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No. 21.

Vienna, 23 May 1902.

6th Year

The Grand Duke of Baden on Zionism.

(Telegram to "Die Welt.")

Karlsruhe, 21 May.

The Grand Duke of Baden to-day received a deputation from the Delegates' Conference of German Zionists, which had been held at Mannheim this week. The deputation consisted of Dr. Bodenheimer (Cologne), Dr. Friedemann (Berlin), Herr Kaufmann (Freiburg i. Br.), Dr. Moses (Mannheim), Dr. Klee (Berlin) and Dr. Schauer (Mainz). The Grand Duke conversed with the deputation in an exceedingly cordial manner. He expressed his lively satisfaction that among the German Jews the misunderstandings concerning the Zionist movement were in the course of disappearing. To further the aims of our leader Dr. Herzl, he said, had always been to him a cherished duty. The successes of our movement fill the Grand Duke with joy. The audience lasted about half an hour.

The Temper of the German Jews.

By Dr. Adolf Friedemann.

A few months ago some thirty persons in Breslau, members of the best Jewish class of society, had themselves baptised. Not singly and by stealth did they slip across into the camp of those who had hitherto oppressed them; not fearfully and shyly was the betrayal accomplished: defiantly and openly they made their assault upon honesty.

This occurrence illuminates in admirable fashion the present temper in the Jewish camp. Men are beginning to divide into two parties which confront each other sharply. On the one side the faint-hearted, the weak, the cowardly and the self-seekers; on the other a gathering of those elements which still cling to Judaism, possess a sense of honour, and despise a lie even when it walks abroad publicly honoured. And because the latter circles are slowly but surely gaining ground, because they are passing over to the attack against weakness and indolence, the deserters are rallying. Because the individual on his way to the enemy finds bayonets levelled at him on every side, they attempt to break out together. And thus it is explicable that the opposition in our meetings assumes ever more irritable forms and shows itself ever more sharply. The more our opponents see their possessions threatened, the more vehemently do they oppose us.

It must, however, also be borne in mind that it grows daily more difficult for the assimilationists to maintain and defend their standpoint. From the Christian side they no longer receive any support — on the contrary. Were we to set ourselves to it, we should have no difficulty in forming a Christian Philo-Zionist League, for sympathy is always with the fighters and not with the soft-hearted, and the necessity of a radical solution of the Jewish question is by now felt even in philosemitic circles. Thus the budget debate in Prussia has passed without producing the slightest intervention on behalf of the Jews, who are everywhere slighted. The Centre, too, now that Dr. Lieber — who was well disposed towards us and held fast to Windthorst's tradition — is dead, will be even less willing than hitherto to support an interpellation, and the pitiful impotence of the Liberal parties becomes more manifest every day. And to these political corpses our assimilationist Jews cling with the strength of despair. Nowhere does the utter political immaturity of the German Jews show itself so crassly as in the circumstance that they still hope for a Liberal Imperial Chancellor, and imagine that on the day Rickert moves into the palace in the Wilhelmstrasse their distress will be at an end. That is no exaggeration. In fact they cannot comprehend that Liberalism is completely buried for the foreseeable future, and that the marriage with the Freisinn must be dissolved, since otherwise we shall follow it into the grave. Our Jews cannot grasp that one may indeed raise monuments to the dead, but neither can nor may prevent the natural decay of the dead body. And when men entrench themselves behind phrases about "gratitude" for services rendered and the like, they merely prove that they do not understand their own vital interests. After all, the Liberal fractions of to-day are not Liberalism. The fighters of 1848 would very strongly against such a Ver-