Ten Essays on Zionism and Judaism

by Ahad Ha'am

The first organised form of Zionism took shape in Russia under the stress of the pogroms of 1880-81. Those pogroms, following a period during which the Russian Government had seemed to be working sincerely towards the emancipation of the Jews, and themselves followed by a whole code of restrictive legislation known as the May Laws, awoke into a blaze the national sentiment which had slumbered but had not died in the Russian Ghetto. They revealed the evils of galuth—exile, life outside Palestine—in all their hideousness, and turned men’s minds to the active accomplishment of that escape from galuth for which during many centuries the Jew had only prayed. Chibbath Zion (Love of Zion) became an organised movement, and throughout Russia groups of Chovevé Zion (Lovers of Zion) began to work for the settlement of Jews on the land in Palestine. At the head of the movement stood Dr. Leo Pinsker, who in his pamphlet Auto-Emancipation had outlined an ambitious scheme for the emigration of Jews en masse to some territory (not necessarily Palestine) where they could be their own masters. His proposal found no response among the emancipated Western Jews, to whom it was addressed; and as its realisation was obviously beyond the power of the oppressed and persecuted Russian Jews, its author turned to Chibbath Zion as the only means open to him of working for a national regeneration of Jewry. Events soon showed that Chibbath Zion was as yet unable to achieve so large an aim. The difficulties in the way of settling Jews on the land in Palestine were enormous, and the resources of the Chovevé Zion were painfully limited. The national sentiment was not sufficiently alive in the Jewish masses to induce large numbers of them to brave the hardships and privations of life in Palestine for the sake of a national ideal. Any Jew whose primary object was to escape from pogroms and May Laws and to better his individual position would naturally prefer some country, like the United States, where economic life was already developed. The Chovevé Zion attempted, rather unwisely, to make Palestine attractive to the less idealistically minded by exaggerating the possibilities of individual self-advancement which it held out. The natural result was disappointment and disillusion; and the Palestinian agricultural settlements (or colonies, as they are generally called) would have faded away altogether but for the generous assistance of Baron Edmond de Rothschild, of Paris. Thanks to him the first colonies pulled through, and after many vicissitudes were set on the road to independence. But the whole colonisation movement remained small and poor, and any hopes which might have been entertained of its bringing about even the beginning of a solution of the material problem of galuth were dissipated at an early date. Meanwhile, however, the Chovevé Zion contributed to a national work of the first importance by helping to lay the foundations of a revival of the Hebrew language, especially in Palestine—a development which, while it had nothing to do with the solution of any material problem, had very much to do with the stimulation of that national sentiment which is the only possible basis of a national as distinct from a purely philanthropic or economic movement.

In 1895, when the colonisation work was at a low ebb, the Jewish world was startled by the appearance of Der Judenstaat, a pamphlet in which a brilliant Viennese journalist and playwright, Dr. Theodor Herzl, advocated, as a solution of the Jewish problem, the establishment of an autonomous Jewish State in some suitable territory (not necessarily Palestine). Herzl’s scheme was (unconsciously) more or less a reproduction of that of Pinsker; but it met with a different fate, largely, no doubt, thanks to the silent growth of the national sentiment which had been brought about during the intervening years by the awakening—albeit to little purpose from a purely practical point of view—of Jewish interest in Palestine. While the Western Jews were for the most part as deaf to Herzl’s call as they had been to Pinsker’s, many of the Chovevé Zion found in his pamphlet a new inspiration, and their pressure induced him to take in hand himself the practical realisation of a scheme which he had meant to leave others to carry out. The result was the Zionist Organisation, which was founded at the first Zionist Congress at Basle in 1897. This organisation, though the great body of its supporters was drawn from the ranks of the Chovevé Zion, reflected the outlook and ideas of Herzl and his handful of friends and supporters from the West. There was to be no more waste of time and effort on “petty colonisation.” Instead, there was to be a political organisation of Jewry, with a large National Fund, which would first of all buy Palestine from the Turk under a Charter guaranteed by the European Powers, and would then proceed to settle in Palestine all those Jews who could not be happy where they were. This beautiful dream roused the Jewish masses for a time to a kind of Messianic fervour; it was so much more alluring than the hard realities which the Chovevé Zion had had to face. But after a few years the inevitable awakening came. Realities remained realities, and the Charter remained a distant vision. Herzl passed away untimely in 1904, and with him and his wonderful personality passed the only force which could make the dream-world appear for a time real. He had, indeed, obtained from the British Government an offer of a territory in East Africa (commonly, though incorrectly, located in Uganda) for a quasi-autonomous settlement of Jews; but this triumph of the Zionist Organisation only served to bring out the essential difference, hitherto more or less successfully kept in the background, between the head of the Organisation and its body. The Chovevé Zion, however they may have erred in attempting to further the colonisation of Palestine by appeals to individual self-interest, had at any rate remained sufficiently nationalist to feel that a national Jewish settlement could by no possibility have any other home than Palestine. They had seen to it that the Zionist Organisation put Palestine and no other country into its programme. Now, when they found their trusted and beloved leader attempting to divert them to East Africa—though he averred solemnly that East Africa was only intended as a temporary refuge, a Nachtasyl, and Palestine remained the real goal—they felt that they had been betrayed. Herzl’s enormous influence averted, at the Congress of 1903, a direct refusal of the British Government’s offer: a Commission was appointed to study the proposed territory. But when the next Congress met, in 1905, Herzl was no more, and the opponents of East Africa—the Zioné Zion, “Zion-Zionists,” as they were called—carried the day. There was of course a violent reaction: the masses swung away from Zionism, now that it no longer held out to them the hope of a refuge from persecution and poverty, and some of the minority party founded a new body, the Jewish Territorial Organisation, to search the globe for a home of refuge. This was all to the good, for the Zionist Organisation was purged of Messianism and was able to face realities again. The framework, and to a large extent the phraseology, created by Herzl were retained, but essentially the Zionist Organisation became perforce an instrument for the realisation of the national ideal along the two lines on which alone real advance is possible—the lines of Palestinian development and national education. It was only during the war, which brought on the one hand the Balfour Declaration, with its promise of a National Home for the Jewish people in Palestine, and on the other hand untold suffering and loss to the Jewish masses in Eastern Europe, that Messianic hopes were again aroused—again to be followed by the inevitable disillusionment and reaction.

On the position created by the recent developments of Zionism Achad Ha-Am has commented in a brief introduction, written in June, 1920, for a new edition of his collected essays in Hebrew. As the question of the scope of the Balfour Declaration is still much debated, and has a special interest for English readers, I reproduce here the greater part of that Introduction.

“When,” he writes, “I returned from Palestine in 1912, and my Summa Summarum aroused violent anger in various quarters, I wrote an explanatory note by way of supplement to that essay; and I should like to remind my readers on this occasion of some of the things that I said then, because they seem to me relevant at the present time. ‘There must be,’ I wrote, ‘some natural connection of cause and effect between an object and the means by which its attainment is sought: we must be able to show how this object can be attained by these means. So long as that connection does not exist, so long as we cannot attempt to justify our choice of means except by such vague phrases as ”Perhaps ... you never can tell ... times change ...”—we may speak of cherished hopes and an ideal for the distant future, but we cannot speak of a practical object which can serve as a basis for a systematic plan of work. For every systematic plan of work must necessarily be based on a clear conception (whether intellectual or imaginative) of the chain of cause and effect which connects the various activities one with another, and all of them together with the object.... No doubt, we cannot foretell the future; no doubt it is possible that unforeseen things may happen and may change the face of reality. But a possibility of that kind cannot be made the basis of a systematic plan of work, and we are dealing no longer with an objective of immediate activity, but with a vision of the future.’

“About two years after these words were written and published the world-war began, and led to those results which we know: ‘unforeseen things happened and changed the face of reality.’ Our own life, too, was caught in the maelstrom of world-happenings; and the face of our own reality, too, was changed as a consequence. Much might be said, and has already been said, about the character of these changes, about their good and their bad side, about their significance both for the Diaspora and for Palestine. I cannot now deal with this subject fully, and I wish for my part only to say a word or two on one of the principal features of the changed situation—I mean the widening of the horizon of our work in Palestine through the famous Declaration of the British Government, which has recently been confirmed by the Supreme Council, and thus has ceased to be merely the promise of a single Government and has become an international obligation. This Declaration has provided a new ‘basis for a systematic plan of work,’ and has set up ‘an objective of immediate activity’—activity on a large scale, such as has been hitherto only a theme for the anticipations of orators and essayists, with no real basis in the present. But at the same time the Declaration has winged anew the imagination of those who were already accustomed to build castles in the air, without regard to the realities of this earthly life. That is, I fancy, one of the reasons why there is still a demand for this book, though much of its contents does not fit the realities of to-day. It is not so much the contents that matter as the point of view from which I have tried to deal with the various questions as they arose. I have tried to judge not on the basis of that ‘you-never-can-tell’ attitude which shrouds itself in the mists of the future, but on the basis of present realities, or of impending realities which can be prognosticated from existing conditions. Even to-day this point of view needs reiteration. For once it has happened, as by a miracle, that what was wildly improbable a short time ago has become to a certain extent actual: and this ‘miracle’ has led those who were always waiting for miracles to claim a victory, and to insist on maintaining their attitude for the future also, and on laying down as the one principle of policy this perverted axiom—that if such a thing has happened once in exceptional circumstances, its like may happen again, and we can therefore construct our world as we please, regardless of present realities, and relying on a repetition of the miracle when we need it. There is a Jewish proverb which says: ‘A mistake which succeeds is none the less a mistake.’ So a plan of work which turns its back on realities, and relies on the possibility that something out of the ordinary may turn up and change realities to its advantage, is a mistaken plan, even if it succeeds for once in a way. And if it goes on banking on the element of chance, which does in fact interfere occasionally with the normal course of events, and continues to act accordingly, it will end in disaster, despite its initial success.

“All the details of the diplomatic conversations in London which led to the Declaration have not yet been made public; but the time has come to reveal one ‘secret,’ because knowledge of it will make it easier to understand the true meaning of the Declaration.

“‘To facilitate the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people’—that is the text of the promise given to us by the British Government. But that is not the text suggested to the Government by the Zionist spokesmen. They wished it to read: ‘the reconstitution of Palestine as the National Home of the Jewish people’; but when the happy day arrived on which the Declaration was signed and sealed by the Government, it was found to contain the first formula and not the second. That is to say, the allusion to the fact that we are about to rebuild our old national home was dropped, and at the same time the words ‘constitution of Palestine as the national home’ were replaced by ‘establishment of a national home in Palestine.’ There were some who understood at once that this had some significance; but others thought that the difference was merely one of form. Hence they sometimes attempted on subsequent occasions, when the negotiations with the Government afforded an opportunity, to formulate the promise in their own wording, as though it had not been changed. But every time they found in the Government’s reply a repetition of the actual text of the Declaration—which proves that it is not a case where the same thing may be put equally well in either of two ways, but that the promise is really defined in this particular form of words, and goes no further.

“It can scarcely be necessary to explain at length the difference between the two versions. Had the British Government accepted the version suggested to it—that Palestine should be reconstituted as the national home of the Jewish people—its promise might have been interpreted as meaning that Palestine, inhabited as it now is, was restored to the Jewish people on the ground of its historic right; that the Jewish people was to rebuild its waste places and was destined to rule over it and to manage all its affairs in its own way, without regard to the consent or non-consent of its present inhabitants. For this rebuilding (it might have been understood) is only a renewal of the ancient right of the Jews, which over-rides the right of the present inhabitants, who have wrongly established their national home on a land not their own. But the British Government, as it stated expressly in the Declaration itself, was not willing to promise anything which would harm the present inhabitants of Palestine, and therefore it changed the Zionist formula, and gave it a more restricted form. The Government thinks, it would seem, that when a people has only the moral force of its claim to build its national home in a land at present inhabited by others, and has not behind it a powerful army or fleet to prove the justice of its claim, that people can have only what its right allows it in truth and justice, and not what conquering peoples take for themselves by armed force, under the cover of various ‘rights’ invented for the occasion. Now the historic right of a people in relation to a country inhabited by others can mean only the right to settle once more in its ancestral land, to work the land and to develop its resources without hindrance. And if the inhabitants complain that strangers have come to exploit the land and its population, the historic right has a complete answer to them: these newcomers are not strangers, but the descendants of the old masters of the country, and as soon as they settle in it again, they are as good as natives. And not only the settlers as individuals, but the collective body as a people, when it has once more put into this country a part of its national wealth—men, capital, cultural institutions and so forth—has again in the country its national home, and has the right to extend and to complete its home up to the limit of its capacity. But this historic right does not over-ride the right of the other inhabitants, which is a tangible right based on generation after generation of life and work in the country. The country is at present their national home too, and they too have the right to develop their national potentialities so far as they are able. This position, then, makes Palestine common ground for different peoples, each of which tries to establish its national home there; and in this position it is impossible for the national home of either of them to be complete and to embrace all that is involved in the conception of a ‘national home.’ If you build your house not on untenanted ground, but in a place where there are other inhabited houses, you are sole master only as far as your front gate. Within you may arrange your effects as you please, but beyond the gate all the inhabitants are partners, and the general administration must be ordered in conformity with the good of all of them. Similarly, national homes of different peoples in the same country can demand only national freedom for each one in its internal affairs, and the affairs of the country which are common to all of them are administered by all the ‘householders’ jointly if the relations between them and their degree of development qualify them for the task, or, if that condition is not yet fulfilled, by a guardian from outside, who takes care that the rights of none shall be infringed.

“When, then, the British Government promised to facilitate the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people—and not, as was suggested to it, the reconstitution of Palestine as the national home of the Jewish people—that promise meant two things. It meant in the first place recognition of the historic right of the Jewish people to build its national home in Palestine, with a promise of assistance from the British Government; and it meant in the second place a negation of the power of that right to over-ride the right of the present inhabitants and to make the Jewish people sole ruler in the country. The national home of the Jewish people must be built out of the free material which can still be found in the country itself, and out of that which the Jews will bring in from outside or will create by their work, without overthrowing the national home of the other inhabitants. And as the two homes are contiguous, and friction and conflicts of interest are inevitable, especially in the early period of the building of the Jewish national home, of which not even the foundations have yet been properly laid, the promise necessarily demands, though it is not expressly so stated, that a guardian shall be appointed over the two homes—that is, over the whole country—to see to it that the owner of the historic right, while he does not injure the inhabitants in their internal affairs, shall not on his side have obstacles put in his way by his neighbour, who at present is stronger than he. And in course of time, when the new national home is fully built, and its tenant is able to rely, no less than his neighbour, on the right which belongs to a large population living and working in the country, it will be possible to raise the question whether the time has not come to hand over the control of the country to the ‘householders’ themselves, so that they may together administer their joint affairs, fairly and justly, in accordance with the needs of each of them and the value of his work for the revival and development of the country.

“This and no more, it seems to me, is what we can find in the Balfour Declaration; and this and no more is what our leaders and writers ought to have told the people, so that it should not imagine more than what is actually there, and afterwards relapse into despair and absolute scepticism.