sense of virtual
though unrecognised superiority; and the separateness which was made
their badge of ignominy would be their inward pride, their source of
fortifying defiance. Doubtless such a people would get confirmed in
vices. An oppressive government and a persecuting religion, while
breeding vices in those who hold power, are well known to breed
answering vices in those who are powerless and suffering. What more
direct plan than the course presented by European history could have
been pursued in order to give the Jews a spirit of bitter isolation, of
scorn for the wolfish hypocrisy that made victims of them, of triumph in
prospering at the expense of the blunderers who stoned them away from
the open paths of industry?--or, on the other hand, to encourage in the
less defiant a lying conformity, a pretence of conversion for the sake
of the social advantages attached to baptism, an outward renunciation of
their hereditary ties with the lack of real love towards the society
and creed which exacted this galling tribute?--or again, in the most
unhappy specimens of the race, to rear transcendent examples of odious
vice, reckless instruments of rich men with bad propensities,
unscrupulous grinders of the alien people who wanted to grind _them_?

No wonder the Jews have their vices: no wonder if it were proved (which
it has not hitherto appeared to be) that some of them have a bad
pre-eminence in evil, an unrivalled superfluity of naughtiness. It would
be more plausible to make a wonder of the virtues which have prospered
among them under the shadow of oppression. But instead of dwelling on
these, or treating as admitted what any hardy or ignorant person may
deny, let us found simply on the loud assertions of the hostile. The
Jews, it is said, resisted the expansion of their own religion into
Christianity; they were in the habit of spitting on the cross; they have
held the name of Christ to be _Anathema_. Who taught them that? The men
who made Christianity a curse to them: the men who made the name of
Christ a symbol for the spirit of vengeance, and, what was worse, made
the execution of the vengeance a pretext for satisfying their own
savageness, greed, and envy: the men who sanctioned with the name of
Christ a barbaric and blundering copy of pagan fatalism in taking the
words "His blood be upon us and on our children" as a divinely appointed
verbal warrant for wreaking cruelty from generation to generation on the
people f