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No. 5. Vienna, 30 January 1903 — 2 Shebat 5663. 7th Year.

The Jews' Bailiff.

Every Jewish community of the Middle Ages stood under the rule of a Jews' bailiff, that stern master whose governance seldom meant anything other than torment and death for those he ruled.

The Jews' bailiff, the inexorable one, is here again — a bailiff whose jurisdiction reaches from sea to sea. It is Hunger. Mercilessly he forces those he rules down into death, exile and slavery.

We certainly have no wish to exaggerate. We merely reprint, soberly, a sober line of nine words which may be read on the 18th page of the minutes of the last Hamburg session of the Committee for Combating the Traffic in Girls, Jewish Section; beside the word "hunger-typhus" stands an asterisk, and the note to this word reads: Some 5000 Jews in Galicia die of it every year. It does not say: In Galicia and in Russia and in Roumania.

And those who, in panic-stricken flight before the Jews' bailiff, prefer the uttermost to the undeserved compulsion of degrading beggary — do they go into exile more gladly, more freely, than the Jews once went at a lordly command? "200, 300 Jewish emigrants passed through yesterday!" is a weekly notice in the daily papers of the capital. The many acts of the drama, from the hunger-cellar in Russia to the sweating-room of London and America, have blunted the Jews of Western Europe, and they feel nothing more at it than the satisfaction of knowing their own country barred against clamouring poverty.

Not long ago everyone of feeling in Central Europe threw up his hands in horror: in Korea, the newspapers said, the famine was so terrible that girls were being sold by their relatives for a mere nothing, or were selling themselves as slaves for a single meal. Far more indifferent and inconspicuous, but of the same purport, was a more recent notice, which read: The traffic in girls has of late grown remarkably stronger; it draws its chief material from Morocco and Eastern Europe.

The sadness of it need not be spelt out — we are speaking of our own misfortune. "The influences of destruction and degradation creep about our co-religionists in the East," says the pamphlet already mentioned, "shake them to the marrow and threaten to ruin them utterly." The Jews' bailiff celebrates his triumphs. He has broken through a sacred tradition of the Jew, the purity of his wife, the pride of the nation. No accusations — no, none! "The oppression, unworthy of human beings," it goes on, "under which the Jews of the East groan, has brought about the present conditions." Feeble words for the distress which has made of the ghettos of the East, of those homes of famous family devotion and famous purity of morals, the chief seat of the traffic in girls!

The budget of every modern state demands enormous sums for the protection of the most precious capital of every nation — the human being. Everywhere men arm against alcohol, against contagious diseases. Our people has better health and few destructive passions. But want works more powerfully than these. Worse than tuberculosis among the other peoples works typhus; worse than alcohol, the traffic in girls. Figures of three places denote the number of especially vigorous individuals whom the latter drives every year into slavery among licentious peoples and to an early end.

What counter-measures are to be taken against this? We have received from the committee mentioned an invitation to lend our assistance. There is a slight naïveté in this communication, inasmuch as we may permit ourselves the remark that, to our knowledge, there is no lack of Zionists in the branch committees of the central body concerned. If the gentlemen desire the intervention of our corporations — no Zionist national organisation has ever refused a task on behalf of the Jewish people. The committee may without further ado ask for any work it desires: the distribution of pamphlets, information, warnings, the establishment of shelters.

But for our part we take the liberty of returning an invitation to the committee and to all who support its endeavours. Its activity and ours suffice at present only, at be-