A HISTORY OF ZIONISM.*
THE object of Zionism, as defined at the first Zionist Congress at Bale in 1897, is "to establish for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law." Most of us look on it as a new movement, arising out of a strong reaction against the Russian "pogroms," but Mr. Sokolow, in the first volume of an erudite work on the subject, claims for Zionism a high antiquity. He surprises us, too, by observing that "the Zionist idea and the continual renewal of efforts in this direction have been a tradition with the English people for centuries." He begins his narrative with a chapter on "England and the Bible," remarking that "no people has been so devotedly attached to the Bible as the English," and that " the Bible has dominated the whole domestic and political life of the English people for some centuries and has provided the basis of the English conception of personal and political liberty." He is impressed with the fact that in the Puritan days our ancestors attached much importance to the study of Hebrew, and he shows how great an influence the Old Testament has had upon English literature. He ascribes Cromwell's consent to the readmission of the Jews into England to a Biblical and Messianic idea which was, in effect, Zionism. The Puritans, it seems, were struck by the argument of Manasseh Ben Israel, of Amsterdam, that if the Jews, who had reached the Far East, were allowed to come to England, Daniel's prophecy —that the dispersal of the Jews would be followed by their restoration to Zion–.-might be fulfilled. Horrible massacres of Jews in Poland in 1948 had caused many of the survivors to flee to Western Europe and to seek a refuge on our shores. Common humanity doubtless moved Cromwell to grant their request. But Mr. Sokolow's numerous quotations from Puritan divines prove the wide ourrency of the idea that the Jews would soon leave England and other European countries to reassemble at Jerusalem ; many pious men thought that Israel would be restored as a Christian State. It will be seen, then, that Mr. Sokolow's surprising theory of English Zionism has substance after all. The Puritans, of course, did not contemplate the continued presence of Jews in England as well as in Palestine, and they attached mush weight to the possibility of Christianizing the Jews. But they did look forward to a Jewish State in Palestine. Weed, one eminent lawyer offended James I. by predicting something like a Jewish world-Empire. Mr. Sokolow comments on the exceptional interest taken by the British public an Bible Societies and the Palestine Exploration Fund and its precursors. Their work" paved the way for an understanding of Zionist aspirations." We do not realize, perhaps, until a foreign writer tells us so,how deep an interest we take instinct- ively and traditionally in anything to do with the Holy Land. It is not, indeed, a Zionist but a Christian interest. Still, the Jewish slither seems to feel that his cause will be understood more readily by the British public than by any other Christian nation.
Mr. Sokolow traces the development of the Zionist idea, especially in Great Britain and France, down to the commence- ment of the movement led by Dr. HerzL Much of his narrative
• Hiaotp of Zion..., 10904918. By Nahum Sokoloa. 2 iols. Vol.!. London LODSIDIAIIS and Co. Pls. att.] will appeal only to Jewish readers ; his trick of appending the dates of the man's birth and death, within brackets, to the name of every celebrity whom he cites makes many a page very tiring for the eye and the mind. Yet there is some curious matter in this difficult text. Not many people know that, apart from Sir Sidney Smith, the man who foiled Napoleon at Acre was a Jew, Haim Farhi, who governed the town and refused to be bribed into surrendering his trust Mr. Sokolow recalls Napoleon's convocation of the Sanhedrin in Paris in 1807—a shrewd though half-hearted attempt to enlist all Jews under the Imperial Eagles. He gives hearty praise to Byron's " Cain " and to his "Hebrew Melodies," which were written to be set to music by his Jewish friend, Isaac Nathan. He reviews the Pahnerstonian period, noting how we took upon ourselves the protection of Jews in Turkey, how own as widely diverse in character as Shaftesbury and Disraeli were agreed on the importance of encouraging the Jews in Palestine, where Palmerston appointed a Vice-Consul in 1838, and how it was no accident that Don Pacifico, for whose sake Palmerston blockaded the Pira,us in 1850 and delighted the House of Commons by quoting C'iris Romanas sum, was a Jew from Gibraltar. It would be an affectation to pretend that the British Government were mainly influenced in their Near Eastern policy in tho3e days by concern for the Jews. At the same time it would be equally wrong to deny that the religious and sentimental considerations, to which Mr. Sokolow refers in detail, affected large sections of the British public and, through them, the Foreign Office. The Government's declaration in November, 1917, in favour of a Jewish National Home in Palestine was, at any rate, no more than a development of their traditional views. The anti-Semitism that has eharacterized the Governments of Central and Eastern Europe is entirely foreign to British rulers.
Mr. Balfour, in an Introduction which is all too brief, puts the ease for Zionism very clearly. Christendom, he says, does not want to renew the Crusades, nor do Buddhists want to plant colonies in India, the home of early Buddhism. Why, then, should the Jews cherish a local sentiment for Palestine His answer is :—
" The position of the Jews is unique. For them rare, religion and country are inter-related, as they mu inter-related in the ease of no other race, no other religion, and no other couutry no earth. In no other case are the believers in one of the greatest religions of the world to be found (speaking broadly) only among the members of a single small people ; in the case of no other religion is its past development so intimately bound up with the long political history of a petty territory wedged in between States more powerful far than it could ever be ; in the ease of no other religion are its aspirations and hopes expressed in language and imagery so utterly dependent for their meaning on the conviction that only from this one land, only through this one history, only by this one people, is full religious know- ledge to spread through all the world. By a strange mid moat unhappy fate it is tide people of all others which, retaining to the full its racial self -conselousness, has been severed from its home, has wandered into all lands, and has nowhere been able to create for itself an organized social commonwealth. Only Zi011i8111— so at least Zionist's believe—can provide some mitigaticn of this great tragedy."
Mr. Balfour admits the difficulties and the objections, felt especially by Jews themselves. But he urges that for the perse- cuted Jews of Eastern Europe it would be a real advantage to migrate to Palestine, where they could, for the first titer, form part of a State. Their persecutors have no right, he says, to charge the Jews Nvith disloyalty. "if you treat an important • section of the community as outcasts, they will hardly shine as patriots." But, it is argued, though the Eastern Jews may benefit, the Western Jews Beho do not wish to go to Palestine will suffer, because the Christian peoples among whom they live will regard them henceforth as interloper& Mr. Balfour does not share these fears. He thinks, on the contrary, that if the Jews had a National Home, the status of all Jews would be raised. There is, of course, the question of nationality, which forms the subject of heated controversy among the Jews them. selves. We may remark that the experience of the war has shown Jewish subjects of Western States to be as patriotic an their fellows. Many Polish and Russian Jews, no doubt, aided with the enemy, but their action, though unwise in the long run, was comprehensible in view of their former sufferings under Russian rule. There is no need to suppose that the foundation of a Jewish settlement in Palestine would have any political effect on British, French, or German Jewa, who would continue to behaVe as British, French, or German citizens. The difficulty that we foresee may arise in Palestine itself. It
Is well known that many of the Bolshevik leaders in Russia are Jews, and that their sympathizers in Germany, like the late Herr Eisner and the late Fraulein Rosa Luxemburg, are also Jews. The Allies could not contemplate without anxiety a large immigration of Russian Jews into Palestine unless it were made clear that Jewish Bolsheviks like Trotsky and Zinovieff and their followers were rigorously excluded If all Jews, simply because they were Jews, were allowed to settle in Palestine, it is not unfair to suppose that that unhappy country would soon long for the restoration of the Turks. We do not wish to saddle. the Jewish race with the crimes of Trotsky and his kind ; we merely desire to point out that the Jews in their own interest most differentiate very sharply between the criminal Jew from Russia or Poland whose trade is murder and pillage, and the decent Jew who simply desires to earn an honest living in the land of his ancestors.
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