But if the thing were felt everywhere as acutely and as consciously as
it is felt in special groups to-day--as it is felt, for instance, in one
particular section of English opinion already represented in the Press,
is felt in a wider section of French opinion, and in a still wider
section of Polish opinion--then the matter would be simple. We could
then say that an issue of the clearest kind had arisen, and forbid a
small alien minority to decide the destinies of those among whom it
lives and of whom it is not. The answer would be obvious, and the only
difficulty would be how the Jewish control might be lessened without
grievous injustice to innocent individuals.
But the thing is not so felt. It is modified, as I have said, by the
varying degrees of intensity in which it is recognized and by the other
international forces which come into play.
If we consider the varying political traditions and the varying
international forces, if we examine the world's national groups, we
shall find something like this: In the vast body of Russia a position
most paradoxical. For years the Jew was everywhere openly attacked and
hated in those parts of the Russian Empire where he was allowed to live
in large numbers. These were nowhere within Russia proper but upon the
western outskirts of that empire, within what was once the old Polish
kingdom and largely within what is now the restored Republic of Poland.
But the Russian traditional antagonism to the Jew changed in a few weeks
of chaos to something not opposite but novel and different. The Russian
allowed a prodigious revolution to be made by the Jews, he accepted the
loot of that revolution which the Jew secured to him; he has submitted
wholly in the towns, partly in the country, to a tyranny exercised by
Jews ever since that complete reversal of his national history, now four
years old.
The external political power of what was once the Russian Empire has
disappeared. The Jews have killed it. But the great mass of Russian
humanity remains strongly affected by this curious change. Where popular
instinct works untrammelled the old and violent passionate antagonism
between the Russian and the Jew survives. You see it in the hotch potch
of the Ukraine, the inhabitants of which, in spite of all theories, are
of Russian race and tradition, and the central town of which is the
sacred region of Russia as a member of Christendom. There, for all the
Jewish Committees with large towns under their complete control, there
have been repeated revolts. But in the greater part of European Russia
at least, and in much of what was once the Asiatic Empire, the Jews hold
what is left of the Executive government.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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