The Maccabaean

MERICA, Britain, France and Italy stand pledged to A: experiment which, judged by ordinary political standards, is little short of visionary. In Palestine, a country peopled for the most part by an Arab race, whose independence they are equally pledged to recognize ‚and guarantee, a “national home” is to be created for a people whose only connection with that country for 1,800 years was one of historic sentiment and religious tradition. This pledge violates all the current ideas of self-determination. It stands isolated and unique among the various phases of the settlement. A superficial explanation of it is easv and has often been eiven.

The Gentile world has failed utterly to assimilate Jewry. Up to the end of the eighteenth century it had indeed made no attempt to do so. Until the French Revolution gave the final touch of inexorable logic to the idea of the national state, sovereign, supreme and united, based on complete uniformity of life and laws and tolerating no separatism within its borders, the bulk of European Jewry lived its own life, made its own laws, taught its own culture, built up indeed and consolidated within the body of Europe its own federal empire with its center in Poland, undisturbed by the ebb and flow of the European struggle round it. With the French Revolution came, however, the most curious development recorded in all modern history. Liberalism and Nationalism, with a flourish of trumpets, threw open the doors of the ghetto and offered equal citizenship to the Jew. The Jew passed out into the Western world, saw the power and the glory of it, used it and enjoyed it, laid his hand indeed on the nerve centers of its civilization, guided, directed and exploited it, and then —refused the offer. Every country has benefited by his economic talents, his philosophy, his artistic genius—nay by his political allegiance and his patriotic devotion. But, broadly speaking—and all generalizations are only approximately true—he has refused assimilation. Moreover—and this is the remarkable thing—the Europe of nationalism and liberalism, of scientific government and democratic equality, is more intolerable to him than the old oppressions and persecutions of despotism. This may appear a paradox to those who see around them in Western Europe contented Jewish populations taking full part in the processes of modern democracy, and who know that the future colonists of Palestine will be drawn not from these populations, but from the oppressed orphans of the Diaspora in Eastern Europe. This is true, but it is also true, first, that the persecutors of Eastern Europe are the nationalists, and secondly, that it is in the settled and contented Jewry of the west that Zionism has won its signal victory over anti-Zionism during these last few years. This victory was won by no mere sympathy for the oppressed Jew in other lands; it arose also from a growing conviction that, in the increasing consolidation of the Western nations, it is no longer possible to reckon on complete toleration—

that there is a steady tendency to present the alternative between assimilation and exclusion in a more and more inexorable form. Startling though the idea may be, it is in a sense true that the ghetto has been more a real home to the Jew than forums and Parliaments. During the darkness of the Middle Ages; during the wars of the Reformation and of national monarchies, he made shift to live and work in the midst of Europe; now, in the dawn of what we are proud to call the enlightenment of a new era, he makes haste to be gone. The horrors of the war just ended turned his eyes more than ever to his traditional home; but it is the conditions of the peace, the nationalism of the new Europe that seem to give the final signal for his exodus. In a world of completely organized territorial sovereignties he has only two possible cities of refuge: he must either pull down the pillars of the whole national state system or he must create a territorial sovereignty of his own. In this perhaps lies the explanation both of Jewish Bolshevism and of Zionism, for at this moment Eastern Jewry seems to hover uncertainly between the two. European statesmanship, partly conscious at least of these things, sees in Zionism the only method of giving to these alien elements in its system the poise, the contentment and the sense of responsibility which the Western world believes it has itself derived from the modern nationalist movement. Hence the “Balfour Declaration” and the strange burden laid on the shoulders of Britain by the mandate for Palestine which the final peace with Turkey will almost certainly confer upon us.

This explanation covers the facts, but it does not go very deep. What untameable qualities have confirmed Jewry in its isolation, keeping it distinct for all these centuries? Is it likely that a people which, while often so powerfully aiding the development of European political thought, has resisted all its conclusions, should now, in the evening of time, be content simply to borrow a political idea from Western democracy and devote itself to the creation of a “national state” after the Gentile model? At any rate, is it conceivable that such a people, characterized hitherto by a faculty of clear thought and relentless logie, should accept a mere installment of such an idea and linger contentedly, not at the goal of the national state, but in the half-way house of the “national home”? In Eastern Europe Bolshevism and Zionism often seem to grow side by side, just as Jewish influence moulded re publican and socialist thought throughout the nineteenth century, down to the young Turk revolution in Constantinople hardly more than a decade ago—not because the Jew cares for the positive side of radical philosophy, not because he desires to be a partaker in Gentile nationalism or Gentile democracy, but because no existing Gentile system of"government is ever anything but distasteful to him. Will such a spirit of revolt be extinguished, such recurring alliances with the rebels be "dissolved, by some (Continued on page 145)

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