I could wish in this connection that some learned Jew would produce a
History of Europe from the point of view of his people: a short
textbook, I mean, intended for our consumption; to show us ourselves
from a standpoint very different from our own. It may be that such a
book exists. I am certain it would be more useful than those indirect
attacks (for they are attacks) upon the Christian tradition which
pretend to a spirit of impartiality but are none the less hostile to
that tradition in every line. I would much rather read the story of
Europe as it was seen by a practising Jewish scholar than a so-called
impartial and agnostic account which grotesquely represents the Church
as something external to the body of Europe and even inimical to it.
In this connection also we should have (what now we lack), and that is a
conspectus of the Jewish action over Christendom and Islam combined. We
are aware of the tolerance, or rather favour, displayed to their Jewish
subjects by the Mohammedans of Spain. It was neither universal nor
continuous. What we do not sufficiently hear, what we have to piece
together from chance allusions, is the connection between the Moorish
Jews, before and during the Reconquista, and their fellows to the north.
Before I leave these cursory and sporadic notes on what I have called
the "theories" upon our problem, I should mention one which would
unhappily seem to have acquired widespread support to-day and which is
surely the least satisfactory of all--even less satisfactory than the
now dying fiction which pretended that the Jewish nation was not present
in our midst, but consisted only of a mass of individuals already
absorbed by their alien surroundings. I mean the theory that it is
possible to continue in a sort of simmering atmosphere of partial
repression, with the Jew treated as something alien and hostile, yet his
presence unceasingly tolerated. That would seem to be the imperfect
conclusion implied, if not stated, in a hundred modern pamphlets and
discussions, the authors of which repudiate the name of Anti-Semite
though they sympathize apparently with action even less logical than the
politics of the Anti-Semite. There is no such equilibrium possible, even
if its establishment were as moral as it is in fact immoral. If a frank
solution be not found, nothing firm can be established. All we shall be
establishing will be a violent and successive fluctuation. It is
impossible to maintain an attitude permanently hostile to one's
neighbour, yet count on that hostility remaining permanently repressed.
You fall inevitably along the slope of such a tendency into those
excesses which it should be our whole object to condemn, to foresee and
to prevent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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