Throughout the past nineteen hundred years of Jєωιѕн expulsion from Palestine, the Jєωs have kept a vengeful memory of Our Lord’s triumph in the city of His first Easter Sunday. “Next year in Jerusalem!” has been the cry at centuries of Jєωιѕн festivals, echoing from the plains of the Pale of Settlement to the ghettos of Rome. It has been reserved to our own day however — the post-French Revolution, Freemasonic era — to see the progress of a vast Jєωιѕн movement to regain a hold on Jerusalem. And significantly enough, this bold restatement of a national Jєωιѕнness, as we now know it, can be traced to the middle of the 1800’s, to a book which bears the antipodal title, Rome and Jerusalem.

In any historical study of Zionism (the name the Jєωs give to their nationalist movement), Rome and Jerusalem must be accorded the position of a new Torah, a formularization at last of that unwritten law which has guided the nation of the Jєωs during all of Christian times.

The book was written in Paris by a Jєω named Moses Hess, who aimed it principally at the assimilationist Jєωs of his native Germany. A long-time disciple of Karl Marx, Hess had a revolutionist’s bent for explosive ideas. On the very first page of his frank preface, he bursts into that basic Jєωιѕн thesis which gives Rome and Jerusalem its title. “Papal Rome,” writes Hess, “symbolizes to the Jєωs an Inexhaustible well of poison. It is only with the drying up of this source that Christian German anti-Semitism will die from lack of nourishment.”

As the text unfolds, he adds such refinements as: “It is true that Christianity shed a certain glow during the dark ages of history … but its light only revealed the graves of the nations of antiquity. Christianity is, after all, a religion of death.”

Hess then proceeds to the positive means by which Catholic Rome could be defeated. That means, he says, is the building up of Jerusalem — an undefined job which Hess apparently feels must start with each individual Jєω. “Every Jєω,” he proposes in casual blasphemy, “has within him the potentiality of a Messiah and every Jєωess that of a Mater Dolorosa.” In Hess’ dispensation, no Jєω could plead for exemption from service to the Jєωιѕн nation, because “A Jєω belongs to his race and consequently also to Judaism, in spite of the fact that he or his ancestors have become apostates … A converted Jєω remains a Jєω no matter how much he objects to it.”

By the time he gets to page 138, Hess is confidently telling his Jєωιѕн patriots that “The Messianic Era is the present age.” A “regeneration” of the world has been going on since the “great” French Revolution. Rome is already on the way down, he declares, and the job of the loyal Jєω is to establish Jerusalem in its place. Christianity will be “finally replaced among the regenerated nations by a new historical cult. To this coming cult, Judaism alone holds the key.”

It has been the mission of present-day Zionists, who regard Moses Hess as their prophet, to grasp that key securely, and start it turning.