Why did the Jewish people suffer two thousand years under the dispersion and why did they not try during this long period to re-establish their political sovereignty in the land of their ancestors? Even the best of our thinkers ascribe this national default and political apathy to a sort of lethargy of which the Jews were apparently the victims. To many a Jewish thinker, Ahad Ha'am not excepted, the past two thousand years of Jewish existence appears to be planless and one great historic confusion; but on looking closely at developments, one will come to recognize that not because of lethargy, but because of given historical conditions, the Jewish people could not up to our times have attempted to re-establish their national sovereignty in the land of their forefathers. More than a thousand years after the downfall of western Rome, Mediterranean civilization, though degenerated, remained supreme and was identical with civilization at large. The chief move of its centre from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and the consolidation of a new center was accomplished only after a struggle of nearly five hundred years. So long as Atlantic civilization was not supreme and so long as the fight for its supremacy was not finished, the political re-establishment of Judea, closely connected with the settlement of the solution of questions arising out of the fight for the Atlantic and all that there is to it—the individualization of international politics, the preservation of the small nationalities, their political restoration, etc.—could not be taken up and no serious attempt to re-establish the Jewish nationality in Palestine could be made by the Jews or other nations interested in the settlement of the Jewish question.
For these reasons, the re-establishment of Judea, as one of the post-bellum problems, is as historically logical now as was the downfall of Judea a historical necessity two thousand years ago.
There are no blind chances in history, nor are there stagnant moments in history. History has its reasons, which, however, reason often fails to understand.
LAND AND PEOPLE
Ever since the Jewish people lost its national independence and sovereignty and began to live in dispersion among the nations of the earth, it has lost the opportunity and possibility of continuing the work of its national civilization and has had to be satisfied with producing cultural values only. Everything that individual Jews have achieved in the past two thousand years in the domain of civilization has been an enrichment of the civilization of the peoples among whom they have lived. Jews have always been prominent in commerce and industry, but there was no national Jewish commerce and no national Jewish industry, even when those who created and developed certain branches of commerce were all Jews. Their commercial and industrial activities and accomplishments strengthened the other nations among whom the Jews lived, but not themselves. In many cases they have endangered and imperiled the Jewish people, because they became the arsenal of anti-Semitic weapons. The individual has profited by Jewish industrial and commercial achievements, but not the Jewish collective body. In short, all our work and energy in the domain of practical civilization has reached not the Jewish people, but other nations, and only a few have given us credit for these achievements.
Often enough have we been blamed for them. The Dutchman is full of envy of the Jew to the present day for having monopolized the diamond cutting industry; the Turks are still angry when they remember that Baron de Hirsch built their railroads. In Switzerland people are blaming the Jews for having monopolized the silk and watch industries; the Russians antagonize them because of their big share in the development of the petrol wells in the Caucasus and in the lumber business in western Russia. A famous German professor, Werner Sombart, has written a voluminous book of five hundred pages in which he indicts us for having developed capitalism, while others are accusing the Jews of having produced anti-capitalistic forces. In short, not only have the activities of individual Jews in the domain of civilization not been of profit to them as a people, but they have in too many cases served as a basis of attack.
The cause of these peculiar phenomena was our diaspora life. We had no homeland of our own. We had no national soil beneath us and no national sky above us. We were a wandering people and as such could not produce a national civilization, which involves and presupposes a static and not a dynamic order of things. But as soon as the Jews can lead a normal national life, all this, unhappy and tragic, will change radically and an entirely new order of things will arise. Not the Jewish individual, as heretofore, but the Jewish people at large, will be the agency of the Jewish genius and whatever the Jewish individual has to contribute to civilization he will contribute through the Jewish people. While his achievements in this domain will serve humanity, as heretofore, they will at the same time enrich the life of his own people and become a source of strength instead of weakness; when the Jews have an opportunity to be active for civilization as Jews, Jewish individualism, the curse of our racial life, will gradually disappear.
Only a few of us realize the fact that this individualism, which finds its unpleasant expression in petty factionalism, communal strife, party quarrels and lack of discipline among the rank and file, is in the main to be ascribed to the fact that the Jews have no national civilization. If we had one, many an unpleasant phenomenon in our public life would be impossible. If the Jews had common political responsibilities, if they had all to look to the safety of their country, if they had all to look after their national economic interests, the national intellect would be more uniform and two Jews would not have three different opinions. It is the lack of a national Jewish civilization that makes the Jewish intellect queer and misshapen. The mind of a people can only be trained by its national civilization, and is orientated by it. But since the Jews have lacked national civilization for the last two thousand years, the intellect of the nation has lost its uniformity, has become atomized and has in many cases gone astray. This has added to our inner misery and has driven many an idealistic Jew to despair. At the moment when the Jews begin to lead a national life on national soil and under their own sky, which give out line and color to the soul of a nation, many negative energies which are active in our life because of the effects of diaspora existence must necessarily disappear. The intellectual discipline of the nation will be re-established and the life of its soul will again assume normal proportions. There will be a Jewish public opinion in the best meaning of the term, not merely the opinion of individual Jews.