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No. 8 | Vienna, 23 February 1900. | Fourth Year

As a considerable number of subscriptions expire at the end of this month, those concerned are reminded to effect the renewal in good time, so that no interruption may occur in the delivery of the paper.

What is in the Air. By G. Marcus.

If we are proud — we Jews — that we have brought it so gloriously far in the world, the facts are in any case not to blame for it. They speak a language such that day after day the blush of shame must rise to our faces, had we not accustomed ourselves to behold all the salvation of our souls and of our bodies in the paint of assimilation.

We have again everything that was bestowed upon us in the days of old, when, still drunk with hope, we expected of our self-denial that it would be requited to us with the gift of civil and social equality. The lie of ritual murder has risen again, and we have a new Mortara case as well. Nay, even the solitary Christian who in sincere abhorrence rears up against the ritual-murder lie pays a forfeit for the courage of his indignation, so that it would be no wonder if, with a glance at us, he muttered the old saying between his teeth: Qui mange du pape en meurt.

And all this is not yet, perhaps, the whole compass of that which makes up our civil, social and human achievements. That is only what lies open and visible to the day. Much, very much more conceals itself behind the veil of hypocrisy, behind the practices with which men strike us in the neck by roundabout ways, and behind our own practices as well, with which we would fain make ourselves believe that it is only a passing cloud that hides the sun from us. This is the astonishing thing, that we fight and fight for others, in that we take part in their national and political feuds, while for us nobody fights — not even we ourselves.

By the dispensations of history there has been allotted to our destiny, powerless and scattered as we are, the widest horizon of all peoples. And we do not even feel ourselves to be a people; everywhere we bear ourselves as a mere appendage, without comprehending that as such we also forfeit the claim to lead a life of our own. We are Republicans in France, Liberals or Social Democrats in Germany, Ministerialists in Hungary, Germans or Czechs in Austria, but Jews — that we are nowhere, save when the others bethink themselves that we are, because they have need of scapegoats.

Then so-called nationalism falls upon us, and it asks little whether we too are a nation, since we ourselves struggle with hands and feet against being regarded and treated as a nation. And it is in vain that we protest in France that we are Frenchmen, in Germany that we are Germans; for all our assimilation the Patriarch still says: "It matters not, the Jew shall be burnt." So it is in the highly civilised countries — how much more so in those which as yet have appropriated only the outward whitewash of the civilisation of the West!

A glance at the European parliaments is right well fitted to instruct us Jews as to what the self-denial — nay, the self-abnegation of half a century has brought us in. The parliaments unite in themselves the flower of the peoples; they are the extract of the nations. We had our own representatives in the parliaments, a Crémieux in France, a Riesser in the Frankfort National Assembly, a Johann Jacoby in the Prussian Chamber of Deputies. But that is long ago. Then, when we had them no more, the Liberals at least took up our cause for a while; the Jewish question formed a point in the programme of Liberalism. Yet that too is over and done with. Liberalism, which has so much to fight for on its own account, leaves us to our fate, when it does not, as for example the National Liberalism of Germany, from motives of self-preservation surrender us without scruple to our oppressors. Whatever anywhere in the world calls itself national links with that, avowedly or unavowedly, the exclusion of the Jews; and what do these do? Instead of reconciling themselves to it and in themselves