reality. A Russian Jew, Dr. Pinsker, at that time wrote a small
pamphlet entitled, "Auto-Emancipation," which was already a prelude to
the modern political Zionism, and sketched all its motives without
however developing them symphonically. He, at any rate, it was who
gave its watchword to the whole movement: "The Jews are no mere
religious community, they are a nation. They desire again to live in
their own country as a united people. Their rejuvenation must be at
the same time economical, physical, intellectual, and moral."

The Jewish youth of the middle schools and universities of Russia were
profoundly affected by Pinsker's arguments. They began to found
national Jewish societies. A number of students who studied at foreign
universities became in their new surroundings apostles of Dr. Pinsker's
idea, and found adherents here and there, for the most part among the
young Jews of Vienna. Others preferred action to word, example to
sermon, abandoned their studies, and emigrated to Palestine in order to
become peasants there,--Jewish peasants on historically Jewish soil.
Deeply moved by this idealism of a peculiarly enthusiastic elite,
cooler headed Jews in Russia and Germany began also to form societies
in order to support from a distance the Palestine settlements of the
Jewish pioneers. This took place without any combined plan and with no
clear notion of the aim and the means. The societies were not
conscious of the fact that they felt and acted as Zionists. They did
not perceive the connection between the Jewish colonization of
Palestine and the future of the whole Jewish nation. It was in their
case rather an instinctive movement in which all kinds of obscure
feelings are dimly discernible,--piety, archaeological-historical
sentimentality, charity, and pride of pedigree. At any rate, the minds
of the Jews were prepared, the feeling was in the air, Jewdom was ripe
for a change.

As is always the case in such historical moments, the man also
appeared whose mission it was to express clearly the ideas obscurely
felt by many, and to proclaim loudly the word they were waiting to
hear. This man was Dr. Theodor Herzl. He published in the autumn of
1896 a concisely written booklet, "Der Judenstaat" (The Jewish State),
which proclaimed, with a determination that till then had no
precedent, the fact that the Jews are a people who demand for
themselves all the rights of a people, and who desire to settle in a
country where