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 Copyright © 2021 Paul Feldwick

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private
study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be
reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case
of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of
licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries
concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the
publishers.

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 ISBN 978 1800468 993

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

O master! If you did but hear the pedlar at the door, you would
never dance again after a tabor and pipe; no, the bagpipe could not
move you: he sings several tunes, faster than you’ll tell money: he
utters them as he had eaten ballads, and all men’s ears grow to his
tunes…

shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, Act IV

 Also by Paul Feldwick

The Anatomy of Humbug

Fascinating and superbly written. It takes us from the beginning of

the modern era of advertising up to the present, with charming
anecdotes and intelligent analyses of the people and ideas that have
made us the struggling, bewildered ad hacks we are today.

Bob Hoffman, author of Advertising for Skeptics

No-one has previously discussed the various “practitioner theories”

of advertising so comprehensively. It’s a great story, and I learned a
lot.

Patrick Barwise, Emeritus Professor of Management and Marketing,

London Business School.

An elegant overview of the history of advertising theory, with the

added joy of being filtered through the immense wisdom, experience
and brain of this advertising guru.

Tess Alps, former Chair, Thinkbox

A thoughtful and beautifully written reflection on the history of
advertising practice.

Nigel Hollis, author of Brand Premium and former Chief Global

Analyst, Millward Brown

The Anatomy of Humbug: How to Think Differently About

Advertising

is available from Matador as hardback, ebook, and audiobook.

Contents

Preface A Serious Business?

Part One The Pedlar At The Door
Chapter One Richard Latham’s Rug
Chapter Two From Salesmanship to Showmanship
Chapter Three Who Framed Sunny Jim?
Chapter Four Because singers sell soap, Mr Norman
Part Two A Kind of Fame
Chapter Five From Barnum to Brands
Chapter Six David Beckham’s Sarong
Chapter Seven Energy, Essence and Icons
Chapter Eight A Face in the Piazza Navona
Part Three Four Facets of Fame
Chapter Nine Broadcast to Go Big
Chapter Ten Make the Monster Massive
Chapter Eleven Give the Lion Wings
Chapter Twelve Infinitely Multiply
Part Four What Kind of Creativity Do We Need?
Chapter Thirteen The C Word
Chapter Fourteen Blowing Shit Up
Chapter Fifteen The Dark Interloper
Chapter Sixteen The Trouble With Ideas
Conclusion Reclaiming Creativity
Bibliography
Preface
A Serious Business?

Advertising is a serious business, and advertisers spend serious

money investing in it. Yet from the earliest times, much advertising
has been far from serious in its appearance, featuring song and
dance, celebrities, cartoons, talking animals, childish jingles, low
humour, and all the other tropes of popular culture.

Indeed, its vulgarity has often offended commentators as much as

its questionable morals. The Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises,
was a stalwart defender of the freedom to advertise, yet he believed
that¹

Like all things designed to suit the taste of the masses, advertising is
repellent to people of delicate feeling.

Sadly, those ‘people of delicate feeling’ have often included not just
advertising’s critics, but many of its own clients, and even quite a
few in the ad agencies themselves. Embarrassed by advertising’s all-
too-obvious and inescapable links with popular culture, they have
constructed for it an alternative persona – advertising as an honest
salesman, which offers its audiences only sober facts and rational
benefits.
This is not wrong, but it only represents a part of what advertising
does – and perhaps not even the most important part. For many
years, this double-think made it harder than it need have been to
produce effective advertising; but it did not make it totally
impossible. I worked for thirty years in an agency where we
repeatedly succeeded in smuggling a cast of dancing polar bears,
laughing aliens and singing chimpanzees past the barriers of selling
propositions, consumer benefits and reasons why.

Today we probably understand the psychology behind the apparent

fluff and nonsense of advertising better than ever before. Concepts
like ‘mental availability’ and the ‘affect heuristic’, the largely
unconscious nature of mental associative networks, the importance
of the right brain hemisphere in connecting emotions, images, and
memory, all these (as we shall see) begin to explain why puppies,
clowns, or monkeys on bicycles create liking and fame, which are
what build valuable brands. Thanks to the published research of
Byron Sharp and Jenni Romaniuk, Peter Field and Les Binet, Orlando
Wood, Robert Heath and others, we know the importance of stories,
emotions, slogans, music, and distinctive brand assets in making
advertising that works.

All the more odd, then, that so many of today’s ad agencies and
their clients appear to ignore all this, or even to do the exact
opposite. While more money is spent on advertising worldwide than
ever before, there’s evidence that it is now less effective, and more
disliked by the public, than it has ever been. Thirty years ago, a
majority of the British public agreed that ‘Sometimes the ads are
better than the programmes’ – the proportion who agree with that
today is vanishingly small.² Instead, the vast majority of the younger
generation now deliberately avoid any exposure to advertising at all.
There will be those who object that the world has changed. That
today’s techniques of individual targeting and personalisation in the
digital space have superseded the old analogue needs to be
engaging, entertaining, or memorable. But the reality is that, while
the internet has transformed so many aspects of our lives and our
commerce, it will never transform the fundamental psychology
behind advertising and brands. Jeff Bezos knew, when he started
Amazon, that³ ‘Brand names are more important on-line than they
are in the physical world’; the most important search engine remains
the one in your head.⁴ Meanwhile, those who fail to understand how
humans actually make choices will go on wasting immense sums of
money on the emperor’s new clothes.

So while advertising today has access to a wider range of

communication channels than ever before, it is failing to make the
best use of any of them. This is because there seems to be a greater
gap than ever between our emerging theoretical understanding of
advertising, and the cultural beliefs and fashions that direct the way
it is actually produced.

This book is an attempt to bridge that gap. My intention is not just

to review what we know today about how advertising works, but to
illustrate its truth and bring it to life through stories and examples
from advertising and brand history, including some from my own
experience. I want to remind us all what so much successful
advertising of the past actually looked and sounded like, to reflect on
the processes and conditions that made it possible to create that
kind of work, and to inspire advertisers and their agencies to adapt
the same principles to the changed media landscape of today. I
would like to encourage all those who work in advertising and brand
management to suspend their ‘delicate feelings’ about what really
creates popularity and fame, and to embrace the idea that
advertising is at least as much showmanship as it is salesmanship.

Advertising is a serious business. So the advertisers who invest their

money in it should pay attention to the fundamentals of how it
works, not to what is fashionable or novel. It is time to rediscover
the fact that advertising builds brands best when it is entertaining,
popular and memorable, when it is not just a pitch, but a
performance.

It is time for the Pedlar to sing again. It would be good for business,
and less annoying for the public. It could even be fun.

Notes

1 von Mises: quoted in Driver and Foxall 1984, p.62.

2 ‘Sometimes the ads are better than the programmes’: source TGI,
an annual survey now owned by Kantar Media.

3 Jeff Bezos: interviewed in 1997 by Jeffrey Seglin.

https://www.inc.com/magazine/19970901/1314 viewed on 3/9/20.
4 ‘The most important search engine remains the one in your head’:
I’m sure I heard this line at a conference or somewhere, but I have
no recollection who I got it from. I repeat it, though I don’t think I
invented it, because it’s so true and so well-expressed. (I explored
the thought further, with an example, in Feldwick 2019.)
Part One
The Pedlar At The Door
Then I said, ‘You sing and so advertise your trade?’

He answered, ‘I do. It lifts the heart, it shortens the way, it attracts

the attention of the citizens, it guarantees good work’.

Hilaire Belloc, Hills and the Sea

‘Only a singer you say, Mr Norman. Well, I want you to know that
the Beautee Soap Company thinks singers are mighty important.
And I’ll tell you why, Mr Norman.’

He opened the drawer of the table and triumphantly held aloft a bar
of Beautee Soap.

‘Because singers can sell soap, Mr Norman. Right, Kimberley?’

‘RIGHT,’ said Kimberley.

Frederick Wakeman, The Hucksters

Don’t sing your selling message. Selling is a serious business.

David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man

Chapter One
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as was the case years ago, an unhealthy excitement in the minds of
220
the people.”
But, facts being more convincing than official denials, the exodus
grew more alarming, because the forces to which it owed its origin
continued in operation. The “Jewish Colonization Association” now
came to the aid of the indigent exiles, and endeavoured to save
them from additional suffering by preventing those who were not
provided with the necessary passage money, or were not physically
221
fit, from leaving their homes. These wise measures restrained to
a certain extent indiscriminate expatriation, but, as might have been
foreseen, failed to check it entirely. The exodus continued, and the
outcry against Roumania spread, for now the countries into which
the undesirable current flowed were compelled by self-interest to do
what they had hitherto vainly attempted to effect from a sense of
philanthropy.
America, the favourite haven of refuge for the fortune-seeker of
every colour and clime, undertook the task of spokesman. The late
Mr. Hay, Secretary of State, in September, 1902, through the
representatives of the United States in the countries which took part
in the Congress of Berlin, reminded the Governments of those
countries of Art. 44 of the Treaty signed by them in 1878, urging
them to bring home to Roumania her flagrant and persistent failure
to fulfil the conditions on which she had obtained her independence.
After a handsome tribute to the intellectual and moral qualities of the
Jew, based on history and experience, the American Minister
protested, on behalf of his country, against “the treatment to which
the Jews of Roumania are subjected, not alone because it has
unimpeachable ground to remonstrate against resultant injury to
itself, but in the name of humanity.” He concluded with a vigorous
appeal to “the principles of International Law and eternal justice,”
and with an offer to lend the moral support of the United States to
222
any effort made to enforce respect for the Treaty of Berlin.
This powerful impeachment, coming as it did from a distant party
in no way connected with the affairs of Continental Europe, may
have caused heart-searchings in nearer and more immediately
concerned countries; but it failed to awaken those countries to a
proper sense of their interests, not to say duties. The only quarter in
which America’s appeal to humanity found an echo was England. A
number of representative men, such as the late Archbishop of
Canterbury, the present Bishop of London, Lord Kelvin, the
Marquess of Ripon, the late Mr. Lecky, Sir Charles Dilke, the Master
of Balliol, and others, publicly expressed their profound sympathy
with the victims of persecution. Mr. Chamberlain also seized the
opportunity of declaring that, as history proves, the Jews, “while
preserving with extraordinary tenacity their national characteristics
and the tenets of their religion, have been amongst the most loyal
subjects of the states in which they have found a home, and the
impolicy of persecution in such a case is almost greater than its
223
cruelty.” Other Englishmen also joined in the denunciation of
Roumania not so much from pity for the victims of oppression as
from fear lest, unless the Roumanian Government was compelled to
change its policy, England should have to face another inroad of
“undesirable” Jewish immigrants.
In like manner, the only Government which volunteered to
second Mr. Hay’s Note was the British, and on the common basis of
these two representations, the signatory Powers of the Treaty of
Berlin “exchanged views.” The results of this exchange can be
summed up only too easily. The historian of the future will probably
derive therefrom some interesting lessons regarding European
politics and ethics in the beginning of the twentieth century. They are
as follows:
Germany, under whose presidency the stipulation concerning the
Jews of Roumania was framed, did not choose to consider herself
called upon to insist on the execution of that stipulation. The Liberal
section of the German press received the American Note with
sincere, but ineffectual, appreciation; while of the Conservative
majority some pronounced it naïve, and others affected to regard it
as an attempt on America’s part to interfere in European affairs, or
even as an electioneering trick having for its sole object to enhance
President Roosevelt’s political prestige! The German Government,
though more courteous than the German press, proved equally cold.
As we have already seen, that Government was the last to join in the
efforts to improve the lot of the Roumanian Jews and the first to
declare itself satisfied with the deceptive revision of Article 7 of the
Roumanian Constitution. This attitude, when considered in
conjunction with the fact that a Hohenzollern reigns in Roumania,
and with that kingdom’s place in the present political combinations of
the Continent, enables us to understand, if not to applaud,
Germany’s reception of Mr. Hay’s Note.
Austria-Hungary, whose proximity to Roumania pointed her out
as the Power primarily concerned, and entitled to act, declined to
take any steps singly or collectively. The self-restraint of Austria, like
that of Germany, and even in a greater degree, was dictated by
political considerations, Roumania being practically the only State in
the Balkans, where the influence of Austria-Hungary and of the Triple
Alliance still counts for something. Besides, the Vienna Cabinet
could not decently join in advocating Jewish emancipation, for it was
Austria which in May, 1887, concluded with Roumania a treaty
whereby some seventy thousand Jewish residents in the latter
kingdom—who, according to a practice common in Mohammedan
countries, had enjoyed Austrian protection while Roumania was
under Ottoman rule—were deprived of the status of Austrian
subjects, without receiving any other status in exchange.
Italy was deterred from lending her support to the American Note
by Roumania’s relations with the Triple Alliance and also by the
vogue which the “Roman” idea obtains in the land which the
Roumanians are pleased to regard as “the cradle of their race.”
Russia, whose treatment of her own Jewish subjects would have
made an appeal to “humanity and eternal justice” on behalf of the
Jews in another country a sad mockery, decorously refrained from
supporting the American Note. It is true that the Russian press
imitated the Teutonic in scoffing at America’s action as a pretext for
gaining admission to the counsels of the European Areopagus, and
in condemning it as an impertinence! But the Czar’s Government,
with better taste, extricated itself from an awkward position by basing
its refusal on the ground that the grievances set forth in Mr. Hay’s
despatch were so old that it was hardly worth while troubling about
them. In the opinion of the Russian Ministers, the Jews must by now
be thoroughly accustomed to starvation.
France, with all the good intentions in the world, could do nothing
without Russia’s consent and, therefore, contented herself with the
expression of a modest hope that the Roumanian Government might
of their own accord decide to fulfil their obligations, seeing that the
real sufferer is Roumania itself, and with pointing to the lack of
224
means of enforcing such fulfilment.
In brief, the European Powers considered that they did their duty
by expressing their platonic concurrence with that part of the
American Note which referred to the obligations of humanity and
civilisation generally. But to the more definite appeal to the Treaty of
Berlin they refused to pay any attention whatsoever. Nor can we
wonder at their refusal. The appeal was not a very happy one; for
every party to that contract has conscientiously broken it in turn.
Russia, in defiance of its provisions, has fortified Batoum; Turkey has
not even attempted to carry out the reforms in the European
Provinces of the Empire, ordained by the Treaty; Great Britain has
done nothing for the Armenians. Why then should poor Roumania
alone be called upon to carry out her share of an agreement, already
disregarded with impunity by everyone else concerned?
Such a retort would, of course, have been too candid and too
rational for diplomacy. Instead, the Roumanian Government had
again recourse to the more correct, if somewhat hackneyed,
expedient of an official contradiction of the truth. The Roumanian
Minister in London declared that “the idea that any persecution
existed was absolutely erroneous.” The Jews were foreigners, and
“the disabilities imposed upon foreigners were absolutely necessary
for the protection of his countrymen, who had bought their
independence with the sword, and had a right to manage their
225
economic affairs according to their requirements, etc., etc.” What
the Roumanian conception of such a right is has been very
eloquently explained by Roumania’s accomplished Queen. After
having drawn a pitiful and, although exaggerated, in the main faithful
picture of Roumania’s economic misery, Her Majesty declares that,
under such conditions, the civilised world ought not “to require her to
harbour and support others, when she herself stands in dire need of
assistance.” Those “others” are “foreigners,” that is, Roumanian
Jews; their exodus is represented as the voluntary emigration of “a
foreign population” due to the instinct which prompts a rat to quit a
sinking ship, and their departure is welcome, because they, being
traders, drain the country of its wealth. This interesting economic
doctrine is expounded by Her Majesty as follows: “It is a fact that no
money has ever been introduced into Roumania through any one in
trade. Any that such a man may possess goes abroad, first to
purchase his stock and outfit, and later for supplies to carry on his
business, even such articles as buttons and the commonest kinds of
braids not being manufactured here except on the very smallest
226
scale.” Here again the Jewish apologist is more convincing than
his Roumanian accuser. Admitting that, on the whole, the Queen’s
statements are correct, he asks: “But why is it so? For the reason
that the ruling class prohibits ‘foreigners’ to acquire lands in the
country, and by means of this and other laws keeps foreign capital
227
from coming in.”
Protests pass away, grievances remain. The well-meant action of
Mr. Hay and Lord Lansdowne, far from bettering, really aggravated
the condition of the people on whose behalf it was taken. The
Roumanian politicians, with characteristic astuteness, perceived that
the immediate cause of the complaint was the emigration of the
Jews to the United States, England and Canada, and, naturally
enough, arrived at the conclusion that the one thing needful was to
remove the ground of complaint by stopping emigration. A
telegraphic order was sent to all the local authorities, forbidding the
issue of passports to the Jews. Those who had already reached the
frontier were forcibly turned back, and hundreds of others, who had
sold all they possessed in order to raise the funds necessary for the
228
journey, were compelled to return home and perish. Thus an act
intended as a blessing proved an unmitigated curse, and modern
Roumania by this new measure has outstripped even mediaeval
Spain in cruelty. For the Spanish sovereigns, blinded by religious
bigotry, had yet given to the Jews the alternatives of conversion or
exile. Their Roumanian imitators, infatuated by racial fanaticism, will
not baptize the Jews, nor dare they banish them; but, like Pharaoh of
old, they virtually bid them stay and be slaves.
 CHAPTER XXIII

ANTI-SEMITISM

We have followed the fortunes of the Jewish people from the

moment of its first contact with the nations of the West to the last
quarter of the nineteenth century. We have seen that this contact
was from the beginning marked by mutual antipathy, enfeebled at
times, invigorated at others, always present. Some Jewish writers
have endeavoured to show that the hatred of the Gentile towards the
Jew in the Middle Ages was an artificial creation due entirely to the
efforts of the Catholic Church; that it flowed from above, and that the
masses of Christendom, when not incited by the classes, were most
amicably disposed towards Israel. This view is hardly tenable. It is
inconceivable that the Church, or any other authority, could have
succeeded so well in kindling the conflagrations which we have
witnessed, if the fuel were not ready to be kindled. It is also a view
contrary to the recorded facts. We have seen in the earlier Middle
Ages popular prejudice spontaneously manifesting itself in the insults
and injuries which were heaped upon the Jews, and restrained with
difficulty by the princes and prelates of Europe. In the time of the
Crusades also it was not St. Bernard who fanned the fury of the mob
against the Jews of the Rhine, but an obscure monk. The
exhortations of the saint were disregarded; but the harangues of the
fanatic found an eager audience, simply because they were in
accord with popular feeling. During the same period bishops and
burgomasters strove to save the victims, in vain.
Again, the persecution of the Spanish Jews in the fifteenth
century would never have attained the dimensions which it did attain,
were it not for the deep-rooted animosity which the bulk of the
Spanish people nourished against them. Castile was then the home
of chivalry and charity. The pretensions of the Pope to interfere in the
affairs of the kingdom had met with scornful opposition on the part of
the Castilian nobles. Three centuries before an Aragonese monarch
had given away his life in defence of the persecuted heretics of
Provence. Less than two centuries before Aragon was one of the few
countries that refused to comply with the joint request of Philip the
Fair of France and Pope Clement V. to persecute the Knights
Templars. At the time when the Inquisition was established in Spain
both Castile and Aragon were hailing the revival of culture. Under
Ferdinand and Isabella, as well as in the subsequent reigns, the
Castilians and the Aragonese vigorously resisted an institution so
contrary to the principles of freedom dear to them. Nor was in Spain
the danger of dissension sufficiently great to justify recourse to so
terrible an instrument of concord. The Spaniards less than any other
people had reason to sacrifice liberty of conscience for the sake of
political conquest. It is, therefore, highly improbable that the Holy
Office would ever have gained a firm footing in Spain, but for the fact
that its way was paved by the popular prejudice against the Jews
and the Moors, and its success assured by the persecution of those
races. Though the Spaniards hated the Inquisition bitterly, they hated
the Semites more bitterly still; and of the two the Jew more bitterly
than the Moor.
We have also seen that neither the Renaissance nor the
Reformation, both movements directly or indirectly hostile to the
Church, brought any amelioration to the lot of the Jew. In every
country Jew-hatred existed as the product of other than
ecclesiastical influences. Here and there, under exceptionally
favourable conditions, the Jews may have been tolerated; they were
not loved. This negative attitude was liable to be at any moment
converted into active hostility. All that the Church did was to turn the
feeling to account, to intensify and to sanctify it. Lastly, we have seen
that the emancipation of the Jews did not come about until the end of
the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth century—a period no
longer of protest against the Church, but one of rebellion against all
the prejudices of all the ages. It was not until the gospel of humanity,
in its broadest sense, was accepted that the secular clamour against
the Jewish portion of the human race was silenced; and even then
not without difficulty. But, though the plant of anti-Judaism was cut at
the root, the root remained, and it was destined in our own day to put
forth a new shoot.
Writers have expended much ingenuity in defining the origin and
the nature of modern anti-Semitism. Some regard it as a
resuscitation of mediaeval religious bigotry; others as the latest
manifestation of the old struggle between Europe and Asia; a third
school, rejecting both those theories, interprets it as a purely political
question arising from the social and economic conditions created by
the emancipation of the Jews; while a fourth sect have attempted to
show that the modern revival is “the fruit of a great ethnographical
and political error.” Those who see in anti-Semitism nothing but a
revival of mediaeval religious rancour ignore the conflict between
Jew and Gentile before the rise of the Mediaeval Church, or even
before the rise of Christianity. Those who explain it as a purely racial
struggle forget the Crusades and the Inquisition and the superstitious
horror of usury. Those who interpret it simply as a question of
modern European politics disregard both those periods of history.
Finally, whatever may be said of crude ethnographical theories and
of nebulous nationalist creeds, it would be doing them too much
honour to suppose that they are the real causes of anti-Semitism.
Men do not slaughter their fellow-men for the mere sake of an
abstract hypothesis, though priests may. All these things do nothing
but give a name and a watchword to a movement born of far less
ethereal parents. In our day the political activity which has used anti-
Semitism as an instrument has only done what clerical activity had
done in the past. It has availed itself of a force not of its own
creation. The fact is that every human action is the result of manifold
motives. The complexity of the motives is not diminished by the
multitude of the actors. There is a strong temptation to simplify
matters by singling out one of those motives and ignoring the rest.
But, though truth is always simple, simplicity need not always be
true. There may be new things under the sun. Anti-Semitism,
however, is not one of them. Its roots lie deep in the past.
Viewed, then, in the light of two thousand years’ recorded
experience, modern anti-Semitism appears to be neither religious,
nor racial, nor economical in its origin and character. It is all three,
and something more. We find in it all the motives which led to the
persecution of the Jews in the past. In antiquity the struggle was
chiefly due to racial antagonism, in the Middle Ages chiefly to
religious antagonism, in the nineteenth century we might expect it to
assume chiefly a nationalist garb. But, as in antiquity religious
antipathy was blended with racial hatred, as in the Middle Ages
economic rivalry accentuated religious bigotry, so in our time
religious, racial, and economic reasons have contributed to the
movement in various degrees according to the peculiar conditions,
material and moral, prevailing in each country where anti-Semitism
has found an echo. If it were possible to unite all these causes in one
general principle, it would be this: every age has its own fashionable
cult, which for the time being overshadows all other cults, gives a
name to the age, explains its achievements, and extenuates its
crimes. Every age has found in the Jew an uncompromising
dissenter and a sacrificial victim. The cult par excellence of the
nineteenth century is Nationalism.
What is this dreadful Nationalism? It is a reversion to a primitive
type of patriotism—the narrow feeling which makes men regard all
those who live in the same place, or who speak the same language,
or who are supposed to be descended from a common ancestor, as
brethren; all others as foreigners and potential foes. This feeling in
its crudest form is purely a family-feeling, in the worst sense of the
term. It grows into a larger allegiance to the tribe, then to the race,
and that in its turn develops into the broad patriotism which
manifests itself now as Imperialism, now as Catholicism.
There is yet a third form of patriotism—the purest and noblest of
all: loyalty to common intellectual ideals. The Greeks attained to this
lofty conception, and an Athenian orator, in enumerating his
country’s claims to the admiration of mankind, dwells with just pride
on this product of its civilisation. Athens, he says, “has made the
name of the Hellenes to be no longer a name of race, but one of
mind, so that Hellenes should be called those who share in our
229
culture rather than in our nature.” Isocrates in making this
statement, however, gave utterance to a dream of his own rather
than to a feeling common among his countrymen. The Macedonian
Empire strove to convert that philosophical dream into a political fact.
Alexander and his successors studded Asia with Greek theatres,
Greek schools, Greek gymnasia, and the East was covered with a
veneer of pseudo-Hellenic civilisation. But their success was only
partial, superficial and ephemeral. The intellectual unity could not go
deep and therefore did not last long. The barriers—social, religious
and racial—which separated the Hellene from the Barbarian proved
insuperable; and the Isocratean ideal of a nationality based on
community of intellectual aims remained an ideal. Hellenism
demanded a degree of mental development to which mankind has
never yet attained. Hence its failure as a political bond. This was not
the case with Imperialism and Catholicism. They both appealed to
more elementary and therefore less rare qualities in man. Hence
their success. Rome achieved more than Greece because she
aimed at less.
The Roman Empire represented the first, the Roman Church the
second variety of this broad patriotism. Civis Romanus was a title
which united in a common allegiance the Italian and the Greek, the
Jew and the Egyptian, the Spaniard, the Briton and the Gaul.
Catholic Rome inherited the imperial feeling of Pagan Rome, but
dressed it in a religious form. The dictatorship of the Caesars was
divided between the Christian Emperor and the Pope: the former
inheriting their political power, the latter the spiritual and moral.
Charlemagne wielded the authority of an Imperator Romanus, his
papal contemporary that of a Pontifex Maximus. Then came the
decay and fall of the Carlovingian fabric; and, gradually, the Papacy
built up a spiritual empire with the débris of the secular. All Catholics
were subjects of that Empire. In the Middle Ages Europe presented a
picture of wonderful uniformity in sentiments, ideals, customs,
political and social institutions. All countries, like so many coins
issued from one mint, seemed to be cast in the same mould,
stamped with the same effigy and adorned with the same legend.
National consciousness was in the Middle Ages practically non-
existent, or, if it did exist, in the later centuries, it was obscured by
the religious sentiment. As in modern Islam we find Arabs, Persians,
Indians, Malays, Chinese, Syrians, Egyptians, Berbers, Moors,
Turks, Albanians—nations differing widely in origin and language—
united by the ties of a common creed, so in mediaeval Christendom
we find English, Scotch, French, Italian, German and Spanish
knights all forming one vast brotherhood. The reader of Froissart
cannot fail to notice this community of feeling and the marvellous
ease with which gentlemen from all those nations made themselves
at home in one another’s countries. The chronicler himself, in his
style and mental attitude, supplies a striking example of this
cosmopolitanism. By the mediaeval Christian, as by the modern
Mohammedan, the human race was divided into two halves: true
believers and others. The universal acceptance of Latin as the
medium of communication was another token and bond of
brotherhood among the Christians of mediaeval Europe, as the use
of Arabic, as a sacred tongue, is a token and a bond of brotherhood
among the Mohammedans of the present day.
This feeling of international patriotism, which found its highest
development and expression in the Crusades, began to fade as soon
as Catholic faith began to decay. Disintegration followed both in the
Church and in the State. Loyalty to one ideal and to one authority
was gradually superseded by local and later by racial patriotism.
Various political units succeeded to the Unity of mediaeval Europe,
the vernaculars ousted the Latin language from its position as the
one vehicle of thought, and the old cosmopolitan universities of Paris
and Bologna were replaced by national institutions. Since the
fifteenth century nationalism has been growing steadily, but in the
eighteenth its growth was to some extent checked by
humanitarianism. The great thinkers of that age extolled the freedom
and the perfection of the individual as the highest aim of culture,
describing exclusive attachment to one’s country and race as a
characteristic of a comparatively barbarous state of society: a
remnant of aboriginal ancestor-worship. Nationalism, accordingly, did
not reach its adolescence until the nineteenth century. Then the zeal
for peace was eclipsed by the splendour of the French exploits in
war, and the doctrine of universal freedom was forgotten in
Napoleon’s efforts at universal dominion. These efforts aroused in
every country which Napoleon attacked a passionate protest which
resulted in successful revolt. But the triumph was won at a
tremendous cost. Each nation in proportion to its sense of what was
due to itself was oblivious of what was due to others. The principles
of the brotherhood of men and of universal toleration were denied,
the narrow jealousies of race which the philosophers of the
preceding century had driven from the realm of culture were re-
installed, and Nationalism—arrogant, intemperate, and intolerant—
arose on the ruins of Humanitarianism. This evolution, or revolution,
has added a new element in social troubles, and has brought into
being a new set of ideas.
For the last hundred years ethnographical theory has dominated
the civilised world and its destinies as theological dogma had done
during the Middle Ages. Consciously or not, the idea of race directs
the policy of nations, inspires their poetry, and tinges their philosophy
with the same prejudice as religion did formerly. Aryan and non-
Aryan have become terms conveying all but the odious connotation
of Christian and infidel; and in place of the spiritual we have adopted
a scientific mythology. The fiction of our Aryan origin has flattered us
into the benevolent belief of our mental superiority over the Mongol,
and of our moral superiority over the Semite. To dispute this tenet is
to commit sacrilege. But even within the bosom of this imaginary
Aryan fold there are schisms: so-called Celtic, Germanic, Latin,
Anglo-Saxon, and Slavonic sects, divided against one another by the
phantom barriers of ethnographical speculation as frantically as in
older days Christendom was divided by the metaphysical figments of
Arian, Manichaean, Nestorian, and what not. In the name of race are
now done as many great deeds and as many great follies are
committed as were once in the name of God. The worship of race
has, as the worship of the Cross had done before, given birth to new
Crusades which have equalled the old in the degree to which they
have disturbed the peace and agitated the minds of men, and in the
violence of the passions which they have excited. Nationalism more
than any other cause has helped to bring discredit upon the
principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity—to prove the eighteenth
century dream of world-wide peace a glorious impossibility—and to
show the enormous chasm which still gapes between the aspirations
of a few thinkers and the instincts of the masses.
 Though common to all European countries, the creed of the age
found articulate exposition first in Germany, and gave rise to various
academic doctrines which attempted to account for the genesis and
evolution of Nationalism in scientific or pseudo-scientific terms. But
names do not alter facts. Ethnographical speculations are in this
case mainly interesting as having supplied a plausible explanation
for the rise of anti-Semitism. Those who are able to see through new
guises, and to detect what old things they conceal, know that anti-
Semitism is little more than a new Protean manifestation of Jew-
hatred. Divested of its academic paraphernalia, the movement is
revealed in all its venerable vulgarity—a hoary-headed abomination
long since excommunicated by the conscience of civilised mankind.
This reactionary movement began in Eastern Germany and
230
Austria. In those countries the Jews are very numerous, very
wealthy, and very influential. Both countries are famous as hot-beds
of racial fanaticism. In Germany Nationalism was begotten of the
independence secured by the Thirty Years’ War in the seventeenth
century, was nursed by the patriotic preachers and poets of the
eighteenth, was invigorated by the wars for emancipation from
Napoleon’s rule, and was educated by Hegel and his disciples. The
Jews in Germany, as elsewhere, are the one element which declines
to be fused in the nationalist crucible. Their international connections
help them to overstep the barriers of country. Their own racial
consciousness, fostered by the same writers, is at least as intense
as that of the Germans; but it does not coincide with any
geographical entity. They are, therefore, regarded as a cosmopolitan
tribe—“everywhere and nowhere at home.” They are distinct not only
as a race, but as a sect, and as a class. Accordingly, the reaction
against tolerance includes in its ranks clerics and Christian
Socialists, aristocrats, as well as Nationalists, that is, the enemies of
dissent and the enemies of wealth, as well as the enemies of the
alien and the enemies of the upstart. And the term “Jew” is used in a
religious or a racial sense according to the speaker. In both Germany
and Austria we saw that the philosophical gospel of social liberty was
very slowly applied to practical politics, and that, even when it had
been accepted, it was subject to reactions. When Jewish
manumission was finally accomplished, the Jews by their genius
filled a much larger place in the sphere of national life than was
deemed proportional to their numbers. And this undue
preponderance, rendered all the easier by the superior cohesion of
the Jewish over the German social system, was further accentuated
by specialisation. The Jews, whose training in Europe for centuries,
owing partly to their own racial instincts and Rabbinical teaching, but
chiefly to the conditions imposed upon them from outside, had been
of a peculiar kind, showed these peculiarities by their choice of fields
of activity. They abstained from the productive and concentrated
their efforts to the intellectual, financial, and distributive industries of
the countries of which they became enfranchised citizens. Jews
flooded the Universities, the Academies, the Medical Profession, the
Civil Service, and the Bar. Many of the judges, and nearly one-half of
the practising lawyers of Germany, are said to be Jews. Jews came
forth as authors, journalists, and artists. Above all, Jews, thanks to
the hereditary faculty for accumulation fostered in them during the
long period when money-dealing was the one pursuit open to them,
asserted themselves as financiers. It is impossible to move
anywhere in Berlin or Vienna without seeing the name of Israel
written in great letters of gold not only over the shops, but over the
whole face of German life. Success awakened jealousy, and
economic distress—due to entirely different causes—stimulated it.
What if the competition was fair? What if the Jews were
distinguished by their peaceful and patriotic attitude? What if they
supplied the least proportion of criminals and paupers? What if
German freedom had been bought partially with Jewish blood, and
German unity achieved by the help of Jewish brains and Jewish
money?
The landed gentry, richer in ancestors than in money or
intelligence, had every reason to envy the Jew’s wealth, and much
reason to dislike the Jew’s ostentatious display of it. They could not
respect in the Jew a gifted arrivé. They saw in him a vulgar parvenu
—one who by his “subversive Mephistophelian endowment, brains,”
demolishes the fences of creed and caste, and invades the highest
and most exclusive circles, thus acting as a solvent in society. If he is
wise, the proud nobleman of narrow circumstances makes his pride
compensate for his poverty, and magnanimously despises the
luxuries which he cannot procure. If, as more often happens, he is
foolish, he enters into a rivalry of vanity with the upstart, and the
result is a mortgaged estate—mortgaged most likely to his rival. In
either case, he can have little love for the opulent and clever
interloper. The animosity of the aristocracy is shared by the middle
classes, and for analogous reasons. The German professional man,
and more especially his wife, resents his Jewish colleague’s
comparative luxury as a personal affront. The excessive power of
money in modern society, and the consequent diminution of the
respect once paid to blood or learning, naturally enable the Jewish
banker to succeed where the poor baron fails; and the Jewish
professor or doctor, though many of these latter are poor enough, to
outshine his Christian competitor. This excessive power of money is
due to causes far deeper than the enfranchisement of the Jews. It is
the normal result of Germany’s modern development. The influence
of the nobles depended largely on their domains of land; and when
industries arose to compete with agriculture, the importance of land
necessarily declined. At the same time, industry and commerce
began, with Germany’s expansion, to divert more and more the
attention of the intelligent from the path of academic distinction—
once the only path to honour open to the ambitious burgher—into
that of material prosperity. Chrematistic enterprise has introduced a
new social standard, and an aristocracy of wealth has come to
supplant the old aristocracies of birth and erudition. This social
revolution, through which every country in the world has passed and
has to pass, was unhesitatingly ascribed to the Jew, who was thus
accused of having created the conditions, which in reality he had
only exploited.
If from the aristocratic and the cultured classes we turn to the
rural population, we find similar causes yielding similar results. In the
German country districts it is objected to the Jews not cultivating the
land themselves, but lying in wait for the failing farmer:
“Everywhere,” says an authority, “the peasant proprietor hated the
Jew,” and he proceeds to sketch the peasant tragedy of which that
hatred was the consequence. The land had to be mortgaged to pay
family claims; the owner had recourse to the ubiquitous and
importunate money-lender; the money-lender, whose business it is to
trade upon the necessity of the borrower, took advantage of the
latter’s distress, and extorted as much as he could. “The Jew grew
fat as the Gentile got lean. A few bad harvests, cattle-plague, or
potato-disease, and the wretched peasant, clinging with the
unreasonable frantic love of a faithful animal to its habitat, had, in
dumb agony, to see his farm sold up, his stock disposed of, and the
acres he had toiled early and late to redeem, and watered by the
sweat of his stubborn brow, knocked down by the Jewish interloper
231
to the highest bidder.” In the Austrian country districts it is urged
that the presence of the Jew is synonymous with misery; his
absence with comparative prosperity. In Hungary, the late M. Elisée
Reclus—the famous author of the Nouvelle Géographie Universelle
—informs us, “The rich magnate goes bankrupt, and it is almost
always a Jew who acquires the encumbered property,” and another
witness adds: “The Jew is no less active in profiting by the vices and
necessities of the peasant than by those of the noble.” In Galicia,
especially, we are told that the land is rapidly passing into the hands
of the Jews, and that many a former proprietor is now reduced to
work as a day-labourer in his own farm for the benefit of a Jewish
master. All this is an absurdly exaggerated version of facts in
themselves sad enough. The Jews as a whole are by no means a
wealthy community, and the gainers by the supposed exploitation
are the few, not the many. And if, as is the case, the condition of
affairs in agricultural states is bad, who is to blame? Wherever there
is agrarian depression there are sure to be money-lenders enough
and Shylocks too many. It does not appear that Christian money-
lenders have ever been more tender-hearted than their Jewish
confrères. Why then set down to the Jew, as a Jew, what is the
common and inevitable attribute of his profession? The ruin of the
borrower does not justify the slaughter of the lender. Philanthropists
would be better employed if, instead of bewailing in mournful
diatribes the woes of the bankrupt peasant and inveighing against
the cruelty of his oppressor, combined to establish agricultural banks
where the farmer could obtain money at less exorbitant interest. This
measure, and measures like this, not slaughter and senile
lamentation, would be a remedy consonant both with the nature of
the evil and with the dictates of civilisation and justice. Until
something of the sort is done, it is worse than futile to demand that
dealers in money, any more than dealers in corn, cotton, or cheese,
should work from altruistic motives. But nothing rational is ever
attempted. Instead, everywhere the nobles ruined by their own
improvidence and extravagance, the peasants by their rustic
incompetence, and both by the exactions of a wasting militarism,
complain of the extortion of the Jewish usurers. It was inevitable that
the old-world monster of Jew-hatred, never really dead, should have
raised its hoary head again. All the elements of an anti-Jewish
movement were present. The only thing that lacked was opportunity.
The deficiency was not long in being supplied.
The Franco-German war and the achievement of German unity
fanned the flame of patriotism. As in the time of Napoleon the First,
so in that of Napoleon III., a great national danger created a strong
fellow-feeling between the different members of the German race; a
great national triumph stirred up an enthusiasm for the Empire which
was indulged in at the cost of individual liberty. Despotism throve on
the exuberance of nationalism. The Germans were led back from the
constitutional and democratic ideals of 1848 to an ultra-monarchic
servility which made it possible for the present Kaiser’s grandfather a
few years after, prompted by Bismarck, to assert openly the
ridiculous old claim to divine right. Thus the ground was prepared for
any anti-alien and anti-liberal agitation. Other causes came to
accelerate the movement. The war had involved enormous
pecuniary and personal sacrifices. The extraordinary success,
instead of satisfying, stimulated German ambition. It aroused an
extravagant financial optimism and self-confidence. Germany,
intoxicated with military victory, was still thirsting for aggrandisement
of a different kind. Economy was cast to the winds, and a fever of
wild speculation seized on all classes of the community. Companies
were floated, and swallowed up the superfluous capital of the great
as well as the savings of the humble. Sanguine expectation was the
temper of the day. Berlin would vie with Paris in elegance and with
London in suburban comfort, and every one of its citizens would be a
millionaire!
 Then came the terrible crash. The bubble burst, and the
magnificent day-dreams were dispelled by misery. A succession of
bad harvests, and the rapid increase in American corn competition,
by impoverishing the agricultural class, added to the general
depression. The disillusioned public wanted a victim whereupon to
vent its wrath. Those who promoted the companies had to suffer for
the folly of those who were ruined by their failure. A great many of
the former, by selling out at the right moment, rose to affluence. The
discontented public, naturally enough, noticing these large fortunes
in the midst of the general wreck, jumped to the conclusion that the
few had enriched themselves by robbing the many. “Exposures”
followed, and among the implicated financiers there were found
many Jews. It was then in order to fill Jewish pockets that the heroes
of Germany had bled on the battlefield, and the burghers of
Germany had been bled at home! The nationalist ideal of Germany
for the Germans, then, was to lead to a Germany for the Israelites!
All those trials had been endured and all those triumphs achieved in
order to deliver up the Fatherland to an alien and infidel race—a race
with which neither the intellect nor the heart of Germany has any
affinity or sympathy! This was the cry of anguish that succeeded to
the paeans of self-glorification, and those nationalists who uttered
these sentiments forgot that their very nationalism had been largely
created and fostered by Jewish thinkers. They also forgot that it was
a Jewish statesman, Lasker, who, at the cost of all personal and
party interests and of his popularity, had alone had the courage to
expose in the Prussian Chamber the evils of extravagant
speculation, in 1873, and to urge both the public and the
Government to turn back, while there was yet time, from the road to
ruin which they pursued. But it has been well said: “Who would think
of gratitude when a scapegoat is required?”
A tongue was given to the popular indignation in a pamphlet by
an obscure German journalist, Wilhelm Marr by name, who seized
the opportunity of attaining to fame and fortune by a plentiful effusion
of his anti-Jewish venom. The work anathematized the Jews not only
as blood-sucking leeches, but as enemies of the Germanic race, and
as forming a distinct and self-centred solecism in German national
life. The Coryphaeus was ably supported by a crowd hitherto mute.
The opponents of industrial and the opponents of religious liberalism,
men of rank, men of letters, and high ecclesiastics joined in the
chorus, and another “black day” (July 30, 1878) was added to the
Jewish calendar. In Adolph Stöcker, a Christian Socialist and court
preacher, and a staunch Conservative in the Prussian Diet, the new
crusade found its Peter the Hermit. He was the first man of position
to preach from the pulpit and to declare in the press that Hebrew
influence in the State was disastrous to the Christian section of the
community, that Semitic preponderance was fatal to the Teutonic
race. As though the printing presses of Germany were only waiting
for the signal, a whole library of anti-Semitic literature was rapidly
produced, and as rapidly consumed. Some of the most popular
journals opened their columns to the campaign, Jewish journalists
opposed violence with violence, and the feud daily assumed larger
dimensions, until by the end of 1879 it had spread and raged over
the whole of the empire.
“It is not right that the minority should rule over the majority,”
cried some. Others accused the Jews, loosely and without adducing
any proofs, of forming a freemasonry and of always placing the
interests of their brethren above those of the country. That there was
some kind of systematic co-operation among the Jews seems
probable. It is also probable that there was a certain degree of truth
in the charge of “clandestine manipulation of the press” for the
purpose of shielding even Jews unworthy of protection. But for this
the Germans had only themselves to thank. By attacking the Jews
as a tribe they stimulated the tribal feeling among them. The social
isolation to which they condemned the Jew intensified his gift of
reciprocity. To the German Christians the Jew, however patriotic and
unexceptionable he may be as a citizen, as a man is a Jew—an
alien, an infidel, an upstart, a parasite. His genius is said to be purely
utilitarian, his religion externally an observance of empty forms,
essentially a worship of the golden calf, and worldly success his
highest moral ideal. German professors analysed the Jewish mind
and found it Semitic, German theologians sought for the Jewish soul
and could find none. Both classes, agreeing in nothing else,
concurred in denouncing the Jew as a sinister creature, strangely
wanting in spiritual qualities—a being whose whole existence, devoid
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