Die Welt

Appears every Friday.

Editorial Office and Administration: Vienna IX., Türkenstraße 9. Telephone No. 8805. Communications are to be addressed not to individual persons but to the Editorial Office or the Administration: Vienna, IX., Türkenstraße 9. Unfranked 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. 24. | Vienna, 17 June 1898. | 2nd Year.

☞ As a considerable number of subscriptions expire at the end of this month, those concerned are reminded to effect the renewal in good time, so that no interruption may occur in the delivery of the paper.

The Administration.

Culture-Elements in Asia Minor.

By O. Erter.

The German Emperor's journey to Palestine is even now rising into an event of the greatest style, although it will not take place for another four months. We foretold it; and now one need only cast a glance into French and Russian papers in order to find again, in another light of course — the political thoughts to which we gave expression at the very first announcement of Wilhelm II.'s journey. We should accordingly have no need to take notice of the French and Russian effusions, did they not with their conclusions touch upon a point which we regard simply as the punctum saliens of the theme. For in Paris as in St. Petersburg the question is asked with one accord: What does Wilhelm II. seek in Palestine? Does he mean to claim for Germany the right of protection over the Christians of the Orient, which from time immemorial has been exercised by France? Does he mean to found in Asia Minor a basis for German influence, from which he might not only render illusory the old Syrian sphere of French influence, but might also drive a German wedge into the entire Asiatic field of rivalry between the Russians and the English? Against such an eventuality men rear up in France, as a matter of course; but in doing so they do not conceal a feeling of impotence, because they do not know with certainty how the casus is thought of upon the Neva. Upon the Neva, again, the attitude is still tentative and expectant, for there is no interest there that the protectorate over the Christians of the Orient should be preserved to the French; for Russia there exists only the question whether in Germany she is to see a dangerous participant in the final decisions upon the future destiny of the Ottoman Empire.

If, then, one detaches from all that is incidental the kernel of the anxieties which Wilhelm II.'s impending journey to Palestine causes in Paris and in St. Petersburg, one obtains the following picture: Germany is to-day the most influential power in Constantinople, because it is the power most friendly to Turkey; its concessionaires and engineers are building, with German money and with German labour, the Anatolian railways, whose prospective terminus will come to lie upon the shore of the Persian Gulf. This material position of power upon the road between the Mediterranean and India is now, through Wilhelm II.'s journey to Palestine, to receive a kind of moral sanction; and thus there suddenly looms up the giant shadow of a future German arbitrium precisely there where France can least endure it, and where it may one day become very inconvenient to the Russians. To set this picture in the right light there is a very eloquent historical precedent. In June 1859 the Grand Duke Constantine of Russia, the son of the Czar Nicholas I. and brother of the Czar Alexander II., undertook a journey to Jerusalem; it was a triumphal progress. The Turkish officials, the consuls, the secular and the monastic clergy of all the schismatic sects gave the Grand Duke escort. Since then Russia, which until that time had not possessed a single building in Jerusalem, has there several large churches, an episcopal palace, a consulate-general and sundry considerable hospices. “A little Kremlin dominates the city of David,” a Russian panegyrist could say as early as the year 1880. What consequences, now, will Wilhelm II.'s journey to Palestine have? For the reception of the Emperor the friendly Sultan is making magnificent preparations; a commission is already at work, at whose head — a Jew stands, Bechai Aschkenasi Effendi, Sub-Prefect of Constantinople and member of the Jewish communal board there.

This last circumstance appears to us especially characteristic. Not because it entirely corresponds to the conditions of population in Jerusalem — there live 55,000 Jews in Jerusalem beside 7600 Turks, 2470 Catholics and 5000 schismatics, Greeks, Armenians, Copts, Ethiopians and Syrians — but because the appointment of the Jew Aschkenasi Effendi as commissary of reception clearly illustrates the relation of the state of culture of the Palestinian population. The Jews in Jerusalem, whose number in the last century did not