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No. 43. | Vienna, 24 October 1902 — 23 Tishri 5663. | 6th Year

The Feast of Tabernacles.

בסכת תשבו שבעת ימים

One of our loveliest festivals we are now celebrating. We dwell in booths and tell one another of the fateful hours of the Jews' wanderings through the wilderness. We dwell in booths and rejoice in the Ethrog, the Lulab, the whole fragrant harvest of the land. We give thanks for the gifts of the earth . . . Yet a quiet sadness steals over us. We look back and behold a flourishing, vigorous, united people. Whoever was then a Jew lived for his brethren, strove for his honour, fought for his tribe, gave the last drop of his blood for the land of his fathers. Once we were all brethren . . . To-day the worm, bred of our very own stock, eats its way into the people. To-day we have enemies — in our own camp. And these are the worst of all!

They feign goodness before God and mankind, and all the while preach hatred against their own blood, because they are too selfish — they say: too "well-bred" — to go along with us, because they are too cowardly to reawaken with us the ancient strength of the people, to nourish the awakened longing for the fields of home that grows in us Zionists and resounds ever further . . . Yet these enemies of our own stock we hate as little as we — respect them. We are far too proud, far too noble, to be capable of hatred at all. To-day, as they celebrate the popular festival of Tabernacles, as they shake the Lulab, we wish only to remind them that this Lulab is an evergreen token of that soil from which the blood of their forefathers sprang!

Jewish Notabilities.

If it is true that literature in general, and the daily press in particular, is a mirror of the age and of society; if it is true that the state of the press is a gauge of the level of a people's culture; in short, if it is true that the press represents public opinion and its tendencies, then we are at times seized with a desperate anxiety for our Jewish society in Western Europe. While the newspapers and periodicals of other nations occupy themselves thoroughly and earnestly with the most important questions and currents of the day, while the whole of civilised mankind is imbued with the conviction that real facts and popular movements, and not individual persons and their fortunes, are what is important and decisive, our Jewish press of assimilationists and Pharisees carries on a repugnant cult of personality. The Jewish people is now living through one of its greatest historical moments: it is rousing itself from a death-like sleep to new life; the non-Jews themselves turn their eyes upon the great movement that has arisen in the bosom of the Jewish people; and only our Jewish press, which feels itself called to speak in the name of rigid Jewry, looks down upon Zionism from on high, for it has, no doubt, greater and more important interests, weightier questions!

In these Jewish "Almanachs de Gotha" one may read articles pages long which proclaim with jubilation and blare of trumpets some distinction conferred upon a Jew — no matter for what or by whom — and would persuade their readers that thereby a further step has been taken towards the attainment of the Kingdom of God on earth. And if only they remained Jewish Gotha calendars, we should have nothing to say against it — but no, they are not content with this rôle, and seek to generalise the smallest, most insignificant facts into the conclusion that the whole sorrowful history of the Golus is drawing to its close and that soon there will be no Jewish question any more.

It is not our intention to engage in polemics against the Jewish papers, nor is it our task to attack particular persons — our movement is too earnest and too profound for that — but none the less we feel ourselves