 made for the circumstance that it is a code for an agricultural 
 people — to aim at all that is best in socialism without inter- 
 fering with the free play of individual activity. It is practical 
 sociology, social science applied to life so as to insure the moral 
 and physical well-being of the race. Only it is sociology raised 
 to religion, so that obedience is rendered, not to cold hygienic 
 laws, but to warm religious feeling. Sociology will never gain 
 a footing in the modern world till it is touched with emotion, 
 and the consumptive lover will never refrain from propagating 
 himself unless kindled by a religious conception of duty to the 
 race. 
 
 145
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 This Mosaic code, with its Rabbinical Commentaries, became 
 the nucleus of a poetic domesticity that sweetened poverty and 
 persecution; it made Israel cohere and be one in a brotherhood 
 of obedience, despite dispersion to the four corners of the 
 earth. This sanctified sociology made the sensuous sacred 
 equally with the spiritual. Judaism sanctified the sensuous, 
 Christianity was an abolition of the sensuous. In the result 
 Christianity succeeded only in abolishing it from religion, not 
 from life. No priestly pitchfork has ever expelled human na- 
 ture. Christianity has fostered an unfortunate dualism by 
 which part of life has become secular, and religion, which should 
 be the breath of the whole, is set in opposition to the material 
 framework of life. The attempt to ignore the flesh and the 
 world must defeat itself; the flesh may be brought under law, 
 it must not be relegated to the Devil. In Judaism even san- 
 itary arrangements are part of religion. To put away cer- 
 tain sides of our nature, as though God were ashamed of them, 
 is of a piece with that other dualism of " Science versus Re- 
 ligion." The uneasy dread with which Religion regards Sci- 
 ence is really a suspicion that the Creator is a dishonest dealer 
 whose books will not bear auditing. Nothing is more typical 
 of the opposed Weltanschauung en of Judaism and Christianity 
 than their marriage services. In Christianity, marriage is a 
 concession to the weakness of the flesh. In Judaism, it is the 
 divinely ordained method of perpetuating the race joyfully and 
 nobly through love. " Blessed art thou, O Lord, who makest 
 the bridegroom to rejoice with the bride." The Christian for- 
 mula savours of topsy-turveydom. To make the continuance 
 of the human race merely a concession to the weakness of the 
 human flesh is to deny the divinity of life. Christianity is a 
 religion of death, of pessimism, as Schopenhauer saw, or at 
 least an other-worldly religion. In practice, of course, Chris- 
 tianity manages to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, 
 and the dualism of its creed is paralleled by the dualism of its 
 code in actual life. It is not only in the Hegelian logic that 
 to be and not to be are the same. The Christians around us 
 run contrary ideals with amusing simultaneity — one code for 
 daily life, another for Church, a lachrymose liturgy followed 
 by a fashionable parade. They eat their cake and lay it up in 
 Heaven as well ; besides believing that it is wrong to eat rake 
 anywhere, anyhow. Religion is outside life, as sentiment is out- 
 side business. It is something strange and esoteric, like Greek 
 plays and the blessed word Mesopotamia. 
 
 146
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 For Judaism the centre of gravity is here and now. Though 
 we were immortal, yet eternity is only a succession of to-days. 
 The whole problem of life faces us to-day. Judaism may be a 
 selection from nature, a moral human harmony shaped by spir- 
 itual genius upon the desolate chaos of nature, but Christianity 
 is a contradiction of nature. Neither is verifiable by science, 
 but while Judaism inspires life, Christianity inspires to nega- 
 tion of life ; valuable as a " counsel of perfection," Christian- 
 ity can only stimulate chosen spirits, making saints of the few 
 and hypocrites of the many. C'est magnifique mats ce ri'est pas 
 la vie. Judaism does not despise the world, it accepts it, and 
 it says grace not only for food (as Charles Lamb complained 
 Christianity does exclusively), but for the sight of forest and 
 ocean. This acceptance of the world is the very note of " mod- 
 ernity." Christianity is concerned rather with the failure and 
 inadequacy of life. " When the Devil fell sick, etc." " Man's 
 extremity is God's opportunity." Man's prosperity should 
 rather be God's opportunity. He should be at the root of all 
 joy and all work. That people should be Christians on their 
 death-bed is of the very smallest use to the world. Christianity 
 is individual, Judaism is communal. Israel confesses its sins in 
 common and in public. Christianity stimulates an unhealthy 
 egoism, a spiritual self-torture ; Judaism makes for a sane sanc- 
 tity. It is not without significance that Max Nordau, the 
 author of " Degeneration," who has raised the rallying cry of 
 sanity in the face of a Europe given over to morbid literary 
 cults, should be an Israelite. Judaism aims at influencing char- 
 acter through conduct, Christianity at influencing conduct 
 through emotion. Judaism builds up the moral character out 
 of moral acts, Christianity thinks to get morality out of spor- 
 adic spirituality. Eight out of the Ten Commandments con- 
 cern acts; only in the tenth and last does Judaism exhort a 
 state of soul, " thou shalt not covet." The soul, built up on 
 the basis of moral acts, becomes capable of moral states. If 
 Judaism is in danger of formalism and Pharisaism, Christianity 
 runs the risk of an empty spiritualism. In fact, Christianity 
 — a negation of life — has never dominated and could not 
 ever really dominate life. It has never expressed the Western 
 vision of the Good. It has been external, not internal. The 
 average Christian is half Jew, half pagan. You cannot get 
 " the new heart " of the gospels to order. It must evolve from 
 within. The Mohammedan missionaries have been more suc- 
 cessful with savages than the Christian because they offer a re- 
 
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 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 ligion of acts, not impose a new view of life. Souls cannot rise 
 above their level. It is true that in working through the figure 
 of Christ, Christianity stands on a basis of sound psychology, 
 for nothing affects character like character. But there must 
 be already a latent affinity between the two characters. There 
 is no such thing as " conversion," no sudden fire, without prior 
 accumulation of inflammable matter. 
 
 If I were asked to sum up in one broad generalisation the 
 intellectual tendency of Israel, I should say that it was a tend- 
 ency to unification. The Unity of God, which is the declara- 
 tion of the dying Israelite, is but the theological expression of 
 this tendency. The Jewish mind runs to Unity by an instinct 
 as harmonious as the Greek's sense of Art. It is always im- 
 pelled to a synthetic perception of the whole. This is Israel's 
 contribution to the world, his vision of existence. There is 
 one God who unifies the cosmos, and one creed to which all the 
 world will come. In science the Jewish instinct, expressing it- 
 self for example through Spinoza, seeks for " One God, one 
 Law, one Element " ; in aesthetics it identifies the True and the 
 Beautiful with the Good; in Politics it will not divide Church 
 from State, nor secular history from religious, for Israel's 
 national joys and sorrows are at once incorporated in his re- 
 ligion, giving rise to feasts and fasts ; in ethics it will not sun- 
 der Soul from Body ; it will not set this life against the next, 
 this world against another; even in theology it will not alto- 
 gether sunder God from the humours of existence, from the 
 comedy which leavens the creation. Unitas, unitas, omnia 
 unitas. 
 
 Like Christianity, Judaism has the defects of its qualities. 
 Its wisdom is the wisdom of age and the ages, not the divine 
 discontent of youth — its sanity is sometimes overpowering, 
 stupefying — it needs a touch of that divine insanity which 
 leads to martyrdoms and missions, poems, and pictures, and 
 symphonies. The young do not understand it at all, and its 
 ministers rarely touch the true chord of its poetry. Israel has 
 been noblest in suffering ; Jeshurun, grown fat, kicks. Despite 
 his crude conception of the equation of merit and reward — 
 based on the grosser texts of the Old Testament — the Jew 
 has never shrunk from suffering for his faith ; despite his pro- 
 verbial astuteness, in his religion the Jew has made a very bad 
 bargain. 
 
 The wider conception of unjust suffering and misery which 
 runs through Ecclesiastes and Job, that conception of " orig- 
 
 148
 
 THE VOICE OP JERUSALEM 
 
 inal sin " and vicarious punishment which appears in " The 
 fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children's teeth are set 
 on edge," must be woven more conspicuously into the web of 
 Judaism ; the doctrine of reward for virtue must needs be trans- 
 ferred from the individual to the race, as it is already in the 
 conception of a mutually responsible brotherhood. On the side 
 of art, Judaism may not profitably widen itself. The latter 
 part of the second commandment, which for long centuries com- 
 bined with his introspective intellect to withdraw the Jew from 
 the plastic arts, has survived its function in the world. There 
 will never be again the worship of image as deity ; though in a 
 more subtle sense the worship of the Beautiful may replace the 
 worship of the Good. But just as Christianity has not con- 
 quered Judaism, so has Judaism not conquered Paganism, or 
 rather Hellenism. But the ancient intensity of that opposi- 
 tion of ideals, when each ideal had yet to develop itself, is no 
 longer necessary, and to-day their prismatic hues may blend in 
 the white light of the religion of the future, and Judaism may as 
 unhesitatingly accept the Hellenic cult of beauty as it may com- 
 promise with " the Christ that is to be." And, indeed, the wor- 
 ship of beauty may well be incorporated into a religion which 
 already says grace at first sight of spring buds — grace for a 
 world lacking naught and containing " goodly creatures and 
 goodly trees to give delight unto the children of men." The 
 unifying instinct of the Jew may still identify the Beautiful 
 with the Good ; but there is no longer need to dread the Grecian 
 wisdom against which the Jewish poet of the Middle Ages 
 warned his brethren; even an infusion of the Greek scientific 
 spirit would strengthen rather than impair, while, if Judaism 
 remains sociologic, the most modern discoveries in practical sci- 
 ence might profitably be embodied in the religion, so that cul- 
 pably to endanger the public health should be accounted " sin." 
 Of the trinity of ideals, the Good is the most important; 
 without it life is impossible, corrupt, distraught. Israel's mis- 
 sion has been the noblest of all, its task the largest and widest ; 
 but its only hope of influencing the future hinges on its power 
 to absorb the culture of the day so as to bring its own pe- 
 culiar contribution to the solution of the problems of its time, 
 its own moral vision of the world. It must come out of the 
 debris of the Ghetto and enrich humanity by its point of view. 
 Israel is too apt to forget that existence is not its ideal, patri- 
 otic pride was not its goal; its superiority was but to be the 
 means to an end. " In thee shall all the families of the earth 
 
 149
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 be blessed." The most useful work Israel is doing at this mo- 
 ment is in the unnoticed form of colonisation. Wherever new 
 lands are to be exploited there the Jew is found, pioneering, 
 and building up states. But this function scarcely justifies his 
 separate existence. Religions must live up to themselves if they 
 are to continue to exist ; they must be redeemed from the leaden 
 meaninglessness of the commonplace and transfused with real- 
 ity and vitality. Their truths can only be proved through the 
 lives of their followers ; for religions are not true in the sense in 
 which scientific facts are true. They live by what is true in 
 the appeal of their ideals, and by the organisation which they 
 provide to link the generations. Judaism needs to live in its 
 own spirit, time to its ardent belief in life — full-blooded, man- 
 ifold life, life that is worth living now, or never. The drift of 
 the higher spirits of the world seems to be towards autonomous 
 morality, with the sense of sin superseded. For people refrain 
 from wrong in proportion to their power of sympathy, of im- 
 aging the consequences to others. The larger the heart, the 
 less the wrongdoing. 
 
 " Yes, what was wanting," thought Mr. Pater's Marius, when 
 he saw the gladiatorial brutalities, " was the heart that would 
 make it impossible to witness all this ; and the future would be 
 with the forces that could beget a heart like that." 
 
 This heart was the Jewish heart, and the forces of the future 
 are still with it. 
 
 To such a creed as Judaism the verbal authenticity of its 
 sacred book is a triviality ; to such an organisation as Israel 
 even the fall of theism would not be necessarily fatal, the energy 
 stored up in it could still be conserved and turned to humanity's 
 benefit. But when one thinks how this earliest of theistic 
 creeds, this original Catholic Democratic Church of Humanity, 
 has persisted through the ages, by which wonderful construc- 
 tive state-craft it has built up a race of which the motto might 
 well be Sanity, Unity, Sanctity, a race of which the lowest unit 
 is no forlorn outcast, no atom in a " submerged tenth," but an 
 equal member of a great historic brotherhood, a scion of the 
 oldest of surviving civilisations, a student of sacred books, a 
 lover of home and peace ; when one remembers how he has agon- 
 ised — the great misunderstood of history — how his " pesti- 
 lent heresy " has been chastised and rebuked by Popes and 
 Crusaders, Inquisitors and Missionaries, how he has remained 
 sublimely protestant, imperturbable amid marvellous cathe- 
 drals and all the splendid shows of Christendom, and how 
 
 150
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 despite all and after all he is living to see the world turning 
 slowly back to his vision of life ; then one seems to see " the fin- 
 ger of God," the hand of the Master-artist, behind the comedy- 
 tragedy of existence, to believe that Israel is veritably a nation 
 with a mission, that there is no God but God and Israel is his 
 prophet ; not Moses, not Christ, not Mohammed, but Israel, the 
 race in whom God was revealed, and if whose faith and hope be 
 a dream, it were well to abandon the search for significance in 
 the futile and ephemeral life of man, and to look forward hope- 
 fully to the Messiah of the cosmic catastrophe. 
 
 DR. M. C BAM/EE, 
 
 M. D. (Haro'd.) 
 City Health Dept. 
 
 LOS ANGELES. CALIF. 
 
 151
 
 SONGS OF THE SYNAGOGUE 
 
 [These translations, chosen from my contributions to " The 
 Service of the Synagogue/' by kind permission of Messrs. George 
 Routledge and Sons, are designed to elucidate Judaism by illustrat- 
 ing the conceptions that found their way into its orthodox liturgy, 
 not necessarily always the highest conceptions it has produced. 
 There is a general approximation to the metre and rhymings of the 
 originals. The use of rhyme and metre, it may be remarked, is a 
 comparative novelty in Hebrew. Rhyme was not introduced into 
 Hebrew poetry before the seventh century, when it appears in the 
 l'ivvutim of Yannai. Milton calls rhyme "that barbarous inven- 
 tion to set off lame metre " ; but there was not even metre in Hebrew 
 then. That was not brought in till three centuries later by Dunash 
 ben Labrat, a young poet of Baghdad origin, who probably picked it 
 up from the Fez poets. " Such a thing hath hitherto been un- 
 known in Israel," said Saadia, the great Gaon of Sura, when Dun- 
 ash showed him Hebrew jigging to Arab measures.] 
 
 YIGDAL, THE RHYME OF THE THIRTEEN 
 ARTICLES 
 
 (Attributed to Daniel ben Judah, fourteenth century.) 
 {Daily Service.) 
 
 1. The living God magnify and bless, 
 Transcending Time and here eternally. 
 
 2. One Being, yet unique in unity ; 
 
 A mystery of Oneness measureless. 
 
 3. Lo ! form or body He has none, and man 
 No semblance of His holiness can frame. 
 
 4. Before Creation's dawn He was the same ; 
 The first to be, though never He began. 
 
 5. He is the world's and every creature's Lord ; 
 His rule and majesty are manifest, 
 
 6. And through His chosen, glorious sons exprest 
 In prophecies that through their lips are poured 
 
 152
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 7. Yet never like to Moses rose a seer, 
 Permitted glimpse behind the veil divine. 
 
 8. This faithful prince of God's prophetic line 
 Received the Law of Truth for Israel's ear. 
 
 9. The Law God gave He never will amend, 
 Nor ever by another Law replace. 
 
 10. Our secret things are spread before His face; 
 In all beginnings He beholds the end. 
 
 11. The saint's reward He measures to his meed; 
 The sinner reaps the harvest of his ways. 
 
 12. Messiah He will send at end of days, 
 And all the faithful to salvation lead. 
 
 13. God will the dead again to life restore 
 In His abundance of almighty love. 
 
 Then blessed be His name, all names above, 
 And let His praise resound for evermore. 
 
 HIGHEST DIVINITY 
 
 (Anonymous, mediaeval.) 
 (New Year Service.) 
 
 Highest divinity, 
 Throned in the firmament, 
 Potentate paramount, 
 Hand superdominant, 
 
 Lord of Infinity ! 
 
 Highest divinity, 
 Great in performing all, 
 Sure in decreeing all, 
 Stern in unbaring all, 
 
 Lord of Infinity ! 
 
 Highest divinity, 
 Speaking in holiness, 
 153
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 Vestured in righteousness 
 Heedful of suppliants, 
 Lord of Infinity ! 
 
 Highest divinity, 
 Saving the children by 
 Grace of their ancestors, 
 Vexing their enemies, 
 
 Lord of Infinity ! 
 
 Highest divinity, 
 Time is His dwelling-place, 
 Goodness e'erlastingly 
 Spanning the firmament, 
 
 Lord of Infinity ! 
 
 Highest divinity, 
 Light is His robe and veil, 
 Suns, stars, have sprung from Him ; 
 Potent and terrible 
 
 Lord of Infinity ! 
 
 Highest divinity, 
 King of the Universe, 
 Piercer of mysteries, 
 Causing the dumb to speak, 
 
 Lord of Infinity ! 
 
 Highest divinity, 
 Propping, sustaining all, 
 Slaying, surviving all, 
 Seeing, unseen of all, 
 
 Lord of Infinity ! 
 
 Highest divinity, 
 Crowned with omnipotence, 
 Right hand victorious, 
 Saviour and Shelterer, 
 
 Lord of Infinity ! 
 
 Highest divinity, 
 Round Him flame cherubim, 
 Seas shake at word of Him, 
 154
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 Yet is His love at call, 
 Lord of Infinity ! 
 
 Highest divinity, 
 Sleeping nor slumbering, 
 Centre of restfulness, 
 Awed angels chant His praise, 
 
 Lord of Infinity ! 
 
 Lowly humanity, 
 Doomed to go down to death, 
 Grave-ward and lower still. 
 Vain is man's heritage, 
 
 Sovran of Vanity ! 
 
 Lowly humanity, 
 Sleep is his daily end, 
 Deep sleep his final goal. 
 Darkness flows over him, 
 
 Sovran of Vanity ! 
 
 Highest divinity, 
 Dynast of endlessness, 
 Timeless resplendency, 
 Worshipped eternally, 
 
 Lord of Infinity ! 
 
 UNDER THE YOKE 
 
 (Eleasar Kalir, eighth to tenth century.) 
 
 (New Year Service.) 
 
 Ah, why is the Kingdom, 
 
 The realm of glory, 
 Cast out and no longer 
 
 Acclaimed in story ? 
 
 'Twas Bel the dragon, 
 
 The idol hollow, 
 With lawless footsteps 
 
 We fain would follow. 
 155
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 The mistress of kingdoms 
 Hence holds us lowly, 
 
 Till shines renascent 
 God's Kingdom holy. 
 
 Our home in ashes, 
 
 Our saints all scattered, 
 
 Chaldea waxeth, 
 
 In might unshattered. 
 
 She bends her bowstring, 
 Her yoke extending ; 
 
 She rends the tender, 
 And reigns unending. 
 
 Roots fiercely plucking, 
 Foundations baring, 
 
 She planned in secret, 
 Performed in daring. 
 
 She broke our tent-poles, 
 Our curtains wrested, 
 
 And drove the ploughshare 
 Where once we nested. 
 
 She props up princedoms, 
 And realms sustaineth, 
 
 But us she vexetli, 
 But us she paineth. 
 
 Now swol'n with cunning, 
 And guile sans leaven, 
 
 In regal vesture 
 She soars to heaven. 
 
 'Gainst Thee rebelleth, 
 High treason scheming, 
 
 Her idols vaunteth, 
 Thy rule blaspheming. 
 
 Lo ! us Thy children 
 She sorely tasketh, 
 156
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 What King o'er me is? 
 Profanely asketh. 
 
 And cries, usurping 
 Thy sceptre lonely, 
 
 Save me no King is, 
 I reign, I only. 
 
 Lord, far uplifted, 
 Hurl down her glory ; 
 
 Once more be sovran 
 Of Israel's story ! 
 
 THE LORD IS KING 
 
 (Eleasar Kalir.) 
 (New Year Service.) 
 
 The terrible sons of the mighty race 
 
 Shout in thunder the Lord is King, 
 The angels whose figure the lightnings trace 
 
 Flame to the world that the Lord was King, 
 And seraphs whose stature is one with Space 
 
 Proclaim that the Lord shall be King for ever. 
 The Lord is King, the Lord was King, the Lord shall be 
 King for ever and ever. 
 
 The rushing and undulant sons of fire 
 
 Fiercely cry that the Lord is King, 
 The rustling legions with harp and lyre 
 
 Sweetly tell that the Lord was King, 
 And numberless creatures in ceaseless choir 
 
 Chant that the Lord shall be King for ever. 
 The Lord is King, the Lord was King, the Lord shall be 
 King for ever and ever. 
 
 The bards who remember the songs of yore 
 
 Sing aloud that the Lord is King, 
 The sages enshrouded in mystic lore 
 
 Find and proclaim that the Lord was King, 
 And rulers of spans of the heavenly floor 
 
 Cry that the Lord shall be King for ever. 
 157
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 The Lord is King, the Lord was King, the Lord shall be 
 King for ever and ever. 
 
 The heirs of the To rah, Thy rich bequest, 
 
 Chant in joy that the Lord is King, 
 The lordly warriors with crown and crest 
 
 Crown thee, declaring the Lord was King, 
 And angels in fiery garments drest 
 
 Repeat that the Lord shall be King for ever. 
 The Lord is King, the Lord was King, the Lord shall be 
 King for ever and ever. 
 
 Mellifluous orators trained of tongue 
 Preach and teach that the Lord is King, 
 
 The shimmering cherubim, radiant, young, 
 Trumpet exultant the Lord was King, 
 
 And seraphim circling have ever sung 
 
 The song that the Lord shall be King for ever. 
 
 The Lord is King, the Lord was King, the Lord shall be 
 King for ever and ever. 
 
 Thy people in passionate worship cry 
 
 One to another the Lord is King. 
 In awe of the marvels beneath the sky 
 
 Each explains that the Lord was King. 
 One sound from Thy pastures ascends on high : 
 
 The chant that the Lord shall be King for ever. 
 The Lord is King, the Lord was King, the Lord shall be 
 King for ever and ever. 
 
 Assemblies of holiness consecrate 
 
 Thee with the cry that the Lord is King, 
 
 Innumerous myriads iterate 
 
 Only this — that the Lord was King, 
 
 And flame-flashing angels enthroned in state 
 Echo, the Lord shall be King for ever. 
 
 The Lord is King, the Lord was King, the Lord shall be 
 King for ever and ever. 
 
 The universe throbs with Thy pauseless praise, 
 
 Chorus eternal, the Lord is King. 
 Thy glory is cried from the dawn of days, 
 
 Worshippers calling the Lord was King. 
 158
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 And ever the Saints who shall witness Thy ways 
 Shall cry that the Lord shall be King for ever. 
 The Lord is King, the Lord was King, the Lord shall be 
 King for ever and ever. 
 
 THE HYMN OF GLORY 
 
 (Anonymous, thirteenth century.) 
 (Eve of Atonement Service.) 
 
 I 
 
 Sweet hymns shall be my chant and woven songs 
 For Thou art all for winch my spirit longs — 
 
 To be within the shadow of Thy hand 
 And all Thy mystery to understand. 
 
 The while Thy glory is upon my tongue, 
 My inmost heart with love of Thee is wrung. 
 
 So though Thy mighty marvels I proclaim, 
 'Tis songs of love wherewith I greet Thy name. 
 
 II 
 
 I have not seen Thee, yet I tell Thy praise, 
 Nor known Thee, yet I image forth Thy ways. 
 
 For by Thy seers' and servants' mystic speech 
 Thou didst Thy sovran splendour darkly teach. 
 
 And from the grandeur of Thy work they drew 
 The measure of Thy inner greatness, too. 
 
 They told of Thee, but not as Thou must be, 
 Since from Thy work they tried to body Thee. 
 
 To countless visions did their pictures run, 
 Behold through all the visions Thou art one. 
 
 Ill 
 
 In Thee old age and youth at once were drawn, 
 The grey of eld, the flowing locks of dawn, 
 159
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 The ancient Judge, the youthful Warrior, 
 The Man of Battles, terrible in war, 
 
 The helmet of salvation on His head, 
 
 And by His hand and arm the triumph led, 
 
 His head all shining with the dew of light, 
 His locks all dripping with the drops of night. 
 
 IV 
 
 I glorify Him, for He joys in me, 
 My crown of beauty He shall ever be ! 
 
 His head is like pure gold ; His forehead's flame 
 Is graven glory of His holy name. 
 
 And with that lovely diadem 'tis graced, 
 The coronal His people there have placed. 
 
 His hair as on the head of youth is twined, 
 In wealth of raven curls it flows behind. 
 
 His circlet is the home of righteousness ; 
 Ah, may He love His highest rapture less ! 
 
 And be His treasured people in His hand 
 A diadem His kingly brow to band. 
 
 By Him they were uplifted, carried, crowned, 
 Thus honoured inasmuch as precious found. 
 
 His glory is on me, and mine on Him, 
 And when I call, He is not far or dim. 
 
 Ruddy in red apparel, bright He glows 
 
 When He from treading Edom's wine-press goes. 
 
 Phylactcried the vision Moses viewed, 
 The day He gazed on God's similitude. 
 
 He loves His folk; the meek will glorify, 
 And, shrined in prayer, draw their rapt reply. 
 160
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 Truth is Thy primal word ; at Thy behest 
 The generations pass — O aid our quest 
 
 For Thee, and set my host of songs on high, 
 And let my psalmody come very nigh. 
 
 My praises as a coronal account, 
 
 And let my prayer as Thine incense mount. 
 
 Deem precious unto Thee the poor man's song 
 As those that to Thine altar did belong. 
 
 Rise, O my blessing, to the lord of birth, 
 
 The breeding, quickening, righteous force of earth. 
 
 Do Thou receive it with acceptant nod, 
 My choicest incense offered to my God. 
 
 And let my meditation grateful be, 
 For all my being is athirst for Thee. 
 
 LAUS DEO 
 
 (Meshuixam ben Kalonymos, flourished at Rome or Lucca 
 
 970.) 
 
 {Bay of Atonement Service.) 
 
 In the height and the depth of His burning, 
 
 Where mighty He sits on the throne, 
 His light He unveils and His yearning 
 
 To all who revere Him alone. 
 His promises never are broken, 
 
 His greatness all measure exceeds ; 
 Then exalt Him who gives you for token 
 
 His marvellous deeds. 
 
 He marshals the planets unbounded, 
 
 He numbers the infinite years; 
 The seat of His empire is founded 
 
 More deep than the nethermost spheres ; 
 161
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 He looks on the lands from His splendour : 
 They tremble and quiver like reeds ; 
 
 Then exalt ye in lowly surrender 
 His marvellous deeds. 
 
 The worlds He upholds in their flying, 
 
 His feet on the footstool of earth; 
 His word hath established undying 
 
 Whatever His word brought to birth. 
 The ruler of hosts is His title ; 
 
 Then exalt Him in worshipful creeds, 
 Declaring in solemn recital 
 
 His marvellous deeds. 
 
 He is master of all He created, 
 
 Sublime in His circle of light ; 
 His strength with His glory is mated, 
 
 His greatness at one with His might. 
 So that Seraphim over Him winging, 
 
 Obeying an angel that leads, 
 Unite in the rapture of singing 
 
 His marvellous deeds. 
 
 His renown fills the heavenly spaces, 
 
 The world He beholds to its ends. 
 His foes, who are mine, too, He chases ; 
 
 I count all who love Him my friends. 
 Exalted be therefore His glory, 
 
 His praises be scattered as seeds, 
 Till all the world learns the great story, 
 
 His marvellous deeds. 
 
 But of man — ah ! the tale is another, 
 
 His counsels are evil and vain : 
 He dwells with deceit as a brother, 
 
 And the worm is the close of his reign. 
 Into earth he is carted and shovelled, 
 
 And who shall recount or who heeds, 
 When above earth he strutted or grovelled, 
 
 His marvellous deeds? 
 
 Not so God ! — earth on nothing He founded, 
 And on emptiness stretched out the skv ; 
 162
 
 THE VOICE OP JERUSALEM 
 
 With land the great waters He bounded, 
 And bade all their breeds multiply. 
 
 In light He is clad as a raiment, 
 His greatness no eulogy needs ; 
 
 Yet exalt, 'tis your only repayment, 
 His marvellous deeds. 
 
 PRAYER FOR DEW 
 
 (Eleasak, Kalie, eighth to tenth century.) 
 (Passover Service.) 
 
 Dew, precious dew, unto Thy land forlorn ! 
 Pour out our blessings in Thy exultation, 
 To strengthen us with ample wine and corn 
 And give Thy chosen city safe foundation 
 In dew. 
 
 Dew, precious dew, the good year's crown, we wait, 
 That earth in pride and glory may be fruited, 
 And that the city now so desolate 
 Into a gleaming crown may be transmuted 
 By dew. 
 
 Dew, precious dew, let fall upon the land, 
 From heaven's treasury be this accorded, 
 So shall the darkness by a beam be spanned, 
 The faithful of Thy vineyard be rewarded 
 With dew. 
 
 Dew, precious dew, to make the mountains sweet, 
 The savour of Thy excellence recalling 1 
 Deliver us from exile, we entreat, 
 So we may sing Thy praises, softly falling 
 As dew. 
 
 Dew, precious dew, our granaries to fill, 
 And us with youthful freshness to enharden ! 
 Beloved God, uplift us at Thy will 
 And make us as a richly-watered garden 
 With dew. 
 163
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 Dew, precious dew, that we our harvest reap, 
 And guard our fatted flocks and herds from leanness J 
 Behold our people follows Thee like sheep, 
 And looks to Thee to give the earth her greenness 
 With dew. 
 
 THE REJOICING OF THE LAW 
 
 (Anon. Time of the Gaonim.) 
 (Service at end of Feast of Tabernacles.) 
 
 This Feast of the Law all your gladness display, 
 
 To-day all your homages render. 
 What profit can lead one so pleasant a way, 
 
 What jewels can vie with its splendour? 
 Then exult in the Law on its festival day, 
 
 The Law is our Light and Defender. 
 
 My God I will praise in a jubilant lay, 
 
 My hope in Him never surrender, 
 His glory proclaim where His chosen sons pray, 
 
 My Rock all my trust shall engender. 
 Then exult in the Law on its festival day, 
 
 The Law is our Light and Defender. 
 
 My heart of Thy goodness shall carol alway, 
 
 Thy praises I ever will render; 
 While breath is, my lips all Thy wonders shall say, 
 
 Thy truth and Thy kindness so tender. 
 Then exult in the Law on its festival day, 
 
 The Law is our Light and Defender. 
 
 THE ANGELS CAME 
 
 (Anon. Time of the Gaonim.) 
 (Idem — Day of Rejoicing of the Law — A Children's Festival) 
 
 The Angels came a-mustering, 
 
 A-mustering, a-mustering, 
 The Angels came a-clustering 
 
 Around the sapphire throne. 
 164
 
 THE VOICE OP JERUSALEM 
 
 A-questioning of one another, 
 Of one another, of one another, 
 
 A-questioning each one his brother 
 Around the sapphire throne. 
 
 Pray who is he, and where is he, 
 And where is he, and where is he, 
 
 Whose shining casts — so fair is he — 
 A shadow on the throne? 
 
 Pray, who has up to heaven come, 
 
 To heaven come, to heaven come, 
 Through all the circles seven come, 
 To fetch the Torah down? 
 
 'Tis Moses up to heaven come, 
 To heaven come, to heaven come, 
 
 Through all the circles seven come, 
 To fetch the Torah down! 
 
 165
 
 THE LEGEND OF THE CONQUERING JEW 
 
 In July, 1911, the First — and so far the last — Universal 
 Races Congress was held at the University of London under 
 the Presidency of Lord Weardale. The list of Officers, Council 
 and supporters of that pioneer Congress of Fraternity, whose 
 emblem was a hand-clasp between the Occident and the Orient, 
 and which opened with a noble paper by a Hindoo completely 
 anticipating President Wilson's Gospel, constitutes a roll of 
 the greatest political and spiritual figures throughout the 
 whole world at the start of the second decade of the twentieth 
 century. And that precisely this period should have exhibited 
 the greatest internecine struggle in human annals, with the 
 most reckless reversion to barbarism in its methods that even 
 warfare has ever witnessed, suggests uncomfortably that we 
 are still at the mercy of what, in the old Russia, they were wont 
 to call " the dark forces." 
 
 But this impotency of the rival forces of light — due to 
 causes by no means beyond analysis — does not alter the fact 
 that the fine flower of the civilisation of 1911 had arrived at 
 the stage of at least desiring international and racial fraternity, 
 without regard even to the colour-line. And as though to bear 
 out the view of " the mission of Israel " maintained in my con- 
 tribution to the discussion, the Congress of Races was organised 
 by a Jew, and it was a Jew — Dr. Charles S. Myers, Lecturer 
 in Experimental Psychology in the Universit} 7 of Cambridge — 
 who struck the clearest note of hope by his well-substantiated 
 thesis that there is no primitive people incapable of progress, 
 provided only the environment be appropriately changed. 
 
 Yet at this same Congress — and, by an ironic coincidence, 
 in immediate sequence to my own paper — a writer of the 
 highest culture and the completest goodwill, whose subject 
 moreover was " The Modern Conscience," put forward a view 
 of Jewish thought and history which is a startling proof of the 
 world's need of the pages that follow, and of such enlighten- 
 ment as they are able to convey on the subject of Judaism or 
 the Jews. 
 
 166
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 II 
 
 Sir Charles Bruce, G.C.M.G., K.C.M.G., J.P., D.L., had — 
 according to Who's Who — been educated at Harrow and had 
 subsequently enjoyed the illumination both of an American 
 University and a German. He had been a Professor of San- 
 scrit at King's College, London, when I was a suckling in that 
 city, and he had gone on to the Directorship of Public Instruc- 
 tion in Ceylon and to a number of other important Colonial 
 positions, including Governorships. Unlike the average edu- 
 cated Englishman he could write in German, and he had con- 
 tributed a work in that language to the Imperial Academy of 
 St. Petersburg. An Imperialist of the noblest kind, really 
 believing in " The White Man's Burden," he had published 
 high-minded books like " The True Temper of Empire," and a 
 volume of Poems had testified to the generous effervescence of 
 his youth. Yet this unprejudiced, widely-travelled scholar and 
 thinker laid it down in the paper that was bound next to mine 
 in the Congress Book — a paper marked moreover by a spacious 
 and sympathetic outlook over all history, all religions, all 
 races — that the Biblical stock from which I come had looked 
 forward to " a constantly multiplied posterity which was in 
 time to people the world, and make it the area of a civilisation 
 of which they should have the exclusive monopoly," and that 
 the means to this monstrous end was " a policy of extermina- 
 tion " towards all other races. 
 
 As some such grotesque notion of the ancient Jews and their 
 bloodthirsty Jehovah is constantly cropping up (though in less 
 surprising environments than a Congress of Races), it may be 
 worth while to examine it in some detail, more especially as it 
 shadows even the modern Jews in the guise of a suspicion, real 
 or feigned, that they too cherish the dream of exterminating 
 or at least conquering the heathen. 
 
 m 
 
 The policy of conquest by extermination, Sir Charles Bruce 
 calmly tells us, is summarised in the notorious command trans- 
 mitted to Saul through the prophet Samuel to smite Amalek 
 and utterly destroy " both man and woman, infant and suckling, 
 camel and ass." But if the object of this command was to 
 make the world safe for Judaeocracy, it is not easy to see why 
 
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 the valuable cattle were included in it. As a matter of fact, 
 the Jews sensibly spared these useful assets, besides chivalrously 
 saving King Agag, and though this combination of the Sancho 
 Panza and the Don Quixote cost Saul his Kingdom at the hands 
 of an avenging divinity, yet the chastisement was merely for 
 disobedience. There was in fact no such general policy of 
 extermination. The policy towards the Amalekites, savage 
 though it was, was peculiar — it was a unique historic vendetta, 
 a long-standing feud that went back to the first days of the 
 Exodus, when the Amalekites meanly barred the way to the 
 Jews coming up out of the Egyptian slavery, so that " the Lord 
 said unto Moses: Write this for a memorial in the book and 
 rehearse it in the ears of Joshua, for I will utterly blot out the 
 remembrance of Amalek from under heaven." Thus the 
 nemesis is regarded as righteous. And here we have a clue to 
 the reading of the Bible without which the reader will go astray. 
 For, as I have remarked in the first essay of this book, the 
 Bible never concedes the principle of modern Prussian thinkers 
 that brute force qua force has a legitimate place in the world. 
 This is a valuable step upwards, though it may lead to sophis- 
 tication of ancient records, and to contemporary hypocrisy. 
 
 Just as Kipling represents the white man's aggressiveness as 
 his " burden," so did the writer of the Pentateuch represent the 
 Jew's invasion of Palestine as a divine chastisement of which 
 he was the instrument. The difference between the two glosses 
 is all in favour of the Bible writer, since Kipling's Englishman 
 prospers through his own overflowing virtues, while the Bible 
 Jew prospers only through his enemy's vices. Thus the pop- 
 ular assumption that the early part of the Bible is barbarous is 
 mistaken ; the elements with which the sacred historian had to 
 deal were frequently savage, but they are all seen refracted 
 through an elevated belief in the divine ordering of all phe- 
 nomena. Bolingbroke defined history as philosophy teaching 
 by example. Bible history is religion teaching by example. 
 
 In such a blood-feud then as that against the Amalekites, in 
 which a righteous nemesis was supposed to demand the radical 
 elimination of the abhorred breed, even the cattle would be 
 accounted under the taint. But so far from this massacre of 
 the Amalekites being part of a policy of exterminating non- 
 Jews, the very description of it shows the Jews carefully spar- 
 ing another tribe. " Saul said to the Kenitcs, Go, depart, get 
 ye down from among the Amalekites lest I destroy you with 
 them, for ye showed kindness to all the children of Israel when 
 
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 they came up out of Egypt. So the Kenites departed from 
 among the Amalekites." 
 
 The policy of destruction was indeed applied by the invaders 
 of Palestine, and is explicitly enjoined in the twentieth chapter 
 of Deuteronomy, but it is carefully based on the necessity of 
 avoiding the contagion of the native abominations and, as one 
 would expect, it was only directed at those tribes who occupied 
 the actual area of " The Promised Land," — no very great area 
 either. It was not to be applied at all to external tribes, if 
 they surrendered peacefully, and only to their males, if they 
 insisted on putting the issue to the sword. Barbarous as is 
 this temper, beneath all the historian's sophistication, its object 
 was merely to find a home for a homeless people, and compares 
 favourably with the objects for which, even within living mem- 
 ory, aborigines of more than one now civilised land have been 
 eliminated by peoples already possessing vast portions of the 
 earth. As for earlier ages, consider the account in Green's 
 " Short History of England " of the wiping out of the ancient 
 Britons. " The English conquest was a sheer dispossession 
 and slaughter of the people whom the English conquered." 
 The fierceness of the struggle, the conquest only partially 
 carried out after centuries of warfare, remind one vividly of 
 the Jew in Palestine, and may be commended to the cultivators 
 of the Anglo-Israelite legend. When at last the struggle 
 lapsed, " Britain," writes Green, " had become England, a land 
 that is not of Britons but of Englishmen. . . . The Briton 
 had disappeared from the greater part of the land which had 
 been his own, and the tongue, the religion, the laws of his 
 English conqueror reigned without a rival from Essex to the 
 Severn, and from the British Channel to the Firth of Forth." 
 This was two thousand years after Joshua. Or let us take a 
 period a thousand years later still. 
 
 " The contact which Columbus established," says Seeley in his 
 " Expansion of England," " being the most strange and violent 
 which ever took place between two parts of the human family, led to 
 a fierce struggle and furnished one of the most terrible pages to 
 the annals of the world. But in this struggle there was no sort of 
 equality. The American race had no more power of resisting the 
 European than the sheep has of resisting the wolf. Even where it 
 was numerous and had a settled polity, as in Peru, it could make 
 no resistance; its states were crushed, the ruling families ex- 
 tinguished and the population itself reduced to a form of slavery. 
 Everywhere, therefore, the country fell into the hands of the immi- 
 
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 grating race, and was disposed of at its pleasure as so much plun- 
 der. The immigrants did not merely, as in India, gradually show 
 a great military superiority to the native race, so as in the end to 
 subdue them, but overwhelmed them at once like a party of hunters 
 suddenly assailing a herd of antelopes." 
 
 We learn in fact from Prescott's " Conquest of Peru " that 
 Pizarro's conquest was a massacre, for the followers of the Inca 
 were unarmed, unacquainted with the effects of artillery, and 
 even with charging horses. Moreover it was treachery, for the 
 Inca came to the fatal plaza as a guest of his white visitors. 
 Yet Pizarro encouraged his followers with the cry that heaven 
 was on their side — his chieftain, a Dominican friar, crucifix in 
 hand, summoned the Indian monarch to submission to Christ 
 and Charles V., and after the butchery, the Christian conquis- 
 tador explained to his royal prisoner that he and his men had 
 come into the country to proclaim the gospel, the religion of 
 Jesus Christ, and that it was no wonder they had prevailed, 
 when His shield was over them. The day's proceedings closed 
 with an exhortation to his desperados to offer up thanksgivings 
 to Providence. This, as I have said, was three thousand years 
 after the Conquest of Canaan. 
 
 IV 
 
 The Old Testament would not be the great literature that it 
 is, did it mirror life as less savage than we know life still to be. 
 And if its Jews fall occasionally almost to the level of some of 
 the races in our recent war, their brutality is mitigated by 
 many a prescription which puts those Christian peoples to 
 shame. For a modern evolutionary view of the rise and 
 progress of Judaism from its crude origins, I must refer the 
 reader to my little book on " Chosen Peoples." But it may be 
 pointed out here how, even in the most primitive section of the 
 Bible and apart from its general veneer of moralisation, we 
 catch notes of chivalry and pity, to which no inconsiderable 
 portion of Christian Europe is still deaf. Thus after the 
 countless rapes of conquered women, with which recent history 
 has made us so painfully familiar, it is like hearing soft music 
 to read in Deuteronomy (xxi. 10 — 13) of the warrior's duty 
 to the enemy woman who has aroused his lust : of the necessary 
 marriage with its set ritual and its due delay before his passion 
 
 170
 
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 could be gratified. Little enough of extermination here. Still 
 less of a narrow matrimonial tribalism. And the Mosaic legis- 
 lator proceeds to trace the course of the husband's duty in the 
 event of the conquered alien woman failing to bring him the 
 expected delight. " Then thou shalt let her go whither she 
 will ; but thou shalt not sell her at all for money, thou shalt not 
 deal with her as a slave, because thou hast humbled her." 
 
 Dekker described Christ as " the first true gentleman that 
 ever breathed." It seems to me that the priority belongs to 
 the Mosaic legislator. In the same vein are other rules for the 
 conduct of war, the prohibition for example against destroying 
 the enemy's necessary fruit-trees — " for is the tree of the field 
 man that it should be besieged of thee? " (Deuteronomy 
 xx. 19). 
 
 Best of all the war regulations of this malignant Mosaic code, 
 and of a mansuetude to which no modern State has yet attained, 
 is that individuals of the citizen army are to withdraw from the 
 approaching battle. " And the officers shall speak unto the 
 people, saying : * What man is there that hath built a new house, 
 and hath not dedicated it? let him go and return to his house, 
 lest he die in the battle, and another man dedicate it. And 
 what man is there that hath planted a vineyard, and hath not 
 used the fruit thereof? let him go and return unto his house, 
 lest he die in the battle, and another man use the fruit thereof. 
 And what man is there that hath betrothed a wife, and hath 
 not taken her? let him go and return unto his house, lest he die 
 in the battle, and another man take her.' " In the final exemp- 
 tion, considerateness is enforced by sagacity : " And the 
 officers shall speak further unto the people, and they shall say : 
 ' What man is there that is fearful and fainthearted ? let him 
 go and return unto his house, lest his brethren's heart melt as 
 his heart.' " 
 
 Here is a shrewd psychological understanding of the dan- 
 gerous contagion of cowardice, as well as of its probable self- 
 conquest if given freedom of choice. The contagion of courage 
 would then probably act upon the trembler, and the fear of 
 confessing himself faint-hearted might nerve him to bravery. 
 Compare this genial wisdom with the grim " Shot at dawn " of 
 contemporary military law; with that stark brutality of the 
 ritual of Moloch which has sent shell-shocked conscripts in 
 their teens to a dishonoured grave. The Jewish law, at once 
 more merciful and more intelligent, tended to produce a state 
 of soul in the ranks resembling that of our first volunteers to 
 
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 avenge Belgium. It is the combination of universal service 
 with freedom. 
 
 A people that could thus, thirty-five centuries ago, make 
 militarism its slave and not its master, might well flatter itself 
 that the Lord was with it. And even though it anticipated 
 modern Europe in covering the ruthless dispossession of its foes 
 by the plea of their abominable practices, it had the saving 
 grace to tell itself: "Not for thy righteousness or for the 
 uprightness of thy heart, dost thou go in to possess their land; 
 but for the wickedness of these nations the Lord thy God doth 
 drive them out from before thee. . . . For thou art a stiff- 
 necked people " (Deuteronomy ix. 5, 6). 
 
 Moreover, despite the narrative in the fifteenth chapter of 
 Samuel, even the Amalekites were not really extirpated, as we 
 learn incidentally from the twenty-seventh chapter of the same 
 book, where the Amalekites figure — as alive as ever — among 
 the tribes against whom David makes raid, leaving " neither 
 man nor woman alive." Three chapters later these twice- 
 annihilated Amalekites themselves make a raid and burn Ziklag 
 and carry away all the inhabitants thereof, including a couple 
 of David's wives. David, however, not to be balked, burst upon 
 the revelling conquerors and " recovered all that the Amalekites 
 had taken," and " there escaped not a man of them." Even 
 now the Amalekites are not done for: there is literally a saving 
 clause, for the verse proceeds : " Save four hundred young 
 men who rode upon camels and fled." Evidently the prior 
 reports of the " annihilation " of the Amalekites are Oriental, 
 or shall we say " official "? They were doubtless designed to 
 bolster up the imaginary honour of Jehovah as an efficient deity, 
 faithful to the legendary bargain with Israel. One doubts even 
 if Saul or David had smitten the Amalekites as ruthlessly as 
 the official versions boasted, for was it likely in those days of 
 blood-feuds that in that case the Amalekites, when successful in 
 the counter-raid at Ziklag, would have merely carried off the 
 wives, sons and daughters captured there, so that David was 
 able to recapture them unharmed? 
 
 It needs, we have seen, no profound scholarship, no subtle 
 dialectic, to traverse and demolish Sir Charles Bruce's thesis: 
 the simplest reference to his own source of evidence, the Bible, is 
 sufficient. There was no general command or design to extir- 
 
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 pate the heathen. The conquest of Moab was indeed especially 
 banned on the ground of the prior historical right of another 
 branch of the clan. " Be not at enmity with Moab, neither 
 contend with them in battle ; for I will not give thee of his land 
 for a possession ; because I have given Ar unto the children of 
 Lot for a possession." There may have been as much prudence 
 as chivalry in this prohibition, for the inscription on the 
 Moabite stone, discovered in 186'8 and now in the Louvre, 
 reveals the Moabites as no less fanatically persuaded of the 
 protection of their God Chemosh than the Jews of Jehovah's. 
 Nor does the prohibition seem to have been respected when the 
 Israelites grew stronger. But on the other hand in the cases 
 where destruction was commanded, it was not invariably carried 
 out ; not only because some of the tribes remained unconquerable 
 so that the invaders had to put up with their presence, but also 
 because in a number of instances where the natives did submit, 
 the victors preferred to make them tributary. (See Judges, 
 i. 28, 30, 33, 35.) 
 
 This mildness, this neglect to extirpate, is, however, inter- 
 preted by the incurable Sir Charles Bruce as only a refinement 
 of Jewish malignity. For lest his readers, though they might 
 be expected not to look up the matter in the Bible, might be 
 smitten by the doubt whether the few million Jews in Palestine 
 could ever really have harboured such an insane hope as to 
 eradicate — not simply conquer but eradicate — not only its 
 autochthones but all the populations of the great Empires of 
 antiquity into the bargain, Sir Charles Bruce explains that 
 prisoners of war were kept alive and " adopted into the com- 
 munity under conditions of servitude," with the Machiavellian 
 design of enlarging Israel for his world-swallowing role; it being 
 manifest that " the natural increase of heredity multiplied by 
 polygamy and concubinage " would not suffice for this super- 
 Alexandrian achievement. But where did Sir Charles Bruce 
 find warrant for his statement that prisoners of war, male and 
 female, were " adopted into the community under conditions of 
 servitude " ? 
 
 We have already seen how female prisoners of war fared if 
 married by Israelites and then divorced, and a further light is 
 thrown by Leviticus xix. 34 upon the treatment of the alien 
 question under the Mosaic code. " If a stranger sojourn with 
 thee in your land, ye shall do him no wrong. The stranger that 
 sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home-born among 
 you, and thou shalt love him as thyself ; for ye were strangers in 
 
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 the land of Egypt." But if by prisoners of war Sir Charles 
 Bruce means not the few survivors of slaughter, but whole 
 conquered or surrendered tribes, by the adoption of whom the 
 community fortified itself, then his language is very loose. For 
 there is a vast difference between exacting tribute or military 
 assistance from a tribe and reducing its individuals to servitude. 
 And even if Israel gradually incorporated the conquered tribes 
 and areas into his little kingdom, that is an operation elemen- 
 tally simple, repeated ad nauseam in universal history, and car- 
 rying no such lurid design of world-destruction. Moreover, if 
 Israel did admit these other peoples into the heritage of the 
 promise, it disposes of his much-denounced tribalism. The fact 
 is, that the honesty of the Jewish historian of the Bible has been 
 the undoing of his people. While other nations carefully avert 
 their eyes from the shambles on which they are established, 
 Israel, by facing life steadily, and facing it whole, has written 
 himself down a brute, compared with these elegant peoples 
 whose history has been tricked out by their poets, and who have 
 carried forward in their consciousness and their literature only 
 its most glorious aspects. Imagine if that passage in Green 
 had formed part of the liturgy of the English church, " familiar 
 in our mouths as household words." 
 
 VI 
 
 Great indeed is the power of the written word. Everywhere 
 it interposes between man and the facts, between the eye and 
 fresh personal vision. Nowhere has this obscuring power been 
 more marked than in the blindness produced by the Bible to the 
 most glaring phenomena in the life of the people whose epic it 
 once constituted. It has fixed the ever-living Jew as unchange- 
 ably as the dead Roman or the ancient Greek. It forbids his 
 development. From the last page of the Bible to the first page 
 of the Doar Hayom, the Jerusalem daily, he has rarely ceased 
 to expand and create; yet he is eternally what he once was. 
 The Book says so. It is the museum in which he is perpetually 
 exhibited. Because, for example, the Old Testament has no 
 definite promise of individual immortality except in a solitary 
 reference to Resurrection in Daniel xii. 2, it is assumed that the 
 modern Jew has still no gospel of future life. But we know 
 that while the Old Testament was still uncompleted, Jews, 
 streaming back to Palestine from Persia after the second 
 Temple was built, brought back from Zoroastrianism the doc- 
 
 174
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 trine of post-mortem Retribution and the whole paraphernalia 
 of Heaven and Hell. If a Jewish prayer-book or the Thirteen 
 Articles of Maimonides were not accessible to Sir Charles 
 Bruce, he had only to walk through a Jewish cemetery to see 
 that the faith in resurrection is no less lively than in the 
 neighbouring churchyard. Yet he tells us that the Jew 
 throughout the ages has found sufficient stimulation in the im- 
 mortality of his race. This would not matter so much if Sir 
 Charles Bruce had not assumed likewise that the sustaining 
 vision has been that same fantastic conception of world-dom- 
 inance by extermination. And here we reach the really mon- 
 strous part of Sir Charles Bruce's case. For a Jew remaining 
 in soecula scecwlorum what he was four thousand years ago — 
 though, of course, even then he was far from realising Sir 
 Charles Bruce's vision of him — it follows that he is still pur- 
 suing sedulously, if subterraneously, his old game of enthroning 
 world-Jewry on the ruins of all other civilisations ; mining what 
 he can no longer conquer above ground, but still, like Marlowe's 
 Tamburlaine, 
 
 " Measuring the limits of his empery 
 By East and West, as Phcebus does his course." 
 
 Recently I was startled to see at the head of a letter in the 
 Times the words in large capitals : " The Mosaic Law in 
 Politics." I naturally thought it was rebuking the savage 
 expression in European life of the Old Testament maxim: 
 " Eye for eye, tooth for tooth " — that maxim, winch has for 
 so long replaced the New Testament mildness ; that sad Ersatz, 
 or substitute, on which Christendom has subsisted during the 
 war, in the course of which the world's stock of goodness has 
 given out, like so many other precious commodities. I was 
 mistaken. The letter referred not to the European debacle, 
 not to our repaying barbarism by barbarism, but exclusively to 
 the ferocity of the Jews, who were declared to be running 
 Bolshevism in Russia, purely and simply as a means of avenging 
 themselves upon the country that had persecuted them; and 
 they were begged to abandon the unique and unparalleled 
 vengefulness of their Shylockian species ; otherwise they would 
 be massacred. 
 
 The letter, which was signed " Verax " — by a slip of the pen, 
 I suppose, for " Mendax " — was, of course, merely one of Lord 
 Northcliffe's numerous devices for saving his Koltchaks and 
 Denikins and discounting their massacres. The Mosaic maxim 
 
 175
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 in question had been practically obsolete in Jewry before Jesus 
 was born, and my bitter amusement at seeing it now ascribed to 
 the only race that had outgrown it, was intensified by the 
 remembrance that a week or two earlier the concord of a dinner 
 party had been seriously impaired by my quarrel with a vicar's 
 wife, who maintained stoutly that " Eye for eye, tooth for 
 tooth " was the correct and righteous principle against the 
 Germans, and that she was, in this instance, for the Old Dis- 
 pensation. She seemed indeed not only to want tooth for tooth, 
 but a whole set of teeth, and not only eye for eye, but a pair of 
 gold eye-glasses thrown in. 
 
 But coming from a clergyman's wife, it was a piece of can- 
 dour, of almost German candour. I say German, because it 
 was that great Church newspaper, the Christliche Welt, which 
 proposed at the beginning of the war a " moratorium for 
 Christianity." To preach Christianity, said the journal, in 
 these days of torpedoes and poison gas, was only to provoke 
 " mocking hellish laughter." 
 
 In the more foggy mentality of Britain, it did not prove 
 impossible to reconcile poison gas with the Holy Ghost, and a 
 host of war-pulpiteers arose — more noxious than war- 
 profiteers — to explain this heavenly harmony. Even now 
 that peace is nominally made, there is scant slackening in the 
 anti-German campaign. Yet " Verax " could speculate 
 " whether the Law of Moses has given the Jewish character its 
 hard and tenacious revengefulness or whether the law of Moses 
 itself is an expression of a peculiar race-character." In truth 
 if ever there was a code soaked in kindliness it is the Mosaic, 
 and if ever there was a race which was forgiving to the point of 
 flabbiness, it is the race which styles itself " the merciful, the 
 sons of the merciful," and of which I have written : 
 
 " Faithful friends to our foemen, slaves to a scornful clique, 
 The only Christians in Europe, turning the other cheek." 
 
 Compare " a tooth for a tooth " with " a life for a sheep " 
 which was British law little more than a century ago : at which 
 period indeed no fewer than two hundred misdemeanours were 
 punishable with death. The Jewish Sanhedrim which executed 
 one man in seventy years was known as " the bloody Sanhedrin." 
 
 "Revenge is a kind of wild justice," says Bacon, and the 
 canon of " eye for eye " was an attempt to remove the wildness 
 of revenge and leave only the justice. It was not a principle of 
 private revenge at all, but a legal maxim for the guidance of 
 
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 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 judges. The antithesis set up by Jesus was thus fallacious, for 
 the individual might quite well, after his right eye had been 
 gouged out by a brute, turn the other cheek to him as Jesus 
 recommended, without lessening the duty of the State in the 
 interests of order to remove the ruffian's own eye. In practice, 
 of course, such disagreeable contingencies were extremely rare, 
 and a money penalty soon replaced the crude operation of the 
 text, which was even legally impracticable if, for example, the 
 accused was blind or toothless. But the principle of exact 
 justice laid down in the text is hardly to be questioned by a 
 Christendom which deliberately perverted the message of Edith 
 Cavell, one of the few Christians whom the war revealed. For 
 " Verax " to single out " the inexorable vindictiveness " of the 
 Jewish character in face of the prevailing Gentile psychology, 
 demands a brazenness which the prince of liars might envy. 
 Civilisation and Christianity are in danger, screams the Morn- 
 ing Post in the silliest and sliest series of articles that have ever 
 degraded British journalism. It is true. But the danger 
 comes not from Judaism but from those Pagan or Prussian 
 doctrines of which the Morning Post is the naked and un- 
 ashamed exponent. 
 
 It is not unintelligible that Christendom endowed with this 
 psychology should conceive Jewry after its own image. The 
 Spectator cannot rid itself of the notion that though the Jewish 
 world-plot is undeniably a mare's nest, yet individuals here and 
 there must be driven by their sufferings to join secret societies 
 for revenge upon the Christian. And that admirable American 
 organ, The Christian Science Monitor, observes : " In the 
 centuries of mental and physical anguish through which it has 
 been the lot of the Jew to pass, slavery in Babylon, torture in 
 the dungeons of the Inquisition, massacre from the Dniester to 
 the Thames, it would have been strange if there had not been 
 born, out of the madness of that suffering, Jews filled with 
 every conceivable aspiration to rule in Christendom, or to whom 
 no scheme of revenge could be too delirious." 
 
 If from these revealing reflections of Christian psychology we 
 turn to the realities of Jewish psychology, we find no echo of 
 these hypotheses in the voice of Jerusalem. Sokolow, speaking 
 in Hebrew at a great Zionist Demonstration, said : " Our 
 masses in Eastern Europe had been facing death in seven circles 
 of hell. . . . For this cold murder of whole communities not 
 Heaven itself, nor all the mercy of the angels could find pallia- 
 tion. . . . Its horror and wicked purposefulness should have 
 
 177
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 stunned the world and cried for vengeance. But the sentiment 
 of vengeance is strange to the Jewish people. An undying 
 fame is reserved for the memory of our martyrs. The tears 
 shed over their graves will, we hope, only deepen the intensity of 
 Jewish national consciousness, and in course of time be 
 dried by the happiness we experience once more in having our 
 own Home strong enough to guarantee the blessings of peace 
 and security." This attitude of passive endurance, combined 
 even with the note that Israel's agony is a righteous punish- 
 ment for sin, has provoked almost to madness the great contem- 
 porary Hebrew poet, Bialik, already stricken to the soul by the 
 spectacle of a pogrom in his own town. With an Old Testa- 
 ment boldness the poet makes God rage against Himself. 
 
 " No root of hatred, not a blade of vengeance, 
 For hark, they beat the breast and cry, Ashamnu! 
 They pray of Me forgiveness for their sin. 
 Their sin? The sin of shadows on the wall, 
 The sin of broken pots, or bruised worms ! 
 What will they? Why stretch out their hands to Me? 
 Has none a fist? And where's a thunderbolt 
 To take revenge for all the generations, 
 To blast the world and tear the heav'ns asunder 
 And wreck the universe, My throne of glory? " 
 
 When one compares the drab realities of Jewish life with the 
 flamboyant picture of the Jew as a world-dominator whether in 
 actuality or design, one knows not whether to laugh or weep. 
 Yet it is this ludicrous legend, this ineffably silly travesty of the 
 facts, that constitutes the stock-in-trade of the anti-Semitic 
 press which, to the dishonour of British journalism, has recently 
 sprung up in our midst, and which to parade its pretended 
 disquiet recoils from no misrepresentation or misquotation of 
 current Jewish thought, my own not excluded. Sir Charles 
 Bruce is not of this gang, nor would he be as deaf as the 
 Morning Post to all disproof. But he offers an historic sum- 
 mary which exceeds even the extravagances of the journalists 
 in its wiJdness and in its dangerous implications. 
 
 vn 
 
 " Under the operation of the cosmic law of action and 
 reaction," he writes, " the policy (i.e., Jewry's policy of destruc- 
 tion) was adopted in retaliation bv every community with which 
 
 178*
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 it came in conflict and which it menaced with destruction or 
 servitude. To quote the words of an illustrious member of 
 their race — 
 
 " ' The attempt to extirpate them has been made under the most 
 favourable auspices and on the largest scale; the most considerable 
 means that man could command have been pertinaciously applied to 
 this object for the longest period of recorded time. Egyptian Phar- 
 aohs, Assyrian Kings, Roman Emperors, Scandinavian Crusaders, 
 Gothic Princes and holy inquisitors have alike devoted their energies 
 to the fulfilment of this common purpose. Expatriation, exile, cap- 
 tivity, confiscation, torture on the most ingenious and massacres on 
 the most extensive scale, a curious system of degrading customs and 
 debasing laws which would have broken the heart of any other peo- 
 ple, have been tried in vain.' " 
 
 Instead of being shocked by this eloquent survey of Disraeli's, 
 Sir Charles Bruce regards all this as but " retaliation " and 
 gives us in fact an elaborate justification of Jewish Persecution 
 right through the ages, up till the day when what he calls " the 
 modern conscience," ceasing to react so crudely, substituted a 
 policy of " amalgamation " for that of " retaliation." Even 
 now — to judge from his language — it is only the reacting 
 force that has civilised itself, there is nothing of " modern con- 
 science " about the Jewish force. 
 
 As history the whole passage is deplorable. Had Sir Charles 
 Bruce confined the operation of his cosmic law of reaction to 
 the natives of Palestine during the centuries of Israel's struggle 
 and primacy, it would have been at least plausible. But to 
 picture the world reacting against Israel's design of extermina- 
 tion, its menace of " destruction and servitude," during the cen- 
 turies when Jewry lay broken and scattered, a helpless and dis- 
 armed minority, penned into Ghettos or Mellahs among the 
 warrior tribes of Christendom or Islam, is too patently absurd. 
 One must charitably suppose that our author means that perse- 
 cution was the traditional answer to the ancient aggressiveness 
 of Israel, and that the sins of the fathers were being visited on 
 the children to the thirtieth and fortieth generation. " Men- 
 aced with destruction or servitude " forsooth ! Never was there 
 a more spiritless people than this Rabbi-ridden folk, which 
 submitted its neck to the yoke, its garment to the badge, its 
 cheek to the smiter (Colaphisation the jurists called the ritual 
 box on the ear, which in some towns the leading Jews received 
 annually on Good Friday). For after the final revolt of Bar 
 
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 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 Cochba against the Romans early in the second century, the 
 Maccaba^an spirit shrank into a pious resignation. The Jewish 
 Exile was declared to be the will of God, which it was even 
 blasphemous to struggle against, and the Jews, in a strange and 
 unique congruity with the teachings of the prophet they 
 rejected, turned the other cheek to the smiter and left to Caesar 
 the things that were Caesar's, concentrating themselves in every 
 land of the exile upon industry, domesticity and a transmuted 
 religion, in which realities were desiccated into metaphors, and 
 the Temple sacrifices sublimated into prayers. 
 
 |_The absence of a territory of their own in which new national 
 history could be made forced them to cling to Zion in idea, and 
 so the religion which preserved them through the long dark 
 centuries of dispersion was saddled with their old territorial 
 traditions, preserving these equally in an indissoluble amalgam^ 
 Thus Palestine soil clung still about the roots of Judaism, ana 
 the old agricultural festivals continued to be observed at seasons 
 with which, in many lands of the exile, they had no natural con- 
 nection. The transplantation was effected only at the cost of 
 fossilisation. Even while the tribal traits had still the potential 
 fluidity of life, neither Greeks nor Romans could change this 
 tenacious race. Its dispersion from Palestine merely indurated 
 its traditions by freeing them from the possibility of common 
 development. The religious customs defended by Josephus 
 against Apion are still the rule of the majority. The last 
 national victory celebrated — that of Judas Maccabaeus — is 
 two thousand years old ; the last popular fast dates from the 
 first century of the Christian era. The Jew agonising in 
 Poland or the Ukraine rejoices automatically in his Passover of 
 Freedom, in his exodus from Egypt. Even new traits super- 
 imposed by their history upon fractions of the race are con- 
 served with equal persistency. The Jews expelled from Spain 
 in 1492 still retain a sub-loyalty to the King of Spain and 
 speak a Spanish idiom, printed in Hebrew characters, which 
 preserves in the Orient words vanished from the lips of actual 
 Spaniards and to be found only in Cervantes. But in this 
 palimpsest patriotism, the basal tradition was still Palestine. 
 The Rabbinic opportunism, to which I have already alluded, 
 while on the one hand keeping alive the hope that the legislation 
 and ritual of Palestine, however gross, would come back in God's 
 good time, went so far in the other direction as to adopt a 
 decision of the Babylonian Talmud — "His country's law is 
 Israel's law " as the dictator of the present. Everything in 
 
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 short — in this transitional period between the ancient glory 
 and the Messianic era to come — - was sacrificed to the ideal of 
 mere survival. The mediaeval teacher Maimonides laid it down 
 that to preserve life, even Judaism might be abandoned in all 
 but its holiest minimum. Thus, under the standing menace of 
 massacre and spoliation, arose Crypto-Jews or Marranos, who, 
 frequently at the risk of the stake or the sword, carried on their 
 Judaism in secret. Catholics in Spain and Portugal, Protes- 
 tants in England, they were in Egypt or Turkey Mohammedans. 
 Indeed, the Donmeh still flourish in Salonika and provide the 
 Young Turks with statesmen, the Balearic Islands still shelter 
 the Chuetas, and only half a century ago persecution produced 
 the Yedil-al-Islam in Central Asia. 1 Russia must be full of 
 Greek Christians who have remained Jewish at heart. A few 
 years before the war a number of Russian Jews, shut out from a 
 University career, and seeking the lesser apostacy, became 
 Mohammedans, only to find that for them the Trinity was the 
 sole avenue to educational and social salvation. 
 
 Where existence could be achieved legally, yet not without 
 social inferiority, a minor form of Crypto-Judaism was begot- 
 ten, which prevails to-day in most lands of Jewish emancipation, 
 among its symptoms being change of names, accentuated local 
 patriotism, accentuated abstention from Jewish affairs and 
 even anti-Semitism mimetically absorbed from the environment. 
 Indeed Marranoism, both in its major and minor forms, may 
 be regarded as an exemplification of the Darwinian theory of 
 protective colouring. This pervasive assimilating force acts 
 even upon the most faithful, undermining more subtly than 
 persecution the life-conceptions so tenaciously perpetuated. 
 
 Nor till the rise of Zionism was there anywhere in the Jewish 
 world any centripetal force to counteract these universal 
 tendencies to dissipation. The religion is shattered into as 
 many fragments as the race. After the fall of Jerusalem the 
 Academy of Jabneh carried on the authoritative tradition of 
 the Sanhedrin, and for over a thousand years Babylonia 
 through a Gaon or religious head and an Exilarch or Prince of 
 the Exile ruled with double sway the scattered scions of Israel. 
 
 In the later Middle Ages there was the Asefah or Synod to 
 unify Jews under Judaism. From the middle of the sixteenth 
 to the middle of the eighteenth century, the Waad or Council of 
 Four Lands legislated almost autonomously in those central 
 European regions where the mass of the Jews of the world was 
 i A similar phenomenon was produced still more recently in the Soudan. 
 
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 congregated. To-day there is no centre of authority, whether 
 religious or political. Even Zionism, judged by the " acid 
 test " of subscriptions, has never rallied more than a minority 
 of the race. Reform itself is infinitely individual, and little 
 remains outside a few great centres but a chaos of dissolving 
 views and dissolving communities, saved from disappearance by 
 persecution and racial sympathy. 
 
 The notion, with which I shall presently deal in detail, that 
 Jewish interests are Jesuitically federated or that Jewish finan- 
 ciers use their power for Jewish ends is one of the most ironic 
 of myths. No Jewish people or nation now exists, no Jews even 
 as sectarians of a specific faith with a specific centre of author- 
 itv such as Catholics or Weslcyans possess; nothing but a 
 multitude of individuals, a mob hopelessly amorphous, divided 
 alike in religion and political destiny. Whatever unification 
 the common work in or on Palestine may effect ultimately, there 
 is as yet no common platform from which the Jews can be 
 addressed, no common council to which any appeal can be 
 made. Their only unity is negative — ■ that unity imposed by 
 the hostile hereditary vision of the ubiquitous Hainan. They 
 live in symbiosis with every other people, each group surren- 
 dered to its own local fortunes. This habit of dispersed and 
 dependent existence has become second nature, and the Jews 
 were the first to doubt whether they could now form a polity of 
 their own. Like Aunt Judy in " John Bull's Other Island," 
 who declined to breakfast out of doors because the open air was 
 " not natural," the bulk of the Jewish leaders consider a Jewish 
 State a political perversion, and are only reconciling them 
 selves to the Palestine project because they have at last come 
 to understand it is but another form of serfdom and symbiosis. 
 There are no subjects more zealous for their adopted father- 
 lands: indeeed they are only too patriotic. There are no 
 Ottomans so Young-Turkish as the Turkish Jews, no Americans 
 so spread-eagle as the American Jews, no section of Britain so 
 Jingo as Anglo-Jewry, which even converts the Chanukkah 
 Celebration of Maccabsean valour into a British military fes- 
 tival. Before the war the French Jewry and the German 
 reproduced in miniature the Franco-German rivalries and tin- 
 latter even aped the aggressive WcltpoUtik. All this ultra- 
 patriotism is probably due to the fact that Jews feel consciously 
 what the other citizens lake as a matter of course; doubtless 
 too a certain measure of Marranoism or protective mimicry 
 enters into the ostentation. At any rate, each section of 
 
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 Jewry, wherever it is permitted entrance into the general life, 
 invariably evolves a somewhat over-coloured version of the life 
 in which it finds itself embedded, and fortunate must be 
 accounted the peoples which have at hand so gifted and service- 
 able a race, proud to wear their livery. 
 
 Yet for Sir Charles Bruce, Israel still lies glooming, like a 
 python about to spring and envelop the world in its monstrous 
 folds. His final word about the race, as he turns to other 
 aspects of his ethical theme, leaves us with the stock tableau of 
 the Jew in " dominant control over finance," with " a practical 
 ascendency over the press of Europe, and, through these com- 
 bined agencies, a large measure of control over the ultimate 
 issues of peace and war." 
 
 VIII 
 
 " Beyond all question the most formidable and the most 
 remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world," corrob- 
 orates Mr. Winston Churchill, writing in a Sunday paper. 
 Formidable? This disunited and pitiful horde, these homeless 
 wanderers, a hundred and fifty thousand of whom have just 
 been massacred in the Ukraine, these wretchedly poor and 
 sweated masses, formidable? To whom? To what? Un- 
 doubtedly they produce geniuses and plutocrats beyond their 
 due average. Although they constituted but one per cent, of 
 the German population, seven out of thirty-one " makers of 
 modern Germany " in that popular book, " Men Around the 
 Kaiser," were of their race. Owing to their super-normal 
 brain-power and energy, there is this disproportionate number 
 of Jews in every role on earth, especially those roles that are in 
 the limelight, even literally in the limelight. They seem almost 
 like "the fifth element " that Pope Boniface VII. called the 
 Florentines. But the bulk of these roles will be found of an 
 intermediary character — the Jew is occupied not in destroying 
 Christendom but in interlinking it, making it more essentially 
 Christian in fact. His gift of tongues, his relationship with 
 all the lands of the exile, mark him out for this function in its 
 various aspects of commerce and finance, journalism and crit- 
 icism, scholarship and travel, connoisseurship and art-dealing. 
 It was by their linguistic talents that the adventurous journeys 
 of Arminius Vambery, Aurel Stein, Sven Hedin and Emin Pasha 
 were made possible. If a Russian-American Jew, Berenson, is 
 the chief authority on Italian art, and Georg Brandes, the 
 
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 Dane, is Europe's greatest critic, if Reuter initiated telegraphic 
 news and Blowitz was the prince of foreign correspondents, if 
 Charles Frohman was the world's greatest entrepreneur and 
 Imre Kiralfy ran its exhibitions, all these phenomena find their 
 explanation in the cosmopolitanism of the Jewish intelligentsia. 
 For when the Jew grows out of his own Ghetto without narrow- 
 ing into his neighbour's, he must necessarily possess a superior 
 sense of perspective. Lifted to the plane of idealism, this cos- 
 mopolitan habit of mind creates Socialism through Karl Marx 
 and Lassalle, an international language through Dr. Zamenhof, 
 the inventor of Esperanto, a prophecy of the end of war 
 through Jean de Bloch, an International Institute of Agricul- 
 ture through David Lubin, and a Race Congress through Dr. 
 Felix Adler. . 
 
 Even where the Jew has contributed directly to the arts, it is 
 rarel} 7 in a specifically Jewish spirit, and the great mark he has 
 made on the stage may not uncharitably be attributed to that 
 same plasticity which produces his biological mimicry and 
 enables him to assimilate to all races without fusing in any. 
 The great comedian, says Diderot, in his well-known paradox on 
 the type, is a creature of intellect who is not carried away by 
 any of his assumptions. And so we find Rachel, the child of a 
 foreign pedlar in a Paris slum, enthralling the Faubourg St. 
 Germain and teaching it purity of diction. Sarah Bernhardt, 
 the daughter of Dutch Jews, carries the triumph of French 
 acting across the Atlantic. A Hungarian Jew, Ludwig 
 Barnay, played a leading role in the theatrical history of 
 German} 7 , and another, von Sonnenthal, in that of Austria. 
 For England we have Kean, and for America Booth, to name 
 only stars of the first magnitude, for the minor coruscations 
 are innumerable. Recently a Yiddish-speaking actor, Mosco- 
 vitch, who must fain study Shakespeare like a foreign classic, 
 held London spell-bound with his Shylock. Charlie Chaplin 
 heads the picture-world. And that there is now a Shakespeare 
 Day in England is due to the success of two Jewish scholars — 
 Sir Israel Gollancz and Sir Sidney Lee — in imposing their 
 own reverential consciousness upon this casual and illiterate 
 island. 
 
 In the other interpretative or intermediary arts we find 
 equally that Jews flourish out of all proportion to their num- 
 bers. They flood the concert-platforms — whether as con- 
 ductors, singers, or performers. Joachim and Rubinstein are 
 dead, but what a marvellous posse of living instrumentalists — 
 
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 Kreisler, Jascha Heifetz, Mischa Elman, Melsa, Zirabalist, 
 Mark Hambourg, Rosenthall, Moiseiwitch, Benham, Irene 
 Scharrer, Fannie Zeisler, et id genus omne, most of them infant 
 prodigies to boot! 
 
 The lack of Jewish initiative — on the heroic scale at least — 
 may be seen in the musicians (Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, Halevi, 
 Cowen, Salaman, Landon Ronald, etc.) though if Schonberg be 
 a Jew, he is certainly an exception to the melodiousness which 
 characterises this Jewish music and which finds its gayest 
 expression in the light operas of Offenbach, Goldmark, Oscar 
 Straus, Leoncavallo and Sullivan. There is little of the con- 
 quering or even the agonising Jew in these shallow rivulets. 
 Nor is there anything epoch-making in the Jewish contribution 
 to painting, admirable and innumerable as are the Jewish artists 
 from Josef Israels to Max Lieberman and Klinger, and copi- 
 ously as they are represented in every gallery and movement, 
 ranging in England for example from the Academy with that 
 master-craftsman, Solomon J. Solomon, to the wilder haunts of 
 Gertler, or the half-way houses of Wolmark and Rothenstein. 
 There is surely nothing Jewish in the one Nobel artist-prizeman, 
 Leo Bakst. On the contrary, what the success of the Jewish 
 artists indicates is the rapidity with which the racial tabu of 
 living form has been outlived, and the Gentile point of view 
 assimilated, and this is especially remarkable in the forbidden 
 realm of sculpture in which Antokolsky reached world-fame 
 and to which Epstein, though far from expressing Semitic sub- 
 limity, is making one of the Jew's few creative contributions. 
 
 In the writing of plays and novels the same psychological 
 mobility that produces the actor is turned on the creation of 
 character. Jewish dramatists are in evidence in every country. 
 To speak only of to-day, London has its Sutro, New York its 
 Belasco, Paris its Bernstein, Berlin its Fulda, Vienna its 
 Schnitzler, Holland its Heijermans, Hungary its Lengyel, Italy 
 its Benelli. But only two have concerned themselves with 
 Jewish life, and of these Bernstein is ignorant and Heijermans 
 antipathetic. In other branches of literature it is the same 
 story. In France, for example, where a Catulle Mendes, or an 
 Armand Silvestre, with their set gaulois, have been indistinguish- 
 able from the Christian boulevardier, only now are real Jewish 
 poets appearing like Andre Spire or real Jewish novelists like 
 Jean Richard Bloch. If there is any other great Jewish 
 novelist in the rest of Europe, and I believe there is either a 
 Dutch or a Scandinavian, I am at least sure he is not concerned 
 
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 with the interpretation of the Jew, or the Jewish spirit. 
 Neither is Ronetti Roman, who seems to be the greatest poet 
 Rumania has produced. Carducci was as definitely Italian. 
 This absence of Jewish colouring cannot be alleged of the 
 greatest creative name in modern Jewish literature — Heine. 
 Nevertheless even he conceived of himself as an intermediary, 
 whose primary role was to interpret France and Germany to 
 each other. 
 
 Jews have indeed — even to the un jaundiced eye — been 
 playing no inconsiderable part in world-affairs, whether we look 
 to the financiers, the Rothschilds, Cassels, Schiffs, Speyers, and 
 Barnatos, or to the journalists (Maximilian Harden, Benedikt, 
 " Pertinax," Sir Sidney Low, Lord Burnham, etc.), or to the 
 politicians (Lord Reading, Edwin Montagu, Klotz, Kurt 
 Eisner, Trotsky, Luzzatto, etc.), but with the exception of 
 Schiff, who refused to finance the Russia of the Czar, can any 
 one trace in their activities even as much subconscious Jewish 
 sympathy as influenced Beaconsfield ? Can any one imagine 
 Clemenceau's Jewish secretary, Mandel, jogging his master's 
 elbow at the Peace Conference in favour of a Hebrew Palestine? 
 As little as one can imagine Sir John Monash marching to 
 Jerusalem — unless ordered by Foch — or the great Jewish 
 chess-champions sacrificing their bishops in some obscure anti- 
 Christian spasm. 
 
 It is in fact in the impersonal and international spheres of 
 science, philosophy and scholarship that, the race of Spinoza 
 has won its greatest, triumphs since it emerged from the Ghetto. 
 Here the record is overwhelming. At least five of the Nobel 
 prizes for Science have already been awarded to Jews: Albert 
 Michelson (optics), Gabriel Lippmann (colour photography), 
 Henri Moissan (chemistry), Dr. Barony (otology), Wilstatter 
 (chlorophyll). In a race that for eighteen centuries has been 
 bent over its books, parasitic on the past, this genius for 
 observation is staggering, till one recalls Leviticus and the 
 practical priestly supplement to the prophetic ethics. Among 
 many other outstanding contributors to Scienee may be men- 
 tioned Heinrich Herz (electro-magnetic waves, wireless teleg- 
 raphy), Meldola (coal-tar dyes), Hcrtha Ayrton (electric 
 arc), J. F. Cohn (bacteriology), Jacques Loeb (partheno- 
 genesis)] Mendeleeff (the periodic law), Lombroso (crimi- 
 nology), Freud and Jung ( psychology), Einstein (physics, new 
 theory of Space). It is no wonder thai the Presidency of our 
 Roval Society has fallen to a Jew. 
 
 186
 
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 As a physician the Jew's fame dates from Saracenic Spain, 
 when he was the bearer of Arabian science, and the tradition 
 that kings shall always have Jewish physicians is still unbroken. 
 Dr. Ehrlich's recent discovery of " 606," the cure for syphilis, 
 Dr. Haffkine's inoculation against the plague in India, and the 
 researches of Dr. Simon Flexner, of the Rockefeller Institute, 
 are but links in the long chain of Jewish contributions to the 
 peculiarly international sphere of medicine ; while Max Nordau, 
 an epitome of every Jewish talent, is also, like Maimonides and 
 so many other Jewish thinkers, a practising physician. 
 
 Nor are the contributions to the more humanistic sciences 
 less amazing. The names of Benfey (Sanscrit), Jules Oppert 
 (Assyriology), Sylvester and Georg Cantor (mathematics), 
 Breal (semantics), Salomon Reinach (universal scholarship), 
 Asser (juristics), Hermann Cohen and Bergson (philosophy) 
 may suffice as examples. 
 
 If the legend of the Conquering Jew meant his emergence 
 from " that curious system of degrading customs and debasing 
 laws " not merely not broken-hearted but able to pour forth 
 streams of courageous vitality on every field of life and thought, 
 " a blessing to all the families of the earth," then the legend 
 would be true indeed. But I can readily understand that the 
 Gentile, seeing himself surrounded or even swamped on every 
 hand by famous Jewish figures, should imagine a menacing cohe- 
 sion, when there is no more solidarity among the celebrities than 
 among those at Madame Tussaud's. And what fosters the 
 great Jewish legend of ubiquity and omnipotence still further 
 is the attribution of Jewishness to every notoriety of any 
 traceable streak of Jewish blood: a method of classification 
 which, in the case of a people scattered for two thousand years 
 among every other in Europe, and intermarrying with all, 
 cannot fail to justify Lowell's maxim: Cherchez le juif. And 
 le juif may be sought with peculiar facility in countries like 
 Spain and Portugal, whence, as we have seen, expulsions en 
 masse could no more drive him out than Nature could be driven 
 out with a pitchfork, or in those intolerant regions of the East 
 or West where he has been absorbed by Christianity or Islam, 
 sometimes after an interval of Marranoism, or pseudo-con- 
 version. And according to the theories of Mendelism, there is 
 no reason why among the many throws of the dice of ancestry 
 an individual of mixed descent should not suddenly incarnate a 
 preponderance of the qualities of a single strain. Thus a 
 Jewish soul may appear and energise in some powerful figure 
 
 187
 
 THE VOICE OP JERUSALEM 
 
 of Christendom. Sometimes the Christianity of the figure is 
 merely supposititious. Even as I write, a book is published 
 revealing that John Zoffany, the British Royal Academician, 
 the delineator of English life, who painted Garrick and Dr. 
 Johnson, was by origin a Bohemian Jew — a fact utterly un- 
 known to the Jewish Encyclopedia. The Church could not 
 even write its own history : that was left for the Jew, Neander 
 (David Mendel). One wonders what the tale would be both for 
 yesterday and to-day if every Jew wore a yellow badge and 
 every crypto-Jew came into the open, and every half-Jew were 
 as discoverable as the author of " Caste," or the composer of 
 " The Mikado." To the Gentile the true Jewish problem 
 should rather be how to keep the Jew in his midst — this rare 
 one per cent, of mankind. The elimination of all this genius 
 and geniality would surely not enhance the gaiety of nations. 
 Without Disraeli would not England lose her only Saint's Day? 
 
 No wonder Mr. Daniels, the secretary of the American 
 Navy, speaking at a Zionist gathering in the States, humor- 
 ously threatened to bar the departure of American Jews for 
 Palestine with a ten-inch gun. 
 
 But the miracle remains that the Gentile world has never yet 
 seen a Jew, for behind all these cosmopolitan types which obsess 
 its vision stand inexhaustible reserves of Jewish Jews — and 
 the Talmudic mystic, the Hebrew-speaking sage, remains as 
 unknown to the Western world as though he were hidden in the 
 fastnesses of Tibet. A series of great scholars — Geiger, Zunz, 
 Steinschneider, Schechter — has studied the immense Hebrew 
 literature produced from age to age in these obscure Jewries. 
 But there is a modern Hebrew literature, too, a new galaxy of 
 poets and novelists, philosophers and humanists, who express in 
 the ancient tongue the subtlest shades of the thought of to-day. 
 And there is a still more copious literature in Yiddish, no less 
 rich in men of talent and even genius, whose names have rarely 
 reached the outside world. 
 
 But never and nowhere in all that specifically Jewish litera- 
 ture will be found the faintest scintilla of any design, expecta- 
 tion, or desire to subjugate the world. 
 
 IX 
 
 And if a leisured and conscientious thinker of Sir Charles 
 Brace's calibre and fine temper goes so grotesquely astray, what 
 should be expected of the popular journalists, whose very pro- 
 
 188
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 fession is to be in a hurry, to write and not to read, and to 
 spoon-feed the mob with its own prejudices? In the days when 
 the world resounded with denunciations and commendations of 
 Bolshevism, and an official fog lay heavy over Russia, there came 
 to me out of the mist the diary of a British lady who had lived 
 in an obscure town through the thick of the Red Revolution. 
 Unconscious of the fierce debate that was about to rage in the 
 rest of the world over its theories or its doings, she had re- 
 corded the petty happenings of day to day, with the dulness 
 of a Defoe and with the same cumulative convincingness. 
 There was just the dash of blood to show that the general run 
 was small beer. It seemed to me infinitely precious not only 
 for history, but for current politics, and I perused it eagerly. 
 But on submitting it, at her request, to an experienced literary 
 agent, I learnt that in Iris apprehension " editors would feel that 
 very few of their readers would be sufficiently interested to 
 read more than a few lines," and that " what the papers are 
 really looking out for is something that they can make a great 
 splash about and that will have advertising value for them " — ■ 
 something presumably like that description in The Times of the 
 atrocities perpetrated by the Jewish Commissaries — horrors 
 outdoing the ghastliest imagining of a Poe but vouched for by 
 " Miss Inigo Jones," a lady who, the moment I questioned her 
 bona fides or her sanity, " softly and suddenly vanished away " 
 like the boojum. 
 
 Populus vult decipi, decipiatwr. Corrupted, or perhaps only 
 expressed, by the cinema, it cannot away with plain truth, it 
 has no interest in ascertaining it, and if nothing sufficiently 
 flamboyant exists, it must be invented. 
 
 That is, perhaps, explanation enough of the lurid figure cut 
 by the Jew in the popular imagination which, whether about him 
 or anything else, can think only in terms of melodrama. And 
 yet something peculiarly fabular seems to attach to all treat- 
 ment of the Hebrew. It is perhaps some dim response in the 
 mob to the real romance of his survival, of that indestructible 
 potency in the teeth of all the efforts recapitulated in Sir 
 Charles Bruce's quotation from Disraeli. 
 
 In a curious play called " Es Geht Weiter," produced with 
 success in Vienna in 1919, a knighted Jew from America ( !) who 
 combines the multiple newspaper proprietorship of a North- 
 cliffe with the territorial ambitions of a Cecil Rhodes, the finan- 
 cial operations of a Rothschild and the philanthropic projects 
 of a General Booth, turns — in the Epilogue after he has ruined 
 
 189
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 Rome — from a street newsvendor crying the bankruptcy of 
 his own schemes into a gigantic figure dominating the land- 
 scape, and passes on — The Wandering Jew — to fresh incar- 
 nations of catastrophic omnipotence. 
 
 Nothing in fact is — to believe the anti-Semite — too colossal 
 for the Jew to have achieved. He has at once made the world- 
 war and pulled the strings of the peace-traps. And similarly 
 nothing is too small. Vide for example the warning given to 
 the world last year by Dr. Hallinan, Bishop of Limerick, as to 
 the true inwardness of the latest feminine fashions. " The new 
 modes," wrote the learned Bishop, " are designed not by women 
 but by men — Parisians, Jews and Freemasons — seeking to 
 uproot Christianity by these dangerous and indecent dresses." 
 It was Jews who murdered the Czar, an accusation actually 
 incorporated in the British White Book, and still exploited by 
 The Times and the reactionary Russians, despite that even the 
 Minister of Justice under Koltchak's Government has certified 
 " that, among the number of persons proved by the data of the 
 preliminary enquiry to have been guilty of the assassination of 
 the late Emperor Nicholas II. and his family, there was not any 
 person of Jewish descent." Of course the Jews ruined Ger- 
 many, both by overturning the Kaiser and through the Kaiser 
 himself being a Jew. Mr. Chesterton, writing of the Irish, 
 caustically remarks that, having for centuries been accused of 
 religious fanaticism, the} 7 cannot now be indicted for its anti- 
 thesis. Yet in Mr. Chesterton's own organ, The New Witness, 
 the most paradoxical accusations against the Jew find Christian 
 hospitality. And for the world at large, although it is as the 
 capitalist that the Jew has been abused throughout the ages, 
 there has been no difficulty in shifting the count to that of 
 Bolshevism the moment a more malodorous bogey appeared on 
 the scene. Shylock is now a Socialist, rabid to destroy all 
 property, including his own. And it is only the other day that 
 he was a venomous pro-German, a supporter of monarchistic 
 militarism and Hun atrocities. 
 
 The taste for thrills and the Satanic is not limited to the 
 malevolent and the vulgar. It victimises even the benevolent 
 and the intelligentsia. Thus we find in Clemenceau's account of 
 the Jews of Busk in his recently published volume, " Au Pied Du 
 Sinai," the observation : " The Semite, so abhorred, has set 
 out to conquer the world into which the dispersion of conquest 
 threw him. Despised, hated, persecuted, for having imposed 
 on us Gods of his blood, he has wished to find compensation and 
 
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 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 culmination in the domination of the earth. For that unheard- 
 of task, no pain was spared, no suffering too great, no torture 
 counted, no revenge was disdained. There is no more aston- 
 ishing history." 
 
 There is not, indeed. Clemenceau, who speaks thus, appears 
 in his book as a not ungenial Voltairean. What are we to 
 expect of the orthodox mind? It is not too much to say that 
 after centuries of scholarship and criticism, the deposit left in 
 most Gentile brains from their nursery period remains as crude 
 and childish as ever. That the Old Testament preaches a 
 blood and iron Jehovah and the dominance of His one chosen 
 people, but that, though every word of it is true, it nevertheless 
 leads up to and was replaced by a New Testament, with quite 
 opposite teachings and a God of universal love, who even 
 offered Himself (or His Son, for the identities are somewhat 
 confused) as atonement for the sins of mankind, that this God 
 was crucified by the Jews, and that they were ever afterwards 
 eternally cursed for enabling the scheme of salvation to go 
 through, and providentially preserved in a quaint mixture of 
 obloquy and opulence as a witness to its truth — such is the 
 farrago which still constitutes the average thought of Europe. 
 Living and moving and having their being in such a conceptual 
 chaos, and devoid of all critical power or historical discern- 
 ment, it is no wonder that the masses remain exposed to the 
 wildest delusions on all other subjects, and a perpetual prey 
 to political adventurers. The worst of it is that this farrago 
 is only the travesty of great tragic historic and cosmic truths, 
 and that even this caricature could have been pragmatically 
 beneficial, had it been seized and clung to in its moral aspects as 
 whole-heartedly as in its mystic and melodramatic, and not sur- 
 rendered at the very moment when it could have been valuable. 
 
 Even the Blood Accusation — an obvious refraction of the 
 Crucifixion story — persists in the fuscous mentality of the 
 European masses, and reaps its toll of Jewish corpses when- 
 ever — especially at Easter — a Christian child is missing or is 
 kidnapped ad hoc by the pogrom-confectors. Presumably the 
 unfortunate coincidence of Passover and its curious rites with 
 Easter — the period when the peasant-brain is full of the Cru- 
 cifixion — supplies the latent hate and distrust with a specious 
 framework. There is a pregnant story in Shalom Aleichem's 
 
 191
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 book, " Jewish Children," of how a Jewish and Christian child, 
 who have gone off in loving companionship to revel for long 
 hours in the spring-tide wood together, return to find a dreadful 
 relief in the village Jewry and a shame-faced sullenness among 
 the Greek-Church peasantry gathered menacingly round the 
 Jewish house. 
 
 Almost the exact situation is reported in Tlie Jewish Chron- 
 icle of April 16, 1920: 
 
 " The disappearance of three Christian boys at Pizdri, near Kal- 
 ish (Poland), led to a blood accusation panic in the townlet. De- 
 spite the protests of the Rabbi, who declared that the Jews did not 
 require Christian blood for Passover, the Synagogues and the resi- 
 dences of the Rabbi, Reader, and Beadle, and a few Jewish notables 
 were searched. In the meantime a large crowd gathered in the 
 streets and threatened to massacre Jews. When the excitement was 
 at its height the missing boys returned from the neighbouring vil- 
 lage, Toporova, and the mob dispersed." The same item adds that 
 " a blood libel trial will soon take place at Rowno (a town in 
 Ukraine occupied by Polish troops). A Jewess, Golda Giternian, is 
 accused by the mother of a missing Christian girl of having killed 
 her daughter for ritual purposes. The origin of the charge is a 
 statement by a fortune-teller, who pointed to the widow Giterman 
 as the author of a ritual crime. The police are favourably inclined 
 towards the blood libel theory." 
 
 Last June a Greek girl in the service of a Jewish merchant at 
 Constantinople disappeared, and even a blood-stained handker- 
 chief of hers was unearthed. Fortunately her employer found 
 her on board a steamer about to sail and brought her back, 
 much to the disconcertment of the mob rioting round his house. 
 Even in Palestine the ancient accusation has been attempted for 
 political purposes. In the middle of March, 1920, murdered 
 Arabs were found in cellars in the Jewish Colonies, and Chris- 
 tian Arabs set up the cry of ritual murder. Fortunately the 
 real murderers were found by the police before the massacres 
 could start. This, of course, did not prevent the massacres 
 later on, though another pretext had to be found. 
 
 In his Polish Report, Captain Peter Wright says : 
 
 " There is a general belief among all classes of Poles that the 
 Jews practise ritual murder; for this there exists not the slightest 
 evidence. It is a myth and an improbable myth. For orthodox 
 Judaism is not a religion of mysterious rites, less so indeed than 
 Christianity, but a highly positive, defined, legal religion. But I 
 think this myth, strongly and widely believed as it is, is the reflec- 
 
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 tion that this antique and oriental religion casts in the minds of 
 ordinary men." 
 
 It is not Judaism that is responsible for the reflection, but 
 the distorting mirror of the Polish mind. 1 And if " all classes 
 of Poles " refract truth so atrociously, it is not astonishing to 
 read that a mob at Cracow recently stormed a hospital to see 
 the Jewish girl of ten and the devil adorned with horns and tail 
 to which she had just given birth ! Some peasants thought 
 Christ had just been killed ! 
 
 Over a quarter of a century ago the first edition of a Hamp- 
 stead Jewish Bazaar Book contained a facetious line in the 
 smallest of print advertising for a Christian boy. It was 
 thought that the myth was so hopelessly mediaeval, having made 
 no appearance in England since the Hugh of Lincoln legend in 
 1255, and surviving in English literature only in Chaucer's 
 " Prioress's Tale," published a century later, that the Jews 
 could now afford to laugh at it. More prudent heads insisted 
 that the whole edition must be cancelled. And, we have just 
 seen, they were absolutely right. As Oscar Wilde said to me 
 once: "Stupidity will never die." This mock advertisement 
 would have been hailed as the long-desired avowal of the abom- 
 inable practice, and translated into every European language, 
 and in Ghettos of Eastern Europe unknown even by name to the 
 mass of cultured mankind, thousands would have agonised and 
 died for the jest. The Beilis case, in which the whole pomp and 
 apparatus of Russian law was brought to bear in proof of this 
 very accusation, is fresh in all our memories, and that was 
 twenty years later than the penning of this mock advertise- 
 ment. Nor is this credulity merely the mentality of the masses. 
 A suspicion that the Blood Accusation may be true after all 
 lurks — like the suspicion of Jewish world-designs — in the 
 most enlightened breasts. Even my friend Sir James Frazer, 
 in his monumental work " The Golden Bough," permits himself 
 the conjecture, partly due to the artist-scholar's delight in all 
 such uncanny rites, that there may have been some smoke 
 behind all this fire. And in a volume on Thomas of Monmouth's 
 " Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich," published by 
 the University of Cambridge, edited by that delightful Canon 
 Jessopp, D.D., and Montague Rhodes James, Litt.D., Director 
 of the Fitzwilliam Museum, these learned and sympathetic 
 
 1 The papers Wiarus and Illttstracya have published pictures of Jewish 
 ritual murder! 
 
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 writers could not forgo an analogous allusion to the possibility 
 of the sainted boy-martyr, William, having actually been killed 
 by a Jew, and not accidentally but for ritual intent. "We 
 have to take into account," they say, " the possibilities of what 
 a mad hatred of a dominant system, or a reversion to half- 
 forgotten practices of a darker age, might effect in the case of 
 an ignorant Jew seven centuries back." And this in face of the 
 knowledge they exhibit that similar accusations were made 
 against Christians by Greeks and Romans, against heretical 
 sects by Christians, against the Knights Templars by their con- 
 temporaries, and even in our own day against Christian mis- 
 sionaries by the Chinese; in the face of their knowledge that 
 the cult of boy-martyrs brought large profits to the shrines, and 
 that all these slanders against the Jews were the deliberate en- 
 gines to bring about their expulsion from England, as the slan- 
 ders against the Templars were invented to prelude the pillag- 
 ing of their wealth, and as the case against the monasteries was 
 heavily blackened to facilitate their confiscation. 
 
 Wo have had such grandiose lessons in public lying nowadays 
 — propaganda the wise it call — that we can appreciate bet- 
 ter than any preceding generation that boundless credulity of 
 the mass mind which supplies the soil for any desirable legend. 
 Indeed our psychologists have long since explained to us that 
 belief is the automatic result of any vivid impression, not con- 
 tradicted at the moment by anything else. And where contra- 
 diction is unpopular, or even treasonable, whence shall it be 
 supplied? Euclid thought that when he had said "Which is 
 absurd," he had settled the matter; but the absurdity of a thing 
 is no bar to belief in it. Did not, indeed, Tertullian say: 
 " Certum est quia impossibile est"? It is not for the fact be- 
 hind the myth that one should look, but to the brain behind it. 
 When the Spectator — which is now as foolishly perturbed over 
 the legend of the Conquering Jew — many years ago challenged 
 me to explain the secular persistence of the Blood Accusation 
 if there was nothing at all in it, I replied that I was not an au- 
 thority on Christum psychology. 
 
 Sir Thomas Browne in fact got hold of the right end of the 
 stick when he prefaced his " Enquiries into Vulgar and Common 
 Errors " by remarking that " The First and Father-cause of 
 common Error, is, The Common infirmity of Humane Nature," 
 by attributing the second cause to " the erroneous disposition 
 of the people," and specifying this union of unintelligence and 
 bad will in the particular forms of " misapprehension, fallacy, 
 
 194
 
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 credulity, infirmity, adherence unto Antiquity, Tradition and 
 Authority." As Mr. Joseph Jacobs puts it luminously in his 
 " Jewish Contributions to Civilisation," the belief in the badness 
 of the Jews can vanish only like the belief in witches. 
 
 It behoves anthropologists to be very sure of their ground 
 before speculating on " half-forgotten practices of a darker 
 age." There are no half-forgotten practices. Judaism has 
 only too good a memory. It carried forward in its Talmud 
 every obiter dictum of ancient Rabbinism, every triviality of 
 ancient ritual. Of all the accusations against the Jews this is 
 the only one of which it may be said with absolute certainty 
 that it has not the minutest shred of justification. Yet babes 
 unborn in Ghettos still uncreated are not improbably destined 
 to be torn to pieces on account of it. 
 
 XI 
 
 But the Blood Accusation has become too grotesque for the 
 more cultured anti-Semites of Western lands ; religious perse- 
 cution, too, is out of date: hence the necessity for a more mod- 
 ern legend of world-conquest which can be speciously rooted in 
 the old Biblical texts, and connected with the newest political 
 movement. To the semi-suppressed Juda?ophobia of the years 
 of peace, the liberating jingoisms of the war provided a hell- 
 born opportunity and the pretext of Bolshevism has proved a 
 Devil-send. 
 
 For Judasophobia, on a well-known Freudian principle, has 
 to find reasons for the hate that is in it ; and " Christian psy- 
 chology," to which I referred the Spectator, is steeped in that 
 mistrust and repugnance which German professors have tried to 
 generalise and disguise as " Anti-Semitism." Under Jesuit ed- 
 ucation in especial the young Christian mind is often systemat- 
 ically poisoned. Witness the favourite children's book " Fleurs 
 de l'Histoire," with its teaching that the Jew is compact of 
 " treason, roguery and lies." 
 
 Sometimes, indeed, Anti-Semitism produces the very defects 
 of Jewish character which it professes to chastise — your true 
 vicious circle. It is saddening to say — after the honest efforts 
 of noble-minded Christians to give the Jew the favour of a fair 
 field — that there is no country in the world in which it is not 
 a disadvantage to be a Jew. Max Nordau exaggerates but lit- 
 tle in asserting that a Jew must be three times as clever as any 
 other man to win equal success in the battle of life. " Justice 
 
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 for the Jew " has never yet been the spontaneous instinct of the 
 masses or even of the classes. The nations have been hurried 
 by wise legislators into codified compassion and formulated fair- 
 dealing, but even their own laws have not completed their educa- 
 tion. " Liberty, Equality and Fraternity " have never been 
 more than a glow at the heart of the great and a formula on 
 the lips of the little. Even in the universities of Europe — 
 where, if anywhere, sweetness and light should rule — the most 
 brilliant Jew lias always been subtly and insidiously handi- 
 capped in the competition for fellowships and professorships. 
 To-day in Germany, Austria and Hungary the Jew's complete 
 exclusion, even Einstein's, is menacingly demanded. While the 
 Jew is not free from social prejudice even in England and the 
 United States, in most other countries he lives in the shadow of 
 a volcano, whose eruptions are irregular but inevitable. And 
 like many other diseases, anti-Semitism is epidemic ; it flies — 
 and with no fear of quarantine — from one country to another. 
 Thus Sweden, which in the eighteenth century sagaciously in- 
 vited Jews to come in and help it to prosper, has caught the 
 general German complaint. 
 
 Whence this persistent hostility to the Jew? Can we really 
 trace it to the factor propounded by Nietzsche or Clemenceau? 
 But — and the evidence has been collected by Mr. Max Radin 
 — it is found in the old Roman writers who had not yet heard 
 of the obscure incident which, according to Anatole France, 
 Pontius Pilate had forgotten. It is true Judaism had prose- 
 lytised with considerable success in the classical world, and this 
 propagandist activity evoked the satire of Horace and Juvenal, 
 and the alarm of Strabo and Seneca. Hecataeus of Abdera, a 
 Greek living in Egypt, described the Mosaic way of living as 
 " inhospitable and inhuman," and shortly after, Manetho, an 
 Egyptian priest, became so libellous on the subject of Jews that 
 a century or two later Josephus took occasion to answer him in 
 the course of his reply to the still more abusive Apion. 
 
 When Cicero defended Flaccus, ex-governor of Asia, against 
 the charge, inter alia, of appropriating the shekels collected by 
 provincial Jews for Jerusalem, the great advocate complained 
 of the crowd of Jews in the court, and took occasion to contrast 
 their rites and customs contemptuously with those of Rome. 
 We see, therefore, that Judrcophobia has its roots in appre- 
 hension of alien power, especially power attached to a somewhat 
 mysterious religion, as well as in the tyranny of majorities and 
 the universal dislike for the unlike. After all, a race that keeps 
 
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 mainly to itself, that counts by a different calendar, and cele- 
 brates a different series of festivals, is, when it lodges itself in 
 other political organisms, a quasi-foreign body, and human na- 
 ture being what it is, every field in which the Jew has thus estab- 
 lished himself becomes a battlefield, with persecution as the 
 equivalent for the fighting which is for every other people the 
 price of self-maintenance. 
 
 Viewed thus philosophically, Anti-Semitism takes its place in 
 the general order, though the fact remains that the struggle by 
 which Israel pays for survival must be supplemented by the 
 fighting incumbent upon him for the continuance of each and 
 every Gentile people with which he lives in symbiosis. As, 
 however, he is nowhere able to express his own entity as com- 
 pletely as a Gentile people, he appears to get an inferior article 
 at double price. The only compensation is the diminished risk 
 of extinction that comes from being everywhere, for, as the 
 biologists tell us, the more widely disseminated a species, the 
 greater the chance of survival. The Jew can always move from 
 an unsafe environment to a relatively safe, though this advan- 
 tage is lessening with the progress of steam, petrol and elec- 
 tricity, since the world begins to wear everywhere the same face 
 — and that not so unlike the face of barbarism as these tri- 
 umphs of civilisation might suggest. In so far as this antag- 
 onism to the Jew is most prevalent in Christian countries, it 
 may be regarded as an aspect of that secular resistance of the 
 West to invasion from the East, which culminated in the ex- 
 pulsion of the Moors from Spain, possibly even it is a subtle 
 continuance of the Punic Wars ; in part the Gentile aspect of 
 it is doubtless a survival from the Dark Ages, still fomented by 
 the Christian prayer-book and still nourished by the dictionary 
 with its verb " to Jew " (as a synonym for Christian chousing). 
 There is even a certain physical repugnance to the Jewish type. 
 And, indeed, coarsened sometimes by Moorish blood, high-liv- 
 ing, lack of exercise, or the intermarriage of uncouth money- 
 bags, it can be unlovely enough. And there are here and there 
 psychical expressions, equally forbidding, not least the frequent 
 concealment of Jewish origin. The prosperous Jew who has 
 shaken off the culture of the Ghetto and not yet taken on mod- 
 ern culture is one of the most disagreeable types our planet has 
 produced; while Pharisaism, though a noble religion, is pecul- 
 iarly liable to those perversions against which Jesus fulminated 
 with so unchristian but so human a wrath. No scientific study 
 of anti-Semitism can leave out these real factors, however small 
 
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 their percentage in the compound, which owes must of its sub- 
 stance to commercial competition, industrial jealousy and the 
 pure joy of malice. 
 
 Instead of regarding its Jews as a part of the nation and 
 their wealth as part of the national wealth, every nation regards 
 them as aliens and invasive and triumphant rivals. As if a 
 country were a huge gambling den in which the gains of some 
 of the inhabitants necessarily meant the loss of all the others ! 
 Even in America — that conglomerate of peoples — this dis- 
 torted view has been imported by its European constituents. 
 
 " It is for his virtues, not his vices, that the Jew is hated," 
 maintained Dr. Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. He con- 
 founded, perhaps, " struggle- for-life " virtues with real moral 
 virtues. Yet of a sooth the same energy and push and busi- 
 ness instinct which are lauded in the Anglo-Saxon, the Scots- 
 man, or the American, are set to the bad in the Jew's account. 
 " The poor Jew's virtues," complains Harold Frederic, a sym- 
 pathetic observer, " are negative and unlovable." The Jew is 
 too meek and sober. The world prefers dash and fisticuff's. In 
 short, the Jew is too Christian. 
 
 Burke pointed out that you cannot draw an indictment 
 against a whole people. If you are to generalise from the indi- 
 vidual, there is no crime of which the Jewish people cannot be 
 made guilty ; though the obverse ascription of every political 
 virtue is strangely neglected. The Jew is contrasted not with 
 his actual neighbours in his particular social stratum, but with 
 an idealised Englishman, Frenchman, Teuton, etc. While the 
 Gentile sees his own people perpendicularly in descending 
 grades of character and wealth, he is apt to see the Jewish peo- 
 ple horizontally. It is as if one should draw one's notion of all 
 Englishmen from Lord Robert Cecil or Crippen. Fagin, in 
 " Oliver Twist," is the Jew. But what Jew ever supposed that 
 Bill Sikes was the Englishman? Long before Burke, Sir 
 Thomas Browne, refuting " the popular tenent that Jews 
 stink," pointed out that it is " a dangerous point to annex a 
 constant property unto any nation." Graetz, the Jewish his- 
 torian, ascribed to his people polarity, or the quality of produc- 
 ing mutually opposite phenomena. But in truth this quality 
 belongs to all peoples. Each carries in its bosom contending 
 forces, as the party system alone suffices to prove. Burke's 
 warning should have been enlarged into Sir Thomas Browne's. 
 You cannot predicate anything at all, whether good or bad, 
 that will cover a whole people. There will always be individual 
 
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 exceptions. Our crude generalisations about Prussia doubt- 
 less did injustice to a large number of excellent Prussian paci- 
 fists. A neutral who strayed into the artistic cafe of Berlin in 
 the middle of the war told me the " Bohemians " were hoping 
 Germany would lose the war in order to gain her own soul. 
 It is only journalists and politicians who can put into phe- 
 nomena a simplicity which is not there. 
 
 If, then, one cannot make all-inclusive statements about any 
 people, how must this impossibility be accentuated with a peo- 
 ple like the Jews, who have not even a territorial unity, but are 
 in a hundred fragments, each exposed to a different political en- 
 vironment ! It is true each race does tend to yield its peculiar 
 spiritual fruits, despite varying mHieucc; one can express a peo- 
 ple by its dominant tendency, as well as, though that seems par- 
 adoxical, by the achievements of its minority. Just as a book 
 ranks according to its best passages, as also by its general 
 level, so with a people. It receives legitimately the prestige of 
 its most brilliant sons, and is gauged likewise by its average. 
 The range of a people is, however, considerably wider than that 
 of a book, which, if by a respectable writer, is hardly likely to 
 sink anywhere into imbecility or indecency, whereas it is almost a 
 Galtonian law that an excessive deviation to the right of a peo- 
 ple's norm is paid for by an equal deviation to the left. 
 
 It may well be therefore that Jewry, so excessive in its gifts 
 and misfortunes, presents extremes equally obnoxious to Gentile 
 criticism, that the exasperating poverty of its masses is bal- 
 anced by the vexatious opulence of its plutocrats, that the un- 
 couth unworldliness of its scholars is adjusted by the over- 
 shrewdness of its commercial classes and the elegance of its par- 
 venu hostesses, that its renegades are as vulgar as its Rabbis 
 are reactionary, that the multitude of its materialists is aggra- 
 vated by the zealotry of its fanatics, and that its tendency to 
 form a nation within a nation is as unpatriotic as the cosmopol- 
 itan outlook it contributes to the Cabinets. But perhaps the 
 deepest reason of anti-Semitism is simply that the word " Jew " 
 exists. Nothing gratifies the mob more than to get a simple 
 name to account for a complex phenomenon, and the word 
 " Jew " is always at hand to explain the never-absent maladies 
 of the body politic ; a word, moreover, admirably surcharged 
 with historic hatred, bigotry and repugnance. The countless 
 noble Jews in every age and clime do not seem able to reach 
 down to the popular consciousness. Barney Barnato is a 
 proverb, while the Baroness de Hirsch passes away practically 
 
 199
 
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 unnoticed. The exhaustless munificence and impeccable finan- 
 cial reputation of the Rothschilds are neutralised by the rigour 
 of Isaac Gordon, the multinominal moneylender. 
 
 " Why does not the world pick out Mr. Mocatta as the typ- 
 ical Jew instead of the flaunting, vaunting type? " asked the 
 Jewish Chronicle in the obituary panegyric of a saintly philan- 
 thropist. " Why should his lack of ostentation be less Jewish 
 than the gaudy showiness of some other Jew? Why should not 
 his reserve, his modesty, and his rectitude be regarded as typ- 
 ically Jewish? " The question is almost an Irish bull. Para- 
 doxical ini])(isse! Unless the Jew shrieks, "Walk up! Walk 
 up ! Behold in me the most dignified man in Creation," his quiet 
 dignity must go unregarded. 
 
 Again, the notion that Jews form an alien section of the na- 
 tion cannot be eradicated. They may call themselves English- 
 men, Frenchmen, Germans, and Italians, but the question is, not 
 what they call themselves, but what Englishmen, Frenchmen, 
 Germans and Italians call them. They may offer body and 
 soul to their country for generation after generation, but a 
 Goldwin Smith will arise to ask, " Can Jews be patriots ? " 
 And every now and then every nation will have sudden spasms 
 of pseudo-racial self-concentration — Pan-Slavism, Pan-Hel- 
 lenism, and other panics of Pan-ism demanding the immediate 
 elimination of the Jew. Even in hybrid Belgium a native pol- 
 itician explained to me before the war that the Jew did not rep- 
 resent " true Belgic ideals." And this in Brussels, where two 
 idioms live on opposite sides of the same street ! From time im- 
 memorial Jews have dwelt in Algeria. We hear of them in the 
 sixth century under the Visigothic kings. After the Spanish 
 persecutions of 1391 Algiers was a great centre for Jewish ex- 
 iles. Yet the parvenu French conquerors, who date only from 
 1830, have persecuted them as foreigners. There were Jews on 
 the banks of the Rhine in the reign of Justinian, yet they are 
 still quasi-alien. 
 
 The conscious pretexts for anti-Semitism vary historically in 
 every country ; they may all be reduced to one simple syllogism. 
 P^very country has Jews, every country has evils ; therefore the 
 Jews are the cause of the evils. Such is the crude logic of 
 Demos and demagogues. Even the better politicians like a 
 whipping-boy. The Jews are as good as a foreign war in 
 averting attention from domestic troubles, and infinitely more 
 economical. Is it profiteering that agitates the public? It is 
 the Jews who are the profiteers. Is it the menace of Bolshe- 
 
 200
 
 THE VOICE OP JERUSALEM 
 
 vism? They are the Bolshevists. Is it the hidden hand? 
 That hand wears heavy Jewish rings. Is it a shortage of 
 houses? It is the Jews who have monopolised all accommoda- 
 tion. Is it a dearth of bacon? It is the Jews who have eaten 
 it up. Is it the awful consequences of imperialistic ambition? 
 The Kaiser has Jewish blood. If there were no Jews they would 
 have to be invented for the use of politicians — they are in- 
 dispensable, the antithesis of a panacea; guaranteed to cause 
 all evils. Is it any wonder that the aforesaid Mr. Mocatta said 
 in a presidential address to the Anglo-Jewish Historical So- 
 ciety : — 
 
 " The lot of the Jews is generally as sad and as trying as it was 
 in the darkest Middle Ages. They seem to have been preserved, not 
 only to attest the continuity of the Divine love and the majesty of 
 the Law, but also to bear the sorrows of the world " ? 
 
 XII 
 
 Two recent scurrilous books, " Jewry Ueber Alles " and 
 " The Jewish Peril," carry in their titles this legend of the con- 
 quering Jew. The latter work, a mass of mystical nonsense 
 translated from the Russian and published by concerted action 
 in various languages after being peddled in MS. round the 
 Governments of Europe and America by notorious Russian 
 anti-Semites as though it were a precious secret document, 
 though it had already appeared in print in 1905, professes to 
 reveal " the secrets of the Sanhedrim " ; but the tirades against 
 England for drawing upon the support of the " Sanhedrim " in 
 her universal intrigues for Empire have been prudently cut out 
 of the English edition, for they would spoil the game. (For 
 cutting out the whole, £10,000 was asked !) 
 
 There is no Sanhedrin now extant, no " Learned Elders of 
 Zion " exist whose meetings can be recorded in " Protocols," 
 and " Nilus " seeming to have discovered this by the time his 
 book reached a third and enlarged edition in 1911, substituted 
 for his original melodramatic mendacities the story that his 
 documents — described in the first edition as stolen from French 
 Freemasonry — were simply the secret reports of the Zionist 
 Congress at Basle in 1897. Unfortunately for "Nilus," I 
 happened to be at all the sittings of that Congress, which was 
 the first, and which I have described in my " Dreamers of the 
 Ghetto." Nothing could be less like the operations of a Jew- 
 
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 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 ish Jesuitry than this gathering, which laid the foundations of 
 the Zionist movement and formulated its programme as " the 
 acquisition of a publicly, legally recognised home for the Jew- 
 ish people in Palestine." As this was an absolutely new move- 
 ment in Jewry, initiated in spite of great public opposition by 
 a few more or less impecunious publicists, it seems indeed a 
 strange manifestation on the part of the secret Semitic gang 
 that ran — and runs — all the papers, parliaments and banks 
 of the world, and in whose iconoclastic propaganda Charles 
 Darwin was a prominent puppet ! We have to do in fact with 
 the forgery of a pious Russian, passionate for the Church and 
 the Czar, edited in 1905 by an agency bent on drowning the 
 Revolution of that year in Jewish blood. Such forgeries in- 
 variably appear in troubled periods, they are a stock historical 
 weapon; though rarely has a forger admitted in more Irish 
 fashion than the author of " The Jewish Peril " that he cannot 
 prove the authenticity of his documents, for — he gravely ex- 
 plains — the essence of this criminal plot is secrecy ! * 
 
 It was like the journal which published the Pigott forgeries 
 to take this grotesque fabrication seriously and thus encourage 
 Count Reventlow and the reactionary monarchist parties in 
 Germany, in whose platform anti-Semitism is a plank. Count 
 Reventlow solemnly declared that he, for his part, had never 
 credited the report that Lord Northcliffe was a Jew. The 
 humourless Fatherland was flooded with a legend of a Jewish 
 combination to destroy it, in which the gentle and venerable 
 philanthropist, Jacob Schiff, figured side by side with Trotsky. 
 
 But it is impossible for even The Times to take " Nilus " seri- 
 ously after the scathing scholarship of Mr. Lucien Wolf, who, 
 in a letter to the Spectator, dissected the tangled threads of 
 self-contradiction and, with a fascinating erudition, traced back 
 the theory of the all-destroying Jew to the literature of Anti- 
 christ that has been forged in successive centuries and in vari- 
 ous blood-curdling shapes to explain the Lutheran Reforma- 
 tion, the Cromwellian Revolution, the French Revolution and 
 
 i Salomon Reinnch, in a characteristically learned article, points out that 
 St. Paul himself had to complain of apocryphal letters circulated (presum- 
 ably by the morning post) over his forged signature, that a fabricated epis- 
 tle 'was attributed for theological purposes to Maui, that about 1610 a 
 Polish ex-Jesuit drew up " Monita Sec ret a," imaginary immoral instructions 
 to the disciples of St. Ignatius, which same useful forgeries were after- 
 wards exploited by Rome against the Freemasons. To this day there is talk 
 in France of the " Palladists," a horrible sect purely invented by the Polish 
 ex-Jesuit, but the heads of which are now said to be Jews! (Xo doubt 
 there are also Semitic snarks and Hebrew Boojums.) 
 
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 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 the Revolutions of '48 as all due to that same Semitic " hidden 
 hand." The latest version of " The Jewish Peril " appears to 
 be largely a plagiarism from the earlier fabrication by a Ger- 
 man named Hermann Goedsche, who had actually been dis- 
 missed from the Prussian Postal Service for forgery, and it also 
 borrows considerably from the pre-existing literature of the 
 great Jewish conspiracy, e.g., Gougenot des Mousseaux's " Le 
 Juif, le Judaisme et la Judai'sation des Peuples Chretiens." 
 
 To these contemporary forgeries may be added the imaginary 
 speech of a Rabbi of Jaffa promising the Jews the conquest of 
 the world (printed by Catholic newspapers in Holland), the 
 letter to the same effect found in the pocket of a dead Bolshe- 
 vist soldier, the utterance of the late Szamuely annexing Hun- 
 gary as a Jewish land, the deliberations of the " Workers of 
 Zion " at Kieff, and the circular recommending Bolshevism 
 " disclosed " by a German paper as sent to the heads of the 
 Alliance Israelite in Russia (a country where no branch of the 
 Alliance exists or is permitted). There should also be noted 
 the repetition of the libel on Zionism in the Brazol " revela- 
 tions " that became the laughing-stock of America. Brazol 
 had been assistant attorney for the Russian Government in the 
 notorious Beilis case, and being in the States on Russian busi- 
 ness, took occasion to publish a work with twenty-five apocry- 
 phal resolutions passed by an imaginary secret sitting of the 
 First Basle Congress. Under examination, these schemes for 
 the Bolshevisation of the world were found to be merely clumsy 
 reproductions of existing anti-Semitic creations in Russian, 
 German, or Rumanian. All these forgeries are, however, but 
 the expression of a state of mind in the public, and doubtless 
 sometimes in the forger too, who feels more like a champion 
 putting his truth in artistic form than a malicious liar and a 
 deliberate cheat. Hence, the danger of these fictions does not 
 evaporate at their exposure, for the public credulity that in- 
 spired them persists and gives the breath of life to fresh embodi- 
 ments of panic. For the fear, as well as the wish, is father to 
 the thought. Note, as Renan said to Salomon Reinach, how 
 uninventive is human malignity. " Elle tourne eternellement 
 dans le meme cercle d' 'accusations. " And the ascription of 
 calamities to a " hidden hand " already hated is one of the most 
 familiar workings of the mass-mind. 
 
 It is not even necessary that the accusation should come by 
 the complex channel of forgery. A bouncing assertion suffices. 
 Since I began this paper, the evidence has become overwhelm- 
 
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 ing of a world-plot worked by a little gang of exiles from Bol- 
 shevist Russia in the favourable atmosphere of a world-concor- 
 dat of sentiment amongst the militarist and monarchical classes 
 of all countries, fomented by the chauvinisms of war, and find- 
 ing vent in this same fantastic charge. According to the Pres- 
 ident of the Independent Order B'nai B'rith, a circular entitled 
 " Jewry Ueber Alles " has been sent out by the gang " to Amer- 
 ican publicists and men of affairs, charging the Jew with the 
 responsibility for the world war and with a vast conspiracy to 
 control the economic world," and the same group " has been 
 distributing throughout the American Legion posts a large 
 amount of literature of the same general nature, urging ex-sol- 
 diers to arm themselves against * the Jewish peril.' " The lat- 
 est manifestation comes, as I write, to lift into notoriety the 
 unknown Dearborn Independent, the personal organ of Henry 
 Ford, the car manufacturer, who, after visiting Germany in a 
 Peace Ship, turned into a rabid militarist when America's own 
 tocsin sounded. An anonymous article in this journal, en- 
 titled " Germany's Reaction Against the Jew," brings the case 
 against the world's whipping-boy to its comic culmination. 
 For it declares that " the sole winners of the war were Jews." 
 Early in the war, in my book, " The War for the World," I 
 had predicted that the time would come when the Jews would be 
 gibbeted as its sole starters, but even my cynical prescience did 
 not foresee that they would grow into its sole winners. Poor 
 Jews, whose bones bleach on every battlefield in Europe, Asia, 
 and Africa! However, the Dearborn Independent deserves 
 our gratitude, for, in reproducing the German case, it naturally 
 reproduces the factor omitted from the British edition of " The 
 Jewish Peril," and England reappears as the Jew's ally or tool 
 in the conquest of the world. Pan-Judaea — " the only State 
 exercising world-government, since all the other States can and 
 may exercise national government only " — had before the war 
 its Capital in London. Strange that I should have been born 
 in this city and lived most of my life therein, and have never 
 heard till this day of the " wonderfully organised All-Jewish 
 Government " whose web radiates thence : the Government 
 " whose fleet is the British fleet which guards from hindrance 
 the progress of All-Jewish world-economy," and in return for 
 which, " Pan-Judaea assures Britain an undisturbed, political 
 and territorial world-rule," and has recently " added Palestine 
 to British control." What was Tamburlaine with his chariot 
 drawn by bitted and harnessed kings to His Imperial Majesty, 
 
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 Judseus, who " is willing to entrust the government of the vari- 
 ous strips of the world to the nationalistic Governments, and 
 only asks to control the Governments " ? It is a gesture that 
 would have left even Bcaconsfield breathless. This marvellous 
 Jewish Super-Government " whose citizens are unconditionally 
 loyal, wherever they may be, and whether rich or poor," and 
 which " can make peace or war, anarchy or order," at its own 
 financial will, " having wreaked its revenge on anti-Semitic Ger- 
 many, will now go forth to conquer other nations. Britain it 
 already has." 
 
 Such is the chivalry of Germany to its Jews who, through 
 Ballin and Rathenau, did more than any other section of its 
 citizens to stave off the disaster which its fatuous generals and 
 light-headed admirals brought upon it: It is, of course, these 
 same monarchist elements that, learning and forgetting noth- 
 ing, attribute to Jewish intrigue and purpose the Revolution 
 which dethroned Junkerdom, and that see in their own inability 
 to effect a counter-revolution the infallible evidence of the " hid- 
 den hand." Poor Ballin, one remembers, committed suicide, 
 unable to survive the literal wreck of all his hopes for his Fa- 
 therland. But in the Junker version he apparently shot himself 
 for joy at the revenge he had helped to wreak on Germany ! 
 
 To those who know that the Jews are, as John Davidson once 
 wrote to me, " a race of ungovernable individuals," — still 
 further broken up by geography and history — the humour of 
 representing them as an army of ants with but one will and 
 purpose, is of the last extravagance. Travesty can no further 
 go. It is the very sublime of the ridiculous ! 
 
 XIII 
 
 The clue to the great Jewish conspiracy is, we have already 
 seen, to be sought less in the nature of the accused than in the 
 psychology of the accuser. The Jew takes on the Protean 
 shapes created by ever-changing panic. But beneath it all lies 
 the same apprehension of mysterious power, of uncanny suc- 
 cess, without which the legend of the advancing conqueror 
 would lose its thrill. And this power in the last resort is 
 money. Not to be exfurcated even by the charge of Bolshe- 
 vism, lies the morbid sense of the Jew's money. It is by the 
 criminal stigmata of f .s.d. that the Jew will be known when the 
 accusations of to-day have vanished like the dew of the morning. 
 
 Yet that other vision of the Jew as an invading pauper horde, 
 
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 a mass of swarming and sweated poverty, is the truer, though 
 even that is ironically lurid with the same sinister aura of suc- 
 cess, since is not the wretched Christian pushed out by the He- 
 brew coolie? 
 
 Official Russian statistics collected by Count Pahlen's com- 
 mission at the beginning of the century showed that 90 per cent. 
 of the Jews in the Pale had no staple occupation and that the 
 average possession of the Russian Jew was under five dollars. 
 And the Russian Jew was half the Jewish race. Of the three 
 million Jews in Poland and Galicia, Sir Stuart Samuel has just 
 reported that " as in other countries the large majority of them 
 are very poor, suffering severely from hunger and privation." 
 Jerusalem has notoriously been a hotbed of mendicity, where a 
 tenth of a penny sufficed to evoke a beggar's blessing. Whence 
 then comes the singular illusion of Jewish wealth? In part it 
 is the magnifying power of the jaundiced eye. A few Jews 
 have always loomed golden in every great capital. Two Jews 
 move into Park Lane, or the Faubourg St. Germain, and in the 
 resentment at their intrusion, it is forgotten that hundreds of 
 Christians have already been enjoying for generations the lux- 
 ury and privilege of those abodes. An acute Christian ob- 
 server remarked to me that in the East End of London a dis- 
 gruntled Tommy, back from the war, passing four times a day, 
 on his way to and from work, a shop formerly Gentile but now 
 bearing the name of Isaacs, has the impression of four success- 
 ful Hebrew competitors. 
 
 No, the Jewish proletariat is not a money success, though it 
 succeeds in living where others would die, because it has had for 
 so long to fight artificial disabilities as well as natural. And 
 the power of surviving among hostile conditions means the 
 power of prospering when the conditions are ameliorated. It is 
 in America that we find the greatest aggregation of Jewish well- 
 being, for here the conditions have been peculiarly favourable, 
 though even here there are no Hebrew names vying in magnifi- 
 cence with those of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Astor or Pierpont 
 Morgan. The manufacture of millionaires from nobodies, 
 which is a feature of American life, has been due to the bound- 
 less field of enterprise and to the conditions of social equality 
 which prevail in the States. In England and other old coun- 
 tries a certain stratified social system has hitherto kept people 
 born in the ranks strictly to their own station. The Euro- 
 pean masses have generally accepted the idea that they were 
 born poor and must remain poor. Farm-labourers, factory- 
 
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 hands, mechanics, they have accepted the social order in which 
 they have found themselves as unquestioningly as a horse re- 
 ceives the shafts between which he is placed ; and European so- 
 ciety has therefore tended to reproduce in every generation, 
 with some small variations, the grades of wealth established by 
 a traditional history. 
 
 " Give us, Lord, our daily rations, 
 Bless the squire and his relations," 
 
 has been the spirit of the European masses over centuries now 
 growing legendary. 
 
 The Jew, however, standing outside the Feudal system by 
 which Europe was organised, was able to escape from this point 
 of view. He did not belong to the lower classes for the simple 
 reason that he belonged to no class at all. He thus ignored 
 the general notion of the hierarchy of wealth, and had the au- 
 dacity to make money beyond his social position. 
 
 If a Barney Barnato could rise in a brief generation from 
 Petticoat Lane to Park Lane ( and from the Lane to the Lane 
 represents the full arc of the social pendulum), if an Andrew 
 Carnegie could develop from a penniless immigrant into a benefi- 
 cent millionaire, it can only be because the conditions are anal- 
 ogous. The American works in a social medium really free; 
 the Jew in a medium in which his aloofness makes him artifi- 
 cially free. While America is the land of adventure, the Jew 
 is the man of adventure. 
 
 But even in America the conditions are now Europeanising 
 themselves. As Mr. Stephen Graham, in his remarkable ar- 
 ticle, " The Spirit of America after the War," puts it, in the 
 very metaphor of my explanation, " a more feudal or static 
 state of business has set in. America is more like England in 
 this respect. Men begin to be in that state of life to which it 
 has pleased God to call them." And millionaires, even amongst 
 the Jews, are few. Most Jewish successes must be considered 
 moderate. Indeed, as already suggested, all Jewish successes 
 are moderate judged by the modern American standards. The 
 successes of the Americans are won by great intellectual com- 
 binations. In these, paradoxically enough, the Jew does not 
 distinguish himself. He prefers to build up his property by an 
 endless aggregation of the infinitely little. He grows rich like 
 Alnaschar in the " Arabian Nights," who started with a bas- 
 ket of glass ; except that the Arab's dream is the Jew's reality. 
 
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 With the returns from the glass he buys something larger, and 
 goes on and on by petty stages till he ends in the palace with 
 the slaves and concubines of the Oriental vision. And before 
 kicking he waits till he has got whom to kick, unlike the poor 
 day-dreamer in the story who kicks over the basket and shatters 
 his glass and his hopes. 
 
 The characteristic habit of accumulating possibly accounts 
 for the fact that in Jewry the men with ideas have no money, 
 and the men with money no ideas. This was strongly brought 
 out in the Zionist movement. The millionaires who might have 
 been suspected of large ideas and the habit of grandiose com- 
 binations were discovered to be of microscopic outlook, while 
 the imaginative combinations and even the practical organisa- 
 tions were made by men of letters and science. Men who have 
 gone cautiously adding field to field for their own advantage 
 are not easily able to conceive of the acquisition of a country 
 for the general good. Even Baron Hirsch could only conceive 
 of an Israel redeemed by being broken into still smaller frag- 
 ments, while Baron Edmond de Rothschild began his epoch- 
 making work in Palestine merely as a philanthropist. 
 
 Generally speaking, the man who has accumulated a fortune 
 through years of toiling and moiling, his initial capital labori- 
 ously saved, the man of this sober temperament is naturally 
 not the kind to risk past and future on a grand coup. It 
 should be added that the Jew's cautiousness is likewise probably 
 due to uneasiness and insecurity. He would not dare adven- 
 ture himself in political complications, or in syndicate opera- 
 tions, notoriously opposed to the general interest. It may 
 seem a contradiction to the contention that the Jews appear to 
 amass riches not by coups but by the steady accumulation of 
 small profits, that the Stock Exchanges of the world bristle 
 with Jews. But that the stockbroker is a speculator by grand 
 coups is a popular delusion. The stockbroker is just the per- 
 son who does not speculate at all ; he accumulates his fortune 
 by petty brokerage on the large and never-ending transactions 
 of other people. Certainly there are Jewish operators on 
 'Change in the gambling sense, but I am not aware that they 
 have ever controlled the market with sovereign power. On the 
 gambling-table of the Veldt, Barney Barnato was beaten by 
 Rhodes at the game of diamond cut diamond. 
 
 This power of achieving moderate successes, of building up 
 gradual aggregates, indicates just the kind of financial talent 
 which we should expect to have been developed by the unhappy 
 
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 history of the race. When the Jews were in their own land 
 they left commerce to the Phoenicians. These Philistines it 
 was who developed the great ports of Tyre and Sidon. But al- 
 though enterprising Jews had always followed in the wake of 
 commerce, and were dotted about the shores of the Mediter- 
 ranean even before Titus took Jerusalem, the people as a whole 
 remained, as Josephus testifies, a pastoral, agricultural, and 
 military race. With the destruction of their centre came their 
 almost total transformation into a commercial and industrial 
 people, and it is curious to find that by the twelfth century 
 Tyre itself held Jewish shipowners and manufacturers of Ty- 
 rian glass. And not only did they change their economic 
 status, but post-Palestinian history forced them to be middle- 
 men in every department. In the Dark Ages, and in those 
 countries where the Dark Ages still reign, we find the Jew 
 largely employed as a middleman between landlords and ten- 
 ants, or as farmer of taxes between people and princes, between 
 noblemen and serfs, often between Church and tithe-payer. 
 The Jew of Poland, Hungary, Germany and Bohemia was the 
 middleman whose duty it was to collect, to force the utmost 
 out of an unwilling population. The profit was not to the Jew, 
 but to the power behind the Jew. When Dickens in " Our Mu- 
 tual Friend," figured his good Jew, Uriah, as the thumb-screw 
 of a hidden Christian employer, Dickens was true to history, 
 however far from true Jewish psychology the rest of the char- 
 acter may be. 
 
 Now, a nation of middlemen cannot yield great originative 
 conceptions in economics. Just as intellectually the mediasval 
 Jew found his function in translating and interpreting one na- 
 tion to another — a role he still largely monopolises — so did 
 he find his chief economic function in linking the scattered na- 
 tions through the medium of " the foreign exchanges." In a 
 well-known passage of the Spectator Addison describes the Jews 
 as " so disseminated through all the trading parts of the 
 world, that they are become the instruments by which the most 
 distant nations converse with one another, and by which man- 
 kind are knit together in a general correspondence. They arc 
 like the pegs and nails in a great building, which, although they 
 are but little valued in themselves, are absolutely necessary to 
 keep the whole frame together." 
 
 And certainly in the ages ere nations understood one another 
 and one another's language and currency, and when they were, 
 moreover, mutually suspicious and hostile, the value of a uni- 
 
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 versally dispersed fraternity as a link between the nations can- 
 not he overrated. The Jew's operations as a middleman were 
 facilitated by his polyglot capacity and by his possession of 
 Hebrew or Yiddish, or Ladino (Spanish- Jewish), which made a 
 common tongue for communities otherwise separated by space 
 and local nationality. The absence of a country of their own, 
 which was the cause of the existence of this diffused brother- 
 hood, was also a factor forcing them into international deal- 
 ings ; in many countries of the Exile they were exclusively to 
 be found in towns, not being allowed either to own or work land, 
 and even had property in land been permitted them, the inse- 
 curity of tenure made it an undesirable form of property. For 
 those in danger of banishment at brief notice possessions must 
 be portable. Hence they preferred to deal in money and with 
 precious jewels of small bulk. Armed with mutual interest and 
 confidence, the Jews wove a network of commerce over the isles 
 of the sea. An Arab geographer of the ninth century gives the 
 name of Radanites to the Jewish merchants who carried goods 
 and slaves between Europe and the East. 
 
 All these remarks, however, refer to that efficient minority 
 which was able to raise itself from the mass and which alone rep- 
 resented Jewry in the eyes of Christendom. But although, for 
 example, every Polish nobleman had his Jewish factor, that did 
 not enrich the mass of the Jews on his estate, who, on the con- 
 trary, were mulcted by his Jewish agent. And if the Jew, by 
 not living the life of the nations, but living in a Biblical dream- 
 world of his own, escaped the feudal point of view with its 
 dispiriting consequences on the fortunes of the lower classes, 
 this peculiar aloofness prevented the dreamier section from ever 
 facing the realities of life. A class of beggar-students and rab- 
 bis and nondescript Bohemians was evolved, who still haunt the 
 Ghettos of the world from New York to Jerusalem. " Luft- 
 menschen " Xordau has ingeniously styled these airy tribes who 
 look to miracles for their daily food, and scan the horizon for 
 provision-bearing ravens. No people in the world possesses so 
 many fantastic ne'er-do-wells as this nation mythically synony- 
 mous with success. Nor does any people possess so many indi- 
 viduals indifferent to moncymaking. General Booth expressed 
 his surprise at finding in Sir Matthew Nathan, then the Gov- 
 ernor of Natal, a man so markedly different in his view of 
 money from the bulk of British officialdom. It is rather odd 
 that a supposed anti-Semite like Mr. Belloc should have re- 
 cently ripped up the fable of Jewish wealth and monev-grab- 
 
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 bing. " Jews as a mass," he pointed out, " were a very poor 
 race, because the making of money was not their principal ob- 
 ject." This is the truth. Shylock himself preferred a pound 
 of inedible flesh to thrice his three thousand ducats offered in 
 court. 
 
 One of our most distinguished Christian law-lords once de- 
 clared to me that the few persons he had known in his life who 
 followed science, learning, art, or literature with uncommercial 
 devotion were all Jews. And indeed of the three great Anglo- 
 Jewish contributions to the work of the war — the camouflage 
 system of Solomon J. Solomon, R.A., the tank of Sir Albert 
 Stern, and the anti-gas fan of Mrs. Ayrton, all alike were 
 marked by a disinterested and almost despairing anxiety to con- 
 vert a slower-brained race to faith in science. 
 
 The traditional relation of the Jew to the credit system, 
 which, according to Sombart, he invented, is vastly exaggerated. 
 In his valuable posthumous book, " Jewish Contributions to Civ- 
 ilisation," Joseph Jacobs carefully summed up the evidence, and 
 there is none of any Jewish participation in its sixteenth cen- 
 tury beginnings, which are due to Italians and Germans. The 
 credit system was such a creation of genius, and Capitalism has 
 in its day proved so fruitful an agency of civilisation and inter- 
 national unification, that it is only my stern sense of justice that 
 refuses to accept the fabular version. The Jew did indeed help 
 to transform the economics of Europe from a barter to a money 
 system, for being, as I have just pointed out, forbidden to hold 
 immovable property, he was the only man whose wealth was in a 
 wandering shape. But in so far as credit in the embryonic form 
 of money-lending is concerned, he had not even the merit of suc- 
 cessful competition in this matter, since the Church's interpre- 
 tation of Luke vi. 35, prohibited Christendom from lending 
 money at interest, and it was therefore Jewish money that had 
 to build the great churches and abbeys of England, to finance 
 Columbus's discovery of America or Strongbow's conquest of 
 Ireland. The Jew was thus a precious, if paradoxical, asset in 
 Christendom, a royal chattel rather than a citizen, a sponge to 
 be squeezed by the King, to whom all the usurer's money es- 
 cheated on his death — and one sees how inconvenient it was if 
 the sponge dipped itself in holy water. Poor William Rufus 
 had to bribe baptised Jews to return to their Judaism. 
 
 Being a Jew was thus a dangerous occupation from which 
 there was no escape. It was dangerous because there is no 
 bigotry like that of defalcating creditors, whose debts can be 
 
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 wiped out by wiping out the debtor, and to be anything but a 
 financial middleman was not easy in a society where labour was 
 organised by guilds, from which the Jew — if only because un- 
 able to take the oaths of initiation — was excluded. In Spain 
 under the Moors he had his own guilds, but under mediaeval 
 Christendom, especially after the Crusades, he was driven from 
 all crafts, and even from commerce. It was fortunate for him 
 that he was not alone in his inglorious pursuit of interest, that 
 the Flemings, Lombards and Florentines had begun to take a 
 hand in money-lending — the financier, as Pinero says, is only 
 a pawnbroker with imagination — and that the Church finally 
 accommodated itself to this text of Luke as it had long since 
 done to the still more difficult beginning of the same verse, 
 " Love ye your enemies." It was fortunate, too, for the Jew 
 that he did contrive to amass some wealth, because that was as 
 important to him for self-defence as strength to the lion or 
 swiftness to the hare. 
 
 The " sinews of war " supplied the place of an army. 
 
 XIV 
 
 My friend and co-worker, the late Sir Lionel Abrahams, laid 
 it down in his last presidential address to the Jewish Historical 
 Society of England, that " Jewish financial genius does not 
 exist, and Jews have attained as a whole comparatively little in 
 the way of financial and economic eminence." This is, perhaps, 
 to exaggerate on the other side, and to ignore his own genius as 
 Indian Financial Secretary, to which Lord Inchcape and other 
 experts have paid tribute. Financial supermen are undoubt- 
 edly to be found among the Jews of all countries. But he is 
 certainly right in tracing the source of the exceptional riches 
 of the Jew to the fact that the wealth he amassed was in coin, 
 that almost alone in the Middle Ages the Jew had property in 
 the shape of money. Citing an ancient document of inquiry 
 into the movables possessed by the inhabitants of Colchester in 
 1301, Sir Lionel Abrahams tells us that of the three hundred 
 and ninety inhabitants examined, only ten were found to pos- 
 sess any money, and the largest sum found was two marks (£1, 
 6s. 8d.). Similarly tenants paid the lord of the manor mainly 
 in work, cows, or poultry. The nobleman's wealth being in 
 lands or villeins, or the merchant's in goods or ships, was not 
 fluid. It was thus that the Gentile had to " go to the Jews " in 
 any crisis demanding metallic money, or securities for money, 
 
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 though for example Shylock's wealth in ducats was probably in- 
 ferior to Antonio's in argosies. Hence the delusion from which 
 the world still suffers. It was because there was no readily 
 available substitute for the Jews as financiers that their expul- 
 sion from England in 1290 curiously led — as Dr. Stokes has 
 pointed out — to the political freedom of this country. The 
 need of ready money was constantly involving the monarchy 
 in friction with Parliament and people, till at last Ship-money 
 brought about its fall. The Republic in its turn brought back 
 the Jews, Cromwell understanding their commercial importance 
 for his expansionist policy. But it was in the Elizabethan age, 
 when the Jews in England were like the snakes in Iceland, that 
 England began to lay the foundations of this policy and to 
 enter what Seeley has called " the main current of its com- 
 merce." And though undoubtedly Jewish finance and genius 
 have played no small part in the establishment of the mightiest 
 Empire the world has ever seen, especially, as Mr. Max J. 
 Kohler has shown, by keeping its early colonies from bank- 
 ruptcy, yet to ascribe its development, or that of the modern 
 world in general, to a capitalistic system predominantly worked 
 by Jews, could occur only to the anti-Semite or the myth- 
 monger. 
 
 If " rich as a Jew " has become a popular proverb, it is be- 
 cause the only Jews with whom the Christian needed to come 
 into contact were the wealthy minority who financed everything, 
 including (by way of the Crusades) their own persecutions. A 
 cockney diner-out in restaurants might as well have imagined 
 that all foreigners were waiters. And the locution — " to go to 
 the Jews " — survived into the period when money had become 
 general and money-lending had been thrown open to Christian 
 competition. Had my Lord Tomnoddy of the Ingoldsby Leg- 
 end " gone to the Jews " in the literal sense of the phrase, he 
 would have found himself among the poorest inhabitants of the 
 most congested slums in Europe. 
 
 XV 
 
 But the myth of the Jewish accumulation of power in the 
 shape of capital does not constitute the real danger to the Jew 
 or the real indictment. Clemenceau, though under the sway of 
 the myth, yet refers wittily to " Venorme puissance d'Israel dans 
 le christianisme capitaliste de nos jours." Christendom is too 
 tainted with capitalism to accuse the Jew of it. It is not cap- 
 
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 italism for profit's sake that the world rebukes and dreads. It 
 is capitalism for Jewry's sake. The Jew bankers of the world 
 
 — that notorious intercatenation of super-moneylenders — are 
 engaged in the old Biblical business of exploiting the rest of 
 mankind as the prelude to its extermination. I suppose nobody 
 is in a better position than I to give the lie to the charge of 
 Jewish solidarity, I, whose life has been half-wasted in the effort 
 to bring it about, who for twenty years toiled to unite the 
 Jewish millionaires in the quest for a Jewish State, and whose 
 supremest triumph lay in assembling three of them, a British, 
 a Russian and an American, in one committee-room to promote 
 
 — emigration from a Jewish centre ! 
 
 Undoubtedly there are Rothschilds in London, and in Paris, 
 and in Vienna, and perhaps still in Frankfort. But the fantas- 
 tic idea that this concatenation of cousins holds the purse- 
 strings of the world and is ready to plunge it into war without 
 a qualm, so that it may finance the whirlwind and capitalise the 
 storm, is — though it lurks in the closing allusion of Sir Charles 
 Bruce and was actually propounded in my hearing by one of 
 our most Liberal men of letters — only to be taken seriously 
 because its effects are serious. One would have imagined that 
 the discovery in the Kaiser's archives of a letter from the late 
 Alfred de Rothschild pleading desperately for the peace of Eu- 
 rope would have given the quietus to this myth. I well remem- 
 ber how astonished Ur. Herzl -was at discovering — when he 
 tried to engage them in Zionism — within what a rigid ambit 
 the Rothschilds dared move of their own initiative, how circum- 
 scribed they felt themselves by the will of the Powers, how chau- 
 vinistically each branch of the cousinship responded to its local 
 Jingoism. Nor were they all so united. The late Lord Roths- 
 child himself told me sardonically how little one of his Conti- 
 nental cousins could be relied upon in a Jewish cause. " Use- 
 less to ask him to contribute. What you would get wouldn't 
 pay the cost of cleaning your boots after the journey." 
 
 As for the Press being in the hands of the Jews, let us 
 bring this question, too, into the open. There comes to my 
 mind a recollection of a conversation with the late Leopold 
 de Rothschild at a moment when The Times was in low water 
 and in the market, and had been offered to New Court. There 
 is no organ which it would be more important to have in Jewish 
 hands, whether for the mythical aggressive or for purely de- 
 fensive purposes. Yet what was the temptation that appealed 
 to the Rothschilds ? " A paper which will put in a letter, if 
 
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 decently written, upon any subject from any standpoint," cried 
 Mr. Leopold enthusiastically, " is not that a national British 
 asset? And is not such an asset worth preserving? " I agreed. 
 Since those days The Times has sunk from a national to an in- 
 dividual organ, and rarely publishes a letter not parasitic to its 
 policies. But only to-day has the significance of that conversa- 
 tion occurred to me. 
 
 The Rothschilds with open eyes allowed the most influential 
 organ in the world to go to Lord Northcliffe, and thus ulti- 
 mately to fall into the hands of an anti-Semitic editor. A 
 quaint way indeed of conducting a world-plot ! I know only 
 two daily papers in London of Jewish editorship or proprietor- 
 ship, the Daily Express and the Daily Telegraph, and it is dif- 
 ficult to decide which is the more radically British. Emma 
 Lazarus felicitously compared the Jew in every country to the 
 intensitive form of the Hebrew verb, and the comparison finds 
 illustration everywhere. The very suspicion that would attach 
 to a Jewish paper, did it favour Jews or Judaism, tends rather 
 to drive it into injustice or anti-Semitism, and Lord Burnham's 
 success in avoiding both is a remarkable feat. Dr. Herzl was 
 one of the editors of the Neue Freie Presse of Vienna, and its 
 most brilliant feuilletonist, yet never while he lived was a word 
 about the Zionist movement allowed to appear in this powerful 
 organ, which was soon alone in Europe in boycotting the theme. 
 
 By a strange coincidence I had barely written this paragraph 
 when I saw that Herr Moritz Benedikt, the proprietor and edi- 
 tor-in-chief of the Neue Freie Presse, was just dead in Vienna at 
 the age of seventy ! " Benedikt," I was informed by The Times 
 correspondent, " more than any other man, was responsible for 
 the downfall of Austria." This may be quite true, for we know 
 the fatal power of a country's leading organ, but I feel sure this 
 sinister potency would not have been ascribed to him had he not 
 been of the fabular race. But what policy was it that he incor- 
 porated? It was, says The Times, "Jewish Pan-Germanism." 
 Now Pan-Germanism we have heard of. But Jewish Pan-Ger- 
 manism is simply a meaningless collocation of words. Unless, 
 indeed, it means — in the sense of Emma Lazarus — an intensive 
 Pan-Germanism, and in that sense it is not easy to see how it 
 could conduce to Jewish ends. " He never forgave England," 
 we read, " for escaping from the orbit of German foreign pol- 
 icy." Evidently, then, not even England's promise to establish 
 " a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine " could 
 soften this rancorous Teutophile. And in truth he was an in- 
 
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 tensive Pan-German, without a spark of sympathy for the Jew- 
 ish national idea, but super-patriotically absorbed, like most 
 emancipated Jews, in the country of his birth. In his obituary 
 in a Jewish nationalist organ I find the deceased characterised 
 as " one of those zealous assimilators who mislead the Jewish 
 masses by the mirage of European civilisation," and though 
 " all his life the champion of liberty, equality and justice, yet 
 for others only, and not for his brethren, whom he did not un- 
 derstand." Nevertheless — be it marked — he does champion 
 liberty, equality and justice, and preaches " religious freedom 
 and the sublimity of the principles of Moses." Thus even 
 through Benedikt speaks the voice of Jerusalem. But of the 
 contention that this voice is raised for the peculiar political 
 benefit of the Jews, let this greatest of all the Jewish editors of 
 our era be the final disproof. 
 
 It may be I am rendering the Jews still weaker in destroying 
 the myth — if it can be destroyed — of their cohesion and soli- 
 darity. For it was that mythical might which induced the 
 French Government to give its famous secret instruction to M. 
 Pichon, at a moment when the war was going in favour of Ger- 
 many, to dangle before the Jews of the world the largest pos- 
 sible hopes as regards Palestine. The bait, we have seen, failed 
 with Herr Benedikt. Unquestionably there is a solidarity of 
 sentiment against Jewish persecution, and it may find incon- 
 venient expression through Jewish journalists, but this never 
 goes so far as action, and would even be limited as thought, if 
 the political interest of the country demanded silence. This 
 negative cohesion is the maximum approach that has ever been 
 made to a Jewish Weltpolitik. No, ten thousand European 
 papers owned and edited by Jews would not make a Jewish 
 Press, for they would have nothing in common unless it was 
 their anti-Jewishness. Thus " the Jewish Press " is as legen- 
 dary as " Jewish Finance," its power over the issues of Peace 
 and War as mythical. It is in every case individual power 
 used for individual ends, local or Gentile. 
 
 XVI 
 
 It is true that the Jew aright to unite all these streams of 
 power for Jewish ends, pull all these strings for both self-pro- 
 tection and the furtherance of Jewish ideals: and I have all my 
 life been urging upon him to do so. 
 
 Just before the war, I issued a call, countersigned by Max 
 
 216
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 Nordau, for an all- Jewish Congress at Basle — that sinister 
 city of " the Elders of Zion." I urged that if only as a relig- 
 ious sect Israel needed concerted action in face of common prob- 
 lems and perils. It is doubtless the Gentiles' perception that 
 this is the natural policy and what they would aim at, were they 
 in Israel's place, that leads them on to their misunderstanding. 
 Their apprehension of aggressive design forgets to take account 
 not only of Israel's ethical superiority to revenge, but of the 
 lower historical conditions that have reinforced his spiritual 
 shrinking from it — the sixteen centuries of persecution that, 
 ever since the Roman Empire embraced Christianity as the 
 python embraces its victims, have sapped the Maccabaan spirit. 
 Islam, that later-born daughter of the synagogue, was only less 
 harsh to her mother than Christianity. That the Jew did not 
 break under the strain is marvellous, but it would have been a 
 miracle if he had remained unbent. It is the same pliancy which 
 saved him from snapping in twain that has produced what has 
 been aptly called " the Ghetto bend." Consider, for example, 
 how the greatness of the Rothschilds was cradled: of what 
 Ghetto they were the children. History's first word anent the 
 Jews of Frankfort — in whose Judengasse their old gabled 
 Stammhaus still stands — is " Hep ! Hep ! " And the mas- 
 sacre of the year 1241 was followed by an exodus which left the 
 Emperor bewailing his lost revenue and nursing an obdurate 
 grievance against his inconsiderate Christian burghers. For 
 the Jews were his private property — servi camera — and could 
 be lent, pledged, or farmed out like any other source of revenue. 
 Here, indeed, was their main safety: they were as valuable as 
 pedigree cattle. In 1349, when the ravages of the Black Death, 
 with the inevitable accusation that the Jews had poisoned the 
 wells, foreshadowed copious pogroms, the far-seeing Carl the 
 Fourth hastened to pledge his Frankfort Jews to the city for 
 some 15,000 pounds of hellers, and, despite his royal promise, 
 left them unredeemed. Jews, not as pawnbrokers, but in pawn 
 to a Christian city, constitute a not unamusing inversion of 
 the conventional concept. At a later period a complex Chris- 
 tian transaction — wheels within wheels, or loans within mort- 
 gages — brought the Frankfort Jews under the power of the 
 Archbishop of Mayence, and there were pretty quarrels be- 
 tween their various Christian proprietors. Penned in the 
 Judengasse behind the three iron-lined gates, and badged on 
 their garments, they lived under a coil of police regulations, 
 much like aliens in the recent war, and in moments when the 
 
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 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 mob saw red, like enemy aliens. Plague and massacre, flight 
 and optimistic return — such are throughout the ages the woof 
 and warp of this Ghetto's story. And at the best that " curi- 
 ous system of degrading customs and debasing laws which would 
 have broken the heart of any other people," not to mention the 
 twenty-six separate sorts of special Jew-taxes that would have 
 broken the bank of any other people. When as late as 1814 
 the Frankfort Jews demanded emancipation, the great free 
 Christian city did not scruple to remind them that they were 
 still its unredeemed pledge. 
 
 Yet it is from this pariah population that the Rothschilds — 
 their very name imposed by the State after the Red Shield on 
 their old gabled home, No. 174, Jew Street — emerged to rule 
 for a time the European money market. 
 
 It would be folly to expect them to use their power other than 
 circumspectly. The marks of such chains are not to be effaced 
 in a single century. Even the Zionist movement, though it was 
 created by a Herzl, and has produced a Jabotinsky, has never 
 risen to the heights of its great argument, is timid, undigni- 
 fied, obsequious and unassertive. The children of the Ghetto 
 who cowered in the cramped alleys, cut off from sun or fresh 
 air, or spent the dreadful night, massed in the congested ceme- 
 tery, clad in their ritual shrouds for the death-confession of 
 sin, and passively waiting to be murdered by the mob, still suf- 
 fer, as Herzl profoundly pointed out, from Agoraphobia, dread 
 of an open space. An anecdote of Horace Vernet, the French 
 painter, relates that he wandered despairingly for weeks in 
 search of a suitable model for a beggar till one day, meeting a 
 white-bearded, tragic-eyed friend on the Boulevard, he cried out 
 in ecstasy : " The very man ! " It was a Paris Rothschild. 
 The anecdote is pregnant. 
 
 With such a subservience to the environment, whether engen- 
 dered of subconscious fear, super-conscious circumspection or 
 exaggerated respect, it is easy to understand how the very 
 leaders of Zionism can disavow any aspiration for a purely 
 Jewish State — the race that is supposed to covet the world 
 shrinking back weakly from the opportunity of securing even 
 a piece little larger than Wales, just as in 1904 it rejected the 
 offer of a valuable territory in East Africa. 
 
 Had the English really been the lost Ten Tribes, the sus- 
 picion of Israel's world-greed would have had some ground — 
 a fourth of the globe in fact. In the words of " Rule Britan- 
 nia":— 
 
 218
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 " All thine shall be the subject main, 
 And every shore it circles thine." 
 
 But for an English Colonial Governor like Sir Charles Bruce to 
 suspect the Jews of imperialism is the last stroke of irony. 1 
 
 When Goldwin Smith asked in his famous article, " Can the 
 Jew be a Patriot? " the then Chief Rabbi, Hermann Adler, has- 
 tened with an anxious affirmative. But the alarmed defender 
 did not summarise the matter by pointing out that life is not 
 logical, only psychological. However you might prove log- 
 ically that, given his liturgical visions, the Jew could not be a 
 patriot, the fact remained that he was only too patriotic. Na- 
 tionality, as I have shown in my little book, " The Principle of 
 Nationalities," is practically an effect of environment, and it is 
 independent of race, which is hereditary and objective, whereas 
 Nationality is acquired and subjective. There may be affinities 
 and common expressions of race between quite different nation- 
 alistic groups, as among the French of Quebec, of New Orleans, 
 and of Paris, but no one supposes that three separate and an- 
 tagonistic war-fevers would not be generated in a crisis. The 
 Jew responds to his nationality-making environment with his 
 habitual super-sensitiveness. Witness Disraeli, of whom Lord 
 Salisbury said : " Zeal for the greatness of England was the 
 passion of his life." Witness the rhapsodies of Sir John Mon- 
 ash over Australia, whose soldiers he led to unbroken victory. 
 Here you have a real conquering Jew, but his legend will be 
 Australian, not Jewish, just as Primrose Day is an English, not 
 a Jewish institution. So chauvinist is the Jew that he will not 
 only fight and die for the country that shelters him, he will even 
 demand Palestine for his poorer brethren if a similar sympathy 
 is felt in his Gentile environment. 
 
 Much of the present Zionism in the wealthier circles of Anglo- 
 Jewry has its origin in this reflected source, as well as in a patri- 
 otic fervour for the extension of the British Empire in the 
 East. 2 It is a great pity that Governments are generally ig- 
 norant of the merest rudiments of psychology, so that our own 
 legislature has recently under mob clamour altered the correct 
 
 i The valuable revised version of the English Bible, issued by the Jewish 
 Publication Society of America, observes in its preface: "The English lan- 
 guage is, unless all signs fail, to become the current speech of the majority 
 of the Children of Israel." This prognostication is hardly consistent with a 
 sense of a specifically Jewish future, much less of a physically conquering 
 Jewish future. 
 
 2 The Jewish Guardian actually quotes: 
 
 "'Here and here did England help me: how can I help England?' — say." 
 
 219
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 law of nationality which determines it by residence (jus soli) 
 into one determining it by blood (jus sanguinis) as though man 
 were a pedigree brute and not a spirit. Presumably by this 
 criterion a man who had lived all his life on the Continent 
 would, if only his father was English, be accounted of British 
 nationality. 
 
 XVII 
 
 But if thus under psychological analysis (or psycho-analysis) 
 the case against the Jew as a capitalistic conspirator to destroy 
 the Gentiles breaks down — for the Jew, wherever emancipated, 
 is a passionate devotee of the national civilisation — the mystic 
 magnification of Jewish potency and malignity finds refuge in 
 the quite opposite charge that the Jew is the power behind Bol- 
 shevism. The antithesis has been indeed flamboyantly accentu- 
 ated by Mr. Austin Harrison, who, without an} r ill-will, but in 
 a mere passion for the picturesque, sees the Jew as the embodi- 
 ment of the rival forces that contest for the empire of the world. 
 Not even Disraeli would have advanced so megalomaniacal a 
 claim. In so far as the power of producing antithetical phe- 
 nomena is concerned, Mr. Harrison's ascription of polarity to 
 the race was, as we have seen, anticipated by its own historian, 
 Graetz, and in so far as he is under the usual illusion of Jewish 
 wealth and its peculiar exercise by Jews to control Governments, 
 he has already been answered. It is characteristic, however, of 
 the legendary treatment of the Jewish question that Mr. Har- 
 rison, having to recognise Cecil Rhodes as the protagonist of 
 modern capitalist imperialism, and Lenin as his antithesis, 
 throws over the former a vague suspicion of Jewish blood, and 
 actually writes of Lenin as if he were either a Jew or a Jewish 
 tool. Perhaps he is relying on The Times, which in its " His- 
 tory of the War " has with characteristic historical accuracy 
 explained to the world that Lenin is a Jew named Zederblum. 
 
 But while capitalistic imperialism has no organic connection 
 with the Jewish temperament — is it not Mr. Montagu who is 
 showing England the path to true imperialism? — Socialism is 
 unquestionably in harmony with the Jewish genius from the days 
 of Moses, while internationalism is latent in Isaiah and Amos : 
 not Socialism in any narrow schematic form of partition of 
 property or destruction of individualism, but the conception of 
 the national organism as one happy and righteous whole, with 
 the world as a federation of such peaceful systems. There is 
 
 220
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 thus to-day not so much a " new evangel " as an attempt of 
 the Jewish soul to re-express for itself and mankind its old 
 aspiration under the changed conditions of the modern world. 
 The Bible, as Mr. George Hodges, Dean of the Episcopal 
 Theological School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, reminds us in 
 his latest work, " is a dangerous and dynamic book, radical and 
 revolutionary, essentially democratic," which " puts all con- 
 servatisms in peril," and " is an armoury for the forces of mili- 
 tant progress." Disraeli was never more Jewish than when he 
 marked in Sybil his horror of the " Two Nations " of wealth 
 and poverty into which England, like Europe at large, was 
 divided. 
 
 If the contention of the Jew-hating Comte de Soissons in a 
 recent number of the Quarterly Reviexo that the Jews are the 
 revolutionary leaven in the modern world is false (since so many 
 are stockish upholders of the Soissons world, and so many 
 revolutionaries are of other races) and if it is equally false that 
 even the rebellious Jewish minority is animated by a hatred of 
 Christianity (since more and not less Christianity is the Jew's 
 demand) there is no denying the role of Jews both in the con- 
 ception of Socialism and the struggle for it. This pole of Mr. 
 Harrison's antithesis has, therefore, more truth than the other. 
 But in succumbing to the policy of violence as the short cut to 
 the millennium, Trotsky has been faithless to the spirit of 
 Judaism — that long tradition of Reason and Love. If it was a 
 Jew who said, " The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and 
 the violent take it by force," he did not say it of the kingdom of 
 heaven on earth. The red road is not the path to Zion. 
 
 Nor has it been cut out by Jews in particular. Its inhu- 
 manly rigid straightness is the work of the Russian ideologue, 
 Lenin. And if there is an excessive percentage of Jews among 
 the Commissaries, it is due partly to the aforesaid disproportion 
 of Jewish figures in everything and anything, but more to the 
 general illiteracy of Russia, the vast majority of whose popu- 
 lation is analphabetic. Jewry produces great revolutionary 
 leaders, as it produces great mathematicians or great actors : 
 but its proletariat is the least revolutionary of all the prole- 
 tariats, as is proved by its meekness in accepting revolutions 
 imposed by the environment. Sufferance, as Shakespeare cor- 
 rectly perceived, is the badge of the tribe. 
 
 In the genesis of the Bolshevist revolution the Jews were 
 even conspicuous by their geographical absence. As Dr. 
 Reuben Blank, the representative of the Petrograd Jews, sums 
 
 221
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 it up, the first generator of Bolshevism was the fleet at Kron- 
 stadt, into which not a single Jew was admitted ; the second was 
 the proletariat of Petrograd, a town into which only a rare 
 Jew could find entry. From these two centres it spread to 
 Great Russia, where the Jews constitute less than 1 per cent, of 
 the population. 1 Victor Kopf, the Bolshevist Commissary at 
 Berlin, complains that only one Jewish party in Russia — the 
 Poale-Zion — welcomed Bolshevism, that the Jewish trading and 
 shop-keeping classes are its greatest enemy, and that although 
 they are massacred in pogroms organised by the counter-revo- 
 lutionaries, they will not fall in with the Socialist regime. 
 
 A friend of my own, returning from Moscow, reported that 
 the question : " Is there a God? " was raised in a public debate 
 by Lunatscharsky, the Bolshevist Commissioner for Public 
 Instruction. The only debater on the affirmative side was 
 Rabbi Mase of Moscow. Not a single Russian pope, in that 
 religious capital of Russia with its swarm of churches, dared to 
 emulate this Jewish courage. In a letter to The Times I had 
 ventured the above interpretation that the comparative prepon- 
 derance of Jewish Commissaries was merely due to the Jews 
 being an educated folk in an illiterate land. I see that Captain 
 Peter Wright, in his official report on Poland, discussing the 
 same question, says : — 
 
 " Bolshevism requires a vast administration and propaganda, 
 which in turn require that men shall at least be able to read and 
 write. But in the proletariat of Eastern Europe only the Jews pos- 
 sess these accomplishments, and therefore the administrators and 
 propagandists of Bolshevism must necessarily be Jews. So much so 
 that Bolshevism appears at times to be almost purely a Jewish 
 movement. But the Commission had the opportunity of studying it 
 very close at hand on the Eastern frontier, and in that part of the 
 world at least this was certainly not the case." 
 
 Indeed, the Chief of the Commission, Sir Stuart Samuel, 
 reports that " the Bolsheviks publicly complained that only 1 
 per cent, of their army were Jews." 
 
 The attempt to represent Jewishness and Bolshevism as 
 synonymous, naturally does not fall short of my own person, 
 and persists in face of rectifications. It may be useful, there- 
 fore, to reproduce here an extract from a speech of mine to a 
 
 i Reference to the statistics given liter in this book will show that with 
 the Jews of Poland and the Ukraine drawn off into separate polities, only 
 900,000 Jews now remain in Russia proper. 
 
 222
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 meeting at the Kingsway Hall, largely Bolshevist, in May, 
 1919: — 
 
 " I should be no honest advocate of liberty if I endorsed the Rus- 
 sian method of imposing Socialism by brute force; and even Social- 
 ism proper — divorced from violence as it appears to have come in 
 Hungary — holds grave dangers for the human spirit, however 
 welcome be the tardy justice it does to the human body. It is mov- 
 ing towards us so swiftly in these latter days that the question of the 
 due boundaries between the State and the individual may be upon us 
 sooner than any of us can foresee. And if Socialism encroaches too 
 far upon individual liberty — and Mr. Brailsford, writing from Hun- 
 gary, says that there is no liberty at all there — not all its loaves 
 and fishes will save it from the soullessness attaching to all mechan- 
 ical constructions. For the State has no life save that which comes 
 to it from its individuals ; and to stereotype for all time the life it 
 has absorbed from any one generation is to sterilise it. The Gospels 
 speak of a mysterious sin against the Holy Ghost. What can this 
 be but the denial of Liberty? Our Quaker friends are right. For 
 the Holy Ghost is the spirit which moves through all things and 
 blows through all men ; and to crib, cabin, and confine it, whether 
 by a British Order in Council, or the edict of a Russian or Hun- 
 garian Soviet, is the supreme blasphemy. Our ancestors had only 
 too great a reverence for the hermit who cut himself off from the 
 State and its doings, but it was a sound instinct that made them 
 realise that the life was in the man and not in the State. By us, 
 hermits have been dragged from their mountain-tops and clapped 
 into khaki. We have conscribed the very gypsies who live outside 
 all States; we have constrained the consciences of the few Chris- 
 tians among us. All this is a fatal policy. It leads to a hive, not 
 a human civilisation. ' The strongest man,' said Ibsen, ' is he who 
 stands most alone.' And similarly, I say the strongest State is that 
 which lets him stand alone. Not to make the world safe for democ- 
 racy, but to make it safe for minorities, is the true human ideal." 
 
 Mr. Bertrand Russell seems to have had to go to Russia to 
 perceive these obvious implications of the communistic ideal 
 when that ideal comes, not as its spiritual essence requires, from 
 the members of the community themselves, all animated by love 
 and brotherhood and the desire of co-operation for the common- 
 weal, but from above by brute force. Mr. Grimstone, the 
 schoolmaster in " Vice Versa," remarked that he would establish 
 a spirit of unmurmuring happiness and unreasoning content- 
 ment in his school if he had to flog every schoolboy to achieve it, 
 and Bolshevism in its Russian caricature is only Grimstonism 
 writ large. But in so far as the war for freedom has under- 
 
 223
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 mined individual liberty throughout the world, in so far the gov- 
 erning classes have themselves prepared the way for Bolshevism. 
 
 The sole fire behind all this acrid smoke is that everywhere 
 throughout Europe, as the old autocracies fall, and careers 
 open themselves to talent, Jews are found stepping into minis- 
 terial or official positions. This is naturally most copiously the 
 case with the most numerous aggregation of Jews — the Rus- 
 sian — and the unfortunate coincidence that here the world's 
 orthodox economic order has been reversed, provides a unique 
 handle for the secular indictment of the Jew as the destroying 
 devil. The only piece of luck in the business is that the head 
 and front of the offence is a Slav. All Israel should set up a 
 statue to Lenin for not being a Jew. 
 
 Mr. Austin Harrison's attempt to represent the contem- 
 porary world-struggle as embodying the two polar Jewish ideals 
 of Capitalism and Bolshevism is thus largely melodramatic. 
 That epithet must attach also to Mr. Winston Churchill's 
 attempt to read history by the same limelight, only with Chris- 
 tianity in the role of Capitalism; though it is, of course, true 
 that to the Jews is owing what Mr. Churchill describes as that 
 " system of ethics, which, even if it were entirely separated from 
 the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious 
 possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all other 
 wisdom and learning put together." The praise of Christianity 
 comes indeed curiously from our War Minister, nor can one 
 alas ! claim with him that " on this system of faith there has 
 been built out of the wreck of the Roman Empire the whole of 
 our existing civilisation." History is not so simple as all that, 
 especially when one considers that " this system of faith," unlike 
 Judaism or Mohammedanism, has never been applied to prac- 
 tical life. It has been on the contrary the first religion to 
 divorce itself from practical politics and to breathe only eccle- 
 siastical air. It may be that the Jews, to whom, as Mr. 
 Churchill says, the world owes Christianity, will take back their 
 misused and misshaped loan and proceed to utilise it for them- 
 selves. 
 
 But correctly as Mr. Churchill recognises the provenance of 
 Christianity, he becomes as melodramatic as Mr. Harrison when 
 he sets up Bolshevism as its Satanic antithesis and in a passage 
 that out-fantasies Mr. Harrison and would arride the author of 
 " The Jewish Spectre," observes that " it would seem as if the 
 Gospel of Christ and the Gospel of Antichrist were destined to 
 originate among the same people and that this mystic and mys- 
 
 224
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 terious race had been chosen for the supreme manifestations of 
 the divine and the diabolical." 
 
 Now obviously, so far as practical life is concerned, the two 
 manifestations are one and the same. The first principle of 
 Bolshevism was laid down by St. Paul when he said: " If any 
 would not work, neither should he eat." Mr. Churchill has 
 elsewhere put the anti-Bolshevist case well, but nothing can 
 justify such galimatias as this antithesis between Bolshevism 
 and Christianity, of which Bolshevism has been at worst an 
 enforced application. Perhaps in that masterly letter of Mr. 
 Lucien Wolf's we may find the clue to this mentality. It is the 
 old " anti-Christ " literature again, remembered or re-created 
 in a brain that is seeing red, and seeing falsely. This perversity 
 of vision produced Mr. Churchill's Russian policy, and the fail- 
 ure of that policy has only distorted his vision further. To 
 this, and not to sheer bravado, may charitably be accredited his 
 acclamation of his instrument, Denikin, the destroyer and 
 despiser of the Jewries along his path, as the protector of 
 Israel. Vladimir Tiomkin, the head of Ukrainian Jewry, whom 
 I have already quoted, testifies of this " Protector of Israel " 
 protected b} r Churchill : — 
 
 " The pogroms of Denikin' s Armies were effected under the lead- 
 ership of the divisional commanders General Ckuro, General Mam- 
 antov and General Progamirov. These pogroms differ from all 
 others by virtue of their original methods which seem to have been 
 carefully worked out beforehand. Not only was there a unity in 
 method but all the circulars of the different commands and those 
 which were issued by Denikin's information bureau, all bore the 
 underlying suggestion that Jews were Bolsheviks, and Denikin's 
 representatives abroad actually made an effort to convince the Euro- 
 pean Governments that this libel was the truth. This was a well- 
 organised effort to justify beforehand the massacres which were 
 subsequently to take place. In many instances they appeared to 
 have succeeded. 
 
 " In their nature and spirit, Denikin's pogroms, fires and murders 
 appear to have been the most terrible. While the number of killed 
 and violated do not appear to be comparatively large, the at- 
 mosphere of oppression and fear which resulted from his methods 
 were by far the most cruel. The question here is not whether 100,- 
 000 or 200,000 Jews were killed. The point of importance is the 
 fact that three million Jews in Ukrainia and Southern Russia found 
 themselves placed outside the pale of every law and in a condition 
 where they might be exterminated to the very last soul. In every 
 city, town and village through which Deniken's forces passed, all 
 
 225
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 males were in the most literal sense exterminated, all women without 
 any exceptions were violated, and no child or aged were spared. 
 Throughout every spot that Denikin's armies touched the same red 
 line is to be traced, the same results found. Appeals were made 
 to Denikin, appeals were forwarded to the European Powers which 
 were maintaining his forces, but it was as an echo in the desert, no 
 relief or protection came from anywhere. 
 
 " Wherever Denikin's armies arrived, they removed the Jewish 
 members of the municipality, shut down the communal institutions, 
 and systematically set about carrying out their work of murder and 
 pillage. Invariably the most innocent people would be exposed to 
 punishment." 
 
 And presumably it is the same obliquity of vision which saw in 
 Denikin a " protector of Israel " that accounts for Mr. 
 Churchill's inability to perceive the transformation in all social 
 values of which he himself has been a leading agent. Was it not 
 he who pointed out that the achievements of his Ministry of 
 Munitions provided the best argument for State Socialism? 
 And after he has conscribed human life remorselessly, and even 
 recklessly, for the benefit of the State, that monstrous Leviathan 
 of Hobbes, the conscription of labour or of property becomes a 
 minor, not a greater expression of communism, or of universal 
 sacrifice for the State-idol. And as a matter of fact the sanc- 
 tity of property was destroyed by the Defence of the Realm 
 Act, as Lord Rosebery discovered with such naive surprise. 
 Once the maya or illusion of sacredness is dissipated, it is im- 
 possible to reconstitute it. The freedom of the individual, of 
 which property is only one facet, having been profaned, it was 
 impossible to put bounds to the sacrilege. The most law-abid- 
 ing municipalities seem now to annex empty rooms for homeless 
 people as unscrupulously as the Government of which Mr. 
 Churchill was a member annexed full hotels for homeless Depart- 
 ments. And with Mr. Bonar Law placidly discussing a Capital 
 Levy, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer already appropriat- 
 ing over a quarter of our incomes, Mr. Churchill's prophetic 
 fury against Bolshevism, though it is genuine, has no more truth 
 in itself than the soap-begotten froth on the lips of the pseudo- 
 epileptic. " The dictation of the proletariat " is already 
 implicit, in our Adult. Suffrage, which Mr. Churchill helped to 
 introduce. And if the earth is rocking and the fountains of 
 the great deep are broken up, it is he and his peers whose 
 " Knock-out-Blow " has brought the earthquake and the deluge. 
 What ! Did they think they could loose tempest and pestilence 
 
 226
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 and all the Beasts of the Apocalypse for a whole quinquennium 
 and then with a movement of their little finger pacify the whirl- 
 wind, and purify the plague, and call off the dragons and the 
 ten-horned monsters? Though the masses should remain 
 " dumb driven cattle," did the politicians who had driven them 
 to the shambles suppose the world held no men with bigger 
 hearts and brains than themselves, that they would be allowed to 
 return unquestioned, uncriticised and unrestrained, but merely 
 belaurelled and begilded, to their crude conception of life and 
 their barbarous antiquated leadership? 
 
 Mr. Churchill, who presides at the War Office, whose whole 
 atmosphere is the mutual mass-murder carried on between 
 nations, and whose class, as I said in a speech, has governed 
 Europe into a graveyard, is sincerely horrified at Lenin, whom 
 he regards as a monster throned upon skulls, with bones for his 
 footstool. But there is no inherent ethical difference between a 
 war of nations and a war of classes — they are equally bar- 
 barous — and the traditional legitimacy of military operations 
 constitutes no more valid a defence of war than the traditional 
 sanction of suttee or cannibalism in their respective countries 
 constituted a vindication of these savage practices. The only 
 possible justification of war lies in self-defence under actual 
 brute attack, and very rarely can modern war plead this grim 
 necessity. The attempt to precipitate the millennium by force 
 is as reprehensible as it is futile. But it is less criminal than 
 the sullen determination of Christendom to continue the still 
 more murderous order of Sovereign States, united at best by a 
 loveless League in a peace which passeth all understanding. 
 
 XVIII 
 
 Having disposed of the legendary factors in the Legend of 
 the Conquering Jew, we are now finally in a position to seek for 
 its core of truth. 
 
 We have seen from Sir Charles Bruce's own quotation from 
 Disraeli that the attempt at extirpation has been made not of 
 the heathen by the Jews, but of the Jews by the heathen. It 
 has been like a scientific epical experiment. To repeat Dis- 
 raeli's fine summary : — 
 
 " The attempt to extirpate them has been made under the most 
 favourable auspices and on the largest scale; the most considerable 
 means that man could command have been pertinaciously applied to 
 
 227
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 this object for the longest period of recorded time. Egyptian 
 Pharaohs, Assyrian Kings, Roman Emperors, Scandinavian Cru- 
 saders, Gothic Princes and holy inquisitors have alike devoted their 
 energies to the fulfilment of this common purpose. Expatriation, 
 exile, captivity, confiscation, torture on the most ingenious and mas- 
 sacres on the most extensive scale, a curious system of degrading 
 customs and debasing laws which would have broken the heart of 
 any other people, have been tried in vain." 
 
 And what has science to say to the failure of this experiment 
 in annihilation, the experiment that is at this very moment in 
 murderous action on a larger scale than ever before, even in the 
 tragic generations of Israel? Whence comes this strange 
 resisting power? It comes partly from the Jew's ubiquity but 
 primarily from his faith — a faith which in the weakness of the 
 flesh might seek unworthy allies in money and in mimicry to pre- 
 serve the race that was its physical channel, but which was 
 animated at bottom by confidence in that very extermination of 
 the heathen which Sir Charles Bruce misapprehends. The 
 heathen would be exterminated by ceasing to be heathen. The 
 idolaters, polytheists and worshippers of immoral deities would 
 accept the One God of justice and truth. In this sense the Jew 
 did contemplate over-running and conquering the earthy 
 
 In our modern catholic sympathy with all expressions of 
 religion, we are apt to overlook the abominations and cruelties 
 with which most pagan cults were entwined or into which they 
 degenerated. For the Jewish prophets, living amid these prac- 
 tices, and seeing Israel straying after the worship of Moloch or 
 Baal, with their human sacrifices or their sexual excesses, there 
 was no such glamour. The very land had been defiled by these 
 abominations and had vomited forth its inhabitants, taught the 
 writer of " Leviticus," and so far from encouraging the Israel- 
 ites to enlarge the promised land, he warned them lest it spue 
 them out likewise. For, even intenser than the prophets' sense 
 of a single divine omnipotence behind Nature and History, as 
 against the polytheism of Greece or the dualism of Persia, was 
 their sense that this mysterious Power was a Power not merely 
 making for Righteousness, but demanding it. And for the uni- 
 versal acknowledgment of this Power, Israel was — they felt — 
 the chosen instrument. 
 
 It may be that at moments of national exaltation this ambi- 
 tion was despiritualised into that vulgar imperialism which 
 breaks out in all conquering peoples. But more probably the 
 materialisation of the prophetic message occurred in moments of 
 
 228
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 national humiliation, for it was then that, looking forward — 
 like the Belgians under the German heel — to some wild revenge, 
 the masses would be tempted to translate into gross dreams of 
 domination the ghostly consolations of Isaiah or Jeremiah. 
 And for these masses, with their inability to rise beyond the con- 
 ception of a physically conquering Messiah, the traditional 
 national figure of King David was at all times a nucleus for 
 reactionary thought. 
 
 This hypothesis is borne out by the history of the Apocalyptic 
 literature beginning with Daniel in which this dream of dom- 
 ination is set forth most plainly. For that literature took its 
 rise in the agonised years of the second century B.C. when the 
 Syrian despot, Antiochus Epiphanes, was ruthlessly crushing 
 out Judaism and imposing the worship of Zeus upon the Temple. 
 Though Judas Maccabaeus triumphed over the tyrant, and to 
 this day annual candles are lit in memory of this salvation, yet 
 the memory of the murdered martyrs and the humiliation to the 
 faith was equally deep and tenacious. A series of writings, at 
 once sublime and grotesque, informed by the notion of the ulti- 
 mate revenge of the righteous, testifies to the reaction of the 
 Jewish soul. Nor was the fact that the victorious Jews soon 
 passed under new masters, and that Judrea changed into a 
 Roman State, calculated to dim the vision. But it should be 
 remembered that none of these books was admitted into the 
 canon of the Synagogue with the exception of Daniel. They 
 were all left in the outer darkness of the " Apocrypha," and 
 Daniel was expressly excluded from the section of the 
 " Prophets " and lumped with the " Writings." 
 
 And even this reactionary thought of the apocalyptic writers 
 was interfused and irradiated with the larger Messianic hope, 
 just as this Messianic hope in its turn was never clearly divorced 
 from the prosperity of the race that had nourished it. Political 
 success was to be the natural outcome of religious rightness, and 
 the accent put on each element of the indissoluble compound 
 varied with the quality of the prophet or the believer. It was 
 at any rate not the triumphant and profiteering nationalism 
 of the modern Christian nation ; at the lowest it was never the 
 mere military hegemony of an Alexander or a Cassar that was 
 visioned: the Messiah, though he was to be a conqueror and of 
 the seed of David, was none the less to bring the Kingdom of 
 God on earth. It was this that explains how the Jewish 
 people — one of the smallest of antiquity — came, j ust 
 eighteen and a half centuries ago, to challenge the masters of 
 
 229
 
 THE VOICE OP JERUSALEM 
 
 the world. Was it that their nationality felt itself intoler- 
 ably oppressed, their religion flouted? But, as we see from 
 the Gospels, Jesus moved among a reasonably free people. 
 Oppression, exaction, there was in abundance, but not to the 
 breaking point, and though crucifixion and martyrdom were 
 not unfamiliar, these were probably more the outcome of the 
 political ferment than its cause. No, the fight with Rome 
 was — fantastic as it sounds — a fight for the hegemony of 
 the world: a h'ght inspired by two centuries of apocalyptic 
 literature, with its visions of divine intervention, of Jehovah 
 Himself vindicating His people and their faith in Him ; of the 
 imminent advent of His Kingdom. It was the same mystic 
 hope that animated the early Christians in that same half- 
 century. But the Jews presumed to put it to the test of the 
 sword. As unflinchingly as Abraham had set the knife to the 
 throat of Isaac, or Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego had 
 entered the fiery furnace, they sought to force the coming of 
 the Kingdom of God on earth. After all, Judas Maccabaeus 
 had beaten back the gods of Greece that had come in the wake 
 of the all-conquering Alexander. Why should the gods of 
 Rome be more powerful? Already the " chosen people " had 
 seen the passing of the empires of Egypt, Babylonia, Chaldea, 
 Persia, Greece. It was not Israel that had destroyed them 
 but God. The legend was of the conquering Jehovah, not the 
 conquering Jew. His devotees were to be found increasingly 
 among the heathen. Why should He not be given the occasion 
 of again manifesting His material might, the occasion indeed 
 that His honour demanded? Why should not the Roman 
 Empire, for all its massive semblance, fade and pass like the 
 others? The event proved the folly of trying to force the 
 hand of Providence. The assurance of Malachi that no harm 
 should befall his people was dismally contradicted. For the 
 desperate revolt was broken and after one of the stubbornest 
 sieges in history the Holy City and Temple was rased to the 
 ground. Hundreds of the defenders were crucified, thousands 
 left to perish of starvation, myriads sent to the mines or 
 thrown to the beasts in the Roman arenas ; the Jewesses were 
 sold as slaves and — such was the glut — for a mere song. 
 Yet the rebellion still raged and it was not till two years later, 
 in the year 72 of our era, that the last Judsean stronghold — 
 Masada — fell ; the garrison slaying first their wives and chil- 
 dren and then themselves. For eighteen centuries no Jew would 
 pass under the Arch Li Rome which Titus erected to celebrate 
 
 230
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 his triumph, with its bas-reliefs of the spoils of the Temple: 
 the seven-branched candlestick, the golden table and the sacred 
 trumpets. 
 
 But the Messianic hope survived even the seeming demonstra- 
 tion that Providence was on the side of the big battalions ; to be 
 tragically disillusioned again two centuries later when Bar 
 Cochba, " the Son of a Star," proved only a Will o' the Wisp, 
 and Hadrian passed the plough over Mount Zion. But even 
 then the hope was not quenched, though the notion of conquest 
 gradually gave place to that of a supernatural redemption, to 
 be simultaneous with that 
 
 " One far-off divine event 
 To which the whole creation moves." 
 
 The flickering flame was tended throughout all the Diaspora by 
 the shadowy forms of the ancient prophets whose rhapsodies 
 had become part of the liturgy; by the writers who added 
 prayers for the Return to every sacred office; by the pious 
 millions who in every century fasted on the ninth of Ab to 
 commemorate the fall of Jerusalem; by the long chain of 
 zealots whose tears have fallen every Friday on the ruined wall 
 of the Temple ; by the mediaeval Spanish poets who sang of Zion 
 as of a beloved mistress ; by the old men who in every genera- 
 tion went to die there and by the myriads who paid tribute 
 to keep its students alive. 
 
 Nor were more active pioneers wanting to relieve with des- 
 perate romance the eighteen centuries of waiting: Davi Alrui, 
 the Alroy of Lord Beaconsfield, who about 1160, a thousand 
 years after Bar Cochba, strove to lead the warlike Jews of 
 Asia against the Moslem; Asher Lammlein, who -in 1502 pro- 
 claimed himself the forerunner of the Messiah, and induced the 
 Jews to observe the anticipatory " year of penitence " ; David 
 Reubeni, who in 1524 arrived from Arabia and Nubia — the 
 mysterious Prince of Chaibar — and was honoured by the Pope 
 and promised eight ships by the King of Portugal ; his follower, 
 Solomon Molcho, the Cabbalist, who flashed through all lands 
 like a mystic meteor, truly predicting flood at Rome and earth- 
 quake at Lisbon, and dying unshaken at the stake in Mantua ; 
 Joseph of Naxos, who, a generation later, obtained Tiberias on 
 the Sea of Galilee from the Sultan, and planted it with mul- 
 berry-trees ; and most amazing of all the pseudo-Messiahs, Sab- 
 batai Zevi, whose only weapon was the Holy Name, to follow 
 
 231
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 whom to Palestine in 1666, prosperous Jews throughout Europe 
 wound up their affairs. New York itself has not lacked a 
 gatherer of Israel, though Major Noah's inverted Zionism led 
 him to see the New Jerusalem on the Niagara river. And to 
 these heroes and mystics and megalomaniacs must be added 
 the modern pamphleteers who have advocated the return to 
 Palestine, the modern philanthropists from orthodox Russian 
 Rabbis to French millionaires, who have made the Holy Land 
 the scene of their experiments; the Chovevi Zion Societies 
 that have sought to repeople it with Jews ; the " Biluits " and 
 other European enthusiasts who have torn at its soil with their 
 fingers when spades were lacking. As early — or as late — as 
 the twelfth century, the Restoration was turned into a dogma 
 of the faith by Maimonides, and the thirteenth article of the 
 creed, still daily recited, declares, eighteen hundred and fifty 
 years after the fall of Jerusalem, unbroken trust in the Mes- 
 siah, " however his coming be delayed." And this Messiah 
 will, in the expectation of the masses, gather the scattered tribes 
 from the four corners of the earth and reign in glory over them 
 in their own land. And on that day, " the Law shall go forth 
 from Zion and the Word of the Lord from Jerusalem." 
 
 If in modern Zionism these Apocalyptic visions have been 
 transformed into a sober political movement, this is none the 
 less spiritual because it looks to the right hand of the race — 
 and not to the outstretched cloudy arm — to do the work of 
 regeneration and regathering. 
 
 But the " survival value " of the Jew's faith in his destiny 
 was unaffected by the exact sense in which he held it. He was 
 confident of outliving the great Empires of antiquity, each of 
 which in turn enfolded him with its colossal and capricious dom- 
 inance, and already whether in the sense of their creeds or their 
 kingdoms he has outlived them all. 
 
 "When I was last in Egypt," said Sir Herbert Samuel in 
 the peroration of his speech at the Maccabaean banquet given 
 to him on his departure to take up the High Commissionership 
 of Palestine, " I saw on the monument of Menepthah what the 
 King had caused to bo written : ' Israel is wasted and his seed 
 is brought to nothing.' That was written three thousand years 
 ago: yet Israel is alive to-day in this Hall, for the ideal endures. 
 And our ideal is not tribal but universalistic. 'In thy seed 
 shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.' So runs the 
 prophecy ; and in that spirit I set out for the Holy Land of 
 Israel." 
 
 282
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 XIX 
 
 The mere existence of the Jew to-day has been a triumph of 
 idealism; it marks a dissent for the sake of an idea from the 
 dominant forces of Asiatic or European civilisation, a protes- 
 tantism persisted in despite the ceaseless persecution of all the 
 centuries of Pagan or Christian supremacy. The real story of 
 " The Wandering Jew " remains, when every deduction has been 
 made, the story of camps of idealists entrenched everywhere in 
 enemy's country, practising (inter se at least) those Hebraic 
 principles of human brotherhood which are now only beginning 
 to work their way from the creed to the life of Christendom, 
 and organising existence round the synagogue and the Tal- 
 mudical college so democratically that the beggar considered 
 himself the equal, if not the benefactor, of the philanthropist he 
 helped heavenwards. The popular idea that Judaism has 
 remained stagnant since the birth of Christianity must, as I 
 have said, be dismissed. If Judaism had indeed died in the 
 birth-pangs of Christianity, if it had only given the impulse to 
 that great current of emotion which has produced Catholicism 
 and Protestantism, stimulated Mohammedanism, and moulded 
 the national character of the Anglo-Saxon race in Britain, 
 Australasia, and America, it would have been revered to-day as 
 we revere Hellenism. But the Jews, unlike the Hellenes — 
 whose spiritual line of life theirs crossed thrice, in the creation 
 of the Septuagint, of the Gospels, and of the Alexandrian 
 philosophy — survived by a continuous tradition their greatest 
 period, and, though scattered to the four corners of the earth, 
 went on developing their old faith on its own lines, side by side 
 with the development of Christianity, producing a wilderness of 
 codes and commentaries, mysticisms and cabbalistic theosophies, 
 poems and pseudo-Messianic movements, evolving unique types 
 of character and unique racial humours, and pouring out a 
 Hebrew literature so voluminous that the catalogue for the last 
 century alone fills an octavo volume of one thousand pages — 
 no bad record for a " dead race " writing in a " dead language." 
 " De sorte que" as Bossuet said in another connection, " il n'y a 
 pas un seul moment ou Mo'ise et sa loi n'ait ete vivante" 
 Curiously intermingled with the picturesque panorama of the 
 mediaeval, bringing the mystery of the Orient and the youth of 
 the world into an atmosphere of barons and crusaders, friars 
 and schoolmen, popes and artists, this strange race moves — or 
 
 233
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 rather is " moved on " — across the stage of the Christian era, 
 always fantastic and fascinating, never out of danger of pillage 
 and massacre, always ground betwixt Church and State, always 
 the unavowed tax-gatherers for kings and emperors, every- 
 where forced into usury, slowly changed from the peasant 
 warrior breed, that fought the Greeks and Romans, into a meek 
 commercial people, forbidden by Papal bulls to deal in anything 
 but old clo' and old iron, stunted and contorted in soul and 
 body, bent from poring over the Law or making feigned obeis- 
 ance to the persecutor, often clothed literally with shame as a 
 garment, and finally shut up in Ghettos ; yet always, somehow, 
 somewhere, rising through individuals to wealth and distinc- 
 tion — viziers in Turkey, hidalgos in Christian Spain and 
 Ministers of State in Saracenic, masters of the mint in Egypt, 
 astronomers royal in Portugal, royal physicians at every court 
 in Europe, putting forth a Maimonides in Cordova and a 
 Spinoza in Amsterdam, and a Heine in Dusseldorf, and finally 
 surviving (with no taints that two generations cannot efface 
 and a vitality that ten generations cannot impair) to attempt 
 its national renaissance in the Palestine lost eighteen and a half 
 centuries ago, and to contribute who knows what clarified gospel 
 to a confused world. For the stress of the centuries has 
 exhausted neither the intellectual nor the ethical strain in the 
 race, and while Bergson, Freud and Einstein have revolutionised 
 modern thought, there has glimmered in ever}' country of the 
 Diaspora, as in France through James Uarmesteter and Joseph 
 Salvador, the dream of a new prophetic Judaism, a charac- 
 teristic example of which has just reached me in the proposal 
 of an obscure London Jew for " A Covenant of Goodness " with 
 a Universal Religion and a Universal Citizenship as the path of 
 Creative Peace. The Jews, who, even Mr. Wells admits, intro- 
 duced into the world two thousand four hundred years ago " the 
 idea of the moral unity of mankind and of a world-peace " 
 begin to recognise that they must see it through. 
 
 XX 
 
 The Jews of America are up in arms because Sargent's fresco 
 in the Boston Library depicts Judaism as an unlovely hag with 
 bandaged eyes. In vain Sargent claims that he is but following 
 the precedent of medieval cathedrals. Judaism to-day is no 
 blind bystander. There is Jewish blood in nearly all the young 
 
 234
 
 THE VOICE OP JERUSALEM 
 
 poets who have returned from the trenches to picture to us the 
 loathsomeness of the process by which Christendom parcels out 
 the kingdoms of the world. It was at the hands of Jewish 
 publicists all the world over — from the conductors of America's 
 New Republic to the Secretary of our Labour Party's Advisory 
 Committee on International Questions — that the brazen 
 attempt to palm off the Paris ukases as the Wilsonian Peace- 
 Programme met with its sternest repudiation. They knew that 
 if " The Tiger " was lying down with the lamb, it was only — as 
 Dickens predicted of the lion — with the lamb inside, and they 
 smiled bitterly at the idea of a new world-order emerging under 
 the aegis of a tribal politician whose very sobriquet recalled the 
 law of the jungle. 
 
 In " The Book of the Nations," an American Jewess, Miss 
 Jessie Sampter, has poured forth in the very idiom of the Old 
 Testament her prophetic indignation against our modern 
 Assyrias and Babylons. At first she will not hear of nations 
 at all, and Israel, too, shall be destroyed. 
 
 " I shall destroy the nations with their own weapons, saith the 
 Lord. 
 
 " I shall set them upon one another because they have hated one 
 another. And each will cry out: I have been attached, I am inno- 
 cent. 
 
 " Because they have pretended innocence when their hands and 
 bowels were full of blood, and because they have called upon my 
 name in vain, using it for war and conquest and oppression. 
 
 " This is the day, saith the Lord, which I have made. Now is the 
 day of judgment. It is here, and you know it not. I am here 
 among you, consuming you, and you see me not." 
 
 But as her chant goes on, she becomes aware of the blankness 
 of a world without nations, and Israel returns — like the 
 authoress herself — to Palestine, to become 
 
 " As a watchman between the East and the West, 
 To turn aside the sword and to keep open the way. 
 
 " And this shall be for a sign: That the nations shall set you in 
 your land. 
 
 " And that the sore and tired peoples will choose you as a balm of 
 Gilead. 
 
 " And they shall say: This people is for peace and for health in a 
 land full of fevers; 
 
 " This is to save us from the sword, from the pestilence of oppres- 
 sion, 
 
 235
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 " For this is a people that has suffered in every land, wise- 
 hearted with the sorroxvs of even/ land. 
 
 " And in your midst they will build the palace of peace. 
 " And the temple of justice." 
 
 And in London, an obscure Yiddish writer, masking himself 
 as " Moses, the Servant," exclaims rhapsodically : " Burn the 
 sun on the altar of infinite love, offer the whole world as a holo- 
 caust on the battlefield of right! Break the rainbow in two, 
 make of one half a bow for Amor, and of the other half a fiery 
 sword for Justice ! " 
 
 Another American poet, Mr. Samuel Roth, has excoriated 
 " Europe " with the same large utterance. Thus saith the 
 Lord, he, too, dares to begin in the antique phrase, though his 
 message is ultra-modern. And with the same sublime assurance 
 he exclaims : " The face of Israel will shine with power when 
 Europe will be a name difficult to remember." The voice of 
 Jerusalem re-echoes from France, where in language of a Semitic 
 sublimity M. Edmond Fleg in his " Le Mur des Pleurs," gives 
 utterance to " Le Cri des Hommes," and proclaims his execra- 
 tion for that God of Battles who would resuscitate the very 
 dead only to renew the slaughter: 
 
 " Sois maudit: a ton cri, nos os ressuscites, 
 S'entre-tuent dans le temps et dans l'eternite ! " 
 
 Perhaps this is the real uneasiness of Christendom in the 
 presence of the Jew. Israel's emancipation has served, as 
 Stevenson said of marriage, to " domesticate the Recording 
 Angel." 
 
 But the Jew is not content to record the crimes of Christen- 
 dom. For him criticism is only the negative aspect of creation. 
 He is out for victory. He will verify the legend of the Con- 
 quering Jew. With the sword of the spirit he will extirpate the 
 heathen. He will overrun the planet. He will bring about a 
 holy League of Nations, a Millennium of Peace. For the 
 words of the Babylonian Isaiah still vibrate in his soul : 
 
 " I have put My spirit upon him, 
 He shall make the right to go forth to the nations, 
 He shall not fail or be crushed 
 Till he have set the right in the earth, 
 And the isles shall wait for his teaching." 
 
 The God whose spirit is thus interpreted, the God who uses a 
 people to make the right to go forth to the nations, and who 
 
 236
 
 THE VOICE OP JERUSALEM 
 
 through faithful followers labours to establish His Kingdom on 
 earth, may be only a national working hypothesis, a divine 
 dynamic. But the conception at least makes the worship of any 
 lesser or rival God impossible, and justifies that jealousy for 
 His service which inspired the anonymous mediaeval poet whose 
 verses are still sung in the synagogue * : — 
 
 " All the world shall come to serve Thee 
 And bless Thy glorious Name, 
 And Thy righteousness triumphant 
 
 The islands shall acclaim, 
 And the peoples shall go seeking 
 
 Who knew Thee not before, 
 And the ends of earth shall praise Thee 
 And tell Thy greatness o'er. 
 
 " They shall build for Thee their altars, 
 Their idols overthrown, 
 And their graven gods shall shame them, 
 
 As they turn to Thee alone. 
 They shall worship Thee at sunrise, 
 
 And feel Thy Kingdom's might, 
 And impart their understanding 
 To those astray in night. 
 
 " They shall testify Thy greatness, 
 
 And of Thy power speak, 
 And extol Thee, shrined, uplifted 
 
 Beyond man's highest peak, 
 And with reverential homage, 
 Of love and wonder born, 
 With the ruler's crown of beauty 
 Thy head they shall adorn. 
 
 " With the coming of Thy Kingdom 
 
 The hills shall break into song, 
 
 And the islands laugh exultant 
 
 That they to God belong. 
 
 And all their congregations 
 
 So loud Thy praise shall sing, 
 
 That the uttermost peoples, hearing, 
 
 Shall hail Thee crowned King." 
 
 i From the author's version in " Service of the Synagogue," by kind per- 
 mission of Messrs. Routledge and Son. 
 
 237
 
 SHYLOCK AND OTHER STAGE JEWS 
 
 In some of the United States the Jews have successfully 
 petitioned for the removal of " The Merchant of Venice " from 
 the school curriculum. Their objection, though it would bar 
 out some of the greatest poetry in the language, is not so 
 unreasonable when it is remembered that as a Christian lady put 
 it for her social class : " Shylock is the only Jew most of us 
 know personally." Moreover, since only one or two Shake- 
 spearean plays can figure in the scholastic repertory, there is 
 no reason to select precisely the one which perpetuates Judaeo- 
 phobia. 
 
 It might be added that this play is calculated to give the 
 child as erroneous notions of Law as of the Children of Israel. 
 I could pass over the irregular procedure by which a young 
 lady, obviously breaking the sartorial law of sex, and armed 
 with an untruthful introduction from an absentee judge, is 
 alloAved to officiate at once as plaintiff, pleader, preacher, arbi- 
 trator, assessor, sentencer, and Christian conversionist. But 
 imagine any judge in the great city of the Doges putting forth 
 such nonsense as that if a pound of flesh is owing to you, you 
 cannot, save on pain of death, cut less than a pound, even by 
 the twentieth part of a scruple. More, I grant you, would be 
 illegal. But less? A capital offence to take less than your 
 debt? Shylock could surely have cut safely on the ca' canny 
 side. As for Portia's brazen contention that the pound of flesh 
 carried with it no drop of blood, any butcher could have told 
 her the contrary. But perhaps Shakespeare's silliness was as 
 feigned as Hamlet's madness. Perhaps he was sardonically 
 forecasting the future of the legal profession after the passing 
 of the Women's Enabling Act. Or, more probably, he was 
 satirising the influence of anti-alien prejudice upon the judicial 
 mind. The bench of England is proverbially the seat of incor- 
 ruptible justice. Decisions have been given recently even 
 against the Crown that recall the noblest traditions of British 
 judicature. Nevertheless, the bench has not utterly escaped 
 the insidious influences of war-fever and not a few anti-alien 
 
 238
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 decisions as grotesque as Portia's have blotted its record. 
 Englishmen cannot ponder too deeply the great saying put into 
 Shylock's mouth by the national bard : 
 
 " If you deny me, fie upon your Law ! 
 There is no force in the decrees of Venice." 
 
 It is a saying which entirely upsets the low-comedy concep- 
 tion of Shylock, which has still its defenders. Indeed, with the 
 elision of a few lines — to me of dubious authenticity — Shylock 
 could be turned from an impossible monster into one of the 
 finest of Shakespeare's creations. 
 
 A popular stage anecdote recounts how Macklin puzzled the 
 critics and the crowd by playing Shylock for the first time not 
 as a low-comedy ogre but as a human being, and how Pope 
 closed the controversy by his pronouncement : 
 
 " This is the Jew 
 That Shakespeare drew." 
 
 It was not, however, till the performance by Edmund Kean — 
 who replaced the Judas-beard by a black — that the full dignity 
 of Shakespeare's creation was revealed. And Kean was a Jew. 
 
 Of the five Shylocks I have seen, four have had more or less 
 Jewish blood: Moscovitch (a hundred per cent.), Tree (fifty) 
 and Bourchier and Irving (say, twenty-five each). But the 
 fifth, whose blood is purely Scotch — Matheson Lang — was to 
 me the most sympathetic of them all, possibly because he made 
 his first appearance in his own house, transferring to an interior 
 the bargain with Bassanio and Antonio, which, by stage direc- 
 tion, occurs in " a public place." And in getting inside that 
 house of which all previous audiences have seen only the door 
 through which Jessica eloped, and the window through which 
 she dropped the stolen jewels to her Christian gallant, we seemed 
 also for the first time to see Shylock from within. As the 
 Englishman's house was his castle, so the Jew's house was his 
 synagogue. Here, kissed by the Princess Sabbath, the dog, in 
 Heine's phrase, became a man. But this secret of the Ghetto 
 was only imperfectly divined by Shakespeare, in whose days 
 England knew no professing Jews. I would have Shylock dis- 
 covered poring over some old Talmudic folio, or at some pictur- 
 esque ceremony with wine cup and spice box, and Jessica 
 holding the taper. Mr. Lang has not ventured so far as that, 
 but he gives us Jessica flitting about the home, so that we can 
 
 239
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 for the first time realise her flight as a tragedy for her father, 
 not as a mere comedy for the gay Venetians. 
 
 It has been curiously overlooked that Shylock demands his 
 " pound of flesh " only after he has been robbed of his daughter 
 and of his treasures, and outraged in his deepest instincts by 
 her baptism. He is now practically insane with lust for 
 vengeance, and from that point Shylock should be played as a 
 morbid will and a deranged intellect, with all the remorseless 
 logic of the monomaniac. Hazlitt, according to the late Dutton 
 Cook, described Shylock as " a man brooding over one idea." 
 Hazlitt said exactly the opposite — such is the reliability of 
 even the best dramatic critics — but the description misattrib- 
 uted to him is true for the second part of the story. The 
 opening Shylock, however, is neither a mean usurer, nor a 
 brooding fiend, nor a pathological figure, but a deeply intel- 
 lectual Jew, probably of Spanish origin and Spanish pride, 
 devoted to his daughter and his dead wife. And this spiritual 
 self-sufficiency — which Irving's too pathetic performance 
 missed — Mr. Lang realised. 
 
 But did not then Shylock plot to trap Antonio into this mon- 
 strous bargain, to "catch him on the hip"? My answer is, 
 " No, he made the bargain out of a superb disdain for the 
 money-seeking Christians." These flamboyant prodigals flouted 
 his thrift, taunted him with usury, spat upon his gaberdine, 
 reviled him for a " cut-throat dog." Very well, he would lend 
 them the three thousand ducats for nothing, nay, for something 
 less valuable than nothing, a pound of their own flesh. 
 
 It was a piece of panache as of a Cyrano de Bergerac, no 
 deep-laid plot, but the inspiration of an ironic moment. As a 
 plot indeed it would have been unworthy of a schoolboy, not to 
 say a shrewd calculating financier. Antonio, to cover these 
 three thousand ducats, had no less than four argosies out, with 
 other " miscellaneous ventures." The chances that all these 
 would make shipwreck were infinitesimal. Ask any marine 
 insurance broker, enquire at Lloyd's, what was the chance of 
 Shylock getting his pound of flesh. It was practically nil. 
 And this without allowing for the probability of Antonio or 
 Bassanio borrowing the money from another source, Christian 
 or Jewish. But the audience, knowing beforehand that the 
 wildly improbable xvill happen, reads the malignity of the sequel 
 into the mere mocking contract, the ironic revenge of the Jew- 
 dog, when the grand signors who have spat upon him must 
 stoop to his money bags. 
 
 240
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 And with this irony went also, so oddly is human nature com- 
 pounded, a desire for the love and respect of these lordly Chris- 
 tians — when has a Jew not coveted that? Shylock has cleared 
 his bosom of the rankling tale of his wrongs — were he trapping 
 Antonio resentment is the last thing he would have betrayed — 
 and now he is ready for a new relation. Flattered by the 
 friendliness of the Venetians, he even relaxes his rigid piety. 
 He goes to supper with them, and it is while he is at supper 
 that — by what the orthodox Jew would regard as a nemesis — 
 the catastrophe of his daughter's abandonment falls on him. 
 To his tragic frenzy the contract devised in irony now appears 
 the way to vengeance. Here is a consistent characterisation, 
 here a genuine dramatic development. 
 
 H 
 
 I am well aware that there are passages that make against 
 this reading, which do show Shylock as a scheming devil, plan- 
 ning for his pound of flesh in cold blood, but they are enor- 
 mously outweighed by the passages which make the diabolical 
 reading impossible. The fact is that the text offers us two 
 discrepant Shylocks. But the passage upon which the case for 
 the scheming devil mainly rests, is a long " aside " lugged in at 
 a most improbable moment, in the very presence of Antonio and 
 Bassanio, who were to be caught napping, and contains, more- 
 over, the statement that Antonio lends money gratis — a state- 
 ment which Antonio (who is supposed not to hear it) contradicts 
 in his first speech. True, this same self-contradiction occurs 
 earlier, but even the careless Bard of Avon would not be likely 
 to contradict himself within the compass of a few lines. It is 
 not impossible that the " aside " was inserted by the commercial 
 manager (who had commissioned the play) to offset Shake- 
 speare's unexpected humanisation of the Jew. For, as Sir 
 Sidney Lee has surmised, the " Merchant of Venice " was prob- 
 ably written to exploit the popular odium for the Jew arising 
 from the hanging, drawing and quartering of the converted Jew, 
 Rodrigo Lopez, the Queen's Physician, on the charge of com- 
 plicity in a conspiracy to poison Elizabeth. Written post- 
 haste as a topical " money-maker," at any rate produced within 
 three months of the Jew's execution, it blessed, like Balaam, 
 where it should have cursed, and closely though it kept to the 
 old story or play on which it was founded, it was yet subtly 
 
 241
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 transformed. For Shakespeare was not only the hack 
 dramatist, he was also Shakespeare. And Shakespeare was — 
 in the language of Xovalis — " at one with nature." Though, 
 as Carlyle said, " His great soul had to crush itself as it could 
 into the mould of the Globe Theatre," his genius could no more 
 tell a lie than George Washington. Moreover, as a ruthless 
 collector of his own private debts, his subconscious sympathy 
 went with Shylock's argumentation. Hence these discrepancies, 
 hence these traces of an earlier type and play left crudely 
 standing — or re-inserted managerially — in contradiction of 
 the new Shylock his universal humanity had evolved. 
 
 But these stumbling-blocks, though they found their way into 
 the text printed without consultation with Shakespeare, must 
 be boldly removed, if Shylock is to remain credible to the modern 
 mind. Every age, it has been truly said, re-interprets the old 
 masterpieces. It is not so important what Shakespeare meant 
 as what he might mean to us. It is not as if the Jew's demand 
 for a pound of flesh rested on any historic foundation. The 
 story comes from Hindu mythology. It cropped up in England 
 in the " Cursor Mundi," and in the old ballad of " Ser Gernutus, 
 the Jew of Venice." Eight years before Shakespeare was born, 
 it figured in an Italian collection, " II Pecarone." When he 
 was fifteen, it was dramatised as " The Jew." But out of 
 eleven versions of the stor}' in the world's literature, four have 
 no Jew at all. Na} r , in the only version purporting to be his- 
 toric — for it is related in Letti's History of Pope Sixtus V. — 
 it is the Christian, " the Merchant of Rome," who demands the 
 pound of flesh from the Jew! The Jew as creditor only 
 appeared in an English version at the very time the race was 
 being banished from England. (In a Japanese version I have 
 seen, it is not a pound but a square foot of flesh.) 
 
 With a myth so floating and mutable an artist may do what 
 he will. It was only fastened on the Jew as all jokes are ulti- 
 mately fathered on Punch. But that was a bad psychological 
 blunder. The Jew was the last person the legend should have 
 been fastened on. The Bible forbids him to cut even from the 
 living flesh of an animal, and a man capable of cutting from a 
 living Christian was never born of Jewish woman. He were as 
 much a monster as the comic demon whom Macklin drove from 
 the stage. Sufferance is the badge of all our tribe, as Shake- 
 speare rightly divined. The Jew survives not by force but by 
 brain-power and the " patient shrug." 
 
 Even, therefore, if Matheson Lang's Shylock did not exist in 
 
 242
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 Shakespeare, it had to be invented. If every age re-interprets 
 its old masterpieces, that is practically rewriting them. The 
 recognised licence to cut Shakespeare — which subtly changes 
 all the proportions — should be supplemented by, indeed, it 
 requires, a complementary licence to add and readjust. Mr. 
 Lang allowed Jessica to kiss her father's hand — Irving intro- 
 duced the knocking at the door of the deserted home. Tree 
 grovelled on the ground, rent his garments and poured ashes on 
 his head; Bourchier (and probably all the others) brought back 
 the Venetian revellers to accentuate the tragedy — it were no 
 great transition to add a line or two of speech to all this 
 gesture-language. But in any case Shylock must be made 
 plausible. And that can be done only if the flight of his 
 daughter is made the dividing line between Shylock sober and 
 Shylock drunk for vengeance. The impossible " aside " must 
 be eliminated — Mr. Lang merely slurs over it. Apart from its 
 absurdity, it is a great artistic flaw, for if even before Jessica's 
 treachery Shylock was meditating so diabolical a revenge on the 
 heathen, the whole episode and all his sufferings become artis- 
 tically meaningless. That is hardly the method of a master 
 craftsman, whose every stroke has significance, whose tragedy is 
 always cumulative. 
 
 Nor is the change that I propose the first " The Merchant of 
 Venice " has undergone. Ever since Shylock became a serious 
 character, the comedy of the Venetian Christians has been 
 thrown out of focus. The new rendering deranges it still more. 
 Impossible after Shylock's tragic exit to restore the gaiety as it 
 was restored, or rather renewed, when the bafflement of the 
 comic demon was but the preparation for the happy ending 
 and the delicious poetry of the moonlit close. And yet it is not 
 against nature that the merry Venetians, having wronged a 
 greater soul than their own, should turn blithely and uncon- 
 sciously to their own debonair life, that the stars should look 
 down in their splendour on an old Jew's broken heart. Only 
 there is an irony greater even than Shakespeare saw, ironically 
 and nobly as he rose above the prejudice of his age. 
 
 in 
 
 My friend, Mr. William Poel, criticising this reading of Shy- 
 lock, objects that Jessica (Act III. Sc. 2) testifies that even 
 when she was with her father, she heard him tell Tubal that he 
 
 243
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 would rather have Antonio's flesh than twenty times the value 
 of the debt. But who can believe Jessica, the most detestable 
 and the least Jewish character in all fiction? She is capable of 
 saying anything to please her Christian friends. There is even 
 less substance in Mr. Poel's further objection that Shylock was 
 not " robbed " of Jessica, because her elopement was voluntary. 
 As if Shylock's feeling that he had been robbed would be les- 
 sened by a consideration like that, especially in days when 
 daughters had no rights ! Mr. Poel's own view is that the play 
 was written as a commercial counterblast to " The Jew of 
 Malta " in which Marlowe " bitterly accused the Christians of 
 lacking candour, honesty, and every Christian virtue." Shake- 
 speare cannily desired to show " the other side of the question." 
 But I look in vain in " The Jew of Malta " for Marlowe's 
 indictment of the Christian. In so far as it was put in the 
 Jew's own mouth, 
 
 " For I can see no fruits in all their faith 
 But malice, falsehood and excessive pride " — 
 
 it would have been discounted by the audience. And per contra 
 the sophistication with which the Christians covered their crimes 
 would have evoked a concordant echo. We hear indeed the 
 self-righteous accent of Bolshevism in the Christian defence. 
 
 "Barabas: Will you then steal my goods? 
 Is theft the ground of your religion? 
 
 " Governor of Malta: No, Jew, we take particularly thine 
 To save the ruin of a multitude: 
 And better one want for the common good 
 Than many perish for a private man." 
 
 This sophistication was, however, almost superfluous in view 
 of the ogreish anti-Christianity of Barabas. A play which 
 ends in a Jew-monster being boiled alive can hardly be called an 
 attack on the Christians ; the venom attributed to the Jew was 
 enough to rouse their passions to boiling point. 
 
 Moreover the hypothesis that Shakespeare's play was a com- 
 mercial counterblast to Marlowe's has to meet the passages in 
 which Shylock (not to mention the course of the fable) likewise 
 exposes the unchristianity of the Christians. The fact is, as 
 Mr. Poel admits, that " The Merchant of Venice " is " illogical 
 and unsatisfactory as a work of art." Forced, then, to choose 
 between Shakespeare's self-contradictions, which passages shall 
 we eliminate to make a consistent whole? 
 
 244
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 The method of Mr. Moscovitch was, as he told me, to play 
 all the contradictions, leaving the onus of them on Shakespeare, 
 it being the duty of an actor, he observed — astonishing but 
 admirable maxim ! — to be faithful to his author. " I grope 
 my way like a blind man from scene to scene," he explained, and 
 it is sufficient proof that no general view of the character is 
 possible, without the cuts I have suggested. The part of 
 Jessica moreover ought to be rewritten; so heartless and dis- 
 honest a jade could scarcely be found in a Christian household, 
 much less in a Jewish, with its closer domesticity. Marlowe's 
 Abigail, the daughter of Barabas, is much nearer the true 
 psychology. 
 
 " Not for myself, but aged Barabas : 
 Father, for thee lamenteth Abigail." 
 
 And this excellent Jewish daughter not only does not despise 
 her father but sets herself to recapture his hidden treasure: 
 
 " Ten thousand portagues, besides great pearls 
 Rich costly jewels and stones infinite." 
 
 It is assuredly from this couple that Shakespeare drew his less 
 convincing twain : 
 
 " O girl ! O gold ! O beauty ! O my bliss ! " 
 
 This is the obvious source of 
 
 " My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter! " 
 
 It is equally the source of Scott's Isaac of York and of that 
 Rebecca whose original has been sought so superfluously in 
 living models. The contrast of the abhorred old Jew with the 
 beautiful young Jewess, coveted of Christendom, was too artistic 
 a trouvaille to be lightly thrown away. 
 
 IV 
 
 Barabas, menaced with the loss of his estate, yet refuses to be 
 a " convertite." And Marlowe has no lack of other Hebraic 
 touches. Yet it is in Shakespeare alone that we find the real 
 differentia of the Jew as a member of society : 
 
 " I will buy with you, and sell with you, talk with you, walk with 
 
 245
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 you, and so following; but I will not eat with you, drink with you, 
 nor pray with you." 
 
 It is odd that so obvious a point should be so absent from 
 literature. Yet it does not appear even in " Nathan der 
 Weise," a play which like Cumberland's " The Jew," substitutes 
 a monster of goodness for Shakespeare's and Marlowe's mon- 
 sters of evil. It is interesting how much more vitalised are the 
 creations of hate than the creations of love. Cumberland's 
 hero has not even Lessing's poetry to veil his goody-goodiness. 
 
 Doubtless Lessing's noble-minded drama will always have a 
 place in the history of German literature and of the modern 
 spirit. But as a piece of art the play surely does not wear 
 well ; it is too compact of duologues, and the end, with its com- 
 plex discoveries of literal brotherhoods, is feeble and is more 
 suited to Boccaccio or to Shakespearean comedy than to the 
 high theme of the human brotherhood. And the draughtsman- 
 ship of Nathan is not specifically Jewish, even though we know 
 he was modelled on Moses Mendelssohn. There was a side of 
 Mendelssohn which Lessing, despite his close friendship with 
 the sage of Berlin, could scarcely grasp. But perhaps Lessing 
 did well to accentuate — against current prejudice and Chris- 
 tian bigotry — the more universal attributes of the ideal 
 Israelite: his unique tolerance, wisdom, and charity. "The 
 righteous of all nations have a share in Paradise," says the 
 Jewish prayer-book, and since the parable is also a character- 
 istically Jewish method of teaching, it was true portraiture in 
 the highest sense to put into Nathan's mouth the famous fable 
 of the three rings, which for the rest occurs in early Rabbinic 
 literature. But the remainder of the picture is shadowy, in the 
 Mohammedan and Christian details, no less than in the Jewish. 
 
 And yet the period and the Court of Saladin gave Lessing 
 the chance of introducing a magnificent figure — the mediaeval 
 philosopher, and refugee from Spain, Maimonides, Saladin's 
 own physician. A famous letter from this thinker of the 
 synagogue, whose thought dominated the Middle Ages and 
 nourished even the Dominican intellect, gives the whole Islamic 
 environment which Lessing might have reproduced for us. 
 
 " I reside in Egypt; the King resides in Cairo, which lies about 
 two Sabbath-day journeys from the first-named place. My duties 
 to my King are very heavy. I am obliged to visit him every day, 
 early in the morning; and when he or any of his eliildren, or the in- 
 mates of the harem, are indisposed, I dare not quit Cairo, but must 
 
 24C
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 stay, during the greater part of the day, in the palace. It also fre- 
 quently happens that one or two of the royal officers fall sick, and 
 then I have to attend them. As a rule, I go to Cairo very early in 
 the day, and, even if nothing unusual happens, I do not return be- 
 fore the afternoon, when I am almost dead with hunger; but I find 
 the ante-chambers filled with Jews and Gentiles, with nobles and 
 common people, awaiting my return . . ." 
 
 And what was true of Saladin's Court at Cairo must have 
 held good for Jerusalem, then equally sealed of the great 
 Mussulman. 
 
 It is from lack of concrete Jewish characterisation that 
 another poetic drama, which may survive, fails to rise beyond 
 nominal Jewishness. This is the " Herod " of Stephen Phillips, 
 whose Jerusalem is as little of the time of Christ as Lessing's is 
 of the era of Saladin. Towards the end of " Herod " the 
 mob — till then indistinguishable from a Shakespearean Roman 
 mob — recall the Lord their God, who brought them out of 
 Egypt, out of the house of bondage. What a dramatic thrill 
 the poet has given us here : what a sense of the romance of 
 history : of the miracle of " the peculiar people," still as 
 entangled with the Caesars of to-day as they then were with 
 Antony and Pompey, and as they had been with Pharaoh and 
 Cyrus. Why did he not insist earlier upon this specific thread 
 of colour and characterisation? It would have transfigured 
 his whole work, and helped to give it that sense of reality which 
 it so sorely needs. Mr. Phillips has selected away everything 
 but the barest humanity, the essential poetry, of his theme — 
 a form of art permissible enough, yet scarcely serving to place 
 him with Shakespeare, or even with Rostand, as some critics of 
 the day believed. There are more affinities with the earlier 
 Maeterlinck. 
 
 " Herod " in some sort combines the merits of two schools 
 of art : it unites classic form with Elizabethan ecstasy ; the unity 
 of Space of Racine with the native wood-notes wild of the lyric 
 poet. The poet has written beautiful lines and devised a series 
 of ironic tableaux vivants, the best thing that wherein Herod 
 has no lines at all. But Herod, Mariamne and Aristobulus, 
 are merely the A, B and C of a dramatic positipn. Who 
 realises for a moment that Aristobulus is High Priest, that he 
 has any connection with the Temple ritual? It is all a poem, 
 far beyond the average of our stage, and anybody who missed 
 the last act of " Herod " deprived himself of a unique stage- 
 memory. But O for a touch of local colour ! Jerusalem, after 
 
 247
 
 THE VOICE OP JERUSALEM 
 
 all, is a magic word. It ought not to mean the mere No Man's 
 Land of poetry. Shakespeare had, in England at least, no 
 opportunity of observing Jewish life, since overt Jews in 
 England there were none. But for Stephen Phillips the material 
 lay at hand, both corporeally and through a mass of garnered 
 history. 
 
 But in place of the picturesqueness and variety of the truth, 
 the comedy and colour of actual history, one gets only the rigid 
 outlines of the pseudo-classic play. One must not make the 
 author responsible for the immortal poster put forward by the 
 theatre, with the prophetically dated Judaeo-Roman coin of " 40 
 B.C." ! But what a picture, had Stephen Phillips possessed 
 a sense of history, one might have had of the Jewish world just 
 before the coming of Christ; the schools and doctors of the 
 Law, the young zealots of the faith yearning to tear down the 
 Roman eagles from the city gate, the pious and not always 
 hypocritical Pharisees, the Sadducees with their aristocratic 
 temper and their denial of immortality, the Essenes with their 
 noble simplicity. 
 
 It was under Herod that the great Jewish sage, Hillel, had 
 his being: Hillel, the announcer, if in obverse form, of " the 
 Golden Rule " which, like most other good things, has been an- 
 nexed by the adjective " Christian." The mere juxtaposition 
 of the philosophical saint and the pre-Nietzschean Tetrarch, 
 " beyond good and evil " would have been rarely dramatic. 
 But there was actual contact. Before Herod left Jerusalem to 
 present himself to Octavianus, the conqueror of Antony — the 
 leave-taking is actually pictured in Mr. Phillips's play — he 
 appointed this unknown Babylonian, Hillel, to be one of the 
 Presidents of the Sanhedrin, and this appointment influenced 
 the whole future of the religion. What a chance missed of at 
 least making Hillel cross the scene: ay, and with him, his great 
 rival, Shammai. These two figures, whose discussions and 
 conflicting schools loom so large in the Talmud, would have 
 served to supply the true atmosphere of old Jerusalem. Herod 
 appointed Menahem to be Hillel's deputy, and Menahem was an 
 Essene, so that through him an atmosphere, akin to that of the 
 coming Christianity, might have wafted into the tragedy. 
 
 And apart from these heroic figures and spiritual suggestions, 
 and the further crossing of Herod's line of life with Cleopatra's, 
 the gallery of the monster's own household, as painted by 
 Josephus, provides a panorama of comedy personages who 
 could have filled the scene with a Shakespearean palpitation of 
 
 248
 
 THE VOICE OP JERUSALEM 
 
 flesh and blood. The poor homicidal despot had no easy time 
 among all the varied results of his ten marriages, complicated 
 by the contrariness of his brother Phenoras, his sister Salome, 
 and his mother-in-law, Alexandra. The ill-natured Salome, for 
 example, was constantly carrying tittle-tattle against Mari- 
 amne's sons, " that they hated their father, and were continu- 
 ally threatening, that if they once got the kingdom, they would 
 make Herod's sons by his former wives country schoolmasters, 
 for that the present education which was given them, and their 
 diligence in learning, fitted them for such an employment. 
 And as for the women, whenever they saw them adorned with 
 their mother's clothes, they threatened that instead of their 
 present gaudy apparel, they should be clothed in sackcloth, 
 and confined so closely that they should not see the light of 
 the sun." 
 
 But perhaps the poet's dodging of all true detail is inten- 
 tional. He may have feared to wound religious susceptibilities, 
 whether Jewish or Christian. Moreover, from the amusing 
 anxiety of the author of the admirable pamphlet put forth at 
 the first production by Her Majesty's Theatre, to show that 
 Herod was not a " Biblical " person : from his grave warning 
 that Herod was not the Herod Antipas, before whom Jesus was 
 sent by Pilate to be tried, it is obvious that the poet felt him- 
 self cramped by the censorship which still exercised its auto- 
 matic objection to " Biblical " figures, and that the public 
 which flocked to every indecent fatuous spectacle accepted the 
 embargo as a mark of reverence. Herod is only " mentioned 
 once " in the Gospels — even that mention, says the pamphlet 
 (with an unconscious Irish irreverence just where it means to 
 be most reverent), is not endorsed by Josephus. The Phari- 
 sees, then, I suppose, were banned, because they are mentioned 
 several times. Herod, by belonging mainly to the blank page 
 between the Old and New Testament, became fit material for 
 the dramatist, while had he belonged to either section his 
 appearance on the stage would have been blasphemous. No 
 more delicious reductio ad absurdwm of the recent English atti- 
 tude towards the personages of Jewish History could have been 
 conceived. To have been written about in the Bible — even if 
 you were Ahab or Jezebel — was to be too sacred for stage 
 presentation. This attitude marked the nadir of belief. When 
 people believed in the Bible, they were only too anxious to see 
 its figures in flesh and blood. Moses is the hero of the first 
 Biblical play on record, Jesus of the second. This modern 
 
 249
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 reverence was, and is, a mixture of ignorance and scepticism. 
 When our mock reverence fades, or our real reverence returns, 
 the Biblical figures will return again to the realm of the poet 
 and the dramatist. They have never been outside the painter's. 
 The production of " Joseph and His Brethren," undistinguished 
 though it was, provided, let us hope, an augury of better things. 
 
 Whether the Apocrypha were ever under the same embargo 
 as the Bible proper I do not know. But the fact that the 
 " Judith " theme had, till Mr. Arnold Bennett took it up, 
 appeared in England only by way of oratorio and cantata — 
 the cantata was by Parry and the best of the three oratorios 
 was by Arne in 1764 — suggests that a similar aroma of 
 sanctity attached to it. Very little either of the beauty of 
 holiness or the holiness of beaut}' remained after Mr. Arnold 
 Bennett's treatment. For though he has followed the text of 
 the ancient historical novel in many a detail and added a very 
 clever study of a chief eunuch, he has, unfortunately, aban- 
 doned the very ground-plan which makes the artistic value of 
 the fable. For the Semitic story-teller pictures a beautiful 
 woman, immersed in the gloom of widowhood and the ritual of 
 piety, becoming suddenly inflamed at the call of patriotism into 
 bewitching and murdering the tyrant Holofernes, and then 
 subsiding meekly, after her desperate adventure, into her aus- 
 tere and saintly widowhood. That is a magnificent artistic 
 conception, and for an author of Mr. Bennett's rank to have 
 missed it, and to have even vulgarised it by a happy ending — 
 Judith picking up a handsome husband in the course of her 
 adventure — would be almost incredible, were not the English 
 stage in question — and its leading ladies. 
 
 This is the more regrettable inasmuch as the true inwardness 
 of Judith has never been presented in art, outside the some- 
 what unread original, the old Masters painting her only at that 
 picturesque moment when she strides gallantly, bearing the head 
 of Holofernes. And that head reminds one of Oscar Wilde's 
 overrated " Salome," prohibited in 1893 by the British licenser, 
 and produced the year after in its original French by Sarah 
 Bernhardt. This prohibition of an indecent work on the 
 ground that it was a Biblical subject is not unamusing and 
 resembles the suggestion that the Prussians would have been 
 allowed to devastate Belgium, had it not been for a certain 
 scrap of paper. The sexual element that Oscar Wilde imported 
 into the story owes, however, nothing to the Bible. It is a 
 purely degenerate invention. There is as little ground in 
 
 250
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 Matthew or Mark for the notion that Salome was in love with 
 John the Baptist, whose head she coveted on the charger, as 
 there is for Renan's statement in his " Vie de Jesus " that she 
 was dissolute. Yet in the copious controversies produced both 
 by the play and the inevitable opera, it was taken for granted 
 that Wilde's sexually perverted conception is rooted in the text. 
 To that extent is even the New Testament unknown to the 
 critics. Outside the Gospels there is no warrant for attribut- 
 ing any share in the Baptist's death either to Salome or her 
 mother. Josephus, a contemporary of John, knows nothing of 
 the vengeance of Herod's wife upon the prophet who denounced 
 her for marrying her undeceased husband's brother; he is 
 ignorant even of Salome's dancing. He ascribes the execution 
 of John to the prudent fear of Herod Antipas lest the prophet 
 become too powerful with the Jewish masses and lead them to 
 rebellion. And he tells us that so revered of the Jews was John 
 that a subsequent defeat of Herod's army was regarded as a 
 divine chastisement for the murder. 
 
 The refusal of commensality which marks the orthodox Jew 
 and which, as we have seen, is conspicuous by its absence from 
 the stage Jew, is not so invariable a trait in modern as in 
 mediaeval Jewry, and therefore our more, recent dramatists are 
 more forgivable for forgetting it. It does not figure even in 
 " Potash and Perlmutter." Yet the mere race-Jew, void even 
 of Zionist feeling, who is now the staple stage type, is so late 
 and contemporary a creation of the Time-Spirit, so transitional 
 a product, that he is almost too topical for art, certainly for 
 any art but comedy, or for any comedy but that of transient 
 " humours," for which posterity will need the illumination of 
 footnotes. Yet this sort of Jew is all we see in Bernstein's 
 grandiosely-entitled " Israel," a play which reveals only a 
 boulevardier's ignorance of all the deeper currents of Jewish 
 life. Heijermans, the Dutch- Jewish dramatist, comes a little 
 closer to them in " The Ghetto," but his Ghetto is revealed only 
 on the side on which it repels the younger generation; it is 
 seen through hate, not love, which according to Goethe is the 
 only true vision ; though, as I have said, love yields tamer results 
 than hate, save in the hands of a master. 
 
 A German dramatist, Carl Rossler, has given us a more sym- 
 pathetic treatment of the high Frankfort Jewry in his mediocre 
 
 251
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 comedy of the Rothschild brothers, " The Five Frankforters." 
 But it is not true to its period. First, because the five 
 brothers — whose financial network is represented as linking 
 Paris and Vienna, Frankfort and London and Naples — were 
 not all thus simultaneously established; secondly, because the 
 Rothschilds of that time were too pious to be arranging a 
 match between a daughter of the house and a German High- 
 ness, as the thesis of the play pretends. There is, however, 
 some appreciation of the solidarity of Jewish family life and the 
 domestic virtues of the old-fashioned Jewish mother, even when 
 begilded. The setting of the play in the old Frankfort home in 
 the quaint archaic Judengasse, that was still at the opening of 
 the nineteenth century a compulsory quarter, is a picturesque 
 promise which is not sustained. For no breath of the outer 
 life of the Jew-street penetrates into these spacious salons, shut 
 off as by golden blinds from the comedies and tragedies of this 
 oldest and latest-enduring of German Ghettos. But the exclu- 
 sion is more probably due to the dramatist's ignorance than to 
 any real absence of Jewish colour in the early environment of 
 this kind-hearted family. And the Frankfort Ghetto was up 
 to 1830 so hedged with picturesque anachronisms — only a 
 dozen of its couples could marry in a twelvemonth, for example, 
 and only four doctors could minister to its six thousand 
 swarming souls — that the artist's ignorance of the milieu he 
 would paint is particularly regrettable. 
 
 With the latest Austrian fantasia on the Hebrew theme, Es 
 Gelit Writer, I have dealt already. It is only another reading 
 of " The Wandering Jew," a theme which curiously broke out 
 in three London theatres in 1873, though it had never appeared 
 in London before, and is appearing there again only this year. 
 The " Stage Encyclopedia " catalogues some thirty-three titles 
 in which the syllable " Jew " figures. 
 
 In Sheridan the Jew was still the moneylender. Shaw, with 
 more verisimilitude, makes him a doctor — for, as I have 
 pointed out on an earlier page, medicine was from mediaeval 
 times one of the great callings of the race, even Emperors who 
 suspected the Jews of poisoning the wells never feeling safe 
 without a Jewish physician. (In our own day, too, it would be 
 difficult to find a monarch without one.) In Jerome the Jew 
 is a bookmaker. Pinero gives us in Maldonado the amorous 
 artistic type, descended like himself from the Spanish-Jewish 
 hidalgos. * In his " ' Mind the Paint ' Girl," we get the genial 
 " bounder " with a pathetic passion for the green room ; and 
 
 252
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 Clyde Fitch gave us a still more degenerate type in " The 
 Woman in the Case." No, it cannot be said that the stage- 
 Jew has yet shaken off his past. 
 
 Mr. Augustus Thomas seems, indeed, to have done for 
 American Jewry what Lessing did for German Jewry, and 
 Richard Cumberland for English Jewry, by presenting a perfect 
 type of colourless Christian manhood as a Jew, and it seems to 
 have been eagerly welcomed, especially by those Jews who are 
 not a bit like it. But I have not seen this play, so must not 
 sink into a dramatic critic. Nor have I seen " The House 
 Next Door," a highly popular inter-marriage play in which, I 
 understand, my own name is bandied about. 
 
 But considering the great figures that Jewry has produced 
 within the ken of the man in the street (who even wears prim- 
 roses in honour of one of them), it is curious that the cad and 
 the moneylender should still practically monopolise the boards. 
 The situation is not saved by producing a play about the actual 
 " Disraeli," who is too individual a hero. But the stage is no- 
 toriously not, as Hamlet conceived it, a mirror held up to na- 
 ture, but a magic mirror reflecting types that have long since 
 passed away. " Watch that man," I said once, pointing out the 
 late Dr. Herzl to a famous actor-manager ; " you will one day 
 play him." That time is not now distant. The stage incarna- 
 tion of Mendel Beilis is, however, an instance of the stage get- 
 ting almost ahead of life. Like his fellow-Jew Dreyfus, this 
 victim of the Blood Accusation became a legend while still in 
 prison, and both in melodrama and cinematography he has been 
 exploited wherever the Ghetto boasts of a theatre. It is pleas- 
 ant to think that the real Beilis, though a mere clerk, retired 
 with dignity to Palestine, where he has just donated his savings 
 to the National Fund. 
 
 Save for this allusion to the Beilis play, I have altogether 
 omitted from this cursory survey the vast field of Yiddish and 
 Hebrew drama, which has not the ear of the world, nor the 
 interest attaching to the spectacle of the Jew as others see him. 
 Of this indigenous drama it may roughly be said that it is tragic, 
 for the Ghetto, unlike Christendom, prefers an " unhappy end- 
 ing," and enjoys death-scenes more than love-scenes. It seems 
 to have become so habituated to tears as to draw an emotional 
 voluptuousness from mimic sorrow. 
 
 253
 
 LANGUAGE AND JEWISH LIFE 
 
 The Hebrew volume in honour of Sokolow's jubilee, to which 
 this essay — in its Semitic rendering — is a contribution, af- 
 fords, like the " Hebrew Encyclopedia " edited by him, a strik- 
 ing disproof of the general idea that Hebrew is an extinct lan- 
 guage. While popular ignorance deems the Old Testament the 
 end as well as the beginning of Hebrew literature, or has at most 
 some vague idea of the Talmud, the scribes have never ceased 
 writing for a moment. None keener than they to welcome the 
 invention of Gutenberg. Myriads of volumes, pouring forth 
 pauselessly through the ages, attest the genius and the pedan- 
 try, the spirituality and sterility of the race. The philosophy 
 of Maimonides, the poems of Solomon Gabirol and Jehuda Hal- 
 evi, the mysticism of the Zohar — these would challenge atten- 
 tion in any literature, and they are the most notable fruits of 
 the long period when the distinction of sacred and secular was 
 scarcely made in Hebrew literature, when every book that fell to 
 the floor was piously kissed as it was picked up. The eight- 
 eenth century shows Luzzatto in Italy producing poetic and 
 allegorical drama in Occidental form, and Wessely in Germany 
 writing the Epic of Exodus after the fashion of Klopstock. 
 And when with the close of that century of storm the light of 
 the outside world began to stream more fully into the Ghetto, 
 th6 sacred tongue took on still stranger functions. In Ger- 
 many Rappaport creates the scientific study of Judaism. 
 Krochmal, a native of Brody — child of a swarming Ghetto, 
 where the casual pilgrim sees only degeneration and dirt — re- 
 interprets the old religion by the principles of Hegel ; a Polish 
 poet, Isaac Erter, satirises its superstitions with the vigour 
 of a Pope or a Swift. Even more remarkable is the nineteenth 
 century movement that curiously owed its impulse to a Hebrew 
 translation of Eugene Sue's " Mysteries of Paris." Abraham 
 Mapu founded the modern Hebrew novel, both in its romantic 
 and realistic forms, and had a host of followers in both fields. 
 Gordon, the Hebrew Byron, arose in Russia to express in nerv- 
 ous modern Hebrew all the tragedy — the external persecution, 
 
 254
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 the internal narrowness — of the Jewish lot. The novels of 
 Smolensky showed Jewry its own visage and, warring equally 
 against mediaeval pietism and modern indifference, taught the 
 need of re-nationalisation. And in these newest applications of 
 the old tongue it is no longer the organ of faith, but the instru- 
 ment of revolt and reconstruction. A host of translators 
 added the ferment of European thought to the internal disin- 
 tegration of the Ghetto, and imported free-thinking and Social- 
 ism. Political journalism sprang up to bring the outer world 
 still nearer. Grub Street arose in the Ghetto, and Bohemia 
 was taken into the Pale. If the belief that Hebrew literature 
 ended with the Old Testament is a vulgar error, no less an error 
 were it to imagine that it is still a Holy Literature in the 
 sense in which holiness is synonymous with piety and ecclesias- 
 ticism. 
 
 So marvellous a survival of an ancient language, and so un- 
 equalled a flow of literature from Genesis to the last number of 
 the Boar Hayom, the Daily Mail of Jerusalem, produced by a 
 race that lost its Fatherland eighteen centuries ago, tempts one 
 to consider the inter-relations between Israel's language and 
 Israel's life. 
 
 II 
 
 Language is the chief index of life. As no man is dead so 
 long as the mirror put to his lips reveals a breath, so no race 
 is extinct so long as there comes from its lips the breath of 
 speech. A people that speaks is not dead ; a people that is not 
 dead speaks. 
 
 "Lend me a looking glass: 
 If that her breath shall mist or stain the stone, 
 Why, then she lives." 
 
 But by speech we must understand a distinctive speech, not 
 a speech spoken by all the world. A peculiar people without a 
 peculiar speech would be a contradiction. The literature of 
 Israel in its widest sense comprises the contributions made by 
 Jews to the thesaurus of the world. All alphabets and all vo- 
 cabularies are drawn into its service. Were it figured after the 
 fashion of that quaint mediaeval tree in the monastery of San 
 Marco, whereof each leaf is the story of a saintly brother, it 
 would appear an Yggdrasil overshadowing the globe, with each 
 leaf typifying another language. There would be, for example, 
 a Greek branch for the Gospels, and a Latin branch for the 
 
 255
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 treatises of Spinoza; an Arabic branch for the metaphysics of 
 Maimonides ; a German branch for the lyrics of Heine ; a French 
 branch for the dramas of D'Ennery ; an Italian branch for the 
 economic treatises of Luzzatti; a Danish branch for the criti- 
 cisms of Brandes ; an English branch for the romances of Dis- 
 raeli ; a Dutch branch for the dramas of Heijernians, and so on, 
 and so on. But these works are all obviously hybrid products, 
 children of mixed marriages. Tempting as would be a critical 
 discrimination of the parental factors, this section of Jewish 
 literature must be excluded from the present survey. In 180-A 
 Elie Halphen Halevy of Paris published a Hebrew Ode to 
 Peace in honour of Napoleon, saviour of France. His grand- 
 son Ludovic delighted the Boulevards with French farcical com- 
 edies ; his great-grandson, again named Elie, publishes works on 
 sociology. However interesting and suggestive this literary 
 heredity, only the first Halevy, the Hebrew poet, used a tongue 
 specifically Jewish, and affords to that extent proof of inde- 
 pendent Jewish life. Speech, then, as a proof of a people's life, 
 must be " peculiar " speech. 
 
 But there is another modification necessary. By speech as 
 a proof of life is meant living speech ; that is to say, fluid speech 
 ■ — speech that changes with the changes of life. The Latin of 
 the Church and of the scholars of the Middle Ages was not, 
 perhaps, quite a dead language, but it was only a half-living 
 language. It was confined to the learned ; its vocabulary could 
 undergo no natural increase, no natural loss. To be wholly 
 living, language must be rooted in the people, must be watered 
 by the tears of the common pain and feel the sunshine of the 
 common joy. It must be a barometer of history, exquisitely 
 sensitive, registering and recording every breath of change. 
 The Hebrew in which Hebrew literature since the destruction of 
 the Second Temple has been written, can for these reasons not 
 be said to be entirely living. Hebrew had, indeed, ceased to be 
 fully alive long before — soon after the return from the Baby- 
 lonian exile — and by the time of Jesus Aramaic had practi- 
 cally replaced it as a living tongue (with Greek as a lingua 
 franca). The Scriptures needed a Targum (translation). 
 The Talmud shows the bilingual conflict even in literature, and 
 Aramaic has its place in the prayer-book, too. In time Ara- 
 maic likewise died from the lips of men — Arabic and other 
 languages took its place as a Jewish vernacular. And when 
 Aramaic was dead it became holy too, almost as holy as He- 
 brew, and Cabbalistic literature could be written in both, as in 
 
 256
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 the Zohar. Hence we have the paradox that if Sokolow or 
 Achad Ha-am can write to-day more or less in the language of 
 Isaiah and the Psalmists it is because of the destruction of 
 Jewish nationality, which left literature the only possession of 
 the Jew. Had Palestine prospered like England, Hebrew would 
 have been as archaic as Anglo-Saxon is for Englishmen. The 
 Greeks who have remained continuously on the soil of Hellas 
 speak an idiom very far removed from that of JEschylus and 
 Thucydides, and this by sheer natural evolution, without the 
 interference of another invasive tongue. In Palestine, in whose 
 Jewish Colonies Hebrew has at last become a living tongue, a 
 few centuries will remove it as far from the Hebrew of the Bible, 
 unless Biblical Hebrew is made the standard and a dictionary 
 like that of the French Academy compiled from it. But even so 
 it would have to admit hundreds of new words, with which we 
 could not dispense. The vocabulary of Neo-Hebrew already, 
 of course, contains words and ideas of which the writers of the 
 Bible did not dream. Of Neo-Hebrew — despite the diction- 
 ary devoted to it by Ben Jehuda, of Jerusalem — it is difficult 
 to say whether it has been the more alive or the more dead. 
 It was more alive than the Hebrew or Latin of the scholars, 
 it was dead beside the gossip of the market-place. All these 
 new words have come to it as importations, not as natural 
 growths; not to mention that the audacities of journalists, in 
 adapting and transforming, substitute imposition from above 
 for creation from below. Since — however great the number 
 of people able to read it or even speak it — it was nowhere the 
 sole natural medium of communication of a large community, it 
 was not really rooted in life. It merely allowed what grew in 
 the outside world to be grafted upon it. Hebrew, then, in spite 
 of the synagogue liturgy and a vast literature, has never lived 
 in the full sense between the earlier days of the Second Temple 
 and the beginning of this century. 
 
 When the liturgical poets of the Middle Ages introduced their 
 ingenious rhymed acrostics, their vexed and tortured word-spin- 
 nings into the prayer-book, two-thirds of the worshippers were 
 prevented by ignorance from understanding or criticising them. 
 They could only devoutly pray them or sing them. And in 
 contemplating the later non-devotional developments of Hebrew 
 literature, the same semi-paralysis of the tongue must be borne 
 in mind. Brilliant as was the ingenuity expended in producing 
 modern literature in terms of the Old Testament and the Tal- 
 mud, it remains, when all is said, the artificial sport of scholars 
 
 257
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 and geniuses imitating the literary forms of their European 
 environment, rather than writing from and to the heart of 
 Israel. The fact that their books are in Hebrew must not blind 
 us to the true nature of the contents. The work of this transi- 
 tional period, particularly of writers like Alcharisi or Imman- 
 uel, who were exclusively secular, is no less hybrid than that of 
 Heine or Disraeli. Immanuel, for example, imitated his friend, 
 Dante, besides importing the sonnet-form, while Alcharisi was 
 inspired by the Arabic Mrikama (dramatic narrative) and even 
 blended Arabic with his Hebrew. The modern masters of He- 
 brew literature, who found their inspiration in their own race, 
 have been for the most part despairing spirits, who saw them- 
 selves as the last minstrels of a dying language, understanded 
 neither of the cultured nor of the people. Dr. Nahum 
 Slouschz, in his fascinating and instructive book, " La Renais- 
 sance de la Litterature Hebrai'que," tells us that the death of 
 Smolensky left Gordon hopeless and drew from him a cry of 
 despair, which may be regarded as his own last word. 
 
 "What, in sum, is all our people and its literature? 
 A felled giant, lying face to earth. 
 
 The whole world is Israel's sepulchre! And his books? 
 The epitaph of his funeral monument." 
 
 Ill 
 
 What, then, is the language in which the real life of Israel in 
 exile has been expressed? The answer is, the language of the 
 particular country in which each section resided, modified by 
 such words and locutions as expressed the difference between 
 Jews and the rest of their fellow-citizens. These differences 
 were mainly religious, and therefore the vast majority of these 
 additional words and phrases were borrowed from the Hebrew ; 
 the rest had reference to peculiar social customs. Added to 
 Spanish, this specifically Jewish language produced Ladino. 
 Added to German (of an earlier epoch and a less grammatical 
 character than the classical), it. produced the jargon known as 
 Yiddish. That both of these were frequently written in He- 
 brew characters is due to the mere accident that many Jews 
 knew no other alphabet. The Ashkenazic communities devel- 
 oped from within, instead of subjecting themselves, like the Se- 
 phardim, to the common European culture. Hence it is to Yid- 
 dish that we must look for the truest repository of specifically 
 
 258
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 Jewish sociology. Although the wealth of emotional and sym- 
 pathetic terms in Ladino serves to tell the tale of Jewish tender- 
 ness in a crueller Spanish environment, Yiddish, far more than 
 Hebrew or Neo-Hebrew, answers to our definition of a living 
 language, The principal, if not the only, medium of communi- 
 cation among the Jewish masses, it vibrates with their history, 
 follows the mould of their life and thought, and colours itself 
 with their moods. Moreover it has that truest mark of life — 
 the power of absorbing and transforming elements from with- 
 out. It sucks in foreign words and turns them to its own 
 moulds as freely as French turns them to its own pronunciation. 
 
 The enormous literary and journalistic activity of Yiddish 
 exceeds even that of Hebrew. It has its shoals of newspapers, 
 its schools of poets, dramatists, and novelists, and even its liter- 
 ary historiographer in Professor Leo Wiener of Harvard Uni- 
 versity. Do we seek to learn of the Ghetto from within, Morris 
 Rosenfeld will sing to us of its poverty and its pain. Gold- 
 faden, Gordin, David Pinski, and a dozen others will bring its 
 humours over the footlights ; Peretz, Asch, Shalom Aleichem 
 and a score of minor geniuses will incarnate them for our inner 
 eye. But we scarcely need their pictures of a highly differ- 
 entiated existence to convince us of the peculiar flavour of Jew- 
 ish life. Yiddish is its own proof. 
 
 From Yiddish we can build up a picture of the life of the 
 Judengasse. Subtracting from a Yiddish dictionary all Teu- 
 tonic elements, we have a residuum which summarises the spe- 
 cific spiritual life of the Jews of the Exile, and shows us the 
 ideas for the sake of which they accepted, or rather courted, 
 isolation from the European masses. Theirs was a life of rich 
 differences from the environment, and if no other evidence of 
 this difference remained, the Yiddish vocabulary, phrases, locu- 
 tions, proverbs, bywords, are sufficient proof of it. 
 
 These deposits from generations of narrow but vivid life 
 form a rich mine of entertainment and instruction, and have 
 not failed to call into existence folklore societies for their 
 specific study. The psychology bred by the Ghetto, the micro- 
 scopic piety and casuistic ceremonial, the mixture of asceticism 
 and shrewd common sense, the pervasive fun and humour, the 
 eager commercialism that yet sustains and reveres a class of 
 student-drones, the unique family love, the cynicism and the 
 tenderness — all have found expression and perpetuation in 
 these racy locutions. Types evolved nowhere else rise living 
 from the glossary — the Shadclian, who is and is not a matri- 
 
 259
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 monial agent ; the Badchcm, who is and is not a marriage- jester ; 
 the Shammos, who is and is not a beadle; the Schnorrer, who is 
 and is not a beggar — because these humble or sordid occupa- 
 tions are all transcended in the larger brotherhood of Israel, 
 which makes every Jew the equal of his superiors without rob- 
 bing him of his natural superiority to his inferiors. 
 
 There is a story of a Jewish witness unable to explain to a 
 magistrate what a Shofar was. At last, to the suggestion that 
 it was a trumpet, he cried in glad relief, " Yes, it is a trumpet." 
 " Then why didn't you say so? " " Because it is not a trum- 
 pet." These shades of significance which it is impossible to 
 render in another tongue are the truest proof of specific exist- 
 ence. The Shofar is a ram's horn, but who thinks of it as any- 
 thing but the solemn instrument pealing repentance to the 
 white-shrouded figures of Atonement Day ? A Shofar is — a 
 Shofar. If a Shofar were indeed a trumpet, no call to national 
 life could ever be blown upon it. 
 
 IV 
 
 Language, then, is the proof of life. There can be no dif- 
 ference of life without difference of language. The truth of 
 this may be iDustrated from less specious examples than na- 
 tions. Every stratum of society has its own catchwords, un- 
 known to the others and acting as shibboleths ; every university, 
 every school, every profession has its lingo ; nay, every family 
 has a store of special phrases due to the comedies of its own 
 experiences, not understanded of the next-door neighbour. 
 Every game creates its own slang; cricket, football, horse-rac- 
 ing, golf, each has its own vocabulary, which the votaries em- 
 ploy among themselves. Wherever, then, there is difference of 
 life, there is difference of language. 
 
 Let us apply this test of life to the so-called emancipated 
 Jewries, to the Jewries of the post-Ghetto period. I will take 
 England and America, which I know best. Among the richer 
 and more educated Jews of London, all words of a specifically 
 Jewish character have been gradually dropped. Even the word 
 Shule, one of the last to go, has been replaced by synagogue. 
 The desuetude of words like " milchig " applied to food or cul- 
 inary apparatus, words which have no English equivalent — one 
 cannot, for example, say a " milky knife " — reveals the decay 
 of the pious practices with which they were associated. 
 
 In the contemptuous repudiation of the jargon as vulgar, 
 even Hebrew words have been ignorantly banned. Just as the 
 
 260
 
 THE VOICE OP JEKUSALEM 
 
 rabbi assimilates in dress to the Christian clergyman, so all re- 
 ligious terms are translated into an English which does not ex- 
 actly express them, and in accordance with which they tend to 
 modify themselves. When for the Hebrew " Son of the Com- 
 mandment," to express the youth who at the age of thirteen is 
 counted an adult with religious responsibilities, the phraseology 
 of Confirmation is introduced, the Christian concepts tend sub- 
 tly to gather round the Jewish ceremonial. It is not, perhaps, 
 so much that a change of vocabulary produces a change of con- 
 ception ; more probably the conception is already in process of 
 transformation under the influence of the alien environment, 
 ere the foreign word is introduced, and its adoption only defi- 
 nitely clarifies the change already vaguely going on, even if it 
 precipitates its rate of movement. When the Hebrew saluta- 
 tion " Peace be to you " is abandoned for " How do you do? " 
 or " How's business? " we are afforded the indication that Jew- 
 ish consciousness and ideals have been silently under transfor- 
 mation, and that the ideas of the milieu are winning their way. 
 Hence it is that pietists fight so frenziedly over apparent ex- 
 ternals. Details of ritual and speech are not trifles, as the 
 superficial imagine who call them superficial. It is true they lie 
 on the surface, but the fanatics are sub-consciously alive to the 
 fact that they have their roots deep in the inner life. The ob- 
 jection to women smoking was not to women drawing in and 
 puffing out mere smoke : it was to the inner emancipation of their 
 psychology, of which the cigarette was only the symbol. 
 
 The Zionist movement, though rather more barren than might 
 have been expected as regards vocabulary, has not entirely 
 failed in its brief span of life to add its quota of evidence to the 
 thesis, " No language, no life." " Shekel " and " shekel-payer " 
 are not new words, but they have been transformed to an en- 
 tirely new connotation in their application to contributions, and 
 to voters for delegates at the Congress. " The Congress " it- 
 self is different from any other Congress. " The Basle pro- 
 gramme " is a phrase which has been added to every civilised 
 language of the Old and New Worlds, and when only a few 
 years old it had already taken on a somewhat undesirable sanc- 
 tity, as indicating a fixed policy from which it were heretical 
 to deviate. But more characteristic evidence of life, and the 
 one entirely new word evolved by Zionism, was Neinsager (no- 
 sayer), a word fashioned in the crucible of history, in that crit- 
 ical hour when — man after man — the last Congress of 
 HerzFs life was voting " Ay " or " No " on the question whether 
 
 261
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 a Commission should be appointed to investigate the British 
 offer of a territory in East Africa. The Zionist movement has 
 thus supplied the only counteractive to the disappearance from 
 modern Jewish life of all verbal indexes of vitality. 
 
 In American Jewry the tendency to exclude all traces of 
 Jewish nomenclature has been pushed to its last limits. The 
 disappearance of the words Kasher and Trepha is an exact indi- 
 cation of the disappearance of the conceptions themselves, with 
 the obedience to these dietary prescriptions. The Synagogue 
 has now become the " Temple," a term which is not even abso- 
 lutely distinctive, since Christian Science has also its Temples. 
 I speak, of course, not of the Ghettos of New York and Chicago 
 — for they are merely Russia and Galicia migrated to America. 
 I speak of the real American Jewish life into which the Ghetto 
 is sooner or later melted up. In this life the " Temple " is not 
 even an object of frequent pilgrimage; for it has been largely 
 supplanted by the Jewish " Club " — a word even less Jewish. 
 It may be contended that American words like " Sunday 
 School " are annexed by Jews and saturated with a peculiar 
 Jewish significance, but even such words are very rare, and 
 limited to the inevitable religious minimum, many conceptions 
 that have no English equivalent disappearing altogether: for 
 example, Mitzvoh, Shochet, Shnodar, HardaJah, Mvnyan, Seder, 
 &c. As for social and semi-religious words like Kehillah, Par- 
 nass, Gabbai, Gett, Yomtovdik — a clean sweep has been made 
 of them. 
 
 Subtract from the American-Jewish dictionary all American 
 terms, and what remains? Practically nothing. Roughly 
 speaking, no specific Jewish language now exists in America, 
 ergo no specific Jewish life. Very nearly the same statement is 
 true of London. Unless, then, our test is false, we reach the 
 undeniable conclusion that Jewish life disappears outside the 
 Ghetto. It may have an apparent existence through Jews in- 
 termarrying, and may thus linger on like an actor loth to leave 
 the stage, but practically it is extinct. 
 
 A life these Jews have, indeed, not necessarily inferior to the 
 Jewish life. But a Jewish life it is not. It is the general life 
 of the nation whose language they spak. Scrupulously buried 
 in the same cemetery, they have a common death. But a com- 
 mon life — no, that they have not. Upon the clear mirror of 
 language they produce no breath. 
 
 If Israel is to live and speak again, it can only be on a soil 
 of his own. 
 
 262
 
 THE TERRITORIAL SOLUTION OF THE JEWISH 
 
 PROBLEM 
 
 {Fortnightly Review, April and May, 1919.) 
 
 Human life does not proceed by logic, nevertheless logic is 
 occasionally useful. At such a crisis in the fate of Israel as 
 the great war has brought, a clear view of the prospect is 
 peculiarly necessary. 
 
 But clear thinking upon the Jewish question is as uncommon 
 as upon any other human question. Even genius, rare as it is, 
 is not quite so rare, for among all races great men appear, who 
 impart dynamic impulses to their age. They, however, add 
 fresh elements to its intellectual confusion, and not till time has 
 tried their ideas can the value of their contributions be disen- 
 tangled from the welter. 
 
 Such men of genius were the first apostles of Territorialism, 
 Pinsker and Herzl. They saw vividly the evils of the Jewish 
 situation and recorded their diagnosis in imperishable words. 
 The Diaspora, they perceived, held two perils for the Jews — 
 the external menace of anti-Semitism and the internal menace of 
 de-Judaisation : the former ranging from massacre and eco- 
 nomic boycott to mere social prejudice, and not to be diminished 
 even by patriotic blood-sacrifices, rather indeed likely to aug- 
 ment under the national self-concentration of war ; the latter 
 ranging from secularisation or Christianisation to the mere neg- 
 ative inability to use a common language or develop a common 
 culture, and producing in the more emancipated countries — 
 even when the physical atoms of Jewry still cohered — a " liv- 
 ing corpse," a body without its soul. 
 
 That these evils were aspects of the same phenomenon — the 
 landlessness of Israel, his ubiquitous existence and persistence 
 as a minority — was equally clear to the pioneers of Territor- 
 ialism. A Jewish State, they pointed out, not with cold detach- 
 ment, but with passionate resentment — whether of the Russian 
 pogroms, or of the Dreyfus persecution — would be free from 
 both these menaces. Within its boundaries at least there 
 would be neither anti-Semitism nor insidious de-Judaisation. 
 
 263
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 And under the spell of their verbal enchantments and con- 
 tagious emotion arose the vision of this new land of Israel, like 
 the sight of domes and cupolas to the thirsting traveller in 
 the desert. 
 
 So far their logic was as impeccable as their observation was 
 accurate. It was only when they put forth this new Jewish 
 State as a remedy for the evils actually existing here and now, 
 a remedy that would work forthwith ; it was only when they pic- 
 tured the Jewish State as supplanting the Diaspora, and the 
 Diaspora as transporting and transforming itself almost over- 
 night into the Jewish State, that their grip on reality relaxed 
 and their logic broke down. 
 
 It was natural enough that, having realised that the evils of 
 the Diaspora were inherent in it and could only vanish with its 
 destruction, Herzl should sally out like a knight-errant to de- 
 stroy it. It was natural enough for his followers to believe 
 that they were out to destroy it. Nevertheless, the realistic vo- 
 cabulary of Herzl — his parade of charters, companies, and 
 banks — served but to disguise the fundamental unreality of 
 his solution, and the glaring fallacy which he shared with Pins- 
 ker. For the Diaspora is indestructible, except by centuries of 
 absorption into the various national melting pots, and the heat 
 of the solution can be provided only by " Christian love," which 
 is rarer than radium. 
 
 In abandoning before the legions of Rome the struggle for 
 independent political existence in favour of spiritual isolation 
 and economic symbiosis, the Jewish race discovered the secret 
 of immortality, if also of perpetual motion. In the Diaspora 
 anti-Semitism will always be the shadow of Semitism. The law 
 of dislike for the unlike will always prevail. And whereas the 
 unlike is normally situated at a safe distance, the Jews bring 
 the unlike into the heart of every milieu, and must thus defend 
 a frontier-line as large as the world. The fortunes of war 
 vary in every country, but there are perpetual tension and fric- 
 tion even at the most peaceful points, which tend to throw back 
 the race on itself. The drastic method of love — which, I re- 
 peat, is the only human dissolvent — has never been tried upon 
 the Jew as a whole, while Russia carefully conserved — even 
 by a ring-fence — the breed she designed to destroy. But 
 whether persecution extirpates or brotherhood melts, hate or 
 love can never be simultaneous throughout the Diaspora, and so 
 there will probably always be a nucleus from which to restock 
 this eternal type. 
 
 264
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 Even when the Jewish State was in full swing, a great Dias- 
 pora existed, and if we Jews had only read our own literature 
 we should have suspected that something so long-standing could 
 not easily be swept away. " There is a certain people," said 
 Haman unto King Ahasuerus, " scattered abroad and dispersed 
 among the peoples in all the provinces of thy kingdom; and 
 their laws are diverse from those of every people ; neither keep 
 they the King's laws ; therefore it profiteth not the King to suf- 
 fer them. If it please the King, let it be written that they be 
 destroyed." 
 
 But if all Israel's enemies have not succeeded in destroying 
 the Diaspora, it may well defy even his own efforts. 1 
 
 i It will help the reader to keep his grip on reality if he studies the latest 
 statistics of the Diaspora, as given on the basis of an American inquiry by 
 the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentvms, of Berlin, in its issue of June 25th, 
 1920. "Poland, 3,300,000; the Ukraine, 3,300,000; United States, 3,100,000; 
 Russia and Siberia, 900,000; Roumania, 650,000; Germany, 540,000; Hun- 
 gary, 450,000; Great Britain and Ireland, 300,000; Austria, 300,000; Lithu- 
 ania, 250,000; Jugoslavia, 200,000; South and Central Africa, 170,000; 
 France, 150,000; Arabia, 130,000; Greece, 120,000; Holland, 110,000; Mo- 
 rocco, 110,000; the Argentine, 100,000; Canada, 100,000; Turkey, 100,000; 
 Palestine, 100,000; Australia, 20,000; other European countries, 200,000; 
 India, Persia, and Afghanistan, 100,000; other American countries, includ- 
 ing the Dutch, Danish, and British West Indies, 30,000. Total, 15,430,000." 
 The number for Palestine is too high by several myriads, but, as this list 
 seems to omit the 65,213 Jews of Tunis, and the 65,000 of Algeria given in 
 the Jetoish Year Book of London, 1919, the total does not err on the plus 
 side. And doubtless other Jews lurk everywhere. Mr. Arnold J. Marks, 
 F.R.G.S. writes in a lecture: "It is more than thirty years since my 
 journeys beyond the seas commenced. It mattered not how far away from 
 the railways my wanderings in the bush, or the high and low veldt, took me, 
 yet among every few white men I met in the wilderness was a Jew. They 
 say the Scotchman is everywhere. So he is in foreign countries or the Col- 
 onies, but it is in the bank, or stores, in towns with safe and comfortable 
 housing, that the cannie but pleasing Scot can be found. Up country the 
 Jew beats the Scotchman easily as a world wanderer. During my numerous 
 journeys to South Africa, and after leaving the shoals of our co-religionists 
 settled in Johannesburg, Barberton, Bulawayo and Salisbury, I have spent 
 weeks and months beyond the zones where neither trains ran nor horses 
 could live, and have met the lonely, cheerful, industrious, thrifty Jew. 
 Again, I have had similar experiences in the Australian bush. At Aden I 
 found an ancient Jewish colony of traders — reliable and respected. Even 
 in such an out-of-the-way place as Italian Somaliland, on the east coast 
 of Africa, at a port named Mogadishaw, there was the Jew, and but for 
 tenacious industry and good repute he would not have been tolerated in 
 such a place." An illuminating illustration of the sub-ubiquity of the Jew 
 is provided by the statistics of the Jews of India, as given by the census of 
 1911, published in the Bene-Israel Annual for this year. They range over 
 every part of the Peninsula, British or native. There are, for example, 
 636 at Janjira in the Konkan group, 260 in the Deccan group, and the list 
 concludes with 3,747 at Aden. There are other remnants of lost Jewish 
 tribes hidden away in Asia and Africa; there is a warrior race of Jewish 
 Highlanders in the Caucasus, besides many survivals of the Chazars, the 
 great Turkish people converted to Judaism in the seventh or eighth century 
 
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 II 
 
 A story relates that Pobiedonostseff, when asked what would 
 become of the Jews of Russia, replied : " One-third will emi- 
 grate, one-third will be baptised, and one-third will starve." 
 Brutal as was the utterance, it was nearer to actuality than 
 early Territorialism. If the question were now asked, What 
 will become of the Jews of the Diaspora? the answer — after 
 twenty years of work upon the Jewish problem — would have to 
 be : " Ten per cent, will emigrate to the Jewish State — if one 
 is ever formed — 20 per cent, will be baptised or otherwise lost 
 to Jewry, and 70 per cent, will remain in the Diaspora, wan- 
 dering about." There is, in fact, no human means by which 
 fourteen or fifteen million Jews, scattered through all coun- 
 tries, can be agglomerated in a single territory under autono- 
 mous conditions. Yet the propaganda of Pinsker and Herzl 
 implied that this miracle was possible. They were themselves 
 eager to live in the State that was to replace the Diaspora, they 
 believed that the bulk of Jewry could be convinced by their 
 reasoning and fired by their ardour, and — most naively of all 
 — they believed that territories capable of receiving the new 
 exodus existed at choice. And in the fervid Oriental imagina- 
 tion of their followers, outrunning even theirs, the Ghettos of 
 the world were transported across space to the chosen land as 
 by some magic carpet of the Arabian Nights. To the Russian 
 masses, who hung up the images of Herzl and Nordau in their 
 cottages and signed petitions or greetings by the hundred thou- 
 sand, the deliverers of Israel had appeared and the end of the 
 Galut (the exile) was at hand. Nor were the educated classes 
 less credulous. Emigration, immigration, colonisation, agri- 
 culture, economics, history, folk-psychology, all were left un- 
 studied, and the Jews never showed themselves so completely 
 Luftmenschen as when they resolved to be at last terrestrial and 
 territorial. 
 
 And the opponents of Territorialism were as naive as its 
 champions. Instead of demonstrating that the re-gathering of 
 Israel was impracticable, they vociferated that it was undesir- 
 able. Instead of admitting that it was too good to hope for, 
 
 in South Russia. The Crimea, part of their kingdom, was known till the 
 thirteenth century as Chazaria or Gazaria. Recent converts to Judaism 
 also abound among the peasantry in Russia, and are so pious that many who 
 applied to the emigration bureaus of my organisation refused to go to any 
 other land than Palestine. 
 
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 they denounced it as reactionary and dangerous. In a panic 
 as fantastic as the mirages of the converted, they saw the Jew- 
 ish State springing up like Jonah's gourd, and themselves 
 forcibly deported to it. And to-day, still untaught by experi- 
 ence, they have raised the same hue and cry over the proposed 
 Palestine settlement under British auspices, as though any Jew- 
 ish State capable of accommodating the Diaspora could pos- 
 sibly arise under the conditions imposed, or within the territory 
 prescribed. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The unhappy fact is that Territorialism, while it can point 
 out to the Diaspora that what is the matter with it is precisely 
 that it is a Diaspora, can do little or nothing to mend or end it. 
 The fathers of Territorialism drew a picture of the Jewish State, 
 and putting it beside a photograph of the Diaspora cried, like 
 Hamlet : " Look here upon this picture and on this." And as- 
 suredly the counterfeit presentments of Hamlet's father and of 
 his uncle exhibited no greater contrast — the one " wholesome," 
 the other " like a mildew'd ear." But as little as Hamlet's 
 wretched uncle could be transformed into his splendid sire, so lit- 
 tle can the Diaspora be transmuted into the Jewish State. It is 
 in a sense almost a mockery of the Jewish misery to hold up be- 
 fore it such a picture of success and happiness. The Jewish 
 State is something in the future — something to be generated in 
 the womb of time: the Diaspora is actually here. The rise of 
 the State would indeed affect the Diaspora, but it is as much 
 calculated to fortify and prolong its existence as to curtail it. 
 True, there are Jews who urge that with the future of Jewry 
 assured in a Jewish State, with an ark and pairs provided 
 against the Deluge, the Diaspora could afford to disappear. 
 Like a parent who had ensured his posterity's fortunes, it 
 would cry " Nunc dimittis" But would it? Would not the 
 effect be the contrary? Has not the very effort to create the 
 State re-animated the Diaspora? Would not the young crea- 
 tion radiate back some of its vitality to the parent? 
 
 Were the Jewish State founded on a great scale, and did it 
 become so prosperous as to draw to itself all that was vital in 
 Jewry, there might be some hope of the Diaspora's decay. But 
 the chances of so heroic a solution dwindle daily, and the eu- 
 thanasia of the Diaspora could be sought more hopefully from 
 complete indifference to Jewish affairs than from the vivifying 
 
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 activity of State-building. The fundamental fallacy of Pins- 
 ker and Herzl lay, however, not in the notion that the rise of 
 the State would indirectly bring about the subsidence of the 
 Diaspora, but in the assumption that the Diaspora could be 
 directly deported to the State. 
 
 They were perhaps misled by the success of Moses in leading 
 the Jews out of Egypt. But, apart from the factor of Moses 
 having Israel's God behind him and a pillar of fire before, his 
 task was comparatively simple. He had his people compactly 
 concentrated — he had not to collect them from the four cor- 
 ners of the earth, divided and diversified by its languages, cus- 
 toms, and politics, and not even united by that community of 
 unbearable suffering which is the only goad to revolutionary 
 change known to history. What Moses had to end was not a 
 Diaspora, but a slavery. Territorialism, in short, should never 
 have been put forward as a cure for the Diaspora, but as a call 
 to new creation. It is not the administering of a nostrum to 
 a diseased and decrepit ancient, but the begetting of a fresh 
 young life. It summons us to cease wringing our hands over 
 the irreparable or wailing over ruined walls, but out of our yet 
 unexhausted seed to create a new Jewish stock in a self-gov- 
 erning Jewish territor}\ 
 
 IV 
 
 Leaving the problem or malady of the Galut as humanly in- 
 curable or insoluble, a sane Territorialism aspires only to cre- 
 ate a new Judasa. It cannot supplant the Diaspora, it can only 
 supplement it. But the new Judaea would be quick with the 
 fires of youth; to its radiant vitality even the final dropping 
 asleep of the poor, weary old Diaspora could bring no menace; 
 into the unknown world of the future it would carry forward 
 that same warm humanity and sane idealism with which ancient 
 Judaea enriched antiquity. In this one focus of Jewish life the 
 abnormal conditions prevalent everywhere else would be re- 
 placed by the normal. In this one milieu the Jewish child would 
 be born as naturally Jewish as the Bristol child is born Eng- 
 lish, the Bordeaux child French, or the Canton child Chinese. 
 But — let us repeat — there is no alchemy by which the Dias- 
 pora itself can be transmuted into a self-governing Israel, and 
 we shall make no progress with the Jewish problem till we real- 
 ise that Territorialism is as likely to prop up the Diaspora as 
 to undermine it, and that the self-governing territory, though 
 
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 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 its pioneer elements and a continuous stream of subsequent im- 
 migration will come from the Diaspora, cannot possibly receive 
 the populations of the Ghettos, Jewries, and Judengassen, nay, 
 that its first legislation must actually be to exclude an indis- 
 criminate rush, and that its stoutest foundations will be laid 
 in the sons born of its own soil. Thus the Diaspora would still 
 be left to wrestle with its own problems. Whatever help the 
 Jewish State could bring it, would be indirect, slow, and uncer- 
 tain ; even the fear that the State would bring harm rather 
 than help, though it is an unmanly fear, is not altogether 
 groundless in so illogical a world. But, however the State and 
 the Diaspora might act and react upon each .other, they would 
 grow more and more unlike each other. As the Canadian- 
 Englishman differs from the slum-born Briton, so would the 
 Judaean Jew tend to differ from the Ghetto-Jew. The genius 
 soli of the Jewish State could not be exported like Palestine 
 earth or bottles of Jordan water, nor would its solution of Jew- 
 ish questions suffice for more than local consumption. Being 
 able to keep its day of rest on the Saturday, it would have, for 
 example, no Sabbath problem. But how would this help the 
 unhappy artisan of America, impaled on the dilemma of Sab- 
 bath desecration or starvation? 
 
 These considerations do not cease to apply if the Palestine 
 form of Territorialism is adopted. The choice of old Judaea 
 as the terrain of the new Judaea could not alter the brute facts. 
 But we must carefully distinguish between Zionism — which is 
 all things to all men — and Territorialism, which is a concept 
 definite and unchanging. The object of Zionism was, for ex- 
 ample, defined by Mr. Sokolow at the last Zionist Congress as 
 to bring Zion to the Diaspora ; a complete reversal of the 
 original concept. But Territorialism is not even the Basle pro- 
 gramme with the abstract form, Itoland, substituted for the 
 concrete Palestine, nor if it accepted Palestine as the sphere of 
 its operations would the breach be wholly healed. For the rift 
 that suddenly opened out between the two parties at the so- 
 called Uganda Conference was not a brand-new chasm made by 
 the earthquake of the British offer; it was the exposure of an 
 abyss which had yawned between them from the first and which 
 had been concealed only by the common territorial objective. 
 Zionism takes its vision and ideal from the past ; Territorialism 
 
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 places them in the future. The one looks back, the other for- 
 ward. Zionism is not safe even from the restoration of animal 
 sacrifices. Territorialism moves along the lines of " creative 
 evolution." The past is our cradle, not our prison, and there 
 is danger as well as appeal in its glamour. The past is for 
 inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repetition. 
 Probably no nation in the world now lives in its original habitat, 
 and had other peoples looked backward as obstinately and slug- 
 gishly as our own, few of the original masters of the world would 
 still be in possession of territories. As in every period great 
 masses of Jews have been able to settle and maintain themselves 
 in almost every country on earth, so with a little more foresight, 
 had they not been paralysed by a tradition of passive expecta- 
 tion, they would long ago have built up at least one self-govern- 
 ing centre, whether in Palestine or elsewhere. Even as it is, 
 they have come nigh to an autonomous life in certain periods 
 and regions. The very Pale of Russia produced a sort of sub- 
 national life. A single city like Salonica, where the Jewish 
 Sabbath came to prevail of itself, might have been made the nu- 
 cleus of a commonwealth like Venice, had not all such ideas been 
 inhibited by the superstition of a Heaven-ordained Exile, to be 
 replaced in God's good time by a replica of ancient Judaea, com- 
 plete from the Temple with its shambles to the last pomegran- 
 ate tassel on the lower hem of the High Priest's robe; a vision 
 which has no more substantiality than the popular poetic dream 
 of restoring the primitive Golden Age, and which could at best 
 have the value of a theatrical reproduction or a museum ex- 
 hibit. 
 
 In the admirable little anthology which the Chief Rabbi of 
 England has prepared for Jewish sailors and soldiers, there is 
 cited Longfellow's sympathetic poem on " The Jewish Cemetery 
 at Newport," expounding how the " Ishmaels and Hagars of 
 mankind " who lie buried there, had lived by the great tradi- 
 tions of their people's past and seen them all reflected in the 
 coming time. They spelt the world backward — says the poet 
 — like a Hebrew book : 
 
 " Till life became a Legend of the Dead." 
 
 The Chief Rabbi prudently cuts the poem short here. He does 
 not give " the conclusion of the whole matter " : 
 
 " But ah ! what once has been shall be no more. 
 The groaning earth in travail and in pain 
 270
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 Brings forth its races, but does not restore, 
 And the dead nations never rise again." 
 
 If Longfellow erred in supposing the Jewish nation irretriev- 
 ably dead, he was profoundly right in teaching that Time never 
 retraces its steps. Even if Judaea is re-established in Palestine, 
 it can never be the old Judasa over again, any more than He- 
 brew, if it becomes again the national language, can be re- 
 stricted to the Biblical vocabulary. Aeroplanes must now fly 
 through Hebrew literature as well as archangels. 
 
 There is no lack of Zionists who perfectly understand this 
 and whose outlook is as modern as the most progressive Terri- 
 torialist could desire, but have they pondered sufficiently the 
 profound warning of Jesus that you cannot put new wine into 
 old bottles ? Will they not, in fact, be exploited by Jewish cler- 
 icalism, by that ossified orthodoxy which would bind Israel for- 
 ever to traditional theology and legendary legislation, and 
 which the vicinity of Sinai will appear to vindicate afresh? 
 
 In a story by Mr. H. G. Wells a man hatches out the egg of 
 an iEpyornis, the largest of extinct birds. For centuries the 
 egg has lain hidden and preserved in the mud of Madagascar, 
 but he brings the latent bird to life and feeds it and brings it 
 up. At first all is charm and idyll, but in a few years the crea- 
 ture, grown colossal and terrible, kicks and pummels its foster- 
 father as with the foot of a cart-horse and a beak like a sledge- 
 hammer. It is the fate that awaits all who play with the past 
 and revive the intellectually extinct. 
 
 It is a thousand pities that the intellectual issues involved in 
 the fate of the Jewish race were not thought out and fought out 
 before any attempt was made to unify Israel by a cut-and-dried 
 scheme. A Pan-Jewish Congress should have preceded the 
 Zionist Congress. Principles and beliefs are the realities be- 
 hind the banding together of men for specific purposes, and a 
 race-bond is no sufficient nexus when there are such grave dif- 
 ferences of outlook and such spiritual issues interfused. As 
 British party politics were suspended in war, so Jewish differ- 
 ences were laid aside by the Zionists for the common task of 
 rebuilding Zion. But Zion is not a mere place ; to rebuild it is 
 not like rebuilding Belgium or Serbia, and the evasion of all 
 root questions in the interests of a sham unity will one day 
 have to be paid for, and with heavy interest. Herzl had a 
 glimpse of this truth when he declared that the return to Juda- 
 ism must precede the return to Zion, but he did not follow up 
 
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 his somewhat belated discovery. His original attempt to treat 
 the Jew as definable by physiology was a grave historic error. 
 Not even Ezra, who reduced the conception of Israel to its low- 
 est race-terms, treated the Jew as a mere ethnic type, for his 
 purgation of the race was professedly in the interests of its 
 religion. 
 
 VI 
 
 But if some extremists for race and soil have sought to dis- 
 pense with a religious bond, others would have it overshadow 
 everything else, and Territorialism, besides being impeded by 
 Zionism, with its cry of "Only in Palestine," has also to meet 
 the onset of anti-Zionism with its cry of " Only a religion." 
 
 The more rabid anti-Zionists go so far as to forget or ignore 
 that even if Judaism has now become synonymous with a mere 
 religion, it at least began as the religion of a peculiar people. 
 They speak as if it were like one of the other religions, which 
 sprang into life with a universal appeal and message to every 
 race and colour. Judaism did, indeed, at a secondary stage of 
 its existence, enter upon a period of propagandism, but un- 
 fortunately, for various historical reasons, its career as a 
 world-religion was checked, and what might have been a great 
 river became a back-water again. It is true that proselytes 
 have never ceased to be admitted more or less grudgingly, but 
 even when they were sought and welcomed, they were absorbed 
 not into a universal doctrine, but into a national system, sat- 
 urated with historic traditions and celebrations. So that, even 
 admitting that Judaism, not the Jewish race, has been the es- 
 sential thought of Israel, we do not escape the conception of a 
 national organism. And since this organism can lead only a 
 cramped, crippled, mutilated, and disjointed life in the Dias- 
 pora, the fact that it is but the incorporation of a religion does 
 not obviate the need of a geographical basis for it. Those who 
 plead that it is " only a religion," like Christianity or Islam, 
 must first make it so. They must denude it of its national ves- 
 ture, strip it of its peculiar chronology and historical celebra- 
 tions, and preach it tirbi et orbi; only thus will vanish even the 
 religious necessity for Territorialism. 
 
 VII 
 
 With this contention that Judaism is " only a religion " is 
 connected the idea of a world-mission, and that this " Mission 
 
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 THE VOICE OP JERUSALEM 
 
 of Israel " is better served by dispersion than by concentra- 
 tion. While the majority of the arguments against Territor- 
 ialism spring from anaemia or ignoble fear, and are beneath con- 
 tempt and below discussion, tins setting up of a rival construc- 
 tive policy instead of the eternal negative, this ideal of Israel 
 as " the servant of mankind " proclaimed in the noble prophe- 
 cies of Isaiah, cannot but evoke a glow of sympathy from every 
 true Jew. 
 
 But if the ideal of the Jewish mission, rooted though it is in 
 Jewish thought and tradition, really demands the dispersion of 
 Israel, we should be driven to the paradox that if there were no 
 Diaspora it would be necessary to create one, and that if we 
 were still in Palestine it would be our duty to scatter from it. 
 Missions do undoubtedly suggest migrations. Missionaries do 
 usually go out in search of the unregenerate. Did not Jesus 
 describe the Pharisees as compassing sea and land to make a 
 single proselyte? How, then, can we deny that it is an ad- 
 vantage for Israel to be everywhere on the spot? For assur- 
 edly he is everywhere surrounded by races of inferior theology, 
 not to say inferior civilisation; races that, despite a veneer of 
 apparent superiority to him, have never yet achieved his spir- 
 itual values, nor the idea of peace to all mankind expressed in 
 his everyday greeting. 
 
 Moreover, did Israel utilise his ubiquity to preach his ideal 
 of human brotherhood and to stand out staunchly for his mis- 
 sion, thus linking up the nations, the evils due to the absence of 
 a territory would cease to count. The glow of apostolic faith 
 and ardour would preserve the Jewish spirit in more than its 
 pristine vitality, while anti-Semitism would be welcomed as at 
 once the price of prophesying and the tribute which the lower 
 pays to the higher. The nation of martyrs and pioneers would 
 then wear persecution as a crown and welcome death as a priv- 
 ilege. The Diaspora would either be wiped out — a glorious 
 ending — or it would survive in prophetic splendour. And 
 should the Great War — despite a material League of Nations 
 — result in no spiritual improvement in the present barbarous 
 system of international relationship, this role would clearly 
 await us. 
 
 Unfortunately I have not detected in any of the preachers of 
 the Jewish Mission the faintest attempt to convert their con- 
 cept into a working reality. By a mission they seem to mean a 
 passive expectation of a providential millennium. There may 
 be occasions when " they also serve who only stand and wait " ; 
 
 273
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 but that this is the sole variety of service open to a great his- 
 toric people, and that it will suffice for the next two thousand 
 rears a it sufficed for the last, is a superstition more contempt- 
 ible than the lowest gospel of race-Zionism. 
 
 As Territorialism is Realpolitik — a real activity for a real 
 political and spiritual situation — - it can take no account of so- 
 lutions so purely academic. Otherwise it would gladly retire in 
 favour of the loftier and the grander ideal of a world-mission. 
 It solaces itself, however, with the reflection that even from a 
 Territorial centre it would not be impossible to pursue the Jew- 
 ish Mission. For some missions are achieved by staying at 
 home. The Athenians abode in Athens and filled the world with 
 thought and beauty. And so, too, the establishment of a model 
 State, a commonwealth of social justice and spiritual dignity 
 — if the Jews could but achieve it — would radiate inspiring 
 impulses to all humanity. 
 
 It may perhaps be urged by the passive proclaimers of the 
 mission that the production of model Jewish communities every- 
 where, without any direct preachment to the heathen, would be 
 still more educative. There would be no answer to this argu- 
 ment did the Jewish communities represent, like the Quaker 
 communities, a distinctive point of view. This, however, is 
 precisely what is wanting, and the Jews, instead of standing for 
 their own ideals, are the most fervid assimilators of the con- 
 ventions of the majority and the moment. Their aim, con- 
 scious or unconscious, is not apostleship, but survival. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Piercing through all the confusion, prejudice, and cowardice 
 of modern Jewry, the formula struck out by the Ito (the Jew- 
 ish Territorial Organisation) at its foundation came like a 
 ray of sunlight. It was the first clear and .statesmanlike con- 
 tribution to the political solution of the Jewish question, and 
 will be increasingly recognised as the only possible programme, 
 even for Zionism itself, once that movement comes to grips 
 with reality. Our formula, like Aaron's rod, must swallow all 
 the others. 
 
 " To acquire a territory upon an autonomous basis for those 
 Jcie.r who cannot or will not remain in the lands in which they 
 lire at present." It is not till this formula Is analysed that 
 the complexity which underlies its seeming simplicity can be 
 realised. There are three separate strands of thought and 
 
 274
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 purpose. In the first place the substitution of the concrete 
 " Jews who cannot or will not remain in the Diaspora " for 
 that disputable political concept, " the Jewish people," cuts 
 away sharply the greatest practical difficulty in the way of the 
 scheme — the fear, real or imaginary, that the Jews who can 
 and will remain in the Diaspora will be politically compromised, 
 and their present status endangered. The autonomous basis, 
 declared to be a sine qua non, will appertain not to Jewry at 
 large, but simply to those who immigrate into the new terri- 
 tory, and who have surely as much right to form a new home 
 and a new nationality for themselves and under their own insti- 
 tutions as had the Mormons, the Pilgrim Fathers, the French 
 emigrants who founded Quebec, or the British sects who, within 
 living memory, built up New Zealand. 
 
 In the second place, this limitation of the scheme to the 
 emigrants from the Diaspora places it on a sound psycholog- 
 ical basis. A problem exists only for those who feel it. Those 
 Jews who will and can remain in the Diaspora prove, ipso facto, 
 that for them the situation is not intolerable. And, thirdly, 
 by building our State out of the best among our emigrants, we 
 help to solve also the Jewish emigration problem, the famous 
 Wohin. Like that village chest which, according to Oliver 
 Goldsmith, was contrived 
 
 " A double debt to pay, 
 A bed by night, a chest of drawers by day." 
 
 this new Jewish State is to be at once a land of self-government 
 and a land of refuge. And it would find its first material, not 
 in Jews solicited to emigrate, but in Jews already emigrating. 
 At one stroke we provide a practical necessity and the luxury 
 of an ideal. That Jewish labour-force, which, with the force of 
 Jewish brotherhood, now goes unutilised by us, would be con- 
 centrated on the chosen soil like a priceless irrigation current. 
 And whereas with the existing centres of immigration the ad- 
 vent of every additional Jew is an additional incentive to anti- 
 Semitism, in Itoland every accession to the population, whether 
 from within or without, would be a strengthening of the Jew 
 and Judaism. 
 
 IX 
 
 It is not to be denied that the difficulties of such an enter- 
 prise are colossal. But, at any rate, there is no truth in the 
 
 275
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 parrot-cry that such a State can be founded " only in Zion " 
 or that our people will go nowhere else. Such an assertion is 
 not merely ideological, it is — in face of the spectacle of the 
 wandering Jew wandering everywhere — positively brazen. 
 The Ito has even tested the point by opening out a new immi- 
 gration area via Galveston. Within a few years ten thousand 
 souls were more or less happily settled in a territory they had 
 never heard of. The bait here was bread. Could we have 
 added also the Jewish folk-life and the Jewish Sabbath, we 
 should have had a rush like that of Christendom to the gold- 
 fields. » 
 
 Indeed, as already pointed out, the danger is we should have 
 too many applicants rather than too few, and these, even when 
 not feckless and sickly, suited but rarely for agricultural pio- 
 neering. The further danger of being swamped by " alien " 
 immigrants, though not to be overlooked, is less grave. A ter- 
 ritory, which had lain dormant so long and would contain no 
 obvious opportunities of easy riches, would not suddenly seem 
 inviting to the general immigrant, particularly if Hebrew or 
 Yiddish were the prevailing idiom. Our popularity is not so 
 great that people who could have the benefit of our room would 
 rush for our company. Moreover, the tragic thinning out of 
 man-power by the war would co-operate with the great call for 
 reconstructive work in every country to reduce the streams of 
 general emigration. And this same cause might make Govern- 
 ments with sparsely-settled territories more anxious than be- 
 fore for immigration and more amenable to a Territorial deal. 
 For, outside of negotiation, there is no means of obtaining a 
 Territory. The sword which Moses and Joshua wielded can- 
 not be ours. There is no way for a Diaspora to organise an 
 army. At most it can contribute Jewish regiments to some 
 belligerent Power, and thus divide itself still more hopelessly. 
 But the negotiation for a Jewish territory would demand in- 
 finite tact and patience and the goodwill of all Israel. For the 
 land would have to be one desirable for other white races — 
 not a derelict tropical desert like the Northern Territory of 
 Australia, once suggested to the Ito by the Premier, Mr. Dea- 
 kin. And to be commensurate with the need the territory must, 
 besides being fertile and healthy, be large enough to sustain a 
 real Jewish commonwealth. A toy republic, like San Marino 
 or Andorra, would be no compensation for all the sweat and 
 travail — still less a territory that was not even autonomous. 
 The Jewish soul can find more profitable employment for its en- 
 
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 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 ergies than to build a doll's house upon sand. We have already 
 seen that the Jewish Diaspora cannot be destroyed even if the 
 Jewish State could be created, but if the State cannot even be 
 created, then it were folly to persist in a sham. 
 
 In so late an age of history, when every " place in the sun " 
 has its ferocious claimants, and earth-hunger has passed from 
 an appetite into a greed, the prospects of discovering and ac- 
 quiring such a territory are not rosy. Nevertheless, the Ito 
 has put forward more than one proposition which held distinct 
 possibilities, and had Zionism been reasonable instead of fanat- 
 ical, Territorial instead of nebulous, the foundations of a Jew- 
 ish State might already have been laid. Cyrenaica, indeed, to 
 which we sent a scientific expedition, disappointed our expecta- 
 tions ; and the negotiations for Angola, on which another ex- 
 pedition reported more promisingly just before the war, were 
 handicapped by the fiscal narrowness of Portuguese colonial 
 policy. But the very existence of these hitherto unknown pos- 
 sibilities made it probable that other opportunities had been 
 equally overlooked. 
 
 A cartoon in a Jewish comic paper, published in New York, 
 once represented the writer in his capacity of President of the 
 Ito as a bachelor in quest of a bride. Four maidens stood 
 awaiting his lordly choice — three fair enough, but one sur- 
 passingly beautiful. This lovely creature was labelled " Zion." 
 The others were marked " Uganda," " Angola," " Cyrenaica." 
 Yet, with a curious want of appreciation, the suitor was turn- 
 ing his back upon the most adorable of them all. 
 
 The cartoonist overlooked that " Zion " was not in the mar- 
 riage market. She was, in fact, already disposed of; a mem- 
 ber of the Grand Signior's harem, and very jealously guarded. 
 " Uganda " — by which, of course, was meant British East Af- 
 rica — was at least virginal. At the time Mr. Joseph Cham- 
 berlain made his celebrated offer of one of its plateaus to Dr. 
 Herzl, the future of the country was embryonic. The white 
 population settled in its vast area could not have filled a village 
 church. And when the Ito won Mr. Chamberlain's assent to 
 the project of converting the entire territory into a British 
 Judaea, with a Jewish Governor, a country to be, when devel- 
 oped, an equal member of the great family of nations which con- 
 
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 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 stitute the British Empire, a prospect was opened out of a 
 really great Jewish future. But the Ito's elaborate memoran- 
 dum on the subject remains in the archives of the British Co- 
 lonial Office. 
 
 A further possibility investigated by the Ito was Canada, 
 where a population smaller than that of London occupies an area 
 nearly as large as Europe. Sir Wilfrid Laurier, then at the 
 height of his power, said to the writer in 1907 : " You are ten 
 years too late. Ten years ago we were begging for immigrants 
 and would gladly have given you a tract under local autonomy 
 to be developed into one of the States of a federal Canada. 
 Now we have all the immigration we need and will give land only 
 to the individual." And Lord Strathcona said the same. 
 
 " Ten years ago! " But that had been just the date of the 
 first Basle Congress. Had Jewry really come together to take 
 counsel, had it opened its eyes and looked round the world in- 
 stead of shutting them and swallowing the formula stuffed into 
 its mouth by the pre-existing Choveve Zionists (Small Colonisa- 
 tion Zionites), the first thing it would have perceived would 
 have been Canada and the great healthy, fruitful spaces 
 thereof, and it would have made instant application to the 
 Canadian Government. 
 
 Sir Wilfrid Laurier added that if we chose to send out our 
 men — each to make individual application for his 160 acres — 
 and if we so planned their holdings as to produce a Jewish 
 commonwealth, the Canadian Government would not try to 
 thwart a scheme executed under its constitution. 
 
 But to carry out such a scheme without the glamour and pro- 
 tection of public policy, without a charter and a flag, and in 
 face of the Zionist clamour and the anti-Zionist outcry, did not 
 seem feasible. Nor did the numerous perspectives tentatively 
 explored by the Ito in Australia, Mexico, and South America 
 seem more calculated to produce the necessary unity. 
 
 Even when the Ito put forward Mesopotamia — the primi- 
 tive Jewish land, the cradle of the race and the conservatory of 
 its purity, as well as the subsequent focus of Judaism for a 
 thousand years, the seat of its most famous academies and the 
 birthplace of the Babylonian Talmud — there was no sign of 
 Zionist sympathy, and this though Mesopotamia came within 
 the ambit of the official programme of Zionism, and offered a 
 far greater possibility than Palestine of a territory on an ade- 
 quate scale. That the Ito's project was not chimerical has 
 been proved by the irrigation work executed on its very lines 
 
 278
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 both by Sir William Willcocks for the Sultan and by the Brit- 
 ish troops for their own purposes. 
 
 The fact was that the Zionists could not rise, and have not 
 yet risen, to the conception of Territorialism. They have been 
 at most mere Palestinians, hovering like ghosts over the grave 
 of their past, and unable to make an act of fresh faith. This 
 was intelligible enough in the orthodox, but that advanced Jew- 
 ish thinkers — and the majority of the Zionist delegates had 
 thrown over the Mosaic code — should babble equally about the 
 irreplaceability of Palestine, is a proof of the paralysis to 
 which centuries of oppression and superstition can reduce a 
 people. 
 
 XI 
 
 Immense as are the difficulties in the way of Territorialism, 
 they cannot be said to be absolutely insuperable even now ; while 
 in the past, when new continents lay practically unpopulated, 
 a Jewish State could have been carved out with comparative 
 facility. The history of Israel is a story of lost opportunities. 
 If onl} r the exiles from Spain had followed in the wake of Co- 
 lumbus ! Even in 1825, when Major Noah conceived his pro- 
 ject of a regathering of Israel within sound of Niagara Falls, 
 the matter of his scheme was far less fantastic than the manner, 
 and had the European Ghettos to which he addressed his ap- 
 peal been sufficiently prepared by propaganda, the great city of 
 Buffalo would by now have been Jewish, with a Jewish major- 
 ity in New York State. When after the pogroms of the 
 'eighties the great stream of Jewish emigration to America be- 
 gan, one of the few statesmanlike Jews, Judge Sulzberger, sug- 
 gested that, instead of receiving it into the cities, it should be 
 diverted to a sparsely-populated territory, which would then, 
 automatically under the Constitution, evolve into a Jewish 
 State. But the suggestion was not followed, and instead of a 
 new member being added to the United States, practically a 
 new Jewish Pale was built up, and a new series of Ghetto 
 slums. 
 
 Perhaps it is even now not too late to pour a stream of Jew- 
 ish migration upon a thinly occupied territory in America — 
 North or South — or in Australia. There may even be, under 
 the new Russian regime, ample territory in the vast and 
 sparsely-settled stretches of Siberia, for Jews to build up, un- 
 der amicable auspices, a State of their own. 
 
 279
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 But none of these ideas can hope for a hearing at present, 
 for by one of those unexpected happenings, which are the only 
 certainties in history, Zionism has received from Great Britain, 
 with the support of other Great Powers, the promise that " a 
 Jewish National Home" shall be established in Palestine, and 
 while the possibility of this project is on trial the Pro naturally 
 lavs aside any rival activities, hoping even that its ends may be 
 attainable within the same territory. Unhappily, the prospect 
 of turning Palestine into " a territory upon an autonomous 
 basis for those Jews who cannot or will not remain in the lands 
 in which they live at present " is not altogether hopeful. The 
 facts of geography and history, which Zionists have always re- 
 fused to look in the face, cannot be abolished by State procla- 
 mations, and now that the dream bids fair to take on reality, 
 the happiness produced by the British promise must inevitably 
 be shadowed by these disagreeable obstacles and drawbacks. 
 
 As a territory Palestine cannot be said to be capacious, and 
 even of its exiguous area the Syrian Christmas claim (for 
 France) a goodly northern slice. Still, it is not too small to 
 produce that richness and variety of life which go to make a na- 
 tion, and now that we are aware that the accommodation of 
 the Diaspora is no part of a sane Territorialism, we need not 
 twit Zionism with the false hopes it once raised among the suf- 
 fering masses of the Pale. We need only consider whether "a 
 Jewish National Home " can be established within this area, in 
 accordance with the promise of Great Britain. 
 
 Unfortunately, that very promise is hedged with a condi- 
 tion which makes it practically a contradiction in terms, for 
 " nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and 
 religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Pales- 
 tine." 
 
 With her delicate relation to the Arab and her position as a 
 Mohammedan Power, Great Britain could not easily act other- 
 wise, nor could Jews demand any restriction of native rights so 
 long as the tribes remain in Palestine. But as it happens that 
 these tribes outnumber the Jews by more than six to one, it is 
 not easy to see how (short of amicably buying out the more no- 
 madic and loosely-rooted, and resettling them in the vast new 
 Arab kingdom which is being set up simultaneously) Palestine 
 can become either Jewish or national or a home. Under any 
 system of constitutional Government there would arise an Arab 
 national autonomy, not a Jewish. " The balance of power in a 
 
 280
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 State," writes Lord Morley, " exists with the class that holds 
 the balance of the land." And so far the Jews hold only 2 
 per cent, of it. Nor can the atmosphere of Palestine — so 
 largely saturated with Christian and Mohammedan emanations, 
 to which incessant pilgrimages will now more than ever con- 
 tribute — become as Jewish as a Ghetto of the Diaspora for a 
 Territorial State on virgin soil. To adopt the image of our 
 Yiddish cartoonist, Zion is a bride who after her divorce from 
 Israel has been twice married to Gentiles — once to a Christian 
 and once to a Mohammedan — and when Israel takes her back 
 he will find his household encumbered with the litter of the two 
 intervening mcnages. Such considerations, however, are still 
 invisible to the stock Zionist on whose self-spun structures reali- 
 ties impinge in vain, and whose Zion is as much a city of dream 
 as that builded on celestial foundations by the popular imagina- 
 tion yearning for the Messiah. As Don Quixote could see 
 great armies with banners where Sancho Panza could see only 
 flocks of sheep, so our dreamers of the Ghetto see a full national 
 life where a sober observer can see only a few farm colonies in 
 an overwhelmingly alien environment. And yet when theology 
 gives place to politics, when Zionism, abandoning the dream of a 
 heaven- wrought millennium, proclaims the manlier programme 
 of self-achieved redemption, its first duty surely is to face polit- 
 ical facts. 
 
 It is true that the Jews will be an intensive minority in con- 
 trol of the economic development of the country, and that Jew- 
 ish immigrants will have the happy sense of coming home. 
 But, so far as the historic Palestine west of the Jordan is con- 
 cerned, unless heroic measures are taken, which are utterly 
 unlikely — for the Zionist leaders are resolved on the less dif- 
 ficult policy of friendly co-operation with the Arab — nothing 
 approaching a Jewish commonwealth can possibly grow up 
 there, and the Zionist settlers will be lucky if, under the asgis 
 of Britain, they can change into friendship the hitherto men- 
 acing hostility of the native majority. 
 
 It is only in the comparatively unpopulated regions to the 
 east of the Jordan that a sort of Hebrew Montenegro is not 
 unattainable, though as a province without independence and 
 as part of a miniature Austria. Under the success of Zionism 
 not only will Israel be divided into Diaspora Jews and Palestine 
 Jews, but Palestine Jews will themselves be divided into locally 
 autonomous Jews, and Jews hopelessly mixed up with other 
 
 281
 
 THE VOICE OP JERUSALEM 
 
 races. Thus instead of normalising Israel's life, Zionism will 
 make it still more abnormal. A motherland that holds only a 
 tithe of its sons, and even those largely interblent with other 
 peoples, will not cease to be an anomaly. 
 
 But Zionism has, of course, long given up pretending to a 
 Territorial solution. With its shrewd policy of cutting its 
 coat according to its cloth and changing its aim into whatever 
 it can get, it now aspires only to a spiritual centre. This is 
 the conception of Achad Ha-am, and it may be magnificent. 
 But it is not Zionism. It is not the gospel of redemption 
 preached at Basle. 
 
 It is not even intelligible. A spiritual centre, round which 
 the Jews of the Diaspora are to group as a political nationality, 
 which nationality is to be, however, in no contradiction with 
 their local nationality as Englishmen, Frenchmen, or Germans 
 — here is a conception which goes dangerously near nonsense 
 and nonsensically near danger. Only if the whole world after 
 the war is organised internationally will such a political broth- 
 erhood of Israel become feasible. But otherwise such a bond 
 is as superfluous as it is impracticable. For the disruption of 
 the Diaspora will have been aggravated by the war. The par- 
 tition of Russia and Austria has broken up even the solidarity 
 of the Pale, while the threatened split of the world into a Ger- 
 man-Russian sphere and a League of other Nations would im- 
 port a still more fatal scission. 
 
 So long, however, as the Disapora believes in Judaism, it has 
 no need of a spiritual centre. The Torah is its spiritual cen- 
 tre. But if it has lost this centre, then to replace the religion 
 which has kept the Diaspora alive nearly two thousand years, 
 and which is a solid reality coming home to the Jew at every 
 hour of the day, by an absentee nationalism so tenuous that 
 another and a nearer nationalism can occupy his heart simul- 
 taneously and claim even the sacrifice of his blood, this is a 
 conception which could occur only to visionaries ignorant of 
 life, or bankrupt politicians clutching at any expedient to save 
 their faces. A " spiritual centre " in Zion may suffice to hold 
 within its ghostly radius the first generation of absentee Zion- 
 ists minus Judaism; such a phantasm without either political or 
 religious substance will not avail to keep their children Jew- 
 ish. The young generation will crave less windy nourishment 
 and a more solid ground for separation from the general life. 
 No minority in history has ever sustained itself in the bosom 
 of a majority unless fortified by a burning faith. 
 
 282
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 xn 
 
 Assuming, however, that the Zionists will be sensible enough 
 to adopt the Ito formula, we must confess that their prospects, 
 poor as they are, are on the surface greater than those of 
 Moses. For Palestine was far more densely populated in the 
 days of the Exodus from Egypt than it is now, and although 
 Joshua came as a victorious invader, yet victories do not always 
 assure the dominancy of the invaders. Autochthones cannot 
 always be all annihilated or all expelled, and they often absorb 
 their conquerors, as the Saxons in Britain absorbed the Nor- 
 mans. " I will not drive them out from before thee in one 
 year," God explains to Moses, " lest the land become desolate 
 and the beasts of the field multiply against thee. By little and 
 little I will drive them out from before thee, until thou be in- 
 creased and inherit the land." What an admission that the 
 conquest and occupation of Canaan proceeded not by miracle, 
 but by natural law! The Deity's views are obviously not or- 
 thodox. How easily the beasts could have been kept down by 
 Providence, and the pace of Israel's increase and settlement 
 precipitated ! As a matter of fact, the tribes in possession re- 
 mained largely on the soil, profiting by this breathing space to 
 intermarry " little by little " with their invaders, and the nation 
 that grew up in Palestine was a blend of all its races on a He- 
 brew basis. The Biblical Palestine, like all other countries, was 
 a melting-pot. 
 
 But such a development — and the situation is not without 
 its irony — is unlikely in the Palestine of to-day. For, partly 
 on account of the inevitably exaggerated race-consciousness of 
 the pioneer Jews, but even more because of the great Diaspora 
 behind them, they will be kept from intermarrying with the 
 tribes in possession. They will feel members of Jewry rather 
 than citizens of Palestine. It is the Diaspora that will keep 
 Palestine Jewish, rather than Palestine the Diaspora. Just so 
 the isolation of Ulster is nourished by the kindred Protestant- 
 ism of Great Britain, and the amalgamation of Austria has 
 been impeded by the existence beyond its frontiers of powerful 
 aggregations of its constituent races. 
 
 The validity of this analysis, though it has been reached 
 mainly on a 'priori grounds, may be illustrated by what hap- 
 pened on the return of the Jews from Babylon. Here, too, 
 there was a great body of Jewry behind them, though it was 
 mainly concentrated in Babylon. And the first result was the 
 
 283
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 super-piety by which Ezra and Nehemiah weeded out all 
 " alien " wives, and imperilled the stability of the State by re- 
 jecting the communion of the Samaritans. Very different is 
 the story of the first Hebrew comers to Palestine. They did 
 not leave behind them in Egypt a great Hebrew settlement to 
 chain them to the past and restrain them from fusing with the 
 new peoples they were to meet. Nay, at the very beginning of 
 their adventure they took up a " mixed multitude " of the old 
 peoples with them. But the Jews who emigrate to Palestine 
 to-day will have a tar more tribal mentality, and so no neo- 
 Jewish race, no synthesis of the Semitic tribes of Palestine, is 
 likely to be again evolved to people and possess Palestine. 
 I knee the difficulty arising from the native tribes is greater 
 than in ancient Palestine ; for they can neither be expelled nor 
 absorbed. Palestine must thus become a mongrel State : at best 
 it can become a Semitic Switzerland of which all the constit- 
 uents will enjoy political equality — no undesirable ideal, in- 
 deed a consummation devoutly to be wished everywhere else, but 
 unfortunately irrelevant to the particular problem which Zion- 
 ism started out to solve, especially as this ideal is unlikely to 
 be achieved wherever else Jews dwell. Thus around this hy- 
 brid centre — according to Zionist doctrine — a long series of 
 overruled or oppressed Jewries will eternally gravitate, the 
 Galut being perpetuated by the very movement which started 
 out to abolish it. 
 
 It has been suspected that, though Israel has been preserved 
 in the Galut by his religion, his religion is in reality only the 
 mask of his invincible will to live, of which will the " hard-shell " 
 Judaism that replaced the Jewish State was a secretion. That 
 the race instinct has invented and is exploiting Zionism is a 
 still more plausible hypothesis. With the diminution of faith 
 and the relaxation of ritual a new protective device was neces- 
 sary. Hence the prospect that Zionism, like Balaam, will bless 
 what it came to curse, and keep alive what it came to destroy, 
 is not so paradoxical as it seems. 
 
 Nevertheless, though the Diaspora survive, a more national 
 kind of Jewish life may well arise east of the Jordan, and even 
 west of it Hebrew is already becoming again a living speech. 
 Such a resurrection — however partial — would be a valuable 
 vindication of the power of a people to outlive its persecutors, 
 and would add a unique and romantic chapter to history. But 
 " the Mission of Israel " would not be furthered unless a civi- 
 lisation higher than the normal was developed in that more com- 
 
 284.
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 pact section where Hebrew idealism would have comparatively 
 free play. Here, then, is the true task for Zionism, and a fur- 
 ther reason why the largest possible measure of autonomy and 
 concentration is essential. 
 
 Since, however, the Diaspora cannot but survive the com- 
 pletest possible triumph of Zionism — since, indeed, according 
 to the latest gospel, its survival will be part of the triumph of 
 Zionism — its religious problems, like its political problems, 
 will still remain clamouring for solution. Not even by seeking 
 refuge in Zion can Judaism escape that religious reconstruction 
 which modern thought has long been imperatively demanding, 
 and which the breakdown of the old order under stress of war 
 has made inevitable for all religions alike. Indeed, a Zionism 
 that frankly abandoned the ideal of a tribal centre for the 
 Diaspora, and set up on Mount Zion a centre of teaching for 
 the whole human race, would be both freer from practical diffi- 
 culties and nearer to the essence of Judaism and Jewish history. 
 
 285
 
 THE OLD CLO' MAN 
 
 (Voices, June, 1920) 
 
 Three battered hats upon his head, 
 And curved beneath his bag, 
 
 The ancient limps with brooding tread. 
 Amid the city's brag. 
 
 It is a day of rocking bells 
 
 And prancing King and Court, 
 
 A day when marching music swells 
 And alien oafs make sport. 
 
 They harry him, these Christian louts, 
 With stones and clownish freaks, 
 
 His hand mechanic flicks the clouts 
 Of mud from oft' his cheeks. 
 
 Blood trickles down his long white beard 
 
 To badge his gaberdine ; 
 He is unused to go un jeered, 
 
 Or mark the outer scene. 
 
 Nor merry banners, purple posts, 
 
 Nor blazoned floral hails, 
 Nor hoarse huzzahing heathen hosts 
 
 Can pierce his mental veils. 
 
 The Titan City's domes and spires 
 
 As little take his eye: 
 Her airy leagues of living wires 
 
 'Her planes that taunt the sky. 
 
 The martial pageant winds within 
 
 The noble storied fane, 
 The soaring organ notes begin 
 
 Their jubilant refrain. 
 
 A thousand flag-dressed merchant ships 
 The river's rapture scream, 
 286
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 They bring no shadow of eclipse 
 To dim his pious dream. 
 
 He ponders on a Hebrew text, 
 Long old when Rome was new, 
 
 And, like a student vaguely vext, 
 Holds tighter to his clue. 
 
 And as the happy Gentiles bawl 
 
 The glory of their race, 
 He flicks the giant capital 
 
 Like the mud from off his face. 
 
 Poor howling, pork-fed brutish horde 
 That know not Israel's God, 
 
 Vain, vain, their Empire of the sword, 
 Their ruthless ruling rod. 
 
 Their city dwindles into dust 
 
 Before Jehovah's fire, 
 And all that mighty life and lust 
 
 Join Babylon and Tyre. 
 
 He sees her princes' skulls dug up 
 Where stand her abbey walls, 
 
 And bats and cockatrices sup 
 Within her palace halls : 
 
 While in some pagan city new, 
 
 Whose name none yet can know, 
 
 Still to their God and Torah true, 
 The chosen cry " Old Clo' ! " 
 
 287
 
 THE MIRAGE OF THE JEWISH STATE 
 
 " Life caricatures our concepts," complained Dr. Herzl to 
 me in the early days of his movement, and, indeed, History has 
 few grimmer ironies to show than that his noble and pacific 
 vision of the Jewish State should draw its hopes of realisation 
 from the bloodiest war in history, or that, on the embodiment 
 of Mr. Balfour's promise in the Turkish Peace Treaty, a Zion- 
 ist leader in Jerusalem should have ordered the Shofar to be 
 sounded as at the coming of the Messiah; and have thus of- 
 ficially identified a dubious political transaction with the " one 
 far-ofF divine event " for which Jewish mysticism has waited 
 nigh two thousand years. It is only another proof of the de- 
 moralising effects of racial egotism and political faction. 
 
 It is true that the dispossession of the Turk, the assassin of 
 the Armenians, and the despoiler of Palestine, is a process that 
 makes for righteousness, and the yearning of the Jewish soul to 
 which Jehuda Halevi gave such touching expression is an emo- 
 tion of no small spiritual potency. But, unfortunately, the 
 disingenuous handling of the new-fangled mandatory system, 
 the cynical flouting of the League of Nations on which it 
 professes to depend, reduces the world again from a common- 
 wealth to a cockpit, and in such a welter there can be for Jewry 
 neither spiritual nor political salvation. 
 
 At first, indeed, it seemed as if the ancient belief that asso- 
 ciated the return of the Jews to Palestine with a millennial or- 
 der would be realised by the triumph of the Wilsonian prin- 
 ciples. But these high-flown dreams have proved to be only 
 the outcome of the opium with which humanity was drugged 
 to continue its mutual butchery, and the awakening has found 
 the patient paying as usual for intoxication by depression and 
 K at zen jammer. That the Jews should nevertheless sing Ho- 
 sannas might at first seem a welcome exception to the prevail- 
 ing pessimism : as welcome an exception as the institution of a 
 Jewish State would be to the prevailing materialism. Unhap- 
 pily it is again the optimism of the opium-eater. The Oriental 
 emotionalism of the race has been exploited, and rejoicings and 
 
 288
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 rhapsodies, processions and synagogical thanksgivings which 
 might have seemed faintly in order at the opening of the first 
 Jewish Parliament in a Palestine regained, have been lavished 
 throughout the ghettos and Judengassen of the world at the 
 mere verbal prospect that England as a mandatory would es- 
 tablish " a Jewish National Home " there, though all that was 
 clear was that French Imperialism had been docked of part at 
 least of the southern section of Syria, and the British Empire 
 had been correspondingly extended and fortified by a new buf- 
 fer-province. Of the promise to the Jews nothing was definite 
 except its negative clauses, and nothing explicit save its limita- 
 tions. Yet the nebulous news from San Remo sufficed to turn 
 Jerusalem from a city of fasting and lamentation over the re- 
 cent pogrom into a city hailing the Messiah with tuck of 
 trumpet. 
 
 There is, indeed, much in common between these hysteric and 
 hyperbolic manifestations and the popular frenzy that attended 
 the career of the seventeenth century Sabbata'i Zevi, " the Turk- 
 ish Messiah " of my " Dreamers of the Ghetto." The jubilance 
 is even more pathetic in its prematurity and more unmanly in 
 its abandonment than those grotesque ululations and grovel- 
 lings on the floor witnessed at the Zionist Congress in 1903, 
 when the mere resolution of the majority to investigate the 
 British offer of a territory in East Africa was taken by the 
 fanatical minority as equivalent to the " surrender " of Pal- 
 estine. 
 
 And this epidemic of ecstasy is immeasurably more wide- 
 spread than that delirium of grief : its ravages spare neither age 
 nor experience. The touching faith in British benevolence and 
 world-philanthropy is unalloyed by recollection of the pogrom 
 which Jabotinsky accused the British military authorities of 
 having incited, and which at the best they allowed to rage for 
 three days against a scrupulously disarmed Jewry. 1 Let us 
 hope this incorrigible belief in Britain will melt the hearts of 
 her politicians, and induce them to take the task of Jewish res- 
 toration seriously in hand. It must, indeed, be a hard Parlia- 
 mentary heart that is left untouched by this flowery exuberance 
 
 1 A Jewish professor, of New York, who happened to be in Jerusalem, 
 writes, anent the outrages of April 6th: " M. Hiramali, an agricultural ex- 
 pert, was killed only a few steps from the British consulate, where they 
 refused him protection, saying they had no instructions to grant it. . . . All 
 the horrors were perpetrated by the Hebronites who were released from 
 prison. . . . The British authorities permitted no one to leave the town. 
 . . . We could not convince the British authorities that it was necessary to 
 send soldiers." 
 
 289
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 of gratitude from every land of the Exile, or unshamed by this 
 unearned increment of benediction. 
 
 Though Cromwell, when he re-admitted the Jews to England 
 in 1656', was swayed by millenarian notions, these would have 
 had little force over his policy had he not perceived the value 
 of the Jews as Intelligencers and promoters of his commercial 
 designs. And similarly, though Mr. Lloyd George is not lack- 
 ing in sentimental sympathy with the Zionist aspiration, we 
 should have heard little of the " Jewish National Home " had 
 not Palestine subserved British political aims. It was as a 
 military barrier for the defence of Egypt that the acquisition 
 of Palestine and its garrisoning by a Jewish self-governing pop- 
 ulation was long urged by the Manchester Guardian, and this 
 mutual interest — do nt des — would have constituted a sound 
 political bargain, had not England, by a double-edged stroke 
 of diplomacy, contrived to ear-mark Palestine for herself and 
 gain the sympathies of world-Jewry without recognising in 
 Israel anything but a pauper beneficiary of her idealism. Her 
 strategy was the more wonderful inasmuch as this grandiose 
 gesture was made at a dark moment of the war, a moment when 
 every little counted, and when even France had secretly in- 
 structed M. Picot to dangle before Jewry " the largest possible 
 hopes of Palestine." The sole credit attaching to the British 
 Government is that of political sagacity — no small virtue 
 indeed in these days of purblind politics, and by no means to be 
 credited to the Zionist leaders, who from beginning to end have 
 played the passive and impotent role of British political agents, 
 and have now seen the much-trumpeted " Jewish National 
 Home " whittled down to a British-Jewish High Commissioner 
 who will naturally be as British a Governor in Palestine as he 
 was a Home Secretary in England. Mount Zion in labour has 
 produced the mouse I foreboded when the renaissance was her- 
 alded, and of the Lion of Judah there is no sign. This does 
 not prevent the Zionist leaders — as we have seen — from con- 
 tinuing to blow the trumpet. It must be remembered in exten- 
 uation that it is their own trumpet which they are blowing. 
 
 Mr. Frederic Harrison has urged upon the Government, that 
 " too many rash promises were made in the stress of war." 
 Evidently, according to this casuist — a religious leader to 
 boot — the Prussian doctrine was correct, and now that the 
 advantages, the imponderdbtUa as well as the ponderabilia, of 
 the Balfour Declaration have been reaped, it can become " a 
 scrap of paper." But why fall back on so brutal a doctrine 
 
 290
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 when the race to which you pay a shilling in the pound declares 
 rapturously that you have honoured your obligation to the 
 full? Why devote effort and brain-work to the tough problem 
 of creating a real " Jewish National Home " in Palestine when 
 you give such boundless satisfaction by shutting the homeless 
 hordes of Jewry out of it? The natives are agitated and 
 aggressive. Why embroil yourself with them to give the land 
 to the Jews, especially when the Arabs are utterly ungrateful 
 for your liberating them from the Turks, while the Jews will 
 bedew with tears of gratitude the hand that binds them? 
 
 We behold in fact the curious phenomenon that at a moment 
 when Hindoos, Egyptians and Irishmen vie with one another to 
 shake off the British yoke, the Jews are equally frenzied to put 
 their necks in it. They are like castaways at sea, rejoicing to 
 be picked up even by a slaver. It is a pathetic testimony to 
 twenty centuries of tossing on a pitiless ocean. But it is 
 equally a proof that twenty years of Zionism have not availed 
 to restore the sapped national dignity. The immemorial Pass- 
 over aspiration, " Next year in Jerusalem ! " is followed in the 
 ritual by, " Next year sons of Freedom ! " England's dole of 
 Freedom was meagre enough, but the Jewish Oliver Twists 
 actually ask for less, not more. The very leaders of Zionism 
 have failed it. Children of the Russian Pale, unaccustomed to 
 an atmosphere of freedom, and overawed by an alien official- 
 dom, they have not varied from the Shtadlanim, the obsequious 
 emissaries of Jewry throughout the Ghetto ages. Dr. Weiz- 
 mann, despite his frequent visits to Palestine, brought never a 
 word to London of the contemptuous attitude of the military 
 authorities towards the Jews, or of their insidious attempt to 
 burke the Balfour Declaration ; had he done so, English meet- 
 ings of protest might have been held and the pogrom in Jeru- 
 salem averted. Of him it may be said, as Macaulay said of 
 Admiral Torrington in the old French war: " He shrank from 
 all responsibility : from the responsibility of fighting, and from 
 the responsibility of not fighting; and he succeeded in finding 
 out a middle way which united all the inconveniences which he 
 wished to avoid." 
 
 To this day the British Government has vouchsafed no clear 
 explanation of Palestine Jewry's status, and though Mr. 
 Balfour's letter carefully promises " a Jewish National Home 
 in Palestine," the Zionists have held thanksgiving services in 
 the synagogues for " Palestine as a Jewish National Home," 
 while a message from Mr. Lloyd George to the Zionist Congress 
 
 291
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 congratulates it on " the restoration to the Jewish people of 
 their National Home." It is impossible to keep pace with these 
 verbal juggleries, all in contradiction of one another and none 
 in accordance with the facts. 
 
 It is urged, of course, that politics is the art of the prac- 
 ticable, and that in accommodating itself to British policy and 
 Arab pretensions, Zionism has shown a sensible statecraft. But 
 the line of least resistance is neither the path of true statesman- 
 ship nor the road of national salvation. 
 
 Under General Dyer, Hindoos had to crawl. But under 
 General Allenby, the Zionist leaders, with the redeeming excep- 
 tion of Jabotinsky, have needed no crawling order. Disraeli 
 said of O'Connell that he had committed every crime that did 
 not require courage. Dr. Weizmann has displayed every 
 virtue that does not require it. 
 
 Although Messrs. Lloyd George and Balfour cannot be 
 acquitted of lethargy and levity in the whole business, they 
 have the excuse of overwhelming preoccupations in every part 
 of the world, and the fiasco of political Zionism would seem less 
 due to any mala fides on their part than to the absence of 
 national temper and creative courage in the Zionist leaders, 
 who, belonging as they unfortunately did to cultural or agri- 
 cultural and not to political Zionism, found themselves blinking 
 at the vast perspectives so suddenly opened before them, and 
 recoiled in alarm like the man in JEsop who called on Death 
 and when Death came was taken aback. It is an historical 
 tragedv, for wrong beginnings are almost impossible to rectify. 
 
 In short, what the dead founder of Zionism always appre- 
 hended has come to pass. The great moment has found a small 
 people. 
 
 II 
 
 Nothing could show the fiasco of political Zionism more 
 clearly than the eagerness of anti-Zionists to take part in the 
 work. Now that the national movement upon which so much 
 enthusiasm, eloquence and money have been expended, and for 
 which Captain Trumpeldor died, crying, " It is good to die 
 for one's country," has dwindled to the familiar philanthropic 
 task of immigration and colonisation under alien authority and 
 responsibility, the communal leaders throw themselves into the 
 work with their wonted beneficence. The danger is over, and 
 the Messiah will not come in their time. They know better 
 
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 than to believe that trumpet. In vain the Zionists pretend 
 that the times of Ezra and Nehemiah are returned, and the 
 day of the Third Temple is at hand. A profound instinct, if 
 not a reasoned analysis, reassures the pillars of the synagogue. 
 In truth, not even the appointment of Mr. Herbert Samuel 
 provides Judah with a Zerubbabel. There is no parallel 
 between the two historic moments. If by the grace of Cyrus 
 the Jewish State arose from its ashes and maintained itself for 
 six centuries longer, though under a succession of suzerains, it 
 was because the new order started under a Governor whose 
 function was not to keep a balance between the various inhab- 
 itants but to restore the Jewish supremacy, and who was not 
 carefully labelled Persian to soothe the non-Jews. Cyrus did 
 not talk high morality and political idealism, he did not under- 
 stand that the same petty territory could afford a national 
 home to two peoples. He did not make a magniloquent prom- 
 ise to the Jews and then impose Persian law. Nor did he make 
 the promise during the war between the Persian and Babylonian 
 Empires, so as to seduce the Babylonian Jews from their alle- 
 giance. With a magnanimous gesture Palestine was restored 
 when victory was complete. Even the sacred vessels of the 
 Temple were handed back to the returning exiles. There was 
 no Persian bureaucracy to control their return. Their rhap- 
 sodies were not illusionary. Harp and psaltery, cymbal and 
 song celebrated a real home-coming. 
 
 Despite the role of espionage to which the Jews of Palestine 
 lent themselves, and without which General Allenby's conquest 
 would have been immeasurably more difficult (a role redeemed 
 from ignominy only by the heroism of Sarah Aaronsohn, who 
 though bastinadoed and tortured, shot herself rather than 
 betray to the Arabs the headquarters of this secret service), 
 British gratitude has so far been limited to rewarding the arch- 
 spy and erecting a monument to the martyred girl. Of any 
 real restoration of Palestine to the Jews there is not certain 
 indication, and our exiles of to-day return with no assurance 
 of even ultimate autonomy, though the women Zionists were 
 invited by their mesmeric organisation to celebrate Redemption 
 Week by throwing their jewels upon the altar, and all female 
 babies born that week in the Jerusalem hospital have been 
 named Geulah (Redemption). With a civil administration 
 replacing the military bureaucracy under which the Hatikvah 
 stood forbidden, the national hymn may now be sung only 
 within closed Jewish doors ; while on the Advisory Council the 
 
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 Jews are swamped by the Moslems and Christians, and all three 
 alike by the British Government. This does not prevent the 
 leaders from abounding in Messianic manifestoes, political, 
 spiritual, and financial. They seem to have learnt from 
 Disraeli that k * with words we govern men." 
 
 So far from the Zionists being in a position to build up the 
 model State they proclaim, even economic control of the coun- 
 try is not to be secured by their Organisation or Jewry at 
 large, except for individual concessions, from which, as from 
 immigration and colonisation, they could scarcely have been 
 barred, had there been no Balfour Declaration at all. A 
 British Colony could not well exclude the race, a scion of which 
 is Lord Chief Justice and another the Secretary for India, and 
 which penetrated into Palestine even under the Turk. But 
 the immigration of Jews is to be carefully restricted, and not 
 directly by the Zionists themselves ; and when they do come in 
 they will have to face the competition of the cheap and abun- 
 dant Arab labour. The sole privilege of Jewry will be to 
 supply the capital for sustaining them in their arduous begin- 
 nings — two to three hundred pounds per immigrant on Dr. 
 Weizmann's calculation. 
 
 We have only to compare this negation of political and eco- 
 nomic power with the measure of autonomy offered by Joseph 
 Chamberlain in East Africa to gauge the shrinkage in Zionism 
 that goes with Zion. The Chamberlain concept of a British 
 Juda-a had already been nibbled down by the Foreign Office, but 
 even the letter of Sir Charles Hill to Mr. Greenberg offers a 
 far higher political status than that with which Dr. Weizmann 
 has now been fobbed off in Palestine. Writing from the For- 
 eign Office in August, 1903, Sir Charles Hill says he is 
 instructed by Lord Lansdowne (the then Secretary for Foreign 
 Affairs) to tell Mr. Greenberg that the Government is prepared 
 to consider favourably a scheme, the main features of which 
 are " the grant of a considerable area of land, the appointment 
 of a Jewish official as the Chief of the Local Administra- 
 tion . . . and local autonomy, conditional upon the right of 
 His Majesty's Government to exercise general control " — in 
 short, the establishment of a British-Jewish Crown Colony. 
 
 To Mr. Barnes, M.P., has apparently been assigned the task 
 of defending the evisceration of the Balfonrian promise, and 
 with a brazenness to be found only in politicians, he has attrib- 
 uted the pogrom in Palestine to that indiscreet announcement, 
 although it was sanctioned by the Cabinet of which he was 
 
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 himself a member! But no verbal jugglery can make Mr. 
 Balfour's letter to Lord Rothschild other than a promise of 
 restoration of Palestine to the Jews and of the Jews to Pales- 
 tine. It is true that this document nowhere speaks of Palestine 
 as a Jewish National Home, but only of a Jewish National 
 Home in Palestine, and that in holding a service of praise in 
 the Cathedral Synagogue thanking God for the former conces- 
 sion, the Zionists have combined mendacity with blasphemy. 
 But although it had by then been made clear to them that 
 Great Britain has been granted no mandate for " Palestine as 
 the Jewish National Home," nothing can absolve Mr. Balfour 
 from the responsibility for having promised it. For words 
 are not the sole constituents of an utterance. The atmosphere, 
 the " universe of discourse," also counts. And it was not 
 merely because of the fanfaronades of the Zionists nor because 
 of the prepossession of an ancient traditional hope that the 
 outside world — Moslem and Christian alike — read into the 
 Declaration the larger meaning. It was because the air was 
 full of the resurrection of peoples, the horizon rosy with 
 national restorations. Mr. Balfour is too old a diplomatist 
 not to have understood in what sense his words, however 
 guarded, would be taken. And no breath of disavowal came 
 from him when, at a great Zionist Demonstration, members or 
 representatives of the Government like Lord Robert. Cecil or the 
 late Sir Mark Sykes inflamed the Jewish imagination (and the 
 Arab resentment), while Herbert Samuel was allowed to com- 
 promise his reputation as a sober politician by declaring that 
 next year would see Israel in Jerusalem, according to the im- 
 memorial aspiration. 
 
 But we do not need these witnesses nor the unanimous world- 
 Press to testify to what Mr. Balfour promised. Fortunately 
 we have another utterance of his dated ten months later, which 
 so far from repudiating repeats and embroiders. On Septem- 
 ber 20th, 1918, Mr. Balfour wrote a preface to Mr. Sokolow's 
 " History of Zionism." And from this preface it is clear that 
 he honestly meant to restore Palestine to the Jews, though he 
 had not been sufficiently advised of the difficulties of the task, 
 and was reiving on Dr. Weizmann's ancient, argumentation in 
 the East-Africa crisis. Remarking for example upon the 
 " strange and unhappy " fact that the one people for whom 
 race, religion, and territory, are uniquely inter-related should 
 be the one people without any territory at all, the one people 
 that has " nowhere been able to create for itself an organised 
 
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 social commonwealth," he is obviously exposed to the implica- 
 tion that this " organised social commonwealth " was now to be 
 set up, even though it involved what he calls a reversal of the 
 course of history. And he goes on : " If as I believe Zionism 
 can be developed into a working scheme, the benefit it would 
 bring to the Jewish people, especially perhaps to that section 
 of it which most deserves our pity, would be great and lasting. 
 It is not merely that large numbers of them would thus find a 
 refuge from religious and social persecution; but that they 
 would bear corporate responsibilities and enjoy corporate 
 opportunities of a kind which, from the nature of the case, 
 they can never possess as citizens of any non-Jewish State." 
 
 Obviously then the advantages which they cannot possess in 
 a non-Jewish State must accrue to them as citizens of a Jewish 
 State! Even in this preface, Mr. Balfour, it will be seen, 
 remains the politician, the airy avoider of the positive. But 
 with all his caution he cannot avoid the affirmation that lies 
 in negation obverted. Nor are more direct evidences wanting, 
 though they are never wholly unscreened by hypothesis. 
 " Those who go to Palestine will not be like those who now 
 migrate to London or New York. They will not be animated 
 merely by the desire to lead in happier surroundings the kind 
 of life they formerly led in Eastern Europe. They will go in 
 order to join a civil community which completely harmonises 
 with their historical and religious sentiments; a community 
 bound to the land it inhabits by something deeper even than 
 custom : a community whose members will suffer from no divided 
 loyalty, nor any temptation to hate the laws under which they 
 are forced to live. To them the material gain should be great: 
 but surely the spiritual gain will be greater still." And answer- 
 ing the fears of the anti-Zionists that (the italics are mine) 
 " their ancient home having been restored to them, they would 
 be expected to reside there," he reassures them, denying only 
 the latter clause. He adds (and again the italics are mine) : 
 " Everything which assimilates the national and international 
 status of the Jews to that of other races ought to mitigate what 
 remains of ancient antipathies : and evidently this assimilation 
 would be promoted by giving them that which all other nations 
 possess: a local habitation and a national home." 
 
 Finally he regards the problem in its true light, not merely 
 as a Jewish problem, but also as a world-problem. But the 
 cloven hoof of the anti-Semite which was displayed in his con- 
 tribution to the East-Africa controversy, peeps out again. 
 
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 Zionism receives his support as " a serious endeavour to miti- 
 gate the age-long miseries created for Western civilisation by 
 the presence in its midst of a Body which it too long regarded 
 as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to 
 expel or absorb." Unless by " age-long miseries " Mr. Balfour 
 means the spiritual miseries of hating, persecuting, and mas- 
 sacring, by which " Western civilisation " afflicted its own soul, 
 this is a very reprehensible statement. The Jews have brought 
 " Western civilisation " not miseries but untold blessings. But 
 if Mr. Balfour's Zionism is an attempt to assist " Western 
 civilisation " to rid itself of its unwelcome foreign Body, still 
 more clearly must he have intended offering that Body the 
 maximum of territory and opportunity in Palestine. 
 
 But in the project as it now materialises, a mere fraction of 
 this Body is simply to change its place of exile, and new mis- 
 eries of race-friction are to be created. " Now you have got a 
 start," ran Mr. Lloyd George's historic message from San 
 Remo. " And it is up to you to make good." It cannot be too 
 emphatically recorded that no start has been given except for 
 colonisation and immigration, and that whatever the measure 
 of success reached, the gain will be more to the British Empire 
 than to Jewry. For while that Empire will be safeguarded by 
 a new barrier for the defence of Egypt, and enriched by a loyal 
 and industrious population that may be used for its battles, 
 and while its derelict acquisition will be converted into a com- 
 paratively fruitful and self-supporting colony, the Jewish 
 problem will remain not merely untransformed but largely un- 
 alleviated. There will be neither quantity of salvation nor 
 quality of status. A common task unifies the workers, and 
 thus the common concentration on Palestine will strengthen and 
 perpetuate the Diaspora on its present lines — a dubious bless- 
 ing indeed. In the deal with Christendom the Jew, as usual, has 
 got the worse of the bargain. 
 
 Ill 
 
 What will be the status of a Jew who becomes a citizen of 
 the new (or nursling) British Arab State in Palestine? Is he 
 by nationality British, Jewish, Arab or Palestinian? He will 
 become Palestinian, it appears. But by a strange ukase of the 
 Supreme Council of the Allies, he may also retain his original 
 nationality ; an arrangement which on the day — if ever it 
 dawns — when the State reaches full-fledged independence, 
 
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 will produce a rare chaos in its constitution. In the meantime, 
 since Palestine is supposed to be training for self-government 
 as a ward of the League of Nations, and Britain is merely the 
 transitory vice-guardian — Palestine citizenship except for 
 existing British subjects carries no rights in the British Em- 
 pire, conveys no claims to the Palmerstonian Civis romanus 
 sum, nor any right to land in Melbourne, Montreal or London 
 except as an alien, or even as an Asiatic ! This will not prevent 
 the Jews of Palestine from being regarded as British by the 
 rest of the world, while the Jewries of the Diaspora, from all 
 of which energies and finances will be streaming towards Pales- 
 tine, can scarcely escape being regarded as pro-British. The 
 peril of such a situation for non-British Jews in the event of a 
 war between England and other Powers possessing Jewish 
 populations needs no accentuation. After our recent experi- 
 ence of the temper and temperature of peoples at war, we know 
 that the Jews will be fortunate if they escape with simple 
 internment. The Jews of England hastened to form a League 
 of British Jews to emphasise that they accepted no political 
 loyalty to the Jewish State that seemed to be looming. But 
 the danger to them is non-existent: it is Leagues of French or 
 German or American Jews that the situation calls for. Still 
 more dubious is the position of the Palestine Jews themselves 
 in the event of the mandatory becoming involved in war. 
 Would Palestine as a ward of the League of Nations be neutral, 
 or would England expect the Palestinians to rally to her 
 defence? Would they, protected by the British Empire but 
 enjoying no privileges in it, be expected to share in its mani- 
 fold risks? Very probably, though the dictionary defines a 
 mandatory as one who does service without compensation. 
 And in the unhappy contingency of war with France, would 
 the nursling States be expected to embrace the feud of their 
 respective mandatories, and British Palestine be involved in 
 combat with the adjoining French Syria? Would not, in such 
 a crisis, the Arabs of both countries join forces against both 
 belligerents, and Jewry be slaughtered between the Moslem and 
 the Christian? In truth, the relations of mandatories to their 
 wards seem as shadowy as their own relations to the League of 
 Nations. No fundamental brain-work seems yet to have been 
 done upon the whole subject. But perhaps fundamental brain- 
 work would reveal too clearly upon what a filmy foundation 
 political structures have been reared, and politicians, whether 
 Christian or Hebrew, prefer to glide along in a nebulosity 
 
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 which covers the nullity of their concepts, and conceals the 
 precipices over which they career. The mandatory idea in fact 
 belongs to the concept of the world as commonwealth. It 
 cannot be applied to the world as cockpit. 
 
 The risks that will arise to foreign Jewries from their sup- 
 posed pro-Britishism, and to Palestine Jews from their resi- 
 dence in the unholy land of religious and political rivalries, 
 would have been worth running, had Israel really achieved, or 
 could he really achieve, independence there. But the autonomy 
 that lies in numbers is a dubious and distant goal, and for gen- 
 erations Israel falls between two stools, neither British nor non- 
 British, neither bond nor free. At best it was doubtful whether 
 in view of the prophetic idealism intertangled with Israel's 
 national life, the nation could afford to owe its resurrection to 
 opportunism and to the politicians of the blockade and the 
 super-Bismarckian Peace. Mazzini with his flaming Repub- 
 lican faith obstinately refused to lend himself to the monarch- 
 ical manoeuvres of Cavour. But Cavour did achieve the 
 Risorgimento, whereas Palestine is still irredenta. An oppor- 
 tunism which does not even grasp its opportunity is doubly 
 damnable — it is the bungling of Sancho Panza added to the 
 collapse of Don Quixote. To sell one's birthright and not even 
 get the mess of pottage ! 
 
 The tragic irony of the situation is enhanced by the fact that 
 the state of the Jewish people as a whole is immeasurably 
 blacker than at any time even in its own tenebrous history. 
 The world's nerves are now so blunted by the horrors in which 
 it has wallowed that it is almost futile to draw attention to a 
 series of massacres, expulsions, boycotts, menaces and other 
 persecutions that outdo in their totality the miseries of any 
 other people, the Armenians not excluded. Yet vast sums that 
 ought to have been used for relief — and there is talk of raising 
 twenty-five million pounds — are diverted to a project, which 
 could demand preference only if it were a real national Redemp- 
 tion. Whereas not only is there no Jewish State within view, 
 but Palestine is not even permitted, or able, to receive the 
 wretched hordes streaming to beat desperately at her gates, 
 many of whom perish, perhaps fortunately, under the hard- 
 ships of the route or in the wretched sailing smacks with which 
 they try to cross the Black Sea or the Mediterranean. The 
 same number of the Jewish Chronicle that contained the news 
 of the incorporation of the Palestine project in the Turkish 
 Peace Treaty contained on a single page the following items of 
 
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 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 Foreign News, the content of which I summarise under each 
 heading. 
 
 German- Austrians Maltreat Jews 
 
 Closing of Vienna University through a riot against the 
 Jewish students with the destruction of their furniture. 
 
 Another Ukraine Massacre 
 
 A pogrom in Podolia by the soldiers of General Bredoff's 
 arm}'. Thirty Jews killed, over a hundred wounded. Twenty- 
 six Jewesses raped. Indescribable cruelties. 
 
 Riot at Kovno 
 
 Victorious Polish troops in the Ukrainian towns cut off 
 beards of Jews and then beat them. 
 
 Deputy Farbstein Attacked 
 
 Soldiers attack him in the train. An officer recognises and 
 saves him. 
 
 Rioting in Galicia 
 
 Jewish quarters of Cracow, Lemberg and Grodek attacked. 
 Beards cut. Jews beaten. 
 
 Anti-Semitic Libel Exposed 
 
 Appeal of Petrograd Jewish Bolshevists to fellow-Jews to 
 enslave the whole world, found to be a forgery printed by the 
 pogram organisers in the Ukraine. 
 
 Vilna Yiddish Newspaper Suspended 
 
 For printing the names of the Jews killed in the last pogrom. 
 
 Jewish Exodus from Poland 
 
 A panic-stricken flight, reported in The Times. 700 to 
 1,000 passports applied for daily. 100,000 have received 
 passports and are waiting to travel to the United States, where, 
 however, their admission is doubtful. 
 
 Elections m Poland 
 
 A municipal election giving the Jews a majority, the Polish 
 
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 authorities annulled it, and arrested the Jewish leader till the 
 elections were over. 
 
 Tlie Alliance Israelite and the Relief for Poland 
 
 Details of subscriptions for clothes and boots for the pogrom 
 victims and the many orphans of Eastern Galicia. 
 
 Outrages upon Hungarian Jewesses 
 
 Drunken officers and soldiers outrage interned Jewesses, rob 
 and kill interned Jews. 
 
 Jewish Professors in Hungary Boycotted 
 
 Christian students boycott Jewish professors and lecturers. 
 Some resign, others are advised to ask prolonged leave. 
 
 The White Terror in Hungary 
 
 700 Jews disappear without leaving trace. A Jewish mer- 
 chant of Czech citizenship who intervenes against the ill-treat- 
 ment of a Hungarian Jew is arrested and ends in an asylum, 
 creeping under the table when a visitor enters. 
 
 Hungarian Rabbi Arrested 
 
 The Chief Rabbi of Szegedin arrested for a bitter speech 
 against Hungary and the Hungarians. 
 
 Jews Protest against Hungary 
 
 Mass meeting in Vienna to protest against treatment of 
 Jews in Hungary. 
 
 A Terrible Passover 
 
 Troops surround the Synagogue, thrash the head of the 
 community and all the other congregants. " The soldiers 
 seized an ailing Jew of sixty-three years, cut his beard off, put 
 it into grease, and compelled him to eat it" 
 
 Anti-Semitic Cruelties in Hungary 
 
 Hungarian noblemen delight to torture Jews. Count Salsz, 
 for example, summons the family of Simon Kemoni, stabs him 
 
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 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 to death, and while the wife bends over the body, dances in his 
 blood, shouting he is " very pleased to smell Jewish blood." 
 
 Jewish Civil Servants Barred 
 
 Jews dismissed and barred from the Civil Service in the Car- 
 pathian Provinces of Czecho-Slovakia. 
 
 Expulsion of Jews from France 
 
 Many Jewish fugitives expelled by Ministry of Interior. 
 Many only released from German prisons at armistice — police 
 demand from them passports duly vised by the French Consul 
 of the country from which they came — an obvious impossi- 
 bility. 
 
 Anti-Semitic Bluff 
 
 Following an anti-Semitic Mass Meeting, an expulsion order 
 against all " aliens " in Lower Austria aimed at the Jewish fugi- 
 tives from the East or from the White Terror in Hungary. A 
 bluff because no trains to transport them. 
 
 Jewish Students Excluded 
 
 The University of Graz, the capital of Styria, tries to copy 
 Budapest University. 
 
 Recipe against Judaism 
 
 Reactionary Austrian officers and Pan-Germans stir up pop- 
 ulation against Jews, declaring Austria must first become 
 German so as to fight the Judaisation of the world. 
 
 An Anti-Semitic Bank 
 
 The old Austrian nobility establish a " purely Aryan " Bank 
 of Styria, " to stem the flood from the East." The Chief 
 Magistrate of Styria is the President — a combination de- 
 nounced in the Arbeiter Zeitung as corrupt. 
 
 The Position of Algerian Jews 
 
 The Algerian Jews, 2,000 of whom have died in battle for 
 France, demand the abolition of political and economic restric- 
 tions. 
 
 The chronicle flows on to another page, for are there not 
 
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 expulsions from Bavaria, pamphlets distributed throughout 
 Germany by the million, urging Jew-massacres, a pogrom even 
 in Jerusalem, etc., etc.? But enough! This, be it marked, 
 is by no means a bad page of Jewish news of the week. There 
 is no atrocity on a colossal scale, such as ensanguines the record 
 in other weeks. It is an average example of the continuous 
 pogrom in action, the vast majority of the episodes in which 
 never even find their way into print, and more than counter- 
 balance any possible exaggeration in those recorded. Such is 
 the background of the Zionist rejoicings. Nowhere have " the 
 drums and tramplings " been more continuous than in the 
 Jewish zones of Europe: towns have been taken and re-taken 
 by the rival armies, and the Jews massacred by all. Kieff has 
 been thus captured — to the music of Jewish death-rattles — 
 seventeen times ! And even where Peace has slowly dawned it 
 brings no balm to the Ghetto, for the abnormal accentuation 
 of race-consciousness in war-time has aggravated anti-Semitism, 
 especially in the beaten countries. England herself combines 
 protection of the Jew in Palestine with a restiveness against 
 " aliens " at home and a tyrannous deportation of as many as 
 possible. 
 
 Infinitely more important and urgent, therefore, than any 
 pseudo-Restoration to Palestine is the problem of the Diaspora. 
 The treaty for minorities drawn up by the Peace Conference, 
 although Poland still cynically ignores it, has set a standard of 
 political ethics, which the world cannot afford to abate. But 
 the question remains, shall the Jews be recognised as national 
 minorities, or shall they simply exist as free and equal citizens 
 of the majority-State? The latter is the form preferred by 
 the old-established English Jews, and corresponds to the fact 
 that national minorities do not exist in England except 
 geographically. The other system, though it has excited 
 apprehension as of a State within a State, is merely a similar 
 device for self-protection, a method of organising a racially 
 mixed State by its constituent factors ; a grouping by races 
 instead of districts. Since none of these races demands or 
 enjoys a separate foreign policy, fiscal system, or Parliamen- 
 tary assembly, such a constitution appears to offer the valuable 
 combination of variety with unity, and to present a sort of 
 League of Nations in microcosm. It would seem the only way 
 of doing justice to the many large racial minorities embedded 
 amid majorities by the Peace Treaties, and were it applied to 
 Palestine would tend more truly to produce a " Jewish National 
 
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 Home " therein, without prejudice to Arab" rights, than a 
 British or American voting system, especially if supplemented 
 by a Ministry of Jewish Affairs, such as already exists in 
 Lithuania and was essayed in the unstable Ukraine. In coun- 
 tries where anti-Semitism reigns, this group system is a guar- 
 antee that the common national Parliament will contain a 
 proportional number of Jewish deputies. It is true the Jewish 
 vote might without this arrangement provide as many Jewish 
 or pro-Jewish deputies. But in practice it has been found — 
 as recently in Poland — that the gerrymandering of the con- 
 stituencies so as to water down Jewish majorities may leave 
 Jewry without even the requisite number of representatives for 
 an interpellation in the House. But however this question be 
 decided, the intolerable conditions of Central-European Jewry 
 will necessitate a large migration of the masses whom Palestine 
 cannot receive, and who are already taking the ancient road to 
 New York. 
 
 That was the path of salvation which the instinct of the 
 masses found for itself, when the pogroms of the early 'eighties 
 began to break up Russo-Jewish life. There lay the road to 
 safety and opportunity. America was the only country of the 
 world in which they could arrive in their tens of thousands with- 
 out arousing serious prejudice. There, and there alone, for- 
 eignness was almost the rule instead of the exception ; a score 
 of other alien groups vied with the Jewish group and facilitated 
 its settlement. And if the Gentiles tended to fuse less slowly 
 in the mammoth Melting Pot, and if more obstinate Jewry 
 found itself faced with a new synthetic anti-Semitism, yet the 
 equal political right of the Jews already in possession tended 
 to repress any graver manifestation, and every fresh Jew 
 brought added safety and political strength. America was, 
 after all, pledged to the doctrine of what Roosevelt called " the 
 square deal." There was lacking only the ramification of the 
 stream of Jewish immigration over the country at large, into 
 the West of which it trickled too slowly. And this a depart- 
 ment of the Jewish Territorial Organisation strove to precipi- 
 tate by constituting Galveston an additional port for Jewish 
 immigration — an attempt which Zionism in its blindness with- 
 stood, and which was successful only to the extent of settling 
 some ten thousand souls in the smaller Western towns as nuclei 
 of further immigration. But the vast area thus opened up 
 offers — if autonomy is to be set aside — a much more prac- 
 ticable and economical outlet for the swarming, impoverished 
 
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 and tormented Jewries of Europe than can be provided by the 
 tiny half-ruined British-Arab territory in Palestine, where the 
 mob that asks for bread cannot be put off with a stone, how- 
 ever holy. Unless Central Europe settles down to a security 
 and prosperity of which there are as yet no signs, or a Russia, 
 re-established and non-reactionary, supplies a nearer and more 
 attractive magnet to the Polish-Jewish masses, America, whose 
 immigration laws will inevitably be relaxed under the dearth of 
 white labour and the need of production, will as inevitably — 
 by whatever port of entry — resume her old place as the Jewish 
 land of refuge. 1 
 
 1 The latest statistics show 37,000 Jews arriving in New York within a, 
 few weeks, and the majority departing to join their relatives in the West. 
 It would thus seem that the Galveston work was more successful than one 
 had imagined, and that, exactly as designed, the 10,000 souls planted in the 
 West are now operating as nuclei to attract immigration from the Eastern 
 slums. 
 
 305
 
 "OUR OWN": A CRY ACROSS THE ATLANTIC 
 
 (Written for the Central Relief Committee of America.) 
 
 Jews of the great Republic, 
 
 Clasped to her mother-breast, 
 Nestling so warm and peaceful 
 
 Within that bosom blest, 
 Turn to our tortured Europe, 
 
 Hark to the myriad moan 
 Of pinched lips, white with hunger, 
 
 That stiffen as they groan, 
 And remember in these wan creatures runs 
 the blood that is your own. 
 
 Their sires and yours together 
 
 Bore Spain's or Poland's scorn; 
 With quenchless faith in marshfires 
 
 They followed after morn. 
 They built their house on quicksand, 
 
 Or the red volcano's cone, 
 And every age beheld it 
 
 Engulfed or overthrown, 
 For never in all the ages did a home remain 
 their own. 
 
 By devastated dwellings, 
 
 By desecrated fanes, 
 By hearth-stones, cold and crimsoned, 
 
 And slaughter-reeking lanes, 
 Again is the Hebrew quarter 
 
 Through half of Europe known ; 
 And crouching in the shambles, 
 
 Rachel, the ancient crone, 
 Weeps again for her children and the fate that 
 is her own. 
 
 No laughter rings in these ruins 
 Save of girls to madness shamed. 
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 THE VOICE OF JEKUSALEM 
 
 Their mothers disembowelled 
 
 Lie stark 'mid children maimed. 
 The Shule has a great congregation 
 
 But never a psalm they drone, 
 Shrouded in red-striped Tallesim, 
 
 Levi huddles with Kohn ; 
 But the blood from their bodies oozing is the 
 blood that is your own. 
 
 Shot, some six to a bullet, 
 
 Lashed and trailed in the dust, 
 Mutilated with hatchets 
 
 In superbestial lust — 
 No beast can even imagine 
 
 What Christians do or condone — 
 Surely these bear our burden 
 
 And for our sins atone, 
 And if we hide our faces, then the guilt is as 
 our own. 
 
 Laden with babes and bundles, 
 
 Footsore on every road, 
 Their weary remnants wander, 
 
 With bayonets for goad. 
 They cry : Shema' Yisroel 
 
 In tragic monotone, 
 And if ye, Israel, hear not, 
 
 By whom shall ruth be shown? 
 For the strength whereby God saves us is the 
 strength that is our own. 
 
 Alas ! for the wizened infants, 
 
 Sucking at stone-dry breasts, 
 Alas ! for the babies writhing 
 
 In the grip of plagues and pests. 
 They are fever-stricken and famished, 
 
 They are rotten of skin and bone, 
 Yet their mothers must die and leave them 
 
 To suffer and starve alone. 
 And any one of these children might be your 
 very own. 
 
 Barefoot, ragged and staring 
 Like walkers in their sleep, 
 307
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 Feeding on bark or sawdust, 
 
 The doomed processions creep ; 
 Crawling through marsh or snowdrift 
 
 Or forest overgrown, 
 They bear on high their Torah 
 
 Like a flag to heaven flown; 
 They prove how great their spirit, let us prove 
 how great our own. 
 
 At last but a naked rabble, 
 
 Clawing the dust for bread, 
 Jabbering, wailing, whining, 
 
 Hordes of the living dead; 
 Half apes, half ghosts, they grovel, 
 
 Nor human is their tone, 
 Yet they are not brutes but brethren, 
 
 These wrecks of the hunger-zone, 
 And their death-cry rings to heaven in the 
 tongue that is your own. 
 
 Jews of the great Republic, 
 
 Who gave your sons to death, 
 That Peace be born in Europe 
 
 And Justice draw new breath, 
 Will ye still endure to witness 
 
 As of yore your kindred thrown 
 To races whose souls are savage, 
 
 To tribes whose hearts are stone, 
 Compared with the love and mercy that for 
 ages have warmed our own? 
 
 Set your lips to the Shofar, 
 
 Waken a fiery blast, 
 Shrill to the heathen nations 
 
 This slaughter shall be the last! 
 And send our old Peace-greeting 
 
 Pealing from cot to throne, 
 Till mankind heeds the message 
 
 On the Hebrew trumpet blown, 
 And the faith of the whole world's peoples 
 is the faith that is our own. 
 
 308
 
 THE POLISH-JEWISH PROBLEM 
 
 The following remarkable statement was made in the Temps 
 of April 7th, 1920, by Signor Arturo Cappa, its Warsaw 
 Correspondent : 
 
 " A few days ago I had a conversation with M. Andrew 
 Niemojewski, a man of superior culture, who had made a 
 speciality of the Jewish question, and is the combined publisher 
 and editor of the journal My si Niepodlegla, which has a circu- 
 lation among all the classes of the population. I could not, 
 however, withhold my sense of indignation when I heard from 
 him the following utterances: 
 
 " ' We are nozv preparing a pogrom on a larger scale than 
 the others; the last gigantic and final pogrom. In that way 
 •we shall solve the Jewish question m Poland.' 
 
 " When I observed that it was not possible to put to death 
 15 per cent, of the population, and that the conscience of the 
 whole world would rise against such a deed, he said in reply : 
 
 "'And why not? Has not the European war sacrificed 
 millions of lives? In face of the universal Reaction Poland 
 would come out even greater and more noble.' " 
 
 M. Niemo j ewski's sentiments throw a lurid light upon the 
 ethical effects of the Great War for Righteousness and Free- 
 dom. Nor are they peculiar to this " man of superior cul- 
 ture." During the war Mr. Stephen Graham honestly warned 
 us that such was the temper of the country which England and 
 France proposed to redeem and re-establish, but I could not 
 believe that it would dare to betray its savagery to its enlight- 
 ened saviours. It had, however, better taken the measure of 
 their morality, and by its advance in Russia it displayed its 
 Prussian belief that success is the only touchstone now in appli- 
 cation or regard. As for its common sense in undertaking 
 fresh wars, this may be gauged from the fact that it has had 
 two million cases of typhus, not to mention the exhaustion and 
 under-feeding of the rest of the population. 
 
 There is an authoritative statement available on the condi- 
 tion of the Jews, against whom M. Niemojewski gaily announces 
 
 309
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 his crusade. Mr. Bernard Horwich, representative of the 
 American Joint Distribution Committee in Poland, a distrib- 
 utor of the twenty-five million dollars collected by the American 
 Jewish Relief Committee, the Central Relief Committee, and 
 the People's Relief Committee, says : 
 
 " Of the 350,000 Jews in Warsaw, one-quarter are famishing, 
 135,000 receive a mark a day. Persons die daily of underfeeding. 
 Hundreds of families live on a single plate of soup each from the 
 soup kitchen, and sometimes the soup is exhausted before the last 
 of the queue is reached. Children of eight to ten years are so weak 
 they have to be carried, their bones growing soft. In many houses 
 of Warsaw bed-linen is absent, having been used up for the corpses. 
 Children of eight to ten may be seen running around the streets at 
 midnight, having lost all their family. One boy of thirteen had the 
 charge of three smaller brothers and sisters. I saw eighteen per- 
 sons living in a cold and filthy hole too bad for a dog. They have 
 no money to emigrate." 
 
 Dr. Haim I. Davis, a major in the U. S. Red Cross Commis- 
 sion to Poland, reported that the younger generation of Jews 
 was virtually wiped out. 
 
 " In Warsaw," he says, " I visited the largest Jewish hospital. 
 It had 700 beds and was trying to care for 1,100 patients, prac- 
 tically without medicine or disinfectants of any kind. There was 
 not even any coal to warm water for bathing the patients, for the 
 Poles were fighting one of the other new nations for possession of 
 the coalfields. 
 
 " While I was in the hospital a Jewish baby was born. The 
 mother of that baby had had no food of any kind for four days. 
 Mothers in this country can perhaps imagine the anguish of the 
 Jewish mother who gave life to the child only to know that it must 
 starve to death. 
 
 " This case was not the exception, but the rule. I travelled 2,000 
 miles in Poland, and in every city, town and village emaciated Jew- 
 ish children piteously cried for bread. Poland is a purgatory, not 
 made by God but by man, and in it human beings are suffering un- 
 tellable tortures." 
 
 We may deduce that the non-Jewish population is in little 
 better case. One may search history in vain for any record of 
 folly equal to the fighting and persecuting policy of re-born 
 Poland. 
 
 And in vain, too, would one search history for a sadder 
 illustration of the demoralising effects of victory. Here is a 
 
 310
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 nation whose tragedy has much in common with that of Israel, 
 a nation which nobly saved its soul from the wreck of its State, 
 which — torn into three fragments, complicated by a dias- 
 pora — held on for a hundred and twenty years, clinging to its 
 language and its hope of resurrection, even sent its sons as 
 knights of freedom to fight at all the barricades of Europe for 
 all other forlorn hopes, all other enslaved peoples. Yet the 
 moment its liberation is achieved, it sets out — a beggar on 
 horseback — to trample on other peoples both within and with- 
 out its legitimate ambit, and regards any remonstrance — 
 even from the Powers that have re-created it — as a violation 
 of its '* sovereign rights." 
 
 In 1902 a German teacher flogged little Polish children for 
 refusing to say their prayers in German. To-day, especially 
 in the Ukrainian provinces, Ukrainian children are maltreated 
 for refusing to speak Polish. In 1908, at the invitation of 
 Sienkiewicz, I joined in the general protest of European men 
 of letters against the Prussification of German Poland by the 
 " Hakatist " policy of placing Germans on Polish land. 1 
 To-day, alas ! all Poland is Prussianised and in a worse sense. 
 For what is now in process is the Polonisation of Ukrainian 
 land. No wonder that Brandes, the most fervid appreciator 
 of the Poles in all literature, has now recanted his rhapsodies. 
 Required by the Peace Conference to sign a clause for the pro- 
 tection of its minorities, Poland fretted and fumed and 
 protested it was being treated like a Central African savage 
 tribe. But I know no African tribe that has proposed to 
 destroy three million fellow-citizens of ancient standing. If 
 anywhere there was a case calling for the appointment of a 
 Mandatory Power, and for a period of wardship, it was the 
 country that could thus celebrate its re-birth, and whose un- 
 bridled recklessness not only nearly destroyed itself over again, 
 but threatened to plunge all Europe into a second great war. 
 Never was there a more comical proclamation than that put 
 forward by the Polish Council of National Defence when the 
 capture of Warsaw was imminent. " The nations of the 
 world," said the signatories, " cannot be heedless to the blood- 
 shed which threatens to overrun not only Poland but also 
 threatens the right of men and nations to free and independent 
 existence." And rising to the heights of grandiose eloquence, 
 
 i The British policy of expelling settled German colonists from ex-Ger- 
 man East Africa shows that here, as in other respects, we have copied Prus- 
 sia and can hardly talk morality to Poland. 
 
 311
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 " Wake up, nations of the world," they cried, " humanity, 
 justice and truth call you!" I am reminded of a repartee in 
 one of Sydney Grundy's plays. " I demand justice," cries the 
 lady, and the man replies, " Madam, I will do nothing so cruel." 
 Nobody would wish to execute full justice upon the Poles, 
 especially when one remembers how they have been incited by 
 the Powers that should have restrained them. They needed 
 for their young, amorphous, and heterogeneous State a host of 
 financiers, engineers, railway men, agricultural and other tech- 
 nical experts. The Powers sent them Military Missions. And 
 these Missions were not only provocative to Poland but misin- 
 formative to the Powers, haunting as they did the officers' clubs 
 and catching only military refractions of the situation. 
 
 II 
 
 Peoples, like books, have their fates, and history has so inter- 
 twined the Jews and the Poles that early Polish coinage bears 
 Hebrew inscriptions, and for centuries Poland has been the very 
 centre of gravity for all Jewry. While the probable existence 
 of Jews in pagan Poland rests only on legend, there is historical 
 evidence that from about the year 1000, which may roughly 
 stand for the date of its Christianisation, Jewish communities 
 have flourished there, and their treatment by the Poles com- 
 pares very favourably on the whole with what they had to 
 endure in~ the rest of Christendom. In more than one era 
 Poland was their refuge from persecution ; it was at the invita- 
 tion of its liberal and intelligent kings and under protection of 
 its charters that Jews flowed in to fill many blanks and niches 
 in its economic and industrial life; it was in Poland that for 
 three centuries they enjoyed an autonomy unknown elsewhere; 
 here were the chief centres of Talmudical study and Cabbalistic 
 lore, and here arose the one important heresy of modern 
 Judaism, the joyous mysticism of the followers of " The Master 
 of the Name," the Jewish St. Francis. 
 
 After the fall of Jerusalem, the Jews, amid obscurer or more 
 tragic adventures, had found a tolerable home in Babylonia, 
 and later they had flourished for a halcyon century or two in 
 the lap of Saracenic Spain. But of all their stepmother lands 
 it is Poland which has harboured the largest number of Jew., 
 and in which for the last five centuries they felt most at home. 
 Amid the raging hatred of the rest of Europe, the statesman- 
 
 312
 
 THE VOICE OF JEKUSALEM 
 
 ship of the Polish kings — so much superior to that of the 
 nobles or the populace — and the tolerance due to a dynastic 
 marriage with religiously divergent Lithuania, combined to 
 establish Poland as the magnet of the race. Hither the Jews 
 poured to escape the massacres that shadowed the Crusades, 
 and to fill the economic gap in a country consisting only of 
 nobles and peasants. Hither in the twelfth century they car- 
 ried their Old German language, now known as Yiddish, and 
 here, under the autonomy of the Kahal and the Council of the 
 Four Lands, a Jewish population greater than the population 
 of England in the days of Elizabeth has lived for centuries 
 under its own culture and institutions. Not, indeed, without 
 exactions, frictions and persecutions, for the nobility, high or 
 low, the middle classes, the clergy and the peasantry of this 
 unpractical country were united only by their opposition to 
 the Jew, but still with comparative content. The history of 
 modern Jewry may almost be said to be that of Polish Jewry, 
 for the Pale was only the share of old Poland that fell to Russia 
 at the trisection, and into Russia proper the Jew was never 
 allowed to penetrate, save under rare circumstances. 
 
 " By the beginning of the fourteenth century," writes the 
 historian Dubnow, " Polish Jewry had become a big economic 
 and social factor with which the State was bound to reckon. 
 It was now destined to become also an independent spiritual 
 entity, having stood for 400 years under the tutelage of the 
 Jewish centre in Germany." 
 
 So assimilated biologically did the Jews become to their 
 fellow-citizens in the course of this long symbiosis, that Sir 
 Stuart Samuel found it " impossible to distinguish between the 
 type of Jew prevailing in the Vilna-Pinsk district and that of 
 the ordinary Russian or Tartar inhabitants." And although 
 their life was always shadowed by blood-accusations and mas- 
 sacres, the Polish Jews developed a love of Poland, and a 
 patriotism quite as keen as that of the Poritz, the nobleman 
 who thought Jewish blood too vile to be mixed with his even in 
 battle. At all the great crises of Polish history Jews fought 
 side by side with Poles. When in the seventeenth century the 
 Ukrainians, aided by the Cossacks, overran Poland, with every 
 Polish priest hung up at the high altar were hung a dog and a 
 Jew. " Freedom shrieked when Kosciuszko fell," says Byron. 
 But when Kosciuszko fell, a regiment of Jewish volunteers under 
 the famous Yoselevitch covered with their bodies the road to 
 Warsaw. In the unsuccessful rising against Russia in 1830 
 
 313
 
 THE VOICE OP JERUSALEM 
 
 another Jewish regiment took part; called, from their long 
 beards, the Beardlings. And in the last revolt against Russia 
 in 1863 the Jews of Warsaw on the solemn feast of the New 
 Year prayed in synagogue for the Polish cause and sang the 
 Polish hymn : " It is not yet over with Poland." The Poles 
 at that time issued a proclamation to the Jews, saying: "And 
 it shall come to pass, when, with God's help, we shall free our 
 country from the tyranny of Russia, we shall enjoy in common 
 the fruits of peace. You and your children shall be in unre- 
 stricted possession of all civil rights. For the Government of 
 the People will not inquire into faith and religion, but solely 
 into the place of birth." 
 
 Now, after fifty-seven years, Poland is free from the tyranny 
 of Russia and we see how she keeps her word. It is true that a 
 Polish Professor at Cracow complains that during the recent 
 war the Jews of Germany and Austrian Poland showed " an 
 unhesitating and absolute loyalty to Germany and Austria " 
 while the Poles were in sullen opposition. But in the half- 
 century since the very name of Poland was blotted out, it can- 
 not be expected that the Jews, born under the German and 
 Austrian Governments, many of them of parents to whom 
 Polish government was equally unknown, should have imbibed 
 that Polish patriotism which the Polish children proper sucked 
 in secretly from their elders. With the Jew, as with any other 
 immigrant, patriotism — in the first generation at least — 
 cannot be racial but is the result of an intelligent co-operation 
 with the good of the State which shelters him, and I know not 
 why the herd-instinct of the animal should be preferred to the 
 conscious choice of human will and reason, as for instance in 
 those Germans who emigrated to America to escape the atmos- 
 phere of militarism. 
 
 " Seek the peace of the city where you are carried away 
 captive " has always been the Jewish doctrine, and already at 
 the moment of writing the Polish Jews are at their old business 
 of fasting and prayer on behalf of Polish victory, and are 
 issuing patriotic appeals to stand by Poland in her hour of 
 crisis. 
 
 Another analogous allegation of the Poles in condonation of 
 their outrages is that they got on very will with the old Polish 
 Jews — the Polackvm — but that since the Russian Jews were 
 driven out of many Russian towns in the 'eighties, the westward 
 stream of immigration into Russian Poland has poured in on 
 them a new class of Jews — the Litvakim — who brought with 
 
 314
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 them no feeling for the Polish irredenta. This may be true — 
 indeed the persistent hostility of Polackim and Litvakim in the 
 London Ghetto of to-day argues that the old Polish Jews 
 resented the newcomers as much as the Polish Christians did — 
 but in general the Polish peasantry, when left unpoisoned by 
 propaganda, are on the friendliest terms with the Jews, who, 
 for their part, soon grow to love Poland. And even if the 
 Russian Jews brought with them on arrival a Russian atmos- 
 phere, they also brought with them considerable benefits to 
 Polish trade. Warsaw, which received the richest contingent, 
 began to blossom out with Polish-Russian enterprises. But 
 neither the Polish sentiments of the older Polish Jewry nor the 
 material boons of the new, avail to abate the anti-Jewish boy- 
 cott which is reducing the Jewish masses to despair, or the 
 graver persecutions by which the Poles, with complete ignor- 
 ance of economic law, propose to drive out the three million 
 Jews embedded in their State by the accidents of history. 
 With a reckless levity that is rebuked even by their own sym- 
 pathiser, Captain Wright, of the British Commission to 
 Poland, they suppose that so ancient and all-ramifying a con- 
 nection can be slit asunder as easily as Alexander slit the 
 Gordian knot. 
 
 Despite the Minority Treaty, by their Sunday Closing Law 
 they have reduced the working da}\s of the Jew to one less than 
 their own, and by their Aliens' Law have already disfranchised 
 200,000 Jews who did not register as Poles when Poland was 
 yet a province of Russia ! It throws an interesting light on 
 this latter grievance that when Paris Jews originally hailing 
 from Poland tried to register in Paris as Poles, the Polish 
 bureaus refused to grant them certificates and allowed them to 
 be stigmatised or interned as Germans ! Of course, when, on 
 the other hand, the Poles were taking a census of East Galicia, 
 where the Ukrainians outnumbered them by 350,000, they 
 insisted on counting all the 660,000 Jews as Poles, and 
 interned hundreds who refused the label. These statistical 
 juggleries go far to confirm the claim of Jews to constitute a 
 separate nationality in lands of mixed population where they! 
 are densely represented. But the present boycott of the Jews 
 in Poland is not due to their national claim, but to their refusal 
 at Warsaw in 1912 to elect an anti-Semitic member to the 
 Duma. They held the voting power and could have returned a 
 Jew, yet they were menaced with massacre unless they returned 
 the notorious Dmowski. I remember being consulted on this 
 
 315
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 point and advising, subject to my ignorance of local conditions, 
 that it was humiliating enough not to be represented by a 
 Jewish member, but that to vote for an anti-Semite would be 
 fatal to their self-respect and that the risks must be taken. 
 The Jews of Warsaw accordingly returned the only candidate 
 who would pledge himself not to support an anti-Semitic policy, 
 but although this was a Pole and a Roman Catholic, the 
 defeated Dmowski devoted himself henceforward to a campaign 
 of persecution. And as if his hapless country had not enough 
 enemies on her borders and enough internal problems to con- 
 front, she has saddled herself with this one-sided civil war, for 
 the boycott is a form of quarrel which it takes only one to make. 
 
 The war gave the Poles the opportunity of more drastic 
 revenge. When the Russians invaded Galicia the Poles 
 denounced the Jews as pro-Germans, hostile to the conquerors. 
 When the Austrians recaptured a town, the Poles denounced 
 the Jews as pro-Russians. What wonder if 215 pogroms were 
 reported from Poland ! 
 
 These, of course, were denied. Sazonoff denied them for 
 Russia, which was still responsible for Poland. And they were 
 denied by England, which considered herself responsible for 
 Russia. All who tried to prove them were accused of inventing 
 slanders against Russia to weaken the Allies. 
 
 Well do I remember the difficulty of telling the truth about 
 Russia in those days. Russia was then a saintly Steam Roller. 
 
 And now when we are told that the later pogroms have also 
 had no existence, one cannot help suspecting so strange a 
 coincidence. Unfortunately even Captain Wright's report 
 leaves the new Poland stained with streams of innocent Jewish 
 blood. 
 
 At the Peace Conference in 1815 Alexander of Russia pro- 
 posed the restoration and reunion of Poland, and he had almost 
 persuaded Prussia to agree to it. But France and England 
 smashed up his plan. In 1916 these same two Powers were 
 secretly leagued with Russia to hand over to her even German 
 and Austrian Poland. To-day these friends of nationality — 
 more especially France, which, crazed by its war-losses and its 
 financial instability, has egged on Poland to new disaster — 
 desire a Poland as large as possible as a buffer to keep Ger- 
 many and Russia apart. It has been awkward for them that 
 the most important creation of the Paris Conference — that 
 Conference which was to make the world safe for democracy 
 and to protect righteousness and small peoples — should have 
 
 316
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 shown itself more barbarous than the countries out of which 
 it has been pieced together again. 
 
 " Jews must get away from Poland," reports a recent Ameri- 
 can visitor. And as a matter of fact they are leaving to the 
 tune of two thousand a week, and the Polish authorities tell us 
 a quarter of a million have applied for passports. But three 
 millions are a tough number to emigrate, and even if it is true 
 that the Poles are now developing commercial habits, and that 
 the Jews are replaceable, this critical moment of economic 
 re-birth is hardly the moment to replace them. Not in emi- 
 gration but in co-operation lies the solution of the Polish- 
 Jewish problem. The New Poland cannot do without her Jews, 
 whose international network of business relationships is 
 Poland's only hope. It is a question if even with the Jews she 
 can keep her head above water. In 1914-15, when the Russians 
 invaded Galicia and prohibited Jewish commerce there, the 
 population nearly died of starvation. It is strange that 
 Poland should fail to understand that an industrious popula- 
 tion is a greater treasure than gold mines. A shrewd Polish 
 Jew reassured me as to the danger of gigantic pogroms, on 
 the ground that however the Poles might bluster they were too 
 inefficient to do anything thoroughly or on a grand scale. It 
 would seem that even for pogroms they would need Jewish 
 assistance. On this point the warning of the Christian member 
 of the Polish Commission is still graver than Sir Stuart 
 Samuel's ! " A race planted in Poland a thousand years, how- 
 ever inconvenient, cannot be eradicated without a convulsion 
 that would be almost fatal." 
 
 Ill 
 
 Sensible as is this admonition of Captain Peter Wright's, and 
 laudable as is the study he has with abnormal conscientiousness 
 given to the Polish-Jewish problem — he has even shamefacedly 
 read German books — his report throws more light upon his 
 own psychology than on that of the Polish Jews, and indirectly 
 illumines the whole Jewish problem. For it reveals that at 
 bottom Christendom feels that the Jew has no right to exist! 
 And the Jew, with his usual assimilativeness feels this too, and 
 apologises for being on the planet, much as Captain Peter 
 Wright apologises for reading German books. 
 
 In 1851, Mr. Punch was righteously indignant with the 
 Austrian Jews because, according to a Viennese correspondent 
 
 317
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 of the Jcrcish Chronicle, they would have nothing to do with the 
 Austrian Loan until they had received the Government's assur- 
 ance that they would be left in possession of their liberties. 
 That they should thus provide " halters for the patriots of 
 Hungary," on condition of being left free themselves, seemed 
 monstrous to Mr. Punch, who, in fact, proposed the very next 
 week that in recognition of the Sultan's services in saving 
 Kossuth from Francis Joseph, a British three-decker should be 
 presented by national subscription to the gallant Abdul-Medjid, 
 and should sail up the Bosphorus, manned for the nonce by 
 British tars. 
 
 It never occurred to Mr. Punch that the liberties of the Jews 
 were as sacred as those of the Hungarians, and that they had a 
 right to defend them by any legitimate means. We have seen 
 from the Debates in the House of Lords and the asperous com- 
 ments in sundry journals, that the acquisition of Palestine by 
 the Jews seems almost as monstrous to Christendom as their 
 continuing to live in countries not their own: In the same 
 spirit Captain Wright is far more concerned for the persecut- 
 ing Poles than for the Jews, whose grievances he was sent out 
 to investigate. Indeed it would seem that it is the Poles who 
 have the grievance in the fact that Jews dare to breathe the 
 same air. Captain Wright resembles the legendary little girl 
 who, when it was sought to move her religious emotions by a 
 picture of Christian martyrdom, commiserated with the one 
 poor lion who was without a Christian. To illustrate how the 
 poor Poles are put upon. Captain Wright insinuates that 
 Englishmen should try to imagine how they would feel if, in 
 London as in Warsaw, every third person was a Jew ; if, more- 
 over, the bulk of these Jews wore a costume, adopted a style of 
 hairdressing, and spoke a dialect that were not English, added 
 to their eccentricity by belonging to that queer sect of Judaism, 
 the Chass'uTim, and refused to declare themselves of British 
 nationality even to become field-officers. In short, the situation 
 of a peculiar race slowly aggregated and niched for a thousand 
 years amid another people, and blent inextricably with its life 
 for mutual advantage, is compared to the situation that would 
 arise were a crude alien mass to pour suddenly into England. 
 The Jews have proved their utility to Poland or they would not 
 be there, and the sudden demand for their expulsion is of a 
 mediaeval barbarity that no comparisons can make less mal- 
 odorous. 
 
 Captain Wright labours to prove the Jews of Poland neither 
 
 318
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 " European " nor " modern," as if that had anything to do 
 with the question, or as if the Polish peasantry among whom 
 they live and by whom their beards are plucked off, offered any 
 more congenial society for a British officer and gentleman. 
 Captain Wright must have a very imperfect knowledge of the 
 races " modern Europe " harbours in its bosom, if he is so over- 
 whelmed by the primitiveness of the Polish Jewry. The very 
 sect of Chassidim before which he recoils as before some fan- 
 tastic creation of Lewis Carroll, has just produced the boy 
 chess-prodigy, Samuel Rzeschewski. It was from the Polish 
 Jewry that have come Rubinstein and half-a-dozen musicians 
 hardly less world-famous than Paderewski himself, and Heaven 
 knows how many of such geniuses have been massacred off. 
 The fact is, that just as anxious as the Poles now are to go 
 into business, are the Jews to get out of it, to go into art, the 
 professions, and agriculture. Their very demand for schools 
 of their own is merely an expression of their desire to transform 
 and raise themselves to a higher moral level, to uplift them- 
 selves and their common country. The notion that they shirk 
 physical work is calumnious. Eastern Europe is a-swarm with 
 a despairing young Jewry longing to turn its hand to any- 
 thing. Witness the Lithuanian Jews, who, driven out of the 
 towns by the German invaders, found themselves in the deserted 
 villages, and set to work upon the fields, even old Rabbis taking 
 part in the novel labour. 
 
 Captain Wright tells us that the Jewish masses of Poland 
 are " unfit for the modern economic world." The statement 
 may be commended to the fomenters of " the legend of the Con- 
 quering Jew." But if it is correct, then why do the Polish 
 rage? The processes of economics will soon eliminate these 
 undesirables. Is it necessary to precipitate their death or 
 departure? 
 
 IV 
 
 Assuming that the Jews of Poland will neither be destroyed 
 nor emigrated to any considerable extent, we may expect them 
 to continue their demand for recognition as a national minority, 
 no less than the Lithuanians and Ukrainians who are equally 
 condemned to live under the new Polish Republic. (One won- 
 ders, by the way, whether Captain Wright recognises the mur- 
 derous breed of the Ukraine as " European " or " modern." ) 
 The case of the Jews of Poland is not therefore exceptional, 
 
 319
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 nor is there anything in this demand of theirs to make either the 
 Polish Christians or the British and American Hebrews fulmi- 
 nate. In Czecho-Slovakia, Lithuania, and elsewhere, the prin- 
 ciple of a national minority has already been conceded. 
 
 I have in a previous article dealt briefly with the pros and 
 cons of this principle, and need only add here that nations have 
 not always been so homogeneous and uni-racial as the modern 
 European ideal seems to demand. Austria did not do so badly 
 by its motley ingredients; in the "reactionary" Ottoman 
 Empire other creeds are still allowed to live under the system 
 of Millets, and in the darkest ages of Christendom the right of 
 the Jew to live his own life, though he was implanted in an 
 alien State, was never disputed, for the Christian Emperors 
 followed the old Roman law by which Judaism was a " rcllgio 
 licita," carrying with it a certain measure of internal auton- 
 umv. But to-day patriotism seems inconceivable apart from 
 racial and national uniformity. Switzerland proves the 
 assumption nonsensical. Union, not uniformity, is strength. 
 There is no reason why several peoples should not combine on 
 economic grounds to run a territory, each submitting to gen- 
 eral laws for common State purposes, while at the same time 
 pursuing a cultural autonomy of its own. Such a union of 
 hearts in fact exists in Great Britain and Wales, and the fact 
 that in many European countries the constituents are inter- 
 fused, instead of being more or less isolated geographically, 
 makes still more for a common patriotism. As the wise declar- 
 ation of the Lithuanian Diet of July 23rd, 1920, runs: " One 
 of the most important political questions of Lithuania is that 
 of the creation of conditions which will allow the national min- 
 orities, while taking their full share in the building up of the 
 State and displaying full civic loyalty, to create their own 
 national culture. This principle was proclaimed at the time 
 of the foundation of the State, and is incorporated in various 
 laws and declarations." 
 
 Such a group-system is practically a league of nations in 
 microcosm. This method is, moreover, as already shown, the 
 best way of protecting minorities, particularly while the real 
 League of Nations remains so shadowy. Even were the League 
 functioning solidly, its absurd rule that decisions must be unan- 
 imous, protects — so far as I can see — a mixed State from 
 interference, not its minorities from persecution. For Poland, 
 being a member of the League of Nations, could always nega- 
 tive any measure against itself. As worked out in the Springer 
 
 320
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 system, the recognition of a national minority merely means its 
 right to run its own schools, charities and places of worship 
 by a proportionate grant from the common taxes, a liaison 
 Minister between the State and the nationality, and a pro- 
 portional number of representatives in a parliament elected not 
 by districts but by races. 
 
 Because the Jews are so dense in Poland, the Poles draw the 
 deduction that they should be expelled. What vicious logic ! 
 The true deduction is, that they have a millennial right to a 
 share in the soil and to their own peculiar existence. Indeed, 
 but for the preoccupation of the Jews with Palestine and of 
 the Gentiles with Poland, a definite territorial claim might have 
 been made for an " ethnographic Judaea." Anyhow, under a 
 proportional representative system they would, if they consti- 
 tute as is claimed, 14 per cent, of the population, have a right 
 to fifty or sixty of the 400 or so seats in the Diet. Actually 
 they began with only nine, which have now increased to eleven. 
 And, as I have already pointed out, by gerrymandering the 
 constituencies and throwing in the big Jewish towns with rural 
 parishes, the Poles have almost neutralised Jewish political 
 power. These eleven deputies have not even been able to bring 
 forward a resolution against the pogroms because that requires 
 fifteen signatures, and even half-a-dozen Socialists cannot be 
 found to help them. Indeed, the Polish Socialists and the 
 whole Polish intelligentsia — in such sad contrast with the 
 Russian intellectuals and rebels under Czarims — are the most 
 virulent anti-Semites ; a fact which serves to explain the para- 
 dox that they were also the most fiery advocates of the advance 
 on Russia, for anti-Semitism is always the obverse of Jingoism. 
 We thus see the comparative worthlessness of political equality 
 as an instrument of self-defence without special nationality 
 rights. With absolute equality on paper, there are still parts 
 of Poland where no Jew may live. 
 
 But the main reason why modern self-respecting Jews — and 
 the Polish Jews we suddenly perceive to be modern after all — 
 will not masquerade under other national colours, is that the 
 kaleidoscopic changes of the war have reduced the practice to 
 absurdity. It was already ridiculous enough that in the Aus- 
 trian census the Jew was compelled to declare himself Pole, Ger- 
 man, Magyar, Ruthenian or Czech. Now that Austria is 
 broken up, he is expected to share the nationality of the domi- 
 nant race in his particular fragment, irrespective of his former 
 registration. " La France, c'est ma troisieme patrie," cries a 
 
 321
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 Jew in a French play. A Jew of Kieff, which has been taken 
 and retaken seventeen times, would have had to be ringing the 
 changes on Russian, Ukrainian, Pole, (not to mention Bolshe- 
 vist and anti-Bolshevist) about once a month. Only a quick- 
 change patriot could have kept pace with the permutations. 
 The Jew in any city wrangled over by rival elements was thus 
 justified by prudence as well as by humour in remaining neutral 
 and just a Jew. When, for example, the fight for Lemberg 
 was raging for days between the Poles and the Ukrainians, with 
 part of the city in the hands of one combatant and part in the 
 hands of another, the Jews of some streets would on the rival 
 theory be Poles and of other streets Ukrainians, and if you 
 crossed the road or called on your cousin in another quarter, 
 you would change your nationality. Had Germany won the 
 war, the Lembergers would all have been Austrians again. I 
 have heard of a case in the war where the Jews would have thus 
 changed their nationality four or five times. 
 
 No, the Jews of Poland must for the present remain what 
 they always were in Poland — a peculiar nationality. The 
 situation of a small and recently immigrated minority of a 
 few hundred thousands like the Jews of England offers no 
 analogy to that of a long-settled group counted by millions, nor 
 is the policy suitable for the one situation suitable for the other. 
 And the Poles must abandon their fanatical conception of the 
 uni-racial State. The crude homogeneous form of nationality, 
 denounced by that great Roman Catholic, Lord Acton, is indeed 
 hardly compatible with the religion Poland holds in common 
 with other European countries ; it is entirely inconsistent with 
 a world bent on a League of Peoples. I can well understand 
 the patriotic passion, which, embittered by the long pressure of 
 alien elements from above, chafes to find, on its release, alien 
 elements embedded in its very structure. But these do not 
 press, they support, and to deny to others the liberty and na- 
 tional rights one claims for oneself is to make no tactful ap- 
 pearance at the bar of history. Nor is a homogeneous nation- 
 ality essential to freedom or self-expression. All that is neces- 
 sary is that the subsidiary nationalities shall be minorities. 
 This condition is not fulfilled in Palestine where every Jew is 
 swamped by seven or eight non-Jews, but it is fulfilled in Po- 
 land where the Poles outnumber all other peoples. If the units 
 of its minorities are treated on precisely the same political 
 basis as the units of the majority, as in England, then their 
 fusion with it — to the enrichment of the common nationality 
 
 322
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 — is only a matter of time. And even if they are given group- 
 representation and their cultural life is lived apart, this adul- 
 terates the majority no more than the many other exotic influ- 
 ences which are constantly infiltrating into all modern civilisa- 
 tions, to their mutual benefit. 
 
 Polish culture will therefore either absorb Jewish, as English 
 has done in England (where the contributions of a Beacons- 
 field to politics and literature, a Jessel to law, or a Meldola to 
 science have been incorporated with the general stock of val- 
 ues), or will at least go unendangered by it: the national life 
 becoming in any case the fuller for the diversity. And if the 
 Poles at their proudest epoch found it both easy and profitable 
 to live with the Jews at a time when these latter were a de- 
 spised sociological element, how much much readily should they 
 adapt themselves to symbiosis with a race now universally rec- 
 ognised as an invaluable asset to any nation. There is not a 
 Jew among all the Allied peoples who did not begin by wishing 
 the new Poland the maximum possible of autonomy, territory 
 and prosperity. And I refuse to believe that the Poles, once 
 they have sown their neo-national wild oats, will have so little 
 fellow-feeling for the most tragic and the longest-suffering na- 
 tionality in history that they will try to stamp it out as the 
 Prussians tried to stamp out Prussian Poland. That would 
 be an irony too sad for laughter, too deep for tears. No, the 
 near future must and will see Pole and Jew working hand in 
 hand to build up the great new Poland, which, despite its initial 
 imbecilities, holds not only the sympathies of humanity, but 
 its dreams and hopes. 
 
 323
 
 THE GOYIM 
 
 {The Venturer, October, 1920) 
 
 Beware of the Goyim, his elders told Jacob, 
 
 In the holy peace of the Sabbath candles, 
 
 They drink Jewish blood : 
 
 They are fiercer than flame, 
 
 Or than cobras acoil for the spring. 
 
 They make mock of our God and our Torah, 
 
 They rob us and spit on us, 
 
 They slaughter us more cruelly than the Shochet our cattle. 
 
 Go not outside the Ghetto. 
 
 Should your footsteps be forced to their haunts, 
 
 Walk warily, never forgetting 
 
 They are Goyim, 
 
 Foes of the faith, 
 
 Beings of darkness, 
 
 Drunkards and bullies, 
 
 Swift with the fist or the bludgeon, 
 
 Many in species, but all 
 
 Engendered of God for our sins, 
 
 And many and strange their idolatries, 
 
 But the worst of the Goyim are the creatures called Christians. 
 
 In the comforting gleam 
 Of the two Sabbath candles 
 
 The little boy thrilled with an exquisite shudder 
 At the words of his elders. 
 
 For the slums that enswathed with their vileness his nest, 
 Pullulated with Christians ; 
 Easy to recognise 
 
 By the stones and the scoffs of their young at his passing, 
 And the oaths of their reeling adults, 
 And the black eyes they gave to their females 
 On Saturday nights. 
 Preparing for Sunday. 
 
 Foul-tongued and ferocious these creatures, the worst of the 
 Goyim. 
 
 324
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 But Jacob grew bigger, 
 
 Outgrowing the Ghetto. 
 
 He laughed at his elders 
 
 With their cowering fears and exclusive old customs 
 
 And mechanical rites. 
 
 He worshipped the Gentiles, 
 
 No savage inferiors to Israel, 
 
 But Plato and Virgil, but Shakespeare and Shelley, 
 
 But Bach and Beethoven, 
 
 But Michael Angelo, 
 
 Dreamers and seers and diviners, 
 
 Shapers of Man, not a tribe ; 
 
 Builders of beauty. 
 
 O the soul-shaking roll of the organ 
 In their dim cathedrals 
 And the sacred trance of the spirit 
 In their grass-grown colleges ! 
 
 Poor Ghetto's fusty lore 
 And the drone it imagined music 
 And the blind-alley it called the cosmos. 
 
 Hats off to the Goyim, he cried, hats off e'en in Synagogue. 
 Great are our brethren the Goyim and the greatest of all are 
 the Christians. 
 
 But behold him to-day, 
 
 Little Jacob once more, 
 
 Bowed small by the years and calamities, 
 
 With his tragical eyes, 
 
 The Jew's haunted eyes, 
 
 That have seen for themselves, 
 
 Seen history made 
 
 On the old Gentile formula, 
 
 Seen the slums written large 
 
 In the red fields of Europe, 
 
 And the Goyim blood-drunken, 
 
 Reeling and cursing 
 
 As on Saturday night. 
 
 Back, back, he cries, brethren. 
 
 Back to the Ghetto, 
 
 To our God of Compassion, 
 
 325
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 To our dream of Messiah, 
 And our old Sabbath candles ! 
 
 For the others are Goyim, 
 Who despite all their Platos, 
 Their Shakespeares and Shelleys, 
 
 Their Bachs and I3eethovens, 
 
 Drink human blood. 
 
 Not only ours but their kinsmen's. 
 
 Pitiless fratricides, 
 
 Beings of darkness, 
 
 Foes of the faith, 
 
 Fiercer than cobras acoil for the spring: 
 
 Many in species, but all 
 
 Engendered of God for our sins, 
 
 And many and strange their idolatries, 
 
 But the worst of the Goyim arc the creatures called Christians. 
 
 326
 
 THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS 
 
 {The Menorah Journal, New York, June, 1920) 
 
 One should not look a gift-horse in the mouth, and Jakob 
 Fingermann's new novel, " Menschen im Abgrund " (R. Lowit 
 Verlag, Vienna and Berlin), being dedicated to the writer, might 
 be considered immune from his criticism. Yet since the young 
 author is anxious for my public opinion, I cannot well deprive 
 him of it. And, indeed, his revelations are of the gravest and 
 demand the light of day. 
 
 When Herr Fingermann first informed me of the kind of 
 book he was writing — the tragedy of Polish Jewry during the 
 war — I naturally prepared myself for expulsions en masse, 
 anti-Semitic persecutions, whether pogroms or pin-pricks, eco- 
 nomic boycotting, accusations of profiteering, charges of 
 treachery from each and all of the invading armies in turn, in 
 short, something like that imagined report of Sir Stuart Sam- 
 uel, which the British Government was so suspiciously keeping 
 back. There would at least be starvation under our blockade. 
 But on the contrary, although of course the poor are poorer 
 than ever, from beginning to end one's nostrils sniff with de- 
 lectation the odours of roasted geese, delicious white rolls come 
 hot from the oven, the samovar steams, champagne fizzes, and 
 dance-music trips and swings. The old Chassidim go with 
 beards unplucked and unimperilled, and in their greasy ragged 
 caftans pore peacefully the long night through over their mys- 
 tic folios, on which the guttering candles drop tallow, while at 
 the expense of an opulent member of the brotherhood they 
 feast royally on Wurst, eggs, and a bottle of Schnapps. In 
 the wedding festivities the bride and bridesmaids (the bride- 
 groom is, by Polish custom, conspicuous by his concealment) 
 sit in white array, the musicians play roisterously, the Mar- 
 schalik turns his merry and mercenary rhymes. Prosperous 
 husbands or fathers buy sparkling jewellery for their women- 
 kind. On the Bourse or in the coffee-houses there is brisk 
 speculation ; in the theatres beautiful ladies in airy toilettes 
 adorn the stage or the stage-boxes ; at the card-tables the play 
 is high and rolls of the falling rouble pass from hand to hand. 
 
 327
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 The only physical persecution of the Jews in the whole book is 
 a raid upon their quarter — to bathe them for fear of spotted 
 typhus! It causes one of the few plaints we hear from them 
 of the hard Jewish lot — how cheap Jewish blood is held, or 
 Jewish dignity. Nor, although it is a war-book, is there a word 
 directly about the fighting. And yet the whole story is one 
 of almost unendurable tragedy, of spiritual degradation. It is 
 the story of the people of the abyss. 
 
 It will be seen that the author has devised a ground-scheme 
 of no ordinary subtlety. He has taken Lublin, a Polish town 
 through which, except for the unresisted Austrian occupa- 
 tion, the war never actually passed, though regiments were drill- 
 ing in it for the front. And though Lublin thus remains un- 
 touched and tranquil, a little dead-alive provincial town to 
 which only its Jews give animation, yet the distant war reaches 
 out a thousand arms to strangle all that is decent in it. Of 
 the purpose of the war we hear no word ; there is nothing of 
 the glamorous rhetoric with which the British soul enswathed 
 it. There could not in fact be a more terrific indictment of 
 war than emanates as if unconsciously from this bland and 
 brutal book. For although not even an enemy aeroplane hov- 
 ers over Lublin, the nervous apprehension that its abnormal se- 
 curity will soon be at an end drives it into the sensuous satis- 
 faction of the moment. All is guzzling and swilling, fraudu- 
 lence and fornication. We have the sordid effects of war with- 
 out even its redeeming heroism. 
 
 With some of these by-products of war we have become fa- 
 miliar even in England — the promiscuity resulting from the 
 absence of husbands, the lessened regard for human life. But 
 we have not reached the shamelessness of these almost public 
 orgies in theatre-boxes or restaurants, though we may have 
 come near them. And though doubtless there have been pecula- 
 tion, food-smuggling, and falsification of passports, we have 
 known nothing on such an organised basis as in Poland, where, 
 according to our author, the Austrian officials, dressed in their 
 little brief authority, have the time of their lives in profiting 
 by their opportunities, and, originally men of honour, go 
 headlong over the abyss of demoralisation. 
 
 And although the moral pestilence germinating in the distant 
 battlefields rages most violently in the Christian quarters, yet 
 the Jews of Lublin do not escape it, partly from their habitual 
 assimilativeness, but mainly from the peculiar treatment dealt 
 out to them. For here comes in the real persecution of Polish 
 
 328
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 Jewry — a negative rather than a positive persecution — a 
 refusal to grant to them any of the concessions or licences nec- 
 essary to their livelihood. And if Shylock was right when he 
 urged : 
 
 " You do take my life 
 When you do take the means whereby I live/' 
 
 it was practically a massacre of Polish Jewry. And though the 
 victims could escape at a price, that did but constitute a moral 
 massacre. Sometimes indeed, in their wretched greed and 
 baseness, the wealthy send their own wives and daughters on 
 the criminal quest of business concessions ; but more often it is 
 a case of sheer necessity, as Folberg, the dandified Jew, ex- 
 presses it in a burst of sympathy. " The Austrians allow no 
 glass of beer to be sold, no bit of bread to be baked, unless 
 some one pays for the concession. And how does one get this? 
 The ways are bitter. In these little towns sit military men and 
 officials. The war is far away, they live like in Paradise, and 
 are sated with gold and grub. They are bored and their belly 
 is full. The Jew comes : ' Give me, gracious Herr, the scrap 
 of official paper so that I may carry on my business.' He finds 
 deaf ears. He comes a second, a third, a fourth time. The 
 surfeited officer laughs him to the door and waits for his des- 
 tined victim. The Jew is in despair. His money is at the last 
 rouble, and famine peers from every corner. He resists, re- 
 flects, seeks some outlet — all in vain. See how the Christian 
 business man, without any trouble, obtains concessions and 
 contracts. The bread in the house is dwindling to the last 
 crumb. He goes yet again to the official : ' Have pity, gra- 
 cious Herr.' ' Get out! You Jews want to eat up the whole 
 trade. I can do nothing . . . Oh, by the way, send your 
 daughter here to-morrow. Perhaps in the meantime I shall 
 think of something for you.' The Jew collapses as under the 
 blow of a headsman. He knows now the frightful price. He 
 suffers, sells his last rag, consumes his last crust, and neverthe- 
 less, one night a Jewish maiden finds herself in the officer's arms. 
 Then full soon the concession is granted. Bread and money 
 stream into the dishonoured Jewish home." 
 
 No wonder another Jew in the book complains that the imme- 
 morial foundations of Jewish life are being undermined. In- 
 deed, without its domestic virtues how should Jewry stand? 
 To quote Shylock again: 
 
 329
 
 THE VOICE OP JERUSALEM 
 
 " You take my house when you do take the prop 
 That doth sustain my house." 
 
 One after another the personages of the story fall over the 
 abyss on whose brink they have been hovering. And all this 
 diseased and distorted life finds its inevitable nemesis — the 
 lights go out, the music dies, and the dancing; perfumed minxes 
 perish in hospital, young soldiers take poison, beautiful women 
 moan insanely for their slain lovers, conspirators murder of- 
 ficials and blow out their own brains — Lublin, though it has es- 
 caped being a battlefield, is left strewn with corpses and sui- 
 cides. 
 
 Obviously not a cheerful book, nor one to encourage man- 
 kind to turn away from the League of Nations. Even a Zion- 
 ist gathering in the Herzl Club brings no balm to the wounded 
 spirit of the critical observer, though a thousand Jews jostle to 
 find standing room when the great Hebrew writer and orator, 
 Brandes — a touch of historic realism this — comes to offer 
 the conventional rhetoric. As the editor of the Morgenhlatt 
 explains cynically to an impressed spectator, they cannot be 
 really awakened from their apathy, or their lust of gold and 
 gormandising; they come as to a dramatic spectacle, to get a 
 cheap sensation. I am bound to say my own observation of 
 many popular meetings — whether Jewish or Christian — ad- 
 dressed by myself does not differ from that editor's. One 
 touch of verisimilitude is, however, absent from this account 
 of a Zionist meeting, for it appears to begin punctually. 
 
 There are characters in this grim book that are new to the lit- 
 erature of the Ghetto. Its leading figure, Lazarewitsch, for 
 example, a Chassid, who prays in phylacteries, and is engaged 
 in great speculations with the rouble and undertakes grandiose 
 illegalities to help the Polish revolutionaries, has yet a ro- 
 mantic passion for his pretty, faithless wife, despite her modern 
 fashionable culture, and for all his narrow pietism is built on 
 big lines, which compel even this giddypate's reluctant admira- 
 tion. It is not a character that I have myself encountered, nor 
 has the author succeeded in making it comprehensible, any more 
 than lie has succeeded in making it clear whether the wife is 
 simply a minor Messalina or is really actuated by the desire 
 to have a child. Possibly we are to understand a subtle self- 
 deception in accordance with the doctrines of the author's fel- 
 low-townsman, Freud. Or perhaps writing in Vienna in days 
 of cold and hunger, Mr. Fingermann has not quite succeeded 
 
 330
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 in his artistic task. His forte, indeed, seems to be less in char- 
 acter-drawing or in construction — the structure of the book 
 is desultory and the atmosphere to some extent broken by the 
 intrusion of a Polish revolutionary episode — than in descrip- 
 tion. The vividness and brevity of his scenes are extraordi- 
 nary, and if he cannot always get inside his personages, his 
 painting of outsides is not easily matched. Whether he is 
 showing us a bearded Jew with thumping heart and false pass- 
 port slipping a thousand-rouble note into the gendarme's hand, 
 at the exit from the railway station ; whether we are sleighing 
 through the snowy streets, past the grey houses, and over 
 rough, dangerously-rutted roads ; whether he hales us into the 
 smoky din of chaffering cafes or into the slangy society of gam- 
 bling and womanising officers ; whether he is giving us welcome 
 glimpses of the humours of Yiddish players or showing us angry 
 speculators quarrelling over their joint losses; whether he is 
 sketching the conscribed shopkeeper who will move heaven and 
 earth to prove he is too sickly for the front, or the shrewd busi- 
 ness man who refuses a loan to an apparently rich colleague be- 
 cause in a cold room he sees a bead of perspiration on the 
 would-be borrower's brow, Herr Fingermann draws in a few 
 strokes a series of unforgettable pictures. 
 
 Even the revolutionary episode, disruptive as it is to the com- 
 position, is wonderfully dramatic. And, like a true artist, 
 Herr Fingermann never underlines. You have to perceive for 
 yourself the irony of the universal longing of the Austrian of- 
 ficers and functionaries for the glories and gaieties of Vienna — 
 where life is one long round of concerts and cabarets, and mil- 
 lions are made over-night. And the artist similarly desists 
 from rubbing in the pathos or the humour of the Jewish sol- 
 diers' jubilation when their eye catches the headline in some 
 trumpery little journal, "Peace negotiations with Russia." 
 They even dash off to fete the Peace ! A true touch of Jewish 
 psychology, that ! 
 
 How far the picture, as a whole, stands in true proportion or 
 correspondence with the realities of Polish-Jewish life during 
 the war, or how far the young novelist has been carried away 
 by righteous indignation — and the book's motto from Jere- 
 miah provides the clue to his mood — I am unable to say ; " the 
 fog of war " having reduced the mutual knowledge of Europe 
 to that of the Dark Ages. But even in our Austrian Jere- 
 miah's picture the gloom is not utterly unrelieved. Stealing 
 through all this horror and ugliness, like a delicate and exquisite 
 
 331
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 music heard in the pauses of a Witches' Sabbath, comes the in- 
 terlude of Brane, the poor maiden who works her hands to the 
 bone at the factor}' and in the poverty-stricken home rather 
 than go over the abyss with her girl-companions, and literature 
 has few scenes more touching than her emotion when she is 
 wooed by an honest breadwinner. That is an episode far more 
 moving than the death through hunger and exhaustion of her 
 little brother — a death that comes much too suddenly and un- 
 prepared to be convincing. Rarely touching, too, is the pic- 
 ture of the happiness of her humble, one-roomed menage, with 
 its dripping walls, its bed and its sewing-machine ; such a bar- 
 gain at three roubles a month ! " Life is beautiful," says the 
 little journeyman tailor. " Never have Brane and I been so 
 well off!" 
 
 And here we see at last what the author is trying by contrast 
 to teach us. For this is the only happiness achieved amid all 
 that egotistic and esurient crew, unless we count the moment 
 when the old innkeeper sings the Sabbath Zemiroth and the 
 young Jewish officer-guest feels that the simple immemorial rit- 
 ual makes a core of peace amid the madness of the Gentiles and 
 their war. And the same lesson wafts from that more ironic 
 episode upon which the story closes. The poor old Chassidim 
 sit at night at their Seder-table ; and while their wealthy, 
 broken-hearted brother, whose adored wife has gone over the 
 abyss, peers in like a lost spirit at the festal lights and the 
 quaint Passover dishes and wine-cups, these penniless white- 
 bearded ancients intone with a yearning rapture : " Next year 
 in Jerusalem! " 
 
 332
 
 CONVERTED MISSIONARIES 
 
 Mr. Leonard Woolf, the presiding genius of the Fabian 
 Society's scheme for a League of Nations, having started a 
 much-needed International Review to keep us informed — de- 
 spite the newspapers — of what was going on abroad, I duly 
 ordered the first number from my bookseller. When a small 
 boy solemnly delivered at my rural retreat an International Re- 
 view of Missions, I was divided between annoyance and amuse- 
 ment. To send me this — me of all persons in the world — to 
 whom missionaries had been anathema since childhood ; con- 
 ceived as a sort of spiritual spider in wait for the Jewish soul 
 and spinning a wicked web of textual sophistry to entangle it! 
 Indeed maturer acquaintance with missionary methods, in which 
 the mistranslation of Isaiah was supplemented by material lures, 
 had not enhanced my respect. These Mrs. Jellybys — it ap- 
 peared moreover — did not limit their attentions to the race 
 which, having produced Jesus, might be presumed best fitted to 
 interpret him. There was no people, however limited its brain- 
 power, or however great and ancient its civilisation, but was 
 equally the target of their theological assaults. 
 
 But still the conversion of a Jew was the blue ribbon of the 
 profession. No wonder that Hebrew converts cost an average 
 of a thousand pounds apiece, and that an effluvium of profiteer- 
 ing hangs over both converter and convert. 
 
 II 
 
 Then there was the missionary who came to our village dur- 
 ing the early days of the war and held forth in the Squire's 
 garden against the grabbing ambitions of the Germans, with 
 their desperate " Drang nach Osten " and their immoral designs 
 against the British Empire. They actually aimed at the oil 
 wells of Mesopotamia, and the monopoly of trade with Bagh- 
 dad. They had a gun-boat plying around Aden and a camou- 
 flaged fort in Palestine. This man hailed from Jerusalem, and 
 was presumably saturated with the aroma of the sacred soil. 
 
 333
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 Lord Salisbury's famous dictum ran : " First the missionary, 
 then the trader, then the gun-boat," but our orator seemed an 
 epitome of them all. 
 
 Being unexpectedly called upon to move a vote of thanks to 
 the lecturer, I blandly advised him to change the order of his 
 remarks in future, and instead of winding up with a eulogy of 
 the British Empire, to begin by pointing out how much more 
 advantageous it was to mankind at large to be governed by the 
 humanitarian Briton than by the barbarous Teuton; otherwise 
 his address sounded as if Britain was in mere crude competi- 
 tion with Germany for the very mountain-top from which the 
 devil showed Jesus all the kingdoms of the world. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Pondering which things, I opened the Jievicxc of Missions, and 
 turned over its pages in ironic expectation of a record of ubi- 
 quitous futility. What was my pleasant disappointment to 
 find that it was as much concerned with the League of Nations 
 as the magazine which it mistakenly replaced, and to come upon 
 passage after passage instinct with the question, admirably 
 summed up by the editor, Mr. J. H. Oldham, " whether the mis- 
 sionary movement if it is to live in the new world must not take 
 a great leap forward and press into the throbbing heart and 
 centre of the nation's life!" Mr. J. S. B. Brough, in a paper 
 on "The Eternal Source of Missions," so eloquent and candid 
 that it is a grief to learn that he has just died of the conven- 
 tional epidemic, says : " The general life of the average pro- 
 fessing Christian does not move men by its self-sacrifice, nor 
 does it challenge conventional standards. . . . There is an un- 
 happy amount of bite in the criticism made of us which concen- 
 trates on our lack of truth, our lack of love, and our lack of 
 life. We are held to be out of touch with reality in respect of 
 God or man : we .ire seen disastrously wanting in true fellowship 
 among ourselves or with those outside our borders. . . . We 
 require a fresh direction of impulse, a revised scale of values; 
 for it has been made clear to us that our normal standards dif- 
 fer disastrously from those of God." Mr. E. Shillito, writing 
 on " Missions and the Man of 191!)." similarly admits that " the 
 Christian Church has often turned aside from its calling," and 
 asserts that " the hope of the world lies ... in a common- 
 wealth of nations." " The man of 1910 " will not listen to the 
 " cowardly " doctrine that Christ's teaching is " meant only for 
 
 834
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 individual souls and not for nations in their commerce with one 
 another." Dr. Diffendorfer, an American colleague, sets forth 
 the programme of " A Dominantly Missionary Church " that 
 is to win the world and " uncover the world's great needs, not in 
 terms of theology or in the cant phrases of the classroom, but 
 in the concrete language of everyday life that all people under- 
 stand." In his " Unoccupied Fields at the Home Base " Mr. 
 Basil Mathews proclaims that after " the unimaginable ruin of 
 the welter of war " we are at the turning-point " when the world 
 will receive the trend of civilisation which will determine whether 
 international and interracial relations are to be rooted in ri- 
 valry, or to grow from co-operative emulation under the rule of 
 Christ." 
 
 So great " a cloud of witnesses " puts the miracle beyond 
 question. The missionaries have been converted to Christian- 
 ity ! 
 
 IV 
 
 And not only under the immense impact of the war have they 
 been brought to see where the duty of the Church lies to-day, 
 but they boldly maintain that such has been the work of its mis- 
 sionaries in the past. They " have been a perpetual protest 
 against any claim for Christianity that falls short of universal 
 domination. They have denied by their witness the unjust 
 claims of nationality." True, the assertion I have italicised is 
 only an example of that " law of missions " which I have pointed 
 out in my little book on " Chosen Peoples "- — the tendency to 
 see newly-conceived purposes as retrospectively in action. As 
 a matter of fact national rivalries have often been imported 
 into missionary effort, just as Christ himself has been uni- 
 versally nationalised. Still, if an inaccurate, it is a noble re- 
 interpretation of Christian missionary effort, an inspiring con- 
 cept for the future, a recharging of a decayed battery, a linking 
 of the Christian with the larger human hope, a revised reading 
 that redeems " Missions " from the flavour of crankiness their 
 official organ admits to be associated with them. With such a 
 renewed inspiration, they might well hope to enlist the sympa- 
 thies of more than the invalids, women, and children, from whom 
 their present support is confessedly drawn. 
 
 335
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 My satisfaction is not, however, untempered. Doubts in- 
 trude. The conversion of the missionaries is somewhat belated. 
 The war is over. It is not so difficult to be a Christian now. 
 Unlike the devil who becomes a saint when he is sick, the mis- 
 sionary appears to become one when the crisis is over. Still, 
 there are a few trifles on which he may try the proverbial zeal 
 of the convert. The war — and still more the peace — has left 
 many opportunities for the imitatio Christi. I shall watch in 
 hope and charity, if not in faith. 
 
 Moreover the missionary's interests still appear to be prac- 
 tically limited to foreign captures. " Unoccupied Fields at 
 the Home Base " does not, as one might imagine, refer to the 
 70 or 80 per cent, of Englishmen who, we are told, never attend 
 a place of worship. It refers only to the minority already 
 saved and its problem is how to stimulate these to save other 
 souls abroad. But why the immense field lying open to them 
 without travelling expenses is ignored, is left a Christian mys- 
 tery. Surely Christianity, like Charity, should begin at home. 
 
 VI 
 
 And I do not like this commandeering for Christianity of 
 that ideal of a brotherhood of nations which is common to all 
 good men, and which was first categorically proclaimed and 
 prophesied in the Old Testament. Still, the more I watch the 
 tragi-comed}' of the Peace Conferences, the clearer becomes the 
 futility of politics and politicians. For to achieve what Mr. 
 Basil Mathews calls " the reconstruction of a new and worthy 
 world-order upon the shell-shattered ruins of our civilisation," 
 there must be a burning missionary faith, an apostleship ready 
 for all sacrifice. If the " Missions " will really supply this, I 
 shall not boggle at their formula?, knowing that " The Eternal 
 Source of Missions " is not a phonograph. In that case I will 
 gladly haunt Mrs. Jellyby's drawing-room, enter into com- 
 munion with the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, and even put 
 money in the plate. 
 
 336
 
 TWO JOSEPHS THAT DREAMED 
 
 I. Joseph Fels 
 {Fortnightly Review, June, 1920.) 
 
 I 
 
 I had never heard of Joseph Fels until a shining-eyed little 
 man walked into my office unannounced and unheralded, and of- 
 fered me a hundred thousand dollars. It was in Essex Street, 
 where Dr. Johnson had once presided over Sam's Club, that this 
 miracle occurred. In this old-world by-way off the Thames, in 
 an atmosphere of solicitors and sporting papers, the Jewish 
 Territorial Organisation (yclept for short, Ito) had raised the 
 standard of the Jewish State, and the visitor's offer was meant 
 as a contribution to the sinews of war. Unfortunately, it is 
 not only the propositions of Satan that have stings to them. 
 Even angels, whose visits are so few and far between, hedge 
 their gifts with conditions, and what Mr. Fels wanted was that 
 the State to be brought into being should be established on a 
 single-tax basis. 
 
 Sympathetically disposed as I was towards land-nationalisa- 
 tion, and still more towards Ito capitalisation, I was unable to 
 pledge the organisation to the Henry Georgian principle, be- 
 cause it was impossible to foresee the circumstances and condi- 
 tions under which the desired tract of territory would become 
 attainable — if, indeed, it would become attainable at all in a 
 world ruled by unreason and the sword. In the motto of the 
 old Flemish painter, " not as I would, but as I can." Our first 
 business was to obtain a territory. For Fels the first business 
 was to single-tax it. One could not know him for a day with- 
 out discovering that to him Henry George was Moses, and 
 " single-tax " all the law and the prophets. " A Calvinistic 
 preacher," says Hazlitt, " would not relinquish a single point 
 of faith to be the Pope of Rome." Fels would not sanction 
 private property in land to be the President of the United 
 States ; taxation of land values was the medicine for all human 
 ills, though when I once bantered him upon his persuasion that 
 it was a panacea he replied with a humour as characteristic as 
 his fervour : " I don't say it will cure in-growing toe-nails." 
 
 337
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 It was this humour that made him bearable oven to the heathen 
 who sware not by St. George, nor held the single-tax sacred. 
 He spoke the American language with a fund of rich and racy 
 locutions that recalled the pungent vitality of the early Mark 
 Twain. They added — if anything could — to the radiation 
 he gave of absolute sincerity, and were the joy of his audiences, 
 public or private. "I love a fanatic," said Oscar Straus to 
 me after an hour of Joseph Fels, with whom he disagreed pro- 
 foundly. But Joseph Fels was loved in despite of his fanati- 
 cism as well as on account of it. 
 
 II 
 
 Nor did his fanaticism prevent his co-operation in other 
 causes, though it prevented his absorption in them. He was in- 
 terested in the Woman Question, and played a useful part in 
 bailing out " suffragettes," male or female. lie was of similar 
 service in the Tchaikowsky and other troubles in Russia — in- 
 deed, in an age when money is so rarely forthcoming at the call 
 of the spirit, though it can be had in sackfuls for causes of 
 recognised respectability, Fels filled a role in which it is not easy 
 to replace him. He was the universal provider, the financier 
 of the unprofitable, the philanthropic publicist, the handy-man 
 of the social revolution, the Chancellor of the Exchequer of Bo- 
 hemia. He advertised his soap, Fels-Naptha, in papers chosen 
 not for their circulation but for their lack of it: sweet are the 
 uses of advertisement. He commissioned a single-tax play; 
 sculptures were dumped in his drawing-room. I once calcu- 
 lated with him the annual income necessary for rescuing from 
 the toils of poverty all the unrecognised geniuses of the day 
 the toll was not alarming. The people who count are easily 
 counted. The prophets, poets, and painters, the thinkers and 
 teachers of the world, could be supported by the State at the 
 annual cost of one shell sent on its mission of d sstruction from 
 a seventccn-inch gun. It is a splendid opening for a small cap- 
 italist. Fels actually did subsidise geniuses of various sorts, 
 much as Wedgwood subsidised Coleridge: possibly also charla- 
 tans. I had the sense of his being surrounded by wild-cat 
 schemes and schemers, as well as by men splendidly devoted to 
 himself and the common cause. Less directly he subsidised 
 scribes, cspeciallv of the single-tax species. A book on the 
 creed, or in its spirit, he would buy up and circulate by the 
 
 338
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 hundred. It is an example that as an author I warmly com- 
 mend. Henry George's " Progress and Poverty " he of course 
 distributed by the bushel as a missionary distributes Bibles. In 
 my own capacity as a heathen savage I received two copies in- 
 scribed, " It is to learn." I never got a letter from him but was 
 surcharged with tracts, mottoes, and verses. He was my bulk- 
 iest correspondent ; no doubt others, too, received this tuition 
 by correspondence. As he appraised men by their soundness 
 on the single-tax and despised some of my most admired friends, 
 his patience towards me must have been the missionary's hope 
 of his prey. Unless it was that his interest in the Jewish ques- 
 tion was far deeper than he admitted even to himself. 
 
 Ill 
 
 He would have called the Ito one of his side-shows, but he 
 never wilfully missed a committee meeting or a public gathering, 
 and Ins speeches upon our platform were not infrequent. But 
 though he never neglected the opportunity to propagate the 
 single-tax, he could not have entertained more than a shadowy 
 prospect of propagating it practically through a Jewish State, 
 and if his purse was the first to open to our necessities and the 
 last to close, it could only have been because of his increasing 
 perception of the Jewish tragedy. He contributed liberally to 
 the expenses of our investigation of Cyrenaica under Professor 
 Gregor}', and in his eagerness to hear the results he accom- 
 panied me to Folkestone to meet the returning expedition, and 
 keen was his disappointment to learn that that vaunted land 
 was a dangerous desert (as the Italian Imperialists who burked 
 our report have since found to their cost) . And when it looked 
 as if Portugal in her fear of German grabbing would concede 
 Angola, or a stretch of it, for Jewish Colonisation, the new 
 expedition would not have been able to set out at all had Fels 
 not generously advanced half the initial outlay. Nor was he 
 by any means a passive committee-man. More than once he 
 tried to hustle a world that is not to be hustled, to poke up 
 Colonial statesmen, to interview business men. His greatest 
 feat on our behalf was his journey to Mexico to obtain a con- 
 cession of territory from President Diaz. That great if not 
 good man was more than willing to facilitate a large immigra- 
 tion of Jewish industrial and commercial workers, but did not 
 welcome the idea of a special territory upon an agricultural 
 basis. It has just transpired that thirty years ago Diaz him- 
 
 339
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 self sought to attract a large Jewish colonisation, and that he 
 was even willing to pay the expenses of a scientific commission 
 to investigate his offer. Our Organisation was not then in 
 existence to educate the Jews on the necessity of a national 
 home, and this, like many another chance in Canada and Aus- 
 tralasia, was let slip. History does not go back on itself, and 
 the Ito, like Germany, began to feel it had come into colonisa- 
 tion too late. 
 
 At one time Fels thought that a tract in Paraguay, which he 
 had secured for the purpose of obtaining an ingredient of his 
 Fels-Naptha soap, might afford the nucleus of the desired de- 
 velopment, while the extracting of this ingredient would afford 
 employment to pioneer immigrants, and help the early stages of 
 colonisation. It was a scheme that would have made both of 
 his ends meet. I remember a long council-meeting at his house 
 with his Paraguay agents, when we worked out the details, but 
 Paraguay, already the scene of so many fantastic and socialis- 
 tic experiments, has hitherto remained immune from ours. Lat- 
 terly, Fels became enthusiastic for a Mesopotamia scheme, 
 which I had publicly broached, but his zeal for which owed 
 perhaps more to Zionism, and most to his wife's intuition in its 
 favour; an intuition, he told me proudly, that had never been 
 at fault. 
 
 IV 
 
 So far, indeed, was he beguiled into side-excursions from the 
 high road of the single-tax that he joined the department of the 
 Ito founded to regulate emigration in view of needs that could 
 not await the foundation of a State. The gravitation of the 
 Jewish masses to New York and the Eastern cities of America 
 had produced an unhealthy congestion, and to avoid the slums 
 and competition of these self-made Ghettos our Emigration 
 Regulation Department set about educating the Russian masses, 
 in the words of Horace Greeley, to " go West." They were to 
 enter by Galveston — a port utterly unknown to the Russian 
 Pale — and thence to be distributed over the immense region 
 west of the Mississippi. Of the London Committee, constituted 
 to supervise this deflection of the human current, Joseph Fels 
 was an original member. The Committee sat in the historic 
 building of the Rothschilds in St. Swithin's Lane, and Mr. Leo- 
 pold de Rothschild acted as Honorary Treasurer. To Fels 
 this alliance with the high priesthood of capitalism was some- 
 thing of a pill, but he swallowed it bravely in view of the im- 
 
 340
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 portance of the work. When by an unconstitutional caprice 
 of the immigration authorities at Washington, a large batch of 
 brawny emigrants was rejected at Galveston on the plea of 
 " poor physique," and I travelled across the North Sea to meet 
 the unhappy victims deported from Ellis Island — men who 
 had sold off their homes in Russia and were now thrown back 
 upon Europe, penniless — Fels accompanied me to Bremen and 
 worked many hours at the task of mending all this superfluous 
 man-made misery. He also hunted up a photographer to 
 prove how many muscular giants the party contained, and as 
 the emigration building — Stadt Warsaw — held likewise nu- 
 merous other Jewish transmigrants, including half a hundred 
 children, Fels had all the little ones photographed in a group 
 — splendid population-stuff for the States they looked — and 
 he bought up all the sweets in the establishment for them. But 
 then children were always a weakness of his. " If I had a boy 
 like yours," he said, rebuking my paternal stoicism, " I should 
 want to have him by me all the time." 
 
 Fels would not have been Fels if he had not taken advantage 
 of the contiguity with the late Lord Rothschild to seek an in- 
 terview with the uncrowned King of Jewry ; not, needless to say, 
 in any courtier spirit, but in the spirit of Catherine of Siena 
 bearding the Pope at Avignon, or an early Quaker lady setting 
 out to convert the Grand Turk. Whether the vices of cap- 
 italism or the virtues of the single-tax formed the main object 
 of this mission I never quite understood. But, knowing both 
 my men, I had no felicitous augury of the result. For Lord 
 Rothschild was brusque, deaf, and despotic, and Fels cheery and 
 irrepressible. The meeting was, I gathered, brief. Lord 
 Rothschild generally secured the last word by leaving the room 
 abruptly, and it is unlikely that he failed to apply this skilful 
 dialectical method on this occasion. What is certain is that 
 Fels's opinion of peers, never very tropical, fell below freezing 
 point. There was hardly anybody he could not call comrade 
 or brother, but I suspect that his sense of camaraderie stopped 
 thenceforward at Lord Rothschild. 
 
 341
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 VI 
 
 His notion of true manhood had been formed at the feet of 
 his neighbour, Walt Whitman, and it was k * the good gray 
 poet " who inspired that general enthusiasm for humanity for 
 which Henry George provided the special conduit. The read- 
 ing of " Progress and Poverty " was the turning-point in his 
 life. It whs a conversion, a rinding of salvation, in the fullest, 
 meaning of these terms. Thenceforth he had a creed by which 
 to live and die. For, of course, he did not see the single-tax like 
 a Chancellor of the Exchequer hailing a fruitful fiscal expedient, 
 but like Abou ben Adhem (may his tribe increase !),who loved his 
 fellow-men, and like Don Quixote out to charge against a mon- 
 strous wrong. Henry George had in fact more to give than a 
 dry, economic device, he was a dynamic emotional impulse 
 against evil, a prophet even in the minor sense of predicting. 
 Nor was his intellectual contribution to political economy at 
 all negligible. It was concrete and business-like, or it would 
 not have carried away a keen business man like Fels, who had 
 his Sancho-Panza side and when another business man tried to 
 best him felt the original sin in him leap like a tiger to the fray, 
 much as the hero of " Les Affaires Sont Les Affaires " bristled 
 for business-combat even over the body of his only son. The 
 creator of Fels-Naptha was the last man in the world to be car- 
 ried away by soft soap. Land really is — how- can one deny 
 it? — man's indispensable standing-ground; no nebulous but a 
 very solid basis for an economic philosophy. That this na- 
 tional necessity should be in private hands is clearly discordant 
 with our communal thinking. (Even Stonehenge has been sold, 
 as if so historic a stone mystery could be subject to the whim 
 of a proprietor — in Italy- (3r any civilised country it would be 
 a " national monument.") That land should be taxed pecul- 
 iarly - or even gradually taxed away without compensation — 
 is a proposition not altogether indefensible. But Fels wrenl 
 much further. He had so convinced himself thai private' land- 
 ownership was the sin against the Holy Ghost, and the taxation 
 of land and all the values inherent and involved in it took on so 
 many aspects to his imagination, that he beheld all life enriched 
 and ameliorated by the unflinching application of his golden 
 rule. Avenues and perspectives innumerable opened up to his 
 vision, and with almost perverted ingenuity lie would trace 
 every social evil to its root in Hie monopolisation of land val- 
 
 842
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 ues. Possibly that impassioned passage misled him in which 
 the Master cries out : " It is this that turns the blessings of 
 material progress into a curse. It is this that crowds human 
 beings into noisome cellars and squalid tenement houses ; that 
 fills prisons and brothels ; that goads men with want and con- 
 sumes them with greed ; that robs women of grace and beauty of 
 perfect womanhood; that takes from little children the joy and 
 innocence of life's morning." 
 
 VII 
 
 The single-tax is, after all, only a fiscal expedient which 
 would lessen the financial burdens of the landless, and even if it 
 increased production and thus diminished Poverty positively as 
 well as negatively, Poverty is, alas ! only one of the many roots 
 of human misery, and were all the prisons, brothels, ugly 
 women and blighted children due to it eliminated, I can imagine 
 these phenomena persisting — if in smaller numbers — in a 
 world of general Comfort. It was not poverty that Sodom and 
 Gomorrah suffered from. Still Poverty is such a Giant De- 
 spair that to despatch him at a stroke would be an achievement 
 so massive that the single-taxers need hardly put their claim 
 higher. But their cause suffers from under-statement as well 
 as over-statement, for " land-values " is an unfortunate term 
 which to the vulgar connotes mostly rent or price per acre, 
 whereas to the true single-taxer it means likewise rent or price 
 for tramway, railway, lighting, cable, or other concessions, and 
 the automatic tapping by the community of these and whatso- 
 ever other potentialities of profit are created less by the initia- 
 tive of the individual than by the accretion of the population, 
 no unit of which has earned the increment arising from the ag- 
 gregation. It is a concept not easily distinguishable — in this 
 enlarged form — from Socialism proper. But Fels drew the 
 line at Socialism, though he shared its spirit. In view of the re- 
 demptive efficiency of the single-tax, he thought it superfluous. 
 In the words of the Master : " All that is necessary to social 
 regeneration is included in the motto of those Russian patriots, 
 sometimes called Nihilists — ' Land and Libertv ' ! " 
 
 VIII 
 
 If I occasionally rallied him on his formula-of-all-work, I 
 was none the less aware that it is only the one-eyed who ac- 
 
 343
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 complish anything in the world of action, and that Argus with 
 his hundred eyes proved hopelessly inefficient at his one job of 
 watching. If the epithet " one-eyed " displeases, let it be re- 
 placed by " single-eyed," which carries the meaning with more 
 dignity. Fels had no eye, for example, for the sentimental side 
 of land, the emotional value of a meadow or an orchard to a 
 family; to such artistic beauties as inhere in the feudal system 
 of great estates he was blind. Burke, according to Hazlitt, 
 thought it as absurd to reduce all mankind to the same insipid 
 level as to destroy the inequalities of surface in a country for 
 the benefit of agriculture and commerce. Fels thought inequal- 
 ities that diminished agriculture and commerce not picturesque, 
 but criminal. The great landed aristocracy of England was 
 anathema. The English ideal of isolation was antipathetic 
 to his American passion for foregathering. The more people 
 enjoying and subdividing a piece of land, the merrier. What 
 right had you to cling to an old family garden, if labourers 
 lacked land for their cottages or the villagers plots for their 
 potatoes? That there were imponderable land-values, by which 
 society benefited, even though immaterially and indirectly — as 
 through the poems and pictures and thoughts they inspired — 
 he would not admit. There was something of an inverted Grad- 
 grind in this remorseless pursuit of happiness for the million. 
 
 Nor did he allow sufficiently for the fact that the gospel of 
 Henry George arose in a late and sophisticated period of civ- 
 ilisation, when the first efforts to break in an intractable earth 
 had already been made, and land had ceased to have its original 
 relation with pioneer labour. It so happened that the Jewish 
 Territorial Organisation brought him into contact with the 
 phase of the problem that Henry George had overlooked. But 
 even the fact that the Ito did not consider Cyrenaica worth the 
 cost of cultivation or irrigation did not alter his sense that its 
 land-values should be taxed. In the pioneering stage of land- 
 development the increment is by no means unearned : it is hard- 
 earned by danger, initiative, and capital. That at a later 
 stage the landlord, especially in growing cities, receives a fat 
 and disproportionate increment is a separate question, but once 
 land has been treated as private property, transferable like any 
 other form, society can only gradually undo what it has done. 
 Fels learnt no lesson either from the failure of his Essex ex- 
 periment, " Marylands," which struck me, when I visited it, as 
 a melancholy and expensive refutation of his theories of the 
 small cultivator and the converted townsman. Farming is, in 
 
 344
 
 THE VOICE OF JEKUSALEM 
 
 fact, an expert occupation, and the value of land qua land is 
 absolutely nil. In Canada you may still have 160 acres for 
 nothing or, rather, in exchange for your pioneer labour. 
 
 On the other hand, Fels did splendidly practical and suc- 
 cessful work by his Society for the Cultivation of Waste Spaces 
 — of which I was an otiose and absent-bodied member. That 
 is an enterprise which, started long before the war, found imita- 
 tion in more than one of the belligerent countries, anxious about 
 the food supply. And, of course, in estimating his practical 
 achievements one must not forget that Fels-Naptha has light- 
 ened washing-day in a million homes. 
 
 IX 
 
 If Fels owed much to Walt Whitman, and more to Henry 
 George, he had his own spiritual power welling up from his own 
 racial founts. For was he not of the race whose prophet 
 taught land nationalisation over three thousand years before 
 Henry George, and whose teachers had risen — even before 
 Jesus — from the brotherhood of Israel to the thought of the 
 brotherhood of the nations? It is not without significance that 
 Christians pronounced him the best Christian they had ever 
 known. He and I had a good chuckle together over the cor- 
 respondent who wrote to the papers to ask what was the good 
 of Mr. Joseph Fels trying to bring the land to the people, 
 when alien Jews were battening upon Britain? He himself 
 knew no blank page between the Old and New Testaments, re- 
 garding the spiritual tradition as continuous, and doubtless 
 at the bottom of his soul he believed it was a single-taxer that 
 drove the money changers out of the Temple. And, in truth, 
 did not Jesus say he was come to fulfil the law of Moses, not 
 to destroy it? We know as a fact that the jubilee provision 
 of the Mosaic land-laws had always been evaded. But Fels had 
 none of the other-worldliness which often adulterates earthly 
 goodness. He had no wish to " lay up treasure in heaven." 
 He had no conception of future reward — even future life had 
 been left by Henry George as a mere hope — but he wanted to 
 see heaven here below. He wanted to see with his own eyes the 
 Kingdom coming nearer. 
 
 Post-mortem philanthropy was his abhorrence. His money 
 must be spent here and now ; indeed, it was only his in the sense 
 that he had the responsibility of its spending. To denounce 
 himself as a capitalist, fattening on the labours of his fellow- 
 
 345
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 men, was no rhetorical figure or sensational trick. While not 
 unconscious of the humour of his situation, and even with a cer- 
 tain whimsical enjoymenl of the disconcertment of other mem- 
 bers of his firm, he had a genuine conviction of sin, which could 
 he cancelled only by restoring his business profits to the world's 
 service. lie was stained with the crime of capitalism — he 
 was grubby with earth privately owned •— why should he not 
 use his soap to wash himself clean? Hence it was that he re- 
 duced his personal expenditure to a minimum, eschewing, for 
 example, Pullman carriages and motor ears, and riding third- 
 class or in omnibuses. True, he was far less rich than the ru- 
 mour of him, but then his donations were so large, his feat in 
 financing the single-tax movement in so many countries so 
 unique, that people, never guessing he was giving to his utmost, 
 thought his gifts mere crumbs from the millionaire's table. 
 They more nearly represented the millionaire's meal. The mil- 
 lionaire, in fact, was a myth, and even a bit of a fraud. " The 
 more I give, the more they think I've got,'' he said to me once 
 with a droll twinkle. The more he gave the less he had, and 
 he would quite cheerfully have gone to the workhouse to ensure 
 that the land it stood on should revert to the people. 
 
 But if his was not the charity that gives away what it does 
 not want, neither was it the charity of cheques. " You mustn't 
 give money and not yourself," he said. What he gave in time 
 and work, in self-consuming zeal, was even more than he gave 
 in money. No journey was too great to make for his ideal. 
 He would have travelled to Tibet to educate the Grand Lama, 
 or unflinchingly addressed Icelandic audiences in Americanese. 
 Nor was his the charity that breeds charity. He hated sub- 
 scriptions to perpetual palliatives; donations that pauperised 
 and not redeemed. Even the propping up of art and artists 
 began to appeal less to him when he realised that his money 
 scarcely sufficed for his central mission. The Apostle became 
 jealous of the Maecenas, and the only time I ever saw him fly 
 into a passion was against himself. The thought that he was 
 letting his pockets be plucked at from every side threw him 
 into a sudden rage. One had to support ideas, not individuals. 
 The ideas would ultimately support the individuals. A distich 
 conveying this moral was one of his favourite enclosures. 
 
 346
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 Nevertheless, Joe Fels was no lover of abstractions. He was 
 always surrounded by individuals, not all of whom clung to him 
 for support, though he rendered friendly services to them all, 
 from prime donne to professors, from musicians to Labour 
 Members or masseurs. Guests of every nationality, especially 
 the " Bohemian," and embracing equally poets and lady laun- 
 dresses, millenarian meat-packers and vegetarians, you would 
 always find at his house in Regent's Park — indeed, he never 
 seemed to " live unto himself alone." And with his erratic 
 habit of dragging one home to eat or sleep, he must have had 
 in Mrs. Fels a housekeeper, as well as a hostess, of genius. But 
 all his motley guests were made into one happy family, and 
 there was always more than enough to eat, if not always 
 enough to sleep on. All the men were his brothers and all the 
 women his sisters, and the atmosphere of an early Christian 
 agape pervaded these meals, eaten as if in communion. 
 
 These guests of his included some of the most distinguished 
 persons of our time, and it is no small tribute to his fascination 
 that with only a moderate equipment of education, with no 
 graces of breeding, and the handicap of a soap business, he 
 was able to attract so many diverse personalities. It was the 
 moral core of the man, the passion of faith, which raised him 
 to equality with them, nay, that made them his inferiors, and 
 sometimes his conscious inferiors. Members of Parliament ac- 
 knowledged his force and leadership. He had confabulations 
 with Cabinet Ministers. Lie inspired a band of workers in a 
 dozen countries. He was received in Spain with the honours of 
 a prophet, nor was he without honour even in his native Amer- 
 ica. Persons who spend huge sums to uplift themselves so- 
 cially may note with envy at how small a money-price it is pos- 
 sible to become a world-figure, if advertisement is the last thing 
 you are thinking of. " To how few of those who sow the seed," 
 writes Heni^ George wistfully, " is it given to see it grow, or 
 even with certainty know that it will grow." Joseph Fels was 
 one of the fortunate few. His death was sadly premature, but 
 in his comparatively brief span he set in motion historic influ- 
 ences, and he saw them begin to modify history. And he en- 
 joyed his success. " I am having the time of my life," he told 
 me, when the movement began to hum and his partners to be 
 wroth. Wherein the devotees of enjoyment may read another 
 
 347
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 lesson. But Mill has already pointed out the paradox that 
 happiness comes not to the wilful hunter, if, indeed, it had 
 not been pointed out long before in Galilee. 
 
 Of his domestic happiness it is not for an outsider to speak. 
 But it may be recorded without indiscretion that he once said 
 to me: "I saw my wife first when she was a very young girl, 
 and I made up my mind there and then that I would marry no- 
 body else." The two were cousins, but it is curious that they 
 should have found each other so unerringly, for, though equally 
 rare souls, they were supplementary rather than similar. I 
 remember a period at which Mrs. Fels was not unreservedly a 
 devotee of the single-tax — Female Suffrage, I imagine, ranked 
 higher. But I remember no time at which Mr. Fels was not 
 unreservedly a devotee of Mrs. Fels. When he parted with 
 her in Piccadilly — to meet two hours later in Regent's Park 
 — he took farewell as if her omnibus were a liner bearing her 
 across the seas. It was an inspiring instance of his delicate 
 instinct that he made her the sole and unconditioned beneficiary 
 of his estate. All-absorbing as his passion for the single-tax 
 was otherwise, he did not feel it had the right to absorb her. 
 But here as often love and wisdom were one, and the abnegation 
 of his cause proved the road to its continuance. That he 
 died when he did, in the flush of his hope and his happiness, 
 and did not live to see all the dreams of the ages mocked by a 
 senseless and ineffably ghastly war, is no tragedy, so far as he 
 was concerned. We may even rejoice that he was spared see- 
 ing the sinister fulfilment of the prophecy of the Master: 
 " The civilised world is trembling on the verge of a great move- 
 ment. Either it must be a leap upwards, which will open the 
 way to advances yet undreamed of, or it must be a plunge down- 
 ward, which will carry us back toward barbarism." To live to 
 see the grimmer alternative would have been agony to this man 
 of fellow-feeling. But for the world it is tragic to be bereft of 
 him at a period when it needs every glimmer of optimism and 
 aspiration. And for his friends life would be a little less dark, 
 had we still the sustainment of his sunny camaraderie, his in- 
 domitable idealism, his breezy pugnacity, his lovable laughter. 
 By what strange prescience was it that Henry George prefixed 
 to the concluding chapter of his Gospel a stanza that might 
 have been written for the passing of his chief disciple? 
 
 " The days of the nations bear no trace 
 Of all the sunshine so far foretold; 
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 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 The cannon speaks in the teacher's place — 
 The age is weary with work and gold, 
 And high hopes wither, and memories wane; 
 On hearths and altars the fires are dead; 
 But that brave faith has not lived in vain — 
 And this is all that our watcher said." 
 
 II. Joseph Jacobs 
 
 (In Memoriam Address to the Jewish Historical Society, 
 Feb. 22, 1916.) 
 
 When I was asked by Dr. Israel Abrahams to deliver an ad- 
 dress in memory of my dear friend, Joseph Jacobs, I was well 
 aware how much less qualified I was than himself or Mr. Lucien 
 Wolf to appraise the life-work of so great and so many-sided 
 a scholar. But a hurried meeting, inspired by piety for the 
 dead, demands affection rather than exact appreciation, and 
 Jacobs was more than an admirable Crichton, he was a prince 
 of good fellows. And it was my privilege to stand for nearly 
 thirty years in as close a relation to him as any other of that 
 now historic and increasingly ghostly circle of " Wandering 
 Jews," while it so happened that in his last passage through 
 England in the Spring of 1914 he stayed with me both at the 
 Temple and in the country, and thus gave me an opportunity of 
 re-discovering with ever fresh surprise the abounding humour 
 as well as the encyclopaedic allusiveness of his conversation, and 
 the gaiety and joie de vivre which neither his sixty years nor 
 the heart-weakness he had come abroad to cure could impair. 
 I remember introducing him to another friend of mine, also 
 troubled with a weak heart, and they had what Jacobs called 
 " a heart to heart talk." If it concerned itself at all with 
 their common ailment it could not have been of a very sombre 
 character, for this other friend, who had only seen Jacobs that 
 once, said to me on hearing of his death : " That fountain of 
 fun frozen ! Incredible ! " Alas ! credo quia incredibile est. 
 
 But with this radiant image before me, it is impossible for me 
 to clothe him for you in Hamlet's " inky cloak " or " customary 
 suit of solemn black." He was bubbling over, not only with 
 fun, but with literary projects, one of the smallest of which 
 was a new Encyclopaedia of a quintessential nature. He did ac- 
 tually arrange with his old friend and illustrator, J. D. Batten, 
 
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 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 for another volume of their famous Fairy Tales. And in his 
 un jaded intellectual curiosity to study the new anti-Semitic 
 wing of English letters, which had grown up so oddly during his 
 residence in America, he got me to bring him together with Mr. 
 Chesterton. The meeting took place at the " Cheshire Cheese," 
 where, if the duel of Aryan and Semite came off without casual- 
 ties, it was perhaps because I had prudently made provision in 
 the spirit of one of the Tosaphoth of Rabbi Elchanan trans- 
 lated by Jacobs in "The Jews of Angevin England." "It is 
 surprising," comments the worthy Rabbi, " that in the land of 
 the isle the Jews are lenient in the matter of drinking strong 
 drinks of the Gentiles and along with them. . . . But perhaps 
 as there would be great ill-feeling if they were to refrain from 
 this, one must not be severe on them." 
 
 At a time when Keats's sad line is more than ever true, when 
 " but to think is to be full of sorrow," it seems a superfluous 
 tragedy that the extinction of so vivid and valuable a life should 
 be one of the innumerable by-products of the homicidal mania 
 which ravages the world, cheapening life and staling death. 
 Had Jacobs not gone to Nauheim for a cure he would in all 
 probability have been still alive, for the specialists, he wrote to 
 me almost apologetically, considered his affection slight. He 
 had booked his passage home via Naples. But he was caught in 
 Germany by the mobilisation half-an-hour before the train 
 reached the Italian frontier and he was turned out at a wayside 
 station to shift for himself. He managed to struggle back and 
 up to Holland, whence he crossed to England again, arriving 
 more dead than alive, indeed not expected to live through the 
 night. But under the kindly care of the Battens he rallied, 
 and my last glimpse of him before he sailed back to New York 
 was in their spacious suburban garden, alarmingly ashen-faced 
 indeed, yet mercurial as ever, reading old volumes of Punch, 
 and full of the side-lights thrown on the European situation by 
 forgotten cartoons. 
 
 II 
 
 Curiously enough my very last encounter with Jacobs was — 
 like Chesterton's first — a duel, though by correspondence, for 
 a leader in the American Hebrav in which I recognised his hand 
 had demolished me as a theologian — doubtless justly enough 
 — but on the insufficient basis of my remark that our revered 
 friend Schechter was not an infallible one. Sweeping me aside 
 
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 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 as old-fashioned, Jacobs asserted that the Jewish problem — 
 the real Jewish problem of the Bible's breakdown as a verbally 
 inspired document — had been solved by Schechter's conception 
 of a living historic tradition and the inspiration of Catholic 
 Israel. I wrote to point out that it was exactly this concep- 
 tion which Schechter had repudiated. By a tragic coincidence 
 I was writing my letter on the very Sunday of his death, and 
 he was not destined to receive my return-shot. 
 
 But, of course, Catholic Israel was the solution which he 
 himself favoured, which he had read into Schechter's. It was 
 implicit in his first published, and alas ! his most brilliant and 
 creative essay, " The God of Israel," which for the breadth 
 of its sweep and the mingled boldness and sobriety of its con- 
 ception is unparalleled in literature as the work of a young 
 man of twenty-four. At an age when destruction is as natural 
 to the thinker as to a kitten, Jacobs was laying down lines for 
 the spiritual transit not only of Jewry but of mankind. 
 " That generations of men have held the Bible sacred must 
 always keep it sacred for us," said this astonishing young Rad- 
 ical from Australia, who, though he thought the future was 
 to the God of Spinoza, rejected Spinoza himself as no true Jew 
 because he lacked " that historic sense of communion with his 
 people's past which has been the bond that kept Judaism alive 
 through the ages." " Some are born wise," said Balthasar Gra- 
 cian, the pithy Spaniard, " and with this natural advantage en- 
 ter upon their studies, with a moiety already mastered." No- 
 body ever illustrated this aphorism more aptly than the young 
 writer who was one day to translate it into English. What- 
 ever we may think, we feel, he told us, what our ancestors 
 thought, and our descendants will feel what we think. That a 
 young man so profound and so poised, who had enjoyed the 
 advantage of both an English and a German University, and 
 had that further sense of the relativity of values which comes 
 from belonging to two communities, should become a great 
 critic was inevitable. But even the paramount position of 
 Jacobs upon the Athenceum in the days when the position of the 
 Athenawm was paramount, did not provide the world with an 
 adequate equivalent for Iris powers. In a sane society, it has 
 always seemed to me, the spiritual treasures of its members 
 would be valued as much as coal and iron : syndicates would be 
 established to exploit them. That so much of Jacobs's time, 
 which was not money but treasure for the race, should have been 
 frittered away by the res angwsta domi seems to me the real 
 
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 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 tragedy of his fellow-citizens' career. He was, he jested — 
 perhaps not without bitterness — one of the greatest contribu- 
 tors to the British Museum Catalogue. And indeed from that 
 portentous list of his works, it is not unlikely that some future 
 German scholar will demonstrate that there must have been 
 many Joseph Jacobses that had got confused together: if, in- 
 deed, the list did not represent a period of eponymous clan- 
 authorship. 
 
 Some of these works, so deftly tossed off, will surely be at- 
 tributed to his next-door neighbour in the Jewish Encyclopedia, 
 Joseph Jacobs, the English conjuror, known as Jacobs the 
 Wizard; palmed off on us, to speak pat. It is said that he 
 edited English classics by Goldsmith, Jane Austen, Thackeray, 
 etc., etc., and translated Boccaccio. But even his hackwork, so 
 far as I know it, his editions of texts — of Howell's " Familiar 
 Letters," of Painter's " Palace of Pleasure," of " The Fables of 
 Bidpai," of " zEsop," of " Barlaam and Josaphat," of 
 " Reynard the Fox," of " Daphnis and Chloe " — provided 
 monumental examples of efficient editorship, with introductions 
 that were masterpieces of luminous and exhaustive survey, and 
 notes that were not only learned but more readable than many 
 texts. Sometimes, too, he made brilliant new suggestions, as 
 when by correcting final Mem into the almost similar Samech 
 he turned the fables of the Talmudic washermen (Cobsim) into 
 those of Kybisses, the Greek fabulist. And even when the 
 learning was not all Jacobite, even when, amid the dizzy peaks 
 and crevasses of scholarship, he — in his own phrase — " tied 
 himself to the latest German," the stodgy omniscience of his 
 guide was transposed into a key of gay lucidity that made it 
 all his own. 
 
 Sometimes, indeed, he became too flippant, as when, apropos 
 of the seventh-century discussion whether Christ had two wills, 
 or whether the divine and human wills fused together, as the 
 Monotheletists maintained against the Dyotheletists, he pro- 
 fessed himself " of the heresy of Lord Dundreary." In his 
 effort not to impose the Teutonic tax on the reader he was 
 peculiarly rich in analytical tables, bird's-eye views, and his- 
 torical or genealogical trees. In his remarkable Jewish Ency- 
 clopedia article on Spinoza he even invented a diagram, repre- 
 senting God and Nature, Substance and Mode, etc., etc., in 
 luminous lines and rays — a sort of Metaphysics without 
 Tears. 
 
 A more parochial Jacobs was the reconstructor of the London 
 
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 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 Jewry of 1290, the pioneer in Anglo-Jewish research, who by a 
 proverbial pact with Mr. Lucien Wolf limited his researches to 
 the pre-Expulsion period; the Jacobs who collaborated in the 
 Anglo-Jewish Exhibition, and in its epoch-making catalogue, 
 and in the foundation of this very Historical Society of which 
 he was once President. This is also the Jacobs of that fasci- 
 nating olla podrida, " The Jews of Angevin England," in which 
 like a bird building a nest of straw and twigs and moss and odd 
 trifles, Jacobs put together mouldering twelfth-century Pipe 
 Rolls of the English Record Office with disconnected Rabbinic 
 commentaries and museum-manuscripts into a complete working 
 model of the old English Ghetto. We see the mediaeval Jew as 
 he lived and moved and had his being, cut off from the State 
 because cut off from the Church, with the King exploiting the 
 wealth derived from the usury forbidden by the Holy Mother. 
 It is an ironic picture, sketched by Jacobs with a reticent 
 humour, and its truth is evident if only from its substantial 
 accordance with the Ghetto projected anew by the Belloc- 
 Chestertonian school. The London Jewry of 1290 he even 
 reconstructed house by house. But no pioneer can hope to be 
 final, and this Jacobs, like others of the clan, sometimes went 
 wrong. That is what pioneers are for; if they did not go 
 wrong, nobody else would go right. I note without surprise 
 that Jacobs's severest critic — Dr. Stokes — is also his greatest 
 admirer. Indeed, the best testimony to the value of Jacobs's 
 researches is conveyed by a single word in Dr. Stokes's " Studies 
 in Anglo-Jewish History." That word occurs in the index, 
 after the name of Joseph Jacobs : it is the word — " passim." 
 
 in 
 
 There is a third Jacobs — the student of Jewish statistics, 
 social, vital, and anthropometric. This Jacobs, who was per- 
 haps the Dr. Jacobs, was a disciple of Galton ; he impinged on 
 the provinces of Mendel and Lombroso, of Wundt and Fechner ; 
 he was tinged by Lazarus and Steinthal, the inventors of Folk- 
 Psychology. He appears to have flourished mainly between 
 1886 and 1891. He wrote in the Journal of the Anthropo- 
 logical Institute on the " Racial Characteristics of Modern 
 Jews," and on " The Comparative Distribution of Jewish 
 Talent," and he joined forces with his lifelong friend, Isidore 
 Spielman, to study " The Comparative Anthropometry of 
 English Jews," making many thousands of tests both in the 
 
 353
 
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 West End and the East End. I remember his coming down to 
 a Jewish school and instituting memory-tests by dictating 
 groups of figures. His deductions from the results constitute 
 a theory of " Prehension," which, as published in Mind, at 
 once won a place in Psychology. I also remember his photo- 
 graphing ten boys to turn them into a composite portrait of 
 the Jewish type. My brother Louis, now a member of your 
 Council, was one of the boys, and, like Aaron's rod, he appears 
 to have swallowed up all the others, for the final type w&s 
 curiously like him. Dr. Maurice Fishberg, who reproduces 
 this composite portrait in his book in the Contemporary Science 
 Series, entitled " The Jews " — a book, let me remark, in which 
 you will find endless facts and figures and everything except the 
 j ews — does not accept Dr. Jacobs's conclusion that a Jewish 
 type exists. He adduces statistics to prove that even the 
 notorious " Jewish nose " exists in only 13 per cent, of our race, 
 while nearly 60 per cent, have actually Greek noses. Nor would 
 the modern Mendelian accept Dr. Jacobs's theory of the pre- 
 potency of the Jewish type in mixed marriages; Dr. RcdclifFe 
 Salaman, indeed, maintains that it is a recessive type. When 
 doctors disagree, the layman can only leave them wrangling. 
 According to the logic of Rabbi Ishmael, when two Bible-texts 
 disagree, a third text will always be found to reconcile them. 
 And according to the logic of Science, when two doctors dis- 
 agree, a third doctor will always be found to contradict both. 
 That is how Science advances — it is a Hegelian progress by 
 contradiction — and if Dr. Jacobs had only left his successors 
 something to contradict, he would not have written in vain. 
 But I am certain that, here, as everywhere, positive results of 
 his methods and outlook will remain. Even Fishberg, who 
 denies his theories that the Jews are abnormally long-headed 
 or big-brained, concedes that he was the first to analyse truly 
 the causes that determine the nature of Jewish occupations. 
 It was probably this Dr. Jacobs to whom is to be attributed the 
 elaborate article " Statistics " in the Jewish Encyclopedia, with 
 its philosophical principles, its wealth of information both con- 
 temporary and mediaeval, and its careful maps, showing the 
 chief centres of Jewish population. And this Jacobs it is who 
 appears to have written his last published article in the Ameri- 
 can Hebrew, pointing out that Jews are now established in some 
 sixteen hundred centres in the States. 
 
 A fourth Joseph Jacobs made his reputation as a Biblical 
 Archaeologist. He discussed " Junior Right in Genesis," and 
 
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 demanded "Are there Totem Clans in the Old Testament?" 
 and proffered a novel explanation of the Nethinim, the mys- 
 terious Temple attendants mentioned in Nehemiah and Ezra. 
 His view of early Hebrew Totemism was inspired by Maclennan 
 and Robertson Smith. But after examining Biblical, Animal 
 and Plant names, Exogamy, Ancestor and Animal Worship, 
 Forbidden Food, Tattooing and Clan Crests, and the Blood 
 Feud, he ultimately arrived at the conclusion that the evidence 
 was insufficient to show that such primitive social clans, with 
 kinship through the mothers and the worship of an animal or 
 plant tattooed on the members, existed in Israel in historic 
 times, though possibly existing among the Edomites. 
 
 There is also a separate Sephardic Jacobs, who was one of the 
 first Jews to return to Spain, albeit only on a month's visit of 
 exploration and exhumation among the ancient manuscripts of 
 its libraries. From this honeymoon of scholarship he brought 
 back copies of nearly a score of important documents and over 
 1,700 records. This Jacobs did for Judaio-Spanish history 
 what his Ashkenazi fellow-Jacobs had done for Anglo-Jewish 
 Flistory, and his " Inquiry into the Sources of the History of 
 the Jews of Spain " laid a foundation on which all future 
 historians must build. The Royal Academy of Madrid hon- 
 oured itself by making the Jewish scholar a Corresponding 
 Member, and the Jewish scholar, in his discourse of reception, 
 finely said: " I welcome in my election one of the many signs 
 that Spain has learnt with regard to the Jews the highest and 
 most difficult of all moral lessons — to forgive those we have 
 injured." Possibly the Joseph Jacobs who translated the 
 Spanish maximist should be classed with this Jacobs, or possibly 
 from the raciness and pungency of the language the translation 
 should go rather with the next group of Jacobses, the more 
 literary series, to which belong Jacobs the critic, Jacobs the 
 necrologist, Jacobs the historian of " Geographical Discovery " 
 and of " Wonder Voyages," Jacobs the historical novelist, the 
 author of " As Others Saw Him," and, most popular of all, 
 Jacobs the teller of fairy tales, English, Celtic, and Indian. 
 The story-books in which he collaborated with the artist, 
 Batten — a partnership as felicitous as that of Gilbert with 
 Sullivan — books that delighted equally the nursery and the 
 drawing-room, with their coda of learned notes for the edifica- 
 tion of the study, revealed at once a great raconteur and a rare 
 literary artist, for many of these tales were written or rewritten 
 by himself for the nursery in defiance of the purists of folk- 
 
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 lore, who thought it sacrilegious to alter a syllable in a tradi- 
 tional tale. But Jacobs maintained that the traditional was 
 the transitional : the fact that a story was first heard in a 
 certain locality was no proof that it had not come from some- 
 where else. And so he invented an idiom for these tales that in 
 its racy homeliness and mother-wit flouted even respectable 
 grammar. It was the same instinct for language that served 
 him so admirably in reviewing the Revised Version of the Bible. 
 His little daughter, May, thought he wrote these Fairy Tales 
 for her alone; that affords at once a charming glimpse of his 
 domestic side and a sidelight upon popular theology. In close 
 affinity with Jacobs the tale-teller stands the Jacobs who edited 
 " Folk-lore," and midway between this editor and the Jewish 
 Historian stands the Jacobs who studied " The Jewish Diffusion 
 of Folk-Tales," or reconstructed by the same scientific methods 
 the homely truth behind the fatal folk-tale of " Little St. Hugh 
 of Lincoln," and the blood-legend in general. And this brings 
 me to the Jacobs whose articles in the Times in 1882 roused all 
 Europe against the pogroms of 1881, and brought about the 
 Mansion House Meetings, and the Russo-Jewish Fund that by 
 a premature optimism was wound up shortly before another 
 series of pogroms. And this Jacobs who was the chief con- 
 tributor to " Darkest Russia," and who seems to have been 
 active again in 1891 and to be not unconnected with the 
 Bibliographer of " The Jewish Question " as it asked and 
 answered itself in a decade of pamphlets, opens out a perspec- 
 tive of further Jacobses, practical Jacobses, innumerable, peak 
 beyond peak, the Jacobses of the Anglo-Jewish Association, 
 and the Board of Deputies, and the Conjoint Committee, and 
 the Hebrew Literature Society, and the Jacobs who founded 
 the Anglo-Jewish Year Book, and gave substance to the Jewish 
 Chronicle. And all these are not to be confused with the 
 American group of Jacobses whose career begins with the 
 twentieth century, when they are seen co-operating in the Jew- 
 ish Encyclopedia, directing the Bureau of Jewish Statistics and 
 Research, editing the American Hebrew and the latest Jewish- 
 American Year Book, teaching Literature and Rhetoric in the 
 Jewish Theological Seminary, sitting on the Committee of the 
 Jewish Publication Society and partaking as Style Editor in 
 its new translation of the Bible, comforting Job by a Com- 
 mentary, reviewing for the New York Times, lecturing to Jewish 
 Ladies and Literary Circles and American Colleges, and receiv- 
 ing the honorary degree Litt.D. from Philadelphia University. 
 
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 THE VOICE OP JERUSALEM 
 
 To trace out, inter-relate and appraise all these activities is 
 beyond my powers. In Bulwer Lytton's posthumous novel, 
 " The Parisians," the last fragment — curiously the most 
 memorable passage in all his works — records how an unfor- 
 tunate resident of Paris during the siege is finally compelled to 
 sacrifice his pet dog to his own necessities. Wiping his mouth 
 after the delicious meal, and pensively contemplating the bones 
 upon his plate, he observes with rueful tenderness : " How 
 Fido would have enjoyed those bones!" I cannot resist a 
 similar reflection anent our lamented friend. How Jacobs 
 would have enjoyed writing this necrology! Who else could 
 disentangle this veritable Jewry of Jacobses, study " The Com- 
 parative Distribution of Jewish Talent " among them, and put 
 them all together again into a composite photograph? How 
 he would have revelled in drawing up one of his famous pedi- 
 grees of their descent and kinship ! 
 
 IV 
 
 Even the literary critic who flourished in England under his 
 name seems to resolve in twain. There was the aesthetic critic 
 pronouncing his judgments in the grand manner, and there was 
 the analytical critic, who, under the inspiration of his friend, 
 R. G. Moulton, dreamed of an inductive science of criticism, 
 which should study the text of the masters rather than presume 
 to judge them. This Jacobs aimed at nothing less than "to 
 reform the study of English Literature . . . rescue it from the 
 clutches of those vapouring Oxonians, Matthew Arnold and the 
 rest." It was a programme after the Cambridge heart, con- 
 ceived in walks in the Madingley Road, but the only outcome 
 seems to have been an elaborate study of " In Memoriam " — a 
 vivisection of its plan, language and rhymes, true or false, 
 which was akin to the Morelli method in art, but which has had 
 no imitators for literature, except for ancient cases of disputed 
 authorship, notably the Bible and the Shakespeare-Bacon 
 stupidity. Personally I prefer the Oxonian manner of the 
 other Jacobs. For criticism, though it may be a science, may 
 also be an art — a super-art, whose subject-matter is the art- 
 creations of others. His necrologies in the Athenceum, his 
 handling of George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, 
 and, mirabile dictu, John Henry Newman, are models of literary 
 criticism, far more artistic and less scientific than he thought. 
 
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 Indeed, I know few things more artistic than his allegorical 
 picture of the vast dis-jected work of Browning as a mansion 
 whose " style is the Gothic with a curious infusion of Italian 
 Renaissance." Particularly happy is the image of the suite of 
 rooms that stands for " The Ring and the Book." " In each 
 the same design, in itself somewhat repulsive, is repeated in 
 mirrors of different shapes, parabolic, elliptical, concave, and 
 the rest, distorting the image in each case, but giving, on the 
 whole, a curious impression of reality." It is a metaphor that 
 might well serve to characterise some of the later art of Henry 
 James. Of Cardinal Newman, though he did ample justice to 
 the saint and the leader, he observed drily : " His histories 
 are unhistorical, his criticism is uncritical, and much of his 
 theology is founded on his history and his criticism." As a 
 critic, indeed, Jacobs and his friend Theodore Watts seem to 
 have left no successors. They had world-standards, whereas 
 there are now none at all. It is all a go-as-you-please, with 
 publishers, if not authors, writing their own reviews, and every- 
 thing coming out as sixpenny classics. 
 
 If, as a man of science, Jacobs was sometimes a young man 
 in a hurry, he touched no branch of knowledge which he did 
 not illuminate, even if only verbally. No German, for example, 
 could ever condense the essence of paganism into the phrase, 
 " the worship of the social bond," though every German has 
 under his eye this paganism in practice. Nor could the preten- 
 tiousness of the specialist be more lightly mocked than by his 
 little dig at Professor Saintsbury, " who never seems to read 
 a book for the first time." By taking all knowledge for his 
 province Jacobs was able, if not to equal the specialist in any 
 department, yet to be superior to him in general grasp and 
 perspective. One figures Jacobs as an aeroplanist flashing 
 over the world of knowledge, and though he frequently descended 
 to make microscopic observations, he never gave you those 
 observations from the ground, but always from the machine to 
 which he had climbed back. 
 
 It was part of this universalist temper to react even against 
 literature and science. Nearing the philosophic forties, he 
 began to inveigh against literaturitis — authors w r ere poor 
 creatures: for knowledge of life one must go to nurses and 
 grandmothers. He was about thirty-eight when he translated 
 Balthasar Gracian's " Art of Worldly Wisdom," and half in 
 fun but half in earnest he would produce you Sancho-Panza 
 maxims for any emergency, some, real citations from his 
 
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 author, some, audacious improvisations. Gracian was only 
 partly a Sancho Panza, and there was not wanting the spiritual 
 strain of the seventeenth-century Jesuit; how else could the 
 translation have been dedicated to Jacobs' devoted friend, Lady 
 Lewis? But the maxims Jacobs delighted to hurl at you were 
 practicalities like " Know to get your price for things," " Do 
 pleasant things yourself, unpleasant through others," or " Bet- 
 ter mad with the rest of the world than wise alone " — a maxim 1 
 highly popular to-day. I fear Gracian did not really help 
 him to get his price for things, for, as he said in his preface, in 
 explaining why men of letters have never written books of 
 maxims, " they cannot have that interest in action and its 
 rewards which is required for worldly success, or else they 
 would not be able to concentrate their thoughts on things which 
 they consider of higher import." Yet the realisation that he 
 had reached middle-age without finding a stable financial foot- 
 ing may have contributed to that general sobering which, as 
 the great Wordsworthian Ode puts it, comes to a man when 
 the vision splendid of youth fades into the light of common 
 day. Like Schopenhauer he prefixed to his version of Gracian 
 the verse of Goethe, which declares that you must be either 
 hammer or anvil — Amboss oder Hammer sein — and he was 
 fond of quoting it. He must have known that his destiny was 
 to be anvil, and that his nearest approach to the hammer was 
 his membership of the Maccabseans. In that drab phase of 
 his, Spinoza gave no comfort; he doubted whether there was 
 anything but emptiness in his old Holy of Holies, and whether, 
 as he puts it, life's curtain was not the picture. It was a stage 
 in which the aimlessness of modern Judaism — its separateness 
 for separation's sake — weighed upon him. He seemed to be 
 waiting for his people to be worthy of its long tragedy. " If 
 Israel have no future," he wrote in collecting the scattered 
 essays of eighteen years, " man's past has no clue." If the 
 Jews do not now bring about the triumph of their ideals, " the 
 long travail of Israel through the ages has been for naught, 
 and man must look back on his past, and forward to his future, 
 without seeing the visible presence of God." 
 
 Solemn, tragic words ! In the very year he was writing 
 them, a movement was arising for the realisation of the very 
 ideal his first-written essay had glorified. But the Zionist 
 doctrine which Jacobs had hailed as a gospel when presented 
 by George Eliot, and the Zionist passion which he had cele- 
 brated in Jehuda Halevi, seemed to him paltry and materialistic 
 
 359
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 when adopted by I)r. Herzl. " I know how to kill Zionism," he 
 said to me, when he first set eyes on the picturesque figure of 
 its founder, " Cut off Herzl's beard ! " That was not merely 
 Graeianism: his repugnance to Herzl was that of the profound 
 student of Jewish problems to the man who approached them 
 superficially as a race-Jew ; who, occupied solely with Tteol- 
 politik', was — at first at least — quite out of touch with the 
 soul of the people or the faith. And Jacobs was not wrong 
 in ever keeping steadfastly before the fanatics of race that a 
 narrow interpretation of their ideal might be not a culmination 
 but an anti-climax to Jewish history. Jacobs' own quest for a 
 role for modern Jewry followed spiritual and not political 
 horizons. Regarding the spiritual walls of the Ghetto as 
 having fallen irreparably, he looked for the Jews either to 
 diffuse the specific contributions of their ethical genius — such 
 as the hallowing of history — or to form a nucleus for the 
 brotherhood of the nations. He did, indeed, logically recognise 
 the Return to Zion as an alternative, but like Ibsen's " Lady 
 From the Sea," who longed to return across it till she was 
 permitted to — when the yearning died — the concrete project 
 left him cold. He was interested more in the thought of 
 returning — with a difference — to Jesus, and taking him up 
 into the apostolic succession of Jewish prophets. A great 
 work he had planned upon " The Jewish Race " — a work of 
 which, alas ! only a feAv chapters have been written — was to 
 have ended, according to its Synopsis, with the sentiment: 
 " Pity Jews have, by conduct of Christians in Middle Ages, been 
 debarred from knowledge of life of Jesus, the noblest Jew who 
 has lived, though not the most Jewish." The same note — that 
 the death of the inspired Galilean Jew could no more than the 
 Affaire Dreyfus be left a chose jttfjee — is struck at the end of 
 "As Others Saw Him": that anonymous attempt of his to 
 re-write the Gospel story in a rationalistic Jewish setting, and 
 with more local colour than the large method of the Gospel 
 narrative vouchsafes. " O Jesus," writes the scribe who re-tells 
 the story, as he sums up the conclusion of the whole matter, 
 " why didst thou seem to care not for aught that we at Jeru- 
 salem cared for? Why, arraigned before the appointed judges 
 of thy people, didst thou keep silence before us, and, by thus 
 keeping silent, share in pronouncing judgment upon thyself? 
 We have slain thee as the Hellenes have slain Socrates their 
 greatest, and our punishment will be as theirs. Then will 
 Israel be even as thou wert, despised and rejected of men — a 
 
 360
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 nation of sorrows among the nations. But Israel is greater 
 than any of his sons, and the day will come when he will know 
 thee as his greatest. And in that day he will say unto thee, 
 ' My sons have slain thee, O my son, and thou hast shared our 
 guilt.' " 
 
 Not that Jacobs was enamoured of Christianity as the Chris- 
 tians have understood it. I shall never forget his disgust when, 
 having restored a little lost child to its parents, he was told: 
 " Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my 
 brethren, ye have done it unto Me 1 " " A simple, natural 
 thing like that ! " he fumed to me. " And it has to be passed 
 through the Christ." But if, as he said in his essay on " Jewish 
 Ideals," the morality of the Christian may result in gush, 
 " Judaism," he pointed out, " tends to confuse morality, law 
 and custom." But there have been few finer interpretations of 
 Judaism than he gave in this essay — I heard it originally as 
 a lecture in the underground Essex Hall over twenty-five years 
 ago, and it has remained stamped on my mind as vividly as 
 some great dramatic performance. Psychology, philosophy, 
 spirituality, knowledge of life and cities, all went to its making. 
 I would give a library of abstract theology for such a remark 
 as that the utility of religious custom is " to create a fund of 
 tender emotion which will be at the service of the moralities." 
 But how futile it seems to talk of spiritual psychology in our 
 world of cave-men ! 
 
 On " Jacobs, the last phase " I have already touched. That 
 buoyant temperament had reached a stage which promised like 
 the old age of Browning's Rabbi Ben Ezra to be 
 
 " The best of life for which the first was made." 
 
 His children were — as they say in America — " making good," 
 and he was cultivating — he wrote me — Uart d'etre grand- 
 pere. Theologically too he had reached repose, for as a Sem- 
 inary Professor he had come strongly within the Schechterian 
 orbit. But indeed the mood of spiritual disillusionment is 
 near akin to orthodoxy, and even before he left England he had 
 begun to urge that " logic is not logical." My retort always 
 was that it is life which is not logical. And Jacobs' life was 
 no more logical than mine — or yours. " We are all of us 
 artists in life," he said in the very first line of his greatest book, 
 
 361
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 " and very poor daubs most of us make of it." Jacobs made 
 anything but a daub of his life, but if here and there he smudged 
 the picture, the tout ensemble is assuredly that of a scholar and 
 thinker who lived habitually upon an exalted plane. There 
 was, a generation ago, no essentially nobler place in London 
 than the little Kilburn study, overflowing with all the latest 
 volumes of literature, philosophy and science, in which Joseph 
 Jacobs carried on his life of plain living and high thinking, and 
 from which he justly rebuked the push and aggressive smartness 
 of Jewry with the advice: "Make fools of your children." 
 For all his swagger of worldly wisdom he was at heart the 
 Parsifal, the pure fool. When he said of his illustrator 
 Batten, " What should I or other English children do without 
 him? " he was speaking truly. In dedicating his just published 
 volume — that was to be the first of a new group of six — 
 "Europa's Fairy Tales" to " Peggy "— he says, "I have 
 told again the fairy tales that all the mummeys of Europe have 
 been telling their little Peggies, oh for ever so many years." 
 Peggy was his grand-daughter, but I cannot help thinking my 
 own little Peggy was in his mind, too, for he and she had fallen 
 in love at first sight, and she took possession of him. 
 
 Dante placed in hell the man who was gloomy in the sweet 
 air: by such a scale of valuations Jacobs should be placed in 
 the seventh heaven, for neither his tribulations, deserved or 
 undeserved, nor his scanty material reward, could ever sour him. 
 In truth his work itself was his reward. People often speak — 
 especially to-day — as if the thinker's life was one of less 
 activity and less essential reality than that of the man of 
 action. It is a gross error. The thinker is active in a world 
 actually more real for man than that merely physical environ- 
 ment which he shares with the animal creation, and in this world 
 he may have as great moments and adventures as Cortez, gazing 
 with a wild surmise, 
 
 " Silent upon a peak in Darien." 
 
 In a set of verses prefixed to Jacobs' edition of " Barlaam 
 and Josaphat " I said, addressing him : 
 
 " O friend, who sittest young yet wise, 
 Beneath the Bo-tree's shade, 
 Confronting life with kindly eyes, 
 A scholar unafraid 
 
 362
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 To follow thought to any sea, 
 Or back to any fount ! " 
 
 In these fearless explorations he must have had no small experi- 
 ence of the hazards and thrills of the spirit. Not seldom he 
 must have felt, like the Ancient Mariner, he was 
 
 " The first that ever burst 
 Into that silent sea." 
 
 Did he however bring back from his voyages anything of lasting 
 moment to mankind? Was there any great adventure com- 
 mensurate with the undoubted greatness of his spirit, was there 
 anything worthy of its compass, its insight, its many-sided 
 knowledge, its Catholic humanity? That we shall not know 
 till we read — if we ever shall read — his magnum opus, 
 " European Ideals — A Study in Origins," which was to trace 
 the genesis of the European Mind. Twenty small things there 
 are, we know, but in literature twenty shillings do not make a 
 sovereign. 
 
 I had pinned my own hopes on the great work on " The 
 Jewish Race " to the Synopsis of which I have already referred. 
 In its bare self this Synopsis, which is divided into Two Books 
 and Sixty-Seven Sections, and covers the whole field of Jewish 
 life, is more instructive and illuminative than the overwhelming 
 majority of completed books. But when I urged him to finish 
 it, he replied by sending me the Synopsis of the rival great 
 work, no longer giving up to the Ghetto what was meant for 
 mankind. The new Synopsis showed a work conceived on the 
 grand scale, in which all his gifts and knowledge could find 
 expression and which would in a sense even absorb the Jewish 
 opus. Dr. Israel Abrahams thinks it is largely or wholly 
 written. If so, that vast absorbing labour would explain — 
 and even justify — the perfunctoriness of some of his Ameri- 
 can hackwork, work that it was tragic he should have to do 
 at all, and which at any rate must have prevented him from 
 keeping fully up to date with his colossal subject. For he 
 aimed to analyse the European mind with almost chemical 
 exactness into its Hebraic, Hellenic, and other constituents, 
 and since he wrote his Synopsis a mass of new literature, if not 
 new light, has been poured forth, some of it apportioning in 
 novel ratios the Hebraic and Hellenic factors even in Chris- 
 tianity itself. And how if — still more tragically — the weari- 
 ness evident in his journalism and lecturing had passed into his 
 
 363
 
 THE VOICE OP JERUSALEM 
 
 book? It Is comforting anyhow to see from his last signed 
 article, " Liberalism and the Jews," in the December Menorah. 
 that his hand had not lost its cunning nor his eye its ency- 
 clopedic sweep. The description of Chutzpah as " iridescent 
 impudence " is in his freshest manner. But even if this mag- 
 num opus should fail us, we must recall his own summary of 
 Browning: " Aspiration is achievement." If his life is destined 
 to leave us no supremely great work, yet it was a great life, 
 and his work as a whole leaves a great lesson. 1 
 
 In the ardour of youth he was prepared to trace all philos- 
 ophy, science, mysticism and religion to Jewish sources. But 
 the very effort to trace them widened his outlook, and the im- 
 pression that radiates from every book he wrote or edited, from 
 every table or pedigree he drew up, is the brotherhood of man. 
 The fairy tales told in Anglo-Saxon nurseries were told earlier 
 or later to the duskier ears of little Hindoos, the japes that 
 gladdened Slavonic firesides in a bleak world of snow brought 
 glee and good-fellowship in the sun-kissed tents of Persia, the 
 homilies that edified the pious Buddhist in the tinkling pagodas 
 of Cambodia were the nutriment of Christian souls in the 
 thatched cottages of France, the parables that enlivened the 
 expositions of the Brahmins of Ceylon relieved equally the dull 
 discourses of the Mullahs, mad or sane, of Nubia and Egypt, 
 the " Chad Gadya," sung by the happy Jew on his Passover 
 pillows, was a Volkslied in the steep cobbled streets of old 
 German towns. The Buddha himself, Jacobs tells us, was made 
 a Christian Saint, when only his deeds and words were known 
 and not his name. Vain to sunder the human family by the 
 artificial boundaries of States, religions, countries, ambitions, 
 hatreds. Underneath and through it all goes the same flesh 
 and blood, and the human nature that politicians drive out with 
 
 1 It now appears that the article " Liberalism and the Jews " formed a 
 chapter of a work called " Jewish Contributions to Civilisation," which 
 seems to be a cross between the two long-projected works, "The Jewish 
 Race: A Study of National Character" and " European Ideals: A Study in 
 Origins." Thus these two "enchanted cigarettes" — to borrow Balzac's 
 term for projected works — did not end altogether in smoke. But unfor- 
 tunately, even of "Jewish Contributions to Civilisation," only one of the 
 three volumes was left in presentable shape. Nevertheless this first vol- 
 ume contains the quintessence of his thought and research, and includes a 
 magnificent introductory summary, and, though it was denied the final re- 
 vision of the master hand, yet by the sobriety and objectivity of its views 
 and the breadth of its information, it must long remain the authority on 
 the historic relations of Jews and Judaism to the Church, to the State, to 
 Capital and Commerce, to Politics, and to Science and Philosophy. If it 
 has a fault it is that of over-meekness in its exposition of the " Jewish Con- 
 tributions to Civilisation." 
 
 364
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 a pitchfork reasserts itself in all its divine identity with a song 
 or a proverb. Hath not a Jew eyes, and if you prick a Chris- 
 tian will he not bleed? It is because the work of Jacobs is 
 saturated in every pore with this conception, that I would write 
 for his epitaph not merely that he was a great Jew, but that he 
 was also — and perhaps the two are really one — a great 
 humanist. 
 
 365
 
 THE PILLAR OF FIRE 
 
 {From the Russian of Bunin.) 
 
 We wandered through the boundless sand, 
 
 The long and burning day, 
 A cloudy pillar led our band 
 
 Where shining pastures lay. 
 
 But now 'tis sweet to breathe — night falls, 
 
 Mirages, mists disband, 
 Jehovah's flaming column calls 
 
 Towards the Promised Land. 
 
 366
 
 EPILOGUE: THE MAJESTY OF ARMENIA 
 
 " I saw all our women and my mother torn to pieces by the 
 monsters who disputed for possession of them," says the old 
 Princess in " Candide," " and I was left for dead amid a heap 
 of corpses. For three hundred leagues around similar scenes 
 were going on — without any omission in the five prayers a day 
 prescribed by Mahomet." It is impossible in reading the 
 evidence as to the treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman 
 Empire not to be reminded of this and other episodes by which 
 Voltaire strove to disconcert the optimism of his Pangloss — 
 episodes which, however, seemed to transcend the licence of even 
 satirical invention and to have no warrant in the actual facts 
 of mediaeval history. Alas, we now know that Voltaire's imag- 
 ination fell below, not exceeded, the diabolism of human nature 
 at those moments when, maddened by war-lust — aggravated 
 let us charitably admit by war-panic — it returns to that pre- 
 historic animal nature through which the soul has slowly 
 struggled. 
 
 From more than one area of the war-zone, from Belgium, 
 from Galicia, from Turkish Armenia, the same story has 
 reached us : the same dread saga of the Avanderings of whole 
 populations, under the spur of massacre, rape, hunger. Little 
 children fall like flies by the wayside, and new children are born 
 on the march. Mothers go mad. Girls throw themselves into 
 the rivers. Men are killed and buried like dogs. Torture 
 becomes a commonplace. There is even cannibalism. 
 
 But Belgium had almost all the world for her friends, and the 
 faith in restoration went before her exiles like a pillar of cloud 
 by day and a pillar of fire by night. Even the Jews of the 
 Pale — torn and tossed between the alternate victors — found 
 a helping hand, and begin to behold some faint gleam of Zion 
 upon the political horizon. On Ararat alone no Ark can rest. 
 For Armenia alone there is the cry without answer : " Watch- 
 man, what of the night? " 
 
 For Armenia alone there is no " Mandatory " — she cannot 
 find protection even in the lion's den or the eagle's nest. There 
 is neither oil nor gold nor aught worth the cost of defending 
 her. The nations, eager to mother more oleaginous or aureate 
 
 367
 
 THE VOICE OF JERUSALEM 
 
 territories, so eager that they will be at one another's throats 
 rather than forgo their loving labour, here vie with one another 
 only in their solicitousness to offer the task to America. 
 
 Sister-nations — I have been accustomed to think — the 
 Armenians and the Jews. Both hail from sister-lands of the 
 cradle of civilisation, both come trailing clouds of glory from 
 the purpureal days of Persia and Babylon, both have borne 
 the shock of the ancient and mediaeval empires and of the mili- 
 tant migrations of their races, and both hold to their original 
 faith ; for if the one was the first preacher of Jehovah, the 
 other was the first nation to profess Jesus. And sisters, too, in 
 sorrow, I thought: exiled, scattered, persecuted, massacred. 
 
 Sisters in sooth, yet not equal in suffering. Hitherto, 
 through the long centuries, the crown of martyrdom has been 
 pre-eminently Israel's. And as, day by day during this war 
 of ours, there came to me by dark letter or whisper the tale of 
 her woes in the central war-zone, I said to myself: " Surely the 
 cup is full: surely no people on earth has such a measure of gall 
 and vinegar to drain." 
 
 But I was mistaken. One people is suffering more. That 
 people, whose ancient realm held the legendary Eden, has now 
 for abiding place the pit of Hell. I bow before this higher 
 majesty of sorrow. I take the crown of thorns from Israel's 
 head and I place it upon Armenia's. 
 
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