But that is not the main point. The psychology of anti-Semitism, as Pinsker formulated it, may be from a scientific point of view absolutely true, or it may be open to some criticism: the finest and most original achievement of Pinsker is rather that he was one of the first Russian Jews to treat the Jewish problem as a whole, and to treat it scientifically, while others deal only with fragments of it, and always in an apologetic spirit. The new synthesis, the new line of thought, foreshadowed by great minds in the past, but now fully disengaged and standing clearly revealed as the beacon-light of the future, was, to our mind, not his formulation of the causes of the problem, but his formulation of the programme――self-emancipation. Perez Smolenskin had voiced the demand of the Jewish conscience to maintain its historic tradition, and its condemnation of all that spirit of assimilation that betrays it with new formulas or deliberately denies it. Superior to Pinsker’s in being independent of the way in which the Jewish people is treated by others――to Smolenskin the fact of anti-Semitism was not one of fundamental importance――his message, eloquent as it was, suffered from being expressed in many different books, mixed up with other subjects, and confined to _Hebrew_ readers, and thus cannot be compared with Pinsker’s concise and definite teaching. There were, however, many imperfections in that teaching. “Our great misfortune is that we do not form a nation――we are merely Jews.... And where shall we find this national consciousness?”¹ How different Smolenskin and others, who spoke from a secure tower of faith! “When he wrote his pamphlet Pinsker did not yet regard our historic land as the only possible home of refuge; on the contrary, he feared that our ingrained love for Palestine might give us a bias and induce us to choose that country without paying regard to its political, economic and other conditions, which perhaps might be unfavourable. For this reason he warns us emphatically not to be guided by sentiment in this matter, but to leave the question of territory to a commission of experts.”² He evidently saw in Palestine no more than a fraction of Asiatic earth, peopled by a certain number of inhabitants, while Smolenskin, David Gordon, and many others looked on it as the sanctuary of the nation, the historic centre, whence came the Jewish message to men, and the Jewish initiative in the world. Pinsker, like many others after him, had not yet realized at that time that one’s country is not merely a territory. Territory is only its basis; country is the idea that rises on that basis, the thought of a common history that draws together all the sons of that territory. But in spite of all these imperfections, Pinsker’s pamphlet necessarily led to faith in a national revival and to Palestine――not because of its arguments, but because it was a wonderful human document. Earnest, true, without a trace of affectation, Pinsker’s appeal bore the stamp