Page:Zionism 9204 Peace Conference 1920.pdf/31

to the failure of the harvest and the crisis caused by the Crimean War. The Holy Land Relief Fund then constituted is still in existence. Having raised upwards of £20,000 and having also just received a legacy of $50,000 for the benefit of Palestine Jews from Judah Touro of New Orleans, Sir Moses went out again to Palestine in May 1855. On his way he obtained from the Sultan a firman permitting the purchase of land, and bought land at Jaffa and Jerusalem on which he planted gardens, erected a windmill, opened a girls' school, and established agricultural colonies at Safed and Tiberias. In 1874 correspondence between Montefiore, Colonel Gawler's son, the Haham Bashi of Jerusalem, and many of the local Jews, was published by the Jewish Board of Deputies 'on the Promotion of Agriculture and other Industrial Pursuits' in the Holy Land; and in the same year Sir Moses made his seventh, and last, pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He suggested sanitary improvements, housing of the working classes in garden cities where olive-trees, vines, and vegetables should be grown, and loan societies to enable colonists to purchase land; and he bade them 'begin at once'. The Sir Moses Montefiore Testimonial Committee, founded in 1878 to commemorate his centenary, adopted some of these suggestions; and the neat little houses outside the Jaffa gate have been erected by building societies which it constituted. Montefiore's noble life kindled the imagination of his co-religionists throughout the world, created quite a literature concerning him in many languages, and, although the glamour attached to his activities is now somewhat out of fashion among Zionists, undoubtedly led to an ever-increasing faith in Palestine as the country for the Jewish colonist. In 1876 George Eliot's Daniel Deronda appeared—a famous novel in which both emancipation and nationalism are claimed for the Jew. Mordecai is the prophet of the hope that 'our race shall have an organic centre, a heart and brain to watch and guide and execute; the outraged Jew shall have a defence in the court of nations'.