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No. 31. | Vienna, 5 August 1898. | Second Year.

On the Dreyfus Affair. *)

By Max Aram.

It is peculiar to nascent, germinating political and social movements that in them the theoretical consciousness has for the most part already unfolded out of every bud-leaf, while the germs of actual fulfilment still lie deeply veiled, indeed are perhaps not yet present at all. Thus it may give the impression of sectarianism when at their meetings the discussions drag on into the night, since no real, limited, practical matters are dispatched, but possibilities of the future are set up, as it were subtly and paradoxically; it may then appear — as is really the case with the vegetarians, nature-cure fanatics, anti-vaccinationists and the like — as though people of one mind merely liked to come together in order to hear from one another what they had themselves thought, and to express themselves upon it. Such are the beginnings of almost all political and social endeavours, and Social Democracy exhibited them in the sixties (in the Lassallean and later in the Leipzig period), indeed still in the early seventies (when the Lassalleans and the Marxists fought one another most bitterly), in a downright typical purity.

But with the following observations the author would furnish no contribution to discussions of that kind. He is no politician and is without any political ambition whatever, and if he nevertheless takes the word in a matter that is after all political, he thinks that perhaps here too a childlike mind might see in simplicity what no understanding of the understanding perceives.

Perhaps, too, only such a mind can have the ingenuousness to utter what must seem to most quite monstrous, and what may remind others precisely of the paradoxes of those speakers in discussion, but what here is surely really grown together with the most fundamental, that is, the most original, the most incipient core of the whole movement?

*) This article contains a quite peculiar conception of the Dreyfus case, with which we do not agree in a number of points. But what the author puts forward may well be listened to, and since he at the same time expresses the principles of Zionism in a very pure and delicate manner, we gladly give him the word. The Editors.

It advances — to anticipate the matter at once — the assertion that Zionism must by no means meddle in the Dreyfus affair, if it does not wish to fall into an insoluble contradiction with its innermost being and meaning.

In the Zionist movement, in its fundamental, incipient core, it is surely a question of those Jews who had never been able or willing to assimilate, not of those who, after a convulsive striving after assimilation, have been thrust back offended and humiliated. The former may by no means be more heroic and prouder — they scarcely remained unassimilated out of a theory or out of Zionist conviction, but in consequence of definite economic and political circumstances — yet inasmuch as they had once and for all remained in the unadulterated, original condition of a people, they were bound to form the firm core and the starting-point of all Zionist endeavours. For them Zionism must even provide what Social Democracy does for its workers, in that it thinks above all of preserving their physical and spiritual strength unimpaired for the ultimate ideal ends: in the social-political respect it must be provident for them, which, however, can by no means signify that it should help workers, say, to commercial gain and prosperity, but that it should care for them in the hygienic respect, with regard to the length of the working day, the protection of labour and the like. These original masses of the people are, moreover, the only ones one can picture transplanted into the rural districts of Palestine, while the Jews who have laboured after assimilation could only attach themselves to them. These Slavonic Jews have long been supported philanthropically by their western “co-religionists”; but it may come to pass that they will one day repay it to them with interest and compound interest. Yet not upon physical and social grounds alone would the Jews who have laboured after assimilation be incapable of realising the ideals of Zionism in any serious sense; in their hybrid and constrained position within the European nations they have also, in an unhappy manner, come into a certain opposition to Jewry itself: Jewish self-irony is generally known and touches almost all non-Jews, and many Jews too, most painfully; indeed there is even a Jewish