the prosperity of thousands more, and induced tens of thousands to turn their backs on the land of their birth. This calamity brutally aroused the Jews from their hundred-year-old illusions and brought them again to a sense of reality. A Russian Jew, Dr. Pinsker, at that time wrote a small pamphlet entitled, "Auto-Emancipation," which was already a prelude to the modern political Zionism, and sketched all its motives without however developing them symphonically. He, at any rate, it was who gave its watchword to the whole movement: "The Jews are no mere religious community, they are a nation. They desire again to live in their own country as a united people. Their rejuvenation must be at the same time economical, physical, intellectual, and moral."

The Jewish youth of the middle schools and universities of Russia were profoundly affected by Pinsker's arguments. They began to found national Jewish societies. A number of students who studied at foreign universities became in their new surroundings apostles of Dr. Pinsker's idea, and found adherents here and there, for the most part among the young Jews of Vienna. Others preferred action to word, example to sermon, abandoned their studies, and emigrated to Palestine in order to become peasants there,—Jewish peasants on historically Jewish soil. Deeply moved by this idealism of a peculiarly enthusiastic élite, cooler headed Jews in Russia and Germany began also to form societies in order to support from a distance the Palestine settlements of the Jewish pioneers. This took place without any combined plan and with no clear notion of the aim and the means. The societies were not conscious of the fact that they felt and acted as Zionists. They did not perceive the connection between the Jewish colonization of Palestine and the future of the whole Jewish nation. It was in their case rather an instinctive movement in which all kinds of obscure feelings are dimly discernible,—piety, archæological-historical sentimentality, charity, and pride of pedigree. At any rate, the minds of the Jews were prepared, the feeling was in the air, Jewdom was ripe for a change.

As is always the case in such historical moments, the man also appeared whose mission it was to express clearly the ideas obscurely felt by many, and to proclaim loudly the word they were waiting to hear. This man was Dr. Theodor Herzl. He published in the autumn of 1896 a concisely written booklet, "Der Judenstaat" (The Jewish State), which proclaimed, with a determination that till then had no precedent, the fact that the Jews are a people who demand for themselves all the rights of a people, and who desire to settle in a country where they can lead a free and complete political existence.

"Der Judenstaat" has become the real starting point of political Zionism,—the starting point, not the programme. Herzl's book is still the subjective work of a solitary thinker who speaks in his own name. Many details in it are literature. It is not easy to draw a sharp boundary line between the sober earnest of the social politician and the imagination of the prophetical poet. The real programme had to be a collective work which was certainly based on Herzl's book, and inspired by Herzl's visions of the future, but which rid itself of all fantastic details, and was built up solely from the elements of reality.

Herzl's book was at once greeted by tens of thousands of Jews, chiefly the young, as an act of redemption. It was not to remain merely printed paper, but should be transformed into a practical creation. New societies were founded everywhere, no longer with a view of the slow, petty settlement of Palestine by means of groups of Jews creeping surreptitiously as it were into the country, but by the preparation for an emigration "en masse" into the Holy Land, based on a formal treaty with the Turkish Government, guaranteed by the Great Powers, by which the former should accord the new settlers the right of self-government.

The premises of political Zionism are that there is a Jewish nation. This is just the point denied by the assimilation Jews, and the spiritless, unctuous, prating rabbis in their pay. Dr. Herzl saw that the first task he had to fulfil was the organizing of a manifestation which should bring before the world, and the Jewish people itself, in modern, comprehensible form the fact of its national existence. He convoked a Zionist congress, which in spite of the most furious attacks and most unscrupulous acts of violence,—the Jewish community of Munich where the congress was originally intended to be held protested against its meeting in that town,—assembled for the first time in Basel, the end of August, 1897, and consisted of two hundred and four selected representatives of the Zionist Jews of both hemispheres.

The first Zionist congress solemnly proclaimed in the face of the attentive world that the Jews are a nation, and that they do not desire to be absorbed by other nations. It vowed to work for the emancipation of that part of the Jewish race which is deprived of all rights, and which is dragging out its existence in undeserved misery, and to prepare for it a brighter future. It puts its aims on record in a programme unanimously adopted with the greatest enthusiasm. This ran as follows:—

"Zionism works to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine guaranteed by public law.

"For the reaching of this goal the congress proposes to adopt the following means:—

"(1.) The well-regulated promotion of the settlement of Palestine by Jewish agriculturists, artisans, and manufacturers.

"(2.) The organization and knitting together of the whole Jewish community by means of proper local and general institutions, in accordance with the law of the different countries.

"(3.) The strengthening of the Jewish self-respect and national consciousness.

"(4.) Preparatory steps for obtaining the consent of the governments, which is necessary for the achievement of the aims of Zionism."

IV.

The first congress did not separate without having created a lasting organization. It elected a "Great Committee of Action," in which all countries with a somewhat considerable Jewish population are represented, and which in its turn selected a smaller "permanent committee" with its headquarters in Vienna, under the presidency of Dr. Herzl. It was followed in the three ensuing years by three further congresses, in 1898 and 1899, again in Basel, and in 1900 in London. The number of the delegates rose in 1898 to two hundred and eighty, in 1899 to three hundred and seventy, and in 1900 to four hundred and twenty. At every succeeding congress the regulations for election were more strictly enforced, the mandates more closely examined, and at the present moment the congress, which has become a permanent institution of the Zionist Jewdom, and which met for the fifth time in December, 1901, again in Basel, can with justice claim to be the real representative of one hundred and eighty thousand electors.

He who desires to know what the Jews who have been represented at the congress have done up to the present time to realize the programme of Zionism drawn up by the first congress, has only to compare the various points of this programme with the facts we are going to record.

"(1.) The well-regulated promotion of the settlement of Palestine by Jewish agriculturists, artisans, and manufacturers."

Zionism rejects on principle all colonization on a small scale, and the idea of "sneaking" into Palestine. The Zionists have therefore devoted themselves