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No. 30. | Vienna, 24 July 1903 — 29 Thamuz 5663. | 7th Year

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Back!

W. So this, then, is wisdom's final word: "Back!"

The representatives of the various relief societies of the Jewish middle class in England, Germany and Austria have once more proclaimed that it is best for the Jews in the lands of oppression and ruin to stay where they are; or, to put it otherwise, that duty requires of these Jews that they not make their dying so burdensome to the Jews of other countries.

But when, notwithstanding, a few hundred families could no longer endure the places where certain destruction awaited them, when some of these disobedient ones ventured as far as Berlin, a member of a relief committee thought it necessary to warn the Jews, in the German newspapers, against granting these emigrants any help. As his reason, this faithful Eckart of Western Jewry stated that such assistance would encourage emigration and draw thousands of Jews to the West.

The man, and the whole school of thought he represents, are not so very wrong. The Jews of the West do in fact face a great danger if the stream of emigrants cannot be checked. Perhaps the worthy spokesman of the committee even means well in his fashion—not only towards the pockets of his well-to-do kinsmen, but in a certain sense towards the poor, despairing emigrants themselves. At least that is suggested by the passage of his warning in which he declares that no home offers itself to the fleeing Jews to which they might go without fear of being turned away. And so he repeats the one thing that seems to him the surest course in the face of all dangers and unpleasantnesses: the demand that the emigrants be sent back.

This wisdom of Abdera—or, lest the German be offended, this cunning of the Schildburgers—is nothing new. "The fault lay, in truth, merely in the means by which they sought to remedy the evil," says the good-natured poet who handed down the merits of Abdera to posterity. This small fault is peculiar also to the gentlemen who stand at the head of the great relief societies. Certainly the danger to the other Jews exists. There is no doubt that emigration on a large scale, without preparation, without organisation, without an assured home, must prove ruinous to the emigrants themselves as well. But does that justify a course of action whose very harshness must drive the despairing to the most perverse deeds?

Let us recapitulate. For decades everyone who does not deliberately feign ignorance has known that for hundreds of thousands of Jews there is but one means of rescue—emigration. It would be a wonder if this eminently economic question had not long since been recognised, and the urgency of its solution were still open to doubt. Yet it is quite natural that the simplest, the most natural thing—namely, the will to submit to necessity—should find it so hard to prevail. The self-evident will always be universally acknowledged and only in the rarest cases acted upon. In this question of emigration, too, nothing could happen until the very number of the victims even the most complacent devotees of comfort and the most narrow-minded egoists auf-