began to think of nationalism as a possible alternative. In the autumn of the following year, a Jewish physician of Odessa, Dr. Leo Pinsker, advocated the formation of a Jewish nationality in a striking pamphlet entitled 'Auto-emancipation,' which he published anonymously in Berlin. Impressed by the fact that anti-Semitism was, at the time, not confined to Russia, however less brutal it might be in other countries, he evolved a theory of the perpetual alienage of the Jews, and concluded that the only cure for it was a Jewish nationality, equal in status, and hence in dignity, with other nationalities, and, if possible, with a land of its own. It is noteworthy that Pinsker makes no appeal to Jewish national tradition, and does not even mention Palestine. He rests his case frankly and exclusively on the political exigencies of the times, and he even recognises the patent absence of Jewish national consciousness as a formidable obstacle to the realisation of his plan.

Pinsker's seed did not fall on sterile soil, although the response to it was slow. Nationalism was then in the Russian air, far beyond the confines of the Jewish Pale of Settlement. The Russifying policy of the Tsar's Slavophil advisers, Pobiedonoszeff and Ignatieff, had everywhere stimulated the selfconsciousness of the non-Russian sub-nationalities, from the Letts and Esthonians in the north to the Ukrainians, Tartars, and Armenians in the south and south-west. All over this vast region, secret organisations were started to defend the national languages, to cultivate the national literatures and customs, and to assert national rights. Among the Jews a similar movement was soon discernible. Not long after the publication of Pinsker's pamphlet, societies were formed in Odessa and elsewhere under the name of Chovevei Zion ('Lovers of Zion '), for the peaceful penetration' of Palestine by Jewish agricultural colonists, while the historian, Simon Dubnow, began to outline his idea of 'spiritual nationalism' in opposition to the Territorial or Palestinian Nationalists. For some years, both movements were vague and timid, but their fundamental national idea spread widely. Meanwhile, a new and redoubtable force had arisen in Russian Jewry. The May Laws, by driving the Jews into the towns, had nearly ruined the small Jewish bourgeoisie, and had created in their place a great and hungry Jewish proletariat. The rise of

Russian industrialism under the artificial stimulus of Witte's protectionist policy found employment for much of this main d'œuvre, which, together with the already considerable artisan class, soon became organised on a Trade-Union basis, and thus came into close contact with all the wilder spirits of Russian democracy. From these Jewish Trade Unions was evolved the famous Jewish Bund, one of the most powerful of the revolutionary organisations in Russia.* At first purely Social Democratic, and averse from all national, as from all social, distinctions, the Bund found itself gradually impregnated with Jewish national sentiment, owing, in part, to the great development of the Yiddish language and literature, stimulated by its own political propaganda. With the love for the old jargon and the new literature, which was a literature of folk-song, of poetry and romance, as well as of politics, economics and natural science, went a love for all the other ethnographic peculiarities of the people-all except the religion, for the Bund, as true Social Democrats, knew only the religious negations of their political teachers. Round this organised nucleus, or in sympathy with it, many other popular elements ranged themselves, including a large intellectual proletariat which the new political disabilities had fashioned out of the University-trained Jewish youth. Thus, Jewish nationality, although otherwise very indistinctly defined, first began to manifest itself in an essentially secular form, and, although it did not know precisely how, aimed at taking its place among the other secular sub-nationalities of the Russian State.

The definite crystallisation of this interesting movement was due to the organisation of political Zionism in 1897. Until then Zionism, though it was the only actual plan of Jewish re-nationalisation before the public, had timorously eschewed political agitation, and had confined itself to the dreaming of dreams, and the founding of unambitious colonies in the Holy Land. In 1897 a startling impulse was given to the movement by Theodor Herzl, a brilliant Viennese journalist, who, affrighted by the progress of anti-Semitism in Austria, had come to conclusions in regard to the future of the Jews in Europe very similar to those of Pinsker, and had declared for

* Ular, 'La Révolution Russe,' pp. 238-239, 273 et seq.; Mater, 'Le Juif Russe,' pp. 17-20.

a Jewish State in Palestine as the only remedy. But Herzl, unlike Pinsker, was used to the ways of the great world, and he took his measures on a scale and with a flourish which at once stirred the popular imagination. With his magnificent talent for réclame, his imposing Pan-Jewish Congresses, his apparatus of political committees and financial institutions, and his showy diplomatic activities, he at first swept the Russian nationalists off their feet. From the beginning, however, the Bund opposed him. They suspected the Zionists as bourgeois and clerical, and they objected to the whole theory of Zionism, not only as destructive of their conception of RussoJewish nationality, but as a betrayal of the larger cause of Russian freedom. The controversy, which spread far beyond the Bund, lasted for some years, but gradually the fundamental distinctions between the two nationalist schools took striking shape. The Zionists, with unsparing logic, declared that the Diaspora (Dispersion) did not exist for them. They waved it majestically aside, and proposed to recommence Jewish history where the old Jewish State had ended, to resume Hebrew as the national language, and to forget the two thousand years of dispersion and sorrow as the unsubstantial fabric of a bad dream. To this the other side replied that the revival of the old order of things might be magnificent, but it was not practical politics; that two thousand years of European history had made of the Jews a European people, with new ideas, new relationships, a new culture, and a new language and literature of their own. To sweep all this away and forget it was impossible. The struggle eventually centred on the language question, and Russian Jewry rang for a time with the bitter controversy of the so-called Hebraists and Yiddishists. The Yiddishists of course won; for Hebrew, whatever its historic associations, and the zeal with which its study was promoted, was an exotic, while Yiddish was a living language, the natural outcome of Russo-Jewish life, the language of the people and the home, the vernacular in which all the tears and laughter of the Ghetto, and all its strivings for freedom, had found spontaneous expression. On this basis the controversy settled itself, but it was not without a certain formal sanction, for in 1903, at a conference of ardent young Yiddish intellectuals, held at Czernowitz, Yiddish was solemnly proclaimed the Jewish national language. The Zionists have

never formally accepted this declaration, but in practice they have been obliged to do so, for all their own propagandist literature in Eastern Europe and in the Ghettos of the Western World is still perforce in Yiddish, while Hebrew remains the linguistic luxury of their elect.

In one important respect the anti-Zionist nationalists remained for a long time at a disadvantage in their struggle with the Zionists. They had no detailed plan for the organisation of their nationality. It had always been held that historic association with a specific territory was an essential attribute of nationality, and this the Jews of the Diaspora nowhere possessed. The difficulty was recognised at an early date. Pinsker himself, while insisting on the necessity of a territory, claimed the same rights for the Jewish nation as for other 'nations,' in opposition to the formula of the assimilative emancipationists, the same rights for Jews as for other citizens,' thus apparently providing for the contingency of a landless nationality. Dubnow was more precise. By his theory of spiritual nationalism, he roundly denied the necessity of a territory at all. At the height of the controversy between the Bundists and the political Zionists, Dubnow restated his theory in a more detailed form.* He accepted the normality of the Diaspora, pointed out that the history of Judaism was a history of the successive formation and growth of new religious centres in new countries, and urged that the national preservation of the religion had always been possible, and would always be possible, without a national territory or a national language, and without even the old forms of religious life, or the new forms of political life. Although much of this theory was anathema to the Bundists and other secular nationalists, it had the effect of widening the basis of the national autonomy for which they were craving, and of thus rendering it possible for all classes of Russian Jews to enter the new national life.

Meanwhile, in Austria, where the system of Crownland autonomy had failed owing to the chaotic admixture of the various nationalities, a similar theory of national autonomy had been evolved. As far back as 1848 it had been thought of, and there are clear traces of it in the constitutional

* Dubnow, 'Pisma o Starom i Novom Yevreistvye,' 1897.

scheme presented to the Kremsier parliament by Palacky.* It was not, however, till the later nineties that the question was comprehensively studied, and a definite scheme worked out. This was the achievement of the Austrian jurist, Rudolf Springer, whose elaborate work, 'The Struggle of the Austrian 'Nations for the State,' is now the bible of national autonomists throughout Eastern Europe.

It is not easy, within the limits of this essay, to give more than the barest outline of Springer's ingenious system. He starts boldly from the proposition that in essence nationality is a personal attribute, and has nothing to do with territory. A man does not lose it by quitting his own country, nor does he acquire it by the mere fact of settling in a strange land. A nation is a union of like-thinking and like-speaking individuals, a collectivity with common political, cultural, and economic interests. A certain sacredness must, of course, attach to one's home and one's native land, but economic necessities require freedom of movement and domicile, if not throughout the world, at any rate throughout the State, by which Springer understands the area of federal union. The problem is to assure the national interests of these wanderers, and of all minorities in the Crownlands and the State, and Springer seeks to solve it by a scheme of self-government which combines the principles of territory and personality. While maintaining the existing Crownland limits, he creates, throughout their whole extent, three categories of linguistic circles (1) Uni-National circles; (2) Circles in which a given nationality is in a majority; and (3) Circles in which it is in a minority. Beyond these circles is what he calls the National Diaspora. The circles themselves are represented proportionately in National Diets, one for each nationality. Minorities are furthermore protected in local administration by a system of proportional representation, or by national electoral curiae. Each diaspora beyond the circles is cared for by its national diet, under special treaties with other national diets. The diet deals with all questions in which national interests are involved, or in which the national idiosyncrasy expresses itself-political rights, public worship,

*Springer, op. cit. pp. 36-37; Eisenmann, 'Le Compromis Austro-Hongrois,' pp. 126-131.