THEODOR HERZL
1860---1910.
HAD Theodor Herzl lived to this month, he would have been fifty years old. He was a young man when he died, only forty-four, and yet the impression he made upon Jewish life was so deep and far-reaching that it seems as if he had been working for the Jewish cause for decades. And more than that. Thirty-six of his forty-four years were spent in the service of an alien life, undisturbed by the plaints of his brethren, concerned with the trivial and frivolous life of the Austrian capital. There he had a reputation as a tolerably able writer of light dramatic pieces; he was a bright feuilletonist; he was an agreeable companion. It was Jewish life that transformed him. He became the leader of the Jewish people in a night. He left every thing of the old life behind him: success as a playwright, comfort, easy-going ambitions, and deliberately plunged into a battle, whose difficulties he little knew at the time, but whose hardships never caused him to flinch. He became an orator, instead of a conversationalist. He became a statesman, instead of a non-resident citizen. He fought for the Jewish people, suffered for them and died for them. There is no exaggeration in that. He died for them. When he knew that persistence in exciting affairs meant an early death, he could not retire from the field. He would not, although he knew death stared him in the face. There is something in Zionism that compels a certain obstinacy, a certain grandiose indifference to individual interests. It is as if the national spirit were a living thing, and it seized hold of a man, and held him to the task, chastened him in the struggle and purified out of him the dross of personal interests. So it seemed with Herzl, our leader, who was, and who still gives direction and holds up the example of his life to all of us, who, in our own feeble way, pray that the spirit of our nation take possession of us, and make us impervious to the appeals of our own self-interest, and devoted, without equivocation, without doubt, to the rebirth, in the real world, of the Jewish nation.