false friendship which I have just dealt with under the head of disingenuousness, but of the genuine attempts at courtesy towards this alien people—the courtesy expressed by those who have no intimate relations with them, and do not desire to have intimate relations with them. It is almost invariably, in those who commonly avoid the Jews, a courtesy which expresses patronage on the surface of it. It may be compared with the courtesy that rich men show to poor men—as offensive a thing as there is in the world.
And how unintelligent is our dealing with any particular Jewish problem; for instance, the problem of Jewish immigration! We mask it under false names, calling it "the alien question," "Russian immigration," "the influx of undesirables from Eastern and Central Europe," and any number of other timorous equivalents. The process is one of cowardly falsehood, but the falsehood is not more remarkable than the stupidity, for no one is taken in and least of all the Jews themselves.
This unintelligence extends to many another field. How unintelligent are the efforts of the writers who would, as it were, make amends to the Jews for former persecution by putting imaginary Jew heroes into their books. In this particular we offend less than did our fathers of the Victorian period. Dickens' offence was grave. He disliked Jews instinctively; when he wrote of a Jew according to his inclination he made him out a criminal. Hearing that he must make amends for this action, he introduced a Jew who is like nothing on earth—a sort of compound of an Arab Sheik and a Family Bible picture from the Old Testament, and the whole embroidered on an utterly non-Jewish—a purely English character.
How unintelligent are the various defences of the Jew by the non-Jew, even with the best intentions! You will hear people tell you solemnly, as a sort of revelation, that there are kindly, witty Jews, Jews who are good prize-fighters or good fencers. I well remember one old gentleman who