A Minority Movement
THE Zionist movement represents a minority. It does not claim, nor has it ever claimed, that the entire Jewish people has recovered to such an extent from the weakening influences of the goluth as to become conscious of the problem of Jewish life involved in the goluth, and particularly of the solution of that problem that is offered by the Zionist movement.
We speak, however, in the name of those Jews who live in the present and see into the future, who refuse to abide by an interpretation of life which is bound to destroy Jewish unity and brotherhood, and to lead to a future in which the Jewish position will be that happy one which Israel Zangwill prophesied of all the peoples living in this country, of being unidentifiable particles in the turbulent hash of the American melting pot.
The indifferent Jew, the materialistic Jew, the Jew who prates of a cosmopolitanism which no human being can ever actually feel, the hand-to-mouth Jew who proclaims the glory of God when he is granted sufficient bread to eat:—these, who are in the majority, we are sorry to say, in the scattered condition of Jewry, these we do not represent nor do we claim that they are favorably disposed toward our effort to rebuild the Jewish nationality. They are the modern Lost Tribes of Israel, whose destiny it is to disappear as entities from the knowledge of mankind, and to be remembered in our history as ineffectual particles, subject to the overpowering attraction of alien forces, and eventually disappearing in them.
The Jews who returned out of Babylon with Nehemiah were the minority. The Jews who stubbornly resisted the onslaughts of the Romans, were the minority. The Jews who rallied about Bar Cochba were the minority. The Maccabees were supported by a handful of men.
The Spanish Jews who remained true to their people, were in the minority. It has always been a minority that has preserved the best in Jewish life, that sacrificed the present for the future, that has given generously of itself for the sake of the generations to come. It is therefore with pride that we Zionists say that not in numbers, nor in power, but in the power of God's spirit and in the truth of our object lies our strength. Our supporters are the men and women who remember the promise of Israel's past, and they are poor, without influence, but they are rich in the wealth that makes kingdoms powerful.
The thing that is close to you, that you see plainly before you, unhaloed by the effect of distance, seems commonplace and ordinary. You meet your relatives so often in the family circle that you are unable to see anything great in anything they do. The prophet is not without honor, save in his own country, or city, or family. So too Zionists themselves after a while lose the sense of appreciating the greatness, the ideality, of the task they are engaged in performing. They see shares of the Colonial Trust before them, shekels and stamps and funds without number, and organization strife and bickerings, and after a while the vision of the magnitude of the work before them becomes blurred, and while they go about doing their duty, they do it in an automatic, half-conscious way, as if the vision of beauty had palled upon them, and they were incapable of seeing the greatness and the importance of the movement.
It is good to speak occasionally of the abstract, the whole of which the concrete things are but the reflection, to show the ideality of our movement as it may be viewed in the light of history, as it appears in the soul of him who while working in the vineyard in a purely menial task, sees before him the picture of the Great Hope realized, the things we are