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No. 30. | Vienna, 26 July 1901. | Fifth Year

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More Willingness to Sacrifice! By M. Nachum.

With the greatness of the tasks — world-shaking tasks — with the greatness of the struggle we have to fight out against prejudices a century old, there must naturally grow also, in every man who takes his place in our ranks, the greatness of the energy with which he overcomes his own egoism. Care for the self has become a bitter necessity in the general life of the modern age, a life which love of one's neighbour and mutual sympathy but very seldom render tolerable to us. Every politician must to-day reckon with the surly hostility with which every smallest circle of persons of like interest defends its economic standpoint and would render as little as possible to the common weal. From this quality of our surroundings we must turn away our eyes if we would find the shortest, though not the most comfortable, road to our aims. We must rather keep present to our consciousness the weight of the responsibility we bear before our manly conscience and before our people, and bring our achievements into accord therewith.

We may always look back with satisfaction upon the support hitherto rendered by our individual adherents. They have in truth outdone everything that any party has ever obtained from its members. But that is just the point! We are no party; we represent a popular movement such as has never yet existed, one which, for the attainment of its ardently sought goal, requires not merely the good will of its following, but enthusiasm — the enthusiasm of deeds. We must go our own steep ways.

If we exercise against ourselves that inexorable severity which we need, then we must say: There is too little willingness to sacrifice too little self-devotion among us Zionists. Whither have they vanished, those youthfully enthusiastic and deed-inflamed men of the Bilu, who in the eighties left the Russian gymnasia and universities, flung away their whole future in the grand manner, and made pilgrimage to Erez Israel, there, amid dangers, privations and adversities of every kind, to lay the corner-stone of the homestead of the Jewish people? To-day Zionism makes far lighter demands upon its student following. Out of their vacation leisure the students are to sacrifice a portion to the Zionist cause; they are to help to widen our knowledge of Palestine by performing a work of collection which is more play and diversion than labour. One would hardly believe how sparsely the enrolments have come in hitherto. Where is the once well-proved zeal for deeds of our students?

The members of the Bilu have passed away. Others followed them, pioneers no less devoted, who conjured bread and wine out of barren rock, as Moses once conjured water. For decades the colonists and agricultural labourers of Palestine have manured the beloved native soil with their sweat and blood, and have fought out many a grim contest with death-bringing pestilences and envious neighbours. And now, when the ideal after which they have lived, for which they have suffered unspeakable things, has found a great host of confessors and has created an organisation ramifying over land and sea: now is the bitter lot to befall them of being torn away from that dear soil in which they are rooted with every fibre of their hearts? It almost seems so. A great number of the agricultural labourers have already left Palestine, and the rest will assuredly follow if the national sentiment of the Ica potentates and the spirit of sacrifice of the Zionist people are maintained at their present height.

Let us go further. Political Zionism has of late won very significant successes. The task now is to hold these successes fast, to make them secure. To this end the instrument of the movement, the Jewish Colonial Bank, whose opening is shortly at hand, must and will be furnished with the pecuniary means requisite for the unfolding of a prosperous activity. Now our stout fellow-adherents in the East, who for the greatest part belong to the poorer and the poorest classes of the population, have for two years accomplished exceedingly notable things for the Colonial Bank. And though it cannot be said that their capacity is exhausted, it is nevertheless in general very limited.