[¹] “Eastward,” “Forward.”
One of the leaders of the Kadima was Nathan Birnbaum, known also by his nom de plume of “Mathias Acher,” who was born in Galicia and graduated at Vienna University. A powerful writer and a keen thinker, he became, in course of time, a considerable figure in German-Jewish literature. In recent years he has become a Jewish democrat, championing the cause of Yiddish. But in the early days of the Kadima he was heart and soul devoted to this Association, of which he was the philosophical leader.
The members of the Kadima soon attracted attention owing to their courageous attitude, and steadily increased in number. They had become conscious Jews, and derived from this fact a great access of moral strength. They were no longer weak, downtrodden, degraded young men, feeling helpless and demoralized; they began to be men, jealous of their honour, demanding their rights as Jews among the nationalities. The Chovevé Zion movement appealed strongly to their emotions and energies. The idea, a mere spark at first, developed into a blazing fire that seized upon several Universities. Young Jews speaking different languages and of many different habits and customs became united by invisible ties all over the Continent of Europe. At the end of the eighties there existed an important Association in Berlin, which was at first somewhat theoretical in character, but very soon afterwards became a sister society of the Vienna Association, taking also the name of “Kadima” (Appendix lxxvii). The members of this group include a great number of workers whose names are inseparably bound up with the history of the Zionist Organization and with Jewish national literature. Most of them were of Russian birth, as might be expected; for it was the Russian Jewish student who, moving from one German University to another, carried with him the torch of the national revival. Besides Dr. Chaim Weizmann, already mentioned, we find in the Berlin Students’ group two of the present members of the Inner Actions Committee—Dr. Shemaryah Levin, a powerful speaker and one of the most energetic propagandists of the movement, and Victor Jacobsohn, who for some years represented Zionism at Constantinople. Martin Buber and Berthold Feiwel, two gifted littérateurs, were both members of the Vienna Kadima who worked later in Berlin. Davis Trietsch, not himself a University student, worked in close co-operation with the Berlin group. An indefatigable advocate of colonization schemes, he has given a great impetus to the study of Palestine and has originated many fruitful ideas. Associated with him on the staff of the Jüdischer Verlag, the Zionist publishing house, was the artist Ephraim Moses ben Jacob Hacohen Lilien, who together with Hermann Struck, an artist of a very different type, best represents Jewish national development on the æsthetic side. It remains to mention two Berlin Zionists who became members of the Inner Actions Committee in 1911—Arthur Hantke, distinguished for his services to the organization of the movement, and Professor Otto Warburg, a well-known botanist and founder of the Palestine Land Development Company.
Similar associations to the Kadima were founded at many German and Swiss Universities—Heidelberg, Munich, Leipzig, Königsberg, Breslau, Berne, Zürich, Geneva and Lausanne. To them is due the national awakening which has led to so great an improvement in the spiritual condition of Jewry in Western Europe. In Germany especially the progress of the national idea among the younger generation was phenomenal. The sons of the most assimilated and denationalized families became the most ardent champions of the new movement back to the Jewish land and Jewish ideals. But much the same thing has happened in all countries which have a considerable Jewish population. In Russia it goes without saying that Jewish Students’ groups were to the fore in the national work. Even in the Polish cities of Warsaw and Lodz, the homes of the most extreme and disintegrating assimilation, numbers of Jewish students at the Universities were kindled by the national idea and did it valuable service. In Anglo-Jewry, isolated by distance and by difference of language and environment from the main currents of Jewish life, the university Zionist movement developed later and has not gone so far. Its history belongs entirely to the last dozen years, and its adherents are still a small band. But it is one of the most remarkable and promising features of Zionist development in England in recent years. While the older generation of Zionists in this country worked mainly in the field of organization, a group of younger men, largely of University training, has paid more attention to the spread of the Zionist idea by means of literature and education. Most of these younger men have been influenced by the ideas of Achad Ha’am. They have produced monthly journals, pamphlets and books on Zionism and in the Zionist spirit, and have contributed in various ways to the spread of Jewish knowledge and the improvement of Hebrew education. They have also taken their share in the work of organization, and one of them, Mr. H. Sacher, has recently become Grand Commander of the Order of Ancient Maccabæans, a Zionist association organised on Friendly Society lines.
3. The Pioneers of the Hebrew Revival in Palestine
While modern Hebrew literature and the propaganda of the Return to Zion were quickening the Jews of the Diaspora to new life and new hope, there were not wanting men who were prepared to throw up their careers and prospects in Europe in order themselves to help in laying the foundations of the revival in Palestine. It is not our purpose here to tell the almost miraculous story of the foundation of the earliest Jewish settlements or “colonies” in the eighties, how by sheer endurance the pioneer settlers maintained their hold in the face of appalling difficulties, and how by the time when the great war broke out there had been created the nucleus of a thriving Hebrew nation, firmly attached once more to its ancestral soil, and repossessed of its ancestral tongue.[¹] We have merely to glance at a few of the outstanding facts and personalities of this revival (Appendix lxxviii).
[¹] For an account of Jewish colonization in Palestine the reader may be referred to Palestine: the Rebirth of an Ancient People, by A. M. Hyamson (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1917), chs. 11–14.
The revival is not wholly, though it is largely, a result of the terrible events which drove large masses of Jews to emigrate from Russia in 1880–1881. Even before that date there were a few Jews in Palestine who, if they were not strong enough of themselves to initiate a national revival, were able to help when new forces came from without. Of these were Jechiel Brill (1836–1886), who, born in Russia and educated in Constantinople and Jerusalem, established a Hebrew monthly, Ha’lebanon, in Palestine in 1863, and later was commissioned by Baron Edmond de Rothschild to conduct a group of experienced farmers from Russia through Palestine; Jechiel Michael ben Noah Pines (1842–1912), also of Russian birth, who in 1878 was sent to Jerusalem to establish charitable institutions associated with the name of Sir Moses Montefiore, and lived thenceforward in Palestine, interesting himself in the welfare of the Jewish community and the organization of the Jewish agricultural colonies; David Yellin, a native of Palestine and one of the most eminent of living Hebraists, who has devoted himself mainly to education, and has played a large part in the development of Hebrew as a living language through his contributions to the perfection of the “natural method” of teaching Hebrew; and the late Abraham Moses Luncz (1854–1918), who had lived in Palestine from early youth, and whose long-established Hebrew Palestine Annual has done much for the historical and geographical study of the country. But it was not till the immigration which followed on the Russian massacres of 1880–1881 that Jewish life in Palestine really began to take a new direction. Among the stalwarts of those early days a group of Russian students known as Bilu (Appendix lxxix) (from the initials of the four Hebrew words meaning “Come, let us go up to the house of Jacob,” which they chose as their motto) will always be held in affectionate remembrance. Their example of stubborn endurance and unfailing optimism did much to rescue the colonization movement from the ruin which threatened it in its early days, when the natural effects of insufficient knowledge and resources began to be felt. Most of the group died young, but a few still survive—among them Israel Belkind, who is still at work in Palestine as a teacher. Elieser Ben-Jehuda, who settled in Jerusalem in 1881, is associated principally with the revival of Hebrew. It is thanks largely to him that out of the welter of languages spoken by Jews in Palestine Hebrew has once and for all won its place as the national language. His monumental Hebrew dictionary, Thesaurus Totius Hebraitatis, in ten volumes, was in course of publication when the war broke out. Another side of the revival is represented by Boris Schatz, the founder and head of the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts at Jerusalem, whose idea of creating a distinctively Jewish art has already borne good fruit (Appendix lxxx). And in yet other spheres the young Jewish settlement owes much to David Levontin, Manager of the Anglo-Palestine Company, the Jewish banking concern in Palestine; to Aaron Aaronsohn, head of the valuable Agricultural Experiment Station at Atlit, near Haifa; to Dr. Benzion Mossinsohn and his colleagues at the Jaffa Hebrew Secondary School, where an education similar to that of a Grammar School is given entirely in Hebrew. Each of these men has done pioneer work in one field or another. They have stood in the van of a movement which has transformed Jewish life in Palestine as Zionist propaganda has transformed Jewish life in the Diaspora, not only creating new types and values of its own, but surely if slowly breaking down the resistance of the anti-national Jewish agencies which were at work in Palestine before Zionism came on the scene. And if the propaganda and organization of Zionism have been essential to the existence and growth of the Palestinian settlement, it is no less true that if not for the work of those who built up the new Jewish life in Palestine, there would have been no inspiring force behind the propaganda of Zionism, and no solid basis for its organization.