Die Welt

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No. 50. Vienna, December 14, 1900. Fourth Year

On the occasion of the turn of the year our esteemed subscribers are requested to renew their subscriptions in good time. That no delay may occur in the delivery, attention is once more drawn to the fact that the publishing house Tuschijah in Warsaw is our agency for Russia.

The Political Equality of the Jews. By Max Nordau. III.

During the dreadful times of the Middle Ages there was no conscious Jewish national policy, and there could be none. Every community, every single Jew was intent only upon surviving the day, and the defence of bare existence against menace and violence so wholly absorbed the powers of our forefathers that they never came to survey wider reaches of time and space, to devise plans for the future, and to attempt their realisation in common.

When, however, after the long night the new age began to dawn, there awoke at once in the best of the Jewish people the consciousness of the solidarity of all the scattered portions of the nation, and they laboured at the betterment of the legal position of their whole race — that is to say, they developed the beginnings of a purposeful Jewish national policy.

The Portuguese and Spanish Jews who desired to settle at Bordeaux in the 16th century negotiated with the Governor of Guienne and then with the King himself, and their settlement was effected upon the ground of chartered rights, not for individuals, but for the whole body. The Dutch Sephardim who desired to establish themselves in England in the 17th century did not seek to steal in one by one, but sent Manasse ben Israel over to Cromwell in order to obtain concessions for the whole body.

The position of the Jews who sought admission into a country from without was comparatively favourable; they could negotiate over conditions and had theoretically the choice either of accepting them and immigrating, or of rejecting them as unacceptable and renouncing the immigration. The Jews in Germany and in the European East were worse placed. They already lived in the land and could not say to the authorities: "We demand these rights and those: grant them to us and we remain; refuse them and we go." They had no conditions to make, but had to resign themselves to the position which it pleased the authorities to prepare for them. Their national policy had to adapt itself to these circumstances, but they too had a national policy.

It was directed to the attainment of the rights of man and of the citizen. Down to the end of the 18th century the Jew in Central and Eastern Europe was in fact proscribed and outlawed. Rights of domicile he had nowhere. His residence was everywhere "precarious," precario, that is to say, no legally founded claim, but a gracious sufferance which had to be petitioned for from case to case and could be granted or refused. The sword of Damocles of individual or of wholesale expulsion hung continually above his head. He abode in his place of dwelling by virtue of a letter of protection which in the most favourable case ran for a fixed term, seldom for more than 20 years, often for only ten. If the term ran out without the renewal of the letter of protection being obtained, then it meant taking up the wanderer's staff, much under the conditions of the present Roumanian emigration: behind the man driven forth a brazen door closed with a crash, and before him no gate opened. During the term of protection the Jew might have but one thought, but one endeavour: to earn money enough to be able to purchase for himself a new term of protection. He laboured unceasingly for the authorities, whose office it was to issue the letter of protection against the highest possible sums. If he acquired wealth, it was not for himself, but for the authorities, who awaited him patiently and with a scornful laugh at the end of his term of protection and then made their conditions. The more he had, the more he had to let be wrung from him, and the expiry of the term of protection thus became a turn of destiny at which the poor Jew and the rich found themselves in the same case: plundered out, ruined, yet with the gracious permission to begin afresh the deadly labour in the economic treadmill for their extortioners and to continue it until the next plundering. Hence it comes that until