evalent. I doubt if he
would now hear Liberal Judaism apostrophised 'as the
safeguard of modern Jews from the attractiveness of
the superior teachings of Christ.'"

Zionism: A Menorah Prize Essay

BY MARVIN M. LOWENTHAL

[Illustration: _MARVIN M. LOWENTHAL (born in Bradford, Pa., in 1890)
is at present a Senior in the University of Wisconsin. He has won the
Wisconsin Menorah Society Prize twice--in 1912 for an essay on "The
Jew in the American Revolution," and in 1914 for the essay on
"Zionism" here published for the first time. Mr. Lowenthal is now the
President of the Wisconsin Zionist Society._]

At the head of an alley-way hard by the Place of the Temple, the
Haram-esh-Sherif, in Jerusalem, a long wall built in rough-hewn
courses lifts itself above the squalor of the Moghrebin quarter to an
eastern sky from which a sun that seldom sleeps bakes the grey stones,
bares every detail of a crumbling ruin, and intensifies the wistful
odor of decay. This, the remnant of Solomon's glory, is the Wailing
Wall of the Jews. Clad in sackcloth and covered with ashes,
patriarchal figures sway to and fro, press their lips to the hot
granite, beat now their chests and now the wall, and today, as every
day for eighteen hundreds of years, wail in the words of the Psalmist:

"Oh God, the heathen are come into Thine inheritance;
Thy holy Temple have they defiled;
They have laid Jerusalem in heaps."[1]

This picture reveals the typical and traditional attitude of the Jew
toward the land of his forefathers. Taught as children in the Cheder
to turn their thoughts and desires toward Palestine; devoting
themselves as men to the study of the Law and the Prophets and to the
building upon this study of the vast Talmudic structure, until a
spiritual Land of the Book may be said to have been created wherein
they continually dwelt; crystallizing and adopting the Restoration as
a dogma of the faith; commemorating with solemn fasts the Ninth of Ab
as the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple by Titus; and
repeating at each Passover with the pitiful hope of a child, "Next
year in Jerusalem," the Jews have bound the memory of Palestine as a
sign upon their hands and as frontlets between their eyes. They have
indeed written it upon the door-posts of their houses and upon their
gates, to the end--that they have wept and prayed. The vision of the
prophets, which created and sustained