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No. 38. | Vienna, 21 September 1900. | Vol. 4

To all our readers, friends, and fellow-adherents we offer, on the occasion of the New Year festival, our heartiest good wishes.

The Editors.

לכל קוראינו ואנשי שלומנו הננו מגישים את ברכותינו לר"ה הבע"ל.

בית המערכת.

Konitz.

By Max Aram.

The Konitz murder affair may well have come as a surprise even to an attentive and honest observer of Jewish conditions in Germany. The more superficial among the Jews have, to be sure, always felt such symptoms of anti-Semitic hatred to be the most violent of surprises, since they never perceived them until, as though out of dreams, they struck their noses against a wall. In Vienna they did not perceive the ruin of the liberal régime until, on those days of the municipal elections, it abruptly collapsed; and in Paris the transvaluation of the sentiments which the broad masses of the people cherished towards the Jews was not perceived by them until the Dreyfus affair drove everything to the surface. In Germany, in the middle of the seventies, they were glad to overlook it with an indescribable readiness when the first signs showed themselves at student gatherings in Leipzig of that reversal which was to be accomplished at the close of the seventies through the Stöcker agitation; and certain strongly anti-Semitic pamphlets of that period upon the mischief of the theatre were simply passed over in silence. But in Konitz even the best judge of East German conditions will be able to discern only a local occurrence of senseless accident, and not the necessary logical consequence of the general social and communal position of the Jews within the life of that place. For there the Jews in their social position always resembled not merely the modest violet that blooms in concealment: rather, the violet had already grown wholly covered with dust and pitiably inconspicuous.

Whatever of anti-Semitic movements broke out in the great cities had its origin in a connection at least rational and logical: in the peculiar and brilliant position of the Jewish circles. There they bloomed not like the violet in the moss, modest, seemly and pure, but like the proud rose, which will only be admired. Even though there too they were excluded from public, official life, they had nevertheless created for themselves a social life of their own. And this was no Jewish sociability, but an international life of a grand and brilliant style, which opened its gates wide precisely to the Jews. When Sudermann, in „Sodoms Ende“, sets a banker Barseinowski upon his feet, he must expressly note in the scenario that he is not to bear a Jewish type; and when in Vienna a charitable society undertakes social entertainments, the anti-Semitic press can point out that, apart from a few “little theatre princesses”, only Jewish circles took part. In the great cities the Jews form almost exclusively the first-night public, which yet exercises a far-reaching intellectual influence. They form further, and pre-eminently, the reading public for the whole of literature: a statistical survey of the readers of the circulating libraries, and especially of the libraries of the academic reading-halls, would yield astonishing results. There, in the great cities, “the Jews” have in fact an influence upon important domains of social and intellectual life which is possible only through a much-envied and luxurious manner of living.

In the small towns, on the other hand, and especially those of the Prussian East, the Jews are excluded from all general social intercourse and have been forced back upon a purely Jewish sociability of their own. The Oddfellow lodges, in which they do indeed meet with middling Christian burgher circles, are far too slender little plants; and when certain purely Jewish associations style themselves “Mercantile Union”, never yet does a Christian merchant stray in among them. Their sociability, their social life, is as modest and as tame as it might have been in the Ghetto. Since they are radically excluded from every attachment to the graduated general life of their little town, they have