by Hilaire Belloc. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1922. 8vo, xx pp. $3.00.
THE entire argument of this essay flows from one premise, which can be stated in very simple terms. Mr. Belloc insists that a Jew is a Jew and can never become an Englishman, Frenchman, German, or American. Israel, he maintains, is a nation, cannot be fused with any other nation, must remain alien to every nation in which its people are domiciled, inevitably breeds hostility to itself as it acquires a dominant position within any other nation or among nations, and will invite persecution and injustice so long as its nationality remains legally and practically unrecognized. There is a Jewish problem, he maintains, because the Jews form ail essentially and ineradicably foreign element wherever they may be. It is not a religious problem but a problem of race.
The book is written as a contribution to a rational solution of the problem, for the avoidance of a shameful outcome. The first step, the only step on which the author insists with certainty, is to give up the ‘Liberal fiction’ with respect to the Jews. Thai Liberal fiction is sentimental and is not in accord with the facts. It refuses to recognize that a Jew is a member of a distinct and separate people. Mr. Belloc finds the root of all evil in this matter in our ostrichlike attitude. ‘Some little time ago the convention went so far that even a mention . . . of anything Jewish in a general company led to immediate awkwardness. Men looked over their shoulders, women gave downward glances right and left. A sort of hunt began, to see whether anyone present could possibly in any remote connection be offended by the monstrous deed. . . . The adjective “Jewish ‘ acted like a pistol shot. This social avoidance of all reference to Jewry is but an aspect of a much larger political, economic, and general public policy which continues to treat the distinction between Jew and non-Jew as if it did not exist. Mr. Belloc traces this policy in all its phases and in the violent reactions against it. He believes that the Jews as a whole can never be absorbed into any national group, and says, ‘You cannot continue . . . with political equality on the one side and a living spirit of enmity on the other.'
The essay is sincere, and much might be said in praise of its sweep and power and the interest that attaches to the author’s clear and coherent views of many related issues, such as Catholicism, industrial capitalism, and Bolshevism. But its total result is negative. Its service will lie in what it does to help Jews and non-Jews to face the differences between them simply and without concealment, just as other different racial groups face their dissimilarities and in the large, their causes of friction. Yet even this affords no ground for concluding that they cannot be granted full citizenship in a modern democracy. In the United States we cannot entertain any form of race discrimination as a national principle without abandonment of the very basis of our political and social system. In our treatment of the negro in the South and if the Japanese in California we have departed from our principle of political equality, but only locally and (we may at least hope) temporarily. To embrace racial discrimination as a national policy would bring on a disastrous and violent struggle. We cannot abandon the very ark of our covenant. To restrict immigration is one thing; to raise our standards for citizenship is one tiling; to deny citizenship on grounds of race is a totally different thing. That way madness lies.
HENRY W. HOLMES.