Zionism

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CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

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Foreword 13

I. The Pre-Herzlites 17

Foreword

It was with much pleasure that I accepted the mandate, offered to me by The Jewish Publication Society of America, to contribute an essay on Zionism as one of a series dealing with prominent Jewish movements. Whichever side of the question appeals to us, we must all recognize that under the name Zionism a solution of the Jewish problem has been presented which must be of much moment for the future of the Jewish people. I venture to think that it is the only solution and to hold that the weal or woe of our race depends upon our espousal or rejection of it. In saying so much, I am practically affirming my standpoint. I make no excuse for the trend of my thought. I have written frankly as a Zionist, and I believe that the Publication Society and its many members will be served best by the presentation of all such subjects at the hand of those whose sympathy for them has made them able to understand their essence. Above all, I have been mindful of the advice given by the

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FOREWORD

philosopher on the throne of the Caesars, *' Let there be in your speech an accent of heroic truth."

It is sometimes held that an historian must be unbiased, and must stand vis-a-vis to his subject much as a physician does to his patient. Such detachment may be valuable for a mere chronicler, to whom dry dates and lifeless facts are all-important. But a people has a soul, just as individual human beings have. To understand that soul, something more is needed than mere dates and facts. If evolution is creative, as Monsieur Bergson holds, the attempt must be made to understand in what that creative spirit consists, and this can be attained only by active sympathy with the peculiar phase of the soul-life the historian has to depict. This need not prevent him from taking a broad view of the opinion of others who do not see the light in exactly the same fashion. I have tried to do justice to the opposing view, and, If I have not succeeded, the shortcoming is excusable from the earnestness with which the problem appeals to me. The reader will make his own deduction on that score.

I have omitted many minor details — small differences of opinion that loomed large at certain times and became subjects of heated discussion — in

FOREWORD

order to lay stress upon what seemed to me to be the leading lines of development. I have also respected confidences, due to my intimate relations with most of the leaders, which might discover motives or place certain facts in a clearer light. The time has not yet come for disclosing the inner history of many of the negotiations to which reference Is made in the following pages.

Richard Gottheil.

Columbia University, New York, October, 191 2.

Chapter I

In commenting upon a passage in the Book of Psalms — so the Talmud relates* — two rabbis expressed opposing views. One held that " the time is adapted to the leader"; the other, that "the leader is adapted to the time." As is so often the case when views diverge, both phrases ** are expressions of eternal truth." To very few men has it been given to be far ahead of the forces they were leading. Such a faculty has been reserved for the thinker and the seer, for the more poetic nature, which can set itself above the demands of practical life and measurable possibilities and soar into the refined atmosphere of pure thought.

Theodor Herzl was not originally a man of action. A poet, a writer, a dreamer in the best sense of that term, he would seem to have been fitted poorly by his early life, his education, his associations for the role he was called upon to play. Yet the circumstances in which the Jewish people were placed and the various converging currents of thought were such as to force him to the leadership of a people at a most critical period of its history. Since 1896 sixteen years have gone by. Some of the acuter controversies raised by the appearance of Zionism have passed away. As opposition has become less marked, and the dire results presaged have not ensued, so also a certain inner evolution has taken place within the movement itself. The fundamental principles upon which the whole organization rests have indeed remained intact and inviolate, but it was inevitable that the direction of its conscious effort should change as the circumstances changed in which it worked. Perhaps the moment has come when an estimate can be made of the part played by Zionism in modern Jewish life, of the clearer perception of Jewish problems which it has induced, and of the contribution it has made towards a possible solution of some at least of these problems. With this purpose in view, the following pages have been written.

I have taken the year 1896 as the starting-point, not because historical movements of great moment can be fixed within definite limits of time, but because that date affords a convenient point of vantage from which to look both backward and forward: backward, because it is necessary to see how " the le was adapted to the leader " ; forward, in order measure the degree in which " the leader was ipted to the time."

One need not be biased towards any of the exng expressions of Jewish feeling and thought to ^ that to none of them could the situation have pealed as satisfactory in itself or as promising the hope that it held out for the future. Western vry, and by that I mean the Jews who had been rn and reared in contact with the more advanced ilization of Central and Western Europe and

the United States, had staked its all upon the litical emancipation for which it had fought with :h tenacity and with such eminent success. It is [e that there were many inner conflicts within that fvry, but the larger mass of the Jews had been itent to leave such matters for discussion among ; learned and the religious leaders. The great lals enounced by the prophets of old had found

echo in the highest aspirations of some of the ding thinkers and statesmen of the century. The 5vs, born optimists as they are, eagerly followed lead that spoke in language to which they and *ir forebears had been well accustomed. As the ills of the physical and constitutional Ghettos :re razed one by one, the Western Jews felt that at last they had come into their heritage, that they could take their place by the side of their non- Jewish fellow-citizens, and that both would move forward and on to a higher level, leaving behind them all the controversies and the struggles of the past as unpleasant reminiscences of a time that was gone forever.

It is quite certain that the Jewish Reformers and their followers were absolutely sincere in their theories and in their actions. They met the demands of the newly-created situation with characteristic energy. They were not merely shouting the language of patriotism. They knew that the enjoyment of new rights carried with it the obligation of new duties ; they had to fit Jewish thought and Jewish observance into the new grooves in which their lives and the lives of their children were to run. Above all, they wished to save the Jewish religion, even at the expense of nationality and race, not realizing that the two last were the chief bulwarks of the religion. They commenced to doff the Jewish gabardine, to shuffle off ways, habits, and observances that seemed to run counter to the forms of modern conditions. For them, in very truth, the ** East was the East and the West was the West.'' They felt that they must do their share in the tacit understanding they had come to with what they called the " modern spirit."

It is not difficult to sympathize with the Reformers in their attempt to save Judaism. This was the kernel, for which rites, ceremonies, and observances made up the husk. Nor did they imagine that the kernel could continue and be shorn of its husk. But they did think that the husk was unnecessarily thick; even that its whole character could be changed and still remain the husk of that particular kernel. In point of fact, a good part of the husk had commenced to be withered and blighted. Various forms had died a natural death and had fallen by the wayside. Jews ever3^where had bridled at some of the ancient customs, and had silently sunk them into oblivion. But no official action had been taken. Very few of the changes that occurred in ritual matters during the Middle Ages had been made consciously or with deliberation. They had been accepted de facto and post eventum. Least of all had such action been taken in matters of belief or theory. But It had always been a Jewish postulate that religion and life were intimately bound up one with the other. The first to break the rivet had been Moses Mendelssohn, the Berlin sage." He had laid entire stress upon one side,

Jewish life, and had allowed individual belief to range as wide as possible. ** The Spirit of Judaism is freedom in doctrine and conformity in action." But absolute conformity in action, both as regards the individual and his neighbor and as regards the present and the past, being impossible, the result was inevitable. Jewish life became atrophied, and Jewish belief, having no hold and no stability, soon lost all distinctive character. The descendants of the Mendelssohnian group have very largely passed out of Jewry.

The German Reformers chose the other way to break through the attachment. They laid great stress upon Jewish belief, upon the religious side. Jewish life as such did not appeal to them with much force, and, freed from what they considered the ** trammels '' of Jewish observance, Jewish belief became in time watered into a thinly-veiled theism. The most serious renunciation was that connected with the great hope of Israel's restoration, the pivot on which Jewish spiritual life revolved. The Jewish world had until then believed that the dispersion was a punishment. To the Reformers it became a blessing. Dispersion should be encouraged, " so that there might be worshipers of the one only and true God everywhere.'' ' The loss of Palestine signified progress, since Israel's ideals were carried into all lands. In conformity with these views, the Frankfort Rabbinical Conference of 1845 voted that '* all petitions for the return to the land of our fathers, and for the restoration of a Jewish state, should be eliminated from the prayers." *

That the Reform movement has not fulfilled its undertaking, and that the Reformers were mistaken in part of the theory on which they worked, must not be laid to their discredit. They could not foresee the general trend of the world's thought and aspiration; they could not presage the effect of the new orientation upon their own descendants ; and, above all, they could not measure the influence the masses of Eastern Europe were to exercise in international Jewry, when once their weight was put in the balance.

At various times in the history of Europe, the principles of internationalism and of national particularism have fought for predominance. In the Middle Ages the Church dreamed of a universal Christian community, divided into nationalities it is true, but all under the sway of the acknowledged head of the Roman Church. Such dreams were rudely shattered by the inner development of the

Church itself, by the resurrection of Paganism or of pagan ideals at the time of the Renaissance, and by the growth of national sentiments that refused to submit even to spiritual domination. Again, at the extreme end of the Middle Ages, a movement towards internationalism was distinctly apparent, led by the encyclopedists and deists of France, and fed by the growth of the natural sciences and the discoveries in the domain of exact knowledge. This was soon followed, however, by a reversal in which old races revived the consciousness of their separate existence, and new national segregations were formed, which tended to develop diversity in place of unison. The first of such transformations may be seen in the rebirth of the German Empire, in the forward movement of the Slavs, and in the growth of the smaller Balkan states ; ' the second, in the vast growth of the United States and of Canada in the northern half of the new world and of the newer republics in its southern half.

Amid such varying developments, the Jewish people occupied a peculiar, not to say dangerous, position. Even in the Roman state, tolerant as it was of alien faiths, existence was always fraught with some danger to the Jews. Exceptional laws were passed in their favor, but just because of these • laws and because of their refusal to enter the melting-pot in which nationalities and races were fused, the Jews were liable at any moment to feel the pressure of exceptional treatment when Roman overlordship was felt to be in danger/ And, after all, even in the Roman Empire citizenship was bound up with religion. However syncretistic that religion might be, it was Roman and not Judaic' In the evolution of a universal Christian community the Jews manifestly could have no share. As both the motives and the objects of this evolution were religious, no proper place could be found for them. All the legislation of the Middle Ages in regard to the Jews turns about the endeavor to make some provision for a people who had been omitted in the scheme according to which the statehood of the day was built up. Again, both the Reformation and the Renaissance were inner Christian movements. The revolt from Rome, as far as it affected the Jews, was a revolt from a religious and a secular tyranny, and what resulted was a tyranny that was religious only. Protestantism did little better than Roman Catholicism ; it could not assimilate the Jews upon the only terms possible for the latter. They remained, no longer a proscribed people, one that was merely tolerated.

Had the universalistlc and international tendencies of the early part of the nineteenth century persisted, the Jews would undoubtedly have found their place as one of the many forces working towards that end. It is interesting to note that Jews have not been backward in furthering movements of a universalistic character. The founders of Socialism were Karl Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle; the inventor of a universal language was Lazarus Ludwig Zamenhof ; ' the projector of the Universal Race Congress was Felix Adler. With equal ardor, the Jews threw themselves into the national movement of the peoples among whom they dwelt. Not only did they wish to justify the granting of equal rights; in some countries their stake was deeper down in the ground than that of many of their co-citizens, and it had been there for a much longer period. Their patriotism was quite whole-souled. Unfortunately, the nationalist bias in Europe tended towards chauvinism, and chauvinism led to a narrowing of the wider outlook. Church and Society joined hands, and once more there was no place for the Jews, who held with tenacity to their separate existence and refused to lose their existence. In this way the ground was prepared in which Bismarck, for political reasons, laid the seed of the modern anti-Semitic movement, which wrought so much havoc in Germany and in France, and which, in passing over to less cultured nations, produced veritable cataclysms among the Jews of Russia, Roumania, and Gallcia.

How was the new danger of anti-Semitism to be met? Some of the better elements in German Christian society thought that a league against anti- Semitism would be efficacious, and founded the Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus. Amopg the Jews, many were of opinion that if they dropped all customs that render them distinct as a community and all forms that differentiate Jewish public worship from that of the Christian Church, the foundations of anti-Semitism would be destroyed. In the same spirit, Salomon Reinach argues that the Jewish proletariat will have more success in economic competition, if Jewish law is so amended as to permit the Jews to violate the Sabbath and to eat pork.' Just as Reinach forgot that such a course, quite apart from all higher considerations, would only increase competition, the ultra- Reform Jews erred In thinking that anti-SemltIsm was based upon theoretical considerations, and arguments could avail where passion was the moving spirit. The genuinely Jewish answer to anti-Semitism was yet to be given 1

The effect upon the Jews themselves of these changes in orientation was formidable. The passage from the Jewish Middle Ages, later in point of time than the general European, to the modern period was naturally fraught with much difficulty. It meant a wrench with the past which was so momentous in many cases as to disorganize families and communities. Here and there excessive zeal in modernizing led to deplorable results, and weakened the foundations upon which Jewish cohesiveness was based. Concessions are necessary on the part of every unit in a state organization: ideas change with increasing knowledge. But the smaller unit must always consider the length to which it may go in making such concessions and the point at which concession loses all its grace and becomes an ungainly rush towards complete self-obliteration." ' Perhaps the most serious objection that can be raised I to some of the later developments of the Reform movement is that they are destroying the unity that has hitherto prevailed in the corporate expression of Jewish practice and of Jewish hope. Violent changes have been made in the ritual, and the Jewish perspective has been remodeled in such manner as to make the remodeling a renunciation. The one was apt to make the Jew a stranger among his brethren in many countries, the other to remove the fixed point in the future towards which all Jewish endeavor pointed and converged. For, as surely as the old Hebrew prophets had a wide outlook embracing more than simply Jewish interests, so surely was this outlook centered upon Judea and upon the return of the Jews to some form of a reconstructed common existence." A people that has no common physical center and not even a spiritual one is dependent upon its common outlook to hold it together and direct its efforts to some concerted end. This once removed, disintegration is bound to set in.

In this respect, a study of ancient Judaism in its relation to Hellenism is most instructive. No movement with which the Jews have come in contact was so persuasive in its attraction and so seductive as Hellenism. It came to the Jews as the representative and symbol of culture and of art. It contained no political element, as did later Roman culture. It was quite adaptable to varying and differing civilizations; its ideals insinuated themselves among men and peoples. Had it not been for the national ideals that animated the Jews 3 29 in Palestine, they might have gone the way of their brethren in Egypt, or have descended to a compromise which would eventually have produced some form of hybrid civilization, like that of pagan Syria. Despite all their Hellenizing, the Jews in the Diaspora looked upon the city in which they dwelt as patris (native city) , but upon Jerusalem as metropolis (mother-city, home)."

On the other hand, an unvarying persistence in stereotyped formulae and an unmodified observance are bound to get out of joint with the times. If the Reform movement has weakened the supports of traditional Judaism, and has facilitated egress from the community, certain forms of unbending Orthodoxy have allowed dry-rot and putrefaction to enter into those supports, and have contributed to the alienation of large numbers of the younger element, whose Jewish feeling failed to find expression in the older manner. The result has been a decided weakening of staying force and a capitulation, on a somewhat large scale, to the iniquitous demands made by social and bureaucratic anti-Semitism, especially in such countries as Germany and Austria."

A new chapter in the history of modern Judaism has been written by the forced exodus of large numbers of Jews from Eastern Europe. As the sad human stream is still flowing, it is too early to gauge its full effect upon their brethren in Western Europe and in America. But even now it is easy to see that this effect must be deep and far-reaching. Forced by circumstances, the Jews of Eastern Europe had lived more secluded from the outside world than those of the West. Segregated in this manner, they had been able to preserve intact more of the forms of Jewish life and to maintain an intenser Jewish spirit than had been possible where contact with other ideals and the demands of more expanded social relations had drawn the Jews into other, orbits. To them the Jewish question presented itself, not merely as a subject for individual speculation, but as a question of their collective life or death. The opposition against which they had to contend was not one of mere pin-pricks ; it threatened their whole existence. They were thrown back upon their own resources, and strengthened In maintaining that which they felt instinctively was their sole hope of salvation. Into their newer exile they carried an intense Jewish spirit and a feeling of solidarity, which revived the waning spirit of Western Jewries.

In addition, the cry for help that went up from the victims of a relentless persecution that refused to disarm, awoke a responsive note in all the various communities into which they came. The active work of making proper provision for the outcasts brought Eastern and Western Jewry into close contact. To many Western Jews it suggested for the first time the thought that, though amongst themselves there was to be found what they were pleased to consider the best product of the amalgam of Judaism and modern culture, the great mass of Jews lived elsewhere — in Eastern Europe; that the Jewish proletariat lived therCy a proletariat that would outweigh themselves both numerically and Jewishly in any settlement of the Jewish question in which the Jews had a word to say. In short, the modern crusade waged against the Jews of Eastern Europe had the result that must attend all such crusades. Instead of hastening the disintegration and final disappearance of the Jews, which was its object, it retarded it. It introduced the Eastern Jews to their Western brethren : it drove them into each other's arms, so that a close bond of sympathy was established between two portions of a people that had been estranged for so long a time.

The Jews emigrating from Russia, however, carried with them into their new homes an ideal that had been fostered by some of their most cherished leaders and widest-read writers— the ideal that has been called Jewish Nationalism JMuch has been written to prove and to disprove the statement that the Jews are a " nation." In the last analysis, the dispute turns upon a definition of the term. The same is true of, the word " race " and its relation to " nation.'* The question of the purity of th( Jewish race, of the measure of intermixture it has suffered during its centuries of exile or before, does ' not concern us here at all. It may well be left, with other similar questions, to be determined by anthropologists. [Race may or may not be conditioned by physical phenomena; but so much may be said : it is not due to the exertion of the human will acting as a free agency. It is different with ** nation,'* which represents an ideal rather than a fact. Men band themselves together for the accomplishment and achievement of certain ideals. Whether they reach the end sought for or not, matters little. The heart of the business lies in the effort that Is madej^t is this common and concerted effort that binds men together : it is the ideal that animates them which makes of them a nation ; It is the common past of weal or woe, the collective intuition of deeds done or of experiences passed through ; it is the combined outlook Into the future. In other words, it is the common soul that segre- \gates a nation and differentiates it from others. ^ It was In this sense that Perez Smolenskin understood the term Jewish Nationalism.

Between the years 1869 and 1884, his fruitful pen labored without cessation to the quickening of the Jewish conscience in Russia. The very title of his chief work, Am Olam {An Eternal People), gives us the keynote of all his endeavor: an eternal people must keep an " eternal Ideal '' constantly In view. That ideal he finds expressed in the one word ** Zion.'* Since the destruction of the Temple, it has represented the hopes of the Jewish people. It stands for the peculiar culture after which the Jews have striven; It connotes the Hebrew language, the use of which must be cultivated anew, as the expression of that Ideal; and later in life it betokened to him the physical goal for which the Jews must strive In order to attempt the realization of the Ideal. Here, for the first time In Russia, a view of Jewish nationalism was proclaimed that was civic and social, not religious. The old inherited Messianic doctrine had become secular and profane. As we shall see, Smolenskin was not alone In his leadership. Many choice spirits were to gather around him and follow him, and they not only propagated the transformed doctrine among their brethren in Russia, but in the persons of many of the exiles from the Pale of Settlement sent it fructifying in the remotest corners of the Diaspora. Though it received its most tangible expression among Russian Jews, it Is wrong to suppose that this ideal of Jewish nationality was entirely strange to the West. This will not surprise any one who is familiar with Jewish thought and history.

Ever since the Second Jewish Commonwealth received its death-blow at the hands of Rome, the Jews as a / body have lived an anomalous life. Driven westward, not only by the general trend of civilization, but also by the special circumstances of their isolated existence, their religious and cultural ideals were so closely connected with Oriental thought, so clothed in Oriental forms, they could sing with their beloved poet Jehudah Halevi, uip^ o!?l in2;D2 ^i«, " though I live in the West, my heart is in the East." It did not need the formalizing genius of a Maimonides to include the doctrine of the return to Palestine in the Jewish creed. It had always been part and parcel of the belief of the Jew, and had been expressed in countless sayings, prayers, and poems." It is true that this return was looked upon, always remain strangers among the nations ; these, It is true, will grant us rights from feelings of humanity and justice; but they will never respect us so long as we place our great memories in the second rank, but in the first the principle, * ubi bene, ibi patria.' '' His great work Rome and Jerusalem, the Latest National Question, published in 1862, not only laid down the historic and economic bases of that which was not yet called Zionism, but also contained a complete plan for the colonization and rejuvenation of the Holy Land.l With this latter we are not concerned; it was catled forth by similar plans formulated by Kalischer, Gordon, and Guttmacher in Russia. jBut it is interestingjto see the strength of Hess' Jewish consciousness, jj^e, a German political writer and leader, went the length of advising his Jewish brethren to sacrifice even their much-prized emancipation, if emancipation should be found to be irreconcilable with Jewish nationality. For he held that it was impossible to eradicate the Jewish national consciousness, and the Jewish type was bound to persist. \

Hess' words, ardent and thrilling though they were, found little echo among his German brethren." As one of his critics said, " It is an old idea which, with its practical demands, has come too early." '' Upon one man, however, Ro7ne and Jerusalem exercised a decided influence, the historian Heinrich Graetz. In an article entitled Die Verjungung des judischen Stammes ( The Rejuvenescence of the Jewish Race)^ published in 1864, he recognizes, as an historian should, the new force that was slowly making its way into Jewish life: *' The Jewish race is approaching, and under our very eye, a rejuvenescence which would formerly not have been thought possible. The enemies of the Jews look upon it with implacable rage, the Jews of cosmopolitan tendency secretly shake their head, the followers of the letter of the law associate deceptive hopes with it — all are dumbfounded at its appearance." He goes on to compare this stirring of the dead bones with a similar agitation among the exiles in Babylon, and leaves his readers to draw their conclusion.'' ■*^ It is true that in some of the proposals put forward the romantic and the fanciful outweighed all practical possibilities ; but though the branches and the twigs reached far out into the realm of imagination, the roots were firmly grounded in facts and in a clear recognition of these facts. Even the somewhat grotesque plan of Mordecai Manuel Noah, to found a refuge for the Jews on Grand Island near

Buffalo, was built upon principles which have found acceptance in later days. He saw clearly the need for the Jews of some segregation, of a return to the cultivation of the soil; that though only a certain number of Jews could be benefited by a segregation, the whole Jewish race would profit by it; that it was necessary to cultivate the Hebrew language; and, finally, that his own scheme provided only for a half-way house to Palestine — very much in the sense in which the East African scheme was finally presented to the Zionist Congress.^"