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[Illustration: Star of David with "Asia Minor", "Syria", "Palestine", "Sinai Peninsula"]

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No. 29. Vienna, 19 July 1901. Fifth Year

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For the Day of Mourning.

By Julius Uprimny.

The workmen of Ezra had built the Temple with the trowel in the one hand and the sword in the other. So long as the proud edifice stood, Judah's sword-hand was never again empty. The Samaritan lied, and the Idumæan whispered glittering words into the ear of the mighty and of the ambitious. Intently the foreign king listened to the tale of his envoy, to the description of the wide treasure-chambers of the Temple, filled with rich booty of heavy gold and of glittering stones; and soon the war-horses were stamping before the murderous scythed chariot. Not long, and the shattered ironwork lay upon a field of Judah, and the horses bore the fugitive hastily back. Perhaps the enemy had at the first surprised the watch about the Temple. But in grim assault the Jews had at last cleansed their homeland of the hosts of the Syrian, of the Egyptian, of the Parthian.

The ninth of Ab it was that first saw the flames in which a wonder of the world went down, flames after whose extinction a night of terror, seeming without end, broke in over the devastated land and its enslaved people; the ninth of Ab heard the sobbing of the hour of parting, in which the captives took leave of the place of their cradle, of the grave of their father, whereon for long, long years no eye was again to rest in loving remembrance. Then burned the bodies of the Temple's defenders upon the pyre that was their due. The fragrance of the cedarwood of the building, of the precious nard of the vessel, caressed amid the burning the dead bodies of the immortal heroes. The white cloud that leapt on high called the scattered fugitive in the distant mountains to a service for the dead for his beautiful, for his brave, for his proud brethren. Honour to the worthy! Of them no man can bring anything more overwhelming than the historian who tells us: Hunger was in the city with its greedy, hideously burning eyes. Only that they did not yet eat the corpses — else everything. The Romans knew this well, and knew the distress within the walls. And yet in this time many of them went over to the Jews. So powerfully had the heroic courage worked upon them, and the victory of the spirit over bodily powerlessness; so eagerly did they hasten into the school of a boundless manhood. In all the world they had struck notches into their swords, in the dullness of accustomed combat. In Judah for the first time they found an adversary by so much the better, that they could fight only with him, not against him.

Battlefield, arena and galley became the mass graves of a glorious people that in its good fortune did not see the future. Not because it neglected to be diplomatically friendly, obliging and reasonable — for that it had its strength. But that strength it entrusted to judges and to heroic leaders who returned too late. It had believed too long the mighty of possession, who in the moment of danger did not hesitate to sacrifice the people to their coin, and who at the least, in their easy living, had found pleasure in rottenness and in the mind of the slave. In the history of Judah's fall we find treason to the people almost always united with much property. The preachers of peace, while the ferment was rising, became deserters when the weapons rang that the people had forged out of its chains.

Berenice, daughter of the Jewish king Agrippa and the friend of Titus, had prompted her lover to the command that the Temple be spared. Our Temple — Judah's Temple, saved by a woman's love for the enemy? Rather let the executioner discharge his office — and then die. For fate was wroth with Rome for Jerusalem's sake, and the year of victory crowned the first Roman soldier-emperor. In civil war Judah's adversary fell for ever — but Judah lives, sick, gravely sick, but it lives!

The tower Phasael upon Moriah looked down on that day of mourning upon the ship-camp of the Romans, as the broken slaves were riveted fast to the rowing-benches and the weeping throng of women and children went down into the darkness of the ships' holds. A picture of later times! At the rowing-benches of foreign peoples the Jews sit to this day, labour for others, suffer through others. In sorrow