CHAPTER XI
CONCERNING THE JEWS
“I hear you are going to Georgia,” said Mr. Macdonald to me as we sipped our coffee in the hotel breakfast room one morning in Geneva. I had heard nothing about an expedition to Georgia and expressed my surprise. “Well, I happen to know that arrangements are on foot for a delegation from the Second International to visit that country and that we shall be amongst those invited to go. Will you accept?” he continued, lighting his pipe and rising to go.
My first impulse was to say no. I had been home from Russia barely four months. Anything remotely connected with the Russia I had seen had not the faintest attraction for me, and the Caucasus was only recently a part of the great Russian Empire, and enjoyed an independence of doubtful quality and stability. Apart from all that, the journey was frightening, not because of its dangers, which were real but not known, but because of its fatigues, which were numerous and foreseen.
When Tseretelli, the handsome and distinguished Georgian who represents his country in Paris so ably, and whose revolutionary career during the old regime in Russia included several years of solitary confinement, approached me with a cordial invitation to visit his country, instead of refusing I took a day on the hills on the French side of Geneva to think about it and promised a definite answer on the following day.
A Polish fellow-delegate, K. Czapsritski, came with me, and I told him of the scheme. He neither spoke nor understood English, and my German was negligible; but we contrived to understand each other in a curious mixture of French and German. When I spoke of the Georgian enterprise he waxed suddenly warm and eloquent.
“Why don’t you come to Poland, comrade? You go everywhere—to Petrograd, Moscow, Berlin, Vienna, Paris, Geneva, but never to Warsaw or Cracow. Why not? We need you in Poland more than they need you in Tiflis. Surely Poland has as good a claim as Georgia?” I had praised the hills by which we were surrounded. “We have beautiful mountains in Poland, far more beautiful than these,” he said, waving his arm in the direction of the Alps, shimmering in the mists of a summer morning. “Our mountains are wild and solemn. And very, very beautiful”—his voice grew tender. “Come to Poland and read Heine in the Polish hills.” I had brought a copy of Heine’s shorter poems with me, and we had read them together at a wayside inn where we called for coffee. I shall remember that little inn for another reason, not so happy. The last time I saw my friend Mary MacArthur in the flesh was when she flashed past that tiny inn in her automobile, on her way to Italy in a restless search for health, never found.
“But the Labour Party has already sent a delegation to Poland along with other Socialist nationals, Mr. Tom Shaw, M.P.——”
“Yes, yes,” he interrupted, “it is true. But we want more to come. We want a woman to come. We should like you to come. Our condition is very bad. We need help and we need understanding. We think the world does not like us very much.”
“But why do you say that? Some of us are inclined to think that Poland is the spoilt darling of the Entente. Surely France, at least, likes you very much!” I said, with a quizzical look at his dark, rather heavy good-natured Jewish face. He appeared to be a well-educated specimen of his race with the broad forehead and developed cranium of so many intellectual Jews. He was certainly very widely read in Polish, French and German literature.
“But perhaps you fear the Bolsheviks?” I ventured, inquiringly. “I gather from the newspapers that Trotsky’s generals are massing their troops for a triumphal entry into Warsaw.”
“Trotsky will never enter Warsaw,” said my colleague confidently. “I do not believe we have anything to fear from the Bolsheviks. There are very few of them in Poland, practically none amongst the peasants; and the Socialists of the towns are very largely Social Democrats.”
“But your fellow-countrymen in this city, to whom I spoke last night, do not think with you on this matter”—and I mentioned the names of a group of Polish exiles in Geneva whose chief preoccupation of mind was the almost certainty that Poland was about to be overrun by the armies of Russia. “They are very nervous and anxious. They imagine that British Labour has more power than it really has, and are trying to get permission from the French Government to travel by Paris to London in order to interest the British working-class leaders in their side of the story. And they are quite right,” I added, “for Labour will one day be all-powerful in England, and at the present moment the British Labour Movement is convinced, rightly or wrongly, that the heavier share of the blame for this fighting belongs to the Poles. They believe the Poles began it by attacking the Russians.”
I made this statement to M. Gavronsky of the Polish Legation in Switzerland, and he promptly retorted that it was not true.
“But it is not enough that I go home and say to British Labour that it is not true the Poles began it. I must have positive proof of this if I am to do you any good.”
“Well, I can give it to you,” said M. Gavronsky. “But I should like to go to London myself and give it to the Labour leaders personally. It is, of course, very difficult to apportion the blame in any conflict, to say who began it and when it began. The raids upon the homes of the Polish peasants by the ravenous Russian troops, who stole all the food and clothing they could lay their hands on, burnt the farms where there was any show of resistance, and ill treated the women were the beginning of the trouble. Very properly the peasants hit back when they could. If your people call this resistance to Bolshevik violence beginning the war, there is nothing more to be said. But I don’t. I admire them for it. What do you suppose Englishmen would have done in the same place? The same thing, of course. I have lived in England. I know them. But”—and here he sprang to his feet and began pacing up and down the room, his handsome face distorted with rage—“the most awful thing these damned Bolsheviks have done is the ill treatment of our prisoners. The brutes have sent Polish officers back to their camps mutilated in the most horrible fashion. That we shall never forget nor forgive.”
To what extent these charges and counter-charges of horrible atrocities are true I am not able to say. They are made by every army in Europe against its enemies. I can speak with definiteness only of those things I have seen, and with confidence only of what I have heard from those witnesses whose calm and dispassionate judgment and power to sift and weigh evidence I know; whose cool blood gives their testimony a certain value. But there was no doubt whatever in the mind of this ardent young Polish patriot and supporter of Pilsudski that the most awful outrages had been perpetrated upon Polish soldiers helpless in the hands of their enemies.
M. Gavronsky is related to the great Polish family, the Radziwills. Despite his aristocratic birth and connexions he is, I am convinced, a man of genuinely democratic sympathies. He is very English in appearance, tall and fair and fresh-complexioned. He speaks English better than most Englishmen. He joins to a delightful boyishness and engaging frankness the elegant manners of a finished specimen of our race. At his request and that of his friends, I introduced him to Mr. Sidney Webb and Mr. J. R. Macdonald, and left him to make upon these two such impression as he could.
Soon after this the situation on the Russo-Polish front completely changed, to the astonishment of the whole world. Warsaw forgot its follies and rose like one man to resist the invaders. The failure of supplies and the breakdown of discipline caused the Russian armies to be driven back. Warsaw broke into a mad riot of joy. The restraining influence of the Allies, whose experience of Russia had developed a certain wisdom in them, saved the jubilant Poles from the stupid blunder of a vindictive pursuit. Some sort of a peace treaty has been patched up between them; but like every other peace treaty made during the last two and a half years it is scarcely likely to prove worth the paper it is written upon.
I asked my companion of the hills to tell me more about Poland. “The trouble with you Poles is that you will not stop fighting. You are everywhere looked upon as the enfant terrible of Europe. Your ridiculously disproportionate army of 600,000 men not only keeps your naturally rich country poor, but is a disturbing factor to the whole of Europe. Of course,” I said hastily, not wishing to hurt, “I know quite well that, as a Social Democrat, you are personally hostile to all militarist enterprises. I say what I have said because I am really sorry for the unpopularity which Poland will bring upon herself when it is discovered whose restlessness it is which is preventing Europe from settling down. You are helping the opinion to grow that the small nation is a big nuisance whatever may be said of the theory of self-determination.” He grinned understandingly, and continued his interesting talk.
Poland’s lot during these years of war has been a particularly sad one. Her plight has at times been terrible. Her fields have been trampled by three armies: the Russian Imperial, the Russian Bolshevik and the German. Whole villages have been razed to the ground. People have died by the roadside in tens of thousands, of hunger, cold and fever. Flights of refugees and cruel evacuations have cost the country untold lives. I was told by a British General, concerned himself with the evacuation of one Polish city, a frightful story which he knew to be true, and one of many equally horrible and equally true.
The weather was intensely cold with the unimaginable cold of Poland in winter. Food was difficult to get and clothing almost impossible. The evacuation was conducted on foot, in open carts without springs or in slow railway trains without any heat. A young mother and father with three small children were amongst the travellers in one of these trains. The cold snow and bitter wind blew in through the broken windows. The children sobbed with cold and hunger. As the train crawled miserably on the sobs became pitiful moans for water. Soon the moans of two of them stopped altogether. They were frozen dead to the seats! The train stopped at a tiny station. To save the last child the frantic mother leapt out of the train for water and, returning, had the agony of seeing husband and child and corpses carried away from her by the rapidly vanishing train. She shrieked aloud. They arrested her for being without a passport. She was conveyed to the police station, raving. Some days later she died, quite mad.
The soil of Poland is very rich. If her armies could be disbanded and set to work upon the fields, Poland could very speedily feed not only her own starving children but millions of other children also. When one of the organizations for relief heard from the beautiful Princess Sapieha the story of the appalling suffering of Poland’s children, the wholly sympathetic committee, whilst promising help, felt bound to point out that it was like pouring money into a sieve to send it to a country for ever challenging the fortunes of war. It is, alas! French policy which is responsible for the militarist spirit and the military adventures of Poland. French officers train the regiments. French soldiers fill the cafés and theatres. French promises keep the people happy. It is the fashion now in Poland to worship the French and to imitate them. But the day will come when Poland, along with the rest of Europe, will discover to its infinite cost that the evil of militarism is just as menacing and corroding to civilization when dressed in the uniform of a French General as in that of a Prussian Guard.
Russia and Poland are popularly conceived to be the pivot and centre of what is called the Jewish problem in Europe. The outrageous anti-Jewish propaganda which is being conducted all over the world is a disgrace to our modern civilization. There is a certain reasonable explanation of it, so far as the people of Central Europe are concerned, in the paralysing fear of Bolshevism which possesses them, invariably associated with the Jews. It is astounding how many otherwise perfectly intelligent human beings believe Bolshevism to be an emanation from the Jewish brain. Trotsky is a Jew, Radek is a Jew, Zinoviev is a Jew, Balabanova is a Jew, Bela Kun is a Jew, therefore all Jews are Bolshevik and all Bolsheviks are Jews; which is absurd! As a matter of fact, only two out of the seventeen or eighteen members of the Bolshevik Cabinet at the time of the British Labour delegation’s visit to Russia were Jews. The most commanding personality in Russia at this hour is not a Jew. He is, if anything distinctive, a Tartar.
“I like your book ‘Through Bolshevik Russia’ very much indeed,” has been said to me over and over again, “but you are too kind to the Bolsheviks. Surely you are aware that the whole Russian business is part of a Jewish conspiracy hatched in New York with the idea of getting possession of the whole world, in order that the Jews may be revenged upon mankind for the things they have suffered in every country since the beginning of the Christian era?”
“Rubbish,” I have said with more force than politeness. “Surely you know that nursery-maids since the beginning of time have frightened little children with bogey stories of just this sort. Don’t be a child”; this to a pale and agitated young man who accompanied me home from one of my meetings, and scarcely knew how to contain himself for horror of the thing he believed.
“But,” he continued excitedly, “there’s Trotsky in Russia, Bela Kun in Hungary, Adler in Austria, Shinwell on the Clyde; there was Liebknecht in Germany, Holst——”
“Stop, for Heaven’s sake!” I interrupted. “Before you go any farther I want to tell you that I know personally both Shinwell and Adler. Shinwell is no more a Bolshevik than you are. The biggest Bolshevik in this country comes from South Wales, and he is made of lath and plaster. A lion on the platform, he roars as gently as a sucking dove when negotiating with the employers. You need have no fear of him. I hear he has been found wanting by his fellow-Bolsheviks and his resignation has been called for. As for Adler, he is one of the most courageous of living men, and has saved Austria from the Bolshevism that for a time captured Hungary. Liebknecht is not a Jew.”
“Well, you can’t deny that there are a million and a quarter Jews in New York and that the East End of London is full of them.”
“But they are not necessarily Bolshevik,” I replied. “The rich Jew is rarely, if ever, a Bolshevik. He is like the rich Gentile, he has too much to lose. The rich Jew is not only an anti-Bolshevik; he is sometimes anti-Jew! That is, he loses his sense of Jewish nationality in his citizen’s pride in his adopted country.”
“Henry Ford doesn’t take so easy a view of it as you do. He is putting up a great fight against the Jews in Detroit. What about Italy? What about Ireland?”—here his voice fell to a fearful whisper—“Sinn Fein, you understand? De Valera is a Portuguese Jew.”
“How do you know that?” I had heard this wild story before and had made careful inquiries in Ireland. It was denied amidst shrieks of hilarity. But if it were true it would have had no terrors for me.
“Lord Alfred Douglas——” he began; but I stopped him, tired of it all at last.
“Then that is all?” I queried. “Plain English and, it may be, the Morning Post is your authority for all this nonsense? Here is where you forge your mighty weapons?” He nodded. “Well, I happen to like the Morning Post. I like its brutalities. I admire its consistency. It delivers frontal attacks upon its enemies. It makes no pretence of friendship it does not feel. It is as full of vices as most newspapers, but you know where you have it. There is no flirting with the thing it hates. It is against every political principle I stand for; abuses like a fishwife everything I cherish. It fills me with blind fury on occasion. But it does not cook its news and—well, I like it. But beware of its prejudices in estimating any cause it attacks.”
I paused to ponder whether the Morning Post would welcome an unsolicited testimonial of this particular sort, and then continued.
“Some newspapers and many men and women have certainly allowed their judgment to be clouded by their prejudice over this question of Bolshevism. To associate Communism with the Jews is also as serviceable to their commercial jealousies as it is to their racial antagonisms. And Bolshevism is only the inevitable throw-up of four years of the most terrible war that ever was waged. I know people in Europe, men of wide culture and of high social standing, who actually profess to believe that it was not the German Kaiser, nor the Austrian Emperor, nor the Junkers, nor the militarists, nor the capitalists, nor the stupid, ignorant millions of deceived and tormented people who caused the war. It was the Jews! The whole wicked business was conceived in the Ghetto! Can raving anti-Semitism go farther?”
“But surely there must be something in it when such people as you describe, men of good brain and fine character, hate the Jews? Why, the whole world is beginning to be up in arms against them. The whole world cannot be wrong. There is something in it.”
“There is exactly this much in it and no more,” I said, picking up a notorious anti-Semitic journal and reading slowly,“‘De Valera’s mother was an Irishwoman, and, judging from the wonderful organizing ability he possesses, his father must have been a Jew!’ What do you think of that for evidence? Judging from the wonderful organizing ability he possesses Mr. Lloyd George’s father must have been a Jew; yet I am sure he was a very much respected Welsh Nonconformist. Judging from the wonderful organizing ability she possesses Miss Pankhurst’s father must have been a Jew; yet I know he was a much esteemed Gentile lawyer of Manchester. The thing is absurd.”
Prejudice was too strong. He left me, unconvinced. But it is simply incredible how many sane people build up a case against a person or a race on evidence as worthless as that which I have just quoted.
The Hungarian Communist Jew, Szamuely, has been proved to have been guilty of frightful atrocities. It is alleged he killed for the joy of killing. He hanged people with his own hand for the pleasure of witnessing the better their dying agonies. He was a madman and a pervert. He finally shot himself; but the Hungarian White Terror has paid this pervert the compliment of imitating him. It has visited upon thousands of miserable Jews of the poorer sort, innocent of crime, the most hideous punishment for this madman’s deeds, and a campaign against the whole Jewish race is employing certain Hungarians of my acquaintance abroad in a manner highly destructive of their reputation for sanity.
The popular argument against the Jew is one of crafty exploitation. It runs something like this. The Jew shopkeeper charges extortionate prices for his goods. He cruelly sweats his workpeople. He watches and waits for the misfortunes of his neighbours to trap them into his power by the offer of loans at extortionate rates of interest. They toil and slave to be rid of their debt. They cannot shake it off. He exploits them for life. He robs the heir of his patrimony and the children of their bread. And all because he hates the Christian. He has even been known to steal Christian children and sacrifice them at the Feast of the Passover. The story is good enough to excite a pogrom anyhow!
I know of no more striking case than that of the Jews, and the things which are said against them, illustrative of the fact that two and two do not always make four. In other words, the fact is not always the truth. It takes more than a statement of fact to make a statement of truth. An unsympathetic statement of the strictest accuracy as to fact may leave the same impression as the most calculated lie.
The fundamental facts of the controversy about the Jew are at least two: Firstly, the success of the Jew is due to good habits and an inherited gift of intellect. Secondly, the objectionable characteristics of the Jew are the direct consequence of persecution.
Consider the circumstances of his life in those Central European countries where Jews abound. The land system of Poland, for example, is the fundamental cause of the misery, not only of the Jews, but of the entire peasant population. A Galician village is ofttimes a very nightmare of filth and poverty. The peasants have not the heart to improve their lot. Improvements on their farms are not paid for. There is no fixity of tenure. Rents are high, and are exacted with great severity to supply the needs of gay landlords dancing in Paris or Rome.
Alcohol is a State monopoly in Poland. It used to be in Russia. It is a valued source of revenue to many European Governments. Who is to manage this highly important Government industry? The peasants are slow, ignorant and unreliable. They drink heavily. The Jews do not drink. A drunken Jew is a thing unknown. The very words are a contradiction in terms. It is a temperate and sober race. The Jews must manage the liquor shops. To the Jews are given a very large proportion of these positions in the interests of the State, and not because of any partiality to the Jew. The drink-shop in a village very naturally becomes the village store. The Jew is the storekeeper.
“We had to cease giving soap to the peasants in Czecho-Slovakia, although they needed it so badly, because they would sell it to the Jew for vodka,” said the lovely Countess Dŏbrenszky.
“Why not prohibit the sale of vodka?” I suggested. She smiled and shook her head. “It could never be done.”
As the servant of the State the Jew is expected to encourage the sale of drink in those countries where it is a State monopoly, and it is easy to see how everything else follows.
The second of the two bottom facts of the Jewish side of the controversy is the undoubted hatred and envy by the Gentile of the superior Jewish intelligence, particularly in commerce, but as certainly in everything else. Nothing can keep the Jewish race from excelling. Ages of ancient wrong could not do it. Present-day oppression cannot do it. In some countries still the Jew is not allowed to own land. In others, Rumania for example, he is not permitted to enter the profession of lawyer, doctor, or teacher. In the old Russia he might not go to the Universities. In Poland he can exempt himself from army service and consequently is denied citizenship. Cruel as it all seems, and is, there is an underlying instinct of self-preservation at the foundation of it, for, given equal chances in the race of life, the Jew will ofttimes leave the Gentile laggard far behind.
In the early ’forties an enterprising statesman of Vienna began to train young Jews in journalism, and now all the important papers of Vienna are run by Jews. Since the opening of new doors to them in Germany they have dominated the artistic professions in Berlin, and have contributed overwhelmingly to the intellectual life of Germany. The greatest continental authority on Shakespeare, Professor Leon Kellner, is a Jew. Professor Einstein is a Jew, Professor Ehrlich is a Jew. These two great scientists are distinguished in a host of learned Jewish men of science. Maximilian Harden, eminent journalist, is a Jew. Max Reinhardt, composer, is a Jew. The list of famous living Jews is too long to be given in full. In England they distinguish themselves chiefly in politics—Lord Reading, Viceroy of India, Sir Herbert Samuel, High Commissioner in Palestine. And the Jews are dominant in the Socialist politics of Europe, not because of any deep and treacherous design against humanity they possess, but for precisely the reason they are dominant in other spheres, because of their good brains, logical minds, keen perceptions and rare artistic abilities.
If the economic domination of the world by the Jews should come to pass it will be in no small measure due to the historic fact of the persecution and exclusion which have necessitated to a great extent the expression of the rich mental life of the race along one narrow channel for two thousand years; and it will be due in some degree to the comparative self-indulgence and contempt for hard intellectual labour of the Gentile section of the world community.
This excursion into Poland, and the question of the Jews which the discussion of Poland always invites, has postponed for several pages the trip to Georgia. I had the intention to go to Warsaw this month, but a charming young Pole, a lovely girl of twenty, has come to stay with me for some months. Her cousin tells me she is Poland in epitome and advises me to stay at home! Wanda is still too young to be other than a fervid nationalist and patriot. She is full of the poetry and romance of things, and the love of dainty dresses. She is filled with the vague longings and sadness of youth, and likes the autumn better than the spring, which is exactly as it should be in sentimental twenty. My only trouble with my guest is one of race and upbringing. I have an unconquerable and brutal British habit of saying “yes” when I mean “yes.” She says “yes” when she means “no,” because to her it is polite and proper to say the thing you imagine you are wanted to say. The consequence is that I am in danger of killing her by dragging her from her books over the hills and dales of an English countryside, to put roses into the pale cheeks, and a bright light into the grey eyes which have seen too much of sorrow and suffering for one so young and fair.