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No. 13. | Vienna, 27th March 1903 — 28th Adar 5663. | 7th Year

Zionism and Jewish Nationalism.

It always affords a serious Jew, one who loves his people and is conscious of his inborn duties towards its whole body, a great satisfaction when kinsmen so distinguished as Mr. Ernst Mezei avow their descent manfully and without reservation, and draw the right conclusions from their relation to their race. The merit is all the greater in that this avowal, in the case of Mr. Mezei, was made under particularly difficult circumstances. For Hungary is the land of an assimilation so fanatical as is to be observed neither in France, which knows the species of "Gauls of the Jewish confession" and of the freethinkers who "consequently" have nothing more in common with Judaism, nor in Germany, which has produced the variety of the Jewish antisemite. It may be sad, but so it is: in such a milieu, to say loudly and clearly, "I am a Jew, it is my pride to be one, and a Jew I will remain!" is an act of moral courage, a kind of "Keriath Schema" before all the world, in which there dwells a peculiar consecration.

We Zionists hold it as a principle that on every occasion and with all our strength we must work not towards discord but towards unity, and that our first and most important endeavour must be to draw together the elements of Jewry, which are all too widely torn asunder. In the present stage of the reunion of the Jewish people, therefore, we emphasise everything that can unite us, and deliberately and consciously neglect everything that must divide us.

We naturally proceed in the same way with Mr. Ernst Mezei. He has spoken golden words upon the nature and aims of Zionism. He has grasped with full understanding the significance of creating a home for the millions of homeless Jews, and has recognised with a true political eye that the idea of settling our brethren in Palestine is practicable, and that its execution is essentially only a question of money. On this part of his remarks we can congratulate him without reserve.

It is otherwise, indeed, with the second part of his speech, in which he denies the existence of a Jewish nationality and will see in this idea only a kind of defiant, embittered exaggeration of the polemic against antisemitism. Here Mr. Mezei goes entirely astray. We must state this, in order to prevent it from misleading and shaking others in their sound convictions; but we understand and excuse his mistaken views. Where he stood up for Zionism, it was his unerring Jewish feeling that spoke. Where he disputes Jewish nationality, we have to do with an utterance of his intellect, which is treating offhand a question to which it has evidently hitherto devoted no close attention. We are convinced that Mr. Mezei, on a more earnest study of the question of Jewish nationality, would arrive at our view, the Zionist view. The denial of Jewish nationality is the baneful work of the Napoleonic Sanhedrin. This doctrine has become the dogma of all the assimilationists. They, to be sure, are the only ones who believe in it. No Christian in the world, not even the most friendly to the Jews, takes it seriously. The Jews cling to it because they confound the notions of citizenship and nationality, and tremble lest the former be denied them if, in the midst of a majority of another nationality, they were to profess, not that nationality, but a particular one of their own. From a Hungarian citizen above all, a Hungarian politician and patriot, one should least have expected such an error — may my frankness be pardoned: so naïve an error. In Hungary there are a whole number of nationalities which the wisdom of the legislator expressly recognises, to which the law has granted definite rights, of which no one demands that they deny their distinctiveness and individuality, and whose love of country nobody nevertheless doubts. The Hungarian Slovak, Ruthenian, Serb, Roumanian, Swabian, to say nothing of the few Bulgarians, Greeks and Armenians, can be a good Hungarian, and as a rule is one; but

*) See "Die Welt" No. 9.