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ZIONISM
AND
WORLD POLITICS
ZIONISM
AND
WORLD POLITICS
A Study in History and
Social Psychology
BY
HORACE MEYER KALLEN, Ph.D.
OF THE
NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH
GARDEN CITY, N. Y., AND TORONTO
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1921
f J*
COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
TO
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
vii
viii PREFACE
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
Liter national 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
CHAPTER
XII.
XIII.
XIV.
XV.
XVI.
XVII.
XVIII.
XIX.
CONTENTS
PAGE
Zionist Endeavour and the Politics of
the Great War 150
The Jewish Cause at the Peace Con-
ference 177
From Versailles to San Remo — The
Basic Conflict 197
From Versailles to San Remo — The
Conflict in Russia and America . 208
From Versailles to San Remo — The
Conflict in Poland, the Ukraine,
Hungary, and Rumania. . . . 217
From Versailles to San Remo — Palestine
and the Near-Eastern Problem . 244
San Remo — The End of an Epoch . . 263
"VitaNuova?" 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
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
PIONEER, O PIONEER 3
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
rlarum 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
1 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
12 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
1 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 Maccabaeus; 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 Nicaea, 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 x
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 Unam 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 Congressas 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 — taxf armers,
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 Judaicns 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 coimpli-
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
clares 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 slowlv 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 Ins 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
Universelle 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
»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' 1
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
y
^'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 40
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' 1 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
x " 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 "TheophrastusSuch,"
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 Prance. 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 Jahrbiicher.
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 lie 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
SECULAE 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-
dievalism 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 passion of faith and devotion which
66 ZIONISM AND WORLD POLITICS
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' 1 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
mediaeval 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.
^'Emmuah Jesharah," 1860.
2 Derishat Zion, 1804.
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' 1 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 HerzPs 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.
J 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' 3 (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' 1 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.
AHAD HA 'AM AND HERZL 83
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 Palestine. 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
PAETIES 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 (I to)
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
APTER 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 ineffectually by its tradition
of "practical' 1 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' 1 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. But 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,
a nd 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 Pressburg in 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, "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' 3 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,
*" 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 Yeshibahs. 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 Montenore 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 Zio?i 9 Wadi-el-Hannin 9
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. With
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,
*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 were 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 Yishub, 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 Vol ad
Halashon, with Ben Yehudah as its head. This Vatad
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 m his Milton, 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-
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' 1 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 w T ould 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 HerzPs
visits 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
va'adim, 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. But 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, Buda-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' 1 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 exploitatious 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 reorganizes 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
2 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 "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 ShHadlan 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 Sh'tadlan.
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 originalSeph-
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' 1 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' 1 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
fill. 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 Semi tics 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 "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 Judsean. 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, v/hose 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. SchifT, 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 Taf t 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 ShHadlanic 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 Stitadlan 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 medievalism, 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' 5 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 medisevalism, 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 Executive 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, aU 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 a
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 Horns, 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 Galuih,
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 ^YORLD 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 re writings, in which 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 "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-
rn
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 j
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 Czecho-Slovakia, 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
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 retro-
1 The 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
/
S
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
mood. 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 ariy 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 205
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 C/. 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 Pour, 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-
: 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 with
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 21
a
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 w T as 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 "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 "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 "Bolshevik."
An Americanization craze, whose typical symptom
is the concept " 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.
222 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 Shlakhta 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 conspicu-
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
Ukrainia, is 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. But 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 interpehetration
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' 1 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 medieval-
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.
1 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 WichtPs
" Weltfreimaurerei, Wei tre volution, 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 an ti- 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-
ableSect.'"
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
mediaeval 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, 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 v came naturally and auto-
matically into operation. The Jews have their
emigres, no less than the Russians, the Ruthenians,
the Austrians, with the em igre 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 245
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.
Tins 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 Sh'tadlanic 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 Khalif ate.
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 w r as "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
ir The "Const itutent 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 Peisal. 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 of
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
l 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."
263
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 "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 w T ere 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 "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 269
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 mediaeval 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 w T hich 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
n% 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
a
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."
^nly 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
x 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-tsikers, 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. supra, 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
*Since 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, 1021, particu-
larly, Exhibit S.) The differences did not lie in "philosophy." They lay in
the fact that the Americans were thinking in terms of the economic actualities
. . T7T''
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 W T orld 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." Their 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 and
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:
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
a
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.
1 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
l 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 Palest' ne 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
J 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
1 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 NIJOVA?" 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. W T hen 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
<» \7T''
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' 1 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
4 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-Par tisan 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.
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 were 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 he 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;
a \J-rr
VITA NUOVA?" 307
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
l 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
a
VITA NUOVA?" 311
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 v/ould 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 NTJOVA?" 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
"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 tfeeir counsels are more surely guided
than heretofore.
2 Nehemiah, rx-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?' $19
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 " 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 "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, " white-collarer," shop-keeper who may
be buying to resell, Jewish "colonist' 2 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.
: 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 yeur 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' 1 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
cc
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 Hachinuch,
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."
4 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
ce
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?" 335
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, 106, 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.
Anti-semitism, 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-
339
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 ; a n t i - 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 Universelle, 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 seq.; 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 fits, 50.
Dunant, Henri, 49.
Economic Council, proposed for
Palestine, 331.
"Economic Man," the, 54.
Education, Jewish, in Palestine, 320;
necessary reorganization of, 327.
Einstein, Albe'rt, 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, 168, 194. 195, 251, 25G,
257, 268, 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,
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.
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, Herzl's, 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, Bcla, 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 Hera Id, 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.
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, Y'ico della, 26.
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.
M©ssinsohn, 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.
Nilus, 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, E01
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 H., 118, note; 141, 170.
Schwendt, Deputy, 35.
Scott, C. P., 165.
Settlers, early Jewish in the United
States, 121; relations with later
comers, 122.
Shekel The 79.
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 seqr, economic changes in, 213;
national neurasthenia in, 214;
foreign propaganda in, 215.
Universalism, prophetic, 12.
Va'ad Hachinuch, 327.
Wad 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 Bea, 99 seq.
Yemenites, 108.
Young Turks, 111; attitude toward
Zionism, 115.
Zangwill, L, 75, 84, 244.
Zechariah, 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.
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