Die Welt.

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No. 2.

Vienna, 14 January 1898.

Second Year.

The New Ghetto.

On 5 January the four-act play "The New Ghetto" by Theodor Herzl was performed for the first time at the Carl-Theater and was favourably received by the public. We refrain from entering more closely upon this piece, since we shall lay it before our readers in full. The publication, already announced in the introductory prospectus of "Die Welt," will begin in one of the coming numbers. The Editors.

The Buffer State.

By Leo Rafaels.

Even with the utmost peaceableness it is not possible to avoid the martial image. Far more even than the victorious advance of the Zionist idea, the retreat of its opponents recalls combat and war. For a long time now the Jewish question, in the widest, world-historical sense of the word, has been an ideal battlefield, upon which a convinced and purposeful minority stands opposed to a majority far superior in numbers but devoid of counsel and of leaders. In the course of the last two years the opponents of the Jewish national and state idea have set up dozens of objections, like entrenchments and fortresses, against the advance of the Zionist movement, and every day some new one is added to the old objections. But whoever attentively follows the emergence and growth of these means of defence cannot close himself to a remarkable observation. The objections to the Zionist idea never appear all at once; the old are dropped as often as a new one appears, and the new one is with the greatest speed sacrificed to a newer, and this in turn most readily to a newest of all. Thus at first it was said that Zionism was the fantasy of idle minds, a supposed rescue where no rescue at all was needed; soon afterwards the distress in the East of Europe was admitted, but an evil limited in time and space was still no reason to jeopardize frivolously, through the Zionist utopia, the moral and material achievements of the western Jews." The next objection no longer excluded the West from the Jewish misery, and thus no longer denied the necessity of a rescue attempt embracing the whole, but declared such an attempt to be impracticable — for a hundred internal reasons. On this occasion we heard of a thousand defects of our people, among others of such as had, remarkably, until now remained hidden even from the falcon-eyes of our enemies: "It does not even occur to the Jews to go to Zion!" Thus roughly were the hundred reasons summed up into a brief conclusion. And again, after some time, the impracticability of the Zionist attempt on internal grounds was forgotten, and the justification of the Jewish-state idea was contested with considerations that left nature and situation out of account and concerned themselves only with the aim pursued. It was inconceivable, they said, to obtain the promised land for the Jews. And again a hundred proofs were furnished for this. It is inconceivable, it was said immediately afterwards, to found a state of seven million people upon the meagre, barren soil of a tiny little country.

This brief enumeration is far from exhausting the list of objections to Zionism. But it is exhaustive enough to prove the very gratifying fact that the opponents of the Zionist idea today abandon the position they erected yesterday, in order to create a new one that they will forsake tomorrow. Every new objection means a defeat of the planless majority and a concession to our idea; every new objection is a new milestone on the triumphal march of a redeeming idea. The fecundity of our opponents in the invention of ever new objections bears a desperate resemblance to the overabundant profusion of accusations that heathens and Christians have for more than two thousand years brought against us Jews, but never all at once, never at the same time. This was always to me an inner reassurance and an inestimable comfort. The enmity against us Jews has required a new pretext every fifty years in order to keep itself theoretically alive, and indeed each new pretext has strangled its predecessor.

The newest objection, raised on the Jewish side against Palestine as the homeland of the whole people, pushes aside all earlier misgivings as petty and irrelevant and, with swaggering, diplomatic self-importance, sets itself in the way of Zionism. "A Jewish state in Palestine, as a buffer state between the two hostile powers of the present and the future, between England and Russia, is from the outset consecrated to destruction."

This new dogma sounds so statesmanlike, so far-seeing, that it is worth while to reply to it in a few words before it is done to death by the next pronouncement. The idea that Syria and Palestine will one day form the wedge between an immense Asiatic and a no less great African power is the soothsaying of a prophet who proclaims the future out of the past. Palestine was a buffer state and