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The 
 
 Social Conception of Judaism 
 
 AND 
 
 The Jewish People 
 
 By 
 
 BERNARD LAZARE 
 
 ®facc of iPublicatfoii : 
 Rooms 2128-Z9-30-31, Park Kow Building 
 
THE SOCIAL CONCEPTION OF JUDAISM AND 
 THE JEWISH PEOPLE.' 
 
 For two thousand years the Jews have been scattered among 
 the nations and sharing their life; for centuries they have been 
 in permanent contact with the Christian nations, and yet their 
 customs, their mind, the doctrines of their sacred books, 
 those of their .philosophers even, are less known than the prac- 
 tices of the Dahomeyans or the Lapps. To appraise the part 
 they play, their action and their intellectuality, people con- 
 stantly make use of the same pack of antique prejudices, and 
 of a certain number of formulas whose only merit is an indis- 
 putable antiquity. 
 
 To all the world the Jews were formerly a collectivity of 
 usurers, trained by their Talmud to the most subtle frauds, 
 brought up in the art of accumulating the maximum of gold. 
 To-day people recognize in them simply marvelous qualities 
 as drainers of capital and as traders ; but people go further. 
 If these gifts are attributed to the Jews, it is by virtue of an 
 alleged social conception which is said to be peculiar to them. 
 And you must not think that this is solely an anti-Semite 
 opinion, — it would not be worth the trouble of either combat- 
 ing or discussing; but it is also the opinion of men who would 
 make an outcry if they were described as having taken sides 
 with any party; it is the opinion of intellectual men, en- 
 lightened in everything but this ; it is even the opinion of 
 some Socialists, notably of Jaures ; and it is for this reason 
 that a reply must be made. 
 
 For those of whom I have been speaking, the social concep-. 
 tion of the Jews is an essentially mercantile conception. 
 They think like the anti-Jews on this point, but they limit 
 themselves to expressing their thought differently; they pre- 
 sent it with a scientific apparatus and a sort of economic dog- 
 
 ' Originally printed in the "Grande Revue," 
 3 
 
4 THE SOCIAL CONCEPTION OF JUDAISM 
 
 matism, but at bottom they come to the same result; they con- 
 sider capitalism as a Jewish creation, and, just as Drumont 
 after Gougenot de Mouneaux speaks of the Judaizing of the 
 Christian peoples, so does Jaures after Marx. 
 
 "It is the Jewish idea," says an anti-Semite, Marquis de 
 la Tour du Pin, ' ' which leads the rich man to the exploita- 
 tion of the poor by the modern form of usury, capitalism " ; ' 
 and Jaures writes, " The social conception of the Jews, 
 founded on the idea of trade, is in perfect harmony with the 
 mechanism of capital." It seems, then, that anti-Sem- 
 itism and Socialism are in agreement on this point — at least 
 the Socialism of Jaures, since after this declaration he added 
 that Drumont might without exaggeration have said that " the 
 Jews, habituated by age-long persecutions to the practice of 
 solidarity, and long since inured to the management of mov- 
 able wealth, exercised in our society a disproportionate and 
 dangerous action," and he ended with these words, very sig- 
 nificant as coming from his pen; " This socialism, shaded 
 with anti-Semitism, would hardly have raised objections 
 among free minds." A strange conception of Socialism, a not 
 less strange conception of the free mind, surprising at all 
 events in a man who is one of the directors of the Socialist 
 movement in France. 
 
 How did Jaures come to the point of formulating such prin- 
 ciples? By servilely adopting an opinion of Marx, an opinion 
 of Marx which has long been a dead weight on the Jewish 
 question, whether it is employed as a weapon by the anti- 
 Semite or is adopted without discussion and without reflection 
 by the Socialist. What is this opinion of Marx? How was 
 he brought to utter it? 
 
 At the moment when the emancipation of the Jews was being 
 discussed in Germany, in 1843, Bruno Bauer issued a book 
 which attracted much attention, " Die Judenfrage." He there 
 expressed this idea,— that, to emancipate himself, the Jew 
 must first deliver himself from his Judaism, then deliver him- 
 self from Christianity, a higher religious term, but one that 
 had sprung from the Jewish religion. In a word, the emanci- 
 
 ' "La Question Juive et la Revolution Sociale," p. 19, 
 
AND THE JEWISH PEOPLE S 
 
 pation of the Jews is a theological question. Marx replied in 
 the " Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher." For him the ques- 
 tion -was social first and foremost, and one had to consider, 
 not " thejew of the Sabbath," as Bruno Bauer had, but " the 
 ordinary Jew." Thenceforth the " question of the Jew's 
 faculty for emancipating himself " is changed into this other 
 question: " What particular social element must be overturned 
 to efface Judaism? " Now, " what is the mundane basis of 
 Judaism? it is practical wants, egoism. What is the Jew's 
 mundane worship? it is trade. What is the Jew's mundane 
 divinity? it is money. Well, then, to emancipate one's self 
 from trade and money — that is, from practical and real Juda- 
 ism — would be the great emancipation so necessary at our 
 epoch. An organization of society which should cause to dis- 
 appear the presuppositions and bases of trade, and conse- 
 quently trade itself, would render the Jew impossible; his 
 religious consciousness as Jew would evaporate and disappear, 
 like a very thin mist in the true vital atmosphere of society. 
 On the other hand, if the Jew recognizes as null, and de- 
 stroys, this Jewish practical essence (selfishness, trade, 
 money), then the Jew raises himself at once out of his present 
 swamp; then the Jew labors in the service of the universal 
 emancipating idea; then the Jew turns to a valiant wrestler 
 against the extreme expression of human alienation. We^ 
 recognize in Judaism, then, an anti-social element, universally 
 diffused, which has been pushed to its present height by the 
 current of history without the collaboration of the Jews ; but 
 this anti-social element cannot blend in it and will disap- 
 pear — Jewish emancipation, in its utmost significance, is t^ie emanci- 
 pation of l^umanity from the bonds that Judaism imposes on it." 
 
 For Marx the Jew had emancipated himself by Judaizing 
 the Christians, when, to be really emancipated, he ought to 
 have de-Judaized himself, and, to put it better, disappeared, 
 carrying with him his conception of trade. 
 
 If the Marx of " Das Kapital " ever reread this hasty and 
 casual polemic, no one can have judged more sternly than 
 himself his own logomachy, his categorical affirmations and 
 peremptory assertions supported by no proof, no fact. Logi- 
 
6 THE SOCIAL CONCEPTION OF JUDAISM 
 
 cian that he was, he certainly smiled at the religio-economic 
 metaphysical emptiness which he naively displayed in bis 
 article in the " Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher. " When 
 he wrote it, he was ignorant of everything about the Jews ; his 
 father had been converted to Protestantism, and had let his son 
 be ignorant of everything, of the religion, the history, and the 
 present situation of those to whom so many spiritual ties at- 
 tached him. Later he must have known them better, — at all 
 events, he utters no further opinion about them; but that which 
 he had one day set forth is still doing service, as I have 
 pointed out. The Anarchists of the Diihring type have 
 picked it up in Germany; anti-Semites like Drumont back 
 themselves up with it; and Socialists do not hesitate on oc- 
 casion to affirm, as the master did one day, that the social 
 conception of the Jews is based on trade. 
 
 How can such a theory be justified by producing scriptural 
 documents, emanating from the Jews, which develop doctrines 
 apologetic for mercantilism; by pointing out in Israel a con- 
 stant tradition adapted to develop the idea and the practice of 
 trade; by establishing from facts, in fine, that Judaism's con- 
 stant care has been business ? 
 
 Let us, for the moment, limit ourselves to written sources. 
 Where can we go to look for the social conception of the Jews? 
 In the Bible, in the Talmud, and finally in the philosophers 
 and economists who have sprung from this nation. Let us see, 
 then, what is the political economy of the biblical writers, — 
 chroniclers, moralists, and prophets ; what is that of the Tal- 
 mudists and the doctors of the middle ages, and that of the 
 philosophers and the theorists. Then we will inquire whether 
 their doctrines have left no trace among the non-Jews. 
 
 " As for us," writes Flavius Josephus, " we do not live on 
 a sea-coast; we are not very fond of commerce. Our cities 
 are remote from the sea, and our occupations consist in cul- 
 tivating the fine land which we inhabit." 
 
 The biblical chroniclers know of no other condition for man 
 than the agricultural condition: " Yahve-Elohim," says Gen- 
 esis (2:15), " took man and installed him in the garden of 
 Eden to practise agriculture there." According to a midrash, 
 
AND THE JEWISH PEOPLE 7 
 
 Cain and Abel having divided between them the empire of the 
 world, the former chose the -agricultural condition, and pos- 
 sessed himself of the soil; the second took the pastoral condi- 
 tion, and possessed himself of the flocks. So the Jewish feasts 
 were feasts of agriculture. Passover the feast of springtime, 
 Pentecost that of harvest, and finally Rosh Hasshanah, the 
 start of field labor, the recommencement of the year ; it is only 
 later that there were attached to these feasts historic recollec- 
 tions like the coming out from Egypt and the promulgation of 
 the Law. 
 
 All the maxims of the Bible are agrarian. If it recom- 
 mends having many children, it is because every parcel of the 
 soil has to be worked ; and Hillel was in the same tradition 
 when he said that a numerous body of domestics is an open 
 sore. How did the old books of Israel understand rewards 
 and punishments? The rewards shall be a good harvest, the 
 ears of wheat bursting with their grains, the trellises break- 
 ing under the weight of the grapes ; the chastisement shall be 
 drought and the unproductiveness of the fields. 
 
 T'o sit in peace under one's vine and fig-tree, such was the 
 ideal; so the golden age was realized under the good kings. 
 Agriculture was in a manner consecrated by God, and the 
 greatest men of Israel — those whom the divine voice called to 
 be heads of the people or prophets — held the plough or drove 
 the cattle. 
 
 As for commerce, the Bible ignores and despises it. In the 
 time of the patriarchs it was in the hands of the Ishmaelites, 
 whose caravans passed through the country. In the time of 
 the kings the Phoenicians practised it. The usual words and 
 terms applicable to commerce did not exist in biblical He- 
 brew. It was only after the exile, and in the Talmudic 
 period, that these words entered into the language. 
 
 And not only was the social conception of the Bible an 
 agricultural conception, but it was parcell^ry, and the law 
 was made with a view to hindering the establishment of large 
 properties. In ancient Israel the field could not be alienated 
 except under compulsion of force. It was let for, a certain 
 number of years, and in the jubilee year the field returned to 
 
8 THE SOCIAL CONCEPTION OF JUDAISM 
 
 the first possessor. Furthermore, between the day of the 
 letting and the jubilee year, there existed a veiy extensive 
 right of redemption (Leviticus 25 : 13, IS, 28). 
 
 It was only when the jubilee year was abolished that the 
 rich families could extend their possessions, and that large 
 properties were established. It is dating from this moment, 
 too, that one sees violent revendications pioduced, which, in 
 the first century before and after Jesus Christ, ended in a real 
 social revolution, whose termination, at the moment of the 
 war against Vespasian and Titus, was characterized by the re- 
 plevining of the lands of the rich by the sicarii and their par- 
 tisans. It has never been pointed out that at the epoch of this 
 resistance to Rome the patriotic struggle was complicated by 
 an inner struggle, a real class struggle, which explains the 
 anathemas and passionate recitals of Josephus, who himself be- 
 longed to the category of the possessors. All the ground of 
 Judea, at the time when Jesus appeared, was turned upside 
 down by the revendications of tribunes and revolutionists. 
 After the destruction of the temple by Titus, after the crush- 
 ing of the Jews, the goods were found in the hands of the 
 sicarii, or of the middle class who had bought them from the 
 sicarii. The dikankon was established, — that is, the right of 
 revendication with regard to the goods bought by the sicarii, 
 — but it was found necessary to suspend its application.' 
 
 Up to this epoch the representatives of popular aspirations 
 were no other than the prophets. They, in the same degree 
 as the old chroniclers, had the love of agriculture and the 
 contempt of commerce. They added to these. a sort of deifica- 
 tion of the poor man, the humble man, the non-possessor, and 
 a fierce hatred of the rich man, of which the Gospels bring us 
 the echo. Mercantilism was odious to them. For them, as 
 well as for the gnomic writers, " merchant " is a synonym 
 for " swindler " ; " The merchant holds in his hands the 
 balance of deceit," says Hosea (12: 8), and Jesus the son of 
 Sirach declares, " The merchant cannot keep from doing 
 wrong " (26 : 28). For them the desirable condition is the 
 
 ' J. Daremberg, " G6ographie de la Palestine," p. 476. 
 
AND THE JEWISH PEOPLE 9 
 
 peace of the countryman planting his vineyard and eating the 
 fruit. 
 
 There were other voices by -which the Jewish people ex- 
 pressed its social ideal ; they were those of the poet of the 
 Psalms, a real literature of the poor, as a scholar has said.' 
 Never was there written a more frantic glorification of the 
 condition of poverty, a more extraordinary apology for in- 
 digence, a more frightful anathema of the rich man. The 
 Gospel, with its fervors and its tendernesses, sprang entirely 
 from there; the primitive church lived on the Psalms, and 
 Catholicism has been unable to conceive another ideal than 
 that. 
 
 It is not in the Bible, then, that we shall find this social 
 conception of the Jews, based on trade. Quite to the con- 
 trary, the conception is cleanly anti-mercantile. Catholi- 
 cism has adopted it, has not ceased to recommend it and in a 
 measure to apply, it, and later this essentially Jewish concep- 
 tion has been turned against the Jews, of whom a fraction had 
 become traders. For Christian society the device was ense et 
 aratro ; the two social types became the soldier, *he who de- 
 fends the fields, and the husbandman, the corner-stone of the 
 nation; the biblical contempt for the middleman was professed, 
 and they had a Jewish hatred for the Jew. 
 
 In fact, it is not from the Greeks or from the Romans that 
 the Christian peoples can have drawn these prejudices. 
 Among the Greeks agriculture was considered a servile pro- 
 fession, and it was the slaves who cultivated the land. As for 
 the Romans, if Cicero did say, speaking of agriculture, 
 " There is nothing worthier of a free man," ° he preferred to 
 speculate with the politicians and to take part in financial 
 companies. In the same way Cato wrote that " one could 
 make no greater eulogy on a man than to say that he was an 
 able agriculturist and a good farm-manager," " but he pre- 
 ferred to lend at fifty per cent, and, hardest of masters, have 
 his slaves toil on the glebe. As for the people, it was a peo- 
 ple of money-handlers or of frumentarii. 
 
 ' Is. Locle, "La Litt^rature du Louvre." 
 ' "Deofficiis." 
 5 "De re rustica." 
 
10 THE SOCIAL CONCEPTION OF JUDAISM 
 
 If among the modern Catholic nations (for the Protestant 
 nations, though brought up in the reading of Jewish books, 
 have succeeded in emancipating themselves by free discussion) 
 we consider France as a type, we shall see that it has con- 
 stantly lived on this biblical and Jewish social conception. 
 If we were anti-Semitic, we should say that it was Jewified ; 
 but from this point of view, as we are going to show at once, 
 no one is more Jewified than the anti-Semite, an essentially 
 agrarian and (theoretically at least) anti-mercantile animal. 
 
 French politicians, economists, and moralists have kept the 
 patriarchal conception of the old Jews. " Husbandry and 
 pasturage are the breasts of France," said Oliver de Serres 
 and Sully; and the latter, desirous to favor agriculture solely, 
 refused even to protect the culture of the mulberry-tree and 
 the silk industry. Antoine de Moret-Chrestien, who asked an 
 equal protection for manufactures and agriculture, was bold in 
 this. 
 
 Colbert's mercantilism was considered abominable, and 
 agrarian protectionists like Bois-Guillebert combated it with 
 violence. Colbert has been popularly made a disagreeable 
 and almost anti-French figure; and, when there was founded in 
 France a truly national school of economists, it was the school 
 of Quesnay and the physiocrats. 
 
 The conception of Quesnay and his disciples is a dogmatic 
 and scientific transference of the Jewish and Christian concep- 
 tion of the political universe; only, in place of being demo- 
 cratic, they were aristocratic agrarians, thinking all that 
 Fontenelle one day wrote: " I might have my hand full of 
 truths, and I would not open it for the people." In agree- 
 ment, besides, with all that eighteenth century whose writers 
 and philosophers wrote and thought only for privileged people. 
 
 Under Quesnay ' three classes composed the -nation: the 
 productive class, that of the cultivators ; the proprietary class, 
 comprising the proprietors properly so called; and the sterile 
 class, composed of those engaged in industry and commerce. 
 An agricultural realm, such was Quesnay' s dream: " Let the 
 
 ' "Tableau Sconomique. " 
 
AND THE JEWISH PEOPLE 11 
 
 sovereign and the nation," said he, " never lose sight of the 
 fact that the land is the sole source of riches, and that agri- 
 culture is -what multiplies them," ' and he praised Sully, 
 ' ' that great minister who, to procure revenues to the king and 
 the nation, and to sustain the forces of the State, desired only 
 husbandmen, vinedressers, and shepherds." So political 
 sovereignty could belong only to the possessors of the land. 
 " He who possesses no land," wrote Turgot, " cannot have 
 a country except by heart, by opinion, by the happy prejudice 
 of childhood." Cleaner-cut and harder, Mably said: " Only 
 the men who have an inheritance have a country" [pafrie, 
 " fatherland "]. This was excluding the poor from citizen- 
 ship, and that was the thought not only of the physiocrats, 
 but of all the pseudo-democratic philosophers of the eigh- 
 teenth century. 
 
 This idea, that only the man who possesses the soil has a 
 country, is found again among the anti-Semites of to-day, and 
 it is on this account that they refuse the Jew the title of citi- 
 zen. 
 
 We have seen how the biblical conception was transformed 
 for the physiocrats. At the end of the eighteenth century, 
 and- during the first years of the nineteenth, it was the doc- 
 trines of the English economists, of Smith and others, that 
 were developed at the same time that industry was being born 
 and growing up. But beginning with 1834, at the moment of 
 the great English industrial expansion, the Christian econ- 
 omists in France felt the need of returning to the sound doc- 
 trines, the revealed ones, those of the Bible. Agriculture, 
 " solid base of all national prosperity," was praised anew; 
 there was formed a " Religious Association for the Progress 
 of Agriculture in France," an association presided over by 
 the due de Montmorency, whose purpose was to " put agri- 
 cultural labor under the influence of the principles and prac- 
 tice of the Catholic religion." -These doctrines found de- 
 fenders, like M. de Villeneuve-Bargemont, who published a 
 treatise on Christian political economy, in which it was said : 
 
 • 
 
 ' " Maxime gfe^rale." 
 
12 THE SOCIAL CONCEPTION OF JUDAISM 
 
 " Of all the industries to which man can deliver himself in 
 order to assure his existence and his happiness, the most 
 solid, the most appropriate to a just distribution of wealth, 
 the least subject to disastrous vicissitudes in the activity of 
 labor and in the rate of wages, that which most happily main- 
 tains equilibrium in population, that, in fine, which Provi- 
 dence first offered to men as at once test and consolation, is, 
 without contradiction, agricultural industry: that is to say, 
 labor exercised on the soil itself to produce food or raw 
 materials. The French and Italian economists of the eigh- 
 teenth century, in considering the land as the source of all 
 wealth, had perceived a great truth, which religion had, more- 
 over, been proclaiming for a long time." As yoa see, the 
 new Christian economists base themselves on the Bible, and 
 praise the physiocrats for having followed it; but they are 
 more in conformity of thought with the sacred writers than 
 are the physiocrats, from- the ethical standpoint at least, since 
 they blame exaggerated wealth and praise self-renunciation, 
 and poverty while trying to reconcile them with the necessities 
 of modern life and industry. This care is especially visible 
 in one of them, M. Charles Perin, the author of " De la 
 Richesse dans les Societes Chretiennes," a work in which he 
 tried to reconcile " material progress and_Christian self- 
 renunciation " and to demonstrate that " for material as well 
 as moral order nothing great and truly useful can be done, or 
 has ever been done, except by self-renunciation." For M. 
 Charles Perin, " far from supposing that a society should be 
 considered inferior because in it agricultural propensities over- 
 come industrial propensities, one may, on the contrary, see in 
 the predispositions that turn national activity toward agricul- 
 ture one of heaven's greatest blessings on that people, and per- 
 haps a sign of the great things that God expects of it." 
 
 But one man above all based himself on the social doctrines 
 of the Old Testament, and he is a man essentially representa- 
 tive of a class and of a condition of mind. This man is Le 
 Play. Net only does he maintain that agriculture, completed 
 by some arts having for their object, like it, the exploitation 
 of the natural wealth of the soil, the air, and the water, is 
 
AND THE JEWISH PEOPLE 13 
 
 strictly sufficient to give a nation a permanent prosperity,' but 
 he further writes the " Organization of Labor According to 
 the Custom of the Shops and the Law of the Decalogue " to 
 praise the patriarchal family, source of prosperity, and to 
 maintain that only nomadic shepherds, and agglomerations 
 of agriculturists owning their estates, escape these alternations 
 of corruption and reform. They alone preserve this solid 
 prosperity, which is revealed, not by wealth, brilliancy, and 
 power, but by labor, frugality, and virtue. 
 
 So it is not in the Bible that we can find a social concep- 
 tion based on trade. We have seen there only a conception 
 of an agricultural and pastoral society, and the biblical ideal 
 has become in our days the ideal of Catholic economists and 
 of anti-Semites. The chief reproach that these last address 
 to the Jews is that of not being agriculturists in the countries 
 where they find themselves. We will examine this reproach. 
 
 We must see now what idea the Talmudic doctors formed of 
 the sources of wealth, and what was their social ideal. As 
 the work of the rabbis was only a long commentary on the 
 Bible, it could not but present agriculture as the thing of all 
 others. " Just as God," says a midrash, " at the beginning 
 of the world occupied himself with the planting of the garden 
 of Eden, so every Israelite's first care should be to apply him- 
 self to agriculture." Eleven tractates of the Talmud were 
 consecrated to agricultural labors, and formed a rural code, 
 the " Sedar Zeraim," and a celebrated rabbi. Rabbi Eleazar, 
 said: " All men will one day leave their trades to give 
 themselves up to agriculture." ° But this sentence is of itself 
 an indication that at the Talmudic epoch agriculture was only 
 the most desirable of conditioils. From a people exclusively 
 pastoral and agricultural the Jews had 'become mainly a peo- 
 ple of artisans, and the Talmudist's social conception is that 
 of a nation of workmen and scholars. " He who gives his 
 child no trade teaches him brigandage," said Rabbi Judah 
 the Holy. " He who earns his living by labor is greater than 
 he who fears God," said another doctor. On every page_of 
 
 ' "Xa R6forme Sociale, " ch. xxxiv. 
 '' Midrash Rubba on Leviticus. 
 
14 THE SOCIAL CONCEPTION OF JUDAISM 
 
 the Talmud there is found this glorification of manual labor, 
 and of labor whatever it may be. " Rather than remain idle," 
 it is said, " hunt for carrion on the highway to earn your liv- 
 ing, though you should be high priest or a man of rank." 
 The scholar himself, so honored that it was said, " A 
 scholar, were he a bastard, takes precedence of the high priest 
 who is ignorant," — the scholar was to derive no profit from 
 science, but was to follow the maxim of Rabbi F^adow: " Do 
 not make of sacred study a crown to stir your pride or an in- 
 strument of domination " ; ' and he must have a manual occu- 
 pation, for he knew with Rabbi Gamaliel that " all religious 
 study which is not accompanied by labor is sterile and leads 
 to sin." ■ 
 
 So all the great doctors were artisans. Rabbi Shammai 
 was a mason. Rabbi Hillel a wood-cutter. Rabbi Tshah a 
 blacksmith. Rabbi Joseph ben Chalabgha a currier. Rabbi 
 Nehemiah a potter. Rabbi Orchaiah a shoemaker, Rabbi 
 Pinchath a stone-cutter. " Do not recoil from any task," said 
 Rabbi Akiba to his disciples; " cut up, if necessary, a beast 
 dead in the open street. Do not say ' But I am a scholar.' " 
 It was this rule of the Talmudists that St. Paul, the com- 
 mentator of the new law, followed when he said : ' ' All that 
 we have need of, I and those who are with me, it is our hands 
 that furnish it to us." ^ Later, Spinoza will conform to it; 
 he will meditate on the eternal substance, but he will not live 
 on his metaphysics; he will refuse the liberalities of the great 
 who wish to pay for his science, and will live by his trade of 
 crystal-polisher. 
 
 This conception is very far from being a mercantile con- 
 ception; the glorification of the artisan having given birth to 
 laws protective of labor, it implied a contempt of the detainer 
 of wealth, of the possessor of gold, and, above all, of him who 
 made it bear fruit. Now, in. an agricultural society like the 
 Jewish, what was the way in which the rich man could in- 
 crease his fortune ? It was lending at interest, usury. Now, 
 
 ' Pirke Aboth, 4 : 7. 
 ' Pirke Aboth, 2 : 2. 
 s Acts 20 : 34. 
 
AND THE JEWISH PEOPLE 15 
 
 no law has been severer against usury than the biblical law, 
 and the Talmudic law which flows from it. For them, money 
 is sterile. 
 
 " If you lend money to one of my people," it is said, " to 
 a poor man who is sojourning with you, you shall not behave 
 toward him as an exactor, you shall not impose on him the 
 obligation of paying you usury " (Exodus 22 : 2S). Leviticus 
 (25 -.35,36) prescribes further: " When your brother becomes 
 poor, you shall maintai-n him; if it is a pagan foreigner and he 
 also-lives with you, you are to maintain the poor pagan too. 
 You shall not take interest from him, from your brother, or 
 from the pagan, for you shall fear your God." To this there- 
 has been opposed an often-cited text of Deuteronomy (23 : 19, 
 20), according to which it was permitted to take interest from 
 the foreigner. In reality this text means the contrary of 
 what it is made to say. Here it is: " You shall not make 
 your brother bite, be it the biting of money or of an object of 
 nourishment, or of any object whatever which he may bite; 
 you may make a foreigner bite, but you shall not make your 
 brother bite." To make one bite was to pay interest to him; 
 and the biblical text signifies that one is to pay no interest to 
 his brother, but that one is to pay interest to the foreigner : 
 Why? Because without doubt this foreigner's law allows him 
 to take interest. It is the Christian conception of the middle 
 ages; the Christian is not to lend on interest, but the Jew and 
 the heretic, the Lombard, the Cahorsin, might do so. 
 
 According to the Bible, a loan was to be gratuitous, but he 
 to whom it had been granted did not remain a debtor forever; 
 a special law, at fixed periods, .came to liberate him; every 
 seven years there arrived the sabbatic year, the year of the 
 Shemitah, and debts were annulled : ' ' Let every creditor give 
 a release of his loan," said the book. " He shall not press 
 his neighbor, his brother, for God has proclaimed the year of 
 release." (Deuteronomy 15: 1.) There was still more: even 
 in the course of the sabbatic year lending at interest was pro- 
 hibited, and it was forbidden to refuse the loan, though the , 
 debt was to be annulled at the expiration of the year. " Take 
 care," Deuteronomy recommends (15:9) " not to let your- 
 
16 THE SOCIAL CONCEPTION OF JUDAISM 
 
 selves be surprised by this impious thought, and to say in your 
 heart: ' The seventh year, which is that of remission, is near,' 
 and thus to turn away your eyes from your brother who is poor, 
 
 without being willing to lend him what he asks you for." 
 
 At Hillel's time it was necessary to evade this law, which 
 economic evolution could not let stand. There was then in- 
 troduced into the code what was called the prosbol. Before the 
 sabbatic year the creditor presented his claim to the tribunal, 
 a minute of this presentation was taken, witnesses attested it, 
 and the limitation was suspended. But this law guaranteed 
 only the payment of the gratuitous loan. As regards usury the 
 Talmudists were harder than the book they commented on had 
 been. They likened usurers to robbers ; usurers were to them 
 
 " gazlanim, " brigands, from whom they took away the right 
 to testify.' A Talmudic legend well shows the sentiments 
 that inspired the money-lender. Those whom the prophet 
 Ezekiel raised to life, it says, had all deserved death for 
 having adored the idol of Nabu-kudurri-usur. But the divine- 
 mercy raised them up, excepting one alone, because he lent at 
 interest. " He who has money and who lends it without in- 
 terest," declares Rabbi Simon, the son of Eleazar, " is he of 
 whom the Psalmist speaks, saying: ' He who does not put his 
 money out at usury nor take reward against the innocent shall 
 never be moved;' it results from this that he who lends at 
 usury shall lose his luck." " It is prohibited to receive a re- 
 ward for waiting for payment, or for having left the capital 
 with the debtor for a certain time. That is the rule of 
 usury," said Rabbi Nahaman.. 
 
 In proscribing usury under all its forms the Talmudists em- 
 ployed all the resources of their casuistry and of their sub- 
 tlety. So they prohibited making a bargain with a peasant 
 that he should furnish his products all the year at the low 
 price of harvest ; for the buyer, in paying him in advance, 
 was considered as a usurer. "If," we find in another text, 
 " an individual says to another: ' Give me money, 1 will give 
 you all the milk that I shall at once obtain from my goats,' 
 h° does a permitted thing; but, if he engages to furnish the 
 
 ' Baba Mezih 61a, Sanhedrin 24a. 
 
AND THE JEWISH PEOPLE 17 
 
 milk of his goats (during all the year and when the price shall 
 have risen) for the low price of the moment of the sale, he 
 does a prohibited thing." One must not, it was again said, 
 " borrow a measure of wheat to return the same measure after 
 harvest " ; in fact, the price might have risen at that time, 
 and a usury would be paid by the debtor. It was even for- 
 bidden to exchange two unlike labors, — for instance, to weed a 
 neighbor's field and have him dig one's own. 
 
 Usury properly so called, nbith hetzuzah, was that forbidden 
 by the Mosaic law; the rabbinical law did more; it forbade- 
 what it called ab ak ribith, the dust of usury, the usury of com- 
 mercial transactions. It prohibited, for instance, giving 
 merchandise to a haberdasher that he might sell it and divide 
 the profit with him who had intrusted it to him; for thus the 
 haberdasher would not get paid for the work that would have 
 fallen upon him in selling what he would say he was only the 
 guardian of, and his contractor would receive a usurious profit. 
 The Talmudists made further refinements ; they prohibited 
 anticipated usury, which consisted in making a present to one 
 from whom one was desirous to borrow; delayed usury, sending 
 a present to one from whom one has borrowed and whom one 
 has paid. They prohibited even usury in words : " One must 
 not say, to give a creditor pleasure, a thing that one would not 
 have said if one had not borrowed the money," and creditors 
 were not to accept any of these sorts of usury. 
 
 This is quite the contrary of a trader's conception, and all 
 these measures tended to hinder commerce and to set barriers 
 to it. Observing such rules, submitting to such laws, a people 
 could not but remain a people of artisans and agriculturists. 
 And the Talmudic law did not limit itself to forbidding usury; 
 it made those who had unlawfully received it disgorge. 
 " Pagan tribunals," said Rabbi Saphra, " force the debtor to 
 pay the creditor the usury which at receiving the loan he en- 
 gaged to pay. It i^ this usury which our tribunals, on the con- 
 trary, force the creditor to return to the debtor, if the latter 
 has already given it to him." ' In the middle ages people ap- 
 plied to the Jew banker and lender his own law, when they 
 
 ' All these texts against usury are taken from the tractate Baba Mezih. 
 
18 THE SOCIAL CONCEPTION OF JUDAISM 
 
 forced him to make restitution; it is true that they took from 
 him interest and capital. 
 
 The Roman tribunals which gave judgment in matters of 
 usury must, in fact, have been an object of horror to the 
 Jews. All the Talmudic legislation was made in favor of the 
 poor man, the peasant, and the working-man. The Roman law 
 was made for the rich man; it was essentially a trader's law; 
 so a part of the social and inner history of Rome is made up 
 of the revolts of the plebs against the rich and the money- 
 lendipg nobles. If one compares the Roman law with the 
 rabbinical law, one feels still more the severity of the former, 
 which gave to the nobleman and the rich man all rights over 
 his debtors. Shylock has existed only among the Romans. If 
 ever a people had a social conception based on trade and 
 speculation, it was the Roman people, which knew no inde- 
 pendent commercial association, and which saw all great 
 financial and industrial operations carried on by appointment 
 of the State, and for its profit.' 
 
 The Roman legislative conception was a cruel conception, 
 based on a harsh and pitiless defence of property, pushed to 
 such a point that there was a time when he whose plough 
 grazed his neighbor's field was guilty of sacrilege and had 
 to take flight, he and his oxen. Never was a system of pluto- 
 cratic and military aristocracy more strongly established than 
 at Rome. The assessment-roll did everything there; it was 
 " the basis of almost all the judicial laws," ^ and Cicero 
 wrote: " To choose a judge, one must have regard to for- 
 tune as much as to personal merit." In what country have 
 men of money had so much influence, and so open an influence, 
 as had at Rome the knights, — that is, the publicans, — that 
 is, the financiers? If the Talmudic doctors were artisans, 
 the writers and philosophers of Rome were usurers or bankers. 
 Cato ground his borrowers; Brutus lent at 48 per cent., and 
 had siege laid to the senators of Salamis, his debtors, of 
 whom five died of hunger during that siege; Cicero got two 
 million sesterces out of his province; Seneca crushed Brittany 
 
 ' A. Deloume, " Les Manieurs d' Argent i. Rome." 
 ' A. Deloume, op. cit. 
 
AND THE JEWISH PEOPLE 19 
 
 under his usury; Pompey made himself the lender of the cities 
 of the east ; and the soldiers of the legions made themselves 
 usurers in the countries they occupied. They had the com- 
 mercial genius besides, as the Greeks had. Cato, to guar- 
 antee his money lent, invented silent partnership ; that paid 
 better than invoking the harsh law of the twelve tables, which 
 yet was an alleviation too, since it limited the weight of the 
 chains with which one could load a debtor, and, in spite of 
 its giving permission to sell the insolvent as a slave, outside 
 Rome, it said " at least unless the creditors prefer to divide 
 among themselves his bleeding members." Never did such 
 barbarity illustrate a Judaic law; the law of like for like was 
 a real alleviation of this law. 
 
 So, if the people withdrew to the Aventine hill, if Catiline 
 conspired, it was because it was impossible to bear longer the 
 cruelty of the money-lenders. But what mattered it to the 
 publicans ? They had their men like Cicero, like Pompey, 
 and the senate decided on war against Mithridates to safe- 
 guard the knights' interests in the provinces of Asia. Pom- 
 pey commanded and followed their interests, as Bonaparte 
 later, in Italy, served the interests of the financiers of the 
 Directory. 
 
 So one may say that the world, in so far as it has become 
 capitalistic, has been Romanized and not Judaized; the Jew 
 himself has been Romanized. Before the diaspora, the dis- 
 persion, he was ignorant of commerce; the Phosnicians dared 
 not teach it to him as long as he remained on his land; it was 
 the Roman who educated him. The craze for money, its 
 •deification, capitalistic barbarity, disregard of every human 
 interest other than the financial or commercial interest, are 
 traits of the Roman soul, but not of the Jewish soul. The 
 Roman was a trader by taste, a part of the Jews followed him 
 by constraint, and from these there always arose protests 
 against those among them who practised usury and banking. 
 
 The Tosafists and doctors of the middle ages were in com- 
 munion of ideas with the Talmudists. Rashi, the great doctor 
 of Champagne, condemned usury; Maimonides likewise. 
 Karo, the theologian, said: " We must give heed, for the 
 
20 THE SOCIAL CONCEPTION OF JUDAISM 
 
 debtor, the creditor, the endorser, the witnesses, are transgres- 
 sors of the law. He who puts money out at interest shall be 
 poor; he is as if he denied the coming out of Egypt and the 
 God of Israel." He added: " The usurer must be forced and 
 struck till he gives up his life." ' 
 
 When the necessities of the times, and the evolution which 
 drew it on, made of the Jewish bourgeoisie a financial bour- 
 geoisie, there were always to be found men like Rabbi Moses 
 of Coucy or Joselmann of Rosheim to condemn exaggerated 
 interest. There were also found, it is true, theologians to put 
 this bourgeoisie aX rest with its conscience. Certain Tosafists, 
 and Karo himself, authorized taking interest in case of dan- 
 ger to life, but those who were called the pilpulists (pepper- 
 pounders), refined casuists, insisted on perverting the law. 
 They proscribed the abhorred name of usury ; they called this 
 act a participation in the profit resulting from the loan. To 
 fix the rate they made an arbitrary valuation of the prospec- 
 tive profit, and divided it so that the half corresponded to the 
 desired rate. Thanks to the etymological interpretation of 
 texts, in themselves prohibitive, from the Bible and Talmud, 
 they even came to justify this procedure and this participa- 
 tion (Hether iska). But this anxiety proves how strong was the 
 power of the prohibition, and what prejudices the Jew had to 
 conquer when he became a money-lender. 
 
 It is not in the Talmud, either, then, or in the works of 
 the Jewish doctors and theologians, that we find this social con- 
 ception of the Jew, based on trade. On the contrary ; and the 
 Christian church inherited this Jewish anti-mercantilism, too. 
 The theory of the church against usury is that of the Talmud. 
 The church did not get this from the Greeks or from the Ro- 
 mans, trading nations, but inherited it from Israel, an agricul- 
 tural people, where such theories ought naturally to be devel- 
 oped. It was only in the middle ages, in the thirteenth cen- 
 tury, that the church could prop itself up with the authority 
 of Aristotle, who had declared money sterile, — and that with- 
 out his theory having ever had an influence on the facts in 
 Greece, or on the law, which never limited the rate of interest. 
 
 ' "Jove Dea," § 160, 1-5. 
 
AND THE JEWISH PEOPLE 21 
 
 The first Christian communities, the first fathers, penetrated 
 with biblical evangelism, knew scarcely more than one form of 
 capital, — capital living on usury; they could not but adopt, 
 then, the doctrines of the Old Testament. But, if for the 
 church the type of the mutuum is the gratuitous loan, it too, 
 under the pressure of facts, admits accommodations, and it 
 recognizes four cases where the mutuum might bear interest : 
 1, the lucrum cessans, — that is, " the loss of an emolument 
 which one would probably have received if one had not lent 
 money " ; 2, the damnum emergens, — that is, " the damage of 
 which the loan is the direct source " ; 3, the periculum sortis, 
 — that is, " the danger of losing the funds lent by reason of 
 the borrower's insolvency " ; 4, the titulum legis, in virtue of 
 which, " by the mere fact that the civil law authorizes the re- 
 ception of an interest proportionate to the loan, this reception 
 is considered legitimate." ' The Tosafists were not so 
 liberal ; it is true that there were protestors. When Ber- 
 nardino of Feltre, to compete with the money-lending Jews, 
 founded in Italy the first monts de piete, these lent gratui- 
 tously; but there came a moment when Bernardino obliged 
 them to take an interest to cover the expenses of administra- 
 tion. After him an Augustinian monk, Barianno, published a 
 furious pamphlet against the " monts d'impiete." 
 
 In our day it is the anti-Semites who theoretically represent 
 the anti-mercantile and anti-usurary conception of the Bible 
 and the Talmud. According to their social conception, ac- 
 cording to the idea of society which they form, the anti-Sem- 
 ites may without paradox be considered as uncompromising 
 Jews ; and in this the anti-Semites are only the left wing of the 
 Catholic economists, the Perins and the Le Plays, and the 
 Christian Socialists. 
 
 If we have not found the doctrine based on trade in either 
 the Bible or the Talmud, shall we find more of it in the works 
 of the philosophers and economists who have sprung from Is- 
 rael ? It is neither Ibn Gabirol nor Spinoza who will show it 
 to us; the Platonism of the one and the pantheism of the other 
 leave no room for an apology for trade. No more is it a Ri- 
 
 ' Ch. Perin, " De la Richesse dans les Soci6t6s Chrftiennes, '' t. 2, p. 384. 
 
22 THE SOCIAL CONCEPTION OF JUDAISM 
 
 cardo, still less a Marx and a Lassalle, who will formulate it; 
 quite the contrary. Will it be said that Colbertism and mer- 
 cantilism — in so far as they are economic theories — are Jew- 
 ish social conceptions ? Thomas Mun, Colbert, and Frangois 
 Malon, are not Jews, no more than is Smith, in spite of his 
 industrial system ; no more than Bentham, who wrote the 
 ' ' Defence of Usury " ; no more than Turgot, who claimed the 
 full liberty of the interest of capital. If there is a social 
 system based on trade, it is not that of the " German Jew 
 Marx," as the good Anarchist Bakounine called him; it is 
 that of St. Simon, who said: " I have received the mission to 
 get political power out of the hands of the clergy, the no- 
 bility, and the judicial order, in order to put it into the hands 
 of the industrial class." ' 
 
 Where, then, shall we find the trace of this " social sys- 
 tem of the Jews, based on trade " ? Listen to Marx: "It is 
 not in the Pentateuch and in the Talmud," says he, " but in 
 present society, that we find the essence of the present Jew; 
 we find him there, not as an abstract essence, but as an essence 
 as empirical as possible." " This is to say that the Jew real- 
 izes practically, in the society in the midst of which he lives, 
 a conception based on traiSc, and that he always has realized 
 it. Disembarrassed of all logomachy, this means that the 
 Jew, since his entrance into the Christian world, has been 
 suitable only to trade. And this is assuredly what we find at 
 the basis of all the reasonings, all the theories against the 
 Jews, or of those which make pretence to explai,n the Jew so- 
 cially. How can such an error have spread? How has it 
 been adopted by well-informed and open minds? This is what 
 I have still to explain. 
 
 Let us suppose a historian who, to study a people, to give 
 its characteristics, its philosophy, and its ideal, limits himself 
 to considering one of the classes of this people. If he re- 
 gards only the proletarians, he will perhaps conclude that this 
 people has a social conception based on anti-mercantilism and 
 on labor. If, on the contrary, he faces solely the financial, 
 
 ' " Systeme industriel, " p. 167. 
 
 ' Marx, " Deutsch-FranzOsische Jahrbilcher. " 
 
AND THE. JEWISH PEOPLE 23 
 
 industrial, and commercial bourgeoisie, he will declare quite as 
 justly that this people's social conception is based on trade. 
 No nation will be able, to escape the consequences of such a 
 way of writing history. 
 
 This is what has happened for the Jews ; and they have been 
 considered under the aspect of traders not only by the anti- 
 Semites, but by the Jews themselves who have wished to write 
 their history. On certain points Drumont is in accord with 
 Gratz; what differentiates them is that Gratz pleads the ex- 
 tenuating circumstances. He too declares that the Jew is a 
 tradesman and money-handler, but it is because he has been 
 constrained to it. This is an assertion radically false ; in 
 reality it is the Jewish bourgeoisie that have become traders 
 and money-handlers, and not the " Jews." But the Jewish 
 historians have never written any but the history of the Jew- 
 ish bourgeoisie, for the use of the Jewish bourgeois of their 
 time. They have not known the people, they have ignored 
 them, they have refused to see them. Their history being 
 also an apologetic history of the Jews in relation to' the 
 Christians, a history written with a view to demonstrate the 
 progressive efforts of the Jews towards assimilation, — which is 
 not fair, — they have- constantly had a preoccupation, not to 
 write the history of the Jews as a nation. 
 
 In reality, this history is not otherwise comprehensible. 
 The Jews have never ceased to be a people. If there are 
 different types among them, — that is, if, such as they are to- 
 day, they do not descend from a single pair, — it is none the 
 less true that these ethnographic types, different among them, 
 belong only to them. They have a similar mentality. I 
 speak in general; for, if I study English mentality, I shall 
 not take as the object of my examination the sons of natural- 
 ized Englishmen living in France. Likewise, in speaking of 
 the Jews, I rnean to speak of the mass of Galician, Rou- 
 manian, Russian, and Oriental Jews, and not of the sparse 
 Christianized and Hellenized Jews of the west, — though never- 
 theless the higher types of these have preserved their Jewish 
 characteristics. In this mass a special intellectuality arises 
 from the same education, from the same material, religious. 
 
24 THE SOCIAL CONCEPTION OF JUDAISM 
 
 and moral mode of life. From a triple point of view, ethno- 
 logical, ethical, and intellectual, the Jews are incontestably a 
 people in which individualities are, as m all peoples, suscep- 
 tible of being naturalized perfectly. If one regards them 
 from the economic point of view, one sees them divided into 
 classes, like every other nation, and it has always been so. 
 There has at every time been among them a financial higher 
 bourgeoisie, — whose part, however, has been exaggerated, — an 
 intellectual or commercial middle bourgeoisie ; and it has not 
 been sufficiently noted that the economic history of the Jews 
 is not the history of struggles between Christian and Jewish 
 money-handlers, but of struggles between petty trading bour- 
 geois, Jewish and Christian. Finally, there has always been 
 among the Jews an immense proletariat. 
 
 That no agriculturists are found among them — and these 
 will be found too, but exceptionally — is not surprising. The 
 Jews immigrated into the ancient world; now, the immigrant 
 is never an agriculturist, except when he utilizes an unin- 
 habited country; when he spreads abroad in the midst of peo- 
 ples occupying a territory, he does business, like the Greek, 
 like the Phcenician, or else he is an artisan. 
 
 It was so for the Jews. If at Alexandria, at Rome, there 
 were among them wealthy dealers, speculators, and financiers, 
 their mass was a body uf poor plebeians. At Alexandria the 
 synagogue was divided into lodges, each occupied by one of 
 the corporations of Jev/ish artisans. At Rome, if many among 
 them possessed an influence due to their wealth, — the only in- 
 fluence one could have at Rome, — and merited Cicero's apos- 
 trophes or Caesar's good will, the greater part was composed of 
 little people, camped around the Capene gate and given up to 
 the lowest trades. 
 
 All the Jewish communities were thus constituted, — a nu- 
 cleus of rich, a group of traffickers devoting themselves to 
 business on the small scale, a great number of artisans, and, 
 finally, a whole gens of paupers living around the synagogue 
 on pious alms and on the levies made by the administrators of 
 the community on the revenue of those who could meet the ex- 
 penses of worship and the support of the needy. 
 
AND THE JEWISH PEOPLE 2S 
 
 In the charters, in the cartularies, these artisans and these 
 paupers do not and cannot appear; they do not treat with cities 
 and religious communities, be it for the possession of real 
 estate, be it for the obtaining of commercial privileges ; no 
 more do they figure on the list of those who pay the taxes. It 
 is the community that pays for them, for it is the administra- 
 tors who are responsible. On thf other hand, part of the 
 chroniclers and historians who incidentally speak of the Jews 
 speak of them in the fashion of anti-Semites, and one is as 
 well informed by reading them as one would be informed on 
 the Jews of the nineteenth century by reading Drumont, who 
 writes, without wrinkling an eyebrow, that the Jew is not a 
 working-man. The Ajobards, the Rigords, see in the Jew 
 only him who practises lending at interest or banking opera- 
 tions. It is by comparing those who pay taxes with the total 
 of the Jewish population that one finds the poor man and the 
 petty artisan. As for documents, they will be found in the 
 writings of the numerous travelers who have visited the Jew- 
 ish communities. These, like Benjamin of Tudela, like 
 Petoyah of Ratisbon, like John Belon, etc., have found the 
 Jewish working-man everywhere. The Jewish chronicles fur- 
 nish enough of precise information in the accounts of popular 
 turmoils or of the discussions which every~(rhere preceded the 
 expulsion of the Jews. " Who has made the Turks so 
 strong " ? said Lorenzo to the senate of Venice and to Louis 
 Mocenigo, who wanted to drive out the Jews, " and where 
 would they have found such able artisans for the manufacture 
 of the cannon, -the bows, the bullets, the swords, the bucklers, 
 and the targets, which permit them to measure themselves with 
 the other peoples, if not among the Jews whom the kings of 
 Spain had driven out ? " ' Finally, the grave-stones of the 
 Jewish cemeteries, and the archives of the communities or 
 documents emanating from them, will furnish precious facts 
 and hints. By studying them one will not only have the his- 
 tory of the classes among the Jews, but one will further ascer- 
 tain that class struggle has always been alive within the com- 
 munities. I cannot cite numerous facts here, and the matter 
 
 ' "Orneh Harbah," p. 181 (S^e's translation). 
 
26 THE SOCIAL CONCEPTION OF JUDAISM 
 
 would deserve a special study; but, if one wishes an example, 
 he may take that of the Jews, at least in the seventeenth cen- 
 tury, when the rich wished to abolish the progressive tax 
 which governed the " career " and to replace it by the per- 
 sonal tax, at the same time changing the doctoral system of 
 representatives of the community in such a way that petty 
 commerce and the artisans could not have been represented in 
 the councils.' 
 
 One will also ascertain that no people had so great a num- 
 ber of poor as the Jewish people. In the first place, war be- 
 ing held in horror in Israel, the desirable condition was that 
 of poor man and doctor of the law. The rich held it an 
 honor to have a numerous clientele of needy persons and of more 
 or less miserable scholars. The history of an Abarbanel in 
 Spain, of a Reina Nassi in Turkey, is very characteristic 
 from this point of view. But circumstances contributed 
 much to create this immense class of dwellers in penury. 
 Agriculturists at home, in their land, traders after the dis- 
 persion, — a part of the Jews became in the Christian nations 
 the intermediaries between Europe and the east. After the 
 great economic movement of the Crusades, the Catholic bour- 
 geoisie takes protectionist measures for its own commerce, and 
 closes to the Jew — after having massacred him besides — the 
 route to the east, reducing him to trade in the interior with 
 the peasant, thus thrusting him back in great part into the 
 petty bourgeoisie. On the other hand, the guilds are formed 
 on a religious and Christian basis; they drive out the Jewish 
 artisan, thrust him back into the lower trades, oblige him to 
 labor almost solely for his brother Jews, and thus contribute 
 to the creating of a formidable class of unemployed in every 
 Jewish community. As soon as the Jew wishes to get out of 
 this situation, and obtains temporary privileges, the guilds of 
 merchants and the corporations of the handicrafts rise against 
 him. This is especially visible in the seventeenth century, at 
 the moment when legislation is made less hard on the Jews. 
 One must see the history of the Jewish tradesmen, those of 
 Bordeaux, AngoulSme, or Languedoc. Almost at the same 
 
 ' Baret, " Revue des Etudes Juives," xxxviii. 
 
AND THE JEWISH PEOPLE 27 
 
 epoch the diamond-workers of Amsterdam protested against 
 the Jewish diamond-workers. They asked for certain privi- 
 leges, and that the Jewish workers be forbidden to labor on 
 Sunday. 
 
 The economic situation of the Jews has not changed in our 
 days. As yesterday, as always, the divisipn into classes re- 
 mains among them; essentially city-dwellers, their bourgeoisie 
 is almost wholly commercial or industrial, save a very small 
 fraction, composed on one hand of intellectual men, on the 
 other hand of the high bourgeoisie of finance. As for the im- 
 mense majority, it is still formed by a proletariat concentrated 
 in the Russian territory, Galicia, Roumania, and Bulgaria, 
 and in the important agglomerations of London and New York. 
 In these two centres the official inquiries into the sweating sys- 
 tem have shown that the Jewish petty padrone class oppressed 
 heavily its proletariat of the same race. It is the same in 
 the great Russian industrial cities, at Lotz and at Berditcheff, 
 for instance, and in certain Galician districts where period- 
 ical strikes bring Jewish padrones and working-men face to 
 face in the struggle. But alongside of this proletariat which, 
 in Holland, in England, in America, has been able to organize 
 itself, there vegetates a whole people of unemployed, a Lump- 
 Proletariat such as does not exist in any nation, a crowd of 
 beggars swarming in the steppes of Russia, Poland, Algeria, 
 and the east. 
 
 But I do not mean here to make a study of the laboring 
 or indigent Jews; it suffices me to establish their number, and 
 that they form almost the t(?tality of the people. They are so 
 numerous in Russia — 293,509 working-men and 89,844 handi- 
 craftsmen by the census of 1887, without counting the poor,, 
 the unemployed, or the very small traders, peddlers, etc., 
 more wretched than the working-men and six times more 
 numerous, — in Roumania, and in Bulgaria, that the Christian 
 working-men complain of their competition. Likewise in Lon- 
 don — there are 60,000 in Whitechapel, 10,000 of them work- 
 ing-men; and in New York there are more than 200,000 of 
 them, where a movement against them has taken shape in the 
 trade unions, the complaint being that they lower wages. 
 
28 THE SOCIAL CONCEPTION OF JUDAISM 
 
 This is correct, for the Jewish proletariat is the most miser- 
 able of all, having against it not only its own rich men, but, 
 besides, the rich and the poor of the peoples in the midst of 
 which it finds itself. 
 
 So the study of the doctrines of his books — Bible or Talmud 
 — has not revealed to us in the Jew a social conception based 
 on trade ; no more has the study of what Marx calls ' ' the em- 
 pirical essence " of the Jew shown it to us. It is to others 
 than the Jews that" the development of the mercantile or in- 
 dustrial cr capitalist system must be ascribed, and it is thanks 
 to an insufficient study of the past and present economic con- 
 dition of the Jews that people can talk as did Jaures one day, 
 after Marx, and can think, with the immense majority of 
 Jewish writers, that this people's enemy is in commercial 
 gain, and that capitalism is its work, when in reality it feels 
 it, and suffers from it, in a keener way proportionately than 
 any other people. 
 
 The Jew has never been studied except in his bourgeoisie ; it 
 is time to study him in his proletariat, the truly strong and 
 characteristic mass of the nation. 
 
,1 f 
 
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