“... he was sorry to say that the magnificent truth respecting the Chosen People has been set aside by certain Jews themselves. There were some who were unconscious of the miracle of the preservation of the Jewish race, in spite of the efforts of the whole world to assimilate them—of the miracle of their distinct existence unassimilated with the other nations of the earth. Where was there a literature produced by any nation that had had that moral civilising and enfranchising power over the hearts and minds and lives of men that the literature of Israel had exercised?...”
“... It was necessary to incite the national idea and national ambition in the heart of Israel throughout the world. Why should an intelligent and powerful race be content to be vagrants on the face of the earth? Why should they be content to be a homeless race now that circumstances were pointing to facilities for giving them a home?...”
“... The national movement was a reality and a fact. It is not a spasmodic movement, but one that was being carried on with great practical business-like skill and determination....”
“... Let the world give the Jews their home. Palestine was the cradle of their race, its ancient and proper home, the centre of its great and glorious history, and it was the outpourings of sorrow for it that has rendered the literature of the Jews the most precious and beautiful one extant. The Jews had a right to Palestine, it was God’s gift to them, and that was a greater right than an Englishman’s right to England....”
“Stir yourselves up, agitate, work, labour for your cause. I know such a man as Mr. Gladstone is a friend of this movement....”[¹]
[¹] No. 18 ... Palestina, The Chovevi Zion Quarterly.... —December, 1896. pp. 14–16.
In confirmation of this evidence as to Gladstone’s attitude towards Jewish national distinctiveness, we find in his writings an eloquent recognition of the “Hebrew genius.”
81. “But indeed there is no need, in order to a due appreciation of our debt to the ancient Greeks, that we should either forget or disparage the function, which was assigned by the Almighty Father to this most favoured people. Much profit, says St. Paul, had the Jew in every way. He had the oracles of God: he had the custody of the promises: he was the steward of the great and fundamental conception of the unity of God, the sole and absolute condition under which the Divine idea could be upheld among men at its just elevation. No poetry, no philosophy, no art of Greece ever embraced, in its most soaring and widest conceptions, that simple law of love towards God and towards our neighbour, on which ‘two commandments hang all the law and the prophets,’ and which supplied the moral basis of the new dispensation.”
82. “There is one history, and that the most touching and most profound of all, for which we should search in vain through all the pages of the classics,—I mean the history of the human soul in its relations with its Maker; the history of its sin, and grief, and death, and of the way of its recovery to hope and life and to enduring joy. For the exercises of strength and skill, for the achievements and for the enchantments of wit, of eloquence, of art, of genius, for the imperial games of politics and of war let us seek them on the shores of Greece.... All the wonders of the Greek civilisation heaped together are less wonderful, than the single Book of Psalms.”
83. “Palestine was weak and despised, always obscure, oftentimes and long trodden down beneath the feet of imperious masters. On the other hand, Greece, for a thousand years, ... repelled every invader from her shores. Fostering her strength in the keen air of freedom, she defied, and at length overthrew, the mightiest of empires; and when finally she felt the resistless grasp of the masters of all the world, then too, at the very moment of her subjugation, she herself subdued them to her literature, language, arts, and manners. Palestine, in a word, had no share in the glories of our race; while they blaze on every page of the history of Greece with an overpowering splendour. Greece had valour, policy, renown, genius, wisdom, wit; she had all, in a word, that this world could give her; but the flowers of Paradise, which blossom at the best but thinly, blossomed in Palestine alone.”[¹]