Page:1902 Encyclopædia Britannica - Volume 25 - A-AUS.pdf/518

 470

ANTILLES — ANTI-SEMITISM

most numerous. There is a small volunteer defence force. The island has direct steam communication with Great Britain, New York, and Canada, and is connected with the West India and Panama Telegraph Company’s cable. The decline of the sugar industry has had a serious effect on the prosperity and public finances of the island; and, as in many other West Indian colonies, considerable retrenchments in public expenditure had to be effected during the last few years of the century, which were also marked by hurricane and drought. Sweet potatoes, yams, maize, and guinea-corn are grown for home consumption, and pine-apples are exported to a small extent. The lands were in 1899 classified as follows:—Cultivated in sugar-cane, 14,860 acres; other crops, 1660 acres; pasture, 22,350; uncultivated, 19,910; mountain and waste land, 10,495; total (estimated) 69,275 acres. In 1896 the exports, chiefly cane-sugar and pine-apples, were £131,000 ; in 1898, £79,000 ; and in 1899, £121,832. The imports in 1896 were £135,600; in 1898 they fell to £105,000, but in 1899 they showed improvement, standing at £109,031. The revenue in 1899 was £42,822, and the expenditure £51,959. The debt stood at £137,500 in 1900. Trade is chiefly with the United States. The tonnage entered and cleared at the various ports of the island was in 1898—steam, 409,122 (all British); sailing, 20,046 (of which 13,612 was British). The islands Barbuda (680) and Bedonda (120) produce phosphates of alumina.

this archipelago. This theory fails to account for the origin of the term itself, which is supposed by some to be a corrupt form of the still older and more famous Atlantis. For the islands and groups now comprised under this designation, see West Indies, and the separate entries— Cuba, Jamaica, &c.

Antioch, (1) on the Orontes. The modern town, Antdkia, stands in the north-western quarter of the ancient city, on the left bank of the el-Asi, Orontes, on level ground at the foot of the rugged range of Mount Casius. More than half the town was destroyed by an earthquake in 1872, and the houses were rebuilt with material from the old walls. A marshy lake, in the fertile plain to the north, makes the town unhealthy, and the trade, in maize and liquorice root, is small. There is a British vice-consulate. The population consists of Moslems and Ansarfeh, 16,000; Christians and Jews, 8000. (2) Pisidian Antioch was situated on the lower southern slopes of the Sultan Dagh, about 1^ mile east of Yalovach, in the Konia vilayet of Asia Minor, on the right bank of a stream, ancient Anthius, which flows into the Hoiran Geul. It was probably founded, on the site of a Phrygian sanctuary, by Seleucus Nicator, 301-280 B.C., and was made a free city by the Komans in 189 B.c. It was a thoroughly Hellenized, Greek-speaking city, in the midst of a Phrygian people, with a mixed population that iucluded many Jews. Before 6 B.C. Augustus made it a colony with the title Caesarea, and connected it with Lystra by the “ Royal Road.” Under Claudius, a.d. 41-54, when visited by Paul and Barnabas it was the civil and military centre of South Galatia, and a place of importance. In 1097 the Crusaders found rest and Antilles, a term of somewhat doubtful origin now shelter within its walls. The ruins are interesting, and show that generally used, especially by foreign writers, as synony- Antioch was a strongly-fortified city of Hellenic and Roman type St. Paul the Traveller: Historical Commentary on the mous with the expression “West India Islands.” Like (Ramsay, Galatians, 1899). “ Brazil,” it dates from a period anterior to the discovery of the New World, “ Antilia ” being one of those mysterious Antioquia, a department of the republic of lands of the Gloomy Ocean, which figured on the mediaeval Colombia, bounded on the N. by the Colombian departcharts sometimes as an archipelago, sometimes as continu- ments of Bolivar and Cauca, on the E. by that of Sanous land of greater or lesser extent, constantly fluctuating tander and Boyaca, on the S. by those of Tolima and in mid-ocean between the Canaries and East India. But Cauca, and on the W. by Cauca. It has an area of it came at last to be identified with the land discovered 22,316 sq. miles, and its population is roughly estimated by Columbus. Later, when this was found to consist of at about 500,000. The population of the capital, a vast archipelago enclosing the Caribbean sea and Gulf Medellin, is estimated at 40,000. The other principal of Mexico, Antilia assumed its present plural form, towns are Marinilla, Sonson, Salamina, Santa Bosa, and Antilles, which was collectively applied to the whole of Puerto Berrio. ANTI-SE MI TI S M. N the political struggles of the concluding quarter of the 19 th century an important part was played by a religious, political, and social agitation against the Jews, known as “ Anti-Semitism.” The origins of this remarkable movement already threaten to become obscured by legend.. The Jews contend that anti-Semitism is a mere atavistic revival of the Jew-hatred of the Middle Ages. The extreme section of the anti-Semites, who have given the movement its quasi-scientific name, declare that it is a racial struggle—an incident of the eternal conflict between Europe and Asia—and that the anti-Semites are engaged in an effort to prevent what is called the Aryan race from being subjugated by a Semitic immigration, and to save Aryan ideals from being modified by an alien and demoralizing oriental Anschauung. There is no essential foundation for either of these contentions. Beligious prejudices reaching back to the dawn of history have been reawakened by the anti-Semitic agitation, but they did not originate it, and they have not entirely controlled it. The alleged racial divergence is, too, only a linguistic hypothesis on the physical evidence of which anthropologists are not agreed (Topinard, Anthropologie, p. 444; Taylor, Origins of Aryans, cap. i.), and, even if it were proved,

it has existed in Europe for so many centuries, and so many ethnic modifications have occurred on both sides, that it cannot be accepted as a practical issue. It is true that the ethnographical histories of the Jews and the nations of Europe have proceeded on widely diverging lines, but these lines have more than once crossed each other and become interlaced. Thus Aryan elements are at the beginnings of both; European morals have been ineradicably semitized by Christianity, and the Jews have been Euro- peans for over a thousand years, during which their character has been modified and in some respects transformed by the ecclesiastical and civil polities of the nations among whom they have made their permanent home. Anti-Semitism is then exclusively a question of European politics, and its origin is to be found, not in the long struggle between Europe and Asia, or between the Church and the Synagogue, which filled so much of ancient and mediaeval history, but in the social conditions resulting from the emancipation of the Jews in the middle of the 19th century. If the emancipated Jews were Europeans in virtue of the antiquity of their western settlements, and of the character impressed upon them by the circumstances of