The Maccabaean

It is true, the Polish nation has shown her wonder ful vitality, preserving intact her national conscience for 125 years, after her body had been dismembered and cut into three pieces by her three neighbors. It is true, the Slav people under Austrian and Turkish sway, have shown that they possess a powerful resistance and they are worthy of living in absolute independence, for during the six centuries of oppression under Austro-Hungarian, domination and under Turkey's power they have preserved their national personality.

But, you, who want to liberate the persecuted nationalities, here you have the 'wonders of wonders, here you have the most beautiful spectacle the history of humanity can offer us; a little nation scattered by the might of the sword, robbed of her territory, yet preserving through twenty centuries of persecution her entire national soul and the distinctive traits of her race!

Poor anti-Semites of the world, who talk with such disdain about Jewish rapacity and about Jewish materialism! Is it possible that they do not know that the survival of the Jews, through 2,000 years of suffering and pain, is a triumph—the most beautiful triumph that idealism has ever witnessed since the world exists?

They were there, in that sunny little corner of Mediterranean Asia, hemmed in between two chains of mountains, gathered around the Holy City of Jerusalem. There they wrought out a moral ideal, the highest which the people of ancient times had been able to reach, and they called it God; this God was Justice; and their righteous God ordered that strangers shall be treated like brethren, that the servants must rest one day in the week, on the Sabbath Day; their hygienic teachings were mixed with precepts of the highest morality. And when the rich took advantage of their wealth, and the kings of their power, from this democracy, arose the Prophets to punish those who violated the Law of God.

One day, seventy years after the wicked and hypocritical had crucified a kind Galilaean, who uttered those symbolic words, the Romans, who were masters of the Jews’ country as they were masters of the whole Mediterranean world, abused their belief and their autonomy ; the Jews revolted, and after a siege, which is the most famous in the history of the world, they were driven from the land of their ancestors and became the wandering people upon which from the very first day Christian- dom, then only in its birth, cast its anathema.

They clung together in the confines of their Ghettoes, they preserved the religion and customs of their parents, while they were condemned to the miseries of small trades because they were not permitted to possess land; they were sober, economic, and calculating, in the midst of childish, careless and confused nations; and were cursed as heretics, despised as aliens, envied for their

commercial aptitudes, hated because of their bankers and pawnbrokers, who traded in money; and were massacred on the days of public misfortunes. For nineteen centuries their life has been a martyrdom in the whole world.

They waited for the hour of salvation, for the Messiah who was to give them back their lost fatherland and make Justice and Peace reign on earth. The France of the Revolution did not give them their lost country, but she gave them the Rights of Man, which free America, free England and all the countries of Western Europe successively accorded to.

If the Jews were treated everywhere as they are in France, in America, in England, and in Germany, the Jewish question as a national one would have been solved. For the French Jews the problem does not exist. They are no longer Jews. They are Frenchmen in language, in culture, in heart. Among her soldiers France has no braver defenders than they. In the great national French body, where the Celts, Latins, and the Teutons have already been blended into such harmonious mixture, the Jewish blood of a century has mixed in such a way with the blood of the French people that they are now indistinguishable from the French nation.

But if for them the national Jewish problem is solved, as it is for the greater part of the English and German Jews. it is far from being solved for the Jews of Poland, Rumania, and Russia. We may succeed in obtaining their emancipation on paper when peace will be made— and we shall insist that those countries cease to consider the Jews as pariahs—in reality, however, they will continue to endure the most crucial moral sufferings. Their persecution has left in millions of them a national conscience which will not be content with palliatives.

Once I used to consider as a chimera this dream of those Jews, the Zionists, who believe that the land of their ancestors should be given back to them. In fact, they have established colonies here and there in Palestine, model colonies, where the Jews show that after 2,000 years of city life, of Ghetto life, they have not lost the qualities of their forefathers, the peasants of Judaea and Galilee. But how can it be hoped that Palestine will revive under the heel of the Turks?

Now we see how Turkey is committing suicide; let us see how Europe will portion out the territories where the Turkish conquerors during six centuries of domination were unable to form a real nation by assimilating itself with the natives; let us see that Palestine falls to the share of the French Republic. France has given the Jews human dignity. To-day she must do more; she must make the Jewish nation revive. At her call, all the Jews of Russia, of Rumania, of Poland, of Asia Minor, all the Jews who have preserved a national Jewish con-