A SPIRITUAL CENTRE (1907)

It has been observed that if men always remembered the true meaning of every word that they use or hear, disputes would be infinitely rarer. The truth of this remark is known by experience to anybody who happens to have promulgated some idea which the contemporary “reading public” did not like, and to have had his “heresy” exposed by the literary mouthpieces of that public. The hapless creature’s first feeling is one of incredulity and astonishment. How, he thinks, is it possible so to pervert things, so completely to confuse ideas and to advance arguments which so fail to touch the point? He puts it down to the malevolence of his opponents, believes that they are purposely twisting his words, and complains bitterly to that same reading public in the name of truth and fairness. But later, when he finds that complaint is unavailing, and that the same thing happens time after time, so that malevolence alone cannot be responsible—then he is driven to the conclusion that there must be some more universal explanation of what he has experienced. The explanation is that the connection between a word and the idea contained in it is not so strong in the human mind as to make it impossible for a man to hear or to utter a word without immediately having a full and exact conception of the associated idea. Hence, when a man hears an opinion which runs counter to his way of thinking, he is apt unconsciously to grasp the novel opinion in an 121incorrect form: he will change the meaning of this or that word until it becomes not difficult for him to refute the opinion by unsound arguments, in which again one word or another is used incorrectly. And all this counterfeiting is done by the thinking apparatus automatically, without the knowledge of its owner, by virtue of its inherent tendency to work at any given moment in accordance with the dominant requirements of the subliminal self at that moment.

I doubt whether there is any contemporary Jewish writer who is more familiar with this experience than myself. Were I to count up all the disputes with which, for my sins, our literature has been enriched—most of them simply glaring instances of the phenomenon in question—the account would be long indeed. But I wish here to adduce only one instance of a dispute which began fifteen years ago^[69] and has continued to this very day.

Fifteen years ago there appeared for the first time an idea that afterwards occasioned endless expenditure of ink. “In Palestine,” I wrote, “we can and should found for ourselves a spiritual centre of our nationality.” My literary experience was not yet extensive, and I overlooked this important consideration: that in putting before the public an idea which does not accord with the general view, one must not merely put it in a logically clear and definite form, but must also reckon with the psychology of the reader—with that mental apparatus which combines unrelated words and ideas according to the requirements of its owner—and must try one’s utmost to avoid any word or expression which might afford an opening for this process of combination. 122I confess now that in view of this psychological factor I ought to have felt that the formula “a spiritual centre of our nationality” would afford a good opportunity to those who wished to misunderstand, although from the point of view of logic it is sufficiently clear and is well adapted to the idea which it contains.

“Centre” is, of course, a relative term. Just as “father” is inconceivable without children, so is “centre” inconceivable without “circumference”; and just as a father is a father only in relation to his children, and is merely So-and-so in relation to the rest of mankind, so a centre is a centre only in relation to its own circumference, whereas in relation to all that lies outside the circumference it is merely a point with no special importance. When we use the word “centre,” metaphorically, in connection with the phenomena of human society, it necessarily connotes a similar idea: what we mean is that a particular spot or thing exerts influence on a certain social circumference, which is bound up with and dependent on it, and that in relation to this circumference it is a centre. But since social life is a complex of many different departments, there are very few centres which are universal in their function—that is, which influence equally all sides of the life of the circumference. The relation between the centre and the circumference is usually limited to one or more departments of life, outside which they are not interdependent. Thus a given circumference may have many centres, each of which is a centre only for one specific purpose. When, therefore, the word “centre” is used to express a social conception, it is accompanied almost always—except where the context makes it unnecessary—by an epithet which 123indicates its character. We speak of a literary centre, an artistic centre, a commercial centre, and so on, meaning thereby that in this or that department of life the centre in question has a circumference which is under its influence and is dependent on it, but that in other departments the one does not exert nor the other receive influence, and the relation of centre and circumference does not exist.

Bearing well in mind this definition, which is familiar enough, and applying it to the phrase quoted above—“in Palestine we can and should found for ourselves a spiritual centre of our nationality”—we shall find that the phrase can only be interpreted as follows:—

“A centre of our nationality” implies that there is a national circumference, which, like every circumference, is much larger than the centre. That is to say, the speaker sees the majority of his people, in the future as in the past, scattered over all the world, but no longer broken up into a number of disconnected parts, because one part—the one in Palestine—will be a centre for them all, and will unite them all into a single, complete circumference. When all the scattered limbs of the national body feel the beating of the national heart, restored to life in the home of its vitality, they too will once again draw near one to another and welcome the inrush of living blood that will flow from the heart.

“Spiritual” means that this relation of centre and circumference between Palestine and the lands of the Diaspora will be limited of necessity to the spiritual side of life. The influence of the centre will strengthen the national consciousness in the Diaspora, will wipe out the spiritual taint of galuth, and will fill our spiritual life with a national content which will be true and natural, 124not like the artificial content with which we now fill up the void. But outside the spiritual side of life, in all those economic and political relations which depend first and foremost on the conditions of the immediate environment, and are created by that environment and reflect its character—while it is true that in all those relations the effect of the spiritual changes (such as the strengthening of national unity and increased energy in the struggle for existence) will show itself to some extent, yet essentially and fundamentally these departments of life in the Diaspora will not be bound up with the life of the centre, and the most vivid imagination cannot picture to us how economic and political influence will radiate from Palestine through all the length and breadth of the Diaspora, which is co-extensive with the globe, in such manner and to such degree as would entitle us to say, without inexact use of language, that Palestine is the centre of our people in these departments also.

Now, at the time when I first used the phrase under discussion, I knew beforehand that I should excite the wrath of the Chovevé Zion (in those days it was they who held the field). But looking, as I did, solely at the logical side, I was sure that the brunt of their anger would fall on the word “centre”; for the use of that word involved a negation of the idea of a return of the whole people to Palestine, and so clipped the wings of those fantastic hopes which even then, in the days before the first Basle Congress, were proclaimed as heralding the end of the galuth and a complete and absolute solution of the Jewish problem in all its aspects. The epithet “spiritual” seemed to me so simple and clear, as a necessary logical consequence of 125the assumption involved in the world “centre,” that it never remotely entered my mind that here might be the stumbling-block, and that I ought at once to file a declaration to the effect that, although the centre would be spiritual in its influence on the circumference, yet in itself it would be a place like other places, where men were compounded of body and soul, and needed food and clothing, and that for this reason the centre would have to concern itself with material questions and to work out an economic system suited to its requirements, and could not exist without farmers, labourers, craftsmen, and merchants. When a man uses, for example, the expression “literary centre,” does it occur to him to explain that he does not mean a place where there is no eating or drinking, no business or handicraft, but simply a number of men sitting and writing books and drinking in the radiance of their own literary talent? Imagine, then, my surprise when I found that my critics paid no attention to the word “centre,” but poured out all the vials of their wrath on the epithet “spiritual,” as though it contained all that was new and strange in the idea: as who should say, “A spiritual and not a material centre? Can such a thing be?”

But my amazement soon died away when I remembered the “psychological apparatus.” It was bound to fasten on some word or other in order to make my unpopular theory appear absurd; and since the word “centre,” if the critics dwelt on it and led the minds of their readers to analyse its meaning, was calculated not to serve that end, but, on the contrary, to make it clear where the absurdity really lay, they found it best to give “spiritual” all the emphasis. “A spiritual centre! Now do you understand what these people want? They 126care nothing for a material settlement, for colonies, factories, commerce: they want only to settle in Palestine a dozen batlanim, whose business shall be spiritual nationality.”

Great indeed is the power of psychology. This interpretation spread abroad, was accepted, and remains to this day a matter of course. Even those Zionists who have not got their knowledge of my views from the pamphlet literature which has flooded the world in recent years, but have read them in the original—even they are certain that that is what spiritual Zionism means. It has availed them nothing to read immediately afterwards, in the same article,^[70] that the spiritual centre must be “a true miniature of the people of Israel,” and that in the centre there will appear once more “the genuine type of a Jew, whether it be a Rabbi or a scholar or a writer, a farmer or a craftsman or a business man.” It has availed nothing, because psychological factors dominate not only the person judging, but also his memory.

Three years ago,^[71] I remember, after I had published in some journal a protest against the favourable reports about the condition of the Palestinian colonies that were then being spread abroad, for diplomatic purposes, a writer in the camp of the political Zionists became angry with me, and determined to shatter with one blow all my views on Zionism, and so remove a dangerous heresy. This idea he carried out in an elaborate article, which was continued through many numbers of the same journal. The details I have forgotten: they were 127but the old arguments dished up in different words. But I still remember one thing, which provoked not only a smile but also reflections such as those which are the subject of the present essay. After proving conclusively that material factors are of great importance, and cannot be lightly brushed aside, our author reaches the conclusion that it is for that reason idle to confine our work solely to the foundation of a spiritual centre for our nationality: we must found in Palestine an economic and spiritual centre. It escaped his notice that so soon as he used the word “centre” he became himself a “spiritual Zionist,” and in adding the epithet “economic” added exactly nothing. The journal in question appeared in Warsaw, which was also at that time the home of our author; and in order to understand the matter aright he had only to go into the street and ask any intelligent Pole: “What is Warsaw to the Polish people as a whole? Is it a spiritual centre of the nation, or a spiritual and economic centre?” The answer, I think, would have been something like this: “For the Polish people as a whole this city is certainly a spiritual centre of their nationality. Here the national characteristics find their expression in every department of life, here the national language, literature, and art live and develop; and all this, and what goes with it, influences the spirit of the Poles, binds them, wherever they may be, to the centre, and prevents the spark of nationality in the individual from becoming buried and extinguished. But an economic centre of the nation? My good sir! How could Warsaw be an economic centre for all the millions of Poles who are scattered over different lands, and whose economic lives depend on entirely different centres, where Polish 128economic conditions do not count at all?” I should not have advised our author, after getting an answer of that kind, to ask: “How so? Are there not in Warsaw, besides spiritual things, ever so many factories and shops and other material things, without which it could not develop its spiritual side? And is it not therefore an economic and spiritual centre?” I should not have advised him to ask that question, because I could not guarantee that the intelligent Pole would waste words on such a questioner.

But amongst ourselves “the economic centre” has become a current phrase with many people who on the one hand want to do their duty by the economic side of Zionism (that is de rigueur nowadays), and on the other hand cannot achieve the imaginative eagle-flights of “Proletarian Zionism,”^[72] which promises to create in Palestine a national economic system so healthy and so vast that it will be able to provide room and work for all those Jews who are being more and more completely elbowed out of the best branches of industry in the lands of their exile (that is, for almost nine-tenths of the people). Zionists like these, in order to get rid of the difficult question as to the possibility of settling the majority of our people in Palestine, even when their new economic system becomes a fact, consent to accept half the loaf, and want to regard Palestine as merely an economic centre. But herein they escape one snare to fall into a worse: they have got rid of an external problem, which depends on arguments from experience, 129and are caught instead in an inner contradiction, which mere logic can expose. With the “Proletarian” formula one can still argue: one can demand, for instance, a somewhat clearer explanation of that “internal process” by which the economic system of Palestine will become able to absorb immigration on a scale unparalleled in history: but at all events there is no self-contradiction. Whereas the conception of “an economic centre of the nation,” when applied to a people scattered over the whole world, leaves no room for argument or questioning, because its refutation is in itself.

But psychological combinations of this kind are a good sign. They show—in common with other clear signs—that the “centre” as an idea is making headway and is leading to various deductions which could not have been imagined some years ago. And that is the all-important thing. In time the deduction which is involved in the word “spiritual,” when rightly understood, will also be drawn, and it will no longer be possible to suppress it by psychological means. True, all this will not do away with the old nonsense about “spiritual Zionism”; on the contrary—and this is even now unmistakably evident—the more the substance of spiritual Zionism prevails, the more will psychology try to distinguish the victorious tendency from its hated name. But what of that? Let the name be beaten, so but the idea prevail!

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