CHAPTER VI

THE ZIONIST SOLUTION

No truer general statement of the case of the Russian Jew, or nobler appeal to enlightened humanity in his behalf, has been made in our time than by Cardinal Manning, in a letter addressed to a London meeting in December, 1890. Every word of this superbly Christian epistle is as true and as applicable to-day as it was thirteen years ago, and I quote the concluding sentences of it here as being both a powerful argument in behalf of an oppressed people, and as a testimony to the liberty-loving spirit of a Cardinal of the Catholic Church:

“Six millions of men in Russia are so hemmed in and hedged about by penal laws as to residence, and food, and education, and property, and trade, and military service, and domiciliary visits, and police inspection as to justify the words, that ‘no Jew can earn a livelihood,’ and that ‘they are watched as criminals.’ The narratives before us may be highly coloured, they may be overcharged; but, all deductions made, they show both a violent and a refined injustice, which is perpetually as ‘iron entering the soul.’

“And, further, when the cry of such a multitude of suffering is wafted through the commonwealth of Europe, it is surely a part of the comity of nations that we should, with all due respect, make known what we have heard, in the confidence that, if things be so, the first to seek out and to treat such evils would be the supreme authority of the Realm from whence those wailing voices came.

“We show no disrespect in believing that what reaches our ears may not have reached the ears of those who are most highly exalted. Knowledge travels more readily on lower levels, and often does not ascend to the highest regions; the highest are, as a rule, the last to know the excesses and malpractices of their local authorities. We, therefore, with all due reverence, petition the Imperial Ruler of all the Russias to take account of all the Governors of the Jewish Pale; and even this we should not venture to do, if the sufferings alleged were not of such a kind and of such an extent as to violate the great and primary laws of human society. On this broad and solid base of natural law the jurisprudence of European civilisation rests. The public moral sense of all nations is created and sustained by participation in this universal common law; when this is anywhere broken, or wounded, it is not only sympathy but civilisation that has the privilege of respectful remonstrance.

“I am well aware of the counter allegations, not only of the anti-Semitic press, but of guarded and responsible adversaries; nevertheless, it is certain that races are as they are treated. How can citizens who are denied the rights of naturalisation be patriotic? How can men, who are only allowed to breathe the air, but not to own the soil under their feet, to eat only a food that is doubly taxed, to be slain in war, but never to command--how shall such a homeless, an exiled race live the life of the people among whom they are despised, or love the land which disowns them?

“It would seem to me that if such were the sufferings of any nation, even in Central Africa, we should be not only justified, but called on, to intervene. How much more, then, in behalf of a race who, in their past and their present and their future, demand of us an exceptional reverence; a race with a sacred history of nearly four thousand years; a present without parallel;, dispersed in all lands, with an imperishable personal identity, isolated and changeless, greatly afflicted, without home or fatherland; visibly reserved for a future of signal mercy.

“Into this I will not enter further than to say that any man who does not believe in their future must be a careless reader, not only of the old Jewish Scriptures, but even of our own. It is not our duty to add to their afflictions, nor to look on unmoved, and to keep the garments when others stone them.

“If we know the mind of our Master who prayed for them in His last hour, we owe to them both the justice of the Old Law and the charity of the New.”

I have come from a journey through the Jewish Pale, a convinced believer in the remedy of Zionism. I failed to see any other that can offer an equal hope of success. It is a necessity of the actual situation, and faces the growing perils of the position of the Russian Jew with a courageous plan of repatriation. Hope for partial or ultimate emancipation in Russia there is none. Other countries cannot be expected to relieve Russia of the unhappy victims of oppression and poverty. Where, then, are they to go?

Russia has a direct responsibility in their impoverishment and discontent, and this fact demands at her hands every help which the Zionist plan requires in its execution, financial co-operation with the wealthy Jews of Christendom in providing the cost of emigration, the purchase of suitable land in Palestine, and in obtaining the necessary rights of settlement and guarantee of protection from the Turkish Government. This latter provision is generally believed to be an affair of money, to be arranged with the Sultan; but, in any case, the moral help of other great Powers would not be refused in such a chivalrous, humane enterprise when once the influential Jews of Europe and America made it, as they easily could do, an appeal for assistance to the sense of justice and of reparation of the nations of Christendom.

It is some eighteen years since I rode from Mount Carmel to Nazareth, thence to Tiberias, and back through the beautiful plain of Jezreel, down to Nablus in Samaria on the way to Jerusalem. Jericho, the wilds of Judea, the country to the west, across the pastoral lands of Sharon, were also visited. I found the German Templer colonies at Haifa, Nablus, and Sarona wearing all the appearance of comfortable clusters of garden and farming homesteads. The Jews of Bessarabia are as sober and as industrious and, at least, as intelligent as these German emigrants. They have progressed in South Russia when permitted to cultivate the land. Why should they not be able to grow grain in Galilee, fruit and olives in Samaria, meat in the mountains of Judea, and wine and other products congenial to the soil and climate in the vale of Sharon, and elsewhere, in a land which once flowed rich with milk and honey?

Christendom is prejudiced against this race because its sons are generally non-producers of wealth, and mere exploiters of the fruits and necessities of direct industry. This is largely, but by no means wholly, true, while the taunt bears with it the spirit of Pharisaical virtue unconscious of self-accusation. Twenty per cent. of the Jews of Bessarabia are artisans and labourers working for wages. But, if the race generally are exploiters and extortioners, who made them so? Are not historical conditions and centuries of deliberate oppression in every Christian land (Ireland honourably excepted) answerable for the Hebrew predilection to profit-seeking by other than the methods of immediate production? And are the Gentiles of the lofty moral school of critics so much above the doctrine and practice of the commercial greed of buying in the cheapest, and selling in the dearest, market? “Expedients of every kind and shade,” writes Herbert Spencer (“Philosophical Essays,” vol. ii., on “Commercial Morality”), “from innocent deception to anything you please, excepting open robbery, prevail even in the higher grades of the commercial world. Innumerable frauds, untruth, both in words and in principles of business, and carefully devised subterfuges are generally in vogue, while many of these have become established as commercial usages.”

It is on record somewhere that no Jew has ever become a millionaire in Scotland or in the United States. His powers of dextrous money-mongering are blunted in some pronounced Christian lands by methods as expert and morals as accommodating as his own. But, whatever ground there may be for the somewhat general feeling prevailing against the Hebrew race for its financial unscrupulousness ought to make for and not against the Zionist movement, which seeks to find a place of refuge and of safety for those whose present sufferings and unhappy prospects appeal to the best side of our common humanity.

Cardinal Manning’s noble words, quoted in support of this humble advocacy of the cause of an oppressed people, will surely find a direct response in every kindly heart and head which may reflect upon the story and the sufferings of the Russian Jew.