to say was that so very few Jews seem to me an insufficient fuel to fire the anti-Semites. How does their opinion flourish?" 'In this way,' he answered. 'The Jews, you see, ridicule our young men for holding such superstitions as the Catholic.'... I then rose from my meal, saluted him, and went musing up the valley road, pondering upon what it could be that the Jews sacrificed in this remote borough, but I could not for the life of me imagine what it was, though I have had a great many Jews among my friends." Belloc's later book The Jews, which came out in February 1922, sets out his specific views in detail with his own words. The work has variously been interpreted over the years, with some critics finding it deeply flawed though with good intentions, tinged with antisemitism, while others viewing it as rather fair for its day. Belloc identified a cycle of persecution faced by Jewish families in the various places in which they lived, a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy caused by evolving social views, and he coined the phrase "the tragic cycle of anti-Semitism". The Jews has been construed both as supporting the case that Belloc had no real prejudices against Jews and as a purported statement by Belloc of the historical view that Jewish integration 'inevitably' causes friction, being insensitive at best. Belloc specifically wrote, "It has been a series of cycles invariably following the same steps. The Jew comes to an alien society, at first in small numbers. He thrives. His presence is not resented. He is rather treated as a friend. Whether from mere contrast in type— what I have called "friction"— or from some apparent divergence between his objects and those of his hosts, or through his increasing numbers, he creates (or discovers) a growing animosity. He resents it. He opposes his hosts. They call themselves masters in their own house. The Jew resists their claim. It comes to violence. It is always the same miserable sequence. First a welcome; then a growing, half-conscious ill-ease; next a culmination in acute ill-ease; lastly catastrophe and disaster; insult, persecution, even massacre, the exiles flying from the place of persecution into a new district where the Jew is hardly known, where the problem has never existed or has been forgotten. He meets again with the largest hospitality. There follows here also, after a period