[Footnote 1:  From his Hebrew poem Ahoti Ruhama, “My Beloved Sister.”]

The exponents of American emigration were inspired by the prospect of an exodus from the land of slavery into the land of freedom.  Many of them looked forward to the establishment of agricultural and farming settlements in that country and to the concentration of large Jewish masses in the thinly populated States of the Union where they hoped the Jews might be granted a considerable amount of self-government.

Side by side with the striving for a transplantation of Jewish centers centers within the Diaspora, another idea, which negatives the Diaspora Diaspora altogether and places in its stead the resuscitation of the Jewish national center in Palestine, struggled to life amidst the birth pangs of the pogroms.  The first theoretic exponent of this new movement, called “Love of Zion,” [1] was M.L.  Lilienblum, who in a former stage of radicalism had preached the need of religious reforms in Judaism. [2] As far back as in the autumn of the first pogrom year Lilienblum published a series of articles in which he interpreted the idea of Palestinian colonization, which had but recently sprung to life, in the light of a common national task for the whole of Jewry.  Lilienblum endeavored to show that the root of all the historic misfortunes of the Jewish people lay in the fact that it was in all lands an alien element which refuses to assimilate in its entirety with the dominant nation—­with the landlord, as it were.  The landlord tolerates his tenant only so long as he finds him convenient; let the tenant make the slightest attempt at competing with the landlord, and he will be promptly evicted.  During the Middle Ages the Jews were persecuted in the name of religious fanaticism.  Now a beginning has been made to persecute them in the name of national fanaticism, coupled with economic factors, and this “second chapter of our history will no doubt contain many a bloody page.”

[Footnote 1:  A translation of the Hebrew term Hibbat Zion.  In Russian it was generally termed Palestinophilstvo, i.e., “Love of Palestine.”]

[Footnote 2:  See p. 236 et seq.]

Jewish suffering can only be removed by removing its cause.  We must cease to be strangers in every land of the globe, and establish ourselves in a country where we ourselves may be the landlords.  Such a country can only be our ancient fatherland, Palestine, which belongs to us by the right of history.  “We must undertake the colonization of Palestine on so comprehensive a scale that in the course of one century the Jews may be able to leave inhospitable Europe almost entirely and settle in the land of our forefathers to which we are legally entitled.”