genius (Genialitaet) but self-consciousness (Selbstgefuehl) and appreciation of our value as men (Bewusstsein der Menschenwuerde), of which we were deprived by you!

Of course, it requires many years and a great expenditure of money to establish a nation on a firm basis.  But in Pinsker’s dictionary the word “impossible” does not exist.  “Far, very far,” says he, “is the haven of rest towards which our souls are turning.  We know not even whether it be East or West.  But be the road never so long, it cannot seem too long to the wanderers of two thousand years.”

Pinsker’s impassioned appeal made a deep impression.  It was obvious that colonization would be the shortest road to renationalization.  But as to the place in which the colonies should be established, no agreement could be reached.  Pinsker, like Herzl after him, left the problem unsolved.  Some preferred America or even Spain.  In southern Russia a society, ’Am ’Olam (The Eternal Nation), was organized on communistic principles.  It sent an advance guard to the United States, where, as the Sons of the Free, they established several settlements, the best-known of which was New Odessa, in Oregon.[8] The majority, however, preferred Palestine, the land which, in weal or woe, in pain or pleasure, remains ever dear to the Jewish heart; the land to which the ancient exiles by the waters of Babylon had vowed that sooner than forget her would their right hands forget their cunning and their tongues cleave to the roofs of their mouths; the possession whereof had been held out as the most alluring promise, and to be deprived of which the prophets had regarded as the severest punishment.

Zionism, even Territorialism, among the Russian Jews is by no means solely the result of modern anti-Semitism.  At the same time that Mordecai Manuel Noah was planning his Jewish state Ararat in western New York (1825), Gregori Peretz, who, as a child, had been converted, with his father, to the dominant religion, and had been advanced to the rank of an officer in his Majesty’s army, was dreaming of the renationalization of his alienated brethren.  As a leading figure in the councils of the Dekabrists, he never ceased his efforts until his comrades accepted the restoration of Israel to his pristine place among the nations of the earth as part of their revolutionary programme.  But with the suppression of the Dekabrists by Nicholas I the scheme died “a-borning,” and sank into oblivion.  Later, David Gordon revived the yearnings of Judah Halevi by his articles in the weekly Ha-Maggid (1863), which he edited in Lyck, Prussia.  Smolenskin’s writings resound with a love for Zion from the very beginning of his literary career.  And a rising young Hebraist, Eliezer ben Yehudah, while still a student of medicine, wrote, in 1878, and again in 1880, stirring letters to the editor of Ha-Shahar, in which he advocated the return to the Holy Land and the revival of the holy tongue as a conditio sine qua non for the realization of