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No. 20. | Vienna, 18 May 1900. | Fourth Year

The Ritual-Murder Junker.

By O. Erter.

It is really quite a pity that the ritual-murder interpellation which was to have been brought forward in the Prussian House of Lords is not to be made. From the reply one might at least have gathered what the Berlin Government thinks of the people who would at any price suggest to it a belief in ritual murder. Itself — of this one may be sure — it judges the infamous falsehood as all unprejudiced and reasonable men judge it: that it is a cowardly, base lie. But its strongest support is the Junkerdom, and this counts in its ranks such individuals as the notorious v. Hertzberg-Lottin, who not merely wished to interpellate it upon ritual murder in general, but with apish rapidity published the interpellation together with its statement of reasons, before the shrewder among his brethren of rank compelled him to keep it in his pocket.

There was once a powerful Prussian minister named v. Hertzberg, who in the first years after the death of Frederick the Great governed the Prussian land. A powerful and a learned minister, who also appointed himself President of the Berlin Academy of Sciences. Perhaps v. Hertzberg-Lottin, the Junker with the withheld ritual-murder interpellation, is his descendant; a degenerate one, of course, who does no honour to the memory of his forefather. But be that as it may, it has once more become manifest what one may under certain circumstances expect of an Uckermark or Farther Pomeranian grandee. In general one pictures such a person as a kind of curiosity left standing over from the Middle Ages, as a grim knight Don Quixote who has lost his way in the world's history, or perhaps as a Trumpeter of Säkkingen turned blue-blooded, of whom it was sung:

There sits one out in the rainy storm, No man knows what he is at, He blows for ever the selfsame song, The song of his — love.

But in our time a very malignant drop has come into this stagnant blood; the Junker of to-day can not only compete successfully with any stock-jobber and corn-speculator, he can also vie in impudent effrontery with a Rector Ahlwardt and in hypocrisy with a Tartuffe. In short, the Junker has modernised himself, and as it commonly goes when an organism "transvalues" itself, so in the Junker too only the not-good ones of the old qualities have remained, and among the new ones one seeks in vain for anything ennobled.

The stronghold of Prussian Junkerdom is the House of Lords. In this, then, the Junker v. Hertzberg-Lottin wished to dispose of his ritual-murder interpellation — that is to say, he wished to turn the newest ritual-murder lie, the Konitz one, to account as a parliamentary poisoning of the wells. The Government was to be asked in merito what it intended to do in order to calm the population excited by the Konitz murder. But the intention that lay concealed behind this question, the tendency and the purpose, might perhaps not have been rightly grasped outside the window, and that this should happen was what the statement of reasons was to serve. In this statement of reasons, which is a model of brazen hypocrisy, the cases of Tisza-Eszlar and Xanten are simply assumed to be historically attested ritual murders which "permit the inference of a particular employment of human blood", while the murders of Polna and Konitz are characterised as such as "point to Jewish perpetrators". Since now "in wide circles of the people" the belief prevails that "the Jewish secret writings enjoin the employment of Christian blood for ritual purposes", v. Hertzberg-Lottin demands an "authentic translation of all Jewish secret writings", and incidentally he moreover casts at the Government the veiled reproach that the police protected the Jews in Konitz against the excited population.

One must confess that never yet has a sanctimonious Junker presented himself before the world in such splendour. Does one seek a model of pettifoggery: here it is. An example of religious hypocrisy: there is none more apt. This Junker can really give lessons to a priest. The Popes Innocent IV., Gregory X., Martin V., Paul III., Clement XIV., who branded the ritual-murder lie ex cathedra, are no re-