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34 The latter, or the 'pig and plough' Zionists, are agricultural, scientific, non-religious, perhaps anti-religious. Their chief adherents are the students and radicals, the intellectuals of the United States as well as Russia. The most forceful and energetic Zionist leaders belong to them. The long duration of the war and the vast upheavals of the Jewish populations of Eastern Europe have made it difficult to estimate the relative strength of the two parties. Probably the majority rests with the secularists: but, merely on grounds of policy, they would be badly advised ostentatiously to eliminate religion. It is said that a father of a boy at the Jaffa gymnasium, who asked the authorities to see to it that he was confirmed, was met with a blank refusal on the ground that they had nothing to do with religious matters. The Commission recently sent out to Palestine under the auspices of the British Government contained no member of the Mizrahi party. A Jewish Palestine without Judaism is unthinkable; and it cannot be denied that many, perhaps desirable, adherents to the cause, have been frightened away because of its lack of spirituality. 



The Jewish National Fund was organized with a view to develop the systematic colonization activity in Palestine. Its establishment originated at the first Zionist Congress (1897), when Professor Shapira of Heidelberg proposed that donations should be collected from Jews of all parts of the world in order to create a 'General Jewish Fund', of which two-thirds were to be devoted to the purchase of land, and one-third to its maintenance and cultivation. Such land was to be mainly rural, suitable for colonization, and never to be sold, but let only to Jews upon hereditary lease. Four years later, at the fifth Congress, a Jewish National Fund was constituted as a limited liability company, with its control vested in the Zionist Congress and its mandatories as the chosen representatives of the Jewish