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nydus/The JewsPublic

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 91 of 263
Table of Contents

CHAPTER IV THE GENERAL CAUSE OF FRICTION

It may be argued that this fear is groundless because the control has now lasted for a long time. It has lasted a lifetime even in its present hardly complete form: and it is secure because its operations are removed from general observation, and because it is mixed up with the interests of all the wealthier classes.

I am afraid these arguments will not hold. Although the Jewish control of finance is not a thing which touches the public at large, yet all educated men down to a comparatively low stratum of society are fully aware of it, and every man who is aware of it resents it. It is resented almost as much by the mass of poor Jews as by the non-Jews, but in a different way.

Again, although this financial monopoly does not directly affect the economic life of the private citizen, he is beginning to understand more and more how it indirectly affects it. It affects him, for instance, through his patriotism. He will not submit to be told that, in order to suit the convenience of these alien bankers, he must forgo the rights of victory and allow some enemy whom he has justly chastised to escape the consequences of that chastisement. Still more urgently will he deny the right of the Jewish bankers to interfere with the national reparation due to him for damage wantonly done in the course of hostilities.

Again, international finance does not live separate from private activities. It touches at last a mass of individual enterprises, and through those individual enterprises its action is questioned and examined by a host of private citizens.

Yet again, the Jews who thus control international finance are at work in many other capacities. For instance, some of them stand behind those

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