There are few things so painful for an Englishman as to be brought in contact for the first time with the Jewish problem in Central and Eastern Europe ; and the more liberal his principles, the more painful is the contact. Who knows or, if he knows, care in England whether his friend of his neighbour or his colleague is a Jew ? It is the commonest thing in England for two men to work together, or play golf together, for months or years without the one discovering that the other is a Jew. But no Austrian, or German, or Hungarian, or Pole, will believe that this is so, unless he has lived in England a very long time indeed and learnt how simply the English really are. It is incredible to him that English people should not have a � nose � for Jews, so that they can tell them at sight. But the English have no Jewish problem : nor have the other nations of Western Europe. The city of New York could put them wise about it.
Comment : the Jews having for centuries been summarily banned in England and in other countries, no �anti-Semitism� was possible there. — (WPT)
� Anti-Jewish feeling �, it has been said,1 � can almost always be expressed in terms of the percentage of Jews to non-Jews intermingled with the other elements of a community. When he percentage rises above a certain point—a point determined in each
case by the character of the non-Jewish population—anti-Semitism makes its appearance.� Has the percentage of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe increased, it may be asked, since the war, to account for the marked intensification of anti-Semitism, which is everywhere apparent ? There is no evidence that it has. The revision of the United States� Immigration quotas and the British restrictions on alien immigration since the war have blocked two important outlets which the ghettos of Eastern Europe could once command. But it is not the Jews of the ghettos who are responsible for the present anti-Semitic reaction.
1 H. Wickham Steed, The Hapsburg Monarchy, London, 1914.
In the past, anti-Semite movements have often been economic in character. The enslavement of a depressed agricultural population to Jewish usurers, for example, has often led to revolts, as in Galicia. The periodic pogroms, which signalized the closing decade of the Tsarist regime in Russia, were directly due to the . . . policy of concentrating the Jews in the Pale of the Western Provinces, to a point which rendered the struggle for existence too acute. In all these cases anti-Semite feeling had an economic basis. But the present movement is not economic in character. It may become so ; and, if and when it does, it is likely to become acute. For the present it is primarily a social reaction, a moral rather than a material movement.
The Central European Settlement of 1919, and the Inflation which it brought forth as surely as
Sin brought forth Death, effected a social revolution in the German-speaking countries not much less sweeping than the Bolshevist Revolution in Russia. In that hectic intermezzo of five years which lasted from the Armistice to the Occupation of the Ruhr the German and Austrian bureaucracies, denuded of prestige by the Collapse and impoverished by the Inflation, stood by in impotence while the reins were snatched from their hands, and the government (to use the English phrase) was put into commission. In Germany during this interlude power passed into the hands of the industrialists, in Austria into the hands of the bankers. Neither had the time nor the inclination to govern. The German industrialists, unfettered by any interference from above and profiting by the enormous advantage of the depreciated currency, proceeded to reconstruct the shattered fabric of German industry—under the circumstances a stupendous achievement. In Austria there was no reconstruction of any kind : but some 600 new � banks � came into existence in Vienna in the years 1919-24 which battened and—what was much worse—enabled the public to batten on the collapse of the national currency and credit. When the crash came, the German industrialists were just on the point of handing over the Reichsbahn [Reichsbank ?] to private enterprise and abolishing the social insurance system which Europe for forty years had been taught to imitate and admire. Austria, when the crash
came, merely reverted, as Austria is apt to do, to the status quo ante. The big Viennese banks absorbed without effort the mushroom growths of the Inflation ; but, as a Viennese satirical paper remarked at the time, the fact of seven big Jews having swallowed up six hundred small ones left the position as between Semite and Aryan unaffected.
To the common man during this period, whether in Germany or Austria, the collapse of State control and the triumph of economic individualism appeared as a visitation of undiluted anarchy, in which the rich grew daily richer and the poor daily poorer. Throughout the Inflation in Germany the working class alone bore the burden of direct taxation, since the principal direct tax (income-tax) was deducted week by week from their wages, while all other classes of income-taxpayers were taxed by assessment. The latter therefore, to escape the burden, had only to wait until the amount assessed had lost all value. There were heavy fines for delay in payment : but the fines melted with the rest.1
1 In the month of April 1923, for example (which in certain aspects may be taken as the peak of the German Inflation), 219,2 milliards of marks were taken by the State from the manual workers in the form of wage deductions, and only 58.6 milliards from the whole of the remaining body of income-tax-payers !
The tragedy of the Inflation in Central Europe has not yet found a dramatist : but it is already a legend which is likely to remain a part of the popular
consciousness at least throughout the present century. Of the world that was before the Inflation the common man remembers only the old bureaucratic regime, which in retrospect appears a paradise of paternalism. The Inflation has obliterated the memories of the war as an earthquake may obliterate the memory of a riot. When it was over, and the savings of the hundred years since the Napoleonic wars had been engulfed and the rentier class wiped out, leaving only a population of employers and employed, the German-speaking peoples instinctively demanded the re-establishment of the arbitral intermediary element to which they had been accustomed ; and, the currency as by miracle1 having been stabilized, the bureaucracy came into its own again.
1 The � miracle � was Dr. Hjalmar Schacht.
But while it lasted, the paralysis of the bureaucracy, and the disappearance of all those restraints which the Court, the Army and the traditions of the old regime comported for the Jew in Central Europe, seemed like the thunder-clap which strikes off the fetters and opens the prison doors of Israel in bondage. Liberty at last ! The liberty which an Austrian once defined as � the free fox in the free hen-roost � ! It was an intoxicating prospect. There were great fortunes to be made, and they were made—in Austria mostly. This was the period of Bosel and Castiglione.
Contrast with their meteoric careers the slow and laborious climbing of a successful Jew under the old regime, as sketched by Mr. Steed1, and the revolution which has taken place in the conditions will be at once apparent :
� The career of such an official is typical of what is possible in Austria, and indeed in Hungary. The son of an obscure provincial Rabbi obtains, by luck or protection, some subordinate appointment in a Department of State. By dint of quick-wittedness and pliancy coupled with a capacity for making himself useful, he gradually rises in the bureaucratic scale and enters the bureau which, in several State Departments, is entrusted with the work of � informing � the Press. Hand in hand with the giving of � information � goes the giving of subsidies from the secret funds to � well-disposed � and � patriotic � journalists. The journalists—most of whom are Jews by birth—thus fed in money and kind, may be trusted never to bite the hand that feeds or has fed them : otherwise, awkward facts in regard to them might come to light. With their help, the active and hard-working official is able to establish his control over a great part of the Press and to render inestimable services to his chief, particularly if the chief be Prime Minister. Careful to keep all the wires in his own hands and to cow opponents by inspiring opportune attacks upon them in the journals at
his disposal ; careful, moreover, to obtain, through his growing influence, the appointment [ . . . etc]
� In a word, he becomes indispensable and, within certain limits, omnipotent. With his help and support a Cabinet, or at least a Premier, can hold office long after its, or his, public usefulness has ceased : and when the end appears nevertheless to be in sight, the omnipotent wire-puller is able, by withdrawing his support from his � chief � and transferring it to some other candidate for the premiership, to hasten the disappearance of the one and the appearance of the other. With skill, this process may be repeated until the wirepuller has exhausted the possibilities of bureaucratic advancement and has tasted to satiety all the joys of semi-clandestine power. He has long since changed his Jewish for a German or a Magyar name. A timely conversion, preferably to Roman Catholicism ; baptism with the support of authentic Catholic and, if possible, titled sponsors to whom he may have rendered in his official capacity some signal service ; a marriage with a well-endowed daughter of some influential but not too prominent family ; [etc].
The common man . . . feels instinctively that the high place which success holds in the Jewish scale of values is inconsistent with much of what he knows is best in his own civilization, in particular the Christian ethic. The principle of � backing the winner �, which seems to dominate the whole social and political outlook of the Jew, is necessarily more apparent in its operation to the loser than it is to the winner. In the
loser countries of the later war, that is to say, in Central Europe, the volte face of Judaism has been so abrupt as to offend the conscience of the common man. The common man in Central Europe believed in German � Militarism �, as taught him for two generations from ever editorial and professorial chair. He was militarist, as the nineteenth-century Englishman was a liberal, not primarily for what he could get out of it—and indeed, though it brought him great prosperity, it imposed on him heavy burdens—but on considerations of the greater good of the community. It was not, taken as a whole, an ungenerous belief. He has been disillusioned, it is true, by the outcome. But when did disillusionment suffice to convince the genuine believer of the error of faith ? The common man submits, like Job, to affliction, hoping for better days.
The alacrity with which the Jew in the same circumstances has hastened, not exactly to embrace the creed of the conqueror—since it was not very clear what the creed of the conqueror was, or indeed if it differed substantially from that of the conquered—but to seek anxiously for common ground with the conqueror, has startled the common man. The readiness with which those publicists and professors, who down to the end of 1918 were the loudest to acclaim the philosophy of the Bismarckian era, have scuttled from the hulk of dead militarism, and turned to pæns of internationalism, of America, of France, of
whatever seems likely to have the last word in the next decade, makes the common man distrust everything they do or say. To talk to the bankers of Vienna in 1932, you would not believe they had ever been Austrian at all. Yet who so black-and-yellow in the Bosnian annexation crisis or in the summer of 1914 ?
The common man cannot understand this. Patriotism to him is an unreasoning sentiment like being in love. Are all our philosophies, he asks himself, no more to them than means to an end ? If so, to what end ? He does not know ; and is left with that vague sense of alarm which is at the basis of mass panic. In the nineteenth century, he reflects, the Jews were Liberal, when Liberalism seemed the winning side in Europe. They became Bismarckian only when the cause of Bismarck had triumphed. In Russia they are backing the Bolshevists. There have been occasions—in Austria, for example, in the latter days of Karl Lueger—when they have even backed anti-Semitism. To men who believe in something as an end in itself nothing is so repugnant as the feeling that others believe in it only as a means. Religious persecutions have arise before now out of just such repugnance�s : and it is the weakness of the Jew, the reverse side to his quickness of perception in things material, that he is proportionately obtuse in regard to the moral impoderabilia of the nations among whom it is his lot to wander.
( pages 187 - 196 )