Page:Zionism 9204 Peace Conference 1920.pdf/35

] subsidizing and assisting libraries and schools, never achieved more than a succés d'estime. Still, it undoubtedly paved the way for modern Zionism; and Herzl could not have achieved his phenomenal success if these 'Lovers of Zion' had not prepared the soil.

Meantime two individual Jews had, by their reasoned munificence, achieved far more than Montefiore in turning their co-religionists to agriculture. Baron Maurice Hirsch (1831–96) founded the Jewish Colonization Association (commonly known as 'Ica'), and endowed it with over ten millions sterling. Its original object was to relieve the oppressed Jews—primarily those of Russia and Rumania by encouraging emigration to its colonies in the Argentine, Brazil, Canada, and the United States. The Baron, however, did not favour Palestine as a field for colonization, because he feared that Russia would become the predominant power there. Baron Edmond de Rothschild has for the last thirty years unostentatiously, but on a scientific basis, also devoted millions to the establishment of agricultural colonies exclusively in Palestine, and especially for viticulture, and he had succeeded before the war in putting his colonies on a self-supporting basis. The 'Ica' is administered by delegates of the Anglo-Jewish Association, the Alliance Israelite of Paris, and Jews of Frankfort, Berlin, and Brussels. A few years ago it undertook for Rothschild the management of his Palestine colonies, so that, although not a Zionist organization, it has great interests in the Holy Land. 



Throughout the nineteenth century, Palestine had commanded the increasing attention of the Jews; but it lacked the vivifying touch of a genius who was to make it monopolize their hopes and ambitions.

Such a genius was Herzl, 'the tall figure with the black-bearded Assyrian head that drew all eyes'. He was the founder of the modern idea of Zionism, and in the brief space of ten years from the publication of