The British and Italian Governments indicated to the Zionist Organization their interest in the welfare of the Jewish people by the opinion they expressed with regard to the clause in the Rumanian-German Treaty referring to Jewish rights. Ever since the Treaty of Berlin, the position of the Rumanian Jews had been one of the scandals of Europe. That Treaty forbade all legal discriminations on account of religious faith. This clause was made a useless “_scrap of paper_” by Rumania considering its Jews “aliens not subject to alien protection.” The Jew has been prevented from living in country districts or owning land outside towns. This does not prevent it from being a standing accusation against the Jews of Rumania that they do not work as agricultural labourers. They have been excluded from the civil service and the liberal professions; they have been disfranchised; factories and mills were forbidden to employ more Jewish workers than one quarter of their entire staff. Yet the Jews in Rumania by no means gave rise to this state of affairs by obvious separatism; the younger generation all spoke Rumanian, both at home and in intercourse with the outer world, and they wore no distinctive dress. It should be stated that the Rumanians are a peasant people; the landowners, all Christians, are largely an absentee class, spending their money in Western Europe. Anti-Semitism has been a convenient safety-valve for diverting the discontent of the peasants from the real authors of their misery. These anti-Jewish laws have caused an immense exodus of Jews from Rumania. Rumania continued its anti-Jewish policy during the war. Rumanian Jews were registered and supervised as aliens, because, owing to defective registration, they could not prove that they were born in Rumania. Many elderly persons were born in places where no registers were kept. There were no registers before 1866, and it was only in 1880 that the whole country began to keep such registers. This brings us directly to the Jewish clause of the treaty with Germany. The German Government had led the Jews in Germany to believe that it would protect the rights of Jews in the treaty. But the treaty merely stated that those Jews hitherto considered aliens were to be naturalized by law if they could prove that they and their parents were born in Rumania, or that they had taken part in the war, either in active service or in army service (_Hilfsdienst_). Such a clause could only open the way to further equivocations. By the addition of this clause to the general statement that differences of religious faith shall have no influence on the legal rights of inhabitants, and in particular on their political and civil rights, the treaty of 1918 actually went back from the position taken by the treaty of 1878. It is not even found possible to make the officers of a regiment in Rumania give a Jewish soldier the paper necessary to prove that he has served in the army.