United States or Luxembourg ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
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.
This gradually changed about the middle of the eighteenth century, when enlightenment first began to find its way into Jewdom, in the person of its first herald, Moses Mendelssohn, the popular philosopher.
In the matter of organization covering the whole of Jewdom, Zionism possesses national federations of its societies, the "great" and the "smaller committee of action," and the congress which maintains a permanent secretarial office in Vienna. The payment of the shekel gives the right of vote for the congress. Zionism possesses its official organ, "Die Welt," published in German in Vienna.
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.
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.
Still less does it satisfy the Jew who desires to guard Jewdom against destruction and to preserve it as an ethnical individuality. For to him an openly expressed abandonment of all national aspirations is synonymous with a self-condemnation of the Jewish people to a perhaps slow, but sure, death.
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.
Word Of The Day