ly that the name is known
everywhere merely as the name of a traitor. The name of Judas nearly
always means Judas Iscariot; it hardly ever means Judas Maccabeus.
And if you shout out "Judas" to a politician in the thick of a political
tumult, you will have some difficulty in soothing him afterwards,
with the assurance that you had merely traced in him something
of that splendid zeal and valour which dragged down the tyranny
of Antiochus, in the day of the great deliverance of Israel.

Those two possible uses of the name of Judas would give us yet another
compact embodiment of the case for Zionism. Numberless international
Jews have gained the bad name of Judas, and some have certainly
earned it. If you have gained or earned the good name of Judas,
it can quite fairly and intelligently be affirmed that this was not
the fault of the Jews, but of the peculiar position of the Jews.
A man can betray like Judas Iscariot in another man's house;
but a man cannot fight like Judas Maccabeus for another man's temple.
There is no more truly rousing revolutionary story amid all the stories
of mankind, there is no more perfect type of the element of chivalry
in rebellion, than that magnificent tale of the Maccabee who stabbed
from underneath the elephant of Antiochus and died under the fall
of that huge and living castle. But it would be unreasonable to ask
Mr. Montagu to stick a knife into the elephant on which Lord Curzon,
let us say, was riding in all the pomp of Asiatic imperialism.
For Mr. Montagu would not be liberating his own land; and therefore
he naturally prefers to interest himself either in operations in silver
or in somewhat slower and less efficient methods of liberation.
In short, whatever we may think of the financial or social services
such as were rendered to England in the affair of Marconi, or to France
in the affair of Panama, it must be admitted that these exhibit
a humbler and more humdrum type of civic duty, and do not remind
us of the more reckless virtues of the Maccabees or the Zealots.
A man may be a good citizen of anywhere, but he cannot be a national
hero of nowhere; and for this particular type of patriotic passion
it is necessary to have a _patria_. The Zionists therefore are
maintaining a perfectly reasonable proposition, both about the charge
of usury and the charge of treason, if they claim that both could
be cured by the return to a national soil as promised in Zionism.

Unfortunately they