Zionist emigration to Palestine was minuscule next to mass Jewish migration westward

Evidence

Many Jews found a personal solution to their problem by emigrating, above all to the United States. Between 1870 and 1900 more than half a million East European Jews migrated to the West. Between 1900 and 1914 the figure ex­ ceeded a million and a half. All in all, about one-third of the Jews of Eastern Europe are estimated to have left their homes in search of a new life in the West. Of the remainder, the overwhelming majority stayed where they were, most of them engaged exclusively in the personal struggle for survival, some—few but not unimportant—seeking a political end to their troubles, through participation in Russian revolutionary movements. Another group, insignificant in numbers but far-reaching in effect, found another way. In 1882 some young Jews, most of them students, met in Kharkov and formed an organization called Lovers of Zion. Their aim was emigration—not to the broad lands of the West, but to a remote and largely derelict Ottoman province known in Christendom but not to its inhabitants as Palestine. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 955

Categorization

• QUESTION: The phrase ‘known in Christendom but not to its inhabitants as Palestine’ is striking — worth chasing how the land’s naming/non-naming itself encodes the Orientalist frame of an external audience naming a place its residents don’t recognize.
• SHARE: The contrast between 1.5+ million choosing America and a handful choosing ‘Palestine’ destabilizes any teleological reading — great corrective for someone assuming Zionism was the dominant response.
• XREF: connects to: Czarist persecution and failed rebellion drove Eastern European Jews to mass emigration to America — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 131