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No. 4 | Vienna, 24th January 1902. | 6th Year

The British Brothers.

Like a trail of blood, antisemitism stretches across the globe. Antisemitism passes from land to land, from the East westward to the ends of the earth. It shrinks from no river, it fears no mountain; no canal, no boundary-stone and no frontier hinders it. It sweeps over everything, surmounts every obstacle, crosses the seas in good heart and good cheer, and wherever a Jew but sets his foot, it stamps out of the ground ten adversaries to make war upon him. To the eternally wandering Jew is joined the eternally wandering antisemitism, a noble pair of brothers, both sprung from the unnatural situation of Jewry. At the moment when the Jew lost his footing in the soil, when he hung in the air between heaven and earth, torn loose from all earthly and natural roots, "neither fish nor flesh," as Shakespeare says, the tragedy of the "Eternally Wandering Jew" was bound to begin. That this tragedy should be followed, as in genuine ancient Greek drama, by the satyr-play as its closing piece, is only the natural development of events. "Persecuted and derided" — such is the earthly lot of the Jew in the present day. With optimism he consoles himself with the hope of a happy hereafter.

It is an axiom whose correctness is beyond all doubt, a truth which the sparrows have long been chirping from the housetops: every country will bear only a certain percentage of Jews. "Take it all in all, you will find no" Gentile who is not infected with antisemitism. In the one, the sense of justice still prevails; in another, intelligence; in a third, material advantage; and in a fourth, a natural modesty which forbids him to display brusquely his hatred of the "foreign Jews," the arrow in his own flesh and blood. Even if the Jew has brought nothing else with him into his place of refuge, into his new home, the hatred of the Jews has surely come along. It is his inseparable shadow, small and scarcely noticeable while the sun of enlightenment stands at its zenith, but covering gigantic spaces when the orb of day hastens to its setting. Great, free England, the home of Lord Chatham, of Burke, of Peel and of Gladstone — England, one of the last places of refuge, where until recently there was as yet no naturalised antisemitism — is now likewise setting out under full sail upon the wide sea of the base instincts of the masses.

"The British Brothers" — that is the Patriots' League of France, the Stöcker League of Germany, the Christian Social party of Austria, in a nutshell. The germ is present among the "British Brothers" in England; the leaders and agitators are present, and the catchwords have been coined. Not new and, say, modern ones — oh no! A catchword must resemble an old, worn coin if it is to circulate freely; it must have lost every form if it is to be able to assume all forms. It must speak to the base instincts of the people, and be vague and devoid of all inner reason; it need only sound full and ring loud — "sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal." The great multitude must be able to grow enthusiastic over it, and each man must be able to think something quite different by it, according to his — want of understanding. It runs differently in the different languages, but the sense is the same, and so is the stale content. Jean Chauvin says: "La France aux Français," Cousin Jonathan: "America for the Americans," the German Michel: "Deutschland den Deutschen," and John Bull now cries in the streets of London's East: "England for the English." Whereupon he unfurls two Union Jacks, one in his right hand and one in his left — two hold better than one — and, his stomach filled full of Scotch whisky, goes from one public-house to the next, and the more he has drunk, the louder he cries: "Britain for the Britons." And so the crowd soon gathers into a noisy, hooting, whistling, bawling and shrieking mob, which, to the blare of trumpets and merry fiddling, marches with unmilitary step through the streets, drawing in ever more newcomers and recruits, until it arrives at the steps of the People's Palace (Volkspalast).

There a merry, wine-flushed company is already assembled, a crowd eager for applause and greedy for it. On the platform sit the "lions of the evening," the members of Parliament Messrs. Gordon, Ridley, Wason, Norman and Robertson, and Messrs.