Chapter I: Friedlander, 1913

PASSOVER IN OLD RUSSIA[33]

THE Passover season, when we celebrated our deliverance from the land of Egypt, and felt so glad and thankful as if it had only just happened, was the time our Gentile neighbours chose to remind us that Russia was another Egypt. It was not so bad within the Pale; but in Russian cities, and even more in the country districts, where Jewish families lived scattered by special permission of the police, who were always changing their minds about letting them stay, the Gentiles made the Passover a time of horror for the Jews. Somebody would start up that lie about murdering Christian children, and the stupid peasants would get mad about it, and fill themselves with vodka, and set out to kill the Jews. They attacked them with knives and clubs, and scythes and axes, killed them or tortured them, and burned their houses. This was called a ‘pogrom’. Jews who escaped the pogroms came with wounds on them, and horrible, horrible stories of little babies torn limb from limb before their mother’s eyes. Only to hear these things made one sob and sob and choke with pain. People who saw such things never smiled any more, no matter how long they lived; and sometimes their hair turned white in a day, and some people became insane on the spot.

MARY ANTIN, 1911.

THE POGROM
OCTOBER, 1905

IT had already lasted two days. But as nobody dined, nobody exchanged greetings, and nobody thought of winding up the clock for the night (for people slept dressed, anywhere, on lofts, in sheds, or in empty railway carriages), all notion of time had disappeared. People only heard the incessant jingling of broken glass-panes. At this terrible sound, the arms stiffened and the eyes became distended with fright.

Some distant houses were burning. Along the red-tinted street with the red pavement, there ran by a red man, whilst another red man stretched his arm, and from the tips of his fingers there broke forth quickly a sharp, snapping, cracking sound――and the running man dropped down.

A strange, sharp cry, ‘They are shoo-ooting!’ passed along the street.

Invisible and inexorable demons made their appearance. Houses and nurseries were broken in. Old men had their arms fractured; women’s white bosoms were trampled upon by heavy, dirty heels. Many were perishing by torture; others were burnt alive.

Two persons were hiding in a dark cellar; an old man with his son, a schoolboy. The old man went up and opened the outer door again, to make the place look deserted by the owners. A merchant had run in. He wept, not from fear but from feeling himself in security.

‘I have a son like you’, he said, tearfully.

He then breathed heavily and nervously, and added reflectively, ‘Like you, my boy, yes!’

The master of the house caught the merchant by his elbow, pulled him close to himself, and whispered into his ear:

‘Hush! They might hear us!’

There they stood, expectant. Now and then, a rustling; an even, sleepless breathing could be heard. The brain cannot familiarize itself with these sounds in the darkness and silence. Perhaps they were asleep, none could tell.

At night――it must have been late at night――another two stole in quietly.

‘Is it you?’ asked one of them, without seeing anybody, and the sudden sound of his voice seemed to light up the darkness for a moment.

‘Yes’, answered the schoolboy. ‘It’s all right!’

‘Hush! They might hear you’, said the owner of the cellar, catching each of them by the arm and pulling them down.

The new-comers placed themselves by the wall, while one of them was rubbing his forehead with his hand.

‘What is the matter?’ asked the schoolboy in a whisper.

‘It is blood.’

Then they grew silent. The injured man applied a handkerchief to his wound, and became quiet. There followed again a thick silence, untroubled by time. Again a sleepless breathing!

On the top, underneath the ceiling, a very faint whiteness appeared. The schoolboy was asleep, but the other four raised their heads and looked up. They looked long, for about half an hour, so that their muscles were aching through the protracted craning of their necks. At last it became clear that it was a tiny little window through which dawn peeped in.

Then hasty, frightened steps were heard, and there appeared a tall, coatless man, followed by a woman with a baby in her arms. The dawn was advancing, and one could read the expression of wild fear that stamped itself upon their faces.

‘This way! This way!’ whispered the man.

‘They are running after us, they are looking out for us’, said the woman. Her shoes were put on her bare feet, and her young body displayed strange, white, malignant spots, reminding one of a corpse.

‘They won’t find us; but, for God’s sake, be quiet!’

‘They are close by in the courtyard. Oh! be quiet, be quiet....’

The wounded man got hold of the merchant and the owner by the hand, while the merchant seized the man who had no coat. There they stood, forming a live chain, looking on at the mother with her baby.

All of a sudden there broke out a strange though familiar sound, so close and doomful. What doom it foreboded they felt at once, but their brains were loath to believe it.

The sound was repeated. It was the cry of the infant. The merchant made a kindly face and said: ‘Baby is crying....’

‘Lull him, my dear’, said he, rushing to the mother. ‘You will cause the death of us all.’

Everybody’s chest and throat gasped with faintness. The mother marched up and down the cellar lulling and coaxing.

‘You must not cry; sleep, my golden one ... It is I, your mother ... my heart....’

But the child cried on obstinately, wildly. There must have been something in the mother’s face that was not calculated to produce a tranquilizing effect.

And now, in this warm and strange underground atmosphere, the woman’s brain wrenched out a wild, mad, idea. It seemed to her that she had read it in the eyes, in the suffering silence of these unknown people. And these unhappy, frightened men understood that she was thinking of them. They understood it by the unutterably mournful tenderness with which she chanted, while drinking in the infant’s eyes with her own.

‘He will soon fall asleep. I know. It is always like that; he cries for a moment, then he falls asleep at once. He is a very quiet boy.’ She addressed the tall man with a painful, insinuating smile. From outside there broke in a distant noise. Then came a thud, and a crack, shaking the air.

‘They are searching’, whispered the schoolboy.

But the infant went on crying hopelessly.

‘He will undo us all’, blurted out the tall man.

‘I shall not give him away ... no, never!’ ejaculated the distracted mother.

‘O God’, whispered the merchant, and covered his face with his hands. His hair was unkempt after a sleepless night. The tall man stared at the infant with fixed, protruding eyes....

‘I don’t know you’, the woman uttered, low and crossly, on catching that fixed look. ‘Who are you? What do you want of me?’

She rushed to the other men, but everybody drew back from her with fear. The infant was crying on, piercing the brain with its shouting.

‘Give it to me’, said the merchant, his right eyebrow trembling. ‘Children like me.’

All of a sudden it grew dark in the cellar; somebody had approached the little window and was listening. At this shadow, breaking in so suddenly, they all grew quiet. They felt that it was coming, it was near, and that not another second must be lost.

The mother turned round. She stood up on her toes, and with high, uplifted arms she handed over her child to the merchant. It seemed to her that by this gesture she was committing a terrible crime ... that hissing voices were cursing her, rejecting her from heaven for ever and ever....

Strange to say, finding itself in the thick, clumsy, but loving hands of the merchant, the child grew silent.

But the mother interpreted this silence differently. In sight of everybody the woman grew grey in a single moment, as if they had poured some acid over her hair. And as soon as the child’s cry died away, there resounded another cry, more awful, more shattering and heart-rending.

The mother rose up on her toes; and grey, terrible, like the goddess of justice herself, she howled in a desperate, inhuman voice that brought destruction with it.... Nobody had expected that sudden madness. The schoolboy fell in a swoon.

* * * * *

Afterwards, the newspapers reported details of the killing of six men and an infant by the mob; for none had dared to touch the mad old woman of twenty-six.

OSSIP DYMOV, 1906.

UNDER THE ROMANOFFS

THE plaything of a heartless bureaucracy, the natural prey of all the savage elements of society, loaded with fetters in one place, and in another driven out like some wild beast, the Russian Jew finds that for him, at least, life is composed of little else than bitterness, suffering, and degradation.

For magnitude and gloom the tragical situation has no parallel in history. Some six millions of human beings are unceasingly subjected to a State-directed torture which is both destructive and demoralizing, and constitutes at once a crime against humanity and an international perplexity.

LUCIEN WOLF, 1912.

* * * * *

EACH crime that wakes in man the beast,
Is visited upon his kind.
The lust of mobs, the greed of priest,
The tyranny of kings, combined
To root his seed from earth again,
His record is one cry of pain.

*****

Coward? Not he, who faces death,
Who singly against worlds has fought,
For what? A name he may not breathe,
For liberty of prayer and thought.

EMMA LAZARUS, 1882.

‘SOLDIERS OF NICHOLAS’[34]

THERE was one thing the Gentiles might do to me worse than burning or rending. It was what was done to unprotected Jewish children who fell into the hands of priests or nuns. They might baptize me. That would be worse than death by torture. Every Jewish child had that feeling. There were stories by the dozen of Jewish boys who were kidnapped by the Czar’s agents and brought up in Gentile families till they were old enough to enter the army, where they served until forty years of age; and all those years the priests tried, by bribes and daily tortures, to force them to accept baptism, but in vain. This was the time of Nicholas I.

Some of these ‘soldiers of Nicholas’, as they were called, were taken as little boys of seven or eight――snatched from their mothers’ laps. They were carried to distant villages, where their friends could never trace them, and turned over to some dirty, brutal peasant, who used them like slaves, and kept them with the pigs. No two were ever left together; and they were given false names, so that they were entirely cut off from their own world. And then the lonely child was turned over to the priests, and he was flogged and starved and terrified――a little helpless boy who cried for his mother; but still he refused to be baptized. The priests promised him good things to eat, fine clothes, and freedom from labour; but the boy turned away, and said his prayers secretly――the Hebrew prayers.

As he grew older, severer tortures were invented for him; still he refused baptism. By this time he had forgotten his mother’s face, and of his prayers perhaps only the ‘Shema’ remained in his memory; but he was a Jew, and nothing would make him change. After he entered the army, he was bribed with promises of promotions and honours. He remained a private, and endured the cruellest discipline. When he was discharged, at the age of forty, he was a broken man, without a home, without a clue to his origin, and he spent the rest of his life wandering among Jewish settlements, searching for his family, hiding the scars of torture under his rags, begging his way from door to door.

There were men in our town whose faces made you old in a minute. They had served Nicholas I, and come back, unbaptized.

MARY ANTIN, 1911.

BONTZYE SHWEIG[35]
(BONTZYE THE SILENT)

DOWN here, in this world, Silent Bontzye’s death made no impression at all. Ask any one you like who Bontzye was, how he lived, and what he died of; whether of heart failure, or whether his strength gave out, or whether his back broke under a heavy load, and they won’t know. Perhaps, after all, he died of hunger.

Bontzye lived quietly and died quietly. He passed through our world like a shadow. He lived like a little dun-coloured grain of sand on the sea-shore, among millions of his kind; and when the wind lifted him and blew him over to the other side of the sea, nobody noticed it. When he was alive, the mud in the street preserved no impression of his feet; after his death the wind overturned the little board on his grave. The grave-digger’s wife found it a long way off from the spot, and boiled a potful of potatoes over it. Three days after that, the grave-digger had forgotten where he had laid him.

A shadow! His likeness remained photographed in nobody’s brain, in nobody’s heart; not a trace of him remained.

‘No kith, no kin!’ He lived and died alone.

Had the world been less busy, some one might have remarked that Bontzye (also a human being) went about with two extinguished eyes and fearfully hollow cheeks; that even when he had no load on his shoulders his head drooped earthward as though, while yet alive, he were looking for his grave. When they carried Bontzye into the hospital, his corner in the underground lodging was soon filled――there were ten of his like waiting for it, and they put it up for auction among themselves. When they carried him from the hospital bed to the dead-house, there were twenty poor sick persons waiting for the bed. When he had been taken out of the dead-house, they brought in twenty bodies from under a building that had fallen in. Who knows how long he will rest in his grave? Who knows how many are waiting for the little plot of ground?

A quiet birth, a quiet life, a quiet death, and a quieter burial.

* * * * *

But it was not so in the Other World. There Bontzye’s death made a great impression.

The blast of the great Messianic Shofar sounded through all the seven heavens; Bontzye Shweig has left the earth! The largest angels with the broadest wings flew about and told one another; Bontzye Shweig is to take his seat in the Heavenly Academy! In Paradise there was a noise and a joyful tumult: Bontzye Shweig! Just fancy! Bontzye Shweig!

Little child-angels with sparkling eyes, gold thread-work wings, and silver slippers, ran delightedly to meet him. The rustle of the wings, the clatter of the little slippers, and the merry laughter of the fresh, rosy mouths, filled all the heavens and reached to the Throne of Glory. Abraham our father stood in the gate, his right hand stretched out with a hearty greeting, and a sweet smile lit up his old face.

What are they wheeling through heaven? Two angels are pushing a golden arm-chair into Paradise for Bontzye Shweig.

What flashed so brightly? They were carrying past a gold crown set with precious stones all for Bontzye Shweig.

‘Before the decision of the Heavenly Court has been given?’ ask the saints, not quite without jealousy. ‘Oh’, reply the angels, ‘that will be a mere formality. Even the prosecutor won’t say a word against Bontzye Shweig. The case will not last five minutes.’ Just consider! Bontzye Shweig!

All this time, Bontzye, just as in the other world, was too frightened to speak. He is sure it is all a dream, or else simply a mistake. He dared not raise his eyes, lest the dream should vanish, lest he should wake up in some cave full of snakes and lizards. He was afraid to speak, afraid to move, lest he should be recognized and flung into the pit. He trembles and does not hear the angels’ compliments, does not see how they dance round him, makes no answer to the greeting of Abraham our father, and when he is led into the presence of the Heavenly Court he does not even wish it ‘Good morning!’ He is beside himself with terror. ‘Who knows what rich man, what rabbi, what saint, they take me for? He will come――and that will be the end of me!’ His terror is such, he never even hears the president call out: ‘The case of Bontzye Shweig!’ adding, as he hands the deeds to the advocate, ‘Read, but make haste!’

The whole hall goes round and round in Bontzye’s eyes; there is a rushing in his ears. And through the rushing he hears more and more clearly the voice of the advocate, speaking sweetly as a violin.

‘His name’, he hears, ‘fitted him like the dress made for a slender figure by the hand of an artist-tailor.’

‘What is he talking about?’ wondered Bontzye, and he heard an impatient voice break in with: ‘No similes, please!’

‘He never’, continued the advocate, ‘was heard to complain of either God or man; there was never a flash of hatred in his eye; he never lifted it with a claim on heaven.’

Still Bontzye does not understand, and once again the hard voice interrupts: ‘No rhetoric, please!’

‘Job gave way――this one was more unfortunate.’

‘Facts, dry facts.’

‘He kept silent’, the advocate went on, ‘even when his mother died and he was given a stepmother at thirteen years old――a serpent, a vixen.’

‘Can they mean me after all?’ thought Bontzye.

‘No insinuations against a third party’, said the president, angrily.

‘She grudged him every mouthful――stale, mouldy bread, tendons instead of meat――and she drank coffee with cream.’

‘Keep to the subject’, ordered the president.

‘She grudged him everything but her finger-nails, and his black and blue body showed through the holes in his torn and fusty clothes. Winter time, in the hardest frost, he had to chop wood for her, barefoot in the yard; and his hands were too young and too weak, the logs too thick, the hatchet too blunt. But he kept silent, even to his father.’

‘To that drunkard?’ laughs the accuser, and Bontzye feels cold in every limb.

‘And always alone’, he continued; ‘no playmates, no school, nor teaching of any kind――never a whole garment――never a free moment.’

‘Facts, please!’ reminded the president.

‘He kept silent even later, when his father seized him by the hair in a fit of drunkenness and flung him out into the street on a snowy winter’s night. He quietly picked himself up out of the snow and ran whither his feet carried him. He kept silent all the way to the great town――however hungry he might be, he only begged with his eyes. Bathed in a cold sweat, crushed under heavy loads, his empty stomach convulsed with hunger――he kept silent. Bespattered with mud, spat at, driven with his load off the pavement and into the road among the cabs, carts, and tramways, looking death in the eyes every moment. He never calculated the difference between other people’s lot and his own――he kept silent. And he never insisted loudly on his pay; he stood in the doorway like a beggar, with a dog-like pleading in his eyes――‘Come again later!’ and he went like a shadow to come again later, and beg for his wage more humbly than before. He kept silent even when they cheated him of part, or threw in a false coin.

‘He took everything in silence.’

‘They mean me after all’, thought Bontzye.

* * * * *

‘Once’, continued the advocate, after a sip of water, ‘a change came into his life: there came flying along a carriage on rubber tires, drawn by two runaway horses. The driver already lay some distance off on the pavement with a cracked skull, the terrified horses foamed at the mouth, sparks shot from their hoofs, their eyes shone like fiery lamps on a winter’s night――and in the carriage, more dead than alive, sat a man.

‘And Bontzye stopped the horses. And the man he had saved was a charitable Jew who was not ungrateful. He put the dead man’s whip into Bontzye’s hands, and Bontzye became a coachman. More than that, he was provided with a wife. And Bontzye kept silent!’

‘Me, they mean me!’ Bontzye assured himself again, and yet had not the courage to give a glance at the Heavenly Court.

He listens to the advocate further:

‘He kept silent also when his protector became bankrupt and did not pay him his wages. He kept silent when his wife ran away from him.’

‘Me, they mean me!’ Now he is sure of it.

* * * * *

‘He kept silent even’, began the angelic advocate once more in a still softer and sadder voice, ‘when the same philanthropist paid all his creditors their due but him――and even when (riding once again in a carriage with rubber tires and fiery horses) he knocked Bontzye down and drove over him. He kept silent even in the hospital, where one may cry out. He kept silent when the doctor would not come to his bedside without being paid fifteen kopeks, and when the attendant demanded another five――for changing his linen.

‘He kept silent in the death struggle――silent in death.

‘Not a word against God; not a word against men!

‘Dixi!’

Once more Bontzye trembled all over. He knew that after the advocate comes the prosecutor. Who knows what he will say? Bontzye himself remembered nothing of his life. Even in the other world he forgot every moment what had happened in the one before. The advocate had recalled everything to his mind. Who knows what the prosecutor will not remind him of?

‘Gentlemen’, begins the prosecutor, in a voice biting and acid as vinegar――but he breaks off.

‘Gentlemen’, he begins again, but his voice is milder, and a second time he breaks off.

Then from out the same throat comes in a voice that is almost gentle: ‘Gentlemen! He was silent! I will be silent too!’

There is a hush――and there sounds in front a new, soft, trembling voice: ‘Bontzye, my child!’ It speaks like a harp. ‘My dear child, Bontzye!’

And Bontzye’s heart melts within him. Now he would lift up his eyes, but they are blinded with tears; he never felt such sweet emotion before. ‘My child! Bontzye!’――no one, since his mother died, had spoken to him with such words in such a voice.

‘My child’, continues the presiding judge, ‘you have suffered and kept silent; there is no whole limb, no whole bone in your body without a scar, without a wound, not a fibre of your soul that has not bled――and you kept silent. There they did not understand. Perhaps you yourself did not know that you might have cried out, and that at your cry the walls of Jericho would have shaken and fallen. You yourself knew nothing of your hidden power.

‘In the other world your silence was not understood, but that is the World of Delusion; in the World of Truth you will receive your reward. The Heavenly Court will not judge you; the Heavenly Court will not pass sentence on you; they will not apportion you a reward. Take what you will! Everything is yours.’

Bontzye looks up for the first time. He is dazzled; everything shines and flashes and streams with light.

‘_Taki_――really?’ he asks, shyly.

‘Yes, really!’ answers the presiding judge, with decision; ‘really, I tell you, everything is yours; everything in heaven belongs to you. Because all that shines and sparkles is only the reflection of your hidden goodness, a reflection of your soul. You only take of what is yours.’

‘_Taki?_’ asks Bontzye again, this time in a firmer voice.

‘_Taki!_ taki! taki!’ they answer from all sides.

‘Well, if it is so’, Bontzye smiles, ‘I would like to have every day, for breakfast, a hot roll with fresh butter.’

The Court and the angels looked down, a little ashamed; the prosecutor laughed.

J. L. PERETZ, 1894.
(_Trans. Helena Frank._)

THE WATCH ON THE JORDAN[36]
(ZIONIST HYMN)

LIKE the crash of the thunder
Which splitteth asunder
The flame of the cloud,
On our ears ever falling
A voice is heard calling
From Zion aloud.
‘Let your spirits’ desires
For the land of your sires
Eternally burn;
From the foe to deliver
Our own holy river,
To Jordan return.’
Where the soft-flowing stream
Murmurs low as in dream
There set we our watch!
Our watchword, ‘The sword
Of our land and our Lord’;
By Jordan then set we our watch.

Rest in peace, lovéd land,
For we rest not, but stand,
Off-shaken our sloth.
When the bolts of war rattle,
To shirk not the battle
We make thee our oath.
As we hope for a heaven,
Thy chains shall be riven,
Thine ensign unfurled.
And in pride of our race
We will fearlessly face
The might of the world.
When our trumpet is blown,
And our standard is flown,
Then set we our watch!
Our watchword, ‘The sword
Of our land and our Lord’;
By Jordan then set we our watch.

Yea, as long as there be
Birds in air, fish in sea,
And blood in our veins;
And the lions in might,
Leaping down from the height,
Shaking, roaring, their manes;
And the dew nightly laves,
The forgotten old graves
Where Judah’s sires sleep;
We swear, who are living,
To rest not in striving,
To pause not to weep.
Let the trumpet be blown,
Let the standard be flown,
Now set we our watch;
Our watchword, ‘The sword
Of our land and our Lord’;
In Jordan now set we our watch.

N. H. IMBER.
(_Trans. I. Zangwill._)

THE TRAGEDY OF ASSIMILATION

WHAT I understand by assimilation is loss of identity. It is this kind of assimilation, with the terrible consequences indicated, that I dread most――even more than pogroms.

It _is_ a tragedy to see a great, ancient people, distinguished for its loyalty to its religion, and its devotion to its sacred Law, losing thousands every day by the mere process of attrition. It _is_ a tragedy to see a language held sacred by all the world, in which Holy Writ was composed, which served as the depository of Israel’s greatest and best thoughts, doomed to oblivion. It _is_ a tragedy to see the descendants of those who revealed religion to the world, and who developed the greatest religious literature in existence, so little familiar with real Jewish thought that they have no other interpretation to offer of Israel’s Scriptures, Israel’s religion, and Israel’s ideals and aspirations and hopes, than those suggested by their natural opponents, slavishly following their opinions, copying their phrases, and repeating their catchwords. I am not accusing anybody. I am only stating facts. We are helpless spectators of the Jewish soul wasting away before our very eyes.

Now, the rebirth of Israel’s national consciousness and the revival of Judaism are inseparable. When Israel found itself, it found its God. When Israel lost itself, or began to work at its self-effacement, it was sure to deny its God. The selection of Israel, the indestructibility of God’s covenant with Israel, the immortality of Israel as a nation, and the final restoration of Israel to Palestine, where the nation will live a holy life, on holy ground, with all the wide-reaching consequences of the conversion of humanity, and the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth――all these are the common ideals and the common ideas that permeate the whole of Jewish literature extending over nearly four thousand years.

S. SCHECHTER, 1906.

* * * * *

THERE has been one short period in modern Jewish history when Israel grew utterly weary of toil and trouble, and began to take pleasure in the fleeting hour, as other nations do. But this was a mere passing phase, a temporary loss of consciousness. The prophetic spirit cannot be crushed, except for a time. It comes to life again, and masters the Prophet in his own despite. So, too, the prophetic People regained consciousness in its own despite. The Spirit that called Moses thousands of years ago and sent him on his mission, against his own will, now calls again the generation of to-day, saying, ‘_And that which cometh into your mind shall not be at all; in that ye say, We will be as the nations ... As I live, saith the Lord God, surely with a mighty hand ... will I be king over you._’

ACHAD HA’AM, 1904.
(_Trans. Leon Simon._)

THE VALLEY OF DRY BONES

THE hand of the Lord was upon me, and the Lord carried me out in a spirit, and set me down in the midst of the valley, and it was full of bones; and He caused me to pass by them round about, and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry. And He said unto me: ‘Son of man, can these bones live?’ And I answered: ‘O Lord God, Thou knowest’. Then he said unto me: ‘Prophesy over these bones, and say unto them: O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord: Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the Lord.’ So I prophesied as I was commanded; and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a commotion, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. And I beheld, and, lo, there were sinews upon them, and flesh came up, and skin covered them above; but there was no breath in them. Then said He unto me: ‘Prophesy unto the breath, prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath: Thus saith the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.’ So I prophesied as He commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great host. Then He said unto me: ‘Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel; behold, they say: Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost: we are clean cut off. Therefore prophesy, and say unto them: Thus saith the Lord God: Behold, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, O My people; and I will bring you into the Land of Israel. And ye shall know that I am the Lord, when I have opened your graves, and caused you to come up out of your graves, O My people. And I will put My spirit in you, and ye shall live, and I will place you in your own land; and ye shall know that I the Lord have spoken, and performed it, saith the Lord.’

EZEKIEL 37. 1‒14.

PALESTINE

THE very name Palestine stirs within us the most elevated sentiments. There is no country, no matter how important in itself, to which such sublime memories attach themselves. From our earliest youth, our imagination, nourished on the sacred traditions of the Hebrew Scriptures, loves to transport itself to those heights where of old pious souls heard in each echo the voice of God, where each stone is a symbol of divine revelation, each ruin a monument of divine anger. The followers of three religions turn with veneration towards these ruins of 2,000 years. All find consolation in that land, some by its memories, others by its hopes. Even sceptics are ready to render historic justice to the great events of which it was the theatre: thus the description of this land and its story have a palpitating interest for all.

S. MUNK, 1863.

THE LAST CORPSES IN THE DESERT

UP, wanderers in the wild, and come away!
Long is the journey yet and long the fray.

Enough of roving now in desert places――
There lies a great, wide road before your faces.

But forty years of wandering have sped,
And yet we leave six hundred thousand dead.

Dishonoured let them lie, across the pack
They bore from out of Egypt on their back.

Sweet be their dreams of garlic and of leek,
Of flesh-pots wide, of fatty steam and reek.

Around the last dead slave, maybe to-night,
The desert wind with desert beast shall fight,

And joyously to-morrow’s dawning shine
Upon the firstlings of a mighty line,

And lest the sands with all their sleepers start,
Let each man’s footfall sound but in his heart.

Let each man in his heart hear God’s voice say:
‘A new land’s border shalt thou cross to-day!

‘No more the quails from heav’n, no more light bread――
The bread of toil, fruit of the hands, instead.

‘No more wild tents pitched under heaven’s dome――
Another kind shall ye set up for home.

‘Beneath His sky, the wilderness outside,
God has another world that reaches wide,

‘Beyond the howling desert with its sand,
There waits beneath His stars the Promised Land.’

CH. N. BYALIK, 1896.
(_Trans. Helena Frank._)

ZIONISM

ONE thing is to me certain, high above any doubt: the movement will continue. I know not when I shall die, but Zionism will never die.

THEODOR HERZL, 1898.

* * * * *

ZIONISM is the lineal heir of the attachment to Zion which led the Babylonian exiles under Zerubbabel to rebuild the Temple, and which flamed up in the heroic struggle of the Maccabees against Antiochus Epiphanes. The idea that it is a set-back of Jewish history is a controversial fiction. The great bulk of the Jewish people have throughout their history remained faithful to the dream of a restoration of their national life in Judea.

The Zionist movement is to-day the greatest popular movement that Jewish history has ever known.

LUCIEN WOLF, 1910,
_in Encyclopaedia Britannica_.

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ALL over the world Jews are resolved that our common Judaism shall not be crushed out by short-sighted fanatics for local patriotism; and, in so far as Zionism strengthens this sense of the solidarity of our common Judaism, we are all Zionists.