The Maccabaean

CEMETERY and benevolent society, holiday services and daily minyan synagogue, hospital, orphan asylum, all the rest of the charitable institutions, each in its due turn —these, the historian tells us, are the well-marked stages of Jewish communal development in America. Somewhere well along the line comes a Y. M. H. A., and finally a communal school.

From its first beginnings Baltimore has been an unexceptionable, regulation Jewish community, a real Kehillah. It went through all the accepted stages as enumerated with staid dignity and a proper degree of self-consciousness. There was even fairly good reason for self-satisfaction, not to say complacency. No breach of obvious duty has ever been charged against it.

All the more curious, that it failed consistently to do its duty in the matter of a Y. M. H. A. Its several attempts to form one were either abortive, or were attended with feeble results wholly out of keeping with Baltimore's solid reputation.

Most curious of all, that when the first success in this field was achieved, the community was not aware it had acquired a Y. M. H. A. Partly the reason for its obliviousness was that for once there had been a departure from the traditional American Jewish program. The cryptic letters were not Y. M. H. A. They were instead I. B. L.—the I. B. L. Literary Society it was called. Suppose the community had known that I. B. L. stood for Isaac bar Levinsohn? How many could even then have realized the equation between I. B. L. and Y. M. H. A.—between I. B. L. and youth, modernity, idealism, hope?

The communal disregard gave little concern to the group of young Russian Jewish immigrants who organized the I. B. L. Literary Society in 1887-1888 or thereabouts. They pursued the evgn tenor of their way, which included the establishment of a library of Hebrew books, the arrangement of a lecture program on Jewish topics, the formation of classes for the study of the Bible in Hebrew, and the organization of classes for the teaching of English to immigrants. For, as 6 Jewish community of Baltimore had not attained to the heights of a Y. M. H. A., so in those years the general community of the city had not awakened to the need of a system of night schools. Some day the story of the school that developed from the classes for English must be told. This is not the place.

One other function was filled by the I. B. L. Literary Society. It afforded a Jewish social center to its members and their friends. "Jewish social center," it must be confessed, is also cryptic terminology, as cryptic as I. B. L. In plain English—the English that has become plain at last, in this year of fate 1917—"Jewish social center" means "hearth of Zionism."

The school depended largely upon volunteer help. The members of the I. B. L. Literary Society gave it in unstinted measure. They sharpened pencils, washed slates, swept rooms, too, and painted floors when called upon. They let down the shutters and put them up night after night.

But they were not compounded wholly of the virtues of self-abnegation. When the chores were done, and the pupils, old and young—very old and as young as the law allowed—were safely, but not too quietly, closeted with their teachers, there was time for talk and plotting—talk about the singular absence of national feeling in

the American Jewish communities, plotting as to how Baltimore at least might be nationalized. If "Daniel Deronda" had not been published at least ten years earlier, I should be tempted to believe that George Eliot had peeped into the chiaroscuro of the rooms on Front Street to find the local color for her "Philosophers" club meetings. Her Mordecai was there, fervent, thoughtful, eloquent, nationally optimistic, and, alas, sick, sick unto death. And one was there whom she, even she with her insight into Jewish life, did not know, and could not have known. The "colporteur of hope" was a product of the Herzlian Zionism that came long after her day. He was a dear little old man, the only old man in the group. Later, when Zionism had become a public propaganda, he assumed the duty of selling the bank shares and distributing the National Fund paraphernalia. He said little, except what is expressed by the mildest and darkest of steady brown eyes, by resting heavy, horn-rimmed spectacles first on the forehead, and then on the very tip of a retroussé nose when the discussion waxed hot, or by letting a lean frame slip down on the chair until it sank almost out of sight. As he sat there with his arms crossed over each other at the wrists, he looked Israel the martyr—his spirit was Israel the seer's.

In time the young men went forth on their underground missions. To each was appointed the task of carrying the new-old evangel of Jewish hope to one of the chosen few in the established community who were deemed receptive, not wholly dulled by the routine of American Jewish life. Finally the day came, in September, 1894, when the Zion Association of Baltimore, Md., sprang into being, the child in flesh of the I. B. L. Literary Society, in spirit of the age-long optimism of the Jew, of the endless line of Jewish prophets extending backward and upward from Isaac bar Levinsohn into dim antiquity.

oman ie Sart «Bal Baltimore has been acclaimed the best Zionized of cities in the United States, the most compactly and intelligently organized. If the estimate is just, the reason is clear. The most assertive Zionist reader of Jewish history cannot assign more than two generations to Israel’s actual work for his. national ideal. Out of this short period, Baltimore has twenty-three years to its credit. It was not the first American community to found a society with the nationalistic aim. Priority belongs to other cities with their Chovevei Zion branches and Shovei Zion societies. But they disappeared, while the Baltimore Zion Association persisted and was merged into the last, the most modern,, phase of the national movement. Three years after its organization, the First International Congress was convened at Basle. At once, in name, purpose, and methods, the Baltimore Zion Association was ready to align itself with the new Zionism of Theodor Herzl. Nothing had to be removed from a constitution free from the taint of charity. Instinct as it was with the idea of national regeneration, it needed only to add the Basle program as a preamble, and to its By-Laws a paragraph on the shekel and another on the Congress. In the winter of 1897-1898, the winter following immediately upon the First Congress, the Society collected shekolim from 128 persons, and the next year there were 172, and the next, 378.

Down to this twentieth year of the Federation of American Zionists it has been a consecutive force for