of acts contrary to the interests of the German empire. Behind this manifesto lies the dread of the assmiliationist that in spite of the selling of his patrimony, he may yet be identified with men who have the courage of their convictions. Courage is the thing they fear. Let the Zionists work in secret and make no noise, and the German patriots will keep silent. But open propaganda is harmful to the patriotic business of making money and spending it, of seeking social distinctions. This, the method of Samballat, who runs to the King when he sees brethren working at a noble edifice and tries to convince him that the edifice will work to his disadvantage. The authors of the Manifesto will be given a page in Jewish history side by side with the Protest rabbis who clamored against the holding of the first Zionist Congress.
Dr. Kohler's Seventieth Birthday.
THE Hebrew Union College celebrated during the month the seventieth birthday of its President, Dr. Kaufman Kohler. Dr. Kohler's position as a scholar is an assured one, and the respect of all elements in Jewry is his. We may not admire the vehemence of his opposition to Zionism, the extreme views he holds as to the destiny of Israel to be scattered among the nations, but none can withhold apprecia-
tion for his erudition and the essential religiosity of his nature. Dr. Kohler represents that branch of the German reform movement that had to fight for the right to hold its own ideas in religion. In defence of these views they suffered persecution and material disadvantage. With them, reform was an individual religious experience and not a weak concession to the prevailing custom. Such men perforce were endowed with the courage of pioneers. Their theology had in it the substance of revealed truth, and however we now may deplore the conditions that forced a revision of religious belief, the men who fought for their right to religious liberty are entitled to our respect. Dr. Kohler has fought Zionism under the impression that it is in opposition in his religious ideals. In so far as his religious ideals include the scattering of the Jewish nation and the modification of tradition to suit alien environment, a denial of the right to Jews to align as a nation and the exclusion of Palestine as a living influence in Jewish life, Dr. Kohler stands outside of the camp of Zionism, but his scholarship, his sincerity as a religious teacher, and his zeal in the defense of Jewish science, entitle him to the good wishes of every Jew, and the MACCABAEAN herewith extends to him its felicitations on the attainment of his seventieth birthday and hopes he may live to see the ideal of Zionism realized.
THE WANDERING SOWER
In a lovely land of the East, many years ago, there lived a man who spent his days in tilling his fields and reaping the grain. In the cool and quiet of the evening he would go to the Desert beyond his fertile fields and gaze with wonder and awe at the vast stretches of sand and sky, or mount to the top of his hills and greet each star as it shone forth upon the heavens. And from the summits of these hills he often looked to the West and his eye was troubled with a strange disquiet as he beheld the coldness and barrenness of the bleak plains and snow-capped mountains that met his gaze.
And thus for many years the man continued to plow and reap, to gaze and wonder till the bleakness of the West began to oppress his soul heavily. The seeds that grew from his soul in the land of the East were rich and wonderful, but the plains and mountains of the West were cold and barren.
One dark and windy night, he lifted on to his back a large sack filled with those seeds, and setting his face to the West he wandered forth into the world.
In the morning he came to a strange land, and when the wild, half-starved inhabitants saw him they were amazed and