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No. 15. | Vienna, 13 April 1900. | Fourth Year

Mizraim.

What especially marks the ruthless brutality with which the Egyptians oppressed and enslaved our forefathers is the circumstance that it was precisely the Egyptians who owed their political greatness, their whole deliverance from death by famine, to a scion of the house of Israel, to Joseph. His family came to Egypt and there enjoyed not only all civil rights, but even the highest princely honours and distinctions. That the Egyptians repaid what they owed to the immigrant Hebrew family with such vile ingratitude — therein lay the outrageous and painful thing in this brutal act of violence.

The current little saying, "Ingratitude is the world's reward," has its justification even to-day. Do not the Germans, Czechs and Poles of to-day range themselves worthily beside the Egyptians of that time? In hotly contested regions we Jews have exposed ourselves and held the ladder upon whose rungs the nations climbed up to political power. We have assimilated ourselves to the Czechs and borne ourselves as though Hussite blood surged in our veins. We have rendered the Poles a blind allegiance and furnished them with excellent, inestimable voting cattle. And what have we reaped for it? That all nations and all parties, however great the gulf that otherwise divides them, unite in a harmonious and little agreeable concert whenever the talk turns upon the Jews, and that with one accord they cheat us of our human rights.

In Austria the hatred of the Jews has apparently reached its highest point. We are wounded in our most elementary feelings. In Galicia the catching of souls is carried on upon a grand scale; Jewish parents have their children stolen from them in maiorem Dei gloriam and carried off into convents; all the entreaties, tears and protests of the parents avail nothing, downright comedy is played with them; culture has happily arrived at the law of the fist. A new era has dawned in the twentieth century, the daybreak of a new age, which declares the Jew an outlaw and sets up towards him an exceptional ethic that culminates in the maxim "The end sanctifies the means" and issues in ethical nihilism.

Whoever takes the part of the Jews is measured with the same measure as they; he is proscribed. While at the Lemberg Polytechnic the lectures were suspended because the academic youth gave vent to an indignation against Professor Thullie which did them honour, at the Czech University in Prague another proceeding finds favour. Here only the lectures of the professor of philosophy Masaryk were stopped, because rowdy and misled students demonstrated against him, the advocate of the Jews.

And since all good things go by threes, yet another menacing symptom appears upon Austria's horizon. By a famous electoral reform the Jewry of the imperial capital is delivered over to the arbitrary will of a brutal, Jew-hating party. What the Jews will have to look for there I need hardly depict. Only in appearance, then, has the hatred of the Jews reached its culminating point, although it has already brought forth the most hair-raising blossoms. The measure is not yet full.

The Feast of Passover accordingly finds us in a mood in which we are but too susceptible to the reading of the "Rabbi of Bacharach" and of the verses which render its keynote:

Break forth in loud lamenting, Thou sombre martyr-song, That I have borne so long Within my flame-still soul!

It presses into every ear, And through the ears into the heart; Mightily have I conjured up The thousand-year-old pain.

The great and the small are weeping, Even the cold-hearted lords, The women and the flowers weep, The stars in heaven weep!

And all those tears go flowing Southward, in silent union, They flow and pour themselves All into the Jordan.

Shall these tears flow for ever? Shall, Israel never cease to be a hunted quarry? As far as