The Maccabaean

VOL. 33

THE word of this moment in Zionism is "To Work," and it is a true word, to which the Gentile friends of Zionism should give their full support in speech and in act. To establish the vines and the fig-trees once more which shall give shade to a Jewish people at home in their own home, and which shall be the works of their own hands,—that is the first need of the whole Jewish race in its relations to all other races in all countries.

I speak of things familiar to all Jews, but I repeat them because I think they cannot be too often or too fully understood, as things that dwell consciously or unconsciously but always effectually, in the mass mind of Europe and also of America. To have the complete respect of other races the Jewish race must demonstrate the first quality without which no race stands erect in the world's worldly opinion—the quality of self-dependence somewhere: and it happens that the Jewish race must demonstrate this quality with a peculiar shining clearness.

The Jew has labored under the implication of stealthy inferiority which attaches itself to every member of every race nowhere self-dependent in a home of its own; and he has also labored under a special implication of such inferiority earned by his own great actual intelligence.

On the first point I call the attention of Jews to the status of such races as the Czecho-Slovaks. With my own eyes at Washington I have observed the difference between the degree of respect granted to American Czecho-Slovaks at Washington in 1917 and the degree of respect offered to them now. Now they have Masaryk not as a symbol but as a ruler. Now they have Prague not as a symbol but as a capital. If there are any Jews who still do not feel the future of their race summoning them to open their purses wide toward Jerusalem—and if there are any Jews who wish to go to Palestine, and could, in fact, go, but do not entirely trust and follow their inward call—I think they may pertinently look at Prague and look at what Prague is gradually but surely doing for Czecho-Slovaks everywhere.

On the second point I am obliged to notice that the indubitable intelligence of the Jew in the lands of dispersion does not at all clear the Jewish race of a certain suspicion which issues into a continued assumption of Jewish inferiority. I call this suspicion a suspicion. Perhaps I ought to call it a rooted superstition. It is the theme of a thousand anecdotes. It leaps out of the suitcase of every traveling salesman. "We will admit that the Jews are clever. We will more than admit—we will claim—that they can make money. But, of course, how do they do it? Why can they get it? It is because we are here. We somehow get it first, and they get it last. They get it somehow off us. Their intelligence is an intelligence for which an environment of us is necessary. We provide the industrial culture. They swim around in it to their profit."

I ask if this extremely familiar state of mind among Gentiles is not worth the familiar and analytical attention of any Jew who is debating the extent of the support which he will offer financially or personally to the rebuilding and repopulating of Palestine. It is a state of mind existing inevitably in present circumstances. The Jew, in fact, has nowhere an industrial culture manifestly and undeniably his own. Ido not think it is possible to be too emphatic or too constant in stating the consequences ensuing. The Jew’s very intelligence becomes the last and heaviest charge against him. Besides being an unsuccessful patriot, he is a successful parasite.

He will emerge from that charge. He will emerge from it on the day when he fulfills the round of prophecy and the round of his own modern racial intelligence and character in institutions challenging the world his separate present begetting of them.

That day is sure. The cry "To Work!" is only the hastening of it. But the hastening of it is the hastening of the end of the shame of the Jew and the shame of the Gentile. Could any end more deserve haste? It summons every religious man, every practical man, of whatever re-