The Jews who mix with the wealthiest classes to-day, especially in
London, have no true idea of their real position in the eyes of their
guests; and the fault is with their guests.
I have cited an obvious daily example, but it is the least important,
for it is passing and shallow. This disingenuousness spreads to
relations more permanent. A man goes into business with a Jew, accepts
him as a partner, works with him constantly and yet nourishes in his
heart a disloyalty to that relationship. It is a phenomenon of constant
recurrence and it poisons the relations between the two races. If a man
is prepared to enter into one of these permanent relations with another
man who differs fundamentally from himself in tradition and human
character, he must face the consequences. One of those consequences, if
he is to remain an honest man, is the acceptation of the position with
all that it implies. He cannot have the advantage--as he hopes to have
it--of the Jewish sobriety, the Jewish tenacity, the Jewish lucidity of
thought, the Jewish international relationships, the Jewish opportunity
of advancement through the aid of his fellows, and at the same time
secretly indulge in a contempt and dislike for his companion, and
relieve that suppressed feeling in his absence. Yet that is what men are
doing daily throughout the business world.
Listen to the conversation of such a man as, having thus engaged in
intimate commercial relationship with the Jew, falls upon misfortune. He
spends the rest of his life denouncing the Jews as a race and his own
companion in misfortune in particular. He has no right to do it. It is
undignified; it is puerile, but, worst of all, it is unjust. He
presumably knew what he was doing when he entered into what could not
but be a difficult relationship. The consequences of that relationship
he should accept whether they turn out well for him or ill.
We find something perhaps even worse to note in the attitude of those
who are successful in their business through an alliance with the Jew.
For in this case gratitude should be added to justice, and that
gratitude is very rarely shown. On the contrary, the non-Jewish partner
is for ever in a mood of complaint about his share. He is perpetually in
a grievance that he has been overreached, or that he has been bullied,
or that he has been robbed, save in those very rare cases where the
success is so overwhelming, the fortunes so rapid, that there is no room
for a grudge. In almost every other case that I have come across there
is that element of recrimination--behind the Jew's back--even under
conditions of success.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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