About Zionism · Albert Einstein
INTRODUCTION
There are two main ways of approach to Zionism. One starts from those Jews who are made to suffer for being Jews, the other from the smaller number who are not. In the one case Zionism means the transfer of masses of Jews from countries in which they are obviously not wanted to a country which they might call their own; in the other case it means the re-creation in Palestine of a Hebraic type of life, which will be regarded by all Jews as the embodiment of their own distinctive outlook and ideals, and will thus help to counteract the inevitable tendency of the Jews, when they are not driven back on themselves by external restrictions, to lose their sense of being a separate people.
Of these two conceptions of Zionism, the former has the more direct and obvious appeal. The fact that masses of Jews are made to suffer for the crime of being Jews and wishing to remain Jews is too patent to call for demonstration; and, while it is true that in some countries Jewish disabilities have been removed so far as that can be done by statute, bitter experience engenders a sceptical attitude towards the idea that universal emancipation will provide a panacea for the Jew’s troubles. In the first place, the countries with the largest numbers of Jews are not all eager to admit them to full equality; and in the second place, even where equality has been accorded, dislike of the Jew often makes itself felt too strongly for his liking or comfort. Hence, from the point of view of a Jew who wishes to see his people better off in the world than it is to-day, or has been these many centuries, there is much to commend a scheme which sets out to cut at the root of the trouble by removing all the victims of anti-Semitism to a land of their own. By contrast with this perfectly simple and intelligible idea, the other conception of Zionism appears abstruse, almost other-worldly.
The problem to which it offers a solution is one of which the existence, let alone the urgency, is not readily realised by ordinary men and women. It requires no great exercise of thought or imagination to appreciate the unenviable position of the Jewish masses, or the desirability of transporting them to a safe home of refuge. It is less easy to recognise that the emancipated Jew presents, from the point of view of Jewish survival, at least as difficult a problem as the unemancipated; that the very removal of restrictions on the political and economic freedom of the Jews in this or that country creates conditions which are more inimical than persecution to the maintenance of whatever is worthily distinctive of the Jew as such; that the consequent disintegration of an ancient people, involving the disappearance of one of the world’s great cultures, is even more tragic than the material ills of the Jewish masses; and that the paramount need of the hour is a safe home of refuge for the Jewish spirit. The line of argument here briefly indicated takes us into the realm of abstract and metaphysical conceptions, of which the common man is impatient.
It presupposes the idea that the reality of a people’s being is to be found in its distinctive “spirit,” by which it is differentiated from other peoples, and that a people lives just in so far as it is able freely to embody its spirit in the forms and activities of an organised corporate existence of its own. It regards a people as something bigger than the sum-total of the individuals who compose it at any given time, as a personality with a soul and a life and a history; it regards the well-being of a people as something not to be measured in terms of the material prosperity or the political freedom of its individual members. In relation to the Jewish people in particular, it sees the crux of the problem in the fact that the national personality is unable, in present conditions, to be creatively self-expressive; and it seeks to save the people by securing for it the possibility of another period of self-expression, naturally in the only land which the people can in any sense call its own. This type of Zionism, often called “Spiritual Zionism,” is more subtle and more radical than the other, which is known, even less appropriately, as “Political Zionism.” It can be defended on philosophical grounds, and, despite its apparent abstractness, on strictly practical grounds; but it does not speak with the clarion voice that rallies millions to a banner.
Hence it is not surprising that Zionism did not begin to assume the proportions of a large popular movement before 1895, when Theodor Herzl, in his _Judenstaat_, propounded the beautifully simple idea of finding, on some more or less unoccupied portion of the earth’s surface, an autonomous home of refuge for those Jews who could not or would not become completely assimilated to their surroundings. Herzl did much more than propound the idea: he spent the rest of his brief and care-laden days in working for its realisation. He created the Zionist Organisation, the Jewish Colonial Trust to provide financial backing for the diplomatic work of Zionism, the Jewish National Fund to purchase land in Palestine. He gave to the Jewish masses the hope and the vision for which they had unconsciously been yearning, and fired their imagination as it had not been fired for many a long year. But his actual plan did not come to fruition. There was no country which could be turned into a Jewish country. The only land of which the Jews were willing to think as potentially their own was Palestine.
As individuals they were ready (and, in those days, able) to migrate from Eastern Europe to countries already developed, and to fit themselves as best they might into the existing national structures; for a national home of their own they wanted Palestine and Palestine only. But Palestine was not suitable for a rapid mass-settlement; and even if it had been, neither the requisite political conditions nor the necessary financial resources were forthcoming. If the life of the Zionist Organisation had depended on its prospect of accomplishing within a measurable time the mass-migration and the autonomous state which were fundamental to Herzl’s original conception, it would not have lived for ten years. In fact, there was something more behind it than a grandiose but impracticable vision. “Spiritual Zionism,” despite its lack of mass appeal, was yet able in the hour of need to provide an objective which could keep the Organisation together when its original _raison d’être_ had disappeared. Not, of course, that the Organisation officially adopted the philosophy of Spiritual Zionism as its own. Its programme, its phraseology, its visions remained unchanged. But as a matter of hard fact, it reconciled itself to comparatively small-scale work in the field of Palestinian development.
The settlement of some thousands of Jews on the soil of Palestine, the concurrent growth of Jewish industry in the principal towns, the creation of a network of Hebrew schools—these and similar activities, important as a demonstration of the unimpaired capacity of the Jew to re-make the forms of his own life under modern conditions, and as a means of reviving the practical interest of the Jewish people in Palestine, bore no intelligible relation to the vision of a safe home of refuge for the oppressed masses of Jewry. And to a large extent theory was inevitably influenced by practice. Zionists came to recognise not only that the idea of transporting the Jewish masses of Eastern Europe to Palestine was a will-o’-the-wisp, but also that there was positive Jewish value in the establishment in Palestine of a relatively small nucleus of the Jewish people, speaking its own language and developing its own culture on the basis of a healthy economic structure. Nor, so long as Palestine remained in the hands of the Turks, did the question of the political future of this nucleus achieve practical importance.
The Balfour Declaration of 1917, and the British Mandate for Palestine, changed the situation in two respects. The establishment of a progressive and friendly regime in Palestine removed many of the obstacles which had hampered Jewish development before the war; and Zionism has taken full advantage of the wider opportunities thus afforded, allowance being made for the fact that the Jewish people has suffered certainly not less than others from the impoverishment and the weariness of the post-war world. The Jewish population of Palestine has more than doubled in the last dozen years, and is now in the neighbourhood of 160,000, about one-fifth of the total population of the country. Jews have developed modern methods in agriculture and industry, have drained marshes and brought neglected areas under cultivation, have successfully fought the endemic diseases of the land, and have done a great deal in the direction of raising the general level of health and well-being. They have crowned their educational edifice with a Hebrew University, have made the Hebrew language once more their own, and on the foundation of this linguistic revival have achieved at least the first steps in the evolution of a type of individual and of life which can be called Jewish, or Hebrew, without any hyphen.
These developments are of some value to the world at large, in so far as they mean the cultivation of a long neglected estate. They are of benefit to the Arabs of Palestine, as bringing them wider cultural opportunities and a higher standard of life. They are of supreme importance to Jews the world over, not only because they have provided many thousands of Jews from Eastern Europe with a better and healthier way of life, but more particularly because of the tonic effect of this gradual unfolding of the creative capacities of a people which has learnt, seeing itself through the eyes of others, to regard itself as incurably parasitic, and has forgotten, under the stress of persecution and the blandishments of emancipation, that it has a great moral and intellectual heritage of its own. Not the least noteworthy effect of Zionist work in Palestine is the general quickening among Jews all over the world of the sense of belonging spiritually together, which is exemplified in the recently achieved union of Zionists and non-Zionists in the Jewish Agency for Palestine.
At the same time, the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate have brought into the foreground the hitherto dormant question of the political status and future of the Jewish community in Palestine itself. The Declaration contemplates “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” It says nothing explicitly about the status of the Palestinian Jews, who are not, and are unlikely to be, more than a comparatively small fraction of that Jewish people to which the national home is promised. But it was naturally understood, both by those who gave and by those who received it, as implying a national status for that part of the Jewish people which is or will be in the national home itself. Nobody doubts that the Mandate was within the intention of the Declaration in recognising the Jews of Palestine as one of the national groups of the country—a recognition most clearly exemplified in the status given to Hebrew as one of the official languages of Palestine. The Declaration means, in other words, that Palestine is not, as some people seem still to think, an Arab country into which Jews may or may not be permitted to enter. It is a country to which a Jew as such has a right to belong; it is in some senses a Jewish land. But how much, or how little, is this going to mean in practice? Is Palestine intended to become wholly a Jewish land, in the sense that only its Jewish inhabitants will control its destinies (in so far as the destinies of any small country can be controlled by its inhabitants) and any others will have only such rights as the Jews see fit to allow them? If that position is unthinkable while the Jews are in a minority, would it be possible if they became a majority?
Justice and common-sense seem to dictate a negative answer to these questions. The two national groups which are recognised as belonging to Palestine, the Jewish and the Arab, ought to develop side by side on a basis of political equality. There ought to be no possibility of the domination of Arab by Jew or of the exclusion of Jew by Arab. The question of majority or minority ought at no time, either now or in the future, to affect the principle of national equality. But nothing of this kind is clearly laid down in the Balfour Declaration; and even if it had been, there is no guarantee that the Arabs of Palestine would have accepted it as a reasonable view. For, rather paradoxically, one of the effects of the recognition of Jewish national aspirations has been to stimulate a Palestinian Arab nationalism which scarcely existed before; and the spokesmen of this nationalism, unwilling to admit a Jewish claim even to equal rights in the country, are naturally anxious to persuade themselves and the world that the Jewish claim is not for equal rights, but for predominance.
That idea, again, though flatly at variance with official Zionist declarations, has derived some colour from the exuberances of less responsible Zionists, and has had a favourable atmosphere in the general vagueness of the political situation. Arab intransigence has naturally not encouraged the development on the Jewish side of a policy of active co-operation between the two national groups, which would at best have been difficult enough by reason of the difference in their cultural levels and of the fact that the Jews are as yet imperfectly Palestinised, and have to bend all their efforts to the securing of their own position in the country. In the result, the two national groups have remained, in all but the merely literal sense, too far apart for a spirit of mutual confidence to develop; and Arab politicians, perhaps genuinely afraid of imaginary Zionist ambitions, have had no great difficulty in stirring up mob passion on more than one occasion. The lamentable outbreak of violence in August 1929 may be said to have brought matters to a head.
It has not, of course, affected the inherent reasonableness of Zionist aims, or the determination of Jews both in and out of Palestine to carry through the work of reconstruction which they have begun; but it has emphasised the desirability of taking active steps to bring about an understanding between the two peoples, instead of leaving it to time and slow education to bridge the gap. On the Arab side there is as yet scarcely any overt sign of a realisation of the need for a more constructive policy than that of demanding the repeal of the Balfour Declaration. But this attitude of mere negation can scarcely persist in the face of the Government’s clear statement of its intention to give the Declaration effect; and there is no need to despair of a solution which will bring about permanent peace. There is no reason to anticipate any obstacle to such a solution on the Zionist side, though it has to be admitted that the recent handling of the situation by the Mandatory Power has not tended to strengthen the hands of those Zionist who are most firmly convinced of the wisdom and the justice of a policy of moderation.
Professor Einstein, some of whose scattered speeches and letters on Zionism and kindred questions are collected in this volume, is better known to the world as a physicist than as a Zionist. Yet for many years past he has given abundant proof both of a keen interest in Zionism and of a penetrating insight into its underlying ideas. Himself an assimilated Jew, he is impelled to Zionism by his acute consciousness of the excessive price at which the blessings of assimilation are bought by the Jewish communities of the Western world, which for him are mainly represented by that of Germany. The price is a loss of solidarity, of moral independence and of self-respect. These, in his view, can be regained only if assimilated Jews find some common task, of absolute human value, to which they can bend their corporate energies as Jews. Such a task is to be found in the restoration of Jewish national life in Palestine, which involves the regeneration of Palestine itself and its transformation into a living and productive country. The fact that this regenerated Palestine will offer a home of refuge for many oppressed Jews is of secondary importance.
What matters most is the new moral freedom and health which Jewry will gain through devotion to an ideal at once Jewish and broadly human, and through the gradual emergence in Palestine of a civilisation at once Jewish and modern. Jewish nationalism is justified, even to a mind so essentially internationalist as Professor Einstein’s, because without it the survival of the Jew is neither worthwhile nor ultimately possible. But, as might be expected, there is in Professor Einstein’s nationalism no room for any kind of aggressiveness or chauvinism. For him the domination of Jew over Arab in Palestine, or the perpetuation of a state of mutual hostility between the two peoples, would mean the failure of Zionism. The events of August 1929 bitterly disappointed the hopes that he had built on the apparently friendly relations between working Jews and working Arabs in Palestine, and on the advantages obviously derived by the Arab population from the Jewish development of the country; they have not altered his conviction that the realisation of the true aims of Zionism can be sought only along the line of peace and co-operation between Jews and Arabs. Throughout this difficult period he has been prominent among those Zionists who have urged most strongly a policy of active peace-seeking: indeed he has, perhaps inevitably, exposed himself to criticism for what the generality of Zionists regard at present as a somewhat extreme and premature advocacy of that policy.
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem represents a side of Zionist activity which naturally makes a peculiarly strong appeal to Professor Einstein, and he has been an active member of the Governing Body of the University since its inception. He is, however, no less alive to the necessity and value of a solid material basis for the development of a Jewish civilisation in Palestine; and some years ago he undertook a tour of the United States on behalf of the Keren Hayesod (Palestine Foundation Fund). This combination of academic with practical interests, coupled with his transparent single-mindedness and simplicity of character, has won him the respect and affection of Zionists the world over. The Einstein Forest in Palestine may prove no less enduring a monument to his fame than the Theory of Relativity. This volume is composed of translations of extracts from speeches and letters delivered and written by Professor Einstein during the last nine or ten years. The speech or letter form has not been preserved, and short passages of purely ephemeral interest have been omitted here and there. The arrangement is roughly, but not strictly, chronological. Permission to reprint various passages has been readily given by the editors of the _Manchester Guardian_, the _Jüdische Rundschau_ (Berlin), the _New Palestine_ (New York), the _Jewish Chronicle_ (London), and the _Jüdischer Almanach_ (Prague), to all of whom the Editor expresses his grateful acknowledgments. _London,_ _September 1930._ L.S.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.