e point applies
to any Jew, and to our own recovery of healthier relations with him.
The point is that we should know where we are; and he would know
where he is, which is in a foreign land.

This is but a parenthesis and a parable, but it brings us to
the concrete controversial matter which is the Jewish problem.
Only a few years ago it was regarded as a mark of a blood-thirsty
disposition to admit that the Jewish problem was a problem,
or even that the Jew was a Jew. Through much misunderstanding certain
friends of mine and myself have persisted in disregarding the silence
thus imposed; but facts have fought for us more effectively than words.
By this time nobody is more conscious of the Jewish problem
than the most intelligent and idealistic of the Jews. The folly
of the fashion by which Jews often concealed their Jewish names,
must surely be manifest by this time even to those who concealed them.
To mention but one example of the way in which this fiction
falsified the relations of everybody and everything, it is enough
to note that it involved the Jews themselves in a quite new
and quite needless unpopularity in the first years of the war.
A poor little Jewish tailor, who called himself by a German name merely
because he lived for a short time in a German town, was instantly
mobbed in Whitechapel for his share in the invasion of Belgium.
He was cross-examined about why he had damaged the tower of Rheims;
and talked to as if he had killed Nurse Cavell with his own pair
of shears. It was very unjust; quite as unjust as it would be to ask
Bethmann-Hollweg why he had stabbed Eglon or hewn Agag in pieces.
But it was partly at least the fault of the Jew himself,
and of the whole of that futile and unworthy policy which had led
him to call himself Bernstein when his name was Benjamin.

In such cases the Jews are accused of all sorts of faults
they have not got; but there are faults that they have got.
Some of the charges against them, as in the cases I have quoted
concerning religious ritual and artistic taste, are due merely
to the false light in which they are regarded. Other faults
may also be due to the false position in which they are placed.
But the faults exist; and nothing was ever more dangerous to everybody
concerned than the recent fashion of denying or ignoring them.
It was done simply by the snobbish habit of suppressing the experience
and evidence of the majority of people, and especially of the major