The Maccabaean

WITH the death of Dr. Herzl, Zionism lost its great leader, but at the same time regained, so to say, its liberty, its individuality. Herzl was the originator, the great organizer, the untiring worker; but he was also the despot as the great leaders usually are, whose very handshake kills resistance, and whose utterances blight the will of their opponents. He gave a new meaning to Zionism, and put it on a broader and more popular basis; but freeing it from the previous narrow confines of a Hibbath Zion, from a pettiness that bordered rather on charitableness than on nationality, he enthralled it by his powerful personality and imprisoned it within the broader yet exclusive confines of Political Zionism. To this main issue he made other Zionist activities, such as cultural work in the diaspora subservient, and present active work in Palestine almost traitorous. And his views were shared by his present adherents.

What road the genius of Herzl might have finally taken after the failure of Political Zionism as such, is hard to tell. The Uganda plan, as a way out of the dilemma, can hardly serve as a precedent. It would have probably ended for him too with the return of the expedition, and would by no means have led him into abstract Territorialism, for which his mind was too concrete. However, at his death he bequeathed the dilemma to his followers. And here the inevitable happened. Herzl’s successor did not have the ability to hold by sheer personal strength the dilemma in abeyance. The more consistent—or, shall I say, stubborn ’—disciples of Herzl, true to the memory and the precepts of the master, went to the logical extreme of purely Political Zionism, and formed the Territorialist move- men—whereas the more sober clung to their Zionistic acquisitions, to its material and spiritual gain in Zion and abroad, but retreated

one step in order to make two forward. With the latter, with all their loyalty to the memory of the previous leader, his policy has been reversed. Instead of the political aspect of the movement being both the means and the end of realizing Zionism, it has now retained the role of the end of Zionistic aspirations, whereas, for the means of the realization of Zionism, national and cultural work in the diaspora and Zionist activity in Palestine have been regarded as more purposive.

This view has now, since the powerful but cramping hand of the master has been removed, became prevalent in almost all Zionist circles; and, as a consequence, we see the individuality of Zionism asserting itself everywhere as a thorough national movement. Culturally it constantly widens its sphere and absorbs or stimulates other cultural movements; and at the same time, contributes to the advancement of the political and economic welfare of the Jews in the diaspora; it devotes its attention to immediate activity in Palestine, in all its phases which lead to the final rehabilitation of the latter by our people. These tendencies and activities are common to all Zionist centers; yet each center presents a different aspect of Zionist or national activity, in accordance with the local problems that come there to the fore.

Russia, with her bulk of Jewish people, was the country where not only the Jewish problem was presented, in all its varying aspects, but where was first offered its solution in the more primitive form of Zionism, Hibbath Zion. Zionism had there its first theorists in a Pinsker, a Lilienblum, an Achad Haam, and its practical enthusiastic adherents who went to Palestine to lay there the cornerstone of a modern Jewish habitat, and to make possible a modern defined active-work-in-Palestine Zionism. It is true that, of late, in the political