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Title: Jewish Nationalism Author: Bernard Lazare Date: 1898 Language: en Topics: religion, nationalism Source: Retrieved on 2016-10-28 from http://marxists.architexturez.net/reference/archive/lazare-bernard/1898/jewish-nationalism.htm Notes: Source: Le Nationalisme Juif. Paris, Stock, 1898; Translated: for marxists.org by Mitch Abidor; CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2007.
Gathered together here, we are individuals from the most diverse
countries; from Russia and Poland, from Romania and Austria, from France
and doubtless from other countries. Nevertheless, we don’t form a
heterogeneous assembly; surrounding us is an atmosphere in which,
whatever our country of origin, we move with equal ease.
What is the tie that unites us and thanks to which our meeting is
homogeneous?
It is our quality as Jews. From whatever city we come, far or near,
whatever the social conditions under which we have been or are subject
to, we feel ourselves to be brothers because we are Jews. It isn’t
enough to state this fact; its meaning must be understood.
When I affirm that I am a Jew in the same way as any other man living in
Odessa, Prague, Bucharest, Pozen, or Warsaw, do I mean to say that I
have the same faith, the same dogmatic or metaphysical beliefs as those
man to whom I feel close? In a word, is it a religious tie that unites
us? In calling ourselves Jews do we mean to say that we have an
identical concept of the divinity, and not only of that divinity, but of
the cult that should be rendered him and even the necessity of that
cult? Not in the least. There are among us practicing Israelites,
liberal or orthodox, doubtless some deists, pantheists in the manner of
Philo or Spinoza, perhaps positivists and materialists, and certainly
some atheists. To be a Jew thus does not mean to have the same religion.
I know full well that the contrary is commonly affirmed, and there are
those who do not consider as being part of Israel those who do not
frequent synagogues. It is especially in those countries where Jews find
consolation for the contempt in which they are held despite the fact
that their emancipation has been consecrated, it is especially in these
countries that Judaism is only seen as a religious confession. This
could be a tactic, a policy – that of the ostrich – but it is not an
expression of the truth! In this particular case – it is doubtless
permitted me to say this here – it is the anti-Semites who are right.
They don’t know why, to be sure, and it is simply their hatred that has
granted them a confused clear-sightedness, but they are in the right
against those newspapers that defend orthodoxy. Judaism includes a
religion, a national religion, but it is not only a religion, and what
can an orthodox, a Hassid, a Talmudist or one of those who repudiates
the name of Jew and only retains that of Israelite say in response to an
atheist who says to them: “I feel I am a Jew.” This is a sentiment that
has its value; at the very least, it exists and it would be right to ask
where it comes from, on what basis it maintains itself with, and what
are its causes and genesis.
An answer to these questions is given both by the philo- and the
anti-Semites. What unites all the Jews of the world is that they are of
the same race. This statement does not stand up to examination. The
Russian Jew with his pushed-in nose, his prominent cheeks, his slanted
eyes; the Spanish Jew with his curved nose, his sensuous mouth; the
little brown-haired straight-nosed Jew and the red-haired Jew of
Germany, do they have the same ancestor, do they descend from the same
couple? No, but their forefathers can be found in ancient Judea, and we
find their effigy both on the bas-reliefs of the Hittites and the
frescoes that adorn the tombs of the pharaohs. There are several Jewish
types, but despite the crossings and the mixes we can say, against
Renan, that the perennial nature of these types is incontestable. If we
thus rectify the ideas of the philo- and anti-Semites have of the Jewish
race, we can say that the identity of origins already constitutes a tie
among the Jews.
But the belief in this community of origins does not suffice to unite
us. Is it only the qualities that are attributed to us that tie us to
each other? No, because we are accorded this quality because of these
ties.
Where then do we find the source for this sense of our unity, if I may
call it thus? In the first place, in a common past, and recent past. The
emancipated Jew conducts himself most often like a parvenu; he forgets
the miserable forefathers from whom he is issued. While everyone works
at finding his ancestors, he wants to forget that he has any. This
ancestor does him little honor; he was generally a poor wretch who was
treated like a dog, whose right to life was barely recognized and who
slogged along quietly, sordidly with a far from aesthetic humility. And
yet if this emancipated Jew closely examined his conscience he would
recognize that the humanity of his forefather has, in him, become
platitude, his resignation cowardice, though the excuse that the little
Jew of the past had no longer exists today. Among those I am speaking
of, among the Jews of the west, there are those who have attempted to
forget this centuries-old past in order to assimilate themselves into
the nations where they live. Have they managed to erase from their
spirits and hearts what seventeen centuries imprinted there? What is a
hundred years? Are they enough to wipe out the work of several
millennia? For in speaking of seventeen centuries I am leaving out the
thousands of years during which the Jewish people were formed, and which
the rage of Rome and Christianity’s hatred spread throughout the earth,
like a rebel seed. If at least during these hundred years animosity and
contempt had disappeared.
And if despite it all they want to forget, don’t they have a living
testimony of this past when they see the present condition of Romanian
and Russian Jews, of the Jews of Persia and Morocco? I remember a day
when the whole of this tragic past appeared before me. It was in
Amsterdam. I was wandering through the streets of the ghetto, following
the shade of the divine Spinoza, and I had gone to sit in the old
Portuguese synagogue in order to better evoke the image of he who the
synagogue pursued. I had remained seated on the bench for a long time,
before the sanctuary whose wood – the legend says – comes from
Palestine, facing the marble plaque upon which are inscribed the names
of the Espinozas. When I left I saw in the courtyard of the synagogue an
encampment of Russian Jews, and I thought I had been thrown back into
the past ages, where troops of fugitive Jews traveled the roads in order
to escape spoliation, martyrdom, and the stake. All the centuries of
poverty, despair, resignation and heroic obstinacy lived again, and it
was the legendary Ahasuerus, the eternal and miserable vagabond that I
thought I saw pass. It is certainly not contemporary anti-Semitism that
will erase all this from our memories. And this then is yet another
enduring tie between us: a common history.
What is this history made up of? It is made up of common traditions and
customs, traditions and customs that have not all equally persisted, for
many of them were religious customs and traditions. Nevertheless, they
have left their traces in us; they have given us habits and, even more,
a similar attitude thanks to which, despite the necessary individual
divergences that separate us and must separate us, we look upon things
from the same angle. Aside from these traditions and customs, a
literature and a philosophy have been elaborated. We were exclusively
nourished by this philosophy and literature for many long years. To be
sure, we currently live – and in the past many Jews lived – on a fund of
general ideas; human and universal ideas that our own people,
incidentally, contributed to the creation of. But we possess certain
categories of ideas and certain possibilities of sensations and emotions
that only belong to us, precisely because they are born of that history,
of those traditions, of those customs, of that literature, and of that
philosophy.
How, then, do we translate this fact of a certain number of individuals
having a common past, traditions and ideas? We translate it by saying
that they belong to the same group, that they have the same nationality.
And this is what makes comprehensible that incontestable Jewish
fraternity that many seek to explain by humanitarian sentiments. A poor
explanation, because these sentiments particularize and those who want
to repudiate their quality as Jews forget them. Such is the
justification of the tie that unites the Jews of the five parts of the
world:
There is a Jewish nation.
This is not the first time I have put forth this opinion. I developed it
three years ago in a book for which I was subject to many attacks. It
was said to me that by affirming the permanence and the reality of a
Jewish nation I was making myself the auxiliary of the anti-Semites. I
thought much about this serious complaint and on this point I persist in
remaining the ally of the anti-Semites, as was said at the time. I am
their adversary on so many others that I can allow myself to support
with precise reasoning their confused affirmations. What shocks me on
the part of anti-Semites is not hearing them say: “You are a Nations,”
nor hearing them affirm that we are a state within the state. I find
that there are not enough states within the state, or, to be more
precise, in modern states there are not enough autonomous and free
groupings with ties among themselves. The human ideal does not appear to
me to be political or intellectual unification. One unification alone
seems to me to be necessary: moral unification. What shocks me, for it
is contrary to truth, is the displaying of the Jews as a nation
especially hateful, corrupt and wicked. What shocks me, because it is
against justice, is, with a suspicious goal, the holding of Jews
responsible for all of society’s ills.
As for the fact that there is a Jewish nationality, if it were it only
be remarked upon by the anti-Semites and rejected by those among the
Jews , some of whom willingly imagine that they were once at the side of
Arminius in the Teutoborg forest and others that they were with
Vercingitorix at Alesia, this would still not for me be a reason to deny
it, since the evidence imposes it. If I look before me I see, I repeat,
a few million human beings who for many centuries submitted to the same
external and internal laws, who lived under the same codes, had the same
ideas, the same mores. I note that these thousands of individuals still
give themselves the same name, that they still feel themselves united
and that they are conscious of belonging to the same group. What then
should I reasonably conclude? That these thousands of individuals form a
nation. It will be said to me that many of them have melted in, have
assimilated. What does this mean? Are there not, for example, Germans of
French origin and Frenchmen of German origin? Does this prevent there
from being a German nation and a French nation? Of course not, not any
more than it prevents critics from establishing what such and such a
German author owes to his French ancestors, or such and such a French
author to his German ancestors. The truth is that among the Jews who
deny the existence of a Jewish nation there are many who are pushed to
this by the fear of consequences. With a few rare exceptions, among them
it is not an opinion or a conviction, it is diplomacy. And strangely, it
is among them that we find the Jewish chauvinist, he who says: “ Now
there is something you don’t find among the Jews.” Or; “There’s
something that can’t be found among the Jews.” I reality, we find among
the Jews the same amount of virtues and vices and infamies as among any
other people. Is this not natural?
If we now examine that Jewish nation we see that it too is divided in
classes. I am not speaking of the Jewish nobility, it comes from the
Holy Empire, but there is a financial, industrial, and commercial grande
bourgeoisie , an intellectual and smuggler petite bourgeoisie, and an
immense Jewish proletariat. In the same way there are Jewish
conservatives, Jews of the juste milieu, and socialist and revolutionary
Jews. Here in the west we don’t clearly observe these divisions among
the Jews, but we can see them everywhere there are Jewish agglomerations
constituted in communities. Thus in Galicia where, following the
development of the individualism of the Jewish bourgeoisie, a part of
the middle class of brokers and shop owners was cast into the ranks of
the proletariat, a proletariat that this same bourgeoisie maintains in
an incredible state of poverty and enfeeblement. Alongside them has been
constituted a class of Jews without any form of work, whose numbers grow
daily. Is it not the same in Russia? Don’t we see there the Jewish
bourgeois of high commerce, of industry and finance enjoying a
privileged situation while all the laws of exception, the persecutions
and the massacres fall upon the workers, artisans, and the unemployed?
If we pass now to London, among that colony of Jewish refugees from
Russia and Poland, don’t we also find there clearly defined classes?
When the sweating system was still in place – and it still is, though in
lesser proportions – was it not the case that the sweat shop owners, the
bosses who most brutally exploited the workers of the East End, were
Jews? It is no different in the United States, where two hundred
thousand Jews rot in New York in indescribable poverty, or in Algeria,
or in Romania, where Jews suffer under a regime you are aware of, a
regime that excludes any form of liberty. Everywhere Jews are divided
into an owning bourgeois minority and a proletarian majority.
But I don’t here have to develop this point of view. I think that I have
sufficiently established what I had to establish, i.e., that the Jews
constitute a nation. In any event, it is because they are a nation that
anti-Semitism exists. Without any doubt, and we cannot insist on this
enough, religious prejudice is the basis of the hatred of Israel, but at
the same time this religious prejudice implies the existence of this
Jewish people upon which the anathemas of the Church have fallen for
1900 years. Suppose that Christianity did not exist and the diaspora had
occurred: the Jews, a nation without a territory, a people scattered
among the peoples would even so have provoked anti-Judaism. It would
doubtless have been less violent, even though this is not certain, for
Judaism would have just as well entered into conflict with other
religious principles, as occurred in Alexandria and Rome. There just
would have been the subtraction of deicide, and that is all.
I have just said that the cause of anti-Semitism was the existence of
the Jews as a nationality. What then are the effects of anti-Semitism?
It is to render that nationality more tangible to the Jews; it’s to make
even stronger their consciousness that they are a people.
A bare thirty years ago what was the situation of the Jews of the globe?
They were divided into emancipated Jews and Jews living under laws of
exception. A great number of Jews placed under the regime of persecution
had as their ideal the condition of emancipated Jews, and the major part
of emancipated Jews tended to de-Judaize themselves, to detach
themselves from the Jewish masses still in bondage and with which they
pretended to have no more attachments than those commanded by humanity.
We are no longer at the same point. A hundred years ago in France, and
less still in Germany, in Austria and England, the Jews of the west were
liberated. The material barriers that separated them from Christian
society were destroyed; they have been permitted to exercise their
rights as men. There was a golden age for the Jews, an era when all
dreams took wing; all dreams, all ambitions, all appetites. What has
happened? A small portion, the possessing portion of the Jews, has
launched an attack on the pleasures from which they were cut off for so
many centuries. It has rotted in contact with the Christian world, which
has exercised on it the same dissolving action that the civilized
exercise on the savages to whom they bring alcoholism, syphilis, and
tuberculosis. And so it is evident that the so-called superior class of
western Jews, and principally the Jews of France, is in a state of
advanced decomposition. It is no longer Jewish, but it is not Christian,
and it is incapable of substituting a philosophy, and even less a free
morality, a credo that it no longer has. While the Christian bourgeoisie
keeps itself upright thanks to the corset of its dogmas, its traditions,
of its morality and its conventional principles, the Jewish bourgeoisie,
deprived of its secular stays, poisons the Jewish nation with its rot.
It will poison the other nations as long as it has not decided – and
this is something we cannot encourage it strongly enough to do – to
adhere to Christianity of the ruling classes and to leave Judaism
behind.
While that category dreamed of acquiring fortune, dignities, honors,
decorations, and positions, while the Jewish petit-bourgeoisie developed
itself intellectually, the re-edification of the ancient ghettoes was
being worked on. In keeping with the economic and political
circumstances, anti-Semitism was born, but these circumstances were
only, it must be stressed, the efficient causes, proper for reawakening
ancient prejudices. To what did anti-Semitism tend? To the restoration
of the ancient legislation against Israel. But this goal it had assigned
itself was an ideal. What real and practical goal did it attain? It did
not arrive, and in France, Austria and Germany it will doubtless never
arrive, at rebuilding distinct neighborhoods, nor at enclosing Jews in a
special territory like in Russia. But thanks to it, they have more or
less reconstituted a moral ghetto. Israelites are no longer cloistered
in the west; chains are no longer stretched across the ends of the
streets on which they live, but around them is created a hostile
atmosphere, an atmosphere of mistrust, or latent hatred, of unspoken
and, for this reason, all the more powerful prejudices, a ghetto more
terrible than that from which we could escape through revolt or exile.
Even when this animosity is hidden the intelligent Jew perceives it, he
feels a resistance, he senses a wall between himself and those in whose
midst he lives.
At the current time, what can we show the Jew of Eastern Europe who so
desires to conquer the situation of his western brothers? We can show
him the Jew as pariah. Isn’t this a lovely goal to seek to attain? And
what can we say to him if he simply says this: “My situation is
abominable; I have obligations and no rights. They have reduced me to
unimaginable poverty and degradation. What remedy do you propose?
Emancipation? What will your emancipation give me? It will place me in
social conditions that will allow me to refine myself, and thanks to it
I will acquire new capacities for feeling and, consequently, greater
suffering. It will develop in me a greater sensibility and at the same
time it will not make the things that wound that susceptibility
disappear; to the contrary. From a wretch who has been occasionally
rendered numb by his poverty it will make a subtle being who will doubly
feel all his stings, and whose existence will then become a thousand
times more unbearable. Of an often unconscious pariah it will make a
conscious pariah. What advantages will I obtain from this change in
condition? None. As a result, I don’t care at all about your
“emancipation”: it is neither a guarantee, nor an assurance, nor an
amelioration.
In order to reply to this argument you need a nationalist, but if a Jew
from Russia spoke in this way to a French Jew I don’t see what the
latter could say in response. He doubtless wouldn’t even call on him to
seek together the means to fight anti-Semitism, for he doesn’t think to
do this in any way, shape, or form. In general he bends, receives the
blows and thinks of the future age when he will be allowed to cut a
better figure in the world. In this alone he is Christian; when he is
slapped on the right cheek he offers the left, and even his neck.
Let us leave aside if you will the Jews of France. They are the best
agents of anti-Semitism. Instead of reacting against their enemies,
which would raise their personal dignity and accentuate their
intellectual and moral personality, they strive – with certain rare
exceptions – to develop their passive acceptance of evil and their
cowardice. They advocate the politics of silence and expect time to do
its work. The example of the Jews of Austria seems to them to be a good
one to follow, and they follow in their steps. Let us leave them aside
until we can set them in motion. They are an infinitesimal minority:
what are 100,000 Jews when more than 6,000,000 suffer in the world.
100,000 would be an incalculable force if they were an elite, but they
are trash, aside from a small group of the petite bourgeoisie, which has
not yet become conscious of the new situation in which it is living due
to the existence of anti-Semitism and its development. But we must look
further. Today the Jewish Question is posed more acutely than ever. A
solution is being sought on all sides. In reality it is no longer a
question of knowing whether or not anti-Semitism should or should not
win seats in parliament. It’s a matter of knowing what is to be the
destiny of millions of Jews scattered around the four corners of the
globe. This is the true problem.
As long as Christianity exists, the Jews, spread about among the peoples
of the world, will cause hatred and anger, and the condition in which
they will be placed will be both materially and morally inferior. If
they can’t enjoy their rights as citizens or men, or if they are the
butt of a certain form of contempt, the result is the same. What is the
solution to this? The obliteration of Christianity? This, unfortunately,
is a far off ideal, and in the meantime what is to be done? I know full
well that the Christian peoples have the option of the Armenian
solution, but their sensitivity would not allow them to envisage this.
And what is more, it is not possible for us a Jews to accept conditions
of existence incompatible with our dignity as men. We have the right to
develop ourselves in every way; it is necessary that this right be
effectively guaranteed to us. Since I leave aside the great majority of
emancipated Jews, who doubtless feel themselves in an acceptable
condition – for which I don’t praise them – we must know what remedy we
will bring to the millions of non-emancipated Jews. I don’t think that
it would be legitimate to count on an economic and social
transformation. In the first place this transformation, which I hope
for, and whose coming I will assist in fighting for with all my might,
sadly seems to still be far off. And then it is not proven to me that it
will bring Jews better conditions. I believe that one day humanity will
be a confederation of free groupings and not organized in keeping with
the capitalist system; free groupings in which the distribution of
wealth and the relations of labor and capital will be completely
different from those of today. These groups must be allowed to be
constituted, to form themselves. Why wouldn’t Jews form one? I see
nothing that opposes this, and it is in the development of Jewish
nationalism that I see the solution to the Jewish Question.
It can be said: If this is your conviction then why have you fought
anti-Semitism here; why have you begun a combat that you know you can’t
emerge victorious from? I have fought and will continue to fight
anti-Semitism because I consider it the duty of any human being to
defend himself when he is attacked. An individual who renounces
resistance and who doesn’t know how to use the arms he has at his
disposal abdicates his personality, consents to slavery and consequently
deserves to disappear. It is a good thing to combat anti-Semitism, if
only for the right to enjoy the benefits of armed peace and in keeping
with the principle that the rights of a belligerent are recognized more
than those of a serf who submits. The Jew who doesn’t rise up in the
face of anti-Semitism sinks down a degree into moral abjection.
This said, I must examine what advantage will accrue to the Jews by
their constitution as a nation, and finally how the nationalism I have
just spelled out can accord with the socialist ideas that were, are, and
will remain my ideas. As for the means by which we will definitively
create this Jewish nation, I don’t have to concern myself with them for
the moment.
How should we consider nationalism? For me it is the expression of
collective freedom and the condition for individual freedom. I call
nation the milieu in which the individual can develop and flourish most
perfectly. Let us now justify these definitions.
If there is one thing that is undeniable it is that there exist special
affinities between certain individuals. Whatever the reasons and causes
that have given birth to these affinities, they exist. When and how are
they born? In order to determine this we must plunge into the darkest
depths of history, and we only note it when the beings endowed with them
have constituted themselves into groups. From that day these affinities
reinforce themselves and become clearer, and thanks to them the
personality of the group is created. Following the reaction of the
collectivity on the individuals that compose it, thanks to these
affinities, thanks to the favorable milieu that they have allowed it to
establish, they then acquire a personality, and serve to increase the
characteristics of the group of which they are a part. Small or great,
these groupings are nations.
What do we call a free nation? This is what we call a nation that can
develop materially, intellectually, and morally without any outside
barrier being placed before its development. If as a result of conquest
or in some other fashion another nation has become dependent upon it,
all that will be left of that second nation will be a number of
denationalized individuals, that is, individuals no longer able to
express their special form of collective spirit, i.e., having lost their
collective liberty.
What happens to these individuals themselves? They are the vanquished,
the conquered, and are consequently placed in a state of inferiority,
and if they don’t accept their disappearance they lose their freedom. It
can be asked: Why don’t they disappear? Why do they remain attached to
those ancient forms that they represented at a given moment of their
existence? These are pointless questions. At the very most we can say in
response that only those human groups that are still amorphous, having
only imprecise characteristics and a vague consciousness of themselves
are susceptible to allowing themselves to be absorbed.
Groups that are strongly constituted and homogenized, having definite
characteristics and a clear consciousness of themselves, necessarily
resist. It is the same with collectivities as it is with men: the weak
surrender and the strong persist. Whatever the case, we are in the
presence of a historic fact: the maintenance and survival in the midst
of nations of certain individuals belonging to different nationalities,
that is, having preserved forms of being different from the forms of
those around them. These individuals, from the sole fact that they have
resisted, suffer a constraint, since peoples have a tendency to reduce
the heterogeneous elements that exist among them. Their freedom is thus
diminished, and if they persist in not surrendering, what will be the
sole condition of their individual liberty? It will be the conquest of
the collective freedom that they lost, i.e., the rebirth of their
nationality. This constraint also prevents them from giving all they
have, a part of their strength having been spent on this resistance, in
this struggle that permits them only to keep their potential for
development without this development being able to be effectuated. It is
yet again the reconstituting of their nationality that will give them
the faculty to flourish.
Is this not currently the case for those Russian or Romanian Jews I’m
speaking of? Given the state in which they are kept, can they give an
idea of what they are capable of producing? Will it not be the same
tomorrow for western Jews when they will be forced to employ their
energy in the combat against anti-Semitism, an eternal, a perpetual
combat made up of victories and disasters capable of wearing out the
minority that supports it?
What does the word “nationalism” mean for a Jew, or rather, what should
it mean? It should mean freedom. The Jew who today says: “I am a
nationalist” is not saying in a special, precise and clear way that I am
a man who wants to reconstitute a Jewish state in Palestine and dreams
of re-conquering Jerusalem. He is saying: “I want to be a completely
free man, I want to enjoy the sun; I want to have the right to my
dignity as a man. I want to escape oppression, escape insults, escape
the contempt that they want to bring to bear on me.” At certain moment
in history, nationalism is for human groups the manifestation of the
spirit of freedom.
Am I then in contradiction with internationalist ideas? Not in the
least. How do I make them agree? Simply by not giving words a value and
a meaning they don’t have. When socialists combat nationalism they are
in reality combating protectionism and national exclusivism. They are
combating that patriotic, narrow, and absurd chauvinism that leads
people to place themselves one against the other as rivals or
adversaries, and who grant each other neither grace nor mercy. This is
the egoism of nations; an egoism as odious as that of individuals, and
every bit as contemptible. What then does internationalism suppose? It
means establishing ties between nations, not of diplomatic friendship,
but of human fraternity. To be an internationalist means abolishing the
current economic-political constitution of nations, for this
constitution only exists for the defending of the private interests of
peoples, or rather of their rulers, at the expense of neighboring
peoples. Suppressing frontiers does not mean making an amalgamation of
all the inhabitants of the globe. Is not one of the familiar concepts of
internationalism socialism, and even of revolutionary anarchism, the
federative concept, the concept of a fragmented humanity composed of a
multitude of cellular organisms? It’s true that ideally this theory says
that those cells that will group together will group together by virtue
of affinities not caused by any ethnological, religious, or national
tradition. But this is of little importance, since it does admit of
groups. In any event, we are here only concerned with the present, and
the present commands us to seek the most appropriate means of assuring
the liberty of man. Currently it is by virtue of traditional principles
that men want to league together. For this they invoke identity of
origin, their common past, similar ways of envisaging phenomena, beings,
and things; a common history, a common philosophy. It is necessary to
permit them to come together.
Another objection. By favoring the development of nationalism, certain
socialists say, you contribute to the union of classes in such a way
that the workers forget the economic struggle by joining together with
their enemies. Is this not the case? This union is generally only
temporary and, something worth noting, most often it is not the owning
class that imposes it on the poor and workers, it is these latter who
oblige the rich to march along with them. In any event, is it not
necessary for the wretched mass of Jewish workers that, before being
able to escape their proletarian poverty, they possess their liberty,
i.e., the possibility to fight and win. The problem will be well and
truly posed the day, for example, when access to several countries will
be refused to those Jews who leave Russia.
I see nothing here that is contrary to socialist orthodoxy and I, who am
orthodox in nothing, find no difficulty in admitting nationalism
alongside internationalism. On the contrary, I find that in order to
establish internationalism it is necessary in the first place for human
groups to conquer their autonomy. They must be able to freely express
themselves; they must be conscious of who they are.
I know full well that I will be reproached for another thing. It will be
said to me that at a moment when everything is being unified you want to
divide. We must understand each other on this. What do we mean when we
speak of unification or human homogeneity? We mean that on one hand,
thanks to economic causes that permit easier penetration, and on the
other thanks to intellectual causes, the differences that once separated
peoples have become less marked. The same degree of culture is being
established, because the same social state is manifesting itself, though
this is be restricted to a few western nations and the New World. We
also mean that the domain of common ideas is growing every day; that a
communion is being established beyond all frontiers between individuals
who possess this maximum of knowledge, which places intelligences on the
same plane. And the number of these individuals increases every day.
This is a statement of fact; as a consequence of this, must we draw from
it a kind of dogma that insists that we do everything to render men
uniform? I don’t see the use of this. Nothing seems more necessary to
humanity than variety. Those who say the contrary are committing a grave
error or, more accurately, they forget something of great importance;
for them humanity is an anthropological expression, a political
expression or an economic expression. But it must be something else: it
must be an aesthetic expression. In order to prevent it from ceasing to
be such we must above all maintain this variety. Men have at their
disposition a certain number of general ideas that belong to the
treasury of the species. But each individual has a particular way of
expressing these general ideas and concepts. It is the same for groups
of individuals. They render beauty differently, they have an artistic
vision that isn’t the same, nor is the matter they have at their
disposal; they make the common matter harmonic in different ways. Human
richness is made up of these varieties, and so each human group is
necessary, is useful to humanity; it contributes in adding beauty to the
world, it is a source of forms, thoughts, and images. Why would we
regiment humanity, why would we make it bend under one sole rule, by
what virtue should we impose a canon on it from which it cannot stray?
In any case, are most socialists, even the internationalist, totally
consistent? Do they act in conformity with their doctrines? Are they not
demanding – and rightly – autonomy for the Cubans, Cretans, and
Armenians? Don’t they recognize that all have the right to fight for
their freedom, and don’t they join together this freedom with the demand
for a nationality?
Can someone tell me in what way the Jews are different? Is it because
they have been deprived of their own land for such a long time? Because
a Sepulcher has replaced the Temple? Because their servitude has lasted
for such a long period of time? What does it matter, since they have
persisted? Is the accumulation of misfortunes, tortures and contempt a
lesser title to sympathy? Oh, I know all this, about the poor Jew who
they strike and massacre, who they oppress. These wretches must expiate
the crime committed by those – the Romans – who, in crucifying a man
created a God. And this people who, unfortunately for them, gave birth
to a divinity, must be treated like a people of deicides.
And yet at long last the time should have arrived when the vagabond can
find an asylum, rest his heavy head and stretch his weary legs. How many
centuries have passed since the day when old Ezekiel, imploring his God,
said to him: “Have pity on wandering Oholibah,” that fornicating
Oholibah that was Jerusalem in his anger of a prophet. Like in those
far-off times the Jews still wander the earth’s roads: how much longer
will they wander in this way? Every year on the evening of Passover
those among them who have preserved their faith three times chant the
sacred wish: “L’shanah haba’ah b’yerushalayim.” I imagine that for those
still groaning in ghettos, like for their ancestors in the Middle Ages,
these words mean: “Next year we will be in a land of freedom; we will be
men and we will be allowed to live in broad sunlight that belongs to
all, except us.”
Western Jews have lost the meaning of these words, but they will
discover them sooner than they think when the countries in which they
live will have become for them like the ancient land of Mizraim. They
should know that from this day forth they should not expect help from
heaven, or the assistance of powerful allies. The Jews will only find
their salvation in themselves. It is through their own might that they
will liberate themselves; that they will re-conquer that dignity that
they have been made to lose. The contemptible and vile portion, without
convictions or any other motives than their personal interests, will
convert. It won’t have any scruples to overcome in order to do this.
What will believers and non-believers do who will never resign
themselves to the recantation? They will even more strongly feel that
they will be free as individuals when the collectivity to which they
belong is free, when that nation without a territory that is the Jewish
nation will have a land and can dispose of itself without any
constraints.
These are your cherished ideas, all of you who have done me the honor of
calling me among you; your cherished ideas and your cherished ideal. You
are right; you are growing, you are expanding your spirits and your
hearts. You want to be yourselves: is there anything higher and more
legitimate? And you have this working for you as well, and it’s that you
are conscious of not working for yourselves alone. You are not working
for today, but are working for the future. It is for this that I was
happy to bring you my fellow-feeling and my fraternity. But in
conclusion, I still have this to say: never forget that, as Renan said,
you are the people who introduced justice to the world; and see to it
that you are forgiven for having given a God to men by always being the
soldiers of justice and human fraternity.