The Maccabaean

the valleys, the rivers and the lakes, all the panorama of the Land, weave themselves into the national ideals of beauty, and become a part of the spiritual life of the generations. The Land is the spinal cord, and the generations the vertebrae. The land holds them together straight and strong.

And the language. The language is not a mere sheaf of words, to be easily substituted by the words of another tongue, or translated. He who possesses such a language is poor indeed in the treasures of the spirit. A word in a language is a dynamo-technical symbol, embodying whole series of ideas, emotions, experiences, shadings, nuances. As the word passed down the file of the generations, each modified its meaning, added to it, polished it, enriched it, and finally passed it on as an inheritance to the later generations. All of that cannot be translated, it can only be lived. When the words of such a language are spoken, with all their inherited richness, the depths of our natures are stirred, the finest fibres of our souls vibrate to their resonance. We become one with our people, one with our own generation, a link in the long chain of generations that have gone before and are to come after.

The inner meaning of a land and a language are instinctively clear to every child of a normally constituted people, though he may be unable to formulate it consciously. If it be unconscious, it is all the deeper. With us it is somewhat different. Our physical contact with our Land lay in the remote past. Our Language was only half alive,—used only in the synagogue and in solemn ceremonial moments of our lives. Our back had become bent, our creative faculties numbed. But the connecting links with the Land and the Language were not altogether severed. Psychologically, in our memories and in our hopes, we have carried Palestine with us. We have forgotten the Hebrew Language, but not denied it. Besides its use in the synagogue and the Cheder, it still formed a bond between Jews speaking various so-called Jewish languages. Ashkenazim and Sephardim, Bokharans and Persians, even the black Abyssinian Falashas.

found the key to their souls in the few Hebrew words they still knew. As Zionism has developed into the movement of the Renaissance, yesterday and to-day have been linked up in preparation of the morrow. Therefore we must return to the Land of yesterday and the Language of yesterday. This logical necessity has brought Palestine and Hebrew into the forefront of Zionist striving. A stream of new blood has been infused into the Zionist movement and into Jewry in general by the simple fact that a tiny fraction of the Jewish people has resumed contact with the national soil, and has, with perfect naturalness. revived the national tongue.

The liberation of the Russian Jews has had a vital significance for the development of Zionism. It is not only that the sword of Damocles is no longer suspended over the heads of the millions of Russian Jewry, that they will now be able to consider their own problems and work unhindered for their own future. It is not only. as Dr. Schmarya Lewin has so beautifully put it, that “The Moses who has come to the Russian people must awaken the yearning for the Messiah in the Jewish people, for what is the Jew but the protagonist of the Messianic ideal.” Much more than that is involved. The Russian Revolution has freed the Jews of Russia, and its hoped-for corollary is that neighboring countries, like Roumania and even Poland, may initiate a new policy towards the Jews. Then the problem of “our poor brethren in the East” will be no more, and the death-knell will have sounded for the last relics of philanthropy in Zionism: There will be no more objects of compassion. Zionism is a movement for self-regeneration. He who wills to be a Zionist must will it for his own sake, for the longed-for rejuvenation of his Land and his Language.

Zionism has grown. It won ground in its twenty years of life in all circles in Jewry. Yet far more important than the spread of the organization has been the quiet evolution from philanthropy to the spiritual-national renaissance.—(Translated from the Yiddish by Lotta Levensohn.)

IT was a good forty years since Ephrayim Lightman had "invaded" England. He was then a young, squat, swarthy unshaven Jew. He had dark, deep-set eyes, which revealed by the keenness of their lustre that a strong, alert, all-conquering spirit was lying hidden within. A Dutch cattle-boat brought him over penniless. There were no pestering dock officials in those days, and no medical examinations, and no Alien Boards of Appeal for the poor, unfortunate "rejected," consequently, with a truer qualification for entry that he possessed, such as a limitless fund of untiring energy, he passed through the sometime "open door" for immigrants unheeded.

In the good, old times the circumference of the Ghetto circle was small in circumscription. Aldgate Pump and Bow Bridge were the two tangents touching the extreme limits of the Jewish “Mother Country” of Whitechapel ; her “Daughter Colonies,” such as Dalston, Maida Vale and Soho, had not then, as yet, imperialistically expanded to serve the needs of her ever-growing population.

In this "New Jerusalem," as the Gentiles jocularly called the Ghetto, Ephrayim pitched his tent. Good

brethren, landsleit, “played the men” with their accustomed good, Jewish hearts. They gave him meals, old clothes and advice. . . . He became a “tally man”! He sold leather goods, jewelry, hosiery, Hebrew books ; was a “casual laborer” at Badchonas, bought up old silver and old teeth, wrote Yiddish letters for the illiterate at a penny a time; occasionally, during the High Festivals, gave a startling exhibition of his vocal acrobatics before his breathless compatriots, ““The Achei Wilna” (for a consideration), and in short, did anything and everything that could possibly, humanly be done to earn a clean morsel of bread.

But his ambitions waxed exceeding great. He longed for wealth, or rather, the security which wealth could procure against the many misfortunes of this our troublous life.. He worked industriously and lived sparingly. His goal became an obsession, a master passion with him. And thus it was that the mountain guides of pertinacity, sagacity and frugality helped him on gradually to climb up to the peaks of his financial prosperity. Each day saw him ascending higher and higher; each day saw the peaks growing more distinctly into view. And just in