Emanu-El, Weekly Paperurl (April 28, 1899)
editorial notes.
The financial experts decline to treat the Prospectus of the Jewish Colonial Trust seriously, and dismiss it contemptuously. The objections are pretty well summarized in the following remarks made by the Financial News:
Failing the aid of the Jew’s whose names are synonymous with financial and administrative capacity, the Jewish Colonial Trust is headed by a strange assembly of bankers and manufacturers from Pinsk and Dwinsk and Jassy and other remote places undistinguished as centers of light and leading. Excellent men they are no doubt, full of racial enthusiasm; but they are not the persons to be entrusted with £ 2,000.000 of English capital, or even a tithe of the sum. There is no guarantee that they are capable of administering such sums, no proof that they can prevent the corrupt use of the money. You cannot govern a colony whose nucleus has had its morale undermined by years of subsistence on charity, through directors dotted over inconsiderable towns in Russia or Roumania, even though there be a head office in London. Nor does the council of twenty give any stronger security, drawn, as it is, from New York to Warsaw, from Paris to Ekaterinoslav, and from towns in Galicia whose names are as unfamiliar, even if they are not so unpronounceable, as those of the councilors themselves. The promoters do not attempt to demonstrate that profitable industries can be acclimatized in Palestine, and their programme is as vague as their sentiments are fantastic. If money is to be spent for the succor of poor Jews, either in Palestine or elsewhere, we should prefer to see it administered through the agency of the Anglo-Jewish Association or the Alliance Israelite, which are frankly charitable. Were it not that the Jews who find the sinews of war for those beneficent organizations know the futility of this Jewish Colonial Trust, there might be some anxiety lest their sources of supply might be interfered with by the promotion; but that risk is small. The Trust will fade away like other dreams, leaving the burden of Jewish philanthropy on the old shoulders. It is a pity that the Jewish people should be misrepresented, as they are, by the hare-brained and irresponsible promoters of this ridiculous Trust. No one can take seriously this request that Gentiles should subscribe to transport Jews wholesale to where they cannot earn a livelihood, and may be the cause of endless political complications.