An Unpromising Land

Abstract

The Jewish migration at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth was one of the dramatic events that changed the Jewish people in modern times beyond recognition. Millions of Jews sought to escape the stressful conditions of their daily lives in Eastern Europe and find a better future for themselves and their families in one of the countries of immigration overseas. The vast majority of the Jewish emigrants went to the United States; others, in much smaller numbers, reached Argentina, Canada, Australia, and South Africa. From the beginning of the twentieth century until World War I, about 35,000 Jews reached Palestine. Because of the difference in the scale of this migration and also because of the place the land of Israel possesses in Jewish thought, historians and social scientists have tended to apply different criteria to immigration to Palestine than those usual in the study of immigration. They have stressed the uniqueness of Jewish immigration to Palestine and the importance of Zionist ideology as a central factor in that immigration. This book seeks to question the assumption of these researchers and present a more complex picture of both the causes of immigration to Palestine and the profile of the mass of immigrants who reached the port of Jaffa in the years 1904-1914.

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