The Duty of the Hour
By Max Nordau
WE are the people of the Messiah. We feel, we think Messianic. In all situations of life, and particularly in the critical ones, we hope for a miraculous event which will fulfill all our yearnings, and in this hope we feel delivered of the manly duty to work for the realization of our ideals, to prepare our salvation by our own efforts.
At this moment a large portion of Israel dreams once more a particularly lively Messianic dream. Hundreds of thousands, millions of Jews, indeed, have abandoned themselves to the expectation that at the conclusion of the peace which will put a stop to the world's war, the destiny of the Jewish people must take a miraculous turn. The plenipotentiaries of the belligerent powers will assemble in a conference or a congress to treat of the conditions of peace. The conquerors will exact of the vanquished the price of their sacrifices and return home with their booty in the shape of territorial acquisitions and indemnities. And in the course of these transactions the miracle will happen that a share will be apportioned to the Jewish people too. Palestine will be offered them, either as an area for colonization or, still better, as a full property under the protectorate of a great power. They will be accorded also entire equality of rights in Russia and Roumania.
The Basis of Jewish Hopes: (1) The Self-Interest of the Powers
WE may plead reasons or excuses for indulging in this dream. Utterances of leading personalities of the big nations which will necessarily be represented at the peace conference have become publicly known which permit the conclusion, without intentional self-beguiling, that some governments at least, if not all of them, are occupying themselves earnestly with the Jewish problem and examining the question whether it might not be worth trying to settle the Jews in search of a homestead in Palestine, under international and local legal conditions vouchsafing them full freedom of economic, intellectual, and moral development.
On the other hand, there is no doubt that the situation of the six millions of Russian Jews occupies a certain place in the thoughts and cares of the governments. Several countries have an interest in turning away from their frontiers the ever more violently swelling stream of Jewish emigration, and doing so otherwise than with the brutal method of locking up their boundaries and posting a police watch before them. Others have the well-being of Russia at heart; they understand that the sufferings and the despair of her six millions of Jews are a source of dire evils and that the emancipation of this hard-working and highly gifted population will bring about the material prosperity, the general progress, and the powerful strengthening of Russia. Other countries again, the statesmen of which are more farseeing than the average and have been able to rise to the conception of a political world hygiene, are aware that the systematic crushing of six millions of intellectual and strong-feeling people driven to despair must create a hotbed of the most dangerous anarchistic and revolutionary epidemics, the spreading of which cannot easily be limited to the spot of their origin. Lastly, even the most irreclaimable pessimist will admit at least the possibility that governments may not be entirely inaccessible to purely humane sentiments of pity and justice, and may regard the treatment of the Jews of Russia and Roumania as an indictment against the civilization and the ruling religion of white mankind.
(2) The Precedent of 1878
THE hope of the peace conference resulting in great achievements for the Jewish people, moreover, can evoke an historical precedent. The Berlin Congress of 1878 which brought the Russo-Turkish war to an end, created the Bulgarian state, raised Roumania to the rank of an independent kingdom, and gave Bosnia and Herzegovina to Austria-Hungary, found time to occupy itself with a Jewish matter and to introduce into the treaty condensing its decisions the well known article obliging the new kingdom of Roumania to bestow on her Jews equality of civil franchises. It is not the fault of the Berlin Congress that this article has remained to this day a dead letter. The case, at any rate, is of a nature to encourage Jewish optimism against those sceptics who sneer: "A diplomatic conference distributes no presents; complacency and liberality play no part there; there are only such interests enforced which are backed by a victorious army or at least by an army which still inspires some fears." Well, in 1878, too, the Jewish people had no country, no army, no government, no accredited ambassador, and yet two of the most influential members of the Berlin Congress, the representative of Great Britain, Earl Beaconsfield, and that of France, Waddington, were ready to step forward as advocates of the Jewish cause, and the president of the Congress, Prince Bismarck, evidently favored their action.
But We Ignore a Valuable Lesson
I HAVE produced everything capable of justifying the expectations with which many Jews look forward to the future peace congress. But I do not notice that the Jewish people keep in view the lessons taught by the historic example of 1878. Beaconsfield and Waddington did not plead for the Roumanian Jews at the Berlin Congress from impulses of their own or in consequence of a sudden inspiration from on high. The Paris Alliance Israelite Universelle, the London Anglo-Jewish Association, the Berlin Verband der deutschen Juden, had done serious and efficient preparatory work, memorialized their several governments, informed them of the facts, solicited their intervention. It was due to their efforts that the position of the Roumanian Jews came up for consideration at the Berlin Congress. They showed the way the Jewish people must follow if they wish to obtain anything of governments in congress. What are the Jewish people waiting for in order to act now as their fathers acted thirty-seven years ago?
The war is raging, in a hundred battlefields uncounted brave men shed their blood for the future of their nation, Jewish soldiers fight and fall side by side with their non-Jewish countrymen and comrades, but their heroic sacrifices are utterly useless for their own people. In every country, even in Russia, the military excellence, the patriotism, the contempt of danger and death of the Jewish soldiers, will be rewarded more or less lavishly and liberally with distinctions and preferment, but experience teaches us that their glorious conduct is forgotten very soon after the war by everybody but themselves and their brethren, and that it certainly does not change in the least the status of the Jewish people among the nations. At any rate the consideration of the merits and military virtues of the Jewish soldiers will not by itself stimulate to action the diplomatists at the peace congress, unless they are insistently recalled to their memory. All this requires preparation and arrangements, of which as yet there is scarcely any trace to be seen.
Who Could Accept Palestine for the Jews?
THERE is another point to which attention must be drawn. Let us admit the most favorable case: the congress will really open up Palestine to the Jewish people for colonization with self-government and autonomous local institutions. To whom will it be in a position to make such a concession? To whom will it deliver Palestine? The Jewish people is a concept, but it is not a political and administrative individuality, it is not a body with a head and vital organs. There is actually not one man who could present himself to the governments assembled in congress, receive Palestine from their hands, and offer them the guarantee that he will lead into the land of their ancestors those Jews that yearn for a new home and national life on an historic soil, and that he will undertake the implanting of modern culture, the maintaining of order, and the economic development of the country. An offer of the congress would fall flat, nobody having the moral right and the material capacity to accept it in the name and in behalf of the Jewish people.
Let Dreaming Give Way to Organizing! The Task for American Jewry
ALL this points to the necessity of an adequate preparation for coming events. The Messianic dream does not suffice. Mere wishes and hopes are vain. We must work. We must organize ourselves without further loss of time. We must create a body with men of authority at its head, and the living forces of the Jewish people, or at least a considerable portion of them, at its back. The forces and the men do exist. They have only to be gathered, united and grouped.
Who is to do this organizing work? My reply is unhesitating: American Jewry. I should be happy to say: here is a task for the Zionists' organization which exists, which lives, which is prepared for work of this kind, and which has to consider its carrying out as its natural function; but I shrink back from giving this near-lying answer. Many pre-eminent and influential Jews whose good Jewish sentiments no one has a right to doubt, persist in considering Zionism as a party tendency against which they raise objections. Now the representations of the Jewish people before the governments must not be a party affair, but ought to be the cause of the entire people and must embrace all its parts. The invitation must therefore be issued by personalities who repel nobody at the outset by their pronounced party color. Moreover, these personalities must necessarily belong to a neutral country, so as to leave no room for the argument that according to the political definition of the hour they are enemies and to co-operate with them would mean disloyalty to one's own country. Only in the case, which I hope will not be realized, of the United States also precipitating itself into the whirlpool of the war, would they be bound to transfer their initiative to the Swiss or the Dutch Jewry. The first labor of the initiators should consist in inviting the existing Jewish organizations of all countries to have themselves represented by a delegation on a permanent board or committee. It would be a matter of regret if they refused, but this ought by no means to be a reason for discouragement nor for discontinuing further endeavors. In this case the initiators would simply have to do fundamental work and try to fall back on elements that at present stand outside, or intentionally keep aloof from, existing organizations. It would be the business of the permanent board to secure financial co-operation that could be called upon under given circumstances, and to cause Jews of standing in every great country to approach their government, to submit to it in time the aspirations of the Jewish people, and to procure its approval and sympathy for them.
"Not an Instant to Lose if We Wish to Prepare"
OUT of the peace which must follow the present horrible war, a new Europe, a new world will be born. It depends on us whether in this new world there is to be a place, "a place in the sun," for the Jewish people. We have not an instant to lose if we wish to prepare for the grand opportunity. Should we miss this occasion we should have to resign all our national hopes, I am afraid, for a very long time, if not for ever. We may, of course, continue to dream our Messianic dream, but this will then ever remain a dream till the dreamer disappears and his dream with him.
FOOTNOTE:
[A] Original and translation read at a dinner of the Harvard Menorah Society.