II
“Let us not theorise too much, or slacken our efforts. Let us avoid impatience and undue haste. Let us increase our devotion to our people and our love for our ancestral land, and the God of Zion will help us.”
These are the concluding words of the long criticism of my first essay which appeared in ha-Meliz.[[9]] It might be inferred that my advice to the Chovevé Zion was that they should confine themselves to theory, give up practical work, proceed with undue haste, and refrain from increasing devotion to our people and love for our ancestral land. But any attentive reader of my article will not need to be told that as regards the two last points I said the exact opposite: that we should not, through undue haste, attempt to achieve by the appeal to self-interest things which are not yet ripe for achievement by force of the ideal itself, because so long as Chibbath Zion is not a living and burning passion in the heart of the people we lack the only basis on which the land could be regenerated, and for that reason we must strive with all our might to increase our devotion to our people and our love for our ancestral land. But as regards theorising and neglecting action, I may really have left my meaning uncertain through excessive brevity. Though I said explicitly that propaganda could be made only by work competently done, and not by speeches alone, it is possible that I ought to have added—what is really self-evident from the context—that so long as the time is not ripe for the actual carrying out of our idea, the object of everything that we do on a small scale ought to be simply to win adherents to our cause; that by that test and that alone we ought to distinguish between what is well and what is ill done both in Palestine and outside it; that therefore quality and not quantity must be our concern, and we must not confine our efforts to the improvement of the colonies, but must use all the many and various ways of appealing to the people.
It is therefore futile for my critic to labour to prove that the Chovevé Zion had no right “to defer action until they had created a new state of mind in the Jewish masses and awakened their national consciousness.”
“Idea and action,” he says, “are not separated in our minds; it requires deeds to convince us. How then could the idea of resettlement gain acceptance with the masses if it were not accompanied by action?” All this does not touch my position, because I did not demand deferment of action. On the contrary, I demanded that everything possible should be done to awaken the love of Palestine, and from that it follows that when the champions of the idea themselves cultivate the Holy Land with the sweat of their brows and their hearts’ blood, as an example, they are doing the very best propaganda work. But the settlement as it is to-day—can it be regarded as propaganda work of this kind? My critic himself says that “the champions of the idea did not do the work with their own hands,” but “talked in four languages;” and what they said was calculated only to incite those who were out for material advancement to go to Palestine and do the work. Such men did in fact go to Palestine, and we know what they did and what happened to them and what the settlement has become. No wonder, then, that the idea has gone on losing its influence on the minds of the people, and that the heart of the Jew does not glow at the vision of Jewish farmers hoeing and ploughing the land of our fathers, as in the days of David and Solomon. Neither the deeds nor the doers are such as to inspire enthusiasm in a people whose heart is chilled by age and trouble.
But my critic joins issue with me in principle as well. He maintains that by no possible means can we succeed in arousing a strong national sentiment among our people, because ever since we became a nation “the sentiment of nationality has been foreign to the spirit of our people, and the individual Jew seeks rather his own good and his private advantage;” and it is vain for us to fight against the spirit and natural character of the people, “for nothing avails against national character.” Hence the Chovevé Zion chose the line of self-interest, not because they preferred it, but because no other was open. “The Jewish masses do not properly understand the language of the national sentiment. Our endeavour must be to make actions speak to them in a language which they do understand—the language of self-interest. Then calculation will succeed where sentiment cannot.”
Now “the language of self-interest” is the language of the struggle for existence, which speaks to each individual in the particular style adapted to his position and ambitions, and to no man in a speech which his neighbour understands; and I for my part am unable to see how it can serve us instead of the unvarying appeal of the national sentiment, which unites all hearts for one aim and one purpose. Even the Utilitarians, who tried to trace all moral and social tendencies to the pursuit of individual advantage, were concerned only to explain the first cause of these tendencies, and to show how they came into existence and developed, as against those who attributed their presence to a direct interposition of Providence. But it is universally admitted that self-interest alone, as it is in itself, cannot provide a basis for any organised society or any great collective effort.
Let us, however, waive that point, and let us hear from our critic’s own lips what is the language of self-interest in this matter. “National sentiment,” he says, “is foreign to the spirit of our people. The way to convince them is to show by figures that any industrious and peaceable man will find what he wants in Palestine, provided he has physical strength and capital.” He admits, then, that only a man who has capital and physical strength, and is industrious and peaceable to boot, will find in Palestine what he wants—that is to say, his individual advantage. Now it is difficult to find the last-named qualifications in a Jew who has capital, and is accustomed to make his living easily and to have a great regard for his own dignity; and apart from that, we have to remember that such a man will not easily find what he wants in Palestine. For a man with capital wants not merely plain food and raiment: he wants also the luxuries and pleasures to which he has been used. And if he is thinking of his individual advantage, he will certainly come to the conclusion that it is folly to lay out his capital in purchasing a piece of land in Palestine, where at the very best he will have to work hard without being able to find satisfaction for even a half of his desires. To the truth of this statement our critic himself bears witness. He tells us that “in those days also (i.e., in the beginning of the colonisation work) the movement existed principally among the poor, who hoped to be established by the generosity of others; and the rich held aloof, then as now.” Again: “In the winter of 1881-82 the first emissary travelled to Palestine, bearing written authority from a number of men in good circumstances to purchase land on their behalf. He bought the land of Rishon-le-Zion, but those who had authorised him to buy for them changed their minds.” And again: “Of those who bought plots of land in the colony just mentioned it was only the poor who went to Palestine; the rich remained at home.” Finally: “The net result of the whole movement was that, with few exceptions, those who remained in Palestine were men in the last stage of poverty.” Experience, therefore, teaches us that men of capital, if they understand no language except that of individual self-interest, will not go to find in Palestine “what they want,” because they want more than they will find there. Who is there, then, whom figures can persuade or to whom self-interest can recommend Palestine, if those who could go will not, and those who would cannot?
I asked in my article why the idea lost ground among our people from the time when it began to take practical shape in the land. Our critic answers with a sigh: “Our impatient people saw that a long time and a great deal of money would be needed to put the colonies which had been founded into a satisfactory condition, and their courage failed them. For eighteen hundred years we found it possible to exist without moving a finger for the colonisation of our land and the salvation of our people; but now that we have not been able to make our colonies all that they should be in six years, we lose heart. Are we not an impatient people?” He does not realise that what he attributes to impatience is simply an inevitable result of the appeal to self-interest. For eighteen hundred years we did not move a finger for the colonisation of our land, because we did not expect it to bring us advantage as individuals. In recent years we have paid attention to the colonisation of our land, because reports and statistics have led us to hope that it will bring us advantage as individuals. But now, when we see that a long time and a great deal of money will be needed to put the colonies already founded into a satisfactory condition, it becomes clear that from the point of view of individual self-interest the thing is not worth while; and so we have quite justifiably lost heart, and the colonisation of our land has become a charitable affair, which affords a scant subsistence to some hundreds of people “in the last stage of poverty.”
Such, then, is the language of individual self-interest. Had our critic really been able to adduce convincing arguments in support of his severe judgment that there never was and never will be any national sentiment among the Jews, and that individual Jews will never be able to rise above “private advantage and individual self-interest,” then we might as well throw up the sponge. We should have no right to be called a people or to lay claim to a land. But, luckily for us, his arguments are not so dangerous.
As a general rule, ethnological investigations into the characteristics of different people are extremely speculative and hazardous. One ethnologist set about to collect the opinions of the foremost authorities as to the characteristics of the Arabs, and this is what he found. Some maintain that the Arab is a man of action, concerned only with concrete things, and very weak on the side of imagination; while others assert that both the Arabs and the Hebrews are strongly imaginative, and that among the Arabs the imagination is always more powerful than the reason. On the other hand, Sprenger regards it as self-evident that the predominance of the imagination over the reason is a characteristic opposed to the Arab spirit, and lays it down as a truth universally recognised that the spirit of the Semitic peoples generally is objective; whereas Lassen, and after him Renan, regard it as universally recognised that the fundamental characteristic of the Semitic peoples is subjectivity.[[10]]
If there are these differences of opinion as regards the characteristics of the Arabs, who have never been uprooted and driven into exile, can anybody have the assurance to dogmatise about the characteristics of a people like our own, which has been scattered among different peoples these two thousand years? Can anybody be so all-knowing as to distinguish with precision between those characteristics which are innate and original in us, and those which have been produced in us by our own environment in exile; to trace one by one all the mutations which the original and the acquired traits have undergone in the passage from generation to generation and from land to land; to forecast which of our characteristics may or may not change with a change of environment? Why, here is our critic laying down the law about the Jewish character as though it were something fixed and unchangeable by time or place, while one famous modern writer has picked out the Jews to demonstrate the truth of his theory that national characteristics depend more on environment and social conditions than on heredity, because he finds that our characteristics differ in different countries and change at different periods, according to our environment and the spirit of the people among whom we live.[[11]]
This being so, I will not enlarge on the details of our critic’s theory as to Jewish characteristics, but will confine myself to that one dangerous characteristic which he attributes to us—the innate lack of national sentiment.
In my essay I argued thus: Seeing that the Law of Moses is entirely based on the welfare of the whole nation, so much so that it has no need to appeal to belief in future reward and punishment (a belief which was known in Egypt in very early times) in order to satisfy the individual, we are justified in inferring the existence at that time of a very strong national sentiment in the whole people, or the most important section of it; and it was only through historical circumstances that this sentiment afterwards lost its force. Thus we are at liberty to believe that by appropriate means it is possible to revive to-day in our people a sentiment which it already had in ancient times. To this our critic replies: “If the Law looked only at the general good, that is not because at a certain time the spirit of individualism did not exist in Israel, but because the Law is practical and reckons with facts. We see that the individual is exposed to all kinds of accidents and misfortunes. How, then, could a practical Law like ours guarantee individual happiness, which is unrealisable?”
I have tried my hardest, Heaven knows, to discover what this means, but in vain. It simply proves my point. For if Judaism is realistic, and if the happiness of the individual on earth is unrealisable, and if at the same time there was no national sentiment, and the people attached no great importance to the well-being of the nation as a whole—then how could Judaism be content with promising a reward which could not have much value as an incentive to right living, when it might have done as other religions have done, both before and since, and as it did itself at a much later period, in response to the needs of the time: namely, have promised every individual a reward in heaven?
And our critic gets himself into all this difficulty simply because he finds it stated by Chwolson that all Semites are individualistic by nature. If that is so, we cannot admit the existence of a national sentiment in Israel at any period. Now we have seen above how much reliance can be placed in such matters on the statements of well-known authorities. But if we examine carefully the passage which our critic quotes from Chwolson, we shall be even more surprised at his finding in it sufficient ground for passing such a sweeping judgment on his people. Chwolson says: “There was scarcely ever a strong bond of union between the Jewish tribes. A full national consciousness has never developed very far among Semites. Each tribe is a unity, the members of which are closely bound together among themselves; but there is no feeling of unity between the different tribes.” The explanation, according to Chwolson, lies in that individualism “which is especially characteristic of the Semites.” But who can show how “a full national consciousness” differs in character from a feeling of love for and attachment to a single tribe? And if it was individualism—and not external circumstances—which prevented the Jewish tribes from being joined by “a strong bond of union,” how is it that this individualism allowed each tribe to become a closely-knit unity? Surely, when a man feels it necessary and possible to subordinate his individual interests to those of the larger unit to which he belongs, even if that unit is only a petty tribe, he has already got beyond individualism, and is therefore capable even of “a full national consciousness,” provided that there are no external obstacles; and the only difference between the national sentiment of a Frenchman and the tribal sentiment of a Montenegrin lies in the magnitude of what inspires the sentiment, not in the character of the sentiment itself. And, in fact, it does happen in all periods, under suitable conditions, that tribal patriotism expands into national patriotism. The ancient Greeks were at first divided into small tribes, continually at war with one another, and it was only at a late period that they acquired the sentiment of national unity. In the Middle Ages the Italian cities were separate and mutually hostile, and yet at last the Italians developed a strong national sentiment. And, to come to recent times, who does not know what the Germans were until a few decades ago? “We still remember,” says one of their great writers,[[12]] “the time when we were justly reproached with being conspicuous among all the civilised peoples of Europe for our lack of a strong and healthy national sentiment.” And look at the Germans now!
In a word: the contention that Semites in general, or the Jews in particular, cannot have a national sentiment (a sentiment of which one of the greatest scientists[[13]] finds traces even in animals) needs to be supported by weightier evidence.
And until such evidence is forthcoming, “let us not slacken our efforts, and let us avoid undue haste. Let us increase our devotion to our people and our love for our ancestral land, and the God of Zion will help us.”
THE FIRST ZIONIST CONGRESS
(1897[[14]])
The Congress of the Zionists, the subject of a controversy which has filled the emptiness of our little world for some months past, is now a piece of history. About two hundred Jews, of all lands and of all parties, met at Basle, and for three days (29-31 August) from morning till evening they discussed publicly, in the sight of the whole world, the establishment of a secure home for the Jewish people in the land of its ancestors. Thus the national answer to the “Jewish problem” came out of its retirement into the light of day, and was proclaimed to the world in ringing tones, in clear language and in manly fashion—a thing the like of which had never happened since the Jews were exiled from their land.
That is all. The Congress could do no more, had need to do no more.
For—why deceive ourselves?—of all the great objects of Chibbath Zion (or, as they call it now, “Zionism”), there is only one towards the accomplishment of which we have at present the strength to approach in any appreciable degree, and that is the moral object—the emancipation of ourselves from the inner slavery and the spiritual degradation which assimilation has produced in us, and the strengthening of our national unity by joint action in every sphere of our national life, until we become capable and worthy of a life of dignity and freedom at some time in the future. Everything else lies at yet in the realm of idea and imagination. Those who oppose the “Jewish State” doubt whether it will be possible to obtain the consent of the nations, and especially of Turkey, to its establishment. But it seems to me that there is a still more difficult question. If we had this consent, should we, in our present moral condition, be fit to accept it?... Nor is that all. One may even doubt whether the establishment of a “Jewish State” at the present time, even in the most complete form that we can imagine, having regard to the general international position, would give us the right to say that our problem had been completely solved, and our national ideal attained. “Reward is proportionate to suffering.”[[15]] After two thousand years of untold misery and suffering, the Jewish people cannot possibly be content with attaining at last to the position of a small and insignificant nation, with a State tossed about like a ball between its powerful neighbours, and maintaining its existence only by diplomatic shifts and continual truckling to the favoured of fortune. An ancient people, which was once a beacon to the world, cannot possibly accept, as a satisfactory reward for all that it has endured, a thing so trifling, which many other peoples, unrenowned and uncultured, have won in a short time, without going through a hundredth part of the suffering. It was not for nothing that Israel had Prophets, whose vision saw Righteousness ruling the world at the end of days. It was their nationalism, their love for their people and their land, that gave the Prophets that vision. For in their day the Jewish State was always between two fires—Assyria or Babylon on one side, and Egypt on the other—and it never had any chance of a peaceful life and natural development. So “Zionism” in the minds of the Prophets expanded, and produced that great vision of the end of days, when the wolf should lie down with the lamb, and nation should no longer lift up the sword against nation—and then Israel too should dwell securely in his land. And so this ideal for humanity has always been and will always be inevitably an essential part of the national ideal of the Jewish people; and a “Jewish State” will be able to give the people rest only when universal Righteousness is enthroned and holds sway over nations and States.
We went to Basle, then, not to found a Jewish State to-day or to-morrow, but to proclaim aloud to all the nations that the Jewish people still lives and desires to live. We have to proclaim this in season and out, not in order that the nations may hearken and give us what we want, but primarily in order that we ourselves may hear the echo of our cry in our inmost hearts, and perhaps be roused thereby from our degradation.
This function the Basle Congress fulfilled admirably in its opening stages; and for this it would have deserved eternal commemoration in letters of gold—had it not tried to do more.
Once again our impatience, that curse which dogs us and ruins all that we do, had full rein. If those who convened the Congress had armed themselves with patience, and had begun by stating clearly that the Messiah was not yet in sight, and that for the moment we could achieve nothing beyond what words and enthusiasm could do—the revival of our national spirit, and the announcement of this revival in a public manner—then, no doubt, the Congress would have been much less well attended than it was, and one day would have sufficed for its business instead of three: but that one day would have been worth whole generations, and the delegates, the chosen of our people (for only the chosen of our people would have been interested in such a Congress) would have returned to their several homes filled with life and determination and new-born energy, to impart their life and determination and energy to the whole people.
But as it is....
The founders of this movement are “Europeans,” and, being expert in the ways of diplomacy and the procedure of latter-day political parties, they bring these ways and procedure with them to the “Jewish State.” ... Emissaries were sent out before the Congress, and various hints were spread abroad in writing and by word of mouth, so as to arouse in the masses an exaggerated hope of imminent redemption. Thus was kindled the false fire of a feverish enthusiasm, which brought to the Basle Congress a rabble of youngsters—in years or in understanding—and their senseless proceedings robbed it of its bloom and made it a mockery.
Councils large and small, committees without number, a sheaf of fantastic proposals about a “National Fund,”[[16]] and the rest of the haute politique of the Jewish State—these are the “practical” results of the Congress. How could it be otherwise? Most of the delegates, representing the down-trodden Jews who long for redemption, were sent for one purpose and on one understanding only—that they should bring redemption back with them. How could they return home without being able to announce that the management of the “State” in all its various branches had been put in good hands, and that all the important questions connected with it had been raised and examined and solved?
History repeats itself. Seven years ago our people looked to the Executive Committee[[17]] at Jaffa as it looks now to the Basle Congress. A large number of people went to Palestine, thinking to buy the land and to build dozens of colonies in a single day. Hope and enthusiasm grew day by day, not less than now. Then also haute politique—though in a different form—was our undoing. The leaders of the movement aroused an artificial exaltation in the people by promises and expectations which were not destined to be fulfilled; and this exaltation could not last long. The dream fled, eyes were opened, and disappointment begat despair. At that time, in the midst of the hubbub and enthusiasm, I ventured to tell the public the bitter truth,[[18]] to warn the people not to be led astray by false hopes: and many regarded me as a traitor to my people, as one who hindered the redemption. Now we have seen these same men, the “practical” men of that day, among the delegates at Basle, crowning the new movement with wreaths, and making game of “practical colonisation”—as though they had completely forgotten that the responsibility for what has happened to the colonisation work lies not on the work itself, but on them, because they carried it on by crooked methods and turned it from its true purpose, in order to create a great popular movement at a single stroke.
At Basle, as at Jaffa, I sat solitary among my friends, like a mourner at a wedding-feast. But now, as then, I may not hold back the truth. Let others say what they will, out of too much simplicity or for worse reasons: I cannot refrain from uttering a warning that danger is at hand and the reaction is close upon us. To-day, as before, the enthusiasm is artificial, and in the end it will lead to the despair that follows disillusionment.
Seven years ago the delegates returned from Jaffa full of good tidings. Redemption had come to the land, and we had nothing to do but wait till the vine bore its fruit. Now the delegates return and tell us that redeemers have arisen for Israel, and we have nothing to do but wait till diplomacy finishes its work. And now, as then, the eyes of the people will soon be opened, and they will see that they have been misled. The fire suddenly kindled by hope will die down again, perhaps to the very last spark.
Could I command the waters of Lethe, I would see that everything that the delegates saw and heard at Basle was effaced from their recollection, and would leave them only one memory: that of the great and sacred hour when they all—these down-trodden Jews who came from the ends of the earth—stood up together like brothers, their hearts full of sacred emotion and their eyes lifted up in love and pride towards their great brother-Jew,[[19]] who stood on the platform and spoke wonders of his people, like one of the Prophets of old. The memory of that hour, were it not that many other hours which followed dimmed the purity of the first impression, might have made this Congress one of the most momentous events in our history.
The salvation of Israel will be achieved by Prophets, not by diplomats....
THE JEWISH STATE AND THE JEWISH PROBLEM
(1897[[20]])
Some months have passed since the Zionist Congress, but its echoes are still heard in daily life and in the press. In daily life the echoes take the form of meetings small and big, local and central. Since the delegates returned home, they have been gathering the public together and recounting over and over again the wonders that they saw enacted before their eyes. The wretched, hungry public listens and waxes enthusiastic and hopes for salvation: for can “they”—the Jews of the West—fail to carry out anything that they plan? Heads grow hot and hearts beat fast; and many “communal workers” whose one care in life had been for years—until last August—the Palestinian settlement, and who would have given the whole world for a penny donation in aid of Palestine workmen or the Jaffa School, have now quite lost their bearings, and ask one another: “What’s the good of this sort of work? The Messiah is near at hand, and we busy ourselves with trifles! The time has come for great deeds: great men, men of the West, march before us in the van.”—There has been a revolution in their world, and to emphasise it they give a new name to the cause: it is no longer “Love of Zion” (Chibbath Zion), but “Zionism” (Zioniyuth). Nay, the more careful among them, determined to leave no loop-hole for error, even keep the European form of the name (“Zionismus”)—thus announcing to all and sundry that they are not talking about anything so antiquated as Chibbath Zion, but about a new, up-to-date movement, which comes, like its name, from the West, where people do not use Hebrew.
In the press all these meetings, with their addresses, motions and resolutions, appear over again in the guise of articles—articles written in a vein of enthusiasm and triumph. The meeting was magnificent, every speaker was a Demosthenes, the resolutions were carried by acclamation, all those present were swept off their feet and shouted with one voice: “We will do and obey!”—in a word, everything was delightful, entrancing, perfect. And the Congress itself still produces a literature of its own. Pamphlets specially devoted to its praises appear in several languages; Jewish and non-Jewish papers still occasionally publish articles and notes about it; and, needless to say, the “Zionist” organ[[21]] itself endeavours to maintain the impression which the Congress made, and not to allow it to fade too rapidly from the public memory. It searches the press of every nation and every land, and wherever it finds a favourable mention of the Congress, even in some insignificant journal published in the language of one of the smaller European nationalities, it immediately gives a summary of the article, with much jubilation. Only one small nation’s language has thus far not been honoured with such attention, though its journals too have lavished praise on the Congress: I mean Hebrew.
In short, the universal note is one of rejoicing; and it is therefore small wonder that in the midst of this general harmony my little Note on the Congress sounded discordant and aroused the most violent displeasure in many quarters. I knew from the start that I should not be forgiven for saying such things at such a time, and I had steeled myself to hear with equanimity the clatter of high-sounding phrases and obscure innuendoes—of which our writers are so prolific—and hold my peace. But when I was attacked by M. L. Lilienblum,[[22]] a writer whose habit it is not to write àpropos des bottes for the sake of displaying his style, I became convinced that this time I had really relied too much on the old adage: Verbum sapienti satis. It is not pleasant to swim against the stream; and when one does something without enjoyment, purely as a duty, one does not put more than the necessary minimum of work into the task. Hence in the note referred to I allowed myself to be extremely brief, relying on my readers to fill in the gaps out of their own knowledge, by connecting what I wrote with earlier expressions of my views, which were already familiar to them. I see now that I made a mistake, and left room for the ascription to me of ideas and opinions which are utterly remote from my true intention. Consequently I have now to perform the hard and ungrateful task of writing a commentary on myself, and expressing my views on the matter in hand with greater explicitness.
Nordau’s address on the general condition of the Jews was a sort of introduction to the business of the Congress. It exposed in incisive language the sore troubles, material or moral, which beset the Jews the world over. In Eastern countries their trouble is material: they have a constant struggle to satisfy the most elementary physical needs, to win a crust of bread and a breath of air—things which are denied them because they are Jews. In the West, in lands of emancipation, their material condition is not particularly bad, but the moral trouble is serious. They want to take full advantage of their rights, and cannot; they long to become attached to the people of the country, and to take part in its social life, and they are kept at arm’s length; they strive after love and brotherhood, and are met by looks of hatred and contempt on all sides; conscious that they are not inferior to their neighbours in any kind of ability or virtue, they have it continually thrown in their teeth that they are an inferior type, and are not fit to rise to the same level as the Aryans. And more to the same effect.
Well—what then?
Nordau himself did not touch on this question: it was outside the scope of his address. But the whole Congress was the answer. Beginning as it did with Nordau’s address, the Congress meant this: that in order to escape from all these troubles it is necessary to establish a Jewish State.
Let us imagine, then, that the consent of Turkey and the other Powers has already been obtained, and the State is established—and, if you will, established völkerrechtlich, with the full sanction of international law, as the more extreme members of the Congress desire. Does this bring, or bring near, the end of the material trouble? No doubt, every poor Jew will be at perfect liberty to go to his State and to seek his living there, without any artificial hindrances in the shape of restrictive laws or anything of that kind. But liberty to seek a livelihood is not enough: he must be able to find what he seeks. There are natural laws which fetter man’s freedom of action much more than artificial laws. Modern economic life is so complex, and the development of any single one of its departments depends on so many conditions, that no nation, not even the strongest and richest, could in a short time create in any country new sources of livelihood sufficient for many millions of human beings. The single country is no longer an economic unit: the whole world is one great market, in which every State has to struggle hard for its place. Hence only a fantasy bordering on madness can believe that so soon as the Jewish State is established millions of Jews will flock to it, and the land will afford them adequate sustenance. Think of the labour and the money that had to be sunk in Palestine over a long period of years before one new branch of production—vine-growing—could be established there! And even to-day, after all the work that has been done, we cannot yet say that Palestinian wine has found the openings that it needs in the world market, although its quantity is still small. But if in 1891 Palestine had been a Jewish State, and all the dozens of Colonies that were then going to be established for the cultivation of the vine had in fact been established, Palestinian wine would be to-day as common as water, and would fetch no price at all. Using the analogy of this small example, we can see how difficult it will be to start new branches of production in Palestine, and to find openings for its products in the world market. But if the Jews are to flock to their State in large numbers, all at once, we may prophesy with perfect certainty that home competition in every branch of production (and home competition will be inevitable, because the amount of labour available will increase more quickly than the demand for it) will prevent any one branch from developing as it should. And then the Jews will turn and leave their State, flying from the most deadly of all enemies—an enemy not to be kept off even by the magic word völkerrechtlich: from hunger.
True, agriculture in its elementary form does not depend to any great extent on the world market, and at any rate it will provide those engaged in it with food, if not with plenty. But if the Jewish State sets out to save all those Jews who are in the grip of the material problems, or most of them, by turning them into agriculturists in Palestine, then it must first find the necessary capital. At Basle, no doubt, one heard naïve and confident references to a “National Fund” of ten million pounds sterling. But even if we silence reason, and give the rein to fancy so far as to believe that we can obtain a Fund of those dimensions in a short time, we are still no further. Those very speeches that we heard at Basle about the economic condition of the Jews in various countries showed beyond a doubt that our national wealth is very small, and most of our people are below the poverty-line. From this any man of sense, though he be no great mathematician, can readily calculate that ten million pounds are a mere nothing compared with the sum necessary for the emigration of the Jews and their settlement in Palestine on an agricultural basis. Even if all the rich Jews suddenly became ardent “Zionists,” and every one of them gave half his wealth to the cause, the whole would still not make up the thousands of millions that would be needed for the purpose.
There is no doubt, then, that even when the Jewish State is established the Jews will be able to settle in it only little by little, the determining factors being the resources of the people themselves and the degree of economic development reached by the country. Meanwhile the natural increase of population will continue, both among those who settle in the country and among those who remain outside it, with the inevitable result that on the one hand Palestine will have less and less room for new immigrants, and on the other hand the number of those remaining outside Palestine will not diminish very much, in spite of the continual emigration. In his opening speech at the Congress, Dr. Herzl, wishing to demonstrate the superiority of his State idea over the method of Palestinian colonisation adopted hitherto, calculated that by the latter method it would take nine hundred years before all the Jews could be settled in their land. The members of the Congress applauded this as a conclusive argument. But it was a cheap victory. The Jewish State itself, do what it will, cannot make a more favourable calculation.
Truth is bitter, but with all its bitterness it is better than illusion. We must confess to ourselves that the “ingathering of the exiles” is unattainable by natural means. We may, by natural means, establish a Jewish State one day, and the Jews may increase and multiply in it until the country will hold no more: but even then the greater part of the people will remain scattered in strange lands. “To gather our scattered ones from the four corners of the earth” (in the words of the Prayer Book) is impossible. Only religion, with its belief in a miraculous redemption, can promise that consummation.
But if this is so, if the Jewish State too means not an “ingathering of the exiles,” but the settlement of a small part of our people in Palestine, then how will it solve the material problem of the Jewish masses in the lands of the Diaspora?
Or do the champions of the State idea think, perhaps, that, being masters in our own country, we shall be able by diplomatic means to get the various governments to relieve the material sufferings of our scattered fellow-Jews? That is, it seems to me, Dr. Herzl’s latest theory. In his new pamphlet (Der Baseler Kongress) we no longer find any calculation of the number of years that it will take for the Jews to enter their country. Instead, he tells us in so many words (p. 9) that if the land becomes the national property of the Jewish people, even though no individual Jew owns privately a single square yard of it, then the Jewish problem will be solved for ever, These words (unless we exclude the material aspect of the Jewish problem) can be understood only in the way suggested above. But this hope seems to me so fantastic that I see no need to waste words in demolishing it. We have seen often enough, even in the case of nations more in favour than Jews are with powerful Governments, how little diplomacy can do in matters of this kind, if it is not backed by a large armed force. Nay, it is conceivable that in the days of the Jewish State, when economic conditions in this or that country are such as to induce a Government to protect its people against Jewish competition by restrictive legislation, that Government will find it easier then than it is now to find an excuse for such action, for it will be able to plead that if the Jews are not happy where they are, they can go to their own State.
The material problem, then, will not be ended by the foundation of a Jewish State, nor, generally speaking, does it lie in our power to end it (though it could be eased more or less even now by various means, such as the encouragement of agriculture and handicrafts among Jews in all countries); and whether we found a State or not, this particular problem will always turn at bottom on the economic condition of each country and the degree of civilisation attained by each people.
Thus we are driven to the conclusion that the only true basis of Zionism is to be found in the other problem, the moral one.
But the moral problem appears in two forms, one in the West and one in the East; and this fact explains the fundamental difference between Western “Zionism” and Eastern Chibbath Zion. Nordau dealt only with the Western problem, apparently knowing nothing about the Eastern; and the Congress as a whole concentrated on the first, and paid little attention to the second.
The Western Jew, after leaving the Ghetto and seeking to attach himself to the people of the country in which he lives, is unhappy because his hope of an open-armed welcome is disappointed. He returns reluctantly to his own people, and tries to find within the Jewish community that life for which he yearns—but in vain. Communal life and communal problems no longer satisfy him. He has already grown accustomed to a broader social and political life; and on the intellectual side Jewish cultural work has no attraction, because Jewish culture has played no part in his education from childhood, and is a closed book to him. So in his trouble he turns to the land of his ancestors, and pictures to himself how good it would be if a Jewish State were re-established there—a State arranged and organised exactly after the pattern of other States. Then he could live a full, complete life among his own people, and find at home all that he now sees outside, dangled before his eyes, but out of reach. Of course, not all the Jews will be able to take wing and go to their State; but the very existence of the Jewish State will raise the prestige of those who remain in exile, and their fellow citizens will no more despise them and keep them at arm’s length, as though they were ignoble slaves, dependent entirely on the hospitality of others. As he contemplates this fascinating vision, it suddenly dawns on his inner consciousness that even now, before the Jewish State is established, the mere idea of it gives him almost complete relief. He has an opportunity for organised work, for political excitement; he finds a suitable field of activity without having to become subservient to non-Jews; and he feels that thanks to this ideal he stands once more spiritually erect, and has regained human dignity, without overmuch trouble and without external aid. So he devotes himself to the ideal with all the ardour of which he is capable; he gives rein to his fancy, and lets it soar as it will, up above reality and the limitations of human power. For it is not the attainment of the ideal that he needs: its pursuit alone is sufficient to cure him of his moral sickness, which is the consciousness of inferiority; and the higher and more distant the ideal, the greater its power of exaltation.
This is the basis of Western Zionism and the secret of its attraction. But Eastern Chibbath Zion has a different origin and development. Originally, like “Zionism,” it was political; but being a result of material evils, it could not rest satisfied with an “activity” consisting only of outbursts of feeling and fine phrases. These things may satisfy the heart, but not the stomach. So Chibbath Zion began at once to express itself in concrete activities—in the establishment of colonies in Palestine. This practical work soon clipped the wings of fancy, and made it clear that Chibbath Zion could not lessen the material evil by one iota. One might have thought, then, that when this fact became patent the Chovevé Zion would give up their activity, and cease wasting time and energy on work which brought them no nearer their goal. But, no: they remained true to their flag, and went on working with the old enthusiasm, though most of them did not understand even in their own minds why they did so. They felt instinctively that so they must do; but as they did not clearly appreciate the nature of this feeling, the things that they did were not always rightly directed towards that object which in reality was drawing them on without their knowledge.
For at the very time when the material tragedy in the East was at its height, the heart of the Eastern Jew was still oppressed by another tragedy—the moral one; and when the Chovevé Zion began to work for the solution of the material problem, the national instinct of the people felt that just in such work could it find the remedy for its moral trouble. Hence the people took up this work and would not abandon it even after it had become obvious that the material trouble could not be cured in this way. The Eastern form of the moral trouble is absolutely different from the Western. In the West it is the problem of the Jews, in the East the problem of Judaism. The one weighs on the individual, the other on the nation. The one is felt by Jews who have had a European education, the other by Jews whose education has been Jewish. The one is a product of anti-Semitism, and is dependent on anti-Semitism for its existence; the other is a natural product of a real link with a culture of thousands of years, which will retain its hold even if the troubles of the Jews all over the world come to an end, together with anti-Semitism, and all the Jews in every land have comfortable positions, are on the best possible terms with their neighbours, and are allowed by them to take part in every sphere of social and political life on terms of absolute equality.
It is not only Jews who have come out of the Ghetto: Judaism has come out, too. For Jews the exodus is confined to certain countries, and is due to toleration; but Judaism has come out (or is coming out) of its own accord wherever it has come into contact with modern culture. This contact with modern culture overturns the defences of Judaism from within, so that Judaism can no longer remain isolated and live a life apart. The spirit of our people strives for development: it wants to absorb those elements of general culture which reach it from outside, to digest them and to make them a part of itself, as it has done before at different periods of its history. But the conditions of its life in exile are not suitable. In our time culture wears in each country the garb of the national spirit, and the stranger who would woo her must sink his individuality and become absorbed in the dominant spirit. For this reason Judaism in exile cannot develop its individuality in its own way. When it leaves the Ghetto walls it is in danger of losing its essential being or—at best—its national unity: it is in danger of being split up into as many kinds of Judaism, each with a different character and life, as there are countries of the Jewish dispersion.[[23]]
And now Judaism finds that it can no longer tolerate the galuth[[24]] form which it had to take on, in obedience to its will-to-live, when it was exiled from its own country, and that if it loses that form its life is in danger. So it seeks to return to its historic centre, in order to live there a life of natural development, to bring its powers into play in every department of human culture, to develop and perfect those national possessions which it has acquired up to now, and thus to contribute to the common stock of humanity, in the future as in the past, a great national culture, the fruit of the unhampered activity of a people living according to its own spirit. For this purpose Judaism needs at present but little. It needs not an independent State, but only the creation in its native land of conditions favourable to its development: a good-sized settlement of Jews working without hindrance[[25]] in every branch of culture, from agriculture and handicrafts to science and literature. This Jewish settlement, which will be a gradual growth, will become in course of time the centre of the nation, wherein its spirit will find pure expression and develop in all its aspects up to the highest degree of perfection of which it is capable. Then from this centre the spirit of Judaism will go forth to the great circumference, to all the communities of the Diaspora, and will breathe new life into them and preserve their unity; and when our national culture in Palestine has attained that level, we may be confident that it will produce men in the country who will be able, on a favourable opportunity, to establish a State which will be a Jewish State, and not merely a State of Jews.
This Chibbath Zion, which takes thought for the preservation of Judaism at a time when Jewry suffers so much, is something odd and unintelligible to the “political” Zionists of the West, just as the demand of R. Jochanan ben Zakkai for Jabneh was strange and unintelligible to the corresponding people of that time.[[26]] And so political Zionism cannot satisfy those Jews who care for Judaism: its growth seems to them to be fraught with danger to the object of their own aspiration.
The secret of our people’s persistence is—as I have tried to show elsewhere[[27]]—that at a very early period the Prophets taught it to respect only spiritual power, and not to worship material power. For this reason the clash with enemies stronger than itself never brought the Jewish nation, as it did the other nations of antiquity, to the point of self-effacement. So long as we are faithful to this principle, our existence has a secure basis: for in spiritual power we are not inferior to other nations, and we have no reason to efface ourselves. But a political ideal which does not rest on the national culture is apt to seduce us from our loyalty to spiritual greatness, and to beget in us a tendency to find the path of glory in the attainment of material power and political dominion, thus breaking the thread that unites us with the past, and undermining our historical basis. Needless to say, if the political ideal is not attained, it will have disastrous consequences, because we shall have lost the old basis without finding a new one. But even if it is attained under present conditions, when we are a scattered people not only in the physical but also in the spiritual sense—even then Judaism will be in great danger. Almost all our great men, those, that is, whose education and social position fit them to be at the head of a Jewish State, are spiritually far removed from Judaism, and have no true conception of its nature and its value. Such men, however loyal to their State and devoted to its interests, will necessarily regard those interests as bound up with the foreign culture which they themselves have imbibed; and they will endeavour, by moral persuasion or even by force, to implant that culture in the Jewish State, so that in the end the Jewish State will be a State of Germans or Frenchmen of the Jewish race. We have even now a small example of this process in Palestine.[[28]] And history teaches us that in the days of the Herodian house Palestine was indeed a Jewish State, but the national culture was despised and persecuted, and the ruling house did everything in its power to implant Roman culture in the country, and frittered away the national resources in the building of heathen temples and amphitheatres and so forth. Such a Jewish State would spell death and utter degradation for our people. We should never achieve sufficient political power to deserve respect, while we should miss the living moral force within. The puny State, being “tossed about like a ball between its powerful neighbours, and maintaining its existence only by diplomatic shifts and continual truckling to the favoured of fortune,” would not be able to give us a feeling of national glory; and the national culture, in which we might have sought and found our glory, would not have been implanted in our State and would not be the principle of its life. So we should really be then—much more than we are now—“a small and insignificant nation,” enslaved in spirit to “the favoured of fortune,” turning an envious and covetous eye on the armed force of our “powerful neighbours”; and our existence as a sovereign State would not add a glorious chapter to our national history. Were it not better for “an ancient people which was once a beacon to the world” to disappear than to end by reaching such a goal as this?[[29]] Mr. Lilienblum reminds me that there are in our time small States, like Switzerland, which are safeguarded against interference by the other nations, and have no need of “continual truckling.” But a comparison between Palestine and small countries like Switzerland overlooks the geographical position of Palestine and its religious importance for all nations. These two facts will make it quite impossible for its “powerful neighbours” (by which expression, of course, I did not mean, as Mr. Lilienblum interprets, “the Druses and the Persians”) to leave it alone altogether; and when it has become a Jewish State they will all still keep an eye on it, and each Power will try to influence its policy in a direction favourable to itself, just as we see happening in the case of other weak states (like Turkey) in which the great European nations have “interests.”
In a word: Chibbath Zion, no less than “Zionism,” wants a Jewish State and believes in the possibility of the establishment of a Jewish State in the future. But while “Zionism” looks to the Jewish State to provide a remedy for poverty, complete tranquillity and national glory, Chibbath Zion knows that our State will not give us all these things until “universal Righteousness is enthroned and holds sway over nations and States”: and it looks to a Jewish State to provide only a “secure refuge” for Judaism and a cultural bond of unity for our nation. “Zionism,” therefore, begins its work with political propaganda; Chibbath Zion begins with national culture, because only through the national culture and for its sake can a Jewish State be established in such a way as to correspond with the will and the needs of the Jewish people.
Dr. Herzl, it is true, said in the speech mentioned above that “Zionism” demands the return to Judaism before the return to the Jewish State. But these nice-sounding words are so much at variance with his deeds that we are forced to the unpleasant conclusion that they are nothing but a well-turned phrase.
It is very difficult for me to deal with individual actions, on which one cannot touch without reflecting on individual men. For this reason I contented myself, in my note on the Congress, with general allusions, which, I believed, would be readily intelligible to those who were versed in the subject, and especially to Congress delegates. But some of my opponents have turned this scrupulousness to use against me by pretending not to understand at all. They ask, with affected simplicity, what fault I have to find with the Congress, and they have even the assurance to deny publicly facts which are common knowledge. These tactics constrain me here, against my will, to raise the artistic veil which they have cast over the whole proceedings, and to mention some details which throw light on the character of this movement and the mental attitude of its adherents.
If it were really the aim of “Zionism” to bring the people back to Judaism—to make it not merely a nation in the political sense, but a nation living according to its own spirit—then the Congress would not have postponed questions of national culture—of language and literature, of education and the diffusion of Jewish knowledge—to the very last moment, after the end of all the debates on rechtlich and völkerrechtlich, on the election of X. as a member of the Committee, on the imaginary millions, and so forth. When all those present were tired out, and welcomed the setting sun on the last day as a sign of the approaching end, a short time was allowed for a discourse by one of the members on all those important questions, which are in reality the most vital and essential questions. Naturally, the discourse, however good, had to be hurried and shortened; there was no time for discussion of details; a suggestion was made from the platform that all these problems should be handed over to a Commission consisting of certain writers, who were named; and the whole assembly agreed simply for the sake of finishing the business and getting away.
But there is no need to ascertain the attitude of the Congress by inference, because it was stated quite explicitly in one of the official speeches—a speech which appeared on the agenda as “An Exposition of the basis of Zionism,” and was submitted to Dr. Herzl before it was read to the Congress. In this speech we were told plainly that the Western Jews were nearer than those of the East to the goal of Zionism, because they had already done half the work: they had annihilated the Jewish culture of the Ghetto, and were thus emancipated from the yoke of the past. This speech, too, was received with prolonged applause, and the Congress passed a motion ordering it to be published as a pamphlet for distribution among Jews.
In one of the numbers of the Zionist organ Die Welt there appeared a good allegorical description of those Jews who remained in the National German party in Austria even after it had united with the anti-Semites. The allegory is of an old lady whose lover deserts her for another, and who, after trying without success to bring him back by all the arts which used to win him, begins to display affection for his new love, hoping that he may take pity on her for her magnanimity.
I have a shrewd suspicion that this allegory can equally well be applied, with a slight change, to its inventors themselves. There is an old lady who, despairing utterly of regaining her lover by entreaties, submission and humility, suddenly decks herself out in splendour and begins to treat him with hatred and contempt. Her object is still to influence him. She wants him at least to respect her in his heart of hearts, if he can no longer love her. Whoever reads Die Welt attentively and critically will not be able to avoid the impression that the Western “Zionists” always have their eyes fixed on the non-Jewish world, and that they, like the assimilated Jews, are aiming simply at finding favour in the eyes of the nations: only that whereas the others want love, the “Zionists” want respect. They are enormously pleased when a Gentile says openly that the “Zionists” deserve respect, when a journal prints some reference to the “Zionists” without making a joke of them, and so forth. Nay, at the last sitting of the Congress the President found it necessary publicly to tender special thanks to the three Gentiles who had honoured the meeting by taking part in it, although they were all three silent members, and there is no sign of their having done anything. If I wished to go into small details, I could show from various incidents that in their general conduct and procedure these “Zionists” do not try to get close to Jewish culture and imbibe its spirit, but that, on the contrary, they endeavour to imitate, as Jews, the conduct and procedure of the Germans, even where they are most foreign to the Jewish spirit, as a means of showing that Jews, too, can live and act like all other nations. It may suffice to mention the unpleasant incident at Vienna recently, when the young “Zionists” went out to spread the gospel of “Zionism” with sticks and fisticuffs, in German fashion. And the Zionist organ regarded this incident sympathetically, and, for all its carefulness, could not conceal its satisfaction at the success of the Zionist fist.
The whole Congress, too, was designed rather as a demonstration to the world than as a means of making it clear to ourselves what we want and what we can do. The founders of the movement wanted to show the outside world that they had behind them a united and unanimous Jewish people. It must be admitted that from beginning to end they pursued this object with clear consciousness and determination. In those countries where Jews are preoccupied with material troubles, and are not likely on the whole to get enthusiastic about a political ideal for the distant future, a special emissary went about, before the Congress, spreading favourable reports, from which it might be concluded that both the consent of Turkey and the necessary millions were nearly within our reach, and that nothing was lacking except a national representative body to negotiate with all parties on behalf of the Jewish people: for which reason it was necessary to send many delegates to the Congress, and also to send in petitions with thousands of signatures, and then the Committee to be chosen by the Congress would be the body which was required.[[30]] On the other hand, they were careful not to announce clearly in advance that Herzl’s Zionism, and that only, would be the basis of the Congress, that that basis would be above criticism, and no delegate to the Congress would have the right to question it. The Order of Proceedings, which was sent out with the invitation to the Congress, said merely in general terms that anybody could be a delegate “who expresses his agreement with the general programme of Zionism,” without explaining what the general programme was or where it could be found. Thus there met at Basle men utterly at variance with one another in their views and aspirations. They thought in their simplicity that everybody whose gaze was turned Zion-wards, though he did not see eye to eye with Herzl, had done his duty to the general programme and had a right to be a member of the Congress and to express his views before it. But the heads of the Congress tried with all their might to prevent any difference of opinion on fundamental questions from coming to the surface, and used every “parliamentary” device to avoid giving opportunity for discussion and elucidation of such questions. The question of the programme actually came up at one of the preliminary meetings held before the Congress itself (a Vorkonferenz); and some of the delegates from Vienna pointed to the statement on the Order of Proceedings, and tried to prove from it that that question could not properly be raised, since all the delegates had accepted the general programme of Zionism, and there was no Zionism but that of Vienna, and Die Welt was its prophet. But many of those present would not agree, and a Commission had to be appointed to draw up a programme. This Commission skilfully contrived a programme capable of a dozen interpretations, to suit all tastes; and this programme was put before Congress with a request that it should be accepted as it stood, without any discussion. But one delegate refused to submit, and his action led to a long debate on a single word. This debate showed, to the consternation of many people, that there were several kind of “Zionists,” and the cloak of unanimity was in danger of being publicly rent asunder; but the leaders quickly and skilfully patched up the rent, before it had got very far. Dr. Herzl, in his new pamphlet, uses this to prove what great importance Zionists attached to this single word (völkerrechtlich). But in truth similar “dangerous” debates might have been raised on many other words. For many delegates quite failed to notice the wide gulf between the various views on points of principle, and a discussion on any such point was calculated to open people’s eyes and to shatter the whole structure to atoms. But such discussions were not raised, because even the few who saw clearly and understood the position shrank from the risk of “wrecking.” And so the object was attained; the illusion of unanimity was preserved till the last; the outside world saw a united people demanding a State; and those who were inside returned home full of enthusiasm, but no whit the clearer as to their ideas or the relation of one idea to another.
Yet, after all, I confess that Western “Zionism” is very good and useful for those Western Jews who have long since almost forgotten Judaism, and have no link with their people except a vague sentiment which they themselves do not understand. The establishment of a Jewish State by their agency is at present but a distant vision; but the idea of a State induces them meanwhile to devote their energies to the service of their people, lifts them out of the mire of assimilation, and strengthens their Jewish national consciousness. Possibly, when they find out that it will be a long time before we have policemen and watchmen of our own, many of them may leave us altogether; but even then our loss through this movement will not be greater than our gain, because undoubtedly there will be among them men of larger heart, who, in course of time, will be moved to get to the bottom of the matter and to understand their people and its spirit: and these men will arrive of themselves at that genuine Chibbath Zion which is in harmony with our national spirit. But in the East, the home of refuge of Judaism and the birthplace of Jewish Chibbath Zion, this “political” tendency can bring us only harm. Its attractive force is at the same time a force repellent to the moral ideal which has till now been the inspiration of Eastern Jewry. Those who now abandon that ideal in exchange for the political idea will never return again, not even when the excitement dies down and the State is not established: for rarely in history do we find a movement retracing its steps before it has tried to go on and on, and finally lost its way. When, therefore, I see what chaos this movement has brought into the camp of the Eastern Chovevé Zion—when I see men who till recently seemed to know what they wanted and how to get it, now suddenly deserting the flag which but yesterday they held sacred, and bowing the knee to an idea which has no roots in their being, simply because it comes from the West: when I see all this, and remember how many paroxysms of sudden and evanescent enthusiasm we have already experienced, then I really feel the heavy hand of despair beginning to lay hold on me.
It was under the stress of that feeling that I wrote my Note on the Congress, a few days after its conclusion. The impression was all very fresh in my mind, and my grief was acute; and I let slip some hard expressions, which I now regret, because it is not my habit to use such expressions. But as regards the actual question at issue I have nothing to withdraw. What has happened since then has not convinced me that I was wrong: on the contrary, it has strengthened my conviction that though I wrote in anger, I did not write in error.
PINSKER AND POLITICAL ZIONISM
(To the memory of Dr. Pinsker, on the tenth anniversary of his death)
(1902)
The 21st of December last (1901) was the tenth anniversary of the death of Dr. Leo Pinsker.
A decade is a long time in our days, when everything keeps changing with extraordinary rapidity; when events come pell-mell, pushing and jostling one another, with a new sensation every day; when men rise and fall one after the other, famous to-day and forgotten to-morrow, rising to the top in an hour, and going under in the next; when the tumult of to-day is so loud that men have no time to pause and look calmly back on yesterday.
Pinsker is one of those men of yesterday, whom the men of to-day have already had time to forget. He died ten years ago, and in these ten years things have changed, and we with them. New birds have come and brought new songs. They pipe in a loud and strident chorus, in the din of which who shall remember the forlorn lay of a lonely songster whom earth knows no more?
In his day Pinsker was head of the Chovevé Zion, and he worked hard for Palestinian colonisation. But in the interval Chibbath Zion itself has given place to Zionism. Petty colonisation, the result of the “infiltration” policy, which absorbed the time and energy of Pinsker and the Chovevé Zion of yesterday, is to-day a source of merriment even for the merest tyro in Zionism. Everybody knows that Herzl has enlarged the narrow horizon of his predecessors by basing the Zionist ideal on a broader foundation—on politics and diplomacy, on the Bank and the Charter.
Twenty years ago Pinsker wrote a small pamphlet of thirty-six pages, called Auto-Emancipation. In its day this pamphlet made a certain stir and evoked some response. But who pays attention now to a little pamphlet that dates from before the new dispensation? Have we not now the Judenstaat, and Reports of four Congresses, full of debates and speeches, as well as a heap of pamphlets and leaflets in every language, explaining and expounding Zionism in every aspect and every detail?
Yes—Pinsker was a great man in his day; he was one of the “precursors” of Zionism—so much even the new Zionists admit. And when they have occasion to recount the history of the Zionist idea to non-Zionists, they begin, in the most approved scientific manner, with the “embryonic” period. Here they commend in one breath all the worthy men who came before the birth of Zionism and prepared the way for it, not forgetting Pinsker and other leaders of the Chovevé Zion who were contemporary with him. But all this is for them simply by way of introduction to the main theme, which enters with the year 1896—the year when Herzl revealed himself in his pamphlet Der Judenstaat. Here they draw a line, as who should say, “Thus far the embryonic period of Zionism, the period of its preparation for birth. Now behold Zionism itself in all its glory and magnificence.”
How is it, then, that many people have now suddenly remembered that Pinsker died ten years ago, on the 21st of December; and that in so many places there have been prayers recited for the peace of his soul, and memorial addresses delivered in his honour, on this sad anniversary? Truth to tell, it is only because the work of the “petty colonisation” movement still maintains its existence, and there is still a Society which works for the support of the colonies. For that reason, and for that reason alone—because he stood at the head of those who worked for the Palestinian Colonies, and afterwards of the Society formed for their support—Pinsker is remembered by his colleagues, the original Chovevé Zion of his own country, whose privilege it was to know him personally and to work with him. It is they who have made the anniversary a matter of public interest. If not for this, the new Zionists, whose calendar begins with the birth of political Zionism, would not have remembered the man who, fifteen years before Herzl, worked out the whole theory of political Zionism from beginning to end, with a logical thoroughness and an elevation of style unequalled by any subsequent work.
How indeed should these new Zionists remember him, seeing that they know nothing at all of Pinsker as the author of the theory of political Zionism? And whence should they know of him, if their leaders have never yet told them, explicitly or by implication, in print or on the platform, in Zionist Congresses or outside them, who was the true author of that theory, the real if unacknowledged fountain from which all who came after him have drunk?[[31]] Pinsker’s pamphlet in the original German is already out of print and rare. While a stream of new pamphlets, mostly poor and tasteless rechauffés, is daily poured forth and spread among the people with the assistance of the Zionist organisation and with the concurrence of its leaders, for propaganda purposes, this pamphlet of Pinsker’s, which is uniquely capable of attracting intelligent Jews in every country to the Zionist idea, has not been honoured with a new edition to this day;[[32]] and many of the new Zionists, especially in the West, have never seen it, nor even heard of its value.[[33]] All that they hear is that there were Zionists even before Herzl, but they were poor, simple-minded dreamers, who—incapable of comprehending a great political idea—thought to solve the Jewish problem by founding a few colonies in Palestine and supporting them with halfpence; and as for Pinsker—well, he was the leader of these poor visionaries.[[34]]
I doubt whether the time has yet come to restore to Pinsker the place of honour in the Zionist movement that belongs to him of right. We are in the thick of the tumult and the shouting, and as yet there is no room for a true and unbiassed judgment. That must be left for later history, for the time when “the tumult and the shouting dies,” and the influence of personality and fleeting circumstance gives place to a national motif more general in scope and more permanent in character. But as the memory of Pinsker is now in the public mind—be it but for a moment—we may not improperly take advantage of the opportunity to recall the message which Pinsker brought to his people, but for which he has not yet received the credit.
That message is, as I have said, the message of political Zionism. Pinsker was the first to lay down a clear theoretical basis for political Zionism. He was also the first to work out—though only in outline—a definite practical programme for the realisation of the idea. It is this programme, or the fundamental points in it, that the new Zionists have laid hold on; it is because of this programme that they call themselves “political,” denoting thereby, as they believe, the original feature which distinguishes them from their predecessors. Pinsker compressed all his teaching, theoretical and practical as well, into his one small pamphlet, which is characterised by conciseness of style and absence of systematic arrangement. His outraged feelings were too strong for the cold processes of thought, and did not allow him to arrange his ideas systematically. Pinsker did not write a scientific treatise; he uttered a loud, bitter, heart-felt cry, fraught with indignation and grief at our external and internal degradation. For that reason he must be studied with close attention before one can put together the scattered fragments of ideas—some repeated time and again with a wealth of poetic eloquence, others no more than briefly hinted at by the way—and discover the full import of his teaching.
This is what I propose here to attempt. But first of all I must point out—what might not be self-evident to all my readers—that my object is only to explain Pinsker’s teaching in its relation to present-day political Zionism. I am not here giving a statement of my own views on political Zionism in general. What I had to say on that subject has been said in various essays, which will be familiar to many of my readers; and these previous utterances absolve me, I think, from the necessity of commenting here on every point with which I am not in agreement. In this essay I take for granted the fundamental standpoint of political Zionism, which was Pinsker’s standpoint also, though, as we shall soon see, he gave it a peculiar turn, making it approximate more to that Zionist ideal which is nowadays called “spiritual Zionism.”
Pinsker, like all subsequent political Zionists, arrived at the idea of Zionism not through the problem of Judaism—through the necessity of seeking for a new foundation for our national existence and unity, in place of the old foundation, which is crumbling away—but through the problem of Jewry—through a definite conviction that even emancipation and general progress will not improve the degraded and insecure position of the Jews among the nations, and that anti-Semitism will never cease so long as we have not a national home of our own. But it is worth while to examine particularly the way in which he arrived at this conviction of the eternity of the feud between Israel and the nations, because it is a different way from that of the later Zionists, and it is this difference that gives a peculiar colouring to Pinsker’s message.
Pinsker finds three principal causes which lead to our being hated and despised more than any other human beings; and for each of the three there is no remedy except a separate Jewish State.
The first cause is a national one, and its roots lie deep in human psychology. We cannot know whether that great day will ever arrive when all mankind will live in brotherhood and concord, and national barriers will no longer exist; but even at the best, thousands of years must elapse before that Messianic age. Meanwhile nations live side by side in a state of relative peace, which is based chiefly on the fundamental equality between them. Each nation, that is, recognises and admits the national existence of the other nations, and even those which are at enmity or even at war with one another are forced to recognise each other as equals, standing on the same plane of nationhood, and therefore entertain each for the other a certain feeling of respect, without distinction between large nation and small, strong and weak. But it is different with the people of Israel. This people is not counted among the nations, because since it was exiled from its land it has lacked the essential attributes of nationality, by which one nation is distinguished from another—has lacked “that original national life which is inconceivable without community of language and customs and without local contiguity.” It is because we lack these attributes that the other nations do not regard us as on the same plane with themselves, as a nation equal to them in integral value. True, we have not ceased even in the lands of our exile to be spiritually a distinct nation; but this spiritual nationality, so far from giving us the status of a nation in the eyes of the other nations, is the very cause of their hatred for us as a people. Men are always terrified by a disembodied spirit, a soul wandering about with no physical covering; and terror breeds hatred. This is a form of psychic disease which we are powerless to cure. In all ages men have feared all kinds of ghosts which their imaginations have seen; and Israel appears to them as a ghost—but a ghost which they see with their very eyes, not merely in fancy. Thus the hatred of the nations for Jewish nationality is a psychic disease of the kind known as “demonopathy”; and having been transmitted from generation to generation for some two thousand years, it has by now become so deep-rooted that it can no longer be eradicated. The primary object of this hatred is not Jews as individuals, but Judaism—by which is meant that abstract nationality, that bodiless ghost, which wanders about among the real nations like something apart and different, and arouses their latent faculty of demonophobia. Hence we see on the one hand that individual Gentiles live in peace and amity with their Jewish acquaintances, while retaining their deep-seated animosity against Jews as a people, and on the other hand that, throughout all the periodical changes of national tendencies and international relations, all nations remain at all times the same in their hatred of the Jews, just as they remain always the same in their hatred of the other kinds of ghosts in whose existence they believe.[[35]]
What, then, must we do to escape from this national hatred?
Assimilate with the nations? If real assimilation be meant—the assimilation that reaches to the very soul and ends in annihilation—that is a kind of death which does not come of itself, and we do not wish to bring it on by our own efforts.[[36]] But the surface assimilation which is the panacea advocated by a certain section of Jews can only make matters worse for us. Pinsker himself does not draw this conclusion in so many words; but it is a necessary consequence of the idea just mentioned. For, seeing that the source of anti-Semitism lies in our lack of a concrete national existence, which would compel the other nations to recognise in us a nation equal to themselves in status, it follows plainly that the more we assimilate—the more we imitate our surroundings and whittle away our national distinctiveness—the less concrete and the more spiritual will our national existence become; and the more, therefore, will the ghost-fear which begets anti-Semitism grow in intensity.
There remains, then, but one means of destroying anti-Semitism. We must become again a real nation, possessed of all those essential attributes of nationality by virtue of which one nation is the equal of another. These attributes are those mentioned above—a common land, a common language and common customs. It is the combination of these that makes “an original national life.”[[37]]
The second cause of our degradation is political in character. “Generally speaking,” says Pinsker, “we do not find any nation over-fond of the stranger. This is a fact which has its foundation in ethnology, and no nation can be blamed for it.” Now since the Jew is everywhere regarded as a stranger by the native population, we should have no right to grumble if our hosts in the various countries treated us like other strangers who settle permanently among them. But in fact we find that people everywhere dislike Jews much more than other strangers. Why is this? For the same reason—replies Pinsker—for which men behave in different ways to a well-to-do guest and to a penniless beggar. The first comes as an equal; he too has a house in which he gives hospitality—no matter whether we ourselves or others enjoy it—and therefore we recognise it as our duty to give him a welcome, even if we are not altogether delighted with his company; while he on his side is conscious that he has a right to demand such treatment as the conventions of polite society dictate, just as in his own house he extends that treatment to others. Not so the homeless mendicant. He on his side is free from the obligations of hospitality, since he has no opportunity of fulfilling them. Hence his request for our hospitality is a request for pure charity. It is not the appeal of an equal to the principle of equality of rights and duties; it is the appeal to compassion of one weaker and humbler than ourselves, who can receive but cannot give. Hence, even if we are so compassionate as to welcome the poor man and treat him with affection and respect, like one of ourselves, the equality is only one of external appearance. In our heart of hearts we feel, and he feels too, that we are doing him a kindness, that we are treating him well out of our goodness of heart, and doing something that we might have forborne doing if not for our charitable and benevolent disposition. This feeling alone suffices to create a wide gulf between us, and to lower his worth in our estimation and his own.
Which picture represents Israel among the nations? Not that of the well-to-do guest; for Israel has no place of his own where he can fulfil the obligations of hospitality towards other nations. Israel is like the mendicant who goes from door to door, asking others to give him what he does not give to others. And therefore the other nations do not regard the Jew as their equal, and do not recognise any duty to show him that decent behaviour which they practise towards all the other foreigners who live among them. If, then, they are kind enough to make room for him, it is only by an act of charity, which degrades the recipient. When their generosity goes to the furthest extreme, they give the poor visitor the greatest boon that they can give—that of equal rights. But the mere fact that the grant of equal rights is an act of generosity, and not a duty based on the real equality of the two parties, robs the boon of its moral value, and makes it merely a piece of legislative machinery. The giver can never forget that he is the giver, nor the receiver that he is the receiver. For this reason Jewish emancipation in all countries has been and must always remain political only, not social. The Jew enjoys equal rights as a citizen, but not equality as a man, as one who takes his part in the intimate life of society. The non-Jew and the Jew alike are conscious of this fact, and so, despite his equal rights, the Jew remains an inferior even in his own estimation, and in non-Jewish society he endeavours to hide his Judaism, and is grateful to non-Jews when they do not remind him of his origin, but behave as though it were a matter of indifference to them.
The conclusion is that the Jews can never attain to true social equality in Gentile countries unless they cease to be always recipients and rise to the rank of respectable visitors, who can give to others what they ask for themselves. In other words, the Jews must once more possess themselves of a native land of their own, where they will be masters and hosts. Then their place in the estimation of other nations will improve automatically, and wherever they set foot they will be regarded as equals by the natives, who will consider themselves in duty bound to treat the Jews with the same respect which they show to other strangers who come to stay among them.[[38]]
Besides the two causes explained above, there is a third cause, economic in character, which gives a practical turn to Gentile hatred of the Jew, and brings it into actual operation in the form of physical restriction and persecution.
In the life of civilised nations the struggle for existence assumes the form of peaceful competition. In this sphere every State distinguishes to a certain extent between the native and the stranger, and gives the native preference where there is not room for both. This discrimination is practised even against the honoured stranger, whom the native regards as his equal; and it stands to sense that there will be a vastly greater amount of discrimination against the poor vagrant, whose existence in the State is tolerated only out of kindness and charity. If you have a large house, with room enough and to spare for your family and for respectable visitors, you do not begrudge the beggar his corner, but let him live with you as long as he likes. But when the family grows and the house begins to feel cramped you will at once look askance at the beggar-guests, whom you are under no obligation to respect or to feed. And if you see that they do not squeeze up and make room for you, but, on the contrary, endeavour to get more elbow-room for themselves, regardless of the fact that they are crowding you, then you will resent the impudence with which they forget their place, and in the heat of anger you will turn them out neck and crop, or at least drive them back into their own corner, make it as small as possible and confine them rigidly to it for the future. But the respectable guests will still be treated with deference, and though you may secretly dislike them for occupying valuable room, you will not permit yourself to overstep the limits of politeness and to turn them out into the street, save in exceptional cases where they themselves overstep the mark and your patience gives out.
Thus we find that even where the number of Jews is small, they bring down on themselves the resentment and hatred of their neighbours because of their success in the struggle for existence, and the advantage which their ability and pertinacity gain for them over their competitors in the various walks of life; and where the Jewish settlement is considerable, anti-Semitism finds its food—even without any success on the Jewish side—in the mere fact of their existence: for their existence is bound, poor and cramped though it be, to lead to competition which their neighbours will feel. In either case the native population does not consider itself obliged to restrain its feelings and behave with perfect politeness to a miserable nation which is allowed to live among the other nations only on sufferance, and is so ungrateful as to jostle its benefactors without shame.[[39]]
This cause also, then, cannot be removed except through the removal of the other causes mentioned before. We must build a house for ourselves, and then, even in foreign countries, we shall have the position of respected guests, and our competition with the native population will not arouse their resentment and jealousy more than the competition of other strangers. But the economic cause differs from the other causes. Our national and political degradation is a moral fact, and requires only a moral remedy—that we stand higher in the estimation of the world, as a nation with a concrete life of its own, and with a land in which it can extend to others that hospitality which it receives elsewhere. But in order to remove the economic cause we must of necessity diminish the competition between Jew and non-Jew in places where that competition is excessive. For even the respected guest has economic freedom only within certain limits. If he oversteps these limits, and his competition presses too hard on the native, the native is forced to protect himself, either by legislative restriction of the foreigner’s rights, or sometimes even by force. It follows that if we succeed in establishing a separate State for our people, the two first causes of anti-Semitism will be removed, even if the State is very small, and even if most of the Jews remain where they are, and only a very small minority goes to settle in our State. For the mere fact of the existence of a Jewish State, where Jews would be masters, and their national life would develop on lines of its own in accordance with their spirit—this fact alone would suffice to remove from us the brand of inferiority, and to raise us in the world’s estimation to the level of a nation equal in worth to the other nations, sharing alike their privileges and their duties; and the attitude of the other nations to us would no longer be different from their attitude to each other. But the economic cause, though its working may be mitigated to some extent when the wandering mendicant is transformed into a well-to-do guest, cannot be got rid of until the number of Jews in every country declines to the limit dictated by the economic condition of the native population. Until that time hatred of these foreign competitors will continue, and the native population will continue to persecute them with restrictive laws and even with violence, even though there exist somewhere or other a separate Jewish State, and even though all nations respect the Jewish nationality which has in that State its concrete expression.
Thus we arrive at a further condition of the solution of our problem. What we need is not simply a State, but a State to which the majority of the Jews will emigrate from all their present homes—to such an extent that their numbers in every country will decline to the extent demanded by local conditions—and a State extensive enough and materially rich enough to maintain so large a population.
And here we come to the Achilles’ heel of political Zionism. Granted that we have it in our power to establish a Jewish State: have we it in our power to diminish thereby the number of Jews in every country to the maximum which the economic condition of the country can bear without their arousing anti-Semitism? This question the opponents of the new Zionism, which promises to put an end to the Jewish problem by the establishment of the State, are continually asking: but so far we have not received from the Zionists a clear and satisfactory answer. During the last twenty years, for instance, at least a million Jews have left Eastern Europe for America and Africa. That is a very large number, sufficient for the establishment of a Jewish State. Yet this emigration has had no perceptible effect on the economic condition of the countries from which it has taken place, and the relations between the native population and the Jews in those countries have not improved. The reason is that the emigration has not in fact lessened the number of Jews in those countries, the loss being always counterbalanced by the natural increase of those who remain. If, then, Pinsker’s idea had been carried out as soon as his pamphlet was published, and all these emigrants had gone not to America or Africa, but to the Jewish State, the State might by now have been successful and flourishing, and national life might be developing there in a satisfactory manner, so as to bring great honour to our people wherever Jews are; but none the less the Jewish problem in the lands whence the emigration proceeded would remain exactly where it was, because economic competition between the Jews and the native population would be just as keen as before, and would still be felt by the latter to an intolerable degree. If, therefore, a Jewish State is really to solve the Jewish problem on its economic side for good and all, then hundreds of thousands must emigrate to it every year from the lands of the Diaspora, so that the diminution in the number of Jews in those lands will be patently perceptible, and their influence on economic life will decrease from year to year, till it ceases to be a cause of hatred and jealousy on the part of the native population. We must therefore ask ourselves first of all, whether it is really possible to transport such a vast number of people in a short time, and to open up for them new sources of livelihood in a new State, wherever it may be. I doubt very much whether any responsible person will answer this question in the affirmative.
But this criticism, which is fatal to the new Zionism, as expounded by Herzl and his followers, does not seriously affect Pinsker’s Zionism. The new Zionists make the political and economic problem the be-all and end-all of their strivings. Their primary aim is to improve the hard lot of the Jews as individuals. They regard such improvement in exile as out of the question, since Jews are regarded as strangers in every country, and the competition of the stranger exposes him to the resentment of the native population. Hence they demand that the Jews shall establish a separate State for themselves, where they will not be strangers and their competition will not be a crime.[[40]] But this idea can be justified only if the State is able to improve the lot of all the Jews or most of them; that is, if all or most of the Jews can leave foreign countries and settle in their State. Unless this condition is fulfilled, the amelioration will be only partial; it will affect only that fortunate minority which succeeds in establishing itself in the Jewish State. The majority will remain as badly off as before—hated and persecuted foreigners in strange lands. Where, then, is the promised annihilation of the Jewish problem through the establishment of the State?
But with Pinsker it is different. The loss which he mourns is primarily the loss of Jewish national dignity. He weeps for a nation which is not regarded and respected by the other nations as an equal, and whose individual members are treated everywhere not merely as foreigners, but as beggars in receipt of charity. With him the question of national dignity comes first of all. Of the three causes to which he traces the ill-feeling between Jews and Gentiles, the first one, which lies in the degraded position of the Jews as a nation—a point not mentioned by the new Zionists—is the most important in his own view, and occupies most of his attention. Next to it stands the political cause; and this cause also, unlike the new Zionists, he regards from the point of view of the problem of national dignity. He is not much troubled by the fact that we are treated as aliens in every country: that fact, no doubt, harms us as individuals, but in itself it does not imply any contempt or inferiority. The root of the trouble is that we are not treated as aliens in the ordinary political sense, but are regarded as wandering mendicants, as inferior beings, who are not entitled to demand respect and consideration as of right. So with the third cause, the economic one. Its sting lies for Pinsker chiefly in the fact that here also we Jews are differentiated from other aliens—that in consequence of the low esteem in which we are held our competition causes more resentment than that of other aliens. Pinsker, therefore, has more right than the new Zionists to regard the establishment of a Jewish State as the absolute solution of the Jewish problem—that is, of the problem of the dignity of the Jewish nation and of its members, who, even if most of them remain scattered among the nations, and even if they continue to be hated and persecuted in various countries because of their economic competition, will at any rate no longer be exposed to the contempt of their neighbours, and to the taunt that they are not a nation, but a pack of beggars wandering about in a world which is not theirs, and existing only on sufferance.
On the other hand, Pinsker raises another question, which does not trouble the new Zionists very much: the question of the national consciousness.
If we assume, as Herzl does in his pamphlet, that the Jewish State will contain all the Jews, and will offer to every individual Jew the possibility of living comfortably among his people, then we need not be much concerned about the anterior development of the national consciousness as an incentive to the establishment of the State. We have ready to hand another and a stronger incentive in the natural desire of every individual to improve his position.[[41]] But if from the outset we accept the fact that even a Jewish State will not absolutely solve the Jewish problem on its economic side, and that the chief purpose for which we need a State is a moral one—to gain for our own nation the respect of other nations, and to create a healthy body for our national spirit—then we are bound to face the question whether the national consciousness is so strong among us, and the honour of our nation so dear to us, that this motive alone, unalloyed by any consideration of individual advantage, will be sufficient to spur us on to so vast and difficult a task.
Now Pinsker, candid here as always, does not conceal from us that, as things are, the national consciousness among us is not nearly strong enough for our purpose. “Our greatest misfortune is that we do not form a nation: we are merely Jews.” The galuth life has compelled every Jew to put all his strength into his individual struggle for existence; and in that struggle we have been compelled to use any kind of weapon that came to hand, without enquiring too closely whether it was consistent with our national dignity. Thus, as time went on, both our sense of nationality and our sense of dignity became dulled; and at last we ceased to feel the need of restoring our dignity, national or individual.[[42]] We left it to the Deity to perform that ideal task by bringing us the Messiah at the proper time, and buried ourselves in affairs more necessary for our immediate physical survival.[[43]] Even in modern times, when the breeze of modern culture has blown on us and begun to awaken our dormant sense of dignity, we try to find satisfaction in a strange delusion of our own invention—that the people of Israel has a “mission,” for the sake of which it must remain scattered among the nations: “a mission in which nobody believes, a privilege of which, candidly, we should be glad to be rid, if at that price we could wipe out the name of ‘Jew’ as a title of shame.”[[44]] This loss of self-respect on the one side aggravates the contempt in which we are held, and on the other side is itself the greatest stumbling-block on our path of progress. For what, except a strong national consciousness, can induce our people to bend all its energies to the task of restoring its national dignity, and to fight unceasingly and unwearyingly against all the obstacles with which it is confronted? That those obstacles are many and serious—this again Pinsker does not conceal from us. At the best, several generations must elapse before we can attain our end, “perhaps only after labour too great for human strength.” Only, as we recognise that this is the one road to our national salvation, we must not turn back faint-heartedly because of the danger or for lack of confidence in the success of our efforts.[[45]] But such language is intelligible only to a thoroughly awakened national consciousness, which can intensify the desire to attain the end in proportion to the heaviness of the task, can flame up for one instant in the heart of the whole people, and produce a “national resolution,” a sacred and unbending resolve to take up the work of revival and to carry it on, generation after generation, till its completion. And “where,” asks Pinsker, bitterly, “where shall we find this national consciousness?”
Pinsker found no satisfactory answer to this question. He made this national consciousness a categorical imperative, a conditio sine qua non; but he did not show how it was to be supplied. For this reason the whole of the practical scheme which follows gives one the impression of being formulated conditionally—subject, that is, to the emergence among our people, no matter by what means, of a national consciousness strong enough to enable them to carry out the idea in practice.
Pinsker’s practical scheme, as I said above, is only an outline. But its general lines are very similar to those laid down by Herzl in the pamphlet which is the basis of present-day Zionist policy.
As we cannot hope for another leader like Moses—“history does not vouchsafe such leaders to the same people repeatedly”—the leadership of the movement for national rebirth must be taken by a group of distinguished Jews, men of strong will and generous character, who “by their union will, perhaps, succeed in freeing us from reproach and persecution, no less than did the one great leader.”[[46]] Herzl uses very similar language about this collective negotiorum gestor,[[47]] and he and Pinsker alike look for its members among the upper-class Jews; but Herzl has his eye especially on the Jews of England, while Pinsker looks generally to the great organisations already in existence.[[48]] Herzl calls this governing body “the Society of Jews”; Pinsker calls it “the Directorium.” Herzl pictures the formation of the Society of Jews in a very simple manner. The best of the English Jews, having approved the project, come together without any preliminaries, and form a “Society of Jews.” Herzl sees no need to call a National Assembly first: the general consent which is necessary to give the Society proper standing with the Governments will come afterwards spontaneously.[[49]] But Pinsker wanted the various organisations to call “a National Congress, of which they themselves would be the nucleus.” Only in the event of their refusing to do this does he suggest that they should at least constitute a special “national institution” called a “Directorium,” which should unite all forces in the national work. The principal and immediate object of this institution would be “to create a safe and independent home of refuge for that superfluity of poor Jews which exists as a proletariat in various countries, and is disliked by the native population.”[[50]] All other Jews, not merely in the West, “where they are already naturalised up to a certain point,” but also “in those places where they are not readily tolerated,” can remain where they are. Unlike Herzl, Pinsker does not think it possible that all the Jews will leave their homes and go to their own State; nor is this necessary for his real object, as I have pointed out above. Economic pressure is under present conditions causing the “superfluity” to emigrate year by year from every country where there is a superfluity; and thousands of Jews leave their homes because they can no longer maintain themselves. At present these emigrants escape one trouble to fall into another. They wander from country to country, and find no proper resting-place; and the large sums of money expended by various organisations on the migration of Jews and their settlement in new homes produce no real benefit, because the new home also is only a temporary lodging. When the number of Jews in the new country reaches the “saturation-point,” the journey will have to be resumed; the Jews must move on to yet other countries. But if we can prepare, while there is yet time, a single secure home of refuge instead of the many insecure ones, the superfluity will gradually find its way thither, and its inhabitants will increase from year to year, till at last it becomes the centre of our national life, though the bulk of the people will remain, as hitherto, scattered in strange lands.
The first act of the “Directorium” would be to send an expedition of experts to investigate and find the territory best suited to our purpose from every point of view. When he wrote his pamphlet Pinsker did not yet regard our historic land as the only possible home of refuge; on the contrary, he feared that our ingrained love for Palestine might give us a bias and induce us to choose that country without paying regard to its political, economic and other conditions, which perhaps might be unfavourable. For this reason he warns us emphatically not to be guided by sentiment in this matter, but to leave the question of territory to a commission of experts, who will solve it after a thorough and detailed investigation. But on the whole he thinks that the desired territory will be found either in America or in Turkey.[[51]] In the latter alternative we shall form a special “Pashalik,” the independence of which will be guaranteed by Turkey and the other Great Powers. “It will be one of the principal functions of the Directorium,” writes Pinsker, for all the world like an orthodox adherent of “diplomatic” Zionism to-day, “to win for this project the sympathy of the Porte and the other European Governments.”[[52]]
“And then, but not till then,” he warns us once again, the Directorium will enter on its work of buying land and organising colonisation. In this work it will need the assistance of “a group of capitalists,” who will form “a joint-stock company”—exactly as in Herzl’s scheme, where side by side with the Society of Jews there is established the Jewish Company, a company of capitalists, to direct the material affairs of the settlement.
Pinsker next proceeds to describe in outline the progress of the new settlement—how the land will be parcelled out in small plots, some to be sold to men with capital, and some to be occupied by men of no means with the assistance of a National Fund established to that end; and so forth. But for our present purpose we need follow him no further. What has been said above will suffice to make it plain to all who wish to see that it was Pinsker who worked out the whole theory of political Zionism, and that his successors, so far from adding anything essential to his scheme, actually took away in large measure its ideal basis, and thus so seriously impaired its moral value that they had to have recourse to various promises which they could neither fulfil nor repudiate. This will become abundantly clear to anybody who will compare the two pamphlets, Pinsker’s and Herzl’s.
Pinsker, as we have seen, puts the emphasis on the moral aspect, Herzl on the material. Hence Pinsker wishes to found only a national centre, Herzl promises a complete “ingathering of the exiles”; Pinsker finds the motive power in a strong national consciousness, Herzl in the desire for individual betterment. For this reason Pinsker does not find it necessary to minimise the difficulties: on the contrary, he repeats many times, with emphasis, that only at the cost of infinite sacrifice will the goal perhaps—mark that “perhaps”!—be reached. Similarly, he recognises that it is not work for one generation alone. “We have to take only the first step; our successors must follow in our footsteps, with measured tread and without undue haste.”[[53]] Not so Herzl. He is bound to make light of the difficulties, because otherwise he would have to face the question: “If we are looking for betterment as individuals, how can we waste so much energy on a task that will take generations to accomplish, and may not be accomplished at all, when we have so many pressing needs which can be more or less met if we devote that energy to them?” Hence Herzl is never tired of promising that it will be very easy to carry out his project in a short time, if only we want it. “Let us but begin, and anti-Semitism will at once die down in every country: for this will be our treaty of peace with it. Once let the Jewish Company be established, and the news of it will spread in one day to the ends of the earth, and our position will immediately begin to improve.... Thus the work will proceed, rapidly yet without convulsion.”[[54]] The same difference is evident in the general scheme of the two pamphlets. Pinsker devotes most of his pamphlet to showing how low we have sunk as a nation, and how badly we need a State of our own to save our dignity. Only at the end does he explain briefly how he pictures to himself the practical realisation of his idea. This is because from his point of view the essential thing is that we resolve that our dignity absolutely demands this course of action, cost what it may. We have no need to spend much thought at the outset on the question whether we shall succeed, or how and when we shall succeed, because, if we suppose that the task is beyond our strength, we must none the less take it up, in order to wipe out our reproach. The question of dignity brooks no calculation. But Herzl deals very briefly with fundamental principles and reasons, because, from his materialistic point of view, there is really no need to enlarge on them. Can anybody doubt that the position of the Jews in exile is very bad, and that it would be better for them and for their neighbours if they went and established a separate State for themselves? Even our “assimilationists” would certainly agree for the most part, if they only knew with absolute certainty from the start that the project could be carried out without too much trouble, “rapidly yet without convulsion.” The root question is, then, whether the goal can in fact be reached under such comfortable conditions. For this reason Herzl gives most of his attention to this question, and explains his practical scheme in minute detail, with the object of showing that it demands no great sacrifices, whether material or spiritual, and that everything from A to Z will be achieved with ease, rapidity and universal satisfaction. All the emigration to the Jewish State, up to the time when the whole people is gathered there, he describes almost as though it were a holiday excursion. And in the State itself everybody lives in comfort and prosperity. Nobody will need to forgo even the minor habits of his ordinary life; and the immigrant will not even have to miss his friends and relations, because the Jews will leave the different countries in “local groups,” and will be settled in their own land on that basis, so that each man can attach himself to the group which is closest to him geographically and spiritually. The working-classes, on whose strength the State will be built up, will work only seven hours a day, and even the Jewish Company, which is to direct the whole work with its capital, will not incur any financial risk, because its investments will be sound and will produce an exceptionally good return.[[55]]
If, further, we take into account the wide difference between the two pamphlets in style, we may see that Herzl’s pamphlet has the air of being a translation of Pinsker’s from the language of the ancient Prophets into that of modern journalism.
Yet the name of Pinsker, as the originator of the political Zionist theory, is almost forgotten. He is mentioned as a rule only in connection with the work of “petty colonisation” in Palestine, as though his horizon had been bounded by his activity in that sphere. Ordinary men, for whom the real is the visible, remember only things that are done: and the thing that Pinsker did—that to which he devoted all his subsequent work—has really no direct relation to the message which he began by enunciating.
I have shown elsewhere how it was that Pinsker came to take part in the work of the Chovevé Zion, despite the political character of his theory. He understood perfectly well that their work was very far removed from the great project of which he dreamt; but he understood also that without a “national resolution,” proceeding from a strong national consciousness, and without unity and an organisation embracing the whole people, it would be impossible to carry out his great idea. The consent of the Powers, the favour of the Sublime Porte, even a Charter signed and sealed—all this cannot help us in the least, so long as we are not a single people, strong by virtue of our unity and our indomitable will, penetrated through and through with a sense of our present national degradation, and prepared to sacrifice our all for a nobler future. Hence, when Pinsker saw that national indifference was the rule in every section of the people; when he saw how faint an echo his pamphlet raised in the hearts of the ruling classes, whom he confidently expected to be the first to rally to his banner; and when he saw a small group of men with insignificant means, or none, putting forth every possible effort to carry out a national project, small and poor though it was in comparison with his own ideal—Pinsker could not help lending a hand to those who were engaged in this work, seeing in them the nucleus of an organisation, and the small beginning of the “national resolution.” For Pinsker the work done in Palestine was not the beginning of the practical realisation of his programme, but only the beginning of the preparatory stage—the beginning of the revival of the national consciousness, and of the union of the people under the banner of a common ideal. He hoped by means of national action on a small scale to arrive ultimately at that national resolution on the part of the whole people for which he looked in his pamphlet; and then the real work would begin.
It is abundantly clear that this is exactly the course which the new Zionists too are taking to-day, though as yet, it would appear, unconsciously. How great, for instance, is the gulf between the Jewish Company of Herzl’s vision—possessing a capital of fifty millions sterling, and undertaking not only to plant the settlers in the Jewish State, but also to sell the property and transact the business of all the Jews in the Diaspora—and the small Bank, with its quarter-of-a-million, which has now been opened, after infinite labour, to carry on some simple and unimportant business operations in Palestine and Russia! Or again, is there any sort of relationship between the Society of Jews which Herzl describes in his pamphlet—a Society which is to stand at the head of the whole people and manage all its national affairs, as Moses did—and the Actions Committee which now stands at the head of the Zionist organisation? And how shall we be brought to the Jewish State—that free State guaranteed by all the Powers—by such minor concessions as it is possible to obtain now, according to the Zionist leaders, at Yildiz Kiosk for a certain price? The plain truth is that all this work, which the new Zionists regard as “political” work par excellence, has as little to do with the theory of political Zionism as had the petty colonisation work which Pinsker took up. In the one case as in the other, the whole value of the work lies in its effect on the people, which it educates gradually in the direction of unity, organisation, national resolution. In other words, we are still, as we were in Pinsker’s day, at the first stage, the preliminary stage of preparatory work.
It must be admitted, however, that in the practical sphere—even confining that to preparatory work and propaganda—Pinsker did little, and did not achieve in his ten years of work half as much as the leader of the new Zionism has achieved in five years. Pinsker was purely a theorist: he worked out the theory of Zionism better and more fully than his successor, but, like all theorists, he was of little use when it came to practical work. Men of his type, simple-souled and pure-minded to a degree, innocent of the tricks and wiles of diplomacy, knowing nothing but the naked truth—such men cannot find the way to popular favour. Their words are too sincere, their actions too straightforward. Those only can attract the mob and bend it to their will who can descend to its level, pander to its tastes, and pipe to it in a hundred tunes, choosing the right one at the right moment. Pinsker had none of these arts. If, for example, he had gone to Yildiz Kiosk to negotiate for the colonisation of Palestine, and had been told there: “If you have two million pounds you may have so-and-so; otherwise—nothing”—what would he have done? Without a doubt he would have replied at once: “We have not such a large sum of money, and have at present no prospect of getting it.” Then he would have returned home empty-handed, and the public at large would have known nothing of his going or of his returning; or, if it had been impossible to keep the matter quiet, everybody would have known that “certain steps had been taken” at Yildiz, but had come to nothing. This, of course, would have made a bad impression, and have helped in some degree to weaken the energy of his few supporters. But we all still remember how the Zionist leaders behaved on a similar occasion last year. Leadership on these lines cannot satisfy those who have a liking for the plain truth; but from a pragmatic point of view it undoubtedly has the advantage. First of all, people heard only the glad news (it “spread in one day to the ends of the earth”) that the Sultan had given the Zionist leaders a favourable reception and made them certain promises, but that the details could not yet be published. This news aroused widespread attention: friends and foes alike waited breathlessly for the curtain to be drawn. Then, after the news had become public property and enlivened the hopes of the Zionists, the leaders made the further announcement that the great promises had been made conditionally, and could not be fulfilled unless they had two million pounds. Everybody who knew the true state of things understood at once—and certainly the leaders understood it, even while they were having audience of the Sultan—that this condition could not be met, so that the promises were mere empty words. And yet the first impression was not altogether effaced, and it served to strengthen in many people the belief that something great could be done if only all sections of the people were ready to put all their strength into it—the kind of belief which is calculated to intensify the energy of the workers, and to spur them on to put forth greater efforts.
In a word: theory and practice are two departments which no doubt depend on each other, but each one needs special abilities and different qualities of mind, which can with difficulty be combined in one man. We must therefore honour every man according to his value in his own department. If I might borrow an illustration from religion, I should say that Pinsker was the originator of the gospel of political Zionism, and Herzl its apostle; Pinsker brought the new dispensation, and Herzl gave it currency. But it is usual for the apostle to recognise the originator and to acknowledge his greatness: as he spreads the gospel, so he publishes abroad and sanctifies the name of him who brought it. Had the Zionist apostle followed this custom, Pinsker would now have a world-wide reputation, and would be venerated by all whose watchword is Zion. But Herzl would not be satisfied with the practical mission which was in reality his métier. He must needs “originate” the gospel itself over again—in an inferior form, it is true—so that it should be all his. Thus the odd result has come about that the further the gospel spreads, the more completely is its true originator forgotten.
But it is not for Pinsker’s reputation that I am concerned. In his lifetime he was so far from the desire for notoriety and ascendancy, that I have no doubt that if he were alive to-day, he would rejoice wholeheartedly at the wide vogue given to his idea, and not a shade of displeasure would pass over his face because of the injustice done to himself personally. My only regret is that Pinsker’s wonderful pamphlet has sunk with him, and the Zionist gospel itself has become more superficial and more materialistic.[[56]] Zionism is a faith, and, like every other faith, it needs one authoritative “Bible,” to be conned by the true believers, to be their fountain-head of spiritual influence. At present Zionism has no “Bible.” Great as is Herzl’s influence with the new Zionists, his pamphlet could not attain that high dignity. But its general spirit pervades all the other brochures and speeches on which Zionists live, and from which they derive their faith; and that spirit, as we have seen, is not calculated to raise the masses above material interests, and render them capable of making great sacrifices for a higher national ideal. Pinsker’s pamphlet is the only one that is worthy to take the first place in the literature of Zionism, and to be revered by the party as the fons et origo of all its views and policies. If this pamphlet were disseminated among Zionists, and made familiar to them, it would undoubtedly help to educate them in its spirit—a spirit of pure idealism, which sets more store by the dignity of the whole people than by the advantage of the individual, never flinches in the face of danger, is never impatient, and demands no certainty of success. Then the leaders would not have to be always looking for some means of keeping the fervour up to the required temperature, nor to entangle themselves in exaggerated promises and self-contradictions, which only the blindness of enthusiasm can fail for a moment to detect.
Enthusiasm, however, is a flame which spreads rapidly but does not last. It is only the slow-burning fire, with its steady flame, that can create the enormous strength required for such a national task in many successive generations. For this reason I believe that there will yet come a day when all the external show and parade will no longer satisfy those who thirst for a national ideal; and in that day many will once more remember Pinsker and his pure and lofty message—a message of work without limit and sacrifice without reward, for no other object than to restore the dignity of our people, and to enhance our value for humanity.
THE TIME HAS COME
(1906[[57]])
You are right, my friends: “Now the time has come to begin planting our literature in the land of its birth and on its own native soil.”[[58]] But it seems to me that there is a wider and a deeper foundation for this statement than you give to it in your announcement. The time is ripe for your enterprise not merely “because there is already a considerable number of Jews in Palestine and the neighbouring countries, and so Hebrew literature, its language being common to the Jews of Palestine, has a function to perform in the sphere of national culture.” If that were the only reason, we Hebrew writers outside Palestine, though we should certainly have welcomed the new adventure and have been glad to enjoy the literary fruit of Palestine, should not have felt it our duty to take an active part in a local Palestinian literary movement, created only for the Jews in Palestine, whose circumstances are known to us only by hearsay, or from the visitor’s brief experience. If none the less I feel—and I am sure that other writers will feel the same—that it is my duty to take part in your undertaking, that can only be because it is not merely the condition of the Jews in Palestine, but the condition of our people in general that now convinces us of the necessity of reuniting our land and our language—those sundered halves of a single whole, those twin main pillars of our national life, which are both so near to us and so far from us—and of making them both together, by the establishment of a worthy literary centre in the land, a single mighty channel through which the influence of our national spirit should be carried to all the lands of our dispersion.
“Now convinces us,” I say: although it is already many years since we began to recognise that the Hebrew spirit is yearning towards its own land, because its life in exile is not a healthy and a complete life. But this recognition itself could not get free all at once from the fetters of galuth, and did not prevent us from dreaming all those years of the revival of our language and literature outside Palestine. Now realities have shown the futility of our dream, and we learn perforce from experience what we would not learn willingly from logic, that just as the Hebrew spirit cannot develop as it should without a free centre “on its own native soil,” so, too, are its outer vestments, our language and literature, under the same disability; and all our efforts to revive them on strange soil will not avail except for a short time—until the hammer of an alien environment strikes out a spark which will destroy in a moment what we have spent many years and the last remnant of our strength in building up.[[59]]
How slow is the development of an idea in the human mind! Every new idea is born with great travail, and even after its birth there is a long lapse of time and a heavy loss of force between its dawn and its noontide splendour. At first it appears shrouded in mist, luminous yet obscure, and its faint rays shimmer on the surface of the human spirit without being able to penetrate to the depths below. Only little by little, after much labour and hard struggling, is the mist dispelled, and the light of the idea grows stronger and floods all the dark corners of the mind. Then we look into these corners, and wonder at ourselves for not having been conscious before of the chaos of error and contradiction which held its own there while the light was already playing on the surface above.
Hard were the birth-pangs of our national idea in the form of “Zionism,” and the mists shrouded it at its birth. In the last generation the Jewish people had settled down to its exile; it waited for the mercy of Heaven and the kindness of the world, scarcely felt how its limbs were being torn asunder and scattered in all directions, and asked no great boon of the future, except a peaceful life and a livelihood among the nations. Then a hurricane arose, and thunderously swept away the hope of kindness from the world, yes, and even the hope of mercy from heaven. And the clarion-call went forth among the exiled people: You wish for a peaceful life and livelihood? Then get you up and go to your national land, and look no more for crumbs from strangers’ tables: for there is neither peace nor livelihood except for each people in its own land.
That was the dawn of our new idea. The memory of our historic land, which had become a lifeless thing, a mere book-memory, became once more a living emotional force, and in its re-birth awoke our love for the rest of our heritage, which now appeared in a new light to many for whom it had lost all actual value. If we say—so these men reasoned—that we have a national land, to which we wish to return in very deed and not only in prayer, then we admit, and want others to admit, that we are actually a nation, and not merely a Church. And if we are a nation, then we must have a national spirit, which distinguishes us from other nations, and we must value and protect it as every other nation does with its national spirit. And if we value our national spirit, where shall we find it if not in the heritage of our past, and especially in our national language and literature, in which each generation stored up its spiritual treasure, and left to its heirs in the next the best fruits of its thought, its secret longings, its half-uttered sighs? Thus Chibbath Zion began by giving an impulse to the “spiritual revival”—the fostering of our language and literature, the establishment of national schools, and so forth—not as a separate and distinct ideal, but as a necessary consequence of the ideal of a peaceful life in Palestine, as a sort of proof of our being really a distinct nation and possessing all the attributes of a nation, and being therefore both in need and deserving of that which we have not now—our national land.
But gradually the Zionist idea began to get clearer, and events in Palestine and elsewhere helped it to emerge from the mists of visionary hopes. Then some of its followers reversed the sequence of ideas. It is not the case, they said, that the redemption of the people is the goal of all our efforts, and the spiritual revival only a means to it, and a branch of it. On the contrary, the spiritual revival is our real object, whether we know it or not, and the whole purpose of the settlement to be built up in Palestine is merely to serve as its basis.
It is true—such was the train of reasoning of this dissident section—that galuth is a very evil thing, and that the only way to escape the ills which are inevitably bound up with it is to escape from galuth itself. But this truth of itself tells us nothing, if we cannot at the same time discover the way to “the only way.” To say to a poor man: “If you want always to be sure of a meal, get rid of your poverty and become rich!” or to a sick man: “If you want to be free of your pains, get up from your bed and be well!”—to say this is to say nothing, unless at the same time you show the poor man how to get rich, and the sick man how to get well. Now Zionism has not shown us how to get out of galuth. For all the sophistication in the world cannot do away with the cruelty of hard facts, which do not allow us to picture to ourselves, even approximately and in a general way, how our work in Palestine, even if in time it develops up to the very maximum of what is possible, and covers the whole land with gardens and orchards and factories, can accomplish this unprecedented miracle: that so small a country as ours should absorb hundreds of thousands of immigrants at a time, year by year, without coming to such a crisis as would drive out its old and its new inhabitants in even greater numbers. But if this miracle does not happen, and the Palestinian settlement develops only little by little, concurrently with the development of the country’s economic resources, then it is impossible to deny that its gradual expansion will not diminish the number of Jews in other countries (since their natural increase will offset the exodus to Palestine), and will not put an end to their wandering and scattering to all the corners of the globe under economic and social pressure, which is brought to bear on them from time to time in every country in which they become too numerous. In other words: the hope for an “ingathering of the exiles” has no basis in reality; and even in that distant future to which we look forward, when the Palestinian settlement will have reached its full development, and the Jews there will grow and multiply and fill all the land and make it their own by their work—even then the majority of Jews will be scattered in strange lands, and their life in those lands will even then depend on the good-will of the peoples among whom they live as a small minority, and the dominant peoples will even then look askance at the growth of this “alien body” in their midst if it dares to rise above a certain level: and finally galuth in the physical sense will still be with us, and only a part of the people will have escaped from it—that comparatively small part which will have had the good fortune to rebuild the waste places of our land and to attain national freedom there, while all the rest of the people, scattered in strange countries, will remain as to its external condition just as it is, and no fleet will set sail from Palestine to protect it from persecution.
But if this is so, have we a right to regard the rebuilding of Palestine as an ideal for the whole nation, and its success as vital to the hopes of the whole nation?
We have! For galuth is twofold—it is material and spiritual. On the one hand it cramps the individual Jew in his material life, by taking from him the possibility of carrying on his struggle for existence, with all his strength and in complete freedom, like any other man; and on the other hand it cramps no less our people as a whole in its spiritual life, by taking from it the possibility of safeguarding and developing its national individuality according to its own spirit, in complete freedom, like any other people. This spiritual cramping, which our ancestors used to call, in their own fashion, “the exile of the Divine Presence,” and for which they shed not less tears than for the exile of the people, has become especially painful in our time, since the overthrow of the artificial wall behind which the spirit of our people entrenched itself in past generations, in order to be able to live its own life; and now we and our national life are enslaved to the spirit of the peoples around us, and we can no longer save our national individuality from being undermined as a consequence of the necessity of assimilating ourselves to the spirit of the alien life, which is too strong for us. Now it is this problem of spiritual galuth which really finds its solution in the establishment of a national “refuge” in Palestine: a refuge not for all Jews who need peace and bread, but for the spirit of the people, for that distinctive cultural form, the result of a historical development of thousands of years, which is still strong enough to live and to develop naturally in the future, if only the fetters of galuth are removed. And though the refuge contain only a tenth part of the people, this tenth part will be sacred to the whole people, which will see in it a picture of its national individuality, of what it is like when it lives its own life, without external constraint. And who can estimate in advance the strength of the influence which this national centre will exert on all the circumference, and the radical changes which that influence will produce in the life of the whole people?
Some of the Chovevé Zion arrived at this idea, as I have said, some eighteen years ago.[[60]] Had they succeeded in making it common property, it might have saved both the people and the land from many mistakes. But ideas do not develop quickly in the human mind, and this idea, like others, met with formidable obstacles, which did not allow it to penetrate fully into men’s minds. When this opinion of a minority was made public, a shudder went through the Zionist camp, as though the presence of a destructive enemy had been detected. Nor was this instinct wholly mistaken. The movement was then only just beginning to spread among the masses, and here was an attempt to give it a form which must alienate the masses, who want above all things an escape from their material troubles! It is possible that men did occasionally say to themselves: “What does it matter? Those few who can really find a quiet life and a livelihood in Palestine at the present time—will they refuse to go there unless they are assured beforehand that they are bringing complete redemption to the whole people? And the men who work for the ideal—they are of course bound to get quite clear in their own minds about the real purpose of their work, with due regard to actualities, so that they may set about their task in the way best suited to achieve their purpose.” It may be that people occasionally indulged in such reflections in secret. But we live in the age of democracy, and everybody believes that only the masses are the source of light and of progress, and that any ideal which the masses cannot grasp is mere nonsense. While it is true that in those days the democratic character of Zionism was not proclaimed from every house-top, as it is to-day, yet even the early Chovevé Zion were unconsciously democrats in this sense, that they regarded the masses not merely as material for the national building, but as conscious architects, deliberately intent on making such a building as the national purpose required. Hence they were scared by the idea that their propaganda would not go down with the masses if they put forward the spiritual revival as their only object; and they went on telling the masses that redemption was at hand if only they would give their whole-hearted support. But in spite of all this they did not succeed in creating a real mass-movement, because the masses not only heard what they said, but also saw what they achieved—and what they achieved was not calculated to confirm the belief that this was the way to redemption. It was only when western Zionism came and proclaimed that it had found a new and “practical” way to achieve the object—the way of diplomacy in the courts of East and West—that the masses followed its flag for a short time, believing in their simplicity that diplomatic documents would be the “paper bridge”[[61]] over which they would soon pass to the land of their fathers—and then an end to galuth and its miseries. But when the hopes of diplomacy were disappointed, the masses once more lost faith in the possibility of escape from galuth; and when at the same time they saw a slight chance of an improvement of their condition in the land of their exile in a not distant future, they turned in that direction. So the masses are deserting the Zionist flag before our eyes, and—what is still more painful—they sometimes take the Zionist flag with them and tack it on to the flag of another camp.
When the history of Zionism comes to be written, the historian will not be able to pass in silence over an extraordinary inconsistency of contemporary Zionist propagandists and writers. When they are trying to attract the people to their flag, they wax enthusiastic over the lofty mission of Zionism, which is to end our exile and to deliver the Jews from all their troubles; and at the same time they gird or scoff at the “spiritual” Zionists, whose unfeeling hearts soar skywards while their brethren are afflicted and their blood is shed like water—and so forth, and so forth. But these same men, when they confront the opponents of Zionism, who ask to be told clearly how Zionism can end our exile if it cannot gather all our scattered hosts into Palestine—then they take refuge in the spiritual mission of Zionism, and instead of “blood shed like water,” they expatiate on our spiritual slavery and the impossibility of developing our spiritual powers in exile. This jumping about from one side to the other, which shows clearly how weak is the belief in a material redemption of those who stand up for it, has become especially noticeable since the question of “Uganda” came up and since the birth of “Territorialism,” which was really latent in the Zionism of material redemption. All those who had become Zionists only for the sake of saving the people from persecution could not understand how it was possible to reject the Uganda proposal, or any other similar proposal which seemed to offer us the desired salvation—“a secure home of refuge”—merely on the ground that we wanted Palestine and Palestine only, though we did not know when, if ever, it would be given to us. And what was the answer of the “Zion-Zionists” (a name, coined in the Uganda period, which also will interest the future historian)? Did they try to show that our scattered hosts could be gathered more quickly and more easily into Palestine, or that in Palestine we should be better able politically to protect the Jews of the Diaspora? No! They had recourse to the “spirit,” and openly admitted the bitter truth that neither in Palestine nor in any other territory could we gather all our exiles from the four corners of the globe; that the object of Zionism was only to establish “a secure home of refuge” for a minority of the people, which should become the centre of the whole people and influence it spiritually; and that this object could be achieved only in Palestine, the birth-place of our national spirit, and in connection with our historic memories and so forth. In fact, they adopted the whole philosophy of the “skyward soaring” school, only adding a few misplaced “political” phrases for form’s sake. But after the Seventh Congress,[[62]] when the doubters had left the organisation and the “Zion-Zionists” were left to themselves, with nobody to ask awkward questions, they reverted to their old tactics; and now once more they dangle before the people the old promises of “an end to galuth.” Meanwhile, however, a general movement for liberty, affecting all the nations in the Empire, arose in the land of our exile[[63]]; and in our own midst new propagandists began to hold out to the people new promises and to speak to it in a new language, which the masses found very agreeable. And so the Zionists began to change their tune, so as to win over the masses. “Political work in the Diaspora?—Of course! It is an essential part of Zionist work. Revolution? Why, who so revolutionary as the Zionists? Socialism?—The very basis of Zionism!” And not alone that, but even the Palestinian work, to which in the end the Zionists returned, after they had awoke from the dreamland of diplomacy, took on a new epithet: “real work in Palestine.” The public must understand that Zionists are not “reactionaries” pursuing a “spiritual” will-o’-the-wisp, but genuine “realists,” and their work in Palestine is “real” work. But if at the Eighth Congress the opponents of “real” work (there are still such among Zionists) propound their doubts again, and demand an explanation of the value of such work from the point of view of the ingathering of the exiles and the redemption of the people, then, I fear, the champions of “real” work will be compelled once more to have recourse to the “spirit” in order to justify their “realism.” For the fact is that all work in Palestine, of whatever kind, material or spiritual, so long as it is properly done, is “real” (that is, calculated to achieve its object and in harmony with actual conditions) only from the point of view of the spiritual redemption, because whatever strengthens our material and spiritual position in Palestine is a source of added strength to our corporate national spirit, and therefore brings us nearer by much or by little to our spiritual goal. But as for the redemption of the people and the end of galuth—that “real” goal is no more brought nearer by all this “real” work than we get nearer to the moon by jumping.
Thus Zionism is always running after the masses—and the masses run away from it.
A well-known economist has correctly indicated one of the principal causes through which the doctrine of Marx made greater headway than similar doctrines before it. Marx, he points out, made his socialistic movement the movement of a definite section of society—the “proletariate”—whose condition and wants inevitably produce in each of its individual members a deep-rooted and powerful desire for a change in the social order, and which is therefore really fitted to fight unitedly and patiently for the attainment of the ideal that promises the satisfaction of their common demands. His predecessors in the development of Socialism, on the other hand, appealed vaguely and in general fashion to “the people,” “the poor,” and similar undefined entities.[[64]]
A similar statement may be made about Zionism, though in a negative sense. One of the principal causes that have prevented Zionism hitherto from finding a firm and secure foundation is the fact that it has not so far succeeded in recognizing and defining its own “proletariate”—its natural body of supporters, which is really fitted to fight unwearyingly for the Zionist ideal, without being turned aside to follow any other. From its inception until the present day, Zionism has appealed to “the people” generally. But “the people” is not its natural support, because the only want of which the great majority of the people is sufficiently conscious—the want which alone, therefore, can form the basis of common national work—is the need for freedom from material pressure. So soon as we leave this common ground, we find the people divided into parties and classes, whose conscious demands differ in each case, and whose relation to our national life, therefore, in each case takes on a different form. If, then, Zionism could really point the way to our material regeneration, it would doubtless unite under its banner the whole people, without distinction of party or class, except, perhaps, that small minority which is already “emancipated” from all national ties, and stands on the threshold of another way of escape from galuth. But, as I have already said, the people does not see in Zionism the way to its material regeneration, and cannot see it there, because it is not there. The unsophisticated masses have always a “feeling for reality” that prevents them instinctively from believing in promises inconsistent with the reality before their eyes. It is only occasionally, in times of deep distress from which there is no escape, that the masses will listen to a promise of redemption that lets a ray of comfort into their hearts; but they turn away and disregard it so soon as they see hope of a remedy more in touch with actualities. It is not strange, therefore, that Zionism, brief though its life has been, has already experienced many a sudden rise and many a sudden fall in the popular estimation, its fortune varying with circumstances. But is a people subject to such changes fitted to be the rank and file of a movement based on a long history, confronted by numerous obstacles, and demanding strenuous, wisely-directed, ordered effort, without sudden leaps backwards and forwards?
I think, then, that the course of events will compel Zionism to come gradually to understand itself and its supporters: to understand itself as a national movement of a spiritual character, whose aim is to satisfy the demand for a true and free national life in accordance with our distinctive spirit; and to find its supporters in that nationalist section which is sufficiently conscious, in all its individual members, of this demand, and which in a certain sense may be called a “spiritual proletariate.”
For, in spite of all the numerous latter-day sections of Jews, with their abbreviated names, it is still doubtful whether among all our “S.D.” and “S.S.”[[65]] with their ceaseless talk about their “proletariate psychology,” there is really any considerable number of members who can properly be held to belong to the proletariate in the Socialist sense of the word. The mission of the proletariate is to hasten the Socialist solution by the concentration of wealth; and this mission can be fulfilled only by those who work in large industrial undertakings. The work of the master-workman and his assistants is not proletariate work, because, so far from hastening, it hinders that solution. Now the working-class Jew has practically no place in the large industrial undertakings; generally speaking, the so-called proletariate section of the Jews belongs to the class of master-workmen. But, on the other hand, there is among the Jews, and only among them, a proletariate in another sense—in the sense indicated by the combination of “national” and “spiritual.” The position and the needs of this proletariate, which are common to all its individual members, compel it to feel a deep-rooted and powerful desire for a change in the established order; but the change desired in this case is not a concentration of the means of production, but just the opposite. What is wanted is a new means of production, wherewith to create a product of a special character. Among all civilised nations ours is the only one that has no special means of production of its own wherewith to create its spiritual and intellectual wealth, but is compelled to make use of the means provided by other nations—their languages, their literatures, their schools and universities, and so forth—and thus to enrich the owners of these means of production by its work. But the proletariate that produces material wealth receives in payment at least a part of the wealth produced by its labour, and only the surplus is left to the owner of the means of production; whereas in our case almost all the result of our toil goes to swell the wealth of others. Our own national treasury is impoverished and empty; our own distinctive spirit dwindles and dwindles. And yet we are rich in spiritual and intellectual powers, and do productive work in every branch of life. This condition of things is distressing to all Jews whose kinship with their people is not one of blood merely, but whose national consciousness and general culture have developed to such a point that they can both understand and feel the deep tragedy of this national degradation. For the people so degraded produced thousands of years ago, for itself and with its own means of production, a store of spiritual wealth from which the world still draws sustenance; and it is impossible for them to imagine that all the endless sacrifices, with which for two thousand years our people has paid for the preservation of its spirit and its own form of life, are to have no result except to bring us at the present day to a condition of spiritual emptiness, the end of which will perhaps be a contemptible death. This constant feeling of distress necessarily impels these men to work for the freeing of our spirit and the products of our labour from alien dominion. Where there is a real want, be it physical or spiritual, there is a solid basis for a union of forces in joint work for the satisfaction of the common demand. And so it is the men who are really conscious of this want who form the only section specially fitted to support the Zionist movement, and to work for it unitedly, patiently, in an organized manner, until its goal is reached.
I am fully aware that not all who feel this need are as yet convinced that they must unite under the banner of Zionism. Many of them still believe in the possibility of freeing the Jewish spirit, and continuing its internal development, even without a national centre. But they will change their minds when that spiritual freedom in exile, for which they wait, is attained, and when they see the net result of their hoping to “sing the Lord’s song in a strange land.” In Western Europe and in America, where the desired freedom has already been granted, and its effect on our national life is obvious, the conviction is already spreading that external freedom, the removal of the heavy hand of oppression, is not in itself sufficient to free our innermost spirit from its moral bondage to the strange environment that surrounds us on all sides in our exile. And this conviction will inevitably spread in Eastern Europe also when the external chains are broken there. Our people will then be able, within certain limits, to live a national life, in accord with its own spirit, just so far as it wills to do so. But it will not be able so to will. The will itself does not depend on free choice. A man may wish to will, and yet be unable, because at that particular moment the necessary conditions are absent, without which the will cannot become an active force. So, too, in the case of a nation. There can be no active national will to live a distinctive spiritual life, even though permission be given under the hand and seal of the ruling power, where the individuals who compose the nation are surrounded by a spiritual atmosphere foreign to them, and breathe this atmosphere whether they will or no, without seeing in the whole world even a square yard of ground which their national spirit, and theirs alone, pervades, subject to no foreign overlord, and in which it creates with its own means of production enough spiritual wealth to satisfy the whole people.
I am aware also that the section that desires to free our national spirit, whether by means of a national centre in Palestine or without it, is not numerous, taken all together, at the present time. But this fact need not make us despair, as though in truth the death of our spirit were at hand, because it has no people to make it manifest in the world. The Hebrew spirit never sought its strength and power in numbers. “The Lord did not ... choose you because ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all people.” The God of this nation, when He saw it “turn quickly from the way,” did not fold up His Law and get Him gone, but said to the one man who remained faithful to Him: “Let Me alone ... that I may consume them: and I will make of thee a great nation.” It is a mistake to think that the national spirit is an abstract idea, which designates the sum of all the spiritual principles that manifest themselves in the life of the people in each generation, and that when this manifestation ceases it no longer exists. The national spirit is in fact a collective idea only in relation to the manner in which it came into being, as a result of the common life of a body of individuals closely connected with one another, and continuing through generations under certain conditions. But when it has once come into being, and has found root in men’s souls by virtue of a long history, then it becomes part of the psychology of the individual: its truth is vindicated in the individual, and does not depend at all on anything external to him. If I feel the Hebrew national spirit in my heart, and it gives a distinctive form to my inner life, then that spirit does exist in me, and its existence does not cease even if all the other Jews in my time no longer feel its existence in their own hearts. I assert, therefore, that if the majority of our people are unconsciously becoming more and more estranged from the national spirit, and if its children born in exile have made for themselves new gods like the gods of the peoples around them, and only a few remain faithful to our national idea in its historic form, and desire for it freedom and development: then these few are the heirs of our national possessions at the present time; it is they who hold the thread of history, and do not allow it to be broken. So long as there is a single Jew who holds the thread, we cannot tell what its end will be. Perhaps the conditions of life will change, and the small remnant will again become “a great nation.”
But how is it possible that the conditions of our life in exile should change in the manner necessary for the revival of the Jewish spirit? What power has a small party to strengthen and hasten this possibility? What security have we that the change, if it come about, will be firm and lasting?
These questions demand an answer not in words, but in deeds. Verbal answers we have given times without number. There is only one way, we have said, to change the conditions of our national life fundamentally, so that it shall become our life indeed, and not a passing shadow of the life of other people; and that way is the foundation of a centre for our national spirit “on its own native soil.” Further, we have promised more than once that this way of ours, like every new path, will be made and prepared by the few for the many, who will afterwards follow of their own accord. But when we came to turn our words into deeds, then it became clear that there was still chaos in the depths of our spirit, although the light of the idea played on the surface.
Whoever knows by experience how dear Palestine is still to every plain Jew, how his heart swells—sometimes even to the point of joyful tears—when he reads or hears of the revival of the Hebrew language among the children in Palestine, or of the success of the Hebrew colonies there—whoever knows this cannot deny that the actual work of building up a centre in Palestine, even before it approached its goal, could have had a wonderful influence on the spirit of the people in the lands of our exile. The truth is, that even now the majority of our people cherish their national inheritance, and desire its eternal preservation; but the bondage of galuth, material and spiritual, cramps the heart, and renders the national feeling and will incapable of becoming an effective force in action. And yet, if our work in Palestine had been such as to show clearly that there is really a prospect and a fair hope for the life of our spirit and our national possessions in the land of their birth; if the people had seen the foundations of the building laid by expert hands, one complete stone upon another, though the stones had been but small: then the people would have sought and found here a new source of life for its dormant national sentiment, and a new strength of will to protect more effectively its spiritual possessions in exile.
But as things are, how can we prove the correctness of our answer? What are the results of our twenty years and more of work in Palestine? With regard to material work, we have only unsuccessful attempts to show; and as for spiritual work, we cannot even show such attempts (except, perhaps, the school at Jaffa),[[66]] for in fact scarcely anything has been done. Those who desired the “ingathering of the exiles” have laboured all these years, first of all in founding philanthropic colonies, and then in political talk; they have had neither the time nor the will to meddle in spiritual matters. Those, again, who desired the “revival of the spirit” have also dissipated all their time and their strength in spiritual work in the Diaspora; in all this time they have not created in Palestine one single spiritual product that could awake an echo in the nation’s heart. It is as though they had forgotten the first principle of their own faith, that the revival of the spirit in exile can come about only through the influence of a national centre in Palestine. They have, indeed, said a great deal about the need for founding universities and schools, and other such needs, the satisfaction of which is beyond their power at present. But they have not done that which was both necessary and possible.
Here, for example, is an attempt to found a small literary organ in Palestine. I ask myself: Why was this not done long ago? In the Diaspora a large number of literary plants have bloomed and faded during the Zionist epoch; they have borne fruit, and have left some good behind them, whether it was much or little. In Palestine, meanwhile, since the beginning of the movement there has not been published a single literary miscellany which has made its mark in our literature. Yet we did not feel that something was lacking. We constantly told the people that only in Palestine could our national spirit flourish and produce fruit after its kind; yet at the same time we were not ashamed to think that the people did not see in Palestine even a shadow of the fruit of its spirit, and that the little fruit that did grow was growing in other countries.
It is true that Palestine is still poor in spiritual forces generally, and in literary forces particularly; but that simply proves the truth of my contention. If we had always had a full and clear conception of the nature of our object, if we had always remembered that what we are seeking to build in Palestine is a refuge for our spirit, we could never have refrained from doing all that was possible to increase the spiritual wealth of Palestine, and to increase, little by little, its moral influence on the people. In that case we should undoubtedly have striven among other things to establish in Palestine a literary organ, an altar on which all our best national writers would have felt it their duty to offer their best, in order to win for it affection and honour in Jewry. An organ such as this, though it would have been at first an artificial creation, would certainly have uplifted the spirit and fostered literary talent in Palestine itself; perhaps also it would by now have become a true, natural literary centre for us, drawing sustenance from the forces which it had called to the land and developed there.
But it is as I said: in the human mind no idea springs from darkness into light at one bound. It was necessary for experience to teach us how slender is the thread on which hangs all our spiritual work outside Palestine, before we could be made to remember that in reality we had no need of such experience, since it only taught us that which was implied in our idea from the very first.
It is just at this moment that you come and tell us: “The time has come to begin planting our literature in the land of its birth.” Need I express my feelings when I read these words?
Yes, the time has come to begin planting, and planting not alone our literature, but also our spirit in all its aspects. All that now runs to waste in exile, voluntarily or involuntarily, must be gathered together and planted “on its own native soil,” and every man in whom the Jewish spirit lives is bound to help in this planting to the utmost of his power, because therein lies our life and our last hope.
“Romanticism,” our young men will say with a smile.
Let them smile—until they grow old enough to understand life as it is, and not as it appears through the glasses of a ready-made doctrine. Then they will understand that what they contemptuously call “romanticism” is the crown of life and the source of man’s superiority over the brute. They will understand, too, that this very anti-romantic doctrine has its attraction principally because of its romantic element—because it offers scope for devoted service in the cause of a distant ideal. But if ever there comes a day when that ideal is realised, and romanticism disappears entirely, then there will arise a new generation, which will curse that day for the hunger it has brought—a hunger not for bread, but for romanticism, for some ideal striving which can once more give scope for exaltation, for sacrifice, and so fill the emptiness of a life of peace and plenty.
“WHEN MESSIAH COMES”
(1907)
“When Messiah comes, impudence will be rife.”
This ancient saying has been used so often as a weapon of controversy, that familiarity has robbed it of its sting. For this reason let me say at the outset that I quote it here for no controversial purpose, but wish, on the contrary, to point out that it really draws attention to a natural and permanent connection between two phenomena of human life, whereof the one is an inevitable consequence of the other. And like every objective truth, it neither censures nor reproves, but simply states a fact.
What we call “impudence” is not as a rule an original, inborn vice, but a quality which develops after birth out of a man’s exaggerated belief in his own worth, strength, wisdom or what not. This exaggerated opinion of himself makes a man hold himself more proudly than he ought before his betters, and censure and decry everybody who will not accept him at his own valuation. Now most men, in times of normal tranquillity, cannot help seeing that knowledge and experience are necessary for the conduct of human affairs, and that not all men have attained an equal degree of development or an equal level of ability and judgment. And so this “impudence” comes to be regarded as a bad thing, because it indicates either an excessive conceit of oneself—as though one were superior to the whole world in learning and experience, and were above criticism—or an excessive stupidity—as though one were unaware that there is anything in life which calls for learning and understanding, and that not everybody is equally competent to pronounce judgment on everything.
But this quality wears a different aspect “when Messiah comes”—that is to say, when a certain body of men, no longer able to submit quietly to life’s tribulations, find or invent some Messiah who is to release them from all their troubles. Whether the Messiah is conceived by them as an individual, or as a collective body, or even merely as a new theory—the result is the same. Believing firmly in their Messiah, seeing in him the fountain of salvation, and consequently also the symbol of truth and goodness, and regarding themselves simply as his followers and his disciples, they naturally cease to recognise distinctions between man and man, or to admit any superiority in wisdom over folly, or in age over youth. For all alike are as dust compared with the Messiah, and all alike receive (or ought to receive) his teaching with passive acquiescence and unquestioning faith. No need any longer for superior knowledge or long experience in order to be able to distinguish between truth and falsehood, between good and evil. All can come in on equal terms and take truth and good ready-made from the Messiah’s storehouse. Whoever disagrees with what comes out of the storehouse, be he never so old and learned, is obviously a fool, an old heretic whom any stripling is entitled to despise. Those who stand outside the Messianic camp are astonished at this sudden decay of morals, at this upsetting of the proper relation between young and old, between the nobodies and the somebodies. “Impudence,” they cry indignantly. But the Messianists themselves do not, and cannot, see anything wrong in their conduct. For it is in truth only an inevitable consequence of their fundamental belief that the Messiah puts great and small on one level, and that there are no longer high and low, but only brothers in Messiah and enemies of Messiah.
Thus the appearance of a Messiah and the growth of impudence are naturally and inevitably connected; and we therefore find that they have always appeared together, in every country and at every time, from the earliest days until the present. When an individual Messiah arose in Israel at the end of the period of the Second Temple, his first devotees—mostly very simple folk—rejected their national leaders and sages with scorn and contempt: precisely as did later the devotees—not less unlearned—of that corporate Messiah which was revealed to them in the form of the Tsaddikim, who, as intermediaries between Israel and his God, were to lighten the burden of galuth and hasten the redemption.[[67]] Both have their parallel in this present generation, which also has its Messiah, or rather Messiahs. But the modern Messiahs and the modern impudence are rather different in form, as is only natural, seeing that times have changed.
The Messiah of old was above reason and above nature, and faith in the redemption which he was to bring about was based not on logical demonstration, but on miracles, like the confounding of destiny and the upsetting of natural laws. Hence his followers needed no great cleverness in order to meet criticism. They met every possible objection by a single argument. “He who can overthrow nature is not precluded from accomplishing a supernatural redemption, and therefore any difficulty based on natural laws is out of court.” Any child can master this simple argument in a trice—and straightway he is of Messiah’s company, one of his followers and evangelists, like all the other believers. For this reason the “impudence” of the Messianists of old was similarly simple and obvious, and had no need to force itself into an artificial mould. So-and-so denies the truth or the power of the Messiah: is there any room for discussion? The fellow, be he who he may, is a scapegrace, and all honour to whoever is first with an insult or a stick.
To-day things are different. Four centuries of free thought and the unravelling of nature’s mysteries have left their mark on the human race. To-day even a Messiah cannot defy reason and nature, but is compelled to base his redemption on logical demonstrations, and to put his message in the form of a system founded on nature and experience. Essentially, indeed, everything is as it used to be: the real basis of Messianism, now as then, is faith in a speedy redemption, a faith which has its roots not in reasoned demonstration, but in the craving to be redeemed. But the exigencies of our age do not allow faith any longer to ignore the demands of reason and nature. Even faith is compelled to speak their language if it would satisfy the modern man. So we get scientific systems of a Messianic character, which, differing one from another, have all this much in common, that their scientific soundness is very much open to question, but leaves no doubt in the minds of the believers, who really need nothing more than the phraseology of science, as a seemly outer cloak for their faith. As the necessary phraseology is there, and the cloak is ready to hand, the believers hold on to the cloak with the utmost tenacity; every one of its threads is sacrosanct, and woe to him who disturbs a single one. They seem to feel unconsciously that if there is too much handling of their cloak, too much examination of its threads in the light of reason and genuine science, it will not be long before it is torn to tatters—and then what will become of their faith? Whence we find in all Messianic camps, to-day no less than of old, a fierce hatred of any attempt at criticism from within, and unlimited impudence towards those who stand without: but whereas this hatred and this impudence used to appear undisguised and unashamed, to-day they cloak themselves in reason and science, and so appear to be different. You must not think that X. is pilloried and jeered at because he has attacked their Messiah. Heaven forbid! Freedom of opinion is their first principle. No: his crime is that he has an axe to grind, and perverts scientific truth—which is, of course, solely and only that which is set forth for all time under hand and seal in this Manifesto or that Programme, and beyond it there is nothing.[[68]]
Have we a right to complain of the Messianists for all this? Can we blame them because their yearning for redemption is so deep that it begets this blind, all-conquering faith? No: we ought not to complain of them, but to envy them. Happy men—be their name Political Zionists, Social Democrats, or any other of the familiar names! Happy indeed, for Messiah stands on their threshold, and redemption knocks at their door, and truth is crystal-clear to them all, great and small alike. But how hard is life in our days for one who is not of their number; for one who cannot follow blindly after one Messiah or the other; for one who does not hear the voice that announces redemption and complete salvation, either close at hand or far away, either for his own time or for the days when his grand-children shall lie in their graves; for one who still looks upon Science and Reason as divine powers, which stand above all sects and judge them all impartially, and not as standard-bearers and trumpeters in the service of a Messiah!
A SPIRITUAL CENTRE
(1907)
It has been observed that if men always remembered the true meaning of every word that they use or hear, disputes would be infinitely rarer. The truth of this remark is known by experience to anybody who happens to have promulgated some idea which the contemporary “reading public” did not like, and to have had his “heresy” exposed by the literary mouthpieces of that public. The hapless creature’s first feeling is one of incredulity and astonishment. How, he thinks, is it possible so to pervert things, so completely to confuse ideas and to advance arguments which so fail to touch the point? He puts it down to the malevolence of his opponents, believes that they are purposely twisting his words, and complains bitterly to that same reading public in the name of truth and fairness. But later, when he finds that complaint is unavailing, and that the same thing happens time after time, so that malevolence alone cannot be responsible—then he is driven to the conclusion that there must be some more universal explanation of what he has experienced. The explanation is that the connection between a word and the idea contained in it is not so strong in the human mind as to make it impossible for a man to hear or to utter a word without immediately having a full and exact conception of the associated idea. Hence, when a man hears an opinion which runs counter to his way of thinking, he is apt unconsciously to grasp the novel opinion in an incorrect form: he will change the meaning of this or that word until it becomes not difficult for him to refute the opinion by unsound arguments, in which again one word or another is used incorrectly. And all this counterfeiting is done by the thinking apparatus automatically, without the knowledge of its owner, by virtue of its inherent tendency to work at any given moment in accordance with the dominant requirements of the subliminal self at that moment.
I doubt whether there is any contemporary Jewish writer who is more familiar with this experience than myself. Were I to count up all the disputes with which, for my sins, our literature has been enriched—most of them simply glaring instances of the phenomenon in question—the account would be long indeed. But I wish here to adduce only one instance of a dispute which began fifteen years ago[[69]] and has continued to this very day.
Fifteen years ago there appeared for the first time an idea that afterwards occasioned endless expenditure of ink. “In Palestine,” I wrote, “we can and should found for ourselves a spiritual centre of our nationality.” My literary experience was not yet extensive, and I overlooked this important consideration: that in putting before the public an idea which does not accord with the general view, one must not merely put it in a logically clear and definite form, but must also reckon with the psychology of the reader—with that mental apparatus which combines unrelated words and ideas according to the requirements of its owner—and must try one’s utmost to avoid any word or expression which might afford an opening for this process of combination. I confess now that in view of this psychological factor I ought to have felt that the formula “a spiritual centre of our nationality” would afford a good opportunity to those who wished to misunderstand, although from the point of view of logic it is sufficiently clear and is well adapted to the idea which it contains.
“Centre” is, of course, a relative term. Just as “father” is inconceivable without children, so is “centre” inconceivable without “circumference”; and just as a father is a father only in relation to his children, and is merely So-and-so in relation to the rest of mankind, so a centre is a centre only in relation to its own circumference, whereas in relation to all that lies outside the circumference it is merely a point with no special importance. When we use the word “centre,” metaphorically, in connection with the phenomena of human society, it necessarily connotes a similar idea: what we mean is that a particular spot or thing exerts influence on a certain social circumference, which is bound up with and dependent on it, and that in relation to this circumference it is a centre. But since social life is a complex of many different departments, there are very few centres which are universal in their function—that is, which influence equally all sides of the life of the circumference. The relation between the centre and the circumference is usually limited to one or more departments of life, outside which they are not interdependent. Thus a given circumference may have many centres, each of which is a centre only for one specific purpose. When, therefore, the word “centre” is used to express a social conception, it is accompanied almost always—except where the context makes it unnecessary—by an epithet which indicates its character. We speak of a literary centre, an artistic centre, a commercial centre, and so on, meaning thereby that in this or that department of life the centre in question has a circumference which is under its influence and is dependent on it, but that in other departments the one does not exert nor the other receive influence, and the relation of centre and circumference does not exist.
Bearing well in mind this definition, which is familiar enough, and applying it to the phrase quoted above—“in Palestine we can and should found for ourselves a spiritual centre of our nationality”—we shall find that the phrase can only be interpreted as follows:—
“A centre of our nationality” implies that there is a national circumference, which, like every circumference, is much larger than the centre. That is to say, the speaker sees the majority of his people, in the future as in the past, scattered over all the world, but no longer broken up into a number of disconnected parts, because one part—the one in Palestine—will be a centre for them all, and will unite them all into a single, complete circumference. When all the scattered limbs of the national body feel the beating of the national heart, restored to life in the home of its vitality, they too will once again draw near one to another and welcome the inrush of living blood that will flow from the heart.
“Spiritual” means that this relation of centre and circumference between Palestine and the lands of the Diaspora will be limited of necessity to the spiritual side of life. The influence of the centre will strengthen the national consciousness in the Diaspora, will wipe out the spiritual taint of galuth, and will fill our spiritual life with a national content which will be true and natural, not like the artificial content with which we now fill up the void. But outside the spiritual side of life, in all those economic and political relations which depend first and foremost on the conditions of the immediate environment, and are created by that environment and reflect its character—while it is true that in all those relations the effect of the spiritual changes (such as the strengthening of national unity and increased energy in the struggle for existence) will show itself to some extent, yet essentially and fundamentally these departments of life in the Diaspora will not be bound up with the life of the centre, and the most vivid imagination cannot picture to us how economic and political influence will radiate from Palestine through all the length and breadth of the Diaspora, which is co-extensive with the globe, in such manner and to such degree as would entitle us to say, without inexact use of language, that Palestine is the centre of our people in these departments also.
Now, at the time when I first used the phrase under discussion, I knew beforehand that I should excite the wrath of the Chovevé Zion (in those days it was they who held the field). But looking, as I did, solely at the logical side, I was sure that the brunt of their anger would fall on the word “centre”; for the use of that word involved a negation of the idea of a return of the whole people to Palestine, and so clipped the wings of those fantastic hopes which even then, in the days before the first Basle Congress, were proclaimed as heralding the end of the galuth and a complete and absolute solution of the Jewish problem in all its aspects. The epithet “spiritual” seemed to me so simple and clear, as a necessary logical consequence of the assumption involved in the world “centre,” that it never remotely entered my mind that here might be the stumbling-block, and that I ought at once to file a declaration to the effect that, although the centre would be spiritual in its influence on the circumference, yet in itself it would be a place like other places, where men were compounded of body and soul, and needed food and clothing, and that for this reason the centre would have to concern itself with material questions and to work out an economic system suited to its requirements, and could not exist without farmers, labourers, craftsmen, and merchants. When a man uses, for example, the expression “literary centre,” does it occur to him to explain that he does not mean a place where there is no eating or drinking, no business or handicraft, but simply a number of men sitting and writing books and drinking in the radiance of their own literary talent? Imagine, then, my surprise when I found that my critics paid no attention to the word “centre,” but poured out all the vials of their wrath on the epithet “spiritual,” as though it contained all that was new and strange in the idea: as who should say, “A spiritual and not a material centre? Can such a thing be?”
But my amazement soon died away when I remembered the “psychological apparatus.” It was bound to fasten on some word or other in order to make my unpopular theory appear absurd; and since the word “centre,” if the critics dwelt on it and led the minds of their readers to analyse its meaning, was calculated not to serve that end, but, on the contrary, to make it clear where the absurdity really lay, they found it best to give “spiritual” all the emphasis. “A spiritual centre! Now do you understand what these people want? They care nothing for a material settlement, for colonies, factories, commerce: they want only to settle in Palestine a dozen batlanim, whose business shall be spiritual nationality.”
Great indeed is the power of psychology. This interpretation spread abroad, was accepted, and remains to this day a matter of course. Even those Zionists who have not got their knowledge of my views from the pamphlet literature which has flooded the world in recent years, but have read them in the original—even they are certain that that is what spiritual Zionism means. It has availed them nothing to read immediately afterwards, in the same article,[[70]] that the spiritual centre must be “a true miniature of the people of Israel,” and that in the centre there will appear once more “the genuine type of a Jew, whether it be a Rabbi or a scholar or a writer, a farmer or a craftsman or a business man.” It has availed nothing, because psychological factors dominate not only the person judging, but also his memory.
Three years ago,[[71]] I remember, after I had published in some journal a protest against the favourable reports about the condition of the Palestinian colonies that were then being spread abroad, for diplomatic purposes, a writer in the camp of the political Zionists became angry with me, and determined to shatter with one blow all my views on Zionism, and so remove a dangerous heresy. This idea he carried out in an elaborate article, which was continued through many numbers of the same journal. The details I have forgotten: they were but the old arguments dished up in different words. But I still remember one thing, which provoked not only a smile but also reflections such as those which are the subject of the present essay. After proving conclusively that material factors are of great importance, and cannot be lightly brushed aside, our author reaches the conclusion that it is for that reason idle to confine our work solely to the foundation of a spiritual centre for our nationality: we must found in Palestine an economic and spiritual centre. It escaped his notice that so soon as he used the word “centre” he became himself a “spiritual Zionist,” and in adding the epithet “economic” added exactly nothing. The journal in question appeared in Warsaw, which was also at that time the home of our author; and in order to understand the matter aright he had only to go into the street and ask any intelligent Pole: “What is Warsaw to the Polish people as a whole? Is it a spiritual centre of the nation, or a spiritual and economic centre?” The answer, I think, would have been something like this: “For the Polish people as a whole this city is certainly a spiritual centre of their nationality. Here the national characteristics find their expression in every department of life, here the national language, literature, and art live and develop; and all this, and what goes with it, influences the spirit of the Poles, binds them, wherever they may be, to the centre, and prevents the spark of nationality in the individual from becoming buried and extinguished. But an economic centre of the nation? My good sir! How could Warsaw be an economic centre for all the millions of Poles who are scattered over different lands, and whose economic lives depend on entirely different centres, where Polish economic conditions do not count at all?” I should not have advised our author, after getting an answer of that kind, to ask: “How so? Are there not in Warsaw, besides spiritual things, ever so many factories and shops and other material things, without which it could not develop its spiritual side? And is it not therefore an economic and spiritual centre?” I should not have advised him to ask that question, because I could not guarantee that the intelligent Pole would waste words on such a questioner.
But amongst ourselves “the economic centre” has become a current phrase with many people who on the one hand want to do their duty by the economic side of Zionism (that is de rigueur nowadays), and on the other hand cannot achieve the imaginative eagle-flights of “Proletarian Zionism,”[[72]] which promises to create in Palestine a national economic system so healthy and so vast that it will be able to provide room and work for all those Jews who are being more and more completely elbowed out of the best branches of industry in the lands of their exile (that is, for almost nine-tenths of the people). Zionists like these, in order to get rid of the difficult question as to the possibility of settling the majority of our people in Palestine, even when their new economic system becomes a fact, consent to accept half the loaf, and want to regard Palestine as merely an economic centre. But herein they escape one snare to fall into a worse: they have got rid of an external problem, which depends on arguments from experience, and are caught instead in an inner contradiction, which mere logic can expose. With the “Proletarian” formula one can still argue: one can demand, for instance, a somewhat clearer explanation of that “internal process” by which the economic system of Palestine will become able to absorb immigration on a scale unparalleled in history: but at all events there is no self-contradiction. Whereas the conception of “an economic centre of the nation,” when applied to a people scattered over the whole world, leaves no room for argument or questioning, because its refutation is in itself.
But psychological combinations of this kind are a good sign. They show—in common with other clear signs—that the “centre” as an idea is making headway and is leading to various deductions which could not have been imagined some years ago. And that is the all-important thing. In time the deduction which is involved in the word “spiritual,” when rightly understood, will also be drawn, and it will no longer be possible to suppress it by psychological means. True, all this will not do away with the old nonsense about “spiritual Zionism”; on the contrary—and this is even now unmistakably evident—the more the substance of spiritual Zionism prevails, the more will psychology try to distinguish the victorious tendency from its hated name. But what of that? Let the name be beaten, so but the idea prevail!
SUMMA SUMMARUM
(1912)
This is a summary not of facts and figures, but of impressions stored in my mind in the course of sixty days during which our national work enveloped me in its atmosphere and engrossed my every thought: ten days at Basle during the Tenth Congress, and fifty days afterwards in Palestine.
Fourteen years have passed since I saw a Zionist Congress (the first), and twelve years since I witnessed the condition of our work in Palestine. My object in revisiting both the Congress and the land was not, as before, to go into details, to collect material, in the shape of facts and figures, for the solution of certain practical problems. On this occasion I opened my mind wide to the different impressions that crowded in on me from all sides; I allowed them to enter and to dissolve of themselves into a single general impression—a kind of mental summary of all that I saw and heard in connection with our movement and our work in and out of Palestine. I am of those who stand on the threshold of age and look back on many long years of work and struggle, of victories and defeats, of pain and of joy. A man in this position finds it necessary at times to turn his thoughts for a while from questions of detail, and to take a more comprehensive view, so that he may find for his own satisfaction an answer to that broad, fundamental question which occasionally disturbs his sleep: What is the purpose, what the result, of all this work which has occupied your life and consumed your strength?
It was this necessity that took me on this occasion to Basle and to Palestine. And let me confess that it is a long time since I spent such happy days as those of my travels. Not that all is now right with the movement; not that the sun has shone on our work, and driven away the shadows, and spread light and joy everywhere. We are still a long way from such a happy consummation. Even to-day the shadows are many; if they are less in one place, they are more in another. But one fact is becoming increasingly clear: our work is not an artificial product, a thing that we have invented to give the people something to do, as a palliative for the national sorrow. That idea might be entertained if aim and achievement corresponded, if the work were done for the purpose of attaining that result which it is in fact attaining. If that were so, one might doubt whether the attainment of this result were really necessary for the nation, and whether the whole business were not artificial. But that is not the case. Since the beginning of the movement the workers have had one goal in view, and have been unconsciously approaching another. This dualism is the surest sign that the driving force is not reasoning reflection, but something much deeper: one of those natural instincts which work in darkness, and make a man do their will whether he likes it or not, while he believes that his action is directed to the object which his reason has set before him. This driving force is the instinct of national self-preservation. By it we are compelled to achieve what must be achieved for the perpetuation of our national existence; and we follow it—albeit without clear consciousness, and by crooked paths—because follow it we must if we would live. I used to be distressed by this dualism; I used to fear that we might lose the right path—the path of life—through making for a goal to which no path can lead. But now that I have seen the results of the work so far, I have no such fears as to its ultimate fate. What matters it that the work is professedly directed to an object which it cannot attain? L’homme propose.... History does not trouble about our programme; it creates what it creates at the bidding of our “instinct of self-preservation.” Whether we ourselves understand the true import and purpose of our work, or whether we prefer not to understand—in either case history works through us, and will reach its goal by our agency. Only the task will be harder and longer if true understanding does not come to our aid.
That is the real state of the case. All that I saw and heard at Basle and in Palestine has strengthened my conviction that the “instinct of self-preservation” slumbers not nor sleeps in the nation’s heart. Despite our mistakes, it is creating through our agency just what our national existence requires most of all at present: a fixed centre for our national spirit and culture, which will be a new spiritual bond between the scattered sections of the people, and by its spiritual influence will stimulate them all to a new national life.
To miss Basle during the Tenth Zionist Congress was to miss seeing an extraordinary medley of languages and ideas—the result of an internal crisis of which everybody was conscious, but which everybody tried hard not to see. Throughout the Congress there was a struggle between two sections, the “political” and the “practical.” You hear the “politicals” declare that they, too, are really “practical,” only that they do not forget “the political end”; you hear the “practicals” protest that they, too, are really “political,” only that they do not forget “the practical means.” And both sections alike protest that the “State” has really been given up, but the Basle Programme has not been given up to the extent of a single comma.[[73]].... In the end the “practicals” won: that is to say, the essential work of Zionism was pronounced to be the extension of the Jewish settlement, and the furthering of education and culture, in Palestine. Thereupon the victors stood up and promised to guard faithfully the Basle Programme and “the Zionist tradition developed during fourteen years.”
But all this confusion was only an inevitable consequence of the state of mind in which the two sections came to the Congress.
The Zionism of the “politicals,” most of whom were brought into the camp not by a heartfelt longing for the persistence and the development of Jewish nationality, but by a desire to escape from external oppression through the foundation of a “secured home of refuge” for our people—their Zionism is necessarily bound up with that object, and with that alone: take that away, and it remains an empty phrase. For this reason they cannot help seeing that the “practical work” which their opponents make the basis of Zionism is not calculated to hasten that end which is, for them, the only end. They still remember the estimate which they heard in the opening speech of the first Congress: that the colonising work of the Chovevé Zion will bring the exiled people back to Palestine in nine hundred years! But the course of events during recent years has destroyed their hope of reaching that goal more quickly by means of that “political” work which is the foundation of “the Zionist tradition.” Hence they were in a quandary at this Congress, and did not know how to extricate themselves. They came with empty hands, and professed devotion to an object which there were no means of attaining; they could only fall back on the hope of a vague future, when external conditions may perhaps become more favourable to “political work.” This explains also the excessive shyness which they displayed. They did not go out to battle, as they used to do, with trumpetings and loud alarums; there was scarcely a mention of those familiar flourishes, which they used to utter with such boldness and vigour, about the salvation which Zionism is to bring to all oppressed and persecuted Jews. Even Nordau, in his speech on the condition of the Jews, changed his tune on this occasion. The whole idea of his speech, which has been given at the opening of every Congress, and has become an essential part of the “Zionist tradition,” was to justify Zionism on the ground of anti-Semitism. “You see”—such, in effect, used to be his argument—“how perilous is your position all over the world; there is no way out. And therefore, if you wish to be saved, join us, and we will save you.” But on this occasion Nordau contented himself with describing the evil, and dealing out reproaches to Jews and non-Jews. The essential thing—the “therefore”—was lacking almost entirely. And throughout the Congress there were heard speeches which openly opposed this Zionism based on anti-Semitism, and the speakers were not shouted down, as they certainly would have been in earlier years.
The “practicals”—mostly Eastern Jews and their Western pupils, for whom national Judaism is the very centre of their being, and who are ruled unconsciously by the “instinct of national self-preservation”—they came to Basle in a very different frame of mind. They brought with them a complete programme of “practical work in Palestine,” embracing both colonising and cultural activity; and they came with a settled conviction that all the various branches of this work were the proper means to the attainment of the end—THE end—the one and only, yet undefined. The “politicals” raised their old question: “Do you honestly believe that the occasional purchase of a small piece of land, the foundation of a tiny colony with infinite pains, a workmen’s farm without security of tenure, a school here, a college there, and so forth—that these are the means of acquiring a ‘home of refuge’ as understood by the ‘Zionist tradition’—a refuge which will end our troubles by ending our exile?” The “practicals” had no satisfactory answer. None the less, they stood to their guns, and stoutly maintained that work in Palestine is the only road that leads to the end: but.... At this point they broke off abruptly, and did not complete their thought—for a very good reason. They dared not expressly repudiate that article of faith which alone has made Zionism a popular movement—“the redemption of the nation.” They dared not recognise and acknowledge that the end of which they speak to-day differs from that of the “Zionist tradition.” What they are working for is not “a home of refuge for the people of Israel,” but “a fixed centre for the spirit of Israel.” All branches of the present work in Palestine, be it buying land or founding schools, are sure means to the attainment of that end, but have nothing to do with the other. The “practicals” were inwardly conscious of this truth even while the “politicals” still had the upper hand, and for this reason they joined with the “politicals” in fighting it bitterly and angrily. It was a disturbing factor, of which they would fain be rid. But now that the star of “political” Zionism had waned, this conviction had grown stronger in the minds of the “practicals,” and had become a real driving force. As yet, however, they lacked the moral courage to intensify this subconscious whisper into a clear profession of faith. Thus the real object remained beneath the threshold of consciousness, while above the threshold there wandered about, like disembodied spirits, here means without an object, there an object without means; and imagination tried hard to combine the two.[[74]]
But while the “makers of history” inside the Congress Hall were in the dark, it was outside the Hall, among the crowds attracted to Basle by the Congress, that I saw quite clearly what history has really been doing. In the fourteen years since the first Congress we have been joined by a body of Jews of a new kind: men in whom the national consciousness is deep-rooted, and is not measured by Shekalim[[75]] or limited by a Programme, but is an all-pervading and all-embracing sentiment. Jews of this type came to Basle from all the ends of the earth; they returned to their people out of the gulf of assimilation, most of them yet young in years, able and willing to work for the national revival. When I saw these men—our heirs—outside the Congress Hall, I said to myself: Never trouble about those who are inside! Let them make speeches and pass resolutions and believe that they are hastening the redemption. The distant redemption may not be any nearer; but the estranged hearts are drawing near. In spite of all, history is doing its work in this place, and these men are helping, whether they know it or not.
This same historical tendency, dimly discerned at Basle through the dark cloud of words, I found in Palestine clearly revealed in the light of facts. The more I travelled and observed, the more evident it became to me that what is happening in Palestine—despite all the contradictions and inconsistencies—is tending broadly towards a single goal—that goal which I mentioned above. No doubt we have a long journey to travel yet; but even an untrained eye can see our destination on the distant horizon. If any there be for whom the horizon is too narrow, and the goal too petty, let him go to Zionist meetings outside Palestine: there he will be shown a wider prospect, with larger aims at the end of it. But let him not go to Palestine. In Palestine they have almost forgotten the wider prospects. Realities are too strong for them there: they can see nothing beyond.
Take the National Bank, which was intended to provide a foundation for “the redemption of the people and the land” by political means. What is the Bank doing? Needless to say, its political object has been abandoned and forgotten. But even in the mere work of colonisation it neither does nor can achieve great things. Its business consists—and must consist, if it wishes to survive—in dealings with local tradesmen, Jews and non-Jews, and its profits are derived chiefly from the latter. All that it does for Jewish colonisation, or all that it could do—if we agree with its critics that it could do more than it does—without danger to itself, is so little, that one cannot even conceive any possible connection between it and the “larger aims,” or imagine it to be moving at all along the road that leads to the complete “redemption.” By this time, apparently, there are many people outside Palestine as well who have ceased to hope much from the Bank in the matter of land-settlement; and they now look for the solution to an Agrarian Bank. But possibly it would be worth while first of all to examine what little the existing Bank has done in the way of loans to the colonies, in order to learn what this experience has to teach as regards the problems of agrarian credit in Palestine. It is not enough to adduce examples from other countries, where the conditions and the people are different, to demonstrate what agrarian credit can do. Credit is a very useful thing if it succeeds, but a very harmful thing if it fails. Everything depends on local conditions and the character of the people. The existing Bank has followed precedent in its attempts to help the colonies already in existence—and with what success? The colonists will tell you. No doubt I shall be told that I am drawing a false analogy, for such-and-such reasons. But I am not here attempting to express an opinion on this question of an Agrarian Bank, which has already been much discussed, and of which the merits and demerits have been fully canvassed. My purpose is merely to hint at the difficulties of the project, even if it is carried out on a very modest scale, so as to suggest that it is premature at the present stage, when the Agrarian Bank is not even in sight, to talk about the great things that it is going to do. Our colonisation work in Palestine is carried out under conditions of such multifarious difficulty, that even small things have to be done with extreme care, and precedent alone is no safe guide. If the proposed Agrarian Bank is really going to aim high—to aim, that is, at something considerable in relation to “the redemption of the people and the land”—we cannot yet say whether in the end it will help or hurt.[[76]]
Then there is the National Fund, and its work for “the redemption of the land” by commercial means, for which purpose it was created. The Fund has already spent a great deal of its money: and how much has it redeemed? How much could it have redeemed if it had spent many times as much? A few scattered pieces of land, lost in the large areas of land not redeemed. Meanwhile, the price of land in Palestine is going up by leaps and bounds, especially in districts where we gain a footing, and the amount of land which it is in the power of the Fund to redeem with the means at its command grows correspondingly less and less. And there is another factor, independent of finance, which lessens its possibilities still further. Many natives of Palestine, whose national consciousness has begun to develop since the Turkish revolution, look askance, quite naturally, at the selling of land to “strangers,” and do their best to put a stop to this evil; while the Turkish Government—be its attitude to our work whatever it may—is not likely to irritate the Arabs for our sakes: that would not suit its book. Thus the purchase of land becomes more and more difficult, and the idea of “the redemption of the land” shrinks and shrinks, until no Palestinian whose eyes are open can see in the National Fund what it was in the imagination of its founders—the future mistress of all or most of the land in Palestine. It is clearly understood in Palestine that many years of hard work, with the help of the National Fund or by other means, will achieve no more than this: to win for us a large number of points of vantage over the whole surface of Palestine, and to make these points counterbalance by their quality the whole of the surrounding area. For this reason, people in Palestine do not talk much about the coming “redemption”; they work patiently and laboriously to add another point of vantage, and another, and yet another. They do not ask: “How will these save us?” They all feel that these points themselves are destined to be, as it were, power-stations of the national spirit; that it is not necessary to regard them as a first step towards “the conquest of the land” in order to find the result worth all the labour.
Then, again, there are the Colonies already established, which were born in pain and nurtured with so much trouble. They also do not fire the imagination to the pitch of regarding them as the first step towards “the redemption.”
It is true that the great progress which has been made in most of the Colonies is matter for rejoicing. Twelve years ago one knew what to expect on entering a Jewish Colony in Palestine. From the farmers one would hear bitter complaints about their intolerable condition, charges of neglect of duty against the hard-hearted administrators, and last, but not least, a long list of requirements, involving large sums of money, for the proper equipment of each farmer. The administrators on their side would rail against the farmers, call them lazy schnorrers, who were always asking for more, though their condition was not at all bad, and denounce the schedule of requirements as a fabrication. To-day there is no echo of these recriminations in most of the Colonies. During the intervening years the administrators—it is but just to them to say so—have done all that they could to remedy their earlier mistakes. They have extended the Colonies wherever it was possible to buy land in the neighbourhood; they have founded new Colonies for those who could not find room in the old; and in general they have endeavoured to finish their work, to free the Colonies gradually from their own supervision, and to transfer the management and the responsibility to the farmers themselves, so that they should at last realise that the man who wants to live must work and look after himself, instead of depending always on external help. No doubt one cannot yet speak of the complete emancipation of the Colonies as an accomplished fact. The strings are still there, and the absentee Administration still holds them. But it no longer pulls the strings, as it used to do, and, consequently, its existence is hardly noticed. So, if one visits one of these Colonies to-day, one hears quite another tune. “We are independent”—that is the first thing they tell one, with the pride of men who know the value of freedom. This pride makes them exaggerate the present blessings, just as they used to exaggerate the evil. “All’s right with the Colony. It is strong and secure, and pays its workers well. No doubt some people are badly off. But what of that? There are failures everywhere. The man who cannot succeed leaves, and makes room for another. The great thing is that the Colony as a whole is able to exist and to develop properly. True, it lacks this, that, and the other, and we cannot yet supply the deficiencies; but in course of time they will be supplied. We need patient work, and everything will come in good time.” That is the prevailing note of what I heard in nearly all the Colonies which I visited.[[77]] Any visitor to Palestine who brings with him, as I did, painful and humiliating recollections of years ago must rejoice beyond measure at all this, and must be inclined to take an extremely optimistic view of the development of the colonisation movement in general.
But all this is highly satisfactory only so long as one regards this colonisation movement as something good in itself. Think but once of the “political aim,” of the first article of the Basle Programme, and the optimism vanishes at once, and gives place to a depressing feeling of poverty and emptiness.
Thirty years’ experience of the life of the Colonies must finally drive us to the conclusion that while Hebrew Colonies can exist in Palestine, and in large numbers, Hebrew agriculturists—those who are to be the foundation of the “home of refuge”—cannot be made even in Palestine, except in numbers too small to bear any relation to so large an aim. The Jew is too clever, too civilised, to bound his life and his ambitions by a small plot of land, and to be content with deriving a poor living from it by the sweat of his brow. He has lost the primitive simplicity of the real farmer, whose soul is bound up in his piece of ground, whose work is his all, and who never looks beyond his narrow acres: as though a voice from above had told him that he was born to be a slave to the land with his ox and his ass, and must fulfill his destiny without any unnecessary thinking. That agricultural idyll which we saw in our visions thirty years ago has not been and cannot be realised. The Jew can become a capable farmer, a country gentleman—of the type of Boaz—who understands agriculture, is devoted to it, and makes a living out of it: the sort of man who goes out every morning to his field, or his vineyard, to look after his workmen as they plough or sow his land, plant or graft his vines, and does not mind even giving them a hand when he finds it necessary. A man of this type—close to the land and to nature, and very different in character from the Jew of the city—a Jew can become. But at the same time he wants to live like a civilised being; he wants to enjoy, bodily and mentally, the fruits of contemporary culture; the land does not absorb his whole being. This excellent type is being created before our eyes in Palestine, and in time it will certainly reach an uncommon degree of perfection. But of what use is all this for building a “home of refuge”? “Upper-class” farmers of this kind, who depend on the labour of others, cannot be the foundation of such a building. In every State the foundation is the rural proletariat: the labourers and the poor farmers, who derive a scanty livelihood from their own work in the fields, whether in a small plot of their own, or in the fields of the “upper-class” farmers. But the rural proletariat in Palestine is not ours to-day, and it is difficult to imagine that it ever will be ours, even if our Colonies multiply all over the country. As for the present, we all know that the work is done mostly by Arabs from the neighbouring villages, either journeymen, who come in the morning and return home in the evening, or regular labourers, who live in the Colony with their families. It is they who are doing for us the work of the “home of refuge.” And as for the future, the number of the Colonies will grow, in so far as it grows, through men of capital, who will found new Colonies of the same “wealthy” type. Colonies for poor men can only be founded by organisations, and their number must be so limited that they can count for nothing in comparison with the need of creating a rural proletariat to cover the whole country and win it by manual labour. Even an Agrarian Credit Bank will not make much difference from this point of view. Such a bank—despite all the great things prophesied for it—will be much better able to help in the foundation of “wealthy” Colonies than to found Colonies for poor men with its own means. Perhaps its inability to increase the number of such Colonies will really be a blessing in disguise. For if they existed in large numbers they must all be full of men quite unfitted for such a difficult task. Only if they are very few can we hope for their survival and development through a process of natural selection, by which the man who has not the necessary qualities will make way for another, and in time these Colonies will gather to themselves all the small body of born agriculturists which is still left among us.[[78]]
However that may be, this is not the way in which our rural proletariat can be made. It may be said that it will be made in ordinary course in the “wealthy” Colonies, through the natural increase of the inhabitants and the consequent division of the land; that the sons or grandsons of the farmers will themselves become poor labourers, living by the work of their hands. But experience shows that this, too, is a vain hope. The children who are born in the Colonies have also the cleverness of the Jew. When the son sees that his paternal inheritance will not be sufficient to make him a substantial farmer, and that he is doomed to be one of those pillars of society, the agricultural labourers, he quickly leaves the Colony, and goes to seek his fortune overseas, where he is content to work like a slave, so long as he is free from bondage to the land, and is able to dream of a prosperous future. But it would be doing these sons of the Colonies a grievous wrong to imagine them lacking in love for Palestine. Most of them do love the country, and long for it, even after they have left it. Some of them return to it in after years, if they have succeeded abroad in acquiring enough money to enable them to settle comfortably in Palestine. But the trouble is that love of the country alone cannot breed agriculturists; for that you must have also love of the land. The genuine agriculturist feels that leaving the land is like giving up life. The inherited link between himself and the land is so strong and deep that he cannot sever it. He therefore prefers to endure poverty and want, to live all his life like a beast of burden, rather than to leave the land. But this trait of the genuine agriculturist disappears gradually even in places where it exists, so soon as it comes into contact with a cultured environment. It is clearly impossible to create it where it does not exist, and most of all in a people like ours, in which two thousand years of wandering have implanted traits of an exactly opposite character.
There remains, then, only one hope: the young labourers who come to Palestine with the intention of devoting their lives to the national ideal, of “capturing labour”[[79]] in Palestine and of creating in our existing and future Colonies that rural proletariat which is so far non-existent. It is significant that the “labour question” has latterly become almost the central problem of our colonisation work. It is felt on all hands that bound up with this question of labour is a still larger question—that of the whole aim of Zionism. If these labourers cannot succeed in supplying what is lacking, that proves that even national idealism is not strong enough to create the necessary qualities of mind and heart; and we must therefore reconcile ourselves to the idea that our rural settlement in Palestine, even if in course of time it develops up to the maximum of its possibilities, will always remain an upper stratum, a culturally developed minority, with the brains and the capital, while the rural proletariat, the manual labourers who form the majority, will still not be ours. This, of course, involves a complete transformation of the character and aim of Zionism. No wonder, then, that there have been so many suggestions for improving the condition of the labourers. Everybody sees that so far the labourers have not succeeded very well in their mission: in recent years many of them have left the country, while few have arrived there, and the position of those who remain is insecure. The general tendency is to put the blame on certain external difficulties, and to look for ways of removing those difficulties—as, by persuading the colonists to give Jewish a preference over Arab labourers; by making things more comfortable for the labourers in the matter of food and lodging; and many other familiar suggestions. The Zionist public consoles itself with the belief that when all these steps are taken the number of Jewish labourers will steadily increase with the increase of work, and that as the settlement grows and the amount of work increases, so will our labouring rural proletariat increase, and thus the “secure home of refuge” will be built up by our own hands, from the foundation to the roof.
Now it seems to me that the time is not very far distant when the external difficulties will no longer stand in the way of the labourers, or, at least, will be reduced to such small proportions that it will no longer be possible to regard them as an insurmountable barrier. The National Fund and other institutions are already trying hard to improve the position of the labourers, and there is no doubt that little by little everything that can be done will be done. Even the greatest difficulty—that of the strained relations between the labourers and the colonists—is visibly growing less. On the one side, most of the labourers now see that it is unfair to demand of any man that he should receive with open arms those who look down on him and make no attempt to conceal the hatred and contempt which they feel for him as a “bourgeois”; and so they try to adopt a more conciliatory attitude than hitherto. On the other side, the colonists are beginning to see that it is not only their duty but also their interest to increase the amount of Jewish labour in the colonies (there is no need here to labour this point, which has been often made before); and so we see in the colonies the development of a certain tendency to employ Jewish labour as far as possible. It is true that most of the colonies still believe that the possibilities of employing Jewish labour are very small (again for reasons too familiar to need explaining here), and an outsider who has paid a brief visit to Palestine cannot express a definite opinion as to the soundness of their judgment on this point. Speaking generally, however, I have no doubt that the more the colonists become inclined to employ Jewish labour, the greater will the possibilities automatically become, until they reach their real limit. But after the removal of those external difficulties which we ourselves can remove we shall find out that the way is beset with more formidable difficulties, which do not depend on our own will.
In every colony and farm which I visited, I talked a great deal with the labourers, and listened attentively to what they said. They expressed many different and conflicting opinions, and were not always all agreed even on the most important questions. This notwithstanding, all these conversations left on my mind one general impression, and that impression did not encourage me to believe in the ability of these young men to accomplish the great task which they had set before themselves.
These young labourers, who come to Palestine with the idea of “capturing labour,” mostly bring with them from abroad the hope of becoming independent farmers after some years of work; only a few come with the fixed intention of remaining labourers all their lives. All alike work for a certain time with enthusiasm and devotion, but after a while the question of their future begins to exercise their minds. Those whose hope from the beginning was to become farmers are, of course, discouraged when they see how remote is the chance of attaining their ambition; that was only to be expected. But even those who came with the intention of remaining labourers begin to feel that a life such as theirs is all very well for a time, but is more than they can endure as a permanency. The civilised man in each one of them begins to clamour for self-expression, and cannot reconcile himself to the idea that he must go on digging or ploughing from morning till evening all his days, and at best be rewarded for all his toil by a meagre subsistence. So the weaker among them leave the country with bitterness in their hearts, and the more obstinate remain in the country with bitterness in their hearts; and you may see them wandering from one colony to another, working in one place for a time, then suddenly leaving it for another, not because they want a better job, but because they are restless in spirit and have no peace of mind.
The labourers at present in Palestine may be divided, broadly speaking, into four classes. There are first the unskilled labourers, who do simple work such as digging, and with difficulty earn enough to satisfy their most elementary needs. This class is very far from being contented; many of its members have left the country, many more will leave, and the rest will for the most part pass into the other classes. Secondly, there are labourers who are expert at certain kinds of work (such as grafting) which require skill and care. They earn good money, and their position is not bad. Yet they are mostly anxious to pass into the third class, that of the farmer-labourers, who have each his own small holding in the neighbourhood of some colony, and work on their own land, but eke out a livelihood by working for others in the colony; or—where the holdings are very small—work mostly for others and only a little for themselves. This experiment has been started by various institutions, which have bought land in or near to a colony and have given plots of it to selected labourers. In some places there are labourers who do well with their holdings, and therefore are already hoping that before long they will cease to be labourers and become independent farmers. Fourthly, there are the labourers who have already attained this ideal of becoming independent farmers, and no longer work for others, but are still sometimes counted as labourers because they maintain certain relations with their former “party.” The members of this class are few, and most of them are men whom the Jewish Colonisation Association settled in Lower Galilee on the tenant-farmer system. Their holdings are comparatively large, and they have neither time nor need to work for others; on the contrary, they themselves need labour at certain seasons, and then these ex-labourers, having become employers, do not invariably employ Jewish labour!
This last-mentioned phenomenon gave me much food for thought all the time that I was in Palestine. Among these farmers I knew some young men who had previously been regarded as among the pick of the labourers, not only from the point of view of efficiency, but also from that of character and devotion to the national ideal. If these men—I said to myself—could not stand the test, then perhaps it is really impossible for anybody to stand it, and whether it be for the reasons which the farmers suggest, or for other reasons, the fact is there all the same. But when I put this problem to labourers who had not yet become farmers, they replied that these comrades of theirs, when once they had become farmers, had lost their proletariat mentality and acquired a different psychology. Then I asked further: “If so, where is the solution? You yourselves tell me that most of your comrades came to Palestine in the hope of becoming farmers in course of time, and that as this hope grew fainter (because the Jewish Colonisation Association changed its system, and ceased to settle on its land labourers who had not a certain amount of money) the number of new arrivals grew less. But if the labourers come with the hope of becoming farmers, and then, when they have achieved their ambition, lose their idealism and employ non-Jews on their own land, how can you ever ‘capture labour,’ and what is the good of your efforts?”
To this question the labourers nowhere gave me a satisfactory answer![[80]]
Such is the condition of “practical work in Palestine,” and such its relation to “the redemption of the people and the land.” The hope of a future redemption is an age-long national hope, still cherished by every Jew who is faithful to his people, whether as a religious belief or in some other form. Every man can picture the realisation to himself as it suits him, without regard to actual present conditions: for who knows what is hidden in the bosom of the distant future? But if men set out to achieve the redemption by their own efforts, they are no longer at liberty to shut their eyes to the facts. There must be some natural chain of cause and effect between what they do and what they wish to attain. Between “practical work in Palestine” and “the redemption of the people and the land” this chain of causation may be imagined to exist by those who are at a distance; but in Palestine itself even imagination cannot find it. In Palestine the possibilities of practical work are too clear. It is possible to buy bits of land here and there; but it is not possible to redeem the land as a whole, or even most of it. It is possible to found beautiful Colonies on the “redeemed” land; but it is not possible to settle in them more than a very few poor Colonists. It is possible to produce in the Colonies an “upper-class” type of agriculturists, whose work is mostly done by others, and perhaps it is possible also to create a small labourer class for the finer kinds of work, which are comparatively easy and well paid; but it is not possible to create a real rural proletariat, capable of monopolising the rougher, more exacting, and worse-paid kinds of work, which alone can support a rural proletariat with its thousands and tens of thousands.[[81]]
This being the case, we should expect every visitor to Palestine whose standard is that of the “home of refuge” to return home in grief and despair. Yet every day we find just the opposite. Orthodox Zionists, who wax grandiloquent at home about “the redemption of the people and the land,” come to Palestine, see what there is to see there, and return home in joy and gladness, full of inspiration and enthusiasm, as though they had heard Messiah’s trumpet from the Mount of Olives.
That is exactly my point. On the surface the Programme is supreme, and all its adherents seem really to believe that their work is bringing the redemption. But beneath the surface the unacknowledged instinct of national self-preservation is supreme, and it is that instinct that urges them on to work—not for the accomplishment of the Programme, but for the satisfaction of its own demands. When our orthodox Zionist comes to Palestine, and sees the work and its results, his whole being thrills with the feeling that it is a great and a noble thing that is being created there; that whether it leads to complete redemption or not, it will be an enormous force for our national preservation in all the countries over which we are scattered. Then the “redemption” idea finds its proper level: it becomes one of those cherished hopes which are not yet ready to be mainsprings of action; and the real object, the object which is actually being attained by practical work in Palestine, appears large and splendid enough in itself to provide inspiration and enthusiasm.
My respect for my readers and for myself does not permit me to explain once more in detail—after more than twenty years of explanation after explanation—what exactly is the object to which I allude here. But I think it no shame to avow that on this occasion I seemed to myself to see my dream of twenty years ago in process of realisation in Palestine, though naturally with differences of detail. What has already been accomplished in Palestine entitles one to say with confidence that that country will be “a national spiritual centre of Judaism, to which all Jews will turn with affection, and which will bind all Jews together; a centre of study and learning, of language and literature, of bodily work and spiritual purification; a true miniature of the people of Israel as it ought to be ... so that every Hebrew in the Diaspora will think it a privilege to behold just once the ‘centre of Judaism,’ and when he returns home will say to his friends: ‘If you wish to see the genuine type of a Jew, whether it be a Rabbi or a scholar or a writer, a farmer or an artist or a business man—then go to Palestine, and you will see it.’”[[82]]
No doubt the time has not yet come, nor will it soon come, when the traveller returned from Palestine, speaking of the “genuine type of a Jew,” can say to his friends, “Go to Palestine, and you will see it.” But he can say, and generally does, “Go to Palestine, and you will see it in the making.” The existing Colonies, although they depend mainly on non-Jewish labour, strike the Jew of the Diaspora as so many little generating stations, in which there is gradually being produced a new type of national life, unparalleled in the Exile. So soon as he enters a Jewish Colony, he feels that he is in a Hebrew national atmosphere. The whole social order, all the communal institutions, from the Council of the Colony to the school, bear the Hebrew stamp. They do not betray, as they do in the Diaspora, traces of that foreign influence which flows from an alien environment and distorts the pure Hebrew form. Of course, he does not find everything satisfactory and commendable. He discovers—if he has eyes to see—many defects in the communal life and in that of the individual. Even the schools in the Colonies are still for the most part very far from perfection; and even the much-vaunted predominance of the Hebrew language in the Colonies is as yet but half complete—it extends only to the children. But everything—he tells himself—is still in its infancy; the process of free development has only just begun, and it is going on. Many of these defects will be remedied in time; and whatever is not remedied must be a defect in ourselves, with its roots in our national character. If we want to create a genuine Hebrew type, we must accept the bad with the good, provided that both alike belong essentially to the type, and that the type itself is not corrupted as in the Diaspora. The Jewish visitor travels from Colony to Colony, and finds them sometimes many hours’ journey from one another, with alien fields and villages in between. But the intervening space seems to him nothing more than an empty desert, beyond which he reaches civilisation again, and breathes once more the refreshing atmosphere of Hebrew national life. Days pass, or weeks, and he seems to have spent all the time in another world—a world of the distant past or the distant future. When he leaves this world he says to himself, “If it is thus to-day, what will it be one day, when the Colonies are more numerous and fully developed?” At such a time he realises that here, in this country, is to be found the solution of the problem of our national existence; that from here the spirit shall go forth and breathe on the dry bones that are scattered east and west through all lands and all nations, and restore them to life.
But from this point of view the term “practical work” does not apply only to the agricultural colonies. This national Hebrew type may have, and indeed has, its generating stations outside the agricultural settlement. Many Zionists criticise the Directors of the National Fund for sinking a good deal of their capital in the building of Jewish quarters in towns (such as Tel-Aviv in Jaffa). From the point of view of the Programme these critics are certainly right. The Fund was created for “the redemption of the land” in the widest sense of the term, and not for the purchase of small pieces of urban land, and the erection on them of houses for Jews. But, as I have said, the work is directed not by the demands of the Programme but by the promptings of an instinct. If our visitor from the Diaspora remains some days in Tel-Aviv, observes its life, and sees the Hebrew children who are growing up there, he will not criticise the National Fund for having made it possible to found such a generating station. He will wish with all his heart that the Directors would commit the same fault again, and create similar stations in the other towns of Palestine.
And need it be demonstrated that the Hebrew schools in Jaffa and Jerusalem are centres of unremitting activity in the creation of “the genuine type of a Jew”? This educational work, again, does not fit in very well with the Programme. “What use,” it is often asked, “is there in educating the children in the national spirit, so long as the land is not redeemed, and the nation does not come to the land, and many of these very children may not remain there? To redeem the land, extend the settlement, capture labour—that is the way to realise the Programme. But education? When the number of Jews in Palestine is large, national education will follow as a matter of course. At present we have no right to use for spiritual purposes the resources which are needed for more important things.” I doubt whether this criticism can be reasonably and logically answered on the basis of the Programme. But what can logic do when instinct pulls the other way? The very men who promise to bring about the redemption by means of “practical work in Palestine” are using a great deal of their energy in educational work in the country; and Zionists generally value such work and turn to it more and more. To learn why, one has only to listen to the speeches at a Zionist meeting during a debate on “cultural work” in Palestine. The “redeemers” forget for a time the Programme, the “home of refuge,” and all their other catchwords, and begin to extol “the revival of the spirit,” and the creation of a new Hebrew type. They prophesy that this type will in future be a connecting link between all the scattered parts of the nation. They point to the beneficial influence already exerted by the schools in Palestine on education in the Diaspora. And so forth, and so forth.
Eighteen years ago I saw the beginnings of this educational work in Palestine, and I could not then bring myself to believe that the individual teachers who stood for the great ideal of a Hebrew education in the Hebrew language, and had begun to put it into practice with their limited resources, could really succeed in producing such a spiritual revolution. But at the same time I saw how bent they were on the attainment of their object, and how confident of success: and I said, “Who knows? Perhaps this confidence will be able to work miracles.”[[83]] Now I have seen that confidence has indeed worked miracles. “A Hebrew education in the Hebrew language” is no longer an ideal in Palestine: it is a real thing, a natural, inevitable phenomenon; its disappearance is inconceivable. No doubt there are some scattered fortresses which have not yet been captured; but these, too, will surrender, as others have, to the demands of the age. Take, for instance, the educational institutions of the German Hilfsverein in Jerusalem, from the Kindergartens up to the Teachers’ Seminary. All in all, they have sixteen hundred pupils of both sexes, and these are being trained—despite the still visible remnant of German education—in the Hebrew spirit and the Hebrew language. All who know how things used to be must confess that there has really been a revolution in Palestine, and that the Hebrew teacher has won.[[84]] Of course, there is still much to be done before the victory can be complete even internally—that is to say, before Hebrew education can find the right road in every department, and before its defects, which are still numerous, can be removed. But the conqueror has already shown his patience and his devotion to his ideal; and we can surely trust him not to rest until he has so perfected Hebrew education in Palestine as to make it a worthy model for Jews throughout the world, a standard type of national education, to which they will endeavour to approximate so far as the conditions of the Diaspora allow.
Yet another urban generating station of a different kind has been created of late years, also by the unbounded confidence of an individual; and the Zionists and the National Fund have not refrained from helping it and enabling it to live and to develop, although it is very difficult indeed to bring it within the scope of the Programme. I mean, of course, the Bezalel.[[85]] True, its great object—the development of Hebrew art—has so far been attained only to a slight extent, and it has not yet touched the higher branches of art. But its achievements in the domain of handicraft justify the belief that here also confidence will work miracles. Whatever may happen, the Bezalel has already become the source of a spiritual influence which makes itself felt in lands far distant from Palestine. Who can tell how many estranged hearts have been brought back to their people, in greater or less degree, by the beautiful carpets and ornaments of the Bezalel?
All these generating stations, whether in the country or in the cities, are welded together in our thought, and appear to us as a single national centre, which even now, in its infancy, exerts a visible and appreciable influence on the Diaspora. Hence a man need not believe in miracles in order to see with his mind’s eye this centre growing in size, improving in character, and exerting an ever-increasing spiritual influence on our people, until at last it shall reach the goal set before it by the instinct of national self-preservation: to restore our national unity throughout the world through the restoration of our national culture in its historic home. This centre will not be even then a “secure home of refuge” for our people; but it will surely be a home of healing for its spirit.
And afterwards?
Ask no questions! In our present state of spiritual disorganisation we have no idea of the volume of our national strength, nor of what it will be able to achieve when all its elements are united round a single centre, and quickened by a single strong and healthy spirit. The generations that are to come afterwards will know the measure of their power, and will adjust their actions to it. For us, we are not concerned with the hidden things of the distant future. Enough for us to know the things revealed, the things that are to be done by us and our children in a future that is near.
THE SUPREMACY OF REASON
(TO THE MEMORY OF MAIMONIDES)
(1904)
At last, after the lapse of seven hundred years,[[86]] the anniversary of Maimonides’ death has been raised to the dignity of an important national day of memorial, and has been honoured throughout the Diaspora. In earlier centuries our ancestors do not appear to have remembered that so-and-so many hundred years had passed since the death of Maimonides; still less did they make the anniversary a public event, as we do now, although they were in much closer sympathy with Maimonides than we are—or, to be more correct, because they were in much closer sympathy with him than we are. They did not feel it necessary to commemorate the death of one whom in spirit they saw still living among them—one whose advice and instruction they sought every day in all their difficulties of theory and practice, as though he were still in their midst. In those days it was almost impossible for an educated Jew (and most Jews then were educated) to pass a single day without remembering Maimonides: just as it was impossible for him to pass a single day without remembering Zion. In whatever field of study the Jew might be engaged—in halachah,[[87]] in ethics, in religious or philosophical speculation—inevitably he found Maimonides in the place of honour, an authority whose utterances were eagerly conned even by his opponents. And even if a man happened to be no student, at any rate he would say his prayers every day, and finish his morning prayer with the “Thirteen Articles”: how then could he forget the man who formulated the Articles of the Jewish religion?
But how different it is to-day! If a Jew of that earlier time came to life again, and we wanted to bring home to him as forcibly as possible the distance between ourselves and our ancestors, it would be enough, I think, to tell him that nowadays one may spend a great deal of time in reading Hebrew articles and books without coming across a single reference to Maimonides. And the reason is not that we have satisfactory answers to all the spiritual questions which troubled our ancestors, and have therefore no need for the out-of-date philosophy of Maimonides. The reason is that the questions themselves are no longer on our agenda: because we are told that nowadays men of enlightenment are concerned not with spiritual questions, but only with politics and hard, concrete facts. If Maimonides in his day accepted the dictum of Aristotle that the sense of touch is a thing to be ashamed of, we in our day are prone to accept the dictum that “spirituality” is a thing to be ashamed of, and nothing is worth notice except what can be touched and felt. When, therefore, we were reminded this year that seven hundred years had elapsed since the death of the man with whom the spiritual life of our people has been bound up during all the intervening period, the fact made a profound impression throughout the length and breadth of Jewry. It was as though our people were quickened by this reminder, and stirred suddenly to some vague yearning after the past—that past in which it was still capable (despite all the Judennot[[88]]) of looking upwards and seeking answers to other questions than those of bread and a Nachtasyl.
Be that as it may, Maimonides has become the hero of the moment and a subject of general interest. Many an address has been delivered, many an article has been written in his honour this year; but nobody, so far as I have seen, has yet used the occasion to unearth, from beneath that heap of musty metaphysics which is so foreign to us, the central idea of Maimonides, and to show how there sprang from this central idea those views of his on religion and morality, which produced a long period of unstable equilibrium in Judaism, and have left a profound impression on the spiritual development of our people. Since none else has performed this task, I am minded to try my hand at it. If even those who are expert in Maimonides’ system find here some new point of view, so much the better; if not, no harm is done. For my purpose is not to discover something new, but to rehearse old facts in an order and a style that seem to me to be new, and to be better adapted to present the subject intelligibly to modern men, who have not been brought up on medieval literature.