£ibranp of Che 'theological ^eromarp 
 
 PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 John Stuart Conning, D.P. 
 
 DS 149 .K3 1921 
 
 Kallen, Horace Meyer, 1882- 
 
 Zionism and world politics 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
# 
 
 ZIONISM 
 
 AND 
 
 WORLD POLITICS 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2018 with funding from 
 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
 https://archive.org/details/zionismworldpoli00kall_0 
 

COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY 
 DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 
 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION 
 INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN 
 
JACOB AND RUTH BILLIKOPF 
 
PREFACE 
 
 THERE are two types of prejudices about the Jews 
 —those entertained by Jews, and those entertained 
 by non-Jews. The former are rooted in an invincible 
 vanity, expressed in the conception of the “Chosen 
 People,” reenforced by tradition, and confirmed and 
 automatically justified as a psychological mechanism 
 of self-defence by the tragic status of the Jew in the 
 religious doctrine and social practices of the Christian 
 world. The latter arises primarily out of the implica¬ 
 tions of the Christian religious system, which gives the 
 Jew a cosmic centrality unparalleled by the status of 
 other peoples, even while it outlaws him from the fellow¬ 
 ship of mankind. Both sets of prejudices are the 
 creations of the passions of hope and fear. Both 
 can be much mitigated, if not entirely dissipated, by 
 knowledge. Both have indeed undergone noticeable 
 modification through the expansion of science and the 
 growth of the objective studies of social groups and 
 social events. Prejudices, however, being the symbols 
 of feeling and not of understanding, die hard. Their 
 lives are the longer in the degree in which they are 
 implicated in those massive sentiments of society whose 
 vital spark is emotion involving the fear of death 
 and the hope of salvation, and whose body is an ancient 
 tradition and a tissue of customs concerned, in however 
 
 Vll 
 
PREFACE 
 
 • • • 
 
 Vlll 
 
 fanciful a manner, with the alleviation and gratifica¬ 
 tion of these feelings. Any sudden interruption of 
 the normal current of sentiment and behaviour, any 
 break or shift in the continuity of social action, any 
 cataclysm or catastrophe, throws these emotions into 
 intense activity and revivifies the whole dead mass 
 of past fancies, ideas, imaginings, doctrines, and prac¬ 
 tices, no matter how silly and absurd they may be. 
 The Great War has done this with respect to wide 
 areas of the historic field of religion and superstition. 
 It has done this also with respect to the Jews. The 
 misery and unhappiness of the race in central Europe 
 can be measured by the intensity of their compensatory 
 hope toward Zion, and the misery and unhappiness 
 of their Gentile neighbours can be measured by the 
 sensibility with which they respond to revivals, in 
 somewhat modernized guise, of mediaeval opinions 
 about Jews by militarist, royalist conspirators from 
 Germany, Russia, Hungary, Poland, acting with 
 malice prepense. The mood of central Europe is a 
 poison which has infected, not without purposive 
 assistance from these same conspirators, England, 
 France, the United States. There has rarely been a 
 time when the truth about the Jews was so needful 
 as an antidote to prejudice regarding the Jews among 
 both Jews and Gentiles. 
 
 It is the truth about the Jews which I have sought, 
 as a psychological and philosophic student of history, 
 to set down, so far as in my power lay, in this book. 
 The studies of which it consists were begun in 1915, 
 long before there was any suspicion of the terrible 
 shattering of the structure of European society which 
 is the outcome of the war to make the world safe for 
 
PREFACE 
 
 IX 
 
 democracy. The continuation of them was modified 
 by American participation in the war, which gave 
 them, willy-nilly, a somewhat different direction than 
 was originally intended. Some of the events here re¬ 
 corded and analyzed I have participated in directly; 
 others, I have been a close witness of. Many I have 
 studied, prior to the Peace Conference, as a member 
 of the Government inquiry into the terms of peace 
 headed by Colonel House, in the light of the probable 
 needs of the American delegation there for correct 
 information. Portions of the studies, being pertinent 
 to special occasions, have been previously printed. 
 These are the sections of the early chapters which deal 
 with the evolution of European nationalism and its 
 influence on the Jewish position, a section of the chap¬ 
 ter on American Jewry, and an abridgment of the 
 last chapter. They appeared, respectively, in the 
 International Journal of Ethics , the American Jewish 
 Chronicle , and the Menorah Journal . 
 
 To Leo Wolman and Wesley Clair Mitchell, my 
 colleagues at the New School for Social Research, I am 
 indebted for much valuable criticism and suggestion; 
 to Miss Lurene MacDonald, the Librarian at the 
 School, for assistance in the classification of the 
 material and preparing the index; to my ever-helpful 
 sister, Ida Kallen, and to my old friend and pupil, Mar¬ 
 vin Lowenthal, for aid in reading the manuscript and 
 getting it ready for the press; to my dear fellow-worker, 
 Julian W. Mack, for help with the proof and many 
 valuable suggestions and corrections. These acknowl¬ 
 edgments can only scantily express what I owe them. 
 
 H. M. Kallen. 
 
 The New School for Social Research. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Preface.vii 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. Pioneer, O Pioneer. 1 
 
 II. The Origin and Basis of Zionism . . 5 
 
 III. Religious Imperialism and the Jewish 
 
 Position.18 
 
 IV. Effects of the Philosophy of Natural 
 
 Rights upon the Jewish Position . 32 
 
 V. The Nationalist Transvaluation of 
 
 Natural Rights and the Return of 
 Secular Jewish Nationalism. . . 44 
 
 VI. Secular Nationalism among the Jews 
 
 of Eastern Europe.64 
 
 VII. Ahad Ha’am, Herzl, and the Develop¬ 
 ment of Organized Zionism... 73 
 
 VIII. Parties and Programmes after Herzl’s 
 
 Death.84 
 
 IX. The Pre-Zionist Jewry of Palestine. . 92 
 
 X. Zionism in Palestine and the Near- 
 
 Eastern Question.104 
 
 XI. Enter American Jewry.120 
 
 xi 
 
Xll 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 XII. Zionist Endeavour and the Politics of 
 
 the Great War.150 
 
 XIII. The Jewish Cause at the Peace Con¬ 
 
 ference .177 
 
 XIV. From Versailles to San Remo—The 
 
 Basic Conflict.197 
 
 XV. From Versailles to San Remo—The 
 
 Conflict in Russia and America . 208 
 
 XVI. From Versailles to San Remo—The 
 Conflict in Poland, the Ukraine, 
 Hungary, and Rumania. . . . 217 
 
 XVII. From Versailles to San Remo—Palestine 
 
 and the Near-Eastern Problem . 244 
 
 XVIII. San Remo—The End of an Epoch . . 263 
 
 XIX. “Vita Nuova?”.274 
 
ZIONISM 
 
 AND 
 
 WORLD POLITICS 
 
Zionism and World Politics 
 
 CHAPTER i 
 
 PIONEER, O PIONEER 
 
 FIFTY miles southward from Lemberg, in the 
 direction of Odessa, there is a hostel owned and man¬ 
 aged by a Polish Jew. His inn is a house by the 
 side of the road, and since 1914 all manner of men have 
 taken shelter in it. It has survived a hundred battles 
 and five campaigns, shabbier and more rickety after 
 each one, but still offering a roof over the head, and, 
 on rare occasions when its owner can make a dicker 
 with the peasants, a bite to eat. Most of its guests 
 bring their own food, according to their rank and 
 station, generals from Austrian and Russian armies, 
 Polish and Ukrainian raiders, once even Soviet cavalry, 
 French and British military emissaries, American 
 Red Cross men and Y. M. C. A. workers. On occa¬ 
 sion women and children of the country have taken 
 refuge in its cellars, until the military pest should pass. 
 Its bar has seen unspeakable cruelties committed upon 
 non-combatants. To-day its guests are mostly young 
 Jews and Jewesses, on their way to Palestine. 
 
 The road beside which the inn stands is one of the 
 barbarous ungraded roads of Slavic Europe. It is 
 long and narrow and uncared for, pitted with deep 
 holes, and speckled with hummocks. Throughout 
 
 l 
 
2 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 the greater part of the year it is an unending ditch 
 of black, sticky mud. 
 
 Throughout the greater part of the year came these 
 young Jews and Jewesses—tramping, tramping, tramp¬ 
 ing, slowly, painfully, unflinchingly on their way to 
 Palestine. Often their feet burst through their worn 
 shoes or are so swollen that they cannot bear to put 
 shoes upon them; their clothes are rags, and they 
 lean upon sticks as they walk. They carry no food 
 in their knapsacks and bundles, and there is no money 
 in their purses. The tavern-keeper takes them in, 
 gives them shelter and, so well as he can, feeds them. 
 For they are on their way to Palestine. 
 
 They are very young—these pilgrims—some no 
 more than sixteen, the oldest no more than twenty- 
 five. Some have been on the way for many, many 
 months; others have come quickly—in a day or two 
 days. They come from everywhere. One may be 
 the last surviving son of a Berlin manufacturer, ruined 
 by the Great War. Another may be the only child of a 
 merchant of Nijni Novgorod; a third, a rabbinical stu¬ 
 dent from the Yeshibah at Lodz; a fourth, an ex-secretary 
 of the Bund in Warsaw, a fifth, a medical student; 
 a sixth, a musician—and so on. Few of them set 
 out in companies. Their companies form and dissolve 
 by the wayside, like clouds adrift in the summer sky. 
 Each reveals a spirit, an urge, that carries his frail 
 body on, alone, tramping, tramping, tramping toward 
 Palestine. They take their night’s rest in the tavern 
 of their fellow-Jew, and in the morning pass on their 
 way through the endless mud of the endless road. 
 
 Their like is to be found everywhere—in Warsaw, 
 in Berlin, in Kovno, in Bukharest, in Kishineff, in 
 
3 
 
 PIONEER, O PIONEER 
 
 Vienna, in Constantinople. They come from uni¬ 
 versities and gymnasia, from Talmudical colleges 
 and from schools of music and art. And everywhere 
 they are fed and housed as in the tavern fifty miles 
 southward of Lemberg, owned and managed by a 
 Polish Jew. 
 
 Officers of the Red Cross, agents of the American 
 Jewish Relief Committee, emissaries of the Zionist 
 Organization see them in these places and converse 
 with them. They ask for nothing, save to be helped 
 as quickly as possible to Palestine. They are all of 
 high sensibility and delicate nurture. They have all 
 undergone inconceivable hardships; some have suffered 
 intolerable indignities on their long way, often of a 
 thousand miles, on foot. They speak of these things 
 without bitterness, without complaint. They wish 
 only to get to Palestine. To reach Palestine they will 
 endure everything, they will stop at nothing. They 
 have heard that it is to be the national home of the 
 Jewish people. They have dedicated themselves to 
 build it up. They are the Halutzim , the pioneers. 
 
 To them who know the story they bring to mind 
 nothing so much as the Children’s Crusade. 
 
 Yet they are not like those crusaders, persons of 
 mediaeval faith and believing passion. They are in¬ 
 tellectuals, with the scepticisms and the deliberations 
 of the modern point of view ingrained in their mental 
 habit and established as their spiritual method. In 
 their regard Palestine has been, from among the many 
 alternatives in the rebuilding of their own lives and 
 the lives of the peoples of Europe out of the ruins of 
 the war, their considered choice. It is not by an 
 alarum that they are moved. If in them the House of 
 
4 
 
 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 Jacob has once more arisen and gone forth, it is because, 
 they say, they have willed that it should be so. They 
 are at once the embodiment, the victims and the 
 vindicators of that ever-young passion toward Zion 
 which has been the animating spirit of the Jew through 
 the generations and which now seems to be on the 
 threshold of its consummation, converting the Zionist 
 into the Judean. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE ORIGIN AND BASIS OF ZIONISM 
 
 ZIONISM is the contemporary phase of an unyield¬ 
 ing loyalty, a practical idealism, which is without 
 parallel in European history for constancy, duration, 
 and force. Crossed by all the currents of aspiration 
 and disillusion that were the changing mind of Europe 
 for two thousand years, this loyalty or idealism re¬ 
 mained, until recently, distinct in itself. It is the 
 Jewish aspect, older than its setting, of that hunger * 
 for safety and happiness which, in the century before 
 the beginning of the Christian era, gripped the civiliza¬ 
 tion of the Mediterranean in an other-worldly grip, 
 spread in later years to all Europe, and held it, with 
 all its mutations, to the present day. The old Zion¬ 
 ism whose heart is the hope of a new Zion was coeval 
 with the moral surrender of the Stoic. It antedated 
 the passionate other-worldliness of early Christianity. 
 It confronted, and survived, the religious imperialism 
 of the Church Triumphant when that was efficacious. 
 It underwent the impact of the newer protestant order. 
 It met the challenge and fecundation of science and 
 free thought, of naturalism and secularism. And it 
 has emerged, more essentially continuous with itself, 
 more essentially like what it was in its beginnings than 
 any other aspiration or adventure which the great 
 tradition of Europe knows. 
 
 5 
 
6 
 
 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 Of this tradition the biography of Zionism is an 
 integral part, both soil and substance of its ancient 
 roots, and leaf and branch of its spreading life, seeking 
 the free air and the sun. Its nature is at once that of 
 a vision and that of an adventure. Of a vision, be¬ 
 cause it sets forth no incarnate and existing society, 
 no operating association of men. Of an adventure, 
 because it never altogether lost grips with reality, 
 never was quite cut off from the spot of tangible 
 earth which might be not only sought, but found and 
 touched and, in spite of all disillusion, loved, in the 
 world of living men and real things. To make this 
 spot of earth once more theirs in fact as it was in 
 spirit, men and women of Jewish blood, generation 
 after generation, during two thousand years, abandoned 
 their all and went apilgrimming toward the Promised 
 ^ Land. Zionism is simply to-day’s phase of the un¬ 
 yielding effort of the Jewish people to make good the 
 Promise of the Promised Land. 
 
 This Promised Land, glamour though much of it is, 
 is yet no Land of Beulah, no Kingdom of Heaven in 
 regions supernal. It is a definite piece of the earth’s 
 surface, of definite dimensions, bordering on the Mediter¬ 
 ranean and lying at the junction of the three conti¬ 
 nental masses of the Eastern Hemisphere. It has been 
 the battle ground of the civilizations of antiquity. 
 It has been the motherland of the dominant religions 
 of the western world. The names of its mountains 
 and its valleys, of its cities and towns and villages, 
 have been woven into the texture of the mind of Europe. 
 For a thousand years its chief city was regarded as 
 the centre of the very universe and all its places as holy 
 places. Yet important as has been the role of these 
 
THE ORIGIN AND BASIS OF ZIONISM 7 
 
 and of the land that holds them in the life of mankind, 
 that importance is of small degree beside the role 
 of this land in the life and labours of the Jewish people. 
 It is from the latter, in fact, that the former derives. 
 Palestine has been the centre of the Jewish theory 
 of life and the Jews’ outlook on the world. Their 
 national tradition is built around it. Entering it, 
 staying in it, being driven from it, returning to it, 
 are the instigating motives of their historic narratives, 
 of their prophetic books, of their psalms, their liturgy, 
 their prayers, their collective endeavour in the com¬ 
 munity of mankind. No people in history has identi¬ 
 fied itself in joy and in sorrow, and always in aspiration, 
 so completely with a single land, and a land which the 
 great majority of their generations have known only 
 in prayer, in idea, in vision, for a thousand years. 
 
 This identification is itself a universally accepted 
 commonplace of the great tradition of the Western 
 world. The connection between the Jew and Palestine, 
 the connection between Palestine and the Jew is 
 customary, natural, a matter of course even to the 
 least literate of Europeans. So, also, by and large, 
 is the reunion of these two that have been sepa¬ 
 rated. 
 
 The original source of these commonplaces of the 
 European mind is of course that body of varied docu¬ 
 ments, sacred to Jew and Christian alike: the Bible. 
 A secondary but equally potent source is Christian 
 theology. According to the biblical narrative, the 
 history of the Jews as a people may be said to begin 
 with the hope of the Promised Land, with the conscious¬ 
 ness of a goal to be attained collectively, in return for 
 the assumption of a collective obligation to a super- 
 
8 
 
 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 natural being. This consciousness in the course of 
 time converted a congeries of tribes into a nation, and 
 the nation into a self-conscious aspirant toward that 
 righteousness without which must come disaster. 
 Israel, in a word, regarded himself as a “chosen people.” 
 Between him and Jehovah there is a contract. Israel 
 is to devote himself to the exclusive service and worship 
 of Jehovah: Jehovah, in return, is to lead Israel to 
 the Promised Land, to keep him and to prosper him 
 there. The service and worship of Jehovah and the 
 prosperity and growth of the nation in Zion were func¬ 
 tions of one another. How, under the influence of 
 the changes from a nomadic to an agricultural order 
 of life, the nature and terms of the contract changed; 
 how, under the propaganda of the prophets, from Amos 
 to Isaiah, ritual in the service of Jehovah was replaced 
 by righteousness; how national security became cor¬ 
 relative, in idea at least, with social justice, are com¬ 
 monplaces of all critical histories of the ancient Jews. 
 Already in Amos the prophetic philosophy of history is 
 manifest: Divine Law requires justice and loving¬ 
 kindness between men and states; disobedience of this 
 law is followed by disaster, brought through God’s 
 will by one state upon another, all states and kings be¬ 
 ing merely the tools and servants of God. This philos¬ 
 ophy is already ripe in the sermons of Jeremiah, but 
 tradition accords supreme excellence to the expression 
 given it by the second Isaiah. Applied to the domes¬ 
 tic history and foreign relations of the Jewish state, 
 it interpreted national defeat at the hands of enemies 
 of Israel as the consequence of domestic iniquity, and 
 national survival and national victory as coincident 
 with domestic righteousness. Righteousness became 
 
THE ORIGIN AND BASIS OF ZIONISM 9 
 
 the condition of political and military security. Ex¬ 
 pulsion from the Promised Land was, hence, the con¬ 
 sequence of sin, and return thereto would be the reward 
 of a return to righteousness. 
 
 Events subjected this philosophy to a drastic test. 
 That it did not possess a monopoly over the thinkers 
 of Israel may be seen from the theory of life promul¬ 
 gated in the Book of Job, which divorces fortune from 
 morals altogether, but there is in the prophetic theory a 
 certain compensatory dimension, a quality of consola¬ 
 tion and justification, which renders it more relevant 
 than the Joban theory to the aboriginal hopes of men 
 and to Nature’s disregard of them. Carried to its 
 logical limit, it must lead the man who has been right¬ 
 eous but unfortunate all his life to the conception of 
 another life and another world beyond Nature, in 
 which he will be fortunate as well as righteous, and 
 in which the wicked will be unfortunate as well as 
 wicked. This is precisely what Christianity, once 
 extended beyond the bounds of Jewry, did. But the 
 Jews then and there did not go so far. For them, 
 reward and punishment were here and now, where 
 sin and virtue were, and the hope of good fortune for 
 the righteous was a hope for this world and not another. 
 Particularly was this the case for a whole people, a 
 nation, whose span of life overarches the brief mor¬ 
 tality of the individual. The people of Israel, banished 
 from its land for its unrighteousness, should be restored 
 for its righteousness. This was Jehovah’s promise, 
 and in this promise his people might take comfort. 
 The restoration would be bodily, political, physical. 
 It would install an era of international peace and in¬ 
 ternational comity, the rule of law replacing the 
 
10 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 rule of force and the life of cooperation, the life of 
 conflict. 
 
 And it shall come to pass in the end of days, 
 
 That the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be estab¬ 
 lished in the top of the mountains, 
 
 And shall be exalted above the hills; 
 
 And all nations shall flow into it. 
 
 And many people shall go and say: 
 
 “ Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, 
 To the house of the God of Jacob; 
 
 And he will teach us of His ways 
 And we will walk in His paths.” 
 
 For out of Zion shall go forth the law, 
 
 And the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. 
 
 And He shall judge between the nations 
 And shall decide for many peoples; 
 
 And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares 
 And their spears into pruning-hooks; 
 
 Nation shall not lift up sword against nation. 
 
 Neither shall they learn war any more. 1 
 
 Dithyrambs such as this, of different imagery, but 
 of the same identical spirit and outlook, are scattered 
 throughout all the prophetic books. They are the 
 well-springs of subsequent Jewish speculation about 
 the nature and destiny of the Jewish people, from the 
 primal passions of the prophets to the sophisticated 
 formulations of modern Jewish theology-mongers. 
 The conception of the “mission’’ of Israel, which the 
 latter make so much of, springs from them, and the 
 Jewish repudiation of that conception springs equally 
 from them. They underlie the Jew’s loyalty to his 
 law or Torah , and the invincible optimism with which 
 the mass of the Jewish people have clung to it. “This 
 
 Isaiah n, 1-5. 
 
THE ORIGIN AND BASIS OF ZIONISM 11 
 
 is the law,” says the daily prayer, “which Moses set 
 before the Children of Israel, according to the word 
 of the Lord. To all who cling unto her, she is a tree 
 of life, and it is well with those who depend upon her. 
 Her ways are ways of kindness, and all her surrounding 
 is peace.” The real and adequate practice of the law, 
 however, the prayer-book also tells us, can be achieved 
 only in the Promised Land, nor can the law prevail 
 among the nations until the restoration to the Promised 
 Land is accomplished. 
 
 This restoration, from the first exile in the seventh 
 century before the beginning of the Christian era 
 through the first millennium after it, is conceived in 
 political terms. The prophets, indeed, are politicians 
 and statesmen, concerning themselves with both 
 domestic and foreign problems, and using “the word 
 of the Lord” as authority for their political doctrine 
 and social policy. The “law” which they preached, 
 as we have it in Deuteronomy and Leviticus, is an 
 obvious response to the challenge of the injustices of 
 ancient—and for that matter, of modern—society. 
 The ideal of international peace under a general law 
 for all nations is the outcome of the bitter political 
 experience of a small state situated at the junction 
 point between the competing military imperialisms 
 of Asia and Africa. The Prophets were nothing if 
 not realpolitiker with a passion for the preservation of 
 Israel for Zion and of Zion for Israel, and they grew 
 to realize that the only device by which this could be 
 secured was an international order and a single law. 
 After the manner of the ancients, they attributed 
 to this law a divine origin and sanction, and described 
 its rule as the rule of God. But the substance of their 
 
n ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 vision is not other than that of the vision of all interna¬ 
 tionalists who regard the realities of the relations 
 between nations and states and hope for their improve¬ 
 ment. It was evoked by the same recurrent causes: 
 how could it have other than the same essence? 
 
 Their glory is that they were the first in all the 
 world to envisage and to utter that essence, but they 
 uttered it, none the less, out of the fervour of their 
 patriotism, and not because they had blurred the living 
 diversities of mankind in an unreal abstraction, labelled 
 “humanity.” Prophetic “universalism” did not abol¬ 
 ish the nations, it harmonized the nations; and it was 
 nationalistic to the point of giving to Israel a dominant 
 tone in the international harmony, and to Zion the 
 foremost place. Indeed, when it was most “universal,” 
 it was most actively nationalistic, for the rhythms 
 of deutero-Isaiah, the utterances of Zechariah and of 
 Haggai framed the conspiracy to restore the indepen¬ 
 dence of the Kingdom with Zerubbabel, servant of the 
 Lord, scion of the House of David, for King. 1 Behind 
 the conspiracy was an urge to independence and to 
 freedom from the foreign yoke which never subsided 
 so long as there was the semblance of a Jewish govern¬ 
 ment in Palestine. When prophet gave way to priest 
 as the master of the mind of Judea, it was the uncon¬ 
 scious cause of the friction between the native and 
 the foreign administrations. It underlay the succes¬ 
 sive resistances, both spiritual and physical, to Persian 
 and Greek conquerors. It animated the Hasmonean 
 uprising and found itself in the Hasmonean indepen¬ 
 dence, and when the alliance with Rome which was to 
 guard that independence became its ravisher, it took 
 
 x Zechariah vi, 9-15. 
 
THE ORIGIN AND BASIS OF ZIONISM 13 
 
 the form of the new schisms within the state; the re¬ 
 sistance to Herod, the hope of a champion, of a Messiah 
 like Judas Maccabseus; the rebellion against Titus 
 and the final uprising and brief success of Bar Kochba. 
 Even after the terrible revenge which the imperial 
 government took for that uprising, the will of the Jews 
 for a free Zion remained unbroken. Oppressed and 
 persecuted by emperor after emperor, particularly 
 after Christianity had become the imperial religion, 
 they had strength enough to join in the seventh cen¬ 
 tury the invading Persians against the Romans, in 
 the hope of reestablishing their ancient state. That 
 hope was again disappointed. When the country re¬ 
 verted to Byzantium, the monks persuaded the Em¬ 
 peror Heraclius to exterminate the Jews. Those who 
 escaped joined their brethren in Egypt and elsewhere 
 in the mediterranean world, to hope anew. 
 
 The most lasting thing which these exiles, like all 
 their kind, carried with them was, then, this hope of 
 the restoration to Palestine. It dominated the liturgy 
 and the poetry of the exile; it governed Jewish policy 
 and suffused the Jewish outlook. It underlies the 
 organization of the Jewish communal economy, con¬ 
 tributing elements in the practice of the ritual and the 
 observation of the seasons. For a thousand years it 
 continued to be an aspiration of practical political 
 import, reenforced with religious faith. Wherever a 
 Jewish community was to be found, then as now, the 
 prayer could be heard: “For our sins have we been 
 banished from our country and removed far from our 
 land,” together with the invocation for the return to 
 Zion, for the reestablishment of the Davidic throne, for 
 the realization of the prophetic pledge. “We cannot,” 
 
14 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 says the prayer, “in our banishment serve Thee accord¬ 
 ing to Thy commandment.” “Next year in Jerusalem,” 
 is a change rung again and again in the liturgy both 
 of week days and Sabbaths, and of holydays. It links 
 itself with the political activities of a whole millennium: 
 hardly a century passed in which the Jews of one coun¬ 
 try or another were not called upon by a self-proclaimed 
 Messiah to gird up their loins and, by miracle or mili¬ 
 tancy, win back to Zion. In fifth-century Crete, one 
 Moses, assuming miracles, led his people into the sea, 
 where most were drowned. David Alroy, again in 
 the twelfth century, actually succeeded in developing 
 a military adventure strong enough six hundred years 
 later to rouse the imagination of Beaconsfield, who 
 made a novel about him. The expectancy of a political 
 restoration, under the leadership of an earthly Messiah, 
 was a commonplace in the mood of Europe. It is 
 sharply evinced in the tenth-century letter of Chasdai 
 ibn Shaprut to the King of the Chazars, judaized by 
 conversion; and it is literally accepted by non-Jewish 
 Europe. To the Christian mind, no less than to the 
 Jewish, Palestine is the Jewish land and the Jews are 
 the Palestinian people, foreign to Europe, absent from 
 their own land, and in the fulness of time to be returned 
 to it. The equity of the Jew in Palestine has remained 
 a strand in the great tradition of the Christian world. 
 The return of this chosen people to this promised land 
 was regarded by multitudes as an essential preliminary 
 to the second coming of the Saviour, and the fulfilment 
 of the forecasts of Christian eschatology. To Chris¬ 
 tians of the first millennium this return was more 
 deeply implicated in a system of supernaturalism than 
 to the Jews, but however implicated, it was expected. 
 
THE ORIGIN AND BASIS OF ZIONISM 15 
 
 The development and final enthronement of a similar 
 supernaturalism among the Jews were accomplished 
 in the twelfth century. The position of the Jews in 
 European countries grew steadily worse. Disability 
 and persecution were multiplied, and the temper of 
 the Crusades brought them to a climax. Under the 
 circumstances, the notion of a naturalistic, though 
 divinely predetermined, restoration which should be 
 salvation from horror and evil, could not withstand 
 the assault of misfortune. That the restoration must 
 come, the Jews of the world became more and more 
 convinced: how else could Israel escape alive out of 
 the inferno which the Church Militant had made for 
 them of their lives? But that it could come out of 
 their own strength, a natural eventuality of the pro¬ 
 cess of history, was no longer conceivable. They 
 were too weak, too battered, impotent against their 
 persecutors. Only the might of a miracle could save 
 them and restore them. And as the figure and mode 
 of their salvation had already been established in 
 tradition and legend as Messiah the son of David, 
 this Messiah acquired a more and more supernatural 
 character. 
 
 Already in the beginnings of the Messianic legend 
 there had been a potential differentiation between an 
 earthly and a heavenly Messiah. The failure of 
 the earthly Messiahship of the leader of the little sect 
 that later developed into the Christian multitude led 
 to the immediate compensation of the other-worldly 
 ideal which is the Messiahship of the Christian; salva¬ 
 tion from evil and happiness both became heavenly 
 things: earth was regarded as a trial and a transition, 
 to be abandoned and spurned. The Messiah was God 
 
16 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 and the Son of God, miserable on earth but omnipotent 
 in the universe. This ideal denial of real failure the 
 Jews had refused to accept. They fought and hoped 
 on for twelve hundred years. And when, finally, 
 misfortune and the contagion from their intellectual 
 and emotional setting made other-worldliness a part 
 of their outlook, it did not become the overruling 
 part. The Messiah became a supernatural figure 
 indeed, preexisting, and destined to conquer the enemy 
 and persecutor and to restore Israel by means of miracle, 
 but the end achieved was still to be a natural and his¬ 
 toric end continuous with the rest of the movement 
 of history, even if the means were to be discontinuous 
 and supernatural. From the twelfth century on, the 
 self-proclaimed Messiahs are more and more miracle- 
 workers, philosophasters, men of a psychopathic strain. 
 Their moral and intellectual settings are misery, magic, 
 and mysticism, the two latter being the complement 
 of, and escape from, the former. For the same reason 
 the puerilities of the Kabbala became constitutional 
 to their outlook and Kabbalism itself a dominant in¬ 
 fluence on the mind and fortunes of Jewry. But the 
 misery and the compensatory supernaturalism reached 
 their height in the seventeenth century. Their symbol 
 was the false or pseudo-Messiah, Sabbattai Zevi of 
 Smyrna. Only that he was a charlatan, weak and 
 without integrity, not that he was a false Messiah, 
 must be regarded a reproach to him. All Messiahs 
 are false when they fail, for the success of works, not 
 faith, is the only proof of true Messiahship, and how is 
 the success of works to be achieved by the means and 
 attributes of the Messiahs of thaumaturgy? The 
 importance of Sabbattai Zevi was due to the European 
 
THE ORIGIN AND BASIS OF ZIONISM 17 
 
 character of his influence. Not only Jews fell under 
 it. It touched statecraft and affected the policies 
 of the world. It is the ironic and picturesque expira¬ 
 tion of a period in the history of the European struggle 
 for democracy. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 RELIGIOUS IMPERIALISM AND THE JEWISH POSITION 
 
 THE year 1648 is a momentous one in the history of 
 Europe. It is the year of the Peace of Westphalia and of 
 the formation of the Puritan Commonwealth in England. 
 It marks the end of over a hundred years of warfare 
 and the final overthrow of a political principle which 
 had dominated Europe to its hurt since the Council 
 of Nicsea, in the 325th year of the Christian era. This 
 was so built into the social system of the Christian 
 world that much of the history of this world might 
 be described as a narrative of the methods hit upon or 
 chosen to evade or oppose it. The principle might 
 be designated, briefly, as the principle of religious 
 imperialism. It was a new thing when it was promul¬ 
 gated. The ancient and pagan world knew nothing 
 about it. It came to Europe as a logical implication 
 of the Christian philosophy of life, and the status 
 and fate of the Jews were closely bound up with it. 
 Although the religions of the states of antiquity, Athens, 
 or Sparta, or Corinth, or Judea, or Rome, were state 
 religions, they did not imply intolerance toward the 
 gods of other states, particularly when those states 
 were not at war. Between these gods and their wor¬ 
 shippers there was held to be a certain community, 
 looking back to a community of blood, which gave 
 the gods a prerogative and monopoly on the reverence 
 
 18 
 
THE JEWISH POSITION 
 
 19 
 
 and worship of the citizens, and the citizens a claim 
 to priority on the good-will and protection of the gods. 
 All gods, as we see most conspicuously in the case of 
 Jehovah, had certain tribal, civic, national predilections 
 and obligations, even when most universal and all- 
 embracing in their divinities. They remained to a 
 great degree chthonic, with larger powers and jurisdic¬ 
 tion over special places, and very specific centres of 
 worship and residence. The men of the ancient world 
 expressed this divine economy by paying due reverence 
 to the gods of the lands in which they travelled or so¬ 
 journed. Even military conquerors, like Alexander, 
 in a day so late as his, worshipped at the shrines of the 
 divinities whose lands they had devastated and im¬ 
 plored them for favour and cooperation. Later and 
 more sophisticated times retained this sense of chthonic 
 over-lordship, and the Romans made it a practice to 
 remove the religious holies from the lands of their 
 conquest to appropriate sanctuaries in Rome. The pro¬ 
 tective power of the divinities, it was supposed, would 
 then accrue to the state of their domicile. Thus pagan 
 Rome was not only tolerant of, but hospitable to, 
 the diversity of religions and of the nationalities of 
 which religions were among the distinguishing marks. 
 The growth of the empire, in fact, exercised in this 
 regard a liberalizing influence, in that it necessitated 
 a very large degree of differentiation between citizen¬ 
 ship and cult. Because of the tribal background of the 
 small city-states and of their tradition of blood- 
 brotherhood and common ancestry, an alien could 
 rarely become a citizen, even in Athens, the freest 
 of them: he could only be a righteous stranger, as the 
 Bible has it, a sojourner, entitled to justice, but not to 
 
20 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS N 
 
 participation in the intimacies of the state’s life. 
 The empire founded by Alexander, which had a sharply 
 conscious missionary character, continued this tradi¬ 
 tion. Although it imposed Greek forms of political 
 and social organization and Greek habits of life and 
 thought upon the mediterranean world, it did not 
 establish a common citizenship which should be de¬ 
 tached from the local society wherein the privileges 
 of citizenship had to be predominantly exercised. 
 This was an achievement of Roman imperialism. 
 
 Roman imperialism, preoccupied from the outset 
 with maintaining the Roman hegemony, the pax 
 Romana of the Roman legions and the Roman law, 
 left local customs and practices intact, indeed sub¬ 
 sidized and encouraged them. Nationalities and 
 cults flourished and had heyday in the empire so 
 long as they were considered not to be dangerous to the 
 state. Until the advent of Christianity there were 
 no religious persecutions in Rome. There was police 
 and military action against political criminals, who 
 practised or were supposed to practise a doctrine 
 subversive of loyalty to the state. Otherwise, freedom 
 of thought, of belief and cult was, as in some places 
 in recent times, untrammelled. Had they not been, 
 Christianism never could have made headway against 
 its rivals. When, for reasons of his own, Constantine 
 made Christianism the religion of the state, the empire 
 was thrown back to the position of the city-state 
 which it had outgrown, and worse. This deteriorative 
 reversion was inevitable from the assumptions of 
 Christianity itself. For these assumptions the Judaism 
 of the priests, as distinguished from the Hebraism 
 of the prophets, has its own responsibility. So long 
 
THE JEWISH POSITION 
 
 21 
 
 as men admit that alternatives are possible to any 
 theories or doctrines they may entertain, the rigours of 
 intolerance and the arrogances of infallibility cannot 
 develop. Experience remains the court of last re¬ 
 sort in the judgment of truth. Truth remains a thing 
 not primary but eventual, and this eventuality in the 
 knowledge of what is true and what is false among 
 alternatives keeps them more or less equal, and bars 
 intolerance. This was the case with the congeries of 
 national divinities of most of the city-states of the 
 ancient world. With hieratic Judaism there came, 
 however, a difference. It assumed the sole and ex¬ 
 clusive right to the acquisition and possession of the 
 truth, as revelation. Everything else, consequently, 
 no matter what it was, nor how or where it came from, 
 had to be regarded as error. Truth being given 
 finally and completely, its possessor was infallible, 
 and debate, experiment, the whole intellectual enter¬ 
 prise, the scientific attitude of mind, became malice 
 and perversity. Difference became either concealed 
 agreement or blasphemous defence of error. For 
 people to whom Holy Scripture was the sum and sub¬ 
 stance of all wisdom, the philosophers and scientists 
 must needs be either its interpreters or its enemies, 
 and were so held. 
 
 When the Christian sectaries made of the script 
 which had become to the Jews the revealed word of 
 God their own holy, adding thereto the New Testament, 
 they also made their own the assumption of infallibility 
 of hieratic Judaism. The adoption of Christianity 
 as the state religion gave them the force wherewith 
 to make this assumption effective. Citizenship be¬ 
 came conditional on conformity to certain artificial 
 
22 
 
 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 standards of right doctrine, those opinions which 
 failed to conform being, ex hypothesi , false, and the 
 judges of the failure being the ruling class to whom 
 the guardianship of the standards had accrued. The 
 Jews were, by the implications of the fundamental 
 doctrines of Christianity, non-conformists, and hence 
 without title to citizenship. Imperial edict deprived 
 them of it in the year 339, and the bulk of them have 
 remained thus deprived to the present day. In the 
 course of time all infidels, non-conformists, dissenters, 
 heretics, became automatically outlaws, and a large 
 portion of the history of European civilization is the 
 history of an attempt, on the one side to crush them 
 out, by fire and sword, on the other side to compel 
 their acquiescence by force or persuasion. No doubt 
 other motives than the religious were involved; no 
 doubt the latter was often used as an excuse for other 
 types of greed and aggression, but until the Reforma¬ 
 tion and after, it remained the foremost in the con¬ 
 sciousness of Europe. 
 
 To the consciousness of Europe the world was basic¬ 
 ally an Augustinian epic. Eternal and Omnipotent 
 God, it held, had created in six days’ time a perfect 
 world. This perfection would never have lapsed if 
 Adam had not of his own free will disobeyed the com¬ 
 mand of Eternal and Omnipotent God. His disobedi¬ 
 ence brought death into the world and all our woe. 
 It caused his banishment from Paradise. The sin, 
 original with him, became a hereditary, constitutional, 
 outstanding element in the nature of all his offspring. 
 All, together with the world God made for them, were 
 deserving of, and under God’s justice were predestined 
 to, eternal destruction, had God’s mercy not prevailed 
 
THE JEWISH POSITION 
 
 23 
 
 against God’s justice and provided atonement. At 
 various times, hence, he manifested himself to a 
 selected portion of the sons of Man, to the seed of 
 Abraham, namely. To these he delivered his law, 
 with the view of an eventual atonement for Adam’s 
 original sin, and the redemption of man from the pen¬ 
 alty of it. Hence the incarnation and the crucifixion. 
 These are the atonement, vicarious of course, but none 
 the less the salvation of those predestined to believe. 
 Such, predestinate from the beginning of time, are the 
 citizens of the City of God, of the Church catholic, 
 universal. All others are citizens of the City of the 
 World. The Jews, particularly, belong to this latter 
 city. They had been God’s first chosen. To them 
 he had revealed himself, with them had made his cove¬ 
 nant, to them had sent as Messiah his only-begotten 
 son who was only another form of himself, for the re¬ 
 demption of sin-cursed mankind. And they had re¬ 
 jected the Messiah and had had him nailed to the cross. 
 For this God rejected them in their turn and cursed 
 them to live under the ban of his rejection, outcast 
 from the community of the saved, plying forbidden 
 vocations in disaster and dispersion until the second 
 coming of the Messiah of the Lord, and the restoration 
 at his hands. 
 
 This eschatology, furthermore, was inextricably 
 interwoven with the social system of the feudal order, 
 a system that has its maximum ideal expression in the 
 bull XJnam Sanctam. It is a thing of logic tempered 
 by rebellion, resting consciously in metaphysics as 
 few social systems have. Its basis is the omnipotence 
 of God, without whose sustaining grace nothing can 
 be or come to be. But this sustaining grace is not 
 
24 
 
 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 regarded as being distributed equally and impartially 
 among all the children of God. Existence is a hier- 
 achy and its parts are related as the links of a pendent 
 chain. Each hangs from the other, without which 
 it would fall into the abyss. Since the greatest strain 
 is on the highest link, in that must be concentrated 
 the greatest power, and as there is no strain to speak 
 of on the lowest link, least power is needed or belongs 
 in that. The highest link, directly pendent on God, 
 is the Pope, his vicegerent on earth, the visible symbol 
 and concretion of the Church universal. In him, 
 consequently, must be the maximum concentration 
 of the grace of God. From him it passes downward 
 and outward, to the princes of the Church and the 
 temporal power, like light decreasing in intensity with 
 its distance from the source, so that when it finally 
 reaches the peasant serf there is enough left for the 
 sacraments of baptism, confirmation, marriage, and 
 burial, but nothing else. Everybody in society de¬ 
 pends on somebody higher up, and woe to the man who 
 has no overlord to depend upon. He is a “masterless 
 man,” without status or right, the prey of any power 
 strong enough to seize him. 
 
 The enforcement of this social system, save in the 
 case of the serfs and the Jews, was never complete. 
 The temporal struggled against the arrogations of the 
 ecclesiastical power, emperors against popes, kings 
 against emperors, noblemen of lesser rank against 
 kings, cities against dynasts, and on occasion even the 
 peasants rose. The great majority of these conflicts 
 were, however, conflicts within a framework of unanim¬ 
 ity. The hand of every man was against the infidel, 
 the dissenter, the non-conformist. The Inquisition 
 
THE JEWISH POSITION 
 
 25 
 
 was as impartial as the temporal power was debauched. 
 Religious imperialism was stronger than political 
 imperialism and for a long time succeeded in maintain¬ 
 ing by force as truly catholic a unanimity as, human 
 nature being what it is, was humanly possible. One 
 dissentient sect after another arose and went down 
 before this force, from the Arians, Lollards, Hussites, 
 to the Huguenots. The_Jews alone, in the heart of 
 Europe, underwent without resistance a religious war 
 waged against them by the whole of Europe, and sur¬ 
 vived it. They were the everlasting protestants. 
 
 But the conscience of Europe was not freed until the 
 mutual interplay and rivalry of religious and dynastic 
 interests brought about that military confrontation 
 in religious terms which we know as the Wars of the 
 Reformation. Those wars, quite as much a conflict 
 of dynasties for empire as of doctrines for domination, 
 and carried on almost continuously for nearly a cen¬ 
 tury and a half, finally destroyed the imperialism of 
 religion in Europe. They left the continent a desert, 
 the feudal order shattered, the local sovereign an 
 autocrat, and the peasantry almost destroyed. But 
 particularly they left the mind of Europe free from 
 the central fixation to which religious imperialism 
 had compelled it, and both the misery and enterprise 
 of Europe free for intellectual adventure. The de¬ 
 struction of the imperialism of the Church converted 
 it into the opportunist foe of the temporal power, 
 and its theorists, like the Jesuit brothers Mariana and 
 Suarez, opposed the people to the kings and super¬ 
 imposed the Church on both. Protestantism itself, 
 again, by setting the authority of the Bible against 
 that of the Pope and abolishing intermediaries between 
 
26 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 God and the hearts of men, struck at all authority, 
 political as well as ecclesiastical. The idea of the natu¬ 
 ral rights of man was used to confront the tradition 
 of the divine rights of kings. Political doctrine took 
 imaginative wings. The challenge to sovereignty 
 was made effective in England by a formal trial and 
 genuine execution of a king according to the law of 
 the land above which he had, as its supposititious source, 
 been held to be. In the rest of Europe this challenge 
 became a potential menace, working in the background 
 of men’s thoughts, and bursting now and then into 
 the foreground in action. 
 
 But if men found themselves in real ideas of this 
 type, they sought also to escape from the misery to 
 which the ideas were a response in a new lease of super¬ 
 naturalism and a new magic. The substitution of 
 the Bible for the church as the seat of authority in 
 religion aroused interest, intellectual but by no means 
 kindly, in the People of the Book and all their works. 
 The Kabbala had almost immediately seized the wan¬ 
 dering imagination of Europe. Its mysteries, letters, 
 phrases, and calculations, its pretensions to magical 
 powers, allied as they were with hidden meanings 
 universally attributed to the Bible, fascinated the 
 imagination of Europeans, from Pico della Mirandola 
 to the latest English Biblitaster mulling in mysteries. 
 This, together with the complete emotional and intel¬ 
 lectual decentralization, could not but lead to anticipa¬ 
 tions of the Messiah. The time of the restoration of 
 Israel to Palestine and of the second advent was held 
 to be at hand. Kabbalistic calculations among Jews 
 put it in 1648. And Christian millennianists put it in 
 1666. 
 
THE JEWISH POSITION 
 
 27 
 
 Between 1648 and 1666—the era of Sabbattai' 
 Zevi’s “mission”—came, however, one of the very 
 darkest pages of the history of the Jewish people. 
 Their status in Europe derived from two assumptions, 
 both implicit in their alienation from citizenship in 
 339. The first was that they were members of a 
 foreign nation, living in their own communities, under 
 their own laws, and governed by their own hereditary 
 or elective rulers. The stress thrown by theology 
 on the absence of the Jews from Zion, the designation 
 of their absence as a Galuth or dispersion, has obscured 
 the truly national character of the Jewish community, 
 national both in the political and the cultural sense. 
 Men forget that absence from Palestine meant presence 
 somewhere else, and it happens that there has been 
 hardly a period in the history of the Jewish people 
 without the concentration of the greater part of them 
 upon a single continuous area, into a community 
 organized and operating under Jewish law. That it 
 was not sovereign, in the sense of being a war-making, 
 peace-making community; that it was a subject- 
 nationality, largely at the mercy of its neighbours; 
 that it was hence a repressed community without 
 freedom for its spontaneous energies, are matters of 
 record. Nevertheless, it was a political entity, self- 
 determined and with almost complete internal au¬ 
 tonomy, and was until the nineteenth century dealt 
 with as such by the masters of Europe and Asia. 
 Such an entity was the Exilarchate of the House of 
 David, which came into being with the Babylonian 
 Captivity; such was the Nagidate in Egypt; such was 
 the Wa’ad Arbah Arazoth (Council of the Four Lands) 
 or Congressus Judaicus in the Polish Empire. The 
 
28 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 \ 
 
 latter dominion, extending at the time when this Con¬ 
 gress flourished almost from the Baltic to the Black 
 Sea, was the great area of concentration for the Jewish 
 people of Europe from the thirteenth century onward. 
 These Jewish governments acted for the Jewish people 
 in all matters affecting their relations with their land¬ 
 lords, conquerors, or overlords. 
 
 The Congressus Judaicus , indeed, was an echo of the 
 Polish Saym resting on a foundation of congregational 
 units and achieving what was for the time a very high 
 degree of democracy. It was responsible to the Polish 
 kings both for the domestic and the foreign affairs 
 of the Jews, particularly for taxes. It was the one 
 agency that stood between the Jewry of Poland and 
 the total destruction that menaced it with the Chmel- 
 nicki uprising in 1648. The Messianic afflatus of the 
 period was largely a function of this uprising. An act 
 of revolt and resentment on the part of the Ukrainian 
 khlops or peasantry against the unbearable exactions 
 of their Polish overlords, it struck hardest at the Jews. 
 The Jews had been agents of these overlords—taxfarmers, 
 factors, and such—and they were the first to pay. Chmel- 
 nicki organized a Jew-hunt that ranged from Podolia 
 and Volhynia to Lithuania and White Russia. He 
 was followed by the Great Russians, who had declared 
 war upon the Poles. The Russians were followed by 
 the plague. In the course of little more than a decade 
 the Jewish people had lost 675,000 of their number, 
 their homes were devastated, their property destroyed. 
 Thousands fled to western Europe, other thousands 
 sought safety in baptism. Without the help of the 
 Jewry of western Europe, which came swiftly and gene¬ 
 rously, the Congressus Judaicus of Poland could never 
 
THE JEWISH POSITION 
 
 29 
 
 have reconstituted the economy of their nation. But 
 the great comfort of their misery was the word out of 
 the East of the imminence of the Messiah and the 
 return to the Promised Land. They believed—how, 
 so miserable, could they help believing?—and their 
 belief sustained them. 
 
 Religious doctrine had its own part in their misery. 
 It was the second and other ground of their disability, 
 a more terrible ground, for the position of the Jew in 
 the European religious system, no matter what the 
 sect, was regarded as determined by divine revelation 
 and was a commonplace of faith that was taught to 
 the poorest serf. The Jew was held to be eternally 
 excommunicate from the gates of the common salvation, 
 rejector of it, and cursed for the rejection. His 
 existence, hence, could be maintained only on sufferance. 
 Being beyond communion, he was incommunicado, 
 without rights, civil or personal. The Church might 
 order his destruction, over-ruling even the will of the 
 king, whose property, according to the mediaeval 
 custom, the Jew was automatically held to be. The 
 Church authorities in Poland were indefatigable in their 
 efforts against the Jews and their faith. They drove 
 them from the public service, assaulted the general 
 principles of their charter, demanded and compelled 
 sumptuary laws against them, both of dress and domi¬ 
 cile, spread against them blood libels and levied on them 
 illegal and extortionate taxes. The Reformation gave 
 the Church in Poland, as elsewhere, an added animus. 
 Jewish influence was credited with causing the heresy, 
 and any punishment short of death was not too great. 
 “The Church,” declared the Ecclesiastical Synod of 
 1542, “tolerates the Jews for the sole purpose of re- 
 
30 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 minding us of the torments of the Saviour.” Between 
 1648 and 1666 the Catholicism of Poland finished off 
 the uncompleted depredations of Chmelnicki and his 
 Haidamacks and of the Muscovite and his troops. 
 The misery of the Polish Jews reached a depth so ulti¬ 
 mate that their minds could not conceive of a salvation 
 less so. The new Messiah was believed in with a 
 fervour measurable only by the tragedy from which 
 he was to save his people. “The Jews of Ukrainia,” 
 writes the Christian, Galatovski, who flourished at the 
 period, “ abandoned their all in readiness to be carried 
 on a cloud to Jerusalem.” 
 
 In sum, then, between 1648 and 1666 the political, 
 intellectual, and emotional condition of the whole 
 European world was such that the achievement of 
 the restoration of the chosen people to their promised 
 land was generally accepted as the imminent precursor 
 to a millennial change. The anticipation moved all 
 classes of society equally, from the miserable and 
 expropriated peasantry and Jewry, seeking in magic 
 salvation from fact, to the most intellectual and scien¬ 
 tific protagonists of that new adjustment of cosmic out¬ 
 look which we call science. It is used by Mennaseh 
 ben Israel in his successful effort to persuade Cromwell 
 to remove the ban against the settlement of Jews in 
 England. “The opinion,” he writes, “of many Chris¬ 
 tians and mine do concur therein that we both believe 
 that the restoring time of our Nation into their native 
 country is very near at hand.” It is the subject of 
 exchange between the Gentile scholar Oldenburg and 
 the Jewish philosopher Spinoza. “All the world here,” 
 Oldenburg writes to Spinoza, “is talking of a rumour 
 of the return of the Israelites ... to their own 
 
THE JEWISH POSITION 
 
 31 
 
 country. . . . Should the news be confirmed, it 
 
 may bring about a revolution in all things.” And 
 Spinoza, many years later, when the Sabbattian craze 
 was already subsident, arguing in the Theologico- 
 Political Tractate for the equality of all peoples before 
 God, insists that whatever election the Jews were 
 beneficiaries of was national and social, that it “had 
 no regard to aught but dominion and physical advan¬ 
 tages, for by such alone could one nation be distin¬ 
 guished from another.” “Nay, I would go so far 
 as to believe that if the foundations of their religion 
 have not emasculated their minds they may even, 
 if the occasion offers, so changeable are human affairs, 
 raise up their empire afresh and that God may a second 
 time elect them.” 
 
 The significant thing about the whole Sabbattian 
 adventure and the development that led up to it is 
 the fact that nowhere in Europe was there any question 
 that the Jews are a nation, that Palestine is “their 
 own country,” that the two belong together. Nor has 
 there been any question in the European mind since. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 EFFECTS OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURAL RIGHTS 
 
 UPON THE JEWISH POSITION 
 
 FOR Europe the Messianic expectancy was only a 
 passing mood. Science, begun as an adventure, be¬ 
 came an institution; its temper of interrogation and 
 challenge forced everything under analytical scrutiny, 
 from the least-regarded spontaneities of nature to 
 the most sacrosanct taboos of man. The eighteenth 
 century incorporated into its common sense what had 
 been daring imagination in the seventeenth, and its 
 calm and satirical eye discerned underneath all the 
 differences of race, faith, colour, wealth, power, station, 
 nurture, and capacity, a “natural man” the equal 
 and the peer of his fellows. Inequalities, it declared, 
 were the artificial effects of the institutions of civiliza¬ 
 tion; the effects of the State and the Church, which, 
 again, were the perversions of nature by the few in their 
 immemorial exploitation of the many. One God, one 
 law, one human nature are at the foundation of all 
 life. Each man is the like of every other man; each is 
 equally and inalienably entitled with all others to 
 “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; each has 
 contracted the insurance of his title by consenting 
 to the creation of government; each has been then 
 defrauded by the government he has created of just 
 that natural right which he had designed it to protect. 
 
 32 
 
NATURAL RIGHTS 
 
 33 
 
 Strip away government, the Church, the economic 
 order, and you abolish crime and poverty and the 
 whole hierarchy of social inequalities. All these are 
 man-made. They do not exist in nature, and they 
 should not be tolerated by enlightened men. By 
 nature men are citizens of the world, not of the state; 
 followers of natural religion, not of this or that fabrica¬ 
 tion of priests; like lovers of one another, not haters 
 seduced thereto by artificial diversities. By nature, 
 men are equal and alike, they differ only by nurture. 
 
 This teaching, common to England and to France, 
 particularly strong in France, was not, of course, the 
 pure deduction of science. It was quite as much, and 
 perhaps more, resentment against the concentrated 
 absolutism which had become characteristic of the 
 state system of Europe in the eighteenth century. In 
 England alone had this failed to fix itself firmly, and 
 the period from the restoration of the Stuarts to their 
 final expulsion and the formulation of the Bill of 
 Rights was a period of actual conflict between a dynas¬ 
 tic absolutism grounding itself on the traditional 
 divine rights of kings, and a democratic nationalism 
 grounding itself on the scientific natural rights of 
 man, with a final practical victory for natural rights. 
 On the continent, the victory was entirely dynastic. 
 States were conceived as estates —“VEtat c’est moi ” 
 was no paradox of a paranoiac king—and populations 
 and territories changed hands in marriage and warfare 
 conducted as the purely private and self-sufficient 
 enterprises of royal privilege. Everything was prop¬ 
 erty, including opinion. Thus, religious imperialism 
 had not given way to tolerance. It merely had been 
 replaced by religious nationalism. Citizenship re- 
 
34 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 mained an appurtenance of conformity to certain 
 standard dogmas and beliefs. This, as Locke’s essays 
 on toleration attest, was as true in England as on the 
 continent; and the winning of toleration was itself 
 a political event compelled mostly by the political 
 strength of the disabled religious minorities. Tolera¬ 
 tion is in substance religious democracy. Whatever 
 may be the situation de jure , it is impossible without at 
 least a de facto distinction between Church and State, 
 a distinction that becomes possible only when sects 
 are so numerous and varied and powerful that the al¬ 
 ternative to toleration is civil war. Over the major 
 part of the continent of Europe religious nationalism 
 prevailed to within the third year of the Great War, 
 and citizenship and church membership were compli¬ 
 cative and coincident. The greater the strength of this 
 artificial coimplication, the more centralized and abso¬ 
 lute the government which sustains it; the more com¬ 
 plete, the more logical and systematic the theoretical 
 repudiation which according to time, place, and circum¬ 
 stances it undergoes. Such was the case in France. The 
 theorizing of the Encyclopaedists, from Diderot and 
 Voltaire to Montesquieu and Rousseau, carried to their 
 logical limit the practical assumptions of Locke and the 
 other authors of the English Bill of Rights. They made 
 good in idea the shortcomings of the social facts. 
 
 That their logic should ultimately be extended to 
 the Jews was inevitable. In England this extension 
 had been proceeding in the normally piecemeal and 
 muddling British way. Although it was not absolutely 
 completed until 1890, it was begun practically with 
 their readmission to England in Cromwell’s day, and 
 progressed in the usual English parliamentary fashion 
 
NATURAL RIGHTS 
 
 35 
 
 from then on. In France, the extension was shorter, 
 sharper, more purely theoretical. First made in formal 
 terms by Montesquieu, it received practical applica¬ 
 tion and defence at the hands of Mirabeau and the 
 Abbe Gregoire. During the Revolution the two latter 
 fought for it in the National Assembly against the 
 clericals, and it was finally carried (1791) as an inevita¬ 
 ble corollary of the Constitution. The effect was for¬ 
 mally to convert the Jews from a nationality into a 
 sect: “Judaism,” wrote Deputy Schwendt to his con¬ 
 stituents in Alsace, “is nothing more than the name of 
 a distinct religion.” The Jews were enfranchised, 
 not as they had been disfranchised, in their collectivity, 
 as a corporate entity, a nationality; but individually, 
 Jew by Jew, each as a “natural man,” the equal of 
 all other “natural men,” without heredity, history, 
 language, culture, or social memory, a mere “now” 
 in the temporal extent of the generations. The strip¬ 
 ping of his selfhood which this requires from any man 
 was of course an impossible price to pay for enfran¬ 
 chisement. It was suicide, and a nationality can only 
 die or be killed, but has so far shown no ability to 
 commit suicide. Nevertheless, the Jews of western 
 Europe fancied that they could pay the price and sur¬ 
 vive as Jews. They accepted the responsibility of the 
 affirmative to Napoleon’s questions of 1806. Without 
 this affirmative he would have withdrawn from them 
 the civil freedom which the Revolution had won for 
 them. Their yielding it initiated, so far as social 
 history is concerned, the mental attitude and develop¬ 
 ment of what is called the Reform movement in 
 Judaism. 
 
 In this movement there is nothing primarily religious. 
 
36 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 It began with no great inspiration, no great vision 
 and gospel of inner regeneration, which are the traits 
 of genuinely religious reforms. Its beginnings rest 
 in a political and social position, and to this day it 
 has not advanced from this position. It stands still on 
 the intellectual platform of the eighteenth century 
 and the French Revolution, on the doctrine of natural 
 rights and natural law and the rule of abstract reason. 
 It strips from the Jew all that makes of him a concrete 
 human being, all his reality. It denies in its very form 
 the existence of the social personality called the Jewish 
 people. It substitutes for the vision of the Messiah, 
 which sustained the Jews in the Middle Ages, the con¬ 
 ception of “the mission of Israel,” to justify such 
 minimal Jewish traits as the organizers of Reform 
 could not bring themselves to abandon. It restates, 
 with an inverted valuation, the mediaeval conception 
 of the status and function of the Jewish people. Where, 
 for example, Christianism declares that the Jews had 
 been condemned by God to dispersion because of their 
 rejection of the Saviour, the Reform Jews say, “The 
 dispersion is a fact, but is not due to the curse of God, 
 but to the realization of the divine purpose to bless 
 the world.” Where Christianism says, “Jews are 
 dispersed and will continue so as a living witness to 
 the prophecies of the Bible which proclaims their 
 dispersion,” the Reformers assert that this dispersion 
 is predestined so that the Jewish sectaries who have 
 been chosen by the Lord may be everlasting witnesses 
 to the truth of the Bible and its prophecies. And 
 where Christianism declares that this dispersion will 
 last until the second coming of Christ, until the appear¬ 
 ance of Christ as the Paraclete, the Reform sect de- 
 
NATURAL RIGHTS 
 
 37 
 
 dares that this dispersion is to continue until all men 
 shall acknowledge the “Jewish God.” In this way 
 the movement has attempted automatically, under 
 the rule that ideals are compensatory for facts, to 
 convert into a merit what to Christian theology is 
 the shame of the Jewish people. It did that, I think, 
 on the whole, if I read the literature aright, with 
 something like a broken heart. It wanted for the 
 Jewish people the same values that other peoples in the 
 world were getting. There is no question about the 
 amiability of the intentions of Reform, and there is no 
 question about the magnificent distinction of one phase 
 of Reform achievement, not noticed by Reformers. 
 This is the liberation of woman in the Jewish com¬ 
 munity and if nothing else justifies it, this does. But 
 once it has liberated the Jewish woman, it has done 
 its whole work. The intention of Reform was excellent 
 but the method it used, being contrary to the trend 
 of social, history, failed to achieve the results in¬ 
 tended. ... 
 
 Other states slowly imitated France. Western 
 Europe completed the enfranchisement of the Jews, 
 severally, only toward the end of the nineteenth 
 century. And this enfranchisement, of course, has 
 the defects of its virtues, for Western Jewry took, 
 with respect to the enfranchisement it sought, a 
 position which was an acknowledgment that Jewish 
 qualities, Jewish forms of life and thought were in 
 Jews unworthy; that Jewish differences from their 
 neighbours were, on the whole, inferiorities, and that 
 Jews must become—except that they call their priests 
 “rabbis” and worship in “temples” and not in churches 
 —the same as the Gentiles. The Reform movement, 
 
38 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 therefore, has been what is called an assimilationist 
 movement. That is, it has wanted for Jews not an 
 equal but a similar happiness to that of all other peoples. 
 And what it has accomplished in order to get this 
 life and happiness has been to rob the enfranchised 
 Jew of the self-respect of his birthright as Jew; has 
 been to compel nim to act on the assumption that the 
 whole substance of the Jewish background and tradi¬ 
 tion, the organization of Jewish life with its implications, 
 is a worthless thing, a thing to be abandoned. 
 
 This whole process rests on the illusion that equality 
 is similarity. It is concomitant with the uncritical 
 doctrine of natural right and natural law; with the 
 resentment which this doctrine expressed against the 
 artificial inequalities of the dynastic and ecclesiastical 
 systems that robbed men of their due of freedom and 
 happiness. The doctrine is compensatory; a protest, 
 not a description. But in animating and guiding the 
 French Revolution it served a high purpose. It 
 enfranchised the peoples of Europe, even in the course 
 of the Napoleonic attempt to enslave them. It 
 awakened their dormant corporate consciousness. It 
 led them to realize their nationality and to struggle 
 for its freedom. To say this is to say that people 
 “were becoming conscious, in trying to respond to the 
 call of the Revolution, of what nature and habit and 
 hope they and their neighbours were, and of how these 
 were expressed in language and tradition, in memory 
 and custom, in all that makes a community’s cycle 
 of life. The revolutionary call to Equality meant, 
 for the daily life, the abolition of all caste and property 
 distinctions. . . . The Revolution’s call to Fra¬ 
 
 ternity meant for the daily life comradeship on an 
 
NATURAL RIGHTS 
 
 39 
 
 equal basis with any one with whom communication 
 could be effectively held—in truth, with the neighbour 
 near at hand, who speaks the same language and has 
 the same background, who, by virtue of this sameness, 
 understands. The Revolution’s call to Liberty meant, 
 first and foremost, the overthrow of the traditional 
 oppressor at home and the achievement there of self- 
 government, the replacing of dynasty by commonwealth. 
 
 “Had the new French nation continued to treat 
 the peoples its armies set free as peers, as fellow- 
 citizens, not as subjects; had Napoleon not once more 
 restored piratical imperialism to the place from which 
 the ideas of the Revolution had driven it, the ruling 
 caste of Europe could never have succeeded in duping 
 their subjects into believing in the identity of their 
 respective interests and the community of their cause. 
 Even so, their success depended on a concession to the 
 principle that sovereignty rests in the people. For the 
 call to resist Napoleon had to be made through an 
 appeal to self-appreciation, through a propaganda, 
 sometimes inspired, sometimes spontaneous, exhorting 
 the various peoples of Europe to consider the ex¬ 
 cellence and dignity of their ancestries, their cults, 
 their traditions, their histories, their ways of living, 
 their arts, and particularly their languages. The most 
 conspicuous continental instance of such a propaganda 
 is the series of ‘Addresses to the German People,’ by 
 the philosopher Fichte.” 
 
 But there were many others. It is part of the irony 
 of the Jewish position that those Jews who were in 
 contact with the great movements of the day, scions 
 of the one people that had from antiquity on been 
 champions of nationality against all imperialism and 
 
40 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 tyranny, should seek themselves to repress and destroy 
 their own at a time when nationality was awakening 
 to renewed life among the peoples of the whole con¬ 
 tinent of Europe—in Greece and among the other 
 victims of Turkish domination; in Germany; in Poland; 
 in Ireland. That the restoration of Palestine to the 
 Jewish people and the Jewish people to Palestine 
 had even in this period touched the interests and hopes 
 of Jews and Gentiles both, there is much in the record 
 to show. An anonymous letter to the Jews of France 
 by “one of them,” proposed in 1798 the creation by 
 the Jews of the world of a Jewish council which should 
 treat with the French government for the restoration 
 of Palestine to its traditional people. “The country 
 we propose to occupy,” he wrote, “shall include (sub¬ 
 ject to such arrangements as shall be agreeable to 
 France) Lower Egypt, with the addition of a district, 
 which shall have for its limits a line running from 
 Acre to the Dead Sea, and from the south point of 
 that lake to the Red Sea.” 1 He pointed out the 
 economic advantages of the position, situated at the 
 juncture of three continents, and concluded: “Oh, my 
 brethren! What sacrifices ought we not to make to 
 attain this object! We shall return to our country, we 
 shall live under our own laws, we shall behold those 
 sacred places which our ancestors rendered illustrious 
 with their courage and their virtues. I already see 
 you all animated with a holy zeal. Israelites! The 
 term of your misfortunes is at hand. The opportunity 
 is favourable. Take care that you do not allow it to 
 escape.” Just how the opportunity was favourable 
 is not known, but it is significant that the Moniteur 
 
 ^ited by A. M. Hyamson, in “Palestine,” p. 165. 
 
NATURAL RIGHTS 
 
 41 
 
 Universelie of 1799, 23 Germinal, records a proclamation 
 ordered in Constantinople by Napoleon, inviting the 
 Jews of Asia and Africa to enrol under his banners 
 for the purpose of reestablishing ancient Jerusalem. 
 The failure of both the Western and Eastern Jewries 
 to respond to these calls had probably no slight con¬ 
 nection with the Napoleonic impatience and severity 
 in 1806, when the Emperor practically compelled 
 by his questions the Jews of his domains either to re¬ 
 pudiate their nationality or to put themselves in a 
 position to affirm it by force. The Council of Notables 
 or Sanhedrin which he called repudiated it: the bulk 
 of them came not from the free heart of France but 
 from clericalist and priest-ridden Alsace. The writer 
 of the letter of 1798 came from a freer-hearted and 
 clearer-visioned time in the history of France. 
 
 Significantly, the one great parallel of this period 
 issues a generation later from the world’s other great 
 seat of freedom and republicanism, where the con¬ 
 ception of “natural rights” dominated—the United 
 States of America. It is there overlaid a little with 
 elements of mountebankery and melodrama, and 
 takes some time to come clear. But clear it does come 
 finally, and its terms are remarkably similar to those 
 of the letter of 1798. Its terms are promulgated by 
 Mordecai Manuel Noah. Its first shape in his mind 
 was that of a Messianic adventure tempered by the 
 business of real estate speculation. Sensitive to the 
 sufferings and disabilities of his people, he conceived 
 the notion of founding for them on Grand Island, not 
 far from Buffalo, New York, a city of refuge, which he 
 designed to call Ararat, and to establish himself as Chief 
 Judge of Israel. He persuaded a Gentile friend to 
 
42 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 invest in the land, and in September, 1825, proceeded 
 amid much comic circumstance and public comment 
 to lay the corner-stone of his city in an Episcopal 
 church in the village of Buffalo. On the occasion 
 he issued a proclamation, appointing commissioners, 
 levying taxes, ordering a census and so on, and re¬ 
 viving and reestablishing the ancient “Government 
 of the Jewish Nation, under the auspices and pro¬ 
 tection of the constitution and laws of the United 
 States of America.” 1 The enterprise was, of course, 
 damned from the outset by its charlatanic character. 
 At its core, nevertheless, were good sense and sound 
 statesmanship. The idea persisted in Noah’s mind, 
 but it turned from a city of refuge on the North Ameri¬ 
 can continent to a complete restoration in Zion. To 
 this he reverted repeatedly, always with the notion 
 that the United States might act as the liberator. 
 “The United States,” he wrote in 1844, “the only 
 country which has given civil and religious rights to 
 the Jews equal with all other sects; the only country 
 which has not persecuted them has been selected 
 and pointedly distinguished in prophecy as the nation 
 which, at a proper time, shall present to the Lord His 
 chosen and downtrodden people, and pave the way 
 for the restoration to Zion.” This could be done simply 
 by the guarantee of protection in the purchase and 
 holding of land in Palestine. The idea met with the 
 approval of John Adams, President of the United 
 States, 1797-1801. “I really wish,” he wrote Noah, 
 “the Jews again in Judaea, an independent nation, 
 for, as I believe, the most enlightened men of it have 
 participated in the amelioration of the philosophy 
 
 1 Cf. “Mordecai M. Noah,” by A. B. Makover. 
 
NATURAL RIGHTS 
 
 43 
 
 of the age; once restored to an independent govern¬ 
 ment, and no longer persecuted, they would wear 
 away some of their asperities. 
 
 “I wish your nation may be admitted to all the privi¬ 
 leges of citizens in every part of the world. This 
 country (America) has done much: I wish it may do 
 more, and annul every narrow idea in religion, govern¬ 
 ment, and commerce.” 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE NATIONALIST TRANSVALUATION OF “NATURAL 
 RIGHTS” AND THE RETURN OF JEWISH NATIONALISM 
 
 THE first families of Europe and their stewards, 
 usually called prime ministers and secretaries of state, 
 who sought to reapportion this continental domain 
 of theirs according to their vested rights as those had 
 been understood prior to the French Revolution, 
 counted without the Revolution. The Congress of 
 Vienna lasted, with interruptions, some five years. 
 Its final act was not signed until May, 1820 , and by that 
 time every position and attitude it had taken in the 
 adjustments of the family squabbles and dower dis¬ 
 putes of kings had been challenged by the rising dis¬ 
 content of peoples. This turned all royal benevolence 
 into defensive tyranny, as in the instance of the noto¬ 
 rious Holy Alliance, and royalty has remained on the 
 defensive ever since. The Revolutionary gospel of 
 liberty, equality, and fraternity had awakened peoples 
 —at least to liberty. Even in the Napoleonic tyranny 
 there had been an element of overturn and equalization. 
 Napoleon himself was a symbol of what opportunity 
 freedom might create for a man, and his Empire a 
 dominion of careers open to and won by talents. A 
 complete reversion to the old feudal caste system 
 of Europe was impossible. The mind and mood of 
 Europe had turned from it. But equally impossible 
 
 44 
 
RETURN OF JEWISH NATIONALISM 45 
 
 was the attainment of that abstract equality and 
 fraternity of the “natural man,” the “human being” 
 that had been the inspiring vision of the Revolution. 
 Both the Revolution itself and the urgent need of 
 dynasts, appealing at last to their subjects to save their 
 thrones, gave it an immediate concrete and specific 
 application in that neighbourliness of common speech, 
 common customs, traditions and memories which are 
 the very heart of nationality. 
 
 These supplied to the abstractions of the Revolution 
 both body and force. These are the explosive elements 
 in democracy, and it is these primarily that throughout 
 the nineteenth century made of the democratic aspira¬ 
 tion an efficacious dynamic in the lives of men. The 
 nineteenth century has been called the century of 
 nationality and, indeed, it was; but it was no less the 
 century of democracy, and the two cannot be separated. 
 One after another the European and Christian subjects 
 of the Turk, the Magyar and the Slavonic and the 
 Italian subjects of the Germans, the Polish subjects 
 of the Russians, the Irish subjects of the English, rose 
 against their masters, some to failure only and some 
 to freedom. One after another peoples arose against 
 governments in France, in Germany, in Austria, in 
 England, in Spain, in Portugal. In all these uprisings, 
 they won, in spite of setbacks, to constantly freer 
 position—sometimes by force, as in France, sometimes 
 by somewhat more legislative action as in England; 
 but they won. The winning marks the rising wave 
 of nationality in Europe, its first phase culminating in 
 1830 with the revolutions in France and Poland, the 
 liberation of Greece, the integration of Switzerland; 
 its second phase in 1848, with uprisings all over Europe, 
 
46 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 and its third phase in 1878 with the Council of Vienna. 
 Its fourth phase culminated in the Great War. This 
 very probably marks the end of the era of nationality 
 as a programme and an ideal. The terms of peace 
 have converted it, in words at least, from a motive 
 into a condition, have established it as an acknowledged 
 fact under the protection of international law, and have 
 thus permitted the emergence into the foreground 
 of history of the second great social motive which 
 was a spring of action in the nineteenth century— 
 the motive of economic justice. That has already 
 sprung clear in Russia and has defined itself sharply 
 in the mass movements of England and Germany and 
 Italy and France. We shall see how it challenges all gov¬ 
 ernment anew and ineluctably as nationality challenged 
 government after 1815. The future belongs to it. 
 
 The past, however, has been governed by the aspira¬ 
 tions of nationality. The utterance and philosophy 
 of these reached their height in the second quarter of 
 the nineteenth century, and its noblest and truest 
 voice was Giuseppe Mazzini. His outlook is simple, 
 a complement rather than a contradiction of the outlook 
 of the eighteenth-century thinkers whose ideas gave 
 birth to the French Revolution. He criticizes them, 
 Voltaire and Montesquieu and Rousseau particularly, 
 for their political and historical formalism. “It is 
 not by the force of conventions or of aught else” he 
 writes, 1 “but by a necessity of our nature that societies 
 are founded and grow.” Hence nationality and the 
 aspirations of nationality. Hence its implication in 
 democracy and democracy’s implication in it. Hence 
 the need for collective action. “Nations are initiated 
 
 Thoughts on the French Revolution of 1789.” 
 
RETURN OF JEWISH NATIONALISM 47 
 
 into the worship of liberty by the sufferings of servi¬ 
 tude.” Individuals cannot by themselves win liberty, 
 they can only die for it: “individual faith makes 
 martyrs; social faith gains victories . . . The char¬ 
 
 ter of each Nation’s liberty is a clause in the charter 
 of Humanity.” These excerpts are from “Faith and 
 the Future,” written in French at Bienne in 1835, as a 
 reply to Louis Philippe’s treachery against democracy. 
 The essay states the whole Mazzinian philosophy of 
 democratic nationalism. What he thought of the 
 Jewish position, its hopelessness and degradation, 
 may be gathered from the reference to them—I have 
 italicized it—in the fifth of the lectures to the Italian 
 workers on the Duties of Man—The Duty to Country. 1 
 “Without Country,” he declares, “you have neither 
 name, token, voice, nor rights, no admission as brothers 
 into the fellowship of the Peoples. You are the 
 bastards of Humanity. Soldiers without a banner, 
 Israelites among the nations , you will find neither faith 
 nor protection; none will be sureties for you. Do not 
 beguile yourselves with the hope of emancipation from 
 unjust social conditions if you do not first conquer 
 a Country for yourselves; where there is no Country 
 there is no common agreement to which you can appeal; 
 the egoism of self-interest rules alone, and he who has 
 the upper hand keeps it, since there is no common 
 safeguard for the interests of all. Do not be led away 
 by the idea of improving your material conditions 
 without first solving the National question. You 
 cannot do it. . . All his other writings are 
 
 either anticipations or echoes of this passionate na¬ 
 tionalist philosophy. Its conception of society is in- 
 
 1 Everyman’s Edition, pp. 53-54. 
 
48 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 dependent of its metaphysical or theological doctrines. 
 The former might go with any of the latter and, in 
 point of fact, did. The unity of mankind is for Maz- 
 zini organic; nations are organs of humanity. 
 
 “We believe,” he declares, speaking for Republican¬ 
 ism, “in the Holy Alliance of the Peoples as the broadest 
 formula of association possible in our age—in the 
 liberty and equality of the peoples without which as¬ 
 sociation has no true life—in Nationality, which is the 
 conscience of the peoples, which assigns to them their 
 share of work in association, their office in Humanity, 
 and hence constitutes their mission on earth, their 
 individuality, for without Nationality neither liberty 
 nor equality is possible—and we believe in the holy 
 Fatherland, that is, the cradle of nationality, the altar 
 and patrimony of the individuals that compose each 
 people.” 
 
 This creed has remained, though crossed by newer 
 and later visions and aspirations, the creed of the 
 peoples of Europe. It is the living spirit in the poetry 
 of Swinburne and the political philosophy of Hegel. 
 It is the centre from which departs the new economic 
 internationalism of the Socialists and the cultural 
 and financial imperialism of the pan-German and pan- 
 Slavist and other panic organizations that precipitated 
 the Great War. Its application to the Jews, whose 
 creed and aspiration it has been from the beginning 
 of their history, of the outlook of whose prophets it is 
 a restatement, is obvious enough. And, indeed, the 
 application was made in Mazzini’s day as a matter 
 of course. Not merely in the remote speculations 
 of the aged Mordecai Noah in the America of the ’40s. 
 It was given the nearness of political practicality and 
 
RETURN OF JEWISH NATIONALISM 49 
 
 religious action in both England and France, and 
 among Gentiles more largely and generously than 
 among Jews. To Hollingsworth, writing in 1852 
 in England 1 , the establishment of a Jewish state 
 in Palestine was not only an act of humanity and 
 justice, but a political necessity, present in the British 
 mind to this very day, in the safeguarding of the high¬ 
 way across Asia Minor to India. 2 To Laurence Oli- 
 phant, who himself settled with a colony near Haifa, 
 the restoration to the Promised Land was, as it still 
 is to so many pious and devout Christians, the indis¬ 
 pensable preliminary to the return of the Saviour. 
 The idea energized the mind of Abraham Petavel, 
 a Protestant minister and professor in Neuchatel. 
 His pamphlet, 3 published in 1864 in Geneva, utters 
 much the same piety and humanism that are apparent 
 in Laurence Oliphant, with somewhat greater regard 
 for the political “realities” of the time. National 
 justice to the Jewish people was one of the ruling 
 passions of Henri Dunant, founder of the Red Cross 
 and author of the Geneva Conventions. He urged 
 the French Alliance Israelite Universelle to settle 
 the Jews in Palestine; appealed to the Jews of Berlin, 
 to the Anglo-Jewish Association. Failing of sympathetic 
 response from them, he organized the International 
 Palestine Society and the Syrian and Palestine Coloniza¬ 
 tion Society. But the Jews of western Europe were 
 still too preoccupied with piecemeal and individualistic 
 emancipation, with the dominant abstractions of the 
 
 ^‘Remarks upon the Present Condition of the Jews in Palestine.” 
 
 2 Its immediate stimulus was the agitation about the Suez Canal. This 
 great project had stirred Frenchmen to the same ideas. Cf. Denbie’s “New 
 Oriental Problem,” and “The New Eastern Question” by E. Laharame. 
 
 3 Devoir des nations de rendre au peuple juif sa nationality. 
 
50 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 eighteenth century, and the Gentiles were too absorbed 
 in their own problems to concern themselves with the 
 problem of the Jews in a purely objective, sociological, 
 and historical as well as a sentimental way. The 
 sentiment was to be noticed all over Europe. It gave 
 tone to much of the literary avocation of Beaconsfield; 
 it was a note in a play of Dumas fils 1 ; it became a 
 great preoccupation of George Eliot. The restoration 
 of the Jewish people to the Promised Land is a theme 
 she returns to again and again—in “Theophrastus Such,” 
 in “The Modern Hep, Hep,” in “Daniel Deronda.” The 
 latter, indeed, may be said to make this restoration 
 its subject-matter. And to the present day there is, 
 to my mind, no more eloquent statement of the senti¬ 
 ment which energizes Zionism than she puts in the 
 mouth of Mordecai: 
 
 When it is rational to say: “I know not my father or my 
 mother; let my children be aliens unto me, that no prayer 
 of mine may touch them,” then will it be rational for the 
 Jew to say, “I will seek to know no difference between me 
 and the Gentile; I will not cherish the prophetic conscious¬ 
 ness of our nationality. Let the Hebrew cease to be, and 
 let all his memorials be antiquarian trifles, dead as the wall- 
 paintings of a conjectured race. Yet let his children learn 
 by rote the speech of the Greek, where he adjures his fellow- 
 citizens by the bravery of those who fought foremost at 
 Marathon; let him learn to say, ‘That was noble in Greek, 
 that is the spirit of an immortal nation!’ But the Jew has 
 no memories that bind him to action; let him laugh that his 
 nation is degraded from a nation; let him hold the monuments 
 of his law which carried within its frame the breath of social 
 justice, of charity, and of household sanctities; let him hold 
 the energy of the prophets, the patient care of the masters. 
 
 x La femme de Claude. 
 
RETURN OF JEWISH NATIONALISM 51 
 
 the fortitude of martyred generations, as mere stuff for 
 a professorship. . . 
 
 In the multitude of the ignorant on three continents who 
 observe our rites and make the confession of Divine Unity, 
 the soul of Judaism is not dead. Revive the organic centre: 
 let the unity of Israel which has made the growth and form 
 of its religion be an outward reality. Looking forward to a 
 land and a polity, our dispersed people in all the ends of the 
 earth may share the dignity of a national life which has a 
 voice among the peoples of the East and of the West— 
 which will plant the wisdom and skill of our race so that it 
 may be, as of old, a medium of transmission and understand¬ 
 ing. Let that come to pass, and the living warmth will spread 
 to the weak extremities of Israel and superstition will vanish, 
 not in the lawlessness of the renegade, but in the illumination 
 of great facts which widen feeling, and make all knowledge 
 alive as the young offspring of beloved memories. . . . 
 
 There is a store of wisdom among us to found a new Jewish 
 polity, grand, simple, just, like the old—a republic where 
 there is equality of protection. . . . Then our race 
 
 shall have an organic centre, a heart and a brain to watch 
 and guide and execute; the outraged Jew shall have a de¬ 
 fence in the court of the nations, as the outraged Englishman 
 or American. And the world will gain as Israel gains. For 
 there will be a community in the van of the East which 
 carries the culture and the sympathies of every great nation 
 in its bosom; and there will be a land for a halting-place 
 of enmities, a neutral ground for the East as Belgium 
 is for the West. Difficulties? I know there are difficulties. 
 But let the spirit of sublime achievement move in the great 
 among our people and the work will begin. . . . 
 
 Let the torch of visible community be lit! Let the reason 
 of Israel disclose itself in a great outward deed; let there be 
 another great migration, another choosing of Israel to be 
 a nationality, whose members may still stretch to the ends 
 of the earth, even as the sons of England and Germany, 
 whom enterprise carries afar, but who still have a national 
 hearth and a tribunal of national opinion. . . . Let 
 
 the central fire be kindled again, and the light will reach afar. 
 
52 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 The degraded and scorned of our race will learn to think 
 of their sacred land, not as a place for sacred beggary, 
 to await death in loathsome idleness, but as a republic 
 where the Jewish spirit manifests itself in a new order founded 
 on the old, purified, enriched by experience our greatest 
 sons have gathered from the life of the ages. . . . The 
 
 sons of Judah have to choose, that God may again choose 
 them. The Messianic time is the time when Israel shall 
 will the planting of the national ensign. . . . Let us 
 
 help to will our own better future and the better future of 
 the world—not renounce our higher gift, and say, “Let 
 us be as if we were not among the populations,” but choose 
 our full heritage, claim the brotherhood of our nation, and 
 carry it into a new brotherhood with the nations of the 
 Gentiles. The vision is there: it will be fulfilled. 
 
 Nor were the Jews of western Europe themselves 
 altogether untouched by this resurgent nationalism. 
 By and large their first reaction to the emancipatory 
 call of the French Revolution had been, as we have 
 seen, one of surrender and self-effacement. Suffering 
 for a thousand years from the over-emphasis of their 
 difference from the other families of mankind, they 
 accepted eagerly the escape from suffering which the 
 eighteenth-century declaration of the sameness of 
 all men opened to them. They launched themselves 
 upon a piteous obliteration of their corporate entity, 
 upon the comminution of their nationality into its 
 individuals and the dilution of their social personality 
 into the undistinguished and neutral association of the 
 reformed congregations. They threw themselves with 
 passion into the republican emancipatory movements 
 of their fellow-subjects of other stocks. They de¬ 
 clared themselves Frenchmen or Germans or English¬ 
 men of the Mosaic persuasion, and as such they laboured 
 
RETURN OF JEWISH NATIONALISM 53 
 
 with not untraditional fervour in the enfranchisement 
 of their fellow-subjects. Members of the race are 
 particularly conspicuous in the Polish and Hungarian 
 rebellions, in the republican uprising in Germany of 
 ’48. Even more conspicuous were they in the new 
 internationalism, an internationalism running across 
 and in many respects denying the cosmopolitanism 
 of the eighteenth century and the ideas of the French 
 Revolution. 
 
 This internationalism is a conclusion from the phi¬ 
 losophy of Socialism. Its strongest authoritative voice 
 was that of the Jew, Karl Marx; its most heroic 
 practical defender the Jew, Ferdinand Lasalle; its 
 unseen root the economic doctrine of the Jew, David 
 Ricardo. 
 
 The whole of this internationalism is an inflation 
 of a new social condition into law, the identification 
 of a changing social fact with an unchanging social 
 principle. The new social condition was the use of 
 machinery in industry. The changing social fact 
 was the realignment of the classes of men in accordance 
 with the operation of the automatic machine, the adap¬ 
 tation of society to machinery. Machinery was both 
 “labour-saving” and “over-productive.” Machinery 
 both multiplied the division of labour and created the 
 unemployment and the competition of labour. It 
 changed the labourer from a semi-independent, self- 
 supporting householder to a factory accessory, from 
 a man into a “hand,” to be bought in the open market 
 as other things are bought, according to the “law” 
 of supply and demand. Society seemed destined 
 merely to produce commodities for foreign markets, 
 and the miseries of men, declared the pundits of the 
 
54 
 
 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 “dismal science,” as political economy was at once 
 called, were the indispensable condition of the progress 
 of society. The creation and encouragement of capital 
 came to be considered the exclusive aim of the state, 
 and men and women and children simply the tools and 
 servants of capital, whether as labourers sacrificed, or 
 employing high priests sacrificing. 
 
 Thus the eighteenth-century idea of the “natural 
 man” was confronted by the nineteenth-century idea 
 of the “economic man.” The sameness of men accord¬ 
 ing to nature was opposed by the sameness of men 
 according to machinery, and in the minds of the more 
 reflective men of the age the latter sameness became 
 the obsessing one. Men were classified from the 
 Ricardan standpoint with respect to their relation 
 to the great god Capital, their natures and realities 
 were held to be determined by whether they owned it, 
 or whether they created it. Between owners and 
 creators, capitalists and labourers, an eternal conflict 
 had necessarily to be waged, under the “iron law of 
 wages,” by which the rich were constantly growing 
 richer and the poor poorer. If only the poor, the 
 workers, would become conscious of this conflict, 
 if they would recognize their community of interest 
 and cease competing with each other, they could then 
 wage successful warfare against their enemies, whose 
 enmity was predetermined by the nature of things: 
 “Workingmen of all the world, unite! You have 
 nothing to lose but your chains.” 
 
 Such is the burden of the gospel according to Karl 
 Marx, the gospel which has been made the established 
 religion of the Russian nation and is becoming such, 
 in ever-growing proportions, of the whole population 
 
RETURN OF JEWISH NATIONALISM 55 
 
 of Europe. Its progress was, as is natural, slow and 
 piecemeal. Its exemplification in the trades unions 
 has been more real and effective than its exemplifica¬ 
 tion in the political party. Like all gospels, it is a 
 compensatory correction of a condition, not the descrip¬ 
 tion of a fact. But it set a pace for Europe. It had 
 the courage of its conclusions, and its protagonists 
 made of them a programme which they have tried 
 with all their might and constantly increasing suc¬ 
 cess to carry out. They created the famous “Inter¬ 
 nationale.” They set themselves against the tradi¬ 
 tional processes and institutions of European society. 
 They repudiated kings and priests and war as well as 
 capitalism. They failed, of course, but it is not their 
 fault that the habits and passions and interests of 
 men cannot keep pace with their intellects. Their 
 real fault is that, being gospellers, they ignored or 
 denied the realities of human nature which did not 
 fit into their system of salvation, so retarding their own 
 progress in realization and converting into opponents 
 forces that might have been aids. Economic interna¬ 
 tionalism, in short, could no more discount nationality 
 than political cosmopolitanism. And this impossibility 
 is conspicuous with no people so much, perhaps, as 
 with the Jews. 
 
 For the greater men of the race, those who, in John 
 Adams’s quaint terms, contributed to “the ameliora¬ 
 tion of the philosophy of the age,” either shut their 
 eyes to the Jewish question or, facing it squarely, 
 adopted the nationalist attitude. Marx and Lasalle 
 shut their eyes; Beaconsfield was a nationalist with 
 immense racial pride. So was the French patriot, 
 Joseph Salvador, son of a Jewish father and a Catholic 
 
56 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 mother; physician, protagonist of the “higher criti¬ 
 cism” of the Bible; close student of the constitutional 
 development of the ancient Jewish state; hated of the 
 clerical party, one of the foremost influences in bringing 
 about the revolution of 1830. He (circa 1837) called 
 for the assembling of a European congress for the 
 purpose of restoring the Jewish people to their promised 
 land. So was Lazar Levy-Bing, prosperous banker 
 of Nancy, large participator in the affairs of the French 
 commonwealth. His Zionism had a religious colour, 
 derived from Petavel, whose work had opened his 
 eyes to the Jewish problem. He saw in the restoration 
 he so passionately advocated a religious as well as a 
 political event, and in the restored Jerusalem the ful¬ 
 filment of the prophecy that the law should go forth 
 from Zion and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. 
 
 Even Jews of purely philanthropic intention, to 
 whom piecemeal emancipation was the sole way out 
 of the difficulties of the Jewish position, could not elude 
 the spirit and outlook of the age, or avoid the impregna¬ 
 tion of the Mazzinian philosophy. Thus the Alliance 
 Israelite Universelle is the creation of the philanthropic 
 impulse of emancipated Jews. It is a charitable 
 organization, evoked in 1860 by a great need, rendered 
 vivid in the misery and persecution for religious reasons 
 suffered by the Jews of Damascus in 1840, and again, 
 and more terribly, in 1860. Among its founders is 
 the notable Adolphe Cremieux, ten years later a min¬ 
 ister of justice in the French Cabinet, and in all essen¬ 
 tials an “assimilated” and “emancipated” man. Yet 
 the statement which explained the organization he 
 helped to found is near to the practical essence of the 
 nationalist political philosophy of the time. “All 
 
RETURN OF JEWISH NATIONALISM 57 
 
 other important faiths,” it declared, “are represented 
 in the world by nations; that is to say, they are incar¬ 
 nated in governments especially interested in them and 
 officially authorized to represent them and speak for 
 them only. Our faith alone is without this important 
 advantage; it is represented neither by a state nor by a 
 society, nor does it occupy a clearly defined territory.” 
 And that the hope and desire to create this “important 
 advantage” was in the minds of the founders of the 
 Alliance may be gathered from the report of Charles 
 Netter, among them the passionate devotee in the 
 creation of this society, on the Agricultural School 
 which it had established near Jaffa. The report tells 
 the central committee which it addresses of the refuge 
 from persecution it is preparing. It speaks of the 
 “peaceful winning of this Holy Land.” It assures the 
 committee that the land can and will be thus won. 
 Since Netter’s day the Alliance has had many a change 
 of mood, swayed by every fashion of feeling and opin¬ 
 ion that infected France and threatened the position of 
 the timorous Frenchmen (like Salomon Reinach, a con¬ 
 temporary director) “of the Mosaic persuasion.” Yet 
 the whole influence of the work of the Alliance , in 
 spite of the wishes of the directors, is witness to the 
 correctness of Netter’s prediction. . . . 
 
 However, the distinguished example of the incapacity 
 of abstract cosmopolitanism and internationalism to 
 withstand the realities of human association on the 
 continent of Europe is Moses Hess. Born in Germany, 
 in 1812, his childhood and youth were passed in the 
 turmoil of conflicting systems, ideas, and organiza¬ 
 tions of which Germany was the theatre between 
 that year and the fateful ’48. Son of a profoundly 
 
58 
 
 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 orthodox father, his education stripped his orthodoxy 
 from him like an outworn garment and alienated him 
 from his family. A brief conciliation was followed by a 
 marriage with a Gentile girl of questionable reputation 
 and rendered the alienation permanent. He was early 
 impregnated with the dominant Hegelianism of the 
 period. But it was the Hegelianism of the left, and 
 it led him first of all to a sharp and lasting opposition 
 to the Hegelianism of the right, that Hegelianism 
 which accepted the Prussian state as the goal and 
 ultimacy of social life, and its dominion as the rule of 
 spirit. This opposition endured until his death. For 
 his participation in the revolution of 1848 Prussia 
 proscribed and pursued him until he found refuge 
 in France. When, in 1870, France expelled him as an 
 alien enemy, he replied with his book, “The Defeated 
 Nation.’’ This book was a call to all Europe to arm 
 against a Germany dominated by Prussia. 
 
 The affirmations of his Hegelianism were primarily 
 and basically socialistic. By temperament and apti¬ 
 tude a libertarian and activist, he was naturally the 
 antithesis of Marx, and the opposition more than 
 once found literary expression. Nevertheless, the 
 two men collaborated in the enterprise of proletarian 
 organization. Hess gave himself from 1845 onward to 
 the propaganda of the Communist programme, so much 
 so that Arnold Ruge satirized him as the “Communist 
 Rabbi Moses.” He contributed to Marx’s JahrbiicJier. 
 He risked his life by returning to Germany to or¬ 
 ganize workmen with Lasalle. In the intervals he 
 studied biology and ethnology. The effect of his 
 studies was the concretion of the abstraction Humanity 
 to whose service he had dedicated himself, of the ab- 
 
RETURN OF JEWISH NATIONALISM 59 
 
 straction Labour for whose liberation he was risking 
 his life, into societies of men and women with character, 
 customs, habits, speech and culture, history and tradi¬ 
 tions attached to places, times, and circumstances. He 
 discovered, in a word, nationality. His conceptions 
 became very similar to those of Mazzini, with the 
 difference in philosophical background and assumptions 
 that the training and practical preoccupations of the 
 two men made. The amplification and vitalization 
 of view which Hess’s discovery of nationality effected, 
 he registered, 1862, in “ Rome and Jerusalem, the Latest 
 National Question.” 
 
 This book is a series of twelve letters, addressed to a 
 doubting friend. It utters Hess’s whole theory of life, 
 with special emphasis on its bearing upon the fate of 
 the Jewish people. Life and the world are, in his 
 view, an organic and living whole of which the con¬ 
 tinuous, infinite multitudes of change and mutation 
 in Nature and in history are manifestations and ex¬ 
 pressions. They are, in the words of Bergson, to 
 whom Hess bears a somewhat striking resemblance, 
 a single undivided elan vital, differentiating itself 
 as life and the universe. This elan is particularly 
 lucid in human life, and history is its clearest self¬ 
 utterance. In the development of this history each 
 race has its own function or mission equally with all 
 others. That of the Jews is the realization of the laws 
 of social justice in organized society. Properly to 
 discharge this function the Jewish people must be 
 restored to free community, to national independence 
 in Palestine. Nothing else can restore them, economic¬ 
 ally, socially, spiritually, to normal. Throughout 
 the western world they are an uprooted and disin- 
 
60 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 herited people, in its economic life, middlemen or trad¬ 
 ers rather than producers; in its social and civil life, 
 outcasts and pariahs, in the life of the spirit chameleons, 
 imitators, because repudiators of their own living 
 tradition, unhappily fossilizing in the eastern world. 
 The return to the Promised Land would give them 
 roots, enable them to become once more the producers 
 and creators they should be, and assure the discharge of 
 their proper functions in the family of nations. The 
 technique of restoration he regards as very simple—a 
 Jewish Colonization Association devoting itself with 
 French protection to the resettling of Jews in Palestine, 
 under the sanction of a Jewish Congress supported 
 by the powers. 
 
 Hess wrote in the Epilogue to “Rome and Jerusalem”: 
 
 The more perfect a people is in its own special function, 
 the more it appreciates the functional individuality of other 
 peoples, and the more willingly it borrows from them the ideas, 
 conceptions, and inventions, which are necessary to modern 
 life. This tendency is especially noticeable in the German 
 people, and it certainly does honour to the German spirit. 
 
 The Jewish nation, therefore, must not hesitate to follow 
 France in all matters relating to the political and social 
 regeneration of the nations, and especially in what concerns 
 its own rebirth as a nation, and Germany in everything 
 which bears upon the revival of intellectual life. Only a 
 stupid reaction, which is consciously or unconsciously carried 
 away by its own alarms, can bear us malice when we sym¬ 
 pathize with France in all matters of a social, political 
 nature, and yet try to absorb and assimilate everything 
 good in German spiritual and intellectual life. 
 
 The cause of national regeneration of oppressed peoples 
 can expect no help and sympathy from Germany. The 
 problem of such regeneration, dating not from the second 
 restoration of the monarchy in France, but from the French 
 
RETURN OF JEWISH NATIONALISM 61 
 
 Revolution, began to find its definite solution in Europe 
 only recently, with the outbreak of the Italian War. Germany 
 met it with mockery and derision: in spite of the fact that 
 it is urgent, that it is almost everywhere, even in Germany, 
 foremost, the Germans have labelled it, “the nationality 
 trick.” And our Jewish democrats, also, exhibit their 
 German patriotism by accusing the French and the peoples 
 sympathizing with them of designs of conquest. The 
 French, say the German politicians, as well as the Allies 
 will only be exploited by the second monarchy, in order to 
 restrain liberty rather than to promote it. The German 
 people should, according to the profound logic of these 
 politicians, obey the Kaiser and the kings in order to be 
 able to frustrate the aggressive desires of the French. But 
 these politicians and patriots forget that the conquest of 
 France and Italy by Germany to-day would result merely 
 in placing the entire German people under police law and in 
 depriving the Jews of their civil rights in a worse manner 
 than after the War of Liberation—when the only recognition 
 granted by the Germans to their Jewish comrades in arms 
 was exclusion from civil life. And truly, the German people 
 and the German Jews do not deserve any better lot when 
 they allow themselves, in spite of the examples of history, 
 to be entrapped by mediaeval reaction. 
 
 The study of science and my experiences in life have both 
 served to confirm my political sympathy for France, par¬ 
 ticularly after I got to know the French people. I have 
 formulated my thoughts as follows: 
 
 The life tendencies of a society are, like the theories of 
 life of the minds of men, typical and primal creations of 
 race. Originally, the history of mankind moved only in the 
 circle of struggle—struggles of race, struggles of class. The 
 race struggle is primary; that of class, secondary. The last 
 dominating race is the German. But, thanks to the French 
 people—who succeeded not only in reconciling race antago¬ 
 nisms in their own land, but also in uprooting every form of 
 race domination within its borders—the race struggle is 
 nearing its end. And with that the class struggle will also 
 end. The equalization of all classes of society will neces- 
 
62 - ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 sarily follow the emancipation of the races, for equalization 
 will become simply a scientific problem in social economics. 
 
 Yet it seems as if a final race war is unavoidable if the 
 German politicians, failing to apprehend the situation, make 
 no endeavour to oppose the mighty sweep of reaction. This, 
 left to itself, will ultimately carry Germany into collision 
 with the Latin peoples and entangle the progressive German 
 democrats in the net of romantic demagoguery. Twice 
 during the present century did medievalism frustrate 
 the effort of the German people for political' and social 
 regeneration—once during the War of Liberation and again 
 during the Italian War. It did so by appealing to the racial 
 instincts of the lords of war who regard themselves as lords 
 of the land by divine right and the people as their rightly 
 inherited slaves. It is not impossible, in case of a war be¬ 
 tween Italy and Austria, that German democracy will for 
 the third time be engulfed in the whirlpool of the reaction¬ 
 aries and join hands with the Austrians in a struggle for 
 race domination the outcome of which must adversely 
 affect progress. But out of the last race struggle . . . 
 
 there will ensue no fresh dominant race and the equality 
 of the historical peoples of the world will follow as a neces¬ 
 sary result. 
 
 Hess’s metaphysics, it will be seen, has its alter¬ 
 natives—what metaphysic has not?—but his sociolog¬ 
 ical acumen and his historical judgment are almost 
 contemporary. Both the quotation from the Epilogue 
 to “Rome and Jerusalem” and the storm which his work 
 raised in German Jewry are witness. The storm was 
 only a passing storm. It led the historian Graetz 
 to remark upon it—upon the anger of the anti-Semites, 
 the fears of the Jewish cosmopolitans, the hopes of 
 the orthodox. But Graetz drew no conclusions. He 
 was too timid. The great bulk of the Jews of western 
 Europe, particularly those of Germany, were too timid. 
 Hess called them to self-assertion and self-help. Their 
 
RETURN OF JEWISH NATIONALISM 63 
 
 reply was—self-concealment and impotence. They 
 were afraid collectively to conquer freedom as a people’s 
 victory; they were not afraid to have emancipation 
 ungraciously thrown to them as a master’s gene¬ 
 rosity. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 SECULAR NATIONALISM AMONG THE JEWS OF EASTERN 
 
 EUROPE 
 
 THAT Eastern Jewry should, all things considered, 
 provide its fair counterpart of Western Jewry was, of 
 course, natural. It did reproduce, line for line, the 
 disturbances and perturbations which shook the 
 Jews of western Europe. It reproduced them, but 
 with a difference. In this difference lies, however, 
 the secret of the vitality of Zionism and the continuity 
 and vigour of its vision and aspiration in the hearts 
 of the great bulk of the Jewish nationality, whose home 
 is in central and eastern Europe. Its history, from 
 the failure of the Sabbattian adventure on, leaves 
 nothing to be desired for tragic irony. The govern¬ 
 ment of Poland itself was disintegrating. Kings, 
 powerless before the unspeakable Shlakhta, whose 
 arrogance, sloth, and selfishness ruined Poland, per¬ 
 force turned the kingship into an engine of intrigue. 
 The royal protection written into the terms of the 
 Jewish charter became a scrap of paper. The Jews 
 themselves were compelled to become the victims and 
 the instruments of the irresponsibilities of the landed 
 magnates, whose absolutism on their lands was ex¬ 
 ceeded only by their misrule. In addition to the ex¬ 
 ploitation and abuse of these magnates, the Jews had 
 to suffer the aggression of the urban German burgher 
 
 64 
 
SECULAR NATIONALISM 
 
 65 
 
 class, always pressing to eliminate the Jewish rival, 
 and the persecution of the Churchman, whose religious 
 zeal had a superlatively powerful dynamic in economic 
 greed. 
 
 The conflicting impositions, demands, and restrictions 
 of these three classes broke up the integrity of the 
 Jewish community. Their pressure squeezed the vital¬ 
 ity out of the Congressus Judaicus, destroyed its au¬ 
 thority, and denuded it of its representative character. 
 It converted the Kahal from a town meeting into a 
 tyrannical corporation of oligarchs. It cut off the 
 contact of the Jews both as individuals and as nation¬ 
 ality from the rest of the world. 
 
 At just the time when the bans and taboos of me- 
 diaevalism were broken in Europe and the spirit of 
 man could adventure free through thoughts and things, 
 persecution and disaster imposed them upon Jewry. 
 The thought and feeling of the great Jewish community 
 turned inward and fed upon itself. The spirit so 
 nourished is a queer and twisted thing of dialectic, 
 passion, and devoutness, as irrelevant to the realities 
 of the business of living as anything mediaeval Chris¬ 
 tianity so devised. It converted changing social 
 customs into everlasting rituals, accidents of fashion 
 in garments and hairdressing into religious vestment, 
 accidents of diet into sacraments. It imagined a gross, 
 material Otherworld that echoed to the last nuance 
 the literalness of mediaeval Christianism of which it had 
 until then been free. It found in the wonder-working 
 rabbi of the Chassidic sect the precise analogue of 
 the Christian mystic, the saint, the hermit, the lay 
 brother who did miracles for a price, and it clung 
 to him with a pas° ; on of faith and devotion which 
 
66 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 r ' 
 
 is a secure measure of the degradation and horror into 
 which the community had fallen. Not an ill nor an 
 evil in this life but had its precise and material com¬ 
 pensation in the world to come! That world assumed 
 all the specification and definiteness of the Christian 
 eschatological system—a region of the habitation of 
 dead saints and unborn saviours, of delectable food 
 and drink and clothing, of magical efficiency and 
 of vengeance upon the persecutor. The lineaments 
 of the real Zion were absorbed into it. The true 
 Messiah became in effect a supernatural being, his 
 appearance contingent upon supernatural events and 
 the restoration of Palestine a heavenly thing, uncon¬ 
 nected with things of earth. Life throughout this 
 period, which lasted some two hundred years, and 
 aspects of which are still dominant, was for the Jews 
 a somnambulism wherein the community and individual 
 escaped from the harsh oppression of the poignant 
 facts. The barren dialectic of Rabbinism and the 
 hopeless inarticulation of mysticism were the whole 
 of it. For once in their history the Jews were at last 
 truly and completely a “religious,” that is, a demoral¬ 
 ized, people. 
 
 The political event which broke into this somnambu¬ 
 lism was the partition of Poland. The partition divided 
 Jewry no less than the Poles between three new and 
 active forces, whose impact brought not only different 
 and new oppression, but also different and new social 
 and intellectual contacts. Prussian and Austrian 
 and Russian monarchs, much under the seductive 
 infection of the liberal ideas of the eighteenth century, 
 could not endure that their Jews should be different 
 from their other subjects. They brought to bear 
 
SECULAR NATIONALISM 
 
 67 
 
 upon them all the malicious pressure of bureaucratic 
 machinery to “modernize” and “assimilate” them. 
 That this should be met with stiffening resistance was 
 inevitable. Neither Joseph I of Austria, nor the 
 first Russian Alexander, nor his successor Nicholas, 
 succeeded in developing among Jews any actual living 
 movement toward modernization. The Jews went as 
 far as they were compelled to, and no farther. And 
 wherever the pressure was relaxed, they reverted to 
 the initial form. Nevertheless, they did get modern¬ 
 ized, and with unparalleled swiftness. The power 
 which achieved this was not, however, political but 
 intellectual and social, and it operated not by force, 
 but by contagion. 
 
 The process of its operation is usually called the 
 “Haskalah” or Enlightenment. It is an inward change 
 in the complexus of the Jewish nationality in eastern 
 Europe, responding to the contacts of the new peoples, 
 new forces, and new ideas which the partition of Poland 
 brought about. It began in Germany, spread thence 
 to Austria and to Russia. Its great protagonist was 
 Moses Mendelssohn. A Polish Jew, come to place 
 and power in Berlin, Mendelssohn felt, and felt truly, 
 that the renewal of Jewry must come first through 
 the force of liberal ideas, such ideas as were the currency 
 of the fashionable and humane cosmopolitanism of his 
 day. The movement he began was a movement to 
 “Germanize”—in his day, the equivalent of “civilize” 
 in all eastern Europe—in the matter of dress and 
 manners (in the course of time to dress or to be other¬ 
 wise “deitch” became a matter for excommunication) 
 as well as in science and letters. But the medium 
 for the transmission of these “German” ideas was 
 
68 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 inevitably Hebrew, always the lingua franca of the 
 multi-lingual Jewish people. Hebrew, the holy tongue, 
 was to be used for profane and secular purposes. 
 There is the true animus of the Haskalah. It was an 
 enterprise in secularization, and the resistance to it 
 took the same form as some centuries earlier had been 
 taken by the resistance to the renaissance in the wider 
 world. Religion was set over against wisdom, super¬ 
 stition against knowledge, authority against freedom. 
 The protagonists of the Haskalah made alliances with 
 the government, to effect their secularizing ends. 
 The more the Rabbinists insisted on the dominion 
 of their power the further the protagonists of Haskalah, 
 called by the Jews Maskilim , went in the loosening of a 
 community which was merely, and so, superstitiously, 
 religious. In the end, the confrontation ceased to be 
 one of religious Rabbinism or scholasticism with secular 
 Hebraism. It became a confrontation of orthodoxy 
 with “assimilation.” 
 
 Of this assimilation, of this perennial detachment 
 of Jew after Jew from his community and his absorption 
 in the community of the non-Jewish majority, the 
 protagonists of the Haskalah had conceived high hopes. 
 The impulsive and uncertain benevolences of Alexander 
 II, the “Tzar liberator,” which opened to Jews the 
 schools of the land and promised improvement of 
 their economic ills, drew thousands of them into a new 
 world; to their ardour and inexperience, a freer and 
 more joyous world. It seemed to them as if the liberal¬ 
 ism of the nineteenth century were about to succeed 
 in accomplishing in Russia what it had failed to do 
 in western Europe. The liberation and absorption 
 of the Jews was to take place by an administrative 
 
SECULAR NATIONALISM 
 
 69 
 
 ukase and the force of circumstances: no Jew had need 
 to do anything but prepare himself intellectually and 
 wait. 
 
 The young hopefuls were disillusioned. Alexander 
 II himself repented of his wisdom just before his as¬ 
 sassination, and his successor, with the assistance of 
 the devout Pobiedonostzeff, arranged that the holy 
 mediseval tradition regarding the treatment of the 
 Jews should in no way be desecrated. The young 
 Jewish hopefuls discovered, as so many of other races 
 and times did, that the solution of a problem of 
 community by self-attrition was not a working solution 
 for the community. They found themselves, therefore, 
 uprooted, loose, tramps in mind and body, with more 
 energy than efficiency. This energy they threw into 
 the vernacular and Hebrew press, which they used 
 as the device to get the benefits of their experiences 
 before the Jewish masses, hoping, and succeeding, 
 by this means to recover or establish a ground for their 
 existence. No people in the world is so completely 
 sensitive to the printed word as the Jew, and the 
 Haskalah became, almost overnight, a mass-movement. 
 To an extraordinary degree it laughed supernaturalism, 
 magic, and myth out of court. It popularized science 
 and radical economics. It created a Yiddish and neo- 
 Hebrew belles lettres. The realities of this renaissance 
 ensue over a period of hardly two generations of the 
 nineteenth century. Its achievement seems a miracle 
 —until it is remembered that the Jews were without 
 any other institutions either for expressing, conveying, 
 or stabilizing opinion. They were literally and ex¬ 
 clusively the people of the book—and the newspaper. 
 
 The interpenetration of science, higher criticism. 
 
70 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 “Jewish science,” political and economic theory, 
 religious speculation and belletristic fabrication with a 
 realizing sense of the great Jewish tradition which 
 was the stable mind of the Jewish masses led toward 
 a recovery of the normal outlook upon the Jewish posi¬ 
 tion and destiny. Haskalah imperceptibly took on 
 the features of Jewish nationalism. Passive emancipa¬ 
 tion at the hands of the non-Jewish majority, which 
 was the hope of secularists, gave way to plans and 
 programmes of active emancipation of the Jewish 
 people by the Jewish people themselves. 
 
 The earliest significant voice—which Hess had heard 
 and to which he had responded—was that of Hirsch 
 Kalischer, a rabbi of the orthodox church in Thon, 
 Prussia. His whole work is witness of the interpene¬ 
 tration of modernism and tradition which the great 
 conflict of the Haskalah resulted in. The Jewish 
 people, Kalischer wrote 1 , needed to reinterpret their 
 life and destiny. They had been taught to wait for 
 the realization of the Messianic hope through a miracle, 
 but the true basis of realization must be self-help. 
 By means of a colonization society working in a modern 
 way under modern conditions 2 the restoration of the 
 Jewish people to the Promised Land and to freedom 
 might be achieved. At the outset, Kalischer had more 
 influence in the West than in the East. The creation 
 of the Alliance Israelite Universelle was due to his in¬ 
 spiration and Hess’s own practical proposals echo his. 
 But in the East the heady taste of secular freedom 
 kept the young men assimilative and the old men 
 resistantly set in scholasticism a generation longer. 
 
 1 “Emmuah Jesharah,” 1860. 
 
 2 Derishat Zion, 1864. 
 
SECULAR NATIONALISM 
 
 71 
 
 It was the anti-Semitic reaction of the ’80s which 
 there brought them to realization of the social realities 
 of the Jewish position. Its mark is Leon Pinsker’s 
 “ Auto-emancipation.” This book, by a man as cos¬ 
 mopolitan as Hess himself, makes an accurate and 
 still valid analysis of the Jewish position. The world, 
 it points out, has been dealing with Jews distributively, 
 not collectively. Emancipation has been piecemeal, 
 where it has occurred at all. The Jews have themselves 
 been content with this condition. They have them¬ 
 selves denied their national reality, though it stared 
 them in the face. In consequence, they have been 
 treated as living individual members of a dead nation, 
 whose entity involved them like a ghost, insubstantial, 
 yet real enough to awaken fear and dislike. As in¬ 
 dividuals they are twice homeless—of uncertain and 
 ambiguous status in the land of their sojourn and 
 without any homeland to which they can refer or with 
 regard to which they can change their status. Thus 
 they are everywhere in the modern world legally and 
 formally free and socially outcast. The only way 
 to resolve this ambiguity is to create a homeland, a 
 centre of corporate reference—anywhere. This can 
 be done by the union of various Jewish alliances, the 
 creation of a single directorate and of a fiscal agency 
 that could raise money through the sale of lands and 
 the necessary subscriptions. 
 
 How near to the actual feeling of the vital generation 
 of Jewry Pinsker’s analysis came may be gathered from 
 its results. For the first time since Sabbattai, a con¬ 
 crete proposal bore practical fruits. A society was 
 organized in Odessa, with Pinsker at its head. Branches 
 sprang up wherever in a Jewish community thoughtful 
 
72 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 men congregated. By 1890 the Hovevei Zion, as it 
 was called, had chapters in Austria, Germany, England, 
 Rumania, France, the United States. It had under¬ 
 taken the adventure. Bodies of ignorant, untried, 
 and tenderly nurtured young idealists had gone to 
 Palestine to found colonies in swamps, to suffer decima¬ 
 tion, to persist, and in the end to conquer: sufferers 
 from Rumanian pogroms had gone; the victims of 
 Russians; and those who were moved only by the 
 love of Zion. To all the Odessa committee held out a 
 helping hand, very often mistakenly and ignorantly, 
 but always with certainty as to the ultimate purpose. 
 Its work in Palestine was met and supplemented with 
 the work of the Alliance Israelite, and of the great 
 benevolent Edmond de Rothschild. Its mistakes were 
 met and supplemented also. But underneath the 
 intrigue, the error, the comedy, and the irony which 
 the work in Palestine developed there was a living thing 
 taking root in the soil and sending shoots in the air 
 and growing free. Observers of the social process 
 could say truly that the Jewish people was finding 
 itself at last. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 AHAD Ha’aM, HERZL, AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF ORGAN¬ 
 IZED ZIONISM 
 
 HOW completely and basically the Jewish people 
 was finding itself may be gathered from the history 
 of what is technically and formally Zionism itself. 
 In the mind of Theodor Herzl, the initiator of the or¬ 
 ganized international movement, it took shape first 
 of all as a reply to anti-Semitism, which from the ’80s 
 to the end of the nineteenth century infected Europe 
 like a disease. Anti-Semitism, Herzl argued in his 
 Judenstaat , is an ineradicable and growing social 
 phenomenon. The world repudiates Jews who come 
 to it as Jews purely, who have not rejected their na¬ 
 tionality and committed national suicide. Such a 
 suicide, even if it were desirable, is a terrible and tragic 
 process of suffering, and impossible to accomplish. 
 Its alternative is the liberation of the Jewish national¬ 
 ity as such, and this liberation must take the form 
 of restoring the Jewish national home. The agency 
 would be a world-wide society of Jews which should 
 make preliminary political and economic investiga¬ 
 tions and create a Jewish company, with a capital 
 of $10,000,000 and headquarters in London, to carry 
 out the enterprise of colonization by obtaining a 
 charter from the Turk and operating under the same 
 privileges as, say, the British East India Company. 
 
 73 
 
74 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 Practical initiative did not, however, come from the 
 author of the Judenstaat; it came from the Kadimah 
 of Vienna, an organization of students, in theory and 
 practice imbued with the spirit of insurgent nationalism 
 that dominated central Europe. This organization 
 pledged its support to Herzl in every effort to bring 
 together his Society of Jews. From various com¬ 
 munities in the heart of Jewry came memorials and 
 appeals. Herzl went to England, where Zangwill 
 introduced him to the Jewish community of the United 
 Kingdom. 
 
 At last the great enterprise was launched and the 
 first call for the Zionist Congress was sent out. Over 
 it the Jewry of the world divided sharply—the prosper¬ 
 ous minority of the West, represented chiefly by rabbis 
 of the reformed sects, resented and denounced it. 
 The great unprosperous majority of both the East 
 and the West welcomed and acclaimed it as the first 
 step in their divinely promised salvation. The old 
 controversy between assimilation and freedom flamed 
 up. The old arguments were repeated and the old 
 rancours renewed, with, however, an unprecedented 
 intensity deriving from the efficiency and vitality 
 of the Zionist enterprise. The first Congress, held at 
 Basle, Switzerland, in 1897, was an irrefutable demon¬ 
 stration of Jewish national solidarity: demonstration 
 of the organic interdependence, of the diversity in 
 unity which is nationality, of all extremes of Jewish 
 life and thought. The platform it adopted: “The 
 aim of Zionism is to create in Palestine for the Jewish 
 people a publicly recognized homeland under legal 
 guarantees,” became a foundation and a centre absorb¬ 
 ing and coordinating all factions of Jewry to the com- 
 
AHAD HA’AM AND HERZL 
 
 75 
 
 mon purpose it expressed. It brought together ortho¬ 
 dox and freethinkers, capitalists and socialists, the 
 East and the West; it gave their unconscious and blind 
 solidarity a conscious and envisioning ground. It 
 rationalized the Jewish being. 
 
 This rationalization is perhaps the most interesting 
 aspect of an enterprise richer in handicaps and other¬ 
 worldly survivals, particularly in sentiment, than in 
 practical endeavour and achievement. It took the 
 form of a conflict and reconciliation of what might be 
 called the colonial temper of the western Zionists and 
 nationalist temper of the eastern ones. The first 
 Congress was naturally dominated by the great Jews 
 of the West—in effect children of the tradition of Europe 
 —by Herzl, Nordau, Zangwill, and their kind. To them 
 Zionism was the solution of a question primarily 
 economic and political. Its achievement was to be 
 remedial rather than creative, and its value one of 
 relief rather than of construction. But to the children 
 of the Haskalah whose voice was the voice of the living 
 Jewish nationality in eastern Europe, Zionism had of 
 necessity to be far more than a relief and a remedy. 
 In their reflection and aspiration it was to be the en¬ 
 franchisement of the creative energies of the Jewish 
 people, the conservation and reconsecration of the 
 Hebraic spirit to the service of mankind in the Hebrew 
 land. For them Zionism was primarily the condition 
 of a spiritual and cultural recovery; economic and 
 political changes were tools, not ends in themselves, 
 and tools which they did not understand and could 
 not care for. 
 
 The most powerful but also the most obscurantist 
 (because he insisted that the desired effect must also 
 
76 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 be used as its own cause—he urged the priority of a 
 merely “cultural centre”) voice of this conviction 
 was Asher Ginsberg. No Jew of modern times has 
 had so profound an influence upon the Jewish people 
 because no Jew has so adequately effected in his own 
 thinking and outlook that fusion of contemporaneity 
 with tradition which is the constant ideal of the Jewish 
 as of every other nationalist. In many ways an autodi- 
 dact, Ginsberg, whose pen name is Ahad Ha’am, had, 
 like most young Jews of his class and generation, studied 
 a little in Germany, a little in Switzerland. He had 
 absorbed both from the writings of Smolenskin and the 
 intellectual temper of the world of his youth the spirit 
 and the method of the Hegelians of the left, and his use 
 of these has served satisfactorily to reconcile the an¬ 
 tagonisms of the factions of the nation. Each national¬ 
 ity, Ginsberg holds, is characterized by a spirit, an 
 essence, a central spontaneity, which expresses itself 
 in all the diverse forms of the national life: economic, 
 social, political, religious, literary, and so on. The 
 opposites of this expression are invariably fused in a 
 common resultant, a synthesis, which alone is the 
 adequate expression of the spirit. Thus the other¬ 
 worldliness of the Essenes and the worldliness of the 
 Sadducees are reconciled in the moralism of the Phari¬ 
 sees, who are therefore the true representatives of the 
 Jewish spirit of their time. And so through every 
 phase of the history of the Jewish people, the present 
 phase excepted. The contemporary Jew of the Ghetto 
 is too restricted and rigid in his life and vision to be 
 truly expressive of the Jewish spirit; the “emanci¬ 
 pated” Jew is too uprooted and errant. The combina¬ 
 tion of stability and freedom which allows for true 
 
AHAD HA’AM AND HERZL 
 
 77 
 
 emancipation is possible only by the recovery of a 
 fixed centre of national culture where the Jew may be 
 a Jew by inclusion and absorption rather than as in 
 the Ghetto by exclusion and rejection. This centre 
 is necessarily Palestine. Tradition, hope, and work 
 make it so, and the academic settlement of Palestine, 
 the establishment there of concrete embodiments of 
 the Hebraic spirit in cultural institutions is the only 
 true method of saving a living Hebraism for the service 
 of mankind. 
 
 This teaching made of Ahad Ha’am a protagonist 
 and leader in the movement of Hovevei Zion. Herzlian 
 Zionism took him by surprise and his relation to it has 
 been that of a critical onlooker. The bulk of the Rus¬ 
 sian Zionists, that is, the bulk of the Zionists, were of 
 his following. They opposed “practical” and “cul¬ 
 tural” enterprises to “political” and diplomatic ones, 
 the winning of the spirit to the saving of the body. Their 
 victory was far-reaching, for they modified the temper 
 and spirit of Herzl also—partly by combat, partly by 
 contagion. By combat, through the steady and relent¬ 
 less party opposition, culminating in the scene at the 
 Congress of 1903, where, in spite of the bitter need of 
 relief from the terrible persecutions of the period, they 
 made overwhelming sacrifice by rejecting the British 
 offer of Uganda. By contagion, through the slow 
 modification of Herzl’s purposes from remedialism 
 to construction, because of contact with the spirit 
 and aspiration of the Jewish people as it lived and 
 laboured. This is to be observed in all his publications 
 from 1897 on, but particularly in “Altneuland.” In that 
 book the writer’s preoccupation is no longer to escape 
 from persecution. The writer’s preoccupation is the 
 
78 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 structure and organization of a just state. His ex¬ 
 perience had set his Zionism in a more comprehensive, 
 a truer vision, a fuller conception of its roots and im¬ 
 plicated fruits. But Herzl saw what Ahad Ha’am 
 did not; what, indeed, he was incapable of seeing—that 
 a free and living culture is not the source but the out¬ 
 come of an organized and stable life; that consequently 
 the alternative to political action such as Herzl always 
 stood for was not “colonization” or “cultural activity” 
 but one more Ghetto, this time in Palestine, added to 
 the others already existing; that this new Ghetto 
 might be a Hebrew-speaking Ghetto and a very 
 learned Ghetto, but, that without self-government and 
 economic competency, it never could be more than 
 a Ghetto. 1 Hence, in Herzl’s view “cultural” ac¬ 
 tivity might—indeed, should—accompany “political” 
 action, but could never be a substitute for it. Herzl’s 
 statesmanship aimed inexorably at a Jewish state in 
 Palestine. And this state, conceived at last in terms 
 of social justice, was his foremost concern when he 
 died. 
 
 The activities which had preoccupied him and his 
 following from the first Congress in 1897 to the day of 
 his death, fall, broadly speaking, into three modes: 
 the organization of Jewry, the development of the 
 fiscal agencies of the organization, and political and 
 diplomatic operations. 
 
 The first of these endeavours was carried on in the 
 broadest of democratic terms. The Zionist Organiza¬ 
 tion was conceived of, and composed, internationally. 
 
 1 The complete absurdity of Ahad Ha’amism is evidenced by the Arabized 
 character of the so-called successful plantations like Petah Tikwah and 
 Rishon-le-Zion which are Arab villages with Jewish lords of the manor. 
 
AHAD HA ’AM AND HERZL 
 
 79 
 
 The first Congress, of necessity, was made up of dele¬ 
 gates representing the Jews of all the world who were 
 interested, without regard either to number, age, basis 
 of representation, or any of the other matters that 
 are fundamental to representative government. The 
 organization which was subsequently formulated made 
 the Congress central. This was thenceforward to be 
 composed of delegates, not less than twenty-four 
 years old, who received their mandates from the mem¬ 
 bers of the Zionist Organization. These, to become 
 members, needed to be at least eighteen years old, and 
 to pay the Shekel, or poll-tax, of twenty-five cents. 
 They were joined together in autonomous national 
 societies or federations, like the English Zionist Federa¬ 
 tion or the Federation of American Zionists. Any 
 four hundred of the members could elect a delegate to 
 the Congress. The Congress determined the policies 
 and actions of the organization. At first it met yearly, 
 then biennially. Its alternate was the Central Commit¬ 
 tee, composed of elected representatives of each national 
 organization in proportion to its numbers, and de- 
 . signed to sit, when the Congress was not in session, 
 with the Inner Actions Committee. The Congress 
 elected the twenty-five members of the Actions (Execu¬ 
 tive) Committee and designated the five to seven in¬ 
 dividuals on it who were to compose the Inner Actions 
 Committee. This latter was the administrative agency, 
 the ministry, of the organization and was in continuous 
 session. During Herzl’s lifetime its interests were 
 largely the creation of the means by which to carry 
 out the programme adopted at the first Congress. 
 
 This programme having declared the aim of Zionism 
 to be the establishment for the Jewish people of a 
 
80 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 publicly recognized and legally secured home in 
 Palestine, proceeded to specify the means of attaining 
 this aim as follows: 
 
 1. To promote through effective agencies the settle¬ 
 ment in Palestine of Jewish agriculturists, artisans, 
 and tradesmen. 
 
 2. To organize and unify the whole Jewish people 
 by means of local and general institutions suitable 
 for the purpose and conforming with the laws of the re¬ 
 spective states. 
 
 3. To strengthen and augment Jewish self-conscious¬ 
 ness in the individual and in the community. 
 
 4. To take the proper preliminary steps toward 
 securing the concurrence of the powers insofar as their 
 assent may be necessary for the attainment of the 
 Zionist goal. 
 
 In the beginning all the emphasis was laid upon the 
 second and fourth proposals. Emphasis on the second 
 led to the creation, as a part of the development of the 
 organization, of the fiscal agencies of the Movement. 
 These are the Jewish Colonial Trust and the Jewish 
 National Fund. The former was the actuality of the 
 “Jewish Company” sketched in the Judenstaat. Its 
 creation was not merely essential as a pre-requisite 
 to the work of colonization in Palestine; it was essential 
 to the establishment of a sound and safe basis of credit 
 there, without which new agricultural or industrial 
 communities could not develop. So, by vote of Con¬ 
 gress, the Jewish Colonial Trust was incorporated, as 
 an English Joint Stock Company. The year of incor¬ 
 poration was 1899. Its projected capital, $10,000,000, 
 was to be provided by the sale of 2,000,000 shares of 
 stock of the value of $5 each, and its shareholders. 
 
AHAD HA’AM AND HERZL 
 
 81 
 
 over one hundred thousand in number, are as wide¬ 
 spread geographically as is the Jewish people; but 
 they have paid in only about four hundred thousand 
 dollars of the ten million. The first hundred of the 
 shares are called Founders’ Shares; they carry more 
 voting power than all the others, but pay no divi¬ 
 dends and are held by trustees who are responsible to 
 the Congress. In them is vested the directing power 
 of the Trust. 
 
 The trustees are also—with the freedom of their 
 action limited in this connection by a “controlling 
 committee” (identical with the Inner Actions Com¬ 
 mittee)—in control of the Jewish National Fund. 
 (The two agencies of Zionist fiscal action are thus 
 under a unified control and administered according to a 
 single policy.) This Fund was established in 1901. 
 Its purpose is to acquire land in Palestine as the in¬ 
 alienable possession of the Jewish people. Its moneys 
 come entirely as free-will offerings from Jews of all 
 lands. The use is decided by the trustees, who com¬ 
 pose under the laws of Great Britain (which chartered 
 the Fund) an association issuing no stock. Under 
 the charter the Fund may only purchase land and 
 other immovable property in Palestine and adjacent 
 territory for the purpose of settling Jews thereon: It 
 can under no circumstance “divest itself of the para¬ 
 mount ownership of any of the soil . . . which 
 
 it may from time to time acquire.” Designed at 
 its inception to accumulate until it had a capital of 
 $1,000,000, this fund has, nevertheless, since the 
 Sixth Congress, 1903, undertaken a good many pur¬ 
 chases and other enterprises in Palestine. This was 
 due to a compromise decision made after a bitter 
 
82 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 quarrel, between the “political” and the “practical” 
 parties of the Congress, and a part of the compromise 
 was the agreement that one fourth of the capital of the 
 Fund must remain an inviolable reserve, against the 
 time when the political situation might demand its use. 
 
 The political situation was in many ways Herzl’s 
 foremost preoccupation. His quarrel with Hovevei 
 Zion derived from their blindness to its centrality 
 and to the importance of political effort. His founda¬ 
 tion of Die Welt was at bottom motivated by it, and 
 so long as he lived operations in Palestine by the 
 Zionist Organization were sharply kept within bounds. 
 He visited one European chancellery after another, 
 making friends for his cause, establishing precedent 
 and priority for the Zionist Organization as the rep¬ 
 resentative and spokesman of the Jewish people. 
 He interviewed the Kaiser and the Sultan, the premiers 
 of Russia and of England. With England he estab¬ 
 lished a connection which has become traditional for 
 good-will, friendliness, and cooperation. 
 
 His opponents, deriving from the politically inex¬ 
 perienced Ghettos of Russia, could neither understand 
 this activity nor tolerate it. Their devotion to Zion 
 was uttermost. They refused to endure anything 
 that seemed like a surrender or compromise of the 
 prime purpose of the recovery of Palestine. Conse¬ 
 quently, the issue between them and Herzl came to a 
 crisis in 1903, at the Sixth Congress. The background 
 of this Congress was the period of anti-Semitic terror¬ 
 ism, of pogrom and massacre, initiated by the Tsarist 
 government to divert public attention from the ad¬ 
 ministrative rottenness which had been responsible 
 for the Russian defeats in the Russo-Japanese War. 
 
83 
 
 AHAD HA’AM AND HERZL 
 
 The towns of Kishineff and Gomel had been devastated, 
 many Jewish communities laid waste. Herzl, seeking 
 relief and finding Palestine—largely because of the 
 intransigent attitude of Jewish millionaires who were 
 begged to and might easily have provided the 
 £10,000,000 demanded by Abdul Hamid for a conces¬ 
 sion in Palestine—for the time being out of reach, 
 negotiated with the British Government and secured 
 the famous offer of Uganda. Over this offer the Con¬ 
 gress split. The delegates from Russian Jewry bolted 
 in a body. Their mandate was clear. They and their 
 constituencies had been the sufferers; their need and 
 their tragedy had prompted the search for a substitute 
 for Palest : ne. But they would accept no substitute. 
 Their ancestors had suffered for a thousand years; 
 they, too, would suffer. They would suffer, they would 
 endure. No matter what the cost, they could accept 
 no way-station, no nacht-asyl; their hope and their 
 destiny were in the land of their fathers and in nothing 
 else. It was with difficulty that Herzl persuaded 
 them to return to the Congress. The British offer 
 was not refused outright; a commission was appointed 
 to study the fitness of Uganda for colonization. But 
 the report of the commission was a foregone conclusion. 
 Indeed, to make assurance doubly sure the Russian 
 Zionists held a conference at Kharkov which formulated 
 a certain ultimatum to put before Herzl. That he 
 satisfied the representatives of the Zionist masses may 
 be gathered from the fact that the meeting of the 
 Actions Committee in April, 1904, gave him a unanimous 
 vote of confidence. Three months later, on July 3rd, 
 he died of heart failure. He was only forty-four years 
 old. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 PARTIES AND PROGRAMMES AFTER HERZL’s DEATH 
 
 THE leader’s death seemed at first a blow from which 
 the Movement could not recover. There were enrolled 
 in it no personalities with the same force and imagina¬ 
 tion, none with any sense of the political realities 
 which had always to be held in the foreground of 
 Zionist statesmanship. The more influential of the 
 western Zionists, to whom Zionism was far more a 
 programme of relief than a principle of creation, dis¬ 
 appointed over the outcome of the Uganda affair, se¬ 
 ceded from the movement, with Zangwill at their head. 
 They formed the Jewish Territorial Organization (Ito) 
 which for a while bade fair to rival the Zionist associa¬ 
 tion in influence and prestige. But the Ito was a lost 
 cause from the beginning. It counted precisely with¬ 
 out that deep emotion and overruling vision of the 
 masses which had led to the dramatic rejection of 
 Uganda, and which was keeping Zionism alive in 
 spite of its inadequate leadership, in spite of the fact 
 that with Herzl dead the movement became for a time 
 a movement without a policy and without a plan, in 
 spite of the fact that it reverted almost instantaneously 
 to the eleemosynary attitude and methods of the pre- 
 Herzlian times. Not that the “great programme” 
 was forgotten; there were simply lacking the initiative 
 and the imagination to carry it on. David Wolfsohn, 
 
 84 
 
AFTER HERZL’S DEATH 
 
 85 
 
 Herzl’s successor as chairman of the Inner Actions 
 Committee, was devoted to Herzl and the Herzlian 
 programme, but he lacked the essentials of leadership. 
 By vocation he was a banker, with distinguished busi¬ 
 ness acumen, infinite caution, and unflinching courage. 
 He lacked, however, the qualities to advance the cause. 
 The best he could do was to keep it from going too 
 far backward, to surround its financial agencies with 
 adequate safeguards, to hold the factions together 
 and—to mark time. In the end, the faction which 
 caused the defeat of the Uganda projects defeated him 
 also, and he also died. 
 
 That faction was tied to ineffectuality by its tradition 
 of “practical” work and by its ardour for “cultural 
 development.” The Inner Actions Committee chosen 
 to express it was truly expressive of it—its dominant 
 figures were journalists, lay preachers, and at best a 
 professor of botany. Neither it nor the Congress 
 which elected it was particularly concerned with and 
 certainly not skilled in the problems and technique 
 of organization, the principles of financing, or any 
 of the essentials which should compose an effective 
 engine of statesmanlike endeavour. Numerically, the 
 organization went backward rather than forward—it 
 lost adherents particularly in western Europe and 
 America, and in eastern Europe it came to a standstill. 
 Attention shifted from the “great programme” to 
 the support of the existing Jewish settlements in 
 Palestine and to the piecemeal construction of new 
 enterprises—more especially of educational enter¬ 
 prises. 
 
 This was accompanied by another phenomenon with 
 which it was causally bound up—the development and 
 
86 
 
 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 stressing of party differences within the movement 
 itself. Under the “great programme” these differences 
 had been academic: they had been irrelevant to and 
 did not in any way affect the unity of purpose and 
 method which sought to secure Palestine once more as 
 the homeland of the Jewish people. Rut with the 
 initiation of specific undertakings these differences be¬ 
 came important and are destined to play a progres¬ 
 sively greater role both in the Zionist Movement and 
 in Palestine itself. 
 
 The differences echo the general political divisions 
 of European society, with such qualifications as the 
 peculiarities of the Jewish people impose. Zionism 
 thus has its Centre, Right, and Left, and the quarrels 
 that usually obtain between them. “Centre” may 
 be used to designate what has often been called the 
 “general” Zionist group, the Zionists who are con¬ 
 cerned primarily and exclusively with the recovery 
 of the Jewish homeland and are content to have let the 
 correlative and subsidiary problems of its social and 
 political economy wait public promulgation until the 
 time comes for confronting and solving them. The 
 overwhelming majority of the Zionists are “general.” 
 They elect the administrative officers and sustain 
 them against the opposition. That, on the whole, 
 and perhaps unfortunately, has made very few encroach¬ 
 ments upon the Centre. 
 
 In most respects in harmony with the Centre, 
 but differing from it in essential emphasis, is the 
 Right. Its official designation is “Mizrachi,” and 
 its interest is the conservation and enhancement of 
 traditional Judaism. It sees in Zionism and in the 
 Jewish homeland simply tools—indispensable tools, 
 
AFTER HERZL’S DEATH 
 
 87 
 
 but nevertheless, tools merely—for the attainment of 
 this end. Indeed, it sees the whole complexus of 
 Jewish life, its culture, social organization, educational 
 system and economy as secondary to this sectarian 
 interest. The Jews, its protagonists hold, are a people 
 whose chief, whose exclusive attribute, is religion, 
 and religion of the type practised and defended by the 
 Mizrachists. For justification they point to the fact 
 that this type of Judaism is the Judaism of the orthodox 
 mass, that the greater part of the history of this mass 
 is religious history. From the Mizrachi point of view 
 the Jewish problem is the maintenance of Judaism 
 in harmony with modern life and society. Says 
 an official apologist, quoting from the declaration 
 made by its representatives at Pressburgin 1904: “The 
 Mizrachi is an organization of orthodox Jews, who 
 adhere to the Basle programme and who strive to per¬ 
 petuate and develop the national Jewish life in the 
 spirit of Jewish tradition.” The Mizrachi believe, 
 he says elsewhere, 44 that Jewish Nationalism is an 
 essential ingredient to the existence of the Jews in the 
 present and the future, and that it has always been 
 an inseparable factor in Judaism, and that the Jewish 
 religion is not complete without it. It further declares 
 that the land of Israel, Palestine, is the land of the 
 Jewish future, and that unless it is obtained, Jews and 
 Judaism are threatened with a grave danger. Finally, 
 it asserts that those two can obtain the ideal state only 
 when they have as a base Torah Israel, the true 
 tradition of the people.” Organized in 1903 by Rabbi 
 Jacob Raines of Lida, to carry out these principles, 
 the Mizrachists have devoted themselves to propaganda 
 among the “orthodox mass” and to the development 
 
88 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 and maintenance of traditionalist educational institutions 
 in Palestine. In view of their proclaimed unanimity 
 with the orthodox mass, they have made extraor¬ 
 dinarily little progress among them. The party’s 
 most numerous and most notable recruits have come 
 from those Jews, both east and west, who find a prob¬ 
 lem of conscience in reconciling orthodoxy with con¬ 
 temporaneity. The Mizrachi programme and point of 
 view offer a solution. But they are a programme 
 and point of view altogether without meaning to the 
 “orthodox mass,” which is at rest in its orthodoxy 
 and feels no problem. Mizrachism plays the same role 
 in Judaism as Modernism in Catholicism, and is, by 
 every probability, destined to the same fate. Mean¬ 
 while, it goes through the usual party exercises of 
 obstruction, disingenuous opposition, demand for ex¬ 
 cessive representation. In Palestine it opposes the 
 secular schools and demands disproportionate support 
 for its own and other orthodox ones. 
 
 The Left is very considerably more than the op¬ 
 posite of the Right. Although the implications of the 
 Right’s position should lead to a complete split in the 
 social economy of life also—Mizrachi seeks the admin¬ 
 istration of the whole “law of Israel” and “ultimate 
 theocracy”—there exists, in fact, a high degree of 
 harmony and cooperation between Mizrachi and the 
 “general” Zionist organization on all matters not 
 relating to Mizrachi’s particular (demanded) preroga¬ 
 tives in organization standing and in Palestinian work. 
 But the Left is irreconcilable. Its position is exceed¬ 
 ingly subtle, and for one not acquainted with the 
 ethnic, religious, and cultural complications of central 
 and eastern Europe, difficult to grasp. It is a position 
 
AFTER HERZL’S DEATH 
 
 89 
 
 in which the postulates of socialism are fused with 
 axioms of nationality. Because of the status imposed 
 upon the Jewish people by the accidents of history, 
 the Poale Zion (the Left is usually so-called—there 
 are other forms of it—Zeiri Zion, Poel Hazair, etc.) 
 hold, the Jewish masses are more absolutely the victims 
 of exploitation than any other in Europe. They are 
 exploited not merely as proletarians; they are exploited 
 also as Jews, and exploited by everybody, by their 
 fellow workmen of other races and sects as well as by 
 the capitalists. The counter to economic exploitation 
 is socialism. The counter to ethnic disability is na¬ 
 tionalism, Zionism. Hence the name “Workers of 
 Zion,” and hence the organization of the workers 
 into “class-conscious national units.” Such organiza¬ 
 tion is imperative for the adequate solution of the prob¬ 
 lem of the Jewish masses. The capitalist Jew may 
 and usually does lose his identity in his economic class, 
 or at most, he retains his connection with the Jewish 
 people by way of the Church and tries to establish 
 the illusion that the Jews are a sect. For the Jewish 
 masses such a moral suicide is impossible, and they 
 would reject it as unworthy if it were possible. The 
 cosmopolitanism of the rigid Marxian socialist, on the 
 other hand, though much assumed and defended by 
 many Jews—the lower East Side of New York is full 
 of exclusively Yiddish-speaking “cosmopolitans”; they 
 really compose a socialist Ghetto—shows itself wherever 
 logically undertaken to be only a “form of assimilation 
 that makes of the Jewish masses a pawn in the hands 
 of ambitious bourgeois.” Consequently, the self- 
 conscious Jewish workmen are not merely Socialists, 
 they are also Nationalists. “With the Jewish masses,” 
 
90 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 writes Mr, Fineman, 1 “nationalism means self-assertion, 
 contempt for servile sufferance, a higher cultural 
 development; and, above all, a determination to take 
 one's fate in one's own hand. Cosmopolitanism or 
 assimilation involves surrender of individuality and 
 destruction of self-reliance and self-respect. A people 
 that is humiliated and is made to feel that its own speech 
 and culture are of negligible importance is one that 
 can also be more easily exploited. No wonder then 
 that with minority nationalities the wealthy bourgeoisie 
 and the exploiting plutocrats are usually in favour of 
 assimilation and, on the other hand, class-conscious 
 workingmen more or less clearly recognize that prob¬ 
 lems of cultural autonomy and equality of national 
 rights are of primary importance to the working class 
 even in their economic struggle.” The concern of the 
 Poale Zionists, consequently, is not merely with the 
 recovery of the homeland of the Jewish people; they 
 are as integrally concerned with the economic and 
 cultural character that this homeland is to have. Where 
 the Mizrachi stress orthodox Judaism, they stress 
 Socialism. But they differ from the Mizrachi in the 
 character of this stressing. To the Mizrachi the secur¬ 
 ity of orthodoxy is the paramount end, and the devices 
 by which this is to be maintained are indifferent: 
 any polity accomplishing the purpose is acceptable. 
 To Poale Zionism the paramount end is the freedom 
 and happiness of the Jewish worker as Jewish worker, 
 and the polity whereby this is to be attained is implied 
 by it. Hence Poale Zion has operated everywhere— 
 in the international congresses, in the various national 
 federations, in Palestine—as a genuine opposition. 
 
 1<4 Poale Zionism,” H. Fineman, New York, 1918. 
 
AFTER HERZL’S DEATH 
 
 91 
 
 pressing always in the direction of economic democracy. 
 However mistaken its economic theories may be held 
 to be, its practice has thus far been exceedingly salutary. 
 It has had the courage, also the foolhardiness of its 
 position: it has neither bargained nor compromised. 
 In the international socialist organization it has con¬ 
 sequently become the acknowledged representative 
 of the Jewish proletarian and it has secured from this 
 organization and others the endorsement of the Jewish 
 claim to Palestine; in the Zionist organization it has 
 acted as a relentless critic of the policy of the majority, 
 more often with heat than with wisdom, but always with 
 unswerving loyalty to its dogmas. It is in Palestine, 
 however, that its influence has been truly salutary. 
 There it helped to create Hashomer, the force of mounted 
 police for the protection of the colonies which has as 
 much as anything else served to win the regard and 
 respect of “Arabs” for Jews; it organized the Jewish 
 workmen against exploitation by Jewish landowners; it 
 defended the Jewish National Fund against abuse; it 
 established a Palestine Labour Fund and Bureau; it 
 organized cooperative societies for day labourers on the 
 Swedish and Italian plans, and it is developing and 
 maintaining various cooperative enterprises recognized 
 to be far from Socialism, which are intended to safe¬ 
 guard the Jewish workman in Palestine from exploita¬ 
 tion on the one side and pauperization on the other. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE PRE-ZIONIST JEWRY OF PALESTINE 
 
 THE Palestine to which the “general” Zionists 
 and the factions turned their attention was anything 
 but the ideal which the tradition had made of it. Such 
 forests as it had possessed had been cut down; its 
 rivers were torrents in winter and rocky aridities in 
 summer; the waters that had been distributed by 
 irrigation ditches were puddled in swamps, and, for 
 drinking and cooking, collected in cisterns. All these 
 had become breeding grounds of malaria. The indi¬ 
 genous peasant population, victims of successive waves 
 of military conquerors, each of which had left a racial 
 sediment in its wake, existed below the level of suste¬ 
 nance necessary for healthful living. It was wasted by 
 dirt and disease (trachoma and malaria outstandingly), 
 retarded by ignorance and superstition, and impover¬ 
 ished by taxes and the exactions of public officials. 
 Its numbers were slowly decreasing; the equilibrium 
 which its ancestry had succeeded immemorially long 
 ago in establishing with its natural and political 
 setting being inadequate for increase and hardly 
 sufficient for self-maintenance. The non-indigenous 
 population other than the Jews was made up of Chris¬ 
 tian sectaries whose existence had no regard, even 
 when they were self-supporting, to the condition of 
 the land and the plight of their neighbours; their 
 
 92 
 
THE PRE-ZIONIST JEWRY 93 
 
 preoccupation was ultimately with heaven and salva¬ 
 tion. 
 
 The same thing was true in even a greater degree of 
 the Jews. There had always been Jews in Palestine; 
 indeed, in all probability the indigenous population 
 is to a great degree Jewish by blood, though no longer 
 by nationality and consciousness. The conscious Jews 
 came mostly from outside of Palestine and their 
 primary interest in the land was in the merit they 
 acquired by living in it, and the security that accrued 
 to them by dying and being buried in it. To live in 
 the Holy Land was, in their eyes and in the eyes of 
 their European brethren, itself sanctification. And it is 
 of the very nature of saintliness that it must not concern 
 itself with the sordid things of this world, such as the 
 provision of food, clothing, shelter, and assurance of the 
 future; it lays up treasure in heaven and lives by 
 charity on earth. The return it makes for what it 
 receives it makes by way of blessings and of prayer, 
 to guarantee prosperity for the living and security 
 for the dead. 
 
 This, since the middle of the eighteenth century, was 
 the special vocation of the Jewish inhabitants of Pales¬ 
 tine. They were concentrated in terrible slums of the 
 cities—Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias. They studied the 
 Torah, they recited psalms, they wept and prayed at the 
 wailing wall, they acted as official mourners and Kaddish- 
 sayers, under stipend, for the pious dead and preoc¬ 
 cupied living in lands beyond. Very many of them 
 were old people who had themselves made pilgrimage 
 * to Palestine to die, but lived—on charity—and bred. 
 For their children they organized the typical mediaeval 
 chedarim or schools and the Talmudical academies 
 
94 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 called Yeshibaks. They married them off—on charity, 
 and when they finally did die, they left them for in¬ 
 heritance their claim on the charitable distribution 
 which had attained the status and value of a vested 
 interest and proprietary right. The charity they 
 lived on and still live on is technically known as Halukah. 
 It is a fund collected from the Jewries of the whole world 
 to maintain the pious and saintly, whose merit it is to 
 live in Palestine. Its administration and distribution 
 participates in the unsavoury character of all such funds, 
 and its existence and consequences constituted from 
 the beginning one of the most vexatious problems of 
 the Jewish secular concern with Palestine. 
 
 This concern became direct and active early in the 
 nineteenth century, with the ritual-murder accusation 
 that was levelled against the Jews of Damascus. The 
 accusation brought Sir Moses Montefiore to Palestine, 
 and in 1854 he tried to colonize thirty-five Safed Jews 
 in Galilee. A score of years later, as one result of 
 the efforts of Hirsch Kalischer, the colonies of Mosza 
 and Petach Tikwah were founded by the settlement 
 in those places of Jews from Jerusalem. To these 
 were added in 1882, Rishon le Zion , Wadi-el-Hannin, 
 Rosh Pinnah , and Zikron Yaakob. 
 
 With the foundation of Rishon le Zion a new type 
 of Jew enters Palestine and the land’s rehabilitation 
 truly begins. There were no indications of this what¬ 
 soever at the outset, nor for a generation to come. 
 The founders of Rishon were young men, intellectuals, 
 most of them tenderly nurtured, innocent of all knowl¬ 
 edge of agriculture, with neither the physique nor the 
 force to undergo the hardships of pioneering. They 
 and their kindred had turned to Palestine in the passion- 
 
THE PRE-ZIONIST JEWRY 
 
 95 
 
 ate disillusion over liberation in Russia. The govern¬ 
 ment of that land, under the Tsar Liberator, had opened 
 up the gates of intellectual and vocational opportunity 
 to the Jews. The younger generation, flocking to the 
 universities, adding itself to the intellectual ferment 
 of all young Russia, became Russophile and “assimila- 
 tionist,” as it were, over night. Then, as unexpectedly 
 as the gates had been opened, they were shut down. 
 The great good Tsar was killed. His successors re¬ 
 placed his liberal ukases with the May Laws of 1882. 
 Pogroms were initiated by the government throughout 
 the Jewish pale, and as a consequence the great con¬ 
 temporary folk-migration of the Jews began. The 
 bulk adventured to America, there to build up the 
 important American Jewish community; a few, a very 
 few, reverting to the old ancestral vision of the Prom¬ 
 ised Land and moved by their misfortunes to seek a 
 radical solution of the problem of which their misfortune 
 was so intimate and poignant an expression, adven¬ 
 tured to Palestine. What distinguished them sharply 
 and utterly from the older communities was the fact 
 that their objective was secular and practical. They 
 were not going to Palestine to die, they were going 
 to Palestine to live. They were not going to lay up 
 treasure in heaven, they were going to win a livelihood 
 from the earth. In their consciousness Palestine had 
 acquired a status different from that of the miraculous 
 Messianic tradition and other-worldly hope of their 
 predecessors. Their sentiment toward the land had 
 a greater kinship with patriotism than with piety. 
 The land was to them the land of their people’s salva¬ 
 tion, even as it was to the religionists, but the salvation 
 was to be secular, through work, not through faith. 
 
96 
 
 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 The naive and unconsidered affirmation of their 
 inexperience met with nullification, however, from 
 two directions. At hand was the nudity and barren¬ 
 ness of the country, changed in the course of centuries 
 of maltreatment from “a land of milk and honey’’ 
 into a swamp-spotted, disease-breeding desert. W 7 ith 
 that went the rapacity of the landowners who sold 
 them land in all sorts of impossible places, like the 
 marsh in which Rishon was founded. Farther off, in the 
 Jewries of the world, there was the debilitating effect 
 of the tenderness toward any Jew who lived in the 
 Promised Land. Even the most secular of the Eu¬ 
 ropean Jewries could not overcome the glamour of 
 the vision whose fascination increased with the dis¬ 
 tance; could not overcome the sense of eleemosynary 
 responsibility for the pious who were accumulating 
 merit by merely living in Palestine. So, when the 
 inevitable happened, when the aspiring young colo¬ 
 nies had consumed all their capital, when inexperience 
 had starved them, when disease had weakened them, 
 and death and flight had decimated them and those 
 that remained turned at last to their brethren in 
 Europe, the Europeans sprang to their assistance. 
 
 But the spirit of the assistance they rendered was 
 essentially charitable. 
 
 They failed altogether to realize the principle of self- 
 help and self-sufficiency. In the east a conference 
 was organized at Kattowitz which later was trans¬ 
 formed into the Odessa Committee. In the west 
 there was the French Rothschild, moved to great 
 largess by the tales of the sufferings and ardours of the 
 colonists. The two vied with each other in errors of 
 method and material wherewith the colonists were to be 
 
THE PRE-ZIONIST JEWRY 
 
 97 
 
 relieved. Little by little the colonists became demoral¬ 
 ized. The first ardour died out, and the urgency of the 
 struggle to survive was relaxed. Under the interest 
 and providence of the Rothschild 1 fortune the colonists 
 felt that they were secure. They ceased to work with 
 their own hands. They acquired the manners and 
 methods of the Arab effendi. Their homes became Arab 
 villages. If a crop failed or money otherwise was needed, 
 it came to them in the guise of a perpetual loan; or the 
 price of a commodity was artificially maintained—by 
 means of the Rothschild millions—regardless of the 
 market and the other conditions controlling production. 
 Wine that could not be marketed was stored in cellars 
 built for the purpose, but prices were maintained and 
 the proceeds used in sustaining in the colonies cheap 
 imitations of the style and manners of Paris. 
 
 Withal, the “administrators” who represented the 
 Rothschild interest and were its stewards, were either 
 indifferent to the development of the settlement or 
 inimical to it. They made all the errors that possibly 
 could be made. By their policy they added a colourful 
 hatred to the colonists’ colourful life. When, in 
 1891, Ahad Ha’am visited Palestine for the Odessa 
 Committee, he found the new Yishub living on a 
 charity, on a Halukah more subtly distributed, but as 
 genuinely a Halukah as the sources of livelihood of the 
 old Yishub. He found strained relationships between 
 the Jewish settlement and the Turkish Government, 
 
 1 It is proper to add that without the interest of Baron Edmond de Roths¬ 
 child, this aspect of the Palestinian adventure would have failed in its very in¬ 
 ception. He has not only generously maintained it, but has been able to 
 profit by experience so that to-day he and his son James de Rothschild are 
 among the staunchest supporters of a realistic policy of colonization and set¬ 
 tlement in Palestine. 
 
98 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 strained because there had been competition and specu¬ 
 lation in the purchase of lands so that the government 
 had found it necessary to prohibit the immigration 
 of and the sale of land to Russian Jews. He found 
 that there were hardly any legalized Jewish holdings. 
 He found the law of baksheesh regnant, and a complexity 
 of devices, all involving more and more baksheesh , to 
 hold together the Jewish colonist and the land. He de¬ 
 manded, therefore, that the approval of the Turkish 
 Government should be secured for any action to be 
 taken by the Odessa Committee and he urged particu¬ 
 larly that no aid should be given the colonists in the 
 form of cash advances. 
 
 His survey and his recommendations were disagree¬ 
 able but tonic. They designated the beginnings of 
 the moral, the economic, and practical rehabilitation 
 in self-help and self-respect which had been the hope 
 and the purpose of the pioneers. That they had fallen 
 into the easy ways of a kept community was not alto¬ 
 gether their fault. There we re the ponderous inertia 
 of tradition, the inexperience, and the incompetence; 
 there was the infection of example from the older 
 settlement of Halukah Jews, and of the established 
 order of society in the land. Talking and studying 
 were after all more habitual, more traditional to them 
 than doing: and their inward drive was toward these, 
 not toward agricultural or industrial competency. 
 Lacking the external compulsion which Would have 
 forced them to achieve the latter, they spent themselves, 
 in the security of the Rothschild providence, on the 
 former. Like the old Yishiib , they concerned them¬ 
 selves with the spirit, but it was a secular spirit and 
 its substance was a rehabilitated Hebrew vernacular. 
 
THE PRE-ZIONIST JEWRY 99 
 
 a Palestinian Hebrew Press, and a system of education 
 in Hebrew. 
 
 Its process and prelude was a cultural revolution 
 in Palestine, a revolution in which the defenders of 
 tradition persecuted, denounced, and excommunicated. 
 Its leader was a young liberal, Eliezer Ben Yehudah. 
 Born in Russia in 1859, his mind was formed by both 
 the forces of the optimistic Haskalah and of the pes¬ 
 simism which made all the young Russians that were 
 his contemporaries into Nihilists. The upshot of his 
 political frustration and his intellectual disillusion 
 was, as it was for so many of his peers, the redis¬ 
 covery of his place among his people, and a self¬ 
 dedication to the regeneration of the one enduring 
 specific symbol of his people’s entity—the Hebrew 
 tongue. He went from Russia to Paris, from Paris 
 to Palestine. Facing death from tuberculosis and 
 starvation, he lived in an underground hovel in Jeru¬ 
 salem, the objective of all the rancour that orthodoxy 
 could concentrate upon him. In his hovel, the only 
 speech he permitted to be used was Hebrew speech. He 
 refused to speak any other language upon the public 
 streets. By force of his example, and the advocacy 
 of the cause in a Hebrew weekly of which he made 
 himself editor, he acquired a following. His following 
 also pledged themselves to use only Hebrew in their 
 households. Their children grew up in a Hebrew¬ 
 speaking setting. They were sent to kindergartens 
 and schools—such as they were—specially provided, 
 where Hebrew alone was the language of play and of 
 work. 
 
 And the Hebraization of the children reacted again 
 upon the parents. Slowly, life in the new Yishub 
 
100 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 became Hebraic. A literature and a drama grew up, 
 as it were over night. In the colonies, the traditional 
 holidays became spontaneously occasions for games, 
 festivals, and pageants, the latter recapitulating various 
 phases of the biblical narratives. To regulate and to 
 guide the vernacular and literary development of 
 Hebrew there was organized in Jerusalem the Va’ad 
 Halashon , with Ben Yehudah as its head. This Va’ad 
 had the nature and functions of Richelieu’s first 
 Academy. It was the court of language. All new 
 forms, spontaneous or manufactured, were brought to 
 it for confirmation or rejection. It set itself the 
 task and purpose of providing expressions needful 
 to the daily as well as the literary life, and not to be 
 found in the existing vocabulary. To accomplish 
 its task it drew upon all sources—archaeological and 
 Talmudical material, the Bible, the Hebrew literature 
 of the Middle Ages. Its results are being incorporated 
 by Ben Yehudah with the outcome of his own private 
 labours in his Millon , or Hebrew dictionary. 
 
 This spontaneous linguistic and cultural develop¬ 
 ment of the new Yishub was by no means a smooth 
 one. That the Hebraic movement was resisted by 
 the older and spiritually mediaeval settlement has 
 already been noted. An attempt on the part of a 
 section of this settlement, made in 1866, to establish 
 a school (the Blumenthal School) where the manage¬ 
 ment was competent and where the study of one 
 European language was compulsory, met with ex- 
 communication on the part of the Ashkenazic section 
 of that community. The first real and effective at¬ 
 tempt from outside to bring something of the spirit 
 of self-help and national self-respect to the Jewish com- 
 
THE PRE-ZIONIST JEWRY 
 
 101 
 
 munities of Palestine was made by the Alliance Israelite 
 Universelle under the leadership and personal initiative 
 of the saintly Charles Netter. In 1870 he founded 
 near Jaffa the Mikweh Israel —an agricultural school, 
 on the most approved model of the time. His super¬ 
 vision lasted until his death, in 1882. With the passing 
 of his personality and the change in temper of the 
 directorate, a change that reflected the political changes 
 in the Europe of the time, the effect and the policy 
 of Mikweh Israel as well as of the other Alliance 
 schools in the Orient were altered. Designed to convert 
 the Halukah-receiving population into self-supporting 
 and self-respecting agricultural labourers—and during 
 the period of Netter’s leadership, labourers with a 
 vision of national restoration before them—its actual 
 effect, like that of all the Alliance schools, was to make 
 of the pupils amateur Frenchmen, agricultural ad¬ 
 ministrators, book-made experts, or teachers eager to 
 find, and eagerly seeking, life and vocation elsewhere 
 than in Palestine. The policy of the Alliance was to 
 cross and to frustrate, as nearly as it could, the spon¬ 
 taneous tendencies of the new settlement and to 
 obstruct its influence upon the old. That it should 
 fail was a foregone conclusion. All it accomplished 
 was to lend prestige to those tendencies—to the use 
 of European methods of education, of management, 
 and to training for industry. It had its competitors 
 in England and in Germany, who endowed schools 
 with analogous purposes and with analogous futility. 
 Colony after colony succeeded in establishing inde¬ 
 pendently its own school and its Hebrew medium. 
 Not easily and not without conflict. In 1888 Israel 
 Belkind tried to found a national school at Jaffa, 
 
102 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 but failed for lack of funds. In the agricultural colonies 
 this lack was met by the Rothschild money, distributed 
 by the Jewish Colonization Association (J. C. A.) 
 
 This association, which is trustee for the Baron 
 Maurice de Hirsch Foundation, had been made trustee, 
 in 1899, of the Rothschild assets and liabilities in the 
 Jewish colonies of Palestine. Its charge was to bring 
 order and self-dependence out of the confusion and 
 pauperism that prevailed in the Rothschild colonies. 
 Although it has been accused of absentee landlordism 
 and bureaucracy, it certainly did attain to something 
 which may be called success in comparison with the 
 utter failure of Rothschild and the Odessa Committee 
 and the independent pioneers. To some degree and 
 after a fashion, it rehabilitated the economics and 
 administration of the colonies. Refusing resolutely 
 to interfere with the cultural interests of the Yishub, 
 it devoted itself to recreating the economic indepen¬ 
 dence which had been lost. It uprooted vineyards, 
 cut down the output of wine, withdrew the Rothschild 
 subsidy which had kept prices at a level of extraordi¬ 
 nary inflation, and compelled the wine-growers to offer 
 their wine in open market to bona-fide buyers. At 
 the same time it arranged to see the colonists through 
 their crises on more of a business and less of a philan¬ 
 thropic basis. This it did by a system of guaranteed 
 loans with specific, though varying, terms, secured 
 by mortgages, and replacing the unguaranteed loans 
 that were really gifts. The necessities of the situation 
 and the pressure of the J. C. A. forced the wine-growers 
 of the six viticultural colonies into cooperative organ¬ 
 ization for both buying and selling. Within ten years 
 they succeeded in making their affairs profitable enough 
 
THE PRE-ZIONIST JEWRY 103 
 
 to begin to discharge their debts and to pay off their 
 mortgages. 
 
 The method had been used by the Jewish Coloniza¬ 
 tion Association in the Argentine and in the establish¬ 
 ment of its own colonies in Galilee. There it set up 
 farms, for the training of agriculturalists, each under 
 the direction of an expert supervisor. Around these 
 farms it built its colonies, consisting of allotments of 
 land, houses, stock, and tools, to be leased to each work¬ 
 man whose training had made him eligible for an 
 allotment. His terms were of the easiest: the pay¬ 
 ment of a rent, at first in kind, of about one fifth 
 his gross produce; then, if both sides were willing and 
 satisfied with each other, a contract under which the 
 colonist was to pay off the cost of his farm and equip¬ 
 ment (varying in price from $2,200 to $3,500) in about 
 fifty-one years, at the rate of 2 per cent, per year. Es¬ 
 sentially philanthropic though this is, it is an enor¬ 
 mous improvement over the earlier pauperizing methods. 
 
 That the readjustments which the methods of the 
 Jewish Colonization Association compelled should 
 work hardship; that the colonists, already pauperized 
 in spirit, did not like them and should complain bit¬ 
 terly, were foregone conclusions. It was not a foregone 
 conclusion that the Association should succeed. For 
 its success was dependent upon a radical change, a 
 change equivalent to a religious conversion, in the 
 psychology of the colonists. This change neither the 
 Association nor any other force active in Palestine 
 could have brought about. It derived, when like a 
 rocket it flashed up, from a new and entirely extraneous 
 influence, supplying a new and efficacious morale, a new 
 dynamic and a new vision. The influence was Zionism. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 ZIONISM IN PALESTINE AND THE NEAR-EASTERN QUESTION 
 
 THE reaction of Palestinian Jewry to Zionism and 
 the Zionist principle could not, at the beginning, fail 
 to conform to the wont and use of their daily lives. 
 These, in their bearing on the economy and polity of 
 Palestine, had the blindness of instinct or the illusion 
 of religion. At no point were they illuminated by an 
 organic principle that should govern the policies of 
 the community and give conscious direction to its 
 life. The orthodox, the Messianists, in Palestine 
 responded to Zionism with the same pious repulsion 
 as their fellow-pietists elsewhere; the pan-Turanians* 
 of whom there were some, echoed the German and 
 French assimilationists, and among the members of 
 the new Yishub there was the same dubious assent as 
 among the Hovevei Zionists who were their chief 
 bread-givers. 
 
 Moreover, the first position and prior policy of the 
 Zionist organization under Herzl’s leadership were in¬ 
 different to their interests. The position was that no 
 enterprises should be undertaken in Palestine except 
 under the guarantee of a charter which would make 
 possible autonomous control and organic national 
 development. The policy was to create the instru¬ 
 ments for such a development and to withhold their 
 utilization until the political guarantee had been 
 
 104 
 
THE NEAR-EASTERN QUESTION 105 
 
 secured. Under Herzl, the Zionist organization, con- 
 4 sequently, devoted itself to building up its membership 
 and institutions and to carrying on diplomatic and 
 political negotiations with the chancellaries of Europe. 
 The Russian Hovevei Zionists, who—with notable ex¬ 
 ceptions such as Ahad Ha’am—had joined the move¬ 
 ment, opposed the position and the policy bitterly; 
 offering as alternative the elaboration and continuance 
 of their own programme, now translumined by the 
 Herzlian purpose as its goal. Between them and 
 Herzl and his followers there was continual strife, 
 and all the parties in Zion were defined, according to 
 their adherence, as “practicals” or “politicals.” 
 
 From the point of view of the “politicals” the posi¬ 
 tion of the Jewish colonists in Palestine was precarious 
 in the extreme. Under Turkish law they had no right 
 to the land they held; indeed, their holdings were either 
 unrecorded, or recorded in the name of some Arab or 
 Turk; they themselves were without legal claim on it. 
 To retain it, and to maintain their status, they were 
 under the compulsion of the frequent and extensive 
 use of baksheesh , and at the mercy of the caprice of 
 every official. Jews, furthermore, could enter Turkish 
 territory, particularly Palestine, only under difficulties, 
 and their stay was formally illegal. By the regulations 
 of the Porte, made in 1888, Jews seeking to enter 
 Palestine were required to secure a “red ticket” and 
 once in, could stay only three months. The regula¬ 
 tions were a dead letter from the moment of their 
 promulgation, baksheesh and the general feeling of their 
 insincerity helping to make them so. But they kept 
 dubious the whole position of the Jewish settlement 
 of Palestine and it was with an eye on them that Ahad 
 
106 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 Ha’am made the recommendations of 1891. In 1900, 
 when it began to be apparent that little would come 
 of the negotiations between Herzl and Abdul Hamid, 
 the Vali of Beirut was again instructed to enforce the 
 regulations, apparently in the hope that such an 
 action might force the hands of the rich Jews, regarding 
 whose riches and desire for Palestine Abdul Hamid 
 had mythical ideas. Had the instructions been obeyed, 
 the whole Yishub would have been destroyed. Italy 
 and the United States protested, however, that en¬ 
 forcement would mean discrimination against their 
 nationals on the basis of religion, and the Turks re¬ 
 frained, reverting to the older practice. The event, 
 of course, was a concrete illustration of the considera¬ 
 tion that animated the “politicals,” and there were 
 some Palestinians who understood them, and sided 
 with them. 
 
 In any case, that the Palestinians’ hopes were stirred 
 and their vision enlarged is indisputable. They were 
 always represented at the congresses, and Herzl’s 
 visit to Palestine produced a marked and lasting inten¬ 
 sification of their nationalist morale. The negotiations 
 over El Arish and Uganda, which succeeded the negotia¬ 
 tions with the Turk, served to intensify it still further, 
 and it was suffused with something like anti-Zionist 
 feeling during the sessions of the Sixth Zionist Congress 
 when the British offer was being debated. The occa¬ 
 sion was not the Congress itself, but another congress 
 in Palestine, organized and presided over by Mendel 
 Ussishkin. Sanguine in temperament and dictatorial 
 in his contacts with other men, he had qualities that 
 fitted him for leadership under the conditions of re¬ 
 stricted public life in Russia, but which were entirely 
 
THE NEAR-EASTERN QUESTION 107 
 
 unsuited to the open methods and public deliberations 
 of parliamentary procedure. Although a member of 
 the Zionist organization and conspicuous by his be¬ 
 haviour rather than by his ideas at the congresses, he 
 was an intransigent Hovevei Zionist and he opposed 
 Herzl and the “politicals” from the start. His meth¬ 
 ods were rather those of Tsarist Russia than of parlia¬ 
 mentary England, and the congress that he created in 
 Palestine was his first reply to the Uganda offer. It 
 proposed an organization of the philanthropic agencies 
 functioning in Palestine—of the Jewish Colonization 
 Association, the Odessa Committee, the Alliance 
 Israelite, the Ezra (a German society) and represen¬ 
 tatives of Baron Edmond de Rothschild, who, together 
 with the Yishub through its chosen spokesmen, should 
 collaborate “practically” to the end of colonizing 
 Palestine with Jews. The enterprise failed, and in 
 the meantime Herzl had died, and the Seventh Congress 
 had with dignity and appreciation declined the British 
 offer. 
 
 This action was a victory for the “practicalists.” 
 It closed a phase of Zionist activity. All subsequent 
 action, economic, social, and cultural, centred about 
 Palestine and the communities there. The first step 
 was taken in the year of the Sixth Congress, when the 
 Jewish Colonial Trust organized the Anglo-Palestine 
 Company bank in Jaffa. Other branches appeared, 
 in the course of time in Jerusalem, Beirut, Haifa, Safed, 
 Tiberias, Hebron, Gaza, and Petah Tikwah. Their 
 ultimate purpose, their economic liberalism, and their 
 —in comparison of course only with what had obtained 
 in the past—apparently businesslike methods created a 
 new industrial and commercial standard for the Yishub, 
 
108 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 a standard suffused with something of the high morale 
 of the national idea. 
 
 The function of these banks was reenforced in 1911 
 by the institution of the Palestine Commission. In 
 that year Wolfsohn, who had succeeded to the post 
 and the policies of Herzl, went down to defeat. The 
 “ practicalists ” became the government of the Zionist 
 organization, with a policy that just barely kept them 
 from going over the edge of Zionism to an absolute 
 philanthropism. This was, in the imagination of its 
 apologists, an extension of the general policy of Europe 
 abroad, to the sphere of Jewish interests. It was “the 
 policy of economic penetration.” The Jewish claim 
 to Palestine on merely historic grounds, argued Otto 
 Warburg, a professor of botany in Berlin and the 
 leader and promulgator of the new programme, was 
 not worth much, nowadays. A valid modern title 
 would have to rest on the economic dependence of 
 Palestine upon Jewish investment, initiative, and 
 resources. The Palestine Office or Bureau was created 
 pursuant to this idea. It purported to function prac¬ 
 tically as a home ministry, collecting information, 
 guiding and assisting would-be settlers, and directing 
 and coordinating all sorts of activities. Certain 
 moneys of the National Fund were, not without a 
 struggle, made available for its activities. It guided 
 and to some degree subsidized experiments—which 
 were wasteful failure—in afforestation; in cooperative 
 colonization, notably the costly and unsuccessful 
 Merchaviah experiment according to the plans of Franz 
 Oppenheimer. It undertook housing experiments, the 
 care of the Yemenites, the encouragement of the art 
 school, Bezalel, and its shops, of the Hebrew Gym- 
 
THE NEAR-EASTERN QUESTION 109 
 
 nasium at Jaffa, of the Technical School at Haifa, 
 and the Hebrew University, projected already before 
 the war—all with the enormous wastage which is the 
 price of inexperience or something more sinister. 
 
 The dominating interest, naturally, was “cultural 
 work” in Palestine. Three at least of the members 
 of the Inner Actions Committee were avowed disciples 
 of Ahad Ha’am. All felt the pressure of the Zionist 
 intellectuals toward cultural revival. The exceeding 
 emphasis on the school system, then, was a part of 
 the party programme, but it represented, as has already 
 been noted, the natural institutional trend of the effec¬ 
 tive will of the Jewish people, this will having become 
 accustomed to expressing itself in schools and litera¬ 
 ture, and having still much training to undergo before 
 it may be able to realize itself in organically conceived 
 national economic and political institutions. Toward 
 that latter end also, however, first and tentative steps 
 had been taken in the development of cooperative 
 consumers and marketing associations among the older 
 colonists, and the growth and functioning of the 
 vciadim, or councils, with their occasional equal 
 suffrage and commission form of administration. The 
 chief instrument of the Zionist organization in helping 
 toward all these developments was the Palestine Office, 
 somehow directed by a sociological writer. Dr. Arthur 
 Ruppin. 
 
 In sum: under the new Zionist policy, the impact 
 of the Zionist idea on Palestine served to awaken and 
 to direct the anarchic Jewry of the land into a com¬ 
 munity tending to acquire the characteristics of a 
 national polity. Compared with even the inchoate 
 Albanians, the spirit of this community was still 
 
110 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 atomic and centrifugal, but beside its antecedents in 
 Palestianian Jewry itself it was corporate and organic 
 indeed. Any enmity, menacing vigorously enough 
 from without, would fuse its disparate organizations 
 into institutions of its society and its consciousness 
 of nationality into the patriotism of nationhood. 
 
 The lacking inimical menace was supplied by the 
 action of European rivalries on the Turkish Empire. 
 These rivalries had kept alive the “Sick Man” of 
 Europe, even through crises in his own existence. The 
 conflicting ambitions of Austria-Hungary and Russia 
 in the Balkans, the British anxiety over the Syrian 
 road to India and the protection of the Suez Canal, 
 the French investments in Syria, and the crystalliza¬ 
 tion of the German programme of a Middle Europe, 
 were cleverly used by Abdul Hamid one against the 
 other to keep himself safe amid atrocities. The 
 latter were as essential a part of his domestic policy 
 as the former were of his foreign policy. For the 
 Turkish Empire was a polyglot empire, and the Turks 
 were a minority in their own dominion. Heirs of 
 the imperial structure of Byzantium, they allowed 
 its common life to run on of its own momentum— 
 until it ran down—and trusted their sovereignty 
 to the sanction of the military force of the Janissaries. 
 But these themselves lost integrity in the course of 
 time. Posts became hereditary, and discipline and 
 ferocity were replaced by intrigue and baksheesh. 
 The peoples that were dominated and exploited by 
 these forces were designated as millets , that is, religious 
 nationalities, having their own leaders, with powers 
 and functions that were secular as well as religious. 
 Thus the Christians of Turkey in Europe were con- 
 
THE NEAR-EASTERN QUESTION 111 
 
 sidered all of the Greek millet, regardless of whether 
 they were Bulgars or Serbs, or Croats, or Vlachs, or 
 Greeks proper. 
 
 It would perhaps have been fortunate for Europe 
 if this mode of unity had remained the dominant 
 one, and the liberation of these nationalities from the 
 Turkish yoke had been the common action of a group 
 regarding itself one and indivisible. Rut the pressure 
 of the continental rivals prohibited this, and the auto¬ 
 genous interests of the linguistic and ethnographic 
 societies were reenforced and were exploited by the 
 continental powers. The slow expulsion of the Turk 
 from Europe is a function not primarily of the single 
 religious, but of the many awakening national con¬ 
 sciousnesses of the various subject-peoples of the 
 Porte. Greek and Serb and Croat and Bulgar and 
 Ruman, by force or fraud or both, attained first to 
 autonomy, then to independence, under the stimula¬ 
 tion of linguistic and literary revival at home and dip¬ 
 lomatic intrigue and military force abroad. It became 
 apparent, finally, that Turkey-in-Europe was doomed. 
 
 It became apparent, to none so much so, as to the 
 subjects of the Porte who called themselves Young 
 Turks, and who hoped to save the empire from the 
 dissolution within and the destruction without, which 
 threatened it. The Committee of Union and Prog¬ 
 ress that led them was recruited from a variety of 
 the races of the empire: Donmeh Jews from Saloniki, 
 Bulgars, Poles. Most of its members had lived in 
 exile abroad. They had been students of European 
 politics and European political theories. They had 
 been particularly intrigued by the ideology of the 
 French Revolution, and at the outset, it would seem. 
 
112 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 they took this ideology literally, abstractly. Their 
 one aspiration was to modernize Turkey, to democra¬ 
 tize and vitalize her. This aspiration fitted the in¬ 
 terests of certain financiers in Saloniki and of others, 
 far more important, in Vienna, Ruda-Pesth, Berlin, 
 and very probably, Paris and London. With the 
 means supplied, in return for pledges of concessions 
 by these financiers, the Young Turks conspired to over¬ 
 throw the government. In 1908 they did overthrow 
 the government, but their revolution was the coup d’etat 
 of a minority, not a great national uprising. For the 
 latter the necessary elements were lacking. The re¬ 
 ligious sanctity of the Sultan was too great; the popu¬ 
 lations were too diverse, too backward, too little in¬ 
 terested in government. 
 
 At the outset there spread the general spirit of 
 good feeling and hopefulness which accompanies 
 vital changes everywhere. The Constitution pro¬ 
 claimed religious and political equality, universal 
 suffrage was introduced, and a parliament convoked. 
 The more progressive parts of the population were 
 filled with hope. But it soon became apparent that 
 the abstractionist principles of the eighteenth century 
 on which the Constitution was built were inapplicable 
 to the mediaeval status and mentality of the popula¬ 
 tion of the empire. The Albanians, and then the 
 other nationalities began to make difficulties. The 
 levelling effect of the rule of universal military service 
 was resented by Jews, Druses, Arabs, and others who 
 had been accustomed to relieve themselves of the obli¬ 
 gations of this service by paying a head-tax. The at¬ 
 tempt to introduce a uniform system of taxation met 
 with similar resentment. Other troubles eventuated. 
 
THE NEAR-EASTERN QUESTION 113 
 
 Just how they converted the Young Turkish ab¬ 
 stractionist libertarianism into what the Germans 
 call “realistic” pan-Turanianism it is difficult to say. 
 The Austrian seizure, in 1908, of the Jugo-Slavic 
 territories of Bosnia and Herzegovina had a great deal 
 to do with it; so had the attainment of complete Bul¬ 
 garian independence; so had the Italian adventure 
 in Tripoli, and the Greek rebellion in Crete. All 
 these enterprises served well and nobly to awaken 
 the Young Turks to the political realities of the situa¬ 
 tion of their empire. They saw the Balkans slowly 
 Europeanized, their own people more and more forced 
 back into Asia. They saw themselves without any 
 real friends in Europe—alienated from the British, 
 the object of exploitations envy of the French, the 
 object of military menace by the Russians, Aus¬ 
 trians, and the Balkan peoples. In this situation 
 their religion was no refuge to them. It was a tool, 
 and, Europeanized liberals as most of them were, it 
 was a tool too unsuited to their temperaments and 
 points of view for any but the crudest and most bung¬ 
 ling uses. They looked to Europe for a way out, and 
 they found it in the chauvinistic nationalism which, 
 after the Franco-Prussian War, had become the Euro¬ 
 pean style. The model they took was naturally 
 Prussia, and they added the trickeries of electoral 
 regulations, of racial disablements, and the other de¬ 
 vices of that highly organized oligarchy to the tradi¬ 
 tionally Turkish methods of government into which 
 they found themselves spontaneously sinking back. 
 
 That step once taken, the others in the imitatio 
 Christianis followed inevitably. As they had changed 
 from religious tolerance and nationalist indifference 
 
114 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 to religious indifference and nationalist chauvinism, 
 so they changed from nationalist chauvinism to 
 cultural imperialism. To the oppressive pan-Slavism 
 and pan-Germanism of the Russians and the Prussians, 
 there was added, thus, the no-more-unworthy pan- 
 Turanianism of the Turks. They saw a vision! a 
 vision of a mighty, united modern empire, stretching 
 from the Bosporus to Persia, from Sinai to the Black 
 Sea. The language of this empire was to be Turkish, 
 and its literature and cultivation were to be not less 
 than the best. It was to be economically and politi¬ 
 cally as powerful as the most powerful, and culturally 
 as vigorous as the most vigorous. That its attain¬ 
 ment meant the spiritual if not the physical murder 
 of the Greek, Armenian, Kurd, Druse, Arab, Jewish 
 and other populations of the empire did not trouble 
 the seers. These subject populations could Turkify 
 if they were made to: did not the Germans and the 
 Hungarians and the Austrians and the Russians com¬ 
 pel their own subject-populations? The order for 
 Ottomanization went out. Inhabitants of the land 
 were willy-nilly to be turned into Turks, bag and 
 baggage, Turks in language, in allegiance, in military 
 and fiscal obligation. The necessity of doing this 
 became, in the opinion of the Committee of Union 
 and Progress, all the more urgent after the disastrous 
 war with the Balkan League. A pan-Turanian propa¬ 
 ganda, led by Tekin Alp, was carried on among the 
 Turks; Syrians and Armenians were faced with the 
 alternatives of Turkifying or being exterminated. 
 
 These policies suited the interests and received the 
 encouragement of imperial Germany. From the time 
 that the rulers of that unfortunate country decided 
 
THE NEAR-EASTERN QUESTION 115 
 
 to adventure after “a place in the sun,” the cultivation 
 of friendly relations with Turkey became the foundation 
 of that scheme of empire known since the beginning 
 of the Great War as Mittel Europa . Turkey was to be 
 the keystone of this arch of empire in the domain of 
 business enterprise, the keystone of this arch of empire 
 in the dreamt-of hegemony of Asia and Africa. The 
 relations with the Young Turks were made closer and 
 more intimate as the latter’s relations with the other 
 European powers grew colder and more strained : 
 German teachers in Turkish schools, particularly in 
 the technological schools', German reorganizers for 
 Turkish business and Turkish finances; German officers 
 and German reorganization for the Turkish army; 
 German concessionaries for Turkish natural resources, 
 such as coal mines at Rodosto and copper mines at 
 Arghana Maden; German concessionaries for Turkish 
 public utilities such as railroads, harbours, and irriga¬ 
 tion undertakings; German religious, scholastic, philan¬ 
 thropic, and colonial enterprises all over the empire, 
 in Palestine, noticeably. Above all, the German 
 language everywhere, displacing Greek or Arabic or 
 Armenian or Hebrew, and rivalling Turkish. Thus 
 in the empire of the Ottomans razor was cutting razor. 
 Turkification and Germanization were going on at the 
 same time and prefacing a complicated future indeed 
 for both the masters and the subjects of the processes. 
 
 Palestinian Jewry was the first of the non-Turkish 
 peoples of the empire to feel their effects. The nature 
 and purposes of the Jewish settlement in Palestine 
 became the subject of malicious animadversion in the 
 German-language press in Constantinople. The Zion¬ 
 ist movement and its plans became an item in the 
 
116 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 Franco-German rivalries. The prominence of Jews 
 of German citizenship in the movement added to the 
 dislike with which the assimilatory directorate of the 
 Alliance Israelite Universelle regarded it, and led to 
 provocative exchanges with members of the Committee 
 of Union and Progress in Palestine. Discussion upon it 
 took place in the Turkish Parliament. It emerged that 
 Zionism was being described as the spear-head of an 
 international conspiracy of financiers against the integ¬ 
 rity of the Turkish Empire; that it was a device to 
 secure the hegemony of the empire’s peoples; and so 
 on. A pan-Arabian movement postulated upon anti- 
 Jewish propaganda, and with an evident French back¬ 
 ground made its appearance. All this was to be added 
 to the pan-Turanianism of the Ottoman Jews them¬ 
 selves. These symptoms of the French bid against the 
 Germans for Turkish good-will served only to unify the 
 Jewry of Palestine and to intensify their consciousness of 
 nationality. Practical measures taken by the Turkish 
 government—the sudden renewal of the enforcement 
 of the rules requiring Jews who entered Palestine to 
 obtain the “red ticket” which permitted them to stay 
 there three months, the attempt to penalize all Jews 
 inhabiting Palestine into Ottoman citizenship, and 
 finally the abolition of the capitulations with the con¬ 
 sequent subjection of foreign settlers to the dominion 
 of Turkish law—these singly and together generated 
 an emotion which crystallized into national solidarity. 
 
 But the irresistible agent of nationalization was 
 the assault upon the one symbol of Jewish solidarity 
 which has been perennial and has survived all the 
 disintegrating forces which have worked upon Jewish 
 life. This symbol is the Hebrew language. With 
 
THE NEAR-EASTERN QUESTION 117 
 
 what pains and how heroically it had been made the 
 speech of the children of the land and the language of 
 the schools, has been recorded. The most conspicuous 
 and cherished symbol of nationality among the other 
 suppressed peoples of Europe and Asia, how much more 
 precious was their language to the Jews, whose sole and 
 only symbol it was, where the others had at least 
 in addition the occupation of their lands by their own 
 national masses, and the continuity and stability of 
 their national customs and traditions. Among the 
 Jews of the Diaspora Hebrew was the lingua franca, 
 the Esperanto overruling their babel; in Palestine it 
 was the cement that suffused and unified their di¬ 
 versities of origination, speech, sect, and custom. All 
 the agencies at work among Palestinian Jews felt this— 
 English, German, even the French. The schools 
 they supported and the teachers they sent out made 
 use of Hebrew as the medium of instruction. Sud¬ 
 denly, and in a very conspicuous case, the Hilfsverein 
 der Deutschen Juden, which had been the German 
 section of the Alliance Israelite Universelle and had 
 split off from it, appeared as the protagonist of German. 
 This was in 1913. The Hilfsverein had for some years 
 previously been conducting and supporting schools in 
 Palestine, and in all of them the language of instruction 
 had initially been Hebrew. The disturbance into 
 which the linguistic cause celebre threw the Jewish world 
 brought to light the fact that German was being 
 insinuated to displace Hebrew in the schools with which 
 the Hilfsverein had any relations. The revealing oc¬ 
 casion appeared itself to be a last step in a scheme of 
 Germanification that fitted too well with the known 
 programme of German imperialism. This occasion 
 
118 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 was the determination of the language of instruction 
 for the projected Polytechnic Institute at Haifa. The 
 bulk of the funds for the organization of the Institute 
 had come from the Wissotzkis, Hovevei Zionists of 
 Moscow, and from a number of American philanthro¬ 
 pists interested in Palestine. The very small remain¬ 
 der had been contributed by the Hilfsverein itself, 
 while the National Fund had contributed the land. 
 A question by Dr. Schmarja Levin regarding the at¬ 
 titude of the organization toward the language to be 
 used in the schools and the Polytechnic forced the 
 German members of the board at last to go explicitly 
 on record in favour of Germanization. The Zionists 
 thereon—Ahad Ha’am, Doctor Levin, and Doctor 
 Tschlenow—necessarily resigned. The Zionist Organ¬ 
 ization immediately drew the Americans into the 
 controversy, and an appearance was created of Ger¬ 
 mania contra mundum. For they, although only a very 
 few were Zionists, agreed with the Palestinians. The 
 Hilfsverein, holding title to the plant, remained in pos¬ 
 session of it. 1 
 
 But it was an empty shell they remained in possession 
 of. The event had thrown the Jewry of Palestine into 
 a turmoil. The Teachers’ Union protested, and their 
 members employed in the Hilfsverein schools were 
 locked out by its officials. Thereupon the pupils struck 
 and with them the remaining teachers. There were 
 meetings, parades, speeches. The whole Yishub was 
 aroused. Money was raised to help the impecunious 
 pupils and to support the striking and locked-out 
 
 J It has since sold it to the World Zionist Organization for the amount 
 actually put in by the German directors. It was paid for by the late Jacob 
 H. Schiff who had contributed liberally toward its foundation. 
 
THE NEAR-EASTERN QUESTION 119 
 
 teachers. An integrated national school system of a 
 sort was worked out somehow, and the Zionist Organ¬ 
 ization pledged itself to meet the budget of the system. 
 The men and women who made the system are mem¬ 
 bers of the Agudath Hamorim or Teachers’ Association. 
 There is no unrelated or independent school committee, 
 no demoralizing external control of the teacher’s opinion, 
 subject-matter or method. The teachers themselves, 
 united in this association, have created the standards— 
 such as they are—for the village and city schools, have 
 licensed teachers, have prepared the needful textbooks. 
 The teaching fraternity in Jewish Palestine is, with all 
 its handicaps and incompetency, what it is nowhere 
 else in the world: a democratic, autonomous, responsi¬ 
 ble professional body, eager for the advancement and 
 maintenance of professional standards and professional 
 competency. Its success has been extraordinary, 
 considering the poorness of the material, the shortness 
 of the time, and the straitness of the circumstances, 
 yet the thing to be expected, considering its autonomy 
 and responsibility. Behind it was the awakened 
 national morale of the Jewry of Palestine, aflame over 
 the assault upon the spiritual integrity of their one 
 truly national institution. In a certain sense the Pales¬ 
 tinian language-struggle was the first pitched battle of 
 the Great War. It was a true and essential confron¬ 
 tation of the ideals of imperialism and democracy, 
 and in that confrontation democracy was completely 
 victorious. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 ENTER AMERICAN JEWRY 
 
 WHAT the line of development for the Jewish 
 communities in Palestine would have been if the war 
 had not intervened is a fairly simple inference. Ad¬ 
 ministrative foresight was not looking very far ahead 
 nor very far around. The policy of “ economic penetra¬ 
 tion, ” in the shape of more or less experimental colonies, 
 private industries, and such small fry, would have been 
 carried on, in a manner more or less desultory and 
 by methods more or less lackadaisical. The policy 
 of 44 cultural” development would have been carried 
 on energetically and aggressively though not efficiently. 
 The Eleventh Congress, which met in 1913, authorized 
 the project of a national Hebrew University, and the 
 multiplication of Hebrew periodicals—verse, fiction, 
 criticism, scientific monographs and textbooks—was 
 a foregone conclusion. But the war intervened. And 
 the war, even if it turn out not to have been a momen¬ 
 tous readjustment in the history of the world, was con¬ 
 spicuously the most momentous event in the history of 
 the Zionist movement, and through that, in the history 
 of the Jewish people. 
 
 Its first effect upon this history was to bring into 
 the foreground of Jewish activity and aspiration the 
 Jewish community in America. 
 
 The story of this community is a modern instance so 
 
 120 
 
ENTER AMERICAN JEWRY 
 
 121 
 
 typical of responsiveness and social adaptability in an 
 ethnic group that it of itself merits more than a glance. 
 But the status and function of the Jews of America 
 in the solution of the Jewish problem are of a character 
 that make a review of their story indispensable. 
 
 The earliest Jewish settlers in the United States were 
 of Spanish and Portuguese origin. They came from 
 the West Indies. In religion they were of the Sephardic 
 sect. They settled in cities like New York, Newport, 
 and Charleston, their settlement dating back nearly 
 300 years. Small in number and prosperous in their 
 commercial and other enterprises, they soon made a 
 place for themselves in the greater colonial communities, 
 in spite of religious differences and certain exclusions. 
 Their contacts with non-Jews were social as well as 
 commercial and before long extended to the intimate 
 relationship of marriage and a common life. Of 
 necessity a decreasing community, they made up in 
 the progressive rigour of their synagogal discipline 
 for the increasing lability of their members. They 
 played their part in the enterprise of the Revolution, 
 contributing their quota in both men and money, 
 in money very significantly indeed. 
 
 The place they established as Americans they 
 guarded jealously. When between ’36 and ’60 a 
 new type of Jew began to enter the United States in 
 large numbers, they drew a class line as rigid and as 
 bitter as any drawn in America by the older settlers 
 against newcomers. They acknowledged the unity 
 of stock and religion between themselves and the 
 immigrant Jews from Germany, but admitted no other 
 sort of unity. The German Jews were good enough 
 to act as their clerks, their servants, and their depen- 
 
122 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 dents, but no more. The notion that they might be¬ 
 come their rivals was inadmissible. The German 
 Jews, however, soon began enormously to outnumber 
 the original Spanish and Portuguese Jewish communi¬ 
 ties. Differences in origin and in economic status, 
 reinforced by the coordinate sectarian differences, 
 generated a community warfare, partly conscious, 
 mostly unconscious, in which, as was inevitable, the 
 numbers were decisive. To-day the American Sephar¬ 
 dic communities of the United States are on the whole 
 negligible, and those which have survived with any¬ 
 thing like the power and distinction which invested 
 them in the beginning have survived by virtue of the 
 fact that instead of fighting out the class war to the 
 bitter end, they admitted the German Jews to an 
 equality with themselves and assimilated them instead 
 of being assimilated by them. Such are the communi¬ 
 ties which survive in Philadelphia and in New York. 
 
 The admission meant that a generation of Jewish 
 immigrants from Germany had under free conditions 
 achieved the same kind of adaptation to the larger 
 social environment as the original Sephardic Jews. 
 It meant that they had become full-fledged Americans, 
 men of influence, wealth, and power, leaders in the 
 community. Their attaining of prosperity and of 
 the full status of the American Jew was marked most 
 distinctly by the Reform movement in the synagogue. 
 This movement operated in the United States as else¬ 
 where. It abolished the essential basis of communal 
 life which most of all served to distinguish the Jew in 
 association with the Jew as against the Jew in associa¬ 
 tion with the Gentile. The way of living got changed 
 from Jewish to non-Jewish. Pig-flesh and shell-fish 
 
ENTER AMERICAN JEWRY 123 
 
 were admitted into the household, and intermarriage, 
 while ecclesiastically discouraged, was, on the whole, 
 not prohibited. Hebrew was almost completely elimi¬ 
 nated from the synagogue ritual. The prayer and 
 the liturgy gave way to the sermon, and the status 
 of the rabbi changed from that of an arbitrator of all 
 matters in the daily life to that of a teacher and con¬ 
 servator of religious dogma. 
 
 By the time the first large mass of east European 
 Jews began to enter the United States, the Jews of 
 German origin had acquired the same relation to the 
 country as the Jews of Sephardic origin. They had 
 become the de facto heads and elders of the Jewish 
 community, the inevitable middle term between the 
 newcomers and the American order of life. To the 
 newcomers, nothing could have been more foreign 
 than the American order of life. In the countries 
 from which they came they had been living, it must 
 be remembered, under mediaeval conditions—without 
 status before the law, without rights and without duties 
 as citizens, and without any legal claim that they 
 could compel the government to make good. ‘‘Mediae¬ 
 val’’ is the only word that could signalize their status. 
 And under mediaeval conditions the position of any 
 Jewish community anywhere in the world had de¬ 
 pended exclusively on the good-will of a single indi¬ 
 vidual or of a small group of such individuals. These 
 might at any time in God’s name let loose or restrain 
 the populace, as they chose. Contact between the 
 Jews and Gentile arbiters of their destiny could never 
 be established directly. It had to be made through 
 a third party, a go-between for whom the Jews had the 
 special name of Sh’tadlan. The Sh'tadlan was some- 
 
124 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 times a banker, sometimes a merchant of great wealth, 
 sometimes a physician—any person who had achieved 
 importance in the eyes of the Gentile oppressor, and who 
 could win his ear. Such a person could sometimes fore¬ 
 stall a pogrom or an auto-da-fe by climbing back stairs 
 and bribing safety and consideration. It was natural and 
 inevitable that such a person should become the literal 
 “boss” of the Jewish community, and should direct 
 its policy and dictate its conduct within and without. 
 His role was, in fact, to be the saviour of the community, 
 actual or potential; to be its only effective reassuring 
 link with the world outside—and hence, its master. 
 
 Now the relation of any immigrant group to the 
 civilization of a new country whose institutions and 
 language are different from anything that its members 
 ever knew is not unlike that of the mediaeval Jew or 
 of the contemporary east European Jew toward the 
 larger community of which he is a part. The immi¬ 
 grant of any stock is in extreme need of a mediator 
 between himself and his environment, a mediator who 
 shall bridge the differences and establish some sort of 
 communion that may ease and simplify the mere 
 business of living. This was particularly true of the 
 Jew, for the Jew was regarded alien in a double sense: 
 he was regarded alien because he came from another 
 country with quite different institutions and ideals, and 
 he was regarded alien because he was denied a share 
 even in the institutions and ideals of that other country. 
 To him government was necessarily identical with 
 oppression, the policeman with bribery, the civil 
 officer with petty tyranny. He was met in America 
 by his fellow-Jew of German origin. This fellow-Jew 
 served as a miraculously ready God-sent SJitadlan. 
 
ENTER AMERICAN JEWRY 
 
 125' 
 
 The necessities of adaptation to the new conditions 
 required a go-between and on the whole, the Jews 
 were more fortunate than the immigrants of other 
 stocks in that they found this go-between ready made, 
 of their own blood and religion. On the other hand, 
 the existence of the go-between meant the reinforcement 
 and continuation of the mediaeval tradition. The 
 attitude of the German Jew toward the east European 
 Jew became spontaneously the attitude of the mediaeval 
 and east European Sh’tadlan toward the Jewish 
 community. American Jews of German origin as¬ 
 sumed, as was natural, complete responsibility for their 
 Eastern brethren. They became their spokesmen, 
 they defined their politics for them, they looked after 
 their physical and intellectual needs, they “American¬ 
 ized” them, and they despised them cordially. 
 
 The first step was to insure against their ever 
 becoming public burdens. To do this the German 
 Jew organized and elaborated systematic benevolent 
 agencies which have been models of “scientific charity” 
 and have had a large influence in giving direction to 
 the progress of charitable organization in the United 
 States. In the second place, they gave them employ¬ 
 ment. When the Eastern Jews began to enter the 
 United States in large numbers, certain industries, 
 most particularly the needle trades, were almost ex¬ 
 clusively in the hands of the German Jews; the Eastern 
 Jews were employed in sweat shops and kept by the evil 
 devices of unregenerate employers on starvation wages, 
 to be saved from starvation by the charity of these same 
 employers. 
 
 As for the possibility of any other relationship, 
 social or cultural, between the two types of Jewish 
 
126 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 communities, this was not even admitted. From the 
 point of view of the German Jew, the Russian Jew was 
 good enough to be exploited in the shops, at the polls, 
 to be spoken for in public and rather scorned and dis¬ 
 liked in private. It used to be impossible, for example, 
 for a Russian Jew to gain admission into a German- 
 Jewish fraternal order like the B’nai Brith. It used to 
 be impossible for a Russian Jew to acquire membership 
 in a German Jewish synagogue or a social club. The 
 sectarian difference between reform and orthodox Juda¬ 
 ism was even greater and marked a greater social gulf 
 than the sectarian differences between the original Seph¬ 
 ardim and Ashkenazim, these being the two prevailing 
 brands of orthodoxy. All this, nevertheless, the first 
 generation of Eastern Jews seem to have accepted as 
 natural, as inevitable, as proper, and with gratitude. 
 
 But a generation of living in America, even such an 
 America as was New York City, meant inevitably 
 the “Americanization” of the east European Jew. 
 The mere pressure of American political institutions 
 gave this Jew a new sense of his relation to the Govern¬ 
 ment. He found himself free and civically responsible. 
 He found himself participating in the business of the 
 Government. He found himself called upon to de¬ 
 termine with his ballot who shall govern him and what 
 the policy of government shall be, not only of his city 
 and his state, but of his nation also. However blindly 
 the masses found themselves in their citizenship, its 
 effect on their attitude toward government has been 
 marked in the extraordinary independence of what is 
 called the Jewish vote. In the field of business, trade, 
 and manufacture, the natural initiative of the east 
 European Jew soon changed him from an employee 
 
ENTER AMERICAN JEWRY 127 
 
 into a rival of his German co-religionist. His restive¬ 
 ness under injustice made him the initiator of the Trade 
 Union movement in his particular field, and brought 
 to his employer the first realization of the possibility 
 that the Russian Jew might be a competitor and an 
 opponent as well as a servant. A far-reaching economic 
 rivalry developed which lasted over a generation, 
 until finally one industry at least is now as compre¬ 
 hensively Russian Jewish as it had been formerly Ger¬ 
 man Jewish, and the enterprise of the Russian Jew has 
 spread into a great many other regions. In fact, the 
 signal growth of New York City—where every fourth 
 person is said to be a Jew—begins with the first great 
 immigration of Russian Jews in the year 1882. 
 
 A generation of American life brought prosperity 
 and independence to the newcomers. With the coming 
 of independence and prosperity, the caste war became 
 intensified. The later comers began to go more and 
 more on their own. To meet the exclusion from the 
 earlier fraternal orders, they organized new fraternal 
 orders like the Brith Abraham and the Brith Shalom. 
 They organized their own “orthodox” charities, and 
 their wealth gave them a place on the charity boards 
 of the earlier American Jews. Their wealth, further¬ 
 more, stimulated their social ambitions and they began 
 to pass from orthodox to reform synagogues, ceasing 
 thereby to be “Russian” and becoming “German” 
 Jews. The difference to-day between orthodox and 
 reform Judaism, apart from dietetic and a few other 
 habits of life, is in large part a difference in nothing 
 so much as in economic status. The dogmas of the 
 two Churches are in what theologians would call es¬ 
 sential matters the same, but the Orthodox Church is 
 
128 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 with few exceptions the church of the poor, and the 
 Reform Church is the church of the rich and the well- 
 to-do. 
 
 This encroachment of the newer community met 
 with a deepening if reflexive resistance on the part of 
 the older community. As the economic and other 
 differences grew less, the social differences received 
 greater emphasis. The “German” Jews found them¬ 
 selves after a while in the same position with reference 
 to the “Russian” Jews as the Sephardim had been 
 with reference to them. The encroachment of the 
 “Russians” upon the privileges of the “Germans” 
 meant two things: on the one side, a combination of 
 interests; and on the other, a sharper drawing of social 
 and other lines. The combination of interests sprang 
 from one fact among others that young “Russian” 
 lads flocked in large numbers into the professions and 
 became eligible husbands for young “German” girls. 
 The second basis turned on the weight of economic 
 similarity itself. Capitalists are compelled by the 
 interests of capital to cooperate, and the “Germaniza- 
 tion” of the prosperous “Russian” was an effect of 
 his economic prosperity. It meant that a section 
 of the original east European Jewish group was slowly 
 getting detached and infiltrating the community of 
 earlier settlers. It meant, furthermore, that the 
 numerical strength of the “Russian” Jews would soon 
 compel a reversal of the process and that the assimila¬ 
 tion of the “German” Jew to the “Russian” Jew, like 
 the assimilation of the Sephardim to the “German” 
 Jew, was a foregone conclusion. 
 
 Whether this process was consciously realized or un¬ 
 derstood by the protagonists of the two classes is doubt- 
 
ENTER AMERICAN JEWRY 
 
 129 
 
 ful. What was noticeable in the years between 1900 
 and 1914 was an increasing osmosis of these classes, 
 and an attempted tightening of the lines on the part 
 of the earlier, more “assimilated” class in direct pro¬ 
 portion to the osmotic pressure. 
 
 In the meantime, a permanent proletarian mass came 
 to self-consciousness under the influence of two forces. 
 One was the spread of the labour movement which in 
 the Ghetto had a Socialist theory of life and labour to 
 envisage it, a theory propagated by many of the most 
 intellectual of the immigrant classes and articulated 
 in a notorious, powerful Yiddish newspaper. The other 
 was the Zionist movement. 
 
 The movement had been marked, on the whole, 
 with an international outlook and economic vision 
 analogous to that of the Socialist movement. It 
 had shown itself, however, far more sensitive to the 
 facts of life. Conceiving society as a collection of 
 group individualities, each of which is entitled to the 
 free and equal fulfilment of its life and the attainment 
 of its happiness, it argued its cause in terms of a vision 
 of society as a great family of nationalities carrying 
 on the enterprises of civilization cooperatively, each 
 contributing to the others according to its nature and 
 power. It asked particularly for the Jewish people, 
 a majority of whom are oppressed and outlawed, the 
 opportunity which all other people have for themselves. 
 And it asked this opportunity in Palestine, the original 
 homeland of the people, fixed through the usage of 
 religion and the immemorial idealism of the race as 
 the goal of Jewish endeavour and suffering throughout 
 history. Zionism was calculated to make a closer 
 appeal to the masses of the Jews in America because 
 
130 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 it invoked instincts, memories, attitudes, which were 
 hereditary and had been passed on through the genera¬ 
 tions. Its appeal, in a word, was internal while the 
 appeal of Socialism was external. The individual of no 
 nationality, particularly not the individual of the 
 Jewish nationality, conceives himself as necessarily 
 and inevitably a member of an economic class. It is 
 precisely for this reason that the Jews in America have 
 turned out to be at one and the same time such con¬ 
 spicuous protagonists of the Socialist movement al¬ 
 though they seem to have understood its protestant 
 better than its constructive spirit, and such thoroughly 
 Americanized trade-unionists, undertakers, captains 
 of industry, and financiers. 
 
 Socialism and Zionism, added to the new self- 
 consciousness as citizens which the immigrant genera¬ 
 tion had acquired, gave the Jewish masses a point 
 of departure and a programme. For many years 
 neither the point of departure nor the programme was 
 conscious. They were there, but as potentialities, 
 and the daily life of labourer and shopkeeper went on 
 undisturbed. The Socialist continued the Yiddish 
 formulation of his internationalist Marxian dogma. 
 The Zionist continued the Yiddish and Hebrew 
 formulation of his nationalist doctrine. Both were 
 of the Ghetto—in temper, manner, and adequacy. 
 Both were old-worldly. The protagonists of both 
 were men and women of European background and 
 European training; the followers of both were mainly 
 of the first generation of immigrants from the older 
 world. Both were more or less irrelevant to the 
 problems and expanses of American life. They went 
 on, only tangent to that, or at best wordy compensa- 
 
ENTER AMERICAN JEWRY 
 
 131 
 
 tions for its restrictions, ridicules, and strangeness. 
 They functioned in the life of the Ghetto communities 
 of America like tunes sung at the machine, or in hospital 
 when the patient’s discomfort is so great that he whistles 
 to keep up his courage. 
 
 Because of rapid changes caused by industry in the 
 structure of American economic life, Socialism emerged 
 first from irrelevancy and foreignness, from the Ghetto 
 of speech and intellectual preoccupation, and its devo¬ 
 tees found themselves at last organized and defined 
 upon the arena of American political and social life, 
 as American Socialists of Yiddish speech, denying 
 and repudiating their Jewish connection and its implica¬ 
 tion in behalf of the fellowship of labour the world 
 over, but particularly in America. They often had 
 great sport abusing the Zionists, and the Zionists had 
 great sport abusing them. 
 
 The latter emerged from their irrelevancy only with 
 the coming of the war in 1914. Until that time, the 
 American Zionist Organization numbered a handful. 
 Its members were journalists, intellectuals, shop¬ 
 keepers, and more or less skilled workmen. Their 
 spirit and outlook and methods were of the tradition 
 of the European Ghettoes from which they had come. 
 Their centre was the lower east side of New York. 
 Their relations with Jews of American nativity, training, 
 and vision were of the slightest. Their organization 
 had been headed by such a Jew, Richard Gottheil, 
 a professor of Semitics at Columbia University. Such 
 a Jew was its founder and has served them as the first 
 secretary of their federation—Stephen Wise, now the 
 foremost rabbi of the Reformed sect; foremost both 
 for the distinction of his pulpit and his role in public 
 
132 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 life. A few such Jews were enrolled in the membership 
 —mostly university men, teachers or students, moved 
 to affiliation by an ancestral sympathy or by a greater 
 knowledge of the nature of nationality, its relation 
 to the Jews, to internationalism, and to the problem 
 in Europe than was the concern or the fortune of most 
 of the American population. 
 
 These intellectuals were almost exclusively of the 
 same extraction as the rank and file of the Zionists. 
 The “German” Jews, the “American” Jews, i. e., the 
 well-to-do Jews, were not to be counted among them. 
 As in Europe, Zionism was an object of suspicion and 
 attack on the part of these classes. Their spokesmen, 
 preeminently the rabbis of the Reformed sect, assaulted 
 the movement in America with even more vigour and 
 vindictiveness than did their confreres in Europe, 
 with indeed an added intensity of resentment, because 
 of its secularism. Reformed Judaism in America 
 being most sleek and prosperous, made a great deal 
 more than its analogue in Europe of “the mission 
 of Israel,” insisted a great deal more upon the notion 
 that the great Jehovah designed his chosen people to be 
 scattered among the nations, a “priest people” charged 
 with the task of manifesting 44 pure ethical monotheism ” 
 to the Gentile neighbour. The wealthier and the more 
 secularized the congregation, the louder was its rabbi 
 in his insistence on its religious spirituality, its univer- 
 salism, and its mission, and the bitterer was he in his 
 denunciation of Zionism. Controversy took about the 
 same course in America as it did in Europe, with the 
 difference that the men on the Zionist side who engaged 
 in it, being farther from the problem-in-crisis than their 
 European fellows, formulated the positions involved 
 
ENTER AMERICAN JEWRY 
 
 133 
 
 with an eye to the general psychological and social 
 situation in Europe. This tended to do violence to 
 the feeling common among Jews of all classes regarding 
 the uniqueness and peculiarity of themselves and their 
 problem. It tended to assimilate the Jewish question 
 into the general complexus of the nationalistic and 
 libertarian strivings of nineteenth-century Europe 
 and caused some disturbance among the Zionists 
 themselves. The American Zionist view tended, in 
 a word, to crystallize in a formulation of the Jewish 
 position less partisan, more scientific, more historical 
 and sociological than formulations made at the seat of 
 the Jewish problem-in-crisis in central Europe, and 
 the American Zionist tended toward an attitude less 
 ardent, more contemplative, and more businesslike 
 than that of the European. There was natural resent¬ 
 ment against this attitude on the part of the Europeans. 
 They accused their American comrades of being not 
 “really” Zionists, of being superficial, ignorant, un¬ 
 caring. They made fun of the Americans’ insight, 
 joked about their Zionist competency, and treated them 
 like the proverbial rich parvenu. “You provide the 
 money,” was the tenor of their attitude, “we will pro¬ 
 vide the rest.” On the other hand, the American 
 formulation of the Zionist position won in America 
 the respectful attention and in the course of time the 
 sympathy and then the adherence of one after another 
 of the more distinguished Americans both of Jewish 
 and non-Jewish extraction. 
 
 Among these was Louis Dembitz Brandeis, now an 
 Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United 
 States. By birth a Kentuckian, by education a Eu¬ 
 ropean, by training and vocation a lawyer, and by 
 
134 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 personal habit an ascetic, his history was even more 
 uncomplicated by Jewish connections than Herzl’s. 
 They simply did not enter into his own problems, and 
 what he had seen of Jews in the practice of his profes¬ 
 sion had not induced him to seek out such connections. 
 There was, however, in his inheritance a strain of mys¬ 
 ticism, mediaeval in articulateness and intensity. 
 In his uncle, Louis Dembitz, of Louisville, Kentucky, 
 for whom he had been named, this showed itself as a 
 scrupulous observance of the Shulchan Aruch and a 
 visionary Zionism of the Messianic type. In Brandeis 
 it took form as a passion for democracy and social 
 justice which rendered him the protagonist of one 
 fight after another against exploiters of the public, and 
 earned him the cognomen, “the people’s lawyer.” 
 Indeed, it was largely as a tribune of the people that 
 he functioned in the years before his acceptance of the 
 judgeship, fighting often alone and single-handed 
 against sinister corporate and political interests of 
 enormous power, influence, and unscrupulousness, who 
 to beat him hesitated at no stratagem, even the libelling 
 of his character and the murdering of his professional 
 reputation. The completeness of their defeat and his 
 victory is a matter of record, but the struggle could not 
 have failed to leave its mark upon him. To the prophet¬ 
 like truculency of his temperament and the passion¬ 
 ate humanitarianism of his outlook there accrued a 
 rigidity which at times gave his really distinguished 
 powers of analysis and judgment a twist of advocacy, 
 and the charge often levelled against him by his enemies 
 that he was incapable of easily giving due weight to 
 the claims or justice of the opposition is not without 
 its basis in the record. His powers showed themselves to 
 
ENTER AMERICAN JEWRY 
 
 135 
 
 be logical rather than persuasive, and his extraordinary 
 influence is due far more to the force of his intellect and 
 his uncompromising honesty than to his understanding 
 of men’s hearts. He is no politician. His leadership and 
 power rest on an uncanny perception of the concrete im¬ 
 plications of events rendered potent by a consuming 
 passion for righteousness. It is this at bottom that led 
 him to Zionism. In Brandeis, for the first time in the his¬ 
 tory of this movement anywhere, a truly national figure, 
 a man of affairs as well as of vision, enrolled himself defi¬ 
 nitely in the Zionist Organization. This occurred in 1910 
 or 1911. Nothing formal or public was made of his 
 adhesion, and its manifestations were mainly contribu¬ 
 tions to the treasury and sympathetic understanding. 
 
 His call to leadership came with the war. On 
 August 1, 1914, the headquarters of the International 
 Zionist Organization was in Berlin, that city being 
 the home of many of its officers and within easy reach 
 of many others. After August 3, 1914, the Interna¬ 
 tional Zionist Organization practically ceased to have 
 a headquarters. Its officers and members became 
 officially and in effect enemies, no longer able to meet 
 for counsel or action, and to the anxious watchers of that 
 anxious period no longer likely to meet. The Jewish 
 national interest seemed about to be lost by default. 
 
 Under the circumstances the officers of the American 
 Federation of Zionists, at the instigation of Dr. 
 Schmarja Lewin, took the initiative. They called, 
 and on August 30, 1914, held in New York, an ex¬ 
 traordinary conference of Zionists from all over the 
 country. This conference, which sat for two days, 
 created the Provisional Executive Committee for 
 General Zionist Affairs, with Louis D. Brandeis as 
 
136 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 chairman and Stephen S. Wise as vice-chairman and 
 eventually Jacob de Haas, who had been an intimate 
 of Herzl’s, as secretary. Associated with them were men 
 like the distinguished humanitarian and philanthropist, 
 Nathan Straus, the jurists Felix Frankfurter and Julian 
 W. Mack, the financier, Eugene Meyer, and many others 
 not formerly connected with Zionism. 
 
 Immediately a new spirit began to manifest itself 
 not only in the organization, but in American Jewry 
 at large. The election of Brandeis to the leadership 
 turned the Zionist movement in America from an 
 incident of Ghetto aspiration into a force to be counted 
 with in Jewish communal life. It challenged prestige 
 and prerogative in established interests in the American 
 Jewish community. It disputed authority, it gave 
 point and direction to the communal unrest of American 
 Jewry of east and central European origin and back¬ 
 ground. The old issues were raised afresh and rede¬ 
 bated in the new setting created by the great civil war 
 in Europe in which the Jewish people of eastern 
 Europe were at once made the victims of both the 
 belligerents. Laymen as well as rabbis addressed 
 themselves to the fray, and “universal Judaism” 
 and “the mission of Israel” were fulminated against 
 Zionism from a hundred pulpits. 
 
 In the course of the controversy, which was an in¬ 
 cident to far more practical issues, Brandeis took 
 occasion to state in unmistakable terms his under¬ 
 standing of the view of the American Zionists regarding 
 the Jewish problem and its solution. He demonstrated 
 more forcefully than it had ever been demonstrated 
 before the futility of trying to evade the problem 
 by definition. “Councils of rabbis,” he wrote, “and 
 
ENTER AMERICAN JEWRY 
 
 137 
 
 others have undertaken at times to prescribe by defi¬ 
 nition that only those shall be deemed Jews who pro¬ 
 fessedly adhere to the orthodox or Reformed faith. 
 But in the connection in which we are considering the 
 term, it is not in the power of any single body of Jews— 
 or indeed of all Jews collectively—to establish the 
 effective definition. The meaning of the word Jewish 
 in the term Jewish Problem must be accepted as 
 coextensive with the disabilities which it is our problem 
 to remove. It is the non-Jews who create the dis¬ 
 abilities and in so doing give definition to the term 
 Jew. These disabilities extend substantially to all 
 of Jewish blood. They do not end with a renunciation 
 of faith, however sincere. They do not end with the 
 elimination, however complete, of external Jewish 
 mannerisms. The disabilities do not end ordinarily 
 until the Jewish blood has been so thoroughly diluted 
 by repeated intermarriages as to result in practically 
 obliterating the Jew.” That also persons of Jewish 
 blood recognize this situation as a constant factor in 
 their setting and react to it thus is shown furthermore 
 in the behaviour of even the most de-Judaized Jew. 
 It is a behaviour that acknowledges the claim of the 
 group, and willy-nilly takes an interest in its fortunes. 
 The Jewish problem, consequently, is the problem first 
 of securing for the members of this group, distributively 
 and collectively, “the same rights and opportunities 
 enjoyed by non-Jews,” and, second, of securing to the 
 world “the full contribution which Jews can make if 
 unhampered by artificial limitations.” 
 
 Liberalism, through which, at the beginning of the 
 last century, it was hoped both these ends should be 
 realized, had failed. Anti-Semitism remained, “univer- 
 
138 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 sal and endemic,” and the Jewish Problem, with all the 
 diversities between the conditions that determine its 
 manifestation, remains one and the same. The failure 
 of liberalism is coincident with the oppression of na¬ 
 tionality: “enlightened countries grant to the individual 
 equality before the law; but they fail to recognize 
 the equality of whole peoples or nationalities. We 
 seek to protect as individuals those constituting a 
 minority, but we fail to realize that protection cannot 
 be complete unless group equality also is recognized.” 
 The Zionist movement is dedicated to the consumma¬ 
 tion of this recognition for the Jews. It is a movement 
 essentially “to give the Jew more, not less, freedom; it 
 aims to enable the Jews to exercise the same right now 
 exercised by practically every people in the world—to 
 live at their option either in the land of their fathers or 
 in some other country; a right which Irish, Greek, 
 Bulgarian, Servian, or Belgian may now exercise as 
 fully as Germans or English.” The struggle for this 
 right, involving as it must and does the recovery of 
 group self-respect and the revitalization of the tradi¬ 
 tion and idealism of the fathers, is the chief, perhaps 
 the only bulwark against the demoralization which 
 Jews have, since the French Revolution, been under¬ 
 going in America and Europe both, and which yields 
 an excuse to the anti-Semite. “The sole bulwark 
 against demoralization is to develop in each new gene¬ 
 ration of Jews in America the sense of noblesse oblige , a 
 sense which can be best developed by actively partici¬ 
 pating in some way in furthering the ideals of the 
 Jewish renaissance; and this can be done effectively 
 only through furthering the Zionist movement.” 
 
 Zionism, thus, is in Brandeis’s view, the salvation 
 
ENTER AMERICAN JEWRY 
 
 139 
 
 of the Jew who elects to build his life elsewhere than in 
 Zion, no less than of the Jew who chooses the destiny 
 of a Judaean. And not merely this. Zionism is 
 demanded as well in the interest of all mankind. The 
 satisfaction of these interests is possible only through 
 organization. “Organize,” Brandeis urged, “in the 
 first place so that the world may have proof of the 
 extent and intensity of our desire for liberty. Organize 
 in the second place so that our resources may become 
 known and be made available. But in mobilizing 
 our forces it will not be for war. The whole world 
 longs for the solution of the Jewish Problem. We 
 have but to lead the way, and we may be sure of ample 
 cooperation from non-Jews. In order to lead the way 
 we need not arms, but men; men with those qualities 
 for which Jews should be peculiarly fitted by reason 
 of their religion and life, men of courage, of high intelli¬ 
 gence, of faith and public spirit, of indomitable will and 
 ready self-sacrifice; men who will both think and do; who 
 will devote high abilities to shaping our course and over¬ 
 coming the many obstacles which must from time to time 
 arise. Organization, thorough and complete, can alone 
 develop such men and the necessary support.” 
 
 “Organize, organize, organize, until every Jew in 
 America must stand up and be counted—counted with 
 us—or prove himself wittingly or unwittingly of the 
 few who are against their own people.” 
 
 The new leader’s statement of this position and 
 this programme was made early in 1915. It was soon 
 condensed into the slogan: “Men, Money, Discipline,” 
 that furnished the objectives of the vitalized fellowship 
 of American Zionists. All three of these were critically 
 wanted at the outset. Time has not lessened the need. 
 
140 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 There was, of course, nothing new in the call to 
 organization. It had been made many times before, 
 and innumerable projects had been advanced to 
 accomplish it. The novelty in this call was the fact 
 that it was effective. It was effective because, at 
 last, circumstances and the man adequate to their 
 control were at hand together. The European war 
 had created a crisis not only in the affairs of the Zion¬ 
 ists but in the affairs of all the Jews of the European 
 continent. There had been crises before, but there 
 had never been before the conjunction of the crisis 
 with the leader whose courage, whose faith in democracy, 
 and whose organizing power could mobilize and bring 
 into useful action the will of Jewry to meet the crisis. 
 The lack of such a leader in 1905-06 had created a situa¬ 
 tion which rendered the solution of the problem of 
 effective organization particularly difficult. It was in 
 1906 that American Jews became acutely aware of 
 the need for united endeavour on their part, in behalf 
 of the Russian Jews. The occasion was the Russian 
 pogroms of 1905-06. These pogroms rendered the 
 chronic Jewish problem once more critical in the minds 
 of all American Jews. The need of their brethren on 
 the other side called for cooperative action and the 
 action was naturally initiated by the traditional leaders 
 of the Jewish community. They created relief agencies 
 and called for contributions. The response of the 
 community was enormous, and when the need had 
 passed, the relief agencies organized ad hoc found them¬ 
 selves with a large sum of money on their hands. 
 
 The situation which had brought the contribution of 
 that money had called the attention of the leaders to the 
 precarious character of the position of the Jews in 
 
ENTER AMERICAN JEWRY 
 
 141 
 
 eastern Europe and to the need of a permanent agency 
 of relief and protection which should meet such crises 
 forehanded when they arose. That they would again 
 arise was recognized on all sides. The agency there¬ 
 upon formed was the American Jewish Committee. 
 It was formed, after some discussion of the 'pros and 
 cons of a possible democratic organization, in terms 
 purely oligarchical, with a view only to the probable 
 prestige and power of its controlling members rather 
 than to their representative character. Democratic 
 organization was regarded as impracticable, and it was 
 felt that the intentions of the Committee rather than 
 the seat of its authority was the thing that mattered. 
 This feeling seemed, at the time, of necessity justifiable. 
 The gentlemen on the American Jewish Committee, 
 men like the late Jacob H. Schiff, Mr. Louis Marshall, 
 Judge Mayer Sulzberger, had been for many years the 
 natural, apparently the inevitable, spokesmen for the 
 whole Jewish citizenry of the United States. They 
 were renowned for good works, for generosity, and a 
 genuine concern for the welfare and Americanization 
 of their fellow Jews. The committee which they 
 organized was acclaimed. Its leadership was accepted 
 without question, and its service as the Sh’tadlan 
 between the unripened immigrant communities and 
 the nation as a whole regarded as natural and gen¬ 
 erous. This service, designated in a charter of incor¬ 
 poration, was multifold and varied, not always wise— 
 as in the case of its agitation during the Taft Adminis¬ 
 tration for the denunciation of the Russian treaty— 
 but always motivated by humanitarian ideals of 
 citizenship and brotherhood. 
 
 In the meantime, however, the self-consciousness of 
 
142 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 the Jewish masses was becoming intensified. The 
 impact of American institutions and conditions showed 
 itself in new arrangements and groupings of the Jews, 
 in a new intellectual and social vigour which is attested 
 by the periodical literature of the interval. The whole 
 change may be called indifferently Americanization 
 or secularization. So far as the internal affairs of 
 the Jewish community were concerned, it showed 
 itself in a growing resentment against the tutelage of 
 the traditional Sh’tadlanic leadership. Again and again 
 it was expressed in bitter criticism of the American 
 Jewish Committee and in proposals for some form of 
 “representative” community government. 
 
 With the European war these proposals were turned 
 into demands, insistent, passionate, poignant. As 
 slowly the news of the atrocities perpetrated on the 
 non-combatant Jewish masses during 1914-15 by 
 the Tsarist armies and by their Polish fellow-subjects 
 even more than by the Teutonic enemy, filtered through 
 the censorship, a tremendous wave of feeling swept 
 the Jewry of America. This feeling called for more 
 than merely financial relief. The passion which 
 fathers and mothers, wives and children, brothers and 
 sisters, were undergoing at the hands of those who 
 should have been their protectors could not be remedied 
 merely by money. The community cried for something 
 which should be done collectively, and which would 
 make a recurrence of such conditions impossible. 
 This blind feeling and inarticulate cry crystallized 
 into a philosophy of group-solidarity and group- 
 responsibility in the conception of a democratically 
 constituted congress of American Jews. It was a 
 chief item in the emergency programme adopted by 
 
ENTER AMERICAN JEWRY 
 
 143 
 
 the Extraordinary Zionist Conference of August 30, 
 1914. It was the foremost concern of a group of vari¬ 
 ous influential associations in the east European 
 Jewish community in the United States. As the jour¬ 
 nals of the period show, it was a notion that met with 
 universal approval among the masses of Jews. It 
 was a notion that precipitated and enchanneled the 
 feeling, relieved the accumulated uneasiness, clarified 
 the mind, and gave some assurance to the faith of the 
 people. It was a notion that precisely for this reason 
 unsettled the old leaders and filled them with uneasi¬ 
 ness and resentment. 
 
 In New York a group of men, mostly journalists very 
 close to the pulse of the emotion and thought of the 
 masses, waited on the executives of the American 
 Jewish Committee and appealed to them to take the 
 initiative, as was proper and good, in calling a congress. 
 In the attitude of the American Jewish Committee 
 toward this request, there became apparent the pro¬ 
 found fission and the caste war in the community. The 
 members of the Committee distrusted the rank and 
 file. They were afraid of the publicity. They were 
 afraid of having their “Americanism” impugned. One 
 of them who had publicly denounced a Russian loan, 
 stated that the Congress must not be held because 
 some poor, anonymous devil of a radical might say 
 something about the Tsarist Government which would 
 then have a very bad effect upon the fate of the Jews 
 in Russia. Others brought analogous objections. The 
 class as a whole, as may be gathered from the texts of 
 periodicals like the American Hebrew and the various 
 weeklies edited by rabbis of the Reform sect, show dis¬ 
 trust of democracy, fear of frankness, a consciousness 
 
144 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 of moral and social insecurity; show themselves living 
 under the dread of anti-Semitism. They insisted that 
 whatever could be done, could be done quietly, by 
 wire pulling, by use of the influence of individuals, by 
 the back-stairs method of the Sh’tadlan of the Middle 
 Ages and of the Russian Ghetto. 
 
 The issue was joined with recriminations on both 
 sides. The Zionist programme, the Zionists having 
 been with the radical leaders in the Congress movement, 
 became an item of contention. It was argued that 
 the Zionists were trying to create the Congress for their 
 own purposes. It was retorted that there was a pro- 
 German bias in the American Jewish Committee. 
 All sorts of things were argued. But the one thing 
 which was really fundamental in the quarrel over the 
 Congress was the fact that it was a struggle between 
 Americanism and medisevalism, between a democra¬ 
 tized Jewry and a traditional Jewish oligarchy. 
 This struggle, old as the Jewish community, had finally 
 been precipitated in the Congress issue and was being 
 fought out to the end. One great Jewish organization 
 after another—fraternal order, synagogue, cultural 
 society, and so on—declared adherence to the Congress 
 movement. Nothing was so conspicuous as the fact 
 that it was a self-conscious mass movement, with 
 democratic postulates and programme. 
 
 Complications developed, however, in connection 
 with what was technically known—only technically—as 
 the “labour” group. The character of the Jewish 
 workingmen has been such that the Jewish labour 
 class and the Jewish labour organization tended to be 
 of a very unstable composition. There is hardly a 
 union which retains a moiety of the same membership 
 
ENTER AMERICAN JEWRY 
 
 145 
 
 seven years running. The only part of any union 
 or other form of association of workingmen that tends 
 to be permanent is the paid administrative organiza¬ 
 tion, that is, the group of “labour leaders.” This 
 fact adds to the existing economic classes a new class 
 having a curious and a distinct set of interests as be¬ 
 tween the labourers as such and the capitalists as such. 
 This is the class of the labour leader—not the actual 
 heads of unions—but the journalistic theorists who 
 are professional labourites and who manage the affairs 
 of the non-industrial, beneficial associations of working¬ 
 men. Although these workingmen’s groups had given 
 their officials a mandate to participate in the movement 
 of the organization of a democratic congress, the 
 leaders, considering their own biases and interests, 
 interpreted the mandate to suit themselves, and dick¬ 
 ered with the American Jewish Committee. The result 
 was a split alignment within the labour groups and 
 dissension whose tendency is toward complete division. 
 
 Apart from that, the Congress movement swept the 
 country. There was established a Congress Organiza¬ 
 tion Committee, of which Mr. Justice Brandeis was 
 made the honorary head. Plans for organization 
 were set in motion. The Organization Committee 
 made every effort to come to some agreement with 
 the American Jewish Committee and its allied groups, 
 most of them under its control. When it seemed that 
 popular sentiment was overwhelmingly in favour of 
 the Congress movement, the American Jewish Com¬ 
 mittee conceded the democratic plans, and that con¬ 
 stitutes the fundamental victory for modernism in 
 Jewish communal life in America. But the concession 
 of principle and its application in action are two differ- 
 
146 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 ent things. The Congress Committee, in spite of 
 prolonged negotiations, found that it could come to no 
 adjustment with the American Jewish Committee. 
 Finally, it gave up trying, and called a conference of 
 all the great Jewish organizations of the country in 
 Philadelphia on March 26, 1916. The delegates 
 
 to that conference represented from a million and a 
 half to two million Jewish souls, from all classes of 
 society. They sat for two days and formulated a 
 programme which received the endorsement and ap¬ 
 proval of many officials of the Government of the 
 United States, notably the Secretary of War. 
 
 The Philadelphia programme involved considera¬ 
 tion not only of the issues brought into the foreground 
 by the war, but of the perennial problems of which 
 the Jewish question is constituted. It aimed to provide 
 for a permanent organization of American Jewry on a 
 democratic basis, for a consideration of the questions 
 and problems of migration, and so on. The character 
 of the Conference and its programme were hailed 
 with enthusiastic approval all over the country. The 
 commissions and committees the programme called 
 for were appointed and set to work. Particularly 
 interesting were the problems of the committees on 
 Representation and Elections and on Permanency 
 of Organization. But before these committees and 
 the others had time to get under way, the effects of 
 the Conference made themselves felt in the opposite 
 camp, and resulted in their calling a conference which 
 was to talk over the question of the Congress anew. 
 That conference, which was called in July, 1916, was com¬ 
 posed chiefly of the members of the American Jewish 
 Committee and its allied organizations and of the 
 
ENTER AMERICAN JEWRY 
 
 147 
 
 Conference of Reform Rabbis. That conference also, 
 though not without much division and bitterness, 
 endorsed the Congress movement and opened negotia¬ 
 tions with the new Congress Organization Committee 
 established by the Philadelphia Conference, to find 
 some modus vivendi. The first compromise involved 
 the surrender of the democratic principle, and by ref¬ 
 erendum was rejected. Finally, a second compromise 
 was attained and submitted by the Congress Organiza¬ 
 tion Committee to referendum. The result of the 
 referendum was acceptance of the compromise. The 
 compromise was then formulated as the call to the 
 Congress, viz.: 
 
 By virtue of the authority vested in us, as the Execu¬ 
 tive Committee for an American Jewish Congress, the 
 Jews of America are earnestly requested to select represen¬ 
 tatives to an American Jewish Congress which shall meet 
 exclusively for the purpose of defining methods whereby, 
 in cooperation with the Jews of the world, full rights 
 may be secured for the Jews of all lands and all laws dis¬ 
 criminating against them may be abrogated. It being 
 understood that the phrase “full rights” is deemed to 
 include: 
 
 1. Civil, religious, and political rights, and in addi¬ 
 tion thereto 
 
 2. Wherever the various peoples of any land are or 
 may be recognized as having rights as such, the conferring 
 upon the Jewish people of the land affected, of like rights, 
 if desired by them, as determined by the Congress. 
 
 3. The securing and protection of Jewish rights to 
 Palestine. 
 
 4. The question of the economic reconstruction of the 
 Jewish communities in the war zone. 
 
 No resolution shall be introduced, considered, or acted 
 upon at the Congress which shall in any way support 
 
148 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 or tend to commit the Congress as a body, or any of its 
 delegates or any of the communities or organizations 
 which shall be represented therein, to the adoption, 
 recognition, or endorsement of any general theory or phi¬ 
 losophy of Jewish life, or any theoretical principle of a 
 racial, political, economic, or religious character, or which 
 shall involve the perpetuation of such Congress. 
 
 The calling and holding of the Congress shall in no 
 manner affect the autonomy of any existing American 
 Jewish organization, but in so far as the Executive Com¬ 
 mittee selected by such a Congress shall take action for 
 the securing of Jewish rights as defined in the Call for 
 such Congress, the activities of such Executive Com¬ 
 mittee shall, during the period of its existence, be re¬ 
 garded as having precedence over those of any other 
 organizations which shall participate in such Congress. 
 
 The call exhibits more explicitly than anything else 
 could the fear and animus of the old regime and the 
 completeness of the victory of the new settlement. 
 It shows how the Congress struggle was not merely 
 a struggle between modernism—or Americanism— 
 and mediaevalism, but just as essentially a struggle 
 between assimilationist individualism and self-respect¬ 
 ing nationalism. For all practical purposes the 
 latter was at the time completely victorious. The 
 theories and philosophies and principles which were 
 to be excluded from discussion were the unquestioned 
 basis of action. They were this because action was 
 not possible on any other basis. 
 
 The agreement was reached on October 2, 1916. In 
 the interim plans for representation and election had 
 been worked out and these being confirmed by the 
 new executive committee which the agreement ne¬ 
 cessitated, the elections were held. Three hundred 
 
ENTER AMERICAN JEWRY 
 
 149 
 
 delegates were chosen by the popular vote of both 
 men and women and one hundred more by the various 
 Jewish organizations of national scope. With the 
 elections, the rank and file of American Jewry passed 
 into a new communal status. It is a status which has 
 still to be made effective and which in all probability 
 cannot be made effective without a great deal more 
 extensive and far-reaching struggle between the strata 
 of the Jewish population—a struggle that can be 
 fought out in the last resort only on domestic issues. 
 Meanwhile, a precedent of free and responsible common 
 action for the rank and file of American Jewry—and 
 through them for all Jewries—has been established. 
 They have publicly debated Jewish issues as such. 
 They have expressed their will at the polls regarding 
 these issues. They have chosen their representatives 
 to carry out their will. The assembling of these 
 representatives as the American Jewish Congress was 
 at first set for not later than May 1, 1917. But in 
 April, 1917, the United States of America entered the 
 war, and from that time on various circumstances in¬ 
 tervened to postpone the holding of the Congress until 
 December 15, 1918. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 ZIONIST ENDEAVOUR AND THE POLITICS OF THE GREAT 
 
 WAR 
 
 BETWEEN October 2, 1916, and December 15, 
 1918, the complexion of events had so changed as to 
 require a fundamental alteration in the problems 
 and attitude of the Congress. The Jews had become 
 the supreme victims of the war. No people on the 
 battlelines, except possibly the Armenians, suffered 
 as the Jews had suffered. The war on the eastern front 
 was being fought within the Jewish pale of settlement. 
 The treachery and incompetency of the Russian bureauc¬ 
 racy; the malice, intrigue, and disloyalty of the Poles; 
 the brutality of the Germans were alike cloaked by 
 means of charges and assaults against the Jews. More 
 than 10 per cent, of the entire Jewish population of 
 Europe was on the battlefield and more than 90 
 per cent, of these were engaged in the armies of the 
 Allies. But in eastern Europe it was their ironic 
 fate that the battlefield should be nothing else than 
 the Pale and that Jewish soldiers should battle for the 
 Allies amid the familiar scenes of their own homes, 
 should be required to burn and raze their own com¬ 
 munities, should be compelled to stand by while fathers, 
 sons, or brothers were executed on trumped-up charges 
 and wives and sisters and mothers were raped and 
 maimed and killed. Thousands went mad; other 
 
 150 
 
POLITICS OF THE GREAT WAR 151 
 
 thousands committed suicide or were shot for insubor¬ 
 dination. Their homes and families, meanwhile, were 
 broken up; great masses of Jews were on various pre¬ 
 texts uprooted, evacuated; their economic foundations 
 were shattered and their lives were thrown under the 
 dominion of fear. 
 
 And the Jewries of western Europe were helpless 
 to aid them. Aid was possible only from the Jews 
 of America, during the first two years of the war the 
 only neutral country with influence and resources 
 great enough even to begin to meet the demands of 
 Europe growing desolated. Amid the great work 
 of relief done by the Americans, the work of the Ameri¬ 
 can Jewish Relief Committee holds a distinguished 
 place. Begun in 1914, it reached in the course of two 
 years, under the impact of the signal generosity of 
 Julius Rosenwald and the organizing power of Jacob 
 Billikopf, unheard-of proportions in scope and organiza¬ 
 tion and still seemed the work of trying to fill a bottom¬ 
 less sack. The Jewish disaster had gone too deep to 
 be amenable to merely relief measures. It had gone 
 too deep to benefit even from the impulsion of the 
 revitalized hopes, the resurgent ideals and promises of 
 the Russian Revolution. To certain Jews, conspicu¬ 
 ously rabbis of the Reformed sect, that revolution, 
 during its Kerensky phase, seemed a God-sent excuse 
 to enable them to evade the responsibilities of the time 
 and the bitter draught that the Jewish Congress was 
 to them. With the creation of the new Russia, they 
 declared, the Jewish need terminated. The problems 
 both of relief and justice were automatically solved. 
 Of course, they knew better. It was impossible, 
 the facts being what they were, not to know better— 
 
152 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 but the occasion was too convenient to forego. Events 
 more than invalidated the declarations and shamed 
 the declarants—at the time, the Revolution served 
 only to add another excuse for obstructing the organiz¬ 
 ation of the Jews of America. The subsequent de¬ 
 velopments in Europe wiped excuses out altogether. 
 They aggravated the anxiety and the horror of the 
 Jewish position—particularly in Poland and the 
 Ukraine. They imposed an urgency which, when the 
 Congress did meet, was acknowledged in the details 
 of the programme it set itself and the terms of its 
 instruction to its delegates to the Peace Confer¬ 
 ence. 
 
 With regard to the Zionist Organization and the 
 Zionist position the changes were even more radical. 
 
 The programme of organization formulated by the 
 leadership was one that had to be carried out against 
 almost insuperable obstacles. No people in the world 
 is so disorganized as are the Jews—wherever they 
 find themselves. So in America also. Over and above 
 the economic groupings and oppositions which underlay 
 the conflict over the Congress, there were literally 
 hundreds of others, minutely diversified, insidious, 
 elusive. The common nationality of the Jews is 
 crossed and broken by groupings based—to mention 
 just a few—on sectarian, domiciliary, linguistic, social, 
 and cultural differences. Each difference tends to be 
 expressed in an association. Each association, once 
 created, functions as a self-preserving social unity 
 with the attractions, repulsions, and crises characteristic 
 of the behaviour of such unities. Their impelling 
 force might in the beginning be nothing more than the 
 anxiety of some petty villager, hungry for the sense 
 
POLITICS OF THE GREAT WAR 153 
 
 of security which contact with the people of the same 
 local memories, habits, and background would give. 
 But organized, they became nuclei of accretion for other 
 interests and functions, with a vested right in existence, 
 bound inevitably to obstruct the consolidation of the 
 always potential larger groups or the efficient discharge 
 of their functions. For larger groups and their func¬ 
 tions are farther from home; they are without the com¬ 
 pulsion of the visible and tangible elements of locality 
 and the memories of the experience of such elements. 
 They are,, by contrast, thin and abstract. 
 
 Both the Congress movement and the Zionist 
 movement were limited and hampered by these local 
 associations. They claimed a prior allegiance which 
 could be overcome only through education and func¬ 
 tional displacement. Thus, the Federation of Ameri¬ 
 can Zionists was made up, at the outside, of “societies” 
 whose members came together for any number of other 
 reasons besides the Zionist, and there was no correla¬ 
 tion between the strength of the societies and the 
 strength of the Federation. Grounded as they were, the 
 societies functioned necessarily as organs of exclusion 
 rather than as organs of absorption, so that at its 
 strongest the Federation of American Zionists never 
 counted more than 20,000 members. To increase in 
 numbers it was necessary to change the principle of 
 association, to render the allegiance to the general 
 Zionist Organization basic and to the local society 
 derivative. It required a change from the federa¬ 
 tive to the individual form of organization. Such 
 a change could obviously not be brought about at 
 once, nor could it be brought about except through 
 the pressure of an external force which should be strong 
 
154 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 enough to loosen if not to shatter established habits 
 of association and thinking, and compel the formation 
 of new patterns. 
 
 The external force was present and active in the form 
 of the war emergency to meet which was the function 
 of the Provisional Executive Committee for General 
 Zionist Affairs, called briefly the Provisional Commit¬ 
 tee. Created to act until the Inner Actions Committee 
 could resume its duties, the latter found it inevitable, 
 when it did emerge, to confirm the powers which cir¬ 
 cumstance had compelled the Provisional Committee 
 to assume and to exercise. These involved the sup¬ 
 port of the Zionist institutions in Palestine, the main¬ 
 tenance and development of the organization in 
 English-speaking countries, and participation in the dip¬ 
 lomatic and political activities which the new problems 
 and conditions necessitated. 
 
 To carry on this work, funds were needed, and as 
 there was neither time nor opportunity to provide a 
 new fund-raising machinery, the existing Zionist 
 organization, such as it was, had to be used for the 
 purpose. This use could not fail to change the centre 
 of attention of the membership from local to general 
 Zionist interests, nor to modify the form of their organ¬ 
 izations. At the same time the Provisional Committee 
 began to figure as a practical and efficacious servant 
 of the individual Jew through the creation of the 
 Transfer Department, which undertook without charge 
 to transmit moneys to individuals in any part of the 
 world where the Zionist organization could reach. 
 This it did so efficiently that the Bureau of Disburse¬ 
 ments of the State Department officially recommended 
 the Provisional Committee to Jews and Gentiles alike 
 
POLITICS OF THE GREAT WAR 155 
 
 as distributing agent. All the while, the Congress 
 agitation was going on, under Zionist leadership. 
 
 These circumstances, taken together, reenforced 
 by the tradition of feeling and aspiration toward Zion, 
 tended slowly to effect the necessary change in habit 
 and thinking. The change showed itself first by 
 the formal adhesion of increasing numbers of individ¬ 
 uals to the Zionist movement at large. Chief among 
 these was Judge Julian W. Mack, of the United States 
 Circuit Court of Appeals, a jurist of note, a leading 
 member of the American Jewish Committee, and a very 
 distinguished figure in American civic life and Jewish 
 philanthropy; he became in the course of time president 
 of the Zionist Organization of America. The change 
 showed itself, secondly, in the formal adoption of the 
 Basle Platform and the vote to pay the shekel , of one 
 great fraternal organization after another. Coinciden¬ 
 tally, the forms and methods of office procedure, which 
 had had all the looseness and inefficacy of a Talmudical 
 college, were organized and put on what is usually 
 called a “business basis”—“business basis” being an 
 ironic American euphemism for efficiency. Propagan¬ 
 dists, American, European, Palestinian, were sent 
 about the country to expound the movement, to show 
 its relation to the Jewish question, and to secure men 
 and money. By the time of the Pittsburgh Conven¬ 
 tion, June, 1918, the change in habit and thinking had 
 become adequate enough to risk a formal change in or¬ 
 ganization. The constituent societies of the Federation 
 of American Zionists, the women’s society known as 
 Hadassah, the Federation itself, and the Provisional Com¬ 
 mittee were dissolved, or rather, reorganized. In their 
 place was put the Zionist Organization of America. All 
 
156 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 Zionists were made directly and individually members of 
 the national organization and this was divided into terri¬ 
 torial districts from which they elected their delegates to 
 the annual convention. This convention in turn was to be 
 elected the National Executi ve Committee which was to be 
 the administrative agent of the Organization between con¬ 
 ventions. The movement is now toward the direct election 
 of the National Executive Committee by the districts. 
 
 The same convention at which this organization 
 was effected showed how far from the starting-point 
 the programme of organization had led. The less 
 than 5,000 enrolled Zionists of 1914 had become 150,000 
 in 1918, with the unenrolled shekel payers well over 
 200,000. The timid budget of about $15,000 of 1914 
 had become $3,000,000 in 1918. The petition it sub¬ 
 mitted in behalf of its programme contained 529,000 
 Jewish signatures. The negligible aggregation of Ghetto 
 shop-keepers and intelligentsia of dreamers and theorists 
 had become as large and potent an organization of Jews 
 as existed anywhere in the world. The anonymous, 
 powerless Jewish society of 1914 had in 1918 become the 
 most influential in America, recognized by governments 
 as the spokesman for the Jewish people and consulted 
 on all matters touching them. 
 
 The most important, though intentionally least con¬ 
 spicuous cause in this change was the leadership which 
 could inspire so great a personal allegiance and devotion 
 on the part of a collection of people hard to parallel 
 for diversified idiosyncrasy and individualism as to 
 overcome them, and to create an unprecedented unity 
 and intensity of action among them. But the com¬ 
 pulsion and opportunity of circumstances were hardly 
 less influential. The institutions and communities 
 
POLITICS OF THE GREAT WAR 157 
 
 of Palestine had to be preserved, and to preserve them 
 required not merely the organization of Jewry and 
 the collection of moneys, but negotiations with govern¬ 
 ments and consultations with diplomats. The suc¬ 
 cess or failure of these was ineluctably a function of the 
 aims and fortunes of the Great War. 
 
 Now the aims of the war involved a duality—more 
 correctly a duplicity—created by its fortunes. The 
 disregard of international decencies and obligations 
 involved in the Austrian assault on Serbia and the 
 German invasion of Belgium, and the atrocities there 
 committed, supplied ground for public and ethical 
 justifications of war which became the organizing ideals 
 of the peoples of the allied countries, and the ruling 
 themes in the propaganda of their governments at 
 home and abroad. These justifications and ideals were 
 formulated as the “principle of nationality” or “self- 
 determination,” “to make the world safe for democ¬ 
 racy,” “to establish lasting peace.” Brought forward 
 among the belligerents of the alliance to stabilize 
 and maintain the morale of their peoples and forces, 
 they were seized on by the subject peoples of every land, 
 but particularly by those of central Europe, among 
 whom they had been vital and momentous for genera¬ 
 tions, and were made the basis for the presentation 
 of their claims for liberation and independence. In 
 addition they were used indifferently by either belli¬ 
 gerent to embarrass the other. But in the United 
 States they were taken at. their face value and they 
 won the sympathy and then the allegiance of both 
 the people and the government of the greatest neutral 
 country. Consequently, when Germany forced this 
 country to enter the war they acquired at once and at 
 
158 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 last the status of primary and overruling objectives 
 of the combat, to which the Allies could not but consent. 
 
 Nevertheless, behind these ideals and justifications 
 lay a complex of desires and interests altogether un¬ 
 related to them, in fact, their exact opposites, much 
 deeper rooted, older, and more potent than they. These 
 desires and interests had determined the behaviour, 
 organization, and armament of European countries 
 for well-nigh half a century. They had created the 
 condition of competitive militarization, commercial 
 rivalry, and emotional tension which Mr. Brailsford 
 has aptly called the war of steel and gold. They had 
 induced in international relations a state of affairs 
 which was nothing more or less than a condition of 
 international anarchy. The usual name for this con¬ 
 dition is economic imperialism. Its core has been 
 the rivalry of land-power and water-power over the 
 control of the eastern Mediterranean. The policy of 
 Britain with respect to the Turkish Empire, the di¬ 
 plomacy of the French, the wars of the Russians, the 
 operations of the Germans, all had had the same end—- 
 the control or possession of the eastern Mediterranean 
 and the roads and highways of Asia Minor. 
 
 The reason should be obvious. Asia Minor, in¬ 
 cluding Palestine, is at the juncture of the three con¬ 
 tinents of the Eastern Hemisphere. The Dardanelles, 
 and the Bosporus on which is situated its greatest 
 city, Constantinople, are the only all-the-year-round 
 outlet to the sea for Russian commerce. Russia con¬ 
 sequently has always striven to dismember Turkey 
 and to gain possession of Constantinople. The ration¬ 
 alization of this striving is called pan-Slavism. But 
 in this Russia has always been frustrated by Great 
 
POLITICS OF THE GREAT WAR 159 
 
 Britain. For to Great Britain the survival of Turkey 
 used to be an insurance of the freedom of Egypt and 
 India from attack by land, and of the maintenance of 
 her monopoly of transportation by water between 
 Europe and western Asia. To the French the integ¬ 
 rity of the Turkish Empire was necessary because of 
 the investments of the French in Turkey, particularly in 
 Syrian railroads. Probably more than three fifths 
 of the Turkish loan is underwritten by French rentiers, 
 and a large proportion of the rest is in the hands of 
 British interests. Now the trade monopoly of the 
 English, the investments of the French, the desire for 
 Constantinople of the Russians were all threatened by 
 the creation of the understanding between Germany and 
 Turkey, which, as we have seen, was the cornerstone 
 of the proposed German structure of Mittel-Europa. 
 On the basis of this understanding Germans received 
 in Syria and Mesopotamia concessions which included 
 coal mines, copper mines, and railroads. Particularly 
 they included the Bagdad Railroad, with a projected 
 terminal on the Persian Gulf. The completion of such 
 a road connecting Bagdad with Berlin would have 
 created for the products and manufactures of Mittel- 
 Europa an all-land route to Asia. It would have given 
 Germany a very distinct trade advantage over Britain. 
 It would also have put into effect a very serious mili¬ 
 tary threat against India. So Britain prevented the 
 completion of the Bagdad Railroad by an understand¬ 
 ing with the Shereef of the Koweit which gave her 
 control of the possible terminals. But this was not 
 enough. The German threat remained. And re¬ 
 mained a threat not only against the interests of 
 Britain but of Russia and France as well. 
 
160 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 The three rivals over Turkey thus found themselves 
 confronted with a common enemy within Turkey, 
 whose existence required them to come to some common 
 agreement with regard to the disposition of their 
 various interests in the empire. Turkish participa¬ 
 tion in the war on the side of the Central Powers sup¬ 
 plied the opportunity and the duplicity of the govern¬ 
 ment of the Tsar with regard to the continuance of 
 Russian participation in the war supplied the occasion. 
 It was hoped that the Russian bureaucracy might be 
 bribed to keep up their end. So accordingly, in 1916, 
 with the fortunes of battle going against the Allies, 
 Sir Mark Sykes, who had been sent to study conditions 
 in Asia Minor, and had expert knowledge about that 
 part of the world, was ordered to Russia in company 
 with M. Georges Picot to see if an arrangement could 
 not be made. One was made. It had the form of ? 
 secret understanding by which Great Britain under¬ 
 took to abandon her traditional policy with regard 
 to the Turkish Empire. The empire was to be dis¬ 
 membered. Russia was to receive Constantinople 
 and her outlet to open water. France was to receive 
 Syria and that part of northern Palestine which 
 includes the Litani, the headwaters of the Jordan, and a 
 portion of Galilee. Great Britain was to receive 
 certain ports on the Syrian coast, namely Haifa and 
 Acre with the implicated part of Palestine, the Tigris- 
 Euphrates Valley, the control of the Persian Gulf, 
 and of the Red Sea. What remained of Palestine 
 was to go under international control. These arrange¬ 
 ments would accomplish the same ends that the sur¬ 
 vival of Turkey would accomplish—the control of the 
 ways to India and the monopoly of trade routes. 
 
POLITICS OF THE GREAT WAR 161 
 
 It would improve the latter, inasmuch as it would 
 make possible the creation of short overland routes 
 between the Syrian ports and the markets of Asia 
 Minor. It would offset the disadvantage of the free¬ 
 dom of the Suez Canal. 
 
 Such was the intent of the secret Sykes-Picot Treaty 
 of May, 1916, to be validated by concerted attacks 
 through the summer of that year on the eastern, the 
 western, the Balkan, and Italian fronts. The attacks, 
 however, gained only ground, not victory, and the 
 sordid Rumanian Government, lured by the promise 
 and hope of being in at the death and participating 
 in the division of the spoils, entered the war on the 
 side of the Allies only to be overrun by the Central 
 Powers and crushed. Russia became less than ever a 
 force to be counted on. The people of the allied coun¬ 
 tries showed distinct signs of exhaustion and war¬ 
 weariness. A period of depression ensued, in which 
 feeling took form in reformulations of war aims, in 
 attempts at stating conditions of peace, in negotiations, 
 secret and overt, toward peace, under the dominion 
 of a mood known as “‘defeatism.” This mood could 
 not and did not, however, influence in any essential 
 way the habits of imperialism. Russian disintegra¬ 
 tion had gone too far to render her government effec¬ 
 tually responsive to the lure of Constantinople. The 
 living force of the country had passed beyond its con¬ 
 trol. Its economic life had come under the direction of 
 the Union of Zemstvos; its political life was moving 
 rapidly toward revolution. With the defection of 
 Russia in view, the French and the English governments 
 were compelled to seek other alliances, were prompted 
 to promise anything. They worked on the Greeks 
 
162 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 and on the Arabs. They planned at last an eastern 
 campaign. 
 
 The work on the Arabs had long been held in view. 
 The Arabs of Syria had always been friendly to Great 
 Britain. Already during the first months of the war a 
 Nationalist Committee, composed of representatives 
 from Syria, Arabia, and Mesopotamia, had been formed 
 at Damascus. This committee formulated a pro¬ 
 gramme of self-government and cooperation which it 
 transmitted secretly to the Shereef Husein at Mecca. 
 If he acquiesced in it he was to negotiate with Great 
 Britain for help in its realization, in return for military 
 support against the Turks. He did acquiesce, and 
 did begin negotiations with the High Commissioner 
 in the newly proclaimed protectorate of Egypt. But 
 by the time partial agreement—sufficient to justify 
 action—had been reached, the Committee in Damascus 
 had been discovered and crushed by the Turks. Syria 
 and Mesopotamia were unable to act. Only Arabia 
 could do anything. The bargain that was made with 
 Husein, through that remarkable young archeologist, 
 Col. T. E. Lawrence, made with the approval of France, 
 required him to proclaim his independence and to enter 
 the war on the side of the Allies. In return, the Syrian 
 and Arabian dominion of the Turk was to be divided 
 into three Arabian principalities: one, consisting of 
 Syria and Palestine, under the rule of the Emir Feisal, 
 eldest son of the King of the Hedjaz; another, em¬ 
 bracing Mesopotamia and the trade routes to India, 
 under the government of the second son, Zeid; and 
 the last, stretching from the Hedjaz to the eastern 
 shore of the Red Sea, under the rule of a third son, 
 Abdulla. France and Britain, of course, were, withal, 
 
POLITICS OF THE GREAT WAR 163 
 
 to safeguard their own especial interest—the British 
 interests being notably the control of Irak, of the 
 provinces of Bagdad, and Basra. 
 
 This secret treaty, made after an understanding with 
 the French, rendered ambiguous the Sykes-Picot 
 Treaty. As negotiated by Sir Henry McMahon, from 
 Egypt, it had the desired effect of bringing the Arabs 
 into action as reenforcements of the British operating 
 in Palestine. It necessitated training them and sub¬ 
 sidizing them. It left open, as a source of future 
 difficulties, the unsettled points, particularly the con¬ 
 trol of the littoral of Syria and Cilicia lying west 
 of Homs, Aleppo, Hama, and Damascus. Its im¬ 
 mediate point was to get additional man-power, and 
 this point was secured. But the man-power made 
 little difference. America’s entry into the war in 
 April, 1917, brought hope, but not hope of a speedy 
 decision. The strain due to submarine and zeppelin 
 attacks, trench warfare, undernourishment, and casual¬ 
 ty lists had produced a depression which in diplomatic 
 circles sought relief in ever-new alliances and combina¬ 
 tions, motivated by old imperialistic conceptions 
 of vital interests. The very last of such alliances 
 which might, at one and the same time, remain in har¬ 
 mony with the publicly announced ideals of the war, 
 keep secure the interests of France and Britain in the 
 Near East, and weaken the Central Powers, was with 
 the Jews. Thus it came about that finally the national 
 aspirations of the Jewish people and the Zionist Organ¬ 
 ization received official attention as factors in the 
 international situation. 
 
 The considerations which led to this attention were 
 manifold. Jews were an influential part of the popula- 
 
164 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 tion of the United States. Jews played an important 
 role in the affairs of the Russian Empire—both in the 
 finances and economic activities of the established 
 order and in the opposition. Their sufferings and 
 persecutions were known and their Zionist hopes were 
 known. It was expected that a pro-Jewish declaration 
 might help hold Russia together, or if a revolution 
 occurred, keep her at least on the battleline. In 
 central Europe Jews constituted a minority nationality, 
 with the same wishes and outlook as other minority 
 nationalities. It was expected that a pro-Jewish 
 declaration would add another to the groups of effec¬ 
 tive disaffection in the Central Empires. Probably, 
 also, a factor was desired in Asia Minor to offset the 
 force of the Arabs, should the time ever come when 
 pledges and understandings had to be made good. 
 It was urged that a Jewish Palestine would be the 
 strongest support of British influence in the East and a 
 great addition to the security of the Suez Canal; that 
 in view of its racial linkage with the commercial 
 settlements of Jews in Bagdad, Persia, India, the 
 Straits, Hong Kong, Shanghai, it would be the chief 
 gate for the economic penetration of the greater part 
 of Asia and a most powerful support in the East for 
 the British merchant and the British manufac¬ 
 turer. 
 
 But this was only half the story. The imperialism 
 of the officials in this case was reenforced, within the 
 general atmosphere of the Christian tradition regard¬ 
 ing the restoration of the Jews, by the piety of one 
 group of Englishmen, by the democratic liberalism of 
 another, and the literality with which the masses of all 
 the allied peoples but particularly of Britain were tak- 
 
POLITICS OF THE GREAT WAR 165 
 
 ing the public formulations of the objectives of the 
 war. 
 
 Already in 1914, a professor of chemistry in Man¬ 
 chester University, Chaim Weizmann, had of his own 
 initiative begun to put the Jewish position and the 
 Jewish aspiration before Englishmen of influence 
 and power. A man of great personal charm, swift wit, 
 and keen social perceptions, he received a hearing 
 which became all the more attentive and considerate 
 after he had performed for the country a very important 
 professional service—he had contributed toward the 
 creation of T N T. But it was a hearing purely personal 
 and unconnected with the actual politics of the interna¬ 
 tional situation. His work, reenforced by the coming to 
 London in November, 1914, of Sokolow and Tschlenow, 
 members of the Inner Actions Committee, had purely the 
 effect of preparing the soil, of providing conditions for 
 favourable action, should the occasion by some miracle 
 arise. In this he secured the agreement and collabora¬ 
 tion of Messrs. C. P. Scott and Herbert Sidebotham 
 of the Manchester Guardian , who organized the British 
 Palestine Committee, and later, of Sir Herbert Samuel 
 and the Rothschilds. Members of religious groups 
 such as the Second Adventists, who saw in the war the 
 apocalyptic Armageddon and regarded the restoration 
 of Palestine to the Jews the final preliminary to the 
 Second Advent, were naturally sympathetic to the 
 Zionist plea, and active in its endorsement. Moreover, 
 British religious tradition and foreign policy generally 
 were weighted in the direction of favourable attention 
 to Jewish rights. And Jewish claims gained additional 
 prestige and picturesqueness through the agitation of 
 Vladimir Jabotinsky and Pincus Ruthenberg for the 
 
166 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 creation of a Jewish legion to fight with the Allies in 
 France and in Palestine. The sole fruit which this 
 agitation bore at the time—it was frowned upon 
 by the Zionist leaders and repudiated by the Organiza¬ 
 tion as impolitic—was the organization of the Zion 
 Mule Corps, made up of Djemal Pasha’s expulsees and 
 a few European Zionists, and led by Colonel Patter¬ 
 son. The corps distinguished itself at Gallipoli. 1 
 
 The work of education and propaganda in England 
 thus met with comparatively favourable conditions 
 from the outset. Its great asset, however, was the 
 known fact that the President of the United States 
 had come to believe in the Zionist programme as the 
 solution of the Jewish question and had promised his 
 best efforts in helping to carry it out. It counted 
 heavily in Mr. Balfour’s consultations with Justice 
 Brandeis during the former’s mission to the United 
 States. 
 
 When, therefore, in the depressed early months of 
 1917, Sir Mark Sykes, acting on behalf of the allied 
 governments, particularly of Britain and France, 
 opened official negotiations with Mr. Sokolow acting 
 for the International Zionist Organization, conditions 
 were ripe. The negotiations condensed the psycholog¬ 
 ical nebulae produced by the conferences, discussions, 
 and propaganda into a programme of definite action. 
 Regarding the terms in which this programme should 
 be formulated there had been endless discussion 
 between the leaders of the movement everywhere and 
 the diplomats of the Allies. They varied from the 
 delimitation of a Jewish state to merely opportunity 
 for immigration and settlement. The formulation 
 
 l Cf. Colonel Patterson’s book: “With the Zionists at Gallipoli.” 
 
POLITICS OF THE GREAT WAR 167 
 
 had to be made, so far as the Jews were concerned, 
 in view of the Jewish position in the politics of Europe 
 and of the Basle programme It was a statement so 
 far as the Allies were concerned that had to be made 
 in view of the complexities of economic, sectarian, 
 and political interests in England, in France, in Italy, 
 and in Asia Minor. Sir Mark came, in the course of the 
 negotiations, to believe in Zionism and to work for it 
 with a fervour which has since marked more than one 
 disinterested liberal among his fellow countrymen. 
 His knowledge, labour, and influence came to be at the 
 constant disposal of the Zionists. He grew to regret 
 the terms of the Sykes-Picot Treaty, and after the 
 statement was publicly made warned the Zionists 
 that it would be necessary to keep the Government 
 reminded of it. 
 
 The journeys of Mr. Sokolow to France, to Italy, to 
 the Vatican; the statements made by Weizmann and 
 Sokolow in May, 1917, to the Conference of the English 
 Zionist Federation, precipitated a condition in England 
 analogous to that in the United States. On May 24 
 the London Times published a letter signed by officers 
 of the Conjoint Committee of the Board of Deputies 
 of British Jews and the Anglo-Jewish Association. 
 The letter recapitulated the philosophy of the “assimi- 
 lationists”: the Jews were not a nationality in Galuth, 
 but a sect dispersed by divine providence for salvational 
 purposes; the Zionists were irreligious enemies of these 
 purposes; their success would hopelessly compromise 
 the Jewish struggle for equal rights in countries where 
 these had not yet been attained, and would work 
 injustice to the Arabs in Palestine, where the Jews, 
 in the opinion of the Committee, after all had no especial 
 
168 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 rights; withal they were not opposed to the establish¬ 
 ment of relief settlements in Palestine. Immediately, 
 the Times was bombarded with replies from all sorts of 
 people, of all degrees of conspicuity and anonymity. 
 In its editorial review of the controversy it hit upon 
 the governing anxiety in the psychology of this group 
 of Englishmen of the Mosaic persuasion. Don’t be 
 afraid, it told them; “only an imaginative nervousness 
 suggests that the realization of territorial Zionism, in 
 some form, would cause Christendom to round on the 
 Jews and say, ‘Now you have a land of your own, go 
 to it!’” But this exposure of the complex to the light 
 of day did not dissolve it. Some eighteen distinguished 
 Englishmen of the Mosaic persuasion associated them¬ 
 selves with Messrs. David Alexander and Claude 
 Montefiore, the signatories to the statement in behalf 
 of the Conjoint Committee. Then the fat was in the 
 fire indeed. One after another the congregations 
 supposed to be represented by the Board of Deputies 
 dissociated themselves from the action of the president, 
 Mr. Alexander, and censured its officers. The Con¬ 
 joint Committee was reorganized and subjected to 
 democratic control. Although Zionism was declared 
 to lie outside its province, practically all the constituent 
 communities in the United Kingdom adopted resolu¬ 
 tions in favour of Zionism. The English press was 
 practically unanimous in the same endorsement. So 
 was the press of the United States. So—it appeared 
 in the course of the next year—were the members of 
 the War Congress of this country, so was the American 
 Union for Labour and Democracy, speaking for the 
 organized workingmen of the country; so was the British 
 Labour Party. So was the liberal-radical government 
 
POLITICS OF THE GREAT WAR 169 
 
 of Russia. Opposition came conspicuously from “ assimi- 
 lationist” or sectarian Jews of a psychology similar 
 to that of the members of the British Conjoint Com¬ 
 mittee. Outstanding among these were rabbis of the 
 Reformed sect in America. 
 
 The collective force of the opposition was too weak 
 to have the remotest chance of success. For once 
 justice, internationalism, and imperialistic interests 
 were in harmony. Sir Mark Sykes, aware cf the 
 conditions in his government’s contracts regarding 
 the Near East, and anxious to resolve them, conceived 
 of an Arab-Armenian-Jewish confederation of the 
 Near East, founded in mutual good -will and creating 
 together there through industry and righteousness a 
 new civilization of culture and progress which should 
 be a potent part of the commonwealth of nations he 
 conceived the British Empire might come to be. The 
 roots of the conception were the needs of imperialism, 
 of course, but what roots are not, of anything that lives 
 and grows and bears fruit, in carnality and earthiness? 
 On November 2, 1917, after nine months of conference, 
 negotiation, consultation, cabling, and visitation; after 
 numberless writings and rewritings, in w T hich repre¬ 
 sentatives of the governments of France, Great Britain, 
 Italy, as well as the Zionists of America, England, and 
 Russia participated, and of which the government 
 of the United States was kept fully informed and with 
 which it was known to be in full sympathy, Mr. 
 Arthur James Balfour, then secretary of state for 
 foreign affairs, sent his famous letter to Lord Rothschild 
 and the Zionist Organization, which has since been 
 known as the Balfour Declaration. Both with respect 
 to the form of this letter and the decision to issue it the 
 
170 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 Government of the United States exercised a determining 
 influence. Mr. Balfour wrote: 
 
 I have much pleasure in conveying to you on behalf of 
 His Majesty’s Government the following declaration of 
 sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been 
 submitted to and approved by the Cabinet. 
 
 His Majesty's Government view with favour the establish¬ 
 ment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people , 
 and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement 
 of this object , it being clearly understood that nothing shall 
 be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights 
 of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights 
 and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country. 
 
 I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration 
 to the knowledge of the Zionist Organization. 
 
 The immediate effects of the declaration were what 
 had been anticipated. Greeted with general approval 
 by the press and the public opinion of the allied coun¬ 
 tries, it became a rallying point for the devotion and 
 the energies of the Jews of the world. It brought new 
 recruits to Zionism and encouraged recent ones like the 
 late Mr. Jacob H. Schiff. It reacted immediately upon 
 the morale of Russia and the Central Empires, to what 
 extent may be gathered from Baron von dem Bussche’s 
 commentary on the statement elicited from Talaat 
 Pasha in Vienna. All that Talaat could well do was to 
 call attention to the historic friendliness of the Turkish 
 Government toward the Jews, to its customary wel¬ 
 come to economic and industrial development of 
 Palestine, and its necessary opposition to “Zionists 
 who have political ambitions for Palestine. ,, The 
 German under-secretary commented significantly: “As 
 regards the aspirations in Palestine of Jewry, particu- 
 
POLITICS OF THE GREAT WAR 171 
 
 larly, Zionism, we welcome the recent statement 
 of the Grand Vizier, Talaat Pasha, expressing the 
 Turkish Government’s intention, ... to promote 
 flourishing settlements within the limits of the capacity 
 of the country, local self-government corresponding 
 with the country’s laws, and free development of their 
 civilization.” Talaat had said nothing of the sort. 
 The statement was a warning to the Turks and a prom¬ 
 ise to the Jews, as parallel as was possible to the 
 Balfour Declaration. 
 
 But it was of no avail. The Declaration accelerated 
 the fission going on in the Central Empires between 
 the subject nationalities and their overlords; in Ger¬ 
 many the Zionists took an attitude which was tanta¬ 
 mount to defiance of their rulers. To the affairs 
 and programme of the Jews the Declaration gave a 
 new turn which no argument could deviate and no 
 machinations hold back. Almost synchronous with 
 it was the long-expected British invasion of Palestine, 
 the conquest of Jerusalem, and the liberation of Judea. 
 And succeeding it, in due order, came the public 
 official confirmations of the French, the Italian, and 
 the other allied governments, not excluding the Chinese 
 and Siamese, while the politic Papacy was quick to 
 announce its approval. Among the Zionists the 
 Ruthenberg-Jabotinsky military programme was im¬ 
 mediately renewed and with the cooperation of British 
 recruiting officers, made as effective as circumstances 
 would permit. A Jewish battalion “recruited chiefly 
 in England, Palestine, and America,” did participate 
 in liberating the Homeland, and was mentioned in the 
 dispatches. In America, the organization devoted 
 itself to the constructive work of assembling and or- 
 
172 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 ganizing and dispatching a Medical Unit to see to the 
 health of the Homeland, and to the immediate ac¬ 
 cumulation of a great fund to begin its restoration. 
 Among non-Zionists the Declaration became the 
 occasion of statements by various groups—depreciation 
 and denunciation by rabbis of the Reformed sect, 
 and by laymen also troubled with “imaginative 
 nervousness” regarding the security of their status 
 and fortune in America; “profound appreciation” 
 by the American Jewish Committee, while Mr. Louis 
 Marshall declared, in refusing to join a group about 
 to organize to combat Zionism, that he would “regard 
 public antagonism to Zionism . . . as an act of 
 
 treachery to the welfare of Judaism.” 
 
 In Russia its effects were cut off from development 
 by the success of the communist revolution and the 
 establishment of the Soviet Republic with all the dis¬ 
 aster that to some degree it created and that mostly 
 was imposed upon it. The dismemberment of the 
 Russian Empire effected through the treaty at Brest- 
 Litovsk dismembered also the world’s greatest Jewish 
 community and threw the Jewish people of central 
 Europe under the dominion of fear and in jeopardy of 
 extermination. It brought Zion as the hope of their 
 salvation as intensely to their consciousness as in 
 days of Sabbattai Zevi, with the living difference 
 that followed from the secularism of the Balfour 
 Declaration and of the new international attitude 
 toward the Jews. It made them more conscious than 
 ever of the defensive and insurance value of explicit 
 acknowledgment in public law of their rights as groups, 
 as national minorities with a historic and present func¬ 
 tion in the organization of such states as Poland, 
 
POLITICS OF THE GREAT WAR 173 
 
 Rumania, the Ukraine, and the rest of lesser ones 
 which the treaty of Brest-Litovsk promised to let 
 loose, and the loosing of which the final victory of the 
 Allies consummated, adding to them the component 
 parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. 
 
 Its consequence in Palestine was the enlistment of 
 all able-bodied young Palestinian Jews in Allenby’s 
 army. The population, although suffering compara¬ 
 tively little through the war, had nevertheless been 
 disorganized and rendered destitute by the policy 
 of Djemal Pasha, who practised evacuations, levies 
 in money and goods, and cut down plantations, and 
 drove off live stock and fodder. Its health had never 
 been properly looked after. A concerted attempt was 
 made to work out a programme of relief in the admin¬ 
 istration of which all the sectaries including the Seph¬ 
 ardim joined, taking a solemn and formal pledge 
 to do all they could 44 in the work of our National 
 Restoration,” and the British military authorities 
 did what they could in the areas they liberated. But 
 the moneys needed were immense and the problems 
 unnecessarily complicated so that it was felt that a 
 representative and responsible body of Zionists should 
 assume the task of rehabilitation of the Jewish com¬ 
 munities of Palestine. Thus the Zionist Commission 
 was conceived and provided for. It went to Palestine 
 in March, just before the last desperate German drive. 
 It went as an international body, whose members 
 represented the Zionists and Jews of England, France, 
 Russia, Italy and, indirectly, the United States. And 
 it went under the sanction and authority of the British 
 Government. Officially, it was designed to serve as a 
 body of advisors to the military administration which 
 
174 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 the Hague conventions prescribe for occupied enemy 
 territory “on all matters relating to Jews, or which 
 may affect the establishment of a national home 
 for the Jewish people in accordance with the declaration 
 of his Majesty’s government.” Under this commission 
 it was practically empowered to do anything it could 
 within the law to rehabilitate Jewish Palestine of pre¬ 
 war times, and to create the Jewish Palestine of the 
 future. Its chairman was Dr. Ch. Weizmann; its 
 liaison officer, Major Ormsby-Gore. The most dra¬ 
 matic and spectacular thing it did, through Weizmann 
 —a thing characteristic and symbolic also—was to lay 
 the cornerstone of the Hebrew University on Mt. 
 Scopus. The episode itself, baldly taken, was hardly 
 more than a rather ridiculous gesture, a grandiloquent 
 flourish; taken in its historic context and implications 
 it was the epitome of the Jewish bias for the word 
 and the book, a warning of irrelevance and impractical- 
 ity quite as much as a promise of sweetness and light. 
 But what makes it truly important is the fact that the 
 President of the United States consented to make it 
 the occasion of a public reaffirmation of the attitude 
 of the Government of the United States toward Zion¬ 
 ism. Mr. Wilson wrote: 
 
 I have watched with deep and sincere interest the recon¬ 
 structive work which the Weizmann Commission has done in 
 Palestine at the instance of the British Government, and I 
 welcome an opportunity to express the satisfaction I have felt 
 in the progress of the Zionist Movement in the United States 
 and in the Allied countries since the Declaration by Mr. 
 Balfour on behalf of the British Government of Great 
 Britain’s approval of the establishment in Palestine of a 
 National Home for the Jewish people, and his promise that 
 
POLITICS OF THE GREAT WAR 175 
 
 the British Government would use its best endeavours to 
 facilitate the achievement of that object, with the under¬ 
 standing that nothing would be done to prejudice the civil 
 and religious rights of non-Jewish people in Palestine or the 
 rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in other countries. 
 I think that all Americans will be deeply moved by the report 
 that even in this time of stress the Weizmann Commission 
 has been able to lay the foundation of the Hebrew University 
 at Jerusalem with the promise that it bears of spiritual 
 rebirth. 
 
 A month later the victory of Allenby came to reen¬ 
 force the victories which Foch had begun to win. 
 Within another month, the Central Powers asked for 
 and received an armistice conditioned on the terms 
 of peace formulated by the President of the United 
 States in his statement of January 8, 1918, and in his 
 subsequent statements, particularly that of September 
 27, 1918. This last statement was the envisagement 
 of an organization of peace which should “express 
 the common will of mankind.” The war, the President 
 asserted, had been a people’s war. The peace must 
 be a people’s peace. It must be a peace which should 
 render “impartial justice in every item of the settle¬ 
 ment, no matter whose interest is crossed; and not only 
 impartial justice, but also the satisfaction of the several 
 peoples whose interests are dealt with.” But, most 
 of all, the conference should establish lasting peace. 
 And lasting peace could be secured only in the form 
 of a league of nations. Agitation for such a league 
 had begun early in the Great War. Societies dedicated 
 to its establishment had superseded the old peace 
 societies in all the countries of the alliance and in most 
 neutral countries, with membership recruited from 
 
176 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 among the most distinguished and influential in all 
 walks of life. In the course of time government de¬ 
 partments had been charged with the consideration 
 of its possibilities, and the preparation of a constitution 
 for it. It was made clear that the President of the 
 United States was much preoccupied with its form and 
 implications, and in this same final pronouncement 
 before the armistice he described it as the cornerstone 
 of any peace that could be lasting, that could guarantee 
 the rights and safeguard the security of national mi¬ 
 norities or could maintain justice between competing 
 nations. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THE JEWISH CAUSE AT THE PEACE CONFERENCE 
 
 SUCH was the situation, when at last, two years 
 after the election of its members, the American Jewish 
 Congress was finally convened in Philadelphia. The 
 atmosphere in which it met and the emotional tone 
 which its delegates brought were not of the healthiest. 
 Repeated demands had been made that the Congress 
 should be convened within the two years’ interval, 
 and the various reasons—from political crises to 
 official requests of officers of the government—given 
 by the executive committee for not doing so had not 
 been regarded as satisfactory. There were many 
 who believed that the American Jewish Committee 
 were trying to void their agreement and had chosen 
 their own special representatives—events proved the 
 latter belief correct—to go to the Peace Conference. 
 Others accused the Zionists of trying to delay the 
 holding of the Congress lest it embarrass their own 
 special interests, so fortunately advanced. Still others 
 feared for the security of the democratic movement, 
 which must inevitably disintegrate through heedless¬ 
 ness and inaction. All these special concerns faded, 
 however, before the urgency of the times. The Peace 
 Conference was imminent, was, in fact, unofficially in 
 session. The need and disaster of the Jews in Po- 
 
 177 
 
178 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 land, in the Ukraine, in Rumania, in the Balkans, in 
 Morocco, and in Persia were overwhelming. The Bal¬ 
 four Declaration was only a promissory note, which 
 required to be formally validated by the Peace Con¬ 
 ference. 
 
 The Congress sat for four days, and each day the 
 factional difficulties receded farther and farther before 
 the felt need for unity in counsel and in action. They 
 showed themselves at the outset, in contest over the 
 chairmanship, to which, finally, the president of the 
 Zionist Organization of America, Judge Mack, was 
 elected by a vote of over four to one. They showed 
 themselves by a demonstration of the Mizrachists 
 against the spokesman for the radicals, Doctor Zhid- 
 lovsky, and that culminated in the vote, moved by 
 the Mizrachists themselves, to permit Zhidlovsky to 
 proceed. They showed themselves in the attempts 
 to get the Congress to vote its own perpetuation and 
 these were overwhelmingly defeated. The men and 
 women of the Congress exhibited a good deal of im¬ 
 patience toward all these matters. They were anxious 
 to get to the business in hand. That was the prepara¬ 
 tion of memoranda, and of resolutions to be based 
 on the memoranda regarding the problems and wishes 
 of the Jews of the world in the establishment and safe¬ 
 guarding of their rights and liberties. It was speedily 
 found that the problem was organic, and that the 
 numerous committees assigned to the consideration 
 of Poland, Rumania, Russia, Ukrainia, Finland, Lith¬ 
 uania, Galicia, and so on, would have to confer as a unit. 
 The upshot of the conferences was the formulation of a 
 “bill of rights” which was to be made the basis for 
 the establishment of the Jewish position in each of the 
 
THE PEACE CONFERENCE 179 
 
 countries where it was in jeopardy or doubt. It reads 
 as follows: 
 
 THE BILL OF RIGHTS 
 
 Resolved that the American Jewish Congress respect¬ 
 fully requests the Peace Conference to insert in the Treaty 
 of Peace as conditions precedent to the creation of the 
 new or enlarged States which it is proposed to call into 
 being, that express provision be made a part of the Con¬ 
 stitution of such States before they shall be finally recog¬ 
 nized as States by the signatories of the Treaty as follows: 
 
 1. All inhabitants of the Territory of . . . includ¬ 
 
 ing such persons together with their families, who sub¬ 
 sequent to August 1, 1914, fled, removed, or were ex¬ 
 pelled therefrom and who shall within ten years from the 
 adoption of this provision return thereto, shall for all pur¬ 
 poses be citizens thereof, provided, however, that such as 
 have heretofore been subjects of other States, who desire 
 to retain their allegiance to such States or assume allegi¬ 
 ance to their successor States, to the exclusion of . . . 
 
 citizenship may do so by formal declaration to be made 
 within a specified period. 
 
 2 . For a period of ten years from the adoption of this 
 
 provision, no law shall be enacted restricting any former 
 inhabitant of a State which included the territory of . . . 
 from taking up his residence in . . . and thereby 
 
 acquiring citizenship therein. 
 
 3. All citizens of . . . without distinction as to 
 
 race, nationality, or creed shall enjoy equal civil, political, 
 religious, and national rights, and no laws shall be enacted 
 or enforced which shall abridge the privileges or immuni¬ 
 ties of, or impose upon any persons any discrimination, 
 disability, or restrictions whatsoever on account of race, 
 nationality, or religion, or deny to any person the equal 
 protection of the laws. 
 
 4. The principle of minority representation shall be pro¬ 
 vided for by the law. 
 
 5. Members of the various national as well as religious 
 
180 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 bodies of . . . shall be accorded autonomous manage¬ 
 
 ment of their own communal institutions whether they 
 be religious, educational, charitable, or otherwise. 
 
 6. No law shall be enacted restricting the use of any 
 language, and all existing laws declaring such prohibition 
 are repealed, nor shall any language test be established. 
 
 7. Those who observe any other than the first day of the 
 week as their Sabbath shall not be prohibited from pur¬ 
 suing their secular affairs on any day other than that 
 which they observe; nor shall they be required to perform 
 any acts on their Sabbath or Holy Days which they 
 shall regard as a desecration thereof. 
 
 To present and urge this bill before the Peace Con¬ 
 ference a committee of seven was chosen, among them 
 Judge Mack and Messrs. Marshall and Wise. They 
 were further instructed by a resolution unanimously 
 adopted “to cooperate with the representatives of 
 other Jewish organizations and specifically with the 
 World Zionist Organization, to the end that the Peace 
 Conference may recognize the aspirations and historic 
 claims of the Jewish people with regard to Palestine, 
 and declare that in accordance with the British Govern¬ 
 ment’s declaration of November 2, 1917, endorsed 
 by the Allied Governments and the President of the 
 United States, there shall be established such political 
 administrative, and economic conditions in Palestine 
 as will assure under the trusteeship of Great Britain 
 acting on behalf of such League of Nations as may be 
 formed, the development of Palestine into a Jewish 
 Commonwealth, it being clearly understood that noth¬ 
 ing shall be done which shall prejudice the civil and 
 religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities 
 in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed 
 by Jews in any other country.” 
 
THE PEACE CONFERENCE 
 
 181 
 
 Although it was expected that the Commission would 
 proceed immediately to Paris, all its members were 
 not assembled there until March 22. Various causes 
 had contributed to this delay. Mr. Wilson’s expressed 
 preference to meet the delegation or its spokesmen 
 on American soil kept a number at home:, the need of 
 personal cooperation with the Zionists in London 
 took others to England. The delay was not without 
 value. When the Commission finally was assembled 
 in Paris it brought with it from the President of the 
 United States assurances of his unchanging sympathy 
 with “the incontestable principle of the right of the 
 Jewish people everywhere to equality of status,” 
 and of a reaffirmation of his approval of the Balfour 
 Declaration and his conviction “that the allied nations, 
 with the fullest concurrence of our Government and 
 people, are agreed that in Palestine shall be laid the 
 foundation of a Jewish Commonwealth.” 
 
 The two declarations, added to the fact that the 
 Commission was the freely and publicly chosen spokes¬ 
 man of the most prosperous and most powerful Jewish 
 community in the world, secured for the Commission 
 a status among the representatives of Jewry in Paris 
 which was all the more needful if its task were to be 
 adequately performed. 
 
 The first of these tasks was to establish some degree 
 of unanimity and cooperation among these representa¬ 
 tives themselves. From the time of their assembling 
 they had been gathered in varied and opposing groups, 
 broadly reducible to two. One, later constituting the 
 Committee of Jewish Delegations to the Peace Con¬ 
 ference, had been democratically established and was 
 representative of the rank and file of the Jewries of the 
 
182 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 world. The other, representing the Joint Foreign 
 Committee of the Board of Deputies and the Anglo- 
 Jewish Association of Great Britain and the Alliance 
 Israelite Universelle of France, stood not so much for a 
 class as for a certain philosophy of Jewish life and 
 destiny—already commented on—which had been 
 formulated as an apologia for the persistence of certain 
 groups of Jews as Jews. 
 
 The Committee of Jewish Delegations was the out¬ 
 come of the attempt made by the Copenhagen Office 
 of the world Zionist Organization soon after the armis¬ 
 tice to call a conference in Switzerland of the repre¬ 
 sentatives of the Jewish National Councils—created 
 through the contagion of the Congress Movement in 
 America—in Russia, Poland, Ukrainia, East Galicia, 
 West Galicia, German Austria, Czecho-Slovakia, Bu- 
 kowina together with other organizations of national 
 scope. The outlook and interests of its constituent 
 groups derived not merely from the concrete and often 
 extravagant nationalist philosophy with which they 
 were imbued, but from the poignant immediacy of 
 experience and suffering and sentiment of the unhappy 
 communities whom they represented. 
 
 Both groups were too near their special problems 
 to attain a proper perspective of thought and emotion 
 with regard to them, to think them in any but dis- 
 proportioned terms. Both suffered from an “im¬ 
 aginative nervousness”—the Englishmen and French¬ 
 men of the Mosaic persuasion from the pathoformic 
 fear of endangering their dearly won and dearly 
 maintained status; the Jews of central Europe from 
 the similar fear of never attaining to any freedom and 
 security at all. 
 
THE PEACE CONFERENCE 
 
 183 
 
 Under the stressful conditions of the Peace Confer¬ 
 ence at Paris an enchannelment of emotions of so great 
 a polarity into a pattern of common and united action 
 was impossible. Nevertheless, the Commission from 
 America promptly charged itself with this task. To 
 the advantage of its prestige it added the advantage 
 of its point of view. Its outlook on the Jewish problem 
 was the echo and homologue of the general American 
 outlook on the world-problem: an outlook resting upon 
 an active and even intense sympathy and idealism 
 cooled and reduced to measure and objectivity by the 
 detachment of distance and the healthy, secure life of 
 the Jewish communities of America. It possessed like 
 the American delegation to the Peace Conference an 
 almost perfect equipment for the work of conciliation. 
 Unlike the American delegation, it was able to use its 
 equipment. That it did not succeed was not its fault: 
 force alone, not persuasion, could, under the circum¬ 
 stances, have succeeded. But it laid a foundation. 
 It held, under the devoted leadership of Mr. Louis 
 Marshall, conference after conference in the attempt 
 at reducing the various committees into a single one, 
 or failing that, of preventing public warfare and secur¬ 
 ing public cooperation. On the surface it seemed as 
 if the Commission might gain its ends, particularly 
 with the representatives of the Conjoint Committee, 
 upon whom the general English outlook naturally 
 had considerable influence. A Conference Committee 
 was created and charged with the task of formulating 
 a joint memorial on the Jewish position and the rights 
 of the Jews. But after many consultations, the “im¬ 
 aginative nervousness,” mostly of the French Mosaists, 
 prevented union. Having conceded the thing in- 
 
184 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 volved in “national rights,” they balked at the phrase 
 that touched off the emotional and associative reactions 
 which had been initiated by the generation that Na¬ 
 poleon’s Sanhedrin of 1807 had spoken for, and the 
 reactions created an imponderable but impassable 
 barrier to agreement. All that the English-French 
 group could be persuaded to assent to was to refrain 
 from taking hostile measures against any representa¬ 
 tions regarding “national rights” which the Com¬ 
 mittee of Jewish Delegations might make. Even 
 this grudging and oral agreement they could not—so 
 great was their anxiety—successfully keep. 
 
 Meanwhile, the Committee of Jewish Delegations, 
 at its headquarters in the Zionist offices, had organized, 
 with the head of the American Commission, Judge 
 Julian W. Mack as its first chairman, and when he 
 was compelled to return to the United States, with 
 Mr. Louis Marshall as his successor, and Mr. Leo 
 Motzkin, former head of the Copenhagen Office, as 
 its permanent secretary. The Delegations held con¬ 
 tinuous sessions. Their problem was so to phrase 
 their memorial to the Peace Conference as to secure 
 the substance of justice to the Jews, individually 
 and collectively, without at the same time adding to 
 the burden of misunderstanding, ill-will, and enmity 
 which had been the people’s traditional lot. From 
 the start it was agreed that the basis of any memoran¬ 
 dum should be the Jewish Bill of Rights adopted by 
 the American Jewish Congress. But concerning the 
 details and formulae there was a difference of opinion 
 among the American commissioners also. However, 
 the facts and specifications of the representatives 
 of the Jewries of central Europe and Russia were 
 
THE PEACE CONFERENCE 
 
 185 
 
 coercive: they made clear to both the most clerical 
 and most legalistic of the Americans that for the Jews 
 of the new states of Europe civil equality without 
 national rights was a delusion and a myth. On May 
 10, 1919, a memorial was unanimously adopted by the 
 Committee and later deposited with the secretary of 
 the Peace Conference. The phrase “national rights” 
 remained a stumbling-block, nevertheless. Adopted 
 in principle by the Peace Conference, the treaty with 
 Poland designates the concept “national rights” 
 by the circumlocution “rights of minorities differing 
 from the majority in race, language, or religion.” 
 Otherwise, the treaty follows the principles laid down 
 in the Bill of Rights of the American Jewish Congress 
 and the memorial of the Committee of Jewish Delega¬ 
 tions. These were provided for also in the treaties 
 with Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Jugo-Slavia, Hungary, 
 Turkey, Bulgaria, Austria, and Greece. Poland and 
 Czecho-Slovakia have ratified the treaties—the Ruma¬ 
 nian Parliament has still to act, and the other treaties 
 are in varying stages of suspension or, if adopted, of 
 sabotage, amid the chaos that followed the Treaty of 
 Versailles. 
 
 All the treaties establish essentially the same things, 
 not for Jews alone, but for all national minorities. 
 First. That the several obligations are recognized as 
 fundamental laws. 
 
 Second. That all inhabitants of the country involved 
 are assured full and complete protection of life, 
 liberty, and property without distinction of birth, 
 nationality, language, race, or religion. 
 
 Third. That all habitual residents of the lands of a new 
 state are admitted into the citizenship of that state 
 
186 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 v *r**r—■ 
 
 and are secured in their rights to adopt another 
 citizenship if they choose to do so, and it be open 
 to them to do so. 
 
 Fourth. That all members of national minorities are 
 to be equal before the law, to be secured in their 
 rights of admission to public employments, func¬ 
 tions, or honours; in the practice of professions, 
 crafts, or industry; in the freedom to use any language 
 for the purposes of private intercourse, commerce, 
 religion, publication, and assembly, and, within 
 reasonable limits, in the use of a minority language 
 before the courts. 
 
 Fifth. That racial, religious, or linguistic minorities 
 must have equal treatment and security in law and 
 in fact; that they are free to establish, manage, and 
 control, at their own expense, charitable, religious, 
 social, and educational institutions; that they shall 
 be free to use their own language therein, and to 
 practise their religion. 
 
 Sixth. That while the State may make obligatory 
 the teaching of the State language, it must supply 
 adequate facilities also for instruction in the lan¬ 
 guage of the minority, and must allocate to towns 
 or districts where appreciable proportions of such 
 a minority reside an equitable share of the monies 
 provided through state, municipal, or other budgets 
 for the purpose of cult, charity, or education. 
 
 Seventh . That the Jewish minorities may, subject 
 to general control of the State, provide, through 
 the action of their local communities, committees 
 which shall receive, distribute, and administer the 
 monies so set aside, for the purpose designated. 
 
 Eighth. That the Jewish minority shall have the full 
 
THE PEACE CONFERENCE 
 
 187 
 
 right to observe their Sabbath; that they shall not 
 be required to attend court or perform other legal 
 business on that day; that the State shall not order 
 or permit to be ordered local or general elections, or 
 registration for election or other purposes on that day. 1 
 Ninth. That the State recognizes and acknowledges 
 the obligations regarding members of racial, lin¬ 
 guistic, or religious minorities as obligations of 
 international concern guaranteed by the League 
 of Nations; that the State recognizes and acknowl¬ 
 edges the right and duty of any member of the Coun¬ 
 cil of the League to bring to the Council’s attention any 
 infraction of these obligations, and that the Council 
 is to take action upon each infraction. That the 
 State agrees that differences of opinion between 
 the State and any other member of the League on 
 these matters shall be held to be a dispute of interna¬ 
 tional character under Article 14 of the Covenant 
 of the League of Nations and that the questions of 
 law or fact involved in it shall upon the demand 
 of either party be referred to the permanent Court 
 of International Justice, whose decision shall be final 
 and shall have the same force and effect as an 
 award under Article 13 of the Covenant. . . . 
 
 So the age-old problem of the rights of national 
 minorities was met, and met for all minorities, by 
 the one that had suffered longest and most terribly 
 through its disinherited status. The ninth of the 
 provisions here summarized constitutes the public 
 and formal acknowledgment of the fact of nationality 
 and the incorporation of its principle into the law of 
 nations. Amid so much that was evil and re tro¬ 
 
 che Seventh and Eighth points are explicit only in the Polish treaty. 
 
188 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 gressive in the action at Versailles this one thing, for 
 which America, official and unofficial, deserves the 
 lion’s share of the credit, stands out as to some degree 
 uttering and fulfilling the hope and the vision with 
 which the free and the humane men of the world had 
 looked to the Peace Conference. 
 
 Yet it does not in reality stick out from the picture. 
 It is a conclusion, not a beginning. The same 
 nineteenth-century spirit and outlook which underlay 
 the rest of the work at Versailles underlies this also. 
 It consummates in law, and thus lays the foundation 
 for that change of habit in which will consist the con¬ 
 summation in fact, of a process of group-rearrange¬ 
 ments whose collective tendency we have observed 
 as “the principle of nationality.” It is worth while 
 repeating that by and large the effect of the recogni¬ 
 tion and application of the principle must be to remove 
 it from the field of political contention and to permit 
 the freer coming into the focus of attention of those 
 other problems of grouping which were born with the 
 industrialization of the western world. 
 
 How rapid or'how slow this change is likely to be de¬ 
 pends entirely on the organization of the minorities and 
 their power to make their rights so effective as to be no 
 longer subject to contention. To-day the law is still a 
 scrap of paper, a promissory note, with the League of Na¬ 
 tions, its guarantor, barely showing a head out of limbo 
 and the minorities too disabled to make themselves felt. 
 
 When, however, the law was being thought out and 
 urged, hopes were high, and upon its adoption in 
 principle and form for incorporation into all treaties, 
 gratulation was not unnaturally extensive, particularly 
 among the Jews. One half of their problem had been 
 
THE PEACE CONFERENCE 
 
 189 
 
 solved, so far as debate, legislation, and the pledged 
 honour of diplomats could be regarded a solution. 
 There remained the other half—the incorporation 
 of the Balfour Declaration into public law. The man¬ 
 date from the American Jewish congress was explicit 
 and the will of the Jewries of central Europe was 
 no less known and resolute. The Committee of Jewish 
 Delegations again acted unanimously. On July 10, 
 1919, its members unanimously adopted a resolution 
 to present to the Peace Conference a memorial regard¬ 
 ing Jewish claims to Palestine. The presentation 
 did not, however, take place until long after the Zionist 
 Organization and the Jewish population of Palestine, 
 acting jointly, had filed their own independent memo¬ 
 rial, and the spokesmen of the Zionists—Messrs. Weiz- 
 mann, Sokolow, Ussishkin, and Andre Spire—had been 
 heard by the Council of Ten. Sylvain Levi, on behalf 
 of the Alliance Israelite, appeared in opposition. 
 
 Had this opposition been the only opposition the 
 end of the matter would have been simple. But the 
 disposal of Palestine was conditioned upon secret 
 treaties, agreements, and counter-agreements. There 
 were implicated in it interests of native landlords 
 and foreign concessionaries, of foreign missionaries 
 and native money-lenders. There was, besides, the 
 swelling wave of nationalism, to no small degree arti¬ 
 ficially fostered by these interests and maintaining a 
 propaganda from Cairo to Delhi. There was the anti- 
 Zionism of high British military officials, who regarded 
 the creation of a Jewish Palestine as impracticable and 
 dangerous, and the resentful opposition of the Secretary 
 of State for India, an Englishman of more or less 
 Mosaic persuasion. Palestine, the military men told 
 
190 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 the members of the Zionist Administrative Commis¬ 
 sion, could be held only by the bayonet, and no govern¬ 
 ment, particularly not the British Government, would 
 undertake to hold it so for the Jews. The briefs, 
 memorials, conferences, innumerable and anxious, 
 had at one and the same time to seek delicate adjust¬ 
 ment to every new phase of the situation and yet not 
 surrender a tittle of the Jewish position. Consulta¬ 
 tion followed consultation, draft followed draft, as 
 rumour shifted and report veered. Finally a memorial 
 was submitted. It was postulated upon Article 22 
 in the Covenant of the League of Nations regarding 
 mandatories. The text of Article 22 is as follows: 
 
 To those colonies and territories which as a consequence 
 of the late war ceased to be under the sovereignty of the 
 states which formerly governed them and which are inhabited 
 by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the 
 strenuous conditions of the modern world, there should be 
 applied the principle that the wellbeing and development 
 of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilization and that 
 securities for the performance of this trust should be em¬ 
 bodied in this Covenant. 
 
 The best method of giving practical effect to this prin¬ 
 ciple is that the tutelage of such peoples should be intrusted 
 to advanced nations who by reason of their resources, their 
 experience, or their geographical position, can best under¬ 
 take this responsibility, and that tutelage should be exer¬ 
 cised by them as mandatories on behalf of the League. 
 
 The character of the mandate must differ according to 
 the stage of the development of the people, the geographical 
 situation of the territory, its economic conditions, and other 
 similar circumstances. 
 
 Certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish 
 Empire have reached a stage of development where their 
 existence as independent nations can be provisionally 
 recognized subject to the rendering of administrative ad- 
 
THE PEACE CONFERENCE 
 
 191 
 
 vice and assistance by a mandatory power until such time 
 as they are able to stand alone. The wishes of these com¬ 
 munities must be a principal consideration in the selection 
 of the mandatory power. 
 
 Other peoples, especially those of Central Africa, are 
 at such a stage that the mandatory must be responsible for 
 the administration of the territory subject to conditions 
 which will guarantee freedom of conscience or religion, sub¬ 
 ject only to the maintenance of public order and morals, 
 the prohibition of abuses such as slave trade, the arms traffic, 
 and the liquor traffic, and the prevention of the establish¬ 
 ment of fortifications or military and naval bases for other 
 than police purposes and the defense of territory, and will 
 also secure equal opportunities for the trade and commerce 
 of other members of the League. 
 
 There are territories, such as southwest Africa and certain 
 of the South Pacific Isles, which, owing to the sparseness 
 of their population, or their small size, or their remoteness 
 from the centres of civilization, or their geographical con¬ 
 tiguity to the mandatory state, and other circumstances, 
 can best be administered under the laws of the mandatory 
 state as integral portions thereof, subject to the safeguards 
 above mentioned in the interests of the indigenous popula¬ 
 tion. 
 
 In every case of mandate the mandatory state shall 
 render to the League an annual report in reference to the 
 territory committed to its charge. 
 
 The degree of authority, control, or administration to be 
 exercised by the mandatory state shall, if not previously 
 agreed upon by the high contracting parties in each case, be 
 explicitly defined by the Executive Council in a special act 
 or charter. 
 
 A permanent commission shall be constituted to receive 
 and examine the annual reports of the mandatory powers 
 and to advise the Council on all matters relating to the 
 observance of the terms of all mandates. 
 
 Pursuant to the terms of this article, the Zionist 
 memorial declared for Great Britain as Mandatory. 
 
192 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 It outlined the historic claims of the Jewish people to 
 Palestine, designated proposed boundaries, described 
 the existing and de facto stake of the Jews in the land, 
 their economic, social, and cultural services to it, and 
 asked for the joint and formal validation of the Balfour 
 Declaration by the members of the Peace Conference, 
 their governments having already severally declared 
 their adherence to it. And so on. At the hearing, the 
 Zionist representatives elaborated and detailed their 
 contentions. They made much of the Jewish urge 
 toward Palestine, of the bearing of the Balfour Declara¬ 
 tion on the Jewish tragedy in central Europe, of the 
 rapidity and efficacy of the Jewish migration to Pales¬ 
 tine, if proper conditions and safeguards are established. 
 
 The designation of these conditions and safeguards 
 were, meanwhile and afterward, being worked out 
 by an interallied Zionist conference in London, in 
 consultation with friendly Britons. Of this, also, 
 numerous versions were made. What was definitive 
 in all of them was the recognition of the essentially 
 economic character, once the political guarantees 
 had been established, of the problem of Jewish settle¬ 
 ment. This recognition was due preeminently to the 
 American Zionists: they had perceived immediately 
 after the Balfour Declaration the necessity of being 
 prepared with a definite economic policy, had studied 
 out what, generally, the situation would demand, 
 and had formulated a declaration which was unani¬ 
 mously adopted by the National Convention held in 
 Pittsburgh in July, 1918. This declaration was sub¬ 
 sequently known as the Pittsburgh Programme. So 
 far as possible, the Zionists sought to make the terms 
 of this programme part of the terms of the mandate. 
 
THE PEACE CONFERENCE 
 
 193 
 
 If accepted, these terms would render it the obligation 
 of the mandatory to establish Palestine as the Jewish 
 National Home and to develop it into “an autonomous 
 commonwealth dedicated to the advancement of 
 social justice.” The realization of this end would 
 require measures to promote the immigration of Jews; 
 to establish Hebrew as one of the official languages 
 of the land; to charge appropriate Jewish agencies 
 with the creation and management of a system of 
 education; to promote and perfect local and municipal 
 self-government; to provide for the public ownership 
 and development of land, natural resources, and public 
 works and utilities; to foster the cooperative organiza¬ 
 tion of all agricultural, industrial, commercial, and 
 financial undertakings, and to do all this in progressive 
 collaboration with appropriate Jewish agencies. Fur¬ 
 thermore, guarantees of liberty of conscience and of 
 civil and political rights would be extended to all the 
 inhabitants of the land, regardless of race, faith, or sex; 
 the holy places would be protected, and all members 
 of the League of Nations or their nationals would be 
 assured of equality of economic opportunity. And 
 when, in the fulness of time and the judgment of the 
 Mandatory, the inhabitants of Palestine should be 
 capable of self-government, the Mandatory would 
 enable them by means of a “democratic franchise 
 without regard to race, faith, or sex, to establish a 
 representative and responsible government in such 
 form as the people of Palestine may devise.” 
 
 The firmness and directness of the formulation and 
 utterance of the Zionist aspirations before the Peace 
 Conference and the Zionist policies in the terms of 
 the mandate by no means represented the Zionists’ 
 
194 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 inood. Behind their serene and bold public front 
 there were at work uncertainties, anxieties, fears. 
 Immediately after the appearance of the Zionist delega¬ 
 tion before the Council of Ten the Emir Feisal— 
 who was then in Paris to demand the admission of 
 his country into the councils of the Allies, among 
 whom it counted itself one—issued a statement resting 
 directly upon the arrangement—verbal, it is true— 
 between the Egyptian High Commissioner and his 
 father. The statement was in direct contradiction of 
 the Balfour Declaration; in direct antithesis to Feisal’s 
 statements in private to Doctor Weizmann. The 
 truth was that this wise and on the whole straight¬ 
 forward statesman was bewildered by the confusion 
 of counsel and contradiction of pledges, by the antago¬ 
 nisms of advisors and the whole devious trend of diplo¬ 
 macy: he sought—in view of his relations to Syria he 
 was compelled to seek—a straight and clean way out. 
 Fortunately he was convinced, through the efforts of 
 Mr. Felix Frankfurter, the lucid and competent chair¬ 
 man of the American Zionist delegation—that Palestine 
 was not involved in the political manoeuvring and 
 counter-manoeuvering over the independence and se¬ 
 curity of the Arab state. He expressed this conviction 
 in a letter addressed to Frankfurter, in which he deplored 
 the misleading of the Arab peasantry and stressed the 
 traditional kinship and cooperation of Jews and Arabs, 
 their common hardships, the sympathy of the Arabs 
 with Zionism, and the hope for cooperation between 
 the two peoples. He wrote: 
 
 Our deputation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the 
 proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organization 
 to the Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate 
 
THE PEACE CONFERENCE 
 
 195 
 
 and proper. We will do our best insofar as we are concerned 
 to help them through. We will wish the Jews a most hearty 
 welcome home. 
 
 These statements simply reaffirmed the sentiments 
 he had somewhat earlier expressed at a public dinner 
 in London. There he declared that “no true Arab 
 can be suspicious or afraid of Jewish nationalism,” 
 and that the Arabs would be unworthy of freedom if 
 they did not say to the Jews, “welcome back home,” and 
 “cooperate with them to the limit of the ability of the 
 Arab state.” But Feisal, though the spokesman, 
 was not the ruler of the Arabs, not even the leader 
 of all of them. Effendis and money-lenders meant 
 him to be a tool rather than a guide; and his anti- 
 Zionist expressions had been compelled by pressure 
 in Paris and the news of unrest in Syria—unrest that, 
 with the postponement of the Turkish Treaty and 
 the multiplication of rumours, propaganda, and con¬ 
 spiracies which more and more disquieted Jews and 
 Arabs alike, reached the point in April, 1919, of threat¬ 
 ened anti-Jewish and anti-Allied outbreaks all over 
 the Arabian and Mohammedan world. This added to 
 the anxieties of the Zionists. And the event that the 
 word of this unrest particularly impressed the experts 
 of the American delegation charged with the definition 
 of the settlement of the Near East did not help to 
 lessen it. Nor did the way in which spying-out 
 commissions were planned and their personnel was 
 changed again and again. The commission that finally 
 did go was by no means favourably disposed, but very 
 sensitive to missionary interests. The upshot of its 
 investigations was a recommendation still unpublished 
 and contrary to the best judgment of the American 
 
196 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 experts on the subject at the Peace Conference. This 
 recommendation was not in favour of Jewish Palestine. 
 
 So the Peace Conference dragged on. By the time 
 the Treaty of Versailles was signed, the terms of a 
 Jewish Palestine had been outlined on paper, verbal 
 pledges had been given and taken, but nothing defini¬ 
 tive had been accomplished. A Turkish treaty had 
 been drafted but its terms were far from established, 
 and the time of its presentation to the Turks seemed 
 indefinitely remote. The Peace Conference disbanded 
 with the bulk of its work still to do. The Zionists 
 returned to their respective countries, fed on air, 
 promise-crammed. The enthusiastic certainty of the 
 war-time had been modified by the experience of the 
 peace-making into anxious and watchful expectancy. 
 It was apparent that if the powers were going to throw 
 overboard any of the causes they had espoused under 
 the lash of war needs the cause of the Jews would be 
 the first to go. Nevertheless, the Zionists, particularly 
 the American Zionists, proceeded with their work 
 and plans as if the Jewish Homeland in Palestine were 
 a foregone conclusion. They proceeded on the assump¬ 
 tion that the war had vindicated for all times the rights 
 of small nationalities and that covenants, particularly 
 the open covenants openly arrived at, between great 
 powers and such nationalities never again would, 
 nor could, be scraps of paper. It was an imaginative 
 and courageous assumption, a fine and bold act of 
 faith. There was perhaps also an element of despair 
 in it. And it is difficult to say whether, in this instance 
 of the process of group contacts and interaction, the 
 faith, as is so often the case in matters social and psy¬ 
 chological, did not create its own verification. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 FROM VERSAILLES TO SAN REMO—THE BASIC CONFLICT 
 
 THAT the treaties signed at Versailles brought not 
 peace, but more war; that they intensified the unrest, 
 misery, and disintegration of all the countries of Europe 
 which were affected by them; that they were in essence 
 an act of dishonesty, a jockeying of solemn pledges 
 to a beaten enemy—these have become commonplaces 
 of liberal and humanist discussion of the terms of 
 peace. The stupidity of these terms was, in liberal 
 opinion, profounder than even their malevolence. 
 By means of them, as Mr. Maynard Keynes has un¬ 
 answerably shown and events have sufficiently proved, 
 the governments of the allied and associated powers 
 cut off their noses to spite their faces. It would 
 be as easy as it is thankless to analyze the behaviour 
 and to apportion the guilt of the statesmen responsible. 
 No doubt the guilt is sure and the responsibility in¬ 
 eluctable: the character, temperament, knowledge, 
 and wisdom of these men must be counted, no less 
 than many other things, as efficient causes in the ulti¬ 
 mate result, and must bear their share of the iniquity 
 of the outcome. 
 
 But they were not the basic causes nor the import¬ 
 ant causes. Certainly, more intelligence and less self- 
 deception on the part of Mr. Wilson, more honesty 
 and less flexibility on the part of Mr. Lloyd George, 
 
 197 
 
198 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 more knowledge and less vindictiveness on the part of 
 M. Clemenceau, would have given the outcome a 
 different turn and the consequent trend of events in 
 Europe a more hopeful and cheerier direction. Cer¬ 
 tainly, had an'y operative factor in the peace-making 
 been other than it was, the peace and its consequences 
 would have been other. When that has been said, 
 all has been said—and nothing. For the significant 
 thing with regard to any discussion of the making of 
 that peace is not the speculation of how it might have 
 been different but the understanding of what were the 
 forces which made it what it was. Of these forces 
 the men who formulated the peace were but the last 
 terms and expressions, the channels, the contact points; 
 in themselves—like the straw that broke the camel’s 
 back—of no weight to speak of, but piled on top of all 
 the rest cataclysmal. 
 
 Now the tendency which is above designated as “all 
 the rest” constituted what has already been pointed 
 to as a diminishing, not an expanding phase of social 
 change. It is the tendency which in making for politi¬ 
 cal democracy made also for financial imperialism. 
 We have seen how the process of this democracy began 
 with the philosophy of natural rights as compensation 
 in idea for the inequalities of the dynastic state, and 
 how in the history of European politics it took the form 
 of the degradation of monarchical power and its dis¬ 
 placement by popular power to be ultimately organized 
 in the mode of parliamentarism on the basis of manhood 
 suffrage. The philosophy of natural rights and its im¬ 
 plicated political ideals could hardly have possessed 
 the force and duration which are their properties if 
 they had not rested in something more substantial 
 
THE BASIC CONFLICT 
 
 199 
 
 than the passion of resentment and the mechanism 
 of emotional compensation. They were, as a matter of 
 fact, expressive as well as compensatory, and what they 
 expressed were the abilities and self-sufficiency of an 
 ordinary family under an economy prevailingly agricul¬ 
 tural. This is the central and coercive fact regarding 
 the “democracy ” for which the Great War was to make 
 the world safe. Implanted in Europe and in America 
 by the force of two revolutions—the one in the British 
 colonies of North America and the one in France—it 
 set the “sovereign nation” of farmer-citizens against 
 the “sovereign king,” government by consent against 
 government by authority, representation of the masses 
 of electors against direct control by the classes. The 
 masses were mostly peasants—farmers and agricultural 
 labourers; the classes were mostly landlords, and oftener 
 than not, of alien race. What lay between them 
 and kept generating their conflict and its cataclysms 
 was the land. The vital need which the whole natural- 
 right philosophy with its nationalist-democratic poli¬ 
 tics expressed and served was the need for land. The 
 modern “democracy” which integrated and incarnated 
 them came into existence as the popular political em¬ 
 bodiment of an elementary economy of agriculture 
 wherein the ostensible unit of political action was the 
 freeholding agricultural worker, living with his family 
 off his land through toil or through rent or both. In 
 America there was any amount of free land to be had 
 for the taking; in France, even as recently in Russia, 
 the revolution became effective and irrevocable, with 
 the expropriation of the feudal landlord and the re¬ 
 distribution of the land to the peasantry. In England 
 and the rest of Europe, however, the recovery of the 
 
200 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 land by the people was slower and more doubtful. 
 Its culmination in the former country was interfered 
 with by the war, and the war seems to have been set 
 going on the continent, in order, among other purposes, 
 to forestall its initiation there. 
 
 The social processes called democracy were, however, 
 no sooner set up than they were crossed and crowded 
 by new ideas and new processes deriving from a new 
 economy. The new economy is the economy of in¬ 
 dustry. Under it the farmer or landowner does not 
 live upon the soil he owns and draw his living direct 
 from it. The working of the soil is merely subordi¬ 
 nated to the operations of the mill or factory and may 
 go on in areas very far removed from these—across 
 continents, in foreign lands, in colonies, and so on. The 
 soil produces only “raw material” which is trans¬ 
 ferred to the industrial plant where the mass of men 
 and women, working at great machines, serve together 
 to change it into the finished product. Mostly, these 
 men and women neither own nor rent land; they neither 
 own nor otherwise are secure in their dwelling-places; 
 they neither own nor lease the tools and machinery 
 which their skill alone can keep from being just so much 
 junk. Compared with the agricultural worker they 
 are nomads. Subject to unemployment, they move 
 from place to place according to the exigencies of 
 machine production. Compared with the agricultural 
 worker, miserable though he may be, they lack both 
 stability and freedom. Willy-nilly, no one of them is 
 in himself anything as an economic unit. Each shares 
 with all his fellows, in the most intimate way, the in¬ 
 terest in the land from which comes the material he 
 works on; the interest in the machine he works it with, 
 
THE BASIC CONFLICT 
 
 201 
 
 the interest in the men and women who are his fellow 
 workers at the machine. For a shortage of raw material, 
 a defect in the machine, a failure of any one worker 
 in his part of the industrial process jeopardizes the live¬ 
 lihood of all. The automatic machine forces all who 
 are productively related to it into an integral commun¬ 
 ity wherein collective possession and free cooperative 
 collaboration are inevitably indicated. They begin 
 as the labour union and other modes of workman 
 associations; it is not yet clear in what form they will 
 culminate. 
 
 Thus, at the same time that the democracy which is 
 the political aspect of the older agricultural economy 
 was winning its slow and precarious way against feudal¬ 
 ism and monarchism, the economy of industry was 
 displacing and profoundly modifying the agricultural 
 scheme. But while democracy was dislocating the 
 feudal overlord politically through suffrage, it en¬ 
 trenched him economically through industry. For 
 he alone—bar a small aggregation of bankers and mer¬ 
 chants, who used to be largely his factors and agents, 
 and who became his partners during the industrializa¬ 
 tion of society—was ever possessed of a surplus of 
 capital large enough to use for making the automatic 
 machine and putting it to work. The central fact 
 of the domestic economy of the western world during the 
 nineteenth century became thus the interplay of the 
 governing ideas of political democracy with the situa¬ 
 tion created by the swift and uneven spread of the 
 industrial economy. Through this interplay, popula¬ 
 tion became urbanized; the serf became the citizen; 
 the peasant, the proletarian; the landlord became 
 the investor, and the factor, the banker and manager; 
 
202 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 foreign lands ceased to be places to loot, as in the 
 past, and became sources of raw material and markets 
 for finished goods. Through this interplay political 
 democracy became a direct and efficient cause of 
 financial imperialism. Europe became and the whole 
 world tended to become, a unified single economic 
 mechanism, dominated by a separatist political ide¬ 
 ology. Soon it grew apparent that the victories of 
 democracy in politics brought with them no modi¬ 
 fication in the economic supremacy of privilege. 
 Capitalism developed into merely the feudalism of 
 industry: it replaced the overlord’s direct control 
 of politics by an indirect or invisible control. Re¬ 
 action against it took form as the new system of ideas 
 embodying the programme of life which is generally 
 called socialism. This spread as a gospel while de¬ 
 mocracy was taking root as an institution. 
 
 The scope and extent of these curiously interlacing 
 processes, usually called capitalism, was contingent 
 on a variety of factors that kept coming together in 
 ironic and often in grotesque combinations. Among 
 these factors alone the inertia of habit and tradition 
 stands out. Highly industrialized countries like Eng¬ 
 land, where the use of machinery had overtaken and 
 outdistanced democracy, seemed, prior to the war, in 
 all basic essentials untouched by the doctrine; yet 
 what happened during the war and since shows how 
 deeply and imperceptibly the automatic machine had 
 altered the habits and outlook of Englishmen, and 
 with it their attitude toward their country’s political 
 organization. Almost exclusively agricultural states 
 like Russia, whose political pattern was very nearly 
 mediaeval, underwent revolution predominantly under 
 
THE BASIC CONFLICT 
 
 203 
 
 the impulsion of a communistic socialism, to emerge, 
 if reports of observers may be trusted, as France 
 emerged from her revolution, secure in the change 
 only through a redistribution of land such as would 
 make inexorably for a political rather than a social 
 democracy, and undergoing socialization, therefore, 
 by means of autocratic force. Germany, next to 
 England the most industrialized country in the world, 
 and without exception the most purposively organized, 
 develops a socialist party which functions politically 
 as a democratic opposition to a powerful monarchy 
 with feudal traditions, and which becomes, in the 
 light of socialist ideology, reactionary once it gets 
 established in power by a revolution brought on through 
 external, not internal, causes. In the United States, a 
 country half industrial, half agricultural, whose sur¬ 
 pluses are still very considerable. Socialism as an 
 ideology is irrelevant and tangential, even trade-union 
 organization is elementary, the Socialist Party is the 
 merest party of protest; yet revolutionary modifications 
 of the political structure of the country take place 
 (such as the growth of executive power, or the creation 
 of commissions like the Interstate Commerce Com¬ 
 mission), compelled by the reshaping pressure of the 
 automatic machine on the habits of men’s lives and the 
 organization of their society. 
 
 And so on. Not a country in the world wherein dwell 
 considerable numbers of men but its economy has 
 undergone alteration in noticeable ways by the existence 
 and increase of machinery. Nevertheless, such altera¬ 
 tions have for the most part been unconscious, reflexive, 
 forced, rather than conscious and voluntary, matters 
 of automatic response rather than of planned control, 
 
204 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 and the theory of life envisaging their purport and 
 direction has functioned as protest rather than pro¬ 
 gramme. It has not yet attained that successful in¬ 
 carnation without which nothing gets recognized 
 as respectable. Its protagonists still lack the prestige 
 of an “integral victory,” just as the protagonists of 
 political democracy lacked it at the beginning of the 
 nineteenth century. At the beginning of the twentieth 
 the latter have it, and their minds, therefore, appre¬ 
 hend righteousness as nothing else than the ideology 
 of this democracy. 
 
 With such variations as differences of inheritance, 
 setting, and experience of necessity impose, the men who 
 possessed the supreme power in the making of the 
 peace were subjected to the domination of the demo¬ 
 cratic ideology and to the conditions whereby it is 
 respectable. When the Treaty of Vienna was signed 
 and the Holy Alliance established as a union of “the 
 ruling princes of Europe into a religious brotherhood 
 pledged to guide themselves wholly by Christian 
 principles,” a similar situation obtained with respect 
 to a less secular body of maxims which had also be¬ 
 come respectable. Circumstances, particularly the 
 swelling tide of political democracy, compelled the 
 coupling of Christian principles with Machiavellian 
 practices, just as after the treaties of Versailles and 
 St. Germain democratic principles got coupled with 
 star-chamber practices. The statesmen who pro¬ 
 moted the practices declared them necessary to pre¬ 
 serve the principles. Even when they knew better, 
 they could not help themselves. They were frightened 
 —frightened of Bolshevism. Old men all of them, past 
 the prime of life, their minds had grown up and the pat- 
 
THE BASIC CONFLICT 
 
 £05 
 
 tern of their political thinking had got fixed in the days 
 “when the political democracy which was establishing 
 itself still stood sufficiently firm upon the agricultural 
 economy which is its foundation. Their lives had 
 been spent in the contemplation and manipulation 
 of the ideology and institutions of this democracy. 
 To the new conditions created by the growth of in¬ 
 dustry under machine operation they deferred only 
 as they were compelled to. The labour movement 
 as distinguished from the political movement was to 
 them an obstruction, not the basis of an ideal. They 
 crushed it when they could and compromised with it 
 when they had to. They did everything to it except 
 understand it. For understanding it they had become 
 too old. Their habits of attention and action—like 
 those of their generation who made and ruled the war— 
 had become fixed, and what they performed habitually 
 and spontaneously was irrelevant to the new conditions 
 which were displacing and rendering obsolescent the 
 political forms wherewith they were preoccupied. So 
 far as their relations to the real conditions of social 
 growth were concerned, they were functioning in a 
 vacuum. Prevailingly, it is this organization of mind 
 that these old men carried over to the peace table: 
 this that has governed their framing of the covenant 
 of international polity and their ordination of a new 
 international system. They framed the most that 
 they were able to frame. They framed a mere re¬ 
 production of the pattern of the national polity of 
 industrial states.” 1 That they did this under the im¬ 
 pulsion of many other motives as well—Wilson’s fear of 
 Bolshevism and blinding obsession with the League, 
 
 1 Cf. Elisha Friedman: “America and the New Era,” pp. 73-74. 
 
206 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 Clemenceau’s militarist imperialism, 1 Lloyd George’s 
 wish to seem to try to keep his election pledges, Or¬ 
 lando’s to mitigate the opposition at home, the wish 
 of the three Europeans to transfer to the erstwhile 
 enemy the burden of meeting the costs of the war and 
 the indebtedness of the peace—is incidental. The 
 treaties imposed upon the Germans and the Austrians, 
 the treaties delivered to the lesser and the newer 
 states—such as Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Finland, 
 Rumania, Bulgaria, Serbia—all speak the language 
 of democracy and impose the regulations of imperialism. 
 They seek to ordain, in terms of exclusive national 
 sovereignties, reciprocal, non-national, economic re¬ 
 lationships. They are consequently implicated in an 
 inevitable self-defeating duplexity which may in¬ 
 differently be interpreted as the hypocrisy and insin¬ 
 cerity of the members of the Council of Four, as Mr. 
 Maynard Keynes thinks, or as the dilemma inherent 
 in the conflict between the ideology of the peace and 
 its effective conditions. One of two things must, in 
 the course of the next few years, inevitably happen: 
 Either Europe will revert to the agricultural economy 
 consistent with the ideology of its dominating cove¬ 
 nant, in the process of the reversion undergoing 
 decimation and moral and intellectual retrogression 
 through the horrors of starvation and the terrors of 
 revolution, or the process of conscious economic 
 integration which the war compelled 2 will be under- 
 
 1 Even Mr. Wilson recognized this. “Through the sessions of the Con¬ 
 ference in Paris,” he wrote to Senator Hitchcock, March 8, 1920, “it was 
 evident that a militaristic party, under the most influential leadership, was 
 seeking to gain ascendency in the councils of France. They were defeated 
 there but are in control now.” 
 
 2 Cf. H. M. Kallen, “The League of Nations Today and Tomorrow.” 
 
THE BASIC CONFLICT 
 
 207 
 
 taken again, on an all-inclusive European, ultimately 
 a world-wide, scale. From the conference at Versailles 
 to the conference at San Remo the former alternative 
 dominated. Since San Remo there have been indica¬ 
 tions, in the altered attitude toward Germany and in the 
 activities of the League of Nations looking toward an 
 international economic conference, of a movement in 
 the direction of the latter alternative. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 FROM VERSAILLES TO SAN REMO—THE CONFLICT IN 
 
 RUSSIA AND AMERICA 
 
 THE outstanding index of the compulsion of events 
 toward sanity has been the changing attitude toward 
 Russia. Such industrialization as had been effected 
 in Russia prior to the revolution had been effected 
 sporadically, in isolated spots, and mostly through 
 foreign capital and management. The bulk of it 
 was concentrated on her western frontier, in those areas 
 which have since become parts of Poland and the other 
 new states. The economy of Russia is still prevailingly 
 agricultural. Prior to the war she was the source of 
 food and raw materials to her industrialized neigh¬ 
 bours. Industry modified her economy mostly in 
 terms of transport; not only her traffic with other com¬ 
 munities, but the development and exploitation of 
 her extraordinarily rich and varied natural resources 
 depended on that. Transport was an outstanding 
 concern of the Tsarist government; it remains the 
 outstanding concern of the Soviet Republic. Even 
 without adequate transport an isolated Russia could, for 
 many years, be economically self-sufficient: her level of 
 organization would be comparatively low and simple and 
 under the stress of the revolutionary ideology, would 
 tend to realize the ideals of democracy of the eighteenth 
 century. The Allied blockade against her hence 
 
 208 
 
RUSSIA AND AMERICA 
 
 209 
 
 succeeded only in killing hundreds of thousands of 
 innocent non-combatants in cities by keeping from 
 them the tools and materials with which they were 
 used to make articles of exchange with the country 
 and by withholding necessary medicines; otherwise it 
 served simply as a tonic to Soviet morale. The Soviet 
 government could have survived under it longer than 
 those of the other European countries; as Signor 
 Nitti admitted, they needed foodstuffs and raw ma¬ 
 terials far more than Russia needed locomotives. 
 But their policy was based on considerations very 
 different from the economic. It was based first of 
 all on the hope and wish to recover for the financial 
 imperialists the pre-revolutionary investments and 
 concessions and their rich profits; and, secondly, on 
 a moral panic manifested in symbols of the democratic 
 ideology. This panic was in Europe the panic of the 
 investing and privileged classes; only in America did it 
 infect—under the influence of malefic propaganda, it 
 is true—the majority of the people. In Europe, the 
 sentiment of the majority of the people opposed it— 
 particularly the sentiment of organized labour—and 
 finally took practical expression in the refusal to trans¬ 
 port ammunitions for use against the Soviet armies. 
 The excess of this ammunition over the needs of the 
 Great War was itself a controlling factor in the prolonga¬ 
 tion of the war of the Allied governments upon Russia. 
 The adventures of Kolchak, Denikine, Judenitch, 
 Wrangel, and Pilsudki would not have been so lightly 
 undertaken without it. 
 
 That they were undertaken at all, moreover, was a 
 symptom of confusion and uncertainty, rather than 
 of well-planned and executed policy on the part of the 
 
210 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 Entente. The social personality known as the Russian 
 Soviet Republic had become a baffling, obscure, and 
 impudent thing, a very enfant terrible of politics. In 
 its foreign relations its government exhibited a candour 
 and realism, a shameless frankness of statement very 
 embarrassing to the tradition and practice of unflinch¬ 
 ing mendacity normal to Allied diplomacy. It had 
 assumed the championship of the rights of man; it 
 repudiated annexations and indemnities; it practised 
 open diplomacy, it preached and sought peace; it pro¬ 
 fessed and practised the doctrine of self-determination. 
 It warred by propaganda even more than by arms; 
 seeking alliance with subject peoples in the east, 
 appealing to peoples against governments in the west. 
 And its practices squared with its professions, as an 
 examination of its treaties with the Baltic States will 
 show. 
 
 How much of the war propaganda was due to doc¬ 
 trinal fanaticism and how much to the exigencies 
 of its position cannot be seriously estimated. Its 
 position held and holds inherent contradictions which 
 must be resolved if Russia is to survive as a communist 
 republic. These contradictions were implicated in 
 the irrelevance of the Socialist ideology to the prevailing 
 agricultural economy. The practical necessities of ad¬ 
 ministration had compelled very extensive accommoda¬ 
 tions of doctrine to the circumstances, habits, social 
 traditions, and personal trends of the peasant masses. 
 The security of the government rested primarily 
 upon the fact that it was the guarantee that the redis¬ 
 tribution of the land was final; secondarily upon the 
 pressure from external enemies. Domestic policy, 
 directed by these two facts, developed as the auto- 
 
RUSSIA AND AMERICA 
 
 211 
 
 cratic regime of a party. Liberty was the least of its 
 concerns, equality the greatest; effort was applied 
 to reducing to a minimum the economic differences 
 between the citizens of the Soviet Republic; all other 
 differences were ignored, and those in conflict ^yith 
 the equalitarian programme were repressed. Thus 
 anti-Semitism has been practically rooted out in 
 Soviet Russia, and barring the provocative action of 
 fanatical Jewish “internationalists,” Jews have been 
 able to go their own way as Jews in no less peace and 
 security than other Russians of the non-proletarian 
 classes. 
 
 At the same time education was organized to estab¬ 
 lish both in adults and in children—in children particu¬ 
 larly—as firm a faith in the Socialist ideology as had 
 ever obtained in the Christian. The new generation 
 has been the overruling object of constructive regard 
 in Soviet domestic policy. 
 
 But faith without works is a danger and a dream. 
 The hope for a genuine communism for the generation 
 to come, Lenine recognized, lies not in the mere altera¬ 
 tion of the ideas of the Russian people; it lies far more 
 fundamentally in the establishment of the institutional 
 conditions which control and direct ideas and generate 
 and confirm the habits whereby institutions keep going. 
 The industrialization of Russia is essential to the success 
 of communism in Russia; it must be ready for the new 
 generation which grows up. This, accordingly, had to 
 become the constructive aim of Russian foreign policy. 
 To accomplish this aim it is indispensable that the 
 economic relations between Russia and the industrial 
 states shall be restored as soon as possible. Lenine, 
 perhaps more than any other statesman in Europe, 
 
212 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 realizes the organic character of modern industrial 
 civilization: he accepts boldly and frankly the inevita¬ 
 bility of industrialization and he is eager, as his sardonic 
 statements show, to initiate as swiftly as possible the 
 exchange of “socialistic wheat for capitalistic locomo¬ 
 tives,” which is the first step. He is ready to make 
 extensive concessions for the sake of the swift expansion 
 of machine industry in Russia. Hence military op¬ 
 pression and militant propaganda in the east are 
 accompanied with offers of all sorts of concessions 
 and agreements in the west. There is every indication 
 that the former are carried on to enable the Soviet 
 Republic to add to the weight of the latter as items 
 of exchange in return for recognition and trade. 
 
 Now the commerce which would come to Russia as a 
 result of an adjustment with the Allies would mitigate 
 in a considerable degree a certain monopoly of the 
 same now enjoyed in Europe by the United States. 
 Whether the attitude of the American Government 
 toward Soviet Russia has not largely been influenced 
 by this fact would be a matter of curious speculation. 
 The irony of the whole international situation lies in 
 the major role which perhaps the most disinterested 
 and powerful, the most naive and idealistic as well 
 as the wealthiest state in the world has played in the 
 making of it. Such democratic and abstractly philan¬ 
 thropic trends as were apparent in the negotiations 
 beginning with the armistice were more immediately the 
 outcome of the attitude of the government of the 
 United States. The eighteenth-century humanitarian- 
 ism, the anti-monarchism, the republicanism, the 
 deference to majorities, and the pacifism which are 
 characteristic of the democratic ideology were, in 
 
RUSSIA AND AMERICA 
 
 213 
 
 fact, the operative sentiment of American public 
 opinion with regard to the peace. The cordial attitude 
 toward the first phases of the revolution in Russia, the 
 dissolution of the central empires and the establish¬ 
 ment of the aggregation of more or less democratic 
 republics in their stead, the guarantees of the rights 
 of national minorities, the pacific and philanthropic 
 items of the covenant of the League of Nations, all 
 expressed the positive traditional sentiment of the 
 American people. But they looked backward rather 
 than forward, and because they looked backward they 
 enabled the American senate to play politics with the 
 treaty without fear of public opinion, and they worked 
 as disintegrating and anarchic rather than saving in¬ 
 fluences upon the organization of Europe. 
 
 The American retrospection was inherent and 
 inevitable. It was a symptom of the strain created 
 by the existence of a growing industrial economy 
 under a fundamental law resting on agricultural 
 foundations. The community had, since 1900, been 
 drifting, without any definite conscious direction, a 
 confusion and a tumult. No real political issues 
 divided it into real parties, no economic classes had 
 gained stability and tradition enough to give body to a 
 class alignment. The only unfailing force in the re¬ 
 molding of the national life was the much-used, but 
 in its social effects altogether unstudied, automatic 
 machine. National political thought looked, as a 
 result, backward, to the lucid and articulate past, to 
 the Constitution and the Fathers. It was motivated 
 by memory rather than the present urgencies to which 
 memory had become irrelevant. Unrest grew, in 
 spite of prosperity, often because of it—and the end is 
 
214 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 not yet. The country grew sick of a neurasthenia 
 from which the various 44 progressive” movements 
 were interesting and inefficacious efforts at relief. 
 The war did bring a degree of relief—unhappily tempo¬ 
 rary. It could do so not because it required meeting a 
 common enemy, but because it compelled political 
 thought and administrative organization to pay con¬ 
 scious attention to new and constant factors in the 
 national life which had caused the conflicts of habit 
 and feeling wherein consisted the national nervousness. 
 From the time these factors came out into the open 
 a tendency toward a rearrangement of the lines of 
 force of the national life has been manifest. War pro¬ 
 duction with its accompanying financial inflation has 
 strengthened this tendency. The artificially created 
 war psychology has strengthened it. The transference 
 since the armistice of the war animus from the Ger¬ 
 mans to the Russians, and the manifestations of Mr. 
 Palmer’s Okhrana and the 4 4 red hysteria” were symp¬ 
 toms of it. For the rest, the public mind lost sight 
 of Europe altogether. League of Nations or no League 
 of Nations, the habitual American ideology had been 
 realized through the war: America had grown tired 
 of foreign entanglements; public attention turned in¬ 
 ward to the issues of industrial conflict, high prices, 
 and such, consideration of which, as a matter of fact, 
 the war had interrupted. The only regard for matters 
 alien which did survive survived in the form of per¬ 
 secuting animosity toward anybody or anything strange 
 and different, usually called at the time 44 Bolshevik.” 
 An Americanization craze, whose typical symptom 
 is the concept 44 100% American,” exfoliated out of the 
 red hysteria and Palmerism. The Constitution was 
 
RUSSIA AND AMERICA 
 
 215 
 
 treated as a fetish and Socialism as a devil. And the 
 while the President was lying helpless on his bed 
 with a clot on his brain, and the members of his 
 bureaucracy either marked time, like the Department 
 of the Interior or held high jinks, like the Department 
 of Justice. 
 
 Oblivious of Europe though America was, so far as 
 the country’s pertinent feeling and efficacious attention 
 were concerned, Europe was kept present to the Ameri¬ 
 can mind in two ways. First (and most significantly 
 because of the political importance of their votes) by 
 the poignant personal interest of great groups of Ameri¬ 
 can citizens of central and east European extraction 
 in the fate of their friends and relatives on that un¬ 
 happy continent. This interest coalesced with the 
 traditional humanitarianism of the American mind 
 and imparted to the philanthropy of various American 
 private relief organizations a certain political import. 
 This import was, however, more sentimental than 
 practical. It bore directly upon the second way in 
 which Europe was kept before the American public— 
 namely, upon the romantic interest of the ethnic groups 
 in the political forms of the new sovereign states and 
 enfranchised nationalities of central Europe. This 
 interest was reenforced by diplomatic emissaries, 
 propagandists, emigres, and agents and military heroes 
 of Allied governments, particularly of France. They 
 constructed for the admiration of the American public 
 a pure image of the new democracies, their political 
 forms somehow flattering imitations of the American, 
 bravely struggling to hold their own and to “ protect 
 civilization from the menace of Bolshevism”; im¬ 
 poverished, starved, of course, and in dire need of 
 
216 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 generous assistance, but assistance to be given as 
 money loans to governments, not as the economic 
 rehabilitation of peoples. The realities of the con¬ 
 trolling economic correlations were nowhere and at 
 no time in the picture. The starvation and misery 
 of the populations were in no way connected with them, 
 nor was there any realization of the mutual implications 
 of political reconciliation and generosity with economic 
 rehabilitation. Mr. Hoover, on the record, might 
 have brought these realities into the picture, but got 
 befooled and diverted by the politics of the coming 
 presidential campaign. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 
 FROM VERSAILLES TO SAN REMO—THE CONFLICT IN 
 POLAND, THE UKRAINE, HUNGARY, AND RUMANIA 
 
 MISLEADING as were the pictures offered to Amer¬ 
 ica of all the new states, the picture of Poland was most 
 particularly so. The reason is not far to seek. Poland 
 had been designed to become the fulcrum of the new 
 hegemony of the continent by which harassed and 
 almost bankrupt French imperialism hoped to evade 
 taxation at home, to collect its debts abroad, and at the 
 same time to insure itself against possible German 
 rivalry and actual and well-deserved Russian animosity. 
 That Poland was chosen and not the much more com¬ 
 petent Czecho-Slovakia is due to precisely the reasons 
 which render Poland an ineffectual means to such an 
 end. It is due to the difference in the intelligence of 
 the leadership, the difference between Masaryk and 
 Dmowski or Pilsudski. Poland, like Russia, had been 
 until late in the nineteenth century without a middle 
 class of its own ethnic stock. From the beginning 
 until practically the 1890’s Poland was a state composed 
 of feudal landlords, Catholic clergy, and peasant villeins. 
 The landlords constituted an upper class of petty 
 autocrats who lived mostly on their estates and devoted 
 their days to hunting, fighting, intrigue, debauchery, 
 and Jew-baiting. The economic work of the state 
 was performed by the peasants. Its administration, 
 
 217 
 
218 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 manufactures, and commerce were delegated to these 
 same baited Jews and to German immigrant bourgeois. 
 These constituted what it needed of a middle class. 
 They were, for obvious reasons, a middle class without 
 the rights and powers of the middle class of other 
 European states. They were able to offer no effective 
 restriction or opposition to the profligate perversities 
 of the Shlakhta and the government which it consti¬ 
 tuted. Powers 1 says: 
 
 Historic Poland was a signal failure. No government in 
 Europe during the last thousand years has a record for more 
 marked incompetency. Under the leadership of truly 
 great sovereigns, the provincialism and local selfishness of 
 the people proved obdurate to every appeal, even in the 
 face of the most unmistakable national dangers. If ever a 
 nation perished because it was unfit to live, that nation was 
 Poland. 
 
 The partition which, on the whole, brought a measure 
 of relief to the Polish masses created a grievance for 
 the classes, and outside of Galicia, which had gone to 
 Catholic Austria, for the clergy. On the grievances 
 of these two estates Polish nationalism was built. 
 It would have been impotent but for the oppressive 
 measures of Prussification and Russification of the 
 other two participants in the partition. Because of 
 those, the religious loyalties and the rudimentary 
 cultural development of the Polish people received 
 acceleration and intensification; the upper class, living 
 either on its estates or in exile, but living always in 
 idleness or adventure, became the protagonists of an 
 idealized nationalist fantasy and the teachers and 
 leaders of rebellion. 
 
 1 “The Great Peace,” p. 290. 
 
POLAND, UKRAINIA, HUNGARY, ETC. 219 
 
 Meanwhile, the Jews continued to function as the 
 Polish middle class. When the edge of the wave of 
 industrialization reached as far as eastern Europe 
 they were conspicuously the first to succumb to it. 
 Together with Germans and Russians from the trading 
 centres of Russia they created in Poland what was a 
 great part of the industrial development of the Russian 
 Empire. A town-dwelling people from the outset, 
 they became the foundation of the proletarian industrial 
 population of Poland, and constitute a very large part 
 of it. The things they produced were sold in Russia, 
 and the outstanding fact about industrial Poland has 
 been its economic interdependence with Russia. The 
 influences which generated a socialist attitude toward 
 life in intellectual Russia generated the same at¬ 
 titude among the Poles, with this difference—that in 
 Russia it was atheistic, universalist, and revolutionary, 
 in Poland it was Catholic, nationalist, and rebellious. 
 It took form among the proletarianized Poles as the 
 Polish Socialist Party, among the Jews as the General 
 Association (Bund) of Jewish Workingmen. The 
 Romanist-nationalist character of the former was re¬ 
 flected in the somewhat milder nationalistic outlook 
 of the latter. Both were opposed by the National 
 Democratic Party, whose interests and leadership 
 were entirely those of the baronial Shlakhta and the 
 land-owning peasantry. The differences between the 
 two Polish parties separated them less than their 
 common anti-Semitism united them. The more in¬ 
 tellectual among them demanded of the Jews complete 
 Polonization while, at the same time, they denounced 
 the Russians for a similar demand for the Russification 
 of the Poles. For the quarter of a century preceding 
 
220 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 the war the Jews were used politically as pawns and 
 stalking-horses of the religious nationalism of the 
 Poles and the cultural imperialism of the Russians. 
 When, under the influence of industrialization, the 
 landed aristocracy began to become an investing class 
 and traces of a Polish middle class became apparent, 
 the Polonizing movement took the form of an eco¬ 
 nomic boycott, which aiming at the “ polonization of 
 commerce” drove the Jews still more definitely into 
 industry. The initiator of the policy was an anti- 
 Semitic candidate for the Duma who had been defeated 
 by the Jewish vote—Roman Dmowski, the head of 
 the National Democratic Party, and later head of 
 the Polish National Committee in Paris. 
 
 When the war came this party adopted a philo- 
 Russian and pro-Ally policy; under this policy its anti- 
 Semitism took the form of pro-German accusations 
 against the Jews. The Polish Party, headed by Pil- 
 sudski, adopted an attitude of militant pro-Germanism, 
 with the view of using opportunity as it might arise 
 for the advantage of Polish independence. The 
 German occupation of Poland soon provided such 
 an opportunity. The government that was then 
 established, the constitution that was adopted, and 
 such protection that the Germans gave was a protection 
 to the powers of that party. Anti-Semitism during 
 the period took the form of pro-Russian accusations 
 against the Jews. When, finally, the Germans were 
 turned out, and it became apparent that the Dmowski- 
 Paderewski-Grabski combination had outguessed the 
 Pilsudski-Kuchzarewski crowd, there was some un¬ 
 certainty as to whether any sort of peace could be 
 patched up between the parties. The baronial- 
 
POLAND, UKRAINIA, HUNGARY, ETC. 221 
 
 clericalist National Democratic Committee had the 
 ear and the good-will of the Allies, particularly of 
 France; the Polish Socialist Party and Pilsudski had the 
 sympathy of the Polish townsmen and tenant peas¬ 
 antry. The government which was finally created was a 
 compromise: Pilsudski received the presidency and 
 Dmowski, Paderewski, and company received the 
 power. The new rulers of Poland thus are all men 
 of the ancient regime, whose habits of mind are im¬ 
 perialistic and codes of behaviour feudal. Among 
 them was an individual who as an official of the Aus¬ 
 trian Empire had as much to do as any one with pre¬ 
 cipitating the Great War. 
 
 Poland, independent once more, was restored into 
 the hands of the class which had lost her her freedom. 
 It was this class which unwillingly signed the Treaty 
 of Versailles. It had learned nothing and had for¬ 
 gotten nothing. Its ideal is mediaeval Poland. It 
 still lives on warfare, Jew-baiting, and vainglory. 
 Incompetent to put its house in order, to face the 
 realities of a genuine reconstruction, its imperialistic 
 aggression aroused the bitter enmity of Esthonia, Latvia, 
 and Lithuania, and then proceeded to draw the usual 
 red herring across its track by charging the Jews 
 with Bolshevism, by permitting—if not inciting— 
 and condoning pogroms, and by lying about, them 
 under investigation. From the reports brought back 
 both by Mr. Henry Morgenthau and Sir Stuart Samuel 
 the inference is inescapable that the Polish Government, 
 in the interests of the class which it represents, is 
 sabotaging the treaty upon which Polish independence 
 is conditioned. It is sabotaging the treaty knowingly 
 and with impunity, for the League of Nations is aborted. 
 
ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 and the hands of the Great Powers are bound. Mean¬ 
 while, although grudging economic reforms were grudg¬ 
 ingly enacted, they were not enforced; starvation 
 and disease were as extensive among the masses as 
 was luxury among the classes; discontent became so 
 intense as to require a more adventurous and less- 
 habitual safety-valve than Jew-baiting. The obvious 
 one was the traditional high moral business of defend¬ 
 ing the marches of civilization—now against Soviet 
 Russia, as once against the Turks. So there was 
 launched a brazen and merry war of unmitigated ag¬ 
 gression in the interests of the land-barons who had 
 holdings beyond the boundaries of ethnographic 
 Poland. Its spirit is an inflated nationalism which 
 misery and disaster must inevitably explode. Its 
 sinews are the military and financial charity of France 
 and England and the United States. Its victim is the 
 one country upon whose markets the rehabilitation 
 of Poland and her development as an industrial state 
 most of all depends. The will of Poland to fight 
 Russia depends on the survival of ShlaJchta control; 
 the strength of Poland to fight Russia depends upon 
 either French suzerainty or commerce with Russia; 
 and commerce with Soviet Russia is bound to mitigate 
 if not to abolish Shlakhta rule and to render war between 
 Poland and Russia progressively more difficult. French 
 imperialism has played very stupidly in eastern 
 Europe. It has played stupidly because it has ignored, 
 wilfully, the conditions upon which strength depends 
 in an industrialized world. 
 
 The extraordinary blindness of the imperialistic 
 policy for central Europe has been even more c onspicu- 
 ous in the fate of Little Russia or Ukrainia, This 
 
POLAND, UKRAINIA, HUNGARY, ETC. 223 
 
 unhappy land was conceived of, together with Poland, 
 as a principal instrument in the establishment of the 
 Gallic hegemony of the continent. Victim, until the 
 successful Chmelnitzki uprising, of the traditional 
 practices of the Polish overlordship, it united, as in¬ 
 surance against the repetition of the terrible Polish 
 exploitation, with Great Russia, in 1654. Only eastern 
 Galicia, with its six million Ruthenians, remained in 
 Polish hands, and passed at the partition under the 
 dominion of the Austrian crown. Bitterly inimical 
 to the Poles by tradition, although closer to them than 
 to the Russo-Ruthenians in religion (they are Uniate 
 Roman Catholics) the Ruthenians of Galicia, with the 
 encouragement of the Austrian Government, retained 
 and developed their linguistic and cultural traditions 
 and their nationalist aspirations. During the war they 
 became the agents and centre of German anti-Russian 
 propaganda in Ukrainia, and of Russian anti-German 
 propaganda in Galicia. They acquiesced in the German 
 project of a united and autonomous Ukrainia under Aus¬ 
 trian hegemony. This project was to some degree carried 
 out. An independent Ukrainia, protected by German 
 arms, was in fact established under the Hetman Skorop- 
 adski, and the recognition of this independence was 
 exacted in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The Treaty of 
 Versailles having abrogated the arrangements of Brest- 
 Litovsk, the Ruthenians of Galicia, instead of being 
 joined with their own people of the Ukraine, fell again 
 under the dominion of the Poles, unsecured by anything 
 except the inefficacious provisions regarding the security 
 and freedom of national minorities. In Ukrainia proper 
 Skoropadski was displaced by Petliura. And then the 
 shattering of that unhappy land began. 
 
224 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 A wide alluvial plain, watered by three great rivers, 
 Ukraina is one of the granaries of Europe. Like the 
 larger part of Poland it is flat land, without natural 
 barriers. The population is mostly a peasantry, who 
 at various times have been members or victims of the 
 Cossack bands. The cities—Kiev, Kishinev, Ekate- 
 rinoslav, Kherson, Odessa—all have a very large Jewish 
 population. Prior to the war, there were in all about 
 3,000,000 Jews in this very considerable and important 
 portion of the old Russian Empire. There, also, they 
 composed economically the commercial and industrial 
 class. Politically, they were, after Versailles, sub¬ 
 jected to the traditional use of pawns in the political 
 game that was being played out in the Ukraine. 
 
 The motives in the game were the anti-Bolshevism 
 of the Allies, the mediaeval imperialism of the Poles, 
 and the nationalism of the Ukrainian National Council. 
 This nationalism expressed itself in the government 
 of Petliura—the so-called Directorate—and took force 
 in an army made up largely of demobilized peasants 
 and khlops. The anti-Bolshevism of the Allies had 
 for its instrument the reactionary government and 
 volunteer army of Denikine. This person and his 
 pretensions were hated by the Ukrainian khlops even 
 more than the Poles. Hence, when in January, 1919, 
 Petliura’s forces were defeated by the armies of the 
 Soviet Republic, the Ukrainian population was dis¬ 
 posed to welcome the Soviet regime in spite of the 
 hardships of an imposed communism. Petliura’s troops, 
 meanwhile, broke up into bands, each under a Hetman, 
 and proceeded—not without an understanding with 
 what had escaped of the Petliura government into 
 Galicia—to ravage the unarmed Jewish populations 
 
POLAND, UKRAINIA, HUNGARY, ETC. 225 
 
 in the cities and villages. The justification offered 
 was the claim that the Jews were Bolsheviks and that 
 they were responsible for the defeat of the Petliura 
 forces at the hands of the Soviet Republic. A proc¬ 
 lamation of the Hetman Simchenko called for “death 
 for the old because they brought up Bolsheviks; death 
 to the women for having brought them into the world; 
 death to the children so that they may not grow up 
 into Bolsheviks!” 
 
 To the Jews, the Ukraine of 1920 reduplicated 
 the Ukraine of 1648. By July of that year there had 
 been 2,000 pogroms; 259,000 Jews had been killed, 
 250,000 more had died of causes related to the pogroms; 
 innumerable capital levies had been made, houses 
 and streets destroyed and towns raided. The Jews 
 had been reduced to a condition of terror and disinte¬ 
 gration without parallel even in their own history. 
 In this reduction, the policy and army of Denikine had 
 a role no less murderously distinguished. Nor did the 
 Poles fail to live up to the standards set by their 
 religious traditions and secular practices. With a 
 claim to East Galicia of the most mythical sort, they 
 established themselves in Lemberg by force, precipitat¬ 
 ing immediately their old conflict with the Ruthenians 
 (who insisted on their solidarity with the Ukraine), or¬ 
 ganizing and encouraging pogroms. When Petliura, 
 desperate, invited the alliance of the Poles in return for 
 the recognition of their claims to East Galicia, the 
 Ruthenians repudiated him for Denikine. But they 
 found Denikine intolerable, and in the end returned to 
 Petliura, who meanwhile, calling upon the hetmans 
 of the various bands to rejoin him, marched with 
 Pilsudski into Kiev. The ultimate victory of the 
 
226 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 Soviet Republic is a foregone conclusion. The rein¬ 
 corporation of Ukrainia, or an intimate economic union 
 between the Soviet Republic and an autonomous 
 Ukrainians a foregone conclusion. By the vigour of 
 its military discipline, by its adequate police and sani¬ 
 tary measures, by the security it assures to life, and 
 within the limits of its rigid equalitarian programme, 
 to property, the Republic has made itself the least 
 disagreeable of the political alternatives to all sections 
 of the population of the Ukraine. 
 
 But the most ironic consequences of the peace and 
 its administration are to be seen in Hungary. Invaded 
 after the conclusion of the armistice of November 4, 
 1918, by Serbian, Czecho-Slovak, and Rumanian armies, 
 only five of her sixty-three counties were free of enemy 
 occupation. This occupation rendered impossible elec¬ 
 tions for a constituent assembly, and cut off the great 
 city of Buda-Pesth, her population more than doubled 
 by refugees, from medicine, fuels, raw materials, and 
 food. Protests to Paris were of no avail. The Karolyi 
 government, postulated upon the Wilsonian policy, 
 found itself unable to withstand the attacks of mon¬ 
 archists and counter-revolutionaries on the one hand 
 and communists on the other. Hungary, like Poland, 
 with which it has great religious and moral kinship, 
 had in the course of the preceding generation been 
 undergoing industrialization. With industrialization 
 had come an intellectual revival in which the centre 
 of Hungarian attention shifted from a rather narrow 
 and turbid clericalist nationalism to a Europeanism 
 like that of the more European and western peoples. 
 
 The leaders in this “Western” movement had been, 
 numerously and conspicuously, “Hungarians of Jewish 
 
POLAND, UKRAINIA, HUNGARY, ETC. 227 
 
 blood,” who constitute a very large portion of the middle 
 and intellectual class of the land. With the Jewish 
 communities of Hungary from which they sprang they 
 had nothing whatsoever to do. Assimilated and 
 passionate Magyars, they figured as conspicuously 
 in the industrial and political movements that were 
 the correlates of the literary, as they did in the literary. 
 Under the Hapsburgs, the journals they edited, and 
 the groups and parties they led and instructed, de¬ 
 veloped into centres of liberal and radical opposition. 
 When, because of the stress of the failure of the Karolyi 
 government to meet the situation created by the bad 
 faith of the Supreme Council and its agents, the move¬ 
 ment toward Communism began, it began naturally in 
 connection with these journals and organizations. 
 Neither political nor military action was able to quash 
 the movement. Deportation of Bolshevist agitators— 
 ordered by the French—did not reduce it; nor did 
 imprisonment reduce it. Demobilized soldiers without 
 jobs, workmen unemployed because the Allied block¬ 
 ade cut off raw materials and fuel, agricultural labourers 
 driven to town by the enemy occupation flocked to 
 the Soviet standards. Even the attempt at calling 
 elections—in spite of the difficulty created by the 
 occupation—and passing agrarian reforms failed to 
 stem the tide. The communist revolution in Hungary 
 was the result of a general mass-movement and ex¬ 
 pressive of the will of the Hungarian people. 
 
 The government this revolution established was a 
 dictatorship not purely communist—it was a coalition 
 between the communists and the social democrats. 
 It avoided, as well as it could, the errors of the Russian 
 Soviet Republic. It tried to upset as little as possible 
 
228 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 the going economy of the country. Of course, it 
 expropriated those who lived on rent, profits, and in¬ 
 terest, and sought to put them to work. Rut it kept 
 in its own employ the managements of the industries 
 and of the great estates; it recognized and rewarded 
 individual superiorities in capacity and responsibility; 
 and it planned to couple with the gradual democratiza¬ 
 tion of agriculture and industry the Taylor system 
 and piece work. It gave the same passionate attention 
 to the education of the masses as the Russian Govern¬ 
 ment, and it honoured and rewarded the teachers 
 by assigning them the highest salaries allowable under 
 the constitution, salaries equal to those of the members 
 of the government themselves. 
 
 Its most difficult stumbling-block was the same as 
 in Russia—the peasants and the peasant psychology. 
 Mainly tenantry or agricultural workers on great 
 estates, entirely under the dominion of an illiterate 
 and intriguing Roman Catholic clergy, suffused with 
 anti-Semitism, these peasants were eager to possess the 
 land, but were not eager to communize its management 
 and control. The government of Bela Kun tried to 
 deal with them as tactfully as possible. It refrained 
 from “socializing” the small farmers. It worked the 
 large estates in the old way but with a new morale. 
 It looked to education and the lapse of time to effect 
 the desired modifications in the mentality of this mass 
 of the population too great to be coerced and too slow- 
 witted to be convinced. General Smuts, sent from 
 Paris to survey the situation, reported himself “well- 
 impressed.” 
 
 The fact was, that the government of Bela Kun was 
 making an experiment, within the limits of reasonable 
 
POLAND, UKRAINIA, HUNGARY, ETC. 229 
 
 control, in easing the adjustment and interpenetration 
 of industrial with agricultural economy. It was mak¬ 
 ing this experiment under insuperable difficulties— 
 without fuel or raw materials in the factories and with 
 insufficient food in the cities. The success or failure 
 of this experiment under its own weight and strength 
 would have been a distinct service to mankind, and 
 every facility ought to have been supplied it to work 
 itself out in peace. But the Supreme Council was as 
 terrified by “Bolshevism” as, a century before, the 
 Holy Alliance had been terrified by “democracy.” 
 When the communist arms were victorious over 
 Czecho-Slovakia and had overrun two thirds of Slovakia 
 it offered Bela Kun a definitive peace provided he would 
 surrender all the fruits of his victory and withdraw his 
 troops. But when he did what it wished and with¬ 
 drew his troops, it repudiated the offer as a “clerical 
 error.” Turning then in despair against the other 
 invader—the Rumanian who also was occupying 
 Hungary in violation of the armistice—with a force 
 half his size, Kun suffered a calamitous defeat and 
 the Rumanians marched into Buda-Pesth. Paris 
 then offered the Social Democrats of the Kun govern¬ 
 ment to lift the blockade if Kun would resign. To 
 save his fellow-countrymen Kun did resign and a 
 moderate socialist government replaced his. But 
 the whole action was nullified by the unspeakable 
 Rumanians. They organized a terror against the 
 “communists,” in a month killing 6,000 intellectuals 
 and Jews. They looted the country with a thorough¬ 
 ness beside which the Germans in Belgium—even in 
 the earliest days—are as innocent as new-born babes. 
 They propagated anti-Semitism and carried out po- 
 
230 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 groms. They encouraged counter-revolutionaries, who 
 brought the Archduke Joseph into power. 
 
 This was more than even the Supreme Council— 
 certainly than Mr. Wilson, whose anti-monarchism 
 at least is adamant—could tolerate. Joseph was 
 driven out and a new government, or a succession of 
 them, was installed. The counter-revolution, with 
 Horthy for its figurehead, placed itself forcefully 
 in the saddle. The constitutional reforms created by 
 the Karolyi government and the communists were 
 abolished. A narrow franchise was established and 
 the monarchical principle reaffirmed. Freemasonry, 
 for reasons best known to the clericals, was suppressed. 
 The White Terror was amplified into a pogrom. The 
 party “Awakened Magyars” was organized. Officers 
 of the late imperial army, persons with titles, feudal 
 landlords, distinguished Catholics, were gathered 
 into terrorist bands, who murdered, raped, and stole 
 and committed unspeakable outrages upon workmen, 
 Socialists and Jews, particularly Jews. The press 
 was subjected to a rigid censorship. Martial law was 
 declared. The peasantry were reduced to a state 
 infinitely more miserable than under the autocratic 
 Communist regime, and far worse than under the 
 Hapsburgs. The workmen and their organizations 
 were proscribed. Unparalleled anti-Jewish laws were 
 enacted. An arrangement was made with the Entente, 
 perhaps with France alone, by which Hungary is to 
 maintain a large army against the Bolsheviks. The 
 details of the witches’ Sabbath which the counter¬ 
 revolution instituted and maintained in Hungary 
 may be read in the separate reports of the commissions 
 of inquiry sent by the International Federation of 
 
POLAND, UKRAINIA, HUNGARY, ETC. 231 
 
 Trades Unions and the British Labour Party. The 
 findings of both led to the reimposition of the blockade 
 upon Hungary until the White Terror should cease and 
 freedom and security be restored. This blockade 
 was an entirely new thing in the history of civilization. 
 It was not a blockade by governments but by the or¬ 
 ganized workers of the world. It was common interna¬ 
 tional action postulated upon the economy of industry 
 and the consciousness of solidarity, power, and inter¬ 
 dependence which the experience of the war has bred 
 among the trade-unionists of Europe. It is these who, 
 having discovered how, have become the effective 
 champions of a Europe safe for democracy. 
 
 The philosophy and ideal which underlie the tyran¬ 
 nous terror of Hungary are those of the class which 
 more than any other had served to precipitate the 
 Great War. It has simply transferred its animus from 
 the Slavs and Rumanians, whom the peace has re¬ 
 moved from its power, to the Jews. It exhibits a 
 mediaeval zest in the obscenities it commits upon them. 
 For it has the mediaeval mind. It is the class of 
 clericals and landlords, in no important way differing 
 from the similar class in Poland. It hates not com¬ 
 munism alone. It is inimical to mere democracy. 
 It desires the feudal respect for authority, the peonized 
 peasant and exploited workman. It wants the exter¬ 
 mination of the Jews. It wants to establish in Hungary 
 a “Christian national system” by which it means 
 a system wherein its own privileges will be forever 
 secure. Its identification of anti-Semitism with anti- 
 Bolshevism is no accident. In Hungary also the Jew 
 is being put to the traditional use of scapegoat. 
 
 The role of the Rumanians in the creation and main- 
 
232 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 tenance of this situation is one of the blackest spots 
 in the black history of the rulers of that land. It is a 
 role dictated by the need to divert public attention 
 from the sabotaged fulfilment of promised economic 
 reforms, and to find an outlet for the anger caused 
 among the unspeakable land-barons and bureaucracy 
 by the minority clauses in the peace treaty. Rumania, 
 more than any other Balkan country, has been a land¬ 
 lord’s paradise. The exploitation of the peasant has 
 been unutterably thorough, in fact, mediaeval, and 
 the development of a political opposition has been a 
 function of the bitter need of the peasants. Prior 
 to Rumanian participation in the Great War, this 
 need was on the point of compelling agrarian reform. 
 The instability of the country was then so great that 
 even a revision of the anti-Jewish laws was pledged, 
 and this was bound up with the enfranchisement of 
 the peasant. The Rumanian bargain with the En¬ 
 tente, by which Rumania entered the war in return 
 for the promise of an “ethnic Rumania” at the ex¬ 
 pense of Austria-Hungary and Russia, was not popular 
 with the people. The disastrous campaign of the 
 Rumanian armies was due not only to deficient general¬ 
 ship and Russian bureaucratic treachery but to 
 defective morale. In the peace of Bucharest the 
 Germans took advantage of this situation to bind 
 the Rumanian upper classes to themselves in terms 
 of benefits. The rights of the Jews which the treaty 
 purported to conserve were conserved in the spirit 
 and practice of the Rumanian constitution and the 
 Rumanian land-barons. The treaty and the German 
 occupation offered a complete alibi for the failure 
 to execute the promised reforms; a dangerous failure, 
 
POLAND, UKRAINIA, HUNGARY, ETC. 233 
 
 in view of the close connection between defeat and 
 revolution. This connection the government of Ru¬ 
 mania understood. It was afraid to demobilize. Its 
 swift invasion and looting of Hungary, its violation 
 of the terms of the armistice, its hide-and-seek policy 
 with the Peace Conference were designed to neutralize 
 the psychological consequences of defeat with at least 
 the simulation of victory—even over an outnumbered, 
 disarmed, and beaten foe. Its anti-Semitism in Hun¬ 
 gary was part and parcel of the same policy by which 
 it tried to escape accepting the minority-rights treaty, 
 and after accepting it, sought to delay and sabotage 
 its enactment by postponing the election of a new 
 parliament to ratify it, among the other familiar de¬ 
 vices of diplomatic sabotage. 
 
 In Rumania, as in other states, the cause of the Jews 
 and the cause of the masses of the people are identical, 
 the status of the former is a direct index of the freedom 
 and culture of the latter. Now, with the accession of 
 Bessarabia and Transylvania the Rumanian Govern¬ 
 ment acquired dominion over more than 500,000 addi¬ 
 tional Jews. The total number of Jews within the 
 Rumanian borders and entitled to citizenship becomes 
 well-nigh a million. Should the traditional Rumanian 
 rule be applied to them, they would be automatically 
 outlawed. For the government of Rumania, in order 
 to evade the application of articles 43 and 44 of the 
 Treaty of Berlin by which, in 1878, Rumania became 
 an independent kingdom, formulated into law what 
 under the Christian dispensation had been the social 
 position of the Jews in Europe since their disfranchise¬ 
 ment in the fourth century by the Emperor Constantius. 
 It designated the Jews as “ aliens without foreign 
 
234 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 protection”—that is, as aliens “in the eyes of the 
 law . . . even without the protection of alienage, 
 
 since allegiance on their part to any other government 
 is not recognized. They were literally looked upon as 
 
 men without a country ,” 1 without opportunity, without 
 
 % 
 
 hope, without redress. 
 
 Only the most explicit guarantees could save minori¬ 
 ties in a land of so black and so ingenious a mediaeval - 
 ism. These guarantees were given, not voluntarily. 
 That the ruling classes will continue to sabotage them 
 is a foregone conclusion. They face a repetition, on a 
 larger scale, of the revolution of 1907. Their habits 
 of mind are such that inevitably they will evade the 
 task of eradicating the causes of social unrest, which 
 alone can solve the problem; they will merely seek to 
 divert attention by spreading sentiments and organizing 
 action against the Jews. 
 
 Poland, the Ukraine, Hungary, Rumania—these lands 
 are all lands of primarily an agrarian economy, with no 
 middle class to speak of, backward, illiterate, ruled by 
 land-barons and exploited by priests; the most ad¬ 
 vanced of them is only at the beginnings of its democ¬ 
 racy—even in the eighteenth-century sense of that 
 term. A free government dedicated to the protection 
 and development of the Rousseauist-Jeffersonian “in¬ 
 alienable rights,” of “life, liberty, and the pursuit 
 of happiness” would, with the best good-will, still have 
 to take into consideration habits of thought and feeling, 
 the inertias of tradition and their modification by the 
 inescapable economic pressure and psychological in¬ 
 fluence of the automatic machine upon its people. 
 
 Memorial to President Wilson by representatives of the American 
 Jewish Congress, March, 1919. 
 
POLAND, UKRAINIA, HUNGARY, ETC. 235 
 
 It would have to depend upon rigorous preventive 
 justice, education, and industrialization to create 
 new habits and to establish a new ideology which in 
 course of time should save the people and prevent 
 Europe from going shipwreck. That they might be 
 destined to success may be gathered from the experi¬ 
 ence of Czecho-Slovakia and of the short-lived Magyar 
 Commune. Now the governments of Poland and 
 Rumania and Hungary are governments of and for a 
 class, not a people, and the Ukraine has been the 
 battlefield of opposed interests and ideologies without 
 regard to its people. Given the actualities of the 
 situation, hence, their organized anti-Semitism and 
 their fathering of Bolshevism upon the Jews were 
 deducible phenomena. Not so easily deducible is 
 the appearance of the same phenomena, in forms 
 somewhat less virulent, also in industrialized countries 
 like Germany and German Austria. Their scope and 
 extent varied with the increase of hunger, insecurity, 
 and disease, and the correlative reactionary reversions 
 to more primitive states of mind which accompany these. 
 In these countries, too, there has been manifest the 
 witch-hunting tendency to attribute the countries’ 
 ills to the Jews. Moreover, anti-Semitic sentiment 
 and propaganda appeared in France and even in England 
 and America. Wherever members of the old regime 
 in Russia, in Germany, or elsewhere in central Europe 
 found or retained a footing they generated or brought 
 with them and sought to spread this social poison 
 surviving from the Middle Ages. 
 
 A comic opera item in the activities of this conspiracy 
 was the revival and extensive use of the so-called 
 “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” These protocols 
 
236 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 are the last chapter in a typical book by a reputed 
 typical paranoid Russian mystic, one Nilus, in which 
 Nilus traces a divine comedy of approved mediaeval 
 type in terms of his own mystical experiences, and 
 those of his friends and his time, supported by docu¬ 
 ments manufactured ad hoc . An Orthodox and a 
 Russian, he makes the Jews the devil of the comedy, 
 ascribing to them a conspiracy to rule the world. The 
 sources of his fantasy may well be a book by one 
 Goedsche, a convicted forger, called “ Goeta, Warschau 
 and Dueppel,” extensively used by Junker anti-Semites 
 in Germany and similarly worked in Russian form by the 
 Tsarist government during the troubles of 1905-1906. 
 Its present use in the English-speaking world is as¬ 
 sociated with a person calling himself Frazier Curtis, 
 operating from London, and one Henry Ford, a very 
 rich maker of cheap automobiles who gave the non¬ 
 sense extensive circulation through his paper, the 
 Dearborn Independent, published at Dearborn, near 
 Detroit, U. S. A. It was first published in the Morning 
 Post , of London. Regarding it, Mr. Lucien Wolf writes 
 in the Manchester Guardian: 
 
 The prodigious essay on “The Cause of World Unrest” 
 which the Morning Post has lately published in seventeen 
 articles and some sixty columns of printed matter is a docu¬ 
 ment on which the student of political thought in England 
 will dwell sadly. Over a century ago, in world circumstances 
 of startling similarity and almost from the same party 
 standpoint, Burke gave us, in his “Causes of the Present 
 Discontents,” his “Reflections,” and his “Regicide Peace,” 
 a large and stately piece of political philosophy. To-day 
 the leading organ of Conservative opinion in this country 
 can only expound a sort of political demonology, borrowed 
 partly from the obscurantists of Bourbon Clericalism and 
 
POLAND, UKRAINIA, HUNGARY, ETC. 237 
 
 partly from the fanatics of Hohenzollern Anti-Semitism. 
 It would be merciful to pass by this strange effort in silence, 
 but unfortunately there is reason to believe that with all 
 its grotesqueness, it is calculated to work a good deal of 
 mischief. Credulous and vicious people are still abundant, 
 and they are not confined to the crowd. Mr. Winston 
 Churchill has darkly hinted that he reads the signs of the 
 times much in the same way as the Morning Post , and a 
 curious story is current that the translation of the Russian 
 forgery on which the theory of that journal mainly rests 
 was actually made in the Intelligence Department of the 
 War Office. Then there are Mr. Chesterton and Mr. 
 Belloc and quite a conventicle of smaller fry who have been 
 vainly preaching the same apocalypse for years. The 
 Morning Post may bring them recruits, and that assuredly 
 is not desirable. 
 
 The theory of the Morning Post may be briefly stated. 
 Its fundamental contention is that all political unrest is 
 artificial. It is a product of the Hidden Hand which is 
 now revealed to us as a “Formidable Sect” encompassing 
 the world. This sect has been at its present work for at 
 least a hundred and fifty years. The French Revolution 
 was contrived by it, as well as all the subordinate revolutions 
 down to our own time. Trade Unionism, Socialism, Syndic¬ 
 alism, Bolshevism, Sinn Fein, Indian Nationalism, and their 
 analogues in every part of the globe are outward and visible 
 signs of its sinister activity. That there are social grievances 
 and even evils at the root of this unrest is not denied, but 
 they are as artificial as the unrest itself. They have all been 
 deliberately brought about by the Hidden Hand in order 
 to stir up revolt against the Throne and Altar. The way 
 in which it is done is a little complicated. Behind the 
 restless and seditious movements which we all know there 
 is a secret revolutionary organization in the shape of Free¬ 
 masonry. But this is only intermediate, for Freemasonry 
 itself, through some obscure transaction between the Temp¬ 
 lars and the Old Man of the Mountain, was created by 
 the “Formidable Sect,” and is wholly, though perhaps un¬ 
 consciously, under its control. 
 
238 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 Now what is this “Formidable Sect”? It is no other 
 than the Jews. Those ancient enemies of the human race 
 are alleged to be far more daring and dynamic in evil-doing 
 than is generally supposed. Throughout their world-wide 
 Dispersion they have secretly preserved their old political 
 organization, and they have used it—and are still using it— 
 with deadly persistency to overturn the established Christian 
 order of things and to found in its place a universal Jewish 
 dominion under the sceptre of a Sovereign of the House of 
 David. The Jews are, in short, the “cause of the world 
 unrest.” 
 
 There is nothing new in this theory except the claim of 
 its authors to have produced documentary proof of its final 
 development—that is, of its Jewish aspect. It was invented 
 over a century ago, as it has been resurrected to-day, to 
 explain the unfamiliar international character of the pre¬ 
 vailing unrest. The clergy and the nobility of the ancien 
 regime were as little capable as the Morning Post tO-day 
 of understanding the natural causes of this phenomenon. 
 And yet they were by no means obscure. The French 
 Revolution, as Burke pointed out, was not a mere uprising 
 against local oppression, but a “revolution of doctrine and 
 theoretic dogma” which was bound to find echoes beyond 
 the French frontiers. In this respect it resembled the 
 Reformation, and also that other “armed doctrine” which 
 we know as Bolshevism. Nevertheless, it puzzled the 
 Bourbon apologists, and, confusing cause and effect, they 
 became convinced that they were in the presence of an 
 international conspiracy. The theory was first propounded 
 by a Superior of the Seminary of Eudists at Caen in 1790, 
 but it was afterward vastly developed by the Abbe Barruel 
 in his “Memoires sur le Jacobinisme,” by Robinson of 
 Edinburgh in his “Proofs of a Conspiracy,” and by the 
 Chevalier de Malet in his “Recherches Historiques.” Their 
 conclusion was that there was a triple conspiracy of Phi¬ 
 losophers, Freemasons, and Illuminati who form an actual 
 sect aiming deliberately and methodically at the overthrow 
 of the established religions and Governments throughout 
 Europe. The theory had a short shrift, though the industry 
 
POLAND, UKRAINIA, HUNGARY, ETC. 239 
 
 of its authors did much to throw light on the organization 
 and activities of the secret societies. So far as the Free¬ 
 masons and Illuminati were concerned it was easily demol¬ 
 ished by the Earl of Moira, who, at a meeting of the Grand 
 Lodge of England in 1800, showed convincingly that it was 
 a mare’s nest. As for the Philosophers, no one ever took 
 the charge against them seriously. For half a century 
 scarcely anything more was heard of this aspect of the 
 “Formidable Sect,” though meanwhile the revolutions of 
 1830 and 1848 had taken place. The nonsuit of Barruel 
 was chose jugee. 
 
 It was revived in the sixties under the influence of the 
 religious passions kindled by the war for Italian unity. 
 The struggle for Jewish emancipation had triumphed all 
 over western Europe, and the new citizens thus enfranchised 
 had everywhere cast in their lot with the Liberal parties. 
 This was swiftly and angrily noted by the Ultramontane 
 polemists, and the old bogey of a “Formidable Sect” began 
 to haunt them in a new and enlarged form. In the new 
 conspiracy there was no longer any talk of Philosophers 
 and Illuminati. Their place was taken by Jews and Prot¬ 
 estants. The “Formidable Sect” thus became a triple 
 alliance of Freemasons, Jews, and Protestants which was 
 said to be directed by the “Grand Master Palmerston” 
 and supported by the whole British people, not only as Prot¬ 
 estants but as descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel and 
 the subjects of a dynasty claiming descent from the House 
 of David. The chief protagonist of this stupendous halluci¬ 
 nation was M. Gougenot des Mousseaux, who in 1869 em¬ 
 bodied it in a volume entitled “Le Juif, le Judaisme, et la 
 Judaisation des Peuples Chretiens.” From his own ad¬ 
 missions, however, it appears that he was largely indebted 
 to German Catholic inspiration. Once again the theory 
 failed to find support, and Gougenot’s book, like the books 
 of Barruel and Robinson, became relegated to the literature 
 of forgotten crazes. 
 
 Later on, however, attempts to revive it were made by 
 M. de Saint-Andre, the Abbe Chabauty, M. Drumont, M. 
 Martin, and M. Copin-Ablancelli, in the full flood of Anti- 
 
240 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 Semitic agitation which had been imported into France from 
 Germany. The only notable addition made to the theory 
 by these writers was the hypothesis of a secret Jewish 
 government, transported from Jerusalem into the Diaspora, 
 which, throughout the ages, has never ceased to command 
 the allegiance of international Jewry and to conspire against 
 the established order of Christian Society. Since 1909 
 the agitation has become retransferred to the headquarters 
 of Clerical Anti-Semitism in Vienna and Munich, and the 
 most recent works on the subject with which the Morning 
 Post appears to have mainly worked, although for obvious 
 reasons it does not acknowledge them—are Wichtl’s 
 “ Weltfreimaurerei, Weltrevolution, Weltrepublik,” Meister’s 
 “Judas Schuldbuch,” and Rosenberg’s “Die Spur des Judens 
 im Wandel der Zeiten,” all published in 1919. All this 
 literature, while expounding exactly the same theory as 
 that of the Morning Post , is as violently anti-English as it is 
 anti-Masonic and anti-Jewish. 
 
 This, then, is the discredited raw material of the theory 
 hashed up as a serious contribution to the grave political 
 preoccupations of British statesmanship at this moment. 
 It will be noted, however, that in the forms so far referred 
 to it is confessedly a theory, resting at the best on evidence 
 of a highly circumstantial character. The novelty in its 
 latest presentation is that an effort is made to bolster it up 
 with what is claimed to be direct evidence. This takes the 
 form of a document entitled “The Protocols of the Learned 
 Elders of Zion,” which was published in an anonymous 
 pamphlet a few months ago by Messrs. Eyre and Spottis- 
 woode. These protocols are alleged to be the minutes 
 of certain meetings of the Secret Directory of the Jewish 
 people held in Paris toward the end of the last century, 
 and they record avowals by the Elders, of the very conspir¬ 
 acy set forth hypothetically by M M. Gougenot des Mous- 
 seaux and Copin-Albancelli. “In this book,” says the 
 Morning Post triumphantly, “for the first time we find an 
 open declaration of the terrible conspiracy of the ‘Formida- 
 able Sect.’ ” 
 
 Unhappily for those who rely on it this document is a 
 
POLAND, UKRAINIA, HUNGARY, ETC. 241 
 
 clumsy forgery which has already been used for the most 
 disreputable purposes. It has been known to the Jewish 
 community for some years. The first draft of it was fabri¬ 
 cated in 1868 by an official in the Prussian Post Office named 
 Hermann Goedsche, who was dismissed from the service on 
 account of more vulgar forgeries. It was long a stock 
 broadsheet of the German Anti-Semites. In 1905 it was 
 used in Russia by the secret police for pogrom propaganda, 
 and it was afterward embodied in a politico-apocalyptic 
 book on Antichrist by a disciple of Father John of Cronstadt, 
 one Serge Nilus, who sought to show that the old “For¬ 
 midable Sect” of Gougenot des Mousseaux, consisting of Jews 
 and Freemasons under the direction of England, was the 
 real Antichrist. This book was used to persuade the credu¬ 
 lous Tsar to conclude a secret treaty with the German Em¬ 
 peror aimed at England and the Entente. In 1918 and 1919 
 doctored typewritten copies of the protocols, with the 
 anti-English passages carefully deleted, were secretly cir¬ 
 culated by emissaries of Koltchak’s and Denikine’s intelli¬ 
 gence service among Cabinet Ministers and other officials 
 of the Allied and Associated Powers, with the object of show¬ 
 ing that Bolshevism was an exclusively Jewish creation 
 and that the whole Russian people were innocent of it. 
 It was then that, thanks to the American Department of 
 Justice, the Jewish community were made aware of their 
 existence. They had already done considerable mischief, 
 as may be seen by the propaganda leaflets distributed by 
 the aeroplane service of the British armies at Archangel 
 and Murmansk and certain oracular utterances of Mr. 
 Winston Churchill in a Sunday newspaper. 
 
 Last year the idea occurred to certain enterprising people 
 who had been concerned in these manoeuvres, and who were 
 justly affrighted by the impending collapse of Denikine, 
 that money might be made out of the protocols. Accord¬ 
 ingly, certain of the Jewish Delegations in Paris were ap¬ 
 proached with an intimation that these precious documents 
 were about to be published, and the kindly offer was made 
 to spare Israel this damning disclosure for the trifling sum 
 of £10,000. 
 
242 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 The upshot of the matter is that the “Formidable Sect” 
 is a German Anti-Semitic and Anglophobe myth constructed 
 out of garbled history and synthetized by impudent forgery. 
 How and for what purpose it has been foisted on the in¬ 
 nocence of the Morning Post have yet to be explained. 
 
 Mr. Wolf’s review, it will be observed, gives indica¬ 
 tions of the existence of something like a gigantic 
 international conspiracy against the Jews designed 
 everywhere to link them with the contemporary devil 
 of respectable society—Bolshevism. Even in Palestine, 
 the Bishop of Jerusalem, a most respectable man, and 
 a pillar of the Church of England, objected to Zionism 
 because of this imputed linkage. 
 
 That the linkage is more often than not malicious 
 and mythopoetic does not alter the fact that it is made 
 —and that it is believed. Nor is this fact much 
 modified by the observation that the attribution is 
 invariably made by parties of reaction, clericalism, 
 and privilege and that the champions of the Jews are 
 the contemporary champions of the rights of man— 
 the workmen’s organizations like the British Labour 
 Party, the men of letters, the liberals, the scientists. 
 We are here face to face with a characteristic phase 
 of Christian psychology. It is a phenomenon which is 
 part and parcel of the recrudescence of atavistic 
 traits in European society, a recrudescence brought on 
 by the general disintegration of the normal spirit of man 
 which the over-centralization of the war and the 
 anarchy of the peace have caused. Central Europe, 
 forced back to practically a primitive mediaeval 
 economy by the terms of the peace, has reverted 
 automatically to the primitive mediaeval mentality. 
 Once again the Jew, assigned to that status by the 
 
POLAND, UKRAINIA, HUNGARY, ETC. 243 
 
 * mediseval theory of life, is made the scapegoat of 
 the ills of the people. Kolchak or Denikine, Kapp 
 or Dmowski, Stephan Friedrich or Bratianu, Maxse 
 or Drumont, Henry Ford or the Morning Post, their 
 psychology is alike. Through them and their followers, 
 the Jews become the ultimate burnt-offerings to the 
 delusions of the peace which was made to save de¬ 
 mocracy, to insure the rights of minorities, and to 
 establish international comity. 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 
 FROM VERSAILLES TO SAN REMO—PALESTINE AND THE 
 
 NEAR-EASTERN PROBLEM 
 
 THE reaction of the Jews themselves to the situation, 
 though not simple, was not confused. Although in 
 some respects the bitter epigram of Zangwill’s 
 
 Hear, O Israel, Jehovah, the Lord thy God, is one, 
 
 But we, Jehovah His people, are dual, and so undone. 
 
 has become truer than ever, in others, it has been con¬ 
 siderably weakened by circumstances. Under the 
 impact of the central European catastrophe the prin¬ 
 ciple of “sauve qui peut” came naturally and auto¬ 
 matically into operation. The Jews have their 
 emigres , no less than the Russians, the Ruthenians, 
 the Austrians, with the emigre mentality and aspirations. 
 They have their Socialists and Bolshevists with the 
 inquisitorial fanaticism of a new religion powerful 
 at last, and they have their established behaviour- 
 patterns of custom, habit, and tradition. The inner 
 life of the Jewish peoples of central and eastern Europe 
 was determined by the confrontation of these psycholog¬ 
 ical forces, with the victory inevitably for the deeper- 
 lying and more primitive trends of mentality. The 
 objective of these trends is secular, but the emotions 
 usually called religious had an overruling influence 
 in rendering it authoritative. Circumstances, more- 
 
 244 
 
PALESTINE AND THE NEAR EAST £45 
 
 over, endowed it with a material purposiveness which 
 in other periods of persecution it had never possessed. 
 It is, of course, Zion, the traditional substance of 
 salvation. 
 
 Between the protagonists of the Zionist idea and 
 programme and the abstract and doctrinaire humani- 
 tarianism of the Jewish internationalists of the Bolshe¬ 
 vik or other Socialist sects there was fought out con¬ 
 comitantly with the tragedies of the Ukraine, Hungary, 
 and Poland, a battle for the .leadership of the Jewish 
 community and the control of the Jewish institutions. 
 In the Ukraine and Russia the Socialist sectaries ac¬ 
 cused the Zionists of being tools of British imperialism, 
 of providing army corps to combat the people’s rights 
 in Egypt and Syria and India. During the German 
 occupation in the Ukraine they called them “infamous 
 friends of England.” When the Soviet government 
 reconquered the Ukraine they accused them of re¬ 
 action and counter-revolution. They denounced He¬ 
 brew as the bulwark of Jewish clericalism and they 
 did their best to obtain complete control of the com¬ 
 munal institutions and the Jewish National Assembly. 
 Disastrously defeated by the Zionists in the elections 
 of 1918, they withdrew from the Assembly, and de¬ 
 voted themselves, under the Bolshevist dominion— 
 which, instructed by them that they represented 
 the Jewish masses, had given them place and power— 
 to persecuting the Zionist organization and breaking 
 up the Jewish communities. They even succeeded, 
 through the intervention of the Ukrainian communist 
 Diamanstein, who was visiting Moscow, in persuading 
 the central government, which had always tried to 
 deal justly with the racial minorities in its dominions, 
 
246 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 to undertake the complete repression of the Zionists. 
 This was prevented by a protest meeting in Moscow. 
 Attended incognito by Soviet commissaries, it in¬ 
 fluenced them to take steps correcting the mistake. 
 
 Of course, the feeling of the Jewish masses in Russia 
 and the Ukraine against the Jewish communists 
 could not fail to become intensely bitter. In the 
 Zionist programme and the Zionist organization they 
 had found the fusion of their past and present hopes 
 of salvation. It gave them a foundation for self- 
 respect and a programme for creative action. The 
 Balfour Declaration, which had come to them as a 
 promise of relief, had developed with the growing 
 tragedy of the time into a gospel of religious hope. 
 More than a million of what remained of the three 
 million disinherited Jews of Russia and the Ukraine 
 were, because of their sufferings, in the state of mind 
 where madness and religious inspiration cannot be 
 distinguished. In Russia great undertakings were 
 planned for Palestine and large sums—in rubles— 
 subscribed. Enormous migrations were projected. 
 Odessa and Sebastopol were overrun with committees 
 trying to arrange migration or restrain migration. 
 Workmen’s groups were organized in thousands. 
 Young men and old sailed in fishing smacks or wandered 
 on foot—to find themselves stranded in Constan¬ 
 tinople and other wayside cities. Poland, Hungary, 
 Rumania—by and large—were in this respect echoes 
 of Russia and the Ukraine. All classes of the Jewish 
 population exhibited the same dominant trend. Even 
 in Germany—where the “Germans of the Mosaic 
 confession” who had before the war controlled the 
 Jewish communities found themselves facing a general 
 
PALESTINE AND THE NEAR EAST 247 
 
 democratic movement for nation-wide community 
 organization analogous to that in the eastward lands— 
 the unity of sentiment on Zionism stood out in con¬ 
 trast to the division on domestic problems. 
 
 This was still more true in the western lands. There 
 were many conflicts within the Jewish communities, 
 accentuated by the war—in America over the perma¬ 
 nence of the American Jewish Congress; in England 
 over the responsibility of the Slitadlanic heads of the 
 Jewish population there. But excepting negligible 
 cases of “imaginative nervousness” or doctrinal 
 repressions, the unity of sentiment regarding the 
 Jewish Homeland was extraordinary. The Board of 
 Deputies in Great Britain had already in March, 1918, 
 endorsed the Balfour Declaration and the planned 
 terms of the Mandate. During the ensuing year it 
 also established with the Committee of Jewish Delega¬ 
 tions informally closer and closer relationships that 
 only waited an annual meeting to be made formal. 
 Alone the Anglo-Jewish Association and the Alliance 
 Israelite Universelle still stood out against the union, 
 their theological internationalism serving the same 
 practical purpose as the economic internationalism 
 of the Jewish communists of obstructing united Jewish 
 action to save two thirds of the Jewish population 
 of the world being done to death. 
 
 The Committee of Jewish Delegations carried on as 
 best it could. It pressed matters left pending by the 
 adjournment of the Paris Conference. It studied and 
 reported on conditions that developed in central 
 Europe. It protested to the public opinion of the 
 world and interpellated and memorialized govern¬ 
 ments. Its constituencies in America and in western 
 
248 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 Europe took similar action with regard to their own 
 governments. And the governments promised investi¬ 
 gation and correction—which, no doubt, in the course 
 of diplomatic time and according to diplomatic agree¬ 
 ments may be effected. But all the while from central 
 Europe the bitter cry of the Jews went up. And they 
 suffered and endured only through the hope of the 
 New Zion. 
 
 Yet as the months crept on, they began to fear, as 
 we have already noted, that the saving vision, which 
 had been the essence of the morale of Jewry through 
 all the long centuries of its outlawry, was about to be 
 destroyed at its base. Not only the leaders, the whole 
 Jewish people became shaken by a bitter great dis¬ 
 quiet. Rumours spread among them in all the lands 
 where they dwelt, that the Balfour Declaration had 
 been only a diplomatic gesture, and having served its 
 purpose, would be abandoned, like other used-up war 
 materials. 
 
 Specifically the reasons were as follows: 
 
 War propaganda, reenforcing the nationalism of the 
 upper classes of Egypt, of Syria, and other of the Asiatic 
 tributaries of the Turk, fused with war oppression 
 and administrative stupidities in Egypt and India, to 
 bring into existence something like a political sentiment 
 among the altogether unpolitical and economically 
 primitive masses of those countries. This sentiment 
 constituted a social explosive which almost anything 
 in the way of an error of judgment or a failure in 
 tact might touch off. Arabia and Irak, which had been 
 under the Turk an insulating vacuum between the two 
 centres, became, under the contagion of Syrian na¬ 
 tionalism and British propaganda, a fairly sensitive 
 
PALESTINE AND THE NEAR EAST 249 
 
 conducting surface. In consequence the Arab world, 
 with its very contrasting social classes and levels 
 of culture, was on the point of attaining a unity of 
 feeling—secular, this time—which it had not been 
 possessed by since the days of the great Arab Khalifs. 
 The ideational channels of this feeling and of the 
 programme of action to which it was to supply the 
 force ran in one direction to the imperialistic extremes 
 of pan-Arabism, in other, to the nationalist harmonics 
 of the Wilsonian programme and the Balfour Declara¬ 
 tion. The latter had in a very short time after its 
 promulgation become a sort of gospel of reconstruction 
 among the masses of the Allies. Article XII of the 
 Fourteen Points stated: 
 
 The Turkish portions of the present Ottoman Empire 
 should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other na¬ 
 tionalities which are now under Turkish rule should be 
 assured an undoubted security of life and absolutely un¬ 
 molested opportunity for autonomous development, and the 
 Dardanelles should be permanently opened as a free passage 
 to the ships and commerce of all nations under international 
 guarantees. 
 
 Until discussions actually began in Paris this para¬ 
 graph represented to the minds of all but the most ex¬ 
 tremist of Syrian and Arab leaders the realistic limits 
 of what they might hope to attain. They were ready 
 to acquiesce in it. To the rather primitive peoples— 
 the Armenians may, perhaps, be excepted—whose self- 
 chosen representatives they were, even these conditions 
 were of remote and somewhat speculative importance. 
 But as it began to be more and more apparent that the 
 official American and popular liberal European terms 
 
250 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 of settlement were being entirely disregarded by the 
 Peace Conference, that the settlement had become the 
 usual diplomat’s game of grab, and that the presenta¬ 
 tion of the Turkish treaty was destined to indefinite 
 delay, Turks and Arabs began a play for their own 
 hands. 
 
 For the Turks the play was desperate. They had 
 been refused all consideration by the Council of Four 
 in terms as unmistakable as they were stinging. Their 
 state, even such as it had been, was completely ruined, 
 and their pre-war pan-Turanianism was bankrupt. 
 There remained a nationalist eastward propaganda 
 among the more or less Turanian stocks from Anatolia 
 to the Carpathians, and a religious general propaganda 
 among the Moslem faithful. Pan-Turanianism and pan- 
 Moslemism were preached at one and the same time. 
 The nationalist leader, Mustapha Kjamil Pasha, produced 
 a reconciling formula for these essentially irreconcilable 
 doctrines. “I preach,” he declared, “Islam as a race.” 
 At the same time he made use of Islam to foment and 
 increase the unrest in Moslem India, Egypt, and Syria. 
 By the Moslems of India, whose nationalist preoccupa¬ 
 tions would be well served by such an occasion, the 
 Turkish peace and the integrity of the Turkish Empire 
 was converted into a religious question of the Khalifate. 
 In Egypt and Syria the conception of the unity of the 
 Moslem world was made the basis of a bitter anti- 
 European propaganda. 
 
 This was possible because the Arabic world was itself 
 insecure in status and confused in counsel. To the 
 contagion which it was undergoing at the hands of the 
 Turks were added the effects of the vacillating policy 
 of the English and the logical imperialism of the French. 
 
PALESTINE AND THE NEAR EAST 251 
 
 Between these two countries a duel went on of which 
 the purpose was, so far as the French were concerned, 
 to squeeze the maximum of advantage out of the 
 Sykes-Picot Treaty; so far as the English were concerned 
 to assuage the excitement in Egypt and in India, to 
 keep their words to the Arabs and the Jews, and to 
 make sure of the possession of the Mesopotamian 
 oil fields and the gates to India. Many British officials, 
 particularly the political and ethnographic experts, 
 felt that this could be accomplished only with great 
 difficulty, and that the Jews were the essential part 
 of any plan not merely of conciliation but of develop¬ 
 ment of the Far East. So, as we have seen, Sir Mark 
 Sykes believed, dwelling on the concept of a confedera¬ 
 tion of Jews, Arabs, and Armenians in a great league 
 of Syria and Asia Minor. In the opinion of Col. T. E. 
 Lawrence, who had been the chief British agent in 
 Arabia and Feisal’s right hand in all the activities 
 of the Hedjaz from the first contact to the conference 
 in Paris, Zionism was “the only practical means of 
 setting the new Semitic near east in order in our own 
 days.” He urged that the Jews become Palestinians 
 as quickly as possible and bring into play in the life 
 of Asia Minor that aspect of their temperament 
 which, because of their long European discipline, is 
 complementary to that of the Arab. Major Ormsby- 
 Gore, the first liaison officer between the Zionist 
 Administrative Commission and the military govern¬ 
 ment in Palestine, now a member of Parliament, urged 
 the necessity of Jewish initiative in the revival of 
 Arabic culture as a foremost device in relieving the 
 long strain due to political disturbances in the Arabian 
 world. General Smuts held a similar opinion. 
 
252 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 The military, on the other hand, felt that all the 
 British purposes could not be accomplished at the same 
 time and that for the good of the empire one or another 
 of them would have to be dropped. They were for 
 dropping the pledge to the Jews. Under that pledge, 
 the strategic problem in Asia Minor and in Egypt 
 became complicated. Palestine became a sort of 
 buffer state between the nationalism of Egypt and 
 the nationalism of Arabia that, from the military 
 point of view, could not be successfully held. A 
 much easier and simpler thing to hold would be a united 
 Asia Minor, a Pan-Arabia, with no ethnic or religious 
 problems superadded to those already existing. Mili¬ 
 tary experience had already proved this. While 
 all Asia Minor was under Allenby, there had been no 
 exceptional police difficulties or any other type of 
 trouble. The administration of Syria and Trans- 
 jordania by the French and Arab officials had gone on 
 smoothly and easily enough. But then Paris demanded 
 and London ordered, in fulfilment of the Sykes-Picot 
 Treaty, the withdrawal of the British troops to the 
 boundaries set by the treaty. The withdrawal was 
 executed—under the protest of both Allenby and Bols, 
 and border troubles immediately began. 
 
 Thinking thus in strategic and imperialistic terms, 
 and animated perhaps by the vision of a continuous 
 British protectorate, from the Mediterranean to 
 India, the military administration, backed by the 
 missionary interest, took advantage of the rules 
 imposed by the Hague conventions regarding the 
 government of occupied enemy territory to sabotage 
 the Balfour Declaration and to establish their own 
 programme as a fait accompli. Anti-Semitism among 
 
PALESTINE AND THE NEAR EAST 253 
 
 high officials had not a little to do with the matter; 
 ignorance, stupidity, and incompetence among their 
 subordinates not a little. That they were not officially 
 made aware of the Balfour Declaration helped. That, 
 as Colonel Lawrence pointed out to Doctor Weizmann, 
 Episcopal dioceses with missionary interests organized 
 anti-Jewish propaganda, helped. And the almost 
 parallel stupidity, ignorance, and incompetence of the 
 Palestinian Jews, and their unparalleled disunion, their 
 sectarian, nationalate, linguistic, and other quarrels, 
 helped. The Occupied Enemy Territory Administra¬ 
 tion was crowded with ex-Turkish officials and Syrian 
 Christians who were used and who made spontaneous 
 use of their positions in political intrigue and opposition 
 to Zionism. Military officers known to be anti-Jewish 
 were appointed to what would become permanent 
 posts. The use of Hebrew on official documents was 
 sabotaged. Palestine became the gathering place for 
 Egyptian and Syrian agitators and the propaganda 
 field of a subsidized press. The Arab landlord and 
 the Arab money-lender were automatically adopting 
 the tactics of the Polish and Hungarian and Rumanian 
 upper classes in the attempt to retain their privileged 
 stranglehold upon the peasantry. Meanwhile, officers 
 of administration were making promises of amendment 
 and correction which were never carried out, while in 
 Europe, Curzon, as Secretary of State for Foreign 
 Affairs, was solemnly reaffirming the Balfour Declara¬ 
 tion. 
 
 The position of the Zionist Administrative Commis¬ 
 sion under these circumstances may be imagined. 
 Its personnel was constantly changing, and in its 
 permanent membership there was no one of character, 
 
254 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 competency, and distinction great enough to command 
 the respect of the military administration. In the 
 course of little more than a year it gathered into 
 its offices a body of Palestinian experts-by-book and 
 others who were no better than the officials of the ad¬ 
 ministration. It tried hard to introduce—particularly 
 at the beginning, when Americans were unofficially 
 in the Commission—system and efficiency into the 
 affairs of the Palestinian communities, but it was 
 neither skilled nor wise enough to find a device that 
 might overcome the babel of minute sectarian, geo¬ 
 graphical, linguistic, economic, social, and political 
 groupings from which the Jewish population of Palestine 
 suffers, and into which it had again disintegrated with 
 the relaxation of the unity of the war. The Commis¬ 
 sion was required to meet problems of relief, education, 
 health, and political organization, but its departments 
 were organized according to a pedantic scheme rather 
 than according to the realities it was called upon to 
 face. Such realities were the Arabs with whom it 
 should have sought a rapprochement, the rising cost 
 of living and the increasing emigration of Jews from 
 Palestine. But for this it possessed neither the 
 inward equipment nor the outward prestige. It 
 needed capacity, men, and money, and the last was piti¬ 
 fully inadequate even for such powers and abilities 
 as it possessed. Palestinian Jewry at the same time 
 were deeply engrossed in the very pleasing business of 
 getting all they could out of the situation, or in speculat¬ 
 ing profoundly and arguing loudly regarding political 
 forms and economic programmes, while the concrete 
 task of work and self-maintenance from day to day 
 were left to the agencies of relief or went by default. 
 
PALESTINE AND THE NEAR EAST 255 
 
 Even the American Zionist Medical Unit—in its 
 relation to its setting a paragon of disciplined efficiency 
 —was infused with the quarrelsome contagion. It 
 also found itself undergoing, in addition to the op¬ 
 position of the old-fashioned Palestinian physicians 
 and the jurisdictional disputes with the Commission, 
 internal dissensions. Its work, indeed, was the most 
 hopeful, and a function of its entire independence from 
 the Commission. It created what is in practice a 
 national health service, with hospitals both fixed 
 and mobile, and medical help for all the inhabitants 
 of the land, without distinction of race or creed. An¬ 
 other hopeful indication was the creation of the Pro- 
 Jerusalem Society, made up of Jews and Arabs, with 
 the purpose of cleaning up, preserving, and beautifying 
 old Jerusalem and building a decent new Jerusalem. 
 Still another was the agitation over the franchise for 
 women precipitated by the orthodox rabbis, whose 
 opinion of women and their rights corresponded with 
 the orthodox opinion of all sects at all times. This 
 quarrel—which through the courageous action of the 
 Commission delayed the election of “the constituent 
 assembly” of Palestinian Jewry until it was settled— 
 was finally settled in favour of the women. 1 Something 
 got done also to improve the educational system and 
 the condition of the teachers. The problem of main¬ 
 tenance was faced, if not met. Consumers’ cooperatives 
 were first encouraged and then mishandled. Kwuzoth 
 or cooperative workmen’s colonies were outfitted. 
 Irrigation and water-power surveys were planned, and 
 
 x The ‘‘Constitutent Assembly” was chosen on the basis of a secret, 
 direct ballot and proportional representation. The workmen’s organizations 
 and the Sephardic communities made the best runs, the others being too 
 broken by schisms and dissensions or being boycotted by the electors. 
 
256 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 within the straitened financial limits undertaken— 
 the engineer in charge being Pincus Ruthenberg, one 
 of the few really forceful personalities who had reached 
 Palestine. 
 
 But confusion and inefficiency within and political 
 obstruction and anxiety without were on the whole too 
 great handicaps. Mr. Justice Brandeis’s visit to 
 Palestine in the summer of 1919 relieved the situation 
 a little. Through his influence one of the chief sabotteurs 
 of the Balfour Declaration was removed, and a politi¬ 
 cally much wiser and administratively more competent 
 man was sent in his place. One man, however, work¬ 
 ing in transit could do little to break the bureaucratic 
 web of intrigue that had somehow gotten stretched 
 from the meanest Arab money-lender in .Nablus to the 
 highest English administrative officer in Cairo. The 
 crisis in the duel of empire developed with the approach 
 of the time for the promulgation of the Turkish treaty 
 of peace. Signs were not lacking that a coup was being 
 prepared not without analogies to the South African 
 coup which was aborted by the Jameson raid. The 
 Arab Club at Damascus—the heir of the nationalist 
 group of the Great War—was encouraged to make 
 bolder and bolder demands. It was anti-French— 
 as are the vast majority of Syrians—and its titular 
 head was Feisal. Its resources came from the Arab 
 administration and this functioned on subsidies from 
 the British and French governments. In cases of 
 error, the more cautious, substantial, and propertied 
 Nationalist Party served to neutralize the attitude 
 of the firebrands, but in an emergency it would not 
 fail to act with the Arab Club. The demands of this 
 club took the form of the resurrection on an imperial 
 
PALESTINE AND THE NEAR EAST 257 
 
 scale of the proposals made in the early days of the 
 war by the Arab National Committee which had been 
 betrayed to the Turks and by them crushed. There 
 was to be an imperial Arab state, under British pro¬ 
 tection, coextensive with Asia Minor. This state 
 should be a fait accompli that the unsuspecting politi¬ 
 cians in Downing Street and the negotiators in San 
 Remo should, willy-nilly, have to face and acknowledge. 
 So, in March, 1920, a Syrian Congress coming together 
 any which way proclaimed Feisal king of Syria and 
 Palestine and his brother Abdullah king of Mesopo¬ 
 tamia. At the same time the Egyptian legislative 
 assembly met and proclaimed the independence cf 
 Egypt and the Sudan. The understandings Feisal 
 declared he had with Doctor Weizmann, his written 
 statements and public proclamations of endorsement 
 of and cooperation with Zionism, the pledge made by 
 the British Government through the Balfour Declara¬ 
 tion, these were to be redeemed by giving Feisal a man¬ 
 date for Palestine and guaranteeing Jewish rights 
 therein by means of a minority treaty of the type the 
 Jews had themselves promulgated for themselves 
 and the other minorities of central and eastern Europe. 
 
 How this brilliant and sardonic conception would 
 have fared among the politicians had the European 
 entanglements of the Entente and the political com¬ 
 plications in India not been in the way, may be specu¬ 
 lated upon. The Moslems of India were demanding 
 an integral Turkey for the sake—so they said—of 
 the Khalifate. They repudiated the Emir at Mecca 
 and all his works. The Tripolitan Arabs protested 
 Feisal, and the Lebanon Committee—these represented 
 the French connection—demanded that he evacuate 
 
258 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 Syria. The French—who seem in addition to have 
 mobilized the Catholic interest (which acquired a 
 sudden anxiety about the Holy Places and reversed 
 itself on Zionism) and to have encouraged the Arab 
 nationalists outside of their piece of Syria—demanded 
 the letter and the spirit of the Sykes-Picot Treaty. 
 
 In Arabia and in Palestine the crowning of Feisal 
 was accompanied by propaganda both spoken and 
 printed. The number of foreign agitators in Palestine 
 multiplied. The city populations, especially that of 
 Jerusalem, were particularly inflamed. Tension in¬ 
 creased. The British authorities were warned by 
 members of the Zionist Commission and by others 
 that there was danger of bloodshed. They ordered 
 the population to give up its arms but they enforced 
 the order against the Jews and not against the Arabs. 
 They were asked to bring in soldiers to do the policing, 
 and they refused that. One anti-Zionist demonstra¬ 
 tion succeeded another. Appeals to the Arabs by 
 the Va’ad Hazmani —a sort of provisional council of 
 the Jewish community—for peace and cooperation 
 failed of attention even. Under the circumstances 
 Vladimir Jabotinsky and Pincus Ruthenberg pro¬ 
 ceeded, in violation of the governor’s prohibition, to 
 organize a defense brigade. The organization was not 
 complete or effective enough to prevent the culminating 
 riot and bloodshed during the Passover of 1920. It 
 had been preceded by a demand—on the threat of a 
 massacre of the Jews—that the Administration suppress 
 the Zionist Commission, expel the leaders, and dis¬ 
 solve the Jewish battalion. The rumour spread that 
 the local administration had conceded this demand, 
 but that General Allenby had vetoed it. A couple 
 
PALESTINE AND THE NEAR EAST 259 
 
 of days later came the riot, with all the casualties on 
 the side of the unarmed Jews. It lasted three days 
 and was accompanied with cheers for Feisal and the 
 exhibition of his portrait. On the third day the ad¬ 
 ministration brought in the soldiers and restored 
 order easily enough. Later, Jabotinsky and members 
 of the Defense Company were arrested for breaking 
 the rules against carrying arms, and other similar 
 high crimes and misdemeanours, and Jabotinsky was 
 sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment, the same 
 sentence as was passed upon two Arabs convicted of 
 rape. The news came on Saturday while most of the 
 Jews were at prayer in the synagogue. Some indication 
 of the total effect of the situation upon their morale may 
 be found in the fact that, led by the rabbis, the masses 
 signed then and there a petition to the governor claiming 
 equal guilt with Jabotinsky for the defense organization 
 and demanding equal punishment. Jews, it will be re¬ 
 membered, are prohibited by their religion from writing 
 on the Sabbath. 
 
 Among the country people the outrages brought 
 similar protests. To Sir Herbert Samuel, who had 
 been sent ostensibly as economic and financial adviser to 
 the military administration, twelve Sheikhs of Druses 
 and Maronites protested the pogrom. Later, eighty- 
 two villages, describing themselves as 70 per cent, of the 
 Palestinian population and 90 per cent, of the peasant 
 landholders, denounced the anti-Zionist demonstration 
 and declared their hope for a great Jewish settlement 
 under British mandate which would liberate them from 
 the oppression of the Effendi and the money-lender. 
 
 In England and in the United States the mixture of 
 news and rumours all of which seemed to point to an 
 
260 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 attempt at nullifying the Balfour Declaration made a 
 very painful impression. Its effect upon the Jews 
 has already been indicated, but its effect upon the 
 non-Jewish citizens of England particularly, is most 
 significant. One paper after another, from the Times 
 to the smallest provincial journal, demanded that 
 the word given the Jewish people should not be broken. 
 Questions were asked Parliament, again and again, on 
 all the elements in the situation. There was formed a 
 parliamentary committee to watch over Palestine 
 affairs, with Lord Robert Cecil as chairman and Major 
 Ormsby-Gore as secretary. Petitions were circulated 
 and signed by members of the House of Lords, the 
 Commons, the journalists, writers, labour leaders, 
 churchmen, societies, demanding the validation of the 
 Balfour Declaration and a British mandate for Pales¬ 
 tine. These petitions were sent to the Peace Con¬ 
 ference which at last was meeting at San Remo. 
 
 The workingmen of Great Britain sent then the 
 following resolution addressed to Mr. Lloyd George: 
 
 At meetings held in London this week the Parliamentary 
 Labour Party, the Executive Committee of the Labour 
 Party, and the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades 
 Union Congress have adopted resolutions reminding the 
 British Government of the Declaration made on November 
 2nd, 1917, that the Government would endeavour to facili¬ 
 tate the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Pales¬ 
 tine, a declaration that was in harmony with the declared 
 war aims of the British Labour Movement, and which was 
 cordially welcomed by all sections of the British people, 
 and was reaffirmed by Earl Curzon on November 2nd, 1919. 
 The National Labour organizations indicated now urge upon 
 his Majesty’s Government the necessity of redeeming this 
 pledge by the acceptance of a mandate under the League 
 
PALESTINE AND THE NEAR EAST 261 
 
 of Nations for the administration of Palestine with a view 
 to its being reconstituted the National Home of the Jewish 
 people. The National Committees desire to associate them¬ 
 selves with the many similar representations being made to 
 the Government urging the settlement of this question 
 with the utmost despatch, both in the interests of Palestine 
 itself as well as in the interests of the Jewish people. 
 
 J. R. Clynes (Acting Chairman 
 Parliamentary Labour Party). 
 
 H. S. Lindsay (Secretary). 
 
 W. H. Hutchinson (Chairman 
 Labour Party Executive). 
 
 Arthur Henderson (Secretary 
 Labour Party Executive). 
 
 J. H. Thomas (Chairman Trades 
 Union Congress). 
 
 C. W. Bowerman (Secretary 
 Trades Union Congress). 
 
 The Jews of the world choked the wires with mes¬ 
 sages. Even the League of British Jews and the Con¬ 
 joint Foreign Committee took steps to help insure the 
 redeeming of the pledge to the Jewish people. From 
 the President and from other members of his adminis¬ 
 tration in America came explicit cables regarding the 
 position of America on the terms of the Turkish treaty. 
 Against the great wave of public sentiment the im¬ 
 perialists could not hope to prevail. Feisal was told, 
 when, after repeated invitations he had stated his 
 case, that the project—not his own—for an integral 
 independent Syria and Palestine was inadmissible. 
 The French took their mandate over Syria, and England 
 accepted that over Palestine and took that over Meso¬ 
 potamia. Constantinople was left to the Turk. On 
 April 25, 1920, the Supreme Council of the Allied 
 Peace Conference decided to incorporate the Balfour 
 
262 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 Declaration into the Turkish treaty. A little more 
 than a month later. Sir Herbert Samuel, distinguished 
 British public servant, devout Jew, Zionist, official 
 philosophic exponent of British liberalism 1 was ap¬ 
 pointed High Commissioner for Palestine. 
 
 But the action was not a clean action for the treaty 
 was written in terms of the tripartite agreement between 
 England, France, and Italy. That meant that there 
 was extended into the future at least the nefarious con¬ 
 sequences of the secret Sykes-Picot Treaty. And that 
 meant essential injustice to both the Jewish homeland 
 and to Feisal. Morally it involved in many respects 
 a violation of the pledges made to both. Nevertheless, 
 the principal pledges were kept. 
 
 1 Cf. Herbert Samuel: “Liberalism: Its Principles and Proposals.” London, 
 1903. 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 SAN REMO: THE END OF AN EPOCH 
 
 THE Treaty of San Remo begins to redeem what 
 the Balfour Declaration pledged. It restores the 
 Jewish people to an equal status with the other peoples 
 of the world. It designs to give them back by public 
 covenant the corporate citizenship under the law 
 of nations which imperial edict took from them in Rome 
 in the 339th year of the Christian era. It is a momen¬ 
 tous covenant, momentous for the Jews, momentous 
 for the world. It marks, in more ways than one, the 
 ending of an epoch in the history of mankind in Chris¬ 
 tian Europe. This is an epoch whose character was 
 determined by the closing of the schools and the sur¬ 
 render of education to the control of the fathers of the 
 church. What it meant for the happiness and freedom 
 of mankind, how it shut in the mind and degraded 
 the body and divided the spirit has already been 
 suggested; 1 it may be read in any history of Europe 
 dealing with the evolution of free institutions and the 
 liberation of the masses of men from their oppressors. 2 
 The critical step in this liberation was the reviving 
 of the freedom of thought. From this everything 
 
 x Cf. Supra pp. 21-25. 
 
 2 Cf. Lecky: “The Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe”; 
 White: “History of the Warfare of Science with Theology”; Gibbon: “The 
 Decline and Fall of Rome”; Taylor: “The Mediaeval Mind”; Schapiro: 
 “European and Contemporary History”; Bury: “The History of the Free¬ 
 dom of Thought.” 
 
264 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 else followed—the shattering of the walls of the world 
 through the slow and painful establishment of the 
 heliocentric astronomical system in the commonsense 
 of mankind; the development of commerce; the physical 
 enlargement of the stage of human enterprise and im¬ 
 aginative adventure by the voyages of Columbus; the 
 overthrow of the tyranny over conscience by the 
 Reformation; the very, very slow recession of obedience 
 to authority and the credulity of religion before the 
 independence and experimentalism of science; the 
 secularization of industry and politics until religious 
 imperialism gives way to religious nationalism, and 
 religious nationalism slowly disintegrates under the 
 contacts with science, and with the art and industry 
 which are the children of science, so that, in theory 
 at least, Church and State become completely separated, 
 and the right of citizenship is finally disentangled al¬ 
 together from the accident of membership in a particu¬ 
 lar religious confession. 
 
 Indeed, under the impact of thought set free, Chris- 
 tianism itself changes its character. It becomes less 
 and less a rigid system of unchanging dogmas sustained 
 by force as the opinion of mankind in Europe. It 
 becomes more and more a sentiment of humane piety, 
 a loyalty to the sources and the fellowships of our 
 being, seeking salvation in works rather than in faith, 
 and aiming at justice rather than charity. The in¬ 
 ternational image of this sentiment is the Christ of 
 “higher criticism,” cleared by the application of 
 scientific and historical method from the mummified 
 encasements of the churches and their theologies, 
 and stepping out of the historian’s reconstruction 
 of the gospels under a new glory, in what is in very 
 
SAN REMO: THE END OF AN EPOCH 265 
 
 truth a second advent—an old symbol renovated by 
 the new time, crying abroad 4 ‘the fatherhood of God 
 and the brotherhood of man.” The lands where this 
 Christ has appeared and been acknowledged are 
 lands where the Church itself has become secularized 
 and “true” religion has become identified with social 
 service. 1 They are lands also in which both political 
 democracy and industrial economy have made exten¬ 
 sive gains, in which the workingmen are self-conscious, 
 organized, and socially active; in which literacy is high 
 and clericalism negligible. They are modern lands, 
 in the best sense of that term, and they are lands in 
 which the Jew is at least formally and legally secure 
 and free. For the freedom and security of the Jew, it 
 cannot be too often reiterated, has always been in 
 Christian Europe, the barometer of the civilization, 
 the culture, the prosperity, the democracy of the 
 countries of his sojourn. It has always been a function 
 of the freedom of thought. It has always been as¬ 
 sociated with the causes of all the oppressed or enslaved 
 portions of the populations of Europe. Lecky writes: 
 
 The persecution of the Jewish race dates from the very 
 earliest period in which Christianity obtained the direction 
 of the civil power; and although it varied greatly in its 
 character and its intensity, it can scarcely be said to have 
 definitely ceased till the French revolution. Alexander II, 
 and three or four other Popes, made noble efforts to arrest 
 it; and more than once interfered with great courage, as well 
 as great humanity, to censure the massacres; but the priests 
 were usually unwearied in inciting the passions of the people, 
 and hatred of the Jew was for many centuries a faithful 
 
 1 Cf. F. G. Peabody: “Jesus Christ and the Social Question.” Harry F. 
 Ward: “The Social Creed of the Churches”; “Social Evangelism”; “The 
 New Social Order”; and many others. 
 
266 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 index of the piety of the Christians. Massacred by the 
 thousands during the enthusiasm of the Crusades and the 
 War of the Shepherds, the Jews found every ecclesiastical 
 revival, and the accession of every sovereign of more than 
 usual devotion, occasions for fresh legislative restrictions. 
 Theodosious, St. Lewis, and Isabella the Catholic—who were 
 probably the three most devout sovereigns before the Ref¬ 
 ormation—the Council of the Lateran, which led the religi¬ 
 ous revival of the thirteenth century, Paul IV who led that 
 of the sixteenth century, and above all the religious orders 
 were among their most ardent persecutors. Everything was 
 done to separate them from their fellowmen, to mark them 
 out as objects of undying hatred, and to stifle all com¬ 
 passion for their sufferings. They were compelled to wear 
 a peculiar dress and to live in a separate quarter. A 
 Christian might not enter into any partnership with them; 
 he might not eat with them; he might not use the same bath; 
 he might not employ them as physicians, he might not even 
 purchase their drugs. Intermarriage with them was deemed 
 a horrible pollution, and in the time of St. Lewis any Chris¬ 
 tian who had chosen a Jewess for his mistress was burnt alive. 
 Even in their executions they were separated from other 
 criminals, and till the fourteenth century, they were hung 
 between two dogs, and with the head downward. According 
 to St. Thomas Aquinas, all they possessed, being derived 
 from the practice of usury, might be justly confiscated, 
 and if they were ever permitted to pursue that practice 
 unmolested, it was only because they were already so hope¬ 
 lessly damned that no crime could aggravate their condition. 
 
 Certainly the heroism of the defenders of every other 
 creed fades into insignificance before this martyr people, 
 who for thirteen centuries confronted all the evils that 
 the fiercest fanaticism could devise, enduring obloquy and 
 spoliation and the violation of the dearest ties, and the 
 infliction of the most hideous sufferings, rather than abandon 
 their faith. For these were no ascetic monks, dead to all 
 the hopes and passions of life, but were men who appreciated 
 intensely the worldly advantages they relinquished, and 
 whose affections had become all the more lively on account 
 
SAN REMO: THE END OF AN EPOCH 267 
 
 of the narrow circle in which they were confined. Enthusi¬ 
 asm and the strange phenomena of ecstasy, which have 
 exercised so large an influence in the history of persecution, 
 which have nerved so many martyrs with superhuman 
 courage, and have deadened or destroyed the anguish of so 
 many fearful tortures, were here almost unknown. Persecu¬ 
 tion came to the Jewish nation in its most horrible forms, 
 yet surrounded by every circumstance of petty annoyance 
 that could destroy its grandeur, and it continued for cen¬ 
 turies their abiding portion. 1 
 
 It continued, and as we have seen, it still continues. 
 But now, because the principle of the rights of national 
 minorities has been incorporated into the law of nations, 
 because of the Balfour Declaration and the Treaty 
 of San Remo, it should not, if science maintains its 
 momentum of growth and industry its pace of ex¬ 
 pansion, fail to end. These principles and treaties 
 are conclusions, not beginnings. They are signs and 
 portents of a profound alteration in the mind and 
 commonsense of the western world. Their effective 
 realization is still remote, difficult, full of travail, but 
 the significant thing is that they could be formulated 
 and uttered at all. Their very being as law enables 
 and initiates their culmination as fact. They renatural¬ 
 ize the Jew as Jew in the world from which he has been 
 kept outlaw for sixteen hundred years. They abolish 
 the ambiguity of the Jewish position. They destroy 
 at a stroke the compulsion upon the individual Jew 
 to commit moral suicide in order to attain civil freedom 
 or social equality. The Treaty of San Remo liberates 
 both the Jew who wishes to assimilate his entity to 
 such non-Jewish nationalities as he selects and as will 
 
 1,4 The Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe,” II. ch. 6. 
 
268 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 receive him, and the Jew who wishes to identify him¬ 
 self wholly and completely with his own people. It 
 liberates the former because it supplies him with a 
 fixed and unmistakable centre of reference with regard 
 to which he may at last say, beyond cavil or question, 
 “I am part and parcel of that,” or “I am not part and 
 parcel of that”; it gives him an equal status with 
 the Frenchman or Englishman or Belgian or Servian 
 or Italian in this respect. If these, or the members 
 of any other European nationality, constitute no prob¬ 
 lem like the Jewish problem, it is because they 
 have never been outlawed by a theological system in 
 which they were an integral item from the fellowship 
 of mankind, and particularly because these peoples 
 actually inhabit as majorities politically definite areas 
 universally acknowledged to be their homelands. 
 The establishment by public law of the ancient home 
 of the Jewish people as their actual centre of life and 
 labour cannot fail to work the same effect upon the 
 Jewish position. Enabling the assimilator freely at 
 last to assimilate, it at the same time enables the Jew 
 who wishes to realize all the potentialities of his life 
 as a Jew, to find himself in an integrated, organic, 
 free Jewish society, where he may fulfil himself Jewishly 
 without let or hindrance, where he may be completely 
 a Jew without being penalized for his preference, 
 where being a Jew shall no longer be identical with 
 possessing the perverse and psychopathic traits of a 
 persecuted people. 
 
 That these ends can be attained only in Palestine, 
 the whole character of the great tradition of Europe 
 and of the Jewish national aspiration as a part of that 
 tradition goes to show. However, let Mr. Balfour 
 
SAN REMO: THE END OF AN EPOCH £69 
 
 himself speak on this matter; in the course of his intro¬ 
 duction 1 to Sokolow’s “History of Zionism” he writes: 
 
 . . . Why it may be asked, is local sentiment to be 
 
 more considered in the case of the Jew than (say) in that of 
 the Christian or the Buddhist? All historic religions rouse 
 feelings which cluster round the places made memorable by 
 the words and deeds, the lives and deaths of those who 
 brought them into being. 
 
 Doubtless these feelings should always be treated with 
 respect; but no one suggests that the regions where these 
 venerable sites are to be found should, of set purpose and 
 with much anxious contrivance, be colonized by the spiritual 
 descendents of those who originally made them famous. 
 If the centuries have brought no change of ownership or 
 occupancy we are well content. But if it be otherwise, we 
 make no effort to reverse the course of history. None sug¬ 
 gest that we should plant Buddhist colonies in India, the 
 ancient home of Buddhism, or renew in favour of Christen¬ 
 dom the crusading adventures of our mediteval ancestors. 
 Yet, if this be wisdom when we are dealing with Buddhism 
 and Christianity, why, it may be asked, is it not also wisdom 
 when we are dealing with Judaism and the Jews? 
 
 The answer is, that the cases are not parallel. The posi¬ 
 tion of the Jews is unique. For them race, religion, and 
 country are inter-related as in the case of no other race, no 
 other religion, and no other country on earth. In no other 
 case are the believers in one of the greatest religions of the 
 world to be found (speaking broadly) only among the mem¬ 
 bers of a single small people; in the case of no other religion 
 is its past development so intimately bound up with the long 
 political history of a petty territory wedged in between 
 states more powerful far than it could ever be; in the case 
 of no other religion are its aspirations and hopes expressed in 
 language and imagery so utterly dependent for their meaning 
 on the conviction that only from this one land, only through 
 this one history, only by this one people, is full religious 
 
 Reprinted in pamphlet form by the Zionist Organization of America. 
 
270 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 knowledge to spread through all the world. By a strange 
 and most unhappy fate it is this people of all others which, 
 retaining to the full its racial self-consciousness, has been 
 severed from its home, has wandered into all lands, and has 
 nowhere been able to create for itself an organized social 
 commonwealth. Only Zionism—so at least Zionists believe 
 —can provide some mitigation of this great tragedy of the 
 Jewish people. 
 
 Doubtless there are difficulties, doubtless there are objec¬ 
 tions—great difficulties, very real objections. And it is, 
 I suspect, among the Jews themselves that these are most 
 acutely felt. Yet no one can reasonably doubt that if, as I 
 believe, Zionism can be developed into a working scheme, 
 the benefit it would bring to the Jewish people, especially 
 perhaps to that section of it which most deserves our pity, 
 would be great and lasting. It is not merely that large 
 numbers of them would thus find a refuge from religious 
 and social persecution; but that they would bear corporate 
 responsibilities and enjoy corporate opportunities of a 
 kind which, from the nature of the case, they can never 
 possess as citizens of any non-Jewish state. It is charged 
 against them by their critics that they now employ their 
 great gifts to exploit for personal ends a civilization which 
 they have not created in communities they do little to main¬ 
 tain. The accusation thus formulated is manifestly false. 
 But it is no doubt true that in large parts of Europe their 
 loyalty to the state in which they dwell is (to put it mildly) 
 feeble compared with their loyalty to their religion and their 
 race. How, indeed, could it be otherwise? In none of the 
 regions of which I speak have they been given the advantage 
 of equal citizenship; in some they have been given no right 
 of citizenship at all. Great suffering is the inevitable result; 
 but not suffering alone. Other evils follow which ag¬ 
 gravate the original mischief. Constant oppression, with 
 occasional outbursts of violent persecution, are apt either 
 to crush their victims, or to develop in them self-protecting 
 qualities which do not always assume an attractive shape. 
 The Jews have never been crushed. Neither cruelty nor 
 contempt, neither unequal laws nor illegal oppression, have 
 
SAN REMO: THE END OF AN EPOCH 271 
 
 ever broken their spirit, or shattered their unconquerable 
 hopes. But it may well be true that, where they have been 
 compelled to live among their neighbours as if these were 
 their enemies, they have often obtained and sometimes de¬ 
 served the reputation of being undesirable citizens. Nor is 
 this surprising. If you oblige many men to be money¬ 
 lenders, some will assuredly be usurers. If you treat an 
 important section of the community as outcasts they will 
 hardly shine as patriots. Thus does intolerance blindly 
 labour to create the justification for its own excesses. 
 
 It seems evident that, for these and other reasons, Zionism 
 will mitigate the lot and elevate the status of no negligible 
 fraction of the Jewish race. Those who go to Palestine will 
 not be like those who migrate to London or New York. 
 They will not be animated merely by the desire to lead in 
 happier surroundings the kind of life they formerly led in 
 eastern Europe. They will go in order to join a civil com¬ 
 munity which completely harmonizes with their historical 
 and religious sentiments; a community bound to the land 
 it inhabits by something deeper even than custom: a com¬ 
 munity whose members will suffer from no unequal laws 
 under which they are forced to live. To them the material 
 gain should be great; but surely the spiritual gain will be 
 greater still. 
 
 But these, it will be said, are not the only Jews whose 
 welfare we have to consider. Granting, if only for argu¬ 
 ment’s sake, that Zionism will on them confer a benefit, 
 will it not inflict an injury upon others who, though Jews 
 by descent, and often by religion, desire wholly to identify 
 themselves with the life of the country wherein they have 
 made their home? Among these are to be found some of 
 the most gifted members of the race. Their ranks contain 
 (at least, so I think) more than their proportionate share of 
 the world’s supply of men distinguished in science and phi¬ 
 losophy, literature and art and medicine, politics and law. 
 (Of finance and business I need say nothing.) 
 
 Now there is no doubt that many of this class look with 
 a certain measure of suspicion and even dislike upon the 
 Zionist movement. They fear that it will adversely affect 
 
ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 their position in the country of their adoption. The great 
 majority of them have no desire to settle in Palestine. Even 
 supposing a Zionist community were established, they would 
 not join it. But they seem to think (if I understand them 
 rightly) that so soon as such a community came into being 
 men of Jewish blood, still more men of Jewish religion, would 
 be regarded by unkindly critics as out of place elsewhere. 
 The ancient home having been restored to them they would 
 be expected to reside there. 
 
 I cannot share these fears. I do not deny that, in some 
 countries where legal equality is not firmly established, Jews 
 may still be regarded with a certain measure of prejudice. 
 But this prejudice, where it exists, is not due to Zionism, 
 nor will Zionism embitter it. The tendency should surely 
 be the other way. Everything which assimilates the na¬ 
 tional and international status of the Jews to that of other 
 races ought to mitigate what remains of ancient antipathies; 
 and evidently this assimilation would be promoted by giving 
 them that which all other nations possess: a local habitation 
 and a national home. 
 
 Mr. Balfour, although a statesman, is an under¬ 
 standing man. His eye, in this instance, at least, is 
 upon those essential trends in society which determine 
 the success or failure of the expedients of politicians 
 and the devices of diplomacy. He recognized the 
 extraordinary role of Palestine in the Jewish psyche; 
 he observes the effects on that psyche of outlawry 
 and persecution, and he is explicit in his recognition 
 that the solution of the difficulty inherent in the Jewish 
 position must lie in that equalization of status for 
 both the group and the individual which is the essence 
 of democracy. Equality of status does not mean, 
 it must be remembered, identity of character or func¬ 
 tion. It means, if anything, freedom for the develop¬ 
 ment and operation of differences of character and 
 
SAN REMO: THE END OF AN EPOCH 273 
 
 function in which progress consists. The assimilation 
 of “the national and international status of the Jews 
 to that of other races” cannot fail not only “to mitigate 
 what remains of ancient antipathies,” it cannot fail 
 to reenforce also and to invigorate that new tendency 
 of the European mind whereby a European statesman 
 of conservative principles can be so oblivious of an 
 ancient tradition as to utter the sentiment for equaliza¬ 
 tion as a principle and lay it down as a programme. 
 
CHAPTER XIX 
 
 “vita ntjova?” 
 
 BY THE Treaty of San Remo the Jews are faced 
 with a problem unprecedented in the history of their 
 Diaspora. The treaty is a legal formula, a promissory 
 note, whose ultimate validation depends far more upon 
 those to whom it is given than those by whom it is 
 given. Speed and range are essential to the success 
 of the validation, and both hang upon the adequacy 
 of the reorientation of the Jewish position which the 
 implications of the treaty require. There is no help 
 toward this reorientation in a study of the past; nor 
 has there been any preparation for it in the present. 
 The situation demanding it has ripened so swiftly 
 and under conditions of so much doubt and anxiety 
 that if the confusion of counsel prevailing among the 
 Jews is any indication, its coming has taken them by 
 surprise. Within six of the most trying years in the 
 history of the western world, six of the most bitterly 
 tragic years in the history of the Jews, a tradition 
 of consolatory aspiration has been precipitated into a 
 condition of compelling fact. By public law and in¬ 
 ternational guarantees of hope of Zion, which was an 
 age-old sentiment and a compensatory fantasy, has 
 been turned into the hope of Zion which is the hard, 
 barren, sordid geographical and ethnographic reality 
 of Palestine, with its needs of economic rehabilitation 
 
 274 
 
“VITA NUOVA?” 
 
 275 
 
 and cultural development, its political complications 
 and religious cross-currents, its problems of public 
 health and social justice. Although in recent years 
 much has been written, written voluminously and with a 
 supremely knowing air, particularly by the experts-by- 
 book in whom Jewish Palestine abounds, on the prob¬ 
 lems of the construction of the Jewish homeland, what 
 has been written remains in the realm of the pleasant— 
 and irrelevant—speculation that has been character¬ 
 istic of the productions in this field from the beginning 
 of the Hovevei Zion activity in Palestine. 1 Nor do 
 the only less official activities of the bureaus of the 
 World Zionist Organization and of its advisory bodies 
 appear to have been more pertinent. 2 The fact is 
 that the validation of the Balfour Declaration by 
 public law finds the Jews—both the masses of the people 
 and the organized Zionists—unprepared; the continen¬ 
 tal communities stripped and broken and despairful; 
 the Americans exhausted by the political and financial 
 efforts compelled by the war; the British too confused 
 by the political entanglements and too retarded by 
 the weight of tradition, which counts much more 
 heavily among the Jews of England than of America. 
 Here at last is the salutation which has been the sus¬ 
 taining hope of the heart of Jewry through the bitter 
 ages, challenging them to new life. Yet the manner 
 in which they respond to it leaves room to doubt 
 
 1 Oettinger: “Colonization in Palestine”; Ruppin: “Der Aufbau des 
 Landes Israel”; Oppenheimer: “Merchavia”; Poale Zion Commission: “Re¬ 
 port on the Work in Palestine.” 
 
 2 Only the surveys and the proposals of the Occupied Enemy Territory 
 Administration, to which the Zionists were not permitted access, had any 
 regard for the realities of the Palestinian economy—such regard as is possi¬ 
 ble to the capitalistically minded. Such Zionist proposals as have been 
 printed somehow keep reminding one of the schemes of Col. Sellars. 
 
276 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 whether the attainment of this new life shall not 
 become a process painful, lingering, and—disillusion¬ 
 ing. 
 
 The reason is that the decision of San Remo effects 
 what is practically a magical change, what is tanta¬ 
 mount to a metaphysical transvaluation in the char¬ 
 acter and significance of Palestine for the Jewish 
 people. And how quickly and completely they adjust 
 themselves to this transvaluation must needs be a 
 large item in the settlement of their fate. Some 
 inference regarding the psychology of this adjustment 
 may be drawn from the astounding parade which 
 took place, on May 25, 1920, on Fifth Avenue, in 
 New York City. The marchers in this parade came 
 from all the strata of Jewish society in America— 
 millionaire merchants, rabbis, great bourgeois and 
 little bourgeois, workingmen, veterans of the Great 
 War, legionaries returned from Palestine, children, 
 women. They intoned psalms and they sang songs. 
 And there was that in their voices and that in their 
 glances as they marched and sang, they the freest 
 and most secularized of the Jews of the world, which 
 brought to mind what one had read of religious demon¬ 
 strations in the Middle Ages, what one had seen 
 of great evangelical revival meetings in one’s own 
 time. The phenomenon was a religious phenomenon, 
 a release and outpouring of hidden streams of feel¬ 
 ing, and bearing the ideology of an immemorial 
 past. 
 
 To these also, in the moment of crisis—even joyful 
 crisis—Palestine, which had been changed from an ideal 
 centre of other-worldly emotion into a locus of practical 
 endeavour, became religious again. The crisis simply 
 
“VITA NUOVA?” 
 
 277 
 
 brought a reversion of mind to that basic other-worldly 
 tendency whose mitigation has been the chief function 
 and best effect of secular Zionism. If the mood of 
 the parading crowds on Fifth Avenue has a meaning, 
 the meaning is that for the Diaspora at least there is 
 the danger that Zion will remain what it always has 
 been—a compensatory ideal. Those who do not live 
 in Palestine have ever been too ready to give as a some¬ 
 how religious duty, and those who do live in Palestine 
 have been ever too ready to take as a somehow religious 
 right, what, is after all, nothing more or less than 
 charity. 1 The Zionist organization, in a very great 
 degree in spite of itself, has been an eleemosynary 
 institution, and the Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, 
 only in very sporadic instances in spite of themselves, 
 have been objects of philanthropy. The emotional 
 survivals which manifest themselves by the readiness 
 of Jewry outside the land to give become with the 
 application of the Treaty of San Remo a thing sinister: 
 the continuance of the eleemosynary activities ac¬ 
 quires an ominous import. Their discontinuance, or 
 rather, their alteration into a programme relevant to 
 the new status of Palestine, requires a change of heart 
 which conditions on the European continent to a large 
 degree preclude, and of which at the present writing 2 
 there is no sign in England or in America. Nowhere 
 except among the handful of American leaders does 
 there appear to be any adequate realization that Pales¬ 
 tine is not any longer a symbolic vision of an other¬ 
 worldly future of salvation from death and the fear 
 of death; that Palestine is at last a present solid and 
 
 1 Vid. supra. Chapters IX and X. 
 
 2 July, 1921. 
 
278 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 coercive fact, whose saving power can be brought into 
 operation only by swift and extensive readjustments 
 of temper and attitude; readjustments, moreover, not 
 merely to Palestine, an und fur sich, as Hegel used to 
 say, but to the specific and concrete and living Palestine 
 which is a node in a network of complicated relation¬ 
 ships that stretch from England to India and around 
 the world, involving the whole economic process of 
 modern civilization, with its political and ethnographical 
 and religious relationships. 
 
 This Palestine, the Palestine that has been the object 
 of racial rivalries and the subject of imperialist ex¬ 
 ploitation, the Palestine of the Arab fellahin and the 
 Jewish Halukah-takers, the Palestine that Allenby 
 conquered and that the Treaty of San Remo allocated, 
 this and no other it is that the Jews are to build their 
 national home upon. And this Palestine is a challenge 
 —no easy one—to the competency, the realism, and 
 the moral enthusiasm of the Jews of the entire world. 
 The meeting of this challenge—the success of which 
 alone can establish that normalization of the Jewish 
 position in which all Jews have a stake—will be watched 
 by a world far from unanimous in its friendliness. Our 
 survey of the mind of Europe, past and present, re¬ 
 garding the Jews shows that the climax has been 
 reached. The alternative to success in Palestine 
 and coordinately, normalization in the Diaspora, is 
 destruction—violently as in central Europe, or through 
 progressively swifter assimilation as in the United 
 States. But the old ambiguity of the Jewish position 
 is doomed. 
 
 The situation created by the San Remo decision thus 
 demands from the Jews a new attitude and new func- 
 
“VITA NUOVA?” 
 
 279 
 
 tions. In the course of time, the situation would no 
 doubt evoke the attitude appropriate to itself; but 
 time is here, as in military operations, an essential in 
 determining failure or success. The new attitude must 
 be created as foresight and establish itself as habit, 
 instead of merely establishing itself as habit; it must be 
 a plan before it is a process. The new functions re¬ 
 quire new organs, and these again cannot be waited 
 for to grow; they must be created ad hoc. Hence, 
 in its present form, the Zionist organization is irrelevant 
 to the realities of the Zionist position. Secular though 
 the movement it expresses may be, it rests, neverthe¬ 
 less, upon a fund of unconscious feelings and trends 
 which are introverted, compensatory, and defensive 
 rather than objective and adjustive. As a consequence, 
 its fiscal institutions, for example, have not been con¬ 
 spicuous for economic insight or even intelligent admin¬ 
 istration. Both the Jewish Colonial Trust with its 
 subsidiaries and the Jewish National Fund are in need 
 of fundamental reorganization—in method, function, 
 and personnel. Their assets must be made liquid, 
 their bookkeeping modern, and their policies regardful 
 of the realities of a Palestine to be settled by self- 
 supporting and not supported Jews. 
 
 The other institutions of the movement, again, its 
 Congress and its executive agencies, have been too much 
 postulated upon propaganda and philanthropy. In¬ 
 evitably so, no doubt, since the Jews have so long been a 
 disfranchised and landless people, and the only peculiar 
 institutions they have been able to develop in the course 
 of their long life in Europe have been those of their 
 religion, their charity, and their literary culture. But 
 whatever the reason, Zionism has been over too great a 
 
280 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 period dominated by cultural conceptions to the ex¬ 
 clusion of more fundamental economic and political 
 ones, 1 and its leadership had, prior to the war, been 
 drawn too exclusively from journalists, orators, lay 
 preachers, schoolmasters, and such, all excellent for 
 purposes of propaganda and instruction, helpless, 
 as events showed again and again, particularly during 
 the years of the war, to meet fundamental situations 
 in fundamental terms. What the war created as an 
 occasion, the peace converts into constant necessity. 
 The international Zionist organization needs a com¬ 
 plete recasting of its form and technique if it is 
 effectively to carry out its new functions. It needs 
 a complete overhauling of its personnel. In this, it 
 is face to face with its acid test. Its leadership is 
 face to face with its acid test. For such an over¬ 
 hauling and reconstruction require a decision between 
 public duty and personal position which those who 
 are acquainted with the temperament of the orator and 
 writer and such know is neither easy nor a foregone 
 conclusion. A propaganda organization whose object 
 invariably touches off fundamental emotions and whose 
 realization is remote easily becomes an end in itself 
 at the expense of its object—political parties are 
 perennial examples—the instrument displaces the end, 
 the camel drives the master from the tent. A rehabili¬ 
 tation of the essential relationships may then become 
 extremely difficult or even impossible. This is a danger 
 of which the Zionists may well beware. 
 
 The purpose of Zionism is now the effective establish¬ 
 ment of the Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine. 
 Logically, if this purpose can be best accomplished 
 
 1 Cf. su-pra, Chapters VII and VIII. 
 
“VITA NUOVA?” 
 
 281 
 
 through keeping the Zionist organization intact, then 
 it should be kept intact. If it can be best accomplished 
 by entirely making over the Zionist organization, then 
 it should be made over, and if it can be best accom¬ 
 plished by abolishing the Zionist organization, then it 
 should be abolished. Of course no such logical con¬ 
 sideration of alternatives is likely to take place; the 
 same trend by which a child clings for years to a rag- 
 doll, in spite of many better-made and more satis¬ 
 factory playthings, makes men cling to antiquated 
 tools and survival-types of organization, particularly 
 if their vanities and sense of personal worth and 
 achievement cohere in them: livelihoods need in this 
 connection not be mentioned, for there are none or 
 few. In the case of the Zionists, thus, the problem 
 is critical. 1 
 
 ^ince the above was written news comes from London bearing out the 
 analysis. At the Annual Conference of 1920, Mr. Justice Brandeis proposed 
 a fundamental reconstruction that would actually have subordinated the 
 organization to its purposes and that would have created for it organs ade¬ 
 quate to the new functions which the situation requires. The proposal 
 failed of acceptance, largely through the type of motive discussed above. 
 The subsequent activities of the officers of the international organization 
 seem to have been determined thereby to the point of a complete break with 
 the realistic American leaders who demanded that administrative integrity 
 should replace sentimental looseness, and the economic needs of Palestine 
 should take precedence over the organization politics of Zionism. This 
 demand was apparently granted. The business of the new Inner Actions 
 Committee which was chosen at the London Conference was to be reor¬ 
 ganization and retrenchment in both London and Jerusalem, and construc¬ 
 tion in Palestine. A Reorganization Commission, with full power, was ap¬ 
 pointed to undertake the work in Palestine. But its activities were nullified 
 before they were begun, and two members of the Commission, Messrs Simon 
 and DeLieme, who were also members of Inner Actions Committee, were 
 forced into resignation. The immediate cause of their resignation was a 
 secret agreement made by Doctor Weizmann with M. Jabotinsky by which 
 M. Jabotinsky, who had failed of election to the Inner Actions Committee 
 at the London Conference, was to be added to it, with the understanding that 
 the conditions on which he assumed membership would be met. These 
 conditions were that the controls which the World Zionist Organization 
 exercised over the Keren Hayesod would be abolished. The Keren 
 Hayesod, or Foundation Fund, was the new fiscal agency which had, by a 
 
282 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 It is the more critical because, without its solution, 
 there cannot be accomplished, within a reasonable 
 time, that change in the Jewish habit of mind regarding 
 Palestine upon which the successful establishment of 
 the Jewish homeland is postulated. Both the feeling 
 and action of the people need to be redirected so as to 
 work in relevant and not defensive or compensatory 
 ways toward the upbuilding of the restored Jewish 
 homeland. Such a redirection cannot be accomplished 
 
 vague resolution, been ordered by the London Conference. Its control was 
 like that of the other financial institutions of the Zionist Movement, kept 
 in the hands of the World Zionist Organization by giving it fifty-one per cent, 
 of the voting power, which was exercised for it by a governor appointed for 
 that purpose by the Inner Actions Committee. It was this control that was 
 abolished. Under the charter which was subsequently drawn for it, the 
 Keren Hayesod becomes a corporation with unlimited powers, of such a sort 
 that it may displace both the Zionist Congress and its executive agencies. 
 The American leaders were opposed to this. They had found reason to mis¬ 
 trust the integrity and the competency of some of the administrative officers 
 in both London and Palestine. These, they had discovered, had been con¬ 
 stantly exceeding the budget, had diverted trust-funds to meet current 
 expenses; had, without authority or right, made use of non-Zionist monies 
 for Zionist purposes, and violated the integrity and broken the statutes of 
 the Jewish National Fund. 
 
 The explanations offered by DoctorWeizmann for himself and his colleagues 
 were those of emergency and necessity. They rationalized these explana¬ 
 tions in terms of what they called a “philosophy” of the Zionist position— 
 namely, that Palestine and the Jewish National Home are not identical, 
 and that it is the business of the Zionists to make the two identical. Differ¬ 
 ences of opinion and policy between the representatives of the national 
 Jewish interest in Palestine and the British colonial interest were not only 
 possible, they were inevitable. Jewish activities in Palestine must be such 
 as would be sure to attain the Jewish objective. Although those of the 
 mandatory would often be in harmony with them, quite as often they would 
 not be. Hence the need for the Keren Hayesod, hence the justification of 
 budgetary looseness and the other irregularities. Hence the need for a 
 strong centralized Zionist organization, for work in the Diaspora, for Dias¬ 
 pora Nationalism, and all the complications of a propaganda-organization. 
 
 To which the American reply indicates that the American leaders agree 
 with the “philosophy,” but do not see how the conclusions of Dr. Weizmann 
 and his colleagues can be drawn from the premises it supplies. With respect 
 to the Keren Hayesod, to budgetary and other irregularities, they drew the 
 exactly opposite conclusions. (See the Annual Report of Zionist Organiza¬ 
 tion of America, for the period November 1, 1920, to May 31, 1921, particu¬ 
 larly, Exhibit 3.) The differences did not lie in “philosophy.” They lay in 
 the fact that the Americans were thinking in terms of the economic actualities 
 
“VITA NUOVA?” 
 
 283 
 
 through propaganda merely. Whatever success ac¬ 
 crued to the propagandist movement, prior to the 
 Great War, was itself something in the nature of an 
 unearned increment upon the existing funds of feeling 
 and the instituted will of the Jewish masses regarding 
 Palestine. The corrective and salvational character 
 of the feeling has already been indicated; it keeps 
 Palestine still so much a gratifying fantasy in the con¬ 
 sciousness of the masses that they resent any realistic 
 
 of Palestine and the Diaspora, and the Europeans were thinking in terms of 
 the political complications within the Zionist Organization. Consequently, 
 Doctor Weizmann and his colleagues resented the resolution adopted by the 
 Convention of the Zionist Organization of America at Buffalo, on November 
 28, 1921, which separated donation from investment funds, and otherwise 
 sought to keep Zionist activity in Palestine on solid ground. In answer to his 
 letter embodying his objections, Judge Mack was directed by the National 
 Executive Committee to formulate a reply which should embody “a detailed 
 statement on the position of the American Organization.” This reply took 
 the form of a memorandum (Exhibit 3 of the Report mentioned above) 
 which was submitted to Doctor Weizmann on his arrival in the United States 
 in April accompanied by Messrs. Ussishkin and Mossinsohn, from Palestine, 
 and conducting Albert Einstein. 
 
 Negotiations began which revealed at once a deep fissure between the 
 American leaders on the one side and the Europeans on the other. In the 
 National Executive Committee itself a minority, the customary opposition, 
 had voted against the memorandum and had dissociated itself from its 
 representations. This minority took sides with Weizmann and his colleagues. 
 As time went on, the fissure widened and deepened. The Yiddish press, with 
 the exception of one paper, was solid against the American leaders. The 
 minority conducted a powerful propaganda against them. The accusation, 
 made by Weizmann even before the London Conference, that they con¬ 
 templated a Zionist “Monroe Doctrine,” and taken up by the American 
 opposition after the Conference as a rallying cry, was shouted from the 
 housetops. They were accused of secession from the World Zionist Organiza¬ 
 tion, they were accused of rebellion against the duly-constituted authority 
 of Weizmann and his Keren Hayesod. They were particularly accused of 
 being disregardful of the respect due to distinguished guests. It was said 
 that they were not Jews, that they did not understand the heart of the Jewish 
 people; that they were autocrats, out of touch with the democracy. 
 
 That they were out of touch, and very completely out of touch, soon 
 became obvious. The facts they pointed to, the records they published, were 
 denounced by the press and the minority as exaggerations or mitigated as 
 “emergencies.” Tlieir explanation that far from seceding, it was they 
 who were protecting the integrity of the World Zionist Organization from 
 usurpation fell on deaf ears. Their plea that they were seeking to protect 
 the honour of the World Zionist Organization by securing standards of trustee- 
 
284 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 account of its own character or that of its Jewish 
 inhabitants. To overcome this, how much careful 
 teaching will they not need that a happy Palestine 
 to-morrow implies complete disillusion about Palestine’s 
 to-day. They will require a new ideology, a new phi¬ 
 losophy of Zion, established as habit in thought and in 
 action, through a new objective, new institutions, 
 and a new technique. There should be no fear that 
 
 ship and the customary safeguards for trust funds was ignored. That the 
 officers of administration in Palestine “did not put the money in their own 
 pockets” but used it for Zionist purposes was regarded as sufficient vindi¬ 
 cation of their honesty and their efficiency. “Our Weizmann,” “Our 
 Ussishkin,” Zionists for so long, the press and the orators declared, 
 could do no wrong; these accusations grew out of the secessionism of 
 the autocratic newcomers in the movement, like Mack and Brandeis. 
 In a word, American Jewry was in the grip of a wave of emotion, a religion¬ 
 like frenzy with Weizmann and the Keren Hayesod as its objects of worship, 
 which made it as impervious to the realities of the case as any country 
 community under the influence of the evangelical revivalist. Pledges of all 
 sorts and sizes were made to the Keren Hayesod which Weizmann formally 
 opened by proclamation on April 17, 1921. Reception committees were 
 organized and passionate meetings held. The delegates to the Convention 
 which the majority of the Executive Committee decided to call for a determi¬ 
 nation of the issue, were overwhelmingly instructed against Judge Mack and 
 his administration. Upon the rejection of his report, by a vote of 139 to 
 75—acceptance would have been tantamount to a vote of confidence—he aind 
 more than two thirds of the Executive Committee resigned, declaring at the 
 same time that they could not hold any office in the Zionist Organization so 
 long as it was opposed to the principles for which they stood. Simultane¬ 
 ously, a letter was read from M. Justice Brandeis endorsing the stand taken 
 by Judge Mack and his associates, and resigning as Honorary President of 
 the Zionist Organization of America. He has also tendered his resignation as 
 Honorary President of the World Zionist Organization. 
 
 Thus, in the United States, in Europe and in Palestine, the responsibility for 
 the future, so far as it is in the hands of the Zionist Organization, falls squarely 
 and unequivocally upon the pre-war propagandist group. The American 
 leadership—for although rejected by a majority they will be responded to 
 as a leadership because of their distinction of character, their position in public 
 life, their moral authority, and their unparalleled services to the cause—are 
 now liberated from the restrictions set upon their work for Palestine by the 
 past and politics of the Zionist Organizaton. They can go at the task of 
 upbuilding Jewish Palestine as a living economy without internal hindrance. 
 At the conference they held with their followers in Cleveland after the rejec¬ 
 tion of Judge Mack’s report, they determined to do so. Time alone can 
 show whether they are capable of the success in which must lie their vindica¬ 
 tion. 
 
“VITA NUOVA?” 
 
 285 
 
 such a philosophy need or can be a break with the old. 
 It will differ from the old because inevitably it must 
 rest upon a different set of determining conditions 
 and must consist of the development and rounding-out 
 of the implications of these conditions; but within 
 this development the old cannot fail to be absorbed 
 and transmuted. 
 
 These determining conditions are organically inter¬ 
 related. They differ from those which grounded the 
 Basle Programme in that they are positive rather than 
 negative. The conditions that led Herzl to his great 
 enterprise still, as we have seen, obtain and are likely 
 to obtain, for generations to come. But now they 
 are essentially at the periphery of the Jews’ problem, 
 not at its centre. With the San Remo decision the 
 Basle Programme has been realized. And with the 
 realization of the Basle programme the centre of the 
 Jews’ problem has shifted from the Diaspora to Pales¬ 
 tine. Americans have expressed the change in the 
 formula that the Basle Programme must be replaced 
 by the Pittsburgh Programme. What they mean is 
 that the nature of the free Jewish commonwealth, 
 which in the fullness of time is to grow up and function 
 in Palestine, has become the norm-giving objective 
 in the affairs of the Jewish people. 
 
 The conditions which set the formal limits and imply 
 the constitutional pattern of this commonwealth are, 
 broadly speaking, of three orders—political, ethno¬ 
 graphic, and economic. Of these the first is the most 
 immediate, closest to the apparent and given motives 
 of men; the second is the most instinctive, but manifest 
 rather in terms of aesthetic and religion, in terms of 
 cultural nationality; the last is the most coercive, 
 
286 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 determining the form of the community, its tempo, 
 and its power. 
 
 To consider them in their order: 
 
 I 
 
 The political complex in which Palestine is an item 
 exhibits the same duplexity which has already been 
 observed in the Treaty of Versailles, its consequents 
 and derivatives. The elements of this duplexity 
 are an imperialistic drive in foreign policy coupled 
 with what is practically a class-war in domestic affairs. 
 The more sharply defined the latter is, the more uncer¬ 
 tain and vacillating is the former. Thus, the strength 
 of the Labour Party in Great Britain can be measured 
 by the changes in the Government’s policy toward 
 Egypt, toward India, toward Mesopotamia, toward 
 Russia. The changes in all these items are in the 
 direction indicated by the ideology of the Fourteen 
 Points—national self-government, democracy, non¬ 
 interference in the internal affairs of other countries. 
 In France, on the other hand, which has a prevailingly 
 agricultural economy, organized labour is weak, and 
 the imperialism of the French has become the effective 
 successor of the imperialism of the Germans. The 
 weakness may be measured by the treatment accorded 
 by the French to the Syrians, to Feisal; by their in¬ 
 trigues in central Europe with Poland and Hungary 
 against Russia, and in America with political oppon¬ 
 ents of the government against President Wilson’s 
 conception of peace terms and the League of Nations. 1 
 
 1 Cf. the press reports of conferences between Senator Lodge and French 
 officials regarding peace terms during the winter and summer of 1919 and 
 the announcement of a set of terms by Senator Lodge remarkably like those 
 
“VITA NUOVA?” 
 
 287 
 
 Now the governments of both France and Great 
 Britain are pledged to the realization of the Balfour 
 Declaration in fact. Both have underwritten it in 
 the Treaty of San Remo. 
 
 But here the similarity ends. For the French this 
 underwriting is an item incidental to the game of im¬ 
 perialism, to be adhered to or repudiated as advantage 
 and opportunity require. The underwriting is an 
 action of the French Government to which the French 
 people are indifferent or slightly hostile, but in which 
 they have no direct emotional or practical concern. 
 For the English, on the other hand, the underwriting 
 has a background of extensive and thorough-going 
 public discussion. It is an action representing—bar 
 certain vested missionary and ecclesiastical interests 
 and professional anti-Semites—the united will of all 
 the people. Not the government alone, the Opposi¬ 
 tion also, stands behind the Balfour Declaration. It 
 was the pressure of the Labour Party, quite as much 
 as the pledges of the government, that made that 
 declaration a part of the law of nations at San Remo. 
 It was the pressure of the Labour Party most of all 
 that overcame the opposition of the militarists and made 
 Great Britain directly responsible for the fulfilment 
 of the terms of the declaration by demanding the 
 acceptance of the mandate for Palestine under those 
 terms. The Labour Party, from the time that it 
 first took a stand on the objects of the war * 1 to the 
 present day, has been staunchly and actively sympa¬ 
 thetic to the Zionist endeavour. Its first step in support 
 
 of the French agent, Cheradame. Later, the announcement made by the 
 Republican candidate for President, Senator, now President Harding, of a 
 conference with a French emissary regarding the League of Nations. 
 
 l Cf. Statement on War Aims. 
 
288 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 was taken not without hesitation. Its last was taken 
 in full confidence. It was taken in full confidence 
 because it saw in the rebuilding of a Jewish homeland 
 in Palestine an opportunity not only to right a historic 
 wrong, but to try out within the limits of conscious and 
 technical control an important experiment in creative 
 democracy; because it regarded the Pittsburgh Pro¬ 
 gramme of the American Zionists as a pledge that con¬ 
 ditions permitting this experiment would be 1 con¬ 
 scientiously attempted. It knew that the terms of this 
 programme were written into the draft form of the 
 mandate presented by the Zionists to the British 
 Government for consideration. And whether the 
 terms are accepted by the British Foreign Office 
 depends largely, again, on the pressure that the public 
 opinion of Great Britain may bring to bear. For, 
 although the mandate is issued, its terms are not yet 
 established, and whether the San Remo decision may 
 become a decision in fact as well as in law, whether a 
 Jewish commonwealth shall ultimately grow up in 
 Palestine, in what manner, and what kind of common¬ 
 wealth, depends to a very large degree upon the terms 
 of the mandate. These terms are in Great Britain a 
 domestic issue with imperialistic implications. They 
 may become, they should be, if the Foreign Office 
 should prefer the programme of the militarists to 
 the endeavour of the Zionists, an item in the struggle 
 between owners and workers which has marked the 
 recent domestic history of Great Britain. 
 
 But they are implied, perhaps even more fundamen¬ 
 tally, in the duel of empire. For the economy of 
 Palestine, the number of people it can support, its 
 
 x Cf. The London Daily Herald, March 25, 1920. 
 
“VITA NUOVA?” 
 
 289 
 
 cultural status and social organization must depend 
 very largely upon the degree of industrialization it can 
 attain. Industrialization depends on power, and in 
 Palestine at the present stage of technical control of 
 power, power on any scale can be nothing except 
 water-power, and water-power is a matter of boun¬ 
 daries, particularly of the northern boundaries. The 
 whole future of Palestine is in the hands of the state 
 which controls the Litani, the Yarmuk, and the head¬ 
 waters of the Jordan. And just now that state is 
 imperialistic France to whose rulers Palestine is a 
 mere pawn in their imperialistic game. The French 
 Government has, according to occasion, taken con¬ 
 flicting attitudes regarding Palestine. It is committed 
 to the Balfour Declaration and its consequences. 
 It has also made counter commitments to the Lebanon 
 and to the scattered handful of pro-French pan-Syrians. 
 It is, however, in no degree much concerned with 
 either. Its dispute with Britain over the northern 
 boundary of Palestine is an item less pertinent to its 
 Syrian than to its European policy. It is demanding 
 the letter of the secret and repudiated Sykes-Picot 
 Treaty and the full measure of the tripartite agreement 
 that it may in return for conceding the letter receive 
 a substantial concession regarding Russia or Germany 
 or central Europe. It may well be content to wreck 
 Jewish Palestine if it can thereby gain some advantage 
 for the international finance whose headquarters is in 
 France. That, in the tentative agreements regarding 
 the northern boundary 1 it has not done so, is to its 
 
 1 The agreement concedes to the Zionists the use of the waters of the upper 
 Jordan and the Yarmuk under an arrangement to be worked out by French 
 and Zionist technicians. The Zionists desire the inclusion of the Valley 
 of the Yarmuk and the headwaters of the Jordan under the British mandate. 
 
290 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 credit, but is to be associated with the reparations 
 conferences. 
 
 Now, however the boundary disputes will be deter¬ 
 mined, the practical question for the Jews is clearly the 
 question, not of present advantage with the powers 
 that be but of harmony in the long run with the trend 
 of life in Great Britain which will dominate domestic 
 activities and establish ideals. That this trend is 
 toward industrial democracy need not be argued: 
 it is predestined, and only the destruction of industrial 
 society can liberate it from its destiny. A vicious 
 boundary is much less troublesome, in an experiment 
 like Jewish Palestine, than an antipathetic public 
 opinion in the country whose public opinion is the sole 
 effective sustaining force of the experiment. The 
 minds of the present active officials of the inter¬ 
 national Zion'st organization do not, however, reveal 
 any adequacy to think in terms of the long run here 
 indicated. By background, training, aptitude, and 
 outlook they express at best the liberalism and 
 sentimentality of the mid-Victorian ideals that are 
 the mental furniture of the American progressive. 
 They exhibit an obvious taste for diplomacy, and 
 a distinct distaste, particularly in England, for po¬ 
 litical and economic realism. If they are without 
 the fanatical intransigence of the Zeiri Zionists and 
 the Poale Zionists of the continent, they lack also 
 the saving cynicism whose absence makes diplo¬ 
 macy a losing game. They are at once too sincere 
 for diplomatic guile, and too wordly-wise for revo¬ 
 lutionary force. In a word, they are sentimentalists, 
 and they are sentimentalists in a position requir¬ 
 ing the clearest and coldest realization of specific 
 
“VITA NUOVA?” 291 
 
 living trends—in England first and then in Asia 
 Minor. 
 
 II 
 
 For the difficulty that attaches to the political 
 situation in England attaches in like manner to the 
 whole social situation in Asia Minor. The sentimental¬ 
 ism of the Jews—manifested in its most vicious form 
 in the conduct of the business of the Palestine Com¬ 
 mission by Menahem Ussishkin (a conduct which re¬ 
 pelled the English and angered the Arabs)—prevents 
 the clear realization of the conditions that must de¬ 
 termine ethnographic adjustment not only between 
 the Jews and the other Palestinians, but between 
 the Jews and the other non-Turkish peoples of Asia 
 Minor. Of these the Arabic-speaking peoples constitute 
 the great majority. Tradition—truly or falsely, does 
 not matter—declares a blood relationship to exist 
 between them and the Jews. History, far more ex¬ 
 plicit and verifiable, records a cultural cooperation 
 between them, lasting through the Golden Age of 
 Arab civilization. The exigencies of imperialism have 
 imposed upon both a common political interest in 
 the preservation of their corporate integrities. Feisal, 
 when the French displayed their conception of the 
 mandatory principle (under which the mandates are 
 to be issued with the consent of the people concerned), 
 by driving him out of Damascus and imposing by force 
 their overlordship on his kingdom, declared that his 
 people must appeal for the cooperation of the Zionists. 
 Similarly, the Jews are not unlikely to find that the 
 terms of the mandate which the imperialistic and mili¬ 
 tary clique will allow are such as will facilitate the 
 complete shift of the base of defense of the Suez Canal 
 
292 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 from Egypt to Palestine and the security of the Arab 
 hinterland, but are not such as will facilitate the swift 
 and adequate development of Palestine as a Jewish 
 homeland. 1 They will then need even more absolutely 
 than now the sympathy, the good-will, and the coopera¬ 
 tion of their Arab neighbours. The cultivation of 
 good relations with the Arabs becomes thus the fore¬ 
 most desideratum of a realistic Jewish policy. 
 
 Such a cultivation can, at the outset, be political 
 only in one respect. That respect is, however, funda¬ 
 mental to the effective foundation of a new interna¬ 
 tional order. It is in respect of the mandatory prin¬ 
 ciple laid down in the covenant of the League of Na¬ 
 tions and underwritten by very nearly all the civilized 
 states in the world. Whether this principle shall 
 
 *A draft Mandate for Palestine has since this writing been laid before 
 the Council of the League of Nations. So far as the Jews are concerned, 
 it does nothing more than repeat and amplify the indeterminate formula 
 of the Balfour declaration: to the mandatory, on the other hand, it assigns 
 “all the powers inherent in the government of a sovereign state,” including 
 those of using the man-power, facilities, and resources of the land for military 
 purposes, and completely controlling foreign affairs. It commits the man¬ 
 datory to the development of Palestine as the “Jewish national home” what¬ 
 ever this may mean, and designates the Zionist Organization as the “Jewish 
 Agency” to help it in this task, so long as this agency’s “organization and 
 constitution are in the opinion of the mandatory appropriate. ” It permits 
 the Palestine Administration to aid in the immigration of Jews to Palestine 
 and their admission to citizenship there. It requires the administration 
 to introduce “a land system appropriate to the needs of the country” and 
 allows it “full power to provide” for public ownership and control of national 
 resources, “public works, services, and utilities, and permits it to arrange 
 with the Jewish agency” to develop or establish these on condition that 
 profits shall be reasonable and excess profits shall be used for the benefit 
 of the land. And it recognizes Hebrew as an official language. Its whole 
 effect, so far as it concerns the Jews, is permissive far more than directive. 
 Everything regarding them comes ultimately to depend upon the good-will 
 of the Administration, not upon the compulsions of fundamental law. The 
 inferences from this situation are obvious. The Arab riots in Jaffa on May 
 7, 1921, are a commentary on it; the latest exposition, in practically iden¬ 
 tical terms, by both Samuel and Churchill, of the meaning of the Balfour 
 Declaration, limiting its scope, are a commentary on it. Both Jews and 
 Arabs must beware; Jews, particularly. 
 
“VITA NUOVA?” 
 
 293 
 
 be a hypocritical cloak for imperialistic exploitation or 
 shall be carried out in good faith depends to-day exclu¬ 
 sively upon the Jews and the Arabs. In the vindica¬ 
 tion of the mandatory principle they have absolutely 
 a common cause before the bar of international justice. 
 
 They have in it absolutely a common enterprise 
 toward the establishment of international peace. 
 For the mandatory principle contains in itself the 
 essential repudiation of imperialism and all its works. 
 In the degree in which its provisions are successfully 
 enforced, the financial exploitation of weaker peoples 
 and the military collisions therein implicated become 
 impossible. But the enforcement of the mandatory 
 principle is hardly likely to arise out of the respect 
 for it by the governments at present holding mandates. 
 It will be compelled only by the peoples who are the 
 subjects of the mandates, and of these peoples alone 
 the Jews and Arabs have the competency to exact 
 the attention and secure the support of the enlightened 
 public opinion of the world. There is thus in the 
 international position created for the Jews by the 
 Treaty of San Remo and in the Arab connection some¬ 
 thing that the religious-minded would no doubt call 
 predestination—the predestination of making real 
 in some sense the prophecy of Isaiah that the law 
 shall go forth from Jerusalem and the word of the Lord 
 from Zion to the effect that men shall beat their swords 
 into plowshares and their spears into pruning-hooks, 
 that nation shall not lift up the sword against nation 
 nor learn war any more. 
 
 Such a culmination, obtained so far as may be 
 through the enforcement of the mandatory principle, 
 is no doubt a matter first of the effective confirmation 
 
294 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 of the principle and then of the slow accumulation 
 of precedents and the establishment of habits which 
 would foreclose such default by mandatory powers 
 as cannot in the nature of things fail to be attempted. 
 Meanwhile, the validation of this common cause of 
 Arab and Jew must rest upon a unity far more com¬ 
 petent than merely common action under the covenant 
 of the League of Nations. It requires a unity estab¬ 
 lished through a meeting of minds, an interchange 
 of intellectual culture, a cooperation in the public 
 enterprises necessary to the smooth going and the 
 progressive enrichment of the daily life of the two 
 peoples. The Jews cannot too soon create in their 
 University a Department of Arabic Life and Letters. 
 They cannot too soon open all their schools, from the 
 highest to the lowest, to the Arabs at home and abroad, 
 and invite reciprocity. As Feisal has repeatedly 
 pointed out, cultural communion must be coupled 
 with economic cooperation, and the building up of 
 Palestine must be accompanied by the development 
 of Syria and Mesopotamia. The need is particularly 
 great to raise the standard of living of the Palestin¬ 
 ian fellah. Already the mere existence of the Jewish 
 colonies, poor as they are, has done much for his wages 
 and his health—this is one of the reasons for the ani¬ 
 mus of the effendi and the money-lender against Zionism. 
 But there is still much to do. The fellah must be 
 completely freed from the exploitation of the landlord 
 and the usurer, and must receive the maximum op¬ 
 portunity for education in the Jewish schools and for 
 the absorption of Jewish standards of life, labour, and 
 thought. That this must be accomplished not by 
 coercion but by contagion is, of course, obvious. 
 
“VITA NUOVA?” 
 
 295 
 
 The fellah of Palestine is a case of the arrested develop¬ 
 ment and enforced degradation typical of the whole 
 Arabic-speaking and Mohammedan world. The cul¬ 
 tural level on which he has found stability is barbarous. 
 His rise above it is restricted by the accumulations of 
 immemorial precepts, prescriptions, and taboos which 
 even in the Bible appear in already vestigial form. 
 From these he will need to be moved by attraction, 
 not impulsion. With the Jewish avenues toward 
 culture and occidentalism open, with no constraints 
 from without, and particularly with the example 
 of Jewish success and prosperity before his eyes, 
 he will, in the course of time, of his own motion seek 
 a status wherein he will help to elevate, as he now de¬ 
 grades, the standards and conditions of life of his 
 European Jewish neighbour. 
 
 The ultimate outcome of such a process is, willy- 
 nilly, likely to be, within Palestine, the assimilation 
 to one another of Jew and Arab, and on the European 
 level of life and culture; outside of Palestine, the realiza¬ 
 tion of that confederation of the peoples of Asia Minor 
 which Sir Mark Sykes dreamed of, and to which his 
 unfortunate arrangement with Picot is to-day the 
 most serious obstacle. 
 
 Ill 
 
 If the political situation has its ethnographic im¬ 
 plications and the ethnographic relations carry their 
 political responsibilities, involving a condition and 
 requiring a will to make effective the prophetic vision 
 of international peace; so also the economic situation, 
 which underlies both the others, has its implications. 
 These involve a condition requiring a will to make 
 
296 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 effective the prophetic vision of national righteousness. 
 
 The struggle to establish this righteousness seems 
 to be the outstanding fact of the internal history of 
 the ancient Jewish state. One of the most interest¬ 
 ing things about the literature of that state is the ab¬ 
 sence of political writings. In other ancient states— 
 the Athenian, for example—political form seems to be 
 a paramount concern. With Plato and Aristotle, the 
 political organization of the state is the outstanding 
 preoccupation and their successors are legion. Ancient 
 Hebrew literature seems to ignore altogether political 
 forms. It seems to take them for granted, and the 
 changes in Hebrew government seem to be changes neces¬ 
 sitated by foreign, not by domestic, problems. The 
 subject matter of the Prophets, of the two books of law, 
 Leviticus and Deuteronomy, is the economy of the state. 
 
 The history of this economy can be summed up very 
 briefly. When the Jews slowly conquered Canaan, 
 the unit of military action was the tribe, and the land 
 that was conquered became the property of the tribe 
 as a whole. When it was distributed, the tribe re¬ 
 ceived it first. Thus, Joshua distributes so much land 
 to this tribe, so much to that tribe, and so on. The land 
 went first into the possession of the tribal community. 
 Then the community distributed it to the clans and 
 families, and from these it could not be alienated 
 except as subject to the right of preemption by the 
 next of kin. Transfer to persons outside the clan was 
 not permitted. Nor, as is told in Numbers, could land 
 be transferred from one tribe to another. At the 
 outset, then, the land was divided among the families 
 and each cultivated its own vine and fig-tree. 
 
 A process of subversion which seems to be universal 
 
“VITA NUOVA?” 
 
 297 
 
 and endemic and as persistent as what is called natural 
 law—it may be observed to-day in Texas even as 
 then in Palestine or Greece—deprived the peasant 
 freeholder first of his land, then perhaps of his children, 
 his wife, and, finally, his freedom. In the next stage 
 the community is, broadly speaking, a community 
 of landowners on the one side and serfs and slaves who 
 till the land of the landowners on the other. All the 
 prophets, from Amos to Isaiah, are engaged in denounc¬ 
 ing both the process and the condition. They are 
 engaged in denouncing the whole system of inequalities 
 that it developed, and their reforms are reforms which 
 look primarily toward eliminating it and preventing 
 its recurrence in the future. Deuteronomy is the 
 first step taken toward this end, Leviticus the second. 
 Between Deuteronomy and Leviticus came the Babylo¬ 
 nian exile, and it is not improbable that the exiles’ 
 observation of land tenure and slavery in Babylon, 
 no less than of religious ritual, had its influence on 
 the drastic reconstruction formulated in the Levitical 
 code. The heart of this code is the conception that 
 the land belongs to the community as a whole and 
 the ordination of an economy based on this conception. 
 Under this economy land may be leased but not sold. 
 The lease may be determined by the value not of the 
 land, but of the crops prior to the year of jubilee. 
 And if the original holder wishes to reclaim his land, 
 he may do so, refunding the price. In the forty-ninth 
 year land must be returned to him whether or no. 
 Houses must be treated like land. 
 
 Similarly with respect to the tools of the labourer, 
 his clothing, food, and so forth. Both Deuteronomy 
 and Leviticus prohibit taking them as pledges. So 
 
298 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 also with interest: it may not be taken from citizens, 
 although it may from aliens. 
 
 The attempt is obviously to safeguard the lives and 
 liberties of men against the menace involved in private 
 ownership or control of natural resources, of the tools 
 and instruments of their trades, and in financial ex¬ 
 ploitation. This is to-day familiar doctrine, and it is 
 all that is substantial in the “righteousness” which 
 the prophets imposed as the conditions of private and 
 public security. 
 
 Deuteronomy and Leviticus reveal the pattern of 
 the problem which the prophets anciently faced 
 and the solutions which the prophets found. They 
 have apparently set the standard for all time. Hardly 
 any of the proposals of contemporary Utopians and 
 thinkers, no matter how radical or how temporizingly 
 statesmanlike, do more than envisage the same es¬ 
 sential confrontations, and propound, in varying 
 degrees, the same essential solutions. Modernly, how¬ 
 ever, the anatomy of the situation has been compli¬ 
 cated by the addition of the automatic machine. The 
 machine has added to the problem new factors and 
 to its solution new elements. The difference between 
 the tasks of Nehemiah and Samuel may turn on noth¬ 
 ing else beside. 
 
 Now the effect of the automatic machine on the 
 problem of livelihood in Palestine is to render impossi¬ 
 ble there economic self-sufficiency and a merely agricul¬ 
 tural economy. Even the mass of the fellah, whose 
 margin of sustenance is barely above the starvation 
 point, have felt the influence of the machine and have 
 become dependent on outside for necessaries such as 
 clothing, and more often than not, for food. The 
 
“VITA NUOVA?” 
 
 299 
 
 Jews, with a much higher standard of living, even 
 among the poorest of them, have so far not succeeded 
 in establishing themselves in a merely agricultural— 
 and so primitively agricultural!—Palestine. If Pales¬ 
 tine is to become a Jewish commonwealth, hence, 
 its agriculture will have to be industrialized at least 
 to the degree in which it is industrialized in the United 
 States, and in addition it will need to develop an in¬ 
 dustrial economy—particularly, perhaps, in terms of 
 textiles—that can quickly absorb, employ, and support 
 a large Jewish immigration. 
 
 But wherever industry has come, there have come 
 radical modifications in the structure of society and 
 a clash of interests—not, as we shall see, necessary— 
 usually called the class war. New social formations 
 have come into existence—banks, trusts, labour unions, 
 regulative commissions, and so on. The country has 
 been put at the mercy of the city and the farmer of 
 the miller, the commission merchant and the banker. 
 Thus, in the United States the clash between industrial 
 worker and owner, taking form as the “labour” 
 problem, is paralleled by the clash between producer 
 and distributor, taking form in the “problem” of 
 the Non-Partisan League. Similar situations are to be 
 found everywhere. It is clear that nothing but ad¬ 
 vantage could accrue to Jewish Palestine if these 
 situations could be averted from the outset. For the 
 problem of constructing the Jewish commonwealth 
 is already very complex and difficult. The mass of 
 the new settlers will come from central and eastern 
 Europe. That means that they will not be either 
 emotionally or physically the stuff that pioneers are 
 ordinarily made of: the Poles and Ukrainians and the 
 
300 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 Hungarians and Rumanians have seen to that. Their 
 organization, instruction, and activities will need to be 
 such as will enable them to recover in the shortest 
 possible time health, hope, and self-dependence, to evoke 
 their initiative and to encourage them in the emulations 
 of work; a morale will have to be created for them; and 
 this in the presence and against the contagion of the 
 lower economy and hope of the Arabs. To permit 
 the complication of this problem by the addition of an 
 unnecessary and dangerous “labour” problem would 
 be the height of folly. Yet, since inertia, sentiment, 
 and prejudice govern men more than either insight or 
 hindsight one may not doubt that the height will be 
 attained. 
 
 IV 
 
 Nevertheless, an attempt has been made to keep the 
 development of Palestine on the plains of commonsense. 
 This attempt is the Pittsburgh Programme. Its 
 origin is to be sought in a series of discussions which 
 began between some of the members of a small group 
 of American Zionists calling themselves “Parushim,” 
 shortly after the publication of Mr. Balfour’s letter 
 to Lord Rothschild. The eight or nine men and women 
 who participated in the discussion were of all shades 
 of opinion and of all schools in economic thought. By 
 common consent they determined to leave doctrine 
 as nearly as possible to the doctrinaries and to face 
 the problem of the economy of Palestine developing 
 into a free Jewish commonwealth in terms of the con¬ 
 ditions which such a development must meet and must 
 overcome. The upshot was the agreement upon a 
 set of principles which they bound themselves, each 
 
“VITA NUOVA?” 
 
 301 
 
 in his own way, to teach and defend. These principles 
 in a modified form were unanimously adopted by the 
 convention of the Zionist Organization of America in 
 July, 1918, under the title “Resolutions Bearing on 
 Palestinian Policy,” and reaffirmed at subsequent 
 conventions. The formulation of these resolutions 
 was the work of one member of the group. The 
 modifications were due to the criticisms of the best 
 minds of the organization, including Mr. Brandeis. 
 The resolutions declare: 
 
 In 1897 the first Zionist Congress at Basle defined the 
 object of Zionism to be “the establishment of a publicly 
 recognized and legally secured homeland for the Jewish 
 people in Palestine.” The recent Declaration of Great 
 Britain, France, Italy, and others of the allied democratic 
 states have established this public recognition of the Jewish 
 national home as an international fact. 
 
 Therefore we desire to affirm anew the principles which 
 have guided the Zionist Movement since its inception, and 
 which were the foundations laid down by our lawgivers and 
 prophets for the ancient Jewish state, and were the inspira¬ 
 tion of the living Jewish law embodied in the traditions of 
 two thousand years of exile. 
 
 1st. Political and civil equality irrespective of race, 
 sex, or faith, for all the inhabitants of the land. 
 
 2nd. To insure in the Jewish national home in Palestine 
 equality of opportunity, we favour a policy which with due 
 regard to existing rights shall tend to establish the ownership 
 and control of the land and of all natural resources, and of 
 all public utilities by the whole people. 
 
 3rd. All land, owned or controlled by the whole people, 
 should be leased on such conditions as will insure the fullest 
 opportunity for development and continuity of possession. 
 
 4th. The cooperative principle should be applied as far 
 as feasible in the organization of all agricultural, industrial, 
 commercial, and financial undertakings. 
 
302 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 5th. The fiscal policy shall be framed so as to protect 
 the people from the evils of land speculation and from 
 every other form of financial oppression. 
 
 6th. The system of free public instruction which is to be 
 established should embrace all grades and departments of 
 education. 
 
 7th. The medium of public instruction shall be Hebrew, 
 the national language of the Jewish people. 
 
 V 
 
 The discussion of which these principles are a 
 precipitate were inevitably wide-ranging, and inevita¬ 
 bly entailed not merely a reversion to economic theories 
 and programmes, but an analysis of political and cul¬ 
 tural ideologies. As they went on and agreement came 
 closer, they tended to take shape as an attitude of 
 mind which involved a practical criticism and restate¬ 
 ment of the postulates or preconceptions of current 
 economic theories, whatever their schools. It was 
 observed that these theories arose as attempts at 
 justifying or correcting special economic situations, 
 and that the theories were challenged, opposed, and 
 finally displaced as the situations altered. There 
 were reviewed and rejected as inapplicable, both 
 generally to the whole region of economic life, and 
 particularly to Palestine, the assumptions of the 
 classical orthodox economists, of the Socialists, of the 
 syndicalists, and of the anarchists. All these seemed 
 to have arisen as responses to secondary rather than 
 primary conditions, and to have undergone distortion 
 in the degree that these primary conditions were lost 
 sight of. 
 
 In Palestine, however, an undeveloped and backward 
 land, the primary conditions w T ere in no way overlaid. 
 
“VITA NUOVA?” 
 
 303 
 
 For all practical purposes, no economy existed in 
 Jewish Palestine, only a charity. An economy was 
 to be created, and it was to be created by bringing 
 together people of a certain character and vision, of 
 certain habits of mind and work with a territory 
 where even the soil would require special treatment 
 before it could begin to support them. The attempt 
 to envisage what they must get and what they must 
 make led ultimately to an anatomy of the economic 
 interests and functions of men, and this to certain 
 premises which, commonplace as they seemed, struck 
 many of that sophisticated company as the beginnings 
 of a restatement of economic theory, having possibilities 
 of much wider relevance than Palestine. 
 
 The point of departure for these premises was the 
 observation that consumers and producers, even more 
 than buyers and sellers, come at a certain level into 
 inevitable conflict with each other. This conflict, so 
 the argument ran, is more widespread and more funda¬ 
 mental than the Socialist’s class war, inasmuch as 
 the latter obtains only between different classes of 
 producers in the same field of endeavour, while the 
 former is coextensive with mankind and obtains in the 
 heart of each and every human being. To the question 
 why the conflict was thus universal, the answer was 
 made that men are born consumers and only become 
 producers. Had the world been one that was made 
 for them, instead of one in which they happen and 
 grow, men would have been consumers purely. The 
 world being what it is, they have to make it over to 
 prepare it for consumption. Thereby the whole com¬ 
 plicated economy of industrial society comes to be in 
 which the ultimate end of production—use, consumption 
 
304 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 —gets displaced by the proximate end, marketing, 
 profit; things get made, like the razors bought by the 
 Vicar of Wakefield’s son at the fair, not for use, but 
 usury; not to serve but to sell. And even where use 
 is held in view, the conflict is apparent. A baker 
 wants to buy the flour and eggs and yeast and housing 
 which he consumes as cheaply as possible and wants 
 to sell his bread as dearly as possible. His customers, 
 who may be the very people from whom he buys these 
 things, want their bread as cheaply as possible, but 
 tend to charge their own patrons all that the traffic will 
 bear. 
 
 Nor is this the whole story, nor its most impor¬ 
 tant phase. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick- 
 maker each produces one thing only, but each consumes 
 many things, very many things, that he does not pro¬ 
 duce and that he cannot produce; that, consequently, 
 other people must produce for him. His interests as 
 consumer have a much wider range and span than his 
 interests as producer. His conflict with all other people 
 as producer is due to the fact that his consumer’s in¬ 
 terest can be served only if he receives a return for 
 what he produces adequate to yield him the satisfac¬ 
 tions he craves. His returns on his production are a 
 rough measure of the effective range of his consump¬ 
 tion, and the completeness of his satisfactions. 
 
 Now there comes a point in consumption when the 
 value begins to fall off. Consumption, no less than 
 production, has its law of diminishing returns, con¬ 
 fusedly treated by economists as “diminishing utility.” 
 In production, however, the law of diminishing returns 
 applies only to profits. Where profits are not involved 
 production may go on indefinitely; but consumption 
 
“VITA NUOVA?” 
 
 305 
 
 stops where the point of gratification is passed. The 
 principle of diminishing returns in consumption makes 
 the rich man poor and turns the so-called law of supply 
 and demand into a business man’s myth. For the 
 law confuses consuming power with purchasing power, 
 and assumes that demand has been satisfied when 
 people have stopped buying. But for the basic 
 products of industrial society—food, clothing, shelter, 
 protection against danger and disease—social demand, 
 consuming power, is insatiable, and purchasing power 
 limited. From the point of view of society, supply 
 can be exhausted by consuming power, and can and 
 often does exhaust purchasing power, as the economy 
 of the war and the current economic crises clearly 
 enough show. 
 
 With individuals the reverse may be the case. A 
 dyspeptic millionaire may have endless purchasing 
 power and yet be practically bankrupt in consum¬ 
 ing power; the threshold at which his satisfaction 
 stops may be very low, and the number and vari¬ 
 ety of his satisfactions may be very small. Indeed, 
 the whole difference between a barbarian and a man 
 of culture may be said to lie in these things. The 
 production power and skill of each in his own sphere 
 may be equal; that of the former may even exceed 
 that of the latter. But the latter’s capacity for con¬ 
 sumption is enormously extended. The barbarian 
 is able to consume only the merest necessities; the 
 other requires not alone what the barbarian requires 
 but a great many more things which are to him equally 
 necessities. Civilization may be defined, in fact, as 
 the multiplication of the necessities of life. A standard 
 of living is high or low by just what it accepts and what 
 
306 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 it rejects as necessary. And the standard of living is 
 the preoccupation of consumption. Currently, it has 
 been measured by two conditions—that of health, 
 and that of morale. By the latter it was agreed to mean 
 the diversity and coherence of consumption interests 
 in a common purpose that may express the identity 
 and continuity of a human group. Thus the country 
 is being deserted and country life is a problem; towns 
 are growing in number and complexity because they 
 present the concentration of a greater diversity of 
 satisfactions. The movement of population from 
 country to city is a consumers’ movement, not a pro¬ 
 ducers’. City has more articulation, is more shot 
 through with spiritual values, its morale is higher. 
 
 The reason is that the city is essentially a centre 
 and organization of consumption. Consumption is the 
 end or goal of life; production is either an instru¬ 
 ment and servant of consumption or is identical with 
 consumption. In the latter case the activities which 
 men undertake are free activities, and their nature 
 is that of art or science or play. They do not merely 
 use material, they use it up. They are recreational 
 in both senses of the word, and the associations of 
 men who pursue them tend to be free associations with 
 professional standards of workmanship and conduct. 
 But the bulk of the productive activities in the economy 
 of life are not free but bond, not recreational but ex¬ 
 hausting. They constitute, and always must consti¬ 
 tute, labour, not art. For, by and large, there is no 
 liberative quality in them. They are things men do 
 because they must, not because they want to. 
 
 And the things men do because they must are, on the 
 whole, the things which in economic life diversify them; 
 
“VITA NUOVA?’’ 
 
 S07 
 
 the things men do because they want to are the things 
 which unite them. Men are by nature in need of food, 
 clothing, shelter, recreation, medicine; they are not 
 by nature farmers or machinists or bakers or physicians 
 or weavers or carpenters or printers. Their consuming 
 interests are innate; their producing interests are 
 acquired. As consumers men are, by and large, simi¬ 
 lar and equal. As producers they are, by and large, 
 diversified and unequal. 
 
 In all societies which have attained a certain level 
 of organization, the similarities become the basis of 
 competition and conflict. Wanting the same things, 
 when there are not enough to go round, as when 
 consumers want bread and meat, or producers want 
 patrons, seems to be the source of all wars, whether 
 economic or political. Baker competes with baker, 
 not with carpenter; shoemaker competes with shoe¬ 
 maker, not with butcher; and so on. Insofar as men 
 are diverse, individual not merely in their vocations, 
 but in their natures; they need one another, are inter¬ 
 dependent and cooperative; insofar as they are simi¬ 
 lar, they tend to be competitors. That diversification 
 of producers known as the division of labour together 
 with the later organization of the diversified pro¬ 
 ducers into guilds, trusts, trade-unions, and so on 
 seems in the history of the industrial arts to have been 
 conditioned upon the similarity of consumers; com¬ 
 petition for custom was obviated by the differentia¬ 
 tion of services. By means of this diversification and 
 the subsequent integration of individuals of similar 
 vocation into vocational groups, producers appear to 
 have obtained an absolute advantage over the “ ulti¬ 
 mate’’ consumer, an advantage tremendously increased 
 
308 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 through the development of the economy of in¬ 
 dustry. 
 
 The consumers’ counter of this advantage has been 
 consumers’ cooperation. It is a form of organization 
 and involves an ideology which appears later in the 
 history of economic associations than producers’ 
 unions. It rests upon the natural and moral priority 
 of consumption over production, and converts the 
 consumers’ similarity and equality from a competitive 
 to a cooperative trend. It does so, moreover, under the 
 Rochdale plan, without denying gratification to the 
 competitive interest, since members of the system 
 buy at cost, yet with a profit, really a saving, propor¬ 
 tional to their purchases. Its development has been 
 a movement from distribution by consumers for con¬ 
 sumers to production by consumers for consumers. 
 Never in its history has it failed to maintain the priority 
 of consumption over production, and to extend the 
 operation of this priority over greater and greater 
 areas of social life. 1 
 
 Producer’s cooperatives, both in agriculture and in 
 industry, do not take their point of departure from 
 the common human interest of the consumer as such 
 in conflict with the specialized interests of different 
 crafts and trades and industries of producers. They 
 take their point of departure from the class war among 
 producers, and the difficulties that exist among them 
 and that are involved in their theories are due to the 
 biases caused by this origin. This makes them aim 
 at the establishment of what is only a social means 
 
 1 Cf. George Jacob Holyoake. “The History of Cooperation in England”; 
 “The History of the Rochdale Pioneers”; L. Smith-Gordon and C. O’Brien: 
 “Cooperation in Many Lands”; Albert Sonnischsen: “Consumer’s Coopera¬ 
 tion,” 
 
“VITA NUOVA?” 
 
 309 
 
 in the position of the social end—which is consumption 
 —through the conversion of the tools and the materials 
 of production in any craft or trade or industry into 
 the property of all the members of the craft, or trade 
 or industry. They hypostatize the instrument, 1 aiming 
 thus at the same kind of control of the consuming 
 public that the capitalist has, minus the class war which 
 troubles the power of the capitalist. 
 
 To avoid the menace in such a control, to obviate 
 the inevitable conflict between different cooperative 
 producers’ unions such as would obtain under syndical¬ 
 ism, and yet to make impossible the servile state which 
 is the constant menace of socialism, the ownership of 
 land, of the resources drawn from the land, of the 
 tools and agencies of production, would obviously need 
 to be vested in the consumers as consumers. In prac¬ 
 tice this would mean that all the inhabitants of a 
 land would be voluntarily associated together, in a 
 consumers’ cooperative society, having a federal 
 structure, and holding title to the land, the natural 
 resources, and the machinery by which these are con¬ 
 verted into consumable commodities and services and 
 the various wants of men are satisfied. Such an organ¬ 
 ization would guarantee to all the inhabitants of the 
 land that usujruct which ownership under the system 
 of private, personal property in these things guarantees 
 to only a few. The priority of consumption would thus 
 be confirmed in organization and in law. 
 
 But if the pattern of economic control were limited 
 to this feature, the essential abuses of the modern 
 industrial system in which the class war has its ground 
 would be neither avoided nor obviated. The producer 
 
 1 Cf. H. M. Kallen: “William James and Henri Bergson,” Chapter I. 
 
310 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 in any industry would be a wage-earner and at the 
 mercy of his employer—in effect, of the management 
 of the industry. That he would, as a member of the 
 National Consumers’ Cooperative society, be to some 
 degree owner as well as worker would make no prac¬ 
 tical difference, for his property right would be too 
 small—as is the case with employees in English and 
 other cooperatives—to modify his status of employee. 
 If he is to get justice as a worker there must be assured 
 to him exactly the type of freedom that the producer 
 seeks by means of the Producers’ Cooperative. It 
 must, however, be assured to him not as against the 
 consumer’s interest but in reconciliation with it, in 
 due acknowledgment of the priority of the consumer’s 
 end. This aim can be attained by the organization 
 of producers according to their different trades, crafts, 
 vocations, or professions—i. e., as agricultural labourers, 
 carpenters, machinists, transport-workers, physicians, 
 teachers, bankers, and so on. These organizations 
 would, in matters of their several technologies, of the 
 conditions of production, be self-governed and autono¬ 
 mous. They would be endowed with ownership of use 
 in contrast to the ownership of usufruct, on the basis 
 of their functions as producers. Every member of a 
 producing cooperative would be an owner in the process 
 of production, would be a member in a free coopera¬ 
 tive company in which the less skilled would have a 
 voice with the more skilled in the government of their in¬ 
 dustry as an organization of productive activities. The 
 various associations producing commodities or services 
 would then be federated into a single society, constitut¬ 
 ing a National Producers’ Cooperative. 
 
 Thus, each citizen of the land would enter twice into 
 
“VITA NUOVA?” 
 
 811 
 
 economic association with his fellows. Once, as con¬ 
 sumer, with all his fellows; once as producer with the 
 members only of his craft, industry, or profession. The 
 duly-chosen administrative officers representing him as 
 consumer together with the duly-chosen administra¬ 
 tive officers representing him as producer would de¬ 
 termine the economy of his country and adjust the 
 conflict between his interests as consumer and as 
 producer. These officers might be selected by two 
 national assemblies chosen by the parties at interest— 
 the consumers and the producers. They would guard 
 the standard of living, which is the main concern of 
 the consumer, and the conditions and methods of pro¬ 
 duction which are the main concern of the producer. 
 They would reconcile the members of the community 
 with one another and with their own selves at just 
 the point where their conflict is the most basic, the most 
 enduring, and the most disastrous in its effects. 
 
 VI 
 
 The similarity of this theory to that of the Guild 
 Socialists comes at once to mind. Its difference, it 
 was pointed out in course of the discussion among the 
 Parushim, lies in the very important fact that it makes 
 no reservations as to political government and weights 
 the relative values of consuming and producing in¬ 
 terests almost inversely. Guild Socialism is primarily 
 interested in the organization of production; it acqui¬ 
 esces in the form of political association already existing. 
 Preoccupied with the application of a mediaeval system 
 of producers’ organization to modern industry, and 
 regarding the problem with reference to the established 
 institutions of the British community, its protagonists 
 
312 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 could not have come, perhaps, to any other conclusion. 
 Although they have ignored, in the formation of their 
 theory, the role and significance of the consumers’ 
 cooperatives in England, it is still true that the politico- 
 economic situation is there too complex, too full of 
 secondary factors, too shot through with vested inter¬ 
 ests to make possible anything short of a violent transi¬ 
 tion from the existing pattern of British organization 
 to such an one as has been outlined above. In Palestine 
 again, among the Arabs, such a change would be quite 
 as impossible. For the barbarous nature of the Arab 
 economy in Palestine and the retarded character of 
 the fellah institutional culture preclude it, desirable 
 as it is. A long process of education and cultivation 
 must intervene. At present neither the Arab mind nor 
 Arab society, with its tribal organization, its nomadic 
 groups, its cult of taboos and prescriptions-, could with¬ 
 out the greatest difficulty adjust itself to such a change, 
 to say nothing of undertaking it. 
 
 The only people among whom it is possible, the argu¬ 
 ment went on, are the Jews. To them it is not only 
 possible, it is inevitable. It is inevitable, regardless 
 of the theoretic validity or invalidity of the plan. 
 For in its adoption and application, in the minimum 
 form of the Pittsburgh Programme, lies their only 
 chance of the swift, effective conversion of Palestine 
 into a Jewish homeland. The reason is, that no matter 
 what part of the western world they come from, the 
 standard of living of the Jews is very many times 
 higher than that of the fellah. They could never 
 survive, as wage earners, in competition with the so- 
 much-cheaper Arab labour. They would be com¬ 
 pelled either to emigrate or to starve. The upshot 
 
“VITA NUOVA?” 
 
 313 
 
 would be that the greater part of agricultural Jewish 
 Palestine would become a collection of manorial 
 estates like Petach Tikwah, and the industrial Palestine 
 to be created would be a Palestine of Jewish owners 
 and Arab workers. The total Jewish development of 
 Palestine would serve only to keep Jews out of Palestine. 
 
 To keep them in, they must, hence, at the same time, 
 become both workers and owners. If the whole soil 
 of Palestine were already in private hands, the situation 
 would become one of extreme difficulty. To change 
 it would cost immense sums of money and perhaps 
 bloodshed. But both the conceptions of land-tenure 
 that underlay Turkish law and the actual state of 
 ownership in Palestine give the public as against the 
 private right a certain preeminence in prestige and 
 actual dominion. Only 15 per cent, of Transjor- 
 dania, 20 of Galilee, and 50 per cent, of Judea are 
 actually held by the fellah. In the sanjak of Jeru¬ 
 salem only some sixteen or seventeen thousand fami¬ 
 lies of them make their living from agriculture, and on 
 farms varying from eight to twelve acres in size. Of 
 the balance of the land, a great proportion is in the 
 hands of absentee landlords. Many of these acquired 
 the mass of their holdings by means of fraudulent 
 registrations under the law of Tabu formulated by 
 the Porte in the early decades of the second half of the 
 nineteenth century. This law created the same effects 
 in Palestine as did the Enclosures in England. Public 
 lands, commons, came into private hands. Workers 
 suddenly found themselves transformed from owners 
 to tenants, and innumerable fellah freeholders fell 
 thereby first under the dominion of the Mohammedan 
 landlord and then in the power of the Christian usurer. 
 
314 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 The remainder of the land is public land, actually 
 in the possession of the Government. Exclusive of 
 the territories of El Arish and Transjordania, this land 
 amounts to about 300,000 acres. It is de facto the 
 possession of the whole people. So, in a somewhat 
 lesser degree, are the existing Jewish holdings in Pales¬ 
 tine. The land owned by the National Fund is that 
 by fundamental law. The land on which the pro¬ 
 prietary colonists are settled can in the majority of 
 cases not be held to be either legally or by use their 
 own. Much of it is under mortgage either to Baron 
 Rothschild or the Jewish Colonization Association, 
 and those who live by its exploitation are not really 
 freeholders at all. They are the beneficiaries of a 
 public trust, philanthropic in character if you will, 
 but public, and capable of hypothecation without 
 improper hardship to the beneficiaries. Thus land in 
 Palestine immediately available for Jewish settlement 
 is already national or semi-national. 1 But its very 
 nature would compel its conversion, if it were private. 
 For it is not like land in other parts of the world on 
 which pioneers have settled and at once found a living. 
 To make it habitable requires an initial investment 
 which is like investment in the structure, instruments, 
 and tools of an industrial plant. It must be “re- 
 
 1 News has recently come of the promulgation of a land transfer ordinance 
 by the office of the High Commissioner. Under this ordinance all transac¬ 
 tions other than leases of three years must be carried out through the land- 
 registry, by the consent of the administration. Buyers or lessors must be 
 residents of Palestine, the amount of their purchase is limited in area and 
 price—about £3,000—and they must prove their intention immediately 
 to undertake cultivation or development. It is to be observed that these 
 provisions will prevent land speculation but will not encourage extensive or 
 swift Jewish settlement. As, however, the High Commissioner is not bound 
 to the law but can consent to land transactions without any restrictions 
 if in his view they are for the public good, the prospects of Jewish settle¬ 
 ment are scarcely altered by the law. 
 
“VITA NUOVA?” 
 
 315 
 
 claimed” before it can be settled, and such a reclama¬ 
 tion is beyond the powers of any one prospective settler. 
 It is a charge upon the Jewry of the world, the returns 
 on which it may take a generation to produce. A 
 public charge of this kind cannot be carried except by 
 a public administration, under public control. 
 
 With respect to public utilities and natural resources, 
 the situation is somewhat different. Transport facili¬ 
 ties, bar those built during the Great War by the British 
 army for war purposes, are either privately owned or 
 heavily mortgaged and bear, like all the public works 
 in the recent Turkish Empire, an interest and mainte¬ 
 nance charge out of all proportion to their earning 
 powers. There are no other public utilities to speak 
 of. They will have to be created. The fundamental 
 one, on which all others will necessarily depend, is a 
 hydro-electric service from the utilization of the water¬ 
 power in the drop of the Jordan. This is the foremost, 
 wellnigh the only one of the natural resources of the 
 land. Both transport and industry must wait upon 
 making available this power, and whether and how it 
 is to be provided is contingent upon political questions 
 of doubtful issue. These are the questions of the 
 northern boundary and of the mandate. The latter is 
 the more important, for by its economic terms will be 
 established whether the decision at San Remo may 
 actually be converted from a formula into a fact. 
 If the Jews of the world do through the Zionist Organ¬ 
 ization in fact receive that priority in economic con¬ 
 cessions on which alone the building of a Jewish Pales¬ 
 tine can be hopefully postulated, they will have the 
 opportunity to put into use the natural resources of 
 Palestine and to develop the necessary public utilities 
 
316 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 under conditions of a public trust. Their claims as 
 against possible competitors are allowable only on this 
 basis, and neither the status of public utilities elsewhere 
 in the world, particularly in England, nor the character 
 of the problem permit of any other. 1 
 
 Thus, in the very nature of the case, the land and 
 other natural resources and the public utilities of a 
 Jewish Palestine must come under public control and 
 be developed for public use. A new, large, and swift 
 settlement of self-supporting Jews does not seem to be 
 possible under any other conditions. That such a 
 socialization would meet with resistance from the 
 vested Jewish interests already established in Palestine 
 is of course a foregone conclusion. But it is equally 
 foregone that such resistance could be broken down 
 either by force or persuasion. There is a precedent 
 for persuasion having the weight of religious authority. 
 This precedent is to be found in the Book of Nehemiah, 
 which portrays a situation not unlike the present one. 
 Nehemiah is the Jewish High Commissioner from 
 Persia, devout, loyal, competent. He finds the country¬ 
 side a desert and the city a desolation. He finds the 
 “restored” Jewish community in the homeland sur¬ 
 rounded by intriguing, inimical neighbours 2 and divided 
 
 1 Cf. Footnote p. 292 supra. 
 
 2 Then there arose a great cry of the people and of their wives against 
 their brethren the Jews. For there were that said. We, our sons and our 
 daughters are many: let us get grain, that we may eat and live. Some also 
 there were that said. We are mortgaging our fields, and our vineyards and 
 our houses: let us get grain because of the dearth. There were also that 
 said, We have borrowed money for the King’s tribute upon our fields and 
 vineyards. Yet now our flesh is as the flesh of our brethren, our children as 
 their children: and lo, we bring into bondage our sons, and our daughters to 
 be servants, and some of our daughters are brought into bondage already: 
 neither is it in our power to help it, for other men have our fields and our 
 vineyards. 
 
 And I was very angry when I heard their cry and these words. Then 
 I consulted with myself and contended with the nobles and the rulers, and 
 
I 
 
 “VITA NUOVA?” 317 
 
 into wealthy and exploiting land-owning and clerical 
 classes on the one side, and oppressed, impoverished, 
 and degraded masses on the other. 1 To guard against 
 the neighbours all the workers are made to become 
 soldiers as well. Against exploitation Nehemiah re¬ 
 calls the labour and sacrifices of the Diaspora and 
 invokes the piety and loyalty of the classes. He suc¬ 
 ceeds. He also secures considerable contributions 
 toward the rebuilding of the city from the “heads 
 of fathers’ houses,” and finally he calls a public as¬ 
 sembly, at which the Law is read by Ezra, translated 
 to the people, and the keeping of it sworn, particularly 
 of that portion of it dealing with land tenure and 
 indebtedness. 2 
 
 History, it may be inferred, still continues to repeat 
 itself, though with a difference, a difference often so 
 great as to turn repetition into mutation. In the 
 case of the restoration of the Jewish homeland, the 
 difference is very great, but it is not a mutation. 
 The same essential conditions reappear: the same need 
 of the masses, the same danger, the same spirit in the 
 
 said unto them: Ye exact usury, every one of his brother. And I held a great 
 assembly against them. And I said unto them, We after our abilities have 
 redeemed our brethren the Jews, that were sold unto the nations: and would 
 ye even sell your brethren, and should they be sold unto us? Then held 
 they their peace and found never a word. Also I said. The thing that ye 
 do is not good: ought ye not to walk in the fear of God, because of the re¬ 
 proach of the nations our enemies? ... I pray you let us leave off this 
 usury. Restore, I pray you, to them, even this day, their fields, their 
 vineyards, their oliveyards and their houses, also the hundredth part of the 
 grain, the new wine, and the oil that ye exact from them. Then said they: 
 We will restore them and will require nothing of them. . . . Then I 
 
 called the priests and took an oath of them, that they would do according 
 to this promise. . . . And the people did according to this promise. 
 
 (Nehemiah v, 1-12.) 
 
 ] As, on the record, the Arabs of to-day have been, and are likely to be, with 
 alien help, for some time to come, unless their counsels are more surely guided 
 than heretofore. 
 
 2 Nehemiah, ix-x, 31. 
 
318 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 economic proposals to obviate the danger and to serve 
 the need. There are no men of considerable wealth 
 and land-ownership among the Jews of Palestine. 
 They are prevailingly paupers, living on Halukah. 
 Such as there are, however, might well be persuaded by 
 the precedent recorded by Nehemiah, to convert their 
 holdings into cooperative Jewish farms. The alterna¬ 
 tive is for them to make alliance with the Arab ab¬ 
 sentee landlords—in which case history would repeat 
 itself, indeed—or to be crowded out automatically by 
 the competition with the cooperative community. 
 
 VII 
 
 The rudiments of this community already exist. 
 But it must not be supposed that they originated ex 
 nihilo , as the fulfilment of a Utopian ideal and the 
 carrying out of a “revolutionary” programme. They 
 arose automatically out of the total situation in which 
 the life and labour of the people of Palestine were 
 involved, and the crux of the problem of the economic 
 organization of contemporary Palestinian Jewry is 
 to be found in the question as to whether they are 
 capable of correction and guidance to the point of 
 functioning as agencies for the economic assimilation 
 of great units of immigrant Jews. 
 
 Of these rudiments, the consumers’ cooperative is 
 the more recent, and by far the more successful. 
 It goes by the name of Hamashbir, literally, the grain- 
 purveyor. Organized in 1914, shortly after the begin¬ 
 ning of the Great War, by the five hundred or so Jewish 
 labourers in Petah Tikwah who found themselves 
 threatened with starvation under the profiteering 
 which the war occasioned, it succeeded with its limited 
 
“VITA NUOVA?” 
 
 319 
 
 means not merely to reduce the cost of living materially 
 but to undertake the manufacture of jams and to give 
 employment to a few of its members. When, in 1917, 
 the Palestine Commission arrived, it made Hamashbir 
 a loan to enable it to extend its operations. These 
 were not conducted according to the Rochdale plan 
 of selling at the market-price and distributing the differ¬ 
 ence between the market and the cost-price as a 
 “profit” or dividend at the end of the year. Nor 
 were purchases limited to the membership. The 
 society sold at cost to everybody. So important 
 were its services in the first year that its expansion 
 was inevitable. In the three years following it was 
 the purchaser of all the grain produced in the Jewish 
 colonies, and established thus a relation between itself 
 and the producers’ cooperatives. So far, what it did, it 
 did for labourers only. In 1918, however, the approach 
 of the British army and the retreat of the Turks led 
 to a kiting of prices in the approved style, and the 
 workers in the Bezalel shops, the teachers and the 
 other “white-collar” proletarians, clamoured for provi¬ 
 sion through the agency of the society. The provision 
 was promised and the country was scoured to add 
 foodstuffs enough to meet their needs. But by the 
 time this provision was secured, at exorbitant prices, 
 the British had entered Palestine, bringing with them 
 grains and other comestibles. Prices immediately 
 fell. The “white-collar” people refused to buy the 
 commodities that had been secured in their behalf. 
 There was no way of holding them to their agreement, 
 and thus the Cooperative Society found itself with 
 the burden of—for it, a very large deficit—about £6,000 
 (sterling). This deficit has been called, by the directors 
 
320 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 of the Anglo-Palestine Bank, a proof of the incom¬ 
 petency of the managers of the society and of the 
 society’s impracticality, and has been made the basis 
 for refusing it further credit. As against this refusal 
 credit has been extended to a new cooperative society, 
 recently formed for these same 44 white-collar” classes, 
 called Hamazmin —the importer. A class war between 
 cooperatives has been initiated, not—it is impossible 
 to believe—without malice. 
 
 The ill-will of the Anglo-Palestine company’s officials 
 has, however, affected the activities of Hamashbir very 
 little. It received credit from the 44 groups” or Cooper¬ 
 ative Producers’ Societies, who sold it all their produce. 
 It established a connection with the English Coopera¬ 
 tive Wholesale, which also gave it credit. It has sur¬ 
 vived its crisis, and is again showing a profit that may 
 enable it to meet its indebtedness. 
 
 Nevertheless, the strictures of the officials of the 
 Anglo-Palestine Company are deserved, simply from 
 the point of view of cooperative technique and the 
 future of the society. It continues to sell to every¬ 
 body—workers, 44 white-collarer,” shop-keeper who may 
 be buying to resell, Jewish “colonist” or Christian 
 usurer. It undersells the ordinary shop-keeper, but 
 it does not require the purchaser to be a member 
 of the society. Of the seventy-five to one hundred 
 thousand Jews in Palestine of whom five or six thousand 
 are organized workmen, only about one thousand 
 are shareholders. Being a shareholder gives no one 
 any advantage over the rest of the population. This 
 benefits simply at the expense of the shareholders and 
 the profit-making competitors. It is being confirmed 
 in its vicious habits of competitive purchase. To 
 
“VITA NUOVA?” 
 
 321 
 
 function as an effective assimilating agent to consumer’s 
 cooperation Hamashbir must adopt the Rochdale 
 plan. It must absorb Hamazmin. It must do every¬ 
 thing in its power to make itself the national Coopera¬ 
 tive Society, with every Jew in Palestine a member. 
 It should at once place itself in the hands of the British 
 Cooperative Wholesale Society for guidance and train¬ 
 ing toward this end. It should, if it is wisely managed, 
 be able to secure money to lease or buy new lands on 
 which it may settle its own members as cooperative 
 producers’ groups, supply them with tools, machinery, 
 cattle, instruction, and other necessaries, and produce, 
 at least, most of the foodstuffs that its members con¬ 
 sume. If it grows more powerful it should extend 
 its operations to the arts, crafts, and industries, until 
 as the National Consumers’ Cooperative Society of 
 Palestine it is the holder of all the land and of the 
 natural resources and the owner of the tools and 
 instruments of production in the land. 
 
 In the holdings of the National Fund, in the actual 
 processes of financing Palestinian undertakings, the 
 beginnings already exist. By squeezing the philan¬ 
 thropy out of them, by making their beneficiaries 
 responsible for them through the obligation and 
 necessity of supplying their own needs—i. e., by making 
 their cost a charge against the Jews of Palestine or¬ 
 ganized as consumers, these beginnings can be developed 
 into agencies of economic self-support and moral 
 freedom for the inhabitants of the Jewish homeland. 
 
 For in relation to production also, the beginnings 
 exist and are not unfavourable. Of the five or six 
 thousand workers who make up the membership of the 
 Ahduth Avodah or Labour Union of Jewish Palestine 
 
322 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 more than half are agricultural labourers—composing 
 the Agricultural Labourers’ Union. Of these from 
 one half to one third are settled upon public land in 
 Kwuzoth or cooperative communities. It is these com¬ 
 munities which in its dark hour sold their produce 
 to Hamashbir on credit, sold it in spite of the higher 
 rate they might have received from other purchasers 
 and their great need of this higher price. Now these 
 communities—there are about twenty-two of them 
 —are far from self-supporting. They are composed 
 almost exclusively of physically weak, agriculturally 
 untrained men and women, European intellectuals 
 all, who have undertaken pioneership out of love of 
 Zion. They have been settled by the Palastina Amt 
 or other agencies on such land as was available, without 
 regard to either sanitary conditions or the essentials 
 of housing and labour. They are unskilled, and no 
 competent training, no foremanship has been supplied 
 them. Once in a long time an expert-by-book would 
 visit them and give them a lecture, but the develop¬ 
 ment of manual skill and practical competency by 
 example was not attempted, because there was nobody 
 in officialdom able to attempt it. 1 Nevertheless, 
 ignorant, untrained, regularly losing from 50 to 25 
 per cent, of their working time through malaria, they 
 held on. They had obligated themselves to the Jewish 
 National Fund, the Jewish Colonization Association, 
 or the Ahuzoth (Land Acquisition Societies) for the 
 cost of buildings, of equipment, and often of food. 
 
 1 The significance of this fact may be noted in the story of the sudden suc¬ 
 cess of the bee industry in the Jewish colonies. Attempts made at various 
 times prior to the appearance of a practical bee-keeper—Livshitz of the 
 Mikweh Israel school—failed. The latter within a year taught the colonies 
 to produce honey at a profit. 
 
“VITA NUOVA?” 
 
 323 
 
 The obligations were to be paid out of their earnings, 
 but, as they themselves sardonically declared, all that 
 they earned—all that they could earn—was a deficit. 
 The life organized for them and by them has been a 
 compromise between an ideology and a condition. As 
 they possessed neither the materials nor the technology 
 to master the condition, they found escape in their 
 ideology and in the free play it could get in the politics 
 of Jewish life in Palestine. If their communities are 
 not “culturally” Arabized as are the “colonial” settle¬ 
 ments, they are economically Arabized, in that the 
 standard of living has been degraded and the tech¬ 
 nological morale , wherever it developed, as in Mer- 
 chavia, destroyed. 
 
 Nevertheless, they represent the basic type of 
 agricultural organization on which alone the building 
 of a Jewish Palestine can be successfully accomplished. 
 Given competent foremanship, instruction aiming at 
 manual skill, and practical agricultural judgment in¬ 
 stead of theoretical botanical knowledge; given proper 
 sanitation and modern tools, the urge which took these 
 young people to Palestine and holds them there can 
 be turned into a technological channel where now it 
 runs in merely a political one. The point of depart¬ 
 ure for their cooperative organization can then become 
 the problem involved in their work, and the free 
 ordering of their lives can at last take its direction from 
 this common base. As members of the Consumers’ 
 Cooperative, they will, in their producers’ association, 
 be working equally for themselves and their fellows. 
 They will be responsible to their peers, not to their 
 alien and superior benefactors. The whole basis of 
 their incentives will be shifted, and will become more 
 
324 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 pertinent to the inward interests and the actual course 
 and condition of their daily lives. 
 
 The same thing is true in a lesser degree of the other 
 crafts and industries represented in the Ahduth Avodah. 
 There are two cooperative societies of printers and of 
 carpenters, one of bakers, one of shoemakers, one of 
 machinists. The iron workers, and of course the rail¬ 
 road workers, are not in a position to labour coopera¬ 
 tively, and of the bakers, the majority are “hands,” 
 not partners in the enterprise. Their membership 
 in Hamashbir, the acquisition by Hamashbir of the 
 private bakershops and printeries and carpenteries 
 and machine shops and such, are easy steps, pre¬ 
 requisite to the reorganization of the practitioners of 
 these crafts into self-governing producers’ units, each 
 embracing all the levels and stages of the industries 
 and including an adequate system of apprenticeship 
 and industrial education. The step toward the conver¬ 
 sion of the railroads into a cooperative producers’- 
 consumers’ enterprise is a more complicated and diffi¬ 
 cult one. Imperialistic foreign investment is involved 
 and the Jewish employees are in very small minority. 
 The first move must be toward the representation of 
 the workers in the existing management, and the focal- 
 ization of their interest upon the problems of manage¬ 
 ment. 
 
 For the rest, Ahduth Avodah itself constitutes the 
 beginning of the national producers’ organization. 
 Its constituent units are the associations, unions, 
 “groups” of the various craftsmen and workers at 
 present composing the organized section of the labour 
 or producers’ interest of the Jewish homeland. But 
 both in its form and in its objective Ahduth Avodah is 
 
“VITA NUOVA?” 
 
 325 
 
 preoccupied not with self-government in industry, 
 not with effecting coordination, economy, and com¬ 
 petency in the business of production, but with the 
 class war which is the interest of mere trades unionism, 
 with the beneficiary institutions of such unionism— 
 i. e., Ahduth Avodah maintains a sick fund, an employ¬ 
 ment bureau, a bureau of information, a kitchen, 
 and a sanatorium (not, of course, at its own expense 
 merely)—and most of all with the political manoeuvring 
 which is so much a filling, like cards for the idle, of the 
 otherwise empty lives in Palestine. The Union has been 
 made to reflect the political and ideological differences 
 of the Jewish Socialist parties in the Diaspora, and like 
 all Jewish organizations has been inclined to lay more 
 stress on ideology than on the problems of the daily 
 life. Recently it has shown signs of waking up to 
 the realities of the situation. If it become thoroughly 
 awake, it will at once devote itself to the expansion 
 of Hamashbir and the inclusion of all the Jewish in¬ 
 habitants of Palestine, whether otherwise cooperators 
 or not, in workers’ or producers’ associations that 
 shall then become members of the Ahduth Avodah. 
 The teachers are already organized, and in terms of 
 the American Zionist Medical Unit, the physicians 
 and sanitarians are organized. They should be in¬ 
 cluded in Ahduth Avodah. So should all other profes¬ 
 sions, crafts, industries that supply commodities or 
 services for the inhabitants of the Jewish homeland. 
 Their mutual relations should be thoroughly analyzed 
 and defined, and a programme of common action 
 looking ultimately toward a commonwealth based on 
 primarily economic and functional relationships should 
 be worked out and undertaken. The proximate end in 
 
326 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 view should be to create a set of institutions that will 
 be ready to replace the mandatory in full responsibil¬ 
 ity for the life of the commonwealth. Perhaps the 
 central item in such a programme, if the implications 
 of the present organization are acknowledged to their 
 logical limit, is education. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Now there exists a certain traditional eulogium 
 regarding the Jewish interest in and aptitude for educa¬ 
 tion. This eulogium is misleading, for the reason 
 that successful education is never education in a 
 vacuum. Teaching and learning are always the teach¬ 
 ing and learning of some particular thing, at a given 
 time and in a given place and under given circumstances. 
 The significance and value of what is taught and what 
 is learned are determined by its relevance to the life 
 that it is supposed to liberate and to guide at the 
 time and in the place and under the circumstances. 
 The education on which the Jewish “love of learning” 
 is postulated has been irrelevant, other-worldly, specula¬ 
 tive, and verbal. It has had little regard for the 
 realities of things, and much for typical compensations- 
 in-idea for the unsatisfactoriness of those realities. 
 It has been an education in fantasy and dream. This 
 has been almost as true of the modern Yiddish and 
 neo-Hebrew developments —vide Ahad Ha’amism— 
 as of the older Talmudical ones. In Palestine it has 
 been notorious. The whole so-called “modern” system 
 of education there is education by book. The teachers 
 are mostly untrained in pedagogical technique, neo- 
 Hebraists who are teachers by virtue of their devotion 
 to Hebrew rather than by virtue of their professional 
 
“VITA NUOVA?” 
 
 327 
 
 competency. Associated into a union, they share with 
 the community and the Zionists the responsibility for 
 the organization and the effectiveness of instruction. 
 The agency of this responsibility is the Vaad Hachinucli , 
 composed of three representatives of each of the three 
 parties at interest. But the Vaad has established no 
 effective coordination and exercises no competent 
 control. It has no system of records, no adequate 
 supervision. Principals and teachers do much as 
 they please, without regard to professional standards 
 of effectiveness and improvement. Vocational educa¬ 
 tion there is none whatsoever. Instruction is ex¬ 
 clusively by book and by word. Its victims are 
 taught Hebrew but not the conditions of labour and 
 the practice of life according to the requirements 
 of Palestine. They are taught in places which are 
 sanitary abominations, and with materials almost 
 barbarous in their inadequacy. Nevertheless, the 
 cost of instruction, in the light of the returns on it, is 
 extraordinarily high, and is paid for almost wholly 
 by contributions from America. The Palestinian 
 community shirks the responsibility: of the £100,000 
 or so spent in 1919 on education, Palestinians contrib¬ 
 uted only £8,000. Adult education, barring instruc¬ 
 tion in Hebrew secured at their own cost by voluntary 
 classes, is practically non-existent. 
 
 Clearly, for a pioneer country like Palestine, where 
 relevant knowledge is of the uttermost importance, 
 these conditions are criminal. Public education will 
 have to take as its point of departure the conditions 
 and necessities of life in Palestine, not irrelevant 
 cultural conceptions generated outside of Palestine. 
 It will have to move from work to vision, in terms of 
 
328 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 the actual economic enterprises undertaken and de¬ 
 veloped in Palestine and of the forms of free human 
 organization these indicate or require. Thus—to 
 take topics of instruction mostly absent from the 
 Palestinian curriculum—geography must be taught 
 as an actual outgrowth of the topography of the scene 
 of the daily life, and not as a remote thing in a book; 
 zoology must be made to derive from animal life on 
 the farm; botany, similarly from the vegetable life, 
 or from the problems of the carpenter’s shop. Particu¬ 
 larly must the so-called social sciences—economics, 
 sociology, history, social psychology—spring directly 
 from the actual processes of want and work as want is 
 expressed and work is organized and undertaken at 
 home, and as it is known to be undertaken abroad. 
 Instruction, which is now the inculcation of doctrine, 
 must become the creation of practice, and the deriva¬ 
 tion of doctrine from practice . 1 To accomplish this 
 will require the importation, for the young, of a large 
 number of teachers, preferably from the United States, 
 who can teach the use of the hands as against those 
 that teach the use of the tongue. It will require, 
 for adults, the provision of competent foremen and 
 of higher officers of management who will know how 
 to make of every farm and factory a school that will 
 reveal the interlinking of the specific operation on the 
 spot with the present life, the past history, and the 
 future destiny of men the world over. And this will 
 need to be done as quickly as possible at a charge upon 
 the economic unit involved, not upon the charity of 
 the Diaspora. 
 
 Education, in a word, must become an integral part. 
 
 l Cf. Dewey: “Democracy and Education.” 
 
“VITA NUOVA?” 
 
 329 
 
 expressly provided for, of every enterprise undertaken 
 in Palestine. The remaking of the mind of the present 
 population, the reconstruction of the population to 
 come, must not be left to the decision of events, to 
 chance, or to circumstance. The growth of the com¬ 
 monwealth, no less than the growth of its children, 
 must be consciously directed. Its institutions must 
 be realizations of its ideals, not contradictions of them; 
 its ideals must be expressions of its institutions, not 
 compensations for them. Broadly speaking, hence, the 
 educational system must be made coincident with the 
 whole community. Not merely in the official schools, 
 but in each enterprise of agriculture and of industry 
 men and women must be taught the art of self- 
 government and of specific technological responsibility 
 through self-government. 
 
 For the young, moreover, who are at school, an 
 opportunity for public service should be provided. 
 It should be provided because what would otherwise 
 be the cost of this service could be used in maintaining 
 the compulsory school age up to the age of nineteen 
 or twenty. It should be provided, also, because it is 
 the surest guarantee of the survival of a democratic 
 spirit and the maintenance of a democratic morale. 
 Much of the misunderstanding between classes of 
 society, not merely between rich and poor, but between 
 carpenters and machinists, bricklayers and plumbers, 
 farmers and industrialists, physicians and mechanics, 
 is due to their failure imaginatively to realize each others’ 
 lives. This failure comes from the absence of common 
 fundamental experience in the business of living. A 
 man who has never actually spread dung in a wheat- 
 field, cleared out an irrigation ditch, run a lathe, or 
 
330 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 mended a road can never get the outlook of one whose 
 life consists in doing just that and nothing more. 
 There are, undoubtedly, in every population, a propor¬ 
 tion of persons whose abilities extend to nothing more. 
 And it is recognized that there are also a far greater 
 proportion known as “the average man” who can live 
 and work on a richer and more varied level, but who 
 do not get the opportunity. It is agreed, moreover, 
 that no educational system is competent which does 
 not supply the maximum of opportunity, and what has 
 been suggested should, if properly undertaken, accom¬ 
 plish just that. But it still remains inexorably a fact 
 that every community rests upon certain basic activities 
 —the so-called “dirty work” of civilized society—* 
 which are the foundations and occasions of the more 
 specialized activities of the different crafts, trades, 
 industries, and professions, whatever be their nature. 
 In this “dirty work,” hence, every citizen should have 
 a share: in building roads, digging irrigation ditches, 
 tending fields or orchards, running machines, and so 
 on. The time for this work is during the school age— 
 in the vacations of the period from the fourteenth 
 to the twentieth year. After schooldays, whatever en¬ 
 terprise or profession is desirable or fit: during school¬ 
 days, participation in the indispensable basic activities 
 of the community. 
 
 Education would thus be made to play its inevitable 
 role to the advantage and not the obstruction of the 
 development of the Jewish homeland. Take care of 
 education, says Plato, and education will take care of 
 everything else. Whatever the climate, the condition 
 of the land, the nature and extent of the natural re¬ 
 sources, the social traditions and individual character 
 
“VITA NUOVA?” 
 
 331 
 
 of the people, whatever their present interests and 
 future aspirations may be and imply, the one force 
 which will count more than any other toward the altera¬ 
 tion or perfection of these is education. In the end 
 the success or failure of the New Zion will be attrib¬ 
 utable to the quality, extent, direction, and competency 
 of its educational system. 
 
 IX 
 
 In the end. . . . 
 
 In the end, clearly. But not more so than in the 
 beginning. The beginning is, however, modified by 
 other considerations, most of which have been 
 enumerated and studied. There remains one to con¬ 
 sider in conclusion, which is of primary importance. 
 This is the will and attitude of the sources of capital. 
 For assuming even the best will on the part of the au¬ 
 thorities and the Jews of Palestine toward the attain¬ 
 ment of the type of community here indicated, the very 
 great sums that the initial investment in such an enter¬ 
 prise will require make the whole matter ultimately 
 dependent on the sources of capital. These sources 
 will of necessity be found outside the Zionist organiza¬ 
 tion, among the Jews—particularly the great and rich 
 Jews—of the world. How they envisage their relation 
 to Palestine, what they mean to do and to refrain 
 from doing becomes the central fact of the Diaspora 
 upon which the reorganization of the Zionist move¬ 
 ment itself must turn. The indications are that their 
 attitude is positive and responsible, conspicuously in 
 England and in the United States. In England an 
 Economic Council has been forming, under the leader 
 ship of Sir Alfred Mond and Major James de Roths- 
 
332 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 child, and in the United States the Conference of 
 American Rabbis have adopted resolutions declaring 
 that however much they differ from the Zionists in 
 theory, they are desirous to join hands with them in 
 the upbuilding of Palestine. Where Zionism was felt 
 as a challenge and a defiance, Palestine is felt as a 
 task and a responsibility. There appears no sufficient 
 reason to doubt that the non-Zionist Jews accept and 
 will carry the task. 
 
 But how, and on what conditions? The usual in¬ 
 centives to investment are lacking in the case of 
 Palestine. Even the interest on a government loan, 
 should one be called for, would need to be somewhat 
 below the market, if the Jews only were to take it, 
 as an earnest of good faith. Many of the enterprises 
 to be undertaken in Palestine will earn no income what¬ 
 soever in the beginning, and only a small one in the 
 course of time. A sense of religious duty, of social 
 responsibility, these far more than the desire for profit, 
 may be. said to have moved non-Zionists to offer 
 service and aid. The same motive will move them 
 to investment in the upbuilding of a Jewish Palestine. 
 But also, and perhaps largely, the desire to mitigate 
 the home problems that arise out of immigration will 
 move them: Palestine is nearer to central Europe 
 than America or Australia and the establishment of the 
 immigrant there is far less costly. Interest in particular 
 modes of development will move them. But not 
 profits as profits. For an undertaking in Palestine 
 initiated merely by the hope of gain can mean only 
 what concessionary enterprises mean in any undevel¬ 
 oped country—the sweating of labour at starvation 
 wages, the skimping of power and the waste of material. 
 
“VITA NUOVA?” 
 
 333 
 
 the multiplication of charges. Such undertakings 
 can only serve, as has already been observed, to drive 
 the Jews from Palestine, not to implant them there. 
 Investments in Palestinian enterprises will necessarily 
 serve a public end far more than a private motive. 
 Investors will need to be glad, if, in the course of time, 
 their money comes back to them, and if it does not 
 come back to them, but has actually served to make 
 numbers of their tragic brethren from central Europe 
 permanently at home in Palestine, they will not need 
 to be without rejoicing. 
 
 Aiming at no profits in the sense in which investors 
 in other fields aim at profits, they will not tolerate the 
 risks which are undertaken in the hope of profit. 
 They will wish their money to be used with all the 
 economy, speed, and efficiency possible; i. e., they will 
 wish the greatest possible number of Jews implanted 
 and self-supporting upon Palestinian soil in the shortest 
 possible time. They will resent the waste that comes 
 through the reduplication of effort, through haste, 
 through carelessness, through incoordination, through ir¬ 
 responsibility, incompetence, untrustworthiness, through 
 any of the conditions that have hitherto prevailed under 
 the East-European Zionist administration in Palestine. 
 The very nature of their objective rules out as dangerous 
 and undesirable the initiation of a collection of diverse 
 projects, each going on its own. The primary want, 
 hence, is for a coordinating central agency, which 
 shall specify, analyze, and establish priorities in the 
 economic needs in Palestine, and shall take the initia¬ 
 tive in creating the industrial and financial instruments 
 to serve their needs. It is an agency, that is, which 
 would function like the American War Industries 
 
334 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS 
 
 Board during the Great War. Its organization, how¬ 
 ever, would need to be determined by the conditions 
 out of which it arises and the interests it serves. It 
 would have to be called together, obviously, by the 
 Zionists, who alone are prepared to assume the already 
 long-delayed initiative. They might designate the 
 Economic Council or some other body to undertake 
 to secure the financing of a company to develop, for 
 example, hydro-electric operations involving water¬ 
 power, water-supply, drainage, and irrigation, and a 
 company to create the building industry, from quarry¬ 
 ing to construction, in the form of a guild like those 
 now in operation in Manchester and London. Each 
 company, as it is formed, would automatically send a 
 representative chosen by the investors to the coordinat¬ 
 ing agency. If, in addition, it is provided that the 
 people of Palestine as 'producers and as consumers 
 are also represented on this board, then the whole of 
 Jewry would be adequately represented, and repre¬ 
 sented in their groupings as the parties at interest. The 
 Zionists and the Jews in general would be represented 
 by the agencies designated to take the initiative: the 
 investors by their chosen representatives; the Jews 
 of Palestine by election from Hamashbir and from 
 Ahduth Avodah whose expansion to the point of 
 embracing the total Jewish population of Palestine 
 would be automatically secured by the assignment 
 to them of this electoral responsibility. The coordinat¬ 
 ing agency thus standing for all Jewry would be a 
 trustee for all Jewry in the development of Jewish 
 Palestine. It might establish its trusteeship by hold¬ 
 ing Founders’ Shares analogous to those of the Jewish 
 Colonial Trust or by more effective or convenient 
 
“VITA NUOVA?” 
 
 S35 
 
 devices. Its charter should require it to devise and 
 provide ways by which, in the fulness of time, the 
 ownership of its enterprises shall pass to the Jews of 
 Palestine organized as a National Consumers’ Coopera¬ 
 tive Association and the management of each pass to 
 its working force organized as the Producers’ Coopera¬ 
 tive Society of the whole industry. 
 
 The steps which lead to this culmination involve 
 a type of financial arrangement and industrial organiza¬ 
 tion for which there is no merely “business” precedent. 
 But neither is there a precedent for the problem these 
 are designed to solve. The matter of importance is 
 that there does exist among the Jews of the world the 
 will to solve the problem, but not the realization of the 
 inexorable terms and conditions of its solution. These, 
 and the methods by which alone they may be met 
 and mastered, have been indicated in the Pittsburgh 
 Programme and the studies that underly it. The 
 New Life of the Jewish people in the New Zion will 
 either attain the forms designated or remain a com¬ 
 pensatory ideal. 
 
 THE END 
 
INDEX 
 
INDEX 
 
 Abdul Hamid, 83, 10G, 110. 
 
 Abraham, 23. 
 
 Actions Committee, 79. 
 
 Adams, John, 42, 56. 
 
 Ahad Ha’am, 76, 89-97, 105, 118. 
 
 Ahduth Avodah, 321, 324, 325, 334. 
 
 Alroy, David, 14. 
 
 Ahuzoth, 322. 
 
 Alexander II, 68. 
 
 Alexander, David, 168. 
 
 Allenby, General, 252, 258, 278. 
 
 Alliance Israelite Universelle, 49, 56, 
 70, 107, 116, 177, 189, 247. 
 
 Alp, Tekin, 114. 
 
 “ Altneuland,” Herzl’s, 77. 
 
 “Americanization,” of Jewish immi¬ 
 grants, 126; influence of, on Jewish 
 community organization, 142. 
 
 American Jewish Commission to 
 Peace Conference, 180; attitude on 
 “national rights,” 184. 
 
 American Jewish Committee, 141; 
 attitude toward American Jewish 
 Congress, 113; attitude toward 
 Balfour declaration, 172, 177. 
 
 American Jewish Congress proposed, 
 142; attitude of Zionists toward, 
 143; of American Jewish Com¬ 
 mittee toward, 143; of “labour 
 leaders” toward, 145; of American 
 Jewry toward, 145; negotiations 
 over, 146; call for, 147; held, 177. 
 
 American Jewish Relief Committee, 
 151. 
 
 American Rabbis, Conference of, 
 331. 
 
 American Zionist Medical Unit, 172, 
 255, 325. 
 
 Amos, 8. 
 
 Anglo-Jewish Association, 247. 
 
 Anglo-Palestine Company, 107. 
 
 Antisemitism, Herzl on, 73; in Tsar¬ 
 ist Russia, 83; in Soviet Russia, 
 211; in Poland, 219; in Ukrainia, 
 
 244 seq.; in Hungary, 229 seq.; 
 in other European countries, 235; 
 in the United States, a class 
 attitude, 242; among British 
 officers in Palestine, 252. 
 
 Annual Conference of 1920, 281, 
 note seq. 
 
 Annual Report of Zionist Organiza¬ 
 tion of America, 282 note. 
 
 Arabs, political work on by British, 
 162; attitude toward Zionism, 189; 
 grown unity of feeling among, 
 249; British and French policy 
 toward, 251; Tripolitan, on Turk¬ 
 ish treaty, 257; historic relations 
 with Jews, 291; cooperation with 
 Jews desirable, 294; economic 
 status in Palestine, 300; impossi¬ 
 bility of cooperative economy 
 among, 312. 
 
 Arab Club, The, 256. 
 
 Arab villages in Palestine, attitude 
 of, toward Zionism, 259. 
 
 Assimilation, 68. 
 
 Atrocities, on Jews in eastern 
 Europe, 142. 
 
 Automatic machine, effect of, on 
 Palestinian economy, 298. 
 
 “Awakened Magyars,” 230. 
 
 Bagdad Railroad, 159. 
 
 Baksheesh, 98, 105, 110. 
 
 Balfour, A. J., 166, 268, 272, 300. 
 
 Balfour Declaration, 169 seq.; effect 
 on Turks and Germans, 170, 171; 
 on Jews, 171 seq.; in Palestine, 
 173; at the Peace Conference, 
 189 seq.; as a gospel of religious 
 hope, 246; later attitude of Board 
 of Deputies toward, 247; in Near 
 Eastern politics, 248; sabotaged 
 by military in Palestine, 252; op¬ 
 posed by missionary interest, 252; 
 
 , reaffirmed by Curzon, 253; en- 
 
340 
 
 INDEX 
 
 dangered by imperialist policies, 
 256-259; realization demanded in 
 England, 260; resolution of British 
 labour on, 260; incorporated in 
 Turkish Treaty, 262, 275; French 
 and British pledge to Arabs, 289. 
 
 Basle Platform, adopted at first 
 Congress, 74; adopted by fraternal 
 organizations in United States, 
 155. 
 
 Beaconsfield, 14, 50, 56. 
 
 Belkind, Israel, 101. 
 
 Bergson, 59. 
 
 Bezalel Art School, 108. 
 
 “Bill of Rights,” Jewish, 178 seq.; 
 basis of memorandum to Peace 
 Conference, 184. 
 
 Billikopf, Jacob, 151. 
 
 Bols, Gen., 252. 
 
 Bolshevism, 204; anti- Semitism 
 under, 211. 
 
 Brailsford, H. N., 158. 
 
 Brandeis, Louis Dembitz, 133, 135, 
 136, 138, 139, 145, 166, 256, 281, 
 note seq., 301. 
 
 Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of, effect on 
 Jews, 172; on the Ukraine, 223. 
 
 British Palestine Committee, 165. 
 
 Bund, The, 219. 
 
 Bussche, Baron von dem, 170. 
 
 Capitalism, Character of, 202. 
 
 Caste War, between “German” and 
 “Russian” Jews in U. S., 217. 
 
 Cecil, Lord Robert, 260. 
 
 Chasdai ibn Shaprut, 14. 
 
 Christianism, 20; and citizenship, 
 21; and infallibility, 22. 
 
 Chmelnicki, 28. 
 
 Citizenship: effect of religious im¬ 
 perialism on, 21; Jews deprived of, 
 22; and church membership, 31; 
 Jews admitted to in England, 34; 
 in France, 35. 
 
 Clemenceau, G., 198, 206. 
 
 Committee of Jewish Delegations to 
 the Peace Conference, 181; dispute 
 with representatives of Joint 
 Foreign Committee and Alliance 
 Israelite Uni verselle, 182; activities 
 after Paris Conference, 247. 
 
 Committee of Union and Progress, 
 
 111 . 
 
 Compensatory habit of mind, Jewish 
 regarding Palestine, 282 seq. 
 
 Cremieux, Adolphe, 57. 
 
 Cromwell, 30. 
 
 Congressus Judaicus, 27-30. 
 
 Conjoint Committee, 167; anti- 
 Zionist letter to London Times, 
 167. 
 
 Constituent Assembly, Jewish, in 
 Palestine, 255. 
 
 Consumers’ Cooperation, 308. 
 
 Consumption, Economics of, 303 
 seq. 
 
 Council of Four, Psychology of, 206; 
 attitude toward Turks, 250. 
 
 “Cultural Centre,” 76 seq. 
 
 Curzon, Lord, 253. 
 
 “Defeatism,” 161; effect of on the 
 attitude of the Allies toward 
 Zionism, 163. 
 
 De Haas, Jacob, 136. 
 
 De Lieme, Nehemiah, 281, note. 
 
 Dembitz, Louis, 134. 
 
 Democracy, political, in Europe, 
 198 seqr, and in America, 199; 
 economic basis of, 199; modified 
 by industrialism, 200; basis of 
 financial imperialism, 202; ideol¬ 
 ogy of, at the Peace Conference, 
 206, 212. 
 
 Denikine, 209, 224, 225. 
 
 Deuteronomy, 297, 298. 
 
 Diamanstein, 245. 
 
 Diderot, 34. 
 
 Djemal Pasha, 166, 173. 
 
 Dmowski, 217, 220. 
 
 Dumas fils, 50. 
 
 Dunant, Henri, 49. 
 
 Economic Council, proposed for 
 Palestine, 331. 
 
 “Economic Man,” the, 54. 
 
 Education, Jewish, in Palestine, 326; 
 necessary reorganization of, 327. 
 
 Einstein, Albert, 283, note. 
 
 Eliot, George, 50. 
 
 Enfranchisement of Jews, in France, 
 35; in England, 35; in western 
 Europe, 37. 
 
 Epic, The Augustinian, 22. 
 
 Eschatology, 23. 
 
 Exilarchate, 27. 
 
INDEX 
 
 341 
 
 Extraordinary Zionist Conference, 
 135, 143. 
 
 Federation of American Zionists, 153. 
 Fellah, The, in Palestine, 294, 298. 
 Feisal, Emir, 162, 194, 195, 251, 256, 
 257, 258, 261, 262, 294. 
 
 Financial Imperialism, democracy a 
 basis of, 202. 
 
 First Zionist Congress, 74. 
 
 Ford, Henry, 236. 
 
 Feudal Order, The, 25 seq. 
 
 Fichte, 39. 
 
 Fineman, H., 90. 
 
 Fourteen Points, The, 249, 286. 
 Frankfurter, Felix, 136, 194. 
 
 French Revolution, The, ideals of, 
 and nationalism, 38, 39; effect of 
 on Jews, 52. 
 
 Friedman, Elisha, 205 note. 
 
 Galatovski, 30. 
 
 George, Lloyd, 197, 206. 
 
 Goedsche, Hermann, 235. 
 
 Gottheil, Richard, 131. 
 
 Grabski, 220. 
 
 Grand Island, 41. 
 
 Graetz, 63. 
 
 Guild Socialism, 311. 
 
 Haggai, 12. 
 
 Halukah, 94, 97, 318. 
 
 Halutzim, 3, 246. 
 
 Hamashbir, 318 seq. 
 
 Hamazmin, 320. 
 
 Haskalah, 67, seq.', 99. 
 
 Hashomer, 91. 
 
 Hebrew, lingua franca of the Jews, 
 68; revival of in Palestine, 99; 
 symbol of Jewish solidarity, 116; 
 struggle for, in Palestinian schools, 
 117; to be an official language of 
 Palestine, 190; use of sabotaged 
 by British officials, 253. 
 
 Hebrew University, 120, 174. 
 
 Hegel, 48, 278. 
 
 Herod, 13. 
 
 Herzl, Theodore, 75, 105, 107, 136. 
 Hess, Moses, 58, 70, 71. 
 Hilfsvereinderdeutschen Juden, 117. 
 Hollingsworth, 49. 
 
 Holy Alliance, The, 44. 
 
 Holyoake, Geo. Jacob, 308, note. 
 
 Hoover, Herbert, 216. 
 
 Horthy, Admiral, 236. 
 
 Hovevei Zion, 71, 72, 77, 82, 107. 
 
 Hungary, industry in, 226; “west¬ 
 ern” movement in, 226; position 
 of Jews in, 227; attitude of Su¬ 
 preme Council toward, 227; com¬ 
 munism in, 228; White Terror in, 
 230; French treaty with, 230; 
 stand of labour toward, 231. 
 
 Husein, Shereef, 162. 
 
 Hyamson, A. M., 40, note. 
 
 Imperialism, Religious, 18; compared 
 with ancient religious life, 18, 19; 
 and political imperialism, 20; 
 Roman, 20; relation to theological 
 infallibility, 20, 21; effect of, on 
 citizenship, 21; economic, 158; fi¬ 
 nancial, 202; and democracy, 202. 
 
 Industry, Economy of, modifies 
 democracy, 200 seq.; influence of, 
 on Russia, 208; on the United 
 States, 213; on Poland, 219; on 
 Hungary, 226; importance for the 
 development of Jewish Palestine, 
 289; influence on the structure of 
 society, 299. 
 
 Infallibility, Theological, 20, 21. 
 
 Inner Actions Committee, 79. 
 
 Inquisition, The, 24. 
 
 International Palestine Society, 49. 
 
 International Peace, Prophetic Con¬ 
 ception of, 11, 12. 
 
 “Internationale,” The, 55. 
 
 Investment in Palestine, probable 
 character of, 332; organization of, 
 
 b 333. 
 
 Isaiah, 8; quoted, 10, 11. 
 
 Islam, preached as a race, 250. 
 
 Israel, 8. 
 
 Israel, Mennasah ben, 30. 
 
 Jabotinsky, V., 165, 171, 258, 259, 
 281, note. 
 
 Jehovah, 8, 9. 
 
 Jeremiah, 8. 
 
 Jewish communities, in seventeenth- 
 century Poland, 27-30; and the 
 Catholic Church in Poland, 29-30. 
 
 Jewish Colonial Trust, 80, 207, 279. 
 
 Jewish Colonization Association, 
 102,103, 107, 314, 322. 
 
342 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Jewish Defense Company, organized 
 in Palestine, 258. 
 
 Jewish National Fund, The, 81, 108, 
 279, 322. 
 
 Jewish Territorial Organization, 84. 
 
 Jews, status in antiquity, 18; in the 
 Roman Empire, 20; in Christian 
 doctrine, 23; in mediaeval Europe, 
 24; admitted to England by Crom¬ 
 well, 30; enfranchised in England, 
 35; enfranchised in France, 35; 
 under Napoleon, 41; in the United 
 States of 1825, 41; as a religious 
 people, 66; effect of partition of 
 Poland on, 67; status in pre- 
 Zionist Palestine, 93; supreme 
 victims of the Great War, 150; 
 after the war in Poland, 219; in 
 Ukrainia, 224, 225; in Hungary, 
 227 seq .; in Rumania, 232 seq.; 
 inner life in central and eastern 
 Europe, 244; treatment of, by 
 Jewish Socialists there, 245; Bol¬ 
 shevist treatment of, 246; effect of 
 treaty of San Remo on, 268-276; 
 unprepared to meet Palestinian 
 problem, 275; historic relations 
 with Arabs, 291; cooperation with 
 Arabs desirable, 294; dependent on 
 Pittsburgh Programme for sur¬ 
 vival in Palestine, 312. 
 
 Job, Book of, 9. 
 
 Joshua, 296. 
 
 Joseph, Archduke, 236. 
 
 Judaism, Reform Movement in, 35; 
 compared with Christianism, 36, 
 37. 
 
 Judenitch, 209. 
 
 Judenstaat, HerzFs, 73. 
 
 Kabbala and Kabbalism, 16, 26. 
 
 Kahal, 65. 
 
 Kalischer, Rabbi Hirsch, 70, 94. 
 
 Kallen, H. M., 206, note; 309, note. 
 
 Kattowitz Conference, The, 96. 
 
 Keren Hayesod, The, 281 note, seq. 
 
 Keynes, Maynard, 197, 206. 
 
 Khalifate, The, as a Near-Eastern 
 problem, 250; attitude of Moslems 
 of India toward, 257. 
 
 Kjamil Pasha, 250. 
 
 Kuchzarewski, 220. 
 
 Kun, Bela, 228, 229. 
 
 Kolchak, 209. 
 
 Kwuzoth, 255, 322. 
 
 Labour Leaders, in American Jewish 
 politics, 145. 
 
 Labour Party, British, on the Bal¬ 
 four Declaration, 287; need of 
 Zionist harmony with, 290. 
 
 Laharame, 49. 
 
 Land tenure, in Palestine, 313. 
 
 Lasalle, F., 55, 56. 
 
 Lawrence, Col. T. E., 162, 251. 
 
 League of Nations, The, 175, 180, 
 187, 188, 190, 286, 292, 294. 
 
 Lebanon Committee, The, 257. 
 
 Lecky, W. H., 263, note; quoted on 
 status of Jews in Europe, 265 seq. 
 
 Lenine, 211. 
 
 Levi Bing, Lazar, 56. 
 
 Levi, Sylvain, 189. 
 
 Levin, Dr. Schmarja, 118, 135. 
 
 Leviticus, 297, 298. 
 
 Livshitz, 322. 
 
 London Daily Herald, The, 288, note. 
 
 Maccabseus, Judas, 13. 
 
 Mack, Julian W., 136, 155, 178, 180, 
 184. 
 
 Machinery, Consequences from the 
 the use of, 53. 
 
 MacMahon, Sir Henry, 163. 
 
 Makover, A. B., 42, note. 
 
 Mandate, article on, in Covenant of 
 the League of Nations, 190; terms 
 of for Palestine, as formulated by 
 Zionists, 192 seq.; draft of, for 
 Palestine, 292, note; common in¬ 
 terest of Jews and Arabs in, 293. 
 
 Manchester Guardian, The, 165, 236. 
 
 Mariana, 25. 
 
 Marshall, Louis, 141, 172, 180, 183, 
 184. 
 
 Marx, Karl, 53, 56, 58. 
 
 Masaryk, Prof., 217. 
 
 Mazzini, G., 46, 48, 59. 
 
 Mendelsohn, Moses, 67. 
 
 Merchaviah, 108. 
 
 “Men, Money, Discipline,” 139. 
 
 Messiah, The, 14, 15. 
 
 Meyer, Eugene, 136. 
 
 Mikweh Israel Agricultural School, 
 101, 322, note. 
 
 Millon, The, 100. 
 
INDEX 
 
 343 
 
 Mirandola, Pico della, 20. 
 Missionary interest in Palestine, 252; 
 opposed to Balfour Declaration, 
 252. 
 
 Mitteleuropa, 115, 159. 
 
 Mizrachi, 86 seq. 
 
 Mond, Sir Alfred, 331. 
 
 “Monroe Doctrine,” Zionist, 283, 
 note. 
 
 Montefiore, Claude, 168. 
 
 Montefiore, Sir Moses, 94. 
 Montesquieu, 34. 
 
 Morgenthau, Henry, 221. 
 
 Moses, of Crete, 14. 
 
 Mossinsohn, Dr., 283, note. 
 
 Moza, 94. 
 
 Motzkin, Leon, 184. 
 
 Nagidate, The, 27. 
 
 Napoleon, 41. 
 
 National minorities, problem of, how 
 met at Peace Conference, 185-188. 
 Nationalism, Religious, 33; Mazzinis’ 
 view of, 47; applied to Jews, 48 
 seq.; effect on Jews, 52. 
 Nationalist Party, Arab, 256. 
 Nationality, and natural rights, 44 
 seq.; growth of, in Europe, 45. 
 “National Rights,” at Peace Con¬ 
 ference, 184 seq. 
 
 “Natural Man,” The, 32. 
 
 “Natural Right,” 32. 
 
 Nehemiah, 316; quoted, 316, note. 
 Netter, Charles, 57, 101. 
 
 Nil us. Serge, 236. 
 
 Nitti, 209. 
 
 Noah, M. M., 41, 48. 
 
 Nordau, Max, 75. 
 
 Numbers, Book of, 296. 
 
 O’Brien, C., 308, note. 
 
 Occupied Enemy Territory Adminis¬ 
 tration in Palestine, 252 seq.; how 
 recruited, 253; anti-Semitism in, 
 252. 
 
 “Odessa Committee,” 72, 96, 102. 
 Oldenburg, 30, 31. 
 
 Oliphant, Lawrence, 49. 
 Oppenheimer, Franz, 100, 275, note. 
 Ormsby-Gore, Major, 174, 251. 
 Oettinger, 275, note. 
 
 Paderewski, Ignace, 220. 
 
 Palestine, as Promised Land, 6; 
 
 condition of, 92; Jewish population 
 in, 104 seq.; German ambitions in, 
 116; in the politics of the Great 
 War, 160; as a problem of the 
 Peace Conference, 189; role of, in 
 Jewish psyche, 272; necessary 
 change of Jewish attitude toward, 
 273; draft mandate for, 292, note; 
 land tenure in, 313; labour in, 321; 
 Jewish education in, 331; interest 
 of Diaspora in, 331; investment in, 
 332. 
 
 Palestine Commission, 108, 109. 
 
 Pan-Arabism, 249. 
 
 Pan-Slavism, 158. 
 
 Pan-Turanianism, 113 seq., 250. 
 
 Parliamentary Committee on Pales¬ 
 tine Affairs, 260. 
 
 Parade, Zionist, 276. 
 
 “Parushim,” The, 300. 
 
 Patterson, Col., 166. 
 
 Peabody, F. G., 265, note. 
 
 Petach Tikwah, 94. 
 
 Petavel, Abraham, 49. 
 
 Petition, Zionist, 156. 
 
 Petliura, 223, 224, 225. 
 
 Pinsker, Leon, 71. 
 
 Pilsudski, 209, 217, 220, 225. 
 
 Pittsburgh Programme, referred to, 
 192, 300; stated, 301; bases of, SOI 
 seq.; necessary to development of 
 Jewish homeland, 312. 
 
 Poale Zion, 89. 
 
 Pobiedonostzeff, 69. 
 
 Poel Hazair, 89. 
 
 Poland, social structure of, 217; 
 Powers quoted on, 218; origin of 
 nationalism in, 218; Jews in, 219; 
 influence of industry on, 219; 
 parties in during the Great War, 
 220; French imperialism in, 222; 
 relation to Soviet Russia, 222. 
 
 “ Polonization of Commerce,” 220. 
 
 Powers, quoted, 218. 
 
 Producers’ Cooperation, 308 seq. 
 
 Production, Economics of, 303, seq. 
 
 Pro-Jerusalem Society, 255. 
 
 Promised Land, The, 6; place in 
 Jewish consciousness, 7; in Chris¬ 
 tian theology, 7; in Jewish history, 
 7 seq.; in the Jewish prayerbook, 
 11; restoration to, 11 seq.; in Chris¬ 
 tian tradition, 14. 
 
344 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Protestantism, 25. 
 
 “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” 
 235; Lucien Wolf’s exposure of, 
 237. 
 
 Provisional Executive Committee 
 for General Zionist Affairs, 135, 
 154. 
 
 Public Utilities, in Palestine, 315. 
 
 Rabbinism, 66. 
 
 Raines, Rabbi Jacob, 87. 
 
 “Red Ticket,” 105, 116. 
 
 Reformation, Wars of the, 25. 
 
 Reformed Judaism in the United 
 States, 132. 
 
 Reform Movement, in Judaism, 35- 
 38. 
 
 Reinach, Salomon, 57. 
 
 Reorganization Commission, Zionist, 
 281, note, seq. 
 
 Resolution, of British Labour on 
 Balfour Declaration, 260, 261. 
 
 Restoration, Idea of, 1648-66, 30; 
 letter to Jews of France on, 40; 
 plan of M. M. Noah for, 42; Hess’s 
 plan for, 60; urged by George 
 Eliot, 50 seq .; Kalischer’s plan for, 
 70; Herzl’s plan for, 73. 
 
 Ricardo, David, 53. 
 
 Righteousness, 8, 9, 295; as social 
 economy in ancient Israel, 296 
 seq. 
 
 Riot, The Jerusalem, 258; effect of, 
 in England and the United States, 
 259 seq. 
 
 Rishon-le-Zion, 94. 
 
 Rochdale Plan, The, 308. 
 
 Rosenwald, Julius, 151. 
 
 Rosh Pinnah, 94. 
 
 Rothschild, Baron Edmond de, 72, 
 96, 97, 107, 314. 
 
 Rothschild, Lord, 169, 300. 
 
 Rothschild, Major James, de, 97, 
 331. 
 
 Rousseau, 34. 
 
 Ruge, Arnold, 59. 
 
 Rumania, organizes Terror in Hun¬ 
 gary, 229; economy of, 232; status 
 of Jews in, 233. 
 
 Ruppin, Arthur, 109, 275, note. 
 
 Russia, economy of, 208; dependence 
 of, on Europe, 209; Soviet Re¬ 
 public of, in foreign politics, 210; 
 
 education in, 211; American atti¬ 
 tude toward, 212. 
 
 Russian Revolution, The, 151. 
 
 Ruthenberg, Pincus, 165, 171, 256, 
 258. 
 
 Sabbattai Zevi, 16, 27-31. 
 
 Salvador, Joseph, 56. 
 
 Samuel, Sir Herbert, 165, 259, 262. 
 
 Samuel, Sir Stuart, 221. 
 
 San Remo, Treaty of, 263; social 
 significance of, 263; effect on Jew¬ 
 ish position, 267 seq. 
 
 Scientific Charity, Relation of Jews 
 to, 125. 
 
 Schiff, Jacob II., 118, note; 141, 170. 
 
 Schwendt, Deputy, 35. 
 
 Scott, C. P., 165. 
 
 Settlers, early Jewish in the United 
 States, 121; relations with later 
 comers, 122. 
 
 mipkpi npiif* 
 
 Shlakhta, The Polish, 64, 218, 219, 
 
 222 . 
 
 Sh’tadlan, The, 123 seq.; 144. 
 
 Sidebotham, Herbert, 165. 
 
 Simon, Julius, 281, note. 
 
 Sixth Zionist Congress, 82, 106. 
 
 Skoropadski, Hetman, 223. 
 
 Smith-Gordon, L., 308, note 
 
 Smuts, Gen. Jan, 228, 251. 
 
 Socialism, origins of, 53; among 
 American Jews, 130. 
 
 Sokolow, N., 165, 166, 167, 189, 269. 
 
 Sounischseu, Albert, 308, note. 
 
 Spire, Andre, 189. 
 
 Spinoza, 31. 
 
 Steel and Gold, War of, 158. 
 
 Straus, Nathan, 136. 
 
 Suarez, 25. 
 
 Sulzberger, Judge Mayer, 141. 
 
 Supernaturalism among Jews, 15; 
 messianic, 65. 
 
 Swinburne, 48. 
 
 Sykes-Picot Treaty, The, 160, 251, 
 258 289. 
 
 Sykes’, Sir Mark, 160, 166, 169, 251. 
 
 Syrian Congress, The, 257. 
 
 Syrian and Palestine Colonization 
 Society, 49. 
 
 Talaat Pasha, 170.' 
 
 Teachers’ Union, The, 118 seq. 
 
INDEX 
 
 345 
 
 Times, London, 167. 
 
 Titus, 13. 
 
 Torah, 10. 
 
 Transfer Department, The, of Pro¬ 
 visional Executive Committee for 
 General Zionist Affairs, 154. 
 
 Tripartite Agreement, The, 262. 
 
 Tschlenow, Dr., 118, 265. 
 
 Turkish Empire, organization of, 
 110 seq; Young Turkish revolu¬ 
 tion in, 112. 
 
 Turks, attitude toward Balfour 
 Declaration, 170; attitude of Coun¬ 
 cil of Four toward, 250. 
 
 Uganda, 77. 
 
 Unam Sanctam, Bull of, 23. 
 
 Ussishkin, M. M., 106, 189, 283, 
 note. 
 
 Ukrainia, French politics for, 223; 
 during the Great War, 223; 
 economic character of, 224. 
 
 Union for Labour and Democracy, 
 American, on Zionism, 168. 
 
 United States, The, influence of, at 
 Peace Conference, 212; ideology of, 
 212 seq.; economic changes in, 213; 
 national neurasthenia in, 214; 
 foreign propaganda in, 215. 
 
 Universalism, prophetic, 12. 
 
 Va’ad Hachinuch, 327. 
 
 Va’ad Halashon, 100. 
 
 Va’ad Hazmani, 258. 
 
 Voltaire, 34. 
 
 Wa’ad Arbah Arazoth, 27. 
 
 Wadi-el-Hannin, 94. 
 
 Warburg, Otto, 108. 
 
 War Aims, duplicity of, 157; British 
 Labour Party Statement on, 287, 
 note. 
 
 Ward, H. F., 265, note. 
 
 War Congress, American, on Zion¬ 
 ism, 168. 
 
 Wars, Religious, 25. 
 
 Water-power, importance of, for 
 Jewish Palestine, 289. 
 
 Weizmann, Chaim, 165, 167, 174, 
 189, 194, 244, 257, 281, note, 316, 
 note. 
 
 Wilson, Woodrow, belief in Zionist 
 
 programme, 166; letter regarding 
 Hebrew University, 174; on war 
 aims, 175; stand on Jewish rights, 
 181; at the Peace Conference, 197; 
 fear of Bolshevism, 205; on French 
 militarism, 206; illness of, 215; 
 programme of, 249, 286. 
 
 Wise, Stephen S., 131, 136, 180. 
 
 Wolfsohn, David, 84. 
 
 Woman, changed position of, 
 through reform movement in 
 Judaism, 37. 
 
 Wolf, Lucien, 236, 242. 
 
 Wrangel, Baron, 209. 
 
 Yehudah, Eliezer Ben, 99 seq. 
 
 Yemenites, 108. 
 
 Young Turks, 111; attitude toward 
 Zionism, 115. 
 
 Zangwill, I., 75, 84, 244. 
 
 Zec-hariah, 12. 
 
 Zeiri Zion, 89. 
 
 Zerubbabel, 12. 
 
 Zhidlovsky, Dr., 178. 
 
 Zikron Yaakob, 94. 
 
 Zionism, origin and basis of, 5 seq.; 
 attitude of Palestinian Jewry 
 toward, 104; organization of, in the 
 United States, 129 seq.; opposition 
 to in the United States, 132; effect 
 of the Great War on, in the United 
 States, 136; and aims of Great 
 War, 157; attitude of British 
 Labour Party to, 168; attitude of 
 American Union for Labour and 
 Democracy to, 168; and American 
 War Congress, 168; of assimila- 
 tionists, 169; papal reversal on, 
 258; Mr. Balfour on, 269 seq.; 
 a compensatory ideal, 277; new 
 purpose of, 280. 
 
 Zionist Commission, The, 173, 190; 
 difficulties of, during British mili¬ 
 tary administration in Palestine, 
 253 seq. 
 
 Zionist Organization, first form of, 
 78; in basic need of reconstruc¬ 
 tion, 279 seq. 
 
 Zionist Organization of America, 
 reorganized from earlier Zionist 
 societies, 155. 
 
 Zion Mule Corps, 166. 
 
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS 
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