On the Origin, Meaning, Use and Abuse of a Phrase

Middle Eastern Studies

Volumn 27, Issue 4, 1991, Pages 539-550

  Garfinkle, Adam M ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84933484521     PISSN: 00263206     EISSN: 17437881     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00263209108700876     Document Type: Article

References (49)

1. Encyclopedia Judaica, Volume 16, p. 1046. Another is to be found in ‘The Jewish Right to Israel: An Ethical Approach’ by Pinhas Rosenbluth in Who Is Left? Zionism Answers Back (Jerusalem: The Zionist Library, 1971), p. 186. Rosenbluth wrote that ‘Certain formulas lose their meaning within a short time…and these include Herzl's remark about a people without a country and a country without a people’. He gives no reference.
2. Territorialism embodied the notion that while the Jews needed a place for themselves, it need not be Palestine. Zangwill founded the Jewish Territorialist Organization (JTO) in 1905 to pursue this end.
3. Herzl's reply to finding out for the first time from Max Nordau that there were Arabs in Palestine was: ‘I did not know that, we are committing an injustice.’ See Howard M. Sacher, A History of Israel (New York: Knopf, 1979), p. 163. Another reference to this episode is in Z. Werblowsky, ‘Israel et Eretz Israel,’ Les Temps Modernes, XXII; 253 (1967), p. 391.
4. Some early Zionists believed that while the Arabs of Palestine were not a people as such, they were nevertheless enough of a problem to make political Zionism in Palestine unrealizable. See Yaakov Ro'i, ‘The Zionist Attitude to the Arabs, 1908–1914,’ Middle Eastern Studies, IV:3 (1968); pp. 198–242.
5. Personal communication from Michael Heymann, 3 April, 1989. Heymann, the director of the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, warned me that Bein ‘never provided me with chapter and verse’.
6. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972).
7. But could not cite chapter and verse either. Personal communication from Walter Laqueur, 25 April, 1989.
8. Again without specific citation, in a letter to Reginald Coupland, from Jerusalem, 7 January, 1939, Magnes wrote that: ‘When Israel Zangwill said: “Give the land without a people to the people without a land,” neither he nor many other Jew realized that there was a people here.’ See Arthur A. Goren, ed., Dissenter in Zion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 318.
9. Emanuala Trevisan Semi, La Verita da ‘Eres Yisra'el Di'Ahad Ha'am (Napoli: Instituto Orientale di Napoli, 1977), Supplemento n. 10 agli annali, Vol. 37 (1977), p. 32. Again no original source is given.
10. ‘The Return to Palestine,’ New Liberal Review (London), II, December 1901, p. 627.
11. Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), pp. 175, 269n. Lewis thanks Michael Curtis for the reference.
12. Peter Buch's introduction to Maxime Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial Settler-State? (New York: Monad Press, 1973), p. 12.
13. David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1974), p. 19.
14. Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Times Books, 1979), p. 9. Some citations are downright silly. Geraldine Brooks, in a 6 March, 1991 Wall Street Journal article (p. A6) entitled ‘In Humiliting Defeat, Can Palestinians Finally Find Peace?’ attributed the quote not to Herzl, or Zangwill, but to Golda Meir!
15. Elia T. Zureik, The Palestinians in Israel: A Study in Internal Colonialism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 33. Zureik does bring a citation, but not to Zangwill. Instead, he cites Ahad Ha'am's ‘Truth From the Land of Israel,’ but the phrase does not appear there.
16. For the text of the Palestinian ‘declaration of independence’ of November 1988 and a commentary, see Orbis, 33:2 (Spring 1989), pp. 248–252. Mention of the phrase appears on p. 249. Arafat continues to make mistaken reference to the famous phrase. Asked what Israeli-Palestinian negotiations might achieve, Arafat began his answer: ‘It means the end of the claim made by world Zionism…about people without land and land without people, that is the land of Palestine for the Israeli people. Their sitting with the Palestinians would mark the end of the claim they have been repeating since the 1897 Zionist Congress.’ See Al-Sharq Al-Awsat (London), 28 March, 1990, p. 5, in FBIS-NEA 29 March 1990, p. 2.
17. Jay Y. Gonen, A Psychohistory of Zionism (New York: Mason/Charter, 1975), p. 193.
18. Amos Elon, The Israelis: Founders and Sons (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), p. 195. Elon misquotes and misunderstands not only this phrase, but others as well. At the beginning of chapter 7 Elon uses this epigram: ‘But there are Arabs in Palestine! I did not know …!’ and attributes it to ‘Max Nordau, 1897’. Of course, the words are not Nordau's but Herzl's, responding to Nordau's criticism, as indicated in note 3 above.
19. With much justification, detailing the divergence of interests between the Arabs of Palestine and Syria, one scholar dates it squarely at 1920. See Daniel Pipes, ‘The Year the Arabs Discovered Palestine’, Middle East Review, Summer 1989.
20. Quoted in Paul R. Mendes-Flohr, A Land of Two Peoples: Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 60.
21. Meir quoted in a standard anti-Zionist work, Alfred M. Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1978), p. 146.
22. If Mrs Meir meant to say in 1969 that there was still no Palestinian nation then, that is, of course, another matter.
23. N. Zeine, The Emergence of Arab Nationalism (Delmar, New York: Caravan Books, 1973), p. 127. Emphasis in original.
24. Quoted in ‘Zionism’, Encyclopedia Judaica, Vol. 16, p. 1075. The original Hebrew version was published in Hamelitz (The Advocate), a Saint Petersburg Hebrew language daily which, in 1891, was the mouthpiece for the Hoveve Tzion movement. It is reprinted in Hebrew in Kol Kitvei Ehad Ha'am (Writings of Ahad Ha'am) (Tel-Aviv: Devir, 1947), and in part one of Ahad Ha'am's Al Parashat D'rakhim (On the Parting of the Ways) (Berlin: Druck von H. Itzkowski, 1904), pp. 26–43.
25. See note 3, above.
26. In general, see Ro'i, ‘The Zionist Attitude to the Arabs, 1908–1914.’ Ro'i spends only a few pages discussing events prior to 1908, but enough to characterize as exaggerations remarks such as: ‘…it was not until after 1908 that a few leading Zionists began to be aware of an Arab problem.’ Fred J. Khouri, The Arab-Israeli Dilemma, Third Edition (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1985), p. 4.
27. See excerpts from Borochov's 1905 essay ‘The National Question and the Class Struggle’ in Arthur Hertzberg, ed., The Zionist Idea (New York: Atheneum, 1969), pp. 355–60.
28. Originally from Yiddisher Kemfer, no. 4, 22 January 1918, quoted in Shabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 37–38.
29. See notes 8 and 20.
30. Israel Zangwill, The Voice of Jerusalem (New York: Macmillan, 1921), p. 92.
31. Zangwill's view then, until his death in 1926, was that for Palestine to be a Jewish state, that Arabs would have to be moved to their own state, which would rise simultaneously with Israel. See Laqueur, A History of Zionism, pp. 231–32.
32. The Voice of Jerusalem, p. 109.
33. This remains the view of dispensationalist American Protestant groups and largely explains their support for the modern State of Israel.
34. He did. See Martin Gilbert, Jerusalem: Rebirth of a City (New York: Viking, 1985), pp. 11–36 passim.
35. ‘The State and Prospects of the Jews’, Quarterly Review, CXXV (January 1839), pp. 166–192. This essay was a review of Lord Lindsey's Letters on Egypt, Edom and the Holy Land (London: 1838). When, on 11 August 1840, Palmerston wrote to the British Ambassador in Constantinople during the Damascus Affair, he used language about the ‘growing belief’ among the Jews of Europe that the time was at hand for the return to Zion deriving almost verbatim from Shaftesbury's article. See Gilbert, Jerusalem, p. 23, for an excerpt from Palmerston's letter; the language corresponds to pages 176–7 of Shaftesbury's ‘The State and Prospects of the Jews.’ This same ‘belief, which was probably more wishful thinking among Christian millenarians than fact, was also mentioned by Benjamin Disraeli to a young Lord Stanley (the 15th Earl of Derby) in 1851. See Robert Blake, Disraeli's Grand Tour: Benjamin Disraeli and the Holy Land, 1830–1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 131.
36. His letter, of 25 September, 1840 — which does not contain the famous phrase — is quoted in part in Georgina Battiscombe, Shaftesbury: A Biography of the Seventh Earl, 1801–1885 (London: Constable, 1974), p. 129. The original letter is cited as being from the National Register of Archives, Palmerston Papers. GC/SH/14.
37. NRA, Shaftesbury (Broadlands), SHA/PD/2,1 August, 1840, quoted in Geoffrey B. A. M. Finlayson, The Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, 1801–1885 (London: Eyre Methuen, 1981), p. 114. Shaftesbury had a special advantage in swaying Palmerston further; he was married to the daughter of Palmerston's long time consort, Lady Emily Cowper, whom he married shortly after her husband's death in 1839. Further, most scholars believe that Shaftesbury's wife, Minnie, was Palmerston's daughter, not Lord Cowper's. In other words, Palmerston was effectively Shaftesbury's father-in-law. See Ronald Sanders, The High Walls of Jerusalem (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1983), p. 5; and Finlayson, p. 45.
38. National Register of Archives (NRA), London, Shaftesbury (Broadlands) MSS, SHA/PD6, 30 July 1853, quoted in Finlayson, pp. 441,462n.
39. A stereopticon is a device that takes pictures simultaneously from two different angles. When the pictures are superimposed upon one another, the resulting image appears to have three dimensional depth. This effect was commonly achieved with specially made binoculars; in Stoddard's case, it was achieved with a set of lanterns projecting light onto a screen.
40. Stoddard, p. 220.
41. Stoddard, p. 221.
42. Stoddard, p. 223.
43. This cannot be directly inferred from the text but Stoddard's biographer, Daniel Crane Taylor, establishes the particulars. Stoddard visited Palestine once, in 1875, but lectured on it during two of seventeen lecture seasons. The first time, in the 1881–1882 season, his lecture ‘From Mars Hill to Mount Olivet’ did not contain the famous phrase. The second, ten years later, ‘Jerusalem and the Holy Land,’ did. Stoddard's lectures were prepared beforehand with great care; his custom was to return after his travels to the Hotel Mesmer in Baden Baden and, in August and September, write his lectures and memorize them. He then would return to the United States to present a five lecture program in each city; this he did for about thirty weeks each year from October through April. Thus, Stoddard wrote the famous words in August or September 1891, and between October 1891 and April 1892 spoke them at least thirty times to large, better-educated audiences all over the east coast and as far west as Chicago. The mention of Baron Edmond de Hirsch's death was enabled by pre-publication editing. See Daniel Crane Taylor, John L. Stoddard: Traveller, Lecturer, Litterateur (New York: P. J. Kennedy & Sons, 1935), pp. 162,193–4.
44. Taylor, pp. 184–5.
45. Taylor, p. 195.
46. Taylor, p. 108. Schiff was an investment banker with access to presidents and influence over indebted foreign governments. Like many German-speaking American Jews of that day, he had mixed feelings about Zionism, so Stoddard's suggestion that Jews ‘return to the land of Abraham’ might not have pleased him. Still, his concern for the plight of Jews the world over was intense and genuine; Zionism as a means of saving the Jews of the Russian empire and elsewhere surely did not bother him. The proof is found in the correspondence that Schiff entered into with Herzl on 10 April, 1904. See Marvin Lowenthal, ed., The Diaries of Theodor Herzl (New York: Dial Press, 1956), pp. 438–40.
47. I say invention, but it is not certain that Stoddard did not get it from earlier Christian Zionists, or from Shaftesbury himself. But Stoddard never mentions Shaftesbury, and the phrase is not in Disraeli's Tancred or in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, the most likely places Stoddard might have encountered it. Nor does Stoddard mention any early Zionist or the word Zionism. Thus, the evidence suggests that Stoddard independently invented the phrase.
48. It may be that Zangwill's memory of Shaftesbury was freshened by his hearing or reading Stoddard. Zangwill was a native English speaker with an ear for a phrase — indeed, he invented a good many himself (e.g., ‘the melting pot’) — and he was a voracious reader. But Zangwill's awareness of Stoddard must remain speculative for Zangwill nowhere mentions him in his writing.
49. There is yet another possible link between Stoddard and Herzl's early entourage. After retirement in 1901, Stoddard moved to Meran in the Austrian Tyrol. His German was in fact excellent; later in life, after his conversion to Roman Catholicism, he translated books from German. Stoddard attended to the Austrian press and probably wrote for it. Thus, Stoddard might have introduced the phrase there in some fashion for Herzl or other German-speaking Zionists to stumble upon and repeat.