The Allied Countries and the Jews

by H. G. Enelow

This is why when Democracy finally arose and demanded the freedom of the Jew, there could be no doubt as to his merit and his right. And in the future, too, the Jew will have to continue to serve and to bestow upon the world those benefits for which he was created.

It is foolish to think that the Jew's problem can be solved in terms merely of happiness and comfort for himself. Not for that was he created. It can be solved in terms only of service—of service to the world! The Jew will never be able to run away from recognition of this fact, which is of the very essence of his soul and his existence.

With the coming of his complete recognition as citizen, will come the increased spiritual responsibility of the Jew. Not only will he have to take part in the political and economic reshaping of the world. He will have to justify his spiritual isolation or separateness. He will be called upon to make his Religion, his peculiar spiritual ideal, count in that spiritual and religious reconstruction which the world will need after the War.

Is there no balm in Gilead? Has the Jew's Religion nothing to contribute to the healing of mankind's spiritual wounds? If so, the days of his Religion are numbered. But if it has, as we proclaim it has, then the Jew will have his part to play, and his duty to perform, when upon the coming of peace mankind starts to set up again the fallen tabernacles—enters upon the process of religious and spiritual reconstruction.

And this duty and part the Jew will have not in one corner only—not in one only secluded, far-off spot, but everywhere, in the midst of the world, amid the storm and stress of the world's life, amid the agony of human suffering and need, where every other Religion will be at work, and men will be engaged in the momentous tasks of rebuilding and rejuvenation.

There are those who indulge in the sweet, idyllic dream of the Jew departing from the common strife of mankind and betaking himself to Zion, and there, amid bucolic surroundings, developing into a spiritual entity the like of which has never been on land or sea. A pleasant dream, this! But history is against it. History shows that although the classical period of the Jew lay in Palestine, since then the Jewish genius has flourished and produced its best fruits in lands other than Palestine.

It is idle to expect reproductions of classical periods. The very contact with the rest of the world, the very friction with other men's thoughts, the very variety of environment, has made for the vitality and versatility of Israel's genius. And in the future, also, it is in the world at large that the Jew will be called upon to serve, and to prove his capacity and his commission as a factor in the spiritual advancement and the moral up-building of the human race.

This is not to say that there may not or shall not be a new centre of Jewish life and glory in the old land of Israel's fathers, in Palestine. On the contrary, we all pray there may be! Every loyal Jewish heart is bound to Palestine, and no true Jew but wants to see it restored and renewed as a place of beauty and of joy. If upon the close of the War, Jews, under proper guarantees, are allowed to settle in Palestine as a matter of right and not merely as a favor, let us hope that those who migrate there, directed by necessity or idealism, will find their heart's desire and will develop a life of which the world and the Jew might be justly proud. Toward the securing of such safeguards we ought all to work together. It must form one of the fruits of the War.

But to think that the resettlement or reconstruction of Palestine is going to dispose of the universal Jewish problem, is a chimera. We need but think of the difficulties that will surround the new settlement, difficulties of a political and religious, as well as of an economic, character—of the small number of Jews the country will be able to absorb, of the many years it will take before Palestine can support in comfort as many as even a million Jews—we need but think of the large number of Jews who do not believe in the formation of a separate Jewish nation, to realize that they who assume that the creation of a new centre, and particularly of a Jewish State, in Palestine would wholly solve the Jewish problem, feed on flowers of phantasy.

The Jew's place is in the world at large, the world now engaged in the most momentous struggle of history, and in the world at large he will have to show that capacity for service which will justify his past and make his future secure and glorious!