A short while ago, I attended a formal dinner in Bratislava, capital of the Slovak Republic. Other guests included some of the country's leading politicians, together with representatives from business and the media. Dazed by four glasses of slivovitz, I ignored the speeches and struck up a conversation with the man sat opposite me. Among much else, we discussed Vacláv Havel, President of the neighbouring Czech Republic, whose recent purchase of a house in Prague worth about 30 years of his presidential salary was raising eyebrows all through Central Europe.

After a defamatory joke that fell flat in Slovak, I turned to a defence. "He is rich" said I. "He has all those theatre royalties, and I'm told his family properties returned under the restitution law include a great slice of Prague".

"Yes" my friend agreed. "And, of course, he is Jewish".

I held my tongue at the Non sequitur. About half the British population seems to believe that the Germans invaded in 1940 and were repelled in a horrible massacre. The Czech President's ethnic origin is a similarly entrenched myth in Slovakia.

I used occasionally to challenge it. Though I know and care nothing about his ancestry, Mr Havel lived as a child throughout the German occupation of the Czechlands. More than 90 per cent of Czech Jews were murdered in this time. Most of the rest were deported and used as slave labour. Mere survival indicates a lack of Jewish blood. Membership of a family still rich enough to suffer after the Communist Coup in 1948 should be final proof.

Not enough, though, for many Slovaks. For them, "Havel is a Jew", no matter what miracle kept him out of Theresianstadt. So is his close friend and adviser, Karel Schwarzenburg - never mind that he is a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire and has ancestral castles all over Bohemia. So are all the richest capitalists in the new Slovakia. So are nearly all its writers, musicians and artists.

Now, this is not yet another "Pogrom Brewing in Slovakia" article. I will emphasise - that there is hardly any hostility here to Jews. Almost no one complained when my Prime Minister repeatedly deplored and apologised for the role played by some Slovaks in the Holocaust. The few parties that celebrated that role received together less than one per cent of the vote in the 1992 elections. A few months ago, Michal Kovác, the Slovak President, attended the inaugural meeting of the Association of Slovak Jews and Christians. His speech, filled with praise of toleration and mutual respect, was broadcast to general approval.

Slovaks are not particularly antisemitic. But they are obsessed by Jews to the point where it constrains them as a nation. Draw up a list of those labelled Jews in Slovakia. Some may indeed be Jewish, but the constant denominator will be that they are rich or clever or otherwise successful. In some nations, success would be regarded as reason for quietly assimilating the oddest outsiders. In Slovakia, it alone is a separating factor. There is even some doubt here whether achievement and pure Slovak blood are mutually compatible.

Of course, I have never met a Slovak who explicitly believes in his own inferiority, and that the Jews form an aristocracy of talent to which everyone who succeeds must somehow belong. Nevertheless, these are constraining propositions that derive from centuries of national submergence, when for a Slovak to do well meant to rise not within but above the nation, and his children to be brought up as German or Hungarian. National survival required a bias against most kinds of self-improvement, expressed in a disinclination to believe it possible and the branding of any who disagreed as outsiders - of whom the ultimate representative was the Jew. Few may accept the propositions, but many have absorbed enough from them for their view of the world to have been darkened.

Having none, I will propose no solution. I suspect though that a nation can never prosper in which failure has so ready an excuse and outstanding ability is so generally suspect. It would be stupid to fear for the safety of Vacláv Havel or any other "Jew" that my dining friend might have identified. But I do sometimes fear for Slovakia.