Gustav Gottheil

“ They care, in the measure of their strength, for the amelioration of the hygiene of the Jewish proletariat, for its economic improvement by means of association and solidarity, for well-directed education of children, and for the instruction of the women. They give the young students a goal for their efforts and an ideal in life. They preach the duty of leading a faultless, spiritual life, the rejection of a crude materialism, into which the assimilation Jews, on account of the want of a worthy ideal, are only too apt to sink, and strict self-control in word and deed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Zionist regards it as contemptible to conceal his nationality. He wishes to be recognized as a Jew, and as he always behaves himself [34] in a natural, unaffected way, plays no comedy of imitation, wishes to deceive nobody about his extraction and identity, intrudes upon no one under a false flag, his relations to his Christian neighbors and fellow-countrymen are sounder, truer, more frank and dignified than those of the assimilation Jew, who makes painful and useless efforts, which disgust every Christian possessing a modicum of good taste, to hide the fact that he is a Jew. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I have taken pains to show, in as brief and as objective a manner as possible, what Zionism is, what it desires to do, how it came into being, and how it has developed up to the present. I have also repeatedly mentioned that its most violent opponents have arisen from the Jewish community.
Many of them content themselves with libeling and insulting the leaders of the Zionist movement. This kind of hostility they who are vilified can afford to despise. ”

“ Be it well understood; the Zionism analyzed above is that of the educated and free Jews,—the Jewish élite. The uneducated mass, clinging to the old traditions, is Zionist without much reflection, from feeling, from instinct, from distress, and yearning. They suffer too much [21] from the hardships of life, from the hatred of the peoples, from legal disabilities, and social outlawry; they feel that they cannot hope for any lasting amelioration of their situation so long as they must live as a powerless minority among a hostile majority. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Mendelssohn teaching logically developed in the first half of the nineteenth century into the "Reform," which deliberately broke with Zionism. For the Reform Jew, the word Zion had just as little meaning as the word dispersion. He does not feel himself in any diaspora. He denies that there is a Jewish people and that he is a member of it. He desires only to belong to the people in whose midst he lives. For him Judaism is a purely religious conception which has nothing whatever to do with nationality. The land of his birth is his fatherland, and he will know of no other. ”

“ Besides these opponents of a lower type, there are others who do not merely lie and slander, but also seek to argue. They delight in comparing the apostles of Zionism with the false Messiahs like the notorious Sabbathai Levi, who have appeared only too often in Jewish history, and who have always done the greatest mischief to the Jewish people they have deceived. To compare Zionism with the vagaries or impostures of false Messiahs of the Sabbathai Levi kind, presupposes great foolishness or great bad faith. Zionism is precisely characterized by the complete absence of any mystical element. ”

“ Those whom the [72] commercial standing of the Jews, here and elsewhere, has not yet cured of this slanderous prejudice will not be converted by my pleading. Envy is an incurable disease; jealousy makes blind, and the common saying is surely true, that none are so blind as those who will not see. But neither have I the least desire to hide or gloss over our real failings and shortcomings. Those who cannot rest on their own real merits and accept the blame for their undeniable demerits must not dare to challenge the judgment of the world. ”

“ Anti-Semitism has also taught many educated Jews the way back to their people. It has had the effect of a sharp trial which the weak cannot [20] stand, but from which the strong emerge stronger or more confident in themselves. It is not correct to say that Zionism is but a "gesture of truculence" or an act of desperation against Anti-Semitism. It is true that more than one educated Jew has been moved only by Anti-Semitism to throw in his lot again with Jewdom, and he would again fall away if his Christian fellow-countrymen would receive him anew in a friendly spirit. ”

“ These new Jews shrug their shoulders at that twaddle which has been the fashion among rabbis and literati for the last hundred years, and which boasts of a "Mission of Jewdom," said to consist in this, that the Jews must live forever in dispersion among the peoples in order to act as their teachers and models of morality, and to educate them gradually to pure rationalism, to a general brotherhood of mankind, and to an ideal cosmopolitanism. ”

“ No man becomes a drunkard with wife and children and aged parents near him for guardian angels. The greatest difficulty the Jewish reformation has to face is what to substitute for the old ceremonials where they have become impracticable, and thus to preserve the essentially domestic character of the ancient faith. Is it thinkable that the Jew would be less objectionable to his surroundings were he to lose his sturdy horror of intemperance, and thus "assimilate" more freely with his neighbors of different faiths? ”

“ They desire to become a nation, to rejuvenate themselves by close contact with mother earth, and to become once more the masters of their destiny. This Zionist mass is still in part not quite free from mystical tendencies. It allows its Zionism to be pervaded, to a certain extent, by Messianic reminiscences, and blends it with religious emotions. They have certainly a clear idea of the aim, the reassembling of the Jewish nation, but not of the means. ”

“ Even a superficial glance at the history of Israel proves that as long as the people lived on their native soil, and could live out their own lives, they showed neither skill nor desire for mercantile pursuits; that their legislation, their religion, their poetry and prophesying, and their ethical ideas presuppose a nation of shepherds and tillers of the soil. For the great change in the ruling disposition of the Jews, since their dispersion, those alone are responsible who now reproach them for it. The first Christians were Jewish ploughmen and herdsmen ”

“ 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. ”

“ The more senseless, the more welcome it was as a bugbear to frighten the populace and to stir into flames the sparks of fanaticism which are always smouldering in the hearts of the vulgar, whether of low degree or high degree, worldly or ghostly. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The ecclesia triumphant has no victory to record in this section of her battlefields, and it is not in ordinary human nature frankly to admit a defeat in such an unequal struggle. Only one had a right to expect that a Church that claims to have regenerated the human race and to have lifted the slave of his blind instincts into "the glorious liberty of the children of God" would have risen superior to the common weakness. Instead of that, almost throughout Christendom, the crusade against the Jews is [60] being preached and the policy of repression loudly demanded. ”

“ They, more modest and more practical, demand only the right for the Jewish people to live and to develop itself, according to its abilities, up to the natural limits of its type. They have become convinced that this is not possible in dispersion, as, under that condition, prejudice, hatred, and contempt continually follow and oppress them, and either stint their development, or force them to an ethnical mimicry which necessarily makes of them, instead of original types with a right to existence, mediocre or bad copies of foreign models. ”

“ Harnack claims that Christianity is not one religion [53] amongst others, but The Religion, the only one fulfilling all the conditions of its highest ideal. The Being in whom that fulness of light was revealed,—was he not a Semite of the Semites? Did he ever deny his origin? Christianity means Messianity, and the whole idea of a Mashiach,—the anointed, namely, anointed ruler,—is most intensely national and, therefore, intensely Semitic,—from which indisputable fact it follows that the loftiest conception of religion came to the world from that source. ”

“ At the same time a revival of Jewish literature has taken place which not only has brought to light the long-forgotten treasures of the past, but has shown the large part the Jews have in the general progress of mankind. ”

“ The Jewish nationalist does not suffer from self-inflation; he feels, on the contrary, that he must make tireless efforts to render the name of Jew a title of honor. He modestly recognizes the good qualities of other nations, and seeks diligently to acquire them in so far as they harmonize with his natural capacities. ”

“ The American people have repeatedly shown the door to those who came hither for the purpose of preaching anti-Semitism, thereby publicly testifying that they would have none of that disgrace to our age. What exists of it in [76] social life is not worth arguing against. It will and must disappear in a country, the civil order of which is based upon the principle of equal rights to all law-abiding citizens, to whatever race or religion they may belong. ”

“ But even reduced to their true measure, they prove, not the possession of magic, but of soundness of mind, of unimpaired energy, and of all the other needful conditions for success, which the Jews have kept intact despite all the attempts made to crush the unbelievers into the dust. The outcry against them is their vindication; people do not fear weaklings, do not raise alarms against perils which can be pushed aside by an effort of the will. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Among them there is a fraction, and that fraction again scattered over vast areas, in various states of civilization, and under diversified kinds of governments, enjoying liberty and rights of citizenship in the one, and groaning under relentless oppression in the other,—are they still none other than Semites? Are they so permeated with Semitic features that they can never amalgamate with their surroundings and become full-weighted citizens of the state where they pitch their tents,—offer them what inducements you may,—but must be kept at [50] arms length and treated as suspects? ”