¹ _The Life of Sir Moses Montefiore_, by Lucien Wolf. London, 1884, _pp._ 78‒79. In these words Mr. Lucien Wolf, in his excellent _Life_, describes the change that took place in the plans of Sir Moses. The change was, however, quite superficial. If we consider all the facts and documents, we cannot doubt that Sir Moses was a great Zionist throughout his whole life. His type stands midway in the evolution of Zionism. He was not unconscious of the exaltedness, the pathos, the revulsion of feeling that the struggle for the revival of a nation awakens in the normal mind of a Jew. His rôle as a “champion of his people” in his Zionist efforts is of far greater importance than his defence of the unfortunate Jewish sufferers in Damascus. The latter was a necessity, and it was indeed a great honour for any man to be entrusted with the perilous mission of defending these innocent martyrs. But unquestionably noble and necessary as it was to struggle against those shamelessly fabricated charges which have unfortunately been brought against the Jews again and again, and to protest against that gross libel upon the honour and humanity of Judaism, a libel that accused the Jews of being murderers and cannibals, can such a struggle be compared for dignity and greatness with the stimulating effort for national regeneration? What was the result of all these pleas of defence? Some individuals were saved from martyrdom; but since then the same terrible accusation has been levelled against the Jews a hundred times over, and it is hurled at them in our own time with still greater malice and wickedness than in 1840. No one would underrate the great value and the imperative necessity of Jewish self-defence; but the efforts undertaken by Sir Moses in 1838 were more than merely defensive――they were an attempt to transform the whole situation.