The Banned Lecture

Now, in this particular sport of suppressing earnest enquirers, it was not much good trying to play on people’s greed. For everyone knew that even if the Jews had wealth, they managed to hide it very successfully, and that they had a nasty way of arranging for protection with people who were too powerful to be bullied, and too good business men to be fooled into killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. So the only motive available was fear, and in those ages where ignorance was fostered with infinite devotion, it was even easier to create a scare about bogies than our propaganda in the recent scrap found it. I was in Venice just before the war, when Halley’s comet was around, and although the Pope himself sprinkled holy water over the comet, and sent it his special benediction and told the people it would do no harm, in his most ex cathedra manner, the Venetians gathered themselves in panic-stricken crowds in the Square of St. Mark and waited, howling, for the end of the world. It was accordingly easy enough to associate the pursuit of knowledge with the most abominable crimes, real or imaginary or both. For this reason, we hear—not as a demonstrated thesis, but as a commonplace of inherited knowledge—that Jews were sorcerers and wizards. In other words, they know something about grammar. We heard that they transformed themselves into cats or bats, and sucked people’s big toes. I have never, personally, investi- gated the question as to whether this form of nutrition is palatable. But, alas ! even in those idyllic Chestertonian times there was a little shrewd common sense knocking about ; the instinct—sometimes very