Part 10

When the history of Zionism comes to be written, the historian will not be able to pass in silence over an extraordinary inconsistency of contemporary Zionist propagandists and writers. When they are trying to attract the people to their flag, they wax enthusiastic over the lofty mission of Zionism, which is to end our exile and to deliver the Jews from all their troubles; and at the same time they gird or scoff at the “spiritual” Zionists, whose unfeeling hearts soar skywards while their brethren are afflicted and their blood is shed like water—and so forth, and so forth. But these same men, when they confront the opponents of Zionism, who ask to be told clearly how Zionism can end our exile if it cannot gather all our scattered hosts into Palestine—then they take refuge in the spiritual mission of Zionism, and instead of “blood shed like water,” they expatiate on our spiritual slavery and the impossibility of developing our spiritual powers in exile. This jumping about from one side to the other, which shows clearly how weak is the belief in a material redemption of those who stand up for it, has become especially noticeable since the question of “Uganda” came up and since the birth of “Territorialism,” which was really latent in the Zionism of material redemption. All those who had become Zionists only for the sake of saving the people from persecution could not understand how it was possible to reject the Uganda proposal, or any other similar proposal which seemed to offer us the desired salvation—“a secure home of refuge”—merely on the ground that we wanted Palestine and Palestine only, though we did not know when, if ever, it would be given to us. And what was the answer of the “Zion-Zionists” (a name, coined in the Uganda period, which also will interest the future historian)? Did they try to show that our scattered hosts could be gathered more quickly and more easily into Palestine, or that in Palestine we should be better able politically to protect the Jews of the Diaspora? No! They had recourse to the “spirit,” and openly admitted the bitter truth that neither in Palestine nor in any other territory could we gather all our exiles from the four corners of the globe; that the object of Zionism was only to establish “a secure home of refuge” for a minority of the people, which should become the centre of the whole people and influence it spiritually; and that this object could be achieved only in Palestine, the birth-place of our national spirit, and in connection with our historic memories and so forth. In fact, they adopted the whole philosophy of the “skyward soaring” school, only adding a few misplaced “political” phrases for form’s sake. But after the Seventh Congress,[62] when the doubters had left the organisation and the “Zion-Zionists” were left to themselves, with nobody to ask awkward questions, they reverted to their old tactics; and now once more they dangle before the people the old promises of “an end to _galuth_.” Meanwhile, however, a general movement for liberty, affecting all the nations in the Empire, arose in the land of our exile[63]; and in our own midst new propagandists began to hold out to the people new promises and to speak to it in a new language, which the masses found very agreeable. And so the Zionists began to change their tune, so as to win over the masses. “Political work in the Diaspora?—Of course! It is an essential part of Zionist work. Revolution? Why, who so revolutionary as the Zionists? Socialism?—The very basis of Zionism!” And not alone that, but even the Palestinian work, to which in the end the Zionists returned, after they had awoke from the dreamland of diplomacy, took on a new epithet: “_real_ work in Palestine.” The public must understand that Zionists are not “reactionaries” pursuing a “spiritual” will-o’-the-wisp, but genuine “realists,” and their work in Palestine is “real” work. But if at the Eighth Congress the opponents of “real” work (there are still such among Zionists) propound their doubts again, and demand an explanation of the value of such work from the point of view of the ingathering of the exiles and the redemption of the people, then, I fear, the champions of “real” work will be compelled once more to have recourse to the “spirit” in order to justify their “realism.” For the fact is that all work in Palestine, of whatever kind, _material or spiritual_, so long as it is properly done, is “real” (that is, calculated to achieve its object and in harmony with actual conditions) only from the point of view of the spiritual redemption, because whatever strengthens our material and spiritual position in Palestine is a source of added strength to our corporate national spirit, and therefore brings us nearer by much or by little to our spiritual goal. But as for the redemption of the people and the end of _galuth_—that “real” goal is no more brought nearer by all this “real” work than we get nearer to the moon by jumping.

Thus Zionism is always running after the masses—and the masses run away from it.

A well-known economist has correctly indicated one of the principal causes through which the doctrine of Marx made greater headway than similar doctrines before it. Marx, he points out, made his socialistic movement the movement of a definite section of society—the “proletariate”—whose condition and wants inevitably produce in each of its individual members a deep-rooted and powerful desire for a change in the social order, and which is therefore really fitted to fight unitedly and patiently for the attainment of the ideal that promises the satisfaction of their common demands. His predecessors in the development of Socialism, on the other hand, appealed vaguely and in general fashion to “the people,” “the poor,” and similar undefined entities.[64]

A similar statement may be made about Zionism, though in a negative sense. One of the principal causes that have prevented Zionism hitherto from finding a firm and secure foundation is the fact that it has not so far succeeded in recognizing and defining its own “proletariate”—its natural body of supporters, which is really fitted to fight unwearyingly for the Zionist ideal, without being turned aside to follow any other. From its inception until the present day, Zionism has appealed to “the people” generally. But “the people” is not its natural support, because the only want of which the great majority of the people is sufficiently conscious—the want which alone, therefore, can form the basis of common national work—is the need for freedom from material pressure. So soon as we leave this common ground, we find the people divided into parties and classes, whose conscious demands differ in each case, and whose relation to our national life, therefore, in each case takes on a different form. If, then, Zionism could really point the way to our material regeneration, it would doubtless unite under its banner the whole people, without distinction of party or class, except, perhaps, that small minority which is already “emancipated” from all national ties, and stands on the threshold of another way of escape from _galuth_. But, as I have already said, the people does not see in Zionism the way to its material regeneration, and cannot see it there, because it is not there. The unsophisticated masses have always a “feeling for reality” that prevents them instinctively from believing in promises inconsistent with the reality before their eyes. It is only occasionally, in times of deep distress from which there is no escape, that the masses will listen to a promise of redemption that lets a ray of comfort into their hearts; but they turn away and disregard it so soon as they see hope of a remedy more in touch with actualities. It is not strange, therefore, that Zionism, brief though its life has been, has already experienced many a sudden rise and many a sudden fall in the popular estimation, its fortune varying with circumstances. But is a people subject to such changes fitted to be the rank and file of a movement based on a long history, confronted by numerous obstacles, and demanding strenuous, wisely-directed, ordered effort, without sudden leaps backwards and forwards?

I think, then, that the course of events will compel Zionism to come gradually to understand itself and its supporters: to understand itself as a national movement of a _spiritual_ character, whose aim is to satisfy the demand for a true and free national life in accordance with our distinctive spirit; and to find its supporters in that nationalist section which is sufficiently conscious, in all its individual members, of this demand, and which in a certain sense may be called a “spiritual proletariate.”

For, in spite of all the numerous latter-day sections of Jews, with their abbreviated names, it is still doubtful whether among all our “S.D.” and “S.S.”[65] with their ceaseless talk about their “proletariate psychology,” there is really any considerable number of members who can properly be held to belong to the proletariate in the Socialist sense of the word. The mission of the proletariate is to hasten the Socialist solution by the concentration of wealth; and this mission can be fulfilled only by those who work in large industrial undertakings. The work of the master-workman and his assistants is not proletariate work, because, so far from hastening, it hinders that solution. Now the working-class Jew has practically no place in the large industrial undertakings; generally speaking, the so-called proletariate section of the Jews belongs to the class of master-workmen. But, on the other hand, there is among the Jews, and only among them, a proletariate in another sense—in the sense indicated by the combination of “national” and “spiritual.” The position and the needs of this proletariate, which are common to all its individual members, compel it to feel a deep-rooted and powerful desire for a change in the established order; but the change desired in this case is not a concentration of the means of production, but just the opposite. What is wanted is a new means of production, wherewith to create a product of a special character. Among all civilised nations ours is the only one that has no special means of production of its own wherewith to create its spiritual and intellectual wealth, but is compelled to make use of the means provided by other nations—their languages, their literatures, their schools and universities, and so forth—and thus to enrich the owners of these means of production by its work. But the proletariate that produces material wealth receives in payment at least a part of the wealth produced by its labour, and only the surplus is left to the owner of the means of production; whereas in our case almost all the result of our toil goes to swell the wealth of others. Our own national treasury is impoverished and empty; our own distinctive spirit dwindles and dwindles. And yet we are rich in spiritual and intellectual powers, and do productive work in every branch of life. This condition of things is distressing to all Jews whose kinship with their people is not one of blood merely, but whose national consciousness and general culture have developed to such a point that they can both understand and feel the deep tragedy of this national degradation. For the people so degraded produced thousands of years ago, for itself and with its own means of production, a store of spiritual wealth from which the world still draws sustenance; and it is impossible for them to imagine that all the endless sacrifices, with which for two thousand years our people has paid for the preservation of its spirit and its own form of life, are to have no result except to bring us at the present day to a condition of spiritual emptiness, the end of which will perhaps be a contemptible death. This constant feeling of distress necessarily impels these men to work for the freeing of our spirit and the products of our labour from alien dominion. Where there is a real want, be it physical or spiritual, there is a solid basis for a union of forces in joint work for the satisfaction of the common demand. And so it is the men who are really conscious of this want who form the only section specially fitted to support the Zionist movement, and to work for it unitedly, patiently, in an organized manner, until its goal is reached.

I am fully aware that not all who feel this need are as yet convinced that they must unite under the banner of Zionism. Many of them still believe in the possibility of freeing the Jewish spirit, and continuing its internal development, even without a national centre. But they will change their minds when that spiritual freedom in exile, for which they wait, is attained, and when they see the net result of their hoping to “sing the Lord’s song in a strange land.” In Western Europe and in America, where the desired freedom has already been granted, and its effect on our national life is obvious, the conviction is already spreading that external freedom, the removal of the heavy hand of oppression, is not in itself sufficient to free our innermost spirit from its moral bondage to the strange environment that surrounds us on all sides in our exile. And this conviction will inevitably spread in Eastern Europe also when the external chains are broken there. Our people will then be able, within certain limits, to live a national life, in accord with its own spirit, just so far as it wills to do so. But _it will not be able so to will_. The will itself does not depend on free choice. A man may wish to will, and yet be unable, because at that particular moment the necessary conditions are absent, without which the will cannot become an active force. So, too, in the case of a nation. There can be no active national will to live a distinctive spiritual life, even though permission be given under the hand and seal of the ruling power, where the individuals who compose the nation are surrounded by a spiritual atmosphere foreign to them, and breathe this atmosphere whether they will or no, without seeing in the whole world even a square yard of ground which their national spirit, and theirs alone, pervades, subject to no foreign overlord, and in which it creates with its own means of production enough spiritual wealth to satisfy the whole people.

I am aware also that the section that desires to free our national spirit, whether by means of a national centre in Palestine or without it, is not numerous, taken all together, at the present time. But this fact need not make us despair, as though in truth the death of our spirit were at hand, because it has no people to make it manifest in the world. The Hebrew spirit never sought its strength and power in numbers. “The Lord did not ... choose you because ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all people.” The God of this nation, when He saw it “turn quickly from the way,” did not fold up His Law and get Him gone, but said to the one man who remained faithful to Him: “Let Me alone ... that I may consume them: and I will make of thee a great nation.” It is a mistake to think that the national spirit is an abstract idea, which designates the sum of all the spiritual principles that manifest themselves in the life of the people in each generation, and that when this manifestation ceases it no longer exists. The national spirit is in fact a collective idea only in relation to the manner in which it came into being, as a result of the common life of a body of individuals closely connected with one another, and continuing through generations under certain conditions. But when it has once come into being, and has found root in men’s souls by virtue of a long history, then it becomes part of the psychology of the individual: its truth is vindicated in the individual, and does not depend at all on anything external to him. If I feel the Hebrew national spirit in my heart, and it gives a distinctive form to my inner life, then that spirit does exist in me, and its existence does not cease even if all the other Jews in my time no longer feel its existence in their own hearts. I assert, therefore, that if the majority of our people are unconsciously becoming more and more estranged from the national spirit, and if its children born in exile have made for themselves new gods like the gods of the peoples around them, and only a few remain faithful to our national idea in its historic form, and desire for it freedom and development: then these few are the heirs of our national possessions at the present time; it is they who hold the thread of history, and do not allow it to be broken. So long as there is a single Jew who holds the thread, we cannot tell what its end will be. Perhaps the conditions of life will change, and the small remnant will again become “a great nation.”

But how is it possible that the conditions of our life in exile should change in the manner necessary for the revival of the Jewish spirit? What power has a small party to strengthen and hasten this possibility? What security have we that the change, if it come about, will be firm and lasting?

These questions demand an answer not in words, but in deeds. Verbal answers we have given times without number. There is only one way, we have said, to change the conditions of our national life fundamentally, so that it shall become _our_ life indeed, and not a passing shadow of the life of other people; and that way is the foundation of a centre for our national spirit “on its own native soil.” Further, we have promised more than once that this way of ours, like every new path, will be made and prepared by the few for the many, who will afterwards follow of their own accord. But when we came to turn our words into deeds, then it became clear that there was still chaos in the depths of our spirit, although the light of the idea played on the surface.

Whoever knows by experience how dear Palestine is still to every plain Jew, how his heart swells—sometimes even to the point of joyful tears—when he reads or hears of the revival of the Hebrew language among the children in Palestine, or of the success of the Hebrew colonies there—whoever knows this cannot deny that the actual work of building up a centre in Palestine, even before it approached its goal, could have had a wonderful influence on the spirit of the people in the lands of our exile. The truth is, that even now the majority of our people cherish their national inheritance, and desire its eternal preservation; but the bondage of _galuth_, material and spiritual, cramps the heart, and renders the national feeling and will incapable of becoming an effective force in action. And yet, if our work in Palestine had been such as to show clearly that there is really a prospect and a fair hope for the life of our spirit and our national possessions in the land of their birth; if the people had seen the foundations of the building laid by expert hands, one complete stone upon another, though the stones had been but small: then the people would have sought and found here a new source of life for its dormant national sentiment, and a new strength of will to protect more effectively its spiritual possessions in exile.

But as things are, how can we prove the correctness of our answer? What are the results of our twenty years and more of work in Palestine? With regard to material work, we have only unsuccessful attempts to show; and as for spiritual work, we cannot even show such attempts (except, perhaps, the school at Jaffa),[66] for in fact scarcely anything has been done. Those who desired the “ingathering of the exiles” have laboured all these years, first of all in founding philanthropic colonies, and then in political talk; they have had neither the time nor the will to meddle in spiritual matters. Those, again, who desired the “revival of the spirit” have also dissipated all their time and their strength in spiritual work in the Diaspora; in all this time they have not created in Palestine one single spiritual product that could awake an echo in the nation’s heart. It is as though they had forgotten the first principle of their own faith, that the revival of the spirit in exile can come about only through the influence of a national centre in Palestine. They have, indeed, _said_ a great deal about the need for founding universities and schools, and other such needs, the satisfaction of which is beyond their power at present. But they have not done that which was both necessary and possible.

Here, for example, is an attempt to found a small literary organ in Palestine. I ask myself: Why was this not done long ago? In the Diaspora a large number of literary plants have bloomed and faded during the Zionist epoch; they have borne fruit, and have left some good behind them, whether it was much or little. In Palestine, meanwhile, since the beginning of the movement there has not been published a single literary miscellany which has made its mark in our literature. Yet we did not feel that something was lacking. We constantly told the people that only in Palestine could our national spirit flourish and produce fruit after its kind; yet at the same time we were not ashamed to think that the people did not see in Palestine even a shadow of the fruit of its spirit, and that the little fruit that did grow was growing in other countries.

It is true that Palestine is still poor in spiritual forces generally, and in literary forces particularly; but that simply proves the truth of my contention. If we had always had a full and clear conception of the nature of our object, if we had always remembered that what we are seeking to build in Palestine is a refuge for our spirit, we could never have refrained from doing all that was possible to increase the spiritual wealth of Palestine, and to increase, little by little, its moral influence on the people. In that case we should undoubtedly have striven among other things to establish in Palestine a literary organ, an altar on which all our best national writers would have felt it their duty to offer their best, in order to win for it affection and honour in Jewry. An organ such as this, though it would have been at first an artificial creation, would certainly have uplifted the spirit and fostered literary talent in Palestine itself; perhaps also it would by now have become a true, natural literary centre for us, drawing sustenance from the forces which it had called to the land and developed there.

But it is as I said: in the human mind no idea springs from darkness into light at one bound. It was necessary for experience to teach us how slender is the thread on which hangs all our spiritual work outside Palestine, before we could be made to remember that in reality we had no need of such experience, since it only taught us that which was implied in our idea from the very first.

It is just at this moment that you come and tell us: “The time has come to begin planting our literature in the land of its birth.” Need I express my feelings when I read these words?

Yes, the time has come to begin planting, and planting not alone our literature, but also our spirit in all its aspects. All that now runs to waste in exile, voluntarily or involuntarily, must be gathered together and planted “on its own native soil,” and every man in whom the Jewish spirit lives is bound to help in this planting to the utmost of his power, because therein lies our life and our last hope.

“Romanticism,” our young men will say with a smile.