jtibrarp of Che Cheolocjiccd ^etninarp 
 
 PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 John Stuart Conning, D.D, 
 
 DS 149 .J39 1919 
 Jastrow, Morris, 1861-1921. 
 Zionism and the future of 
 Palestine 
 
ZIONISM AND THE 
 FUTURE OF PALESTINE 
 
OTHER WORKS 
 
 BY 
 
 MORRIS JASTROW, Jr., Ph.D., LL.D. 
 
 The Civilization of Babylonia and As¬ 
 syria 
 
 Hebrew and Babylonian Traditions 
 
 The Study of Religion 
 
 The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria 
 
 Aspects of Religious Belief and Practice 
 in Babylonia and Assyria 
 
 Babylonian-Assyrian Birth Omens and 
 Their Cultural Significance 
 
 The War and the Bagdad Railway 
 
 The War and the Coming Peace 
 
 A Gentle Cynic, being the Book of 
 Ecclesiastes 
 
ZIONISM AND T 
 FUTURE OF PALESTI 
 
 The Fallacies and Dangers of Political Zionism 
 
 BY 
 
 MORRIS JASTROW, Jr., Ph.D., LL.D. 
 
 Professor in the University of Pennsylvania 
 
 “The past is for inspiration, not imitation, 
 for continuation, not repetition. ” 
 
 (Zangwill) 
 
 iSeto gorfe 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 1919 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
Copyright, 1919 
 
 By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published, May, 1919 
 
TO 
 
 FELIX ADLER 
 
 A MODERN APOSTLE OF FREEDOM 
 AND LIGHT 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2018 with funding from 
 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
 https://archive.org/details/zionismfutureofpOOjast 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 
 Preface . 
 
 • • 
 
 PAGE 
 • • 
 
 Vll 
 
 I 
 
 The Three Aspects of Zionism 
 
 • • 
 
 I 
 
 II 
 
 The Roots of Modern Zionism 
 
 • • 
 
 13 
 
 1—1 
 
 1—1 
 
 1—1 
 
 The New Era and Reformed Judaism . 
 
 4i 
 
 IV 
 
 Jewish Self-Consciousness and Anti- 
 Semitism . 
 
 5o 
 
 V 
 
 Nationality Versus Nation 
 
 • • • 
 
 68 
 
 VI 
 
 The Trend of Jewish History 
 
 • • 
 
 85 
 
 VII 
 
 Palestine of To-day . 
 
 • • • 
 
 97 
 
 VIII 
 
 Political Zionism and the 
 Question. 
 
 Jewish 
 
 • • • 
 
 11 7 
 
 
 Appendix. 
 
 
 151 
 
/ 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Up to the present the Zionists have done most 
 of the writing and all of the shouting. They have 
 succeeded in moving the political aspects of Zionism 
 so far into the foreground as to overshadow the 
 older religious Zionism which forms an integral 
 doctrine of orthodox Judaism, and entirely to ob¬ 
 scure the original aspect of the modern movement 
 which started out as a purely ameliorative meas¬ 
 ure to secure, through colonization in Palestine, 
 “ self-emancipation ” 1 for Jews living under dis¬ 
 tressing conditions in Russia. Political Zionism 
 holds the center of the stage. The Zionists have 
 also succeeded in creating the impression on the 
 outside world that Political Zionism represents a 
 national uprising among the Jews in general, a re¬ 
 crudescence of national feelings that have long lain 
 dormant. The claim is made that Zionism is part 
 of the movement for the reassertion of nationalities 
 that forms such a striking feature of the political 
 history of Europe in the nineteenth century, and 
 
 1 See for this term, p. 5. 
 
 • • 
 vu 
 
Vlll 
 
 Preface 
 
 that is now showing itself again at the end of the 
 war in the rise of the suppressed nationalities of 
 Poland, Bohemia, Armenia and Arabia. This im¬ 
 pression is entirely erroneous and misleading. As 
 a matter of fact, of the Jews settled in Western 
 European countries and in this country where Jews 
 enjoy precisely the same political and other rights 
 as their fellow-citizens, only a very small percentage 
 of those who have lived long enough in these coun¬ 
 tries to have become assimilated to the political and 
 social conditions, approve of political Zionism. 
 The larger proportion of such Jews are probably en¬ 
 tirely indifferent to the question. 
 
 Not content with this, political Zionists now 
 claim that the issue has been won, that opposition 
 to it has become useless, that those who continue 
 to combat it are blind to the rapid movement of 
 events through which, as one of the leaders puts it, 
 “ Zionism has been transferred from the field of 
 national aspirations to the realm of political fact.” 
 The slogan has been given out to drown all opposi¬ 
 tion by a mighty chorus of “ victory ” shouts. And 
 all this before the Peace Conference at Paris has 
 made any declaration on the subject! 
 
 The basis of this assurance appears to be largely 
 the statement made by the Right Honorable Arthur 
 
Preface 
 
 IX 
 
 J. Balfour, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, 
 under date of November 2nd, 1917, that the Brit¬ 
 ish government “ view with favor the establish¬ 
 ment in Palestine of a national home for the Jew¬ 
 ish people, and will use their best endeavors to facil¬ 
 itate the achievement of this object.” The state¬ 
 ment means much or little according as one gauges 
 what Mr. Balfour had in mind in making it. It 
 will be noted that Mr. Balfour avoids the term 
 “ Jewish State,” and speaks only of a “ national 
 homeland.” To a “ homeland ” for such Jews as 
 have gone to Palestine or who propose to settle 
 there, there is, of course, no objection; and I em¬ 
 phasize throughout this volume the desirability of 
 encouraging the colonization movement in every 
 possible way as much for the sake of Palestine as 
 for that of the Jews, since the country can only 
 benefit by the presence of a thrifty and industrious 
 population devoted to the improvement of the land 
 and to promoting its industrial and commercial ac¬ 
 tivity. It all depends, therefore, on what is meant 
 by “ national.” Mr. Balfour, it may be admitted, 
 would not have used the term had he not accepted 
 ; the main contention of political Zionists that the 
 Jews were a separate nation or nationality. Now 
 Mr. Balfour, so far as known, has made no special 
 
x Preface 
 
 study of either Jewish history or of the Jewish re¬ 
 ligion or of the psychology of the Jewish people. 
 His type of mind is, as is well known, essentially 
 skeptical, and he would be apt to view such a ques¬ 
 tion as Zionism from the point of view of diplo¬ 
 matic policy. At all events he would probably be 
 the last one to claim any weight attaching to his 
 opinion of the crucial question, whether the Jews 
 are a nation or merely a religious body that once 
 was a nation. The ultimate source, therefore, of 
 the introduction of the term “ national ” into Mr. 
 Balfour’s declaration is the platform of the political 
 Zionists. If, therefore, it can be shown, as I pro¬ 
 pose to do in this volume, that this term cannot 
 properly be applied to the Jews, the declaration 
 would merely have the force attaching to any state¬ 
 ment coming from so distinguished a personage as 
 Mr. Balfour. Granting the full weight of the state¬ 
 ment as it stands, it does not follow that Mr. Bal¬ 
 four favors the organization of the Jews, viewed 
 as a national unit, into a political unit in Palestine 
 to be placed in control of that country. He is silent 
 on this essential point — naturally so, for Mr. Bal¬ 
 four is, above all, a statesman, and when he wrote 
 this declaration, the issue of the war was still un¬ 
 certain, and even he was not in a position to decide 
 
Preface 
 
 xi 
 
 what should become of Palestine upon the termina¬ 
 tion of the great conflict. He could not at the time 
 have envisaged more than the recognition of the 
 Jews to the right of self-government in their colo¬ 
 nies. We are now in a position, however, to appeal 
 from Mr. Balfour of 1917 to Mr. Balfour of 1918, 
 at a time when the war was approaching its close. 
 Judging from his later utterance, 1 it would seem that 
 Mr. Balfour has been impressed by the opposition 
 which, since his first declaration, Zionism had en¬ 
 countered in many circles. The emphasis is placed 
 by him on Palestine as a home for “ homeless ” 
 Jews. The “ national homeland ” is not stressed, 
 and it would appear that Mr. Balfour now views 
 1 Zionism largely, if not purely, as an ameliorative 
 measure for a portion of the Jewish people. He 
 expresses his belief that those Jews who are led to 
 go to Palestine will be happier in a “ civil community 
 which completely harmonizes with their historical 
 and religious sentiments: a community bound to 
 the land it inhabits by something deeper even than 
 custom.” To this every one interested in the wel¬ 
 fare of such Jews as wish to settle in Palestine can 
 cheerfully assent, but this is not political Zionism. 
 
 1 In the Introduction (dated September 20th, 1918) to N. So- 
 kolow’s History of Zionism (London, 1919), pp. xxjx-xxxiv. 
 
Preface 
 
 • • 
 
 Xll 
 
 Apparently, the political Zionists themselves have 
 come to a realization of the vagueness of the former 
 declaration, for a demand is being made for a more 
 precise statement as to the intentions of the British 
 Government towards Palestine. 1 
 
 The fact is that a declaration such as Mr. Bal¬ 
 four made before the termination of the conflict 
 should only have been taken at the time as an in¬ 
 dication of general sympathy with the ameliorative 
 aspects of the Zionistic movement, and not as an 
 endorsement of the political aims of the Zionists to 
 reorganize Palestine as a distinctively Jewish State. 
 Similarly, the endorsement of Mr. Balfour’s senti¬ 
 ments by the French and Italian governments, 
 couched in very general terms, and the statement 
 issued last September by President Wilson ought 
 not to be regarded as more than a general expression 
 of sympathy with the humanitarian phases of the 
 Zionistic movement. 
 
 Events that have transpired since the termination 
 of the war justify the suspicion — and indeed more 
 than suspicion,— that the statesmen who are to grap¬ 
 ple with the problem of the reorganization of 
 Palestine will feel their way cautiously. Even be¬ 
 fore the termination of the war protests from Chris- 
 
 1 See the London Jewish Chronicle for February 7th, 1919. 
 
tians and Mohammedans were raised against the 
 political program of Zionism. Still more signifi¬ 
 cant is the attitude of representative men among 
 English, French and American Jews. In England 
 a “ League of British Jews ” was formed led by 
 such men as Claude G. Montefiore and Israel Abra¬ 
 hams, whose authoritative position as students of 
 Jewish history and Jewish religion lends great 
 weight to their utterances. In this country, a state¬ 
 ment signed by over three hundred representative 
 American Jews from all parts of the country, pro¬ 
 testing against the program of the political Zion¬ 
 ists has been forwarded to the Peace Conference. 1 
 The opposition also shows itself in England and in 
 this country in warnings raised by such men as Sir 
 George Adam Smith, Herbert Adams Gibbons, the 
 Honorable Henry Morgenthau, Ex-Ambassador of 
 the United States to Turkey, and others, who speak 
 from a direct knowledge of the East and of Eastern 
 conditions. 2 
 
 In the spring of 1918 the French government 
 sent a commission of experts to Palestine for the 
 purpose of investigating the economic conditions 
 and the attitude of the natives towards political 
 
 1 Republished as an appendix to this volume, pp. 151-159. 
 
 2 See note on p. n 7. 
 
XIV 
 
 Preface 
 
 Zionism. Among the members of the commission 
 was M. Sylvain Levi, the distinguished Orientalist, 
 who in the same year was sent by the French gov¬ 
 ernment to this country in order to ascertain the 
 views of Zionists, and Non-Zionists as well, to¬ 
 wards the proposed reorganization of the Jewish 
 State. The result of M. Levi’s investigations in 
 Palestine and in this country is to be seen in the 
 statement that he made before the Peace Confer¬ 
 ence on March ist which was decidedly unfavor¬ 
 able to political Zionism. Strong pressure was 
 brought to bear upon Professor Levi to refrain from 
 exposing the weaknesses of political Zionism, but 
 he felt it his duty, on the basis of his investigations, 
 to do so, with the result of bringing down on him 
 the wrath of the English Zionists, who apparently 
 believe in the foolish policy of forcible suppression 
 of opposition to their movement. A delegation of 
 English Zionists was heard by the Peace Confer¬ 
 ence just preceding M. Sylvain Levi, and Dr. Weiz- 
 mann in his account to the Zionist Conference of the 
 result of the hearing was frank enough to state that 
 he declined to shake hands with M. Levi, and ac¬ 
 cused him of “ betraying ” the cause. 1 This exhi- 
 
 1 See the report of the Conference in the Jewish Exponent, 
 Philadelphia, for March 28, 1919. 
 
XV 
 
 Preface 
 
 ^ bition of bad manners as well as of bad temper does 
 \ not indicate that the Zionists are as confident of 
 1 their ultimate success as their public utterances would 
 
 not yet been won is the manner in which the po¬ 
 litical Zionists have shifted their position of late. 
 They now place the organization of the Jewish State 
 in the distant future, possibly in order to prepare 
 their followers for the disappointment that will 
 ensue in case the Peace Conference should decide 
 not to propose steps for the organization of such 
 a State. Some of them have even gone so far as 
 to suggest the abandonment of the designation 
 “ Jewish State ” and now speak of a “ Common¬ 
 wealth of Palestine.” They thereby either give the 
 whole case away, or raise the suspicion of proposing 
 a verbal camouflage to conceal the real aim that 
 they have in mind. It is probably a safe guess that 
 the leaders have been given an intimation that the 
 Peace Conference will not go beyond the expression 
 of general sympathy with Jewish colonization in 
 Palestine and the promise to secure full rights to 
 Jews settled there, with perhaps local autonomy for 
 the colonies. 
 
 But irrespective of what the Peace Conference 
 may or may not do, it must be clear to all who view 
 
XVI 
 
 Preface 
 
 the situation calmly that the Palestinian problem, as 
 the other questions connected with the Near East, 
 will occupy the thought of the world for some time 
 to come. Meanwhile, it is of importance to under¬ 
 stand the nature of these problems. Zionism is one 
 of them (though only one) and the wide interest 
 that it has aroused, which is not limited to those di¬ 
 rectly concerned, is sufficient justification for mak¬ 
 ing the attempt, as I do in this volume, to consider 
 the various aspects and the roots of the movement, 
 its relation to the general Eastern Question and to 
 conditions in Palestine, and also what appear to me 
 to be the fallacies of political Zionism from the point 
 of view of a student of history. I am further led 
 to make this endeavor by requests that have reached 
 me from various sides to give a full presentation of 
 the reasons why many who have made a study of the 
 subject cannot accept the program of the political 
 Zionists. 
 
 In stressing the historical point of view, as I do 
 throughout the volume, I trust that even those who 
 may not be disposed to agree with me will recognize 
 that I do not look upon the historical treatment of 
 a subject as a cold-blooded anatomical dissection. 
 The historian must aim to clothe the skeleton of his 
 facts with flesh and sinews, aye, even to supply it 
 
• • 
 
 Preface 
 
 xvi 1 
 
 with “ teeth.” In tracing Zionism to its roots, as 
 in following the trend of Jewish history including 
 a survey of the Reform movement in Judaism, and 
 in setting forth the present-day conditions in Pales¬ 
 tine, it has been my aim not only to be fair, but also 
 to reveal my sympathies for those larger aspects 
 of Jewish history which account for the peculiar in¬ 
 terest attaching to an analysis of the status of the 
 Jews, and more particularly to their strange sur¬ 
 vival, despite all vicissitudes. For the Jews fur¬ 
 nish a single and singular illustration of a people 
 commingling with all the nations of the world with¬ 
 out losing their identity — like the Gulf Stream that 
 can be distinguished from the great body of the sur¬ 
 rounding ocean through which it flows. 
 
 I cannot refrain from touching here upon a weak¬ 
 ness of the Zionistic movement which I have directly 
 encountered in the preparation of this volume, and 
 which consists in the vagueness of the definitions 
 of terms such as “ Jewish Nation,” “ Jewish culture,” 
 “ Jewish spirit,” used by Zionists in describing the 
 movement. This is in part due to the fact that 
 many of those who make public addresses and write 
 on Zionism, including some of the leaders of the 
 movement in this country, have not made any spe¬ 
 cial study of the history of the Jews or of their 
 
xviii Preface 
 
 literature. Without such study one is apt to fall 
 into all kinds of strange vagaries. The tension of 
 the situation is somewhat relieved upon finding dis¬ 
 tinguished jurists extolling the glories of Judaism, 
 of which they know little either in theory or prac¬ 
 tice, and expounding the beauties of the Hebrew 
 language of which they cannot read the characters. 
 The task of the student of the subject would be 
 much simplified if Zionists could agree upon some 
 clear and definite statement of the fundamentals 
 that might be labelled as “ genuine,” with the addi¬ 
 tional warning, “ beware of imitations,” As it is, 
 every Zionist feels at liberty to manufacture his own 
 brand of Zionism. This is particularly the case 
 when it comes to a definition of a “ Jewish State.” 
 In the hope of overcoming opposition to their po¬ 
 litical program some Zionists are so vague in their 
 use of the term “ nation ” and in their view of the 
 “ Jewish State,” that they practically define both 
 terms out of existence. I have tried to make allow¬ 
 ances for what appear to be merely subtle arguments 
 in the presentation of the subject and have taken 
 as my point of departure that a “Jewish State” 
 means what the term used implies to the person 
 of average intellect; and I have tried, following in 
 
Preface 
 
 xix 
 
 the wake of Lord Bryce, to distinguish between a 
 “ nation ” and a “ nationality.” 1 
 
 Lastly, I would call attention to the fact that it 
 is only for the sake of convenience that I have 
 treated the subject in a series of eight sections. The 
 volume should be read as a whole, and I trust that 
 those who do read it will reserve their judgment 
 until they have followed the presentation of the sub¬ 
 ject to the end. 
 
 A word of grateful acknowledgment is due, as 
 in the case of all my books, to my wife, my severest 
 and my most sympathetic critic, who has, as usual, 
 read through the manuscript and aided in revising 
 the proofs, with the result of making valuable sug¬ 
 gestions and of detecting slips and errors. 
 
 It is a pleasure and privilege to be permitted to 
 write on the dedication page the name of a valued 
 friend whose career, devoted to the service of hu¬ 
 manity, has exerted a deep influence on my own 
 thought and whose companionship has been a source 
 of real inspiration these many years. 
 
 Philadelphia, May, 1919. 
 
 1 See p. 68 et seq. 
 
ZIONISM AND THE FUTURE 
 OF PALESTINE 
 
 i 
 
 THE THREE ASPECTS OF ZIONISM 
 
 Through recent events Zionism has been moved 
 into the foreground of publicity. The movement, 
 which seeks as its ultimate aim the reorganization 
 of Palestine as a Jewish State, is of interest not only 
 to Jews, and that irrespective of their attitude to¬ 
 wards religion,— but also to non-Jews. For Zion¬ 
 ism involves the future of Palestine; and Palestine 
 is a country equally sacred to the followers of three 
 great religions,— to Christians and Mohammedans, 
 as well as to Jews — who together constitute about 
 one-half of the entire population of the world. 1 
 
 There are three main aspects of Zionism which 
 need to be sharply differentiated from each other, 
 
 1 There are, on a rough estimate, about 240 million Moham¬ 
 medans, about 565 million Christians and about 15 million 
 Jews, a total of 820 millions or about 50 per cent, of the 
 world’s population. 
 
 I ' , 
 
2 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 though in the movement itself they tend to coalesce 
 — Religious, Economic, and Political Zionism. 
 Religious Zionism is an integral part of the ortho¬ 
 dox Jewish faith. The hope of a return of the 
 Jews to Palestine rests for the orthodox believer 
 upon his belief in the fulfillment of divine prophe¬ 
 cies, which assert that Jehovah will gather His 
 chosen people from the ends of the earth, restore 
 the Temple service as of old (including such a crude 
 survival of primitive worship as animal sacrifices) 
 and re-establish both the ancient Jewish priesthood 
 and the Jewish Kingdom. This belief in the restora¬ 
 tion of the Jews is closely bound up with another 
 doctrine, that Jehovah will at the proper time, send 
 a Messiah to redeem His people and to bring all 
 mankind to recognize the sway of the one God, who 
 chose Israel to preach His doctrine to the world. 1 
 Furthermore, these two doctrines, the restoration 
 of the Jews to Palestine, and the belief in a Messiah, 
 are corollaries following from a third doctrine, 
 that the Jews are the chosen people of God. 
 
 >' Orthodox Judaism may thus be said to rest upon 
 four pillars — the belief in one God, the Telief that 
 the Jews are His people, belief in the Messiah as 
 
 1 See M. Friedlaender, The Jewish Religion (London, 1901), 
 pp. 156-163. 
 
The Three Aspects of Zionism 3 
 
 God's messenger to be sent to redeem His people and 
 all mankind, and belief in the return of the Jews to 
 their native land. It will be apparent that the 
 Zionism of orthodox Jews assumes an indissoluble 
 bond between religion and nationality. According 
 to this faith the Jews are bound by a double bond, 
 but the national bond, although tacitly assumed, has 
 a merely theoretical or academic force until the time 
 for the restoration arrives. Orthodox Zionism, 
 furthermore, stands on the platform that the fulfill¬ 
 ment of divine prophecy is not to be brought about 
 through ordinary human agencies,— not even 
 through a Peace Conference,— but by God Himself 
 in His own time and in His own way. Religious 
 Zionism is, therefore, a doctrine hardly capable of 
 being translated into an active political movement. 
 As a matter of fact, only a small proportion of 
 genuinely orthodox Jews are actively engaged in 
 the modern Zionistic movement, 1 though the ortho¬ 
 dox longing for the return to Zion is, as we shall see, 
 one of the chief roots of the modern movement it¬ 
 self. 
 
 We may designate as economic Zionism the ef- 
 
 1 The orthodox group represented in the movement is known 
 as Mizrachi, signifying “ Eastern.” See Richard Gottheil, 
 Zionism, pages 97 and 177. The group was founded in Vilno 
 in 1903. 
 
4 
 
 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 fort which has to a large degree inspired the entire 
 Zionistic movement, to ameliorate the pitiable condi¬ 
 tion of Jews living in such countries as Russia and 
 Roumania, without rights of citizenship and sub¬ 
 ject to all manner of oppression, alternating with per¬ 
 secution and officially sanctioned pogroms. Hud¬ 
 dled together within the restricted area known as the 
 “ Pale ” and there living without civic rights, they 
 were at all times at the mercy of a sinister and des¬ 
 potic government which, when it suited its purpose, 
 inflamed the people to brutal attacks on the lives and 
 property of defenseless men, women and children. 
 The world has been horrified and scandalized at 
 various times during the past three decades by re¬ 
 ports of persecution, murder and pillage in the Jew¬ 
 ish Pale. The hopelessness of the outlook for in¬ 
 ternal improvement of the position of the Jews in 
 these countries, to which we may add Poland where 
 the situation was likewise disheartening, naturally 
 suggested as the only remedial measure a plan of 
 securing a home elsewhere. Even though it was 
 realized that wholesale emigration was not possible, 
 yet some measure of relief would be afforded by 
 having an outlet for at least a portion of the con¬ 
 gested Jewish population in Russian Poland and Rou¬ 
 mania, forming together one-half of the entire num- 
 
The Three Aspects of Zionism 
 
 5 
 
 ber of Jews in the world. 1 This congestion, more 
 particularly in Russia where the Jews were huddled 
 together within the Pale of settlement, strictly de¬ 
 fined by the Government, emphasized at once the 
 seriousness and the hopelessness of the problem un¬ 
 less unforeseen changes should take place. It was 
 therefore natural, and certainly not accidental, that 
 the modern Zionistic movement took its rise in 
 Russia, and at first purely as an ameliorative pro¬ 
 gram. When in 1881 it became evident, through 
 the promulgation of the cruel “ May Laws/’ impos¬ 
 ing still further restrictions on the Jewish Pale, 
 that the Russian Government instead of alleviating 
 the situation was determined to crush all hopes of 
 any improvement, a physician, Dr. Leo Pinsker, 
 living in Odessa, voiced his project of what he 
 called “ Self-Emancipation ” for the Jews. 2 By 
 this he meant an effort on the part of Jews them¬ 
 selves to secure a new home in some soil where they 
 might live safely and develop freely without the 
 pressure of the unequal struggle imposed upon them 
 
 1 Almost seven million in Russia and what was Russian Po¬ 
 land, and over 300,000 in Roumania. 
 
 2 This is the title of a work issued by him in German in 
 1882 ( Auto-Emancipation ), and translated into English un¬ 
 der the title Self-Emancipation . by A. A. L. Finkenstein, Lon¬ 
 don, 1891. 
 
6 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 through restrictive governmental measures. The 
 project was one born of despair and which was not 
 unnatural in view of an anti-Semitic outbreak in 
 Germany and Austria, which threatened the position 
 and rights of the Jews even in these politically more 
 advanced countries. Pinsker himself was quite in¬ 
 different to Palestine as a land of refuge, but as a 
 consequence of the stimulus exerted by his pro¬ 
 posed solution of what had become known as the 
 “ Jewish Question/’ organizations were formed 
 throughout Russia, known as “ Lovers of Zion,” to 
 encourage the colonization of Jews in the Holy 
 Land. These organizations spread to Germany and 
 Austria under the influence of the reaction upon the 
 Jews in those countries of the wave of anti-Semitic 
 piejudice, while sympathy for their oppressed breth¬ 
 ren in Eastern lands led to branches being 
 formed in Western Europe, and also in the United 
 States. 
 
 With this aspect of Zionism, which merely in¬ 
 volves the colonization of Jews in a land which had 
 both historical and sacred associations, Jews every¬ 
 where sympathized, even though it was felt that 
 Palestine afforded an outlet for only a small por¬ 
 tion of the superfluous population. North and 
 South America received by far the bulk of the Rus- 
 
7 
 
 The Three Aspects of Zionism 
 
 sian Jews who after 1881 began to emigrate en 
 masse from the land of oppression, and during the 
 past three and a half decades over two million Jews 
 have wended their way westward and not eastward. 1 
 Events have, therefore, moved in a direction quite 
 contrary to the hopes of the “ Lovers of Zion,” but 
 the movement for Palestinian colonization was not 
 abandoned, and Jewish colonies on a small scale 
 began to be formed in Palestine. The effort made 
 a strong though largely sentimental appeal to Jews 
 as an ameliorative measure of peculiar interest, be¬ 
 cause of the possibility that it afforded of improving 
 the economic conditions in Palestine itself through 
 the influx of energetic and enthusiastic groups, even 
 if these were not very large ones. Had Zionism 
 confined itself to the purely economic aspect of pro¬ 
 viding an outlet, even though a limited one, for the 
 overflow of the Jewish population in Russia, there 
 would never have arisen any differences of opinion 
 as to the beneficial character of a movement aiming 
 to establish Jewish colonies organized on the basis 
 of autonomous government in a country that would 
 benefit thereby. The sentimental background to 
 such colonies would have given the movement addi- 
 
 1 According to the statistics in the American Jewish Year- 
 Book for 1918-19, p. 345 (Philadelphia, 1919). 
 
8 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 tional force without introducing any disturbing 
 factor. 
 
 The first Jewish colony was established in Pales¬ 
 tine in 1870 by the Alliance Israelite Universelle, 
 the first Zionist colony in 1882. Others soon fol¬ 
 lowed. The project was largely aided by Baron 
 Edmond de Rothschild, of Paris, but it is interesting 
 to note that those colonies flourished best which were 
 formed and maintained by the enthusiasm and de¬ 
 votion of the colonists themselves. At present 
 there are some forty Jewish colonies in various parts 
 of Palestine, with a total population of somewhat 
 over 10,000. 1 Small as this number is in compari¬ 
 son with the general population of Palestine and 
 Syria, the Jewish colonies have nevertheless left 
 their mark on the country. Modern methods of ag¬ 
 riculture have been introduced, and an agricultural 
 experiment station has been established at Athlit; 
 and with that keen intellectual ambition which is 
 a pronounced trait among Jews everywhere, schools 
 have sprung up in connection with the colonies. 2 
 
 1 See Appendix No. 18 in Nawratzki, Die Juedische {Coloni¬ 
 zation Palaestinas (Leipzig, 1914), which is the most compre¬ 
 hensive work on the subject. 
 
 2 See the article on “ The Educational Institutions of 
 Palestine” by M. Mnuchin in Kadimah (New York, 1918, 
 Federation of American Zionists), pages 75-132. 
 
9 
 
 The Three Aspects of Zionism 
 
 Encouragement has also been given, by the side of 
 agriculture, to the cultivation of the technical arts. 
 The most notable achievement in this respect is the 
 Bezalel School at Jerusalem, in which throughout 
 the year over four hundred persons are engaged in 
 learning and practicing industrial occupations, weav¬ 
 ing, carpentry, copper, brass, ivory and silver work, 
 lace making, lithography and the like, while more 
 recently a Jewish Technical Institute has been estab¬ 
 lished on the basis of a considerable endowment at 
 Haifa. 
 
 An entirely new direction, however, was given to 
 the Zionistic movement through the introduction 
 of the political factor. This was the work of the 
 late Dr. Theodor Herzl, 1 who may be regarded 
 as the founder of political Zionism, which, quite 
 distinct from the religious and economic phases, 
 has as its ultimate aim the conversion of Palestine 
 into a Jewish State. In 1896 Herzl launched the 
 new movement by publishing his monograph on the 
 “ Jewish State,” 2 in which as the solution of the 
 Jewish Question, the organization of the Jews as 
 
 1 Born in Budapest in i860, died in Vienna 1904, Dr. Herzl 
 was a writer and journalist by profession, and for many years 
 associated with the leading paper of Vienna, the Neue Freie 
 Presse. 
 
 2 English translation by Sylvie d’Avigdor (London, 1896). 
 
io Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 a nationalistic unit was proposed, with a view of cre¬ 
 ating a political center for the reestablishment of a 
 Jewish Nation. Herzl reached this rather remark¬ 
 able conclusion as the result of his interpretation 
 of the cause of the difficulties which the Jews en¬ 
 countered even in those countries in which they 
 had been accorded political rights. Convinced that 
 the existence of a “ Jewish Question ” in the en¬ 
 lightened nineteenth century was due in its last 
 analysis to the fact that the Jews actually formed a 
 separate nationality, his thought was centered on 
 the creation of a visible focus for this Jewish na¬ 
 tionality. Through the reestablishment of the Jews 
 as a nation, the bond which in Herzl’s view was the 
 real tie binding them together would not only be 
 strengthened, but would become an active force 
 through diplomatic pressure and other means ex¬ 
 erted by a real Jewish State, in securing protection 
 for Jews everywhere. The plan of a Jewish State, 
 it will be seen, was in one respect merely the exten¬ 
 sion of Pinsker’s project of self-emancipation, but 
 Herzl sought to attain the aim in view through lay¬ 
 ing the chief emphasis on what he considered the 
 nationalistic bond uniting Jews wherever they may 
 
 A second edition by J. de Haas was published in New York 
 in 1904. 
 
The Three Aspects of Zionism 11 
 
 be found. Herzl in thus striking the national note ' 
 ga\ e an entirely new turn to the Zionistic movement, ■. ‘ i 
 and since the first Zionistic Congress held at Basel 
 in 1897, through Herzl’s energetic efforts, the po-*'' 
 litical note has been the dominant one in the Zion¬ 
 istic movement, attaching to itself both the religious 
 and the economic aspects in such a way as to secure 
 a far more general cooperation for the ultimate aim 
 of political Zionism. But on the other hand, po¬ 
 litical Zionism has brought to a practical issue ques¬ 
 tions which hitherto had been of more academic and 
 theoretical interest, whether the Jews actually were 
 a nation, and if so, whether it was desirable for 
 them to reorganize themselves in a political sense 
 after having ceased to be a nation from the political 
 point of view for over 2000 years. 
 
 Such, then, are the three aspects of Zionism which 
 need to be borne in mind in order to reach an un¬ 
 derstanding of the present situation. 
 
 Religious Zionism should demand the respect of 
 those who cannot accept the doctrine on which it 
 rests. Being purely an ideal, it is an impressive 
 dream and also innocuous. Economic Zionism, 
 involving the further development of Jewish colon¬ 
 ization in Palestine, is a movement that merits en¬ 
 couragement and aid in every possible way, not only 
 
12 
 
 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 because it offers free and happy development for 
 Jews attracted for one reason or the other to the 
 Holy Land, but also because it directly conduces 
 to the improvement of economic conditions in 
 Palestine itself. Political Zionism, however, is an 
 entirely different matter and must be viewed from 
 a totally different angle. It involves not only dif¬ 
 ficulties, as the Zionists themselves recognize, but 
 also dangers which in the opinion of non-Zionists 
 are sufficiently serious to condemn the entire move¬ 
 ment as unfortunate and as threatening the position 
 of Jews throughout the world. Before taking up 
 certain fundamental objections to political Zionism 
 it is necessary for us to trace the three aspects of 
 Zionism, which thus coalesce in the most recent 
 political phase, to their roots. 
 
II 
 
 THE ROOTS OF MODERN ZIONISM 
 
 In tracing modern Zionism to its source we discover w ' 
 three factors contributing in about equal propor¬ 
 tions to its rise and growth, to wit: the persistence 
 of the longing of orthodox and also of unorthodox 
 Jews for the old homeland; secondly, the persistence 
 of the retention of the nationalistic aspect to Juda¬ 
 ism, even though inconsistent with the basis on 
 w hich that religion rests; and thirdly, the conditions 
 under which Jews were formerly forced to live and 
 under which to a large extent they still live in coun¬ 
 tries like Russia, Roumania and Poland. Let us 
 consider these three roots of Zionism. 
 
 Pirst, let us not undervalue the force of sentiment 
 in swaying human lives. Amiel, the French thinker, 
 says 1 that “ the decisive events of the world take 
 place in the intellect.” I should be inclined to as¬ 
 sign a still higher place to sentiment as perhaps the 
 most powerful incentive to human action; and 
 Zionism is an illustration in point. 
 
 1 Journal Intime under date of Dec. 28, 1880, 
 
 13 
 
14 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 “ If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, 
 
 Let my right hand forget her cunning; 
 
 Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, 
 
 If I remember thee not; 
 
 If I set not Jerusalem 
 Above my chiefest joy.” 1 
 
 Thus sang a Zionist of about 2500 years ago in 
 enforced exile in Babylonia, to which he, with his 
 fellow-countrymen, had been deported by the Baby¬ 
 lonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar II in 586 b. c. De¬ 
 spite the vicissitudes through which the Jews have 
 passed during the past two millenniums, despite the 
 changes that have come over Palestine itself, that 
 longing has persisted and is an essential factor in 
 modern Zionism, swaying both those to whom the 
 return of the Jews to Palestine, to be reconstituted 
 there as a nation, is a doctrine of religious faith, 
 as well as those who view the hoped for reorganiza¬ 
 tion of the Jews as a nation purely as a political 
 measure, constituting, according to them, the logical 
 solution of what is commonly termed' the “ Jewish 
 Question.” Zionism thus makes its appeal to the 
 unorthodox Jew as well as to the one for whom 
 Zionism is a part of his religious faith. 
 
 There is assuredly something impressive, some- 
 
 1 Psalm 137, 5-6. 
 
The Roots of Modern Zio nism 15 
 
 thing romantic and picturesque, in the thought of 
 a people that two millenniums ago was a nation, 
 coming back, after wanderings throughout the 
 world, to its ancient home, there to lead again the 
 life so eloquently pictured in the pages of the Old 
 Testament. The possibility of the fulfillment of 
 a hope that has persisted for so long a period stirs 
 the imagination; and all the more so at the present 
 moment, when other nations, like the Poles, the 
 Czechs, the Slavs, the Armenians, are about to re¬ 
 gain a national independence that they had lost. 
 If Poland is to be given back to the Poles, Bohemia 
 to be restored to the Bohemians, and Armenia is 
 to be reorganized for the Armenians — why not 
 Palestine for the Jews? The argument gains ap¬ 
 parent force from the feelings of Christian believ¬ 
 ers who have stepped forth as Zionists, and who 
 are encouraging the movement for a return of the 
 Jews to what was once their native land, though 
 y strangely enough, Jewish Zionists are apt to over- 
 \\ look the important fact that from the Christian point 
 of view the restoration of Palestine is the prelude 
 1 t0 the second coming of Jesus, and that this will be 
 followed by the disappearance of the Jews through 
 their acceptance of the Messiah whom they once re¬ 
 jected. Insofar as official and unofficial Christian- 
 
16 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 ity is interested in Zionism, it is because it may be 
 expected to lead to the ultimate triumph of the New 
 Covenant over the old. Christian Zionists favor 
 Jewish Zionism as a step leading not to the perpetu¬ 
 ation but to the disappearance of the Jews. In this 
 respect the Christian believer places himself, though, 
 of course, involuntarily, on almost the same plane 
 as the anti-Semitic agitators of Germany and Aus¬ 
 tria who should, consistently, be most enthusiastic 
 Zionists, since the movement, if successful, would 
 afford the possibility of getting rid at least of the 
 “ presence ” of the Jews scattered among European 
 nations. But of this aspect more anon. 
 
 More than this, Zionism makes its appeal to the 
 unorthodox Christian who is subject to the sway 
 of romantic sentiment. One need only recall 
 George Eliot’s eloquent portrayal of the sentiment 
 in Daniel Deronda to recognize its influence even 
 on one who had thrown off all belief in the doc¬ 
 trines of Christianity. She makes one of the char¬ 
 acters in her novel voice the nationalistic hope in 
 the following terms. 
 
 “ Let the torch of visible community be lit! Let 
 the reason of Israel disclose itself in a great outward 
 deed, let there be another great migration, another 
 choosing of Israel to be a nationality, whose members 
 
The Roots of Modern Zionism 17 
 
 may still stretch to the ends of the earth, even as the 
 sons of England and Germany, whom enterprise car¬ 
 ries afar, but who still have a national hearth and a 
 tribunal of national opinion. . . . Let the central fire 
 be kindled again, and the light will reach afar. . . . 
 The sons of Judah have to choose, that God may again 
 choose them. The Messianic time is the time when 
 Israel shall will the planting of the national ensign.” 
 
 George Eliot reveals her own feelings in those 
 words. 
 
 We need have no quarrel with the sincere Chris¬ 
 tian believer whose sympathy with Zionism involves 
 the fulfillment of a hope to which he has clung with 
 a persistency equal to that of the orthodox Jew, who 
 never fails to include in his prayers the hope of 
 the restoration of Jerusalem as the religious center 
 of the Jews. We should in a similar spirit respect 
 this doctrine of orthodox Judaism, though unable 
 to subscribe to it, but this must not deter us from 
 recognizing the source of this doctrine, and if we 
 do so we will see the serious mischief that the Zion- 
 istic longing is bound to work when it is divorced 
 from its attachment to religion, as is done by the 
 leaders of political Zionism, particularly by the 
 American and English leaders and by many of those 
 who have become Zionists just because of this di- 
 
18 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 vorce. Through this divorce Zionism becomes a 
 political question fraught with mischief, confusion 
 and dangers. I have not now in mind the fact that 
 these leaders of political Zionism, and many of 
 their followers, have not the slightest intention of 
 abandoning their citizenship in the country to which 
 they belong and where they enjoy as loyal citizens 
 the full rights and privileges of their fellows, 
 though this aspect of the movement cannot be en¬ 
 tirely ignored. Can one imagine Moses, who in¬ 
 augurated the first Zionistic movement, convening 
 a congress and saying in his presidential address to 
 his followers, “ You cross the Red Sea, and plunge 
 into the wilderness, while I remain behind at the 
 comfortable court of Pharaoh ” ? Can one for a 
 moment conceive of Joseph Smith gathering the 
 Mormons around him and sending them out to found 
 a new state in Utah, instead of leading them there? 
 That is not the way in which great movements are 
 inaugurated or carried out. Those who profess to 
 be Zionists but who have no intention of attaching 
 themselves to the movement are merely Zionists by 
 proxy. I have in mind rather those who profess to 
 be Zionists and intend to go to Palestine, but for 
 whom Zionism is a political movement, who look 
 at it purely from its supposed nationalistic point of 
 
The R oots of Modern Zionism 19 
 
 view, who want to see Jews organized as a separate 
 group, to recreate a Jewish nation, to bring into be¬ 
 ing what they call a Jewish culture, to reintroduce 
 Hebrew not because it is a sacred tongue in which 
 the greatest religious contributions of the Jews are 
 couched, but as a national language, so that the Jews 
 may be in every respect a distinct nationalistic unit. 
 Against this conception of Zionism, which is the 
 chief, aye, the dominating, note in the movement, 
 heard above all other sounds, I venture to set up 
 the thesis that while Zionism as a doctrine of faith 
 is intelligible, and Zionism as an economic scheme to 
 promote agricultural colonies in Palestine is timely 
 and should be encouraged by all interested in the 
 welfare of such Jews as wish to settle in Palestine, 
 Zionism as a political measure is an anachronism. 
 
 Now, why can one be so positive in maintaining 
 this thesis? Simply because the second root of 
 Zionism, which furnishes us also with the reason 
 for the persistence of the sentiment which we have 
 seen to be the first root, is to be found in the con¬ 
 ditions prevailing throughout antiquity, which al¬ 
 ways interpreted religion in terms of nationality. 
 In contrast to the modern point of view which looks 
 upon a religion as a concern of the individual, an¬ 
 tiquity made religion an affair of the group. As a 
 
20 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 survival from this earlier status of religion, Juda¬ 
 ism retained a double aspect, religious on the one 
 side, with the nationalistic aspiration attached to it 
 on the other. With the opening of the new era in 
 which we live, the nationalistic attachment disap¬ 
 peared from the consciousness of the Jews living in 
 lands in which they had obtained full political rights, 
 though it continued to survive in the form of the 
 orthodox doctrine of a restoration of the people, to 
 be brought about, however, not through a political 
 Zionistic movement, but as the fulfillment of a pro¬ 
 phetic hope, which will come to pass as part of the 
 Divine plan of the Deity especially concerned for 
 His “ chosen people.” This double aspect of re¬ 
 ligion, religion as an affair of the group and re¬ 
 ligion as a matter between the individual and his 
 conscience, requires some further explanation. 
 
 Until comparatively recent times there existed 
 as an inherent feature of political organization in 
 all European countries, a close union between 
 Church and State; and as a survival of this condi¬ 
 tion we still find, even in such advanced democra¬ 
 cies as England and Holland, an established church, 
 recognized as the official one, though with freedom 
 of worship and conscience for all non-conformist 
 denominations as they are called. Now, how did 
 
The Roots of Modern Zionism 21 
 
 such a union come about? The answer is that the 
 union is the direct outcome of the view of religion 
 which prevailed everywhere throughout antiquity 
 and which assumed that every country was under the 
 special protection of some god or gods. Every na¬ 
 tion in antiquity regarded itself as a chosen people, 
 singled out by some deity as his very own, though 
 in reality it was the people who chose the god; and 
 from this point of view religion was necessarily in¬ 
 terpreted in terms of the solidarity of the group. 
 The gods of Greece were the gods of the Greek 
 people. The individual entered into consideration 
 merely as a member of the group. The concern 
 of the gods was primarily for the group and, as a 
 corollary, the jurisdiction of the gods was limited 
 to the district in which a group lived. It was con¬ 
 sidered perfectly natural that every people should 
 have its own god or gods; as natural as that a people 
 should have its own language and its peculiar cus¬ 
 toms. From this it followed that only those who 
 were Greeks could worship Greek gods. It was 
 presumptuous and sacrilegious for others to do so, 
 since the Greek gods were concerned only with the 
 Greek group. Citizenship was likewise linked to 
 nationality, for no one could be a Greek citizen who 
 was not a Greek by descent or had become Greek 
 
22 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 by intermarriage with someone who was Greek. 
 Religion, nationality and citizenship thus formed a 
 triple wall sharply separating a political group from 
 a neighboring one. Extension of Greek sover¬ 
 eignty, especially after the period of Alexander the 
 Great after the middle of the fourth century before 
 this era, introduced some modifications of this hide¬ 
 bound order of things, but for all that the prevail¬ 
 ing belief continued to be that religion as the con¬ 
 cern of the group was inseparable from nationality. 
 Even the still larger scope of the Roman Empire, 
 after the imperialistic policy was in full swing, could 
 not conceive of a Civis Romanus who was not also 
 a worshipper of the Roman gods. The tribal god 
 might by extension of Roman sovereignty become 
 a deity of almost universal sway, but he would for 
 all that retain his function of recognizing the po¬ 
 litical group who constituted his worshippers, simply 
 on the ground that they belonged to the State over 
 which his jurisdiction extended. 
 
 Religion and nationality were the two sides of a 
 medallion. This was the case among all nations 
 of antiquity, and such a conception of religion ac¬ 
 counts for the fact also that the welfare of the in¬ 
 dividual plays such a secondary role in most an¬ 
 cient religions. Prayers and incantations make 
 
The Roots of Modern Zionism 23 
 
 their appeal on behalf of the people as a whole. 
 The gods are to bring victory in war, to secure good 
 crops for the country and to afford relief from 
 pestilence, but the specifically individual needs are 
 conspicuous by their absence from the practical side 
 of the ritual. The king appears to be the only in¬ 
 dividual who has a place in religion, and that merely 
 because the ruler, as standing nearer to the gods — 
 frequently regarded indeed as a direct descendant 
 of the gods — affects the welfare of the group. 
 Upon his good relations to the gods the happiness 
 and prosperity of the group depended. If things 
 go well with the king, it is a proof of divine favor 
 . extended to the people and, correspondingly, a mis¬ 
 fortune to the ruler or to his household affects the 
 entire group. 
 
 The ancient Hebrews formed no exception to the 
 rule. They had a national deity whom they called 
 Yahweh, 1 who was their protector, and whose con¬ 
 trol was limited to the territory which the Hebrews 
 could call their own. They were the chosen peo¬ 
 ple of this national protector, precisely as groups 
 around them had been chosen by some other god. 
 
 1 Or Jahweh, as the name may also be written. The writ¬ 
 ing with Y is preferable in an English transliteration of the 
 name. See note on page 31. 
 
24 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 This view prevailed in the days of David, who com¬ 
 plains that when he was driven out of his country 
 by the enmity of Saul, he was forced out of the 
 presence of Yahweh. 1 David could not worship 
 the national deity in the land of the Philistines, 
 because that district lay outside of Yahweh’s do¬ 
 main. Jerusalem becomes Yahweh’s city, and the 
 Temple there his dwelling-place, and, precisely as 
 among the Greeks, only those who were Hebrews 
 could worship in the central sanctuary of Yahweh 
 and in the shrines of this deity scattered throughout 
 that part of the country which belonged to the He¬ 
 brews. 
 
 But in the ninth century before our era a move¬ 
 ment begins which results in an entirely new con¬ 
 ception of religion, a conception which was destined 
 to cut the bond between religion and nationality, 
 and which ultimately led to the view of religion 
 prevalent in our days as the concern of the indi¬ 
 vidual and not of the group. This striking de¬ 
 parture was inaugurated by a body of itinerant 
 preachers who became known as Prophets. They 
 began by proclaiming that Yahweh is unlike other 
 gods, that he searches the hearts and punishes the 
 wrong-doers, that his concern for the group is con- 
 
 1 1 Samuel 26, 19. 
 
The Roots of Modern Zionism 25 
 
 ditioned not upon caprice or upon carrying out 
 ritualistic obligations, but upon the obedience of 
 his followers to certain principles involving ethical 
 distinctions between right and wrong. These Pro¬ 
 phets, addressing themselves to their people, natu¬ 
 rally did not ignore the group, but they boldly an¬ 
 nounced that Yahweh had rejected his people be¬ 
 cause of the callousness of the rulers, because of the 
 oppression of the poor by the rich, because of the 
 prevailing injustice in the courts of justice, because 
 crime was rampant. Sin was looked upon as dis¬ 
 loyalty to Yahweh, who was determined to destroy 
 his people without mercy unless they would mend 
 their ways. Amos, the earliest of this new class 
 of teachers, declares that because of their sins Yah¬ 
 weh has decided that “ the end has come upon my 
 people Israel; I will not pardon them any more.” 1 
 Hosea makes the same prophecy of the rejection 
 of the people. 2 Isaiah exceeds both these Prophets 
 in the vehemence of his denunciation, and empha¬ 
 sizes with particular force that sacrifices and tri¬ 
 bute are an abomination to Yahweh, that he does 
 not want his worshippers to defile his holy place by 
 coming there with unclean hands. 3 
 
 1 Amos 8, 1. 
 
 2 Hosea, Chap. 4. 
 
 8 Isaiah 1, 13-17. 
 
26 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 Now that was a new language, one that had never 
 been heard before. Its significance — at first 
 hardly conscious to the Prophets themselves — lay in 
 the emphasis which it placed on the conduct of the 
 individual as the test of religion. Under the old 
 view prevailing throughout antiquity, the individual 
 entered into consideration only as a member of the 
 group. Under the new view the conditions were 
 reversed, and the group entered into consideration 
 as representing an entity composed of individuals. 
 
 It was this movement that led to Judaism in the 
 historical sense, that is to say, a religion based upon 
 a monotheistic conception of divine government and 
 making the conduct of the individual the test of re¬ 
 ligious life. It is doubtful whether at first the Pro¬ 
 phets actually did conceive of Yahweh as the only 
 god, but their teaching that Yahweh imposed jus¬ 
 tice and righteous conduct as an obligation upon 
 his followers necessarily led to the view which 
 transformed the national Yahweh into a universal 
 Jehovah. A more definite step in that direction 
 was taken after the destruction of the Jewish State 
 by a Babylonian monarch, and we thus see Judaism 
 emerging as the butterfly out of the chrysalis of 
 Hebrew nationalism at the time of its extinction. 
 The belief in a God of universal scope concerned 
 
The Roots of Modern Zionism 27 
 
 for all mankind cuts the bond between religion and 
 nationality. 
 
 It is a fact of the utmost significance that the 
 great contribution of the Jews to the world’s spir¬ 
 itual treasury was made not while the national life 
 was flourishing, but as it was ebbing away. The 
 Prophets with their revolutionary doctrines made 
 their appearance when the southern Kingdom was 
 beginning to show symptoms of decline, and the 
 movement reached its height after this kingdom 
 had disappeared and the national existence of the 
 southern Kingdom was threatened. The religion 
 of the Prophets is the swan song of ancient Hebra¬ 
 ism, and the example of a people flourishing with¬ 
 out a national background had to be furnished to 
 the world in order to bring the new conception of re¬ 
 ligion to fruition, which divorced religion from na¬ 
 tionality and made it solely the expression of the 
 individual’s aspiration for the higher life and for 
 communion with the source of all being. The an¬ 
 cient Hebrews disappeared. It was the Jews, as 
 we should call the people after the Babylonian Exile, 
 who survived, and they survived despite the fact 
 that they never recovered their national independ¬ 
 ence in the full sense of the word. 
 
 This, to be sure, was not made manifest at once, 
 
28 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 and to the superficial observer it might seem that 
 when, under the mild rule of Cyrus, conqueror of 
 Babylon, the Jews were permitted to return to their 
 native country and to establish a Temple cult, the 
 nation was actually being reconstituted. As a mat¬ 
 ter of fact, the political life of the Jews was kept 
 safely under the control of the Persian governor of 
 Palestine; though the Jews were recognized as form¬ 
 ing a political unit. This was in accord with the 
 policy of Cyrus which, in contrast to Babylonian 
 imperialism that aimed to crush the national life of 
 conquered nations, favored the granting of as much 
 autonomy to a subdued people as was consistent with 
 the recognition of Persian supremacy. Cyrus, and 
 to a certain extent also his successors, seemed par¬ 
 ticularly anxious not to interfere with the religious 
 life in the countries that came under the Persian 
 sway; and since religion and nationality were closely 
 yoked, the permission granted to the Jews to reor¬ 
 ganize their cult seemed also to afford an oppor¬ 
 tunity for the renewal of national existence. To a 
 certain extent this was the case, but ardent Jews 
 whose longings for Zion are so eloquently voiced 
 in many a Psalm, must have been conscious of the 
 fact that the nationalistic aspiration had assumed 
 a secondary role, trailing behind the religious boon 
 
2 9 
 
 The Roots of Modern Zionism 
 
 of being permitted to appear again in the presence 
 of Yahweh in His rebuilt sanctuary in the city which 
 Yahweh had chosen as His abiding place. 
 Whether these ardent religious followers of the 
 new Judaism also realized the further implication 
 that the religion had actually changed the people 
 from a political to a religious unit is doubtful. 
 Some of the more advanced minds may have felt 
 the profound difference between the purely national 
 aspirations and such as were connected primarily 
 with carrying out the religious ideals of the Pro¬ 
 phets. For the masses, however, the difficulties in¬ 
 volved in wrenching the political from the religious 
 life, so entirely unheard of in antiquity, accounts 
 for the strange phenomenon that we now encounter 
 a Prophet also turning Priest, despite the inherent 
 difference between the functions of the two. Eze¬ 
 kiel (c. 592-570 b. c.), who speaks with the fervor 
 of an Isaiah, has also the ardent patriotism of a 
 Jeremiah. He sketches a plan 1 for the religious 
 reorganization of Israel which is so dominated by 
 the priestly ideal that from Ezekiel to Ezra (c. 
 440 b. c.) who perfects the Code that creates a 
 theocratic state, is a natural step. Ezra’s Code, 
 which is embodied in Exodus, Leviticus and Num- 
 
 1 Ezekiel, Chaps. 40-48. 
 
30 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 bers, was subsequently combined with the two earlier 
 codes, one in Exodus and the other in the Book of 
 Deuteronomy. These codes encased in a frame¬ 
 work of early traditions and of tribal experiences 
 became the present Pentateuch, which served at 
 once as the basis of religious life and at the same 
 time recognized the solidarity of the Jews as a 
 political unit. 
 
 From the point of view of such writers as the so- 
 called Second Isaiah and the other writing Prophets 
 of the post-exilic period who followed in the wake 
 of the pre-exilic speaking Prophets, 1 the reconstitu¬ 
 tion of the Jews as a political unit (though without 
 complete independence) was a misfortune, for it 
 once more attached the religion to what remained 
 of the national life. Naturally, the Jews felt en¬ 
 couraged under the mild policy of Persian rule to 
 look forward to regaining their complete inde¬ 
 pendence, and, though Persia saw to it that this 
 hope should not lead to any definite efforts, yet the 
 hope remained and continued to exercise a pro¬ 
 found influence. But with the Jews occupied with 
 the renewal of purely national aspirations, the 
 broader outlook of post-exilic Prophets, whose gaze 
 
 1 On this contrast between speaking and writing Prophets, 
 see Jastrow, A Gentle Cynic, p. 48 et seq. 
 
The Roots of Modern Zionism 31 
 
 was directed towards the time when the supreme 
 Author of all being would become, through the ex¬ 
 ample set by the Jews, the sole object of worship of 
 mankind, was obscured. 
 
 The universal Jehovah 1 had not entirely put aside 
 the rule of the tribal Yahweh. Yahweh was still 
 viewed as the special protector of His chosen peo¬ 
 ple by the side of His traits as the God of universal 
 scope. The crisis came in the days of Jesus, who, 
 as the successor of the Hebrew Prophets, drew the 
 logical conclusion from their premises and substi¬ 
 tuted for the national ideal that of the “ Kingdom 
 of God.” “ Render unto Caesar the things that 
 are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are 
 God’s.” 2 By such a single saying Jesus broke 
 definitely with all nationalistic aims, which even dur¬ 
 ing the period of Roman control, strict and complete 
 as it was, the Jews did not entirely abandon. 
 
 1 The name Jehovah, which is not older than the twelfth 
 century of our era, is a combination of the name Adonai 
 “Lord” with the consonants of YHWH! (or JHWH) form¬ 
 ing the name of the tribal deity Yahweh. As early as the 
 fourth century b„c. the general name Adonai for deity was 
 substituted for the personal one Yahweh, under the influence 
 of the growing strength of the monotheistic conception which 
 found it distasteful to apply the name of an old tribal deity 
 to a spiritually conceived Power of universal sway. 
 
 2 Mark 12, 17. 
 
3 2 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans a gener¬ 
 ation after Jesus, in 70 a. d. Subsequent efforts 
 of rebellion failed — though not without a heroic 
 struggle. The last vestiges of Jewish independence 
 disappeared about 135 a. d. and the Jews scattered 
 in all directions, though long before this Jewish 
 settlements in considerable number were being 
 founded in various parts of the ancient world — in 
 Babylonia, in upper Egypt, particularly at Alexan¬ 
 dria, in Asia Minor and even in Greece. But wher¬ 
 ever the Jews went they carried with them, as a sur¬ 
 vival of their hopes, the Zionistic longing. Bound 
 by a tradition from which they could not extricate 
 themselves, they continued to echo through the ages 
 the plaint of the Psalmist, 
 
 “ If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, 
 
 Let my right hand forget her cunning; 
 
 Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, 
 
 If I remember thee not.” 
 
 I Evolution in human society never completely sub- 
 1 stitutes the new for the old, but carries part of the 
 If era into the new epoch. Judaism represents a 
 |; new conception of religion which makes religion an 
 affair of the individual and a bond uniting the in- 
 vidual to the rest of mankind. Zionism rests upon 
 the sway of the older conception which attached re- 
 
The Roots of Modern Zionism 33 
 
 ligion to the national life, and so we have the strange 
 phenomenon of a religion which declares through 
 one of its exponents, 
 
 “ Have we not all one Father ? ” 1 
 
 and which looks forward to the time when the 
 Temple of Jehovah will be called 
 
 “ A House of Prayer for all peoples,” 2 
 
 yet retaining as a doctrine of a faith which eschews 
 nationality a hope for the restoration of the national 
 life of a little group within a restricted area. Juda¬ 
 ism and Zionism are thus mutually exclusive, but 
 for all that passed down the ages linked to one an¬ 
 other as inseparable partners. 
 
 This, then, is the second root of Zionism — the 
 survival in Judaism of the early conception of re¬ 
 ligion which attached it closely to nationalistic limita¬ 
 tions, and which continued to interpret even a re¬ 
 ligion universalistic in its implication in terms of 
 the solidarity of the group. So strong was the 
 hold of the ancient conception of religion that the 
 very people to whom we owe the divorce of religion 
 from nationality, preserved and emphasized the 
 union of the two factors straight through the cen- 
 
 1 Malachi 2, 10. 
 
 2 Isaiah 56, 7. 
 
34 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 turies until the advent of the new era in which we 
 live. Strange indeed this double aspect of Judaism 
 must appear to those who overlook the historic 
 causes which brought it about. Strange also that 
 the Jews themselves did not recognize that they 
 survived the extinction of national life and their 
 dispersion through the Western world, because they 
 had become more than a nation. 
 
 It was natural, however, for the Jews thus to con¬ 
 tinue to combine their religion with the hope for a 
 restoration of the national life, natural even though 
 inconsistent with the basis upon which the religion 
 rested, for the conditions under which the Jews were 
 forced to live in the lands in which they settled made 
 them homeless; and here we strike the third root 
 of Zionism. 
 
 Christianity, as we have seen, broke at its founda¬ 
 tion with Jewish nationalism. It definitely cut the 
 thread that bound religion to the limitations inher¬ 
 ent in associating religion with the group. The sig¬ 
 nificance of the teachings of Jesus lies just in this 
 circumstance — that he brought the nationalistic con¬ 
 ception of religion as preached by the Prophets and 
 which made religion solely a matter between the in¬ 
 dividual and his conscience more definitely and in 
 
The Roots of Modern Zionism 35 
 
 an uncompromising form into the foreground. It is 
 an error to suppose that the Jews rejected the re¬ 
 ligious teachings of Jesus. They could not have 
 done so, for these teachings breathed the same spirit 
 as those of their own Prophets, but the weight of 
 tradition and of their established attitude of mind, 
 added to the pressure of the religious conception 
 current about them, was sufficiently great to pre¬ 
 vent them from accepting the implications of the 
 position taken by Jesus, though even these were 
 identical with those of the Prophets. The Jews 
 could not conceive of a Messiah who was not also 
 a nationalist. Jesus could not conceive of Judaism 
 except as detached from Zionistic longings — and 
 so the inevitable break took place. When St. Paul 
 came to give the doctrinal setting to the teachings 
 of Jesus and to interpret the meaning of his life 
 with its tragic end, he laid the chief emphasis on 
 the salvation of the individual through the accept¬ 
 ance of the belief in Jesus. The sins of the world 
 were washed away through the blood of Jesus as 
 a vicarious offering for mankind. Every in¬ 
 dividual was offered the opportunity of securing 
 salvation for his soul by accepting Jesus as his 
 saviour. The new conception of religion gained 
 
36 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 the day, and Christian apostles travelled into all 
 lands to preach the new faith of individual salva¬ 
 tion. 
 
 But strangely enough Christianity itself suc¬ 
 cumbed to the Zionistic temptation of an alliance 
 with the old nationalism, though in a form that at 
 first appeared to be international. Christianity be¬ 
 came the official religion of Rome. A union was 
 established between the two which led to the con¬ 
 ception of the Church Universal as a complement 
 to the ambition of the Roman Empire for universal 
 sovereignty. Rome and Christianity — a State 
 Universal and a Church Universal — thus became 
 linked to each other. The individualism of the 
 Christian scheme of salvation was overshadowed 
 by the official recognition of Christianity as the 
 State religion. The Church usurped the place once 
 occupied by the old Roman paganism. Religion 
 became once more an affair of the solidarity of 
 the group, and the underlying principle involved 
 was not affected by the circumstance that the new 
 grouping aimed at universal jurisdiction. Largely 
 through the official status given to Christianity, the 
 young and vigorous religion spread throughout the 
 Roman Empire, and when that Empire broke up into 
 the states out of which eventually the present Eu- 
 
The Roots of Modern Zionism 37 
 
 ropean nationalities were to evolve, the union of 
 Church and State survived logically as a legacy of 
 this indissoluble link between the State and the 
 Church universal. Church and State are merely 
 different terms for religion and nationality; they 
 represent religion and nationality writ large. 
 Christian Europe continued to maintain, as a sur¬ 
 vival of the past, that only one who had accepted the 
 official religion could be a member of the State. 
 There was, to be sure, an advance in this respect, 
 that while the older order, prevailing in antiquity, 
 prescribed e.g. that only a Greek could worship 
 Greek gods, under the new order the proposition 
 was turned around and adherence to the Church 
 was made the condition of citizenship. Under the 
 new order any one could become a member of the 
 official religious body, whereas Greek citizenship 
 was limited to those who were born Greeks or who 
 had entered into the Greek body politic through 
 intermarriage. Beyond this advance, however, 
 there was no difference between the old and the new. 
 The underlying principle in both was the same. 
 
 In this way Christianity assumed a double aspect 
 precisely as did Judaism, though each through dif¬ 
 ferent circumstances and for different reasons. 
 Under this double aspect which bound citizenship to 
 
38 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 a confession of a certain faith, even though that 
 faith aimed to be universalistic, the Jews were neces¬ 
 sarily excluded from participation in the political 
 life about them, and became a people without a 
 country; and so strong is the social instinct which 
 impels people to associate themselves with the un¬ 
 folding of political activities that the Jews, scat¬ 
 tered throughout Christian Europe, clung to their 
 nationalistic hopes as the only substitute at their 
 disposal for a real country. Man as a social and 
 political being cannot live without a country.' If 
 he has no real one he creates an ideal one. The 
 continued attachment of a Zionistic longing to Juda¬ 
 ism, though not, as we have seen, involved in the 
 basis upon which the faith rested and indeed incon¬ 
 sistent with such a basis, thus appears likewise as 
 a logical necessity — as well as a survival — result¬ 
 ing from the conditions under which the Jews by 
 the exclusiveness of the States organized on a basis 
 of union between Church and State were compelled 
 to live. 
 
 Here, then, is the third root of Zionism, the ex¬ 
 clusion of the Jews for so many centuries from 
 participation in the political life that hummed 
 around them. The situation was most humiliating: 
 
 o 
 
 for the steadily increasing numbers of Jews in all 
 
The Roots of Modern Zionism 39 
 
 European countries, stigmatized as they were as 
 political outcasts and compelled to live in cramped 
 ghettos; and even in these living prisons they were 
 exposed to the contumely of the outside hostile mob. 
 The moral degradation of the conditions under 
 which the Jews thus passed their lives necessarily 
 reacted on their character. While it strengthened, 
 on the one hand, the bond uniting those who suf¬ 
 fered in common, it created on the other a spirit of 
 clannishness, and produced other faults which are 
 necessarily bred in such an atmosphere. A people 
 living in a hostile atmosphere, obliged to be ever 
 on their guard against attacks and at the mercy of 
 government officials who in return for bribes were 
 willing to grant favors that connived at existing 
 laws, naturally develope a phase of shrewdness born 
 of the instinct of self-preservation. This in turn 
 engenders personal qualities which are not attrac¬ 
 tive and breeds methods in business and other deal¬ 
 ings with their own kin or with strangers that will 
 not stand a severe ethical test. The defects to be 
 found in the character of the Russian Jew, upon 
 which even writers who harbor no prejudices have 
 not infrequently,dwelt — though generalizations al¬ 
 ways embody only semi-truths — are precisely those 
 that are evolved among a people, living in a coun- 
 
40 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 try in which they have no rights. It were a miracle 
 were it otherwise. Sufferings through intolerance, 
 alternating with frightful persecutions, thus served 
 to intensify the longing for redemption through 
 divine intervention. The Zionistic hope became for 
 the Jews the only rock to which they could cling in 
 the storm that raged about them — the beacon light 
 that illumined the darkness of their lives. It was 
 this hope alone that enabled them to retain their 
 faith in a protecting Providence amidst the injustice 
 of which they were the perpetual victims. 
 
 The three roots of Zionism thus turn out to be: 
 the force of sentiment assuming an increasingly 
 picturesque and romantic tinge; the persistency in 
 Judaism, as a plank in its religious platform, of the 
 older conception of religion as involving the soli¬ 
 darity of the group; and the combination between 
 Christianity and nationalism surviving until the 
 threshold of the new era in the organization of the 
 European States, and which, excluding the Jews 
 from citizenship and submitting them to all manner 
 of suffering and persecution, served to maintain 
 among Jews the Zionistic longing as the only means 
 of satisfying the need of the individual to belong to 
 some country. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE NEW ERA AND REFORMED JUDAISM 
 
 We are now in a position to show how incongruous 
 political Zionism is with the new era that began at 
 the end of the eighteenth century, marked by such 
 events as our own Declaration of Independence and 
 the French Revolution. These were symptoms of 
 the approaching end of the epoch marked by the 
 union of Church and State. Christianity was to 
 free itself from continued attachment to the idea 
 of nationality, which tied it officially to a state. 
 The divorce between Church and State which was 
 thus brought about was merely one consequence of 
 the many changes wrought by the new order that 
 was setting in. Religious freedom for the in¬ 
 dividual which was involved in this divorce was a 
 specific application of the general principle which 
 demanded freedom of mind as well as of con¬ 
 science; and equally bound up with the new order 
 was the ideal of political freedom that proclaimed 
 the sovereignty of the popular will, and the inherent 
 
 4i 
 
42 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 right of nations to govern themselves, instead of 
 bearing a yoke imposed upon them. 
 
 The force of the new order was irresistible, 
 though the movement for political and religious 
 freedom proceeded more rapidly in some countries 
 than in others. Our own land took the lead and 
 furnished Europe with an example of states band¬ 
 ing themselves together to form a union with the 
 recognition of a complete divorce between Church 
 and State. The federation thus formed welcomed 
 to citizenship all who were ready to be loyal to the 
 principles of the Republic. France followed, though 
 not without some reactionary movements which in 
 the end failed. England and Holland, though 
 formally still recognizing an established Church, 
 threw down the barriers excluding non-conform¬ 
 ists from citizenship, and even Austria and Ger¬ 
 many, though remaining autocratic in their form 
 of government, were forced to make concessions to 
 the onrush of the democratic spirit. As a result 
 of the process of political emancipation which, be¬ 
 ginning early in the nineteenth century, extended 
 well into the last quarter, the Jews in all these 
 countries as well as in Greece and Italy and in the 
 Balkan States with the exception of Roumania, 
 were gradually granted full rights of citizenship; 
 
The New Era and Reformed Judaism 43 
 
 and as they entered upon their new privileges we 
 find among them a corresponding process, more 
 rapid in some countries than in others, but every¬ 
 where proceeding steadily, of assimilation on their 
 part to the new political and social conditions thus 
 created. Since their political emancipation the Jews 
 have entered with zest into the political life of the 
 countries in which they live, showing a patriotic 
 zeal and devotion to the welfare of what now be¬ 
 came their country, which more than justified the 
 removal of the civic disabilities under which they la¬ 
 bored and suffered for so many, many centuries. By 
 that same force of logic which had led them to look 
 to Palestine as the only land which one day they 
 would be able to call their country, they now lost 
 the consciousness of being a separate political unit 
 by gaining as their own the land in which they had 
 cast their lot. That social instinct in man which 
 makes for political organization found its natural 
 expression, and with this the one root of Zionism 
 fell away for all Jews living in lands that had 
 granted them the same privileges and rights of 
 citizenship as their fellows. 
 
 Accompanying the political emancipation of Jews 
 there arose a movement within the fold to adapt the 
 external character of Judaism to the new conditions. 
 
44 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 The era of Reformed Judaism as the movement 
 came to be called, set in — inevitably so. We err 
 completely in looking at the movement as a destruc¬ 
 tive one; it is essentially constructive. Its main 
 aim is the adaptation of the old religion to the new 
 age, which affected not only the political and social 
 life of the Jews, but also brought about through 
 progress in research and through discoveries more 
 particularly in the realm of natural science an en¬ 
 tirely new and changed attitude towards life and 
 towards man’s relations to the universe. Jews be¬ 
 came affected by the spirit of the age precisely and 
 to the same degree as were their fellows in the 
 Christian Church. All the sects of Christianity 
 have during the past century felt the need to set 
 their house in order, to meet the results gleaned in 
 the fields of geology and biology, which revealed 
 the great age of the world and an order in the evo¬ 
 lution of life on this planet entirely different from 
 the view which had for so long been traditionally 
 accepted. 
 
 The historical and critical survey of the Old and 
 the New Testament swept away likewise established 
 traditions regarding the origin of Biblical books and 
 even regarding their character. Nor was the funda¬ 
 mental doctrine on which Judaism and Christianity 
 
The New Era and Reformed Judaism 45 
 
 rested, as well as Islam, permitted to escape the im¬ 
 plications involved in the new scientific attitude to¬ 
 wards the universe and towards the position of man 
 in nature. The Reform movement in Judaism thus 
 had a double character imposed upon it. On the 
 one hand established rites and ceremonies, which 
 were an inheritance of a religion originating in an 
 ancient Oriental environment, no longer made their 
 appeal to Western Jews imbued with Western ideals 
 and the Western spirit; and on the other it had to 
 reinterpret the doctrines of the ancestral religion 
 in accord with the postulates of modern thought, 
 and more particularly to bring the beliefs into line 
 with the conditions of life upon which the Jews had 
 entered. 1 
 
 The reformation in Judaism did not, as hap¬ 
 pened in Christianity, bring about a sharp break 
 between those who aimed to give to the old re¬ 
 ligion a new form, and those who clung tenaciously 
 to time-honored rites and customs, but those who cut 
 loose from the moorings of tradition moved ever 
 further away from their orthodox brethren in the 
 interpretation of the doctrines and aspirations of 
 Judaism, until to-day the extreme left wing accepts 
 
 1 See for details Philipson, Reform Movement in Judaism 
 (Macmillan, New York, 1907). 
 
46 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 without reservation the results of the historical criti¬ 
 cism of the Old Testament and the postulates from 
 the discoveries in the realm of natural science which 
 have so materially altered fundamental conceptions 
 in the sphere of religion. The ethical ideals of the 
 Hebrew Prophets have been moved into the fore¬ 
 ground by Reformed Judaism, and this has not 
 been without its effect also on the orthodox wing, 
 which was forced to make some concessions to the 
 spirit of the age in order to maintain its hold upon 
 its adherents. 
 
 Leaving aside aspects of Reformed Judaism which 
 do not concern us here, the most important under¬ 
 current to be detected beneath the external changes 
 in forms and rites is the struggle to throw off the 
 traces of the older view of religion which interprets 
 man’s religious aspirations in terms of nationality, 
 and which, as pointed out, Judaism through stress of 
 circumstances carried with it in its winding course 
 through the ages. The Zionistic doctrine as part 
 of the religion lost its raison d'etre when the Jews 
 became citizens of the country in which they had 
 settled. The social instinct which impels a man 
 to have one country also prevents him from having 
 more than one. The essence of Reformed Juda¬ 
 ism, viewed from the standpoint of a student of 
 
The New Era and Reformed Judaism 47 
 
 history, lies precisely here, that it freed Judaism 
 and the Jews from the double aspect of being bound 
 both by a religious and a political tie. Reformed 
 Judaism logically involved removing from the re¬ 
 ligion all Zionistic aspects, which we have seen, as 
 a matter of fact, had no place in the new concep¬ 
 tion of religion for which both Judaism and Chris¬ 
 tianity from the beginning stood, but which were 
 retained in both through a special series of circum¬ 
 stances. The separation of Church and State in 
 countries that had hitherto been Christian is paral¬ 
 leled by the complete divorce between religion and 
 nationality in Reformed Judaism. The one step 
 necessarily entailed the other. Reformed Judaism 
 viewed in this light as the expression of the spirit 
 of the age thus cut away the second root of Zionism. 
 Once more the thread between religion and nation¬ 
 ality was snapped. Judaism was brought into con¬ 
 sistent agreement with its fundamental principle of 
 a faith which, breaking all national and racial bar¬ 
 riers, proclaimed religion to be the regulation of 
 the life of the individual according to the dictates 
 of his own conscience, with the religion itself based 
 upon a belief in a Providence whose care was ex¬ 
 tended over all mankind. The old doctrine of a 
 chosen people, in so far as it survived into the new 
 
48 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 era, was thus given a different interpretation. 
 From having been a special privilege accorded 
 them by a tribal deity, it became a solemn obligation, 
 imposed by their historical position, to spread the 
 doctrine of divine unity in the government of the 
 universe and to exemplify the tenets of their re¬ 
 ligion by their conduct in life. There remains, 
 then, of the three roots of Zionism which we above 
 discussed only one, the force of the time-honored 
 sentiment attaching itself to the memory of distant 
 days when the Jews were a nation living in the land 
 which they had conquered for themselves, 
 
 “ If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, 
 
 Let my right hand forget her cunning.” 
 
 Two main objections to this sentiment when the 
 attempt is made to convert it into action are, in 
 the first place, that it misinterprets the trend of the 
 history of the Jews during the past 2000 years and 
 secondly, that it ignores also the changes that have 
 come over Palestine itself during this period. Be¬ 
 fore, however, taking up these objections, which 
 may be called fundamental to the endeavor to con¬ 
 vert the Zionistic sentiment, however impressive, 
 into a political movement, we must face the question 
 which will be naturally raised at this point, why 
 
The New Era and Reformed Judaism 49 
 
 did a strong Zionistic movement set in a generation 
 ago, just at the time when the process involving the 
 removal of the two other roots, had made such 
 progress and, furthermore, why has modern Zion¬ 
 ism taken on such a decided political color which 
 gives to it all the appearance of a revival of a na¬ 
 tionalistic sentiment among the Jews? 
 
IV 
 
 JEWISH SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND ANTI-SEMITISM 
 
 Naturally, all that has been said in regard to the 
 removal of the two roots of Zionism through the 
 trend of events which set in at the close of the 
 eighteenth century, the definite separation of re¬ 
 ligion from nationality in Reformed Judaism on 
 the one hand, and on the other the recognition of 
 Jews as fullfledged citizens in all countries organ¬ 
 ized on a democratic and liberal basis, applies only 
 to those countries in which the separation of Church 
 and State has practically been accomplished and all 
 political distinctions among the classes of inhabi¬ 
 tants removed. In lands like Russia and Roumania, 
 the three roots of Zionism still exert their full force. 
 It was, therefore, natural for a Zionistic movement 
 to originate in Russia despite the advent of the new 
 era, and it is significant that even at the present 
 time the movement gathers its main strength from 
 the adherence of those Jews who have either di¬ 
 rectly experienced, in Russia and Roumania, the 
 
 50 
 
Jewish Self-Consciousness 51 
 
 martyrdom of being political outcasts and of being 
 victims of persecution, or who though escaping to 
 lands of freedom are weighed down by their recol¬ 
 lections and at the same time stirred by a natural 
 sympathy for the millions of their less fortunate 
 brethren who still languish in a condition which 
 represents a modern equivalent to the ancient Egyp¬ 
 tian bondage. Bearing in mind that Russian and 
 Roumanian Jews together, form one half of the 
 fifteen million Jews in the world, it is not surprising 
 to find that an effort to ameliorate the condition of 
 so many millions should secure a large adherence 
 among Russian and Roumanian Jews living out¬ 
 side of these countries. Modern Zionism at its in¬ 
 ception was distinctly an outcome of conditions pre¬ 
 vailing in Russia and Roumania. It was because 
 the Jews in these lands had no country that Zionis nj 
 arose to meet man’s social need to belong to some 
 country. Zionism in its modern aspects as it took 
 shape in Russia in the 8o’s of the preceding century 
 was also an expression of intellectual stirrings. 
 Curiously enough, while Russia is the stronghold of 
 Jewish orthodoxy, due in part at least to the back¬ 
 ward state of political life in that country, it is also 
 the center of a remarkably advanced intelleetualism 
 among large bodies of Jews who have, despite ad- 
 
52 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 verse circumstances, emancipated themselves from 
 orthodox surroundings and have experienced the 
 stimulating contact with the new scientific spirit of 
 the age, as well as the movement for freer political 
 life that culminated, after a long struggle, in our 
 own days in the recent Russian revolution. Be¬ 
 cause of this intellectualism in conjunction with 
 their religious emancipation, these Russian Jews 
 have felt the humiliation to which they have been 
 subjected all the more keenly. Excluded practically 
 from all direct participation in both intellectual and 
 political activities — barring exceptional instances 
 — they became sharply self-conscious of the stigma 
 attaching to them as Jews, irrespective of the fact 
 that they had in most cases thrown off all connection 
 with the ancestral religion. 
 
 Seeking for an explanation of the fact that de¬ 
 spite all efforts on their part to become part and 
 parcel of the native population they were neverthe¬ 
 less regarded as aliens, they found a justification 
 for their self-consciousness in the supposition that 
 they were denied the rights of citizenship and 
 treated as political outcasts, because they repre¬ 
 sented a distinct nationality, foreign to the body 
 politic about them. 
 
 This same self-consciousness explains the spread 
 
Jewish Self-Consciousness 
 
 53 
 
 of the Zionistic sentiment to Germany and Austria 
 in which countries it began to take strong hold in 
 the closing decade of the last century. Here it 
 was an anti-Semitic outbreak which brought about 
 a recrudescence of Jewish self-consciousness. 
 Theodor Herzl, who became the founder and 
 leader of political Zionism, was himself led to his 
 position by the reaction on himself of the anti- 
 Semitic movement. It was this movement which 
 made him, the once prominent journalist of Vienna, 
 without any affiliations with the religion of his 
 fathers, conscious of the isolated position occupied 
 by the Jews in countries like Germany and Austria, 
 despite the improvement in their political status. 
 He likewise reached the conclusion that the Jews 
 were regarded as a separate entity, not because of 
 their religion but in spite of it. It was not their 
 religion that stamped the Jews as a compact body, 
 but the fact that they belonged to a separate nation¬ 
 ality. The interpretation that was thus given to the 
 anti-Semitic movement played directly into the 
 hands of the opponents of the Jews whose hostility, 
 it may be said in passing, was not worthy of so ex¬ 
 alted an interpretation. 
 
 Jewish self-consciousness thus lies at the bottom 
 of the solution proposed by Herzl and his followers 
 
 
54 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 for the Jewish Question. With a frank confes¬ 
 sion as his starting-point that the Jews were a dis¬ 
 tinct nationality, Herzl maintained that the Jews 
 could only regain the respect and esteem of the 
 world by an effort to re-establish themselves as a 
 national group. Hence the “ Jewish State ” which 
 loomed up in Herzl’s mind as a way out of the bewil¬ 
 dering maze. 1 By organizing a Jewish State the 
 Jews would force the most powerful weapon of their 
 enemies out of their hands, and it was further main¬ 
 tained that with a national organization and a na¬ 
 tional center the Jews would be in a position to ex¬ 
 ercise pressure, backed by diplomatic prestige, to se¬ 
 cure protection for Jews living outside of the pro¬ 
 posed Jewish State. Herzl did not have in mind 
 at first that this State should necessarily be estab¬ 
 lished in Palestine, but when the Jewish Congress 
 called by him met in Basel in 1897, the Zionistic 
 sentiment was so strong and aroused such enthu¬ 
 siasm among the delegates that there was no ques¬ 
 tion of the strength of the movement centering in 
 the romantic attitude towards the old homeland. 
 When at a subsequent Congress a plan for the pos¬ 
 sible establishment of the Jewish State outside of 
 Palestine was broached, the opposition to it was so 
 1 See above, p. 9 et seq. 
 
Jewish Self-Consciousness 55 
 
 vigorous as almost to cause a break; and later the 
 break did come. 1 
 
 The movement, thus resting on a plane of self- 
 consciousness of recent origin and on a sentiment of 
 a time-honored character, spread to other countries 
 because prejudice towards Jews, though in a milder 
 form, showed itself also in such lands as France 
 and to some extent in England as well as in our 
 own country. Many Jews in these countries were 
 led to accept the Zionistic contention that the Jews 
 are a nation, because they too came to ascribe the 
 feeling towards them as Jews to this fact, though 
 these newly fledged Zionists contradicted their own 
 position by virtue of their complete political at¬ 
 tachment to the only country which they regarded 
 as their own. It ought to be said also that by far 
 the majority of those who in England and the 
 United States and so far as one can judge also in 
 France (where the movement appears to be weak¬ 
 est) have joined the ranks of political Zionism are 
 to be found among the emigrants from Russia and 
 Poland, who are naturally still swayed by memories 
 of their former condition, or are moved by sympa¬ 
 thy with their fellows in accepting the political plank 
 in the Zionistic platform which declares the Jews to 
 
 1 For details, see Gottheil, Zionism, pp. 120-142. 
 
56 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 be a separate nationality. I say the majority, for 
 I am aware of the fact that some of the leaders of 
 Zionism in the United States and in England do not 
 fall within this category. Barring these leaders — 
 who are a mere handful — it is safe to say that 
 of American and English born Jews or of such who, 
 though not natives, have lived long enough in these 
 countries to have become thoroughly assimilated to 
 prevailing political and social conditions, not five 
 per cent in either country are political Zionists. 
 The movement thus retains most decidedly its char¬ 
 acter as Russian in origin 1 and is strengthened by 
 the reaction on the Jews of Germany and Austria 
 through the anti-Semitism prevailing in these lands, 
 which despite their intellectual position fell until 
 the end of the war within the category of politically 
 backward countries. 
 
 Now the fallacy in the position of the Russian 
 
 1 It is only necessary to scan the list of delegates to the 
 so-called American Jewish Congress, which was held in 
 Philadelphia in December, 1918, and the International Zion¬ 
 ist Conference held in February, 1919, in London, to recog¬ 
 nize the justification for this statement. It is no reflection on 
 either conference that it was composed in large majority of 
 those who have in recent years come to the United States 
 and England, but the fact is significant that the Philadelphia 
 meeting could not be called a representative American Jewish 
 gathering, nor the one in London a representative English 
 Jewish gathering, 
 
Jewish Self-Consciousness 57 
 
 intellectuals in making their Jewish self-conscious¬ 
 ness the starting-point for a political Zionism, based 
 upon the supposition that the feelings towards Jews 
 was due to their being a separate people, is obvious; 
 and even more obvious is the false position in which 
 those Jews have placed themselves who became po¬ 
 litical Zionists in countries in which they had pre¬ 
 cisely the same rights and obligations as their fel¬ 
 low citizens, but who were led thereto by the influ¬ 
 ence, direct or indirect, of European anti-Semitism. 
 The prejudice existing against Jews in countries 
 like Germany and Austria and, though to a less ex¬ 
 tent, even in such as are organized on a purely 
 democratic basis, is essentially social in contrast to 
 that existing in former centuries when it was dis¬ 
 tinctly religious. Social prejudice is irritating; it 
 leads to self-consciousness, but it is not as serious 
 as we often picture it. It would be, if social preju¬ 
 dice against Jews were the only phenomenon of its 
 kind in this world. There is a strong social preju¬ 
 dice against Catholics in many countries, particu¬ 
 larly in such where the population is predominat¬ 
 ingly Protestant; and there are many other phases 
 of social prejudice in other countries that might be 
 mentioned, all of which goes to show that social 
 prejudice is so common as to justify one in regard- 
 
58 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 ing it as the “ touch of nature which makes the 
 whole world kin.” There are few, surprisingly few 
 people, Jews or non-Jews, who are free from social 
 prejudice. Most of us have an endless supply that 
 crops out on the most unexpected occasions. The 
 source of this prejudice is the perfectly human, 
 though not for that reason justifiable, feeling that 
 we like people who are like ourselves. We resent 
 the intrusion into the social circle of any one who is 
 or seems to be different from us. It is conceit that 
 in the last analysis underlies social prejudice, and it 
 is perhaps a sad reflection that as long as human na¬ 
 ture does not change, social prejudice in some form, 
 directed at those different from ourselves, will con¬ 
 tinue to exist. At the same time it is some com¬ 
 fort to realize that social prejudices have a tendency 
 to lose their sting as people of different habits and 
 different ways of looking at things, and, if you 
 please, different ways of conducting themselves, 
 are led by force of circumstances to intermingle. A 
 great war, such as the one we have just passed 
 through, has an exhilarating influence in making 
 us more open-minded, more democratic and less 
 clannish. The various elements of a nation are 
 forced into closer contact through the unifying ef¬ 
 fect of a war, with the inevitable result of our get- 
 
Jewish Self-Consciousness 59 
 
 ting rid of at least some of our prejudices, though 
 we need not worry lest we shed them all. Now it 
 is natural that this prejudice should be stronger in 
 countries like Russia and Roumania, where the Jews, 
 deprived of political rights, have always been looked 
 upon as a separate and different group. It is one 
 of the natural, though unfortunate, results of the 
 forced isolation from their fellow beings in which 
 Jews in these countries have for centuries lived, that 
 they have become so different in their ways from 
 the surrounding population. The greater the ex¬ 
 ternal differences separating the group from its 
 surroundings, the stronger the social prejudice en¬ 
 gendered on both sides — with this difference, to be 
 sure, that the stronger group shows its hostility 
 without any disguise and frequently in a most brutal 
 manner, whereas the weaker must hide its feelings 
 as best it can. 
 
 One may also observe a gradual diminution of 
 this kind of prejudice towards Jews in those lands 
 in which they have been admitted to full political 
 life. Even in Germany and Austria anti-Semitism 
 did not lead to such violent outbreaks as in Russia 
 and Roumania, but manifested itself chiefly in petty 
 annoyances, in a polemic of printers ink in the 
 form of the brochure, of which the Germans are so 
 
60 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 fond. The chief result of anti-Semitism was to 
 produce a deluge of literature, most of which had 
 an ephemeral vogue. It also had the effect of hin¬ 
 dering the Jews in their careers, particularly those 
 who had chosen the professions, but it was after 
 all mild as compared to the manifestations in lands 
 where the Jews were still excluded from the en¬ 
 joyment of civic rights. As we pass to democratic 
 countries, the social character of the prejudice be¬ 
 comes more clearly manifest, and assumes the still 
 more harmless though annoying form of exclusion 
 from summer hotels and from social clubs. 
 
 There is not the slightest warrant, however, for 
 assuming that the prejudice against Jews in any 
 country is due to their being a separate nationality. 
 The political Zionists cannot lay this flattering unc¬ 
 tion to their souls. They are guilty of self-decep¬ 
 tion in offering such an explanation. For we must 
 bear in mind that anti-Semitism, as one of the 
 many prejudices of which the world is full and 
 which has been a factor in making converts to Zion¬ 
 ism in different countries, has an old, though not 
 an honorable, lineage. It may be traced back to the 
 days of Pharaoh before the Jews were a nation, and 
 it crops out in Roman days after they had ceased to 
 be one. The main difference between the old and 
 
Jewish Self-Consciousness 61 
 
 the new variety lies in the reasons assigned for its 
 existence by those who feel it incumbent to explain 
 their attitude. The Bible tells us that the Egyp¬ 
 tians did not like the Hebrews because they were 
 shepherds. The Egyptians did not like to sit down 
 at the same table with these shepherds; they did not 
 belong to the same social set. The Hebrews prob¬ 
 ably reciprocated this feeling and looked upon the 
 Egyptians, though representatives of a higher cul¬ 
 ture, as degenerates. The modern anti-Semite 
 seeks to justify his social prejudice by a pseudo¬ 
 political philosophy regarding race purity, backed, 
 perhaps, by a recollection that he had met some 
 Jews whom he did not like, or who perhaps did not 
 like him. One is reminded of the remark attributed 
 to the late King Edward who, as Prince of Wales, 
 had invited his fashionable tailor to a public re¬ 
 ception. The Prince asked the tailor how he was 
 enjoying himself, to which the latter replied: “ It’s 
 
 a rather mixed company, Your Royal Highness.” 
 “ Well,” said the Prince, “ we cannot all be tailors.” 
 The Romans were quite undiscriminating in their 
 social prejudices, and included the Christians with 
 the Jews. They looked upon both as dangerous 
 innovators — religious Bolsheviki — because neither 
 Jews nor Christians would recognize the Roman 
 
62 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 gods. In fact, Roman writers speak of Jews and 
 Christians as atheists, because they did not believe 
 in Jupiter. 
 
 Now at first sight it might seem that this prejudice 
 was in reality religious, but as a matter of fact the 
 religious opposition to the Jews did not arise until 
 Christianity had become part and parcel of the 
 Roman Empire. Under the old conception of re¬ 
 ligion as above set forth and which made religion 
 an affair of the group, the one who was not of the 
 same religion was excluded in a social sense. 
 Otherwise, the attitude towards him was one of in¬ 
 difference. There was no religious intolerance un¬ 
 der the conditions prevailing in antiquity, because 
 it was regarded as perfectly natural that every 
 country should have its own gods, its own way of 
 worship and its own way of looking at life. When, 
 however, Christianity set up its ideal of a single 
 church of universal sway as a complement to the 
 political theory upon which the Roman Empire 
 rested, the corollary necessarily followed that those 
 who were outside of Christianity were heretics or 
 infidels. The feeling against those who despite all 
 efforts continued to remain outside of the official 
 recognized religion, naturally assumed a more posi¬ 
 tively hostile character. Christianity became em- 
 
Jewish Self-Consciousness 63 
 
 phatically intolerant of those who did not accept 
 the Christian faith. Christian states looked upon 
 them as stiff-necked, stubborn, hopelessly blind, 
 and they treated them accordingly. When persua¬ 
 sion failed persecution set in, and when persecution 
 seemed ineffective they burnt the Jews, as they exe¬ 
 cuted the heretics in their own ranks. But even 
 during the Middle Ages when the religious feelings 
 towards Jews as towards others who were regarded 
 as heretics ran so high, there was always an element 
 of social prejudice involved, and this element re¬ 
 mained after the more liberalizing movement of 
 modern times set in. 
 
 Now at bottom what does all this social prejudice 
 amount to except that we do not like people who are 
 different from us, who do not believe the same 
 things; do not speak the same language; do not 
 dress in the same way; who have different kinds of 
 names, different looks, differently-shaped heads or 
 noses, who have not our manners, who act differ¬ 
 ently? Social prejudice may also arise from fear 
 of competition, but whatever its cause or its nature, 
 it cannot be overcome by succumbing to it, and still 
 less by admitting its justification, as the Zionists 
 unwittingly do in proclaiming to the world that the 
 Jews are a separate substance in the body politic in 
 
6 \ Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 which they live. It is starting at the wrong end 
 to take as one’s guide for direction the outburst of 
 those whose anti-Semitism is merely an index of a 
 general reactionary frame of mind. It is not acci¬ 
 dental that Treitschke, the soul of the anti-Semitic 
 movement in Germany, was also the one who inter¬ 
 preted the nationalistic trend of Germany in the 
 narrowest spirit, the spirit which led to the pre¬ 
 dominance of Prussia and Prussian militarism and 
 eventually brought with it the sad downfall of what 
 was once a great nation — and what, we all hope, 
 may again become a nation worthy of the traditions 
 which it had established before entering upon a 
 wrong path. Anti-Semitism because it was reac¬ 
 tionary and placed the over-emphasis on nationality, 
 was one of the factors that led to the moral collapse 
 of Germany. In other countries, like Austria and 
 France, those who took up the cry of anti-Semitism 
 were likewise those who were found on the side of 
 the reactionaries, in league with the forces opposed 
 to the spirit of the age which ever since the days of 
 Napoleon had been moving towards political liberal¬ 
 ism. Surely in view of all this it is the height of ab¬ 
 surdity to take the existence of social, or, if you 
 choose, even racial prejudice — though it assumes 
 the proportions of a movement — as a point of de- 
 
Jewish Self-Consciousness 65 
 
 parture for the interpretation of the position of the 
 Jews in the world that involves, among other things, 
 as will presently be shown, a misreading of their 
 entire history since the time that they ceased to be 
 a nation in any real sense of the word. It is in¬ 
 deed one of the main charges to be brought against 
 the political Zionists that they entirely neglect this 
 historical factor — in many cases, I believe, through 
 ignorance— in setting up their claim that the Jews, 
 despite the evidence to the contrary, are still a na¬ 
 tion, and that the reconstitution of them as a na¬ 
 tional entity furnishes the only logical solution for 
 what is called the “ Jewish Question.” 
 
 The traits possessed by modern Jews, both the 
 good and the bad ones, so far as they present any 
 peculiarities or characteristics, are due to the factor 
 which the late James Darmesteter, one of the most 
 distinguished scholars of his day, called “ tradi¬ 
 tion,” the result of living for centuries in close 
 proximity and in imposed isolation from the outside 
 world. 1 Common experiences, under conditions 
 which in the case of the Jews in former centuries 
 meant common sufferings, produce a common out- 
 
 1 See his essay on “Race and Tradition” in Selected Es¬ 
 says of James Darmesteter, translated from the French by 
 Helen B. Jastrow (Boston, 1895), pp. 155-177. 
 
66 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 look on life. A certain clannishness, on the one 
 side, balanced by strength of will on the other, a 
 marked family attachment, flanked by shrewdness, 
 the fruit of suspicion of a hostile world. Tradi¬ 
 tion extends its influence even to peculiarities of 
 speech and to physical features, for people who live 
 together are apt to grow alike in appearance. 
 Much, therefore, which passes current for racial 
 or ethnic traits in the supposed separate character 
 of the Jews as a race or nation, is due to totally 
 different causes, which would produce the same re¬ 
 sults in the case of any other group obliged to live 
 under the same surroundings. In fact the racial 
 factor which is involved in the Zionistic contention 
 that the Jews are a nation, has led to considerable 
 confusion in the public mind, in conjunction with 
 the false view which was current a few decades ago 
 as to the advantages of purity of race. Scholars 
 now agree that a pure race is a fiction. All races 
 that have achieved anything are more or less mixed. 
 All great civilizations have been produced by com¬ 
 mingling of various racial elements in the popula¬ 
 tion. The Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks and 
 Romans are all mixed races, and so are the modem 
 European nations. The Jews form no exception, 
 and even in Palestine it is more than likely that they 
 
Jewish Self-Consciousness 67 
 
 mingled with others than Semites. It is only neces¬ 
 sary to regard the various types among Jews at the 
 present time to realize the extent to which this mix¬ 
 ture must have proceeded for centuries, despite the 
 unfavorable circumstances which restricted that mix¬ 
 ture to a point below the normal. In fact there 
 are no purely racial characteristics to distinguish 
 Jews from their surroundings in European coun¬ 
 tries or in this country, beyond those traits and fea¬ 
 tures which are due to the result of the factor which 
 I have called “ tradition.” 
 
 But the question, for all that, will be asked, are 
 not the Jews a nation by virtue of the fact that they 
 were one during the six centuries (about 1200 to 
 600 b. c.) of their national independence in Pales¬ 
 tine? Let us see. 
 
V 
 
 NATIONALITY VERSUS NATION 
 
 Lord Bryce in an illuminating essay on “ The Prin¬ 
 ciple of Nationality ” 1 emphasizes the distinction 
 between a nationality and a nation. The former is 
 a term expressive of common ethnic descent of a 
 people, though, as we have seen, the ethnos need not 
 necessarily be pure and rarely is. A nation, on the 
 other hand, represents a political entity which may 
 consist of a single nationality, but it is also possible, 
 
 1 Essays and Addresses in Wartime (London, 1918), Chap¬ 
 ter 7. 
 
 A friend, who is a keen student of current events, calls 
 my attention in this connection to the unfortunate lack of 
 a suitable term to express the modern idea of a nation as a 
 political unit, as against the older view of an ethnic unit. 
 After all, nation and nationality are really synonymous terms, 
 and it is only by an artificial process that we can differenti¬ 
 ate between the two as Lord Bryce has done. Inasmuch, 
 however, as no special term exists to express a political unit 
 independent of all ethnic factors, I am obliged to retain the 
 existing terminology, but will endeavor in every instance to 
 make it clear that I mean the political unit, which may be 
 composed of one nationality or of various nationalities or of 
 many nationalities. 
 
 68 
 
Nationality Versus Nation 69 
 
 and under modern conditions more common, for 
 several nationalities to be represented in the nation. 
 A single common nationality forms the starting- 
 point for the development of a State, but it is not 
 the goal and certainly does not represent the high¬ 
 est conception of political life. Great Britain forms 
 one nation, but it is composed of three nationalities, 
 English, Scotch and Welsh. In the case of Bel¬ 
 gium we have a national entity composed of two 
 nationalities, Flemish and Walloon. In Switzer¬ 
 land we have a state organized into a nation consist¬ 
 ing of three nationalities, Teutonic, Gallic and 
 Italic, combining to form a single nation, while our 
 own country is an example of the mixture and com¬ 
 bination of many nationalities from all parts of the 
 world to form one American nation. Germany, 
 France and Italy, on the other hand, are nations 
 formed by a predominating single nationality, 
 though even in these lands, as also in Poland and 
 Bohemia, there is a considerable admixture of other 
 nationalities, which suggests that it may be an 
 error in dealing with the problem of the reconsti¬ 
 tution of Poland and Bohemia, which have large 
 admixtures of other nationalities, particularly Ger¬ 
 man, to lay too great a stress on the factor of single 
 nationality. There ought to be no such thing within 
 
70 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 a modern state as the separation of a population 
 into a majority and a minority nationality, and cer¬ 
 tainly not a segregation of that minority as a sepa¬ 
 rate national unit. All the elements of which a 
 country is composed together form the nation in a 
 state organized on democratic principles. 
 
 We see in the difficulties that have already arisen 
 between the rival claims of the Jugo-Slavs and the 
 Italians for the domination of a certain section of 
 the Dalmatian Coast, how difficult it is in these days 
 of close intercourse between countries to settle prob¬ 
 lems of sovereignty on the basis of nationality alone. 
 The natural trend in a democratic age is towards 
 mixture of nationalities to form a nation. 
 
 Another danger involved in laying too strong an 
 emphasis on a single nationality as the basis of 
 national life is that it engenders chauvinism and false 
 patriotism. France in the past has suffered from 
 this evil because of the predominating single nation¬ 
 ality in that country; and modern Germany is a sig¬ 
 nificant and disastrous example of a state which col¬ 
 lapsed by its over-emphasis on the single nation¬ 
 ality which predominates in Germany. It was this 
 over-emphasis which lent itself to the designs of a 
 sinister Pan-Germanic policy and which, in turn, by 
 its chauvinistic implication led to the ambition to 
 
Nationality Versus Nation 71 
 
 force “ Deutschtum ” on the rest of the world. 
 Over-emphasis on nationality is largely responsi¬ 
 ble also, as we have seen, 1 for the outbreak of 
 the anti-Semitic movement. “ Deutschland fiber 
 Alles”!— the correct translation of which phrase 
 as placing everything German in the minds of Ger¬ 
 mans far above anything else is quite as objection¬ 
 able as the ordinary misinterpretation of it as though 
 it meant to imply the domination of Germany 
 over everything. “ Deutschland iiber Alles ” ought 
 to be nothing more than “ My Country Tis of 
 Thee,” but it involves by its insinuating phraseology 
 precisely that over-emphasis on nationality which 
 led to the position reached by Treitschke and his 
 followers, that the German nation must remain free 
 from the taint of anything that was not “ Deutsch,” 
 that the nation must remain a single nationality with 
 no foreign admixture. The Poles must, therefore, 
 be forcibly Germanized. Everything Gallic must 
 be driven out of Alsace-Lorraine, and since accord¬ 
 ing to this conception of “ Deutschtum,” the Jews 
 cannot belong to the German nationality, they must 
 be kept from participation in the political and public 
 life for fear that their influence might endanger the 
 purity of the German nationalistic ideal. Had that 
 1 Page 64. 
 
72 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 “ ideal” been less pure, it might have prevented 
 Germany from violating her treaty obligations to 
 Belgium and from such barbarisms as the sinking 
 of the Lusitania. 
 
 Now what is the application of all this to the 
 status of the Jews? Obviously that, in the first 
 place, the Jews may be a nationality without for that 
 reason being necessarily destined or impelled to 
 form a nation. They might, assuming that they 
 would care to be united as a single group or could 
 be so united, form a nationality as part of some na¬ 
 tion itself composed of other nationalities. Apply¬ 
 ing this to the situation in Palestine, the population 
 of which consists at present of various nationalities 
 and indeed, as we shall see, of representatives of a 
 surprisingly large number of such nationalities, the 
 obvious form that the reconstruction of Palestine 
 after the war should take on is the creation of a 
 Palestinian State based on all the nationalities 
 there congregated, and not a Jewish State which, if 
 it means anything at all, would place the emphasis 
 on a state formed of a single nationality. As for 
 the large bulk of Jews who will always live outside 
 of Palestine, for the sufficient reason that Palestine 
 will not hold more than one-tenth of the fifteen mil¬ 
 lion Jews in the world,— granting again that the 
 
Nationality Versus Nation 73 
 
 Jews would wish to regard themselves as a separate 
 nationality,— they should naturally form an ele¬ 
 ment in making up the national entity in each of the 
 countries throughout which they are scattered. The 
 Jews actually fulfill this function at present in 
 Western European lands, as in this country and 
 elsewhere where states are organized on the basis 
 of democracy, with the recognition of the equal 
 rights of citizenship for all the inhabitants. The 
 logic of the situation, therefore, suggests that the 
 remaining tenth of Jews who, for one reason or the 
 other, will desire to settle in Palestine, should like¬ 
 wise be one nationality among the many at present 
 represented in Palestine, forming with the others a 
 single political entity which would constitute the 
 Palestinian nation. 
 
 Moreover, the circumstance that the Jews once 
 formed a separate nation in a state organized, as all 
 states of antiquity were, on the basis of a single 
 nationality until the days of the Roman Empire, is 
 no reason why they should again do so, even if this 
 were possible or desirable. But are the Jews at 
 present even a nationality, on the ground that they 
 once were one 2000 years ago? In any political 
 sense of the word, certainly not, for apart from the 
 fact that a nationality without any specific country 
 
74 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 to which it belongs and without a common language 
 is an abnormality amounting almost to a contradic¬ 
 tion of terms, there is no unity among Jews except 
 that represented by the bond of a common religion 
 and of a common tradition, the common tradition 
 remaining even in the case of those who no longer 
 are Jews in a religious sense. 
 
 Beyond this common tradition the Western Jew 
 has scarcely anything that binds him to the Jew of 
 Eastern lands. He feels no nearer to him than he 
 does to other non-Jewish Easterners. Even among 
 the Jews of Western Europe it is well known that 
 the German Jew, for example, is not particularly 
 attracted to his Polish brethren and not infrequently 
 shows his repugnance towards them. The common 
 impression that Jews everywhere feel particularly 
 bound to one another is entirely erroneous . 1 
 
 To be sure — and this must be freely admitted — 
 the fact that the Jews are scattered throughout the 
 world would not be a decisive factor in determining 
 that they are not a nationality, for Germans, Ital- 
 
 1 See further on this subject Felix Adler’s address on 
 “ Nationalism and Zionism,” p. 6, in which he points out the 
 results that would follow' any attempt to bring together Jews 
 from various parts of the world, who are not congenial to 
 one another. 
 
75 
 
 Nationality Versus Nation 
 
 ians, Greeks and English are likewise found in many 
 parts of the world, but when, however, in addition 
 to this we also find that there is no particular coun¬ 
 try which, since the loss of Palestine, may be re¬ 
 garded as the homeland of the Jews, then their dis¬ 
 persion throughout the world does become a decid¬ 
 ing factor in answering the question whether the 
 Jews are at present a nationality in the negative. 
 The situation may, therefore, be summed up as fol¬ 
 lows : The Jews ceased to be a nation with the com¬ 
 plete eclipse of the last semblance of their national 
 independence ; 1 and they ceased to be a nation¬ 
 ality when the movement of emigration from Pales¬ 
 tine (which began as far back as the conquest of the 
 country by Nebuchadnezzar at the close of the sixth 
 century before this era) had, by the fifth century of 
 our era, left only a small and ever-decreasing minor¬ 
 ity in what was once the Jewish homeland. Egypt, 
 Rome, Morocco, Spain, the Crimea, Germany, Hol¬ 
 land, Poland, Russia became in turn the real centers 
 for the Jews, insofar as we can speak of any center 
 for a dispersed people. At the present time there 
 are at least five such centers, Russia, Poland, Ger¬ 
 many, England and the United States. Therefore, 
 
 1 In the year 135 a. d. See above, p. 32. 
 
76 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 even if Palestine should in the future become a cen¬ 
 ter, it would be only one of many centers, and not 
 
 the center. 
 
 But, it may be objected, is not the circumstance 
 that Judaism, though it marked theoretically the 
 cutting loose of religion from nationality and laid 
 the emphasis on religion as the affair of the indi¬ 
 vidual and not of the group, because it remained 
 confined to a single group and continued to present 
 a double aspect to such an extent that the hope for 
 a national restoration of the people became part and 
 parcel of the religion and remains to this day a 
 doctrine of orthodox Judaism — is not this circum¬ 
 stance a justification for regarding the Jews as a 
 nationality at least, if not as a nation a nation¬ 
 ality, if you choose, temporarily deprived of its 
 independence? Hardly. For, as pointed out, the 
 political restoration is entirely secondary in ortho¬ 
 dox Judaism to the religious aspect of such an event. 
 The latter has always held the larger place. The 
 political restoration in the orthodox doctrine is 
 purely incidental to the restoration of the Jews as 
 a religious body who will be permitted, when God 
 so wills, again to dwell in the old homeland, not for 
 the purpose of enjoying national independence but 
 in order to restore the Temple cult. The Temple, 
 
Nationality Versus Nation 
 
 77 
 
 not the State, forms the center of this belief in a 
 restoration, precisely as the Messianic promise is es¬ 
 sentially a religious doctrine and only to a minor 
 degree, like a tail to a kite, a political one. At no 
 time in the history of the Jews since their dispersion 
 throughout the world has there been any combina¬ 
 tion in the name of the religion for a political restor¬ 
 ation, though there have been movements of a 
 purely religious character led by those who laid 
 claim to being the Messiah and who as part of that 
 claim were to lead the people back to Palestine. 1 
 
 Now, in view of all this, it is manifestly mislead¬ 
 ing to hold up Zionism in its modern political aspect 
 as the manifestation of the reassertion of the na¬ 
 tionalistic feeling or spirit among the Jews. It is a 
 surface view to regard Zionism, as is done by most 
 of the political Zionists, as part of the general 
 movement of the rise of nationalities which is a dis¬ 
 tinguishing trait in the political history of the nine¬ 
 teenth century, which led to the resuscitation of the 
 Balkan nationalities, which prompted the union of 
 Italy and found another expression in the formation 
 of the united German Empire in 1871, and which is 
 
 1 See the account of such a movement in the eighteenth 
 century in Graetz, History of the Jews, Volume 5, pp. 272- 
 290. 
 
78 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 manifesting itself at the end of the war in the efforts 
 of Polish, Bohemian and Magyar nationalities for a 
 renewal of their national independence. These 
 movements furnish no analogy for Zionism. None 
 of the nationalities here involved had ever ceased to 
 be one. They had remained nationalities, despite 
 some emigration from their native lands. The 
 movement for political union and political inde¬ 
 pendence followed in the case of all the nationalities 
 above named upon the removal of pressure exerted 
 by a foreign domination in some form or the other. 
 That pressure had kept the nationalities in question 
 from asserting themselves. The Balkan nations al¬ 
 ways remained in the Balkan States, and fought for 
 their independence in lands which they had never 
 given up. German and Italian unity was accom¬ 
 plished as soon as it became feasible through change 
 of political circumstances, for groups artificially 
 separated from one another to coalesce. The union 
 represented the normal condition following the 
 breaking up into little groups; the separation an 
 abnormal state of affairs brought about through 
 conquest or through internal difficulties. It is only 
 necessary to study the conditions under which the 
 movement for the reassertion of the principle of na¬ 
 tionality in Europe during the nineteenth century 
 
Nationality Versus Nation 79 
 
 unfolded itself to recognize that Zionism is a move¬ 
 ment of a totally different character. 
 f Zionism did not arise through the removal of 
 pressure on a suppressed nationality, but starts as an 
 ameliorative measure because of that pressure. It 
 is a movement on the part of people who, because of 
 the hopeless outlook for improving their condition 
 in the country in which they dwelt, sought an oppor¬ 
 tunity to lead a new life under freer development 
 elsewhere. / Zionism does not arise in Palestine, but 
 outside of it. It moves towards Palestine under 
 the influence of a romantic sentiment, f It is not a 
 movement arousing the Jews in all parts of the 
 world, except insofar as Jews sympathize with their 
 suffering fellows. For similar reasons the analogy 
 between political Zionism and the efforts of the Irish 
 to secure their political independence falls to the 
 ground. The Irish never ceased to be a nationality 
 in the land in which they remained after coming 
 under British rule. Ireland remained distinctively 
 Irish, despite large emigrations through economic 
 pressure to the United States and Canada. But 
 Palestine ceased to be Jewish a few centuries after 
 the extinction of the national life of the Jews. It 
 is to-day predominatingly Arabic, and next to Mo¬ 
 hammedans, Christians from all parts of the world 
 
80 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 are more numerous in Palestine than Jews, indeed 
 about twice as numerous. Similarly the rise of the 
 Armenians and of the Arabs of Arabia during the 
 war to assert their right to self-determination are 
 movements among those living in their own lands. 
 
 It was natural that both in Russia, where the 
 Zionist movement arose, and in Germany and Aus¬ 
 tria, where it gained strength through the reaction 
 upon Jews of the social prejudice aroused against 
 them, the movement should attach itself to the 
 Zionistic sentiment. The political Zionists are the j 
 victims of a curious self-deception in interpreting 
 this sentiment as due to a nationalistic feeling. The 
 sentiment is due, in the case of the orthodox among 
 the Zionists — and they form, as we have seen, a 
 very small group — because of their belief in the 
 doctrine of the restoration as primarily a religious 
 hope; and in the case of those who have abandoned 
 orthodox Judaism the sentiment is to be explained as 
 the survival of the influence exerted by the doctrine 
 for so many centuries. It would be strange if it 
 were otherwise, for it is of the nature of sentiment 
 to survive long after the basis upon which it rests has 
 passed away. Tradition continues to exert its force 
 long after the belief upon which it rests has been 
 dispelled. Ceremonies and rites continue to be 
 
Nationality Versus Nation 81 
 
 practiced for centuries after the reasons underlying 
 them are no longer accepted or even understood. 
 And it is well from many points of view that this 
 should be the case, for without tradition and with¬ 
 out the influence of sentiment, life would be de¬ 
 prived of some of its finest aspirations and much of 
 that romantic coloring, which we need to counteract 
 the deadening influence of the everyday prosaic 
 and monotonous succession of the same experiences 
 — the endless cycle of everlasting repetition which 
 that amiable cynic, Koheleth, justly recognizes as 
 the source of ennui, of becoming tired of life itself. 1 
 
 We must differentiate therefore in an analysis 
 of Zionism between the conditions that called it 
 forth, and the direction that it took under the influ¬ 
 ence of the one root for a political Zionistic move¬ 
 ment that survived after the two others had lost 
 their raison d'etre . That sentiment is expressed by 
 the Psalmist of old 
 
 “ If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, 
 
 Let my right hand forget her cunning.” 
 
 There can be no question of the strength and genu¬ 
 ineness of that sentiment among many who have in 
 
 1 Ecclesiastes, Chap. i. See Jastrow, A Gentle Cynic, p. 
 
82 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 recent years given their adherence to the movement. 
 Indeed, ever since the rise of the Russian societies 
 of the “ Lovers of Zion,” when the trend towards 
 establishing colonies in Palestine as an escape for 
 Russian Jews set in, the romantic sentiment towards 
 Palestine has steadily gained in strength. Natu¬ 
 rally so, for it makes its appeal to every one who is 
 capable of feeling the attachment to a historic and 
 significant past, irrespective of his attitude towards 
 Judaism viewed as a religion. “ There is a sense,” 
 says George Eliot in one of her essays, 1 “ in which 
 the worthy child of a nation that has brought forth 
 illustrious prophets, high and unique among the 
 poets of the world, is bound by their visions.” The 
 Zionistic sentiment would therefore become a very 
 natural bond uniting those who feel that they have 
 something in common with fellow Jews. It is not 
 too much to say that one can only escape from this 
 feeling by a deliberate attempt to suppress it, but 
 neither the feeling nor the sentiment for Palestine 
 is due to any national consciousness. The test may 
 be made by any Jew who feels himself to be a thor¬ 
 ough American or a thorough Englishman or 
 Frenchman. He cannot feel any bond of nation- 
 
 1 “ The Modern Hep, Hep,” in the Impressions of Theo¬ 
 phrastus Such. 
 
Nationality Versus Nation 83 
 
 ality attaching him, let us say, to the Jews of Mo¬ 
 rocco or of Yemen, who will appear as strange to 
 him as they would to any other Westerner coming 
 in contact with groups that have remained thor¬ 
 oughly Oriental in character and with points of 
 view and customs that remind one of the remote 
 past rather than of the living present. Only those 
 who have no country or who do not feel strongly 
 attached to the one in which they happen to dwell, 
 can possibly have a genuine nationalistic stirring at 
 the thought of Palestine. The fallacy of political 
 Zionism thus rests on a whole series of false inter¬ 
 pretations and false analogies: a false interpreta¬ 
 tion of the original desire of Russian Jews to secure 
 what Pinsker called “ self-emancipation,” and which 
 was merely an endeavor to seek a new life with 
 opportunities for free development; a false inter¬ 
 pretation of the reaction of anti-Semitism on those 
 who no longer were religious Jews; a false interpre¬ 
 tation of Jewish self-consciousness; a false analogy 
 between the present status of the Jews and that of 
 genuine nationalities seeking political independence; 
 a false analogy between the factor of tradition and 
 that of race; a false analogy between the position 
 of Jews over 2000 years ago as a political unit and 
 their present status as a people bound by a common 
 
84 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 religion and by common tradition, with the tradi¬ 
 tion surviving among those who have ceased to feel 
 the religious bond. The romantic sentiment for 
 Palestine is natural and worthy, provided it does 
 not pass beyond the point proper to it — that is, 
 provided it remains a sentiment. When it trans¬ 
 gresses that bound it leads to Jewish self-conscious¬ 
 ness, which, while likewise an intelligible reaction 
 against social prejudice, is apt to mislead one into 
 the error of mistaking the reaction for the stirrings 
 of a dormant national feeling. Political Zionism! 
 also involves a false reading of the trend of Jewish 
 history during the past 2000 years. It is to this 
 aspect of the question that we must next turn, and , 
 it will be my effort to show that it is because when 
 the Jews ceased to be a nation they became some¬ 
 thing more, that they survived. 
 
VI 
 
 THE TREND OF JEWISH HISTORY 
 
 Attention has already been called to the impor¬ 
 tant fact that the prophets, who inaugurated the 
 movement which culminated in Judaism, appeared at 
 a time when the national life of the Jews in Pales¬ 
 tine was approaching its eclipse. The new concep¬ 
 tion of religion which they brought forward was 
 not an outcome of Jewish nationalism, but rather a 
 protest against it, in so far as the new conception 
 broke with the old one, which assumed that a deity 
 was particularly concerned with one group, and that 
 a people could not survive after rejection by their 
 national protector. The conception of a God of 
 universal sway which was the logical conclusion 
 from the position of the prophets, though not defi¬ 
 nitely reached till the post-exilic period, was incon¬ 
 sistent with the doctrine on which religion among 
 the ancient Hebrews, as in antiquity in general, 
 rested, whereby the jurisdiction of a deity was 
 geographically circumscribed by the territory which 
 
 8s 
 
86 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 a people controlled. Even more significant as an 
 indication of the profound break with a past entirely 
 wrapped up in the national life of a people, is the 
 circumstance that the contributions made by the 
 Jews to the world came, not when the national life 
 was at its height, but after it had ceased practically 
 to exist, even though the aspirations and the hope 
 for renewal of political independence continued. 
 
 We have seen that when the Jews were permitted 
 to return from the Babylonian exile at the end of 
 the sixth century and received a measure of local 
 autonomy under Persian control, they were no 
 longer a purely political unit, but essentially a reli¬ 
 gious group. The impelling factor that dominated 
 their lives after the Babylonian exile was the oppor¬ 
 tunity afforded by the return to restore the Temple 
 in Jerusalem with its service. Yahweh’s sanctuary 
 served as their rallying point. The study of His 
 Law as embodied in a series of codes, enclosed in a 
 framework of tradition, became the chief expression 
 of the people’s highest ambitions. The national life 
 and the national hope were tacked on to the religious 
 mission of which the people became more and more 
 conscious. Bound, however, as every people is by 
 the weight of tradition, the Jews could not entirely 
 divorce their religion from their nationality, and 
 
The Trend of Jewish History 87 
 
 only the choicest spirits among them recognized the 
 direction in which they were drifting as a group. 
 For all practical purposes the religious bond became 
 more and more the sole tie uniting the people, with 
 national consciousness tacked on as a survival of the 
 past. Even when this national feeling flares up 
 under the pressure of a political crisis, it is as much 
 due to a religious impulse as to a political one. The 
 Maccabean uprising in the year 166 b. c. is proof in 
 point. It was essentially a religious rebellion, an 
 effort to prevent the religion from being lost by the 
 attempt of the Greeks to crush it. The pollution of 
 the holy sanctuary through a policy of Helleniza- 
 tion which was to be extended to the cult aroused 
 Judas Maccabeus and his followers to a supreme 
 effort; and it was only because religious freedom 
 could not be obtained without also throwing off the 
 political yoke of the Greek governors that the up¬ 
 rising assumed a political character, a genuine upris¬ 
 ing to preserve the right of the people for self- 
 determination of its destinies, religious and political. 
 
 The process which changed the Jews from a mere 
 nation to something more than a nation reached its 
 climax when the final struggle with the Roman 
 power ensued and which ended in 135 a. d. in the 
 complete national eclipse. The Jews split into two 
 
88 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 groups, those who followed the teachings of the 
 Apostles and proceeded to gain the world for the 
 new religion; and those who remained a separate 
 group, becoming more and more isolated from the 
 world about them by assuming the role of a reli¬ 
 gious band, who combined with the aspirations of 
 the ancient Prophets an unyielding attachment to a 
 mass of rites and ceremonies that had grown up in 
 the course of many centuries and which had be¬ 
 come Traditional or, as it is sometimes called, Tal¬ 
 mudic Judaism. Had the Jews remained merely a 
 nation they would have disappeared upon the down¬ 
 fall of their distinct national life, precisely as so 
 many other nations of antiquity disappeared upon 
 the extinction of their national vitality, as the Egyp¬ 
 tians, Babylonians, Phoenicians, Moabites, Philis¬ 
 tines, the Persians, the Hittites and many others dis¬ 
 appeared. The Jews survived because they had 
 ceased to be a mere nation for several centuries 
 before the actual extinction of the feeble flame of 
 nationality; they survive to-day because of the 
 strong bond that was created among them through 
 their becoming a religious people. Declining to 
 make any concessions in their religion to include 
 others than Jews, Judaism presented the aspect of 
 a religion universal in its implications but restricted 
 
The Trend of Jewish History 89 
 
 in its scope, as against Christianity which opened its 
 doors to all peoples and threw down all nationalistic 
 barriers to the acceptance of the new faith. 
 
 In accord with the fact that Judaism is not an 
 outcome of Jewish nationalism but reaches its defi¬ 
 nite constitution after the national life had almost 
 run its course, we find the great contributions of 
 the Jews to the world all made, not as a result of 
 their national activity, but through the stimulus 
 exerted by their religion as it shaped itself after the 
 rise of the prophets. 1 The spirit prevailing in the 
 Pentateuch is that of the Prophets, not that of the 
 earlier nationalists. The traditions of the past and 
 the entire history of the people are viewed in the 
 historical books of the Old Testament likewise 
 from the standpoint of the religion of the Prophets. 
 They receive their final form as the expression of 
 post-exilic Judaism. The great master-pieces of 
 Old Testament literature — the Psalms, Job and 
 Ecclesiastes — all of them of post-exilic origin, are 
 the product of the new note struck by the Prophets, 
 which entirely altered the attitude of the people to¬ 
 wards life, and ultimately changed the status of the 
 Jews from a nation to that of “ the people of the 
 
 1 See further on this point, Jastrow, A Gentle Cynic, p. 56 
 et seq. 
 
90 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 book,” as Mohammed calls than — a people kept 
 together by a spiritual bond that far transcended in 
 significance and in its results the former political 
 union. If in the Psalms the national note is not 
 infrequently struck, it is as an accompaniment to 
 the religious melody which dominates. The Zion- 
 istic longing which like a plaint runs through the 
 ages, 
 
 “ If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,” 
 
 is primarily religious, not nationalistic. The Psalm¬ 
 ist thinks of Jerusalem as the Holy City — not of 
 the national center and the political capitol. 
 
 In a further illustration that the destiny of the 
 Jews — so far as that destiny can be read in their 
 history — was to unfold their real strength after the 
 national life had ebbed away, we may point to the 
 fact that as a nation in Palestine they made no im¬ 
 portant contribution to civilization, but only after 
 they ceased to be a nation and scattered outside of 
 Palestine. Politically, Palestine never played any 
 notable part either in antiquity or in later days. Its 
 geographical position as the bridge between Asia 
 and Africa, singled it out in early days as a buffer 
 state between the Empire of the Nile and the one 
 which arose in the Euphrates Valley. It also acted 
 
The Trend of Jewish History 91 
 
 often as a bulwark against the advance of hordes 
 from the North — and at times the bulwark was 
 stormed. Palestine has no river that can serve as 
 an avenue of commerce. It is cut up by mountain 
 ranges and valleys which split up the population into 
 separate groups. Even the Jews themselves could 
 not maintain their unity in such a land and soon 
 divided into a northern and a southern Kingdom. 
 
 As long as the Hebrews enjoyed national inde¬ 
 pendence they made no contributions in the field of 
 art, or in science, in methods of government or in 
 military strategy. When Solomon planned to build 
 the Temple he had to send to Phoenicia for architects 
 and builders. There did not rise in Palestine any 
 specific Jewish architecture. The Temple was pat¬ 
 terned after the religious structures of Phoenicia and 
 Babylonia. In literature, as has just been pointed 
 out, the Hebrews made no original contributions of 
 any moment until after the creation of the new type 
 of religion which, be it noted once more, made its 
 appearance as the national life was passing away. 
 But note the profound difference in the intellectual 
 activity of the Jews after their dispersion through¬ 
 out the Western world. In Alexandria, under the 
 stimulus of close contact with Greek thought and 
 Greek culture, the Jewish settlement, which can be 
 
92 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 traced back to a few centuries before our era, created 
 an original school of speculative thought. The 
 Jews of Egypt became world traders, and as they 
 passed into one European country after the other 
 they reacted on the impulse exerted by the new con¬ 
 ditions of life. Until restrictions to their natural 
 energies were put upon them, chiefly during the Mid¬ 
 dle Ages, they constituted an important element in 
 the population, contributing to the science, art and 
 commerce of their surroundings. While in Pales¬ 
 tine, leading a purely national existence, the Jews 
 produced no great philosophers, but after their dis¬ 
 persion throughout Western Europe a Maimonides 
 and Ibn Gebirol arose in Spain, a Spinoza in Hol¬ 
 land, and in our days Bergson in France. More 
 particularly since their political emancipation in 
 Western Europe which enabled them to enter fully 
 into the intellectual life about them, have the Jews 
 produced an amazingly large array of eminent men 
 — and also some eminent women — in all fields. 
 We do not learn of any great musicians among the 
 Hebrews of ancient Palestine, but in Germany they 
 produce a Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and a Meyer¬ 
 beer, in Russia Rubinstein, and in Austria Gold- 
 mark — to name only the most eminent among a 
 host of distinguished names. One scans the pages 
 
The Trend of Jewish History 
 
 93 
 
 of the Old Testament in vain for great political 
 leaders, with the exception of Moses of whom much 
 that is told is legendary, and of David of whom 
 much that is told is not edifying; but within an 
 astonishingly short time after their political eman¬ 
 cipation they produced a Beaconsfield in England, 
 Lasker and Bamberger in Germany, and a Sonnino 
 in Italy. In all European countries as well as in 
 this country we have a long list of eminent scien¬ 
 tists, historians, physicians, mathematicians, philolo¬ 
 gists, economists, who are Jews or of Jewish origin. 
 
 Outside of the literary inspiration afforded by 
 the religious movement, the Jews while in Palestine 
 produced no great literati, but in Germany we 
 have Heine, in England Zangwill, in Denmark 
 Brandes, and in Austria Schnitzler — all of the 
 highest quality. It is hardly necessary to do more 
 than refer to the large part played by Jews through¬ 
 out the world in commerce and finance, and this 
 prominence is all the more noteworthy because in 
 
 I Palestine they were an agricultural people and 
 
 > eschewed commerce. The dispersion changed their 
 mode of life as well as their outlook upon it, so that 
 their contributions towards commercial activity in 
 
 : 
 
 the Western world are a direct result of their ceas¬ 
 ing to be a nation, devoted to agricultural pursuits. 
 
94 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 But, say the Zionists, these contributions are not 
 credited to the Jewish people but to the lands in 
 which those who distinguish themselves happen to 
 dwell. In Palestine alone can men be produced who 
 will be recognized as being great in their capacity as 
 Jews. I confess that I have little patience with 
 such a chauvinistic sentiment which places race 
 pride above the actual achievement. What differ¬ 
 ence does it make whether the contributions of the 
 Jews are entered in a ledger as due to them or not, so 
 long as the world receives the benefit? Secondly, 
 it is admitted on all sides that the Jewish type of 
 mind, so far as it can express itself, is to be detected 
 in the songs of Heine, in the compositions of Meyer¬ 
 beer and in the novels of Zangwill, as it also shows 
 itself in the philosophy of Spinoza and in the criti¬ 
 cal acumen of Brandes. As for such fields as his¬ 
 tory, archaeology, philology and the natural sciences, 
 surely no one supposes that there is such a thing as 
 “ Jewish ” mathematics or “ Jewish ” chemistry. 
 It is always somewhat chauvinistic and a little vul¬ 
 gar to boast of a great man because he is a Jew, 
 but it is certainly still worse to regret that he was 
 not born in Palestine and that his contributions to 
 science or literature or music were not made as a 
 member of a Jewish State. The only index that 
 
The Trend of Jewish History 95 
 
 we have of judging of the destiny of a people is by 
 its past, and the history of the Jews during the past 
 2000 years points unmistakably to their function of 
 commingling with their fellow men and thus render¬ 
 ing their share of service towards the advancement 
 of culture and civilization. To those who read his¬ 
 tory aright it must be clear that it is the function of 
 the Jews to enter into the life about them, to give 
 also, as the recent war has shown, their full share of 
 patriotic service when their country demands it. 
 
 Now, instead of drawing the obvious lesson from 
 the trend of Jewish history, the political Zionists 
 propose to make the attempt to turn the hands of 
 time backward some 2000 years in order to set up 
 as an ideal the re-recognition of the Jews as a sepa¬ 
 rate political entity, and this at a time when a new 
 era of liberalism appears to be dawning which there 
 is reason to hope and believe will bring to the Jews 
 of Russia, Roumania and Poland relief from their 
 present pitiable condition through a recognition of 
 their full rights of citizenship in these lands. Such 
 a recognition would alone furnish a solution of the 
 so-called Jewish Question in accord with the spirit 
 of the age. Not only the Jews but the world ought 
 to be unwilling to accept any other solution. It 
 seems strange indeed to find the Zionists engaged 
 
96 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 in exerting every nerve to take a step backward, 
 while the whole world seems bent on moving for¬ 
 ward. It seems still stranger that Zionists should 
 grow enthusiastic over the prospect of establishing 
 a Jewish State in a land which can only hold one- 
 tenth of the entire number of Jews in the world. It 
 seems strangest of all that they should favor a state 
 which necessarily involves a recognition of some 
 bond between religion and nationality and sets up 
 again the older conception of a nation formed by a 
 single nationality, whereas the history of Palestine 
 itself during the past 2000 years points unmistak¬ 
 ably to its reorganization according to the modern 
 democratic view of the State, based on a national 
 unit formed by peoples irrespective of descent or 
 ethnic qualities. What is needed is a Palestinian 
 State in which all who agree to adhere to the prin¬ 
 ciples on which the country of their birth or adop¬ 
 tion is to be organized shall have an equal share. 
 The fallacy of political Zionism is strikingly re¬ 
 vealed by a consideration of Palestine of To-day, to 
 which we next turn. 
 
VII 
 
 PALESTINE OF TO-DAY 
 
 The changes that have come over Palestine itself 
 since it ceased to be a national center for the Jewish 
 people constitute another potent objection to the 
 aim of the political Zionist to reconstitute that his¬ 
 toric corner of the globe as a Jewish State. 
 
 From having once been the “ Promised Land ” 
 for one nationality, Palestine has become a land of 
 promise for many peoples, a great gathering place 
 of nationalities from all parts of the world. It 
 contains at present a mixed population out of all 
 proportion to its limited territory of some 10,000 
 square miles. 1 It is no exaggeration to say that 
 the changes in Palestine during the past two millen¬ 
 niums have been as decisive in their character as 
 those that have taken place in the Western Continent 
 since its discovery some 400 years ago. A totally 
 different Palestine has arisen in the place of the old 
 
 1 It is somewhat larger than the State of Vermont and 
 somewhat smaller than the State of Maryland. It would 
 stretch on the Hudson from New York to Albany, and east¬ 
 wards to an extent varying from twenty to forty miles, 
 
 9 7 
 
98 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 one which the Jews through force of circumstances 
 were obliged to abandon. As a land now filled with 
 sacred associations for the followers of three great 
 religions, it cannot be said to belong to any particu¬ 
 lar group, as is maintained by the political Zionists. 
 It has become as sacred to Christians and Moham¬ 
 medans as to Jews. Palestine is the birth-place of 
 Christianity as well as of Judaism, and that single 
 momentous fact compels the historian to regard it in 
 a different light from what it was before Chris¬ 
 tianity. While not the birth-place of Islam, Mo¬ 
 hammed yet drew his inspiration from the religions 
 that arose in Palestine. The only miracle recorded 
 in Mohammed’s life was the mysterious night ride 
 to Jerusalem to confirm his mission as the Messen¬ 
 ger of Allah. Mohammed claimed to be a suc¬ 
 cessor of a line of Prophets stretching from Abra¬ 
 ham to Jesus. He called himself the “ seal ” of 
 these messengers of God. He fixed upon Jerusalem 
 as the spiritual center of the religion he had founded. 
 The prayers of the faithful were to be directed to¬ 
 wards Jerusalem, as the Jews and the early Chris¬ 
 tians orientated themselves towards that center in 
 their religious worship. It was only when both 
 Jews and Christians declined the invitation of Mo¬ 
 hammed to recognize him as a Prophet that he 
 
Palestine of To-Day 
 
 99 
 
 changed the kibleh — that is, the direction of 
 prayer—from Jerusalem to his own birth-place, 
 Mecca. Despite this change, Jerusalem became as 
 sacred to Mohammedans as Mecca, aye, in some re¬ 
 spects more so, for there is nothing in Mecca to 
 remind the Mohammedan pilgrim of the Prophet, 
 except the fact that he was born there. The pil¬ 
 grimage to Mecca was not instituted by Mohammed 
 but was an old Arab institution which Mohammed, 
 bound by the traditions of the past, observed and 
 which on that account became an obligation upon all 
 his followers. In Jerusalem, in the cave under the 
 sacred rock around which the chief mosque is built 
 the mark of Mohammed’s head is shown. Day and 
 night Mohammedans may be found in this cave seek¬ 
 ing by prayer to Allah to obtain the merit that 
 attaches to the sanctity of this spot. The rock rep¬ 
 resents the site of Solomon’s Temple, but its sacred 
 character antedates even the coming of the Hebrews 
 by an indefinite number of centuries. The rock 
 itself is a survival of primitive stone worship, 
 and Solomon chose this site for his Temple because 
 the Jebusites, from whom David conquered Jeru¬ 
 salem (c. 1000 b. c.), had brought their sacrifices 
 to this rock, which was an ancient altar . 1 
 
 1 See Barton, Archeology of the Bible, p. 168. 
 
ioo Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 The sanctity of Jerusalem thus reverts to a 
 period far beyond the rise of the oldest of the 
 three religions whose associations are entwined 
 around the place. It carries us back to the primi¬ 
 tive Semites for whom Jerusalem was a stronghold 
 centuries before the federation of the Hebrew semi- 
 nomadic tribes was organized. Outside of Jeru¬ 
 salem, the whole of Palestine is as sacred for Chris¬ 
 tians as it is for Jews. Bethlehem, Nazareth, Ti¬ 
 berias and the Jordan are associated with events or 
 legends in the life of the founder, and Christians, 
 Mohammedans and Jews alike revere the sites 
 which are associated with such figures of the Old 
 Testament as Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Rachael, 
 David, Solomon, Absalom, Job and the Prophets. 
 Mohammedans and Christians have fought for pos¬ 
 session of the land. One of the first goals of the 
 Arabic forces gathered by the successors of Mo¬ 
 hammed was the conquest of Palestine, which took 
 place in 636 a. d. only a few years after the death of 
 the Prophet at Medina (632 b. c.). For two centu¬ 
 ries, from the tenth to the twelfth, armies crusaded 
 from all parts of Europe to wrest Palestine from 
 the hands of the Mohammedans. No fiercer wars, 
 intensified as they were by a religious background, 
 were ever waged than those for the possession of 
 
Palestine of To-Day 
 
 IOI 
 
 Jerusalem during these two centuries. The struggle 
 ended in the triumph of the Crescent over the Cross, 
 but the soldiers of the Cross kept in their hearts the 
 longing of the ancient Zionist, 
 
 “ If I forget thee, O Jerusalem.” 
 
 The Mohammedan conquerors in time made con¬ 
 cessions to their vanquished rivals, and permitted 
 them to retain possession of the sites most sacred to 
 Christianity, more particularly the traditional birth¬ 
 place and the tomb of the founder. Around these 
 places as well as in other spots associated with the 
 life of Jesus, churches and chapels have been erected 
 which constitute the most sacred monuments of 
 Christianity. The visitor at Jerusalem is pro¬ 
 foundly impressed by this pathetic three-fold at¬ 
 tachment to Jerusalem on the part of the followers of 
 three religions who, despite the bitterness in their 
 hearts towards one another, meet in Jerusalem, 
 drawn thither because of recollections that they have 
 in common. If one would visualize what Jerusa¬ 
 lem means to Jews, Christians and Mohammedans, 
 one must pass from the Mosque around the rock 
 to the church of the Holy Sepulchre, and thence to 
 the wall remaining from the Temple in the days of 
 Herod at which pious Jews wail daily for the loss 
 
102 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 of Jerusalem. The scenes that one witnesses at 
 these three spots epitomize the history of Palestine 
 as a sacred land. They illustrate what the country 
 means to all who feel the touch of the past, whose 
 faith dominates their lives and with whom the senti¬ 
 ment of Zion remains a living force. 
 
 The same impulse which has at all times acted as 
 a magnet in drawing pious Jews to Palestine, 1 there 
 to spend their lives in study and devotion and to be 
 buried on holy soil, has also drawn Christians from 
 all parts of the world who wish to live near the 
 scenes of the Gospel stories and who feel that only 
 in the land of the Christ can they lead rounded- 
 out Christian lives. Bethlehem and Nazareth are 
 largely Christian settlements, Nazareth almost en¬ 
 tirely so. In Jerusalem the Eastern and Western 
 branches of the Church are represented by large 
 establishments. The hold that Eastern Christianity 
 has upon Jerusalem is particularly striking. The 
 Russian or Greek church is if anything more largely 
 represented than the Roman Catholic or Protestant, 
 and thousands of Russians, chiefly of the peasant 
 class, come yearly to Jerusalem, many of them 
 
 1 See Zangwill’s charming and pathetic story, “To Die in 
 Jerusalem,” in his volume They that Walk in Darkness, as an 
 illustration of the strength of this magnet. 
 
Palestine of To-Day 
 
 103 
 
 wandering on foot for long stretches to assure their 
 eternal salvation by immersion in the sacred waters 
 of the Jordan. Christian pilgrims from France, 
 Spain, Italy and other countries are constantly pass¬ 
 ing up and down through the land. 
 
 There is scarcely a European country that is not 
 represented in the permanent Christian population 
 of Palestine. Among the circa 150,000 Christians, 
 we find Russians, English, French, Germans, Span¬ 
 iards, Portuguese, Greeks, Italians, Dutch, Swedes, 
 Swiss, Poles, Bohemians, Abyssinians, and so on. 
 There is an American colony in Jerusalem which 
 was founded by a Chicago woman some sixty years 
 ago, and to-day the children of the third generation 
 feel strongly the attachment to the soil. Similarly, 
 in the Mohammedan population of Palestine, about 
 500,000, all sections of the Islamic world, Egypt, 
 Arabia, Asia Minor, Persia, Turkey, are repre¬ 
 sented. The predominating Arabic speaking popu¬ 
 lation are the direct descendants of those who have 
 been in possession of the soil for many, many cen¬ 
 turies. If, therefore, there is such a thing as an 
 historical claim to the land, the claim of the Moham¬ 
 medan natives of Palestine rests on as substantial 
 a basis as that of either Jews or Christians, as Pro¬ 
 fessor George Adam Smith, the most distinguished 
 
104 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 authority on Palestine past and present, points out. 1 
 The Jewish population, while steadily increasing 
 through the growth of the Zionist colonies in Pales¬ 
 tine and other new-comers (chiefly to Jerusalem), 
 is the smallest of all, estimated at about 80,000. 
 
 It is evident that this position which Palestine 
 has acquired must form the point of departure for 
 the reorganization of the country, now that the 
 pressure of Turkish rule, or rather misrule, has been 
 removed. If the trend of the history of the Jews 
 during the past two millenniums points to their work¬ 
 ing out their destinies in the lands through which 
 they are scattered, the changes which have come 
 over Palestine during this same period point with 
 equal clearness to the organization of a State based 
 on a mixture of nationalities and certainly not on 
 a single nationality as the controlling element. 
 Palestine has become what some of the ancient 
 Plebrew Prophets envisaged 
 
 “ And peoples shall flow unto it, 
 
 And many nations shall go and say: 
 
 Come, let us go up to the mountain of Yahweh. ,, 2 
 
 The dream has not been fulfilled in the manner that 
 the Prophet had in mind, but yet in a spiritual and 
 
 1 Syria and the Holy Land, p. 56. 
 
 2 Micah 4, 2, and Isaiah 2, 2. 
 
Palestine of To-Day 105 
 
 in its highest sense, it is true that, as he goes on to 
 say, 
 
 “ Out of Zion shall go forth the law, 
 
 And the word of Yahweh from Jerusalem,” 
 
 for Western and Eastern civilizations alike have re¬ 
 ceived their inspiration from the teachings of the 
 Prophets and of Jesus and the Apostles. Palestine 
 has become an intra-national possession. To set 
 up in the face of so momentous a fact the claim of 
 a single group, because they held the land for some 
 centuries by virtue of forcible conquest some 3000 
 years ago, is not only to ignore the equally impor¬ 
 tant fact that this group lost it again through re¬ 
 conquest by others, but that the associations which 
 have since grown up around the country are of such 
 a character as to set aside any claims based on a sup¬ 
 posed poetical or historical justice. Such a claim 
 cannot be defined otherwise than as a misdirected 
 sentimental appeal, which can only serve to illustrate 
 the mischief that must result when an attempt is 
 made to convert a fine sentiment into a political 
 movement. Fanaticism will generally be found to 
 be the outcome of a misdirected sentimental appeal, 
 ^ and we may expect to see the flames of fanaticism 
 burst forth from all sides, if the attempt is made now 
 
io6 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 or at any future time to make Palestine officially a 
 Jewish State. 
 
 Those who have visited the country will testify to 
 the strong feelings of mutual animosity among the 
 three classes of inhabitants, which the Turkish gov¬ 
 ernment did little or nothing to moderate. It is 
 idle to close our eyes to this fact, so obvious to the 
 traveller in Palestine, and yet in the discussions of 
 Zionism this aspect of the situation is rarely touched 
 upon. I wish to emphasize it here as one of the 
 most serious objections to the practical execution 
 of the aims of the political Zionists, and that the ex¬ 
 istence of this animosity, extending even to bitter 
 rivalry among Christian sects, suggests a totally 
 different solution for the reorganization of Palestine 
 under the new conditions created by its having been 
 wrested out of the hands of the Turks. The world 
 is weary of strife and bitter rivalries and hostilities 
 that eat at the vitals of our civilization. What will 
 have been gained by the victory over Germany, if in 
 the settlement of the problems that confront the 
 world, we introduce a factor that will lead to fur¬ 
 ther strife, that will accentuate hostilities instead 
 of soothing them, that will keep the world in an 
 insecure state instead of advancing at least some 
 degrees in the direction of the establishment of bet- 
 
Palestine of To-Day 107 
 
 ter feelings among mankind, on which basis alone 
 an enduring peace can be hoped for ? 
 
 Voices in protest have already been raised by 
 Mohammedans and Christians in Palestine and 
 Syria against the aims of the Zionists to usurp, as 
 they regard it, the control of Palestine. According 
 to reliable reports a delegation of Mohammedans 
 from Palestine came to England about a year ago to 
 lay their protest before the English government. 
 The Syrian National Society has published a pam¬ 
 phlet, “ Syria for the Syrians,” a section of which 
 is devoted to the Zionist danger. 1 These protests 
 may be regarded as symptoms of the genuine storm 
 that may be expected if the possibility of carrying 
 out the political aims of the Zionists should come 
 within the range of realization. 
 
 I wish, however, to put the objection to political 
 Zionism on higher grounds than mere expediency, 
 or even on higher grounds than the fear of the re¬ 
 sults that will follow upon a step that would serve 
 to check the growth of more amicable relations 
 among the adherents of different faiths in the Holy 
 Land. The aim to recognize Palestine as a Jewish 
 
 1 H. L. Katibah, Syria for the Syrians (Syrian National 
 Bulletin, Volume I, No. 9, February 28, 1919). 
 
 See also the excellent article of Herbert Adams Gibbons in 
 the Century Magazine for January, 1919. 
 
108 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 State runs counter to the trend of Palestinian history, 
 which points distinctly to its reorganization on the 
 modern democratic basis of government which re¬ 
 places the older idea of a nation based on a single 
 nationality, by a larger conception of a national unit 
 formed of various nationalities. The presence of 
 so many nationalities in Palestine of to-day is the all- 
 sufficient argument in favor of creating a Palestin¬ 
 ian State — not a Jewish State any more than a 
 Mohammedan or a Christian State, or an Anglo- 
 Saxon or a Gallic or Teutonic State. A Jewish 
 State, no matter on how broad a basis it may be con¬ 
 stituted, necessarily involves the older conception of 
 a nation based on a single nationality. Where con¬ 
 ditions exist which suggest such a political form, 
 a single nationality forms the natural point of de¬ 
 parture, though, as we have seen, even there, it en¬ 
 counters difficulties in the present age of close inter¬ 
 communication and constant shiftings of population, 
 which are forcing such States to a recognition of 
 the larger principle of a national unit, not limited 
 to a single nationality. But where as in Palestine 
 the conditions definitely preclude a State of a single 
 nationality, except by the forcible submission of 
 other nationalities already represented, it is an injus¬ 
 tice to give the preference to any single group even if 
 
io9 
 
 Palestine of To-Day 
 
 such a group should constitute the majority. Now 
 since a Jewish State is devoid of any meaning un¬ 
 less it means the acceptance of the idea for Palestine 
 of the domination by a single nationality, it follows 
 that even if the rest of the population be accorded 
 equal political rights, a Jewish State without such 
 domination would mean nothing at all, would be 
 an empty sound, a formal acknowledgment of a 
 purely academic character to satisfy a clannish sense 
 of pride. 
 
 Any one can become a Palestinian, as any person 
 can become an American or an Englishman, by ob¬ 
 taining nationalization papers and swearing alle¬ 
 giance to the principles of the country, but no one can 
 become a Jew except by a profession or an adherence 
 to a certain faith. Even the most ardent political 
 Zionists will not deny this contention, and since the 
 Zionists also claim that Zionism is not a religious 
 movement, they surely do not contemplate making 
 converts to Judaism in the proposed Jewish State. 
 Plow, then, is it possible to organize a State in this 
 democratic age, which by its name sets up a barrier 
 to citizenship that can only be overcome by a re¬ 
 ligious test? A Jewish State, by a logic which we 
 cannot escape, necessarily limits citizenship in the 
 full sense to a definitely prescribed group, precisely 
 
11o Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 as in ancient Greece only a Greek by birth or by 
 affiliation through marriage with a Greek could be 
 a Greek citizen, and as in the mediaeval Christian 
 States of Europe only one who professed Chris¬ 
 tianity could have all the rights of citizenship. 
 Even marriage with a Jewess does not make one a 
 Jew, any more than marriage with a Jew makes 
 the woman a Jewess. A Jewish State under the 
 most liberal possible government sets up this bar¬ 
 rier, whether we express it in terms of religion or 
 of nationality. As a writer has pithily put it, “ if 
 it be Jewish, it cannot be a State; if it be a State! 
 it cannot be Jewish.” 1 
 
 Reference is sometimes made in the discussion of 
 this dilemma to the liberal spirit of the Priestly 
 Code, as a proof that a Jewish State is historically 
 bound to be organized on a broad policy. The Code 
 says explicitly that there shall be “ one law for the 
 stranger and the native.” 2 That principle involves 
 a notable advance over conditions prevailing gen¬ 
 erally in antiquity, and we should respect this broad 
 outlook of the Code, 3 as due to the new religious 
 
 1 Israel Abrahams, “Palestine and Jewish Nationality,” in 
 the Hibbert Journal for April, 1918, p. 458. 
 
 -Exodus 12, 49; also Numbers 9, 14 in a slightly variant 
 wording. 
 
 3 The two passages form part of the Priestly Code which 
 was promulgated in the post-exilic period. 
 
Ill 
 
 Palestine of To-Day 
 
 spirit introduced by the Prophets. But note that the 
 Code still divides the citizens into two classes, the 
 native and the ger, as the technical term reads, and 
 which means originally a “ sojourner.” Once a ger 
 always a ger is still the principle underlying the 
 Code. The ger can only become a native, even ac¬ 
 cording to the Priestly Code, by accepting the re¬ 
 ligious faith of the native. The Code merely says 
 — though this is a great deal — that the ger shall 
 be on a par with the native before the law; but it 
 does not state that he is to be a fullfledged citizen 
 with all the rights and privileges of a native. It 
 could not say that without upsetting the foundation 
 on which a Jewish theocratic commonwealth, as set 
 forth in the Biblical codes, rests. The natives must 
 be Tews, and neither the children nor the grandchil¬ 
 dren of the ger nor the great-grandchildren can be¬ 
 come natives, any more than he can become a native. 
 There is a limit beyond which even so liberal a Code 
 as the Priestly compilation could not go without 
 breaking the bond between religion, nationality and 
 citizenship which is implied throughout. 
 
 Zionists will, therefore, find it to be of little avail 
 to give the assurance that the rights and privileges 
 of the Mohammedan and Christian inhabitants of 
 Palestine would not be interfered with. The pro- 
 
1 12 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 test is against the principle involved in placing the 
 control of a country in the hands of any particular 
 group. The recent war was waged to establish the 
 principle that a country belongs to all of the popula¬ 
 tion who live in it. The Jews who have suffered 
 most from the undemocratic regulation of govern¬ 
 ments in former ages, and who still suffer in those 
 countries in which democracy has not yet secured 
 a definite foothold, would cut a sorry figure indeed 
 at the present juncture in the world’s affairs if they, 
 the first champions of religious liberty, should ap¬ 
 pear in advocacy of a plan which is based upon the 
 old principle of organizing a State on the basis of the 
 accidental factor of birth or creed, or what is even 
 worse on both factors. Instead of welding the 
 various ethnic elements of Palestine into a political 
 whole, under the conditions which would be created 
 by a Jewish State, the policy would necessarily result 
 in keeping the various elements separate from one 
 another; and that is contrary to the democratic 
 spirit of popular government. 
 
 It is not to the point to argue, in reply to this, as 
 political Zionists do, that the Jewish State actually 
 proposes to extend the full rights of citizenship to 
 all, irrespective of creed, race, descent or even sex. 
 They point with satisfaction to the first plank in the 
 
Palestine of To-Day 
 
 ii 3 
 
 Zionistic platform adopted by the American Zion¬ 
 ists in June 1918, which emphasizes this broad 
 definition of citizenship. No one questions, of 
 course, the good faith of the political Zionists m 
 thus placing themselves on a sound democratic basis, 
 but the point is that they contradict the principle of 
 their platform the moment they combine the ad¬ 
 jective “ Jewish ” with “State.” The adjective 
 and noun do not agree; they are mutually exclusive. 
 The Jewish State can protect the rights of all citi¬ 
 zens irrespective of their nationality. It can toler¬ 
 ate them. It can give them large privileges, but 
 how can such a State possibly give them full rights 
 of citizenship, when the very name of the State im¬ 
 plies a government organized on the basis of a single 
 nationality and controlled by that nationality. Or, 
 if you choose, you can put it in this way how can 
 it a State remain Jewish if it abandons the basis upon 
 Which alone it has any meaning? Will not the re- 
 suiting condition be precisely that of which many 
 Jews complain even in countries in which they en¬ 
 joy full political rights, that they are merely pro¬ 
 tected and tolerated and given certain privileges 
 without being regarded as forming an integral part 
 of the country? Will not those in Palestine who 
 do not belong to the Jewish nationality find them- 
 
114 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 selves precisely in this position of not forming an 
 integral part of the country? If the principle is 
 wrong in one case, it is equally wrong in the other. 
 I do not see any escape from such a conclusion. 
 The principle is wrong, for a modern democratic 
 State cannot recognize any distinctions among its 
 citizens because of varying religious proclivities or 
 because of varying national origins, since the former 
 is a purely personal factor and the latter an acci¬ 
 dental one. Such distinctions will lead to internal 
 dissensions and, what is more, will result in an in¬ 
 tolerable segregation of groups within a population. 
 
 And lastly in this connection, even though the 
 political Zionists claim that their movement is not 
 religious — and it may be granted that it is not — 
 to the outside world the term Jewish carries with 
 it a religious connotation. You cannot escape from 
 that. The man of the street is impatient of subtle 
 distinctions. To him the term Jewish means one 
 who by birth or by conviction belongs to a certain 
 faith. All Jews are alike to him, and since, as a 
 matter of fact, the majority of those Jews who are 
 in Palestine or who will go there will also be Jews 
 by religion and not merely in the nationalistic sense 
 in which political Zionists wish to use the term, a 
 Jewish State would necessarily imply some kind of 
 
Palestine of To-Day 115 
 
 a bond between religion and nationality, precisely 
 as the liberal Priestly Code above quoted still as¬ 
 sumes this point — in fact takes it for granted as a 
 matter of course. Will the Jews who have settled 
 in Palestine and those who will go there as members 
 of the religious body, strongly attached to the an¬ 
 cestral faith, be satisfied to have an absolute separa¬ 
 tion from church and state, so that in the Jewish 
 State to be organized there will be no laws touching 
 upon religion in any way? Even if the State should 
 be organized theoretically on the basis of a divorce 
 between religion and the State, would not Judaism 
 in a Jewish State by sheer necessity continue to pre¬ 
 sent precisely that double aspect of a religion and a 
 nationality which, we have seen, it carried with it 
 through the ages until in modern times Reformed 
 Tudaism broke the thread? The Jewish State will, 
 therefore, mean, even from the standpoint of re¬ 
 ligion, a step backward, a reversion to the condition 
 which interpreted religion in terms of the group. 
 It will involve a step back to a condition which has 
 been found to be incompatible with the spirit of the 
 aee. The State if formed will be handicapped at 
 the outset by this close and inevitable affiliation with 
 religion. Even if the State should not suffer from 
 the combination, the religion will be checked in its 
 
116 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 natural growth and, what is more, the Jews, par¬ 
 ticularly the nine-tenths who will permanently re¬ 
 main outside of Palestine, will suffer by being placed 
 in an anomalous position. The Jewish Question 
 instead of being solved, as the Zionists hope through 
 their plan, will receive a new complication. It is to 
 that aspect of the fallacy of political Zionism that 
 in the concluding section I now turn. 
 
VIII 
 
 POLITICAL ZIONISM AND THE JEWISH QUESTION 
 
 The political Zionists appear to have been impressed 
 by the opposition which the proposition to convert 
 Palestine into a Jewish State has aroused among 
 native Mohammedans and Christians as well as 
 among the Jews and Christians of this country, 
 England and France, 1 and perhaps also by the logic 
 
 i In England a “League of British Jews” led by such 
 prominent Englishmen as Claude G. Montefiore, Israel Abra¬ 
 hams, and Lord Swaythling has been formed; in the United 
 States a statement setting forth objections to the Jewish 
 State has been prepared (see the Appendix), and with the 
 signatures of 300 prominent American Jews attached, repre¬ 
 senting all parts of the United States and men in all pro¬ 
 fessions and in the various walks of life, has been forwarded 
 to the Peace Conference through President Wilson. In 
 France a non-sectarian Society composed of Catholics, Prot¬ 
 estants and Jews has been organized known as Friends of 
 the Holy Land,” which likewise has taken a definite stand 
 against the aim of the political Zionists. This organization 
 has republished in English and French the article of Herbert 
 Adams Gibbons which appeared in the January number of the 
 Century Magazine and which set forth in clear and vigorous 
 language, from the standpoint of a student of the East, the 
 reasons why political Zionism is unacceptable. 
 
 11 7 
 
118 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 of the objections urged by such eminent authorities 
 as Sir George Adam Smith 1 and others whose gen¬ 
 eral sympathy with that part of the Zionistic pro¬ 
 gram which seeks to find a safe homeland for Jew¬ 
 ish colonists in Palestine, adds weight to their views. 
 A distinct tendency towards the modification of the 
 political program of the Zionists has set in. It is 
 now declared by those qualified to speak for the 
 Zionists that there is no intention at present of ask¬ 
 ing that Palestine be handed over to the Jews, but 
 only that assurances be given of non-interference 
 with the movement of further immigration of Jews 
 to that country, and that the status of the Jewish 
 colonists be recognized in a legal form so as to se¬ 
 cure their complete protection and, I suppose, also, 
 their local autonomy — to which, of course, there 
 is no objection. The President of the American 
 Federation of Zionists has gone even further and 
 is quoted as declaring that a Jewish State for the 
 present must remain a dream, to be realized only 
 when the Jews shall form the majority in Pales¬ 
 tine. This position seems to have been generally 
 
 1 In his monograph above referred to, Syria and the Holy 
 Land, pp. 52-57 (London, 1918). See also an able article 
 on Zionism by Prof. Kemper Fullerton of Oberlin College, 
 in the Harvard Theological Review, Vol. X (1917), pp. 313- 
 335 - 
 
Political Zionism and the Jewish Question 119 
 
 accepted, and the further assurance is given that po¬ 
 litical Zionism aims to take over the affairs of the 
 country in a perfectly natural way under the work¬ 
 ings of the law of the majority. One hears little 
 at present of the point that Dr. Herzl pressed so 
 emphatically in his “ Jewish State,” that one of the 
 aims of the Jewish State was to act as a powerful 
 means, through the channels of diplomacy, in exert¬ 
 ing pressure over governments in which Jews are 
 subject to injustice and maltreatment. Herzl and 
 his followers visualized a Jewish State which would 
 be regarded as a national center by all Jewry with 
 the authority to speak for the 15 million Jews scat¬ 
 tered throughout the world. The Jewish State 
 ! would be the mouthpiece for Jews everywhere. 
 This dream, it appears, has been shattered, and prop¬ 
 erly so, for it soon became obvious after the organi¬ 
 zation of political Zionism that the movement was 
 not going to unite the Jews into a single body. Each 
 succeeding Jewish Congress showed more clearly 
 than its predecessor that while Zionism did form a 
 bond sufficiently strong to bring together for the 
 first time Jews from all parts of the Western world, 
 the bond lacked the element of permanency because 
 of the emphasis upon nationality, which the subse¬ 
 quent course of events showed would be the rock 
 
120 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 on which any endeavor to unite the Jews politically 
 would suffer shipwreck. It is instinctively felt, even 
 if it cannot be satisfactorily demonstrated by the 
 great body of Jews in those lands in which they have 
 become assimilated to the prevailing political and 
 social conditions, in countries like England, France, 
 United States, Italy, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, 
 Switzerland, and to a large extent even in Germany 
 and Austria, that in some way the appeal to Jewish 
 nationalism conflicts with the complete attachment 
 for the nation to which the Jews, living in any of the 
 countries named, belong and should belong. Any 
 political interest in a Jewish State established else¬ 
 where would have a taint of hyphenation or of di¬ 
 vided allegiance. I do not speak here from the 
 point of view of policy, nor have I in mind the fear 
 of arousing a suspicion of hyphenation, but from 
 the feeling which every ioo per cent American, 
 Englishman or Frenchman would naturally and 
 spontaneously harbor that beyond a sentimental or 
 historical interest in any other country but his own, 
 whether because he formerly belonged to that coun¬ 
 try or had associations with it that have attached 
 him to it, he must not yield to the temptation to 
 look upon such a country as a kind of second 
 home. It is impossible to belong to two countries, 
 
Political Zionism and the Jewish Question 121 
 
 and if one makes the effort, complete attachment to 
 one must necessarily be impaired. “ Allegiance 
 must be perfect — cannot be divided. Either a 
 
 Palestinian or an American.” 1 
 
 Involuntarily and in subtle fashion one’s Ameri¬ 
 canism, to take our own country as an example, is 
 affected by a divided attachment of any character. 
 This may not go to the extent of affecting one’s 
 patriotic duties, but a divided allegiance will affect 
 the spirit in which one carries out one’s duties. The 
 mental concentration on the one and only country 
 to which individuals should feel themselves as be¬ 
 longing would be lacking. This lack is injurious 
 and will prevent one from responding spontaneously 
 to the pulsations of the political and social life about 
 him. 
 
 The recent experience through which this country 
 has passed has shown the dangers inherent in the 
 encouragement of any kind of hyphenation. The 
 trying position in which hundreds of thousands of 
 loyal American citizens were placed because in days 
 of peace and in an unsuspecting manner they had 
 permitted their feelings for Germany, due to senti¬ 
 mental or personal attachment, unbounded sway, 
 should serve as a warning now that peace has come 
 again, to avoid a repetition of such a condition. 
 
 1 Felix Adler, Nationalism and Zionism, p. 14 (an address 
 published by the American Ethical Union, New York, 1919). 
 
122 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 We were obliged to go to war with Germany be¬ 
 cause by her policy and by her military methods, 
 she represented a menace to the freedom of the 
 world. This occasioned a painful struggle in the 
 hearts of those who, without being conscious of any 
 hyphenation, yet were the unfortunate victims of 
 a divided allegiance; and this despite the fact that 
 it was a long and short division, and the part they 
 gave to Germany was only a small percentage. The 
 present advocates of political Zionism appear to 
 recognize how dangerous it is in the present temper 
 of the world to play with such combustible material 
 as is involved in the question of allegiance to the 
 country to which one belongs. Accordingly, it is 
 declared that the Jews remaining outside of Pales¬ 
 tine will not be affected by the organization of a 
 small Jewish State. But is that true? Will the 
 nine-tenths of the Jews, who will not technically be¬ 
 long to the Jewish nation, escape the implication that 
 they nevertheless form part of a separate Jewish 
 nationality, and will not this necessarily affect the 
 status of the nine-tenths? A moment’s reflection 
 will show that the Jewish State will again play di¬ 
 rectly into the hands of those who are only too eager 
 to seize upon such a weapon to justify their social 
 prejudice and deeper hostility, precisely as the con- 
 
Political Zionism and the Jewish Question 123 
 
 elusion drawn by Herzl and his followers that the 
 feeling towards the Jews was due to their being a 
 separate nationality — an alien element in the body 
 politic of European countries — appeared to justify 
 the contention of the German and Austrian anti- 
 Semites. “ What of it,” political Zionists say, in 
 reply, “ if those who will under any circumstances 
 maintain their feelings against Jews are given 
 an excuse that will be recognized as a mere 
 flimsy pretense?” The answer is that the situa¬ 
 tion created by the organization of a Jewish State, 
 no matter how small, with the necessary em¬ 
 phasis on a separate Jewish nationality as its raison 
 d'etre, will enhance the difficulties of the Jews all 
 over the world in combating the social prejudice 
 or other forms of hostility that exist or that may 
 arise. It will retard the political assimilation of 
 the Jews even in more advanced countries in which 
 reactionary movements like anti-Semitism have left 
 their mark. It will certainly create obstacles in the 
 way of those who are laboring to secure full political 
 recognition for Jews in Russia, Poland and Rou- 
 mania. Let us bear in mind once more that the 
 average person has little patience with subtle dis¬ 
 tinctions. He will not be apt to draw a line be¬ 
 tween a Jew naturalized as a citizen of the United 
 
124 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 States, England or France, and one who belongs to 
 a Jewish State in Palestine — nor would he pay 
 much heed to the fact that the vast majority of Jews 
 — at least nine-tenths — would not belong to that 
 State. That the proposed Jewish State will look for 
 support to Jews living outside of Palestine — not 
 only for financial aid but for moral support and 
 sympathy — will appear to justify the conclusion 
 that Jews everywhere harbor a peculiar attachment 
 towards the nationalistic one-tenth associated with 
 Palestine; and indeed many will undoubtedly have 
 such an attachment. The term American Jew sug¬ 
 gests no hyphenation, any more than American Cath¬ 
 olic or American Protestant. It merely connotes a 
 religious affiliation, or an association connected with 
 the accidental factor of birth and descent, just as 
 American Irish or American German expresses the 
 national origin of the individual in question; but 
 the existence of a Jewish State will invert the po¬ 
 sition of the two terms. The American Jew will 
 become the Jewish American, and this is a hyphen 
 precisely of the same objectionable character as 
 the German-American proved to be in the recent 
 war. 
 
 Are political Zionists quite sure that in case of a 
 conflict between the country of their birth or adop- 
 
Political Zionism and the Jewish Question 125 
 
 tion and Palestine they will not to any degree be 
 influenced by the possible hyphenation? 
 
 It is quite within the range of possibility that a 
 condition may arise, even under the rule of the 
 world by a League of Nations, when through po¬ 
 litical complications the proposed Jewish State may 
 find itself in opposition to some other state or vice 
 versa, some state will have a quarrel with the 
 Jewish State. Such a contingency might place the 
 Jews everywhere in a most uncomfortable position 
 to say the least. No doubt they will give their al¬ 
 legiance to the land in which they dwell but with 
 many it may involve a struggle to do so, and this ele¬ 
 ment will at least be open to a suspicion affecting 
 all the others, as in the recent war American citi¬ 
 zens of German birth or remote German origin were 
 put in the suspect class. They had to give proof of 
 their loyalty instead of such loyalty being taken for 
 granted, and many innocent people suffered because 
 of the open or disguised disloyalty, or even of the 
 indiscretions of a few. Can we be quite sure that 
 in case of such a conflict as is here hypothecated 
 and which at any time may arise, some Jews having 
 sympathy with their fellows may not commit indis¬ 
 cretions reflecting on all? The world has always 
 been disposed to generalize in regard to the Jews, 
 
126 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 and human nature does not change perceptibly from 
 century to century. 
 
 Now look at a situation that will certainly arise 
 if the Jewish State is formed. What attitude will 
 that State take towards political Zionists who are 
 Germans or Austrians? Dr. Herzl himself was an 
 Austrian, and some of the most prominent and effi¬ 
 cient leaders of the movement before the outbreak 
 of the war were to be found in the lands of the Cen¬ 
 tral Powers. The center of the Zionist organization 
 was at one time in Germany. If Dr. Herzl, the 
 founder of political Zionism, were alive to-day, is it 
 conceivable that with the present attitude of the 
 world towards Germany and Austria he would be 
 permitted to go to Palestine to take part in the or¬ 
 ganization of a Jewish State, the idea of which he 
 called into being? Palestine, it is generally con¬ 
 ceded, will be placed under the mandatory power of 
 Great Britain. What will be the natural attitude 
 of that government in regard to German and Aus¬ 
 trian Jews who wish to settle in Palestine? Would 
 Great Britain be criticized if she decided to shut out 
 all immigrants from, Germany and Austria as well 
 as from Turkey (or what remains of Turkey) and 
 Bulgaria for a considerable number of years? Will 
 she even after this prohibition is removed be likely 
 
Political Zionism and the Jewish Question 127 
 
 to allow Germans and Austrians to take part in the 
 political life of a country under her direction? 
 German influence was particularly strong in Pales¬ 
 tine prior to the war, and even the Zionists had their 
 struggle with the German brethren who wanted to 
 force the introduction of German into the training 
 school for teachers in Jaffa, 1 and in which they were 
 aided by the German Consul General. This was in 
 1913. What, in view of this incident and of all 
 that has happened since 1914, will be the attitude 
 of the political Zionists themselves towards German 
 and Austrian Zionists who form such a considerable 
 contingent — in fact next to Russians, the strongest 
 contingent. The Zionists will probably be wise 
 enough not to try to force the issue, but will prefer 
 to place themselves in an anomalous position by de¬ 
 claring that the Jewish State for the present must 
 taboo Jews from the very lands in which the move¬ 
 ment took definite shape. Here, then, we have im¬ 
 mediately a complication that may be taken as a 
 sample of the kind of difficulties that will arise 
 through the endeavor to hold up the Jews as form¬ 
 ing a distinct nationality to be welded into a political 
 
 1 See a brief account of this struggle in an article on “ The 
 Educational Institutions of Palestine,” in Kadimah (New 
 York American Federation of Zionists, 1918), pp. 95-100. 
 
128 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 unit composed of a single nationality. If a quarrel 
 were to break out between England and Russia, dur¬ 
 ing the period of the exercise of the mandatory 
 power by Great Britain over Palestine, it might sim¬ 
 ilarly lead to the exclusion of Russian Jews, to 
 whom the Zionistic movement is due. 
 
 It will be admitted that the fourteen million Jews 
 who will always live outside of Palestine cannot af¬ 
 ford to have themselves thus placed in an anomalous 
 and risky position by the one-tenth who may choose 
 to regard themselves as a national body. They will 
 object to a small minority representing itself as the 
 Jewish nation, and which the rest of the world will 
 naturally assume to have the authority to speak for 
 all. The existence of such a tiny Jewish State 
 representing at the most one-tenth of all the Jews, 
 therefore, so far from helping to solve the Jewish 
 Question, will only succeed in complicating it in 
 various directions. In the first place it will arouse 
 the opposition of the natives of Palestine and of the 
 adjoining Syria who will resent being pushed to the 
 wall; secondly it will create hyphenated Jews all 
 over the world; and thirdly it will place Jews out¬ 
 side of Palestine in a position that will oblige them 
 in self-defense to present a decided attitude of oppo¬ 
 sition to their fellows who insist upon their sepa- 
 
Political Zionism and the Jewish Question 129 
 
 rate nationalism. Political Zionism, instead of 
 serving to unite the Jews, will create further splits 
 of the most serious character, and the upshot of the 
 movement will be to keep alive the spirit of opposi¬ 
 tion in those lands in which the Jews are treated 
 as aliens without political rights. 
 
 Surely the most important problem for Jews at 
 present interested in the welfare of their brethren, 
 more important even than the encouragement of the 
 colonization of Palestine, is to secure for those liv¬ 
 ing in such large numbers in countries like Russia, 
 Roumania and Poland, constituting almost one-half 
 of all the Jews in the world, complete rights and du¬ 
 ties of citizenship, both because such rights are de¬ 
 manded by the conditions under which modern 
 states are organized, and as a protection against in¬ 
 dignities and sufferings to which they are constantly 
 exposed in the countries in which they live, but which 
 they are precluded from regarding as their country. 
 It is gratifying to see that both in Poland and Rou¬ 
 mania a decided disposition exists among the lead¬ 
 ers in favor of granting equal rights to the Jewish 
 population, and the President of the newly organ¬ 
 ized Republic of Bohemia has come out strongly 
 against regarding the Jews in that country as a 
 separate national unit The Peace Conference, it is 
 
130 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 hoped, will emphasize the necessity for all the newly 
 organized states to place themselves on the principle 
 of equal political rights to all the inhabitants. But 
 it must be obvious that this movement will be hin¬ 
 dered if the Jews themselves raise the cry that they 
 represent a separate nationalistic unit in the very 
 populations among which they live. It is to be 
 particularly regretted that the recent so-called Jew¬ 
 ish Congress held in Philadelphia paved the way 
 for a possible reactionary tendency by emphasizing 
 “ Jewish nationalism ” not only in connection with 
 the Palestinian problem, but as applicable also to 
 the countries of Western Europe. The attitude of 
 some of those who attended this Congress as dele¬ 
 gates was amazingly frank in laying the stress on 
 “ national ” rights of the Jews in countries outside 
 of Palestine instead of on equal rights. 1 No Ameri¬ 
 can delegate at the congress with a keen feeling of 
 his Americanism can possibly have approved of such 
 an un-American spirit, but the sentiment voiced 
 illustrates the direction toward which political 
 Zionism drifts as the result of the emphasis on 
 nationalism. It is a serious indictment against po- 
 
 X A declaration issued by the “National Socialist” Group 
 of Zionists maintains the “ right of the national union of 
 Jews in all countries in respect to education, culture and 
 language.” 
 
Political Zionism and the Jewish Question 131 
 
 litical Zionism that the principle upon which it rests 
 leads some of those who adhere to it to justify the 
 organization of the Jews as a separate unit in other 
 countries than Palestine. Dividing a population 
 into separate nationalistic units instead of welding 
 the various nationalities into a single nation is sub¬ 
 versive of the very foundation upon which democ¬ 
 racy rests. There is no greater danger to democracy 
 than the recognition of an imperium in imperio. 
 With the Jews themselves interpreting their status 
 in the world as that of a separate nationality, there 
 will always remain a Jewish Question and it will 
 always remain unsolved. 
 
 The Jewish Question! What is the Jewish Ques¬ 
 tion but the struggle to secure for Jews in all lands 
 the same political rights as their fellow-citizens. 
 That is the only solution possible because the only 
 one compatible with the spirit of democracy that 
 was ushered into the Western world at the close of 
 the eighteenth century and that has, despite all re¬ 
 actionary efforts, despite all checks and hindrances, 
 made steady progress. The improvement in the 
 political and social status of the Jews in all European 
 countries — barring a few exceptions — since the 
 new spirit set in furnishes the proof that the line 
 of progress has been steadily upward. Not that 
 
132 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 this improved status is the only index of this prog¬ 
 ress, but it is one of the indications of real prog¬ 
 ress made that the curve marked by the fortunes 
 of the Jews during the last century mounts stead¬ 
 ily. Step by step the civic disabilities under which 
 the Jews labored were removed in most of the states 
 of Europe, and this in spite of the opposition of re¬ 
 actionaries. The steady march of democracy has 
 meant the growing triumph for the idea underlying 
 it, and it is this triumph that has made for the po¬ 
 litical and social assimilation of Jews in one country 
 after the other, until to-day it is taken for granted 
 by all leaders of liberal thought that equal rights to 
 all citizens must form the foundation stone on which 
 a state is to be reared. The Jews by virtue of their 
 survival through dark ages of persecution and in¬ 
 tolerance are the living witnesses to testify to the 
 ultimate failure of all reactionary tendencies. 
 
 It is true that the reactionary spirit has not been 
 conquered everywhere, but instead of fixing our 
 gaze in a bewildered attitude on reactionary symp¬ 
 toms, we should rather in a spirit of hope and en¬ 
 couragement base our judgment of the future of 
 the Jews and of their ultimate destiny, on the steady 
 progress in their civic emancipation during the past 
 century and more. The spirit of democracy has 
 
Political Zionism and the Jewish Question 133 
 
 never been stronger in any period of the world’s 
 history than at the close of this war, fought to safe¬ 
 guard democracy. Even the extremes to which the 
 spirit is being carried in some countries, reacting 
 against the pressure under which they formerly were 
 cramped, is a testimony to the strength of the spirit. 
 The extravagances and the abuses will correct them¬ 
 selves in time. Surely this is not the moment to 
 raise the cry of despair because difficulties exist 
 which should call forth one’s courage to surmount 
 them, because reactionary forces are still endeavor¬ 
 ing to assert themselves and which it should be our 
 aim to overcome. Even while recognizing that the 
 woilds progress is necessarily slow, at times pain¬ 
 fully slow, the present juncture in the affairs of 
 men and of nations invites us to turn our faces for¬ 
 ward and not backward, to realize more decidedly 
 than ever that so far as the Jews are concerned 
 their place is in the seething world around them, 
 the world seething with fresh life and enlarged 
 hopes, and not in a restricted glorified ghetto which 
 would be the result of the creation of a tiny Jewish 
 State by a tiny minority of the Jews. 
 
 The mere fact that Palestine can never hold more 
 than a small minority of the Jews of the world con¬ 
 stitutes by itself a most potent argument against the 
 
134 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 creation of a Jewish State even if it were desirable, 
 as it also shows how fallacious it is to seek for a 
 solution of the Jewish Question by the creation of 
 such a state. Let me in concluding this analysis 
 set forth somewhat more explicitly this aspect of 
 the Zionistic movement. 
 
 Political Zionists have succeeded by virtue of 
 their enthusiasm in creating the impression that 
 Palestine would have room for several million Jews. 
 Some go so far as to say five or six millions. This 
 is an entirely misleading view and needs to be ex¬ 
 posed. Palestine at present holds a population es¬ 
 timated somewhere between 600,000 and 700,000, 
 of which about 60 per cent are Mohammedans, 28 
 per cent Christians, and 12 per cent Jews. On the 
 basis of a careful investigation undertaken by a com¬ 
 mission of French experts sent to Palestine during 
 the summer of 1918, and which included Professor 
 Sylvain Levi, the distinguished Orientalist of the 
 College de France, it can now be authoritatively 
 stated that, including improved methods of agricul¬ 
 ture and the redemption of certain arid tracts, there 
 would be room in Palestine proper for an additional 
 population of 600,000. That would mean that at 
 the utmost Palestine can harbor in the future a popu¬ 
 lation of one and a half millions. Beyond that the 
 
Political Zionism and the Jewish Question 135 
 
 economic pressure on a too thickly settled district in 
 proportion to its ability to yield support would cre¬ 
 ate misery and ruin. Now, assuming that the ad¬ 
 ditional 600,000 will be entirely composed of Jews, 
 this would give a maximum of 700,000 Jewish in¬ 
 habitants as the utmost figure without driving 
 the 600,000 Mohammedans and Christians away. 
 Since immigration to Palestine can hardly proceed 
 more rapidly than on an average of 25,000 a year, 
 about a quarter of a century would have to elapse 
 before the Jewish population would reach the posi¬ 
 tion of being in a majority; and according to the 
 program of the political Zionists the Jewish State is 
 not to be called into existence until that point has 
 been reached in the Jewish population. In this cal¬ 
 culation, however, there is omitted the important ele¬ 
 ment of the natural growth of the present popula¬ 
 tion of Palestine. Despite unfavorable and unsani¬ 
 tary conditions of life in a large part of the country 
 and the great death rate among children, as is the 
 case throughout all the neglected portions of the 
 Near East, the increase of population in Palestine 
 has been steady though naturally not large. Under 
 better conditions that will certainly prevail when 
 Palestine comes under the supervision of the man¬ 
 datory power of Great Britain, the natural increase 
 
136 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 in population will grow larger. If it reaches an 
 average of only two per cent yearly the result will 
 be that the full contingent of 600,000 additional to 
 the population will be contributed in large part by 
 the natives. The present Jewish population of Pal¬ 
 estine would itself become a factor in reducing the 
 possible number of Jews that could come from the 
 outside world to find room in that small country. 
 The likelihood of the Jews ever reaching the position 
 of being in a decided majority is thus reduced and 
 the great difference between the present proportion, 
 12 per cent as against 88 per cent Mohammedans 
 and Christians is too large to be overcome by any 
 normal process. The alternative is to drive the non- 
 Jewish population out of the country (which, of 
 course, the political Zionists have no intention of do- 
 to force them out by economic pressure, 
 which may conceivably take place. Either pros¬ 
 pect is not pleasant to contemplate. Let us assume 
 that through superior advantages enjoyed by the 
 Jews who come to Palestine they will in the competi¬ 
 tive struggle succeed in obtaining control. It mat¬ 
 ters little how this end will be obtained. Even if it 
 should come by the most perfectly natural process, 
 the feelings of the natives as they see themselves 
 driven to the wall, becoming more and more de- 
 
Political Zionism and the Jewish Question 137 
 
 pendent upon those who are usurping their place, will 
 not be any the less bitter on that account. The re¬ 
 action of such a situation will be felt by the Jews all 
 over the world. It is assuredly a serious matter to 
 propose a policy which must, even if involuntarily, 
 work injustice and hardships for others as a condi¬ 
 tion of its being carried out. Mankind looks for¬ 
 ward hopefully, though also timidly, to a time when 
 animosities, particularly those arising through dif¬ 
 ferences of religious belief, will tend to diminish 
 and eventually disappear. There can be no substan¬ 
 tial progress towards the ideals of peace unless we 
 envisage the possibility of such a gradual decline in 
 the unfriendly attitude of nations and of religious 
 sects towards one another. The least that we ought 
 to do is not to create new conditions which will in¬ 
 tensify old animosities and promote new forms of 
 unfriendliness. The program of the political Zion¬ 
 ists, however, is precisely of a character to entail 
 such a possibility. The mere suspicion that the pur¬ 
 pose in encouraging Jewish immigration into Pales¬ 
 tine is to secure control of the country will arouse 
 resentment; and, as a matter of fact, steps are al¬ 
 ready being taken by Mohammedans and Chris¬ 
 tians to prevent lands from falling into the hands 
 of Jews. 
 
13 8 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 The Zionistic program invites the possibility of a 
 fate for Palestine as tragic as the misrule of the 
 Turk. It will be sad indeed, if a land filled with 
 sacred associations should again become a battle¬ 
 field on which in the past such bitter contests were 
 waged in the name of religion. One need not be a 
 prophet of gloom to recognize the possibility of a 
 renewed outbreak of religious animosities in a coun¬ 
 try like Palestine of the present day, where you 
 start out with an already existing intense mutual 
 feeling of hostility, not to say hatred, among the 
 various classes of the population, Mohammedans, 
 Christians and Jews. To the Western visitor who 
 goes to Palestine for the first time it is a painful 
 surprise to witness how little influence life amid 
 sacred associations exerts in promoting kindness and 
 gentleness among those who are privileged to spend 
 their days near the sacred spots. In Palestine the 
 individual is labeled according to his faith. One 
 encounters narrowness, bigotry, fanaticism every¬ 
 where. 1 
 
 How, then, is it conceivable that the creation of a 
 Jewish State will be able to furnish a solution for 
 
 1 See a picture of these conditions in present-day Palestine 
 by Joseph Koven, in his article “Palestine: Lights and 
 Shadows” in the April number (1919) of the Century Maga¬ 
 zine. 
 
Political Zionism and the Jewish Question 139 
 
 any aspect of the Jewish Question ? It will not solve 
 the problem for the Russian Jew, whose condition 
 is the worst, because it cannot accommodate at the 
 most more than one-tenth even of the Russian Jew¬ 
 ish population; 1 and this small proportion could 
 only reach this haven of refuge after the lapse of a 
 quarter of a century. What is to become, mean¬ 
 while, of the remaining more than nine-tenths of the 
 Jews scattered throughout the Russian Empire? 
 
 The tiny Jewish State can certainly not exert any 
 pressure on Russia and Roumania with a view of 
 improving the status of the Jews in these countries. 
 By the admission of the political Zionists, the Jew¬ 
 ish State would only be qualified to speak for that 
 small portion of Jewry which regards itself as a 
 nationality and which, we have seen, is probably not 
 above five per cent, outside of those who live in 
 Russia and those who view the situation from the 
 Russian-Jewish standpoint. We have also seen 
 that the reorganization of a Jewish State, so far 
 from promoting the movement to grant equal rights 
 to Jews everywhere, will hinder it by leading many 
 Jews, as is actually the case, to emphasize that the 
 
 1 According to the statistics of the American Jewish Year- 
 Book for 1918-19, p. 340, the total number of Jews in the 
 Russian Empire, including what was Russian Poland, is 6,946,- 
 
140 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 Jews in every country should constitute a separate 
 nationality. It would hinder the movement for the 
 solution of the Jewish Question also by tending to 
 keep alive mutual animosities among the three classes 
 of the present inhabitants of Palestine; and this ani¬ 
 mosity will react on the Jews everywhere. It will 
 further hinder it by placing in the hands of those 
 who for one reason or the other do not wish to see 
 Jews admitted to full citizenship in such lands as 
 Russia, Poland and Roumania a weapon that can be 
 used against this claim. It will create new complica¬ 
 tions of the Jewish Question by placing nine-tenths 
 — or rather, more than nine-tenths, as we may now 
 say,— of the Jews who will permanently remain out¬ 
 side of Palestine in a position where they will en¬ 
 counter greater difficulties in overcoming social 
 prejudice and in efforts to improve the status of 
 their less fortunate brethren. 
 
 So far from increasing the respect for Jews as 
 the political Zionists also claim, the Jewish State 
 will serve to strengthen the hands of reactionaries 
 whose interest it is to keep alive the spirit of anti- 
 Semitism. Above all it will serve to push into the 
 background those elements- of Judaism, viewed as a 
 religion, which are universalistic in their implica¬ 
 tion and in their application, and instead will bring 
 
Political Zionism and the Jewish Question 141 
 
 out in bold relief the separatistic features of the reli¬ 
 gion — the rites and ceremonies which, when strictly 
 carried out, of themselves tend to create a wall of 
 separation between Jews and their fellows. These 
 rites and ceremonies have their proper place, of 
 course, in Judaism, as in any other religion. They 
 should call forth our respect when observed by those 
 to whom they are the expression of a faith in which 
 they sincerely believe; but for all that, they are the 
 externals of the religion. Behind and beneath these 
 rites are the ideals for which a religion stands. 
 The creation of a Jewish State will serve to empha¬ 
 size, at least for the outside world, not the religious 
 ideas, but the religious practices, many of which an¬ 
 tedate the days of Judaism itself and were preserved 
 merely through the weight of tradition. Such em¬ 
 phasis upon externals would be unfortunate from 
 every point of view; it would mark a step backward 
 in the effort to realize the religious ideals. 
 
 And now, a final question. Why a Jewish State 
 in Palestine, when all that those who have gone there 
 and those who propose to settle in that country have 
 in mind can be accomplished just as well, if not in¬ 
 deed better, without it? Why a Jewish State when 
 what is needed for those who wish to create for 
 themselves a future under better auspices than is 
 
142 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 possible at present in their surroundings, is a home 
 in which they may feel secure, a land in which they 
 will enjoy full rights of citizenship, a country which 
 will be protected against aggression by the League 
 of Nations? Why a Jewish State, when the ma¬ 
 jority of orthodox Jews to whom attachment to 
 Palestine is more than a sentiment or a doctrine of 
 faith, will not look with favor upon a resuscitation 
 undertaken from a purely secular standpoint as a 
 national movement without a religious background ? 
 Why a Jewish State which would certainly not sat¬ 
 isfy those who look to the fulfillment of divine 
 prophecy, and which will be a disillusionment to 
 those who believe that it will form the solution of 
 the Jewish Question? Why a Jewish State which 
 will never be representative of more than a small 
 fraction of the Jews and which will meet with the 
 constant opposition of the large majority, who will 
 look upon it with ill favor and suspicion? Why a 
 Jewish State, when even for cultural autonomy all 
 that is needed or desirable is fulfilled by complete 
 local autonomy for the Jewish colonies now es¬ 
 tablished in Palestine and to be established? Such 
 local autonomy will without much question be 
 granted by the mandatory power, and cheerfully so, 
 for Great Britain will encourage Jewish coloniza- 
 
Political Zionism and the Jewish Question 143 
 
 tion in every possible way. It is through such 
 colonies, formed by enthusiastic and energetic new¬ 
 comers, ready to work under a communal stimulus, 
 that the land can be redeemed from the neglect into 
 which it has been allowed to lapse through Turkish 
 misrule and through the existence of a government 
 which did little or nothing for its people, for the im¬ 
 provement of the land or for education and that 
 took no thought of making the population fit for 
 self-government. All honor to the zeal of the Jew¬ 
 ish colonists in Palestine in having already changed 
 the aspect of certain portions of the country through 
 successful agriculture and viniculture. Let us pay 
 due meed to what has been done by the colonists 
 themselves for the improvement of the land by the 
 Zionistic organizations, as well as by high-minded 
 philanthropists, in promoting education by establish¬ 
 ing trade and technical schools. 
 
 The Zionists say a “ national homeland,’’ con¬ 
 trolled by Jews, is needed in order that as Jews they 
 may develop a culture of their own and make their 
 further contributions to the world; that a country 
 of their own is needed and a language of their own, 
 as an essential condition of producing this result. 
 Now we have seen that the best contributions of the 
 Jews have been made since their dispersion through- 
 
144 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 out the country under the stimulating contact with 
 others, and we have also seen that outside of the 
 religion which they gave through the Prophets and 
 the literature which sprung from it, the Jews made 
 no contributions while they had a separate national 
 existence. Why should it be different under an¬ 
 other trial of the experiment, particularly when this 
 experiment will necessarily involve that only a small 
 proportion of the Jewish people will participate in 
 it? We have seen that the great civilizations of an¬ 
 tiquity, as in modern times, have all been produced 
 by the mixture of nationalities and not by a single 
 nationality, isolating itself from others and proceed¬ 
 ing in its own unimpeded way. Culture is the 
 spark that ensues when diverse ethnic forces meet. 
 One reason perhaps, apart from the geographical 
 position of Palestine, why the Jews during their na¬ 
 tional existence did not make any striking contribu¬ 
 tions to civilization was just because they were not 
 sufficiently mixed. Under modern conditions of 
 life mixture of nationalities is a normal condition — 
 isolation the abnormal that leads to sterility. It is 
 by a constant crossing of currents and countercur¬ 
 rents that modern progress and culture proceed. 
 A Jewish State would necessarily emphasize isola¬ 
 tion, and if it did not it would cease to be a Jewish 
 
Political Zionism and the Jewish Question 145 
 
 State. The fundamental principle underlying the 
 plan for the formation of a Jewish State is thus in 
 contradiction not only to the testimony borne by the 
 past history of the Jews, it runs not only contrary 
 to the trend of Jewish history during the past 2000 
 years, it not only ignores the changes that have come 
 over Palestine during this period, the entirely differ¬ 
 ent country that it has become, but it is also con¬ 
 trary to the general trend and spirit of the age. But 
 granted that the Jews of Palestine should be placed 
 in a position to make their independent and cul¬ 
 tural contribution, granted even that for this pur¬ 
 pose it is necessary to resuscitate the old Hebrew 
 language in order to make it the medium of their 
 thoughts and aspirations — though this movement 
 has an artificial aspect which does not particularly 
 commend it — even for this purpose a Jewish State 
 is not needed. All that is required is a congenial 
 environment with freedom of movement; and these 
 two conditions are fulfilled by giving the colonies 
 complete independence in the management of their 
 local affairs. For cultural autonomy no State is re¬ 
 quired. 
 
 Why, then, all this agitation for the satisfaction 
 of a sentiment which, though impressive from the 
 romantic aspect, is fraught with such great dangers 
 
146 Zionism and the Future of Palestine 
 
 when the attempt is made to convert it into a re¬ 
 ality— danger to the Jews of Palestine in adding 
 a further discordant element to the many that al¬ 
 ready exist there, instead of improving the rela¬ 
 tions of the various elements of the population to 
 one another, as well as danger to Jews outside of 
 Palestine who will be placed in a wrong position 
 before the world through the misinterpretation of 
 the trend of Jewish history; danger also to the 
 principle of democracy through the creation of a 
 State based on the undemocratic principle of a sin¬ 
 gle nationality in a country which is marked by the 
 presence of many nationalities. For be it empha¬ 
 sized once more, that since a country belongs to all 
 who live in it, irrespective of ethnic descent and 
 without reference to racial affiliation, the creation 
 of a Jewish State necessarily impresses one as a re¬ 
 actionary project, and this despite the fact that 
 those who advocate it are undoubtedly high-minded, 
 sincerely enthusiastic, but unfortunately blinded by 
 a romantic sentiment, wrongly interpreted. Pal¬ 
 estine of all countries, by virtue of its fortunes 
 which have made it a sacred land for the followers 
 of three great religions, should become under the 
 aegis of the new era which is opening for the entire 
 East, a state organized on an intra-national basis. 
 
Political Zionism and the Jewish Question 147 
 
 The Palestinian question forms part of the gen¬ 
 eral plan for the resuscitation and reorganization 
 of countries in the Near East. 1 It needs to be set¬ 
 tled by the application of those general principles 
 of political freedom and political guidance for long- 
 neglected peoples, which will enable them to become 
 fit again for self-government and build up a new 
 East that may join with the West in contributing 
 to the future progress of humanity. 
 
 What higher destiny can there be for Palestine 
 than to become a center, symbolizing by the po¬ 
 litical union of the many nationalities that have 
 found their home there, the coming together of peo¬ 
 ples which is the very keynote of the international 
 conference that has ensued upon the termination of 
 the great war? The world, storm-tossed by the dis¬ 
 asters of the last four years, longs for peace. 
 Where is that peace to come from if we throw new 
 apples of contention into the ring? What better 
 beginning can be made toward bringing about en¬ 
 during peace among nations than by furnishing an 
 example of a practical “ League of Nations ’ 
 through the setting aside of one place in the world 
 in which all the nations of Europe and America and 
 
 1 See Jastrow, The War and the Bagdad Railway, pp. I 43 ~ 
 152 . 
 
148 Zionism, and the Future of Palestine 
 
 many parts of Asia and Africa already have a 
 share. What a happy destiny it would be for Pal¬ 
 estine to be reorganized in such a manner as to 
 present a prospect at least of that peace of which 
 one of the ancient Prophets gave us so impressive 
 a description, a country “ in which swords shall be 
 beaten into plow-shares and spears into pruning 
 hooks/ 1 and where nation shall not lift sword 
 against nation, where there will be no need for 
 drilling men for war, and in which everyone shall 
 sit under his vine and his figtree and “ there will be 
 none to make him afraid.” A dream perhaps, the 
 realization of which, even though limited to one spot 
 in the world, it may be idle to look forward to — 
 perhaps! It must be confessed that we are still far 
 from the realization of that dream, and yet the 
 world needs the vision to cheer it on in its course, to 
 comfort it for its sufferings and to retain the hope 
 for the future. 
 
 It would be nothing short of sacrilegious to miss 
 the present opportunity to reorganize Palestine on 
 the broadest possible basis, the basis suggested by 
 its eventful history and by its present position as a 
 genuine gathering-place of nations because of the 
 sacred associations with which that land is filled. 
 
 I plead for a Palestine reorganized as this country 
 
Political Zionism and the Jewish Question 149 
 
 is, as are England, France, Italy and other European 
 lands — on the broad platform of democracy. I 
 plead for a Palestinian State in which all who are 
 there and all who go there will share alike in helping 
 it to fulfill what would appear to be its manifest 
 destiny, an example that peoples gathered from all 
 quarters of the globe are able to live together in 
 amity and join in forming a new national unit — a 
 Palestinian State. I should like to envisage a Pales¬ 
 tine that may become a beacon-light for the world, 
 that may again become a spiritual focus, furnishing 
 further inspiration for mankind as it proceeds in 
 its march through the ages to a still higher, albeit un¬ 
 known and unknowable, goal. Such a Palestine is 
 worth striving for, and I should like to see the Jews, 
 — the Zionists, if you please,— take an honorable 
 share in bringing about a Palestine that may look 
 forward to such a future. Such a Palestine, how¬ 
 ever, cannot be built up through the creation of a 
 Jewish State. A Jewish State would simply mean a 
 glorified ghetto, narrow in its outlook, undemocratic 
 in its organization, and that may well turn out to be 
 reactionary in its tendencies. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 A STATEMENT TO THE PEACE 
 CONFERENCE 1 
 
 As a future form of government for Palestine will 
 undoubtedly be considered by the approaching Peace 
 Conference, we, the undersigned citizens of the United 
 States, unite in this statement, setting forth our objec¬ 
 tions to the organization of a Jewish State in Pales¬ 
 tine as proposed by the Zionist Societies in this coun¬ 
 try and Europe and to the segregation of the Jews as 
 a nationalistic unit in any country. 
 
 We feel that in so doing we are voicing the opinion 
 of the majority of American Jews born in this coun¬ 
 try and of those foreign born who have lived here 
 long enough to thoroughly assimilate American politi¬ 
 cal and social conditions. The American Zionists 
 represent, according to the most recent statistics avail¬ 
 able, only a small proportion of the Jews living in this 
 country, about 150,000 out of 3,500,000. (American 
 Jewish Year Book 1918, Philadelphia.) 
 
 1 Handed to President Wilson on behalf of the signers by 
 Congressman Julius Kahn on March 4th, 1919, for transmis¬ 
 sion to the Peace Conference at Paris. See above, p. 117, note 
 1. The statement was prepared conjointly by the Rev. Dr. 
 Henry Berkowitz, of Philadelphia, Mr. Max Senior, of Cin¬ 
 cinnati, and Professor Morris Jastrow, Jr., of the University 
 of Pennsylvania. 
 
 151 
 
15 2 Appendix 
 
 At the outset we wish to indicate our entire sympa¬ 
 thy with the efforts of Zionists which aim to secure 
 for Jews at present living in lands of oppression a 
 refuge in Palestine or elsewhere, where they may 
 freely develop their capabilities and carry on their 
 activities as fi^e^citizens. 
 
 But we raise our voices in warning and protest 
 against the demand of the Zionists for the reorganiza¬ 
 tion of the Jews as a national unit, to whom, now or 
 in the future, territorial sovereignty in Palestine shall 
 be committed. This demand not only misinterprets 
 the trend of the history of the Jews, who ceased to be 
 a nation 2000 years ago, but involves the limitation 
 and possible annulment of the larger claims of Jews 
 for full citizenship and human rights in all lands in 
 which those rights are not yet secure. For the very 
 reason that the new era upon which the world is en¬ 
 tering aims to establish government everywhere on 
 principles of true democracy, we reject the Zionistic 
 project of a “national home for the Jewish people in 
 Palestine.” 
 
 Zionism arose as a result of the intolerable condi¬ 
 tions under which Jews have been forced to live in 
 Russia and Roumania. But it is evident that for the 
 Jewish population of these countries, variously esti¬ 
 mated at from six to ten millions, Palestine can be¬ 
 come no homeland. Even with the improvement of 
 the neglected condition of this country, its limited area 
 can offer no solution. The Jewish question in Russia 
 and Roumania can be settled only within those coun- 
 
Appendix 153 
 
 tries by the grant of full rights of citizenship to Jews. 
 
 We are all the more opposed to the Zionists, be¬ 
 cause they, themselves, distinctly repudiate the solely 
 ameliorative program. They demand and hail with 
 delight the “ Balfour Declaration ” to establish “ a 
 national home for the Jewish people in Palestine,” i. e., 
 a home not merely for Jews living in countries in 
 which they are oppressed, but for Jews universally. 
 No Jew, wherever he may live, can consider himself 
 free from the implications of such a grant. 
 
 The willingness of Jews interested in the welfare of 
 their brethren to aid in redeeming Palestine from the 
 blight of centuries of Turkish misrule, is no acceptance 
 of the Zionist project to segregate Jews as a political 
 unit and to re-institute a section of such a political 
 unit in Palestine or elsewhere. 
 
 At the present juncture in the world’s affairs when 
 lands that have hitherto been subjected to foreign 
 domination are to be recognized as free and indepen¬ 
 dent states, we rejoice in the avowed proposal of the 
 Peace Congress to put into practical application the 
 fundamental principles of democracy. That princi¬ 
 ple, which asserts equal rights for all citizens of a 
 state, irrespective of creed or ethnic descent, should 
 be applied in such a manner as to exclude segrega¬ 
 tion of any kind, be it nationalistic or other. Such 
 segregation must inevitably create differences among 
 the sections of the population of a country. Any such 
 plan of segregation is necessarily reactionary in its 
 tendency, undemocratic in spirit and totally contrary 
 
154 Appendix 
 
 to the practices of free government, especially as 
 these are exemplified by our own country. We 
 therefore strongly urge the abandonment of such a 
 basis for the reorganization of any state. 
 
 OBJECTIONS TO SEGREGATION OF JEWS AS A POLITICAL 
 
 UNIT 
 
 Against such a political segregation of the Jews in 
 Palestine or elsewhere we object: 
 
 i. Because the Jews are dedicated heart and soul to 
 the welfare of the countries in which they dwell under 
 free conditions. All Jews repudiate every suspicion 
 of a double allegiance, but to our minds it is neces¬ 
 sarily implied in and cannot by any logic be elimi¬ 
 nated from the establishment of a sovereign State 
 for the Jews in Palestine. 
 
 By the large part taken by them in the great war, 
 the Jews have once and for all shattered the base 
 aspersions of the Anti-Semites which charged them 
 with being aliens in every land, incapable of true 
 patriotism and prompted only by sinister and self- 
 seeking motives. Moreover, it is safe to assume that 
 the overwhelming bulk of the Jews of America, Eng¬ 
 land, France, Italy, Holland, Switzerland and the 
 other lands of freedom, have no thought whatever of 
 surrendering their citizenship in these lands in order 
 to resort to a “ Jewish homeland in Palestine.” As a 
 rule those who favor such a restoration advocate it 
 not for themselves but for others. Those who act 
 thus, and yet insist on their patriotic attachment to 
 
Appendix 155 
 
 the countries of which they are citizens, are self-de¬ 
 ceived in their profession of Zionism and under the 
 spell of an emotional romanticism or of a religious 
 sentiment fostered through centuries of gloom. 
 
 2. We also object to political segregation of Jews 
 for those who take their Zionistic professions seri¬ 
 ously as referring not to “ others ” but to themselves. 
 Granted that the establishment of a sovereign Jewish 
 State in Palestine would lead many to emigrate to 
 that land, the political conditions of the millions who 
 would be unable to migrate for generations to come, 
 if ever, would be made far more precarious. Rou- 
 mania — despite the pledges of the Berlin Treaty — 
 has legally branded her Jews as aliens, though many 
 are descended from families settled in that country 
 longer than the present Roumanian government has 
 existed. The establishment of a Jewish State will 
 manifestly serve the malevolent rulers of that and 
 other lands as a new justification for additional re¬ 
 pressive legislation. The multitudes who remain 
 would be subject to worse perils, if possible, even 
 though the few who escape might prosper in Palestine. 
 
 3. We object to the political segregation also of 
 those who might succeed in establishing themselves in 
 Palestine. The proposition involves dangers which, 
 it is manifest, have not had the serious consideration 
 of those who are so zealous in its advocacy. These 
 dangers are adverted to in a most kindly spirit of 
 warning by Sir George Adam Smith, who is gen¬ 
 erally acknowledged to be the greatest authority in the 
 
156 Appendix 
 
 world on everything connected with Palestine, either 
 past or present. In a recent publication, Syria and the 
 Holy Land, he points out that there is absolutely no 
 fixity to the boundaries of Palestine. These have 
 varied greatly in the course of the centuries. The 
 claims to various sections of this undefined territory 
 would unquestionably evoke bitter controversies. 
 “ It is not true,” says Sir George, “ that Palestine is 
 the national home of the Jewish people and of no other 
 people.” “ It is not correct to call its non-Jewish in¬ 
 habitants * Arabs/ or to say that they have left no 
 image of their spirit and made no history except in 
 the great Mosque.” “ Nor can we evade, the fact 
 that Christian communities have been as long in pos¬ 
 session of their portion of this land as ever the Jews 
 were.” “ These are legitimate questions,” he says, 
 “ stirred up by the claims of Zionism, but the Zion¬ 
 ists have not yet fully faced them.” 
 
 To subject the Jews to the possible recurrence of 
 such bitter and sanguinary conflicts which would be 
 inevitable, would be a crime against the triumphs of 
 their whole past history and against the lofty and 
 world-embracing visions of their great prophets and 
 leaders. 
 
 4. Though these grave difficulties be met, still we 
 protest against the political segregation of the Jews 
 and the re-establishment in Palestine of a distinctively 
 Jewish State as utterly opposed to the principles of 
 democracy which it is the avowed purpose of the 
 World’s Peace Conference to establish. 
 
Appendix 
 
 157 
 
 Whether the Jews be regarded as a “ race ” or as a 
 “ religion,” it is contrary to the democratic principles 
 for which the world war was waged to found a nation 
 on either or both of these bases. America, England, 
 France, Italy, Switzerland and all the most advanced 
 nations of the world are composed of representatives 
 of many races and religions. Their glory lies in the 
 freedom of conscience and worship, in the liberty of 
 thought and custom which binds the followers of 
 many faiths and varied civilizations in the common 
 bonds of political union. A Jewish State involves 
 fundamental limitations as to race and religion, else 
 the term “ Jewish ” means nothing. To unite Church 
 and State, in any form, as under the old Jewish hier¬ 
 archy, would be a leap backward of two thousand 
 years. 
 
 “ The rights of other creeds and races will be re¬ 
 spected under Jewish dominance,” is the assurance of 
 Zionism. But the keynotes of democracy are neither 
 condescension nor tolerance, but justice and equality. 
 All this applies with special force to a country like 
 Palestine. That land is filled with associations sacred 
 to the followers of three great religions, and as a result 
 of migrating movements of many centuries contains an 
 extraordinary number of different ethnic groups, far 
 out of proportion to the small extent of the country 
 itself. Such a condition points clearly to a reorgani¬ 
 zation of Palestine on the broadest possible basis. 
 
 5. We object to the political segregation of the 
 Jews because it is an error to assume that the bond 
 
158 Appendix 
 
 uniting them is of a national character. They are 
 bound by two factors: First, the bond of common 
 religious beliefs and aspirations and, secondly, the 
 bond of common traditions, customs, and experiences, 
 largely, alas, of common trials and sufferings. Noth¬ 
 ing in their present status suggests that they form in 
 any real sense a separate nationalistic unit. 
 
 The reorganization of Palestine as far as it affects 
 the Jews is but part of a far larger issue, namely, the 
 constructive endeavor to secure the emancipation of 
 the Jews in all the lands in which they dwell. This 
 movement, inaugurated in the eighteenth century and 
 advancing with steady progress through the western 
 lands, was checked by such reactionary tendencies as 
 caused the expulsion of the Poles from Eastern Prus¬ 
 sia and the massacre of Armenians in Turkey. As 
 directed against Jews these tendencies crystallized into 
 a political movement called Anti-Semitism, which had 
 its rise in Germany. Its virulence spread (especially) 
 throughout eastern Europe and led to cruel outbreaks 
 in Roumania and elsewhere, and to the pogroms of 
 Russia with their dire consequences. 
 
 To guard against such evils in the future we urge 
 that the great constructive movement, so sadly inter¬ 
 rupted, be reinstituted and that efficient measures be 
 taken to insure the protection of the law and the full 
 rights of citizenship to Jews in every land. If the 
 basis of the reorganization of governments is hence¬ 
 forth to be democratic, it cannot be contemplated to 
 
Appendix 159 
 
 exclude any group of people from the enjoyment of 
 full rights. 
 
 As to the future of Palestine, it is our fervent hope 
 that what was once a “ promised land ” for the Jews 
 may become a “ land of promise ” for all races and 
 creeds, safeguarded by the League of Nations which, 
 it is expected, will be one of the fruits of the Peace 
 Conference to whose deliberations the world now 
 looks forward so anxiously and so full of hope. We 
 ask that Palestine be constituted as a free and inde¬ 
 pendent state, to be governed under a democratic 
 form of government recognizing no distinctions of 
 creed or race or ethnic descent, and with adequate 
 power to protect the country against oppression of 
 any kind. We do not wish to see Palestine, either 
 now or at any time in the future, organized as a 
 Jewish State. 
 
 THE END 
 
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