Stephen Karetsky: Ulysses Grant in “The Holy Land” 1878
Reviews of Ron Chernow’s Grant omit the fact that this lengthy biography includes only one paragraph about the former President’s trip to the Holy Land in 1878 and that it is a misleading one. It implies that the only Jews there were in Jerusalem and that they were little more than beggars.
The reviewer follows suit. (Of course, Grant’s primary mission was not to visit and study the various Jewish communities there.) But, for some reason, Chernow omits an event of probable interest to many readers.
Finding that most of what is now the central area of Israel was almost entirely unpopulated, bleak, and consisting mainly of sand, Grant and his traveling companion, journalist John Russel Young, investigated what they were traveling over and determined that beneath the sand was fertile soil.
They both agreed that the area would be flourishing farmland if Americans had come there. This great development, of course, came very shortly afterwards with the arrival of Zionist Jews. Young’s contemporaneous accounts were printed in the American press as the trip proceeded.
His detailed, two-volume description of Grant’s worldwide tour was published soon after the two adventurers returned to the U.S. It is still in print and remarkably relevant to today’s headlines, e.g., China’s claims to Japanese islands.
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