every line. I would much rather read the story of Europe as it was seen by a practising Jewish scholar than a so-called impartial and agnostic account which grotesquely represents the Church as something external to the body of Europe and even inimical to it.
In this connection also we should have (what now we lack), and that is a conspectus of the Jewish action over Christendom and Islam combined. We are aware of the tolerance, or rather favour, displayed to their Jewish subjects by the Mohammedans of Spain. It was neither universal nor continuous. What we do not sufficiently hear, what we have to piece together from chance allusions, is the connection between the Moorish Jews, before and during the Reconquista, and their fellows to the north.
Before I leave these cursory and sporadic notes on what I have called the "theories" upon our problem, I should mention one which would unhappily seem to have acquired widespread support to-day and which is surely the least satisfactory of all—even less satisfactory than the now dying fiction which pretended that the Jewish nation was not present in our midst, but consisted only of a mass of individuals already absorbed by their alien surroundings. I mean the theory that it is possible to continue in a sort of simmering atmosphere of partial repression, with the Jew treated as something alien and hostile, yet his presence unceasingly tolerated. That would seem to be the imperfect conclusion implied, if not stated, in a hundred modern pamphlets and discussions, the authors of which repudiate the name of Anti-Semite though they sympathize apparently with action even less logical than the politics of the Anti-Semite. There is no such equilibrium possible, even if its establishment were as moral as it is in fact immoral. If a frank solution be not found, nothing firm can be established. All we shall be establishing will be a violent and successive fluctuation. It is impossible to maintain an attitude permanently hostile to one's neighbour, yet count on that hostility remaining permanently repressed. You fall inevitably along the slope of such a tendency into those excesses which it should be our whole object to condemn, to foresee and to prevent.