Called into life by enthusiasts with inadequate material resources, these colonies would have scarcely been able to survive, had not their plight aroused the interest of Baron Edmond de Rothschild in Paris.

Beginning with 1884, the baron, pursuing purely philanthropic aims, gave his support to the colonies, spending enormous sums on cultivating in them the higher forms of agriculture, particularly wine-growing.

Gradually, the baron became the actual owner of a majority of the colonies which were administered by his appointees, and most of the colonists were reduced to the level of laborers or tenants who were entirely in the hands of the baron's administration.

This state of affairs was unquestionably humiliating and almost too hard to bear for men who had dreamed of a free life in the Holy Land.

Yet there can be no doubt that under the conditions prevailing at the time the continued existence of the colonies was only made possible through the liberal assistance which came from the outside.
The progress of the Palestinian colonization, slow though it was, provided a concrete basis for the doctrines preached by the "Lovers of Zion" in Russia.