Die Welt

Appears every Friday.

Editorial Office and Administration: VIENNA IX., Türkenstrasse No. 9. Telephone 14199.

Communications are to be addressed not to individual persons, but to the Editorial Office or the Administration: Vienna, IX., Türkenstrasse No. 9. Unstamped letters are not accepted, and manuscripts are not returned. Editorial hours: Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 3 to 4 o'clock.

Advertising rates: The four-column petit line, 20 Heller. The advertisement section closes Tuesday evening. Single numbers 30 Heller.

Subscription rates: Austria-Hungary: yearly 12 Kronen, half-yearly 6 Kronen. For abroad: Germany yearly 12 Mk. 70 Pf., half-yearly 6 Mk. 35 Pf.; England yearly 14 Shg., half-yearly 7 Shg.; Russia yearly 7 R., half-yearly 3 R. 50 Kop.; Switzerland, France, Italy, Turkey, Roumania, Bulgaria, Servia, Greece, Egypt yearly 17 Frcs., half-yearly 8 Frcs. 50 Cts.; America yearly 3 Doll. 40 Ct.

No. 27. Vienna, 6 July 1900. Fourth Year

Before the Gates of Zionism.

By Berthold Feiwel (Bruenn).

A few thousand of the "six million living, suffering, bleeding witnesses of Zionism" are now wandering through Europe. The West-European Jews must see them, whether they will or no. For they have even been remarked already by the non-Jewish public. More than that: in the face of the great number of the emigrants, the West-European Jews are compelled to ask, "Why do you wander?" And they are compelled to hear what boundless lamentation prevails among the Jews of Roumania; that the thousands who wander are the fortunate ones, who still had strength enough to save themselves out of the misery; that hundreds of thousands of Jews must remain behind in the most frightful despair.

How is one to help? Whence take the vast sums of money? And if one supports the thousands of emigrants to-day, who will help them to-morrow? And withal, the hundreds of thousands who have remained behind need help still more urgent, still more ample. But that is not even all. In these last days there have joined themselves to the Roumanian wanderers beggar-Jews who come in droves out of Hungary, Russia and Galicia. What monstrous misery! The great men of business, the mighty reckoners, lose all survey of it. Their sight swims before eyes which yet they cannot turn away, because they must see!

You who rudely and clumsily stayed our arm when we opened the great work of rescue that is Zionism — then, when it was just high time and yet not too late; you who, a little generation of men too clever or too stupid, of the cowardly or of the well-fed, strove with one accord to stifle our great thought in its germ: do you feel to-day, now that the Jewish distress walks through your Zion, through the streets of the capitals, what you have neglected, wherein you have sinned, how you have transgressed? So many wanderers, so many accusations against you! Those who wander there are Zionists in heart and body, who set their whole hope upon our work of rescue, and in whose name we spoke to you. And you?

Do you feel to-day the weight of the thousand accusations?

Where, then, is to-day that superior smile, honourable assimilants, which always played about your lips when we spoke of the Jewish distress? Why do you stand there helpless, you who were yet always so much cleverer than we, the "visionaries," the "Utopians"?

And you, venerable rabbis? Do but tell the wanderers what you so often told us! You knew once how to set it so beautifully in words! Go then to the emigrants! Seek them out in the graveyards, or under the bridges, or on the open fields, where they are wont to encamp! And instruct them, as you once instructed us and your anti-Zionist congregational presidents, what a fine thing "patriotism" is and what a fine thing forbearance; preach to them what the "true spirit of Judaism" is, and of what kind is the sanctified mission of Israel among the nations!

And you, you international Social Democrats, why do you not tell us, as before so often, that "all misery is to be traced back to economic factors," that "there is no specific Jewish misery, that Zionism is nothing else than a bourgeois swindle?"

The anti-Zionist brotherhood of all lands has yet always had a last trump against us! When in Vienna anti-Semitism grew great, they spoke of the "Socialism of the stupid fellow." When soon afterwards the frightful excesses broke out in Galicia, they called that the "easily comprehensible backwardness of half-Asiatic lands," and pointed to the rest of fairer Austria. When in Bohemia the window-panes rattled, they consoled themselves with this, that these were "excrescences of national chauvinism," which "would of themselves disappear with the increasing ripeness of the peoples" — witness Germany and France. When then the Dreyfus trial came, men spoke of the "pernicious coalition of the holy-water sprinkler and the sabre," which must be beaten down. Polna and Holleschau were once again the "consequence of mediaeval backwardness, which, etc." — witness Germany. Only when in Germany, the first cultured state of Europe, the "mediaeval spectre" went abroad, and no land remained over whither Jewish optimism could save itself, did Anti-Zion grow perplexed. That was indeed an event "to which all scientific experience