Jewish Autonomy Quotes
This quotation is very surprising for most people. Reading the text alone, most of us would assume that it came from someone when the Zionist movement was fighting for a Jewish homeland in what is now Israel. Or just before the UN decision in 1947 to partition Palestine. However, it came from one of our founding fathers in Colonial times. Adams was by no means the only Founding Father with this point of view. Fundamentalist Protestants have put much credence in God’s granting the area for the Jewish People—then as today.
This is the first statement of a Jewish nation since Biblical Times.
It was signed by over 400 American notables—politicians and clergy, Christian and Jewish. Signers included the Mayors of Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore, congressmen and editors of most of the leading newspapers of the day. Blackstone’s Memorial predated the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl by 4 years and Blackstone, thought a Christian, was credited as being the “Father of Zionism” by many of the American Jewish Zionist leaders. See {614859}.
The recommendation for partition was the basis of the decision of the United Nations in 1949 to partition Palestine.
at the First World Zionist Congress, 1897
During the 1920s there was a dispute between Romania and Russia regarding land area claimed by both. Few modern people know that Communist Russia, less than a decade after the Russian Revolution, had proposed the creation of a Jewish State. The State would be part of the Soviet Union and under Communist control. While there were some communist Russian Jews who were enthusiastic supporters of such a Jewish State, the Jews of the area were more concerned by the kind of autonomy the Jewish state would have. Western Jews were split. Most were Zionists and wanted an independent Jewish nation, not a Jewish subdivision of the Soviet Union. Pro Communist Jews tended to like the idea but many of them preferred a communist nation in Palestine. Anti-Communist Jews did not want Russia to dominate any more land and saw a Jewish state under communist domination as contrary to the highly traditional Jewish individualistic and independent culture. Soon Lord Balfour was to make his famous declaration about Palestine as a Jewish homeland, and most Jews and many others lost all interest in the earlier Russian idea.
