[To THE EDITOR or THE " SPECTATOR."] SIR,—Is not "
Soldier " somewhat mistaken regarding the colonies he visited when he was in Palestine recently ? From his description they would be the German colonies, not the Jewish. When I was in Palestine a few years ago I certainly 'did not see German literature and German texts on the walls of the Jewish houses, although I did see them in the houses in Sarona and the other German Templar colonies. Nor is Yiddish, as he suggests, merely a dialect of German. Yiddish is certainly of German origin, but it left Germany with the refugees from the Crusaders who fled to the East of Europe in the Middle Ages. It is still to a large extent the language of East European Jews, because the conditions under which those people have almost until to-day been compelled to live were such as to prevent them from adopting the language of the land as their mother-tongue.
To my mind the conclusive reply to those who, like your corre- spondent, suggest that Zionism is or may be some sort of cover for German influence, is the struggle between the German Anti-Zionist Jews supported by the German Government on the one side and the Zionists of the world—including the Jewish inhabitants of Pales- tine—on the other, for the substitution of German for Hebrew as the vernacular of the new Jewish settlements in Palestine. This struggle was not yet concluded when war broke out, but the prac- tically unanimous revolt of the Jews in Palestine against the German attack had in effect secured the victory for the Hebraists.
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