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No. 32 — Vienna, 5th August 1904 — 24th Ab 5664. — 8th Year.

Plehwe.

Minister von Plehwe, the master of Russia, the man by whose stern and unbending will this great empire was governed — nay, ruled — has been assassinated. The papers have reported the appalling details of the grim event; they have told of the constant dread of the slain man, who had always feared so violent an end, and they have described the mutilation of the body, which came to lie in the street as an all but unrecognisable trunk.

The political reflections which have followed these accounts of the dreadful deed of a political desperado are pretty well unanimous. There is no great newspaper which does not hold responsible for the deed not only the fanaticism of an individual, but also the political conditions of Russia. The craving, in a great empire numbering 120 millions of inhabitants, to force one opinion and one fashion upon men's minds; the undisguised want of freedom of thought; and not least the harsh means, long since discarded elsewhere, by which the principles of government were to be carried out — all this has been glaringly recalled to memory by the murder of the all-powerful Minister.

Minister von Plehwe had many enemies — he made them himself.

The destiny of a great empire was placed in his hand, and instead of showing that a country can truly be the mother of children of differing natures, he made the proofs of her motherly love dependent upon an impossible genuflexion demanded of the children. He, who would have had the power to unite the free endeavours of all the inhabitants of the great empire of the Tsars, Russians and non-Russians alike, for the good of the State, preferred to spend an immeasurably great part of the forces of the State in holding citizens down.

To us Jews in particular Plehwe had always been a relentless enemy. He who possessed the power to oppress our people, so far as it dwelt within the Russian Empire, always exercised that power without restraint. He ruled cruelly over the Jews of Russia without knowing them, without understanding them, and without taking the slightest pains to learn their nature. The Jewish character counted with him as a bad one — not because its harmfulness had been demonstrated, no, but because it was burdened with the irremediable evil of not being Russian. He was filled with the shallowest notions about Judaism. The good qualities of the Jews, which even he was obliged to acknowledge, served him, as they have served rulers for centuries, to prove the dangerousness of the Jews; and the alleged bad qualities of the Jews were naturally likewise a pretext for severe measures against our people. Jewish intelligence, Jewish eagerness for learning, Jewish thrift and abstemiousness served quite as much to justify cruel special laws against the Jews as did their alleged aversion to hard labour.

A thousand years of history did not teach him that the Jews are an unbending people, from whom, it is true, traitor souls break away for the sake of material advantage, but which as a whole never forgets its nationhood. And Plehwe let himself be deceived by the sight of these treacherous figures. He saw only that the hardening of material and moral existence tore individuals away from their people, and believed that by severity and harshness he could hold down and bow the whole Jewish people.

Nor did he grasp the apparent contradiction which exists between the attitude of the Jewish people as a whole and the attitude of the individual Jew; he did not know that the strength of the Jewish people lies in its nationhood, and that the individual, in face of the monstrous and terrible means employed for centuries on end, could not but become timid and cowed. He saw a great people, brave on behalf of its nationhood, whose individual members nevertheless always appeared to him as cowards. He did not understand the nature and the heroism of passive resistance — until the man came who seemed to him to solve the riddle.