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No. 24 | Vienna, 10th June 1904 — 27th Sivan 5664. | 8th Year.

The Returning Emigrants.

When one speaks of the Jewish returning emigrants, one speaks of those whom misery has clasped in its arms with unutterable intimacy — so intimately that it will no longer let them go. It is a type such as scarcely any other people on earth knows, however much wretchedness and want there may be everywhere. These are the wretched, whose lot is so evil that they expect some betterment of their condition even from a return to Russia or Roumania. And these are also the resolute, who parted with the last remnants of their pitiful "possessions," with their last bed and their last shirt, to escape the jaws of hell that threatened to devour them and their children. These are the daring, who began their wanderings without knowing whether they would not be driven back the very next day, and who yet staked their whole hope upon this one, last attempt. These are the desperate, whose goal was far more adventurous than Colchis and the Fleece once were for the Argonauts; for they sought a land where men are kind to poor, persecuted strangers — where men are kind to Jews. They are the warriors beside whom the fighting men of the great migrations seem like boys with wooden swords; for the whole world stands in arms against them, the defenceless. And these are the strong; for they resist deliverance, resist death that lies so easily within reach, because they must live not for themselves but for others, for their children or their parents.

It is with these Jewish returning emigrants that we are concerned. Why do they return? Well, to one State they are unwelcome. It does not so much as admit them. Another grants them entry, to be sure, but demands security that they shall not become a burden upon it in the first years. And a third troubles itself about them not at all, and leaves them — men hungry for work and thirsting for a livelihood — without any assistance whatever, because it has enough to do with its own people. And so it comes about that every year hundreds pay for the venture of their wandering with sickness or with the utter exhaustion of all their strength. They emerge from the superhuman struggle as the vanquished. And since they wrestle not with a divine being, as once did their patriarch, the great wanderer, but with men and human institutions, it costs them not merely a wrenched thigh but their whole humanity. What returns, vanquished, from this terrible struggle to the old scene of its sufferings is broken, trampled down in its feeling and its thought; only a dull sense of duty towards its kindred, and perhaps also the dread of an act condemned by religious law, still holds it back from the self-destruction it longs for.

Most of the returning emigrants are of this kind. That there are also unclean elements among them is natural. But according to all the experience at the disposal of the competent persons and authorities, these are exceedingly few. So few that one must marvel at the moral steadfastness of the Jews, whom so unexampled a misery has not all corrupted and brutalised. Think only of the rest, the blameless, who must beg their way back to the land of their birth, which even before their wandering offered them nothing but evil, and which will now perhaps offer them worse still. And the humiliations of the homeward road! It is not only their shattered self-confidence, not only the asking of alms, that they feel bitterly. The unpredictable attitude of the Jews whom they pass on the way, the treatment they receive at the hands of those on whose help alone they can still count, the harsh rebuff that any longer halt meets with — and not only from the State authorities — all this they must taste to the full.

These are facts known to everyone who has observed the Jewish migration of recent decades. Nor have attempts been wanting to bring order into this sorry chaos; but only since the States have turned upon this social-political problem an attention which from their standpoint may perhaps be defensible, but which is by no means friendly to the Jews, has the desire for regulation shown itself in Jewish circles as well. How much self-love was at play in this shall not be examined; for it cannot be denied that the disorderly, precipitate emigration of the Eastern Jews gradually