Of all the people that have suffered deeply from the present war, none
have borne a greater burden than the Jews—in physical and economic
loss, in moral and spiritual torment.
Jews are today fighting each other in all the armies of Europe. Russia
alone has over 350,000 Jewish soldiers; Austria has over 50,000;
altogether there are probably one-half million Jews in the ranks of the
fighting armies.
The Jews are bearing the brunt of the war’s burdens, not only on the
field of battle, where they suffer with the rest of the world, but also
in their homes, where they have been singled out, by their peculiar
geographic, political and economic position, for disaster surpassing
that of all others.
When the war broke out, one-half of the Jewish population of the world
was trapped in a corner of Eastern Europe that is absolutely shut off
from all neutral lands and from the sea. Russian Poland, where over
two million Jews lived, is in a salient. South of it is Galicia, the
frontier province of Austria. Here lived another million Jews. Behind
Russian Poland are the fifteen Russian provinces, which, together with
Poland, constitute the Pale of Jewish Settlement. Here lived another
four million Jews.
Thus seven million Jews—a population exceeding that of Belgium by
one million—have borne the brunt of the war. Behind them was Holy
Russia, closed to them by the May Laws of 1881. In front were hostile
Germany and Austria. To the south was unfriendly Roumania. They were
overwhelmed where they stood; and over their bodies crossed and
recrossed the German armies from the west, the Russian armies from the
east and the Austrian armies from the south. True, all the peoples of
this area suffered ravage and pillage by the war, but their sufferings
were in no degree comparable to those of the Jews. The contending
armies found it politic, in a measure, to court the good will of the
Poles, Ruthenians and other races in this area. These sustained only
the necessary and unavoidable hardships of war. But the Jews were
friendless, their religion proscribed. In this medieval region all the
religious fanaticism of the Russians, the chauvinism of the Poles,
combined with the blood lusts liberated in all men by the war—all
these fierce hatreds were sluiced into one torrent of passion which
overwhelmed the Jews.
Hundreds of thousands were forced from their homes on a day’s notice,
the more fortunate being packed and shipped as freight—the old, the
sick and insane, men, women and children, shuttled from one province
to another, side-tracked for days without food or help of any kind—the
less fortunate driven into the woods and swamps to die of starvation.
Jewish towns were sacked and burned wantonly. Hundreds of Jews were
carried off as hostages into Germany, Austria and Russia. Orgies of
lust and torture took place in public in the light of day. There are
scores of villages where not a single woman was left inviolate. Women,
old and young, were stripped and knouted in the public squares. Jews
were burned alive in synagogues where they had fled for shelter.
Thousands were executed on the flimsiest pretext or from sheer
purposeless cruelty.
These Jews, unlike the Belgians, have no England to fly to. The
sympathy of the outside world is shut off from them. They have not the
consolation of knowing that they are fighting for their own hearths,
or even for military glory or in the hope of a possible reward or
indemnity. The only thought they cherish is that after the struggle
shall be over they may at last achieve those elementary rights denied
to no other people, the right to live and move about freely in the
land of their birth or adoption, to educate their children, to earn
a livelihood, to worship God according to the dictates of their
conscience.