The Maccabaean

(The following essay was written by Dr. Pasmanik, the able Russian Zionist, in 1906, at the time when the question of securing a charter from Turkey was being discussed with a great deal of vagueness. Dr. Pasmanik aims to show that a charter is required by the movement, but that it needs first of all legalized concessions. The essay has been translated in English from the Yiddish, and has been curtailed by the elimination of matter of a controversial nature that has no bearing on Dr. Pasmanik’s thesis.)

WHEN Zionists speak of obtaining a charter, they must by all means consider the unusual position of the Jews with relation to the government from which they hope to secure it, as well as their relation to the Powers, who are expected to give the legal guarantees to the charter.

Let us examine then, briefly, the evolution of the charter in history.

First in order are the charters granted by a government to its own subjects, for use in its own territory. In England, France and Spain, charters were granted by royal fiat to their own subjects, and these eharters were of a political nature. For example, the Magna Charta in England, and the provincial town charters in France and Spain. These charters granted political rights or fiscal privileges, but no territorial concessions. The charter was assured, limited by the fact that its life depended upon the good-will of the royal power which had granted it. In England the people who had wrested the charter from the sovereign, remained victorious, but in France and Spain the sovereigns repudiated rights wrested from them by force when the force weakened.

But we are not in a position to discuss this sort of a charter, for the Jews at present do

not constitute an integral portion of the Turkish Empire, as do the Armenians or the Macedonians. We are not on Turkish territory, nor are we bound up with the industrial life of the country. A people bound up with the land is the very basic idea, from which issues a political or fiscal charter, as described in the foregoing paragraph. That is why we require a concession of an economical nature in order that we may establish a lasting bond between the individual and the territory—between the Jew and Palestine; and, in the second place, it will be a long time yet before we shall constitute an actual force to guarantee the charter, when once secured.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a new form of charter appeared to meet entirely new circumstances. Then occurred the discoveries of new lands, and territorial conquests in foreign parts. England, in 1601, guaranteed to a private English company a monopoly to exploit the East Indian country. This charter granted to the company legislative and executive privileges. Of a similar nature were the charters granted by Holland, France and Portugal, in the seventeenth century. These faraway countries, over which the charters thus granted extended, were regarded as res nullius. Any one could appropriate territory on transoceanic continents, provided one was able to displace the occupants. The object of the charter, however, was not so much the seizure of land as the accumulation of wealth. The land was not occupied for colonization by Europeans, but for the exportation of wealth in the form of gold or produce.

Zionists cannot consider this form of a charter, however, for these reasons: Because Palestine is not res nullius, and cannot be taken without the consent of its legal possessors; because no European Power can