Part 8:The Controversy of Zion....The "Prophet"...The Coming of Zionism...The World Zionist Organization

Chapter 23 

THE "PROPHET" 

The 19th Century moved inexorably towards the repudiation of the Sanhedrin's avowals to Napoleon, towards the resegregation of the Jews, towards the reestablishment of that theocratic state in the midst of states, the danger of which Tiberius had depicted before the Christian era began. The struggle was not between "the Jews" and "the Gentiles"; as on the ancient day when the Persian king's soldiers enabled Ezra and Nehemiah to enforce "the new Law" on the Judahites, it was once more between some Jews and some Gentiles and the other Jews and the other Gentiles. The mystery always was that at such junctures the Gentile rulers allied themselves with the ruling sect of Judaism against the Jewish masses and thus against their own peoples, among whom they fostered a disruptive force. This paradox repeated itself in the 19th century and produced the climacteric of our present day, in which all nations are heavily involved. 

The emancipated Jews of the West were undone on this occasion, with the mass of Gentile mankind, by the Western politicians, who enlisted, like a Swiss Guard, in the service of Zionism. Therefore this narrative must pause to look "at the Liberals" of the 19th Century, who by espousing Zionism enabled it to disrupt the affairs and deflect the national policies of peoples. 

They may best be studied through the founder of their line. "The Prophet" (he claimed the title which Amos angrily repudiated) was Henry Wentworth Monk, by few remembered today. He was the prototype of the 20th Century American president or British prime minister, the very model of a modern Western politician. 

To account for this man one would have to revivify all the thoughts and impulses of the last century. It is recent enough for a plausible attempt. One effect of emancipation was to make every undisciplined thinker believe himself a leader of causes. The spread of the printed word enabled demagogues to distribute ill considered thoughts: The increasing speed and range of transport led them to look for causes far outside their native ken. Irresponsibility might pose as Christian charity when it denounced its neighbours for indifference to the plight of Ethiopian orphans, and who could check the facts? Dickens depicted the type in Stiggins, with his society for providing infant negroes with moral pocket handkerchiefs; Disraeli remarked that the hideous lives of coal miners in the North of England had "escaped the notice of the Society for the Abolition of Negro Slavery". 

The new way of acquiring a public reputation was too easy for such rebukes to deter those who were tempted by the beguiling term "liberal", and soon the passion for reform filled the liberal air, which would not brook a vacuum. The "rights of man" had to be asserted; and the surviving wrongs were most easily discovered among peoples faraway (and, for fervour, the further the better). It was the heyday of the self-righteous, of those who only wanted the good of others, and cared not how much bad they did under that banner. The do-gooders founded a generation, and also an industry (for this vocation was not devoid of material reward, as well as plaudits). In the name of freedom, these folk were in our day to applaud, and help bring about, the re-enslavement of half Europe. 

Into such a time Henry Wentworth Monk was born (1827) in a farm settlement on the then remote Ottawa River in Canada. At seven he was wrenched from kith and kip and transported to the Bluecoat School in London, at that time a rigorous place for a lonely child. The boys wore the dress of their founder's day (Edward VI), long blue coat, priestly cravat, yellow stockings and buckled shoon. They lived as a sect apart, ate monastic fare and little of it, the rod was not spared, and they were sternly drilled in the Scriptures.

Thus young Monk had many emotional needs, crying to be appeased, and his child's mind began to find modern applications in the Old Testament, to which his infant mind was so diligently directed. By "swift beasts", he deduced, Isaiah meant railways, and by "swift messengers", steamships. He next decided, at this early age, that he had found the keys to "prophecy" and could interpret the mind of God in terms of his day. He ignored the warnings of the Israelite prophets and of the New Testament against this very temptation; what he found was merely the teaching of the Levitical priesthood, that one day the heathen would be destroyed and the chosen people re-gathered in their supreme kingdom in the promised land. 

Men of rank and influence also were toying with this idea that the time had come for them to make up God's mind. When Monk was eleven a Lord Shaftesbury proposed that the great powers should buy Palestine from the Sultan of Turkey and "restore it to the Jews". England then had a statesman, Lord Palmerston, who did not let such notions disturb his duty, and nothing was done. But in young Monk an idea was ignited, and The Prophet was born; his life thenceforth held no other interest until it ended sixty years later! 

At fourteen he obtained special leave to attend a sermon preached by "the first English Bishop in Jerusalem" (whose name, history records, was Solomon Alexander). The little boy returned to school with shining eyes, dedicated to his life's work of procuring Palestine, without regard to the people already in it, for some body of other people utterly unknown to him. The idea would not let him settle down on his father's Canadian farm when he returned to it; it stood between him and the Christian ministry, when he was made a candidate for this. He pored over the Old Testament and found it was but a code, that cleared before his eyes. 

Thus he fell into the irreverence which the study of the Levitical scriptures sometimes produces in men who describe themselves as Christians and yet ignore the New Testament. Once they accept the concept of foretellings to be literally fulfilled, they yield, in fact, to the Judaic Law of a political contract which leaves [184] no latitude whatever to God, save in the one point of the time of completion. From that they proceed, in one bound, to the conclusion that they know the time (which God, presumably, has forgotten). At that stage such men believe that they are God. This is the end to which the process must lead them: the denial of Christianity, and of all divinity. This is the profanity to which all leading politicians of the West, in our century, lent themselves; Monk was the original of a multitude. 

Even in his remote Canadian habitat he found other prophets. An American Jew, a Major Mordecai Noah, was trying to build a Jewish "city of refuge" on an island in the Niagara River, preparatory to "the return"; from what the Jews of North America needed refuge, until they "returned", he alone knew. Also, a Mr. Warder Cresson. the first United States Consul in Jerusalem, became so ardent for "restoration" that he embraced Judaism and published a book, Jerusalem The Centre And Joy Of The Whole World. Returning to America, he cast off his Gentile wife, renamed himself Michael Boas Israel, went to Palestine and there contrived to marry a Jewish girl with whom he could communicate only by signs. 

All this fired Monk's ardour the more. He decided, in the Old Testamentary tradition, no more to cut his hair or adorn his body until "Zion is restored". As his hair grew abundantly, he became most hirsute; as he sold his small property and thereafter never laboured, he was for the rest of his days dependent on others. At twenty-six he set out for Jerusalem and reached it after much hardship. Having nothing but shagginess and shabbiness to testify to the truth of his message, he found few hearers. 

Monk might have disappeared from the annals at that point but for a chance encounter which made him publicly known. In this century of world wars, trans-continental and trans-oceanic projectiles, and mass destroying explosives, the 19th Century counts as a stable, peaceful period of time, unshadowed by fear for the morrow. The student, particularly of this controversy of Zion, is astonished to find how many educated men apparently lived in fright of annihilation and decided that they could only be saved if a body of the planet's inhabitants were transported to Arabia. The Prophet's path crossed that of another of these tremulous beings. 

A young English painter, Holman Hunt, appeared in Jerusalem. He also was ready for "a cause", for he was waging the characteristic feud of the young artist against the Academicians, and that produces an inflammable state of mind. He enjoyed ill health and often thought his end near (he lived to be eighty-three). He had just painted The Light of the World, which depicted Jesus, lantern in hand, at the sinner's door, and the sudden apparition of the bearded Monk caught his imagination. He grasped eagerly at the Prophet's idea of threatening mankind (including the Academicians) with extermination if it did not do what Prophecy ordained.

So these two, Prophet. and pre-Raphaelite, concerted a plan to startle the  indifferent world. Monk depicted "the scapegoat" to Holman Hunt as the symbol of Jewish persecution by mankind. They agreed that Holman Hunt should paint a picture of "the scapegoat" and that Monk should simultaneously write a book explaining that the time had come for the persecuted to be restored, in fulfilment of prophecy. 

(In fact the scapegoat was an ingenious Levitical device, whereby the priest was empowered to absolve the congregation of its sins by taking two kids of the goat, killing one for a sin-offering, and driving the other into the wilderness to expiate by its suffering "all their transgressions and all their sins. . . putting them upon the head of the goat". The Prophet and Holman Hunt transformed the meaning into its opposite. The scapegoat for the sins of the Jews was to become the symbol of the Jews themselves; its tormentors, the Levitical priests, were by implication to be changed into Gentile oppressors!) 

Holman Hunt went to work; this was a delightful way, both to take a swing at the Royal Academy ("problem pictures") and to identify himself with a cause. His picture would say more than any spoken word, and it would be followed by Monk's written word. The Picture and The Book, The Symbol and The Interpretation, The Herald and The Prophet: once the world beheld "The Scapegoat" Monk's work of revelation would find an audience, awakened to its transgressions and eager to make amends. 

Hunt, wearing Arab robes and carrying easel and rifle, was then seen by the Bedouin driving a white goat to the Dead Sea. He painted an excellent picture of a goat (indeed, of two goats, as the first goat, with excessive zeal, died, and a substitute had to be found). For greater effect, a camel's skeleton was brought from Sodom and a goat's skull borrowed, and these were arranged in the background. The painting certainly produces the impression that the Levites must have been cruel (the animal's agony was graphically represented) and wicked, to pretend that by its suffering they could wash out all the iniquities of their people: Holman Hunt took it to England, first pledging himself, with Monk, "to the restoration of the Temple, the abolition of warfare among men, and the coming of the Kingdom of God upon the earth"; probably no painter ever had such large purposes in mind when he conceived a picture. 

Monk then produced his Simple Interpretation of the Revelation and the joint undertaking was complete; the world had but to respond. In this first book Monk still tried to wed Levitical politics with Christian doctrine. Historically he stayed on safe ground; he pointed out, correctly, that "the ten tribes" could not have become extinct, but lived on in the mass of mankind: This led him to his "interpretation", which was to the effect that "the true Israelites", Jewish and Christian, should migrate to Palestine and establish a model state there (at that point he was far from literal Zionism, and ran risk of being accounted an "anti semite"). His portrayal of the consequences was plain demagogy; if this were done, he said, war would come to an end. But then came the paramount idea (and who knows whence Monk got it?): an International Government must be set up in Jerusalem. Here Monk hit on the true intention of Zionism. Monk was only enabled to have his work published through an acquaintanceship which he owed to Holman Hunt: John Ruskin, the famous art critic, prevailed on the publisher Constable to print it. The Book (like The Picture) failed of effect, but Ruskin helped The Prophet with money and in other ways, and thus saved him from oblivion. 

Ruskin, too, was the product of early pressures and inner disappointments. Like Wilkie Collins (an excellent craftsman who could not rest content with writing good novels and vainly tried to emulate Dickens's gift for arousing moral indignation), he was not happy to remain in the field where he was eminent but was ever ready to champion (and less ready to examine) anything that looked like a moral cause. Like Monk, he had been drilled in the Old Testament as a child (though by a possessive Puritan mother), and he was recurrently unlucky in love, sometimes humiliatingly so. He was therefore at all times in search of an outlet for unspent emotional impulses. He feared life and the future, so that The Prophet's incessant warnings of wrath to come unnerved him and made him put his hand in his pocket. He had a large audience and yielded to the same impiety as Monk and Holman; as his biographer says (Mr. Besketh Pearson), "he succumbed to the delusion, common to all messiahs, that his word was God's", and in the end his reason waned, but by then he had enabled The Prophet to preach and wander on. 

After the failure of Monk's book Holman Hunt tried again. He began a painting of Jesus, in the synagogue, reading the messianic prophecies and announcing their fulfilment in himself. To make his meaning clear, he used Monk as the model for the figure of Jesus, and the indignation of the elders was to symbolize the world's rejection of The Prophet. Holman Hunt's preliminary study for this picture is in the National Gallery at Ottawa and shows Monk holding in one hand the Bible (open at the Book of the Revelation) and in the other: a copy of the London Times. (I was working in monastic seclusion in Montreal, somewhat bowed down by the nature and weight of the task, when I discovered the picture, and my neighbours were then surprised by the loud noise of mirth which burst from the usually silent room where a former correspondent of The Times bent over his labours). 

Thereafter human nature slowly had its way. Holman Hunt sold a picture of the Finding of Christ in the Temple for 5,500 (pounds) and his resentment against life (and the Academicians) mellowed. He found himself unable to ask the tattered Prophet to accompany him to fine houses like those of Val Prinsep and Tennyson. Ruskin was busy with ill-starred loves, and was becoming sceptical as well. Nevertheless, these two sedentary men could not quite forget The Prophet's warnings that they would be destroyed unless they soon effected the restoration of the Jews to Palestine. He was always telling them that "the day" was at hand and pointing to some warlike episode, in Africa or Asia Minor or the Balkans or Europe, as the foretold beginning of the end; skirmishes and minor campaigns never lacked. At last Holman Hunt and Ruskin hit on a plan which seemed likely to allay their fears, appease their consciences and rid them of The Prophet; they urged him to go to Jerusalem and (like Sabbatai Zevi) proclaim the approach of The Millennium! 

He was about to go when another war broke out, completely confounding him because it was not in any of the places where, interpreting prophecy, he had foretold the beginning of the end of days. It was in the very area from which, according to his published interpretation, salvation was to come: America. 

After a glance at the authorities, The Prophet announced that he had located the error in his calculations: the Civil War was in fact the great, premonitory event. Now something must be done about Palestine without delay! John Ruskin put his foot down. If The Prophet were truly a prophet, he said, let him hasten to America before he went to Jerusalem, and call down some sign from heaven that would stop the Civil War. He, Ruskin, would finance the journey. And The Prophet went, to stop the Civil War. 

The tradition then prevailed in America that a republican president must be accessible to all, and Mr. Abraham Lincoln was so beleaguered three days a week. One day, when the President's doors were open, The Prophet was swept in with a crowd of patronage-seekers, petitioners and sightseers. 

His appearance gained him a few words of conversation with the President. Mr. Lincoln's harassed eye was arrested by the sight of something peering at him through the undergrowth. He asked who the visitor was, then learning that he was a Canadian come to end the war. Asked for his proposal, The Prophet urged that the South free its slaves against compensation and the North agree to Southern secession, a suggestion which (Monk recorded) "appeared to amuse the President. Mr. Lincoln asked, "Do not you Canadians consider my Emancipation Proclamation as a great step forward in the social and moral progress of the world?" 

Monk said this was not enough: "Why not follow the emancipation of the Negro by a still more urgent step: the emancipation of the Jew?" Mr. Lincoln was baffled (the Jews had always been emancipated in America) and asked in astonishment, "The Jew, why the Jew? Are they not free already?" 

Monk said, "Certainly, Mr. President, the American Jew is free, and so is the British Jew, but not the European. In America we live so far off that we are blind to what goes on in Russia and Prussia and Turkey. There can be no permanent peace in the world until the civilized nations, led, I hope, by Great Britain and the United States, atone for what they have done to the Jews, for their two thousand years of persecution, by restoring them to their national home in Palestine, and making Jerusalem the capital city of a reunited Christendom". [no one had done anything to the Jews other then their own levitical priests,the creators of the ghetto DC]

Characteristically, Monk had never been to "Russia, Prussia or Turkey"; he was that kind of "Liberal". In Russia the Talmudic rabbinate was opposing emancipation by every means, and two years before Monk saw Mr. Lincoln the Czar Alexander II had been assassinated when he announced a parliamentary constitution; in Prussia the Jews were emancipated and for this very reason were the objects of attack by the Jews in Russia; the Jews under Turkish rule (which oppressed all subject nationalities impartially) were already in Palestine and thus could not be restored thither. 

In Mr. Lincoln's day the notion that all wars, wherever fought and for whatever reason, ought to be diverted to the aim of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine was new (today it is generally accepted and put into practice, as the two world wars have shown), and the President was again amused. 

He had on hand the cruellest war in Western history, up to that time. Being a man of resource, and versed in dealing with importuners, he rid himself of The Prophet with a good-humoured jest. "My chiropodist is a Jew", he said, "and he has so often put me on my feet that I would have no objection to giving his countrymen a leg up". Then, reminding Monk of the war in progress, he begged The Prophet to await its end: "then we may begin again to see visions and dream dreams". (Another topic for a debating society: was the use of this phrase chance or intention? Mr. Lincoln certainly knew what fate the Old Testament prescribes for "false prophets and dreamers of dreams".) 

Monk returned to London and Ruskin paid his expenses to Palestine, whence, on arrival, he was deported as a nuisance in 1864. Destitute, he signed as seaman aboard a Boston-bound clipper and, being wrecked, swam the last part of the Atlantic. He was cast ashore bleeding and almost naked, so that, looking like a bear, he was shot as one, in semi-darkness, by a farmer. He lost his memory and mind, and in this condition at last came home. He recovered after some years and at once returned to his obsession. The "day of trouble", so long foretold, still had not come; the planet kept its accustomed place. He re-examined prophecy and decided that he had erred in recommending the union of Jews and Christians in the world-state to be set up in Jerusalem. Now he saw that what prophecy required God to do was first to put the Jews in possession of Palestine, and then to set up a worldwide organization with power to enforce the submission of nations to its law. 

After a lifetime Monk thus stumbled on the fullness of the political plan of world dominion which is contained in the Old Testament, and still thought that he was interpreting divine prophecy. No evidence offers that he ever came in contact with the initiates and illuminates of the grand design. The only recorded Jewish money he was ever offered was a charitable gift of five pounds "if you are personally in want". He moved always in the company and at the cost of the bemused Gentile "Liberals". 

He was forgotten in the Ottawa Valley when, in 1870, his hope (one must use the word) that "the day of troubles" was at last at hand was revived by a huge [189] forest fire, which he took as a sign from heaven that the time had come. Somehow he made his way to London (1872) and to Hunt and Ruskin, who had thought him dead. Ruskin was wooing Rose La Touche, so that for the time he was unresponsive to warnings of doom and wrote to The Prophet, "I acknowledge the wonderfulness of much that you tell me, but I simply do not believe that you can understand so much about God when you understand so little about man. . . you appear to me to be mad, but for aught I know I may be mad myself" (these last words, unhappily, were prescient). 

Such admonitions were not new to The Prophet. His relatives and friends had ever implored him, if he felt called to improve mankind, to look around him at home: the lot of the Canadian Indians, or even of the Canadians, might be bettered. To a man who held the key to divine revelation advice of this kind was sacrilegious, and Monk, by way of various pamphlets, came at length to the idea of a "Palestine Restoration Fund". For this he borrowed a notion of Ruskin's, originally devised to help Ruskin's own country; namely, that wealthy folk should forfeit a tithe of their incomes for the purpose of reclaiming English wastelands. Monk decided that the tithe should serve a better object: the "return"! 

By this time (1875) Ruskin was once more unnerved, first by the death of Rose La Touche and next by the apparent imminence of one more distant war (this time a British-Russian one). Clearly The Prophet was right after all; the "day of troubles" was come. Ruskin signed Monk's manifesto and dedicated a tenth of his income to The Prophet's fund for the purchase of Palestine from the Sultan while the English wastelands stayed unreclaimed. When this was achieved, a congress of all nations was to set up a federation of the world in Jerusalem. 

The Prophet, thus propped on his feet again, was further helped by Laurence Oliphant, a lion of the Victorian drawing rooms whom he had by chance met when he made his way about America, hobo-fashion. Oliphant was a man of different type, a bold, cynical venturer, or adventurer. The idea of buying Palestine appealed to him, but he had no illusions about it. He wrote to Monk, "Any amount of money can be raised upon it, owing to the belief which people have that they would be fulfilling prophecy and bringing on the end of the world. I don't know why they are so anxious for the latter event, but it makes the commercial speculation easy". Oliphant, as will be seen, did not trouble to hide his disdain for The Prophet's message. * 

* Oliphant touched on an interesting point. One interpretation of the numerous prophecies is that the end of the world will follow the "return" of the Jews to Palestine, so that the folk who promote this migration presume even to determine the moment when Jehovah shall bring the planet to an end. The mystification expressed by Oliphant was felt by a perplexed French politician at the Peace Conference of 1919, who asked Mr. Balfour why he was so eager to bring about "the return" of the Jews to Palestine; if this truly was the fulfilment of prophecy, then prophecy also decreed that the end of the world would follow. Mr. Balfour replied languidly. "Precisely, that is what makes it all so very interesting".

In 1880 Holman Hunt, again enjoying deteriorated health, was so alarmed by small warlike episodes in Egypt and South Africa that he thought extinction at  hand and joined with Monk in issuing a manifesto which anticipated the Zionist-ruled world government schemes of this century. It was headed "The abolition of national warfare", called on all men of goodwill to subscribe a tenth of their income to the realization of "the Kingdom of God" in the form of a world government to be set up in Palestine and to be called "the United Nations", and proposed that the money be given to Mr. Monk for the purpose of acquiring Palestine. 

That was the finish. Ruskin, approaching his end, rudely refused all further part in the fantasy. Oliphant dropped out. The "Bank of Israel" came to nothing. Samuel Butler showed The Prophet the door. Even Holman Hunt at last appealed to him to preach "that there is a God in heaven, who will judge every man on earth" and to desist from pretending in effect that he, Monk, was God. The Jews spoke similarly: one told him, "The land of our forefathers is dead, and Palestine is its grave. . . to attempt to form a nation from the polyglot people of Judaism today would only end in utter failure". 

Monk was beyond redemption. In 1884 the Bluecoat boy returned to Ottawa for the last time and spent his final years canvassing, pamphleteering, and haranguing members of the Canadian House of Commons as they sat, between sessions, in their garden by the Ottawa River. They listened to him with amused indulgence; sixty years later Canadian Ministers, at Ottawa and New York, were to repeat all the things Monk said as the unassailable principles of high policy, and no Member would demur. 

Monk's life was wretched and was not redeemed by any true faith or genuine mission. This account of it is given to show how false and foolish the great project was seen to be, and how misguided the men who took it up, against the background of the last century. The fallacy of the whole notion, of Zionism leading to the despotic world-government, is instantly displayed when it is considered in that setting, with Monk and his friends declaiming from the stage. The whole thing then is seen as a picaresque comedy; a farce, not merely because it was unsuccessful, but because it was never serious. What was recommended could not be seriously entertained because its consequences obviously had not been considered and, if calculated, at once were foreseen to be disastrous. Against the background of a time when debate was free and opinion, being informed, might be brought to bear on the matter, these men strut foolishly, leaving only the faint echo of clownish noises in the corridors of time. 

Nevertheless, in the present century the entire vainglorious scheme, unchanged, was imported into the life of peoples as a serious and urgent undertaking, transcending the needs of nations. Indeed, it was made a sacrosanct one, for an unwritten law of heresy was set around it which in effect checked the antiseptic force of public discussion, and within this palisade the politicians of the West made a morality play out of The Prophet's claptrap. John Ruskin and Holman Hunt, from whatever bourne the Victorian friends of the oppressed may  now inhabit, may look down and see the graves of many dead, and the living graves of nearly a million fugitives, as the first results of their great plan, now in accomplishment. 

Monk, had he lived in this century, would have been qualified for important political rank, for support of this cause has become the first condition for admission to the high temporal places. His life was spent in pursuing the lure of an excessive vanity and in the very year of his death, 1896, the fantasy which led him became a political and practical reality, dominating our time. While he went his vagrant way between Ottawa, Washington, London and Jerusalem very different men, in Russia, built up the real force of Zionism. In 1896 it was launched into the lives of the peoples, and its explosive detonations have grown louder and more destructive until today even the newspaper scribes commonly allude to it as the issue which may set the spark to the third world war.

Chapter 24 

THE COMING OF ZIONISM 

In the second half of the last century when Communism and Zionism began their simultaneous assault on the West, Europe was a place of strong and confident states well able to withstand the effects of inner troubles and foreign wars. The revolutionary outbreaks of 1848 had been overcome without great exertion. Austria-Hungary and France were not much weakened by their Prussian defeats in 1866 and 1871; they resumed their national existences, as defeated countries for centuries had done, side by side with yesterday's victor, and soon were tranquil again. The Balkan people, emerging from five centuries of Turkish rule also were moving towards prosperity, in the kindlier air of national freedom. On the eastern borders of Europe Russia, under the flag of Christendom, appeared to be joining in this process of national and individual improvement. 

The appearance was deceptive, for the two maggots were in the apple, and today's scene shows the result. The eighteen Christian centuries which, despite ups and downs showed a total sum of human betterment greater than that of any earlier time known to man, were coming either to an end or an interregnum; which, we still do not know, though believers have no doubt about the good resumption, somewhen. However, one eminent man of that period, from whom confidence in the outcome might have been expected, foresaw what was to come in our century and thought it would be the end, not a transient Dark Age. 

This was Henry Edward Manning, the English clergyman who was converted to Rome, became Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, and, had he accepted nomination by his fellow cardinals, might have become Pope. Edmund Burke, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton had all perceived the worldwide aims of the revolution and foretold its spreading eruptions. Disraeli, Bakunin and others, a half-century later, had testified to, and warned against, the Jewish usurpation of the revolutionary leadership. Manning joined in these warnings but also foresaw the coming of Zionism and the part it would play in the dual process. 

Of the revolution he said, "The secret societies of the world, the existence of which men laugh at and deny in the plenitude of their self-confidence; the secret societies are forcing their existence and their reality upon the consciousness of those who, until the other day, would not believe that they existed" (1861). He expected the full success of Weishaupt's original plan and thought the time in which he lived was "the prelude of the anti Christian period of the final dethronement of Christendom, and of the restoration of society without God in the world". Today the anti-Christian revolution holds temporal power in half of Europe, the Christian cross has been expunged from the flags of all great European nations save the British and from those of many small ones, and a "society without God" has been set up as a potential world-government, so that  these words of ninety years ago are seen as an impressive forecast part-fulfilled. 

Then (and in this he rose above the other seers) he depicted the part which Zionism would play in this process: "Those who have lost faith in the Incarnation, such as humanitarians, rationalists and pantheists, may well be deceived by any person of great political power and success, who should restore the Jews to their own land. . . and there is nothing in the political aspect of the world which renders such a combination impossible". 

Finally, he said that he expected the personal coming of Antichrist in the form of a Jew. (In these words he moved from the ground of political calculation, where as events have shown he was expert, to that of interpreting prophecy; he related Saint Paul's message to the Thessalonians, 2.1.iii-xi, to the coming time, saying, "It is a law of Holy Scripture that when persons are prophesied of, persons appear".)

Thus, while Europe outwardly appeared to be slowly moving towards an improving future on the path which for eighteen centuries had served it well, in the Talmudic areas of Russia Zionism joined Communism as the second of the two forces which were to intercept that process. Communism was designed to subvert the masses; it was the "great popular movement" foreseen by Disraeli, by means of which "the secret societies" were to work in unison for the disruption of Europe. Zionism set out to subvert rulers at the top. Neither force could have moved forward without the other, for rulers of unimpaired authority would have checked the revolution as it had been checked in 1848. 

Zionism was essentially the rejoinder of the Talmudic centre in Russia to the emancipation of Jews in the West. It was the intimation that they must not involve themselves in mankind but must remain apart. 

Never since Babylon had the ruling sect ventured to play this card. It can never be played again, if the present attempt ultimately ends in fiasco. For that reason the Talmudists ever refrained from playing it, and only did this when emancipation confronted them with a vital emergency, the loss of their power over Jewry. Indeed, they had always denounced as "false Messiahs" those who clamoured that the day of fulfilment was come. 'Had Sabbatai Zevi, or for that matter Cromwell or Napoleon, been able to deliver Palestine to them, they might have proclaimed one of these to be the Messiah. On this occasion they proclaimed themselves to be the Messiah, and that bold enterprise can hardly be repeated. Historically therefore, we are probably moving towards the end of the destructive plan, because it obviously cannot be fulfilled, but the present generation, and possibly some generations to come, by all the signs have yet a heavy price to pay for having encouraged the attempt. 

Dr. Chaim Weizmann's book is the best single fount of information about the twin roots of Communism and Zionism and their convergent purpose. He was present at the birth of Zionism, he became its roving plenipotentiary, he was for forty years the darling of Western courts, presidential offices and cabinet rooms, [l94] he became the first president of the Zionist state, and he told the entire tale with astonishing candour. He shows how, in those remote Talmudic communities nearly a hundred years ago, the strategy took shape which in its consequences was to catch up, as in a vortex, all peoples of the West. Americans and Britons, Germans and Frenchmen, Italians, Poles, Scandinavians, Balts, the Balkanic peoples and all others were to be implicated. The lifeblood and treasure of the West were to be spent on the promotion of these two complementary purposes like water from a running tap. 

Millions, living and dead, were during two wars involved in their furtherance. Men now being born inherit a share in the final upheavals to which they must inexorably lead. The Jews shared in all that tribulation, in their small proportion to the masses affected. Dr. Weizmann's account enables today's student to see the beginnings of all this; and now this narrative reaches our own time, which receives daily shape from what then occurred. 

He explains that the Jews in Russia were divided into three groups. The first group was that of the Jews who, seeking "the peace of the city", simply wanted to become peaceable Russian citizens, as the Jews of the West, in the majority, at that time were loyal German, French or other citizens. Emancipation was for this group the final aim, and it chiefly contained those Jews who, by talent, diligence and fear of Talmudic rule, had escaped from the ghettos. 

Dr. Weizmann dismisses it as small, unrepresentative and "renegade", and as it was swept away it must also disappear from this narrative, which belongs to the two other groups. By the edict of the Talmudists it has "disappeared from the face of the earth", or been excommunicated. 

The remaining mass of Jews in Russia, (that is, those that lived in the ghettos under Talmudic rule) were divided into two groups by a vertical line which split households and families, including Dr. Weizmann's own house and family. Both groups were revolutionary; that is to say, they agreed in working for the destruction of Russia. The dissension was solely on the point of Zionism. The "Communist-revolutionary" group held that full "emancipation" would be achieved when the world-revolution supplanted the nationstates everywhere. The "Zionist-revolutionary" group, while agreeing that the world-revolution was indispensable to the process, held that full "emancipation" would only be achieved when a Jewish nation was established in a Jewish state. 

Of these two groups, the Zionist one was clearly the superior in Talmudic orthodoxy, as destruction, under the Law is but a means to the end of domination, and the dominant nation is that ordained to be set up in Jerusalem. In the households, dispute was fierce. The Communists maintained that Zionism would weaken the revolution, which professed to deny "race and creed"; the Zionists contended that revolution must lead to the restoration of the chosen people, of whom race was the creed. Individual members of these households probably believed that the point in dispute was valid, but in fact it was not. 

Neither of these groups could have taken shape, in those sternly ruled communities, against the will of the rabbinate. If the rabbis had given out the word that Communism was "transgression" and Zionism "observance" of "the statutes and judgments", there would have been no Communists in the ghettos, only Zionists. 

The ruling sect, looking into the future above the heads of the regimented mass, evidently saw that both groups were essential to the end in view; and Disraeli, in one of the passages earlier quoted, named the motive. From the middle of the last century the story of the revolution is that of Communism and Zionism, directed from one source and working to a convergent aim. 

Dr. Weizmann gives an illuminating glimpse of this apparent dissension among the members of a conspiratorial, but divided, Jewish household where the ultimate shape of the high strategy was not seen and the issue between "revolutionary-Communism" and "revolutionary-Zionism" was fiercely argued. He quotes his mother, the Jewish matriarch, as saying contentedly that if the Communist-revolutionary son were proved right she would be happy in Russia, and if the Zionist-revolutionary one were correct, then she would be happy in Palestine. In the outcome both were by their lights proved right; after spending some years in Bolshevism Moscow she went to end her days in Zionized Palestine. That was after the two conspiracies, having grown in secrecy side by side, triumphed in the same week of 1917. 

Communism was already an organized, though still a secret and conspiratorial party in the ghettos when Zionism first took organized (though equally secret) form in the Chibath Zion (Love of Zion) movement. This was founded at Pinsk, where Dr. Weizmann went to school, so that as a boy his path led him into the Zionist-revolutionary wing of the anti-Russian conspiracy. In his childhood (1881) something happened which threatened to destroy the entire legend of "persecution in Russia" on which Talmudic propaganda in the outer world was based. 

In 1861 Czar Alexander II, the famous Liberator, had liberated 23,000,000 Russian serfs. From that moment the prospect of liberty and improvement on the Western model opened out for Russian citizens of all nationalities (Russia contained about 160 nationalities and the Jews formed about 4 percent of the total population). Then, during the twenty years following the liberation of the serfs, the Jews began, under Talmudic direction, to offer "bitter passive resistance to all 'attempts at improvements' " (Dr. Kastein). In March 1881, Alexander II moved to complete his life's work by proclaiming a parliamentary constitution. Dr. Kastein's comment speaks for itself: "It is not surprising to find a Jewess taking part in the conspiracy which led to the assassination of Alexander II" . 

This event, the first of a similar series, was the first major success of the revolutionaries in preventing emancipation. It restored the ideal condition [196] depicted by Moses Hess (one of the earliest Zionist propagandists) in the year following the liberation of the serfs: "We Jews shall always remain strangers among the nations; these, it is true, will grant us rights from feelings of humanity and justice, but they will never respect us so long as we place our great memories in the second rank and accept as our first principle, 'Where I flourish, there is my country' ". 

During this period Leon Pinsker, another herald of Zionism, published his book Auto-Emancipation. The title was a threat (to the initiated); it meant, "We will not accept any kind of emancipation bestowed on us by others; we will emancipate ourselves and will give 'emancipation' our own interpretation". He said, "There is an inexorable and inescapable conflict between humans known as Jews and other humans", and he described the master-method to be used to bring about this "self-emancipation" and to "restore the Jewish nation": the struggle to achieve "these ends, he said, "must be entered upon in such a spirit as to exert an irresistible pressure upon the international politics of the present ". 

These words of 1882 are some of the most significant in this entire story. They show foreknowledge of the highest order, as the reader may discern if he try to picture, say, some Polish or Ukrainian patriot-in-exile talking, then or now, of "exerting irresistible pressure upon international politics". The political emitter is a sad man of hope deferred, an habitué of the Café des Exiles who is usually thankful if the second secretary of an Under Secretary of State deigns to spare him half an hour. Pinsker was an obscure Jewish emigré in Berlin, little known outside revolutionary circles, when he wrote these words, which would seem to be of the most foolish pretension if the events of the next seventy years had not proved that he knew exactly what he meant. He knew how Zionism would prevail. Clearly the conspiracy, long before its nature was even suspected in the outer world, had powerful support far outside Russia and this unknown Pinsker was aware of the methods by which the affairs of the world were to be rearranged.

Such was the state of the two-headed conspiracy in Russia when Dr. Weizmann grew to manhood and began to play his part. The word "conspiracy", frequently used here, is not the author's; Dr. Weizmann candidly employs it. Loathing Russia, he went (without hindrance) to Germany. The sight of "emancipated" Jews there so repelled him that he longed for the ghettos of Russia and returned to them during his holidays, then resuming his part in "the conspiracy", as he says. Then, at various universities in the emancipated West he continued his "open fight" to de-emancipate the Jews of Europe. They recognized the danger and turned faces of fear and enmity to these Ostjuden. 

Thus in Germany Gabriel Rieser told the Zionist-revolutionaries from Russia "We did not immigrate here, we were born here, and because we were born here, we lay no claim to a home anywhere else; we are either Germans or else we are homeless". Similarly, the rabbis of Reform Judaism resolved that "the idea of the Messiah deserves every consideration in our prayers, but all requests that we may be led back to the land of our fathers and the Jewish State be restored must be dropped out of them". 

These Jews struggled to keep faith with the Sanhedrin's pledges. They had made peace with mankind, and it appeared impossible that the Talmudists could ever lead them back into a new Nehemiah type captivity. Dr. Kastein records with horror that towards the end of the 19th century "one Jew in five married a Gentile" and, with greater horror, that in war "on all fronts Jew stood opposed to Jew; this was a tragedy . . . which will be repeated . . . as long as Jews are compelled to fulfil their duties as citizens of the lands of their adoption". 

The shadow of the new Talmudic captivity was much nearer to the Jews of the West than even they could suspect. The elders in Russia had been organizing during all these decades and as the end of the century approached were ready to "exert irresistible pressure upon the international politics of the present". The most successful specialist in this exertion of pressure; a roving Zionist prime minister, was young Chaim Weizmann, who during the last years of Monk's life moved about the European cities and universities, from Darmstadt to Berlin, and later from Berlin to Geneva, planting therein the time-bombs of the future and preparing for his 20th Century task. 

As the century closed came a sudden acceleration in this process, as if a machine long in construction were completed and began to run at high power, and its throbbing pulsations were at once felt throughout all Jewry, though the Gentile masses, less sensitive to such vibrations, remarked them not at all. In the succession to Moses Hess another Jew from Russia, Asher Ginsburg (Ahad Ha'am) proclaimed that the Jews not only formed a nation but must have a Jewish state in Palestine. However, this was but one more voice from remote Russia, and the weakness of the Jews in the West was that they did not realize the power and strength of the compact, organized mass in the Eastern ghettoes, or at any rate, they could not see how it could make itself felt in Europe. 

The warning to them came in 1896, the year of Prophet Monk's death, when Theodor Herzl published The Jewish State. With that, the cat was in their dovecot, and not very long afterwards the doves were in the cat. Their ranks were split, for this Theodor Herzl was not one of the Eastern Jews, not a Jew from Russia. He was one of themselves, or at all events they held him to be one. He appeared to be the very model of an emancipated Western Jew, yet he was on the side of the Zionists. A premonitory tremor ran through Jewry. Christendom, which had as much cause to be perturbed, remained blissfully unaware for another sixty years.

Chapter 25 

THE WORLD ZIONIST ORGANIZATION 

If mere chance, ever and again, produces men like Karl Marx and Dr. Theodor Herzl at moments when their acts can lead to destructive consequences out of proportion to their own importance, then chance in the past century has been enlisted in the conspiracy against the West. The likelier explanation is that a higher command was already in charge of these events and that it chose, or at all events used Herzl for the part he played. The brevity of his course across the firmament (like that of a shooting star), the disdainful way in which when his task was done he was cast aside, and his unhappy end would all support that explanation. 

Those who have known Vienna and its atmosphere in our century will understand Herzl and his effect. A declining monarchy and a tottering nobility: a class of Jews rising suddenly and swiftly to the highest places; these things made great impression among the Jewish masses. Dr. Herzl, rather than the Neue Freie Presse, now told them how went the world and instructed politicians what to do. Obsequious Obers in the chattering cafés hastened to serve "Herr Doktor!" It was all new, exciting. Self-importance filled the Herzl's and de Blowitz's of that time and when Dr. Herzl emerged as the self-proclaimed herald of Zion the Western Jews were left awed and uncertain. If Dr. Herzl could talk like this to the Great Powers, perhaps he was right and the Napoleonic Sanhedrin had been wrong! 

Could it be true that policy was made in Dr. Herzl's office, not in the Ballhausplatz? Had a Jew from Russia written The Jewish State, or attempted to set up a World Zionist Organization, the Western Jews would have ignored him, for they feared the conspiracy from the East and at least suspected its implications. But if Dr. Herzl, a fully emancipated Western Jew, thought that Jews must re-segregate themselves, the matter was becoming serious. 

Herzl asserted that the Dreyfus case had convinced him of the reality of "antisemitism". The term was then of fairly recent coinage, though Dr. Kastein seeks to show that the state of mind denoted by it is immemorial by saying "it has existed from the time that Judaism came into contact with other peoples in something more than neighbourly hostility". (By this definition resistance in war is "antisemitism", and the "neighbours" in the tribal warfare of antique times, to which he refers, were themselves Semites. However, the words "contact exceeding neighbourly hostility" offer a good example of Zionist pilpulism.) 

Anyway, Dr. Herzl stated that "the Dreyfus process made me a Zionist", and the words are as empty as Mr. Lloyd George's later ones, "Acetone converted me to Zionism" (which were demonstrably untrue). The Dreyfus case gave the Jews complete proof of the validity of emancipation and of the impartiality of justice under it. Never was one man defended so publicly by so many or so fully vindicated. Today whole nations, east of Berlin, have no right to any process of [199] law and the West, which signed the deed of their outlawry, is indifferent to their plight; they may be imprisoned or killed without charge or trial. Yet in the West today the Dreyfus case, the classic example of justice, continues to be cited by the propagandists as the horrid example of injustice. If the case for or against Zionism stood or fell by the Dreyfus case, the word should have disappeared from history at that point. 

Nevertheless Dr. Herzl demanded that "the sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation" (he specified no particular territory and did not especially lean towards Palestine). For the first time the idea of resurrecting a Jewish state came under lively discussion among Western Jews.* The London Jewish Chronicle described the book as "one of the most astounding pronouncements which have ever been put forward". Herzl, thus encouraged, went to London, then the focus of power, to canvass his idea. After successful meetings in London's East End he decided to call a Congress of Jews in support of it.
* At that time it hardly reached the mind of the Gentile multitude. In 1841 a Colonel Churchill, English Consul at Smyrna, at the conference of Central European States called to determine the future of Syria had put forward a proposal to set up a Jewish state in Palestine, but apparently it was dismissed with little or no consideration.
Consequently, in March 1897, Jews "all over the world" were invited to send delegates to a "Zionist congress", a counter-Sanhedrin, at Munich in August. The Western Jews were adamantly opposed. The rabbis of Germany, and then the Jews of Munich, protested, and the place of meeting was changed to Basel, in Switzerland. The Reform Jews of America two years earlier had announced that they expected "neither a return to Palestine. . . nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish State". (Most curious to relate today, when Rabbi Stephen Wise in 1899 suggested a book about Zionism to the Jewish Publication Society of America its secretary replied, "The Society cannot risk a book on Zionism"). 

When Herzl's congress met most of the 197 delegates came from Eastern Europe. This group of men then set up a "World Zionist Organization", which proclaimed Jewish nationhood and "a publicly secured, legally assured home" to be its aims, and Herzl declared "The Jewish State exists". In fact, a few Jews, claiming to speak for all Jews but vehemently repudiated by many representative bodies of Western Jewry, had held a meeting in Basel, and that was all. 

Nevertheless, the proposal, for what it was worth in those circumstances, was at last on the table of international affairs. The congress was in fact a Sanhedrin summoned to cancel the avowals made by the Napoleonic Sanhedrin eighty years before. That Sanhedrin repudiated separate nationhood and any ambition to form a Jewish state; this one proclaimed separate nationhood and the ambition of statehood. Looking back fifty years later, Rabbi Elmer Berger observed, "Here was the wedge of Jewish nationalism, to be driven between Jews and other human beings. Here was the permanent mould of ghettoism into which Jewish life in the unemancipated nations was to remain compressed so that the self-generating processes of emancipation and integration could not come into play". 

The Napoleonic Sanhedrin had a basic flaw, now revealed, of which Napoleon may well have been unaware. It represented the Western Jews, and Napoleon cannot reasonably be expected to have known of the strength of the compact, Talmudic-ruled mass of Jews in Russia, for Dr. Herzl, who surely should have known of this, was ignorant of it! He made the discovery at that first World Zionist Congress, called by him in such confident expectation of mass-support: "and then. . . there rose before our eyes a Russian Jewry, the strength of which we had not even suspected. Seventy of our delegates came from Russia, and it was patent to all of us that they represented the views and sentiments of the five million Jews of that country. What a humiliation for us, who had taken our superiority for granted! " 

Dr. Herzl found himself face to face with his masters and with the conspiracy, which through him was about to enter the West. He had declared war on emancipation and, like many successors, was unaware of the nature of the force he had released. He was soon left behind, a bugler whose task was done, while the real "managers" took over. 

He had forged the instrument which they were to use in their onslaught on the West. Dr. Weizmann, who became the real leader, clearly sees that: "It was Dr. Herzl's enduring contribution to Zionism to have created one central parliamentary authority for Zionism . . . This was the first time in the exilic history of Jewry that a great government had officially negotiated with the elected representatives of the Jewish people. The identity, the legal personality of the Jewish people, had been re-established". 

Dr. Weizmann presumably smiled to himself when he included the words "parliamentary" and "elected". The middle sentence contains the great fact. The Jews who met at Basel, shunned by the majority of Western Jews, and its declarations, could only be lent authority by one event, which at that time seemed unimaginable; namely, their recognition by a Great Power. This inconceivable thing happened a few years later when the British Government offered Dr. Herzl Uganda, and that is the event to which Dr. Weizmann refers. From that moment all the Great Powers of the West in effect accepted the Talmudists from Russia as representing all Jews, and from that moment the Zionist-revolution also entered the West.

Thus ended the century of emancipation, which began with such bright prospect of common involvement, and the prescient words of Mr. Houston Stewart Chamberlain (written just before Dr. Herzl's congress met at Basel) at once became truth and living reality. Looking back on Gottfried von Herder's words of a hundred years before, "The ruder nations of Europe are willing slaves of Jewish usury", Chamberlain wrote that during the 19th Century "a great change has taken place. . . today Herder could say the same of by far the greatest  part of our civilized world . . . The direct influence of Judaism on the 19th Century thus becomes one of the burning subjects of the day. We have to deal here with a question affecting not only the present, but also the future of the world". 

With the formation of the World Zionist Organization, which the great governments of the West were to treat, in effect, as an authority superior to themselves, the burning subject began to mould the entire shape of events. That it affected "the future of the world" is plainly seen in 1956, when this book is concluded; from the start of that year the political leaders of the remaining great powers of the West, Britain and America, observed in tones of sad surprise that the next world war might at any time break out in the place where they had set up "the Jewish State", and they hastened to and fro across the ocean in the effort to concert some way of preventing that consummation.

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THE HERESY OF DR. HERZL-147s