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No. 40. — Vienna, 30 September 1904. — 21 Tishri 5665. — 8th Year.

On the Jewish Migration.*)

II.

The world organisation which we must strive for in order to regulate the Jewish migration will naturally not come into being so quickly, even if we presuppose good will on every side. The reason why so necessary an undertaking is likely to require a considerable time lies not only in the magnitude of the task and in the difficulty of carrying it out in a manner agreeable to all the parties concerned, but above all in the great disunity which every collective Jewish enterprise encounters. We must not forget that for almost a century men laboured with deliberation and energy to kill in the Jewish people every feeling of belonging together; that, with the expenditure of every intellectual and — sit venia verbo — moral means, they strove to accomplish the degradation of our nationhood into a religious community which supposedly knew "no specifically national-Jewish aspirations whatsoever."

This unnatural war of annihilation against all national-Jewish feeling, and therefore unsuccessful from the very beginning, did not lead to any deepening and purification of Jewish religious life, but it did lead to a grave loosening of the bonds which had formerly tied the Jews to their Judaism. If for a time it seemed that the dissolution of Judaism, at least in the lands of greater political freedom, was only a question of a few decades, that is certainly no longer to be feared since the rapid growth in strength of the national Jewish idea. The damage done, however, is already so great that every joint action of the Jews of different countries meets with the greatest difficulties and, thanks to the insane work of destruction of the merely-confessional party, has also to contend with a positively paralysing mistrust.

We have been able to study these conditions sufficiently since the founding of the first "Chovevei Zion" societies, and especially since the convening of the first Zionist Congress,

*) Vide the "Welt" No. 39.

to say nothing of the somewhat grotesque sequel of the projected German Jewish Congress. But we have to deal with them anew whenever it is a question of a matter reaching beyond the most ordinary local interests. It is therefore to be foreseen that we shall not bring the world organisation of the Jewish migration into being too easily or too quickly either. To be sure, the Zionist Congresses themselves have given an exemplary instance of how Jews of all lands can work at a common Jewish cause without prejudice to their patriotic and national interests. The endeavours, appearing everywhere, to gather the Jews — be it only for defence against hostile currents — into larger corporations, provincial and state associations, show further that the idea of Jewish national solidarity is gaining ground. We can therefore go to work under more favourable conditions than some twenty years ago and attempt the founding of this world organisation. We may hope for success all the more because it is here a question of an economic problem which compels not only the mass of the Jewish proletariat, but also — in consequence of the general Jewish distress and the closer connection between the Jewish proletariat and the Jewish bourgeoisie resulting from it — the propertied classes to seek a remedy.

But if these endeavours towards the creation of a Jewish world organisation of the Jewish migration are to have a firm foundation, we must above all develop further the beginnings of such an organisation which already exist. In many countries individual societies or committees are already occupied with the emigration question. These are called first of all to work together. To this category belong not only the Jewish Emigration Society and the Jewish Emigrants Informations Bureau, not only the committees at the various frontier and port stations, not only the Alliance and the Ica, but also all the communities which lie at the principal railway junctions and therefore come to have dealings with the emigrants. Until now the