DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.27180#0306
PYRAMID AND TEMPLE
We can guess where their rhythm comes from. What
they produce is not the work of the insignificant poet, but
the house of prayer. Everyone recognizes their fund of
energy which has withstood persecution, exile, and massacre
on innumerable occasions, and everyone wonders where they
learned how to cling together like burrs and rise above the
others who had compelled them to crawl about in caves. It
is the synagogue that stands behind them; nothing replaces
this stimulant, this fund of energy. But does it still exist?
In producing the house of prayer on the stage, they are
getting further away from it. The ghettos are disappearing.
Russia no longer provides pogroms for them, but places the
proper modern producer at their disposal. It is a question
whether the abandoning of their oriental Golgotha, the sense
of measureless anguish, the breeding-place of immeasurable
fertility, may not prove the solution of the Jewish question:
that is to say, the dissolution of the Jews.
Can they discover the substitute for the synagogue they
are searching for in Palestine? The people on the stage deny
it with every limb, and drunkards tell the truth. Zionism is
a poetic fact, a theatrical production. The Jews who are
establishing themselves as peasants, building towns and
founding a State are abandoning the raw product. They are
keen on an idea and fight for it with exemplary energy and
political circumspection, but they are hampered by the very
same systematic display. The settlers bridle the word that
in the synagogue turns into dance or song. They are modern
people, drenched by the great machine that washes all of us,
the machine that works far more effectively than anti-
Semitism for the extermination of the Jews. The mouthing
belongs to the past. As recompense, they may now develop
some of the artistic energy that hitherto we have been
accustomed to deny them.
280
We can guess where their rhythm comes from. What
they produce is not the work of the insignificant poet, but
the house of prayer. Everyone recognizes their fund of
energy which has withstood persecution, exile, and massacre
on innumerable occasions, and everyone wonders where they
learned how to cling together like burrs and rise above the
others who had compelled them to crawl about in caves. It
is the synagogue that stands behind them; nothing replaces
this stimulant, this fund of energy. But does it still exist?
In producing the house of prayer on the stage, they are
getting further away from it. The ghettos are disappearing.
Russia no longer provides pogroms for them, but places the
proper modern producer at their disposal. It is a question
whether the abandoning of their oriental Golgotha, the sense
of measureless anguish, the breeding-place of immeasurable
fertility, may not prove the solution of the Jewish question:
that is to say, the dissolution of the Jews.
Can they discover the substitute for the synagogue they
are searching for in Palestine? The people on the stage deny
it with every limb, and drunkards tell the truth. Zionism is
a poetic fact, a theatrical production. The Jews who are
establishing themselves as peasants, building towns and
founding a State are abandoning the raw product. They are
keen on an idea and fight for it with exemplary energy and
political circumspection, but they are hampered by the very
same systematic display. The settlers bridle the word that
in the synagogue turns into dance or song. They are modern
people, drenched by the great machine that washes all of us,
the machine that works far more effectively than anti-
Semitism for the extermination of the Jews. The mouthing
belongs to the past. As recompense, they may now develop
some of the artistic energy that hitherto we have been
accustomed to deny them.
280