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No. 35. | Vienna, 31 August 1900. | 4th Year

The Fourth Zionist Congress.

Speech of Dr. Max Mandelstamm.

Honoured Assembly!

If I am to speak to-day upon the "physical improvement of the Jews," I shall of course take into consideration only the "Ghetto Jews" of the East, those who dwell in Russia, Roumania and Galicia and who make up almost three-quarters of the whole of Jewry. For inasmuch as I hope to demonstrate that the decrepit, pitifully feeble bodily constitution of the Ghetto Jews is the exclusive product of their desolate social and economic situation, I need take no account of the Jews of the western countries, since the latter are economically by no means worse off than their Aryan fellow-countrymen and consequently require no special discussion.

I am indeed happy that I am able to ventilate this theme, as important as it is sad, within the precincts of London, in the heart of England. A people such as the English, which on the one hand came so early to the recognition that only in a healthy body can a healthy, resolute manly spirit dwell, and which therefore provides with the rarest consistency for the harmonious development of the mind and the body of its citizens — this people will surely on this occasion also, as it has so often done before, bring understanding and moral support to a people which, under the high pressure of social misery, has physically fallen into such frightful decay and possesses nothing further than an active brain wrapped in skin and bone, which in untiring labour of thought broods upon the means of its own preservation.

It goes without saying that I cannot discuss the physical improvement of the Ghetto Jews before I have made this highly honoured assembly acquainted with the milieu, the medium, within which these unfortunates live, or, better said, vegetate. Of this milieu, however, in spite of my description, he will hardly be able to form a conception who has not lived among the Ghetto Jews, or who has not at least fleetingly looked upon the Ghetto. Nevertheless I would invite the highly honoured assembly to transport itself for a moment in spirit into the Jewish quarter of the East End, into Whitechapel, say, with its close, filthy side-alleys, its misery and lamentation, and then to picture this portion of the East End magnified a hundred thousand fold, spread over an area of more than 20,000 square miles, an East End without end, as it were, with some 6 to 7 millions of inmates — and even then the highly honoured assembly will obtain but a faded image of that which is called the Ghetto of the East.

This assertion of mine might indeed appear to many an exaggeration, seeing that an area of more than 20,000 square miles ought to suffice completely, not merely to nourish seven millions of men abundantly, but three times that number, and to supply them besides with a boundless reservoir of fresh, healthy air. That would certainly be quite correct if the Jews were not penned up exclusively in the towns and little towns, and if, with very minute exceptions, the open country had not been made inaccessible to them. What once lived in the villages and enjoyed the advantages which wood, meadow and field offer to the bodily well-being of man was driven thence, chased into the hamlets and little towns, and there crowded together into so narrow and unhygienic a space that it fares with these wretched people just as with that beast upon the barren heath, "led round and round in a circle by an evil spirit, while all about lies fresh, succulent pasture." In this way the Jewish popu-