Bible and Sword (21 page)

Everyone was glad to be allowed to drop a prickly subject without a clear-cut decision—with one lone exception. To Manasseh ben Israel, who had put all his passion, his learning, his persuasiveness into the plan, all the ancient longing of his people plus a new urgency because of recent persecutions in Poland—to him a compromise was worthless. He went back to Holland, aged, penniless, defeated; and in little over a year, at the age of fifty-three, he was dead, perhaps of that elusive complaint, a broken heart.

The immediate consequences of Cromwell’s “connivancy” are no part of this story. Because of the indecisiveness of the result no large-scale immigration took place at the time; but in 1656, when England went to war with Spain, the Marranos were enabled to throw off their Spanish disguise and, despite renewed agitation, to win official permission for an open synagogue and limited rights as English residents. Manasseh’s nephew was admitted as a broker on the Royal Exchange in the same year in which his uncle died of despair. In fact, Cromwell’s compromise, a typical English solution, illogical but workable, was fortunate for the Jews when Commonwealth gave way to Restoration. There being no statute on the books for Charles II to cancel, he reasonably allowed things to go as
they were, ignored petitions for re-expulsion of the Jews, and, since many Jewish families of monarchist sympathies had helped the Stuarts in exile, refused to consider any restrictions, and in short connived, like Cromwell, at a condition that was useful to him.

Gradually, over two centuries, the Sephardic community increased; and bit by bit, though always against new Prynnes and
Demurrers
, civil emancipation was won piecemeal.

These first stirrings in Puritan England of interest in the restoration of Israel were unquestionably religious in origin, born out of the Old Testament reign over the mind and faith of the party in power during the middle years of the seventeenth century. But religion was not enough. No practical results would have come out of the Puritans’ sense of ghostly brotherhood with the children of Israel or out of their ideals of toleration or out of their mystical hopes of hastening the millennium, had not political and economic expediency intervened. Cromwell’s interest in Manasseh’s proposal was dictated by the same factor that dictated Lloyd George’s interest in Chaim Weizmann’s proposal ten generations later: namely, the aid that each believed the Jews could render in a wartime situation. And from Cromwell’s time on, every future episode of British concern with Palestine depended on the twin presence of the profit motive, whether commercial, military, or imperial, and the religious motive inherited from the Bible. In the absence of either, as during the eighteenth century when the religious climate was distinctly cool, nothing happened.

When the power of the Puritans was broken their earnestness and deadly seriousness went out of fashion, though not out of England. The dominant tone of Restoration and eighteenth century was set by the curled black wig, the cool intelligence, the casual shrug of Charles II. After nearly fifty years of being intense, England with a sigh of relief determined to be gay, to be good-humored — to be anything but serious.

But Puritanism, like a subterranean river, carried on among the Dissenters. Ejected from the re-Established Church, excluded from office, from the universities, from society, deprived even of civil rights until 1689, they still preserved a living tradition that was to emerge again in the nineteenth century. In the intervening period loosely called the eighteenth century Dissent lived in the shadows; aristocracy held the place in the sun. It was the age, says Trevelyan, of “aristocracy and liberty; the rule of law and absence of reform”; a “classic” age, orderly, mannerly, rational, and as un-Hebraic as possible.

The eighteenth century, if it is to have a coherent character, must be allowed to divest itself of strict chronological limits and wriggle itself into the period from 1660 to somewhere in the 1780’s; that is, from the Restoration to the decade when the American Revolution triumphed, the
French Revolution began, and the Industrial Revolution got under way with Cartwright’s power loom and Watt’s steam engine. It was the age of reason and free thought. Science with its discovery of natural laws began to challenge the Bible. Not God but gravity, Isaac Newton discovered, brought the apple down on his head. The awful logic of John Locke opened new realms of uncertainty. Under the impact of these new thought processes the supreme authority of Scripture melted away like butter in the sun. Security of faith gave way to the insecurity of knowledge. Deism tried to supply a substitute for the Bible as Revelation. With youthful faith in the power of human reason to overcome religious controversy, the Deists offered a God whom all men of reason could believe in—a God whose existence was proved by all the wonders of the natural world and who needed no miracles, prophecies, or other supernatural revelations to show himself to mankind.

In reaction to “awful devout Puritanism” the Hellenic mood had returned. It left men clear-headed but uncomfortable with the craving for some omnipotent Authority unsatisfied. And the “moral depravity” that Arnold noted in the Renaissance returned too. While the tarnished silver of Restoration comedy held the stage, the government of England was left in the hands of the lordly and unprincipled Cabal. The Bloodless Revolution that unseated the Stuarts for good and brought in the Bill of Rights was an opposite tendency, but it slowly slid down to a nadir of political morality under the German Georges. Their time is memorable for its South Sea Bubbles and rotten boroughs, its fortunes in slave trade and its ministers so busy jockeying for power under a half-crazy king as hardly to notice that they were losing an empire in America. Though called the Augustan Age by literary critics, it was also the gin-soaked age of Hogarth’s rakes and trollops. In a world of Yahoos, said Swift, the only angry voice of the time, “decency and comeliness are but conventions.”

In its official religion the age was High Church, polite, and satisfied to serve no other purpose than to offer its preferments as a refuge to the nobility’s younger sons and deserving relations. Gone was Independency. The order and legality of a state Church, however empty of fervor, was preferred to the anarchy of a dozen self-governing congregations, however sincere and devout. What chance had the Bible in a Church personified by Jane Austen’s immortal curate, Mr. Collins? The people of the Bible, New Testament as well as Old, were, like the Puritans, extremists. There is not a comfortable or complacent person among them. In eighteenth-century England the divine rage of the prophets could not penetrate what Gibbon called “the fat slumbers of the church.”

Yet a strong current of enthusiasm, of yearning for moral rectitude, ran underneath the urbane surface of the eighteenth century. The Wesley brothers’ Methodism and hymn singing were as much a product of the time, though of a different class, as Pope’s
Rape of the Lock
or Lord Chesterfield’s
Letters to His Son
. And how can one generalize about a period that included at its beginning Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress
and at its end Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall
, two of the most remarkable books of any era? Gibbon represents the skeptic, the scientist, and the anti-Christian, Bunyan the believer, the enthusiast, the apostle of virtue. One is knowledge, the other faith, or, as Arnold would say, one is Hellenic, the other Hebraic.
Pilgrim’s Progress
is probably the most widely read book ever written in English after the Bible. Indeed, it was like a second Bible, in the cottage if not in the manor house. The educated class ignored it, but in the end it proved to be, in Macaulay’s words, “the only book about which the educated minority has come over to the opinion of the common people.” It is somewhat startling to find that this epitome of piety appeared in the same decade as Wycherley’s
Country Wife
and
Plain Dealer
, the epitome of profligacy. Although Bunyan belonged to the older Puritan generation,
his book belongs to later generations who loved it and lived with it. He was both the heir of the Puritans and the predecessor of the Methodists—the bridge that carried Puritanism over to the Evangelical Revival of the nineteenth century.

But while the common people read eagerly of Christian’s progress to the Heavenly Gate, it was Mr. Worldly Wiseman who presided over the country and the time. He was unconcerned about the Messiah whose promised advent so exercised the Puritans. Not unnaturally, he was equally unconcerned about the restoration of Israel and the Jews. In fact, the only evidence of interest in the Jews during the eighteenth century was the antagonism aroused by the Naturalization Act of 1753. The Jew Bill, as it was called, proposed to “enable all Jews to prefer bills of naturalization in Parliament without receiving the sacrament.” One opponent warned that allowing Jews to become landowners would give the lie to New Testament prophecy, which, according to Christian interpretation, implied that the Jews must remain wanderers until they acknowledged Christ as the Messiah. Another speaker added: “If the Jews should come to be possessed of a great share of the land of the kingdom how are we sure that Christianity will continue to be the fashionable religion?” Yet the bill was passed by the Commons and, with the bishops’ approval, by the Lords. Such a storm of protest from pamphleteers and howling mobs met the Act that it was repealed the following year and not finally re-enacted until the Emancipation Act of 1858, over one hundred years later.

Initial passage of the Act, regardless of its repeal, reflects the latitudinarian spirit of the eighteenth-century enlightenment, the spirit of live and let live. At the same time eighteenth-century rationalism was working against the fulfillment-of-prophecy argument that had favored the restoration of Israel. Rationalism found the whole argument from prophecy untenable. Rationalist writers on theology,
Hobbes, Hume, and others, discovered as they examined one by one the bases of Christian dogma that the allegorical interpretations that made Jesus the fulfillment of the Hebrew Messianic prophecies were “irrational”; that the elaborate scheme of reading into every line of the Old Testament an allegory of some yet-to-come event in Christian church history must fall apart under the light of reason. Anthony Collins in a
Discourse on Freethinking
(1713) dared to announce that the Book of Daniel was not autobiographical, but was authored in Maccabaean times—an interpretation that sheds a very different light on its prophecies. Other dangerous thinkers began to suspect that Moses did not personally indite the whole Pentateuch; and the farther they delved and studied, the more they were forced to the conclusion that Christianity’s hope of the Second Advent, so far as it was based on Hebrew prophecy, was a hope in vain.

While the rationalists held the field little interest could be aroused in restoring the Jews to Zion. Nevertheless through the rationalists’ study of the historic foundations of the Bible new interest in Palestine as a country was created. Its archaeological remains were now studied, not as relics, but as mirrors of the life of the past. One of the earliest of the investigators’ works on the Bible lands was the worthy Dr. Fuller’s
A Pisgah-sight of Palestine
. Although published in 1650, it has nothing in common with Puritanism, and in fact Fuller, by temperament and interest, leaned toward the Royalists. No Puritan could have written of the Bible’s homeland with his detachment. The marvellous good humor and wit that break through the lines of even his weightiest works and the urge to be fair (which in life enabled him to keep out of trouble with both sides, even in the hottest days of the Civil War) separate Fuller from his time. His motive, he says, in writing a descriptive work on Palestine is to contribute to the true understanding of the Bible, even though, he asserts, “these corporall (not to say carnall) studies of this terestriall
Canaan begin to grow out of fashion with the more knowing sort of Christians.” He carefully describes the animal and vegetable life, the mineral resources and geographical formation of the terrain, correcting common misapprehensions as he goes along. In fact, the country is no desert, he points out, despite the frequent use of the word in Scripture. “Indeed the word Desert sounds hideously to English eares: it frights our fancies with apparitions of a place full of dismall shades, savage beasts and dolefull desolation, whereas in Hebrew it imports no more than a woody retiredness from publick habitation; most of them in extent not exceeding our greater Parks in England, and more alluring with the pleasure of privacy, than affrighting with the sadness of solitariness.”

He tries to clarify “cubit” and other terms of Hebrew measurement; he discusses the ancient laws and customs, household habits, farming methods, food, and clothing. There are many maps dotted over with tents, temples, battle sites, and turreted cities; plans of buildings, such as Solomon’s Temple shown with all its furniture, utensils, and treasures; plates of dress and ornaments purporting to show the exact design worn by each class of person–maid, wife, widow, and harlot, for example. Fuller’s book was at least scientific in purpose if not in results. He concludes with a chapter disputing the Jews’ hope of Restoration, maintaining that the return out of the Babylonian exile fulfilled all prophecies and that if any further promise remains it must take the form of the Jews’ conversion to Christianity without, however, the “temporall regaining” of their old country. This, he maintains, must remain a dream. As to conversion, he is not sure whether God really intends it or not, but since there is nothing revealed to the contrary it is best to suppose that He does, and in that event Fuller is sure that, all obstacles notwithstanding, as soon as God wishes it, “in the twinckling of an eye, their eies shall be opened.” But with that burst of the fairness that he can never repress, he admits that conversion
is unlikely as long as Christians exclude Jews from the community: “There must be first conversing with them before there can be converting them.”