entary force. In Austria it counts among its adherents men of
the highest social station. Even France, which from the days of the
Revolution has been specially distinguished for its liberality to the
Jews, has not escaped the contagion. General Boulanger found the
anti-Jewish sentiment sufficiently powerful to make an appeal to it
one of the articles of his programme, and the extraordinary popularity
of the writings of Drumont shows that Boulanger had not altogether
miscalculated its force.
It is this movement which has been the occasion of the very valuable
work of M. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu on 'Israel among the Nations.' The
author, who is universally recognised as one of the greatest of living
political writers, has special qualifications for his task. With an
exceedingly wide knowledge of the literature relating to his subject
he combines much personal knowledge of the Jews in Palestine and in
many other countries, and especially in those countries where the
persecution has most furiously raged.
That persecution, he justly says, unites in different degrees three of
the most powerful elements that can move mankind--the spirit of
religious intolerance; the spirit of exclusive nationality; and the
jealousy which springs from trade or mercantile competition. Of these
elements M. Leroy-Beaulieu considers the first to be on the whole the
weakest. In that hideous Russian Persecution which 'the New Exodus' of
Frederic has made familiar to the English reader, the religious
element certainly occupies a very leading place. Pobedonosteff, who
shared with his master the chief guilt and infamy of this atrocious
crime, belonged to the same type as the Torquemadas of the past, and
the spirit that animated him has entered largely into the anti-Semite
movement in other lands. The 'Gloria' of Galdos, perhaps the most
powerful religious novel of our time, describes the conflict in modern
Spain of the fanaticism of Catholicism with the fanaticism of Judaism.
Even the old calumny that the Jews are accustomed at Easter to murder
Christian children in order to mix their blood with the passover
bread, is still living in many parts of Europe. M. Leroy-Beaulieu has
collected much curious evidence on the subject. It is a calumny which
appears first to have become popular about 1100 A.D. It is
embodied in a well-known tale of Chaucer. It is the subject of one of
the great frescoes that were painted around the Cathedral of Toledo to
commemora
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