THE
WANDERING JEW
565
standpoint; and my answer is: Yes, their faith was justified.
It
was
justified in so far, at any rate, as the belief in the ultimate solidarity
of mankind is itself one of the conditions necessary for the preserva–
tion of humanity and for the cleansing of our civilization of the dregs
of barbarity that are still present in
it
and poison it.
Why then has the fate of the European Jews left the nations
of Europe, or the gentile world at large, almost cold? Unfortunately,
Marx was far more right about the place of the Jews in European
society than we could realize some time ago. The major part of the
Jewish tragedy has consisted in this, that
in
result of a long historic
development, the masses of Europe have become accustomed to iden–
tify the Jew primarily with trade and jobbing, money lending and
money making. Of these the Jew had become the synonym and the
symbol to the popular mind. Look up the Oxford English Dictionary
and see how it gives the accepted meanings of the term "Jew":
firstly, it is a "person of Hebrew race"; secondly-this is the col–
loquial use--an "extortionate usurer, driver of hard bargains." "Rich
as a Jew" says the proverb. Colloquially the word is also used as
a transitive verb: to jew, the Oxford Dictionary tells us, means "to
cheat, overreach." This is the vulgar image of the Jew and the vulgar
prejudice against him, fixed in many languages, not only in English,
and in many works of art, not only in the
Merchant of Venice.
However, this is not only the vulgar image. Remember what
was the occasion on which Macaulay pleaded, and the manner in
which he pleaded for political equality of Jew and Gentile and for
the jew's right to sit in the House of Commons. The occasion was
the admission to the House of a Rothschild, the first Jew to sit in the
House, the Jew elected as Member for the City of London. And
Macaulay's argument was this:
If
we allow the Jew to manage our
financial affairs for us, why should we not allow him to sit among
us here, in Parliament, and have a say in the management of all our
public affairs? This was the voice of the bourgeois Christian who took
a fresh look at Shylock and hailed him as brother.
I suggest that what had enabled the Jews to survive as a
separate community, the fact that they had represented the market
economy amidst people living in a natural economy-that this fact
and its popular memories have also been responsible, at least in part,
for the
Schadenfreude
or the indifference with which the populaCie
