A Century before Statehood: The Forlorn Land the Zionists “Stole”

Daphne Anson
24 November '10

One hundred years before the realisation of the Zionist dream, an English clergyman , Reverend A. G. H. Hollingworth, travelled in the Jewish homeland and surrounding region, and in 1849 published The Holy Land Restored. The following extract was printed in the London Jewish Chronicle (15 March 1850), and hardly depicts a land abundant with milk and honey. The extract (to which I append a description of Tiberias at the same period) appears here with no further comment from me (the pictures are from another source):

All its ancient fertility has been obliterated. As if the earthquake had become its only tenant for centuries, its valleys and mountains are riven and dislocated, shattered and torn, heaped with rocks and gravel, deprived of soil and wasted, as if repeatedly burned with fire. The heart of the modern traveller becomes oppressed with a profound melancholy as he moves in silence over the vales. Or when standing on the summit of some precipitous range, he overlooks a wide and extended plain, his eye wanders gloomily upon the deserted face of this which was once the glory of all lands, and he turns in wonder to those pages that describe its original fertility....

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