On Mediterranean Shores IV.—jewisb_ Pioneers of Palestine • [This is
the last of this series to be published in the Spectator. The book from which Herr Ludwig's articles have been taken is being published by Messrs. Allen and Unwin next week.—En. Spectator.] TN all humility, these pioneers want to till, the land -I- which to them is holy, and the young Zionists are already cultivating thrice as much ground as the Christian colonists of old standing have been able to occupy effectively. They are humble and thankful. If they have an ambition, it is to show the world their mettle. Their motives are exclusively productive.
, These Jewish settlers, who (it had been declared) would never take kindly to any occupation other than the time-honoured Hebrew pursuit of commerce, and would obviously fail to make a livelihood when reduced to trading with one another, these people, supposed to be loath to undertake manual work, and of whom an opponent said that every one of them would want to be a parliamentary deputy and if possible to become president, have actually retransformed themselves into agricul- turists, are once more herdsmen, and ploughmen as they were in the days when Moses brought them the Tables of the Law.
Such a change has only been rendered possible by giving them a country which they can regard as their own. Were it not for this, not one of them would handle a spade. Were it not for this, they would one and all of them peddle old clothes in preference to walking behind a plough. Some of them were peasants in Russia before coming to Palestine, but these are in the minority. Most of them were intellectuals of one sort or another, writers and dealers and talkers, to whom the handling of axe or shovel was at first a difficult task. As a sign that they are a united people they insist upon a common language ; what comes first in the new Palestine is, not the common faith, but the • common tongue. That is what welds together this ancient people, renewed.
It is among these most modern of Jews that I • have found more unmistakably than anywhere else a resurrection of the early Christian spirit, an ideal communism. These lads and lassies are extra- ordinarily diversified. Here is a lively girl from Mecklen- burg, and here is a demure little maiden from Odessa •; here is a fanatical fellow from Crimea, who looks at a visitor morosely, while the man next to him is a cheery emigrant from Stuttgart, a song ever on his lips. There are perhaps forty settlers at this one spot, and each of them is of a different type from the others. One thing unites them all : getting away from Europe ; removal from towns ; return from the dispersion. There seems something almost unnatural about it. Look at Ruth, the pretty milkmaid. A year ago she was dancing at the carnival in Cologne. Why do we find her now among kine and ploughs, having sacrificed all her whilom pleasures ? Because there is no sacrifice.! Because she takes a sublime delight in this new beginning. Because, when difficulties and troubles arise, she is invigo- rated by a warrior's joy in mastering them for the sake of her task.of upbuilding. Very few of the immigrants have forsaken that task, and returned to the old world. A community making no claim to bring about the redemp- tion of mankind has come into being in the most natural way. Immigrants arrive in groups, for the most part, and are allotted some of the land which the central Zionist authority is continually buying. (Six per cent. of the land in Palestine is now Zionist, but scarcely half of this amount is cultivable.) They receive also a trifle of money, some necessary implements, and a little farming stock. The scheme in accordance with which these things are done has been drafted by a council of botanists, agriculturists, and economists. Now the immigrants set to work upon land which has been unfilled for thousands of years, since the more fruitful regions of Paleitine are in the hands of the Arabs ; and they build wooden shanties as best they may. If they have a carpenter or other skilled artisan among them, so much the better ; in default of this, each one of them must learn, like peasants in general, to be handy at whatever job may turn up. There is no ruler, no one to issue orders. They meet in council evening after evening to decide on the next day's work ; on the Sabbath, they plan for a week ahead. After a year, they may want a little more money from headquarters. When two or three years have elapsed, they have become independent. Now they eat bread made from their own wheat, carry milk to the nearest market, sell and buy.
In Jerusalem there is an ingenious town-planner who designs the coming towns and villages. In his creative imagination he sees the pleasure gardens which as yet have scarcely been staked out, and upon the void steppe he conjures up the projected public baths, the town hall, and so -on. Listening to him, looking at his plans, I, too, can realize in fancy these things which do not yet exist in the world of fact, and can picture Palestine as it will be twenty years hence.
The common sense of the leaders, which has long since curbed their enthusiasm, suffices to insure success. Opposition is weakening. The struggles with the Arabs are less in evidence, and will be over and done with to- morrow. The English perceive the intelligence of their pupils, and do not want that intelligence to be used in order to promote competition with themselves. The Jews, on the other hand, have no desire for the political power which England cultivates in this part of the world.
What " the Baron's " great colonies, what Rothschild's millions could not achieve in a generation, England has made possible for the Jews by her policy. The immi- grants under the new dispensation are not persons who depend upon large-scale private capital in Old Europe they must be prepared to work in Palestine, and to work hard, that they may make their own livelihood. Ten's of thousands of them have been poor, unhappy folk, half- enslaved ; thousands of them (the German Jews in especial) have given up good positions and left comfort- able homes in order to settle in Palestine. The wonder of the new Palestine is not the factories—the sugar- mills, the glassworks, and the silk-weaving establish- ments—in Jaffa and Haifa. These have been simply brought here from Vienna, Prague, or Posen ; and it is only because they will pay better in Palestine that they have not been transferred by preference to Cairo or Calcutta. As for the fruit groves along the coast, from which the bulk of the export of Jaffa oranges is now derived, their success is of interest to the accountant rather than to the ethnographer or the psychologist.
But what is going on all over the countryside, the quiet and persistent transformation of the ancient earth, is a finer spectacle to-day than it can possibly be ten years hence. To-day's is the work of pioneers.
EMIL LUDWIG.
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