The Shaping of the Modern Middle East Read Online Free PDF

though smaller, contribution to classical Islamic civilization. Like them, too, they suffered from the aftermath of the Crusades. The Ottoman conquests and the immigration of the relatively advanced Spanish and Portuguese Jews brought new opportunities, and during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries they were able to acquire a position of some influence in the Ottoman lands. They lost it during the seventeenth century and were eclipsed, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, by the vigorous and rising eastern Christian communities.

    Throughout the period of the dispersion, Jews from other lands had from time to time settled in the Holy Land. Their numbers, however, had been small, and their purposes mainly religious. In the nineteenth century, an entirely new type of immigrant began to come from Eastern and Central Europe, where the spread of nationalist ideologies provided a new ethos for both gentile persecution and Jewish survival. The new immigrants were men and women whose faith was national rather than religious and whose purpose in the Holy Land was not to pray and die but to work and live. The growth of militant anti-Semitism in Europe gave new point and drive to Jewish nationalism. The two European countries with the largest Jewish populations-Czarist Russia and Austria-Hungary-were both, though differently, affected. In Austria-Hungary, antiSemitism was intellectual and in some degree social. Its effects on the mass of the Jewish population were relatively minor, but its impact on Jewish intellectuals was deeply wounding. It was in the vast and heterogeneous Austro-Hungarian Empire, with its many different nationalities, that Zionism-the idea that there should be a political solution to the Jewish problem, through the restoration of Jewish nationhood and the creation of a Jewish state-was born.
    The position of the much larger Jewish communities of the Russian Empire was incomparably worse. Discrimination against Jews was universal and was sanctioned by both law and custom. Persecution was endemic and frequently violent. Caught in an intolerable situation, the Jews found different ways of escape. By far the greatest number solved their problems individually, by emigration above all to America. A small minority sought a political solution by participating in revolutionary movements aimed at the overthrow of the Czarist regime. Another group, also small, chose the Zionist solution of Jewish rebirth and, instead of migrating to the lands of opportunity in the West, chose to migrate to some impoverished and neglected districts of the Ottoman Empire, to which they laid an ancestral claim.
    By 1914, there were, according to various estimates, between 60,000 and 85,000 Jews in these districts. In the peace settlement after the First World War, this area was assigned under a mandate by the League of Nations to the British Empire and renamed Palestine. In 1917, by a unilateral declaration, the British government had expressed its approval of the idea of establishing a "Jewish National Home" in Palestine. This principle was incorporated in the text of the mandate, and the mandatary government was empowered to take the necessary steps to ensure its accomplishment, without, however, compromising the rights of the existing population. Not surprisingly, the mandatary power found the combination of these two tasks to be impossible, especially when the rise of Nazism in Germany and the persecution and subsequent destruction of Jewish communities wherever the Nazis held sway sent thousands of Jews from all over continental Europe fleeing for their lives.

    The persecuted Jews of Czarist Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had an open world before them. The world depression of the 1930s and the world war and the upheavals in the 1940s offered no such opportunity to refugees and survivors from Nazi Europe. On the contrary, all doors were closed to them. In Western Europe, those who survived the