Israel in Europe

by G. F. Abbott

In the meantime the Jewish population of Palestine has been increasing steadily and rapidly, by immigration chiefly of Ashkenazim refugees from Central and Northern Europe. In 1872 there were scarcely 10,000 Jews in the Holy Land; by 1882 they had risen to 20,000; in 1890 there were only 25,000; in 1902 they were estimated at 60,000—distributed in the various towns of Jaffa, Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias, and others. In all these places are to be seen new Jewish colonies housed in neat white-washed buildings which stretch in barrack-like lines—the bounty of a Rothschild or a Montefiore. In addition to these urban colonies, there are numerous agricultural settlements in Central Judaea, Samaria, and Galilee. Immigration, stimulated by the persecution to which the Hebrew race is subjected in Eastern Europe, and facilitated by the construction of the Jaffa-Jerusalem railway, which has now been running for twelve years, continues, partly under the auspices of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. This society maintains many schools for boys and girls, endeavouring to infuse French culture and the new spirit into the ancient body of Judaism, which in Tiberias especially has always sought its refuge and its tomb. Besides general instruction, the pursuits of agriculture and gardening are assiduously encouraged. From the elementary schools the most promising pupils are sent to the Professional School of Jerusalem or to the Model Farm of Mikweh, founded in 1870, whence, at the conclusion of their studies, the students are placed in the Jewish colonies of Palestine and Syria as head-gardeners and directors of agriculture, while others are apprenticed to handicrafts, thus being gradually formed a population both morally and materially equipped for life’s work under modern conditions. The agricultural colonies, divided into three groups—Palestine, Samaria, and Galilee—have helped, it is said, to attach to the soil some 5000 out of the 60,000 Jews of the country. Other centres of the same nature are in the course of formation across the Jordan, towards the Howran range of mountains, where vast tracts of land were acquired a few years ago, and are slowly reclaimed from the waste of sand, rock, and marsh by the perseverance and untiring industry of the Jewish colonists.

But, while dwelling on this bright side of the Zionist movement—the side of enlightened enterprise—it is well to note another side not so promising. The recent traveller, already quoted, gives a very pessimistic account of his impressions. It is to be hoped that his statements are exaggerated and his pessimism inordinate; but, in the interests of historic truth, we feel compelled to listen to his tale: “The Ashkenazim,” he tells us, “preponderate so largely as to swamp the others. If there is ever a Jewish State, it will be Ashkenazim. The great mass of them is located in Jerusalem, and the rest in Safed, Tiberias, and Hebron. Gregarious by instinct, urban by habit, they herd together in the towns, creating new ghettos similar to those they have left in Europe. A fraction of them maintain themselves by petty commerce; the rest live on Haluka, a fund provided by their wealthy co-religionists in the West. This amounts to £50,000 annually in Jerusalem. Its object is to enable its recipients to study the Talmud and engage in religious exercises vicariously for those who contribute it. Haluka is a fruitful source of sloth and hypocrisy, and places undue power in the hands of the rabbis who are charged with its administration. To those who know only the trading Jew of our commercial centres, the modern Sadducees, it reveals a new aspect of the race—that of the Jew turning aside from all enterprise, content to live in pious mendicancy, his sole business the observance of the minutiae of the ceremonial law; the Jew who binds on his phylactery, wears long ringlets brought down in front of the ears in obedience to a Levitical precept, and shuns the carrying of a pocket-handkerchief on the Sabbath, save as a bracelet or a garter. Haluka is a mistake and a stumbling-block in the path of Zionism. To turn Palestine into a vast almshouse is not the way to lay the foundation of a Jewish State. It attracts swarms of slothful bigots whose religion begins and ends with externals, a salient example of ‘the letter that killeth,’ whose Pharisaic piety has no influence on their conduct in life. It has established an unproductive population of inefficients, drawn from the least desirable element of the race. Its evil effect is patent, and the better sort of Jews themselves condemn it or advise its restriction to the aged and infirm. It is depressing to move among crowds of burly men, contributing nothing to the commonweal, puffed up with self-satisfied bigotry and proud of their useless existence. Left to his own devices the Jew gives the land a wide berth and sticks to the town. But Western philanthropy has expended much money and energy in putting him on to the land, rightly judging that the foundations of a nation cannot be laid on the hawking of lead-pencils among the Bedawin who do not want them.

“An agricultural college has been established near Jaffa, but it was found that the youths availed themselves of the excellent general education it afforded in order, not to till the land, but to engage in more congenial and more profitable pursuits. Agricultural colonies were founded, and the colonists, in addition to free land, seed, and implements, were endowed by M. Edmund de Rothschild with 3 francs a day for every man, 2 francs for every woman, and 1 franc for every child. This enabled the recipients to sit down and employ Arabs to do the work, and has been stopped, to the great chagrin of the colonists. As a matter of fact, the best of the farms to-day depend on native labour. The mattock and the hoe are repugnant to the Jewish colonists, who all seek for places in the administration. The financial result is not cheering. The most prosperous concern, perhaps, is the wine-growing establishment of Rishon le Sion. Wine-making is the one industry the Jews take to. They practise it individually on a small scale. The Western tourist in Hebron is invariably accosted by some ringleted Israelite, who proffers him his ‘guter Wein,’ and his thoughts go back to childhood and that Brobdingnagian cluster of grapes which the spies bore between them from the neighbouring valley of Eschol. The attitude of the Jew with respect to agriculture is not to be wondered at. His hereditary tendencies are against it. Centuries of urban life and urban pursuits lie behind him. Inured to no exercise save that of his wits, poor in physique, unused to the climate, can it be expected that this child of the ghetto should turn to and compete with the strong brown-lined Judaean peasant on the burning hillside? The one exception is to be found in the Bulgarian Jews of Sephardim stock. Hardy, stalwart, accustomed to tillage, these have made efficient farmers, and next to them come the Jews from Roumania. But with every inducement to settle on the land, and all sorts of props and aids, the agricultural Jews in Palestine number only about 1000 out of an ever-augmenting population. The fact is significant.”[318]

Another point worth serious consideration is the political situation created by Jewish immigration into Palestine. The colonists, the majority of whom come from Russia, are a bone of contention between the rival foreign propagandas in the country. The Russians, as has been seen, while massacring the Jews in Bessarabia, court their favour in Syria. The German Emperor, while tolerating anti-Semitism in the Fatherland, earns the thanks of the Zionists by his affability towards the exiles. The French, through the educational efforts of the Alliance Israélite, whose pupils were hitherto mainly drawn from the Spanish Jews, seek to turn the Jews of Palestine, as of other parts of the Near East, into apostles of Gallic preponderance and into instruments for the promotion of Gallic interests. The Zionists are regarded by the French supporters of the Alliance as its adversaries, and that for the reason that, while the mission of the Alliance, as it is understood by the French, is the extension of the Republic’s influence, and, therefore, very remotely connected with the religious and national aspirations of the Jewish people, these aspirations are precisely the point on which the Zionists lay the greatest stress.[319]

Lastly, the poverty of Palestine is a source of infinite difficulties which can only be overcome by proportionate labour. Mr. Zangwill has very eloquently described these conditions in one of his speeches: “My friends,” he said, “you cannot buy Palestine. If you had a hundred millions you could only buy the place where Palestine once stood. Palestine itself you must re-create by labour, till it flows again with milk and honey. The country is a good country. But it needs a great irrigation scheme. To return there needs no miracle—already a third of the population are Jews. If the Almighty Himself carried the rest of us to Palestine by a miracle, what should we gain except a free passage? In the sweat of our brow we must earn our Palestine. And, therefore, the day we get Palestine, if the most joyous, will also be the most terrible day of our movement.”[320]

It was the consideration of the various obstacles enumerated above, and others of a similar nature, coupled with the urgent need to find a home for those wretched outcasts whose refuge in England was menaced by the anti-alien agitation, that induced Dr. Herzl, in July 1903, acting on Mr. Chamberlain’s suggestion,[321] to propose that an agreement should be entered into between the British Government and the Jewish Colonial Trust for the establishment of a Jewish settlement in British East Africa. The British Government, anxious to find a way out of the “Alien Invasion” difficulty, welcomed the proposal, and Lord Lansdowne expressed his readiness to afford every facility to the Commission which, it was suggested, should be sent by the Zionists to East Africa for purposes of investigation. If a suitable site could be found, the Foreign Secretary professed himself willing “to entertain favourably proposals for the establishment of a Jewish colony on conditions which will enable the members to observe their national customs. For this purpose he would be prepared to discuss the details of a scheme comprising as its main features the grant of a considerable area of land, the appointment of a Jewish official as the chief of the local administration, and permission to the colony to have a free hand in regard to municipal legislation, and the management of religious and purely domestic matters; such local autonomy being conditional on the right of His Majesty’s Government to exercise general control.”[322] This project was announced at one of the meetings of the Zionist Congress at Basel in August, 1903, and the motion submitted to the Congress for the appointment of a committee, who should send an expedition to East Africa in order to make investigations on the spot, was adopted. But, though 295 voted in its favour, it was opposed by a great minority of 177 votes, and the Russian delegates left the hall as a protest. In a mass meeting of Zionists held in the following May in London Mr. Israel Zangwill spoke warmly in favour of the proposal, urging on his fellow-Zionists to take advantage of the offer made by the British Government. But he added, “The Jewish Colonisation Association, the one body that should have welcomed this offer of territory with both hands, stood aloof.”[323] Indeed, it cannot be said that this new departure of Zionism has commanded universal approval.

Nor did opposition to the scheme confine itself to platonic protests. In the following December, Dr. Max Nordau, one of the most distinguished men of letters among Dr. Herzl’s followers, who had declared himself at the Basel Congress of the previous August in favour of the proposal, was fired at in Paris by a Russian Jew, who in his cross-examination before the Magistrate confessed that, in making that attempt on Dr. Nordau’s life, he aimed at the enemy of the Jewish race—the supporter of a scheme which involved the abandonment by Zionists of Palestine as the object of the movement.[324] The incident afforded a painful proof of want of concord, not only among the Jews generally, not only among the supporters of various movements all theoretically recognising the necessity of emigration, but even among the partisans themselves of the Zionist cause. Dr. Herzl, anxious to allay the ill-feeling aroused by his alleged abandonment of the Zionist idea, wrote a letter to Sir Francis Montefiore, the president of the English Zionist Federation, repudiating any desire to divert the movement away from the Holy Land and to direct it to East Africa. Nothing, he protested, could be further from the truth. He felt convinced that the solution of the Jewish problem could only be effected in that country, Palestine, with which are indelibly associated the historic and sentimental bias of the Jewish people. But as the British Government had been generous enough to offer territory for an autonomous settlement, it would have been impossible and unreasonable to do otherwise than give the offer careful consideration.[325]

The clouds of misconception of which Dr. Herzl complained were not dissipated by this declaration. If the attachment to Palestine is to be the central idea of Zionism, it is hard to see how its realisation could be promoted by the adoption of East Africa as a home. East Africa, as a shrewd diplomatist has wittily observed, is not in Palestine nor on the road to it. Its name awakens no memories or hopes in the Jewish heart. Its soil is not hallowed by the temples and the tombs of Israel. Its hills and vales are not haunted by the spirits of the old martyrs and heroes of the nation. Neither the victories of the past nor the prophetic visions for the future are in any way associated with East Africa. In the circumstances, it is not to be wondered at that the proposal, as Dr. Herzl admitted, did not meet with the enthusiasm required for success, and that the strongest opposition to the scheme came from those very Jews in the Russian “pale” who stand in most need of a refuge from persecution. It must be borne in mind that those very Jews who suffer most severely from persecution are the most sincerely and wholeheartedly attached to the ancient ideals of the race, and, owing partly to this psychological cause, partly to their less advanced stage of development, they were the least able to appreciate the practical advantages of the scheme—the least disposed to submit to the dictates of prosaic expediency. They firmly believe that, sooner or later, the beautiful dream is destined to cohere into substance; and, like all dreamers, they abhor compromise.

The proposal, however, met with opposition in other quarters than the Russian Ghetto. Sir Charles Eliot, H.M.’s Commissioner for the East Africa Protectorate, did not approve of it. While disclaiming all anti-Semitic feeling, he said that his hesitation arose from doubt as to whether any beneficial result would be obtained from the scheme. The proposed colony, he pointed out, would not be sufficiently large to relieve appreciably the congested and suffering Jewish population of some parts of Eastern Europe, and he expressed the fear that the climate and agricultural life would in no way be suitable to Israelites. Moreover, when the country began to attract British immigrants who showed an inclination to settle all round the proposed Jewish colony, he considered that the scheme became dangerous and deprecated its execution. It was, Sir Charles declared, tantamount to reproducing in East Africa the very conditions which have caused so much distress in Eastern Europe: that is to say, the existence of a compact mass of Jews, differing in language and customs from the surrounding population, to whom they are likely to be superior in business capacity but inferior in fighting power. To his mind, it is best to recognise frankly that such conditions can never exist without danger to the public peace.[326]

Sir Harry Johnston also was at first opposed to the scheme, but, influenced partly by the development of the idea into a less crude plan, and by the opening up of the country by the Uganda Railway, partly, perhaps, by the intimate connection between the proposal and the solution of our own overcrowding problem, he was ultimately converted into a warm supporter of it.[327] Soon afterwards a Commission was despatched to East Africa to report on the tract of land offered by the British Government for the proposed Zionist settlement,[328]—a proof that official opposition was abandoned.