B"H

Authentic historical insight to Zionism

The new Jews.

Thus the generations that were under the influence of the Mendelssohnian rhetoric and enlightenment-of reform and assimilation-were followed in the last twenty years of the 19th century by a new generation which strove to secure for the Zionist question a different position from the traditional one. These new Jews shrug their shoulders at the talk of Rabbis and writers about a "Mission of Judaism" that has been in vogue these hundred years.

The Mission is said to consist in this, that the Jews must always live in dispersion among the nations in order to be unto them teachers and models of morality and to educate them gradually to a pure rationalism, to a universal brother­hood of man, and to an ideal cosmopolitanism. They declare this Mission to be a piece of presumption or folly. More modern and practical in their attitude, they demand for the Jewish people only the right to live and to develop in accordance with its own powers to the natural limits of its type. They have found, however, that this is impossible in a state of dispersion, as under such circumstances prejudice, hatred, contempt ever pursue and oppress them, and either inhibit their development or else tend to reduce them to an ethnic mimicry. Thus, instead of their being originals worthy of their existence, this striving at imitation will mould them into mediocre or wretched copies of foreign models. They are therefore working systematically to make the Jewish people once again a normal people, which shall live on its own soil and discharge all the economic, spiritual, moral and political functions of a civilized people.

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