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No. 6. Vienna, 6th February 1903 — 9th Shebat 5663. 7th Year

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Morocco.

Ex oriente lux! — In the East there is a gleaming and a flashing. Heavy clouds are gathering there, and a storm of passion among the masses of the people, long gagged and enslaved, is rising against their oppressors.

In Morocco, the land which occupies one of the best and most favourable positions on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea and yet is sunk in deep barbarism and does not understand how to draw profit from its favourable situation — in Morocco, the land of the barbarians, open revolution, a civil war, has broken out.

And, as always happens in barbarous states, the popular revolt took the form of a party struggle between the adherents of the anglophile Sultan now reigning, Muley-Abd-el-Aziz, and the pretender to the throne, Bu-Hamara, who is supported by the hordes of the Berbers and Kabyles; it became a "guerilla."

If, then, all Europe holds its eyes fixed in tense expectation upon events in Fez and Tangier, if the Moroccan question occupies all the diplomatists of Europe, if England, France, Italy and Spain follow events with anxious hearts, since it is indeed a matter of their own supremacy in the Mediterranean, we Jews, and especially we Zionists, have perhaps still more reason to interest ourselves in the question.

For we too have interests in Morocco which lie nearer our hearts than the arts of diplomacy, than the political rivalry which is in truth of no significance for the life of the nations — we have in Morocco a hundred and fifty thousand brethren.

The Jews of Morocco! There was a time, and it is not so long ago, when they were on everyone's lips. At that time the rumour spread over Europe that in Morocco the Jews found themselves in a condition surpassing all the horrors of the Middle Ages, that they were being mercilessly massacred in multitudes as victims of the blind fury of the fanatical population.

And the hearts of the Jewish philanthropists were stirred, and Sir Moses Montefiore himself went thither in the year 1880 and employed his whole authority, spared no pains, and secured for the unhappy Jews a momentary, seeming relief — life was made, if not tolerable, at least possible for them.

But meanwhile other and greater misfortunes visited the Jewish people; other, mightier floods of Jewish tears and Jewish sorrow poured over the lands and with their roar drowned the moaning and whimpering of the distant Jews of the Maghreb.

But once again a violent storm has arisen in Morocco; the cry of mortal terror reaches us once more and compels us to turn our attention to them, our tortured brethren.

There is, moreover, yet another reason for us to go more closely into the Moroccan question. Men cannot directly see their own features; for that purpose they must have a reflection, an image. When we Zionists lay bare to the West European Jew, with hair-fine exactitude and inexorable consistency, all the defects of his social position, when we draw his attention to the dangers that threaten him, he shrugs his shoulders mistrustfully — he does not believe it; he cannot and will not believe it. And that is natural, for nothing is so deeply rooted in human nature as the desire for happiness and well-being, nothing is so powerful as self-deception. And this self-deception of the West European Jew, which paralyses his energy, lays fetters upon his mind and checks its flight, we can overcome only if we hold his own situation before his eyes in a reflection, in a magnification — demonstrate it ad oculos.

150,000 Jews dwell in Morocco. They are scattered over the whole country, but the largest communities are in the cities of Fez, Marakkesch, and Mequinez, which belong to the "crown lands," to the Bilad-el-Maghsen, that is, to the territory where the Arabs loyal to the government dwell. But Jews are also to be found in the rest of the country, among the Berbers (called Amazirghen in the north, Schillukhs in the south).