It promises its adherents no miracles; on the contrary, it continually impresses on them that their emancipation from a situation they find intolerable can only be the result of their own work, the fruit of their long, strenuous, and combined efforts.

People declare Zionism to be a dream, and deny that its practical realization is possible. To objections of this category the Zionists have a hundred times given a sufficient answer. This simple negative criticism can be passed over. Its only real refutation is in deeds, such as the Zionists have already performed and as they intend further to perform.

The one point which probably forever excludes the possibility of an understanding between Zionist and non-Zionist Jews is the question of the Jewish nationality. Whoever maintains and believes that the Jews are not a nation can indeed be no Zionist; he cannot join a movement which is only justified when it is admitted that it desires to create normal conditions of existence for a people living and suffering under abnormal conditions. He who, on the contrary, is convinced that the Jews are a people must necessarily become Zionist, as only the return to their own country can save the everywhere hated, persecuted, and oppressed Jewish nation from physical and intellectual destruction.

Many Jews, especially those of the West, have, in their heart of hearts, completely broken with Judaism, and they will probably soon do so openly, and if they do not break away, their children or grandchildren will. These desire to be entirely absorbed by their Christian fellow-countrymen. They resent it as a great annoyance when other Jews proclaim that they are a people apart, and desire to bring about an unequivocal separation between themselves and the other nations. Their great and constant fear is to be denounced as strangers in the land of their birth, of which they are free citizens. They fear that this will be more than ever the case, if a large section of the Jewish people openly claim for themselves rights as an autonomous nation, and still worse, if anywhere in the world a political and intellectual center of Judaism should really be created, in which millions of Jews would be grouped together, united as a nation.

All these feelings on the part of the assimilation Jews are comprehensible. From their standpoint they are justified. These Jews, however, have no right to expect that Zionism should for their sake commit suicide. The Jews who are happy and contented in the land of their birth, and who indignantly reject the suggestion of abandoning it, are about a sixth of the Jewish nation, say two millions out of twelve. The other five sixths, or ten millions, feel themselves profoundly unhappy in the countries where they reside, and they have every reason for doing so. These ten millions cannot be called upon to submit forever unresistingly to their thraldom, and to renounce every effort for redemption from their misery, merely in order that the comfort of two million happy and contented Jews may not be disturbed.

The Zionists are, moreover, firmly convinced that the misgivings of the assimilation Jews are unfounded. The reassembling of the Jewish people in Palestine will not have the consequences which they fear. When there is again a Jewish country, the Jews will have the choice of emigrating thither, or of remaining in their present home. Many will doubtless remain, and will prove by their choice that they prefer the land of their birth to their kindred and to their national soil. It is barely possible that the Anti-Semites will still throw the scornful and perfidious "stranger!" in their face. But the real Christians among their fellow-countrymen, those who think and feel according to the teaching and examples of the Holy Writ, will be convinced that they do not regard themselves as strangers in the land of their birth, and will then rightly comprehend the real meaning of their voluntary renunciation of a return to a land of the Jews, and of their fidelity to their homes and to their Christian neighbors.

The Zionists know that they have undertaken a work of unexampled difficulty. Never before has the effort been made to transplant, peacefully, in a short space of time, to another soil, several million people from various countries; never has it been attempted to transform millions of physically degenerate proletarians, without trade or profession, into agriculturists and cattle breeders, to bring townbred hucksters and trades people, agents, and men of sedentary occupation again into contact with the plough and the mother earth. It will be necessary to accustom Jews of different origins to one another, to train them practically to national unity, and at the same time to overcome the superhuman obstacles of difference of language, unequal civilization, and of the manners of thought, prejudices, likes, and dislikes of foreign nations, brought severally from the lands of their birth.

What gives the Zionists the courage to begin this labor of Hercules is the conviction that they are doing a necessary and useful work, a work of love and civilization, a work of justice and wisdom. They desire to save eight to ten millions of their kindred from intolerable suffering. They desire to free the nations among whom they now vegetate from a presence which is considered disagreeable. They wish to deprive Anti-Semitism—which everywhere lowers public morals and develops the very worst instincts—of its victim. They wish to make unquestionable producers out of the Jews at present reproached with being parasites. They desire to fertilize with their sweat and till with their hands a country that is to-day a desert, until it is again the flowering garden it has once been. Thus will Zionism in an equal degree serve the unhappy Jew and the Christian peoples, civilization and the economy of the world; and the services which it can render, and wishes to render, are great enough to justify its hope that the Christian world, too, will appreciate them, and support the movement with its active sympathy.

ANTI-SEMITISM
IN EUROPE

BY

Dr. Gustav Gottheil

THE TRUE NATURE OF ANTI-SEMITISM IN EUROPEToC

Anti-Semitism would be simply ridiculous if it were not so terribly in earnest. People who make that word a war cry upon a whole race ought to know its meaning, especially if it is to express the chief reason for their hostility. Before they prefix the "anti" to a word they should be sure that they understand the "pro," lest they be found to fight shadows merely, specters of their own creation. But how far is this the case? How many ever tried to learn the sense of the designation under which they have enrolled themselves? Suppose we ask, "What does Semitism mean?" Only this, must be our answer,—that it is a summing up of the ruling dispositions, habits, mental endowments, and moral peculiarities of all the races comprised under the name of Semites, so named from their supposed descent from the eldest of the three sons of Noah. So