Our Monthly: Mi-mizraḥ u-mi-ma‘arav

Anyone who says that our Hebrew literature has developed, expanded, and been enriched over the past few years either errs or misleads. Or, perhaps, they demand very little from literature in general and our literature in particular. We shall not lie and claim that our monthly journal will fill the void of our literature, or that it will rebuild it and raise it up to the level of living literatures. A task such as this requires great, unceasing, and multigenerational collective work focused on a single goal. And this requires great and fundamental changes in the lives of the members of our nation. But nevertheless, we are not exempt from sitting idly by, from growing lazy, or from trying to evade this titanic labor. And just as it foolish to vainly exaggerate our spiritual powers, to overstate their value and quality—for reality slaps our faces, strikes our mouths, and we are tangled in the thicket of our everyday affairs and are proven false—so too it is a national crime to fail to recognize the forces and talents that we have, or to belittle their character, to weaken their striving and aspiration toward their goal. We wish to revive our literature and to expand its tent to the best of our ability and power. And these are the means we have chosen in order to achieve this goal: We are ready to include in this monthly articles pertaining to all scientific and literary disciplines and their subgenres. Today, every literature stores and absorbs everything conceived and pondered by the hearts of mankind who reflects, expresses, and feels. [ . . . ]

Our literature contains a large amount of specialized drugs, but it lacks basic necessities and food to sustain the heart and enliven the spirit. Whenever we look with eyes wide open at our new Hebrew literature, the words of Darwin come to mind. In his book The Voyage of the Beagle, he recounts that on the St. Paul, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, there are two types of birds, the “booby” and the “noddy” who make nests for themselves there. Species of flies, moths, and ticks sustain themselves on their flesh, and their feces are food for the beetle and the woodlouse. And from these all types of small mosquitoes are fruitful and multiply and they spread over the entire world. Shortsighted, small-minded Hebrew writers are used to defending with stupid mouths and obscene pens the poverty and meager state of our literature. And when they see that in our monthly we will publish articles in all disciplines of science, scholarship, philosophy, literature and their subgenres that have flourished and expanded in our time, they fear that we have imported into our literature elements that are foreign to the spirit of our nation.

Jacob, my servant, do not fear! (Jeremiah 46:27): philosophy and science, the spirit of beauty and good taste, are healthy to the soul of Israel as they are beneficial to all nations. Wisdom, understanding, scholarship, and knowledge are the legacy of the ancients; they are our forefathers’ heritage. And whoever says that that light which is sweet to the eyes of every person is painful to our eyes, and that the spiritual sustenance that brings health and is necessary for the existence of every nation that desires longevity, life of honor and glory, with development and growing perfection—that this substance harms our national body—anyone who says such a thing sentences our nation to death. For a person or a nation that does not have the ability to digest elements that come to its body from without, to turn them into its own flesh and blood, ceases to live. Whoever says, and indeed there are many in our day who say this, that we must not, God forbid, introduce into our Hebrew literature elements that are [only] relevant to the person qua person [not qua Jew], that is the obligation of our literature to pass in complete silence over all the new ideas in science and literature that dominate the era and which propel the members of our generation forward [ . . . ] fully admits that it is best and proper for our nation to be among the gentiles like a potsherd. [i.e., useless, culturally valueless]

Our monthly has an established method and a clear agenda. We aspire to meet these with all our might, and we will neither veer left nor right from the path that we have paved for ourselves. However, we will not shut the gate of our journal before sages and scholars whose views do not correspond with our opinions and views—as long as they also desire the existence of Israel as a nation and admit to the necessary corollaries of this axiom. [ . . . ] We will try to flood our journal with many articles that can shed light upon the qualities of our nation’s soul and its spiritual character, articles predicated on ethnology and anthropology, with accurately analyzed statistics and charts. We will include many articles and books about economics and social sciences in general, and will strive to clarify the livelihood—state of craftsmanship, commerce, and business—among the Jewish people. [ . . . ]

Ever since the day that the ancient hatred of Israel dressed itself in new attire, that which they call “racial hatred,” our [Jewish] brethren in Western Europe have not ceased to fight against it and to waste in this war-effort our moral and intellectual forces. It is all done without any order or organization, without any system or theoretical preparation, for every soldier chooses whatever weapon or strategy is at hand, whatever circumstances present to him. This war is comprised of confusion and bedlam, and it has no national benefit. For do our advocates and defenders know what to answer or to whom should they respond? Do they know how to respond, how much to respond, or whether it is necessary them to respond at all?