The Maccabaean

It is usual when summarizing the happenings of the Jewish year to marshal the outstanding facts in bewildering array. But the great majority of those facts are not especially characteristic of any one year. With a mere change of names, the same typical occurrences and the same recurrent gains and losses figure persistently in the record of every year, and a resumé of facts which are interesting but not especially significant is of little present value. Moreover, the factors of gain and loss in each year largely cancel each other. The balance sways, but at the end of the year we can point to no permanent disturbance of the equipoise. The light in one country is offset by the shadow in another. As the Jew in one land climbs to Carmel heights of sunshine, in another he is thrust down yet deeper into the vale of sorrow and the valley of the shadow of death. The political honors heaped upon the Jew in an England are nullified by the political oppression of the Jew in a Russia. An improvement in the Jewish social order in a country such as France is more than offset by the social oppression in a Roumania. In every country the national pendulum swings from gain to loss, from loss to gain. Everywhere new leaders appear to take the place of those whom death has taken from us. We are therefore free to cancel out the multifarious, obscuring and non-characteristic details of the year's record, and we turn our attention to those significant events which especially characterize the year that has closed.

Mah Nishtanah? Wherefore does this year differ from all other years? On all sides we are told that the most important event of the Jewish year was the abrogation of the United States' Treaty of 1832 with Russia. This epochal event, as it is called, we are told ranks in importance with the emancipation of the Jews in France and the removal of the disabilities of the Jews in England.

It is true that the treaty does not come to

an end until January 1, 1913, and it is therefore rash to prophesy as to the effect of the abrogation. But unless the omens are unusually misleading, it is safe to say that for the Jewish people the effect of the abrogation will be negligible. The agitation of last year was striking and picturesque; its immediate success was spectacular; its after effects on the Jewish people will be nugatory. No country has shown signs of following the example set by the United States. France has just declared her inability to take any action in the matter. Even free and mighty England is entangled in an entente with Russia, and she does not feel it politic to raise unpleasant questions with the Muscovite Bear; and assuredly no other country will stir to embroil itself in political asperities for the sake of its contemned Jews.

Russia, whatever it may do on paper, will not willingly give way in practice to the American protest on the passport question. For well it knows that the free issuance of passports to Jews would mark the beginning of the end of the Pale of Settlement —that accursed hell which Holy Russia creates and maintains for the economic obliteration of the Jew, the shattering of his nerve and the corruption of his morale. The abrogation of the treaty has done and will do nothing tangible to lighten the horror of the Russian Jewish tragedy, which involves the fate of the greater portion of our people. And therefore one is forced to confess in bitterness and sorrow that the spectacular abrogation of the Treaty of 1832 is, in all human probability, Jewishly of no importance. This is a confession of failure, with helplessness and hopelessness. At the end of the year, as at its beginning, we still stand helpless and baffled in the face of the most pitiless persecution and agonizing torture of the majority of our race.

When the passport question was before the public, we took every opportunity to announce with stereotyped communal hyp-