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No. 14.

Vienna, 6 April 1900.

Fourth Year

Turkey and Jewish Immigration.

By O. Erter.

We reported lately that Roumanian Jews have been permitted to immigrate into Turkey upon the same conditions as the Mussulmans. To that report we attached a comment in which we paid this decision of the Ottoman Government the recognition due to it.

This permission was granted by the Council of Ministers, and the Grand Vizier made it publicly known with the addition of the following conditions: the immigrating Jews must acquire Turkish nationality; they have no claim to the reimbursement of the costs of travel and of settlement; no landed property whatever is conceded to them for the purpose of settlement.

We rejoice in that act of prudent tolerance which the permission granted by the Porte is unquestionably to be accounted, and we shall not, we hope, be guilty of any sanguine exaggeration if we say: ce n'est que le premier pas qui coute. In any case the resolution of the Porte is a symptom of a friendlier disposition and of a better insight, which we may register with satisfaction. When we consider that the Roumanian Jew is in a manner a res nullius, that he has behind him the support of no nationality whatever, because it is denied him by the land in which he was born and which he inhabits, then it is already a considerable gain that with his immigration into Turkey nationality is conceded to him. One must indeed be as comfortlessly and as pitilessly stripped of the most primitive of human rights as the Roumanian Jew is, in order to accept even this as a particular piece of good fortune, that one is admitted to the acquisition of nationality in Turkey. The whole lamentableness of Roumanian Jewish misery is laid bare in this flight in search of asylum, and at the same time there is manifested therein, greatly to the advantage of Turkey, the sad backwardness of Roumanian humanity.

But with this the esteem which we entertain for the resolution of the Porte and for its general significance has also reached its limit. We must not conceal from ourselves that at bottom not much is gained by this permission — conditional at that — for the settlement of Roumanian Jews in Turkey, chiefly because it comes to the aid only of the more well-to-do emigrants, and because no guarantee under public law is bound up with it. By such an unregulated Jewish emigration, behind which stands no protecting organisation and no guarantee, not merely is little done for deliverance and welfare, but it rather harbours within itself the danger of a mere change of place, which may prove purposeless and perhaps even ruinous. We have lived through this with a shudder in the Argentine emigration, and we therefore reject also the fantastic notion of the Cyprian settlement project, although we do not misjudge the good will which finds expression in all these things. If we are not mistaken, we have somewhere read that the Porte intends to assign to the immigrating Roumanian Jews the neighbourhood of Ismid as their place of settlement. That would amount to an internment which — we repeat it — may still be more desirable and more advantageous than Roumanian outlawry; but it lies upon the surface that the first and last motive of a Jewish migration in our days is thereby not in the remotest degree taken into account. To send poor Jews upon their wanderings, in order then, when they have reached the place of their destination, to abandon them to their fate — a fate that may be far more ruinous than the one from which they have escaped — in that, truly, no solicitude for their welfare can be discerned.

It is rather by such miscarried or little effectual attempts that one first perceives in its whole compass the ethical and economic justification of the Zionist aim of colonisation. The benevolence of the Sultan is certainly to be greeted with gratitude, but what is at issue above all is the acquisition of a right, by virtue of which the Jews who settle under Zionist direction upon the new soil may also cherish that soil as their home and grow together with it in every sense, without having to fear that, before ever they have begun the work, or in the very midst of it, they shall perish unprotected. In a word: what is at issue is