To take refuge in the stronghold of Pharaoh,
And to take shelter in the shadow of Egypt!” (Isaiah xxx. 2).
“Therefore shall the stronghold of Pharaoh turn to your shame,
And the shelter in the shadow of Egypt to your confusion” (Ibid. 3).
“Woe to them that go down to Egypt for help,...” (Ibid. xxxi. 1).
“... Both he that helpeth shall stumble, and he that is helped shall fall,
And they all shall perish together” (Ibid. 3).
In the period of the Second Temple, the Hellenists again made frantic efforts to be emancipated by the Greeks. The Jewish Law, which was the life and progress of the nation, was for them the stronghold of Jewish unity and the obstacle in their path. But the more they strove after equality with the Greeks, the more futile seemed their strivings. It was the loss of their faith in God and their nation that made them cast about for another power to deliver them. They preferred the attractions of Hellenic culture to Hebrew morality; Syrian power to the Divine Spirit; the material army of the Seleucides, whose forces they could count and whose weapons they could handle, to the unseen moral power of their nation. This was the sin of the Hellenists. When their success was at its height, they gave themselves with savage energy to the persecution of those of their brethren who remained faithful to their own nationality. With a zeal that far excelled that of the enemy, they hunted to death the innocent followers of the old prophets. But just when this persecuting fury was burning at its hottest, the Maccabeans came forward and exhorted the “captive daughter of Zion” to shake herself from the dust. Henceforth they became the blessed messengers of national self-help, and it was their chief joy to sing the glories of the Divine grace which enabled them to be more abundant in works than all others.
Was not Rabbi Akiba (50?–132?) ben Joseph the spiritual hero and martyr, a preacher of self-emancipation? Did not the same idea inspire Judah Halevi [Abu al-Hassan al-Lawi] (1085(6)–post 1140), Moses ben Nachman Gerondi [RaM-BaN]: Nachmanides: [Bonastruc da Porta] (1194–1270?), Obadiah (Yareh) (circa 1475–1500?) ben Abraham Bertenoro, and that splendid host of scholars who endeavoured to re-establish the ordination in Palestine, and to encourage the Jewish settlement, in that country, amidst terrific troubles and dangers, as well as Don Joseph Nasi [João Miguez]—(circa 1510–1579), Duke of Naxos, who spared no effort to help his brethren to settle in the promised Land?
This same idea lies at the root of Pinsker’s conception. A clear-minded and quiet thinker, he was deeply impressed by the events of 1880–1881. The grave anxieties through which the Russian Jews passed, and the awakening of anti-Jewish feeling in Western Europe, particularly in Germany, led him to reconsider the conventional Emancipation doctrine, in which he, like all highly educated Russian and Polish Jews, had formerly believed. Being a medical man, he may have seen the tortures of the victims; as an old inhabitant of Odessa, he no doubt remembered the anti-Jewish riots of 1859 and 1871; and now the eighties, with all their horrors, began. He then enunciated “the message of political Zionism.”[¹] “Pinsker, like all subsequent political Zionists, arrived at the idea of Zionism not through the problem of Judaism—through the necessity of seeking for a new foundation for our national existence and unity, in place of the old foundation, which is crumbling away—but through the problem of Jewry—through a definite conviction that even emancipation and general progress will not improve the degraded and insecure position of the Jews among the nations, and that anti-Semitism will never cease so long as we have not a national home of our own.” Pinsker discovered that the root causes of “our being hated and despised more than any other human beings ... lie deep in human psychology.”[²]