The Blackstone Memorial of 1891 was a petition written by William Eugene Blackstone, a Christian Restorationist, in favor of the delivery of Palestine to the Jews. It was signed by many leading American citizens and presented to President Benjamin Harrison. [1]
The Memorial was motivated by concern over the plight of the Jews in Russia where they were being murdered in government-incited pogroms. It argued that it would be politically unwise to ask the Russian government to desist, "What shall be done for the Russian Jews? It is both unwise and useless to undertake to dictate to Russia concerning her internal affairs." [2] But assumed that they would not be welcome in western countries, "Where shall 2,000,000 of such poor people go? Europe is crowded and has no room for more peasant population. Shall they come to America? This will be a tremendous expense, and require years." [2] There was a solution:
"Why not give Palestine back to them again? According to God's distribution of nations it is their home, an inalienable possession from which they were expelled by force." [2]
"Why shall not the powers which under the treaty of Berlin, in 1878, gave Bulgaria to the Bulgarians and Servia to the Servians now give Palestine back to the Jews? These provinces, as well as Roumania, Montenegro, and Greece, were wrested from the Turks and given to their natural owners. Does not Palestine as rightfully belong to the Jews?" [2]
The Memorial petition was circulated in five major cities: Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City, and Chicago. It was signed by 431 prominent citizens from those cities: financiers John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan, future President William McKinley, and Chief Justice Melville Fuller; many members of Congress; the editors of all major newspapers in those five cities, including the still-extant The Boston Globe , The New York Times , Chicago Tribune , The Philadelphia Inquirer , and The Washington Post ; and a long list of university and seminary presidents, mayors, and leading businessmen. The Memorial was presented to President Harrison with little result.
The Blackstone Memorial was turned over to the State Department archives for safe keeping. It has been lost since. All knowledge of the Blackstone Memorial are derived from newspaper reports of the period and biographies of the major people involved. A copy of the Memorial can be found in the Blackstone archives at the Billy Graham Center on the campus of Wheaton College.[ citation needed ]
May 16, 1916, Nathan Straus, at the behest of (later Supreme Court Justice) Louis Brandeis wrote Rev. Blackstone. “Mr. Brandeis is perfectly infatuated with the work that you have done along the lines of Zionism. It would have done your heart good to have heard him assert what a valuable contribution to the cause your document is. In fact he agrees with me that you are the Father of Zionism, as your work antedates Herzl". [3]
After the initial contact, Brandeis asked Rev. Blackstone to prepare for presentation to President Woodrow Wilson a second Blackstone Memorial. The purpose of the second Memorial was to influence President Wilson to support the developing Balfour Declaration. Rev. Blackstone, though 75 years of age, energetically undertook the mission. Of central importance to the second Memorial was the securing by Rev. Blackstone of the endorsements of the Presbyterian Church and most of the mainstream American Protestant movement. President Wilson was a deeply religious Presbyterian. The second Memorial was presented privately to President Wilson May, 1917. The Memorial strongly influenced President Wilson to let the British government of Lloyd George know of American sympathy in favor of the Balfour Declaration. The second Blackstone Memorial was never publicly presented. [4]
The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British government in 1917 during the First World War announcing its support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population. The declaration was contained in a letter dated 2 November 1917 from the United Kingdom's Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. The text of the declaration was published in the press on 9 November 1917.
Zionism is a nationalist movement that emerged in the 19th century to enable the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine, a region roughly corresponding to the Land of Israel in Jewish tradition. Following the establishment of Israel, Zionism became an ideology that supports "the development and protection of the State of Israel".
Chaim Azriel Weizmann was a Russian-born biochemist, Zionist leader and Israeli statesman who served as president of the Zionist Organization and later as the first president of Israel. He was elected on 16 February 1949, and served until his death in 1952. Weizmann was fundamental in obtaining the Balfour Declaration and later convincing the United States government to recognize the newly formed State of Israel.
This is a partial timeline of Zionism in the modern era, since the start of the 16th century.
A homeland for the Jewish people is an idea rooted in Jewish history, religion, and culture. The Jewish aspiration to return to Zion, generally associated with divine redemption, has suffused Jewish religious thought since the destruction of the First Temple and the Babylonian exile.
The Churchill White Paper of 3 June 1922 was drafted at the request of Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State for the Colonies, partly in response to the 1921 Jaffa Riots. The official name of the document was Palestine: Correspondence with the Palestine Arab Delegation and the Zionist Organisation. The white paper was made up of nine documents and "Churchill's memorandum" was an enclosure to document number 5. While maintaining Britain's commitment to the Balfour Declaration and its promise of a Jewish national home in Mandatory Palestine, the paper emphasized that the establishment of a national home would not impose a Jewish nationality on the Arab inhabitants of Palestine. To reduce tensions between the Arabs and Jews in Palestine the paper called for a limitation of Jewish immigration to the economic capacity of the country to absorb new arrivals. This limitation was considered a great setback to many in the Zionist movement, though it acknowledged that the Jews should be able to increase their numbers through immigration rather than sufferance.
Christian Zionism is an ideology that, in a Christian context, espouses the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land. Likewise, it holds that the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 was in accordance with Bible prophecy: that the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty in the Levant — the eschatological "Gathering of Israel" — is a prerequisite for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. The term began to be used in the mid-20th century, in place of Christian restorationism, as proponents of the ideology rallied behind Zionists in support of a Jewish national homeland.
The Faisal–Weizmann agreement was signed by Emir Faisal, the third son of Hussein ibn Ali al-Hashimi, King of the short-lived Kingdom of Hejaz, and Chaim Weizmann, President of the Zionist Organization on 3 January 1919. Signed two weeks before the start of the Paris Peace Conference, it was presented by the Zionist delegation alongside a March 1919 letter written by T. E. Lawrence in Faisal's name to American Zionist leader Felix Frankfurter as two documents to argue that the Zionist plans for Palestine had prior approval of Arabs.
The King–Crane Commission, officially called the 1919 Inter-Allied Commission on Mandates in Turkey, was a commission of inquiry concerning the disposition of areas within the former Ottoman Empire.
Nahum ben Joseph Samuel Sokolow was a Zionist leader, author, translator, and a pioneer of Hebrew journalism.
William Eugene Blackstone was an American evangelist and Christian Zionist. He was the author of the Blackstone Memorial of 1891, a petition which called upon America to actively return the Holy Land to the Jewish people. Blackstone was influenced by Dwight Lyman Moody, James H. Brookes, and John Nelson Darby. He is remembered as the author of the Blackstone Memorial.
The Gathering of Israel, or the Ingathering of the Jewish diaspora, is the biblical promise of Deuteronomy 30:1–5, made by Moses to the Israelites prior to their entry into the Land of Israel.
HeHalutz or HeChalutz was a Jewish youth movement that trained young people for agricultural settlement in the Land of Israel. It became an umbrella organization of the pioneering Zionist youth movements.
As an organized nationalist movement, Zionism is generally considered to have been founded by Theodor Herzl in 1897. However, the history of Zionism began earlier and is intertwined with Jewish history and Judaism. The organizations of Hovevei Zion, held as the forerunners of modern Zionist ideals, were responsible for the creation of 20 Jewish towns in Palestine between 1870 and 1897.
"A land without a people for a people without a land" is a widely cited phrase associated with the movement to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine during the 19th and 20th centuries. Its historicity and significance are a matter of contention.
Christian Zionism in the United Kingdom is a Christian ideology that sees the return of the Jews to Israel as a fulfilment of scriptural prophecy. Supporters of Christian Zionism believe that the existence of the Jewish State can and should be supported on theological grounds.
Anti-Zionism is opposition to Zionism. Although anti-Zionism is a heterogeneous phenomenon, all its proponents agree that the creation of the modern State of Israel, and the movement to create a sovereign Jewish state in the region of Palestine—the biblical Land of Israel—was flawed or unjust in some way.
The Hogarth Message was a January 1918 message from Commander David Hogarth, head of the Arab Bureau in Cairo, to Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca, following Hussein's request for an explanation of the Balfour Declaration.
This timeline of anti-Zionism chronicles the history of anti-Zionism, including events in the history of anti-Zionist thought.
The Future of Palestine, also known as the Samuel memorandum, was a memorandum circulated by Herbert Samuel to the British Cabinet in January and March 1915, two months after the British declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire.
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