Bible and Sword: England and Palestine From the Bronze Age to Balfour

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  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 Such a storm of protest from pamphleteers and howling mobs met the Act that it was repealed the following year and not finally re-enacted until the Emancipation Act of 1858, over one hundred years later.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.”

  Another popular book was Two Journeys to Jerusalem, published in 1704 by Nathaniel Crouch, editor of a series of penny histories that Dr. Johnson called “very proper to allure backward readers.” The book contained, in addition to the travel diaries, some “Memorable remarks upon the Ancient and Modern state of the Jewish Nation,” Samuel Brett’s account of the Jews’ Council in Hungary, an account of the “Wonderful Delusion” of the Jews by Sabbatai Zevi, and a report of the Council’s debate on Manasseh ben Israel’s proposal in 1655. One of the two journeys was the “strange and true” adventures of Henry Timberlake already mentioned (Chapter VI); the other was a reprint of the travels of fourteen Englishmen in 1669, which had first appeared in 1683. The whole collection seems to have had a steady audience, for it kept on being reissued, once even in a Welsh translation, at various times over the next hundred years, with a final edition in 1796.

  Crouch, who himself wrote the “Memorable Remarks” under the name Robert Burton, plunges into the problem that puzzled generations of writers on Palestine: how so barren a country could ever have supported the busy, prosperous population of Biblical, Roman, and Byzantine times. In our own day, when the White Paper cut Jewish immigration on the pretense that the land could not support any more people, the same problem under the awesome name of “economic absorptive capacity” produced endless debates in Parliament. But Burton (or Crouch), writing two hundred years before it was necessary to worry about appeasing the Arabs or about a “political upper limit,” approached the question in the realistic spirit of his time. Assuming a revival of the careful cultivation practiced by the “ancients,” he calculated that an acre of good ground will easily feed four men for a year, allowing each two pounds, six ounces of bread a day, “but since our Israelites were great eaters let us allow them double the nourishment, that is to say four pounds, twelve ounces a day,” or two men to an acre. The area of the ancient kingdom of Judea he estimates at 3,365,000 acres, and, deducting half of this as noncultivable, he concludes that it could still support the equivalent of one man to an acre for the whole. Curiously enough, this figure of three and a half million is not far from that which the present government of Israel is aiming at, though ridiculed as fantastic and impossible by all the White Paper experts.

  The general impression of Palestine as barren, Burton went on, was due to the fact that travelers usually saw only the country between Jaffa and Jerusalem, which was never famous for fertility; and “for want of cu
lture and tillage among the barbarous Infidels … who by their continuous wars and ravages have made it almost desolate and like a desert” it has become “like a place forsaken by God.” Yet in Bible times it flowed with milk and honey, thanks to the husbandry of the Israelites, who terraced and fertilized it and wasted none of it in “parks for hunting, nor Avenues, nor Bowling greens, nor grass-plats.”

  The general decay under Islam was noticed, too, by the group of fourteen Englishmen, members of the Levant Company’s factory at Aleppo, whose tour is reported in the book. Passing through Caesarea and the country north of Jaffa, they found it “now ruinate and inhabited by a company of savage Arabs.” Jaffa, for which Richard fought so valiantly, where Venetian galleys once massed in the bay to disembark their pilgrim crowds, was, these merchants thought, a poor second-class harbor. Its chief trade was in potash for soap and in cotton and cotton yarn. Far from falling on their knees or thinking solemn thoughts, these travelers of three hundred years ago behaved exactly like the guided bus tourists of today. At Jerusalem they crowded around the visitors’ book to look for familiar names and counted a hundred and fifty-eight English visitors since the year 1601. At the site of the Garden of Eden “we spent some time in cutting sticks and setting our names on the great trees.” On the Bethlehem road they fell in with some local Christians “whose art is to make the figure of our Saviour’s sepulchre or what Holy story you please upon your Arm; they make it of a blew color and it is done by the continual pricking of your Arm with two needles.” Everyone in the group selected a pattern from prints shown and was accordingly tattooed.

  In 1776, over a hundred years later, another party from the Aleppo factory came through, and their account, by one Richard Tyron, is still as matter-of-fact in tone as if they had been visiting London from the provinces. They are not bothered by questions of ancient prophecy or future fulfillment. Tyron, remarking on the general rack and ruin, notes briefly that the land “is now under a curse” and leaves it to that. Between these two visits a century apart few Englishmen were coming out to Palestine; the fashionable tour was rather to Greece and Rome, the lands of classical antiquity. Only factors or chaplains of the Levant Company already resident in the East occasionally wandered through Palestine, looking less for religious experience than for knowledge and information about the country.

  Thomas Shaw, for example, a chaplain from Algiers, who published his tour of the Holy Land in 1738, was chiefly concerned in sketching botanical species, which adorned his book in splendid copperplate illustrations. Likewise Henry Maundrell, chaplain at Aleppo, indulges in no religious raptures, but is more interested in copying ancient inscriptions, examining ruins, and uncovering traces of old cisterns and aqueducts. His Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem, first published in 1697, went into three editions and was reprinted in many travel collections during the next century. Although Palestine is now, he reports, “a most miserable, dry, barren place,” yet it is “obvious for anyone to observe that these rocks and hills must have been anciently covered with earth and cultivated.” He gives an admirable little lecture on soil erosion, showing how the ancients, “for the husbandry of these mountains,” built walls to form “many beds of excellent soil rising gradually one above another from the bottom to the top of the mountains.” At the Dead Sea Maundrell confutes old legends by making his own observations. Birds fly over the sea and do not fall dead into its waters, he reports, and he finds oyster shells and other signs of marine life on its shores. He takes practical note, too, of the Turks’ method of governing subject peoples by sowing division among them (a method not unfamiliar in the later British Empire), “by which art they create contrary interests and parties amongst the inhabitants, preventing them from ever uniting under one prince, which, if they should have the sense to do (being so numerous and almost the sole inhabitants thereabouts) they might shake off the Turkish yoke and make themselves supreme lords of the country.”

  By far the most learned work of the eighteenth century dealing with Palestine was written by Richard Pococke, son of the great Hebrew and Arabic scholar. His Description of the East appeared in 1743–45 in three magnificent folio volumes, of which the second dealt with Syria and Palestine.

  Nothing could be more typical of the eighteenth-century attitude toward Palestine than that Pococke, who was to become a bishop, chose to dedicate his volume on the Holy Land to that prototype of the material virtues, the Earl of Chesterfield. The Holy Land is, after all, he says by way of preface, “a very interesting subject,” with many places “of which we hear mention every day and generally take pleasure in acquiring the least knowledge in relation to them.” In this spirit he sets out from Egypt to cross the wilderness in the footsteps of the Exodus, determined to give an accurate eyewitness picture of that famous route. He notices every landmark, describes the vegetation in detail, and sketches innumerable plans and maps from every elevation, showing every tree and rock. He copies rock inscriptions and tries to identify each stopping place and the site of each incident of Moses’ forty-year march. Avoiding the Bedouins as “a very bad people,” he finds hospitality with a tribe of “Seleminites” who seem to adhere to the Jewish religion and who, he surmises, might be descended from Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law.

  Once arrived in Jerusalem, he examines each local tradition to see if it conforms with known facts, history, and probability, accepting nothing on faith. His masterly attack on the supposed pillar of Absalom, a popular tourist attraction, is like Sherlock Holmes’s elucidation of a muddy footprint; “Josephus calls it a marble pillar; but as he says it was two furlongs from Jerusalem, though this vale, in which Kedron runs, might be the King’s dale; yet as the distance does not agree, it may be doubted whether this was really the monument; and it seems more probable that it was farther to the south-west, beyond the vale of Gehinnon. But if this was the King’s dale in which Melchisedeck, King of Salem, came to meet Abraham, it would be a circumstance to prove that Jerusalem was the ancient Salem.” And in conclusion he notes that the pillar’s Ionic style indicates an origin considerably later than the time of Absalom.

  Pococke traversed the whole country from the Dead Sea to Galilee, missing nothing, studying everything for what it could reveal of the famous past. Cisterns, pools, and wells that he found in the Plain of Esdraelon showed him how the land was once irrigated. Struck by the beauty of a field of tulips in bloom near Ramleh, he was led to surmise that these must have been the “lilies of the field” that outshone Solomon in all his glory. This was breathing life into the pages of the Bible. More than all his elaborate engravings of mosques and sepulchers (which later archaeologists have proved largely incorrect) Pococke’s tulips began the process of unwrapping Palestine from the cerements of the past.

  CHAPTER IX

  THE EASTERN QUESTION:

  Clash of Empires in Syria

  In the closing year of the eighteenth century Englishmen were once again fighting on the beach before Acre, five hundred years to the decade since the Crusaders had lost Acre for the last time. The famous fortress dominating the seaward approach to Palestine and the military highway along the coast had been a prize of arms uncounted times during its embattled career of some thirty centuries. In 1291, the last Europeans were expelled by the Turks, and the key to Palestine, and with it all the Holy Land, were finally enveloped in the Turkish empire.

  Now, suddenly, after five centuries of Islamic sleep, British gunboats boomed in the harbor and fierce Mamelukes desperately defended the walls while a European army laid siege by land. This time, oddly enough, the British were defending the fort, not attacking it. They were fighting on the side of the Turks against a European foe, and their guns were aimed not at the walls of Acre, but at the army of Napoleon beneath them.

  Palestine’s geography had returned to plague it. It lay across the road to India, where Napoleon was determined to plant his foot, cut off his arch-enemy, Britain, from the wealth and commerce of the East, and rule unchallenged over a second Alexandrian em
pire. Egypt and Syria were essential to his plan, and to the same degree it was essential to Britain to keep them out of his clutches. The very army Napoleon took on his expedition to Egypt was the army that he had assembled for the invasion of England. At the last minute that fatal hesitancy to dare the Channel dash that overcame Hitler, too, at the water’s edge in 1940, turned Napoleon eastward in the hope of stabbing Britain from behind, exactly as Hitler was to turn to North Africa in pursuance of the same vain strategy.

  In fact, the parallels fall so thick and fast between the Napoleonic and the Hitlerian campaigns that one is often under the impression of seeing double. In both epochs the strategy that swirled around Palestine was the same—and still is. Reduced to the simplest terms, it amounts to this: Whatever swelling despot—non-British, of course—threatens to gain the mastery of Europe must be kept at all costs from likewise controlling the Middle East. This was as true in Napoleon’s time as in the Kaiser’s, as in Hitler’s, and as today in Russia’s. The area from Cairo to Constantinople, inclusive, must be kept out of the hands of any would-be world ruler who could convert the Mediterranean into a private lake and close the approaches to the Far East. From the strategic point of view little Palestine must fit into the larger pattern for the Middle East, regardless of who holds the country. Once it was the Turks, then the British, now Israel. It does not matter which—as far as power politics are concerned—so long as it is not the power dominating Europe.