If a man cannot tolerate the contrast between the Jewish race and our own, or if he regards that race as possessing energies which will invariably defeat him in the competition of commerce, then let him keep away from a Jewish alliance altogether. It is the simplest plan. But to immix himself with the Jewish commercial activity and then to grumble at the results is despicable.
All this is worse, of course, when one is dealing with relations even closer than those of commerce. Those relations are numerous in the modern world, and disingenuousness in them takes the worst possible form. Men, especially of the wealthier classes of the gentry, will make the closest friends of Jews with the avowed purpose of personal advantage. They think the friendship will help them to great positions in the State, or to the advancement of private fortune, or to fame. In that calculation they are wise. For the Jew has to-day exceptional power in all these things. They therefore have the Jew continually at their tables, they stay continually under the Jew's roof. In all the relations of life they are as intimate as friends can be. Yet they relieve the strain which such an unnatural situation imposes by a standing sneer at their Jewish friends in their absence. One may say of such men (and they are to-day an increasing majority among our rich) that the falsity of their situation has got on their nerves. It has become a sort of disease with them; and I am very certain that when the opportunity comes, when the public reaction against Jewish power rises, clamorous, insistent and open, they will be among the first to take their revenge. It is abominable, but it is true.
And this truth applies not only to friendships, it even applies to marriages. Marriage between Christian and Jew is, in that rank, an affair of interest, and the bitterness the relation breeds is excessive.