The Jews Under the Peace Treaties

During 1925 the bitter fight against religion seemed to have relaxed somewhat, and Christian and Mohammedan bodies are now allowed to give religious instruction to small "groups" of their children after school hours. In the case of Jews, however, two children have been declared to constitute a school, and subject to the dire penalties for teaching religion or Bible to children at a school. Religious instruction is therefore given clandestinely, underground or in lofts and at midnight, as in the days of the Inquisition. In Dec. 1925 two teachers were sentenced at Kieff to six months' imprisonment with hard labour for this offence; and 200 children were imprisoned at Vinnitza, Podolia, for refus ing to betray the name and whereabouts of their religious teachers. Zionists are pursued with a tsar-like ferocity as counter-revolu tionaries and "agents of British Imperialism," hundreds of them having been banished to Siberia. The use of Hebrew is suppressed as a "bourgeois" language.

These persecutions called forth among the faithful remnant a new fervour and a deeper self-sacrifice for their faith ; but Jewish institutional religion became paralysed in Soviet Russia, and the religious outlook for the growing generation is dark indeed. Before the war, the intense religious and intellectual life of Rus sian Jewry was duly reflected in the works of a whole galaxy of rabbinical, Hebrew and Yiddish writers. With the outbreak of hostilities all Hebrew and Yiddish publications of any kind were forbidden by the tsarist authorities. After the revolution there was a brief literary revival, which was soon strangled by the Bolshevists.

Poland, Baltic and Balkan States.

Jewish religious life has in the main resumed its pre-war aspect in Poland, the Baltic and the Balkan countries, despite the economic ruin of a large portion of the Jewries wrought by racial hatred and social unrest in those politically immature States. In Poland a widely ramified net of Hebrew-speaking schools, both elementary and secondary, has been founded by the Tarbuth organization, and is recognized by the Government. In Greece, the large Jewish community of Salonika is declining in consequence of the failure of the Greek Government to keep the solemn pledges it gave to respect the Jewish Sabbath. In Turkey, the status of all religions has under gone violent transformation under the secularizing Kemalist regime. The activities of the chief rabbinate, which hitherto had practically the same powers as the patriarchates of other denomi nations, are now limited to ecclesiastical matters, and the congre gations are organized on autonomous lines. The chief rabbi, Cha

cham Bashi Bijerano, introduced far-reaching reforms in the Jewish law of divorce. These have, however, not found recognition with the rabbinic authorities of other lands.

France, Italy, Central Europe.—Judaism in France has been strengthened by the accession of the important religiously con servative congregations of Alsace-Lorraine, as well as by the Moroccan communities now under French control. In 1924 the grand rabbi of France, M. Israel Levi, appealed to the leaders of East European orthodoxy to consider the enactment, in accord ance with rabbinic law, of modifications in certain aspects of the Jewish marriage and divorce law (Agunah). Italian Jewry found itself threatened by the new education law, with its compulsory Catholic instruction. Even a graver danger is its dearth of native rabbis. In Geneva, Jewish questions of great religious consequence are often discussed. In Feb. 1925 a proposal was submitted to the League of Nations Commission of Inquiry into the reform of the calendar to introduce "blank days" (i.e., the last day or days of the year to be considered outside the calendar). As one result of this would be a constantly backward moving day of rest, the proposal was strongly and successfully opposed by the representatives of the Jewries of the East and of the West. In Central Europe the war resulted in the impoverishment of the Jewish schools of learning. A lamentable manifestation of the National Socialist regime in Germany was the forcible imposition of disabilities on the Jews in that country. (See GERMANY.) Among the noteworthy productions in the study of Judaism written during the period under review by Central European scholars are the works of the neo-Kantian philosopher, Hermann Cohen, Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums (1919) ; of Immanuel Loew, Flora der Juden; of Simon M. Dubnow, Welt geschichte des jiidischen V olkes (World History of the Jewish People), in to vol., appearing in German and Hebrew (1925, etc.) ; of Ismar Elbogen, Der jiidische Gottesdienst (on the Jewish Liturgy) ; of S. Krauss, Talmudische Archaologie, 3 vol., on Jewish life in Talmudic times; and the Monumenta Talmudica (1914, etc.). The following savants died in the period under review: Wilhelm Bacher, Abraham Berliner, David Hoffmann, D. H. Muller, A. Harkavy, A. Epstein, Hermann Cohen, Jakob Guttmann and H. P. Chajes.