er in London might be like Judas Iscariot; but a
moneylender in Moscow must be like Judas Maccabaeus.

Nevertheless there remained in our common sense an unconscious but
fundamental comprehension of the unity of Israel; a sense that some
things could be said, and some could not be said, about the Jews as a
whole. Suppose that even in those days, to say nothing of these, an
English protest against Russian Anti-Semitism had been answered by the
Russian Anti-Semites, and suppose the answer had been somewhat as
follows:--

'It is all very well for foreigners to complain of our denying civic
rights to our Jewish subjects; but we know the Jews better than they do.
They are a barbarous people, entirely primitive, and very like the
simple savages who cannot count beyond five on their fingers. It is
quite impossible to make them understand ordinary numbers, to say
nothing of simple economics. They do not realise the meaning or the
value of money. No Jew anywhere in the world can get into his stupid
head the notion of a bargain, or of exchanging one thing for another.
Their hopeless incapacity for commerce or finance would retard the
progress of our people, would prevent the spread of any sort of economic
education, would keep the whole country on a level lower than that of
the most prehistoric methods of barter. What Russia needs most is a
mercantile middle class; and it is unjust to ask us to swamp its small
beginnings in thousands of these rude tribesmen, who cannot do a sum of
simple addition, or understand the symbolic character of a threepenny
bit. We might as well be asked to give civic rights to cows and pigs as
to this unhappy, half-witted race who can no more count than the beasts
of the field. In every intellectual exercise they are hopelessly
incompetent; no Jew can play chess; no Jew can learn languages; no Jew
has ever appeared in the smallest part in any theatrical performance; no
Jew can give or take any pleasure connected with any musical instrument.
These people are our subjects; and we understand them. We accept full
responsibility for treating such troglodytes on our own terms.'

It would not be entirely convincing. It would sound a little far-fetched
and unreal. But it would sound exactly like our utterances about the
Irish, as they sound to all Americans, and rather especially to
Anti-Irish Americans. That is exactly the impression we produce on the
people of the United States when we say, as we do say in