y to accustom Jews of different origins to one
another, to train them practically to national unity, and at the same
time to overcome the superhuman obstacles of difference of language,
unequal civilization, and of the manners of thought, prejudices,
likes, and dislikes of foreign nations, brought severally from the
lands of their birth.
What gives the Zionists the courage to begin this labor of Hercules is
the conviction that they are doing a necessary and useful work, a
work of love and civilization, a work of justice and wisdom. They
desire to save eight to ten millions of their kindred from intolerable
suffering. They desire to free the nations among whom they now
vegetate from a presence which is considered disagreeable. They wish
to deprive Anti-Semitism--which everywhere lowers public morals and
develops the very worst instincts--of its victim. They wish to make
unquestionable producers out of the Jews at present reproached with
being parasites. They desire to fertilize with their sweat and till
with their hands a country that is to-day a desert, until it is again
the flowering garden it has once been. Thus will Zionism in an equal
degree serve the unhappy Jew and the Christian peoples, civilization
and the economy of the world; and the services which it can render,
and wishes to render, are great enough to justify its hope that the
Christian world, too, will appreciate them, and support the movement
with its active sympathy.
ANTI-SEMITISM
IN EUROPE
BY
DR. GUSTAV GOTTHEIL
THE TRUE NATURE OF ANTI-SEMITISM IN EUROPE
Anti-Semitism would be simply ridiculous if it were not so terribly in
earnest. People who make that word a war cry upon a whole race ought
to know its meaning, especially if it is to express the chief reason
for their hostility. Before they prefix the "anti" to a word they
should be sure that they understand the "pro," lest they be found to
fight shadows merely, specters of their own creation. But how far is
this the case? How many ever tried to learn the sense of the
designation under which they have enrolled themselves? Suppose we ask,
"What does Semitism mean?" Only this, must be our answer,--that it is
a summing up of the ruling dispositions, habits, mental endowments,
and moral peculiarities of all the races comprised under the name of
Semites, so named from their supposed descent from the eldest of the
three sons of Noah. So ineradicable are these features supposed
|