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No. 14. Vienna, 7 April 1898. 2nd Year.

Springtime of the Peoples.

By Dr. Adolf Friedemann (Berlin).

Spring is coming all around. The earth grows green anew, the violets spring up in the meadows, in the fields the larks mount upward, and the forest puts on its summer dress. In men too a new gladness sprouts, and even Faust, the restless and the peaceless, feels something of the old, long-forgotten peace of childhood enter into his soul at the sound of the Easter bells. For Easter is indeed the festival of the resurrection of man as of nature, the festival at which despair shall be softened, inconsolable mourning shall be transfigured into gentle sadness, and a new hope of life shall enter into broken hearts.

Thus does the Christian world keep the feast of Easter. But into the general merriment there sound dull, tormented noises, groans of terror and cries of despair.

Now in the north, now in the south, in Tisza-Eszlar and Corfu or Xanten on the Rhine, the pariahs of European society tremble before the hordes of the mob, to whom the blood-superstition furnishes the pretext for murder and plunder. Thus stands culture at the end of the 19th century.

And we remember the past. How often, in earlier centuries, when the Easter bells sang of peace and joy, did they ring in our forefathers' ears like the alarm-bells that called men to the "slaughter of the Jews," to nameless atrocities. When all the world was abroad amid the green in the gladness of spring, then the ghetto was shut up, and the impudent Jews who made bold to take their pleasure in God's nature as well were beaten to death; for "Where a green blade grows, there no Jew," was the word throughout the land. Or the elders of the congregation were fetched out of the ghetto and made, as in Rome, to run races before the mob upon the Corso — but only in the third place: first came the noble horses, then the dogs, and last the Jews, as the lowest of living creatures.

What bloody tears have the Easter bells brought upon us, how many thousands of honourable and peaceable citizens have they untimely tolled to the grave. And these were our fathers!

And yet these men, threatened with continual peril of death by malice and brutality, kept their Passover too, and kept it with a fervour such as the Christians about them did not show; for they were celebrating their one hope — a festival of resurrection also, the festival of redemption out of bondage, the festival of national rebirth.

To us also, their descendants, the festival is holy, because the hopes have remained holy to us which our fathers bound up with it — the hope that one day, upon a soil of our own, we may again be permitted to be men.

The German popular legend makes Faust, the symbol of seeking, striving man, begin a new life upon Easter Day. Happiness he does not look to find, for that is unattainable by man; contentment, however, he does. He finds it not in the wild enjoyment of life, not in the intoxication of love, not in the giddiness of power, and not in unhindered commerce with the supersensible world. Faust finds peace with himself in creating for others, in bringing the land under cultivation and peopling it with men who are glad of life and industrious. He would fain "stand with a free people upon free ground"; then has he attained his goal.

We Jews too should learn a little from the great Goethe how contentment is won — we who have likewise housed so long in mustiness among our forefathers' household gear; we should step forth among the rest of mankind, should demand our portion of life in the bright light of spring, and a little corner of the world, which indeed still offers a right fruitful field for the endeavours of civilisation.

When the Jewish people shall one day celebrate its resurrection in the land of the fathers, then will the Passover be a pure festival of joy, a festival at which none trembles and quails, not even the stranger. For on that day we shall remember that we ourselves were once strangers, that we trembled and suffered and redeemed ourselves.

Perhaps few of those who labour to-day at the great work will behold its end. Perhaps most of us must be content, like Faust, to see the fulfilment of the dream of our life only in foreboding. But in the striving after its accomplishment they will find contentment, the contentment of a life that has been dedicated to a great idea.

Happy would our fathers have been had they seen the beginning; happy are we, who can see it. The words of the Hagada, which men used to speak with longing and in believing confidence on the Seder evening, the words in which for two thousand years the hope of resurrection of the Jewish nation clothed itself, have awakened to a new meaning. And if a gloomy mood would steal upon us as we contemplate the past and the present, let us remember the words: