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No. 43. Vienna, 21 October 1904. — 12 Marcheshvan 5665. 8th Year.

Protected Jews.

Ahlem, in the province of Hanover, is a preparatory school training Jewish boys for agriculture and the crafts. In truth, however, the intention of its directors was that the school should teach something quite different to someone quite different. The truth was to become a gag for the antisemitic bawlers who cry out against the cheating Jewish nation of traders. Let us at least laugh at this jest, since it has, after all, already cost so much Jewish money. What? Does not a whole army of our craftsmen toil bitterly for bread, and does the sweat of our tens of thousands of peasants make the anti-Jewish lie any more faint-hearted? For whom, then, the three dozen pupils of Ahlem? And if someone should nevertheless surprisingly bring forward a justification for the founding of Ahlem, his good fortune as its defender would come to an end at the results: the great majority of the pupils sink back into the trading class of their fathers, since no one hires their manual skills; one or two of the craftsmen find their way with difficulty to a workshop — but of the Jewish agriculturists not one obtains an opportunity for work; no one has called upon one of these German peasants of the Jewish confession, and those who did not throw away the spade use it exclusively as cemetery gardeners.

The great battle which it was intended to deliver against antisemitism upon the fields of Ahlem was thus shamefully lost. By no means to the joy of the Zionists. We give our warmest thanks even for ten Jews rescued from misfortune, although we are gladly reproached with upholding a theory of revolution in the Jewish question and with expecting the progress of our idea from a worsening of conditions. We repel the ugliness of this nonsense far from us. Our partial approval, however, does not lessen the reproaches which we raise against all the Ahlemists in Jewry. Those in Hanover are not the only ones who have discovered a miracle-medicine against Jewish distress and who, in the explosions of their wisdom, squander uncounted millions and immeasurable energies.

An unhappy extravagance at a time when the demands of our misery are deepening into the bottomless. We here leave the mass tragedy of Half-Asia entirely out of account and wish only to carry out a cold-blooded calculation of probabilities for the civilised countries. In face of the purely practical way of thinking of present-day politics, we likewise abandon the outworn standpoint from which some grow excited over the shameful and daily antisemitic insults. What shall be decisive for us is not what the antisemites cry, but only whether the Jews cry.

Two mutually independent manifestations have made themselves heard in recent days as grave symptoms of our difficult situation. A widely read Jewish newspaper in Germany wrote, and a well-attended citizens' meeting in Vienna spoke, upon the theme: "The Struggle against the Jewish Tradesmen and Officials". Mark well, in both places it was assimilationists who stood forth, and the suspicion of a Zionist agitational colouring falls away entirely. Nevertheless, one plaintive grievance followed upon another, and it was expressed that the populace and the public offices outdid one another in the boycott and the harassment of the working Jew. The express protection of the law, which may be enforced in the courts, is in many cases brought to nothing by administrative orders and the tacit traditions of the authorities, who find in the trade regulations and the trade penal law india-rubber paragraphs enough to inflict grave injury upon the Jews. The prospects of the Jewish official need not even be discussed.

There lies the antisemitic dog buried. For protests and tirades against the insolences of some lout or other we have neither time nor inclination any longer. But when in the Great Market Hall of Vienna the Jewish dealers are given separate stands, when the town councils of Moravia by turns close the booths to the Czech and to the German (read in both cases: Jewish) market-traders, when the Treasury will sell nothing to the Jewish salt-dealers of Galicia, when Jewish lodging-letters in Vienna sit for weeks in gaol for the unauthorised keeping of a hotel; when Reich-German business-