The historical fact that we Jews are usually lagging in our ideas and movements way behind the free Gentiles has been already established long ago. As an isolated people we lack the lively threads that bind other people under whom we live, and before the vicissitudes in their cycle of ideas, culminating from the progress of the world, reach us, considerable time passes. For example, when the world had stormed with the Reformation, which was a revolution against the Powers of the church, we were active in sophistry; when the world was striving for 2political democracy intensified by the agitation of philosophers and thinkers, the Jews believed that Shabsi Tzwie [a fanatical dogmatist] could realize the redemption through the ineffable name of God. When the nations were beginning to formulate boundaries and culture, the Jews were ardent cosmopolitans, and so it goes on like this endlessly.

This also holds true for our Jewish socialists. They tread in the steps of the Gentile socialists, and are always a few decades behind. They firmly cling to the out-moded internationalism of Karl Marx. They have already known that internationalism can only become a reality when the different nations will be free, each having its own home-land independently.

Enlightened socialists in various countries are nationalists to begin with, and internationalists afterward. While they believe in internationalism, they maintain that their own nation should free itself above anything else, and they recognize that very right for all other nations.

Our socialists - as children of an isolated people - have not as yet reached the stage of developing concepts. They are still clinging to the decrepit concept of internationalism without a nation. The only Jewish socialists who have shown progress along with the world are the Poale Zion [an organization fighting for socialism in Palestine].

And now we witness a Gentile socialist giving the Jewish socialist a lesson; incidentally, he is not a cheap socialist either. He is the 4secretary of the Internationalist Socialist Bureau in Europe, Mr. Heismans. He is a recognized socialist leader. In a public statement, the noted socialist said that the realization of Zionism is one of the possibilities of the forthcoming international treaty among the nations, and that he, as a socialist, is very much in sympathy with the movement.

This, coming from a prominent Gentile, is a hope that our Jewish socialists will probably discard their semi-mouldy ideas and fall in line with the progressive socialists.