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No. 8. Vienna, 22 February 1901. Fifth Year

בני ציון היקרים!

Noble children of Zion! Accept my best thanks for all the manifestations of love and attachment to my person upon the occasion of my 70th birthday. I am yours, and shall remain so until the end of my life.

Bonn, February 1901. Dr. J. Rülf.

To the Editor, Mr. Gerhard C. Polak.

Paris, 17 February 1901.

Most honoured Mr. Editor!

Since it is no vain war of words that I am concerned with, I will not dwell long upon the reproach of an incomplete citation of my own words in the very place where, a few weeks earlier, those words were to be read in their completeness; and I will likewise pass over the remark that my theses, which were the quite short, quite compressed summary of three long essays, "did not fully contain" what you "read in my Article III, 'the political equality of rights of the Jews'."

I will now answer as clearly as possible the new, concrete questions which you have the kindness to put to me.

"Is there any land at all in which there is not to be found a small minority of anti-Semitic rabble?"

I do not believe that such a land exists. But of a "small minority of anti-Semitic rabble" I have nowhere spoken. Where only a small minority of politically uninfluential, ignorant and despised corner-loungers, cigar-end pickers or vagabonds harbours and utters anti-Semitic sentiments, there the Jew has in truth no need to trouble himself about this pack; for the decent and educated Christian countrymen will despise this pack quite as much as he does himself, and if it grows insolent the police suffice to teach it manners. There is, after all, other riff-raff besides, which rebels against the laws of the State, which for example begs, steals, offers resistance to the officers of the law, and so forth. For this riff-raff the State has precisely its constables, its judges and its prisons.

But you cannot seriously believe that I spoke of such a minority. My three essays are indeed not 48 pages long (however in the world do you arrive at that figure?), but together not quite 7½ pages; yet even if they really were 48 pages, and thus six or seven times as long as they really are, I should still not have been able to give a juristic and philosophical definition of every expression I employed. I have honestly striven to be intelligible, and if in spite of this I am not understood, I really do not believe that the fault lies with me. It appeared clearly from my essays that by the "small minority" I did not wish the rabble to be understood, but Christian countrymen at least of the same social category as the Jews, who "demand a share in the wielding of the sovereign power of the State over its subjects".

Well then: where even a small minority of this social category "takes offence at the exercise of the power of the State by Jews", there in my opinion the Jew ought in truth "upon principle to renounce the demand for a share in the wielding of the sovereign power of the State over its subjects". For reasons which I have developed at length in the third essay of the series.

"Do you really mean that, for the sake of this rabble, we are to withdraw from the great undertakings, from the municipal or the State administration?"

That it is not to be done for the sake of "this rabble" I have already said. But I hold besides that you have put your question, which you believe you have put "precisely", without doubt involuntarily in a most imprecise manner — indeed in such a manner that, if I had before me a less honest, a less high-minded opponent than yourself, I should raise the charge of bad faith.