"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down; yea, we wept, when we
remembered Zion." By the river of Bâle we sit down, resolved to weep
no more. Not the German Rhine, but the Rhine ere it leaves the land of
liberty; where, sunning itself in a glory of blue sky and white cloud,
and overbrooded by the eternal mountains; it swirls its fresh green
waves and hurries its laden rafts betwixt the quaint old houses and
dreaming spires, and under the busy bridges of the Golden Gate of
Switzerland.
In the shady courtyard of the Town Hall are sundry frescoes testifying
to the predominant impress on the minds of its citizens of the life
and thoughts of a little people that flourished between two and three
thousand years ago in the highlands of Asia Minor. But, amid these
suggestive illustrations of ancient Jewish history, the strangest
surely is that of Moses with a Table of the Law, on which are written
the words: "Who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the
house of bondage."
For here, after all this travail of the centuries, a very modern
Moses--in the abstract-concrete form of a Congress--is again
meditating the deliverance of Israel from the house of bondage.
Not in the Town Hall, however, but in the Casino the Congress meets,
and, where Swiss sweethearts use to dance, are debated the tragic
issues of an outcast nation. An oblong hall, of drab yellow, with cane
chairs neatly parted in the middle, and green-baized tables for
reporters, and a green-baized rostrum, and a green-baized platform,
over which rise the heads and festal shirt-fronts of the leaders.
A strangely assorted set of leaders, but all with that ink-mark on the
brow which is as much on the Continent the badge of action, as it is
in England the symbol of sterility; all believing more or less naïvely
that the pen is mightier than the millionaire's gold.
Only one of them hitherto has really stirred the world with his
pen-point--a prophet of the modern, preaching "Woe, woe" by
psycho-physiology; in himself a breezy, burly undegenerate, with a
great gray head marvellously crammed with facts and languages; now to
prove himself golden-hearted and golden-mouthed, an orator touching
equally to tears or laughter. In striking contrast with this
quasi-Teutonic figure shows the leonine head, with its tossing black
mane and shoulders, of the Russian leader, Apollo turned Berserker,
beautiful, overpowering, from whose resplendent mouth roll in mountain
thunder the barbarous Russian syllables.
And even as no two of the leaders are alike, so do the rank and file
fail to resemble one another. Writers and journalists, poets and
novelists and merchants, professors and men of professions--types that
once sought to slough their Jewish skins, and mimic, on Darwinian
principles, the colors of the environment, but that now, with some
tardy sense of futility or stir of pride, proclaim their brotherhood
in Zion--they are come from many places; from far lands and from near,
from uncouth, unknown villages of Bukowina and the Caucasus, and from
the great European capitals; thickliest from the pales of persecution,
in rare units from the free realms of England and America--a strange
phantasmagoria of faces. A small, sallow Pole, with high cheek-bones;
a blond Hungarian, with a flaxen moustache; a brown, hatchet-faced
Roumanian; a fresh-colored Frenchman, with eye-glasses; a dark,
Marrano-descended Dutchman; a chubby German; a fiery-eyed Russian,
tugging at his own hair with excitement, perhaps in prescience of the
prison awaiting his return; a dusky Egyptian, with the close-cropped,
curly black hair, and all but the nose of a negro; a yellow-bearded
Swede; a courtly Viennese lawyer; a German student, with proud
duel-slashes across his cheek; a Viennese student, first fighter in
the University, with a colored band across his shirt-front; a dandy,
smelling of the best St. Petersburg circles; and one solitary
caftan-Jew, with ear-locks and skull-cap, wafting into the nineteenth
century the cabalistic mysticism of the Carpathian Messiah.
Who speaks of the Jewish type? One can only say negatively that these
faces are not Christian. Is it the stamp of a longer, more complex
heredity? Is it the brand of suffering? Certainly a stern Congress,
the speeches little lightened by humor, the atmosphere of historic
tragedy too overbrooding for intellectual dalliance. Even the presence
of the gayer sex--for there are a few ladies among the delegates, and
more peep down from the crowded spectators' gallery that runs sideways
along the hall--only makes a few shots of visual brightness in the
sober scene. Seriousness is stamped everywhere; on the broad-bulging
temples of the Russian oculist, on the egg-shaped skull and lank white
hair of the Heidelberg professor, on the open countenance of the
Hungarian architect, on the weak, narrow lineaments of the neurotic
Hebrew poet; it gives dignity to red hair and freckles, tones down the
grossness of too-fleshy cheeks, and lends an added beauty to
finely-cut features.
Superficially, then, they have little in common, and if almost all
speak German--the language of the Congress--it is only because they
are all masters of three or four tongues. Yet some subtle instinct
links them each to each; presage, perhaps, of some brotherhood of
mankind, of which ingathered Israel--or even ubiquitous Israel--may
present the type.
Through the closed red-curtained windows comes ever and anon the sharp
ting of the bell of an electric car, and the President, anxiously
steering the course of debate through difficult international
cross-roads, rings his bell almost as frequently.
A majestic Oriental figure, the President's--not so tall as it appears
when he draws himself up and stands dominating the assembly with eyes
that brood and glow--you would say one of the Assyrian Kings, whose
sculptured heads adorn our Museums, the very profile of
Tiglath-Pileser. In sooth, the beautiful sombre face of a kingly
dreamer, but of a Jewish dreamer who faces the fact that flowers are
grown in dung. A Shelley "beats in the air his luminous wings in
vain"; our Jewish dreamer dreams along the lines of life; his dream
but discounts the future, his prophecy is merely fore-speaking, his
vision prevision. He talks agriculture, viticulture, subvention of the
Ottoman Empire, both by direct tribute and indirect enrichment; stocks
and shares, railroads, internal and to India; natural development
under expansion--all the jargon of our iron age. Let not his movement
be confounded with those petty projects for helping Jewish
agriculturists into Palestine. What! Improve the Sultan's land without
any political equivalent guaranteed in advance! Difficulty about the
holy places of Christianity and Islam? Pooh! extra-territorial.
A practised publicist, a trained lawyer, a not unsuccessful comedy
writer, converted to racial self-consciousness by the "Hep, Hep" of
Vienna, and hurried into unforeseen action by his own paper-scheme of
a Jewish State, he has, perhaps, at last--and not unreluctantly--found
himself as a leader of men.
In a Congress of impassioned rhetoricians he remains serene, moderate;
his voice is for the more part subdued; in its most emotional
abandonments there is a dry undertone, almost harsh. He quells
disorder with a look, with a word, with a sharp touch of the bell. The
cloven hoof of the Socialist peeps out from a little group. At once
"The Congress shall be captured by no party!" And the Congress is in
roars of satisfaction.
'Tis the happy faculty of all idealists to overlook the visible--the
price they pay for seeing the unseen. Even our open-eyed Jewish
idealist has been blest with ignorance of the actual. But, in his very
ignorance of the people he would lead and the country he would lead
them to, lies his strength, just as in his admission that his Zionist
fervor is only that second-rate species produced by local
anti-Semitism, lies a powerful answer to the dangerous libel of local
unpatriotism. Of the real political and agricultural conditions of
Palestine he knows only by hearsay. Of Jews he knows still less. Not
for him the paralyzing sense of the humors of his race, the petty feud
of Dutchman and Pole, the mutual superiorities of Sephardi and
Ashkenazi, the grotesque incompatibility of Western and Eastern Jew,
the cynicism and snobbery of the prosperous, the materialism of the
uneducated adventurers in unexploited regions. He stands so high and
aloof that all specific colorings and markings are blurred for him
into the common brotherhood, and, if he is cynic enough to suspect
them, he is philosopher enough to recognize that all nations are
compact of incongruites, vitalized by warring elements. Nor has he any
sympathetic perception of the mystic religious hopes of generations
of zealots, of the great swirling spiritual currents of Ghetto life.
But in a national movement--which appears at first sight hopeless,
because it lacks the great magnetizer, religion--lies a chance denied
to one who should boldly proclaim himself the evangel of a modern
Judaism, the last of the Prophets. Political Zionism alone can
transcend and unite: any religious formula would disturb and dissever.
Along this line may all travel to Jerusalem. And, as the locomotive
from Jaffa draws all alike to the sacred city, and leaves them there
to their several matters, so may the pious concern themselves not at
all with the religion of the engineer.
Not this the visionary figure created by the tear-dimmed yearning of
the Ghetto; no second Sabbataï Zevi, master of celestial secrets,
divine reincarnation, come with signs and wonders to lead back Israel
to the Promised Land. Still less the prophet prefigured by Christian
visionaries, some of whom, fevered nevertheless, press upon the
Congress itself complex collations of texts, or little cards with the
sign of the cross. Palestine, indeed, but an afterthought: an
aspiration of unsuspected strength, to be utilized--like all human
forces--by the maker of history. States are the expression of souls;
in any land the Jewish soul could express itself in characteristic
institutions, could shake off the long oppression of the ages, and
renew its youth in touch with the soil. Yet since there is this
longing for Palestine, let us make capital of it--capital that will
return its safe percentage. A rush to Palestine will mean all that
seething medley of human wants and activities out of which profits are
snatched by the shrewd--gold-rush and God-rush, they are both one in
their economic working. May not the Jews themselves take shares in so
promising a project? May not even their great bankers put their names
to such a prospectus? The shareholders incur no liability beyond the
extent of their shares; there shall be no call upon them to come to
Palestine--let them remain in their snug nests; the Jewish Company,
Limited, seeks a home only for the desolate dove that finds no rest
for the sole of her feet.
And yet beneath all this statesmanlike prose, touched with the special
dryness of the jurist, lurk the romance of the poet and the purposeful
vagueness of the modern evolutionist; the fantasy of the Hungarian,
the dramatic self-consciousness of the literary artist, the heart of
the Jew.
Is one less a poet because he regards the laws of reality, less
religious because he accepts them, less a Jew because he will live in
his own century? Our dreamer will have none of the Mediæval, is
enamoured of the Modern; has lurking admiration of the "over-man" of
Nietzsche, even to be overpassed by the coming Jerusalem Jew; the
psychical Eurasian, the link and interpreter between East and
West--nay, between antiquity and the modern spirit; the synthesis of
mankind, saturated with the culture of the nations, and now at last
turning home again, laden with the spiritual spoils of the world--for
the world's benefit. He shall found an ideal modern state, catholic
in creed, righteous in law, a centre of conscience--even
geographically--in a world relapsing to Pagan chaos. And its flag
shall be a "shield of David," with the Lion of Judah rampant, and
twelve stars for the Tribes. No more of the cringing and the
whispering in dark corners; no surreptitious invasion of Palestine.
The Jew shall demand right, not tolerance. Israel shall walk erect.
And he, Israel's spokesman, will not juggle with diplomatic
combinations--he will play cards on table. He has nothing to say to
the mob, Christian or Jewish, he will not intrigue with political
underlings. He is no demagogue; he will speak with kings in their
palaces, with prime ministers in their cabinets. There is a touch of
the +hubris+ of Lassalle, of the magnificence of Manasseh Bueno
Barzillai Azevedo Da Costa, King of the question-beggars.
Do you object that the poor will be the only ones to immigrate to
Palestine? Why, it is just those that we want. Prithee, how else shall
we make our roads and plant our trees? No mention now of the Eurasian
exemplar, the synthetic "over-man." Perhaps he is only to evolve. Do
you suggest that an inner ennobling of scattered Israel might be the
finer goal, the truer antidote to anti-Semitism? Simple heart, do you
not see it is just for our good--not our bad--qualities that we are
persecuted? A jugglery--specious enough for the moment--with the word
"good"; forceful "struggle-for-life" qualities substituted for
spiritual, for ethical. And yet to doubt that the world would--and
does--respond sympathetically to the finer elements so abundantly in
Israel, is it not to despair of the world, of humanity? In such a
world, what guarantee against the pillage of the Third Temple? And in
such a world were life worth living at all? And, even with Palestine
for ultimate goal, do you counsel delay, a nursing of the Zionist
flame, a gradual education and preparation of the race for a great
conscious historic rôle in the world's future, a forty years'
wandering in the wilderness to organize or kill off the miscellaneous
rabble--then will you, dreamer, turn a deaf ear to the cry of millions
oppressed to-day? Would you ignore the appeals of these hundreds of
telegrams, of these thousands of petitions with myriads of signatures,
for the sake of some visionary perfection of to-morrow? Nay, nay, the
cartoon of the Congress shall bring itself to pass. Against the
picturesque wailers at the ruins of the Temple wall shall be set the
no less picturesque peasants sowing the seed, whose harvest is at once
waving grain and a regenerated Israel. The stains of sordid traffic
shall be cleansed by the dews and the rains. In the Jewish peasant
behold the ideal plebeian of the future; a son of the soil, yet also a
son of the spirit. And what fair floriage of art and literature may
not the world gain from this great purified nation, carrying in its
bosom the experience of the ages?
Not all his own ideas, these; some perhaps only half-consciously
present to him, so that even in this very Congress the note of
jealousy is heard, the claim of an earlier prophet insisted on
fiercely. For a moment the dignified assembly, becomes a prey to
atavism, reproduces the sordid squabbles of the _Kahal_. As if every
movement was not fed by subterranean fires, heralded by obscure
rumblings, though 'tis only the earthquake or the volcanic jet which
leaps into history!
But the President is finely impersonal. Not he, but the Congress. The
Bulgarians have a tradition that the Messiah will be born on August
29. He shares this belief. To-day the Messiah has been born--the
Congress. "In this Congress we procure for the Jewish people an organ
which till now it did not possess, and of which it was so sadly in
want. Our cause is too great for the ambition and wilfulness of a
single person. It must be lifted up to something impersonal if it is
to succeed. And our Congress shall be lasting, not only until we are
redeemed from the old state, but still more so afterwards ... serious
and lofty, a blessing for the unfortunate, noxious to none, to the
honor of all Jews, and worthy of a past, the glory of which is far
off, but everlasting."
And, as he steps from the tribune, amid the roar of "Hochs," and the
thunder of hands and feet and sticks, and the flutter of
handkerchiefs, with men precipitating themselves to kiss his hand, and
others weeping and embracing, be sure that no private ambition
possesses him, be sure that his heart swells only with the
presentiment of great events and with uplifting thoughts of the
millions who will thrill to the distant echo of this sublime moment.
What European parliament could glow with such a galaxy of intellect?
Is not each man a born orator, master of arts or sciences? Has not the
very caftan-Jew from the Carpathians published his poetry and his
philosophy, gallantly championing "The Master of the Name" against a
Darwinian world? Heine had figured the Jew as a dog, that at the
advent of the Princess Sabbath is changed back to a man. More potent
than the Princess, the Congress has shown the Jew's manhood to the
world. That old painter, whose famous Dance of Death drew for
centuries the curious to Bâle, could not picture the Jew save as the
gaberdined miser, only dropping his money-bag at Death's touch. Well,
here is another sight for him--could Death, that took him too, bring
him back for a moment--these scholars, thinkers, poets, from all the
lands of the Exile, who stand up in honor of the dead pioneers of
Zionism, and, raising their right hands to heaven, cry, "If I forget
thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning!" Yes, the
dream still stirs at the heart of the mummied race, the fire quenched
two thousand years ago sleeps yet in the ashes. And if our President
forgets that the vast bulk of his brethren are unrepresented in his
Congress, that they are content with the civic rights so painfully
won, and have quite other conceptions of their creed's future, who
will grudge him this moment of fine rapture?
Or, when at night, in the students' _Kommers_, with joyful weeping and
with brotherly kisses, sages and gray-beards join in the _gaudeamus
igitur_, who shall deny him grounds for his faith that _juvenes sumus_
yet, that the carking centuries have had no power over our immortal
nation. "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite
variety."
The world in which prophecies are uttered cannot be the world in which
prophecies are fulfilled. And yet when--at the wind-up of this
memorable meeting--the Rabbi of Bâle, in the black skull-cap of
sanctity, ascending the tribune amid the deafening applause of a
catholic Congress, expresses the fears of the faithful, lest in the
new Jewish State the religious Jew be under a ban; and when the
President gravely gives the assurance, amid enthusiasm as frantic,
that Judaism has nothing to fear--Judaism, the one cause and
consolation of the ages of isolation and martyrdom--does no sense of
the irony of history intrude upon his exalted mood?