It is first to be noted that most of the accusations made against the Jews by their enemies and most of the very proper rebuttals of those accusations advanced by the Jews and their defenders, miss the mark because they attempt to put in abstract form what is really something highly concrete. And this is equally true of the praise bestowed upon the Jews, of the special virtues ascribed to them and of the denials of these virtues.
They miss the mark because they attempt to express in terms of one category what should be expressed in terms of another. They are doing what a man does when he compares two pictures by their outline while in point of fact their interest lies in colour, or when he affirms something of a tune the fundamental point of which something is not the air at all but the instruments upon which it is played: as who should say that "God save the King" was "shrill" because he heard it played on a penny whistle or "booming" because he heard it played on a violoncello. The real point to note is not that the Jews appear to us (or we to them) to possess certain abstract qualities and defects, but that in their case each quality or defect has a special character, a special national _timbre_ which it lacks in ours.
Thus you will hear the Jews arraigned by their enemies for three such vices as cowardice, avarice and treason--to take three of the commonest accusations. You examine their actions and you find innumerable instances of the highest courage, the greatest generosity and the most devoted loyalty: but courage, generosity and loyalty of a Jewish kind, directed to Jewish ends, and stamped with a highly distinctive Jewish mark.
The man who accuses the Jews of cowardice means that they do not enjoy a fight of his kind, nor a fight fought after his fashion. All he has discovered is that the courage is not shown under the same circumstances, nor for the same ends, nor in the same mode. But if the word courage means anything, he cannot on reflection deny it to actions of which one could make an endless catalogue even from contemporary experience alone. Is it cowardice in a young man to sacrifice his life deliberately for the sake of his own people? Did that young Jew show cowardice who killed the Russian Prime Minister, the antagonist of his people, after the first revolution following on the Russo-Japanese war? Was it cowardice to walk up in a crowded theatre, surrounded by all the enemies of his race, and shoot their chief in their midst? Is it cowardice to stand up against the vast alien majority, and to do so over and over again, perhaps through a whole lifetime, insisting on things that are grossly unpopular with that majority and running a risk the whole time of physical violence? You find Jews adopting that attitude all over Europe. Can one think it is cowardice which has permitted the individuals of this nation to maintain their tradition unbroken through two thousand years of intermittent torture, spoliation and violent death? The thing so stated is ridiculous, and it is clear that those who make such an accusation are confounding their own form of courage with courage as a universal attribute.