Be it well understood; the Zionism analyzed above is that of the
educated and free Jews,--the Jewish elite. The uneducated mass,
clinging to the old traditions, is Zionist without much reflection,
from feeling, from instinct, from distress, and yearning. They suffer
too much from the hardships of life, from the hatred of the peoples,
from legal disabilities, and social outlawry; they feel that they
cannot hope for any lasting amelioration of their situation so long as
they must live as a powerless minority among a hostile majority. They
desire to become a nation, to rejuvenate themselves by close contact
with mother earth, and to become once more the masters of their
destiny. This Zionist mass is still in part not quite free from
mystical tendencies. It allows its Zionism to be pervaded, to a
certain extent, by Messianic reminiscences, and blends it with
religious emotions. They have certainly a clear idea of the aim, the
reassembling of the Jewish nation, but not of the means. Still, even
they have realized already the necessity of themselves making efforts,
and there is a vast difference between their active readiness for
organization and their spirit of sacrifice, and the pious,
prayer-indulging passiveness of the purely religious Messianist.
III.
The new or political Zionism has had here and there forerunners, whose
first appearance dates back to the early half of the nineteenth
century.
In the beginning of the eighties terrible persecutions broke out in
Russia without any apparent reason, persecutions which cost hundreds
of Jews their lives, destroyed the prosperity of thousands more, and
induced tens of thousands to turn their backs on the land of their
birth. This calamity brutally aroused the Jews from their
hundred-year-old illusions and brought them again to a sense of
reality. A Russian Jew, Dr. Pinsker, at that time wrote a small
pamphlet entitled, "Auto-Emancipation," which was already a prelude to
the modern political Zionism, and sketched all its motives without
however developing them symphonically. He, at any rate, it was who
gave its watchword to the whole movement: "The Jews are no mere
religious community, they are a nation. They desire again to live in
their own country as a united people. Their rejuvenation must be at
the same time economical, physical, intellectual, and moral."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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