The Jews should further remember that to-day every one outside their own
community is potentially an Anti-Semite. Not every one, perhaps not even
yet a majority, at least in the directing and wealthier classes, is
other than friendly or indifferent to the Jews, but there has grown up
in every one not a Jew something of reaction against the Jewish power.
It requires but an accident to change this from the latent and slight
thing it is in most men to an angry passion. I have noticed that among
the most violent of Anti-Semites are those who had passed some
considerable portion of their early manhood in ignorance of the whole
problem. These come across a Jew unexpectedly in some relation hostile
to them--they lose money through some Jewish financial operation, or
they connect, for the first time, in middle age, several misfortunes of
theirs with a common element of Jewish action, or they find Jews mixed
up in some attack on their country: thenceforward they become and remain
unrepentant Anti-Semites.
The dupe, when he discovers he has been duped, is dangerous, and there
is even a considerable category of those who have suffered nothing, even
by accident, at the hand of the Jew, yet who, when they discover what
the Jewish power is, feel they have been played with, and grow angry at
the trickery.
It has been and will be with Anti-Semitism as with all movements. When
they begin they are ridiculed. As they grow they come to be feared and
boycotted; but of those that are successful it may be justly said that
the moment of success begins when they turn the corner and from a fad
become a fashion.
It is still (doubtfully) the fashion to separate oneself from the
Anti-Semitic movement. You still hear men, when they write or speak upon
the Jewish problem, no matter with what hostility to the Jew, excuse
themselves as a rule at the beginning of their remarks by saying, "I am
no Anti-Semite." For some flavour of the old ridicule still attaches to
the name. But fashions change rapidly and the new fashion which comes in
to support a growing thing, when it does arrive, arrives in a flood.
We can all of us remember the time when the talk of nationalization, the
old State Socialist talk, was the talk of a few faddists who were
everywhere ridiculed and despised. To-day it is the fashion; and the
practice of State control, State support, the universality of State
action, is such that it is those who oppose it who are now the faddists
and the cranks.
We can all of us remember the day when, in the United States, a
prohibitionist was a faddist, and a very unpopular faddist at that. We
have seen fashion catch him up with a vengeance.
We can all of us remember the day when the supporters of women's
suffrage in England were a very small group of faddists indeed: we know
what has happened there!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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