The Maccabaean

SPIRITUALITY, as Professor Schechter has said, is not a negative quality, and like other ideals it has to be translated into action to make it an effective force.

The "Mission of the Jew," which is another expression of the ideal, cannot be performed unless the Jew lives—lives not as a mere economic or social factor, but as a distinct element in human society with a purpose and a character of its own; and it is our first object, therefore, to preserve Jewish life. We look around, and we see that that life is threatened, on its moral as well as its physical side, by two equal dangers—persecution on the one hand, and assimilation on the other.

We remember how, in an earlier dispersion, Jewry was saved by the setting up again of the national life by a remnant in the ancient land, and how from that centre there went forth those great Jewish values which afterwards entered into the mental and spiritual woof of a large part of mankind. The ideals for which the Maccabees fought have still to contend all the world over against other and less spiritual ideals; and we who claim those heroes as our own are their guardians. What sort of guardians are we? and how in present conditions do we fulfil our function? The „process of disintegration which has set in nearly everywhere in the so-called lands of freedom, not less than the systematic degradation of the larger areas of persecution, robs us of our traditional virtues, and depriving us of our distinctive an ancient and glorious culturists characteristics, turns a people with an anc’'ent and glorious culture into an aggregate of impotent units in the midst of the nations. Nay, more—are we not charged with being, from that very abondonment of iur distinctiveness, a disruptive and demoralizing force? We burn with indignation when we see our people, whose whole historic existence with its unparalleled suffering and self-sacrifice, has been one long

passionate protest against material power, branded in the eyes of the world as types and exponents of materialism. And so the Jewish nationalist, who is proud of his past and hopeful of his future, aims at establishing a centre of Jewish life where his ancient culture may be preserved and developed, and where a rallying point may be found for all the now scattered efforts of the Jewish genius.

Is there any justification for hostility to the movement as a menace to the position of the Jews among the nations? The answer is to be found in the exhortation of the prophet of the Dispersion and of the Return of Zion, “Seek the welfare of the city in which you live”; and in the evidence to be found in every page of our history that the Jewish people have faithfully followed this precept. The Jewish solidarity which is supposed by some te be one of the fundamental characteristics of our life is, in modern times at least, nothing but a cruel irony. There is no people which is so scattered and divided mentally, culturally, and temperamentally, as well as geographically, as the Jews of to-day. We speak different languages, think different thoughts, feel different feelings, have different social and economical standards, and have different patriotic aspirations according to the countries in which we dwell, and for the most part the only solidarity which binds us together is the solidarity of our enemies. In the very last clash of the nations, in the so-called struggle of the Balkan peoples to be free, did not the Jew fight against Jew, Servian against Bulgarian, Bulgarian against Roumanian, Greek against Turk, and all for their Fatherlands? The testimonies of every one of these nationalities speak for the patriotism of their Jewish soldiers, and yet tere were many Zionists in their ranks, especially among the Roumanians, who were to receive the long-desired guerdon of full citizenship for their devotion to the cause of their adopted country.