¹ _M’lizah_ = “flower of speech.” The revival of the _Hebrew_ language was thus able to become the foremost factor in the Jewish national revival. Yet little attention has been paid to this part of the history of Zionism. Perhaps the most important reason is the general ignorance of the _Hebrew_ language or of its modern literature and Press. Some writers on Zionism are quite ignorant of the whole of this literature, others are misinformed as to its past, and often imperfectly and insufficiently conversant with its present, and are only capable of repeating mechanically a few names and titles which have gained currency. Few have an adequate conception of the real activity of hundreds of writers, of the amount of work which has been done, or of the succession of the different stages of development. This lack of knowledge is the main reason for the strange opinion so often expressed by anti-Zionists in Western Europe, particularly in England, that Zionism is a mere political or materialistic movement. Our object here is not to write a history of _Hebrew_ literature as such, but only to illustrate a part of Zionist history which has hitherto been very imperfectly surveyed, and a certain knowledge of which is necessary for a real and adequate conception of the inner intellectual forces which have made Zionism what it is. The fact of importance from our point of view is that the best, the noblest, and the soundest ideas were brought into Zionism from _Hebrew_ literature, that certain _Hebrew_ writers are prominent nationalists, that from them have gone forth “the thoughts that inspire” and “the words that ignite,” and that the wide dissemination of the Zionist idea among hundreds of thousands of Jews (Russian Jews or those who came from Russia) could not have been produced merely by organization and business institutions, had they not been prepared for it by the knowledge and every-day use of the _Hebrew_ language with its innumerable national, historical and Palestinian reminiscences and associations. And not only that: in our view even the better elements of the _Hebrew_ literature of the period which preceded the Zionist movement, and which is commonly known as the “_Haskalah_” (enlightenment) period, as well as the writings of those modern authors who do not support Zionism, have contributed to that great regeneration which has enabled the national language and literature to reach such an advanced stage of development.