Page:EB1922 - Volume 32.djvu/1173

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ZICHY—ZIONISM
1129

ZICHY, COUNT EUGEN (1837-1906), Hungarian traveller (see 28.979), died in 1906.

ZIEM, FELIX FRANÇOIS GEORGE PHILIBERT (1821-1911), French painter (see 28.979), died in Paris Nov. n 1911.

ZIMMERMANN, ARTHUR (1859- ), the German Foreign Secretary who, during the World War, conceived the idea of trying to inveigle Mexico into an alliance against the United States, was born May 8 1859 at Frankenstein. After having been vice-consul at Shanghai and acting consul in 1900 at Tientsin, he entered the Foreign Office in 1902 in a subordinate capacity and rose by 1910 to be director of the Political Section. In 1911 he was appointed under-secretary and in Nov. 1916 Secretary of State in succession to von Jagow. In this capacity he addressed to America the note of Jan. 31 1917 on the subject of U-boat warfare. He was also the author of the extraordinary invitation of Jan. 19 1917 to Mexico to enter into an alliance with Germany and to sound Japan as to her willingness to cooperate. For Mexico the price of this alliance was to be the American States of New Mexico, Texas and Arizona. This proposal, which was sent through the medium of the German minister to Mexico, von Eckhardt, was intercepted in America, and President Wilson was in a position to publish it on March i 1917. With other disclosures regarding German machinations against the United States it materially contributed to rouse American national feeling, which found expression in the decisive votes of the Senate and the House of Representatives on April 5 in favour of declaring war upon Germany. Zimmermann retired on Aug. 5 1917 shortly after the resignation of Bethmann Hollweg. The German Liberals and the governmental Socialists had withdrawn their support from Bethmann Hollweg's Govern- ment at the time of the so-called " Peace Resolution " (July 19 1917), largely on the ground that it was inconceivable that the Allies and America should ever negotiate with politicians like Zimmermann and Bethmann, who had been guilty of the note to Mexico and other treacherous proceedings.


ZINOVIEV, GRIGORI [OVSEI GERSHON ARONOR] (1883- ), Russian revolutionary politician, was born at Novomirgorod in 1883. He was of Jewish origin and his original name was Aronor, but he was known in early life under the names of Apfelbaum or Radomyslovsky and later adopted several designations, such as Shatski, Grigoriev, Grigori and Zinoviev, by the two last of which he is most frequently called. For many years he was an active member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour party, and attended the London Conference in 1907. The next year he was arrested on a charge of participating in the work of the printing press Rabolnik, sentenced to a term of solitary confinement in St. Petersburg and forbidden to reside there in future. He then made his way abroad, and in 1 909 was editing the Social Democrat, the party's main organ. He was present at the party meeting of Nov. 1915, when a split occurred amongst the Russian Social Democratic members of the Duma, and earlier in that year had attended the Zimmerwald meeting at Berne, consisting mainly of Lenin's group, where arrangements were made to get copies of the Social Democrat secretly into Russia and to keep in close touch with Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in Germany so as to ensure the distribution of Lenin's literature to Russian prisoners of war.

After the Revolution Zinoviev returned to Russia and became a prominent member of the Petrograd Soviet, of which he became president after the murder of Uritsky in 1918. In the summer of 1917 the paper Den published revelations showing that he had been formerly employed by the department of police, and this statement was not refuted.

Zinoviev became a member of the Petrograd Committee and of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist party, and was first president of the Third (Communist) International. He was also president of the Petrograd Extraordinary Commission for combating counter-revolution, speculation and sabotage, and he occupied the position of president of the Soviet Govern- ment in Petrograd.


ZIONISM (see 28.986). The part played by anti-Semitism in the growth of the Zionist movement has often been exaggerated.

Zionism is a natural, indeed an inevitable, outcome of the instinct of self-preservation, which is as strong in the Jewish people as in any other; and the conditions which threaten the continued existence of the Jewish people in modern times are not wholly referable to anti-Semitism in any of its phases. They are equally present in countries in which anti-Semitism does not exist, or, if it exists, does not seriously affect the civic, social or economic position of the Jews. In such countries which include, broadly speaking, all the countries of the western hemisphere except those of the old Russian and Austrian Empires and Rumania the rapid assimilation of the Jews to the prevail- ing modes of life and thought is accompanied by an attenuation of the tie which binds them to their people, with the result that emancipation is a more potent enemy of Jewish solidarity and of Judaism than persecution or the milder forms of anti-Semitism. It follows that from the point of view of the Jews, which of course postulates the desirability of the continued existence of the Jewish people and of Judaism, the substitution of conditions of emancipation for conditions of persecution solves one problem only by creating another. Naturally enough, this was not fore-, seen by Moses Mendelssohn and the other pioneers of Jewish emancipation in Europe. They took it for granted that the Jew, having emerged from the ghetto and divested himself of the external peculiarities which cut him off from European life, would still be able to maintain his religious separateness, and to carry out a specifically religious and moral mission in the modern world. But experience has shown them to have been wrong. Judaism reduced to a set of religious beliefs and practices, or to a moral code with some superstructure of ritual, has no abiding hold on the Jew. The possibility of the continued existence of the Jewish people and of Judaism stands or falls with recognition of the fact that to be a Jew means primarily to be a member of a particular ethnic group. On that basis it is possible to build attachment to Judaism as religion or as moral teaching; without that basis the Jew is powerless to with- stand through successive generations the forces of an environment which is always drawing him away from his own tradition, in its religious, ethical and intellectual aspects even more than in its ceremonial aspect. Hence a reaffirmation of the national idea in Judaism is even more readily intelligible as a reaction against the results of emancipation than against persecution.

It is not surprising, therefore, that, when the case for Jewish nationalism was first presented by a Jew in a European language, it was based on the disintegrating effects of assimilation rather than on the sufferings of the unemancipated Jews. In his Rom und Jerusalem, published in 1862, Moses Hess delivered a trenchant attack on the theory of German " Reform " Judaism, showed that Judaism could not live except on the basis of the national idea, and foretold a spiritual and political rebirth of the Jewish people in Palestine. Fourteen years later Jewish Nationalism was advocated on similar lines by George Eliot in Daniel Deronda. For both writers the essential thing is that the Jewish people should have an opportunity of taking up the broken thread of its history, and of expressing its own spirit and characteristics in a form of life shaped by itself. Considera- tions based on anti-Semitism are secondary.

Even in Russia, for so long the home of the great masses of Jews and the very temple of governmental anti-Semitism, Zionism was not fundamentally a product of persecution or pogroms. Until well after the middle of the igth century, the best minds of Russian Jewry saw its hope in emancipation, not in nationalism. They thought that if the Jews of Russia discarded their distinctive language and dress, modified their religious ceremonial so as to make it compatible with European life, and sent their children to Russian schools, they would be admitted to full participation in the life of their country, like the Jews of western Europe, and all would be well. A vigorous propaganda on behalf of Haskalah "enlightenment " or "modernism" had been carried on for some decades in the Hebrew language, which was used not because of its national associations, but because the apostles of Haskalah disdained to write in Yiddish, and no European language, was intelligible to