The Right Hon. J. X. Merriman said in an address delivered on the 9th of July, 1914, in opening the Zionist Bazaar at Capetown, that “Zionism is a ramshackle movement, because it began in a very small way, and it had gradually spread. This had been achieved by the general effort of the people themselves, who had laudable desires. They had settled a good many people on the land and had brought to bear their remarkable faculty of energy, enterprize and skill in restoring Palestine to its former fertility.” On the following day the Bazaar was opened by Sir Thomas Smartt, M.L.A.: “There could be few,” said Sir Thomas in his eloquent address, “but what admired their great leader, Dr. Herzl, in his lofty ideal for re-establishment as in the days of old, after many years of wanderings, the ancient glories of their race—of establishing a nation which had done more than any other nation for the spread of religious thought throughout the world. Notwithstanding the long and dark ages of suffering and tribulation through which the race had passed, the love and devotion to its traditions were just as strong as ever. Their young men still continued to dream dreams and their old men to see visions of that sun of righteousness which was to rise with healing in its wings.” In seconding, Senator Powel said that it was a great satisfaction to know that the Palestine movement had got beyond the stage of dreams and visions, and was becoming an accomplished fact. He hoped that they would never slacken their efforts in what is one of the greatest movements in the world to-day.
At the General Conference of the Canadian Jews held in Montreal on the 14th of November, 1915, which was unique in the annals of the Jews of Canada (for this was the first time in their history that the representatives of every section and every element of the Canadian Jewish Community came together from all parts of Canada to take part in a conference), a representative of the Canadian Government, Mr. Maighen, brought the Assembly the good wishes of the Government for the success of the Conference and its high appreciation of that spirit of brotherhood which had caused them to come together. He spoke of the history and traditions of the Jewish race and of the debt that mankind owed to it. He referred to Jewish civilization as being the most ancient that influenced the world of to-day and of the wonderful way in which it had endured in spite of the ages of oppression its zealots had suffered. Speaking of the wish cherished so long by the Jews to regain possession of Palestine, Mr. Maighen gave utterance to the following: “I think I can speak for those of the Christian faith when I express the wish that God speed the day when the land of your forefathers shall be yours again. That task will, I hope, be performed by that champion of liberty the world over—the British Empire.” This speech shows how, in the minds of English statesmen, the question of rights for the Jews all over the world, and that of a Jewish homeland for the nation are bound up in one great principle of justice and freedom.
To conclude the way we began mention must be made of Christian religious literature, which continues to support Zionism in its own way. The Rev. Earle Langston published recently his ideas on the subject. The Christadelphians have published ample literature to which the learned Mr. Walker has contributed extensively. Mr. Frank Jannaway, an ardent Christadelphian whose interest in Jews and their homeland dates back some forty years, and who has paid several visits to Palestine at intervals of a few years, and has thus enjoyed some splendid opportunities of watching the gradual development of the Holy Land, has published a book, Palestine and the Jews (1914), of which two new editions, one of them entitled Palestine and the Powers, have since appeared. His knowledge is wide and thorough. He sees Palestine as the land of the future, and every new development is to him the fulfilment of a prophecy. He offers biblical chapter and verse for the happenings that have been convulsing the world, and in a way which reminds one of the oldest English pro-Zionist literature of the seventeenth century, which links up the position of the present and future aspects with sacred prediction. His views favour the Jewish cause and show considerable and correct acquaintance with the Zionist movement. It must finally be observed that during the last two years a great number of excellent articles have appeared in English newspapers and magazines, and some also in the French Press, in which great sympathy is expressed with the Zionist cause from a political, as well as from a humanitarian point of view.
ZIONISM DURING THE WAR
1914–1918
GENERAL SURVEY
The year 1914 will stand out as the Great Divide in contemporary history. It was a year of endings and beginnings. Humanity left an age behind it, and entered upon an age in which old things have passed away and all things had to become new.
Long feared and long foretold, yet never seriously expected, the European War came at last. Nations, great and small, arose in their strength, and gathered, in an avalanche of excitement, all their manhood to battle, all their old age to guard, and all their womanhood, not only as in bygone days, to tend and heal the wounded and sick, but also to do preparatory work for the fighting armies. Generations, young and old, rushed eagerly to defend their countries, leaving home, property, calling; knowing no fear save that here and there one of their fellow-citizens might prove less patriotic than themselves. The world was thrown back to the moral level and the ethical conceptions of thousands of years ago: man became again a wolf to man, as in the Pleistocene Age. On the one hand, the vast and bloody epic produced a sort of ecclesiastical moratorium which, for the duration of the war, annulled all moral obligations and abrogated the Ten Commandments, while on the other hand, it developed, to the highest degree, all the great and noble feelings—sense of honour, unselfishness, magnanimity, courage. Nationality, patriotism, the sense of duty, the spirit of sacrifice, enthusiastic heroism and patriotic martyrdom filled the hearts and created a new atmosphere, in which every kind of human activity was intensified: industry, art, science, and literature. This great storm, the greatest storm that had ever stirred mankind, produced the greatest spiritual tragedy the world has ever known. The most terrible aspect of the war was not the fact that Europe was being bled white, that all the amenities of civilization were breaking down with the strain of the military operations, and that each day some new and more brutal engine of destruction was prepared and brought into use, but—the ethical conflict carried on with minds and nerves on the rack of tense emotion which not only upset mental balance and changed the outlook of peoples, hitherto industrious and peaceful, but developed moral and social fears and passions which will not pass away in a day. This universal catastrophe would indeed have degraded the world into “a sort of malign middle term between a lunatic asylum and a butcher’s stall,” if it had not finally become—as it has become—“a war against war.” The peoples turned their ploughshares into swords, they ceased to make useful, beneficial rails and plates and angles and girders of their iron ore and their coal, and they manufactured harmful, destructive shells and guns to project them to the slaughter of the enemy, hoping that when the time came they would again turn their swords into ploughshares. They realized that the enemy of society is militarist despotism, and that militarist despotism therefore must be ended, or it will end society. A great moral idea arose out of this war: the liberation of oppressed small nations. Another great moral idea arising from it is the de-militarization of humanity. The whole world is now involved in a life or death struggle for righteousness. This is the justification for all the sufferings and all the sacrifices. If this war were not a war of principles and for ideals it would be nothing, and could result in nothing except the further enthronement of the doctrine and worship of force, and the perpetuation of the untold misery and degradation which that form of religion carries with it. It should never be forgotten that this was a war for liberty of the peoples, and in particular of the small peoples.
This great war has aggravated and made terribly clear the position of Jewry and the tragic problem of its existence as a small and oppressed nationality. The war has turned numerous Ghetti of Galicia, Bukovina, Russian Poland, Lithuania, Courland and Roumania into heaps of ashes, and hell would be pleasant compared with the situation of great masses of the Jewish people. In this war, particularly in Eastern Europe, hundreds of thousands of Jews were fighting against one another in the hostile camps of the belligerent countries; and the significant factor is that they were not fighting because they were forced to, but from a sense of supreme duty. Even among those that were fighting in the Russian Army before the Revolution, there were many who were not acting under compulsion: they were giving of their best and from their heart. They wanted to take their places in the virile, the over-virile world—which is also their world, they wanted to live and die taking their place in the great living society which called to them. The spirit of Europe—rather the spirit of present-day Europe, which was the spirit of obstinate conflicts and of extreme courage of devotion—has seized the Jews also: they also have entered into this tremendous catastrophe, into this pilgrimage through chaos towards a new world.
But for the Jews this war meant infinitely worse evil and greater danger; the nations were divided one from another, Jewry was divided against itself; each nation opposed its fixed shape and character, untouched even by defeat, to the overflooding chaos, but the Jewish nationality seemed to be its victim, in its own wavering and chaotic form of the Diaspora. It almost seemed as though there existed Jews, and divided Jews, but no Jewry.