The Maccabaean

T was given to but few of the stu- 5 dents of German universities to have come into contact with the person of Theodor Herzi. Those fortunate enough to attend the Congresses or to meet Dr. Herzl during his silent journeyings through the larger cities, or those who belonged to some of the student societies in Vienna, have all been set a pulsating at the sight of his wonderful person and have repeated their impressions of his rare personality to their comrades. But with the mass of students it was not as it was with so many hundreds in other walks of life, that contact with Dr. Herzl’s person won over to him and to the idea he stood for.

Almost from the first, Dr. Herzl seemed to have been spiritualized, to have been himself made into an ideal. The Zionist movement and its leader seemed to be related to one another as body and soul. The tales of the magic of the beauty of his person, of his gentleness and his determined strength, were so well authenticated that, together with his printed utterances and the visible effects of his work, they compelled the Jewish student, intellectually independent and filled with the rebellious spirit of youth, to subject himself without suspicion to the power of a great man. The Jewish students became his disciples with more devotion than they showed their academic masters. The great men of the present and of the past had not lost hold upon them; but they clung to none with so much fervor as to this Jewish hero, who strange to say, was still alive in the flesh before them, and was leading the move-

ment which was expressive of their highest ideals.

He who is but slightly acquainted with the condition under which the Jewish students lived before Dr. Herzl's advent, knows what dire need of a Jewish hero there was. The growth of the anti-Semitic movement had yielded the saddest of all fruits —the loss of Jewish self-respect. The exclusion of Jews from the Burschenschaften and the other student corporations, and the withdrawal of non-Jews from those societies in which Jews were to any extent represented, did not teach the Jewish students the needed lesson. Wtih almost pathetic devotion to the idea of "German students of the Jewish persuasion," they refused to engage upon Jewish activities as Jews, although the few societies that were left to them were composed almost exclusively of Jews. They resented passionately the suggestion that they should call their societies by Jewish names and thereby represent to some extent the Jewish student body.

What a change has overcome the Jewish students in German universities since the coming of Dr. Herzl is manifested by the existence of numerous Jewish associations, with the Verein Juedischer Stu- denten and the Austrian Zionist Union at their head. These associations have their being in specifically Jewish work. They represent the Jews as such in all the student movements. Their influence upon the Jewish student body and upon other movements in which young Jews are interested is shown, for example, by the growth of Jewish Turn-Vereins, which