Library of Che Theological Seminary PRINCETON ° NEW JERSEY +0 <> D> PRESENTED BY John Stuart Conning, D.D. DS 141 .L48 1925 | Lewisohn, Ludwig, 1882-1955. Israel | Uer ae + Pade 2 Adie my kk i Nene tie piney eG ap ; { 4 LA L t H vi : : aes 7) ve i ye s i‘) uAn » eae SD ‘ td] ‘- ‘ Wy 1 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library _https://archive.org/details/israel0Olewi — MES sh s If ‘4 | Ame f. ot TUS AT fey ford co Some NOS AN arg SE oe Uo ah_ Gee Pad a A dhe + Ve bel” Fare §G, Books by Ludwig Lewisohn The Broken Snare The Modern Drama The Spirit of Modern German Literature The Poets of Modern France The Drama and the Stage Up-Stream: An American Chronicle Don Juan The Creative Life Israel Books Edited and Translated by Ludwig Lewisohn Créveccur: Letters of an American Farmer Sudermann: The Indian Lily Halbe: Youth Hirschfeld: The Mothers The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Haupt- mann. Seven Volumes Latzko: The Judgment of Peace Wassermann: The World’s Illusion A Modern Book of Criticism (The Mod- ern Library) Books with Introductions by Ludwig Lewisohn Gourmont: A Book of Masks Newberry: The Poems of Paul Fort Frenssen: Joern Uhl (The Modern Library) Books with Contributions by Ludwig Lewisohn These United States Our Changing Morality Sy fix aN far Ee = ee = , = | | Vee FRO QIRD AE! GRVRO TAC) GRNRO 1 QE! 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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES , ‘e9 First printing, November, 1925 Second printing, November, 1925 Third printing, December, 1925 To THELMA SE HE Pai ese R “ a a pp MAHLER: Song of the Persecuted Man in the Tower. , ae le Yh. a rthhy a Wie i seis Davee: veal ff he é ai ! be ; YP Py Ste yn Vehee 4 mayest ee as eee CONTENTS PAGE EMS VEODTSTIONS OP Sm anges hae Meo ee ah LARGO Tee Tht g 1X Conae Coe Ole VERE Bern Ceuta tii gieahl Mev Wallis Negi Me 19 PIS SR ATT Vir PACED Gt ub he aul aid) e ke tray Wild A aah ra by (fh 43 — PES LOT OSs uy AT) ATARI) aU aby Ls ath Geta tire. pill Se Pele 81 EVRA ND ORISA Bir sue beni cea Gar oor Rcat ti ght tate AMY, Shae SARI BETES ATS RCO Rie Mk unicies neo Na MMe, minor ate tale Lig, eee VN COE ANC MOO ARI TOR SINAN tury Re meat oe ae LOO NDC PEON OVROM trun ovum ee neg nar Wr etn Mees Oy cls ds Ville Dee Cann, anpirae WoRnp ic eS eh i B42 EC ROG EAN SMe a Wi), We Rerly tutte gt ice kee heat seb ac EL Oy ail : ale L) " ia apd rs Ade: hfe Aish! INTRODUCTION It is the first of May of the year nineteen-hundred and twenty-five. The spring is late and harsh despite the full, dark foliage of the poplars, the whiteness of cherry-blossoms in all orchards, the rapture of skylarks over the upland meadows of the Wiener Wald. Hin- denburg has just been elected to the presidency of the German Republic; Italy, Spain, Poland, Hungary and the Balkan States have become primitive military des- potisms. Official France plays the liberal because there is nothing left for her to conquer. Britain, though under a conservative government, clings to her ancient mod- eration and humanity. In America an intrepid minority is creating a new and fruitful culture. But at the same time great masses of her people are being infected with the most ignominious superstitions and a soldier in her armies is sentenced to forty years at hard labor on the suspicion of having sympathized with the equal des- potism of the Communists. The human scene is not gay. It becomes almost un- bearable when, by the help of detailed knowledge and a strong imagination, one penetrates to the concrete stripes and slayings, to the imprisonments and persecu- tions, the desolation and the dread that underlie any general descriptive statement of the political condition of the world. Among the sources of the thinker’s dismay perhaps [ ix ] INTRODUCTION the deepest is this, that much of the craft and cruelty which darken the earth spring from the supposedly nobler aspects of human nature and are implicated with things sacred and venerable from of old to the hearts of men. Who would not free the soil of his fatherland from a foreign ruler? Who would not wish to keep pure the speech and manners of his forbears from influences that seem sinister because they are strange? Who, see- ing his country in danger, would quibble over moral trifles? What long-oppressed and liberated people will not guard its political and cultural sovereignty against those minorities that the accidents of human migration or the necessity of safe frontiers have cast within its boundaries? The German reactionaries brooding over revenge, and the bloody tyrants of Poland can both appeal to famous examples, to heroic names, to old, sonorous verses—to a tradition taught in every school, graven into every monument, held to be part of the in- heritance of every generous heart. It takes the sad lu- cidity of the experienced thinker to be shocked by the gross and violent immorality of “Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die!’ The schoolboy will not see that this attitude literally reduces men to the level of animals. Nor will he, when repeating the Vergilian verse tw regere imperio populos, Romane, memento! reflect upon the people murdered, the cities razed, the temples ruined in order that the “peace” of Rome might prevail. The tradition of force and of the unthinking loyalties to its instruments is implanted early and hence all but [x] INTRODUCTION ineradicably in the mind. At the core of the young human creature’s heart there smolders an element of primordial fear. Nor must one forget how often psychical accidents deepen this fear into a suspicion of inferiority. The adolescent is therefore commonly con- cerned with the effort to be the equal of his fellows or, if possible, their superior. In the life of the imagination he will inevitably identify himself with those that are strong, that prevail, that impose their will upon others. The Judzo-Christian ethos scarcely touches the fringes of his character. His human weakness sustains itself by an inner identification with wielders of swords, riders of plumed horses, marchers in armies with banners. From these fancies he derives a sense of power and security. He is no longer alone and no longer afraid. He is part of an unconquerable mass of his equals. And the total power of that mass he feels to be his own. He becomes a patriot and is willing to be a soldier out of the depth of his fears. Men, in brief, can be gathered into armies because they are afraid. They can be thrust into uniforms because they fear the ache of aloneness and of a possible inferiority. A man in uniform is “as good as the next man’; one with a stripe on his sleeve has risen slightly above his fellows yet not lost the protection of the mass. A world without fear could be a world of peace. What, then, in fact, sustains and perpetuates the con- servative tradition everywhere, the tradition of war- like patriotism, of royalism, revenge, belligerent racial solidarity, is the residuum of a terror that was old when Babylon was built and the palaces of Minos flourished. Thousands of years of the most primitive protective [ xi ] INTRODUCTION social cohesion among men implanted that terror. If a man wandered ever so little from the protection of his tribe hostile men and wild beasts destroyed him on the instant. No wonder that among savages any deviation from tribal rite and custom was and is pun- ished with death. Blind loyalty is in that primitive situation in fact the price of the tribe’s survival. States- men and captains, citizens and soldiers, tyrants and persecutors, led by the tribal bards from Tyrtzus to Kipling, still act from within the old terror of the feeble tribe striving to avert extinction in the forests and deserts of the early world. The patriotic tradition, seen in its true character, is not a tradition that was ever rationally examined or embraced. It is not a great and good tradition at all. Charged as it is with the splendor of art and letters, it is yet but a survival of old fears and barbarous in- stincts. It antedates the use of the reason in the ex- amination of human experience which was first made in Greece in the sixth century before Christ; it ante- dates the discovery by the sages and prophets of Israel in the same century of those moral concepts that first measured the state not by its power, but by its use- fulness to the citizen and changed the sullen tribal slave into the free man. It is no accident that the forces of reaction are everywhere both orthodox and anti- Semitic, hostile to reason and to righteousness, alien- ated from both Greece and Judea. It is clear then, that it is this twofold tradition of reason and righteousness and no other that is the great and good tradition of Western mankind. Its repre- sentatives are not statesmen and nationalistic poets, not [ xii ] INTRODUCTION strong priests and victorious captains. Its represen- tatives and symbols are the martyrs of science, thought and peace, the eternally heterodox, the eternal resisters of myth and force and hate. Montaigne and Spinoza, Bacon and Voltaire, Lessing and Goethe, Hazlitt and Shelley, Thoreau and Whitman, Romain Rolland and Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein—these and their fellows have created the one tradition that saves us from that primordial barbarism into which men are always straining to relapse. Chaos is still very close to us. Recorded history which seems quite immemorial to short-lived man is but an hour in the long year of being. Barbaric man plays with intricate inventions to his own hurt and, inno- cent of both reason and righteousness, thinks himself an intelligent creature. Yet within his heart and mind he differs scarcely a whit from the savage tribesmen who were his forbears and all the forces of patriotism and historic religion tend to keep him fettered in his darkness of superstition and futile agitation. Hence we must not hope too vividly nor must we be cast down at the constant recurrence upon the human scene of war and irrational tumult. If we but tend the one central and in truth sacred fire, if we seek to preserve and to extend the one tradition of salvation that is ours, we shall have driven another edge of light into the primordial darkness, we shall have conquered an- other province of chaos and given it significance and form. This book tells the story of how an entire people, a small and scattered one but still a people, is prepar- ing to dedicate itself consciously to the service of rea- | [ xiii | INTRODUCTION son and of peace. ‘That people has shared the bar- barisms, the wars, the delusions of all other peoples. But its will has never been wholly subdued nor its conscience wholly persuaded. Driven partly by an inner urgency, partly by the intense savagery of this hour in history, it has determined to express that will and that conscience which were purged of the grosser lusts for war and victory and dominance by its unfor- gotten prophets of five-and-twenty centuries ago. Whether in America or in Europe or in Palestine, the House of Jacob is remembering its necessary service to mankind—to resist unrighteousness, to break every yoke, to establish peace. The other day the British minister for the Colonies received in Jerusalem delegates representing the vari- ous sections of the Palestinian population. The Arabs sent by the Mohammedan-Christian Union protested against Jewish immigration, Jewish agriculture, Jew- ish schools and colleges. Mr. Amery replied that the Jews were bringing money and energy into the land, were reclaiming the waste places, were asking no one’s help in the establishment of their schools of science and of learning. Thus, he plead, they were doing good to the entire land and added that it would be well if the Arab majority would also devote itself to such works of peace. His answer was received in silence. At last the Emir Omar el-Bittar of Jaffa drew himself up to speak. His words were these: “In al-Din-din, Ye- hudi ibn Yehudi! (“Cursed be the faith of thy faith, O Jew, son of a Jew!”) Is not this answer profoundly symbolic of all the ancient barbarisms of man, of the spirit that underlies all racial enmities and rivalzies, all [ xiv ] INTRODUCTION patriotism that divides, all pride that leads to combat? What is the answer of the Jews to that dark and irra- tional cry? To reclaim more waste places, to open their clinics and hospitals and their university to the Arabs. Even as pacifists have never succeeded in curbing war, so the tradition of reason and righteousness may in this instance go down to temporary disaster as it has often done before. But to be truly human is to believe that it will prevail in the end, to act and work as though it must prevail, to sustain it without faltering and against all odds. Man may not become human as soon as we hope. In the meantime we shall at least have been. [ xv] ISRAEL WIN! a . * EN = 14 he Sey ees Bil a} ye ) Ws Fd Pa: 1 ; Ye) = Pe | Ly fo ¥ a> VT Oo ue | 1. Can i at aE CHAPTER I OUT OF THE WEST I SEEKING for the precise beginning of this pilgrimage which brought me finally to where Mount Hermon, gray and formidable, looks over into Galilee, I find it, of all places, in Chicago. About us was the frosty blue-and-gold of an American winter. Behind the sweep of the avenues of the South Side one felt the glitter and heard the hard, small beat of Michigan. My two friends and I walked on toward the Standard Club. There were many things to talk about, but we came -back from books and people and events to the ever- lasting Jewish question which seemed on that day, as on many others before and since, like an obsession, a secret anguish to be eased by words. We three were Jews. But we agreed, among other things, that the obsession was not confined to us. Israel, that small and scattered people, was gnawing, as it had often done before, at the world’s consciousness. ‘Technical anti- Semitism, we remarked, had reached our shores, so that numerous men and women were as absorbed by our kind as passionate prohibitionists are by liquor or negative moralists by sex. We went into the club and settled down at a table. My friend the surgeon, broad, blond, sagacious, with calm blue eyes behind precise spectacles, tried for a [19 ] ISRAEL minute or two to be ironic and even gay. But practical experiences of an untoward sort were too close to him. Life had pressed upon him. He summed up all that weighed on him, the total of a hundred personal and kindred burdens, simply but with an air of finality: “We are not wanted anywhere.” It was characteristic of him that he sought the center of our problem in the world without and was depressed but not embittered, melancholy but not morbid. He would, I knew, steep himself more and more in his specific tasks and, by a definite discipline, try to live as though the question that was troubling him today did not exist. Of such a discipline my other friend, the lawyer, was not capable. I can see now that electric dark face, heavy, passionate, impatient lips, great forehead, tireless eyes. He had, so far, said only a few abrupt, acrid things. Now he seemed, for a moment, to col- lapse within himself, then to arise in violent protest against his own momentary weakness and to gather himself for a great repudiation. But what he said at last, what rather he cried out, was strangely out of keeping with the accustomed play of his extraordinarily vigorous and scrupulous'mind: “I hate the Jews! I hate myself!” ... 3 From these two sayings it is possible to gain a pro- found insight into the position of every minority group within any civilization and, above all, of that permanent and classical minority group which is post-exilic Jewry. The first mark of the position of a minority is its complete lack of self-determination. Do what it may, the terms of its very existence are fixed for it by the [ 20 ] OUT OF THE WEST mere weight and tendencies and habits of the surround- ing majority. And this is no less true when that ma- jority is friendly than when it is hostile. Favor and disfavor are the moods of the masters. Laws, insti- tutions, manners are decreed and arbitrarily fixed by the majority. There is no situation in life into which, for a member of the minority group, there do not enter elements of strangeness and of force. He may either intellectually or as a matter of habit approve the con- ditions of life dictated for him; he may consent to them with a sincerity in which his own searching can find no flaw. He did not create them. His occupation, the place and character of his dwelling, his very ap- pearance and demeanor conform to rules and instincts that he has not made and cannot change. Of this fundamental fact the majority need not be conscious. In America during many years it was not, but honestly and proudly offered the only freedom a majority has ever yet offered—the freedom to be like itself. The minority accepted this offer so far as it could, with indeed an amazing completeness, sometimes beyond its strength. An equilibrium, an apparent equilibrium was thus established. But this equilibrium is always profoundly unstable. Whenever the majority becomes conscious of the char- acter of its offer of freedom and equality, the minority’s conformity will be found incomplete, the equilibrium will be destroyed, there will be, in the grosser and more obvious sense, oppressors and oppressed. Old favors will be withdrawn, old immunities cease to be exer- cised, old exceptions to be made. The fact that the minority is at the majority’s mercy becomes a naked [ 21 | ISRAEL and a cruel one. A fact it always was. But now it is part of the open rumor of the marketplace. Such is the history of the Jews in every Western country during the past half century. Such is their history in America too. Once the Jewish fellow citizen was heartily patronized, the rare Jewish intellectual generously protected. His proficiency in American ways of life and thought was regarded as a subtle com- pliment to those ways. ‘The Jew was petted like a precocious child, like a cripple who had learned to dance... Those days, comfortable but not quite honorable, are over. The majority has decided, as it always does and always must decide, that its offer of the freedom to be like itself has been imperfectly accepted. ‘The minority, remembering old comforts and immunities, still pro- tests. But the majority, utterly savage as its funda- mental assumptions are, is right in fact. Its impossible demand has, in truth, not been met, for the plain rea- son that it cannot be and should not be. And the re- sults of this cognition are what they have been every- where and always—direct and at last conscious pres- sure. We are a courteous people in America and in many ways a kindly one. In many circles the New England strain and the old tradition are still in power. I do not believe that conditions in America are ever likely to approximate in degree the conditions found in so enlightened a country as Germany. In kind the conditions are already identical: the attempted and often successful exclusion of Jews from study, teach- ing, practice or proper preferment in the liberal pro- fessions, their expulsion from definite houses, streets, [ 22 ] OUT OA DELLE. MW ES TL neighborhoods, hostelries, resorts, the growing estrange- ment and division in all forms of social and corporate life—these are the classical devices by which the ma- jority seeks always and everywhere to extrude from the national body a minority which has not, as indeed it cannot and should not, accepted the offer to assimi- late and disappear. ‘Thus, despite a thousand or ten thousand personal exceptions and a thousand ease- ments in specific small circles here and there, we have in America today the condition which my friend the surgeon summed up subjectively but exactly: We are not wanted anywhere. The human spirit has borne no stranger fruits in all its long and tortuous history than are found among these Jews who are rejected where they are at home, who seek to live their own life and also the life that is demanded of them, who seek to buy inner peace and outer security at a price that, from the nature of things, no man can pay. Thus the middle-class American of what he calls Jewish faith is commonly, like his cultural equal among his Gentile fellow citizens, a man of little or no faith at all. He may pay for a pew in a temple of the reformed persuasion, he may even be seen in that pew on certain high holidays. 'Those emotions in him that are deeply akin to the religious are more likely to be awakened over a book, or at a play, an opera or a concert. Yet he must sustain that sectarian affilia- tion, since it is the frail shield of his exposed position. According to the argument that sustains him, he dif- fers from other Americans by his religion alone. Hence he must cleave to that religion. The reformation of [ 23 | ISRAEL his cult permits him to be in his office on the Sab- bath, even to attend worship on Sunday. The Day of Atonement finds him, if not fasting, yet at home. Since the division between himself and his fellow- men is so slight in theory, it should be equally so in practice. The reverse is true. Our American friend of Jewish faith may be almost blond and straight- nosed; he may be admirably like the majority in pro- nunciation and manner; he may have a son at Harvard and a daughter at Vassar; he may have abbreviated his name. Yet when he sits at the head of his board the guests will be Levinskys and Rosenfelds; his table at his luncheon club—we are safe in assuming him to be a business man or a lawyer—will hear voices in which the echo of the ancestral prayer and study-chant will still be audible. His son and his daughter will have Gentile friends at college. But these friendships will, after graduation, fade by what has all the appearance of mutual consent. Despite his theory our friend does not, in fact, seek Gentile society. Firstly he is, as a rule, rather sensitive and self-respecting. He does not wish to be where he is not wanted; and memories and instincts warn him that he probably is not. Secondly, though he may deny it both vigorously and even blithely, he knows his position to be an exceedingly precarious one. Let | a Unitarian, for instance, rebuff him socially—his en- tire theory crumbles. ‘Thus, for the sake of his inner equilibrium, he must associate exclusively with those who are in a like position and live by the same assump- tions. In his circles you find a complete and admirable imitation of Gentile culture. It seems to differ from [ 24 ] OUT OCS UE Be Wek ST. the real thing only by a more passionate love of the arts and by the almost complete absence of anyone but Jews. These Jews, moreover, can never be a shade more orthodox than himself. They must never harbor a doubt of the complete success of the assimilationist theory. If our friend’s social contacts are circumscribed for the sake of his soul’s security, his citizenship is of an even more fettered kind. Though he lives by the asser- tion of equality, he is always impelled to be more pub- lic-spirited and patriotic than his Gentile neighbor in order to attain it. He embraces positions of public trust with an inordinate satisfaction and feels flattered when he is asked to contribute effort or money to the general welfare. His whole life as a citizen is a petitio principt. Yet he fares well enough in matters that pertain to his city and his state. In matters interna- tional his way is still harder. He wishes to share the opinions of other Americans of good social and pro- fessional standing and to conform to them. Alas, he cannot quite rejoice in the independence of Poland; he cannot love Rumania despite her sufferings dur- ing the war under the heel of the Prussian. He has a sneaking kindness for the pre-war Germany of Rathe- nau, Dernburg, Ballin, even though he spent himself, his substance, his sons’ blood for the Allies; he has— and dare not whisper it to his own soul—a shadow of tolerance for the Soviets who put down pogroms and gave the Jews complete civic equality. He is an American. He is a one-hundred-per-cent American. Yet he brings to all his political reactions another, an [ 25 ] ISRAEL international consciousness. In extreme cases he curses that internationalist prejudice. It remains. He does other curious things that belie his assump- tions. He is proud of Jewish achievement. One does not find Methodists or Anglicans so passionate in this matter. Our friend will not overemphasize such things. He will show good taste, according to Nordic stand- ards, though the heavens fall. But he is not a little pleased with relativity and psychoanalysis and the new art of the theater. He will appreciate Mahler and Bloch in music, Sassoon in poetry, Schnitzler and Was- sermann in prose. On a lower level he will sometimes ferret out Jewish artists and scientists of far smaller achievements and read lists of them and their doings in some periodicals printed for Americans “of his faith.” He is a generation or two removed from ritual or religious observance; he does not know the ancestral tongue or the history or legends of his people; his chil- dren are not permitted to hear even those scraps of colloquial Hebrew that persist longest. He is an American, an American! But his friends are Jews and his interests are tinged with Jewishness and he compensates for his protestations and his actions by pride in whatever his people shows of genius or of glory. He is unhappy in the presence of Gentiles whom he suspects of the faintest prejudice; he is un- happy in the presence of Jews whom he suspects of — anti-assimilationist beliefs. He is an American! Yet when he hears of a mixed marriage he shakes his head. He has no objection in principle. He is afraid it can come to no good. It fills him, too, with a strange, faint feeling of loss) Why? Why? He ponders. [ 26 | OULD OF (THE WEST What has he to do with the integrity of Israel? He is too enlightened scientifically to believe that any racial strain is unmixed. His faith, heaven knows, has no propagandist ardor. It does not worry him to see the temples empty. What is wrong with him? He is an American. He will be an American! Yet when, at breakfast, he opens his paper, he glances first at the Jewish names among the notices of deaths and births, feels a faint sinking of the heart at a cabled report of anti-Jewish agitation at a Hungarian university, is consoled by the fact that a Jewish Egyptologist has, despite protest, been called to Munich, and that Mr. Rosenwald of Chicago has given another magnificent contribution to negro education. Driven into a corner, he will admit these things. But he is not often driven into a corner. Gentiles will not think of asking the question. ‘Toward non-assimilationist Jews he plays the part of anger or indignation. He will not permit his Americanism to be impugned, certainly not by for- eigners! Did he not. ... Does he not. ... He even likes baseball. II He is not a tragic figure. Not yet. He still con- sents inwardly to his Jewishness and controls his world with the instincts of his blood. His consciousness still has enough Jewish content to make his position, pre- carious and absurd though it be, tolerable for a time. ... His children are in different case. From their minds all Jewish content has been drained. They identify not only themselves but their historic past with the people among whom they live. The American Revo- [ 27 ] ISRAEL lution was theirs, although their fathers heard of it as a faint rumor in the Ghetto of Frankfort or the darker Ghetto of Minsk; the Renaissance was theirs despite the cap and shameful gabardine of their fathers in the cities of Italy; the crusades were theirs despite the fires and flayings and majestic martyrdoms of Mainz and York and Toulouse. Faintly they wonder, as at a legend, at those strange Jewish men and women who, all through the Dark Ages, slew their children with their own hands rather than consent to apostasy. Of Titus they remember his love affair with Berenice because Racine has written about it; they forget his dealings with the Temple. They are quite attuned to echoing the gibe of Horace: “Credat Judeus Apella!’”’ For while Gentile ignorance and superstition seem to them part of that historic process which their imaginations have embraced, and are celebrated by the poets and novelists with whom they live, Jewish ignorance and superstition are devoid for them of both poetry and pathos and are allied in their minds with associations from which they are eager to escape. ‘They see the high poetry of the Mass, not of the ram’s horn blown as the Day of Atonement draws to its solemn close; they have an eclectic appreciation of the mystics of Christendom from Saint Teresa to Swedenborg but have not heard of the Master of the Name and think of Chasidim dancing on the eve of Simchat Torah as dirty and discreditable folk. To them Fundamentalists are funny, Talmudists repulsive. . . . Taxed with this attitude, they will admit and defend it. The argument runs thus: We are living in an en- lightened age and are citizens, first of the country of [ 28 | OUT OF THE WEST our birth or allegiance, next of that central domain of Western civilization of which our country is a part. We are in no respect different from our fellows; their history, literature, tradition have, in point of fact, be- come as our own. Our minds are as much at home as our bodies and, anyhow—at this point a perceptible hesitation always sets in—to admit any difference in tradition or, above all, instinct is merely to play into the hands of the anti-Semite. As it is, we bear a burden for which we can find no inner reason, suffer exclusions to which nothing within us consents, have thrust upon us a guilt of which our souls are free. And that is why—here our friends commonly become passionate—that is why we dislike Jewish superstition, ignorance, vulgarity, assertiveness, display, servility, extremes of wealth or poverty, all that we find it so easy to tolerate in Gentiles, because we are made re- sponsible for all these things, are made co-sharers of them, bearers of whatever guilt or ugliness they in- volve. ‘That is why, broad in our sympathies as the world, we exclude all things Jewish from these sym- pathies, for it is our supposed portion in these Jewish things that shuts us out from clubs, fraternities, of- fices, emoluments, opportunities, friendships, alliances. . . . Jewish characteristics become an ache to us, the Jewish face becomes unbeautiful. . . . Are these not the whips held over us and the irons wherewith we are branded? We will escape, we must escape this meaningless curse, this dreadful shadow, this simu- lacrum out of a past of which we know nothing... . These are the pitiful people who change their names beyond recognition, who, in other lands—not yet among [ 29 ] ISRAEL us—become professional anti-Semites, editors of Pan- Slavic or Pan-Germanic papers. . . . The nobler ones break out at moments of spiritual tension into that ery of my friend: I hate myself; I hate the Jews... . Subtle as their experiences are, they are normal so long as the theory prevails among men that uniformity is a positive good and that it is the right and indeed the duty of every majority to force minorities into the ultimate subservience of assimilation. ‘The moral at- mosphere of societies and polities so constituted makes every minority characteristic an abnormality, an ugly abnormality. ‘The sense of the abnormality of all non- majority characteristics is so pervasive that it filters into the sensitive minds among the minority too. Also, there is among all peoples a necessary percentage of that strangest of creatures the snob who regards what is other than himself as desirable and what is removed from him as noble. Careless of spiritual values, he is taken in by the vain pretensions of others and emulates whatever is fashionable, glittering, spuriously at ease. McCarthys become Cartiers and Kaisers Kenneths as well as Moseses Moss. Catholics may become Prot- estant; Germans may cultivate jazz; Jews hate the Jewish nose... | Is it not then, the assimilationists whom I have de- scribed will say, is it not then the majority pressure which is alone responsible for our miseries, our trage- dies and, if you will have it so, our dishonorable passion for escape? Why should we be blamed for the mad- ness that pervades the world? The world is indeed mad in its deductions and its methods. It is not mad in its initial perceptions. ‘The [ 30 | OUT OF THE WEST wildest and silliest anti-Semite starts out with a per- fectly correct perception: the perception that the Jew is different from himself. Without that initial fact of consciousness the anti-Semite could never have dreamed, would never have dreamed of embracing his wild theories; without that fact he could not persuade others to share them. If a minority does not, to the unan- swerable common instincts of the majority, differ from itself, it would no longer be felt as a minority and the pressure, which is the result of the perception of dif- ference, would automatically cease. Such is the iron fact. It is not pressure that produces Jewish differen- tiation; it is the persistence of Jewish differentiation that causes pressure. I do not deny that persecution produces solidarity, that danger makes for cohesion. But these factors have been wrongly emphasized and interpreted. The posi- tive forces have been more powerful at nearly all pe- riods of Jewish history. ‘The production of that vast literature which is known as Talmudical was prompted by the passionate desire of the Jewish people to re- main a people even after the destruction of the state, the city and the temple. This nation, which held itself to be the bearer of certain religious and ethical notions of transcendent import, determined to remain a na- tion upon terms new in the history of mankind. It had no country now, no rulers, no instrument of war. It was powerless, defenseless, scattered. It clung to its law which, though held divine in origin, was so practical and detailed and concrete in character that under it the Jew remained a Jew, the member of a peculiar people, in Africa or Spain, in Rome as truly [31 ] YSRAEL us once in Jerusalem. This law the great schools of learning of the East extended and promulgated. In the first half millennium of the Christian era, amid darkness, confusion, the conflict of creeds and the down- fall of classical civilization, the Jews learned the lesson of being a nation by the force of the spirit alone, by cleaving to an idea, a tradition, a faith. It was thence that they drew the power to suffer and resist the persecution of the next thousand years. Concerning this persecution both Jews and Gentiles -are accustomed to speak in vague terms of admiration and respect. When one leaves vague phrases and vague knowledge and studies the facts and reads the con- temporary chronicles, those for instance, that pertain to the period of the Crusades, one is no longer con- tented with the ordinary descriptions and characteri- zations. This millennial martyrdom of a people was, on the one hand, without definite hope of surcease or of any possible triumph over a hostile world. ‘The blood of the Jewish martyr was never, like that of the Christian, the seed of any church, the sacrifice by which anything he loved could hope to conquer or prevail. This martyrdom was, on the other hand, different from that of the Armenian people. ‘There was always a way out; there was always the gate of apostasy. Jew- ish martyrdom, like that of the Christian saints, was an active martyrdom. But it was an active martyrdom | without hope. Again and again in the course of the centuries tender women slew their children, husbands their wives, sons their mothers, rather than have them fall a prey to crusader or inquisitor. With their last cries they declared the unity of the Eternal. Yet they [ 82 ] OUT OP OPH ER Wks T did not die for a theological dogma. They died for the integrity of Israel; they died that their nation might Xive—not, like the soldiers of some political state, that their flag should not be humbled, or their provinces taken from them. These things were not theirs. They died in order that from this world of power, war, force, hate, there might not disappear one “kingdom of priests,’ one “holy nation,” one people that had for- ever exchanged the edge of the sword for the witness of the spirit. That terrible millennium of resistance not only more than decimated the Jewish people; it also enfeebled them. Dry Talmudical hair-splitting alternated with febrile Messianic hope. Not even the apostasy of Sab- batai Zevi, the pretended Messiah, could rob thousands of all by which they had learned to live. No health came to the soul of the Jewish people until, in desolate Polish fields and villages, arose the Chassidic teaching of mystical union with God, of the spirit and not the letter of the law sanctifying action and passion, of the end being that each man become a law, a Torah in his own right. And Chassidism came from within and was, like all previous movements, a movement within that spiritual entity and community which is the Jewish na- tion. It never occurred either to the Chassidim or to their opponents that they were anything but Jews, as it had not occurred to Talmudist or martyr of Spanish magnate or Arabic scholar or Persian Prince of the Captivity. The French revolution came and gradually, very gradually and sporadically, the gates of the Ghetto were opened. Contempt, servitude, restrictive laws, [ 33 ] ISRAEL special taxes remained. Citizenship was not granted the Jews of England till 1832 nor the Jews of Prussia till 1847. But this gesture and similar gestures else- where earlier and later, more and less sincere, were supposed capable of obliterating the historic existence, consciousness, experience of a people that had been a people for three thousand years. This was the fallacy of the Gentiles; this is the fallacy of the unhappy assimilationist. Both he and the semi- benevolent Gentile are deceived by the uniqueness of the position of the Jewish nation. Nationhood is iden- tified with land, armies, power. The continued ex- istence of Jewry from the Babylonian captivity to the French Revolution, a period of roughly two thousand three hundred years, proves that there is one nation without the conventional attributes of nationhood. So soon as this incontrovertible fact is grasped, it is easy to see the triviality and irrelevance of those discussions concerning race which have made such a noise in the world in recent years. Like every other people, the English, the German, the French, the Jews are racially mixed. As Celtic, Saxon, Latin and pre- Aryan blood is found in all these peoples, or, to employ another method of differentiation, Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean, so the Jews in their enormously long history have undergone racial intermixture. The his-— toric process evidently transcends the question of race and shapes peoples by forces which we are not in- structed enough to grasp. Jews differ among them- selves as widely as a Tyrolese German differs from a Schleswiger, a Provencal from a Norman, a Creole from a Vermonter. They remain Jews, even as these [ 34 ] OUT OF THEA WEST others remain, beyond all local and racial differences, Germans, Frenchmen, Americans. A central and per- manent approach to an outer and inner norm, type, group of characteristics persists. Wherever the per- ception of this plain fact is not artificially inhibited, it is as potent as ever. The few remaining Marranos of Spain, Spanish and outwardly Catholic for over four centuries, have applied to the Chief Rabbinate of Je- rusalem for formal readmittance to Jewry; a Bedouin tribe of Trans-Jordania remembers its Jewish origin; the dark, small Yemenites from farthest Arabia, the gorgeous Bokharans, the scattered remnants of Persia, Tunis, Babylon, Caucasia have all remembered, have all persisted. We have been a people. Weare.... Tit We are a people. This is the potent fact which our American assimilationist is tempted to deny. And his denial is often quite sincere. For the content of his consciousness is completely Western, completely American. But there is that consciousness itself; there are the instincts with which one grasps the world of appearances. ‘That consciousness, those instincts are shaped in each human being by the experience of his kind, his people. The subconsciousness of our assimi- lationist has not forgotten exile and terror, the knife, the fagot, the long days in the house of study, the exclusion of the menacing external world, the isolation, the Messianic hope. Like any Bocher in the Polish Ghetto of today he is precocious, intellectually pas- sionate, incapable of moral compromise—almost scoun- [85] ISRAEL drel or almost saint—given to dreams and schemes of world betterment, choked with inhibitions, anxieties, uncertainties. . . . He assimilated? Has he ever really envisaged the members of his football team at college? H{as he ever grasped that happy, pagan ease, that at- homeness in Zion, that uninhibited straightness of in- stinctive activities, that blithe and natural acceptance of this gaudy, brave, foolish, maddening, lovable world of flivvers and flirting and cutting classes, of rooting and loyalty and play? Why was he active in scien- tific or literary clubs, madly ambitious intellectually, earnest about world-reform? And if he took the last step, if he himself played football, was it not an antic- ipatory gesture against the reproach of Jewish physi- cal sloth? He cannot shake off the impress of the experience of seventy generations. Seventy generations. Let him once reflect on the racial and national experience of the fathers of the captain of his football team, then on that of his own fathers and on the relations of the two. The point is too simple to be labored. It is assimilation that would be the miracle, the break in the eternal chain of causality. . . . Our assimilationist may never think a Jewish thought or read. .a Jewish book. In the essential character of all his passions as well as of all his actions he remains a Jew. .. . The groundwork of Jewish character is his; the terrible post-exilic experience is his; he remains a strange mix- ture of passionate prophet and beaten cur, leader and outcast. If he has forgotten the call to “restore the preserved of Israel,” le throws himself into the busi- ness of giving “a light to the Gentiles.” He is liberal, [ 36 ] OTs OR) ave: Wiis ‘T reformer, practitioner or patron of the arts; he makes discoveries in medicine or, as a lawyer, pleads the causes of those for whom none will plead. If he does none of these things he is a sordid scoundrel. But the sordid scoundrels are a minority. ‘The average decent Jew in business, in the professions, in journalism or the arts sustains a perceptible relation to the prophets of bisipeaplesy 4.0 Despite himself, then, the assimilationist is a Jew by character and by national experience. Nor must it be forgotten, though he himself tries eagerly to forget it, that the nature of the national experience has under- gone no essential but only accidental change. I ven- ture the assertion that there is today in the entire Aryan world no recognizable Jew who in his child- hood, in street or school, has not been taunted with his Jewishness, made by some slight, gesture, word, to feel excluded and inferior and has not thus received a spiritual wound that is incurable. Incurable by him- self, incurable by his fellows, incurable by Gentile friendship, kindness, respect, cooperation, love. An in- ner censor may try to force that moment of childhood into forgetfulness. Its imprint remains. From it arises the compensatory eagerness for success; from it are born artists, reformers, financiers; from it arise the fervor of poets, the generosity of philanthropists, the prodigality of the vulgar, the mercilessness of the usurer —all those imperious and exorbitant extremes to which, for both good and ill, the Jew is prone. Since he can- not be an equal, it is his will to become superior to the mass of men. Only irresistible brute violence can make a slave of him. [ 37 ] ISRAEL Nor is that childhood moment and its consequences the only unchanged element in the national experience. The invitation to assimilate in every respect except the narrowly religious which has been extended to the Jew in Western Europe and America is in itself not sin- cere. I do not mean that it is consciously hypocritical. Nor do I forget those thousands of liberals, especially in America, who would welcome Jewish assimilation. The nation as a whole, while demanding: assimilation, resists it. Were the invitation to assimilate sincere, schools, colleges, societies, associations, clubs, legisla- tures could not be too full of Jews to please non-Jewish Americans. The minority’s fullest and most unrestricted codperation in the national life would be welcomed. For the measure of that codperation would be the measure of the Jew’s Americanism. But I have only to state the necessary consequences of a sincere invitation to as- similate, to expose the absurdity of its present preten- sions. As the world is constituted today no majority desires minority assimilation; it desires minority servi- tude. It wants uniformity of taste, character, instinct in the national life, not multiformity. It wants minori- ties to keep quiet, obedient, unobtrusive and to fight for the meager privilege of remaining so in case the country goes to war. Thus, to take an amusing but symbolical instance, a critic like Stuart P. Sherman, who, in a manner so well-bred yet so decisive, deprecates the Jewish codperation in American thought and let- ters would be the first to tell Jewish thinkers and writers at the appropriate moment that it is lovely and be- coming to die for the fatherland.... No, assimilation is impossible. It is impossible be- [ 38 | OUT OF THE WEST cause the Jew cannot change his national character; he cannot, by wishing it, abandon himself any more than the members of any other folk can do so. It is impossible, also, because time cannot be turned back, history re-lived, the Jew permitted to share the na- tional experiences of the peoples among whom he has lived for so many centuries. He is the product today of the impact of millennial experiences upon his original character. Were the invitation to assimilate sincere, were the Jew to be permitted really to share the na- tional life and experiences of the American people for ten centuries, or five, or three—a different story might be told. In a nationalistic, war-like world that suppo- sition is, even for America, chimerical and absurd. I repeat: even for America. It would be profoundly unjust and uncritical not to differentiate America in fact if not alas, in ultimate spirit, from all other lands. Upon this soil no Jewish blood has flowed; in these cities no Ghettos have stood nor have their market- places known the crackle of fagots or the cry of the despairing of Israel. Here alone citizenship was won without humiliating delay and tedious struggle; here as recently as the day of the Russian massacres of 1903 a whole nation embraced the distress of Israel as though that distress were its own, and the chief magistrate of the republic caused the record of that sympathy to be embodied in the archives of the nation. Yet that chief magistrate, Theodore Roosevelt, would have been the first to demand complete assimilation and regimentation for the sake of solidarity in war as the first duty of the American Jew. It is the inheritor of his tradition who today demands the obliteration of all national and [ 39 | ISRAEL cultural differences in the country in the service of the absolute sovereignty of the belligerent state. It is he, too, who framed those monstrous immigration laws which belie the past of America and in fact, if not in theory, accept the race doctrines of the vulgar anti- Semite. Thus the position of the American Jew is one of peculiar difficulty today. For several generations he thought that in America there had appeared a land which at last answered the notions of human justice and mercy laid down in the Torah long ago. “Ye shall have one manner of law, as well for the sojourner as for the homeborn. . . . Judge righteously between a man and his brother, and the sojourner that is with him, . . . Love ye therefore the sojourner.” The poli- ties of Europe never, historically at least, made such pretensions. America made them and made them, dur- ing a certain period, with all possible sincerity and truth. With considerable suddenness the American Jew finds all that changed. An impossible assimilation is demanded of him. As a reward he is offered citizen- ship of the second class, a citizenship with handicaps, reservations, social repressions and exclusions. Less than what had once been given him as his right is now grudgingly offered him as a favor. The facts have not changed so much as the spirit. He is regarded with suspicion; he is tolerated; he is reproved; he is ques- tioned. He is blamed for being himself, which is pre- cisely what, in America, he ought to have had a chance to be. His talents no less than his faults are made a cause for reproach. The stupid old myth of Jewish [ 40 | OUT OF THE WEST conspiracies is whispered about at the corners of cities and villages. ‘The most pacific and unorganized of peoples becomes an object of fear to the ignorant and the envious. The step from fear to hate is short... . No wonder that the American assimilationist is a little frantic today. ‘The national experience of the ages is renewed; it rises into his consciousness; he finds the armor of his assimilatory self grow brittle and crack. What shall he do? Whither shall he turn? He tries all the old methods. He does not know that they have been tried a thousand times to no purpose. He says he is a mere sectary; he becomes an Ethical Cul- turist; he attends the Unitarian churches. There is, of course, no reason why he should not do either. He is a Jew. He remains a Jew. The majority has dis- covered the fact, as it always does sooner or later; he discovers it too. Gentile and Jew find that there is no escape. Both believed in escape. ‘There is none. PN Tee The best and noblest among both Gentiles and Jews are deceived into believing that an escape exists. They are deceived because they need none. They dwell to- gether in unity, accepting each other as they are, seek- ing in each other not likeness but complementary dif- ference, seeking from each other not imitation or sub- servience but light and fire. That small and luminous world in which Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, Gerhart Hauptmann and Jakob Wassermann and many others of less fame in many lands dwell together knows Gentile and Jew but as the name of the two equal paths toward the City of God which both seek to build. I trust that that company of the elect prefigures the [41 ] ISRAEL world of the future and is the living symbol of that world. But we are here amid primitive fears, myths, passions, conflicts. And in this dust and heat there is no escape, there is no hiding. There is acceptance, creative acceptance of the fate decreed. Only through such acceptance can we bring nearer by the breadth of a hair the coming of another world and hasten the march of the inevitable centuries between that world and our own troubled day. . . IV In my last travels about America, I saw Jews in many cities. I spoke with many men and women. Most of them were unhappy and disturbed and uncer- tain of themselves. They felt the subtle coming of an unaccustomed atmosphere. I heard no words more frequently than these: “It was not so when we went to school or college.” T heard: “Tt is difficult to build a house in a Gentile neigh- borhood. If you call on new neighbors, as of course you want to do, you risk being insulted. But if you don’t you may be missing very charming people and they may think you exclusive and unneighborly. .. .” An eminent surgeon said: “Yes, the University Club elected me to membership the other day. But I didn’t accept. I’m the only Jew they’ve elected and I know they intend to elect no other. I don’t want, in the first place, to be anybody’s pet Jew, and I certainly won’t furnish the club with [ 42 | OUT OR VTHE WEST the argument it wants to refute the perfectly correct charge of bitter though polite anti-Semitism.” At dinner in a dining-car opposite me a gentleman of sixty-odd. Very well preserved. Rosy and clean- shaven. Close-cropped white hair. Gold-rimmed spectacles. Wealthy. Charitable. Yiddish accent al- most gone from his English. Slightly suspicious “r’s” and “‘th’s.”’ “T think there is no difficulty at all. I have always had faith in the good sense of the American people. I have lived in my city for forty years and I have many Gentile friends including the Catholic Bishop of the diocese. . . . On my sixtieth birthday they gave me a public dinner in appreciation of what I had done for our city. The Bishop presided and spoke of the help I had given him toward re-decorating his Cathe- dral. He said: ‘Our Brother Solberg here is an ex- ample of Jewish citizenship. . . .’ There were several prominent Protestant ministers present, too. ... If things are not always as nice as they were—I’m not prepared to admit it—but if they are not, it is be- cause people do foolish things. Right now in my city there’s a young Jewish boy, a lawyer, very brilliant fellow. Well, instead of building up a fine practice—he could do it easy; I am ready to turn over some real- estate transfers to him. Instead of doing that, he has to run for office on a radical ticket with a bunch of radicals. He wants to clean up city politics; he wants to stop graft; he wants, well—how should I know? Naturally people don’t like it. They say: ‘Why should a Jew tell us what to do” Of course, that’s foolish- ness, too. But why should we put ourselves forward [ 43 ] ISRAEL that way and hurt people’s feelings? Graft! There always has been graft, there always will be graft. As I said to that young fellow: ‘You have an idea what I’m worth and you know, too, there isn’t a member of this community, Jew or Gentile, that wouldn’t say a good word for me. Well, I didn’t get where I am today by mixing into other people’s business. Think of your wife and your fine little children... .’ And do you know what he answered me? He said: ‘Mr. Solberg, mind you, I’m not a Zionist; but you—youw’re enough to make a radical Zionist out of the rabbi of a reformed millionaire congregation! You see? First he comes with one kind of foolishness and then with Zionism, another kind of foolishness. What can you expect?” In a southwestern city I met an elderly couple. They were very well-bred and kindly people. And they were half-heartedly looking for a house. They told me that it was cheaper to buy than to rent one. But they hadn’t somehow the heart to buy. ‘They had spent the greater part of their lives in a small southern town and had brought up their children there and had been neigh- borly with everyone. But in recent years, they said, a new spirit had come over the town. Old friends and acquaintances had turned against them, had begun to view them with suspicion and a strange kind of fear, and the condition, intangible enough but intensely real just the same, had gone so far that they no longer felt at home in that town and had sold the house in which all their children were born and had come to this city in which one of their sons lived and in which there was a powerful Jewish community. Yet they [ 44 ] OO TO Beste EoOW EST didn’t feel at home here either. They were too old to be uprooted. ... I met reformed rabbis who belonged to the ministerial unions of their communities and were hectically opti- mistic, and isolated, ironical Zionists who were teased and “kidded” by their friends and acquaintances. I met an eminent physician, a man of grave character and profound philosophic culture who told me that his young son was having his first rude contact with the world at Williams College—was getting the first bitter taste of slights, exclusions, humiliations. And every- where I found minds touched with anxiety and a deep though rather helpless preoccupation with this persistent problem: this problem of the Jew’s relation both to the world and to himself. I heard a thousand subtle and a thousand clever and ironical observations. But all that I heard was curiously negative in its character. And I saw many ways in which people, by the trickery of psychical substitution, tried to get a temporary re- lief from this great preoccupation. ‘They interested themselves in good causes, in Negro welfare, in the reform of education. But, though they were not con- scious of the fact, these causes were to them only ways of escape. And nowhere did I meet—though this may have been ill-luck—between New York and St. Louis, between Dallas and Detroit any group of Jews, how- ever small, who said: We are Jews and can be nothing else and thus it is as Jews that we must make our contribution to American civilization. .. . I did not, on the other hand—though this may also have been a matter of luck—meet with the fury of assimilationism which later, with a strange suddenness, [45 ] ISRAEL met me in a London drawing-room where a lady with the mien and ancestral passion of a Hebrew prophetess told me that she was an Englishwoman, nothing but an Englishwoman, as her ancestors had been since the days of Cromwell, that all continental Jews were for- elgners to her precisely as continental Protestants were foreigners to decent English people of the Prot- estant persuasion, that her little boy at Winchester —or was it Charterhouse—was doing, being, feeling precisely as other little English boys had done for four hundred years, that horrid persons like myself would end by forcing all self-respecting English Jews to change their religion and that she was a Dame of the Primrose League. She forgot to mention the name of the League’s founder; she would not discuss the political or social position of her ancestors between the re-settlement and the Reform Bills. ... Up the Thames we steamed—famous and exquisite stream. Houses on the shore, set in gardens of in- numerable flowers, flowers as perfect, as precise as jewels. Everywhere brilliancy and sobriety, comfort and assurance—an assurance, an historic rootedness, an easy familiarity with power and dominion so high, so remote from danger or self-distrust that it can afford to tolerate, to patronize, to soothe the handful of Jews that share its cities and countrysides. A grand seigneur can pick what friends he pleases; the upstart is more CALeTUL toi. Eton College. A classroom occupied since 1480 with bits of yesterday’s Latin prose-composition still on the wooden blackboard. . . . Next the chapel with its glow and splendor, with flags from the great war, with [ 46 ] OUT OF THE WEST memorials of all the long list of England’s wars, con- quests, triumphs, with busts of her statesmen, war- riors, with that carved motto which makes one glance suddenly at the lonely bust of Shelley among these other strong, victorious people, the motto: Vincet Amor Paine... A scene of more than Roman dignity, symbol of a world of more than Roman splendor. As pagan as Rome, as far from peace which is salvation as Rome— still alienated from the future of civilization, if civiliza- tion is to survive at all. ... There is, I know, another England, an England first in all the tasks of humanity. But how small is that other England and how feeble —a fragment of this nation of conquerors. One nation only is no longer pagan—one whole nation, small though it be. Here, more clearly than ever, I knew that Israel had yet a function to perform in the society of nations, a word to say in the councils of mankind.... [47] CHAPTER II CREATIVE EXILES I Tue lands of German speech are lands of violent and symbolica! contrasts. Berlin with its fine, tight severity, Berlin by tradition and in fact the most cere- bral city of Europe permitted itself for centuries to be the backyard of the Hohenzollern. The Berliners laughed quietly at the pompous and absurd Siegesallee, but were pleased at titles strewn by an opera bouffe emperor. . . . Vienna, the freest and most poetical of cities, Vienna whose music, grace and wit still charm the world, is black with clericalism, soaked in incense to the bone. The Viennese will talk and write and compose divinely. At the moment of action they col- lapse before the bearers of gross and obvious super- stition. ... Germany missed the Renaissance, and nearly per- ished in the Thirty Years’ War instead. She missed the great critical eighteenth century. Lessing was ad- mirable, but Lessing did not suffice. Romanticism en- gulfed her; romanticism engulfs her people still. Mil- hons of today sing folk-songs to the sounds of the lute. It is adorable. But it does not make for a conquest of the world as object. ... The Tiergarten is the most idyllic of parks. You lose yourself in those glades and dream beside the groves and quiet waters. A Hyde Park tumult is unimaginable here. It is even [ 48 ] CREATIVE EXILES more unimaginable among the hills and forests of the Wiener Wald. At all seasons the Viennese wander forth into the open and sing and discuss and dream.... The loftiest philosophies are born in Germany and the silliest theories. Chamberlain is as famous as Eucken. High scientific achievement is not always ac- companied by the scientific temper. For one Rudolf Virchow there are always dozens of men who, eminent in their special sciences, are royalists, reactionaries, anti- Semites as men and citizens. In German literature these contrasts tend to disappear. The divine lyrical literature of eight centuries is almost wholly subjective, the high drama is philosophic and universal, the tale is idyllic. When, in the nineteenth century, reason and objectivity begin to assert themselves, they do so in cities and circles where the Jewish influence is strong. Jewish writers helped to shape this newer literature, Jewish critics defended it, Jewish audiences accepted it, Jewish publishers printed it. The proclaimers of many of the most solid reputations of the nineteenth century were Jews. It was so in the case of Hebbel, of Hauptmann, of Stefan George. The anti-Semites are quite right: modern German literature is “verjudet.” From the days of Heine and Borne on German literature and art have been under a critical and creative Jewish in- fluence which is out of all proportion to the Jewish population. . Germany is nthe classical land of J ati assimilation; it is the classical land of anti-Semitism. Here, in truth, anti-Semitism was invented. For it is unhistorical to speak of anti-Semitism as existing prior to the middle of the nineteenth century. Before that the Jew was [ 49 ] ISRAEL an outcast because he was a stranger and an unbeliever. He was a ghastly Oriental; he had killed Christ. How should he not be suspected of evil, of poison and black magic in a world of magic and miracle? How could he be the subject of kings and princes when subject and Christian were, in the very structure of things, con- vertible terms? His enforced isolation was like the isolation of disease; his destruction was pleasing to God and the church.... This theory did not disappear with the French Revo- lution. For years after the Reform Bills it was debated in England whether a non-Christian could hold public office in a Christian state. The theory of the Christian State appears uninterruptedly in those long years of struggle, from 1812 to 1848, during which the Jews of Germany fought for the recognition of their civil rights. Nor can that theory be said to be entirely dead today. It is no longer held officially: it lingers in the conscious- ness of thousands everywhere. Once governments abandoned that theory, however, there was no longer any respectable excuse for continu- ing the civil disabilities of the Jews. First physical iso- lation was discontinued. The Ghettos opened. Next Jewish marriages were freed from intolerable restriction and the people could increase normally. Last came—at least on paper—the freedom of trades, professions, offices. The process was a long one. In Germany it lasted from the days of Moses Mendelssohn practically until the Franco-Prussian War. But all during that period the assimilatory tendencies in German Jewry were extraordinarily powerful. Whether it was because the [ 50 | CREATIVE EXILES Jewish masses had for centuries spoken a German dia- lect, or whether the blending of lyrical subjectivity with dialectic subtlety and the essential musicalness of Ger- man culture made a special appeal to the Jewish soul, the fact remains that Jewish assimilation was effortless and profound. I do not speak of the vulgar practice of baptism for the sake of security or preferment, nor of the vulgar escape of the mere renegade. With an instinctive passion the Jews of Germany accepted the modern theory of the nationalistic state, consented to consider themselves a mere body of religious sectaries, modernized and Germanized their liturgy, ritual, mode of life and became the most active co-workers in the task of German civilization. On a thousand occasions and in the course of a thousand controversies they asserted that they were Germans, one-hundred-per-cent Germans of Jewish faith, and did indeed live and on a hundred fields of battle die for their fatherland. Here, if anywhere, the Gentile invitation to assimilate, to become part of the nation and of the national culture was accepted. Here was the classical land of assimila- tion. And in this land arose the modern anti-Semitic movement and the theory which, for the obvious purpose of excluding Jewry from the work and the councils of the nation, substituted the Aryan or Nordic for the old-fashioned Christian State. Between the fear that the Jew will damn the Christian soul and the fear that the Semite will contaminate the Aryan mind the differ- ence is small. From its humble beginnings in the “Anti-Semitic League,” the movement grew and was gradually or- ganized. The protests of men like Virchow and Momm- [51 ] ISRAEL sen availed little. A largely Gentile “Society for Com- bating Anti-Semitism” proved equally ineffective. A political party was founded and at one time there were thirteen officially anti-Semitic members in the Reichs- tag. There arose a distinctly anti-Semitic press, an anti-Semitic method of rewriting history, not excluding the history of the Old Testament. Under the influence of the unfounded declamations of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a determined effort was made to prove that the lost inhabitants of the kingdom of Israel were not “Jews” at all, that the “Jews” were an alien and a wicked tribe who had destroyed the lofty Israelitish civilization and who were at their work of destruction still. Needless to say that Gentile Semitologists com- batted this folly vigorously.” The half-instructed crowd continued to harbor this as well as other absurdities in order to justify its actual aversion to Jewish life and character. The sport of pseudo-philosophical Jew-baiting reached its height between 1880 and 1900. It was in the former year that in France, too, pamphlets began to appear with the familiar names: L’Anti-Juif, L’An- ti-sémitique. From these it was but one step to the dis- covery that the defeat of France at the hands of Prussia was due to Jewish influence: Le Juif—voila l Knnemi. In 1886 the notorious Edouard Drumont in a long and laborious book summed up the theory that all the his- torical ills of the French nation from the Middle Ages on were due to Jewish wickedness: La France Juive. With true French logicalness and hysteria, a group of deputies proposed the expulsion of the Jews from 1 Eduard Koenig: Das Antisemitische Hauptdogma. Bonn: 1914. [ 52 | CREATIVE EXILES France. Such was the prologue to the Dreyfus contro- versy. With an open shamelessness unequaled in West- ern Kurope the French nation pursued its helpless prey from the conviction of Alfred Dreyfus in 1894 to his final acquittal in 1906.... The handful of French Jews bowed before the storm. In Germany, although the Jews never numbered more than one one-hundredth of the total population, they dwelt in a few compact masses; they were not without influence; they had creatively mastered the culture of their step-fatherland. Their inner alliance with German civilization was so profound that their instinctive answer to the anti-Semitic movement was deeper and closer assimilation. In 1895, Jews constituted one-tenth of the student body of the German universities. Hence ten times as many Jews proportionately sought the highest cultural training as their Gentile neighbors. In spite of a thousand obstacles, in spite of much public insult and much private chagrin the intense assimilatory effort of German Jewry produced a series of personalities so commanding that before them all but the dregs of the anti-Semitic rabble fell silent: Walther Rathenau, Paul Ehrlich, Gustav Mahler, Max Liebermann, Jakob Was- sermann, Albert Einstein.... The tragedy of German assimilationism. ... Here is a book before me: Die Frau in Traum (19138), by Her- mann Levy. I do not know who Hermann Levy is. But his name tells a part of his story. In the assimilatory families under the empire, the children were given na- tionalistic German names: Hermann, Kurt, Ludwig, Hans.... The book, Die Frau in Traum, is a book of verses. ‘The verses are not highly original. But they [ 53 | ISRAEL are exquisite. They master the intricate and astonishing wordcraft of George and Rilke from within; they are profoundly musical. 'To this poet the language in which he wrote, was not a garment. With all its memories, associations, overtones, it had become interwoven into the very texture of his being. Germany had become the home of his spirit; the Christian-European past had become the past of his imagination. He wrote in cele- bration of the Madonna. ... But his name was not only Hermann; it was Levy. At school it was often pro- nounced with an old, old gesture of humorous con- tempt. ... At the university Levy was not received into the fraternities founded by the authentic sons of Hermann, the Cheruscan.... Any Schmidt or Mueller who could not speak the native tongue with either grace or correctness esteemed himself at bottom the superior of this Jew. ... Half of the careers open to Schmidt and Mueller were closed to Levy. Not officially, of course, but in fact. He could write poetry. For whom? The average Aryan lover of poetry would say: German poetry? By Levy? I wonder.... Does this sound strange to American ears? Does it sound strange to the ears of the generation that is now at college, that is now entering upon life? Mary Austin has told me that I must not write about love for Ameri- cans, since my racial experience of the matter is alien; Brander Matthews announced in the Times that after all, a Jew like myself could not be expected to write sound English; Stuart Sherman is concerned, like Adolf Bartels, for the Nordic integrity of our cultural life. The story of German assimilation is a parable... . During the World War many songs were written [ 54 | CREATIVE EXILES and sung in Germany and Austria. But the most haunting of all was the Austrian Cavalry Song by a young Jewish advocate of Vienna named Hugo Zucker- mann who rode forth with the riders of his country and fell somewhere in the Carpathians. Today that song which once many thousands were singing is for- gotten. ... In August, 1924, there was conducted in Berlin a memorial service for those who had fallen in the War. The sliest as well as the grossest chicanery was used to exclude a rabbi from the services. The twelve thousand Jews who had fallen were not publicly remembered, «03 % Zuckermann, as his posthumous poems show, was not entirely the dupe of the assimilatory process. He fought with conviction against the Russia of Plehve and of the massacres of Kishinev. His poems have the brevity and laconic plangency of the best German folk- songs. But they speak of a Jewish fate and a Jewish soul and reach their highest note in an ode. concerning the rebuilding of Zion. Zuckermann was duped in another fashion. In war the nations want solidarity and aid at any price. When the German armies overran Poland the high command issued an appeal in Yiddish to the Jews of that unhappy country: “Our flags bring you justice and liberty and equal rights, religious free- dom, liberty to work undisturbed in all departments of both the economic and the cultural life in your own spirit. ‘Too long have you groaned under the iron yoke of the Muscovite. . . . Clear our road to defeat the enemy and bring the victory of liberty and jus- tice!” The appeal was signed by Ludendorff. And it is admitted in Poland that the German armies were [ 55 | ISRAEL humane and not unregardful of either the security or the sensibilities of the Jews. But when the war was over the party of Ludendorff murdered Rathenau, con- spired with Hitler and the knights of the Hooked Cross and tried to drive Jewish professors from their lecture halls. Hugo Zuckermann is silent among the twelve thousand uncommemorated dead. II I have said that the story of German assimilationism is a parable. It illustrates for the past and for the fu- ture all phases of this matter which seems so intricate and subtle and is, in point of fact, so tragically plain. The majority says: Be like us and we shall be brothers and equals. ‘The minority accepts the invitation. It seeks to forget its blood, past, traditions, experiences, both historical and personal. It seeks to merge wholly with the nation upon whose soil it lives. Then comes a fine day on which the majority discovers that its invi- . tation has not been wholly accepted in one respect and far too well in another. ‘Thus it was found in Ger- many that the Jews remained Jews even when they were most German; it was found in addition that the Jew, to speak plainly and grossly, could beat the Ger- man at his own game. If we were a stupid people there would be no Jewish problem. : There was never more than one Jew to every one hundred Germans. The Jews control the most influential sections of the press; they control the theaters; they produce nearly half of the sound literature written in the German tongue ... and remain Jews. Yes, for it is their Jewishness that makes of them by preference, leaders [ 56 | CREATIVE EXILES of opinion, teachers, scholars, poets. We are the people of the book, the people of the mind. History has forced us to do without land, power, adventure in the physical world. It has forced us to the conquest of what is not made with hands. . . . The majority’s an- swer to this necessary process and its results is modern anti-Semitism. In America there are about three millions of Jews. Most of them are recent emigrants from the East of Europe and the children of these people who came in great waves after the Russian massacres of the late nineteenth century. ‘They have not had time to be- come assimilated, nor did they find here, as they did in Germany, a compact, ripe and kindred culture. Yet already our universities are sharply on the defensive, Jewish influence in the press, in the theater, in music is being deprecated and the conservative critics of lit- erature have raised a warning cry. We do not dis- appear; we cannot commit national suicide; we remain Jews. Remaining Jews we operate with our minds and seek to master our world from within. Therefore the majority cries to us, Become Americans, and yet resists the process it demands. In twenty-five, in fifty years at most we shall, if the present confusions of the world continue, have a situation in America that re- sembles the German situation at all points. One must understand the anti-Semite. In Germany it is not hard to understand him. Huis myths of race or of Jewish conspiracies are merely attempts to ra- tionalize his position. Neither Adolf Hitler, nor Henry Ford nor even Hilaire Belloc dares quite face his actual dilemma. They are, in essence, primitive [ 57 ] ISRAEL men and hence absolutists. They feel secure only within the limits of a compact and war-like tribe with uniform perceptions, tastes, mores. These perceptions, tastes, mores are to them emotional absolutes. Differ- ent perceptions, tastes and mores they desire to see confined to alien tribes whom they can hate and with whom they can wage war. Now these men find neigh- bors and fellow citizens who are different from them- selves. Not violently different. The differences are profound and subtle. And the central difference is this, that these others despise force. ‘The best among them disregard it wholly, the worse meet it with guile. But since there is nothing so futile as force, nothing so negative, nothing so purely destructive and primor- dial, it follows that in a highly organized society these strange people whom long historic experiences have en- lightened as to the nature of force, function upon the whole well and successfully. Thus the anti-Semite, the natural man who lives by his prejudices, passions, super- stitious fears, is put out, puzzled, angry. He has an unfair competitor. And he is quite right. He has. He and his ancestors used force against the Jews. And force did not prevail. It taught the Jew the uses and powers of the unconquerable mind. Genius, so far as we know, is accident. But the anti-Semite, the nat- ural, primitive man, never thinks of this explanation. He still worships force and thinks that it can prevail. Hence to him the Jew is uncanny. He dreams of con- spiracies, like Henry Ford, or of racial Utopias, like Adolf Bartels or, like Hilaire Belloc who has a strange, contorted perception of the truth, clamors for the old Ghetto and the violent elimination of the Jew [ 58 | CREATIVE EXILES from normal society. . . . And the one thing that never occurs to the nations is that if they, too, would learn to despise force and temper the essential levity of their way of life with practical moral earnestness, the little people of the Jews would trouble them no more... . In Germany the struggle and the misunderstanding began long ago. ‘The Jews did not wait for emanci- pation. They fell in love with the culture of Ger- many at a period when, at some German frontiers, they had still to pay the same fee that was charged for heads of cattle. . . . The fathers and brothers of Rahel and the other famous Jewesses of the Romantic period had no civic rights. Heine escaped the Ghetto through the accident of Napoleon’s presence on the Rhine; Ludwig Borne passed his childhood in the stifling Ghetto of Frankfort. There were constant promises of emanci- pation. These promises were not kept. What was demanded as a preliminary to the granting of the most partial liberties was assimilation, Germanization. The Jews were ready to respond to that demand in the lower as well as in the higher sense. Christian baptism for social or professional reasons became epi- demic. But at the same time there began that Jewish cooperation in the literature, art and thought of Ger- many which is so important in itself and so significant of the precise character of the Jew and the Jewish problem everywhere. These people had suffered. They desired to build a better world—passionately like Ferdinand Lassalle, through the cold operations of the mind like Karl Marx. They had been silenced and desired to speak out. In the stories of Leopold Kompert, in the weightier fic- [ 59 | ISRAEL tions of Karl Emil Franzos there is the expression of the impassioned yearning for Europe. In the stories and novels of Berthold Auerbach there is no longer flight. There is an attempt at complete identification with the life of the German folk. The poets, novelists, scholars, scientists who arose thereafter had, with their conscious minds, cut themselves off from the history and spirit of their people and threw themselves pas- sionately into the work of German civilization. An odd ana fascinating book could be written on the Jews ir. German literature and science—on the profound completeness of their acceptance of the invi- tation to become one with the very soul of the German people. Even when they came from the border prov- inces of the Kast, what their hearts heard was the magic of German speech and song. An old Jew from Aus- trian Silesia, Heinrich Landesmann (Hieronymus Lorm), blind and palsied and in great poverty, wrote some of the most authentic poetry of his period. From the compact Ghetto regions, too, came later poets like Jakob Julius David and Hugo Salus and Adolf Donath. Germany shone like a sun upon the border- lands. Arthur Schnitzler’s grandfather was an illiterate carpenter in Hungary. | I can give only indications. It would be beyond the purpose of this book to give more. For a complete account of Jewish authorship in German one must read the books of the professional anti-Semites who seek to show how the worm of Jewish influence is gnawing away the foundations of their Nordic temple. They seek to show, too, how their greatest artists must be distrusted. or all these are “verjudet.” The dead [ 60 ] CREATIVE EXILES Richard Dehmel and the living Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann and Gerhart Hauptmann are all to be suspected and almost to be shunned. They have Jew- ish wives or, at the least, Jewish friends, critics, biog- Pagers t.''s Jewish codperation becomes most active, of course, with the beginning of the modern movements in litera- ture. Next to the name of Hauptmann stands that of Schnitzler. The critics who proclaimed and the di- rectors who nurtured the great new drama were nearly all Jews. Arthur Eloesser and Julius Bab and Alfred Kerr are still the leaders of dramatic criticism and Otto Brahm who created the naturalistic art of the theater was followed by the creators of the neo-romantic and expressionistic theaters: Max Reinhardt and Leopold Jessner. Minor dramatists like Georg Hirschfeld and Ludwig Fulda did not fulfill the promise of their youth. Protest and gesture were of no avail. Gentile enmity, resistance, estrangement robbed them of the stuff of art. When Hirschfeld had written of what he knew, the life of a little circle of assimilated Jews in Berlin and their Gentile servants, his power failed, be- cause his material gave out.’ A similar fate overtook the naturalistic novelist Georg Hermann. Schnitzler alone, among the direct interpreters of life in drama and story, escaped this gradual impoverishment. The vast creative energy of Jakob Wassermann transcended its possibility from the start. The rebirth of poetry, the setting-free of the imagi- nation, relieved the Jew of the necessity of drawing ex- perience from sources rarely open to him. Drama and 1Compare, from this point of view, the works of Miss Fannie Hurst. 61 ISRAEL novel are rooted in the life of society; the poet draws in solitude from history, legend, universal things, the promptings of his own heart. Many Jews, like Leo Greiner, immersed later in the hard necessities of the world, began by adding things of deep and rich beauty to German poetry. Others opposed their idealism to life more effectually, like the eminent philosophic poet Alfred Mombert. Ernst Lissauer, Jewish even in his furious assimilationism, rose finally to “something like prophetic strain” in “The Eternal Pentecost.” The most finely balanced natures hushed or eluded the vio- lence of struggle and produced noble and untroubled poetic work. Such are the lyrist Stefan Zweig and the poetic dramatist Richard Beer-Hofmann. And these are but a few. But they suffice. A historian of the Jews in Germany would have much to say of their pre- eminent influence, within and without the universities, during this period, on the history of literature, of music, of systematic thought and would begin with such names as Richard Moritz Meyer, Max Friedlander, Hermann Cohen. 7 I come to the immediate present. Moritz Heimann and Max Brod stand somewhat aside from the move- ments of the day. ‘These movements, under whatever fugitive name they go—activism, expressionism—hay- ing as their end the recreation of life through ‘the power of the spirit, are largely Jewish. ‘There are Sternheim and Toller in the drama, Doblin in the novel, Leonhard, Rubiner, Ehrenstein, Lichtenstein, Wolfenstein in the lyric. There is, above all, Franz Werfel, the most notable lyrical talent that has arisen in Europe for a decade. [ 62 ] CREATIVE EXILES These names, these facts, give but the faintest, the most inadequate notion of the part played by Jewry in the artistic and intellectual life of Germany. I have moved in the leading literary circles of Berlin and Vienna. Jews... Jews... I asked Beer-Hofmann: “Are there no Gentile writers in Austria?’ He smiled his wise, tolerant, subtle smile—half Hebrew prophet, half esthetic dandy of the most brilliant days of the Viennese literary renaissance before the war. He thought: “There is Rudolf Hans Bartsch; there is Karl Schénherr. There is... .’ He faltered. I do not write this in pride. I have heard no Ger- man or Austrian Jew speak of this matter with pride —with the old pride of the assimilationist which flour- ishes in certain sections of our American-Jewish press. In Germany where assimilationism made its extreme and ultimate effort, where the Jews, functioning ac- cording to their eternal nature became, out of all rea- sonable proportions to their number, the teachers and thinkers and singers and creative spirits of their new homeland—in Germany assimilationism is a by-word and an evil jest, a thing absurd and bankrupt. It was demanded; it was tried. The answer was anti-Semi- tism. ‘The answer is that today it is more difficult than ever for a Jew to codperate normally in the life of the nation. All offices, posts, functions in the state and the universities are made more cruelly difficult of ac- cess. The academic youth of the country is corrupted with the poison of race myths and race hatreds. The social division between the Gentile and the Jewish stu- dent is complete. The Jews live, think, create in and through Germany. They do so in isolation from the [ 63 ] ISRAEL people who consume the fruit of their labors. They are islanded among the surging millions whom they serve. . . . No wonder that many are returning to an- other tradition, the tradition of Leopold Zunz and Heinrich Graetz. For it must not be forgotten that Germany is the home not only of assimilationism, but also of modern Jewish history and philosophy. ‘To these poets and thinkers are returning. It is no acci- dent that Stefan Zweig wrote “Jeremias’ or Beer- Hofmann “Jakobs Traum” or that Wassermann is contemplating a Jewish novel. It is no accident that one of the most exquisite living masters of German prose, Martin Buber, has concerned himself wholly with the life and legends, the history and thought of the people that is his own. III To establish the fact that anti-Semitism is the an- swer to assimilation is not enough. Many minds among both Jews and Gentiles are deceived by the wave-like character of anti-Semitic agitation. They see the wave rise; they see it recede; they nurse the false hope of better days. They are still immersed in the ideology of progress which marked the nineteenth century. This fallacious hope is especially prevalent in the English- speaking world. For it is, in truth, the special glory of that world that Romanticism did not wholly and at once destroy the labors of the critical and rational — eighteenth century, and that men like James Mill and John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold and John Morley carried the great tradition of reason, of philo- sophically-grounded liberty and tolerance into our own [ 64 ] CREATIVE EXILES day. The greatest English Romantics did not, in fact, break with the eighteenth century, but, like Shelley, developed its thoughts to their ultimately necessary conclusion. Hazlitt opposed the reaction after Water- loo; the republican Landor lived to hand on the torch to Swinburne who, Aryan aristocrat and pagan, pro- tested in fiery verse against the slaughter of the Rus- sian Jews. Those days, those hopes are over. The sodden romanticism of myth and blood and racial na- tionalism has reached England, too. One has but to consider what Shelley or Mill would have said to Ches- terton and Belloc; what even Macaulay or Frederic Harrison would have said to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. . . . The wave of anti-Semitism recedes and rises. We remain the playthings of the fears and furies of the nations. It is necessary to dismiss false hopes; it is more profitable to study coldly the exact character of the movement of that wave... . The first period of Jewish emancipation followed the French Revolution. ‘The European masses and minor governments resisted as stolidly and as long as possible. There was no medieval argument, there was no trickery left unused to oppose the liberation of the Jew. But the ideas of the French Revolution had an ultimate and commanding foree from which there was no complete withdrawal. Those ideas burned not only in the cities of the Continent but in the Ghettos of those cities too. The Jews began to demand as of right what hitherto they had sued for as a favor. In every Parliament, near every throne there were a few men whose reason was convinced. The actual process of emancipation was slow and difficult. But the spirit [ 65 | ISRAEL of the time worked for it. The conception of the Chris- tian state was dying hard. But it was dying. The defeat of Napoleon led to the first period of reaction. The Jews were deprived of the meager rights they had won. The superstition of legitimacy clung to its outposts. Jews had fought and fallen in the Ger- man wars of liberation even as they had done in the armies of Napoleon. ‘They fought for the freedom of Germany, hoping that their own would then be granted them; they fought under Napoleon, hoping for the lib- eralizing of the Continent.” Both hopes went down to disaster as all such hopes have done. Fear of being engulfed by the revolution led the statesmen of the old order to make grudging concessions. When the AI- lies triumphed force and superstition triumphed too. That triumph was brief seen in the perspective of his- toric time; we know now how precarious it was. It probably seemed neither brief nor precarious to those Jewish men and women, especially in Germany, who like the mother of Heine, had imbibed the ideas of the revolution, felt themselves to be thorough Europeans and were reduced once more to the status of despised and dangerous serfs. The July Revolution lighted the gloom of those years. So did the British Reform Bills. Neither one brought anything approaching complete emancipation to the Jewry of EKurope. But these events shook the security of the states and restrained them from excesses. Be- neath the surface of society the revolutionary forces were gathering. The year 1848 came in sight—the best year of all modern history, the year in which, for once, liberalism and reason had the upper hand and the darker [ 66 | CREATIVE EXILES superstitions of the ages seemed for once to be per- manently discredited. Now and only now the actual emancipation of Jewry set in. Now, for the first time, was issued the invita- tion to the Jews to become part of the nations among whom they lived. Now began that strange effort of the Jews to fulfill an impossible demand. An immoral demand, too, especially immoral from the point of view of the dozen aspiring nationalities of central and Near Eastern Kurope. But these nationalities regarded the Jews merely as a religious community; the Jews re- garded themselves as such. That dangerous fallacy was embraced by all sides. But it was, for a period, sin- cerely and honestly embraced. We know now with what results. But from 1848 to 1869 a genuine lib- eralism prevailed. Doors were opened everywhere. At least they stood ajar. Jews swarmed into the univer- sities. ‘They were admitted to aristocratic fraternities. The patriotic Jewish subject and citizen was regarded with favor by some, without fear and disgust by many. It was a period of the consolidation of power. Ger- many, under the leadership of Prussia, was growing stronger year by year. France deemed herself strong. The states dreamed of even greater power and that meant, from the point of view of the pagan Gentile world, conflict and triumph, war and victory. Pre- paring, consciously or unconsciously, for war the na- tions desired solidarity, they desired peace within. They wanted, to use the frank and expressive Ger- man word, Burgfrieden. Contention, gross inequality, obvious oppression within the Burg, the nation looked upon as a citadel, might weaken the fighting power of | 67 | ISRAEL the state machine. Solidarity demands inner cohesion. The Jews were treated reasonably well. Eighteen-sev- enty came and the Jews flew to the standards of their countries. They were more numerous and more influ- ential in Germany than in France. Nor should the historic and inner kinship of the Jew with much that is best in German civilization be lightly dismissed. But the Jews of France burned to defeat the Prussian even as the Jews of Germany did to humble the empire of the second Napoleon. The Jews fought for their coun- tries; they fought in gratitude for the liberation of the preceding years. ‘They never dreamed of its cause. They did not question its continuance. It is in the years following the Franco-Prussian war that one begins to gain a complete insight into the causes of the rise and fall of the eternal wave of Jew- baiting. Germany was the victor, France the defeated. For some years after Sedan Germany was absorbed in the enjoyment of her power and prestige, France in the healing of her wounds. ‘Then the reaction set in. It had been convenient and grateful to liberate the Jews for the purpose of solidarity and power. But the liberated Jews continued the activities permitted them and grew more numerous, more cultivated, more influential under the German Empire. Then arose the cry that the Jew was, despite assimilation and patri- otism, a stranger and a menace. . . . And simultane- ously arose in defeated France the cry that the Jew had undermined the forces of the country. He be- came a scapegoat, became the vicarious sacrifice, became in the person of Alfred Dreyfus literally the Crucified [ 68 ] CREATIVE EXILES for the sins and follies and weaknesses of a Gentile nationey.:'s\'. Dreyfus was acquitted at last; the anti-Semitic movement in Germany dwindled. From 1900 until 1918 there set in, despite the horrors of the war, a golden age for the Jews of Germany. Jewish states- men were high in the councils of the nation, Jewish professors taught in unprecedented numbers in Ger- man universities, Jewish playwrights, novelists and poets were acclaimed. It was not much otherwise in France; it was quite so, except for numbers, in Eng- land. The nations were preparing for war and wag- ing war. Once more they wanted solidarity; once more they exercised toleration; once more they made the old promises and fulfilled them, too. But they fulfilled them not because reason and humanity and ultimate security demand their fulfillment. They wanted Burg- frieden; they wanted the codperation of the wisest, strongest, best, regardless of race or past. And the device, not a conscious one of course, succeeded. The Jewry of the world threw itself into the war with un- precedented ardor and soaked the fields of Flanders and France and Poland with its blood.... Once more there are victors, once more the van- quished. And in the countries of the vanquished they are saying and crying exactly what the vanquished French said and cried in 1880: the Jews have poisoned our civilization and have robbed us of power and of the possibility of effective resistance. Hence our down- fall. Down with the Jews! And among the Allies, whose victory was costly and incomplete, there arises a double psychology: the psychology of the victors who [ 69 ] ISRAEL no longer need solidarity and desire to drive the Jews forth from the opportunities and positions granted them for the sake of solidarity; and the psychology of insecurity, of incompleteness in victory, of the suspicion that an incurable wound has been inflicted on the body of civilization. . . . Who made the victory incomplete? The Jews. Who wounded our whole civilization be- yond measure and healing? The Jews. Pan-Germans and Awakening Hungarians are at one with the cohorts of lAction Francaise, with Ku-Klux-Klanners in Kansas, with leaders of business and society in New York and Chicago. The Jews ...the Jews... financiers, Reds, millionaires, Bolsheviks, patriots, profiteers—whatever they are, say, do. ... It is the Jews. Hitler, Daudet, Belloc, Ford send out the word among victors and vanquished: not our sins, follies, superstitions have wrought destruction. It is not we who are guilty. It is the Jews.... Old religious horrors blend with this feeling, primor- dial fears that antedate Judaism and Christianity. Moloch is angry, Moloch must be appeased. Throw him the Jews. Neither victors nor vanquished can ac- count for the state and nature of things. ‘They will not give up their worship of force nor their exercise of it. They will not stop making war. They invent — poison gases deadlier than any yet heard of. They want a reason and a sacrifice, a scapegoat and a propitiatory object. The Jews despise force and are, out of pro- portion to their numbers, acute competitors. The Jews are uncomfortable. Something about them troubles the conscience of the world. Something about them has [70 ] CREATIVE EXILES long troubled the conscience of the world. Crucify them! The cause of modern anti-Semitism is assimilation. The occasion of modern anti-Semitism is war. The abating of anti-Jewish feeling and action among nations preparing for war is no less ominous and deadly than the outbreak of such feeling and action that follows every modern war among both the victors and the defeated. The process is one. It is inherent in the character of a war-like civilization, in the char- acter of the absolutely sovereign state, the absoluteness of whose sovereignty would be a burden and a nuisance except for the expectation and the memory of war. The Jew will be, whatever he does, helot first, then enemy, then victim, until the lust for war has left the blood of the Gentile, until the memory of war is as hideous, as unnatural to the soul of the nations as it is hideous and unnatural to the soul of Israel... . The process, as I have said, is one. Optimists and facile assimilationists in all countries are saying that conditions willimprove. They are quite right. A grad- ual readjustment, both economic and psychical may take place. ‘The wounds in the world’s body and con- science may slowly heal. The Jew will be more blandly tolerated again. It will be forgotten that all the sins of mankind were thrown upon his shoulders. But that easement and abatement will mean nothing so long as war is at the core of civilization and competitive arm- ing and regimentation for war are inherent in its life.... “In the year 1869,” writes the redoubtable Adolf Bartels, “shortly before the collapse of the French Km- pire, a certain Des Mousseaux published a book in [71] ISRAEL Paris called ‘Le Juif, le Judaisme et la Judaisation des peuples Chrétiens.’ A similar book could have been written about Germany before the war. It was not - long before our débacle came upon us too.” The Jew causes defeat. The Jew troubles the victor. Yet in every new war the Jews go forth to battle in the hope of an anticipatory refutation of these argu- ments and their attendant horrors. The Jews go forth to fight. That is their sin against themselves and against mankind. ... But I must not anticipate. I may, however, repeat: the cause of modern anti-Semi- tism is assimilation; its occasion is war. IV In the countries of the defeated there is disillusion, there is the old disease of the Jews—love turned to bit- terness. They were mostly liberals; they are pacifists at heart. But they loved the people, landscape, speech of Germany. Like their fellow countrymen they be- lieved, not without reason, that the war was not one of offense. They threw themselves into the defense of the fatherland. ‘Twelve thousand of them fell in battle. Today they are cold and a little wary. Why should they not be? It was a Jew, by a world irony, who wrote the song of hate against England. It was | a Jew who gathered the poetry of the war. It was a Jew who tried vainly to warn the Emperor of the doom to come. It was a Jew—since murdered—who tried not unsuccessfully to gain for Germany a sym- pathetic hearing in the councils of the hostile nations. It was a Jew who made the surgical war service of [ 72 ] CREATIVE EXILES the Germans the best in the world. It was a Jew who, after the armistice, was the first German to lecture in German in England and America and help to reéstab- lish the honor of the German name. Lissauer, Bab, Ballin, Rathenau, Israel, Einstein. It was of no avail. None. The dead were of no avail nor the living. It is of no significance to reply that there is a liberal, tolerant, an eternal Germany. There is. But it is guilty since it is not effective. There is a liberal America; there is a liberal England. These are not effective either. ... Along the Kurfiirstendamm in Berlin, in the villas set in gardens in the Grunewald the Jews are cynical today. They speak of the Ger- mans objectively. They know what to expect. Better days will soften them again. Such days will not, I trust, make them forget... . A. Justizrat in Berlin, a charming, high-minded, cul- tivated gentleman. He said to me with a touch of melancholy pride: “Our friends blame my wife and me for having Jewish friends, for not joining the ranks of the anti-Semites. But we are devoted to our Jew- ish friends and they to us. We cannot forget what the German Jews have done and suffered for the coun- try.” His face darkened a little. “Of course I do not include in my sympathies the Jews who streamed in here from Poland during the war and profiteered and had food when we starved. ‘They are the cause of the evil situation today.” Was there any use in reminding this gentleman of the appeal of Ludendorff to these very Jews in Poland? Would it have been useful to tell him that these people were fugitives from slaughter and famine who fled east- [ 73 ] ISRAEL ward into Germany? Did he expect them to starve out of politeness? Surely they used their wits as best they could. ‘They had neither land, nor honor, nor possessions. They were hungry and had wives and children and those five wits. Was it for me to tell my friend the Justizrat that the Prussian landowners feasted through war and famine while the city-folk died? ‘The Junkers made the war inevitable. It was their country and their war. They had its glory and its honors, its glitter and intoxication. My Justizrat had no word of blame for them. He wanted the profi- teering Jews from the East expelled. Then he was willing to tolerate the assimilated German Jews who, he admitted gladly, were largely impoverished like his own class and had sacrificed all, including the blood of their sons, for the fatherland. And this sacrifice of theirs he took for granted even as he took for granted the sacrifices of himself and his fellow-Germans. He forgot that Jewish disabilities had not been wholly re- moved, even on paper, till 1869, that they had never been wholly removed in fact and that, within his own moral universe, the sacrifices of the Jews had an ethical value so much higher than his own as to outweigh a thousand times the enrichment of a few men from Warsaw. He illustrated admirably the spiritual im- pudence of even the best Gentiles when it comes to the ~ Jewish question. And he reminded me of home, of the well-bred American distinction between good Jews and bad, refined and unrefined, assimilated and the re- verse, Western and Eastern, cultured and ignorant.... The days of propitiatory assimilation are coming to an end. Our loftiest minds see the vision of that end. [ 74 ] CREATIVE EXILES It is not easy for them to consent to that vision, For the material in which they work is the speech and life of the Gentiles. They have given their gifts, they can- not take these gifts back. ‘They cannot relive their lives and give these gifts in another spirit—give them proudly as the gifts of Jews to mankind, instead of pretending to give them as Germans to Germany, Frenchmen to France, Englishmen to England. Thus they pretended to give them. And the pretense was discovered first by the Gentiles, then—by them- selves. . . . Perhaps these creative spirits always har- bored a profound suspicion that in the calculation of the assimilatory theory there was some gross if deeply hidden error. Early or late they were driven to speak of the Jew and of Jewish history and life. Even Schnitzler, the perfect Viennese German, wrote “Der Weg ins Freie” and “Professor Bernhardi.” ... In autumn, in the Styrian Alps, I walked and talked with Jakob Wassermann. ‘The tall, dark firs were mo- tionless in the still, cool air. It was so quiet that in the narrow valley you could hear the delicate thud of the ripe chestnuts falling on the ground. From the great cones of the mountains came a tranquillity reach- ing beyond time. The lake was steel-blue, the sunset one glow of temperate fire; the ice-fields of the lofty Dachstein glacier were white with a blinding whiteness. Primordial purity . . . far from the heat and hate of life. Bare-headed, in rough jacket, knickers and tall boots, Wassermann walked along the lake with a restrained and measured energy. He rarely smiled. His dark head had a glow of concentrated visionary passion. [ 75 ] ISRAEL There was no trace of the self-consciousness of fame in his demeanor or his words. He spoke of his plans for future work. These plans revealed once more the workings of the largest imagination of our period—an imagination strong enough to create a vast, coherent, self-sustaining world. .., I did not ask him to tell me how far he had gone in the processes of his inner life beyond the point reached in that over-intense and irritated book, “Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude.” I knew, before many words had passed between us, that he had left behind him the eagerness to establish the possibility of a complete synthesis between the Ger- man and the Jew. “My books are the works of a Jew (von einem jiidischen Menschen geschrieben) ,” he vol- unteered. “And did I not begin with “Die Juden von Zirndorf’? Our creative energy, especially in the Diaspora, is often denied. I cannot consent to that denial. I must rot.” He smiled one of his rare, child- like smiles, a smile that pleads for confidence and af- fection. “If we are not a creative people, I might as well string myself up to the nearest tree.’ We walked along in silence for a little. Then he began: “We have, have we not... .?”’ He went over great names, the names of men and creative visions from Isaiah to Einstein. He weighed, argued, distinguished. With what measure shall we mete? If with the highest, cre- ative spirits are few among any people. And we are a little people. A people scattered, homeless, open to every disruptive and confusing influence. Yet what have we not accomplished, what have we not given out of our fewness and our sorrows? He was, perhaps [ 76 ] CREATIVE EXILES beyond his consciousness of it, a Jew within Jewry, a lover and proclaimer of Israel. “When I consider,” he went on, “the hatred and stupidity vented upon us in every age, wreaked upon us again in this age and land, I am the more convinced of our import, of our mission. Yes, we are a very famous people.” His irony was hearty, purged of all bitterness. “A very famous people. The whole world talks about us, thinks about us. Why?” The landscape darkened. Behind us the wall of the mountain, reflecting the last rays of the sun, was one expanse of unimaginably rosy fire. We stood silent. Then we turned and Wassermann glanced at the bright windows of his house that stands by the lake and faces the great hills. “I do not know why. I know that we are needed. There is, for in- stance, a great artist who is austerely dedicated to his art. So austerely, in fact, that he is not much con- cerned with the well-being of his children, the security of any committed to his care. He turns out his flaw- less works. ‘That is all. Could I do that, in spite of my absorbed and tireless labors? Could any of us do that? We are slaves—the slaves of righteousness, of the ultimate humanities, of the moral energy whose name is love... .” Wassermann is one of the three or four most emi- nent living masters of the German language. Kiven the anti-Semitic professors are forced to take him seri- ously and to desist from their favorite phrases. They cannot call his work “Jewish pinchbeck.” He knows neither Yiddish nor Hebrew. Yet I have pictured a Jew, conscious of the history and character of his [77 ] ISRAEL people, feeling that history and character in his blood and heart. He has penetrated into the life of the Gen- tiles with an imaginative love and ardor that lead to the artistic identification of the self with the objects of its vision. But that self is a Jewish self, as all such selves must be from the nature of things. And today Jakob Wassermann sees that Jewish self of his proudly, se- renely. . . . Assimilation is bankrupt... . The scientist’s situation is simpler than the poet’s. Both his ideas and his symbols are universal. The Jewish writer clings to the speech he uses. And speech is drenched with historic experience, with faith, love, blood. Language often deceives him, makes him an unconscious betrayer of his ultimate self. The bio- chemist, the astronomer, the physicist has an aloofness from the heat of life that is inherent in his work. A chemical formula is not nationalistic; an equation in the realm of astro-physics lies beyond human wars. Hence the scientist is less imprisoned in the concrete and comes upon the confusions of the mortal scene with simplicity and freshness of sight. This becomes very clear upon seeing and hearing Albert Einstein. He has something of the saint about him and some- thing of the child. He lives in the universe. In the world of men he is awkward. His clothes do not fit. He takes a child-like delight in simple things. He is gently surprised at the follies and confusions of earth. He laughs at them with an infinitely kind and gentle laugh. He has pierced the ultimate illusions. He deals with the lesser ones with a soft but secure directness. He is not passionate. His quiet pale face [ 78 ] CREATIVE EXILES set in a frame of unmanageable hair hardly quickens. But he is earnest and certain. Confusion and psychi- cal unveracity bother him. One must correct unworthy errors. “In my home in Switzerland,” he said, “I hardly ever thought of the Jewish question. My work absorbed me. But when I came to Germany I could not help observing the unhappiness of the assimilatory Jews. They were always protesting that they were something that, of course, they were not. And I could not really blame them, but it is clear that people can- not live with any degree of spiritual dignity in a po- sition so wrong and so contradictory. I did not of myself discover the solution. I did not myself see how this negative attitude could be turned into a posi- tive and fruitful one. But one fine day a wise friend came up to my rooms and told me. And the matter became clear to me. The same thing has happened to others and the old assimilatory nonsense is pretty well played out.” He stopped and smiled. “When I was a student, for instance, it was the normal ambition of every Jewish student to be elected to membership into a fraternity where he would be insulted as little as possible. Today no Jewish student thinks of such a thing. He joins a Jewish fraternity as a matter of course. That is a step in the right direction. For the point is that our Jewish students today do this thing not because they are excluded elsewhere. They do it as a positive thing—in a spirit of national self- consciousness and moral self-respect.” Assimilation is bankrupt. Germany was the great laboratory of the experiment. I think that the experi- [ 79 ] ISRAEL ment was necessary. It was an unescapable part of the modern historic process. But the experiment has failed. It is not necessary that several American gen- erations be sacrificed to foreknown humiliation and predictable disaster, [ 80 ] CHAPTER III HOUSE OF BONDAGE I Tuer Polish frontier has been moved west. A few hours from Berlin a Polish crew boards the train. The world grows dark. If this darkness is a delusion of the eye, it is not of the mind and the memory. The moral atmosphere of a landscape is a thing as real as rock. Wrong, violence and superstition soak into hill and plain; where cruelty has had its age-long home the gold of the sun is tarnished, the harvest field has no richness and the stubble of autumn is submerged in gloom. ‘The uplands of Vermont are pure as a heron’s wing in flight. Over the abandoned rice-plan- tations of Carolina hovers the melancholy of slaves long dead. The plain of Poland is desolate. War and persecution, hunger and hate, tumult and terror are mative)here, 9:2. The Polish officials have broad faces with flat noses, high cheek-bones, bushy mustaches. They address one in their native tongue—as the Czecho-Slovak, Jugo-Slavic and Hungarian officials likewise do—to exhibit their nationalistic truculence. They know per- fectly that there is no chance of one’s knowing a word of Polish. One answers them in French, whereupon they begin to speak bad but fluent German and com- munication is established. This recurrent ceremony is [ 81 ] ISRAEL a symptom of the diseased condition of Balkanized Middle Europe.... Gone are the neat, well-cultivated fields, the houses with brightly-polished window-panes that stretch from the Hook of Holland through Germany to the Oder River. The country is large, flat, rough, primitive yet decayed. Peasants trudge bare-foot along the mired roads. ‘The villages are small and huddled; the churches and monasteries massive and forbidding. Force broods over the land—the force of the State that is alienated from man and his life, that is not expression but im- position from without, that alternately whips into sub- mission or inflames into violence the people of the country. Morning brings one to Warsaw, a city elegant but ruined. Italianate houses with lovely court-yards and balconies date from the beginning of the seventeenth century. The spirit of the West and South came again and again to curb the turbulent barbarism of the peo- ple. In vain. Thence comes the pervasive atmosphere of a city always ruined before it was completed, neg- lected, ravaged, out at heel. There are a million people in Warsaw today. The principal street is that of a small, remote, provincial Slavic town. Three hotels ape the West in all respects but that of cleanliness. There is a single coffee-house largely frequented by army-oflicers who rattle their sabers, drink liqueurs, reek of perfume and hope they have a Parisian air. They are well-built and neat. Their eyes are unimag- inative; the ruddy skin is drawn tight over their knuckles and cheek-bones. They are everywhere in this new Poland that stretches from Danzig to the Ru- [ 82 ] HOUSE OF BONDAGE manian frontier. They are drunk with power; the edges of their swords are kept sharp. They are the masters of minorities numbering eleven millions. They are de- termined to remain masters. ... In the center of the city stands the symbol of the old masters of the land. There, in a dominant position, the Russians built a cathedral with a tall, golden dome. Warsaw, which is wholly Roman Catholic and Jewish, was to be made aware at every moment of the insolence of power. The new masters, the Poles, hated the old tyranny not because it was tyranny, but because it was not their own. The Russian Cathedral is to them neither warning nor symbol. They are tearing it down. The golden dome is ripped through the middle; the naked rafters show; the exquisite mural paintings have been scratched with blunt and vicious tools; the paint hangs in loose shreds and patches. Tyrants build up: tyrants destroy. Their spirit remains one... . It is pleasanter away from the two main thorough- fares of the city. Here, too, the houses are pretentious and ruined—the great gray houses with their arches and cavernous entry halls and dark flights of stone stairs. But on the cobbled streets there is less sense of im- mediate strain, ominous force, brutal imposition. Here, too, the atmosphere is immeasurably cheerless. But here the eating-houses are kosher and there is no danger, as in the coffee-houses across from the Bristol Hotel, that a Polish officer will bring his sword crashing down on a table and cry: “Jews out!” There is less danger that, if you loiter a bit, an officer will run his blade through your body and be buried in flowers by the ladies of Warsaw for his heroic action. [ 88 ] ISRAEL Here walk, in caftans and caps, wearing beards and earlocks, the Jews of Poland. They are a little bowed. The centuries have been long and heavy. Stealthy oppression has alternated with open massacre. The Russian was cruel and faithless; the Pole is no less so. Whatever there is of hard contempt or open insult, of unbearable poverty, of irresistible injustice—these peo- ple have borne it. For many years their men-children and youths were stolen from them for twenty-five years of military servitude, for enforced baptisms, for death in noisome barracks or Siberian villages or on strange fields of battle. 'Their communal organizations were destroyed. ‘They were accused of ritual murder and of ruining the peasantry; they were confined to the least honorable of employments and then blamed for their supposed unproductivity. The Russian is gone, but the Pole continues his work. The Jews are a little bowed. | There has fallen upon them, most strange of all, the contempt of the Jewry of the West. They have been again and again the objects of charity. But the as- similationists of Germany, England, America who have commiserated their fate, have hoped for them, at best, crumbs from the table of a more tolerant polity. I shall not be accused of defending superstition as such. Neither Rabbinical rigidness nor Chassidic Mysticism, despite the genuine saintliness of isolated Zaddikim, has any saving power. I am glad to see the citadel of orthodoxy a ruin today. But that it was defended and kept standing by so many indomitable generations in Poland was due to an instinct as correct as it was pro- found. For it saved millions from those disintegrat- [ 84 ] HOUSE OF BONDAGE ing influences that have produced the persecuted as- similationist—that strangest and most pitiful of creatures, who is not a Jew and cannot be a non-Jew and wanders, an unhappy phantom, between two alien worlds. The “Poles of Mosaic faith’—they existed of course—never made any headway here. The masses stood firm. ‘The Chassidim, in fact, feared and dis- trusted the sporadic offers of civic and political rights. For they perceived quite clearly that here, as elsewhere, these rights were offered them not as an inalienable hu- man possession of which they had been robbed, but as a favor in return for which they were to be “improved” into the likeness of what they were not and could never be. The Polish Jews, in brief, insisted upon the exercise of their most fundamental right—the right to be them- selves. They were willing to sell the right at no price. Unguided by any philosophical insight they did in practice resist the concept of the master state which offers its slaves privileges in return for psychical regi- mentation in peace and physical regimentation in war. They remained a people. They fought conscription by passive resistance. They fought Russification and Polonization in the same manner. They held out through the terrible pogrom waves from Odessa in 1871 to Bialystok in 1906. During this very period, in fact, they created their own enlightenment, the Haskala, from within, practically the whole of Yiddish litera- ture, and laid the foundations of the modern literature of the Hebrew tongue. Hence at the end of the World War they were in a position to demand minority rights and minority representation and theoretically at least [ 85 ] ISRAEL to aim 2 blow at the evils of the master state. They are bowed; they are unbroken. In Warsaw an old and a new world are to be seen. But both are Jewish worlds. Both have a meaning not only for Jewry, but for mankind. . . . Through dark hallways, up broken stairs I went to see a rabbi. He sat at the head of a long table in a brownish room filled with the faint musty odor of the. Hebrew tomes that lined the walls. A beautiful old man in black silk cap and caftan with severe eyes but tender hands and a long white beard. Here he sits all day at prayer and study. But his door is open and the people come to him for counsel and comfort. He told me that his grandfather had been a famous rabbi in Berlin in the days following the Mendelssohnian enlightenment and, seeing the road of assimilation that the younger genera- tion was sure to tread, had sent his children to War- saw. He had been willing to risk for them the horrors of Russian misrule rather than the comforts and profits of Germanization. My old friend, who has the rep- utation of not being illiberal, took it for granted that I would understand. And I did. For I have come to see that the relation of Jews to their faith and legends and traditional wisdom is not like the relation of the peoples of the West to their religion. Primitive Christianity is Jewish and has never converted the — Gentiles. The pomp of Rome and her gods is in the South; Germanic festivals and legends and epics rule the north. Hence the Christian world whose re- ligion is divided from its national culture has lost the conception of an autonomous, national faith. We Jews need not believe in our religion even as enlightened [86] HOUSE OF BONDAGE Greeks did not believe in gods or oracles. It is the still veracious symbol of our national character and history. The Torah and the Prophets, the wisdom books and legends of later ages—these are our Iliads and Nibelungen Lays; they express our national char- acter, our essentially eternal traits. ‘The chivalric war- like Gentile does not find himself in the Gospel. He has to be converted again and again. When it suits him he abrogates the teachings of his faith, and preaches hate in the name of Jesus. The Jew need believe nothing. But when he reads of Joseph ask- ing concerning the old man, his father, and weeping; when he reads that the ground must lie fallow every seventh year for the poor and must not be held in perpetuity since it is God’s; when he reads of the Jubilee year in which all wrongs are to be righted and every man returned unto his own; when he reads of Gideon’s refusal of power; when he reads that a young poet and musician was chosen to be king; when he reads in Isaiah of a golden age not in the past but in the future, a golden age whose name for all peoples shall be peace—when he reads these things he comes home to his people and himself. For these ideas and events express his innermost self; they are today, as they have been in the past, the exact image of his in: nate character and modes of thought... . The old and the new in Warsaw. . . . A wind-swept railroad junction at the edge of desolate fields. Shabby passenger cars waiting for a locomotive. In a com- partment of one of them the windows are open and you see two old men. The younger has a crafty look; the older one of infinite mildness. They are two fa- [ 87 ] ISRAEL mous Zaddikim, the Radzimener and the Kornarner. Many stories are told of the Kornarner Zaddik, of his extraordinary insight into the human heart, the strength and exactness of his intuitive perceptions, the saintli- ness of his walk and conversation. Below the window of the compartment a crowd of men and women is gathered. A few of the men wear caftans. But most of the men and women might be poor working people anywhere. They yearn toward that window. ‘The nearest climb toward it to touch the Zaddik’s gar- ment. Finally he leans out of the window and dis- tributes small coins among the people. The coins have been in his hands and will bring good fortune and the fulfillment of desire... . From such scenes it is, physically, but a little way to the great Yiddish and Hebrew publishing houses whose editions of Goethe and Spinoza and Bergson, of Flaubert and Rolland and Wassermann are constantly exhausted. It is but a little way to banquets given in honor of the living Yiddish or Hebrew poets and novelists and playwrights. And the point to be made is the continuity of these two worlds in Poland. The new is not an alien world; it grew out of the old; it is not the fruit of assimilation; it is the flowering of the nation itself. Not that these people practise deliberate isolation. ‘They command the idioms of their part of Europe; they are cultivated in Polish literature; Vilna gave birth not only to the creators of modern Hebrew poetry, the Lebensohns, father and son, but also to Frug who, though in every sense a Jewish poet, is said to command one of the noblest lyrical styles in modern Russian literature. [ 88 ] HOUSE OF BONDAGE The continuity of Jewish culture in Poland can best be studied in an unfamiliar and neglected field. In the house of the Kehillah of Warsaw there is a small museum in which are preserved examples of Jewish craftsmanship dating from the sixteenth century on. There are spice-shakers, Chanukah candle-sticks, wine pitchers and flasks, platters for the dedication and re- lease of the first-born, shields, bells and crowns for the adornment of the Torah scrolls, bookbindings, il- luminated manuscripts and wedding-certificates, rings and elaborate embroideries. It must be remembered that no Gentile craftsman took a Jewish apprentice and that this beautiful and curious art, quaint and imaginative at once, grew up within the community which is saved. In another room of the same building there is an exhibition of contemporary craftsmanship and contem- porary painting. These young designers and colorists who exhibit here have had, of course, all the influences of the modern world at their command. Yet they feel their work to be part of an unbroken tradition, part of the same tradition in which their lives, too, are rooted. For they are pitifully poor. They are hungry. There is no one in Poland to employ them; the great world knows nothing of them. Yet as their fathers knew need and cold and were not to be turned aside from the pursuit of knowledge and understanding, as they saw it, by the temptations of the world, so these Jewish youths cling to their chosen art. Apostasy of any sort is rare among us. It is especially rare in Poland. These Jews have never dreamed of being anything but Jews. As such they endured through the ages, as such [ 89 ] ISRAEL they are now fighting their hopeless battle for the rights guaranteed them by the constitution of the new republic of Poland. II The modern history of the Jews in Poland, in the entire pale of settlement of the old Russian empire, il- lustrates with barbaric insolence the theory of the master state. The continuous projects of the Russian government were directed toward the end of making the Jews “useful” citizens by “improving” them. The methods employed to gain this end were various: the censorship of Hebrew books, the offer of various ease- ments, reliefs, rewards for Russification, Polonization, baptism, the extension of military servitude, the expul- sion of the Jews from the villages and the open coun- try, their division into rigid classes, some more favored some less, the practical legalizing of pogroms. In the last years of the Russian empire the government, havy- ing come to the conclusion that the Jews could not be “improved” into “usefulness,” declared frankly that “the Western frontier was open.” The result was first the great migration to America, next the birth of that movement that has since become known as Zionist. The methods of the Russian government in the past stirred the world to anger and pity. The methods of the Polish government today are precisely the same. The theory behind those methods was, however, sin- cerely held and does not differ very vitally from the theory of the state and the citizen held instinctively by many an enlightened American or Englishman who would be the first to protest against open oppression [ 90 ] HOUSE OF BONDAGE and to be horrified at massacre. For, according to that theory, the state is an abstract, absolute sovereign. It makes little difference in practice whether that ab- solute sovereignty is concretely identified with a mon- arch, an oligarchy or a real or fictive majority. The master State, in this conception, has the right to set norms of “usefulness” for its citizens and to compel them to conform to this norm. It has the right, then, in regard to any group of citizens, of isolation, as- similation, exclusion by force. It can conscript work, goods and life. It acknowledges no obligation except that of “protection.” This means, in practice, that it protects life and property against all but itself. So soon as it considers its interests, which are never iden- tical with the interests of the people, imperiled, it will hold life literally cheaper than dirt. It will be a little more careful of money than of life. But it is quite as capable of expropriation as it is of conscription. Its manners differ among different nations. Its funda- mental morals know no change. The Fascist dictator- ship in Italy silences the opposition press by brute force; Mr. Henry Ford foresees crises in which the na- tion (he means the State) will want to get “some- thing done” and in which constitutional guarantees and such trifles “will not matter.” I shall not enter into a discussion of the causes that make otherwise humane and intelligent men cling to the theory of the master State. The ways of that State are mischievous and degrading. Its only posi- tive quality is efficiency in war. Upon this efficiency in war its defense will always be finally grounded. And it will be so grounded not on account of the belliger- [91] ISRAEL ency, but on account of certain rooted fears in human nature. From the memories of innumerable ages man is still fearful of the ambush, attack, slaughter, en- slavement of primitive warfare. These things have actually ceased to be. If we examine the creation of a war-psychosis in modern times, however, we shall find that the propaganda of the State appeals to these im- memorial terrors and issues the call. to arms under threats of a hostile razing of cities, slaughter of men, theft of women and cattle. Nor is this all. The State never permits the war- psychosis to die out. It lkens the great communities of today to an African kraal or, at best, to a walled hamlet of the Middle Ages. In that kraal, in that hamlet the secret presence of the member of another and equally warlike tribe might have constituted a real danger. A moment’s reflection will show that the Ger- manization of Poles, the Czechization of Germans, the Italianization of the Southern Tyrolese, the slaughter of Armenians, the enforced regimentation of national minorities everywhere is put into practice and defended on the ground of that absurd and untenable analogy. The Czechs wanted the rich industrial districts of north- ern Bohemia. That is brutal but comprehensible. It is mad, primordial and irrational that ancient German cities are officially called by Slavic names, that the Czechs attempt to break down the educational system of over three millions of Germans, precisely as the Rus- sians sought to destroy the Cheder and Yeshivah, that | the minority rights guaranteed the Germans are sys- tematically evaded or abrogated. Not only in old Russia and in new Poland, but every- [ 92 ] HOUSE OF BONDAGE where and always, from the days of the Pharaoh of the Exodus to those of the last exalted Kleagle of the Klan, the active motives of Jew-baiting are derived from the conception of the absolutely sovereign State that is either preparing for war or at war. Why did the Rus- sians seek to “improve” the Jews into “usefulness” to the State, that is, into likeness to themselves? It was not mere dislike. A rational man may dislike another intensely without ever dreaming of making that other over in his own image. Variety of character, culture, experiences, are, indeed, academically admitted to be an enrichment of human society. But academically only. The practical measures of all contemporary states, from our own immigration laws and Americanization efforts, to the bestialities of the dominant Poles and awakening Magyars are unthinkable—quite literally unthinkable— without the conception of the state as an armed camp of drilled cannon-fodder. In great and, complex societies the actual motives for the persecution of minorities are not always on the sur- face. In smaller and more primitive groups they are clear at once. In Hungary today even the “awakening Magyars” are not considered sufficiently hot and active. A super-Fascist organization has been formed with the avowed purpose of clearing at least sixty-three counties of Jews, expelling all Jews who settled in the country later than 1900, withdrawing from all other Jews both political and civic rights, bringing all wealthy Jewish landholders and industrialists to trial for “hostility to the Magyars.”* Asa matter of fact the assimilation of the Jewish bourgeoisie in Hungary was as complete as 1 Neue Freie Presse. No. 21663 (Jan. 4, 1925). [ 98 | ‘ ISRAEL possible and the creation of modern Magyar literature and scholarship owes an inestimable debt to Jewry. The Hungarian plays that hold the stages of Europe and America are nearly all the works of Jews. But Hungary was confined to very narrow boundaries after the war; the Magyars have no thought but reconquest and revenge. They were badly frightened by the Jewish leadership of the brief Communist experiment in Buda- pest. They want neither revolutionaries, nor writers, nor scholars. They want neither idealists, well or ill guided, nor merchants, nor manufacturers, nor any one who by character or occupation is concerned with peace and the tasks of peace. The Jews are for peace or, at the extremest, for such reforms as in their judg- ment, whether right or wrong, lead to justice and to peace. Hence they are now felt to be alien and danger- ous to that armed camp which is the Hungarian State. The “active Magyars”’ fear the pacific influence of the Jewish press. ‘They are prepared to establish a dictator- ship at Kecskemét. They desire to plunge Hungary into the complete darkness of Balkan war and confusion. They are prepared to organize pogroms on a large Seale, les te | A. sinister hush has settled down over the city of Budapest. One can see that it was once a gay and brilliant capital. It is still handsome. ‘There is a grandeur about the Danube here that it has not nearer the Western Mountains. The royal palace stands on a high bank and the sun sets magnificently behind it. In > the streets below there is little trade or traffic. There is the breath of uncertainty, of fear, of all things harsh and ominous. Hate, persecution and the cold lust for [ 94 ] OE HOUSE OF BONDAGE war poison the air and landscape here as they do in Poland. It is a relief to cross the frontier even into Czecho-Slovakia. Even Pressburg (now fov»lishly called Bratislava) seems homelike and with delight one drives through the exquisite villages of Austria. . . In Hungary there is nothing to counteract the mas- ter State. In Poland there is. For in Poland the Jews, as I have pointed out, never became assimilated in con- siderable numbers, but kept their cultural autonomy al- most intact. Hence in the formation of the new Repub- lic of Poland they were recognized as a_ national n.inority having minority rights. Formally, at least, the post-war treaties established a state here that was to exist by virtue of the free cooperation of the nation- alities composing it. The affirmation in law of the possibility and necessity of such states is the one positive achievement of the otherwise infamous and disastrous treaties of Versailles. One wonders, however, whether the makers of the treaties who in their own practice em- braced the theory of the master State, actually expected the state of codperating nationalities to function accord- ing to the provisions of the compacts involved. The cold cynicism of one of the signatories was brilliantly symbolized to me by the apparition of a French General, sky-blue uniform, glittering decorations, gray Henri Quatre, which was the first thing the eye met in the doorway of the Hotel Bristol at Warsaw. . . The non-assimilation of the Polish Jews, however, and the presence of the German, Ukrainian, Russian and White Russian minorities in Poland made the estab- lishment of a state of codperating nationalities, at least on paper, all but inevitable. ‘The Poles had been ; [ 95 ] ISRAEL wronged and oppressed for centuries. So much was certain. Their own character and history were forgot- ten. There was wanted, furthermore, a belligerent buffer-state between Germany and Russia. Hence the Poles asked for everything in sight and got it. Their Republic has a population of thirty millions. Nineteen millions of Poles live in this Republic and eleven millions of non-Poles. A gesture was necessary; a gesture, fine enough as such, was made. But the Poles had long been thirsting for power. They called it liberation and meant dominance. Once they had welcomed the Jews as fellow-sufferers under Russian rule, as fellow-fighters against it. In 1794 Berek Joselewitz had raised a regiment of light cavalry among his fellow-Jews. The regiment fought under Kosciuszko and perished almost to a man in the defense of Warsaw. Again during the Polish uprising in 1830 a Jewish fighting unit in Central Poland carried its special ensign against the Russian tyrant. Men came from far villages, men unused to violence and blood. Upon their ensign they engraved in the middle of the shield held by the Polish eagle’s claws the name of Jehovah in Hebrew. They studded the ensign with jewels and their women embroidered the rich silk that surrounds the glittering shield. Once more they fell. The ensign was hidden away from the anger of the Russian. When the Polish Republic was declared the ensign and the banner were brought forth.... I stood before it in the house of a friend in Warsaw. 'The jewels still glitter softly in the shield. The engraving of the name of Jehovah is sharp and fresh. . . . The ensign and the sacrifice are forgotten as such things [96] gras. HOUSE OF BONDAGE always are. The work of war and violence was futile as it must always be. So soon as their liberation was in sight the Poles determined to be masters in a master State, to crush minorities into uniformity, starve them into submission or drive them into exile. The Jews have shared their air and earth and bread for nine hundred years; their ancient wooden synagogues are the oldest architectural monuments on Polish ground. These things do not matter. The master State, preparing for war, has neither memory nor faith. It can guarantee minority rights without a scruple, with no intention of permitting those rights to be exercised. Its sovereignty is absolute. The Polish state, moreover, has a clear memory. It knows that the four million Jews within its borders cannot be “improved” into being Poles, but demand the right, guaranteed them by the nations, of being themselves. Hence that state has determined to boycott, to starve, to degrade the Jews, to crush them to utter subservience or to actual death. “How do you survive at all?’ I kept asking my friends in Poland. The answer was always the same: “We survive for a little because the Pole is not as crafty as he is barbar- ous.” And always they added with a rather wistful smile: “But see Vilna... .” lif Leaving behind the flat expanse of central Poland, the train, feeling its way over frail wooden bridges, enters a gently rolling country traversed by winding streams. Far in the fields, diminished by the distance, barefoot peasants exercise their primitive husbandry. [97 ] ISRAEL Nearer the foreground a woman in a brilliant head- kerchief plies a wooden flail. Low frame houses appear along the track. The tiny gables and eaves and porches are fretted with the wood-carving of the White Rus- sians. A. forlorn station appears and by it stands a train of small freight-cars filled with peasants, They throng the door-ways. They have broad, placid faces. Many are clad in the shabby semi-Western fashion of Warsaw. But the majority of the women still wear the gay skirts and bodices and head-kerchiefs of their ancestral costume and strings within strings of many- colored beads go well with the dark eyes and red cheeks above. They are pilgrims, Polish or White Russian or Lithuanian. One group is singing. Perhaps they are going to that wonder-working Madonna in Vilna whose open shrine spans the street where soldiers and peasants and beggars and priests kneel on the sharp cobble- stones and where, Jew or Gentile, you pass with un- covered head or are dragged to jail... . The city lies before one—huddled, desolate, medizval. The gilded cupolas of the Russian monasteries against the pale blue sky serve only to accentuate the chill and dread and strange remoteness of the place. It is a very still city despite its one hundred and fifty thousand in- habitants. ‘There is no horse-car, tramway or omnibus. The poor trudge. The less poor and the stranger are trundled over the cobble-stones in small horse-cabs. The drivers round sharp corners suddenly and warn the passers-by—a peasant woman carrying a pig across her shoulders, a grave old Jew, a tall priest, a harlot in her pitiful imitation of European finery—with a long, low, toneless, nhuman cry... . [ 98 ] HOUSE OF BONDAGE Here, as in Warsaw, as in other Polish cities, the flathouses are three or four stories high and are built of brick covered with mortar. The facades and cornices often have a faded, old-fashioned elegance. But the plaster has crumbled off in great, ragged patches and the houses have a sordid and dejected air. All walls are broken, all enclosures somewhere open to the wind, all pavements half-sunken in the earth. Tough grass sprouts from crumbling brick and mortar to be nibbled at by vaguely wandering goats. ‘The Roman churches are plain and angular. An occasional niche in their gray, blank walls holds a saint’s image. On their steps huddle old women with pitifully bandaged feet and stretch out dirty, shriveled, hopeless hands after an alms. Contemptuously a Russian monk black-hatted and long-haired, passes by; next a Jew, ragged, nervous, mobile. The barefooted hag who listlessly sweeps up the horse-manure with a primitive broom of twigs does not look up. ... According to the Poles there are fifty thousand Jews in Vilna; according to the Jews themselves there are over seventy thousand. Whichever number is correct, the nine-hundred-year-old Jewish settlement in Poland has left no deeper traces anywhere. Amid the incon- ceivable squalor of this place, from the crooked, crippled, crazily winding alleys of its noisome Ghetto, arose again and again the dignity of learning and the authority of spiritual power. Here an endless succession of rabbis composed those mighty tomes of scholastical and juridical lore that throng the shelves of the old synagogal library; here lived and studied and wrote the famous Gaon or genius of Vilna, a mighty scholar and [99 ] ISRAEL teacher and fierce foe of the Chassidic sectaries; here, as I have pointed out, lived the founders of the modern Jewish renaissance whose verse and prose, in Yiddish and Hebrew, is now read by thousands in far cities of which the ancient rabbis never dreamed... . The Ghetto is open now and nothing is left of the ancient gates but the brick arches, spanning the alleys, from which the gates once hung. Yet these alleys could never have been more wretched. The effort of the Poles to starve the Jews into utter degradation is grimly effective here. Dozens of shops, mere holes, are punched into the ancient rotting walls. The whole stock of one is a handful of smoked fish, of another a few boxes of wilted greens, of a third pins and needles and remnants of cheap cloth. ‘There are neither doors nor windows. Somewhere, deep in these caverns, the people live. Sometimes the row of shops is broken and through a ruined brick archway you can enter a court-yard of fetid, teeming life. Nowhere in the world is there more naked poverty. But these people do not beg. These people are in such rags as eyes accustomed to Western civilization have not seen in the slums of post-war Lon- - don and Berlin. On the faces of most of them are the marks of hunger and of fear. Yet there is a curious erectness about them and a dignity unobliterated even here. Filthy, starved, oppressed, they cling to that strange eternal thought that they are, in the words of the Torah, a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. .. . In the middle of the Ghetto is a single court-yard that is tolerably airy and reasonably clean. It is the court- yard of the houses of study and prayer. One entire side is occupied by the famous old synagogue. ‘The [ 100 | HOUSE OF BONDAGE building, which is over three hundred years old, is square, plain, massive. It is sunk deep into the earth, since the Poles would not permit it to be built higher than the churches of its day; its tall windows are all toward the court-yard, for no window was permitted to face the streets beyond the Ghetto. Its dignity and austere beauty are within. Four huge pillars of marble sustain the entire structure. The walls are plain. But the great ark that holds the many scrolls of the law is adorned with carvings and with hand-wrought metal work that illustrate once more the unbroken tradition of fine and ancient Jewish craftsmanship. Enter the synagogue at any hour—it need be neither Sabbath nor festival—and you will find men in the act of prayer. Over their rags they have draped their praying-shawls; they have covered their heads with them. On their foreheads are the capsules that hold the law. Many are tall, gaunt figures. The eyes of all but the very aged have a smoldering light in them. They sit or stand; they sway back and forth; their gestures are their own and without prescribed formalism. They chant in study or to glorify the Lord of the World. They barely note the stranger. They are half-starved workingmen and shop-keepers. What, in the world, do they live on? The Polish Jew lives on wind! 'That is the classical joke. What does it matter? They can- not have less than they have. Meantime they raise their voices unto Jehovah and remember the mountain that burned with fire unto the heart of heaven. .. . Below, in chambers almost subterranean, is the great library of the synagogue. Volumes of Hebrew legend and learning date from the second half of the fourteenth [ 101 ] ISRAEL century. The early Hebrew printers were craftsmen second to none and though the wood-cuts and later the copper-plates are primitive in design, the mechanical execution is delicate and precise. Manuscripts abound, both plain and illuminated; the intricate Hebrew letters were traced by these ancient penmen with more than monastic exactitude and grace. Last the shabby, long- coated librarian, himself a scholar and-an author, shows you the original manuscripts, written in cursive rab- binical letters, of the works of the Gaon. They are worth a fortune; Western universities and orientalists would be eager to buy them. They are not for sale. Holiness and hunger and the pride of these are native HELE Ahan: Out in the feeble sunlight once more, you cross the court-yard and enter a smaller and plainer house of prayer. This one was built in 1748 and here the Gaon himself sat at prayer and study. The place is never empty, neither this nor any other synagogue or Beth Hamidrash of the dozens that flank the court or crowd the quarter. This world and its ways are evil—more evil nowhere than in this land and this city. It is the eternal world of Israel’s history and hope that men try to dwell in. All day resounds the song of prayer and the chant of study; hungry hucksters and mechanics are notable scholars and subtle disputants. If the belly is empty, the mind at least is not... . The contents of this tradition are changing. The tradition itself should stand firm. You feel that pro- foundly in one of the most moving places in the world— the old Jewish graveyard on the outskirts of the town. [ 102 } HOUSE OF BONDAGE It is eight hundred years old and the oldest graves have sunk deep into the earth. But of the simple sarcophagi many remain that are four centuries old. They were built in the shape of tiny gabled houses of brick. In the front of each was an opening through which one could read, the Hebrew entablature. Today most of them are ruined. The little side walls were broken in the successive pogroms and desecrations of the centuries, seeds were blown in and grass and clover cover the floor. But most of the inscriptions are intact, especially the in- scriptions that mark the resting places of the Gaon and of other learned and holy rabonim. ‘Tradition has it that even the fiercest fires spare the synagogues, which accounts for the preservation of many of the old wooden houses of prayer in remote towns and villages of Poland, where pogroms are as native as disease. Here, too, the symbols of the imperishable are intact... . Of the imperishable. . . . And of the strange wan- derings and pathos of the human heart. . . . You fol- low a narrow foot-path through the long, matted grass to the very end of the graveyard and find a great heap of rubble from which grows a single tree. This is the grave of a Polish count and magnate named Valenti Potozki who, in the middle of the eighteenth century, embraced the Jewish religion and fled from his friends and fellow-countrymen and became an outcast in a village of outcasts. A wicked and envious Jew named Jossel denounced Potozki to the Church. There was a trial and the count was burned and his ashes were brought hither by pious Jews. He had not recanted and hence his grave is a holy place. Men and women [ 103 ] ISRAEL come to the grave of the Ger Zedek, the stranger become a holy one, and throw a bit of stone or mortar on it in commemoration of their visit and in token of some wish or prayer. So at least the attendant caretaker tells you. And he tells you further that the Ger Zedek cursed his betrayer Jossel who became an outcast from among his own people and whose descendants bear the mark of that curse to this very hour... . It is very peaceful out in the pe Abe) The marks of riot and pogrom that did not even spare the monu- ments of the dead seem withdrawn into a past that is remote and calm. Back in the Vilna streets with their heavy-jowled priests and long-sabered, carefully gloved, hard-eyed Polish officers, comes to you the breath of present menace and immediate hate. Cultivated and moneyed Jews, of whom there are a very few, live in a hasty, semi-proletarian fashion. Their great-grand- fathers’ great-grandfathers were here and wished to make this land their home. But these men and women today do not feel secure enough to build a house. Vilna changed masters eight times during the recent wars. The Germans and the Soviet forces alone refrained from plundering and slaughtering the Jews. The Poles were the most implacable. And the Poles are per- manent masters now... . No, the Jews do not build houses. But they remain the people of the book. Out of their indescribable pov- erty they support two teachers’ seminaries, four gym- nasia, also kindergartens, public schools and evening schools. In spite of the minority rights guaranteed by the Western nations that established the Polish republic, [ 104 | HOUSE OF BONDAGE none of these schools receive any state aid, although sixty per cent of all urban taxes are paid by Jews. The graduates of the Jewish colleges are not admitted to Polish universities. They are admitted to the uni- versities of Belgium and Switzerland. But who can go to Belgium or to Switzerland? Who can go anywhere? It does not matter. It does not matter that the pay of all teachers is months in arrears. Nothing matters except that, amid hunger and pain, these institutions be maintained. . . . In the bare class-rooms of the Yiddish Teachers’ Seminary are attempts at biological labo- ratories and improvised studios for modeling. There are no facilities. There are results. For there is talent; there is the fervor of the spirit and the passion for learn- ing. The Gaon is alive not only amid the Talmudical disputations of the synagogical court-yard and library; he is alive here; he is alive in slum and school and street. . .. There is no food; there is no raiment; there is no security. Hard-headed, politically trained men tell you that any war engaged in by the Polish republic would be the signal for coldly deliberate pogroms unequaled in history. . . . Prayer and study go on; the schools and colleges persist through inconceivable hardships; dread and disaster are swept aside. The spirit of Israel is unbowed. .. . This is assuredly the better part of human history: victory in defeat, erectness under oppres- sion, patience in suffering, the mind that will not hate but is unconquerable. All men of all races who love liberty and peace have a special relation to the Jews of Vilna; they have a share in the Gaon’s study; they should throw a memorial on the Ger Zedek’s grave. [ 105 | ISRAEL IV It is of importance to the Jews, it is of importance to the world that the precise conditions in Poland be made known. It is of crucial importance to make it clear how little it avails to declare and establish legal compacts if the principles of those compacts are utterly alien to the consciousness of the people who are to be curbed. Those compacts are like the laws of war. War, being bar- barous in its nature, knows no law but that of force. The state of codperating nationalities cannot be imposed by legal fiat upon a people arrogant and warlike, splen- did and dirty, gallant and superstitious. But before discussing the conditions that obtain in the Polish state, I shall try to clarify once more an historic misunderstanding, an historic division among the Jewish people itself. West and East! In the consciousness of Western Jews and of the liberal Gentiles of the West, these two words have become synonymous with enlightenment and ignorance, progress and reaction, almost with honesty and its reverse. The Jews of the West have been chari- . table to their Kastern brethren, but have disliked them; they have quietly consented when Gentile friends have asked: “But between you and these people is there not a great gulf?” There is a great gulf. But that gulf must be bridged; it is being bridged today. For the division between West and East has been attributed to superficial causes and characterized by accidental marks. The division is between nationalism and assimilation; between being [ 106 ] HOUSE OF BONDAGE oneself and seeking favor by trying to be what one can never be. The East went to the extreme of excluding Gentile culture from its consciousness. But it preserved the nation. The West went to the extreme of letting Gentile culture conquer it and awoke to find itself, despite that conquest, irrevocably stamped as alien by the Gentile world. Had not the East preserved the nation, the West would have today neither refuge nor reliance, neither human dignity for the present nor heart for the future. The Polish Jew may be deprived of his rights. He may suffer. But he is the member of a people whom the nations have acknowledged, to whom, according to those nations, rights are due. The Jew of Germany and of America is a suppliant at many gates; he treads the weary stairs of others . . . the stairs wind up andup. Thereisnoend.... At this troubling point I can so well guess the inner- most fears of my American friends. “Are we to give up our very souls? For the culture of the West is in our very souls. Are we to stop being, feeling, doing what we have always been and felt and done?” The answer is: You are to give up nothing you possess, ex- cept the delusion of assimilation. AI] you have you shall own—but you shall own it as Jews. You shall be less arrogant but prouder, never servile but more capable of the grace of humility. You shall no longer feel ex- cluded. Your solidarity and cohesion shall seem right and natural to yourselves and to others. To others! Why has the assimilationist Jew so rarely Gentile friends? Not business associates and courteous col- leagues, but friends? The reason is that subtly but [ 107 | 4 ISRAEL constantly, by a thousand implications, the assimila- tionist Jew says to the Gentile: “I am like you: we are one and at one; overlook these little peculiarities of me and my house and my children. ‘They do not count.” And something within the Gentile, the most tolerant, the most finely attuned, answers and answers rightly: “Why so anxious? What does that anxiety conceal? Are we really quite alike? I doubt it; I should deprecate it a little.” A suitor can never be a friend. One who asks for friendship as a favor can never be a friend. He who asks a favor is humbled and he who grants it is shamed at seeing the other’s humiliation. .. . The East has stood firm amid the disasters of the ages. Its gift to the Western Jew is this: He shall remember that he belongs not to a sect, but to a people that has its history, traditions, character, rights. He shall no longer comfort himself with Jewish achievement, charity, law- abidingness, with all the psychical machinery of propitiation. Nor shall he shiver if a Jew turns out to be a rascal. He shall no longer try to justify his exist- ence. He has seen no American do so, no Frenchman, not even a Montenegrin or Albanian. Why should he? Because the Gentile world robbed him of his land, destroyed his Temple, drove him forth? His wrongs give him a higher right. But he need not insist upon that right. That a people has appeared upon the scene of human history and sustained itself there is an ultimate fact. It needs no defense, no explanation. We are, wherever, we are, of right. We are Jews of right. This is what the East has never forgotten. This is what the West must learn. ... [ 108 ] HOUSE OF BONDAGE East and West! During the war a friend of mine was running a school for wireless telegraphy in New York. And a great many young Russian and Polish Jews came there to study. My friend watched this process with growing irritation. Finally he burst out: “They are doing it to avoid active military service, the damned little Jids.” He caught himself. “Dear old man, I didn’t mean to offend you. But as a matter of fact it’s my old classmate Joe Benjamin who’s called my atten- tion to the fact.” I didn’t doubt my friend’s word. Of course it was the super-patriotic assimilationist Jew who, trying to justify his American existence, had characterized the Eastern Jews as slackers. In his measureless folly and ignorance he did not know that these youths had fled the master State and the horrors of military servitude hoping to find in America a higher type of civilization, that their political thought and action was thus beyond his reach, that he was the barbarian, playing the game of a barbarian world which they—cultural nationalists, pacifists, economic codperators—had long transcended. He despised them. He communicated his contempt to his Gentile friend, in whose eyes he desired to be as much of a belligerent Aryan as he could feign to be... . Need I add that the propitiatory belligerency of the Benjamins has not availed them? Is not their folly and its failure a thrice-told tale in every Western country? The youths from Russia and Poland are not trying to get into Gentile clubs on their war-record. They are Jews and are serving the world as Jews. They may end by saving the West from itself. ... [ 109 ] ISRAEL Vv The actual conditions that obtain in the Polish state could be described at very great length. Example could be heaped upon example to illustrate that régime of con- summate cruelty and icy fraud. But a detailed account would demand a separate treatise. It will suffice to sum up the facts here by means of a single document of unquestioned authenticity and irresistible force. The Jewish members of the Polish Diet, deprived of all legislative influence through the complete isolation forced upon them by the parties of the Left as well as of the Right, formed a parliamentary “kolo” or club. On the 10th of December, 1924, Deputy Schreiber, in— the name of the Jewish Parliamentary Club, read the following declaration in the Diet in order to ground the refusal of the Jewish Deputies to vote in favor of an additional budget. (Bulletin du Comité des Déléga- tions jguives, No. 27, 5 April, 1925.) “The entire political system and the methods em- ployed by the Government have up to the present done nothing but aggravate in the most cruel and un- paralleled manner the economic ruin and cultural oppression of the Jewish population of Poland. Any hope of improvement which that population ever enter- tained has long been annihilated. Such have been the actual practices of the present Government that what- ever small faith the Jewish population ever placed in the good-will of the administration, has faded, and any confidence of obtaining the civil equality guaranteed by the laws of the Republic has disappeared. “Not only has the Government failed to abrogate an [110 ] HOUSE OF BONDAGE entire series of legal enactments which it inherited from the Russian régime, which, being in full force, impair the equality of Jews before the law and which are, con- sequently, flagrant contradictions of the Polish con- stitution; not only has the Government failed to give any satisfaction to those nationalistic rights guaranteed the Jews by both the constitution and international treaties, but it has also made no effort to put an end to the conditions of chaotic disorder in that restricted self- government of the religious communities which, by virtue of the old laws, the Jews have been able to retain. “Nor is this all. ‘The Government ordered elections to take place in Jewish communities. At the same time and despite contrary promises it tolerated the sabotage of these elections on the part of the local authorities, a practice which discredits the entire legal structure of the Polish state. In most localities and everywhere in Galicia the local authorities have thus succeeded in rendering utterly impossible the constitution of repre- sentative bodies to carry out the will of the people. In Congress Poland the same result has been obtained by provoking a useless conflict in regard to the question of what language should be employed in the necessary public meetings. “Nor has the Government made the slightest effort to aid so much as the beginning of self-government among the Jewish population of the border provinces of the East. “In the realm of culture and education the Govern- ment has systematically followed its adopted policy which is either to ignore or to stifle the needs of the Jewish population. The government has not been sat- [-111] ISRAEL isfied with a total neglect of the duties incumbent upon it in this matter; it has not merely neglected in its budg- etary appropriations to take into consideration the edu- cational needs of the Jewish population and especially of already existing Jewish schools. It has gone to the extent of destroying and tolerating the destruction of schools created and supported by the private means of the Jewish people. ‘These schools have been closed, their grounds and buildings have been requisitioned; they have been the objects of endless chicaneries. And it was undoubtedly meant as an evil jest at the expense of the Jews of Poland that in its last budget the Gov- ernment appropriated the ridiculous sum of 10,000 zloty ($2,000) as a contribution to the religious expenditures of a population of over three millions of its citizens. “In direct violation of the provisions of the constitu- tion the Government tolerates the use of restrictions which practically prevent the access of Jews to the universities and technical schools. Jewish youths who wish to leave the country to pursue their studies are subjected to every conceivable annoyance. If they com- plete their studies abroad they are met by equally aggravating delays and chicaneries in the matter of having their diplomas officially acknowledged. A. chain is thus being forged that has no purpose but to enfeeble the intellectual capacities of the Jews. “In the domain of economics the Government’s policy of deliberate extirpation has been pushed to the last extreme. That economic and fiscal policy has suc- ceeded in bringing about the indescribable impoverish- ment of the broad masses of Jewry who literally suc- cumb under the weight of these exactions and are utterly (112 ] HOUSE OF BONDAGE hopeless of the possibility of amelioration. In its blind- ness the Government may not be aware of the fact that its methods are mercilessly destroying the existence of tens of thousands of citizens of the Polish state. But it is not necessary to assume blindness. Since the citizens in question are Jews, the Government recoils from no consequences. “The workshops and offices of the State are closed to the Jewish worker and intellectual. Jewish employees of long years’ standing are pitilessly discharged from establishments taken over by the Government in the pursuit of its recent policy of monopolies. “The governmental order issued to an entire group of towns in the Warsaw region according to which all fairs must take place on Saturday, is clearly another means toward the deliberate end of completely destroy- ing Jewish commerce. “As a striking example of this entire system we may point to the monstrous project of taking away from tens of thousands of families, mostly Jewish, the licenses which they have often held for generations and which constitute their sole means of subsistence. This scheme is defended on the ground of the State’s obligation to war veterans. “The Jewish Parliamentary Club is fully aware of the rights of veterans and invalids to receive a sufficient pension from the State. But this obligation to satisfy the demands of justice and the necessity of the veterans should be charged upon the population as a whole, above all, upon the wealthier classes. Under no pretext should the entire burden be imposed upon one specific class of [113 ] ISRAEL citizens, especially when this class is already notoriously impoverished. “Tf this project is carried through it will constitute a brutal assault against the very foundations of the exist- ence of the Jewish population and in the name of that population we protest with all possible energy.’ “The Jewish Parliamentary Club, finally, desires to express the conviction that the pacification of the eastern provinces can be accomplished only if the needs of all the elements of their population, including the Jewish, be satisfied. It is clear from many complaints that the Government systematically violates the constitutional right of these nationalities to use their languages. In Eastern Galicia there are in circulation secret orders of the ministry forbidding the use of the Jewish language in public meetings. Methods such as these are cal- culated, of course, to undermine all faith in the Gov- ernment. Local authorities know perfectly well that they will be upheld. But there is no occasion for being surprised at this state of affairs when one realizes that the inspiration behind them comes from the highest authorities of the State, when one remembers the declaration of the supreme chief of the State to the effect that anyone who publicly instigates crime or has been duly condemned by the courts for crimes committed need have no fear for his liberty since the prisons are already packed. “For the reasons here adduced the Jewish Parliamen- tary Club can have no confidence in the Government and will cast its votes against an extension of the budget.” * The protest has proved futile. | [114] HOUSE OF BONDAGE VI “Confidence in the Government. ...” What these pale and restrained phrases cover is a great tragedy and a great passion. It is the tragedy of the Vilna Ghetto, of a hundred Ghettos even more terrible and obscure; it is the tragedy of the fugitives in every harbor of Europe; it is also a great passion—the passion and the somber glow of that last scene I witnessed and carried away forever in my mind from Warsaw... . Through the ill-lt streets we rumbled in our tight little Droschken. In passing, one could see the shadowy outline of the tall monument of Adam Mickiewicz, the Polish national poet. In an often quoted passage of his best-known work he had saluted the Jew as a brother. It is a very sore point with the Poles. He, too, is in the shadow, like his monument. . . . We crossed the Vistula, river of blood and tears. They have thrown corpses into it for centuries. For a time its West Prussian banks were at peace. Today there is no tell- ing when that historic pastime will begin again as the river flows through the Polish corridor past Danzig into the Baltic Sea... . Dim tree-tops stir in the cool wind. We take a rather roundabout way. One of the bridges was blown up dur- ing the war. The cobble-stones become more and more jagged. At last we stop. Our Droschken join a large semi-circle of others. ... We plunge into a dark, streaming crowd. Jews, all Jews. Long caftans and caps; modern clothes out of little shops. Not only old men in caftans, but boys and youngsters. No very long ear-locks here. Some concession is made to [ 115 ] ISRAEL modernity in the city. The beards are long, however, and but for some red Judas physiognomy here and there, the faces, especially of the old and older men, have a grave and noble beauty. Thus Rembrandt saw them; thus they are today. ‘The women are less definitely marked in character. Only here and there are glimpses of shapely profiles. It is not an orderly crowd. But its disorder is quite without violence. Some passion stirs it, however, some impulse that lifts 1t above its workaday self. Are these the people that walk the Warsaw streets so quietly, so sadly? Are these the old men of the Ghetto streets, these the haggling slatterns of a thousand shops, these the caftaned boys who rather hug the walls when the sun shines? They throng toward the platform of the railroad sta- tion. Most of them in vain. Only those who have tickets are admitted. ‘This is not an unreasonable regu- lation. But for it all the half-million Jews in Warsaw would be here tonight. Intellectually they are dis- united. ‘There are parties and parties. Nevertheless they would be here tonight. Assimilationism of any kind is dead here—dead forever. The Poles, as we have seen, have taken good care of that. The nine-hundred- year-old sharing of earth and sun and bread and vicissitude and fighting against a common enemy and oppressor can count no more. So what are parties opinions, divisions? All Jewish Warsaw is here in body or in spirit tonight. ‘Two hundred people are being entrained on their way to Constanza, where they take ship, on their way out of bondage, on their way to Eretz Jisroel—the land of the fathers. ... [ 116 ] HOUSE OF BONDAGE The blue-coated Polish policemen with their long swords are impassive. Impassive and a little surly. Their duty tonight rather disgusts them. They are accustomed to inspiring fear, at least a nervous shrink- ing. Tonight, despite their authority, which cannot be denied, they simply do not exist. The spirit of the crowd has risen above them. .. . We have tickets, of course, and are under competent guidance. But we, too, are sent with calculated rude- ness from one gate to another. . . . At last we are on the platform, in the midst of an even intenser crowd— a crowd whose faces are a little pale under the dim lights. Pale but uplifted. For here are the people who are actually going and here are their fathers and mothers, their brothers and sisters, who will probably never see them again, but who are glad to give them up out of the darkness into the light and out of degradation to spiritual erectness. If they themselves cannot see Jerusalem, it is well that these others may; if they must await the pogroms to come, it is well that so many are saved. So many. So few. This thing that we are witness- ing is a weekly occurrence. About two hundred people leave each week. But in the files of the Palestine office you see that there are ten thousand applications a week. Why are there so few out of so many? ‘The answer to that question isin America... . The train stands beside the platform and the leader from the Palestine office is busy getting his people on board. He accompanies them to the Rumanian border, sees to it that they are not cheated nor delayed through passport or visa chicaneries, nor suffer violence nor rob- [ 117 ] ISRAEL bery. At the border another leader takes his place, who accompanies and protects the group to its final destina- tion. | Our Warsaw leader is a model of quiet efficiency. In half an hour he has his people in their proper com- partments. No bundles must be lost and no children misplaced. For only one third of today’s group con- sists of young men and women, of Chaluzim, or pioneers. The rest are families who have the necessary minimum of capital which entitles them to go to Palestine. The heads of the families are carpenters, locksmiths, expert workmen in the building trades. They are more than that. ‘They are idealists and, in a sense, scholars. For they are all speakers of Hebrew, in addition to Polish and Yiddish, and they have all liberated their minds. from the restraints and inhibitions of the current orthodoxy and have seen an unheard-of vision and had the hardihood to break through a thousand shackles, overcome a thousand difficulties on their way to this tremendous adventure. ... We leave the ladies of our party tucked in a safe cor- ner and my guide from the Palestine office and I make our way through the crowd and go into one packed compartment after another to speak to those who are going. The third-class compartments are barren and comfortless and the long journey, followed by the steerage passage on an emigrant ship, is in itself enough to appal the Western mind. And these emigrants are not the Ellis Island type. Here are no fugitives. Let that be made as clear as possible. We speak to men and to women and touch the heads of children. These people will suffer on the trip, and the hardships of the land to [ 118 ] HOUSE OF BONDAGE which they are going will be real hardships to them. But they are sustained by what is within; they are sus- tained by the thought that their children will not be the helots of barbarians... . A single carriage of first-class compartments heads the train. The doors are still open, and outside of them stand the Polish officers who are to occupy the com- partments. They try to keep their faces expressionless. But as they stand there or walk up and down trailing their long swords you get from them an indefinable moral atmosphere. They are contemptuous and yet amazed. Something here does not fit in with their cal- culations. Something. ... What is it? It is this, that the outcasts and the hunted and the oppressed that are here have undergone a profound change. They are as powerless physically as ever. Morally they are no longer so. For from the middle of the train flutters a little flag of blue and white—a flag that represents no guns or battalions or frontiers or force or fraud, a flag that represents no aspiration after power, only a hope, only an act of spiritual self-recollection. But that is enough. The flag is there. And with the flag the song. And slowly, a little hoarsely at first, then with rising energy and fervor, the crowd sings the Hatikvah, the song of that hope, of that aspiration. .. . The Polish officers enter their compartments; the doors of the other compartments are closed too. Against the panes of the windows, close to the panes, are the faces of our people—men and women and little children. The faces on the platform, silently turned to those others, are strained but calm and self-controlled. From an open compartment-window a young Chaluz is [ 119 ] TSRAEL quietly saying a few words in Hebrew to those who must remain behind in Galuth, in the terrible Galuth of Poland. But there is no sentimentality, no excess of feeling. The hour is too tremendous for that. Two thousand years are gone, are swept away. ‘This year here,” the fathers have said for generations and genera- tions, “this year here, next year in Yerushelayim!” That next year has come. . . . Slowly the train pulls out of the dim station. A single sob is heard from a woman on the platform. Then no more. Only the strains of the Hatikvah, only the restrained melody of the song of hope, and here and there a final word of both farewell and salutation, the best word, the only word— Shalom, which means peace. [ 120 | CHAPTER IV LAND OF ISRAEL I TuE change from West to East is abrupt and com- plete. The edge of Atlantic winds reaches Warsaw; at Trieste the sky touches the top of the steep little Via del Monte; the young Jewish pioneers who trundle their luggage down that street are bare-headed; their shirts are open at the throat; a wind furrows their dark hair; their eyes seek the half-naked hills that jut out into the Adriatic. Night may bring the rainy Hyades; ships in the harbor have passed the Acroeeraunian walls. A world begins here which is, in truth, neither West nor East. It is that old, old Mediterranean world which is one, which saw all the beginnings of history, which gave birth to all the arts, to all the wisdom by which man lives, which has changed little, careless of millenniums, deaf to tumult. The naked cliffs of Crete, more myth than island, are mauve and tan in the translucent air, rough and yet shapely as the Judean hills. is the Dead Sea, a thread of silver which is the Jordan. Neither from the tower of the citadel nor from any hill-top does one see a Jewish dome or spire. The walls [ 180 | LAND OF ISRAEL of the citadel are built upon Herodian foundations; but these are sunk fathoms deep in earth. Stones fashioned by the workmen of Herod, perhaps even by the builders of the second Temple are among the nineteen buried layers beneath the present West wall of what was once the enclosure of the Temple. The debris of the ages has filled this spot that was once a valley to a depth of thirteen meters. The tombs of the Judges are to the North, of the prophets to the South, burial caves sur- round the city. Southeast of the city, on the north slope of the Mount of Corruption is a Jewish graveyard of great antiquity. The headstones are broken; shards and rubble are as deep as they were when Nehemiah returned from Babylon and found the city so ruined that there was no place for the beast that was under him to pass. But of the monuments of life from the days of our kingdom nothing is left. The old city within the walls of the citadel of Suleiman is, except for the Temple place on its South- eastern edge, demonstrably not the city of David at all. That lay to the South, dominated the vale of Kidron and was refreshed by the pool and brook of Siloam. It was from here that David went up the hill of Moriah and bought the top of the hill of Araunah, the Jebusite, who had turned it into a threshing-floor. David built an altar to Jehovah on that spot which was later to be the Temple of Solomon and the site of the Second Temple. East and Northeast of the old city of David the road winds through a narrow valley. It passes the Mount of Corruption on which Solomon built altars to the gods of his strange wives; it passes through the vale of [ 181 | ISRAEL Jehosophat; it passes those three mysterious and immemorial monuments which are half hidden in the rocky hill-side. Are they the pillar that Absalom reared him in the king’s dale and the house of Osias and the tomb of Zechariah, the prophet? Are the Hellenistic columns on all three and the Kgyptian cone on the tomb of Absalom later additions to monuments already ancient? It matters little. To the left of the road is the wall of the citadel. A few dusky cypresses wave beside it. To the right, beyond the tombs the hill rises first gradually, then more loftily to the heights of Mount Scopus whence always the conquerors besieged the city, to the heights of the Mount of Olives. And road and valley, and hill-slopes are filled with the rubble of the ages. Stones... stones... not the stones of the field which cover all this land. But stones hewn and graven once by the hands of men, hewn and graven by the workmen of Israel, built and always destroyed. The chronicle of conquest upon conquest is written here. And always Israel succumbed except that once when the hand of God stayed Sennacherib. Always was Israel conquered. Victory of the sword was never our portion nor strong walls our effectual defense. Ruins are our monuments. Ruins—except for the immortal spirit that broods here despite a hundred conquests, except for the spirit that, in this evening of time, has brought us here again. The old town within the walls of the citadel is crowded - with houses. The streets are three or four yards wide and fantastically crooked. ‘They are rarely level for more than ten feet. Steps lead up, steps lead down. Everywhere arches span the narrowest alleys. When [ 132 ] LAND OF ISRAEL the sunshine filters into the streets, the wells of radiance are cut by the sharp, large shadows of house and arch, man and beast. At night feeble lanterns twinkle at the doors of houses and synagogues and one walks, but for an occasional glint of starlight between roofs and arches, asin catacombs. By day the scene in the alleys is busy. There are markets and shops and cafés and the open bazaars of the Orient. The dignified idle Arabs, in fezzes or turbans and many colored, shabby robes, sit or crouch in the open cafés, smoking their nargilehs. Here in the wall is a potter at his primitive wheel; yonder is an oil- press turned as of old by a small, rough-coated ass. Arab women go by, holding their well-wrought water jugs beautifully upon their heads. Next comes a vendor of flat cakes or of sweets. Next a small, mobile, dark Sephardic Jew and behind him a giant—old, severe, Rembrandtesque—from far Galicia in a robe of bronze- colored velvet and a round, fur-brimmed hat. 'There are monks: Russians in tall birettas, Armenians in black hoods, Dominicans and Capuchins of the Western Church. There are Arab children and Arab beggars; and suddenly with rhythmic swing comes a gaunt, slow, tawny camel and throws its crooked shadow against arch and wall. In the strictly Jewish streets the shops are neater and the crowd is more orderly. But the division is not sharp. In front of the court-yard of a massive syna- gogue stands an Arab holding a shy and fragile gazelle in leash. The houses are the same, the stones are the same. When the eve of the Sabbath comes it is from all parts of the old city that Jews stream through the prison-like walls of the settlement of the Moroccan [ 133 ] ISRAEL Muslims to that harsh, stony, cramped enclosure which faces all that is left them of the brief days of their national splendor: the West wall of the Temple, the Wall of Wailing. The stones rise, layer upon layer. So huge are the stones that a tall man faces the middle of the second layer. ‘Their beveled edges are crumbled here and there; tufts of grayish grass grow out of the interstices. Hither the pious exiles of the House of Israel have come to mourn through the ages. Rome fell and Byzantium; America was discovered; great states arose and were cast down, the bugles and the tramplings of a hundred wars and persecutions passed by—passed by like a shadow, like a dream. Hither the exiles came to mourn —not for a Temple destroyed or a city taken or the passing of power, but for the menaced integrity of the spiritual life of a scattered nation. Hither they still come. Old men and women in the garb of the East of Europe. And some in white robes, and some wrapped in praying-shawls. Young men and women too in the dress of modern workers. They pray and chant with a rhythmic fervor, with a terrible aspiration. They will wring their rights from a stubborn universe. . . . More peacefully they kiss the stones. A crumpled, inconceivably old woman in apron and head-kerchief. passes in and out of the crowd offering men and women the refreshment of a whiff of sweet and pungent herbs. She will take no alms for her service. It is the eve of | the Sabbath. ... Above, so far above that no glimpse of it can be caught here at the bottom of the twenty-four layers of rock that are visible, lies that spacious and magnificent [ 134 | LAND OF ISRAEL rectangle in which stood the Temple, in which stand today and have stood for at least a thousand years the Dome of the Rock and the mosque of Al-Aqsa. The Moorish arcades, delicate yet strong, the slender cypresses, the raised central portion on which the Dome of the Rock stands, all serve to accentuate the free- dom and the beauty of this small plateau. No wonder that Solomon built his Temple here and Justinian a Basilica and the Muslims one of the most sacred of their shrines. Both of the mosques, though spoiled by unskilful restoration here and there, are of a dream- like loveliness. Mosaics and marbles and flower-like windows shimmer in the soft gloom of the great mosque. The columns are not all Moorish: the iron grill-work was left by the Crusaders; in the Al-Aqsa the Christian nave still dominates. Yet the final note is that of Moor- ish grace and elegance. It speaks the spirit of a civ- ilization that never had the mark of continuity or com- pleteness of power. It expresses little that belongs to the Palestinian Arab of today. Yet it is his and will remain his for all time. Whatever the future holds, we are content with the Wall of Wailing, the symbol of our exile and endurance; we are content with the stones of the field, the stones of the many barren fields of Palestine which no hand has touched for centuries, out of which we are building things better than temples— homes for men. The site of the Temple is not ours and the city is filled with the churches and the monasteries of the Chris- tians. Yet a modern and liberal Christian will feel, even as the Jew does, that Jerusalem, never abandoned [135 ] ISRAEL in spirit by us, is ours in fact once more. For the temples of mystic faiths are but historic monuments, like collections of beautiful old armor. And those who fear, or feign to fear for the Holy Places through a Jewish resettlement of Palestine, are not sufficiently aware of our rationalism of outlook. For generations innumerable we went to Jerusalem to pray and die. Those days are over; we go to work and live. . . Beyond the old walled city, beyond ruins, graves, temples, monuments, there is a new world. Stand on the Jaffa road in the great flood of light. All colors glow here—yellow and blue and orange turbans, the scarlet fez of an Arab on a donkey; the white shawls of the Bedouins of the desert gleam. But there are young men and women in the sobriety of Kuropean garb. They are the pioneers, the workers. And what they see is not shrine or sarcophagus, but stone to be quarried, fields to be digged, water and power to be brought into the wastes of this desolate land, new cities on hill-tops fronting the same old stars. They see a new Jerusalem, too. Not a city of mystic forms or golden stairs. A city of houses and parks and theaters and seats of learn- ing. The plans for that new city are laid and that city is being built. There are new houses and new quarters; there are schools and hospitals; there is the beauty of trees where for centuries no shade fell. Out in the limestone quarry Jews are lifting the stone from the earth—J ews who had done no such labor for two thousand years. And near the quarry and be- yond in the new quarters Jews are building houses. Un- til two years ago there was scarcely a Jewish builder [ 1386 | LAND OF ISRAEL in the world; there was no Jewish mason or stone-cutter. The charming Oriental houses adapted to modern needs which you see in Talpioth, in Beth Hakerem, houses on hills with graceful, arched verandas facing the imme- morial Jand—these houses are built by the hands of Jews. I went to the camp where the stone-masons live. The hand of the craftsman comes to understand and to love the material in which it works. They are polishing the limestone of Jerusalem. It gleams like marble; it is veined like marble. The craftsman becomes the artist. In front of the camp stood a tall, lithe, booted, bare- armed man with the head of a youthful prophet: deep- set eyes, tight black hair and short beard. Two years ago he was a law-student in Russia. He had never touched a chisel or a mallet. He began as a quarrier of stone. He stood there over a block of the polished limestone chiseling an urn. Everywhere you see those urns made by Jewish craftsmen. They have both dig- nity and beauty, both strength and’ grace. The tall man stood erect. He had no head-covering. He had grown into the land and its light, the stone of the land was living under his hands; he spoke, and the sonorous Hebrew sounded terse upon his tongue. East on the top of Scopus they are building too, these Jewish masons and cutters of stone. They are building the Hebrew University. The two completed buildings with their tall, airy rooms and arcades for cool- ness and vision stand in a grove of trees. Science is the first need of a new land, or in an old one that is to be reclaimed. ‘Thus the rooms of the university are labora- [137 ] ISRAEL tories today. Chemical, bio-chemical and micro-biologi- cal research is vigorously pursued. In the laboratories glisten the glass and steel of the most modern instru- ments from America and Germany. From these you turn to a window. The chemist or biologist who looks up sees in the distance the blue and mauve and brown hills of Moab. Nebo is one of the peaks—Nebo from which Moses saw the Promised Land. A little farther West lies the village in which Jeremiah was born and the hill where Samuel judged Israel and the city of Ai toward which Joshua once pointed his javelin. And from another window the vision embraces the Dead Sea like a great, glittering shield and the Jordan flow- ing between the hills. A micro-biologist bends over his test-tube. In the stable of an agricultural group in the valley of Jezreel the cattle are threatened with sickness. By the time that the sun sets over the Mediterranean the men of Jezreel must have an answer to their question of that morning: What ails their cattle; what are they to do? The answer will come to them. The man of science works with profound intensity. The land of Israel is waiting for his message; the dispersed of the house of Israel are waiting; the nations are waiting—none too friendly—for that message which shall help to reclaim the land. ... The new Jerusalem is not a city of temples and shrines. Let the Christians pray in their holy places and the Muslims guard forever the Dome of the Rock. Our holy place is the earth of the land and our city the city that we are building; our rock is the rock of work and vision which can be Scopus as well as Moriah, which ean be Tabor or Carmel by the sea.... [ 138 | LAND OF ISRAEL III South and east of Jerusalem stretch desert lands and the cities are desert cities. KEiverywhere centuries of neglect and war and spoliation have ruined the country. And here nature has been in league with man, For here one is on the edge of the original desert which must be fought and kept within bounds. The olive trees are dusty here and even the shaggy goats few. The golden sand flies in clouds upon the roadway. The caravans travel by night. One awakes and hears the soft, for- lorn tinkle of the camel bells. Kiven the South and the lands about the Dead Sea can be reclaimed. The Arabs plant no trees and do not dig deep and the black tents of the Bedouins who live by raising camels and asses are here today and gone tomorrow. ‘They seek the few natural oases or follow the sparse grasses that push through the sand. Our people have planted trees and watered fields and raised grain and almonds as far south as Ruchamah near Gaza. But the Southeastern country up to the Jordan valley and the shore of the Dead Sea lies desolate. It lies desolate today. But straight East from Jeru- salem it has a grandeur that is, strictly speaking, incom- parable. On the road from Jerusalem to Jericho one understands the Torah and the prophets; one under- stands the temper of Israel—austerity and passionate wildness, melancholy and agonized aspiration, the im- mitigable moral earnestness. .. . The road winds in sudden semi-circles, in bold parabolas in and out among the hills from the heights of Jerusalem down into the valley of the Jordan. The imagination itself is stag- [ 18? ISRAEL gered by these curves that have been cut into the sides of the mountains. The white road flees ahead of the fleeing car. Suddenly it is gone—gone apparently down dread abysses. The car turns. Again the wild white road flees ahead .. . flees . . . The mountains tower. Barren primordial mountains tawny in the di- rect unendurable light. Mountains dead and yet dread- fully alive. Is this some great herd of gigantic beasts, of super-mastodons suddenly petrified here by an up- heaval in the storms of creation? Or were there citadels and domes here of the giants, the Anakim of old, over which suddenly was flung a scarce imaginable covering of velvet colored like the lions of the waste? ‘The folds of the hills are like the falling folds of fabric. The tops of the hills are round. The crust of the earth seems here not crumpled, riven, torn by a catastrophe in nature, but rounded, curved, built to awe the spirit of man.... Down and down the road plunges; the hills fall. Far East gleams a white structure. It is the Nebi Musa which the Arabs feign to be that sepulcher of Moses which no man knoweth. Here they come in pilgrimage, thousands of them. They come at the time of the Pass- over in subtle protest against the Jews in the land.... The road ends and the car plows its way through heavy sand. Gone are the hills. Amid low dunes and harsh bushes shy young camels disport themselves. ‘The tents of the Bedouins to whom they belong are hidden in the hills behind. Then the dunes fall away too. The Dead Sea lies ahead. A great inland lake. One can see the flat shore and farther the mountains that lie beyond in Trans-J ordania. [ 140 ] LAND OF ISRAEL South the sea stretches farther than eye can reach. A small heavy, sullen tide beats at one’s feet. The surface of the water glitters as though a thousand spear-pointed crystals floated on it. The world is drenched in light, swallowed by the light. In the unendurable whiteness it lies preternaturally still. We stoop to pick up pebbles on the shore of the sea, pebbles abraded into beautiful strange shapes. We leave the shadow of the car and stroll on to where a few Arab huts stand on poles. In front of the huts three or four Arabs are loading sacks of grain on the backs of the kneeling camels. On small boats the grain is brought across the sea from Trans-Jordania. Here it is sent Westward. The Arabs crouch in the sand. Their heavy robes are stiff with filth. Children appear. Already their eyes are infected, blear with trachoma. They offer us little slabs of salt from the sea. They cry; Baksheesh! All Arab children do. We give them a handful of piasters. They dis- appear. Again the preternatural stillness. . . . Some day this shore will be peopled. A great wealth of potash and salt lies in the Dead Sea; the grain could be carried on ships and, transshipped by rail. We could give the Arabs a decent wage and our physicians and nurses could heal the eyes of their children and keep them from going blind. Some day.... We climb back into our car. It plows on through the sand. But soon the driving is a little easier. Trees appear. Weare nearing the Jordan. Here, under these now dusty willows, flows the crooked little river with a faint murmur among the reeds, with a soft plash about the keel of a single boat. Here where the water is shallow in the rainless season, Joshua and the children [141 ] ISRAEL of Israel are said to have forded the stream. A Greek hunter and watchman lives on this spot in a little com- pound. A fierce-looking, mustachioed man who rows tourists across from shore to shore. It matters little whether this is the exact spot where Israel forded the river. If the Old Testament stories are legends, the legends were invented with a punctilious regard for the topography of the land. From here the road leads straight to Jericho. Nebo towers in the distance. Israel marched from well to well until it came to the walls of the'city, ... 3 The car follows that line of march. The modern town of Jericho is little more than a large Arab village in an oasis. An effendi has built himself a house m a beautiful walled garden. Above the walls tower the cypresses, the recently imported banana-trees. In the shops of the village streets the small, dark, very sweet bananas are for sale. On the edge of the village lies the spring which made the ancient city and the modern village possible. West of the spring lie the ruins of the city that Joshua took. Perhaps the spring was within the walls. Here, as everywhere in Palestine, one gropes amid suppositions. Fantastically perched on a ledge half-way up the nearest mountain is a huge Russian monastery. The money that came into the land was spent on incantations. It is for us, some day, to dig below the ruins of Jericho and recover the record of this phase of the history of mankind. We must dig too into those knolls that stretch along the road. It is unbelievable that nature formed them thus or hewed them thus. Are they mounds, mounds of the pre- Israelitish Semites or of inhabitants still more remote? [ 142 ] LAND OF ISRAEL Did the Anakim build them or that strange race sym- bolized as sons of God descending unto the daughters of men? . . . Nothing is impossible here, nothing in- credible. .. . The mountains begin again. Here is the road up to Jerusalem.... Going south from Jerusalem the land is less formi- dable, less rugged. Here, indeed, it once bloomed like a garden. The desert had been conquered here, as it shall be conquered again. It was faring along this road to Bethlehem that Rachel, having borne Benjamin, died and Jacob erected a pillar over her grave. The tomb of Rachel that stands beside the road today has a Moorish arch and cupola. But that the spot has been uninterruptedly commemorated through ages during many of which no Jewish foot dared tread these paths, illustrates once more the tenacity with which our spirit, if not the body of our people, has possessed the land. A khan appears along the road—an open enclosure of crumbling masonry. Here the caravans and their driv- ers stop for rest. There is no tree. Arabs crouch in the sun. Camels stand by the wall. Somewhere there must be a little brackish water. Once water refreshed the earth here. For not far from the khan appear the pools of Solomon. The king had gardens here, gardens of palms and fig-trees and pomegranates. And in the garden he had built three large artificial pools. Small lakes with marble steps leading down into the water. You can see the dusk and the heavy stars drooping over the hills, and the queen who was the daughter of Pharaoh descending the steps to bathe. ... The momentary vision fades. In the great sunlight you see workmen in one of the pools. They are Jewish workmen repair- [ 143 ] ISRAEL ing the walls of the pool, whence water is to be led to refresh Jerusalem.... The road winds into Bethlehem. Here David fed his father’s sheep. ‘Today Bethlehem is a small Christian- Arab city; narrow, crooked, crowded streets, children and boys crying for baksheesh, men and women busy manufacturing amulets and rosaries and _ souvenirs. Hardly a tree. The sun smites down on the shadowless streets. The town lives by the Church of the Nativity. The Church is supported by pillars that were ancient when the Crusaders came and left their crosses carved on the capitals. An astonishing Byzantine altar with By- zantine saints on a gold background, with silver relief work. Down dim stairs you are guided into a cavern where the stable of the Nativity stands. But you cannot see wall or manger. Lamps and images and jejune ornaments bedizen the place. A prophet born in a manger. How that falls in with this austere land of Israel. The trappings of the Greek Church strike a false and trivial note... . Hebron, where this road ends, is a city of another kind. It is an Arab city. The Jewish community is not yet large. And the Arabs are fanatical and hostile. It, too, is treeless and sun-baked and stony. But gaunt corners of houses projecting into the streets and window- less walls and something severe and massive seems to keep true the character of this city whose antiquity stag- gers the mind. For here Abraham dwelt by the oaks of Mamre. One great oak, an oak of enormous girth, its brittle old branches supported by staves, stands in an iron enclosure and is shown as the tree under which he raised an altar to God. And here, too, in this city, [ 144 | LAND OF ISRAEL is the cave of Machpelah where Abraham and Sara, Jacob and Leah lie entombed. A huge, formless mosque has been built over the tomb of the patriarchs. A long flight of very ancient stone stairs leads upward. Dark, barefoot Arabs guard the stairs. No Jew must go be- yond the seventh step. The Arabs are in earnest. There is a fanatical gleam in their eyes. They point to a jagged hole in the ancient masonry. You may put your hand in and make a wish. You may, elsewhere in this gray and crumbling pile, look through something resembling a keyhole into a rude vault that is said to hold the tomb of Esau. For the privileges of the sev- enth step and the keyhole a fee is demanded. ‘The graves of our patriarchs we may not see. The mufti is ob- durate. Even the pleading of the American consulate no longer avails. . . . Here, as in the case of the Temple site, we are serene. The dark men who guard the stairs in Hebron attribute to us their own ways of thought. Some day they will learn that, though we are not with- out a proper reverence for the monuments of antiquity, we are beyond the age of miracle and magic. We do not buy absolution with olive leaves from a garden; we do not seek healing from the touch of a tomb. Work and justice must bring us the first; drainage and the Hadassah Medical service the second. Since we are dedicated by our history and character to a complete abstention from the exercise of force and the exertion of power, the continued Christian or Mohammedan pos- session of the memoried places of the land is a not unwelcome symbol of our national mood and our na- tional aspirations.... Hebron, in spite of all, is ours. Ours the earth and [ 145 ] ISRAEL the memories. Hither the spies of Joshua came, hither to Kiriath Avba, city of one of the kings of Anak. Here grew those clusters of the grape. Here, where the desert creeps in now, we shall cause the grapes to grow again. Joshua assigned the city as a city of refuge to be held by the priests, the children of Aaron. All our cities shall be cities of refuge from the peacelessness of the world hereafter. Yet the city will remember that David’s children were born here, that from here David first ruled the kingdom, that later Absalom called himself king in Hebron. Poetic and tragic memories gather here. .. . Today the desert sand sifts in. Street- vendors crouch in the sand. Blind beggars abound and children with the terrible beginnings of trachoma. The black-swathed Arab women bear burdens while their lords precede them, lolling on asses. But already a few tree-tops wave here and there—the trees that are in this land the symbol of the Jew. ... IV Jericho lies, hot and blazing, far below the level of . the sea. Hebron lies in the hills and cool winds sweep through the town. The nights are full of freshness here as in Jerusalem and the dewfall is heavy. But these cities are on the edge of the desert. North of Jerusalem the desert is at an end. In northern Judea, in the two Galilees the true character of the land is | revealed. ‘This is Palestine. . A country of hills. Even the narrow strip of level coastland is broken by the glory of Carmel. Between the coast and the valley of the Jordan the plains are [ 146 | LAND OF ISRAEL few. Whether it is the hill-country of Ephraim where the massive cone of Tabor towers, or Judza or Galilee in the north. The long, soft slopes of the hills are everywhere—the mauve, brown, tawny or golden hills. Except in the valley of Jezreel the roads are all moun- tain roads that curve and sweep in and out among the hills in circles, in loops, in beautiful, intricate patterns. The roads sweep along the sheer edges of the moun- tains; you look down and your heart leaps into your mouth. Stone bridges span abysses and the courses of water. The roads sweep on... . In Judea the hills were all terraced once and olive groves climbed to their very peaks. The softer, longer slopes of Galilee needed no terracing. But all the hill- sides of Palestine were forested or cultivated once and it takes no very powerful imagination to see this land as it will be if our work goes on—a green and irrigated land, a land of parks and pools, a land of mountain gardens and of hillside-fields, of blossoms of the almond and the orange everywhere, vineyards on all the south- ern slopes and of palm groves to the rim of the desert. For it is a mistake that the country is without water. The rain is seasonal but sufficient once proper means of preserving and distributing the water are found. The great reservoir of Lake Kinnereth, the smaller water of Merom, the Jordan rising in Northern moun- tains and flowing downward through the valley—these sources of irrigation have scarcely been touched. Nor must the two brooks farther west be forgotten nor the springs, like the famous spring of Harod, nor the possibility of digging artesian wells, nor the remark- able feat accomplished, for instance, by the people of [ 147 ] ISRAEL Nahalal. They drained the swamps; completely stamped out malaria in three years; gathered the drained water into reservoirs which irrigate thousands of dunams and thus quite literally turned a poisonous desert into a garden. Today the hills are still tan and red and yellow. Conquest after conquest, centuries of misrule, of neg- lect and sloth have done their worst. The forests were cut down or uprooted; no water was preserved; the rains carried the soil into the sea. Many of the hills are naked rock—majestic but barren. Yet ruined as the land is and hard to reclaim, there are everywhere spots that support one’s vision of the future. You drive from Tiberias to Safed. There is no more fan- tastic road in the world. Out of the glow of that tropical valley the car climbs up into the hills once more. ‘The radiant surface of the lake below is lost and seen again a dozen times. It disappears behind mountains; it shines again between the heights; it seems to follow and yet is lost. Here are thousands of acres of deserted land. It is no man’s land today. Not even wandering Bedouins come into these northern wastes. There is scarcely a village. There is no tree. High on the western shore of the lake is perched an Italian monastery. It, too, is deserted. The shutters | are closed. The hill-winds sweep through the arcades of the beautiful top story. No one wants this land. The Arabs have let it lie barren through the centuries. Today it is technically government land. Why is it not given to men like the men of Nahalal? . .. The car still climbs upward through the naked hills. Suddenly a point of green appears. It grows into a patch, into [ 148 ] LAND OF ISRAEL acres; it lifts the heart as only in a desolate land trees and water can lift it. On a saddle of the hills, miles from their fields of grain, their almond groves and their vineyards the people of Rosh-Pinah have planted a lit- tle forest of the eucalyptus. The long, drooping branches wave in the wind; the waste is no longer a waste. The eucalyptus which the Arabs call the Jew- ish tree is here. The future is here, the forest coolness of days to come. ... The hills in Juda and lower Galilee are not so high. Here the country is more thickly settled and shows its most characteristic ap- pearance. Here the roads are more level and one can loiter to look upon the land. ... A village of Arab fellaheen, or peasants. 'The huts are grayish-white, built of mud and mortar. They are small, irregular cubes, more like tombs than houses. They huddle together or are connected by crumbling walls, so that the village straggles up the hillside in a compact, irregular, in- extricable mass. Windows are few. The door-holes are dark and cavernous. Some of the flat roofs are of mud, some thatched with rotting straw. There is no tree. By the walls men sit in the sun crosslegged. . A few children play feebly. A woman is grinding corn between two stones. An ass nibbles a dry wayside shrub. . . . Beyond the village, at the foot of the hill, stretch a few ragged fields. A man is plowing. He has a bullock hitched to a wooden plow. The grind- ing of the corn, the plowing of the field have not changed in a hundred generations. . . . Still farther on, if the village is lucky, there is a grove of small orange trees. Near the orange-grove is the well used for irrigation and a tired, dispirited camel walks [ 149 | ISRAEL round and round and round turning the handle of the primitive irrigation pump... . If the village is large there is a mosque with a tiny cupola somewhere in the coil of huts and a minaret rises from it which is rude in the sun but will be beautiful at dusk when the hills turn purple and the sky rose and the heavy stars appear... . The village is listless. The squatters in the sun hardly move. People along the road are unaware of time. A man, sitting sidewise on an ass, trots at a snail’s pace. It will take him a long, hot day to ride from Nazareth to Nablus. ... iAnother on his ass leads a camel on which are all his household goods: a few sacks, a few earthenware jars, a few bits of brass. His wife trudges behind the camel in the deep sand. . . . Suddenly there is a rattling. A wagon full of grain or fruit drawn by two vigorous mules. A youth- ful driver with a face full of intelligence and energy. In the back of the wagon two others: bare arms and throats, taut muscles, sunbrowned by labor in the open fields despite near-sighted eyes and the foreheads of thinkers. Chaluzim. These are our people... . The road turns and the Arab village disappears. Across well-cultivated fields appear the barracks and houses of a Jewish colony. The houses are roofed with | orange tiles, and these orange tiles will soon be as char- acteristic of the land as the cube-like Arab huts. Trees appear: the inevitable eucalyptus that drains swamps, but also the broad-leaved figtree, the almond and olive, the peach tree and the palm. Beyond the fields lies an orange-grove and from afar comes the inimitable melancholy sound—half cry, half wail—of the mechani-| [ 150 ] LAND OF ISRAEL eal irrigation pump. In the immediate foreground olive trees border the field. A group of pickers is at work: vigorous girls in neat white head-kerchiefs, youths in open blouses. The car stops. Shalom! They smile and give us handfuls of olives. ‘They are bringing to the land, they are bringing to themselves life and Peace aids The road goes on. Barren places again. At long intervals the single palm and well that mark a saint’s or nebi’s tomb. Here and there not too far from the road black tents woven of goat’s wool—tents of the Bedouins. .. . A caravan of camels, a motor-car once in a long while; an Arab effendi on a horse. Under his biretta of crimson velvet his eyes are severe. . Arab villages. . . . Stretches of desert hill and narrow valley. . . . Suddenly woods and water and green fields and the orange-colored roofs of Jewish houses and the plaintive cry of the pumps. . . . Huge cactus, slender date-palm, mysterious cypresses behind a crumbling wall... The murmur of water in orange-groves. . . . Olives on a few hillsides and again the naked hills. ... The ocean of light, shadowless light by day; the large and liquid stars by night... . Palestine... . The road winds into cities, the cities of the West and North: Jaffa with Tel-Aviv, of which I shall speak later; Haifa which lies at the foot of Carmel; Tiberias and Safed which became in late exilic times the seats of scholars and mystics and were accounted holy cities. Jaffa, bright, busy, rattling, half-Europeanized, lies by the harbor that is, unluckily, guarded and made dif- ficult of access by the fabled rocks of Andromeda. Arab cafés and shops full of brass utensils line the streets. [151] ISRAEL The barefoot burden-bearers, mighty men who can shoulder huge packing-cases and pianos, swarm about with their flat feet and padded backs. Ramshackle carriages rattle over the stones. Here is the immi- gration station at which the greater part of the three thousand Jewish immigrants a month arrives. This is the gate of the land. From here road and train go to the colonies and settlements, to Jerusalem in the south, to Haifa in the north... . An exact semi-circle of hills, rising to the “excel- lency of Carmel,” holds in its arms the beautiful harbor of Haifa. Carmel rises at the southern edge and on the narrow plain at its foot the city is built. Across the bay at the north lies Acre, once made famous by the Crusaders, now a dwindling Arab town. The hills about the bay are blue and golden; when the light fades they turn first amethyst, then mauve. The bay has the iridescence of all Southern waters. Beyond its deep and broad expanse the Mediterranean rolls with a muffled roar. The scene has amplitude and gran- deur. But it is not formidable. It is clothed in soft- ness as with a cosmic garment of gold. Winding, white-walled roads gradually ascend the mountain to which Elijah gathered the tribes of Israel to make their choice between Jehovah and the gods of the strangers. From every point on these roads the harbor and the town are visible. At night the in- numerable lights of the town are magical through vel- vet darkness under the rich, white stars. But it is per- haps morning that is loveliest from the top of Carmel. The freshness of air and water is exquisite; the light [152] LAND OF ISRAEL glows without burning; the green and blue and gold of the scene are still delicate and restrained. A wind from the sea rustles in the fragrant pines and the tops of the cypresses sway with a grave and gentle motion. From afar floats the trampling of long breakers on the beaches. There is just enough sound to make the silence audible. Mountain, city and bay melt into the eye which, having seen this spot, cannot but remember it forever. . . . “Thy head upon thee is like Carmel,” the poet of the Song of Songs said of the prince’s daugh- ter. Carmel is still the symbol of ultimate beauty in the land of Israel. And people are gathering there to study and to live. A college of liberal arts should soon join the admirable technological institute in Haifa. The orange-colored roofs of our new suburbs and set- tlements increase in number daily. From Haifa to Tiberias on the shore of Lake Kin- nereth one travels, as one does from Jerusalem to Jericho, eastward and from high mountains into deep valleys. So deep is the Jordan Valley that stretches from Kinnereth to the Dead Sea, that one changes from a temperate mountain climate to a sub-tropical one. Snow lies on Hermon, beyond the Syrian border; the winds of the sea are cool over Carmel; Tiberias glows in an eternal Summer. The city was built to be the capital of the Tetrarchate of Galilee. But little can be seen today that recalls the Hellenistic period. A ruined Arab fortress fronts the lake. Conventional Arab townhouses with thick walls and airy arches stand on crooked streets. Since over sixty per cent of the population is Jewish there are many European houses [153 ] ISRAEL and many trees. From the verandas of the houses one sees the blue lake with its vigorous surf and the misty mountains to the north and west. From very ancient times Tiberias has been a Jewish city. It be- came the center of spiritual authority after the destruc- tion of the Temple; the Mishna and Jerusalem Talmud were completed here. In later ages men of great name came to the city. North of it lie buried Maimonides and Rabbi Akiba. On the shore of the lake, near an immemorial synagogue is the grave of Rabbi Meir baal Ness. To this house of study men still repair. A group of Polish Jews in black caftans and long ear- locks may be seen loitering upon the yellow sand by the lake. A little beyond the old house of study, shut in by rude structures of masonry, are the famous hot springs. Jews and Arabs use the baths. The water flows into the lake; you may plunge a hand into the hot and healing stream. In Autumn the air still burns a little. But the winter climate is like that of Florida or the Riviera. The pines and mountain roads and bathing beaches of Haifa, the palms and hot springs and lake shore of Tiberias—these form no small part of the potential wealth of Palestine. There are no lovelier or healthier winter resorts in the world. The Arabs let them lie lonely and barren. A new period begins. ...... By that fantastic road through the mountains along the lake one reaches Safed, the northmost city of the land. One of the highest, too. It is built on a hill that rises thirty-five hundred feet above the sea. ‘The houses straggle up and down the hillside. Cool winds [ 154 | oa LAND OF ISRAEL blow. Arab and Jew mingle in the sun-drenched streets. Safed, too, is a sacred city. Again and again in the course of time the Jewish community rose to fame. In the sixteenth century Rabbi Isaac Luria lived here and the mystic teachings of the Kabbala went forth from this hill. The Jews here are still pious. In a newly built house, the house of a man who spoke Russian and German and English, I met for the first time a Russian ger, one of those many thousands of Russian peasants who, far from the pale of residence, from Jewish teaching or example, came in their strange primitive way to the conclusion that Jesus had not abrogated the law of his fathers. Therefore these peasants traveled far and sought out rabbis and after seven years of the most rigid testing underwent cir- cumcision and with their wives and children entered the House of Israel. Some of them came to Palestine. Their prayerbooks are in Russian. They are poor now. But every hand stretched out to them is a help- ing hand. They are gerim, sojourners. The command to treat the sojourner even as the home-born is kept. ... From Safed we drove back to Haifa and saw once more that incomparable scene and watched the morn- ing there once more. Through Nazareth we drove, by Miriam’s well, through the valley of Jezreel where the new life is strong and hopeful, through the Arab city of Jenin, through Nablus which is the Shechem of old days, back under a clear sickle moon and the scarcely imaginable stars to Jerusalem. . . . We had seen the desert cities and the Dead Sea; we had seen the trees of Metulla, farthest north of our colonies, [ 155 | ISRAEL from the hill-top of Safed. ... A small land and a poor land. Yet not so poor but that it can harbor a few mil- lions of our people; not so small or so poor but that, as in ancient days, it can give birth to ideas that man- kind will not willingly let die. ... [ 156} CHAPTER V, EARTH AND FOLK I THE notion of reclaiming and resettling Palestine is not new. Neither is the notion that to conquer Galuth, the dispersion, not only as an outer but as an inner fact, it is necessary for the Jew to regain con- tact with the earth. All through the ages there have been periodic returns and resettlements. But these were mainly religious in motive and character. What differentiates the various movements of the last forty- five years from all others is the growing conviction that, in the various alien and often hostile civilizations in which the Jew has dwelt, there has been a loss of both human dignity and national creative power. To regain these—thus the argument runs—it is necessary to normalize the situation of the Jewish people: to establish a peasantry on the soil of Eretz Israel, to create for the Jew that blending of native land and native speech which is the mark of other national cul- tures, to liberate him thus from the constant and un- ending friction that, at best, belongs to the life of every minority group. I shall not enter into an analysis or criticism of this argument yet. Its force must be clear to every reflec- tive mind. Its weakness lies, aside from insuperable practical obstacles, in its insistence upon the normali- [ 157 | ISRAEL zation of the position of the Jewish people. But if the facts of human experience have any meaning it is clear from the history of Israel during the period from the Babylonian captivity to the present day that it is, in no figurative sense, a peculiar people, that its posi- tion is, in point of fact, unique and that its function- ing upon the scene of human history is inseparable from that uniqueness. Yet I am as anxious for the _upbuilding of Palestine as any radical Zionist. For about that upbuilding, about that ideal and that task, have been gathered the most positive forces that Jewry has known for generations. The task and the ideal have vivified the national and cultural consciousness of the scattered tribes. Through them negation of oneself becomes affirmation, fear is exchanged for loy- alty, cringing for a just pride, forgetfulness for self- recollection. Palestine has healed thousands of souls, it has spread the sense of national and human dignity to the remotest regions of the dispersion; it has given us recognition as a people and a place in the councils of the nations. It is self-recovery; it is salvation. ‘The upbuilding of the land is the historic task of the Jew- ish people of this age. If we fail we fail the world, we fail ourselves; we lapse back into a moral helotage unknown since the darkest periods of our history. We dare not and we cannot fail... . The earliest modern colonists, largely financed by Edmond de Rothschild and the Jewish Colonization Association established by Baron Hirsch, came from those Russian circles of the “Friends of Zion’ who, after the massacres of 1879 to 1882 despaired of Eu- rope, despaired of the palliatives of protest and charity [ 158 ] EARTH AND: FOLK and, under the leadership of Leo Pinsker, revived the ancient Jewish doctrine of auto-emancipation. Many years were to pass before Theodor Herzl was to issue his now historical call for complete national self-recol- lection: to gather the first Jewish Congress at Basel (1897) and to found the Zionist Organization which first unofficially but today by international agreements is the sole spokesman and representative of the Jewish people. The early colonists were isolated and forlorn groups. They fought the desolate soil, swamp and fever, the tyranny and chicanery of the Turk. No wonder that the life of the settlements was precarious, that it often seemed doubtful whether they could en- dure. There had been, furthermore, no special prep- aration of the people for the land; there was not even an experimental basis in economic or agricultural theory. Yet the settlements did endure; they repre- sented a foothold in Palestine. Their moral value was inestimable. They are almost venerable places today: the magnificent agricultural school and settlement of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. Mikveh Israel, a place of dusky groves and avenues of trees, broad fields, rich vineyards; Rosh-Pinah near the sacred city of Safed; the famous colonies that cluster on the coast- land north and south of Jaffa—Petach-Tikvah, Rishon- le-Zion, Nes-Ziona and Rehoboth. These colonies were all founded on the basis of private ownership and the buying of labor in the open market of the land. Associations, like that of the winegrowers, were of course formed. Nevertheless, the struggle of the individual farmer was severe. Nor was this all. The employment of Arab labor threat- [ 159 ] ISRAEL ened to recreate a certain phase of Galuth represented by the Jewish employer and the non-Jewish worker. Thus the cry of exploiter and exploited might easily, however unjustly, have been raised. Successful ef- forts have been made in recent years to mend these conditions. On National Fund lands the Keren Haye- sod has established settlements of Yemenite Jews at Rishon-le-Zion, Rehoboth and Petach-Tikvah. In ad- dition, Chaluzim have been settled on neighboring lands who can undertake the seasonal work on the old farms and plant trees and cultivate fields and raise poultry and cattle of their own. The old habit of employing Arab labor has not been wholly abandoned. The fel- lah is cheap; and since he comes from a neighboring village of his own, the employer has no responsibility toward him beyond the prompt payment of the daily wage. But with the increased immigration of agri- culturally trained Jewish workers this evil, a very real one, tends to disappear. Petach-Tikvah, Gate of Hope, is the oldest and largest of the early colonies. Over four thousand peo- ple live here in the long well-shaded village streets. Old eucalyptus forests with their white stems and wil- lowy, drooping branches give health and coolness. ‘The little Yakon River furnishes water for the many orange- groves. ‘The low stone houses along the streets still have something of that air of the Galician exile which — clings to these old settlements. But beyond the streets are pleasanter houses with airy verandas from which one sees the ruins of Antipatris and the long line of the Judean hills. Here one can walk through a long avenue of cypresses into a garden and drink tea with [ 160 ] EARTH AND FOLK one’s host beside a fountain. Here are palms and flowers and from the roof of the spacious house behind, the doves flutter through the mild air. The orange- grove borders the garden and one hears the cry of the pump and the gurgle of water in the irrigation trenches. Behind the house are neat stables for the cattle and in the barn one’s host shows the fruit of his first tobacco harvest. He has been here for forty years. He was here in those early days when the colonists lived in a hill-village. For where these groves and fields and gardens are were swamps poisonous with malaria. He is gnarled and hardy. A Jewish pioneer who has fought the wilderness and won the fight. A profound satisfaction breathes from him. Will Eng- land keep her moral engagements in Palestine? He waves the question aside. It is, thank God, no longer the Turk. “He is pioneer, farmer, thinker, too. He speaks Russian and German and, of course, Hebrew. He has been through much—through the Turkish con- scription of his sons, through the Arab attack of 1921. An intrepid and yet quiet spirit. He has literally turned the wilderness into a garden; he has reclaimed a por- tion of Eretz Israel and set an example to the gen- erations to come. Now he tells us has come the age of a Jewish and a quiet life in the old land. A Jew. He has conquered his piece of earth, but he does not dream of power or force. He dreams of the creative activities of the Jewish spirit for his posterity, for his people, for mankind... . The other old colonies stretch south and east of Jaffa. Most famous of them is Rishon-le-Zion with its great wine-cellars built by Rothschild—huge caves [ 161 ] ISRAEL under the earth in which the wine ripens in endless rows of casks. Some of the great casks hold thirty to forty thousand liters. The aroma of the wine rises pleasantly into the head and, coming from the cellars, the trees and houses lie mellow in the golden atmos- phere. In spite of impoverishment in Europe and pro- hibition in America, the wine-growers are recovering from the ruinous depression of the war. The acute French manager is very sure of the future of both the land and its wines. “The independence of Egypt, the French power in Syria: the collapse of Russia, the American exclusion of immigrants—these things are bringing the Meshiach. . , .” The road to Rehoboth is sandy before the winter rains and must be traveled by mule-cart. It is still cool in the woods of Rishon-le-Zion; it is pleasant to see the neat little houses of the Yemenites, their special syna- gogue, the dark small slender graceful people who, cut off from the rest of Jewry for ages, have brought hither their piety, their industry, their ancient and beautiful craftsmanship. Beyond their quarter the Palestinian road begins. At this season to drive here is like plow- ing through dunes. Our driver, a tall spare native Palestinian, urges his mule on in Hebrew and Arabic. The colony is left behind and, even in this fertile region, something like desert land begins. One meets desert people. Bedouins grave and graceful on their sway- ing camels ride by. The rich saddles and many-colored hangings of the camels are brilliant in the sunlight. They pass. From among the low sand-hills on the right emerges quite suddenly a little group of Bedouin women on foot. They are not veiled like the women [ 162 | ~ EARTH AND FOLK of the fellaheen. Their faces are tattooed; over fore- head and nose they wear hangings of silverwork and old coins and one or two of them have golden nose- rings. They are small and quick and soft in their movements like the lizards that scurry across the road. Their long black pitifully filthy robes trail in the heavy sand and one can see, now and then, the motion of their small brown feet. At a bend of the road they vanish. But soon the dunes on one side of the road disappear and a desert field stretches to the low hills beyond. In the middle of the field are black tents— the square tents of the Bedouins. We clamber from our cart and walk over to the tents. A small woman kneels in the sand. She is weaving the black tent- cloth of goat’s wool on a loom that is merely a little frame in the sand. Behind her another is pounding grain between two stones. The women arise and others come out of the tents. A few children, too. The Bedouins are friendly near the colonies. There is so much chance to steal. The tattooed faces of the women have a shy, dusky comeliness. Their wrists and hands are tiny. Their black eyes shine. We look into the tents. A few bags for sleeping. A broken piece of ._shoddy European furniture. We cannot go into the tents for fear of vermin. But there are craftsmen in the desert. The women wear charming things. Through our driver who speaks Arabic and pats the little women on their ring-like turbans we chaffer with them. I buy some old, beautifully wrought silver, a few primitive rings, a bracelet, a chain woven of cloves and pieces of old amber. I ask one of the women whether the child beside her is her own. She shakes her head and [ 163 ] ISRAEL smiles sadly. “I had one. It died. I have no other. I think God is not at peace with me.” We drive on through the heavy, burning sand. Sud- denly shadows fall across the path—shadows in this weary land. ‘The Jewish tree? Yes, it is a eucalyptus grove. The desert is a desert no more. From the trees comes a group of Chaluzim. Young men stripped to the waist. Newcomers who want to get sun-tanned and, so, sun-hardened as soon as may be. Roadworkers. Next season this will be no desert-road but a well- kept chaussée, and motor-cars will spin up and down it. The Chaluzim wave to us. Shalom! Morning and evening and through the bitter burning of the noon- time, through want and inconceivable hardship— Shalom! Work, hope, peace... . The eucalyptus disappears and tall bushes of the mimosa line the sandy road. ‘The mimosas are in bloom. Innumerable little tufts of gold hang on the bushes and fall into the deep sand. Then we see palms and tall oaks and an archway of stone. Nes Ziona! We drive through the archway. The irrigation pump is beside it. We see a high reservoir of masonry. On its edge stands a youth—stripped, cast in bronze. One moment he stands poised. He plunges into the cool water of the reservoir. ... The plash of water, the murmur of running water, the rustling of trees in the wind. .. . You do not know what these things are until you come to a desert country, a land that has been permitted to lapse back into the ever-hungry desert. . . . For hours we had been on that road, our wheels in the sand often to the axles. ‘The sun had beaten down on us and the unsparing light whipped [ 164 ] EARTH AND FOLK our eyes. The mule was covered with foam and its eyes had a hurt, strained look in them. . . . And then the shade of trees and the coolness of water in Nes Ziona. ... We walked into the orange-grove. An old man stood among the trees leading the water, the fresh, running spring water from one ditch to another. The trees were full of fruit, still deep green but ripe. Our Palestinian driver assured us that they were best before they turned yellow. We plucked them from the trees and ate them and listened to the heavenly rustle of the trees, to the plash and murmur of water.... Beyond the groves and fields of Nes Ziona we drove on to Rehoboth, a large and pleasant village with houses in gardens, with its synagogue on a hill to the north, with trees of the pine, the olive, the cypress and the almond. Here, too, as in most of the old colonies the Keren Hayesod has added Yemenite workers and pioneers from the West. Here, too, the long years of struggle are coming to an end and you feel in the air a country peace of vine and fig-tree and of men and women resting against their mother earth... . The history of the old individualistic colonies is one of mistakes, of heroic suffering, heroic endurance, often heroic failure. The new Zionist methods and resettle- ments, the new scientific agriculture are at last mak- ing them steadily safe and profitable. Yet the service of those old colonies, even in their hardest days, was an inestimable one. ‘They proved that this ruined and desert land could be made to blossom; they showed that it could be made to blossom through the labor of Jews. They furnished the fundamental proof of the possi- bility of the upbuilding of Palestine. ‘Their sufferings [ 165 } ISRAEL and their labors helped, at a crucial hour of history, to win from the nations our right in the homeland of our race. II The differences between the old and the new colonies are differences in origin and economic structure. All other differences arise from these two. ‘The old colo- nies depended on individual philanthropists; the new depend on the concerted efforts of the Jewish people in all parts of the world. In 1901, the Keren Kayemeth Leyisrael was founded, the Jewish National Fund for the purchase of land in Palestine. The land purchased by it is the inalienable possession of the Jewish people. Parcels are assigned to colonies or colonists as lease- holds personal or hereditary. But even as Leviticus declares that the land shall not be sold in perpetuity, since it is God’s, so the Palestinian land acquired by the Jewish National Fund cannot be alienated, since it is the nation’s. A second fund for the upbuilding of the land, the now famous Keren Hayesod, was founded in 1920. It provides the means for the Pal- estinian budget, both economic and cultural. It founds colonies, trains colonists, supports the educational sys- tem, reforests barren lands and drains swamps, co- operates with the Hadassah medical service—in brief, carries out all the cultural and economic tasks of the governmental agency of a colonizing nation. It is strictly speaking impossible to overestimate the moral effect both on the new colonies and on the Jews in Galuth of these two funds or organizations. The Chaluz or pioneer in the poorest or newest settlement, [ 166 ] BA Ray AND: OE housed worse than his cattle, living on hard and in- sufficient fare, laboring in the unaccustomed heat of a semi-tropical climate, feels that he is supported and sustained by his fellow-Jews in almost every habitable land of the earth, that he is symbol, emissary, ful- fillment of hope and yearning to thousands upon thousands of his scattered race. The moral effects of the activity of the two funds upon its participants have been equally notable and will be fully discussed further on. What must be abundantly clear at once is that the new colonies, as conscious and codperative experiments of a great though scattered group of people welded together by the fire of an idea, are founded on the basis of new assumptions, new methods, new aims. The difficulties endured by the older colonies were closely studied. It was found that the conquest of this land, the sale of its products in the markets of the world, the cultural institutions necessary for a Jew- ish communal life, could not be sustained by the acci- dental codperations withm an individualistic society. For here was no finished social structure into which people could filter and find their place. And, indeed, the existence of such a structure would have repro- duced the conditions of Galuth. The ruin and deso- lateness of the land was and is to us its glory and its opportunity. Here the creative effort of the Jew must build first the very soil he is to dig, bring the very water that is to make it tillable, fight the diseases of man and beast and plant which to the natives had been mere objects of superstitious fear. Here stones had to be broken and roads to be built and sand dunes turned into forests. A whole generation of individual [ 167 ] ISRAEL pioneers might have perished of malaria. Only co- operative groups could hope to survive and succeed. And this necessity fortunately fell in not only with the modern but with the immemorial Jewish dream of social justice and economic peace. To the descendants of those ancients who demanded the release from bond- age, the return of every man to his own and the for- giveness of debts in Sabbatical years and years of Jubilee, as they had instinctively founded and led all modern movements toward the socialization of man’s economic life, it seemed but natural that in the land of Israel codperation and not competition should be at the basis of the social structure. Practical necessities and ideological tendencies coincided. From this coinci- dence the new colonies arose. The new colonies are, broadly speaking, of two types: the Kvuzah or purely cooperative group and Moshav Ovdim (Settlement of Workers) or group of codpera- tive leaseholders. ‘There are minor distinctions. Per- haps the most important both economically and cul- turally is that between the small and restricted and the large and unrestricted Kvuzah. And for seekers after a new and better way of human life this distinction is one of great import. Nor need I hesitate to say that my personal sympathies go out strongly to those who hold that a healthy commune must be a commune of tested and harmonious and eongenial spirits, and that one which opens its doors to all, however worthy in other respects, will soon loosen its grasp upon common ideals and degenerate from a group into a crowd. But for my present purpose it suffices to indicate this as an example of the stirring questions which, after the long [ 168 ] EARTH AND FOLK days of labor in road or field, in barn and smithy, ex- ercise the minds of the Jewish pioneers. The new colonies then are either Kvuzoth or Moshavei Ovdim. The former are purely communistic settle- ments. But I must add at once that the word com- munistic is here to be taken literally and to be stripped of all political connotations. The colonists are not in- terested in the class struggle; they stand in no oppo- sition to the industrialists and merchants of the towns; they have, above all, no impulse toward imposing their experimental adventures in new forms of living upon others. I do not mean that there are no parties or diverging views in Palestine. Both the Poale Zion (Workers of Zion) and the Hapoel Hazair (Young Worker) groups stand four-square upon the more or less accepted basis of Socialist doctrine. But all workers, whether in the colonies or in the towns, are primarily dedicated to the upbuilding of Palestine through creative Jewish effort and are prepared at any time to sink both doctrine and practice into the demands of this ultimate and supreme goal. The most recent but already extraordinarily suc- cessful type of colony is the Moshav Ovdim. In this type of colony each family is assigned in hereditary leasehold as much land as it can work. The vegetable garden and poultry yard are near the dwelling house; the fields of vine or grain or tobacco le farther off. Two fundamental principles govern the Moshav Ovdim. One is the elimination of hired labor. In case of need the colonists help each other. The second principle is that of codperative management, buying and selling. Thus the business manager, the physician [ 169 ] ISRAEL and apothecary, the various necessary mechanics serve the group which gains all the advantages of codpera- tion without that loss of the more traditional kind of family life which, at least to the observer, the structure of the Kvuzah entails. Before proceeding to a description of individual colonies or groups of colonies I must dwell on a final and most important characteristic of all the new rural settlements in the land. Since these settlements are planned by the nation through the Zionist Organiza- tion and its funds, their character is never haphazard, their well-being and future are left to chance in practi- cally no respect. The land for a new colony is care- fully selected; the settlers are carefully selected and grouped. Then plans are drawn up. The new settle- ments will all be garden villages or garden cities. They will be beautiful; they will be beautiful in a way that is suitable to the landscape, the climate, the social structure. In Jerusalem the admirable Richard Kauf- mann draws plans and sees the vision of each individual colony. The landscape gardening and the architecture will in each case be adapted to the terrain of the in- dividual colony. But one broad principle governs all these plans: each village or town will be grouped about some height on which will stand library, school, temple. A tiny acropolis will crown each settlement from which streets will melt into gardens and gardens into fields and forests. . . . Today, alas, none of these plans are much more than plans. Except in the suburbs of the cities Kaufmann’s dreams remain dreams. The Jewry of the world has not yet wholly awakened to the neces- sity and duty of that great national and creative act [170 ] EARTH AND FOLK which must be done in Palestine both for Israel and for mankind... . A little northwest of Jerusalem on the Jaffa road lies the Kvuzah of Kiriat Anavim, the city of grapes. Woods and well tilled fields and wooden bee-hives in a broad meadow lead to a large farmyard. On the eastern side of the yard stand the living barracks of the one hundred people who cultivate the four thou- sand dunam (circa one thousand acres) assigned to them. The one-story barracks are of unpainted wood, browned by sun and rains. Flowers and shrubs are planted beside them. But they are rude inside as well as out. Iron beds of the plainest and hardest stand in the sleeping barracks. In the dining hut which serves all social purposes rough benches without backs stand beside the long rough heavy wooden table. A few unframed prints are tacked to the brown walls. The floor is broken here and there. At one end of the dining barrack, in a large wooden cupboard, is stored the one wealth of these pioneers—a small library of well-thumbed books. Beyond the eating hut and the kitchen are a few tiny separate rooms for the mar- ried couples. ‘These rooms are very neat, well-scoured as is every place and object in the settlement, but as stripped of any appliance of ease as the cells of the severest monastic order. A better built hut houses the babies and tiny children and the trained nurses that care for them. But the terrible ecomomy that must be practised reduces everything here, too, to the sole standard of hygiene and safety from the weather. To live here and toil here requires a strength and austerity of soul, a patience and a fortitude before which praise : [171 ] ISRAEL itself falls silent. For it must never be forgotten that the men and women in these Kvuzoth are not hard- ened and insensitive peasants. They are city-people, students, thinkers, with nerves made sensitive by gen- erations of persecution, with minds made acute by two thousand years of study and meditation, with senses that cry out for beauty and music and modulated speech. Jews... It is upon seeing such a scene as the dining-barrack of Kariat Anavim, that I have felt as though no man, having seen it, could wait to go to the Jews of America and say: Forget names and the names of policies and divisions of opinion that last a year. Here are people of our blood destroying Ghetto and exile, destroying them not by futile argument but by the creative act of an heroic life. Who shall say hereafter of the Jew that he is unproductive and sloth- ful and can live by barter and by chaffering alone? The way of these pioneers could be made a little less barren. ‘Their progress could be made less painfully slow. They will be independent in good time. They are but breaking the new earth of the land today. Do not haggle; do not ask; give. .. . At the northern end of the farmyard stand the stables and barns. These are built not of wood but of concrete. The cattle and the harvest must be well- housed. ‘The cow-barn is of the most modern and ap- proved type. Miulk and butter, honey, fruits and table- grapes are the chief products of this colony. The colonists show their calves with pride. They are cross- ing Kuropean cattle with the native Arab stock. Thus they are producing a breed that can stand the climate and give as much milk as a Jersey or a Holstein. Every- [172 ] EARTH AND FOLK thing has to be created—the breeds of cattle and poul- try, the soil and the shade. ... A young man from the Kvuzah looked across the fields. “We could be more productive if we had additional agricultural machinery, a few more head of cattle—a little, just a little more. For we here—we have only our hands. .. .” . Just north of Rishon-le-Zion is situated the girls’ Kvuzah of Nachlat Yehudah. Eighteen girls from Central and Eastern Europe under the leadership of Hannah Cezek live here and cultivate one hundred dunam of land. All that the Keren Hayesod could spare them was a loan of four hundred and fifty pounds. They built two sheds and bought some second-hand tents. They bought a few cows and chickens and pro- ceeded to establish a tree-nursery. When the rains of the first winter set in the tents were soaked and the girls fell ill, They had to take to sleeping in a neighboring colony and walking to and from their work. They walked in bare feet. They had no money for shoes, which are dear. ‘They were paying back the loan of the Keren Hayesod; they were planning to buy a bull and more chickens. They wanted to be- come economically productive at any cost. At the end of their first year they had paid back three hundred and sixty pounds and had bought their poultry and their bull. They had a tree-nursery of one hundred thousand saplings. They had a well-equipped poultry yard. They were still barefoot and still sleeping in tents and a little afraid of the rains of the second winter. I stood with the leader and a group of the girls beside a shed, near flowers that had been planted, near the [ 173 ] ISRAEL endless rows of the tree-nursery. Women not with- out cultivation of the mind and heart, nurtured in touch with all that the great centers of European civilization offer, full of the natural grace of girlhood. . . . They had, in their old lives, known nothing of these things. They were, they told me laughing, forced to find an agricultural technique with the soul. . . . They were finding it. Their cattle and poultry are flourishing. What exercised their minds was the stupid fact that the earthen-ware pots for the tree-nursery were still being imported and not manufactured in Eretz Israel. It was not they who complained of the barrenness of their dining and living shed, of the tents, of their bare feet. It was my friend and guide who pointed out these things. Why had those girls come here? A fundamental question. For it must never be forgot- ten that the Chaluzim and Chaluzoth, the young pioneers of both sexes, are the best, the strongest in mind and body, the most capable of high idealism and high devotion from the countries of their birth. The half-hearted, the compromisers, the selfish, the intent on their own profit do not come. Perhaps the answer is that which a friend in Jerusalem, an American, gave for himself. It is the spiritually sensitive who come here and brave these hardships and, often enough, fling away life and health, for the sake of inner harmony, inner oneness. ‘They have not fled the outer struggle of Galuth. They are the type who would have suc- ceeded in the struggle. The hardships of the body are here. They have escaped the false position, the moral discomfort, the thousand restraints and inhibi- tions and subtle injustices of their old lives. Here [174 ] EARTH AND FOLK they stand upon their own earth; they are among their own folk. Life takes on a new freedom and natural- ness, a new spontaneity. The present is unspeakably difficult; the future not yet certain. But every hour that passes is a creative hour. The girls’ heads are erect. They are no longer suppliants or intruders, forced into false humility or angry arrogance, They are the daughters of the people of the land. They are themselves. ... I have dwelt on the Kvuzah of Kiriat Anavim and the Girls’ Kvuzah at Nachlat Yehuda not because the groups are different from others or better or even more representative. But there are now about eighty-five rural settlements in Palestine. I did not see them all. Of the many I saw I had no choice but to select those which by virtue of mood or weather or the quality of human faces and voices seemed to me to speak most elo- quently and truly of the earth and its folk. III When you cross the highlands of Samaria north of the Arab city of Jenin there spreads before you the famous valley of Jezreel. It extends almost from the Jordan on the east to a point beyond Nazareth on the west and north. Here where at last after the endless hills the land is level and full of springs the com- manders of ancient days chose their battle-ground. Here Sisera was pursued by the men of Barak; here the Midianites and the Amalekites assembled them- selves together while on the valley’s eastern edge, near the spring of Harod, Gideon and all the people that [175 | ISRAEL were with him encamped. The valley has known the tread of the Egyptian and the Syrian and of the ele- phants of Antiochus. A knoll is pointed out at which in this old land ended the triumphant march of Na- poleon. In the last days, the legend runs, the battle of Armageddon will be fought upon this plain. During recent centuries this valley, like every other part of Palestine, fell into utter ruin and neglect. But while drought reigned in the hills, poisonous swamps made life impossible here. The springs that abound in the valley overstepped their basins and the old water- courses and turned the land into marshes. The Arabs called the western spring Ain Samune or Poison Well, and believed that anyone who drank of the water was certain to die of malaria. Forty years ago it was at- tempted to found a German colony here. ‘The colonists died or fled. Pestilence steamed from this piece of earth and the Arabs avoided it in both real and super- stitious terror. Four years ago the Jewish National Fund began the work of drainage. Three years ago the Keren Hayesod began to plant colonies on the drained land. Today the greater part of the Emek Jezreel is in our hands. Jews of the Gdud Avodah, the battalion of labor, entered the steaming swamps; they turned the waters of the springs into natural channels or pipes; they gathered the swamp-water into reservoirs; they discovered that the western wells had been polluted by the sheep of the natives. Today malaria is stamped out. The valley is a place of woods and fields and delight- ful villages. We stood beside the spring of Harod and saw it gushing from the deep cave in the hillside [176 ] EARTH AND FOLK and leaned over and scooped up the water in our hands and drank. We entered the cool cave and breathed the clean, fresh air, and came out into the sunlight and drew in the warmer air fragrant with the scents of harvest. We drove from village to village and saw the sunlight upon the sleek backs of the golden brown cattle and heard the hum of the tractor and the echo of the smith’s hammer at the forge. At Merhavia, God’s Free Place, we had luncheon at the neatest and tinest of inns. The little parlor of the inn was cool and restful. Our host gave us soup and chicken and fresh vegetables and country cheese, sweet and bland, and ripe olives. We sat on the little veranda of the inn. The fertile valley spread out before us to the circle of the hills. A wind stirred the bushes. A calf came from the little farm- yard and put its nose into our hands. A dog romped. The print of olden wars seemed obliterated; the mias- mas of a few years ago seemed a legend. Israel had brought peace. During the past three years the colonization activi- ties of the Keren Hayesod have been centered to a large extent on the Emek Jezreel and its immediate environs. The colonies have been of the two types already de- scribed in outline, and it will suffice to deal somewhat more intensively with one important and representa- tive settlement of each kind: the Kvuzah of Ain Harod and the Moshav Ovdim of Nahalal. The commune situated, as its name shows, by the spring of Harod, is a settlement of the Gdud Avodah, the legion of labor, which indeed has its central or governing council here. The communism of the sev- eral hundred young men and women who live here is [177 ] ISRAEL wholly unpolitical. It is idealistic and experimental. Its aim is simply to find a new and better way of life for the worker. The fundamental principle of the colony is that it shall be self-sustaining. Hence, in addition to the cultivation of its land, to dairy and poultry husbandry, it operates a smithy, a large car- penter’s shop that builds anything from a bee-hive to a wagon, a tailor’s, a shoemaker’s, a locksmith’s shop. There is a hospital, a small museum of natural history, a library of two thousand volumes, a créche, a chil- dren’s house and a school. The discipline within this strictly self-governing body is severe. At frequent councils the work of the colony is planned and the concrete tasks assigned. ‘There is complete equality in duty and profit-sharing. Every attempt is made to keep all profits within the group for its development and extension. Through the breeding of horses, cattle, poultry and through the activities of the shops the colony has provided for more than its own needs and is beginning to supply those of neighboring settlements. On the strictly agricultural side the colony raises grain, wine, bananas, tobacco and has, like every settlement, a large tree-nursery for the gradual reforestation of the land. | In order to judge fairly of the future and the life of such a commune as that of Ain Harod, one must try to share the hopes and dreams of the colonists. Today they live and work in large, temporary bar- racks. Their intention is to build their permanent houses on rising ground a few hundred yards away from their present situation. The air will be cooler there and the view broader and more beautiful. The [178 ] \ EARTH AND FOLK permanent houses that are to be built are to be spacious and comfortable, however devoid of luxury and show. They will afford, one may be sure, thorough opportu- nities for study, for music, for social intercourse. What strikes one in the barracks as they are today is the discomfort, the crowdedness, the terrible lack of privacy. We arrived at the dinner hour. In the huge eating shed several hundred people were eating at the rude tables. The benches had no backs. The dishes and utensils were of the coarsest. There was clatter and noise. ‘There were flies. There was a sense of haste, of improvisation. Had these people been peas- ants with the nerves and the appetences of peasants one would have harbored no doubts. But one had only to look at the heads of the young men and women. They, like oneself, were able to be contented with naked simplicity of life. But were they quite satisfied with this hubbub, this—I am forced to use a very plain word —messiness? Was the sense of moral discomfort that I felt here for the one and only time in Palestine merely the echo of my own wretched bourgeois sensibilities? It may be so. And the rather stern young man who showed us the colony cut me short with an epigram: “A commune is no barrack.” (Kommune ist nicht Kaserne.) Well, it ought not to be. And perhaps it will not be. If itis, however, I think the large Kvuzah is likely to disappear despite its unquestionable eco- nomic efficiency. We saw the house of the little children and parents snatching what seemed to us a pitiful and again crowded glimpse of both the children and each other before, the dinner hour being over, each had to return [179 ] ISRAEL to his or her appointed task. If each couple had only been able to see its child alone. . . . We saw the din- ner of the larger children. ‘There are, yet, only a few. They sat huddled about their teacher, a scholarly but rather forlorn-looking young man. If he has to spend his whole day with his pupils, how can he retain fresh- ness and edge of mind? But that is his task. And the task of the parents is in field or shop and the task of the children is to study and to grow up. And suppose among these children there are artist natures —creatures born to think, to write, to make music. But I need hardly suppose. Are they not Jews? I know the answers to my criticisms and I know how valid and serious the answers are. How much chance has the average proletarian anywhere to see his chil- dren? Here at least he does see them in peace and freedom and the sense that they are being cared for with great skill and perfect kindness. What does the development of a probably second-rate critic or fiddler matter in comparison to the success of an experiment which may find a new and better and nobler way of life for the workers first of this and then perhaps of other lands? How true these objections are. And how true it is also that I cannot by an effort of the will assume the inner development of these younger men and women from the east of Europe and enter into the spirit of their communist austerity! To me the creative individual is the aim, fruit, goal, meaning of human life. And are we not a people of individualists, protestants, moral revolutionaries? I am assuredly no vulgar anti-Bolshevik. But in the large Kvuzah I see a contamination of our life by the supineness, the mass- [ 180 ] EARTH AND FOLK life, the morbid and dangerous submersion of personal- ity that seems to mark the Russian character whether under Czar or Soviet. I hasten to add that this is not all I saw at Ain Harod. I saw magnificent self-sacrifice, magnificent fortitude, magnificent singleness of purpose in the pursuit of an end embraced. I saw human qualities that cannot but stand in good stead in the development of any land or any people. Concrete social aim, concrete experiments in social structure can and will change. The spirit be- hind them remains. And the spirit counts. What I have said of Ain Harod may be taken to apply to the neighboring Kvuzoth of Tel Joseph and Beth Alpha. Agriculturally and industrially these col- onies, even in their primitive state, are triumphs. They have conquered the land and made a garden of it. They have vindicated the courage, the endurance, the pioneer- ing ability of the Jew. As social experiments they fill - my Western mind with misgiving and dismay. Profoundly different is the impression made by the Moshav or small-holders’ settlement of Nahalal. The principle that there shall be no hired labor prevents the possibilities of social injustice as securely as the Kvuzah system; the cooperative purchase of essential materials, sale of produce, the cooperative activities of building, deep-plowing, afforestation weld the settlers into a ho- mogeneous working-group. The group operates as a group. But itis composed of families, each of which has a home, gardens, fields. Thus there is both privacy and flexibility. There is the wide and necessary margin for the play of personality in labor and recreation. The adults assemble in communal council. Then they go [181 ] ISRAEL home. The children attend the communal school and go home. And the liberty of going home is as funda- mental and important in any healthy human society as the liberty of leaving a place that has ceased, in spiri- tual fact, to be a home. What, at all events, is indisputable is the happy moral atmosphere of Nahalal. The village is built upon an almost circular hillock which rises gradually in the middle of the fruitful valley. The plans of Kaufmann, according to which it was laid out, are admirably adapt- ed to the landscape and the needs of the settlement. On the top of the hillock stand the communal offices, the codperative stores, the school, the temple, all still housed of course in temporary and provisional buildings. Around the rim of the hill in a perfect circle are built the houses of the,seventy-five families of farmers. The radii from the circumference to the communal center are the streets on which live the mechanics and profes- sional men whom the colony employs. Behind each farmer’s house stretches in the segment of a greater circle concentric with the first his garden and vegetable garden and farm-yard with stable, barn and poultry house. There is an admirable union of harmony and convenience in the planning of the village which seems to coincide with the temper of the men and women who live and labor here. Beyond the last circle of the village stretch the actual farms of one hundred dunam each. From the size of these farms (circa twenty-five acres each) it is clear that the cultivation must be of the most skilful and intensive kind and that the vegetable garden, the cattle and poultry husbandry that are carried on near each [ 182 ] EARTH AND FOLK house represent an important item in the economy of each family. In addition to the farms there is an agricultural school and experiment station for girls at Nahalal. Here are the delightful tree-nurseries that one sees everywhere; here is carried on the important work of crossing Kuro- pean with Arab cattle and Wyandottes and Rhode Island Reds with the native chickens so as to produce breeds that shall be both hardy and profitable. So suc- cessful have these experiments been that while the native cow, for instance, yields an average of six hundred liters of milk a year, the cow bred at Nahalal has an annual yield of from two thousand to two thousand five hun- dred liters. These humble facts, rightly looked upon, take hold of the imagination. When have Jews gone into malarial marshes and drained them and stamped out disease and planted lovely villages where for cen- turies the place was a miasmic waste? When have they planted forests and produced new breeds of domestic animals? When, above all, have they done that as Jews? It is an unforgettable experience to wander through one of the gardens and farm-yards of Nahalal. The farmer’s house is small. But flowers are all about it. A sense of ample country peace comes to you from it. The farmer, a scientifically trained agriculturist, shows you the vegetables, the calves of his own breeding, the glistening colts, the large American turkeys that flourish here. In a sunny corner near the neat barn he shows you his aged father at some light task. He has brought the old men hither from some stony and harsh Ghetto of Eastern Europe. And in the very posture of that old man, in his very gestures you can see the great [ 183 ] ISRAEL healing of Palestine. That old man’s feet, accustomed to wander on strange and stony ways, press the soft earth; his hands touch living plants with tenderness; his ears hear the speech of his fathers; his eyes behold the fruitful fields, the new forests, the vineyards and orchards of Eretz Israel. I am not unaware, as I shall show farther on, of the dangers that lurk in a too narrow re-nationalization of Jewry, nor of the fact that, with our utmost efforts, only a small percentage of the Jews of the world can ever hope to live in the homeland. But I shall never forget that aged man in the farm- yard of Nahalal. Nor do I believe that any human being who can see with the eye not only of the body but of the spirit could forget him.... Afternoon came and evening. The horizon above the circling hills turned into a sheet of rose under which the hills were somber and’ majestic. Before the huge stars began to droop a sickle moon floated in the sky over the village of Balfouria—the completest of the Palestinian villages. The streets are lined with little white houses and behind each house stands a white barn and both house and barn are covered with orange-colored tiles. There are no sheds or barracks here. ‘The Ameri- can Zion Commonwealth (Kehillath Zion) by selling shares and lending the colonists modest but sufficient sums for the immediate necessities of both a civilized life and a scientific system of agriculture, has succeeded in planting a village here which shows what the other villages may one day become. People stood in their front-gardens on that evening or sat on their verandas after the heat and work of the day, and the cool winds from the hills stirred trees that stood black against the [ 184 ] EARTH AND FOLK roseate sky. Balfouria is a Moshav Ovdim like Nahalal. Here too are the homes of men. But here too no land is held as private property and no hired labor is em- ployed. Here, too, the social ideals of the Prophets shall prevail. Even from so selective an account as this I must not omit the famous colony of Dagania Aleph. It lies south of Lake Kinnereth in the tropical valley of the Jordan on the river’s eastern bank. It was founded in 1908 on a tract of eight thousand dunam. The eighty mem- bers of the group were dedicated from the start to the ideals of the small Kvuzah: the elimination of the struggle for existence on a basis of equality; the peace- ful (not anti-capitalistic) development of new forms of social living; the restriction of the group in number and quality. The striking economic and social success of Dagania is doubtless due to the third of the three principles. A small group of comrades and friends, men and women who unite tireless idealism with prac- tical sagacity, has accomplished a notable work here. Despite the inevitable set-back of the war years the prosperity of the colony is such that it has been able to found a second settlement: Dagania Beth. Communal funds are invested in various congenial undertakings throughout the land. Yet in this case at least success has not quenched the spirit of the founders. Delicate women whose health sometimes requires a change from the broiling heat of the Jordan Valley hesitate to visit friends or relatives in the cool hill-lands for fear that their labor and their presence may be needed in the Kvuzah to which they have dedicated their lives. Beautiful avenues of trees lead to the inner yard of [ 185 ] ISRAEL Dagania. A handsome three-story communal house with dwelling rooms and clubrooms is being completed. The houses now in use are commodious and agreeable to the eye. It goes without saying that the stables are models of their kind, that modern agricultural imple- ments and the best scientific methods are employed. The colony, now in its seventeenth year, shows what the small Kvuzah can accomplish through its founders. When these age, when their children grow up other problems may arise. But their work is permanent. Dagania is unforgettable. A noble avenue of cy- presses leads to the bank of the Jordan. Here, we were told, young couples stroll in the cool of the evening. Trees shade the river bank. The vision crosses the river to the hills that roll beyond Lake Kinnereth to Safed. Far and shadowy loom the heights of Lebanon. Intense stillness. Intense glow of light. At one’s feet lies the river which is broad here and shallow before the winter rains. A group of Arabs is crossing it. Men and women with their robes girdled to their thighs wade through the stream. They lead the slow, grave, rocking camels. The aged, white-garbed sheikh fords the river on his horse. Thus might Abraham have crossed the immemorial river at this spot where people of his blood dwell once again... | | IV I have spoken constantly of the methods used by our farmers in Palestine. These methods are the results of the studies and practical experiments of the Zionist Organization’s Institute of Agriculture and Natural [ 186 ] EARTH AND FOLK History at Tel-Aviv. Here in these laboratories and demonstration rooms the agricultural experiments un- dertaken at Ben Shemen and the other experimental farms are proposed, tested and interpreted. From here the practical labor of the colonists is directed. To il- lustrate the precise function of the Institute in the land I can do no better than give an outline of what was told me by the admirable director, Dr. Eleazari- Volcani. Jewish agriculture is today at a half-way house. In the home market it still finds it difficult to compete with the Arabs. One reason for this is that agricultural machinery is a convenience but is not necessarily pro- ductive. The Arab plows only half an acre a day. But his plow costs one pound. His subsistence costs next to nothing. His mentality is so unawakened that the long day with the wooden plow and the bullock does not strike him as a waste of time and irritate him. The Jew uses an American plow that costs ten pounds. He has a horse. He works swiftly and intelligently and accomplishes vastly more than the Arab. But that more is not yet enough to pay for the plow, the horse, the horse’s fodder, to give the plowman the difference be- tween his subsistence, simply and austerely as he lives, and the Arab’s handful of dates. The Jew is a EKuro- pean and usually an intellectual. He needs food, soap, something to read. One must grasp the two mentali- ties, Arab and Jewish, in relation to the two types of plow, work, life, to understand the difficulty of our agriculturists in the markets of the homeland and its environs. For competition in the world markets, on the other [187] ISRAEL hand, Jewish agriculture and Jewish methods are not yet sufficiently advanced. How, for instance, can the Palestinian orange, unwrapped and unadvertised, com- pete with the “Sunkist” oranges of California, the in- ternational advertising of which unites the precision of science with grace of art? The solution of the entire problem is evidently a cultivation so scientific and intense that the productivity of the Jewish dunam, whether it bears grain or oranges or tobacco or vegetables or bananas or castor-oil or olives, shall be so increased as to annihilate the disad- vantages of the colonist in both the home market and the markets of the world. To this task the Institute is addressing itself. That rapid and ordered observa- tion which we call science must shorten the way. Thus the Institute studies in one field the increase of fertility due to a favorable time of sowing; in another that due to a new depth of sowing; in a third it uses both factors and studies the results. It brings all the experience of mankind to bear upon the problems of Palestinian agri- culture. Its department of economic entomology has already a triumphant record in its fight against the animal life that destroys crops. These departments are issuing bulletins that are beginning to command the attention of similar scientific institutes in various parts of the world." The difficulties of the Palestinian agri- culturist, in a word, are being faced and solved as those 1 Bulletin 1. The Coccide of Palestine. First Report on this family. By Dr. F. 8. Bodenheimer. Tel-Aviv. 1924. Bulletin 2. The Chemical Composition of Palestine Olives and their Oils. The Chemical Composition of the Sesame Oil Cake. Composition of Rain Falling et Tel-Aviv. By Dr. F. Menchikowsky. Tel-Aviv. 1924. Bulletin 3. Preliminary Report on the Agricultural Aspects of a Sugar Industry in Palestine, By M. Eleazari. Tel-Aviv. 1924. [ 188 | EARTH AND FOLK of the American farmer have been and are. We are not only reclaiming the desert and afforesting the hills and raising crops where for centuries there were stone and sand dunes. We are putting the entire agriculture of the Near East on a scientific basis. Egypt and Trans- Jordania, Syria and Mesopotamia will profit by our studies and our experiments. We are not only saving some of the dispersed of Israel, but adding to the wealth and garnered wisdom of mankind. [189 ] CHAPTER VI WORK AND DREAM I I wap heard many things about Tel-Aviv, the Jewish city. The last thing I heard before I saw it with my own eyes was from a kindly old gentleman in Jerusalem. He looked over his glasses. “You will like Tel-Aviv,” he said, “it’s like Far Rockaway.” 'There was to me, later on as I recalled it, a deep pathos in this saying of my old friend. Even in New York he had been con- scious of that atmosphere of hostility to the Jew which is so strong in certain circles and spreads forth from them. When summer came he had retired with his family to the Jewish summer hotels or cottage settle- ments at Far Rockaway. And since Tel-Aviv is also by the sea, the comparison seemed to him pleasant and complete. | It is, in fact, not so complete as he thought. The Jews who go to Far Rockaway are comfortable there. But because they go there the place has, to very many people, a discredited and half-comic air. Hence the “refined” assimilationist who shudders at a kosher sign jn a butcher’s window doesn’t go to Far Rockaway and indeed considers it a little vulgar. Well, it is vulgar. For the vulgus, the crowd of ordinary human beings, assembles there. I, too, share the Horatian fear of the profane and noisy. But man in the mass is not, from [ 190 | WORK AND DREAM this narrow point of view, a delightful or a soothing spectacle in any place. If it were to come to a decision, however, I should go to Far Rockaway rather than to Newport. For among the seething crowd of Far Rockaway I should find, sooner or later, a minority that cares for art, letters, music, thought; I should find even among the others an inherited respect for the things and interests that I represent in the world. At New- port I should find nothing. And its ceremonials of sport and pleasure and society would find in me an eternal alien... ... The comparison between F'ar Rockaway and Tel- Aviv is one of far-reaching implications. We shall be, as Jews and as human beings, upon a better way when Far Rockaway is more like Tel-Aviv; when those who now spurn Far Rockaway and hanker for Newport will go to Far Rockaway in order to make it more like Tel-Aviv; when Tel-Aviv will cease to offer even the slightest resemblance to Far Rockaway because the good people who frequent Far Rockaway will not be able to bring a whiff of its present flavor to Tel-Aviv.... For Tel-Aviv is not a city to which people flee to crowd against each other for comfort; it is not a city of refuge, a city of denial, a city whose citizens would rather, perhaps, be in Cairo or Damascus, as so many of the transitory denizens of Far Rockaway would per- haps rather be at Newport or Bar Harbor. Tel-Aviv is a city built by men who wanted that city, who built it to express themselves, who molded it first for them- selves but also for their posterity. One must not expect too much. I heard many com- plaints in Palestine. The houses in Tel-Aviv are not [ 191 ] ISRAEL beautiful. Some of them are cheap and pretentious and seem to have been built in imitation of the worst period of American domestic architecture. That is true. But people from Lodz or Brownsville did not, of course, come here with a new Jewish-Palestinian architecture ready in their minds. I keep a vivid recollection, on the other hand, of the small white house with its graceful arches and general air of dreamy amplitude in which we went to call on the eminent thinker and essayist Achad Ha’am. And if many of the houses are ugly, the palms about them are beautiful. These houses set in the glow of the light and surrounded by a semi- tropical vegetation strongly suggested to me certain streets in Charleston, in Savannah, in New Orleans. In those cities too you will find ugly houses and beautiful gardens; there, too, as in Tel-Aviv, you feel the magic of the ever-present sea. We are, moreover, a people given to the arts in time rather than to those in space. I observed that I was myself less offended by the ugliness of the houses in Tel- Aviv than I was pleased at the names of the streets which are called after poets, Yehuda Halevy and Bialik, after thinkers, Moses Hess and Achad Ha’am, after prophets of various sorts and ages, Rambam (Maimonides) and Herzl, after benefactors, Rothschild and Balfour. It pleased me to think of a city council that gave such names to streets, sure that these names would fall in with the tastes and ideas of the citizens. And what seemed to me the strongest plea for this city was a story I heard of a celebration that was given on the beach with bonfires and dances and singing, with the mass-life of the people expressing itself in the true folk way. The strongest [ 192 ] WORK AND DREAM plea—because this spontaneous celebration did not honor a politician or commemorate a victory but was a tribute brought to the loftiest and severest of modern Hebrew poets, Chaim Bialik. That is what I should expect of a Jewish city; it is by the example of such things that a Jewish city can justify itself among the cities of the world. : Tel-Aviv, moreover, is a young city. It was in 1909 that sixty families met on the sand-dunes north of Jaffa and determined to build a clean and healthful residential suburb there. Sixteen years have passed and on those dunes has arisen a city of thirty thousand inhabitants with schools, colleges, temples, libraries, banks, shops, factories, hotels, newspaper offices. And no jail. Jewish policemen, unarmed, keep order and regulate the traffic. There is no prison in Tel-Aviv. The people of the city hope that it will never be necessary to build one. I am no economist. It would be fruitless for me to discuss the banks and industries of Tel-Aviv, to enter into the question raised by not a few people: on what solid foundation is the rapid development of the city based? Neither need I discuss the danger of specula- tion in real-estate values which seems now and then to sicker in from various parts of the world. The city glows with life, with a spontaneous and powerful will to be. I have compared the aspect of the streets with that of streets in certain American cities. Tel-Aviv differs from those cities by the healthy intensity of its atmos- phere. The people are building the city with joy. With joy in the building. There is neither gold nor iron nor oilin Palestine. You cannot get rich quick; you cannot exploit natural resources. The manufacturer has got [ 1938 | ISRAEL to work gradually, laboriously. He has to treat his workers justly. He has to create a demand for his building material or furniture or textiles or mineral waters or leather or sweets or electric batteries. A large building is planned—perhaps it is already completed— full of lofts for small industries. Many other like things were told to me and I was given pictures and plans and statistics. I do not underestimate these facts nor their meaning. Neither am I unaware of the dangers that lurk in certain aspects of the economic life of Tel-Aviv. These are the passing things. They are thus today and will be changing tomorrow. Perhaps they have already changed in the few weeks since I heard the Mediter- ranean surf thunder on the beach. I turn to what is fundamental and permanent. The Jews have built a city. They have not built it as entrepreneurs, furnishing the capital and hiring labor. They have built a city with their own hands. Every spadeful of earth has been turned up by Jews, every brick has been laid by Jews. The large ugly houses and the small charming houses and the superb Rutenberg Electric Light and Power Station have been planned by the minds and built by the hands of Jews. They have laid out the streets and avenues and made the sanitary arrangements and built the school system. The mayor, Mr. Dizengof, had never been a mayor before and the city councillors had never been city councillors before » and the policemen had assuredly never been policemen before. And Tel-Aviv is without any question one of the most hygienic, agreeable, ably and honestly admin- istered cities in the world. How long is it since the Jews have built a city? Some- [ 194 | WORK AND DREAM where between two thousand and three thousand years. And during that period the task of building and admin- istering a city has become, to speak mildly, more com- plicated. Hence between the draining and cultivating of the Emek Jezreel on the one hand and the building of the city of Tel-Aviv on the other, the Jews have furnished proof of their ability to do that fundamental work on which civilization is based. The anti-Semite who speaks of a nation of hucksters and exploiters and middlemen and commercial nomads ought to be finally silenced. This is the first time in the course of many ages that the Jews have had a chance to do the produc- tive work of civilization. They have done it with unsur- passed adaptability, zeal, skill, honesty. The anti-Semite will not, of course, be silenced. It is at this point that I part company with my radical Zionist friends. 'They accept the accusation of essential unproductivity in the diaspora however guiltless we may be of it. They accept the fact and in Palestine furnish the answer and the remedy. It is not for such reasons that I love both the villages of the Emek and the streets of Tel-Aviv. For these reasons are purely romantic ones. Itis aromantic myth that the country is pure and the city foul, that a merchant is essentially and neces- sarily more ignoble than he who cultivates the soil, that the work of the hand has a moral value which the work of the mind lacks. In a complicated modern civilization, whatever its specific economic forms, every function is as necessary as every other. However hard the peasant delves, the modern city would die without the carriers and exchangers of goods. A people of traders, physi- cians, teachers, artists, even lawyers is in any place this [ 195 ] ISRAEL side of Utopia as productive and honorable as a people of farmers, factory hands, hewers of wood and drawers of water. Nor do we observe the Gentile, even the anti- Semite, avoiding the “parasitic” activities of the Jew. In the West, at least, there is no lack of Gentile bankers, merchants, middle-men of all sorts. And in the trades of intellectual mediation, such as journalism and teach- ing, nothing is more obvious than the Gentile’s desire to drive the Jew forth and monopolize the field for him- self. No, this entire controversy in regard to the pro- ductive and the unproductive work of civilization arises from a convenient romantic fiction. A gypsy fiddling delightfully at a roadside inn is as good a man and member of the human brotherhood as the peasants who dance to his strains. If we were, speaking in the manner of a parable, a people of gypsies, I should be rather proud of it. But we are not. Our supposed lack of productivity is due to disuse brought about by historical causes that every schoolboy knows. For centuries we were prevented from holding land by the most cruel and relentless laws. No medieval guild accepted a Jewish member or a Jewish apprentice. To reproach us for not being farmers and tinsmiths is the last refuge of imper- tinent stupidity. To accept the reproach is to share the romantic muddleheadedness which gave it birth. The virtues of Tel-Aviv are not those of a treatise on Jewish apologetics. ... It had been a busy day and we were tired and went to bed early. But we could not sleep because young and old people strolled along the streets in groups and chatted and sang and the sound of their speech and song came in with the mild air through the wide open windows. Speech and song were in [ 196 ] WORK AND DREAM Hebrew, occasionally in Yiddish. And in those singing and speaking voices there was a freedom and a spon taneity that went straight to the heart. I had never heard Jews speak so or sing on summer nights on either Riverside Drive or Second Avenue. But suddenly I knew that they wanted to do so, that it was natural for them to do so, but that in New York they dared not do so because they knew that hostile ears would hear them and hostile lips would say: Vulgar, noisy JCWSiiec ss I stood by the window and saw the groups of people loitering under the palms. And there came to me the memory of another scene. A large and splendid foyer in a Jewish club in America. A hundred men and women eating hors-d’cwvres. Physicians, lawyers, journalists, bankers. Their wives. Clever women, most of them and charmingly gowned. The cock-tails are served and the hum of conversation rises. In the eyes of my friend whose guest I am I see a troubled look. “Did you ever,” she exclaims, “hear an American crowd make such a noise?” “No,” I answered quite truthfully. “But I like the zest and warmth and I’m quite sure the conversation is more intelligent in substance than—”’ My friend cut me short with a shiver. “I don’t like it.” She could not be at peace among her own people, among her own friends because the subtle and corrupting injus- tice of majority standards had sickered into the very crevices of her nerves. Why, in God’s name, should these people not be noisy? But indeed they were not at all noisy from any point of view but that of comparison with the most rigidly restrained Anglo-American so- ciety. ... The virtue of Tel-Aviv is that Jews can [ 197 ] ISRAEL be noisy there without hesitation. The highest virtue of Tel-Aviv is that its example may teach Jews to be noisy everywhere in the world. ... I think that Tel-Aviv will be a great city some day. Behind it the agricultural colonies will stretch out to Jerusalem, north to Haifa and northeast, through the valley of Jezreel to the Jordan. Great mills, such as already exist at Haifa will be built to grind the grain of the hinterland; there will be textile mills and tobacco factories and canning works for fruits and olives... . Instead of three thousand students there will be thirty thousand, instead of two publications twenty. And the purpose of all that will be to let the Jews be noisy. .. . On the eve of Simchat Torah, the feast of the rejoic- ing of the law, we went into the old city of Jerusalem to see the Chassidim dance. ‘The temple curved above us like a vast bell. In front of the ark a dozen men walked in the grave measures of a circular dance. Their robes and caps were of white satin; the scrolls of the law which they pressed to their bosoms were clothed in satin and silver and gold. ‘The candles shone with a steady light and the crowns and bells on the Torah scrolls glittered. What faces those men had! Above those beards of glossy black or wraithlike white there was an extraordinary blending of dignity and fervor. And one pale, pointed, youthful face pressed with closed eyes against the scroll was the eternal face of the martyrs of Israel who die on crosses or at stakes or on barricades or in political prisons for a thing not made with hands. : They danced; they chanted. “Out of the mouth of the Lord Israel shall be blessed. . . .” [ 198 | WORK AND DREAM Only a dozen. Their faith is with all the faiths of yesterday. It is the day of the stone-masons and the scientists and the poets and thinkers. But that dance and that chant are an eternal gesture and answer an eternal instinct. In Tel-Aviv, in the cities and villages of Palestine the children of Israel dance and chant with- out false shame or hidden fear. “Out of the mouth of the Dordewene II The houses and factories and schools of Tel-Aviv do not represent the entire building activity of the Jews in Palestine. This building activity ranks as an actual achievement next to the reclaiming and cultivation of the soil. It is largely the result of the labor of the last five years and is due to the activities of the codperative building guild called Solel Boneh. When, at the end of the World War, the gates of Palestine were reopened to immigration, the half-ruined agricultural colonies were totally unable to absorb the immigrants who sought to settle in the land. ‘The first necessity moreover for further settlement and for the actual opening of the land was the construction of roads. Since there were no capitalistic companies to hire laborers and bid for government contracts, the laborers, most of them newcomers and unaccustomed to hard manual toil, organized the Solel Boneh guild for build- ing and public works and built those magnificent roads that opened up the entire northern part of the country. Training its men, who had been students and indoor workers, to acquire the skill and endure the hardships of their new occupations, the Solel Boneh next proceeded [ 199 ] ISRAEL to relieve the scarcity of dwellings in the country. Through Zionist initiative mortgage banks were estab- lished; a staff of able engineers and architects guided the work; the incomparable adaptability of the Jewish worker was once more established. Since those earlier days the Solel Boneh has not only built the greater part of Tel-Aviv, but the new residen- tial quarters of Jerusalem, of Haifa, of Tiberias. It has constructed public buildings of all kinds, ranging :rom the beautiful Convalescent Home for workers at Mozah to the massive Electric Station at Tel-Aviv. It has erected dwelling-houses, factories, schools, hospitals; it has continued its road-building and has constructed barns and stables throughout the colonies. It has built houses of silicate brick, of cement blocks, of stone, of reénforced concrete and has mastered its necessary tech- nique with faultless efficiency. One of its most extraor- dinary achievements is the construction of the Imperial war cemetery and memorial at Beersheba. Yet this is only one of the many tasks which the guild has per- formed for the Palestinian Government, for the munici- palities and railways and for the Military Administra- tion. These dry facts take on human significance as one actually recalls the arches and spacious halls of the Mozah Convalescent home and visualizes once more the new pillars and capitals of that building which seem to have grown on that hillside from which one sees the taller hills on which Jerusalem stands. In the new quarters of Beth Hakerem and Talpioth in Jerusalem, in Bath Galim and Hakarmel near Haifa, in the Kiriat She- muel quarter of 'Tiberias there are houses, both large and [ 200 ] WORK AND DREAM small, which answer every need of comfort, of beauty, of adaptability to the climate and the landscape of the country. Finally one recalls the wooden bridge that spans the Jordan near Dagania, the new house of the commune and the road from Tiberias to Semach. Without initial capital and without government subsidy the Jewish workers in codperation are building roads and cities, even as they have drained swamps, planted forests and tilled the ruined earth into beauty and fer- tilttveran The Solel Boneh is, of course, only one among several associations of Jewish workers in Palestine. Some of these codperatives are practical, some political in their character. They are all united in the Central Organi- zation of Jewish Workers (Histadruth haklalith shel haovdim ha Ivrim) whose headquarters are in the Work- ers’ House of Tel-Aviv. A white house of two stories in the overwhelming light. Upstairs a small, shaded room—half library, half rude council chamber. As everywhere in Palestine except in a few private houses, complete austerity, complete carelessness of comfort. There is the burning idea . . . there is the work to be done . . . that is all. ... A man has come there to talk to me about the workers—a spare man in careless clothes with the hands of a laborer except for the shape of the fingers which are slim and mobile, with sunken cheeks and very speaking eyes, a good high forehead, a bristling mustache over a slightly protruding, ugly, elo- quent mouth. He has to talk to me through an inter- preter. He has spoken Hebrew so exclusively for so long that he has lost command of the languages of Galuth. I can watch him all the better for that reason; [ 201 ] ISRAEL I can fathom, all the more completely the utter earnest- ness, simplicity, single-mindedness of the man, the essential nobleness of that wanting of nothing for him- self, of everything for the workers, for the land, for the days and the generations to come. He spoke with the air of one who is “not fond of speaking or born to speak. A rather silent man orig- inally. But forced into speech by the duty of communi- cating the character of the work he had at heart. Speak- ing well now precisely because he did not care for speech. “Our aim is the regeneration of the working powers of the Jewish people. We want to render Jewish work both economically and culturally productive. In order to attain this end we workers sink all party differences. They exist but they do not divide. And that is so because, beyond theories and party platforms, we are trying to learn what to do from life itself. We really harbor no theory that is antecedent to practice. We workers must be the constructive element in Eretz Israel and in order to be that we must seek what unites, not what divides. And what is it that unites us here? Every- where else in the world we live and labor as.German Jews or English or Polish or American Jews. Here we are Jewish Jews. Here we face for the first time not the question of the right to labor but of the possibilities of labor. Here, for the first time, our labor can be creative. “In all the lands of the Galuth we live at the expense of others. We work within an economic structure, an economic organization built by others. Culturally as well as economically we trade with the fundamental values, the Urwerte, created by others. We become the [ 202 | WORK AND DREAM carriers and continuators of the creative values of others. Thence arises the nations’ instinct of opposition to us. Since we realize this it follows that in Eretz Israel we do not combat anti-Semitism. We are quite freed from that external conflict. Our conflict, our struggle here is an inner one: How to become a productive people. “What is given us here is the earth on which we can become a creative folk. It is this thought that unites the workers; an overwhelming majority of the workers desires this end, strains after this aim. And the workers know that this aim can be achieved only by national work, not by class struggle. There are Marxists in the land, undoubtedly. But they too join in the great, national, concentrated effort toward rendering Israel a productive people. “Our experiments in the land extend over forty years. And we found that as long as work was depend- ent on private initiative or philanthropic aid, there was no renewal of life. There were employers and employed and many of the employed were not Jews and so the old conflicts and problems arose that have always arisen in the lands of the Galuth. It was only when we began to work out of a national and codperative initiative, that there arose the Jewish worker, that we began to see the possibilities of a renewal in the economic, the political and the moral life of the nation. For, observe, private initiative needs profit. Profit means the export of goods. And the export of goods means dependence on the outer world. What we desire, above all, is to be self-sustain- ing, to export only an excess of commodities. This is the aim of the workers’ codperative experiments in town and country, of the guild, the Kvuzah, the Moshav [ 203 ] ISRAEL Ovdim. .. .” He stopped and leaned his head a little wearily on his hand. But almost instantly he brightened up again with a fine, though somber flash. “Remember please: we seek the way! All of our present experiments of social organization may be changed, may be, nay, probably will be transcended. Only—all land and all values and all properties belong to the nation and there must be no hired labor and no exploitation; there must be neither oppressors nor oppressed. ‘Thus the codpera- tive organizations regulate the conditions of labor and consumers’ associations, such as the Hamashbir, regu- late prices. ‘These associations are controlled and, if need be, checked by the banks, by the nation itself. But the ordinary safeguards and checks against excessive labor demands are not needed, since the workers are inspired by good sense and good-will and desire not the profit of their class or of any class but the increasing freedom and productivity of all Israel. This aim of the workers is constantly emphasized and intensified by the cultural work of the Histadruth or great organization. The organization employs one hundred people in its cultural work alone. It arranges courses in the Hebrew language and lectures, it operates evening schools; it sends out teachers to special groups for special purposes; it sends out traveling libraries of books in all languages to the remotest farms and labor camps; it publishes pamphlets and books; it maintains reading-rooms; it has organized concert associations and choruses and is at work on the beginnings of a people’s theater. . . .” I have let this man speak very much as he spoke to me since, as he himself so frankly admitted, both his- toric and economic theories are transitory. Spiritual [ 204 ] WORK AND DREAM facts and values alone are permanent. I do not think I know enough to exercise any criticism of his tentative economic theories. I am sure that his interpretation of the position of Israel in Galuth is narrow and romantic and discredited by the very fallacies of the Anti-Semite. All honest work is productive work. I am not unaware —how could I be?—of the fact that the Jewish artist and thinker seems often in Galuth, especially under the gaze of hostile eyes, to be working with the fundamental values, the Urwerte, of others. The deeper truth is that he is working, if he counts at all, with the Urwerte of mankind which are his as much as any others, that like the better of his Gentile compeers, he transcends the national limitations through which he inevitably works and belongs to his own people, to the people among whom he lives and creates and thus to all peoples. .. . But theories, as I have said, are transitory and formu- lations for aday. What I see is that dark, slim, earnest man in the workers’ house in Tel-Aviv. And behind him I see the many men and women, the workers, whom I met and with whom I spoke. It is their spirit and the spirit of their work that counts. They do not care for comfort or dainty food or well-made garments. ‘They live as best they can. They live by the heat and the light of the flame within. Yet they are simple and human and cheerful and unpretentious and not given to sound- ing words or the gestures of the reformer. They take both their hardships and their ideas as a matter of course. They are building up the land of Israel. But greater than the task is the spirit of the task and the example of it. And that spirit and that example belong even now [ 205 ] ISRAEL to the permanent possessions of all men and are becom- ing “part of our lives’ unalterable good. . . .” It belongs to the humanness of the situation that, outside of the Workers’ House once more I met a young man who smiled rather sardonically. “You’ve been talking to our friend A. in there? Well, did you know that he’s the executive secretary of the Hapoel Hazair (Young Workers’ Party)? They’re a terribly idealistic crowd!” “They may be,” I said. “But they represent a good many people. . They had twenty-three delegates in the last Histadruth conference.” “True,” he flung back. “But Achduth ha-Havodah (Palestinian branch of Poale Zion, World Zionist Socialist Party) had sixty-seven delegates.” “And are you people,” I asked, taking it for granted that he belonged to the Poale Zion, “so very hard- boiled?” He reflected for a moment. “I suppose not,’ he admitted. “Beyond all theoretical differences we do the same work and live the same life.” Tit The colonists and the workers generally enter the country at the port of Jaffa and proceed to the Immi- gration Station at Tel-Aviv. The station is housed in two Arab buildings. There have been neither means nor opportunity yet to construct an adequate station. The Arab houses are extraordinarily beautiful. But in those enormous and enormously lofty chambers and arcades there is a great waste of space. There could be at least [ 206 ] WORK AND DREAM two tiers of dormitories and beds where now there is only one. The psychological effect too, is not likely to be happy. The immigrant in his barrack will miss these solemn halls in which effendis entertained their guests, these high hushed chambers in which the ladies of the harem sat, these arcades with their far view out into the land. This immigration station, at all events, is supported and managed by the Zionist Organization which takes complete charge of Jewish immigration and relieves the Palestinian government of one of its normal functions. This is a point of the utmost importance. Voices are occasionally heard in England complaining of the ex- pense of Palestine to the British Empire. The Jewish immigrants who, by their labor, reclaim and enrich the territory of the Mandatory Power, are selected, brought into the country and settled in it by the Agency that represents the Jewish nation. Exclusive of loans to immigrants, of contributions to the workers’ kitchens which feed them, to the sick societies that care for them in case of need, and exclusive, too, of course, of the expenses of colonization, the mere process of bringing immigrants into the country costs the Zionist Organiza- tion over thirty thousand Egyptian pounds a year. It goes without saying that the Zionist station admits people into the country in strict conformity with the regulations of the Palestinian government. According to these, seven classes of persons are now permitted to enter. I. Tourists. II. Immigrants with a capital of five hundred Egyptian pounds. III. Members of the liberal professions. (The admission of members of this class, as such, has at least temporarily been abolished.) [ 207 ] ISRAEL IV. Dependents of Palestinian settlers established in the country who guarantee the maintenance of such dependents. V. Contract laborers certified by the Zion- ist Organization. ‘Their numbers depend on the coun- try’s capacity of economic absorption. VI. Persons desiring Palestinian residence for religious reasons. This class includes priests, clerics, missionaries of all Chris- tian churches, as well as pious Jews supported by the Chalukah. VII. Palestinian citizens expatriated dur- ing the war and desiring repatriation. It is clear that the Zionist Organization’s chief labors after the necessary formalities of immigration are con- cerned with class V. This class includes the chaluzim and chaluzoth who as farmers and workers furnish the broad and indispensable foundation for both the eco- nomic and national upbuilding of the land. The amount of help that must be given them varies greatly. None are admitted who have not had adequate preparation for the actual life and work of the country. Artisans are given loans for tools, for travel, for the care of them- selves and their families until they begin to draw wages. No one is pauperized or treated as an object of charity. Promissory notes are required as security for the loans extended. This method has proved most satisfactory. Agricultural workers are assigned to the colonies that need them or to the work of clearing new land, draining swamps, building roads for new colonies. The young women (chaluzoth) present a special problem. ‘They also are assigned to colonies or to the great schools for agriculture and poultry husbandry at Tel-Aviv or Nahalal. These dry facts are, plainly, of tremendous signifi- [ 208 ] WORK AND DREAM cance. The Jewish National Fund buys land; the Keren Hayesod brings people into the country and settles them on the land. It receives the immigrant; it finds him land or labor; it supports the cultural institutions which I shall discuss in the next chapter. It supports the scientific institutions which I have already described. In other words, the scattered Jewish people through its representatives is building up the land and founding a new and fruitful civilization in it at its own expense and without the slightest desire or hope of exercising political power. We desire to possess the land creatively and not in terms of power and force and dominance. A consti- tution will be drafted in time. Under it we expect equal rights with Arab and Christian. Nomore. For all that we bring to the land we ask no more than equality with the people of continuous residence in it. I say people of long continuous residence. I do not say natives. For in the truest sense we are the natives of the land who never wholly abandoned either a theoretical or a prac- tical claim to its possession. The briefest reflection will show this entire situation to be unique. Explorers have discovered new lands and have taken possession of them for their governments. Then and then only have colonists come in, usually on their private initiative, with flags and guns and soldiery to make possession of the land effective. Or else, espe- cially in modern times, great governments have settled the veterans of their wars on lands within their domin- ions. Behind all colonization there has been power; one of the objects of colonization has always been the exten- sion of power. The Jewish people has no power. It cannot levy taxes; it cannot enforce laws nor inflict [ 209 ] ISRAEL penalties. The money given by Jews in every part of the world to the great Zionist funds has been in the nature of a voluntary gift and its giving has exempted them from the payment of no tax, direct or indirect, in the lands of their residence and political allegiance. Thus every shekel given and every donation used for the upbuilding of Palestine represents a spiritual act of an | extraordinary and unique kind. You cannot compare the donations to moneys that people give for charity or for the support of churches. The Zionist donation is no badge of respectability; its gift is announced in no local paper; it does not add to one’s standing as a citizen. Quite the contrary. The defenders of the theory of the master State and helot citizen, both Jew and Gentile, have often declared the giving of the shekel, the devotion to Palestine, to be in the nature of a disloyalty to the master State. They have babbled of divided allegiance, of psychical expatriation. ‘They have misinterpreted the spiritual renaissance in the life of the Jewish people which expresses itself in part and only in part in the up- building of Eretz Israel. They have met the Zionist with the supreme folly of what they take for commonsense. If you do not like America, or Germany or England, why do you not go to Palestine? No, the moneys that have been given to the funds have brought the givers | neither credit nor good repute nor conventional praise. Few of them can hope to see the land in which their gifts are used. They must remain satisfied with the descrip- tions of others, with a shadow, with a dream, with a sense of some inner urgency, greater than themselves, having been expressed. What has been given is very little com- pared to what must and shall be given, very little relative [ 210] WORK AND DREAM to what is needed. But in themselves the sums have been large; they have increased notably year by year; they represent a moral effort invaluable both in itself and as an example to all men. IV More must be given. There were pogroms in War- saw and Lodz the other day; Jewish students at the Rumanian universities were driven from the lecture halls last week. The gates of America are closed; the gates of Canada are closing. The ports of Europe are _ thronged with refugees. Where shall they go? And thirty years of Zionist activity has brought it to pass that these fugitives are no longer only fugitives. They are pilgrims. They are not only in flight. They have a goal. And that goal is the land of Israel. The territory delimited by the mandate embraces nine thousand square miles. 'The population today con- sists of, roughly speaking, seven hundred thousand Arabs and Christians, the latter being in a small minor- ity, and one hundred and twenty thousand Jews. A conservative estimate, borne out by every observer of both our agricultural and industrial beginnings, places the possible Jewish population of the land without Trans-Jordania, at three millions. Immigrants are now coming in at the rate of three thousand a month. More, far more desire to come and need to come. There are no funds wherewith to bring them; there are no lands on which to settle them. We have been given the moral and political right to settle in Palestine. We have been given nothing else. [211 ] ISRAEL Not even the waste lands, the ownerless lands. ‘There are no Jewish squatters in Palestine. The swamps and the dunes must be bought foot by foot, dunam by dunam. One hundred and twenty Arab magnate families control sixty per cent of the soil of Palestine. ‘They let huge parcels of it lie waste. But we must buy the lands, the waste lands. We must capitalize the plans of the emi- nent engineer Pinhas Rutenberg to water the lands and to turn water power into electricity. We must do every- thing with money. Today our holdings are only a little over four per cent of the area of the country. It is little more than a beginning. More must be given. For there is need everywhere. The excellent Girls’ Institute for Agricultural and Household Arts in Tel-Aviv, let us say, needs twenty- five pounds. Not as a gift, not as charity. But as a loan to render the superb gardens and the remarkable poultry yards more productive and to help the Institute to give better food at lower prices in the workers’ kitchen which it has organized. So, through a friend in the Zionist administration, the Institute pleads for its loan. The friend goes to the directorate of the Keren Hayesod which is snowed under with expenses and which grants the Institute fourteen pounds and fifty piasters. ... A humble fact of this kind is more eloquent than a trea- tise. The Institute, by the way, does the best it can with the smaller sum. ‘The girls work harder, live with a sterner frugality. They continue to be superbly cheerful and hopeful. It is this spirit that pervades the land. It is not one of easy optimism. Jews are not given to that, and the hardships and difficulties are far too immediate, insistent [ 212 ] WORK AND DREAM and severe. What one finds is rather an indomitable confidence that somehow the stars in their courses, the energies that shape the historic process, are on the side of the land and of our task in the land and of that self- recollection on the part of the Jewish people of which the upbuilding of the land is both the expression and the symbol. [ 218 ] CHAPTER VII VITA NUOVA I In the villages near Jaffa you meet old men and women who still speak Yiddish. In the streets of Tel- Aviv fragments of Yiddish and English are heard from newcomers. Officials, teachers, physicians can all speak English, many of them German, a few French. The speech of the Jewish folk in Palestine is Hebrew. In colonies and labor-camps, in street and school and hos- pital, in offices and factories, in conventions and con- gresses there is but one language. Under the British Mandate English, Arabic and Hebrew are the three official languages of Palestine. Causes are pleaded in Hebrew, all public notices are written or printed in Hebrew. The Jewish press is a Hebrew press. There are simple men and women in Palestine who have half forgotten the languages of the dispersion. There are thousands of little children who know no language but | that of the classics of their race. The establishment of Hebrew as the language of the Jewish folk in Palestine did not take place without a struggle. Nor can it be said to have passed the stage of controversy yet. Herzl seems always to have thought of the homeland as one of German speech; the great masses from the East had a natural tendency to bring with them that Yiddish tongue which they had spoken [ 214 ] VITA NUOUOVA for so long and in which a powerful press and a powerful literature had long existed. The present situation may be said to have been brought about by the coincidence of an idealistic argument with some very practical con- siderations. The idealistic argument was that there could be no creative functioning of the Jewish spirit except through the language which that spirit had itself brought forth. It was asserted quite truly that Hebrew had in fact never disappeared as a living tongue and that all that was needed was its reapplication to the broader uses of life. In the sturdy beginnings of a modern Hebrew press, in the works of the poets and novelists of the Hebrew renaissance this reapplication had already, in a large measure, been accomplished in the dispersion. The movement toward Hebrew had, in brief, been spon- taneous and inevitable and was bound to culminate in the folk-life and literature of those of the dispersed of Israel who, returning to Palestine, were ultimately to vindicate the creativeness of the Jewish spirit. The men who argued thus could point to interesting analogies. They could point out the fact that a century ago Hungarian was the dying speech of an illiterate peasantry which the will of a people has reéstablished as that people’s idiom in life and in literature. They could point to the revival of several Slavic dialects as the cre- ative speech of folk-groups; they could point to the phenomena of the Celtic renaissance. Their arguments gained practical point and force, as I have said, from considerations arising out of the actual life of the people. In a kindergarten class of ten it was found that six languages were spoken: Yiddish, Spaniol, Russian, [ 215 ] ISRAEL Persian, Bokharan, Arabic. Here was the dispersion reappearing in Eretz Israel with a vengeance. It was obviously out of the question to make any of these lan- guages the unifying element of the group. The children all learned Hebrew readily; their parents knew it well enough as the language of liturgy and prayer to acquire its practical use with ease. In a thousand such ways Hebrew won its place as the language of the folk and the unifying element. ‘Today we are facing the ac- complished fact. Enthusiasts still feel the position of Hebrew to be precarious. They are apt to be over- zealous in its defense. I do not think that they have anything to fear. The arguments for Hebrew are deci- sive; the practical needs of life in the country have demanded it; the education of the entire present genera- tion of children in the language safeguards its future. Unhappily there enter into this question intricate con- siderations that have nothing to do with either logical argument or the immediate exigencies of the practical life. ‘The end and aim of Palestine is the creative Jew- ish soul. By this idealists do not mean more literary men or scientists or thinkers. The diaspora furnishes these in great numbers. What is meant is that among the hills and in the valleys of Palestine there is to arise an autochthonous cultural folk-life in Hebrew from which shall issue poets, seers, regenerators of life for Israel and for mankind. This is the end of the great experiment; this is the high and noble and generous vision that has cast its spell upon many of the finest spirits of the movement. I see life in soberer colors. I distrust that vision because I suspect its origin. That origin is romantic; it [ 216 | VITA NUOVA derives from the same sources as the romantic muddle- headedness, the false cultivation of the primitive which is characteristic of the honest anti-Semite and patriotic nationalist in all countries. The primitive epic and the folk-lyric are forever charming, forever precious. But they grow out of a society and a social consciousness of myth and religion and war and barbaric dreams and virtues from which humanity must slowly liberate itself if human life is to be worth living at all. The famous anti-Semitic scholar Adolf Bartels was in his youth a lyrist of that exquisite, inimitably magical, volkstiimlich kind. Jews do not often write such lyrics. But neither do they fan hatred and instigate persecution and delight in official murder. Chesterton and Belloc have both written beautiful poetry, poetry charged with the flavor and myth and lore of their native earth. The literary work of Jews is drier or, if you please, harder. It rarely has, in any language, the lovely primitive lyric cry, the simplicity of the folk-song. It has little primitive warmth. It has light. Who has ever heard of a Jewish writer or thinker who was a reactionary, who did not throw the weight of his talent, critical or creative, on the side of liberty, tolerance, peace? Noone. That is our glory and our service. The Hebrew idealists have let the arguments of the Central European folkists and nation- alists get under their skins. We do not want idiot geniuses like the late Anton Bruckner; we can dispense with the folk-song. Man in this age deserves and needs another service. The analytically minded Jewish man of letters who everywhere strengthens the hands of the liberals, pacifists, rationalists is a better friend not only of Israel but of mankind than the most exquisite of folk- [217] ISRAEL poets with the merftality of the romantic soldier, hang- man, priest. Hebrew is established as the tongue of the land of Israel and as the unifying factor of the Jews who live in the land. With this inevitable fact it would be foolish to quarrel. My criticism is directed against an attitude toward that fact which involves dangerous implications. The most dangerous of these implications is, in effect, a denial instead of an affirmation of our history and character, a dream that we shall gain health as a people by becoming like other peoples, by reintegrating our- selves wholly with earth, myth, legend and thus recover- ing the naiveté and the naive creativeness of other folk- groups who have never lost that touch with earth, myth, speech. In brief, the romantic idealists in Zion plan to substitute national assimilation for personal assimila- tion. We are to go to Zion and be a folk like other folks. Precisely the contrary is to be striven for. We go to Zion to be ourselves. The function of those who go to Zion is to teach the eternal and necessarily eternal masses in the Galuth to be themselves. Self-affirmation as a people and as individuals must be our aim. We do not desire renationalization in the romantic sense. Shall we build up another Hungary, Jugo-Slavia, even an- other Denmark—another little folk with another little literature practically lost to the central civilization of mankind? It is just this sort of thing that as a people we have transcended; we have bought that transcendence with the blood and sweat and tears of the centuries. Are we now to strive to become like the peasants of Galuth in the hope that, some day, there may arise among us & Bruckner or, at most, a Burns? [ 218 | Vib ANG OVA The practical danger of such a consummation is hap- pily small. In Central Europe they have talked about the uncreative analytical faculty of the Jewish mind so long that sensitive spirits have begun to suspect the wholesomeness of the Jewish mind even as that friend of mine in America was made uncomfortable by the sound of Jewish voices. Quite objectively speaking the Jew- ish mind strikes me as being singularly wholesome. Our writers and thinkers in all countries are, upon the whole, guided by the light of reason and concerned over the welfare of mankind. Our men of letters are apt to be prematurely on the crest of every new movement. Thus fine talents like Ernst Toller and Waldo Frank sacrifice significant contour and clarity to brittleness and vague- ness. But they are not romantic patriots, warriors, myth-mongers. The high average of Jewish mentality tends to approach such a type as Bertrand Russell rather than such a one as Chesterton. What could be more precious or more wholesome? We are the people of reason and of peace. That is our glory which we must preserve; that constitutes our function among the na- tions and our service to mankind. I repeat that the practical danger is small. Our fundamental tendencies are not likely to change. But I should like to see the inevitable establishment of Hebrew as the language of Jewish Palestine and its rebirth as a living speech everywhere disentangled from dangerous analogies and stripped of shoddy dreams. When that comes about the Palestinian Jew will be bi-lingual or even tri-lingual not only in fact but on principle. I was frightened by the many little children who could speak Hebrew only. Suppose there is a poet [ 219 | ISRAEL among them? ... The other day a Hungarian friend of mine was trying to tell me about Ady, the great modern Hungarian poet who died an untimely death a few years ago. My friend explained to me that Ady used the words of the Hungarian language with such freshness and force and connotative richness that his diction alone was more thrilling than any music. I could well believe it, but it meant nothing to me. There are only eight million possible readers of Hungarian in the world. Poetry is untranslatable. My friend translated for me the substance of a few poems of Ady that the poet wrote in Paris and spoke to me of his life. And from the translations and the account there came to me the unmistakable breath of a terrible forlornness, a crushing futility. ... Yet Ady had the consolation that he could at least speak to his own people. The Hebrew speaking Palestinian will not even have that. However much we cultivate Hebrew as a second language and accomplishment in the dispersion—and I am heartily in favor of such cultivation—the voice of the Hebrew poet will never reach even half of his own people as a living voice. It will not reach mankind at all.... It is imperative that, within a reasonable period, bi-linguality become part of Palestinian ideal and practice. | There is an even graver reason than any I have adduced. Palestine, it must never be forgotten, does not exist for itself alone. It exists for itself; it exists for the Jewish people everywhere in the world. By the time we have brought three millions of Jews to Palestine there will probably be almost as many left in the dis- persion as there are today. The difficulties of inter- communication must be reduced toa minimum. The life [ 220 ] Ve DANE OV ok that streams forth from Palestine must be, in the largest possible measure, a life immediately intelligible to great masses of the Jewry of the world. Intelligible or, at least, accessible. Let me not be thought of as harboring any grave fears in this matter. The mental and cultural flexi- bility which the Jew has acquired through so many gen- erations is not likely to be lost through a theory. My criticism is directed against the theory which would rob us of clear advantages and reduce us, for the sake of fancied and romantic goods, to the status of a Near Eastern peasant people. That theory is derived from sources alien to ourselves, alien to the life of the modern world. We are the most modern of peoples; we were modern in an immemorial antiquity. The Prophets were the conscious destroyers of their national state whenever that state became tyrannous. Of romantic patriotism, of the doctrine of “my country, right or wrong,” they were wholly innocent. They welcomed defeat as cleans- ing and captivity as a judgment upon national unright- eousness. Folk solidarity for the sake of power, physi- cal or cultural, is an ideal that they would not have com- prehended. They strove after justice; their Messianic state was a realizable commonwealth upon the solid earth. ‘They might conceivably have understood both H. G. Wells and Bertrand Russell. They would have been able to make nothing of those romantic notions of folk, solidarity, loyalty, which did not arise until the heathen, the primitive peoples of the heaths and forests of Europe had completely drained Christianity of its Jewish content, divorced it from its Jewish origin and substituted a new Pantheon of gods for the last of the [ 221 ] ISRAEL Prophets. By all means, then, let Hebrew be the chief language of Palestine and let its study spread in the dispersion. But let it be a means toward a temperately considered end. With medievalizing and romantic no- tions of the supreme preciousness of Volkstiimlichkeit we have nothing to do. We transcended those notions many centuries before they were born. The best minds of the modern world are approaching the temper and the aims of Jeremiah. To harbor the dreams of the romantic nationalist would be for us to submit to the last indignity of assimilation, to abandon both ourselves and our necessary function among the peoples of the world. II The question of language is inseparable from that of education in Palestine. Under this aspect the problem assumes another and acuter form. For it is perfectly evident and is, in fact, not denied by anyone, that an educational process conducted, wholly in Hebrew is bound to result in a narrowing, an isolation, an impover- ishment of the mentality of several generations of pupils. I do not doubt that the utmost is being done to transfer into a Hebrew medium the cultural material upon which education is based. It is clear, however, that that utmost can be but little for the present, can not be a great deal for a considerable period to come. For in such matters a voluntary effort, however well conducted and intelli- gent, counts for less than those processes of ripening and intensification that lie beyond the activity of a con- scious will. The radical Hebrew idealists admit the character of [ 222 | VITA NUOVA the situation and are ready to accept it. They are will- ing to sacrifice the youth of several scholastic genera- tions. I am not sure that they are fully aware or ready to be at all times fully aware of the magnitude of the sacrifice. Not that I accuse them of a want of candor. They have simply, in their minds, substituted a world of doctrinaire idealism for the world of reality as given. In that real world, it is the advantage of the Jew that he can master one or several of the Western cultural tradi- tions with an astounding intimacy and sympathy and yet remain himself. Our idealists are betrayed in their reasoning first by the attacks of the philosophical anti- Semite or, rather, the pseudo-philosophical anti-Semite and, secondly, by the assimilatory Jew whose life repre- sents an agreement with the doctrines of that anti- Semite. It is a fallacy that race and culture are iden- tical. It is a fallacy that varieties within a national culture are an evil. If a Jewish man of letters creates a style in prose which has an undertone, a rhythmic quality demonstrably Jewish, he has in so far enriched the human and artistic possibilities of the prose medium in which he works. The Provencal strain in French is considered no impoverishment nor the Swiss Alemanic strain in German nor the Scotch in English. The answer that we are more alien, that we are immitigably Oriental is fallacious too. We have lived in the West now as long as we ever lived in the Kast. We know this world and have become a part of it. Our uniqueness is due to certain original moral qualities which history has preserved and intensified. We are still rebels, destroyers, seekers of abstract justice, hostile to the sacredness of the state, passionate for a Messianic kingdom on earth. [ 223 ] ISRAEL But that does not make us alien. With this character of ours, with these permanent traits we master the cul- tures of the West. From that process springs our func- tion, service, right. The anti-Semite says: Though you speak English or French or German with the tongue of men and angels you remain a Jew. ‘The assimilatory Jew answers: No, I do not. I have become an English- man, Frenchman, German. The Hebrew idealist says: You are quite right. We shall cease to speak your tongues and shall withdraw from your world. ‘The ra- tional answer is: Yes, we remain Jews. As Jews we master and possess the cultures of the West; as Jews we contribute our best and deepest to those cultures and what we contribute belongs to us and also to mankind. ‘You do not want what we give? You do not want us? That is meaningless, for we are here—here through forces beyond all human willing, all human arbitrament. During the World War you also said you did not want the Germans or German civilization upon the earth. That is the babble of children. We are here as the Ger- mans are here. The world and the universe include us as they include all the eternally given elements that are a part of its essential character. You have, indeed, tried again and again to destroy us. A people cannot be destroyed except from within. We are here, part evi- dently of the eternal landscape of mortality. We are — here neither by your grace nor by our will. Call it the will of God . . . call it the nature of things. .. . Do I seem to be digressing? The truth is that these various questions are inter-coherent. Without the Hegelian glorification of the absolute state, without the romantic identification of nationalistic race-culture with | [ 224 | VITA NUOVA the integrity of the war-like master State, it would never have occurred to anyone to apply racial tests to the par- ticipants in any given linguistic culture or to be so irra- tional as to think uniformity a good or assimilation a necessity. Nor would it ever, by the same token, have occurred to the Hebrew idealists to risk de-Huropeaniz- ing the educational system of Palestine and producing one-hundred-per-cent Jews. Jew and Gentile have been ensnared by the same fallacy—the fallacy of the virtue of one-hundred-per-centism, impoverishment, exclusion, uniformity, mass feeling, action, solidarity. ... I do not wish, to use the common phrase, to make my criticism a destructive one. I accept Hebrew as the chief language of Palestinian Jewry and hence of our educational system there. I protest against its exclu-. sive dominance, on the ground of the assimilatory char-- acter of the theories that support this dominance. Their history and character has made the Jews good linguists. Let them remain so. They are quick to master a new culture. Let them not give up that precious ability. Are there not enough cultural nationalists in the world— enough Frenchmen who know no literature but their own, Englishmen who think German a barbarous Jar- gon, Germans who insist that Jesus and Plato and Dante must have been of Teutonic blood? I shall, of course, be asked for a practical plan. It is very simple. I hope to see the educational system of Palestine bilingual—Hebrew and English—from the kindergarten on. I hope to see German a compulsory study in all secondary schools. And I choose German rather than French not on account of my own fondness for the language and literature, but because nine-tenths [ 225 ] ISRAEL of the intellectual and artistic productivity of modern Jewry happens to be embodied in German. A Jew who does not know German is not only cut off from an ines- timable and congenial source of culture, but from the history, literature, philosophy of his own people in the period between the emancipation and the present. The importance of this consideration transcends all questions of partisanship, taste or prejudice. The entire modern literature on the history and philosophy of the Jewish people is written in German. The history and _ phi- losophy of the nationalist and Zionist renaissance is written in German. The Palestinian Jew must speak and read Hebrew and English; he must read German. It will be said that this is a heavy burden. But the heaviness of a burden depends upon the strength of the bearer. Whoever has come in contact with Jewish life in Poland or in the Succession States of Central Europe will have no misgiving in this matter. Nor will he fear that the Palestinian Jew of the future will be able to use no language with native purity, ease and precision. He has too often been witness of the contrary. He knows, too, that in this matter of the fine and creative use of language difficulties have been made on grounds of mere theory. They have been declared to exist by those who desired them to exist. I have, as it happens, no great admiration for the work of Rabindranath Tagore. But he seems to me, linguistically, a luminous example of what I would have a Palestinian poet of the future be. That poet will undoubtedly write chiefly in Hebrew. But he should also be able to speak clearly and beauti- fully to a larger world. The problem or, rather, the dilemma of language is [ 226 ] VITA NUOVA the only one that presses heavily upon the new educa- tional system in Palestine. Our schools suffer from poverty, of course. The government has so far given them no aid. The entire cultural as well as the entire colonizatory activity in Palestine is supported by the voluntary self-taxation of the Jewish people. The thirty-eight kindergartens, the sixty-five elementary schools, the three schools of collegiate rank, the teachers’ seminaries, the technical schools, the schools of music and of art, the libraries, the research institutes of the uni- versity—all these institutions of a kind hitherto unheard of in this land are, except for the tuition fees collected by the schools of secondary and collegiate rank, depend- ent for support upon the Jews of the world. ‘Today there are twelve thousand pupils and students and five hundred teachers. ‘Tomorrow these numbers will have doubled. ... Day after tomorrow they will have trebled. For here is an activity in Palestine that has not, like its economic activities, rigid limits dictated by the size and the resources of the land. Jews from all parts of the world will send their children here for a year, for two years, in order that those children may bring back with them into the lands of the world that profound sense of their right to be anywhere what indeed they are, without which the life of no man can be tolerable, worthy or:cleantiaies. There is about our schools in Palestine a light that is more than the strong sunlight of the land. It is the light of a human ease and freedom. The old gray inhibitions and fears are gone. I know of nothing more tragic than the situation of Jewish pupils and students in nearly all the schools of Galuth. Acceptance engenders the fear [ 227 | -_ ISRAEL of its ceasing and that fear for the comfort of the present begets a shadow of servility. . .. Open exclusion is almost healthier. But that, in turn, produces a defen- sive arrogance; it produces, too, love and longing that are thrown back upon themselves, that grow bitter and contorted. For let us have the courage of our essential decency. It is not we who harbor instinctive hate or dis- like. Our children, uninhibited by words, cries, slights, would love the children of the Gentiles. For to us love is not dependent on sameness nor brotherhood on uni- POrty.s ey te From the schools of Palestine these conflicts are gone. This old bitterness has never stained them. Speech and gesture have lightness, naturalness, clarity... . The oldest and most famous of our schools is the Herzlia Gymnasium at Tel-Aviv. The handsome white building with its arcades stands almost at the center of the town. The arcades with their tall round arches are the note of the place as they are of the Technicum and of the Beth Sefer Reali at Haifa. You stand in those arcades and look across the flowers that border them and through the tall arches upon the landscape of Palestine. And whether the scene be the Mediterranean shore, as at Tel-Aviv, or whether it be these strangely sublime hill- sides, as at Haifa, you have a presage of the future. A presage too vague for the coarseness of words. But overwhelmingly definite to the spirit. This architecture, this landscape, this ease and freedom in the flooding light will mold the youth of Israel. It is no optimist’s dream to hope that from these colleges will come men and women who will, some day, carry into dark corners of the diaspora their own spiritual erectness, their un- [ 228 | Vi er ae IN GO OOV) A. woundedness to the wounded in heart, their natural dig- nity to those who cannot find the mean between servility and arrogance. In the Herzlia Gymnasium the students can elect to pursue either a scientific or a literary and philosophical curriculum. It is a sign of the abundant health of the situation that slightly more than half of the young men and women elect to pursue the latter course. Although they will probably have to engage in the rudest of prac- tical pursuits after graduation, they have the uncon- torted instinct for what belongs to a truly human life. They thus offer a living argument against the romantic extremists who speak of the overdevelopment of the Jewish mind and counsel in almost Mid-Western Amer- ican terms the cultivation of the hand and a devotion to so-called practical studies. I do not by any means underestimate the work of the magnificent Technicum. I know how necessary it is to the building-up of the country. Here again I plead against an attitude. A Jewish peasantry like any other peasantry, Jewish mechanics like Gentile mechanics— what are they to us or to the world? Happily the danger of such a development is again slight. The Jewish tiller of the earth reads Goethe and Spinoza; graduates of the literary course at Herzlia proceed to Mikveh Israel for practical training in agriculture; the engineers turned out by the Technicum will not be skilled persons with a Philistine mind and outlook; the mechanics in the towns need books as essentially as they do tools. This is the Jand of Israel... . I need not dwell on the well-known Bezalel school for art and handicrafts at Jerusalem, nor on the schools of [ 229 ] ISRAEL music there and at Haifa nor on the extensive press of the land. There is an opera company in Jerusalem; in the great hall of the Herzlia Gymnasium we heard a quite good piano recital; the flourishing Musical Society of Jerusalem invited my wife to give a song-recital which was received precisely as it would have been in New York or Vienna. Nor need I describe the marvel- ous hospitals and stations of the Hadassah Medical Service where all the people and races of the land receive healing, nor the orphanages in gardens nor the delightful children’s republic near Balfouria. Art, the things of the mind, the works of humanity are everywhere. F'arm- stead and workshop are aware of intellectual values. But these are not matters for pride. They are matters of course. ‘That they are so is the charter, is the reason for the existence of a land of Israel... . Til My description of the land of Palestine and of the people and of the work there has been tentative and fragmentary. But it has been so quite consciously. For what I have desired to communicate is a vision that I saw, an atmosphere that I felt, a hope that is going forth, a dream that has been dreamed so long and so passionately that it has passed, that it is passing into the world of reality. Statistics tell a very vague story at best, nor have I a mind for them. In regard to Palestine they are, moreover, like the shifting dunes. The population increases daily; new colonies are founded; the great pilgrimage is on. If the Jewry of the West becomes aware of its duty and provides the [ 280 | VITA NUOVA means, the Palestinian jest will soon be a fact: while you have turned your back to the country you have lost your concrete knowledge of it. So swift is the growth. ... I must be more definite, however, concerning the political foundations upon which our experiment and our hope are based. To not a few of my readers what I shall now say will be a twice-told tale. But to the majority of Americans it will not be so. I am sure that there are thousands of thoughtful people, even of Jews, in America who have but the vaguest notion of those international events and agreements that have trans- formed the Zionist aspiration into a historic fact and into an unescapable obligation upon the Jewry of the world. It was through the meeting of two extraordinary minds and characters, those of Chaim Weizmann and Arthur James Balfour, that at the end of the World War an existing force and trend in human history were given an official political existence through the declara- tion of one of the great powers. The now famous Bal- four Declaration, issued on the second of November, 1917, is as follows: “His Majesty’s government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish People, and will use their best en- deavors 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 country.” This declaration was confirmed by the Premiers of Great Britain, France and Italy at the San Remo Con- [ 231 ] ISRAEL ference in April, 1920, and later embodied in the treaty signed by Turkey and the Allied Powers at Sevres. It was a foregone conclusion at San Remo that the Man- date for the Government of Palestine should be en- trusted to Great Britain. This was in fact done. The Council of the League of Nations drew up the Palestine Mandate, a document consisting of a preamble and twenty-eight articles, which was published at London in July, 1922, and deposited in the archives of the League. This instrument, then, embodies the pledged views and intentions of the Allied Powers and has since been con- curred in as fully as possible by the Government and the people of the United States. It is not necessary to quote or analyze any consider- able portions of the Mandate. It will suffice to call attention to those provisions that guarantee the Jewish settlement of Palestine and those others which are cal- culated to allay the fears of people who are tender- minded in respect of their “loyalty” to the master State. The Mandate of the League of Nations quotes and reaffirms the Balfour Declaration. It recognizes the “historical connection of the Jewish people with Pales- tine,’ as a ground “for reconstituting their National home in that country.” It therefore instructs the Man- datory Power, Great Britain, to place the country “under such political, administrative and economic con- ditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish National Home.” It directs that the administration of Palestine shall without prejudicing the interests of other sections of the population, “facilitate Jewish immigra- tion under suitable conditions,” and shall “encourage settlement by Jews on the land, including state lands [ 282 ] j VITA NUOVA and waste lands not required by public purposes.” In official confirmation of these provisions, the Mandate declares that “English, Arabic and Hebrew shall be the official languages of Palestine” and that inscriptions on stamps or money if in Arabic shall be repeated in He- brew and if in Hebrew shall be repeated in Arabic. These statements are unmistakably clear. Whatever current of distrust or opposition there may be within the countries of the powers constituting the League of Nations, there can be no doubt as to the definiteness of the pledged word of those powers. 'These powers, furthermore, while instructing the Mandatory of Pales- tine to give the Jews all reasonable aid and opportunity, placed the responsibility for the upbuilding of Palestine squarely upon the Jewish people whom they therefore implicitly and explicitly recognized as a_ people. Hence they provided in the Mandate “that an appro- priate Jewish Agency shall be recognized as a public body for the purpose of advising and codperating with the administration of Palestine in such economic, social and other matters as may affect the establishment of the Jewish National Home and the interests of the Jewish population in Palestine.” Accepting the facts of the historic moment, the powers recognized the Zionist Or- ganization as such an agency. The Mandate, however, adds these important words: “The Zionist Organiza- tion in consultation with the British Government shall take steps to secure the codperation of all Jews who are willing to assist in the establishment of the Jewish National Home.” In brief, the Mandate foresaw the necessary and proper codperation of the whole of Jewry. And in accordance with this provision of the powers the [ 233 | ISRAEL Thirteenth Zionist Congress (Carlsbad, August 1923) resolved upon the calling of a Jewish World Congress within three years which should provide for the forma- tion of a Jewish Agency one half of whose members should belong to the ranks of the non-Zionists. The Zionist Congress provided, in addition, for the imme- diate codperation of all Jews who were in sympathy with the upbuilding of Palestine and in substantial agree- ment with the terms of the Balfour Declaration and the Palestine Mandate. I think that these quotations require but little com- ment. ‘The recognition of the existence of the Jews as a people has always been a part of the correcter instincts of mankind. ‘That recognition has now been affirmed in a sort of international charter which admits our right as members of a people and as upbuilders of Palestine to our eivic and political status in the various lands of the diaspora. I have no simple faith in treaties or dec- larations or in the honor of the essentially belligerent and hence still barbaric states of today. But this charter, having been given, though it can be partially or wholly revoked in action, can never be abrogated in moral fact, can never be expunged from the records or the memories of men, can never be eliminated from among the creative forces of the future. It remains to add that this charter of the recognition of the existence and the rights of Jewish nationality and internationality has been approved and confirmed by America too. The sixty-seventh Congress of the United States, on September 21, 1922, passed resolu- tions embodying and seconding the Balfour Declara- tion. In addition the Senate Committee on Foreign [ 234 ] VT Acie OVA Relations has just (March 1925) recommended the passage of a bill by which the Government of the United States, not being a member of the League of Nations, shall express its acceptance of and concurrence with the Palestine Mandate and all its provisions. The most anxious of conventional patriots need hesitate no longer. He may, putting the matter on this lowest plane, admit that the Jews are a people and give his contributions to the Keren Hayesod. If his nationalist Gentile neighbor asks him why, being the member of a people and a friend of Palestine, he does not get out of America and go there, our anxious patriot can reply that his attitude and activity have the pledged support and approval of the powers forming the League of Nations as well as of the Government of the United States. This is perhaps the best place to deal with another fancied difficulty which in past years gave rise to the long and acrimonious dispute between political and cul- tural Zionists. All friends of Palestine are cultural Zionists today. ‘They are so because the point of the old controversy has been blunted. The concept state has lost its rigidity. The Jewish people through its agency does in fact administer the government of the Jews in Palestine today in all matters that pertain to civilization We colonize, educate, sanitate. We deal with all eco- nomic problems. We do not exercise the political func- tions of the state. But political government has fallen into a just disrepute. It has always drifted into war; 1t has always destroyed the works of civilization; it is al- ways and everywhere tyrant and menace. It is the most primitive political thinking that can envisage no kind of state except the conventional political state. We [ 235 | ISRAEL are, in fact, building up an organization in Palestine which may be called a state or not, as one pleases, but which has nothing to do with force. Perhaps this sort of organization is the state of the future. Eliminate war and it is clear that the state needs, outside of its cul- tural and economic activities, only a minimum of police power. As the economic life becomes more cooperative and less competitive, as is bound to be the case in Pales- tine, arbitration will replace litigation. Since Jews are in addition, not likely to demand repressive or sump- tuary laws or censorships of any kind, it is clear that the political activities of this type of state will be so reduced as to tend to disappear. By the time there are three millions of Jews in Palestine, it is not unlikely that the nations may have awakened partially at least from their destructive delusions concerning the master State, the necessity for force and regimentation, the inevitability of armed conflicts. And thus it is possible that then the organization we shall have built up in Eretz Israel will, in fact, be a state, the state of the future, the state of codperation and peace. Meanwhile we shall abstain from the exercise of political power, from the ambition for it, and rather suffer temporary ills and disappoint- ments than question the right and supremacy of the British Mandatory. We shall, in brief, set the example of a nation that has transcended the desire for power, the desire for political rule, that knows the vanity of such power and refuses it for reasons akin to those rea- sons for which of old Samuel hesitated to place a king over Israel. Our position in the whole matter is admi- rably clear. We are, by the pledged word of the great powers, including the United States, in Palestine as of [ 236 ] VITA NUOV A right. We have the given word of the nations that this right shall not interfere with our civic and political rights anywhere else in the world. Having as a people out- grown the delusions of force and war we shall instinc- tively and naturally abstain from any activity which may endanger the moral weight of the pledges that have been given us. IV I have said that our position is admirably clear. I have not said that it is easy ... There are difficulties, problems, dilemmas. We are living in a politically- minded world, that world is passing through a period of black reaction. Lower depths have been touched than were touched in the reactionary period following the Napoleonic wars. The Fascisti have just called upon the reactionaries and blood-thirsty nationalists of the world to unite; they seek a league with the awaken- ing Magyars; they stretch out hands to the barbarous Poles; they are prevented from fraternizing with the Bavarian Hakenkreuzler only through their own incon- sistent brutality in South Tyrol. All these parties are hotly anti-Semitic, violently opposed to our colonization of Palestine. Everywhere the Jew is a liberal, a social- ist, a friend of peace. It is easier to attack him than to attack the Christian liberal. For against the Jew, one has the weapon of calling him alien and therefore traitor and enemy of the people. The Jew has no power and the weapons against him are ready to hand. In addi- tion there are the rivalries of the predatory imperial- isms. Italy wants the hegemony of the Mediterranean. She grudges the British stronghold in Palestine. [ 237 ] ISRAEL Hence a Fascist Italy, friendly at last with the Vatican, causes the outcry over the holy places in Palestine. Hence from remote and mysterious sources the Moham- medan-Christian Union in Palestine receives encourage- ment and funds, and our difficulties with the Arabs are increased. : The problem of the Arab population is our most serious one. Seven hundred thousand Arabs live in Palestine. Their rights are clear and indestructible. Neither their neglect of the land nor their ignorance nor the poverty of the great majority of them nor fanati- cism nor disease nor their hostility to what we consider progress can diminish their rights by one jot. Whether they are a majority in the land as today, or a minority, as they will inevitably be tomorrow—their rights and our duties remain the same. It is a very hard task that confronts us; itis anew task. It is the task of proving to the simple Arab peasant that we indeed desire that there shall never be either oppressors or oppressed in the land, that we will not use our skill or knowledge or money against him. And the difficulty of the task arises from the fact that the Arab cannot, in the nature of things, believe in our sincerity since to him, as to most people in the world today, it seems axiomatic that those who have power of any sort should use it, that intelligent minorities should seek privilege at the expense of the many and that popular majorities should seek to oppress or to stamp out those who are different from themselves and fewer than themselves. The Arab cannot by any possibility reach the level of our economic and political thinking. Hence even though we pay for every foot of land that is bought and though the Arab comes to our [ 238 ] Widide tee sis WO) Vi Al hospitals and clinics, there remains a broad foundation of distrust from which, on the slightest provocation, fric- tion, instigation from without, there may arise misun- derstandings and conflicts. ‘The process of conciliation would of course be more rapid if the Arabs and our- selves were left untouched by the anti-Jewish influ- ences of Europe. For our enrichment of the land, which must profit all of its people, is clear enough for the simplest to see. Our sanitary engineering, our success- ful fight against the fearful curse of trachoma—these are things that neither fellah nor effendi can wholly disregard. We must make up our minds, however, that we cannot escape the sinister influences of the outside world and that we must be deterred by no hardship from carrying out our duty toward the Arab population with perfect patience, serenity and with unfaltering good- will. In this matter of the relations of two peoples in one land, as in the matter of our gradual organization of a cultural, economic, non-political state, we must, the opportunity now being ours, resolutely and austerely accept our function as seekers and exemplars of a new and better order for all the world. I do not wish to represent the situation in colors un- duly dark. In purely Arab towns and villages one feels quite often the breath of a sullen hostility. In many parts of the country, on the other hand, the relations between Jewish and Arab workers are excellent. Many of the Arab notables are hostile to us in a secondary fashion only. ‘They miss the profits and privileges of Turkish corruption and misrule and include British and Jews in a common envy and dislike. Others, on the contrary, are fully aware of the advantages of Jewish [ 239 ] ISRAEL colonization to the country as a whole. Thus Ibrahim Abdin of Ramleh, one of the leading Arab notables, has just issued an appeal to the Arab people in the paper Al Akhbar, urging them for their own good to cooper- ate as fully as possible with the Jews whose numbers, resources, influence and justice bring nothing but good to the land. Our policy being fixed, what is needed, above all, is an intensification of our activity. Neither hostile powers from without nor resistance from within can harm our work or hope. But we must not fail ourselves. It is useless for a Jew to say today: Iamnota Zionist. If this work stagnates, if this task fails, if this experiment is permitted to be overwhelmed by difficulties, by sloth, by niggardliness, the nations who gave us our right in the Jand of the fathers will not ask: How many Zionists were there? How many non-Zionists? What private quarrels, what vain fears, what old self-seeking, what ambition of local and transitory Gentile favor impeded this creative enterprise? They will not ask these ques- tions. ‘They will say: You have not the character nor the cohesion nor the dignity nor the strength of a people. They will offer us the old dilemma between complete assimilation and extinction. Our minority rights in Eastern Europe will be a thing of jeers and contumely; our people in Central Europe will be driven to the ignominy of a false apostasy. Nor let the pros- perous merchant or lawyer in Cleveland or Kansas City imagine that, if he but gives a little to charity, this mat- ter does not touch him. He can close his heart and mind to the fate of his people. He cannot protect himself or his children from being unescapably involved in that [ 240 | VITA NUOVA fate. The upbuilding of Palestine has become test and symbol and decision in the councils of the nations and the consciousness of mankind. We shall henceforth either be a people, a pacifist and creative people, but a people— or else we shall enter a worse than medizval period and drag our Jewishness through the world in the guise of a secret pestilence and a hidden shame. ‘To avert the lat- ter fate, to liberate those in bondage, to guard lest the freedom we enjoy in the West do not once more lapse into bondage, there is but one means. There is one over- whelmingly imperative duty. The work in Palestine must be accelerated and intensified. The self-taxation of the Jewish people must be doubled or trebled at once. American Jewry must save the Jews of the world; it will thus help to save all men everywhere from the crimes of intolerance, of belligerent nationalism, of cruelty and of hate. [ 241 ] CHAPTER VIII THE LAND AND THE WORLD I In the long run the idea is stronger than the fact. It becomes fact. It becomes flesh. By the strength of an idea we have sustained ourselves through the ages; by virtue of an idea we are regenerating our people and contributing to the regeneration of all men. Meanwhile, in the fine vernacular phrase, the ground is burning under our feet. Not only in Poland and in Hungary, but in Rumania and Bulgaria. Once it mattered less, for the gates of America were open. But the muddy wave of reactionary nationalism has overwhelmed us there too. ‘The immigration system by quotas shuts out the Jews of Eastern Europe. It shuts them out com- pletely. Where shall they go? Canada is surly and the tropics are inhospitable. In every harbor of Europe as well as notoriously in Cuba thousands of fugitives are starving. ‘They have neither home nor refuge; they can neither return nor goon. They aredoomed. They and thousands of others who will be forced gradually to share their fate. Wherever their feet touch the ground the ground begins to burn. And their feet have wan- dered so long and so far. They have but one hope. And the name of that hope is Palestine... In this respect then, as in other and even more far- reaching ones, it no longer matters whether one is a [ 242 ] DHE DAN DARN D:D HBr WO RL D Zionist or a non-Zionist or an anti-Zionist. One has only tobe human. One has no more excuse for not aid- ing in the upbuilding of Palestine than one would have for not saving one’s neighbor’s children from a burn- ing house. ‘That neighbor’s theological or philosophical or political opinions would scarcely weigh at such a mo- ment. First one would save the children. Every Jew must give to Palestine; every liberal and humane Gen- tile must plead for Palestine. These fugitives in Hamburg and Liverpool and Ha- vana, have heard the call. They flee, often in confusion, often misled. But the true goal to them is Eretz Israel. A pious legend has become a living hope. Dimly they feel the vast futility of exchanging one Ghetto for an- other. The West complains of their dirt... . Poverty is not likely to be clean. The West complains of their rigid orthodoxy... . It has been their resistance to op- pression. The West complains of their profiteering, their black bourses, their dishonest chaffing. . . . For centuries they have had no alternative but that of oppos- ing’ guile to force. Let them go to Palestine. Their children will be clean, enlightened, honest. There is a story told in various forms; it is a profound illustration of the trend of the saga of the regeneration of Israel through Palestine. It is the shabbat. In the old town in Jerusalem two tall, old men sit near the eurb. They are clothed in their long Polish velvet robes and wear the fur-rimmed hats of the seventeenth cen- tury. They are speaking in Yiddish. They are droning in Yiddish. ‘““When does one begin to be mindful of the powers of the rain?’ Rabbi Elieser said: “From the first day of Succoth? Rabbi Jehoshua, on the con- [ 243 j ISRAEL 99 trary. ... The old men look up. Two young men are passing. Clean-shaven. Khaki trousers. Athletic shirts, open at the throat. Bareheaded. They speak Hebrew and are discussing the point that Strindberg- ian situations, at least, are avoided in the Kvuzoth, since the hectic closeness of conventional marriage with its nervous exacerbations is impossible there. The two young men are smoking although it is some hours from the appearance of the first star and the ending of the shabbat. . . . The two old men look at each other with a grieved bitter glance. They look at those impious youths. And with contempt and anger in his voice, one graybeard says to the other: “Zionists!’ Then he drones on: “Rabbi Jehoshua, on the contrary said: Since on the Succoth rain is the sign of a curse...” The practical uses of Palestine to the world are, then, abundantly clear. The land offers a refuge to those Jews whom intolerable persecution drives forth from the East of Europe and upon whom the West has shut its gates. But it offers a refuge in which the old Ghetto conditions are not duplicated in a merely minor form. By virtue of conditions both sociological and economic the Eastern Jew undergoes a transformation of both character and outlook in Palestine. He is not oppressed and therefore need not rely on the protection of guile; he is not asked to assimilate and hence does not need the support of orthodoxy to sustain his integrity. He is not endured but is in the land as of right. He is driven neither to cheat nor to cringe. He conquers the Ghetto for himself and for the world. The most anti-national of assimilatory Jews may find in these facts sound motives for uniting with their [ 244 ] THE LAN Dit AN Dy DH Bs WoO RL D nationalist friends in the upbuilding of Palestine. They cannot get rid of their Jewishness; they cannot crush the instinctive integrity of Israel. They are put out and embarrassed and shamed by these Jews from the East, with their caftans and earlocks and kosher cook- ing and petty trading. Let them but help to send these people to settlements in Palestine. They will be em- barrassed and put out no more. J['reedom is a sover- elon remedy. They will not have to apologize to the Gentile world for the children who grow up in Pales- tine. ‘They will not be shamed by the Palestinians as they are by the Poles.... It is easy to see, from every point of view, how the transformation of the Eastern Ghetto Jew into the free and erect Palestinian will tend to clean and heal one of the festering wounds of civilization. I am, of course, profoundly aware of the coil of tragic injustice in which we are involved. It is the Poles and Hungarians to whom the missionaries of civilization should be sent. It is of them that men should be ashamed, not of the Jews whom they have oppressed. But Poland is France’s buffer state against the wicked Soviets and our Department of State forbids Count Karolyi to plead for the liberation of his country at the instigation of the emissaries of Horthy’s White Terror. ... Jewish things are fashionable in France today. Benoit went to Pal- estine to curse and stayed to bless. The new “Revue Juive’”’ is published by one of the most distinguished of the publishing houses of Paris. But I have not heard that the French Government has protested against the deliberate starving out of the Jewry of Poland. I have not heard of French protests against the Steiger affair [ 245 ] LS hee which so closely recalls that other affair of Captain Dreyfus. ... We had better remember the old Talmudic saying: “If I am not for myself, who will be? If I am for myself alone, what am 1? And if not today when?” II We have not been for ourselves; we have not been on our own side. No more idiotic myth was ever in- vented than that of the coherence and common activity of the Jewry of the world. Jewish money helped crush the Russian Revolution of 1905; there is the gravest danger today that Jewish money will steady the infam- ous Hungarian régime of Horthy. The extremes of economic conservatism and economic radicalism have coexisted within Jewry, the extremes of nationalism and internationalism. ‘There is the division between East and West, between the assimilationist and the anti- assimilationist, between orthodox and reformed, above all, between the passionate adherents of the lands and polities of their residence and political allegiance. What patriots have we not been—even in old Russia, even in new Poland. Landscape and language and folkways have captured our hearts again and again. Even in Jerusalem today where interaction is faultless and the dedication to a common ideal at last complete, people in their more intimate social life still tend to drift into little English and American and German and Russian groups. ... We must come home to ourselves. In the diaspora, the eternal diaspora, we must come home to ourselves. The nations as I have shown, are right in their percep- [ 246 | DE ES) AON De Ae ee Pika WV OE TD tion that we are a people. We have been afraid to be a people frankly and openly, because being a people has always meant and still unhappily means in most minds wanting power and being the foe of other peoples. Our history and our present, if we will but use both, prove that a people can be a people without power, jealousy, hostility, that, in brief, spiritual nationalism of a new and prophetic kind can exist.... It is here that we come upon the supreme importance of Palestine to the Jews of the dispersion and, indeed, to the world. All previous great movements within Jewry, as all previous movements within the life of all other peoples, have been dividing movements. Chassidim and Misnagdim were in an opposition that is analogous to the opposition between Protestants and Catholics. Movements that depend upon either metaphysical or economic concepts must divide even while they unite. Thoroughly unifying movements within a people have hitherto commonly been negative; they have arisen from jealousy or fear and have issued in war. The modern Jewish renaissance, culminating in the Palestinian task is capable of being absolutely unifying; it is absolutely pacifistic; it unites the possibility of Jewish cohesion with friendliness toward all mankind.... I do not say that a cohesion of the Jewry of the world crystallizing about the upbuilding of Palestine will solve the Jewish problem or silence the anti-Semite. To say that would indeed be to state the whole matter loosely and inaccurately. For the so-called Jewish problem consists in nothing but the uniqueness of our position, in the existence of a people which, though without the phys- ical possessions and common marks of nationhood, is [ 247 ] ISRAEL still and will always be a people. We do not want, then, to solve the Jewish problem. ‘To solve it would be to destroy ourselves. We want, on the contrary, to affirm it, to affirm the fact that there can be a people that is never an enemy of any other people, that is never held together by the possession or the hope of power, that has, therefore, represented for centuries, and rep- resents now, a type of nationalism that may be the hope of a barbarous and warlike world. We want to affirm the Jewish problem and, by being and remaining emphat- ically what we are, transcend the reactionary nationalist and anti-Semite everywhere in the world. ... Transcend him in our thinking and our action and ally ourselves constantly with those forces that in every country are struggling to transcend him too. By the constant ex- ample of our pacifist and spiritual nationhood we shall help to remold the concept nation itself and at last con- sciously function correctly and so fulfill our mission among the peoples of the earth. Our lack of cohesion, our local ardors and patriotisms have been not only a betrayal of ourselves but a betrayal of our service to mankind. Every Jew who denies or belittles his Jewishness and merges himself wholly with the people among whom he lives betrays not only his own people but all peoples. For there is no secure hope for mankind except in peace, except in brotherhood, ex- cept in the divorcement of nationalism from power, of economic activity from conflict, of the coexistence of nations from war.... We have been chosen by the trend of history from time immemorial as the example of a people of peace, a people without power, a people by the force of the spirit alone. .. . It is time now to be for our- [ 248 | THE LAN DY ANID )T HE WORLD selves; it is time for us to know profoundly that being, in this sense, for ourselves, we shall also be for all men. The upbuilding of Palestine answers, as I have tried to show, all the necessities of such a cohesive force as this hour in history demands. Every Jew can be touched by it on some side. If it appeals to him at first as a matter of humanitarian activity, of finding a home for the homeless alone, it may yet gradually speak to him concerning its subtler issues and help him to affirm himself creatively, to reexamine his social and political relationships, to learn concerning the possibility of a cul- tural state—a new kind of state, the state of the future, perhaps, in which the incentives for tyranny and warlike solidarity and so for intolerance will be found no more. He may begin by giving a shekel for charity and end by helping to destroy the political state. He may begin by buying a bit of eucalyptus forest and end by literally embracing the ideals of the Hebrew prophets from Amus to Jesus of Nazareth. The whole matter involves something like a conver- sion, through experience and the just processes of thought, to a view of things that is bound more and more to prevail in the modern world. In my personal expe- rience the reverse is true. I was a pacifist; I had come to see the evils of the political state. I came to the con- clusion that it was my Jewishness that had instinctively led me to these views. And I came to see that the char- acter and history of Israel made it from of old the natu- ral representative and bearer of that vision of life. But to others who still share, with the majority of people, the barbaric view of life—that love must be grounded in some hate, that war and competition cannot be tran- [ 249 ] ISRAEL scended as slavery had been or witch-hunting or human sacrifice of any kind; to such others a preoccupation with the ideas of the history of Israel, with the Pales- tinian plan and work; may bring that vision which is also the vision of Anatole France and Bertrand Russell and of all the clearest minds in all parts of the world... . It is not easy to state in specific terms the nature of such an inner re-orientation as I have in mind. We live from day to day and sometimes from year to year by the compromises and instinctive adjustments of our partic- ular situation. We try to exclude from consciousness the bitter little stings, the disappointments that we feel, the recurrent sense of incompleteness, of estrangedness. We wonder vaguely at this core of peacelessness in our lives. We are not, as a rule, quite happy among Gen- tiles. But neither are we so among Jews. Among the latter we have an impulse either of flight, or a faint sus- picion that our comfort, if we find it there, is bought at the price of some unworthiness. We are not often _ aware of the fact that our trouble is the result of a fal- lacy that is in the very air we breathe, a gross and silly superstition. The superstition is that solidarity must be confined to servants of the same state, the same power-group, and that it is the majority of these who have a right to set the norms of our outer and even of our inner lives. And this superstition has soaked so deeply even into our minds because of the coarse and barbaric belief that solidarity has but one ultimate aim—the repulsion or ex- ertion of force. , | But a day comes on which this superstition suddenly drops from us. We see that force is altogether evil, [ 250 | THE LAND AND THE WORLD that solidarity in its service is an evil too. There is no sound reason why we should be like anyone but ourselves, why we should adapt or adjust ourselves. We ask no one else todo so. Our social appreciations are not lim- ited by the test of uniformity. We do not ask our friends of other races to be less themselves in order to be our friends. Then why should we ask that of our- selves? If all of life were but recruiting for an army, that would be a different matter. But it is not. And we do an ill service both to ourselves and to our neighbors by playing into the hands of the barbarians who, in every country, would have all life reduced to that contempti- ble level... By some such process of reflection we lose our desire to be like our Gentile friends and neighbors and we are serene if they will not accept us in our unlikeness. And at the same time we feel our solidarity with our own people to be no longer an offense or a subtle disloyalty to other interests. For we know that Jewish solidarity is never one that seeks power or exerts force, that it is, historically and actually, a solidarity the fruits of which are charity and peace. And thus our human and our Jewish attitude is no longer negative. It becomes posi- tive and fruitful and all our human and social relations take on an unwonted dignity and serenity. .. . From this point it is but a step toward a rediscovery of the history and the literature of Israel—a rediscov- ery not so much through study as through the living ex- perience of the fact that that history and that literature answer profound instincts within our own hearts, that the prophets speak our thoughts, that the law-givers adumbrated our social tendencies, that so many Jews [ 251 | ISRAEL are followers of Jesus because their blood and his, their traditions and his are one. And now there follows, in every mind thus liberated, a desire to share in the total present fate and larger activity of its people. ‘The cen- tral question of Palestine arises and it is seen that Pales- tine not only offers a home to our homeless, not only be- comes the symbol of our reaffirmation of our right to be a people, but offers to all the world the first example of a national community that exists, in the old, eternal words of Zechariah, not by might, nor by power, but by the spirit... . . III I am not at all blind to the difficulties which the nation- alist Jew is likely to meet in the practical world. 'That world does not share his notion of nationalism becausé it does not, of course, share either his national experi- ence nor the character that made the national experience what it is. In Hungary all Zionist activity has been proscribed on the ground that no Hungarian subject must have non-Hungarian interests. There the sub- ject is a possible recruit. Nothing else. The state is a war machine. Wielders of the bayonet must be in psy-= chical uniform, and, if possible, of a uniform stupidity. Even in America the nationalist Jew will be accused of a subtle disloyalty and may actually be asked what, seeing that Great Britain is the Mandatory for Pal- estine, he would do in the event of a war between England and America. So long as the Jew is caught in the same superstition | as those who ask such questions he is, of course, helpless. He, therefore, has the strongest possible motive for in- [ 252 ] RHE LAND AN Diet BE owOR LD quiring into the nature of the state. He has the strong- est possible reason for helping to spread a more civilized notion of the state and its rights. He will soon, by some study and reflection, come to see that the state of the future, the cultural state, the state of peace, will be neither prison nor reformatory. The primary right to be what one is antecedes citizenship and the exercise of that right is consonant with all the duties of citizenship except the supposed duty of hating and killing the cit- izen of some other state. The mental and moral com- plexion of a man who deals honestly and kindly with others and pays his taxes, is no one’s business but his own. The state has not even the right to inquire what other cultural nationalist, religious or ethical interests he has. Men do not exist to serve the State; the State exists to serve the men. It exists to serve them as they are, not as some theory of regimentation would have them to be. ‘The best citizen is the worst recruit. An actual taste for physical combat is a remnant of the brute in man and the assimilatory Jew’s self-protective mim- icry of it is the last of human degradations. His incomparable fortitude under persecution renders the reproach of cowardice—a foolish reproach, by the way— absurd. He isa pacifist by history and instinct. And since the free and cultural state of the future cannot coexist with war, it is his duty both to himself and to others to help the hope and work for that state to pre- vail. It is such a state that he is founding in Palestine. It is only in such states in the diaspora that his future as well as the future of all men, can be tolerable. He must proceed in all his actions and attitudes from ab- solute, pacifist foundations. ‘The temporary obloquy [2538 | ISRAEL and contempt that he will suffer from the mob he will share with the noblest minds among all peoples, with Jeremiah and Jesus among his own. I do not wish to labor any point unduly. But this one is of supreme importance. I have described in a previous chapter the rise and fall of violent anti-Semi- tism and have shown how it coincides with the rise and fall of war-like emotion. The nations, at the deepest core of popular consciousness, think of themselves still as embattled tribes. Hence their instinctive impulse alternately to use and to extrude the Jewish minorities in their midst. There is no remedy for this situation so long as nationalism is identified with solidarity for economic warfare or the more open warfare of poison- gas and machine-guns. ‘The Jews of the diaspora can- not be emancipated until the nations are emancipated from their darkest sins and superstitions. The extent and violence of anti-Semitism in a given state is a test of that state’s relation to any rational concept of hu- mane civilization. The salvation of Israel and the sal- vation of mankind are one. Hence, the duty of the Jew to himself as well as to his Gentile fellowmen is over- whelmingly clear: to be as a Jew always on the side of the oppressed and disinherited, to be unfalteringly in league with those who work for peace anywhere in the world, to give and expect no return, to resist war and the call to war and the propaganda of war to the utter- most, to do all this as a normal self-expression of his Jewishness, to build up in Palestine a state that abstains from power, that knows nothing of rivalry, that will suffer injustice rather than seek to share political re- [ 254 | ie ee AGNI AGN Dirks WO RTD sponsibility, a state that shall not only restore the pre- served of Israel but be a light to the Gentiles. In assuming this task and the moral attitude which it entails the Jew can exchange his present attitude of self-obliteration for one of self-expression. He can be at once much humbler and much prouder. His lack of psychical balance comes from his often enforced but quite unnecessary and always futile flight from himself. He is by nature and tradition a sharer in moral revo- Jutions, a builder of some Messianic kingdom upon earth. He has but to be true to himself and the central] ideals of his people. The deep wrong of assimilation is a wrong the Jew does not only to himself but to all men. The Talmud tells the story how on that day on which the Egyptians were overwhelmed by the Red Sea, the great angels about the throne of God prepared to intone their song of praise. But God silenced them. “The work of my hands is drowning in the sea and you would sing a song of praise?” And to this day on the traditional anni- versary of the destruction of the Egyptians the Jewish liturgy dispenses with the great song of praise. . . . To the inheritor of such a tradition it should be clear that he has no place among those who hate and fight. It is perhaps here that the whole question of assim- ilation can be finally clarified. ‘The anti-assimilationist does not mean, as has been foolishly supposed, that we are to sunder our relations with Western culture, that we are to cease to possess it or to cease to share in its creative activities. He means that we are to cease be- cause of false shame to share in the barbarism of the world which our remote ancestors had transcended. I [ 255 ] ISRAEL have been told the story of a Jewish student at West Point who, in anticipation of gibes and slights, made himself the best boxer of his class. This story illustrates the lowest depth of the assimilatory process. What busi- ness had a Jew at a war-college? He betrayed his people; he betrayed civilization. If he thirsted for con- flict and self-immolation, was there not somewhere in the world a movement of passive resistance to be or- ganized or led? Were there none unjustly imprisoned, none oppressed? Was there no pestilence-stricken wil- derness anywhere where men needed the help of the unafraid? In that lad’s life every Jewish instinct had been warped; from his mind every Jewish thought had been driven. He was proud to be tolerated at West Point. He should have been too proud to be there at all. He had never been taught the verses of our eternal Psalms: Some trust in chariots, and some in horses, but we will make mention of the name of Jehovah our God... . It is easy to multiply examples of assimilation in the evil and servile sense. ‘There are Jewish fraternities at our colleges that without any inner urgency ape the habits and methods of Gentile fraternities; there are Jewish fraternities at European universities that have gone so far as to imitate the barbarous stupidity of dueling. There are private schools all over the country that are attended exclusively by Jewish pupils. They have Christian names and cultivate a superficially Chris- tian atmosphere and are patriotic and stopped teaching German during the war. There is no course in the Torah or the prophets or the tragic and glorious history of Israel. It is evil and servile assimilationism that [ 256 | THE LAND AND THE WORLD does not build a Jewish university in every country where we are not made thoroughly welcome at Gentile universities ... made welcome as we are... not because we assume the protective coloring of being keen on competitive sports or careless of study ... we, the people of the book, to whom learning has been as the breath of life... . Evil and servile assimilationism, in brief, is doing anything that is a contradiction of our fundamental Jewish instincts. The process has often gone so far that the man no longer knows what ails him. He is conscious of nothing but a vague spiritual discomfort. Let him talk to nationalist Jews; let him read the sacred books once more quite simply and as the documents of a human people and their human story. He will come home to himself and to his people and he will find the ideals of their history at one with the profoundest moni- tions of his own soul. ... I have come to the conclusion that the orthodox Jew who is enmeshed in a web of intellectually indefensible formalism is a more dignified and hopeful human phenomenon than the emancipated and shame-faced Jew whose whole existence is one long rite of propitiatory imitativeness. We who desire that all men should be free and at peace, let us at last exer- cise the first and most necessary of human liberties: let us be ourselves; let us be Jews. ... Our flight is in any event so futile. And I have ob- served with a somewhat bitter amusement how in our flight, though we never gain anything, we lose certain obvious and proper advantages. In America, for in- stance, and in Central Europe, the countries I know best, the Jews are, out of all proportion to their num: [ 257] ISRAEL bers, the supporters of music, of art, the audience of the best poets and novelists, the supporters of liberal and humane causes. .. . Well, these are all Jewish matters. Art and liberty are proper and instinctive and old Jewish preoccupations; charity and learning are the chief aims of the entire religious system of the Jew. ... We deserve no credit for these things, no personal credit. .. . But we should know with a calm and steady knowledge the qualities and tendencies of our character as a people. We must not brag; we need not whisper. There is far too much whispering. .. . self-criticism is one thing, shamefacedness is an- other. We must expel from blood and brain the most terrible of all the results of our long persecution—a shadow of our persecutor’s estimate of us. Not our greatest have quite escaped this curse. Wassermann re- grets that in every Jewish family that has been able to rise above the care for daily bread there is an artist. ... A subtle anti-Semitism has stolen into his mind.... Perhaps these aptitudes and energies could be more fruitfully employed than in writing novels and poems and symphonies that commonly miss true excellence. ... But those aptitudes and energies are in themselves beau- tiful and admirable... . There was a Zaddie who asked that there be inscribed upon his tomb neither name nor date but only this legend: “One who loved Israel.” ... IV What have I in mind? A Jew. A man first and a Jew afterwards. But profoundly a Jew for the sake of men. One such I have known. He never ceased for [ 258 | CRE. LAN DAN Dt THE WORLD a moment to be a Jew because he contributed richly and memorably to the particular Aryan civilization in which his lot was cast. But he knew without reflection, he knew through a deep inner monition that his contribu- tion should be high and fine and cleansed of dross be- cause he was a Jew. No, not to repel anti-Semitic re- proaches. But out of a positive dignity and fineness that became him as a son of so many martyrs and proph- ets. He evaded all strife. He preferred to suffer grave disadvantages and also petty annoyances rather than engage in strife. . . . On a snowy winter night, coming out of a crowded theater, he refused quietly to join in the scramble for the few available taxicabs. There might have been controversy. There might have been an ugly word from a pushing or ill-tempered per- son. And my friend who is, physically too, the noblest and most dignified of men, used the slow and rather dilapidated tramway of his city. . . . Nothing about him touched me more deeply than this incident. . . . It was a Jewish trait he showed. For many a pushing and jostling Jew pushes and jostles to override that impulse in himself. Why does he strive to override it? Because the Gentiles have taunted him with cowardice and servility and he desires to show that he is as good a man as anyone and can guard his interests as well as anyone else. But the attitude and gesture do not suit him, do not sit well upon him and he becomes offensive and vulgar. . . . Like the Gaels of old when we fare forth to battle we always fall. Our victories are of another kind... . It is not easy to be a Jew. It will be easier when the Jew is content to be himself. He must listen to his [ 259 | ISRAEL own soul. It is futile for him to try to cultivate the chivalric virtues—love of combat, uncritical acceptance of standardized objects of loyalty, an artificial sense of honor, an acceptance of life as a game to be played according to rules. The Aryan gentleman asks con- cerning an action: Is it honorable according to a code? Is it correct? Is it gentlemanly? Is it “quite cricket’’? The Jewish gentleman asks: Is it righteous? What is its relation to an eternal justice, to an eternal mercy? It is perfectly true that, according to the standards of chivalric Europe and the analogous tradition in Amer- ica, the Jew is no gentleman. How could he be? Why should he strive to be? He cannot say, for instance, “my country, right or wrong.” His historic experiences are not rooted in the Germanic institutions of nobles and retainers, of fealty as an abstract virtue. He missed not only by actual exclusion but as a matter of char- acter and instinct the whole experience of the feudal world. As a romantic curiosity he can appreciate the devotion of Aryan gentlemen to a royal nonentity, to the mediocre occupant of an exalted office. Personally he can never share these emotions. His democracy, his passion for reasoned justice, are bone-deep and thou- sands of years old. In the moral world he does not understand compromise. When the great oppressed the humble the prophets of Israel sought to destroy the state even unto obliteration, even unto foreign cap- tivity. The Jew has not changed. It was inevitable that modern socialism should be largely the creation of Jews. It does not matter whether the precise doc- | 1IT am aware of the coincidence of these ideas with those so eloquently expressed by my friend Maurice Samuel. [ 260 ] THE LAND AND THE WORLD trines of any group of them are likely to prevail. They acted out of an immemorial and unchangeable Jewish instinct. “He judged the cause of the poor and needy; then it was well. Was not this to know me? saith Jehovah.” Thus the Jew finds himself spiritually in conflict with his environment and, being the weaker, being the mem- ber of a persecuted minority, he becomes a servile as- similationist in his attempt to establish a harmony be- tween himself and his environment. The Jew of the future will understand both himself and the world bet- ter. That world cannot be saved, cannot be redeemed from chaos except through codperation and peace. Liberals and pacifists and the truly ethically minded see that. They know that the chivalric instincts must fall into disuse, that the gallant barbarisms of the North will end by destroying civilization unless they are curbed. Men must return to the ideals which Jesus derived from the prophets and teachers of his people. The world must be Christianized, the world must be Judaized. The two are one... . The Jew who sees these truths, who strives to build the state of peace and justice first in Palestine, next to codperate with all men who seek to build it else- where—that Jew will be calmly and serenely himself. Being a Jew is what he owes mankind. It may be that he will fail. It may be that all those thousands of fine and erect spirits among the Gentiles who are at one with him will fail. It may be that the black reaction now upon the world will issue in other wars and catas- trophes that will overwhelm the great civilizations of the West. It may be. . . . Then at least we shall have [ 261 | ISRAEL been among the least guilty; we shall have tried; we shall have clung to the saving doctrines of our people. With Elijah and Amos, with Jeremiah and Jesus we shall have stood unafraid before the powers of earth, we shall have loved the sojourner and judged right- eously between a man and his brother; we shall not have brought vain oblations to the idols of the marketplace; we shall have striven that violence shall no more be heard in the land, nor desolation nor destruction within its borders, but that its walls shall be called salvation and its gates praise. [ 262 | CHAPTER IX PROGRAM I Among the ill-known books of the world are the Hebrew scriptures. Protestants read them with the- ological preoccupation; they interpret them in the light of anterior assumptions that have nothing to do with that body of literature or with the character of the peo- ple who produced it. Orthodox Jews equally fettered by the theory of literal inspiration quibble over the in- terpretation of rules and laws. The modern Jew rarely reads the Hebrew books at all. He may, in fact, be repelled by the traces of an early and barbaric age that are found in certain of the most ancient legends; he may also be faintly disturbed by the use which hostile Gen- tiles have made of many passages in both the Torah and the prophetic books. The civilization in which he lives is more or less permeated with the spirit of these hostile interpretations. For himnself, then, this modern Jew prefers the liberal and radical philosophies of Christen- dom, the scriptures of the Greeks, even of the Hindus. He is, however free he may be in his own mind, hampered and inhibited by the false analogy to which I have called attention in a previous chapter. The books of the old Testament are not to us what the gospels are to the Christians. Jews and Judaized Gentiles went forth into the world and preached a new religion. The | 268 | ISRAEL peoples of Europe accepted this new religion in super- ficial speech and gesture. In fact they transformed it into the image of their immemorial selves. They have been and are pagan. The pacifists, the non-resisters, the absolute democrats are men and women who, by virtue of an innate difference of vision, have found Christianity, the original and completely Jewish teach- ing of Jesus, necessary to the health of their souls, to what they conceive to be the salvation of men on earth. And if we look about in the world we see that such men and women are always closely allied with Jews by bonds of common effort and of personal sympathy. The Jew should remember that the Hebrew scrip- tures are the expression of his people’s national self. Historic or scientific exactness has nothing more to do with this matter than it has with the Greeks’ relation to Homer or Plato, with that of the Germanic peoples to the Nibelungenlied or to Beowulf, with that of medieval Europe to Dante. Each of these documents embodies the human and ethical ideals that have sprung from the character of the people that gave it birth. iach is, in a deep sense, an unerring guide to the nature of that people. The Hebrew scriptures are our epics, songs, the expression of our profoundest moral leanings, of our reactions to man and nature and human life. ‘The traces of early and barbaric ideals need bother us no more than they troubled the author of the Re- public in Homer or than they do a humane and high- minded British imperialist in Beowulf. Each still found and finds himself fundamentally expressed in the epics of his race. This matter was very simply and strikingly illustrated [ 264 | PROGRAM by an incident that happened during the World War. When it was apparent that America was about to join forces with the Allies, a very admirable German friend living in America sent me a poem which he had written | in the Nibelungen stanza. In very moving terms he described the tragic conflict of loyalties that his fellow German-Americans were soon likely to face and com- pared that conflict to an analogous conflict of loyalties that is described in the epic of his race. I sympathized intensely with the difficulties of my German-American friends. But their conflict of loyalties meant nothing to me. I wanted to know on which side in that great conflict there was a preponderance of justice. If there was none on either side I was prepared to sympathize with the defeated, with the humiliated, and with the victors only in so far as they used their victory with restraint, with magnanimity, with justice, with mercy. Justice and mercy and peace have the allegiance of the Jew. Of loyalty irrespective of ethical values he knows little. Human and cultural sympathies may indeed cause him to see justice and mercy and peace where they are far to seek. But it is these that he wants as the objects of his loyalty. ... The legend by which this Jewish allegiance to justice and mercy, this Jewish carelessness of power, of any claims save those of justice and mercy, are illustrated is always the same. It begins to take form in the very ancient story of Elijah. Ahab the king desired the vineyard of a certain man Naboth who dwelt in the valley of Jezreel. But Naboth was unwilling to give up even to the king the inheritance of his fathers. So Jezebel, the queen, suborned false witnesses who swore [ 265 ] ISRAEL that Naboth had been guilty of blasphemy and the man was stoned to death. It is remarkable enough that in an ancient oriental monarchy the king had to barter with a plain farmer; it is remarkable that the man had to be declared guilty of an ethical offense. At this point, however, he who should really be called the eternal Jew enters the story. Elijah the Tishbite went to the king. “In the place where dogs licked the blood of Naboth shall dogs lick thy blood—even thine.” And Ahab, in- stead of having the prophet put to the sword, cried: “Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?” and rent his clothes, and put sackcloth upon his flesh and fasted... . A humbler man than Elijah was Amos. He was a herdsman of Tekoa, a dresser of sycamore trees. With wild and passionate energy he denounced the corrup- tion, the luxury, the oppression of the rulers of the political state. The priests, supporters of the existing order by which they profited, warned King Jeroboam: “Amos hath conspired against thee in the midst of the house of Israel... .”’ It is the earliest version of the story of Ibsen’s Dr. Stockmann, the “enemy of the peo- ple’. . .. It is the enduring story of the friend of mankind... . Profounder than either of these stories is the story of Jeremiah. The king of Babylon’s army was fighting against Jerusalem. The little Jewish kingdom in the corridor between two vast monarchies was about to be wiped out. The national existence of the Jews was in deadly peril. Was this not a time for loyalty, for solidarity, for active patriotism? Not to the eternal Jew. It was in this hour that Jeremiah spoke unto Zedekiah, king of Judah in Jerusalem. He spoke of op- [ 266 ] PROGRAM pression, of wrong, of injustice. He was accused—how familiar that sounds—of “falling away to the Chal- deans.’ Prototype of the pacifist, the seeker for justice amid our human confusions and false loyalties, of the pro-German in the camps of the Allies, of the pro-Ally in the citadels of Central Europe. . . . The destroyer of “morale,” of the mere heathen will toward resistance, toward victory ... the “defeatist’’ of the ages.... Naturally the “princes said unto the king: Let this man, we pray thee, be put to death; for as much as he weaken- eth the hands of the men of war, in speaking such words unto them: for this man seeketh not the welfare of this people but the hurt.” And they cast Jeremiah into a dungeon in which there was no water but only mire, as they have been casting him ever since—once in the court of the guard in Jerusalem in the sixth century before Christ, later in Leavenworth and Aleatraz.... The same Jewish legend, gathering in the Hellenized Roman empire about Jesus, the carpenter’s son of Nazareth, a humble man like Amos and like him a pacifist and a friend of the oppressed, swept through the heathen world. But powers and principalities made that legend their own, stripped it of its Jewish meaning and built about it religions of pagan festival and joy in battle. The Jewish people, driven from its land, despised, cast out, unfriended as the individual prophets had been, assumed unconsciously or consciously the part of prophet, denouncer, resister, herald of peace in the world of the battling nations and became a thorn in the side, an ache in the conscience of mankind... . Among Slavic communists in the East and Nordic re- actionaries in the West there are two common objects [ 267 ] ISRAEL of hatred and contempt today: the religion of Jesus and the folk from which Jesus sprang. ... II The Prophets in Israel never stood quite alone. Among the people as a whole there had developed from early times on notions quite at variance with any that were entertained either by their contemporaries in the ancient East or by later peoples untouched by the Jew- ish teachings of Jesus. Thus the purchase of a slave entitled the master to but six years of the man’s service. In the seventh year the slave was set free. If the slave desired voluntarily to remain, his ear was pierced with an awl. Why? asked the later sages of the Talmud. Because that ear too had heard the great message that came from Horeb concerning a covenant with the Eter- nal and yet the man’s slavish spirit wanted no free- MOMs iie8 | The law had regard for the poor. Here and not in the slave-supported oligarchies of Greece are the be- ginnings of democracy in the modern, humanitarian sense. The tillers of the land were commanded not to reap the corners of the fields nor to glean after the reaping nor to gather the fallen fruit. All this was for the poor. In every seventh year, moreover, the owners of farms and vineyards and oliveyards were commanded to turn over their lands to the poor, the landless. ‘The taking of interest was forbidden within Israel and pledges of fundamental necessity had to be returned whether the loan was paid or not. In every fiftieth year, moreover, in the great year of the jubilee, liberty [ 268 | PROGRAM was to be proclaimed throughout the land and every man was to be returned unto his original possession. Hence it was impossible, as the law distinctly states, for land to be held in perpetuity and purchase was equivalent to a leasehold of half a century. Mortgaged lands were to be returned to the original owners in the year of the jubilee; properties within walled cities if not redeemed by the seller within a year became the permanent property of the purchaser. But houses in unwalled villages were considered as part of the fields. They could be redeemed at any time and possession of them ceased in the year of the jubilee. It is curious how attention among both Jews and Gentiles has always been fastened upon the dietary regu- lations of the Torah and never upon its social and eco- nomic laws, which both in spirit and in fact are two full millenniums ahead of the latest possible date that can be assigned to the documents in question. In view of the position of the Jews in the dispersion it is equally curious that no more weight has been attached to the extraordi- nary liberality of the laws of the Jewish state in regard to the stranger in Israel. The law reiterates nothing quite so often as the equality that must obtain between the sojourner and the native-born. ‘A sojourner shalt thou not wrong, neither shalt thou oppress him... . Judge righteously between a man and his brother and the sojourner that is with him. . . . Love ye therefore the sojourner, for ye were sojourners in the land of Egypt. . .. Ye shall have one manner of law, as well for the sojourner as for the home-born. ... Ye shall have one law for him that doeth aught unwittingly, for him that is home-born among the children of Israel, and [ 269 ] ISRAEL for the stranger that sojourneth among them.”’ There are here, be it observed, no regulations that the so- journer shall acquire citizenship or embrace a state re- ligion or sacrifice to a new god. Justice and mercy and love are to be his because he is a fellow-man. It is the Torah that announces the even more revolutionary com- mand: “Ye shall not respect persons in judgment; ye shall hear the small and the great alike; ye shall not be afraid of the face of man.” | Of the utmost social and psychological significance are the regulations in regard to military service. The officers shall examine the men who make up the army and before any battle is joined they are to exempt those who have built a new house and have not dedicated it, those who have planted vineyards and have not reaped the fruit, those who are betrothed to a maiden and have not taken her to wife, and him who is “fearful and faint- hearted,” “‘lest his brethren’s heart melt as his heart.” There is no word of contempt for him who is by nature averse to slaughter. ‘There was no spear at the back of the Jewish soldier to make him face the spear of the enemy. It is perfectly clear, of course, both from the nature of mankind and from the history of Israel that these various economic and moral laws were never perfectly enforced. ‘The Jewish state was probably not very dif- ferent from any other. Except in this vital respect— that it was a state with a troubled conscience and a divided soul, that rich men and princes and kings did in very truth quake before the Prophets, who opposed — to their power and rapacity the humane and merciful law. It is a return to this law that Prophet after [ 270 ] PROGRAM Prophet demanded. And the Prophets literally pre- ferred foreign captivity and the extinction of national power to disobedience to that law which differentiated Israel from all the other families of mankind. Even before the age of the Prophets there was in Israel a presage of the evils of power, of the fact that power would lead to apostasy and a neglect of the law. Whether the stories are historic memories or character- istic legends makes little difference in regard to their significance. The legend of Gideon, for instance, bears internal evidence of proceeding from a very: remote and still barbaric period. A wild flame dances in it, strange and primordial. Yet when the men of Israel offered the chieftain hereditary rule over them, he refused. “TI will not rule over you, neither shall my son rule over you: Jehovah shall rule over you.” And the ancient chronicler of these events weaves into his narratives (Judges, ix, 8-15) a fable of extraordinary depth and beauty. The trees were going to anoint a king over them. The olive refused to leave her fatness for a barren waving to and fro over the other trees and the fig refused to leave her sweetness and the vine her fruit which cheereth God and man. But the barren thorn accepted the offer and became king... . Better known is the story of how the elders of Israel came to Samuel and said: “Now make us a king to judge us like all the nations.” Samuel warned them. He told them that a king would conscript their sons and their work, both life and property, that his luxury would beget rapacity, and that they would cry out and ery in vain against the tyranny of the king. They did not listen to him. The old pathetic assimilatory cry [271 ] ISRAEL arose even then—the cry of the radical Zionist of yes- terday: “Nay, but we will have a king over us that we also may be like all the nations. . . .” So Israel tried to be like all the nations. For a brief period the little kingdom attained power and a shadow of splendor. But the temporal splendor faded in the dusk of unhappy battles, and the Prophet arose to protest against the fruits of power which are injustice and oppression. And, from the days of the Babylonian Captivity on, Israel became a people and remained a people more through the force of an idea, a dream, an aspiration, than through any foothold it had upon the solid earth.... III An idea, a dream, an aspiration. .. . First concerning the worthiness of being merely human. The Talmudists declare that the deepest mean- ing of the Torah is in the plain statement: “These are the generations of Adam.” All men are said to be the descendants of one for the sake of the peace of God’s creatures. No man can say to his neighbor: My father is a greater than thine. None must. “The rich and the poor meet together; Jehovah is the maker of them all.” In the Messianic state “the fool shall no more be called noble, nor the churl said to be bountiful.” Israel acknowledges no rank but that of man. “Seek not after fame,” writes the Talmudist, “nor after honor. Lust not after the table of princes. For thy table and thy crown are above theirs.” | Thence arises the passion of the Prophets and the passion of Israel for social justice. “They have sold [ 272 | PROGRAM the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of shoes. . . » Lhey know not to do right who store up violence and robbery in their palaces. . . . Ye who turn justice to wormwood, and cast down righteousness to the earth, seek him that maketh the Pleiades and Orion and turneth the shadow of death into morning.” Isaiah is at one with Amos: “Thy princes are rebellious and companions of thieves; everyone loveth bribes and followeth after rewards; they judge not the fatherless, neither doth the cause of the widow come unto them. ... The spoil of the poor is in your houses; what mean ye that ye crush my people and grind the face of the poor? ... He looked for justice but, behold, op- pression; for righteousness but, behold, a cry.” Jeremiah takes up that eternal burden: “They plead not the cause, the cause of the fatherless, and the right of the needy they do not judge.” Hosea sums up its essence: “Jehovah hath a controversy with the in- habitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor good- ness nor knowledge of God in the land.” The venge- ance of God is called down on him only who “re- membered not to show kindness, but persecuted the poor and needy man, and the broken in heart.” The words of the Prophets are read in churches and they are admired. But to the Jew they have a fiery reality. He need never have read them. He may be false to their teaching in every action of his life. He knows concerning them from within. He knows his apostasy when he commits it. He recognizes their un- escapable force so soon as he comes upon them. ‘Thence derive the charitable gifts of the grimiest and thence the [ 278 | ISRAEL social revolutionary tendencies of the most alienated from the immediate traditions of Israel. . . Unfaltering are those traditions. “If thine enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat: and if he be thirsty, give him water to drink. . . The merciful man doeth good to his own soul; but he that is cruel troubleth his own flesh. . . . By mercy and truth iniquity is atoned for.” From the most ancient sources are drawn those interpretative precepts of the Talmud that govern the relation of a man to his fellows, precepts of unique depth and power: “Mine is mine and thine is thine— that is the speech of the mob. Maine is thine and thine is mine—these are the words of the spiritually vulgar. The good man says: Mine is thine and thine is thine. . . - Despise no one and undervalue no thing. There is no man but shall have his hour, no thing but will attain its use. . . . Condemn no one until you have been in his position. . . . Only man’s sins shall be obliterated, not the sinner. .. . Wherever thou comest upon the trace of man, there God stands before thee.’ ‘These precepts embody the natural attitude of a people whose Psalmist cried: “If thou, Jehovah, shouldest mark iniquities, who could stand?” of a people the last of whose Prophets of the older tradition said, “Judge not that ye be not judged.” | Hand in hand with this intense democrary of spirit there has always gone the sense of election. But it must not be forgotten that the election was never one to favor only. That is its degenerate phase. It was an — election to responsibility. “You only have I known of all the families of the earth: therefore I will visit upon you all your iniquities.”” This sense of responsi- [ 274 ] PROGRAM bility is deeply graven in the folk-ways of the Jewish people. ‘The ambitions of parents for their children, their sacrifices for their children’s education are no accident. They are part of the immemorial sense of responsibility. The Jew must be just and merciful and Jearned and thus hallow the Ineffable Name. He must be, in some sort, “a light to the Gentiles; to open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, and them that sit in darkness out of the prisonhouse.” For is it not written: “Is not this the fast that I have chosen: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the bands of the yoke, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke?” Except in this matter of moral responsibility the peoples are equal. “Have I not brought Israel out of the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor and the Syrians from Kir?’ And still more emphatically: “Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria, the work of my hands, and Israel, my inheritance.” This equality was always clear to the sages of the Talmud: “A heathen that doeth good is of as much worth as the high priest in Israel.” Israel’s election, in brief, is an election to service. Israel is merely the instrument of salvation. Through it salva- tion is to be “unto the end of the earth”: through it “all the kindreds of the nations shall worship” before God. “All the nations shall be gathered” unto the capital of the Messianic kingdom; the house of its God “shall be called a house of prayer for all people.” To strive after justice and peace for all men, to have no reward except in that striving, to be elected to terrible responsibility and to the sufferings of all those who, [275 ] ISRAEL oppose the fierce and pagan instincts of man—such is the somber and glorious mission of Israel... . And Israel has no weapon. Force is futile. “By strength shall no man prevail.” Nor must Israel ally itself with physical power: “Woe to them that go down to Egypt for help, and rely on horses and trust in chariots, because they are very strong.” Violence can- not bring justice; peace is never born of war. “Truth, justice and peace,” declares the Talmud, “these are the pillars of human society.” ‘The ideal of Israel is “to break the sword and the bow and the battle out of the land.” And this can be done only by the strength of the spirit. “The prophet that prophesieth of peace, when the word of that prophet shall come to pass, then shall the prophet be known that Jehovah hath truly sent.” Peace is the test. Peace is the sign. “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace.” Peace is the mark of the universal and Messianic kingdom on earth which it is the mission of Israel to bring into being: “And it shall come to pass in the latter days, that the mountain of Jehovah’s house shall be established on the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it. And many peoples shall go and say, Come ye and let us go up to the mountain of Jehovah, to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us his ways, and we will walk his paths: for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of Jehovah from Jerusalem. And he will judge between the nations, and will decide concerning many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation [ 276 ] PROGRAM shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” An idea, a dream, an aspiration that have sustained and preserved a people through dark and hostile ages. Egypt and Assyria, Greece and Rome are gone. The peoples of the sword have perished. ‘The people of the spirit remains... . IV I shall not be accused of honoring tradition unduly or of wanting any man to be guided by it. But to the modern Jew the tradition of Israel is not useful as a guide; it is, as I have said before, useful as a confirma- tion of all he is and desires. If a Jew were to say: I find nothing in those traditions that corresponds to my convictions, to the tendencies of my inner self; I am an American; I believe in the immigration laws of my coun- try and in the warlike expenditures of my government and in the Republican party and in Japanese exclusion and in making the nigger know his place. ... If any Jew says that, the traditions of his people have, obviously enough, lost any possible relation to his mind and character. But there are, I believe, not many such. There is servile assimilation; there are propitiatory gestures. There are Jews who not only contribute to Christian charities, as indeed they should, but who give moneys for the building of Anglican cathedrals while there is not money enough for the oppressed of Poland to get to Palestine. The great majority of Jews, how- ever, are liberal, pacifist, humanitarian. To these people it should bring strength and courage and inner dignity to know that their convictions and ideals have been the [277 ] ISRAEL central convictions and ideals of their folk for at least two thousand five hundred years; that by virtue of these convictions and ideals, Israel has survived the un- imaginable wars, persecutions, tumults, catastrophes of that long period and is a light in the world today to bear witness to the reality of its conception of righteousness, to the victory whose name is peace. I have called this chapter “Program,” because from a blending of their living convictions with the traditions of Israel modern Jews may definitely motivate their instinctive actions as well as proceed to other actions from which they are inhibited only by ignorance and fear. It is proper and inevitable, to begin with a humble matter, that Jewish merchants and industrialists should never exclude Christians from their employment, although many Christians will not employ Jews. It is quite right that we should contribute to Christian charities even though Christians do not often contribute to ours. It is a foregone conclusion that, if we establish any educational or learned institutions, Gentiles of all creeds and races shall be admitted to these institutions on an equal basis with ourselves. But these things must be understood to be not the result of a facile good- nature or as the concessions of weakness. They must be understood to be part of the positive ideals and polities that belong to Israel as a people of humanity and of peace. It is equally proper and inevitable that Jews should resist all forms of oppression anywhere in the world; that they should codperate with all who strive for social justice and economic peace, that they should insist in [ 278 | PROGRAM season and out that the so-called “Jewish radical” is not, from the Gentile point of view, a radical at all. He is merely'a Jew... It follows that, wherever they live, Jews must throw the weight of their strength and influence against the power of the absolute, belligerent, master State and that their supreme way of doing this is by aiding in the up- building of Palestine and insisting that their devotion to Palestine, far from interfering with their civic rights, is prophetic of the freer citizenship of the state of the future. For myself I have still another ideal. It is a hard one and even those who have followed me so far may shrink from this ultimate task and test. I do not think that Jews should fight any more. Not on any side. Not for any cause. Their records in the World War suffice to repel the charge of cowardice. Indeed they are supremely brave. For no Jew likes to fight. Yet the Jews forced themselves to fight and many on all sides of the conflict were conspicuous for gallantry. It was pathetic; it was wrong. Jews should not consent to the horror and degradation of military servitude. What people or, if one pleases in this matter, what faith has a better right to withdraw itself from the barbarism of war? Like the admirable Quakers we should declare that war is opposed to our instincts, to our conscience, to the tradition of our prophets and sages and saints for more centuries than have passed since the birth of any of the war-like modern nations. Not more of our conscientious objectors would be shot than were killed in Flanders and in Poland. No more devastating pogroms would follow than those which desolated the [ 279 | ISRAEL Ukrainian plains, no crueler tyranny than now holds sway from Vilna to the Black Sea. We cannot fare worse by refusing to fight. We can shed our blood and endure our martyrdom for peace. We can be true to ourselves and to Israel. We can be like the Quakers a light to them who are in darkness. . . . For myself I hold this ideal. . . . I do not expect it to be accepted today. . . . But its day will come.... - In the meantime every Jew can find himself. I have done so. Not everyone need go upon so long a pilgrimage. But everyone can come home to himself and to Israel and learn that to be a Jew is to be a friend of mankind, to be a proclaimer of liberty and peace. THE END f er hihy é Lick i er at SARC. R i ‘;\ aX Pani Mg ai fist ae 1g. Ste ie ‘els y's AG if ie th yy, AM wih) *) sae cy DAIS (Ph Pi SN f Pe ley 4 . Wa, 4 0} Pa wh oe Oy, FG oe ed nh Sten ts Deke AA ry Py ive) ie F if Prd } am “ti ** Megs AER Dee We od thle WA, Kha i Hoe bier) Peat +P aE e ‘of ace ue y ‘ i y } : 7 yi ‘ shee Melee e f we a 4 i Oe ras i tat at) A Md See ¥ a Pe ag ae Ss = ess ~~ = ned ad a je *.)