And this truth applies not only to friendships, it even applies to marriages. Marriage between Christian and Jew is, in that rank, an affair of interest, and the bitterness the relation breeds is excessive. This disingenuousness, then--lack of candour on the part of our race in its dealings with the Jew--a vice particularly rife among the wealthy and middle classes (far less common among the poor), extends, as I have said, to history. We dare not, or will not teach in our history books the plain facts of the relations between our own race and the Jews. We throw the story of these relations, which are among the half-dozen leading factors of history, right into the background even when we do mention it. In what they are taught of history the schoolboy and the undergraduate come across no more than a line or two upon those relations. The teacher cannot be quite silent upon the expulsion of the Jews under Edward I or upon their return under Cromwell. A man cannot read the history of the Roman Empire without hearing of the Jewish war. A man cannot read the Constitutional History of England without hearing of the special economic position of Jews under the Mediaeval Crown. But the vastness of the subject, its permanent and insistent character throughout two thousand years; its great episodes; its general effect--all that is deliberately suppressed. How many people, for instance, of those who profess a good knowledge of the Roman Empire, even in its details, are aware, let alone have written upon the tremendous massacres and counter-massacres of Jews and Europeans, the mass of edicts alternately protecting and persecuting Jews; the economic position of the Jew, especially in the later empire; the character of the dispersion? There took place in Cyprus and in the Libyan cities under Hadrian a Jewish movement against the surrounding non-Jewish society far exceeding in violence the late wreckage of Russia, which to-day fills all our thoughts. The massacres were wholesale and so were the reprisals. The Jews killed a quarter of a million of the people of Cyprus alone, and the Roman authorities answered with a repression which was a pitiless war. One might pile up instances indefinitely. The point is, that the average educated man has never been allowed to hear of them. What a factor the Jew was in that Roman State from which we all spring, how he survived its violent antagonism to him and his antagonism to it; the special privilege whereby he was excepted from a worship of its gods; his handling of its finances--all the intimate parallel which it affords to later times is left in silence. The average educated man who has been taught, even in some fullness, his Roman History, leaves that study with the impression that the Jews (if he had noticed them at all) are but an insignificant detail in the story.