t kind of financial
warfare were mostly supplied by the fathers and grandfathers of the
present generation. Sometimes, no doubt, the capital was lost, and in
those cases it must be said that the Jewish speculator disappears from
the stage without a sigh or a cry. He begins again, and if he should
have to do what his grandfather did, walk from house to house with a
bag on his back, he does not whine.

One cannot blame the Jews or any other speculators for using their
opportunities, but they must not complain either if they excite envy,
and if that envy assumes in the end a dangerous character. The Jews,
so far from suffering from disabilities, enjoy really certain
privileges over their Christian competitors in Germany. They belong to
a _regnum_, but also to a _regnum in regno_. They have, so to say, our
Sunday and likewise their Sabbath. Jew will always help Jew against a
Christian; and again who can blame them for that? All one can say is
that they should not complain of their unpopularity, but take into
account the risk they are running. No one hated the Jews such as they
were in Dessau fifty years ago. They had their own schools and
synagogues, and no one interfered with them when they built their
bowers in the streets at the time of their Feast of Tabernacles, and
lived, feasted, and slept in them to keep up the memory of their
sojourning in the desert. They indulged in even more offensive
practices, such as, for instance, putting three stones in the coffins
to be thrown by the dead at the Virgin Mary, her husband, and their
Son. No one suspected or accused them of kidnapping Christian
children, or offering sacrifices with their blood. They were known too
well for that. Conversions of Jews were not infrequent, and converted
Jews were not persecuted by their former co-religionists as they are
now. Even marriages between Christians and Jews were by no means
uncommon, particularly when the young Jewesses were beautiful or rich,
still better if they were both. Disgraceful as the Anti-Semitic riots
have been in Germany and Russia, there can be no doubt that in this as
in most cases both sides were to blame, and there is little prospect
of peace being re-established till many more heads have been broken.

What helped very much to keep the peace in the small town of Dessau,
as it did all over Germany, nay, all over the world, till about the
year 1848, was the small number of newspapers. In my childhood and
youth their num