Diana Muir: Who really said it? ... “A Land without a People for a People without a Land”
[Diana Muir is the author of Reflections in Bullough’s Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England (University Press of New England, 2000).]
“A land without a people for a people without a land” is one of the most oft-cited phrases in the literature of Zionism—and perhaps also the most problematic. Anti-Zionists cite the phrase as a perfect encapsulation of the fundamental injustice of Zionism: that early Zionists believed Palestine was uninhabited,1 that they denied—and continue to reject—the existence of a distinct Palestinian culture,2 and even as evidence that Zionists always planned on an ethnic cleansing of the Arab population.3 Such assertions are without basis in fact: they both deny awareness on the part of early Zionists of the presence of Arabs in Palestine and also exaggerate the coalescence of a Palestinian national identity, which in reality only developed in reaction to Zionist immigration.4 Nor is it true, as many anti-Zionists still assert, that early Zionists widely employed the phrase “A land without a people for a people without a land.”
The Origin of the Phrase
Many commentators, such as the late Arab literary theorist Edward Said, erroneously attribute the first use of the phrase to Israel Zangwill, a British author, playwright, and poet.5 In fact, the phrase was coined and propagated by nineteenth Christian writers.
In 1831, Muhammad Ali Pasha, the ruler of Egypt, wrested control of Greater Syria from direct Ottoman control, a political change which led the British Foreign Ministry to send a consul to Jerusalem. Such a development catalyzed popular imagination.
The earliest published use of the phrase appears to have been by Church of Scotland clergyman Alexander Keith in his 1843 book The Land of Israel According to the Covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob.6 Keith was an influential evangelical thinker whose most popular work, Evidence of the Truth of the Christian Religion Derived from the Literal Fulfillment of Prophecy,7 remains in print almost two centuries after it was first published. As an advocate of the idea that Christians should work to encourage the biblical prophecy of a Jewish return to the land of Israel, he wrote that the Jews are “a people without a country; even as their own land, as subsequently to be shown, is in a great measure a country without a people.”8 Keith was aware that the Holy Land was populated because he had traveled to Palestine in 1839 on behalf of the Church of Scotland, and returned five years later with his son, George Skene Keith, believed to be the first photographer to visit to the Holy Land.
In July 1853, British statesman and social reformer Lord Shaftesbury wrote to Foreign Minister George Hamilton Gordon, Lord Palmerston, that Greater Syria was “a country without a nation” in need of “a nation without a country… Is there such a thing? To be sure there is: the ancient and rightful lords of the soil, the Jews!”9 Shaftesbury elaborated in his diary that these “vast and fertile regions will soon be without a ruler, without a known and acknowledged power to claim dominion. The territory must be assigned to some one or other. There is a country without a nation; and God now in his wisdom and mercy, directs us to a nation without a country.”10 A subsequent Shaftesbury biography sold well and exposed a wider audience to the phrase.11
The year after Shaftesbury’s first use, a writer in a Presbyterian magazine told readers that, “Surely the land without a people, and the people without a land, are intended soon to meet and mutually possess each other”12 and, in an 1858 essay, yet another Scottish Presbyterian, Horatius Bonar, advocated the “Repatriation of Israel… [in which] we have a people without a country, as well as a country without a people.”13
Following an 1881 trip to the Holy Land, American William Eugene Blackstone, another Christian advocate of restoring a Jewish population to Palestine, wrote that this “phase of the question [of what to do with Jews subject to Tsarist persecution] presents an astonishing anomaly—a land without a people, and a people without a land.”14
Anglicans also favored the concept. In 1884, George Seaton Bowes, a Cambridge University clergyman advocated the return of Jews to Palestine and also used the phrase, “a land without a people… [for] a people without a land.”15
John Lawson Stoddard, a Bostonian from a privileged background, grew rich traveling to faraway lands and then giving stereopticon lectures upon his return. In an 1897 travelogue, he exhorts the Jews, “You are a people without a country; there is a country without a people. Be united. Fulfill the dreams of your old poets and patriarchs. Go back, go back to the land of Abraham.”16
By the late nineteenth century, the phrase was in common use in both Great Britain and the United States among Christians interested in returning a Jewish population to Palestine.17 Christian use of the phrase continued into the first decades of the twentieth century. In 1901, American missionary and, later, Yale professor, Harlan Page Beach wrote approvingly of the idea that the Jews will one day, “In God’s good time, inhabit the land of their forefathers; otherwise we can offer no valid explanation of a people without a land and a land without a people.”18 In her 1902 novel, The Zionist, English writer Winifred Graham (1873-1950) has her Jewish hero stand before the Zionist congress and advocate for the return of “the people without a country to the country without a people.”19 Augustus Hopkins Strong, a prominent American Baptist theologian, used the phrase in 191220 and, on December 12, 1917, the lead article in The Washington Post, written by a Christian journalist, used the phrase.
The first use of the phrase by a Zionist did not come until 1901 when Israel Zangwill, probably echoing Shaftesbury’s wording, wrote in the New Liberal Review that “Palestine is a country without a people; the Jews are a people without a country.”21
Although the image of Palestine as a “land without a people” was most commonly advanced by Christian proponents of a Jewish return to Palestine, it would be wrong to ascribe the perception of Palestine as a land without a people only to Christians. In the context of the nineteenth century and the many nationalist movements that captured the Western imagination, the notion of a Jewish restoration in Palestine seemed logical, even without religious motivations. In 1891, William Blackstone sent an open letter, known today as the Blackstone Memorial, to U.S. president Benjamin Harrison: “Why shall not the powers which under the treaty of Berlin, in 1878, gave Bulgaria to the Bulgarians and Servia to the Servians now give Palestine back to the Jews?…These provinces, as well as Roumania, Montenegro, and Greece, were wrested from the Turks and given to their natural owners. Does not Palestine as rightfully belong to the Jews?”22 Nineteenth-century westerners associated peoples or nations with territory, and so to be a land without a people did not imply that the land was without people, only that it was without a national political character. ...
Rashid Khalidi uses the phrase to charge Zionist leaders with believing that the land was “empty.”64 Edward Said actually alters the wording of the phrase to allege that Zionists thought that Palestine was “a land without people.”65
But travelers such as Keith, Blackstone, Stoddard, and Zangwill—who first visited Israel in 1897 and whose own father went to live there—were well aware of the small Arab population, which Blackstone, at least, addressed when he opined that it would not pose an obstacle to Jewish restoration.66 If some Zionists believed that Israel was literally empty, it is unlikely that they did so after Ahad Ha’Am’s 1891 essay, “Truth from Eretz Yisrael,” sparked debate over conditions in Palestine.67
Did some Jews imagine the Land of Israel as an abandoned land? Perhaps. But it seems more likely that Jews were capable of knowing on one level that there were enough Arabs in Palestine to stage pogroms in Hebron and Safed in 1834, while still referring to the land as empty. The editors of The Maccabean, for example, estimated in 1901 that there were only 150,000 Arabs in Palestine, perhaps one-third of the true number, and suggested the following year that one-third of the population was already Jewish. They nevertheless characterized Palestine in 1905 as “a good land, but it is an empty land.” 68
Zionism, with its penniless, powerless enthusiasts and grand plans to restore a Jewish commonwealth, was a movement of wishful thinkers. Herzl’s treatment of the topic in The Jewish State was typical.69 He gives the resident population passing mention and only in the context of discussion of political obstacles that lay in the path to building a Jewish state. ...
Read entire article at Middle East Quarterly (Spring 2008)
“A land without a people for a people without a land” is one of the most oft-cited phrases in the literature of Zionism—and perhaps also the most problematic. Anti-Zionists cite the phrase as a perfect encapsulation of the fundamental injustice of Zionism: that early Zionists believed Palestine was uninhabited,1 that they denied—and continue to reject—the existence of a distinct Palestinian culture,2 and even as evidence that Zionists always planned on an ethnic cleansing of the Arab population.3 Such assertions are without basis in fact: they both deny awareness on the part of early Zionists of the presence of Arabs in Palestine and also exaggerate the coalescence of a Palestinian national identity, which in reality only developed in reaction to Zionist immigration.4 Nor is it true, as many anti-Zionists still assert, that early Zionists widely employed the phrase “A land without a people for a people without a land.”
The Origin of the Phrase
Many commentators, such as the late Arab literary theorist Edward Said, erroneously attribute the first use of the phrase to Israel Zangwill, a British author, playwright, and poet.5 In fact, the phrase was coined and propagated by nineteenth Christian writers.
In 1831, Muhammad Ali Pasha, the ruler of Egypt, wrested control of Greater Syria from direct Ottoman control, a political change which led the British Foreign Ministry to send a consul to Jerusalem. Such a development catalyzed popular imagination.
The earliest published use of the phrase appears to have been by Church of Scotland clergyman Alexander Keith in his 1843 book The Land of Israel According to the Covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob.6 Keith was an influential evangelical thinker whose most popular work, Evidence of the Truth of the Christian Religion Derived from the Literal Fulfillment of Prophecy,7 remains in print almost two centuries after it was first published. As an advocate of the idea that Christians should work to encourage the biblical prophecy of a Jewish return to the land of Israel, he wrote that the Jews are “a people without a country; even as their own land, as subsequently to be shown, is in a great measure a country without a people.”8 Keith was aware that the Holy Land was populated because he had traveled to Palestine in 1839 on behalf of the Church of Scotland, and returned five years later with his son, George Skene Keith, believed to be the first photographer to visit to the Holy Land.
In July 1853, British statesman and social reformer Lord Shaftesbury wrote to Foreign Minister George Hamilton Gordon, Lord Palmerston, that Greater Syria was “a country without a nation” in need of “a nation without a country… Is there such a thing? To be sure there is: the ancient and rightful lords of the soil, the Jews!”9 Shaftesbury elaborated in his diary that these “vast and fertile regions will soon be without a ruler, without a known and acknowledged power to claim dominion. The territory must be assigned to some one or other. There is a country without a nation; and God now in his wisdom and mercy, directs us to a nation without a country.”10 A subsequent Shaftesbury biography sold well and exposed a wider audience to the phrase.11
The year after Shaftesbury’s first use, a writer in a Presbyterian magazine told readers that, “Surely the land without a people, and the people without a land, are intended soon to meet and mutually possess each other”12 and, in an 1858 essay, yet another Scottish Presbyterian, Horatius Bonar, advocated the “Repatriation of Israel… [in which] we have a people without a country, as well as a country without a people.”13
Following an 1881 trip to the Holy Land, American William Eugene Blackstone, another Christian advocate of restoring a Jewish population to Palestine, wrote that this “phase of the question [of what to do with Jews subject to Tsarist persecution] presents an astonishing anomaly—a land without a people, and a people without a land.”14
Anglicans also favored the concept. In 1884, George Seaton Bowes, a Cambridge University clergyman advocated the return of Jews to Palestine and also used the phrase, “a land without a people… [for] a people without a land.”15
John Lawson Stoddard, a Bostonian from a privileged background, grew rich traveling to faraway lands and then giving stereopticon lectures upon his return. In an 1897 travelogue, he exhorts the Jews, “You are a people without a country; there is a country without a people. Be united. Fulfill the dreams of your old poets and patriarchs. Go back, go back to the land of Abraham.”16
By the late nineteenth century, the phrase was in common use in both Great Britain and the United States among Christians interested in returning a Jewish population to Palestine.17 Christian use of the phrase continued into the first decades of the twentieth century. In 1901, American missionary and, later, Yale professor, Harlan Page Beach wrote approvingly of the idea that the Jews will one day, “In God’s good time, inhabit the land of their forefathers; otherwise we can offer no valid explanation of a people without a land and a land without a people.”18 In her 1902 novel, The Zionist, English writer Winifred Graham (1873-1950) has her Jewish hero stand before the Zionist congress and advocate for the return of “the people without a country to the country without a people.”19 Augustus Hopkins Strong, a prominent American Baptist theologian, used the phrase in 191220 and, on December 12, 1917, the lead article in The Washington Post, written by a Christian journalist, used the phrase.
The first use of the phrase by a Zionist did not come until 1901 when Israel Zangwill, probably echoing Shaftesbury’s wording, wrote in the New Liberal Review that “Palestine is a country without a people; the Jews are a people without a country.”21
Although the image of Palestine as a “land without a people” was most commonly advanced by Christian proponents of a Jewish return to Palestine, it would be wrong to ascribe the perception of Palestine as a land without a people only to Christians. In the context of the nineteenth century and the many nationalist movements that captured the Western imagination, the notion of a Jewish restoration in Palestine seemed logical, even without religious motivations. In 1891, William Blackstone sent an open letter, known today as the Blackstone Memorial, to U.S. president Benjamin Harrison: “Why shall not the powers which under the treaty of Berlin, in 1878, gave Bulgaria to the Bulgarians and Servia to the Servians now give Palestine back to the Jews?…These provinces, as well as Roumania, Montenegro, and Greece, were wrested from the Turks and given to their natural owners. Does not Palestine as rightfully belong to the Jews?”22 Nineteenth-century westerners associated peoples or nations with territory, and so to be a land without a people did not imply that the land was without people, only that it was without a national political character. ...
Rashid Khalidi uses the phrase to charge Zionist leaders with believing that the land was “empty.”64 Edward Said actually alters the wording of the phrase to allege that Zionists thought that Palestine was “a land without people.”65
But travelers such as Keith, Blackstone, Stoddard, and Zangwill—who first visited Israel in 1897 and whose own father went to live there—were well aware of the small Arab population, which Blackstone, at least, addressed when he opined that it would not pose an obstacle to Jewish restoration.66 If some Zionists believed that Israel was literally empty, it is unlikely that they did so after Ahad Ha’Am’s 1891 essay, “Truth from Eretz Yisrael,” sparked debate over conditions in Palestine.67
Did some Jews imagine the Land of Israel as an abandoned land? Perhaps. But it seems more likely that Jews were capable of knowing on one level that there were enough Arabs in Palestine to stage pogroms in Hebron and Safed in 1834, while still referring to the land as empty. The editors of The Maccabean, for example, estimated in 1901 that there were only 150,000 Arabs in Palestine, perhaps one-third of the true number, and suggested the following year that one-third of the population was already Jewish. They nevertheless characterized Palestine in 1905 as “a good land, but it is an empty land.” 68
Zionism, with its penniless, powerless enthusiasts and grand plans to restore a Jewish commonwealth, was a movement of wishful thinkers. Herzl’s treatment of the topic in The Jewish State was typical.69 He gives the resident population passing mention and only in the context of discussion of political obstacles that lay in the path to building a Jewish state. ...