Courier Post · Camden, New Jersey · 26 April 1913

CP-1913-002

Condition Of Jews In Russia Not Helped By Our Stand

American Government’s Action Has Had a Great Moral Value for History, Says Nahum Sokolow, Noted Publicist, Now Here, but Little Actual Effect—Looking to Palestine for a New Home.

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Transcribed from the clipping

“Since Zionism started in its present form, Herr Sokolow said, some sixteen years ago, the number of Jewish settlers in Palestine has increased about 50,000, there being now about 100,000 there. Fully 90 per cent., he declared, came from Russia.

That there had not been immigration into the Holy Land in greater numbers, he said, was due to the great uncertainty at first hedging about the possibilities of colonization in Palestine, the great question whether or not the natural resources of the land were such as to promise success for the labor of the pioneer settlers and the uncertainty as to the political outlook there… ‘There has been a great change since then,’ he said, ‘and what seemed then a land of little promise and of unknown and doubtful potentialities as concerned its ability to respond to and repay the work of settlers has now, in the colonies conducted by Zionists, shown itself full of promise and plenty to those who will work.’… ‘As for the present greater tide of immigration from Russia to the United States, we Zionists do not consider that a loss to Palestine or to our cause.

There is no competition between this country and Palestine in that regard. We realize that immigrants who come to this country and learn to live under its free institutions and to work under its equal opportunities grow stronger and more enterprising and courageous, more efficient workers for colonization.’”

How this transcription was made

The headline, the summary, the caption and the passages above have been read back against the scan. The page runs to eight agate columns, beside a translated prose poem and a feature about a woman who catches seals, and has not been transcribed further.

Context added by this archive

A leading Zionist figure interviewed in an American paper in 1913, and the vocabulary is his own: colonization twice, settlers, pioneer settlers, the colonies conducted by Zionists. What the country is measured by is whether it will respond to and repay the work of settlers.

The one sentence about America is worth keeping too: immigrants who go to the United States are not a loss, because they come back more efficient workers for colonization. Nobody already living in Palestine is mentioned in any of it.

Cite this clipping

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