of a national fund of dollars and cents. For, while we possess a great reserve fund in the past creations of our genius, surely even the ocean may be drained and the richest treasures exhausted. The fountains of Jewish originality must be made to well up again that the river of living water may gladden the city of God. Zionism, convinced that Jewish consciousness, on the periphery through gradual attrition, must suffer destruction, undertakes to prepare betimes a centre for maintaining intact and unfolding the potencies of the Jewish genius.
“V, Zionism means to me, above all, / orientation. It rcasserts the prophetie conN vietion of the indestructibility of Israel. “If the ordinances of the sun by day, and of the moon and stars by night, depart from before Me, then the seed „of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before Me forever. Zionism preelaims that in the going back (tessubah) to Jewish life and Jewish ideals and Jewish hopes lies our salvation. Its work must necessarily consist, on the one hanl, in strengthening the hands of those who vo.unteer to build up
the waste places on the hills of Palestine, and, on the other, in building up the Jewish consciousness in the diaspora Jew. Zionism will respect the synagogue and the Jewish school and so reinforce them that they may become nurseries of the reawakened Jewish spirit, where in particular the Hebrew language shall be euiti- vated, the holy tongue in which alone the Jewish soul can adequately express itself, in which the former revelations were uttered and in which the latter shal! likewise be given to the world. Zionism will also re- eognize that each evuntry has its own problem for Judaism, and arrive at a truer for- ınula whereby we may adjust ourselves to our environment without forfeiting our national conseiousness. In all matters affecting Jewry, Zionism wi.l take a leading part. We stand for the whole of Jewry, and not for a part thereof. We are the vanguard, that the laggards shall not remain far behind.
"With assurances of my highest esteem,I am, with Zion's greetings,
Yours most truly,
MAX MARGOLIS."
If I Had Known, Dear Master!
In Memoriam: Moritz Steinschneider, died January 28, 1907
If I had known, dear Master, when of late , I held thy hand within my own to say The thousand things I’d thought of on the way, But sheer forgot, for very awe, to state ;>— l£ I had known the summons was so near, And that thy presence never more would grace The little room which was the trysting place Of every scholar, booklover and seer That came from North, from South, from East and West, To call himself thy pupil and be blest— l fain would have besought thee to allow My unclean lips to kiss the wizard hand That made of learning such a wonderland, And lost its matchless cunning only now.