The Maccabaean

SOME of the most uncompromising opponents of Zionism concede to the movement the attribute of spirituality. They go so far as to maintain that it is the only movement in the Judaism of to-day that deserves to be described as spiritual. Yet the Zionist who depends for the steadfastness of his purpose and the strength of his conviction upon the concessions of the ad- ve sary, will find the concession of spirituality a rope of sand. These apparently generous opponents bestow with one hand only to take with the other. Their approval is followed by a “but.” They express doubt in the ability of Jews to govern themselves, which is tantamount to mistrust at once in the spiritual strength of the Jew and his practical skill. They confess fear of a movement that purposes to concentrate Jews in one locality and constitute them a body independent of other peoples in the making of its laws and the guarding of its welfare. For a state Jewish in composition and complexion, they foresee anarchy and corruption within, war and annihilation from without. They hold that Jewry would gather itself together from all corners of the globe for a Nero of the Jew-haters the better to fell the whole nation at a single blow, and they prophesy that floundering Jewry will prove its own Nero.

Of such paradoxes is Jewish history made up: libraries of books have been written to solve the mystery of a nation stripped of land and language, existing for centuries; and now it is feared that the same nation cannot live, or cannot live worthily, if it should come into possession of its land and its language.

The commendation of the adversaries of whom we are speaking is tainted with the time-worn fallacy that there is such a thing as a good theory which yet is incapable of being applied in practice. Or it rests upon a puerile misunderstanding of the term spiritual, a blurred notion that spiritual is synonymous with utopian, and

that what is visionary is admirable solely because it is visionary,—a transfer to the moral sphere of the principle on which young authors and readers admire “fine writing.”

Their distrust is a serious indictment, more sweeping than they seem to know. It is distrust, not only of the efficacy of the Zionist movement, of the comity of the nations, of the powers and the character of the Jew, but, bluntly, of Judaism itself. The inference from their inconsistent opinions of Zionism is that Judaism is what its enemies for two thousand years have been asserting it to be, an effete system, a dead-alive issue, an aglomerate of legal quibbles and antiquarian curiosities, without generative power or progressive vital impulse; at best, an utopian vision whose realization would be an anachronism.

Nothing but the event can demonstrate whether a plan for the Jewish State worked out by Zionists assembled in council will prove in all its details practicable and wise. The point under debate is not, however, whether a scheme formulated by Zionists will turn out a good working plan. The question is whether the fundamental proposition set up by Zionism, namely, that the Jewish problem will be solved by the restoration of Jewish nationality, is true, and is capable of realization in one form or another.

The doubters cannot be silenced by being reminded of the diplomatic genius of a Beaconsfield, or the statemanship of a Lasker, or the mastery of jurisprudence by a Judah P. Benjamin, or the patriotic activity of a Riesser, a Crémieux, and a Luzzatti. They will reply, and with some degree of justice, that the ability and achievement of such Jews must be regarded as the product, not of Jewish genius, but of Jewish genius influenced, moulded, and perhaps transformed, by forces lying outside the Jewish range. If David Ricardo, Ferdinand Lassalle, Karl Marx, and Eduard Bernstein be cited to them as evidence that the