@israel@palestine Had to lookup “baronet” 🫢 … the #Sephardic “Montefiores” are a household name in #Israel. We all learn about these (anti-#Zionist) philanthropists, albeit with some disdain. Luckily for the proto-zionist movement though, they were there to help the failing early settlement attempts outside of the established historically jewish centers in Palestine. These “pioneers” were mostly Russians, with no experience in farming and totally alien in Palestine. They started arriving in very small numbers in the middle of the 19th century, escaping violent pogroms in the Pale of Settlement. In #Palestine they lived apart from the indigenous #Jewish communities of Jerusalem, Jaffa and elsewhere. Luckily for these them though, when the first attempt was just about to go under, and right before they started packing, someone stepped-in the to help. One famous such fail was of the so called “First Aliyah”. Avraham Muyal (Moyal), born in Morocco in 1847, stepped-in. He was a businessman who lived in Jaffa, and unlike them, spoke Arabic and had good working relationships with the local population as well as Ottoman officials. He was also Baron Edmond de Rothschild’s business partner. Rothschild was persuaded to finance and transform the almost abandoned first agricultural enterprise… When the Zionist movement retroactively wrote its own teleological narrative of pioneering and hardship in the “deserted” and “empty” old land, they couldn’t completely avoid mentioning these families’ contributions, unlike Moyal’s… https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/jul/08/simon-sebag-montefiore-i-worked-down-a-south-african-goldmine-at-1
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