Forest City press. (Forest City, Potter County, D.T. [S.D.]) 1883-19??, 1917-12-27
BRITISH SUCCESSES IN HOLY
LAND HAVE MADE POSI-
BILE REALIZATION OF OLD.
DREAM OF JEWRY FOR Ma.
TIONAL HOME AND REFUGE.
From the Spectator, London,

nificance to the agitation among British
Jews for 1.-THE reconstruction of Pales-
tine as the national home of the Jewish
people. 10 which the government hav
promised their support. The idea is very
old-so old indeed. that it has for many
Jews ceased to possess any secular
meaning. w may lOok back through
the ages to the fatal year 1874. when
Hadrian took Jerusalem. stamped out
Bar Cochba's revolt i'm blood and for
babe the Jews to settle again i'm Judea,
and trace the more or less feeble efforts
or ne oppressed people to regain their
old home. But as the centuries passed
the Jews of the dispersion were con-
flrmed in the belief thai the return to
zion, for which they prayed in their
sNiiaSoSues. would not be accomplished
IN this world; a very small minority
interpreted literally their traditional
Ionsln2s and migrated to the Holy
Land. III is true that Palestine offered
lew attractions for energetic traders
and artisans. The Mongol and Tartar
lhNaslonS of the Thirteenth and Four
teenth centuries worked havoc through
out the near east and Palestine was laid
waste with such barbaric t~horoughness
tnat III mas never vet from
the shock. The early Turkish sultans.
and especially Solyman the Magnifi-
cent, Henry WIS contemporary. were
friendly to the Jews, as the caliphs had
been before them, and admitted the
refugees fleeing from the Spanish in
QUESTION. The late. sultans We're not
hostile and little waves of immiNration
from Poland, Russia, Austria and Ru-
mania broke at long intervals on the
silent shores. where, as Gibbon saws.
once ~reSounded the worlds debate
Napoleon. with the insight of genius.
proposed to found a Jewish state i'm
Palestine when he was besieging Acre,
but his proposal was coldly received i'm
,Jewry and was dropped. A few thou
sand Jews. virtually all immigrants or
out a wretched existence in the decayed
towns of Palestine. They We're sup
ported to a large extent by the CHA
lukah," or system of charitable funds
to which the Jews all over Europe ON
%tributed. nominally for the support of
poor scholars studying i'm the holy
places. This small and pauperized
community offered no basis for "a state
such as Napoleon had i'm mind.
The revival of Palestine as a Jewish
land may be said to date from about the
year 1910, when Mehemet Ali's claim
to Syria had set the powers by the ears
and directed attention to that part of
the Turks dominions.
In 1870 there We're said to be no more
than $4,000 Jews i'm all Palestine. BY
1880 there We're $4,000 Jews i'm .Jerusa-
lem, alone. George Eliot in Daniel De-
ronda GS76) expressed in eloquent
terms the idea that Palestine shouid he
"a republic where the Jewish spirit
manifests itself in a new order found
ed ON the old" and Laurence Oliphant
a few years later tried hard to start a
Jewish agricultural settlement east of
the Jordan for some Rumanian refu-
gees. But the Jews of western Europe
and America took little interest in the
subject until it vas forced upon them
by the Russian ''pogroms" in 1881 and
1882. The thousands of wretched folk
fleeing from the horrors of the Pale
compelled their fellow Jews in happier.
lands to consider whether q systematic
emigration from Russia and Rumania
to Palestine would not solve, at least
in part. the problem of Jewry in east
ern Europe. Many of the refugees
who. with help from the west, formed
the Jewish colonies which, until the
war broke out, We're prospecting, eS-
pecially at Tel AVN, the garden suburb
of Jaffa, and at Zichron Jacob, near
Samaria. whose early Rumanian set
tiers were assisted by O%liphant. The
universal compassion felt for the suf-
ferers stirred Jewry to it's depths. The
society of "Choveve Zion" or Lovers
of Zion was founded i'm 1884, and soon
had branches in all countries where
Jews lived. Baron Edmond de Roths
child gave literally both Of his time
and money for the organization of the
Jewish settlements, and especially for
education in the widest sense. Baron
Hlrsch left Gl0,000, 900 for the work of
the Jewish Colonization association.
The political side of the new move
ment was still further emphasized when
Or. Theodore Herzl. he Austro-
Partisan journalist. founded the Zionist
organization in 1896, with the object of
uniting all Jews in the world over in
an effort to set up a Jewish state.
DR.. Herzl himself did not care very
much where that state should be: but
the first Zionist congress. held at Basic
in 1897, resolved that the Jewish home
secured by public law SHOULD be in
charter from the sultan failed. The
foreign office in 1903 made conditional
offer of land in British East Africa.
which was not accepted. Then the
Jewish territorial organization, under
the lead of. Mr.. Zangwill, @prospected
possible sites for Jewish colonies in
Cyrenaica and in Angola, but nothing
came of these suggestions. Meanwhile
the Zionist organization, with it's adj
mlnistrative center in Germany, first at
Cologne and then at Berlin, and it's
financial headquarters in London, con-
tlnued, in common with other Jewish
societies, to assist the Jewish settlers
in Palestine. The settlers suffered by
the fall of Abdul Hamid, for the Young
Turks made it clear from the outset
that they would abolish all special pri-
vileges to alien races, and would, for
example. compel Christians and jews
as we'll as Turks to serve in the army.
Yet before the war broke out the Jews
in Palestine were prospecting. They
were sail to number 1875, DOOR 10
times as many as the Palestinian Jews
Of 1S40-and half of them lived in Jeru-