DS 
 149 
 M275z 
 
 MAGNUS 
 
 ZIONISM AND THE 
 NEO-ZIONISTS
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 ZIONISM 
 AND THE NEO-ZIONISTS 
 
 By 
 LAURIE MAGNUS, M.A., 
 
 Temp.-Major, Royal Defence Corps. 
 
 Reprinted in revised form from Aspects of the 
 Jewish Question, Murray, 1902. 
 
 LONDON : 
 
 Printed by St. Clements Press, Ltd., Portugal Street, 
 Kingsway, W.C. 2. 
 
 1917
 
 " The securities were shifted, the terms of the trustee- 
 ship changed, when the people of the Land became the people 
 of the Book. . . . The idea of their trusteeship was a sheet- 
 anchor to the Jews as the waves and the billows passed over 
 them. . . . Trustees of civilisation might not sigh or sing in 
 solitudes ; nor was it worth while, with the feeling so keen 
 that ' a thousand years are but as a day, ' to plot or plan 
 against the oppressors of the moment. . . . The ideal of the 
 Jews must always be ' from Zion shall come forth instruc- 
 tion, and the Word of God from Jerusalem ' ; and to this 
 end ' that all the people of the earth may know Thy name.' 
 This is the goal of Jewish separateness. . . . The loyal believe 
 that a political restoration would be a retrogressive step, 
 narrowing and embarrassing the wider issues." 
 
 KATIE (Lady) MAGNUS, 1889.
 
 /f? 
 
 ZIONISM 
 AND THE NEO-ZIONISTS 
 
 Fifteen years ago I wrote* : "The Eussian Pale will 
 not be broken down till the Jews of Russia have suc- 
 ceeded, like the Jews of England before them, in assert- 
 ing their right to civil and religious 'liberty. Liberty in 
 Russia is non-existent ; when Russia has learnt its bless- 
 ing, Russian Jews will share in it. The real problem 
 of the twentieth century is the backwardness of the 
 nations, not the forwardness of the Jews." 
 
 I was there expressing a conviction that the Jewish 
 problem in the twentieth century, then only a year old, 
 would be solved by the progress of backward nations , 
 not by the surrender of the Jewish race to the neo- 
 Zionists ; and, because my argument was misrepresented 
 in certain quarters as an attack on the author of The 
 Jewish State, I added the following words, to which I 
 subscribe to-day : 
 
 ' My ibedief in the foredoomed failure of neo-Zionism, 
 my objection to its leaders' readiness to ' make capital," 
 in Mr. Zangwill's words, of the ' longing for Palestine ' 
 (as if to say that the name of Isaiah has been added to 
 
 * Aspects of the Jewish Question. By a Quarterly Reviewer. 1902. 
 Mr. John Murray, who published this little book, kindly allows me to 
 make use of its contents in the present pamphlet.
 
 the directorate of Zion, Limited), and my conviction 
 that neither Turkey nor the Great Powers would ever 
 seriously consider the project, are independent of my 
 admiration for Dr. Theodor Herzl himself. The attack 
 on the scheme must stand, for what it is worth, but 
 there is nothing personal in its intention. I have twice 
 had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Herzl ; once, in Vienna, 
 in 1896, and again, in London, this year [1902]. On 
 each occasion he has allowed me to express my dis- 
 agreement from his views, and on each, and especially 
 on the second, I have been deeply sensible of the single- 
 mindedness, the devotion, and the sincerity which inspire 
 the leader of this hope. He does, I believe, more harm 
 than good, bat the conclusion of the matter lies on the 
 knees of the gods." 
 
 We may be nearing this conclusion to-day. At least, 
 there is a body of Jews, smaller in this country than 
 abroad, who, despite the writing on the wall and the 
 birth of liberty in Russia, still desire to lead the Jews back 
 to the country from which they have spread the law, 
 still desire to draw them away from the scenes of their 
 missionary work and to exchange the old Zionism for 
 the new. Before that conclusion is registered 'beyond 
 recall (and it has still a long way to travel), it has been 
 suggested to me that I should re-issue portions of the 
 essay which I wrote in 1902. 
 
 For the interval of fifteen years has brought some 
 changes for the good. In 1902 we read in The Jewish 
 Year Book : 
 
 ' The dawn of the twentieth century finds the Jews 
 in many countries groaning under disabilities . .' . 
 which seem to mock at all ideas of human progress. As 
 one reads of them, one almost fancies that time must 
 
 2
 
 have moved backward instead of forward. . , . The 
 unpleasant truth is forced upon us that a large portion of 
 Europe is still plunged in the darkness of the Middle 
 Ages." 
 
 Assuredly, that is not so true to-day. The star of free- 
 dom has risen in new Russia, and Prussian Kultnr, 
 which re-invented anti-Semitism, is setting in baths of 
 blood. The Jewish problem to Jewish eyes in 1902 was 
 how to escape persecution. Theodor Herzl was a 
 desperate man. Jewish conditions under Francis Joseph 
 were intolerable, and the situation was even worse in 
 Roumania and Russia. To-day this despair is lifted. 
 Prussia, the State without Semitism, is falling 'by the 
 vision she rejected. Democratic Bussia is finding her own 
 soul. The remedies devised by the neo-Zionists to cure 
 the evils they could not bear disappear with the evils 
 that engendered them. Dr. Leon Pinsker's Self-Eman- 
 cipation of September, 1882, reads like 'an old,! dead 
 play :- 
 
 ' ' The international Jewish question must undergo a 
 national solution. Our national regeneration can take 
 place, of course, only very slowly. But we .must take 
 the first step, and our successors will have to follow\ 
 .' ' . . The national regeneration of the Jews must be 
 initiated by a congress of Jewish notables:" 
 
 The first steps are being taken by the Gentiles, and 
 there is no longer an international Jewish question. So, 
 too, Dr. Herzl's monograph, A Jewish State : An Attempt 
 at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question, first pub- 
 lished in England in 1896, is likewise antiquated and out 
 of date. Herzl's original manife.sto proposed to found a 
 Jewish State in Western Asia or South America. Later 
 on, he selected Palestine, as the ancient home of the Jews, 
 
 3
 
 possessing a glamour to attract the victims of European 
 hate. His notion was that the Sultan of Turkey would 
 sell the province to the Jews- Dr. Pinsker shared this 
 delusion and that the European powers would 'guarantee 
 its integrity as a fifth-rate buffer State the wildest 
 notion, to our thinking, which an ambitious journalist 
 ever based on a neglect of political facts and an indiffer- 
 ence to religious (belief. It never had the least prospect 
 of success; and the Herzl variant of Zionism, though it 
 successfully deluded a heterogeneous crowd of foreign 
 enthusiasts, proved an unfortunate compromise 'between 
 two quite opposite ideas. 
 
 The restoration of the Jews to the land of their old 
 independence may occur in one of two ways. It may be 
 by the concerted 'act of the Governments of the countries 
 of their dispersion, devised as a measure of self-protection 
 against the spread of the Jews ; or it may be by the ful- 
 filment of prophecy when the Jewish mission as complete. 
 The first is the creed of good anti-Semites, the second of 
 orthodox Jews. The orthodox Jew recognises a divine 
 purpose in his exile. He is where he is for some purpose. 
 By his mere survival and patience he is serving some 
 divine end. He is a witness and a priest, and he may 
 not interrupt the mission of liis race to save his own 
 poor skin. But Dr. Herzl' s plan imade short work of the 
 spiritual element in the new exodus of Jewry. He tried 
 to anticipate Providence. The restoration, instead of 
 occurring as the appointed end of the dispersion, was 
 to be interpolated in the middle of it as a means 
 of evading its obligations. This plan, which was 
 a travesty of Judaism, was equally futile as state- 
 craft. There was not the least disposition on the part 
 of the Great Powers of Europe to see the wealth and 
 talent of Israel pass into the hands of the Sultan, nor 
 
 4
 
 yet to see the Holy Land invaded by a crowd of Jews, 
 still less to complicate the Eastern question by planting 
 another weak State in that troublesome ward of 
 invalids. 
 
 The unaccustomed meekness of the scheme was, 
 perhaps, its most surprising feature. Isaiah said: 
 " "Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the 
 brightness of thy rising. Break forth into joy, sing 
 together, ye waste places of Judah, for the Lord hath 
 comforted his people. Say unto Jerusalem, thou shalt 
 be built; and to the temple, thy foundation shall be 
 laid." On these passages, and passages like these, the 
 Jews have based their faith in the Messiah, whether 
 personal or impersonal, at whose coming the nations of 
 Christendom will be eager to take hold of their skirts ; 
 and the people which is permitted to look forward to so 
 splendid a destiny as this is forgiven by all just men for 
 the touch of racial arrogance, inevitable, perhaps, to those 
 who live in the light of such a mission. But now, con- 
 trast with Isaiah and his appeal to racial pride the 
 apologetic tone of Dr. Herzl in defining the destiny of 
 his race : 
 
 "The departure of the Jews," he wrote, in his 
 introduction to the Jewish State, "will involve no 
 economic disturbances, no crises, no persecutions; in 
 fact, the countries they abandon will revive to a new 
 period of prosperity. There will be an inner migration 
 of Christian citizens into the positions evacuated by Jews. 
 . The Jews 'will leave as honoured friends, and if 
 some of them return, they will receive the same favour- 
 able welcome and treatment at the hands of civilized 
 nations as is accorded to all foreign visitors. Their exodus 
 will have no resemblance to a flight, for it will 'be a well- 
 regulated expedition under control of pu'blic opinion." 
 
 5
 
 A flight, accordingly, which is no flight, an abandon- 
 ment and an evacuation this was to be the modern 
 rendering of the Messianic hope ; instead of Gentiles 
 coming to the light, Dr. Herzl offered the pretty picture 
 of Jews content, like foreign visitors, with a " favourable 
 welcome and treatment." I have called this a travesty 
 of Judaism. But it proved worse than a travesty in the 
 event. For Dr. Herzl and those who thought with him 
 became themselves part-authors of the anti-Semitism 
 which they set out to slay. How could the European 
 countries which the Jews proposed to " abandon " justify 
 their retention of the Jews? Why should civil equality 
 have been won by the strenuous exertions of the Jews if 
 the Jews themselves were to be the first to offer to 
 ' ' evacuate ' ' their position , and to claim the bare courtesy 
 of ' ' foreign visitors ' ' ? Why should the Russian Jews 
 depart in the very hour that the Russian peasant found 
 his soul? We all remember the debates in the House of 
 Commons of 1833. Lord Macaulay, speaking in com- 
 mittee on behalf of the removal of disabilities, said : 
 
 " Another objection which has been made to this 
 motion is that the Jews look forward to the coming of a 
 great deliverer, to their return to Palestine, to the re- 
 building of their temple, to the revival of their ancient 
 worship, and that, therefore, they will always consider 
 England not their country, but merely as their place of 
 exile. But surely, Sir, it would be the grossest ignorance 
 of human nature to imagine that the anticipation of an 
 event which is to happen at some time altogther indefinite 
 . can ever occupy the minds of men to such a 
 degree as to make them regardless of what is near and 
 present and certain. . . . Are we to exclude all 
 millenarians from Parliament and office?" " ." ; . 
 
 Fourscore years a strong man's lifetime make a 
 
 6
 
 short instalment of the Millennium, but if the neo- 
 Zionistic plan for the political restoration of the Jews 
 hiis to be taken into serious account, then Ma-caulay was 
 wrong, and his "grossly ignorant" opponents were 
 right in their view of human nature. 
 
 But the neo-Zionists were playing with words, and knew 
 not all they said. Zion was a magical name in the ears 
 of the ignorant victims of Russian and Roumanian per- 
 secution ; and though Dr. Her/1 was indifferent at first 
 whether he led them to Argentina or to Palestine, he 
 quickly perceived the commercial value of keeping the 
 name of the old firm on his prospectus. Not even Mr. 
 Zangwill, ingenious rhetorician though he is, could evade 
 the logic of this conclusion. " Palestine, indeed, but an 
 afterthought," he wrote in his Dreamers of the Ghetto: 
 "an aspiration of unsuspected strength, to be utilised 
 like all human forces by the maker of history. States 
 are the expression of souls ; in any land the Jewish soul 
 could express itself in characteristic institutions, would 
 shake off the long oppression of the ages, and renew its 
 youth in touch with the soil. Yet since there Is this 
 longing for Palestine, let us make capital of it capital 
 that will return its safe percentage." Was there ever a 
 more cynical confession of the commercialisation of a 
 spiritual idea? And 'the promoters knew their public. 
 Poor Jews, who would have preferred the flesh pots of 
 Vienna to the unknown terrors of South America , jumped 
 at the sound of Jerusalem. To die in Palestine is their 
 ambition; the restoration is their waking dream; and 
 Dr. Herzl, the " maker of history," was quick to repre- 
 sent his scheme of evading the mission of the exiles and 
 their duty to the lands of their dispersion as a fulfilment 
 of the ancient prophecy. 
 
 "The Jews," he himself wrote, "have dreamt this 
 
 7
 
 kingly dream all through the long nights of their history. 
 ' Ne_xt year in Jerusalem,' is their old phrase. Now 
 comes the opportunity to prove that the dream ixuy be 
 converted into a living reality ' ' and to the extent of 
 the possibility of the off-chance ueo-Zionism launched its 
 propaganda. The opportunity, stated with so much 
 skill, might be the trumpet-call to Zion ; at least the 
 ears of Ghetto-bred Hebrews, bewildered with cries of 
 hate, might well be eager to .accept another false prophet 
 as the Redeemer. Not, indeed, that Dr. Herzl's suc- 
 cess was commensurate with his anticipations. In 1896 
 he wrote: "I imagine that Governments will, either 
 voluntarily or under pressure from the anti-Semites, pay 
 certain attention to this scheme ; and they may perhaps 
 actually receive it here and there with a sympathy which 
 they also show to the Society of the Jews." This 
 expectation was not fulfilled. The Western Govern- 
 ments did not invite a spontaneous outburst of anti- 
 Semitism 'by acknowledging their Jews as strangers ; 
 and, as to the interviews with the Sultan of Turkey which 
 Dr. Herzl enjoyed, we know now that his Imperial 
 Majesty was smiling in his long sleeve. But the Con- 
 gress was founded, and each year it was addressed by 
 " impassioned rhetoricians," whose airy structure in the 
 clouds quickly began to reveal little signs of rifts and 
 flaws. I may be permitted to quote the picturesque 
 account of such a gathering from the reporter's pen of 
 Mr. Zangwill, who, as a friend of the movement, if 
 called a.s a witness on the other side, will give evidence 
 of supreme importance. He wrote some years ago : 
 
 "As no two of the leaders are alike , so do the rank 
 and file fail to resemble one another. Writers and 
 journalists, poets and novelists and merchants, pro- 
 fessors and men of professions types that once sought 
 
 8
 
 to slough their Jewish skins and mimic, on Darwinian 
 principles, the colours of the environment, but that now, 
 with some tardy sense of futility or stir of pride, pro- 
 claim their brotherhood in Zion they are come from 
 many places ; from far lands and from near ; from 
 uncouth, unknown villages of Bukowina and the 
 Caucasus, and from the great European capitals ; 
 thickest from the pales of persecution, in rare units from 
 the free realms of England and America a strange 
 phantasmagoria of faces ' and, it may fairly be added, 
 a strange foundation of a State. The italics are my own ; 
 but Pole, Hungarian, Roumanian, Frenchman, Dutch- 
 man, German, Russian, Egyptian, Swede how shall 
 these be welded together into a single republic, pent 
 closely between the desert and the sea ? " As an attempt 
 to realise the ideal of Judaism," wrote Mr. Oswald John 
 Simon in the Nineteenth Century as long ago as Septem- 
 ber, 1898, " the programme formulated at Basle presents 
 the spectacle of the most contemptible, if not the most 
 grotesque, species of idealism which was ever laid be f ore 
 the remnant of the descendants of a great nation." 
 
 These words are even truer to-day. Vixere fortes 
 ante Agamemnona; there were Zionists before Theodor 
 Herzl, long before he had as much as realised that any 
 Judaism existed except by the disabilities which it 
 imposed. Let me quote Isaiah for a moment Isaiah, 
 the first and greatest, the most eloquent and most 
 spiritual of Zionists, whose burning pride in his own race 
 and whose invincible belief in its destiny were combined 
 in an impassioned appeal to which no true Jew can be 
 deaf : ' The sons of them that afflicted thee shall come 
 bending unto thee, and all they that despise thee shall 
 bow themselves dow r n at the soles of thy feet ; and they 
 shall call thee, The city of the Lord, the Zion of the 
 
 9
 
 Holy One of Israel. " "I will bring thy seed from the 
 East, and gather thee from the West. I will say to the 
 North, give up, and to the South, keep not back. Bring 
 my sons from far, and my daughters from the ends of the 
 earth ; everyone that is called by my name. For I have 
 created him for my glory, I have formed him, yea, I 
 have made him." What is there of this prophetic con- 
 fidence, of this stubborn and steadfast faith, in the 
 Zionism of a Congress and a Bank and of negotiations 
 with Oriental tyrants? Their Zion is to " return a safe 
 percentage," a safe percentage of the glory of the Lord, 
 of the Zion of the Holy One of Israel. I have read a 
 fair amount of Hebrew literature, and I venture to assert 
 that not even Heine himself, in his bitterest mood of 
 disillusion, ever touched with more savage mockery a 
 high and an inspiriting ideal. Aid the hope and the 
 patience and the waiting, all the suffering and the agony 
 and the martyrdom, all the inspired belief in an end 
 transcending the unfulfilled prayers and the incomplete 
 longings of the ages, are to be sacrificed to the temporary- 
 advantage of using the name of Zion and are to gratify 
 the ' ' frightfulness ' ' of anti-Semitism 'by abandoning the 
 mission of the Semites. Surely, to quote Isaiah again, 
 ' ' The bed is shorter than tha.t a man can stretch him- 
 self on it; and the covering narrower than he can wrap 
 himself in it." Zionism demands an ampler air. 
 Zion the symbol of emancipation -the promise of 
 redemption the salvation of the world will not per- 
 manently acquiesce in so humiliating a defeat, nor adopt 
 so foreshortened a standard in lieu of its age-long aim. 
 
 The neo-Zionists are pliant enough not to require all 
 Jews to hasten to the Zion of their foundation. " For 
 thus saith the Lord, I will extend peace to her like a 
 river, and the glory of the Gentiles like a flowing stream, 
 
 10
 
 As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort 
 you, and ye shall be comforted in Jerusalem." But Dr. 
 J)aiches, eight years ago, addressing the London Univer- 
 sity Zionists, contracted thia flowing stream to the size 
 of an inland canal : " It is not the intention of Zionism," 
 he declared, though we learned our Zionism from the 
 Prophets, " that all Jews all over the world should leave 
 the countries in which they live and emigrate to Pales- 
 tine. This is not necessary, this is scarcely possible. A 
 great number of Jews will always remain in the Dias- 
 pora." Are these still to be permitted, we wonder, to pray 
 for the Zion of the Eestoration? For our dream, our pro- 
 phetic certainty, of the Messianic Zion would foe mocked 
 by the Zionist flag of such as migrate to that colony. 
 What a pitiful travesty of nationalism ! We are to be 
 citizens of the country in which we live ; we are to be 
 members of the State of Palestine ; we are to cherish the 
 Zion of Hebrew hopes. In their vaunted national am- 
 bition, these neo-Zionists forget how to think imperially 
 of Zion. Let them call their adventitious colony by any 
 other name they choose, Daicheeia or Zangwillopolis, or 
 what they will, but let them leave us the mother-comfort 
 which is the promise of Israel in Jerusalem. 
 
 We used to hear about Little Englanders. Surely 
 Little Jews is the right term for the neo-Zionists, bred in 
 persecution, who " prophesy falsely unto you in My 
 name : I have not sent them, saith the Lord." Des- 
 perate men in places may have urged the remedy o 
 flight. But the strenuousness, the consistency, the moral 
 purpose have always lain in the direction of an improve- 
 ment of Jewish conditions from within. Russian Jews 
 by remaining in "Russia will help Russia to become a 
 modern State. German Jews will teach Semitic virtues 
 to the disciples of Herren Adolf Stoecker and Houston 
 
 11
 
 Chamberlain. For this is the mission of Israel in exile, 
 the divine object of his dispersion, as it may 'be read. 
 And here, accordingly, is found the final solution of the 
 Jewish question, as it presents itself to the minds of 
 spiritual Jews acquainted with their own history : 
 
 "God wills that His -world, the world of man, shall 
 become 'better, not worse. With the optimism of faith 
 the Hebrew seers and poets look forward to a Golden 
 Age : they do not relegate it to a distant and irrecover- 
 able past. Righteousness and peace shall at last prevail. 
 ' They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and 
 their spears into priming-hooks : nation shall not lift 
 up sword against nation, neither shall they know war 
 any more.' This is the final issue of Israel's work. 
 . . . Such is the exalted hope, ethical and religious 
 in one, world- wide in its range, spiritual in its goal, 
 which the highest teachers of the Bible explicitly con- 
 nect and co-ordinate with the mission and the destiny 
 of Israel. . . . They form, to my thinking, the 
 essence of Judaism."* We shall spill that essence at 
 grave peril. 
 
 LAURIE MAGNUS. 
 
 Montefiore, Bible for Home Reading, II. 
 
 12
 
 JUDAISM AND NATIONALISM 
 
 STATEMENT BY AMERICAN RABBIS. 
 
 The follmving statement appears in the Message of the President to 
 the Twenty-eighth Annual Convention of the Central Conference of 
 American Rabbis, held in Buffalo, New York, on June 28, 1917: 
 
 Another movement, which in my judgment is 
 calculated to suppress the religious vitality which Judaism 
 should manifest, is one not making itself felt from without 
 but rather from within the camp of Israel. I refer to 
 Jewish nationalism. I am not here to quarrel with 
 Zionists. Mine is only the intention to declare that we 
 as rabbis, who are consecrated to the service of the Lord, 
 whose lips are to guard knowledge and from whose mouth 
 the people are to seek the Law because we are messengers 
 of the Lord of Hosts, have no place in a movement in 
 which Jews band together on racial or national grounds 
 and for a political state or even a legally-assured home. 
 Upon us rests the obligation to take up and sound 
 unremittingly the keynote to which the Jew has ever given 
 expression. The religious Israel, having the sanctions 
 of history, must not be sacrificed to the purely racial Israel 
 of modern planning. If it is sacrificed, the religious demand 
 of the Jews of our age, apart from other considerations, 
 cannot be satisfied. The time has come for this Conference 
 to publish the statement that it stands for an Israel whose 
 mission is religious, and that, in the light of this mission, 
 it looks with disfavour upon any movement the purpose of 
 which is other than religious.
 
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