Sejarah Zionisme, 1600-1918/Volume 1/Surat kepada Penulis
LETTERS TO THE AUTHOR
From the Rt. Hon. Viscount Bryce.
3, Buckingham Gate, S.W. 1, January 30th, 1918.
Dear Sir,
In response to your request for some observations by me on the value which your treatise may have for students of history, I send you these few lines. The pressure of heavy and urgent work forbids me to deal in any but the briefest way with the subject of your book, great as its interest is.
The history of Israel presents some of the most striking phenomena in world history. No other nation (with the exception of the two very ancient nations of the Far East) has annals so long as are those of the descendants of Abraham. Those annals go back, dim as are their earlier outlines, to a time long anterior to the earliest records of the Hellenic and Italic peoples. The records of the old civilization of Assyria and Egypt are, no doubt, even more remote in time, but the nations that created those civilizations have been so changed by conquest and the admixture of new elements that we can no longer recognise them as the same. But Israel has preserved its identity through all vicissitudes. It was carried into captivity in a far land, and returned thence after seventy years. It was, after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Emperor Hadrian, scattered over the face of the earth, and now counts its children everywhere, from Singapore to San Francisco. Its numbers have grown to be fifteen or twenty times greater than they were before the Great Dispersion. It has been kept in existence as a nation through many centuries of oppression and suffering by its Faith and its Literature, a faith embodied in a law which included both a moral and a ceremonial code, a Literature small in bulk but splendid in content, which has formed the mind of the people, sharpening their intelligence and intensifying their national self-consciousness. It is one of those three great literatures of the ancient world which still rule the thought and still help to form the character of mankind. This is a unique phenomenon, and perhaps the most striking testimony that history can show to the vivifying power of ideas.
This consciousness of an enduring national life has been constantly associated in the thoughts of Israel with the ancient home in Palestine, a little country, no bigger than Wales in Britain or Connecticut in North America. To its rocky hills and green valleys, its cities and its battlefields, its heroes and its prophets, the hearts of the people have turned in days of sorrow. The memories of these things have maintained the sense of national life. The flame has often burnt low, but it has never been extinguished. Quite recently it has leapt up with a brilliant glow. The idea that a part of the dispersed people should be gathered from the regions where their lot was worst and be re-settled in their ancient home, long desolated by the tyranny of the cruel and rapacious Turk, has gained strength, and the capture of Jerusalem by the British arms has now made it seem attainable. The sympathy of many thoughtful and sympathetic Christians has been gained, and the British Government has given clear expression to that sympathy. It is to the history of this idea of re-settlement, to which the name of Zionism is now given, that your book is devoted. There are, I am aware, some differences of opinion among Jews themselves as to the form in which this idea might be practically realized, and as to the way in which that form might affect the position of Jews in the countries where they now dwell and of which they wish to remain citizens, though I gather that these differences do not touch the question of the desirability of a large Jewish immigration into Palestine. Upon these differences of opinion I must not pronounce any judgment, though personally inclined to believe that the existence of a national home at the eastern end of the Mediterranean will not affect the loyalty to the other countries where they dwell of the Jews settled in those countries, nor expose them to any suspicion of disloyalty. It is as a student of history, and in that capacity only, that on this particular occasion I desire to speak, expressing my sense of the high interest of the subject of your book, and feeling that the rapid growth of the Zionist movement, the forces that have produced it, and the enthusiasm it has excited, well deserve to be fully, accurately, and impartially described.
I am,
Faithfully yours,
Bryce.
Mr. N. Sokolow.
From Colonel Sir Mark Sykes, M.P.
9, Buckingham Gate, S.W. 1, May 27th, 1918.
My dear Mr. Sokolow,
After many days’ delay, I write to you my message of goodwill and good hope for the success of this your great work on the cause which you have at heart and for which you have laboured so long.
It is an odd thought which crosses my mind at this moment—if it be egotistical I cannot help it—nevertheless I will set it down. I foresee myself handed down to posterity as one of those enduring obscurities, who did nothing in any way remarkable, yet whose names last for all time, because they scratched their fleeting impressions on the Memnon at Luxor.
In languages yet unknown, and in States unborn, this your work will be read by people who will know perhaps as little of the details of life in these days as we do of those of the times of the first dispersion of the Jews.
Your cause has about it an enduring quality which mocks at time; if a generation is but a breath in the life of a nation, an epoch is but the space ’twixt a dawn and a sunrise in the history of Zionism.
When all the temporal things this world now holds are as dead and forgotten as the curled and scented Kings of Babylon who dragged your forefathers into captivity, there will still be Jews, and so long as there are Jews there must be Zionism.
We live in an age when mankind is reaping the whirlwind of its wickedness and folly. Wherein the past men have sown those dragons’ teeth of intolerance, tyranny, injustice, and race hatred, legions of armed men now spring up to destroy and shatter the husbanded resources of progress.
The War of to-day is the logical result of the “peace” of yesterday. The grand problem which we have to consider is whether or no the peace of to-morrow is to be the precursor of a future war which will overwhelm civilization for ever. Unless forces different to those which have counted in the direction of the affairs of men hitherto are in the ascendant, I feel no doubt that what is called Civilization is predestined to suicide, and that in the real meaning of the words “felo de se.” The blind genius which people call “science” wrests mechanical discoveries and chemical formulæ from the accumulated experience of the past and gives men hygiene, transit, and commerce with one hand, and explosives and military organization with the other. You, my dear Mr. Sokolow, represent a people who have watched this process of constructive destruction in the course of evolution, and have seen the higher men climb in pride and vanity the more deplorable is their fall.
If the peace which is to follow the War is to be a real peace, and not a pause in war, then you and your people must be watchers no longer. In Zionism lies your people’s opportunity. In alliance with those other forces of regeneration and illumination which are centred on Jerusalem and which radiate through the world, it may be that you and your successors will play a part in establishing a moral order which will enable mankind to combine universal material progress with mutual subjection and charity.
Yours very sincerely,
Mark Sykes.