luence of the Mendelssohnian rhetoric and enlightenment, of reform
and assimilation, have, in the last twenty years of the nineteenth
century, been followed by a new generation which seeks to take up a
standpoint other than the traditional towards the question of Zion.
These new Jews shrug their shoulders at that twaddle which has been
the fashion among rabbis and _literati_ for the last hundred years,
and which boasts of a "Mission of Jewdom," said to consist in this,
that the Jews must live forever in dispersion among the peoples in
order to act as their teachers and models of morality, and to educate
them gradually to pure rationalism, to a general brotherhood of
mankind, and to an ideal cosmopolitanism. They declare the mission
swagger to be either presumption or foolishness. They, more modest and
more practical, demand only the right for the Jewish people to live
and to develop itself, according to its abilities, up to the natural
limits of its type. They have become convinced that this is not
possible in dispersion, as, under that condition, prejudice, hatred,
and contempt continually follow and oppress them, and either stint
their development, or force them to an ethnical mimicry which
necessarily makes of them, instead of original types with a right to
existence, mediocre or bad copies of foreign models. They therefore
work methodically with a view to rendering the Jewish people once more
a normal one, which lives on its own soil, and accomplishes all
economical, intellectual, moral, and political functions of a
civilized nation.

The goal cannot be reached at once. It lies in a future more or less
near. It is an ideal, a desire, a hope, as the Messianic Zionism was
and is. The new Zionism, which has been called the political one,
differs, however, from the old, the religious, the Messianic one, in
this,--that it disavows all mysticism, no longer identifies itself
with Messianism, and does not expect the return to Palestine to be
brought about by a miracle, but desires to prepare the way by its own
efforts.

The new Zionism has grown in part only out of the internal impulsions
of Judaism itself, out of the enthusiasm of modern educated Jews for
their history and martyrology, out of the awakened consciousness of
their racial qualities, out of their ambition to save the ancient
blood, in view of the farthest possible future, and to add to the
achievements of their forefathers the achievements of their posterity.