Mr. Chesterton's Notebook of Travel and Opinion "Tue New Jervsate." By G. K.
Chesterton, Hodder and Stoughton.
12s, 6d. net, Mr. Chesterton's book about his travels among the Jews will be read with all the more curiosity because he is generally regarded as an anti-Semite (Robert Lynd writes, in the "Daily News"). He does not himself admit the justice of the epithet. In fact, he goes to special pains to dissociate himself from "the new Anti-Semitism which is netely Anti-Socialism."" On this point he writes:
1 have muck more sympathy—for the Israelite we are beginning te reject, than for the Israelite we have already accepted. I have more respect for him whew he leads some sort of revolt, however narrow anarchic, against the oppression the poor, than when he is safe at the head of great money-lending business oppressing the poor himself.
It is not the poor aliens, but the rich aliens I wish we had' excluded, 1 myself wholly reject Bolshevism, not because its actions are violent, but because its very thought is materialistic and mean, And, if this preference is trae even of Bolshevism, it is ten times truer of Zionism. It really seems to-me rather hard that the full storm of fury should have burst about the Jews, at the very moment wher some of them at least felt the call of a far cleaner ideal; and that when we have tolerate ed their tricks with our country, we should turn on them precisely when they seek in sincerity for their own. Thus he went to Zion as a Zionist in so far as he was anything but a militant Christian. He is for the most part a Crusader, defending his religion against Mr. Wells, Mr. Archer. and the Mohammedans. But, on such occasions as he is confronted with the Jewish ideal, he not only takes off his hat, but waves it jubilantly.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.