This became the dominant
opinion. It dawned upon many that the only salvation for the Jews lay in
becoming a nation once more. A yearning for a new fatherland and a new
country seized young and old. The times were auspicious. Cosmopolitanism
was everywhere giving place to nationalism. The little Balkan States had
broken the yoke of Ottoman rule, and become self-governing nations since
1878. In Poland, Hungary, and Ireland, home rule was advocated with
fervor that threatened a revolution. Italy and Germany became united
under their own king or emperor. And the Russian Jews, tired of the
constant conflicts with the surrounding peoples, experienced the desire
which had prompted their ancestors to be like all the other nations.
Sokolov's sentiments were reinforced in an anonymous pamphlet written by
Doctor Leo Pinsker (1821-1891), one of the foremost physicians of
Odessa. His _Auto-Emancipation_ (Berlin, 1882) is now recognized as the
forerunner of Herzl's _Judenstaat_, which appeared fifteen years later.
Pinsker accepts as an axiom what Sokolov had tried to demonstrate as a
proposition. Jew-hatred, he claims, like Lombroso in his work on
anti-Semitism, is a "platonic hatred," a hereditary mental disease,
which two thousand years' duration has so aggravated as to render it
incurable.
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