The Maccabaean

LOYAL COMRADES AND HONORED GUESTS:

I GREET you heartily, you who have come together for the first time in free Russia to voice the hopes of a people struggling for emancipation and renascence and to discuss the measures to be taken with regard to our future work.

It is only three months since Russia has achieved freedom, and already the terrible stain of Jewish disabilities has been washed away. The history of our people knows of no example of so immense a Ghetto being destroyed, knows of no liberation which was accomplished so humanely and simply.

Now we feel that the last two Ghetti must fall: those in Finland and Rumania. Finland has already taken steps in this direction; and it is to be hoped that Rumania will not wait for a world congress to act for her, but will free her Jewish subjects of her own accord.

They say of us Zionists with more or less sincerity, that we wash our hands of the Golus, as it were, that we take no interest in the problems of the Diaspora. What is more, some maintain that in our eyes "the worse things are, the better they are." Zionism, they say, is a reaction from Jewish disabilities. If these disappear, Zionism will have no raison d'être.

There is no greater fallacy than this contention. The Basle Platform itself proves this. The organization and union of all Jewish forces in the various countries, the awakening of national consciousness—are these not the aims of the non-Zionists who are actively engaged in Jewish work? Yes, only for them that is the end of national endeavor, whereas for us it is the means of realizing a definite ideal, the renascence of the Jewish people in its ancestral home. But that does not lessen the importance of work in the Golus. We expressed our attitude to this question clearly and fully to the Helsingfors Conference.

It is impossible to estimate the suffering which the world war has brought to Russian Jewry. We bow our heads in memory of the untold numbers who have fallen on all the battle fronts. It will be a long time before our wounds are healed. But I want to call your attention to other martyrs, to the hundreds of thousands of Jews who have been thrown out of their homes and scattered throughout Russia, and to the hundreds of thousands who have remained in their homes to starve.

It has been a tremendous task to bring them material and spiritual help—and in this task who was it that took the initiative? The Zionists! We want to remind the people of this fact, simply to demonstrate the groundlessness of their accusations. Recently a new.slogan has reached us from the camp of our enemies; they have started a cry of a “Zionistic deluge.”

Deluge? We deny it. But it is certain that our strength is felt in every sphere of Jewish life. This strength of ours is a result of our will-power, of the realization that our work in the Diaspora is important. How can it be otherwise? Zionism is the solution of the Jewish problem for the Jewish people. Not one of us believes that there

* Delivered at the Zionist Convention in Petrograd, July, 1917.

will be a concentration of all the Jews in Palestine, at all events for a long time to come. And we do not consider it necessary. What we are striving for is to establish a national center for the scattered fragments of our people, a national metropolis for our national colonies. The center draws and will continue to draw its strength from the periphery. Consequently the periphery is of great importance to us.

On the other hand, the fragments of our nation will be able to live a normal life only when they will be enabled to draw vitality and the needed stimulus from the metropolis. That is, we think, the way in which the Jewish organism will be invigorated; that is how the whole problem of the Jewish people will be solved. Our work in Palestine and our work in the Diaspora will blend harmoniously. Each will supplement the other.

We are on the eve of the opening of the constitutional convention which is to lay a new foundation for free Russia and for its peoples. Perhaps the most difficult problem that will confront the convention is that of nationalities. Russian Jewry is vitally interested in this problem and will no doubt participate in its solution. But what we must do first of all, is to work out the basis of a national existence—national representation of emancipated Russian Jewry. We know that the problem of national existence is more complicated for us than for other nationalities. We are crowded into cities, where in many cases we constitute the majority of the population. We are scattered throughout the various national groups of Russia, each one of which will endeavor to increase its members and to intensify the activities of its own elements on its own territory. And finally as we have not one but two languages, the right of each must be guaranteed in accordance with its importance and its role.

Under no circumstances may we ignore the importance of our national tongue which holds together the fragments of our people in the Diaspora and which will serve as a yet greater stimulus and as a stronger cement when once the national center is established in Palestine. But at the same time we must take cognizance of the fact that in the last centuries a large section of our Jewish masses has developed a dialect which serves it as a medium of intercourse in daily life. All this complicates our problem of national life.

We must not forget, however, that whatever Jewry creates in the Diaspora is merely the substitute of a national existence. The reason for this lies not in one law or another, but in the organic conditions of a nation which does not live in its own territory, but is interwoven with other peoples and influenced by their cultural and_ political atmosphere.

A nation cannot live a normal, full, national life elsewhere than on its own soil, where it can fulfill all its functions, utilizing all values from the most elementary to the loftiest expressions of thought and poetry. That is an axiom, but it is often ignored in our case. We ourselves, however, are convinced of its truth, and have molded our actions in accordance with it for thirty years. The