Die Welt

Editorial Office and Administration: VIENNA IX., Türkenstrasse No. 9. Telephone 14199.

Published every Friday. Correspondence is to be addressed not to individual persons but to the Editorial Office or the Administration: Vienna, IX., Türkenstrasse No. 9. Unstamped letters are not accepted, and manuscripts are not returned. The editors receive callers daily from half past eleven until half past twelve.

Advertising rates: according to the tariff available on request. The advertisement section closes on Tuesday evening. Single numbers 30 Heller.

Subscription prices: Austria-Hungary: yearly Kr. 12.—, half-yearly Kr. 6.—, quarterly Kr. 3.—. Abroad: Germany yearly Mk. 13.70, half-yearly Mk. 6.85, quarterly Mk. 3.45; England yearly Shg. 14.—, half-yearly Shg. 7.—, quarterly Shg. 3.10; Russia yearly R. 7.—, half-yearly R. 3.50, quarterly R. 1.75; Switzerland, France, Italy, Turkey, Roumania, Bulgaria, Servia, Greece, Egypt yearly Frcs. 17.—, half-yearly Frcs. 8.50, quarterly 4.25; America yearly Doll. 3.40, half-yearly Doll. 1.70, quarterly Doll. —.85

No. 31. Vienna, 1 August 1902. 6th Year

The Faint-Hearts of Jewry.

One would be at a loss if one tried to gather under a fitting collective name all that is proposed and undertaken for the Jewish common weal outside the Zionist movement. Can one seriously speak of a Jewish national policy on the part of our opponents? They themselves would doubtless protest against it most vehemently — they whose nerves are already set on edge by the very term "Jewish people," and who find it altogether indecent to speak of a Jewish policy. Quite apart from the fact that it would in itself be the bitterest mockery to present this flighty and distracted, planless and systemless bustle as a national policy.

But even if one could not easily settle upon a suitable noun to describe it, it can hardly be difficult to define with the utmost precision, by an adverb, the activity of the assimilationists on behalf of Jewry as a whole. Always fearfully — that is the watchword of anti- and a-Zionist tactics, the one definite thing in their otherwise indefinite actions. Our wounds, but our soundest parts as well, must not for anything in the world be laid bare — if the antisemites were to see it! . . . Jewish nationhood? For Heaven's sake: grist in flood to the antisemites' mill! A Jewish home? So the Jews are without a fatherland — the antisemites will say. Always the antisemites again . . . The Jew may not distinguish himself from others either to his disadvantage or to his advantage; there may not even be more mentally ill among us than among the non-Jews, lest the enemies of the Jews draw ruinous conclusions from that too. Ergo the "Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith" condemns the efforts to establish a Jewish sanatorium for nervous diseases, however urgent the need for one may be. Another example: when it is a question of extending momentary help to persecuted Roumanian Jews driven from their homes, then the heart of the assimilated Hungarian Jew, too, beats in brotherly sympathy — and in mortal terror. Will not the antisemites say that the interests of the Hungarian Jews extend beyond the red-white-and-green frontier posts? So let us by all means exercise our Jewish sympathy, but nicely and discreetly, with the public excluded . . .

One may therefore judge how provoking the first appearance of the Zionists must have been to these faint-hearts. Here came people storming forward who took not the slightest account of the antisemites, who did not shrink from setting the peaceful aspirations of the Jewish nation in the full light of European publicity, who unveiled the sufferings and the ills of Jewry before all eyes. No — that was unheard of, that could not be tolerated. A flood of protests came pelting down, and the exasperation of the assimilationist faint-hearts rose to its height. That is the psychology of the Protest-Rabbis and of all the ugly hostility which our movement encountered in its beginnings.

Since then the temperature of anti-Zionism has noticeably fallen. It has become evident that the candour and the honesty of our endeavours have in no way harmed Judaism, and have even wrung respect from the antisemites. Nevertheless one would be mistaken in believing that the people who combat us have cast off the least particle of their undignified timidity. Again and again, whenever the true situation of the Jewish people is set forth from the Zionist side before a wider public, an anxious rustling passes through the anti-Zionist forest of newspapers: Whatever will the antisemites say to that!

Such a rustling was called forth, too, by Dr. Herzl's recent testimony before the English Alien Immigration Commission. Various German-Israelite assimilationist papers printed a "critical appreciation" of Dr. Herzl's testimony, in which it is pointed out with horror that a member of the Commission, Major Gordon, the leader of the anti-alien movement, attempted "to exploit a number of Dr. Herzl's remarks for his own purposes." Immediately afterwards, to be sure, it is admitted