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No. 18. Vienna, 1 May 1903 — 4 Iyar 5663. Seventh Year

The Passing Phenomenon.

W. Hatred of the Jews, as everyone knows, is a passing phenomenon. At least our assimilationists assert as much with the greatest certainty. And they must know, for they have announced to us that antisemitism has here and there been buried for good, while elsewhere it has received no burial at all, but lies there a corpse from which only artificial attempts at galvanisation can still wring a few twitches.

We have listened to these assurances with due reverence and, "impractical utopians" that we are, have quite modestly voiced a few doubts. We have pointed to the experience of history, which will not quite square with this doctrine of the "passing phenomenon." By way of answer, figures were held up against us. Not statistical figures, arrived at scientifically — those, indeed, it was we who adduced. No! Only two were named to us: 1789 and 1848. And then followed a long panegyric upon these two figures, with a prospect of a third, the year 10,000, in which all hatred and envy will have vanished — and we were beaten. Beaten to the point of annihilation, thoroughly disposed of, together with our "utopia," which demands a home for the Jewish people so that it may not be brought to ruin by the "passing phenomenon."

Now, in the opinion of our esteemed opponents, that last danger was in any case excluded. And from their standpoint they were, in truth, entirely right. Since there is no Jewish people — as sundry rabbis and "mission"-fools — it logically cannot perish at all. And further, it logically needs no home either, for one surely needs no place of refuge for something that does not exist. With this last argument our assimilationists draw near to a group of so-called Zionists to whom the body of the Jewish people likewise does not seem of the great importance that we attach to it. According to the views of this group, a small fraction of Jews filled with the Jewish spirit suffices for the preservation of the Jewish type. This fleshless Zionism — and, despite all the spirit expended upon it, unhappily spiritless as well — which holds itself to be the most radical, thus touches at its outer edges the very type of Jew it most deeply despises: the Jews who do not wish to be Jews. This is so remarkable that it shall one day be discussed at greater length.

These two groups — the one that will not renounce the fleshpots of Egypt, and the other that pays homage to a kind of Zionist vegetarianism — have once again been roughly reminded by the events of the past week of the reality of conditions which is so repugnant to them. Once again there have been grave outrages against the Jews. Jewish blood has been shed, Jewish property has been plundered, and hundreds of Jewish families know not whither to flee to escape destruction. With deep sorrow we record these facts, and with bitter anger too. With sorrow for our unhappy, homeless brethren of our people, and with bitter anger — not only against the murderers and robbers whom the laxity of the authorities permitted to indulge their fanaticism, their superstition and their basest instincts, but with anger above all against those Jews who stay our arm when we labour at the work of redemption for our people. Yes, who stay our arm! For their inactivity, their holding aloof from every effort to bring about a lasting change, their secret and open resistance to a territorial solution of the Jewish question, their grudging disparagement of all that has been achieved, and their mockery of all our hopes for the future, calculated to discourage us, are far mightier obstacles to us than all the other resistances that separate us from our goal.

But let that not be our subject this time. The sad occurrences in Kishineff and in Uhnow once more thrust into the foreground the question: "What now?" Go back, bury the dead and rebuild what has been destroyed — so the prudent will say. Certainly, it is seemingly the most obvious course. The authorities will punish severely a part of the criminals, probably the clumsiest and not the guiltiest. Quiet will return once more. But what a quiet! The wrong that they have done will perhaps burn upon men's souls once quiet has returned, but their hatred will only grow the more bitter and implacable for it. The punishment they will have to suffer will make this hatred still shar-