“What is needed is the leaven—­what is needed is the seed of fire.  The heritage of Israel is beating in the pulses of millions; it lives in their veins as a power without understanding, like the morning exultation of herds; it is the inborn half of memory, moving as in a dream among writings on the walls, which it sees dimly but cannot divide into speech.  Let the torch of visible community be lighted!  Let the reason of Israel disclose itself in a great outward deed, and let there be another great migration, another choosing of Israel to be a nationality whose members may still stretch to the ends of the earth, even as the sons of England and Germany, whom enterprise carries afar, but who still have a national hearth, and a tribunal of national opinion.  Will any say, ‘It cannot be’?  Baruch Spinoza had not a faithful Jewish heart, though he had sucked the life of his intellect at the breasts of Jewish tradition.  He laid bare his father’s nakedness and said, ‘They who scorn him have the higher wisdom.’  Yet Baruch Spinoza confessed he saw not why Israel should not again be a chosen nation.  Who says that the history and literature of our race are dead?  Are they not as living as the history and literature of Greece and Home, which have inspired revolutions, enkindled the thought of Europe and made the unrighteous powers tremble?  These were an inheritance dug from the tomb.  Ours is an inheritance that has never ceased to quiver in millions of human frames....

“I cherish nothing for the Jewish nation, I seek nothing for them, but the good which promises good to all the nations.  The spirit of our religious life, which is one with our national life, is not hatred of aught but wrong.  The masters have said an offence against man is worse than an offence against God.  But what wonder if there is hatred in the breasts of Jews who are children of the ignorant and oppressed—­what wonder, since there is hatred in the breasts of Christians?  Our national life was a growing light.  Let the central fire be kindled again, and the light will reach afar.  The degraded and scorned of our race will learn to think of their sacred land not as a place for saintly beggary to await death in loathsome idleness, but as a republic where the Jewish spirit manifests itself in a new order founded on the old, purified, enriched by the experience our greatest sons have gathered from the life of the ages.  How long is it?—­only two centuries since a vessel earned over the ocean the beginning of the great North American nation.  The people grew like meeting waters; they were various in habit and sect.  There came a time, a century ago, when they needed a polity, and there were heroes of peace among them.  What had they to form a polity with but memories of Europe, corrected by the vision of a better?  Let our wise and wealthy show themselves heroes.  They have the memories of the East and West, and they have the full vision of a better.  A new Persia with