6

Heine as Saint-Simon had been worshipped by Pereira,where, also, the Universal Israelite Alliance' counted its most active members, and Mazzini's 'Alta Venta' had received help and approval from liberalizing Jews, the fall of Louis Philippe meant a further step towards their supremacy. Crémieux and Goudchaux became Ministers of Justice' and 'Finance 'this, by the way, is the whole Jewish problem in a nutshell -under the Provisional Government. If we may trust the evidence brought forward in Drumont, they were guilty of most shameful dealing with the French public moneys for the benefit of the House of Rothschild. Twenty-two years later, Crémieux, the eloquent advocate, the President of the Israelitish Alliance, and the comrade of Sir Moses Montefiore in that pilgrimage to Damascus which was occasioned by the mysterious death of Padre Tommaso in 1840-this patriarchal Crémieux, we say, took advantage of the disorder into which France had fallen, to emancipate by one stroke of his pen the Algerian Jews. Such was his contribution, in October 1870, to the national defence. In like manner, at the Berlin Congress of 1878, the chief concern of M. Waddington appears to have been, not so much what would become of Turkey, as whether the Jews in Roumania were to be protected against the peasants whom they were eating up with their usuries, and morally corrupting with bad liquor, and temptations to evil on which we must not dwell. From the accession of Louis Philippe, the Jews in France had been growing more powerful, and, as will happen to prosperous men, more insolent. The Pereiras, Foulds, Rothschilds-Spanish and German branches in turnhad control of the Bank and the Exchequer. The Second Empire favoured them; the Republic which dates from September 4th, 1870, has simply become their province; and Gambetta, their kinsman, was not unfittingly styled the Jewish Emperor.

Thus the last twenty-five years exhibit in one remarkable tableau the extremes of good and ill fortune to which this astonishing race seems ever destined. In Paris they rule as demigods. At Berlin and among the Germans they traffic in millions; their financial chief, Bleichröder, laid down the terms of the French ransom; their wire-pulling Lasker held in his hand all the threads of journalism; but the army does not yield them respect, Court-Chaplains announce a fresh crusade against them, the anti-Semite movement takes fire; and although the liberties granted since 1848 have never been revoked, it may well be that as the strong spirit of Teutschenthum' prevails, a patriot-Emperor will ask himself what profit there is in reaping

German

German harvests, if the dead hand of Jew mortgages cannot be lifted off them? In Austria, the situation is still more perplexing. Vienna, like other Western capitals, has its Hebrew magnates dwelling in streets of palaces, owning the mines, railways, forests, and tossing the Stocks up and down with a juggling dexterity which always brings them profit. They are masters, says Professor Nitti, of eight per cent. of the land of Galicia; they own a third of the kingdom of St. Stephen; and to their great golden house belongs one-fourth of Bohemia. The Emperor obeys their bidding in matters financial; and it is only Rothschild himself who shuts his door to the tribe of Judah. On the other hand, in no country have the people shown more passionate feelings against them; the blood accusation of Tisza-Esslar will prove that they stand in danger of seeing the Middle Ages return upon them with sword and fire; the clergy, the peasants, the bourgeoisie of large towns hate them with a perfect hatred; and no apology they can offer will clear them in the common judgment from charges so frightful that even to hint at their nature would be unjust. Evidence, however, is not wanting, to quote Professor Nitti once more, the Austrian Jews who carry on large industries, or possess great estates, have never sought to improve the condition of the class that labours for them. And recent enquiry has shown that nowhere do the proletarians suffer more from their employers' greed and severity, than in the factories and upon the farms which are owned by Jewish proprietors.

that

In countries yet more remote from civilization, where the Jews abound, and their neighbours, Slavs or Roumanians, are still governed by mediæval ideas, the question of usury in its most degrading form overshadows all the rest. Not the land only, but the men of these primitive communities are mortgaged. What Napoleon said of the Jews of Alsace is verified to the letter in South-Eastern Europe-they are palmer-worms and locusts that devour every green blade. They forestall, they disclose, they take compound interest on loans which have never been fully advanced. They practise all manner of demoralizing traffic; and they spin the cobwebs in which an industrious, though ill-informed and dim-sighted people, are caught by these golden spiders. M. Leroy-Beaulieu describes them as cormorant-middlemen who catch prey for the landlords and suck the blood of the poor. From time to time, the Government interposes; old-Jew laws are put in force, thousands of the frowsy, unkempt, and Talmud-observing hordesit is Treitschke's language-flce into exile, carrying their Rabbinical superstitions along with them to London, New Vol. 183.-No. 365.

E

York,

York, and Chicago: there is a loud cry from their brethren all over the world; and the name of religion is invoked where race and free-contract' alone are in question. Or will the bold step be taken of declaring that Judaism commands its disciples thus to make a prey of the Gentiles, as some have affirmed? In that case, what goes by the name of religion is little else than a Society of commercial Thugs, who offer the spoils they have seized at the shrine of their deity. For such Free-trade the believer in liberty need not scruple to express his detestation. Why should the Christian nations of Europe suffer themselves to be treated as idolaters, and let their lands and goods be ravished from them on principles which their own beliefs have always condemned, and by a method which differs only from open warfare by appealing to crooked and inhuman chicanery instead of the sword?

Nevertheless, all Jews have not entered into the wealth of the Gentiles. Myriads among them are poor indeed. And their condition, like enough to that of the 'square miles of misery' which lie embedded in our immense Babylons, could not fail to stir the last prophetic fibre in Israel which the age has known. Among the writers of Young Germany' was Karl Marx, from Trèves-an Hegelian of the Left, bitterly logical, unsparing of toil, who defined capital as the exploitation by the rich-whether Jews or Gentiles-of the 'surplus product' of labour. He did not free the proletarians, but he gave them a philosophy and a programme. They still wanted a leader, whose fiery eloquence might tell the world that a new social era was approaching; and Lassalle, another Jew, passionate, vain, conceited, drunk with self-consequence, leaped to the front he would be the Napoleon of the Fourth Estate. In a little while he had shaped it into the Democratic Socialism that has since invaded literature and legislation; that counts in the French Chamber its sacred band of deputies, and in Germany its millions of voters. The International,' founded in London, and brought to shame by the Communists of Paris in 1871 (with whom it was too hastily identified), was but an episode. Lassalle, the Miles Gloriosus, romantic in his life, sordid and tragi-comical when the duel finished him, had burnt up all the Utopias, and from their ashes distilled an elixir which seemed to have in it rejuvenescence for the peoples. But here, again, the peculiar spirit of Israel, and its unlikeness to the Christian hope, are most manifest.

If, on the one hand, we see notable financiers coalescing into a feudalism which has no duties except to make money and to spend it with ostentation, and if these are the Hebrew noblesse,

on

6

on the other hand we perceive the steady growth of a Socialism, resolved to absorb all the monopolies into one and to call it the State. In either alternative, be it remarked, the old healthy balance of private capital employed in a free market by individuals of every class disappears. But more. The society which is dominated by la Haute Banque' has simply forgotten its early training in the Catechism; it practises all forms of luxury, and never dreams that a Day of Judgment will come. It knows nothing of the supernatural; it does not look beyond the grave. In Renan's brilliant and melancholy parable, the modern Jew is Koheleth, an aristocrat by his smooth skin, his nervous susceptibility, his air of doing nothing; a bourgeois by his slight sympathy with physical courage, and by a certain sense of inferiority from which all his distinction cannot save him.' And now that he has arrived at perfect wisdom, what does it consist in? Merely, observes Renan, 'in the undisturbed enjoyment of the fruits of his labour, amid works of delicate art, and images of exhausted pleasure.' Yes, that is Koheleth when he has come into his kingdom. But Marx, Lassalle, Liebknecht, and the other Socialists of Jerusalem, are so many Koheleths denied the enjoyment of their kingdom. They wish to overturn society, not because they long after a kingdom of God, wherein the supernatural is the real, and immortality pours its radiance even upon our earthly tabernacles; to them, the 'Beyond' is a chimera. What they would have men possess -all men, as they say-is 'undisturbed enjoyment,' and works of delicate art,' and 'images of pleasure' which they hope will not be exhausted. The wide Jewish propaganda of Socialism, if we consider it close at hand, is of one substance with the ideals of Auguste Comte; it is wholly secular, bounded by this world, and, according to many of its teachers, early and late, we may describe it as the 'rehabilitation of the flesh.'

How far does this language differ in meaning from the satirical innuendo which we light upon repeatedly in Graetz, that 'for sixteen centuries Christianity had surfeited the nations of Europe with belief in the supernatural,' and did but hold out 'imaginary fancies in the place of truth'? Undoubtedly, the commercial Jew, now alone surviving from all other types of the race, aims at making his Paradise in this world. We have no ideals now,' says Esther Ansell in Children of the Ghetto.' Certainly, it is not the Mordecai of George Eliot, that elaborate misconception,' nor appeals to the prophecies of Isaiah (which the Jew financiers have never laid to heart), neither is it the passing flashes of inspiration in New-Hebrew poetry, that can persuade us otherwise. The modern Jew is carnal, not spi

E 2

ritual, whether he keeps up the daily and yearly rite, or puts it from him as a thing outworn. He has much affinity with the Mohammedan, little or none with the Christian. If, in controversy with those who read the Bible, he quotes all that is beautiful in its pages, and is proud of declaring Hillel to have been the forerunner of Jesus, when he throws down his pen, all that is forgotten. To the Israel which now holds so large a stake in the lands, loans, syndicates, and joint-stock capital of Europe, America, Africa, and Australia, there is but one Heaven, success; but one Hell, failure.'

·

What, then, has Jacob, the supplanter, created in our day? A world of speculation; unbounded facilities of enjoyment for those who know how to gamble skilfully in a rising or a falling market; some light and sensuous music;—and that is all. He seems to have taken in earnest the cynical aphorism, 'If you want to make money, be sure not to make anything else.' True it is that if he did not invent, he has brought to perfection la réclame, the art of puffing,' and la névrose, the malady of the rich.' But in science, physical, biological, metaphysical; in productive industry and the active work of commerce; in exploration of new countries; in mining, railway-making, tunnel-piercing; in the improvement of agriculture, the progress of machinery, the arts of design; in any work which demands the power of patient research, and the gift of combining details into an artistic whole, the Jew-save only where the history and antiquities of his own race are concerned-has done so little that, if his name were blotted from the chronicle of labour wrought with head or hand during the last century, it would not be missed, nor would mankind be visibly the poorer. That is no light statement; it is, however, one which, if untrue, admits of easy refutation. Let the catalogue be drawn out, the names inserted, of those Hebrew men or women who, apart from the flying squadrons of journalism, have by plans which they did actually invent, by forces physically applied, by intellectual generalisations fruitful in results, and not merely by issuing prospectuses and dealing on 'Change, produced something tangible. Let us hear, even in the domain of letters, the gifted persons quoted, with the exception here and there of a Heine or an Auerbach, that can distantly pretend to rank with European classics. The challenge is fair, and it cannot be deemed superfluous. For we have no intention of denying to the Hebrew genius that which is truly its own. But, if it shall appear that the modern Jew has contributed so slightly to civilization, whether of the sound material kind or of the lofty spiritual, that is a serious conclusion. For it implies, under

the