oms the salvation of Judaism was primarily associated with the idea
of emigration. The champions of American emigration were prone to
idealize this movement, which had in reality sprung from practical
necessity, and they saw in it, not without justification, the beginning
of a new free center of Judaism in the Diaspora. The Hebrew poet Judah
Leib Gordon [2] addresses "The Daughter of Jacob [the Jewish people],
disgraced by the son of Hamor [the Russian Government]" [3] in the
following words:

[Footnote 1: That idea was subsequently championed by the writer of this
volume. See more about it in Vol. III.]

[Footnote 2: See p. 228 et seq.]

[Footnote 3: An allusion to Gen. 34, with a play on the words
_Bem-hamor,_ "the son of an ass."]

Come, let as go where liberty's light
Doth shine upon all with equal might,
Where every man, without disgrace,
Is free to adhere to his creed and his race,
Where thou, too, shalt no longer fear
Dishonor from brutes, my sister dear![1]

[Footnote 1: From his Hebrew poem _Ahoti Ruhama_, "My Beloved Sister."]

The exponents of American emigration were inspired by the
prospect of an exodus from the land of slavery into the land
of freedom. Many of them looked forward to the establishment
of agricultural and farming settlements in that country
and to the concentration of large Jewish masses in the thinly
populated States of the Union where they hoped the Jews
might be granted a considerable amount of self-government.

Side by side with the striving for a transplantation of Jewish centers
centers within the Diaspora, another idea, which negatives the Diaspora
Diaspora altogether and places in its stead the resuscitation of the
Jewish national center in Palestine, struggled to life amidst the
birth pangs of the pogroms. The first theoretic exponent of this
new movement, called "Love of Zion," [1] was M.L. Lilienblum, who in a
former stage of radicalism had preached the need of religious
reforms in Judaism. [2] As far back as in the autumn of the first pogrom
year Lilienblum published a series of articles in which he interpreted
the idea of Palestinian colonization, which had but recently sprung
to life, in the light of a common national task for the whole of
Jewry. Lilienblum endeavored to show that the root of all the
historic misfortunes of the Jewish people lay in the fact that it
was in all lands an alien element which refuses to assim