David Wolffsohn—France—M. Léon Bourgeois—Michel Erlanger—Zadoc Kahn—Baron Edmond de Rothschild—Professor Joseph Halévy—Dr. Emil Meyersohn—Dr. Waldemar Haffkine—The brothers Marmorek—Bernard Lazare.
In its early years the new Zionist movement showed perhaps insufficient appreciation of the importance of Palestinian colonizing work. Its attention was turned mainly in another direction, that of paving the way for a great resettlement of the Jewish people by the creation of favourable political conditions; and the plodding and often blundering work of the Chovevé Zion seemed to some of its leaders and many of their followers to be poor, petty and uninspiring by comparison with the wide sweep and the brilliance of their own ideal. But as time went on, and it became obvious that in the main the new movement must look for support to those who had worked for the same end as “Lovers of Zion,” the necessary adjustment between the new and the older methods had to be made; and the internal history of Zionism since 1897 is one of the penetration of Chovevé Zion ideas into the large framework created by the master-mind of Herzl under the stress of ideas somewhat different. It is not our intention to trace this history here[¹] (Appendix lxxxi): we are concerned less with the inner history of the movement than with its repercussions in the literature and the politics of England and France. It may suffice to say that the Congresses, held first annually and afterwards biennially, attracted an ever-growing number of delegates and an ever-increasing amount of attention; that in its early years the movement established a Jewish National Fund for the purpose of buying land in Palestine on a great scale, and a financial instrument, the Jewish Colonial Trust, which in turn founded the Anglo-Palestine Company for the conduct of actual banking business in Palestine (Appendix lxxxii); that after the death of Herzl in 1904, and the rejection of the offer by the British Government of a piece of territory in East Africa, there developed a somewhat serious fissure between the two tendencies in the movement, the one looking to political activity and the other to Palestinian colonization as the right line of progress; that Herzl’s friend and follower, David Wolffsohn (1856–1914) (Appendix lxxxiii), who succeeded him as President, was able by a rare combination of gifts to hold the movement together during the period of crisis; that after the Turkish Revolution in 1908, which seemed to make political activity impossible or useless, there was a marked concentration of effort on Palestinian development; that meanwhile the Zionist organization spread to the four corners of the globe, and societies and federations were formed not only in every country in Europe, but also in all parts of the British Dominions, and particularly in the United States of America; and that the outbreak of war found the movement in a position to point both to a large membership—about a quarter of a million—and to substantial achievements in Palestine in support of its claim for the definite reconstitution of the Jews as a nation in their ancient land.
[¹] For a general history of the movement see Zionism, by Prof. R. Gottheil (Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia, 1914).
David Wolffsohn
We turn from this brief summary to the impression made by the new movement in France and in England.
In France, where there had always been statesmen and writers who had a proper understanding of the Zionist idea, the most notable pronouncement from a non-Jewish source came from M. Léon Bourgeois, one of the greatest French statesmen of the present generation. His views, as imparted to Baroness Bertha von Suttner (1843–1914), were published by her in 1899:—[¹]
[¹] Zionisten und Christen ... Emil Kronberger ... Leipzig ... 1900. pp. 117–119.
“Bourgeois held forth to me enthusiastically and explained the various reasons why according to his view the movement should be supported. Complete assimilation—not altogether impossible after a long time—looms still in the far distance; until then very many individuals—if they do not break away—must suffer. The individual is still everywhere the highest consideration, collectivism is only an abstract conception. Until now the Jews have been too strongly differentiated from their surroundings to assimilate without being noticed. They are recognizable for their shortcomings as well as for their most outstanding virtues. Difference does not mean inferiority; no one will allow himself to be insulted because he belongs to this or that ethnical group. To be a Zionist means to make a stand against anti-Semitism. The people among whom they live are even more injured by Jew-hatred than the Jews; it is opposed to culture, and prevents the realization of the ideal of peace. Culture happily unites all its objects more closely and aims at an unattainable ideal, but all good works are directed towards paving the way to future success. Therefore every fresh sign of energy is welcome. From a nation newly reconstituted, full of energy, and composed of such intelligent, capable and talented elements, an increase in the general work of culture may be expected. Therefore Zionism is to be encouraged. It is self-understood that the first necessity is to bring relief to a persecuted and unfortunate people. But I wish to clear up this side of the question, which belongs to the future; to bring forward such arguments as are debated. In our Chauvinistic circles, the following argument will be brought forward: Let us be glad that in the Jews we possess a cosmopolitan element; that the scholar, the artist and the thinker amongst them work and create without reference to national ideas. But that kind of argument is false, because to be cosmopolitan, to recognize that the interests of humanity outweigh those of one’s fatherland, or still more to understand this, one must, before all things, have a fatherland.”
What is remarkable about these views is their similarity in some respects to those expressed in 1866 by Moses Hess in his Rom und Jerusalem. Hess, though himself a German Jew writing in German, connected Zionism with the political rôle of France. He regarded the French Revolution as one of the great events that were to prepare the restoration of Israel, and therefore he looked to France for help. France had extended her protection to the Roman Catholics of Syria, and was the beau idéal and the avant courier of human progress. The renationalization of humanity was his aim. He realized the distinctiveness of the Jew. He said that Jews and Germans were as the poles asunder in thought and conceptions of life, and the logic of history and the necessities of humanity made him plead for Zion to be restored. Nature’s economy, he said, demands that the Jew should lead his own life, in his own fashion, and in his own country. He pleaded in the first place for a reaction against Hellenistic theories of life: to him family life was sacred; the mother’s love was the real sacred source of Jewish persistence, because it was spiritual yet not unreal. From the family to the nation was but a step; the family should possess in the individual what the nation should uphold in the mass. He attacked most scornfully the German-Jewish Reform movement, not because he was of the ultra-orthodox school, but because there had been no real Reformation in Judaism. He believed in the upholding of traditional observances not because of their religious utility, but because they were expressive of the Jewish nation, because many of them link us to the remote past. Seeing the gradual disappearance of the little groups of emancipated Jews, and the great misery of the bulk of the Jewish people, he watched most jealously and anxiously over their destiny, desiring to preserve their original purity and ancestral dignity. “The Jew should live his own life,” said Hess: “Welcome to all fresh and sound symptoms of energy,” said Bourgeois. It is the same idea, bespeaking the same sense of humanity and real equality.