Lord Byron’s Proto-Zionist Poem and His Jewish Collaborator

In 1815, the British poet Lord Byron published a cycle of “Hebrew melodies,” among them a poem mourning the absence of “Israel’s scatter’d race” from “Judah’s hills.” This poem was the product of Byron’s collaboration with a Jewish musician, as Vivian Eden explains (with audio):

Isaac Nathan (1790-1864), music master to Princess Charlotte (1796-1817), was the son of a cantor who claimed to have been a Polish king’s illegitimate son. In a letter, he cold-pitched a collaboration to the poet, whom he had never met: Byron would provide poems and he, Nathan, would provide a “selection from the favorite airs which are still sung in the religious Ceremonies of the Jews. Some of these have . . . been preserved by memory and tradition alone. . . . But the latitude given to the taste and genius of their performers has been the means of engrafting on the original Melodies a certain wildness and pathos, which have at length become the chief characteristic of the Sacred Songs of the Jews.”

An impious Christian but a fan of “wildness and pathos,” as well as a supporter of disenfranchised nations (he died preparing to defend the Greeks against the Turks), Byron befriended Nathan and contributed 29 poems, not all of them connected to “Hebrews.” . . . Hebrew Melodies was a bestseller in its day.

Read more at Haaretz

More about: Arts & Culture, British Jewry, Isaac Nathan, Lord Byron, Poetry, Proto-Zionism, Romanticism

 

Donald Trump’s Plan for Gaza Is No Worse Than Anyone Else’s—and Could Be Better

Reacting to the White House’s proposal for Gaza, John Podhoretz asks the question on everyone’s mind:

Is this all a fantasy? Maybe. But are any of the other ludicrous and cockamamie ideas being floated for the future of the area any less fantastical?

A Palestinian state in the wake of October 7—and in the wake of the scenes of Gazans mobbing the Jewish hostages with bloodlust in their eyes as they were being led to the vehicles to take them back into the bosom of their people? Biden foreign-policy domos Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken were still talking about this in the wake of their defeat in ludicrous lunchtime discussions with the Financial Times, thus reminding the world of what it means when fundamentally silly, unserious, and embarrassingly incompetent people are given the levers of power for a while. For they should know what I know and what I suspect you know too: there will be no Palestinian state if these residents of Gaza are the people who will form the political nucleus of such a state.

Some form of UN management/leadership in the wake of the hostilities? Well, that might sound good to people who have been paying no attention to the fact that United Nations officials have been, at the very best, complicit in hostage-taking and torture in facilities run by UNRWA, the agency responsible for administering Gaza.

And blubber not to me about the displacement of Gazans from their home. We’ve been told not that Gaza is their home but that it is a prison. Trump is offering Gazans a way out of prison; do they really want to stay in prison? Or does this mean it never really was a prison in the first place?

Read more at Commentary

More about: Donald Trump, Gaza Strip, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict