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

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  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.* 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!

  When the Reverend Mr. Crybbace spoke of the area from the Nile to the Euphrates what he had in mind, of course, was the original conception of the Promised Land as staked out in that day when “the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates” (Genesis 15:18). This was the old Canaan, the land promised anew to Moses and again to Joshua. The Lord was very explicit. The Twelve Tribes were to push out the Canaanites and the Hittites, the Amorites and the Jebusites, and “every place that the sole of your foot shall tread upon, that have I given unto you”—from the wilderness (that is, the Sinai peninsula) to Lebanon, from the western sea to the Euphrates (Joshua 1:3).

  Actually the kingdoms of Judah and Israel, once established, never occupied anything like this area. They extended from Dan to Beersheba and from the Mediterranean to Gilead and Moab east of the Jordan. This was the area considered as Palestine, and it remained the common conception of Palestine until White Papers and Commissions of Inquiry took to chopping it up. To our simple ancestors Palestine was simply the land covenanted to Israel; they gave no thought — happy men — to Abraham’s other son, Ishmael. What Victorian thunders would have rolled had the Reverend Mr. Crybbace or Lord Shaftesbury or Colonel Churchill been alive in 1922 to see all of Palestine east of the Jordan lopped off for the benefit of the Arab sons of Ishmael! What explosions of eloquence would have followed upon the partition plan that left Israel without Hebron where the Patriarchs are buried, without Shiloh where the Ark of the Covenant was housed, without Dothan where Joseph was sold, without Bethel where Jacob dreamed, without Jericho where Joshua triumphed, and without Bethlehem. What final awful silence would have met that remarkable Jewish state proposed by the best minds of the United Nations—a Jewish state without Jerusalem!

  Of course our ancestors lived in happy ignorance of a wealth beneath the desert floor, a richer liquid than the water that gushed forth in the wilderness to save Hagar and her dying son Ishmael. Perhaps that legendary gush of water was meant as an omen. At any rate, Hagar’s son, in the person of the Arab League states, holds today an area outside of Palestine ninety times the size of Israel’s inheritance and a sizable chunk of Palestine as well.

  However, to get back to the 1840’s, there was another event of the time, besides the expected collapse of the Porte, that made the Middle East crucial for control of the road to India. This was the advent of steam navigation. Steamships depended on frequent ports of call for recoaling and therefore used the Mediterranean-Red Sea route with transshipment at Suez (the Canal being not yet cut) rather than the Cape route around Africa. In 1840 the P. & O. opened regular steamship runs from England to India by way of the Red Sea. This too was used as an argument by advocates of the restoration. In 1845 E. L. Mitford of the Ceylon Civil Service proposed the “re-establishment of the Jewish nation in Palestine as a protected state under the guardianship of Great Britain.” Among the “incalculable” advantages that he foresaw for Britain was that such a state would “place the management of our steam communication entirely in our hands.” It would moreover, he believed, “place us in a commanding position (in the Levant) from whence to check the process of encroachment, to overawe open enemies and, if necessary, to repel their advance.”

  Another official from another corner of the empire, Colonel George Gawler, a former governor of South Australia, put forward a detailed scheme for the accomplishment of the same purpose. He also urged Jewish settlement in Syria in order to prevent intrusion by a foreign power. England “urgently needs,” he said, “the shortest and safest lines of communication.… Egypt and Syria stand in intimate connection. A foreign hostile power mighty in either would soon endanger British trade … and it is now for England to set her hand to the renovation of Syria, through the only people whose energies will be extensively and permanently in the work—the real children of the soil, the sons of Israel.” Gawler, like Colonel Churchill, returned time and again to his thesis, urging it on all sides. He became acquainted with Montefiore and accompanied him on a survey of Palestine in 1849. He went farther than Shaftesbury, who saw no “pecuniary outlay” by the guarantor-state and proposed that the powers should undertake financial support of the scheme in expiation for their treatment of the Jews. He urged the Jews to come forward in the event of the collapse of Turkey and “boldly enforce” their c
laim to Palestine, serving notice that “This portion belongs to the God of Israel and to his national people” and eventually “to hold their own upon the mountains of Israel against all aggressors.”

  It is a notable fact that clergymen and military men-men of the Bible and men of the sword—dominate these discussions of Israel’s return to Palestine. An odd little echo of the military’s interest occurs in Mrs. Finn’s memoirs of the British consulate in Jerusalem. In 1858 a distinguished party came up from the British frigate Euryalus, anchored at Jaffa. The fourteen-year-old Prince Alfred, a younger son of the Queen, was on board as a cadet and was escorted, with his tutor Major Cowell and the ship’s commander, Captain Tarleton, on a tour by the Finns. “All the way to Bethlehem,” Mrs. Finn recalls, “there was chat with Major Cowell and the Captain (both of whom knew their Bible very well) on the prospects of this land and of the Jews.”

  The Major and the Captain are heard of no more. Meanwhile Consul and Mrs. Finn, still carrying on the Shaftesbury tradition in the field, were pursuing their local effort to enable the Jews to take root in their own land. The Finns, like Montefiore, tried to begin with the material at hand, the old Jewish community of Jerusalem. It consisted of some four thousand Sephardim, descendants of the Spanish Jews expelled in 1492 who had been allowed to settle in Jerusalem by Suleiman the Great, and of some three thousand Ashkenazim, poor stragglers from central Europe who came to lay their bones in Zion. Largely they were sunk in “hopeless pauperism,” partly due to the local inhabitants’ refusal to give them work and partly to a rabbinical dictatorship that chained them to the condition of a medieval ghetto. Against this obstacle the Finns, still dedicated to conversion, could make little headway. They were tactful. Mrs. Finn says she was careful to keep the Cross out of sight of the Jewish wet nurse whom she had for the children, for she “quite understood the feelings of our Jewish friends on the subject.” How at the same time she could “fully believe and expect that some day Israel would fulfill the Divine conditions” is a paradox that I will not attempt to explain. Whatever the reasoning, it held them to the conviction, to use Mrs. Finn’s words, “that this work will progress and that the Holy Land will again be peopled by its lawful owners, the Hebrew nation, and will again ‘blossom as the rose.’ “