and his cycle. If we wish to see this ritual in its glory in the Scandinavian World, we must study its development among the Scandinavians who stayed at home. By contrastLines of Inquiry
WE have now, perhaps, established the truth that ease is inimical to civilization. Can we next proceed one step farther? Can we say that the stimulus towards civilization grows positively stronger in proportion as the environment grows more difficult? Let us review the evidence in favour of this proposition and then the evidence against it, and see what inference emerges. Evidence indicating that the difficulty and the stimulus of an environment are apt to increase pari passu is not hard to lay hands upon. Rather, we are likely to be embarrassed by the wealth of illustrations that leap to the mind. Most of these illustrations present themselves in the form of comparisons. Let us begin by sorting out our illustrations into two groups in which the points of comparison relate to the physical environment and the human environment respectively; and let us first consider the physical group. It subdivides itself into two categories: comparisons between the respective stimulating effects of physical environments which present different degrees of difficulty; and comparisons between the respective stimulating effects of old ground and new ground, apart from the intrinsic nature of the terrain.
The Yellow River and the Yangtse
Let us, as a first example, consider the different degrees of difficulty presented by the lower valleys of the two great rivers of China. It seems that when man first took in hand the watery chaos of the lower valley of the Yellow River (Hwang Ho), the river was not navigable at any season; in the winter it was either frozen or choked with floating ice, and the melting of this ice every spring produced devastating floods which repeatedly changed the river’s course by carving out new channels, while the old channels turned into jungle-covered swamps. Even to-day, when some three or four thousand years of human effort have drained the swamps and confined the river within embankments, the devastating action of the floods has not been eliminated. As recently as 1852 the channel of the Lower Hwang Ho was entirely changed and its outflow into the sea shifted from the southern to the northern side of the Shantung Peninsula, a distance of over a hundred miles. The Yangtse, on the other hand, must always have been navigable, and its floods, though they occasionally assume devastating proportions, are less frequent than those of the Yellow River. In the Yangtse Valley, moreover, the winters are less severe. Nevertheless, it was on the Yellow River and not on the Yangtse that the Sinic Civilization came to birth.
Attica and Boeotia
Any traveller who enters or leaves Greece, not by sea but through the northern continental hinterland, cannot fail to be struck by the fact that the home of the Hellenic Civilization is more rocky and ‘bony’ and ‘difficult’ than the lands to the north which never produced a civilization of their own. Similar contrasts, however, may be observed within the Aegean area itself.
For instance, if one travels by train from Athens along the railway which eventually leads, through Salonika, to Central Europe, one passes, on the first stage of the journey, through a stretch of country which gives the Western or Central European traveller an anticipatory glimpse of the scenery with which he is familiar. After the train has been climbing slowly for hours round the eastern slopes of Mount Parnes through a typical Aegean landscape of stunted pines and jagged limestone crags, the traveller is astonished to find himself being rattled down into a lowland country of gently undulating deep-soiled ploughlands. Of course this landscape is nothing but a ‘sport’; he will not see the like again until he has put Nish behind him and is descending the Morava to the Middle Danube. What was this exceptional piece of country called during the lifetime of the Hellenic Civilization? It was called Boeotia; and in Hellenic minds the word ‘Boeotian’ had a quite distinctive connotation. It stood for an ethos which was rustic, stolid, unimaginative, brutal—an ethos out of harmony with the prevailing genius of the Hellenic culture. This discord was accentuated by the fact that, just behind the range of Cithaeron and just round the corner of Parnes where the railway winds its way nowadays, lay Attica, ‘the Hellas of Hellas’: the country whose ethos was the quintessence of Hellenism lying cheek by jowl with the country whose ethos affected normal Hellenic sensibilities like a jarring note. The contrast was summed up in the piquant phrases: ‘Boeotian swine’ and ‘Attic salt’.
The point of interest for our present study is that this cultural contrast which impressed itself so vividly on the Hellenic consciousness was geographically coincident with an equally striking contrast in physical environment. For Attica is ‘the Hellas of Hellas’ not only in her soul but in her physique. She stands to the other countries of the Aegean as they stand to the regions beyond. If you approach Greece from the west and enter through the avenue of the Corinthian Gulf you may flatter yourself that your eye has grown accustomed to the Greek landscape—beautiful but forbidding—before the view is shut out by the cliff-like banks of the deep-cut Corinth Canal. But when your steamer emerges into the Saronic Gulf you will be shocked afresh by an austerity of landscape for which the scenery on the other side of the Isthmus had not fully prepared you; and this austerity attains its climax when you round the corner of Salamis and see Attica spread out before your eyes. In Attica, with her abnormally light and stony soil, the process called denudation, washing the flesh off the mountain bones and burying it in the sea, which Boeotia has escaped down to this day, was already complete in Plato’s time, as is attested by his graphic description of it in the Critias.
What did the Athenians do with their poor country? We know that they did the things which made Athens ‘the education of Hellas’. When the pastures of Attica dried up and her plough-lands wasted away, her people turned from stock-breeding and grain-growing—the staple pursuits of Greece in that age—to devices which were peculiarly their own: olive-cultivation and the exploitation of the subsoil. The gracious tree of Athena not only keeps alive but flourishes on the bare rock. Yet man cannot live by olive oil alone. To make a living from his olive groves the Athenian must exchange his Attic oil for Scythian grain. To place his oil on the Scythian market he must pack it in jars and ship it overseas—activities which called into existence the Attic potteries and the Attic merchant marine, and also, since trade requires currency, the Attic silver-mines.
But these riches were merely the economic foundation for the political and artistic and intellectual culture which made Athens ‘the education of Hellas’ and ‘Attic salt’ the antithesis of Boeotian animality. On the political plane the result was the Athenian Empire. On the artistic plane, the prosperity of the potteries gave the Attic vase-painter his opportunity for creating a new form of beauty which, two thousand years later, enraptured the English poet Keats; while the extinction of the Attic forests compelled Athenian architects to translate their work from the medium of timber into that of stone and so led to the creation of the Parthenon.
Byzantium and Calchedon
The enlargement of the area of the Hellenic World, the cause of which we mentioned in our first chapter (see p. 4), offers another Hellenic illustration of our theme: the contrast between the two Greek colonies, Calchedon and Byzantium, which were planted, the former on the Asiatic, the latter on the European, side of the entrance to the Bosphorus from the Sea of Marmara.
Herodotus tells us that, a century or so after the foundation of the two cities, the Persian governor Megabazus
‘made a mot which won him immortal celebrity among the Helles-pontine Greeks. At Byzantium he heard that the Calchedonians had planted their city seventeen years earlier than the Byzantines had planted theirs; and he had no sooner heard it than he remarked: “Then the Calchedonians must have been blind men all that time.” He meant that they must have been blind to choose the worse site when the better was at their disposal.’ 1
But it is easy to be wise after the event, and in Megabazus’s day (at the time of the Persian invasions of Greece) the respective destinies of the two cities had already declared themselves. Calchedon still was what she had always meant to be, an ordinary agricultural colony, and from the agricultural point of view her site was, and is, immensely superior to that of Byzantium. The Byzantines came later, and took the leavings. As an agricultural community they failed, perhaps chiefly because of the continual raiding of the Thracian barbarians. But in their harbour, the Golden Horn, they had accidentally stumbled on the possession of a gold-mine; for the current which comes down the Bosphorus is in favour of any vessel trying to make the Golden Horn from either direction. Polybius, writing in the second century B.C., about five hundred years after the foundation of the Greek colony and nearly five hundred years before its promotion, as Constantinople, to the rank of an oecumenical capital, says:
‘The Byzantines occupy a site which, from the twin standpoints of security and prosperity, is the most favourable of all sites in the Hellenic World to seaward and the most unprepossessing of all to landward. To seaward Byzantium commands the mouth of the Black Sea so absolutely that it is impossible for any merchantman to pass either in or out against the Byzantines’ will.’ 2
Yet perhaps Megabazus secured by his mot a reputation for discernment which he hardly deserved. There can be no reasonable doubt that, if the colonists who took Byzantium had arrived twenty years earlier, they would have chosen the then vacant site of Calchedon; and it is also probable that, if their agricultural efforts had been less hampered by the Thracian raiders, they would have been less disposed to develop the commercial possibilities of their site.
Israelites, Phoenicians and Philistines
If we turn now from Hellenic history to Syriac, we shall find that the various elements of population that entered Syria, or held their own there, at the time of the post-Minoan Volker-wanderung, distinguished themselves relatively thereafter in close proportion to the relative difficulty of the physical environment in the different districts in which they happened to have made themselves at home. It was not the Aramaeans of ‘Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus’, who took the lead in the development of the Syriac Civilization; nor was it those other Aramaeans who settled on the Orontes where long afterwards the Greek Seleucid dynasty made a capital city at Antioch; nor was it those tribes of Israel who halted east of the Jordan to fatten their ‘bulls of Bashan’ on the fine pastures of Gilead. Most remarkable of all, the primacy of the Syriac World was not retained by those refugees from the Aegean who came to Syria not as barbarians but as heirs of the Minoan Civilization and took possession of the ports and lowlands south of Carmel—the Philistines. This people’s name has acquired a connotation as contemptuous as that of the Boeotians among the Greeks; and, even if we admit that Boeotians and Philistines may neither of them have been as black as they were painted, and that we owe our knowledge of them both almost entirely to their rivals, what is that but to say that their rivals have outstripped them and won, at their expense, the respectful attention of posterity?
The Syriac Civilization has three great feats to its credit. It invented the Alphabet; it discovered the Atlantic; and it arrived at a particular conception of God which is common to Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Islam but alien alike from the Egyptiac, Sumeric, Indie and Hellenic veins of religious thought. Which were the Syriac communities by whom these achievements were contributed?
As regards the Alphabet we really do not know. Though its invention is traditionally attributed to the Phoenicians, it may have been transmitted in an elementary form by the Philistines from the Minoan World; so in the present state of our knowledge the credit for the Alphabet must be left unallocated. Let us pass to the other two.
Who were those Syriac seafarers who ventured to sail the whole length of the Mediterranean to the Pillars of Hercules and out beyond? Not the Philistines, in spite of their Minoan blood; these turned their backs upon the sea and fought a losing battle for the fertile plains of Esdraelon and the Shephelah against tougher fighters than themselves, the Israelites of the hill country of Ephraim and Judah. The discoverers of the Atlantic were the Phoenicians of Tyre and Sidon.
These Phoenicians were a remnant of the Canaanites, the peoples in occupation before the incoming of Philistines and Hebrews—a fact expressed genealogically in an early chapter of Genesis where we read that Canaan (son of Ham, son of Noah) ‘begat Sidon, his firstborn’. They survived because their homes, along the middle section of the Syrian coast, were not sufficiently inviting to attract invaders. Phoenicia, which the Philistines left alone, presents a remarkable contrast to the Shephelah in which the Philistines settled. On this section of the coast there is no fertile plain; the Lebanon Range rises sheer from the sea—so sheer that there is hardly room for road or railway. The Phoenician cities could not communicate easily, even with one another, except by sea, and Tyre, the most famous of them, is perched, like a seagull’s nest, on a rocky island. Thus, while the Philistines were browsing like sheep in clover, the Phoenicians, whose maritime horizon had hitherto been restricted to the short range of the coastwise traffic between Byblus and Egypt, now launched out Minoan-fashion into the open sea and founded a second home for their own version of the Syriac Civilization along the African and Spanish shores of the Western Mediterranean. Carthage, the imperial city of this Phoenician overseas world, outstripped the Philistines even in their chosen field of land warfare. The most famous military champion of the Philistines is Goliath of Gath; he cuts a poor figure beside the Phoenician Hannibal.
But the physical discovery of the Atlantic is surpassed, as a feat of human prowess, by the spiritual discovery of monotheism; and that was the feat of a Syriac community stranded by the Volker-wanderung in a physical environment even less inviting than the Phoenician coast: the hill-country of Ephraim and Judah. Apparently this patch of thin-soiled forest-covered hill country had remained unoccupied until it was populated by the vanguard of the Hebrew nomads who had drifted into the fringes of Syria out of the North Arabian Steppe, in and after the fourteenth century B.C., during the interregnum following the decay of ‘the New Empire’ in Egypt. Here they transformed themselves from nomadic stock-breeders into sedentary tillers of a stony ground, and here in obscurity they lived until the Syriac Civilization had passed its zenith. As late as the fifth century B.C., at a date when all the great prophets had already said their say, the very name of Israel was unknown to Herodotus and the Land of Israel was still masked by the Land of the Philistines in the Herodotean panorama of the Syriac World. He writes of ‘the Land of the Philistines’ 1 —and Filastin or Palestine it remains to this day.
A Syriac fable tells how the God of the Israelites once tested a king of Israel with the most searching test that a god can apply to a mortal.
‘The Lord appeared to Solomon in a dream by night; and God said: “Ask what I shall give thee.” And Solomon said, “. . . Give . . . thy servant an understanding heart.” . . . And the speech pleased the Lord, that Solomon had asked this thing. And God said unto him: “Because thou hast asked this thing, and hast not asked for thyself long life; neither hast asked riches for thyself, nor hast asked the life of thine enemies; but hast asked for thyself understanding to discern judgment; behold, I have done according to thy words: lo, I have given thee a wise and an understanding heart, so that there was none like thee before thee, neither after thee shall any arise like unto thee. And I have also given thee that which thou hast not asked, both riches and honour, so that there shall not be any among the kings like unto thee all thy days.” ‘ 2
The fable of Solomon’s Choice is a parable of the history of the Chosen People. In the power of their spiritual understanding the Israelites surpassed the military prowess of the Philistines and the maritime prowess of the Phoenicians. They had not sought after those things which the Gentiles seek, but had sought first the Kingdom of God; and all those things were added to them. As for the life of their enemies, the Philistines were delivered into Israel’s hands. As for riches, Jewry entered into the inheritance of Tyre and Carthage, to conduct transactions on a scale beyond Phoenician dreams in continents beyond Phoenician knowledge. As for long life, the Jews live on—the same peculiar people—to-day, long ages after the Phoenicians and Philistines have lost their identity. Their ancient Syriac neighbours have gone into the melting-pot and been re-minted, with new images and superscriptions, while Israel has proved impervious to this alchemy—performed by History in the crucibles of universal states and universal churches and wanderings of the nations—to which we Gentiles all in turn succumb.
Brandenburg and the Rhineland
From Attica and Israel to Brandenburg might seem a far cry and a steep descent, yet on its own level it offers an illustration of the same law. As you travel through the unprepossessing country which formed the original domain of Frederick the Great— Brandenburg, Pomerania and East Prussia—with its starveling pine plantations and sandy fields, you might fancy you were traversing some outlying portion of the Eurasian Steppe. In whichever direction you travel out of it, to the pastures and beech-woods of Denmark, the black earth of Lithuania or the vineyards of the Rhineland, you pass into easier and pleasanter country. Yet the descendants of the medieval colonists who occupied these ‘bad lands’ have played an exceptional part in the history of our Western Society. It is not only that in the nineteenth century they mastered Germany and in the twentieth led the Germans in a strenuous attempt to provide our society with its universal state. The Prussian also taught his neighbours how to make sand produce cereals by enriching it with artificial manures; how to raise a whole population to a standard of unprecedented social efficiency by a system of compulsory education and of unprecedented social security by a system of compulsory health and unemployment insurance. We may not like him but we cannot deny that we have learnt from him lessons of importance and value.
There is no need to argue the point that Scotland is a ‘harder’ land than England, nor to elaborate the notorious difference of temperament between the traditional Scotsman—solemn, parsimonious, precise, persistent, cautious, conscientious and well educated—and the traditional Englishman—frivolous, extravagant, vague, spasmodic, careless, free and easy and ill grounded in book-learning. The English may regard this traditional comparison as rather a joke; they regard most things as rather a joke; but the Scots do not. Johnson used to chaff Boswell with his apparently oft repeated mot that the finest prospect a Scotsman ever sees is the road to England; and before Johnson was born a wit of Queen Anne’s day said that, if Cain had been a Scotsman, his punishment would have been reversed and, instead of being condemned to be a wanderer on the face of the Earth, he would have been sentenced to stay at home. The popular impression that the Scots have played a part disproportionate to their numbers in the making of the British Empire and in the occupancy of the high places of church and state is undoubtedly well founded. The classic parliamentary conflict of Victorian England was between a pure-bred Scot and a pure-bred Jew, and, of Gladstone’s successors in the premiership of the United Kingdom down to this day, nearly half have been Scots. 1
The Struggle for North America
The classic illustration of our present theme in our own Western history is the outcome of the competition between half a dozen different groups of colonists for the mastery of North America. The victors in this contest were the New Englanders, and in the preceding chapter we have already taken note of the unusual difficulty of the local environment which first fell to the lot of the ultimate masters of the Continent. Let us now compare this New England environment, of which the site of Town Hill is a fair specimen, with the earliest American environments of the New Englanders’ unsuccessful competitors: the Dutch, the French, the Spaniards and the other English colonists who settled along the southern section of the Atlantic seaboard, in and around Virginia.
In the middle of the seventeenth century, when all these groups had found their first footing on the fringes of the American mainland, it would have been easy to predict the coming conflict between them for the possession of the interior, but the most far-sighted observer then alive would not have been likely to hit the mark if he had been asked, in 1650, to pick the winner. He might have had the acumen to rule out the Spaniards in spite of their two obvious assets: their ownership of Mexico, the only North American region that had been broken in by a previous civilization, and the reputation then still enjoyed, but no longer deserved, by Spain among European Powers. He might have discounted Mexico in view of its outlying position, and discounted Spanish prestige in consideration of Spain’s failures in the European war (the Thirty Years’ War) just concluded. ‘France’, he might have said, ‘will succeed to the military primacy of Spain in Europe, Holland and England to her naval and commercial primacy at sea. The competition for North America lies between Holland, France and England. On a short view Holland’s chances might appear to be the most promising. She is superior to both England and France at sea, and in America she holds a splendid water-gate to the interior, the valley of the Hudson. But on a longer view France seems likely to be the winner. She holds a still finer water-gate, the St. Lawrence, and she has it in her power to exhaust and immobilize the Dutch by using against their homeland her overwhelming military superiority. But both the English groups’, he might have added, ‘I can confidently rule out. Possibly the southern English colonists, with their relatively genial soil and climate, will survive as an enclave, cut off from the interior by the French or the Dutch—whichever of them wins the Mississippi Valley. One thing is certain, however: the little group of settlements in bleak and barren New England is bound to disappear, cut off, as they are, from their kinsfolk by the Dutch on the Hudson, while the French press in upon them from the St. Lawrence.’
Let us suppose that our imaginary observer lives to see the turn of the century. By 1701 he will be congratulating himself on having rated French prospects higher than Dutch; for these latter had tamely surrendered the Hudson to their English rivals in 1664. Meanwhile the French had pushed up the St. Lawrence on to the Great Lakes and over the portage to the Mississippi Basin. La Salle had followed the river down to its mouth; a new French settlement, Louisiana, had been established there; and its port, New Orleans, clearly had a great future before it. As between France and England, our observer would see no reason to alter his forecast. The New Englanders had perhaps been saved from extinction by the acquisition of New York, but only to enjoy the same modest future prospects as their southern kinsfolk. The future of the Continent seemed virtually decided; the winners would be the French.
Shall we endow our observer with superhuman length of life, in order that he may review the situation once more in the year 1803? If we preserve him alive till then, he will be forced to confess that his wits have not been worthy of his longevity. By the end of 1803 the French flag has disappeared off the political map of North America altogether. For forty years past Canada has been a possession of the British Crown, while Louisiana, after being ceded by France to Spain and retroceded again, has just been sold by Napoleon to the United States—the new Great Power that has emerged out of the thirteen British colonies.
In this year 1803 the United States have the Continent in their pockets and the scope of prophecy is reduced. It only remains to forecast which section of the United States is going to pocket the larger share of this vast estate. And surely this time there can be no mistake. The Southern States are the manifest masters of the Union. Look how they are leading in the final round of the competition in an inter-American race for the Winning of the West. It is the backwoodsmen of Virginia who have founded Kentucky—the first new State to be established west of those mountain ranges which have so long conspired with the French to keep the English settlers from penetrating the interior. Kentucky lies along the Ohio and the Ohio leads to the Mississippi. Meanwhile the new cotton-mills of Lancashire are offering these Southerners an ever-expanding market for the cotton crop which their soil and climate enable them to raise.
‘Our Yankee cousin’, the Southerner observes in 1807, ‘has just invented a steam-boat which will navigate our Mississippi upstream, and a machine for carding and cleaning our cotton-bolls. Their “Yankee notions” are more profitable to us than they are to the ingenious inventors.’
If our aged and unlucky prophet takes the Southerners’ prospects at what was undoubtedly then and for some time later the Southerners’ own valuation, he must indeed be in his dotage. For in this last round of the competition the Southerner is destined to meet as swift and crushing a defeat as has already overtaken the Dutch and the French.
In the year 1865 the situation is already transformed, out of all recognition, from what it was in 1807. In the Winning of the West the Southern planter has been outstripped and outflanked by his Northern rival. After almost winning his way to the Great Lakes through Indiana and getting the best of the bargain over Missouri (1821), he has been decisively defeated in Kansas (1854-60) and he has never reached the Pacific. The New Englanders are now masters of the Pacific coast all the way from Seattle to Los Angeles. The Southerner had counted on his Mississippi steam-boats to draw the whole of the West into a Southern system of economic and political relations. But ‘Yankee notions’ have not ceased. The railway locomotive has succeeded the steam-boat, and has taken away from the Southerner more than the steam-boat ever gave him; for the potential value of the Hudson Valley and New York, as the main gateway from the Atlantic to the West, has been actualized at last in the Railway Age. Railway traffic from Chicago to New York is surpassing river traffic from St. Louis to New Orleans. The lines of communication within the Continent have been switched from the vertical direction to the horizontal. The North-West has been detached from the South and welded on to the North-East in interest and in sentiment.
Indeed the Easterner, who once presented the South with the river-steamer and the cotton-gin, has now won the heart of the North-Westerner with a double gift; he has come to him with a locomotive in one hand and a reaper-and-binder in the other, and so provided him with solutions for both his problems: transport and labour. By these two ‘Yankee notions’ the allegiance of the North-West has been decided and the Civil War lost by the South before it has been fought. In taking up arms in the hope of redressing her economic reverses by a military counter-stroke, the South has merely consummated a dibdcle that was already inevitable.
It may be said that all the different groups of colonists in North America had severe challenges to meet from their environments. In Canada the French had to encounter almost Arctic winters and in Louisiana the vagaries of a river almost as treacherous and devastating as the Yellow River of China, of which we took note in the first of the comparisons in this series. Still, taking all in all—soil, climate, transport facilities and the rest—it is impossible to deny that the original colonial home of the New Englanders was the hardest country of all. Thus North American history tells in favour of the proposition: the greater the difficulty, the greater the stimulus.
So much for comparisons between the respective stimulating effects of physical environments which present different degrees of difficulty. Let us now approach the same question from a different angle by comparing the respective stimulating effects of old ground and new ground, apart from the intrinsic nature of the terrain.
Does the effect of breaking new ground act as a stimulus in itself? The question is answered in the affirmative in the myth of the Expulsion from Eden and in the myth of the Exodus from Egypt. In their removal out of the magic garden into the work-a-day world Adam and Eve transcend the food-gathering economy of primitive man and give birth to the founders of an agricultural and a pastoral civilization. In their exodus from Egypt the Children of Israel give birth to a generation which helps to lay the foundations of the Syriac Civilization. When we turn from myths to the history of religions we find these intuitions confirmed. We find, for example, that—to the consternation of those who ask ‘Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?’—the Messiah of Jewry does come out of that obscure village in ‘Galilee of the Gentiles’, an outlying piece of new ground which had been conquered for Jewry by the Maccabees rather less than a century before the date of Jesus’s birth. And when the indomitable growth of this Galilaean grain of mustard-seed turns the consternation of Jewry into active hostility, and this not only in Judaea itself but among the Jewish diaspora, the propagators of the new faith deliberately ‘turn to the Gentiles’ and proceed to conquer new worlds for Christianity on ground far beyond the farthest limits of the Macca-baean kingdom. In the history of Buddhism it is the same story, for the decisive victories of this Indie faith are not won on the old ground of the Indie World. The Hinayana first finds an open road in Ceylon, which was a colonial annex of the Indie Civilization. And the Mahayana starts its long and roundabout journey towards its future domain in the Far East by capturing the Syriacized and Hellenized Indie province of the Panjab. It is on the new ground of these alien worlds that the highest expressions of both the Syriac and the Indie religious genius eventually bear their fruit—in witness to the truth that ‘a prophet is not without honour save in his own country and in his own house’.
A convenient empirical test of this social law is offered by those civilizations of the ‘related’ class which have arisen partly on ground already occupied by the respective antecedent civilization and partly on ground which the related civilization has taken over on its own account. We can test the respective stimulating effects of old and new ground by surveying the career of any one of these ‘related’ civilizations, marking the point or points within its domain at which its achievements in any line have been most distinguished, and then observing whether the ground on which’ such points are located is old ground or new.
Taking first the Hindu Civilization, let us mark the local sources of the new creative elements in Hindu life—particularly in religion, which has always been the central and supreme activity of the Hindu Society. We find these sources in the South. It was here that all the distinctive features of Hinduism took shape: the cult of gods represented by material objects or images and housed in temples; the emotional personal relation between the worshipper and the particular god to whose worship he has vowed himself; the metaphysical sublimation of image-worship and emotionalism in an intellectually sophisticated theology (Sankara, the founder of Hindu theology, was born about A.D. 788 in Malabar). And was Southern India old ground or new? It was new ground, which had not been incorporated into the domain of the preceding Indie Society until the last stage of that society’s existence, in the time of the Mauryan Empire, which was its ‘universal state’ (circa 323-l85 B.C.).
The Syriac Society gave birth to two affiliated societies, the Arabic and the Iranic, of which the latter, as we have seen, proved the more successful, eventually absorbing its ‘sister’. In what areas did the Iranic Civilization most conspicuously flourish? Almost all its great achievements in war, politics, architecture and literature were accomplished at one or other of the two extremities of the Iranic World, either in Hindustan or in Anatolia, culminating respectively in the Mughal and in the Ottoman Empire. The site of both these achievements was new ground, beyond the range of the antecedent Syriac Civilization, ground wrested in the one case from the Hindu and in the other from the Orthodox Christian Society. By comparison with these achievements the history of the Iranic Civilization in its central regions, in Iran itself for example, the old ground taken over from the Syriac Civilization, was quite undistinguished.
In what regions has the greatest vigour been displayed by the Orthodox Christian Civilization? A glance at its history shows that its social centre of gravity has lain in different regions at different times. In the first age after its emergence from the post-Hellenic interregnum the life of Orthodox Christendom was most vigorous in the central and north-eastern parts of the Anatolian Plateau. Thereafter, from the middle of the ninth century onwards, the centre of gravity shifted from the Asiatic to the European side of the Straits and, as far as the original stem of the Orthodox Christian Society is concerned, it has remained in the Balkan Peninsula ever since. In modern times, however, the original stem of Orthodox Christendom has been far outstripped in historical importance by its mighty offshoot in Russia.
Are these three areas to be regarded as old ground or new? In the case of Russia the question hardly needs answering. As for Central and North-Eastern Anatolia, it was certainly new ground so far as the Orthodox Christian Society was concerned, though two thousand years earlier it had been the home of the Hittite Civilization. The Hellenization of this area was retarded and always imperfect, and its first, and perhaps its only, contribution to the Hellenic culture was made in the last phase of the life-span of the Hellenic Society by the Cappadocian Fathers of the Church in the fourth century of the Christian Era.
The remaining centre of gravity of the Orthodox Christian Society, the interior of the Balkan Peninsula, was also new ground, for the veneer of Hellenic Civilization in a Latin medium with which this region had been thinly overlaid in the lifetime of the Roman Empire had been destroyed without leaving a trace during the interregnum which followed that empire’s dissolution. The destruction here was more thoroughgoing than in any western province of the Empire except Britain. The Christian Roman provincials were not simply conquered but were practically exterminated by the pagan barbarian invaders, and these barbarians eradicated all elements of local culture so effectively that when their descendants repented of the evil their fathers had done they had to obtain fresh seed from outside in order to start cultivation again, three centuries later. Thus the soil had lain fallow here for twice as long as the soil of Britain had lain fallow at the date of Augustine’s mission. So the region in which the Orthodox Christian Civilization established its second centre of gravity was ground which had very recently been reclaimed de novo from the wilderness.
Thus all the three regions in which the Orthodox Christian Society specially distinguished itself were new ground, and it is still more remarkable to observe that Greece itself, the radiant focus of the preceding civilization, played an altogether insignificant part in the history of the Orthodox Christian Society until, in the eighteenth century of the Christian Era, it became the water-gate through which Western influence forced an entry into the Orthodox Christian World.
Turning now to Hellenic history, let us ask the same question regarding the two regions which successively held primacy in the early history of the Hellenic Society: the Asiatic coast of the Aegean and the European peninsula of Greece. Were these flowerings on new or on old ground, from the standpoint of the preceding Minoan Civilization? The ground was new ground, here again. On the European Greek peninsula the Minoan Civilization, even at its widest extension, had held no more than a chain of fortified positions on its southern and eastern coastline, and on the Anatolian coast the failure of our modern archaeologists to find traces of the presence, or even of the influence, of the Minoan Civilization has been so signal that it can hardly be attributed to chance, but seems to indicate that, for some reason, this coast did not come within the Minoans’ range. Conversely, the Cyclades Islands, which had been one of the centres of the Minoan culture, played a subordinate role in Hellenic history as humble servants of the successive masters of the sea. The part played in Hellenic history by Crete itself, the earliest and always the most important centre of the Minoan culture, is even more surprising.
Crete might have been expected to retain importance not only for historical reasons, as the place in which the Minoan culture had attained its culmination, but for geographical reasons as well. Crete was by far the largest island of the Aegean Archipelago and it lay athwart two of the most important sea routes in the Hellenic World. Every ship that sailed from the Peiraeus for Sicily had to pass between the western end of Crete and Laconia; every ship that sailed from the Peiraeus for Egypt had to pass between the eastern end of Crete and Rhodes. Yet, whereas Laconia and Rhodes each played a leading part in Hellenic history, Crete remained aloof, obscure and benighted from first to last. While Hellas all round was giving birth to statesmen and artists and philosophers, Crete produced nothing more reputable than medicine-men, mercenaries and pirates, and the latter-day Cretan became a Hellenic by-word, like the Boeotian. Indeed he has passed judgement on himself in a hexameter which has been embedded in the canon of Christian Scripture. ‘One of themselves, even a prophet of their own, said: “The Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, slow bellies.”’ 1
Finally, let us apply the same test to the Far Eastern Society, which is affiliated to the Sinic Society. At what points in its domain has this Far Eastern Society shown the greatest vigour? The Japanese and the Cantonese stand out unmistakably as its most vigorous representatives to-day, and both these peoples have sprung from soil which is new ground from the standpoint of Far Eastern history. The south-eastern seaboard of China was not incorporated into the domain of the ‘apparented’ Sinic Society until a late phase of Sinic history, and even then only on the superficial plane of politics as a frontier province of the Han Empire. Its inhabitants remained barbarians. As for the Japanese Archipelago, the offshoot of the Far Eastern Civilization which was transplanted thither by way of Korea in the sixth and seventh centuries of the Christian Era was propagated there on ground that showed no trace of any previous culture. The strong growth of this offshoot of the Far Eastern Civilization on the virgin soil of Japan is comparable to the growth of the offshoot of the Orthodox Christian Civilization which was transplanted from the Anatolian Plateau to the virgin soil of Russia.
If it is true, as our evidence suggests, that new ground provides a greater stimulus to activity than old ground, one would expect to find such stimulus specially marked in cases where the new ground is separated from the old by a sea voyage. This special stimulus of transmarine colonization appears very clearly in the history of the Mediterranean during the first half of the last millennium (1000-500) B.C., when its western basin was being colonized competitively by maritime pioneers from three different civilizations in the Levant. It appears, for instance, in the degree to which the two greatest of these colonial foundations, Syriac Carthage and Hellenic Syracuse, outstripped their parent cities, Tyre and Corinth. The Achaean colonies in Magna Graecia (southern Italy and Sicily) became busy seats of commerce and brilliant centres of thought, while the parent Achaean communities along the northern coast of the Peloponnese remained in a backwater until after the Hellenic Civilization had passed its zenith. Similarly the Epizephyrian Locrians in Italy far surpassed the Locrians who remained in Greece.
The most striking case of all is that of the Etruscans, the third party competing with Phoenicians and Greeks in the colonization of the Western Mediterranean. The Etruscans who went west, unlike the Greeks and Phoenicians, were not content to remain within sight of the sea across which they had come. They pushed inland from the west coast of Italy across the Apennines and the Po to the foot of the Alps. The Etruscans who stayed at home, however, attained the very nadir of obscurity, for they are unknown to history and no record of the precise location of their homeland survives, though Egyptian records indicate that the original Etruscans took part with the Achaeans in the post-Minoan Volkerwanderung and had their base of operations somewhere on the Asiatic coast of the Levant.
The stimulating effect of a sea-crossing is perhaps greatest of all in a transmarine migration occurring in the course of a Volkerwanderung. Such occurrences seem to be uncommon. The only instances which the writer of this Study can call to mind are the migration, during the post-Minoan Volkerwanderung, of Teucrians, Aeolians, Ionians and Dorians across the Aegean to the west coast of Anatolia, and of Teucrians and Philistines to the coast of Syria; the migration of the Angles and Jutes to Britain during the post-Hellenic Volkerwanderung; the consequent migration of Britons across the Channel to what then came to be called Brittany; the contemporary migration of the Irish Scots to Argyll; and the migration of the Scandinavian Vikings in the Volkerwanderung which followed the abortive evocation of the ghost of the Roman Empire by the Carolingians: six instances in all. Of these, the Philistine migration proved comparatively unproductive, in circumstances already described (see pp. 92-4), and the subsequent history of the Bretons was undistinguished, but the other four overseas migrations present certain striking phenomena which are not to be observed in the far more numerous instances of migration overland.
These overseas migrations have in common one and the same simple fact: in transmarine migration the social apparatus of the migrants has to be packed on board ship before it can leave the shores of the old country, and then be unpacked again at the end of the voyage. All kinds of apparatus—persons and property, techniques and institutions and ideas—are subject to this law. Anything that cannot stand the sea voyage at all has to be left behind, and many things—not only material objects—which the migrants do take with them, have to be taken to pieces, never perhaps to be reassembled in their original form. When unpacked, they are found to have suffered ‘a sea change into something rich and strange’. When such a transmarine migration occurs in the course of a Volkerwanderung, the challenge is the more formidable and the stimulus the more intense because the society that is making the response is not one that is already socially progressive (like the Greek and Phoenician colonizers discussed above), but one that is still in that static condition which is the last state of primitive man. The transition, in a Volkerwanderung, from this passivity to a sudden paroxysm of storm and stress produces a dynamic effect on the life of any community, but this effect is naturally more intense when the migrants take ship than when they trek over solid ground, carrying with them much of the social apparatus which has to be discarded by the seafarer.
‘This change of outlook [after the voyage overseas] gave birth to a new conception of gods and men. The local deities whose power was co-extensive with the territory of their worshippers were replaced by a corporate body of gods ruling the World. The holy-place with its blot-house which had formed the centre of Middlegarth was raised on high and turned into a divine mansion. Time-honoured myths setting forth the doings of mutually independent deities were worked up into a poetical mythology, a divine saga, on the same lines that had been followed by an earlier race of Vikings, the Homeric Greeks. This religion brought a new god to birth: Odin, the leader of men, the lord of the battlefield.’ 1
In somewhat similar fashion the overseas migration of the Scots from Ireland to North Britain prepared the way for the entry of a new religion. It is no accident that the transmarine Dalriada became the headquarters of St. Columba’s missionary movement with its focal point in Iona.
One distinctive phenomenon of transmarine migration is the intermingling of diverse racial strains, for the first piece of social apparatus that has to be abandoned is the primitive kin-group. No ship will hold more than one ship’s company, and a number of ships sailing together for safety and combining in their new homeland may well be drawn from different localities—in contrast with the usual process of migration overland, in which a whole kin-group is apt to pack its women and children and household stuff into ox-carts and move off en masse at a snail’s pace over terra firma.
Another distinctive phenomenon of transmarine migration is the atrophy of a primitive institution which is perhaps the supreme expression of undifferentiated social life before this is refracted, by a clarifying social consciousness, on the separate planes of economics and politics and religion and art: the institution of the
and his cycle. If we wish to see this ritual in its glory in the Scandinavian World, we must study its development among the Scandinavians who stayed at home. By contrast
‘in Iceland the May Day game, the ritual wedding and the wooing scene seem hardly to have survived the settlement, partly, no doubt, because the settlers were mainly of a travelled and enlightened class, and partly because these rural observances are connected with agriculture, which could not be an important branch of activity in Iceland’. 1
Since even in Iceland there was an agriculture of some sort, we must regard the former of the two suggested reasons as the more important.
The thesis of the work we have just quoted is that the Scandinavian poems committed to writing in the Icelandic compilation called The Elder Edda are derived from the spoken words of the primitive Scandinavian fertility-drama—the only element in the ritual which the emigrants were able to cut away from its deeply embedded local roots and to take on board ship with them. According to this theory the development of the primitive ritual into drama was arrested among those Scandinavians who migrated overseas; and the theory is supported by an analogy from Hellenic history. For it is a well-established fact that, although the Hellenic Civilization first came to flower in transmarine Ionia, the Hellenic drama, based on primitive rituals, sprang from the continental soil of the Greek Peninsula. The counterpart, in Hellas, of the sanctuary at Upsala was the theatre of Dionysus in Athens. On the other hand it was in Ionia, in Iceland and in Britain that the transmarine migrants—Hellenic, Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon— produced the epic poetry of ‘Homer’, The Edda and Beowulf.
The Saga and the Epic arise in response to a new mental need, a new awareness of strong individual personalities and of momentous public events. ‘That lay is praised of men the most which ringeth newest in their ears’, Homer declares. Yet there is one thing in an epic lay more highly prized than its novelty, and that is the intrinsic human interest of the story. The interest in the present predominates just so long as the storm and stress of the Heroic Age continues; but the social paroxysm is transitory and, as the storm abates, the lovers of Epic and Saga come to feel that life in their time has grown relatively tame. Therewith they cease to prefer new lays to old, and the latter-day minstrel, responding to his hearers’ change of mood, repeats and embellishes the tales of the older generation. It was in this later age that the art of Epic and Saga attained its literary zenith; none the less, these mighty works would never have come into existence but for the stimulus originally exerted by the ordeal of oversea migration. We arrive at the formula: ‘Drama . . . develops in the home country, Epic among migrating peoples.’ 1
The other positive creation that emerges from the ordeal of transmarine migration in the course of a Volkerwanderung is not literary but political. This new kind of polity is based not on kinship but on contract.
The most famous examples, perhaps, are the city states founded by the sea-faring Greek migrants on the coast of Anatolia in the districts subsequently known as Aeolis, Ionia and Doris, for the scanty records of Hellenic constitutional history seem to show that the principle of organization by law and locality instead of by custom and kinship asserted itself first in these Greek settlements overseas and was afterwards imitated in European Greece. In the oversea city states thus founded, the ‘cells’ of the new political organization would be, not kindreds, but ships’ companies. Having co-operated at sea as men do co-operate when they are ‘all in the same boat’ amid the perils of the deep, they would continue to feel and act in the same way ashore when they had to hold a hardly won strip of coast against the menace of a hostile hinterland. On shore, as at sea, comradeship would count for more than kin, and the orders of a chosen and trusted leader would override the promptings of custom. In fact a collection of ships’ companies joining forces to conquer a new home for themselves overseas would turn spontaneously into a city state articulated into local ‘tribes’ and governed by an elective magistracy.
When we turn to the Scandinavian Volkerwanderung, we can discern the rudiments of a similar political development. If the abortive Scandinavian Civilization had come to birth instead of being swallowed up by that of Western Europe, the part once played by the city states of Aeolis and Ionia might have been played by the five city states of the Ostmen on the Irish coast or by the five boroughs (Lincoln, Stamford, Leicester, Derby and Nottingham) which were organized by the Danes to guard the landward frontier of their conquests in Mercia. But the finest flowering of an oversea Scandinavian polity was the republic of Iceland, founded on the apparently unpromising soil of an Arctic island five hundred miles away from the nearest Scandinavian point d’appui in the Faroe Islands.
As for the political consequences of the transmarine migrations of the Angles and Jutes to Britain, it is perhaps something more than a coincidence that an island which was occupied at the dawn of Western history by immigrants who had shaken off the shackles of the primitive kin-group in crossing the sea should afterwards have been the country in which our Western Society achieved some of its most important steps in political progress. The Danish and Norman invaders who followed on the heels of the Angles, and who share the credit for subsequent English political achievements, enjoyed the same liberating experience. Such a combination of peoples offered an unusually favourable soil for political cultivation. It is not surprising that our Western Society should have succeeded, in England, in creating first ‘the King’s Peace’ and thereafter parliamentary government, while on the Continent our Western political development was retarded by the survival of the kin-group among the Franks and Lombards, who had not been relieved of that social incubus at the outset by the liberating transit of the sea.
Having now examined the stimulus of physical environments, we may complete this part of our study by surveying the field of human environments in the same way. We may distinguish, first, between those human environments which are geographically external to the societies upon which they act and those which are geographically intermingled with them. The former category will cover the action of societies or states upon their neighbours when both parties start by being in exclusive occupation of particular areas. From the standpoint of the organizations which play the passive role in such social intercourse, the human environment with which they are confronted is ‘external’ or ‘foreign’. The second of our two categories will cover the action of one social ‘class’ upon another, where the two classes are in joint occupation of the same area—using the term ‘class’ in its widest meaning. The relationship in this case is ‘internal’ or ‘domestic’. Leaving this internal human environment for later examination, we may begin by making a further subdivision between the external impact when it takes the form of a sudden blow and its incidence in the form of a continuous pressure. We have here, therefore, three subjects of inquiry: external blows, external pressures and internal penalizations.
What is the effect of sudden blows? Does our proposition ‘the greater the challenge the greater the stimulus’ hold good here? The first test cases that naturally occur to the mind are cases where a military power has first been stimulated by successive contests with its neighbours and has then suddenly been prostrated by an adversary against whom it has never measured its strength before. What usually happens when incipient empire-builders are thus dramatically overthrown in mid-career? Do they usually remain lying, like Sisera, where they have fallen, or do they rise again from their mother earth, like the giant Antaeus of Hellenic mythology, with their strength redoubled? The historic examples indicate that the latter alternative is the normal one.
What, for example, was the effect of the Clades Alliensis upon the fortunes of Rome? The catastrophe overtook her only five years after her victory in her long duel with Etruscan Veii had placed her at last in a posture to assert her hegemony over Latium. The overthrow of the Roman army at the Allia and the occupation of Rome herself by barbarians from the back of beyond might have been expected to wipe out at one stroke the power and prestige which Rome had just won. Instead, Rome recovered from the Gallic disaster so rapidly that, less than half a century later, she was able to engage with ultimate success in longer and more arduous encounters with her Italian neighbours, which extended her authority over all Italy.
Again, what was the effect on the fortunes of the ‘Osmanlis when Timur Lenk (Tamerlane) took Bayezid Yilderim (the Sultan Bajazet) captive on the field of Angora? This catastrophe overtook the ‘Osmanlis just when they were on the point of completing their conquest of the main body of Orthodox Christendom in the Balkan Peninsula. It was at this critical moment that they were prostrated, on the Asiatic side of the Straits, by a thunderbolt from Transoxania. A general collapse of their uncompleted edifice of empire is what might have been expected. But it was not what happened in fact; and, half a century later, Mehmed the Conqueror was able to place the coping-stone on Bayezid’s building by taking possession of Constantinople.
The histories of Rome’s unsuccessful rivals show how a crushing defeat nerves a community to more purposeful activity even though further defeat, after a more stubborn resistance than before, frustrates the purpose. The defeat of Carthage in the First Punic War stimulated Hamilcar Barca to conquer for his country an empire in Spain which surpassed the empire she had just lost in Sicily. Even after the defeat of Hannibal in the Second Punic War the Carthaginians twice astonished the world in the half-century that elapsed before their final destruction, first by the rapidity with which they paid off their war indemnity and recovered their commercial prosperity, and secondly by the heroism with which their whole population, men, women and children, fought and died in the final struggle. Again, it was only after his crushing defeat at Cynoscephalae that Philip V of Macedon, hitherto a somewhat futile monarch, set himself to transform his country into so formidable a power that his son Perseus was able to challenge Rome single-handed and come near to defeating her before his stubborn resistance was finally broken at Pydna.
Another example of the same kind, though with a different outcome, is furnished by the five interventions of Austria in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Her first three interventions brought her not only defeats but discredit. After Austerlitz, however, she began to gird up her loins. If Austerlitz was her Cynoscephalae, Wagram was her Pydna; but, more fortunate than Macedon, she was able to intervene once again with victorious effect in 1813.
Still more striking is the performance of Prussia in the same cycle of wars. During the fourteen years that culminated in the catastrophe of Jena and the surrenders that immediately followed, she had pursued a policy at once futile and ignominious. There followed, however, the heroic winter campaign of Eylau, and the severity of the terms dictated at Tilsit only added to the stimulus which the shock of Jena had first administered. The energy evoked in Prussia by this stimulus was extraordinary. It regenerated not only the Prussian army but also the Prussian administrative and educational systems. In fact it transformed the Prussian state into a chosen vessel for holding the new wine of German nationalism. It led through Stein and Hardenberg and Humboldt to Bismarck.
This cycle has repeated itself in our own day in a manner too painfully familiar to call for comment. The German defeat in the war of 1914-18 and the exacerbation of that defeat by the French occupation of the Ruhr Basin in 1923-4 have issued in the demonic, though abortive, Nazi revanche. 1
But the classic example of the stimulating effect of a blow is the reaction of Hellas in general, and Athens in particular, to the onslaught of the Persian Empire—the Syriac universal state—in 480-479 B.C. The pre-eminence of the Athenian rebound was proportionate to the severity of Athenian sufferings, for while the fertile fields of Boeotia were saved by the treachery of their owners to the Hellenic cause and the fertile fields of Lacedaemon by the prowess of the Athenian fleet, the poor land of Attica was devastated systematically in two successive seasons, Athens herself was occupied and her temples were destroyed. The whole population of Attica had to evacuate the country and cross the sea to the Pelopon-nese as refugees; and it was in this situation that the Athenian fleet fought and won the battle of Salamis. It is no wonder that the blow which aroused this indomitable spirit in the Athenian people should have been the prelude to achievements unique in the history of mankind for their brilliance and multitude and variety. In the rebuilding of her temples, which was for Athenians the most intimate symbol of their country’s resurrection, Periclean Athens displayed a vitality far superior to that of post-1918 France. When the French recovered the battered shell of Reims cathedral they performed a pious restoration of each shattered stone and splintered statue. When the Athenians found the Hekatompedon burnt down to its foundations, they let the foundations lie and proceeded, on a new site, to build the Parthenon. 1
The stimulus of blows finds its most obvious illustrations in reactions from military disasters, but examples can be sought and found elsewhere. Let us confine ourselves to a single supreme case, that presented in the field of religion by the Acts of the Apostles. These dynamic acts, which were eventually to win the whole Hellenic World for Christianity, were conceived at the moment when the Apostles were spiritually prostrated by the abrupt withdrawal of their Master’s personal presence so soon after it had appeared to be miraculously restored. This second loss might have been more desolating than the Crucifixion itself. Yet the very heaviness of the blow evoked in their souls a proportionately powerful psychological reaction which is projected mythologically in the appearance of two men in white apparel and in the descent of the Pentecostal tongues of fire. In the power of the Holy Ghost they preached the divinity of the crucified and vanished Jesus not only to the Jewish populace but to the San-hedrin, and within three centuries the Roman Government itself capitulated to a Church which the Apostles had founded at the hour when their spirits were at their lowest ebb.
We have now to examine cases in which the impact takes the different form of a continuous external pressure. In terms of political geography the peoples, states or cities which are exposed to such pressure fall, for the most part, within the general category of ‘marches’ or frontier provinces, and the best way to study this particular kind of pressure empirically is to make some survey of the part played by exposed marches, in the histories of the communities to which they belong, in comparison with the part played by more sheltered territories in the interior of the domains of the same communities.
On no less than three momentous occasions in the history of the Egyptiac Civilization the course of events was directed by Powers originating in the south of Upper Egypt; the foundation of the United Kingdom circa 3200 B.C., the foundation of the universal state circa 2070 B.C., and its restoration circa 1580 B.C., were all carried out from this narrowly circumscribed district; and this seed-bed of Egyptiac empires was in fact the southern march of the Egyptiac World which was exposed to pressure from the tribes of Nubia. During the latter course of Egyptiac history, however— the sixteen centuries of twilight between the decline of the New Empire and the ultimate extinction of the Egyptiac Society in the fifth century after Christ—political power reverted to the Delta, which was the march confronting both Northern Africa and Southwestern Asia, as persistently as it had been apt to revert to the southern march during the preceding two thousand years. Thus the political history of the Egyptiac World, from beginning to end, may be read as a tension between two poles of political power which in every age were located respectively in the southern and in the northern march. There are no examples of great political events originating at points in the interior.
Can we offer any reason why the influence of the southern march predominated in the first half of the time-span of Egyptiac history and the influence of the northern march in the second half? The reason would seem to be that, after the military conquest of the Nubians and their cultural assimilation under Thothmes I (circa 1557-1505 B.C.), the pressure on the southern march declined or vanished, whereas about the same time or soon afterwards the pressure on the Delta from the barbarians of Libya and the kingdoms of South-Western Asia very markedly increased. Thus not only does the influence of frontier provinces predominate in Egyptiac political history over the influence of central provinces, but the most threatened march at any given time enjoys the predominant influence.
In the Iranic World
The same result in quite different circumstances is revealed by the contrasted histories of two Turkish peoples, the ‘Osmanlis and the Qaramanlis, who each occupied a part of Anatolia, the western advanced bastion of the Iranic World, in the fourteenth century of the Christian Era.
These two Turkish communities were both of them ‘successor states’ of the Anatolian Saljuq sultanate, a Muslim Turkish Power which had been established in Anatolia in the eleventh century, just before the beginning of the Crusades, by Saljuq Turkish adventurers who made provision for themselves in this world and the next by thus enlarging the borders of Dar-al-Islam at Orthodox Christendom’s expense. When this sultanate broke up in the thirteenth century of the Christian Era, the Qaramanlis seemed to have the finest, and the ‘Osmanlis the poorest, prospects of all the Saljuqs’ heirs. The Qaramanlis inherited the kernel of the former Saljuq domain with its capital, Qoniyah (Konieh, Iconium), while the ‘Osmanlis found themselves in possession of a piece of the husk.
In fact the ‘Osmanlis had received the leavings of the Saljuq estate because they were the latest comers and had arrived in humble circumstances. Their eponym, ‘Osman, was the son of one Ertoghrul, the leader of a nameless band of refugees, an insignificant fragment of the human wreckage which had been hurled to the farthest extremities of Dar-al-Islam by the tremendous impact of the Mongol wave when it broke upon the northeastern marches of the Iranic Society from the heart of the Eurasian Steppe. The last of the Anatolian Saljuqs had assigned to these refugee fathers of the ‘Osmanlis a strip of territory on the north-western edge of the Anatolian Plateau, where the Saljuq territories marched with those still held by the Byzantine Empire along the Asiatic shores of the Sea of Marmara: an exposed position appropriately called Sultan Onii, the Sultan’s battle-front. These ‘Osmanlis may well have envied the good fortune of the Qaramanlis, but beggars cannot be choosers. ‘Osman accepted his lot and set himself to enlarge his borders at his Orthodox Christian neighbours’ expense, taking as his first objective the Byzantine city of Brusa. The capture of Brusa took him nine years (A.D. 1317-26), but the ‘Osmanlis have justly called themselves by his name, for ‘Osman was the true founder of the Ottoman Empire.
Within thirty years of the fall of Brusa the ‘Osmanlis had gained a footing on the European shore of the Dardanelles, and it was in Europe that they made their fortune. Yet before the end of this same century they had conquered the Qaramanlis and other Turkish communities of Anatolia with their left hand at the same time as they were subduing Serbs and Greeks and Bulgars with their right.
Such was the stimulus of a political frontier, for an examination of the preceding epoch of history shows that there were no special hero-breeding qualities in the geographical environment of the ‘Osmanlis’ original base of operations in Anatolia, as contrasted with that of the unadventurous and deservedly forgotten Qaramanlis, such as would bring Sultan Onii within the field of the first section of this chapter. If we turn back to the time before the irruption of the Saljuq Turks in the third quarter of the eleventh century of the Christian Era, when Anatolia was still within the frontiers of the East Roman Empire, we find that the territory afterwards occupied by the Qaramanlis was almost coincident with the former district of the Anatolic Army Corps, which in the earliest age of Orthodox Christian history had held the primacy among the corps of the East Roman Army. In other words, the East Roman predecessors of the Qaramanlis in the district of QSniyah held that pre-eminence in Anatolia which was held in the later age by the ‘Osmanli occupants of Sultan Onii; and the reason is plain. At that earlier date the Qoniyah district had been a frontier province of the East Roman Empire vis-avis the Arab Caliphate, while the territory afterwards occupied by the ‘Osmanlis was in that age enjoying the comfortable obscurity of the interior position.
In Russian Orthodox Christendom
We find here, as elsewhere, that the vitality of the society has tended to concentrate itself, successively, in one march after another as the relative strengths of the various external pressures on the several marches have varied in intensity. The Russian region in which the Orthodox Christian Civilization first took root at the time of its original transplantation across the Black Sea and across the Eurasian Steppe from Constantinople was the upper basin of the Dniepr. From there it was transferred in the iwelfth century to the upper basin of the Volga by the frontiersmen who were enlarging their borders in this direction at the expense o* the primitive pagan Finns of the north-eastern forests. Soon afterwards, however, the seat of vitality withdrew to the Lower Dniepr to meet a crushing pressure from the nomads of the Euiasian Steppe. This pressure, suddenly imposed upon the Russians as a result of the Mongol Batu Khan’s campaign of A.D. 1237, was extreme and prolonged; and it is interesting to observe that, in this instance as in others, a challenge of unusual severity evoked a response which was remarkably original and creative.
This response was nothing less than the evolution of a new manner of life and a new social organization which enabled a sedentary society, for the first time in history, not merely to hold its own against the Eurasian nomads, not merely to chastise them by transitory punitive expeditions, but actually to make an enduring conquest of nomad ground and to change the face of the landscape by transforming the nomads’ cattle-ranges into peasants’ fields and replacing their mobile camps by permanent villages. The Cossacks, who performed this unprecedented feat, were frontiersmen of Russian Orthodox Christendom who were tempered in the furnace and fashioned on the anvil of border warfare against Eurasian nomads (Batu Khan’s ‘Golden Horde’) in the two following centuries. They owe the name they have made legendary—Cossacks—to their enemies; it is simply the Turkish word qazaq, meaning an outlaw who refuses to acknowledge the authority of his ‘legitimate’ nomad overlord. 1 The far-flung Cossack communities which—at the moment of their annihilation in the Russian Communist Revolution of 1917—were echeloned right across Asia from the Don to the Ussuri, were all derived from a single mother-community, the Cossacks of the Dniepr.
These original Cossacks were a semi-monastic military brotherhood with points of resemblance to the Hellenic brotherhood of the Spartans and to the Crusading Orders of Knighthood. In their methods of conducting their truceless warfare against the nomads they realized that, if a civilization is to wage war with success against barbarians, it must fight them with other weapons and resources than their own. Just as modern Western empire-builders have overwhelmed their primitive opponents by bringing to bear against them the superior resources of industrialism, so the Cossacks overwhelmed the nomads by availing themselves of the superior resources of agriculture. And as modern Western generalship has reduced the nomads to military impotence on their own ground by outmatching their mobility with such instruments as railways, motor cars and aeroplanes, so the Cossacks reduced the nomads to military impotence in their own way by seizing upon the rivers, the one natural feature of the Steppe which was not under the nomads’ control and which told against them instead of in their favour. To nomad horsemen the rivers were formidable as obstacles and useless for transport, whereas the Russian peasant and lumberman was expert in river navigation. Accordingly the Cossacks, while learning to vie with their nomad adversaries in the art of horsemanship, did not forget to be watermen, and it was by boat and not on horseback that they eventually won their way to the dominion of Eurasia. They passed from the Dniepr to the Don and from the Don to the Volga. Thence in 1586 they crossed the watershed between the Volga and the Ob and by 1638 their exploration of Siberian waterways had brought them to the shores of the Pacific on the Sea of Okhotsk.
In the same century in which the Cossacks thus signalized their victorious reaction to the nomad pressure on the south-east, another frontier became the principal recipient of external pressure and the principal focus of-Russian vitality. In the seventeenth century of the Christian Era, Russia experienced for the first time in her history a formidable pressure from the Western World. A Polish army occupied Moscow for two years (1610-12), and soon afterwards the Sweden of Gustavus Adolphus barred out Russia from the Baltic by making herself mistress of the whole eastern coastline of that sea from Finland to the northern frontier of Poland, which at that time ran to within a few miles of Riga. But the century had barely closed when Peter the Great retorted to this Western pressure by founding Petersburg in A.D. 1703, on territory reconquered from the Swedes, and displaying the flag of a Russian navy, in Western style, on Baltic waters.
In the Western World over against the Continental Barbarians
When we pass to the history of our own Western Civilization we find that at first, not unnaturally, the heaviest external pressure was felt on its eastward, or landward, frontier over against the barbarians of Central Europe. This frontier was not only victoriously defended but was continuously pushed back until the barbarians had disappeared from the scene. Thereafter our Western Civilization found itself in contact on its eastern frontiers no longer with barbarians but with rival civilizations. At present we are concerned to draw examples of the stimulating effects of frontier pressure only from the first part of this span of history.
In the first phase of Western history the stimulating effect of the pressure of the Continental barbarians declared itself in the emergence of a new social structure, the still half-barbarian principality of the Franks. The Merovingian regime, in which the Frankish principality was first embodied, had its face turned towards the Roman past, but the succeeding Carolingian regime looked to the future; for, though it incidentally evoked a ghost of the Roman Empire, that ghost was only evoked—in the spirit of the cry ‘Debout les morts!’—in order to assist the living in carrying out their task. And in what part of the Frankish domain was this substitution of the vital and positive Carolings for the decadent and fainiant Merovings accomplished? Not in the interior but on the frontier; not in Neustria (roughly equivalent to Northern France), on soil fertilized by ancient Roman culture and sheltered from barbarian inroads, but in Austrasia (the Rhineland), in a territory which bestrode the Roman frontier and was exposed to constant assaults from the Saxons of the North European forest and from the Avars of the Eurasian Steppe. The measure of the stimulus from this external pressure is given by the achievements of Charlemagne, his eighteen Saxon campaigns, his extirpation of the Avars, and the ‘Carolingian Renaissance’, which was one of the first manifestations of cultural and intellectual energy in our Western World.
This Austrasian reaction to the stimulus of pressure was followed by a relapse. Accordingly we find it succeeded by a Saxon reaction which came to a head, rather less than two centuries later, in the career of Otto I. The enduring achievement of Charlemagne’s career had been the incorporation of the domain of the Saxon barbarians into Western Christendom; but by this very success he had prepared the way for the transfer of the frontier, and with it the stimulus, from his own victorious Austrasia to conquered Saxony. In Otto’s day the same stimulus evoked in Saxony the same reaction that had been evoked by it, in Charlemagne’s day, in Austrasia. Otto smote the Wends as Charlemagne had smitten the Saxons, and thereafter the frontiers of Western Christendom were pushed back steadily farther eastwards.
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the task of Westernizing the last remaining Continental barbarians was carried on no longer under the leadership of hereditary monarchs who, like Charlemagne and Otto, had assumed the Roman Imperial title, but through the instrumentality of two new institutions: the city state and the militant monastic order. The Hansa towns and the Teutonic Knights, between them, advanced the bounds of Western Christendom from the Oder to the Dvina. That was the last round in this secular conflict; for before the close of the fourteenth century the Continental barbarians, who had been pressing on the frontiers of three successive civilizations, the Minoan, the Hellenic and the Western, for three thousand years, had been wiped off the face of the earth. By A.D. 1400 Western Christendom and Orthodox Christendom, which had once been entirely isolated from one another on the Continent by intervening bands of barbarians, had come to march with one another along a line extending across the whole breadth of the Continent from the Adriatic to the Arctic.
It is interesting to observe how, on this moving frontier between an advancing civilization and a retreating barbarism, the reversal of the direction of pressure, which became constant from the time when Otto I took up Charlemagne’s work, was followed by a progressive transference of stimulus as the Western counter-offensive proceeded. For example, the Duchy of Saxony suffered the same eclipse after Otto’s victories over the Wends that Austrasia had suffered, two centuries earlier, after Charlemagne’s victories over the Saxons. Saxony lost her hegemony in A.D. 1024 and broke into fragments sixty years later. But the Imperial dynasty which followed the Saxon dynasty did not originate farther east on the advancing frontier, as the Saxon dynasty had originated eastward of the Carolingian. Instead, the Franconian dynasty and all subsequent dynasties bearing the Imperial title— Hohenstaufen, Luxemburg, and Hapsburg—originated on one or other of the confluents of the Rhine. The now distant frontier did not impart its stimulus to these Imperial successor dynasties, and we shall not be surprised to find that, in spite of the eminence of certain individual emperors, such as Frederick Barbarossa, the Imperial power steadily declined from the latter part of the eleventh century onwards.
Yet the empire resuscitated by Charlemagne survived, a ghost of a ghost no doubt, ‘neither Holy nor Roman nor an Empire’, to play a vital part once again in the political life of the Western Society. It owed its recovery of vitality to the fact that, at the latter end of the Middle Ages, a series of dynastic arrangements and accidents installed the Rhenish House of Hapsburg in Austria, where it eventually shouldered altogether new frontier responsibilities and responded to a new stimulus that these brought with them. To this subject we must now pass on.
In the Western World over against the Ottoman Empire
The impact of the Ottoman Turks on the Western World began in earnest with the hundred years’ war between the ‘Osmanlis and Hungary which culminated in the extinction of the medieval kingdom of Hungary in the battle of Mohacz (A.D. I 526). Hungary, standing at bay under the leadership of John Hunyadi and his son Matthias Corvinus, was the most stubborn opponent the ‘Osmanlis had as yet encountered. The disparity, however, between the respective forces of the two combatants, in spite of the reinforcement of Hungary by its union with Bohemia from 1490 onwards, was so great that the effort proved to be beyond Hungary’s strength. The upshot was the battle of Mohacz; and it was only a disaster of this magnitude that could produce a sufficient psychological effect to bring the remnant of Hungary together with Bohemia and Austria into a close and enduring union under the Hapsburg dynasty which had been ruling Austria since A.D. 1440. This union endured nearly four hundred years— only to dissolve in the same year, 1918, that saw the final break-up of the Ottoman Power which had delivered the dynamic blow at Mohacz four centuries back.
Indeed, from the moment of the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy’s foundation its fortunes followed those of the hostile Power whose pressure had called it into existence. The heroic age of the Danubian Monarchy coincided chronologically with the period during which the Ottoman pressure was felt by the Western World most severely. This heroic age may be taken as beginning with the first abortive Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1529 and ending with the second in 1682-3. these two supreme ordeals the Austrian capital played the same role in the desperate resistance of the Western World to the Ottoman assault as Verdun played in the French resistance to the German assault in the war of 1914-18. Both sieges of Vienna were turning-points in Ottoman military history. The failure of the first brought to a standstill the tide of Ottoman conquest which had been flooding up the Danube Valley for a century past—and the map shows, what many will find hard to believe without verification, that Vienna is more than half-way from Constantinople to the Straits of Dover. The failure of the second siege was followed by an ebb which continued thereafter, in spite of all pauses and fluctuations, until the Turkish frontier had been pushed back from the south-eastern outskirts of Vienna, where it had stood from 1529 to 1683, to the north-western outskirts of Adrianople.
The Ottoman Empire’s loss, however, has not proved the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy’s gain, for the heroic age of the Danubian Monarchy did not survive the Ottoman Empire’s decline. The collapse of the Ottoman Power, which threw open a field in South-Eastern Europe for other forces to occupy, simultaneously released the Danubian Monarchy from the pressure which had stimulated it hitherto. The Danubian Monarchy followed into decline the Power whose blows had originally called it into existence, and eventually shared the Ottoman Empire’s fate.
If we take a glance at the Austrian Empire in the nineteenth century, when the once-menacing ‘Osmanli had become ‘the sick man of Europe’, we find that it was now suffering under a double disability. Not only was it in this age no longer a frontier state; its supernational organization which had proved an effective response to the Ottoman challenge of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had become a stumbling-block to the newfangled nationalist ideals of the nineteenth. The Hapsburg Monarchy spent the last century of its existence in attempts—all dpomed to failure—at hindering the inevitable revision of the map on nationalist lines. At the price of renouncing the hegemony over Germany and the possession of territory in Italy, the Monarchy contrived to go on living side by side with the new German Empire and the new Italian Kingdom. By accepting the Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich of 1867 and its Austro-Polish corollary in Galicia, it succeeded in identifying its own interests with the national interests of the Magyar and Polish as well as the German elements in its dominions. But it would not or could not come to terms with its Roumanians and Czechoslovaks and Jugoslavs, and the pistol-shots of Sarajevo proved the signal for its obliteration from the map.
Finally, let us glance at the contrasting attitudes of ‘inter-war’ Austria and ‘inter-war’ Turkey. From the war of 1914-18 they both emerged as republics and both of them shorn of the empires which had once made them neighbours and adversaries. But there the resemblance ended. The Austrians were at once the hardest hit and the most submissive of the five peoples that had found themselves on the losing side. They accepted the new order passively, with supreme resignation as well as with supreme regret. By contrast, the Turks were the only one of the five peoples who took up arms again, less than a year after the armistice, against the victorious Powers and successfully insisted upon a drastic revision of the peace treaty which the victors had intended to impose upon them. In so doing the Turks renewed their youth and changed their destiny. They were now no longer fighting, under a decadent Ottoman dynasty, to preserve this or that province of a derelict empire. Deserted by their dynasty, they were once again waging a frontier war and following a leader chosen on his merits like their first Sultan ‘Osman, and this not to extend their homelands but to preserve them. The battlefield of In Onii, on which the decisive action of the Graeco-Turkish war of 1919-22 was fought, lies in that original patrimony which the last of the Saljuqs had assigned to the first of the ‘Osmanlis six hundred years before. The wheel had come full circle.
In the Western World on its Western Frontiers
In its early days our Western Society experienced pressure not only along its Continental eastern frontier but also on three fronts in the west: the pressure of the so-called ‘Celtic Fringe’ in the British Isles and Brittany; the pressure of the Scandinavian Vikings in the British Isles and along the Atlantic coast of Continental Europe; and the pressure of the Syriac Civilization represented by the early Muslim conquerors in the Iberian Peninsula. We will deal first with the pressure of ‘the Celtic Fringe’.
How is it that the struggle for existence between the primitive and ephemeral barbarian principalities of the so-called Heptarchy has resulted in the emergence of two progressive and enduring states of our Western body politic? If we glance at the process by which the Kingdoms of England and Scotland have replaced ‘the Heptarchy’, we shall find that the determining factor at every stage has been a response to some challenge presented by external pressure. The genesis of the Kingdom of Scotland can be traced back to a challenge which was presented to the Anglo-Saxon principality of Northumbria by the Picts and Scots. The present capital of Scotland was founded by Edwin of Northumbria (whose name it still bears) as the frontier fortress of Northumbria over against the Picts beyond the Firth of Forth and the Britons of Strathclyde. The challenge was presented when the Picts and Scots conquered Edinburgh in A.D. 954 and thereafter compelled Northumbria to cede to them the whole of Lothian. This cession raised the following issue: Was this lost march of Western Christendom to retain its Western Christian culture in spite of the change of political regime, or was it to succumb to the alien ‘Far Western’ culture of its Celtic conquerors? Far from succumbing, Lothian responded to the challenge by taking its conquerors captive, as conquered Greece had once captivated Rome.
The culture of the conquered territory exercised such an attraction upon the Scottish kings that they made Edinburgh their capital and came to feel and behave as though Lothian were their homeland and the Highlands an outlying and alien part of their dominions. In consequence the eastern seaboard of Scotland up to the Moray Firth was colonized, and the ‘Highland Line’ pushed back, by settlers of English origin from Lothian under the auspices of Celtic rulers and at the expense of a Celtic population who were the Scottish kings’ original kinsfolk. By a consequent and not less paradoxical transfer of names, ‘the Scottish language’ came to mean the English dialect spoken in Lothian instead of meaning the Gaelic dialect spoken by the original Scots. The ultimate consequence of the conquest of Lothian by the Scots and Picts was not to set back the north-western boundary of Western Christendom from the Forth to the Tweed but to push it forward till it embraced the whole island of Great Britain.
Thus a conquered fragment of one of the principalities of the English ‘Heptarchy’ actually became the nucleus of the present Kingdom of Scotland, and it is to be observed that the fragment of Northumbria which performed this feat was the march between Tweed and Forth and not the interior between Tweed and Humber. If some enlightened traveller had visited Northumbria in the tenth century, on the eve of the cession of Lothian to the Scots and Picts, he would surely have said that Edinburgh had no great future and that if any Northumbrian town was going to become the permanent capital of a ‘civilized’ state, that town would be York. Situated in the midst of the largest arable plain of Northern Britain, York had already been the military centre of a Roman province and a metropolitan see of the Church, and had quite recently become the capital of the ephemeral Scandinavian realm of the ‘Danelaw’. But the Danelaw had submitted in A.D. 920 to the King of Wessex; thereafter York sank to the level of an English provincial town; and to-day nothing but the unusual size of Yorkshire among English counties recalls the fact that a greater destiny once seemed to be in store for her.
Of the Heptarchic principalities south of the Humber, which one was to take the lead and form the nucleus of the future Kingdom of England? We notice that by the eighth century of the Christian Era the leading competitors were not the principalities nearest to the Continent but Mercia and Wessex, both of which had been exposed to a frontier stimulus from the unsubdued Celts of Wales and Cornwall. We also notice that, in the first round of this contest, Mercia had drawn ahead. King Offa of Mercia commanded greater power than any of the kings of Wessex in his day, for the pressure of Wales on Mercia was stronger than the pressure of Cornwall on Wessex. Though the resistance of the ‘West Welsh’ in Cornwall has left an undying echo in the legend of Arthur, this resistance seems nevertheless to have been overcome by the West Saxons with comparative ease. The severity of the pressure on Mercia, on the other hand, is attested philologically by the name Mercia itself (‘the March’ par excellence) and archaeo-logically by the remains of the great earthwork, stretching from the estuary of the Dee to the estuary of the Severn, which bears the name of Offa’s Dyke. At that stage it looked as though the future lay, not with Wessex, but with Mercia. In the ninth century, however, when the challenge from ‘the Celtic fringe’ was outclassed by a new and far more formidable challenge from Scandinavia, these prospects were falsified. This time Mercia failed to respond, while Wessex under the leadership of Alfred responded triumphantly and thereby became the nucleus of the historic Kingdom of England.
The Scandinavian pressure on the oceanic seaboards of Western Christendom resulted not only in the coalescence of the Kingdom of England under the House of Cerdic out of the Heptarchy but also in the articulation of the Kingdom of France under the House of Capet out of the derelict fragments of the western part of Charlemagne’s empire. In face of this pressure England found her capital, not in Winchester, the previous capital of Wessex, within range of the West Welsh but comparatively remote from the Scandinavian danger, but in London, which had borne the heat and burden of the day and which had perhaps given the long battle its decisive turn in A.D. 895 by repelling the attempt of a Danish armada to ascend the Thames. Similarly, France found its capital not in Laon, which had been the seat of the last Caro-lingians, but in Paris, which had stood in the breach under the father of the first of the Capetian kings and had brought the Vikings to a halt in their ascent of the Seine.
Thus the response of Western Christendom to the maritime challenge from Scandinavia gave birth to the new kingdoms of England and France. Further, in the process of gaining the upper hand over these adversaries, the French and English peoples forged the potent military and social instrument of the Feudal System, while the English also gave artistic expression to the emotional experience of their ordeal in a new outburst of epic poetry of which a fragment survives in The Lay of the Battle of Maldon.
We must also observe that France repeated in Normandy the achievement of the English in Lothian by winning the Scandinavian conquerors of Normandy as recruits for the civilization of the conquered. Little more than a century after Rollo and his companions had made with the Carolingian Charles the Simple the pact which secured them a permanent settlement on the Atlantic seaboard of France (A.D. 912), their descendants were extending the bounds of Western Christendom in the Mediterranean at the expense of Orthodox Christendom and Islam, and were spreading the full light of the Western Civilization, as it now shone in France, into the insular kingdoms of England and Scotland which till then had still lain in the penumbra. Physiologically the Norman Conquest of England might be regarded as the final achievement of the previously frustrated ambitions of the Viking barbarians, but culturally such an interpretation is mere nonsense. The Normans repudiated their Scandinavian pagan past by coming not to destroy the law of Western Christendom in England but to fulfil it. On the field of Hastings, when the Norman warrior-minstrel Taillefer rode singing into battle in the van of the Norman knights, the language on his lips was not Norse but French and the matter of which he was inditing was not the saga of Sigurd but the Chanson de Roland. When the Western Christian Civilization had thus captivated the Scandinavian invaders of its own domain, it is no wonder that it was able to set the seal upon its victory by supplanting the abortive Scandinavian Civilization in Scandinavia itself. We shall return to this subject later when we collect for comparative treatment a list of ‘abortive’ civilizations.
We have left till last the frontier pressure which came first in point of time, exceeded all others in intensity, and seemed overwhelming in its potency when measured against the apparently puny force of our civilization in its cradle; indeed, in the judgement of Gibbon, it came near to relegating our Western Society to a place on the list of abortive civilizations. 1 The Arab onslaught upon the infant civilization of the West was an incident in the final Syriac reaction against the long Hellenic intrusion upon the Syriac domain; for when the Arabs took up the task in the strength of Islam they did not rest until they had recovered for the Syriac Society the whole of its former domain at its widest extension. Not content with reconstituting as an Arab empire the Syriac universal state which had originally been embodied in the Persian empire of the Achaemenidae, they went on to reconquer the ancient Phoenician domain of Carthage in Africa and Spain. In the latter direction they crossed, in A.D. 713, in the footsteps of Hamilcar and Hannibal, not only the Straits of Gibraltar but also the Pyrenees; and thereafter, though they did not emulate Hannibal’s passage of the Rhone and the Alps, they broke ground which Hannibal never trod when they carried their arms to the Loire.
The discomfiture of the Arabs by the Franks under Charlemagne’s grandfather at the Battle of Tours in A.D. 732 has assuredly been one of the decisive events of history; for the Western reaction to Syriac pressure which there declared itself continued in force and increased in momentum on this front until, some seven or eight centuries later, its impetus was carrying the Portuguese vanguard of Western Christendom right out of the Iberian Peninsula and onwards overseas round Africa to Goa, Malacca and Macao, and the Castilian vanguard across the Atlantic to Mexico and on across the Pacific to Manila. These Iberian pioneers performed an unparalleled service for Western Christendom. They expanded the horizon, and thereby potentially the domain, of the society they represented until it came to embrace all the habitable lands and navigable seas of the globe. It is owing in the first instance to this Iberian energy that Western Christendom has grown, like the grain of mustard seed in the parable, until it has become ‘the Great Society’: a tree in whose branches all the nations of the Earth have come and lodged.
The evocation of Iberian Christian energy by the stimulus of pressure from the Moors is attested by the fact that this energy gave out as soon as the Moorish pressure ceased to be exerted. In the seventeenth century the Portuguese and Castilians were supplanted in the new world ‘that they had called into existence by interlopers—Dutch, English and French—from the Trans-pyrenaean parts of Western Christendom, and this discomfiture overseas coincided in date with the removal of the historic stimulus at home through the extirpation, by massacre, expulsion or forcible conversion, of the remaining ‘Moriscos’ of the Peninsula.
It seems, then, that the relation of the Iberian marches to the Moors resembles the relation of the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy to the ‘Osmanlis. Each was vigorous so long as the pressure was formidable; and then, as soon as the pressure slackened, each of them, Spain, Portugal and Austria, began to relax and lose the lead among the competing Powers of its own Western World.
Lame Smiths and Blind Poets
When a living organism is penalized, by comparison with other members of its species, through losing the use of a particular organ or faculty, it is apt to respond to this challenge by specializing in the use of some other organ or faculty until it has secured an advantage over its fellows in this second field of activity to offset its handicap in the first. The blind, for example, are apt to develop a more delicate sense of touch than is usually possessed by people who enjoy the use of their eyes. Somewhat similarly we find that, in a body social, a group or class which is socially penalized—either by accident or by its own act or by the act of other members of the society in which it lives—is apt to respond to the challenge of being handicapped in, or altogether excluded from, certain fields of activity by concentrating its energies on other fields and excelling in these.
It may be convenient to start from the simplest case: a situation in which certain physical handicaps inhibit certain individuals from following the ordinary avocations of the society of which they are members. Let us remind ourselves, for example, of the predicament in which a blind man or a lame man finds himself in a barbarian society where the ordinary male member is, when needed, a warrior. How does the lame barbarian react? Though his feet cannot carry him into battle, his hands can still forge weapons and armour for his fellows to wield and wear, and he acquires a skill in handicraft which makes them as dependent on him as he is on them. He becomes the workaday prototype of lame Hephaestus (Vulcan) or lame Weland (Wayland Smith) in the world of mythology. And how does the blind barbarian react? His predicament is worse, for he cannot use his hands in the smithy; yet he can still use them to strike a “harp in harmony with his voice and he can use his mind to make poetry out of the deeds he cannot perform, though he learns of them at second hand from the artless soldier’s tales of his fellows. He becomes the means to that immortality of renown which the barbarian warrior desires.
A race of heroes brave and strong
Before Atrides fought and died:
No Homer lived; no sacred song
Their great deeds sanctified:
Obscure, unwept, unknown they lie,
Opprest with clouds of endless night;
No poet lived to glorify
Their names with light.
1
Slavery
Of the penalizations imposed not by accident of nature but by the hand of man, the most obvious, the most universal and the most severe has been enslavement. Take, for example, the record of the vast concourse of immigrants who were brought to Italy as slaves from all the countries round the Mediterranean during those two terrible centuries between the Hannibalic War and the establishment of the Augustan Peace. The handicap under which these slave immigrants began their new life is almost beyond imagination. Some of them were heirs to the cultural heritage of the Hellenic Civilization, and these had seen their whole spiritual and material universe tumble about their ears when their cities had been sacked and they and their fellow citizens haled to the slave-market. Others, coming from the Oriental ‘internal proletariat’ of the Hellenic Society, had lost their social heritage already, but not their capacity for the grievous personal suffering that slavery inflicts. There was an ancient Greek saying that ‘the day of enslavement deprives man of half of his manhood’, and this saying was terribly fulfilled in the debasement of the slave-descended urban proletariat of Rome, which lived not by bread alone but by ‘bread and shows’ (panem et circenses) from the second century B.C. to the sixth of the Christian Era, till the flesh-pots failed and the people perished off the face of the Earth. This long-drawn-out life-in-death was the penalty of failure to respond to the challenge of enslavement, and no doubt that broad path of destruction was trodden by the majority of those human beings of many different origins and antecedents who were enslaved en masse in the most evil age of Hellenic history. Yet some there were who did respond to the challenge and did succeed in ‘making good’, in one fashion or another.
Some rose in their masters’ service until they became the responsible administrators of great estates; and Caesar’s estate itself, when it had grown into the universal state of the Hellenic World, continued to be administered by Caesar’s freedmen. Others, whom their masters established in petty business, purchased their freedom from the savings that their masters had allowed them to retain and eventually rose to affluence and eminence in the Roman business world. Others remained slaves in This World to become philosopher-kings or fathers of churches in another, and the true-born Roman who might justly despise the illegitimate authority of a Narcissus or the nouveau-riche ostentation of a Trimalchio would delight to honour the serene wisdom of the lame slave Epictetus, while he could not but marvel at the enthusiasm of the nameless multitude of slaves and freedmen whose faith was moving mountains. During the five centuries between the Hannibalic War and the conversion of Constantine the Roman authorities saw this miracle of servile faith being performed under their eyes and repeated—in defiance of their efforts to arrest it by physical force—until eventually they themselves succumbed to it. For the slave immigrants who had lost their homes and families and property still kept their religion. The Greeks brought the Bacchanalia, the Anatolians the worship of Cybele (‘Diana of the Ephesians’, a Hittite goddess who had long outlived the society in which she had been conceived), the Egyptians brought the worship of Isis, the Babylonians the worship of the stars, the Iranians the worship of Mithra, the Syrians Christianity. ‘The Syrian Orontes has poured its waters into the Tiber’, wrote Juvenal in the second century of the Christian Era; and the confluence of these waters raised an issue which revealed the limitations on the slave’s subjection to his master.
The issue was whether an immigrant religion of the internal proletariat was to swamp the indigenous religions of the dominant minority of the Hellenic Society. When once the waters had met it was impossible that they should not mingle; and, when once they had mingled, there was little doubt as to which current would prevail if nature were not counteracted by art or force. For the tutelary gods of the Hellenic World had already withdrawn from the intimate life-giving communion in which they had once lived with their worshippers, whereas the gods of the proletariat had proved themselves to be their worshippers’ ‘refuge and strength, a very present help in time of trouble’. In face of these prospects the Roman authorities halted for five centuries between two opinions. Should they take the offensive against the foreign religions or should they take them to their hearts? Every one of the new gods appealed to some section of the Roman governing class: Mithra to the soldiers, Isis to the women, the heavenly bodies to the intellectuals, Dionysus to the Philhellenes and Cybele to the fetish-worshippers. In the year 205 B.C., in the crisis of the Hannibalic War, the Roman Senate anticipated Con-stantine’s reception of Christianity more than five centuries later by receiving, with official honours, the magic stone or meteorite, fallen from heaven and charged with the divinity of Cybele, which they had imported as a talisman from Anatolian Pessinus. Twenty years later they anticipated Diocletian’s persecution of the Christians by suppressing the Hellenic Bacchanalia. The long-drawn-out Battle of the Gods was the counterpart of an earthly contest between the slave immigrants and their Roman masters; and in this dual contest the slaves and the slaves’ gods won.
The stimulus of penalization is also illustrated by racial discrimination as exemplified in the caste system of the Hindu Society. Here we see races or castes, excluded from one trade or profession, making good in another. The Negro slave immigrant of modern North America has, however, been subject to the twofold penalization of racial discrimination and legal servitude, and to-day, eighty years after the second of these handicaps has been removed, the first weighs as heavily as ever on the coloured freedman. There is no need to enlarge here upon the appalling injuries inflicted by the slave-traders and slave-owners of our Western World, European and American, upon the Negro race; what we are concerned to observe—and after our examination of the Hellenic parallel we observe this without surprise—is that the American Negro, finding the scales thus, to all seeming, permanently and overwhelmingly weighted against him in This World, has turned to another world for consolation.
The Negro appears to be answering our tremendous challenge with a religious response which may prove in the event, when it can be seen in retrospect, to bear comparison with the ancient Oriental’s response to the challenge from his Roman masters. The Negro has not, indeed, brought any ancestral religion of his own from Africa to captivate the hearts of his White fellow-citizens in America. His primitive social heritage was of so frail a texture that, save for a few shreds, it was scattered to the winds on the impact of our Western Civilization. Thus he came to America spiritually as well as physically naked; and he has met the emergency by covering his nakedness with his enslaver’s cast-off clothes. The Negro has adapted himself to his new social environment by rediscovering in Christianity certain original meanings and values which Western Christendom has long ignored. Opening a simple and impressionable mind to the Gospels, he has discovered that Jesus was a prophet who came into the world not to confirm the mighty in their seats but to exalt the humble and meek. The Syrian slave immigrants who once brought Christianity into Roman Italy performed the miracle of establishing a new religion which was alive in the place of an old religion which was already dead. It is possible that the Negro slave immigrants who have found Christianity in America may perform the greater miracle of raising the dead to life. With their childlike spiritual intuition and their genius for giving spontaneous aesthetic expression to emotional religious experience, they may perhaps be capable of kindling the cold grey ashes of Christianity which have been transmitted to them by us until, in their hearts, the divine fire glows again. It is thus perhaps, if at all, that Christianity may conceivably become the living faith of a dying civilization for the second time. If this miracle were indeed to be performed by an American Negro Church, that would be the most dynamic response to the challenge of social penalization that had yet been made by man.
Phanariots, Qazanlis and Levantines
The social penalization of religious minorities within a single and otherwise homogeneous community is so familiar a fact that it hardly needs illustration. Everyone is aware of the vigorous response to such a challenge that was made by the English Puritans of the seventeenth century; how those who stayed at home, by the instrumentality first of the House of Commons and afterwards of Cromwell’s Ironsides, turned the English Constitution inside out and assured the ultimate success of our experiment of parliamentary government, and how those who crossed the seas laid the foundations of the United States. It is of greater interest to study some less familiar examples in which the privileged and the penalized denominations belonged to different civilizations, though included within the same body politic through force majeure exerted by the dominant party.
In the Ottoman Empire the main body of Orthodox Christendom had been endowed, by intruders of alien faith and culture, with a universal state which the Orthodox Christian Society could not do without yet had proved unable to establish for itself; and the Orthodox Christians had to pay for their social incompetence by ceasing to be masters in their own house. The Muslim conquerors who established and maintained the Pax Ottomanica in the Orthodox Christian World exacted payment,’ in the form of religious discrimination, for the political service they were rendering to their Christian subjects; and here, as elsewhere, the adherents of the penalized denomination responded by becoming experts in those pursuits to which their activities were now forcibly confined.
In the old Ottoman Empire none who were not ‘Osmanlis might govern or bear arms, and in large tracts of the Empire even the ownership and cultivation of land passed from the subject Christians into the hands of their Muslim masters. In these circumstances the several Orthodox Christian peoples came—for the first and last time in their histories—to an unavowed and perhaps not even consciously designed but none the less effective mutual understanding. They could now no longer indulge in their favourite pastime of fratricidal war nor enter the liberal professions, so they tacitly parcelled out among themselves the humbler trades, and as traders gradually regained a footing within the walls of the imperial capital from which they had been deliberately evicted wholesale by Mehmed the Conqueror. The Vlachs from the Rumelian highlands established themselves in towns as grocers; the Greek-speaking Greeks of the Archipelago and the Turkish-speaking Greeks of landlocked Anatolian Qaraman set up business on a more ambitious scale; the Albanians became masons; the Montenegrins hall-porters and commissionaires; even the bucolic Bulgars found a living in the suburbs as grooms and market-gardeners.
Among the Orthodox Christian reoccupants of Constantinople there was one Greek group, the so-called Phanariots, who were stimulated by the challenge of penalization to such a degree that they actually rose to be virtual partners and potential supplanters of the ‘Osmanlis themselves in the administration and control of the Empire. The Phanar, from which this clique of aspiring Greek families derived their name, was the north-western corner of Stamboul, which the Ottoman Government had abandoned to its Orthodox Christian subjects resident in the capital as the equivalent of a ghetto. Thither came the Oecumenical Patriarch after the church of Santa Sophia had been converted into a mosque, and in this apparently unpromising retreat the Patriarchate became the rallying-point and instrument of the Greek Orthodox Christians who had prospered in trade. These Phanariots developed two special accomplishments. As merchants on a grand scale they entered into commercial relations with the Western World and acquired a knowledge of Western manners, customs and languages. As managers of the affairs of the Patriarchate they acquired a wide practice and a close understanding of Ottoman administration, since, under the old Ottoman system, the Patriarch was the official political intermediary between the Ottoman Government and all its Orthodox Christian subjects of every tongue in every province. These two accomplishments made the fortunes of the Phanariots when, in the secular conflict between the Ottoman Empire and the Western World, the tide definitely turned against the ‘Osmanlis after the second unsuccessful siege of Vienna in A.D. 1682-3.
This change of military fortunes introduced certain formidable complications into Ottoman affairs of state. Before the reverse of 1683 the ‘Osmanlis had always been able to count upon settling their relations with the Western Powers by the simple application of force. Their military decline confronted them with two new problems. They had now to negotiate at the conference table with Western Powers whom they could not defeat in the field, and they had to consider the feelings of their Christian subjects whom they could no longer be sure of holding down. In other words they could no longer dispense with skilled diplomatists and skilled administrators; and the necessary fund of experience, which the ‘Osmanlis themselves lacked, was possessed by the Phanariots alone among their subjects. In consequence the ‘Osmanlis were constrained to disregard the precedents and tamper with the principles of their own regime by conferring upon the opportunely competent Phanariots the monopoly of four high offices of state which were key-positions in the new political situation of the Ottoman Empire. Thus in the course of the eighteenth century of the Christian Era the political power of the Phanariots was steadily enhanced, and it looked as though the result of Western pressure might be to endow the Empire with a new governing class drawn from among the victims of centuries of racial and religious penalization.
In the end the Phanariots failed to achieve their ‘manifest destiny’ because, towards the end of the eighteenth century, the Western pressure on the Ottoman body social attained a degree of intensity at which its nature underwent a sudden transformation. The Greeks, having been the first of the subjects of the Ottoman Empire to enter into intimate relations with the West, were also the first to become infected with the new Western virus of nationalism—an after-effect of the shock of the French Revolution. Between the outbreak of the French Revolution and the Greek War of Independence the Greeks were under the spell of two incompatible aspirations. They had not given up the Phanariot ambition of entering into the whole heritage of the ‘Osmanlis and keeping the Ottoman Empire intact as a ‘going concern’ under Greek management; and at the same time they had conceived the ambition of establishing a sovereign independent national state of their own—a Greece which should be Greek as France was French. The incompatibility of these two aspirations was demonstrated conclusively in 1821 when the Greeks attempted to realize them both simultaneously.
When the Phanariot Prince Hypsilanti crossed the Pruth from his base in Russia in order to make himself master of the Ottoman Empire and the Maniot chief Petro Bey Mavromikhalis descended from his mountain fastness in the Morea in order to establish an independent Greece, the outcome was a foregone conclusion. The resort to arms spelt the ruin of Phanariot aspirations. The reed on which the ‘Osmanlis had been leaning for more than a century pierced their hand, and their fury at this betrayal nerved them to break the treacherous staff in pieces and to stand at all costs on their own feet. The ‘Osmanlis retorted to Prince Hypsilanti’s act of war by destroying at one blow the fabric of power which the Phanariots had been peacefully building up for themselves since 1683; and this was the first step in eradicating all non-Turkish elements from the remnant of the Ottoman heritage—a process which reached its climax in the eviction of the Orthodox Christian minority from Anatolia in 1922. In fact, the first explosion of Greek nationalism kindled the first spark of its Turkish counterpart.
Thus, after all, the Phanariots just failed to secure that ‘senior partnership’ in the Ottoman Empire for which they seemed to be destined. Yet the fact that they came within an ace of success is evidence of the vigour with which they had responded to the challenge of penalization. Indeed the history of their relation with the ‘Osmanlis is an excellent illustration of the social ‘law’ of challenge-and-response; and the antithesis between Greek and Turk, which has attracted so much interest and excited so much animus, is explicable only in these terms and not in the racial and religious terms which have been in fashion on both sides in the popular polemics. Turcophils and Graecophils agree in attributing the historical differences in ethos between Greek Christians and Turkish Muslims to some ineradicable quality of race or some indelible imprint of religion. They disagree only in inverting the social values which they assign to these unknown quantities in the two cases. The Graecophil postulates an inherent virtue in Greek blood and in Orthodox Christianity and an inherent vice in Turkish blood and in Islam. The Turcophil simply transposes the vice and the virtue. Actually the common assumption underlying both these views is contradicted by unquestionable matters of fact.
It is unquestionable, for instance, in the matter of physical race, that the blood of Ertoghrul’s Central Asian Turkish followers which flows in the veins of the modern Turk is no more than an infinitesimal tincture. The Ottoman Turkish people has grown into a nation by assimilating the Orthodox Christian population in whose midst the ‘Osmanlis have been living for the last six centuries. Racially there can by now be very little to choose between the two peoples.
If this sufficiently refutes the a priori racial explanation of the Graeco-Turkish antithesis, we may refute the a priori religious explanation by a glance at another Turkish Muslim people which is living, and has long been living, in circumstances resembling, not those of the Ottoman Turks but those of the ‘Osmanlis’ former Orthodox Greek subjects. On the Volga there exists a Turkish Muslim community called the Qazanlis, who have been subject for some centuries to the Orthodox Christian government of Russia, and suffered much the same racial and religious penalizations under that alien regime as the ‘Osmanlis imposed on Orthodox Christians. And what sort of people are these Qazanlis? We read that they are
‘distinguished by their sobriety, honesty, thrift and industry. . . . The chief occupation of the Qazan Turk is trade. . . . His chief industries are soap-boiling, spinning and weaving. . . . He makes a good shoemaker and coachman. . . . Till the end of the sixteenth century no mosques were tolerated in Qazan and the Tatars were compelled to live in a separate quarter, but the predominance of the Muslims gradually prevailed.’ 1
In essentials this description of Turks penalized by Russians in the days of the Czars might be a description of Orthodox Christians penalized by Turks in the heyday of the Ottoman Empire. The common experience of being penalized on account of religion has been the governing factor in the development of both communities; and in the course of centuries their identic reaction to this common experience has bred in them a ‘family likeness’ to each other which has quite effaced the diversity between the original imprints of Orthodox Christianity and Islam.
This ‘family likeness’ is shared by adherents of certain other religious denominations who have been penalized on account of their religious allegiance and who have responded in the same way, for example the Roman Catholic* ‘Levantines’ within the old Ottoman Empire. The Levantines, like the Phanariots, could escape from their penalization by abandoning their religion and adopting that of their masters. Few, however, cared to take this course; instead, like the Phanariots, they set themselves to exploit the limited opportunities left open by their arbitrarily imposed disabilities, and in doing so they displayed that curious and unattractive combination of toughness of character and obsequiousness of manner which seems to be characteristic of all social groups placed in this particular situation. It made no difference that the Levantine might be descended physically from one of the most warlike and imperious and high-spirited among the peoples of Western Christendom: medieval Venetians and Genoese or modern French, Dutch and English. In the stifling atmosphere of their Ottoman ghetto they must either make the same response to the challenge of religious penalization as their fellow victims of diverse origins or else succumb.
In the earlier centuries of their dominance the ‘Osmanlis, knowing the peoples of Western Christendom—the Franks, as they called them—only through their Levantine representatives, assumed that Western Europe was wholly inhabited by such ‘lesser breeds without the law’. A wider experience led them to revise their opinion, and the ‘Osmanlis came to draw a sharp distinction between the ‘fresh-water Franks’ and their ‘salt-water’ namesakes. The ‘fresh-water Franks’ were those who had been born and bred in Turkey in the Levantine atmosphere and had responded by developing the Levantine character. The ‘saltwater Franks’ were those who had been born and bred at home in Frankland and had come out to Turkey as adults with their characters already formed. The Turks were puzzled to find that the great psychological gulf which divided them from the ‘freshwater Franks’ who had always lived in their midst did not intervene when they had to deal with the Franks from beyond the seas. The Franks who were geographically their neighbours and compatriots were psychologically aliens, whereas the Franks who came from a far country turned out to be men of like passions with themselves. But the explanation was really very simple. The Turk and the salt-water Frank could understand one another because there was a broad similarity between their respective social backgrounds. Each had grown up in an environment in which he was the master of his own house. On the other hand they both found difficulty in understanding or respecting the fresh-water Frank because the fresh-water Frank had a social background which was equally foreign to both of them. He was not a son of the house but a child of the ghetto; and this penalized existence had developed in him an ethos from which the Frank brought up in Frankland and the Turk brought up in Turkey had both remained free.
The Jews
We have now noticed, without discussing at any length, the results of religious discrimination in the case where the victims of penalization belong to the same society as the perpetrators of it, the English Puritans being one of several familiar examples; and we have discussed at greater length examples from the history of the Ottoman Empire of the case where the victims of religious discrimination belong to a different civilization from their persecutors. There remains the case where the victims of religious discrimination represent an extinct society which only survives as a fossil. A list of such fossils was given on an early page (see p. 8), and every one of them would furnish illustrations of the results of such penalizations; but by far the most notable is one of the fossil remnants of the Syriac Society, the Jews. Before passing to a consideration of this long-drawn-out tragedy, the end of which is not yet, 1 we may notice that another Syriac remnant, the Parsees, have played the same role within the Hindu Society as the Jews have played elsewhere, developing much the same expertness in trade and finance; and yet another Syriac remnant, the Armenian Gregorian Monophysites, have played much the same part in the World of Islam.
The characteristic qualities of the Jews under penalization are well known. What we are concerned here to find out is whether these qualities are due, as is commonly assumed, to the ‘Jewish-ness’ of the Jews, regarded either as a race or as a religious sect, or whether they are simply produced by the impact of penalization. The conclusions already drawn from other examples may prejudice us in favour of the latter view, but we will approach the evidence with an open mind. The evidence can be tested in two ways. We can compare the ethos displayed by the Jews when they are being penalized on account of their religion with the ethos when the penalization has been relaxed or wholly remitted. We can also compare the ethos of Jews who are or have been penalized with the ethos of other Jewish communities to whom the stimulus of penalization has never been administered.
At the present time the Jews who display most conspicuously the well-known characteristics commonly called Jewish and popularly assumed in Gentile minds to be the hall-mark of Judaism always and everywhere are the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe, who, in Rumania and in adjoining territories which used to be included in the so-called ‘Jewish Pale’ of the Russian Empire, have been kept morally, if not juridically, in the ghetto by the backward Christian nations among whom their lot is cast. The Jewish ethos is already less conspicuous among the emancipated Jews of Holland, Great Britain, France and the United States; and, when we consider how short a time has passed since the legal emancipation of the Jews in these latter countries took place, and how far from being complete their moral emancipation still is, even in the relatively enlightened countries of the West, we shall not underrate the significance of the change of ethos which is already apparent here. 1
We may also observe that, among the emancipated Jews of the West, those of Ashkenazi origin who have come from the Jewish Pale still appear distinctly more ‘Jewish’ in ethos than the rarer Sephardim in our midst who have come originally from Dar-al-Islam; and we can account for this difference by reminding ourselves of the diversity in the history of those two Jewish communities.
The Ashkenazim are descended from Jews who took advantage of the opening up of Europe by the Romans and made a perquisite of the retail trade of the semi-barbarous Transalpine provinces. Since the conversion and break-up of the Roman Empire these Ashkenazim have had to suffer doubly from the fanaticism of the Christian Church and from the resentment of the barbarians. A barbarian cannot bear to see a resident alien living a life apart and making a profit by transacting business which the barbarian lacks the skill to transact himself. Acting on these feelings, the Western Christians have penalized the Jew as long as he has remained indispensable to them and have expelled him as soon as they have felt themselves capable of doing without him. Accordingly the rise and expansion of Western Christendom have been accompanied by an eastward drift of the Ashkenazim from the ancient marches of the Roman Empire in the Rhineland to the modern marches of Western Christendom in the Pale. In the expanding interior of Western Christendom the Jews have been evicted from one country after another as successive Western peoples have attained a certain level of economic efficiency—as, for example, they were evicted from England by Edward I (A.D. 1272-1307)— while, in the advancing Continental fringe, these Jewish exiles from the interior have been admitted and even invited to one country after another, in the initial stages of Westernization, as commercial pioneers, only to be penalized and eventually evicted once again as soon as they have once again ceased to be indispensable to the economic life of their transitory asylum.
In the Pale this long trek of the Ashkenazi Jews from west to east was brought to a halt and their martyrdom reached its climax; for here, at the meeting-point of Western and Russian Orthodox Christendom, the Jews have been caught and ground between the upper and the nether millstone. At this stage, when they sought to repeat their performance of trekking eastward, ‘Holy Russia’ barred the way. It was fortunate, however, for the Ashkenazim that by this time the leading nations of the West, which had been the first to evict the Jews in the Middle Ages, had risen to a level of economic efficiency at which they were no longer afraid of exposing themselves to Jewish economic competition—as for example the English by the time of the Commonwealth, when the Jews were readmitted to England by Cromwell (A.D. 1653-58). The emancipation of the Jews in the West came just in time to give the Ashkenazim of the Pale a new western outlet when their old eastward drift was brought up against the blank wall of ‘Holy Russia’s’ western border. During the past century the tide of Ashkenazi migration has been ebbing back from east to west: from the Pale into England and the United States. It is not to be wondered at that, with these antecedents, the Ashkenazim whom this ebb-tide has deposited among us should display the so-called Jewish ethos more conspicuously than their Sephardi co-religionists whose lines have fallen in more pleasant places.
The less sharply accentuated ‘Jewishness’ which we observe among the Sephardi immigrants from Spain and Portugal is explained by the antecedents of the Sephardim in Dar-al-Islam. The representatives of the Jewish Dispersion in Persia and in the provinces of the Roman Empire which ultimately fell to the Arabs found themselves in a comparatively happy position. Their status under the ‘Abbasid Caliphate was certainly not less favourable than that of Jews in those Western countries where Jews have been emancipated to-day. The historic calamity of the Sephardim was the gradual transfer of the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors to the Western Christians which was completed at the end of the fifteenth century. They were presented by their Christian conquerors with a choice between the three alternatives of annihilation, expulsion or conversion. Let us glance at the latter state of those Peninsular Sephardim who saved their lives in one of the two alternative ways and whose posterity is therefore alive to-day. Those who preferred to go into exile found asylum among the enemies of Catholic Spain and Portugal: in Holland, in Turkey or in Tuscany. 1 Those who went to Turkey were encouraged by their ‘Osmanli protectors to settle in Constantinople, Salonica and the lesser urban centres of Rumili in order to fill a vacuum left by the eviction or ruin of the previous Greek urban middle class. In these favourable circumstances the Sephardi refugees in the Ottoman Empire were able to specialize and prosper in trade without paying the price of developing an Ashkenazi ethos.
As for the Marranos, the Iberian Jews who, four or five centuries ago, agreed to conform to the Christian religion, their distinctive Jewish characteristics have been attenuated to vanishing-point. There is every reason to believe that in Spain and Portugal to-day there is a strong tincture of the blood of these Jewish converts in Iberian veins, especially in the upper and middle classes. Yet the most acute psychoanalyst would find it difficult, if samples of living upper- and middle-class Spanish and Portuguese were presented to him, to detect those who had Jewish ancestors.
In modern times a party among the emancipated Jews of the West has sought to complete the emancipation of their community by endowing it with a national state of the modern Western kind. The ultimate aim of the Zionists is to liberate the Jewish people from the peculiar psychological complex induced by centuries of penalization; and in this ultimate aim the Zionists are at one with the rival school of emancipated Jewish thought. The Zionists agree with the Assimilationists in wishing to cure the Jews of being a ‘peculiar people’. They part company with them, however, in their estimate of the Assimilationists’ prescription, which they regard as inadequate.
The ideal of the Assimilationists is that the Jew in Holland, England or America should become simply a Dutchman, Englishman or American ‘of Jewish religion’. They argue that there is no reason why a Jewish citizen in any enlightened country should fail to be a completely satisfied and assimilated citizen of that country simply because he happens to go to synagogue on Saturday instead of to church on Sunday. To this the Zionists have two replies. In the first place they point out that, even if the Assimila-tionist prescription were capable of producing the result that its advocates claim for it, it is only applicable in those enlightened countries whose fortunate Jewish citizens are a mere fraction of World Jewry. In the second place they contend that, even under the most favourable conditions, the Jewish problem cannot be solved in this way because to be a Jew is something more than to be a person ‘of Jewish religion’. In the eyes of the Zionists, a Jew who tries to turn himself into a Dutchman, an Englishman or an American is simply mutilating his Jewish personality without having any prospect at all of acquiring the full personality of a Dutchman or whatever the Gentile nationality of his choice may be. If the Jews are to succeed in becoming ‘like all the other nations’ the process of assimilation, so the Zionists contend, must be carried out on a national and not on an individual basis. Instead of individual Jews making the vain attempt to assimilate themselves to individual Englishmen or Dutchmen, the Jewish people must assimilate itself to the English people or the Dutch by acquiring— or reacquiring—a national home where the Jew, like the Englishman in England, will be master in his own house.
Though the Zionist movement as a practical undertaking is only half a century old, its social philosophy has already been justified by results. In the Jewish agricultural settlements in Palestine the children of the ghetto have been transformed out of all recognition into a pioneering peasantry which displays many of the characteristics of the Gentile colonial type. The tragic misfortune of the experiment is its failure to conciliate the pre-existent Arab population of the country.
It remains to record the existence of some little-known groups of Jews who have escaped penalization throughout their history by withdrawal into remote ‘fastnesses’ where they display all the characteristics of sturdy peasants or even of wild highlanders. Such are the Jews of the Yaman in the south-west corner of Arabia, the Falasha in Abyssinia, the Jewish highlanders of the Caucasus and the Turkish-speaking Jewish Krimchaks of the Crimea.