J. D. B. News Letter

which to beat us? Whatever be the future reserved for the Jewish colony in Palestine, and I wish it all prosperity and all the wisdom possible, for the Jews of the West the problem of nationality was long ago solved. The idea of a Jewish nation was dealt a decisive blow by Moses Mendelssohn.

We see in the Judaism of the future that which is already in the minds of many Jews — a moral community, a group of individuals bound together by the remembrance of great things done in the past, of sufferings and injustices endured in common as well as by the relief afforded by sublime and fructifying moral ideas which are at the base of their religious faith. This conception of religious and social morality suffices to ensure to Judaism the vitality of an organism clearly differentiated, were it only by what it does not contain.

More or less that represents the views of all the Reinach brothers. As one of the members of the Council of the Ica, Salomon Reinach came into contact several times with Dr. Theodore Herzl, who addressed him as “my excellent adversary”.

“I called him my dear opponent”, Salomon Reinach afterwards wrote to Herzl.

I got to know Theodore Herzl in 1903, he wrote. We also corresponded a little. I called him “My dear Opponent”, for on Zionism we were not of one mind. He impressed me as an enchanting, highly-cultivated and thoroughly honest man. But he did not trouble himself very much about economics or practical matters, while I, since 1886 a member of the Alliance Israelite and one of the founders of the Ica, knew from many years of experience, that enthusiasm may be useful, but that it cannot suffice.

In a letter to Salomon Reinach, informing the Ica of the failure of the Sinai Plan, Herzl wrote: “The project which had almost united us has failed — but this between us — I have still a ray of hope, and if my efforts succeed I count upon you, yes, upon you, my excellent adversary, to uphold my propositions in your Council”.