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No. 43. | Vienna, 28 October 1898. | Second Year.

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The Emperor's Days in Jerusalem.

By O. Erter.

Poets are prophets. One might almost take the former Palestine for an oriental Germany, wrote Heinrich Heine, comparing the spiritual qualities of the Jewish people with those of the German. This phrase of the "oriental Germany" acquires in these days a strangely living ring. For sixty years and more it was passed over by the poet's readers like an empty sound; now an Emperor gives it a content of almost fairy-tale wonder.

Yes indeed, an Emperor sojourns as a guest within the walls of Jerusalem, and it is the Emperor of the mighty German Empire, which once seemed to go under only to rise again in splendour. When the poet compared Germany with Palestine he was sad, as only a poet can be. "When I think of Germany in the night, I am robbed of sleep." And the fate of the "former Palestine" lay as heavily upon his soul as that of Germany. Now Germany has become the great power in the world; her Emperor has set forth to unfold an image of that power in the Orient as well, and in Jerusalem he shows himself in the whole splendour of his sovereign fulness and of his impressive personality. In poor Jerusalem, which is rich only in faded glory and in unspeakably sorrowful destinies! Those who sit in the seat of the scornful, or who in the sober emptiness of their souls turn away from every great thing that comes to pass, may deny that it is a wondrous breath of world-history which they are witnessing: to us it is nevertheless as though we heard the word of the prophet Isaiah, "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith God," and there wells up joyfully within us the thought that for the "former Palestine" too the hour might have come again when it shall awaken to become a present Palestine, blossoming as of old in labour and self-created prosperity, in peace, and — in the poet's word — in "spirituality."

We are not thinking to-day of politics with its confusedly tangled threads; we think only of the sorrow of a two-thousand-year-old burning longing, which has remained unsated and yet has not been extinguished. How cruelly and how bloodily men have sought to kill it within us, and it has been in vain! Apostasy or death, the Middle Ages shrilled at us by the firelight of our burning huts, in the sight of our murdered martyrs; apostasy or the loss of all rights was the choice left to us in a time that was growing lighter. And it almost seemed as though it were to be proved true in us that a people also may perish miserably, in spite of an incomparable historical past, if it accepts the fact of its homelessness as an unalterable dispensation. But lately we still paddled, forgetful of our nationhood, in the shallow waters of emancipation and assimilation; like beggars we lived upon the meagre crumbs of toleration, while right and equal esteem were denied us. Yet the sting grew keener as even toleration became ever scantier and scantier, and out of the tribulation there blossomed anew a national feeling and a yearning for a homeland. Jerusalem became for us once more the city of our longing, Palestine the land of our hope.

Who can misunderstand why our thoughts entwine themselves with the German Emperor's journey to Jerusalem, why we discover in it a ray of light which may perhaps illumine our destiny also? We have heard from the Emperor's own lips that friendship and mutual furtherance can subsist "in spite of the difference of confession and of race." What the Emperor proclaims as self-evident for the relation between the German and the Mohammedan peoples has in our case been disputed. And yet we do not doubt for a moment that the Emperor, with the unprejudiced cast of mind that adorns him, excepts no nationality, no confession and no race from the lofty conception of human reciprocity that floats before him. Ill do they understand him who suppose that an exclusive delight in the display of personal splendour, or a one-sided Protestant confessionalism, determined him upon the journey to Jerusalem. He consecrates the Church of the Redeemer; but the Wailing Wall too, with the devout figures who, praying and