Louis D. Brandeis was born November 13, 1856 in Louisville, KY. His family, refugee immigrant Bohemian Jews, fled the failed Liberal European revolutions of 1848. The Brandeis family were not traditional practicing Jews. They had a vague connection to the false Messiah movement of Jacob Frank. Brandeis grew up comfortably middle class. He traveled abroad and spent two years studying in Dresden Germany before attending Harvard Law. At Harvard he demonstrated extraordinary leadership becoming the head of his class all the while obtaining the highest academic scores of any student to date. Brandeis was gifted with an incredibly brilliant, disciplined, organized and perceptive mind.

Brandeis married Alice Goldmark, 1889, a woman from a similar Bohemian Jewish background to his own.

He was appointed by President Wilson, and confirmed by the United States Senate in 1917, as the first Jew to serve on the United States Supreme Court.

Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born December 28, 1856, in Staunton, VA. His family was of Scot-Irish ancestry, Southern sympathizers and slave owners. His father, Reverend Dr. Joseph Ruggles Wilson, was a founder and a minister of the Southern Presbyterian Church when it broke away from the mainstream Presbyterian Church in 1861. They were deeply religious people. Woodrow Wilson read the Bible and prayed daily his entire life.

Wilson, unable to read until he was ten, probably suffered from dyslexia. He devised his own system of shorthand to compensate. Diligent, determined, Wilson worked hard to achieve his academic accomplishments. His family's moderate wealth provided the means for him to graduate Princeton in 1879 and afterwards attended law school for one year at the University of Virginia. Changing majors he earned a PhD from Johns Hopkins University (1883) in history and political Science.

Wilson married Ellen Axson, a minister's daughter in 1885. She died in 1914. Woodrow Wilson had just been elected the 28^th president of the United States. He remarried a year later to Edith Galt, a direct descendent of the American Indian princess Pocahontas.

William Eugene Blackstone was born in Adams County, New York, October 6, 1841. His family was of very modest means. The Blackstone's were the first white settlers of Boston.

A Methodist, he accepted Jesus publically at age 11. Physically weak he was rejected by the Union army during the American Civil War but volunteered through the U.S. Christian Commission – an institution akin to the Red Cross.

W.E.B., as he modestly liked to be known, was never formally educated. He was never privileged to attend University or Divinity schools. W.E.B., possessing a brilliant intellect, was largely self- educated.

1866 he married Sarah Lee Smith settling in Chicago four years later. Achieving respectable financial success as a real estate developer, he deliberately chose to abandon business and devote himself to God for the rest of his long life.

* ** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Superficially, Reverend William E. Blackstone was a premillennial dispensational Christian evangelist and missionary. He was the author of the hugely successful and influential, Jesus is Coming, in 1878. His book, the veritable reference source of American dispensationalist thought, sold millions of copies. It was translated into 48 languages. Blackstone clearly laid out the Biblical justifications for the return of the Jews and the reestablishment of the Jewish state as a pre-condition of the second coming of Jesus. His efforts influenced countless millions of Christians to identify as Christian Zionists.

Contemporary historians have almost entirely ignored, forgotten or even deliberately marginalized Blackstone's crucial role in Zionist and American history. Anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian sources actively remember him but with vitriol. Why?

Decisions between men and their God at times come after intense introspection and struggle. For W.E.B. it was no different. A highly successful businessman, he was confronted with two paths on his life's road. The first path was to continue in the world of Mammon making generous donations of his funds to advance his faith in God through other's work. The second was to dedicate his life, his being, to God. In a night of deep personal struggle, filled with prayers, soul searching and painful choices, he made his choice to follow God. He pledged he would spend the next two years spreading the Gospel. The pledge was fulfilled but his two years extended to the rest of his long life.

Blackstone's Gospel was deeply influenced by John Nelson Darby and Dwight L. Moody. Perhaps the single most influential element on Blackstone's Gospel was his self educated reading of the Bible. Since the first traumatic events of the Reformation and the translation of the Bible from Latin to the language of the layman, the Bible was open to be read by all without control and direction of clergy. It was the very freeing of access to the Bible and the fact that Blackstone never attended divinity school to shape his thoughts about his relationship to God that brought his own direct reading to Restorationism as a part of Dispensationalism.

Restorationism is the belief derived from direct Biblical interpretation that one of the preconditions for the Second Coming of Jesus was the return of the Jews to their God pledged land of Palestine. Unlike 2,000 years of orthodox Catholic and Eastern Catholic thought that the Jews were replaced by the Church because of their sin of rejecting Jesus, Dispensationalist Christians believe that God had never abandoned his special relationship with the Jewish people. The Jews had endured a period of chastisement but not abandonment. Before the end of time, after periods of dispensations – the Jews would return to Palestine and rebuild the Temple. To Blackstone, God's love for the Jewish people and their place in Biblical fulfillment of prophecy was not a revocable event of an uncertain God. Blackstone's religious understandings linked the return of the Jews to the 1,000 year reign of Jesus in Jerusalem after the Rapture, when true believers would be called to God in safety ahead of the seven year tribulation and time of destruction that marked the end of time. Evil would be cleansed but all was dependent upon the Jews being protected to return to Palestine. Without the Jewish Restoration there could be no return of Jesus.

Blackstone attended the Prophetic (Niagara) Conference of 1878. A topic of discussion was the implications of the Berlin Treaty of 1878 and the restoration of Balkan countries to their original owners. The dismemberment of the sick man of Europe, Turkey and its empire, was clearly visible. The Ottomans ruled the Holy Land for over three hundred years. Christians had comprised the largest block of people inhabiting the areas, loosely defined as Palestine, since the Byzantine Era. The conquest of the area by the Muslims in the 7^th century and the forced conversions of the inhabitants changed the character of the land over time. Jewish presence, though greatly reduced in numbers, never had been severed, even since the Roman cleansing of the land of Jews.

Many Christians and Blackstone clearly could read the writing on the wall. It was a matter of time. Ottoman rule over the Holy Land was coming to an end.

The 19^th century was an age of rediscovery of the Holy Land for many English speaking peoples. W.E.B. and his daughter visited Palestine in 1888. Americans had been engaged in physical Restorationist activity for decades in Palestine for both Christian and Jew alike.

It was also the age of vicious Eastern European, and in particular Russian scapegoating, institutionalized anti-Semitism, to cover the intentional reactionism and oppression of the Russian people. Jewish life went from tenuous in Russia to questionable marginal survival in the last quarter of the century.

W.E.B. was alarmed at the destruction of the Jewish people. Many in the Western media were horrified. They did little but protest in their papers.

On his own, using his own funds and the incredible energy of faith and purpose, building upon his extraordinary effort to find a rapprochement of understanding of communities of faith between Christian and Jew in Chicago in 1890, Blackstone did something about Jewish suffering in Russia. November 24-25, 1890, Blackstone organized the first Ecumenical conference between Christian and Jew in America, the Conference on the Past, Present and Future of Israel. A major result of the conference was a joint, Christian and Jewish, declaration against Russian oppression of the Jews.

Blackstone understood the politics of the possible. He was a man of faith but he was also a realist. America was a power rising but was not yet a world power. The Great White Fleet had not sailed. America's destiny, as a shaper of the twentieth century, was intimated but not a reality.

America was the bastion of faith in a better tomorrow but America also was not willing to become the New Zion for the world's millions of Jews. Not even the old established, dominant, assimilated American German Jews wanted the hordes of Russian Jews, whom many of them distained, flooding onto American shores. They feared it could kindle American anti-Semitism and threaten their own hard won acceptance and toleration.

Blackstone recognized the potential Russian death wish for its Jews. He linked action to save the Jews of Russia with his personal faith as "God's Little Errand Boy", a self described role. He sought a solution to the terrible suffering of Russian Jewry. The written resolution alone that came from the conference would not solve the problem. It was only words without actions. To save the Jews of Russia, Blackstone knew there was only one solution. Restore the Jews to Palestine. The Ottoman Empire was rotting from within under debt and decay. The return of the Jews, to some sort of semi-autonomous self rule in Palestine, would benefit the Ottomans with cash compensation and provide a solution to the "Jewish Problem" of the world.

Working with feverish energy, Reverend Blackstone assembled a memorial to President Harrison. The memorial was signed by 413 prominent Americans, business leaders such as J.P. Morgan, John Rockefeller, prominent Congressional leaders including William McKinley (the later American President), Thomas Reed Speaker of the House of Representatives, religious leaders, Christian and Jewish, editors and publishers of Major American print media and even the Chief Justice of U.S. Supreme Court Melville Fuller. The Memorial called for American support in concert with the world community for the creation of a humanitarian solution to the Jewish suffering in Russia. His solution, permit the Jews to return to Palestine. The Memorial was formally presented to President Harrison March 5, 1891. The Memorial was major American news for weeks. The complete text was printed in the Chicago Tribune.

President Harrison received the Memorial and Reverend Blackstone formally and with solemnity. The Blackstone Memorial was recognized as politically important. Harrison could not simply shrug it off. The Memorial urged President Harrison to "consider the condition of the Israelites and their claims to Palestine as their ancient home, and to promote, in all other just and proper ways, the alleviation of their suffering condition."

President Harrison was a pragmatist. He was not a particularly religious man and recognized the limitations of American power. He pigeonholed the focus of the Memorial. Later he did support mild diplomatic efforts to the Czar to mitigate Jewish oppression. He even mentioned the sufferings of Russian Jewry in his 3^rd State of the Union Address.

Blackstone's efforts continued, presenting the Memorial to President Theodore Roosevelt with even less receptivity and action. His extraordinary effort at stirring American political support through Presidential politics faded but never left his thoughts. The ability of acting and influencing the American President had seemingly faded.

It was be a full twenty five years later that the Blackstone Memorial would again resurface as a factor in American Presidential consideration and American Foreign relations.

Louis Dembitz Brandeis, a nationally prominent Jewish Boston lawyer accepted, for reasons still clouded in controversy and mystery, the Chairmanship of the moribund Provisional Executive Committee for Zionist Affairs in 1914. American Zionism, disorganized, fractious and impoverished could muster about 15,000 members in 1914. Brandeis embarked on a speaking tour between 1914-1915, using his personal prestige and reputation as an American Jew to reform, organize and develop popular support for the Zionist goals of self-determination and freedom for Jews in a Jewish homeland. Brandeis legitimized for millions of American Jewish immigrants, as well as first and second generation American Jews searching for an American Jewish identity, Zionist congruence with Americanism and Democracy. Jews exercised an incredible new experience – freedom and toleration. They could strive for a Jewish solution to an age old problem, the Jewish Problem, and maintain their legitimate rights as loyal American citizens. Under Brandeis' influence the American Zionist ranks grew from nothing to over 250,000.

Few speak of or even know of today the mini-Holocaust of Jews in Eastern Europe during World War I. Savaged by both sides, but especially by the Russians by 1916, Jews were being murdered by the hundreds of thousands. It was well known in the media. Jews organized special relief efforts for food, medicine, money and political support. Not much was accomplished. Brandeis was intimately involved in the effort as a Zionist to try and save Jewish lives. America was neutral and not much could be done from the American end. It was a question of time if America would be drawn into the European conflict and then, on which side?

Until the early stage of World War I the center of the Zionist world was Berlin, Germany. It soon became apparent that the Zionist movement would have to relocate to a more neutral center. Disagreements existed as to where that center should be; eventually the choices became limited to Britain or the U.S. Territoriality and tension between London and New York quickly grew up. Though part of the same movement, British Zionism saw itself as the center of the world. Legitimately, Britain was at its apogee politically. The sun never set on the British Empire around the globe. American Jewry numbered in absolute count the vastly superior population but Britain was on the ground in Europe and the Middle East fighting the Turk and the German.

British Zionism was under the able leadership of Chaim Weizmann. He had been cultivating British political leadership for years; Weizmann struggled forward with his goal, a British declaration in favor of a Jewish homeland. Weizmann believed in British hegemony in the Middle East. He saw Britain as the future protector of a Jewish homeland. Weizmann and Brandeis, though working at common purposes, were already beginning to exhibit contentious differences. They did not openly share information.