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No. 18. Vienna, 4th May 1900. Fourth Year

Zionist Thought-Splinters.

By O. Erter.

If one looks attentively about him, day in and day out, and does not merely survey events but also gives ear to the voices that make themselves heard, one makes a singular experience. Never do four-and-twenty hours go by without one's having something "Jewish" to record. That is to say: something which concerns the Jews, and that, as the times are now constituted, is almost never anything good. Nulla dies sine linea.

Let us cite something from the chronicle of the very last few days!

The Berlin "Kreuzzeitung" sheds tears over the hard fate of the women matzo-bakers in Russian Poland. These unhappy Jewesses, to whom the Berlin Junker sheet devotes so much human sympathy, are said to be obliged to work twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours of the day for an incredibly small wage. What follows from this for the Kreuzzeitung? That they must be helped, that their hours of labour must be reduced? Oh no; not so strangely does Carlos contradict himself. The poor women matzo-bakers are merely a sentimental pretext for calling the attention of the Russian Government to the fact that there exists in Warsaw a secret Jewish Socialist league, from whose secret printing-press appeals in favour of the women matzo-bakers proceed. And what such a neighbourly hint to the Russian authorities signifies is easy to comprehend. Jewish Socialists, united in a secret league! One fairly feels how, at this notion, a cold shiver runs down the back of the Governor-General of Warsaw — nota bene, if the hint of the Kreuzzeitung was first needed in order to discover in the matzo-bakeries the traces of the ghastly secret league.

In the end the threads of this league reach — it is no very great distance, reckoned in kilometres — from Warsaw over to the little West Prussian town of Konitz, where a "ritual murder" has taken place which has thrown the whole district into commotion. West Prussia has once more its Polna. Once more, for it is not long since men were upon the track of a "ritual murder" in a neighbouring little town of Konitz, in Tuchel. And West Prussia has for its Chief President a truly cultivated and enlightened man, who moreover pursues natural-scientific studies with a zeal that goes far beyond the measure of the dilettante. It is Herr v. Gossler, the former Minister of Public Worship. In a miasma that wanders to and fro between West Prussia and Bohemia this Chief President assuredly does not believe; but perhaps in a sort of ambition which will not let the people in Konitz sleep, because the people in Polna are one "ritual murder" ahead of them.

In Berlin, of course, men are far more cultivated, although the express train needs but a few hours to cover the stretch from Berlin to Konitz. There the anti-Semitic organ waxes indignant merely over the "Judaisation of art and science," because a Jew, by the name of James Simon, has been called to the Commission of Experts attached to the Royal Museums for the period from 1900 to 1903. This Jew, who into the bargain is merely a merchant, passes for an extraordinary connoisseur of pictures and is besides a highly esteemed citizen, wherewith it is surely explained sufficiently enough that he was called, by means of an imperial decree signed by the Minister of Public Worship Studt, to the Commission of Experts for the Picture Gallery of the Royal Museums in Berlin. But this explanation, which may satisfy everybody, does not exist for the worthy anti-Semitic "Staatsbürgerzeitung." If a man is a Jew, no explanation avails, no imperial decree and no ministerial signature. "The Jew shall be burnt."

Or, what under another sky is the same thing, driven out. Under another sky — let us say, for the sake of the example and of clearness, in Russia. There it has suddenly been discovered that upon the German and upon the Austrian frontier smuggling has attained a great flourishing — a thing which in truth might have been perceived from time immemorial. And since in such cases a scapegoat is always needed, it was the Jews, as almost goes without saying, who came in for it. They, and they alone, are the smugglers. And so there went forth of late an edict of the Ministry of the Interior which the sojourn of Jews upon the German