The Maccabæan
EDITORIAL PAGES
A Choice of Duties
IN his London letter in the Saturday Review of the "N. Y. Times" of May 3rd, William L. Alden says :
Mr. Zangwill has a short story in one of the m gazines this month, but with that exception he has published nothing of consequence for a long time, and there is no prospect of new novels from his pen. The truth is that Zionism has engrossed Mr. Zangwill's attention so completely that he had little time for anything else. He evidently dreams of being a new Moses and of leading his people back to the promised land again. The dream does not just at present seem to be on the point of materializing, but Mr. Zangwill is full of hope and confidence. Those who have read and admired Mr. Zangwill naturally regret that he should devote to merely philanthropic and national aims the talents which were evidently given to him in order that he might write novels. What does it matter who possesses Palestine so long as we have novels like those which Mr. Zangwill wrote a few years ago? Novelists should stick to their trade and not meddle with other things. When Thackeray tried to get into Parliament and was defeated every one who really admired his books mus have been thankful. He had no business in the House. There were some thousands of men then in England who could legislate acceptably, but there was no one else who could have written “Henry Esmond.”
Mr. Alden's question is Mr. Zangwill's justification. If men of his power and position know so little of Zionism as to class it with "merely philanthropic and national aims," the need of voices like that of Zangwill to diffuse a better knowledge of it, is clearly enough demonstrated. Mr. Alden seems to be unaware of the fact that the question which Zionism labors to solve is one of life and death to hundred thousands of human beings who are at this moment being .crushed under a yoke of oppression which for cruelty and injustice vies with that of Egypt of old. If Zangwill does desire to become their Moses, it proves that he is more than a writer of novels, that he is a true-hearted man and a high-minded spirit, and if he has taken the greatest man in history (and we call Moses so not as a mere phrase of rhetoric, but in sober earnest) that again shows that he considers the respons-
ibility for his talents many fathoms deeper down than those of a mere novelist and we must cry out to him: “All hail to the brave leader to whom the woes of his suffering brethren are a louder admonition than the flattering homage of the novel-devouring public,” most of whom read only because they have nothing else to do and want to be amused and entertained. Moses may also have fancied until his eightieth year that he had received “his talents” for the purpose of providing new songs and “Reigentaenze” for the shepherdess of the desert and to furnish material for critics to praise or blame. But the hour came when the divine voice summoned him to his true place and the real work for which the many years of deep and silent brooding were after all but a consecration. Vain was all resistance to that Voice; as it always is when God really speaks in the heart of man. To compare Zangwill’s pleading with Thackeray’s puny venture for a seat in Parliament is but another and a stronger proof of the total blindness of men like Mr. Alden to the problem which is pressing with even greater weight upon the bosom of the martyr nation.
G. GOTTHEIL.
Mr. Wolf on Zionism
WE have great respect for the Hon. Simon Wolf of Washington. He has at all times valiantly defended the rights of Jews in this country, and has labored earnestly and zealously to destroy many petty prejudices against them. Recently he wrote an article on Zionism in a Washington paper in which he falls into several errors we feel called upon to correct. We do this knowing that Mr. Wolf misinterprets the movement from no desire to misrepresent. Before we consider the objections we should like to give his opinion of the importance of the movement. He said :
There are several phases connected therewith [with the Zionist movement] that should be considered most carefully, for the local conditions which have given rise to the movement lend color and give emphasis to its appearance that do not strike the public at large and are not responded to by the Jewish community as a whole, especially in the United States. The leaders of this movement, through whose inspiration it has grown into what may be justly termed a world eminence, were, no doubt, inspired by disinterested and noble sentiments, created by the lamentable and deplorable situation of the Jews in Russia, Galicia and Romania, and who, no