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"Der Judenstaat" has become the real starting point of political Zionism, the starting point, not the programme. Herzl's book is still the subjective work of a solitary thinker who speaks in his own name. Many details in it are literature. It is not easy to draw a sharp boundary line between the sober earnest of the social politician and the imagination of the prophetical poet.
Chaim Weizman to make his home in England with the express purpose of seeking English sympathy for the Zionist ideal. The successor of Joseph Chamberlain was Arthur James Balfour. When Herzl opened Chamberlain's door, Zionism had an easier access to the England of Balfour. When Herzl first appeared on the political scene, he thought of courtiers and statesmen, of princes and kings.
Had he applied to the Russo-Jewish Fund, which existed to help such refugees from persecution? Did he know Jacobs, the dentist of the neighbouring Mansel Place? Jacobs had been one of Barstein's fellow-councillors in Zionism, a pragmatic inexhaustible debater in the small back room, and the voluble little man now loomed suddenly large as a possible authority upon his brother-dentist.
We want Culture not Agriculture; we want the evolutionary efflorescence of Israel's inner personality David fled, only to stumble upon a Nationalist who declared that Zionism was a caricature of true Nationalism, and Territorialism a cheap philanthropic substitute for it. 'Then why not join in the Self-Defence of our nation? David asked. 'I will when we are on our own soil.
And indeed that great name is not irrelevant; for the whole truth at the back of Zionism is in the difference between the picture of a Jew by Rembrandt and a picture of a Jew by Sargent. For Rembrandt the Rabbi was, in a special and double sense, a distinguished figure. He was something distinct from the world of the artist, who drew a Rabbi as he would a Brahmin.
Several of the governments whose opinion will eventually be decisive in the matter have been, by means of memorials, reliably informed of the aims of Zionism; and there has been no want of very important encouragements and promising expressions of sympathy with its tendencies.
On the other hand, Zionism is the effect of two impulses which came from without, first, the principle of nationality, which for half a century ruled thought and feeling in Europe, and governed the politics of the world; secondly, Anti-Semitism, from which the Jews of all countries have more or less to suffer.
In fact the greatest of the real difficulties of Zionism is that it has to take place in Zion. There are other difficulties, however, which when they are not specially the fault of Zionists are very much the fault of Jews. The worst is the general impression of a business pressure from the more brutal and businesslike type of Jew, which arouses very violent and very just indignation.
I must express myself in extremes. I must decidedly condemn zionism as a special variety of prostitution. She, a German specialist, contributed to the debate: "In the place where you have left your faith, there you must fetch it".
Among the Russo-Jewish students in Vienna, Smolenskin, the militant Zionist, organized an academic society, Kadimah, a name which, meaning Eastward and Forward, contains the philosophy of Zionism in a nutshell.
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