Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [116]
The sudden and malign bloom of anti-Semitism in France was part of a wider outbreak. As a social and political force anti-Semitism emerged in the late Nineteenth Century out of other expanding forces which were building tensions between classes and among nations. Industrialization, imperialism, the growth of cities, the decline of the countryside, the power of money and the power of machines, the clenched fist of the working class, the red flag of Socialism, the wane of the aristocracy, all these forces and factors were churning like the bowels of a volcano about to erupt. “Something very great—ancient, cosmopolitan, feudal, agrarian Europe,” as a contemporary said, was dying and in the process creating conflicts, fears and newfound strengths that needed outlet.
A classic outlet was anti-Semitism. As scapegoat to draw off discontent from the governing class, it appeared in Germany under Bismarck in the seventies and in Russia in the eighties. The pogroms of 1881 and the subsequent disabling May Laws awoke in Jews a recognition of Mazzini’s dictum, “Without a country you are the bastards of humanity.” Anti-Semitism served equally as scapegoat for the propertied class, and its virulence at this time reflected a profound unease under a sense of impending breakup of the old order. Old values were giving way. Anarchist assaults, Socialist agitation, the growing self-consciousness of labour were threatening position and property, and nothing so generates hostility as a threat to possessions. In the West the new antipathy afflicted cultivated men like Balfour’s secretary, George Wyndham, and Theodore Roosevelt’s particular friend, the English diplomat Cecil Spring-Rice. Henry Adams expressed it rabidly and incessantly: he lived only in the wish to see the end of “infernal Jewry” and all “gold-bugs”; “we are in the hands of Jews who do what they please with our values”; “I read with interest France juive, Libre Parole and all”; “I pass the day reading Drumont’s anti-Semitic ravings.”
In men of this class the sentiment sprang from hatred of the new power of money (although nothing concerned Adams himself more than money), that is, of new “gold-bug” money deriving from stocks and shares and financial operations, in place of the acceptable form deriving from land and rents. The Jewish problem, explained the Duc d’Orléans during the Affair, was one of economic war. The day was approaching when all persons with attachment to the land and thus to their country would have to defend themselves against “the anonymous and vagabond” fortunes of the Jews, who had gorged themselves on the ruin of the Union Générale with the Government as their accomplice. The Union Générale was a Catholic bank founded with the blessing of Pope Leo XIII with the express purpose of attracting the investments of the faithful. On the advice of their priests, the aristocracy invested in it their capital, and modest Catholic families their savings. When, owing to the superior resources and shrewd maneuvers of its rivals, including the Rothschilds, the Union Générale collapsed in 1882, rich and poor Catholics alike lost their funds. The Jews were blamed. The Jewish “question” began to be discussed in the clerical and royalist papers. Secret plots and malignant powers were attributed to them. All the arguments which the Jew had inspired as the perennial stranger who persisted in retaining his own identity were revived. Jews were not Frenchmen; they were aliens within the French body, probably conspiring against France, certainly against the Church; they were promoters of the anti-clerical movement and enemies of Catholic bien-pensants.
French anti-Semitism, like its virulent appearances elsewhere in history, required the juncture of an instigator with circumstance. The instigator in this case was the previously