These thoughts, expounded with that simplified logic which will strike certain types of mind as incontrovertible, were fully attuned to the sentiments of the Jewish masses which were standing with “girded loins,” ready for their exodus from, the new Egypt. The emigration societies formed in the beginning of 1882 counted in their ranks many advocates of Palestinian colonization. Bitter literary feuds were waged between the “Americans” and “Palestinians.” A young poet, Simon Frug[1], composed the following enthusiastic exodus march, which he prefaced by the biblical verse “Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward” (Ex. 14.15):
[Footnote 1: He became later a celebrated poet in Russian and Yiddish. He died in 1916.]
Thine eyes are keen, thy feet
are strong, thy staff is firm—
why then, my nation,
Dost thou on the road stop and droop, thy
gray head
lost in contemplation?
Look up and see: in numerous bands
Thy sons return from all the lands.
Forward then march, through a sea of sorrow,
Through a chain of tortures, towards the dawn
of the
morrow!
Forward—to the strains of the song
of days gone by!
For future ages like thunder to us cry:
“Arise, my people, from thy grave,
And live once more, a nation free and brave!”
And in our ears songs of a new life
ring,
And hymns of triumph the storms to as sing.
This march voiced the sentiments of those who dreamed of the Promised Land—whether it be on the shores of the Jordan or on the banks of the Mississippi.
2. PINSKER’S “AUTOEMANCIPATION”
The conception of emigration as a means of national rejuvenation, which had sprung to life amidst the “thunder and lightning” of the pogroms, found a thoughtful exponent in the person of Dr. Leon Pinsker, a prominent communal worker in Odessa, who had at one time looked to assimilation as promising a solution of the Jewish problem. In his pamphlet “Autoemancipation” (published in September, 1882), which is marked by profound thinking, Pinsker vividly describes the mental agony experienced by him at the sight of the physical slavery of the Jewry of Russia and the spiritual slavery of the emancipated Jewry of Western Europe. To him the Jewish people in the Diaspora is not a living nation, but rather the ghost of a nation, haunting the globe and scaring all living national organisms. The salvation of Judaism can only be brought about by transforming this ghost into a real being, by re-establishing the Jewish people upon a territory of its own which might be obtained through the common endeavor of Jewry and through international Jewish co-operation in some convenient part of the globe, be it Palestine or America. Such is the way of Jewish autoemancipation, in contradistinction from the civic emancipation, which had been bestowed by the dominant nationalities upon the Jews as an act of grace and which does not safeguard them against