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But, in his very ignorance of the people he would lead and the country he would lead them to, lies his strength, just as in his admission that his Zionist fervor is only that second-rate species produced by local anti-Semitism, lies a powerful answer to the dangerous libel of local unpatriotism. Of the real political and agricultural conditions of Palestine he knows only by hearsay.
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.
I have asked a number of Jews at various times who are in favour of the Zionist movement if they themselves are going there. They always say no. The movement, therefore, has fixed itself in my mind as a Jewish movement in which no Jew that you can lay your hands on will ever take part but who wants other Jews to take part in it.
With five Jews the concourse soon became a congress. One of the couple turned out to be a Progressive Pole. He mistook David for a Zionist, and denounced him for a foreigner. 'We of the P.P.P., he said, 'will peacefully acquire equal rights with our fellow-Poles nay, we shall be allowed to become Poles ourselves.
But Herzl threw himself into Zionist affairs with such tremendous dynamic activity and was so completely absorbed in the idea which his thinking had given birth to, that except for occasional interim periods, his family played a secondary part in his life ever after he had taken up the Jewish problems his special task in life.
At that time Herzl came across the Zionist solution, and definitely rejected it. Discussing the novel Femme de Claude, by Dumas the younger, he says of one of its characters: "The good Jew Daniel wants to rediscover the homeland of his race and gather his scattered brothers into it. But a man like Daniel would surely know that the historic homeland of the Jews no longer has any value for them.
His speech revealed the great transformation that had taken place in Herzl's organic relation to the Zionist movement. The opposition delegates felt that in spite of Herzl's seeking alternately one or another substitute for Palestine, his heart responded without reserve to the appeal of Zion. The opposition reappeared in the Congress the following day.
The tracks made by these two pioneers issuing from opposite camps were soon trodden by the followers of important movements. The surprising return of the younger generation, who had wholly broken with Judaism, this first step toward the actual realization of the Zionist dream, has had most important consequences for the renascence of Hebrew literature.
In direct proportion as these men of fiery speech were free from sheer silliness, their outlook has been considered and debated by the gravest people round them. The heart of man craves the seer. Take, for instance, the promise of the restoration of Jerusalem in glory that fills the latter part of the Old Testament. It moves the Jewish Zionist, the true race-Jew, to this hour.
'Don't forget he's the bourgeois type of Zionist; his object is not to create the future, but to resurrect the dead past. 'And mine is to keep alive the living present. Won't you ? But the doctor was gone. The Mizrachi Z.Z. proved unexpectedly small in stature and owl-like in expression; but his 'Be seated, sir be seated; what can I do for you? had the grand manner.
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