Bible and Sword (29 page)

And what then? What of the great hopes to be realized, the great truths to be propagated, the great light that was to beam upon the world from the Anglican See in the Holy City beckoning home God’s ancient people? The painful fact is that nobody saw it. Popery did not wither away, Protestantism was not visibly advanced, Judaism remained untouched. This extraordinary and now forgotten episode that added so many degrees of heat to Victorian
religious controversy found its ultimate epitaph in a report by an English traveler, E. Warburton, author of
The Crescent and the Cross
. In 1844 he visited Bishop Alexander’s church in Jerusalem and found a total congregation of eight converted Jews and one or two tourists. “The Hill of Zion is not a likely place for a Jew to forsake the faith of his fathers,” a Hebrew told Warburton. No one in England seems to have thought of that.

Only Ashley, mourning the untimely death of Bishop Alexander in 1845, allowed a sliver of doubt to penetrate his mind. “Have we,” he wondered, “conceived a merely human project and then imagined it to be a decree of the Almighty?”

Yet Ashley had not labored in vain. There was a valid political idea at the core of his scheme, even if there was little sense to the form that he hoped it would take. Through the agitation that his proposals had aroused the British public was gradually made aware of the strategic advantages to be gained from a sphere of influence in the Middle East. Napoleon’s expedition, Nelson’s victory at the Nile, the romantic history of Mehemet Ali’s rise and fall punctuated by the echo of British naval guns, Palmerston’s neat triumph in the Syrian crisis, the visionary prospects aroused by the Evangelical craze for conversion of the Jews and the Jerusalem bishopric, all these events centering in the Holy Land combined to create almost a proprietary feeling about Palestine. The idea of a British annex there through the medium of a British-sponsored restoration of Israel began to appeal to other minds than Ashley’s. His followers, however, invariably stressed the strategic arguments that he had added only half-heartedly to the old religious objectives.

The most far-sighted and sensible of Ashley’s successors was Colonel Charles Henry Churchill, a grandson of the Duke of Marlborough (and thus an antecedent of Winston Churchill) and an officer in the army that overthrew Mehemet. Churchill was captured by his idea when he was stationed in Damascus at the time of the furor over the ritual murder trial and Montefiore’s visit. It was Churchill to whom Montefiore sent the Sultan’s firman of 1840 for
presentation to the Jewish community of Damascus. In recognition of Churchill’s help in their cause during the year of terror the Damascus Jews gave a banquet honoring him, together with the fourteen victims of the blood accusation just released from prison. His speech on this occasion and, more particularly, a letter to Montefiore that he wrote shortly afterwards, already mark a change from the Evangelicals’ visionary nonsense to a more realistic point of view. He seems to have been concerned with restoring the Jews for their own sake rather than as agents of prophecy, and he nowhere mentions their conversion as a precondition or corollary of the return to Zion. He hoped, he told the Damascus group, that the hour of the liberation of Israel was approaching, when the Jewish nation would once again take its place among the powers of the world. England, he added, was the only country friendly to Israel’s hopes.

Then, in a letter to Montefiore dated June 14, 1841, he makes the point that had escaped everyone so far: namely, that “It is for the Jews to make a commencement.”

“I cannot conceal from you,” he wrote, “my most anxious desire to see your countrymen endeavor once more to resume their existence as a people. I consider the object to be perfectly obtainable. But two things are indispensably necessary: Firstly that the Jews themselves will take up the matter, universally and unanimously. Secondly that the European powers will aid them in their views.”

Next he hit on a second truth: the essential fallacy of Britain’s policy of propping up the Turkish Empire—a fallacy that was to plague her diplomacy throughout the nineteenth century. The effort is doomed to “miserable failure,” Churchill predicts. Syria and Palestine must be rescued from the “blundering and decrepit despotism” of the Turks and Egyptians and taken under European protection. When that day came the Jews should be ready and able to say: “Already we feel ourselves a people.” He “strenuously urged” Montefiore as president of the Jewish Board of Deputies,
the governors of London’s Sephardic community, to start the wheels turning in this “glorious struggle for national existence” and to stir up the deputies to meet, petition, and agitate.

In a second letter a year later he took up Ashley’s idea of a guarantee and suggested that the Jews of England and the Continent should petition the British government to appoint a resident commissioner for Syria to watch over the interests of Jews residing there and protect the security of their property, and thus to encourage colonization “under the auspices and sanction of Great Britain.”

Such a step was too much for the courage of the deputies. They could be aroused to action in behalf of distressed or persecuted Jews in cases like the Damascus affair, but they were too concerned in the struggle for civil emancipation at home to look any farther ahead toward Jewish nationhood. In later years, of course, the more emancipated they became the less (with certain notable exceptions) they liked the idea of nationhood in any form. But that is another story. In 1842 even Montefiore could not move them, and they adopted a resolution regretting that the Board was “precluded from originating any measures for carrying out the benevolent views of Col. Churchill.” They added that the Jews of Eastern Europe and the Near East would have to make their views known before the British Jews could venture any step in support. Churchill replied that they might “endeavor to ascertain the feelings and wishes of the Jews in the rest of Europe on a question so interesting and important” as the “prospective regeneration” of their country, but there is no evidence that the suggestion recommended itself to the Board. The rest, as far as the records show, is silence.

The Jews of the West would not listen; the Jews of the East behind their ghetto walls could not hear; nor did Churchill have the ear of the Foreign Secretary or the opportunity to influence state policy over the dinner table as Ashley had done. In fact, during the half-century or so
after the Ashley-Palmerston opening move in 1840 there were no advocates of restoration eminent in high councils apart from Ashley himself. As Lord Shaftesbury he continued to bestride the Victorian heights for nearly another fifty years. He never abandoned the cause and indeed made the finest expression of it near the end of his life.
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His association with Palmerston, who was soon back in the Foreign Office and went on to a ten-year reign as prime minister, remained as close as ever, but both were absorbed in those years by larger matters. In any case the heyday of Evangelical enthusiasm for converting the Jews was over, and with its passing Shaftesbury’s own particular motive had become out of date.

Later advocates of Israel’s restoration were more concerned with its relation to Britain’s imperial progress eastward than to her spiritual progress upward. “It must be clear to every English mind,” wrote Colonel Churchill in his book
Mount Lebanon
, “that if England’s oriental supremacy is to be upheld, Syria and Egypt must be made to fall more or less under her sway of influence.” The book, which was the product of his fifteen years of residence in the Middle East, was published in 1853, the year before the Crimean War, when rumblings from the East were, as usual, interpreted as the death rattle of the Turkish Empire. When Palestine ceases to be Turkish, predicted Churchill (correctly if prematurely), it must become either English or an independent state, and the prospect stirs him to a burst of Ashleyan eloquence: “The land of Jacob’s might and Ishmael’s wandering power, of David’s lyre and Isaiah’s strain, of Abraham’s faith and Immanuel’s love—where God’s mysterious ways with man began and where in the fullness of time they are to be accomplished—it also has claims on England’s watchful vigilance and sympathising care and already invokes her guardian Aegis.”

His was not the only voice trying to summon that Aegis
to a destiny in Palestine. Hardly a returned traveler from the Grand Tour of the East failed to make the point. In 1844 everyone was reading Warburton’s
Crescent and the Cross
, a book that was to go into seventeen editions over the next forty-odd years. It epitomized the experience of generations of pilgrims to the Holy Land when the author spoke of “a sort of patriotism for Palestine.” The emotions aroused by place names familiar from early childhood and the thrill of being received “by Sheiks of Abraham’s fashion who feast him on the fare that was set before the Angels” do not obscure from this observant traveler the fact that Abraham’s footsteps mark what is now the shortest route to India. Where the Crusades failed to establish a foothold, he remarks, “The interests of India may obtain what the Sepulchre of Christ has been denied.” Admitting that “this is perhaps a delicate subject,” he hurriedly passes on to other matters, only to come back to it again. Everywhere in his travels, he reports, he has met the expectation that England is coming to the East. When the mad old Pasha Mehemet Ali dies, England should not allow Egypt to be restored to the “imbecile tyranny of the Porte,” but “boldly assert” her right of way through Egypt to India, bringing in her wake prosperity to the country and freedom to the people—a relative phrase when used by an English author, meaning freedom from the Turks.

Warburton does not notice in the Jews a possible
avant-garde
of England’s imperialism. His predecessor by a few years, Lord Lindsay, whose book inspired Ashley’s groundbreaking article in the
Quarterly Review
, came closer to it. As he follows “in the steps of the Israelites to the Promised Land,” as he experiences the “strange and thrilling pleasure” of rereading the passage of the Red Sea “with the sight before my eyes,” as he camps at night in the desert and never drives a tent pin “without thinking of Jael and Sisera,” the future of the chosen people begins to occupy his mind. He is convinced that the barrenness and decay everywhere around are due, not to a curse on the land, but
simply to “the removal of the ancient inhabitants.” He believes that it is the will of the Almighty that the “modern occupants should never be so numerous” as to prevent the return of the “rightful heirs” and that the once fertile land “only waits the return of her banished children and the application of industry commensurate with her agricultural capabilities to burst once more into universal luxuriance and be all she ever was in the days of Solomon.”

Another enterprising traveler, Lady Francis Egerton, finds herself pricked into curiosity about the condition of God’s ancient people as she wanders through the country seeing on every hand living images of Moses and Elijah. In Jerusalem she pokes into Jewish homes and synagogues, asks questions of the London missionaries, discusses the Damascus persecutions and theories of the restoration. Repeatedly she notices the feeling, recorded in so many travel books of the period, that these were “fateful” times, that something extraordinary was about to happen, vaguely connected in some way with the fulfillment of prophecy and the return to Zion. Lady Francis puts it down to the common expectation of the downfall of the Ottoman Empire and the belief that the ensuing vacuum in Palestine would be filled by the return of the Jews to temporal power. She finds, however, that the impression prevailing in England of Jews “flocking” to the country is imaginary and concludes that in her opinion the Jews will never be restored until they are converted. Her book, intended, she says, only as a private diary, was published in 1841 at the earnest solicitation of friends for the benefit of the Ladies Hibernian Female School Society and found its way to the bed table of the unctuous Baron Bunsen when he visited the queen dowager, showing, he said, “the exquisite hospitality of a Queen surrounded by English noblemen of the right sort.”

The report of the Turk’s death, which seemed so imminent in the 1840’s, proved to be greatly exaggerated; his coma continued chronic for some seventy years more. But
it was believed at the time that the Holy Land would soon be available for new ownership. What more convenient and natural than the return of the old tenant with a new landlord? The idea appealed to a variety of English minds. “Were the Ottoman power to be displaced the old commercial route would reopen,” wrote Dr. Thomas Clarke in a treatise called
India & Palestine: Or the Restoration of the Jews Viewed in Relation to the Nearest Route to India
.

“Jews,” he continued, “are essentially a trading people. What so natural than that they should be planted along that great highway of ancient traffic … and in what more skillful hands could exchanges betwixt the East and the West be placed?… Syria would be safe only in the hands of a brave, independent and spiritual people, deeply imbued with the sentiment of nationality.… Such a people we have in the Jews.… Restore them their nationality and their country once more and there is no power on earth that could ever take it from them.”

A similar pamphlet entitled A
Tract for the Times, being a Plea for the Jews
was published in 1844 by the Reverend Samuel A. Bradshaw, proposing that Parliament should grant four million pounds, provided the churches should collect another million, for the restoration of Israel. In the same year a committee was convened in London for the purpose of forming a “British and Foreign Society for Promoting the Restoration of the Jewish Nation to Palestine.” Although it was apparently stillborn, it is interesting to note that the opening address by the chairman, a reverend with the delightful name of T. Tully Crybbace, urged that England secure from Turkey the surrender of the whole of Palestine “from the Euphrates to the Nile, and from the Mediterranean to the Desert.” What generous ideas Englishmen had in those days, when Palestine belonged to someone else, of the area that should be returned to its ancient proprietors!