Books-New and Old
Palestinian Yesterdays and Tomorrows
Palestine of the Jews—Past, Present and Future. By NORMAN BENTWICH. 288 pp. London, Kegan Paul.
Mr. Norman Bentwich, a scholarly member of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, has presented us in this volume with an extremely valuable work of Palestinian retrospects and prospects, written during the leisure hours of camp-life in the summer of 1917 while waiting at the portals to enter the Promised Land. The author’s proximity to the Holy Land, and his remoteness from books and libraries while writing, have given his account a wonderful freshness and vividness of first-hand impression. He brought with him to Egypt, not in books, which his baggage-limit debarred, but in his head and heart, a marvelously minute acquaintance with Palestine lore which needed only contact with the immemorial East for a final vitalizing touch. Being inspired, he inspires. Right from the beginning, he succeeds in transmitting to the reader something of his own faculty of intelligent wonder and a sense of vast backward vistas:
of intelligent wonder and a sense of vast backward vistas. “To the whole land there may be applied the words which Cicero used of Athens: ‘Wherever we plant our foot we are treading on history? ... Here we find the stone implements of the paleolithic age illustrating the first attempt of man to conquer Nature; gigantic catacombs and Dolman areas constituting veritable historic cemeteries; mounds which cover the foundations of colossal walls that encircled the fortified cities of the early Semites; ruined streets of Ionian and Corinthian columns, and the remains of vast amphitheatres and basilicas which tell of the settlement of Greeks and Romans; Byzantine churches and mosaic pavements of extraordinary thickness; stern monasteries and skeleton castles of Crusaders perched on almost inaccessible rocks—bastioned walls today enclosing a collection of mud-huts; spacious mosques and graceful minarets soaring out of the plain; and vast stony palaces, convents and hospitals, vying with each other in bigness and solidity, covering the hills. Cave-dwellers and Hittites, Amorites and Philistines, Hebrews and Phœnicians, Babylonians and Assyrians, Hellenes and Romans, Persians and Arabs, Franks and Saracens, Egyptians and Turks, have in turn fought for the country and conquered it and left their traces behind them.”
There follows, then, in Mr. Bentwich’s book, an account of the only conquerors upon whom the country left behind left indelible traces and an unconquerable longing for a return—the Jews. The chapter “Palestine in Jewish History” is a classical pattern of suc- einct historical presentation and of the art to shed light upon the essense of an epoch through illuminating facts, briefly and aptly adduced in support of general characterizations. Chapter II, “The Modern Zionist Movement,” accomplished in twenty-eight pages what two stout volumes of recent British manufacture failed to accomplish—it gives a history of Zionism as a mass-movement, outlining intelligible motives and analyzing a complex of causes and eflects. Beginning with the third chapter, our author enters upon a comprehensive description of the Holy Land, its topography, ethnology, colonies, resources and prospects. The third and fourth chapters, devoted to a descriptive account of the Jewish agricultural colonies, leave a profound impression upon the reader’s mind of an obstinate, continuous struggle for settlement, originating from various quarters of the Jewish compass, maintained in the face of hostile circumstance, renewed after every momentary defeat, and triumphant, thus far, in a petty way— which is not the way envisaged by our learned brother- Zionist for the future:
“The Jewish traveler who does not restrict his time to the round of the chief towns and the Jewish villages can hardly fail to be struck by the smallness of the area still worked by Jewish hands. It is almost a Pale of Settlement under free conditions. He may ride for days over hill and vale without seeing a Jewish farmstead or passing a Jewish wagon. From the great plain of Esdraelon through Jenin, and through Nablons and the center of the country to Judea, or from Jerusalem southward through Hebron to Beersheba, or again along the whole length of the country east of the Jordan, through the Hauran and Gilead and Moab, the way leads through hills that still show the lines of old terraces, and through plains strewn with the ruins of ancient villages and towns, with never a sign of a Jewish settlement. This is the wide field for future enterprise; all this area cfies out for an industrious and sturdy population to develop its resources. .. . Wandering tribes of Bedouins and sparse settlements of Arabs divide the Transjordania region, but there is room for another two and a half tribes of Israel who would revive its old prosperity. .. . The story will come true when the crown lands of the Turkish Sultan come into the market. Then the Jewish agricultural domain will be something more than a fringe and a series of oases. The Jewish belt will spread out eastward and westward, and Jews will share the whole country with the Arabs in friendly emulation. Then we shall be able to speak of a Jewish country instead of Jewish colonies. But this development will require a more whole-hearted effort of the entire Jewish people than Palestinian colonization has as yet evoked. ... When peace comes, the time will have arrived to sound the trumpet, to raise the banner, and to gather the exiles from the four corners of the earth.” ;
After this foreheralding of a great Jewish future in Eretz-Israel; Mr. Bentwich, in Chapter V, turns to the oldest of old Jewish interests—to Jerusalem. Here again, a peculiar clarity and circumspect compass of vision, an ability amounting almost to genius of clearly encompassing and tersely depicting vast complexes, stands our author in good stead. We have looked at the canvas of Jerusalem as unrolled by Renan, by Margoliuth, by Pierre Loti—yet nowhere in our tolerably wide range of reading have we found such a serene and luminous perspective of the Holy City as in Mr. Bentwich’s fifth chapter. Our readers, we are sure, will thank us for reproducing a few swift strokes of ethical delineation:
“_.. There is no large city in which the proportion of the Jewish to the total inhabitants is so great, and there is no place in the world, not even New York with its million Jews, where the Jewish population is so representative of every section and class of Jewry. Already they have begun to stream in from the four corners of the earth, just as in the time when the Temple stood, they came up to the Metropolis of their nation. Here you find kaftaned and gaberdined Jews from every ghetto of Eastern Europe; eager-looking students from the universities of the west; tall, commanding figures clad in cloth of gold from Bokhara and Turkestan, and living near them poor weak immigrants from Yemen and Persia, hoping equally to hasten the day of the coming of the Messiah; dignified but indolent Sephardin from the near East, side by side with the hustling Americanized Ash- kenazio, or the highly-strung Russian revolutionaries half-intoxicated with modern thought. .... No Jewish community, however remote, is unrepresented at Jerusalem. Even the Falash’as of Abyssinia, a strange survival of the first exile, mixed with foreign and strange elements, who have been cut off from the catholic conscience of Jewry for 2,000 years, have sent students there to be trained in the