Bible and Sword (26 page)

Indeed, it is quite striking how optimistic the Society’s workers were in a task in which the greatest of all missionaries had conspicuously failed. They constantly quote Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews in justification of their work, but they never seem to have questioned why his own people denied him the success he later had among the Gentiles, or to ask themselves why the Jews, after 1800 years of none too happy association with Christianity, should
find the Society’s arguments any more convincing than they had Paul’s. Yet their sincerity and serious purpose were unmistakable. The Reverend Alexander MacCaul, executive head of the Society’s missionary work and professor of Hebrew at King’s College, London, was not only the greatest Hebrew scholar of his day in England, but also a man who had lived and worked among the Jews of Russia and Poland and knew Judaism at first hand, a rare distinction. Lewis Way, a wealthy barrister who devoted his fortune to the Jews’ Society and is credited with “the first great impulse given in the Jewish cause,” burned with an equal conviction of the benefit to the whole world that would be conferred by the ultimate success of his work.

Way came to the Jews’ Society in a manner typical of the exalted antirational spirit of the Evangelicals. According to the legend retold at every annual meeting (though later disputed) he had admired a magnificent stand of oaks during a day’s ride from Exmouth to Exeter, and was told by a companion that a former owner of the property, one Jane Parminter, had given orders in her will that it was never to be cut down till the Jews should be restored to Palestine. Struck by this quaint notion, Mr. Way went home to reread his Bible and came so under the thrall of prophecy that he gave up the law, studied divinity, took orders, donated thirteen thousand pounds to bring the Jews’ Society out of debt, and thereafter remained for twenty years its principal financial backer. He financed publication of the Bible in Yiddish and of the Church of England Liturgy in Hebrew and visited both the Russian Czar and the King of Prussia to obtain their official influence in behalf of the Society’s work.

It was while Way was collecting a library of Hebrew literature that he became acquainted with MacCaul, then a student of Hebrew at Trinity College, Dublin, and persuaded him that conversion of the Jews represented “the highest good of the Jewish people and through them of the whole world.” To the disgust of the Dublin dons, who had
high hopes of this brilliant young scholar, MacCaul deserted the University to go to Warsaw as a missionary to the Jews. On the voyage out, his daughter tells in her memoirs, he read Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews thirteen times, and such was his determination to become proficient in Hebrew script that in the accumulated spare hours of his lifetime he wrote out the whole of the Pentateuch eight times in longhand. It is hardly to be wondered at that his daughter, who was born in Warsaw, learned Hebrew at three, at four could read the Bible and speak German and Yiddish, and at twelve taught Hebrew in the Mission school at “Palestine Place.”

Back in London in 1831, MacCaul was appointed president of the Society’s College of Missionaries and took an active part in making the condition of the Jewish people known to the English, who, says his daughter, “knew very little about it and cared less.” Still straining to convince the reluctant beneficiaries of his mission, MacCaul published a weekly tract, called
The Old Paths
, expounding the thesis that Christianity remained the logical outcome of the faith of Moses, whereas medieval rabbinical writings had departed from the true Mosaic law. Mrs. Finn, his daughter, recalls the excited conferences in her father’s study on Saturday afternoons, when Jewish gentlemen came to discuss religious matters while she, aged eight, and her younger brother listened at a crack in the door. This young lady, who later made her home in Jerusalem for eighteen years as wife of the British consul there and worked with her husband to reopen the Holy Land to “its lawful owners, the Hebrew nation,” was to be a living link between Shaftesbury and Balfour. At fifteen she had copied out Shaftesbury’s historic letter to Palmerston proposing England as sponsor of the Jews’ return, on “cream laid foolscap with gilt edges,” as a gift for her father. She died in 1921 at the age of ninety-six, having lived to see Britain assume the Palestine Mandate.

It is impossible not to admire the learning, devotion,
and good will of men such as MacCaul and Shaftesbury. The latter, after he became president of the Jews’ Society in 1848, attended every annual meeting for thirty-seven years until his death and even took lessons in Hebrew from his friend “Rabbi MacCaul.” Yet one is left with an impression of the immense disproportion of earnest endeavor to minuscule results. The impressive edifice was built on sand and, so far as “promoting Christianity among the Jews” was concerned, was dedicated to a goal no more substantial than a drifting mirage in the desert.

There were critics of the Society who voiced their doubts from the beginning. In its annual report for 1810 the Society admits to having been ridiculed for “foolish and Utopian expectations” and to being open to the charge of “enthusiasm.” In fact, on one occasion membership in the Society was offered as evidence of insanity in a case brought before the Lunacy Commission in 1863. “Are you aware, My Lord, that she subscribes to the Society for Conversion of the Jews?” “Indeed,” replied the Chairman, none other than Lord Shaftesbury, “are you aware that I am president of that Society?”

Such critics held that, if the Jews were to be converted, it could only be by a miracle, some stroke of divine intervention such as delivered them from Pharaoh, and that human efforts to anticipate this were presumptuous (incidentally the same objection as that urged by orthodox Jews). So much time and money, growled the critics, were better spent in the service of the Christian Church than in hankering after the Jews. Angriest of all was a Reverend Henry Handley Norris, who in 1825 published an entire book reviling the Society and all its works through six hundred and ninety pages of furious invective. This gentleman, known as the “Bishop-maker,” happened also to be chaplain to Shaftesbury’s estranged father, the sixth Earl, a harsh old autocrat—a fact that may possibly have initiated the son’s warm adoption of the opposite point of view.

In answering these attacks the Society’s defenders repeatedly
urged the duty of making good the long wrong done to “God’s ancient people.” They had convinced themselves that converting Jews to Christianity somehow represented an act of retribution for Christianity’s persecution of them. An unacknowledged sense of guilt for ill requiting the gift of the Gospel was certainly a factor. The Society’s centennial historian, Reverend W. T. Gidney, for example, discusses all the historical references to Joseph of Arimathea or to one or more of the apostles’ having preached the gospel in Britain, and insists that, since the original message of salvation came from a “Hebrew Christian,” Britain out of gratitude if nothing else should return the gift of Christianity to the Hebrews of today.

The Society had, in fact, a double task. It had to convince Jews of “the errors and absurdities of their present mistaken opinions,” and it had to convince suspicious Christians that the Jews, though admittedly a stiff-necked, dark-hearted people, sunk in moral degradation, obduracy, and ignorance of Gospel, were not only worthy of salvation but also vital to Christianity’s hope of salvation. This they accomplished by a kind of inversion that enables the missionary mind to transcend logic. Paul had said: “As concerning the Gospel they are enemies for your sakes; but as touching the election, they are beloved for the father’s sakes.” The old forgotten fact that Jesus’ message was addressed to his “kinsmen according to the flesh” became the basic text of the Evangelical preachers. Charles Simeon, in a sermon in 1818, startled his hearers with the reminder that “it is a Jew who is at this moment interceding for us at the right hand of God.” For His sake they should regard the Jews as “the most interesting of all people and, under God, the greatest benefactors of the human race.” Similarly at the Society’s jubilee celebration in 1858 Canon Edward Hoare congratulated the members as being “those who love the Jewish nation, and, above all, Christians who love the Jewish King.”

Actually it was not love for the Jewish nation, but concern
for the Christian soul, that moved all these good and earnest people. They were interested only in giving to the Jews the gift of Christianity, which the Jews did not want; civil emancipation, which the Jews did want, they consistently opposed. During the first half of the nineteenth century the Emancipation Bill, permitting Jews to enter Parliament without taking the usual oath “on the true faith of a Christian,” was debated many times before its final enactment in 1858, and each time found Lord Shaftesbury speaking against it on the ground that waiver of the oath was a violation of religious principles. It was not the Evangelicals with their love for “God’s ancient people” who favored admitting the Jews to full citizenship on equal terms, but the less pious Liberals. It was Lord Macaulay arguing from history, not Lord Shaftesbury arguing from prophecy, who made that eloquent speech for Emancipation which recalled that when Britain was “as savage as New Guinea … the Jews had their fenced cities and cedar palaces, their splendid Temple, their schools of learning”; and if they are now reduced to low circumstances, “shall we not rather consider it as a matter of shame and remorse to ourselves?” (Parenthetically it should be added that Shaftesbury accepted Emancipation gracefully when it was ultimately voted by both Houses and promptly proposed Sir Moses Montefiore for a peerage. “It would be a glorious day for the House of Lords,” he wrote to Gladstone, “when that grand old Hebrew were enrolled on the lists of the hereditary legislators of England,” a view in which the Lords did not concur. Shaftesbury was unconventional as always.)

If the Jews’ Society had concerned itself only with conversion we could ignore it. It was that vital linked factor, the restoration of Israel, that gives the Society’s work historical importance. The year after Victoria came to the throne, 1838, was that in which things began to move; the year, as we recall, when Syria (including Palestine) was caught in the turmoil of Mehemet Ali’s defiance of the
Sultan and the resulting European intervention. In that year Britain became the first European power to appoint a consul to Jerusalem. The appointee was only a vice-consul, but it was a beginning. It happened that in March 1838 the simmering Turco-Egyptian feud began to boil toward another crisis when a local Arab revolt against Mehemet’s viceroy and son, Ibrahim Pasha, encouraged the Sultan to arm for a last attempt to crush his upstart vassal. Palmerston, to aid the Sultan, concluded a commercial treaty with the Porte and, with Lord Ashley (as Shaftesbury then was) jogging his elbow, included provision for a British consulate in Jerusalem. One can be sure that anything to do with Jerusalem originated with Ashley, and he, in fact, had conceived the idea as a first step toward his great goal of Israel restored. It was Palmerston’s pen that instructed the consul “that it will be part of your duty as British vice-consul at Jerusalem to afford protection to the Jews generally and you will take an early opportunity of reporting … upon the present state of the Jewish population in Palestine”; but it was not Palmerston’s idea. The Foreign Secretary, as Ashley privately regretted, “did not know Moses from Sir Sydney Smith,” but he could be appealed to in terms of practical British self-interest. In this case Ashley emphasized the usefulness of having a British agent on the spot at such a crucial time and put into Palmerston’s head the idea of using the Jews as a British wedge within the Ottoman Empire. He kept his own more sublime motive to himself, recording privately in his diary that “God put it into my heart to conceive the plan for His honour and gave me influence to prevail with Palmerston.”

Ashley’s influence was, curiously, always greater with Palmerston, who was of the opposite party, than with the Conservative ministers of his own party, and not so much because he was Palmerston’s stepson-in-law as because the two oddly contrasting men, one with his eyes fixed on this world, the other on the next, were genuinely fond of each other. Palmerston valued the younger man’s advice
on religious issues and as prime minister, it is said, never appointed a bishop except on Ashley’s recommendation. Ashley, for his part, knew that his dashing, exuberant chief could be counted on for the bold or original gesture, the plan of scope and daring, which cold Peel or cautious Aberdeen would only view with alarm.

His own exuberance at the consul’s appointment is recorded complete with Victorian italics and exclamation points. “Took leave this morning of Young, who has just been appointed her Majesty’s Vice-Consul at
Jerusalem!
What a wonderful event it is! The ancient city of the people of God is about to resume a place among the nations, and England is the first of Gentile kingdoms that ceases ‘to tread her down.’ “

It may seem a large message to have read into the appointment of a vice-consul, but Ashley saw him not as a mere functionary of the Foreign Office, but haloed with the rays of prophecy, “accredited, as it were, to the former kingdom of David and the Twelve Tribes.” He had in fact arranged it so that the consul’s jurisdiction should cover the whole country within the ancient limits of the Holy Land and that the chosen consul should be a person sympathetic to the cause. Young entered on his duties with enthusiasm and soon reported back a census of 9,690 Jews all of whom, he said, were sufficiently poor and oppressed and stateless to be eligible for British protection. In fact, he followed his instructions with such zeal that his superior, the consul-general at Alexandria, complained to the Foreign Office that Mr. Young was “granting British protection in an indiscriminate manner to all Jews.” The Foreign Office upheld Young with a promise of “all proper support.”

Meanwhile Ashley had been reading Lord Lindsay’s just-published
Letters from Egypt, Edom and the Holy Land
, the first in that flood of Holy Land travel books that over the next forty years was to saturate the British public with an average of some forty books a year. He took the
opportunity of reviewing the book to present publicly his vision of restoration of the “Jewish nation” under the aegis of the Anglican Church. The political regeneration of Palestine as a British sphere of influence had hardly yet taken shape in his mind, but the first green shoots of the idea that was to become the British Mandate appeared in the article on Lindsay’s book that he wrote for the
Quarterly Review
of December 1838.