The Impoverished Jews of Pre-Zionist Palestine

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In 1853, the Reverend Arthur G. H. Hollingsworth, published atreatise, Remarks Upon the Present Condition and Future Prospects of the Jews in Palestine:

Amongst the scattered and feeble population of this once happy country, is found, however, an increasing number of poor Jews; some of their most learned men reside in the holy cities of Jerusalem, Hebron, and Tiberias. Their synagogues are still in existence. Jews frequently arrive in Palestine from every nation in Europe, and remain there for many years; and others die with the satisfaction of mingling their remains with their forefathers’ dust, which fills every valley, and is found in every cave.

The Jews weren’t exactly thriving in Palestine. They eked out an existence there against enormous odds. Hollingsworth explains that the Turks made life extremely difficult for the Jews:

He creeps along that soil, where his forefathers proudly strode in the fulness of a wonderful prosperity, as an alien, an outcast, a creature less than a dog, and below the oppressed Christian beggar in his own ancestral plains and cities. No harvest ripens for his hand, for he cannot tell whether he will be permitted to gather it. Land occupied by a Jew is exposed to robbery and waste. A most peevish jealousy exists against the landed prosperity, or commercial wealth, or trading advancement of the Jew. Hindrances exist to the settlement of a British Christian in that country, but a thousand petty obstructions are created to prevent the establishment of a Jew on waste land, or to the purchase and rental of land by a Jew….

What security exists, that a Jewish emigrant settling in Palestine, could receive a fair remuneration for his capital and labour? None whatever. He might toil, but his harvests would be reaped by others; the Arab robber can rush in and carry off his flocks and herds. If he appeals for redress to the nearest Pasha, the taint of his Jewish blood fills the air, and darkens the brows of his oppressors; if he turns to his neighbour Christian, he encounters prejudice and spite; if he claims a Turkish guard, he is insolently repulsed and scorned. How can he bring his capital into such a country, when that fugitive possession flies from places where the sword is drawn to snatch it from the owner’s hands and not protect it?

By 1857, according to the British consul in Palestine, “the country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is that of a body of population.” Henry Baker Tristram, yet another in the seemingly endless stream of English travelers, reported in the 1860s that “the north and south [of the Sharon plain] land is going out of cultivation and whole villages are rapidly disappearing from the face of the earth. Since the year 1838, no less than 20 villages there have been thus erased from the map and the stationary population extirpated.”

The most celebrated chronicler of Palestine’s pre-Zionist desolation was Mark Twain, who wrote about his travels in the Holy Land in The Innocents Abroad in 1869. It is Twain’s literary genius that gives us the most indelible images of the wasteland that was Palestine:

Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies. Where Sodom and Gomorrah reared their domes and towers, that solemn sea now floods the plain, in whose bitter waters no living thing exists—over whose waveless surface the blistering air hangs motionless and dead—about whose borders nothing grows but weeds, and scattering tufts of cane, and that treacherous fruit that promises refreshment to parching lips, but turns to ashes at the touch. Nazareth is forlorn; about that ford of Jordan where the hosts of Israel entered the Promised Land with songs of rejoicing, one finds only a squalid camp of fantastic Bedouins of the desert; Jericho the accursed, lies a moldering ruin, to-day, even as Joshua’s miracle left it more than three thousand years ago; Bethlehem and Bethany, in their poverty and their humiliation, have nothing about them now to remind one that they once knew the high honor of the Saviour’s presence; the hallowed spot where the shepherds watched their flocks by night, and where the angels sang Peace on earth, good will to men, is untenanted by any living creature, and unblessed by any feature that is pleasant to the eye….Palestine is desolate and unlovely. And why should it be otherwise? Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land?

Sir John William Dawson stated the obvious in 1888 when he said: “No nation has been able to establish itself as a nation in Palestine up to this day. No national union and no national spirit has prevailed there. The motley impoverished tribes which have occupied it have held it as mere tenants at will, temporary landowners, evidently waiting for those entitled to the permanent possession of the soil.”

The wait would not be much longer. An English clergyman, Reverend Samuel Manning, described the Plain of Sharon as “a land without inhabitants” that “might support an immense population.” That immense population was beginning to come.