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No. 5 / Vienna, February 2, 1900. / Fourth Year

Jews and Blacks. By Leo Rafaels.

We have scarcely recovered from the terrible news out of the Southern States of North America. Only think: the Negroes of Newport have all at once discovered their anti-Semitic sentiments and declare that they will not rest until every Jew has been driven out of the town. Appalling! The American Jews, or more correctly the "Americans of the Jewish persuasion," who fare so well in the New World that they behold their Palestine in the United States and their Zion in Washington, stand before a new and undreamt-of danger: the Negro question, of which America has been ailing this half century, has overnight developed in the town of Newport into a Jewish question. The bootblacks and water-carriers of Newport — for that is roughly the social station of the Negro in America — feel themselves threatened in the purity of their race or in their higher culture by the inferior Jews, and demand the removal of the noxious alien. Will Washington be able to offer resistance to this legitimate national feeling of the Blacks of Newport?

In truth the matter is serious, comical as it sounds. The fact that a number of insolent or drunken Negroes in an obscure American town smash the windows of Jews is in itself of very slight significance; but for one who knows the history of the persecutions of the Jews, the Negro uproar of Newport is a disquieting phenomenon, a sign of the times which forebodes foul weather for the Jews of America. The Jews of Newport have for the first time exhibited themselves in the rôle of the scapegoat for everything. To us European Jews this enforced rôle, in which our people has attained to virtuosity, has been familiar these thirty years — in America it is new. For what have we not been held responsible! When the country folk of Russia, sucked dry and brought to misery by senseless husbandry, began to stir and to give signs of discontent, the Jews were all at once the bitterest enemies of the peasant, and the mass expulsions were set in scene which annihilated thousands upon thousands of livelihoods and ruined the trade of whole districts, without of course bringing the country folk the slightest benefit. When the intelligent circles of the same great empire were suddenly seized by dangerous notions of subversion as by a raging fever, and the doings of the Nihilists kept all the world in terror and agitation, Jewish students were expelled from the universities. and forced into new, strange, unsuitable paths. When Germany got its labour question, the Stöckers and Hammersteins were at once at hand with their universal remedy, the baiting of the Jews; and in our own midst, at this very moment, we behold the edifying spectacle of the degenerate national idea in Austria seeking everywhere, with commendable impartiality, to indemnify itself upon the Jews.

America has hitherto, in contrast to Europe, suffered comparatively little from political questions. The land is so rich and the people so young that they overcome every malady with ease. Events and conditions which for any European state would be catastrophes pass over the United States without a trace. The gigantic strike of Pittsburg and the rise of socialist propaganda bound up with it — what has become of all those dangers? Pittsburg is as before the greatest seat of industry in the world, and the American workmen honestly help the millionaires to make the products of European industry impossible for American markets. The Jingo spirit which goes through the Anglo-Saxon world, and which England for the present pays for so dearly, has threatened America too with baleful entanglements — and how swiftly the Cuban crisis was surmounted at Washington!

What wonder that blessed, over-rich, fortunate America is magnanimous enough to grant the little handful of industrious Jews — for the Jews still form only a vanishingly small fraction of the population in the giant realm of America — their bread and their freedom? They may gather up the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table, they enjoy all the benefits of the laws — so much, no more and no less, does the Republic offer them. That may be little enough for the favoured among our fellow-tribes-