that Belloc held nuanced opinions alien to the discriminatory anti-Semites of the time. As well, rabbi David Dalin has commented positively on Belloc's study of how antisemitism comes in cycles, viewing Belloc's ideas as being perceptive. Critics taking a more negative view of Belloc's attitudes about Jews and Judaism have cited incidents such as when Belloc made the following controversial statements in a conversation with Hugh Kingsmill and Hesketh Pearson: Belloc: It was the Dreyfus case that opened my eyes to the Jew question. I'm not an anti-Semite. I love 'em, poor dears. Get on very well with them. My best secretary was a Jewess. Poor darlings – it must be terrible to be born with the knowledge that you belong to the enemies of the human race. Kingsmill: Why do you say the Jews are the enemies of the human race? Belloc: The Crucifixion. Author Robert Speaight, however, has cited a private letter by Belloc to one of his Jewish-American friends in the 1920s in which Belloc pilloried conspiracy theorist Nesta Helen Webster for her accusations against "the Jews". Webster had rejected Christianity, studied Eastern religions, accepted the Hindu concept of the equality of all religions and was fascinated by theories of reincarnation and ancestral memory while also making claims about a so-called Illuminati. Belloc expressed his views on Webster's antisemitism very clearly: "In my opinion it is a lunatic book. She is one of those people who have got one cause on the brain. It is the good old 'Jewish revolutionary' bogey. But there is a type of unstable mind which cannot rest without morbid imaginings, and the conception of a single cause simplifies thought. With this good woman it is the Jews, with some people it is the Jesuits, with others Freemasons and so on. The world is more complex than that." In the later years of his life, Belloc wrote publicly against the Nazi German regime ruled by Adolf Hitler. He viewed the state as "odious" and particularly condemned Nazi antisemitism. In 1940s The Catholic and the War, Belloc asserted, "The Third Reich has treated its Jewish subjects with a contempt for justice which even if there had been no other action of the kind in other departments would be a sufficient warranty for determining its elimination from Europe". Gilbert Chesterton's views in detail Points often made about Chesterton's attitude to Jews relate to well-known writings,