The Anti-Semitic agitation has died a natural death: you may curse the
Jews, but you cannot crush them. They make good citizens, and are for ever
trying to gain more political influence, which is surely to their credit,
though it annoys a certain class in Tunis. As intermediaries between the
Arab and the white man they are invaluable, their plasticity allowing them
to ascend or descend in either direction, while their broad and active
tolerance, fruit of bitter experience in the past, has honeycombed the
land with freemasonry and scientific charity and liberalism. So far as I
can see, their dirt does not detract from their astuteness--perhaps it
aids it, by removing one source of mental preoccupation, cleanliness. The
old distinction between Livornese and Tunisian Jews is slowly becoming
effaced.
If there is one class of these immigrants whom the ordinary French employe
hates more than another it is his own countrymen, the Corsicans. They have
the gift of climbing into small but lucrative posts of administration, and
there, once established, they sit fast like limpets, to the dismay of
competing French office-seekers.
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