The Maccabaean

RATHER queer thought came to A me when I read the editorial request that I contribute to the tenth anniversary number of THE MacCABAEAN. I wandered what I would have io say were I asked to contribute, say ten years hence. For I have my own notion as to some of the things that are hidder: behind the veil. of next ensuing decade.

It is all of twenty years since I began an active interest in Jewish journalism, a period long enough to have afforded me endless hopes, and endless regrets. When THE MaccaBAEAN was born I thought we were more than half way towards that victory for what I might liken to present day insurgency in American politics. When I joined the Jewish press Jewish suffering was so much a matter of fact, that a Jewish weekly without a full dose of heartrending tales would have been regarded as an anachronism. And there was a certain humor in the stories of persecution. The journals of one country always laid the most stress on the incidents in another. Thus I looked to Paris for the most violent stories of German anti-Semitism and to Mosse’s Berlin weekly for the fuller account of Drumontism, until it was provided in that worthy’s own daily. That is, all Europe was just as chauvanistic as American Jewry is to-day.

We took our sufferings with a certain tension in those days. Our weeklies howled, and the air was full of speeches. It was however in Europe the day of the Jewish oligarchy. Well meaning, quite thoughtful men, came together on the first or second or third Monday of the month, precisely at eleven o'clock and talked it all over till a few minutes to one when they adjourned for a month.

The routine was perfect. All these men had once been moved more or less by some stirring idea, but they had added to their first purpose until their monthly programs were choked with routine matters, and so it went on and on, and still goes on. I have not the slightest doubt that this routine administration of the affairs of Jewry did a certain amount of good.

In France, for instance, it did all it could to turn Palestine into a French colony. In Berlin it tried hard to create a German influence in the Holy Land. In England it did what it could for English influence. It did even more than this, it aided Jews in obscure places in the Levant to get some kind of education. It ambled along in all the capitals of Europe in this fashion until the I. C. A. was established.

The I. C. A. afforded me endless amusement in my younger days. Col. Goldsmid had rather prejudiced me against Baron de Hirsch. An Argentinian Jew had given me excellent reasons for placing no great faith or hopes in the Argentinian project, and the Baron himself, in two interviews I had with him, —it was before the days of militant Zionism—did not impress me as a profound thinker nor as the regenerator whom he Jews were longing for, and which he and his millions suggested. But the joke about the I. C. A. was that the Baron wanted the interest of his capital spent and the administration of his estate did not know how to do this and so they had to devise all sorts of plans to handle their annual surplus without spending it. I was stupid enough to believe that all the money could be spent, and with the callow, imagination of youth I did not see what good would