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No. 23. Vienna, 3 June 1904 — 20 Sivan 5664. 8th Year.

The Land.

Not all the institutions we have created keep equal pace with the spread of our idea and the strengthening of our organisation. We know very well that in the comparatively short period of orderly work not everything could be done. Nevertheless we must be clear about the fact itself, so that we may know where our labour must especially be applied. To one such point attention shall be particularly drawn to-day. It concerns the significance of our National Fund, long insufficiently appreciated, and with it the acquisition of the homestead which we have recognised as indispensably necessary.

If we ask ourselves whence this lagging behind arises, we must above all lay the blame upon our insufficient propaganda. Our work of agitation, to be sure, offers difficulty enough, and our opponents often try our patience in high degree. The hardest to win are our rich men, for the most part de-Judaised. They feel themselves especially disquieted by our appearance on the scene. One thing above all wounds them painfully: that we say openly that the comfortable repose which they so gladly display to themselves and to others, the firmness with which they fancy themselves rooted in their place, is nothing but empty show. One hour of excitement among those around them can destroy the fair edifice of well-being which they have carpentered together for themselves, nicely remote from their people, as though it had never been. They feel this well enough, for no inner satisfaction is joined to the outward splendour. Nevertheless they laugh at all warnings and scold us as foolish, unpractical idealists. They mock not because they think themselves so strong, but because they trust in the "civilisation of the XXth century," whose technical and material advances they hold to be the be-all and end-all of "civilisation"; because the phrases of culture and humanity hold their one-sidedly trained faculties of thought under a spell; and finally, because to most of them it seems needless to arm for a struggle which they hope in any case to escape by deserting the beleaguered camp.

For other Jews, as persons belonging only half to us any longer, cannot be our opponents at all. Our pious, to be sure, are being told that we are acting against Judaism when we decline to acknowledge as the leaders and judges in Israel the noble gentlemen of Mainz and elsewhere, who in their modest piety hold themselves alone to be the righteous and all others sinners. That is a clumsy jest, though not the first time the gentlemen of extra piety have made it, and only the simple fall for it. When some fanatical agitator "protects" religion with furious outcry — religion which he can grasp only in its grossly sensual aspect — that is indeed a repugnant sight to us, and we keep our opinion of him as little to ourselves as our opinion of the Christianising preachers of the Israelite faith. But by our resistance to such pests, who present nauseating caricatures of true religiousness, we hope even to render a great service to those whom they dominate and to Judaism at large! And the insight that this is so is beginning to spread even among the most pious. That we do not play the hypocrite, that we respect their view, differing from our own, has already been repeatedly affirmed to them by estimable comrades who stand in our ranks as gallant fighters. That filth should be thrown at these estimable men from the sewers of the most narrow-minded fanaticism, merely because they adhere to Zionism, will embitter all honest men. We are convinced that those among us who are truly pious will be our allies.

As regards, now, the first-mentioned among our opponents, we have little to hope from them. But it is the great multitude of those who follow in blind obedience the magnates of Jewry in the various countries upon whom we must bring our influence to bear. To them we must make it clear that from the great misery there is only one way out: national regeneration, and the soil on which it can come to pass, the land of our fathers, the land of our heroes — the Land, in a word.

The recovery of the Land, however, for our brothers who have no homestead at all,