| "Oh God, the heathen are come into Thine inheritance; |
| Thy holy Temple have they defiled; |
| They have laid Jerusalem in heaps."[1] |
This picture reveals the typical and traditional attitude of the Jew toward the land of his forefathers. Taught as children in the Cheder to turn their thoughts and desires toward Palestine; devoting themselves as men to the study of the Law and the Prophets and to the building upon this study of the vast Talmudic structure, until a spiritual Land of the Book may be said to have been created wherein they continually dwelt; crystallizing and adopting the Restoration as a dogma of the faith; commemorating with solemn fasts the Ninth of Ab as the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple by Titus; and repeating at each Passover with the pitiful hope of a child, "Next year in Jerusalem," the Jews have bound the memory of Palestine as a sign upon their hands and as frontlets between their eyes. They have indeed written it upon the door-posts of their houses and upon their gates, to the end—that they have wept and prayed. The vision of the prophets, which created and sustained this passionate ideal, itself inhibited the realization by emphasizing the redemption as miraculous, as a consummation to come in its own time without man's effort, and indeed in spite of man's will. And so, except for the sporadic and meteoric fiascos of mock-Messiahs, the Jews—this most practical of people—continued in hope and prayer to watch the centuries creep by. Frequently the hope flowered into the songs of a Judah Halevi or Ibn Gabirol, songs as sweet as have blossomed in the medieval garden; and the prayer found expression in a poignancy attributable only to the racial genius which created the Psalms; but until the nineteenth century the dream preserved all the qualities of a dream.
A Crusade for A Birthright
ON August 29, 1897, a congress convened in Basel, Switzerland, comparable in Jewry to the Council of Clermont; for in this congress two hundred and four Jews, acting as delegates of their people from half the countries in the world, assembled at the call of Theodor Herzl to go crusading for the recovery of Palestine. This difference, among others, may be apparent—the Christians sought the recovery of a grave; the Jews, of a cradle. Palestine was to be a cradle in two senses; this Congress, the first body representative of all Jewry to be convened in the Diaspora, claimed the land of Israel not by virtue of a death, but as a birthright, and furthermore hoped to find its recovery the opportunity for the rejuvenation of a people.
Quoting from his book, "The Jewish State"[2]—a book journalistic in style, but trumpet-toned in the note it sounded for political Zionism—Theodor Herzl offered the following definition of Zionism after the first Zionist Congress (1897): "Zionism has for its object the creation of a home, secured by public rights, for those Jews who either cannot or will not be assimilated in the country of their adoption."[3] Zionism, in a word, is not the last truism in a weary debate, nor a new verse to an old song; it is, on the contrary, a definite answer to a perplexing and imperative question. What are these Jews who cannot or will not be assimilated, and why cannot or will not they be assimilated? This question constitutes what is known as the Jewish problem, or, for those who deny or dislike the term, the Jewish position; and this question must first be fully stated before the Zionist or any other answer can be intelligible.
The Isolation of Medieval Jewry
THE Jews in the Middle Ages were considered by themselves, their few friends, and their many enemies, as a twice separated nation—a people separated from those among whom they dwelt and separated from the land in which they originated. They were governed by their own law—the Lex Judæorum—which was recognized by the authorities of the land in which they lived as peculiar and proper to them;[4] they dwelt in communal groups which were bound together by common interests; they observed their own customs and nourished their own culture; they were held to be foreigners, and in a comparison of their own with the Christian civilization, they readily acknowledged this status. The force of persecution without and the religious conviction of superiority, separateness, and nationality within, preserved and constantly increased this solidarity.[5]
That the existence of a separate, recalcitrant, and even obnoxious nation within a nation did not constitute a problem for the medievals may be attributable to two reasons: (1) the medieval theory of life accentuated a hierarchical order of existence—a theory that found expression in feudalism, in Church organization, and in guild and craft life; in pursuance of this theory, the Jews were accorded a recognized and distinct status; (2) furthermore, the Jews were an economic necessity in the times when a ban was laid on money-lending, and they constituted an important economic facility at a little later period when capital could indeed be worked but when rivalry and hatreds rendered communication uncertain.[6] To the maintenance of Jewish solidarity and the preservation of things Jewish qua Jewish, sacrifices culminating in the surrender of life bequeathed to the race a comprehensive martyrology.[7]
Ernest Renan defines a nation as "a great solidarity constituted by the sentiment of the sacrifices that its citizens have made and those they feel prepared to make once more. It implies a past, but is summed up in the present by a tangible fact—the clearly expressed desire to live a common life." In sum, the Jews throughout the Middle Ages, which was prolonged for them until a little less than two hundred years ago, comprised a nation as virtual in point of their own claim and its recognition by other nations as in the days when they were established in Palestine. Renaissance, Reformation, and the rediscovery of the world by science failed to make an impression on the thick ghetto walls; and Jewish isolation, even as late as the eighteenth century, may be vividly realized by thinking of Rousseau and Voltaire in contrast with the contemporary lights of Jewry—Elijah Gaon and Israel Besht,[8] men as medieval as a gargoyle.
The French Revolution with its early philosophy of naturalism and humanism and its later political expression in liberty, equality, and fraternity, razed the physical and spiritual walls of the ghetto and set up the "Jewish problem." Following the Revolution, four currents of thought and action, working both simultaneously and successively, causing, reacting upon, and intermingling with one another, affecting the Jews now favorably and now unfavorably, went into the making of this problem. To deal with Emancipation, Enlightenment, Nationalism, and Anti-Semitism in detail would consume a volume, but an outline of their bearing on the present situation is essential.