The opening sitting of the Zionist Congress, which has been
held at Basle and was attended by some three hundred and fifty delegates, male and female, was enlivened by a trenchant speech from Dr. Max Nordau on "The General Situation of the Jews of the World." Touching on the Dreyfus case, Dr. Norden ridiculed the notion of the existence of a Jewish syndicate, pointing out that the defence had been under- taken almost entirely by non-Jews. He detected symptoms of anti-Semitism in England in the Alien Immigration Bill, and declared Zionism to be the only true cure for the hostility shown to the Jews and the degeneracy of the Jews themselves. In this connection the interesting article of Mr. Bensusan, in Tuesday's Daily Mail, on the agricultural colonies in Palestine, deserves careful attention. As the result of a personal inspection, he finds that although Baron Edmund Rothschild's lavish subsidies—amounting to over a million pounds—have wrought evil as well as good, some of these settlements are now self-supporting, while the physique of the settlers is immensely improved by their emancipation from the Ghetto. "They can work and they can fight, as the predatory Arabs now find to their cost."
Previous page
