Die Welt

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No. 49. | Vienna, 4 December 1903 — 15 Kislev 5664. | 7th Year.

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The Administration of "Die Welt."

Boycott.

One of the saddest phenomena of the sad Jewish history of the last 1800 years is the boycott, under which the Jewish people has suffered unspeakably, and which has followed it stubbornly into every land of its exile. There is no field of human endeavour and activity, no conceivable calling, which has not, in the course of their history in the Diaspora, been made impossible for the Jews, or made difficult, or at the very least made bitter to them.

Cruelly torn from the soil of its homeland, the Jewish people has been prevented from establishing a home for itself elsewhere. Apart from isolated exceptions (the Jewish tribes of the Arabian peninsula, where they held autonomous but unconnected commonwealths until the rise of Islam), we do not find that the Jewish people was ever granted, anywhere in the many regions of the world into which it had been flung, the chance to devote itself quietly and permanently to agriculture, that first and cardinal condition of gaining a firm foothold in a new homeland. At first, and this immediately after the loss of their statehood, disturbances and instability in the political sphere made it impossible for them to take up the life of husbandmen, whether in their new home of Babylonia or in their ancestral land of Palestine.

It fared still worse with them when later, yielding to the pressure of circumstances, they made their way to Europe. Here all activity in this direction was made impossible for them, simply by forbidding them to till the land and to acquire landed property. And even where this law did not exist, care had been taken, by other restrictions and exceptional laws, to spoil agriculture for the Jews. Or could there be any talk of a developed husbandry, or even of an inclination towards it, where they had to expect at every moment to be driven from their existing places of abode? This was the first and the most effective boycott employed against the Jewish people, and truly no better means could have been devised to place it at a disadvantage against the other nations and to make its existence hard.

The Jews fared little better with the handicrafts. In this field, too, obstacle upon obstacle was contrived for them at all times and in all countries, until at last in many lands the practice of a handicraft was made altogether impossible for them. And in all these cases the boycott was the more effective as it was the outflow of religious and economic motives. And it was bound to be the more effective as no means were shunned to enforce it. For it was easy, so exceedingly easy, to get the better of a weak minority, hemmed in and fettered on every side, since the weak must come off the worse in every struggle, be it of a political or an economic nature. And nothing was easier than to use for this purpose the prejudice prevailing against the Jews as such, and this means never failed. And so the Jews had much to suffer from the deplorable fact of boycotts of every kind, and were continually confined to an ever-narrowing field of possible livelihoods.

When at length the wrong done to the Jews through the centuries was in some measure made good, by their being recognised in all civilised states as citizens of equal rights, the Jewish side cherished the expectation that the boycott against them would now also cease. It was expected, and it could fairly be expected, that with the equality of the Jews at least the state itself would avoid everything that might point to a boycotting of the now emancipated Jewish citizens. But far from it. The states relapse, in their dealings with the Jews, into the usage of an age in which duties and