"WHY JEWS SUCCEED."
TO this question, so often asked, Mr. Zangwill, who is both a competent and an eloquent advocate of his people, gives in the New Liberal Review for May a prompt and flat reply. They do not succeed, he says, and he obviously speaks the truth. There is no race in the world of equal reputation which has failed so completely as the Jew, which is so miserably poor, or which suffers con- tinuously such daily, almost hourly, oppression. Even the Armenians under Turkish rule are better off than the mass of the Jewish race living in Russia and Roumania, for though every now and then they are massacred by order of the Sultan, they are not shut out from the professions, may hold any land they can acquire, and are not liable at any moment of their lives to be treated like dangerous animals by mobs whose very motives they are unable to discern. As Mr. Zangwill says, "eleven millions of human atoms scattered incoherently through the world, devoid of any common territory or common power, unable to concentrate their force in any desired direction, devoid of a national art, and almost destitute of a contemporary literature, even their ancient unity of religion broken into a dozen fragments, half their number crowded into the Pale in Russia, congested in towns, and forbidden even the fields of the Pale itself, hundreds of thousands of others denied in Roumania almost the rights of animals, liable even when they are prospering under nominal equality, as in France and Germany, to perpetual back- washes of anti-Semitism, excluded in free America itself from the general social life, the serfs of the world the Jews present anything but the pict ire of a successful people." Half the Jews of the world live in Russia, and their average property is officially calculated as under a pound a head ; in Roumania it is even less ; in Asia the body of the people are mendicant paupers ; and even in London, where they are absolutely free, the immense majority live by working under sweaters for fourteen hours a day in overcrowded rooms for less wages than Christians will take. Their industry is a marvel, they are free from the curse of drink, their cleverness makes them dreaded by their neighbours and rivals much as the dwarfs were dreaded by the giants, and this is the result -of it all. Full of capacity, they have never acquired anywhere the smallest direct political power ; the most stiff-necked of races, they have never risen on their oppressors ; the most hungry of all peoples for useful knowledge, they have never become educated' the vainest of mankind, they have submitted in countries like Germany and America, where neither King nor mob can touch them, to a social boycott. They have had time, which for such a purpose is almost unlimited, more than seventeen hundred years ; the whole world has been open to them, for they can, and do, retain their ex- ceptional vitality anywhere, in Spain as in Scotland, in Bengal as in Pennsylvania ; but they have never founded a State, never become a ruling caste, never lifted the feet even of races far inferior to themselves from off their necks, or made of any one of the ruling races of mankind their steady protectors. Successful people, forsooth ! We declare, as we read their modern history, we could almost believe the blasphemous superstition of the Continent which attributes a Corsican vendetta to the All Merciful, and supposes Him to be eternally avenging on the innocent the guilt of their remote forefathers in the murder of Christ.
So far we are entirely with Mr. Zangwill ; but we do not feel so completely satisfied with his explanation of the success of individual Jews. This has been so exceptional and so continuous, especially in the accumulation of capital, as to spread throughout Europe the absurd illusion that Jews are all rich, to give birth to the proverb, "As rich as a Jew," and to create on the Continent a secret but strongly operative fear that if the social boycott were lifted off the Jews, as well OA legislative restrictions, they would monopolise all the professions, all the professoss' chairs, all the newspapers, and nearly all representation in the Parliaments. That is the excuse intelligent Russians always make for their dreadful laws of exclusion ; the Germans declare that the process is going on, and must be stopped ; while the Anti-Semites of France assert with curses that if the Jews are not expelled France will become before long a Judaic heritage. The panic is ridiculous, for Jews have done nothing in war, and nothing very particular in art, or literature, or applied science ; and, as Mr. Zangwill points out, they have been far outstripped even as money-makers by dull Anglo-Saxons. Any Jew may grow as rich as he pleases in the United States without being either banished or lynched, but the American millionaires who have recently thrown the world into a rather silly twitter are not Jews. Mr. Rockefeller, Mr. Carnegie, Mr. Pierpont Morgan, the Vanderbilts, and the Astors are none of them Jews, even by distant origin, and two of them at least out- rank in the possession of capital disposable at will any single member of the greatest of Jewish firms. Still, many Jews have been singularly successful, and the con- trast between their position and that of the body of their kinsfolk is curious enough to suggest inquiry. Mr. Zang- will answers it by recapitulating the general economic excellences of the Jewish race, which with their intelli- gence and their special habit of training households to act as trustworthy partners account to him for the facts. They are thrifty, they are sober, they are intelligent, and they are trained to seek money, and therefore they are potential millionaires. We do not quite see it. These qualities do account for the Jew millionaires in part, but then they account for so much too much, for if all Jews are industrious and intelligent and honest and temperate and disposed to trust those bred in the same nursery, why do the immense majority of Jews fail so obviously in the battle of life ? Oh, says Mr. Zangwill, that is the result of external oppression. Conceivably ; but have not the successful Jews been oppressed as well as the unsuc- cessful, and yet have emerged, to be delighted sometimes with the chance of a little kicking back ? Jews are free enough, heaven knows, in Whitechapel, and a more miserable, overworked, oversqueezed group of human beings does not exist. We should be rather disposed to suggest that in this matter of money-making a certain law of the Jewish people, visible even in their earliest history and connected in some way with their very peculiar collec- tive nature, was still in operation. There never was a nation in whom individuals towered so unmistakably above the mass. Never was there a people more earthy, never one that produced loftier souls. The prophets who bore aloft the torch of Monotheism came from a race that was always wanting to follow the polytheistic beliefs of other Semites. The least poetic of peoples evolved the poets whose songs have been the solace of the world ever since the birth of Christianity broke up their seclusion. The body of the Jews assented to or urged the execution of Christ, yet from amidst their rabble stepped two Jews who reduced Christ's system into the doctrines which have become the ultimate laws of the white race, now the masters of the world. The Jew nation is a morass in which, under conditions that the naturalist cannot yet fully explain, there grow mighty oaks. Reading its history, we find nothing so wonderful in the undoubted fact that while the mass of Jews have for ages failed to make money; a, few individuals should have displayed a singular capacity for making it in great lumps. One would not have expected Anselm Rothschild out of a Frankfort Ghetto ; but then would one have expected Moses Mendelssohn out of aD.-..ssau schoolhouse, or Heine out of the hopeless Philistines of Hamburg, who would have liked to choke him for singing ? Mr. Beit is one of the richest men in England, if not the richest, and possibly may have found business brains for Mr. Rhodes ; but he is not Mr. Beit because the Jews, as people are saying now, if enfranchised would all show the capacity to become millionaires. They would much more probably all fail in freedom as they have failed in slavery, with the exception of a few, who would soar to very great business heights indeed,—half the height even, it is possible, of the Dutch-American Rockefeller. Exceptional Jews do succeed exceptionally ; but one reason why they seem to succeed amazingly is the extreme flatness of the plain above which they rise. The terror at the idea of their enfranchisement, which on the Continent haunts even some acute minds, seems to us singularly baseless. Individuals among them may succeed greatly, and will be as safe reservoirs of capital as any Rockefeller or Vanderbilt ; but the race will remain an ordinary one with only a special quality, which it displayed also ages ago, of throwing up remarkable individualities.
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