G. F. Abbott

“ In the night of their darkest desolation the Jews kept their eyes fixed to the East, and said to themselves and to one another, “Courage, the day is at hand.” Attachment to Faith and Fatherland—the religious and the national ideals—are the two strands, indissolubly entwined, of that great Messianic dream which runs like a golden thread through the black web of Jewish history. The Holy Land never ceased to be regarded as the true home of the race. ”

“ To the Hebrew mind the sun that shines in the sky and the blossoms that adorn the earth are at most but pale symbols of Divine Love, pledges for a bliss which is not of this world. And yet Socrates emptied the cup of death with a smile and a jest, where Job would have filled the world with curses and bitter lamentation. Laughter came as spontaneously to the Greek as breath, and the two things died together. The Jew could not laugh, and would not allow any one else to do so. The truth is that the Greek never grew old, and the Jew was never young. ”

“ He knew that the engagement about the delivery of arms was reciprocal, and that, as France had failed to ratify it on her part, King Constantine rightly considered himself free from all obligations on his part. He also knew that, far from being lured into landing by false assurances of surrender, he had been emphatically warned against it by categorical refusals and intimations of resistance. Yet, human nature being what it is, the honest sailor, maddened by his discomfiture, called the inevitable collision a "guet-apens" and, even whilst negotiating for release, he meditated revenge. ”

“ But it is not the only aberration with which history will charge our statesmen and diplomats.
Greece was going through an internal crisis; and those who know Greece will know what that means. In private life no people is more temperate, more moderate, than the Greek: a sense of measure always seasons its pleasures, and even the warmest passions of the heart seem to obey the cool reflections of the brain. In public life, by way of compensation, the opposite qualities prevail; and as citizens the Greeks display an astonishing lack of the very virtues which distinguish them as men. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As free men, the Greeks resented the violence done to their liberty; but as intelligent men they would have resented open violence less than a profanation of the name of liberty that added mockery to injury and administered a daily affront to their intelligence. There was yet a spirit of resistance in the country which would not be crushed, and a fund of good sense which could not be deceived. ”

“ Even the shrill song of the humble grasshopper held sweet music for the Greek. He revelled in the loveliness and colour of life. He was inspired by the glory of the human form. He extolled the majesty of man. The Hebrew mind was nursed by meditation; the Hellenic drew its nourishment from contemplation. Nature was the Greek’s sole guide in taste as well as in conduct; from nature he learnt the canons of the beautiful as well as the laws of right and wrong. Hence no country has produced greater poets than Greece, or fewer saints. ”

“ Former friends had become deadly enemies: the community was rent with dissensions and poisoned with suspicions. Preposterous falsehoods were freely scattered and readily snatched at on both sides: the side of M. Venizelos and the side of M. Gounaris. Politicians who had been eclipsed by the Cretan's brilliance, came forth now to regain their lustre at his expense. For like all men who have played leading parts on the world's stage, M. Venizelos had gathered about him as much animosity as admiration; and hate is more enterprising than love. ”

“ Tolerance and speculative freedom were never better understood than in pagan Greece and Rome. The Pagan was content to navigate his own ship by his own compass—whether of head or of heart—without insisting that every one else should adopt the same compass, or be drowned. The total absence of dogma, which forms at once the charm and the foible of polytheism, while precluding persecution, encouraged a free exchange of religious traditions, not only between sister nations, as the Greek and the Italian, but even between entirely foreign and even hostile races. ”

“ Politicians casting about for arguments wherewith to back their views may leave their hearers to imagine that Great Powers keep armies ready to be planked down at any point at a moment's notice; but the fact is that an army, even if it can be spared from other tasks, is a cumbrous affair to move about, requiring all sorts of tiresome things—food, arms, ammunition—the provision of which requires, in its turn, complicated processes, before the army is potentially effective for the role assigned to it in the creative mind of an excited orator. ”

“ As these charges are still brought against the Jews by their enemies in England, it may be not irrelevant to answer some of them once for all. No one with a biographical dictionary on his book-shelf requires to be told that the Jewish people, far from specialising in material aims, has never shirked its due share in the world’s intellectual work, though it has seldom been accorded its due share of the world’s recognition. Look wheresoever we like, in science, art, music, philosophy, letters, politics, we everywhere find the Jew generously contributing to the common fund of human knowledge. ”

“ It is easy to understand why the one race should have drawn its inspiration from within and the other from without; why the one should have sunk the individual in the community and the other sacrificed the community to the individual; why the one should have worshipped the form and the other the spirit. It is especially easy to understand the Greek’s inextinguishable thirst for new things and the Jew’s rigid attachment to the past. Everything in Greece suggests progress; everything in Palestine spells permanence. ”

“ A new man was needed—a man free from the deadening influences of a corrupt past—a man daring enough to initiate a new course and tenacious enough to push on with inexorable purpose to the goal.
During the first period of his career, M. Venizelos had been a capable organizer of administrative departments no less than a clever manipulator of seditious movements. But he had mainly distinguished himself as a rebel against authority. And it was in the temper of a rebel that he came to Athens. Obstacles, however, external as well as internal, made a subversive enterprise impossible. ”

“ It was the same spirit that now forbade the Jew to feel at home in the presence of the Gentile. Judaism has always lacked the magnetic attraction of Christianity and Islam, not because the rule of life which it prescribes is less pure, or the prospect of peace which it holds out less alluring to the heart that yearns for rest, but because, unlike Christianity and Islam, it deliberately repels instead of inviting outsiders. The doors of Moses’s heaven are jealously closed to the stranger; and those who have entered into it have at no time been more numerous than those who have come out of it. ”

“ Abroad the progress of M. Venizelos excited almost as much interest as it did in Greece. The Greeks are extraordinarily sensitive to foreign opinion: a single good word in a Western newspaper raises a politician in public esteem more than a whole volume of home-made panegyric. M. Venizelos had not neglected this branch of his business; and from the outset every foreign journalist and diplomatist who came his way was made to feel his fascination: so that, even before leaving his native shores, the Cretan had become in the European firmament a star of the third or fourth magnitude. ”

“ CHAPTER IX When M. Venizelos taunted M. Skouloudis with forgetting that he had promised the Allies "not only simple neutrality, nor simply benevolent neutrality, but most sincerely benevolent neutrality," the aged Prime Minister, who apparently had a sense of humour, replied: "I do not know how there can be such a thing as benevolent neutrality. A neutrality really benevolent towards one of the belligerents is really malevolent towards the other, consequently it is more or less undisguised partiality. Between benevolence and malevolence there is no room for neutrality." ”

“ THE REFORMATION AND THE JEWS The love for liberty which gave birth to the Renaissance was also the parent of another child—the Reformation. The first saw the light in Latin, the second in Teutonic Europe. The vindication of man’s rights was their common object: but while the Renaissance strove to attain that object through the emancipation of the human reason, the Reformation endeavoured to reach it by the emancipation of the human conscience. Intelligence, the inheritance of Hellenism, was the weapon of the one: the other drew its strength from the Hebraic fountain of Intuition. ”

“ By the methods which she employed, France succeeded in gaining Greece and losing the Greeks. Nothing else could have been expected: friends are sometimes to be won by good offices; sometimes by the promise of good offices; and sometimes by good words. They are seldom won by injuries, and by insults never. It is curious that so elementary a lesson in human nature should have been unknown to the able men who guided the policy and diplomacy of France during the War, who raised her military prestige and re-established her position in the first rank of the European Powers. ”

“ To the Russian Jews groaning in servitude the Czar’s Empire is a foreign land; his religion a foreign religion. In leaving Russia they leave a hotbed of idolatry as fierce, as cruel, as Godless as the idolatry of Egypt, Babylon, Syria, or Rome. To them the Russian god who can sanction such persecution is a veritable Moloch. He can claim no kinship with Jehovah. They owe it to themselves to escape from the house of bondage, and to their God to continue bearing witness to His unity. They, therefore, like their remote ancestors, seek freedom of worship by expatriation. ”

“ In Holland alone rebellion did not degenerate into a new species of despotism. While the hidalgos of Castile, impelled by lust for glory and gold, carried into a new world the cross and the cruelty of the old, conquering kingdoms for Charles and Philip, souls for Christ and wealth for themselves; while even in England one sovereign was engaged in persecuting Popery, another Puritanism, and a third both, the citizens of the Netherlands were laying the foundations of a less splendid but far more solid prosperity. ”

“ They recalled all the encroachments upon her neutrality, all the infringements of her sovereignty, to which Greece had submitted unresistingly, trusting to the Allies' solemn promises. And how had they kept those promises? After the violation of so many pledges, how was it possible to put faith in M. Jonnart's assurances? If the French troops pursued their march into the country, imposed upon it Venizelos by force, dragged it into the war, who could stop them? Better perish without dishonour. ”