Authors: Barbara W. Tuchman
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 claim 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.’ “
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.”