ermann Struck, Autographed by Theodor Herzl._

_Reproduced from the Original by Courtesy of the Berlin Photographic
Co._

_Frontispiece_
THE MENORAH JOURNAL
_December, 1915_]

THE

MENORAH JOURNAL

VOLUME I DECEMBER, 1915 NUMBER 5

[Illustration]

The Menorah

BY THEODOR HERZL

_Translated from the German by Bessie London Pouzzner_

DEEP in his soul he began to feel the need of being a Jew. His
circumstances were not unsatisfactory; he enjoyed an ample income and
a profession that permitted him to do whatever his heart desired. For
he was an artist. His Jewish origin and the faith of his fathers had
long since ceased to trouble him, when suddenly the old hatred came to
the surface again in a new mob-cry. With many others he believed that
this flood would shortly subside. But there was no change for the
better; in fact, things went from bad to worse; and every blow, even
though not aimed directly at him, struck him with fresh pain, till
little by little his soul became one bleeding wound. These sorrows,
buried deep in his heart and silenced there, evoked thoughts of their
origin and of his Judaism, and now he did something he could not
perhaps have done in the old days because he was then so alien to
it--he began to love this Judaism with an intense fervor. Although in
his own eyes he could not, at first, clearly justify this new
yearning, it became so powerful at length that it crystallized from
vague emotions into a definite idea which he must needs express. It
was the conviction that there was only one solution for this
_Judennot_--the return to Judaism.

When this came to the knowledge of his closest friends, similarly
situated though they were, they shook their heads gravely and even
feared for his reason. For how could that be a remedy which merely
sharpened and intensified the evil? It seemed to him, on the other
hand, that their moral distress was so acute because the Jew of to-day
had lost the poise which was his father's very being. They ridiculed
him for this when his back was turned--many even laughed openly in his
face; yet he did not allow himself to be misled by the banalities of
these people whose acuteness of judgment had never before inspired his
respect, and he bore their witticisms and their sneers with equal
indifference. And since, in all other respects, he acted like a man in
his senses, they suffered him gradua