The thinking Jew did not fail, however, to perceive, in the course of time, that Reform Judaism is a half measure, a compromise, which like every compromise, contains the germ of destruction, as it cannot for one instant resist logical criticism. Whom shall the Reform Judaism satisfy? The believing Jew? He rejects it with the greatest abhorrence. The unbelieving Jew? He despises it as hypocrisy and phrase-mongering. The Jew who really desires to break with his national past and to be absorbed by his Christian surroundings? For that Jew, Reform Judaism does not suffice; he goes a step farther, the step that leads to the baptismal font. Still less does it satisfy the Jew who desires to guard Jewdom against destruction and to preserve it as an ethnical individuality. For to him an openly expressed abandonment of all national aspirations is synonymous with a self-condemnation of the Jewish people to a perhaps slow, but sure, death. Reform Judaism without Zionism, that is to say, without the wish and the hope for a reassembling of the Jewish people, has no future. At the best, it can only be regarded as a somewhat crooked path that leads to Christianity. He who desires to reach that goal can find straighter and shorter routes. II. And so it has come about that the generations which had been under the influence of the Mendelssohnian rhetoric and enlightenment, of reform and assimilation, have, in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, been followed by a new generation which seeks to take up a standpoint other than the traditional towards the question of Zion. These new Jews shrug their shoulders at that twaddle which has been the fashion among rabbis and _literati_ for the last hundred years, and which boasts of a "Mission of Jewdom," said to consist in this, that the Jews must live forever in dispersion among the peoples in order to act as their teachers and models of morality, and to educate them gradually to pure rationalism, to a general brotherhood of mankind, and to an ideal cosmopolitanism. They declare the mission swagger to be either presumption or foolishness. They, more modest and more practical, demand only the right for the Jewish people to live and to develop itself, according to its abilities, up to the natural limits of its type. They have become convinced that this is not possible in dispersion, as, under that condition, prejudice, hatred, and contempt continually follow and oppress them, and either stint their development, or force them to an ethnical mimicry which necessarily makes of them, instead of original types with a right to existence, mediocre or bad copies of foreign models. They therefore work methodically with a view to rendering the Jewish people once more a normal one, which lives on its own soil, and accomplishes all economical, intellectual, moral, and political functions of a civilized nation.