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No. 44.

Vienna, 1 November 1901.

Fifth Year

The Palestine Bibliography of the "Society for Technical Studies in Syria and Palestine". By A. Neufeld, cand. cam. (Vienna).

On the 27th of April 1898 Kiaochow was proclaimed a German colony; immediately thereupon the "Industrial Syndicate for the Economic Opening-up of Kiaochow and its Hinterland," founded in Berlin, entered upon its activity; the Deutsch-Asiatische Bank in Shanghai proceeded to the establishment of a branch in Tsingtau, the capital of Kiaochow; the press found its representative there in the "Deutsch-Asiatische Warte"; the "Shantung Railway and Mining Syndicate," called into life on the 1st of June 1899 with a capital of 54 million marks (capital of the Jewish Colonial Bank only 40 mill. Mk.), set about the realisation of its large-scale plans; and — finally, in January 1899, a midwife from Cologne addressed an inquiry to the Governor of Kiaochow whether favourable prospects for her professional activity were to be found there. Thus do the Germans colonise in a land which is almost unexplored, almost unknown, and of which the existing literature can scarcely be counted upon the fingers of one hand.

And what do the Jews do? They have a land which has been known for thousands of years, whose bibliography fills a couple of thousand octavo pages, in which almost every stone has been explored and described by the four Palestine research societies, which in antiquity stood upon the summit of ancient civilisation; they have a land which on every side is surrounded by the nurseries of the old civilisation; they have a land which, through the development of the lines of communication in part projected and in part already in course of execution, is predestined to the rôle of a modern Phoenicia — and they seek to frustrate the coming into being of the Jewish Colonial Bank, the bank which, out of the last pfennigs of the hungry masses, has only after many difficulties and pains attained its capacity for action.

Where have the rich barons of finance and princes of the Bourse remained? At the chase. At the chase after the title of Consul-General of some negro republic; at the chase after the purchasable order of some duodecimo prince who finds himself always in momentary embarrassment for money; at the chase after intercourse with the rulers of a polity which seeks to cover the money it requires for its perpetual revolutions by ever-new emissions of postage stamps (sold in advance to the philatelic wholesale dealers). The Jewish potentates of the Bourse know well that Jewry can for the present offer them neither titles nor orders; therefore they squander their capital upon those polities which have the best prospect of declaring themselves bankrupt in the shortest time. Many of our financiers, on the other hand — as is known to the initiated — have attempted to frustrate the coming into being of the Jewish Colonial Bank by the ugliest of means.

That the financial activity of the bank is held in abhorrence by our masters of finance and that the capital of the Colonial Bank was not many times over-subscribed, that people who can offer nothing but their money have held aloof from the bank — that is in part, and I do not shrink from saying it here, the fault of the bank's direction. It sought by its prospectus to work only upon the feelings of the reader; it forgot, however, that the Jew who by his emotional disposition is accessible to Zionism is usually no capitalist, and that the capitalist in his turn suffers himself, unhappily, to be influenced only by material considerations, is mistrustfully disposed towards everything Jewish, and all the more so towards an undertaking founded by intellectual Jews inexperienced in matters of money, such as the Jewish Colonial Bank, whose direction unhappily omitted, in its appeal for the subscription of shares, that which every small joint-stock undertaking offers in its prospectus of issue — to adduce real, numerical evidence of its profitableness and to sketch a picture of its probable future shape. It was the duty of the bank's direction to work out such a business-like and numerical prospectus, if not for the great mass of the people, at any rate for the small band of our haute finance. And nothing was, and nothing would even now be, more conducive to the purposes of the bank than the publication of a suitable Palestine bibliography, systematic, and if not complete, yet exhaustive in the natural-economic-technical and the political-diplomatic direction. To say something more particular upon this will be the purpose of the lines which follow.

There is scarcely a land about which so much has been written as about Palestine. The statisticians, who love to juggle with great numbers, find a grateful task in calculating how many letters for the