Ever since the Jewish people lost its national independence and
sovereignty and began to live in dispersion among the nations of the
earth, it has lost the opportunity and possibility of continuing the
work of its national civilization and has had to be satisfied with
producing cultural values only. Everything that individual Jews have
achieved in the past two thousand years in the domain of civilization
has been an enrichment of the civilization of the peoples among whom
they have lived. Jews have always been prominent in commerce and
industry, but there was no national Jewish commerce and no national
Jewish industry, even when those who created and developed certain
branches of commerce were all Jews. Their commercial and industrial
activities and accomplishments strengthened the other nations among
whom the Jews lived, but not themselves. In many cases they have
endangered and imperiled the Jewish people, because they became the
arsenal of anti-Semitic weapons. The individual has profited by Jewish
industrial and commercial achievements, but not the Jewish collective
body. In short, all our work and energy in the domain of practical
civilization has reached not the Jewish people, but other nations, and
only a few have given us credit for these achievements.
Often enough have we been blamed for them. The Dutchman is full of
envy of the Jew to the present day for having monopolized the diamond
cutting industry; the Turks are still angry when they remember that
Baron de Hirsch built their railroads. In Switzerland people are
blaming the Jews for having monopolized the silk and watch industries;
the Russians antagonize them because of their big share in the
development of the petrol wells in the Caucasus and in the lumber
business in western Russia. A famous German professor, Werner Sombart,
has written a voluminous book of five hundred pages in which he indicts
us for having developed capitalism, while others are accusing the Jews
of having produced anti-capitalistic forces. In short, not only have
the activities of individual Jews in the domain of civilization not
been of profit to them as a people, but they have in too many cases
served as a basis of attack.
The cause of these peculiar phenomena was our diaspora life. We had
no homeland of our own. We had no national soil beneath us and no
national sky above us. We were a wandering people and as such could
not produce a national civilization, which involves and presupposes a
static and not a dynamic order of things. But as soon as the Jews can
lead a normal national life, all this, unhappy and tragic, will change
radically and an entirely new order of things will arise. Not the
Jewish individual, as heretofore, but the Jewish people at large, will
be the agency of the Jewish genius and whatever the Jewish individual
has to contribute to civilization he will contribute through the Jewish
people. While his achievements in this domain will serve humanity,
as heretofore, they will at the same time enrich the life of his own
people and become a source of strength instead of weakness; when the
Jews have an opportunity to be active for civilization as Jews, Jewish
individualism, the curse of our racial life, will gradually disappear.
Only a few of us realize the fact that this individualism, which finds
its unpleasant expression in petty factionalism, communal strife, party
quarrels and lack of discipline among the rank and file, is in the main
to be ascribed to the fact that the Jews have no national civilization.
If we had one, many an unpleasant phenomenon in our public life would
be impossible. If the Jews had common political responsibilities, if
they had all to look to the safety of their country, if they had all to
look after their national economic interests, the national intellect
would be more uniform and two Jews would not have three different
opinions. It is the lack of a national Jewish civilization that makes
the Jewish intellect queer and misshapen. The mind of a people can
only be trained by its national civilization, and is orientated by
it. But since the Jews have lacked national civilization for the
last two thousand years, the intellect of the nation has lost its
uniformity, has become atomized and has in many cases gone astray.
This has added to our inner misery and has driven many an idealistic
Jew to despair. At the moment when the Jews begin to lead a national
life on national soil and under their own sky, which give out line
and color to the soul of a nation, many negative energies which are
active in our life because of the effects of diaspora existence must
necessarily disappear. The intellectual discipline of the nation will
be re-established and the life of its soul will again assume normal
proportions. There will be a Jewish public opinion in the best meaning
of the term, not merely the opinion of individual Jews.
It is generally asserted that, though the Jews as such have not
produced a civilization during their life in diaspora, they have
produced a culture. This is sincerely believed by all Jews, by
believers and disbelievers, orthodox and reform, nationalists and
assimilationists. Though one lays more stress on the spiritual and the
other more on the secular aspect of the so-called Jewish culture, the
outstanding fact is, however, that the belief in the Jewish culture
produced in the diaspora is general. But if it is true that culture is
a superstructure of civilization and has civilization as its basis, it
is hard to see how it is possible to assume for one moment that the
Jews have produced anything like a culture during their diaspora life.
It is true that Jews have written books among which some are famous
in world-literature. It is true that the Jews have painted good
pictures. It is also true that the Jews have composed good music. But
the question is often more than justified whether or not the Jewish
genius has drawn the material from Jewish sources and Jewish life. Are
all the good books Jews have written Jewish books? Are all the good
pictures Jews have painted Jewish art? And is the good music Jews have
composed Jewish music? In some cases they are partly Jewish. In the
overwhelming majority of cases they are not Jewish at all. Neither
Spinoza nor Bergson, neither Heine nor Hoffmannsthal, are Jews in the
sense that they have been inspired exclusively by Jewish motives and
that they have drawn their inspiration from Jewish sources alone. But
we can go even further and maintain that even those great Jews from
Philo of Alexandria to Maimonides and from Maimonides to Herman Cohen,
who were always conscious of their Judaism and who thought that they
were working as Jews and that their creations were Jewish, stood much
more under the spell of alien than Jewish influence, and in their work
were less Jews than is generally supposed. In spite of their racial
enthusiasm, their intellect was hyphenated. Philo was at least as much
Greek as he was Jew, Maimonides at least as much Greek and Arab, and
Cohen is at least as much German as he is Jew, if not more.
We are quick in our condemnation of those who wrote on the tombstone of
Maimonides, "Heretic and Disbeliever." We are angry at the "fanatics"
of Amsterdam who excommunicated Spinoza, and we are often angry at
those who utter severe criticism of Herman Cohen as a Jew. But these
fanatics, wrong as they may be in their methods, are not entirely
wrong in their motives and ideas. They are Jews in whom strong Jewish
instincts are alive and these Jews, gifted with more original instincts
than the average Jew, see more quickly what is Jewish and what is not
in the work of a great Jew; it is the un-Jewish motive in these works
by which they are repulsed.
Even the Jewish religion has been largely influenced, not only by
non-Jewish surroundings, but also by non-Jewish religious motives. The
truth of the matter is that national Jewish culture ceased to be with
the destruction of the Jewish state. From that time on, individual
Jews have cultivated Jewish thoughts and Jewish feelings, but they
could not prevent their thoughts and feelings from being so mingled
with and darkened by non-Jewish thoughts and feelings as to lose
their original strength. Much of our so-called national literature is
not organic, but consists of a number of books written by individual
Jews who were only too often inspired by motives more non-Jewish than
Jewish. The same is true of Jewish art, Jewish music, etc. Only when
our culture touches upon our classical past or upon our national
future, that is to say, when it is not influenced by the chaos of the
present, is it truly Jewish.
When the Jews return to Palestine and begin to develop a national
civilization, their culture will be built up not only on the past or
the future, but also on the present. It will grow with the growth
of civilization and it will not be a culture of individuals who are
inspired by one thought appearing in different colors as the result
of various influences; it will be the culture of a nation, an organic
essence produced and developed with the help of the entire nation.
This will be the consequence of a national Jewish homeland in
Palestine.