Lucien Wolf

“ There is no treaty of amity and commerce between the United States and Roumania, but this Government is pleased to believe that Roumania follows the precepts of comity in this regard as completely and unreservedly as we ourselves do, and that the American in Roumania is as welcome and as free in matters of sojourn and commerce and legal resorts as the Roumanian is in the United States. We hear no suggestion that any differential treatment of our citizens is there imposed. No religious test is known to bar any American from resorting to Roumania for business or pleasure. ”

“ Syria and Palestine, in a word, must be taken under European protection and governed in the sense and according to the spirit of European administration. It must ultimately come to this. What a great advantage it would be, nay, how indispensably necessary, when at length the Eastern Question comes to be argued and debated with this new ray of light thrown around it, for the Jews to be ready and prepared to say: "Behold us here all waiting, burning to return to that land which you seek to remould and regenerate. Already we feel ourselves a people. ”

“ In short, by the cumulative effect of successive restrictions, the Jews of Roumania have become reduced to a state of wretched misery. Shut out from nearly every avenue of self-support which is open to the poor of other lands, and ground down by poverty as the natural result of their discriminatory treatment, they are rendered incapable of lifting themselves from the enforced degradation they endure. Even were the fields of education open to them, of civil employment and of commerce, as to "Roumanian citizens," their penury would prevent rising by individual effort. ”

“ Whether consciously and of purpose, or not, these helpless people, burdened and spurned by their native land, are forced by the sovereign power of Roumania upon the charity of the United States. This Government cannot be a tacit party to such an international wrong. It is constrained to protest against the treatment to which the Jews of Roumania are subjected, not alone because it has unimpeachable ground to remonstrate against the resultant injury to itself, but in the name of humanity. ”

“ Be it known by this our Royal Edict—may God exalt and bless its purport and elevate the same to the high heavens, as he does the sun and moon!—that it is our command, that all Jews residing within our dominions, be the condition in which the Almighty God has placed them whatever it may, shall be treated by our Governors, Administrators, and all other subjects, in manner conformable with the evenly balanced scales of Justice, and that in the administration of the Courts of Law they (the Jews) shall occupy a position of perfect equality with all other people ”

“ Thus, with the evident promotion of the Russian revolution by the Jews of all countries, in one form or another, to a larger or smaller extent, providing it above all with intelligent leaders, arms and pecuniary means, the so-to-say international side of our revolutionary movement becomes perfectly clear, and at the same time reveals those forces which the Imperial Government must combat, as well as the factors of State and public life abroad, on which it must rely in this struggle. ”

“ The sentiment has gone forth amongst us and has been agitated and has become to us a second nature; that Palestine demands back again her sons. We only ask a summons from these Powers on whose counsels the fate of the East depends to enter upon the glorious task of rescuing our beloved country from the withering influence of centuries of desolation and of crowning her plains and valleys and mountain-tops once more, with all the beauty and freshness and abundance of her pristine greatness." I say it is for the Jews to be ready against such a crisis in diplomacy. ”

“ It is not only that the edifice of Religious Liberty in Europe has to be completed, but also that some six millions of human beings have to be freed from political and civil disabilities and social and economic restrictions which for calculated cruelty have no parallels outside the Dark Ages. The Peace Conference will have accomplished relatively little if a shred of this blackest of all European scandals is allowed to survive its deliberations. ”

“ At any rate, according to an observation by the Deutsche Tageszeitung, which has made it its special aim to organise the fight against the impending general European revolution, the more candid publicists of Social-Revolutionary tendencies are already expressing unceremoniously their hope that the Russian movement of hostility to the Government only presents a prelude to that general European upheaval which, among other things, is to destroy utterly the monarchical order of contemporary Europe. ”

“ Even if it were true that the constitutions of all the five contracting States assure civil and religious liberty to their inhabitants without distinction of religion—Roumania herself is a flagrant exception—it would not afford as permanent a guarantee as an international obligation. ”

“ The Plenipotentiaries of the three Allied Courts being desirous moreover of giving to Greece a new proof of the benevolent anxiety of their Sovereigns respecting it, and of preserving that country from the calamities which the rivalry of the religions therein professed might excite, agreed that all the subjects of the new State, whatever may be their religion, shall be admissable to all public employments, functions, and honours, and be treated on the footing of a perfect equality, without regard to difference of creed in all their relations, religious, civil or political. ”

“ The principal aim of the "Alliance Israélite Universelle"—the all-round triumph of anti-Christian and anti-monarchist Jewry (which has already taken practical possession of France) by means of Socialism which is to serve as a bait for the ignorant masses—could not but find the State system of Russia—a land of peasants, Orthodoxy and monarchism—an obstacle in its path. ”

“ Plus le noble désintéressement des Puissances qui ont porté secours à l'Empereur des Ottomans, leur fournit des titres à sa reconnaissance moins il peut être douteux que ces mêmes Puissances sont pleinement en droit de réclamer de ce souverain des concessions dans un but purement spirituel et uniquement destinées à relever l'exercice du culte chrétien de la triste condition où il se trouve dans la contrée même qui l'a vu naître. ”

“ It cannot admit such discrimination among its own citizens, and can never assent that a foreign State, of its own volition, can apply a religious test to debar any American citizen from the favor due to all. ”

“ The political disabilities of the Jews in Roumania, their exclusion from the public service and the learned professions, the limitations of their civil rights, and the imposition upon them of exceptional taxes, involving as they [42] do wrongs repugnant to the moral sense of liberal modern peoples, are not so directly in point for my present purpose as the public acts which attack the inherent right of man as a bread winner in the ways of agriculture and trade. The Jews are prohibited from owning land, or even from cultivating it as common laborers. ”

“ In Morocco the Consular Protection System affected Jews more closely than in Turkey. It was for many years their sole protection against the oppressions of the Bashaws and the cruel fanaticism of the people, and on this ground there was much to be said for its so-called abuses and irregularities. The right of protection seems to have been derived from a very loosely worded article of the Anglo-Moorish Treaty of 1728, granting immunity from taxation to all the native servants of British subjects, whether Moors or Jews. ”

“ Putting together the facts now painfully brought home to this Government during the past few years: that many of the inhabitants of Roumania are being forced, by artificially adverse discriminations, to quit their native country; that the hospitable asylum offered by this country is almost the only refuge left to them; that they come hither unfitted by the conditions of their exile to take part in the new life of this land under circumstances either profitable to themselves or beneficial to the community ”

“ Through the political assimilation of the Jews with the populations among whom they dwell, and more particularly through their emancipation in the various countries of Western Europe and America, they have acquired the same rights in foreign countries under International Law and treaties as their Christian fellow-citizens. Unfortunately this has not been universally recognised, and it has frequently happened that, when they travelled into countries where Jewish disabilities still lingered, they were held liable as Jews to ill-treatment from which their Christian fellow-countrymen were free. ”

“ Certain British Jews resident in Warsaw complained that the disabilities imposed upon native Jews were also imposed upon them, and they appealed to Her Majesty's Government for protection. Lord John Russell held that the articles of the Treaty of 1859, by which British subjects in Russia and Russian subjects in England were to be treated on an equal footing with the nationals of those countries, did not mean that British Jews in Russia should be treated as British subjects, but that they should only have equal treatment with their oppressed co-religionists. ”

“ In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the struggle between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation was at its height, the naval balance of power in the Mediterranean rested between Spain and Turkey. Hence a bias towards Turkey on the part of Protestant States was inevitable. Curiously enough, the Jews, who were then hostile to Spain, supported the pro-Turkish policy of England, as they did in 1876-78 on account of their antipathy to Russia. In the time of Cromwell this consideration was reinforced by our trade interests in the Levant and in India. ”