The Land of Riddles (Russia of To-day) — John Shaqi
The Land of Riddles (Russia of To-day)Ganz, Hugo
History
The Land of Riddles (Russia of To-day)
Ganz, Hugo
Russia
I have no faith in a Polish kingdom. There may be a Polish revolution
to-morrow, perhaps, when the Russians shall meet defeat in eastern Asia,
as the Russian patriots hope, but a Polish kingdom there will never be.
It is quite apparent how the influence of the times is changing the
entire social structure of the people. No nation can maintain itself
without a middle class, and Poland still has no middle class. The
material for such a class, the strong Jewish population, has been so
ground down that a half-century would not be sufficient for its
restoration and the Russian régime of to-day is disposed to anything
rather than to the uplifting and the education of the Polish Jewry. It
is stated that there are in Warsaw a quarter of a million Jews, a few
well-to-do people among them, who have hastened, for the most part, to
transform themselves into "Poles of the Mosaic faith," without
disarming thereby the clerical anti-Semitism of the Polish people, and
innumerable beggars or half-beggars, who are designated in western
Europe as "schnorrer." And of these there are in Warsaw an unknown
number. It is hard to draw the line between the "schnorrer" and the
"Luftmensch" (a man without any certain source of income), who has not
yet resigned himself to beggary, and yet cannot tell in the morning
whence he is to draw his sustenance at noon. These include artisans,
sweat-shop workers, agents, and go-betweens, a city proletariat of the
very worst kind. I have seen no such shocking misery in the Jewish
quarters on the Moldau as I encountered in the brilliant capital Warsaw.
The Polish Jew, everywhere despised and unwelcome, is the wandering
poverty-witness of Polish mismanagement. A system that succeeds in
depraving the sober, pious, and sexually disciplined orthodox Jew to the
extent observed in a portion of the Jewish Polish proletariat should be
accorded recognition as the most useless system on the face of the
earth. In the last analysis it was the Polish "schlachtzitz," and the
Polish clerical going hand-in-hand with him, that constituted the prime
cause of all the miseries of the nineteenth century.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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