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On September 6, 1934, Isaiah Berlin arrived in Tel-Aviv on a train from Cairo. He was accompanied by John Foster, an All Souls colleague. When the train crossed the border into Palestine, and a uniformed Jewish conductor asked the two for their tickets, tears came to Berlin's eyes, much to Foster's surprise. "It was the first time he had seen a Jewish official in authority anywhere," Michael Ignatieff tells us.¹ And indeed, Berlin's trip to Eretz Israel evoked in him an extremely sentimental response. After all, this was also his first adventurous tour into the exotic Levant. "[V]ery like E. M. Forster's Passage to India," Berlin described it on another occasion, resorting to a somewhat Orientalist image.² The buildup of expectations before the trip was great: Walter Ettinghausen, who had visited Palestine before Berlin and fallen in love with it, wrote letters with enthusiastic descriptions of the vibrant atmosphere of the Yishuv and the colorful Orient.³ Marion and Felix Frankfurter, who by that time had already become Berlin's close friends, also sent him beautiful postcards from their visit to the Holy Land. A letter from Thomas Hodgkin was just as animated. Hodgkin came to Palestine in order to conduct archeological excavations and stayed there as an assistant secretary at the Mandatory Civil Service.⁴ He promised Berlin he would be given the same "messianic reception" the Frankfurters had received. Knowing of Berlin's Zionist sympathies, Hodgkin added: "I know you expected to be critical but it would be much easier to understand or attempt to understand Zionism in your company & with your comments."⁵

DOI: 10.1057/9781137015723_6

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