ion, without exaggeration and polemical heat.

I will endeavor to furnish readers of good faith, who are not biased,
and have no other interest than that of gaining authentic information
about a phenomenon in contemporary history, as concisely and soberly
as possible with all the facts, as they really are, not as they are
reflected in muddled brains, or distorted and falsified by
calumniators.

I.

Zionism is a new word for a very old object, in so far as it merely
expresses the yearning of the Jewish people for Zion. Since the
destruction of the second temple by Titus, since the dispersion of the
Jewish nation in all countries, this people has not ceased to long
intensely, and hope fervently, for the return to the lost land of
their fathers. This yearning for, and hope in, Zion on the part of the
Jews was the concrete, I might say, the geographical, aspect of their
Messianic faith, which in its turn forms an essential part of their
religion.

Messianism and Zionism were really, for nearly two thousand years,
identical conceptions, and without caviling and hair-splitting
interpretation, it would not be easy to make a distinction between the
prayers for the appearance of the promised Messiah, and those for the
not less promised return to the historical home,--both of which stand
side by side on every page of the Jewish liturgy. These prayers were,
until a few generations ago, meant literally by every Jew, as they
still are by the simple believing Jews. The Jews had no other idea
than that they were a people which as a punishment for its sins had
lost the land of its forefathers, which was condemned to live as
strangers in strange lands, and whose great sufferings would first
cease when it was again assembled on the consecrated soil of the Holy
Land.

This gradually changed about the middle of the eighteenth century,
when enlightenment first began to find its way into Jewdom, in the
person of its first herald, Moses Mendelssohn, the popular
philosopher. The faith of the Jews became more lukewarm; the educated
classes, where they did not simply convert themselves to Christianism,
began to regard the doctrines of their religion in a rationalist
manner; for them the dispersion of the Jewish people was a final and
unalterable fact; they emptied the conception of the Messiah and of
Zion of every concrete meaning, and arranged for themselves a singular
doctrine, according to which the Zion promised to the Jews was to b