The New JerusalemChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Religion
The New Jerusalem
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Jerusalem; Jews -- Restoration; Palestine
In short, the Jewish problem differs from anything like the gipsy
problem in two highly practical respects. First, the Jews already
exercise colossal cosmopolitan financial power. And second,
the modern societies they live in also grant them vital forms of national
political power. Here the vagrant is already as rich as a miser
and the vagrant is actually made a mayor. As will be seen shortly,
there is a Jewish side of the story which leads really to the same
ending of the story; but the truth stated here is quite independent
of any sympathetic or unsympathetic view of the race in question.
It is a question of fact, which a sensible Jew can afford to recognise,
and which the most sensible Jews do very definitely recognise.
It is really irrational for anybody to pretend that the Jews
are only a curious sect of Englishmen, like the Plymouth Brothers
or the Seventh Day Baptists, in the face of such a simple fact
as the family of Rothschild. Nobody can pretend that such
an English sect can establish five brothers, or even cousins,
in the five great capitals of Europe. Nobody can pretend that the
Seventh Day Baptists are the seven grandchildren of one grandfather,
scattered systematically among the warring nations of the earth.
Nobody thinks the Plymouth Brothers are literally brothers,
or that they are likely to be quite as powerful in Paris or in
Petrograd as in Plymouth.
The Jewish problem can be stated very simply after all.
It is normal for the nation to contain the family.
With the Jews the family is generally divided among the nations.
This may not appear to matter to those who do not believe in nations,
those who really think there ought not to be any nations.
But I literally fail to understand anybody who does believe in patriotism
thinking that this state of affairs can be consistent with it.
It is in its nature intolerable, from a national standpoint,
that a man admittedly powerful in one nation should be bound
to a man equally powerful in another nation, by ties more private
and personal even than nationality. Even when the purpose is not
any sort of treachery, the very position is a sort of treason.
Given the passionately patriotic peoples of the west of Europe especially,
the state of things cannot conceivably be satisfactory to a patriot.
But least of all can it conceivably be satisfactory to a Jewish patriot;
by which I do not mean a sham Englishman or a sham Frenchman,
but a man who is sincerely patriotic for the historic and highly
civilised nation of the Jews.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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