Summary
Early Zionist idealist whose Rome and Jerusalem (1862) Said sets beside George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda for the same theoretical language: restoration of a Jewish state by Jewish colonies in the land of the ancestors, with France as patron and saviour.
Details
- Hess, quoted by Said, looks to France to lend a hand to the founding of Jewish colonies and to restore the Jewish people to its place in universal history, the lost fatherland rediscovered on the road to India and China (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.88 / printed p.67).
- Hess quotes Ernest Laharanne’s The New Eastern Question for his peroration: the Jews as a living channel between three continents, bearers of civilisation to inexperienced peoples and mediators between Europe and far Asia, reclaiming barren land (Laharanne, quoted in Hess, quoted by Said) (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.88 / printed p.67).
- Said’s three interdependent ideas in Hess and Eliot: the nonexistent Arab inhabitants, the Western-Jewish attitude to an empty territory, and the restorative Zionist project (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.89 / printed p.68).