For Zionism to them can never become a personal ideal, something requisite for the salvation of their souls. It can at its best appeal to them, in so far as they are consciously Jewish, as the cause of the nation as a whole; and consequently the mere suspicion that their affiliation with the movement might be held up against them as an impugnment of their loyalty to the land of their birth and abode is sufficient to keep them aloof from it. It was very interesting for me to notice how everywhere, after a long manœuvre of Zionist discussions with good Jewish young men, they would finally halt at their unshakable position that Zionists might arouse the suspicion of their Gentile neighbors as to the loyalty and patriotism of the Jews. Where people are obsessed by the fear of being misunderstood in doing what they otherwise think to be good and impeccable, no arguments, of course, can avail. They are in this respect characteristically Jewish. In their Brand-like racial frame of mind, the Jews could never stop midway between the two antipodes of roving world-citizenry and hidebound mono-patriotism. It is probable that their attitude will change as soon as it is generally realized that personal devotion and loyalty to two causes are not psychologically a self-deception, and that the serving of two masters is not a moral anomaly unless, as in the original adage, one of the masters be Satanic.
Extract from a letter received from William Chadwick, President of the Hebrew Congregation and the Adler Society, Oxford University, England, commenting on the section devoted to England in Mr. Wolfson's article in our January number: "The remarks of Mr. Wolfson, whom we remember very well, concerning Oxford, were very apt for the time; but in Oxford, one particular type of Judaism never remains for long; Judaism here is in a state of perpetual flux, and to seize upon any one moment and represent that view as a type of Oxford's Judaism is very erroneous. I am sure that if Mr. Wolfson were here now, he would not recognize the services or the attitude now prevalent. I doubt if he would now hear Liberal Judaism apostrophised 'as the safeguard of modern Jews from the attractiveness of the superior teachings of Christ.'"
Zionism: A Menorah Prize Essay
By Marvin M. Lowenthal
MARVIN M. LOWENTHAL (born in Bradford, Pa., in 1890) is at present a Senior in the University of Wisconsin. He has won the Wisconsin Menorah Society Prize twice—in 1912 for an essay on "The Jew in the American Revolution," and in 1914 for the essay on "Zionism" here published for the first time. Mr. Lowenthal is now the President of the Wisconsin Zionist Society.
AT the head of an alley-way hard by the Place of the Temple, the Haram-esh-Sherif, in Jerusalem, a long wall built in rough-hewn courses lifts itself above the squalor of the Moghrebin quarter to an eastern sky from which a sun that seldom sleeps bakes the grey stones, bares every detail of a crumbling ruin, and intensifies the wistful odor of decay. This, the remnant of Solomon's glory, is the Wailing Wall of the Jews. Clad in sackcloth and covered with ashes, patriarchal figures sway to and fro, press their lips to the hot granite, beat now their chests and now the wall, and today, as every day for eighteen hundreds of years, wail in the words of the Psalmist: