The Maccabaean

that we must enlist this interest among Jews dispersed throughout the world. The scattered Jewries will find in Palestine an object of common interest, a cause for united participation and in its successful development a common joy. And while their participation will help to upbuild Palestine and to regenerate its inhabitants, it will also help to regenerate Jewish inter-

ests and Jewish life throughout the world.

We make our apeal to our brethren in the name of the same ideal which has been the constant hope and prayer of our people, everywhere and at all times since the dispersion, the hope and the prayer which have given us strength and sustained us during our long martyrdom until this day.

WE hear it said that history never repeats itself. It all depends on what is meant by history. If the single event at a given time with all its individual coloring, then, indeed, each stands forth unique; it was, but it had not been and will never be again. But if by history we mean the typical and general, that which results from a constellation of causes which may recur again and again, nay, from undying motives, from eternal principles, then, indeed, history does repeat itself, and the science of history, aiming at the fixed law, the universal rule, will endeavor to make good its interpretations of the past by predicting the future and comprehending the present. This, of course, is the ideal which the historian is far from attaining. The predictive office belongs to the prophet. A student of history he is, but the search of archives does not exhaust his interests; with the poet he shares the warmth of feeling, the glow of enthusiasm, but he is no idle dreamer; he resembles the practical statesman in that he makes and shapes history and knows how to gauge the opportune moment, but his insight into the events with which he is contemporary and his foresight of the things that are to come are surer and truer, because born of that intuition which comes to the seer by the grace of the Spirit that is at the centre of the great drama called World-history.

Such a seer was the great prophet of the rhapsody Zion Restored, the great Zionist of the Exile. From a superficial point of view, he spoke to the generation of the Babylonian exile solely; and if that were so, our interest in him would be merely academic, and I with my subject would be out of place at this gathering. But the Synagogue has with a deeper insight invested his prophecies with a potency extending far beyond the immediate needs of the generation to whom they were addressed, and found in him the spokesman of the longings and hopes of the later and longer exile. The Church, with its interest centered upon the one Jew in whom the whole of Jewish destiny culminated, thenceforth to be merged in the ocean of humanity, celebrates the Babylonian seer as the evangelist of the New Covenant; and the denationalized Jewry of our own days in the cloak of prophetic Judaism sings the praises of the great universalist. Both rid themselves of the unwelcome bulk of a dyed-in-the-wool nationalism by the old method of allegorical interpretation or by the more questionable process of castration. Allegory means making a man say things he never meant to say; castration is downright falsification and, I believe, among Jews, an abomination. We Zionists, at one with the historic consciousness of our people, approach the ancient prophecies with an