Israel in Europe

by G. F. Abbott

In 1267 Nachmanides, faithful to his own teaching, performed the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and found the city, owing to the ravages of the Mongols, a heap of ruins—a devastation which was considered to indicate the near approach of the Messiah. Nachmanides, in a letter to his son, thus describes the melancholy sight: “Great is the solitude and great the wastes, and, to characterise it in short, the more sacred the places, the greater the desolation. Jerusalem is more desolate than the rest of the country: Judaea more than Galilee. But even in this destruction it is a blessed land.” He goes on to say that, among the two thousand inhabitants to which the population of Jerusalem had been reduced by the Sultan’s sword, he found only two Jews, two brothers, dyers by trade, in whose house the Ten Men, the quorum necessary to form a congregation for the purpose of worship, met on the Sabbath, when they could; for Jews and Jewesses—“wretched folk, without occupation and trade, pilgrims and beggars”—continued to come from Damascus, Aleppo, and from other parts, to mourn over the ruins of Zion. In spite of all the afflictions which met his eye, and in spite of his longing for the friends and kinsmen whom the aged pilgrim had forsaken without hope of ever seeing again, Nachmanides is able to declare that for all those losses he is amply compensated by “the joy of being a day in thy courts, O Jerusalem, visiting the ruins of the Temple and crying over the ruined Sanctuary; where I am permitted to caress the stones, to fondle the dust, and to weep over thy ruins. I wept bitterly, but I found joy in my tears. I tore my garments, but I felt relieved by it.” Nor does the Jew’s sublime optimism fail him even in view of that desolation: “He who thought us worthy to let us see Jerusalem in her desertion, he shall bless us to behold her again, built and restored when the glory of the Lord will return unto her ... you, my son, you all shall live to see the salvation of Jerusalem and the comfort of Zion.”[298]

The example of this noble old man was followed by many Jews of Spain and Germany, both in his own and in subsequent times. Down to this day a pilgrimage to Jerusalem is considered a sacred duty, and many devote the savings of a laborious life to defray the expenses of a last visit to the Fatherland—“our own land.” Like shipwrecked mariners long tost on the waves, they drift year after year from all parts of the world to this harbour of rest and sorrow and hope. On the eve of the Passover aged Jews and Jewesses of every country on earth may be seen leaning against the grim ruin of the Temple—all that remains of the magnificence of Israel—weeping and wailing for the fall of their nation. They kiss the ancient stones, they water them with their tears, and the place rings with their poignant lamentations.

And yet, though many come to lament the faded lustre of their race, and are happy to die in Palestine, how many are there who would care to live in it? This is a question to which different Jews would give different answers. It may be urged that the longing for Zion is a romantic dream which might lose much of its romance by realisation. It can also be shown that the Jewish people has seldom thriven in isolation; that a narrow environment is uncongenial to its temperament; and that the Jew has always instinctively preferred the life which is more suitable to the free development of his gifts—that is, the life of competition with foreign nations. All this may be to a great extent true; but, none the less, there are Jews who believe that the majority of their race, or at all events the suffering portion of it, would, under favourable conditions, gladly return to the land of their ancestors. The same belief has been held by several distinguished Christians, British and American, who at various times have lent their support to the movement for Jewish rehabilitation—some actuated by an enthusiasm for the Millennium, others by an enthusiasm for British interests in the East. Among the latter may be mentioned Lord Palmerston and Lord Salisbury, both of whom years ago countenanced the attempts made to obtain from the Sultan a concession of territory in Palestine for the purpose of establishing a self-governing Jewish colony.[299]

But while the bulk of the race enjoyed comparative toleration, few Jews were there found willing to relinquish the land of their adoption for the gratification of a merely sentimental yearning towards that of their remote forefathers. It was not until the revival of persecution under its more rabid and sanguinary forms that the Zionist Utopia became a living reality, and the assertion of Gentile Nationalism led to a corresponding invigoration of Jewish Nationalism. Then the Jews began to consider seriously the problem of the future of their race, and to cast about, once more, for a refuge where they could worship their God unmolested, develop their moral and intellectual tendencies uninfluenced by an alien environment, and pursue their daily occupations unfettered by legal restrictions. Such a refuge could only be found in Palestine. One of the promoters of this idea summed up the reasons, which led him to the choice of Palestine, in the following terms:

“In Europe and America it is a crime to have an Oriental genius or an Oriental nose; therefore, in God’s name, let the Jew go where his genius will be free and his nose not remarked.”[300]

The massacres of Russian Jews in 1881 and 1882 coincided with the publication of various schemes of rescue by members of the persecuted race, who found many sympathisers outside Russia. The practical fruit of the agitation was the birth, among other committees and societies all over Russia and Roumania, of an association under the name of “Chovevi (Lovers of) Zion,” the programme of which was to promote the settlement of Jewish refugees in the Holy Land with a view to the ultimate creation of an autonomous Jewish State. This was the origin of the movement now known all over the world by the name of Zionism. From the very first it met with a reception which proved how sincere and how widespread was the desire for a return to the Land of Promise. A writer, well qualified to speak on the subject, thus describes the welcome accorded to the proposal: “It has seized upon the imagination of the masses and produced a wave of enthusiasm in favour of emigration to Palestine, the force and the extent of which only those who have come in contact with it, as I have done, can appreciate.”[301]

It was not, however, until 1896, when Dr. Theodor Herzl came forward with a definite plan, that the movement acquired cosmopolitan importance and was placed on a solid practical foundation. Dr. Herzl was a Jewish journalist of Vienna, born in Buda-Pesth on the 2nd of May, 1860. He was the son of a well-to-do merchant, and was educated in Vienna, where his parents had removed shortly after his birth. Having for some time practised at the Bar, he subsequently gave up Law for Literature, contributed to the Berliner Tageblatt and other journals, and wrote several novels and plays. In 1891 he was appointed Paris correspondent of the Vienna Neue Freie Presse, and it was during his sojourn in Paris that Dr. Herzl, filled with indignation at the outburst of French anti-Semitism, and dismayed by the triumph of the enemies of the Jews in Austria, resolved to undertake the lead in the movement for the rescue of his co-religionists. Even if no practical result were attained, he felt that the effort would not be utterly wasted, as it would, at all events, tend—in the words of the Zionist programme adopted at the first Congress in Basel, in 1897—to promote “the strengthening of Jewish individual dignity and national consciousness.”

Firm in this conviction, the young leader expounded his scheme in a pamphlet which appeared in 1896 in the three principal European languages, under the title, The Jewish State: an attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question. According to Dr. Herzl’s proposal the State was to be a self-governing republic tributary to the Porte. Christian susceptibilities would be consulted, and diplomatic complications avoided, by establishing the principle of broad religious toleration, and by excluding from Jewish jurisdiction the scenes of Christ’s life and death, and the shrines of the different Christian communities in Palestine. The plan was received with applause by a minority in every quarter, and Dr. Herzl found enthusiasts in both hemispheres ready to help the cause with their pens and with their purses. A Zionist newspaper was founded in Vienna (Die Welt), a new Zionist Association was organised with numerous ramifications in all parts of the Jewish world, and in less than seven years from its beginning the movement numbered several hundred thousand of adherents. The Association holds annual Congresses in various great European centres, with a view to disseminating the idea, discussing all details connected with the movement and deciding on the practical steps necessary to its success.

It is obvious that the first requisite was the Turkish Government’s consent to the acquisition of land in Palestine on the terms already described. For this purpose Dr. Herzl paid a visit to Yildiz Kiosk in May, 1901, and again in August, 1902. The latter expedition was undertaken in response to a telegraphic invitation from the Sultan himself, who expressed the desire to be informed of the precise programme of the Zionists. Regular conferences took place with high officials both of the Palace and of the Porte, and in the end Dr. Herzl drew up and laid before Abdul Hamid a minute statement of his views, explaining the demands of the Zionists and formulating the conditions of a Jewish settlement in a part of Palestine and elsewhere in Asia Minor, on the basis of a charter. The proposals were duly considered, and the Sultan expressed his deep sympathy with the Jewish people, but the concessions which he was prepared to make for a Jewish settlement were not considered adequate by the leaders of the Zionist movement, and the negotiations led to no definite result.[302]

Indeed, the obstacles in the way of a satisfactory arrangement on the basis of the Zionist programme are neither few nor small. The Turks, it is true, have always displayed towards the Jews a degree of toleration such as the latter have seldom experienced at the hands of Christians. As we have seen, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Turkey was the only country that offered an asylum to the Jewish refugees from the West. Religious sympathy may be partially responsible for this toleration, strengthened by the fact that the Jews of Turkey, devoid of all national aspirations, are distinguished among the Sultan’s subjects by their loyalty to the Ottoman rule, and by their readiness to help the Porte in the suppression of Christian rebellion. It has also been suggested that Abdul Hamid was anxious, by a display of sympathy with the Jews generally and the Zionists in particular, to secure their powerful championship in the West against the host of enemies which the Armenian massacres had raised to his Empire. Hence the present Sultan’s attitude towards the race—an attitude which in its benevolence contrasts strongly, if not strangely, with the treatment meted out to his Christian subjects. In 1901 Abdul Hamid appointed members of the Hebrew community to important posts in the Turkish army, and attached two more to his personal entourage. On another occasion, when a blood-accusation was brought against the Jews by the Christians of the East, he caused the local authorities to take steps to prove its groundlessness and clear the Jews of the heinous charge. And yet, it would be hard to imagine the Sultan giving his sanction to the creation of a fresh nationality within his Empire, and thus adding a new political problem to the list, already sufficiently long, which makes up the contemporary history of Turkey. Moreover, concerning the return of the Jews to the Land of Promise, there are certain old prophecies to whose fulfilment no true Mohammedan can be expected to contribute. For both these reasons, political and religious, the Turkish Government in 1882, upon hearing that the Jews who fled from Russia were meditating an immigration into Palestine, hastened to arrest the movement.