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

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  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.

  Using as evidence a letter written to him by a convert recently arrived from Warsaw, he spoke about the resurgence of the feeling among the Jews of Russia and Poland that the time “for the turning of their captivity was nigh at hand,” about the upsurge of Christian interest in the Holy Land, about what he insisted was “a new and tender interest in the Hebrew people” among Christians and what he insisted was an approximation toward Christianity among Jews. He told of the Society’s plan to build an Anglican church in Jerusalem, “if possible on Mt. Zion itself,” for which funds were now being collected. Already the Society’s missionaries were on the spot conducting services in Hebrew where no Protestant services had ever been held before, and a “small but faithful congregation of proselytes hear daily the Evangelical verities of our Church on the Mount of the Holy City itself in the language of the prophets and in the spirit of the Apostles.” Surely, Ashley glowed, this event is “one of the most striking that have occurred in modern days, perhaps in any days since the corruptions began in the Church of Christ.” As heralding the conversion of the Jews under Protestant auspices it would establish forever “the pure doctrines of the Reformation as embodied and professed in the Church of England.”

  Leaving the religious question, he then calls attention to the significance of the recent consular appointment and suggests that “the soil and climate of Palestine are singularly adapted to the growth of produce required for the exigences of Great Britain” — cotton, silk, madder, and olive-oil. “Capital and skill are alone required,” and these he sees as forthcoming from Britain now that Palestine enjoys “the presence of a British officer and the increased security of property which his presence will confer.” Why, then, shall the world not see at last the return of the Jews, “who will betake themselves to agriculture in no other land, and having found in the English Consul, a mediator between their people and the pasha, will … become once more the husbandmen of Judea and Galilee”?

  We may smile at Ashley’s faith in the ability of a lone vice-consul to move empires by his mere presence, but the Victorian self-confidence, like the Elizabethan, built the British Empire. The consul represented Britain. What more was necessary?

  For one thing, the Jews themselves, the essential ingredient, were necessary but still missing, for as yet there was no mass movement for the return. Not until a generation later, when political anti-Semitism as a state policy was resorted to by the czars as a vent for popular discontent, was enough pressure built up to push the Jews into active Zionism. But the battles, intrigues, and clashing ambitions now reverberating around Palestine determined one Jew to investigate for himself the possibility of reopening the land to his people. This was Ashley’s fellow philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore, who out of religious feelings as deep and fervent as Ashley’s, if less mystical, believed also in the literal restoration of the Jewish state, though (it seems hardly necessary to point out) for different reasons. Montefiore was a believing Jew of the most orthodox description who daily attended synagogue at seven A.M., dated his letters by the Jewish calendar, and refused to attend his own inauguration as sheriff because it fell during Rosh Hashana. But, having made his way in the business world, he was accustomed to work for what he wanted, not wait for it. “Palestine must belong to the Jews and Jerusalem is destined to be the seat of the Jewish Empire,” he is quoted as saying by his biographer Lucien Wolf. But, being a practical man, he also said: “Begin in the first instance with the buil
ding of houses in Jerusalem; begin at once.”

  Conversion, Ashley’s motivating idea, he would probably have regarded, like the learned counsel, as lunatic. Yet otherwise they were not far apart. The “Jerusalem” engraved on Ashley’s ring appeared on Montefiore’s carriage crest in Hebrew letters of gold. Both believed that the Jews, once they felt the soil of Palestine beneath their feet, would again become agriculturists, restore the vine and the fig tree, and reclaim their homeland from decay. Both were, in a sense, Zionist-before-the-fact; and to be a Zionist in the 1830’s was something like being an antifascist in the 1930’s—“premature.” Ashley was right for the wrong reason; Montefiore was right, but too soon.

  In November 1838 he set out for Palestine, where, thanks to his prestige and wealth and the memory of his munificence on a previous visit, his passage through the country was like a royal progress. Its climax was entry into Jerusalem on a prancing Arab steed provided by the Turkish governor, which bore him down the Mount of Olives through two lines of mounted Turkish soldiers in ceremonial uniform. Between parades and oriental courtesies Montefiore, always businesslike, surveyed housing, sanitation, and possibilities for work and land reclamation available to the wretched Chalukah community, who so far had lived on prayers, wailing, and reciting the Talmud and on pennies from “Jerusalem boxes” abroad.

  Proceeding to an audience in Egypt with Mehemet Ali, who had once asked Montefiore to be his business agent, he laid before the Pasha a plan for land purchase described in detail in his diary on May 24, 1839:

  “I shall apply to Mohammed [Mehemet] Ali for a grant of land for fifty years; some 100 or 200 villages; giving him an increased rent of from 10 to 20 per cent, and paying the whole in money annually in Alexandria, but the land and villages to be free, during the whole term, from every tax or rate either of Pasha or Governor of the several districts. The grant obtained, I shall, please heaven, on my return to England form a company for the cultivation of the land and the encouragement of our brethren in Europe to return to Palestine.… By degrees I hope to induce the return of thousands of our brethren to the land of Israel. I am sure they would be happy in the enjoyment of the observance of our religion in a manner which is impossible in Europe.”

  Mehemet, smoking his diamond-studded pipe, promised him “any portion of land open for sale in Syria” and agreed to “do everything that lies in my power” to support his project. But within little more than a year Mehemet’s power too was broken; Syria reverted to the sultans, and not until their miserable dynasty was at last extinguished was the opportunity to come again.

  Meanwhile the Damascus Incident had erupted, growing out of a charge of ritual murder against the Jews in the death of a Capuchin friar. All the ferocious hallmarks of the pogrom followed—riots, sacking, imprisonment, and torture to extract confessions, instigated and kept going by French agents and the local Catholic orders. It was part of the boiling over of the Eastern Question, which now, in the years 1839–40, reached its crisis, with France set against the other powers. Though the Damascus Incident was historically important in the development of nineteenth-century Jewish nationalism, arousing Jews the world over to the need of united action, it is relevant here only so far as it provided opportunity and motive for British intervention on behalf of the Jews in the Turkish Empire and awakened public opinion to their situation.

  A memorial addressed to the Protestant Monarchs of Europe appealing for the restoration of the Jews was published in full in the Times of March 9, 1840. It drew attention to the Eastern crisis and “other striking signs of the times” as providing an opportune moment for “what may be the probable line of duty” of Protestant Christianity to the Jewish people. Shortly afterwards the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland published a report by two of its missionaries on the condition of the Jews of Palestine that attracted much attention and followed it with a memorial addressed to Palmerston, also carried by the Times (December 3, 1840). It commended him for appointing a consul to Jerusalem and extending British protection to the Jews and expressed the hope that the current crisis in Syria “will result in the more firm and more extensive establishment of British influence in that interesting land.”

  Meanwhile Montefiore, hardly back in England, hurriedly set out again for the East, resolved to obtain release of the Jewish prisoners in Damascus dungeons, not with a pardon, which he scorned, but with acquittal on the blood accusation as well as reparation and a general order from the Sultan protecting Jewish life and property. Montefiore was not a man to be stopped, whether by French intrigue, Mohammedan red tape, or war. To the astonishment of the world he obtained not only full acquittal, but also a firman, granted grudgingly by the Sultan, assuring to the Jews equality of treatment with all Turkish subjects. “The Magna Charta for the Jews in Turkish dominions,” Montefiore proudly, if too hopefully, acclaimed it, and he took particular pleasure in stopping off at Paris on the way home for the purpose of personally presenting to Louis Philippe a copy of the firman obtained at the cost of that discomfited monarch’s ambitions in the East. The moment must have given him even more satisfaction than the “supporters” to his coat of arms granted by Queen Victoria on his return, in specific recognition of his “unceasing exertions in behalf of his injured and persecuted brethren in the East and of the Jewish nation at large.”

  The Queen’s interest may have been personal,* but Palmerston’s instructions about the Jews were not. While Montefiore was in the East Palmerston was sending to Ponsonby and other envoys at Turkish posts the series of dispatches that mark the beginning of official British intervention on behalf of the “Jewish nation” and of its resettlement in Palestine. Already in July he had concluded the Treaty of London, pledging the Four Powers’ help to the Sultan against Mehemet, which had so infuriated France and had precipitated the final phase of the Eastern crisis.

  While Palmerston was chortling at his bold stroke and Montefiore was charging forth like a medieval knight to save his fallen brethren, Ashley, still wrapped in prophetic visions, was using the occasion too.

  “Anxious about the hopes and prospects of the Jewish people,” he wrote in his diary on July 24. “Everything seems ripe for their return to Palestine. Could the Five Powers of the West be induced to guarantee the security of life and possessions to the Hebrew race, they would flow back in rapidly augmenting numbers. Then, by the blessing of God, I will prepare a document, fortify it by all the evidence I can accumulate and, confiding to the wisdom and mercy of the Almighty, lay it before the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.”

  On August 1 he dined with Palmerston and “propounded my scheme, which seemed to strike his fancy; he asked some questions and readily promised to consider it.” Ashley confesses that he used political, financial, and commercial arguments, for these are the considerations that strike home to the Foreign Secretary, who “weeps not like his Master over Jerusalem” and is unaware that he has been “chosen by God to be an instrument of good to His ancient people and to recognize their rights without believing their destiny.”

  Palmerston comes through handsomely. On August 11 he writes to Ponsonby, ambassador at the Porte, the dispatch, quoted earlier in this chapter, urging the advantages to the Sultan and to Britain of resettling the Jews in Palestine. On the same day the British fleet arrived off the coast of Syria. On the 17th appeared Ashley’s article in the Times, followed by the flood of replies that it provoked. One anonymous correspondent suggested that Britain should buy Palestine for the Jews. Another urged their restoration as a matter of practical politics on the optimistic theory that if the Jews repossessed Syria it would be removed as a bone of contention among the powers and thus contribute to the general peace.

  On September 25 Ashley formally presented to Palmerston his document for “recall of the Jews to their ancient land.” Its tone is uninspired, for Ashley, in trying to make out a case for official policy, carefully restrained his pen from raptures about “God’s ancient people” and “Christ’s coming Kingdom
.” Nor, being an anti-imperialist at heart, could he force himself to any enthusiasm about advancing the British flag. He simply proposes the plan as a means of “adjusting the Syrian question” and promoting the fertility of “all the countries between the Euphrates and the Mediterranean Sea.” He affirms that the Hebrew race believes the time is near for their restoration to the soil of Palestine, and that only fear for their persons and estates holds them back. He proposes that the “Governing Power of the Syrian provinces” (who this would be was still uncertain at the time he wrote) should enter into a “solemn engagement to establish the principles and practises of European civilization”; that this power should be induced to enact “equal laws and equal protection to Jew and Gentile”; that the Four Powers should guarantee performance and that an article ratifying their guarantee should be included in the final treaty in settlement of the Eastern Question. Such a guarantee would call forth the “hidden wealth and industry of the Jewish people.” Lands now worthless as a source of revenue would be settled and developed. More effort could be expected from the Jews than from others, because of their “ancient reminiscences and deep affection for their land.” Their industry and perseverance are prodigious, they can subsist on the smallest pittance, they are accustomed to suffering and trained in “implicit obedience” to arbitrary rule. “They will submit to the existing form of government.”