Die Welt.

Appears every Friday.

Editorial Office and Administration: Vienna, IX., Türkenstraße 9. Telephone No. 8805.

Correspondence is to be addressed not to individual persons, but to the Editorial Office or Administration: Vienna, IX., Türkenstraße 9. Unstamped letters are not accepted, and manuscripts are not returned.

Advertising rates: the four-column petit line, 10 kr. Single numbers 15 kr.

Subscription rates: Austria-Hungary — half-yearly 3 fl. = 6 Kr., yearly 6 fl. = 12 Kr.; for abroad — Germany yearly 13 Mk. 70 Pf., half-yearly 6 Mk. 85 Pf.; England yearly 14 Shg., half-yearly 7 Shg.; Russia yearly 7 R., half-yearly 3 R. 50 Kop.; Switzerland, France, Italy, Turkey, Roumania, Bulgaria, Servia, Greece, Egypt yearly 17 Frcs., half-yearly 8 Frcs. 50 Cts.; America yearly 3 Doll. 40.

No. 4. — Vienna, 28 January 1898. — 2nd Year.

The Mendl Case.

By Leo Rafaels.

It is an intricate, almost tragicomic story. In a great English seaport, at a by-election, two candidates are contending for the parliamentary seat. The one is put up by the Conservatives, and he goes into the electoral fray with the watchword of the unity of the Empire. Great Britain must not be torn asunder by the separatist cravings of the Irish; it is the duty of every thinking and patriotic Englishman to set himself most energetically against the Irish wishes. In other words: it is the duty of the inhabitants of Plymouth to help the Conservative aspirant into Parliament. The second candidate is enthusiastic for the Liberal programme, and Gladstone's belief that a separate Irish parliament is a state necessity is his own as well; the violation of the Celtic-Catholic sister isle on the part of Germanic-Protestant England is a disgrace that can be expiated only by a penitent, if belated, turning-back. These watchwords have, since Gladstone's going over into the camp of the Home Rule party, been repeated to the point of surfeit at every election great and small; they have scarcely any interest even for English voters, and for us certainly none whatever. But in Plymouth something peculiar has occurred. The Liberal candidate who takes up the cause of the oppressed Irish is named Mendl. The name is no deception. He himself was born in England in the year 1866, is naturalised in England, and has enjoyed an excellent, thoroughly English education; but his father comes from Roumania and neglected, on settling in England, to purchase himself a Norman, Celtic, or Anglo-Saxon name — say Meynell or McDonnell or Mendhill. This nearly cost his son the seat for Plymouth, for his opponent struck the necessary political capital out of the name Mendl, and the mocking cry of "German Jew" rang in the Liberal candidate's ears for weeks. "German Jew" is far worse than Hepp, hepp!, if only because the English Jew too feels it as an insult, just as, among us, the Polish Jew is made to taste all the superiority of his Moravian or Bohemian fellow-tribesman. "German Jew" is an insult of the most refined malice; the inherited hatred that found vent in the figure of Shylock, and the daily growing, jealous fear of Germany, are effectively combined in the reproach. It is indeed astonishing that the Jew Mendl managed to beat his opponent Guest by some hundred votes.

Yet this antisemitic incident is of not the slightest interest to us — first, because such things do not surprise us even in England; second, because it would be a misreading of English conditions to draw any conclusions about the mood of the population from a party manoeuvre. The Plymouth voters who cried "German Jew" are probably antisemites; but the cry alone cannot prove it. What interests us in the Mendl case is the effect that the Hepp! hepp! of Plymouth has had upon the Anglo-Saxon citizens of the Jewish confession. As was to be foreseen, the dreadful event struck the foremost Anglo-Saxon of the community most deeply. One can picture how the family of the Chief-Rabbi Dr. Adler was frightened by the malicious term of abuse of the Plymouth voters. "German Jew!" A thoroughbred Englishman like Mendl, who was born in England, sat on the school-bench beside the sons of counts and dukes, and won his academic degree at one of the venerable, primordially English universities — a "German Jew!" Good God! why, tomorrow it might happen to himself, the supreme Anglo-Saxon of the Jewish faith. Yes, how was that even possible? What seduced the Anglo-Saxon fellow-citizens of the Christian confession overnight into so unheard-of a denial of equality and liberty? Ah yes, Mendl's ill-starred candidature! What business has a Jew standing for election at all and bringing his name before the public! And such a name at that! And what has a Jew to do with the Irish; what concern is it of an Anglo-Saxon of the Jewish faith how the Celts on the green isle fare? So that is it: first, a Jew is to sit nicely and quietly behind the invisible ghetto walls; he has nothing whatever to seek out there in the political tumult of battle; second, one should not be called Mendl if one is already so clever as to come into the world in England; third, as a born Englishman of the Jewish faith one is to have no Celtic sympathies.

To these logical conclusions one must have come in the family of the Chief-Rabbi of England, for Marcus Adler, the brother of the supreme shepherd of souls, sat down and wrote an epistle to the Jewish voters of Plymouth, in which he warns his co-religionists against giving their votes to the friend of the Irish Home Rule party, since this would involve a danger to Jewry as a whole. It is the duty of the Jews, he says, to vote conservatively, in the sense of the population of sound Anglo-Saxon sentiment.

The letter is, even if the Chief-Rabbi did not prompt it, a valuable document. When to an English Jew of the type of the Chief-Rabbi or his