Of all the expressions which the ideal of Zion has received there has ben none more widespread than the philanthropic or more fervent than the religious. To help the sufferer, to support the weak, to right a people's wrongs—these voice a perennial desire and have a perennially vague satisfaction; the more so, as more often than not, charity and conscience-money are one and the same thing. Deeper than the charitable lies the religious instinct which makes Zion the symbol for the restoraion of a cult and the rehabilitation of an outgrown and transcended ideal. The cause of Zion can not be rooted deep if its espousal can be only by philanthropists and religionists, and its sanction lie in the mere satisfaction of animal needs and the reconstitution of a cult. The moral warrant of a race-movement is not to befound in the filling of an empty stomach or the rearing of a temple; to rest it on philanthropy is to satisfy an instinct without convincing the reason, to rest it on religion is to fulfill a prejudice without valuation of its data. Unhappiness does not jusity the continuance of a futile existence, nor is the conception of a divinely-sanctioned destiny even a quicksand foundation for an ineffective life. A philanthropic or religious Zionism, based as they are on sentiment and opinion rather than fact; on passion, rather than on law, are both inadequate for the ideal of Zion.
Nor is a question of people's right to survive determinable by their persistence.
Many noxious things persist. A virility of vigor merely biologie, which has no other expression than the bare eneum- bering of the earth with a vegetative mass. of people, more or Jess parasitic and always depleting of the more significant growth is cternally sanctioned for sueh annihilation as the Jew knows in Russia and experienced in Spain. In the moral world to be and to be right are not identieal; and it is only a sophistry that makes them so in the natural world. If what he anti-Jew maintains against him is true, the Jew is a noxious weed and Zionism is immoral. It seeks to posit and maintain in its individuality a people deliterious to the growth of the human kind, a parasitie alicn to the co-operative solidarity of the struggling family of peoples. Nor is Zionism moral and ethically well-grounded if the anti-Jew is wrong, and that Jewish critic of his race right, who maintains his people to be functionally helpful, not, however, in their individuality as Jews, but: as members of a varying nationality,. Turk, English, French or Russian. Zionism then becomes a mere sentiment and false. For it is unethical to assert a useless distinction as to espouse an evil cause; and to add to the columns of misunderstanding a new malrepresentation which shall further clog the world’s moveiment is no less immoral.
Not religion, then, nor philanthropy,nor physical vigor, nor sentiment can together or each alone constitute a warrantfor rehabilitating the Jewish nation.