The Maccabaean

A CENTRAL point of conflict between Zionism and Reform Judaism, one of the chief causes of the frequent clashes between the two movements, has been the misunderstanding, on both sides, as to what is so often declaimed about and so rarely brought down to the solid soil of reality, as the Mission of Judaism

Reform preachers expose themselves to just ridicule when they claim it to be the mission of the modern Jew to convert the world to monotheism. A claim of that kind invites satire, first of all, because monotheism is to-day the creed of science, the philosophy of life, the goal of all the equivocations by which modern Christianity is seeking to shed its absurd dogmas and mythological tales, movements in which Jews have borne or are bearing no more than a subordinate part; secondly, because, sad to say, if a mission logically calls for the missionary spirit, it must be admitted that there is less of the zeal for religious propaganda among us than is to be found, perhaps, among the adherent of any faith; lastly, because we Reform Jews lack even the first of all requisites for missionary activity in the religious field, the deep religiousness, the strong conviction, the loyal observance which fit the missionary for his arduous work.

There is another reason, touching the Zionist more closely, why this assertion of missionary vocation has sounded a challenge to the consistent Zionist. As has been set forth again and again, whatever anagonism there is between the two movements of Zionism and of Reform Judaism is due, most largely, to the fact that they were born out of the consecutive and, in

*Paper read at the Annual Convention of the Texas Zionist Association.

a way, interfering waves of thought. Refurm Judaism arose out of that philosophy of cosmopolitan humanitarianism which, becoming articulate at the end ot the eighteenth century, reached its climax about the middle of the nineteenth. The pioneers of Reform Judaism, dreaming of world-parliament, world speech and re- Eeion of humanity, felt the millennium not far off and proceeded to take off the clothes of Judaism lest, having a costume of its own, it might be out of fashion in an age of perfect homogeneity. The reign of reason and justice being, to their minds, close at hand, what with the tremendous strides of education, enlizhtenment, commerce and philanthropy, they felt that the disappearance of prejudice was a matter of a few decades at most; in their enthusiasm they looked upon dispersion not as a source of weakness, danger, suffering, but as 3 providential opportunity for closer intercourse, for wider and more effective teaching. Interpreting history in that light, they saw in the diaspora not a course of education fo Israel, but a God-ordained mingling of Israel with the nations (as if the Medieval Ghetto had not meant a far stricter spiritual isolation than had the life in Palestine), and in modern emancipation (which to them seemed virtually complete) that last and closest intermingling by which our re!zious influence upon humanity must become the more direct and widespread.

The soberer wisdom of scientific reasoning and the disenchanting lessons of recent experience have helped the Zionistic idea to supersede these illusions wherever minds are open to conviction. We cannot not to-day repeat the solemn rhetorical nonsense, echoed and re-echoed with so much gusto only a decade or so ago, about