The Maccabaean

act in the career of Napoleon the Great. In March, 1799 that Napoleon, toward the close of his humiliating and disastrous campaign in Egypt, carried Jaffa by storm. During its progress he ordered the killing of 4000 Albanian soldiers, the reason for this butchery being to save himself the trouble and expense of transporting them as prisoners of war, though their surrender to the Frenchmen was on the condition that their lives be spared. The

place of this unspeakable act is said to have been near the Armenian Church which Napoleon used as a prison for prisoners of war.

The tourist is also reminded of another cruel deed by the same military commander. When he was forced to retreat across the desert to Egypt, and found several hundreds of his men in hospitals whom he could not remove, he ordered the administration of poison and left them behind.

TO have some idea of what Zionism has accomplished since "The Jewish State" was published, we must go back some fifteen years before Dr. Herzl wrote his "Jewish State" and review the beginning of the practical Zionist movement in 1882, and see what really caused this national movement.

It is said by some that Zionism was created by Jewish persecution. Although Practical Zionist work was instituted after the progroms in the northern part of Russia in 1882, if Jews had not been spiritually developed and filled with a desire to preserve the Jewish nation, the progroms could not have inspired the cream of the Jewish youth of Russia, students of universities, wealthy young men, to leave their homes in order to become the first pioneers to establish a colony in Palestine.

Now and then a star Aad risen in the horizon of the Jewish sky; a poet to sing of the ruins of Israel, a thinker to picture Israel’s future; but their words faded away like the sands of the desert. The doors of the ghettos were closely watched that no new thoughts, ideas or hopes should reach the ears of the coming generation. But at last, the light of civilization penetrated the dense walls of the ghetto. The young generation instead of studying the Talmud and Kaballa only, began to familiarize themselves with their history and their language. as well as to imbibe new thoughts and modern ideas. Credit must also be given to the Jewish thinkers and writers of the second half of the ninetcenth century who awakened the Jewish consciousness of the younger generation.

In 1882, eleven prominent Jewish writers and public leaders, among them the Hebrew writer and thinker Achad Ha’Am and Dr. Brainard, met in Odessa for the purpose of organizing the first Zionist Society, its program being to commence Jewish colonization in Palestine and to propogate the idea generally among Jews throughout the Russian Empire. During the same year five hundred Jewish young men of Odessa organized a society with the intention of going to the United States and forming a Jewish State. They failed to carry out their plans, but it nevertheless goes to prove that many minds were thinking and planning an independetn national life. Lovers of Zion Societies were organized in every Jewish community in Russia, their intentions being to colonize Palestine. All this was being done by the younger element. The older generation, on the other hand, in the Eastern part of the world, opposed the idea because they believed it to be against Jewish traditions, while the Western Jews claimed that the Jewish problem could only be solved through assimilation. It was not until Dr. Theodor Herzl, a Western Jew as well as a prominent writer, published his “Jewish State,” in 1896, that Jews all over the world were, by means of this publication, finally brought to realize and appreciate that the Jewish problem could only be solved by an independent national life. They were then confirmed in the belief that assimilation for the Jew was utterly unpractical, as the only means of assimilation open to him would be wholesale intermarriage. This, taking into con-