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From Puritanism to Zionism: The Story of a Metamorphosis

Dr Ali Azzali 

From Puritanism to Zionism: The Story of a Metamorphosis

Part One

 

To know where to explore we must stand back from the event and look over some parts of 

the relevant historical background. The terrain is extensive and the mud deep, so I shall try to 

proceed by pointing out markers. 

Theodor Herzl

 

 

At the Seventh Moscow Conference on International Security, on April 4, 2018, Sergei Lavrov, Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation, said: "The impression is that the Americans are trying to maintain a situation of controlled chaos in this huge geopolitical region [the Near East], hoping to use it to justify the open-ended US military presence in the region within the framework of their unilateral agenda."1 Nihil novi sub sole, similar motivations prompted Britain during the 19th century to create the conditions for the establishment of a "Jewish client state in Palestine" to serve its strategy of domination and to defend its trade routes with the colonies. The purpose of this study, divided into two parts, is to reconstruct the historical and ideological reasons that inspired British policy in Palestine.

The fateful year 1917 was marked by three events destined to profoundly change the international political order. April 6 saw the intervention of the United States in the Great War. Although commonly associated with Wilson's design of building a world order animated by universalist assumptions and trust in international law, the intervention was in reality aimed at avoiding the loss of war credits disbursed during the conflict2. The intervention not only changed the course of the conflict but ushered in the fatal "American century."

On February 27 in St. Petersburg the red flag was hoisted on the roof of the Winter Palace, and the same evening the first workers' delegates of the soviet were elected, while the Duma announced the break with the Romanov dynasty. On the night of October 24-25 (in the Julian calendar), to the cry of "all power to the soviets", the coup d'état of the Bolshevik insurgents led by Leon Trotsky was successfully concluded, forming the first revolutionary government presided over by Lenin. The October Revolution thus inaugurated the first experiment in egalitarian socialism with the transfer of power to the Military Revolutionary Committee. The Revolution soon spread to most of the territories of the former Russian Empire.

On 2 November, British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour sent an official letter to Baron Lionel Walter Rothschild3, representative of the British Jewish community and contact person for the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland4, in which the British government pledged to support the creation in Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire, of a "national home" for Jews while respecting "the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities of Palestine." The declaration was later incorporated into the Treaty of Sèvres, which marked the beginning of the partition of the territories of the Ottoman Empire. Arthur Koestler wrote that in the letter: "A nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third.5" As for the "existing non-Jewish communities of Palestine," which accounted for 90 percent of the population, Balfour, in a letter to Lord Curzon, stated: "Zionism, right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in centuries-old traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far deeper importance than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.6"

 

On December 11, British General Edmund Allenby triumphantly entered Jerusalem. Allenby, "succeeding where Richard the Lionheart had failed," stated that "the Crusader wars are now over."

We report in full the translation of the text of the letter, significantly published in the Times, spokesman of the influential circle of the Round Table, dated November 9th:

 

«Foreign Office

November 2nd 1917

«Dear Lord Rothschild,

I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet.

"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.

Yours sincerely,

Arthur James Balfour»

 

It should not be assumed, however, that what was expressed in the Declaration represented the unanimous opinion of British Jews, many of whom did not identify with the demands of the Zionist movement. Lord Edwin Samuel Montagu, Secretary of State for India from 1917 to 1922 and cousin of Herbert Samuel7, for example, believed that:

 

"Zionism, ..., was a ‘mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom.’ An English Jew longing to ‘shake British soil from his shoes and go back to agricultural pursuits in Palestine’ had ‘acknowledged aims inconsistent with British citizenship.’ As he regarded Judaism as purely a religion, Montagu spurned the concept that he belonged to the same nationality as Jews living in other countries.”8

 

Montagu says:

" I have always understood that those who indulged in this creed [Zionism] were largely animated by the restrictions upon and refusal of liberty to Jews in Russia. But at the very time when these Jews have been acknowledged as Jewish Russians and given all liberties, it seems to be inconceivable that Zionism should be officially recognised by the British government, and that Mr Balfour should be authorised to say that Palestine was to be reconstituted as the ‘national home of the Jewish people’. I do not know what this involves but I assume that it means that Mohammedans and Christians are to make way for the Jews and that the Jews should be put in all positions of preference and should be peculiarly associated with Palestine in the same way that England is with the English or France with the French, that Turks and other Mohammedans in Palestine will be regarded as foreigners, just in the same way as Jews will hereafter be treated as foreigners in every country but Palestine. Perhaps also citizenship must be granted only as a result of a religious test.”9

In another memo, Montagu stated that Zionism was “opposed by every British Jew ‘who is prominent in public life, with the exception of the present Lord [Walter] Rothschild, Mr Herbert Samuel and a few others’”.10

In an essay published by the Indiana State University, Mohameden Oud-Mey defines Zionism as "a political geography idea founded on a theory of racial appropriation of space and time. It is centered on a Jewish exclusive inheritance claim over both the territory of the former British Mandate of Palestine and the cultural heritage and genetic material of the Biblical Israelites. By the same token Zionism denies such exclusive inheritance ‘rights’ to the Muslim and Christian Arabs who are the natives of Palestine."11

The moral and ideological basis for justifying mass settlement in Palestine as the Promised Land is based on belief in the idea of a "return to history" (hashiva la-historia), a concept rooted in a metaphysical and sacred view of historical events. A diasporic people, fragmented over the centuries and perpetually aliens among Gentile societies, were finally allowed to return to their ancient "home" in the Near East. If until that moment, in fact, in the words of David Ben-Gurion, the Jews had been "excluded from the history of the world", now, thanks to the providential mediation of the British and the tireless efforts of the Zionist movement, they were ready for a dramatic return.

An impartial historical analysis of events, however, cannot escape the real reasons for this policy, which was essentially aimed at defending the strategic nodes of British trade routes and controlling the oil resources of the Arab world in the face of the weakness and therefore the fragmentation of the Ottoman Empire. Abdul Wahhab Al Kayyali wrote: "The importance of Arab lands as a gateway to Africa and a bridge to Asia was made evident by the Napoleonic campaign (1797-1799) and the dangers posed by Mohammed Ali's attempt to form an independent state comprising Egypt and the Arab countries. Thus, the need to stifle any nascent independent state, doubly more threatening to imperialism in the wake of the spread of Arab nationalist sentiment, became ever more insistent as the Ottoman Empire drifted further and further toward disintegration. [...] This issue has prompted major imperialist figures to propose the idea of creating a client state of Jewish settlers in Palestine, intended primarily to block the realization of unity and independence in that important area of the world and to serve the interests of its sponsors. The events of the latter part of the century have fostered the creation of a consensus of opinion among imperialist and Western politicians, with the collaboration of Western Jewish millionaires and anti-Semites, everywhere in favor of Zionism and Jewish emigration and the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine."12 It has been said that "the acquisition of the Suez Canal and Cyprus by Disraeli in the years between 1874 and 1878 made the physical conquest of Palestine inevitable. It was the point of no return."13 The promotion of the Zionist movement can therefore be considered as an ideological weapon for the benefit of British geopolitical interests on the world chessboard. In this regard, it has been possible to speak of "the British policy of Zionization of the Jews and Judaization of Zionism."14

Sir Halford J. Mackinder, in a work published in the aftermath of the end of the Great War, defines the historical and political importance of Jerusalem and Palestine as a function of the strategy of British domination:

 

" In a monkish map, contemporary with the Crusades, which still hangs in Hereford Cathedral, Jerusalem is marked as at the geometrical center, the navel, of the world, and on the floor of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem they will show you to this day the precise spot which is the center. If our study of the geographical realities, as we now know them in their completeness, is leading us to right conclusions, the medieval ecclesiastics were not far wrong. If the WorldIsland be inevitably the principal seat of humanity on this globe and if Arabia, as the passage-land from Europe to the Indies and from the Northern to the Southern Heartland, be central in the World-Island, then the hill citadel of Jerusalem has a strategical position with reference to world-realities not differing essentially from its ideal position in the perspective of the Middle Ages, or its strategical position between ancient Babylon and Egypt. As the war has shown, the Suez Canal carries the rich traffic between the Indies and Europe to within striking distance of an army based on Palestine, and already the trunk railway is being built through the coastal plain by Jaffa, which will connect the Southern with the Northern Heartland. Who owns Damascus, moreover, will have flank access to the alternative route between the oceans down the Euphrates Valley. It cannot be wholly a coincidence that in the selfsame region should be the starting point of history and the crossing point of the most vital of modem highways."15

In a later chapter, the British geographer, a friend and associate of Lord Balfour, expounds the political advantages of creating a "national house" and highlights both the character and historical parable of the Jewish people and their widespread reluctance towards the Zionist project:

"The Jewish national seat in Palestine will be one of the most important outcomes of the war. That is a subject on which we can now afford to speak the truth. The Jew, for many centuries shut up in the ghetto, and shut out of most honorable positions in society, developed in an unbalanced manner and became hateful to the average Christian by reason of his excellent, no less than his deficient, qualities. German penetration has been conducted in the great commercial centers of the world in no small measure by Jewish agency, just as German domination in southeastern Europe was achieved through Magyar and Turk, with Jewish assistance. Jews are among the chief of the Bolsheviks of Russia. The homeless, brainful Jew lent himself to such internationalist work, and Christendom has no great right to be surprised by the fact. But you will have no room tbr these activities in your League of independent, friendly nations. Therefore a national home, at the physical and histori cal center of the world, should make the Jew ‘range’ himself. Standards of judgment, brought to bear on Jews by Jews, should result, even among those large Jewish communities which will remain as Going Concerns outside Palestine. This, however, will imply the frank accep tance of the position of a nationality, which some Jews seek to forget. There are those who try to distinguish between the Jewish religion and the Hebrew race, but surely the popular view of their broad identity is not far wrong.”16

 

The fundamental role played by the restorationist movement, by the so-called "Gentile Zionists" and in particular by the Anglican clergyman William Henry Hechler (1 October 1845 – 30 January 1931), chaplain at the British embassy in Vienna, first alongside Leon Pinsker in Odessa, then as "not only the first, but the most constant and indefatigable of Herzl's followers"17,  will then be analyzed in the course of the present study.

 

Gentile Zionism: From Cromwell to Palmerston.

Theodor Herzl was not under any illusions when he said: "From this place the Zionist movement will take a higher and higher flight.… England the great, England the free, England with her eyes fixed on the seven seas, will understand us."18 Well before the birth of Jewish political Zionism, a non-Jewish Zionism of millenaristic origin had flourished in England19. The central aspect of Christian eschatology is based on the idea of the second Coming of Jesus. which will establish the Kingdom of God on Earth, destined to last a millennium, according to the prophecies of the Book of Daniel and the Revelation of John (20:1-16).  The noted historian of Zionism Nahum Sokolow has stated in this regard: "For almost three centuries Zionism has been a religious and political idea that great Christians and Jews, especially in England, have handed down to posterity."20 The origin of "Gentile" Zionism goes back to English Puritanism21, as Regina Sharif explains: "Puritanism meant the invasion of Hebraism as transmitted through the Old Testament, but distorted by the effort to apply the ethics, laws and manners of the Old Testament Hebrew people, a people that lived in the Middle East more than two thousand years earlier, to post-Renaissance England. Matthew Arnold described Puritanism as 'a revival of the Hebraic spirit in reaction to the Hellenic spirit that had animated the period immediately preceding the Renaissance.' [...] The concept of Jewish race thus came to play a special role in English thought and understanding of the existing world order. The idea that Palestine had to be restored to its Hebrew ancestors had its beginnings here, Palestine had up until then been remembered as the Christian Holy Land, unfortunately, lost to Islam. But in seventeenth-century England it came to be regarded as the homeland of the Jews, whose return to Palestine was, according to Old Testament prophecies, inevitable for the coming of the Second Advent of Christ.”22

 

The genesis of the idea of the restoration of the Jews in Palestine in the context of British Protestant theology. It was based on three factors: "the military Turko-Catholic threat to Protestant Christendom, the Puritan millenarian speculations between 1640 and 1660, and England's moral responsibility to the Jews. During the six- teenth and seventeenth centuries, the fear of Catholic Turkish military power led theologians to believe that the Jews' conquest of Palestine would necessarily be preceded by victory over Islam and Catholicism. Consequently, they supported this Restoration as a means to their political end. Moreover, they believed that such a Restoration would lead to the fulfillment of the Pauline expectation of the millennial kingdom; the Jews' Restoration to Palestine would inaugurate England's messianic age. Also by concentrating on Romans 11, these English evangelists felt that they owed the Jews a debt which they could repay only by converting them to Christianity and restoring them to Palestine. This became the Englishman's burden of responsibility to the Jews whose rejection of Christ in the first century had allowed the overall salvation of the Gentiles."23

The idea of Jewish history and tradition engendered by Puritanism, however, was not based on a direct knowledge of that people, banished from the year 1290, but on a sort of self-perception modeled on the theological and ethical ideals of English Protestantism. In the case of Oliver Cromwell, in addition to religious motivations, it is also legitimate to think of reasons of commercial interest and the advantages that would have been derived from it by the British maritime power, at the time weakened by the consequences of the civil war and threatened by Dutch expansion. Petitions for the readmission of Jews to England mixed millenarian tones with commercial promises, as Barbara Tuchman recalls: "In the year 1649, the very peak and mid-point of Puritan rule in England, two English Puritans of Amsterdam petitioned the government ‘That this Nation of England, with the inhabitants of the Netherlands, shall be the first and the readiest to transport Izraell’s sons and daughters in their ships to the Land promised to their forefathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob for an everlasting Inheritance.’ The petition further requested that the Jews ‘may again be received and permitted to trade and dwell amongst you in this Land.’”24

Albert Montefiore Hyamson explains: "These tendencies culminated in the formal readmission of Jews to England during the last years of the Protector [Oliver Cromwell]. A few years later, the marvelous deeds of the Jewish pseudo-messiah Sabbathai Zevi again aroused the interest of some English merchants who, speculating on the possibility that the Millennium was not at hand, began to consider whether it was not appropriate to adopt Judaism and settle in the Holy Land, in order to be ready to welcome the Messiah”25.

The restoration and conversion of the Jews would fulfill the prophecies of the Old and New Testaments and fulfill the messianic role of Albion, the new Zion. 

For most European Jews, from about 1550 onwards the doctrines of the Kabbalistic Rabbi Yitzhak Luria (1538–72) became predominant, upholding "the uniqueness of the Jews" and their salvific mission26

In the centuries that followed, with British maritime expansion, the question of Jewish restoration in Palestine went beyond the boundaries of millenarianism and the "second coming of Christ" to the point of integrating into British imperialist strategy.

 

In England, the devastating impact of the French Revolution had led to a rejection of political and philosophical rationalism and a return to the Bible after the "Hellenistic" interlude of the eighteenth century. "Eighteenth-century skepticism had given way to Victorian piety; eighteenth-century rationalism was again surrendering to Revelation."27 Evangelicalism then became predominant and then spread to the New World, particularly in New England, under the name of "Fundamentalism". Evangelicalism was based on a literal interpretation of the Bible as the Word of God and a strong millenarian inspiration inspired by the prophecies of the Old Testament. This dogma called for a final and complete conversion and restoration of the Jewish people in Palestine. In the field of Evangelicalism, the London Society for the Promotion of Christianity Amongst the Jews (now Church's Ministry Among Jewish People) was founded in 1809 in response to the establishment of the Grand Sanhedrin in Paris in 1807 by Napoleon. The most authoritative proponent of this doctrine was Lord Shaftesbury (1801-1885), "the most evangelical of evangelicals" and one of the main promoters of the emerging "Christian Zionism". As in the case of Cromwell, Shaftesbury's restorationism, though inspired by biblical prophecy, was no stranger to the expansionist interests of Victorian England. The conquest of Greater Syria in 1831 by Mehmet Ali28 had changed the conditions under which European power politics in the Near East operated. As a result of this change, Shaftesbury managed to persuade Foreign Secretary Palmerston to send a British consul, James Finn, to Jerusalem in 1838. In 1848, Shaftesbury became president of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews, of which Finn was a prominent member. In an article published in the Quarterly Review (December 1838) Lord Lindsay wrote:

"The growing interest shown in these regions, the increased investment of British capital and the confluence of British and foreign travelers from all parts of the world, have recently induced the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs to place there a representative of our Sovereign, in the person of a Vice-Consul. This gentleman sailed for Alexandria at the end of last September; his residence will be fixed in Jerusalem, but his jurisdiction will extend to the whole country within the ancient limits of the Holy Land. The soil and climate of Palestine are singularly adapted to the growth of the produce necessary for the needs of Great Britain; The finest cotton can be obtained in almost unlimited abundance; Silk and madder are the basis of the country and olive oil is now, as it has always been, the real wealth of the land. Only capital and skill are required: the presence of a British officer, and the greater security of property which his presence will confer, might invite the inhabitants of these islands to cultivate Palestine; and the Jews, who will not devote themselves to agriculture in any other land, having found in the English consul a mediator between their people and the Pacha, will probably return in greater numbers and return to be the cultivators of Judea and Galilean. Napoleon was well aware of the value of an alliance with the Jews, and he sought to reproduce in the capital of France the spectacle of the ancient Sanhedrin, which, basking in imperial favor, might give laws to the whole body of Jews throughout the habitable world, and aid it, no doubt, in its bold plans against Poland and the East. What Napoleon planned in his violence and ambition, thinking to 'destroy not a few nations,' we may wisely and legitimately undertake for the maintenance of our Empire."29

Nur Masalha comments: "With the support of foreign secretary Lord Palmerston, Shaftesbury began promoting Jewish restorationism in Victorian England in the 1830s. Shaftesbury was also instrumental in the setting up of the British Consulate in Jerusalem in 1839. The public activities of Shaftesbury, James Finn and their English “restorationist” followers – which preceded the founding of the European political Zionist movement by Theodor Herzl by nearly half a century – demonstrate clearly that ‘Zionism’ began as a distinctly Christian Protestant movement, not a Jewish one."30

In 1841, in reaction to the Damascus Affair31, a fact-finding mission sent by the Church of Scotland to Palestine issued a "Memorandum to the Protestant Monarchs of Europe for the Restoration of the Jews in Palestine." The text, published in its entirety by The Times, was accompanied by an article in which it was stated that the Memorandum "dictated by the peculiar conjuncture of affairs in the East, and other striking signs of the times, reverts to the original covenant which secures that land to the descendants of Abraham, and urges upon the consideration of the Powers addressed what may be the probable line of duty on the part of Protestant Christendom to the Jewish people in the present controversy in the East."32 The document concluded, in fact, with an appeal: "As the spirit of Cyrus, king of Persia, was raised up to build the Temple of the Lord, which was in Jerusalem (II Chron. xxxvi. 22:23), who is there among you, high and mighty of all nations, to fulfill the good pleasure of the holy will of the Lord of heaven, who said in Jerusalem, 'You will be built,' and in the temple, 'Will your foundation be laid?'"

In 1841 the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews obtained the appointment of a baptized Jew, Michael Solomon Alexander, as Anglican bishop in Jerusalem33.

It should be noted that, before his intervention with Lord Palmerston to solicit British diplomacy to help the Jewish community of Damascus, in 1838 Sir Moses Hayyim Montefiore, after meeting in Palestine with the representatives of the mission of inquiry of the Church of Scotland, had presented a plan for the settlement of Jews in the Holy Land at the Khedive of Egypt Mehmet Ali and the Sultan, with the approval of Avraham Finzi, the British consular agent in Acre.

Never before has it been so true that: "behind the protection of trade and religious minorities there lay the major political and strategic interests of the powers."34 The protection of the Jewish people implied colonial considerations: while the French had been recognized by the Great Porte as protectors of the Roman Catholic Church and the Russians of the Greek Church in Palestine, the British could not claim similar rights against native Protestants, who did not exist in the region. The defense of the Jews would allow them to fill this vacuum and lay the foundations for the future partition of the Ottoman Empire, "the sick man of Europe," according to the famous definition attributed to Tsar Nicholas I. On 4 September 1840 Palmerston sent a letter to his ambassador in Constantinople, Lord Ponsonby, inviting him to: “… don’t lose sight of my recommendation to the Porte to invite the Jews to return to Palestine. You can have no idea how much such a measure would tend to interest in the Sultan’s cause all of the religious party in this country, and their influence is great and their connexion extensive. The measure moreover in itself would be highly advantageous to the Sultan, by bringing into his dominion a great number of wealthy capitalists who would employ the people and enrich the Empire.”35

As Montefiore Hyamson recalls: "One of the immediate consequences of the Damascus affair was the issue by Palmerston of instructions to all British representatives in the Levant and Syria, placing the Jews under their special protection, and informing them that so far as non-British subjects were concerned, the Turkish Government desired its attention to be directed to any case of oppression, and had promised the British Ambassador that ‘it will attend to any representation which may be mide to it by the Embassy, of any act of oppression practised against the Jews.’ […] Lord Aberdeen, in the name of the British Government issued specific instructions to the British Consul to undertake the protection of foreign Jews, whose own Consuls refued to act for them”.36 The absolute protection accorded, regardless of nationality, thus gave the British government a kind of extraterritorial authority.

In 1844, the Rev. Samuel Alexander Bradshaw published a pamphlet entitled A Tract for the Times, being a Plea for the Jews, in which he considered it a duty of the Christian peoples to restore the Jews in Palestine. To this end, he argued that the British Parliament should grant four million pounds and that another million should be collected by the various Churches. His proposal contained a plan that would first provide for the creation of a British protectorate in Palestine, which, once it had gained the necessary vigour, would be followed by eventual national emancipation. In support of his proposal, the Reverend Bradshaw advanced geopolitical considerations: "This plan would be attended with political advantages of incalculable importance to Great Britain, tending to restore the balance of her power in the Levant, and giving her the command of a free and uninterrupted communication with her Eastern possessions. . . . The re-establishment of the Jewish nation in Palestine under British protection would retrieve our affairs in the Levant, and place us in a commanding position from whence to check the progress of encroachment, to overawe open enemies, and, if necessary, to repel their advance ; at the same time that it would place the management of our steam communication entirely in our own hands."37

It is interesting to note that in the same years (1851) the Italian Benedetto Musolino "an illustrious son of the strong Calabria, Christian, patriot, Garibaldian, deputy and then senator of the Kingdom of Italy dreamed of the idea of reconstituting a political state of Israelites in the Holy Land and for this purpose he studied, spent, traveled and left a precious monument of his generous aspirations in a work still unpublished, entitled Jerusalem and the Jewish people."38 Musolino was received in London by Lord Palmerston, who introduced him to Lord Rothschild. The object of his mission was to prevent "a terrible clash between Russia and England, which, having its origin in their rivalries in India and Constantinople, would have been a cause of pause and perhaps of retrogression for the civilisation of the human family." As David Meghnagi notes: "Musolino's ideas did not develop in a vacuum. They were part of a geopolitical design that had as its reference the British imperial power and its political and cultural civilization, as an idealized point of reference. And as a premise, an overestimation of the role that the development of a railway linking the Near East to the Indies would have played in the preservation of British supremacy. [...] A maritime power, England risked seeing its political and economic hegemony weakened with the development of the railways. Overestimating the danger, Musolino wanted to anticipate a general and differentiated strategy to protect his possessions in the Far East. The project was based on the idea of an alliance with the Ottoman Empire in opposition to the Tsarist Empire."39

One of the most influential British restorationists was Colonel George Gawler (1795–1869), former governor of South Australia. Gawler, on the strength of his solid colonial experience of settling British prisoners in Australia40, promoted a campaign of gradual colonization of Palestine as a prelude to the establishment of an autonomous Jewish nation-state under British tutelage. He was a close friend of Moses Montefiore, with whom he made an educational trip to Palestine in 1849. He expounded his theories in three papers: The Tranquillization 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. (1845); The Emancipation of the Jews (1847), thirty-five years ahead of Leon Pinsker's Selbstemanzipation; Syria and its Near Prospects (1853), in which the author argues that Jewish settlements would have safeguarded England's lines of communication, as "Egypt and Syria stand in intimate connection. A foreign hostile Power mighty in either would soon endanger British trade.”41 In the aftermath of the Crimean War, Gawler founded The Palestine Society " a non-sectarian body, was formed and this developed into a Palestine Colonisation Fund, in the activities of which Jew and Christian worked side by side.”42

 

The first settlers in Palestine

“The Hebrew seers announce in time

The return of Judah to her prime;

Some Christians deemed it then at hand

Here was an object: Up and Do. 

With seed and tillage help renew

Help reinstate the Holy Land”. 

 

Herman Melville43

 

It was from the second half of the nineteenth century that the first movement of agricultural settlement in Palestine by Christian, European and American settlers began. Ruth Kark, a lecturer in the Department of Geography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, wrote: "The pioneers of modern agricultural settlement in the Holy Land were Christians. Foremost among these were several Americans who came in the 1850s and 1860s to settle-ignoring warnings from local experts and from representatives of the United States government. The leaders of the settlers were inspired by millenarist ideas and by faith in the Return to Zion-rife among fundamental Protestant sects in the early nineteenth century.”44 This "gentile" movement was later perceived as a harbinger of perhaps unpredictable developments at the time, in which new political actors made a name for it. Their appearance on the international scene, as in the case of the Quaker Warden Cresson (1798-1860), the first U.S. consul in Jerusalem, of whom Herman Melville, who had met him in Palestine in 1857, wrote in his Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant: "Warder Crisson [sic] of Philadelphia - an American turned Jew - divorced from his former wife - married to a Jewess - sad".45 The clear importance of the movement is confirmed by the words of Montefiore Hyamson, who, in 1918, wrote: " Meanwhile, a new movement was being initiated in Palestine, partly under English auspices, Jewish and Gentile, a movement which, after many disappointments and set-backs, ultimately developed into the colonization of Palestine, and the regeneration of the land under Jewish auspices. In 1844, Warder Cresson had been appointed United States Consul at Jerusalem. His main object in seeking the appointment was his interest in Jews and Judaism, an interest which increased so powerfully that four years later he became a Jew, adopting the name of Michael Boaz Israel. His faith in the people and the land was sufficiently strong to make him believe that the people, once they were placed upon their feet, would be well able to regenerate themselves and the land. To him the solution of the problem lay in the establishment of agricultural colonies, and to the furtherance of this policy he devoted his own means, as well as other sums which were placed at his disposal by friends and well-wishers.."46

In Palmerston's time, Christian Zionists were often confronted with the fact that among European Jews the idea of a return to Palestine was not at all popular, as evidenced by a letter sent by the British consul in Ottoman Syria, Charles Henry Churchill, nephew of the Duke of Marlborough and ancestor of Winston, to Sir Moses Montefiore: "I cannot conceal from you my most anxious desire to see your countrymen endeavour once more to resume their existence as a people. I consider the object to be perfectly obtainable. But two things are indispensably necessary: Firstly that the Jews themselves will take up the matter, universally and unanimously. Secondly that the European powers will aid them in their views."47

 

Footnotes

1 Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s remarks at the 7th Moscow Conference on International Security, Moscow, April 5, 2018. At: https://www.mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/1567838/

2 “By January 1915, four months into the Great War, the British government had named a private New York banking house, J.P. Morgan & Co., to be its sole purchasing agent for all war supplies from the United States. Morgan was designated Britain’s exclusive financial agent for all British war lending from private U.S. banks as well. In a short time, Britain in turn became the guarantor for all such war purchases and loans by the French, Italians and Russians in the war against the German–Austrian Continental powers. It was a giant credit pyramid on top of which sat the influential American house of Morgan. Never had a single banking house gambled on such high and risky global stakes. […] The role of Morgan and the New York fi nancial community was of supreme importance to the war efforts of the Entente powers. Under an exclusive arrangement, purchase of all American munitions and war materials, as well as necessary grains and food supplies for Britain, France and the other Allied powers in Europe, was funneled through the house of Morgan. Morgan also utilized its London affiliate, Morgan Grenfell & Co., whose senior partner, E.C. Grenfell, was a director of the Bank of England, and an intimate friend of Chancellor of the Exchequer Lloyd George. Morgan’s Paris offi ce, Morgan Harjes & Co., completed the essential Entente circle. Such power in the hands of a single investment house, given the scale of the British war requirements, was without precedent.” William Engdahl, A Century of War, 1992, pp. 51-2.

3 Lionel Walter Rothschild (8 February 1868 – 27 August 1937), was born in London as the eldest son and heiress of Emma Louise von Rothschild and Nathan Rothschild, 1st Baron Rothschild, an immensely wealthy financier of the eponymous international financial dynasty and the first Jewish peer in England. At the age of 21, despite an overwhelming passion for zoology, he resigned himself to working at the family bank, N M Rothschild & Sons in London, where he remained until 1908. He was a Liberal Unionist MP for Aylesbury from 1899 until he retired from politics at the general election of January 1910. He was an active promoter of the Zionist movement and a close friend of Chaim Weizmann.

4 The Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland was founded in 1899 to promote a permanent homeland for the Jewish people.

5 Arthur Koestler, Promise and Fulfilment, London 1949, p. 4.

6 Quoted in Karl Sabbagh, Israel, Palestine and what a Curzon declaration might have looked like, in The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/13/israel-palestine-and-what-a-curzon-declaration-might-have-looked-like.

7 Herbert Louis Samuel (6 November 1870 – 5 February 1963) was a British politician who was leader of the Liberal Party from 1931 to 1935. He was the first practicing Jew to serve as a Cabinet minister and to become leader of a major British political party. Samuel had promoted Zionism within the British Cabinet, beginning with his 1915 memorandum entitled The Future of Palestine. In the memorandum, he suggested that Britain conquer Palestine in order to protect the Suez Canal from foreign powers and to make Palestine the homeland of the Jewish people. In 1920 he was appointed the first High Commissioner for Palestine, responsible for the administration of the territory.

8 David Cronin, Balfour's Shadow A Century of British Support for Zionism and Israel since 1917, 2017, pp. 12-13

9 Ibid., p. 13.

10 Ibidem

11 Mohameden Oud-Mey, The Non-Semitic Origins of Contemporary Jews, date not specified, https://www.indstate.edu/cas/sites/arts.indstate.edu/files/Faculty/melyassini/NSOCJ_1_0.PDF.

12 Abdul Wahhab Al Kayyali, The Historical Roots of the Imperialist-Zionist Alliance, (International Symposium on Zionism and Racism, Baghdad November 1976), https://sawtoroba.com/Eng/?p=3068.

13 Barbara Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour. New York: New York University Press, 1956, p. 16 of the digital edition

14 Mohameden Oud-Mey, Geopolitical Genesis of Herzlian Zionism, Indiana State University, https://www.indstate.edu/cas/sites/arts.indstate.edu/files/Faculty/melyassini/Geopolitical%20Genesis%20of%20Herzlian%20Zionism.PDF

15 Halford Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality, New York, 1919, pp. 110-111.

16 Ibid., pp. 216-7.

17 Paul Merkley, The Politics of Christian Zionism 1891-1948, Routledge, 1998.

18 Alex Bein, Theodor Herzl, Philadelphia, 1954, p. 346.

19 “Millenarism is the cosmology of eschatology, a chronology of future events compared to a historical record of the past. In the Christian tradition, all millenial theologies involve the triumph of Christ, the vindication of the suffering saints, and the eventual reign of Christ on the earth”. E. R. Sandeen, Millenialism, pp. 104-05 in E. S. Gaustad (Ed.), The rise of Adventism, New York, 1974.

20 Nahum Sokolow, History of Zionism, 1600-1918, 2 vols. (London, 1919), 1: xxvi-vii.

21 In a curious apology for the "religion of Americanism," David Galernter wrote: " The Bible in English laid the basis of Puritanism — and of modern Britain, America, and the liberal democratic state. And the Bible posed a deep choice respecting the nature of war, which continues to occupy America and the world at large. So I will begin with the English Bible. The American Religion has two basic components, a Creed and the doctrine I call American Zionism. Puritanism laid the basis of Americanism by developing American Zionism and other essential ingredients of the American Religion. The revolutionary generation (influenced heavily by the Bible, Puritanism, and American Zionism) developed the American Creed, thereby completing the American Religion in principle." David Galernter, Americanism - The Fourth Great Western Religion, New York, 2007, pp. 20-21.

22 Regina Sharif, Christians for Zion 1600 -1919, Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 5, No. 3/4 (Spring - Summer, 1976), pp. 124-5.

23 N. I. Matar, The Idea of the Restoration of the Jews in English Protestant Thought, 1661-1701, The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 78, No. 1/2 (Jan. - Apr., 1985), p. 115.

24 Tuchman, op. cit. cit., p. 152.

25 Albert Montefiore Hyamson, British Projects for the Restoration of the Jews, 1917, p. 2

26 Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky write: "Yesaiah Tishbi, an authority on the Cabbala who wrote in Hebrew, explained in his scholarly work, The Theory of Evil and the (Satanic) Sphere in Lurianic Cabbala (1942, reprinted in 1982): ‘It is plain that those prospects and the scheme [of salvation] are intended only for Jews.’ Tishbi cited Rabbi Hayim Vital, the chief interpreter of Rabbi Luria, who wrote in his book, Gates of Holiness: ‘The Emanating Power, blessed be his name, wanted there to be some people on this low earth that would embody the four divine emanations. These people are the Jews, chosen to join together the four divine worlds here below.’ Tishbi further cited Vital’s writings in emphasizing the Lurianic doctrine that non-Jews have satanic souls: ‘Souls of non-Jews come entirely from the female part of the satanic sphere. For this reason souls of non-Jews are called evil, not good, and are created without [divine] knowledge.’" Israel Shahak, Norton Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, London 2004, p. 58.

27 Tuchman, op. cit. cit., p. 217

28 “When Mohammed Ali (Al-Kabir) of Egypt em¬barked on his ambitious plan to modernize Egypt and build a strong independent state comprising Egypt, Greater Syria and the Arab Penin¬sula during the first decades of the nineteenth century, the British government adopted a course of direct military intervention and was instrumental in driving the armies of Ibrahim Pasha (son of Mohammed Ali) back to Egypt. Mohammed Ali’s advance into Syria opened the Syrian Question (a question which still remains as it is synonymous with Western schemes and endeavours to prevent Arab unity). New British policies were for¬mulated. One of the keys to the new approach was Palestine, the Jews a prominent part of its spearhead”. Abdul Wahhab Al Kayyali, op. cit.

29 Crawford, Alexander Lindsay (Lord Lindsay). Letters on Egypt, Edom, and the Holy Land, The Quarterly Review 125 (Dec.):166-92

30 Masalha, Nur, The Zionist Bible: Biblical Precedent, Colonialism and the Erasure of Memory, Routledge, 2014, p. 83.

31 The Damascus Affair concerned the alleged ritual murder of the Sardinian Capuchin Father Tommaso di Calangianus and his assistant Ibrahim Amarath on February 5, 1840, on the occasion of the Jewish Passover. This event had wide international resonance and saw the direct intervention of Sir Moses Hayyim Montefiore and Lionel Rothschild to Lord Palmerston in order to solicit British diplomacy with the Khedive of Egypt Mehmet Ali Pasha and the Sultan of Istanbul "promoting at the same time a parliamentary debate and an interest of France. Fearing the protracted negotiations, Montefiore and some members of the Parisian Jewish community went first to Alexandria, and then to Constantinople, and obtained the release of the prisoners of Damascus”.  (https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/moses-haim-montefiore_(Biographical-Dictionary)/

32 Montefiore Hyamson, op. cit., p. 5.

33 Ibid., p. 3.

34 Albert Hourani, Ottoman Reform and the Politics of Notables, in Beginning of Modernisation in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century, ed. William Polk and Richard Chambers, Chicago, 1968, pp. 41-68

35 Charles Webster, The Foreign Policy of Palmerston, Londra, 1951, pag. 762

36 Montefiore Hyamson, op. cit., pag. 11.

37 Ibid., pp. 14-15.

38 "Mari [...] One fine day he announced his visit to me and begged me to listen to some of his proposals concerning the Israelites and Palestine. I agreed, and received in my study the Hon. [...] Musolino, who, after having placed on my desk a large volume bound in black leather, told me that the book was a manuscript in which he had set forth his project in favor of the Israelites, and began to tell me that he had long had a thought of promoting the return of the Jews to their ancient national home.  so that with their alert intelligence they might bring to Asia a life-giving current of European culture, and open to those peoples the way of civilization to prevent and prevent a terrible clash between Russia and England, which, having its origin in their rivalries in India and Constantinople, would have been a cause of pause and perhaps of regression for the civilization of the human family. [...] three times he had been to Palestine, and a fourth voyage he would gladly have undertaken if he had not been discouraged from further expense by the useless efforts made to find promoters to aid his design. He told me that for this purpose he had presented himself in London to Lord Palmerston, who had advised him to consult the Rothschild banker, who had spoken to a Rabbi, I do not remember whether in England or France: but no one had listened to him. He spoke to me enthusiastically of the fertility of Galilee, where he said, wheat grows spontaneously, luxuriant, even though no one has ploughed and sown; He emphasized the ease with which the Jews in Palestine could better than elsewhere observe the feasts, their traditional religious observances, and concluded, asking if I thought there was anything to be done in Italy to bring about its division." M. Finzi, A Precursor of Zionism, 1905. In: www.benedettomusolino.it/ebraica/finzi_ita.pdf

39 David Meghnagi, Gerusalemme ed il popolo ebreo di Benedetto Musolino, Trauma and Memory, 2021, Volume 9, n. 3, p. 86.

40 "It has happened to me, un der Divine providence, to have been the local founder of the finest colony in proportion to its duration, that has ever yet appeared in the world ; and I may therefore soberly aspire to be, further, an adviser of the foundation of the most important colony that the world will perhaps ever witness—the first Jewish colony in Palestine." In Montefiore Hyamson, op. cit., p. 15.

41 Israel Cohen, The Zionist Movement, New York, 1946, p. 52.

42 Montefiore Hyamson, op. cit., p. 17.

43 Herman Melville, Clarel, A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, 1876

44 Ruth Kark, Millenarism and agricultural settlement in the Holy Land in the nineteenth century, Journal of Historical Geography, 9, 1, 1983, p. 48

45 Stuart Schoffman, Insane on the Subject of Judaism: Pursuing the Ghost of Warder Cresson. The Jewish Quarterly Review. 94 (2), 2004, pp. 318–360. Critics also believe that Cresson was the model for the central character Nathan in Melville's epic poem Clarel.

46 Montefiore Hyamson, op. cit., p. 19.

47 Regina Sharif, op. cit., p. 132.