PART FOUR
DIFFERENTIATION AND SYNTHESIS
I. NEW MEN AND NEW SCHEMES
FOR all the disappointment which the London Treaty had caused to the
friends of the Restoration idea, the Eastern crisis left the Restoration
Movement strengthened and invigorated. Approaches to the Jews began to assume
new forms. Conversion played a less important part than -in the past, while the
idea that the Jews should cease to be a passive object of Restoration and start
to act for themselves gained strength. Thus, in the mid-forties of the
nineteenth century, religious and political circles alike favoured the
resettlement of Palestine by the Jews or even the creation of a Jewish
commonwealth.
Without losing its fundamental religious character, the idea of Restoration grew
into the fabric of cultural and political life. The conviction that its
realisation was only a matter of time was no longer a prerogative of visionaries
and of the devout. The lay element, conspicuous in the Movement from its very
beginnings, became more and more prominent. In 1845, two writers who treated the
question from purely political or humanitarian angles made an almost
simultaneous appearance. Edward Ledwich Mitford and Colonel Gawler, both former
high colonial officials, represented two opposite trends which were never to be
absent from the Restoration Movement thereafter. Mitford stood for the
establishment of a Jewish State, Gawler distrusted such "wild schemes" and
advocated the methodical colonisation of Palestine as part of the Turkish
Empire.
In his book, An Appeal in behalf of the Jewish Nation in connection with
British policy in the Levant, Mitford, a disciple of Bacon, attributed to
the Jews peculiar qualities of "fortitude and perseverance" responsible for the
miracle of their continuity. For this extraordinary but humbled people Mitford
demanded a State.
"The plan I would propose is, first, the
establishment of the Jewish nation in Palestine, as a protected state, under the
guardianship of Great Britain, secondly their final establishment, as an
independent state, whensoever
the parent institutions shall have acquired, sufficient force and
vigour
to allow of this tutelage being withdrawn..."
Mitford was also the first Restoration writer to raise the problem of the
indigenous population and of their attitude towards Jewish immigrants; his
solution strikes one as amazingly topical:
"The country, compared with its extent,
is at present thinly populated, yet the pressure caused by the introduction of so large a body of strangers upon the actual inhabitants might
be attended with injurious results. Before, however, attempting to make a
settlement it would be desirable that the country should be prepared for their
reception. This might be done by inducing the Turkish Government to make the
Mohammedan inhabitants fall back upon the extensive and partially cultivated
countries of Asia Minor, where they might be put in possession of tracts and
allocations, equally advantageous, and far superior in value to those they
abandoned."
George Gawler, in Tranquillisation of Syria and the East:
Observations and Practical Suggestions, in furtherance of the Establishment of
Jewish Colonies in Palestine, the most sober and sensible remedy for the
Miseries of Asiatic, Turkey, proposed the establishment not of a State but
"of a colony or colonies, large enough to be respectable and influential; but
not so large as to be unmanageable". Colonisation was to be gradual, in
agreement with the Turkish Government, yet under British protection. Funds for
the purpose were to be raised from the Christian nations as compensation for the
grievous wrong done to the Jews in the past and in gratitude for the spiritual
values received from them. The compromise embodied in Gawler's plan, quite
unlike Mitford's radicalism, ensured its favourable reception by Jews and
Gentiles alike.
In 1853, Gawler published his Syria and its near prospects, in which the
religious motives emerged far more strongly than in his first book. Gawler
asserted that Great Britain is manifestly destined to perform in these modern
times a work similar to that, which her maritime mother Tyre accomplished in the
days of David and Solomon". These hopes and the expectations of a progressive
colonisation within the framework of the Ottoman Empire were shared by another
contemporary non-Jewish Restorationist, the Italian philosopher and politician,
Benito Musolino, whose Le Gerusalemme e it Popolo Ebreo was published in
1851. Musolino, who had visited Palestine several times, regarded a Jewish
settlement in the Holy Land as a means of transplanting European culture to the
Near East and of strengthening Turkey militarily and politically. Musolino
appealed to Lord Palmerston by that time again Foreign Secretary to speed the
Restoration of the Jews.
A new accession of strength came to the traditional ideas from the land of
Calvin whose teachings had so strongly contributed to the birth of the
Restoration doctrine. In 1844, Geneva and Jerusalem by the Swiss
theologian Samuel Louis Gaussen was published in English. Gaussen attached to
the Restoration of the Jews the utmost importance for the whole civilised world.
In 1849 two memorable publications, by A. G. H. Hollingworth and John Thomas,
were added to the Restoration literature. Hollingworth's book, dedicated to the
Duke of Manchester '"as a Friend of the Restoration of Israel", was entitled
The Holy Land Restored : or an Examination of the Prophetic Evidence for the
Restitution of Palestine to the Jews. The name in itself is a sufficient
indication of a reorientation. Hollingworth divested the term "restoration" of
its usual meaning. It now signified simply the regaining and restoration of
the land by the Jewish people. Convinced that Restoration was drawing near,
Hollingworth set himself the task of rousing Jews and English Christians,
demanding at the same time that emissaries of the Restoration Movement, not
missionaries, should be sent among the Jews. Unlike Churchill, Hollingworth
declared that the initiative for the movement should not come from the
Jews themselves, but that "such a movement could be communicated by the Gentile
Christian to his Hebrew brother". Hollingworth opposed conversionist activities
as useless, and asked instead for "fraternal affection", for a desire to see
[the Jew] in Equality", to "raise him to the level of other nations", and to
give him "the Liberty of reclaiming his own ancestral ruins, cities and
mountains". Earnestly hoping that it might be vouchsafed to England to fulfil
this mission, he emphasised that a new Ezra was as essential as a new Cyrus.
Three years after The Holy Land Restored, Hollingworth published a second
book on the same subject, Remarks upon the Present Condition and Future
Prospects of the Jews in Palestine, and the duty of England to that Nation,
in which he proposed that the Sultan be induced to declare Jerusalem "a free
city for the Jews" and "to create a Jewish government, under treaty, with our
protection of Palestine".
Hollingworth's attempt to call to life a world-wide movement for the
renaissance of the Jewish people in which Jews and Gentile would work hand in
hand was no more successful than that of Colonel Churchill. But the
prediction in his first book proved to be true: "What is done in our time
is a beginning of a progressive development."
John Thomas's book, Elpis Israel(Hope of Israel): An Exposition of
the Scriptures in general, with special reference to the hope of Israel as the
Divine basis of the hope of mankind in the age to come, published at the
same time as Hollingworth's first book, became one of the most widely read works
of Restoration literature and incidentally also marked the inception of the
religious community known as the Christadelphians. According to Thomas,
the "preadventual" colonisation of Palestine would be on purely political
principles, with the Jews emigrating thither as agriculturists and traders.
Events during the world crisis which he foresaw as the outcome of the 1848
revolution would force the British Empire to collaborate in the Restoration.
The year 1849 saw also the publication of A Letter to the Right Honourable
Lord Ashley on the Necessity of Immediate Measures for the Jewish Colonisation
of Palestine. Its author was W. Cunningham, who produced a number of works
on the interpretation of prophecy about Restoration, identifying himself with
Hollingworth's ideas. He urged "the immediate formation of a Society to aid and
promote the agricultural settlement of believing Israelites in Palestine" and
invited Lord Shaftesbury to be its president.
It is not known what reply Shaftesbury returned to Cunningham's invitation. His
name, at any rate, does not appear in the list of the "Association for
promoting Jewish Settlements in Palestine" which was in fact founded at
the end of 1852, as a result of the tenacious efforts of Abraham Benisch, the
youthful Prague pioneer of the Jewish national movement (see p. 145). The
Association had a mixed Christian-Jewish Committee. Benisch himself, Solomon
Sequerra (Hon. Secretary) and Monta Leverson (Treasurer) were the first members.
The Christian representatives were Sir Hugh William Black, founder of the
Palestine Archaeological Association, and John Mills, a Methodist
minister. In an Address to the Public of December 20, 1852, the
Committee appealed for the establishment of a large settlement in the area
between Safed and Tiberias.
Thus, the two Restoration movements, the British and the Jewish, had joined up
on British soil thanks, to a great extent, to the gradual abandonment of
conversionist designs which had impeded contact before. But the outbreak of the
Crimean War two years after the Association's establishment forced it to suspend
its activities, which were never to be resumed.
Nevertheless, Jewish colonisation of Palestine had actually started at the
halfway mark of the century. A fusion of the two movements marked this memorable
beginning. The link between them was most appropriately and almost symbolically
a proselyte, Warder Cresson, American Consul in Jerusalem, who embraced Judaism
in 1849 and from then on called himself Michael Boaz Israel. In 1852 he founded
an agricultural Jewish colony in the valley of Raphaim as the beginning of "a
new Palestine, where the Jewish nation may live by industry, congregate and
prosper". In 1854 Cresson addressed a circular letter to the Jews of Germany,
England and America, advocating the establishment of a society for the
encouragement of agriculture in Palestine. His beliefs are set out in a series
of writing of Messianic character.
At about the same time as Warder Cresson settled in Palestine, James Finn,
son-in-law of Alexander McCaul, came to Jerusalem to succeed W. T. Young as
British Consul. The seventeen years that he remained in office form an
outstanding chapter in the history of renascent Palestine. Finn and his wife
Eliza were model Evangelicals and warm friends of the Jewish people. They leased
a piece of land and engaged Jews to build cisterns, clear the ground, and lay
out plantations. The colonists who, under Finn's aegis, began to
cultivate the neglected soil, included -a strange counterpart to Warder
Cresson- the Hebrew Christian, John Meshullam, former servant and travelling
companion of Byron, and the Rev. A. A. Isaacs.
James Finn's work forged a link between the English Restoration Movement and
Palestine. To further it, a "Society for the Promotion of Jewish Agricultural
Labour in the Holy Land", consisting almost exclusively of Christians, was
established. Among its founders was Alexander McCaul. In this manner the friends
of Restoration added practical colonisation work to their literary and political
activities.
II. THE MOVEMENT DURING THE CRIMEAN WAR
Interest in the fate of Palestine and the Restoration of the Jews was again
stimulated by the Crimean War (1854-1856), the third armed conflict of modern
times to affect the Holy Land directly. After war was declared by Britain on
March 28, 1854, Lord Shaftesbury recorded in his diary (May 17):
Wrote this day to Sir Moses
Montefiore
to learn, if I could, the sentiments of his nation respecting a plan I have
already opened to Clarendon [the Foreign Secretary] and Clarendon to Lord
Stratford [British Ambassador in Constantinople], that the Sultan should be
moved to issue a firman
granting to the Jewish people power to hold land in Syria, or any part of the
Turkish dominions. . . .
At that historic moment, Shaftesbury, in fact, was acting as the self-appointed
representative and champion of the Jewish people. The firman which the Sultan
issued shortly afterwards, implicitly sanctioning the immigration of Jews, may
well have been, at least partly, the fruit of Shaftesbury's intercession.
The outbreak of the war gave a strong impetus to a discussion of the Restoration
question. Israel in the World, or the Mission of the Hebrew to the great
military Monarchies, published in 1854 by William Henry Johnstone, Chaplain
of Addiscombe, presented the Russian Empire as pretender to the role of
the "Fourth Monarchy". Basing himself upon this interpretation, Johnstone
foresaw "that the rise of this Power should be accompanied by some foreboding
what it would inflict upon Israel, when once it would rule the land which used
formerly to confer arbitration of human destinies.... The Hebrew nation,
recognising their mission and vocation, should resist and check this military
monarchy and thus advance towards the completion of their own destiny -the
establishment of the righteous kingdom. . ." If the Hebrew people, Johnstone
went on to argue, were to utilise their financial power for good, namely for the
downfall of despotism, they would make a definite contribution to permanent
peace and earn the gratitude of the Western world. This would also bring about a
solution of the Eastern Question. "It is not an extravagant supposition," he
concluded, "that Palestine may be [then] placed within the grasp of its ancient
owners".
The most extravagant hopes cherished by the Restorationists reappeared
in the anonymous pamphlet The Final Exodus ; or the Restoration to Palestine
of the lost Tribes, the result of the present crisis; with a description of the
battle of Armageddon, and the downfall of Russia, as deduced wholly from
prophecy (1854). The author predicted, not a temporary but a definitive
migration of Israel after victory over Russia and called England to implement
this return.
In yet another anonymous appeal, The Crisis, and Way of Escape,
An Appeal for the Oldest of the Oppressed (1856), the idea of justice, ever
immanent in the Restoration Movement, found powerful expression:
To do justice at once to a people
approved of God as His inheritance . . . a simple course is open to us -to the
nations. Let us prevail upon the Porte to allow the Jews facilities to return to
their own land; to appoint Palestine as a place of refuge for them, from the
anarchy and confusion from which they suffer but in which they have no share...
If Christians really believe in a Just and Holy God, and that the Bible is His
Word; if Mohammedans feel that God is great, who hath appointed them the keepers
of His holy place again this time, while their elder brother has been in exile
...if, we say, integrity in belief or duty has any place at all with the parties
concerned, this matter of a refuge for the Jews has only to be mentioned to be accomplished…
Britons, let us at least be true to the position which the integrity and
foresight of our fathers have, in the providence
of God earned for us and do an act of tardy justice
to a people to whom mankind owe all their higher justice privileges and better
civilisation.
In this truly human document, the last trace of conversionism has been removed
from the Restoration doctrine. In fact, the very opposite view is here
propounded, the nations being urged to live up to the ideals of Justice and
Righteousness which they had received from the Hebrew Bible.
Conduct and outcome of the war both deceived the exalted hopes of the
Restorationists. The fall of Sebastopol was followed by peace talks. Palmerston,
now Prime Minister, with Lord Russell as his Foreign Secretary, took no
advantage of the opportunity to change the existing order in Palestine. Only
Article 9 of the Paris Treaty of March 30, 1858, indirectly affected Palestine's
future when the Crimean War ended. The enjoyment by Jews of equal rights with
the Christian population of the Ottoman Empire was solemnly granted and their
right to settlement tacitly guaranteed in principle.
This clause fell very short of being a replica of the Decree of Cyrus, with
which Abraham Benisch, writing in the Jewish Chronicle on March 21, 1856,
had compared the Firman of Sultan Abdul Medziz. On the other hand the Crimean
War may be said to have given birth to the philanthropic colonisation of
Palestine. Even the intercession for which Sir Moses Montefiore appealed to
Clarendon was concerned mainly with aid to the suffering population of
Palestine. By such well-meaning acts Jewish philanthropists alleviated the lot
of Palestine Jewry. But they let go by default the chances offered by the
political situation. One more great opportunity had been wasted.
III. CONTINUANCE AND TRANSFORMATION
The Crimean War was followed by a sudden revival of the Restoration Movement in France, where it had virtually disappeared since Bonaparte's Oriental expedition some sixty years earlier. Napoleon III may well have thought of following the example of his great predecessor and it was certainly more than a coincidence that his private secretary, Ernest Laharanne, in his La Nouvelle Question d'Orient, Empire d'Egypte et d'Arabie. Reconstruction de la Nationalite Juive (1860) should have mooted ideas which were strongly reminiscent of the Letter to the Brethren of 1798 and of Bonaparte's Proclamation to the Jewish Nation. At the same time, the theologian Abram Francois Petavel, of Neufchatel, advocated the Restoration of the Jews in his Israel, Peuple d'Avenir (Paris, 1861). The Jewish exponent of this French Restorationist trend was the eminent Franco-Jewish scholar Joseph Salvador who in his Paris, Rome, Jerusalem pleaded for the resuscitation of Palestine as the spiritual centre of a regenerated civilisation. Prompted by humanitarian motives, Henri Dunant, founder of the Red Cross, established a "Societe Nationale Universelle pour le Renouvellement de 1'Orient" which in 1866 issued an appeal containing also the suggestion that the rising Jewish colonies in Palestine might, like Switzerland, be diplomatically neutralised.
The new wave of French Restorationism did not, however, long survive the Second Empire.
In the meantime, the restorationists in England displayed considerable activity. In 1860, a pamphlet by Rosa Rame, The Restoration of the Jews, was dedicated to Lord Shaftesbury. A letter from the Rev. Jacob H. Brooke Mountain, reprinted in the pamphlet, expressed regret that England had missed the opportunity of restoring the Jews to their country. "If it is ever vouchsafed to us again, "the writer
added, "I fervently pray that we may embrace it with zeal and alacrity".
Similar views were expressed by Dr. Thomas Clarke in his India and Palestine: or, the Restoration of the Jews, viewed in relation to the Nearest Route to India (1861). "Syria would be safe," he declared, "only in the hands of a brave, independent and spirited people, deeply imbued with the sentiment of nationality. . . . Such 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".
New religious trends, too, bore witness to the unbroken vitality of the traditional Restoration idea. The Society of Christadelphians, founded by John Thomas (see p. 79), had in the early sixties grown into a considerable community with its headquarters in Birmingham and represented a new fighting fellowship of Restorationists. A simultaneous phenomenon was the rise of British-Israelism. Its origins go back to the beginnings of Puritanism and, at a later stage, to Richard Brothers (see p. 43), but as a sect British-Israel did not come into being until the middle of the nineteenth century. The year 1845 saw the publication of the first systematic work of this eccentric school, John Wilson's Our Israelitish Origin.
The followers of the new creed claimed that the ancestors of the Saxon races
appeared in the seventh, or eighth century B.C.E.: at the very place in Asia to which the inhabitants of the Israelitish Kingdom had been removed early in the eighth century. For Israel thus rediscovered in the English people the originators of the theory laid claim to the blessings of Abraham and asserted that it would also perform the Restoration of the descendants of Judah and Levi. "The Jews most assuredly will return to Judaea, but not until we ourselves restore them", said Edward Hine, one of the exponents of British-Israelism.
On this evidence, British-Israelism may be regarded as a branch of the Restoration Movement, though apart from its eccentricity it held an inherent contradiction to the fundamental Messianic principle of the Restoration idea and this provoked violent opposition especially from Restorationists themselves.
But the main event of that period, as far as the traditional doctrine of Restoration was concerned, was the appearance in 1861 of a remarkable book which was the first and still remains the only systematic theological exposition of the Restoration Doctrine. The Restoration of the Jews, The History, Principles and Bearings of the Question, by David Brown, Professor and Principal of the Free Church College, Aberdeen, opened with a survey of the doctrine's development down to the author's own day. Much of the theological section proper expounded arguments against the allegorical interpretation of the Scriptures and sought to prove that a correct reading of the Bible justifies the expectation of a terrestrial Restoration. Drawing a sharp line between the theological Restoration doctrine and colonizing tendencies Brown argued that "the mere bodily repossession of Palestine by the Jewish nation" would not be identical with the Restoration predicted in the Scriptures, which could be, he maintained, only "the Divine sequel and public seal of Reconciliation to the new contrite and converted nation".
In spite of his outspoken conversionist views, David Brown's book helped to strengthen the belief in the Restoration of the Jews, and to override the doubts of rationalist interpreters. This happened, strangely enough, at a time when a danger far more serious than any represented by rationalist interpretation of prophecy loomed up before opponents and defenders of the traditional Restoration doctrine alike. For almost simultaneously with Brown's work, there appeared in 1859 Charles Darwin's epoch-making work The Origin of Species which, followed by Thomas Huxley's Man's Place in Nature (1863) and Darwin's The Descent of Man (1871), dealt a more grievous blow to unquestioning acceptance of the Bible than eighteenth century rationalism or Bible criticism. Under the pressure of the idea of Evolution the structure on which the millennial hope was erected threatened to crumble. A controversy between Faith and Science broke out and raged from the 'sixties to the 'eighties on a scale and intensity equalled only by the religious struggle during the Reformation. But the Bible withstood the tremendous onslaught upon it and remained the most widely read book in England. There arose a new organisation which used modern means to defend the threatened principles of revealed religion. The "Palestine Exploration Fund", founded in 1865, gathered round it students inspired by the desire to search the soil of the Holy Land for irrefutable evidence of the truth of the Word. It was also from their midst that there came new fighters for the idea of the Restoration. Foremost among them was Charles Warren, director of excavations in Jerusalem, who published in 1875 The .Land of Promise; or Turkish Guarantee. Warren described the rich potentialities of Palestine and predicted that "its productiveness will increase in proportion to the labour bestowed on the soil, until a population of fifteen millions might be accommodated there". He clearly foresaw the magic transformation which intensive afforestation could effect upon the desolate slopes and valleys of Palestine. Yet what Warren had in mind was no mere colony: "Let this be done", he declared, "with the avowed intention of gradually introducing the Jew, pure and simple, who is eventually to occupy and govern this country".
Another member of the first expedition sent to Palestine by the "Palestine Exploration Fund" in 1865 was Claude Reignier Conder, then a lieutenant, aged 25, who published Tent Work in Palestine in 1872-6. Like Warren, he preached the gospel of the Holy Land's future fertility. In 1878 the Jewish Chronicle printed an article from his pen on the nature of Palestine, which aroused much comment. "The energy, industry and tact", he wrote, "which are so remarkable in the Jewish character, are qualities invaluable in a country whose inhabitants have sunk into fatalistic indolence".
While the scientific search for the confirmation of the Bible led to a reassurance of the hopes for the resurrection of the Land of Israel, the sublimated approach of modern critics to the Scriptures, though it conflicted with the literal interpretation dear to Evangelists, gave additional support to the validity of the "lofty Messianic idea", as Matthew Arnold, "the prophet and poet of the age", described Jewish Messianism. Arnold thought that historic Israel had a claim to eternity no less than the values it had created. Thus the changed attitude to the Bible came to broaden rather than to diminish the idea of Restoration. This explains why prominent figures of the mid-Victorian era advocated the Restoration of the Jews with a zeal equalling that displayed by its earlier champions.
Ch. H. Churchill and E. L. Mitford may well be considered the forerunners of a Restorationist trend which advocated the renascence of the Jewish nation in the Land of Israel on grounds very similar to the principles of Judaism itself. This new doctrine, which since the mid-Victorian era strongly influenced the old religious tradition, was closely interwoven with the political interests of the growing empire. Yet passionate desire to do justice to Jewish values no less than to the needs of the "martyr people" filled many minds in an epoch in which, in the words of G. M. Trevelyan, "even the Agnostics were Puritan in feeling and outlook". The transformed restorationist attitude was an offshoot of this religious and humanitarian trend.
IV. THE VISIONS OF ROBERT BROWNING AND GEORGE ELIOT
The new understanding of the Jewish character and destiny found the most
fascinating expression in works of two of the greatest creative spirits of the
Victorian era : Robert Browning and George Eliot.
In the work of Robert Browning, Jewish themes occur more often than in any
earlier English poetry. The people which had defied all sufferings and which was
the symbol of continuity and closeness to eternity, had, both in fact and
imagination, led the kind of existence which Browning thought ideal While others
saw in Judaism merely a forerunner of Christianity, Browning recognised it as
the giver of an absolute scale of values by which Christian civilisation must be
measured.
Browning's poem The Holy Cross Day, written in 1855 during his
stay in Italy, is the most perfect reflection of this attitude. We see a crowd
of Jews, driven into a church and packed tight into the seats, to attend the
service and to hear a special sermon on Holy Cross Day. A mystic song -Ben Ezra's
song- vibrates through the church, uplifting the hearts of the Jews:
The Lord will have mercy on Jacob yet,
And again in His border see Israel yet,
When Judah beholds Jerusalem.
The stranger shall be joined to them;
To Jacob's House shall the Gentiles cleave,
So the Prophet saith and the sons believe.
By the torture, prolonged from age to age,
By the infamy, Israel's heritage,
By the Ghetto's plague, by the garb's disgrace.
By the badge of shame, by the felon's place.
By the branding tool, the bloody whip,
And the summons to Christian fellowship
We boast our proof that at least the Jew
Would wrest Christ's name from the Devil's crew.
Rabbi Ben Ezra's song is a moving affirmation of the prophecy-inspired faith in
the redeeming force of Judaism. After long wanderings the genius of the English
people had returned to the very first origins of the Restoration tradition,
Israel's prophets.
In the year in which The Holy Cross Day was written, a collection of
Hebrew Melodies appeared. The unpretentious verse of Robert Young gave
touching expression to the desire for the redemption of the Jews.
Restore the long-lost scattered band
And call them to their native land
are typical lines repeated, with slight variations, on almost every page.
Two decades later, the spirit that had caused Robert Browning to become the
singer of Jewish Restoration was revived in George Eliot when she wrote the book
which, as a work of literature, forms the pinnacle of the British Restoration
Movement. Unlike The Holy Cross Day, the fruit of youthful
inspiration, the book came at the end of a long creative literary career. Daniel Deronda (1876) was, in fact, George
Eliot's last novel.
How one of the greatest English novelists of her time came towards the close of
her life to write the epic of Jewish Renaissance makes a fascinating chapter in
the history of the Restoration Movement.
As a girl, Mary Ann Evans, the future George Eliot, witnessed the rise of
Evangelicalism at close quarters. Like her father and her sisters, she became an
Evangelical. But while her religious emotions made her receptive to Evangelical
teachings another side of her nature prompted her to absorb eagerly the
critical, scientific and philosophical trends of the day. The Church Fathers and
Pascal were presently replaced by Spinoza, Feuerbach and D. F. Strauss, author
of The Life of Jesus. Her interest in these iconoclasts was so
strong that she devoted a great deal of her time and energy to translating their
works.
It was only at this stage of her development that she began to take an intense
interest in the Jews of the Diaspora. A rich store of knowledge about Biblical and
post-Biblical Judaism had been gathered by her early in life. From 1855
all her journeys included visits to synagogues. Book titles about Jews in
the Middle Ages are noted in her diaries. A passage in Daniel Deronda
hints at the deep impression which Spinoza's words on the Restoration of the
Jews (see p. 34) had left on her mind. Alongside these spiritual influences, not
the least part in George Eliot's awakening to a strong affection for Judaism and
the Jewish people was played by her companion, George Henry Lewes, whose
thorough knowledge of Germany also embraced the German-Jewish community. His
acquaintance with Moses Hess, the author of Rome and Jerusalem justifies
the assumption that George Eliot was not unaware of this precursor of
modem Zionism. But her historic mission was to rediscover the Restoration
idea and to reshape it in her own original manner.
Already in Romola (1863) and in The Spanish Gipsy (1868)
she had pronounced the acceptance of the duties imposed by one's origin to be
the most sacred obligation of man. In the following years she saw an entire
people trying to escape from its inheritance and about to renounce its values
and its own identity. Was this process inevitable? Must tragedy of physical and
spiritual decline lead to the burying of a priceless civilisation? George Eliot
felt impelled to answer this question.
In June 1874 she began to write her novel of the Jewish people's renaissance.
Daniel Deronda is born a Jew but brought up as an English non-Jew in Sir Hugo
Mallinger's home. Deronda's mother, a Sephardi Jewess, coerced into marriage by
her father and widowed early, has decided to save her son from the Jewish fate
which she abhors. The eventual failure of this plan is mainly due to the
influence of the mystic Mordecai Ezra Cohen, the towering spiritual figure of
the novel. It is in the chapters dealing with him and his sister Mirah that
George Eliot makes her historic contribution to the movement for the revival of
the Jewish people. The boldness and accuracy of vision conveyed in one of
Mordecai's pronouncements heralds a new chapter in Jewish history:
There is a store of wisdom among us to found a new policy, grand, simple, just,
like the old -a republic where there is equality of protection, an equality
which shone like a star on the forehead of our ancient community and gave it
more than the brightness of Western freedom amid the despotisms of the East.
Then our race shall have an organic centre, a heart and brain to watch and guide
and execute; the outraged Jew shall have a defence in the court of the nations,
as the outraged Englishman or American. And the world will gain, as Israel
gains. For there will be a community in the van of the East which carries
the culture and the sympathies of every great nation in its bosom. Difficulties?
I know there are difficulties. But let the spirit of sublime achievement move
the great among our people, and the work will begin....
Mordecai gives resounding expression to his faith in redemption through free
choice, the necessity for action by man and the creative significance of the
Jews' return to the founts of their national existence.
The affinity of this philosophy with Deronda's own feelings explains the
surprising readiness with which he confesses himself a Jew. He leaves the
society in which he was brought up, marries Mirah, and goes with her to
Palestine, there to realise Mordecai's dream of a reborn Jewish commonwealth.
Mordecai cannot follow them -he dies in the midst of preparations for
Deronda's departure, blessing Deronda with his last breath. With the death scene
the novel ends. Nothing could have indicated more impressively that Mordecai is
the real hero of the book.
As George Eliot saw it, the regeneration of the Jewish people was the great
divine mystery of world history. But the miracle must be wrought in Israel's
soul. She makes no appeal to England, nor does she expect the Government to
follow the example of Cyrus. She addresses herself to the Jewish
people. Without propounding any state project or settlement scheme, she
recognises the historic necessity for a "new Jewish polity" and considers the
"visible community" to be the centre whence a force would radiate in all
directions. The Restoration of the Jews becomes identical with the rebirth of
the Jewish people.
Daniel Deronda represents, as it were, the last map of a voyage round the
world of the Restoration idea. The Movement began by demanding the conversion of
the Jews as a first step to their Restoration. Later it admitted that
Restoration should precede conversion. With Deronda it arrived at a point
where Restoration became identified with a return to the Hebrew heritage and the
rebirth of Israel. Secession from Judaism had become a great sin; acceptance of
Jewish values the way of redemption.
The future exponent of Judaism and Jewish history, David Kaufman, saw that
Daniel Deronda was a counterpart to Lessing's Nathan the Wise, which
pleaded for human rights for the Jews, while Deronda' claimed the right
of the Jew to join the family of nations on equal terms. In America the Jewish
poetess Emma Lazarus, accepting Mordecai Ezra's message of Jewish regeneration
as a personal appeal to herself, became its enthusiastic protagonist. George
Eliot's work had a most momentous and enduring practical effect on
Lithuanian-born Yehuda Perlman known to Jewish history as Eliezer ben
Yehuda. It was Mordecai's creed that was responsible for his decision to devote
his life to the revival of the Hebrew language in the Land of Israel itself.
The criticism voiced against her excursion into the Jewish field, far from
discouraging her, actually stimulated George Eliot to persist. Her last work,
Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879) contains- an essay The
Modern Hep, Hep, Hep, in which the ideas expressed in Daniel Deronda
are carried to their logical conclusion. Once again the theme "England and
Israel" was discussed. George Eliot substituted critical self-examination for
ecstatic identification and found a striking similarity between the English and
the Hebrew characters which "is only the more apparent when the elements of
their peculiarity are discerned."
The reception accorded to Daniel Deronda by the England of those days was
a clear indication of the tendency to accept "amalgamation" soon to be known by
its new name "assimilation", as a worthy and desirable ideal. In her essay
George Eliot attacked this trend and placed the dilemma before Christians and
Jews alike:
If we are to consider the future of the Jews at all, it seems reasonable to take
a preliminary question: are they destined to complete fusion with the peoples
among whom they are dispersed, losing every remnant of a distinctive
consciousness as Jews: or, are there, in the political relations of the world,
the conditions, present or approaching, for the restoration of a Jewish state,
planted on the old centre of national feeling, a source of dignifying
protection, a special channel for special energies, which may contribute some
added form of national genius and an added voice in the councils of the world?
Answering herself, she displays a remarkable blend of historical understanding
and prophetic vision:
Some of us consider this question dismissed
when they have said that the
wealthiest Jews have no desire to forsake their European palaces and go to live
in Jerusalem. But in return from exile, in the restoration of a people, the
question is not whether there will be found worthy men who will choose to lead
the return...The hinge of possibility is simply the existence of an adequate
community of feeling as well as widespread need in the Jewish race, and hope
that among its finest specimens there may arise some men of instruction
and ardent public spirit, some new Ezras, some modem Maccabees, who will know
how to use all favouring outward conditions, how to triumph by heroic example
over the indifference of their fellows and foes, and will steadfastly set their
faces toward making their people once more one among the nations.
By this transformation of Mordecai's ecstatic message into a logical theory,
George Eliot gave to the Restoration Doctrine a new philosophical content. If
Jewry was to redeem itself, the role of the other nations could only be that of
helpers. The road to a synthesis between the Restoration Movement and the Jewish
renascence movement lay open. In this sense George Eliot's testament (she died
in the year following the publication of the essay, on May 6, 1880) was the last
word of the Restoration Movement before the rise of modern Zionism.
V. THE EASTERN QUESTION, 1877-78, AND DISRAELI'S RESTORATIONIST EXPERIMENT
In the eighteen-seventies the Eastern Question again became the focus of
foreign affairs. In 1874 Disraeli succeeded Gladstone, and in the next year
he acquired from Viceroy Ismail of Egypt 177,000 shares of the Suez Canal Company.
The prodigious rise of British influence in the Near East resulting from the
"greatest service that Disraeli rendered to his country" soon made itself felt
in a series of events which, once again, were about to shake the foundations of
the Ottoman Empire.
In the summer of 1875 the Balkan Slays took up arms to overthrow the hated
Turkish tyranny. In May 1876, Turkish irregulars massacred 12,000
Bulgarian Christians and in the following year, in April 1877, Russia declared
war on Turkey. The peace of St. Stefano concluded between Russia and Turkey
(March 3, 1878) failed to resolve the crisis. Britain and Austria demanded that
the peace treaty be submitted to a European conference, and the way to the
Berlin Congress was paved. Meanwhile, Disraeli concluded a defensive alliance
with Turkey whereby Cyprus was ceded to Britain. With these guarantees he went
to Berlin (in June 1878) and brought back "peace with honour".
The Russo-Turkish war and the defeat of Turkey in 1878 had raised in the minds
of the English restorationists hopes similar to those of 1840. "The feeling
everywhere seems abroad that the time has at last arrived to restore the
desolations of Zion, and to rebuild the waste places of the Land of Israel",
reads a passage in Rev. James Neil's Palestine Re-peopled; or, Scattered
Israel's Gathering. A sign of the Times. From 1877 to 1883, this
pamphlet saw not less than eight editions.
For the fourth time since Bonaparte's expedition, the friends of Jewish
Restoration were to be disillusioned. One of the main results of the Berlin
settlement of 1878 was that -in accordance with Britain's traditional policy
-Turkey's Asian possessions remained untouched. The consternation caused by the
seeming indifference of Lord Beaconsfield to Palestine's political fate can be
gauged by a Note published in The Spectator on May 10, 1879. "If he "
[Lord Beaconsfield], declared the writer, "had freed the Holy Land and restored
the Jews, as he might have done, instead of pottering about Rumelia and
Afghanistan, he would have died Dictator".
Yet an entry prior to the Berlin Congress found in the diary of Leon von
Bilinski, later Austrian Minister of Finance, makes it appear that Disraeli had
sent to the British Ambassador in Vienna, Sir Andrew Buchan, the English draft
of his essay The Jewish Question in the Oriental Question for translation
and anonymous publication. Translated by Baron Johann Chlumecky, a well-known
Austrian political writer, the essay was published in Vienna in 1877 as a
pamphlet under the title Die judische Frage in der orientalischen Frage,
von... under the direction and participation of Perez Smolenskin, the famous
Hebrew author and champion of Jewish renascence. Chlumecky presented Bilinski
with a copy of the pamphlet and informed him that Disraeli originally intended
to raise the question of Palestine on the agenda of the Berlin Congress but had
abandoned these efforts due to the opposition of Bismarck and the
Austrian Foreign Minister, Count Andrassy, and instructed the Embassy to stop
the distribution of the pamphlet and to destroy all available copies.
Many questions, raised particularly by Dr. Cecil Roth in his biography,
Benjamin Disraeli, have yet to be answered before the full story of what is
believed to be the most dramatic chapter in the history of the Restoration
Movement prior to Theodor Herzl's appearance will be known. It may well show the
greatest statesman the Jewish people has produced in the Diaspora engaged in a
struggle to bring about the Restoration of the Jews, but losing the battle
against forces in the Gentile world and against the indifference of the Jews
themselves. For there was certainly nobody among the official Jewish
representatives willing to claim Palestine for the Jewish people and to fight
for it as resolutely as the Alliance Israelite had done for the equal rights of
the Jews in the Balkans. "It is a thousand pities Disraeli did not flourish
later or Dr. Herzl not earlier. They should have met". Thus, Israel Zangwill to
Lady Battersea on February 1, 1914.
The Restoration Movement had reached a political turning point at the moment
when George Eliot sounded the call for a new Ezra and Benjamin Disraeli guided
the British Empire. Through Disraeli's sixteen-page essay the British
Restoration Movement proclaimed its ideal throughout the length and breadth of
the Continent of Europe, the creation of a Jewish State under the protection of
Great Britain. Anticipating events which the present generation has at last
witnessed, the author of the pamphlet asked:
Is it not probable that within, say,
half a Century, there would be developed in that land a compact Jewish people,
one million strong, speaking one language (scil.
that of protecting England), and animated by one spirit -the typical national
spirit -the desire to achieve autonomy and independence?
Even Perez Smolenskin, the regenerator of Hebrew literature, would not have
dared to correct the only major error in this admirable prediction, namely that
English would become the language of a revived Israel.
Disraeli's lasting historic contribution to the rebuilding of Jewish Palestine
was made, as it were, inadvertently. By strengthening Britain's power in the
Near East he helped more than any of his predecessors to bring the Land of
Israel within the orbit of her vital interests and thereby to tighten the
bond between the ancient and modern history of Israel. The growth of British
influence in the Orient partly compensated the advocates of Restoration for the
disappointment caused by the outcome of the Berlin Congress. Soon two men of
outstanding quality emerged as protagonists of the Restoration idea, Edward
Cazalet and Laurence Oliphant.
Edward Cazalet was a practical economist and far-sighted industrialist
with great political ability and a thorough knowledge of the Near East. In an
address on the Eastern Question, delivered in 1878 at the Club for Working Men
in London, he advocated a British Protectorate over Syria which would provide a
much more efficient protection of the Suez Canal than the questionable
annexation of Egypt and which would offer to the Jewish nation the opportunity
of a safe return to their country after eighteen hundred years of exile. During
the General Election Campaign of 1879, Cazalet stipulated the Restoration of the
Jews as one of Britain's great historic tasks. Cazalet contended that Britain
bore serious guilt for the checking of the regeneration of Syria and Palestine
begun by Mehemet All by delivering these countries back to the mercies of the
Turk. The Restoration seemed to him the only practicable means by which the
generation of Syria could be effected. He advocated the establishment of a
college in the Holy Land which would serve as a centre of Jewish philosophy and
science. With equal clarity Cazalet foresaw that the pressure upon Russian Jewry
would precipitate the greatest exodus in Jewish story.
Cazalet's election address constitutes a landmark of the Restoration Movement
because it practically carried the problem of Restoration to the gates of the
British Parliament. Laurence Oliphant went even a step further. Not satisfied
with a mere presentation of ideas, he used his mighty energies to achieve an
immediate realisation of his plans. The epic story of Laurence Oliphant's
efforts deserves a special chapter -one of the most splendid in the history the
Movement.
VI. LAURENCE OLIPHANT MEETS THE LOVERS OF ZION
In the long line of unusual personalities associated with the history of the
Restoration Movement, Laurence Oliphant is certainly one of the most original
and colourful. Born in 1829 in Cape Town as the only son of Sir Anthony
Oliphant, Laurence at the age of thirteen left school in England and travelled
unaccompanied all the way to Ceylon, to rejoin his father, then Chief Justice at
Colombo. His youth was spent in alternating study and travel throw Ceylon and
India, varied by elephant hunts. In 1852 he wrote his first book, a description of travel in India, and then left for
Edinburgh to read for the Bar but found himself in Russia instead.
Oliphant was 25 at the time of his first visit to the New World. But the Crimean
War called him and he took part in it both as fighting man and as diplomat. Lord
Elgin took him on a two-year mission to China. In 1862, aged 32, he was
appointed British Charge d'Affaires to Jedo (Japan). Seriously injured in an
attempt made on his life, he started out for home a few months later. In 1863,
the outbreak of the Polish revolt irresistibly drew him again to Russia. Fifteen
years more went by before he reached out to the Jewish people, during which he
became a Member of Parliament, worked as The Times correspondent in the Franco-Prussian War, and wrote fiction.
Under the influence of his mother, Oliphant learned early in life to
examine his own relation to religion. Though he lost his unquestioning belief in
dogma and in the literal interpretation of the Bible, his personal religion grew
in intensity.
The first reference to his Eastern Project was made in a letter he wrote
on December 10, 1878. The passage has much that is puzzling:
My Eastern Project is as follows: To
obtain a concession from the Turkish Government in the northern and more fertile
half of Palestine, which the recent survey
of the Palestine Exploration
Fund proves to be capable of immense development.
Any amount of money can
be raised upon it, owing to
the belief which people have
that they would be fulfilling
prophecy and bringing on the end of the world. I don't know why they are so
anxious for this latter event, but it makes the commercial speculation easy, as
it is a combination of the financial and sentimental elements which will, I
think, ensure success. And it will be a good political move for the Government,
as it will enable them to carry out reforms in Asiatic Turkey...
It is obvious that intensive study and preparation must have gone before this
letter was written. The soldier, the student of Russia, the diplomat, the man of
action -all these facets of Oliphant's personality made him extremely
susceptible to the stir that went through the political and particularly the
Restorationist camp at the revival of the Eastern Question following the
Russo-Turkish War and the Berlin Congress. At this time millenarian hopes
found expression in public demonstration and the framing of programmes
subsequently published as manifestoes also in America. It is true that
Oliphant's own religious faith took a line very different from the millenarian
teachings. He objected to "popular theology", to the belief in a redemption of
the world through external miracles. But he did regard the millenarian creed as
one of the historical forces hastening the process of the Restoration, the
consummation of which he felt was near at hand.
Laurence Oliphant lost no time in approaching religious leaders and, above all,
responsible statesmen. The atmosphere appeared to have been never more
favourable in the history of the Restoration Movement. Oliphant was even allowed
to explain his scheme to the Prince of Wales -the future Edward VII -and
received much encouragement from him. There is no doubt that his object was
practically identical with that pursued by Lord Beaconsfield at that time.
Having secured the latter's and Lord Salisbury's assurance of support, he
hurried on their advice to Paris to enlist the sympathy of William Henry
Waddington, France's English-born Foreign Minister and representative at the
Berlin Congress. Thus Oliphant obtained from the two Western Great Powers a
semi-official mandate to negotiate with Turkey. With high hopes he started out
in the spring of 1879 for Beirut. From that point of vantage, with
a single companion and a few attendants he set out on his adventurous
reconnaissance of Palestine. He chose Gilead in what is now Jordan, "the most
fertile part of Palestine", and felt that he had found the future Land of
Promise. His book, The Land of Gilead, published in 1880, contains
a detailed description of the country and the people. His project envisaged the foundation of an Ottoman Chartered Company with the object
of colonising a million and a half acres. The future settlers who were to be
granted Turkish citizenship were to be drawn from the Russian Pale of
Settlement, from Rumania, and from the Turkish Empire. The settlement was to
enjoy autonomy within the framework of the Ottoman Empire.
Prompted by faith in his cause, Oliphant carried out his plans with admirable
energy and foresight. Until then he had rarely come into personal contact with
Jews. Now, contact was established at once. The first groups of "Hovevei Zion"
(Lovers of Zion) came into being in Eastern Europe. Very soon his name was known
in all countries where persecuted Jews were hoping for the redemption of their
people.
Oliphant's reception in Constantinople seemed to justify the most optimistic
hopes. The British and French Ambassadors were most helpful and everywhere
Oliphant felt that his scheme was viewed with favour. But a turn of the
political wheel in England dealt a death blow to his scheme. At the General
Election of 1880 the Liberal Party came into power and Beaconsfield was
displaced by Gladstone. A Gladstone government in office necessarily meant a
change in England's attitude towards Turkey. Overnight England ceased to be
Turkey's friend and protector.
It did not take Oliphant long to realise the ominous meaning of these events for
him, for his plans and The Land of Gilead. The book which he had planned
as a potent weapon of propaganda, became an epilogue to a failure at the moment
of its publication. Even so, it was a landmark in the history of Restorationist
literature. Here was not only the first on-the-spot report by a practical
Restorationist but also an inspiring manifesto and a courageous declaration of
faith in a cause apparently lost. In his Introduction, Oliphant made the
following realistic comment on the situation of the Movement:
The accident of a measure involving most
important international consequences, having been advocated by a large section
of the Christian community from a purely Biblical
point of view, does not
necessarily impair its political Value. On the contrary, its political value on
estimated on its own merits and admitted, the fact that it will carry with it
the sympathy and support of those who are not usually particularly well versed
in foreign politics is decidedly in its favour.
An article in the Jewish Chronicle called Oliphant's plan "the most
feasible that has yet been put before the world". Also letters to the Jewish
Chronicle from the Jewish "Committee of the Society for the Colonisation of
Palestine" in Bucharest and from Oliphant himself set the seal on the contact
established between the English Restoration Movement and the Jewish
masses of Eastern Europe.
An anti-Jewish campaign had been launched in Rumania at the beginning of
the 'seventies. When on March 1, 1881, Czar Alexander II was assassinated, a
wave of pogroms followed throughout Russia. The violence, extent and persistence
of these attacks, and the Government's encouragement of the perpetrators, filled
the Jews with panic. Emigration seemed the only possible escape. While hundreds
of thousands of Jews poured into America, those left behind underwent a process
of spiritual transformation. Inspired by the writings of the pioneers of Jewish
renascence, such as Hirsch Kalischer's Drishath Zion (Longing for Zion),
the stirring Rome and Jerusalem by Moses Hess, and above all, Leo
Pinsker's brilliant political pamphlet Auto-Emancipation--Call to his Fellow
Jews by a Russian Jew, large sections of the Jewish masses tightened
their hold on Judaism and its Messianic hopes. The first Aliyah (ascent
to the land of Israel) was beginning to take shape, its heroes being the Bilu,
young people passionately devoted to the revival of Israel. (Their name was
formed from the initials of the verse Is. ii, 5.)
It was these new pioneering Jews whom Laurence Oliphant met after the failure of
his restorationist scheme. The persecutions of the Jews were also instrumental
to his appearance in their midst. On February 1, 1882, a public meeting had been
held at the Mansion House in London "to give expression to public opinion on the
persecution to which the Jews of Russia have recently been subjected". The most
famous men of the nation, among them Charles Darwin and Lord Shaftesbury, had
taken the initiative. Shaftesbury, then in his eighty-first year, was the first
speaker. With the authority derived from a long life of selfless service,
he raised his voice to rouse humanity's conscience on behalf of "God's ancient
people". The practical result of the meeting was the opening of a relief fund
for the persecuted Jews, which Laurence Oliphant was chosen to administer.
Accompanied only by his wife, he started out on his mission of mercy in March
1882. Oliphant himself recorded the remarkable scenes that took place during
this journey in his autobiography:
"At every station they (the Jews) were
assembled in crowds with petitions to be transported to Palestine, the
conviction apparently having taken possession of their minds that the time appointed for their return to the land of their ancestors
had arrived, and that I was to be their Moses on the occasion".
Before the middle of 1882, driven by the desire to make a new attempt to see his
old plan realised, he set out for Constantinople, only to find there a situation
no less difficult than it had been two years earlier. Turkey's growing distrust
of England had the effect of practically blocking Palestine to Jewish
immigration. This prevented the establishment of large settlements in Palestine
of the type envisaged by Oliphant. He was now faced with the thankless task of
disclosing the true state of affairs to the leaders of the Hovevei Zion
and the Bilu. In a circular letter dated June 15, 1882, the Bilu
delegates tell in plain and moving words how "Sir Oliphant" had first raised
their hopes, but had, on June 14, advised them to extend their stay by a few
months until the settlement of the Egyptian crisis, or else to petition
the Pasha of Mesopotamia for permission to settle in his territory on the same
terms as non-Jews. The letter goes on, "We . . . believe that, even if the
masses migrate to Syria, it is nevertheless our duty to make Eretz Israel into a
centre for our people. We therefore resolve to fight with all our strength to
remove the obstacles in our path and to migrate nowhere but to Eretz Israel".
Oliphant remained loyal to the cause of Restoration. In an open letter to
the Jewish leaders in Russia, he informed them that he was obliged to leave
Constantinople but had no intention of giving up his plans and felt bound to the
Jewish cause. "I believe that a more favourable juncture of circumstances will
ere long arise", he wrote. "In the meantime, I trust that your co-religionists
will not allow themselves to be discouraged by this check, and they may rest
assured that I shall continue to feel a warm sympathy in their sufferings and
their future welfare".
The sincerity of these words was proved by deeds. The third and longest phase of
Oliphant's work for the Restoration lasted throughout the last six years of his
life. The dream of Jewish regeneration, so often entertained by English men and
women, never had a truer embodiment than in the person of this world
traveller who came to live with his wife among the Jewish settlers in Palestine,
who corresponded intimately with Perez Smolenskin, and who employed as his
secretary and interpreter Naphtali Herz Imber, author of the Jewish national
anthem Hatikvah.
Oliphant's unshaken belief in the forthcoming rebuilding of Palestine was
expressed in an essay which appeared in The Nineteenth Century in
September 1883 under the title The Jews and the Eastern Question.
Disregarding the idea of conversion altogether, Oliphant replaced it by the
ideal of a Jewish renaissance such as George Eliot had envisaged, and indeed of
a religious regeneration of Jewry:
". . . It would surely be a noble
ambition for the orthodox Jews to aspire to develop a religion which should
commend itself to the unsatisfied cravings of Christendom, as for the orthodox
Christian to hope, as he now does, that the restoration of the race to
Palestine, should lead to their conversion to his form of theological belief. .
. ."
He laid even greater stress than in The Land of Gilead on the necessity
for co-operation between Jewish and Christian restorationists:
"There can be no doubt that . . . unless
the Jews of the West are prepared to co-operate with the movement
more cordially than they have done hitherto, they will
find that it will slip from their control altogether".
His most remarkable prediction was, however, that of the grim fate awaiting
Jewry. He knew that the assimilated Jews who felt so secure would one day be
faced with a grave crisis, and realised that the colonisation of Palestine,
which he originally conceived as a means to help Turkey, would save the
Jewish people.
When writing The Jew and the Eastern Question, Oliphant
had already made up his mind to continue working on his own to advance the cause
of Jewish settlement in Palestine. He made his home in Haifa in order to help
the vanguard of the Jewish settlers who came to prepare the soil of the country
for the Jewish people. Thus he became a source of strength and encouragement for
the Hovevei Zion in Palestine itself. Fashioning a mutual-aid community
out of the first Jewish settlers and friendly Germans from a nearby colony, he
must have felt that he was helping to usher in a new era both for the Jewish
people and for mankind at large.
A great sorrow for Oliphant was the death of his wife in Haifa in 1886. In the
history of the Restoration Movement, Alice Oliphant's name is gratefully
recorded. Never discouraged, full of hope to the end, she had written a few days
before her death: "Never mind about what looks like the failure of the Palestine
scheme, it is in reality making sure progress".
She was laid to rest on Mount Cannel, and shortly afterwards Oliphant left the
Holy Land. Visiting New, York in 1886, he was met by a deputation consisting of
the poet-composer Abraham Goldfaden and local leader of the Hovevei Zion.
He spoke to them of his work for the Jews and emphasised that he entertained no
conversionist intentions. By the end of 1887 be was back in Palestine and
spent most of his time in assisting the Jewish settlers. In 1888 he left
for England. Death came to him on December 23, 1888.
VII. THE MOVEMENT BEFORE THE ADVENT OF ZIONISM
Dominated though it was by the figure of Laurence Oliphant, the Restoration Movement after the Berlin Congress was carried on by a number of other, remarkable personalities. New schemes and literary productions appeared. Persecution in Russia and anti-Jewish legislation in Rumania gave a sense of urgency to the idea of Restoration.
English Restorationists in this period received much encouragement from the Hovevei Zion movement in England. The Hovevei Zion societies provided the platforin for the first public discussions between Jewish and Christian Restorationists. Also the Egyptian question proved a new powerful incentive after the occupation of Egypt in 1882. It was thought that the time when Palestine would be drawn into the British zone of influence in the Near East could not be far off.
These political developments spurred some restorationist authors to reformulate the old teachings. An original attempt to reconcile the religious character of the Restoration with contemporary historical reality was made by H. Walker in The Future of Palestine as a Problem of International Politics and in connection with the requirements of Christianity and the aspirations of the Jews, in which he recommended the settlement of Jews in Palestine under an international protectorate.
Two other Restorationists, Henry Wentworth Monk and George Nugee, also published timely and politically well-considered projects. Monk had already advocated the Restoration before the Crimean War. Later on, this devout Christian assisted, together with Rabbi Sneersohn of Jerusalem, in the establishment of the first Jewish colonies. To the British Ambassador at Constantinople, G. J. Goschen, he submitted a proposal that Turkey be compensated in cash for giving up Palestine and that the rebuilding of the country be initiated by an "Anglo-Jewish West Asian Company" co-operating with Jewish settlers, until such time as the Jewish people itself could complete the work and take over the administration.
The Rev. George Nugee also advocated
the resettlement of Palestine under British protection. In a pamphlet,
England and the Jews: their destiny and her duty (1881), he affirmed that the Jews'
destiny imposed upon the British people the duty of bringing about the Restoration.
At every stage of the Eastern Question, ignoring all political setbacks,
Alexander Bradshaw had for some forty years bombarded the British public with
religious arguments in support of Restoration and with practical proposals.
The Egyptian Crisis and the pogrom wave in Eastern Europe prompted him,
despite his advanced age, to attempt a last effort to help the Jews. In his The Trumpet Voice:
Modus Operandi in Political, Social, and Moral Forecast concerning the East (1884) he combined
apocalyptic vision with realistic suggestions. Advocating the annexation of Palestine to Egypt,
-which had meantime been occupied by Britain -he looked to the great financiers to furnish the
funds for reconstruction "in order to discharge their responsibilities on earth."
A modest handbill was distributed in the streets of London in the same year. Its author was the Rev. William H. Hechler, born (1845) in South Africa of German Parents, Rector of the Holy Trinity Church in Kilburn (London). Calling himself "Lover of God's ancient people" he engaged, like Oliphant, in an intensive activity to help the victims of the Russian pogroms by collecting money for their settlement in Palestine. He went to Russia and the Holy Land and, in 1882, carried a personal letter from Queen Victoria to the Sultan Abdul Hamid.
Hechler's Restorationist ideas, reflected in his first
pamphlet The Jerusalem Bishopric (1883), are developed in
The Restoration of the Jews to Palestine. In the succinct form of Some points
remembered in connection with the most important question, Hechler presents the quintessence
of the Restoration Doctrine in an original and systematic form. Hechler calls for spiritual
preparation for the Restoration on the part of Christians to include love of the Jews
and careful study of the "momentous question". In 1885 Hechler was appointed chaplain of the British Embassy in Vienna. The assignment was to prove a portentous event in the history of the Restoration Movement. For in Vienna, eleven years later, Hechler met Theodor Herzl and became one of his earliest and most eager followers.
When the last decade of the nineteenth century opened, Palestine's resurrection was no longer an open question for British Restorationists. It had become an imminent certainty. "That the future of these old lands may be more important than the present, it requires little penetration to see", wrote the great Canadian-born naturalist John William Dawson in his Modern Science in Bible Lands, published in 1888. Among the many Palestine travellers from England, the famous geologist was one of the best qualified to judge the country and its future. His verdict on the dire neglect of the once flourishing land was devastating:
.. No nation has been able to establish itself, as a nation in Palestine up to this day, no national union and no national spirit have prevailed there. The motley,
impoverished tribes ... have held it as mere tenants at will, temporary landowners, evidently waiting for those entitled to the permanent possession of the soil.
Dawson left no doubt as to the identity of those whom he considered the rightful owners.
Colonel Conder, formerly Oliphant's collaborator, was as anxious as ever to further the revival of Jewish Palestine. In an article in Blackwood's Magazine (1891) he declared that experience had already demonstrated the Jews aptitude for agricultural colonisation. In 1892 he addressed the Western Tent of the Hovevei Zion Association in London. The lecture was published in the same year under the title Eastern Palestine. "It has always seemed to me", Conder said, "that the future element of prosperous colonisation is to be found among the Jews of Eastern Europe". He invited the English Hovevei Zion to acquire for these settlers the largest available quantity of land east of the Jordan, which he, like Oliphant, considered ideal for settlement. Two years later, when the English Hovevei Zion tried to implement Conder's advice concerning settlement in Eastern Palestine, they were supported by Lord Rosebery, Salisbury's successor at the Foreign Office.
One of the main features of the Restoration Movement towards the end of the century was the shifting of its centre of gravity to the United States of America. There, the millenarian circles from whom Laurence Oliphant had expected so much were the foremost supporters of the Restoration idea. Drafted by William E. Blackstone, a minister of the Methodist, Episcopal Church, and dated March 5, 1891, a petition to President Harrison, signed by the Speaker and the Clerk of the House of Representatives, the Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, members of Congress, judges, mayors, newspaper editors, members of professions and business, three archbishops, six bishops, ninety-nine other Christian clergymen and fourteen rabbis, argued that "all the great European Powers are jealous of each other's influence in, or possible occupation of, Palestine, and this favours the giving of it to such an energetic small nation as the Jews under international guarantees and protection". Blackstone emphasised "that he has special reasons for believing such sentiment already prevails to a large extent in Great Britain, and it seems to appeal to all classes of Christians as a magnificent humanitarian movement".
This American petition shows striking similarity with the
English plea addressed fifty years earlier by the people of Carlow to Lord Palmerston.
Three months after the petition was submitted, Our Day printed an article from
Blackstone's pen, May the United States Intervene for the Jews? Blackstone described
the desperate position of the Jews driven from Russia to whom "the civilised world says,
'We do not want them'," and who "are turned back to go -where?"
He could scarcely have foreseen, how terribly his words would come true half a century later when he exclaimed in 1891:
One stands appalled before the prospect. It seems
as if the agony and horror of 1492 were to be quadrupled in 1892. Will the Christian nations of the nineteenth
century stand by the wreck and launch no lifeboat?
The main object of the article was to refute objections to
Government action in favour of the Jews. It was true, he argued, that the number of
Jews actually resident in Palestine was small, but the country could absorb two or three
millions of newcomers without displacing the present population. In support of his assertion
that the Jews' claim to Palestine had not lapsed, Blackstone quoted eminent legal authorities.
He concluded that an international order had become inevitable -
"a universal court or congress, in which all national disputes and questions shall be peacefully considered and settled" -and within this new order the Jewish people must have its nationhood recognised.
Thus, at the end of the nineteenth century, on the threshold
of the rise of political Zionism, the Restoration Movement, in the writings of George Eliot,
Laurence Oliphant and William E. Blackstone, reached the peak of its maturity. No longer solely
a religious tenet the idea of Restoration had acquired political, humanitarian and juridical
aspects. Conversion of the Jews was no longer thought to be a prerequisite of the Restoration.
Oliphant had sought the co-operation of popular theology, while the theologian Blackstone
marshalled arguments which might have been borrowed from George Eliot's Mordecai.
The Jewish point of view was at last understood. Contact with the Jewish world was established.
In fact, later development inside and outside the Jewish world had been anticipated. Six years before the First Zionist Congress, thirty years' before San Remo, people belonging to all classes demanded a settlement of the Restoration question by an international conference. But what Palmerston and Disraeli in most, auspicious moments had left undone could not be expected of accomplishment by Harrison. Charles Henry Churchill, Hollingworth and George Eliot had proved correct in their foresights: only an effort by the Jewish people itself could effectively set the forces poised in action towards realisation. Just before the turn of the century the great moment of fulfilment had come. It is everlastingly linked with the name of Theodor Herzl. When in 1896 the Restorationist William H. Hechler stood in Vienna face to face with Theodor Herzl their encounter signified that the British Movement for the Restoration of the Jews and Jewish Zionism had reached their predestined crossroads.
Part Three
