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No. 26. Vienna, 1 July 1898. Second Year.

The Reichstag Elections in Germany.

By Max Aram.

"There went a man in Syrian land."

The manifold elections in the lands of culture do not, it is true, afford that reliable picture of the soul of a people which the admirers of the parliamentary system assert, inasmuch as they do not remotely take the place of the living view of a land and its people; but they force many a valuable observation upon the thoughtful onlooker. Upon the Jew in particular there must, in this connection, press itself into consciousness with wonderful distinctness the whole strange condition of his people, unique within the European world of culture. Then it must become clear to him how he resembles the man in the Syrian land who hung upon a bramble bush in the shaft of the well and was threatened above him by a fearful camel's head and beneath him by the gaping jaws of a hideous monster, while a pair of mice gnawed at the roots of the bramble bush.

By the elections the Jew is startled out of the private, rootlessly individual life into which he has for the most part spun himself. If the prophet will not come to the mountain, here the mountain does indeed come to the prophet. And from the duties of the citizen, from the whole political machinery, he cannot withdraw himself, unless his position is to become wholly untenable. No sooner does he say that the struggles of the parties are a matter of indifference to him and that he will abstain from the poll, than the answer falls to him in an insinuating tone: "That I well believe, that the election, or the fate of the country at large, can be indifferent to you." In such wise the gulf and the coldness between the Jews and the host peoples could only grow ever greater; nay, a general and voluntary renunciation of the exercise of so important a civic right must depress even their purely human standing among their host peoples. And on the other hand: as soon as the Jew attaches himself with energy to a party, the opposing party will not fail to recall his Judaism to him in an unfriendly fashion. Even in Sweden, where the number of Jews is a minimal one and where assimilation has accordingly advanced in real earnest very far, a Jewish advocate cannot be put forward as candidate of the liberal party for the Reichsrath without the Judaism of the aspirant being held up in conservative election addresses and newspapers as something ill-bred and odious, and without even liberal wholesale merchants declaring themselves openly against his candidature, because they hold that in national and especially in military questions a Jew cannot, after all, sufficiently look to the interest of the country. In Germany, accordingly, the number of — non-social-democratic — Jewish candidates for the Reichstag grows ever smaller. When some time ago the "Freisinnige Zeitung" declared in a press polemic that so few Jews stood upon the liberal list of candidates only because it was pre-eminently the Jewish voters in the several constituencies who were prejudiced against such candidates, that may well accord with the facts; but there is this in addition, that the nomination of a Jewish candidate, depresses the prospects of the party concerned. If a Jewish candidate is put up in the district, then the word before and within every polling place is: "You may vote for whom you will, but you will surely not vote for a Jew"; wherefore natures of finer feeling shrink from exposing themselves to all these manifold affronts. An old parliamentarian like Ludwig Bamberger withdraws voluntarily from every candidature, although he would have had no defeat to fear, since his constituency of Alzey-Bingen was the only one which the liberal party held without effort at the first ballot in the whole German Empire. To be sure — let it be said once more — this indolence is comprehensible. The last Jewish candidate of the Liberals, a Dr. Bernstein in the district of Teltow-Beeskow-Storkow-Charlottenburg lying before the gates of Berlin, who is even a baptised Jew, came in this formerly liberal district, with a disproportionately small number of votes, behind the social-democratic and the conservative-antisemitic candidates, and even the Social Democrats brought forward his descent again and again with deliberate purpose.

After the election was accomplished the torment grew still greater for the Jews, who had to atone for all the manifold jobbery of the preparations for the second ballots; and wherever a party interest was but scratched, an unreasoning, blind hatred of the Jews became manifest. When the "Berliner Tageblatt" for an alliance of all the bourgeois parties against