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No. 37.

Vienna, 13th September 1901.

5th Year

לכל קוראינו, עוזרינו ואנשי בריתנו הננו מביעים בזה את ברכותינו לר"ה הבע"ל.

בית המערכת.

To all our readers, contributors and friends we tender hearty good wishes for the New Year festival. The Redaction.

The Boundaries of Zionism.*)

By Berthold Feiwel.

I.

With the steady outward growth and the advancing inward development of Zionism, a periodical fixing of its boundaries becomes an ever more pressing necessity. Not only are the old adherents, in the natural course of development, set before ever new problems, to which Zionism leads them directly or indirectly; there come also ever new men, who bring something new of their own spirit with them. Unknown relations, modified needs emerge. To this is added the influence, independent of Zionism, of outward circumstances, which creates altered foundations. It therefore appears the indispensable precondition of a healthy further development that the existing material of fact and of knowledge belonging to Zionism be brought into a system, and that the new material be harmoniously united with it. The determination of boundaries shall then permit us to know the most exact possible measure of what Zionism has created and is creating in ideal and material values and goods, and of what it means and ought to create in the future. If we speak of the “greatest possible” exactness, that has its ground in the often limited possibility of research and ascertainment, and in the very concept: Zionist “movement” itself. The variable and the fluctuating exclude every absolute exactness. But a relative one, a determination of the Zionist domain as exact as may be, is what we must desire.

*) This title is borne also by a treatise composed by J. Klausner, which appeared some time ago in the Hebrew journal “Haschiloah”. We shall return, in one of the following essays, to this treatise, which deals polemically with the attitude observed by many Zionists in the question of physical, economic and intellectual elevation.

To be sure, there are two kinds of Zionists for whom the detailed knowledge of all Zionist things and the regular system become superfluous: these are the merely-enthusiastic, whose gaze is directed upon the One, the Great, alone, and the merely-practical, who have eye and talent only for what lies nearest. The merely-enthusiastic have the glorious final goal alone before their eyes. They see the golden light that flames up above the mountain summit and storm towards the height, unconcerned about the right and the left — when they are not resting, sunk in happy, dreaming contemplation. The others, the merely-practical, the enemies of grey theory and of rosy dreams, work as the day's need demands. They turn the great watchwords into small labour, they clear away the hindrances, they dig, build, lay little stone upon little stone ....

Certainly, we would not be without either kind of Zionist. The one brings to the movement a surplus of warmth and of fine impetus; the others bring energy and create a solid foundation for the outward upbuilding. But our third breed of men, which would fain unite ideal enthusiasm with sound, practical work, requires, in all the weighty questions with which Zionism brings it into contact, the most definite possible grounds for its judgments and its actions. Nor may it be that Zionists, for want of better insight, work one against another. There is a Zionist conscience, which demands of every man that he make his own, with the greatest possible exactness, the compass and the content of the idea he serves; that he do with certainty what he may do or ought to do, and that he refrain from that which does not fall within the domain of Zionism or contradicts it.

But whence are the Zionists to take the material of fact and of knowledge that is decisive for their manner of thinking and of acting?

Scientific Zionism shall give it to them. But not a scientific character that merely heaps barren theories one upon another. Thus much only will we say now: scientific Zionism would have to stand in the very midst of Zionist life, constantly fructifying it and at the same time receiving nourishment from it.

But were we, then, hitherto unscientific? No and yes. In the first and highest question of Zionism, for the proof of the necessity of the fundamental doctrine: