The Jew is not everywhere a revolutionary. He is everywhere discontented
with a society alien to him: that is natural and inevitable. But he does
not exercise his power invariably, or even ordinarily, towards the
oversetting of an established social order by which, incidentally, he
often largely benefits.
You do not find the Jew in history perpetually leading the innumerable
revolts which citizens in the mass make against the privileged or the
superior conditions of the minority. He has sometimes benefited by these
movements in the past; more often suffered. We often find individual
Jews sympathizing with the revolutionary side, but we also find many
individual Jews sympathizing with the other. The Jew is not, in the
history of Europe, the prime agent of revolution: quite the contrary.
The great acts of violence, successful and unsuccessful, which have
marked our society from the agrarian troubles of pagan Rome to the
French Revolution, the land war in Ireland, the Chartist Movement in
London, or whatever modern movement you will, have appealed much more to
the fighting instincts and political traditions of _our_ race than they
have to the Jews. They are marked everywhere by an attitude towards
property and patriotism which are the very opposite of the Jews'
characteristics. The Revolutions of the past were for the better
distribution of property and for the betterment of the State. Often they
were openly undertaken because patriotism had been offended by defeat in
war and because the Nation was thought to be betrayed. Usually they were
jingo and always for distribution of wealth.
It is the unique mark of the Russian revolution and of its attempted
extension elsewhere that it repudiates patriotism and the division of
property. In that, it differs from all others; and it is markedly,
obviously, _Jewish_. But why had the Jews a chance of action in Russia
which they lacked elsewhere?
What were the special characters in the Russian opportunity which made
the Jew the creator of the whole movement?
There are, I take it, three main factors present in this case peculiarly
suitable to the Jewish effort.
In the first place, this revolution fell upon, and was directed towards,
a particular social phenomenon in which that profound instinct in the
European, the desire for settled property, had decayed. It fell upon the
state of affairs called _Industrial Capitalism_, the chief mark of which
is the destruction in the mass subjected to it (or, at any rate, the
atrophying) of that essential part of the European soul--ownership. The
Jew is, undoubtedly, unable to sympathize with us in that central core
of our civic instincts. He has never understood the European sense of
property and I doubt if he ever will.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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