more than 25,000 of them in the home of their race, but by the beginning of the European War, when their immigration ceased for the present, they numbered 120,000 souls.  Till then the Ottoman Government adopted the ancient Turkish policy of neglect towards them, for they were not powerful enough numerically to earn the honour of a massacre, and, in addition, they were useful settlers.  Backed by powerful Western influence, French, English, and German alike, they improved out of knowledge the values of the lands where they established themselves, and by intelligent management, by conserving and increasing the water supply with irrigation and well-digging, they have brought many thousand acres into cultivation.  Originally refugees, fleeing from outrageous persecutions, their immigration by degrees took on a different spirit.  Not only were they coming out of captivity, but they were entering into the ancient Land of Promise again.  Zionism, the spirit of the returning exiles, animated them, and, according to their prophets, they realised that ’The Lord shall comfort Zion, He shall comfort all her waste places.’  They had sowed in tears; now, on their return, they were reaping in joy, and, though their land was still under the infidel yoke, they were allowed to dwell in peace, busy, industrious, with the halo of home-coming in their hearts.  They paid, of course, their Turkish taxes, but these were not levied in any oppressive manner, and their colonies were thrifty, self-governing, and prosperous.  Already before the war, one-tenth of the cultivated land in Palestine was in their hands, they had their own schools, their own methods of organisation, and, more significant than all, Hebrew became a living language again.  Germany, intent on her penetration of Turkey, made an attempt to Germanise them also (for Germany, as we shall see, has a very special interest in these Jewish colonies), shook her head over Zionism, for which she tried to substitute Prussianism, and wanted to make the German language compulsory in Jewish schools at Haifa and Jaffa, but her effort completely failed.  Nothing could show the inherent vitality of this Jewish colonisation more strikingly.

These Jewish settlers then were left in peace; from minuteness they escaped the notice of the Young Turk party in its schemes for the complete Ottomanisation of the Empire, and, until the present year 1917, no mention of ‘the Jewish question’ was propounded.  But it will he remembered that in 1915, certain Jewish refugees, taking warning from the Armenian massacres, fled to Egypt, and there founded a Zionist mule-corps, which served under the English in the Gallipoli campaign.  It seems very probable that it was this that directed the attention of Jemal the Great to the Jewish colonies in Palestine:  possibly it was merely that he was a more thorough Ottomaniser than his colleagues in Constantinople.  In any case he ordered the ‘deportation’ of all Jews from Jaffa, Gaza, and other agricultural districts.  All Jews