Before we move on to the great post-Christian pogrom in Nazi Germany, it might be as well to assess the reasons behind the failure to integrate the Jews into Christendom, and the price that had to be paid for failure.
The pogroms of Egypt and Rome have demonstrated that, religious factors apart, the existence of a separate and exclusive nation within an empire creates a tension and a potential for pogrom. Over and above this there was in Christendom a strongly religious aspect to the problem of integration. From the beginning of the twelfth century to the Reformation in the sixteenth, the existence of an unbaptised International Jewry in Christian Europe was seen as an anomaly which threatened the unity of both Church and State.
Moreover just as Ramasses had feared that the Jews in Egypt would ally themselves with Asiatic invaders, so monarchs in Europe feared that the Jews would ally themselves with the Moslems. These aspects of Jewry were not, of course, grasped by the masses in Europe. To them the Jew was the pedlar and money-lender, the hated tax-collector and usurer of the Christian princes, the dark stranger who lived mysteriously behind the walls of his ghetto. And at times of crisis, as we have seen, he was the scapegoat, the murderer of Christian children, the son of the murderers of Our Lord, the screen on which was projected all the undesirable things in man whose existence within himself he does not recognise.
This sub-human valuation of the Jew was reinforced by the current legislation. Forbidden to carry arms, to enlist in the army, debarred from the guilds of trade, from posts of civic responsibility, from owning land, he was kept out of the feudal system and made to appear on the fringe of common law and unworthy to carry the badge of citizenship. It was reinforced, too, by the conviction in the Middle Ages that a man did not have his full stature unless he was a Christian and a member of Christ’s Mystical Body.
As time went on the line of demarcation between Jew and Christian became ever sharper. At higher levels it was noticed that discontented Christians gravitated towards the Jews and formed with them a troublesome nucleus. It was remembered that the hated Frederick II had them in his company. They were suspected of friendship with Moslems and seen as a threat to European unity. At lower levels they became the symbols of usury and financial oppression.
Nevertheless it must not be assumed that the strings of tension were being tightened by the moving of the Jews away from the Christians. Equally the Christians had moved farther away from the Jews. This was the inevitable result of mistakes and misunderstandings.
The major mistake appears to have been the conviction that all Jews were in bad faith. All of them were deliberately blind to Christianity and, as such, conscious enemies of Church and State. The possibility that many Jews were blind to the Faith because God had not given them the gift of faith was barely considered. Nor was it considered that part of their obstinacy could be attributed to fear and hatred begotten by Christian pogrom. Just as one of the obstacles now to the spread of Christianity in Africa, India and Asia is the identification in the popular mind of Christianity and former high-handed Liberal imperial policies, so too in the mind of the Jew Christianity was identified with pogrom.
This view was further reinforced by the mistake of forced baptism. Time and again this was the alternative of butchery in the pogroms that raged in Christendom. How could a Jew believe that Christianity was a religion of love when he saw rampant animals with a crucifix in one hand and a blood-stained sword in the other? The mere existence of pogrom was in itself sufficient to stiffen the morale of the Jewish people.
The third mistake was the imposition upon the Jew of the role of usurer and tax-collector. This made him more unpopular and led to pogrom. In turn this incited him to revenge and gave him, at the same time, financial weapons which are stronger and sharper than swords.
That Jews should hate Christians as much as Christians hated Jews was an inevitable fruit of such a climate. It made the problem of his conversion and of his integration almost insoluble. Some influential Jews undoubtedly intrigued for the downfall of Christianity at particular times. But at all times there were many Jews whose main purpose was not to undermine existing institutions but quite simply to stay alive. In such circumstances it was natural for Jews to show sympathy with any non-Christian Power who would give them the tolerance they had learned not to expect from Christian rulers.
It is here that Christendom paid its price for failure. When the Reformation broke out the Jews became the natural allies of the Reformers. Christianity with many of them had become identified with the Inquisition, and it was the Inquisition that they fought, at least the model of it that Jewry had known in Spain. Here are Dr. Lucien Wolf’s remarks from Transactions, Jewish Historical Society of England, Vol. XI, p. 8:
“From an early period the Marranos in Antwerp had taken an active part in the Reformation movement and had given up their mask of Catholicism for a not less hollow pretence of Calvinism. The change will be readily understood. The simulation of Calvinism brought them new friends, who, like them, were enemies of Rome, Spain and the Inquisition. It helped them in their fight against the Holy Office, and for that reason was very welcome to them. Moreover it was a form of Christianity which came nearer to their own simple Judaism. The result was that they became zealous and valuable allies of the Calvinists.”1
The wealth of Jewry was behind the Reformation in England, Germany and France. Protestant Bibles were printed at Ferrara by Jews and circulated far and wide. Some might see this as damnable intrigue by Jews against Catholics, but to the Jew it was at least a shield against pogrom. Whatever interpretation is given, the financing of the Reformation by Jews was part of the price Christendom had to pay for its failure to integrate them.
In the new post-Christian world to be forged by capitalism and science, the Jews, as we shall see, were to play a dominant role. Capitalism was also to be their downfall in the last and worst of all the pogroms they would have to endure. Throughout the Christian era no official pogrom attempted to exterminate the Jews. At times of fury and group madness the masses did exterminate them, but it was not sanctioned by spiritual or temporal authority. Time after time the Popes condemned the popular madness. The Spanish Inquisition might brain-wash them, the English deport them, the Portuguese enslave them, the French rob them, the Venetians isolate them—but, officially, no State set out to exterminate them. This is the modern prerogative of German Pharaohs and Russian Caesars.
The Jews had their prophet in Karl Marx. He warned that capitalism was the root and source of class hatred. Let them become identified with capital and they are at the source of trouble. Marxism needed only a Lenin to prolong the dictatorship of the State indefinitely, or a Hitler to arrest it at the level of extreme nationalism, and there is the Jew for both of them, the capitalist, the enemy of the new regime, the manipulator of the proletariat or the Herrenvolk, ready to be thrown to the wolves.
However, the writing on the wall was not seen. Dr. Max Raisin could write in 1923: “Socialism itself was largely a product of the Jewish mind.... The very latest period of Jewish history, stretching for seventy years, from 1848 to 1918, will doubtless for ever rank in Jewish annals as the most important and in a large sense the most glorious page in the story of the Jewish people since the destruction of the second Temple at the hands of Titus ... a new day is at hand when the weak and oppressed of the earth will find themselves permanently delivered... the beginning of this complete emancipation has already been made in the wonderful change in the status of six million Jews wrought overnight, as it were, by the Russian Revolution”.2
This must be the most misguided and saddest prophecy made by any Jew in modern times. The Jews would have done better to listen to Marx and Lenin and see the warning against capital and grasp the implication of bloody revolution.