These also will certainly and with some reason ascribe to Jewish influence the great economic revolution of the seventeenth century, which has been followed by so vast an extension of wealth and of population, though hardly of human happiness.
Now for all this there is certainly something to be said as an aspect of historical truth. How far it may be extended to cover, as its exponents would make it cover, the whole historical field, may be debated, but I would ask my readers to consider what change we should have seen in the development of Europe if by some magical instrument Jewish influence had been upon some one date removed. It is a theory fascinating, in a way applicable, and arresting. It is, at any rate, not nonsense.
It is particularly true that something in the continuous exercise of analysis by the Jewish intelligence perpetually moves European intelligence to action—The great disputations of the Early Middle Ages were, largely, either directly disputations with Jews or disputations provoked by the intellectual attitude of the Jew; and the Jew, in the famous name of Spinoza, stands at the origin of that merely natural, that Lucretian interpretation of the world which continued through Descartes to its great expansion in the present day. You find that element in economics as you do in philosophy, in political science as you do in economics; and, talking of economics, it must not be forgotten that the greatest name at the foundation of modern economic science is the name of a Jew, Ricardo, while the most prominent name in the development of its most prominent direct application is also a Jewish name—the name of Karl Marx.
It is not without significance that any one of these names recalls, side by side with its Jewish origin, an aloofness from the general community of the Jews. That community, I think it is fair to say, abandoned Spinoza; Ricardo and, I believe, Karl Marx were alien to the national religion, and the latter married out of his people and exercised his enormous influence