THE TIME OF "JACOB'S TROUBLE."

Taihape Daily Times, Volume 7, Issue 290, 25 September 1915, Page 7

THE TIME OF "JACOB'S TROUBLE."

A striking article on the Jews is appearing in the Metropolitan Magazine, United States. It is written by Israel Zangwill, and contains some shockers for the people who maintain that the Jew will yet dominate the earth. At present 15,000 Jews are fighting for the British Empire, 50,000 for the German, 170,000 for the Austro-Hungarian, and 350,000 for the Russian. “ There is no luck for the Jews, ’ ’ says the Talmud. Individual Jews are frequently shrewd and fortunate, but as a people they are Schlemihl, a hapless never-do-d well. Twenty centuries of wandering find him concentrated precisely in the plain of Armageddon. And here in a hundred places he must again grasp the wanderer’s staff. A workhouse and a hostel at London have been congested with Belgian Jews. Forty ravaged towns have poured their Ghettos into Warsaw; Prague, Vienna, and BudaPesth seethe with refugees. A census taken of 4,653 Jews who fled into Alexandria showed subjects of England, France, Russia, Spain, America, Australia, Turkey, Persia, and Roumania. Before our guns 1,500 'fled from the Dardanelles. The only section of Jewry ' which has escaped the war is that which poured itself into the American melting-pot. Not only are there ten of the thirteen millions of Jewry in the European cockpit; nearly three millions > are at the fiercest centre of the fighting in Poland. And Poland has been the heart of hell. For two of the Powcs that combined to dismember it are now fighting the third across its fragments, and Jewish populations are at their thickest along those six hundred miles of border country through which Russia East Prussian Poland or Galician Poland, Germany hacks her way westward, or Austria hurls her counterattacks. It is upon the Ghettos of Lomzha and Bialystock that the bombs of the German airmen do their deadliest work. It would seem as though the Jews had gathered upon these awful frontiers to suffer deliberate extermination. Not only have they suffered equally with the Poles in the ruin of Poland, in the miserable burnings, bombardings, pillagings, trampiings; not only have they shared in the miseries of towns taken and re-taken by the rival armies, but accused hysterically or craftily before both belligerents of espionage or treachery, and even of poisoning the wells, they have been Crucified by both. Hundreds have been imprisoned as hostages, shot, knouted, hanged, buried alive, women have been outraged, whole populations have fled. In the long history of Jewish martyrdom. there is not a ghastlier chapter. But while Belgium and Poland are crowned by their sorrows and cheered by the hope of re-birth, while' the agony of Belgium has become an immortal heroic memory, the agony of the Jews is obscured and unknown, unlightened with sympathy, unredeemed by any national prospect, happy if it only escapes mockery. It is related that when one of these ejected, footsore populations, wandering at midnight on the wintry roads, with their w r eeping young children, met marching regiments of their own army, the women stretched out their hands in frantic besecchment to the Jews in the ranks. But the Jewish soldiers could only weep like the children —and march on. Poor Judah!