was
equally bewildered, and perhaps all this profusion of theories came in
both from the same lack of tangibilities. Both peoples possessed
nothing.

Perhaps, indeed, the ultimate salvation of the Jews lay in identifying
themselves with Russia. But then, who could tell that the patriots who
welcomed them to-day as co-workers would not reject them when the
cause was won? Perhaps there was no hope outside preserving their own
fullest identity. Poor bewildered Russian Jew, caught in the
bewilderments both of the Russian and the Jew, and tangled up
inextricably in the double confusion of interlacing coils!

The Parties, then, were perhaps inevitable; he must make his account
with them. How if he formed a secret _Samooborona_ Committee, composed
equally of representatives of all Parties? But, then, how could he be
sure of knowing them all? He might offend one by omitting or
miscalling it; they formed and re-formed like clouds on the blue. A
new Party, too, might spring up overnight. He might give deadly
affront by ignoring this Jonah's gourd. Even as he thus mused, there
came to him the voices of two young men, the one advocating a
P.P.L.--a new Party of Popular Liberty--the other insisting that the
new _Volksgruppe_ of all anti-Zionist Parties was an unconditional
historic necessity. He groaned.

It seemed to him as he stumbled blindly through the ill-paved alleys
that a plague of doctors of philosophy had broken out over the Pale,
doctrinaires spinning pure logic from their vitals, and fighting
bitterly against the slightest deviation from the pattern of their
webs. But the call upon Israel was for Action. Was it, he wondered
with a flash of sympathy, that Israel was too great for Action; too
sophisticated a people for so primitive and savage a function; too set
in the moulds of an ancient scholastic civilization, so that, even
when Action was attempted, it was turned and frozen into Philosophy?
Or was it rather that eighteen centuries of poring over the Talmud had
unfitted them for Action, not merely because the habit of applying the
whole brain-force to religious minutiae led to a similar
intellectualization of contemporary problems--of the vast new material
suddenly opened up to their sharpened brains--but also because many of
these religious problems related only to the time when Israel and his
Temple flourished in Palestine? The academic leisure and scrupulous
discrimination that might be harmlessly devoted to th