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Palestine of the Jews—Past, Present and Future. By Norman BENTWICH, of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force. With an Appendix: The Redemption of Judaea, and other Ärticles on the British Advance. London: Paul Kegan, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd.
During these months of Zionist suspense and transition, perhaps the most helpful sedative for restless minds is a study of rational anticipations of a Jewish Palestinian future, based upon the country’s historical past and upon an intelligent survey of its present condition. Mr. Bentwich’s “Palestine of the Jews” meets this timely demand of the disquieted popular psyche in an unexcelled fashion. It surveys in seven chapters the Jewish history of Palestine, gives a luminous account of the modern Zionist movement, describes the agricultural colonies born of Zionist sentiment, contrasts their life with the obsolescent pietism and quietism of Jerusalem and the “holy cities” and depicts the changes now under way in the educational methods of the Palestinian Jewries, Chapter VIII and IX, entitled respectively “The War and the Settlements” and “The Future of the Land and the People,” deaf with the liberation of the land from the Turkish yoke and with anticipations of a National Home for the Jews. The appendix, consisting of a fascicle of reprinted contributions to the Manchester Guardian, gives a wonderfully vivid account of British campaign exploits in Holy Land anno 1917, and of the author’s participation therein as a member of the Eevptian Expeditionarv Force.
Of the origin of the volume the author, an illustrious young scholar with an enviable record of Zionist service, gives the following account in his preface:
"This little book has been written during the leisure hours of camp life in the summer of 1917, while waiting at the portals of Palestine to enter the Promised Land. It is based on notes which I had jotted down in the country during several visits in the years before the war. As, between 1916 and 1917, we slowly crossed the Wilderness of Sinai in which the Hebrew tribes had wandered nearly 4,000 years ago, I would often meditate at night under the starry sky upon the past and the future of my people who had wandered now over the world for night two thousand years. When vision was limited, reflection and reminiscence helped the lingering hours to pass, and when action was checked I would dream of what might be when Israel was restored to his home. . . . My stray notes which I have put together in these circumstances may perchance help to make better known the rebirth of the Jewish people, and the regeneration of the historic land of Israel, which has been happening in the last half century. . . . My reason for adding to the inexhaustible literature of Palestine is that I have tried to tell the simple tale of what has been achieved by a small remnant of the oldest nationality."
Chapter I, "Palestine in Jewish History," is both a model of concise outline-drawing and a striking presentment of what might be called the stratified culture of a very old center of Mediterranean civilization, layer upon layer, from pre-Hebrew days to the days of the unspeakable Turk, together with a brief account of mediaeval Palestinian travel and colonization.
Chapter II, "The Modern Zionist Movement," gives in fewest words the history of Jewish emancipation in Western Europe, with its two consequences: first, assimilation and then reversal to the national concept.
Chapters III and IV introduce a most luminous and succinct history of the Jewish colonial settlements in Judea, Samaria and the North, with a survey of their present condition. The bustle and stir, the very heartbeat of a nascent Jewish Palestine finds a resonance in the reader's soul as he peruses these fascinating chronicles of many independent an intercrossing efforts at rebuilding the land.
Chapter V gives a panoramic view of Jerusalem—a wonderfully competent and circumspect account of this Eastern hive of the nations and of their tangled religious interests in the place.
Chapter VI, in its fine word-painting, partakes of the gentle beauty of Galilee which it describes. It affords us a glimpse at the past glories of the "holy cities" of Safed and Tiberias.
The seventh chapter is entirely devoted to Jewish educational retrospects and prospects in Palestine—the Talmud Torahs, the schools of the Alliance and the Hilfsverein—the modern schools and the Revival of the National Tongue—the Haifa Polytechnikum and the struggle for Hebrew, the Bezalel School, and—last but not least—the Hebrew University at Jerusalem.
Upon such retrospects and presentments of present-day conditions as detailed above are based the hopeful and ingenuous anticipations of the two concluding chapters—anticipations for which we refer our readers to the book itself. It will richly repay close study. As Zionists and as Jews, we exult in the promise of this thoughtful classical English prose, informed with a scholarly knowledge of the past and the inspiration of a great national rebirth on the olden soil in the near future.
A "Deserted Village" of the East
A Lithuanian Village. By LEON KOBRIN. Translated by Isaac Goldberg, Ph.D. 12mo, cloth, $1.75 net. Brentano's.
All Ghetto novels written by people to the manner born are, in a sense, idylIs—tragi-comedies of life lived within narrowly circumscribed surroundings and under the sway of immemorial Jewish . traditions—traditions attacked and modified by the life without but extremely tenacious in their hold upon Jewish soul-states. Jewish life has been for many centuries divorced from tilled ground. The reflection of this life in modern fiction is therefore, in the main, a literature of the city pavements. There runs, however, through modern Ghetto fiction, an undercurrent of wistful longing after rural existence—a sentiment that looks backwards to the vines and figtrees of scriptural times and forward to a restoration of the ancient soil to the people that made it famous all over the globe. This back-to-nature sentiment finds an interesting outlet in Leon Kobrin’s “Lithuanian Village”—a cycle of idylis made accessible now to the English-readinze public in Dr. Goldberg’s translation.
There are isolated Jewish village-communities scattered all over the Western part of the former Czaric empire. Nearly all of them are in a process of liquidation—as time goes on their dissolution gathers speed, through the war and its after-effects, through insecurity of life amid hostile surroundings, through the sinking economic level of the inhabitants and the rising fortunes of their relatives in America and elsewhere. Within a decade or so, most of these Russian-Jewish village-communities will probably be a memory of the past. At the brink of the World-War, in 1914, Mr. Kobrin resolved to preserve the fragrance of their remoteness in a volume of reminiscences—with the result now before us.
"Somewhere in Lithuania" he begins his tale of a moribund community, "there once nestled (the clumsy inversion is part of Dr. Goldberg's utterly resourceless English) the little village of B—. It boasted a population of several hundred Jewish souls and a score or more of Gentile peasants; it had a market and shops; an old, gloomy Polish church in the middle of the market-place; a Jewish apothecary who would have been reckoned by his fellow-Jews as a Gentile, only that (sic) he appeared in the synagogue at New Year's services and upon the Day of Atonement; a Jewish teacher with an