Digest of Public Opinion on Jewish Matters

[The purpose of the Digest is informative. Preference is given to papers not generally accessible to our readers. Quotation does not indicate approval.–Editor.]

The achievement of Lindbergh which now holds the attention of the whole world reminds the Cleveland “Jewish Independent” of the exploits of Otto Lilienthal, the German Jew, who was one of the very first pioncers in the conquest of the air and who lost his life after he had demonstrated the possibilities of aerial navigation. Says the paper:

“On August 9, 1896, there died at Rhinow, in Germany, a man who had given twenty-five years of his life to experimentation in aerial flights. Like Lindbergh, Otto Lilienthal was endowed with a bird-sense and in his attempts to pattern his air ship principles upon the flight of the bird, he finally gave the first real demonstration of the possibility of man’s conquest of the air.

“In 1891, with a pair of curved wings, he made several successful flights, but five years later, during another test, came the fatal crash.”

SEES VAST POSSIBILITIES IN FELIX WARBURG’S TEN-YEAR PLAN

Felix Warburg’s reported ten-year plan for Palestine reconstruction and Russian colonization would bring about, avers the “Day,” not only vastly greater impetus and efficiency in the work of Jewish rehabilitation but also real unification and unity in American Jewry. Discussing the proposal of Mr. Warburg in its May 28 issue, the paper has this to say:

“If Felix Warburg would really undertake to carry out this plan it would mean a colossal step forward in the direction of true unity in American Jewry and would constitute a tremendous gain for the Jewish work in Palestine as well as in Russia.

“American Jewry can be brought together in real unity only on the basis of mutuality of Jewish work. When one part of American Jewry stands for Russia and another part for Palestine the distance dividing them must grow wider and wider, and should it happen that one party crosses the path of the other naturally a conflict rather than a friendly meeting is unavoidable. The best way to avoid quarrelings and establish understanding is not to wait for the millenial era when all grievanees will be forgotten, but to start without delay to work together for a mutual cause and in this work to find the long hoped-for understanding. Such a mutual effort can be based on the active interest of American Jewry in the two Jewish undertakings, in Palestine and in Russia.

“As regards the enterprise proper, nothing can be more significant for it than the guarantee that for the next ten years the work will proceed regularly, unhindered and undisturbed by financial difficulties. The coming ten years will be the deciding period both for the Palestine reconstruction and the Russian colonization.

“It needs but to be remembered for the sake of the work as well as American Jewry’s unity, that partnership is partnership and that mutual work means equal rights and privileges as well. In such a partnership as Mr. Warburg proposes there must be no favoritizm in any particular direction,” the paper declares.

FAVORS LATIN CHARACTERS FOR HEBREW

The recent publication in Palestine of a Hebrew book in Latin characters by Ittamar Ben-Avi, son of the late Eliezer Ben Yehudah, who has set himself the aim of reducing Hebrew to the script prevailing in all countries of Western civilization, is the subject of extended comment by Dr. H. Danby, noted Bible scholar and translator of Dr. Klausner’s “Jesus of Nazareth”, in “The Near East” magazine of London. Writing in the May 5th issue of that paper, Dr. Danby expresses approval of Ben-Avi’s idea but finds fault with his method of transliteration and doubts whether the new experiment will so quickly find imitators in Palestine.

“It is perfectly true,” Dr. Danby says, “that there is an increasing number of people who speak Hebrew but who stop short of the ability to read it. Arabs pick up the language with the greatest ease; and owing to the wholesale use of the ‘direct method’ in teaching Hebrew adopted in the Joeal classes for adult Jearners, there is an appreciable number of Jews and Gentiles whose energy takes them just far enough to make them able to converse freely, but fails to carry them through the initial difficulties of reading. Mr. Ben Avi thinks both to benefit them and, at the same time, remove an aged incubus and a useless national burden. The present book is only a first instalment. But one is doubtful how far others will take his efforts seriously, or even how far he is justified merely from the opportunist standpoint-whether his possible public is not really too small to justify so radical a venture. It remains to be seen how large this public really is, and how far the experiment will be imitated by others-for such imitation alone will justify the experiment.

“The result of the transeription hardly looks appetizing: it makes Hebrew look very much like Magyar. But possibly a similar remark was made when somebody, somewhere about Moses’ time, first wrote Hebrew in Phoenician instead of cuneiform characters, or when Ezra or the Maccabees or Barkokhba played tricks with the script-as, apparently, they did.

“It is easy to pick holes in the transliteration adopted by Mr. Ben Avi. He wholly ignores, even if he is not ignorant of, the standard and more or less unoform methods of transliteration from oriental languages adopted by European scholars. His only standard is the possibilities of the various founts of European type at his disposal. He uses a fount no more elaborate than is necessary for printing French. The various accents serve to differentiate the numerous peculiarities of the Hebrew vowels; and the peculiar Semitic consonants, which are usually represented by a dot under the approximate Indo-Germanic consonant these are represented in Mr. Ben Avi’s transliteration by the simple device of turning the consonant upside down. Furthermore Mr. Ben Avi is no grammarian. He makes no attempt consistently to allow the transliteration to reflect the niceties of the Hebrew grammatical forms; they are sacrificed to short cuts at reproducing ordinary Palestinian Jewish pronunciation-a pronunciation not always very pretty, and very often grammatically inaccurate.”