Minorities and majorities

Abstract

history at the mercy of politics, of further political acts, inspired primarily by religious or secular ideologies, and only secondarily by economic considerations, by rational calculations of profit and loss. True, some minority communities derive from migrations in search of material improvement. The Chinese in south-east Asia, the Indians in former British colonial territories, like foreign workers in today's prosperous West, came to form minority communities because they felt the pull of a better life, rather than the push of a political master. But apart from minorities which took part in the migrations to the open spaces of the New World, and remained to some extent minorities thereafter, the minorities born of economic choice are much less numerous than those created by political necessity. In any case, even the former are more vulnerable to politics than are the majorities among which they live. The arbitrariness of political acts can of course be regulated by codes of conduct deriving from philosophical considerations of common humanity, political principles of equality or religious rules about proper behaviour towards strangers within the gates. Prudential considerations or self-interest, as expressed, for example, in the advice tendered traditionally in Muslim formularies of government that the prosperity of a realm depends on its ability to attract and retain subjects, can lead to benevolent political decisions. But, on the whole, minorities have had more cause to fear than to hope from politics. The Jews have been an archetypal minority for two millennia. They did not leave the land of Israel because it had run short of milk and honey. But having conquered the land in the first place to form a majority within it, they were evicted from it by conquest, and many of them have now returned to it as a result of a decision taken in the course of a war and fully realized as a result of further wars. The experience of the Jews in the lands of the diaspora and the attitudes of the encompassing majorities is the subject of Professor Bernard Lewis's Semites and Anti-Semites.' This elegant and scholarly book can be read as a number of essays on conflict and prejudice, as its sub-title has it. Prejudice, which Professor Lewis nails in his opening reference to Prime Minister Raymond Barre's telltale remark about the bombers of a Paris synagogue in 1980 ('They aimed at the Jews, and they hit innocent Frenchmen')