e
understood only in a spiritual sense, as the setting up of the Jewish
monotheism in the whole world, as the future triumph of Jewish ethics
over the less sublime and less noble moral teaching of the other
nations. An American rabbi reduced this conception to the striking
formula, "Our Zion is in Washington." The Mendelssohn teaching
logically developed in the first half of the nineteenth century into
the "Reform," which deliberately broke with Zionism. For the Reform
Jew, the word Zion had just as little meaning as the word dispersion.
He does not feel himself in any diaspora. He denies that there is a
Jewish people and that he is a member of it. He desires only to belong
to the people in whose midst he lives. For him Judaism is a purely
religious conception which has nothing whatever to do with
nationality. The land of his birth is his fatherland, and he will know
of no other. The idea of a return to Palestine excites him either to
indignation or to laughter. He answers it with the well-known, silly,
would-be witticism, "If the Jewish state is again set up in Palestine,
I will ask to be its ambassador in Paris."

The thinking Jew did not fail, however, to perceive, in the course of
time, that Reform Judaism is a half measure, a compromise, which like
every compromise, contains the germ of destruction, as it cannot for
one instant resist logical criticism. Whom shall the Reform Judaism
satisfy? The believing Jew? He rejects it with the greatest
abhorrence. The unbelieving Jew? He despises it as hypocrisy and
phrase-mongering. The Jew who really desires to break with his
national past and to be absorbed by his Christian surroundings? For
that Jew, Reform Judaism does not suffice; he goes a step farther, the
step that leads to the baptismal font. Still less does it satisfy the
Jew who desires to guard Jewdom against destruction and to preserve it
as an ethnical individuality. For to him an openly expressed
abandonment of all national aspirations is synonymous with a
self-condemnation of the Jewish people to a perhaps slow, but sure,
death. Reform Judaism without Zionism, that is to say, without the
wish and the hope for a reassembling of the Jewish people, has no
future. At the best, it can only be regarded as a somewhat crooked
path that leads to Christianity. He who desires to reach that goal can
find straighter and shorter routes.

II.

And so it has come about that the generations which had been under the
inf