Background
Jacob Judah Aaron De Haas was born on August 13, 1872 in London, United Kingdom, the son of Aaron de Haas and Anna Haarbleek, who were of Dutch-Sephardic extraction. His parents died in his early childhood.
(The task of compressing the last two thousand years of Pa...)
The task of compressing the last two thousand years of Palestinian history has been achieved here through impressive research through the archaeological record and ancient manuscripts. Chapters included are, from the roman conquest to 70 C. E., Roman era, continued 70 to 305, the advance of the cross, Byzantine rulers - 3985 to 564 and much more. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
https://www.amazon.com/History-Palestine-Last-Thousand-Years/dp/1406709301?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1406709301
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
https://www.amazon.com/Theodor-Herzl-V2-Biographical-Study/dp/1432587110?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1432587110
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
https://www.amazon.com/Theodor-Herzl-V1-Biographical-Study/dp/1432587102?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1432587102
Jacob Judah Aaron De Haas was born on August 13, 1872 in London, United Kingdom, the son of Aaron de Haas and Anna Haarbleek, who were of Dutch-Sephardic extraction. His parents died in his early childhood.
De Haas was educated in the Stepney Jewish School and in several high schools in London.
De Haas turned early to journalism and before his twentieth birthday was associate editor of the Jewish World, a weekly newspaper. During the eight years of his connection with that journal (1892 - 1900) he also contributed to various of the London daily papers and literary periodicals.
The turning point of De Haas's life came when he first met Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement. On July 6, 1896, Herzl made his first public speech on Zionism before the Maccab'ans, a club of the intellectual and social élite of London Jewry. De Haas was in the audience, and he realized that, despite polite applause and questioning, Herzl had failed to carry the group for his ideas. At the end of the evening he approached Herzl and arranged a meeting between them. The outcome was the appointment of De Haas as Herzl's honorary secretary for the English-speaking countries and the arrangement by De Haas of a public meeting for the next week, at which Herzl for the first time turned directly to the Jewish masses. For the next eight years, until Herzl's death in 1904, De Haas served as one of his most intimate associates.
Almost at the very beginning of his Zionist endeavor Herzl had established contacts in the United States, and, becoming convinced that American support would be of vital importance to the success of Zionism, he asked De Haas to go there as his emissary. At the 1901 convention of the American Zionist Federation, De Haas, on the basis of a letter from Herzl, was elected to the post of secretary of the organization.
De Haas arrived in the United States in 1902, and for the next three years he served both in the post to which he had been elected and as editor of the official organ of the American Zionist Federation, The Maccabaean, with his headquarters in New York City. At the 1905 convention, however, he was voted out of office in a movement motivated by a turning away from orthodox Herzlian political policy to a greater concern with practical work in Palestine and with the Jewish cultural revival. Personal considerations also were not lacking, since De Haas's temperament and manner were not always calculated to make friends.
After some months in which he briefly edited a weekly publication called The Chronicler (together with Bernard G. Richards) and worked for a while on the New York Commercial Advertiser, De Haas left for Boston, where he took over the professional direction of its Y. M. H. A. After two years at this post he became the editor of the Jewish Advocate in Boston, serving in that capacity from 1908 to 1918. It was in Boston that De Haas met the second great hero of his life, Louis D. Brandeis. De Haas was the guide and mentor who brought Brandeis actively into the Zionist movement.
In 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, Brandeis became the chairman of the Provisional Committee for Zionist Affairs and the leader of American Zionism. De Haas was in effect Brandeis's "Secretary of State, " acting at first informally and then, in 1916, as executive secretary of the Provisional Committee and of an organizing committee (also headed by Brandeis) which led to the convening of the first American Jewish Congress. Through Brandeis, who was in close touch with President Wilson relative to the negotiations which brought about the Balfour Declaration (1917), De Haas exercised considerable influence on this classic turning point in modern Jewish history. In those hectic years he also helped to organize the Jewish Legion, which went to Palestine to fight with Allenby against the Turks, and was associated with Henrietta Szold in assembling the first Hadassah medical unit to go to Palestine.
In 1919 De Haas was appointed by the American Jewish Congress as a member of the commission which was to represent the cause of Jewish rights at the Paris Peace Conference. He did not, however, go to Paris, and the end of his Zionist career at the center of affairs was soon in sight. In 1920, at the first postwar international conference of the Zionist movement in London, Brandeis chose to remain on the United States Supreme Court rather than accept the international leadership of Zionism. For some time there had been friction between Brandeis and Chaim Weizmann, and at the 1921 convention of the Zionist Organization of America, Brandeis and his group were defeated on their own home grounds. All of them, De Haas included, withdrew from the organization. De Haas did return once again to the Zionist Organization of America as part of a coalition administration in 1930, but he was no longer at home or even well known personally within that body, and he stayed but briefly.
In his last years, De Haas devoted himself to literary work. He published a two-volume biography of Theodor Herzl in 1927, a biography of Louis D. Brandeis in 1929, an attack on British policy in Palestine under the title The Great Betrayal (together with Stephen S. Wise) in 1930, and a History of Palestine in 1934, and he was the editor of and principal contributor to a one-volume Encyclopedia of Jewish Knowledge (1934). Jacob de Haas died on August 13, 1872, in New York City and was buried in the cemetery of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue there, Shearith Israel.
Jacob Judah Aaron De Haas is remembered as a Zionist leader, who published a two-volume biography of Theodor Herzl in 1927, a biography of Louis D. Brandeis in 1929, an attack on British policy in Palestine under the title The Great Betrayal (together with Stephen S. Wise) in 1930, and a History of Palestine in 1934.
(The task of compressing the last two thousand years of Pa...)
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
Even in his years in the political wilderness Jacob De Haas never abandoned his Zionist interests, but they were increasingly channeled towards the outer fringes of extremist opposition to the movement. In 1935 he served as the chairman of the first international Congress of the New Zionist Organization, a group which had been organized by Vladimir Jabotinsky to demand an immediate Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan. To De Haas in his last days this maximal demand was the true Herzlian position rather than the more compromising policy of the official Zionist movement which he had helped to fashion.
De Haas believed that political negotiation in the grand manner and a bold tone were the only true Zionism, and he therefore opposed any partnership in effort with non-Zionists, such as was effected by the enlargement of the Jewish Agency in 1929. Temperamentally he was a man born to be in the minority, a disturber of the peace - his own included - a hero-worshiper, and a Bohemian, who affected a beard in his younger years and, towards the end, looked like a figure out of Rembrandt. Always a romantic and mystic, he sought the Messiah and attempted to find him in a modern political movement. But the Messiah did not come overnight; De Haas therefore felt betrayed both by the non-Jewish world, which had not given Zion to the Jews, and by his own people, who had not risen to his heroic and often melodramatic vision.
On March 1, 1905, he had married Lillian E. Eisenberg, by whom he had two children, Florence and Aaron.
Theodor Herzl was an Austrian journalist, playwright, political activist, and writer who was the father of modern political Zionism.
Louis Dembitz Brandeis was an American lawyer and associate justice on the Supreme Court of the United States from 1916 to 1939.
