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No. 24.

Vienna, 13 June 1902.

6th Year

I inform my friends that I have suffered a great and grievous loss. My good father, Mr. Jacob Herzl, died suddenly in Vienna on the night of 9 June. Dr. Theodor Herzl.

The Bankruptcy of the Assimilationist Endeavours in Russia.

(From a St. Petersburg Letter.)

"Have we done little in caring for others, labouring for others, shedding our blood for others? Is there a people in the world that has not exploited our labour, is there a spot on earth that has not been soaked with our blood? And what have we in return? We know not where to lay our weary heads; everywhere we are driven away, all despise us, we are not even regarded as human beings. It is time to come to our senses and to give up caring for others. Until now the Jews have laboured in every field and cast this labour into the common mass of human labour; but now we begin to lay our labour upon a heap of its own. Palestine shall be our centre, our storehouse, where we shall keep our spiritual treasures. Palestine shall be that light which will illumine the whole world... The modern Jewish intelligentsia I hate. It is the most colourless intelligentsia in the world; the Jewish people has nothing from it. It is a disgrace to have an intelligentsia which draws flesh and blood from the people and strives only to forget the existence of that people as soon as possible."

These splendid words, which the Russian story-teller Pruschanskij, who died before his time, addressed to the assimilationists through the Zionist Rachel, the heroine of one of his novellas drawn directly from life, characterize best of all the ideas that now govern the rising Jewish generation in Russia. In his famous novel "Fathers and Sons" Turgenev had announced the outbreak of the Nihilist era in Russia; in his strictly realistic tales from the life of the Jews in Russia, Pruschanskij has now, so to speak, discovered the decline of the assimilationist endeavours and the victory of the Zionist idea among the Jews of Russia, and has portrayed this phenomenon with the warmth of living blood.

It is worth while, however, to examine this true-to-life phenomenon more closely in its origin and development, and to point out those factors which were bound, sooner or later, to bring about the bankruptcy of the assimilationist endeavours among the Jews in Russia. We possess hitherto unknown documents of great importance, which shed a clear light upon the position of the Jews in Russia and prove plainly that even in the times of the so-called benevolent policy towards the Jews, the assimilationist endeavours of the Russian Jews found no response anywhere in the Tsar's empire, and that the Russian Jews' courting of the affection of their Christian fellow-citizens was rebuffed, now in a more or less courteous, now in a harsh form. The assimilationists resembled apes in this respect: they succeeded, no doubt, in faithfully imitating many of the manners and customs of the non-Jews, but they were never found to be the equals of those they imitated. As a milch-cow the Russian assimilationist Jew was often and gladly used and exploited, but his every attempt to bring about a rapprochement was always met with a thundering "Whither?" The well-known railway contractor Samuel Poljakow had, by great gifts of money for the building of Russian churches, begged from the Tsar Alexander II. the rank of a Councillor of State, yet as a Jew he was nowhere tolerated, let alone loved. The little word "Whither?", in Russian "Ruda", confronted the assimilationist Jews in Russia everywhere; and from the Empress Elisaveta Petrovna, who rejected the resolution of the Senate permitting Jews to attend the annual fairs with the well-known words: "From the enemies of Christ I desire no profit," down to the present day, the Jew in Russia has been a res nullis... And neither the economic isolation nor the exceptional legal status of the Jews was able to discredit the idea of assimilation so thoroughly as has the constant degradation of the man in the Jew. When, some considerable time ago, the assemblies of the nobility in Russia resolved to refuse the admission of Jews into the nobility, the so-called assimilationists learned that they were not wanted for their own sakes. Under the law then in force, the claim to admission into the nobility could be raised only by Jews of academic education who, through special services to the fatherland, had attained a certain rank or a certain Aus...