The New JerusalemChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Religion
The New Jerusalem
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Jerusalem; Jews -- Restoration; Palestine
by the waters of Babylon. For exile is the worst kind of bondage.
In insisting upon that at least the Zionists have insisted upon
a profound truth, with many applications to many other moral issues.
It is true that for any one whose heart is set on a particular
home or shrine, to be locked out is to be locked in.
The narrowest possible prison for him is the whole world.
It will be well to notice briefly, however, how the principle
applies to the two Anti-Semitic arguments already considered.
The first is the charge of usury and unproductive loans, the second
the charge either of treason or of unpatriotic detachment.
The charge of usury is regarded, not unreasonably, as only
a specially dangerous development of the general charge of
uncreative commerce and the refusal of creative manual exercise;
the unproductive loan is only a minor form of the unproductive labour.
It is certainly true that the latter complaint is, if possible,
commoner than the former, especially in comparatively simple
communities like those of Palestine. A very honest Moslem Arab
said to me, with a singular blend of simplicity and humour, "A Jew
does not work; but he grows rich. You never see a Jew working;
and yet they grow rich. What I want to know is, why do we not
all do the same? Why do we not also do this and become rich?"
This is, I need hardly say, an over-simplification. Jews often
work hard at some things, especially intellectual things.
But the same experience which tells us that we have known many industrious
Jewish scholars, Jewish lawyers, Jewish doctors, Jewish pianists,
chess-players and so on, is an experience which cuts both ways.
The same experience, if carefully consulted, will probably tell us
that we have not known personally many patient Jewish ploughmen,
many laborious Jewish blacksmiths, many active Jewish hedgers
and ditchers, or even many energetic Jewish hunters and fishermen.
In short, the popular impression is tolerably true to life,
as popular impressions very often are; though it is not fashionable
to say so in these days of democracy and self-determination. Jews
do not generally work on the land, or in any of the handicrafts
that are akin to the land; but the Zionists reply that this is
because it can never really be their own land. That is Zionism,
and that has really a practical place in the past and future of Zion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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