they can lead a free and complete political existence.

"Der Judenstaat" has become the real starting point of political
Zionism,--the starting point, not the programme. Herzl's book is still
the subjective work of a solitary thinker who speaks in his own name.
Many details in it are literature. It is not easy to draw a sharp
boundary line between the sober earnest of the social politician and
the imagination of the prophetical poet. The real programme had to be
a collective work which was certainly based on Herzl's book, and
inspired by Herzl's visions of the future, but which rid itself of all
fantastic details, and was built up solely from the elements of
reality.

Herzl's book was at once greeted by tens of thousands of Jews, chiefly
the young, as an act of redemption. It was not to remain merely
printed paper, but should be transformed into a practical creation.
New societies were founded everywhere, no longer with a view of the
slow, petty settlement of Palestine by means of groups of Jews
creeping surreptitiously as it were into the country, but by the
preparation for an emigration "en masse" into the Holy Land, based on
a formal treaty with the Turkish Government, guaranteed by the Great
Powers, by which the former should accord the new settlers the right
of self-government.

The premises of political Zionism are that there is a Jewish nation.
This is just the point denied by the assimilation Jews, and the
spiritless, unctuous, prating rabbis in their pay. Dr. Herzl saw that
the first task he had to fulfil was the organizing of a manifestation
which should bring before the world, and the Jewish people itself, in
modern, comprehensible form the fact of its national existence. He
convoked a Zionist congress, which in spite of the most furious
attacks and most unscrupulous acts of violence,--the Jewish community
of Munich where the congress was originally intended to be held
protested against its meeting in that town,--assembled for the first
time in Basel, the end of August, 1897, and consisted of two hundred
and four selected representatives of the Zionist Jews of both
hemispheres.

The first Zionist congress solemnly proclaimed in the face of the
attentive world that the Jews are a nation, and that they do not
desire to be absorbed by other nations. It vowed to work for the
emancipation of that part of the Jewish race which is deprived of all
rights, and which is dragging out its existence in undeserved mis