A JEWISH VIEW OF THE ANTI-JEWISH AGITATION.

Thou hast spoken of the Jew as the persecution of such as thou art has made him. Heaven in ire has driven him from his country, but industry has opened to him the only road to power and to influence which oppression has left unbarred. Read the ancient history of the people of God, and tell me if those, by whom Jehovah wrought such marvels among the nations, were then a people of misers and usurers!—And know, proud knight, we number names amongst us to which your boasted northern nobility is as the gourd compared with the cedar-names that ascend far back to those high times when the Divine Presence shook the mercy-seat between the cherubim, and which derive their splendour from no earthly prince, but from the awful Voice, which bade their fathers be nearest of the congregation to the Vision. Such were the princes of Judah, now such no more!-Yet there are those among them who shame not such high descent. I envy not thy blood-won honours! I envy not thy barbarous descent from northern heathens! I envy thee not thy faith, which is ever in thy mouth, but never in thy heart nor in thy practice.-SIR WALTER SCOTT, Ivanhoe.

Sind Christ und Jude eher Christ und Jude
Als Mensch ?-LESSING, Nathan der Weise.

THE wave of anti-Jewish agitation which is now sweeping across almost the entire world, and which has reached its fiercest and most significant torrents in Germany, is not so phenomenal as most people think, although it certainly derives an aspect of some importance from the apparently paradoxical circumstances of its appearance. It is probably the last time that we shall witness the surgings and swellings of this hoary visitation in any remarkable prominence; for this is the first occasion upon which its current has been at all impeded, and it has found itself impotently splashing against an adequate breakwater-the breakwater of a highly educated and vigorous liberalism. To my mind, indeed, it is almost a subject of congratulation that this agitation has reappeared so soon after the emancipation of my people, in dimensions sufficient to attract the consideration of the thinking world and to evoke the protests of the most cultured and highly venerated amongst us. What Dean Milman calls the iron age of Judaism' has now endured for more than a thousand years. Consecrated by soi-disant holy records and countenanced by secular traditions, nursed into a

.

monstrous adolescence by legend, and vulgarised by fable, the hatred of the Jew has grown and grown until its indoctrination has ranged from the dicta of popes and emperors to the refrains of nursery lullabies. Can it be wondered at then that this passion has entered deeply into the natures of the dominant races of the world? Its resuscitation at this moment, when it is generally considered that civil and religious liberty is not a mere theory, but an established and indispensable copestone in all well-ordered politics, is a sufficient proof that its complete eradication is a work of very slow develop⚫ment. Hitherto it has luxuriated in congenial surroundings, and its outbursts have been, if not quite unchecked, at least comparatively successful. When the last violent ebullition of anti-Jewish prejudices took place, just sixty years ago, the state of things in Europe was, as far as the moral receptiveness of all classes of society was concerned, very different from that of the present day. The autocracies were then in the ascendant, and the excesses of the French Revolution had discredited those dreams of popular freedom and of religious liberty which have reached a certain degree of realisation in our own times. Under these circumstances the existence of a class burdened with disabilities was no inconsistency, and their occasional persecution no anomaly. Since then the political changes which have been effected are enormous, and in theory at least the equality of all classes has been fully established. Still, however, the hatred of the Jew has continued to lurk illogically amongst the primary passions of non-Jewish nature, and now, but shortly after our emancipation, it has broken out in much of its ancient violence.

There can be no doubt, however, that it has this time been effectually checked. In its first reappearance but a vulgar revival of mediæval prejudice, it was sternly met by the simple but irrefutable rebukes of modern philosophy. Since then its changes of front, in the endeavour to assert itself successfully, have been beyond number, and if it has attempted, as it certainly has, to vindicate itself on philosophic principles, it is a sign of its weakness, as it clearly shows the nature and strength of the weapons with which it has had to cope. Can there, then, be any doubt as to the result of this conflict between the unanswerable propositions of modern liberalism and the casuistical justifications of an anachronistic prejudice? It must end in the well-merited disgrace and degradation of the latter, and thus one of the most important works of the age will be largely proceeded with. Its complete success cannot of course be immediate, but, once branded with despicable failure, another generation will be slow to receive its tarnished traditions, and then gradually its paroxysms must weaken and weaken until they die away altogether. It is for this reason that I regard the latest outbreak of anti-Semitism with a species of cœur léger; and I must confess that I do not approach an investigation of its history, its arguments, and its aims, with any

of those dire forebodings which have characterised so many other disquisitions on the subject which I have had the advantage of perusing.

If this latest revival of Judeophobia is not infelicitous in its appearance amongst a people through long ages addicted to a display of passion in this direction, it is certainly deserving of attention on account of its not being confined to one country. The effervescence of a certain feeling against the Jews is apparent in almost all the large states of the world, with the single exception perhaps of France. Eastern Christianity, which Mr. Gladstone has ventured to characterise as carrying the torch of civilisation in the Orient, has signalised itself, for some time past, in outrages upon the Jews, before which the excesses of Batak may be relegated to a category of comparative humanity. The fiery cross' has been adopted by the smaller Mohammedan States, and has left a smoking trail over the whole of the southern littoral of the Mediterranean; even in Italy, where so many Israelites occupy positions of prominence and responsibility, ugly rumours, quasi-justified by a certain deafness to the sufferings of the Roumanian Jews, have been heard of high personages cherishing a prejudice against the Jews; in America the 'Boycotting' of Jews is a common occurrence, and in this country we have been recently told that the agitation which was commenced by Professor Goldwin Smith, and continued by some of the lights of the Liberal party, is only slumbering until other more pressing affairs shall have been disposed of.

And yet, strange to say, there is nothing even in the latest phases of this agitation to commend it to that high standard of intelligence which is accepted as the spirit of the age. The involved and often contradictory arguments in its favour which are now so numerously put forward did not generate the present agitation, but were really generated by it under the pressure of being forced to adopt a programme capable of whitewashing it into the required degree of respectability. It broke out in precisely the same way as it has always broken out before. The hatred of the Jew by the Christian has become, as I have already pointed out, one of those acquired habits which proverbial philosophy teaches us are as secondary instincts. In normal passions there is a community of feeling which embraces all ages, from the darkest to the present day, and amongst these passions Judeophobia has long been ranked. In our present development of intellectual strength, these passions do little more than balance the relatively enlightened sentiments which we evolve from a calm and educated appreciation of equitable law; but let this equilibrium be once disturbed, and they immediately rise into the ascendant. Thus when the holy aspirations of the Crusades degenerated into vulgar fanaticism, the Jews were persecuted; when the balance of mind and passion was disturbed by the appearance of the Black Death, the

primary prejudices of Christians associated the Jews with their visitation, and their wholesale massacre became inevitable; in 1820, Germany found itself groaning under fearful burdens, and when in their despair their fretful eyes by chance alighted upon a few Jews who had managed to amass wealth, the Germans gave vent to all their grievances in one mighty outburst of their most congenial prejudice. See too how, in this country, when party feeling reached the highest pitch it has ever reached in English history, the Hebrew extraction of the then Prime Minister was sufficient to induce a host of writers and speakers to vent all their party spleen on the Jewish race. Similar circumstances have generated the present agitation. Germany has, during the last ten years, fallen from the position of one of the richest and happiest, to one of the poorest and most disturbed of states. Bowed down beneath the intolerable burden of an immense standing army, and distracted by failing trade and intense political conflict, the country has presented a melancholy appearance, and consequently the Jews have become the scapegoats of all the popular discontent. The vague and illogical murmurs of the people have been taken up by all extremes of political opinion; and Socialists and Conservatives, Protestants and Catholics, have alike found in Judeophobia an identity with their own interests. This fact alone is sufficient to show the blindly instinctive-as distinct from the intelligently deliberate-nature of the agitation, and it is therefore hardly likely that it will survive in its integrity the inevitable return to calm, honourable, and immortal principles.

Before, however, I examine the most noteworthy amongst the arguments of the anti-Semites, it may be desirable that I should briefly sketch the history of the recent outbreak, in illustration of my theory of the inherent nature of the prejudice which has brought it about.

During the late Russo-Turkish war the Jews all over the world were loud in their condemnation of what they, in common with a large number of their countrymen, regarded as the hypocritical designs of Russia. Carried away by the heat of party conflict, which then ran phenomenally high, many of them even ventured to appear at public meetings and to express the tendency of their opinions with the courage and outspokenness of citizens and patriots. Political differences rapidly fermented until they reached the highest point of violence, and then, boiling over, they degenerated into vindictive personalities and low abuse. This was the opportunity for signalising themselves required by the more narrow-minded of the opponents of the national programmes in England and Hungary. In this country Sir Tollemache Sinclair, and in the Cisleithan kingdom an individual named Istoczy, seized with avidity upon the theme, and, having discovered that Lord Beaconsfield was of Hebrew parentage, and that Jews generally supported the Russophobic

policy, they abandoned the more complex problems of the Eastern question--to the solution of which they had not been able to contribute anything for the more simple outery that the Jews were at the bottom of all the mischiefs of which they complained. At that moment the German people were, by a combination of the elements of depression, particularly susceptible to an attack of Judeophobia; the contagion was not slow to reach them, and it soon became apparent that the vague murmurs of the multitude, which were speedily heard, only required some directing and organising agency to give them more than ordinary point and effect.

Singularly appropriate was the anti-Semites' first choice of a leader. This was made in the person of one Wilhelm Marr, an obscure German journalist, who appeared to hold sufficiently gloomy views on the Jewish question to recommend him to the public, and these he very soon embodied in a pamphlet which he entitled Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum.

In this work the author mournfully and lugubriously exclaimed that Germany was becoming thoroughly Judaised. He explained that the Jews were gradually ousting native Germans from every post of value and importance in the country, and that, by their remarkable discipline as a class, their rapid multiplication, and their demoralising avocations, they were in a fair way, if not to exterminate the Teuton race altogether, at least to subjugate it. To such a pitch of despair did Herr Marr work himself in this unique literary production that he concluded with this very distressing peroration:A voice in the desert has been raised, and has stated facts-undeniable facts. Let us accommodate ourselves to the inevitable, if we cannot remedy it. Væ victis, finis Germania!' There was, however, some method in Herr Marr's melancholia. Notwithstanding the cheerless view of the prospects of his fatherland which he took in the body of his pamphlet, in a short prefatory address to his readers he suddenly brightened up, and called upon his countrymen to join with him in preventing the consummation of the Hebrew conspiracy which he had discovered, by founding a social and political weekly newspaper, to be edited by himself.

Unfortunately, everything was so ripe for an outbreak of Judeophobia that the German public did not trouble itself to inquire into Herr Marr's motives. It read his brochure with avidity, and within a few days six editions were exhausted. The Ultramontane and Conservative organs eagerly seized upon the theory promulgated by Marr; the former accepting it as a novel form of an old and cherished polemical whetstone, the latter recognising in it a plausible basis on which to avenge all the wrongs which an impoverished and intolerant Junkerthum attributed to the Jews. Diatribe after diatribe was launched from the columns of such representative prints as the Germania, the Vaterland, the Reichsbote, and the