Conference Traces American Interest in Palestine over 300 Years

Three centuries of contintinuing American interest in Palestine, and in the Jewish restoration to Palestine, were uncovered by leading historians here today in the religious and secular literature of the United States since the 17th Century and in the co u#### of newspapers and periodicals published in this country during the past 200 years. The historians are participating in a two-day Conference on the Early History of Zionism in America, convened by the American Jewish Historical Society and the Jewish Agency for Palestine, being held at the Theodor Herzl Institute here.

The opening session of the conference was a seminar on “Pre-Herzlian Zionism,” or the emergence in this country of the idea of the Jewish restoration to Palestine prior to the organization of political Zionism by Theodor Herzl in 1897. The conference also heard a paper prepared by Dr. Alex Bein, director of the Central Zionist Archives of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem, describing the vast wealth of historical material available to the researcher, a large portion of which originated in the United States.

In a paper tracing the changing concepts of Palestine in 17th, 18th and 19th Century American literature, Dr. Samuel H. Levine, educator and lecturer at Long Island University, observed that from the days of the early and literary New England divines, Palestine, as theme o### #sion, in book, in sermon or in place name, has been present in American life and letter in some periods it was central; in others only peripheral. But it was always there.”

In a study of “The American Press and Jewish Restoration During the 19th Century,” Dr. Milton Plesur, of the University of Buffalo, noted that while the term “Zionism” did not begin to appear in the American press until the mid-1890’s , there was always “a rather remarkable and persisting concern for a Jewish restoration,” and “Jewish colonies established in Palestine sporadically throughout the last century attracted considerable attention.”

Dr. Plesur believes that part of the newspaper and periodical concern with Palestine was stimulated by travel and exploration there. Also, throughout the 19th Century, the many Jewish persecutions aroused American sympathies, he points out. “Long before Herzl, a nation still moved by daring feats of pioneering, perceived that the Jew had a stated in his old homeland,” he stresses. “The New York Daily Tribune reported in ### that agricultural colonization had achieved great results and supported the idea that Czarist victims should rebuild Palestine.”