_circumference_, which, like every circumference, is much larger than
the centre. That is to say, the speaker sees the majority of his people,
in the future as in the past, scattered over all the world, but no
longer broken up into a number of disconnected parts, because one
part—the one in Palestine—will be a centre for them all, and will unite
them all into a single, complete circumference. When all the scattered
limbs of the national body feel the beating of the national heart,
restored to life in the home of its vitality, they too will once again
draw near one to another and welcome the inrush of living blood that
will flow from the heart.
“Spiritual” means that this relation of centre and circumference between
Palestine and the lands of the Diaspora will be limited of necessity to
the spiritual side of life. The influence of the centre will strengthen
the national consciousness in the Diaspora, will wipe out the spiritual
taint of _galuth_, and will fill our spiritual life with a national
content which will be true and natural, not like the artificial content
with which we now fill up the void. But outside the spiritual side of
life, in all those economic and political relations which depend first
and foremost on the conditions of the immediate environment, and are
created by that environment and reflect its character—while it is true
that in all those relations the effect of the spiritual changes (such as
the strengthening of national unity and increased energy in the struggle
for existence) will show itself to some extent, yet essentially and
fundamentally these departments of life in the Diaspora will not be
bound up with the life of the centre, and the most vivid imagination
cannot picture to us how economic and political influence will radiate
from Palestine through all the length and breadth of the Diaspora, which
is co-extensive with the globe, in such manner and to such degree as
would entitle us to say, without inexact use of language, that Palestine
is the centre of our people in these departments also.
Now, at the time when I first used the phrase under discussion, I knew
beforehand that I should excite the wrath of the _Chovevé Zion_ (in
those days it was they who held the field). But looking, as I did,
solely at the logical side, I was sure that the brunt of their anger
would fall on the word “centre”; for the use of that word involved a
negation of the idea of a return of the whole people to Palestine, and
so clipped the wings of those fantastic hopes which even then, in the
days before the first Basle Congress, were proclaimed as heralding the
end of the _galuth_ and a complete and absolute solution of the Jewish
problem in all its aspects. The epithet “spiritual” seemed to me so
simple and clear, as a necessary logical consequence of the assumption
involved in the world “centre,” that it never remotely entered my mind
that here might be the stumbling-block, and that I ought at once to file
a declaration to the effect that, although the centre would be spiritual
in its influence on the circumference, yet in itself it would be a place
like other places, where men were compounded of body and soul, and
needed food and clothing, and that for this reason the centre would have
to concern itself with material questions and to work out an economic
system suited to its requirements, and could not exist without farmers,
labourers, craftsmen, and merchants. When a man uses, for example, the
expression “literary centre,” does it occur to him to explain that he
does not mean a place where there is no eating or drinking, no business
or handicraft, but simply a number of men sitting and writing books and
drinking in the radiance of their own literary talent? Imagine, then, my
surprise when I found that my critics paid no attention to the word
“centre,” but poured out all the vials of their wrath on the epithet
“spiritual,” as though it contained all that was new and strange in the
idea: as who should say, “A _spiritual_ and not a _material_ centre? Can
such a thing be?”
But my amazement soon died away when I remembered the “psychological
apparatus.” It was bound to fasten on some word or other in order to
make my unpopular theory appear absurd; and since the word “centre,” if
the critics dwelt on it and led the minds of their readers to analyse
its meaning, was calculated not to serve that end, but, on the contrary,
to make it clear where the absurdity really lay, they found it best to
give “spiritual” all the emphasis. “A _spiritual_ centre! Now do you
understand what these people want? They care nothing for a material
settlement, for colonies, factories, commerce: they want only to settle
in Palestine a dozen _batlanim_, whose business shall be spiritual
nationality.”
Great indeed is the power of psychology. This interpretation spread
abroad, was accepted, and remains to this day a matter of course. Even
those Zionists who have not got their knowledge of my views from the
pamphlet literature which has flooded the world in recent years, but
have read them in the original—even they are certain that that is what
spiritual Zionism means. It has availed them nothing to read immediately
afterwards, in the same article,[70] that the spiritual centre must be
“a true miniature of the people of Israel,” and that in the centre there
will appear once more “the genuine type of a Jew, whether it be a Rabbi
or a scholar or a writer, _a farmer or a craftsman or a business man_.”
It has availed nothing, because psychological factors dominate not only
the person judging, but also his memory.
Three years ago,[71] I remember, after I had published in some journal a
protest against the favourable reports about the condition of the
Palestinian colonies that were then being spread abroad, for diplomatic
purposes, a writer in the camp of the political Zionists became angry
with me, and determined to shatter with one blow all my views on
Zionism, and so remove a dangerous heresy. This idea he carried out in
an elaborate article, which was continued through many numbers of the
same journal. The details I have forgotten: they were but the old
arguments dished up in different words. But I still remember one thing,
which provoked not only a smile but also reflections such as those which
are the subject of the present essay. After proving conclusively that
material factors are of great importance, and cannot be lightly brushed
aside, our author reaches the conclusion that it is for that reason idle
to confine our work solely to the foundation of a spiritual centre for
our nationality: we must found in Palestine an _economic and spiritual_
centre. It escaped his notice that so soon as he used the word “centre”
he became himself a “spiritual Zionist,” and in adding the epithet
“economic” added exactly nothing. The journal in question appeared in
Warsaw, which was also at that time the home of our author; and in order
to understand the matter aright he had only to go into the street and
ask any intelligent Pole: “What is Warsaw to the Polish people as a
whole? Is it a spiritual centre of the nation, or a spiritual and
economic centre?” The answer, I think, would have been something like
this: “For the Polish people as a whole this city is certainly a
spiritual centre of their nationality. Here the national characteristics
find their expression in every department of life, here the national
language, literature, and art live and develop; and all this, and what
goes with it, influences the spirit of the Poles, binds them, wherever
they may be, to the centre, and prevents the spark of nationality in the
individual from becoming buried and extinguished. But an _economic_
centre of the nation? My good sir! How could Warsaw be an economic
centre for all the millions of Poles who are scattered over different
lands, and whose economic lives depend on entirely different centres,
where Polish economic conditions do not count at all?” I should not have
advised our author, after getting an answer of that kind, to ask: “How
so? Are there not in Warsaw, besides spiritual things, ever so many
factories and shops and other material things, without which it could
not develop its spiritual side? And is it not therefore an economic and
spiritual centre?” I should not have advised him to ask that question,
because I could not guarantee that the intelligent Pole would waste
words on such a questioner.
But amongst ourselves “the economic centre” has become a current phrase
with many people who on the one hand want to do their duty by the
economic side of Zionism (that is _de rigueur_ nowadays), and on the
other hand cannot achieve the imaginative eagle-flights of “Proletarian
Zionism,”[72] which promises to create in Palestine a national economic
system so healthy and so vast that it will be able to provide room and
work for all those Jews who are being more and more completely elbowed
out of the best branches of industry in the lands of their exile (that
is, for almost nine-tenths of the people). Zionists like these, in order
to get rid of the difficult question as to the possibility of settling
the majority of our people in Palestine, even when their new economic
system becomes a fact, consent to accept half the loaf, and want to
regard Palestine as merely an economic _centre_. But herein they escape
one snare to fall into a worse: they have got rid of an external
problem, which depends on arguments from experience, and are caught
instead in an inner contradiction, which mere logic can expose. With the
“Proletarian” formula one can still argue: one can demand, for instance,
a somewhat clearer explanation of that “internal process” by which the
economic system of Palestine will become able to absorb immigration on a
scale unparalleled in history: but at all events there is no
self-contradiction. Whereas the conception of “an economic centre of the
nation,” when applied to a people scattered over the whole world, leaves
no room for argument or questioning, because its refutation is in
itself.
But psychological combinations of this kind are a good sign. They
show—in common with other clear signs—that the “centre” as an idea is
making headway and is leading to various deductions which could not have
been imagined some years ago. And that is the all-important thing. In
time the deduction which is involved in the word “spiritual,” when
rightly understood, will also be drawn, and it will no longer be
possible to suppress it by psychological means. True, all this will not
do away with the old nonsense about “spiritual Zionism”; on the
contrary—and this is even now unmistakably evident—the more the
substance of spiritual Zionism prevails, the more will psychology try to
distinguish the victorious tendency from its hated name. But what of
that? Let the name be beaten, so but the idea prevail!
Footnote 69:
[_i.e._, in 1892.]
Footnote 70:
[_i.e._, the article “Dr. Pinsker and his Pamphlet,” from which the
phrase under discussion is quoted.]
Footnote 71:
[_i.e._, in 1904.]
Footnote 72:
[The name given to a Zionist doctrine based on Marxian Socialism,
which had a vogue in Russia, especially among the younger generation,
at the time when this article was written. The “internal process”
(mentioned later) belongs to the terminology of this doctrine.]
SUMMA SUMMARUM
(1912)
This is a summary not of facts and figures, but of impressions stored in
my mind in the course of sixty days during which our national work
enveloped me in its atmosphere and engrossed my every thought: ten days
at Basle during the Tenth Congress, and fifty days afterwards in
Palestine.
Fourteen years have passed since I saw a Zionist Congress (the first),
and twelve years since I witnessed the condition of our work in
Palestine. My object in revisiting both the Congress and the land was
not, as before, to go into details, to collect material, in the shape of
facts and figures, for the solution of certain practical problems. On
this occasion I opened my mind wide to the different impressions that
crowded in on me from all sides; I allowed them to enter and to dissolve
of themselves into a single general impression—a kind of mental summary
of all that I saw and heard in connection with our movement and our work
in and out of Palestine. I am of those who stand on the threshold of age
and look back on many long years of work and struggle, of victories and
defeats, of pain and of joy. A man in this position finds it necessary
at times to turn his thoughts for a while from questions of detail, and
to take a more comprehensive view, so that he may find for his own
satisfaction an answer to that broad, fundamental question which
occasionally disturbs his sleep: What is the purpose, what the result,
of all this work which has occupied your life and consumed your
strength?
It was this necessity that took me on this occasion to Basle and to
Palestine. And let me confess that it is a long time since I spent such
happy days as those of my travels. Not that all is now right with the
movement; not that the sun has shone on our work, and driven away the
shadows, and spread light and joy everywhere. We are still a long way
from such a happy consummation. Even to-day the shadows are many; if
they are less in one place, they are more in another. But one fact is
becoming increasingly clear: our work is not an artificial product, a
thing that we have invented to give the people something to do, as a
palliative for the national sorrow. That idea might be entertained if
aim and achievement corresponded, if the work were done for the purpose
of attaining that result which it is in fact attaining. If that were so,
one might doubt whether the attainment of this result were really
necessary for the nation, and whether the whole business were not
artificial. But that is not the case. Since the beginning of the
movement the workers have had one goal in view, and have been
unconsciously approaching another. This dualism is the surest sign that
the driving force is not reasoning reflection, but something much
deeper: one of those natural instincts which work in darkness, and make
a man do their will whether he likes it or not, while he believes that
his action is directed to the object which his reason has set before
him. This driving force is the instinct of national self-preservation.
By it we are compelled to achieve what must be achieved for the
perpetuation of our national existence; and we follow it—albeit without
clear consciousness, and by crooked paths—because follow it we must if
we would live. I used to be distressed by this dualism; I used to fear
that we might lose the right path—the path of life—through making for a
goal to which no path can lead. But now that I have seen the results of
the work so far, I have no such fears as to its ultimate fate. What
matters it that the work is professedly directed to an object which it
cannot attain? _L’homme propose_.... History does not trouble about our
programme; it creates what it creates at the bidding of our “instinct of
self-preservation.” Whether we ourselves understand the true import and
purpose of our work, or whether we prefer not to understand—in either
case history works through us, and will reach its goal by our agency.
Only the task will be harder and longer if true understanding does not
come to our aid.
That is the real state of the case. All that I saw and heard at Basle
and in Palestine has strengthened my conviction that the “instinct of
self-preservation” slumbers not nor sleeps in the nation’s heart.
Despite our mistakes, it is creating through our agency just what our
national existence requires most of all at present: _a fixed centre for
our national spirit and culture, which will be a new spiritual bond
between the scattered sections of the people, and by its spiritual
influence will stimulate them all to a new national life_.
To miss Basle during the Tenth Zionist Congress was to miss seeing an
extraordinary medley of languages and ideas—the result of an internal
crisis of which everybody was conscious, but which everybody tried hard
not to see. Throughout the Congress there was a struggle between two
sections, the “political” and the “practical.” You hear the “politicals”
declare that they, too, are really “practical,” only that they do not
forget “the political end”; you hear the “practicals” protest that they,
too, are really “political,” only that they do not forget “the practical
means.” And both sections alike protest that the “State” has really been
given up, but the Basle Programme has not been given up to the extent of
a single comma.[73].... In the end the “practicals” won: that is to say,
the essential work of Zionism was pronounced to be the extension of the
Jewish settlement, and the furthering of education and culture, in
Palestine. Thereupon the victors stood up and promised to guard
faithfully the Basle Programme and “the Zionist tradition developed
during fourteen years.”
But all this confusion was only an inevitable consequence of the state
of mind in which the two sections came to the Congress.
The Zionism of the “politicals,” most of whom were brought into the camp
not by a heartfelt longing for the persistence and the development of
Jewish nationality, but by a desire to escape from external oppression
through the foundation of a “secured home of refuge” for our
people—their Zionism is necessarily bound up with that object, and with
that alone: take that away, and it remains an empty phrase. For this
reason they cannot help seeing that the “practical work” which their
opponents make the basis of Zionism is not calculated to hasten that end
which is, for them, the only end. They still remember the estimate which
they heard in the opening speech of the first Congress: that the
colonising work of the _Chovevé Zion_ will bring the exiled people back
to Palestine in nine hundred years! But the course of events during
recent years has destroyed their hope of reaching that goal more quickly
by means of that “political” work which is the foundation of “the
Zionist tradition.” Hence they were in a quandary at this Congress, and
did not know how to extricate themselves. They came with empty hands,
and professed devotion to an object which there were no means of
attaining; they could only fall back on the hope of a vague future, when
external conditions may perhaps become more favourable to “political
work.” This explains also the excessive shyness which they displayed.
They did not go out to battle, as they used to do, with trumpetings and
loud alarums; there was scarcely a mention of those familiar flourishes,
which they used to utter with such boldness and vigour, about the
salvation which Zionism is to bring to all oppressed and persecuted
Jews. Even Nordau, in his speech on the condition of the Jews, changed
his tune on this occasion. The whole idea of his speech, which has been
given at the opening of every Congress, and has become an essential part
of the “Zionist tradition,” was to justify Zionism _on the ground of
anti-Semitism_. “You see”—such, in effect, used to be his argument—“how
perilous is your position all over the world; there is no way out. And
_therefore_, if you wish to be saved, join us, and we will save you.”
But on this occasion Nordau contented himself with describing the evil,
and dealing out reproaches to Jews and non-Jews. The essential thing—the
“therefore”—was lacking almost entirely. And throughout the Congress
there were heard speeches which openly opposed this Zionism based on
anti-Semitism, and the speakers were not shouted down, as they certainly
would have been in earlier years.
The “practicals”—mostly Eastern Jews and their Western pupils, for whom
national Judaism is the very centre of their being, and who are ruled
unconsciously by the “instinct of national self-preservation”—they came
to Basle in a very different frame of mind. They brought with them a
complete programme of “practical work in Palestine,” embracing both
colonising and cultural activity; and they came with a settled
conviction that all the various branches of this work were the proper
means to the attainment of the end—THE end—the one and only, yet
undefined. The “politicals” raised their old question: “Do you honestly
believe that the occasional purchase of a small piece of land, the
foundation of a tiny colony with infinite pains, a workmen’s farm
without security of tenure, a school here, a college there, and so
forth—that these are the means of acquiring a ‘home of refuge’ as
understood by the ‘Zionist tradition’—a refuge which will end our
troubles by ending our exile?” The “practicals” had no satisfactory
answer. None the less, they stood to their guns, and stoutly maintained
that work in Palestine is the only road that leads to _the_ end: but....
At this point they broke off abruptly, and did not complete their
thought—for a very good reason. They dared not expressly repudiate that
article of faith which alone has made Zionism a popular movement—“the
redemption of the nation.” They dared not recognise and acknowledge that
the end of which they speak to-day differs from that of the “Zionist
tradition.” What they are working for is not “a home of refuge for the
_people_ of Israel,” but “a fixed centre for the _spirit_ of Israel.”
All branches of the present work in Palestine, _be it buying land or
founding schools_, are sure means to the attainment of that end, but
have nothing to do with the other. The “practicals” were inwardly
conscious of this truth even while the “politicals” still had the upper
hand, and for this reason they joined with the “politicals” in fighting
it bitterly and angrily. It was a disturbing factor, of which they would
fain be rid. But now that the star of “political” Zionism had waned,
this conviction had grown stronger in the minds of the “practicals,” and
had become a real driving force. As yet, however, they lacked the moral
courage to intensify this subconscious whisper into a clear profession
of faith. Thus the real object remained beneath the threshold of
consciousness, while above the threshold there wandered about, like
disembodied spirits, here means without an object, there an object
without means; and imagination tried hard to combine the two.[74]
But while the “makers of history” inside the Congress Hall were in the
dark, it was outside the Hall, among the crowds attracted to Basle by
the Congress, that I saw quite clearly what history has really been
doing. In the fourteen years since the first Congress we have been
joined by a body of Jews of a new kind: men in whom the national
consciousness is deep-rooted, and is not measured by _Shekalim_[75] or
limited by a Programme, but is an all-pervading and all-embracing
sentiment. Jews of this type came to Basle from all the ends of the
earth; they returned to their people out of the gulf of assimilation,
most of them yet young in years, able and willing to work for the
national revival. When I saw these men—our heirs—outside the Congress
Hall, I said to myself: Never trouble about those who are inside! Let
them make speeches and pass resolutions and believe that they are
hastening the redemption. The distant redemption may not be any nearer;
but the estranged hearts are drawing near. In spite of all, history is
doing its work in this place, and these men are helping, whether they
know it or not.
This same historical tendency, dimly discerned at Basle through the dark
cloud of words, I found in Palestine clearly revealed in the light of
facts. The more I travelled and observed, the more evident it became to
me that what is happening in Palestine—despite all the contradictions
and inconsistencies—is tending broadly towards a single goal—that goal
which I mentioned above. No doubt we have a long journey to travel yet;
but even an untrained eye can see our destination on the distant
horizon. If any there be for whom the horizon is too narrow, and the
goal too petty, let him go to Zionist meetings outside Palestine: there
he will be shown a wider prospect, with larger aims at the end of it.
But let him not go to Palestine. In Palestine they have almost forgotten
the wider prospects. Realities are too strong for them there: they can
see nothing beyond.