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No. 37. — Vienna, September 14, 1900. — Fourth Year

A Publicistic Success.

* * * For all who will hear and see, who are not resolved from the outset to condemn every one of our steps as a blunder, this one fact stands beyond all doubt: the London Congress was a great publicistic success. The whole non-Jewish press has taken notice of Zionism, has discussed it; the majority of the daily and weekly papers has greeted our movement as a lofty ideal with hearty sympathy and has flung the watchword "Palestine for the Jews" among the Christian masses as a desirable and well attainable goal. That, from the standpoint of propaganda, is a great success. Let us not forget how little men in impartial Christian circles actually occupy themselves with the Jewish question. Of the Jews there is very much spoken, far too much; of Judaism, of the Jewish question, very little. As a Jew one is astonished ever anew when one makes the observation, in Christian society, that our endeavours, our sufferings, our wishes and hopes never in truth penetrate beyond the walls of the spiritual Ghetto. And this is quite intelligible. The public is kept posted day by day upon the Chinese troubles; for the South African war the newspapers have engaged scholars of their own; and upon the doings behind the scenes of the meanest suburban theatre reports of a column's length are furnished. Only for the Jewish question, for what passes within Judaism, have these papers not a line to spare.

The London Congress has compelled the press to occupy itself for a week with the Jewish question, and that is a success. To people who swear by the "Jewish Chronicle" the hair stands on end that in the "Times," besides China and Africa, there should also be talk of — — Jews; we, who have nothing to conceal, who confess our Judaism with pride before all the world, we rejoice that the Christian world has at last been given an opportunity of learning to know Judaism in its true representatives, of hearing and grasping the true Jewish spirit.

But with this alone the publicistic success is not exhausted. The voices of the English press — they are to be numbered by hundreds! — have for ourselves, for our own conviction, a quite peculiar significance. The utterances of the Christian papers confirm us in our hopes, for they clear away at a single stroke an obstacle again and again rolled up before us by our opponents. "The Christians will never allow that the places hallowed by the Founder of Christianity should come into the power of the Jews!" How often have we heard this objection, how often have we refuted it — to weariness, but without success! Now the pious English Christians have spoken; and how do they bear themselves towards the question raised by our Jewish opponents? The dreamed-of obstacle simply does not exist for them! It is to be hoped that for our timorous fellow-believers also the spectre of a Christian crusade is banished once and for all.

And yet another and more essential circumstance. We are wont to be dismissed as fantasts and romanticists, as "Dreamers of the Ghetto." But the English Christians? Verily, the most unscrupulous, the most venal assailants of the Zionist thought will not lower themselves to cry down the editors of the English newspapers as dreamers. The English press is, in keeping with the English national character, the soberest in the world. Were Zionism a Utopia, a Freeland, Bellamy or Henry George ideal, then "Times" and "Daily News" would not have lost a word over our Congress, and so critical, nay hypercritical an organ as the "Saturday Review" would have killed our movement like a soap-bubble with a few ironical pin-pricks. That review devotes to our movement a long notice, by no means optimistic, but assenting at the core, sympathetic; and we shall more than once cry into the ears of our opponents the words of the sober, pessimistic politician: "There stand in the way of the realisation of the Zionist ideal absolutely no insurmountable obstacles."

And how practically, how shrewdly, by the English press, has the pivotal point of the whole movement been dis-