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28
THE ZIONIST CONGRESSES
[No. 162

constitution was adopted, under which Congresses were to meet every other year, with a conference in the years intervening. The Greater Actions Committee was to consist of (a) twenty-three members elected by Congress on the nomination of standing Committees; (b) the Presidents of the Executives of the National Federation and of other Federations; (c) the Chairmen of Council and Directors of the Jewish Colonial Trust, the Anglo-Palestine Co., and the Jewish National Fund; (d) the Chairmen of the Board of Arbitration and the Congress Council. The leadership was to be with the Deputy President and three other members of the Actions Committee.

Wolffsohn's health was breaking down, and he offered to resign; but the Congress decided to make no change in the presidency till their next meeting. The Russian delegates, under Ussishkin, sought to capture the movement. They were all for political work, and wished the seat of administration to be removed from Cologne to Paris or Berlin, but did not carry their point. Wolffsohn was a practical Zionist, and belonged to the more sober section who thought that the preparation of the people and the land for colonizing was the practical work for Palestine. This mode of economic penetration was a reversion to the Palestinian activities of the 'Chovevi Zion' type.

At the biennial conference held in July 1910 a suggestion that the Administration should be strengthened by an Advisory Board consisting of Nordau, Sir Francis Montefiore and Tchlenov, a leading Russian Zionist, fell through, as each of these gentlemen declined to act. Nordau was beginning to create an opposition to the Wolffsohn leadership.

In August 1911 the tenth or 'Jubilee' Congress was held at Basle, under the presidency of Nordau. Here the cleavage between the political Zionists and the cultural Zionists became accentuated, but, on the whole, the tendency was rather to the Palestinian ideals of the 'Chovevi Zion'. A decided movement ensued for the re-establishment of Hebrew as a living