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.dt The Project Gutenberg eBook of Ten Essays on Zionism and Judaism, by Achad Ha-am
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TEN ESSAYS ON ZIONISM AND JUDAISM
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Printed in Great Britain by
St. Stephen’s Printing Works, Bristol, England.
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TEN ESSAYS ON ZIONISM AND JUDAISM
BY
ACHAD HA-AM
TRANSLATED FROM THE HEBREW BY
LEON SIMON
Author of Studies in Jewish Nationalism
LONDON
GEORGE ROUTLEDGE & SONS, LTD.
BROADWAY HOUSE, 68-74, CARTER LANE, E.C.
1922
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CONTENTS
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Translator’s Introduction #vii#
#The Wrong Way (1889):art01# #1#
#The First Zionist Congress (1897):art02# #25#
#The Jewish State and the Jewish Problem (1897):art03# #32#
#Pinsker and Political Zionism (1902):art04# #56#
#The Time Has Come (1906):art05# #91#
#“When Messiah Comes” (1907):art06# #114#
#A Spiritual Centre (1907):art07# #120#
#Summa Summarum (1912):art08# 130
#The Supremacy of Reason (1904):art09# 162
#Judaism and the Gospels (1910):art10# 223
#Index:index# 254
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TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
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The present volume of translations from the Hebrew
of Achad Ha-Am[#] differs in character from the volume
of Selected Essays published in 1912 by the Jewish
Publication Society of America. The earlier selection
was confined, by the express desire of the publishing
Society, to essays dealing with the broader aspects of
Judaism and Jewish thought; essays of a more polemical
character, in which the author has defined his attitude
to the modern Jewish national movement, were designedly
omitted. Of the ten further essays included in
the present selection, only two belong to the former
category, and these have been placed, out of their chronological
order, at the end. The other eight essays all
deal with one aspect or another of Zionism, and they
form a series which will enable the English reader who
is interested in the Zionist movement to follow its
history under the guidance of one who is at the same
time among its staunchest pillars and its most unsparing
critics. The first[#] of the eight—which is also the first
essay written by Achad Ha-Am—belongs to the early
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years of the Jewish national movement, when the
Zionist Organisation was unborn, and the very name
“Zionism” uninvented. The last of the eight—and the
most recent of Achad Ha-Am’s essays, for the war and
ill-health have made him silent of recent years—records
his impressions of the practical results achieved by
Zionism in Palestine up to 1911.
As the background of these essays is for the most
part unfamiliar to English readers, it will not be out of
place to give here a brief sketch of the phases through
which the Zionist movement has passed, in so far as
that is necessary for a proper understanding of the
criticisms and allusions in the essays themselves.
The first organised form of Zionism took shape in
Russia under the stress of the pogroms of 1880-81.
Those pogroms, following a period during which the
Russian Government had seemed to be working sincerely
towards the emancipation of the Jews, and themselves
followed by a whole code of restrictive legislation
known as the May Laws, awoke into a blaze the
national sentiment which had slumbered but had not
died in the Russian Ghetto. They revealed the evils of
galuth—exile, life outside Palestine—in all their hideousness,
and turned men’s minds to the active accomplishment
of that escape from galuth for which during many
centuries the Jew had only prayed. Chibbath Zion
(Love of Zion) became an organised movement, and
throughout Russia groups of Chovevé Zion (Lovers of
Zion) began to work for the settlement of Jews on the
land in Palestine. At the head of the movement stood
Dr. Leo Pinsker, who in his pamphlet Auto-Emancipation
had outlined an ambitious scheme for the emigration
of Jews en masse to some territory (not necessarily
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Palestine) where they could be their own masters. His
proposal found no response among the emancipated
Western Jews, to whom it was addressed; and as its
realisation was obviously beyond the power of the
oppressed and persecuted Russian Jews, its author turned
to Chibbath Zion as the only means open to him of working
for a national regeneration of Jewry. Events soon
showed that Chibbath Zion was as yet unable to achieve
so large an aim. The difficulties in the way of settling
Jews on the land in Palestine were enormous, and the
resources of the Chovevé Zion were painfully limited.
The national sentiment was not sufficiently alive in the
Jewish masses to induce large numbers of them to brave
the hardships and privations of life in Palestine for the
sake of a national ideal. Any Jew whose primary object
was to escape from pogroms and May Laws and to better
his individual position would naturally prefer some
country, like the United States, where economic life was
already developed. The Chovevé Zion attempted,
rather unwisely, to make Palestine attractive to the less
idealistically minded by exaggerating the possibilities
of individual self-advancement which it held out. The
natural result was disappointment and disillusion; and
the Palestinian agricultural settlements (or colonies, as
they are generally called) would have faded away
altogether but for the generous assistance of Baron
Edmond de Rothschild, of Paris. Thanks to him the
first colonies pulled through, and after many vicissitudes
were set on the road to independence. But the whole
colonisation movement remained small and poor, and
any hopes which might have been entertained of its
bringing about even the beginning of a solution of the
material problem of galuth were dissipated at an early
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date. Meanwhile, however, the Chovevé Zion contributed
to a national work of the first importance by
helping to lay the foundations of a revival of the Hebrew
language, especially in Palestine—a development which,
while it had nothing to do with the solution of any
material problem, had very much to do with the
stimulation of that national sentiment which is the only
possible basis of a national as distinct from a purely
philanthropic or economic movement.
In 1895, when the colonisation work was at a low
ebb, the Jewish world was startled by the appearance
of Der Judenstaat, a pamphlet in which a brilliant
Viennese journalist and playwright, Dr. Theodor Herzl,
advocated, as a solution of the Jewish problem, the
establishment of an autonomous Jewish State in some
suitable territory (not necessarily Palestine). Herzl’s
scheme was (unconsciously) more or less a reproduction
of that of Pinsker; but it met with a different fate,
largely, no doubt, thanks to the silent growth of the
national sentiment which had been brought about during
the intervening years by the awakening—albeit to little
purpose from a purely practical point of view—of Jewish
interest in Palestine. While the Western Jews were
for the most part as deaf to Herzl’s call as they had
been to Pinsker’s, many of the Chovevé Zion found in
his pamphlet a new inspiration, and their pressure
induced him to take in hand himself the practical realisation
of a scheme which he had meant to leave others
to carry out. The result was the Zionist Organisation,
which was founded at the first Zionist Congress at Basle
in 1897. This organisation, though the great body of
its supporters was drawn from the ranks of the Chovevé
Zion, reflected the outlook and ideas of Herzl and his
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handful of friends and supporters from the West. There
was to be no more waste of time and effort on “petty
colonisation.” Instead, there was to be a political
organisation of Jewry, with a large National Fund,
which would first of all buy Palestine from the Turk
under a Charter guaranteed by the European Powers,
and would then proceed to settle in Palestine all those
Jews who could not be happy where they were. This
beautiful dream roused the Jewish masses for a time to a
kind of Messianic fervour; it was so much more alluring
than the hard realities which the Chovevé Zion had
had to face. But after a few years the inevitable
awakening came. Realities remained realities, and the
Charter remained a distant vision. Herzl passed away
untimely in 1904, and with him and his wonderful personality
passed the only force which could make the
dream-world appear for a time real. He had, indeed,
obtained from the British Government an offer of a
territory in East Africa (commonly, though incorrectly,
located in Uganda) for a quasi-autonomous settlement
of Jews; but this triumph of the Zionist Organisation
only served to bring out the essential difference, hitherto
more or less successfully kept in the background, between
the head of the Organisation and its body. The Chovevé
Zion, however they may have erred in attempting to
further the colonisation of Palestine by appeals to individual
self-interest, had at any rate remained sufficiently
nationalist to feel that a national Jewish settlement
could by no possibility have any other home than
Palestine. They had seen to it that the Zionist
Organisation put Palestine and no other country into its
programme. Now, when they found their trusted and
beloved leader attempting to divert them to East
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Africa—though he averred solemnly that East Africa
was only intended as a temporary refuge, a Nachtasyl,
and Palestine remained the real goal—they felt that
they had been betrayed. Herzl’s enormous influence
averted, at the Congress of 1903, a direct refusal of the
British Government’s offer: a Commission was
appointed to study the proposed territory. But when
the next Congress met, in 1905, Herzl was no more,
and the opponents of East Africa—the Zioné Zion,
“Zion-Zionists,” as they were called—carried the day.
There was of course a violent reaction: the masses
swung away from Zionism, now that it no longer held
out to them the hope of a refuge from persecution and
poverty, and some of the minority party founded a new
body, the Jewish Territorial Organisation, to search the
globe for a home of refuge. This was all to the good,
for the Zionist Organisation was purged of Messianism
and was able to face realities again. The framework,
and to a large extent the phraseology, created by Herzl
were retained, but essentially the Zionist Organisation
became perforce an instrument for the realisation of the
national ideal along the two lines on which alone real
advance is possible—the lines of Palestinian development
and national education. It was only during the
war, which brought on the one hand the Balfour Declaration,
with its promise of a National Home for the
Jewish people in Palestine, and on the other hand untold
suffering and loss to the Jewish masses in Eastern
Europe, that Messianic hopes were again aroused—again
to be followed by the inevitable disillusionment
and reaction.
On the position created by the recent developments
of Zionism Achad Ha-Am has commented in a brief
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introduction, written in June, 1920, for a new edition
of his collected essays in Hebrew. As the question of
the scope of the Balfour Declaration is still much
debated, and has a special interest for English readers,
I reproduce here the greater part of that Introduction.
“When,” he writes, “I returned from Palestine in
1912, and my Summa Summarum aroused violent anger
in various quarters, I wrote an explanatory note by way
of supplement to that essay; and I should like to remind
my readers on this occasion of some of the things that
I said then, because they seem to me relevant at the
present time. ‘There must be,’ I wrote, ‘some natural
connection of cause and effect between an object and the
means by which its attainment is sought: we must be
able to show how this object can be attained by these
means. So long as that connection does not exist, so
long as we cannot attempt to justify our choice of means
except by such vague phrases as ”Perhaps ... you
never can tell ... times change ...”—we may speak
of cherished hopes and an ideal for the distant future,
but we cannot speak of a practical object which can
serve as a basis for a systematic plan of work. For
every systematic plan of work must necessarily be based
on a clear conception (whether intellectual or imaginative)
of the chain of cause and effect which connects
the various activities one with another, and all of them
together with the object.... No doubt, we cannot
foretell the future; no doubt it is possible that unforeseen
things may happen and may change the face of
reality. But a possibility of that kind cannot be made
the basis of a systematic plan of work, and we are
dealing no longer with an objective of immediate activity,
but with a vision of the future.’
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“About two years after these words were written and
published the world-war began, and led to those results
which we know: ‘unforeseen things happened and
changed the face of reality.’ Our own life, too, was
caught in the maelstrom of world-happenings; and the
face of our own reality, too, was changed as a consequence.
Much might be said, and has already been
said, about the character of these changes, about their
good and their bad side, about their significance both
for the Diaspora and for Palestine. I cannot now deal
with this subject fully, and I wish for my part only to
say a word or two on one of the principal features of
the changed situation—I mean the widening of the
horizon of our work in Palestine through the famous
Declaration of the British Government, which has
recently been confirmed by the Supreme Council, and
thus has ceased to be merely the promise of a single
Government and has become an international obligation.
This Declaration has provided a new ‘basis for
a systematic plan of work,’ and has set up ‘an objective
of immediate activity’—activity on a large scale, such
as has been hitherto only a theme for the anticipations
of orators and essayists, with no real basis in the
present. But at the same time the Declaration has
winged anew the imagination of those who were already
accustomed to build castles in the air, without regard
to the realities of this earthly life. That is, I fancy, one
of the reasons why there is still a demand for this book,
though much of its contents does not fit the realities of
to-day. It is not so much the contents that matter as
the point of view from which I have tried to deal with
the various questions as they arose. I have tried to
judge not on the basis of that ‘you-never-can-tell’
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attitude which shrouds itself in the mists of the future,
but on the basis of present realities, or of impending
realities which can be prognosticated from existing conditions.
Even to-day this point of view needs reiteration.
For once it has happened, as by a miracle, that
what was wildly improbable a short time ago has become
to a certain extent actual: and this ‘miracle’ has led
those who were always waiting for miracles to claim a
victory, and to insist on maintaining their attitude for
the future also, and on laying down as the one principle
of policy this perverted axiom—that if such a thing has
happened once in exceptional circumstances, its like
may happen again, and we can therefore construct our
world as we please, regardless of present realities, and
relying on a repetition of the miracle when we need it.
There is a Jewish proverb which says: ‘A mistake which
succeeds is none the less a mistake.’ So a plan of work
which turns its back on realities, and relies on the
possibility that something out of the ordinary may turn
up and change realities to its advantage, is a mistaken
plan, even if it succeeds for once in a way. And if it
goes on banking on the element of chance, which does
in fact interfere occasionally with the normal course of
events, and continues to act accordingly, it will end in
disaster, despite its initial success.
“All the details of the diplomatic conversations in
London which led to the Declaration have not yet been
made public; but the time has come to reveal one
‘secret,’ because knowledge of it will make it easier to
understand the true meaning of the Declaration.
“‘To facilitate the establishment in Palestine of a
National Home for the Jewish people’—that is the text
of the promise given to us by the British Government.
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But that is not the text suggested to the Government
by the Zionist spokesmen. They wished it to read:
‘the reconstitution of Palestine as the National Home
of the Jewish people’; but when the happy day arrived
on which the Declaration was signed and sealed by the
Government, it was found to contain the first formula
and not the second. That is to say, the allusion to the
fact that we are about to rebuild our old national home
was dropped, and at the same time the words ‘constitution
of Palestine as the national home’ were replaced
by ‘establishment of a national home in Palestine.’
There were some who understood at once that this had
some significance; but others thought that the difference
was merely one of form. Hence they sometimes attempted
on subsequent occasions, when the negotiations with the
Government afforded an opportunity, to formulate the
promise in their own wording, as though it had not been
changed. But every time they found in the Government’s
reply a repetition of the actual text of the Declaration—which
proves that it is not a case where the same
thing may be put equally well in either of two ways, but
that the promise is really defined in this particular form
of words, and goes no further.
“It can scarcely be necessary to explain at length the
difference between the two versions. Had the British
Government accepted the version suggested to it—that
Palestine should be reconstituted as the national home
of the Jewish people—its promise might have been
interpreted as meaning that Palestine, inhabited as it
now is, was restored to the Jewish people on the ground
of its historic right; that the Jewish people was to
rebuild its waste places and was destined to rule over it
and to manage all its affairs in its own way, without
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regard to the consent or non-consent of its present
inhabitants. For this rebuilding (it might have been
understood) is only a renewal of the ancient right of the
Jews, which over-rides the right of the present inhabitants,
who have wrongly established their national home
on a land not their own. But the British Government,
as it stated expressly in the Declaration itself, was not
willing to promise anything which would harm the
present inhabitants of Palestine, and therefore it
changed the Zionist formula, and gave it a more
restricted form. The Government thinks, it would
seem, that when a people has only the moral force of
its claim to build its national home in a land at present
inhabited by others, and has not behind it a powerful
army or fleet to prove the justice of its claim, that people
can have only what its right allows it in truth and
justice, and not what conquering peoples take for themselves
by armed force, under the cover of various ‘rights’
invented for the occasion. Now the historic right of a
people in relation to a country inhabited by others can
mean only the right to settle once more in its ancestral
land, to work the land and to develop its resources
without hindrance. And if the inhabitants complain
that strangers have come to exploit the land and its
population, the historic right has a complete answer to
them: these newcomers are not strangers, but the
descendants of the old masters of the country, and as
soon as they settle in it again, they are as good as
natives. And not only the settlers as individuals, but
the collective body as a people, when it has once more
put into this country a part of its national wealth—men,
capital, cultural institutions and so forth—has again in
the country its national home, and has the right to
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extend and to complete its home up to the limit of its
capacity. But this historic right does not over-ride the
right of the other inhabitants, which is a tangible right
based on generation after generation of life and work in
the country. The country is at present their national
home too, and they too have the right to develop their
national potentialities so far as they are able. This
position, then, makes Palestine common ground for
different peoples, each of which tries to establish its
national home there; and in this position it is impossible
for the national home of either of them to be complete
and to embrace all that is involved in the conception of
a ‘national home.’ If you build your house not on
untenanted ground, but in a place where there are other
inhabited houses, you are sole master only as far as your
front gate. Within you may arrange your effects as
you please, but beyond the gate all the inhabitants are
partners, and the general administration must be
ordered in conformity with the good of all of them.
Similarly, national homes of different peoples in the
same country can demand only national freedom for
each one in its internal affairs, and the affairs of the
country which are common to all of them are administered
by all the ‘householders’ jointly if the relations
between them and their degree of development qualify
them for the task, or, if that condition is not yet fulfilled,
by a guardian from outside, who takes care that
the rights of none shall be infringed.
“When, then, the British Government promised to
facilitate the establishment in Palestine of a national
home for the Jewish people—and not, as was suggested
to it, the reconstitution of Palestine as the national
home of the Jewish people—that promise meant two
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things. It meant in the first place recognition of the
historic right of the Jewish people to build its national
home in Palestine, with a promise of assistance from
the British Government; and it meant in the second
place a negation of the power of that right to over-ride
the right of the present inhabitants and to make the
Jewish people sole ruler in the country. The national
home of the Jewish people must be built out of the
free material which can still be found in the country
itself, and out of that which the Jews will bring in from
outside or will create by their work, without overthrowing
the national home of the other inhabitants. And
as the two homes are contiguous, and friction and conflicts
of interest are inevitable, especially in the early
period of the building of the Jewish national home, of
which not even the foundations have yet been properly
laid, the promise necessarily demands, though it is not
expressly so stated, that a guardian shall be appointed
over the two homes—that is, over the whole country—to
see to it that the owner of the historic right, while he
does not injure the inhabitants in their internal affairs,
shall not on his side have obstacles put in his way by
his neighbour, who at present is stronger than he. And
in course of time, when the new national home is fully
built, and its tenant is able to rely, no less than his
neighbour, on the right which belongs to a large population
living and working in the country, it will be
possible to raise the question whether the time has not
come to hand over the control of the country to the
‘householders’ themselves, so that they may together
administer their joint affairs, fairly and justly, in accordance
with the needs of each of them and the value of
his work for the revival and development of the country.
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“This and no more, it seems to me, is what we can
find in the Balfour Declaration; and this and no more
is what our leaders and writers ought to have told the
people, so that it should not imagine more than what is
actually there, and afterwards relapse into despair and
absolute scepticism.
“But we all know how the Declaration was interpreted
at the time of its publication, and how much
exaggeration many of our workers and writers have
tried to introduce into it from that day to this. The
Jewish people listened, and believed that the end of the
galuth had indeed come, and that in a short time
Palestine would be a ‘Jewish State.’ The Arab people
too, which we have always ignored from the very beginning
of the colonisation movement, listened, and
believed that the Jews were coming to expropriate its
land and to do with it what they liked. All this
inevitably led to friction and bitterness on both sides,
and contributed much to the state of things which was
revealed in all its ugliness in the events at Jerusalem
last April.[#] Those events, in conjunction with others
which preceded them, might have taught us how long
is the way from a written promise to its practical realisation,
and how many are the obstacles, not easily to be
removed, which beset our path. But apparently we
learned nothing; and only a short time after the events
at Jerusalem, when the British promise was confirmed
at San Remo, we began once more to blow the Messianic
trumpet, to announce the ‘redemption,’ and so forth.
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The confirmation of the promise, as I said above, raised
it to the level of an international obligation, and from
that point of view it is undoubtedly of great value. But
essentially it added nothing, and the text of the earlier
promise remains absolutely unaltered. What the real
meaning of that text is, we have seen above; but its
brevity and vagueness allow those who so wish—as
experience in Palestine has shown—to restrict its meaning
much more—indeed, almost to nothing. Everything,
therefore, depends on the good will of the ‘guardian,’
on whom was placed at San Remo the duty of giving
the promise practical effect. Had we paid attention to
realities, we should have restrained our feelings, and
have waited a little to see how the written word would
be interpreted in practice.
“I have dwelt perhaps at undue length on this point,
because it is the fundamental one. But in truth we are
now confronted with other questions, internal questions,
which demand a solution without delay; and the
solutions which we hear from time to time are as far
from realities as are the poles asunder. It will not be
long, however, before these visionary proposals, which
are so attractive, have to make way for actual work,
and we have to show in practice how far we have the
material and moral strength to establish the national
home which we have been given permission to establish
in Palestine.
“And at this great and difficult moment I appear
before my readers—perhaps for the last time—on the
threshold of this book, and repeat once more my old
warning, on which most of the essays in this book are
but a commentary:
“Do not press on too quickly to the goal, so long as
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the actual conditions without which it cannot be reached
have not been created; and do not disparage the work
which is possible at any given time, having regard to
actual conditions, even if it will not bring the Messiah
to-day or to-morrow.”
.tb
It is because Achad Ha-Am has consistently driven
home the lesson reiterated in these last words, and
because that lesson is so strikingly apt at the present
time, that one feels justified to-day in producing a
translation of some of his essays which, as regards their
actual subject-matter, are somewhat out of date. The
point of view from which he approaches Zionist questions—that
of an idealism guided but not subdued by a
sternly objective apprehension of realities—is not out
of date, and never will be until either human beings or
external realities change very much. And that point of
view is capable of a wider application than is expressly
given to it by the Lover of Zion, concerned primarily
with the problems and the destiny of his own people:
for it is true of any other ideal movement no less than
of Zionism that it is endangered not alone by those who
oppose it, but also by those who adhere to it only because
they expect it to work miracles.
.tb
The translations in this volume, like those in its predecessor,
have had the advantage of revision by Achad
Ha-Am. The few foot-notes which the translator has
added are enclosed in square brackets.
I am much indebted to Mr. Fisher Unwin and to
Messrs. Paul Goodman and Arthur D. Lewis for permission
to include in this volume the translation of “A
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Spiritual Centre,” which first appeared in Zionism:
Problems and Views, and to the Union of Jewish
Literary Societies for permission to reprint that part of
“The Time has Come” which appeared in the Jewish
Literary Annual for 1907. My best thanks are due to the
Editors of the Jewish Review, Messrs. Norman Bentwich
and Joseph Hockman, who have kindly allowed me to
include “Judaism and the Gospels” and “Summa Summarum”
from the Jewish Review. I have also to thank
the Jüdischer Verlag, which now owns the copyright of the
Hebrew original, for consenting to the publication of
this volume of translations.
LEON SIMON.
.fn #
Achad Ha-Am (= “one of the people”) is the pen-name of Asher
Ginzberg, a famous Hebrew thinker and essayist, born in Russia in
1856, who has lived in London since 1908. His biography (up to
1902) is given in the Jewish Encyclopædia. For some account of his
teaching I may refer to the essay called “One of the People” in my
Studies in Jewish Nationalism (Longmans, 1920).
.fn-
.fn #
This essay (“The Wrong Way”), when first published, had
to be expressed somewhat obscurely so as to pass the Russian
Censor. It was altered subsequently, when the first collection of
Achad Ha-Am’s essays was published in book form, but it still
lacks somewhat of the absolute clarity which distinguishes his usual
style.
.fn-
.fn #
The anti-Jewish riots of April, 1920, in which many lives
were lost. In a footnote at this point the author recalls that as far
back as 1891 he drew attention to the Arab question, and pointed out
the folly of regarding the Arabs as “wild men of the desert,” who
could not see what was going on around them.
.fn-
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.pn +1
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.pn 1
.sp 4
.h2 id=art01
THE WRONG WAY | (1889)
.sp 2
.h3
I
.sp 2
For many centuries the Jewish people, sunk in
poverty and degradation, has been sustained by faith
and hope in the divine mercy. The present generation
has seen the birth of a new and far-reaching idea, which
promises to bring down our faith and hope from heaven,
and transform both into living and active forces, making
our land the goal of hope, and our people the anchor
of faith.
Historic ideas of this kind spring forth suddenly, as
though of their own accord, when the time is ripe. They
at once establish their sway over the minds which respond
to them, and from these they spread abroad and make
their way through the world—as a spark first sets fire
to the most inflammable material, and then spreads to
the framework of the building. It was in this way that
our idea came to birth, without our being able to say
who discovered it, and won adherents among those who
halted half-way: among those, that is, whose faith had
weakened, and who had no longer the patience to wait
for miracles, but who, on the other hand, were still
attached to their people by bonds which had not lost their
strength, and had not yet abandoned belief in its right
to exist as a single people. These first “nationalists”
raised the banner of the new idea, and went out to fight
// File: b002.png
.pn +1
its battle full of confidence. The sincerity of their own
conviction gradually awoke conviction in others, and
daily fresh recruits joined them from Left and Right:
so that one might have expected them in a short time to
be numbered by tens of thousands.
But meanwhile the movement underwent a fundamental
change. The idea took practical shape in the work of
Palestinian colonisation. This unlooked-for development
surprised friends and foes alike. The friends of
the idea raised a shout of victory, and cried in exultation:
Is not this a thing unheard-of, that an idea so young has
strength to force its way into the world of action? Does
not this prove clearly that we were not mere dreamers?
The foes of the movement, on their side, who had
hitherto despised it and mocked it, as an idle fancy of
dreamers and visionaries, now began grudgingly to admit
that after all it showed signs of life and was worthy of
attention.
From that time dates a new period in the history of
the idea; and if we glance at the whole course of its
development from that time to the present, we shall find
once again matter for surprise. Whereas previously the
idea grew ever stronger and stronger and spread more
and more widely among all sections of the people, while
its sponsors looked to the future with exultation and high
hopes, now, after its victory, it has ceased to win new
adherents, and even its old adherents seem to lose their
energy, and ask for nothing more than the well-being
of the few poor colonies[#] already in existence, which are
what remains of all their pleasant visions of an earlier
day. But even this modest demand remains unfulfilled;
the land is full of intrigues and quarrels and pettiness—all
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.pn +1
for the sake and for the glory of the great idea—which
give them no peace and endless worry; and who knows
what will be the end of it all?
If, as a philosopher has said, it is melancholy to
witness the death from old age of a religion which
brought comfort to men in the past, how much more sad
is it when an idea full of youthful vigour—the hope of
the passing generation and the salvation of that which
is coming—stumbles and falls at the outset of its career!
Add to this that the idea in question is one which we see
exercising so profound an influence over many peoples,
and surely we are bound to ask ourselves the old
question: Why are we so different from any other race
or nation? Or are those of our people really right, who
say that we have ceased to be a nation and are held
together only by the bond of religion? But, after all,
those who take that view can speak only for themselves.
It is true that between them and us there is no longer
any bond except that of a common religion and the
hatred which our enemies have for us; but we ourselves,
who feel our Jewish nationality in our own hearts, very
properly deride anybody who tries to argue out of existence
something of which we have an intuitive conviction.
If this is so, why has not the idea of the national rebirth
succeeded in taking root even among ourselves and in
making that progress for which we hoped?
Writers in the press give us two answers to this
question. Some blame the Chalukah[#] with its Rabbis
// File: b004.png
.pn +1
and scribes, others “the Baron”[#] with his agents and
administrators in Palestine. All alike try to fasten the
blame on certain men, as though but for them the Jewish
problem would have been solved for all time; and the
only point at issue is whether it is A. and B. or X. and Y.
who stand in the way of that consummation. But such
answers are not at all satisfying. They simply raise a
further question: How is it that certain individuals, be
they who they may, are in a position to obstruct the
progress of the whole nation? Must it not be a sorry
“national movement” which depends for its success on
the generosity of a philanthropist and the kindness of
his agents, and cannot withstand the miserable Chalukah,
which is itself fighting for its existence with what
strength it has left?
We must look, then, for the cause of all the evil not
in isolated facts, in what this man or the other does, but
much deeper. If we do that we shall find, I think, the
true cause to lie in the “victory” which the idea has
achieved prematurely through the fault of its champions.
In their eagerness to obtain great results before the time
was ripe, they have deserted the long road of natural
development, and by artificial means have forced into the
arena of practical life an idea which was still young
and tender, neither fully ripened nor sufficiently
developed; and thanks to this excessive haste their
strength has failed them, and their labour has been in
vain.
This judgment will certainly not be widely acceptable,
and I will therefore endeavour in what follows to explain
it so far as I am able, and so far as the nature of the
subject permits.
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.pn +1
Every belief or opinion which leads to action must
necessarily be founded on the following three judgments:
First, that the attainment of a certain object is felt by us
to be needed; secondly, that certain actions are the
means to the attainment of that object; and thirdly, that
those actions are not beyond our power, and the effort
which they require is not so great as to outweigh the
value of the object in our estimation. The first of these
judgments is based on feeling, and needs no proof; the
second and third are based on knowledge of facts and
phenomena outside ourselves, and therefore need the
assent of reason.
When, therefore, a new idea summons us to a new
course of action, it may be simply discovering new
methods of attaining an object which we valued before,
and may at the same time be able to demonstrate by
conclusive proofs, whether theoretical or practical, that
these methods really lead to the attainment of the
object, and are commensurate with its value and with
our resources. A new discovery of this sort belongs
entirely to the sphere of reason, and therefore its
sponsors need put their case only before people of
intelligence and good judgment. If such men pronounce
the new idea right, and proceed to act as it bids, its
victory among the masses is assured: for gradually the
masses will follow in the right course. But it will be
different if one of these conditions is lacking—if, that
is, the object which the new idea sets before us is one
that we do not already value, or one not valued proportionately
to the difficulty of its attainment; or again
if it cannot compel reason, by convincing arguments, to
admit the correctness of its judgment as regards the
connection between the means and the object, and as
// File: b006.png
.pn +1
regards the resources and the effort necessary for the
attainment of the object. In either of these cases the
new idea must rely for its success not on reason, but on
sentiment. For the growth of a feeling of affection and
desire for the object will carry with it not only a
strengthening of the determination to strive after its
attainment, no matter how great the effort required, but
also an increasing intellectual belief in the possibility of
its attainment, in spite of the absence of conclusive
evidence that it is attainable. Hence those who
originate an idea of this kind have not, at the outset of
their activity, any concern with the intellectuals, the
men of dry logic and cold calculation: it is not in that
quarter that they will find support. They must turn only
to those whose sensibilities are quick, and who are
governed by their feelings; they alone will listen. And
for that reason the originators of the idea must themselves
be above all things men of keen sensibility,
temperamentally capable of concentrating their whole
spiritual life on a single point, on one idea and one desire,
of devoting their whole life to it and expending in its
service their last ounce of strength. By doing their work
competently and with absolute devotion they will show
that they have themselves boundless faith in the truth of
their idea, and infinite love for its service; and that will
be the only sure means of awakening faith and love in
others. In that way, and not by mere talk, will they
gain wide support for their idea. And if they appeal
in this way to sentiment, then there is a chance for the
idea (provided that it does in some way correspond to a
current need) to spread gradually and to win many
adherents who will be devoted to it heart and soul. It
is true that such adherents, being strong mainly on the
// File: b007.png
.pn +1
side of feeling, are not generally fitted, for all their
good will, to carry out a difficult undertaking, which
needs strength, discernment, and experience; but that
matters not at all. For in course of time, as the idea
strikes root more and more firmly in the heart of the
people, and makes its way into every house and every
family, it will at last capture the great men, the leaders
and the thinkers. They, too, will begin, whether they
like it or no, to feel the workings of the new force which
envelops them on every side. Their opposition will
grow feebler and feebler, until at last they will succumb
and take their place in the van. Then the idea will
become a force to be reckoned with in practical affairs,
and its originators, setting out on the task of its realisation,
with the confidence born of strength, and with
the necessary equipment of knowledge and skill, may
achieve brilliant results, and have the laugh of the
intellectuals and the sceptics who used to scoff at them
as dreamers.
The history of ideas and beliefs afford actual examples
of all that has been said above. But it is time to return
to our immediate subject.
The idea which we are here discussing is not new
in the sense of setting up a new object of endeavour; but
the methods which it suggests for the attainment of its
object demand a great expenditure of effort, and it
cannot prove the adequacy of its methods so conclusively
as to compel reason to assent to the truth of its
judgments. What it needs, therefore, is to make of the
devotion and the desire which are felt for its ideal an
instrument for the strengthening of faith and the
sharpening of resolution. Now the devotion of the
individual to the well-being of the community, which is
// File: b008.png
.pn +1
the ideal here in question, is a sentiment to which we
Jews are no strangers. But if we would estimate aright
its capacity to produce the faith and the resolution that
are needed for the realisation of our idea, we must first
of all study the vicissitudes through which it has passed,
and examine its present condition.
All the laws and ordinances, all the blessings and
curses of the Law of Moses have but one unvarying
object: the well-being of the nation as a whole in the
land of its inheritance. The happiness of the individual
is not regarded. The individual Israelite is treated as
standing to the people of Israel in the relation of a single
limb to the whole body: the actions of the individual
have their reward in the good of the community. One
long chain unites all the generations, from Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob to the end of time; the covenant which
God made with the Patriarchs he keeps with their
descendants, and if the fathers eat sour grapes, the teeth
of the children will be set on edge. For the people is
one people throughout all its generations, and the individuals
who come and go in each generation are but as
those minute parts of the living body which change every
day, without affecting in any degree the character of that
organic unity which is the whole body.
It is difficult to say definitely whether at any period
our people as a whole really entertained the sentiment
of national loyalty in this high degree, or whether it was
only a moral ideal cherished by the most important section
of the people. But at any rate it is clear that after the
destruction of the first Temple, when the nation’s star
had almost set, and its well-being was so nearly shattered
that even its best sons despaired, and when the elders
of Israel sat before Ezekiel and said: “We will be as
// File: b009.png
.pn +1
the heathen, as the families of the countries,” and “Our
bones are dried, and our hope is lost”—it is clear that
at that time our people began to be more concerned
about the fate of the righteous individual who perishes
despite his righteousness. From that time date the
familiar speculations about the relation between goodness
and happiness which we find in Ezekiel, in Ecclesiastes,
and in many of the Psalms (and in Job some would add,
holding that book also to have been written in this
period); and many men, not satisfied by any of the
solutions which were propounded, came to the conclusion
that “it is vain to serve God,” and that “to
serve the Master without expectation of reward” is a
fruitless proceeding. It would seem that then, and not
till then, when the well-being of the community could
no longer inspire enthusiasm and idealism, did our
people suddenly remember the individual, remember
that besides the life of the body corporate the individual
has a life peculiarly his own, and that in this life of
his own he wants pleasure and happiness, and demands
a personal reward for his personal righteousness.
The effect of this discovery on the Jewish thought of
that epoch is found in such pronouncements as this:
“The present life is like an entrance-hall to the future
life.” The happiness which the individual desires will
become his when he enters the banqueting-hall, if only
he qualifies for it by his conduct in the ante-room. The
national ideal having ceased to satisfy, the religious
ordinances are endowed instead with a meaning and a
purpose for the individual, as the spirit of the age
demands, and are put outside the domain of the national
sentiment. Despite this change, the national sentiment
continued for a long time to live on and to play its part
// File: b010.png
.pn +1
in the political life of the people: witness the whole
history of the long period which ended with the wars of
Titus and Hadrian. But since on the political side there
was a continuous decline, the religious life grew correspondingly
stronger, and concurrently the individualist
element in the individual members of the nation prevailed
more and more over the nationalist element, and
drove it ultimately from its last stronghold—the hope
for a future redemption. That hope, the heartfelt
yearning of a nation seeking in a distant future what
the present could not give, ceased in time to satisfy
people in its original form, which looked forward to a
Messianic Age “differing from the life of to-day in
nothing except the emancipation of Israel from servitude.”
For living men and women no longer found any
comfort for themselves in the abundance of good which
was to come to their nation in the latter end of days,
when they would be dead and gone. Each individual
demanded his own private and personal share of the
expected general happiness. And religion went so far
as to satisfy even this demand, by laying less emphasis
on the redemption than on the resurrection of the
dead.
Thus the national ideal was completely changed. No
longer is patriotism a pure, unselfish devotion; no
longer is the common good the highest of all aims, overriding
the personal aims of each individual. On the
contrary: henceforward the summum bonum is for each
individual his personal well-being, in time or in
eternity, and the individual cares about the common
good only in so far as he himself participates in it. To
realise how complete the change of attitude became in
course of time, we need only recall the surprise expressed
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.pn +1
by the Tannaim[#] because the Pentateuch speaks of “the
land which the Lord swore to your ancestors to give
to them.” In fact, the land was given not to them,
but only to their descendants, and so the Tannaim find
in this passage an allusion to the resurrection of the
dead (Sifré). This shows that in their time that deep-rooted
consciousness of the union of all ages in the body
corporate of the people, which pervades the whole of
the Pentateuch, had become so weak that they could
not understand the words “to them” except as
referring to the actual individuals to whom they were
addressed.
Subsequent events—the terrible oppressions and frequent
migrations, which intensified immeasurably the
personal anxiety of every Jew for his own safety and
that of his family—contributed still further to the
enfeebling of the already weakened national sentiment,
and to the concentration of interest primarily in the life
of the family, secondarily in that of the congregation
(in which the individual finds satisfaction for his needs).
The national life of the people as a whole practically
ceased to matter to the individual. Even those Jews
who are still capable of feeling occasionally an impulse
to work for the nation cannot as a rule so far transcend
their individualism as to subordinate their own love of
self and their own ambition, or their immediate family
or communal interests, to the requirements of the nation.
The demon of egoism—individual or congregational—haunts
us in all that we do for our people, and suppresses
// File: b012.png
.pn +1
the rare manifestations of national feeling, being the
stronger of the two.
This, then, was the state of feeling to which we had
to appeal, by means of which we had to create the
invincible faith and the indomitable will that are needed
for a great, constructive national effort.
What ought we to have done?
It follows from what has been said above that we ought
to have made it our first object to bring about a revival—to
inspire men with a deeper attachment to the national
life, and a more ardent desire for the national well-being.
By these means we should have aroused the necessary
determination, and we should have obtained devoted
adherents. No doubt such work is very difficult and
takes a long time, not one year or one decade; and, I
repeat, it is not to be accomplished by speeches alone,
but demands the employment of all means by which
men’s hearts can be won. Hence it is probable—in fact
almost certain—that if we had chosen this method we
should not yet have had time to produce concrete results
in Palestine itself: lacking the resources necessary to
do things well, we should have been too prudent to do
things badly. But, on the other side, we should have
made strenuous endeavours to train up Jews who would
work for their people. We should have striven gradually
to extend the empire of our ideal in Jewry, till at
last it could find genuine, whole-hearted devotees, with
all the qualities needed to enable them to work for its
practical realisation.
But such was not the policy of the first champions of
our ideal. As Jews, they had a spice of individualism
in their nationalism, and were not capable of planting
a tree so that others might eat its fruit after they themselves
// File: b013.png
.pn +1
were dead and gone. Not satisfied with working
among the people to train up those who would ultimately
work in the land, they wanted to see with their own eyes
the actual work in the land and its results. When,
therefore, they found that their first rallying-cry, in
which they based their appeal on the general good, did
not at once rouse the national determination to take up
Palestinian work, they summoned to their aid—like our
teachers of old—the individualistic motive, and rested
their appeal on economic want, which is always sure
of sympathy. To this end they began to publish favourable
reports, and to make optimistic calculations, which
plainly showed that so many dunams[#] of land, so many
head of cattle and so much equipment, costing so-and-so
much, were sufficient in Palestine to keep a whole
family in comfort and affluence: so that anybody who
wanted to do well and had the necessary capital should
betake him to the goodly land, where he and his family
would prosper, while the nation too would benefit. An
appeal on these lines did really induce some people to
go to Palestine in order to win comfort and affluence;
whereat the promoters of the idea were mightily pleased,
and did not examine very closely what kind of people
the emigrants to Palestine were, and why they went.
But these people, most of whom were by no means
prepared to submit cheerfully to discomfort for the sake
of a national ideal, found when they reached Palestine
that they had been taken in by imaginative reports and
estimates; and they set up—and are still keeping up—a
loud and bitter outcry, seeking to gain their individual
ends by all means in their power, and regardless of any
distinction between what is legitimate and what is not,
// File: b014.png
.pn +1
or of the fair name of the ideal which they dishonour.
The details of the story are public property.
What wonder, then, that so great an ideal, presented
in so unworthy a form, can no longer gain adherents;
that a national building founded on the expectation of
profit and self-interest falls to ruins when it becomes
generally known that the expectation has not been
realised, and self-interest bids men keep away?
.tb
This, then, is the wrong way. Certainly, seeing that
these ruins are already there, we are not at liberty to
neglect the task of mending and improving so far as
we can. But at the same time we must remember that
it is not on these that we must base our hope of ultimate
success. The heart of the people—that is the foundation
on which the land will be regenerated. And the people
is broken into fragments.
So let us return to the road on which we started when
our idea first arose. Instead of adding yet more ruins,
let us endeavour to give the idea itself strong roots and
to strengthen and deepen its hold on the Jewish people,
not by force, but by the spirit. Then we shall in time
have the possibility of doing actual work.
“I shall see it, but not now: I shall behold it, but
not nigh.”
.sp 2
.h3
II
.sp 2
“Let us not theorise too much, or slacken our efforts.
Let us avoid impatience and undue haste. Let us
increase our devotion to our people and our love for our
ancestral land, and the God of Zion will help us.”
These are the concluding words of the long criticism
// File: b015.png
.pn +1
of my first essay which appeared in ha-Meliz.[#] It
might be inferred that my advice to the Chovevé Zion
was that they should confine themselves to theory, give
up practical work, proceed with undue haste, and refrain
from increasing devotion to our people and love for our
ancestral land. But any attentive reader of my article
will not need to be told that as regards the two last
points I said the exact opposite: that we should not,
through undue haste, attempt to achieve by the appeal
to self-interest things which are not yet ripe for achievement
by force of the ideal itself, because so long as
Chibbath Zion is not a living and burning passion in the
heart of the people we lack the only basis on which the
land could be regenerated, and for that reason we must
strive with all our might to increase our devotion to our
people and our love for our ancestral land. But as
regards theorising and neglecting action, I may really
have left my meaning uncertain through excessive
brevity. Though I said explicitly that propaganda could
be made only by work competently done, and not by
speeches alone, it is possible that I ought to have added—what
is really self-evident from the context—that so
long as the time is not ripe for the actual carrying out
of our idea, the object of everything that we do on a small
scale ought to be simply to win adherents to our cause;
that by that test and that alone we ought to distinguish
between what is well and what is ill done both in Palestine
and outside it; that therefore quality and not quantity
must be our concern, and we must not confine our efforts
to the improvement of the colonies, but must use all the
many and various ways of appealing to the people.
// File: b016.png
.pn +1
It is therefore futile for my critic to labour to prove
that the Chovevé Zion had no right “to defer action
until they had created a new state of mind in the Jewish
masses and awakened their national consciousness.”
“Idea and action,” he says, “are not separated in our
minds; it requires deeds to convince us. How then
could the idea of resettlement gain acceptance with the
masses if it were not accompanied by action?” All
this does not touch my position, because I did not
demand deferment of action. On the contrary, I
demanded that everything possible should be done to
awaken the love of Palestine, and from that it follows
that when the champions of the idea themselves cultivate
the Holy Land with the sweat of their brows and their
hearts’ blood, as an example, they are doing the very
best propaganda work. But the settlement as it is
to-day—can it be regarded as propaganda work of this
kind? My critic himself says that “the champions of
the idea did not do the work with their own hands,” but
“talked in four languages;” and what they said was
calculated only to incite those who were out for material
advancement to go to Palestine and do the work. Such
men did in fact go to Palestine, and we know what they
did and what happened to them and what the settlement
has become. No wonder, then, that the idea has gone
on losing its influence on the minds of the people, and
that the heart of the Jew does not glow at the vision of
Jewish farmers hoeing and ploughing the land of our
fathers, as in the days of David and Solomon. Neither
the deeds nor the doers are such as to inspire enthusiasm
in a people whose heart is chilled by age and trouble.
But my critic joins issue with me in principle as well.
He maintains that by no possible means can we succeed
// File: b017.png
.pn +1
in arousing a strong national sentiment among our
people, because ever since we became a nation “the
sentiment of nationality has been foreign to the spirit of
our people, and the individual Jew seeks rather his own
good and his private advantage;” and it is vain for us
to fight against the spirit and natural character of the
people, “for nothing avails against national character.”
Hence the Chovevé Zion chose the line of self-interest,
not because they preferred it, but because no other was
open. “The Jewish masses do not properly understand
the language of the national sentiment. Our endeavour
must be to make actions speak to them in a language
which they do understand—the language of self-interest.
Then calculation will succeed where sentiment cannot.”
Now “the language of self-interest” is the language
of the struggle for existence, which speaks to each individual
in the particular style adapted to his position and
ambitions, and to no man in a speech which his neighbour
understands; and I for my part am unable to see
how it can serve us instead of the unvarying appeal of
the national sentiment, which unites all hearts for one
aim and one purpose. Even the Utilitarians, who tried
to trace all moral and social tendencies to the pursuit of
individual advantage, were concerned only to explain
the first cause of these tendencies, and to show how they
came into existence and developed, as against those who
attributed their presence to a direct interposition of
Providence. But it is universally admitted that self-interest
alone, as it is in itself, cannot provide a basis
for any organised society or any great collective effort.
Let us, however, waive that point, and let us hear
from our critic’s own lips what is the language of self-interest
in this matter. “National sentiment,” he says,
// File: b018.png
.pn +1
“is foreign to the spirit of our people. The way to
convince them is to show by figures that any industrious
and peaceable man will find what he wants in Palestine,
provided he has physical strength and capital.” He
admits, then, that only a man who has capital and
physical strength, and is industrious and peaceable to
boot, will find in Palestine what he wants—that is to say,
his individual advantage. Now it is difficult to find the
last-named qualifications in a Jew who has capital, and
is accustomed to make his living easily and to have
a great regard for his own dignity; and apart from that,
we have to remember that such a man will not easily find
what he wants in Palestine. For a man with capital
wants not merely plain food and raiment: he wants also
the luxuries and pleasures to which he has been used.
And if he is thinking of his individual advantage, he will
certainly come to the conclusion that it is folly to lay out
his capital in purchasing a piece of land in Palestine,
where at the very best he will have to work hard without
being able to find satisfaction for even a half of his
desires. To the truth of this statement our critic himself
bears witness. He tells us that “in those days also
(i.e., in the beginning of the colonisation work) the
movement existed principally among the poor, who
hoped to be established by the generosity of others; and
the rich held aloof, then as now.” Again: “In the
winter of 1881-82 the first emissary travelled to Palestine,
bearing written authority from a number of men
in good circumstances to purchase land on their behalf.
He bought the land of Rishon-le-Zion, but those who
had authorised him to buy for them changed their
minds.” And again: “Of those who bought plots of
land in the colony just mentioned it was only the poor
// File: b019.png
.pn +1
who went to Palestine; the rich remained at home.”
Finally: “The net result of the whole movement was
that, with few exceptions, those who remained in
Palestine were men in the last stage of poverty.”
Experience, therefore, teaches us that men of capital,
if they understand no language except that of individual
self-interest, will not go to find in Palestine “what they
want,” because they want more than they will find there.
Who is there, then, whom figures can persuade or to
whom self-interest can recommend Palestine, if those
who could go will not, and those who would cannot?
I asked in my article why the idea lost ground among
our people from the time when it began to take practical
shape in the land. Our critic answers with a sigh:
“Our impatient people saw that a long time and a great
deal of money would be needed to put the colonies which
had been founded into a satisfactory condition, and their
courage failed them. For eighteen hundred years we
found it possible to exist without moving a finger for the
colonisation of our land and the salvation of our people;
but now that we have not been able to make our colonies
all that they should be in six years, we lose heart. Are
we not an impatient people?” He does not realise
that what he attributes to impatience is simply an
inevitable result of the appeal to self-interest. For
eighteen hundred years we did not move a finger for the
colonisation of our land, because we did not expect it
to bring us advantage as individuals. In recent years
we have paid attention to the colonisation of our land,
because reports and statistics have led us to hope that it
will bring us advantage as individuals. But now, when
we see that a long time and a great deal of money will
be needed to put the colonies already founded into a
// File: b020.png
.pn +1
satisfactory condition, it becomes clear that from the
point of view of individual self-interest the thing is not
worth while; and so we have quite justifiably lost heart,
and the colonisation of our land has become a charitable
affair, which affords a scant subsistence to some hundreds
of people “in the last stage of poverty.”
.tb
Such, then, is the language of individual self-interest.
Had our critic really been able to adduce convincing
arguments in support of his severe judgment that there
never was and never will be any national sentiment
among the Jews, and that individual Jews will never be
able to rise above “private advantage and individual
self-interest,” then we might as well throw up the
sponge. We should have no right to be called a people
or to lay claim to a land. But, luckily for us, his
arguments are not so dangerous.
As a general rule, ethnological investigations into the
characteristics of different people are extremely speculative
and hazardous. One ethnologist set about to
collect the opinions of the foremost authorities as to the
characteristics of the Arabs, and this is what he found.
Some maintain that the Arab is a man of action, concerned
only with concrete things, and very weak on the
side of imagination; while others assert that both the
Arabs and the Hebrews are strongly imaginative, and
that among the Arabs the imagination is always more
powerful than the reason. On the other hand, Sprenger
regards it as self-evident that the predominance of the
imagination over the reason is a characteristic opposed
to the Arab spirit, and lays it down as a truth universally
recognised that the spirit of the Semitic peoples generally
is objective; whereas Lassen, and after him Renan,
// File: b021.png
.pn +1
regard it as universally recognised that the fundamental
characteristic of the Semitic peoples is subjectivity.[#]
If there are these differences of opinion as regards the
characteristics of the Arabs, who have never been
uprooted and driven into exile, can anybody have the
assurance to dogmatise about the characteristics of a
people like our own, which has been scattered among
different peoples these two thousand years? Can anybody
be so all-knowing as to distinguish with precision
between those characteristics which are innate and
original in us, and those which have been produced in
us by our own environment in exile; to trace one by one
all the mutations which the original and the acquired
traits have undergone in the passage from generation to
generation and from land to land; to forecast which of
our characteristics may or may not change with a change
of environment? Why, here is our critic laying down
the law about the Jewish character as though it were
something fixed and unchangeable by time or place,
while one famous modern writer has picked out the Jews
to demonstrate the truth of his theory that national
characteristics depend more on environment and social
conditions than on heredity, because he finds that our
characteristics differ in different countries and change at
different periods, according to our environment and the
spirit of the people among whom we live.[#]
This being so, I will not enlarge on the details of
our critic’s theory as to Jewish characteristics, but will
confine myself to that one dangerous characteristic
which he attributes to us—the innate lack of national
sentiment.
// File: b022.png
.pn +1
In my essay I argued thus: Seeing that the Law of
Moses is entirely based on the welfare of the whole
nation, so much so that it has no need to appeal to belief
in future reward and punishment (a belief which was
known in Egypt in very early times) in order to satisfy
the individual, we are justified in inferring the existence
at that time of a very strong national sentiment in the
whole people, or the most important section of it; and
it was only through historical circumstances that this
sentiment afterwards lost its force. Thus we are at
liberty to believe that by appropriate means it is possible
to revive to-day in our people a sentiment which it
already had in ancient times. To this our critic replies:
“If the Law looked only at the general good, that is not
because at a certain time the spirit of individualism did
not exist in Israel, but because the Law is practical and
reckons with facts. We see that the individual is
exposed to all kinds of accidents and misfortunes. How,
then, could a practical Law like ours guarantee individual
happiness, which is unrealisable?”
I have tried my hardest, Heaven knows, to discover
what this means, but in vain. It simply proves my
point. For if Judaism is realistic, and if the happiness of
the individual on earth is unrealisable, and if at the same
time there was no national sentiment, and the people
attached no great importance to the well-being of the
nation as a whole—then how could Judaism be content
with promising a reward which could not have much
value as an incentive to right living, when it might have
done as other religions have done, both before and since,
and as it did itself at a much later period, in response to
the needs of the time: namely, have promised every
individual a reward in heaven?
// File: b023.png
.pn +1
And our critic gets himself into all this difficulty simply
because he finds it stated by Chwolson that all Semites
are individualistic by nature. If that is so, we cannot
admit the existence of a national sentiment in Israel at
any period. Now we have seen above how much
reliance can be placed in such matters on the statements
of well-known authorities. But if we examine carefully
the passage which our critic quotes from Chwolson, we
shall be even more surprised at his finding in it sufficient
ground for passing such a sweeping judgment on his
people. Chwolson says: “There was scarcely ever
a strong bond of union between the Jewish tribes. A
full national consciousness has never developed very far
among Semites. Each tribe is a unity, the members of
which are closely bound together among themselves;
but there is no feeling of unity between the different
tribes.” The explanation, according to Chwolson, lies
in that individualism “which is especially characteristic
of the Semites.” But who can show how “a full
national consciousness” differs in character from a
feeling of love for and attachment to a single tribe?
And if it was individualism—and not external circumstances—which
prevented the Jewish tribes from being
joined by “a strong bond of union,” how is it that this
individualism allowed each tribe to become a closely-knit
unity? Surely, when a man feels it necessary and
possible to subordinate his individual interests to those
of the larger unit to which he belongs, even if that unit
is only a petty tribe, he has already got beyond individualism,
and is therefore capable even of “a full
national consciousness,” provided that there are no
external obstacles; and the only difference between the
national sentiment of a Frenchman and the tribal sentiment
// File: b024.png
.pn +1
of a Montenegrin lies in the magnitude of what
inspires the sentiment, not in the character of the
sentiment itself. And, in fact, it does happen in all
periods, under suitable conditions, that tribal patriotism
expands into national patriotism. The ancient Greeks
were at first divided into small tribes, continually at war
with one another, and it was only at a late period that
they acquired the sentiment of national unity. In the
Middle Ages the Italian cities were separate and mutually
hostile, and yet at last the Italians developed a
strong national sentiment. And, to come to recent
times, who does not know what the Germans were until
a few decades ago? “We still remember,” says one
of their great writers,[#] “the time when we were justly
reproached with being conspicuous among all the civilised
peoples of Europe for our lack of a strong and
healthy national sentiment.” And look at the Germans
now!
In a word: the contention that Semites in general,
or the Jews in particular, cannot have a national
sentiment (a sentiment of which one of the greatest
scientists[#] finds traces even in animals) needs to be
supported by weightier evidence.
And until such evidence is forthcoming, “let us not
slacken our efforts, and let us avoid undue haste. Let
us increase our devotion to our people and our love for
our ancestral land, and the God of Zion will help us.”
.fn #
[i.e., Jewish agricultural settlements in Palestine.]
.fn-
.fn #
[Chalukah—lit. “division”—is the Hebrew name for the stream
of charity which flows—or flowed before the war—into Palestine
from all quarters of the Jewish dispersion. Intended primarily for
the support of scholars, it has in practice done much to pauperise
the Jewish population in the cities of Palestine, and has created a
problem which it may take a generation or more of economic
progress to solve.]
.fn-
.fn #
[Baron Edmond de Rothschild.]
.fn-
.fn #
The Jewish teachers of the period (roughly) from 200 B.C. to
200 C.E. They were responsible for the Mishnah—the first Code of
Jewish Law after the Pentateuch—and for the earliest commentaries
on the Bible or parts of it, one of which is called Sifré.
.fn-
.fn #
\[A Turkish measure = about ¼ acre.]
.fn-
.fn #
[The Hebrew paper in which this and the foregoing essay
originally appeared.]
.fn-
.fn #
A. Müller, Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie, XIV., p. 435.
.fn-
.fn #
Henry George, Progress and Poverty, p. 352.
.fn-
.fn #
Ed. Zeller, Vorträge, II., p. 434.
.fn-
.fn #
Du Bois-Reymond, Reden, I., p. 309.
.fn-
// File: b025.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2 id=art02
THE FIRST ZIONIST CONGRESS | (1897[#])
.sp 2
The Congress of the Zionists, the subject of a controversy
which has filled the emptiness of our little world
for some months past, is now a piece of history. About
two hundred Jews, of all lands and of all parties, met
at Basle, and for three days (29-31 August) from
morning till evening they discussed publicly, in the sight
of the whole world, the establishment of a secure home
for the Jewish people in the land of its ancestors. Thus
the national answer to the “Jewish problem” came
out of its retirement into the light of day, and was proclaimed
to the world in ringing tones, in clear language
and in manly fashion—a thing the like of which had never
happened since the Jews were exiled from their land.
That is all. The Congress could do no more, had
need to do no more.
For—why deceive ourselves?—of all the great objects
of Chibbath Zion (or, as they call it now, “Zionism”),
there is only one towards the accomplishment of which
we have at present the strength to approach in any
appreciable degree, and that is the moral object—the
emancipation of ourselves from the inner slavery and
the spiritual degradation which assimilation has produced
// File: b026.png
.pn +1
in us, and the strengthening of our national unity by
joint action in every sphere of our national life, until
we become capable and worthy of a life of dignity and
freedom at some time in the future. Everything else
lies at yet in the realm of idea and imagination. Those
who oppose the “Jewish State” doubt whether it will
be possible to obtain the consent of the nations, and
especially of Turkey, to its establishment. But it seems
to me that there is a still more difficult question. If we
had this consent, should we, in our present moral condition,
be fit to accept it?... Nor is that all. One
may even doubt whether the establishment of a “Jewish
State” at the present time, even in the most complete
form that we can imagine, having regard to the general
international position, would give us the right to say
that our problem had been completely solved, and our
national ideal attained. “Reward is proportionate to
suffering.”[#] After two thousand years of untold misery
and suffering, the Jewish people cannot possibly be
content with attaining at last to the position of a small
and insignificant nation, with a State tossed about like
a ball between its powerful neighbours, and maintaining
its existence only by diplomatic shifts and continual
truckling to the favoured of fortune. An ancient people,
which was once a beacon to the world, cannot possibly
accept, as a satisfactory reward for all that it has
endured, a thing so trifling, which many other peoples,
unrenowned and uncultured, have won in a short time,
without going through a hundredth part of the suffering.
It was not for nothing that Israel had Prophets, whose
vision saw Righteousness ruling the world at the end
of days. It was their nationalism, their love for their
// File: b027.png
.pn +1
people and their land, that gave the Prophets that vision.
For in their day the Jewish State was always between
two fires—Assyria or Babylon on one side, and Egypt
on the other—and it never had any chance of a peaceful
life and natural development. So “Zionism” in the
minds of the Prophets expanded, and produced that great
vision of the end of days, when the wolf should lie down
with the lamb, and nation should no longer lift up the
sword against nation—and then Israel too should dwell
securely in his land. And so this ideal for humanity has
always been and will always be inevitably an essential
part of the national ideal of the Jewish people; and a
“Jewish State” will be able to give the people rest only
when universal Righteousness is enthroned and holds
sway over nations and States.
We went to Basle, then, not to found a Jewish State
to-day or to-morrow, but to proclaim aloud to all the
nations that the Jewish people still lives and desires to
live. We have to proclaim this in season and out, not
in order that the nations may hearken and give us what
we want, but primarily in order that we ourselves may
hear the echo of our cry in our inmost hearts, and
perhaps be roused thereby from our degradation.
This function the Basle Congress fulfilled admirably
in its opening stages; and for this it would have deserved
eternal commemoration in letters of gold—had it not
tried to do more.
Once again our impatience, that curse which dogs us
and ruins all that we do, had full rein. If those who
convened the Congress had armed themselves with
patience, and had begun by stating clearly that the
Messiah was not yet in sight, and that for the moment
we could achieve nothing beyond what words and enthusiasm
// File: b028.png
.pn +1
could do—the revival of our national spirit, and
the announcement of this revival in a public manner—then,
no doubt, the Congress would have been much less
well attended than it was, and one day would have
sufficed for its business instead of three: but that one day
would have been worth whole generations, and the delegates,
the chosen of our people (for only the chosen
of our people would have been interested in such a
Congress) would have returned to their several homes
filled with life and determination and new-born energy,
to impart their life and determination and energy to the
whole people.
But as it is....
The founders of this movement are “Europeans,”
and, being expert in the ways of diplomacy and the procedure
of latter-day political parties, they bring these
ways and procedure with them to the “Jewish State.” ...
Emissaries were sent out before the Congress,
and various hints were spread abroad in writing and by
word of mouth, so as to arouse in the masses an
exaggerated hope of imminent redemption. Thus was
kindled the false fire of a feverish enthusiasm, which
brought to the Basle Congress a rabble of youngsters—in
years or in understanding—and their senseless
proceedings robbed it of its bloom and made it a
mockery.
Councils large and small, committees without number,
a sheaf of fantastic proposals about a “National Fund,”[#]
and the rest of the haute politique of the Jewish State—these
are the “practical” results of the Congress. How
could it be otherwise? Most of the delegates, representing
the down-trodden Jews who long for redemption,
// File: b029.png
.pn +1
were sent for one purpose and on one understanding
only—that they should bring redemption back with them.
How could they return home without being able to
announce that the management of the “State” in all
its various branches had been put in good hands, and
that all the important questions connected with it had
been raised and examined and solved?
History repeats itself. Seven years ago our people
looked to the Executive Committee[#] at Jaffa as it looks
now to the Basle Congress. A large number of people
went to Palestine, thinking to buy the land and to build
dozens of colonies in a single day. Hope and enthusiasm
grew day by day, not less than now. Then also haute
politique—though in a different form—was our undoing.
The leaders of the movement aroused an artificial
exaltation in the people by promises and expectations
which were not destined to be fulfilled; and this exaltation
could not last long. The dream fled, eyes were
opened, and disappointment begat despair. At that
time, in the midst of the hubbub and enthusiasm, I
ventured to tell the public the bitter truth,[#] to warn the
people not to be led astray by false hopes: and many
regarded me as a traitor to my people, as one who
hindered the redemption. Now we have seen these
same men, the “practical” men of that day, among
the delegates at Basle, crowning the new movement with
wreaths, and making game of “practical colonisation”—as
though they had completely forgotten that the
responsibility for what has happened to the colonisation
work lies not on the work itself, but on them, because
// File: b030.png
.pn +1
they carried it on by crooked methods and turned it from
its true purpose, in order to create a great popular
movement at a single stroke.
At Basle, as at Jaffa, I sat solitary among my friends,
like a mourner at a wedding-feast. But now, as then, I
may not hold back the truth. Let others say what they
will, out of too much simplicity or for worse reasons:
I cannot refrain from uttering a warning that danger is
at hand and the reaction is close upon us. To-day, as
before, the enthusiasm is artificial, and in the end it will
lead to the despair that follows disillusionment.
Seven years ago the delegates returned from Jaffa
full of good tidings. Redemption had come to the land,
and we had nothing to do but wait till the vine bore
its fruit. Now the delegates return and tell us that
redeemers have arisen for Israel, and we have nothing
to do but wait till diplomacy finishes its work. And
now, as then, the eyes of the people will soon be opened,
and they will see that they have been misled. The fire
suddenly kindled by hope will die down again, perhaps
to the very last spark.
Could I command the waters of Lethe, I would see
that everything that the delegates saw and heard at
Basle was effaced from their recollection, and would
leave them only one memory: that of the great and
sacred hour when they all—these down-trodden Jews
who came from the ends of the earth—stood up together
like brothers, their hearts full of sacred emotion and their
eyes lifted up in love and pride towards their great
brother-Jew,[#] who stood on the platform and spoke
wonders of his people, like one of the Prophets of old.
The memory of that hour, were it not that many other
// File: b031.png
.pn +1
hours which followed dimmed the purity of the first
impression, might have made this Congress one of the
most momentous events in our history.
The salvation of Israel will be achieved by Prophets,
not by diplomats....
.fn #
\[This note on the first Zionist Congress evoked a storm of indignation,
which led the author to explain his views more fully in the
essay on “The Jewish State and the Jewish Problem.” As to the
unwonted harshness of some expressions in the Note, see the concluding
paragraph of that essay (p. #55#).]
.fn-
.fn #
\[A familiar quotation from the Talmud—Aboth, V., 23.]
.fn-
.fn #
The capital then suggested was ten million pounds!
.fn-
.fn #
[Of the Chovevé Zion.]
.fn-
.fn #
\[The reference is to an article called “The Truth about
Palestine,” written after the author’s first visit to that country in
1891.]
.fn-
.fn #
[Dr. Max Nordau.]
.fn-
// File: b032.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2 id=art03
THE JEWISH STATE AND THE JEWISH PROBLEM | (1897[#])
.sp 2
Some months have passed since the Zionist Congress,
but its echoes are still heard in daily life and in the press.
In daily life the echoes take the form of meetings small
and big, local and central. Since the delegates returned
home, they have been gathering the public together and
recounting over and over again the wonders that they
saw enacted before their eyes. The wretched, hungry
public listens and waxes enthusiastic and hopes for salvation:
for can “they”—the Jews of the West—fail to
carry out anything that they plan? Heads grow hot and
hearts beat fast; and many “communal workers” whose
one care in life had been for years—until last August—the
Palestinian settlement, and who would have given
the whole world for a penny donation in aid of Palestine
workmen or the Jaffa School, have now quite lost their
bearings, and ask one another: “What’s the good
of this sort of work? The Messiah is near at hand, and
we busy ourselves with trifles! The time has come for
great deeds: great men, men of the West, march before
us in the van.”—There has been a revolution in their
world, and to emphasise it they give a new name to
the cause: it is no longer “Love of Zion” (Chibbath
Zion), but “Zionism” (Zioniyuth). Nay, the more
careful among them, determined to leave no loop-hole
for error, even keep the European form of the name
// File: b033.png
.pn +1
(“Zionismus”)—thus announcing to all and sundry that
they are not talking about anything so antiquated as
Chibbath Zion, but about a new, up-to-date movement,
which comes, like its name, from the West, where people
do not use Hebrew.
In the press all these meetings, with their addresses,
motions and resolutions, appear over again in the guise
of articles—articles written in a vein of enthusiasm and
triumph. The meeting was magnificent, every speaker
was a Demosthenes, the resolutions were carried by
acclamation, all those present were swept off their feet
and shouted with one voice: “We will do and obey!”—in
a word, everything was delightful, entrancing, perfect.
And the Congress itself still produces a literature of its
own. Pamphlets specially devoted to its praises appear
in several languages; Jewish and non-Jewish papers still
occasionally publish articles and notes about it; and,
needless to say, the “Zionist” organ[#] itself endeavours
to maintain the impression which the Congress made,
and not to allow it to fade too rapidly from the public
memory. It searches the press of every nation and every
land, and wherever it finds a favourable mention of the
Congress, even in some insignificant journal published
in the language of one of the smaller European nationalities,
it immediately gives a summary of the article, with
much jubilation. Only one small nation’s language has
thus far not been honoured with such attention, though
its journals too have lavished praise on the Congress: I
mean Hebrew.
In short, the universal note is one of rejoicing; and
it is therefore small wonder that in the midst of this
general harmony my little Note on the Congress sounded
// File: b034.png
.pn +1
discordant and aroused the most violent displeasure in
many quarters. I knew from the start that I should not
be forgiven for saying such things at such a time, and
I had steeled myself to hear with equanimity the clatter
of high-sounding phrases and obscure innuendoes—of
which our writers are so prolific—and hold my peace.
But when I was attacked by M. L. Lilienblum,[#] a writer
whose habit it is not to write àpropos des bottes for the
sake of displaying his style, I became convinced that
this time I had really relied too much on the old adage:
Verbum sapienti satis. It is not pleasant to swim against
the stream; and when one does something without
enjoyment, purely as a duty, one does not put more than
the necessary minimum of work into the task. Hence
in the note referred to I allowed myself to be extremely
brief, relying on my readers to fill in the gaps out of
their own knowledge, by connecting what I wrote with
earlier expressions of my views, which were already
familiar to them. I see now that I made a mistake, and
left room for the ascription to me of ideas and opinions
which are utterly remote from my true intention.
Consequently I have now to perform the hard and
ungrateful task of writing a commentary on myself, and
expressing my views on the matter in hand with greater
explicitness.
.tb
Nordau’s address on the general condition of the Jews
was a sort of introduction to the business of the Congress.
It exposed in incisive language the sore troubles, material
or moral, which beset the Jews the world over. In
Eastern countries their trouble is material: they have
// File: b035.png
.pn +1
a constant struggle to satisfy the most elementary physical
needs, to win a crust of bread and a breath of air—things
which are denied them because they are Jews. In the
West, in lands of emancipation, their material condition
is not particularly bad, but the moral trouble is serious.
They want to take full advantage of their rights, and
cannot; they long to become attached to the people of
the country, and to take part in its social life, and they
are kept at arm’s length; they strive after love and
brotherhood, and are met by looks of hatred and contempt
on all sides; conscious that they are not inferior
to their neighbours in any kind of ability or virtue, they
have it continually thrown in their teeth that they are
an inferior type, and are not fit to rise to the same level
as the Aryans. And more to the same effect.
Well—what then?
Nordau himself did not touch on this question: it was
outside the scope of his address. But the whole Congress
was the answer. Beginning as it did with Nordau’s
address, the Congress meant this: that in order to escape
from all these troubles it is necessary to establish a
Jewish State.
Let us imagine, then, that the consent of Turkey
and the other Powers has already been obtained, and
the State is established—and, if you will, established
völkerrechtlich, with the full sanction of international
law, as the more extreme members of the Congress
desire. Does this bring, or bring near, the end of the
material trouble? No doubt, every poor Jew will be
at perfect liberty to go to his State and to seek his living
there, without any artificial hindrances in the shape of
restrictive laws or anything of that kind. But liberty to
seek a livelihood is not enough: he must be able to find
// File: b036.png
.pn +1
what he seeks. There are natural laws which fetter
man’s freedom of action much more than artificial laws.
Modern economic life is so complex, and the development
of any single one of its departments depends on so
many conditions, that no nation, not even the strongest
and richest, could in a short time create in any country
new sources of livelihood sufficient for many millions
of human beings. The single country is no longer an
economic unit: the whole world is one great market, in
which every State has to struggle hard for its place.
Hence only a fantasy bordering on madness can believe
that so soon as the Jewish State is established millions
of Jews will flock to it, and the land will afford them
adequate sustenance. Think of the labour and the
money that had to be sunk in Palestine over a long
period of years before one new branch of production—vine-growing—could
be established there! And even
to-day, after all the work that has been done, we cannot
yet say that Palestinian wine has found the openings that
it needs in the world market, although its quantity is
still small. But if in 1891 Palestine had been a Jewish
State, and all the dozens of Colonies that were then
going to be established for the cultivation of the vine had
in fact been established, Palestinian wine would be to-day
as common as water, and would fetch no price at all.
Using the analogy of this small example, we can see
how difficult it will be to start new branches of production
in Palestine, and to find openings for its products
in the world market. But if the Jews are to flock to
their State in large numbers, all at once, we may
prophesy with perfect certainty that home competition
in every branch of production (and home competition
will be inevitable, because the amount of labour available
// File: b037.png
.pn +1
will increase more quickly than the demand for it) will
prevent any one branch from developing as it should.
And then the Jews will turn and leave their State, flying
from the most deadly of all enemies—an enemy not to be
kept off even by the magic word völkerrechtlich: from
hunger.
True, agriculture in its elementary form does not
depend to any great extent on the world market, and
at any rate it will provide those engaged in it with food,
if not with plenty. But if the Jewish State sets out to
save all those Jews who are in the grip of the material
problems, or most of them, by turning them into agriculturists
in Palestine, then it must first find the necessary
capital. At Basle, no doubt, one heard naïve and
confident references to a “National Fund” of ten
million pounds sterling. But even if we silence reason,
and give the rein to fancy so far as to believe that we can
obtain a Fund of those dimensions in a short time, we
are still no further. Those very speeches that we heard
at Basle about the economic condition of the Jews in
various countries showed beyond a doubt that our
national wealth is very small, and most of our people
are below the poverty-line. From this any man of sense,
though he be no great mathematician, can readily
calculate that ten million pounds are a mere nothing
compared with the sum necessary for the emigration of
the Jews and their settlement in Palestine on an agricultural
basis. Even if all the rich Jews suddenly became
ardent “Zionists,” and every one of them gave half his
wealth to the cause, the whole would still not make up
the thousands of millions that would be needed for the
purpose.
There is no doubt, then, that even when the Jewish
// File: b038.png
.pn +1
State is established the Jews will be able to settle in it
only little by little, the determining factors being the
resources of the people themselves and the degree of
economic development reached by the country. Meanwhile
the natural increase of population will continue,
both among those who settle in the country and among
those who remain outside it, with the inevitable result
that on the one hand Palestine will have less and less
room for new immigrants, and on the other hand the
number of those remaining outside Palestine will not
diminish very much, in spite of the continual emigration.
In his opening speech at the Congress, Dr. Herzl,
wishing to demonstrate the superiority of his State idea
over the method of Palestinian colonisation adopted
hitherto, calculated that by the latter method it would
take nine hundred years before all the Jews could be
settled in their land. The members of the Congress
applauded this as a conclusive argument. But it was a
cheap victory. The Jewish State itself, do what it will,
cannot make a more favourable calculation.
Truth is bitter, but with all its bitterness it is better
than illusion. We must confess to ourselves that the
“ingathering of the exiles” is unattainable by natural
means. We may, by natural means, establish a Jewish
State one day, and the Jews may increase and multiply
in it until the country will hold no more: but even then
the greater part of the people will remain scattered in
strange lands. “To gather our scattered ones from
the four corners of the earth” (in the words of the
Prayer Book) is impossible. Only religion, with its
belief in a miraculous redemption, can promise that
consummation.
But if this is so, if the Jewish State too means not an
// File: b039.png
.pn +1
“ingathering of the exiles,” but the settlement of a
small part of our people in Palestine, then how will it
solve the material problem of the Jewish masses in the
lands of the Diaspora?
Or do the champions of the State idea think, perhaps,
that, being masters in our own country, we shall be
able by diplomatic means to get the various governments
to relieve the material sufferings of our scattered fellow-Jews?
That is, it seems to me, Dr. Herzl’s latest theory.
In his new pamphlet (Der Baseler Kongress) we no
longer find any calculation of the number of years that it
will take for the Jews to enter their country. Instead,
he tells us in so many words (p. 9) that if the land
becomes the national property of the Jewish people, even
though no individual Jew owns privately a single square
yard of it, then the Jewish problem will be solved for ever,
These words (unless we exclude the material aspect of
the Jewish problem) can be understood only in the way
suggested above. But this hope seems to me so fantastic
that I see no need to waste words in demolishing it. We
have seen often enough, even in the case of nations
more in favour than Jews are with powerful Governments,
how little diplomacy can do in matters of this kind, if it
is not backed by a large armed force. Nay, it is conceivable
that in the days of the Jewish State, when
economic conditions in this or that country are such as to
induce a Government to protect its people against Jewish
competition by restrictive legislation, that Government
will find it easier then than it is now to find an excuse for
such action, for it will be able to plead that if the Jews are
not happy where they are, they can go to their own State.
The material problem, then, will not be ended by the
foundation of a Jewish State, nor, generally speaking,
// File: b040.png
.pn +1
does it lie in our power to end it (though it could be
eased more or less even now by various means, such as
the encouragement of agriculture and handicrafts among
Jews in all countries); and whether we found a State or
not, this particular problem will always turn at bottom
on the economic condition of each country and the degree
of civilisation attained by each people.
Thus we are driven to the conclusion that the only true
basis of Zionism is to be found in the other problem, the
moral one.
But the moral problem appears in two forms, one in
the West and one in the East; and this fact explains the
fundamental difference between Western “Zionism”
and Eastern Chibbath Zion. Nordau dealt only with the
Western problem, apparently knowing nothing about the
Eastern; and the Congress as a whole concentrated on
the first, and paid little attention to the second.
The Western Jew, after leaving the Ghetto and
seeking to attach himself to the people of the country
in which he lives, is unhappy because his hope of an
open-armed welcome is disappointed. He returns reluctantly
to his own people, and tries to find within the
Jewish community that life for which he yearns—but in
vain. Communal life and communal problems no longer
satisfy him. He has already grown accustomed to a
broader social and political life; and on the intellectual
side Jewish cultural work has no attraction, because
Jewish culture has played no part in his education from
childhood, and is a closed book to him. So in his trouble
he turns to the land of his ancestors, and pictures to
himself how good it would be if a Jewish State were
re-established there—a State arranged and organised
exactly after the pattern of other States. Then he
// File: b041.png
.pn +1
could live a full, complete life among his own people,
and find at home all that he now sees outside, dangled
before his eyes, but out of reach. Of course, not all the
Jews will be able to take wing and go to their State; but
the very existence of the Jewish State will raise the
prestige of those who remain in exile, and their fellow
citizens will no more despise them and keep them at arm’s
length, as though they were ignoble slaves, dependent
entirely on the hospitality of others. As he contemplates
this fascinating vision, it suddenly dawns on his
inner consciousness that even now, before the Jewish
State is established, the mere idea of it gives him almost
complete relief. He has an opportunity for organised
work, for political excitement; he finds a suitable field of
activity without having to become subservient to non-Jews;
and he feels that thanks to this ideal he stands
once more spiritually erect, and has regained human
dignity, without overmuch trouble and without external
aid. So he devotes himself to the ideal with all the
ardour of which he is capable; he gives rein to his fancy,
and lets it soar as it will, up above reality and the limitations
of human power. For it is not the attainment of
the ideal that he needs: its pursuit alone is sufficient
to cure him of his moral sickness, which is the consciousness
of inferiority; and the higher and more distant the
ideal, the greater its power of exaltation.
This is the basis of Western Zionism and the secret
of its attraction. But Eastern Chibbath Zion has a
different origin and development. Originally, like
“Zionism,” it was political; but being a result of
material evils, it could not rest satisfied with an
“activity” consisting only of outbursts of feeling and
fine phrases. These things may satisfy the heart, but
// File: b042.png
.pn +1
not the stomach. So Chibbath Zion began at once to
express itself in concrete activities—in the establishment
of colonies in Palestine. This practical work soon
clipped the wings of fancy, and made it clear that
Chibbath Zion could not lessen the material evil by one
iota. One might have thought, then, that when this fact
became patent the Chovevé Zion would give up their
activity, and cease wasting time and energy on work
which brought them no nearer their goal. But, no: they
remained true to their flag, and went on working with
the old enthusiasm, though most of them did not understand
even in their own minds why they did so. They
felt instinctively that so they must do; but as they did
not clearly appreciate the nature of this feeling, the things
that they did were not always rightly directed towards
that object which in reality was drawing them on without
their knowledge.
For at the very time when the material tragedy in the
East was at its height, the heart of the Eastern Jew was
still oppressed by another tragedy—the moral one; and
when the Chovevé Zion began to work for the solution
of the material problem, the national instinct of the
people felt that just in such work could it find the remedy
for its moral trouble. Hence the people took up this
work and would not abandon it even after it had become
obvious that the material trouble could not be cured in
this way. The Eastern form of the moral trouble is
absolutely different from the Western. In the West it is
the problem of the Jews, in the East the problem of
Judaism. The one weighs on the individual, the other
on the nation. The one is felt by Jews who have had a
European education, the other by Jews whose education
has been Jewish. The one is a product of anti-Semitism,
// File: b043.png
.pn +1
and is dependent on anti-Semitism for its existence; the
other is a natural product of a real link with a culture
of thousands of years, which will retain its hold even if
the troubles of the Jews all over the world come to an
end, together with anti-Semitism, and all the Jews in
every land have comfortable positions, are on the best
possible terms with their neighbours, and are allowed
by them to take part in every sphere of social and political
life on terms of absolute equality.
It is not only Jews who have come out of the Ghetto:
Judaism has come out, too. For Jews the exodus is confined
to certain countries, and is due to toleration; but
Judaism has come out (or is coming out) of its own accord
wherever it has come into contact with modern culture.
This contact with modern culture overturns the defences
of Judaism from within, so that Judaism can no longer
remain isolated and live a life apart. The spirit of our
people strives for development: it wants to absorb those
elements of general culture which reach it from outside,
to digest them and to make them a part of itself, as it
has done before at different periods of its history. But
the conditions of its life in exile are not suitable. In our
time culture wears in each country the garb of the
national spirit, and the stranger who would woo her must
sink his individuality and become absorbed in the
dominant spirit. For this reason Judaism in exile cannot
develop its individuality in its own way. When it leaves
the Ghetto walls it is in danger of losing its essential
being or—at best—its national unity: it is in danger
of being split up into as many kinds of Judaism, each
with a different character and life, as there are countries
of the Jewish dispersion.[#]
// File: b044.png
.pn +1
And now Judaism finds that it can no longer tolerate
the galuth[#] form which it had to take on, in obedience to
its will-to-live, when it was exiled from its own country,
and that if it loses that form its life is in danger. So
it seeks to return to its historic centre, in order to live
there a life of natural development, to bring its powers
into play in every department of human culture, to
develop and perfect those national possessions which it
has acquired up to now, and thus to contribute to the
common stock of humanity, in the future as in the past,
a great national culture, the fruit of the unhampered
activity of a people living according to its own spirit.
For this purpose Judaism needs at present but little. It
needs not an independent State, but only the creation
in its native land of conditions favourable to its development:
a good-sized settlement of Jews working without
hindrance[#] in every branch of culture, from agriculture
and handicrafts to science and literature. This Jewish
settlement, which will be a gradual growth, will become
in course of time the centre of the nation, wherein its
spirit will find pure expression and develop in all its
aspects up to the highest degree of perfection of which
it is capable. Then from this centre the spirit of
Judaism will go forth to the great circumference, to all
the communities of the Diaspora, and will breathe new
// File: b045.png
.pn +1
life into them and preserve their unity; and when our
national culture in Palestine has attained that level, we
may be confident that it will produce men in the country
who will be able, on a favourable opportunity, to establish
a State which will be a Jewish State, and not merely
a State of Jews.
This Chibbath Zion, which takes thought for the preservation
of Judaism at a time when Jewry suffers so
much, is something odd and unintelligible to the
“political” Zionists of the West, just as the demand
of R. Jochanan ben Zakkai for Jabneh was strange and
unintelligible to the corresponding people of that time.[#]
And so political Zionism cannot satisfy those Jews who
care for Judaism: its growth seems to them to be fraught
with danger to the object of their own aspiration.
The secret of our people’s persistence is—as I have
tried to show elsewhere[#]—that at a very early period
the Prophets taught it to respect only spiritual power,
and not to worship material power. For this reason the
clash with enemies stronger than itself never brought
the Jewish nation, as it did the other nations of antiquity,
to the point of self-effacement. So long as we are
faithful to this principle, our existence has a secure
basis: for in spiritual power we are not inferior to other
nations, and we have no reason to efface ourselves. But
a political ideal which does not rest on the national
culture is apt to seduce us from our loyalty to spiritual
// File: b046.png
.pn +1
greatness, and to beget in us a tendency to find the path
of glory in the attainment of material power and political
dominion, thus breaking the thread that unites us with
the past, and undermining our historical basis. Needless
to say, if the political ideal is not attained, it will have
disastrous consequences, because we shall have lost the
old basis without finding a new one. But even if it is
attained under present conditions, when we are a scattered
people not only in the physical but also in the
spiritual sense—even then Judaism will be in great
danger. Almost all our great men, those, that is, whose
education and social position fit them to be at the head
of a Jewish State, are spiritually far removed from
Judaism, and have no true conception of its nature and
its value. Such men, however loyal to their State and
devoted to its interests, will necessarily regard those
interests as bound up with the foreign culture which
they themselves have imbibed; and they will endeavour,
by moral persuasion or even by force, to implant that
culture in the Jewish State, so that in the end the Jewish
State will be a State of Germans or Frenchmen of the
Jewish race. We have even now a small example of this
process in Palestine.[#] And history teaches us that in the
days of the Herodian house Palestine was indeed a
Jewish State, but the national culture was despised and
persecuted, and the ruling house did everything in its
power to implant Roman culture in the country, and
frittered away the national resources in the building of
heathen temples and amphitheatres and so forth. Such
// File: b047.png
.pn +1
a Jewish State would spell death and utter degradation
for our people. We should never achieve sufficient
political power to deserve respect, while we should miss
the living moral force within. The puny State, being
“tossed about like a ball between its powerful neighbours,
and maintaining its existence only by diplomatic
shifts and continual truckling to the favoured of fortune,”
would not be able to give us a feeling of national glory;
and the national culture, in which we might have sought
and found our glory, would not have been implanted in
our State and would not be the principle of its life. So
we should really be then—much more than we are now—“a
small and insignificant nation,” enslaved in spirit to
“the favoured of fortune,” turning an envious and
covetous eye on the armed force of our “powerful
neighbours”; and our existence as a sovereign State
would not add a glorious chapter to our national history.
Were it not better for “an ancient people which was
once a beacon to the world” to disappear than to end
by reaching such a goal as this?[#] Mr. Lilienblum
reminds me that there are in our time small States, like
Switzerland, which are safeguarded against interference
by the other nations, and have no need of “continual
truckling.” But a comparison between Palestine
and small countries like Switzerland overlooks the
geographical position of Palestine and its religious
importance for all nations. These two facts will make
it quite impossible for its “powerful neighbours” (by
which expression, of course, I did not mean, as Mr.
Lilienblum interprets, “the Druses and the Persians”)
// File: b048.png
.pn +1
to leave it alone altogether; and when it has become a
Jewish State they will all still keep an eye on it, and
each Power will try to influence its policy in a direction
favourable to itself, just as we see happening in the case
of other weak states (like Turkey) in which the great
European nations have “interests.”
In a word: Chibbath Zion, no less than “Zionism,”
wants a Jewish State and believes in the possibility of
the establishment of a Jewish State in the future. But
while “Zionism” looks to the Jewish State to provide
a remedy for poverty, complete tranquillity and national
glory, Chibbath Zion knows that our State will not give
us all these things until “universal Righteousness is
enthroned and holds sway over nations and States”:
and it looks to a Jewish State to provide only a “secure
refuge” for Judaism and a cultural bond of unity for
our nation. “Zionism,” therefore, begins its work with
political propaganda; Chibbath Zion begins with national
culture, because only through the national culture and
for its sake can a Jewish State be established in such a
way as to correspond with the will and the needs of the
Jewish people.
Dr. Herzl, it is true, said in the speech mentioned
above that “Zionism” demands the return to Judaism
before the return to the Jewish State. But these nice-sounding
words are so much at variance with his deeds
that we are forced to the unpleasant conclusion that they
are nothing but a well-turned phrase.
It is very difficult for me to deal with individual
actions, on which one cannot touch without reflecting
on individual men. For this reason I contented myself,
in my note on the Congress, with general allusions,
which, I believed, would be readily intelligible to those
// File: b049.png
.pn +1
who were versed in the subject, and especially to
Congress delegates. But some of my opponents have
turned this scrupulousness to use against me by pretending
not to understand at all. They ask, with affected
simplicity, what fault I have to find with the Congress,
and they have even the assurance to deny publicly facts
which are common knowledge. These tactics constrain
me here, against my will, to raise the artistic veil which
they have cast over the whole proceedings, and to
mention some details which throw light on the character
of this movement and the mental attitude of its adherents.
If it were really the aim of “Zionism” to bring the
people back to Judaism—to make it not merely a nation
in the political sense, but a nation living according to
its own spirit—then the Congress would not have postponed
questions of national culture—of language and
literature, of education and the diffusion of Jewish
knowledge—to the very last moment, after the end of
all the debates on rechtlich and völkerrechtlich, on the
election of X. as a member of the Committee, on the
imaginary millions, and so forth. When all those present
were tired out, and welcomed the setting sun on
the last day as a sign of the approaching end, a short
time was allowed for a discourse by one of the members
on all those important questions, which are in reality
the most vital and essential questions. Naturally, the
discourse, however good, had to be hurried and
shortened; there was no time for discussion of details;
a suggestion was made from the platform that all these
problems should be handed over to a Commission consisting
of certain writers, who were named; and the
whole assembly agreed simply for the sake of finishing
the business and getting away.
// File: b050.png
.pn +1
But there is no need to ascertain the attitude of the
Congress by inference, because it was stated quite
explicitly in one of the official speeches—a speech which
appeared on the agenda as “An Exposition of the basis
of Zionism,” and was submitted to Dr. Herzl before
it was read to the Congress. In this speech we were
told plainly that the Western Jews were nearer than those
of the East to the goal of Zionism, because they had
already done half the work: they had annihilated the
Jewish culture of the Ghetto, and were thus emancipated
from the yoke of the past. This speech, too, was
received with prolonged applause, and the Congress
passed a motion ordering it to be published as a pamphlet
for distribution among Jews.
In one of the numbers of the Zionist organ Die Welt
there appeared a good allegorical description of those
Jews who remained in the National German party in
Austria even after it had united with the anti-Semites.
The allegory is of an old lady whose lover deserts her
for another, and who, after trying without success to
bring him back by all the arts which used to win him,
begins to display affection for his new love, hoping that
he may take pity on her for her magnanimity.
I have a shrewd suspicion that this allegory can equally
well be applied, with a slight change, to its inventors
themselves. There is an old lady who, despairing
utterly of regaining her lover by entreaties, submission
and humility, suddenly decks herself out in splendour
and begins to treat him with hatred and contempt. Her
object is still to influence him. She wants him at least
to respect her in his heart of hearts, if he can no longer
love her. Whoever reads Die Welt attentively and
critically will not be able to avoid the impression that
// File: b051.png
.pn +1
the Western “Zionists” always have their eyes fixed
on the non-Jewish world, and that they, like the
assimilated Jews, are aiming simply at finding favour in
the eyes of the nations: only that whereas the others
want love, the “Zionists” want respect. They are
enormously pleased when a Gentile says openly that the
“Zionists” deserve respect, when a journal prints some
reference to the “Zionists” without making a joke of
them, and so forth. Nay, at the last sitting of the Congress
the President found it necessary publicly to tender special
thanks to the three Gentiles who had honoured the
meeting by taking part in it, although they were all
three silent members, and there is no sign of their having
done anything. If I wished to go into small details, I
could show from various incidents that in their general
conduct and procedure these “Zionists” do not try to
get close to Jewish culture and imbibe its spirit, but that,
on the contrary, they endeavour to imitate, as Jews, the
conduct and procedure of the Germans, even where they
are most foreign to the Jewish spirit, as a means of
showing that Jews, too, can live and act like all other
nations. It may suffice to mention the unpleasant incident
at Vienna recently, when the young “Zionists”
went out to spread the gospel of “Zionism” with sticks
and fisticuffs, in German fashion. And the Zionist organ
regarded this incident sympathetically, and, for all its
carefulness, could not conceal its satisfaction at the
success of the Zionist fist.
The whole Congress, too, was designed rather as a
demonstration to the world than as a means of making
it clear to ourselves what we want and what we can do.
The founders of the movement wanted to show the outside
world that they had behind them a united and
// File: b052.png
.pn +1
unanimous Jewish people. It must be admitted that
from beginning to end they pursued this object with clear
consciousness and determination. In those countries
where Jews are preoccupied with material troubles, and
are not likely on the whole to get enthusiastic about a
political ideal for the distant future, a special emissary
went about, before the Congress, spreading favourable
reports, from which it might be concluded that both the
consent of Turkey and the necessary millions were nearly
within our reach, and that nothing was lacking except
a national representative body to negotiate with all parties
on behalf of the Jewish people: for which reason it was
necessary to send many delegates to the Congress, and
also to send in petitions with thousands of signatures,
and then the Committee to be chosen by the Congress
would be the body which was required.[#] On the other hand,
they were careful not to announce clearly in advance that
Herzl’s Zionism, and that only, would be the basis of
the Congress, that that basis would be above criticism,
and no delegate to the Congress would have the right
to question it. The Order of Proceedings, which was
sent out with the invitation to the Congress, said merely
in general terms that anybody could be a delegate “who
expresses his agreement with the general programme of
Zionism,” without explaining what the general programme
was or where it could be found. Thus there
met at Basle men utterly at variance with one another
in their views and aspirations. They thought in their
simplicity that everybody whose gaze was turned Zion-wards,
// File: b053.png
.pn +1
though he did not see eye to eye with Herzl, had
done his duty to the general programme and had a right
to be a member of the Congress and to express his views
before it. But the heads of the Congress tried with all
their might to prevent any difference of opinion on fundamental
questions from coming to the surface, and used
every “parliamentary” device to avoid giving opportunity
for discussion and elucidation of such questions.
The question of the programme actually came up at one
of the preliminary meetings held before the Congress
itself (a Vorkonferenz); and some of the delegates from
Vienna pointed to the statement on the Order of Proceedings,
and tried to prove from it that that question
could not properly be raised, since all the delegates had
accepted the general programme of Zionism, and there
was no Zionism but that of Vienna, and Die Welt was its
prophet. But many of those present would not agree,
and a Commission had to be appointed to draw up a
programme. This Commission skilfully contrived a
programme capable of a dozen interpretations, to suit all
tastes; and this programme was put before Congress
with a request that it should be accepted as it stood,
without any discussion. But one delegate refused to
submit, and his action led to a long debate on a single
word. This debate showed, to the consternation of
many people, that there were several kind of “Zionists,”
and the cloak of unanimity was in danger of being
publicly rent asunder; but the leaders quickly and skilfully
patched up the rent, before it had got very far.
Dr. Herzl, in his new pamphlet, uses this to prove what
great importance Zionists attached to this single word
(völkerrechtlich). But in truth similar “dangerous”
debates might have been raised on many other words.
// File: b054.png
.pn +1
For many delegates quite failed to notice the wide gulf
between the various views on points of principle, and a
discussion on any such point was calculated to open
people’s eyes and to shatter the whole structure to
atoms. But such discussions were not raised, because
even the few who saw clearly and understood the position
shrank from the risk of “wrecking.” And so the object
was attained; the illusion of unanimity was preserved
till the last; the outside world saw a united people
demanding a State; and those who were inside returned
home full of enthusiasm, but no whit the clearer as to
their ideas or the relation of one idea to another.
Yet, after all, I confess that Western “Zionism”
is very good and useful for those Western Jews who have
long since almost forgotten Judaism, and have no link
with their people except a vague sentiment which they
themselves do not understand. The establishment of a
Jewish State by their agency is at present but a distant
vision; but the idea of a State induces them meanwhile
to devote their energies to the service of their people,
lifts them out of the mire of assimilation, and strengthens
their Jewish national consciousness. Possibly, when they
find out that it will be a long time before we have policemen
and watchmen of our own, many of them may leave
us altogether; but even then our loss through this movement
will not be greater than our gain, because
undoubtedly there will be among them men of larger
heart, who, in course of time, will be moved to get to
the bottom of the matter and to understand their people
and its spirit: and these men will arrive of themselves at
that genuine Chibbath Zion which is in harmony with our
national spirit. But in the East, the home of refuge of
Judaism and the birthplace of Jewish Chibbath Zion,
// File: b055.png
.pn +1
this “political” tendency can bring us only harm. Its
attractive force is at the same time a force repellent to
the moral ideal which has till now been the inspiration
of Eastern Jewry. Those who now abandon that ideal
in exchange for the political idea will never return again,
not even when the excitement dies down and the State
is not established: for rarely in history do we find a
movement retracing its steps before it has tried to go
on and on, and finally lost its way. When, therefore,
I see what chaos this movement has brought into the
camp of the Eastern Chovevé Zion—when I see men who
till recently seemed to know what they wanted and how
to get it, now suddenly deserting the flag which but
yesterday they held sacred, and bowing the knee to an
idea which has no roots in their being, simply because it
comes from the West: when I see all this, and remember
how many paroxysms of sudden and evanescent enthusiasm
we have already experienced, then I really feel the
heavy hand of despair beginning to lay hold on me.
It was under the stress of that feeling that I wrote my
Note on the Congress, a few days after its conclusion.
The impression was all very fresh in my mind, and my
grief was acute; and I let slip some hard expressions,
which I now regret, because it is not my habit to use
such expressions. But as regards the actual question
at issue I have nothing to withdraw. What has happened
since then has not convinced me that I was wrong: on
the contrary, it has strengthened my conviction that
though I wrote in anger, I did not write in error.
.fn #
[One of a series of three essays on “Political Zionism.”]
.fn-
.fn #
[Die Welt, the German organ founded by Herzl.]
.fn-
.fn #
[The first Secretary of the Chovevé Zion, and an opponent of the
“spiritual” ideas of Achad Ha-Am.]
.fn-
.fn #
See my essay Imitation and Assimilation. \[Selected essays by
Achad Ha-Am, pp. 107-124.]
.fn-
.fn #
[Galuth—“exile”—is the word commonly used by Jews to denote
the condition of the Jewish people so long as it is not in its own land,
Palestine.]
.fn-
.fn #
The “political” Zionists generally think and say that they were
the first to lay it down as a principle that the colonisation of
Palestine by secret and surreptitious means, without organisation and
in defiance of the ruling Power, is of no value and ought to be
abandoned. They do not know that this truth was discovered by
others first, and that years ago the Chibbath Zion of Judaism
demanded that everything should be done openly, with proper
organisation and with the consent of the Turkish Government.
.fn-
.fn #
\[After the fall of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., Titus asked Rabbi
Jochanan, one of the leading Jews of the time, what he wanted.
The reply was, “Give me Jabneh and its scholars.” The Rabbi
understood—though the Roman conqueror did not—that in the conditions
then existing a centre of Jewish learning would do more to
preserve Israel than political institutions.]
.fn-
.fn #
In Imitation and Assimilation.
.fn-
.fn #
\[The reference here is to the schools of the Alliance Israélite
Universelle, which were French in spirit. Many years after this essay
was written, in 1913, the Germanising tendencies of the schools
maintained by the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden in Palestine led to
an acute conflict between that body and the Zionists.]
.fn-
.fn #
The phrases in inverted commas are taken from my note on the
Congress. As my critics have misinterpreted them, I have taken
this opportunity of explaining their true meaning.
.fn-
.fn #
The fact mentioned is familiar to many Chovevé Zion in all the
towns which the emissary visited with a letter from the headquarters
of the movement. In my Note I only alluded to it briefly, and I
am sorry that the denials of my opponents have compelled me here
to refer to it again more fully.
.fn-
// File: b056.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2 id=art04
PINSKER AND POLITICAL ZIONISM | (To the memory of Dr. Pinsker, on the tenth anniversary of his death) | (1902)
.sp 2
The 21st of December last (1901) was the tenth
anniversary of the death of Dr. Leo Pinsker.
A decade is a long time in our days, when everything
keeps changing with extraordinary rapidity; when events
come pell-mell, pushing and jostling one another, with a
new sensation every day; when men rise and fall one
after the other, famous to-day and forgotten to-morrow,
rising to the top in an hour, and going under in
the next; when the tumult of to-day is so loud that men
have no time to pause and look calmly back on
yesterday.
Pinsker is one of those men of yesterday, whom the
men of to-day have already had time to forget. He
died ten years ago, and in these ten years things have
changed, and we with them. New birds have come and
brought new songs. They pipe in a loud and strident
chorus, in the din of which who shall remember the
forlorn lay of a lonely songster whom earth knows no
more?
In his day Pinsker was head of the Chovevé Zion, and
he worked hard for Palestinian colonisation. But in the
interval Chibbath Zion itself has given place to Zionism.
// File: b057.png
.pn +1
Petty colonisation, the result of the “infiltration”
policy, which absorbed the time and energy of Pinsker
and the Chovevé Zion of yesterday, is to-day a source of
merriment even for the merest tyro in Zionism. Everybody
knows that Herzl has enlarged the narrow horizon
of his predecessors by basing the Zionist ideal on a
broader foundation—on politics and diplomacy, on the
Bank and the Charter.
Twenty years ago Pinsker wrote a small pamphlet of
thirty-six pages, called Auto-Emancipation. In its day
this pamphlet made a certain stir and evoked some
response. But who pays attention now to a little
pamphlet that dates from before the new dispensation?
Have we not now the Judenstaat, and Reports of four
Congresses, full of debates and speeches, as well as a
heap of pamphlets and leaflets in every language, explaining
and expounding Zionism in every aspect and
every detail?
Yes—Pinsker was a great man in his day; he was one
of the “precursors” of Zionism—so much even the new
Zionists admit. And when they have occasion to recount
the history of the Zionist idea to non-Zionists, they begin,
in the most approved scientific manner, with the
“embryonic” period. Here they commend in one
breath all the worthy men who came before the birth
of Zionism and prepared the way for it, not forgetting
Pinsker and other leaders of the Chovevé Zion who were
contemporary with him. But all this is for them simply
by way of introduction to the main theme, which enters
with the year 1896—the year when Herzl revealed himself
in his pamphlet Der Judenstaat. Here they draw
a line, as who should say, “Thus far the embryonic
period of Zionism, the period of its preparation for
// File: b058.png
.pn +1
birth. Now behold Zionism itself in all its glory and
magnificence.”
How is it, then, that many people have now suddenly
remembered that Pinsker died ten years ago, on the 21st
of December; and that in so many places there have
been prayers recited for the peace of his soul, and
memorial addresses delivered in his honour, on this sad
anniversary? Truth to tell, it is only because the work
of the “petty colonisation” movement still maintains
its existence, and there is still a Society which works for
the support of the colonies. For that reason, and for
that reason alone—because he stood at the head of those
who worked for the Palestinian Colonies, and afterwards
of the Society formed for their support—Pinsker is
remembered by his colleagues, the original Chovevé Zion
of his own country, whose privilege it was to know him
personally and to work with him. It is they who have
made the anniversary a matter of public interest. If
not for this, the new Zionists, whose calendar begins
with the birth of political Zionism, would not have
remembered the man who, fifteen years before Herzl,
worked out the whole theory of political Zionism from
beginning to end, with a logical thoroughness and an
elevation of style unequalled by any subsequent
work.
How indeed should these new Zionists remember him,
seeing that they know nothing at all of Pinsker as the
author of the theory of political Zionism? And whence
should they know of him, if their leaders have never yet
told them, explicitly or by implication, in print or on the
platform, in Zionist Congresses or outside them, who
was the true author of that theory, the real if unacknowledged
fountain from which all who came after him
// File: b059.png
.pn +1
have drunk?[#] Pinsker’s pamphlet in the original
German is already out of print and rare. While a
stream of new pamphlets, mostly poor and tasteless
rechauffés, is daily poured forth and spread among the
people with the assistance of the Zionist organisation
and with the concurrence of its leaders, for propaganda
purposes, this pamphlet of Pinsker’s, which is uniquely
capable of attracting intelligent Jews in every country
to the Zionist idea, has not been honoured with a new
edition to this day;[#] and many of the new Zionists,
especially in the West, have never seen it, nor even
heard of its value.[#] All that they hear is that there were
Zionists even before Herzl, but they were poor, simple-minded
dreamers, who—incapable of comprehending
a great political idea—thought to solve the Jewish
problem by founding a few colonies in Palestine and
supporting them with halfpence; and as for Pinsker—well,
he was the leader of these poor visionaries.[#]
// File: b060.png
.pn +1
I doubt whether the time has yet come to restore to
Pinsker the place of honour in the Zionist movement
that belongs to him of right. We are in the thick of the
tumult and the shouting, and as yet there is no room for
a true and unbiassed judgment. That must be left for
later history, for the time when “the tumult and the
shouting dies,” and the influence of personality and fleeting
circumstance gives place to a national motif more
general in scope and more permanent in character. But
as the memory of Pinsker is now in the public mind—be
it but for a moment—we may not improperly take
advantage of the opportunity to recall the message which
Pinsker brought to his people, but for which he has not
yet received the credit.
That message is, as I have said, the message of
political Zionism. Pinsker was the first to lay down a
clear theoretical basis for political Zionism. He was also
the first to work out—though only in outline—a definite
practical programme for the realisation of the idea. It
is this programme, or the fundamental points in it, that
the new Zionists have laid hold on; it is because of this
programme that they call themselves “political,”
denoting thereby, as they believe, the original feature
which distinguishes them from their predecessors.
Pinsker compressed all his teaching, theoretical and
practical as well, into his one small pamphlet, which is
characterised by conciseness of style and absence of
systematic arrangement. His outraged feelings were
too strong for the cold processes of thought, and did not
allow him to arrange his ideas systematically. Pinsker
did not write a scientific treatise; he uttered a loud,
bitter, heart-felt cry, fraught with indignation and grief
at our external and internal degradation. For that
// File: b061.png
.pn +1
reason he must be studied with close attention before one
can put together the scattered fragments of ideas—some
repeated time and again with a wealth of poetic
eloquence, others no more than briefly hinted at
by the way—and discover the full import of his
teaching.
This is what I propose here to attempt. But first of
all I must point out—what might not be self-evident to
all my readers—that my object is only to explain
Pinsker’s teaching in its relation to present-day political
Zionism. I am not here giving a statement of my own
views on political Zionism in general. What I had to
say on that subject has been said in various essays, which
will be familiar to many of my readers; and these
previous utterances absolve me, I think, from the
necessity of commenting here on every point with which
I am not in agreement. In this essay I take for granted
the fundamental standpoint of political Zionism, which
was Pinsker’s standpoint also, though, as we shall soon
see, he gave it a peculiar turn, making it approximate
more to that Zionist ideal which is nowadays called
“spiritual Zionism.”
Pinsker, like all subsequent political Zionists, arrived
at the idea of Zionism not through the problem of
Judaism—through the necessity of seeking for a new
foundation for our national existence and unity, in place
of the old foundation, which is crumbling away—but
through the problem of Jewry—through a definite conviction
that even emancipation and general progress will
not improve the degraded and insecure position of the
Jews among the nations, and that anti-Semitism will
never cease so long as we have not a national home of
our own. But it is worth while to examine particularly
// File: b062.png
.pn +1
the way in which he arrived at this conviction of the
eternity of the feud between Israel and the nations,
because it is a different way from that of the later
Zionists, and it is this difference that gives a peculiar
colouring to Pinsker’s message.
Pinsker finds three principal causes which lead to our
being hated and despised more than any other human
beings; and for each of the three there is no remedy
except a separate Jewish State.
The first cause is a national one, and its roots lie deep
in human psychology. We cannot know whether that
great day will ever arrive when all mankind will live in
brotherhood and concord, and national barriers will no
longer exist; but even at the best, thousands of years
must elapse before that Messianic age. Meanwhile
nations live side by side in a state of relative peace,
which is based chiefly on the fundamental equality between
them. Each nation, that is, recognises and admits
the national existence of the other nations, and even
those which are at enmity or even at war with one
another are forced to recognise each other as equals,
standing on the same plane of nationhood, and therefore
entertain each for the other a certain feeling of respect,
without distinction between large nation and small,
strong and weak. But it is different with the people of
Israel. This people is not counted among the nations,
because since it was exiled from its land it has lacked the
essential attributes of nationality, by which one nation is
distinguished from another—has lacked “that original
national life which is inconceivable without community
of language and customs and without local contiguity.”
It is because we lack these attributes that the other
nations do not regard us as on the same plane with themselves,
// File: b063.png
.pn +1
as a nation equal to them in integral value.
True, we have not ceased even in the lands of our exile
to be spiritually a distinct nation; but this spiritual
nationality, so far from giving us the status of a nation
in the eyes of the other nations, is the very cause of their
hatred for us as a people. Men are always terrified by
a disembodied spirit, a soul wandering about with no
physical covering; and terror breeds hatred. This is a
form of psychic disease which we are powerless to cure.
In all ages men have feared all kinds of ghosts which
their imaginations have seen; and Israel appears to
them as a ghost—but a ghost which they see with their
very eyes, not merely in fancy. Thus the hatred of the
nations for Jewish nationality is a psychic disease of the
kind known as “demonopathy”; and having been transmitted
from generation to generation for some two
thousand years, it has by now become so deep-rooted
that it can no longer be eradicated. The primary object
of this hatred is not Jews as individuals, but Judaism—by
which is meant that abstract nationality, that bodiless
ghost, which wanders about among the real nations like
something apart and different, and arouses their latent
faculty of demonophobia. Hence we see on the one hand
that individual Gentiles live in peace and amity with
their Jewish acquaintances, while retaining their deep-seated
animosity against Jews as a people, and on the
other hand that, throughout all the periodical changes
of national tendencies and international relations, all
nations remain at all times the same in their hatred of the
Jews, just as they remain always the same in their
hatred of the other kinds of ghosts in whose existence
they believe.[#]
// File: b064.png
.pn +1
What, then, must we do to escape from this national
hatred?
Assimilate with the nations? If real assimilation be
meant—the assimilation that reaches to the very soul
and ends in annihilation—that is a kind of death which
does not come of itself, and we do not wish to bring it
on by our own efforts.[#] But the surface assimilation
which is the panacea advocated by a certain section of
Jews can only make matters worse for us. Pinsker himself
does not draw this conclusion in so many words; but
it is a necessary consequence of the idea just mentioned.
For, seeing that the source of anti-Semitism lies in our
lack of a concrete national existence, which would compel
the other nations to recognise in us a nation equal to
themselves in status, it follows plainly that the more we
assimilate—the more we imitate our surroundings and
whittle away our national distinctiveness—the less concrete
and the more spiritual will our national existence
become; and the more, therefore, will the ghost-fear
which begets anti-Semitism grow in intensity.
There remains, then, but one means of destroying anti-Semitism.
We must become again a real nation,
possessed of all those essential attributes of nationality
by virtue of which one nation is the equal of another.
These attributes are those mentioned above—a common
land, a common language and common customs. It is
the combination of these that makes “an original
national life.”[#]
// File: b065.png
.pn +1
The second cause of our degradation is political in
character. “Generally speaking,” says Pinsker, “we
do not find any nation over-fond of the stranger. This
is a fact which has its foundation in ethnology, and no
nation can be blamed for it.” Now since the Jew is
everywhere regarded as a stranger by the native population,
we should have no right to grumble if our hosts in
the various countries treated us like other strangers who
settle permanently among them. But in fact we find that
people everywhere dislike Jews much more than other
strangers. Why is this? For the same reason—replies
Pinsker—for which men behave in different ways
to a well-to-do guest and to a penniless beggar. The
first comes as an equal; he too has a house in which he
gives hospitality—no matter whether we ourselves or
others enjoy it—and therefore we recognise it as our duty
to give him a welcome, even if we are not altogether
delighted with his company; while he on his side is
conscious that he has a right to demand such treatment
as the conventions of polite society dictate, just as in his
own house he extends that treatment to others. Not so
the homeless mendicant. He on his side is free from the
obligations of hospitality, since he has no opportunity of
// File: b066.png
.pn +1
fulfilling them. Hence his request for our hospitality is
a request for pure charity. It is not the appeal of an
equal to the principle of equality of rights and duties; it
is the appeal to compassion of one weaker and humbler
than ourselves, who can receive but cannot give. Hence,
even if we are so compassionate as to welcome the poor
man and treat him with affection and respect, like one of
ourselves, the equality is only one of external appearance.
In our heart of hearts we feel, and he feels too,
that we are doing him a kindness, that we are treating
him well out of our goodness of heart, and doing something
that we might have forborne doing if not for our
charitable and benevolent disposition. This feeling
alone suffices to create a wide gulf between us, and to
lower his worth in our estimation and his own.
Which picture represents Israel among the nations?
Not that of the well-to-do guest; for Israel has no place
of his own where he can fulfil the obligations of hospitality
towards other nations. Israel is like the
mendicant who goes from door to door, asking others to
give him what he does not give to others. And therefore
the other nations do not regard the Jew as their
equal, and do not recognise any duty to show him that
decent behaviour which they practise towards all the
other foreigners who live among them. If, then, they
are kind enough to make room for him, it is only by an
act of charity, which degrades the recipient. When
their generosity goes to the furthest extreme, they give
the poor visitor the greatest boon that they can give—that
of equal rights. But the mere fact that the grant
of equal rights is an act of generosity, and not a duty
based on the real equality of the two parties, robs the
boon of its moral value, and makes it merely a piece of
// File: b067.png
.pn +1
legislative machinery. The giver can never forget that
he is the giver, nor the receiver that he is the receiver.
For this reason Jewish emancipation in all countries has
been and must always remain political only, not social.
The Jew enjoys equal rights as a citizen, but not equality
as a man, as one who takes his part in the intimate life of
society. The non-Jew and the Jew alike are conscious
of this fact, and so, despite his equal rights, the Jew
remains an inferior even in his own estimation, and in
non-Jewish society he endeavours to hide his Judaism,
and is grateful to non-Jews when they do not remind him
of his origin, but behave as though it were a matter of
indifference to them.
The conclusion is that the Jews can never attain to true
social equality in Gentile countries unless they cease to be
always recipients and rise to the rank of respectable
visitors, who can give to others what they ask for themselves.
In other words, the Jews must once more
possess themselves of a native land of their own, where
they will be masters and hosts. Then their place in the
estimation of other nations will improve automatically,
and wherever they set foot they will be regarded as
equals by the natives, who will consider themselves in
duty bound to treat the Jews with the same respect which
they show to other strangers who come to stay among
them.[#]
Besides the two causes explained above, there is a
third cause, economic in character, which gives a
practical turn to Gentile hatred of the Jew, and brings it
into actual operation in the form of physical restriction
and persecution.
In the life of civilised nations the struggle for existence
// File: b068.png
.pn +1
assumes the form of peaceful competition. In this
sphere every State distinguishes to a certain extent between
the native and the stranger, and gives the native
preference where there is not room for both. This discrimination
is practised even against the honoured
stranger, whom the native regards as his equal; and it
stands to sense that there will be a vastly greater amount
of discrimination against the poor vagrant, whose
existence in the State is tolerated only out of kindness
and charity. If you have a large house, with room
enough and to spare for your family and for respectable
visitors, you do not begrudge the beggar his corner, but
let him live with you as long as he likes. But when the
family grows and the house begins to feel cramped you
will at once look askance at the beggar-guests, whom
you are under no obligation to respect or to feed. And
if you see that they do not squeeze up and make room for
you, but, on the contrary, endeavour to get more elbow-room
for themselves, regardless of the fact that they are
crowding you, then you will resent the impudence with
which they forget their place, and in the heat of anger
you will turn them out neck and crop, or at least drive
them back into their own corner, make it as small as
possible and confine them rigidly to it for the future.
But the respectable guests will still be treated with
deference, and though you may secretly dislike them for
occupying valuable room, you will not permit yourself to
overstep the limits of politeness and to turn them out into
the street, save in exceptional cases where they themselves
overstep the mark and your patience gives out.
Thus we find that even where the number of Jews is
small, they bring down on themselves the resentment
and hatred of their neighbours because of their success in
// File: b069.png
.pn +1
the struggle for existence, and the advantage which
their ability and pertinacity gain for them over their competitors
in the various walks of life; and where the
Jewish settlement is considerable, anti-Semitism finds its
food—even without any success on the Jewish side—in
the mere fact of their existence: for their existence is
bound, poor and cramped though it be, to lead to competition
which their neighbours will feel. In either case
the native population does not consider itself obliged to
restrain its feelings and behave with perfect politeness to
a miserable nation which is allowed to live among the
other nations only on sufferance, and is so ungrateful as
to jostle its benefactors without shame.[#]
This cause also, then, cannot be removed except
through the removal of the other causes mentioned
before. We must build a house for ourselves, and then,
even in foreign countries, we shall have the position of
respected guests, and our competition with the native
population will not arouse their resentment and jealousy
more than the competition of other strangers. But the
economic cause differs from the other causes. Our national
and political degradation is a moral fact, and requires
only a moral remedy—that we stand higher in the
estimation of the world, as a nation with a concrete life
of its own, and with a land in which it can extend to
others that hospitality which it receives elsewhere. But
in order to remove the economic cause we must of
necessity diminish the competition between Jew and non-Jew
in places where that competition is excessive. For
even the respected guest has economic freedom only
within certain limits. If he oversteps these limits, and
his competition presses too hard on the native, the native
// File: b070.png
.pn +1
is forced to protect himself, either by legislative
restriction of the foreigner’s rights, or sometimes even
by force. It follows that if we succeed in establishing a
separate State for our people, the two first causes of
anti-Semitism will be removed, even if the State is very
small, and even if most of the Jews remain where they
are, and only a very small minority goes to settle in our
State. For the mere fact of the existence of a Jewish
State, where Jews would be masters, and their national
life would develop on lines of its own in accordance with
their spirit—this fact alone would suffice to remove from
us the brand of inferiority, and to raise us in the world’s
estimation to the level of a nation equal in worth to the
other nations, sharing alike their privileges and their
duties; and the attitude of the other nations to us would
no longer be different from their attitude to each other.
But the economic cause, though its working may be
mitigated to some extent when the wandering mendicant
is transformed into a well-to-do guest, cannot be got rid
of until the number of Jews in every country declines to
the limit dictated by the economic condition of the native
population. Until that time hatred of these foreign
competitors will continue, and the native population will
continue to persecute them with restrictive laws and
even with violence, even though there exist somewhere
or other a separate Jewish State, and even though all
nations respect the Jewish nationality which has in that
State its concrete expression.
Thus we arrive at a further condition of the solution of
our problem. What we need is not simply a State, but
a State to which the majority of the Jews will emigrate
from all their present homes—to such an extent that
their numbers in every country will decline to the extent
// File: b071.png
.pn +1
demanded by local conditions—and a State extensive
enough and materially rich enough to maintain so large
a population.
And here we come to the Achilles’ heel of political
Zionism. Granted that we have it in our power to
establish a Jewish State: have we it in our power to
diminish thereby the number of Jews in every country to
the maximum which the economic condition of the
country can bear without their arousing anti-Semitism?
This question the opponents of the new Zionism, which
promises to put an end to the Jewish problem by the
establishment of the State, are continually asking: but
so far we have not received from the Zionists a clear and
satisfactory answer. During the last twenty years, for
instance, at least a million Jews have left Eastern
Europe for America and Africa. That is a very large
number, sufficient for the establishment of a Jewish
State. Yet this emigration has had no perceptible
effect on the economic condition of the countries
from which it has taken place, and the relations
between the native population and the Jews in those
countries have not improved. The reason is that the
emigration has not in fact lessened the number of Jews in
those countries, the loss being always counterbalanced by
the natural increase of those who remain. If, then,
Pinsker’s idea had been carried out as soon as his
pamphlet was published, and all these emigrants had
gone not to America or Africa, but to the Jewish State,
the State might by now have been successful and flourishing,
and national life might be developing there in a
satisfactory manner, so as to bring great honour to our
people wherever Jews are; but none the less the Jewish
problem in the lands whence the emigration proceeded
// File: b072.png
.pn +1
would remain exactly where it was, because economic
competition between the Jews and the native population
would be just as keen as before, and would still be felt
by the latter to an intolerable degree. If, therefore, a
Jewish State is really to solve the Jewish problem on its
economic side for good and all, then hundreds of thousands
must emigrate to it every year from the lands of
the Diaspora, so that the diminution in the number of
Jews in those lands will be patently perceptible, and their
influence on economic life will decrease from year to
year, till it ceases to be a cause of hatred and jealousy on
the part of the native population. We must therefore ask
ourselves first of all, whether it is really possible to transport
such a vast number of people in a short time, and to
open up for them new sources of livelihood in a new
State, wherever it may be. I doubt very much whether
any responsible person will answer this question in the
affirmative.
But this criticism, which is fatal to the new Zionism, as
expounded by Herzl and his followers, does not seriously
affect Pinsker’s Zionism. The new Zionists make the
political and economic problem the be-all and end-all of
their strivings. Their primary aim is to improve the
hard lot of the Jews as individuals. They regard such
improvement in exile as out of the question, since Jews
are regarded as strangers in every country, and the competition
of the stranger exposes him to the resentment of
the native population. Hence they demand that the
Jews shall establish a separate State for themselves,
where they will not be strangers and their competition will
not be a crime.[#] But this idea can be justified only if the
State is able to improve the lot of all the Jews or most
// File: b073.png
.pn +1
of them; that is, if all or most of the Jews can leave
foreign countries and settle in their State. Unless this
condition is fulfilled, the amelioration will be only
partial; it will affect only that fortunate minority which
succeeds in establishing itself in the Jewish State. The
majority will remain as badly off as before—hated and
persecuted foreigners in strange lands. Where, then, is
the promised annihilation of the Jewish problem through
the establishment of the State?
But with Pinsker it is different. The loss which he
mourns is primarily the loss of Jewish national dignity.
He weeps for a nation which is not regarded and respected
by the other nations as an equal, and whose
individual members are treated everywhere not merely as
foreigners, but as beggars in receipt of charity. With
him the question of national dignity comes first of all.
Of the three causes to which he traces the ill-feeling
between Jews and Gentiles, the first one, which lies in
the degraded position of the Jews as a nation—a point
not mentioned by the new Zionists—is the most important
in his own view, and occupies most of his attention.
Next to it stands the political cause; and this cause
also, unlike the new Zionists, he regards from the point
of view of the problem of national dignity. He is not
much troubled by the fact that we are treated as aliens
in every country: that fact, no doubt, harms us as
individuals, but in itself it does not imply any contempt
or inferiority. The root of the trouble is that we are not
treated as aliens in the ordinary political sense, but are
regarded as wandering mendicants, as inferior beings,
who are not entitled to demand respect and consideration
as of right. So with the third cause, the economic one.
Its sting lies for Pinsker chiefly in the fact that here also
// File: b074.png
.pn +1
we Jews are differentiated from other aliens—that in
consequence of the low esteem in which we are held our
competition causes more resentment than that of other
aliens. Pinsker, therefore, has more right than the new
Zionists to regard the establishment of a Jewish State as
the absolute solution of the Jewish problem—that is, of
the problem of the dignity of the Jewish nation and of
its members, who, even if most of them remain scattered
among the nations, and even if they continue to be hated
and persecuted in various countries because of their
economic competition, will at any rate no longer be
exposed to the contempt of their neighbours, and to the
taunt that they are not a nation, but a pack of beggars
wandering about in a world which is not theirs, and
existing only on sufferance.
On the other hand, Pinsker raises another question,
which does not trouble the new Zionists very much: the
question of the national consciousness.
If we assume, as Herzl does in his pamphlet, that the
Jewish State will contain all the Jews, and will offer to
every individual Jew the possibility of living comfortably
among his people, then we need not be much concerned
about the anterior development of the national consciousness
as an incentive to the establishment of the State.
We have ready to hand another and a stronger incentive
in the natural desire of every individual to improve his
position.[#] But if from the outset we accept the fact that
even a Jewish State will not absolutely solve the Jewish
problem on its economic side, and that the chief purpose
for which we need a State is a moral one—to gain for
// File: b075.png
.pn +1
our own nation the respect of other nations, and to create
a healthy body for our national spirit—then we are bound
to face the question whether the national consciousness
is so strong among us, and the honour of our nation so
dear to us, that this motive alone, unalloyed by any consideration
of individual advantage, will be sufficient to
spur us on to so vast and difficult a task.
Now Pinsker, candid here as always, does not conceal
from us that, as things are, the national consciousness
among us is not nearly strong enough for our purpose.
“Our greatest misfortune is that we do not form a
nation: we are merely Jews.” The galuth life has compelled
every Jew to put all his strength into his individual
struggle for existence; and in that struggle we have
been compelled to use any kind of weapon that came to
hand, without enquiring too closely whether it was consistent
with our national dignity. Thus, as time went on,
both our sense of nationality and our sense of dignity
became dulled; and at last we ceased to feel the need of
restoring our dignity, national or individual.[#] We left it
to the Deity to perform that ideal task by bringing us
the Messiah at the proper time, and buried ourselves in
affairs more necessary for our immediate physical survival.[#]
Even in modern times, when the breeze of
modern culture has blown on us and begun to awaken
our dormant sense of dignity, we try to find satisfaction
in a strange delusion of our own invention—that the
people of Israel has a “mission,” for the sake of which
it must remain scattered among the nations: “a mission
in which nobody believes, a privilege of which, candidly,
we should be glad to be rid, if at that price we could wipe
// File: b076.png
.pn +1
out the name of ‘Jew’ as a title of shame.”[#] This loss
of self-respect on the one side aggravates the contempt
in which we are held, and on the other side is itself the
greatest stumbling-block on our path of progress. For
what, except a strong national consciousness, can induce
our people to bend all its energies to the task of restoring
its national dignity, and to fight unceasingly and
unwearyingly against all the obstacles with which it is
confronted? That those obstacles are many and
serious—this again Pinsker does not conceal from us.
At the best, several generations must elapse before we
can attain our end, “perhaps only after labour too great
for human strength.” Only, as we recognise that this is
the one road to our national salvation, we must not turn
back faint-heartedly because of the danger or for
lack of confidence in the success of our efforts.[#]
But such language is intelligible only to a thoroughly
awakened national consciousness, which can intensify
the desire to attain the end in proportion to
the heaviness of the task, can flame up for
one instant in the heart of the whole people, and produce
a “national resolution,” a sacred and unbending resolve
to take up the work of revival and to carry it on,
generation after generation, till its completion. And
“where,” asks Pinsker, bitterly, “where shall we find
this national consciousness?”
// File: b077.png
.pn +1
Pinsker found no satisfactory answer to this question.
He made this national consciousness a categorical
imperative, a conditio sine qua non; but he did not show
how it was to be supplied. For this reason the whole of
the practical scheme which follows gives one the
impression of being formulated conditionally—subject,
that is, to the emergence among our people, no matter
by what means, of a national consciousness strong
enough to enable them to carry out the idea in practice.
Pinsker’s practical scheme, as I said above, is only an
outline. But its general lines are very similar to those
laid down by Herzl in the pamphlet which is the basis of
present-day Zionist policy.
As we cannot hope for another leader like Moses—“history
does not vouchsafe such leaders to the same
people repeatedly”—the leadership of the movement
for national rebirth must be taken by a group of distinguished
Jews, men of strong will and generous
character, who “by their union will, perhaps, succeed
in freeing us from reproach and persecution, no less than
did the one great leader.”[#] Herzl uses very similar
language about this collective negotiorum gestor,[#] and he
and Pinsker alike look for its members among the upper-class
Jews; but Herzl has his eye especially on the Jews
of England, while Pinsker looks generally to the great
organisations already in existence.[#] Herzl calls this
governing body “the Society of Jews”; Pinsker calls
it “the Directorium.” Herzl pictures the formation of
the Society of Jews in a very simple manner. The best
// File: b078.png
.pn +1
of the English Jews, having approved the project, come
together without any preliminaries, and form a “Society
of Jews.” Herzl sees no need to call a National Assembly
first: the general consent which is necessary to give the
Society proper standing with the Governments will come
afterwards spontaneously.[#] But Pinsker wanted the
various organisations to call “a National Congress, of
which they themselves would be the nucleus.” Only in
the event of their refusing to do this does he suggest that
they should at least constitute a special “national
institution” called a “Directorium,” which should unite
all forces in the national work. The principal and
immediate object of this institution would be “to create
a safe and independent home of refuge for that superfluity
of poor Jews which exists as a proletariat in various
countries, and is disliked by the native population.”[#] All
other Jews, not merely in the West, “where they are
already naturalised up to a certain point,” but also “in
those places where they are not readily tolerated,” can
remain where they are. Unlike Herzl, Pinsker does not
think it possible that all the Jews will leave their homes
and go to their own State; nor is this necessary for his
real object, as I have pointed out above. Economic
pressure is under present conditions causing the “superfluity”
to emigrate year by year from every country
where there is a superfluity; and thousands of Jews leave
their homes because they can no longer maintain themselves.
At present these emigrants escape one trouble
// File: b079.png
.pn +1
to fall into another. They wander from country to
country, and find no proper resting-place; and the large
sums of money expended by various organisations on the
migration of Jews and their settlement in new homes
produce no real benefit, because the new home also is
only a temporary lodging. When the number of Jews in
the new country reaches the “saturation-point,” the
journey will have to be resumed; the Jews must move on
to yet other countries. But if we can prepare, while there
is yet time, a single secure home of refuge instead of the
many insecure ones, the superfluity will gradually find its
way thither, and its inhabitants will increase from year
to year, till at last it becomes the centre of our national
life, though the bulk of the people will remain, as
hitherto, scattered in strange lands.
The first act of the “Directorium” would be to send
an expedition of experts to investigate and find the
territory best suited to our purpose from every point of
view. When he wrote his pamphlet Pinsker did not yet
regard our historic land as the only possible home of
refuge; on the contrary, he feared that our ingrained love
for Palestine might give us a bias and induce us to choose
that country without paying regard to its political,
economic and other conditions, which perhaps might be
unfavourable. For this reason he warns us emphatically
not to be guided by sentiment in this matter, but to leave
the question of territory to a commission of experts, who
will solve it after a thorough and detailed investigation.
But on the whole he thinks that the desired territory
will be found either in America or in Turkey.[#] In the
// File: b080.png
.pn +1
latter alternative we shall form a special “Pashalik,”
the independence of which will be guaranteed by
Turkey and the other Great Powers. “It will be one
of the principal functions of the Directorium,” writes
Pinsker, for all the world like an orthodox adherent of
“diplomatic” Zionism to-day, “to win for this project
the sympathy of the Porte and the other European
Governments.”[#]
“And then, but not till then,” he warns us once again,
the Directorium will enter on its work of buying land
and organising colonisation. In this work it will need
the assistance of “a group of capitalists,” who will form
“a joint-stock company”—exactly as in Herzl’s scheme,
where side by side with the Society of Jews there
is established the Jewish Company, a company of
capitalists, to direct the material affairs of the settlement.
Pinsker next proceeds to describe in outline the progress
of the new settlement—how the land will be
parcelled out in small plots, some to be sold to men with
capital, and some to be occupied by men of no means
with the assistance of a National Fund established to that
end; and so forth. But for our present purpose we need
follow him no further. What has been said above will
suffice to make it plain to all who wish to see that it was
Pinsker who worked out the whole theory of political
Zionism, and that his successors, so far from adding anything
essential to his scheme, actually took away in large
measure its ideal basis, and thus so seriously impaired
its moral value that they had to have recourse to various
promises which they could neither fulfil nor repudiate.
This will become abundantly clear to anybody who
// File: b081.png
.pn +1
will compare the two pamphlets, Pinsker’s and
Herzl’s.
Pinsker, as we have seen, puts the emphasis on the
moral aspect, Herzl on the material. Hence Pinsker
wishes to found only a national centre, Herzl promises
a complete “ingathering of the exiles”; Pinsker finds
the motive power in a strong national consciousness,
Herzl in the desire for individual betterment. For this
reason Pinsker does not find it necessary to minimise
the difficulties: on the contrary, he repeats many
times, with emphasis, that only at the cost of infinite
sacrifice will the goal perhaps—mark that “perhaps”!—be
reached. Similarly, he recognises that it
is not work for one generation alone. “We have to
take only the first step; our successors must follow in
our footsteps, with measured tread and without undue
haste.”[#] Not so Herzl. He is bound to make light
of the difficulties, because otherwise he would have to
face the question: “If we are looking for betterment
as individuals, how can we waste so much energy on a
task that will take generations to accomplish, and may
not be accomplished at all, when we have so many
pressing needs which can be more or less met if we
devote that energy to them?” Hence Herzl is never
tired of promising that it will be very easy to carry out
his project in a short time, if only we want it. “Let
us but begin, and anti-Semitism will at once die down
in every country: for this will be our treaty of peace
with it. Once let the Jewish Company be established,
and the news of it will spread in one day to the ends of
the earth, and our position will immediately begin to
improve.... Thus the work will proceed, rapidly yet
// File: b082.png
.pn +1
without convulsion.”[#] The same difference is evident
in the general scheme of the two pamphlets. Pinsker
devotes most of his pamphlet to showing how low we
have sunk as a nation, and how badly we need a State
of our own to save our dignity. Only at the end does
he explain briefly how he pictures to himself the practical
realisation of his idea. This is because from his
point of view the essential thing is that we resolve
that our dignity absolutely demands this course of
action, cost what it may. We have no need to spend
much thought at the outset on the question whether
we shall succeed, or how and when we shall succeed,
because, if we suppose that the task is beyond
our strength, we must none the less take it up,
in order to wipe out our reproach. The question of
dignity brooks no calculation. But Herzl deals very
briefly with fundamental principles and reasons,
because, from his materialistic point of view, there is
really no need to enlarge on them. Can anybody doubt
that the position of the Jews in exile is very bad, and
that it would be better for them and for their neighbours
if they went and established a separate State for themselves?
Even our “assimilationists” would certainly
agree for the most part, if they only knew with absolute
certainty from the start that the project could be carried
out without too much trouble, “rapidly yet without
convulsion.” The root question is, then, whether the
goal can in fact be reached under such comfortable
conditions. For this reason Herzl gives most of his
// File: b083.png
.pn +1
attention to this question, and explains his practical
scheme in minute detail, with the object of showing
that it demands no great sacrifices, whether material
or spiritual, and that everything from A to Z will be
achieved with ease, rapidity and universal satisfaction.
All the emigration to the Jewish State, up to the time
when the whole people is gathered there, he describes
almost as though it were a holiday excursion. And in
the State itself everybody lives in comfort and prosperity.
Nobody will need to forgo even the minor
habits of his ordinary life; and the immigrant will not
even have to miss his friends and relations, because the
Jews will leave the different countries in “local groups,”
and will be settled in their own land on that basis, so
that each man can attach himself to the group which is
closest to him geographically and spiritually. The working-classes,
on whose strength the State will be built
up, will work only seven hours a day, and even the
Jewish Company, which is to direct the whole work
with its capital, will not incur any financial risk, because
its investments will be sound and will produce an
exceptionally good return.[#]
If, further, we take into account the wide difference
between the two pamphlets in style, we may see that
Herzl’s pamphlet has the air of being a translation of
Pinsker’s from the language of the ancient Prophets
into that of modern journalism.
Yet the name of Pinsker, as the originator of the
// File: b084.png
.pn +1
political Zionist theory, is almost forgotten. He is
mentioned as a rule only in connection with the work of
“petty colonisation” in Palestine, as though his
horizon had been bounded by his activity in that sphere.
Ordinary men, for whom the real is the visible, remember
only things that are done: and the thing that
Pinsker did—that to which he devoted all his subsequent
work—has really no direct relation to the message
which he began by enunciating.
I have shown elsewhere how it was that Pinsker came
to take part in the work of the Chovevé Zion, despite
the political character of his theory. He understood
perfectly well that their work was very far removed
from the great project of which he dreamt; but he
understood also that without a “national resolution,”
proceeding from a strong national consciousness, and
without unity and an organisation embracing the whole
people, it would be impossible to carry out his great
idea. The consent of the Powers, the favour of the
Sublime Porte, even a Charter signed and sealed—all
this cannot help us in the least, so long as we are not a
single people, strong by virtue of our unity and our
indomitable will, penetrated through and through with
a sense of our present national degradation, and prepared
to sacrifice our all for a nobler future. Hence,
when Pinsker saw that national indifference was the
rule in every section of the people; when he saw how
faint an echo his pamphlet raised in the hearts of the
ruling classes, whom he confidently expected to be the
first to rally to his banner; and when he saw a small
group of men with insignificant means, or none, putting
forth every possible effort to carry out a national
project, small and poor though it was in comparison
// File: b085.png
.pn +1
with his own ideal—Pinsker could not help lending a
hand to those who were engaged in this work, seeing
in them the nucleus of an organisation, and the small
beginning of the “national resolution.” For Pinsker
the work done in Palestine was not the beginning of the
practical realisation of his programme, but only the
beginning of the preparatory stage—the beginning of
the revival of the national consciousness, and of the
union of the people under the banner of a common ideal.
He hoped by means of national action on a small scale
to arrive ultimately at that national resolution on the
part of the whole people for which he looked in his
pamphlet; and then the real work would begin.
It is abundantly clear that this is exactly the course
which the new Zionists too are taking to-day, though
as yet, it would appear, unconsciously. How great,
for instance, is the gulf between the Jewish Company
of Herzl’s vision—possessing a capital of fifty millions
sterling, and undertaking not only to plant the settlers
in the Jewish State, but also to sell the property and
transact the business of all the Jews in the Diaspora—and
the small Bank, with its quarter-of-a-million, which
has now been opened, after infinite labour, to carry on
some simple and unimportant business operations in
Palestine and Russia! Or again, is there any sort of
relationship between the Society of Jews which Herzl
describes in his pamphlet—a Society which is to stand
at the head of the whole people and manage all its
national affairs, as Moses did—and the Actions Committee
which now stands at the head of the Zionist
organisation? And how shall we be brought to the
Jewish State—that free State guaranteed by all the
Powers—by such minor concessions as it is possible to
// File: b086.png
.pn +1
obtain now, according to the Zionist leaders, at Yildiz
Kiosk for a certain price? The plain truth is that all
this work, which the new Zionists regard as “political”
work par excellence, has as little to do with the theory
of political Zionism as had the petty colonisation work
which Pinsker took up. In the one case as in the
other, the whole value of the work lies in its effect on
the people, which it educates gradually in the direction
of unity, organisation, national resolution. In other
words, we are still, as we were in Pinsker’s day, at the
first stage, the preliminary stage of preparatory work.
It must be admitted, however, that in the practical
sphere—even confining that to preparatory work and
propaganda—Pinsker did little, and did not achieve in
his ten years of work half as much as the leader of the
new Zionism has achieved in five years. Pinsker was
purely a theorist: he worked out the theory of Zionism
better and more fully than his successor, but, like all
theorists, he was of little use when it came to practical
work. Men of his type, simple-souled and pure-minded
to a degree, innocent of the tricks and wiles of
diplomacy, knowing nothing but the naked truth—such
men cannot find the way to popular favour. Their
words are too sincere, their actions too straightforward.
Those only can attract the mob and bend it to their will
who can descend to its level, pander to its tastes, and
pipe to it in a hundred tunes, choosing the right one at
the right moment. Pinsker had none of these arts. If,
for example, he had gone to Yildiz Kiosk to negotiate
for the colonisation of Palestine, and had been told
there: “If you have two million pounds you may have
so-and-so; otherwise—nothing”—what would he have
done? Without a doubt he would have replied at once:
// File: b087.png
.pn +1
“We have not such a large sum of money, and have at
present no prospect of getting it.” Then he would
have returned home empty-handed, and the public at
large would have known nothing of his going or of his
returning; or, if it had been impossible to keep the
matter quiet, everybody would have known that “certain
steps had been taken” at Yildiz, but had come to
nothing. This, of course, would have made a bad
impression, and have helped in some degree to weaken
the energy of his few supporters. But we all still
remember how the Zionist leaders behaved on a similar
occasion last year. Leadership on these lines cannot
satisfy those who have a liking for the plain truth; but
from a pragmatic point of view it undoubtedly has the
advantage. First of all, people heard only the glad
news (it “spread in one day to the ends of the earth”)
that the Sultan had given the Zionist leaders a favourable
reception and made them certain promises, but
that the details could not yet be published. This news
aroused widespread attention: friends and foes alike
waited breathlessly for the curtain to be drawn. Then,
after the news had become public property and
enlivened the hopes of the Zionists, the leaders made
the further announcement that the great promises had
been made conditionally, and could not be fulfilled
unless they had two million pounds. Everybody who
knew the true state of things understood at once—and
certainly the leaders understood it, even while they
were having audience of the Sultan—that this condition
could not be met, so that the promises were mere empty
words. And yet the first impression was not altogether
effaced, and it served to strengthen in many people the
belief that something great could be done if only all
// File: b088.png
.pn +1
sections of the people were ready to put all their
strength into it—the kind of belief which is calculated
to intensify the energy of the workers, and to spur them
on to put forth greater efforts.
In a word: theory and practice are two departments
which no doubt depend on each other, but each one
needs special abilities and different qualities of mind,
which can with difficulty be combined in one man. We
must therefore honour every man according to his value
in his own department. If I might borrow an illustration
from religion, I should say that Pinsker was the
originator of the gospel of political Zionism, and Herzl
its apostle; Pinsker brought the new dispensation, and
Herzl gave it currency. But it is usual for the apostle
to recognise the originator and to acknowledge his
greatness: as he spreads the gospel, so he publishes
abroad and sanctifies the name of him who brought it.
Had the Zionist apostle followed this custom, Pinsker
would now have a world-wide reputation, and would
be venerated by all whose watchword is Zion. But
Herzl would not be satisfied with the practical mission
which was in reality his métier. He must needs
“originate” the gospel itself over again—in an inferior
form, it is true—so that it should be all his. Thus the
odd result has come about that the further the gospel
spreads, the more completely is its true originator forgotten.
But it is not for Pinsker’s reputation that I am concerned.
In his lifetime he was so far from the desire
for notoriety and ascendancy, that I have no doubt that
if he were alive to-day, he would rejoice wholeheartedly
at the wide vogue given to his idea, and not a
shade of displeasure would pass over his face because
// File: b089.png
.pn +1
of the injustice done to himself personally. My only
regret is that Pinsker’s wonderful pamphlet has sunk
with him, and the Zionist gospel itself has become more
superficial and more materialistic.[#] Zionism is a faith,
and, like every other faith, it needs one authoritative
“Bible,” to be conned by the true believers, to be their
fountain-head of spiritual influence. At present Zionism
has no “Bible.” Great as is Herzl’s influence with the
new Zionists, his pamphlet could not attain that high
dignity. But its general spirit pervades all the other
brochures and speeches on which Zionists live, and
from which they derive their faith; and that spirit, as
we have seen, is not calculated to raise the masses above
material interests, and render them capable of making
great sacrifices for a higher national ideal. Pinsker’s
pamphlet is the only one that is worthy to take the
first place in the literature of Zionism, and to be revered
by the party as the fons et origo of all its views and
policies. If this pamphlet were disseminated among
Zionists, and made familiar to them, it would undoubtedly
help to educate them in its spirit—a spirit of pure
idealism, which sets more store by the dignity of the
whole people than by the advantage of the individual,
never flinches in the face of danger, is never impatient,
and demands no certainty of success. Then the leaders
would not have to be always looking for some means
of keeping the fervour up to the required temperature,
nor to entangle themselves in exaggerated promises
// File: b090.png
.pn +1
and self-contradictions, which only the blindness of
enthusiasm can fail for a moment to detect.
Enthusiasm, however, is a flame which spreads rapidly
but does not last. It is only the slow-burning fire, with
its steady flame, that can create the enormous strength
required for such a national task in many successive
generations. For this reason I believe that there will
yet come a day when all the external show and parade
will no longer satisfy those who thirst for a national
ideal; and in that day many will once more remember
Pinsker and his pure and lofty message—a message of
work without limit and sacrifice without reward, for no
other object than to restore the dignity of our people,
and to enhance our value for humanity.
.fn #
We hear now that Herzl commended Pinsker and his pamphlet—for
the first time—at one of the sittings of the Fifth Congress. That
Congress met at Basle some weeks after the Chovevé Zion in Russia
had given prominence to Pinsker’s name on the anniversary of his
death. This is evidence that the President of the Zionist Congress
still sometimes pays attention to the public opinion of Russian Jewry.
But, of course, this does not affect what is said above.
.fn-
.fn #
[A second edition was published about a year after the appearance
of this Essay.]
.fn-
.fn #
Here is an incident which illustrates the extent to which the
contents of Pinsker’s pamphlet have been forgotten, even in Russia.
A short time ago, some of the Jewish periodicals in Russia published
a letter of Pinsker’s dating from 1883, which was found among the
papers of the Odessa Committee. The letter contains only a few
headings of the ideas which are explained in detail in his pamphlet.
But the periodicals were surprised, and found it necessary to remark
that it appeared from this letter that so long as twenty years ago
Pinsker had “foreseen, as it were,” the Zionist movement of our day.
.fn-
.fn #
In Austria the Chovevé Zion used to call themselves “Zionists”
long before Herzl’s time. I believe that Dr. Birnbaum invented the
name in his journal Selbst-Emanzipation. Herzl mentions the
“Zionists” a few times in his brochure, and satirically represents
them as trying to raise a heavy load by the steam of a tea-kettle
(Judenstaat, p. 4).
.fn-
.fn #
Autoemancipation, pp. 1-7 \[7-11 in the second edition, 1903.]
.fn-
.fn #
ib. p. 15 \[17.]
.fn-
.fn #
Pinsker died before the days of what is now called “spiritual
nationalism,” the view which denies the need for a distinct national
territory, believing it possible that sooner or later we shall obtain
equal rights in the lands of our dispersion as a nation: that is, shall
be allowed to carry on our distinctive national life in these lands,
just as we have already obtained equal rights, as citizens, in many
countries: that is, have been allowed to take part in social and
political life like the other inhabitants. But Pinsker lays the
foundation for this view, by demanding—for the first time—national
equality, and substituting the formula of spiritual nationalism: “the
same rights for the Jewish nation as for the other nations” (“die
Gleichstellung der jüdischen Nation mit den anderen Nationen”—Autoemancipation,
p. 7 \[11]) for the older formula of the protagonists
of emancipation: “the same rights for Jews as for the other
citizens.” It is, however, fundamental to Pinsker’s view that
national equality is unattainable so long as we lack the concrete
attributes of nationality. A nation which is a nation only in the
spiritual sense is a monstrosity which the other nations cannot
possibly regard as their compeer; it follows that they cannot recognise
its title to demand the same rights as those enjoyed by the real
nations.
.fn-
.fn #
ib. pp. 7-10 \[11-13.]
.fn-
.fn #
ib. pp. 10-11 \[13-14].
.fn-
.fn #
Judenstaat, pp. 24-26.
.fn-
.fn #
The question, “What will induce the Jews to found their State
and to settle in it?” is answered by Herzl quite simply: “We can
trust the anti-Semites to see to that.” (Judenstaat, p. 59.)
.fn-
.fn #
Autoemancipation, p. 12 \[15].
.fn-
.fn #
ib. p. 16 \[18].
.fn-
.fn #
ib. p. 19 \[20]. As the sequel shows, Pinsker’s criticism is aimed
only at those who make the “mission” the moral end of our
dispersion. They think that we can fulfil our mission only if we are
thoroughly scattered: whereas the fact is precisely the reverse. “So
far the world does not regard us as a genuine firm, and allows us
little credit.” If, therefore, we really wish to benefit the world by
fulfilling a mission, we must first of all establish our national
position, so as to enhance our credit with the rest of the world.
.fn-
.fn #
ib. p. 20 \[21].
.fn-
.fn #
ib. p. 26 \[25].
.fn-
.fn #
Judenstaat, p. 70.
.fn-
.fn #
He means, apparently, the Alliance Israélite Universelle and its
sister organisations in England and Austria. The Jewish Colonisation
Association had not yet come into existence.
.fn-
.fn #
Herzl shows, in his pamphlet, no great liking for large meetings,
even for propaganda purposes. “There is no need”—so writes the
founder of the Zionist Congress—“to summon special meetings with
a lot of palaver.” (ib. p. 57.)
.fn-
.fn #
Autoem. p. 27 \[25-26]. Elsewhere (p. 34 \[30]) Pinsker insists that
the home of refuge must be secured by political means (“politisch
gesichert.”)
.fn-
.fn #
Herzl also, in his pamphlet, does not decide on a territory; but
he also looks to America and Turkey, and suggests the Argentine or
Palestine (Judenstaat, p. 29).
.fn-
.fn #
Autoem. p. 30 \[28].
.fn-
.fn #
ib. p. 35 \[31].
.fn-
.fn #
“Eilig und doch ohne Erschütterung” (Judenstaat, p. 85). In
one place Herzl says that the emigration of the whole people from
the various countries to its own State will take “some decades”
(p. 27), but does not say how many. Elsewhere he is more definite;
the emigration will last “perhaps twenty years or perhaps more”
(p. 79).
.fn-
.fn #
It is worth pointing out that Pinsker, too, hints that the company
of capitalists, which is to co-operate with his Directorium, may
expect a good profit. But as soon as he has mentioned this expectation
he adds: “Whether, however, this act of national redemption
will be more or less good business or not—that question is not of
great moment in comparison with the importance of the undertaking
for the future of our people.” (pp. 32-33 \[30].)
.fn-
.fn #
Even in his lifetime Pinsker was not understood, and his pamphlet
was not appreciated at its full value. Smolenskin, in his critique,
saw nothing in the pamphlet beyond the superficial Chibbath Zion
which had then a wide vogue in Hebrew literature, and could find
nothing to say in its praise except that it was written in German—a
language in which “such ideas ... have never been
expressed before.”
.fn-
// File: b091.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2 id=art05
THE TIME HAS COME | (1906[#])
.sp 2
You are right, my friends: “Now the time has come
to begin planting our literature in the land of its birth
and on its own native soil.”[#] But it seems to me
that there is a wider and a deeper foundation for this
statement than you give to it in your announcement.
The time is ripe for your enterprise not merely “because
there is already a considerable number of Jews in
Palestine and the neighbouring countries, and so
Hebrew literature, its language being common to the
Jews of Palestine, has a function to perform in the
sphere of national culture.” If that were the only
reason, we Hebrew writers outside Palestine, though
we should certainly have welcomed the new adventure
and have been glad to enjoy the literary fruit of
Palestine, should not have felt it our duty to take an
active part in a local Palestinian literary movement,
created only for the Jews in Palestine, whose circumstances
are known to us only by hearsay, or from the
visitor’s brief experience. If none the less I feel—and
I am sure that other writers will feel the same—that it
is my duty to take part in your undertaking, that can
only be because it is not merely the condition of the
Jews in Palestine, but the condition of our people in
general that now convinces us of the necessity of reuniting
our land and our language—those sundered
halves of a single whole, those twin main pillars of our
national life, which are both so near to us and so far
// File: b092.png
.pn +1
from us—and of making them both together, by the
establishment of a worthy literary centre in the land, a
single mighty channel through which the influence of
our national spirit should be carried to all the lands of
our dispersion.
“Now convinces us,” I say: although it is already
many years since we began to recognise that the Hebrew
spirit is yearning towards its own land, because its life
in exile is not a healthy and a complete life. But this
recognition itself could not get free all at once from the
fetters of galuth, and did not prevent us from dreaming
all those years of the revival of our language and
literature outside Palestine. Now realities have shown
the futility of our dream, and we learn perforce from
experience what we would not learn willingly from
logic, that just as the Hebrew spirit cannot develop as
it should without a free centre “on its own native
soil,” so, too, are its outer vestments, our language and
literature, under the same disability; and all our efforts
to revive them on strange soil will not avail except for
a short time—until the hammer of an alien environment
strikes out a spark which will destroy in a moment
what we have spent many years and the last remnant
of our strength in building up.[#]
How slow is the development of an idea in the human
mind! Every new idea is born with great travail, and
even after its birth there is a long lapse of time and a
heavy loss of force between its dawn and its noontide
splendour. At first it appears shrouded in mist,
luminous yet obscure, and its faint rays shimmer on the
// File: b093.png
.pn +1
surface of the human spirit without being able to penetrate
to the depths below. Only little by little, after
much labour and hard struggling, is the mist dispelled,
and the light of the idea grows stronger and floods all
the dark corners of the mind. Then we look into these
corners, and wonder at ourselves for not having been
conscious before of the chaos of error and contradiction
which held its own there while the light was already
playing on the surface above.
Hard were the birth-pangs of our national idea in the
form of “Zionism,” and the mists shrouded it at its
birth. In the last generation the Jewish people had
settled down to its exile; it waited for the mercy of
Heaven and the kindness of the world, scarcely felt
how its limbs were being torn asunder and scattered in
all directions, and asked no great boon of the future,
except a peaceful life and a livelihood among the
nations. Then a hurricane arose, and thunderously
swept away the hope of kindness from the world, yes,
and even the hope of mercy from heaven. And the
clarion-call went forth among the exiled people: You
wish for a peaceful life and livelihood? Then get you
up and go to your national land, and look no more for
crumbs from strangers’ tables: for there is neither
peace nor livelihood except for each people in its own
land.
That was the dawn of our new idea. The memory
of our historic land, which had become a lifeless thing,
a mere book-memory, became once more a living
emotional force, and in its re-birth awoke our love for
the rest of our heritage, which now appeared in a new
light to many for whom it had lost all actual value. If
we say—so these men reasoned—that we have a national
// File: b094.png
.pn +1
land, to which we wish to return in very deed and not
only in prayer, then we admit, and want others to admit,
that we are actually a nation, and not merely a Church.
And if we are a nation, then we must have a national
spirit, which distinguishes us from other nations, and
we must value and protect it as every other nation does
with its national spirit. And if we value our national
spirit, where shall we find it if not in the heritage of our
past, and especially in our national language and
literature, in which each generation stored up its
spiritual treasure, and left to its heirs in the next the
best fruits of its thought, its secret longings, its half-uttered
sighs? Thus Chibbath Zion began by giving an
impulse to the “spiritual revival”—the fostering of
our language and literature, the establishment of national
schools, and so forth—not as a separate and distinct
ideal, but as a necessary consequence of the ideal of a
peaceful life in Palestine, as a sort of proof of our being
really a distinct nation and possessing all the attributes
of a nation, and being therefore both in need and deserving
of that which we have not now—our national land.
But gradually the Zionist idea began to get clearer,
and events in Palestine and elsewhere helped it to
emerge from the mists of visionary hopes. Then some
of its followers reversed the sequence of ideas. It is
not the case, they said, that the redemption of the
people is the goal of all our efforts, and the spiritual
revival only a means to it, and a branch of it. On the
contrary, the spiritual revival is our real object, whether
we know it or not, and the whole purpose of the settlement
to be built up in Palestine is merely to serve as its
basis.
It is true—such was the train of reasoning of this
// File: b095.png
.pn +1
dissident section—that galuth is a very evil thing, and
that the only way to escape the ills which are inevitably
bound up with it is to escape from galuth itself. But
this truth of itself tells us nothing, if we cannot at the
same time discover the way to “the only way.” To
say to a poor man: “If you want always to be sure of a
meal, get rid of your poverty and become rich!” or to
a sick man: “If you want to be free of your pains, get
up from your bed and be well!”—to say this is to say
nothing, unless at the same time you show the poor
man how to get rich, and the sick man how to get well.
Now Zionism has not shown us how to get out of
galuth. For all the sophistication in the world cannot
do away with the cruelty of hard facts, which do not
allow us to picture to ourselves, even approximately
and in a general way, how our work in Palestine, even
if in time it develops up to the very maximum of what is
possible, and covers the whole land with gardens and
orchards and factories, can accomplish this unprecedented
miracle: that so small a country as ours should absorb
hundreds of thousands of immigrants at a time, year by
year, without coming to such a crisis as would drive out
its old and its new inhabitants in even greater numbers.
But if this miracle does not happen, and the Palestinian
settlement develops only little by little, concurrently
with the development of the country’s economic
resources, then it is impossible to deny that its gradual
expansion will not diminish the number of Jews in other
countries (since their natural increase will offset the
exodus to Palestine), and will not put an end to their
wandering and scattering to all the corners of the globe
under economic and social pressure, which is brought to
bear on them from time to time in every country in
// File: b096.png
.pn +1
which they become too numerous. In other words:
the hope for an “ingathering of the exiles” has no
basis in reality; and even in that distant future to which
we look forward, when the Palestinian settlement will
have reached its full development, and the Jews there
will grow and multiply and fill all the land and make it
their own by their work—even then the majority of Jews
will be scattered in strange lands, and their life in those
lands will even then depend on the good-will of the
peoples among whom they live as a small minority, and
the dominant peoples will even then look askance at
the growth of this “alien body” in their midst if it
dares to rise above a certain level: and finally galuth
in the physical sense will still be with us, and only a
part of the people will have escaped from it—that comparatively
small part which will have had the good
fortune to rebuild the waste places of our land and to
attain national freedom there, while all the rest of the
people, scattered in strange countries, will remain as to
its external condition just as it is, and no fleet will set
sail from Palestine to protect it from persecution.
But if this is so, have we a right to regard the rebuilding
of Palestine as an ideal for the whole nation, and its
success as vital to the hopes of the whole nation?
We have! For galuth is twofold—it is material and
spiritual. On the one hand it cramps the individual
Jew in his material life, by taking from him the possibility
of carrying on his struggle for existence, with
all his strength and in complete freedom, like any other
man; and on the other hand it cramps no less our people
as a whole in its spiritual life, by taking from it the possibility
of safeguarding and developing its national
individuality according to its own spirit, in complete
// File: b097.png
.pn +1
freedom, like any other people. This spiritual cramping,
which our ancestors used to call, in their own
fashion, “the exile of the Divine Presence,” and for
which they shed not less tears than for the exile of the
people, has become especially painful in our time, since
the overthrow of the artificial wall behind which the
spirit of our people entrenched itself in past generations,
in order to be able to live its own life; and now
we and our national life are enslaved to the spirit of the
peoples around us, and we can no longer save our
national individuality from being undermined as a consequence
of the necessity of assimilating ourselves to
the spirit of the alien life, which is too strong for us.
Now it is this problem of spiritual galuth which really
finds its solution in the establishment of a national
“refuge” in Palestine: a refuge not for all Jews who
need peace and bread, but for the spirit of the people,
for that distinctive cultural form, the result of a
historical development of thousands of years, which is
still strong enough to live and to develop naturally in
the future, if only the fetters of galuth are removed.
And though the refuge contain only a tenth part of the
people, this tenth part will be sacred to the whole
people, which will see in it a picture of its national
individuality, of what it is like when it lives its own life,
without external constraint. And who can estimate in
advance the strength of the influence which this national
centre will exert on all the circumference, and the
radical changes which that influence will produce in the
life of the whole people?
Some of the Chovevé Zion arrived at this idea, as I
have said, some eighteen years ago.[#] Had they succeeded
// File: b098.png
.pn +1
in making it common property, it might have
saved both the people and the land from many mistakes.
But ideas do not develop quickly in the human mind,
and this idea, like others, met with formidable obstacles,
which did not allow it to penetrate fully into men’s
minds. When this opinion of a minority was made
public, a shudder went through the Zionist camp, as
though the presence of a destructive enemy had been
detected. Nor was this instinct wholly mistaken. The
movement was then only just beginning to spread
among the masses, and here was an attempt to give it
a form which must alienate the masses, who want above
all things an escape from their material troubles! It
is possible that men did occasionally say to themselves:
“What does it matter? Those few who can really
find a quiet life and a livelihood in Palestine at the
present time—will they refuse to go there unless they
are assured beforehand that they are bringing complete
redemption to the whole people? And the men who
work for the ideal—they are of course bound to get quite
clear in their own minds about the real purpose of their
work, with due regard to actualities, so that they may
set about their task in the way best suited to achieve
their purpose.” It may be that people occasionally
indulged in such reflections in secret. But we live in the
age of democracy, and everybody believes that only the
masses are the source of light and of progress, and that
any ideal which the masses cannot grasp is mere nonsense.
While it is true that in those days the democratic
character of Zionism was not proclaimed from every
house-top, as it is to-day, yet even the early Chovevé
Zion were unconsciously democrats in this sense, that
they regarded the masses not merely as material for the
// File: b099.png
.pn +1
national building, but as conscious architects, deliberately
intent on making such a building as the national
purpose required. Hence they were scared by the idea
that their propaganda would not go down with the
masses if they put forward the spiritual revival as their
only object; and they went on telling the masses that
redemption was at hand if only they would give their
whole-hearted support. But in spite of all this they
did not succeed in creating a real mass-movement,
because the masses not only heard what they said, but
also saw what they achieved—and what they achieved
was not calculated to confirm the belief that this was
the way to redemption. It was only when western
Zionism came and proclaimed that it had found a new
and “practical” way to achieve the object—the way
of diplomacy in the courts of East and West—that the
masses followed its flag for a short time, believing in
their simplicity that diplomatic documents would be the
“paper bridge”[#] over which they would soon pass to
the land of their fathers—and then an end to galuth
and its miseries. But when the hopes of diplomacy
were disappointed, the masses once more lost faith in
the possibility of escape from galuth; and when at the
same time they saw a slight chance of an improvement
of their condition in the land of their exile in a not
distant future, they turned in that direction. So the
masses are deserting the Zionist flag before our eyes,
and—what is still more painful—they sometimes take
the Zionist flag with them and tack it on to the flag of
another camp.
When the history of Zionism comes to be written,
the historian will not be able to pass in silence over an
// File: b100.png
.pn +1
extraordinary inconsistency of contemporary Zionist
propagandists and writers. When they are trying to
attract the people to their flag, they wax enthusiastic
over the lofty mission of Zionism, which is to end our
exile and to deliver the Jews from all their troubles;
and at the same time they gird or scoff at the “spiritual”
Zionists, whose unfeeling hearts soar skywards while
their brethren are afflicted and their blood is shed like
water—and so forth, and so forth. But these same
men, when they confront the opponents of Zionism, who
ask to be told clearly how Zionism can end our exile if
it cannot gather all our scattered hosts into Palestine—then
they take refuge in the spiritual mission of Zionism,
and instead of “blood shed like water,” they expatiate
on our spiritual slavery and the impossibility of developing
our spiritual powers in exile. This jumping about
from one side to the other, which shows clearly how
weak is the belief in a material redemption of those who
stand up for it, has become especially noticeable since
the question of “Uganda” came up and since the birth
of “Territorialism,” which was really latent in the
Zionism of material redemption. All those who had
become Zionists only for the sake of saving the people
from persecution could not understand how it was possible
to reject the Uganda proposal, or any other similar
proposal which seemed to offer us the desired salvation—“a
secure home of refuge”—merely on the
ground that we wanted Palestine and Palestine only,
though we did not know when, if ever, it would be given
to us. And what was the answer of the “Zion-Zionists”
(a name, coined in the Uganda period, which also will
interest the future historian)? Did they try to show
that our scattered hosts could be gathered more quickly
// File: b101.png
.pn +1
and more easily into Palestine, or that in Palestine we
should be better able politically to protect the Jews of
the Diaspora? No! They had recourse to the “spirit,”
and openly admitted the bitter truth that neither in
Palestine nor in any other territory could we gather all
our exiles from the four corners of the globe; that the
object of Zionism was only to establish “a secure home
of refuge” for a minority of the people, which should
become the centre of the whole people and influence it
spiritually; and that this object could be achieved only
in Palestine, the birth-place of our national spirit, and
in connection with our historic memories and so forth.
In fact, they adopted the whole philosophy of the “skyward
soaring” school, only adding a few misplaced
“political” phrases for form’s sake. But after the
Seventh Congress,[#] when the doubters had left the
organisation and the “Zion-Zionists” were left to themselves,
with nobody to ask awkward questions, they
reverted to their old tactics; and now once more they
dangle before the people the old promises of “an end
to galuth.” Meanwhile, however, a general movement
for liberty, affecting all the nations in the Empire, arose
in the land of our exile[#]; and in our own midst new propagandists
began to hold out to the people new promises
and to speak to it in a new language, which the masses
found very agreeable. And so the Zionists began to
change their tune, so as to win over the masses.
“Political work in the Diaspora?—Of course! It is an
essential part of Zionist work. Revolution? Why,
// File: b102.png
.pn +1
who so revolutionary as the Zionists? Socialism?—The
very basis of Zionism!” And not alone that, but
even the Palestinian work, to which in the end the
Zionists returned, after they had awoke from the dreamland
of diplomacy, took on a new epithet: “real work
in Palestine.” The public must understand that Zionists
are not “reactionaries” pursuing a “spiritual” will-o’-the-wisp,
but genuine “realists,” and their work in
Palestine is “real” work. But if at the Eighth Congress
the opponents of “real” work (there are still
such among Zionists) propound their doubts again, and
demand an explanation of the value of such work from
the point of view of the ingathering of the exiles and
the redemption of the people, then, I fear, the champions
of “real” work will be compelled once more to have
recourse to the “spirit” in order to justify their
“realism.” For the fact is that all work in Palestine,
of whatever kind, material or spiritual, so long as it is
properly done, is “real” (that is, calculated to achieve
its object and in harmony with actual conditions) only
from the point of view of the spiritual redemption,
because whatever strengthens our material and spiritual
position in Palestine is a source of added strength to
our corporate national spirit, and therefore brings us
nearer by much or by little to our spiritual goal. But
as for the redemption of the people and the end of
galuth—that “real” goal is no more brought nearer by
all this “real” work than we get nearer to the moon
by jumping.
Thus Zionism is always running after the masses—and
the masses run away from it.
A well-known economist has correctly indicated one of
the principal causes through which the doctrine of Marx
// File: b103.png
.pn +1
made greater headway than similar doctrines before it.
Marx, he points out, made his socialistic movement the
movement of a definite section of society—the “proletariate”—whose
condition and wants inevitably produce
in each of its individual members a deep-rooted
and powerful desire for a change in the social order, and
which is therefore really fitted to fight unitedly and
patiently for the attainment of the ideal that promises
the satisfaction of their common demands. His predecessors
in the development of Socialism, on the other
hand, appealed vaguely and in general fashion to “the
people,” “the poor,” and similar undefined entities.[#]
A similar statement may be made about Zionism, though
in a negative sense. One of the principal causes that have
prevented Zionism hitherto from finding a firm and
secure foundation is the fact that it has not so far succeeded
in recognizing and defining its own “proletariate”—its
natural body of supporters, which is
really fitted to fight unwearyingly for the Zionist ideal,
without being turned aside to follow any other. From
its inception until the present day, Zionism has appealed
to “the people” generally. But “the people” is not
its natural support, because the only want of which the
great majority of the people is sufficiently conscious—the
want which alone, therefore, can form the basis of
common national work—is the need for freedom from
material pressure. So soon as we leave this common
ground, we find the people divided into parties and
classes, whose conscious demands differ in each case,
and whose relation to our national life, therefore, in
each case takes on a different form. If, then, Zionism
could really point the way to our material regeneration,
// File: b104.png
.pn +1
it would doubtless unite under its banner the whole
people, without distinction of party or class, except, perhaps,
that small minority which is already “emancipated”
from all national ties, and stands on the threshold
of another way of escape from galuth. But, as I
have already said, the people does not see in Zionism
the way to its material regeneration, and cannot see it
there, because it is not there. The unsophisticated
masses have always a “feeling for reality” that prevents
them instinctively from believing in promises
inconsistent with the reality before their eyes. It is
only occasionally, in times of deep distress from which
there is no escape, that the masses will listen to a
promise of redemption that lets a ray of comfort into
their hearts; but they turn away and disregard it so
soon as they see hope of a remedy more in touch with
actualities. It is not strange, therefore, that Zionism,
brief though its life has been, has already experienced
many a sudden rise and many a sudden fall in the
popular estimation, its fortune varying with circumstances.
But is a people subject to such changes fitted
to be the rank and file of a movement based on a long
history, confronted by numerous obstacles, and demanding
strenuous, wisely-directed, ordered effort, without
sudden leaps backwards and forwards?
I think, then, that the course of events will compel
Zionism to come gradually to understand itself and its
supporters: to understand itself as a national movement
of a spiritual character, whose aim is to satisfy the
demand for a true and free national life in accordance
with our distinctive spirit; and to find its supporters in
that nationalist section which is sufficiently conscious,
in all its individual members, of this demand, and which
// File: b105.png
.pn +1
in a certain sense may be called a “spiritual proletariate.”
For, in spite of all the numerous latter-day sections
of Jews, with their abbreviated names, it is still doubtful
whether among all our “S.D.” and “S.S.”[#] with their
ceaseless talk about their “proletariate psychology,”
there is really any considerable number of members who
can properly be held to belong to the proletariate in the
Socialist sense of the word. The mission of the proletariate
is to hasten the Socialist solution by the concentration
of wealth; and this mission can be fulfilled
only by those who work in large industrial undertakings.
The work of the master-workman and his assistants is
not proletariate work, because, so far from hastening,
it hinders that solution. Now the working-class Jew
has practically no place in the large industrial undertakings;
generally speaking, the so-called proletariate
section of the Jews belongs to the class of master-workmen.
But, on the other hand, there is among the Jews,
and only among them, a proletariate in another sense—in
the sense indicated by the combination of “national”
and “spiritual.” The position and the needs of this
proletariate, which are common to all its individual
members, compel it to feel a deep-rooted and powerful
desire for a change in the established order; but the
change desired in this case is not a concentration of the
means of production, but just the opposite. What is
wanted is a new means of production, wherewith to
create a product of a special character. Among all
civilised nations ours is the only one that has no special
means of production of its own wherewith to create its
spiritual and intellectual wealth, but is compelled to
// File: b106.png
.pn +1
make use of the means provided by other nations—their
languages, their literatures, their schools and
universities, and so forth—and thus to enrich the owners
of these means of production by its work. But the proletariate
that produces material wealth receives in payment
at least a part of the wealth produced by its
labour, and only the surplus is left to the owner of the
means of production; whereas in our case almost all the
result of our toil goes to swell the wealth of others.
Our own national treasury is impoverished and empty;
our own distinctive spirit dwindles and dwindles. And
yet we are rich in spiritual and intellectual powers, and
do productive work in every branch of life. This condition
of things is distressing to all Jews whose kinship
with their people is not one of blood merely, but whose
national consciousness and general culture have
developed to such a point that they can both understand
and feel the deep tragedy of this national degradation.
For the people so degraded produced thousands
of years ago, for itself and with its own means of production,
a store of spiritual wealth from which the
world still draws sustenance; and it is impossible for
them to imagine that all the endless sacrifices, with
which for two thousand years our people has paid for
the preservation of its spirit and its own form of life,
are to have no result except to bring us at the present
day to a condition of spiritual emptiness, the end of
which will perhaps be a contemptible death. This
constant feeling of distress necessarily impels these
men to work for the freeing of our spirit and the
products of our labour from alien dominion. Where
there is a real want, be it physical or spiritual, there is
a solid basis for a union of forces in joint work for the
// File: b107.png
.pn +1
satisfaction of the common demand. And so it is the
men who are really conscious of this want who form the
only section specially fitted to support the Zionist movement,
and to work for it unitedly, patiently, in an
organized manner, until its goal is reached.
I am fully aware that not all who feel this need are as
yet convinced that they must unite under the banner of
Zionism. Many of them still believe in the possibility
of freeing the Jewish spirit, and continuing its internal
development, even without a national centre. But they
will change their minds when that spiritual freedom in
exile, for which they wait, is attained, and when they
see the net result of their hoping to “sing the Lord’s
song in a strange land.” In Western Europe and in
America, where the desired freedom has already been
granted, and its effect on our national life is obvious,
the conviction is already spreading that external freedom,
the removal of the heavy hand of oppression, is
not in itself sufficient to free our innermost spirit from
its moral bondage to the strange environment that surrounds
us on all sides in our exile. And this conviction
will inevitably spread in Eastern Europe also when the
external chains are broken there. Our people will then
be able, within certain limits, to live a national life, in
accord with its own spirit, just so far as it wills to do
so. But it will not be able so to will. The will itself
does not depend on free choice. A man may wish to
will, and yet be unable, because at that particular
moment the necessary conditions are absent, without
which the will cannot become an active force. So, too,
in the case of a nation. There can be no active national
will to live a distinctive spiritual life, even though permission
be given under the hand and seal of the ruling
// File: b108.png
.pn +1
power, where the individuals who compose the nation
are surrounded by a spiritual atmosphere foreign to
them, and breathe this atmosphere whether they will or
no, without seeing in the whole world even a square yard
of ground which their national spirit, and theirs alone,
pervades, subject to no foreign overlord, and in which
it creates with its own means of production enough
spiritual wealth to satisfy the whole people.
I am aware also that the section that desires to free our
national spirit, whether by means of a national centre
in Palestine or without it, is not numerous, taken all
together, at the present time. But this fact need not
make us despair, as though in truth the death of our
spirit were at hand, because it has no people to make it
manifest in the world. The Hebrew spirit never sought
its strength and power in numbers. “The Lord did
not ... choose you because ye were more in number
than any people; for ye were the fewest of all people.”
The God of this nation, when He saw it “turn quickly
from the way,” did not fold up His Law and get Him
gone, but said to the one man who remained faithful to
Him: “Let Me alone ... that I may consume them:
and I will make of thee a great nation.” It is a mistake
to think that the national spirit is an abstract idea,
which designates the sum of all the spiritual principles
that manifest themselves in the life of the people in each
generation, and that when this manifestation ceases it
no longer exists. The national spirit is in fact a collective
idea only in relation to the manner in which it
came into being, as a result of the common life of a
body of individuals closely connected with one another,
and continuing through generations under certain conditions.
But when it has once come into being, and
// File: b109.png
.pn +1
has found root in men’s souls by virtue of a long history,
then it becomes part of the psychology of the individual:
its truth is vindicated in the individual, and does not
depend at all on anything external to him. If I feel the
Hebrew national spirit in my heart, and it gives a distinctive
form to my inner life, then that spirit does exist
in me, and its existence does not cease even if all the
other Jews in my time no longer feel its existence in
their own hearts. I assert, therefore, that if the majority
of our people are unconsciously becoming more and
more estranged from the national spirit, and if its
children born in exile have made for themselves new
gods like the gods of the peoples around them, and only
a few remain faithful to our national idea in its historic
form, and desire for it freedom and development: then
these few are the heirs of our national possessions at the
present time; it is they who hold the thread of history,
and do not allow it to be broken. So long as there is a
single Jew who holds the thread, we cannot tell what
its end will be. Perhaps the conditions of life will
change, and the small remnant will again become “a
great nation.”
But how is it possible that the conditions of our life
in exile should change in the manner necessary for the
revival of the Jewish spirit? What power has a small
party to strengthen and hasten this possibility? What
security have we that the change, if it come about, will
be firm and lasting?
These questions demand an answer not in words, but
in deeds. Verbal answers we have given times without
number. There is only one way, we have said, to
change the conditions of our national life fundamentally,
so that it shall become our life indeed, and not a passing
// File: b110.png
.pn +1
shadow of the life of other people; and that way
is the foundation of a centre for our national spirit “on
its own native soil.” Further, we have promised
more than once that this way of ours, like every new
path, will be made and prepared by the few for the
many, who will afterwards follow of their own accord.
But when we came to turn our words into deeds, then it
became clear that there was still chaos in the depths of
our spirit, although the light of the idea played on the
surface.
Whoever knows by experience how dear Palestine is
still to every plain Jew, how his heart swells—sometimes
even to the point of joyful tears—when he reads
or hears of the revival of the Hebrew language among
the children in Palestine, or of the success of the Hebrew
colonies there—whoever knows this cannot deny that
the actual work of building up a centre in Palestine,
even before it approached its goal, could have had a
wonderful influence on the spirit of the people in the
lands of our exile. The truth is, that even now the
majority of our people cherish their national inheritance,
and desire its eternal preservation; but the bondage of
galuth, material and spiritual, cramps the heart, and
renders the national feeling and will incapable of becoming
an effective force in action. And yet, if our work
in Palestine had been such as to show clearly that there
is really a prospect and a fair hope for the life of our
spirit and our national possessions in the land of their
birth; if the people had seen the foundations of the
building laid by expert hands, one complete stone upon
another, though the stones had been but small: then the
people would have sought and found here a new source
of life for its dormant national sentiment, and a new
// File: b111.png
.pn +1
strength of will to protect more effectively its spiritual
possessions in exile.
But as things are, how can we prove the correctness
of our answer? What are the results of our twenty
years and more of work in Palestine? With regard to
material work, we have only unsuccessful attempts to
show; and as for spiritual work, we cannot even show
such attempts (except, perhaps, the school at Jaffa),[#]
for in fact scarcely anything has been done. Those
who desired the “ingathering of the exiles” have
laboured all these years, first of all in founding philanthropic
colonies, and then in political talk; they have
had neither the time nor the will to meddle in spiritual
matters. Those, again, who desired the “revival of
the spirit” have also dissipated all their time and their
strength in spiritual work in the Diaspora; in all this
time they have not created in Palestine one single
spiritual product that could awake an echo in the nation’s
heart. It is as though they had forgotten the first principle
of their own faith, that the revival of the spirit in
exile can come about only through the influence of a
national centre in Palestine. They have, indeed, said
a great deal about the need for founding universities
and schools, and other such needs, the satisfaction of
which is beyond their power at present. But they have
not done that which was both necessary and possible.
Here, for example, is an attempt to found a small
literary organ in Palestine. I ask myself: Why was
this not done long ago? In the Diaspora a large number
of literary plants have bloomed and faded during
the Zionist epoch; they have borne fruit, and have left
some good behind them, whether it was much or little.
// File: b112.png
.pn +1
In Palestine, meanwhile, since the beginning of the
movement there has not been published a single literary
miscellany which has made its mark in our literature.
Yet we did not feel that something was lacking. We
constantly told the people that only in Palestine could
our national spirit flourish and produce fruit after its
kind; yet at the same time we were not ashamed to
think that the people did not see in Palestine even a
shadow of the fruit of its spirit, and that the little fruit
that did grow was growing in other countries.
It is true that Palestine is still poor in spiritual forces
generally, and in literary forces particularly; but that
simply proves the truth of my contention. If we had
always had a full and clear conception of the nature of our
object, if we had always remembered that what we are
seeking to build in Palestine is a refuge for our spirit,
we could never have refrained from doing all that was
possible to increase the spiritual wealth of Palestine,
and to increase, little by little, its moral influence on the
people. In that case we should undoubtedly have striven
among other things to establish in Palestine a literary
organ, an altar on which all our best national writers
would have felt it their duty to offer their best, in order
to win for it affection and honour in Jewry. An organ
such as this, though it would have been at first an
artificial creation, would certainly have uplifted the spirit
and fostered literary talent in Palestine itself; perhaps
also it would by now have become a true, natural literary
centre for us, drawing sustenance from the forces which
it had called to the land and developed there.
But it is as I said: in the human mind no idea springs
from darkness into light at one bound. It was necessary
for experience to teach us how slender is the thread on
// File: b113.png
.pn +1
which hangs all our spiritual work outside Palestine,
before we could be made to remember that in reality we
had no need of such experience, since it only taught us
that which was implied in our idea from the very first.
It is just at this moment that you come and tell us:
“The time has come to begin planting our literature
in the land of its birth.” Need I express my feelings
when I read these words?
Yes, the time has come to begin planting, and planting
not alone our literature, but also our spirit in all
its aspects. All that now runs to waste in exile, voluntarily
or involuntarily, must be gathered together and
planted “on its own native soil,” and every man
in whom the Jewish spirit lives is bound to help in this
planting to the utmost of his power, because therein
lies our life and our last hope.
“Romanticism,” our young men will say with a smile.
Let them smile—until they grow old enough to understand
life as it is, and not as it appears through the
glasses of a ready-made doctrine. Then they will
understand that what they contemptuously call
“romanticism” is the crown of life and the source of
man’s superiority over the brute. They will understand,
too, that this very anti-romantic doctrine has
its attraction principally because of its romantic
element—because it offers scope for devoted service in
the cause of a distant ideal. But if ever there comes a
day when that ideal is realised, and romanticism disappears
entirely, then there will arise a new generation,
which will curse that day for the hunger it has brought—a
hunger not for bread, but for romanticism, for some
ideal striving which can once more give scope for exaltation,
for sacrifice, and so fill the emptiness of a life of
peace and plenty.
.fn #
\[A letter to the editors of Ha-Omer, a Hebrew miscellany which
began to appear in 1907—the first of its kind in Palestine.]
.fn-
.fn #
[From the preliminary announcement of Ha-Omer.]
.fn-
.fn #
This Essay was written at the end of the period of the movement
for freedom in Russia, which attracted almost all the educated Russian
Jews, with the result that our national work and Hebrew literature
were greatly impoverished. \[Footnote added in 1913.]
.fn-
.fn #
\[i.e., in 1889.]
.fn-
.fn #
[An allusion to an old Jewish legend.]
.fn-
.fn #
\[1905. It was at this Congress that the split on the question of
East Africa (often loosely referred to as Uganda) took place. Some
of the minority seceded and formed the Jewish Territorial
Organisation.]
.fn-
.fn #
[Russia.]
.fn-
.fn #
Sombart, Socialismus und sociale Bewegung (1905), p. 61.
.fn-
.fn #
[S.D. = Social Democrats; S.S. = Zionist Socialists.]
.fn-
.fn #
[i.e., the Chovevé Zion Hebrew School.]
.fn-
// File: b114.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2 id=art06
“WHEN MESSIAH COMES” | (1907) | “When Messiah comes, impudence will be rife.”
.sp 2
This ancient saying has been used so often as a
weapon of controversy, that familiarity has robbed it of
its sting. For this reason let me say at the outset that
I quote it here for no controversial purpose, but wish,
on the contrary, to point out that it really draws attention
to a natural and permanent connection between
two phenomena of human life, whereof the one is an
inevitable consequence of the other. And like every
objective truth, it neither censures nor reproves, but
simply states a fact.
What we call “impudence” is not as a rule an
original, inborn vice, but a quality which develops after
birth out of a man’s exaggerated belief in his own worth,
strength, wisdom or what not. This exaggerated
opinion of himself makes a man hold himself more
proudly than he ought before his betters, and censure
and decry everybody who will not accept him at his
own valuation. Now most men, in times of normal
tranquillity, cannot help seeing that knowledge and
experience are necessary for the conduct of human
affairs, and that not all men have attained an equal
degree of development or an equal level of ability and
judgment. And so this “impudence” comes to be
regarded as a bad thing, because it indicates either an
excessive conceit of oneself—as though one were
// File: b115.png
.pn +1
superior to the whole world in learning and experience,
and were above criticism—or an excessive stupidity—as
though one were unaware that there is anything in
life which calls for learning and understanding, and that
not everybody is equally competent to pronounce judgment
on everything.
But this quality wears a different aspect “when
Messiah comes”—that is to say, when a certain body of
men, no longer able to submit quietly to life’s tribulations,
find or invent some Messiah who is to release
them from all their troubles. Whether the Messiah
is conceived by them as an individual, or as a collective
body, or even merely as a new theory—the result is the
same. Believing firmly in their Messiah, seeing in him
the fountain of salvation, and consequently also the
symbol of truth and goodness, and regarding themselves
simply as his followers and his disciples, they naturally
cease to recognise distinctions between man and man,
or to admit any superiority in wisdom over folly, or in
age over youth. For all alike are as dust compared
with the Messiah, and all alike receive (or ought to
receive) his teaching with passive acquiescence and
unquestioning faith. No need any longer for superior
knowledge or long experience in order to be able to
distinguish between truth and falsehood, between good
and evil. All can come in on equal terms and take
truth and good ready-made from the Messiah’s storehouse.
Whoever disagrees with what comes out of the
storehouse, be he never so old and learned, is obviously
a fool, an old heretic whom any stripling is entitled to
despise. Those who stand outside the Messianic camp
are astonished at this sudden decay of morals, at this
upsetting of the proper relation between young and
// File: b116.png
.pn +1
old, between the nobodies and the somebodies.
“Impudence,” they cry indignantly. But the Messianists
themselves do not, and cannot, see anything
wrong in their conduct. For it is in truth only an
inevitable consequence of their fundamental belief that
the Messiah puts great and small on one level, and that
there are no longer high and low, but only brothers in
Messiah and enemies of Messiah.
Thus the appearance of a Messiah and the growth
of impudence are naturally and inevitably connected;
and we therefore find that they have always appeared
together, in every country and at every time, from
the earliest days until the present. When an individual
Messiah arose in Israel at the end of the period of the
Second Temple, his first devotees—mostly very simple
folk—rejected their national leaders and sages with
scorn and contempt: precisely as did later the
devotees—not less unlearned—of that corporate Messiah
which was revealed to them in the form of the
Tsaddikim, who, as intermediaries between Israel and
his God, were to lighten the burden of galuth and hasten
the redemption.[#] Both have their parallel in this
present generation, which also has its Messiah, or rather
Messiahs. But the modern Messiahs and the modern
impudence are rather different in form, as is only
natural, seeing that times have changed.
The Messiah of old was above reason and above
nature, and faith in the redemption which he was to
bring about was based not on logical demonstration,
// File: b117.png
.pn +1
but on miracles, like the confounding of destiny and
the upsetting of natural laws. Hence his followers
needed no great cleverness in order to meet criticism.
They met every possible objection by a single argument.
“He who can overthrow nature is not precluded from
accomplishing a supernatural redemption, and therefore
any difficulty based on natural laws is out of court.”
Any child can master this simple argument in a trice—and
straightway he is of Messiah’s company, one of his
followers and evangelists, like all the other believers.
For this reason the “impudence” of the Messianists
of old was similarly simple and obvious, and had no
need to force itself into an artificial mould. So-and-so
denies the truth or the power of the Messiah: is
there any room for discussion? The fellow, be he who
he may, is a scapegrace, and all honour to whoever is
first with an insult or a stick.
To-day things are different. Four centuries of free
thought and the unravelling of nature’s mysteries have
left their mark on the human race. To-day even a
Messiah cannot defy reason and nature, but is compelled
to base his redemption on logical demonstrations, and
to put his message in the form of a system founded on
nature and experience. Essentially, indeed, everything
is as it used to be: the real basis of Messianism, now
as then, is faith in a speedy redemption, a faith which
has its roots not in reasoned demonstration, but in the
craving to be redeemed. But the exigencies of our age
do not allow faith any longer to ignore the demands of
reason and nature. Even faith is compelled to speak
their language if it would satisfy the modern man. So
we get scientific systems of a Messianic character,
which, differing one from another, have all this much
// File: b118.png
.pn +1
in common, that their scientific soundness is very much
open to question, but leaves no doubt in the minds of
the believers, who really need nothing more than the
phraseology of science, as a seemly outer cloak for their
faith. As the necessary phraseology is there, and the
cloak is ready to hand, the believers hold on to the
cloak with the utmost tenacity; every one of its threads
is sacrosanct, and woe to him who disturbs a single one.
They seem to feel unconsciously that if there is too
much handling of their cloak, too much examination of
its threads in the light of reason and genuine science,
it will not be long before it is torn to tatters—and then
what will become of their faith? Whence we find in all
Messianic camps, to-day no less than of old, a fierce
hatred of any attempt at criticism from within, and
unlimited impudence towards those who stand without:
but whereas this hatred and this impudence used to
appear undisguised and unashamed, to-day they cloak
themselves in reason and science, and so appear to be
different. You must not think that X. is pilloried and
jeered at because he has attacked their Messiah.
Heaven forbid! Freedom of opinion is their first principle.
No: his crime is that he has an axe to grind,
and perverts scientific truth—which is, of course, solely
and only that which is set forth for all time under hand
and seal in this Manifesto or that Programme, and
beyond it there is nothing.[#]
// File: b119.png
.pn +1
Have we a right to complain of the Messianists for
all this? Can we blame them because their yearning
for redemption is so deep that it begets this blind, all-conquering
faith? No: we ought not to complain of
them, but to envy them. Happy men—be their name
Political Zionists, Social Democrats, or any other of
the familiar names! Happy indeed, for Messiah
stands on their threshold, and redemption knocks at
their door, and truth is crystal-clear to them all, great
and small alike. But how hard is life in our days for
one who is not of their number; for one who cannot
follow blindly after one Messiah or the other; for one
who does not hear the voice that announces redemption
and complete salvation, either close at hand or far away,
either for his own time or for the days when his grand-children
shall lie in their graves; for one who still looks
upon Science and Reason as divine powers, which stand
above all sects and judge them all impartially, and not
as standard-bearers and trumpeters in the service of a
Messiah!
.fn #
\[The Hebrew word translated above “devotees” is
chassidim = “pious ones.” This name is specifically given to a
mystical sect which arose early in the 18th century. The Rabbis of
this sect were called by their followers tsaddikim (= “righteous
ones”) and were credited by them with supernatural powers.]
.fn-
.fn #
As I write these words some of the best German Social Democrats
are making public confession that by sins of this kind their party
has alienated many of its supporters, and that to this cause is due
in part the great defeat which it suffered in the last elections. But
this repentance will not save them from the same sin in future,
because the sin is inherent in every Messianic movement. We Jews
have only to look at what is happening around us, to be convinced
that the characteristic in question is not peculiar to Germany or to
the Social Democratic Party.
.fn-
// File: b120.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2 id=art07
A SPIRITUAL CENTRE | (1907)
.sp 2
It has been observed that if men always remembered
the true meaning of every word that they use or hear,
disputes would be infinitely rarer. The truth of this
remark is known by experience to anybody who happens
to have promulgated some idea which the contemporary
“reading public” did not like, and to have had his
“heresy” exposed by the literary mouthpieces of that
public. The hapless creature’s first feeling is one of
incredulity and astonishment. How, he thinks, is it
possible so to pervert things, so completely to confuse
ideas and to advance arguments which so fail to touch
the point? He puts it down to the malevolence of his
opponents, believes that they are purposely twisting his
words, and complains bitterly to that same reading
public in the name of truth and fairness. But later,
when he finds that complaint is unavailing, and that the
same thing happens time after time, so that malevolence
alone cannot be responsible—then he is driven to the
conclusion that there must be some more universal
explanation of what he has experienced. The explanation
is that the connection between a word and the idea
contained in it is not so strong in the human mind as to
make it impossible for a man to hear or to utter a word
without immediately having a full and exact conception
of the associated idea. Hence, when a man hears an
opinion which runs counter to his way of thinking, he is
apt unconsciously to grasp the novel opinion in an
// File: b121.png
.pn +1
incorrect form: he will change the meaning of this or
that word until it becomes not difficult for him to refute
the opinion by unsound arguments, in which again one
word or another is used incorrectly. And all this
counterfeiting is done by the thinking apparatus automatically,
without the knowledge of its owner, by virtue
of its inherent tendency to work at any given moment
in accordance with the dominant requirements of the
subliminal self at that moment.
I doubt whether there is any contemporary Jewish
writer who is more familiar with this experience than
myself. Were I to count up all the disputes with which,
for my sins, our literature has been enriched—most of
them simply glaring instances of the phenomenon in
question—the account would be long indeed. But I
wish here to adduce only one instance of a dispute
which began fifteen years ago[#] and has continued to this
very day.
Fifteen years ago there appeared for the first time
an idea that afterwards occasioned endless expenditure
of ink. “In Palestine,” I wrote, “we can and should
found for ourselves a spiritual centre of our nationality.”
My literary experience was not yet extensive, and I
overlooked this important consideration: that in putting
before the public an idea which does not accord
with the general view, one must not merely put it in a
logically clear and definite form, but must also reckon
with the psychology of the reader—with that mental
apparatus which combines unrelated words and ideas
according to the requirements of its owner—and must
try one’s utmost to avoid any word or expression which
might afford an opening for this process of combination.
// File: b122.png
.pn +1
I confess now that in view of this psychological factor I
ought to have felt that the formula “a spiritual centre
of our nationality” would afford a good opportunity to
those who wished to misunderstand, although from the
point of view of logic it is sufficiently clear and is well
adapted to the idea which it contains.
“Centre” is, of course, a relative term. Just as
“father” is inconceivable without children, so is
“centre” inconceivable without “circumference”; and
just as a father is a father only in relation to his
children, and is merely So-and-so in relation to the
rest of mankind, so a centre is a centre only in relation
to its own circumference, whereas in relation to all that
lies outside the circumference it is merely a point with
no special importance. When we use the word
“centre,” metaphorically, in connection with the phenomena
of human society, it necessarily connotes a
similar idea: what we mean is that a particular spot or
thing exerts influence on a certain social circumference,
which is bound up with and dependent on it, and that
in relation to this circumference it is a centre. But
since social life is a complex of many different departments,
there are very few centres which are universal
in their function—that is, which influence equally all
sides of the life of the circumference. The relation
between the centre and the circumference is usually
limited to one or more departments of life, outside
which they are not interdependent. Thus a given circumference
may have many centres, each of which is a
centre only for one specific purpose. When, therefore,
the word “centre” is used to express a social conception,
it is accompanied almost always—except where
the context makes it unnecessary—by an epithet which
// File: b123.png
.pn +1
indicates its character. We speak of a literary centre,
an artistic centre, a commercial centre, and so on, meaning
thereby that in this or that department of life the
centre in question has a circumference which is under
its influence and is dependent on it, but that in other
departments the one does not exert nor the other
receive influence, and the relation of centre and circumference
does not exist.
Bearing well in mind this definition, which is familiar
enough, and applying it to the phrase quoted above—“in
Palestine we can and should found for ourselves
a spiritual centre of our nationality”—we shall find
that the phrase can only be interpreted as follows:—
“A centre of our nationality” implies that there is
a national circumference, which, like every circumference,
is much larger than the centre. That is to say,
the speaker sees the majority of his people, in the future
as in the past, scattered over all the world, but no longer
broken up into a number of disconnected parts, because
one part—the one in Palestine—will be a centre for
them all, and will unite them all into a single, complete
circumference. When all the scattered limbs of the
national body feel the beating of the national heart,
restored to life in the home of its vitality, they too will
once again draw near one to another and welcome the
inrush of living blood that will flow from the heart.
“Spiritual” means that this relation of centre and
circumference between Palestine and the lands of the
Diaspora will be limited of necessity to the spiritual side
of life. The influence of the centre will strengthen the
national consciousness in the Diaspora, will wipe out the
spiritual taint of galuth, and will fill our spiritual life
with a national content which will be true and natural,
// File: b124.png
.pn +1
not like the artificial content with which we now fill up
the void. But outside the spiritual side of life, in all
those economic and political relations which depend
first and foremost on the conditions of the immediate
environment, and are created by that environment and
reflect its character—while it is true that in all those
relations the effect of the spiritual changes (such as the
strengthening of national unity and increased energy
in the struggle for existence) will show itself to some
extent, yet essentially and fundamentally these departments
of life in the Diaspora will not be bound up with
the life of the centre, and the most vivid imagination
cannot picture to us how economic and political influence
will radiate from Palestine through all the length and
breadth of the Diaspora, which is co-extensive with the
globe, in such manner and to such degree as would
entitle us to say, without inexact use of language, that
Palestine is the centre of our people in these departments
also.
Now, at the time when I first used the phrase under
discussion, I knew beforehand that I should excite the
wrath of the Chovevé Zion (in those days it was they
who held the field). But looking, as I did, solely at
the logical side, I was sure that the brunt of their anger
would fall on the word “centre”; for the use of that
word involved a negation of the idea of a return of the
whole people to Palestine, and so clipped the wings of
those fantastic hopes which even then, in the days
before the first Basle Congress, were proclaimed as
heralding the end of the galuth and a complete and
absolute solution of the Jewish problem in all its
aspects. The epithet “spiritual” seemed to me so
simple and clear, as a necessary logical consequence of
// File: b125.png
.pn +1
the assumption involved in the world “centre,” that it
never remotely entered my mind that here might be the
stumbling-block, and that I ought at once to file a
declaration to the effect that, although the centre would
be spiritual in its influence on the circumference, yet in
itself it would be a place like other places, where men
were compounded of body and soul, and needed food
and clothing, and that for this reason the centre would
have to concern itself with material questions and to
work out an economic system suited to its requirements,
and could not exist without farmers, labourers, craftsmen,
and merchants. When a man uses, for example,
the expression “literary centre,” does it occur to him
to explain that he does not mean a place where there
is no eating or drinking, no business or handicraft, but
simply a number of men sitting and writing books and
drinking in the radiance of their own literary talent?
Imagine, then, my surprise when I found that my critics
paid no attention to the word “centre,” but poured
out all the vials of their wrath on the epithet “spiritual,”
as though it contained all that was new and strange in
the idea: as who should say, “A spiritual and not a
material centre? Can such a thing be?”
But my amazement soon died away when I remembered
the “psychological apparatus.” It was bound to
fasten on some word or other in order to make my
unpopular theory appear absurd; and since the word
“centre,” if the critics dwelt on it and led the minds of
their readers to analyse its meaning, was calculated not
to serve that end, but, on the contrary, to make it clear
where the absurdity really lay, they found it best to give
“spiritual” all the emphasis. “A spiritual centre!
Now do you understand what these people want? They
// File: b126.png
.pn +1
care nothing for a material settlement, for colonies,
factories, commerce: they want only to settle in
Palestine a dozen batlanim, whose business shall be
spiritual nationality.”
Great indeed is the power of psychology. This interpretation
spread abroad, was accepted, and remains to
this day a matter of course. Even those Zionists who
have not got their knowledge of my views from the
pamphlet literature which has flooded the world in
recent years, but have read them in the original—even
they are certain that that is what spiritual Zionism
means. It has availed them nothing to read immediately
afterwards, in the same article,[#] that the spiritual
centre must be “a true miniature of the people of
Israel,” and that in the centre there will appear once
more “the genuine type of a Jew, whether it be a Rabbi
or a scholar or a writer, a farmer or a craftsman or a
business man.” It has availed nothing, because psychological
factors dominate not only the person judging,
but also his memory.
Three years ago,[#] I remember, after I had published
in some journal a protest against the favourable reports
about the condition of the Palestinian colonies that
were then being spread abroad, for diplomatic purposes,
a writer in the camp of the political Zionists became
angry with me, and determined to shatter with one
blow all my views on Zionism, and so remove a dangerous
heresy. This idea he carried out in an elaborate article,
which was continued through many numbers of the
same journal. The details I have forgotten: they were
// File: b127.png
.pn +1
but the old arguments dished up in different words.
But I still remember one thing, which provoked not
only a smile but also reflections such as those which
are the subject of the present essay. After proving
conclusively that material factors are of great importance,
and cannot be lightly brushed aside, our author
reaches the conclusion that it is for that reason idle to
confine our work solely to the foundation of a spiritual
centre for our nationality: we must found in Palestine
an economic and spiritual centre. It escaped his notice
that so soon as he used the word “centre” he became
himself a “spiritual Zionist,” and in adding the epithet
“economic” added exactly nothing. The journal in
question appeared in Warsaw, which was also at that
time the home of our author; and in order to understand
the matter aright he had only to go into the street
and ask any intelligent Pole: “What is Warsaw to
the Polish people as a whole? Is it a spiritual centre
of the nation, or a spiritual and economic centre?”
The answer, I think, would have been something like
this: “For the Polish people as a whole this city is
certainly a spiritual centre of their nationality. Here
the national characteristics find their expression in every
department of life, here the national language, literature,
and art live and develop; and all this, and what goes
with it, influences the spirit of the Poles, binds them,
wherever they may be, to the centre, and prevents the
spark of nationality in the individual from becoming
buried and extinguished. But an economic centre of
the nation? My good sir! How could Warsaw be an
economic centre for all the millions of Poles who are
scattered over different lands, and whose economic lives
depend on entirely different centres, where Polish
// File: b128.png
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economic conditions do not count at all?” I should
not have advised our author, after getting an answer of
that kind, to ask: “How so? Are there not in Warsaw,
besides spiritual things, ever so many factories and
shops and other material things, without which it could
not develop its spiritual side? And is it not therefore
an economic and spiritual centre?” I should not have
advised him to ask that question, because I could not
guarantee that the intelligent Pole would waste words
on such a questioner.
But amongst ourselves “the economic centre” has
become a current phrase with many people who on the
one hand want to do their duty by the economic side of
Zionism (that is de rigueur nowadays), and on the other
hand cannot achieve the imaginative eagle-flights of
“Proletarian Zionism,”[#] which promises to create in
Palestine a national economic system so healthy and so
vast that it will be able to provide room and work for
all those Jews who are being more and more completely
elbowed out of the best branches of industry in the lands
of their exile (that is, for almost nine-tenths of the
people). Zionists like these, in order to get rid of the
difficult question as to the possibility of settling the
majority of our people in Palestine, even when their
new economic system becomes a fact, consent to accept
half the loaf, and want to regard Palestine as merely
an economic centre. But herein they escape one snare
to fall into a worse: they have got rid of an external
problem, which depends on arguments from experience,
// File: b129.png
.pn +1
and are caught instead in an inner contradiction, which
mere logic can expose. With the “Proletarian”
formula one can still argue: one can demand, for
instance, a somewhat clearer explanation of that
“internal process” by which the economic system of
Palestine will become able to absorb immigration on a
scale unparalleled in history: but at all events there is
no self-contradiction. Whereas the conception of “an
economic centre of the nation,” when applied to a
people scattered over the whole world, leaves no room
for argument or questioning, because its refutation is in
itself.
But psychological combinations of this kind are a
good sign. They show—in common with other clear
signs—that the “centre” as an idea is making headway
and is leading to various deductions which could
not have been imagined some years ago. And that is
the all-important thing. In time the deduction which
is involved in the word “spiritual,” when rightly understood,
will also be drawn, and it will no longer be possible
to suppress it by psychological means. True, all
this will not do away with the old nonsense about
“spiritual Zionism”; on the contrary—and this is even
now unmistakably evident—the more the substance of
spiritual Zionism prevails, the more will psychology try
to distinguish the victorious tendency from its hated
name. But what of that? Let the name be beaten,
so but the idea prevail!
.fn #
\[i.e., in 1892.]
.fn-
.fn #
[i.e., the article “Dr. Pinsker and his Pamphlet,” from which
the phrase under discussion is quoted.]
.fn-
.fn #
\[i.e., in 1904.]
.fn-
.fn #
[The name given to a Zionist doctrine based on Marxian
Socialism, which had a vogue in Russia, especially among the
younger generation, at the time when this article was written. The
“internal process” (mentioned later) belongs to the terminology of
this doctrine.]
.fn-
// File: b130.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2 id=art08
SUMMA SUMMARUM | (1912)
.sp 2
This is a summary not of facts and figures, but of
impressions stored in my mind in the course of sixty
days during which our national work enveloped me in
its atmosphere and engrossed my every thought: ten
days at Basle during the Tenth Congress, and fifty days
afterwards in Palestine.
Fourteen years have passed since I saw a Zionist
Congress (the first), and twelve years since I witnessed
the condition of our work in Palestine. My object in
revisiting both the Congress and the land was not, as
before, to go into details, to collect material, in the
shape of facts and figures, for the solution of certain
practical problems. On this occasion I opened my
mind wide to the different impressions that crowded in
on me from all sides; I allowed them to enter and to
dissolve of themselves into a single general impression—a
kind of mental summary of all that I saw and
heard in connection with our movement and our work in
and out of Palestine. I am of those who stand on the
threshold of age and look back on many long years of
work and struggle, of victories and defeats, of pain and
of joy. A man in this position finds it necessary at
times to turn his thoughts for a while from questions of
detail, and to take a more comprehensive view, so that
he may find for his own satisfaction an answer to that
broad, fundamental question which occasionally disturbs
his sleep: What is the purpose, what the result, of all
// File: b131.png
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this work which has occupied your life and consumed
your strength?
It was this necessity that took me on this occasion to
Basle and to Palestine. And let me confess that it is
a long time since I spent such happy days as those of
my travels. Not that all is now right with the movement;
not that the sun has shone on our work, and
driven away the shadows, and spread light and joy
everywhere. We are still a long way from such a happy
consummation. Even to-day the shadows are many;
if they are less in one place, they are more in another.
But one fact is becoming increasingly clear: our work
is not an artificial product, a thing that we have invented
to give the people something to do, as a palliative for
the national sorrow. That idea might be entertained
if aim and achievement corresponded, if the work were
done for the purpose of attaining that result which it
is in fact attaining. If that were so, one might doubt
whether the attainment of this result were really necessary
for the nation, and whether the whole business
were not artificial. But that is not the case. Since the
beginning of the movement the workers have had one
goal in view, and have been unconsciously approaching
another. This dualism is the surest sign that the driving
force is not reasoning reflection, but something
much deeper: one of those natural instincts which work
in darkness, and make a man do their will whether he
likes it or not, while he believes that his action is
directed to the object which his reason has set before
him. This driving force is the instinct of national self-preservation.
By it we are compelled to achieve what
must be achieved for the perpetuation of our national
existence; and we follow it—albeit without clear consciousness,
// File: b132.png
.pn +1
and by crooked paths—because follow it we
must if we would live. I used to be distressed by this
dualism; I used to fear that we might lose the right
path—the path of life—through making for a goal to
which no path can lead. But now that I have seen the
results of the work so far, I have no such fears as to its
ultimate fate. What matters it that the work is professedly
directed to an object which it cannot attain?
L’homme propose.... History does not trouble about
our programme; it creates what it creates at the bidding
of our “instinct of self-preservation.” Whether
we ourselves understand the true import and purpose of
our work, or whether we prefer not to understand—in
either case history works through us, and will reach its
goal by our agency. Only the task will be harder and
longer if true understanding does not come to our aid.
That is the real state of the case. All that I saw and
heard at Basle and in Palestine has strengthened my
conviction that the “instinct of self-preservation”
slumbers not nor sleeps in the nation’s heart. Despite
our mistakes, it is creating through our agency just what
our national existence requires most of all at present:
a fixed centre for our national spirit and culture, which
will be a new spiritual bond between the scattered
sections of the people, and by its spiritual influence will
stimulate them all to a new national life.
To miss Basle during the Tenth Zionist Congress was
to miss seeing an extraordinary medley of languages
and ideas—the result of an internal crisis of which
everybody was conscious, but which everybody tried
hard not to see. Throughout the Congress there was a
struggle between two sections, the “political” and
the “practical.” You hear the “politicals” declare
// File: b133.png
.pn +1
that they, too, are really “practical,” only that they
do not forget “the political end”; you hear the “practicals”
protest that they, too, are really “political,”
only that they do not forget “the practical means.”
And both sections alike protest that the “State” has
really been given up, but the Basle Programme has not
been given up to the extent of a single comma.[#]....
In the end the “practicals” won: that is to say, the
essential work of Zionism was pronounced to be the
extension of the Jewish settlement, and the furthering
of education and culture, in Palestine. Thereupon the
victors stood up and promised to guard faithfully the
Basle Programme and “the Zionist tradition developed
during fourteen years.”
But all this confusion was only an inevitable consequence
of the state of mind in which the two sections
came to the Congress.
The Zionism of the “politicals,” most of whom were
brought into the camp not by a heartfelt longing for the
persistence and the development of Jewish nationality,
but by a desire to escape from external oppression
through the foundation of a “secured home of refuge”
for our people—their Zionism is necessarily bound up
with that object, and with that alone: take that away,
and it remains an empty phrase. For this reason they
cannot help seeing that the “practical work” which
their opponents make the basis of Zionism is not calculated
to hasten that end which is, for them, the only
end. They still remember the estimate which they
// File: b134.png
.pn +1
heard in the opening speech of the first Congress: that
the colonising work of the Chovevé Zion will bring the
exiled people back to Palestine in nine hundred years!
But the course of events during recent years has
destroyed their hope of reaching that goal more quickly
by means of that “political” work which is the foundation
of “the Zionist tradition.” Hence they were in
a quandary at this Congress, and did not know how to
extricate themselves. They came with empty hands, and
professed devotion to an object which there were no
means of attaining; they could only fall back on the
hope of a vague future, when external conditions may
perhaps become more favourable to “political work.”
This explains also the excessive shyness which they
displayed. They did not go out to battle, as they used
to do, with trumpetings and loud alarums; there was
scarcely a mention of those familiar flourishes, which
they used to utter with such boldness and vigour, about
the salvation which Zionism is to bring to all oppressed
and persecuted Jews. Even Nordau, in his speech on
the condition of the Jews, changed his tune on this
occasion. The whole idea of his speech, which has
been given at the opening of every Congress, and has
become an essential part of the “Zionist tradition,”
was to justify Zionism on the ground of anti-Semitism.
“You see”—such, in effect, used to be his argument—“how
perilous is your position all over the world; there
is no way out. And therefore, if you wish to be saved,
join us, and we will save you.” But on this occasion
Nordau contented himself with describing the evil, and
dealing out reproaches to Jews and non-Jews. The
essential thing—the “therefore”—was lacking almost
entirely. And throughout the Congress there were
// File: b135.png
.pn +1
heard speeches which openly opposed this Zionism
based on anti-Semitism, and the speakers were not
shouted down, as they certainly would have been in
earlier years.
The “practicals”—mostly Eastern Jews and their
Western pupils, for whom national Judaism is the very
centre of their being, and who are ruled unconsciously
by the “instinct of national self-preservation”—they
came to Basle in a very different frame of mind. They
brought with them a complete programme of “practical
work in Palestine,” embracing both colonising and
cultural activity; and they came with a settled conviction
that all the various branches of this work were
the proper means to the attainment of the end—THE
end—the one and only, yet undefined. The “politicals”
raised their old question: “Do you honestly believe
that the occasional purchase of a small piece of land,
the foundation of a tiny colony with infinite pains, a
workmen’s farm without security of tenure, a school
here, a college there, and so forth—that these are the
means of acquiring a ‘home of refuge’ as understood
by the ‘Zionist tradition’—a refuge which will end our
troubles by ending our exile?” The “practicals”
had no satisfactory answer. None the less, they stood
to their guns, and stoutly maintained that work in
Palestine is the only road that leads to the end: but....
At this point they broke off abruptly, and did not complete
their thought—for a very good reason. They
dared not expressly repudiate that article of faith which
alone has made Zionism a popular movement—“the
redemption of the nation.” They dared not recognise
and acknowledge that the end of which they speak
to-day differs from that of the “Zionist tradition.”
// File: b136.png
.pn +1
What they are working for is not “a home of refuge
for the people of Israel,” but “a fixed centre for the
spirit of Israel.” All branches of the present work in
Palestine, be it buying land or founding schools, are
sure means to the attainment of that end, but have
nothing to do with the other. The “practicals” were
inwardly conscious of this truth even while the
“politicals” still had the upper hand, and for this
reason they joined with the “politicals” in fighting it
bitterly and angrily. It was a disturbing factor, of
which they would fain be rid. But now that the star
of “political” Zionism had waned, this conviction had
grown stronger in the minds of the “practicals,” and
had become a real driving force. As yet, however, they
lacked the moral courage to intensify this subconscious
whisper into a clear profession of faith. Thus the real
object remained beneath the threshold of consciousness,
while above the threshold there wandered about, like disembodied
spirits, here means without an object, there
an object without means; and imagination tried hard to
combine the two.[#]
But while the “makers of history” inside the Congress
// File: b137.png
.pn +1
Hall were in the dark, it was outside the Hall,
among the crowds attracted to Basle by the Congress,
that I saw quite clearly what history has really been
doing. In the fourteen years since the first Congress
we have been joined by a body of Jews of a new kind:
men in whom the national consciousness is deep-rooted,
and is not measured by Shekalim[#] or limited by a Programme,
but is an all-pervading and all-embracing
sentiment. Jews of this type came to Basle from all
the ends of the earth; they returned to their people out
of the gulf of assimilation, most of them yet young in
years, able and willing to work for the national revival.
When I saw these men—our heirs—outside the Congress
Hall, I said to myself: Never trouble about those
who are inside! Let them make speeches and pass
resolutions and believe that they are hastening the
redemption. The distant redemption may not be any
nearer; but the estranged hearts are drawing near. In
spite of all, history is doing its work in this place,
and these men are helping, whether they know it
or not.
This same historical tendency, dimly discerned at
Basle through the dark cloud of words, I found in
Palestine clearly revealed in the light of facts. The
more I travelled and observed, the more evident it
became to me that what is happening in Palestine—despite
all the contradictions and inconsistencies—is
tending broadly towards a single goal—that goal which
I mentioned above. No doubt we have a long journey
to travel yet; but even an untrained eye can see our
destination on the distant horizon. If any there be for
// File: b138.png
.pn +1
whom the horizon is too narrow, and the goal too petty,
let him go to Zionist meetings outside Palestine: there
he will be shown a wider prospect, with larger aims at
the end of it. But let him not go to Palestine. In
Palestine they have almost forgotten the wider prospects.
Realities are too strong for them there: they
can see nothing beyond.
Take the National Bank, which was intended to provide
a foundation for “the redemption of the people
and the land” by political means. What is the Bank
doing? Needless to say, its political object has been
abandoned and forgotten. But even in the mere work
of colonisation it neither does nor can achieve great
things. Its business consists—and must consist, if it
wishes to survive—in dealings with local tradesmen,
Jews and non-Jews, and its profits are derived chiefly
from the latter. All that it does for Jewish colonisation,
or all that it could do—if we agree with its critics that
it could do more than it does—without danger to itself,
is so little, that one cannot even conceive any possible
connection between it and the “larger aims,” or
imagine it to be moving at all along the road that leads
to the complete “redemption.” By this time, apparently,
there are many people outside Palestine as well
who have ceased to hope much from the Bank in the
matter of land-settlement; and they now look for the
solution to an Agrarian Bank. But possibly it would
be worth while first of all to examine what little the
existing Bank has done in the way of loans to the
colonies, in order to learn what this experience has to
teach as regards the problems of agrarian credit in
Palestine. It is not enough to adduce examples from
other countries, where the conditions and the people
// File: b139.png
.pn +1
are different, to demonstrate what agrarian credit can
do. Credit is a very useful thing if it succeeds, but a
very harmful thing if it fails. Everything depends on
local conditions and the character of the people. The
existing Bank has followed precedent in its attempts
to help the colonies already in existence—and with what
success? The colonists will tell you. No doubt I
shall be told that I am drawing a false analogy, for such-and-such
reasons. But I am not here attempting to
express an opinion on this question of an Agrarian Bank,
which has already been much discussed, and of which
the merits and demerits have been fully canvassed. My
purpose is merely to hint at the difficulties of the project,
even if it is carried out on a very modest scale, so
as to suggest that it is premature at the present stage,
when the Agrarian Bank is not even in sight, to talk
about the great things that it is going to do. Our
colonisation work in Palestine is carried out under conditions
of such multifarious difficulty, that even small
things have to be done with extreme care, and precedent
alone is no safe guide. If the proposed Agrarian
Bank is really going to aim high—to aim, that is, at
something considerable in relation to “the redemption
of the people and the land”—we cannot yet say whether
in the end it will help or hurt.[#]
Then there is the National Fund, and its work for
“the redemption of the land” by commercial means,
for which purpose it was created. The Fund has
already spent a great deal of its money: and how much
has it redeemed? How much could it have redeemed
if it had spent many times as much? A few scattered
pieces of land, lost in the large areas of land not
// File: b140.png
.pn +1
redeemed. Meanwhile, the price of land in Palestine
is going up by leaps and bounds, especially in districts
where we gain a footing, and the amount of land which
it is in the power of the Fund to redeem with the means
at its command grows correspondingly less and less.
And there is another factor, independent of finance,
which lessens its possibilities still further. Many natives
of Palestine, whose national consciousness has begun
to develop since the Turkish revolution, look askance,
quite naturally, at the selling of land to “strangers,”
and do their best to put a stop to this evil; while the
Turkish Government—be its attitude to our work whatever
it may—is not likely to irritate the Arabs for our
sakes: that would not suit its book. Thus the purchase
of land becomes more and more difficult, and the idea
of “the redemption of the land” shrinks and shrinks,
until no Palestinian whose eyes are open can see in the
National Fund what it was in the imagination of its
founders—the future mistress of all or most of the land
in Palestine. It is clearly understood in Palestine that
many years of hard work, with the help of the National
Fund or by other means, will achieve no more than this:
to win for us a large number of points of vantage over
the whole surface of Palestine, and to make these points
counterbalance by their quality the whole of the surrounding
area. For this reason, people in Palestine
do not talk much about the coming “redemption”;
they work patiently and laboriously to add another point
of vantage, and another, and yet another. They do not
ask: “How will these save us?” They all feel that
these points themselves are destined to be, as it were,
power-stations of the national spirit; that it is not
necessary to regard them as a first step towards “the
// File: b141.png
.pn +1
conquest of the land” in order to find the result worth
all the labour.
Then, again, there are the Colonies already established,
which were born in pain and nurtured with so
much trouble. They also do not fire the imagination
to the pitch of regarding them as the first step towards
“the redemption.”
It is true that the great progress which has been made
in most of the Colonies is matter for rejoicing. Twelve
years ago one knew what to expect on entering a Jewish
Colony in Palestine. From the farmers one would hear
bitter complaints about their intolerable condition,
charges of neglect of duty against the hard-hearted
administrators, and last, but not least, a long list of
requirements, involving large sums of money, for the
proper equipment of each farmer. The administrators
on their side would rail against the farmers, call them
lazy schnorrers, who were always asking for more,
though their condition was not at all bad, and denounce
the schedule of requirements as a fabrication. To-day
there is no echo of these recriminations in most of the
Colonies. During the intervening years the administrators—it
is but just to them to say so—have done all
that they could to remedy their earlier mistakes. They
have extended the Colonies wherever it was possible to
buy land in the neighbourhood; they have founded new
Colonies for those who could not find room in the old;
and in general they have endeavoured to finish their
work, to free the Colonies gradually from their own
supervision, and to transfer the management and the
responsibility to the farmers themselves, so that they
should at last realise that the man who wants to live
must work and look after himself, instead of depending
// File: b142.png
.pn +1
always on external help. No doubt one cannot yet
speak of the complete emancipation of the Colonies as
an accomplished fact. The strings are still there, and
the absentee Administration still holds them. But it no
longer pulls the strings, as it used to do, and, consequently,
its existence is hardly noticed. So, if one
visits one of these Colonies to-day, one hears quite
another tune. “We are independent”—that is the
first thing they tell one, with the pride of men who
know the value of freedom. This pride makes them
exaggerate the present blessings, just as they used to
exaggerate the evil. “All’s right with the Colony.
It is strong and secure, and pays its workers well. No
doubt some people are badly off. But what of that?
There are failures everywhere. The man who cannot
succeed leaves, and makes room for another. The
great thing is that the Colony as a whole is able to exist
and to develop properly. True, it lacks this, that, and
the other, and we cannot yet supply the deficiencies;
but in course of time they will be supplied. We need
patient work, and everything will come in good time.”
That is the prevailing note of what I heard in nearly all
the Colonies which I visited.[#] Any visitor to Palestine
who brings with him, as I did, painful and humiliating
recollections of years ago must rejoice beyond measure
at all this, and must be inclined to take an extremely
optimistic view of the development of the colonisation
movement in general.
// File: b143.png
.pn +1
But all this is highly satisfactory only so long as one
regards this colonisation movement as something good
in itself. Think but once of the “political aim,” of
the first article of the Basle Programme, and the
optimism vanishes at once, and gives place to a depressing
feeling of poverty and emptiness.
Thirty years’ experience of the life of the Colonies
must finally drive us to the conclusion that while Hebrew
Colonies can exist in Palestine, and in large numbers,
Hebrew agriculturists—those who are to be the foundation
of the “home of refuge”—cannot be made even
in Palestine, except in numbers too small to bear any
relation to so large an aim. The Jew is too clever, too
civilised, to bound his life and his ambitions by a small
plot of land, and to be content with deriving a poor
living from it by the sweat of his brow. He has lost
the primitive simplicity of the real farmer, whose soul
is bound up in his piece of ground, whose work is his
all, and who never looks beyond his narrow acres: as
though a voice from above had told him that he was
born to be a slave to the land with his ox and his ass,
and must fulfill his destiny without any unnecessary
thinking. That agricultural idyll which we saw in our
visions thirty years ago has not been and cannot be
realised. The Jew can become a capable farmer, a
country gentleman—of the type of Boaz—who understands
agriculture, is devoted to it, and makes a living
out of it: the sort of man who goes out every morning
to his field, or his vineyard, to look after his workmen
as they plough or sow his land, plant or graft his vines,
and does not mind even giving them a hand when he
finds it necessary. A man of this type—close to the
land and to nature, and very different in character from
// File: b144.png
.pn +1
the Jew of the city—a Jew can become. But at the
same time he wants to live like a civilised being; he
wants to enjoy, bodily and mentally, the fruits of contemporary
culture; the land does not absorb his whole
being. This excellent type is being created before our
eyes in Palestine, and in time it will certainly reach an
uncommon degree of perfection. But of what use is all
this for building a “home of refuge”? “Upper-class”
farmers of this kind, who depend on the labour
of others, cannot be the foundation of such a building.
In every State the foundation is the rural proletariat:
the labourers and the poor farmers, who derive a scanty
livelihood from their own work in the fields, whether
in a small plot of their own, or in the fields of the
“upper-class” farmers. But the rural proletariat in
Palestine is not ours to-day, and it is difficult to imagine
that it ever will be ours, even if our Colonies multiply
all over the country. As for the present, we all know
that the work is done mostly by Arabs from the neighbouring
villages, either journeymen, who come in the
morning and return home in the evening, or regular
labourers, who live in the Colony with their families.
It is they who are doing for us the work of the “home
of refuge.” And as for the future, the number of the
Colonies will grow, in so far as it grows, through men
of capital, who will found new Colonies of the same
“wealthy” type. Colonies for poor men can only be
founded by organisations, and their number must be so
limited that they can count for nothing in comparison
with the need of creating a rural proletariat to cover the
whole country and win it by manual labour. Even an
Agrarian Credit Bank will not make much difference
from this point of view. Such a bank—despite all the
// File: b145.png
.pn +1
great things prophesied for it—will be much better able
to help in the foundation of “wealthy” Colonies than
to found Colonies for poor men with its own means.
Perhaps its inability to increase the number of such
Colonies will really be a blessing in disguise. For if
they existed in large numbers they must all be full of
men quite unfitted for such a difficult task. Only if they
are very few can we hope for their survival and development
through a process of natural selection, by which
the man who has not the necessary qualities will make
way for another, and in time these Colonies will gather
to themselves all the small body of born agriculturists
which is still left among us.[#]
However that may be, this is not the way in which
our rural proletariat can be made. It may be said that
it will be made in ordinary course in the “wealthy”
Colonies, through the natural increase of the inhabitants
and the consequent division of the land; that the sons
or grandsons of the farmers will themselves become
poor labourers, living by the work of their hands. But
experience shows that this, too, is a vain hope. The
children who are born in the Colonies have also the
cleverness of the Jew. When the son sees that his
paternal inheritance will not be sufficient to make him
a substantial farmer, and that he is doomed to be one of
those pillars of society, the agricultural labourers, he
quickly leaves the Colony, and goes to seek his fortune
overseas, where he is content to work like a slave, so
long as he is free from bondage to the land, and is able
to dream of a prosperous future. But it would be doing
// File: b146.png
.pn +1
these sons of the Colonies a grievous wrong to imagine
them lacking in love for Palestine. Most of them do
love the country, and long for it, even after they have
left it. Some of them return to it in after years, if they
have succeeded abroad in acquiring enough money to
enable them to settle comfortably in Palestine. But
the trouble is that love of the country alone cannot breed
agriculturists; for that you must have also love of the
land. The genuine agriculturist feels that leaving the
land is like giving up life. The inherited link between
himself and the land is so strong and deep that he cannot
sever it. He therefore prefers to endure poverty
and want, to live all his life like a beast of burden,
rather than to leave the land. But this trait of the
genuine agriculturist disappears gradually even in places
where it exists, so soon as it comes into contact with
a cultured environment. It is clearly impossible to
create it where it does not exist, and most of all in a
people like ours, in which two thousand years of wandering
have implanted traits of an exactly opposite character.
There remains, then, only one hope: the young
labourers who come to Palestine with the intention of
devoting their lives to the national ideal, of “capturing
labour”[#] in Palestine and of creating in our existing and
future Colonies that rural proletariat which is so far
non-existent. It is significant that the “labour question”
has latterly become almost the central problem
of our colonisation work. It is felt on all hands that
bound up with this question of labour is a still larger
question—that of the whole aim of Zionism. If these
// File: b147.png
.pn +1
labourers cannot succeed in supplying what is lacking,
that proves that even national idealism is not strong
enough to create the necessary qualities of mind and
heart; and we must therefore reconcile ourselves to the
idea that our rural settlement in Palestine, even if in
course of time it develops up to the maximum of its
possibilities, will always remain an upper stratum, a
culturally developed minority, with the brains and the
capital, while the rural proletariat, the manual
labourers who form the majority, will still not be ours.
This, of course, involves a complete transformation of
the character and aim of Zionism. No wonder, then,
that there have been so many suggestions for improving
the condition of the labourers. Everybody sees that
so far the labourers have not succeeded very well in
their mission: in recent years many of them have left
the country, while few have arrived there, and the
position of those who remain is insecure. The general
tendency is to put the blame on certain external
difficulties, and to look for ways of removing those
difficulties—as, by persuading the colonists to give
Jewish a preference over Arab labourers; by making
things more comfortable for the labourers in the matter
of food and lodging; and many other familiar suggestions.
The Zionist public consoles itself with the
belief that when all these steps are taken the number
of Jewish labourers will steadily increase with the
increase of work, and that as the settlement grows and
the amount of work increases, so will our labouring
rural proletariat increase, and thus the “secure home
of refuge” will be built up by our own hands, from the
foundation to the roof.
Now it seems to me that the time is not very far
// File: b148.png
.pn +1
distant when the external difficulties will no longer
stand in the way of the labourers, or, at least, will be
reduced to such small proportions that it will no longer
be possible to regard them as an insurmountable barrier.
The National Fund and other institutions are already
trying hard to improve the position of the labourers,
and there is no doubt that little by little everything that
can be done will be done. Even the greatest difficulty—that
of the strained relations between the labourers and
the colonists—is visibly growing less. On the one side,
most of the labourers now see that it is unfair to demand
of any man that he should receive with open arms those
who look down on him and make no attempt to conceal
the hatred and contempt which they feel for him as a
“bourgeois”; and so they try to adopt a more conciliatory
attitude than hitherto. On the other side, the
colonists are beginning to see that it is not only their
duty but also their interest to increase the amount of
Jewish labour in the colonies (there is no need here to
labour this point, which has been often made before);
and so we see in the colonies the development of a
certain tendency to employ Jewish labour as far as
possible. It is true that most of the colonies still believe
that the possibilities of employing Jewish labour are
very small (again for reasons too familiar to need explaining
here), and an outsider who has paid a brief visit to
Palestine cannot express a definite opinion as to the
soundness of their judgment on this point. Speaking
generally, however, I have no doubt that the more the
colonists become inclined to employ Jewish labour, the
greater will the possibilities automatically become, until
they reach their real limit. But after the removal of
those external difficulties which we ourselves can
// File: b149.png
.pn +1
remove we shall find out that the way is beset with more
formidable difficulties, which do not depend on our own
will.
In every colony and farm which I visited, I talked a
great deal with the labourers, and listened attentively
to what they said. They expressed many different and
conflicting opinions, and were not always all agreed
even on the most important questions. This notwithstanding,
all these conversations left on my mind one
general impression, and that impression did not
encourage me to believe in the ability of these young
men to accomplish the great task which they had set
before themselves.
These young labourers, who come to Palestine with
the idea of “capturing labour,” mostly bring with them
from abroad the hope of becoming independent farmers
after some years of work; only a few come with the
fixed intention of remaining labourers all their lives.
All alike work for a certain time with enthusiasm and
devotion, but after a while the question of their future
begins to exercise their minds. Those whose hope from
the beginning was to become farmers are, of course,
discouraged when they see how remote is the chance of
attaining their ambition; that was only to be expected.
But even those who came with the intention of remaining
labourers begin to feel that a life such as theirs is
all very well for a time, but is more than they can endure
as a permanency. The civilised man in each one of
them begins to clamour for self-expression, and cannot
reconcile himself to the idea that he must go on digging
or ploughing from morning till evening all his days,
and at best be rewarded for all his toil by a meagre subsistence.
So the weaker among them leave the country
// File: b150.png
.pn +1
with bitterness in their hearts, and the more obstinate
remain in the country with bitterness in their hearts;
and you may see them wandering from one colony to
another, working in one place for a time, then suddenly
leaving it for another, not because they want a better
job, but because they are restless in spirit and have no
peace of mind.
The labourers at present in Palestine may be divided,
broadly speaking, into four classes. There are first the
unskilled labourers, who do simple work such as digging,
and with difficulty earn enough to satisfy their
most elementary needs. This class is very far from
being contented; many of its members have left the
country, many more will leave, and the rest will for the
most part pass into the other classes. Secondly, there
are labourers who are expert at certain kinds of work
(such as grafting) which require skill and care. They
earn good money, and their position is not bad. Yet
they are mostly anxious to pass into the third class, that
of the farmer-labourers, who have each his own small
holding in the neighbourhood of some colony, and work
on their own land, but eke out a livelihood by working
for others in the colony; or—where the holdings are
very small—work mostly for others and only a little for
themselves. This experiment has been started by
various institutions, which have bought land in or near
to a colony and have given plots of it to selected labourers.
In some places there are labourers who do well
with their holdings, and therefore are already hoping
that before long they will cease to be labourers and
become independent farmers. Fourthly, there are the
labourers who have already attained this ideal of becoming
independent farmers, and no longer work for others,
// File: b151.png
.pn +1
but are still sometimes counted as labourers because
they maintain certain relations with their former
“party.” The members of this class are few, and most
of them are men whom the Jewish Colonisation Association
settled in Lower Galilee on the tenant-farmer
system. Their holdings are comparatively large, and
they have neither time nor need to work for others; on
the contrary, they themselves need labour at certain
seasons, and then these ex-labourers, having become
employers, do not invariably employ Jewish labour!
This last-mentioned phenomenon gave me much food
for thought all the time that I was in Palestine. Among
these farmers I knew some young men who had previously
been regarded as among the pick of the
labourers, not only from the point of view of efficiency,
but also from that of character and devotion to the
national ideal. If these men—I said to myself—could
not stand the test, then perhaps it is really impossible
for anybody to stand it, and whether it be for the reasons
which the farmers suggest, or for other reasons, the fact
is there all the same. But when I put this problem to
labourers who had not yet become farmers, they replied
that these comrades of theirs, when once they had
become farmers, had lost their proletariat mentality and
acquired a different psychology. Then I asked further:
“If so, where is the solution? You yourselves tell me
that most of your comrades came to Palestine in the
hope of becoming farmers in course of time, and that as
this hope grew fainter (because the Jewish Colonisation
Association changed its system, and ceased to settle on
its land labourers who had not a certain amount of
money) the number of new arrivals grew less. But if
the labourers come with the hope of becoming farmers,
// File: b152.png
.pn +1
and then, when they have achieved their ambition, lose
their idealism and employ non-Jews on their own land,
how can you ever ‘capture labour,’ and what is the
good of your efforts?”
To this question the labourers nowhere gave me a
satisfactory answer![#]
.tb
Such is the condition of “practical work in Palestine,”
and such its relation to “the redemption of the people
and the land.” The hope of a future redemption is an
age-long national hope, still cherished by every Jew
who is faithful to his people, whether as a religious
belief or in some other form. Every man can picture
the realisation to himself as it suits him, without regard
to actual present conditions: for who knows what is
hidden in the bosom of the distant future? But if men
set out to achieve the redemption by their own efforts,
they are no longer at liberty to shut their eyes to the
facts. There must be some natural chain of cause and
// File: b153.png
.pn +1
effect between what they do and what they wish to
attain. Between “practical work in Palestine” and
“the redemption of the people and the land” this
chain of causation may be imagined to exist by those
who are at a distance; but in Palestine itself even
imagination cannot find it. In Palestine the possibilities
of practical work are too clear. It is possible to buy
bits of land here and there; but it is not possible to
redeem the land as a whole, or even most of it. It is
possible to found beautiful Colonies on the “redeemed”
land; but it is not possible to settle in them more than
a very few poor Colonists. It is possible to produce in
the Colonies an “upper-class” type of agriculturists,
whose work is mostly done by others, and perhaps it is
possible also to create a small labourer class for the
finer kinds of work, which are comparatively easy and
well paid; but it is not possible to create a real rural
proletariat, capable of monopolising the rougher, more
exacting, and worse-paid kinds of work, which alone
can support a rural proletariat with its thousands and
tens of thousands.[#]
This being the case, we should expect every visitor to
Palestine whose standard is that of the “home of
refuge” to return home in grief and despair. Yet
every day we find just the opposite. Orthodox Zionists,
who wax grandiloquent at home about “the redemption
of the people and the land,” come to Palestine, see
what there is to see there, and return home in joy and
gladness, full of inspiration and enthusiasm, as though
they had heard Messiah’s trumpet from the Mount of
Olives.
// File: b154.png
.pn +1
That is exactly my point. On the surface the Programme
is supreme, and all its adherents seem really
to believe that their work is bringing the redemption.
But beneath the surface the unacknowledged instinct of
national self-preservation is supreme, and it is that
instinct that urges them on to work—not for the accomplishment
of the Programme, but for the satisfaction
of its own demands. When our orthodox Zionist
comes to Palestine, and sees the work and its results,
his whole being thrills with the feeling that it is a great
and a noble thing that is being created there; that
whether it leads to complete redemption or not, it will
be an enormous force for our national preservation in all
the countries over which we are scattered. Then the
“redemption” idea finds its proper level: it becomes
one of those cherished hopes which are not yet ready
to be mainsprings of action; and the real object, the
object which is actually being attained by practical work
in Palestine, appears large and splendid enough in itself
to provide inspiration and enthusiasm.
My respect for my readers and for myself does not
permit me to explain once more in detail—after more
than twenty years of explanation after explanation—what
exactly is the object to which I allude here. But
I think it no shame to avow that on this occasion I
seemed to myself to see my dream of twenty years ago
in process of realisation in Palestine, though naturally
with differences of detail. What has already been
accomplished in Palestine entitles one to say with confidence
that that country will be “a national spiritual
centre of Judaism, to which all Jews will turn with
affection, and which will bind all Jews together; a centre
of study and learning, of language and literature, of
// File: b155.png
.pn +1
bodily work and spiritual purification; a true miniature
of the people of Israel as it ought to be ... so that every
Hebrew in the Diaspora will think it a privilege to behold
just once the ‘centre of Judaism,’ and when he returns
home will say to his friends: ‘If you wish to see the
genuine type of a Jew, whether it be a Rabbi or a scholar
or a writer, a farmer or an artist or a business man—then
go to Palestine, and you will see it.’”[#]
No doubt the time has not yet come, nor will it soon
come, when the traveller returned from Palestine, speaking
of the “genuine type of a Jew,” can say to his
friends, “Go to Palestine, and you will see it.” But
he can say, and generally does, “Go to Palestine, and
you will see it in the making.” The existing Colonies,
although they depend mainly on non-Jewish labour,
strike the Jew of the Diaspora as so many little generating
stations, in which there is gradually being produced
a new type of national life, unparalleled in the
Exile. So soon as he enters a Jewish Colony, he feels
that he is in a Hebrew national atmosphere. The whole
social order, all the communal institutions, from the
Council of the Colony to the school, bear the Hebrew
stamp. They do not betray, as they do in the Diaspora,
traces of that foreign influence which flows from an
alien environment and distorts the pure Hebrew form.
Of course, he does not find everything satisfactory and
commendable. He discovers—if he has eyes to see—many
defects in the communal life and in that of the
individual. Even the schools in the Colonies are still
for the most part very far from perfection; and even
the much-vaunted predominance of the Hebrew language
// File: b156.png
.pn +1
in the Colonies is as yet but half complete—it extends
only to the children. But everything—he tells himself—is
still in its infancy; the process of free development
has only just begun, and it is going on. Many of
these defects will be remedied in time; and whatever is
not remedied must be a defect in ourselves, with its
roots in our national character. If we want to create a
genuine Hebrew type, we must accept the bad with the
good, provided that both alike belong essentially to the
type, and that the type itself is not corrupted as in the
Diaspora. The Jewish visitor travels from Colony to
Colony, and finds them sometimes many hours’ journey
from one another, with alien fields and villages in
between. But the intervening space seems to him
nothing more than an empty desert, beyond which he
reaches civilisation again, and breathes once more the
refreshing atmosphere of Hebrew national life. Days
pass, or weeks, and he seems to have spent all the time
in another world—a world of the distant past or the
distant future. When he leaves this world he says to
himself, “If it is thus to-day, what will it be one day,
when the Colonies are more numerous and fully
developed?” At such a time he realises that here, in
this country, is to be found the solution of the problem
of our national existence; that from here the spirit shall
go forth and breathe on the dry bones that are scattered
east and west through all lands and all nations, and
restore them to life.
But from this point of view the term “practical work”
does not apply only to the agricultural colonies. This
national Hebrew type may have, and indeed has, its
generating stations outside the agricultural settlement.
Many Zionists criticise the Directors of the National
// File: b157.png
.pn +1
Fund for sinking a good deal of their capital in the building
of Jewish quarters in towns (such as Tel-Aviv in
Jaffa). From the point of view of the Programme these
critics are certainly right. The Fund was created for
“the redemption of the land” in the widest sense of
the term, and not for the purchase of small pieces of
urban land, and the erection on them of houses for Jews.
But, as I have said, the work is directed not by the
demands of the Programme but by the promptings of
an instinct. If our visitor from the Diaspora remains
some days in Tel-Aviv, observes its life, and sees the
Hebrew children who are growing up there, he will not
criticise the National Fund for having made it possible
to found such a generating station. He will wish with
all his heart that the Directors would commit the same
fault again, and create similar stations in the other
towns of Palestine.
And need it be demonstrated that the Hebrew schools
in Jaffa and Jerusalem are centres of unremitting activity
in the creation of “the genuine type of a Jew”? This
educational work, again, does not fit in very well with
the Programme. “What use,” it is often asked, “is
there in educating the children in the national spirit,
so long as the land is not redeemed, and the nation does
not come to the land, and many of these very children
may not remain there? To redeem the land, extend
the settlement, capture labour—that is the way to
realise the Programme. But education? When the
number of Jews in Palestine is large, national education
will follow as a matter of course. At present we have
no right to use for spiritual purposes the resources
which are needed for more important things.” I doubt
whether this criticism can be reasonably and logically
// File: b158.png
.pn +1
answered on the basis of the Programme. But what
can logic do when instinct pulls the other way? The
very men who promise to bring about the redemption
by means of “practical work in Palestine” are using a
great deal of their energy in educational work in the
country; and Zionists generally value such work and
turn to it more and more. To learn why, one has only
to listen to the speeches at a Zionist meeting during a
debate on “cultural work” in Palestine. The
“redeemers” forget for a time the Programme, the
“home of refuge,” and all their other catchwords, and
begin to extol “the revival of the spirit,” and the
creation of a new Hebrew type. They prophesy that
this type will in future be a connecting link between all
the scattered parts of the nation. They point to the
beneficial influence already exerted by the schools in
Palestine on education in the Diaspora. And so forth,
and so forth.
Eighteen years ago I saw the beginnings of this educational
work in Palestine, and I could not then bring
myself to believe that the individual teachers who stood
for the great ideal of a Hebrew education in the Hebrew
language, and had begun to put it into practice with
their limited resources, could really succeed in producing
such a spiritual revolution. But at the same time
I saw how bent they were on the attainment of their
object, and how confident of success: and I said, “Who
knows? Perhaps this confidence will be able to work
miracles.”[#] Now I have seen that confidence has indeed
worked miracles. “A Hebrew education in the Hebrew
language” is no longer an ideal in Palestine: it is a
// File: b159.png
.pn +1
real thing, a natural, inevitable phenomenon; its disappearance
is inconceivable. No doubt there are some
scattered fortresses which have not yet been captured;
but these, too, will surrender, as others have, to the
demands of the age. Take, for instance, the educational
institutions of the German Hilfsverein in Jerusalem,
from the Kindergartens up to the Teachers’ Seminary.
All in all, they have sixteen hundred pupils of both
sexes, and these are being trained—despite the still
visible remnant of German education—in the Hebrew
spirit and the Hebrew language. All who know
how things used to be must confess that there has really
been a revolution in Palestine, and that the Hebrew
teacher has won.[#] Of course, there is still much to be
done before the victory can be complete even internally—that
is to say, before Hebrew education can find
the right road in every department, and before its
defects, which are still numerous, can be removed. But
the conqueror has already shown his patience and his
devotion to his ideal; and we can surely trust him not
to rest until he has so perfected Hebrew education in
Palestine as to make it a worthy model for Jews throughout
the world, a standard type of national education, to
which they will endeavour to approximate so far as the
conditions of the Diaspora allow.
Yet another urban generating station of a different kind
has been created of late years, also by the unbounded
// File: b160.png
.pn +1
confidence of an individual; and the Zionists and the
National Fund have not refrained from helping it and
enabling it to live and to develop, although it is very
difficult indeed to bring it within the scope of the Programme.
I mean, of course, the Bezalel.[#] True, its
great object—the development of Hebrew art—has so
far been attained only to a slight extent, and it has not
yet touched the higher branches of art. But its achievements
in the domain of handicraft justify the belief that
here also confidence will work miracles. Whatever may
happen, the Bezalel has already become the source of a
spiritual influence which makes itself felt in lands far
distant from Palestine. Who can tell how many
estranged hearts have been brought back to their people,
in greater or less degree, by the beautiful carpets and
ornaments of the Bezalel?
All these generating stations, whether in the country
or in the cities, are welded together in our thought, and
appear to us as a single national centre, which even
now, in its infancy, exerts a visible and appreciable
influence on the Diaspora. Hence a man need not
believe in miracles in order to see with his mind’s eye
this centre growing in size, improving in character, and
exerting an ever-increasing spiritual influence on our
people, until at last it shall reach the goal set before it
by the instinct of national self-preservation: to restore
our national unity throughout the world through the
restoration of our national culture in its historic home.
This centre will not be even then a “secure home of
refuge” for our people; but it will surely be a home of
healing for its spirit.
And afterwards?
// File: b161.png
.pn +1
Ask no questions! In our present state of spiritual
disorganisation we have no idea of the volume of our
national strength, nor of what it will be able to achieve
when all its elements are united round a single centre,
and quickened by a single strong and healthy spirit.
The generations that are to come afterwards will know
the measure of their power, and will adjust their actions
to it. For us, we are not concerned with the hidden
things of the distant future. Enough for us to know the
things revealed, the things that are to be done by us and
our children in a future that is near.
.fn #
\[The first article of the Basle Programme, formulated in 1897,
reads: “Der Zionismus erstrebt für das jüdische Volk die Schaffung
einer öffentlich-rechtlich gesicherten Heimstätte in Palästina.” Until
the Ninth Congress (1909) this was generally understood as involving
the creation of an autonomous “Jewish State” in Palestine.]
.fn-
.fn #
It may be worth while to mention here an article written at Basle
during the Congress and printed in the Jewish Chronicle (25 Aug.,
1911), as it is a striking example of the confusion of thought which
reigned at this Congress. The writer regards the victory of the “practicals”
as an abandonment of the national ideal, and expresses his
surprise that Hebrew occupied so prominent a place at such a Congress.
The Herzlian Zionists, he thinks, standing as they do for a
national ideal, naturally desire the revival of the national language;
but these “practicals,” who have turned their backs on the national
ideal, and made Zionism merely a colonising scheme—what interest
have they in the revival of Hebrew? Could not Jews live comfortably
in their Colonies in Palestine even if they spoke other languages,
like the Jews of the rest of the world?—I should advise those
against whom this argument is directed not simply to dismiss the
paradox with a smile, but to ask themselves how it came about that
their aims could be so misunderstood.
.fn-
.fn #
[The Biblical Shekel (plural Shekalim) has been adopted as the unit
of contribution to the Zionist Organisation.]
.fn-
.fn #
\[The Agrarian Bank is still (1921) only a project.]
.fn-
.fn #
I speak (here and further on) only of the Colonies in Judea and
Lower Galilee. I did not visit Upper Galilee on this occasion. There
are, indeed, two or three Colonies in Judea which are exceptions; but
special reasons have made them unprosperous and kept their inhabitants
in the old rut. We are not here concerned with these individual
problems.
.fn-
.fn #
The Colonies of this type, founded during the last few years, have
already been left by many of the first settlers, whose places have
been taken by others.
.fn-
.fn #
[i.e., securing the exclusive employment of Jewish labour on
Jewish-owned land.]
.fn-
.fn #
There is a further class of “contractor-labourers,” called in
Palestine k’vutzoth (groups), who work National Fund land in some
places on a co-operative basis. But the results of this experiment are
not yet clear, and in any case the system cannot be expected to
develop so far as to be able to bring about a radical change in the
labour problem. Recently, too, Yemenite Jews have been coming to
Palestine, settling in the Colonies, and working as labourers; and
the Zionists are already proclaiming that the Yemenites will build
up the land. But this is another experiment on which judgment cannot
yet be passed. Many people in Palestine think that the Yemenites
are not physically strong enough for hard work; and, moreover, their
level of culture and their mentality are so different from ours that
the question inevitably presents itself whether an increase in their
number will not change the whole character of the settlement, and
whether the change will be for the better.
I have here touched only on the question of the possibility of “capturing
labour.” But an answer is still awaited to another question—whether
it is proper for us, who are “bottom dog” everywhere, to
aim at a monopoly of labour, and whether they are not right who
maintain that this policy will prove to be our most serious obstacle.
.fn-
.fn #
In Petach-Tikvah, for instance, it is possible for three or four
hundred labourers at most to earn a living by the finer kinds of
work; whereas the unskilled labour employs at times thousands.
.fn-
.fn #
\[The quotation is from an Essay called Dr. Pinsker and his
Pamphlet, written in 1892.]
.fn-
.fn #
\[From the Supplement to an Essay called Truth from Palestine
(II), written in 1894.]
.fn-
.fn #
I cannot refrain from mentioning here a small incident which illustrates
the present position excellently. I visited one of the classes of
the Hilfsverein school at Jaffa during the German reading lesson.
The pupils were puzzled by the word aufheben, and the teacher tried
to explain it by German synonyms, which they equally failed to
understand. At last the teacher’s patience was exhausted, and he
exclaimed angrily, in pure Sephardic pronunciation, “levatel!” All
the pupils understood at once!
.fn-
.fn #
[A Hebrew school of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem.]
.fn-
// File: b162.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2 id=art09
THE SUPREMACY OF REASON | (TO THE MEMORY OF MAIMONIDES) | (1904)
.sp 2
At last, after the lapse of seven hundred years,[#] the
anniversary of Maimonides’ death has been raised to the
dignity of an important national day of memorial, and
has been honoured throughout the Diaspora. In earlier
centuries our ancestors do not appear to have remembered
that so-and-so many hundred years had passed
since the death of Maimonides; still less did they make
the anniversary a public event, as we do now, although
they were in much closer sympathy with Maimonides
than we are—or, to be more correct, because they were
in much closer sympathy with him than we are. They
did not feel it necessary to commemorate the death of
one whom in spirit they saw still living among them—one
whose advice and instruction they sought every day
in all their difficulties of theory and practice, as though
he were still in their midst. In those days it was almost
impossible for an educated Jew (and most Jews then
were educated) to pass a single day without remembering
Maimonides: just as it was impossible for him to
pass a single day without remembering Zion. In whatever
field of study the Jew might be engaged—in
halachah,[#] in ethics, in religious or philosophical speculation—inevitably
he found Maimonides in the place of
// File: b163.png
.pn +1
honour, an authority whose utterances were eagerly
conned even by his opponents. And even if a man
happened to be no student, at any rate he would say
his prayers every day, and finish his morning prayer
with the “Thirteen Articles”: how then could he forget
the man who formulated the Articles of the Jewish
religion?
But how different it is to-day! If a Jew of that
earlier time came to life again, and we wanted to bring
home to him as forcibly as possible the distance between
ourselves and our ancestors, it would be enough, I think,
to tell him that nowadays one may spend a great deal
of time in reading Hebrew articles and books without
coming across a single reference to Maimonides. And
the reason is not that we have satisfactory answers to
all the spiritual questions which troubled our ancestors,
and have therefore no need for the out-of-date philosophy
of Maimonides. The reason is that the questions
themselves are no longer on our agenda: because we
are told that nowadays men of enlightenment are concerned
not with spiritual questions, but only with politics
and hard, concrete facts. If Maimonides in his day
accepted the dictum of Aristotle that the sense of touch
is a thing to be ashamed of, we in our day are prone to
accept the dictum that “spirituality” is a thing to be
ashamed of, and nothing is worth notice except what
can be touched and felt. When, therefore, we were
reminded this year that seven hundred years had elapsed
since the death of the man with whom the spiritual life
of our people has been bound up during all the intervening
period, the fact made a profound impression
throughout the length and breadth of Jewry. It was as
though our people were quickened by this reminder, and
// File: b164.png
.pn +1
stirred suddenly to some vague yearning after the past—that
past in which it was still capable (despite all the
Judennot[#]) of looking upwards and seeking answers to
other questions than those of bread and a Nachtasyl.
Be that as it may, Maimonides has become the hero
of the moment and a subject of general interest. Many
an address has been delivered, many an article has been
written in his honour this year; but nobody, so far as I
have seen, has yet used the occasion to unearth, from
beneath that heap of musty metaphysics which is so
foreign to us, the central idea of Maimonides, and to
show how there sprang from this central idea those
views of his on religion and morality, which produced
a long period of unstable equilibrium in Judaism, and
have left a profound impression on the spiritual development
of our people. Since none else has performed
this task, I am minded to try my hand at it. If even
those who are expert in Maimonides’ system find here
some new point of view, so much the better; if not, no
harm is done. For my purpose is not to discover something
new, but to rehearse old facts in an order and a
style that seem to me to be new, and to be better
adapted to present the subject intelligibly to modern
men, who have not been brought up on medieval literature.
.sp 2
.h3
I
.sp 2
Can Maimonides claim to be regarded as the originator
of a new system? This is a question which has exercised
various authors; but we may leave it to those who attach
importance to names. We may give Maimonides that
title or not: but two facts are beyond dispute. On the
// File: b165.png
.pn +1
one hand, the fundamental assumptions on which he
built up his system were not his own, but were borrowed
by him almost in their entirety from the philosophy of
Aristotle as presented at second hand by the Arabs,
who introduced into it a good deal of neo-Platonic
doctrine. But, on the other hand, it is indisputable that
Maimonides carried to their logical conclusion the
ethical consequences of those assumptions, as the Greeks
and the Arabs, with whom the assumptions originated,
did not; and in this way he did say something that was
new and hitherto unsaid, though it was logically implied
in the fundamental principles which he took from other
thinkers.
If, then, we would understand the ethical system of
Maimonides, we must set clearly before our minds the
metaphysical assumptions on which it was built. Those
assumptions are so far removed from the philosophical
and scientific conceptions of our own time that the
modern man can scarcely grasp them. But in those
days even the greatest thinkers believed these airy
abstractions to be the solid truths of philosophy, rock-based
on incontestable evidences. Hence it is not surprising
that Maimonides, like the rest, was convinced
beyond doubt that this “scientific” teaching was the
uttermost limit of human understanding, and could never
be changed or modified. So absolute, indeed, was his
conviction that he went so far as to put this teaching in
a dogmatic form, as though it had been a revelation
from above.[#]
The following is an outline of his dogmas, so far as is
necessary for our purpose:
“All bodies beneath the firmament are compounded
// File: b166.png
.pn +1
of matter and form.”[#] But “form” here is not “form
as vulgarly understood, which is the picture and image
of the thing”; it is “the natural form,” that is to say,
the reality of the thing, “that by virtue of which it is
what it is,” as distinct from other things which are not
of its kind.[#]
“Matter is never perceived without form, nor form
without matter; it is man who divides existing bodies
in his consciousness, and knows that they are compounded
of matter and form.”[#] For since the form is
the reality, by virtue of which the thing is what it is, it
follows that matter without form would be a thing without
a real existence of its own: in other words, a mere
intellectual abstraction. And it is superfluous to add
that form without matter does not exist in the sublunar
world, which consists wholly of “bodies.”[#]
“The nature of matter is that form cannot persist
in it, but it continually divests itself of one form and
takes on another.” It is because of this property of
matter that things come into being and cease to be,
whereas form by its nature does not desire change, and
ceases to be only “on account of its connection with
matter.” Hence “generic forms are all constant,”
though they exist in individuals which change, which
come and go; but individual forms necessarily perish,
since their existence is possible only in combination with
finite matter.[#]
// File: b167.png
.pn +1
“The soul of all flesh is its form,” and the body is
the matter in which this form clothes itself. “When,
therefore, the body, which is compounded of the
elements, is dissolved, the soul perishes, because it
exists only with the body” and has no permanent existence
except generically, like other forms.[#]
“The soul is one, but it has many different faculties,”
and therefore philosophers speak of parts of the soul.
“By this they do not mean that it is divisible as bodies
are; they merely enumerate its different faculties.”
The parts of the soul, in this sense, are five: the
nutritive, the sensitive, the imaginative, the emotional,
and the rational. The first four parts are common to
man and to other animals, though “each kind of animal
has a particular soul” special to itself, which functions
in it in a particular way, so that, for instance, the
emotion of a man is not like the emotion of an ass.
But the essential superiority of the soul of man lies in
its possession of the additional fifth part—the rational:
this is “that power in man by which he thinks and
acquires knowledge and distinguishes between wrong
actions and right.”[#]
Thus the soul of man differs from the souls of other
living things only in the greater variety and higher
quality of its functions. In essence it is, like “the soul
of all flesh,” simply a form associated with matter, having
no existence apart from the body. When the body
is resolved into its elements the soul also perishes with
all its parts, including the rational.
This extreme conclusion had already been deduced
from the teaching of Aristotle by some of his early commentators
// File: b168.png
.pn +1
(such as Alexander Aphrodisius). There
were, indeed, other commentators who, unable to
abandon belief in the survival of the soul, tried to explain
Aristotle’s words in conformity with that belief by
excluding the rational part from the “natural form”
and attributing to it a separate and eternal existence.[#]
But Maimonides was too logical not to see the inconsistency
involved in that interpretation; and so he sided
with the extremists, though their view was absolutely
opposed to that belief in personal immortality which in
his day had come to be generally accepted by Jews.
Had he been content with that view alone, he would
inevitably have gone back to the conception of primitive
Judaism, as we find it in the Pentateuch: that immortality
belongs not to the individual, but to the nation;
that the national form persists for ever, like the generic
form in living things, and the changing individuals are
its matter. In that case his whole ethical system would
have been very different from what it is. But Maimonides
supplemented the teaching of Aristotle by another idea,
which he took from the Arabs; and this idea, amplified
and completed, he made the basis of his ethical system,
which thereby acquired a new and original character,
distinguished by its fusion of the social and the individual
elements.
The idea is in substance this: that while reason,
which is present in a human being from birth, is only
one of the faculties of the soul, which is a unity of all
its parts and ceases wholly to exist when the body
ceases, yet this faculty is no more than a “potential
faculty,” by virtue of which its possessor is able to
apprehend ideas; and therefore its cessation is inevitable
// File: b169.png
.pn +1
only if it remains throughout its existence in its
original condition—in the condition, that is, of a
“potential faculty” whose potentiality has not been
realised. But if a human being makes use of this faculty
and attains to the actual apprehension of Ideas, then his
intellect has proceeded from the stage of potentiality to
that of actuality: it has achieved real existence, which
is permanent and indestructible, like the existence of
those Ideas which it has absorbed into itself and with
which it has become one. Thus we are to distinguish
between the “potential intellect,” which is given to a
human being when he comes into the world, and is
merely a function of the body, and the “acquired intellect,”
which a human being wins for himself by apprehending
the Ideas. This acquired intellect “is not a
function of the body and is really separate from the
body.” Hence it does not cease to exist with the cessation
of the body; it persists for ever, like the other
“separate Intelligences.”[#]
Now since the form of every existing thing is that
individual essence by virtue of which it is what it is and
is distinguished from all other existing things, it is clear
that the acquired intellect, which gives its possessor
immortality, is the essence of the human being who has
been privileged to acquire it: in other words, his true
form, by which he is distinguished from the rest of mankind.
In other men the form is the transient soul given
to them at birth; but in him who has the acquired intellect
even the soul itself is only a kind of matter. His
essential form is “the higher knowledge,” “the form
// File: b170.png
.pn +1
of the soul,” which he has won for himself by assimilating
“Ideas which are separate from matter.”[#]
Thus mankind is divided into two species, the difference
between which is greater than that between mankind
as a whole and other kinds of animals. For man
is distinguished from the rest of animate nature only by
having a distinctive form: in quality his form is like the
forms of other living things, seeing that in his case as
in theirs the individual form perishes. But the distinctive
form of the man who has the acquired intellect
is distinct in quality; for it persists for ever even after
its separation from matter. Its affinity is not with the
other forms in the lower world, but with those “separate
forms” in the world above.[#]
Thus far Maimonides followed the Arabs. But here
the Arab philosophers stopped: they did not probe this
idea further, did not carry it to its logical conclusions.
Maimonides, on the contrary, refused to stop half-way;
he did not shrink from the extremest consequences of
the idea.
First of all, he defined the content and the method of
the intellectual process by which man attains to “acquired
intellect.” If we say that the intellect becomes actual
and eternal by comprehending the Ideas and becoming
one with them,[#] it follows that the content of the Ideas
themselves must be actual and eternal. For how could
// File: b171.png
.pn +1
something real and eternal be created by the acquisition
of something itself unreal or not eternal? Thus we
exclude from the category of Ideas by the apprehension
of which the acquired intellect is obtained: (1) those
sciences which contain only abstract laws and not the
explanation of real things, such as mathematics and
logic; (2) those sciences which teach not what actually
exists, but what ought to be done for the achievement
of certain objects, such as ethics and æsthetics; (3) the
knowledge of individual forms, which have only a temporary
existence in combination with matter, such as
the histories of famous men and the like. All knowledge
of this kind, though it is useful and in some cases
even necessary as preparation, is not in itself capable of
making the intellect actual. What, then, are the Ideas
by the apprehension of which the intellect does become
actual? They are those whose content is true and
eternal Being. This Being includes (going from lower
to higher): (1) the generic forms of all things in the
lower world, which are, as we know, constant; (2) the
heavenly bodies, which, though compounded of matter
and form, are eternal; (3) the forms which are free of
matter (God and the separate Intelligences).[#] All this
relates to the content of the intellectual process; but
there is also a very important definition of its method—a
definition which is implied in the conception itself.
The result must be achieved by the intellect’s own
activity: that is to say, man must apprehend the truth
of Being by rational proofs, and must not simply accept
truth from others by an act of faith. For apprehension
by this latter method is purely external; reason has had
// File: b172.png
.pn +1
no active part in it, and therefore that union of the
intellect with its object, which is what makes the intellect
actual, is lacking.[#]
And now let us see what are the ethical consequences
of this idea.
The question of the ultimate purpose of the universe
is for Maimonides an idle question, because it is not
within our power to find a satisfactory answer. For
whatever purpose we find, it is always possible to ask:
What is the purpose of that purpose? And in the end
we are bound to say: “God willed it so,” or, “His
wisdom decided so.” But at the same time Maimonides
agrees with Aristotle and his school that the proximate
purpose of all that exists in this world of ours is man.
For in that “course of genesis and destruction” which
goes on in all the genera of existing things we see a kind
of striving on the part of matter to attain to the most
perfect form possible (“to produce the most perfect
being that can be produced”); and since “man is the
most perfect being formed of matter,” it follows that
“in this respect it can truly be said that all earthly
things exist for man.”[#]
Now if man is the proximate purpose of all things on
earth, “we are compelled to inquire further, why man
exists and what was the purpose of his creation.”
// File: b173.png
.pn +1
Maimonides’ view of the human soul being what it is,
there is, of course, a ready answer to this question. The
purpose of man’s existence, like that of all material
existence, is “to produce the most perfect being that
can be produced”: and what is the most perfect being
if not the possessor of the “acquired intellect,” who
has attained the most perfect form possible to man?
The purpose of man’s life, then, is “to picture the Ideas
in his soul.” For “only wisdom can add to his inner
strength and raise him from low to high estate; for he
was a man potentially, and has now become a man
actually, and man before he thinks and acquires knowledge
is esteemed an animal.”[#]
But if this is so, can we still ask what is the highest
moral duty and what is the most perfect moral good?
Obviously, there is no higher moral duty than this: that
man strive to fulfil that purpose for which he was
created; and there is no more perfect moral good than
the fulfilment of that purpose. All other human activities
are only “to preserve man’s existence, to the end
that that one activity may be fulfilled.”[#]
Here, then, we reach a new moral criterion and a
complete “transvaluation of values” as regards human
actions in their moral aspect. Every action has a moral
value, whether positive or negative, only in so far as it
helps or hinders man in his effort to fulfil the purpose
of his being—the actualisation of his intellect. “Good”
in the moral sense is all that helps to this end; “evil”
is all that hinders. If we determine according to this
view the positions of good actions in the ethical scale,
we shall find that higher and lower have changed places.
// File: b174.png
.pn +1
At the very top, of course, will stand that one activity
which leads direct to the goal—the apprehension of
eternal Being by rational proof: that is to say, the study
of physics and metaphysics. Below this the scale bifurcates
into the two main lines of study and action. In
the sphere of study, mathematics and logic have special
moral importance, because knowledge of these sciences
is a necessary preliminary to the understanding of Being
by rational proof. Below them come subjects which
have a practical object (ethics, etc.): for the actions
with which these subjects deal are themselves only
means to the attainment of the supreme end, and therefore
the study of these subjects is but a means to a
means.[#] In the sphere of action, again, there are different
degrees. Those human actions which have as
their object the satisfaction of bodily needs have positive
moral value only in a limited sense: in so far as they
effectively keep off physical pain and mental distraction,
and thus allow a man to give himself untroubled to the
pursuit of the Ideas.[#] Above these are actions which
are connected with “perfection of character,” because
that perfection is necessary for the attainment of true
wisdom. “For while man pursues after his lusts, and
makes feeling master over intellect, and enslaves his
reason to his passions, the divine power—that is,
Reason—cannot become his.”[#] Hence even perfection
of character has no absolute moral value, any more than
// File: b175.png
.pn +1
other things which appertain to practical life. The
moral value of everything is determined by its relation
to the fulfilment of the intellectual purpose, and by that
alone.[#]
Starting from this standpoint, Maimonides lays down
the principle that virtue is “the mean which is equidistant
from both extremes.”[#] This principle is taken,
of course, from Aristotle’s doctrine of virtue. But
Aristotle did not set up a higher moral criterion by
reference to which the mean point could be determined
in every case. For him all virtue was really but a code
of good manners to which the polite Greek should conform,
being enabled by his own good taste to fasten
instinctively on the point equidistant from the ugliness
of the two extremes. Not so Maimonides, the Jew.
He made this principle the basis of morality in the true
sense, because he coupled with it a formulation of the
supreme moral end. This moral end, for which the
virtues are a preparation,[#] compels us and enables us
to distinguish between the extremes and the mean. For
the extremes, being apt to impair physical health or
mental peace, prevent a man from fulfilling his intellectual
function; the mean is that which helps him on
his road.[#]
But with all this we have not yet a complete answer
// File: b176.png
.pn +1
to our question about the purpose of the existence of
the human race as a whole. We know that the human
race really consists of two different species: “potential
man” and “actual man.” The second species, indeed,
does not come into existence from the start as an independent
species, but is produced by development out of
the first. But this development is a very long one, and
depends on many conditions which are difficult of fulfilment,
so that only a few men—sometimes only “one
in a generation”—are privileged to complete it, while
the great majority of mankind remains always at the
stage of “potential man.” Thus the question remains:
What is the purpose of the existence of the great mass
of men “who cannot picture the Idea in their souls”?
For when we say that all material things exist for the
sake of the existence of man, we do not mean that all
other things are but a “necessary evil,” an evil
incidental to the production of the desired end—in other
words, merely Nature’s unsuccessful experiments in her
struggle towards “the production of the most perfect
being that can be produced,” like the many imperfect
specimens of his art that the inexpert artificer turns out
before he succeeds in creating one that is perfect. We
cannot so regard them in the face of the evidence that
we have of the wonderful wisdom of creative nature,
which proves that the Artificer can do his work in the
way best fitted to achieve his object. We must therefore
assume that “things do not exist for nothing”;
that Nature, in her progress towards the production of
the most perfect being, has formed all other things for
the benefit of that most perfect being, whether for food
or “for his advantage otherwise than by way of food,”
in such a way that the sum-total of things in the inferior
// File: b177.png
.pn +1
world is not merely a ladder by which to ascend to the
production of man, but also a means to secure the permanence
of man when once he has been produced. It
follows, therefore, that all the millions of men “who
cannot picture the Idea in their souls” cannot be void
of purpose, like the spoilt creations of the artist, which,
not being suited to their object, are left lying about
until they perish of themselves. There must of necessity
be some advantage in their existence, as in that of the
other kinds of created things. What, then, is this
advantage? The answer is implied in the question.
“Potential man,” like other earthly things, exists without
doubt for the benefit of the “perfect being,” of
“actual man.” In conformity with this view Maimonides
lays it down that “these men exist for two reasons.
First, to serve the one man (the ‘perfect’): for man
has many wants, and Methuselah’s life were not long
enough to learn all the crafts whereof a man has absolute
need for his living: and when should he find leisure to
learn and to acquire wisdom? The rest of mankind,
therefore, exists to set right those things that are
necessary to them in the commonwealth, to the end
that the Wise Man may find his needs provided for and
that wisdom may spread. And secondly, the man without
wisdom exists because the Wise are very few, and
therefore the masses were created to make a society for
the Wise, that they be not lonely.”[#]
Thus the existence of the majority of mankind has a
purpose of its own, which is different from that of the
existence of the chosen minority. This minority is an
end in itself—it is the embodiment of the most perfect
form in the inferior world; whereas the purpose of the
// File: b178.png
.pn +1
majority lies not in its own existence, but in the fact
that it creates the conditions necessary to the existence
of the minority: it creates, that is, human society with
all its cultural possessions (in the material sense), without
which it is impossible that wisdom should spread.
Thus we have introduced into ethics a new element—the
social element.
For if each man could attain the degree of “actual
man” without dependence on the help of human society
for the provision of his needs, the moral criterion would
be purely individual. Each man would be free to apply
for himself the formula at which we arrived above:—all
that helps me to fulfil my intellectual function is for
me morally good; all that hinders me is for me morally
evil. But if the attainment of the supreme end is possible
only for the few, and is possible for them only
through the existence of the society of the many, which
has for its function the creation of the conditions most
favourable to the production of the perfect being: then
we are confronted with a new moral criterion, social in
character. All that helps towards the perfection of
society in the manner required for the fulfilment of its
function is morally good; all that retards this development
is morally evil. This moral criterion is binding
for the minority and the majority alike. The majority,
whose existence has no purpose beyond their participation
in the work of society, can obviously have no other
moral criterion than the social. But even the minority,
though they are capable of attaining the supreme end,
and have therefore an individualistic moral criterion, are
none the less bound to subordinate themselves to the
social criterion where the two are in conflict. For as
society becomes more perfect, and the material basis
// File: b179.png
.pn +1
is provided with less expenditure of effort, so much the
greater will be the possibility of producing the perfect
being with more regularity and frequency. Hence from
the point of view of the supreme end of the whole human
race—and that is the source of moral duty—the well-being
of society is more important than that of an
individual man, even though he belong to the perfect
few.[#]
From this point of view all branches of man’s work
which further the perfection of society and the lightening
of the burden of life’s needs have a moral value,
because they help more or less to create that environment
which is necessary for the realisation of the most
perfect form in the chosen few. Hence, to take one
instance, Maimonides reckons the fine arts among the
things that further the attainment of mankind’s end
(though naturally beauty has in his system no independent
value): “for the soul grows weary and the
mind is confused by the constant contemplation of ugly
things, just as the body grows weary in doing heavy
work, until it rest and be refreshed, and then it returns
to its normal condition: so does the soul also need to
take thought for the repose of the senses by contemplating
pleasant things until its weariness is dispelled.”
Thus “the making of sculptures and pictures in buildings,
vessels, and garments” is not “wasted work.”[#]
To sum up: society stands between the two species
of men and links them together. For the “actual
man” society is a means to the attainment of his end;
// File: b180.png
.pn +1
for the “potential man” it is the purpose of his own
being. The “potential man,” then, being in himself
but a transient thing, which comes into being and ceases
to be, like all other living things, must content himself
with the comforting knowledge that his fleeting existence
is after all not wasted, because he is a limb of the
social body which gives birth to the immortal perfect
beings, and his work, in whatever sphere, helps to produce
these perfect beings.
Thus Maimonides gets back to the view of early
Judaism, which made the life of society the purpose of
the life of the individual, although at first he seemed to
diverge widely from it in setting up the one “perfect
man,” the possessor of “acquired intellect,” as the sole
end of the life of humanity at large.
It is possible, indeed, at first sight to find a certain
resemblance between Maimonides’ ethics and another
doctrine which has recently gained such wide currency—the
doctrine of Nietzsche. Both conceive the purpose
of human existence to lie in the creation of the most
perfect human type; and both make the majority a tool
of that minority in which the supreme type is realised.
But in fact the two doctrines are essentially different,
and the resemblance is only external. In the first place,
Nietzsche’s Superman is quite unlike Maimonides’
Superman in character. Nietzsche, Hellenic in spirit,
finds the highest perfection in a perfect harmony of all
bodily and spiritual excellences. But Maimonides, true
to the spirit of Judaism, concentrates on one central
point, and gives pre-eminence to a spiritual element—that
of intellect. And secondly, the relation of his
“actual man” to society is different from that of
Nietzsche’s Superman. The Superman seeks an outlet for
// File: b181.png
.pn +1
his powers in the world outside him; he strives to
embody his will in action, and tolerates no obstacle in
his path. He is therefore eternally at war with human
society; for society puts a limit to his will and sets
obstacles on his path by means of its moral laws, which
have been framed not to suit his individual needs, but
to suit the needs of the majority. Maimonides’ “actual
man,” on the contrary, aims not at embodying his will
in the external world, but at perfecting his form in his
inner world. He demands nothing of society except
that it satisfy his elementary wants, and so leave him
at peace to pursue his inner perfection. He does not
therefore regard society as his enemy. On the contrary,
he sees in society an ally, without whose aid he
cannot attain his end, and whose well-being will secure
his own.
.sp 2
.h3
II
.sp 2
So far I have purposely refrained from bringing the
religious element into the ethics of Maimonides, with
the object of showing that he really based his view of
human life on philosophy alone, and did not give way
a single inch in order to effect a compromise between
his philosophy and the religious ideas which were
accepted by Jews in his time. None the less, there is
no doubt that Maimonides was a religious man, and
believed in the divinity of the Law of Moses: only his
idea of the nature of religion, its function and its value,
was a new one, and differed entirely from the accepted
idea, because here also, in the sphere of religion itself,
he remained faithful to those fundamental axioms on
which he based his moral system.
Does philosophy leave any room for a belief in the
// File: b182.png
.pn +1
existence of a revealed religion—that is to say, in a Law
given to men by God through a supernatural revelation
of himself to one or to many individuals? This question
turns on another: Is the existence of the world
independent of time and external cause, or is it the
result of a creative act of God, as the Pentateuch
teaches? According to the first view, “everything in
the Universe is the result of fixed laws, Nature does not
change, and there is nothing supernatural.” There is
therefore no room for revelation, which upsets the order
of nature, and “the whole teaching of Scripture would
be rejected.” But if the world is the result of a creative
act, and nature is consequently nothing but a revelation
of the divine will, made in such time and place as God’s
wisdom decreed, then it is no longer impossible that the
divine will should one day reveal itself a second time
in a supernatural manner. Hence, “accepting the
Creation, we find that ... revelation is possible, and
that every difficulty in this question is removed.” For
if we ask: “Why has God inspired a certain person
and not another? Why has he revealed his Law to one
particular nation, and at one particular time?” and so
forth—“We answer to all these questions: He willed
it so; or, His wisdom decided so. Just as he created
the world according to his will, at a certain time, in a
certain form, and as we do not understand why his will
or his wisdom decided upon that peculiar form, and
upon that peculiar time, so we do not know why his will
or his wisdom determined any of the things mentioned
in the preceding questions.”[#]
Maimonides gave much thought to the question of the
creation of the world, and examined it from every side.
// File: b183.png
.pn +1
He tried to ascertain whether there was anything conclusive
in the evidences adduced by his predecessors in
favour of the eternity of the world or of its creation;
and he did not scruple to avow that if he had found a
convincing proof of the eternity of the world he would
not have rejected it out of respect for the Torah. But
purely philosophic investigation led him to the conclusion
that there was really no convincing proof one
way or the other. Seeing then, he says, that “the
eternity of the universe has not been demonstrated,
there is no need to reject Scripture,” and we may
believe in the creation theory, which has “the
authority of Prophecy,” without any sin against our
reason.[#]
But when once we have adopted the creation theory,
revelation becomes possible, and there is nothing to
prevent our holding the belief which our nation has
accepted throughout its history: that at a definite point
in time the Law was given to our people from heaven
through the instrumentality of the chief of the Prophets,
who received a unique inspiration from the divine source,
and was taught what to tell his people in the name of
God.[#] It is not relevant (as we have seen above) to ask
why this Law was given to us and not to others, at that
// File: b184.png
.pn +1
particular time and at no other. But it is relevant to
ask what is the purpose of this Law and what benefit it
was meant to produce. For it can scarcely be supposed
that God would interfere with the order of nature for
no advantage or object; and if we cannot understand
the working of the divine wisdom in every detail, we
must and we can form for ourselves some general conception
of the object for which the divine teaching was
given to us and the way in which it can help men to
attain their end.[#]
Now it is clear that the divine teaching, whether on
its theoretical or on its practical side, cannot lead a
man straight to his supreme goal—the raising of his
intellect from potentiality to actuality. For this goal,
as we know, is to be attained not by good actions, and
not even by the received knowledge of truth, but only
by the activity of the intellect itself, which must arrive
at truth by the long road of scientific proof. And if
religion cannot raise its followers to the stage of “actual
man” in a direct way, we must conclude that its whole
purpose is to prepare the instrument which is necessary
for the attainment of that end: to wit, human society,
which creates the environment of the “actual man.”
The aim of religion, then, is “to regulate the soul and
the body” of society at large, so as to make it capable
of producing the greatest possible number of “actual
men.” To this end religion must necessarily be
popular: its teachings and prescriptions must be aimed
not at the chosen few, who strive after ultimate perfection,
but at the great mass of society. To this mass
it must give, in the first place, true opinions in a form
suited to the intelligence of the many; secondly, a code
// File: b185.png
.pn +1
of morals, individual and social, which makes for the
health of society and the prosperity of its members;
and thirdly, a code of religious observances intended to
educate the many by keeping these true opinions and
moral duties constantly before their minds.[#] In these
three ways—the third of which is merely ancillary to
the other two—religion aims at raising the cultural level
of society, so as to make a clear road for the perfect
individual: to provide him from the beginning of his
life with an environment of correct opinions and good
morals, and save him from the necessity of frittering
away his strength in a twofold battle—against the evil
conditions of a corrupt society, and against false opinions
implanted in himself by that society. Religion is there
to save him from this battle against corruption without
and falsehood within: to secure that as soon as he shows
the ability and the will to attain perfection he shall find
favourable conditions prepared for him, and proceed
towards his goal without let or hindrance.
This was how Maimonides conceived the function of
the divine religion; this was how he was bound to conceive
it, his philosophy being what it was. But as he
was also persuaded by various reasoned proofs that the
Law of Moses was the divine religion,[#] he could obviously
have no doubt that this Law must contain on its theoretical
side the “true opinions” (that is, those philosophical
opinions which he considered true), albeit in
popular form, and on its practical side a moral doctrine
for the individual and for society which was adapted to
the end desiderated by his philosophy, together with
the form of religious observance best calculated to
// File: b186.png
.pn +1
educate society in the right opinions and the right
morality.
It is at this point that Maimonides’ task becomes
difficult. Armed with this a priori judgment, he comes
to close quarters with the Torah: and he finds that in
many matters, both of theory and of practice, it is, if
taken at its face value, diametrically opposed to what
his pre-conceived ideas would lead him to expect. The
beliefs embodied in the Torah seem to be directly
opposed to the most fundamental philosophical truths
of Maimonides’ system; the actions prescribed in the
Torah contain much that it is difficult to reconcile with
the social purpose of the divine religion as conceived
by that system. What course, then, was open to
Maimonides? To compromise between philosophical
and religious truth, as many had done before, was for
him impossible. For every compromise means simply
that both sides give way; and how could Maimonides,
with his conviction that the attainment of truth by means
of proof is the end of human existence and the only way
to eternal happiness, give up one jot of this truth for
the sake of another truth, of inferior value inasmuch as
it has come to us only through tradition? Thus he has
but one possible course. Necessity compels him to subdue
religion absolutely to the demands of philosophy:
in other words, to explain the words of the Torah
throughout in conformity with the truth of philosophy,
and to make the Torah fulfil in every part the function
which philosophy imposes on it.
This necessity worked wonders. By dint of enormous
labour Maimonides discovered various extraordinary
ways of interpreting the Torah; with wonderful skill he
found support for his interpretations in words and
// File: b187.png
.pn +1
phrases scattered about the Scriptures and the Talmud;
until at last he succeeded in making religion what it had
to be according to his belief.
This is not the place to explain Maimonides’ methods
of exegesis in detail. For us to-day they are but a sort
of monument to the weakness of the written word in the
face of a living psychological force which demands that
“yes” shall become “no” and “no” be turned into
“yes.” This psychological force led Maimonides to
turn the “living God” of the Torah into an abstract
philosophical conception, empty of all content except a
collection of negations; to make the “Righteous Man”
of Judaism a philosopher blessed with “acquired intellect”;
to transform the “future world” of the Talmud
into the union of the acquired intellect with the “active
intellect”; to metamorphose the Biblical penalty of
“cutting off” into the disappearance of the form when
the matter is resolved: and so forth. All this he did
in conformity with his “philosophic truth,” of which
he refused to change one atom.[#]
So, too, with the practical side of religion. Only in
a very roundabout way could practical religion be
brought under the general principles which Maimonides
deduced from his philosophy. The difficulty was
especially great in the case of the laws of religious
worship, many of which have no apparent educative
value as a means of confirming true opinions and
morality. But here also necessity did its work, and
Maimonides managed to find educational “reasons”
for all the religious laws, not excepting those which
seem on the face of them actually to confirm false
// File: b188.png
.pn +1
opinions and to arouse inclinations opposed to morality—such
as, for instance, sacrifices and the accompanying
rites.[#] None the less, he was compelled after all
his hard labour to lay down this strange axiom: that
there is a reason for the commandments in a general
way, but not for their details, these having been
ordained only because there can be no universal without
particulars of some kind or other.[#]
Maimonides had an easier task in bringing the moral
laws of the Torah within his system. In themselves
these laws demanded as a rule no heroic exegesis to
show their utility for the social order: indeed, the Torah
often emphasises this utility, which in any case is self-evident
in most commandments of this class. But in
arranging these commandments in order of moral value
Maimonides was compelled to coerce religion by his
characteristic methods into conformity with his system,
according to which good actions—whether moral or
religious—are of an inferior order, having no value
except that of a necessary preparation of the individual
and of society for the attainment of the supreme moral
good, the perfection of intellect. This attitude of
Maimonides towards moral actions, which we have met
already as a philosophical postulate, is just as strongly
maintained after such actions have been invested with a
// File: b189.png
.pn +1
religious sanctity. Hence religion affects Maimonides’
philosophical ethics only to this extent, that it makes
all the observances of religious worship a moral duty,
equal in value to the other moral duties, because
religious worship is one way of leading mankind to the
attainment of the supreme moral good in the chosen
individuals.
What, then, is the “divine religion”—that is to
say, the teaching of Judaism—according to the system
of Maimonides?
On its theoretical side it is popular metaphysics, and
on its practical side social ethics and pædagogics. It
cannot bring man to his ultimate perfection; its whole
function is to regulate society—that is, the masses—in
accordance with the requirements of the perfect man.
Hence religion is not above reason, but below it: just
as the masses, for whom religion was made, are below
the perfect man. Reason is the supreme judge; religion
is absolutely subordinate to reason, and cannot abrogate
one jot of its decisions. For God, who implanted the
reasoning faculty in man, that by it he might attain
truth and win eternal Being, could not at the same time
demand of man that he believe in something opposed to
that very truth which is attained by reason, and is the
goal of his existence and the summit of his happiness.
Even if a Prophet works miracles in heaven and earth,
and requires us therefore to believe that there has been
prophetically revealed to him some “divine” truth
which is opposed to reason, we must not believe him nor
“regard his signs.” “For reason, which declares his
testimony false, is more to be trusted than the eye which
sees his signs.”[#]
// File: b190.png
.pn +1
But all this does not detract from the general and
eternal duty of observing in practice all the commandments
of the divine religion. Religion, like nature, is
a creation of God, in which the divine will is embodied
in the form of immutable laws. And just as the laws
of nature are eternal and universally valid, admitting of
no exception, though their usefulness is only general,
and “in some individual cases they cause injury as
well,” so also “the divine guidance contained in the
Torah must be absolute and general,” and does not
suffer change or modification “according to the different
conditions of persons and times.” For the divine
creation is “that which has the absolute perfection possible
to its species”; and that which is absolutely perfect
cannot be perfected by change or modification, but
only made less perfect.[#] Religion, it is true, was given
through a Prophet, who received the divine inspiration;
but when once it had been given it was placed outside
the scope of creation, and became, like Nature after its
creation, something independent, with laws which can
be investigated and understood by the function of reason,
but cannot be changed or abrogated by the function of
prophecy. It may happen, indeed, that in accordance
with the divine will, which was made an element in the
nature of things when nature was created, the Prophet
can change the order of the universe in some particular
detail for a moment, so as to give a sign of the truth of
his prophecy;[#] and similarly the Prophet can sometimes
abrogate temporarily some point of the Law, to meet
some special need of the time. But just as the Prophet
cannot modify or change completely any law of nature,
// File: b191.png
.pn +1
so he cannot modify or change completely any law of
the Torah. Nor can he, by his function of prophecy,
decide between opposing views on a matter which is
capable of different interpretations, because his opinion
on a question of this kind is important by virtue of his
being a wise man, and not by virtue of his being a
Prophet, and it is therefore no more decisive than that
of another wise man who is not a Prophet. And “if a
thousand Prophets, all equal to Elijah and Elisha, held
one view, and a thousand and one wise men held the
opposite view, we should have to follow the majority
and decide according to the thousand and one wise men
and not according to the thousand venerable Prophets.”
For “God has not permitted us to learn from Prophets,
but from wise men of reasoning power and knowledge.”[#]
What I have said so far, in this section and the preceding
one, is sufficient, I think, to give a clear idea of
the fundamental beliefs of Maimonides as to the function
of man and his moral and religious duties. But before
we pass on to consider how Maimonides tried to make
these ideas the common property of his people, and
what mark his system has left on the development of
Judaism, it is worth while to mention here that
Maimonides himself has given us the essence of his
system in a perfectly unmistakable form, by dividing
men into various classes according to their position on
the scale of perfection. He compares the striving of
man after the perfection of his form to the striving of
a king’s subjects “to be with the king in his palace”;
and using this simile he finds in mankind six successive
stages, as follows:—
// File: b192.png
.pn +1
1. Men who are outside the country altogether—that
is, savages “who have no religion, neither one
based on speculation, nor one received by tradition.”
They are considered “as speechless animals.”
2. Men “who are in the country,” but “have their
backs turned towards the king’s palace, and their faces
in another direction.” These are “those who possess
religion, belief and thought, but happen to hold false
doctrines, which they either adopted in consequence of
great mistakes made in their own speculations, or
received from others who misled them. Because of
these doctrines they recede more and more from the
royal palace the more they seem to proceed. These are
worse than the first class, and under certain circumstances
it may become necessary to slay them, and to
extirpate their doctrines, in order that others should not
be misled.”
3. “Those who desire to arrive at the palace, and
to enter it, but have never yet seen it.” These are
“the mass of religious people; the multitude that
observe the divine commandments, but are ignorant.”
4. “Those who reach the palace, and go round
about in search of the entrance gate.” These are
“those who believe traditionally in true principles of
faith, and learn the practical worship of God, but are
not trained in philosophical treatment of the principles
of the Torah.” On the same level with them are those
who “are engaged in studying the Mathematical
Sciences and Logic.”
5. Those who “have come into the ante-chamber”—that
is, “those who undertake to investigate the principles
of religion,” or those who have “learnt to understand
Physics.”
// File: b193.png
.pn +1
6. Those who have reached the highest stage, that
of being “with the king in the same palace.” These
are they “who have mastered Metaphysics—who have
succeeded in finding a proof for everything that can be
proved—who have a true knowledge of God, so far as
true knowledge can be attained, and are near to the
truth wherever only an approach to the truth is possible.”[#]
In this classification Maimonides sets forth his ethical
system in plain terms, with perfect coldness and calm,
as though there were nothing startling about it. We of
the present day feel our moral sense particularly outraged
by his cruel treatment of the second class—“those
who happen to hold false doctrines”—though we can
understand that a logical thinker like Maimonides, who
always went the whole length of his convictions, was
bound to draw this conclusion from his philosophical
system. For that system regards “true opinions” as
something much more than “opinions”: it attributes
to them the wonderful power of turning the reasoning
faculty into a separate and eternal being, and sees therefore
in the opposite opinions a danger to life in the
most real sense. But in Maimonides’ day the persecution
of men for holding false opinions was a common
thing (though it was done in the name of religion, not
of philosophy); and even this piece of philosophic ruthlessness
created no stir and aroused no contemporary
protest. What did stir contemporary feeling to its
depths was another conclusion involved in his classification:
namely, “that philosophers who occupy themselves
with physics and metaphysics are on a higher
plane than men who occupy themselves with the
// File: b194.png
.pn +1
Torah.”[#] Whoever knows in what esteem our ancestors
of that period held the study of the Torah will not be
surprised that “many wise men and Rabbis” were
driven to the conclusion that “this chapter was not
written by the Master, or if it was, it should be suppressed,
or, best of all, burnt.”[#]
Poor, simple men! They did not see that this
chapter could not be either suppressed or burnt except
in company with all the other chapters of Maimonides’
system, which led him inevitably to this extreme conclusion.
But there were other men in Israel who saw
more clearly, and actually condemned all the chapters
to the fire. To them we shall return later.
.sp 2
.h3
III
.sp 2
The supremacy of Reason! Can we to-day, after the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, conceive how tremendous,
how fundamental a revolution the phrase
implied in the time of Maimonides?
We all know that the outstanding characteristic of the
human mind in the Middle Ages was its negative attitude
to human reason, its lack of faith in the power of reason
to direct man’s life and bring him to the goal of real
happiness. Reason was almost hated and despised as
a dangerous tempter and seducer: it led men away from
the pursuit of truth and goodness, and was to be
eschewed by all who cared for their souls. Fundamental
questions about life and the universe had to receive
super-rational answers. The simpler and more reasonable
the answer, the more suspect and the less satisfactory
// File: b195.png
.pn +1
it was; the stranger the answer, the more
violently opposed to sane reason, the more cordial was
its welcome and the more ready its acceptance. The
famous Credo quia absurdum of one of the Church
fathers was the cardinal rule of thought for all cultured
nations, Christian and Mohammedan alike. Nor had
Judaism escaped the sway of this principle. Not only
the mass of the people, but the leaders and teachers,
generally speaking, believed in the literal sense of the
Scriptures and the Talmud, even where it was plainly
contrary to reason. The coarsest and crudest ideas
about the nature of the divine power and its relation to
men, and about the soul of man and its future in “the
world to come”—ideas which reason cannot tolerate
for a moment—were almost universally held; and even
those learned in the Law staunchly maintained these
ideas, because so they had found it written in Bible or
Talmud, and that which was written was above reason,
and no attention should be paid to that impudent scoffer.
It followed naturally from this fundamental point of
view that the important things in the sphere of morals
were to know and to perform all that was written. The
function of reason was not to understand life and the
universe, but to understand what was written about life
and the universe. The thing best worth doing for a
Jew was to ponder on the written word and to work out
its details, theoretically and practically, to infinity.[#]
No doubt some Jewish teachers before Maimonides
had tried to introduce into Judaism more rational principles,
which they had derived from Arabic philosophy.
But these attempts only affected details; the cardinal
// File: b196.png
.pn +1
principle remained untouched. Reason remained subordinate
to the written word; its truths were still discarded
for the higher truth of religion. The Gaon
Saadiah, the greatest of the earlier Jewish religious
philosophers, explains the relation of reason to religion
by the following simile: “A man weighs his money,
and finds that he has a thousand pieces.” He gives
different sums to a number of people, and then, “wishing
to show them quickly how much he has left, he says
that he has five hundred pieces, and offers to prove it
by weighing his money. When he weighs the money—which
takes little time—and finds that it amounts to
five hundred pieces they are bound to believe what he
told them.” But there may be among them a particularly
cautious man, who wants to find the amount
left over by the method of calculation—that is, by adding
together the various amounts distributed and subtracting
their sum from the original amount.[#] Religion,
of course, is the weighing process, which gives us the
truth at once, by a method which is direct and cannot
be questioned. Reason corresponds to calculation: a
cautious man with plenty of time may use it to establish
a truth which has already been proved to him by the
short and certain method of weighing. But obviously
calculation cannot change the result which weighing has
already given; and if there is any difference in the
results, the weighed money will neither be increased nor
diminished, and the mistake must be in the calculation.
This way of regarding reason and its relation to religion
was common to all the Jewish thinkers who laboured,
before Maimonides, to reconcile religion and philosophy.
They regarded their labour only as a necessary evil.
// File: b197.png
.pn +1
They shouldered the burden because they saw that it
had to be done; but in their heart of hearts they were
wholly on the side of religion, and it never occurred to
them to give reason precedence.[#] In this respect they
were like the Arabic religious philosophers; and like
them they chose the philosophical views which confirmed
their religious faith rather than those which were
confirmed by reason. “They did not investigate,”
writes Maimonides, jeering at “philosophers” of this
kind, “the real properties of things; first of all they
considered what must be the properties of the things
which should yield proof for or against a certain creed.”
They forgot “that the properties of things cannot adapt
themselves to our opinions, but our opinions must be
adapted to the existing properties.”[#]
If we remember that this was the general attitude of
mind, we cannot help asking how it could happen that
in such a period and in such an atmosphere Maimonides
arrived at the doctrine of the supremacy of reason in its
most uncompromising form. No doubt, if we care to
be satisfied with any answer that comes to hand, we
may say that Maimonides, starting out with a predisposition
in favour of the Arabic version of the Aristotelian
philosophy, and a sternly logical mind, could
not stop half-way, or fail to see the logical consequences
of Aristotelianism. But when we observe how, with a
devotion far greater than that of his non-Jewish teachers,
he set himself to develop and extend the idea of the
// File: b198.png
.pn +1
supremacy of reason till it became a complete, all-embracing
theory of life; and when we remember also
his love for the teachings of Judaism, which ought to
have induced in him a disposition not to extend the
empire of reason, but to restrict it: we are forced to
confess that logic alone could never have produced this
phenomenon. There must have been some psychological
force, some inner motive power, to make Maimonides
so extreme and uncompromising a champion of reason.
We shall discover what this motive power was, I
think, if we take account of the political position of the
Jews at that time.
It was a time when religious fanaticism was rife
among the Moslems. In many countries to profess
another religion meant death, and large numbers of
Jews, who could with difficulty change their place of
abode, accepted Mohammedanism, though but outwardly.
One of these countries was Southern Spain, the birthplace
of Maimonides, who was a boy of thirteen when
religious persecution broke out in that country. It may
or may not be true, as recent historians maintain, that
he and his father and the whole family changed their
religion under compulsion: the question has not yet
been definitely settled. But there is no doubt that even
if he was saved by some means from an open change of
faith, he was at any rate forced to conceal his Judaism,
for fear of oppression, so long as he lived in Spain and
in Fez (where religious persecution first started, and
fanaticism had its stronghold). It was only in Egypt
that his troubles ceased, and when he reached Egypt
he was already about thirty years of age. This, then,
was the terrible position in which Maimonides spent his
years of development. He was surrounded by lying
// File: b199.png
.pn +1
and religious hypocrisy; Judaism had to hide from the
light of day; its adherents had to wear a mask whenever
they came out of their homes into the open. And
why? Because Mohammed had called himself a prophet,
had performed miracles, according to his followers, to
win their faith, and by virtue of his prophetic power had
promulgated a new Law and revealed new truths, which
all men were bound to believe, although they were contrary
to reason. This state of things was bound to
make a profound impression on a young man like
Maimonides, with his fine nature and his devotion to
truth. He could not but feel every moment the tragedy
of such a life; and therefore he could not but become
violently opposed to the source of religious fanaticism—to
that blind faith in the truth of prophecy which relies
on supernatural “evidence,” and despises the evidence
of reason. It was this blind faith that led the Moslems
to force the Jews into accepting the teaching of the new
prophet; and it was this that led many of these very
Jews, after they had gradually become accustomed to
their new situation, to doubt of their Judaism and ask
themselves why they should not be able to believe in
Mohammed’s prophecy, just as they believed in that of
Moses. If Moses had performed miracles, then surely
Mohammed might have done the same; and how could
they decide between the one teaching and the other with
such certainty as to pronounce one true and the other
false?[#]
These impressions, which were constantly influencing
Maimonides’ development in his childhood and youth,
// File: b200.png
.pn +1
were bound to swing him violently over to the other
side, to the side of reason. Ultimately he was led to
subject man—and God too, if one may say so—to that
supreme ruler: because Judaism could trust reason
never to allow any new prophet with his new teaching
to work it harm. When once Judaism had accepted the
supremacy of reason and handed over to reason the seal
of truth, it would never again be difficult to show by
rational proof that the first divine religion was also the
only divine religion, never to be displaced or altered
till the end of time; and then, even if ten thousand
prophets like Mohammed came and performed miracles
beyond telling, we should never believe in their new
teaching, because one proof of reason is stronger than
all the proofs of prophecy.[#]
Perhaps, too, Maimonides’ rationalism is traceable to
yet another cause, which lies like the first in the situation
of the forced converts of that period. These men were
no doubt able to observe the Jewish law within their
own homes; the Moslems did not, like the Christians
later, invent an Inquisition to pry into every hole and
corner. None the less, Maimonides himself makes it
clear that the Jews were often compelled to break the
commandments of their Law, when they could not
observe them without arousing suspicion in the minds
of the authorities. This naturally caused the unfortunate
Jews great distress, and drove some of them to
despair. What, they asked themselves, was the use of
// File: b201.png
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remaining true to their ancestral faith at heart, if they
could not in practice keep clear of transgressions both
great and small, and must in any case merit the pains
of hell?[#] It is reasonable, therefore, to suppose that
this painful feeling also helped to lead Maimonides—though
unconsciously—towards the doctrine of the
supremacy of reason, which teaches that man’s “ultimate
perfection does not include any action or good conduct,
but only knowledge”[#]—thus implying that man may
win salvation by attaining to true opinions, though he is
sometimes forced in practice to transgress the commands
of religion.
However that may be, whether for these reasons or for
others, we do find that Maimonides had his system perfected
and arranged in all its details even in his early
days, when he first came out of his study into public life,
and that he made scarcely any change in it from that
time till the day of his death.[#] All his efforts went to
the propagation of his teaching among his people, and
to the endeavour to repair by its means all the shortcomings
which he found in contemporary Judaism.
These shortcomings were great indeed. Judaism, as
Maimonides found it, was by no means fulfilling its
function as “the divine religion.” It was not “true
opinions” that the people derived from Judaism: on
the contrary, they had come, through a literal acceptance
of all that it taught, to hold false ideas about God
and man, and had therefore by its means been removed
// File: b202.png
.pn +1
still further from perfection. Even the practical duties
of morality and religion could not easily be learnt by the
people generally from their religious writings. For in
order to deduce practice from theory it was necessary
to navigate the great ocean of the Talmud, and to spend
years on minute and tangled controversies—a task for
the few only, not for the masses. Here, then, was an
odd state of things. The whole purpose of religion was
to improve society at large, to speak to the masses in a
language which they understood; but if the masses could
not understand the language of religion, and could learn
from it neither true opinions nor practical duties, then
religion was not fulfilling its function in society, and
its existence was useless.
This state of affairs produced in Maimonides, while
he was still young, an ardent desire to stand in the
breach and make Judaism fit to fulfil the double function—theoretical
and practical—which it had as the only
“divine religion.” For this purpose it was necessary
on the one hand to show the whole people, in a form
suited to its comprehension, the “true opinions” contained
in the Torah, and on the other hand to rescue
the practical commandments from the ocean of Talmudic
disputation and to teach them in a short and simple
manner, so that they should be easily remembered and
become familiar to the people.
But in those early days Maimonides had not the
courage to strike out a new line and to present the whole
content of religion in an entirely fresh manner in conformity
with his philosophical system. Hence he chose
a line which was already familiar, and decided to supply
the need of his own age by the help of a book which in
its time had been intended to fulfil a somewhat similar
// File: b203.png
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purpose—the Mishnah. Thus it was in the form of a
Commentary on the Mishnah that he tried to give his
contemporaries what they lacked: to wit, clear doctrine
and a plain rule of practice. Wherever the Mishnah
leaves a point in doubt, he gives the decision laid down
in the Talmud; and wherever the Mishnah hints at some
theoretical opinion, he takes advantage of the opportunity
to explain the “true opinions.”[#] This latter
process was, of course, especially important to him;
and he sometimes expatiates on the subject at much
greater length than is usual in a Commentary of the
ordinary kind.[#] Thus he was able to introduce into his
Commentary, besides a mass of scattered notes, complete
essays on questions of faith and philosophy in the
form of Introductions to different sections of the Mishnah.[#]
Maimonides gave a great deal of work to this Commentary,
which he began and finished in his years of
trouble and wandering. In the result he produced a
masterpiece, which remains to this day superior to all
later Commentaries on the Mishnah. But he did not
achieve the principal object for which he took so much
trouble: he did not make religion effective. His Commentary
did not become widely known, and made no
great impression; still less did it bring about a revolution
in popular opinion, as its author hoped that it
would. And it failed of its object on the practical as
// File: b204.png
.pn +1
well as on the theoretical side. Many of the later laws,
which have no basis in the Mishnah, could not be
included in it; and those that were included were scattered
about in no proper order, because the Mishnah
itself has no strict order.
But as Maimonides grew older and reached middle
life, years brought him wider knowledge and greater
confidence in himself. This self-confidence gave him
courage and decided him to approach his goal by another
road. He would produce a work of striking originality,
such as no Jew had ever produced before.
So he set to work on his Mishneh Torah. Instead
of a Commentary on the Mishnah of R. Jehudah,
Maimonides now produced a Mishnah of his own, new
in content as in arrangement.[#] Here he sets forth all
the practical laws of religion and morality and all the
“true opinions” in the form best adapted to the understanding
of ordinary men, in beautiful and clear language
and in perfect logical order. Everything is put in its
right place; decisions are given without hair-splitting
arguments; opinions are set out untrammelled by
arguments or proofs. In a word, the book presents all
that the divine religion ought to give in order to fulfil
its function, and presents it in precisely the right
manner.[#]
// File: b205.png
.pn +1
This time Maimonides was justified in supposing that
he had fulfilled his duty to his people and his religion,
and had attained the end which he had set before himself.
Within a short time this great book spread
through the length and breadth of Jewry, and helped
considerably not only to make the practical commandments
more widely known, but also to purify and transform
popular religious notions. Views distinguished
by their freedom and their antagonism to current
religious ideas appeared here in the innocent guise of
canonical dicta; and as they were couched in the
language of the Mishnah and in the familiar terminology
of the old religious literature, people did not realise
how far they were being carried, but swallowed the new
ideas almost without resistance. If the dose was
accepted not as pure philosophy, but as religious dogma,
that was precisely what Maimonides intended: for
according to his system religion was to teach philosophical
truth to the masses in the guise of “divine”
truth which needed no proof.
But Maimonides’ work was not yet completed. In
the Mishneh Torah he had reformed religion so far as
its social function was concerned: that is to say, so far
as the needs of the common people demanded. He had
still to reform it from the point of view of the function
of society itself: that is to say, to meet the needs of the
chosen few. For the common people it was necessary
to clothe philosophical truth in religious garb; for the
// File: b206.png
.pn +1
few it was necessary to do just the reverse—to discover
and expose the philosophical truth that lay beneath the
religious garb. For this minority, consisting of those
whom “human reason had attracted to abide within its
sphere”—who had learnt and understood the prevailing
philosophy of the time with all its preambles and its
proofs—could not help seeing the deep gulf between
philosophy and Judaism in its literal acceptation. It
was impossible to hide the inner contradiction from
such men by means of a superficial gloss, or to harmonise
discrepancies of detail by a generalisation. What then
should one of these men do if he were not only a
philosopher, but also “a religious man who has been
trained to believe in the truth of our Law”? He must
always be in a state of “perplexity and anxiety.” “If
he be guided solely by reason ... he would consider
that he had rejected the fundamental principles of the
Law; ... and if, instead of following his reason, he
abandon its guidance altogether, it would still appear
that his religious convictions had caused him loss and
injury. For he would then be left with those errors
[i.e., those derived from a literal interpretation of
Scripture], and would be a prey to fear and anxiety,
constant grief and great perplexity.”[#]
If we remember Maimonides’ conception of the
“actualisation” of intellect, and how it obtains independent
existence through understanding the Ideas, we
shall see that he was bound to regard this perplexity of
the “perfect individuals” as being in itself not merely
something undesirable, but a grave danger from the
point of view of the supreme end of mankind. For how
could these perplexed men attain to the summit of perfection,
// File: b207.png
.pn +1
to “acquired intellect,” if they doubted the
truth of reason because it did not square with the truths
of religion, with the result that subject and object could
not be united in them and become a single, indivisible
whole? If the divine teaching itself brings “loss and
injury” to the chosen few, the harm that it does more
than outweighs the good that it has done in improving
the multitude and thus removing social obstacles from
the path of the few.
This grave evil required a remedy; the “perplexed”
had to be satisfied that they could devote themselves
peacefully to the acquisition of the Ideas, without being
disturbed by the thought that in so doing they were
rejecting the fundamental principles of the Law. This
was the task which Maimonides set himself in his last
book, the Guide for the Perplexed. The book is in a
way his own confession of faith; it shows his perplexed
pupils the method by which he has succeeded in escaping
from his own perplexity. After what has been said
above, we need not here deal with this book at length.
The “true opinions” which it contains have already
been explained in outline; the method by which these
opinions are discovered in the Torah has been broadly
indicated, and the details are not essential to our present
purpose. It does not matter to us how Maimonides
subordinated religion to reason; the important thing is
that he did subordinate it. From this point of view we
may put the whole teaching of the Guide in a single
sentence. “Follow reason and reason only,” he tells
the “perplexed,” “and explain religion in conformity
with reason: for reason is the goal of mankind, and
religion is only a means to the end.”
Had Maimonides written the Guide before he wrote
// File: b208.png
.pn +1
the Mishneh Torah, he would certainly have been pronounced
a heretic, and his book would have made no
deep impression either in the orthodox camp or in that
of the doubters. The orthodox would have turned their
backs on it and have striven to blot out its memory, as
they did with so many other books which they thought
dangerous to their faith; and the doubters would not
have accepted its views as a perfect doctrine, but would
have regarded it as merely an attempt on the part of
one of their fellow-doubters to escape from his perplexity,
and an attempt which in many details had failed
and could not give entire satisfaction.
But in fact the Guide was written after the Mishneh
Torah, when Maimonides was already considered the
greatest exponent of the Law, and enjoyed an unequalled
reputation throughout the Diaspora. Hence even the
Guide could not dethrone him from his eminence. Willingly
or unwillingly, his contemporaries accepted this
further gift at his hands. The believers stormed and
raged among themselves, but did not dare to attack
Maimonides openly so long as he lived. The doubters
welcomed the book with open arms; they did not stop
to test or criticise, but drank eagerly of the comforting
draught for which their souls had been thirsting. It was
not some sophist, but the greatest sage in Israel, the
light of the Exile, who went before them like a pillar of
fire to illumine their path. How could they but be
satisfied with such a guide?
But things changed when Maimonides’ death freed
the zealots from the restraint of fear. A fierce conflict
broke out about him, and raged for a hundred years.
The religious leaders, long accustomed to ban every
book that did not suit their views, could not possess their
// File: b209.png
.pn +1
souls in silence when they saw, for the first time in
Jewish history, that revolutionary books like the Guide
and the Book of Science were spread abroad without let
or hindrance, and were more popular and more esteemed
by the people at large than almost any of the other
books which the teachers and sages of Israel had placed
in the treasury of Judaism.[#] The details of this conflict
are familiar to scholars, and it is not my intention here
to write the history of that period. But it is worth
pointing out that most of Maimonides’ opponents at
that time did not recognise clearly the fundamental
change which he had introduced into Judaism. No doubt
they all felt that his teaching meant a complete revolution
in the national outlook; but they did not all understand
what was the pivotal issue of the revolution. For
the most part they merely pointed to certain details in
which they found heresy, such as the denial of resurrection,
of hell and paradise, and so forth. Only a few
of them understood that Maimonides’ teaching was
revolutionary not because of his attitude on this or that
particular question, but because he dethroned religion
altogether from the supreme judgment-seat, and put
reason in its place: because he made it his basic principle
that “whenever a Scripture is contradicted by
proof we do not accept the Scripture,” but explain it
in accordance with reason.[#]
This emancipation of reason from its subordination to
an external authority is the great and eternal achievement
// File: b210.png
.pn +1
which has so endeared Maimonides to all those of
our people who have striven after knowledge and the
light. The theoretical system at which Maimonides
worked so hard from his youth to the end of his life has
long been swept away, together with the Arabic metaphysics
on which it was based. But the practical consequence
of that system—the emancipation of reason—remains,
and has left its mark on the history of Jewish
thought up to the present day. Every Jew who has left
the old school and traversed the hard and bitter road
that leads from blind faith to free reason must have met
with Maimonides at the beginning of his journey, and
must have found in him a source of strength and support
for his first steps, which are the hardest and the most
dangerous. This road was traversed not only by Mendelssohn,
but also by Spinoza,[#] and before and after them
by countless thinkers, many of whom won golden reputations
within Judaism or outside it.
S. D. Luzzatto’s criticism of Maimonides, on the
ground that his views on the nature of the soul led to
the degradation of reason in Jewish thought, is superficial.
Maimonides, according to him, “laid down
what we must believe and what we must not believe,”
whereas before his time there was no rigid dogma, “and
there was no ban on opinions to prevent each thinker
from believing what he thought true.”[#] Now this is
not the place to show how far Luzzatto was from
historical accuracy when he credited pre-Maimonidean
Judaism with freedom of thought. To understand the
true nature of that freedom we need only remember how
// File: b211.png
.pn +1
Maimonides’ opponents—who were certainly faithful to
the older Judaism—spoke and acted in the period of conflict.
But as regards Maimonides himself, Luzzatto
overlooks the fact that, while his psychological theory
no doubt led him to regard certain opinions as obligatory,
he placed the source of the obligation no longer in any
external authority, but precisely in human reason. That
being so, the obligation could not involve a ban on
opinions. For as soon as other thinkers are persuaded
that human reason does not make these particular
opinions obligatory, they are bound, in conformity with
Maimonides’ own system, to believe each what he thinks
true, and not what Maimonides erroneously thought
true. In other words: if we wish to judge Maimonides’
system from the point of view of its effects on Judaism,
we must look not at the Thirteen Articles which he laid
down as obligatory principles in accordance with that
system, but at the one principle which underlies all
others—that of the supremacy of reason. A philosopher
who frees reason from authority in general must at the
same time free it from his own authority; he cannot
regard any view as obligatory except so long as it is
made obligatory by reason. Imagine a man put in
prison and given the key: can he be said to have lost
his liberty?[#]
// File: b212.png
.pn +1
.sp 2
.h3
IV
.sp 2
Here ends what I wished to say about the supremacy
of reason in Maimonides’ system; and here I might conclude
this Essay. But I should like to add some
remarks on another supremacy—on that of the national
sentiment. In these days we cannot discuss the thought
of one of our great men, even if there are seven hundred
years between him and us, without wanting to know
whether and to what extent his thought reveals traces
of that sentiment which we now regard as the most vital
element in the life of Judaism.
But this question really contains two different questions,
which have to be answered differently so far as
Maimonides is concerned. The first question is: Did
Maimonides recognise the supremacy of the national
sentiment in the spiritual life of his people, and allow
it consciously and of set purpose an important place in
the teaching of Judaism? The second is: Do we find
traces of the supremacy of the national sentiment—as
an unconscious and spontaneous instinct—in the
mentality of Maimonides himself?[#]
The first question cannot be answered in the affirmative:
the evidence is rather on the negative side. Had
// File: b213.png
.pn +1
Maimonides recognised clearly the strength of the
national sentiment as a force in Jewish life, and its
importance as a factor in the development of Judaism,
he would undoubtedly have used it, as Jehudah Halevi
did, to explain the numerous features of Judaism which
have their origin in the national sentiment. At any
rate, he would not have endeavoured to invest those
features with a universalistic character. For instance,
in seeking reasons for the commandments he could
easily have found that many of them have no purpose
but to strengthen the feeling of national unity; and he
would not have said of the Festivals that they “promote
the good feeling that men should have to each other in
their social and political relations.”[#] Nor would he
have said, in dealing with the future redemption, that
“the wise men and the prophets only longed for the
days of the Messiah in order that they might be free to
study the Torah and its wisdom, without any oppression
or interference, and so might win eternal life.”[#] No
doubt we do sometimes find in his Letters, and especially
in those that were written to encourage his people in
times of national trouble, feeling references to the
fortunes and the mission of the Jewish people.[#] But
despite these isolated and casual references, only one
conclusion can be drawn from the general tenor of
Maimonides’ teaching: that he did not recognise the
value of the national element in Jewish life, and did not
allow that element due weight in his exposition of
// File: b214.png
.pn +1
Judaism.[#] On the other hand, various indications show
that in Maimonides himself the national sentiment was,
without his knowledge, a powerful force: so much so,
that it sometimes actually drove him from the straight
road of logic and reason, and entangled him—of all
men—in contradictions which had no ground or justification
in his theory. We shall always find in the
psychology of even the most logical thinker, despite his
efforts to give to reason the undivided empire of his
thought, some remote corner to which its sway cannot
extend; and we shall always find a rebel band of ideas,
which reason cannot control, breaking out from that
point of vantage to disturb the order of its realm. Of
this truth Maimonides may serve as an example. It is
particularly evident in regard to the dogmas of Judaism
which he laid down, accompanied by a declaration that
“if any man rejects one of these fundamental beliefs,
he severs himself from the community and denies a
principle of Judaism: he is called a heretic and an
unbeliever, and it is right to hate him and to destroy
him.”[#] As we have already seen, it is an inevitable
consequence of Maimonides’ teaching that the dogmas
of religion must be formulated clearly and made
obligatory on the whole people. But in strict accordance
with his system Maimonides ought to have included
among the dogmas only those “true opinions” without
which religion could not have been maintained or have
// File: b215.png
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fulfilled its function. And in fact all his dogmas are of
that character, except only the two last—those which
assert the coming of the Messiah and the resurrection.
How, then, did he come to include these two?
This question was raised soon after Maimonides’ own
time (especially in regard to the belief in the Messiah);
and his critics rightly pointed out that before laying
down dogmas one must define exactly what is meant by
a dogma, so that we may know how to distinguish
between what may and what may not be properly so
called.[#] It is indeed strange that Maimonides forgot so
elementary a rule of logic, and still more strange when
we remember that elsewhere, in enumerating the six
hundred and thirteen commandments of the Law, he was
fully alive to the necessity of explaining first of all “the
principles which it is proper to take as a criterion,” in
order to select from the multitude of ordinances in the
Torah those capital commandments from which the rest
are derived. For this reason he fell foul of the earlier
enumerations, which he regarded as ignorantly made
and full of mistakes; and for his own part he first laid
down fourteen “principles,” and then proceeded to
enumerate the commandments according to those principles.[#]
But if this procedure was necessary in dealing
with the practical commandments, surely it was even
more necessary in the case of the dogmas of faith. How,
then, did it happen that Maimonides embarked on so
important a task as the enumeration of dogmas without
first laying down some principle by which to guide himself?
It seems to me that we have to do here not with a
casual mistake, but with one of those facts which
// File: b216.png
.pn +1
indicate that the national sentiment was strong enough
in Maimonides to conquer even logic. If Maimonides
had set out to define the term “dogma” in its purely
religious sense, he could not have found the slightest
justification for regarding the national belief in a future
redemption as a dogma. But he felt that a national
hope was necessary to the existence of the nation; and
without the existence of the nation the continuance of
its religion is unthinkable. It was this feeling that made
him for once oblivious of logic, and prevented him from
clearing up in his own mind the nature of religious
dogmas in general, so that he might be able to include
among them that national belief on which the nation
depends for its existence, although it has no direct
relation to the maintenance of religion as such.[#]
So also with the belief in resurrection, by which our
people has always set great store in its exile. Every
individual Jew has suffered the pain of exile not merely
in his own person, but as a member of his people; his
indignation and grief have been excited not by his
private trouble only, but by the national trouble. He
could find personal consolation in the hope of eternity
in paradise; but this did not blunt the edge of the
national trouble, which demanded its consolation in the
prospect of a bright future for the nation. In those
days the individual Jew was no longer, as in ancient
times, keenly conscious that successive generations were
made one by the organic life of the nation; and he could
not therefore find consolation in the happiness which
awaited his people at the end of time, but which he himself
would not share. Hence he clung to the belief in
// File: b217.png
.pn +1
resurrection, which offered what he required—a reward
to himself for his individual share of the national grief.
Just as every Jew had participated, during his own lifetime,
in the national sorrow, so would every Jew be
privileged in the future to see with his own eyes the
national consolation and redemption.[#] Thus the belief
in resurrection was complementary to the belief in the
Messiah. United, they gave the people heart and
strength to bear the yoke of exile and to battle successfully
against a sea of troubles, confident that sooner or
later the haven would be reached. When, therefore,
Maimonides found it written in the Mishnah (beginning
of chapter Chelek) that he who denies resurrection forfeits
eternal life, he did not feel any need to explain this
statement in a sense opposed to its literal meaning, as
he usually did when his system so demanded, but took
it just as he found it, and made it a dogma. He satisfied
his heart at the expense of his head.
Strangely enough, Maimonides himself was perplexed
over the question of resurrection, and could not explain
why he clung to a belief which it was not easy to combine
with his own theory of the soul and the future life.
When he formulates the dogmas in his Commentary on
the Mishnah, he passes hurriedly over this one, and dismisses
it in a few words, as though he were afraid that
if he lingered at this point logic would catch him up and
ask awkward questions. In the Mishneh Torah, again,
he does not explain this dogma at all, either at the beginning
of the book, where he deals with the Foundations
of the Law, or at the end, where he discusses the Messianic
Age. This omission led some of his critics to
suspect that he did not really believe in a literal resurrection
// File: b218.png
.pn +1
of the body, but explained it in the sense of the
rebirth of the soul hereafter (on which he enlarges
very often). This suspicion made him very indignant,
and he wrote a whole treatise to prove that he had never
intended to take resurrection in any but its literal sense.
On the contrary, he maintained that the belief must be
accepted literally, and that it was in no way inconsistent
with what he had written or with his general view.[#]
But the arguments in this treatise are all very weak,
and the general impression which it leaves is that he did
not clearly understand his own mind. He felt instinctively
that he could not give up this belief, though it
was foreign to his system; but it was only with great
difficulty that he could explain why he allowed it such
importance. It was, of course, impossible for a man
like Maimonides to admit to himself that he was following
feeling rather than reason. He tried therefore to
justify his standpoint on rational grounds, but without
success.[#]
We find the same struggle between philosophical
system and national sentiment in Maimonides’ attitude
to the Hebrew language. From the point of view of
his system he naturally saw no difference between one
language and another: what matters is the idea, not its
external dress. Hence he lays it down that speech “is
// File: b219.png
.pn +1
not to be forbidden or allowed, loved or despised,
according to the language, but according to the subject.
That which is lofty may be said in whatever language;
that which is mean may not be said in any language.”[#]
Practising what he preached, he wrote most of his books
not in Hebrew, but in Arabic, because he thought that
by being written in the ordinary language of his age and
his surroundings they would be of greater use from the
point of view of their subject-matter. The only book
that he wrote in Hebrew was the Mishneh Torah; and
here also he was guided by practical considerations. He
chose the language of the Mishnah because he wanted
his people to regard the book with respect as a kind of
second Mishnah. The beautiful Mishnaic language
would carry off the “true opinions,” which needed the
help of a sacred language to make them holy and bring
them under the ægis of religion. Thus far Maimonides
the philosopher. But in his letters we find clear indications
that after he had finished his work his national
sentiment proved stronger than his philosophy, and he
regretted that he had not written his other works in
Hebrew as well. Not only that, but he actually thought
of translating them into the national language himself,
so as “to separate that which is precious from that
which is defiled, and to restore stolen goods to their
rightful owner.” But the decline of his powers in old
age did not permit him to carry out this intention, and
the Hebrew translation had to wait for other hands.
Some of it was done in his lifetime; and his letter to the
translator of the Guide shows how pleased he was.[#]
// File: b220.png
.pn +1
But there is really no need to look for the influence of
the national sentiment in particular parts of Maimonides’
work. His work as a whole cannot be fully understood
unless we allow for this sentiment. Of course, as we
have seen, Maimonides’ efforts to improve religion were
the result of his philosophy, which taught him that
religion must be made fit to fulfil its function in the
spheres of theory and practice; and for his own part he
certainly believed that he was actuated solely by this
conviction, and was doing, as needs he must, what
reason demanded of him. But we, who look at things
in the light of modern psychology, which tells us that
intellectual conviction is not sufficient to produce sustained
effort unless it is accompanied by a strong
emotion, whereby the will is roused to conquer all
obstacles—we cannot conceive the possibility of arduous
work without a compelling emotion. And when we look
for the emotion which is most likely to furnish an
explanation in this particular case, we shall find none
except the national sentiment.
For we know, on the one hand, that religious laws
were for Maimonides nothing but an instrument of
education—a means of confirming people in true beliefs
and good habits of life. Moreover, he regarded many
of them (sacrifices and the ceremonial associated with
sacrifices) as merely a necessary evil, designed to restrict
a bad practice which had taken root in the national life
at an early period, and could not be abolished entirely;
and even this justification applied only to the laws as a
whole, while their details, as we saw above, were in his
opinion wholly without meaning or significance. And
yet, holding such views, he worked day and night for
ten years to collect all these laws and arrange them,
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with meticulous exactness, down to their smallest
details. Whoever realises the enormous labour that it
required to get together the mass of legal prescriptions,
scattered over an extensive literature, must admit that
no man can be qualified for the work (even if he recognises
its usefulness from a certain point of view) unless
the work itself has a strong attachment for him. To
see the usefulness of the work is not enough; it must
be a real labour of love. What then can have kept
Maimonides to his task if not the national sentiment,
which made him love his people’s Law and ancient
customs even where his philosophy did not attach to
them any particular importance?
And on the other side, Maimonides could not have
laboured to turn Judaism into a pure philosophy without
the help of the national sentiment. We can understand
the religious philosopher who tries to effect a compromise
between religion and philosophy. The impelling
force is his religious feeling: anxious to save
religion from the danger threatened by rationalism, he
adopts the familiar expedient of dressing religion in the
trappings of philosophy, so as to safeguard its essential
meaning. But when a philosopher starts, as Maimonides
did, with the conviction that there is no room for compromise,
but that religion is compelled, willy-nilly, to
teach only what reason approves and when he labours
indefatigably to purify religious belief of all super-rational
elements, and to turn its essential content into
a pure philosophical system, and all this by long and
devious methods, which reason cannot always approve:
then we are bound to ask what emotion it was that gave
him the strength and the will-power required for so
difficult a task. Religious emotion certainly gained
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nothing from a process by which religion was driven
from its own throne and deprived of its letters patent
as a guide to eternal happiness along a private road of
its own. Philosophical emotion—if the term may be
used—might have gained more if Maimonides had
accepted and prescribed the method adopted by free-thinkers
before and after him—that of leaving faith to
the believing masses and being satisfied for his own part
with reason alone. But the national sentiment did gain
a great deal by the transformation of the Jewish religion—the
only national inheritance which had survived to
unite our scattered people in exile—into philosophical
truth, firmly based on rational and (as Maimonides sincerely
believed) irrefragable proofs, and consequently
secure for all time against assault.
So we come finally to the conclusion that Maimonides,
too, like the other Jewish thinkers, had as the ultimate
aim of his great work (though perhaps he did not realise
it clearly) the shaping of the content and form of Judaism
into a fortress on which the nation could depend for its
continuance in exile. There is only this difference:
that whereas his predecessors held Judaism secure
because it was above reason, Maimonides came and said:
“No! Judaism is secure because it is reason.”
.fn #
\[Maimonides died on the 13th December, 1204.]
.fn-
.fn #
[Jewish Law.]
.fn-
.fn #
[Allusion to well-known speeches at Zionist Congresses.]
.fn-
.fn #
Mishneh Torah, Foundations of the Law, chaps. i.-iv.
.fn-
.fn #
Ibid., chap. iv. 1.
.fn-
.fn #
Guide, Part I., chap. i. [In rendering quotations from the Moreh
Nebuchim (Guide for the Perplexed) the translator has used Dr.
Friedländer’s English version so far as possible.]
.fn-
.fn #
Foundations of the Law, ibid., 7.
.fn-
.fn #
In the upper world Aristotle’s philosophy postulates the existence
of forms divorced from matter: they are the “separate Intelligences,”
which emanate one from another and are eternal (see Foundations of
the Law, ibid., and Guide, Part II., chap. iv.).
.fn-
.fn #
Guide, Part III., chap. viii.
.fn-
.fn #
Foundations of the Law, ibid., 8 and 9.
.fn-
.fn #
Eight Chapters, chap. i.
.fn-
.fn #
See Munk, Le Guide des Egarés, I., pp. 304-8 (note).
.fn-
.fn #
Guide, Part I., chaps. lxx. and lxxii. and passim. For details see
Munk (ibid.), and Dr. Scheyer’s monograph, Das Psychologische
System des Maimonides, Frankfort a/M, 1845.
.fn-
.fn #
Foundations of the Law, chap. iv., 8, 9.
.fn-
.fn #
There is some ground for thinking that Maimonides thought of
the eternal existence after death of the possessors of “acquired
intellect” not as personal, but as a common existence in which they
are all united as a single separate being. See Guide, III., chap.
xxvii., and Foundations, ibid., and chap. ii., 5-6. This has been
pointed out by Dr. Joel in Die Religionsphilosophie des Mose ben
Maimon, Breslau, 1876 (p. 25, note).
.fn-
.fn #
Guide, I., chap. lxviii.
.fn-
.fn #
According to the division of the sciences current in those days, all
this knowledge of true Being is contained in Physics and Metaphysics.
.fn-
.fn #
All this teaching is scattered up and down Maimonides’ works,
partly in explicit statements and partly in hints (see, e.g., Guide,
III., chap. li.). Dr. Scheyer was the first to work out these definitions
in detail (ibid., chap. iii.). In general it must be remembered
that Maimonides nowhere explains his whole system in logical order,
and we are therefore compelled, if we would understand his system
as it was conceived in his mind, to make use of scattered utterances,
hints, and half-sentences written by the way, to explain obscure statements
by others more precise, and to resort freely to inference.
.fn-
.fn #
Guide, III., chap. xiii., and Introduction to Commentary on the
Mishnah, section Zera’im.
.fn-
.fn #
Introduction cited in last note.
.fn-
.fn #
Ibid.
.fn-
.fn #
Guide, III., chap. li. Maimonides does not there emphasise the
difference between practical studies on the one hand and mathematics
and logic on the other, because this is not germane to his purpose at
the moment. But the distinction is necessarily implied.
.fn-
.fn #
Guide, III., chaps. xxvii. and liv.; Hilchoth De’oth, chaps. iii.
and iv.
.fn-
.fn #
Introduction to Zera’im.
.fn-
.fn #
Maimonides’ attitude to perfection of character is most clearly
revealed by the fact that he calls it “bodily perfection,” in contrast
to “perfection of the soul,” which is intellectual perfection (Guide,
III., chap. xxvii.).
.fn-
.fn #
See Hilchoth De’oth, chap. i.; Eight Chapters, chap. iv.
.fn-
.fn #
Guide, III., chap. liv.
.fn-
.fn #
See Eight Chapters, end of chap. iv. and beginning of chap. v.
Lazarus (Ethik des Judentums, I., chap. xiv.) fails to notice this
difference between Aristotle and Maimonides, and therefore finds it
strange that Maimonides introduces Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean
into Jewish ethics.
.fn-
.fn #
Introduction to Zera’im.
.fn-
.fn #
See Guide, III., chaps. xxvii., xxxiv. Maimonides is not explicit
on the relation of the minority to social morality; but his view on this
question is evident from what he says in the chapters quoted, and
passim.
.fn-
.fn #
Eight Chapters, chap. v.
.fn-
.fn #
Guide, II., chap. xxv.
.fn-
.fn #
Guide, II., chaps. xxv. and xvi.
.fn-
.fn #
Maimonides explains his views on the methods of divine revelation
and the nature of prophecy in general, and of the prophecy of Moses
in particular, in several places: especially in Guide, II., chaps.
xxxii.-xlviii., and in Mishneh Torah, section Foundations of the Law,
chap. vii. But for our present purpose we need not enter into these
speculations. It suffices to say that here also he was true to his own
system. The Prophet is for him the most perfect “actual man”;
and the divine inspiration reaches the Prophet through that separate
Intelligence (“active intellect”) which is, according to the philosophical
system adopted by Maimonides, charged with the guidance
of the world and with the raising of all forms (including the form of
the soul) from potentiality to actuality.
.fn-
.fn #
See Guide, III., xxvi.
.fn-
.fn #
Ibid., chaps. xxiii. and xxviii.; see also II., chaps. xxxiv. and xl.
.fn-
.fn #
See Guide, II., chaps. xxxix. and xl.; and especially the Iggereth
Teman.
.fn-
.fn #
All this is explained in many passages throughout Maimonides’
books, which are too numerous to be particularised.
.fn-
.fn #
For the “reasons of the commandments” see Guide, III., chaps.
xxvi.-xlix.
.fn-
.fn #
For instance: there is a reason for sacrifices in general. “But
we cannot say why one offering should be a lamb, whilst another is
a ram; and why a fixed number of them should be brought....
You ask why must a lamb be sacrificed and not a ram? but the same
question would be asked, why a ram had been commanded instead of
a lamb, so long as one particular kind is required. The same is to
be said as to the question why were seven lambs sacrificed and not
eight; the same question might have been asked if there were eight.”
Guide, III.,