Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: strong is the tie which binds all these various elements into one Jewish community! In times of peace and quiet this tie may become so thin and impalpable as to be hardly noticed. But let calamity somewhere befall Israel, and, behold, how the Jewish heart is stirred! The Jewish heart, in whichever breast it beats—orthodox, reformed or socialistic—is a Jewish heart still, deeply smarting from a wound inflicted anywhere on the Jewish body. "Behold a people dwelling by themselves, not counting themselves among the Gentiles'' (Num. 23: 9), is as true to-day, after four thousand years, as it was when Israel pitched his tents in the desert of Sinai. 2. 7s the "goluth"-life of the Jew the sole cause of his troubles and shortcomings? No one will maintain that an existence of almost two thousand years, as strangers and homeless wanderers, has done the Jew any good, or has helped to bring out the best qualities of which his nature is capable. But to ascribe all the Jewish troubles and imperfections to his life in exile, is not quite warranted by the facts of his history. Were not trials and tribulations, foreign subjection and foreign oppression, wars and internal dissensions, the rule in that little land of Palestine, during the several hundred years that Israel occupied it? For a little while sunshine and calm would prevail in the Judsean land, only to be followed again by storm and stress. The only years, perhaps, in their entire national history in Palestine, in which the Jews can be said to have tasted to the full a real,independent, national existence, were those of the reign of Solomon, during their first period, and of John Hyrcanus, the Hasmonean, during the second period. Less than forty years in one case and only about thirty in the other. But even these most br...