1 The Secret Jewish Government
This proposition, borrowed, for the most part, from the wild conjectures of Copin-Albancelli, has a queer flavour of the anti-Catholic bogey which was at one time so fiercely exploited by Hot-gospellers, and in which even Mr. Gladstone believed as late as 1874—the Pope standing for the Prince of the Captivity and the Syllabus for the Protocols of Nilus. What, however, is very remarkable is that the protagonists of this fantastic calumny are, for the most part, Roman Catholics who have themselves suffered from it in a form much more difficult to grapple with. The short answer to it in the case of the Jews is that it is an invention, and that not only is there no trace of it in the history of the Dispersion, but that, on the contrary, the Jews, even as a Church, and still more in their secular relations, have suffered more from the want of international organisation and uniformity than any other Church or religious community. The Princes of the Captivity, for example, were confined to the Babylonian Exile, and were little more than the local Presbyters omnium Judæorum Angliæ of Angevin England or the Presidents of the Jewish Consistory of modern France. The allegation that the final aim of this Secret Government is the establishment of a universal Jewish dominion under a Prince of the House of David is a curious muddle of eschatology and politics. With much better reason the early Anabaptists said virtually the same thing of the Roman Catholic Church, and, indeed, on the Morning Post plan of campaign, it might be retorted on all the great Churches. With the Jews it has no more to do with practical politics than the analogous hopes of pious Christendom. The Morning Post, however, does not stand alone in its error. A curious variant of it is found in recent German Antisemitica. The World Unrest is there pictured as due to a conspiracy of Jewry and the British Empire, based on the Anglo-Israelitish theory that the British people are the Lost Tribes and the Royal House of Windsor the authentic seed of David. Accordingly, Britons and Jews together are accused of having plotted the late war in order to fulfil the Messianic prophecies in the person of King George.7 Les grands esprits se rencontrent!