s very thought is materialistic and mean.
And if this preference is true even of Bolshevism, it is ten times
truer of Zionism. It really seems to me rather hard that the full
storm of fury should have burst about the Jews, at the very moment
when some of them at least have felt the call of a far cleaner ideal;
and that when we have tolerated their tricks with our country,
we should turn on them precisely when they seek in sincerity
for their own.

But in order to judge this Jewish possibility, we must understand
more fully the nature of the Jewish problem. We must consider it
from the start, because there are still many who do not know that
there is a Jewish problem. That problem has its proof, of course,
in the history of the Jew, and the fact that he came from the East.
A Jew will sometimes complain of the injustice of describing
him as a man of the East; but in truth another very real
injustice may be involved in treating him as a man of the West.
Very often even the joke against the Jew is rather a joke against
those who have made the joke; that is, a joke against what they
have made out of the Jew. This is true especially, for instance,
of many points of religion and ritual. Thus we cannot help feeling,
for instance, that there is something a little grotesque about
the Hebrew habit of putting on a top-hat as an act of worship.
It is vaguely mixed up with another line of humour, about another
class of Jew, who wears a large number of hats; and who must not
therefore be credited with an extreme or extravagant religious zeal,
leading him to pile up a pagoda of hats towards heaven.
To Western eyes, in Western conditions, there really is something
inevitably fantastic about this formality of the synagogue.
But we ought to remember that we have made the Western conditions
which startle the Western eyes. It seems odd to wear a modern top-hat
as if it were a mitre or a biretta; it seems quainter still when the hat
is worn even for the momentary purpose of saying grace before lunch.
It seems quaintest of all when, at some Jewish luncheon parties,
a tray of hats is actually handed round, and each guest helps
himself to a hat as a sort of _hors d'oeuvre_. All this could
easily be turned into a joke; but we ought to realise that the joke
is against ourselves. It is not merely we who make fun of it,
but we who have made it funny. For, after all, nobody can
pretend that this particular type of head-dress is a part of t