esque anti-Semitic movement and the
lamentable persecution of the Jews. What could inflict more injury to
our higher nature, to our real culture? And yet in this lies concealed
a deep instinct of a purely moral nature. It does not, however,
concern merely that people whom the course of events has cast among
other nations, still much less the individual man, who, without choice
or intention, has been born among, and therefore forms a part of them.
It involves the secret of the world-historical problems that struggle
so long with each other until the right one triumphs. To these
problems, with his incomparable depth of soul, the whole life and work
of our artist is devoted as long as he breathes and lives, moved by
the holiest feeling for his nation, for the time--yes, for mankind, in
whose service he as real "poet and prophet" stands with every fibre of
his nature and works with every beat of his heart.

That unnoticed, misunderstood expression at the close of the paper by
"K. Freigedank," in 1850, was this: "One more Jew we must name, who
appeared among us as a writer, namely, Boerne. He stepped out of his
individual position as Jew, seeking deliverance among us. He did not
find it, and must have become conscious that he would only find it in
our own transformation also into genuine men. To return in common with
us to a purer humanity, however, signifies, for the Jew, above all
else, that he shall cease to be a Jew. Boerne had fulfilled this. But
it was precisely Boerne who taught us how this deliverance cannot be
achieved in cool comfort and listless ease; but that it involves for
them, as for us, toil, distress, anxiety, and abundance of pain and
sorrow. Strive for this by self-abandonment and the regenerating work
of salvation, and then we are united and without difference! But,
remember that your deliverance depends upon the deliverance of
Ahasrer--his destruction!"

No other people has received those cast out by all the world with such
sacredly pure, humane feeling as the Germans. Will they then at last
find their deliverance among us from the curse of homelessness, their
new existence by absorption into a larger, richer, deeper whole? It is
this question which animates and moves Wagner; but by no means in the
sense of a casual and shifting quarrel among different races or even
religious parties. On the contrary, he feels that this question is a
life-question of the time, approaching its final solution. It is
not