nationalist points of view, should resort to a threat of bodily harm. Then I realized that he was too impatient for uttering any other words, and I remembered that when it comes to a question of honor words are often futile. The time
will surely come when Jews who berate and belittle their own people will do so at the risk of either being coupled with apostrates and traitors, or of being subjected to even worse treatment.
BORRIOBOOLA GHA! or TELESCOPIC IDEALISM
(NOTE: Mrs. Jollyby of "Bleak House," one of Dickens' most delicious satires, is interested in the "moral and intellectual advancement" of a tribe of savages in an unheard of, unknown village which she herself has named "Borrioboola Gha!")
"Should Mrs. Jollyby chance to come in our midst and ask us wkether indeed we knew something about “Borrioboola Gha” we would be obliged to manifest openly our total ignorance upon the subject in question. Now, having been forced to admit our ignorance in the presence of a stranger, we would naturally become wroth, and, consequently, we would inquire, very pointedly, w"at is this Borrioboola Gha? And Mrs. Jollyby, that stupendous engine of brain and heart, would smile her most tolerant and most benevolent smile Ah! she knows! She not only knows that it is a small village on the left bank of a small stream in the plateau region of Africa, a region as yet unexplored but for Mrs. Jollyby’s own travels, but she is directly interested in the moral and *“physical enhancement of the naked, starving, wretched inhabitants of the village which she herself has named! “But,” ask the few of us who have not been totally annihilated by this revelation, “but, why must Mrs. Jollyby go so far for the exercise of her philantrophic nature? If the savages of Borrioboola Gha are naked it is a habit, quite an agreeable habit in that hot climate, with them. And if they are starved they have always fought for their food on the same level. Why does not the stupendous engine of mind and heart turn her eyes upon the misery in the midst of which she herself is living, in which her own life is molded, and exercise her philantrophies upon people who are forced to wander about naked though
it is infinite misery to do so, who are striving while they feel within themselves a right to Live and to Happiness? Mrs. Jollyby assures us that she "just feels" for those poor ignorant wretches! O Telescopic Philanthropy! O the charms of Borrioboola Gha!
In Mrs. Jollyby, Charles Dickens has given us not only a keen insight into the character of the philanthropy of the opulent, he has also created for us a scale upon which we can weigh the highest ideals and the most pretentious idealists. When we read of a manufacturer who in his pursuit of Power reduces wages and raises the price of food, in fact does not stop at the impoverishing of millions of fellow creatures, if we read of him that he is donating libraries we mentally note that here is another Mrs. Jollyby whose ideal is in Borrioboola Gha. The ideal for sane humanity, we decide, must be hope —the hope of emancipation from an imminent danger. The call of the ideal must be nothing abstract but real bodily pain. And, unless we are bodily as well as spiritually concerned for the Ideal, unless our souls combine terror and longing for it, our ideal too is Borrioboola Gha: we are acting on telescopic idealism so frequent or so totally absurd as it is our own ranks of Jewish Idealists.
There is no question about there being a need for a united Jewish force to cope with the fearful anti-Semetism which is eating at the heart of the world's greatest institution. No sane, deliberative Jew is unconscious of an uncompromising demand on the part of the Jewish soul for keener individuation. There is even very little doubt in the mind of anti-Zionists, and anti-Semites about the ability of the Jews to create in the Holy Land a strong center.