nd walking and wearing
only the dust-hued habit of modern war. There went no trumpet
before him, neither did he enter by the Golden Gate; but the silence
of the deserts was full of a phantom acclamation, as when from far
away a wind brings in a whisper the cheering of many thousand men.
For in that hour a long-lost cry found fulfilment, and something
counted irrational returned in the reason of things.
And at last even the wise understood, and at last even the learned
were enlightened on a need truly and indeed international, which a mob
in a darker age had known by the light of nature; something that
could be denied and delayed and evaded, but not escaped for ever.
_Id Deus vult_.

CHAPTER XIII

THE PROBLEM OF ZIONISM

There is an attitude for which my friends and I were for a long period
rebuked and even reviled; and of which at the present period we are
less likely than ever to repent. It was always called Anti-Semitism;
but it was always much more true to call it Zionism. At any rate
it was much nearer to the nature of the thing to call it Zionism,
whether or no it can find its geographical concentration in Zion.
The substance of this heresy was exceedingly simple. It consisted
entirely in saying that Jews are Jews; and as a logical consequence
that they are not Russians or Roumanians or Italians or Frenchmen
or Englishmen. During the war the newspapers commonly referred to them
as Russians; but the ritual wore so singularly thin that I remember
one newspaper paragraph saying that the Russians in the East End
complained of the food regulations, because their religion forbade
them to eat pork. My own brief contact with the Greek priests
of the Orthodox Church in Jerusalem did not permit me to discover
any trace of this detail of their discipline; and even the Russian
pilgrims were said to be equally negligent in the matter.
The point for the moment, however, is that if I was violently opposed
to anything, it was not to Jews, but to that sort of remark about Jews;
or rather to the silly and craven fear of making it a remark about Jews.
But my friends and I had in some general sense a policy in the matter;
and it was in substance the desire to give Jews the dignity
and status of a separate nation. We desired that in some fashion,
and so far as possible, Jews should be represented by Jews, should live
in a society of Jews, should be judged by Jews and ruled by Jews.
I am an Anti-Semite if that is Anti-Se