This small land of Palestine, drenched with human blood since time immemorial, has become the holy centre of three great religions, and witnessed the birth of two great religions, Judaism and Christianity. From the purely religious point of view the land is as holy to Islam as it is to Christendom or Jewry. Politically, it has always been and still remains the goal of many a great power. The Turk holds it, the British are anxious to conquer it, the French have politico-historical claims on Syria, which includes Palestine, the Roman Church considers it its special domain and aspires to possess it; the Emperor of Austria still bears the title King of Jerusalem, and the King of the Belgians, on the assumption that he is an offspring of the Crusader Prince who ruled over Jerusalem for a while, asserts historic claims on the Holy Land which, however, he does not press. Palestine has seen many a change of masters and has been inhabited in turn by many peoples. But among all the peoples that have lived in Palestine there is only one, the nationhood and culture of which has grown and developed there--the Jewish people. The Judaism originating in Palestine has become one of the driving powers in history; it continues to fructify the human mind of the present day. Mankind bears in mind that just as in modern philosophy there is scarcely a single thought that was not already known either to the Greeks or to the Romans, so in modern social ethics, humanitarianism and countless branches of modern political life there is scarcely an idea or thought that was not propounded by the representatives of the ancient Jewish mind. Many a radical idea commonly supposed to be a product of the civilization of the 19th century is found on close examination to be the embodiment of an ancient Jewish idea born on Palestinian soil. The kernel and sum total of Marxism is of ancient Jewish origin; Karl Marx added a modern garb to an ancient Jewish thought. But Palestine has witnessed not only the birth and development of Judaism but also of Christianity. Christianity is, reduced to its original components, a synthesis of Eastern and Western Aryan thought, consisting of the universalism and pessimism of ancient India and the individualism and optimism of the Greeks and Romans. Christianity is therefore not only not a continuation of Judaism, but its very antithesis, despite the fact that there is nothing in Eastern Aryan and Western Aryan thought, when looked at separately, that cannot also be found in Judaism.