whether he is exploited by a German or an English master?" or, again, "Why should the individual Tom Smith be sacrificed for an abstraction called England?" or again, "Nationalism is the great obstacle to the full development of humanity"—all that sort of thing, which we feel by instinct and can, if it is necessary, prove by reason to be nonsense in our case, sounds, in Jewish ears, as very good sense indeed. For in his case these things involve no fallacies at all; they apply to him vividly and exactly. Why should the Jew be sacrificed for England? In what way is England, or France, or Ireland, or any other nation necessary to him ? Again, is it not obvious in his eyes that these terms, "France, Ireland, England, Russia," are but abstractions? The real thing in his eyes when he thinks of us, is the individual and his certain needs, especially his physical and material needs; because upon these there can be no doubt; upon these all are agreed; these are visible and tangible. "England," "France," "Poland" are whimsies.
It is true that if you were to put his special case to the Jew with similar force and say, "No Jew should run any risk for Israel," "no Jew should suffer any inconvenience by trying to help a fellow Jew in distress," "the idea of Israel is a vague abstraction—all that counts is the individual Jew and especially his physical requirements"; if you said that sort of thing you would be offending the most profound instincts of Jewish patriotism and you would, in fact, clash with the overt and covert action of the Jews throughout the world. But the Jew would answer that, as his was an international polity, the argument applying to our national polity did not apply to him; that his feelings, though analogous to ours, were of a different kind, and that, at any rate, he cannot sacrifice a fine idea of his like Communism for our provincial and local habit, called by us Europeans "the love of our country."
There is more than this in the business. Even those truths which we know to be truths have little effect upon us, unless they enter into the practice of our lives. There are, no doubt, a number of Jews who would