Andrew Royce has his first installment of a 3-part essay on Hilaire Belloc’s book The Jews (1922). A PDF of Belloc’s book can be found here. Royce writes:
Of all the fallacies that one confronts when engaging with the theme of relations between Jews and Europeans, one of the most easily disproven is the idea that antagonism towards Jews is constantly changing. In the ‘mainstream’ reading of the history of European-Jewish interactions, the friction that exists between Jews and other elements of the society is argued to be linked solely to a Christianity-induced communal psychosis on the part of Europeans. This psychosis is said to undergo almost ceaseless metamorphoses…
In my examination of Robert Wistrich’s Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred, I pointed to that author’s typically contorted argument that a “virus” existed in Europe, in which “pagan, pre-Christian anti-Semitism grafted on to the stem of medieval Christian stereotypes of the Jew which then passed over into the post-Christian rationalist anti-Judaism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”…
Belloc begins by outlining in simple language the thesis of his book: the need to address the problem of reducing or accommodating the strain produced by the presence of an alien body, in this case the “small but intense” Jewish population (12), within European culture and society. Belloc writes: “The alien body sets up strains, or to change the metaphor, produces a friction, which is evil both to itself and to the organism which it inhabits (4).”
