The Maccabaean

Dr. Max Heller has written a very lucid account of the present status of Zionism, which appeared in the New Orleans Item of June 28. Dr. Heller is a graceful and clear thinking writer, whose direct contributions to Zionist thought are not as numerous Zionists would have them. The article follows:

The situation, so far a sthe Zionist movement is concerned, is possibly more puzzling now that it has ever been. The newspaper reader is aware that something resembling a revolution has taken place in Turkey, whereby the crafty old sultan, with his autocratic system, has been removed and the "young Turks," a party with a liberal platform along lines of modern progress, placed in power. Just how permanent this change is likely to be, whether it will prove no more than one of the many palace revolutions, a change of despotic cliques, a victory of the outs over the ins, or whether it brings a permanent alignment of Turkey with the constitutional methods of Western governments, it is not easy to say. There are those, indeed, who claim that the revolution is altogether a European move of most of which the enormously larger Asiatic portion of the Empire knows nothing and with which it is not in sympathy.

While there is something plausible about this claim, it must be remembered on the other hand, first, that Constantinople is the political, financial, intellectual and religious head of the empire; then that the Sheikh Ul Islam, the Mohammedan pope, is in thorough accord with the movement; that the leaven of modernism has been at work for decades, both in European Turkey and in Western Asia Minor; that the desire for parliamentary government dates some decades back; that, lastly, the universal, spontaneous joy with

which the triumph of the young Turks was welcomed throughout European Turkey and contiguous Asia, together with other manifestations, ought to go to some length toward proving the state of public feeling.

Turkey is in many ways better prepared for constitutional forms than Persia is, whose popular ignorance, incredible poverty and religious fanaticism, as well as remoteness from civilization, render the experiment an unpromising one. The Turk, by universal testimony, possesses those solid elements of uprightness, intelligence and love of order which form a steadfast basis for self-government.

The position of the Jews in this struggle was a difficult one. The dethroned sultan, whatever his faults may have been, had been more liberal and kindly towards them than almost any other European sovereign; Jews had, under him, ranked high in army and navy, especially in the medical service; he had been among the first to succor the sufferers of the Kishineff masacre and had in many other ways exhibited a religious toleration to which his nearest neighbors were utter strangers. On the other hand, he had passed stringent laws against Jewish immigration and Jewish landholdings in Palestine; to the Zionist movement he had, now and then, held out encouragement in that elusive and incalculable way for which his diplomacy had become proverbial.

That the Turkish Jews, however, viewed their place in the empire in no selfish, chauvinistic way, became readily apparent in the prominent and enthusiastic part which they took in this, as in so many previous revolutions. It is, by the way, one of the most interesting sidelights on Jewish national character, how ardent-