The Doctrine of Beitar

• 67 -

"to manage my work, which I have begun."

It has been a long time since I have glanced at Herzl's diaries, and even longer—at his feuilletons. As I tell the reader of the book Altneuland these days, I therefore do not remember the circumstances surrounding his series about Hans. According to the axis of the dream he mentions, it was surely in 1897, some time before the first Zionist Congress, when they created the spiritual foundation of Israel's national future. He hoped with a singular intention to create a spiritual government, a golden sreifah, as they say in the courts of the Hasidim—things. In other places in his diary he speaks, countless times, about his Hans and Pauline Sarolf. Besides this gentle modesty that was in the city, the scion of Waldheim, sanctified upon my lips. I remember that when I read it, I felt what every public activist also feels, though he is unwilling to admit it: in the end, however unsaintly the communal workers may be in all their pleasures, the essence of their lives are Hans, Pauline and the old woman—Sarolf. In his feuilletons, if I am not mistaken, there is also a passage about their children, one of the artistic passages in this artistic work which is like an abundance of images. I do not remember the words nor the images—however, one impression I cannot forget—the city of silence, of worry, and of hidden pride. The feeling of "the apple of our eye" that wafts from between the chapters, ringing quietly from the depth of the author's heart like an echo of his sigh and his laughter together.

Behold the divine conflagration upon their hope and their pride, for you the exalted lady in the house—the Dubliner world: neither of my people nor exalted, and like one gone to ground in another distant French city.

There is no desire to speak of this bitter matter, when a fire of shame covers his face as his friend's. But if he is already dead—and yet we see that he is spoken of—we ourselves must explain the need to extinguish the light. How did this happen? How is it possible that all of this will end like this? Who is to blame, what is to blame? People? Or this complex of all kinds of impurity that is called Exile? Or perhaps that Jew was right, who said that beneath the shadow of this beam that glitters, the genius—by the way also the ascetic—awaits a generation? Teyku. I say: Cast off the veil,