Note 149 — Chapter XXV · A.D. 1400-1500. THE JEWS IN GERMANY AND ITALY.
Reading edition
Palestine is a land ‘rich in its soil, boundless in its capabilities of production, glowing in the sunshine of an almost perpetual summer—this enchanting land was indeed (what the patriarch had described it) a field which the Lord had blessed.... But Mohammedan sloth and despotism have converted it into a waste rock and desert, with the exception of some few spots, which remain to attest the veracity of the accounts formerly given of it.’—Bannister’s Holy Land, pp. 37, 38.