Chapter 2
The Zionist societies use every effort that the members and the Jewish masses in general may know the history of their nation, and become acquainted with the sacred and profane literature in the Hebrew tongue. They teach the Jews to hold their heads high, to be proud of their descent, and to despise the Anti-Semitic lies, calumnies, and insults. They care, in the measure of their strength, for the amelioration of the hygiene of the Jewish proletariat, for its economic improvement by means of association and solidarity, for well-directed education of children, and for the instruction of the women. They give the young students a goal for their efforts and an ideal in life. They preach the duty of leading a faultless, spiritual life, the rejection of a crude materialism, into which the assimilation Jews, on account of the want of a worthy ideal, are only too apt to sink, and strict self-control in word and deed. They found athletic societies in order to promote the long neglected physical development of the rising generation. They give a new impulse to the celebration of Jewish historical feasts and memorial days. In many instances they even make themselves outwardly conspicuous by wearing insignia. The Zionist regards it as contemptible to conceal his nationality. He wishes to be recognized as a Jew, and as he always behaves himself in a natural, unaffected way, plays no comedy of imitation, wishes to deceive nobody about his extraction and identity, intrudes upon no one under a false flag, his relations to his Christian neighbors and fellow-countrymen are sounder, truer, more frank and dignified than those of the assimilation Jew, who makes painful and useless efforts, which disgust every Christian possessing a modicum of good taste, to hide the fact that he is a Jew.
"(4.) Preparatory steps to obtain the consent of the governments necessary to achieve the aims of Zionism."
Several of the governments whose opinion will eventually be decisive in the matter have been, by means of memorials, reliably informed of the aims of Zionism; and there has been no want of very important encouragements and promising expressions of sympathy with its tendencies.
For the moment the committee of action is trying to obtain from Turkey a charter for the colonization of such land in Palestine as can be disposed of, and which at present is lying waste, and for the opening of its neglected resources. The exploiting of such a charter is not possible without considerable sums of money. In order to be armed financially for the time that Turkey will accord such a charter, the second Zionist congress (1898) decided to found a national Jewish bank institute, the "Jewish Colonial Trust," with its headquarters in London. This resolution was carried out the following year (1899). The bank has been brought into being. Its capital in shares is two million pounds sterling. It can, by the statutes, start business when one eighth of this capital, two hundred and fifty thousand pounds sterling, has been actually paid up. This has already been done.
Another financial instrument of Zionism is the "National Fund," created by the fifth congress (1901), which is raised by voluntary subscription and which is to amount to two hundred thousand pounds sterling. The half of this sum is to be devoted to the purchase of land in Palestine, the other half to remain an intangible common property of the Jewish people, which will by means of compound interest and gifts continually increase, so that at important junctures the interest may be used for great national purposes.
V.
I have taken pains to show, in as brief and as objective a manner as possible, what Zionism is, what it desires to do, how it came into being, and how it has developed up to the present. I have also repeatedly mentioned that its most violent opponents have arisen from the Jewish community.
Many of them content themselves with libeling and insulting the leaders of the Zionist movement. This kind of hostility they who are vilified can afford to despise. Men who, without expecting the slightest advantage to themselves, out of the purest, most unselfish love for the unhappy ones of their race, out of reverence for their forefathers, out of a general spirit of philanthropy, have made the greatest sacrifices in money, time, strength, and health, in order to elevate their people and to free millions of innocent, persecuted men from the bitterest misery, have the right smilingly to shrug their shoulders when irresponsible fanatics or pitiable paid scribes reproach them with self-interest or with vanity.
Besides these opponents of a lower type, there are others who do not merely lie and slander, but also seek to argue. They delight in comparing the apostles of Zionism with the false Messiahs like the notorious Sabbathai Levi, who have appeared only too often in Jewish history, and who have always done the greatest mischief to the Jewish people they have deceived. To compare Zionism with the vagaries or impostures of false Messiahs of the Sabbathai Levi kind, presupposes great foolishness or great bad faith. Zionism is precisely characterized by the complete absence of any mystical element. It promises its adherents no miracles; on the contrary, it continually impresses on them that their emancipation from a situation they find intolerable can only be the result of their own work, the fruit of their long, strenuous, and combined efforts.
People declare Zionism to be a dream, and deny that its practical realization is possible. To objections of this category the Zionists have a hundred times given a sufficient answer. This simple negative criticism can be passed over. Its only real refutation is in deeds, such as the Zionists have already performed and as they intend further to perform.
The one point which probably forever excludes the possibility of an understanding between Zionist and non-Zionist Jews is the question of the Jewish nationality. Whoever maintains and believes that the Jews are not a nation can indeed be no Zionist; he cannot join a movement which is only justified when it is admitted that it desires to create normal conditions of existence for a people living and suffering under abnormal conditions. He who, on the contrary, is convinced that the Jews are a people must necessarily become Zionist, as only the return to their own country can save the everywhere hated, persecuted, and oppressed Jewish nation from physical and intellectual destruction.
Many Jews, especially those of the West, have, in their heart of hearts, completely broken with Judaism, and they will probably soon do so openly, and if they do not break away, their children or grandchildren will. These desire to be entirely absorbed by their Christian fellow-countrymen. They resent it as a great annoyance when other Jews proclaim that they are a people apart, and desire to bring about an unequivocal separation between themselves and the other nations. Their great and constant fear is to be denounced as strangers in the land of their birth, of which they are free citizens. They fear that this will be more than ever the case, if a large section of the Jewish people openly claim for themselves rights as an autonomous nation, and still worse, if anywhere in the world a political and intellectual center of Judaism should really be created, in which millions of Jews would be grouped together, united as a nation.
All these feelings on the part of the assimilation Jews are comprehensible. From their standpoint they are justified. These Jews, however, have no right to expect that Zionism should for their sake commit suicide. The Jews who are happy and contented in the land of their birth, and who indignantly reject the suggestion of abandoning it, are about a sixth of the Jewish nation, say two millions out of twelve. The other five sixths, or ten millions, feel themselves profoundly unhappy in the countries where they reside, and they have every reason for doing so. These ten millions cannot be called upon to submit forever unresistingly to their thraldom, and to renounce every effort for redemption from their misery, merely in order that the comfort of two million happy and contented Jews may not be disturbed.
The Zionists are, moreover, firmly convinced that the misgivings of the assimilation Jews are unfounded. The reassembling of the Jewish people in Palestine will not have the consequences which they fear. When there is again a Jewish country, the Jews will have the choice of emigrating thither, or of remaining in their present home. Many will doubtless remain, and will prove by their choice that they prefer the land of their birth to their kindred and to their national soil. It is barely possible that the Anti-Semites will still throw the scornful and perfidious "stranger!" in their face. But the real Christians among their fellow-countrymen, those who think and feel according to the teaching and examples of the Holy Writ, will be convinced that they do not regard themselves as strangers in the land of their birth, and will then rightly comprehend the real meaning of their voluntary renunciation of a return to a land of the Jews, and of their fidelity to their homes and to their Christian neighbors.
The Zionists know that they have undertaken a work of unexampled difficulty. Never before has the effort been made to transplant, peacefully, in a short space of time, to another soil, several million people from various countries; never has it been attempted to transform millions of physically degenerate proletarians, without trade or profession, into agriculturists and cattle breeders, to bring townbred hucksters and trades people, agents, and men of sedentary occupation again into contact with the plough and the mother earth. It will be necessary to accustom Jews of different origins to one another, to train them practically to national unity, and at the same time to overcome the superhuman obstacles of difference of language, unequal civilization, and of the manners of thought, prejudices, likes, and dislikes of foreign nations, brought severally from the lands of their birth.
What gives the Zionists the courage to begin this labor of Hercules is the conviction that they are doing a necessary and useful work, a work of love and civilization, a work of justice and wisdom. They desire to save eight to ten millions of their kindred from intolerable suffering. They desire to free the nations among whom they now vegetate from a presence which is considered disagreeable. They wish to deprive Anti-Semitism--which everywhere lowers public morals and develops the very worst instincts--of its victim. They wish to make unquestionable producers out of the Jews at present reproached with being parasites. They desire to fertilize with their sweat and till with their hands a country that is to-day a desert, until it is again the flowering garden it has once been. Thus will Zionism in an equal degree serve the unhappy Jew and the Christian peoples, civilization and the economy of the world; and the services which it can render, and wishes to render, are great enough to justify its hope that the Christian world, too, will appreciate them, and support the movement with its active sympathy.
ANTI-SEMITISM
IN EUROPE
BY
DR. GUSTAV GOTTHEIL
THE TRUE NATURE OF ANTI-SEMITISM IN EUROPE
Anti-Semitism would be simply ridiculous if it were not so terribly in earnest. People who make that word a war cry upon a whole race ought to know its meaning, especially if it is to express the chief reason for their hostility. Before they prefix the "anti" to a word they should be sure that they understand the "pro," lest they be found to fight shadows merely, specters of their own creation. But how far is this the case? How many ever tried to learn the sense of the designation under which they have enrolled themselves? Suppose we ask, "What does Semitism mean?" Only this, must be our answer,--that it is a summing up of the ruling dispositions, habits, mental endowments, and moral peculiarities of all the races comprised under the name of Semites, so named from their supposed descent from the eldest of the three sons of Noah. So ineradicable are these features supposed to be that, no matter where the races have lived or are now living, no matter what stage of civilization they have passed through or have reached now, no matter what influence non-Semitic races have exercised upon them, they remain essentially the same. What are these features? Who will formulate the precise standard by which a descendant of Shem is unfailingly known and set apart from those of Ham or Japhet? When we consider that we are pointed back for the meaning of Semite to antediluvian times, that is to say, to one of the oldest myths of the world, we must admit that it would indeed be the wonder of wonders if a large section of mankind have a family likeness so clear that they are marked off from the rest. And this, despite the long ages that have passed since the supposed separation of the sons of Noah and their wide dispersion; despite their triumphs and defeats in wars, in state building, and church formation; despite the wide diversity between them in their literature, their philosophy, their art, their trades and industries. Are the Semites still characterized by the same gifts and tendencies of mind and heart, ruled by the same passions, subject to the same limitations, as were their ancestors in all their generations?
Among them there is a fraction, and that fraction again scattered over vast areas, in various states of civilization, and under diversified kinds of governments, enjoying liberty and rights of citizenship in the one, and groaning under relentless oppression in the other,--are they still none other than Semites? Are they so permeated with Semitic features that they can never amalgamate with their surroundings and become full-weighted citizens of the state where they pitch their tents,--offer them what inducements you may,--but must be kept at arms length and treated as suspects? Has nature lost all her power in this instance and become faithless to herself? Will the Hebrew child not love the land of its birth and feel the kinship with the people whose language and mode of life become its own? But why heap up improbabilities and impossibilities? The designation fastened upon us as a stigma was a fraud from the beginning, a conscious fraud and a malicious invention. It was "conceived in mischief and brought forth in iniquity." What was meant was not anti-Semitism, but _anti-Judaism_; but that name had to be avoided because it implies hostility to a religion and a creed; and that, again, might be construed as springing from an awakened zeal for the instigator's own Church; a suspicion they could not permit to rest upon them. No, it is not the Jew's religion that makes him obnoxious and a danger to the state, but it is his descent from the eldest son of Noah. True, the Jews have at no time adopted it as a national name. "Semitic" is of comparatively recent date, an abstract word intended merely for scientific classification, never meant for discrimination of any portion of the Semitic races, or to become a hissing and a byword or a mask for robbers of human rights and destroyers of human happiness.
The victims of this crusade are not a nameless horde for whom a designation had to be coined; they are known to history for three thousand years as Hebrews, Israelites, Jews, and they have no mind to exchange these names for any other. But a new "Hep Hep" was wanted, and so "Semites" was hauled from the world of books, disfigured, and fastened upon the Jewish gabardine in noble emulation of the barbarism of the Middle Ages. The more senseless, the more welcome it was as a bugbear to frighten the populace and to stir into flames the sparks of fanaticism which are always smouldering in the hearts of the vulgar, whether of low degree or high degree, worldly or ghostly.
The strangest thing, however, in this learned falsification is that it should have succeeded so well with people calling themselves Christians and clinging to that name often after they have given up all its historic substance. Is Christianity not purely Semitic at the core? Is it not based upon the Semitic conception of the relation between man and his Creator? The great efforts to liberalize and rationalize the Church which the last century witnessed, up to Professor Harnack's recent attempt to sum up "Das Wesen des Christenthums,"--what are all these but endeavors to free it from foreign accretions and envelopments and to bring its Semitic character into greater prominence?
It is the only Asiatic conception of religion that has subdued Europe and America, and that still holds undisputed sway over all its diverse nationalities. The very name which symbolizes to them all that is noblest, purest, and most blessed, points to that source as unfailingly as the needle of the compass to the poles. Harnack claims that Christianity is not one religion amongst others, but _The Religion_, the only one fulfilling all the conditions of its highest ideal. The Being in whom that fulness of light was revealed,--was he not a Semite of the Semites? Did he ever deny his origin? Christianity means _Messianity_, and the whole idea of a Mashiach,--the anointed, namely, anointed ruler,--is most intensely national and, therefore, intensely Semitic,--from which indisputable fact it follows that the loftiest conception of religion came to the world from that source. Thence came the Bible,--the book of the world which has been translated into every living tongue and dialect, and to the elucidation of which hosts of scholars still devote their lives. Painting, sculpture, music, poetry, have attempted their highest flights under its inspiration. From countless pulpits its moral and religious truths are expounded, week after week, and on every great occasion of national significance,--in whatever part of Christendom it may occur,--the Songs of Zion are awakened as the fittest expressions of the prevailing sentiment. The Psalter is the most wonderful of existing books,--at home alike in the palace of the king and the cottage of the peasant, the inexhaustible theme of our masters of music. Noeldeke, Protestant professor at the University of Strasburg, one of the great lights of Semitic scholarship, declares that "by the side of the Psalms all other religious hymns appear as pale imitations merely." On that field were gathered the sheaves which a master hand has wound together into the One Universal Prayer, in which all Churches join with one accord. And the Universal Day of Rest,--that one sure blessing of the laboring man,--whence did it come? What other legislator had the divine audacity to make its observance one of the foundation laws of his constitution, and to give it precedence, even over all moral enactments?
Professor R.F. Grau of the conservative school of theology writes:--
"God is a living, holy, loving Being. He is not first and foremost to be scientifically comprehended, but worshipped and revered in the heart, and because He is such a Being, the Semites had to be chosen as His apostles to the whole world. For they had a heart for Him in the beginning.... The Semite has the religion of the Infinite, and as this is the perfect religion, ... the Church, as the Community of Christ, has sprung from the Semitic mustard seed, although at present myriads of Indo-germanics dwell under the branches of the tree."
In the face of admissions like these by men who have a right to be heard in the matter, and considering that the tree can never change the nature of the root from which it sprang, the conclusion is not unwarranted that "anti-Semitic" is a synonym for "anti-Christian."
Its success is due to the still persistent prejudice against the Jews among so many Christians,--all their professions to the contrary notwithstanding. And it continues for several reasons. One is its long duration; it has lasted for ages and is ingrained in their feelings and ideas. What if it be shown ever so clearly that it is unjust, unreasonable, yea, even unchristian!--that will not materially change the temper of the great masses of the people. The common man is rarely swayed by the force of arguments; the power of a principle, so weighty with the thinkers, is of no consequence to him. He belongs to the material world, and to make good his place in it is the aim toward which all his energies are bent. For things spiritual he has neither time nor capacity. He is ruled by the sentiments which were implanted in him in his youth and by his immediate surroundings. All thinking must be done for him; all new ideas must be presented to him, as it were, ready made and in tangible form. He does not push himself forward, but must be led onward by hands that understand him and his ways. But in this instance, his guides are not particularly anxious to bring about a change for the better,--even if we suppose that they consider the liberation from prejudice against the Jews a betterment. They have their own theological difficulty to contend with. The Jews are still unconverted, and the missions established and maintained for the purpose of winning them over can show no better results now than in the past. The chief controversy between the Church and Israel stands to-day where it stood when it was first raised at Jerusalem eighteen centuries ago. A judicial sentence of a court at Jerusalem has grown into a pivotal point on which, as the Church declares, turns the salvation of mankind for time and eternity; and if she is right, the Jews must be wrong. Since that fatal occurrence, Christianity, in one form or another, has conquered Europe and America, and has planted outposts in almost every part of the earth, but has not been able to subdue the Jew. Every conceivable means to make him surrender has been tried, including that of the jailor and the executioner and all the horrors that lie between them,--expulsion, pillage, social degradation, impaling in ghettos, and what not--but in vain. The same policy is continued to this day as far as the present more civilized state of the Christians permits; but still in vain. So far are their persecutors from having brought the Jews to their knees, that the self-consciousness of the race, as a whole, has deepened; and their advance in general culture enables them to measure swords, intellectually, with their accusers and to give a reason for the faith that is in them.