The Cochran Journal · Cochran, Georgia · 17 April 1913

CP-1913-001

New Era In Palestine

Scan 1162 × 1700 pixels

Transcribed from the clipping

“PHILANTHROPIC work of a new sort which has been instituted in Palestine through the generosity of Nathan Straus has reached such proportions that Mr. Straus is now on his second trip to that country… The institutions which are already in existence through Mr. Straus’s activities are known as the Nathan Straus Relief Fund and the Health Bureau.

The first operates exclusively among the poor of Jerusalem, while the second extends over all of Palestine and concerns some 600,000 persons.

Now he proposes to introduce the system which has been so successfully employed here of providing trained nurses to disseminate hygienic knowledge in districts where modern methods have hitherto been unknown and to teach medical principles so that the ignorance of the people in regard to such subjects may be dissipated… Under his direction the first steps have been taken that the dwellers in the city of Jerusalem and the surrounding country have ever known for the relief of the conditions that have so long impeded the commercial and social progress of that portion of the Turkish empire… With all this charity and benevolence among them, after so many years of neglect, the people of Palestine are taking new heart.

They who have been a downtrodden and discouraged race are now hopeful and cheerful… Betterment of one means improvement of the other, and both are on the forward march. There is a new era in the Holy Land.”

Context added by this archive

A Georgia weekly in April 1913, and two things in it are worth keeping. The health bureau extends over all of Palestine and concerns some 600,000 persons — a working population figure for the country, printed without argument, at a moment when other American pages were calling the same country desolate.

And the phrase for who they are is the people of Palestine, undivided, with no adjective in front of it. What they get in the same sentences is condescension: ignorance to be dissipated, a downtrodden race taking new heart. The page’s other half is a column of jokes headed Gathered Smiles.

Cite this clipping

More from the 1910s

• Condition Of Jews In Russia Not Helped By Our StandCourier Post · 26 April 1913
• …ough the Desert to the Holy LandEvansville Courier & Press · 22 June 1913
• CALLS PALESTINE ARID LANDThe New York Times · 14 December 1913
• HOLY LAND NATIVES SCARED.El Paso Times · 29 December 1913
• JEWISH COLONISTS REDEEM PALESTINEThe New York Times · 13 October 1912
• CHRISTIANS MOWED DOWN BY MOSLEMS AT JAFFA, PALESTINEReading Times · 21 November 1912
• All 77 clippings from the 1910s →

In these collections