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No. 14. — Vienna, 3 April 1903 — 6 Nissan 5663. — 7th Year.

Before the Passover Festival.

W. The fairest and most glorious of Jewish festivals draws near: the festival that commemorates the deliverance out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. There is scarcely a festival outside Judaism that approaches our Passover in hallowed sanctity, in wondrous vernal beauty; for Passover is the festival that proclaims freedom to us, even in the house of slaves.

Many thousands of Passovers has our people already kept: in freedom and in independence, and in bondage and in misery. Many thousands of martyrs have hallowed this festival with their blood. Can such a festival ever be forgotten? Can it ever be robbed of its majesty, of its radiant beauty? What are the handful of Goluth Jews who dismiss it with a shrug of the shoulders or a scornful smile, against the millions who keep it fervently, with longing for the homeland in their hearts and the hopeful cry of freedom on their lips? No! Even in the Goluth the splendour of our Passover will shine, though a thousand renegades be blind to its radiance.

And yet! A painful bitterness mingles with our joy. Year after year we see what is holiest and fairest to us dragged in the dust, defiled by insolent hands, slavered upon by venomous mouths. Year after year even those Jews who know only Easter and would gladly forget the Passover are reminded of it. They are forced back into the community from which they seek to withdraw. Though they will not keep the Passover, the blood-libel they must endure.

It was a few years ago, at the time when the Polna murder trial was being exploited to the full against the Jews in Austria. That depraved creatures who make a trade of antisemitism should strain every nerve to construct a ritual murder did not surprise me. But that otherwise fair-minded men in high and responsible positions could in all earnestness believe in such madness seemed to me, as to every other Jew, a thing impossible. It was then that I had the honour of being received at the archiepiscopal palace in Vienna, and afterwards by a high dignitary of the Church. They were eminent men whom I asked for their opinion of the alleged ritual murder. The answer was discouragingly cautious. I published these interviews at the time in a great Anglo-Jewish paper, which shortly before had printed the indignant utterances of the Archbishop of London upon the ritual-murder imposture.

Still more discouraging, however, than the answers I had received in Vienna was a communication which the editor of the English paper forwarded to me. It was the letter of an eminent German Jew, who deplored the publication of these interviews as inopportune and betrayed the greatest fear that they had done nothing but harm.

What must pass in the head and in the soul of such a Jew? That was the question which forced itself upon me then, and which is timely once more today; for the blood-libel has again cropped up this year, and the over-cautious are never in short supply. What enmity on every side must he believe in, what dangers must he see threatening, if he fears harm from such a publication! We Zionists are reproached with painting the situation of the Jews black on black, with exaggerating. But beside such Jews we are the most childlike of optimists! The deeper cause of this difference of opinion lies elsewhere, however. Jews of the stamp of that letter-writer, who were forever holding back their "co-religionists" from every Jewish action by pointing to universal humanity and assured progress, not only had no respect for any display of strength by the Jewish community, but positively feared it, lest people speak of a Jewish solidarity, lest a weapon be put into the hands of the enemies of the Jews. That is what confuses their heads and hearts — fear of their adversaries, this hypnosis that compels them to keep their eyes fixed ever and only upon the Jew-baiter, lest he fall upon them. Not the consciousness of their own strength, not the conviction of their own right, not faith in the imperishability of their people fills them. To them the outside help promised by a few little factions of liberal iridescence, or the publication of an "Antisemites' Mirror" in which every piece of knavery that has come to light among shady men of honour is catalogued, or the decoration of some banker or great industrialist of Jewish descent, seems the be-all and end-all of that which the world, concerning the struggle between the