They were but a small layer of conquerors superimposed on the native population.

This point is highly debatable. If one includes in Crusader society the native oriental Christians, as certainly one must, the Crusaders seem to have been well in the majority. If Israel, on the other hand, annexes the newly occupied territories, Hebrew society may well find itself soon enough a minority in its own state.

Were the Crusaders a nation, rooted in Palestine in the way that the new Hebrew nation certainly is? This question must be answered in any comparison between the two. It is, of course, difficult to apply a modern term like "nation" to a time in the past in which the very notion of nationality was unknown and inconceivable. I use the term here in the sense of a community that thinks of itself as a distinctive entity, tied to a specific territory. Did the Crusaders, even those who were eighth-generation sabras (as we nowadays call Israeli-born Jews) consider themselves Palestinians, destined to live and die in their country, or did they think of themselves rather as Franks, Germans and Italians, serving on a foreign shore, who could go back any time to their real homeland? One rather thinks that many of those descendants of the old established Crusader families, and certainly the oriental Christians, considered Palestine, by the end of the thirteenth century, their only true homeland. But nothing like the Israeli nationality, with its fierce sense of belonging to the country-with a new and common language uniting all newcomers from many lands-seems to have evolved.

In summing up his History of the Crusades, Runciman records these memorable words:

Outremer (meaning "beyond the sea," as the Europeans called the Crusader states) was permanently poised on the horns of a dilemma. It was founded by a blend of religious fervor and adventurous land-hunger. But if it was to endure

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