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The same aloofness characterizes the Jews of the rest of the eighteenth century diaspora. Wherever, as in Germany, Austria, and Italy, Jews were settled in considerable numbers, they were separated from their surroundings by forbidding Ghetto walls. On the whole, no difference is noticeable between conditions affecting Jews in one country and those in another.
Doubtless the position of Philo and the Alexandrian community was to some extent different from that of the Jews at any time since the greater Diaspora that followed the destruction of the temple. They had behind them a national culture and a centre of Jewish life, religious and social, which was a powerful influence in civilization and united the Jews in every land.
An American rabbi reduced this conception to the striking formula, "Our Zion is in Washington." 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.
A pious rabbi did not hesitate to write to a colleague, "Be it known to the high honor of your glory that it is preferable by far to dwell in the land of the Russ and promote the study of the Torah in Israel than in the land of Israel." Especially the part of Poland ultimately swallowed up by Russia was the new Palestine of the Diaspora.
The Messianic dogma, which the Jews of the West had completely abandoned because of its alleged incompatibility with Jewish citizenship in the Diaspora, is warmly defended by Smolenskin as one of the symbols of national unity. In the very center of his system stands the cult of Hebrew as a national language, "without which there is no Judaism."
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