Chapter XIX: Zionism a Surrender, Not a Solution2

Zionism is the most stupendous fallacy in Jewish history. I assert that it is wrong in principle and impossible of realization; that it is unsound in its economics, fantastical in its politics, and sterile in its spiritual ideals. Where it is not pathetically visionary, it is a cruel playing with the hopes of a people blindly seeking their way out of age-long miseries. These are bold and sweeping assertions, but in this chapter I shall undertake to make them good.

The very fervour of my feeling for the oppressed of every race and every land, especially for the Jews, those of my own blood and faith, to whom I am bound by every tender tie, impels me to fight with all the greater force against this scheme, which my intelligence tells me can only lead them deeper into the mire of the past, while it professes to be leading them to the heights.

Zionism is a surrender, not a solution. It is a retrogression into the blackest error, and not progress toward the light. I will go further, and say that it is a betrayal; it is an eastern European proposal, fathered in this country by American Jews, which, if it were to succeed, would cost the Jews of America most that they have gained of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

I claim to speak with knowledge on this subject. I have had occasion to know the Jew intimately in all the lands where he dwells in numbers, and to study his problems on his own ground, with the intensity and sympathy which were required by my duty to help in each place to formulate the plans for his immediate assistance. I was born among the Jews of Germany, and by natural association with German Jews in New York, and by repeated visits to Germany, am familiar with their life and problems. As an American of fifty-five years’ residence, as a director of the Educational Alliance and of Mt. Sinai Hospital, as president of the Bronx House and the Free Synagogue for more than ten years, and as one who has travelled on speaking tours from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Canada to New Orleans on behalf of the American Jewish Relief Committee, I became thoroughly familiar with the American Jews. As American Ambassador to Turkey, I came into daily official contact with the Jews from all parts of the Near East, not only the Jews of Turkey and of the Turkish Protectorate in Palestine itself, but also the Jews of Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece, Roumania, and Bulgaria, to say nothing of the accredited representatives of the Zionist Party in Constantinople. As the head of President Wilson’s Commission, which was sent to investigate the alleged pogroms of the Jews of Poland following the Armistice in 1919, I spent several months on the ground in Poland and Galicia, and talked with thousands of Jews in every walk of life in that greatest centre of Jewish population in the world. They told me their troubles; the indignities and the perils they endured; the hatred of their neighbours because of their religion; the deliberate efforts that were being made to stifle their economic life; the political discriminations to which they were subjected; and the social barriers which did not permit them to enjoy a full life as members of their community.

I speak as a Jew. I speak with fullest sympathy for the Jew everywhere. I have seen him in his poverty--despised, hated, spat upon, beaten, murdered. My blood boils with his at the thought of the indignities and outrages to which he is subjected. I, too, would find for him, for me, the way out of this morass of poverty, hatred, political inequality, and social discrimination.

But is Zionism that way? I assert emphatically that it is not. I deny it, not merely from an intellectual recoil from the fallacy of its reasoning, but from my very experience of life: as a seeker after religious truth, as a practical business man, as an active participant in politics, as one who has had experience in international affairs, and as a Jew who has at heart the best interests of his co-religionists.

First, let me trace briefly the origins of Zionism. I shall not attempt to give a complete résumé of these origins, but shall sketch only a broad picture of the facts.

Zionism is based upon a literal acceptance of the promises made to the Jews by their prophets in the Old Testament, that Zion should be restored to them, and that they should resume their once glorious place as a peculiar people, singled out by God for His especial favour, exercising dominion over their neighbours in His name, and enjoying all the freedom and blessings of a race under the unique protection of the Almighty. Of course, the prophets meant these things symbolically, and were dealing only with the spiritual life. They did not mean earthly power or materialistic blessings. But most Jews accepted them in the physical sense; and they fed upon this glowing dream of earthly grandeur as a relief from the sordid realities of the daily life which they were compelled to lead.

Zionism arose out of the miseries of the Jews. It was offered as a remedy, a release, a plan of action which would provide a road to happiness. This is the secret of its hold upon its adherents. The promises which it offers are so dazzling that Jews everywhere have rushed to embrace its faith without stopping to examine them closely or to calculate whether they can be made good.

Zionism is not a new idea, but it gained a fresh impetus following the outbreak of wholesale massacres in Russia beginning with Kiev and Kishineff, and all through that ghastly trail of bloodshed following the recrudescence of Anti-Semitism. The Jews, in their agony and peril, sought afresh for a path toward safety. Zionism was then restated as the remedy. Theodore Herzl gained new power as its fiery apostle, and Jews the world over embraced the doctrine as a drowning man grasps at a straw. This largely accounts for the present intense agitation of the Zionists.

Let me now define Zionism more fully. To the average Jew, unread in other histories than his own, ignorant of the great currents of world progress in science, industry, and the art of government, it is a blind and simple faith in the imminence of realization of the dream I have just described of the reërection of Zion as an earthly Kingdom. By those intellectual leaders of Jewish thought who have embraced this fallacy of a panacea, Zionism is defined in more subtle and in more plausibly rational terms. There are, first, those intellectual Jews who conceive of “Zion” (that is, Jerusalem restored to the Jews) as being a physical symbol of spiritual leadership, lifted up before their eyes and inspiring them all to a common purpose; as a demonstration of Hebraic civilization; a centre from which should proceed instruction and exhortation to the Jews of all the world.

This analogy, however, is not complete. For these leaders conceive the Jews to be, not merely a religious congregation, but, besides, a nation. They think that not merely should spiritual power be centralized in Zion, but temporal power as well. In their view, the discrimination against Jews in other countries will greatly diminish, once there is erected a Jewish state in Palestine.

This nation is to be, in their theory, not only the seat of a religion and the fostering home of distinctive racial culture. It is to be, as well, an actual political entity, with territorial boundaries and a capital city, maintaining a temporal government with a ruler accrediting ambassadors to foreign courts and capitals, dealing with other governments on an equality as a sovereign state, and seeking to use the familiar instruments of diplomatic pressure to redress the wrongs of its citizens who happen to reside under the jurisdiction of “foreign” nations.

I say that this _is_ the programme of the Zionists: perhaps I should say _was_. It is true that they have, for the moment, altered the structure of their dream, to accept the compromise held out to them by the Balfour Declaration. They have stepped down from their plans for a sovereign Jewish state in Palestine: they now accept the ideal of a “National Home for the Jewish People”--to quote the words of that declaration. This is, however, only a temporary compromise--a truce. Nothing short of the full glory of their Zion will long content the ambitious apostles of Zionism.

It is worth while at this point to digress for a moment from my main argument, to point out that the Balfour Declaration is itself not even a compromise. It is a shrewd and adroit delusion.

The Balfour Declaration is: “His Majesty’s Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, nor the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

The plain sense of these plain words has been woefully misunderstood by some of the Zionist leaders, and wilfully distorted by others. They contain no promise of a Jewish state: they offer no recognition of a Jewish nation. They do, it is true, apply the obscure but pleasant name of “Jewish Home Land” to the land which the Declaration then accurately defines by its political name as “Palestine”; but it guarantees to the Jews in their Home Land only those familiar assurances of security of person and property which are the common possessions of British subjects the world over.

I have been astonished to find that such an intelligent body of American Jews as the Central Conference of American Rabbis should have fallen into a grievous misunderstanding of the purport of the Balfour Declaration. In a resolution adopted by them, they assert that the Declaration says: “Palestine is to be a national home land for the Jewish people.” Not at all! The actual words of the Declaration (I quote from the official text) are: “His Majesty’s Government views with favour the establishment _in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people_.” These two phrases sound alike, but they are really very different. I can make this obvious by an analogy. When I first read the Balfour Declaration I was making my home in the Plaza Hotel. Therefore I could say with truth: “My home is in the Plaza Hotel.” I could not say with truth: “The Plaza Hotel is my home.” If it were “my home,” I would have the freedom of the whole premises, and could occupy any room in the house with impunity. Quite obviously, however, I could not occupy the rooms of any other of the guests of the hotel whose leases long antedated mine.

These men would gladly entertain me as a visitor, but how they would resent and legally fight so unjustifiable an attempt as my trying forcibly to enter their premises and displace them and make their quarters my home.

A leader of the Jewish community in Vilna, who took a very prominent part in the incidents that arose when the Poles took possession of the city.]

This is exactly the differentiation in meaning between the Balfour Declaration and the claims of those Zionists who profess to see in it British authority for claiming Palestine as the seat of a Jewish nation. The Balfour Declaration very carefully says: “The British Government favours the establishment of a home land for the Jewish people _in Palestine_.” But this does not say that the Jews shall have the right to dispossess, or to trespass upon the property of those far more numerous Arab tenants whose right to their share in it is as good as that of the Jews and, in most cases, of much longer standing.

Palestine is a country already populated, and the British Government has no intention of evicting the Arab owners of the soil in favour of the Jews. Nor, I may add in passing, have the Arab owners any intention of selling their holdings to the Jews, for they are fully aware of the Zionist programme, are very resentful of it, and intend to use every means at their command to frustrate it.

In February, 1921, this obvious meaning of the Balfour Declaration was made officially explicit, when the complete text of the mandate for Palestine was first made public. After reiterating in the preamble the language which I have above quoted, this official transaction of the Council of the League of Nations proceeds to enumerate the specific terms under which Palestine shall be governed as a mandatary of Great Britain. The very first article of this mandate explodes completely the theory that the Allied Powers had any idea of setting up a Jewish nation. It reads: “His Britannic Majesty shall have the power to exercise as mandatory all the powers inherent in the government of a sovereign state save as they may be limited by the terms of the present mandate.” In other words, not a government of Jews over a Jewish nation, but His Britannic Majesty is declared to be the repository of “the powers inherent in a sovereign state.”

To be sure, these powers are limited by certain specific terms enumerated in the mandate. Space does not permit a quotation of them in full, but I would advise those interested to secure a copy of the mandate and to study it in the light of the claim of some Zionists that the Balfour Declaration recognizes a Jewish State. These so-called “limitations” do not really limit the sovereign power of His Britannic Majesty. They are not limitations; they are statements of the direction in which the British as mandataries pledge themselves to pay especial attention to the interests of the Jews _as a part of the body of the citizens of Palestine_. Except for these expressions of benevolent intention specifically toward the Jews, every one of the twenty-seven articles in the declaration is just as applicable to every other citizen of Palestine, whether Jew or Gentile, Mohammedan, Arab, or Christian Syriac. They are guaranties of civil liberty, freedom of conscience, equality before the law, and the like.

It was a politic move of the British Government to name a Jew as the first governing head of Palestine when the British began to function under this mandate. But this appointment of Sir Herbert Samuel was only politic, it was not political. It has no general significance.

As I have said, some of the Zionist leaders woefully misunderstood the Balfour Declaration. The terms of the mandate now leave to them no room for misunderstanding. Other Zionist leaders, however, wilfully misrepresented it. They knew that it meant what it said, but they did not dare to tell their followers what it meant. They chose rather to let them think that it was only another phrasing of their original programme of the erection of a Zionistic national sovereign state, or that it would lead to it. These misleaders, being more vociferous than their more honest colleagues, have had the ear of the great mass of Jews throughout the world. This mass now believes that Zionism, as a national ideal, is presently attainable, if, indeed, it is not actually attained already. These Zionistic apostles are culpable, in that they have failed to undeceive the masses of this error. Instead, they have capitalized this credulous faith, and are collecting funds in America and in Europe, ostensibly to finance what they call the establishment of their dream, although really, as I believe, to finance further propaganda for their unattainable ideal.

Having disposed of the fallacious assumption that Zionism has been, or is about to be attained, let me now return to my main argument, namely, that it never can be attained, and that it ought not to be attained.

Let us examine the pretensions of Zionism from three essential angles: Is it an economic fallacy? Is it a political fantasy? Is it a spiritual will-o’-the wisp?

First, its economic aspect. I assert positively that it is impossible. Zionists have been working for thirty years with fanatical zeal, and backed by millions of money from philanthropic Jews of great wealth in France, England, Germany, and America; and the total result of their operations, at the outbreak of the World War, was the movement of ten thousand Jews from other lands to the soil of Palestine. In the same period, a million and a half Jews have migrated to America.

The truth is that Palestine cannot support a large population in prosperity. It has a lean and niggard soil. It is a land of rocky hills, upon which, for many centuries, a hardy people have survived only with difficulty by cultivating a few patches of soil here and there, with the olive, the fig, citrus fruits and the grape, or have barely sustained their flocks upon the sparse native vegetation. The streams are few and small, entirely insufficient for the great irrigation systems that would be necessary for the general cultivation of the land. The underground sources of water can be developed only at a prodigious capital expense. There are thirteen million Jews in the world: the Zionist organization itself claims for Palestine only a maximum possible population of five millions. Even this claim is on the face of it an extravagant over-estimate. After careful study on the spot in Palestine, I prophesy that it will not support more than one million additional inhabitants.

Palestine is in area about equal to the state of Massachusetts; and that New England state, blest (as Palestine is not) with plentiful water, ample water-powers, abundant forestation, and a good soil, supports only four million people. This bald comparison, however, does not begin to tell the story. Massachusetts is an integral part of a tremendously prosperous nation of one hundred million souls. Distributed among forty-eight states, between which there are no political boundaries to protect, no fences to be maintained, no tariff discrimination, or unfavourable exchanges to be considered, she enjoys all the advantages of a highly industrialized community, and of established commercial intercourse with the rest of the most progressive nations in the world. If Massachusetts were situated as Palestine is situated, remote from the great currents of modern economic life; without even one of those absolutely indispensable prerequisites to commercial success, namely natural ports; without its network of railways, bringing to it cheaply the raw materials for its manufactures, and carrying from it cheaply and quickly to rich markets its manufactured articles, Massachusetts would support a population far less than its present numbers.

This is the condition of Palestine: not only must agriculture be pursued under the greatest possible handicaps of soil and water, but it is subject to the direct competition of far more favoured lands in the very agricultural products for which it is distinctive. These are the citrus fruits, almonds, figs and dates, grapes and wine. How can little Palestine compete in these products with Italy, France, and Spain, and their north African colonies, whose richer soil lies in the direct line of the great march of commerce?

A great industrial Palestine is equally unthinkable. It lacks the raw materials of coal and iron; it lacks the skill in technical processes and the experience in the arts; and, above all, it is not in the path of modern trade currents. What hope is there for Palestine, as an industrial nation, in competition with America, Great Britain, and Germany, with their prodigious resources, their highly organized factories, their great mass-production, and their superb means of transportation? The notion is preposterous.

I claim that the foregoing analysis demolishes the economic foundation of Zionism.

What of its political foundations? Is Zionism a political fantasy? I assert most emphatically that it is. The present British mandate over Palestine is a recognition, by the great powers of the world, of the supreme political interest of Great Britain in that region. It was no mere accident that it was a British army which captured Jerusalem from the Turks in the late war. The life-and-death importance of the Suez Canal to the integrity of the British Empire has for more than half a century made the destiny of Palestine as well as of Egypt a vital concern of British statesmanship. So long as the Turk was in control, the British had no cause to fear what that impotent and backward neighbour might do to interrupt the life current that flows through this jugular vein connecting India with the British Isles. But now that the Turk is in process of being dispossessed of sovereignty, and the future disposition of his territories in doubt, British statesmen can hold but one opinion concerning either Egypt or Palestine, and this opinion is, that no matter what else may befall, British influence must be omnipotent on both sides of the Suez Canal. It may be politic for them for the moment to coddle the aspirations of a numerically negligible race like the Jews. But the notion that Great Britain would for one instant allow any form of government in Palestine, under any name whatever, that was not, in fact, an appanage of the British Crown, and subservient to the paramount interests of British world policy, is too fantastical for serious refutation.

I have just said that it may be politic for the British Government to coddle the aspirations of the Jews. There are, however, profound reasons why this coddling will not take the form of granting to them even the name and surface appearance of a sovereign government ruling Palestine. In the first place, Britain’s hold upon India is by no means so secure that the Imperial Government at London can afford to trifle with the fanatical sensibilities of the millions of Mohammedans in its Indian possessions. Remember that Palestine is as much the Holy Land of the Mohammedan as it is the Holy Land of the Jew, or the Holy Land of the Christian. His shrines cluster there as thickly. They are to him as sacredly endeared. In 1914 I visited the famous Caves of Machpelah, twenty miles from Jerusalem; and I shall never forget the mutterings of discontent that murmured in my ears, nor the threatening looks that confronted my eyes, from the lips and faces of the devout Mohammedans whom I there encountered. For these authentic tombs of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are as sacred to them, because they are saints of Islam, as they are to the most orthodox of my fellow Jews, whose direct ancestors they are, not only in the spiritual, but in the actual physical sense. To these Mohammedans, my presence at the tombs of my ancestors was as much a profanation of a Mohammedan Holy Place as if I had laid sacrilegious hands upon the sacred relics in the mosque at Mecca. To imagine that the British Government will sanction a scheme for a political control of Palestine which would place in the hands of the Jews the physical guardianship of these shrines of Islam, is to imagine something very foreign to the practical political sense of the most politically practical race on earth. They know too well how deeply they would offend their myriad Mohammedan subjects to the East.

Exactly the same political issue of religious fanaticism applies to the question of Christian sensibilities. Any one who has seen, as in 1914 I saw at Easter-tide, the tens of thousands of devout Roman Catholics from Poland, Italy, and Spain, and the other tens of thousands of devout Greek Catholics from Russia and the East, who yearly frequent the shrines of Christianity in Palestine, and who thus consummate a lifetime of devotion by a pilgrimage undertaken at, to them, staggering expense and physical privation; and who has observed, as I have observed, the suppressed hatred of them all for both the Jew and the Mussulman; and who has noted, further, the bitter jealousies between even Protestant and Catholic, between Greek Catholic and Roman--such an observer, I say, can entertain no illusions that the placing of these sacred shrines of Christian tradition in the hands of the Jews would be tolerated. The most enlightened Christians might endure it, but the great mass of Christian worshippers of Europe would not. They regard the Jew not merely as a member of a rival faith, but the man whose ancestors rejected their fellow Jew, the Christ, and crucified Him. Their fanaticism is a political fact of gigantic proportions. A Jewish State in Palestine would inevitably arouse their passion. Instead of such a State adding new dignity and consideration to the position of the Jew the world over (as the Zionists claim it would do), I am convinced that it would concentrate, multiply, and give new venom to the hatred which he already endures in Poland and Russia, the very lands in which most of the Jews now dwell, and where their oppressions are the worst.

The political pretensions of Zionism are fantastic. I think the foregoing paragraphs have demonstrated this.

Is Zionism a spiritual will-o’-the-wisp? I assert with all the vigour of my most profound convictions that it is. Its professed spiritual aim is the reassertion of the dignity and worth of the Jew. It is a mechanism designed to restore to him his self-respect, and to secure for him the respect of others. The means by which it proposes to accomplish this have been described above. How pitifully inadequate these means are has been demonstrated.

The effort of the Jews to attain their legitimate spiritual ambitions by means of a political mechanism needs hardly further to be controverted in the negative, or destructive, sense. I prefer to meet this issue on positive and constructive grounds. My answer to the spiritual pretensions of Zionism is the positive answer that the solution has already been discovered--the way out has been found. The courageous Jew, the intellectually honest Jew, the forward-looking Jew, the Jew who has been willing to fight for his rights on the spot where they were infringed, has won his battle, and has found all the glorious freedom which Zionism so impractically describes. The brave Jews of England did not surrender their cause. They did not seek a moral opiate in an Oriental pipe-dream of retreat to a cloud-land Zion pictured by fancy on the arid hills of Palestine. They stayed in England; they fought on English soil for their rights as men. Their courage enlisted the admiration of the nobler spirits among the English, and it allied to them such Britons as Macaulay and George Bentinck, whose splendid eloquence and political acumen assisted in the repeal of the Jewish Disabilities in 1858. This epochal legislation gave the Jews every right enjoyed in Britain by the Christians. It made possible the splendid political career of Beaconsfield (for many years Prime Minister of Great Britain), and the brilliant experience of Sir Rufus Isaacs (now Earl Reading) who has progressed through the highest political honours of the nation as Lord Chief Justice, Ambassador to America, and Viceroy of India.

Do not forget that in this victorious struggle the Jew made no compromise whatever with his conscience. He did not abandon his racial, religious, or cultural heritage.

The courageous and wise Jews of France and Italy have fought this same battle to this same victorious conclusion.

But this book will be read chiefly by Americans: such influence as it may wield will be particularly upon American minds. Need I elaborate the argument in its American setting? The facts lie upon the surface for the dullest eyes to see them. Nowhere in the world has so glorious an opportunity been offered to the Jew. Generous America has thrown wide the doors of opportunity to him. The Jew possesses no talents of the mind or spirit that cannot find here a free field for their most complete expression.

Does he seek political office? Jews in this country have been or are members of every legislature, including the Senate of the United States; ambassadors representing the person of the President at foreign courts; officers of the judiciary in every grade from justice of the peace to justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Does he seek freedom of conscience? He may freely choose his mode of worship, from the strictest of orthodox tabernacles to the most liberal of free synagogues.

Does he seek a field for business talent? The evidence of opportunity in this direction is so overwhelming that it need not here be wearyingly recapitulated. The progress of Adolph S. Ochs from a printer’s devil in Knoxville, Tenn., fifty years ago, to owner of the greatest newspaper in the greatest city in the world, is characteristic of dozens of like successful Jewish careers in this country; and it is emblematic of hundreds of thousands of Jewish careers less spectacular but equally momentous in their own degree.

Does he seek social position? Here, indeed, his path is made more difficult. But the social barriers are not insurmountable. Where they seem so, calm judgment will reveal that the social environment where this irrational prejudice exists is not worthy of the entrance of the Jew. Leave the intolerant to associate with their own kind. The Jew who has raised himself to the highest level will have put himself beyond the reach of prejudice, and he will find himself welcomed in the highest Christian circles.

The enlightened Jews of America have found the true road to Zion. To them Zion is no mere political mechanism existing by the political sufferance of the greater Powers. It is not defined by geographical boundaries, circumscribing an arid plot of ground which their ancestors of two thousand years ago conquered from its aboriginal inhabitants and occupied for a brief, though glorious, period before they, in turn, were driven onward by a new conqueror. To them, Zion is a region of the soul. To them, it is an inner light, set upon the hill of personal consciousness, inspiring them as individuals to fight, each for himself, the battle of life where he meets it; demanding in virtue of his own worth the respect of those about him; winning through to the dignity and position to which his native gifts and his self-developed character entitle him. This is the only true Zion. All other definitions of it are unreal.

The proudest boast of all these men, and my proudest boast, is: “I am an American.” None of us would deny our race or faith. We are Jews by blood. We are Jews, though of various sects, by religion. But as for me (and here I am sure I speak for a vast body of Jews in the United States), if I were pressed to define myself by any single appellation, I would unhesitatingly select the one word _American_. Neither I nor the humblest worshipper in the most orthodox congregation can hope for anything from Zionism that is not already ours in virtue of our participation in the freedom of America. And neither of us need make the smallest compromise with any conviction that we hold dear. I have found it more convenient (as well as quite within the approval of what I regard as my somewhat more enlightened conscience) to cast off the other symbols of the Hebraic faith, such as the Kosher observances, the untouched beard, and the distinctive dress; but there are thousands of Russian Jews in the United States to-day who retain these excrescences of antiquity, with only a small inconvenience that is certainly very far short of persecution. From observation and experience I know full well that these same orthodox devotees will themselves become enlightened--if not they, then certainly their children--and will perceive, as I and others have perceived, that the Mosaic admonitions were purely temporal devices, expedient truly for the age in which they were promulgated, useful until modern sanitation and modern education did their work, but now become empty of those first values.

Here lies the crux of my affirmative argument against Zionism. We anti-Zionist Jews of America have found that the spiritual life, after whatever formula of faith, in modern times can be most fully enjoyed by those people who accept the beneficent progress which the world at large has made in science, industry, and the art of government. We have learned the folly of persisting in the sanitary regulations taught by Moses, in this age when all civilized peoples have the benefit of the more advanced sanitary knowledge of Lister, Pasteur, Metchnikoff, and Flexner. We have learned the folly of persisting in a distinctive style of clothing, beard, and locks (imposed upon the Jews extraneously as a badge of slavery and oppression), and of ascribing a spiritual significance to such a costume in this age when saints like Montefiore and Baron Edmond de Rathschild, the great patrons of Palestine, have found sanctity not incompatible with the ordinary dress of those about them. We have come to see that the worship of the God of Israel, the acceptable obedience to His will, is not contingent upon the Clothes one wears, upon the meat one eats. His kingdom is the soul of man. In that boundless temple He receives the priceless sacrifices of the true believer. That time and place and mode are most acceptable to Him in which the human spirit brings its richest offerings.

It follows, then, that the Jew everywhere (in Poland and Russia, as well as in France and America) can acceptably serve the God of his fathers and still enter fully into the life about him. We in America refuse to set ourselves apart in a voluntary ghetto for the sake of old traditional Observances.

I have often used a figure of speech--it was brought to my mind by meeting the rug-makers in Turkey--as follows: The Jew has been content, in most lands and down the ages, to be the fringe of the carpet, the loose end over which every foot has stumbled, where every heel has left its injuring impression on the disconnected individual strands. What the Jew should do is, to become a part of the pattern of the carpet itself: weave himself into the very warp and woof of the main fabric of humanity; and gain the strength which comes from a coördinated and orderly relation to the other strands of human society. His peculiar beauties (his peculiar talents), which in the fringe are soiled and hidden, take on new value when they become part of the main carpet; and they find their glory in lending to the pattern a unique splendour and a special lustre.

I, for one, will not forego this vision of the destiny of the Jews. I do not presume to say to my co-religionists of Europe that they shall accept my programme. But neither do I intend to allow them to impose their programme upon me. They may continue, if they will, a practice of our common faith which invites martyrdom, and which makes the continuance of oppression a certainty. I have found a better way (and when I say _I_, it is to speak collectively as one of a great body of American Jews of like mind). In the foregoing pages I have given my reasons for opposing Zionism. They make plain why I asserted at the beginning of this chapter that Zionism is not a solution; that it is a surrender. It looks backward, and not forward. It would practically place in the hands of a few men, steeped in a foreign tradition, the power to turn back the hands of time upon all which I and my predecessors of the same convictions have won for ourselves here in America. We have fought our way through to liberty, equality, and fraternity. We have found rest for our souls. No one shall rob us of these gains. We enjoy in America exactly the spiritual liberty, the financial success, and the social position which we have earned. Any Jew in America who wishes to be a saint of Zion has only to practice the cultivation of his spiritual gifts--there is none to hinder him. Any Jew in America who seeks material reward has only to cultivate the powers of his mind and character--there are no barriers between him and achievement. Any Jew in America who yearns for social position has only to cultivate his manners--there are no insurmountable discriminations here against true gentlemen. The Jews of France have found France to be their Zion. The Jews of England have found England to be their Zion. We Jews of America have found America to be our Zion. Therefore, I refuse to allow myself to be called a Zionist. I am an American.