that special paper is _jüdisch_. The modern campaign against Jews
began nearly thirty years ago, when a Court chaplain called Stöcker
startled the world by the violence of his invective. But the fire he
stirred to flame must have been smouldering. He and his followers gave
the most ingenuous reasons for curtailing Jewish rights and privileges
in Germany, one of which was the provoking fact that Jewish boys did
more brilliantly at school than Christians. The subject bristles with
difficulties, and no one who knows the German Jew intimately will wish
to pose him as a persecuted saint. The Christian certainly makes it
unpleasant for him socially, but in one way or the other he holds his
own. I have seen him vexed and offended by some brutal slight, but his
keen sense of humour helps him over most stiles. So no doubt does his
sense of power. "They will not admit me to their clubs or ask my
daughters to their dances," said a Jewish friend, "but they come to me
for money for their charities." And I knew that half the starving poor
in the town came to his wife for charity, and that she never sent one
empty away.
When a very clever, sensitive, numerically small race has lived for
hundreds of years cheek by jowl with a dense brutal race that has
never ceased to insult and humiliate it, you cannot be surprised if
those clever but highly sensitive ones become imbued in course of time
with a painful undesirable conviction that the brutes are their
superiors. So you have the spectacle in Germany of Jews seeking
Christian society instead of avoiding it; and you hear them boast
quite artlessly of their _christlicher Umgang_. They would really
serve their people and even themselves more if they refused all
_christlicher Umgang_ until the Christians had learned to behave
themselves. An Englishwoman living in Berlin told me that once as she
came out of a concert hall an officer standing in the crowd stared at
her and said, so that everyone could hear: "At last! a single face
that is not a _jüdischer Fratz_." The concert, you will understand,
must have been a good one, and therefore largely attended by a Jewish
audience. Possibly the officer who so much disliked his surroundings
had married a Jewish heiress and was waiting for his wife. Such things
happen. During the worst times of Stöcker's campaign a woman with
Jewish features could hardly go out unescorted; and even now, though
it is not openly expressed, you can hardly fail to catch some note of
sympathy with the Russian persecution of the Jews. The deep helpless
genuine horror felt in England at the pogroms is felt in a fainter way
in Northern Germany.
Meanwhile the Jewish woman of the upper classes takes her revenge by
knowing how to dress. In German cities, when you see a woman who is
"exquisite," slim that is and graceful, dainty from head to foot and
finely clad, then you may vow by all the gods that she has Jewish
blood in her.
APPENDIX
Page 4, l. 26. _Wunderkind_: a prodigy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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