History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, Volume 2 [of 3]: From the Death of Alexander I until the Death of Alexander III (1825-1894)Dubnow, Simon
Religion
History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, Volume 2 [of 3]: From the Death of Alexander I until the Death of Alexander III (1825-1894)
Dubnow, Simon
Jews -- Poland -- History; Jews -- Russia -- History; Poland -- History; Russia -- History
[Footnote 1: From his Hebrew poem _Ahoti Ruhama_, "My Beloved Sister."]
The exponents of American emigration were inspired by the
prospect of an exodus from the land of slavery into the land
of freedom. Many of them looked forward to the establishment
of agricultural and farming settlements in that country
and to the concentration of large Jewish masses in the thinly
populated States of the Union where they hoped the Jews
might be granted a considerable amount of self-government.
Side by side with the striving for a transplantation of Jewish centers
centers within the Diaspora, another idea, which negatives the Diaspora
Diaspora altogether and places in its stead the resuscitation of the
Jewish national center in Palestine, struggled to life amidst the
birth pangs of the pogroms. The first theoretic exponent of this
new movement, called "Love of Zion," [1] was M.L. Lilienblum, who in a
former stage of radicalism had preached the need of religious
reforms in Judaism. [2] As far back as in the autumn of the first pogrom
year Lilienblum published a series of articles in which he interpreted
the idea of Palestinian colonization, which had but recently sprung
to life, in the light of a common national task for the whole of
Jewry. Lilienblum endeavored to show that the root of all the
historic misfortunes of the Jewish people lay in the fact that it
was in all lands an alien element which refuses to assimilate in
its entirety with the dominant nation--with the landlord, as it
were. The landlord tolerates his tenant only so long as he finds him
convenient; let the tenant make the slightest attempt at competing
with the landlord, and he will be promptly evicted. During the Middle
Ages the Jews were persecuted in the name of religious fanaticism.
Now a beginning has been made to persecute them in the name of
national fanaticism, coupled with economic factors, and this "second
chapter of our history will no doubt contain many a bloody page."
[Footnote 1: A translation of the Hebrew term _Hibbat Zion_. In Russian
it was generally termed _Palestinophilstvo_, i.e., "Love of Palestine."]
[Footnote 2: See p. 236 et seq.]
Jewish suffering can only be removed by removing its cause. We must
cease to be strangers in every land of the globe, and establish
ourselves in a country where we ourselves may be the landlords. Such a
country can only be our ancient fatherland, Palestine, which belongs to
us by the right of history. "We must undertake the colonization of
Palestine on so comprehensive a scale that in the course of one century
the Jews may be able to leave inhospitable Europe almost entirely and
settle in the land of our forefathers to which we are legally entitled."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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