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. Unstamped letters are not accepted, and manuscripts are not returned. — Advertising rates: the four-times-divided 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. 38. — Vienna, 23 September 1898. — Second Year.

The Patron Saint.

By Max Aram.

In the feuilleton of a great and respected liberal Berlin newspaper there lately appeared an essay, "The Patron Saint," which in more than one respect may be of considerable interest for a Zionist way of regarding things. It gives itself out as a "festal prologue" to the coronation festivities which are at present taking place in Holland with processions, banquets, festal prologues and military reviews; but in linking itself to a Rembrandt exhibition arranged upon this occasion, for which several hundred pictures and more than two hundred drawings of the master have been brought together, the feuilletonist arrives, by way of the Jodenbreetstraße in which Rembrandt dwelt, at the eternally new theme of the "Jewish question." In one of the narrow side lanes of the "Jewish quarter," of which the Judenbreitstraße is still the main street, he was present at a scene of quarrelling between two neighbour women who, corpulent, without corsets, asthmatic, with black hair hanging in tangled strands about their heads, threatened one another with their arms, until a gentleman who is no inhabitant of this quarter intervened, spoke soothingly to all sides, and so parted the disputing women. "This little duet of quarrelling has in and for itself nothing particular about it," he now continues reflectively, "and yet something in it struck me. A crowd of people stood by who did not belong to the actual inhabitants of these Jewish streets: boatmen from the neighbouring canals, chance passers-by. Let one imagine the same scene elsewhere—it is clear that for the onlookers these two quarrelling women would not be merely two quarrelling women like any others—the scene would have a particular after-taste besides—I need not say of what kind. Here nothing of the sort.

"The like may be observed at The Hague, at Rotterdam, in other Dutch towns, where the descendants of those driven out of Spain and Portugal dwell in great numbers. In all these towns there is a strong population of harbour labourers, of boatmen, of small folk. That no hostility whatever exists between the one and the other I will not even emphasise. But in the intercourse among all these elements there prevails nothing constrained, nothing alien; everything goes its natural way. Each has his own peculiarity, and each appears to hold it a matter of course that the other has his peculiarity too.

"All this proves not only that between two different strata of the population, between two parts of the same people sprung from a differently constituted past, a good understanding exists; it proves far more. It proves that the sound Hollander, endowed with a good portion of self-confidence, has preserved that respect for individual liberty which is nothing other than the true mark of a civilised nation and the true feeling of freedom. Here there prevails not that "toleration" which always has a fatal after-taste, but equality of rights. The Hollanders have to this day not become untrue to their great past, and were Master Rembrandt to come back into the world once more for a single day, he would perhaps not feel himself too much a stranger.

"He would stand again in the Jodenbreetstraße, where trade is still busily carried on, and the inhabitants of the quarter would throng about him as he has thronged them about old Simeon in his glorious picture "Simeon in the Temple," painted in his years of youth, which the small but rich gallery at The Hague possesses. His barret pushed jauntily to one side, so that the wind which comes from the canals may cool the broad brow and blow back the locks, he goes on his way. At the next corner he meets the learned Rabbi Menasseh-ben Israel, and they chat of how old Leah has died, but that Joseph is still being sold by his brethren, and that the plague of the Inquisition has once again broken out—in some land of culture or other—I know not in which degree.

And Rembrandt, who outweighs all the saints of the calendar, appears to him in a beautiful manner as the patron saint for the royal festivities. To him he is not the artistic genius alone; he has his place in the first rank of the great teachers of the Reformation. "Let one look at his portraits, above all his self-portraits with the strong brow that seems to burst the canvas asunder—there are no mightier hymns to individual liberty. And everything in him is love of life, love of nature, and everything is humanity and toleration. The warm light upon his pictures embraces with equal love all who there