Page:George Pitt-Rivers - The World Significance of the Russian Revolution (1920).pdf/35

 Rh surely as a foul body breeds lice. We had also to insist on the essentially different type of civilisation presented by an almost exclusively agricultural country like Russia, and, as a consequence, the patriarchal nature of its government, and the comparative absence of middle classes, bourgeoisie and proletariat (industrial operatives); all these imported classes forming an insignificant fraction of the total population. It can now be understood why the patriarchal government of the Tzars took care to exclude and vigorously control Jews, who, as a class, are normally found in greatest numbers among the bankers, middlemen, profiteers and usurers.

Generations of persecution and repression developed in the ghettos a race whose powers of adaptation under such treatment must necessarily have preserved many of the meanest (the most adaptable) as well as a few of the noblest elements (the most resistant to a mean environment) amongst them. Constantly plundered and robbed of their goods, they have learned to handle the power that lies in bonds and exchangeable tokens of wealth. When deprived of the concrete goods of this world they have set store by the abstract or the ideal. The Jewish race has produced great financiers and merchants, but also great scientists, great philosophers and great prophets. When a Jew believes in an ideal he will give himself up to it more whole-heartedly, perhaps, than any Gentile. When he rebels against the inhospitable country of his birth, he rebels passionately with a slow, persistent fire, and waits for his revenge; but when he can identify himself and his power with the country which sheltered