Page:Zionism 9204 Peace Conference 1920.pdf/41

] language; and some interest was shown in Jewish emigration outside Palestine to relieve the economic pressure arising out of persecution. A symptom of the cleavage in Zionist ranks was evidenced in the English law courts, where an attempt, opposed by Zangwill in person, was made to restrain the Jewish Colonial Trust from colonizing elsewhere than in Palestine, Syria, Asiatic Turkey, Sinai, and Cyprus. Four hundred delegates from 28 countries attended this Congress, which was chieﬂy memorable for the progress made by the 'Mizrahists', a section which insisted on the religious side of Zionism as of at least equal importance to the political.

Meantime the differences between Wolffsohn, who was the leader of the cultural Zionists, and the acting President Nordau, who was leader of the political opposition, grew more bitter. Nordau took the opportunity offered him, when he presided at a Herzl Memorial Meeting at Paris in August 1913, while pronouncing an impassioned eulogy of Herzl, to attack Wolffsohn, to defend political Zionism, and explain his own abstention from the forthcoming Congress.

In September 1913 the eleventh and latest Congress was held at Vienna, under the presidency of Wolffsohn. The proceedings at this Congress were disorganized and the Zionists as a body were disappointed and discouraged. It was a triumph of practical over political Zionism. There was a dispute between Nordau and the Executive over the choice of a leader. Tchlenov, the Russian Zionist, was unacceptable, and so was Ussishkin; finally Wolffsohn succeeded in retaining his leadership of the party for a while.

The chief practical outcome of the Congress was the emergence of a Jewish University in Jerusalem. Such a University had formed part of the original programme of 1901, but had been left in the background, as it was feared that it might divert energy from the really urgent agricultural work in Palestine. It was now argued, however, that it might prove valuable because it would bring educated people into Palestine