W. H. Page On The Zionist Movement: 1918

Walter Hines Page, Life and Letters of Walter H. Page (Vol. II), by Burton J. Hendrick (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company; 1922), pp. 350, 351.

‘I have never been able to consider the Zionist movement seriously.

It is a mere religious sentiment which will express itself in action by very few people.

I have asked a number of Jews at various times who are in favour of the Zionist movement if they themselves are going there. They always say no.

The movement, therefore, has fixed itself in my mind as a Jewish movement in which no Jew that you can lay your hands on will ever take part but who wants other Jews to take part in it.

Of course there might be a flocking to Palestine of Jews from Russia and the adjoining countries where they are not happy, but I think the thing is chiefly a sentiment and nothing else. . . . I do not think that anybody in the United States need be the least concerned about the Zionist movement because there isn’t a single Jew in our country such a fool as to go to Palestine when he can stay in the United States. The whole thing is a sentimental, religious, more or less unnatural and fantastic idea and I don’t think will ever trouble so practical a people as we and our Jews are.’

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