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No. 15. | Vienna, 12 April 1901. | Fifth Year

The Passover double number — excellently suited for agitation — may be obtained from the Administration, so far as the stock lasts, upon prior remittance of the amount (in postage stamps).

The Jews in Jerusalem.

By Elias Barg (Jerusalem).

When we consider the in every respect sad condition of the Jews in Jerusalem and ask ourselves what means would best be capable of improving it, we must first seek to discover the root causes which have brought this condition about. In doing so nothing would be more mistaken than to do what most of those who have occupied themselves more or less with this question have done, namely: to lay the blame for the bad state of things there either upon the Jews of that place, by denying them all sense of gainful industry while ascribing to them a very pronounced schnorrer spirit, or to lay it at the door of the Jews abroad, by railing against the so-called philanthropic system. For quite apart from the fact that with accusations of that kind, unjustified as they are, it is impossible to prepare the way for a change of the situation for the better — which alone ought to be every man's concern — such an unjust proceeding against the one party or the other testifies either to a prejudiced disposition or to a complete ignorance, and hence to a wholly false conception of the actual circumstances there. Of a like ignorance of the circumstances the proposals put forward as means for the solution of this question also testify. The one advises that the "Chaluka" be raised, that is, that by an appeal to the charitable sense of the Jews abroad a steady increase of the relief or poor monies for Jerusalem be brought about; the other sees the salvation of the Jews there in the entire abolition of the "Chaluka" and holds that in its stead factories and other branches of gainful employment might be founded there. That the first proposal proceeds from the manifest error that all the Jews in Jerusalem live exclusively upon the "Chaluka", and that he who called the second proposal into life was naive enough to believe that all the Jews there are people able to work and to earn — this I leave undecided. One may see from it that both have conceived the matter as though it were here merely a material question, which could be solved only by the improvement or the abolition of the "Chaluka".

It is not to be denied that the "Chaluka" plays a weighty part in the general condition of the Jews there, and that, as one link in the chain of causes which have brought about the present state of things in Jerusalem, it has to bear the responsibility for much. But it is decidedly wrong to trace all the mischief back to it. Just as little is it right to see in it, in the "Chaluka", the sole and best means by which these conditions might be altered or bettered.

It is clear that within the narrow compass of an article one cannot give a detailed account of the history of the development of a great community numbering nearly forty thousand souls; but that is not at all necessary here. For our purpose it suffices to single out the chief moments of that history and to show what decisive factors were then chiefly at work and furnished the sources out of which the present evil conditions there gradually developed.

If we cast a glance back about a century, to the time when the first beginnings of a resettlement of the then still very thinly inhabited city of Jerusalem by Ashkenazic Jews became noticeable, we can establish chiefly two impelling motives which gave the first impulse to this settlement and for a time furthered it. These are, first, the patriotic love for the Holy Land of his fathers that dwells in the breast of every true Jew, which makes it his sacred duty to dwell in the fatherland. And secondly, the religious view widely spread among pious Jews that at the coming of the Messiah all the dead who do not lie buried in the Holy Land will have to set out upon a subterranean wandering through caverns until they to the Mount of Olives, the burying-ground of the Jerusalem