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No. 51. Vienna, 20th December 1901. 5th Year

The Maccabean Number is already out of print, and the addresses last received can therefore not be taken into account. The friends of the cause are requested to let the copies they have read circulate further.

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Four Years.

By Dr. Alexander Marmorek (Paris).

Into the midst of the woe and the sorrow, into the gloomy forsakenness and the tears of the mass of our people, there now shines at least one light. Clear, sharp, bright, visible from afar. It is the Zionist movement. It has already become the stronghold which the well-nigh lost Jewish people is raising for itself, for the shelter and defence of its national future. Four years have passed since, in the historic city on the Rhine, the shadowy wish for redemption, the fluttering hope of liberation, took on recognisable form. Those men who laid the first stone are almost all of them still living among us, and yet the first Jewish Congress seems surrounded by the resplendent aureole of a heroic age. – Like the heroes of olden time, whom the legends of the people endow with superhuman strength and courage, who overcame fantastic monsters with ease and piled mountain upon mountain in order, in an untameable craving for freedom, to fashion another destiny for themselves and for their people, our plain fellow-combatants — history will one day teach it to our grandchildren — have done the like. Their mountains were the obstacles of prejudice and the fear of what is new; their venom-spewing monsters were Jews, full of calumny and want of understanding.

Since the eyes of us all are turned once more towards Basle, it is right to ask whether the toil and the exertion expended since the first assembly have been crowned with success; whether the steps and the ways that were taken were the right ones; and whether that which the foreseeing spirit divined and clothed in words audible far and wide — the rallying of a people to the standard and the possibility of its self-liberation — was not merely the fantasy of overheated brains. Nothing is easier than to dissect our movement truthfully and without prepossession, in order to understand its growth and its triumphal progress. For the annual Congresses are the clear stages in the development of the Zionist idea, as of the national revival of the Jewish people.

Before the first Congress all willing and all yearning for help within sight lay in chaotic confusion. To be sure, men desired freedom and an end of the Golus; they wrestled, they cried out confusedly, single voices of noble pioneers were heard, in spirit men looked across to the old homeland as to the seat of happiness. But the guiding will was lacking, the perception of a tangible goal; the grasp of the possible means was lacking. The convocation of the first Congress was the discovery of the key with which to open a lock that had been barred for thousands of years. Now, when it sprang open, a sea of hope poured out over the nation. Through the open gate men began to see the longed-for land as really attainable. The Zionists assembled at the first Congress did not content themselves with the joy of finding one another again — it was the finding again of brothers long, too long parted —; they set to work at once. The programme which the first Congress drew up contains, in its few lines, not merely the expression of the Golus-longing, not merely the delimitation of the goal, but also, in the two words "public — legal", the clear grasp of modern means. As the general before the battle issues the general idea of the fight, so was the Basle Programme the general order which the Zionists received for execution.

At the second Congress it was a question of forging the instrument, of giving our peaceful weapon a modern shape: a Zionist national bank. Alarmed, many shrank back from the deed. In this they were still Ghetto-Jews, even if perhaps they would not confess it to themselves: trembling, fearful, so soon as the deed demands of a man all that free men alone can give — responsibility, energy, resolution. The resistance which the advocates of the bank scheme encountered was, however, of use. At once there fell away the weak, and those who supposed that the old Jewish tangle of a thousand heads and a thousand opinions would, undiminished and in spite of so many bitter experiences, revive anew.