STACK 
 ANNEX 
 
 5 
 
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 AND 
 
 HE JEWISH DIASPORA 
 
 BY 
 
 Paul Goodman. 
 
 i 
 ( iWA 
 
 Published by 
 
 THE ENGLISH ZIONIST FEDERATION, 
 75, Great Russell Street, London, W.C.1. 
 
 1921 
 [Price 4d.]
 
 ZIONISM 
 
 AND 
 
 THE JEWISH DIASPORA 
 
 BY 
 Paul Goodman. 
 
 IT may be said that there are few, if any, parallels to that 
 intimate, indissoluble connection between a people, its religion and 
 its land which exists in the case of the Jews. Mythology and 
 folklore incline to connect the aborigines of a country with its 
 local deities, but there is no instance of a people within modern 
 civilisation that has any feeling for its country beyond that of 
 patriotism or of love of the ancestral soil. The sense of sanctity 
 attaching to the native country is to be found here and there, 
 as in the veneration felt by pious Eussians for Kiev or Moscow, 
 or the patriotic pride of the Italians in the historic glory of Eome. 
 It is somewhat like the appeal that Westminster Abbey makes 
 as a national shrine to the English people. But this sense of the 
 sacred is not a fundamental part of the collective life of those 
 nations. England will remain England without the shrine at 
 
 2069905
 
 Westminster, as France, the eldest daughter of the Church, has 
 remained France in spite of its official separation from 
 Catholicism. At the same time we find that, in spite 
 of the tenacity with which a people will defend the 
 possession of its motherland, a great deal of this pat- 
 riotism is governed by political considerations. We observe, 
 for instance, that the French in Canada are indifferent to the fate of 
 France ; that the Germans in Austria and Switzerland, though 
 once politically united with other Germans in their proximity, are 
 relatively independent of the present German Eeich. We have 
 seen in the case of the United States of America that even a 
 determined antagonism may grow up in a colony towards the 
 home of the race. 
 
 In the case of the Jews, in spite of distance of time and place, 
 there has never been a definite divorce of the people from its 
 religion and its land. It is remarkable that even those who are 
 most insistent on their indifference to Palestine as the homeland 
 of the Jewish people have taken great pains to interest them- 
 selves in that country. The Alliance Israelite Universelle and the 
 Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden, organisations which before 
 the War competed primarily for the spread not of Jewish 
 but of French and German influences respectively, devoted 
 to Palestine a measure of their resources and energies quite out 
 of proportion to the number of the Jewish inhabitants of that part, 
 of the world. 
 
 The reason for this instinctive attachment of the Jews to Pales- 
 tine is to be found in the hold which the Land of Israel has 
 exercised on the people of Israel from the very earliest times. If 
 we go through the Books of Moses, from the call of Abraham 
 till the entry of the children of Israel into the Promised Land, 
 we find that the idea of the possession of that land as an integral 
 part of the purpose and destiny of the people is a dominant note 
 which is never absent in the history and legislation, in the discip- 
 line and the religion of those to whom God has given that supreme 
 national blessing. The words in which the call of God comes to 
 Abraham begin: "Go forth from thy country and from thy birth- 
 place and from thy father's house unto the land that I will shew
 
 thee" (Gen. xii., 1). Throughout the story of the patriarchs, 
 the possession of that land by their descendants is held out as 
 the great reward for their faithfulness. When we read through 
 the wonderful narrative that closes with Moses' vision of the 
 land from Pisgah, we are moved by the words of God to him: 
 "This is the land which I sware unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and 
 unto Jacob, saying, Unto thy seed will I give it" (Deut. xxxiv., 
 4). Ha-arez, the Land par excellence, which God has given to 
 His people, is invested with every beautiful imagery, 
 with a sanctity that made its occupation the symbol of 
 God's grace to the patriarchs and their descendants. 
 Just as the possession of the land was to be a reward 
 for the fulfilment of the commandments of God, so dis- 
 obedience to His laws would entail the loss of that country. 
 
 The special place which the land of Israel occupied in the 
 spiritual as well as in their national life was, of course, part of 
 that religious discipline which, like the people, was intended to 
 serve a higher purpose. But it is only necessary to refer to the great 
 Prophets of Israel, who proclaimed the universality of His sway, to 
 realise that the land of Israel was indeed regarded as 
 a priceless possession. It was not only, in the words of 
 Deuteronomy, "a land which the Lord thy God careth for; always 
 are the eyes of the Lord thy God upon it" (Deut. xi., 12), or in 
 the appeal of the psalmist, "For thy servants take pleasure in 
 her stones and favour the dust thereof" (Ps. cii., 14), but it is 
 out of Zion that the Law shall go forth to the nations of the earth. 
 The second Isaiah, the . most universalistic of the Prophets, 
 hailed also in most exalted strain the triumphant return of tho 
 exiled people to its own land. 
 
 The Babylonian Captivity was unquestionably an event which 
 was looked upon as the long-heralded calamity that was to 
 have overtaken the people because of their sins. The Return, 
 on the other hand, was ushered in by the words: "Comfort ye, 
 comfort ye my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to 
 Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, 
 that her iniquity is pardoned; for she hath received of the Lord's 
 hand double for all her sins" (Isaiah xl., 1, 2). It is neces-
 
 6 
 
 sary to emphasize this aspect of the question in view of 
 the heresy which asserts that instead of the contrite 
 confession: "Because of our sins we were exiled from 
 our land," we ought to rejoice "that we have been 
 removed far from our country." Whatever spiritual comfort 
 may be derived from this idea, the doctrine is certainly new and 
 has no support in Jewish tradition and sentiment. 
 
 The designation Golah or Galuth (The Captivity, or Diaspora 
 [Dispersion] in the Greek translation) was applied to those 
 who had been deported from their own land to Baby- 
 lonia. The exiles spread over the Babylonian Empire, and, 
 in spite of such outbursts of despair as we find depicted in Psalm 
 cxxxvii., rapidly adapted themselves to their new environment. 
 Their material condition was probably good, and spiritually, too, 
 there was opened up a new horizon before them. But the bend that 
 kept the exiles to their native land is best illustrated in the case 
 of Nehemiah, who held the high position of cupbearer to the King. 
 In the first chapter of Nehemiah we read: 
 
 "And it came to pass . . that Hanani, one of my 
 brethren, came, he and certain men of Judah; and I 
 asked them concerning the Jews that had escaped, which 
 were left of the captivity, and concerning Jerusalem. 
 And they said unto me, The remnant that are left of 
 the captivity there in the province are in great affliction and 
 reproach : the wall of Jerusalem also is broken down, and the 
 gates thereof are burned with fire. And it came to pass, when 
 I heard these words, that I sat down and wept, and mourned 
 certain days, and fasted, and prayed before the God of heaven. 
 And said, I beseech thee, Lord God of heaven, the great and 
 terrible God, that keepeth covenant and mercy for them that love 
 him and observe his commandments : Let thine ear now be 
 attentive, and thine eyes open, that thou mayest hear the prayer 
 of thy servant, which I pray before thee now, day and night, for 
 the children of Israel thy servants, and confess the sins of the 
 children of Israel, which we have sinned against thee : both I and 
 my father's house have sinned. We have dealt very corruptly 
 against thee, and have not kept the commandments, nor the
 
 statutes, nor the judgments, which thou commandedst thy ser- 
 vant Moses. Eemember, I beseech thee, the word that thou 
 commandedst thy servant Moses, saying, If ye transgress, I will 
 scatter you abroad among the nations : But if ye turn unto me, 
 and keep my commandments, and do them; though there were 
 of you cast out unto the uttermost parts of the heaven, yet will 
 I gather them from thence, and will bring them unto the place 
 that I have chosen to set my name there." 
 
 What would have become of the Jewish captives in Babylonia 
 if Ezra and Nehemiah had not set up the Judoean community 
 may be surmised if we consider the fate of the captives of tho 
 Northern Kingdom of Israel. They disappeared, and left no trace 
 behind them. There was no one, no body which preserved a 
 record of their sufferings and strivings in exile, and what we now 
 know of their tragic history we owe to the revival of the 
 polity of Judah on the return from Babylonia. But we are also 
 told that the exiles who returned to rebuild the Temple and the 
 city of Jerusalem were only a very small number, and that the 
 dissolution of the people had assumed extensive proportions by 
 intermarriage, and the ignorance of their national language and 
 religious traditions. Yet it was this post-exilic community of Jews 
 that produced some of the choicest treasures of our literature 
 and consolidated the faith and practices of Israel for all time. 
 
 The new Judasan commonwealth was politically of very little 
 importance, and its survival during great upheavals was mostly 
 due to its weakness and obscurity, but spiritually it created 
 Judaism as we know it, and gave birth to Christianity. The 
 Temple and the academies in Jerusalem became the rallying 
 point of the Jewish race in its ever-increasing dispersion. It was 
 not only that every adult male member paid a half -shekel into the 
 treasury of the Temple, but Jerusalem was the object of pilgrim- 
 age by Jewo from all parts of the Diaspora. 
 
 The Jewish Diaspora at the time of the second 
 Temple may be roughly divided into the Babylonian and 
 the GrjEco-Roman sections. Both parts of the Diaspora 
 looked to Palestine as their motherland and paid rever- 
 ence to Jerusalem as the Holy City, but, at the same
 
 8 
 
 time, there was in existence a local patriotism not unlike 
 that which Jews possess at this day. The attitude of most 
 "assimilated" Hellenistic Jews towards the centre of their race 
 and faith on the one hand and towards their native lands on the 
 other, may best be illustrated in the following words of Philo who, 
 in the first century, was equally proud of Alexandria and 
 of Jerusalem, just as an English Jew may feel towards 
 Jerusalem and London in the twentieth century: "For 
 no one country can contain the whole Jewish nation, by 
 reason of its populousness, on which account they frequent 
 all the most prosperous and fertile countries of Europe or 
 Asia, whether islands or continents, looking, indeed, \ipon the 
 Holy City as their metropolis in which is erected the sacred temple 
 of the most High God, but accounting those regions which have 
 been occupied by their fathers and grandfathers and great- 
 grandfathers, and still more remote ancestors, in which they have 
 been born and brought up, as their country" (Philo, Against 
 Flaccus, Yonge's transl., IV., p. 70). 
 
 The destruction of the Temple and the end of Jewish indepen- 
 dence intensified the sentiment which Jews felt for their mother- 
 land. The patriarch of Tiberias was able to exercise spiritual 
 jurisdiction over the Diaspora by reason of his residence in 
 the Holy Land, and it was only by the gradual extermination of 
 the Jews in Palestine that the centre of authority was shifted 
 to the schools that had been established in Babylonia. Never- 
 theless, the longing for the land of Israel among the Babylonians 
 is evidenced by numerous references in the Talmudic literature 
 There are well-known sayings, such as that by E. Johanan : "He 
 who walks a distance of four cubits in Palestine is assured of a 
 share in the world to come," or that to live in the land of Israel 
 outweighs in merit all the commandments of the Torah. Just as 
 at the present day the Jewish pilgrim feels drawn to kiss the 
 Western Wall of the Temple, so E. Jose ben Hanina kissed the 
 atones of Acre, saying, "Up to this point is the land of Israel." 
 To live in Palestine was in itself considered not only an inestimable 
 privilege but of very great merit. To be buried in Palestine is, 
 as we know by the innumerable pilgrims who went to Palestine
 
 9 
 
 only for the purpose of ending their last days there and finding 
 their eternal rest in the hallowed soil, a yearning that has 
 made a profound appeal to the Jew throughout the ages. And 
 those who could not enjoy the privilege of being buried in the Holy 
 Land had at least some particles of its earth sprinkled over them 
 when committed to the grave. 
 
 Palestine also filled a special phase in Talmudic literature 
 on account of the "Mizvoth hateluyoth ba-arez," the command- 
 ments that are only applicable in that land. There was the 
 important distinction between Erez Israel and Huz la-arez, 
 between the land of Israel and the Diaspora. The keen concern 
 which the Talrnudic sages had for maintaining and increasing the 
 Jewish population in Palestine is evidenced by the various legal 
 and ritual facilities they enacted to further this purpose. It was 
 only under the stress of actual starvation that it was permissible for 
 anyone to leave Palestine ; the export of the necessities of life 
 from Palestine was discouraged. What was thought of the Jewish 
 colonization of Palestine in Talmudic times we may infer from the 
 enactment that a Jew who proposed buying land in Palestine from 
 a Gentile could have the contract written out on the Sabbath day. 
 It is needless to emphasize the pre-eminent importance which 
 the Holy Land occupies in the prayers, the festivals and the fasts. 
 It is a remarkable instance of the divorce of religion from life 
 that men of piety who devoutly pray for the Return and who observe 
 most scrupulously the fast days should evince no practical interest 
 in the object of their apparently intense yearning. Still more strange 
 is the fact that Jews who offer up those prayers and observe the 
 fasts and feasts maintain that they are not meant to be for what 
 they were instituted. We can at least understand those who have 
 deliberately erased from their prayers the references to the Return, 
 who have given up the fasts and have changed their forms of 
 prayers on the festivals we need not argue with them for the 
 present, but they nevertheless implicitly admit that the Nationalist 
 interpretation of the prayers, of the fasts and the feasts is in 
 accordance with the original tradition and with Jewish sentiment. 
 The place of affection which Palestine . always held in the 
 hearts of the Jews is strikingly illustrated by the pilgrimages
 
 10 
 
 which Jews have undertaken to that country from all climes and 
 in all ages. There were many who went to Palestine to die 
 in that country; among those pilgrims there were not only 
 those who braved the hardships of a life dependent on 
 the charity of others though the world-wide collections of the 
 Haluka (for the relief of indigent Jews in Palestine) 
 may not be regarded in the light of mere almsgiving but 
 also many men of distinction and of learning who made the pious 
 pilgrimage to the Holy Land to live there. The special interest 
 attaching to Judah Halevi is his love of Zion, which, in 
 those far-off days of pirates and slave-dealers, he sealed with his 
 pilgrimage to the land of his ideal. Those great lights of 
 Rabbinical Judaism, Moses Maimonides and Moses Nach- 
 manides, in the twelfth and thirteenth century, went to the Holy 
 Land for inspiration. In the thirteenth century, when the governor 
 of Jerusalem granted permission to Jews to visit the cave .of 
 Machpelah, the burial place of the patriarchs, 300 rabbis from 
 England and France made a pilgrimage to Palestine. It is sig- 
 nificant that the "Shulhan Aruch," by Rabbi Joseph Caro, which 
 has remained to this day the authoritative standard code of 
 modern Judaism, was composed there. The spread of the 
 Cabbalah, with its lore regarding the mystic qualities of 
 the soil of Erez Israel, gave an added touch of sanctity to that 
 ever-hallowed land to which many of the devotees of the 
 Cabbalah, particularly the Hassidim, proceeded for the 
 purpose of getting into closer touch and communion 
 with the spirit that is supposed to reign there. The adage, 
 "The air of the land of Israel maketh wise," has long passed into 
 the currency of Jewish life and thought, and throughout the dis- 
 persions of Israel it has always been felt that the Shechinah, the 
 Divine Presence, was in exile with His people, exiled from that 
 Holy City which God has specially chosen for His abode. 
 
 While in the long, drawn-out Galuth those who settled in 
 Palestine did so out of pietistic motives, to lead there a life of 
 study and contemplation, it was only because of lack of oppor- 
 tunities or of organisation that the Jewish Settlement in Palestine 
 did not assume a larger and economically more independent
 
 11 
 
 aspect. In the sixteenth century we see not only the growth of 
 the Jewish settlement of Cabbalists, but Joseph Nasi 
 entered on a well-ordered plan of Jewish colonization 
 near the lake of Tiberias. Unfortunately, the politi- 
 cal conditions, the lack of men who combined energy 
 of action with wide vision, and the generally disorganised 
 state of Jewry made any systematic Jewish colonization of Pales- 
 tine well-nigh impossible. The restoration of the Jews to their 
 homeland was always in the air, but it remained a mere dream, 
 a pious hope. Even the practical effort of Mordecai Manuel Noah, 
 who, as a stepping-stone to the colonization of Palestine, attempted 
 in 1825 the creation of a Jewish agricultural colon} 7 in the State 
 of New York, led to no result. It required a man like Sir Moses 
 Montefiore, with his prestige among Jews and Gentiles, with his 
 indomitable energy and considerable resources, to bring the Jewish 
 colonization of Palestine within the realm of actuality. What hon- 
 oured place Palestine occupied in the heart and mind of the most 
 illustrious Jew produced by England needsno telling, for he devoted 
 his life to the regeneration of his people not only in championing 
 their emancipation all over the world but in furthering by all the 
 means at his disposal their re-settlement in Palestine. Sir Moses 
 Montefiore is the classical evidence of the compatibility of the 
 political emancipation of the Jews in the Diaspora with a potential 
 Jewish commonwealth in Palestine. For the efforts that Sir Moses 
 Montefiore made in connection with Palestine were not merely 
 the well-meaning endeavours of a large-hearted philanthropist, 
 but the considered plans of a Jewish statesman. The actions and 
 utterances of Sir Moses Montefiore leave no doubt as to his efforts 
 for the ultimate creation of a Jewish Palestine. His extant 
 schemes and his negotiations with Mohamed Ali show that he 
 anticipated many of the ideas and plans which Zionists have since 
 then adopted as part of Jewish national policy. If there were any 
 doubt as to the views and sentiments of this protagonist of Jewish 
 emancipation in England, we can have our minds set at rest by a 
 positive statement on this point in Mr. Lucien Wolf's excellent 
 biography of Sir Moses Montefiore, while he was still in the land of 
 the living. Mr. Lucien Wolf stated: "He unites a literal adher-
 
 12 
 
 ence to the hopes of a national restoration of Israel as expressed 
 by the Prophets and Kabbis. When questioned on the subject 
 some years ago, he answered, with a satisfied smile: 'I am 
 quite certain of it; it has been my constant dream, and I hope 
 will be realised some day when I shall be no more.' To the ob- 
 jection that it would be impossible to gather in the Israelites scat- 
 tered in all corners of the globe, he replied: 'I do not expect 
 that all Israelites will quit their abodes in those territories in 
 which they feel happy, even as there are Englishmen in Hun- 
 gary, Germany, America, Japan; but Palestine must belong to 
 the Jews, and Jerusalem is destined to become the seat oi a 
 Jewish Empire.' ' ("Sir Moses Montefiore: A Centennial Bio- 
 graphy," p. 276). It is perhaps not without interest at the present 
 time to hear what Mr. Lucien Wolf had to say in 1884 on this and 
 other aspects of Sir Moses Montefiore. Mr. Wolf added to Sir Moses' 
 remarks, by way of comment, the following words : "It is notable 
 that critics of Judaism who find a dangerous narrowness in this 
 creed they call it 'tribalism' have never attempted to explain 
 the phenomenon of its development in the person of Moses Monle- 
 fiore of the most unrestricted hurmonitarianism. The noble spirit 
 with which it has inspired hirn is illustrated by his entire career; 
 but happily, in many of his letters, he has given it a definite ex- 
 pression upon which those who come after him may do< well to 
 ponder." 
 
 It is not the purpose here to give an account of the Jewish 
 colonization of Palestine, except in so far as it may show the hold 
 which the idea of a Jewish Palestine has had on the hearts and 
 minds of the Jews throughout their dispersions. The Alliance 
 Israelite Universelle has, from the very first, devoted a dispro- 
 portionately large part of its efforts for the amelioration of the 
 Jews in Palestine, and even though in later years, with the 
 weakening of the Jewish national idea which had originally brought 
 the Alliance into* being, its energies drifted into a wrong channel, 
 it could not obviate the inevitable fact that whatever was created 
 by or for the Jews in Palestine added to the strength of Jewish 
 Nationalism not only in that country but among Jews generally. 
 The struggle for the civil and political emancipation of the
 
 13 
 
 Jews in the Diaspora absorbed too much of their energies, 
 and their hopes as to the effects of emancipation were too 
 roseate, to permit of any but a passing interest in Palestine. Some 
 there were, like Charles Netter, the founder of the Agricultural 
 School "Mikveh Israel," who were carried along by the spell 
 which Palestine exercises on most Jews who have visited it even 
 in the days of its abasement. Joseph Salvador brought 
 the idea of a Jewish State into relation with the 
 spiritual regeneration of the world. An advanced thinker like 
 Moses Hess struck on the political conception of a Jewish 
 commonwealth in Palestine by a purely logical conception of the 
 Jewish national problem, without the religious impedimenta which 
 have more often proved a hindrance than a support to a clear, 
 unprejudiced view of the Jewish question as a purely human pro- 
 blem. The wave of Nationalism which swept over Europe, 
 particularly in the emancipation o<f the Balkan races from the 
 Turkish yoke, involuntarily turned the minds of many Jews to 
 the possibilities of their own national freedom. The pogroms in 
 Russia in 1881 brought these floating ideas, hardly to be discerned 
 in the general struggle for emancipation, into the light of the 
 day, while in the great avalanche that swept hundreds of 
 thousands of Jews out of Russia, the question of the re-settlement 
 of Palestine by Jews became of urgent, practical importance. 
 
 To the Chovevi Zion, Palestine was the one and only country 
 where the Jews could build up an autonomous community of their 
 own. But there were Jewish Nationalists to whom the tradi- 
 tional sentiment regarding Erez Israel had ceased to appeal, 
 and it is for this reason that some, like Pinsker, were more con- 
 cerned for the development of a Jewish self-governing territory than 
 for the re-settlement of Palestine. Not a few attempted to find 
 in agricultural colonies in America that possibility to escape alien 
 domination which was a motive of their emigration quite as much 
 as the necessity to find a place of security for life and property. It 
 was this relative absence of the traditional Jewish sentiment for 
 Palestine that subsequently led some Nationalists to join the Jewish 
 Territorial Organisation in search for a Jewish home in any part of 
 the inhabited or uninhabited globe. But the experiments that have
 
 14 
 
 been attempted to form a Jewish community with the potentia- 
 lities of a State have failed because they lacked that essential 
 quality of attachment to the soil which is inherent in the idea of 
 Hibath Zion. The love of Zion has bound the homeless people to 
 its unpeopled home by those subtle bonds which we readily discern 
 in the attachment of all other nations to the land of their 
 ancestors. To a people like the Jews, which had been rooted out 
 of its natural soil for so many centuries, it was only by restored 
 contact with its historic land that it could renew its national 
 existence. 
 
 It is this understanding of the elementary principle of Jewish 
 nationhood that brought Theodor Herzl from the colour- 
 less Nationalism he outlined in his "Jews' State" to that 
 profound love for the ancestral land which led him to 
 his last wish that when his people shall return to Erez Israel 
 they shall take his bones with them to be interred in 
 the national soil. But the idea which Herzl entertained of the 
 Eeturn was that of a Prophet. When, at a memorable mass 
 meeting at the Great Assembly Hall, in London, he proclaimed 
 that soon the Jewish people would be set into motion, he spoke in 
 the apocalyptic strain that had impelled not only himself, but in- 
 numerable thousands of his people, to believe that at last, in their 
 own days, the Geulah, the Redemption, was near at hand. 
 
 To Herzl and those who, in the first years of his activity, 
 were engaged in the work of national redemption, the question 
 as to the relations between a Jewish Palestine and the Diaspora 
 were of little concern. There were some, like Nathan Birnbaum 
 (known by the pseudonym of Matthias Acher), and S. Dubnow, 
 the exponent of "Spiritual Nationalism," who evolved the ideal of 
 a national-cultural autonomy of the Galuth, particularly in Eastern 
 Europe, and Achad Ha 'am, the philosopher of Jewish Nationalism, 
 gave a brilliant setting and new interpretation to Jewish history 
 and destiny, but the whole weight of the Zionist forces 
 was concentrated on the almost superhuman task of turning the 
 Zionist idea of the restoration of Israel to its homeland 
 into a reality. It was only as time went on and many 
 latent forces called for action that Zionism set about to Nation-
 
 15 
 
 alize Jewry in the Diaspora. There was the famous mot 
 by Max Nordau that the Zionists should "capture the commu- 
 nities," i.e., take charge of Jewish communal bodies, and raise 
 them from purely denominational or charitable congregations to a 
 higher conception cf Jewish organisation. The Jewish community, 
 was henceforth to resume the functions of the historic Jewish 
 Kehillah, and nothing Jewish should be alien to it. At 
 the fourth Zionist Congress held in London there was 
 also elaborated an ambitious idea, called "Gegenwarts 
 arbeit, " by which Zionists were no longer to confine 
 their efforts to the creation of a Jewish Palestine, but should also 
 turn their energies to Jewish work nearest at hand. Part of this 
 programme was already then in operation. There was education, 
 the elementary basis of Jewish life, which was transferred under 
 the sway of Zionism from an antiquated system into a living 
 force. The traditional mode of imparting a know- 
 ledge of Hebrew gave way to the system of the teaching of 
 Hebrew as a living tongue, Ibrith be'ibrfth, which, in spite oi 
 its drawbacks, created a wholesome revolution in the teach- 
 ing of a language and literature which then, even among its 
 devotees, had come to be regarded as artificial, if not 
 dead. Then we had the great awakening of the Uni- 
 versity youth. Here thousands upon thousands of young 
 intellectuals, estranged from Judaism, came back to the 
 Jewish fold under the inspiration of the resurrection of 
 their people. The Jewish class-conscious proletariat, which 
 had come to look upon Judaism as a hateful auxiliary of economic 
 enslavement, also returned in large numbers to the old faith of 
 which the labouring masses had once been the main support. Many 
 men of mature judgment, who had turned their backs on Judaism 
 long ago, now put into it a new content, and gave to it a new sense 
 of loyalty. The memorable words uttered by Herzl at the first Con- 
 gress: "Zionism means the return to Judaism even before the 
 return to the Jewish land," had now become true. 
 
 Among the scattered Jewish minorities in the nationally 
 homogeneous West the effects of Zionism showed themselves 
 mostly in individuals, though it brought also a quickened
 
 16 
 
 force into communal life, and promoted a study and un- 
 derstanding of the conditions of the living Jewish people 
 instead of the archaeological researches of the "science" of Ju- 
 daism, as it was aptly called. In an ever-growing degree it became 
 recognised that philanthropy can effect no solution of the Jewish 
 problem, and that it is in Palestine alone that the civic sense 
 of the many "homeless" Jews can be adequately satisfied. But in 
 the East, Zionism produced a revolution in the Jewish outlook, a 
 re-orientation of Jewish prospects and hopes among those who, 
 by their social and intellectual standing, had assumed the leader- 
 ship of the Jewish people. Even when these elements did not 
 range themselves under the Zionist banner, they implicitly 
 acknowledged the justice of the Zionist claims by demands for 
 the national grouping of the Jews where they lived in more or 
 less compact masses. The idea of the nationalization of Jewish 
 life has permeated even those who are nominally hostile to 
 Zionism. Already, during the high hopes entertained in the con- 
 stitutional revolution in Russia in 1905, the project of a national- 
 cultural autonomy of the Russian and Polish Jews had become 
 popular among all sections of the Jewish people, and was accepted 
 by the revolutionary forces that were shaping the new Russia as a 
 legitimate, if not self -understood, claim of an ancient people with 
 its historic religion and traditions. Even the pronouncedly anti- 
 Nationalist Russo- Jewish Labour "Bund" had perforce to 
 turn its hostility into a sullen acquiescence. The funda- 
 mental idea underlying Jewish Nationalism, which is still 
 agitating so many minds in the West, has received 
 almost universal acceptance among those Jews in the East who 
 are concerned for the future of their people, and the differences 
 among the various sections are only as to the interpretation anJ 
 application of that idea. 
 
 What will be the relations of Zionism t<> the Diaspora in the 
 future ? 
 
 It may be said that if the Zionist conception of a Jewish 
 National Home in Palestine be realised, Zionism will cease to re- 
 present a party within the Jewish people. Already we see among 
 those who oppose Zionism out of principle, or for the sake of ex-
 
 17 
 
 pediency, a somewhat suspicious claim to present some phase 
 of Zionism as an adequate fulfilment of the age-long yearn- 
 ings of the people of Israel. The famous anti-Zionist manifesto 
 of the former Anglo-Jewish Foreign "Conjoint Committee" be- 
 gan with a fervent protestation of absorbing interest in the welfare 
 of Palestine and of the Jewish future in that country. One of 
 the objects of the League of British Jews the only concrete and 
 positive part of its programme is "to facilitate the settlement 
 in Palestine of such Jews as may desire to make Palestine their 
 home." As it was once said that we were all Socialists now, so 
 we can anticipate that, with the recognition of Zionism not only by 
 Jewish democracy but by the world outside, all nationally 
 conscious Jews will become Zionists, even though Zionists of 
 a sort. 
 
 The crucial point in which most non-Zionist Jews are inter- 
 ested is the political attitude which Jews in the Diaspora will have 
 to assume towards the Jewish commonwealth in Palestine, and 
 how far this will affect their political status in the countries of their 
 allegiance. The reply to this question has two aspects: the in- 
 ternal one and the external. In so far as the Jews of Palestine 
 are concerned, the conception of a "Jewish National Home," as 
 distinguished from a number of colourless urban and rural settle- 
 ments of Jews, presupposes the cieation and development of a 
 specifically Jewish polity. It is obvious that anyone who lends 
 himself to Jewish colonization in Palestine in any form is nolens 
 volens supporting the development of a Jewish national entity 
 in that country. The only feasible, but obviously impracticable, 
 alternative is that the Jews in Palestine should become Arabs of 
 the Jewish persuasion. Therefore, there remains the fact, amply 
 demonstrated by the new Jewish Settlement in Palestine, that 
 the Jews in their National Home would necessarily create a 
 Jewish political organism. How and when Palestine will develop 
 ultimately into a self-governing Jewish commonwealth, at least 
 into a country in which men and women of Jewish race and faith, 
 of Hebrew speech and culture will become the politically pre- 
 dominant type, will depend as much on the sympathies and self- 
 sacrifice of the Jews in the Diaspora as on the course of events
 
 18 
 
 in Palestine under the British Mandate of the League of Nations. 
 This, however, does not mean that all Jews living in 
 Palestine will as a matter of course owe political allegiance to it, 
 whatever form Palest-man citizenship may take in international 
 law; certainly not, that Jews outside Palestine will have 
 any political relations whatever with their people in that 
 country. In Palestine, we must distinguish the civil from the 
 political aspect of the question. The Jew of American or French 
 citizenship could retain in Palestine, as elsewhere, the duties 
 and rights of his political allegiance, so long, of course, as he did 
 not change it by naturalization, but in matters of local govern- 
 ment, in the administration of justice, in education, in religion, 
 as well as in taxation, the American or French Jew might be bound 
 by certain legal enactments governing the Jewish community. It 
 could not well be otherwise, nor does it appear that there is any 
 hardship involved, assuming that a Jew, living amidst a self- 
 governing community of Jews in Palestine, did not regard it as 
 an inestimable privilege to be under Jewish jurisdiction. Beyond 
 this local jurisdiction over those Jews who are domiciled in Pales- 
 tine, the Jewish nationality in that country would raise or 
 command no political claims whatever over those who will live out- 
 side the geographical boundaries assigned to the Jewish Palestine. 
 To what extent the existence in Palestine of a Jewish Na- 
 tional Home would affect the political status of the Jews in the 
 Diaspora must, therefore, be judged by the preceding remarks. 
 It is, of course, conceivable that opponents of the Jews would 
 use this as a pretext against them, but such an attitude 
 has not hitherto been dependent on the existence of Zionism 
 or of a Jewish Palestine. The thoroughly assimilationist Alliance 
 Israelite Universelle has in fact been used in innumerable 
 instances as a weapon against the Jews; the mere existence of 
 financiers of Jewish descent, who have denied all sympathy with 
 their people or any interest in their future, has been a fertile 
 source of charges against the Jews. The attacks of Stocker, 
 Drumont and Lueger, and the anti-Semitic agitation in Ger- 
 many and France, were initiated before the rise of Jewish Nation- 
 alism in Western Europe, and were directed against circles that
 
 19 
 
 lay open to no suspicion of Jewish separatism. The anti-Semitic 
 campaign of "The Morning Post" and "The New Witness," with 
 its emphasis on the "double allegiance" of the Jews, is 
 not due to Zionist aspirations, but is admittedly directed 
 against Jews of influence in English public life, such as 
 Mr. Edwin Montagu, who are notoriously opposed to the 
 very idea of a Jewish nationality. Of course, against malevo- 
 lence or stupidity even the gods fight in vain, but there may be 
 some reason to assume that the existence of a Jewish Palestine 
 as the national centre of the Jewish people will provide a clear- 
 cut issue on which all those of good faith, whether Jews or non- 
 Jews, will be able to determine their attitude. 
 
 This problem may be simplified by the process of elimination 
 which will be brought about by the existence of Jewish Nation- 
 alism as a determining factor in Jewish life. It is 
 possible that there will be a definite cleavage between 
 those who will look to Judaea as their spiritual home 
 while retaining their political allegiance, their patriotic 
 associations, their economic interests in the lands of their 
 birth and of their children's future, and those who will deliberately 
 cut themselves adrift from Jewish Nationalism by a further de- 
 velopment of Jewish Universalism and will merge their individual 
 identification into the ideals and aspirations of their non-Jewish 
 neighbours. But both sections may include two groups the Na- 
 tionalists in the Diaspora will be morally reinforced by those who 
 will be Judseans, either actual or potential, and the 
 Universalists will be faced by those who will feel that they have no 
 place in Judaism, and will, therefore, sever their connec- 
 tion with it. These necessary distinctions will do away with the 
 presumption of those who, without any faith in the Jewish 
 religion or in the future of the Jewish people, speak, and are 
 quoted, as representing the views and hopes of the Jews. While, 
 in the one case, the uncompromising Zionist may ultimately find 
 his spiritual, if not political, ideal in citizenship of the Judsean 
 commonwealth, the un- Jewish Jew will relieve himself of a tie 
 which is as weakening to Judaism as it is embarrassing to himself. 
 These anticipations, however, in so far as they deal merely with
 
 20 
 
 the political aspect of things, only touch the surface of the Jewish 
 problem, and those who concentrate their attention on the possible 
 effects of Jewish Nationalism on the political status of the Jews 
 in the lands of the Dispersion are hardly doing justice to the 
 gravity and subtleness of the question. The disintegration of 
 Jewry, particularly owing to its gradual break-up into separate 
 territorial and cultural sections, is counteracted by the positive 
 thesis of Zionism that, despite of the proved, indeflectable loyalty 
 of the Jews to the lands of their birth or adoption and the inevit- 
 able differences due to environment and education, Israel is in 
 essentials a national organism, a spiritual and social unity. The 
 Jewish collective will to live cries out for such a solid foot-hold 
 and rallying force as can only be afforded by a Jewish national- 
 spiritual centre in Palestine and by that synthesis of Jewish ideals 
 and aspirations that have found their expression in Zionism. 
 On the other hand, there is the obvious difficulty, which 
 seems consistently ignored, of reconciling the claim of 
 non-conforming Jews in the Diaspora to belong to a com- 
 munity ostentatiously assumed by them to be of a purely 
 religious character. A de-nationalised Judaism, with a special 
 emphasis against the national features in the Jewish religion, will 
 be worn away by the corroding influences of Rationalism and secu- 
 larism. With the inevitable acceptance of the doctrine of in- 
 dividual freedom of thought, Judaism in the Diaspora will have to 
 face fairly and squarely the question of the purely racial Jew 
 who denies not only the national but the religious raison d'etre 
 of the Jewish race. But when we find that the Nationalist con- 
 ception of Jewry has attracted again to the service of the Jewish 
 people men of diverse religious and philosophical convictions and 
 temperaments, we may assume that a many-sided national life, 
 with its stimulating effects on the self-consciousness and creative 
 powers of the Jews, will lead to an active association with their 
 people of such Jews who, in the absence of any specific interest in 
 the narrowly circumscribed manifestations of present-day Jewish 
 communal life, have no means of identifying themselves more 
 closely with the affairs of a sectarian, as distinguished from a 
 national, community.
 
 21 
 
 The Diaspora will remain the battlefield of Judaism, where, 
 amidst hostile influences, it will maintain the social and spiritual 
 ideas inherent in the Jewish mentality and way of life, but rein- 
 forced by the vitality and inspiration it will derive from the 
 Jewish Renaissance in Erez Israel. The Diaspora will at the same 
 time also be the great reservoir whence for generations to come 
 the Jewish Palestine will draw the necessary human and material 
 resources for its growth and upbuilding. In Palestine these re- 
 sources will be transmuted into Jewish spiritual and cultural values 
 that will become the life-blood coursing through Judaism all over 
 the world. Israel in the Diaspora will remain the Witness of God 
 among the nations of the earth no longer, indeed, suffering under 
 the consciousness of being in Galuth, in physical and spiritual 
 exile; not, indeed, debased by the feeling of impotence, but up- 
 lifted by the realisation that Israel has at last come into its own, 
 that Judaism is not living merely on its great past, is not only 
 receptive and assimilative, but creative and again enriching the 
 world by the native genius of Israel, "for the Lord hath built up 
 Zion; He hath appeared in His glory" (Ps. , cii., 16). 
 
 With all the new forms of Jewish life that will arise with the 
 development of a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine, it will widen 
 immeasurably that narrow view which sees in Judaism a religion 
 confined to a peculiar people and which has come to regard a 
 charitable disposition as the highest test of Jewish public spirit. 
 With new responsibilities there will also develop a more heroic 
 conception of Jewish civic life. There will come a day when a Jew 
 will consider it quite as natural to lay down his life for his own 
 pec pie as for the country of his citizenship. In the Jewish Pales- 
 tine, there will emerge in Judaism a new sense of the spiritual, 
 whereby Conservatism will cease to denote a mere steadfast ad- 
 herence to tradition and the Reform of Judaism a gamble with 
 the Jewish future. There will be a growth, an evolution of 
 Judaism, but it will have its roots, as in the Biblical days of old, 
 in the hallowed soil of Erez Israel. For under the inspiration of the 
 resurrection of the Jewish people there will arise new Jewish values 
 and ideals, new forms of Jewish piety and saintliness ; there will 
 rise up men whose lips will again be touched by live coal from the
 
 22 
 
 Jewish altar, and whose minds will be fired by the social and 
 spiritual ideas that will go to the making of a rejuvenated Israel. 
 And this self -revelation of the latter days, this redemption of the 
 ancient people of Israel from the age-long spell of the Captivity 
 of Two Thousand Years, will bring a new message to the Jews in 
 the Diaspora, perhaps a new message to mankind. For Zionists, 
 more than any other Jews, are moved by the fervent hope of a 
 great future in store for the Jewish people, and indeed believe 
 that once again "the Torah shall go forth from Zion and the word 
 of the Lord from Jerusalem."
 
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