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No. 13.

Vienna, 28 March 1902.

6th Year

The Activity of the Alliance.

By Dr. Elias (Mülhausen).

In the forty years of its existence the Alliance has rendered great services to the oppressed and needy portion of our people; but the effective help which it promises in its statutes it has not brought them.

In spite of the exertions it has made, in spite of the enormous means placed at its disposal by the sense of solidarity of the Jews of Western Europe, in spite of the fact that one of the most gifted statesmen of Jewish stock stood at its head for years and decades and placed his influence and his experience at its service, it has succeeded only in isolated cases in preventing injustice from being done to the Jews, and has been able to relieve the misery of the Jewish masses only for a few moments. The general condition of the Jews it could not influence.

In the lands of Jewish distress, in Persia, in Morocco, in Roumania and Russia, the Jews still groan, weighed down by the hatred of the Jews. Still, and more than ever before, the lament of our unhappy people rises to heaven, and still there are no signs that the Alliance will render effective help. It is indeed understandable that at the beginning of its activity it could achieve no brilliant results. It was the first time since the Jews have lived in the Dispersion that an organisation had been founded whose task it was to stem Jewish distress. The leaders of this organisation had to be their own teachers; they were bound to err at first; but from their successes and failures they ought to have learned what means, or which means best, could heal the languishing body of the Jewish people.

From the outset the Alliance was well aware that the forms of charity known from of old could effect no lasting improvement in the condition of the Jews. It therefore contented itself, and with perfect justice, with helping by grants of relief only in the event of catastrophes. For the rest, it sought to bring about a material betterment of the Jews by equipping them with knowledge that was to lighten their struggle for existence, and by endeavouring to induce the peoples among whom the Jews lived to mitigate or to repeal the exceptional laws directed against them.

To improve the Jews morally it can hardly have seriously wished; for it knew full well that in moral respects the emancipated Jew may learn from the Jew of the Ghetto, and not the reverse.

Where a betterment in the country itself was not possible, it encouraged, at least in certain periods, an emigration of the Jews.

The Alliance concentrated its chief activity upon instruction. Its regular revenues it employed in founding and maintaining schools: elementary and technical schools. One may say with perfect justice: the history of the Alliance is for the greater part a history of its schools.

Now, are schools capable of furthering the material interests of great masses?

The answer is: Yes, if the instruction pursues only the object of preparing the pupils for life, and if those who leave the school are offered the opportunity of turning the knowledge they have acquired to profitable account.

These conditions, however, the Alliance schools do not fulfil.

Schools whose language of instruction is not the language of the country pursue other aims than mere aims of instruction.

Further, as the Alliance itself reported in its reports of the years 1893 and 1897, the Jews in the countries in which it maintains the most schools are not in a position to derive profit from the knowledge acquired in the schools.

In the report of the year 1893 it is stated that "the Jewish youth who leave school furnished with a store of elementary knowledge must exercise their activity in a barren and very often hostile milieu."

And in the year 1897 the complaint is made "that the condition of the handicrafts in the East is so sad that in many places the apprentices are very often without employment, and that, seeing only an uncertain future before them, they quickly lose heart."

The task, however, which the Alliance had set itself could not be solved by its schools; no more than by its plan of bringing about a repeal or mitigation of the exceptional laws directed against the Jews.