number. The advent of Christianity and the coming of Mohammedanism seemed to have complicated the question of the restoration and the return for the Jews, inasmuch as associations connected with that country were sacred to these two faiths as well as to the Hebrew. But with the indomitable faith that was and is his, the added difficulties served merely to increase the ardor of the Jew and make him feel the necessity of keeping himself prepared for the great event that he felt was being treasured up for him. When in 1492 the Spanish Inquisition drove him from Spain, a drop of sweetness was put into his cup of woe by the knowledge that he could travel and settle eastward, and that eastward was in the direction of Palestine. Nor should it be forgotten that all through their history in European countries, the Jewish communities had successfully cultivated a sort of cloistered spirit that kept them out of the common ways of existence. Avoidance of intermarriage had preserved their racial affinities and peculiarities with a certain amount of precision. A common language both for prayer and for intercommunication had fostered a sodality which held the scattered elements together as would have been impossible through any instrument of pure force.

It is true that even at an early date in the seventeenth century certain schemes were put forwardespecially by non-Jews-to hasten on the glad event of the restoration. But these were millenarian and largely religious in character. The Jews shrank from the controversy and from the battlefield that any such attempt would create; and the fight for release from disabilities in European countries embraced whatsoever attention was given by Jewish leaders to mun

dane affairs. Napoleon's proclamation in 1799 inviting the Jews of Asia and Africa to reëstablish Jerusalem under the aegis of his arms fell upon ears that had been dulled by the din of battle and the roar of cannon. Even as late as 1841, when Colonel Churchill, the resident English officer at Damascus, writing to Sir Moses Montefiore, said that he could not "conceal his most anxious desire to see your countrymen (the Jews) endeavor once more to resume their existence as a people," and that "were the resources which you all possess steadily directed toward the regeneration of Syria and Palestine, there cannot be a doubt but that, under the blessing of the Most High those countries would amply repay the undertaking, and that you would end by obtaining the sovereignty of at least Palestine," no response came from the Jewish side. Even George Eliot's stirring words in "Daniel Deronda" (1876) failed to awaken the fire of enthusiasm. The distress and affliction suffered in certain Christian countries had led the Jews to look with a measure of fair appreciation upon the Turkish Empire and to be unwilling to venture her ill-grace by any attack upon her sovereignty; in which view they were upheld by some of the Western European countries in search of trade facilities in the Levant.

Two movements contributed much to focus the attention of the Jews upon the problem with which they had to deal. The first was the destructive and the disintegrating influences that modern life and thought had upon the communities settled in the Western world. The growth of national sentiment and national ardor in the various countries had weakened the allegiance of the young to the older ideals, and had given the false impression that the two sets

of ideals were necessarily at odds one with the other. As Jewish communities cast their fling way out into all corners of the globe, the use of Hebrew was apt to fade away; religious observances were liable to take on new forms more conformable to the surroundings in which they were observed. The strong attachment that had been the characteristic of early days. was turning into a sympathetic detachment. The need of a center was felt from which an authentic voice could go out to the various corners of the Diaspora.

The second was the so-called anti-Semitic agitation which, starting in 1881, wrought such havoc in Russia, became general in Eastern Europe, and even planted some of its disastrous roots in France. It was in direct consequence of the infamous May Laws that an Odessa physician, Leo Pinsker, sent a note ringing throughout East European Jewry. The very title of his work, "Auto-Emancipation," shows the purpose he had in mind-to awaken his brethren to a sense of the duty they owed to themselves to bring the Jewish people to a fuller sense of their corporate existence.

It was in 1882 that the first group, called the "Lovers of Zion," came together at Odessa. This group enflamed the ardor especially of the younger element and many a youth threw down his books to shoulder a spade and march to the re-conquest of the old land in Palestine.

In the meantime men of a practical turn of mind had put their hands to the plow, had freed themselves from all cant of party, and had commenced to found Jewish agricultural colonies in Palestine despite all the drawbacks of Turkish misrule and the

dried phrases of Turkish statesmanship. Beginning in 1874, continuing in 1882, immigrants mostly from Russia and Rumania settled in Galilee and in Samaria and then in Judea, largely through the generosity of Baron Edmond de Rothschild. In 1911 these colonies were able to liquidate a portion of their indebtedness to the Baron and to free themselves from the philanthropic pall that had threatened their free existence, though already in 1907 absentee landlordism had been abolished and the colonies and their government handed over to the colonists. At the outbreak of the war in 1914, forty-five such colonies existed in Palestine, covering an area representing from 8 to 14 per cent. of its cultivated surface.

Side by side with the practical development of Jewish life in Palestine, the cultural and educational has gathered head. The language question was one long to be puzzled over. The Jews that had come to resettle in Palestine had brought with them the various tongues they had acquired in the countries of their former dwelling. Arabic was the language spoken by all the other inhabitants of the land; it was a language with which they were quite unfamiliar. But wheresoever they had gone there was one language that the Jews had not forgotten, that was in very truth their own. Hebrew had always been cultivated by them, for ritual, scholastic, and literary purposes. It had been the language of the past; the hope had persisted that it would be the language of the future. On the ground of Palestine need joined hands with desire, and the pursuit of Hebrew was fed by the flames of national passion. It has become the vehicle of conversation and of instruction. Elementary schools have been founded in all the colonies; a

Union of Hebrew Teachers, that also publishes a pedagogic journal, looks after the development of the methods of instruction. Hebrew day-schools with a more distinctly religious tendency satisfy the needs of that part of the population that desires such spiritual color. In 1905 the Bezalel Art School was founded at Jerusalem, where carpet-weaving, filigree, copperware, carpentry, lace, metalwork, ivory carving, and lithography were taught. In 1907 the Jaffa gymnasium came into being, where secondary education of a purely secular kind is offered, and in 1909 a similar gymnasium at Jerusalem. In that same year the Girls' School, organized at Jaffa in 1893, was rebuilt, and schools for women and for girls were put up at Jerusalem, Jaffa, Tiberias, and Safed, where the making of lace is taught. To put the crown upon this system, the Eleventh Zionist Congress held at Vienna in 1913 voted to found a Hebrew University in Jerusalem; and among the first acts of the official representative of the Jews who came to Palestine after General Allenby had occupied the city in 1918-Dr. Chaim Weissmann-was the formal laying of the cornerstone of the first building designed for such a use.

Side by side with this development of the moral, intellectual, and economic progress of Palestine, have gone the preparations made by the Jews for the occasion which was not thought as near to the present as it has proved to be. In the center of all these adjustments and disposals stands the figure of Theodore Herzl, commanding, leading, persuading-a fit continuation of the line of such figures that has preserved the Jewish spirit intact from Biblical times down to our own. It was in 1895 that he, the representative in Paris of a leading Vienna newspaper, wrote his