the early Zionists to think of a Jewish national home as solving more than the immediate problem-the plight of the Jews in modern, nationalistic Europe-and to think of a new state as a continuation of ancient Jewish history, after a short interruption of two thousand years. The old Israelite kingdoms constituted the first Jewish commonwealth, centered on the First Temple. After the return from Babylonian exile, the second Jewish commonwealth was set up, centered on the Second Temple. The time had come to create a new commonwealth, a modern Jewish state, in truth a Third Temple. Thus, the political idea, designed primarily to provide the European Jews with a haven of salvation, became imbued with a religious mystique that gave it a deep messianic impulse. Although all this was quite alien to Herzl himself, a typical JewishViennese intellectual, when he came into contact with the Jewish masses in Eastern Europe, he became convinced that this mystique was essential to the movement.

* * *

Another spirit was abroad in Eastern Europe at that time, the spirit of socialism, the utopian myth that promised the liberation of man from the yoke of an oppressive social environment. For young Jews in the ghettos the gospel of Tolstoy and the gospel of Marx became intertwined. Labor, manual labor as a salvation for the soul, had a magical attraction for those boys and girls in Poland and Russia who saw their pale parents in the ghetto, the despised tailors and shopkeepers and money lenders.

All these diverse longings and aspirations resolved into one: to get away from it all, not to be any longer a helpless minority, at the mercy of any passing Cossack troop, any drunken mob of mujiks incited by a corrupt government incapable of providing them with any other outlet for their miseries but a bloody pogrom. To get away from a parasitical existence that made you despise yourself, your body and your work. To go somewhere where you

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