THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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killing, until after long centuries the air outside the ghetto seemed a little less dangerous. The Jew was now simply beaten, despised, but no longer burnt to death. This
patronage further increased, in the course of bourgeois liberation, the yellow patch was removed from the caftan, the latter also disappeared, and around 1800 the
Jewish fellow citizen emerged in the West. He took up his new position trustingly, and since doings and dealings prevailed in the world outside anyway, and also the
more chivalrous or official professions continued to remain closed to him, the start was for the most part commercial. He entered existing capitalist society, no longer, as
in the Spanish heyday, a feudal and ecclesiastically learned society. This causes distinctions; they are not simply a burden to those Jews who so smartly went into
general business life, the station of the cross is also important at which the long life of suffering finally stops. This station was the capitalist one, for the same reason that it
was the provisionally liberating one: free competition requires the legal equality of its partners. Amongst these partners the best Jewish element did not always come to
light, any more than the best German or French element. The stock market does not look good from all angles, and it was the columns of the liberal press from which
the breath of the age blew most fiercely. The Jewish spirit came to be one which gabbled everything to pieces, which produced solely for the market, and distinguished
itself in this respect. Only in the beginning, when liberation arrived, this sort of thing did not yet become apparent. The fall of the walls which had surrounded so much
oppression and of course also so much seriousness and devout strictness seemed even biblical. It was a first red dawn, that of conformity; behind it nothing but
democratic happiness was suspected, new life after long paralysis. It was not just the Jews however, but also the Gentiles who did not, as we know, wholly achieve
what was hoped for in this liberation. The equality of Jews with others, if it ever existed, was a temporary exception, it never became a rule. In the end that which
seemed unthinkable only to the fools who believed in an empty rolling progress returned, returned in an intensified form: extermination. The liberal citizen stood by, arms
at the ready, in so far as he was not himself aiming his rifle at Jews. There seemed or seems nothing left for it but to separate for good from fellow citizens who
endangered their lives, a homeland* gleams before them.
* Bloch is not using his own concept ‘Heimat’ here for ‘homeland’. We translate it thus in this section in view of the language of the Balfour declaration discussed
below.