The Maccabaean

to a realization that Judaism has a measure of truth, or else this body of people, modern with the moderns, would not persist in maintaining a separatist organization. Mutely the Reform Temple protests against the conceit of self-sufficient orthodox Christianity, pointing to the religion of the future which shall move nearer to Judaism. The Church won over the world by its promise of eternal life to the individual. But the trend in the modern Church is in the direction of social salvation, and that is more in line with the prophetic religion. And the Sunday congregations in the Temples, largely composed of non-Jews, are a direct, positive missionary factor. Do not cast ridicule on the Mission idea. It is older than Reform. It is as old as the prophet of the exile. And its last formulation came from the Galician ghetto, where a lonely scholar set out to interpret Judaism in Hegelian terms.

-< Reform must needs be attractive to those who chafe under the taunt of Christian theology that Judaism is particularistic and the libel of anti Semitista that the Jew is clannish. It sets out to prove that a Jew may take his place in the world, enter fully into the large life without, and yet maintain his Judaism. It emphasizes the universalistic moments in Judaism. It declaims against nationalism, wheresoever it manifests itself, and be the world never so locked in deadly conflict on its behalf, as an obsession, and stamps the Jew as the protagonist of internationalism. It ignores the latter day theories about racial inequality and the racial factor in human progress. What of it if the chauvinist anti-Semite denounces internationalism, be it of the black, red, or golden variety? Reform places itself squarely upon the ideas of 1789 and 1848. Universalism is of course a great idea, collective uniformity a great ideal. In politics, it leads to imperialism, to the creation of world-empires. In religion, it means the Catholic idea of the world-Church. It is the prerogative of Reform to align itself with internationalism which Protestantism, the Christian Reformation, has set out to overturn. But it comes somewhat late into the world with its declaration that a Jew, in order to be a Jew religiously, must cease to be a Jew nationally. That was the position of John the Baptist, of Jesus, of Paul, who set up a Judaism divested of its national limitations, its “historical ballast.”

If Reform would save Judaism as a denationalized religion, Zionism is concerned with the salvage of the Jewish people amidst the shipwreck of religion. Assimilation makes itself nugatory by stopping short of fusion. Prejudice against the Jew is not a matter of superstition, or of ignorance, which may be dissipated by enlightenment, but it is rooted in instinct and therefore ineradicable. The instincts of a majority, either uniform or tending to become uniform, will recoil from a minority which, while assimilating itself to the majority in language, manner of life, and other cultural matters, stubbornly refuses to coalesce with it. Our neighbors do not fail to remind us that there is “something of separateness” in our social life among them; they bid us place above our separate interests and our separate inheritance “the great common heritage of the nation and the nation’s faith.” They tell us that we are a race with “race traditions,” a people “distinct, individual, unmistakable,” a “cohesive nationality which no disaster has destroyed, no misfortune weakened, no lapse of time impaired.” Our “church organization” may retard the process of absorption, but to those who have eyes to see it has begun in all truth. Nature is rarely catastrophic, spending her forces in a day; patiently she commits her purposes to the evolution of years. She destroys a minority lodged in the organism of a nation by slow stages, by integrating those on the top who are ready for submersion, and by converting

those below, beginning with the outlandish immigrant, into the next higher stratum where are found the numerically fewer and the culturally fitter. Zionism may have been born in the stress of Russian persecution, but to say that with the advent of the Russian revolution Zionism may abdicate rests on a failure to comprehend its philosophy. Zionism is no philanthropic movement; a measure of relief it is, but for the Jewish people. Zionism rejoices in the boon of liberty which at last has come to the Russian Jew. It is the last link in the chain of Jewish emancipation, and the formula of Jewish integration into the world's nations, great and small, must work itself out to its fullest content. Will anti-Semitism disappear? Certainly not, to judge from our experiences in Western Europe, where its most virulent activity followed the emancipation. Will the Pale vanish? Yes, to make room for congestion in ghettos self-made. And are they really made at will? Far more potent than external force is that which works from within. The instinct of the Jew is for concentration. Concentration means self-preservation. Dispersion spells extinction. The will to live is strong in the Jewish masses, though it may have been atrophied in the Jewish classes. On the periphery, the Jewish consciousness, through gradual attrition, must needs suffer destruction. A diluted Judaism, which patterns itself upon the dominant faith and absorbs the slogans of the hour to promulgate them as Jewish religious contributions, cannot save the Jew. Long before the time set, he will have "stepped out" and down and vanished. Intermarriage will serve as a racial euthanasia for the Jewish people. If, then, concentration is demanded by instinct, and concentration in the dispersion makes for anti-Semitism, the place for it must be a Jewish center in the Jews' land.

Orthodoxy hoped for a second revelation by far transcending the first. Reform believes that the revelation has come. A voice there was, but it was from without. It was the voice of recrudescent paganism with the great heathen of Weimar as its apostle; it was the voice of the newer Protestantism impatient of the tutelage of the Hebraic spirit; it was the voice of the critical philosophy reducing theological formulas to unsolvable antinomies; it was the voice of the exact sciences and of evolutionism dethroning God in nature and in history. The voice was heard in the ghetto, where Jewish life had become stagnant, the Jewish mind petrified, and the Jewish intellect lost in regions that had not the remotest connection with life. The voice said, Connect the Jewish energy with life. Like all oracles, this one was just as ambiguous. Reform mistook Life for the life of the large world, that each Jew individually, in industry, art, and science, might contribute to the progress of humanity. No, says Zionism, that Life must be Jewish, consisting in living Jewish interests; the Jews, collectively, must take their place in the concert of nations. "We who believe (or rather feel) that we are still a nation must equally believe, without requiring further proof, that the creative power is still alive in the depth of the national soul, and that the nation is capable of producing new and great things as in the days gone by." A home shall be created, not only for the oppressed Jewish people, but in particular for the suppressed Jewish soul, to the end that, released from her prison, she may, like the dove sent out by Noah, find a rest for the sole of her foot. Not only are the dispersed of Israel to be gathered, but there shall also be a regathering of Israel's scattered energies. The spiritual bondage of Israel, the sterility of the Jewish genius and the dissipation of Jewish energy, must be terminated. The thinned Jewish consciousness of the dispersion is but a ghostlike memory of the past. Not in reminiscences, but in positive and new cultural achievements,