Supplement to No. 35 of "Die Welt".

Address of Dr. Max Mandelstamm.

Highly honoured Assembly!

In April of the current year I was entrusted by the delegates of the preliminary conference which sat in Vienna with the honourable commission of instituting an enquiry into the various currents within the Zionist camp and within the camp of the Chowewe-Zion societies, the "Friends of Zion"; of drawing the sum total from the divergent views; and, if possible, of indicating in general outline the path along which we might proceed in common, so that we may come nearer to the great goal we have set ourselves.

There have reached me 7 reports, from Zionists as well as from Friends of Zion: one from France, 2 from Germany, 2 from Austria and 2 from Russia. I have striven, to the best of my knowledge and conscience, to examine the various tendencies and, where possible, to detect differences of principle; and I must declare, to my great satisfaction, that within the Zionist camp itself I could perceive no differences of opinion in any way worth mentioning, so that my labour was thereby considerably lightened, and that, before I lay our programme before this highly honoured assembly, I shall have to deal only with those tendencies absolutely hostile to us — while from our own standpoint I can find not the slightest occasion to regard the Chowewe-Zion societies, the so-called practical Zionists, as our opponents.

I must beg the indulgence of this highly honoured assembly if, as a physician grown grey in practice and therefore confined within a physician's narrow horizon, I conceive the problem I am to solve from the medical standpoint. I regard the Jewish people, then, as an organism diseased through and through, for whose healing we have here come together in so exceedingly numerous a consultation. The pathology of this sick body has been set forth with the greatest precision in the acute and lucid expositions of another physician, Dr. Max Nordau, last year as well as this. It is plainly a case of a wasting sickness, a chronic marasmus, into which the great body of the Jewish people has fallen. From want of light, of fresh air — which is maliciously poisoned for it — and of good nourishment. What appears to be present here is not so much an organic as rather a functional disorder, which by methodical, energetic, purposeful treatment might yet perhaps be remedied. For this speaks the circumstance that the Jewish people, in spite of a two-thousand-year Diaspora, has not perished, and lives still.

And so it will be my task, first, to demonstrate that the methods of cure hitherto applied have been no rational ones, but rather recall the cures of the empirics of the good old time, who, lacking a correct diagnosis, were wont to steer against single symptoms and petty symptoms instead of grasping the evil at its root. I mean the cures of assimilation and baptism. And secondly it will be my task to furnish the proof that the method of cure which we Zionists propose has this good in its favour, that it rests upon a rational basis, upon experiment and upon two thousand years of observation, and therefore, if energetically and consistently carried through, must and will lead to the recovery of our people. The status praesens, the true state of the case, is now as follows: of the nine to ten millions of Jews scattered over the wide round of the earth, some seven millions dwell in Russia, Roumania, Austria. Though separated one from another by frontier posts, they nevertheless form within this territory a mass of population which bears in itself all the attributes, all the marks of a single nation. Above all they have a common religion, to which the great majority cling with ancient tenacity and fidelity; they nearly all speak a common tongue of daily intercourse — the Jargon — a kind of Semitic Volapük, a dialect which renders with epigrammatic brevity the spirit and the character of this people in the aptest manner; and then they have besides a common literary language, the ancient Hebrew, which hundreds of thousands read and write, in which all without exception pray, and which has an enormous literature to show. They live, finally, all of them in a common Golus, or, to speak medically, they are one and all firmly cemented together by a uniform connective substance — by persecutions and sufferings of every kind. Through centuries they have lived through a common past — in the Ghetto; they have a common present — in the Ghetto; and a common future awaits them — a total bodily, moral and spiritual degeneration, unless some change be somehow wrought... It would therefore be quite preposterous to maintain of these Jews of the East that they form merely a "community of co-religionists" and not rather a nation.

Whoever has lived among them for any length of time will surely have to admit that the national consciousness of these Jews of the East, though latent, though bound in lethargy, is nevertheless a very intense one, and that it needed but one warm ray of sunshine to blaze up in bright flames.

Over against this overwhelming majority there stands a minority of West European Jews, chiefly in Germany, then in France, England, Holland, Italy, of whom, upon superficial view, one can scarcely see that they should have anything in common with their eastern kinsmen beyond the ordinances of religious belief. This minority is highly developed in culture, vies with its Aryan neighbours in every field of art and science, of commerce and industry, speaks and writes the language of the land in the greatest perfection, has wholly taken over the manners and customs of its surroundings and full often parades them with particular ostentation... To this is added the circumstance that this minority is de jure possessed of all the rights which constitutional states accord to their citizens, so that the stomach-