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No. 41. | Vienna, 10 October 1902 — 9 Tishri 5663. | 6th Year

The Lesson from South Africa.

The news that Lord Alfred Milner has recognised the Zionist central body in South Africa as the representative of the Jewry there, by entrusting to the Federation a share in the issuing of passports to Jews, has aroused the most justified attention in wide circles. While the friends of Zionism see in the reported fact a natural and gratifying advance in the treatment of the Jewish question, the announcement of the South African administration's ordinance has, naturally, called forth a feeling of discomfort among the opponents of Zionism. And yet even anti-Zionists have had to concede the inner justice of the measure, in that they raise no objections to it, at least as regards a portion of the Jews. It is therefore evident that the anti-Zionist displeasure is not directed against the ordinance as such, which settles a seemingly difficult question in a simple manner, but that the ill-humoured astonishment of our fanatical opponents springs solely from the recognition that here a step has been taken which contradicts their laboriously propped-up theories and is therefore thoroughly distasteful to them.

Every person who wishes to enter the territory of the Transvaal or of the former Orange State, or to leave these territories, requires a passport under the regulations of the South African authorities. For non-Englishmen the passport is to be obtained only through the agency of the consulates concerned. Yes, there lies the difficulty: the consulates concerned. Which is this consulate concerned for the Jewish emigrants, counted by thousands, who come from countries in which they were almost never, or only in limited measure, recognised as citizens, and which bar their gates for ever to the Jews who have freed themselves from their merciless embrace? Should these poor people, who have never felt the blessing of a fatherland because they come from countries inhabited and ruled by barbarians, should they remain for ever unprotected and without representatives?

Does international law offer no solution to this question? Yes, and the English Government, the representative of the mightiest and politically most developed people on earth, has found it.

International law holds it equally possible that a person be regarded as a member of two states, as it admits the possibility that someone may stand outside every political community. For the case does sometimes arise that one state regards a person as having withdrawn, while no other state as yet accords this individual its citizenship. This case has hitherto properly acquired great importance only in theory; in practice it has seldom appeared as a mass phenomenon. Only the Jewish question has turned the dilemma from a theoretical into a practical one.

How, then, is such a persona nullius civitatis to be treated?

Even though all civilised countries, that is, in particular the whole of Europe with the exception of Russia and Roumania, treat all inhabitants in principle alike in matters of private law, in matters of public law a distinction is nevertheless made — within certain limits. If, therefore, a person is not entitled to the rights of a native, and in particular if a person is not represented by the authorities of the country, the question of the representative must naturally be raised. What, then, if no representative is to be found, or the one found refuses to act?

It is indeed a rule of international law that — within certain bounds — every man is to be judged according to the laws of his native land. But what if this native land is a land without law and civilisation? Can a state in which the principle prevails that all men are equal suffer the barbarism of a state which denies to a group of men equal legal capacity to extend to its own territory? Does the vague principle of international law count for more there than civilisation? The great Russian authority on international law, Martens, says in so many words: "The peculiar social and political conditions in which the Mohammedan peoples as well as the heathen and savage tribes live afford absolutely no possibility, in intercourse with these uncivilised or half-