The World Significance of the Russian Revolution/Section 9
IX.—The Jew as Trader and Revolutionary.
Generations of persecution and repression developed in the ghettos a race whose powers of adaptation under such treatment must necessarily have preserved many of the meanest (the most adaptable) as well as a few of the noblest elements (the most resistant to a mean environment) amongst them. Constantly plundered and robbed of their goods, they have learned to handle the power that lies in bonds and exchangeable tokens of wealth. When deprived of the concrete goods of this world they have set store by the abstract or the ideal. The Jewish race has produced great financiers and merchants, but also great scientists, great philosophers and great prophets. When a Jew believes in an ideal he will give himself up to it more whole-heartedly, perhaps, than any Gentile. When he rebels against the inhospitable country of his birth, he rebels passionately with a slow, persistent fire, and waits for his revenge; but when he can identify himself and his power with the country which sheltered him, he becomes one of those rare powers of consolidation which was brought to so fine a pitch in the person of Benjamin Disraeli.
It would be futile to suggest that all Bolsheviks are Jews, or that it is merely a Jew movement. I am only trying to show why, as a matter of fact, Revolutionaries are so largely Jews in Russia. The full significance of the part played by the Jews in Bolshevism must be postponed for a while; meanwhile it is sufficient to point out that:
(1) Russia had particular attractions for the "usurer" instinct of the Jews as a class, because of the greater thriftlessness helplessness of the illiterate peasantry, and the absence of middle-class rivals.
(2) The not unnatural resentment of Jews in Russia at their repression, and exclusion from so profitable and favourable a field for their particular type of genius. Their suppression resulted in the formation of the most formidable of the revolutionary parties in modern Russia the so-called "Jewish Bund."
(3) The equally natural solicitude of a paternal government, its primary duty, to save its masses from exploitation at the hands of a foreign element in its midst. The "pogroms" which even now continue, in spite of the protection of a Jew bureaucracy, being sufficient proof of the Russian peasant's hatred of the Jew—deplorable in their effects and in themselves though pogroms are.
At this point it may not be out of place to make a very brief digression by pointing out that it was in England, the home of the Jew, that the Tzar's Government was always systematically vilified, and for years made out as the blackest home of tyranny and oppression in the world. Atlhough there were English writers like Mr. Stephen Graham who, years ago, went out to Russia to live there because he considered it the freest country in Europe. It was, of course, the least commercialised, while England, one of the most commercialised countries—and the greatest lovers and entertainers of Jews—in the world, in consequence, sees no merit in a simple agricultural existence. Neither is it surprising in view of her cult of unlimited industrialism, and its consequences—an ever-expanding industrial and urban population—free commercial exploitation by all and sundry middlemen, usurers, Jews; and the translations of all values into money-values, by which alone can be realized that ideal of personal equality, dead-levelness and compulsory mediocrity in which she glories under the name of Liberalism and Democracy. Can England with her tradition of 300 years of Jew-loving free-mammonism, democratic-shopkeeping, Puritanism, and obsessional urban-industrial expansion, in any case understand a healthier ideal of rural simplicity and paternal government, which, in spite of the obvious short-comings of his successor, was the ideal of Alexander III?