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Feb. 24, 2005 One theme that one encounters now and then in the writings of apologists for Israel is that there has been a continuous Jewish presence in Palestine since the time of King David. Some Jews acknowledge that this supposed millennial Jewish community in Palestine was tiny, perhaps less than 5% of the population of the whole region. Others try to exaggerate the Jewish presence, minimizing the Palestinian presence. It gets to the point where you might believe that Jews were always there, and that Arabs are the interlopers. Anyway, around 1997 I read a book in Hebrew by a man with a name something like Ostritzky. Because of the dubieties of Hebrew orthography, there are no fewer than 12 ways this could be rendered in English letters—Ostritski, Ostrizki, Ustritsky, etc. I’ve tried to find his name on the Worldwide Web, but cannot. His book was merely the diary of a Russian Jew living in Moscow during the reign of Tsar Alexander III (lived 1845-1894; reigned 1881-1894). Alexander III was the emperor of Russia during the time of the pogroms we so often hear about, and he also ordered the banishment of Jews from Moscow to places like today’s Ukraine and Belarus. Usually billed as unreasoning anti-Semitism, the pogroms and expulsions often were reactions, perhaps over-reactions, to Jewish sharp practices, like extortion, monopolies, bootlegging and the like. But Ostritzky was not a high roller by any means. Quite the contrary, he worked in a meat market owned by a more prosperous Jew, and prided himself on the fact that he rose from being a mere butcher to being a sausage-maker, which apparently takes more skill. He was living in an apartment in Moscow, where he says, that, fleeing police inspections, in his stocking feet in the dead of Winter, he contracted pneumonia. One day, the meat market was closed by the police, and Ostritzky, out of a job, and illegally present in Moscow, moved to Ukraine, as I recall, where a number of Jews had gathered. At that time there was much talk, on one hand, of Aliya (Return to Zion) and, on the other, of Hitbollelut (Assimilation). Various organizations were formed, including one called Billui (an acronym whose meaning I’ve forgotten) and another called the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA). The founder of the JCA was Sir Edmund Rothschild, a French Jew of the famous banking and finance family. Supposedly he got the idea from Alexandre Dumas, of Three Musketeers fame, who, though not himself Jewish, was the friend and well-wisher of Edmund Rothschild. So with his immense resources, Rothschild undertook to foster the Return to Zion, purely for sentimental reasons, and Ostritzky was one of the Jews who joined up. It is to be noted that the Jews were not expelled from the Russian Empire entirely, nor were they under compulsion to move to Palestine, then part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. The assimilationists even proposed to move to South America, and some may have done so. The Jews who did return to Zion were not paupers or free-loaders for the most part. They were farmers from Russia, Byelorussia, Moldavia, Poland, Bulgaria and other parts of Eastern Europe. So they already had some money to invest, but the task of settling the largely unimproved lands was too great a burden upon them, even with the help of Rothschild. Ostritzky speaks of having to work 20 hours a day without enough to eat, and other tremendous hardships. At first the community of Jews in which Ostritzky was a member, consisting of a handful of farmers, opted to attempt to grow lucrative cash crops. They experimented with silk, planting mulberry trees. But this didn’t work out. So they tried tobacco, but this was a fiasco too. So they were reduced to more mundane crops, like beans, wheat and corn. There was no running water and no roads. They had to transport produce to Beirut on camel back. They lacked the means to build a bridge, so they merely filled a nearby river with boulders, figuring the water would flow through. But the road was so bumpy that they had to carry sacks of earth to spread over the top of the boulders. Of course, the earth was washed away again and again, with the result that they had to keep replacing it. One can certainly sympathize with their hardships and sufferings, but the point I am getting at here is that Ostritzky attests no great Jewish population already present in Palestine. All the people there were Arabs, mostly nomads and itinerants to be sure, but still Arabs, and still there. There were ceaseless contentions among the two ethnic groups. This enables one to see that, in reality, this was the beginning of an infiltration or invasion, rather than the continuation of an age-old Jewish presence. Naphtali Imber, the composer of Hatikva was there, and Eliezer ben Jehuda, the most illustrious lexicographer of the Hebrew language, was there. But the former was a Bohemian Jew and the latter a Lithuanian Jew. Of Palestinian Jews, there were none. So much for the idea that Jews have always been in Israel! Reading Ostritzky’s book is something like watching Candid Camera. You see what was really happening, as opposed to what is advertised to have happened. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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