MAX NORDAU (born in Budapest, 1849), world-famous neurologist, author, and publicist, a Nestor among Jewish leaders, and since Herzl's death the President of the International Zionist Congresses. His books on "Degeneration," "Paradoxes," and other volumes of social studies, have evoked world-wide discussion. In sending the present article to The Menorah Journal from Madrid, where he is now sojourning on account of the War, Dr. Nordau writes: "I wish my words may not be dropped into deaf ears. You can do much to bring them home to the consciousness and the conscience of leading American Jews."
The Duty of the Hour
By Max Nordau
WE are the people of the Messiah. We feel, we think Messianic. In all situations of life, and particularly in the critical ones, we hope for a miraculous event which will fulfill all our yearnings, and in this hope we feel delivered of the manly duty to work for the realization of our ideals, to prepare our salvation by our own efforts.
At this moment a large portion of Israel dreams once more a particularly lively Messianic dream. Hundreds of thousands, millions of Jews, indeed, have abandoned themselves to the expectation that at the conclusion of the peace which will put a stop to the world's war, the destiny of the Jewish people must take a miraculous turn. The plenipotentiaries of the belligerent powers will assemble in a conference or a congress to treat of the conditions of peace. The conquerors will exact of the vanquished the price of their sacrifices and return home with their booty in the shape of territorial acquisitions and indemnities. And in the course of these transactions the miracle will happen that a share will be apportioned to the Jewish people too. Palestine will be offered them, either as an area for colonization or, still better, as a full property under the protectorate of a great power. They will be accorded also entire equality of rights in Russia and Roumania.
The Basis of Jewish Hopes: (1) The Self-Interest of the Powers
WE may plead reasons or excuses for indulging in this dream. Utterances of leading personalities of the big nations which will necessarily be represented at the peace conference have become publicly known which permit the conclusion, without intentional self-beguiling, that some governments at least, if not all of them, are occupying themselves earnestly with the Jewish problem and examining the question whether it might not be worth trying to settle the Jews in search of a homestead in Palestine, under international and local legal conditions vouchsafing them full freedom of economic, intellectual, and moral development.
On the other hand, there is no doubt that the situation of the six millions of Russian Jews occupies a certain place in the thoughts and cares of the governments. Several countries have an interest in turning away from their frontiers the ever more violently swelling stream of Jewish emigration, and doing so otherwise than with the brutal method of locking up their boundaries and posting a police watch before them. Others have the well-being of Russia at heart; they understand that the sufferings and the despair of her six millions of Jews are a source of dire evils and that the emancipation of this hard-working and highly gifted population will bring about the material prosperity, the general progress, and the powerful strengthening of Russia. Other countries again, the statesmen of which are more farseeing than the average and have been able to rise to the conception of a political world hygiene, are aware that the systematic crushing of six millions of intellectual and strong-feeling people driven to despair must create a hotbed of the most dangerous anarchistic and revolutionary epidemics, the spreading of which cannot easily be limited to the spot of their origin. Lastly, even the most irreclaimable pessimist will admit at least the possibility that governments may not be entirely inaccessible to purely humane sentiments of pity and justice, and may regard the treatment of the Jews of Russia and Roumania as an indictment against the civilization and the ruling religion of white mankind.
(2) The Precedent of 1878