THE USES OF CLIMATOLOGY

MODERN Jewish nationalism was not only a return to history, or a rediscovery of the people and the nation, but also a return to geography, or rather to the natural native geography. According to the historical perception of the Zionist idea, the Jewish people had been uprooted from its natural geographical environment and had lived ever since in different surroundings, ‘against nature'; that is, without a natural environment of its own. In the Diaspora, the Jewish people adapted itself to the changing patterns of the ‘host civilizations’ and to the different natural environments, but nowhere did it develop a ‘natural’ attachment to the land and to its landscape. It is as if the course of Jewish history had run against the maxim that ‘a civilization cannot simply transplant itself, bag and baggage’. This Jewish alienation from Nature became a major theme in the Haskalah literature. While it usually described Gentile peasants as an almost integral part of the landscape, the Jews were described as strangers, alien to the land; they have no true feeling for the forest, the trees, the rivers, or the fields, a natural human feeling which all Gentile peasants possess. In contrast to this image, one of the main motifs in the literature of the national revival movement was the return to the soil and to the land, and, as an almost inevitable conclusion, the return to the natural homeland of the Jewish people: Palestine (Eretz Yisrael). Not all Jewish nationalists believed that the return to Palestine was a real possibility, and many rejected the idea, for different reasons.