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character and are never substantiated; he has enough intelligence to observe what is going on around him and who makes a business of patriotism. For anti-semitism is not a movement based on a great idea; it is generalizing hatred which shouts the more, the less real evidence it has. It is a step back into barbarism which may for a time sweep the masses off their feet, but cannot retain them under its baneful influence. Today Czech anti-semitism is moribund; it may assume the guise of a-semitism for a while, and then it will expire, as I believe, for good.

I base my optimistic judgment on the real good nature of the Czech people and the desire of the Jew for lasting rest. For a transformation is going on in his soul; he has realized that nationalist zeal of German Jew and Magyar Jew did not save him from injustice, and that for the future his place must be on the side of those who are wronged and not those who commit the wrong; he will never again be found among the jingoes. But what about the Zionists? Is their movement in the Czechoslovak Republic breaking up? On the contrary they gained many supporters after the revolution, especially in Moravia and Slovakia from the ranks of those Jews who want to be no longer Germans or Magyars, and cannot be Czechs or Slovaks by reason of their upbringing and political past. These men will be full of enthusiasm for a Palestinian state, will contribute to various Zionist funds, but they will not go themselves to Palestine. The final outcome, however, must be that children of the present Zionists will succumb to Czech environment—most of them in the first and second generation, while in Slovakia the completion of the process may extend into the third generation.

That does not mean that Zionism lacks an ethical foundation. In it humanity protests against insults based on difference of religion and descent. But this is after all negative; Zionism, at any rate in Western Europe, is merely a reaction against anti-semitism. Whether that will be sufficient for creative activity remains to be seen. Perhaps Zionism will create in Palestine a new culture of a new tongue out of various new ethnical elements, and will call it the re-born culture of the old Hebrew nation. There is no need to discuss that. Even if a new culture is created, only the Palestinian Jew will have a part in it, and not Jews living outside of Palestine, especially those of Western Europe.

In this connection we should notice instructive figures given in a statistical essay of Dr. Felix Theilhaber; he attempts to prove by them that Jews in Germany will become fused in the mass of the German people, unless Zionism saves them. But it will not accomplish that either in the West or in our Republic. They are fusing into one body with the rest of the citizenship, to their own benefit and to the benefit of the nation whose members they feel themselves to be. Neither anti-semitism nor Zionism can prevent it.

Whatever may be the differences in our Bohemian lands between the Jews and their Christian fellow-citizens, flocks of Jewish refugees from Galicia who during the war flooded the Bohemian lands convinced all unprejudiced observers that the difference between the Jew of Bohemia and the Jew of Poland is far greater than between the Czech Jew and Czech Christian. The Czech-Jewish assimilation movement has been in existence only forty years and so many obstacles were placed in its way; and yet what a large number of Jews have already had a part in the new Czech culture, whether they were gained over directly through the influence of this movement or fused with the national organism simply through their Czech environment.

Let me name here, beside Siegfried Kapper, Dr. Zucker, late professor of criminal law in the Czech University of Prague, Dr. Arnost Kraus, professor of Germanic languages in the same school, Dr. Victor Vohryzek who died in the fall of 1918, a physician and a philosopher, the deepest thinker of the Czech-Jewish movement, who searched for a synthesis of Jahvism and the Gospel, Dr. Bohdan Klinenberger, lawyer and philosopher, Vojta Rakous who described in bright colors the life of old country Jews, journalists Mor. Schonbaum, Penížek, Hlaváč; of the younger men Dr. Otto Guth, Dr. Victor Teyta, Otto Fisher, essayist Dr. Jindřich Kohn, musical critic Dr. Lowenbach, educator Dr. Karel Velemínský, Jindřich Fleischner, author of engineering works, Dr. Eugen Stern, author of social studies, Dr. Alfred Meissner, member of National Assembly and his brother Dr. Emil Meissner, author of books on commercial law. Among the younger authors