The Maccabaean

ZIONISM is not merely a solution of the Jewish question. It is not like the atomic theory, or the Darwinian theory. It is not merely an argument which logically proves a certain thing, and which you must, as a logical being, accept and cease combatting. If you see the truth of it you are not saved. It is not merely a program. If it were, discussion, education, argument, etc., would be the simple method of propaganda, and it could get along without orators, songs or displays, without appeals to the imagination, without poetry or enthusiasm.

Theodor Herzl expressed it right when he said that a return to Judaism would precede the realization of the object of Zionism, but by the word Judaism, I take it, Herzl meant a return to the fervor and enthusiasm, a return to faithfulness, which has always been associated with religion in its larger sense.

Before Zionism, which is the means of escape from the goluth, can become a reality, it must be preceded by the rebirth of emotion, which, among Jews, will take the form of religious enthusiasm. You may talk for centuries of theories, of certain truths—as reform Jews talk of the Jewish mission—but until the souls of the persons appealed to have been quickened, until the idea has become related to their

*Read before the Nordau Zionist Society, Auditorium, Educational Alliance, Jan. 23, 1909.

own being, the idea, or the theory, or the truth, is just so much junk in the intellectual treasury of the world and nothing more.

An annual exhibition of spiritual and intellectual squinting and dodging is given by the Central Conference of American Rabbis, who also speak of truths, Jewish ideals, etc. It is not many years since that dignified body of wanderers in the desert of barren ideas and empty phrases, declared that the Jews do not constitute a nation, that Washington is our Jeurasalem and the United States our Zion, and yet, that idea, unrelated to the life and thought of the Jewish people, actually untrue to Jewish life, has floated about the United States, the object of ridicule, a gratuitous fling at the aspiration of loyal sons of the Jewish people, a useless, impudent, foolish idea. for it never had a basis in the lives of Jews who have the right to speak as Jews. The force of spiritual necessity has even brought into the fold of Zionism a large number of the very men who at the time stood by and passively permitted the rabbinical stupidity to speak.

The Jewish mission has dwindled down to a mere whisper, and is heard now only in apologetic terms, for the force of circumstances has swept it off the boards, and it is now properly taking its place in the archives of American Jewish history, which our alert American Jewish Committee is compiling for the edification of future generations. It was an artificial