Zionism and World Politics; A Study in History and Social Psychology (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: and of the land that holds them in the life of mankind, that importance is of small degree beside the role of this land in the life and labours of the Jewish people. It is from the latter, in fact, that the former derives. Palestine has been the centre of the Jewish theory of life and the Jews' outlook on the world. Their national tradition is built around it. Entering it, staying in it, being driven from it, returning to it, are the instigating motives of their historic narratives, of their prophetic books, of their psalms, their liturgy, their prayers, their collective endeavour in the community of mankind. No people in history has identified itself in joy and in sorrow, and always in aspiration, so completely with a single land, and a land which the great majority of their generations have known only in prayer, in idea, in vision, for a thousand years. This identification is itself a universally accepted commonplace of the great tradition of the Western world. The connection between the Jew and Palestine, the connection between Palestine and the Jew is customary, natural, a matter of course even to the least literate of Europeans. So, also, by and large, is the reunion of these two that have been separated. The original source of these commonplaces of the European mind is of course that body of varied documents, sacred to Jew and Christian alike: the Bible. A secondary but equally potent source is Christian theology. According to the biblical narrative, the history of the Jews as a people may be said to begin with the hope of the Promised Land, with the consciousness of a goal to be attained collectively, in return for the assumption of a collective obligation to a supernatural being. This consciousness in the course of time converted a congeries of tribes into a nation, ...