whole conception of life becomes different, and the unchastity of woman becomes an article of trade, or an object of ironical scepticism. Still, in comparison with their environment, even these Jews may be called chaste: for they are morally sound beside the barbarism of the Orient. But is it not, nevertheless, monstrous, that in a Christian country the hard-won sexual morality of a part of the population, once gone, must be endangered only maleovolent politics will have it so. The moral purity of the Jews and of the
Teutonic races has redeemed the world from the deep depravity of the Roman decadence. Now, a Christian state policy destroys a part of the iron stability of this moral acquisition of humanity;" and the author goes on to explain himself in some detail.
Are we not right when we say that Russia is the land of the sob, tears that have their origin in the depth of human suffering. And the author has no hopes for the future. The Jewish question will long remain unsolved. For whom could the Russian officials bleed if not the tormented, worried, defenseless Jew?
Zionism and England's Offer
To-night the pious Jews of the world celebrate their feast of Thanksgiving or Independence. The irony of it! These down-trodden, cringing victims of the Ghetto are celebrating the victories of Judas Maccabaeus. These poor, peaceful slum dwellers, who have never known a fatherland, are singing paeans of triumph at having won back their Holy Land and Temple from the ancient Syro-Greeks over two thousand years ago. What a shadow-world the Jew lives in. Is it not about time Rip Van Winkle woke up and took stock of things and himself? We have not had a stock-taking for nearly two thousand years. It is eighteen hundred and thirty-four years since we lost our fatherland, and the period of mourning should be about over. We have either got to reconcile ourselves to our loss or set about recovering it. But to choose clearly between one alternative
or the other is a faculty the Jew has lost. He lost it in the Middle Ages when unable to accept either Christianity or death, either Mohammedanism or martyrdom, he in many countries compromised and became what is known as a Marrano, one who professed to be as the world around, but who carried on his Jewish rites in secret. The Marrano scheme looked clever, but it did not always work satisfactorily. The double life meant a life of terror, of endless bribes; and discovery— which was frequent—meant the stake and the sword. When, in the eighteenth century, the sunshine of emancipation began to dawn in Western Europe and the Jew to emerge into the general life of the world, the hunted creature still could not shake off this feeling that his own life was something that must be hidden. His whole public life became ostentatiously identical with