'Frank Danby' was not guilty of exaggerating the feeling when in Dr. Phillips: A Maida Vale Idyll she made one of the Jewish characters exclaim 'I don't believe in Christians. The men drink, the women are bad.'

Pity is sometimes by the kind-hearted bestowed upon Jews. because of the feeling that is—or let us hope was-entertained for them by their Christian neighbours; but never has pity been so misplaced. The Christian world has never realised the supreme contempt in which it was held by the Jews who mixed only with Jews even the more cosmopolitan members of the latter community could not refrain from exultation as they thought in anticipation of Disraeli's famous utterance: Half Christendom worships a Jewess, and the other half a Jew.' The strongest feeling in the Jew is pride of race, nurtured through the centuries -the pride of belonging to a race whose origin goes back to days so remote that only a few legends, a few names and a decalogue survive-but the names are reverenced by the entire Christian world and the laws rule the entire civilised race. The Jew may humble himself in business but that is for his own ultimate gain— he comes of a race the members of which (perhaps unduly) exemplify the truth of the old adage of stooping to conquer; but the most disreputable-looking 'old clo'' man, the very Jewish beggar, too, who comes to the back door, regards himself complacently as superior to any member of any other race, and never forgets that his ancestors stood for civilisation when the wodestained Briton was running wild in the forests. He is of the elect. Fate cannot touch him, for is he not of the chosen people? It is not strange, therefore, that the proudest boast of the Jew is that he is a Jew; nor that he looks upon other and newer religious communities in very much the same way as the Church of England regards the various nonconformist sects. Nor has this feeling of pride of race been modified by the treatment accorded to the race. Persecuted in most countries, merely tolerated in the rest, an alien in all, it is from this feeling that he has drawn the courage that has enabled him to survive. Even to-day-when active persecution in most countries is a thing of the past-the greatest crime in the eyes of his compatriots that a Jew can commit is to deny his race. To them a renegade Jew is the most contemptible thing on earth, except a converted Jew; for no Jew, however broad-minded in other respects, can ever be brought to believe in the sincerity of the convert. A community that never proselytises cannot believe in proselytes. The objection is not perhaps so much that the man changes his religion-though that is hard to swallow-but that he commits the unpardonable crime of betraying his race.

At the back of the disbelief in the morality of Christian men and women, there was in the minds of Jewish parents the

fear, if they mixed with their Gentile neighbours, of intermarriage between the families; and intermarriage was regarded as the most heinous crime that could be committed short of conversion to Christianity. So it remained that while Christian and Jew met every day in business, outside that sphere they passed like ships in the night. The situation has been admirably summarised by 'Frank Danby.'

In a sort of jealous exclusiveness these Jews lived by and among themselves [she has written in Dr. Phillips]. They fancied they did so from choice. It was not so: it was a remnant of the time when the yellow cap and curiously-shaped gaberdine marked them out as lepers in the crowd. The garb had been discarded, but the shrinking feeling of generations was still lingering. There is a certain pride in these people; they are at once the creatures and outcasts of civilisation. The difference between Jew and Gentile was once one of religion. Now it is a difference that it will take as many centuries of extermarriage to overcome, as it has taken centuries of intermarriage to bring about. The Jews feel this acutely. They remember the leper mark that has been taken from them, and they shrink from accentuating the remembrance by association with the people whose ancestors affixed it. Put two strange Jews, one from London and one from the Antipodes, amid a hundred people of other nationalities, and in a quarter of an hour they will have recognised their kinship, and have gravitated towards each other in unconscious Ishmaelitism against the rest of the company. Sections of them are trying very hard to struggle against this race-barrier, and with a modicum of success. But they have much to contend against. Of course this congregating together in a social gathering was usually the result of shyness and want of savoir-faire, and was confined to those classes of Jews unused to going about and meeting people other than of their own race.

Dr. Phillips was published in 1886, and since then the struggle against the race-barrier has been carried on with the greatest persistence by the race which, Disraeli said, can do everything but fail. Then, the vast majority of Jews were essentially provincial, though perhaps not so narrow as the inhabitants of a small town, because their business generally brought them into touch with inhabitants of other, and often far distant, countries; but their interests outside trade were few. Music they loved always, but the great worlds of art and letters were to most of them unknown. As Jews made money, however, they took care that their children should be better educated; and as the young generation became better educated they began to lose the provincial taint that had disqualified them. The girls were still kept among their friends of the race, but the men began to move among their Christian peers, a little nervously at first, then, finding no harm come of it, more boldly. They exchanged ideas, and widened their horizon; and told the narrow-minded old folk at home that all Christian men did not drink, that all Christian women were not bad, that, indeed, the Jew had misjudged the Christian as for centuries the Christian had misjudged the Jew.

This discovery was good for individual Jews, but it was most harmful to the race. From this time may be dated the genesis of the disintegration of the Jewish nation. What centuries of persecution had been powerless to do, has been effected in a score of years by friendly intercourse. With the world against him the Jew had not yielded one jot or tittle of his distinctive attributes-he wore his gaberdine as proudly as a peer his garter; the world with him-the world now a very pleasant world-he allowed the barriers that had endured through the centuries to fall into decay. It must, of course, be clearly understood that this does not yet apply to the majority of the Jewish nation; indeed, at present the feeling, though spreading gradually through all the ranks of the community, is in the main confined to a certain set, the members of which are artists, men of letters, soldiers, sailors, and those wealthy distinguished families who have, indeed, for generations, mixed in general society. These folk form a class apart, as distinct from the rest of their compatriots as a member of the Bachelors' or the Guards' from the suburban dandy. They are well-bred, they are well-read, they are, like their less cultured brethren, remarkably intelligent, they are received everywhere, and if the prejudice against their nationality is not, even in their case, entirely abandoned, it is at least very considerably abated. They are a credit to their race, but at the same time they are, curiously enough, the great danger against which it has to contend. To say that the Jews as a body are more popular in England than they were fifty years ago would be a statement far more daring than any that the present writer is prepared to advance. Individual Jews may be many are, indeed-very popular, admired, and respected; but the prejudice against the race is still very strong, as is only to be expected in a country where it has become a commonplace of language to describe a mean, overreaching man as a regular Jew.' What then, it is natural to ask, is the reason for this unpopularity? It cannot be mainly religious differences, though there are strong influences in country places where the Church and its allied associations form the hub of the little social world; nor can it be entirely that Jews are exceptionally good men of business. Is it, then, merely the old prejudice, that dates from the Crucifixion? or is it the character of the Jew of to-day. Disraeli, who had no doubt of the existence of the prejudice, traced it to the former cause.

If [he addressed the House of Commons on the Jewish Disabilities Bill] you had not forgotten what you owe to this people-if you were grateful for the literature which for thousands of years has brought so much instruction and so much consolation to the sons of men, you as Christians would be only too ready to seize the first opportunity of meeting the claims of those that profess this religion; but you are influenced by the darkest superstition of the darkest ages that ever existed in this country. It is this feeling

which has been kept out of this debate, indeed that has been kept secret in yourselves enlightened as you are and that is unknowingly influencing others abroad.

Probably to-day the prejudice is based upon both of the causes suggested. It is not, indeed, surprising that the Jew should be unpopular, since for so long he was restricted to money-lending, and other displeasing callings. A man doesn't realise a fortune without giving his mind to it, and the making of money brings into play all the inferior qualities,' John Davidson has written; and this at first sight would appear to apply equally to the Gentile and the Jew. There is this difference: that many Christian men are content with their position, few Jews. The present writer, who in his youth spent some months in the City, remembers being struck by the fact that whereas the Christian clerks confined their interests mainly to the duties imposed upon them and, so far as their future in business was concerned, limited their speculations to the prospects of obtaining a rise of salary, the Jewish warehouseman was careful to learn all he could, not only about his own department but also about that of others, and while he was no less eager than the others for an increased wage, his thoughts were concentrated on the best way to prepare for setting up on his own account.

It must be pointed out, however, that to the Jew while business is business, it is also something more. It is his passion, it is the love of his life. He does not regard it merely as a means of providing himself and his family with a competence; he devotes all his thoughts and energies to it. He may appear mean and grasping, yet the meanness is not to him meanness, and the grasping is not greed; these are the weapons amongst others that he uses in the fight. It is the battle as much as or more than the results that he enjoys; in it for centuries past he has been compelled to dissipate the warlike tendencies that once animated his nation. It is this feeling that explains so much of the Jewish characteristics that Thackeray, usually so antagonistic to the race, saw and understood and had some sympathy with.

He [the old clo' man] held in his hand a white hat, which I am sure he had just purchased, and which was the cause of the grief which smote his noble features [the novelist wrote in a 'Roundabout Paper,' Autour de Mon Chapeau]. Of course, I cannot particularise the sum, but he had given too much for that hat. He felt he might have got the thing for less money. It was not the amount, I am sure; it was the principle involved. He had given fourpence (let us say) for that which threepence would have purchased. He had been done: and a manly shame was upon him, that he, whose energy, acuteness, experience, point of honour, should have made him the victor in any mercantile duel in which he should engage, had been overcome by a porter's wife, who very likely sold him the old hat, or by a student who was tired of it. I can understand his grief. . He had desired,

...

coaxed, schemed, haggled, got what he wanted, and now found he had paid too much for his bargain. . . . The Old Clothes' Man has been defeated in one of the daily battles of his most interesting, chequered, adventurous life.

The Jew is, indeed, a paradox. Grasping in the city, yet at home charitable and generous; the shrewdest of business men, yet a dreamer; too often contemptuous of ideals, yet in the inmost recesses of his soul an idealist.

ness

There is yet another mainspring of the Jewish character. The Jew is incurably ambitious; no rung on the ladder entirely satisfies him except the rung at the top. Until he is there he is always restlessly and often resistlessly striving to reach the goal. The determination to succeed in the world of busidoes not bring into play very desirable desirable qualities, and it must be confessed that the Jew in the transition stage is not always a pleasant person. He is all too frequently selfassertive and thick-skinned; he is often, alas! when success begins to crown his efforts, purse-proud and ostentatious. These are the qualities that are most easily observed by those who look on; his virtues of industry, perseverance, generosity, of good heart, of hospitality, of devotion to his family, of love of home, which redeem him, are not so obvious, and so escape notice. When he has secured the object for which all his life he has striven it is usually too late for him to change his outward demeanour, and his arrogance rather than his kindliness still attracts attention. Happily each year improves the position. The sons are better educated; the grandsons have the rough edges removed at public schools and universities, they have less occasion to assert their position, they have no need to throw themselves into the rude scramble for money, they enter a profession, they work, they succeed, they become distinguished ornaments, not only of their own nation, but of the country in which they reside. No longer is their hand against every man; on the contrary, every man's hand is stretched out to grasp theirs, for the Englishman respects and admires not so much success as the brains that have made success possible. The Englishman, as every Jew will admit, has his dislikes but he does not cherish petty rancours. Every country has the Jews it deserves; and the English Jews by universal admission are the pick of the world's crop. When the Jew is fairly treated he is not ungrateful-of course it is, logically speaking, absurd that he should be grateful for fair treatment, but when he sees how his fellow-Jews are treated in other lands he is, small wonder! grateful; and he shows his gratitude by becoming an excellent and a loyal citizen.

It is now necessary to discuss the effect that Anglicisation is having upon the Jewish race, but before entering upon that