Upon a world thus already exasperated, and in some large sections exasperated to the point of unreason—for the anti-Semitic drive was, and is, full of unreason—there suddenly fell the double effect of the Bolshevist revolution: a revolution which struck both at the benevolent who would hear no harm of the Jews, and those who had hitherto shielded or obeyed them as identified only with the interests of large Capital. It was a blow in flank under which staggered both the supporters of Jewish neutrality and the dependants upon Jewish finance.
The old Liberal policy still officially held the field; but when this shattering explosion came it compelled attention. Bolshevism stated the Jewish problem with a violence and an insistence such that it could no longer be denied either by the blindest fanatic or the most resolute liar.
Such was, in its largest lines, the recent historical sequence leading up to the state of affairs we now find. Let us trace that sequence in more detail and from a little farther back.
A lifetime ago, when the Liberal policy was founded and when conditions were favourable to its establishment, the populace might still nourish its traditional antagonism to the Jew, but in the West of Europe his numbers were very limited (only a few thousand in France and England combined, and hardly as many in Italy).
He belonged for the most part to the classes that did not come into direct competition with the poor of the large towns. From the countrysides he was absent. He had not attempted to govern his hosts as a politician, nor, in any large measure, to indoctrinate them through the Press. The rapid decline of religion at that time broke down one barrier, and the transformation of the governing classes from the old territorial Lords to the modern plutocracy broke down another. The convention that the Jew was indistinguishable from the citizens of the country in which he happened to live, or, at any rate, from that in which he had last lived, was