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No. 22. | Vienna, 1 June 1900. | Fourth Year

This year's Congress will be held in London.

Opening on the 13th of August.

High Politics. A Pentecost Reflection as Well. By O. Erter.

It has gone out of fashion to prefix to the journalistic reflections devoted to the Feast of Pentecost the motto of the "tongues of fire." The motto, once so beloved an ornament of intellectual production, has altogether fallen from its glory and become unfashionable. We speak nowadays as unadorned as may be, and when we have something to say we follow the example of the patriarch Jacob when he wooed Rachel and laid his suit before her father plainly and briefly: "I desire Rachel, thy younger daughter." One might believe it to be the reflex of a hard and toilsome age that our manner of expression has grown so unfigurative, so purposeful, and so austere. But something else besides is at work here: we have no illusions left. This holds of all, of Christians and of Jews; yet it is easy to draw a distinction. In general it is doubtless a consequence of the passage from the dominion of the mental sciences to the dominion of the exact sciences that the speech of men has altered in the direction of the dryly matter-of-fact. With us Jews, however, there is joined to it the growing recognition of that complete isolation, of that inexorable state of being thrown wholly upon ourselves, at which we have arrived and arrive ever more fully, now that not one of the blossom-dreams of the civilising Mendelssohnian, and then of the political, idea of assimilation has ripened.

We keep our Feast of Pentecost with greater fervour than the two generations that went before us, but the brightness of the springtide mood we have only within ourselves; from without it is bitterly soured for us.

How could it be otherwise? From every quarter the sighs and lamentations of our own blend together into one moving cry of distress; and if for a moment we would spin ourselves into the delusion that culture with its redeeming effects cannot, after all, pass by our destiny without a trace, "with unaverted eye," then a wail of misery out of Roumania or a discord of hatred out of the North German metropolis of culture shrills in our ear, cruelly to shake us out of a venial self-deception. In Germany, for two decades past, the mischief has more and more gained ground among the Jews that those whose names point to their belonging to Jewry alter those names with the sanction of the authorities. Such changes are no sign of bravery and fidelity; to finer souls it may even appear that they are almost a denial of the memory of parents, a defacement of their graves. But it is not for that reason that the Berlin "Kreuzzeitung" waxes hot over the three sisters Schmuhl in Berlin, who have exchanged that name for another, or over the family Josephsohn, which now calls itself Möllhausen. Oh no; it slavers because the authorities lend themselves at all to the fulfilment of Jewish wishes. The Jews once wore the yellow badge, and now they actually take it upon themselves to wish to be called Schmuhl or Kohn or Levi no longer! The lately deceased Munich General Music Director Hermann Levi, a brightly shining artist from the circle of Richard Wagner, was once travelling in a railway compartment with his brother, who as an actor called himself Lindeck, and at one station there joined them a high Bavarian aristocrat who was among Levi's many admirers. Levi, who at that time had not yet gone over to Christianity, presented his brother. "My brother Lindeck." — "Your brother Lindeck?" asked the aristocrat. — "Yes," came the smiling reply, "formerly I too was called Lindeck; now I am called Levi."

It is but a symptom that the organ of the Prussian bigots, from whose midst there also proceeded the recent ritual-murder interpellant Hertzberg-Lottin, uses even the Jewish changes of name as an occasion for pouring out its hatred of the Jews. Yet symptoms can at times be very instructive, and this one has its particular significance because it comes to light in a centre of modern culture and enlightenment. If such a thing in the Berlin Wilhelms-