But whichever theory you adopt, the fact is there. The Catholic Church
is the conservator of an age-long European tradition, and that tradition
will never compromise with the fiction that a Jew can be other than a
Jew. Wherever the Catholic Church has power, and in proportion to its
power, the Jewish problem will be recognized to the full.
On the other hand, there never has been and never will be, or can be,
admission by Catholic morals of warfare against the Jew. Those morals
are plain. That doctrine has been defined over and over again and acted
upon throughout history. If indirect hostilities are opened against the
majority by a minority in its midst, they may be repressed and punished.
Still more important, insincere and pretended conversion, used as a
cloak, may be repressed and punished. But though a community has the
right to determine its own life, and (if it think it possible) even to
eliminate (with justice, not with cruelty, violence or injustice in any
form) an alien, a hostile minority; yet that minority has its own right
to live, if not there, then elsewhere. It has its right--once it is
rooted and traditional--to its own convictions, to its own tradition. If
you allow it to live among you, you must allow it to live its own life
save where that life threatens yours. The Catholic Church will always
maintain reality, including the reality of that sharp distinction
between the Jew and his hosts.
The opponent of the Catholic Church will tend, other things being equal,
to support the Jew, because, under that distinction, the Jew may find
himself ill at ease. The whole Protestant tradition of the North was for
more than 300 years favourable to the Jew, partly indeed on account of
its reliance upon the Jewish Scriptures, its absorption in the inspired
Jewish folk-lore, but more because the alliance with the Jew was an
alliance against the Catholic Church. Strong traces of that spirit
still remain. What has warred against it has been the sheer necessity
in every country, Catholic or Protestant, Liberal or anti-Liberal, to
preserve society against what each began to feel as a disruptive and an
alien domination.
There remain the two novel forces--Modern Capitalism, and, protesting
against it, its victim, the Modern Industrial Proletariat.
A few years ago anyone would have said that the opposition to the Jew
was an opposition to capitalism alone; the Jew was the representative of
capitalism, and Jewish finance was the particular aspect of Jewish power
in which that power was universally hated. But we have seen all that
change. To-day the strongest force against the Jew is on the other side.
It is mainly aroused, not by the fear of capitalist forces, but by the
fear of revolutionary forces.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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