The Commercial Appeal · Memphis, TN · 2 October 1997

CP-1997-037

1906 letter tells of life in Palestine

PERRE MAGNESS

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Transcribed from the clipping

In scrapbooks, in attics, in drawers all over town are fascinating documents of family history, often ignored and unrecognized. One such family treasure has seen the light. Dr. Sidney S. Friedman found a letter that tells an unusual story, especially meaningful as Jews around the world gather today to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.

Friedman’s great-grandparents, Herman and Mollie Goldberger, had a clothing factory in Memphis. For a few years around the turn of the century, they lived in New York, then returned to Memphis. In 1906, they received this letter from a relative whom they had entertained in their Brooklyn home, recounting his journey to Palestine.

At the beginning of the 20th Century, thousands of Jewish immigrants came to the United States from eastern Europe, fleeing pogroms and persecution in their homelands. Adolph H. Schagrin reversed that trend. In 1906, he went with his family from the United States to settle in Palestine. Palestine — today’s Israel — has been overrun by conquerors from time immemorial.

Ammonites, Canaanites, Hebrews, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Seleucids, Romans, Arabs, Christian Crusaders, Mamelukes, Ottoman Turks all laid claim to the land at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. Most of the Jews fled during Roman times.

By the time Palestine became part of the Ottoman Empire in 1517, there were small colonies of Christians and Jews, but most of the population was Muslim. During the 1800s, organized persecution of the Jews in Russia spurred Jewish immigration to Europe and the United States.

In 1882, a group of Jewish youths calling themselves Lovers of Zion formed a movement to promote immigration to Palestine. Austrian journalist Theodore Herzl was a leader in the political Zionist movement, seeking recognition of the Jewish claim to a homeland in Palestine. Herzl organized the first World Zionist Conference in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897.

The movement gained political recognition during World War I, when Britain defeated the Turks. In 1947, after the Holocaust of World War II, the United Nations approved the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. Adolph Schagrin joined the early Zionist movement to settle in Palestine. He wrote his impressions in a Jan. 16, 1906 letter to his aunt and uncle.

How this transcription was made

Date confirmed on the page (folio-verified (the folio reads “THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL” centre-left and “MEMPHIS, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 2, 1997” at the right. 2 October 1997 was a Thursday, and it was also the first ).

Context added by this archive

A local-history column, not news. Its value for the archive is as a 1997 example of American prose about Palestine in which the indigenous population is present only as a religious census category and a line in a list of conquerors. The one-word absence — “Palestinian” never appears — is the finding.

Cite this clipping

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