In this connection also every wise man will admit that there is no greater error than to exaggerate the consciousness of Jewish action whether the error proceed from those who admire or who detest it. To hear their modern opponents talk one might imagine that the Jewish people formed a small club of which every member knew every other while each worked in the unison of a disciplined body. That aberration I have dealt with more than once upon former pages. The truth is that no nation on earth presents so many surprising exceptions to its general action as does this nation, and that no nation on earth, when it moves in one general direction, as it often does, is actuated by a common motive less conscious. We who stand outside the Jewish body may mark its cohesion, and will mark it, I hope, to its honour; but its own members complain rather of its lack of cohesion. I have heard them complain--I know not how often--of the way in which the wealthier Jews left their society for that of an alien body, sneered at the general body of Israel, and remained indifferent to the common cry of the race. It is this unconsciousness in action, this frequent replacement of motive by instinct which accounts for what all observers have noticed, especially in times of persecution. I mean the bewilderment of the oppressed at the action of their oppressors.
I remember once listening to a most eloquent speech delivered in the course of a debate in which, with that long recollection which is characteristic of his people, an Israelite passionately declaimed the gratitude of that people to St. Bernard who saved their remnant upon the Rhine from the popular fury. I remember also how another in a debate (for I have attended many such up and down the country and have heard from as many aspects as possible what the Jewish attitude towards us is) stated simply, in reply to my description of the Jewish financial position in this country after the Conquest: "Your cathedral and your abbeys and even your castles were built with _our_ money." The phrase was significant of the way in which what the English community of the time regarded as a tolerated abuse, those fortunes which _they_ never thought of as Jewish at all, but as moneys temporarily unjustly wrung from the people at large, were regarded in contemporary Jewry as private property legitimately acquired, held in full possession.