And so they went ahead. They organized work projects, not only to give unemployed Jews paid labor, but also to make headway toward land reclamation. Land was rented for an irrigation project, though with pitiful results, for most of the beneficiaries were too weak to walk the mile to the field. An English surgeon, Mr. Sandford, one of the Finns’ little band of helpers, made the discovery that the high mortality rate among the Jews was “chiefly due to want of food.” And if they accepted work from the gentiles, they were disowned by the rabbis. Still the Finns persisted, and Mrs. Finn wrote constant letters home trying to enlist financial support from England. It was discouraging to find that few people at home could be convinced that “the Jews would work or that the Holy Land was worth cultivating.”
Enough were found, however, to finance purchase of a tract of land, which they named Abraham’s Vineyard; but not much was accomplished beyond temporary relief of the most destitute. Yet for years they persisted, and the Society for the Promotion of Jewish Agricultural Labor in the Holy Land, which they formed at this time, continued in existence under various names right up to the Mandate.
Consul Finn, as long as he was in Jerusalem, also kept up political activity on behalf of the Jews. In 1849 he induced the Foreign Office to grant him powers to take over protection of all Russian Jews in Palestine when the Russian government discarded them. He was always ready to make the Pasha enforce Jewish rights or to take up any case of persecution. Once he succeeded in getting a Turkish soldier publicly reprimanded and punished before the whole garrison for an offense committed against a poor Jew fourteen months before, which “greatly astonished the population.” In 1857 he tried again to revive Shaftesbury’s old plan and forwarded to the then foreign secretary, the Earl of Clarendon, a detailed scheme “to persuade Jews in a large body to settle here as agriculturists on the soil … in partnership with the Arab peasantry.” As the word “persuade” indicates, the time was still not ripe, the necessary volition being not yet present among the Jews of Europe.
While it was in the making, one figure in England was also preparing for a role that was to bring the British Empire to the frontiers of Palestine. It has been said that there was no one apart from Lord Shaftesbury in a position to influence policy among the nineteenth-century advocates of Anglo-Israel dominion in Palestine. But there is one glittering exception. One of the most provocative figures in English history, the personage in question is of course Disraeli. Though he was unconnected with the restoration of Israel, it would be as absurd to leave him out of the story as to leave the ghost out of Hamlet. But in relation to it, as in his relation to his time and his country, he almost defies classification. Alone among eminent Victorians he was not primarily a religious man. Judaism he abandoned; Christianity, adopted for expediency, hardly touched him; prophecy was nothing to him. Yet he felt the age-old pull of Palestine in his bones. He wrote passionately in Alroy of a revived kingdom of Israel; yet he never took a political step toward its modern achievement. He took no notice of the proposals of the Shaftesbury-Churchill school. He took no share in Montefiore’s enterprises. He does not belong with the Jewish nationalists, because his nationalism was individual and unique. He was the trumpet of Israel’s heritage, not of her destiny. He was concerned with the world’s debt to the Jews, not with the Jews’ future in the world.
“Where is your Christianity if you do not believe in their Judaism?” he asked the House in the debate on Jewish Emancipation. “On every altar … we find the table of Jewish law.… All the early Christians were Jews … every man in the early ages of the Church by whose power or zeal or genius the Christian faith was propagated, was a Jew.… If you had not forgotten what you owe to this people … you as Christians would be only too ready to seize the first opportunity of meeting the claims of those who profess this religion.” He jeopardized his political career to make the speech. As a private member, dependent for advancement on the higher-ups in his party, he nevertheless, alone among the Tories, spoke for the Bill and each year when it came before the House crossed the floor to vote for it with the Liberals, against his own party.
Pride in his race and its heritage appears repeatedly in his novels, in prefaces to the later editions, in the famous chapter on the Jews that suddenly erupts in the midst of his political biography of Lord George Bentinck. “The world has by this time discovered that it is impossible to destroy the Jews … that it is in vain to attempt to baffle the inexorable laws of nature which have decreed that a superior race shall never be destroyed or absorbed by an inferior.” Like Matthew Arnold, he believed that England’s strength and purpose derived from the moral laws of the Hebrews transmitted through the Bible. England, he said, “despite her deficient and meagre theology has always remembered Sion.”
Ultimately it was not as a Jew at all, but as an empire builder, that he contributed to British progress toward Palestine. Even above the lure of Palestine he felt the lure of empire. Britain’s eastward expansion in the latter nineteenth century was under his guidance, largely his doing. Long ago Richard the Lion-Heart had stopped off to take Cyprus on the way to the Holy Land. When Disraeli reacquired it for Britain in 1878 he knew that the logistics of empire would bring the next advance to Palestine. His purchase of the Suez made that advance inevitable.
But in the 1840’s all this was still a generation ahead and Disraeli still a junior M.P. known for his ornamental novels and for a certain uncomfortable power that left the House uneasily aware that the odd duckling in their midst would one day turn out to be an eagle. In 1831 he had been on a Byronic Eastern tour from Greece to Egypt, where every stopping place was a hall of ancient fame, every day’s journey along an imperial pathway of the past. The Acropolis, the Pyramids, the roadsteads of Alexander and Caesar and Mahomet, the graves of the Crusaders, above all the tombs and ruined Temple of his race glowed like crown jewels in his mind. In Constantinople he had an audience with the Sultan, in Alexandria one with the Pasha, Mehemet Ali. From Cyprus he had sailed down the coast of Syria, past Beirut, Tyre, and Acre to Jaffa, and finally, “well mounted and well armed,” he had ridden up through the desolate hills until “the city on which I gazed was JERUSALEM!”
The next days were among the most enraptured of his life. All the accumulated glories of the past, all the nostalgia of exiled centuries poured over him. He stayed only a week, but before he departed he had already begun to write a novel on “a gorgeous incident in the annals of that sacred and romantic people from whom I derive by blood and name”—that is, the Jewish rebellion led by the pseudo-Messiah, David Alroy, “Prince of the Captivity,” against the Caliphate of Baghdad in the twelfth century. Disraeli’s heroes are often autobiographical in spots, and it is difficult not to see in Alroy an autobiographical reflection of an inner dream.
“You ask me what I wish,” says the Jewish sage, Alroy’s eminence grise: “My answer is, a national existence, which we have not. You ask me what I wish: my answer is, the Land of Promise. You ask me what I wish: my answer is Jerusalem. You ask me what I wish: my answer is, the Temple, all we have forfeited, all we have yearned after, all we have fought for, our beauteous country, our holy creed, our simple manners, and our ancient customs.”
Disraeli wrote that speech with real feeling. In contrast with the rest of Alroy’s purple prose, decorated with silks and scimitars, Afrites and Cabalists, fountains of quicksilver and voluptuous princesses, it stands out starkly. Alroy, its author once said cryptically, represented his “ideal ambition.” Indeed, it would be strange if the young Disraeli, with his pride of race, his burning ambition, standing amid the exalted surroundings where his ancestors had ruled, had not dreamed that he himself might be destined to win back nationhood for his people.
If he did, the realities of English politics soon supervened. Four years later he entered Parliament determined to be prime minister, nothing less. (“By God,” said Lord Melbourne, “the fellow will make it yet.”) When next he published an eastern novel, Tancred, it shows him on the wa
y to his goal, concerned no longer with a kingdom of Israel, but with an empire for England. He had intended Tancred as a novel of “Young England’s” search for spiritual rebirth. The hero, a world-weary duke’s son, has shaken the dust of England from his boots and come to Jerusalem to penetrate the “Asian mystery.” But hero and author soon forget all about that and become immersed in the swirling politics of the Middle East and in the over-all question of how England shall control the road to India. The Syrian crisis was still fresh; the surging currents stirred up by Mehemet Ali’s bid for a sovereign Arabian state had not been quieted by his defeat. Curiously enough, Disraeli sees England’s opportunity in Arab rather than in Jewish nationalism. Half sardonically but with a foresight that is almost uncanny he pictures the possibilities.
Speaking through the mouth of Fakredeen, the emir of Lebanon, a wily, ambitious Syrian whose only religion is one “which gives me a sceptre,” he says: “Let the Queen of the English collect a fleet … transfer the seat of her empire from London to Delhi.… In the meantime I will arrange with Mehemet Ali. He shall have Bagdad and Mesopotamia.… I will take care of Syria and Asia Minor.… We will acknowledge the Empress of India as our Sovereign and secure for her the Levantine coast. If she like she shall have Alexandria as she now has Malta; it could be arranged. Your Queen is young: she has avenir.…” Indeed she did. Thirty years later the author of Tancred officially added the title “Empress of India” to the Queen’s other titles.
Tancred includes other startling glimpses into the future. Two comic characters are discussing world politics:
“ ‘Palmerston will never rest till he gets Jerusalem,’ said Barizy of the Tower.
“ ‘The English must have markets,’ said the Consul Pasqualigo.
“ ‘Very just,’ said Barizy of the Tower, ‘I think of doing a little myself in cottons.’ ” Disraeli was joking, of course—or was he? Farther on a Jew of Jerusalem tells Tancred: “The English will not do the business of the Turk again for nothing. They will take this city; they will keep it.” The English public of 1847 may not have taken Tancred seriously, but history did.
* See below, page 250.
CHAPTER XII
ENTER THE JEWS:
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me?”
So far the people of Israel had taken no active part in the gradual reopening of the path to Palestine. On the occasion of the first return from exile, when Persia was the intermediary power, they were ready as soon as King Cyrus gave the word, and they went back from Babylon forty thousand strong with their basins of gold, their vessels of silver, their servants and horses and camels and asses. But then they were near at hand, and the separation from Zion had lasted only fifty years. The second exile had lasted 1800 years, and its people were scattered over every latitude of the globe, dulled by the desperate effort simply to stay alive, not to be absorbed, not to lose their identity. They succeeded—the only people on earth ever to retain national identity without a national territory—but at grim cost. Survival was won only by turning inward, encasing themselves within a hard shell of orthodoxy, concentrating every thought on the only thing they could bring out of their country: its heritage and its code, the Torah and the Talmud, the Law. Other men could plow or build or fight. Without land, such occupations were closed to the Jews. What land could they seed and reap, or build on or fight for? When the Temple was pulled down, according to an old rabbinical legend, a splinter from its stones entered the heart of every Jew. That stone in their hearts was their only country.
But with changing times it was not to be enough. “Without a country,” said Mazzini, the prophet of nineteenth-century nationalism, “you have neither name, voice nor rights nor admission as brothers into the fellowship of peoples. You are the bastards of humanity—Ishmaelites among the nations.” He was addressing the Italians, not the Jews, but his cry was the spirit of the age, and the Jews began to hear it too.
Until 1800 the centuries had gone by in passive waiting for supernatural intervention. The prayer “Next year in Jerusalem” had marked the passing of each year since 70 A.D. like the dripping of water on a stone. But now it began to dawn on first one and then another that only their own hands on their own bootstraps would pull Israel out of exile. “The Jewish people must be their own Messiah,” wrote the historian Heinrich Graetz in 1864. Many forces were at work in the nineteenth century to produce this revolutionary idea.
It is almost impossible to attempt even the briefest survey of the modern resurrection of the Jewish people without getting hopelessly mired in internal Jewish controversies and external European politics. Europe in the wake of the French Revolution brought the Jews into the period of the “Enlightenment” and emancipation, but also into a period of religious and social conflict that tore apart the unity of Judaism, so fiercely hugged over the centuries of imprisonment, only to be lost forever in the emerging struggle for freedom, citizenship, and finally statehood. The background is the history of Europe under Napoleon, then the reaction to the disappearance of Napoleon, the futile attempt by the Holy Alliance to clamp down autocracy, the revolutions of 1830 and ‘48, the rise of Nationalism, Liberalism, Socialism, the Commune in France, Bismarck and Pan-Germanism, the convulsions of Russia in the last stages of Czarist senility. All these forces acted upon the Jews as the spasms and contractions of labor pains, driving them into the painful process of rebirth as a nation.
The process begins with the “Enlightenment” initiated by Moses Mendelssohn in eighteenth-century Germany, which shattered the protective shell of orthodoxy and opened the way to acquaintance with Western culture and participation in Western affairs. The reign of the Talmud and the rabbis was broken. All over Europe the shuttered windows were flying open. Jews read Voltaire and Rousseau, Goethe and Kant. The Reform movement followed, shedding the old rituals, trying to adjust Judaism to the modern world. Civil Emancipation became the goal. In 1791 the French Constituent Assembly had decreed citizenship for the Jews; Napoleon confirmed it wherever he had dominions. Reaction rescinded it, and thereafter it had to be fought for separately in each country. Civil Emancipation was won around the middle of the nineteenth century, and if it had been a success, Judaism would have ended there. But it was not; and in the process of discovering why not, the Jews discovered nationalism. They became aware that Judaism was dying; on the one hand petrifying into a dry husk of rabbinical mumbo jumbo, and on the other dissolving in the open air of Western “enlightenment.” If it were to be kept alive, it was in urgent need of a new soul. Nationalism provided it. From then on the movement toward Palestine slowly, hesitatingly, unhappily got under way, not out of enthusiasm but out of necessity. It was never a single movement along a straight line: it was an infinite splintering off of contradictory tendencies and groups: Reform against orthodoxy, nationalists against assimilationists, both against anti-Zionists, and, on the heels of all, the baying of the hound of anti-Semitism.
Political anti-Semitism was a creature of the nineteenth century. It rose like a black phoenix from the ashes of the Napoleonic conquest, with Germany, it is no surpise to learn, as the scene. The “Hep! Hep!” that resounded through the streets of Heidelberg and Frankfort in 1819 to the accompaniment of riots and pillaging of Jewish homes went on down the century through the Damascus affair, through the May laws, the Pale and the pogroms of Russia, through the Dreyfus case to the ultimate holocaust of Hitler. Always it was pushing, pushing the Jews, some toward nationalism and Palestine, others toward escapism and assimilation.
This pressure was what proved enlightenment and emancipation illusory. Despite the nineteenth century’s fervent and touching belief in Progress, anti-Semitism did not disappear. The orthodox had once believed that they had only to wait long enough and the Messiah would appear and miraculously restore them to Zion. The assimilationists now believed that they had only to wait long enough and that if they were quiet, well-mannered, and cultivated, if they bothered no one, anti-Semitism would inevitably disappear in a
haze of Progress and the brotherhood of man. But somehow it didn’t. Neither did it vanish before the magic wand of Marxism and the Socialist International. The Jews twisted and turned, seeking a solution in a dozen different directions, striving to be ordinary citizens of whatever country they lived in, yet still to be Jews; to find an escape for their persecuted brothers in the East, yet to keep their own hold on the measure of freedom and of the good life that they had found in the West. These pulls and tugs produced a tragic factionalism in Jewry unknown since the last days of the Temple, when Pharisees, Sadducees, and Zealots fought one another while the city fell about their ears. Divisions deepened, splinters multiplied, internal antipathies increased, hampering the effort toward nationhood as they hamper the nation today. But the baying of the hound kept the movement going. Herzl hearing it in enlightened France went home in agony of mind to write the Judenstaat and to call the Zionist Congress that was to launch “the vessel of the Jewish state upon its way.” But fifty years earlier Moses Hess had heard it at Damascus.
Hess, like Herzl after him, was an “emancipated” Jew-one of the early German socialist leaders who thought of themselves as socialists first, Germans secondly, and Jews last if at all. Suddenly the Damascus affair hit him like an unexpected blow from behind. It showed that Jews could still be imprisoned and tortured and a whole community despoiled over a pretense dug up from medieval superstition. It spread a black shadow over every Jewish community from New York to Odessa. “Then it dawned upon me for the first time in the midst of my socialist activities,” Hess wrote later, “that I belong to my unfortunate, slandered, despised and dispersed people … and I wanted to express my Jewish patriotic sentiment in a cry of anguish.” But he was not content with anguish. He wanted a solution. There was only one. “Without a country … you are bastards of humanity”—Mazzini’s yet unwritten dictum was already inescapable. Emancipation was emptiness. No matter how bitter the truth, it had to be spoken. In 1862 Hess published Rome and Jerusalem, subtitled The Latest National Question. “The hour has struck,” he wrote, “for resettlement on the banks of the Jordan.” Country was a necessity. “With the Jews, more than with other nations, which, though oppressed, yet live on their own soil, all political and social progress must necessarily be preceded by national independence. A common native soil is a primary condition.…”
Bible and Sword: England and Palestine From the Bronze Age to Balfour Page 24
