MACEDONIA AND THE JEWISH PRESS.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."]
STR,—In the article entitled "The Position in Macedonia" appearing in the Spectator of August 22nd you refer to "the widely diffused Jewish Press" as always upholding Mussul- man authority against Christian rebellion, and you put forward as grounds for this alleged policy—(1) "its justifiable hatred and dread of Russia," and (2) possibly "a quite in- applicable tradition of the position of Jews in litahommedan Spain." Without for one moment admitting that the so-called "Jewish Press" has any such consistent policy, or questioning whether the particular tradition is much present to the minds of modern Jews, I desire to call attention to another factor in the situation which is far more likely to carry weight with these journalists, if in fact their writings are as much influenced by their Jewish sympathies as you seem to suggest. I allude to the cruel treatment meted out to her Jewish subjects by Roumania since her establishment as an independent State, a treatment planned and adopted in deliberate breach of the most solemn treaty obligations, and persisted in despite the strongest protests and remonstrances. It is probably correct to say that nowhere else, not even in "darkest Russia," has the persecution of the Jews been reduced to such a fine art, or carried out so relentlessly, as in Roumsuia. And it would be hard to find in all history so unique and saddening an example of an erstwhile persecuted race becoming so speedily in its turn a race of persecutors. With this object-lesson before his eyes, is it to be expected that any Macedonian Jew should be at all anxious to exchange the comparatively benign rule of the Mahommedan for the possibly intolerable yoke of the Christian ? When he finds that Christianity is practised, and not merely preached, in Eastern Europe, then, and not till then, can the Jew—who, after all, is but human—be reasonably asked to view without misapprehension his transfer from the shadow of the Crescent
to that of the Cross.—I am, Sir, &c., ERNEST LESSER. 2 Stone Buildings, Lincoln's Inn.
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