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No. 9 | Vienna, 2 March 1900. | Fourth Year

Conferences of Conciliation.

By Rudolf Kohn (Schlackenwerth).

For several weeks past the conferences of conciliation between Germans and Czechs have been sitting in Vienna. The public takes far less interest in them than in the Boer war and other remote occurrences. People have had their fill of the dreary language quarrel and will hear no more of district courts, autonomous authorities, and so forth. All the world wishes for an agreement — all the world, even the Jews, of whom the anti-Semites so often assert that they kindled the strife of the nationalities in Austria in order to rule over the contending parties. Among the countless lies of our opponents this is perhaps the worst, and they all know it: the contending nationalities turn far less against one another than against the mediating Jews, after the old recipe: "If you beat my Jew, then I shall beat your Jew."

It may be true that the Jews have an interest in the quarrel of the nationalities, and that worse times still are to break in upon them, until the Germans and Czechs, reconciled and united, shall make new laws against the Jews, after having hitherto been united only in abusing the old laws against them. But nothing of all this has ever hindered the Jews from wishing for the understanding and preparing it. They are, moreover, so deeply concerned in the economic depression brought about by the political decline that their wish for an understanding at last is more than the outflow of a general ethical sentiment. The prospects of an armistice between the nationalities are, however, far from favourable as yet. The cowardice of the leading parties and the incapacity of their leaders are far greater than the pressing need for a pause in the struggle over the pettiest national possessions, over paper paragraphs and district boundaries. The German Liberals fear the tale-bearing of the Radicals, who out of the fury of rivalry denounce all who think otherwise as traitors to the people before those of whom there is never any lack; the Czech "Free-minded" find themselves in a like position towards their younger rival foundations. Nevertheless one may conceive that in the end, by the time the deputies shall find themselves in agreement with their electors — perhaps already after the next elections — the great work will succeed. The German-speaking half-Slavs of Northern Bohemia will perhaps at last come to an agreement with the Czech-speaking half-Germans of the Sudeten lands.

All this is possible, and even probable. But what is wholly impossible and wholly improbable is an understanding between the Jews and the Central Europeans. Why does this thought appear so Utopian? Why is any negotiation with the anti-Semites over a compromise entirely out of the question? The anti-Semites too, after all, do not wish to hang all the Jews; they too, if one may believe their assurances, wish only to do away with the "excessive influence" of the Jews, and not to extirpate all the Jews. For the trade in old clothes, perhaps even for his theatres, his houses of pleasure, his newspapers and his lawsuits, even the most embittered anti-Semite would like — or would he not? — to keep the Jews. He objects only to this, that some Jews should wish to be active in other callings as well.

What shall we set about when they really do fall upon us one day? ... In this land of half- and quarter-culture, in which only a small fraction of the masses is clear about its economic interests, anti-Jewish laws will undoubtedly be made, once the representatives of the people shall have time for it. The stenographic protocols are already to-day full of legislative proposals from the most various parties for the combating of the Jews. The Liberals, if indeed they still possess more than ten Chamber-of-Commerce mandates, will hardly be able to help us; the Socialists just as little; the other parties are in any case anti-Semitic and a-Semitic.

The Jews of Austria are as little armed against these possibilities as the Jews of Eastern Europe were armed against the Russian and Roumanian exceptional laws. The indifferent and the anti-Zionists, who at present form the majority of the Austrian Jews, deliberately close their eyes to every gloomy prospect, or console themselves with the adapt-