THE JEWISH RACE.                      539

operation instead of bitter hostility from the denaturalized
leaders of all these Jewries, the attempt to acquire Palestine
would have had the opposition of Turkey and of the 600,000
Arabs in possession. It is little wonder that since the great
leader's lamentable death, Zionism--again with that idealiza-
rion of impotence--has sunk back into a cultural movement
which instead of ending the Exile is to unify it through the
Hebrew tongue and nationalist sentiment. But for such uni-
fication, a religious revival would have been infinitely more
efficacious: race alone cannot survive the pressure of so many
hostile milieux--or still more parlous-so many friendly.  The
Territorial movement, representing the original nucleus of the
Herzlian idea, is still searching for a real and not a metaphorical
soil, its latest negotiation being with the West Australian
Government.
  But if the prospect of a territorial solution of the Jewish
Question, whether in Palestine or in the New World appears
remote, it must be admitted that the Jewish race, in abandon-
ing before the legions of Rome the struggle for independent
political existence, in favor of spiritual isolation and economic
symbiosis, discovered the secret of immortality, if also of per-
petual motion. In the diaspora Anti-Semitism will always be
the shadow of Semitism. The law of dislike for the unlike
will always prevail. And whereas the unlike is normally
situated at a safe distance, the Jews bring the unlike into the
heart of every milieu and must thus defend a frontier-line as
large as the world. The fortunes of war vary in every country,
but there is a perpetual tension and friction even at the most
peaceful points, which tend to throw back the race on itself.
The drastic method of love the only human dissolvent-has
never been tried upon the Jew as a whole, and Russia carefully
conserves--even by a ringfence--the breed she designs to de-
stroy. But whether persecution extirpates or brotherhood
melts, hate or love can never be simultaneous throughout the
diaspora, and so there will probably always be a nucleus from
which to restock this eternal type. But what a melancholy
immortality! "To be and not to be"-that is a question beside
which Hamlet's alternative is crude.
  It only remains to consider what part the world should be




			

OHS/National Afro-American Museum & Cultural Center Serial Collection

African Methodist Episcopal Church Review, Vol. 28, Num. 2

Volume:  28
Issue Number:  02
Date:  10/1911