The Maccabaean

the Jew is a thousand fold greater than the American's need of the Cuban. For this once, the Jew—the middle man and marked man, the peddler and the huckster have first class economic value. From Constantinople to Medina; from the Bosphorus to the Euphrates, the mixed multitude of Araby must turn to the only other safe mixed multitude, the Jews, to give the commercial stamina which alone can help achieve political success.

drive a bargain. Ask for a rug and the reply is "It is not for sale." So did the sons of Hamor when Abraham came to them to buy the cave of Machpelah. So both sides understood the methods "current with the merchant." The question that remains, is can the buyer conceal his impatience whilst by the curious nature of the case he has to admit his anxiety to make a trade? That is why Herzl—but that thought will keep for another day.

I.

It was forcibly said by Emma Lazarus that if only a single Jew survived of the millions who have inhabited the earth, all mankind would yearn to gaze upon the last member of so remarkable a race. But unfortunately, not one, but many survive, and the treatment accorded them in the past and present is well known. Yet the very persecution of the Jews but serves to bring out more luminously the twofold aspect of as wonderful a human problem as was ever offered for solution. For nowhere in the history of man has one single race persisted and endured with so little essential alteration in ethnological characteristics through so many centuries of progress and change, as the Jews. And nowhere in the history of man have so many efforts been made to exterminate a people, nowhere has any people excited such universal hatred and persecution as the Jews.

I do not purpose to enter into the causes either of the long life of the Jewish nation or of the fact of anti-Semitism, even if it were possible to settle on those causes with any hope of their acceptance by others. But I do wish to note the fact that Zionism is an attempt to meet both these aspects of the Jewish problem. It is, in effect, an attempt to silence the outcries of anti-Semitism by giving to the

Jewish people a home where they may continue to exist, not scattered in exile, but one and united; Zionism will at least draw its :fangs, so as to speak, by making the Jews, not a perished, but a rejuvenated nation. To have the Jews a numerous and powerful people will extinguish anti-Semitism just as surely as to have them dead and forgotten would do so.

But unfortunately Zionism must hew Its way through a forest of difficulties. It might seem as if the mere announcement of Zionism ought to attract to its standard every Jew in the wide world. A solution of a vexing problem, so simple, an end to sorrow so gratifying, a stop to persecution so sublime ought surely to inspire every Jewish heart with enthusiasm and devotion. But need one say what the real answer to Herzl's appeal has been? And yet Herzl, and we with him have perhaps expected too much.

The main obstacle in the way of a unanimous acceptance of Zionism are two. The first of these obstacles lies in the fact that the Jews are a people of an enormously prolonged exile—a nation that even in the days of the kings of Judah was in intermittent banishment, and that since eighteen hundred years has been a homeless wanderer on the face of the earth. During all this time Jews have called with tears