The persecution of the Jews in Russia, their oppression in Roumania and the revival of the old prejudice against them in Western Europe during the last quarter of the nineteenth century have, as has been pointed out, arrested the gradual denationalisation of Judaism, which had commenced in the latter part of the eighteenth under Mendelssohn’s impulse, and, in proportion as they have widened the hostility between Jew and Gentile, they have tended to tighten the links of sympathy between the Jews scattered in various parts of the world. Under the benign influence of persecution Jewish patriotism has again blazed up into flame. This sentiment has found a practical expression in many movements set on foot for the relief and rescue of the suffering race. One movement of the kind, prompted by the anti-Jewish agitation in Russia and the resuscitation of the blood accusation against the Jews of the Near East in the ’fifties, resulted in the birth of a society the object of which it is to watch over the interests of the Jews in the countries where they are exposed to danger, to protect them against persecution, to promote their material welfare, and to encourage their intellectual development. This is the Alliance Israélite Universelle, founded in Paris, in 1860. Its funds are derived from thousands of subscribers all over the world, and its work is carried on by branch establishments in many countries. The educational activity of the Alliance is especially directed to the Near East and the coast of North Africa—Bulgaria, Turkey in Europe and Asia, Persia, Egypt, Tripoli, Tunis, Algeria, Morocco. In all these countries it maintains numerous schools at an annual expense which in 1903 amounted to 1,200,000 francs. In connection with the Alliance there was established, in 1871, in London the Anglo-Jewish Association, and in Vienna the Israelitische Allianz, whose principal aim is the elevation of the Jews of Galicia. It was mainly through these societies that the cause of the Roumanian Jews was advocated in 1872 and that the members of the Congress of Berlin, in 1878, were induced to take the ineffectual steps already described for the improvement of the condition of the Jews in Roumania and Servia. Foremost among these, and many other organisations for the succour of Jewish victims of persecution, stands Baron Hirsch’s gigantic fund of £9,000,000 for the settlement of emigrants in new countries.

But all these efforts can only be described as palliatives. They aim simply at a temporary alleviation of the sufferings of Israel; they do not attempt to provide a radical remedy for the evil. The only remedies that history points out as worthy of the name are either assimilation of the Jews in various countries to the Gentiles among whom they dwell, or separation from the latter, geographical as well as political. The first alternative, as we have seen, has from time to time appeared within a certain distance of partial realisation, reaching its nearest approach in the years following on the emancipation of the race under the influence of the broad principles of humanitarianism which reigned during the latter half of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Whether this approach would ever have developed into a general absorption of the Jews is a speculative question which admits of more answers than one. The fact that is of greater value to the historian is that such a development was checked by the reaction already described under the name of anti-Semitism. Hence the other remedy has come more and more to the front under the name of Zionism.

The movement combines in itself two aims, a practical and a sentimental one. Its practical aim is to provide a solution of the Jewish problem by bringing about the geographical and political separation of the Jews from the Gentiles. Its sentimental aim is to satisfy the traditional attachment of the Jews to the land of their origin. In neither of its two aims can the movement, under its modern aspect, claim to be original. Attempts to restore the Jewish State, in some form or other, have repeatedly been made in the past. In the middle of the sixteenth century—the age of the Ghetto—Tiberias was proposed by a Jew as the seat of a new Jewish State. In the middle of the seventeenth—the age of Sabbataï Zebi—three more schemes of the kind were advocated: one for a settlement of the Jews in the Dutch West Indies, another for their emigration to Dutch Guiana, and a third recommended French Guiana. In the middle of the eighteenth century South America was again proposed, and North America in the middle of the nineteenth. But none of these proposals succeeded in evoking any enthusiasm among the Jews. On the contrary, the orthodox Jews—and such are the majority of Eastern European Jews—led by their Rabbis, strenuously opposed the last suggestion of emigration to America which was made by their more advanced brethren of the West; and the plan perished still-born.

The Zionist movement, on the other hand, differs from all former movements, except the first, inasmuch as it strives to enlist in its favour the heart as well as the head of Israel. In selecting Palestine as the future home of the race, the leaders of the movement have endeavoured to gratify a craving, the force of which it is easy to exaggerate, but impossible to ignore. If there is in Jewish history one event that has exercised a lasting influence over the fortunes of the nation, it is the destruction of Jerusalem and the consequent dispersion. If there is one sentiment that has bound the branches of the Jewish family together through the ages, more strongly than any other, it is the hope of ultimate rehabilitation. For eighteen hundred years the children of Israel have wandered over the earth, insulted, oppressed, persecuted, without a country, without a home, with scarcely a resting place, strangers in every realm in which they pitched their tent. But, though banished from the land of their birth and far from the tombs of their forefathers, the vast majority of them have preserved, amidst all trials and temptations, their traditions, their usages and their faith unimpaired. Without the hope of restoration such constancy would have been impossible and meaningless.

The destruction of Zion cast its shadow over the soul of the Jewish people throughout the Middle Ages, and the mourning for it is the most picturesque, the most pathetic, and the most prominent feature of their public and domestic life. In the synagogues, as well as in many private houses, a space on the wall was always left unpainted to recall the national humiliation. The Jews of every country in token of grief wore black, whence they were called “Mourners of Zion.” In memory of the same calamity gold and silver ornaments were banished from the bridal wreath, and ashes were strewn over the heads of the bride and the bridegroom at weddings. In Germany the bridegroom wore a cowl of mourning and the bride a white shroud. A mediaeval table-hymn, sung after the meal on Friday evenings, or Saturday mornings, ran as follows:

Similar examples might be cited from every side—all showing that the sad memories of the past and the belief in ultimate triumph were the two poles between which revolved the spiritual life of the nation. The Prophets who had predicted the dispersion and the captivity of the children of Israel had also predicted their repatriation. “Behold, I will gather them out of all countries whither I have driven them in mine anger, and in my fury, and in great wrath; and I will bring them again unto this place, and I will cause them to dwell safely.”297 This hope was the life-belt which enabled the Jew to float amidst the wrecks of so many storms during eighteen centuries. In the night of their darkest desolation the Jews kept their eyes fixed to the East, and said to themselves and to one another, “Courage, the day is at hand.” Attachment to Faith and Fatherland—the religious and the national ideals—are the two strands, indissolubly entwined, of that great Messianic dream which runs like a golden thread through the black web of Jewish history. The Holy Land never ceased to be regarded as the true home of the race. Benjamin of Tudela, writing about the middle of the twelfth century, testifies to the tenacity with which many of the Jewish communities in Europe, which he visited in his tour, clung to the belief that they were destined to be redeemed from captivity and be gathered together in the fulness of time. The various Messiahs whose rise and failure have been narrated in the foregoing pages would never have attained their wonderful popularity but for this belief. But even in normal times it was the ardent desire of every good Jew to die in Jerusalem, and the longing of some to live there. This desire was nursed by the poets and thinkers of Israel. We have seen at the beginning of the twelfth century Jehuda Halevi addressing Zion, in accents full of tenderness, as his “woe-begone darling,” and in fulfilment of a life-long vow ending his days among her ruins. ♦1211♦ A century later three hundred Rabbis from France and England set out for Palestine.

In 1267 Nachmanides, faithful to his own teaching, performed the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and found the city, owing to the ravages of the Mongols, a heap of ruins—a devastation which was considered to indicate the near approach of the Messiah. Nachmanides, in a letter to his son, thus describes the melancholy sight: “Great is the solitude and great the wastes, and, to characterise it in short, the more sacred the places, the greater the desolation. Jerusalem is more desolate than the rest of the country: Judaea more than Galilee. But even in this destruction it is a blessed land.” He goes on to say that, among the two thousand inhabitants to which the population of Jerusalem had been reduced by the Sultan’s sword, he found only two Jews, two brothers, dyers by trade, in whose house the Ten Men, the quorum necessary to form a congregation for the purpose of worship, met on the Sabbath, when they could; for Jews and Jewesses—“wretched folk, without occupation and trade, pilgrims and beggars”—continued to come from Damascus, Aleppo, and from other parts, to mourn over the ruins of Zion. In spite of all the afflictions which met his eye, and in spite of his longing for the friends and kinsmen whom the aged pilgrim had forsaken without hope of ever seeing again, Nachmanides is able to declare that for all those losses he is amply compensated by “the joy of being a day in thy courts, O Jerusalem, visiting the ruins of the Temple and crying over the ruined Sanctuary; where I am permitted to caress the stones, to fondle the dust, and to weep over thy ruins. I wept bitterly, but I found joy in my tears. I tore my garments, but I felt relieved by it.” Nor does the Jew’s sublime optimism fail him even in view of that desolation: “He who thought us worthy to let us see Jerusalem in her desertion, he shall bless us to behold her again, built and restored when the glory of the Lord will return unto her ... you, my son, you all shall live to see the salvation of Jerusalem and the comfort of Zion.”298

The example of this noble old man was followed by many Jews of Spain and Germany, both in his own and in subsequent times. Down to this day a pilgrimage to Jerusalem is considered a sacred duty, and many devote the savings of a laborious life to defray the expenses of a last visit to the Fatherland—“our own land.” Like shipwrecked mariners long tost on the waves, they drift year after year from all parts of the world to this harbour of rest and sorrow and hope. On the eve of the Passover aged Jews and Jewesses of every country on earth may be seen leaning against the grim ruin of the Temple—all that remains of the magnificence of Israel—weeping and wailing for the fall of their nation. They kiss the ancient stones, they water them with their tears, and the place rings with their poignant lamentations.

And yet, though many come to lament the faded lustre of their race, and are happy to die in Palestine, how many are there who would care to live in it? This is a question to which different Jews would give different answers. It may be urged that the longing for Zion is a romantic dream which might lose much of its romance by realisation. It can also be shown that the Jewish people has seldom thriven in isolation; that a narrow environment is uncongenial to its temperament; and that the Jew has always instinctively preferred the life which is more suitable to the free development of his gifts—that is, the life of competition with foreign nations. All this may be to a great extent true; but, none the less, there are Jews who believe that the majority of their race, or at all events the suffering portion of it, would, under favourable conditions, gladly return to the land of their ancestors. The same belief has been held by several distinguished Christians, British and American, who at various times have lent their support to the movement for Jewish rehabilitation—some actuated by an enthusiasm for the Millennium, others by an enthusiasm for British interests in the East. Among the latter may be mentioned Lord Palmerston and Lord Salisbury, both of whom years ago countenanced the attempts made to obtain from the Sultan a concession of territory in Palestine for the purpose of establishing a self-governing Jewish colony.299

But while the bulk of the race enjoyed comparative toleration, few Jews were there found willing to relinquish the land of their adoption for the gratification of a merely sentimental yearning towards that of their remote forefathers. It was not until the revival of persecution under its more rabid and sanguinary forms that the Zionist Utopia became a living reality, and the assertion of Gentile Nationalism led to a corresponding invigoration of Jewish Nationalism. Then the Jews began to consider seriously the problem of the future of their race, and to cast about, once more, for a refuge where they could worship their God unmolested, develop their moral and intellectual tendencies uninfluenced by an alien environment, and pursue their daily occupations unfettered by legal restrictions. Such a refuge could only be found in Palestine. One of the promoters of this idea summed up the reasons, which led him to the choice of Palestine, in the following terms:

“In Europe and America it is a crime to have an Oriental genius or an Oriental nose; therefore, in God’s name, let the Jew go where his genius will be free and his nose not remarked.”300

The massacres of Russian Jews in 1881 and 1882 coincided with the publication of various schemes of rescue by members of the persecuted race, who found many sympathisers outside Russia. The practical fruit of the agitation was the birth, among other committees and societies all over Russia and Roumania, of an association under the name of “Chovevi (Lovers of) Zion,” the programme of which was to promote the settlement of Jewish refugees in the Holy Land with a view to the ultimate creation of an autonomous Jewish State. This was the origin of the movement now known all over the world by the name of Zionism. From the very first it met with a reception which proved how sincere and how widespread was the desire for a return to the Land of Promise. A writer, well qualified to speak on the subject, thus describes the welcome accorded to the proposal: “It has seized upon the imagination of the masses and produced a wave of enthusiasm in favour of emigration to Palestine, the force and the extent of which only those who have come in contact with it, as I have done, can appreciate.”301

It was not, however, until 1896, when Dr. Theodor Herzl came forward with a definite plan, that the movement acquired cosmopolitan importance and was placed on a solid practical foundation. Dr. Herzl was a Jewish journalist of Vienna, born in Buda-Pesth on the 2nd of May, 1860. He was the son of a well-to-do merchant, and was educated in Vienna, where his parents had removed shortly after his birth. Having for some time practised at the Bar, he subsequently gave up Law for Literature, contributed to the Berliner Tageblatt and other journals, and wrote several novels and plays. In 1891 he was appointed Paris correspondent of the Vienna Neue Freie Presse, and it was during his sojourn in Paris that Dr. Herzl, filled with indignation at the outburst of French anti-Semitism, and dismayed by the triumph of the enemies of the Jews in Austria, resolved to undertake the lead in the movement for the rescue of his co-religionists. Even if no practical result were attained, he felt that the effort would not be utterly wasted, as it would, at all events, tend—in the words of the Zionist programme adopted at the first Congress in Basel, in 1897—to promote “the strengthening of Jewish individual dignity and national consciousness.”

Firm in this conviction, the young leader expounded his scheme in a pamphlet which appeared in 1896 in the three principal European languages, under the title, The Jewish State: an attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question. According to Dr. Herzl’s proposal the State was to be a self-governing republic tributary to the Porte. Christian susceptibilities would be consulted, and diplomatic complications avoided, by establishing the principle of broad religious toleration, and by excluding from Jewish jurisdiction the scenes of Christ’s life and death, and the shrines of the different Christian communities in Palestine. The plan was received with applause by a minority in every quarter, and Dr. Herzl found enthusiasts in both hemispheres ready to help the cause with their pens and with their purses. A Zionist newspaper was founded in Vienna (Die Welt), a new Zionist Association was organised with numerous ramifications in all parts of the Jewish world, and in less than seven years from its beginning the movement numbered several hundred thousand of adherents. The Association holds annual Congresses in various great European centres, with a view to disseminating the idea, discussing all details connected with the movement and deciding on the practical steps necessary to its success.

It is obvious that the first requisite was the Turkish Government’s consent to the acquisition of land in Palestine on the terms already described. For this purpose Dr. Herzl paid a visit to Yildiz Kiosk in May, 1901, and again in August, 1902. The latter expedition was undertaken in response to a telegraphic invitation from the Sultan himself, who expressed the desire to be informed of the precise programme of the Zionists. Regular conferences took place with high officials both of the Palace and of the Porte, and in the end Dr. Herzl drew up and laid before Abdul Hamid a minute statement of his views, explaining the demands of the Zionists and formulating the conditions of a Jewish settlement in a part of Palestine and elsewhere in Asia Minor, on the basis of a charter. The proposals were duly considered, and the Sultan expressed his deep sympathy with the Jewish people, but the concessions which he was prepared to make for a Jewish settlement were not considered adequate by the leaders of the Zionist movement, and the negotiations led to no definite result.302

Indeed, the obstacles in the way of a satisfactory arrangement on the basis of the Zionist programme are neither few nor small. The Turks, it is true, have always displayed towards the Jews a degree of toleration such as the latter have seldom experienced at the hands of Christians. As we have seen, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Turkey was the only country that offered an asylum to the Jewish refugees from the West. Religious sympathy may be partially responsible for this toleration, strengthened by the fact that the Jews of Turkey, devoid of all national aspirations, are distinguished among the Sultan’s subjects by their loyalty to the Ottoman rule, and by their readiness to help the Porte in the suppression of Christian rebellion. It has also been suggested that Abdul Hamid was anxious, by a display of sympathy with the Jews generally and the Zionists in particular, to secure their powerful championship in the West against the host of enemies which the Armenian massacres had raised to his Empire. Hence the present Sultan’s attitude towards the race—an attitude which in its benevolence contrasts strongly, if not strangely, with the treatment meted out to his Christian subjects. In 1901 Abdul Hamid appointed members of the Hebrew community to important posts in the Turkish army, and attached two more to his personal entourage. On another occasion, when a blood-accusation was brought against the Jews by the Christians of the East, he caused the local authorities to take steps to prove its groundlessness and clear the Jews of the heinous charge. And yet, it would be hard to imagine the Sultan giving his sanction to the creation of a fresh nationality within his Empire, and thus adding a new political problem to the list, already sufficiently long, which makes up the contemporary history of Turkey. Moreover, concerning the return of the Jews to the Land of Promise, there are certain old prophecies to whose fulfilment no true Mohammedan can be expected to contribute. For both these reasons, political and religious, the Turkish Government in 1882, upon hearing that the Jews who fled from Russia were meditating an immigration into Palestine, hastened to arrest the movement.

But, even if the Sultan could be brought, as Dr. Herzl hoped, “to perceive the advantages that would accrue to his Empire from a Jewish settlement on the basis of the Zionist programme,” it should not be forgotten that the Sultan is not the only, or indeed the most important, agent in the matter. Palestine, and Asia Minor generally, is a field for the eventual occupation of which struggle most of the Great Powers of Europe. Missions of a semi-religious, semi-political character, representing several European nationalities, and sedulously supported by several European Governments, have long been at work in the land. Among them may be mentioned the Russian, the French, the Italian, and the German. Russia, who persecutes the Jews at home, would not see with any degree of pleasure a hostile population, consisting for the most part of her own victims, settled in a province to the ultimate absorption of which she aspires; the less so as that population will in all probability be under British influence. Although, for reasons not difficult to fathom, the Russian Consuls in Palestine and Syria are instructed to extend over the Russian Jews in those countries a protection with which the latter very often would gladly dispense, the Russian Minister of Finance, in 1902, forbade the sale of the Jewish Colonial Trust shares in the Czar’s dominions—a step which created great perturbation in the ranks of Polish Zionists, the most deeply affected by the prohibition.303 This measure, harmonising as it does with Russia’s well-known designs in Palestine, throws on that Power’s real attitude towards Zionism a light too clear to be affected even by the Russian Government’s assurances of a benevolent interest in the movement.304 An analogous opposition, in a minor degree, may reasonably be anticipated on the part of the rival Powers, especially Germany, and that despite the promises which the German Emperor made to the delegation of Zionists who waited on him during his visit to Palestine in 1898. Both Russia and Germany enjoy a strong ascendancy over the present Sultan, whose fear of the one Power and appreciation of the other’s friendship are too lively to permit of any action calculated to offend either. The Christians of the East are also a power to be reckoned with, and they, any more than the Christians of the West, would not bear to see the sanctuary of Christendom falling into the hands of the “enemies of Christ.” The extra-territorialisation of Jerusalem has indeed been suggested by the Zionists. But is it to be expected that the Jews will ever really resign themselves to the final abandonment of Zion? The more powerful they grew in Palestine the less inclined would they be to suffer the ancient capital of their nation to remain in any hands but Israel’s.

To these external difficulties must be added the lack of unanimity among the Jews themselves. Although the Zionist movement is undoubtedly enjoying a considerable measure of popularity, it is subject to a measure of opposition no less considerable. The great Jewish financiers of the West, who, thanks to their wealth, have little reason to complain of persecution, have hitherto shown themselves coldly sceptical, or even contemptuous, towards the idea. Nor has its reception been more cordial among the high spiritual authorities of Israel. Both these classes hold that the plan of restoration, even if it prove feasible, is not desirable. To the cultured and prosperous Jew of the West the prospect of exchanging the comforts and elegant luxuries of civilised life in a European or American city for the barren obscurity of an Asiatic province is not alluring. The re-settlement of Israel in Palestine has no charm for him. To him the old prophecies are an incumbrance, and their fulfilment would be a disappointment. For such a Jew nothing could be more inexpedient or more embarrassing than the advent of the Messiah. This attitude is well illustrated by a saying attributed to a member of the wealthiest Jewish family in Europe: “If ever the Messiah came,” is this gentleman reported to have said, “I would apply for the post of Palestinian ambassador in London.” Less polished, but not less significant, was another Western Jew’s terse reply to the question whether he would go to Palestine: “Pas si bête.”

Even so, what time Cyrus permitted the captives of Babylon to return to the land of their fathers, many preferred to remain in rich Mesopotamia. The sacrifice of present comfort in the pursuit of a romantic ideal presupposes a degree of emotional fervour and of material wretchedness that it would be unreasonable, if not uncharitable, to demand from a whole nation. But this opposition, or indifference, to the Zionist efforts at repatriation does not necessarily and in all cases spring from worldly motives of self-indulgence. It is only one manifestation of a sincere divergence of sentiment which has its sources deep in the past of the Jewish race, or, one might say, of human nature, and which can only be adequately treated in a separate work on Modern Judaism. Here it is sufficient to describe it only in so far as it bears on the subject immediately under discussion. Zionism, while acclaimed with enthusiasm by the Jews of the East, has met in the West with two sets of adversaries who, though asunder as the poles, have found a common standpoint in their opposition to the movement. These adversaries are the extreme Liberal and the extreme Orthodox Jews of Western Europe and America—the Sadducees and Pharisees of to-day. The one scoffs at the movement as too idealistic, the other as not idealistic enough. The contempt of the one is based on commonsense; that of the other on the Bible. The one objects to all Messiahs; the other refuses to follow any but the Messiah. To the one Dr. Herzl appeared as a dreamer of dreams; to the other as a prosaic utilitarian. The sentimental aim of Zionism is an offence in the eyes of the one; the other condemns its methods as sordidly practical. They both, starting from diametrically opposite premises, arrive at the conclusion that the movement is a set-back of Jewish history, an agitation, artificial and superfluous, which “has no roots in the past and no fruits to offer for the future.”

The Liberal Jew’s ideal is not separation from the natives of the country of his adoption, but assimilation to them. He has long lived in political freedom. All careers are open to him; all objects of distinction for which men strive are within his reach. He is an ardent patriot. The political toleration to which he owes his liberty is accompanied by a religious breadth, or may be scepticism, in which he fully participates. Like his Christian neighbour, he is content to live in the present. He has gradually abandoned the ceremonial observances of the Law and the belief in a Messianic restoration, and is trying to obliterate all traces of tribal distinction. By intermarriage and education he endeavours to identify himself with the country of which he is a citizen. In point of nationality he calls himself a German, a Frenchman, an Italian, an Englishman, or an American. In point of creed he may be a Reformed Jew, a Unitarian, a Theist, an Atheist, or a placid Agnostic. This attitude is as intelligible as the sentiment from which it springs is respectable. Such a Jew feels that he cannot be a citizen of two cities. He must choose; and in his choice he is guided by self-analysis. He feels that the country of his birth has greater claims upon him than the country of his remote origin; that he has more in common with his next-door neighbours than with the Patriarchs and Prophets of Asia.

To this category evidently belongs the anonymous author of a book that may be regarded as the Liberal Jew’s apologia pro vita sua. After having demonstrated that among modern Jews there is, strictly speaking, neither racial nor religious unity, the writer goes on to explain what, in his opinion, should be the attitude of “the modern Occidental Jew”:

“Such a Jew, educated in an English, German, French, or American school and university, is certainly in looks, manners, character, habits, tastes, and ideas as different from a Jew of Turkey, or Egypt, or Russia as he can well be. The people to whom he corresponds in all essential points are the people of his own country in which he was born and bred and has lived.... Now, what must such an Occidental Jew say of himself, if he is true to himself, and if he recognises truth in all matters as the supreme guide of man? He will have to say that the strict racial unity of the Jews is doubtful, even with regard to the past; and as regards the present he will have to deny it altogether.”305

The author proceeds to point out that, with regard to his moral and intellectual development, the Occidental Jew has undergone the same educational influences as his Christian compatriot and contemporary: Hebraism, through the Bible, Hellenism through the Renaissance, Catholicism, Chivalry, Reformation, French Revolution: “He must finally, above all, remember his indebtedness to the moral standard of modern times, that love of man as man which is the result of no one of these currents alone, but is the outcome of the action of all of them, and to the standard of truth, as intensified by modern science. Now, realising all this, he must admit that a very small portion of his moral and intellectual existence is Jewish in the Oriental sense of the term, and he cannot thus be cramped back into the laws which are to govern the thought and life of a Jew as laid down in the Talmud and embraced by the practices of the devout and observant Jew. He is speaking and living a lie if he denies this by word or deed.”306

The practical question arises: “Recognising the evils of racial exclusiveness, what ought such a modern Occidental Jew to do?” The answer is: “He has simply to live up to his convictions in every detail of his life. He must not only, as he has ever done, perform the duties of a citizen in the country in which he lives, fully and conscientiously, but he must refuse, as far as the race question goes, in any way to recognise the separate claims of the Jews within his country.... He may feel justly proud of being a descendant of a race which is not only the oldest and purest, but has through many centuries steadfastly followed the guidance of a great spiritual idea to the blessing of mankind, just as a Norman, or a Saxon, or a Celt in Great Britain may, when called upon to do so, consider, and be gratified by, the memory of his own racial origin. Beyond this he must not go. He must spurn and avoid all those symbols and rites which have been established to signify a separate, even though a chosen, people. His marriage and his choice of friends must be exclusively guided by those considerations of inner affinity which are likely to make such unions perfect as far as things human can be perfect.”307

Such a Jew’s advice, if asked by his less advanced brethren of Eastern Europe, would be, not to perpetuate the narrowness of antiquity, but to share in the broad development of modern civilisation. Not to go back to the political and religious isolation of Palestine, but to move on with the political and religious progress of modern Europe and America: to seek for light not in the East but in the West. He regards the memories of Israel with indifference, and its aspirations with perplexity. He can hardly enter into his Polish brother’s soul and realise his modes of thought and feeling. To him the longing for Zion is an incomprehensible mystery, the attempt to gratify it a wild and hopeless adventure. If Eastern Europe will not have the Jews, he is ready to help them to migrate to Western Europe, or to America; but with the Zionist Utopia he neither can nor will have anything to do. When told that Western Europe has eloquently declared her hostility, and America may soon follow, he calmly answers that anti-Semitism is a passing cloud; the wind which has wafted it over the western sky will, sooner or later, dissipate it.

Precisely similar are the views entertained by the cultured minority of Russian and more especially of Polish Jews. Despite the strong anti-Semitic feeling displayed by the Christian inhabitants of those countries, the more advanced representatives of the race offer a vigorous opposition to Zionism and its separatist tendencies, holding that the re-animation of Jewish national sentiment is a temporary infatuation due to the cruel treatment of the Jews and destined to die out with it. These Jews also have abandoned the old Jewish national ideals, convinced that a man may frequent a Jewish synagogue and have a Semitic nose and yet be as good a Polish or Russian patriot as any other. They feel that a thousand years’ residence in Poland has weaned them effectually from any sentimental attachment to Palestine and that, born and bred as they are in the North, they are physically unfit for a southern climate. In one word, they consider themselves both in body and in mind children of the land in which they have lived and suffered for so many centuries.

In direct opposition to this type of Jew stands the irreconcilable and uncompromising Israelite—a man who after twenty centuries’ residence in the West still persists in calling himself Oriental, in cultivating obedience to antiquated modes of thought, and in adhering to formulas obsolete and, in his altered circumstances, a trifle absurd. Like the Zionist of the Russian pale, this Oriental Jew of the West is ready to exclaim with the Psalmist: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.” But, unlike the Russian Zionist, he declines to support the movement, the object of which is to restore him to Jerusalem. His wish is to remain distinct from the Gentiles, and yet to remain amongst them. He clings to the Pharisaic ideal of social isolation, while he recoils from geographical and political segregation. He abhors the Liberal Jew’s doctrine of assimilation and ridicules the Zionist’s efforts at repatriation. Is the heroic endurance of Israel under all its sufferings to lead to nothing but racial extinction by intermarriage—the very thing which, had it been allowed to happen twenty centuries ago, would have obviated those sufferings? Such an idea implies a negation of divine justice, and lowers the solemn tragedy of Jewish history into something quite different. It also forms a negation of what the orthodox Jew holds to be the mission of Israel on earth. This mission, according to the orthodox Jew of the West, is to maintain intact the monotheistic dogma among the nations of the world. In order to fulfil this mission, Israel must remain severely apart and yet scattered among the nations. It is the argument “that it may possibly have been God’s will and meaning, that the Jews should remain a quiet light among the nations for the purpose of pointing at the doctrine of the unity of God”—an argument which Coleridge answered by his famous retort: “The religion of the Jews is, indeed, a light; but it is as the light of the glow-worm, which gives no heat and illumines nothing but itself,”308 and which a modern Jewish writer has described as “a controversial fiction.”309 It might, perhaps, be more justly described as an unhappy afterthought.

A Jew of this type may, or may not, believe in the ultimate political restoration of his race; but if he believes in it, he holds that it is to be brought about by some mysterious and miraculous dispensation of Providence, such as the Pharisees expected to bring about the conversion of the heathen. He opposes Zionism on the ground that it discredits Providence by striving to effect by human means that which, according to the prophets, is to be the special task of God. His attitude is that of the typical Oriental. Persuaded of the futility of personal action, he trusts in a vague impersonal Power which envelops all things and shapes the course of events to an inevitable and predestined end.

An eminent example of this way of looking at life is presented by a recent publication, apparently authoritative, though anonymous. On the one hand the author deplores the liberalism of the Occidental Jew, and on the other he denounces the Zionism of Dr. Herzl. With regard to the first, he says: “The miraculous preservation of the Jews is itself an argument for their election. By every law and rule of history they should have been exterminated long since, yet we see them to-day in all parts of the world, fighting steadily and pertinaciously for the purpose they are set to fulfil. That purpose carries with it the bar on intermarriage, which, despite occasional breaches, is still jealously observed by the overwhelming majority of Jews as an essential condition of their survival.”310 The purpose in question is the one explained already, “to be a light to the nations.” With regard to Zionism, the author’s position is, to say the least, very emphatically set forth. For that movement, and for its leader, he reserves some of his choicest sarcasms. Dr. Herzl is “this redoubtable Moses from the Press-club”; he is accused of having “traded on the resources of prophecy”; “Dr. Herzl, with ingenious effrontery, represented his scheme of evading the mission of the exiles, and their duty to the lands of their dispersion, as a fulfilment of the ancient prophecy.” “Dr. Herzl and those who think with him are traitors to the history of the Jews.” These and similar titles are abundantly bestowed on the man who has been guilty of the heinous sin of seeking to redeem his co-religionists from the house of bondage by purely human means, without waiting for a direct interference on the part of the Deity,—or of the European Concert: “The restoration of the Jews to the land of their old independence,” affirms the author, “may occur in one of two ways. It may be by the concerted act of the Governments of the countries of their dispersion, devised as a measure of self-protection against the spread of the Jews; or by the fulfilment of prophecy when the Jewish mission is complete.... But Dr. Herzl’s plan makes short work of the spiritual element in the new exodus of Jewry. He would force the hand of Providence. The restoration, instead of occurring on the appointed end of the dispersion, would be interpolated in the middle of it as a means of evading its obligations. This plan, which is a travesty of Judaism, is equally futile as statecraft.”311

Many Jews also, who sympathise with the Zionist idea, shrink from associating themselves with a movement which for the attainment of its object must necessarily solicit the favour of Abdul Hamid. They feel that the Sultan, owing to his drastic methods in the treatment of domestic complaints, is not popular abroad, and they, not unreasonably, apprehend that any practical advantages which the movement might derive from its relations with the Sultan would be more than counterbalanced by the loss of the moral support of the Christian nations.

Lastly, even among Dr. Herzl’s own adherents, the men who year after year gathered from all parts of the world in Basel, drawn thither by one common desire, there did not reign that degree of concord which is essential for the success of any enterprise of the magnitude of the Zionist movement. The proceedings in those congresses have been described by a Jew of the Occidental school with a vivacity which need not be less accurate because it is prompted by candid scepticism. “There,” says the chronicler, “at the gateway to the playground of more than one continent, the Zionists met annually to disagree in many languages on the advisability of setting up Israel among the nations again; and here the descendants of Abraham proved themselves no longer a race but a fortuitous concourse of peoples: an exceptionally cosmopolitan and polyglot multitude. More than that, their differences were accentuated by the very enthusiasm that had drawn them together. The Zionism of the English stockbroker and the French boulevardier is different entirely from the sacred hope which the same word connotes for the rabbi of Eastern Europe.... The young, up-to-date German student in University club cap, who looked as if he might have stepped out of ‘Old Heidelberg,’ made no secret of his contempt for the gabardined and long-curled rabbi. To the latter the cigarette which the student coolly puffed on the Sabbath was desecration; the non-Jewish meals in which the student indulged daily were regarded with pious horror and indignation. Not for this had the other come to Basel, and the sad-eyed and silent delegate who tramped half-way across Europe on what he deemed a holy pilgrimage sighed and thought that Israel was in greater darkness in the centre of its new-born hope than in the unhappy land of persecution wherein he was suffered to exist. Nor here did he expect to see the sacred Mosaic ordinances openly flouted, nor those who had committed the greatest of sins—that of marrying out of the faith—received with enthusiasm. Intermarriage is the very antithesis of the Zionistic ideal, and here they were endeavouring to run hand in hand. Here is the canker which is gnawing at the hope of the sons of Zion. The Jewish race has always been held inseparable from the religion of Judaism, and it will ever remain so. But the old tradition, ‘All Israel are brethren,’ no longer holds good for all that. Like the Christian, the Jew is now a member first of the land that gave him birth, or which he adopts, and a Jew afterwards.”

The writer goes on to comment on the inevitable outcome of this diversity among the delegates: sections, plotting and counter-plotting against one another, faction, cabal, personal animus, tumult, Babel.312

This lack of unanimity will, no doubt, become more and more pronounced as the movement advances from the purely theoretical to the practical stage. Let us for a moment picture Israel back in Palestine. Each community of immigrants, bound together by the ties of language, habit, and particular home associations, will live in a separate quarter. They will instinctively cling to their mother tongue and bring up their children in it. The British Jews will despise their Polish and Roumanian brethren as ignorant, and will, in their turn, be despised by them as spurious Jews. The Spanish-speaking Sephardim will scorn and be scorned by the Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim. All the differences, social and national, which underlie the religious unity of Israel will emerge to the surface. The feeling of brotherly equality will be superseded by class distinctions and, in one word, freedom will bring about the disruption which oppression had checked. Even as it is, the difference between the various sections of the Jewish inhabitants of Palestine is noticeable at every turn. There is, for instance, a small community, dwelling in a secluded valley of Northern Galilee and first discovered by Lord Kitchener in the course of his survey work in Palestine. These are said to be the remnant of the ancient inhabitants. They speak the tongue of their Syrian neighbours—an Arabic dialect retaining many elements of Aramaic—they till the soil as their neighbours do, and, though scrupulous in the observance of their religion and abstaining from intermarriage with outsiders, they live on the best of terms with them. On the other hand, the Jewish immigrants are not only distinct in dress, dialect, and mode of living from these native Jews, but are amongst themselves divided by the barrier of language, the Spanish Jews being utterly unable to understand or to make themselves understood to their brethren from Northern and Central Europe, though they all employ the Hebrew characters in writing; and by manners, the Spanish immigrants, owing to their longer residence in the country, being more Oriental than the new-comers. The Sephardim have adopted the Eastern garb and head-dress, and, besides their Spanish mother-tongue, also speak Arabic. The Russian and Polish Jews are clad in long flowing gowns of silk or cloth, and their heads are covered with fur caps. The German Jews affect the quaint long coat and low wide-awake of the land of their origin. None of the Ashkenazim are permitted by their Rabbis to learn Arabic. Their domestic life is that of the Western Judenstadt. But they all cultivate the long ringlets which the Levitic law prescribes. Not less marked is their difference in character, “The Sephardim,” a recent traveller attests, “are tolerant, easy-going, and sociable. They earn their living largely by manual labour, are fishers at Tiberias, porters at Jerusalem and Jaffa. The Ashkenazim limit their activities to traffic, shun work with their hands, are rigid separatists, sticklers for the observance of the oral law, and conservative in their Judaism. The Sephardim are stationary in numbers; the Ashkenazim increase by leaps and bounds. They constitute the wave of Jewish immigration and stand for the development of Judaism in Palestine. There are two other sections of Jews in the country insignificant in number. One comes from Bokhara, the other from Yemen; the latter are very poor, and follow the humblest callings. The shoe-blacks of Jerusalem are recruited from their ranks. These various groups of the Jewish population, one in race and faith, are so strongly marked off from each other that they may be regarded as diverse nationalities.”313 Finally, it should be added that, besides the orthodox Jews, both Chassidim and Karaites are represented in the population of the country.

Diversity of political ideals will intensify the discord arising from social, sectarian, and national differences. In the new Jewish commonwealth, it is to be feared, the old feud between the Pharisees and the Sadducees will be revived under a new aspect. The more advanced Jews from the West will be anxious to administer the country on Western, that is secular, principles. The Rabbis, with the fanatical populace of Eastern, Polish, and Roumanian Jews at their back, will insist on establishing on a large scale that supremacy of the Synagogue which formed the basis of the ancient Hebrew State, and of the internal constitution of the Jewish communities whilst in exile. And the Rabbis will be supported by the traditions of the race. The Jewish catechism distinctly states that the Law of Moses is only in abeyance, and that “whenever the Jews return to their own land, and again constitute a state, it will have full force.” Synagogue and State will thus repeat the struggle which Church and State waged in Christendom for so many centuries. And, whichever party won, the result would be almost equally disastrous. Should the Rabbis succeed in establishing the Levitical polity the country would, in the opinion of a high authority, “either pass away through internal chaos or would so offend the modern political spirit that it would be soon extinguished from outside. If it were secular, it would not be a Jewish State. The great bulk of its present supporters would refuse to live in it, and it would ultimately be abandoned to an outlander population consisting of Hebrew Christians and Christian Millennarians.”314

However, be the practical difficulties as serious as they may, so long as anti-Semitism endures the enthusiasm for Zionism is bound to endure. Mr. Israel Zangwill, one of the most eminent champions of the cause in England, has repeatedly expounded the views of his brother-Zionists. In his address to a meeting in May, 1903, he declared that “the only solution of the Jewish question was to be found in a legally-assured home in Palestine.” He pointed to the recent butchery of the Jews at Kishineff as a proof “that the question was just where it was in the Middle Ages,” and expressed his conviction that “the rest of Europe also tended to slide back into the Dark Ages.” Hence arises the necessity for leaving Europe. Referring to Baron Hirsch’s emigration scheme, Mr. Zangwill said, “Baron Hirsch left £2,000,000 for emigration only, and £7,000,000 for emigration principally. His trustees had reduced emigration to a minimum. They despaired of emigration. But because colonists in the Argentine and Canada were a failure, was that a reason for despair? How dared they despair till they had tried the one land to which the Jew’s heart turned?”315

In August of the same year the Zionist Congress met at Basel, and several interesting details were given concerning the progress of the movement. It was stated that the number of members had risen from 120,000 to 320,000, all of whom were directly represented at the Congress by so-called shekel payments. The Report of the Committee of Management showed that the year’s receipts amounted to £9886, that Zionism was on the increase everywhere, and that the Zionist Colonial Bank in London was already declaring small dividends.316 This bank, it should be noted, was founded under the name of Jewish Colonial Trust, with a capital of £2,000,000 in £1 shares, over £350,000 of which has been subscribed from among the poorer Jews, with the result that it boasts no fewer than 135,000 shareholders. In addition to this institution, two more Jewish National Funds have been started, one of them known as the Shekel Account. In October of the same year the Odessa newspapers reported that a number of persons, acting on behalf of 107 Jews, mostly of the working classes, were taking steps to effect, through the medium of the Colonial Bank, the purchase of an immense tract of land in Palestine for the purpose of colonisation.317 In the Zionist Congress of 1904 there were represented about 2,500 organisations in various parts of the world. These facts amply prove that Zionism has stirred a very real enthusiasm among a vast section of the Jewish race, even though it has stirred an equally real opposition.

In the meantime the Jewish population of Palestine has been increasing steadily and rapidly, by immigration chiefly of Ashkenazim refugees from Central and Northern Europe. In 1872 there were scarcely 10,000 Jews in the Holy Land; by 1882 they had risen to 20,000; in 1890 there were only 25,000; in 1902 they were estimated at 60,000—distributed in the various towns of Jaffa, Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias, and others. In all these places are to be seen new Jewish colonies housed in neat white-washed buildings which stretch in barrack-like lines—the bounty of a Rothschild or a Montefiore. In addition to these urban colonies, there are numerous agricultural settlements in Central Judaea, Samaria, and Galilee. Immigration, stimulated by the persecution to which the Hebrew race is subjected in Eastern Europe, and facilitated by the construction of the Jaffa-Jerusalem railway, which has now been running for twelve years, continues, partly under the auspices of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. This society maintains many schools for boys and girls, endeavouring to infuse French culture and the new spirit into the ancient body of Judaism, which in Tiberias especially has always sought its refuge and its tomb. Besides general instruction, the pursuits of agriculture and gardening are assiduously encouraged. From the elementary schools the most promising pupils are sent to the Professional School of Jerusalem or to the Model Farm of Mikweh, founded in 1870, whence, at the conclusion of their studies, the students are placed in the Jewish colonies of Palestine and Syria as head-gardeners and directors of agriculture, while others are apprenticed to handicrafts, thus being gradually formed a population both morally and materially equipped for life’s work under modern conditions. The agricultural colonies, divided into three groups—Palestine, Samaria, and Galilee—have helped, it is said, to attach to the soil some 5000 out of the 60,000 Jews of the country. Other centres of the same nature are in the course of formation across the Jordan, towards the Howran range of mountains, where vast tracts of land were acquired a few years ago, and are slowly reclaimed from the waste of sand, rock, and marsh by the perseverance and untiring industry of the Jewish colonists.

But, while dwelling on this bright side of the Zionist movement—the side of enlightened enterprise—it is well to note another side not so promising. The recent traveller, already quoted, gives a very pessimistic account of his impressions. It is to be hoped that his statements are exaggerated and his pessimism inordinate; but, in the interests of historic truth, we feel compelled to listen to his tale: “The Ashkenazim,” he tells us, “preponderate so largely as to swamp the others. If there is ever a Jewish State, it will be Ashkenazim. The great mass of them is located in Jerusalem, and the rest in Safed, Tiberias, and Hebron. Gregarious by instinct, urban by habit, they herd together in the towns, creating new ghettos similar to those they have left in Europe. A fraction of them maintain themselves by petty commerce; the rest live on Haluka, a fund provided by their wealthy co-religionists in the West. This amounts to £50,000 annually in Jerusalem. Its object is to enable its recipients to study the Talmud and engage in religious exercises vicariously for those who contribute it. Haluka is a fruitful source of sloth and hypocrisy, and places undue power in the hands of the rabbis who are charged with its administration. To those who know only the trading Jew of our commercial centres, the modern Sadducees, it reveals a new aspect of the race—that of the Jew turning aside from all enterprise, content to live in pious mendicancy, his sole business the observance of the minutiae of the ceremonial law; the Jew who binds on his phylactery, wears long ringlets brought down in front of the ears in obedience to a Levitical precept, and shuns the carrying of a pocket-handkerchief on the Sabbath, save as a bracelet or a garter. Haluka is a mistake and a stumbling-block in the path of Zionism. To turn Palestine into a vast almshouse is not the way to lay the foundation of a Jewish State. It attracts swarms of slothful bigots whose religion begins and ends with externals, a salient example of ‘the letter that killeth,’ whose Pharisaic piety has no influence on their conduct in life. It has established an unproductive population of inefficients, drawn from the least desirable element of the race. Its evil effect is patent, and the better sort of Jews themselves condemn it or advise its restriction to the aged and infirm. It is depressing to move among crowds of burly men, contributing nothing to the commonweal, puffed up with self-satisfied bigotry and proud of their useless existence. Left to his own devices the Jew gives the land a wide berth and sticks to the town. But Western philanthropy has expended much money and energy in putting him on to the land, rightly judging that the foundations of a nation cannot be laid on the hawking of lead-pencils among the Bedawin who do not want them.

“An agricultural college has been established near Jaffa, but it was found that the youths availed themselves of the excellent general education it afforded in order, not to till the land, but to engage in more congenial and more profitable pursuits. Agricultural colonies were founded, and the colonists, in addition to free land, seed, and implements, were endowed by M. Edmund de Rothschild with 3 francs a day for every man, 2 francs for every woman, and 1 franc for every child. This enabled the recipients to sit down and employ Arabs to do the work, and has been stopped, to the great chagrin of the colonists. As a matter of fact, the best of the farms to-day depend on native labour. The mattock and the hoe are repugnant to the Jewish colonists, who all seek for places in the administration. The financial result is not cheering. The most prosperous concern, perhaps, is the wine-growing establishment of Rishon le Sion. Wine-making is the one industry the Jews take to. They practise it individually on a small scale. The Western tourist in Hebron is invariably accosted by some ringleted Israelite, who proffers him his ‘guter Wein,’ and his thoughts go back to childhood and that Brobdingnagian cluster of grapes which the spies bore between them from the neighbouring valley of Eschol. The attitude of the Jew with respect to agriculture is not to be wondered at. His hereditary tendencies are against it. Centuries of urban life and urban pursuits lie behind him. Inured to no exercise save that of his wits, poor in physique, unused to the climate, can it be expected that this child of the ghetto should turn to and compete with the strong brown-lined Judaean peasant on the burning hillside? The one exception is to be found in the Bulgarian Jews of Sephardim stock. Hardy, stalwart, accustomed to tillage, these have made efficient farmers, and next to them come the Jews from Roumania. But with every inducement to settle on the land, and all sorts of props and aids, the agricultural Jews in Palestine number only about 1000 out of an ever-augmenting population. The fact is significant.”318

Another point worth serious consideration is the political situation created by Jewish immigration into Palestine. The colonists, the majority of whom come from Russia, are a bone of contention between the rival foreign propagandas in the country. The Russians, as has been seen, while massacring the Jews in Bessarabia, court their favour in Syria. The German Emperor, while tolerating anti-Semitism in the Fatherland, earns the thanks of the Zionists by his affability towards the exiles. The French, through the educational efforts of the Alliance Israélite, whose pupils were hitherto mainly drawn from the Spanish Jews, seek to turn the Jews of Palestine, as of other parts of the Near East, into apostles of Gallic preponderance and into instruments for the promotion of Gallic interests. The Zionists are regarded by the French supporters of the Alliance as its adversaries, and that for the reason that, while the mission of the Alliance, as it is understood by the French, is the extension of the Republic’s influence, and, therefore, very remotely connected with the religious and national aspirations of the Jewish people, these aspirations are precisely the point on which the Zionists lay the greatest stress.319

Lastly, the poverty of Palestine is a source of infinite difficulties which can only be overcome by proportionate labour. Mr. Zangwill has very eloquently described these conditions in one of his speeches: “My friends,” he said, “you cannot buy Palestine. If you had a hundred millions you could only buy the place where Palestine once stood. Palestine itself you must re-create by labour, till it flows again with milk and honey. The country is a good country. But it needs a great irrigation scheme. To return there needs no miracle—already a third of the population are Jews. If the Almighty Himself carried the rest of us to Palestine by a miracle, what should we gain except a free passage? In the sweat of our brow we must earn our Palestine. And, therefore, the day we get Palestine, if the most joyous, will also be the most terrible day of our movement.”320

It was the consideration of the various obstacles enumerated above, and others of a similar nature, coupled with the urgent need to find a home for those wretched outcasts whose refuge in England was menaced by the anti-alien agitation, that induced Dr. Herzl, in July 1903, acting on Mr. Chamberlain’s suggestion,321 to propose that an agreement should be entered into between the British Government and the Jewish Colonial Trust for the establishment of a Jewish settlement in British East Africa. The British Government, anxious to find a way out of the “Alien Invasion” difficulty, welcomed the proposal, and Lord Lansdowne expressed his readiness to afford every facility to the Commission which, it was suggested, should be sent by the Zionists to East Africa for purposes of investigation. If a suitable site could be found, the Foreign Secretary professed himself willing “to entertain favourably proposals for the establishment of a Jewish colony on conditions which will enable the members to observe their national customs. For this purpose he would be prepared to discuss the details of a scheme comprising as its main features the grant of a considerable area of land, the appointment of a Jewish official as the chief of the local administration, and permission to the colony to have a free hand in regard to municipal legislation, and the management of religious and purely domestic matters; such local autonomy being conditional on the right of His Majesty’s Government to exercise general control.”322 This project was announced at one of the meetings of the Zionist Congress at Basel in August, 1903, and the motion submitted to the Congress for the appointment of a committee, who should send an expedition to East Africa in order to make investigations on the spot, was adopted. But, though 295 voted in its favour, it was opposed by a great minority of 177 votes, and the Russian delegates left the hall as a protest. In a mass meeting of Zionists held in the following May in London Mr. Israel Zangwill spoke warmly in favour of the proposal, urging on his fellow-Zionists to take advantage of the offer made by the British Government. But he added, “The Jewish Colonisation Association, the one body that should have welcomed this offer of territory with both hands, stood aloof.”323 Indeed, it cannot be said that this new departure of Zionism has commanded universal approval.

Nor did opposition to the scheme confine itself to platonic protests. In the following December, Dr. Max Nordau, one of the most distinguished men of letters among Dr. Herzl’s followers, who had declared himself at the Basel Congress of the previous August in favour of the proposal, was fired at in Paris by a Russian Jew, who in his cross-examination before the Magistrate confessed that, in making that attempt on Dr. Nordau’s life, he aimed at the enemy of the Jewish race—the supporter of a scheme which involved the abandonment by Zionists of Palestine as the object of the movement.324 The incident afforded a painful proof of want of concord, not only among the Jews generally, not only among the supporters of various movements all theoretically recognising the necessity of emigration, but even among the partisans themselves of the Zionist cause. Dr. Herzl, anxious to allay the ill-feeling aroused by his alleged abandonment of the Zionist idea, wrote a letter to Sir Francis Montefiore, the president of the English Zionist Federation, repudiating any desire to divert the movement away from the Holy Land and to direct it to East Africa. Nothing, he protested, could be further from the truth. He felt convinced that the solution of the Jewish problem could only be effected in that country, Palestine, with which are indelibly associated the historic and sentimental bias of the Jewish people. But as the British Government had been generous enough to offer territory for an autonomous settlement, it would have been impossible and unreasonable to do otherwise than give the offer careful consideration.325

The clouds of misconception of which Dr. Herzl complained were not dissipated by this declaration. If the attachment to Palestine is to be the central idea of Zionism, it is hard to see how its realisation could be promoted by the adoption of East Africa as a home. East Africa, as a shrewd diplomatist has wittily observed, is not in Palestine nor on the road to it. Its name awakens no memories or hopes in the Jewish heart. Its soil is not hallowed by the temples and the tombs of Israel. Its hills and vales are not haunted by the spirits of the old martyrs and heroes of the nation. Neither the victories of the past nor the prophetic visions for the future are in any way associated with East Africa. In the circumstances, it is not to be wondered at that the proposal, as Dr. Herzl admitted, did not meet with the enthusiasm required for success, and that the strongest opposition to the scheme came from those very Jews in the Russian “pale” who stand in most need of a refuge from persecution. It must be borne in mind that those very Jews who suffer most severely from persecution are the most sincerely and wholeheartedly attached to the ancient ideals of the race, and, owing partly to this psychological cause, partly to their less advanced stage of development, they were the least able to appreciate the practical advantages of the scheme—the least disposed to submit to the dictates of prosaic expediency. They firmly believe that, sooner or later, the beautiful dream is destined to cohere into substance; and, like all dreamers, they abhor compromise.

The proposal, however, met with opposition in other quarters than the Russian Ghetto. Sir Charles Eliot, H.M.’s Commissioner for the East Africa Protectorate, did not approve of it. While disclaiming all anti-Semitic feeling, he said that his hesitation arose from doubt as to whether any beneficial result would be obtained from the scheme. The proposed colony, he pointed out, would not be sufficiently large to relieve appreciably the congested and suffering Jewish population of some parts of Eastern Europe, and he expressed the fear that the climate and agricultural life would in no way be suitable to Israelites. Moreover, when the country began to attract British immigrants who showed an inclination to settle all round the proposed Jewish colony, he considered that the scheme became dangerous and deprecated its execution. It was, Sir Charles declared, tantamount to reproducing in East Africa the very conditions which have caused so much distress in Eastern Europe: that is to say, the existence of a compact mass of Jews, differing in language and customs from the surrounding population, to whom they are likely to be superior in business capacity but inferior in fighting power. To his mind, it is best to recognise frankly that such conditions can never exist without danger to the public peace.326

Sir Harry Johnston also was at first opposed to the scheme, but, influenced partly by the development of the idea into a less crude plan, and by the opening up of the country by the Uganda Railway, partly, perhaps, by the intimate connection between the proposal and the solution of our own overcrowding problem, he was ultimately converted into a warm supporter of it.327 Soon afterwards a Commission was despatched to East Africa to report on the tract of land offered by the British Government for the proposed Zionist settlement,328—a proof that official opposition was abandoned.

But the opposition on the part of the Jews remained, as was shown by the comments of the Jewish press of America on Mr. Israel Zangwill’s visit to that country with a view to interesting American Jews in the project, by his own “absolute and profound disgust” at their cold irresponsiveness, and even more clearly by the establishment of the London Zionist League. The President of this association, Mr. Herbert Bentwich, in his inaugural address, commenting on the matter, said that the British East Africa scheme had never touched Zionism in the slightest degree; that it was a mere accident in Jewish history to which Zionists could not devote their energies; that the offer of territory had been made as a practical expression of sympathy “by those who would exclude the alien immigrant from Great Britain and as such was gratefully to be received, but it could never be dealt with seriously,” and that the Zionists hoped not to amend but to end the Jewish distress; that being the object for which the league had been formed in London.329

The Commission’s report, published in English and German, was partly unfavourable and partly inconclusive; but even if it had been favourable it is doubtful whether it would have met with approval. At all events, when the scheme was definitely submitted to the Zionist Congress at Basel, towards the end of July, 1905, it gave rise to scenes of an unexampled character in the history of Zionism. The Congress was divided into “Palestinians,” who were opposed to any Jewish national settlement outside Palestine, and into “Territorialists,” who maintained that the true aim of Zionism is to obtain an autonomous settlement anywhere. The latter party, led by Mr. Zangwill, was strongly in favour of the British offer; the former was as strongly against it. After a stormy discussion the scheme was rejected, and a resolution was adopted by an overwhelming majority, in which the Seventh Zionist Congress reaffirmed the principle of the creation of a legally secured home for the Jewish people in Palestine, repudiating, both as object and as means, all colonising activity outside Palestine, and adjacent lands, and, while thanking the British Government for its kindness, it expressed the hope that the latter will continue to aid the Zionists in their efforts to attain their true aim. Thus this episode in the history of Zionism came to an end.

While the East Africa scheme was the subject of so much discord both among the Jews and elsewhere, the leader of the Zionists passed away. Dr. Herzl died at Edlach, in Austria, on the 3rd of July, 1904, denied the happiness of seeing the mission to which he had consecrated his life fulfilled. Among his adherents he has left the reputation of a fervent apostle of emancipation, an inspired idealist, a Messiah burning with the desire to rescue his people from persecution and to lead them back to the Land of Promise. But even those least inclined to follow his lead, could not but admire in him that single-minded devotion to an ideal and that steadfastness in its pursuit, which, whether success crowns their possessor or not, proclaim the great man. Among the masses of his suffering co-religionists the claims of Dr. Herzl to gratitude are less liable to qualification. His personality produced a deep impression on their imagination, and his efforts to realise the dream of eighteen centuries, aided by the magic of his eloquence and the grace of his manner, stirred their hearts to their inmost depths. Parents named their children after Dr. Herzl, and his death aroused universal grief. Ten thousand mourners, men and women, accompanied the funeral to the Vienna cemetery, where the remains of the leader were laid to rest amid the lamentations of his followers. The latter subsequently gave a tangible proof of their gratitude by providing for their leader’s orphaned family, and by resolving to perpetuate his memory in a manner that would have pleased him. The memorial is to take the form of a forest of ten thousand olive trees planted in some historic spot in Palestine, and to be known as the Herzl Forest.