(Blackstone, William E.) Palestine for the Jews. A Copy of the Memorial Presented to President Harrison March 5, 1891.

<<Likely the first official request to an American President for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.>> William Eugene Blackstone (1841-1935) American evangelist and Christian Zionist was the author of the famed “Blackstone Memorial,” a petition presented to President Benjamin Harrison in favor of the delivery of Palestine to the Jews and signed by leading American citizens, prominent among them John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Cyrus McCormick, Senators, Congressmen, religious leaders of all denominations, newspaper editors, the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and others. The Memorial was motivated by concern over the plight of the Jews in Russia who were being murdered in government-incited pogroms. Blackstone asks President Harrison,”What shall be done for the Russian Jews? …Why not give Palestine back to them again? According to God’s distribution of nations, it is their home, an inalienable possession, from which they were expelled by force… Why shall not the powers which under the treaty of Berlin in 1878 gave Bulgaria to the Bulgarians and Servia to the Servians now give Palestine back to the Jews? …Let us now restore them to the land of which they were so cruelly despoiled by our Roman ancestors.” A precursor of the Christian Zionist movement of contemporary times, this pamphlet foresaw and paralleled the later ideas of Theodor Herzl, founder of modern Zionism.