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This book examines the relationship between the Jewish people and the nations in which they reside. The author argues for the necessity of open discussion and the abandonment of concealment to address the political tensions surrounding this issue.

Page 178 of 263
Table of Contents

CHAPTER IX THE POSITION IN THE WORLD AS A WHOLE

The rest of the world is either of Islam or heathen. In the heathen world, so far, the Jew has little place. He has a strong grip on India, of course, but only through the British Raj, not through the native population; and in China, except as a quasi-European merchant, he has no power at all; neither has he over the strong and organized nationality of Japan.

Such are the degrees, very roughly, of the problem; such the differences of its quality in the various national groups to-day. Of these the two most interesting states of the problem by far, because they are changing with the greatest rapidity, are found in France, in England and in the United States.

I have said that the second modifying condition was the difference of civic traditions of the various nations. Here again you have a differentiation from East to West. But within it a differentiation, ultimately due to religion, from North to South. In Russia there was never any tradition of keeping silence upon the Jew, or of respecting the Jew at all. He was, until the recent revolution, the national enemy, and there was the end of it. Similarly in Poland, Roumania and the vaguer populations of their borders, and even in the old Hungary, the Jew was talked of openly as belonging to a separate nationality and, on the whole, a hostile one.

But as one got west another spirit emerged, another tradition. It was "the thing" to treat the Jew as a citizen. This fashion was weaker in the Germanies than in the Low Countries, France, or England; it was everywhere present west of the Elbe.

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