Eitan Bar-Yosef. Israel Studies. Volume 8, Issue 2, Summer 2003.
In addressing the members of the Jewish Historical Society of England in 1925, David Lloyd George spoke candidly about the origins of the Balfour Declaration. “It was undoubtedly inspired by natural sympathy, admiration, and also by the fact that, as you must remember, we had been trained even more in Hebrew history than in the history of our own country.” Lloyd George explained: “On five days a week in the day school, and on Sunday in our Sunday schools, we were thoroughly versed in the history of the Hebrews […]. We had all that in our minds, so that the appeal came to sympathetic and educated—and, on that question, intelligent—hearts.”
This is a well-known passage, often cited by historians who evoke Lloyd George’s pious Nonconformist education not only to explain his own role in Britain’s embracing of the Zionist cause during the First World War, but also as an illustration for a much broader cultural claim. Indeed, following the insights of Zionist historians from as early as 1917, and particularly Nahum Sokolow’s History of Zionism (1919), it has become commonplace to see the Balfour Declaration as the culmination of a rich tradition of Christian Zionism in British culture: a tradition which emerged in the seventeenth century, slumbered in the eighteenth, and re-emerged, with a vengeance, in the nineteenth. Even scholars who have emphasized the immediate political objectives that generated the Declaration—the hope that an appeal to American Jewry would enhance the American involvement in the War, or that a Bolshevik revolution would be averted by reaching the Russian Jewish proletariat—even they have frequently pointed to the wider religious impetus behind the Declaration.
Th e argument, essentially, has been twofold; first, that an impressive gallery of Victorian individuals and institutions promoted, sometimes vigorously, the Jewish colonization of Palestine; and secondly, that these eminent Christian Zionists were men and women of their time, and that their restorationist views were somehow characteristic of a more prevalent cultural climate. Exactly how prevalent, however, is a question frequently asked but seldom answered. While it is clear, for example, that the millenarian logic of the restoration was associated with the more zealous Evangelical circles, it has proved extremely difficult to assess the actual circulation or influence of these ideas. Nevertheless, the assumption has often been that nineteenth-century ideas about the restoration of the Jews to Palestine somehow paved the way towards Britain’s wartime policy. Consequently, accounts of Christian Zionism often read like a dot-to-dot drawing, connecting Lord Shaftesbury, George Eliot and Laurence Oliphant with some of their lesser-known contemporaries, only to reveal, in due course, a neatly-sketched draft of the Balfour Declaration. And if we were to indulge in this metaphor further, we might say that the empty space between the lines has been colored with a vague form of philosemitism, what Lloyd George has called “natural sympathy” and “admiration.”
As this essay will demonstrate, what the conventional Zionist interpretation has failed to take into account is the fact that throughout most of the nineteenth century, projects concerning the Jewish restoration to Palestine were continuously associated with charges of religious enthusiasm, eccentricity, sometimes even madness—all of them categories of differentiation which located Christian Zionism beyond the cultural consensus. This is not the consensus as it surfaces in retrospect, but as it was understood and practiced at the time: no one was more aware of the marginality of their beliefs than the Christian Zionists themselves. Th at some of them were venerable members of society merely added to their sense of predicament: even their respectability did not allow them to propound these views as freely as they would have liked. Contrary to the rosy picture painted by Zionist historians, Christian Zionism was a desire very reluctant to speak its name.
Concentrating on the period up to the early 1880s—before the emergence of an established “Jewish” Zionism—the following discussion will thus qualify the traditional historiographical claim by charting the political and theological forces which located ideas concerning the Jewish restoration to Palestine in the discursive fringe of Victorian culture. Why was it, this essay will ask, that Christian Zionists were so often unwilling to express their ideas in the open? How, as a result, did they seek to articulate their restorationist projects? To what extent was the Jewish colonization of Palestine part of the Victorian imperial vision? If Christian Zionism was indeed a marginal cultural phenomenon, what should we make of George Eliot’s “Zionist” novel, Daniel Deronda? Of Lloyd George’s Sunday-School reminiscences? Or, indeed, of the Balfour Declaration itself? And, finally, what was at stake for Zionist historiography in this glorification of the Christian-Zionist tradition?
Christian Zionism and the Boundaries of Victorian Consensus
Mary Seddon, of a respectable Wigston family, had always been keenly interested in the return of the Israelites to their old homeland. Finally, in 1823, she gathered some Jews, bought a white donkey and started off for Jerusalem. She reached Calais—some claim, Paris—before being abandoned by the little assemblage. Her husband had to cross the channel and bring her back to England, where she was committed to a lunatic asylum. One of her granddaughters, Georgina Meinertzhagen, remembered visiting the “remarkable old lady” who studied Hebrew and music, “full of fun and kind-hearted to a degree, but withal peculiar and flighty.” Still, in her detailed family history, Meinertzhagen omitted the reason for her grandmother’s confinement. As her younger sister, Beatrice Webb, candidly explained, the whole affair “was always referred to as a slur on our birth.” Seddon was eventually released, “sane on all but one subject—her special mission to lead the Jews back to Jerusalem.” But she never returned to her husband, “whom she could not mention without a shuddering memory of the horrors of an old-fashioned lunatic asylum with its penal discipline.”
Years later, in 1862, the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, the great Evangelical reformer, narrated an anecdote “to show that eminent men sometimes formed their opinions as to the sanity of a patient on very flimsy evidence:”
Once when he was sitting on the [Lunacy] Commission as Chairman the alleged insanity of a lady was under discussion, he took a view of the case opposite to that of his colleagues. One of the medical men who was there to give evidence, crept up to his chair and, in a confidential tone, said, “Are you aware, my lord, that she subscribes to the Society for the Conversion of the Jews?” “Indeed!” replied Lord Shaftesbury; “and are you aware that I am President of that Society!”
Th e expectation that the Jewish people would return one day to Palestine was central to the work of the Society in question, the London Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews (est. 1809). After all, both conversion and restoration—the exact order of events was much disputed—were seen as a necessary prelude to the Second Coming. Shaftesbury himself, according to his biographer, “never had a shadow of doubt that the Jews were to return to their own land, that the Scriptures were to be literally fulfilled, and that the time was at hand.” “Our lot is cast in very wonderful times,” Shaftesbury wrote in an article entitled “State and Prospect of the Jews,” published in the Quarterly Review in 1839: “We have reached, as it were, Mount Pisgah in our march; and we may discern from its summit the dim though certain outlines of coming events.” A year later, in the wake of the Damascus Affair and the international crisis concerning the future of Syria, he felt that the restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land was at last imminent. “Everything seems ripe for their return to Palestine,” he wrote in his diary on 31 July 1840: “the way of the Kings of the East is prepared.” He then famously urged Palmerston, his step-father-in-law, to encourage the Jewish colonization of Palestine as a policy that would benefit both the Ottomans and the British. One might imagine a delighted Mary Seddon, following the developments from her confined room.
Was Shaftesbury mad? According to his friend Henry Fox, his character seemed “quite unintelligible and can only be accounted for by a dash of madness.” Florence Nightingale thought that, had Shaftesbury not devoted himself to reforming lunatic asylums, he would have been in one himself. Lady Palmerston told Shaftesbury that her friends regarded him “certainly as an honest man, but as a fanatic, an extravagante.” Shaftesbury narrated his little anecdote to demonstrate that patients were sometimes locked in “on very flimsy evidence;” but the anecdote also suggests that very weighty evidence was sometimes required—lineage, wealth—to allow the madman to remain outside the gates of Bedlam.
Of course, chairing the Jews Society, or even advancing a political plan for colonizing Palestine with Jews, was still a far cry from purchasing a donkey and heading towards the Holy Land. Nevertheless, Shaftesbury himself was the first to sense that even sober projects concerning Jewish restoration were perilous. When, on 17 August 1840, the Times published a leader on his plan “to plant the Jewish people in the land of their fathers,” Shaftesbury was far from pleased. He described his feelings in his diary, “half satisfaction, half dismay; pleased to see my opinions and projects so far taken up and approved; alarmed lest this premature disclosure of them should bring upon us all the charge of fanaticism.” And again: “we must pray for more caution. Those gentlemen who have now got access to the columns of the Times will, by over-zeal, bring a charge of fanaticism on the whole question.” To be labeled a fanatic—someone “characterized, influenced or prompted by excessive and mistaken enthusiasm, especially in religious matters”—meant to have one’s voice excluded from the public arena, locked away from the political, and even religious, consensus.
On the one hand, restoration plans were very often ridiculed simply because they seemed amazingly far-fetched. In the 1840s, more than half a century before the emergence of Herzl’s political Zionism, when Jews showed little inclination to participate in a mass-migration to Palestine— and no inclination to convert—these grand schemes of restoration and conversion seemed preposterous. Still, the scorn with which these plans were often received was rooted not only in their political impracticability, but in the religious climate from which they emerged. The affinity between lunacy and an over-zealous study of prophecy could be traced back to the late seventeenth century, when their aversion to the pious emotionalism of the radical Protestant sects, led some members of the ruling-class élite to equate enthusiasm with “delusion, obsession, madness.” In 1711, the third Earl of Shaftesbury blessed that “good Providence which had by reason and education separated us from the impure and horrid superstitions, monstrous enthusiasms, and wild fanaticisms of those blasphemous visionaries we saw abounding in the world.” Th is diagnosis was later imposed institutionally. “Fanaticism is a very common cause of Madness,” wrote William Pargeter in his Observations on Maniacal Disorders (1792): “Most of the Maniacal cases that ever came under my observation, proceeded from religious enthusiasm.” Th e author of Observations on the Religious Delusions of Insane Persons (1841) maintained that madness could originate in religious excessiveness, such as the “terror inspired by fanatical preaching” and the “perplexity of mind from studying controverted subjects, or endeavoring to unravel the mysterious parts of the sacred writings; or the misapplication of particular texts.”
A survey of Victorian doctoring of madness is well beyond the scope of this essay. It is enough to note, however, that literal interpretations of prophecy were often associated with different forms of mental instability. Ernest Sandeen has observed that some aspects of the London Jews Society appear “lunatic in retrospect;” perhaps not only in retrospect, as Shaftesbury’s little anecdote has already suggested. Between 1816 and 1825, the Society’s enterprise provoked outrage against what was seen as “the English madness,” or “this mania for conversion.” In his well-known analysis of “Church Parties” (1853), the Rev. W.J. Conybeare spared little eff ort in mocking the May meetings of the Society: “Their bill of fare includes the immediate approach of the Red Dragon; the achievements of Gog and Magog; a fresh “discovery” of the Lost Tribes […]; a new and accurate account of the battle of Armageddon; and a picture of the subversion of Omar’s Mosque by an army of Israelites marching from the Seven Dials.” Th e Society was just one of the many “extravagances” of that “extreme party,” the “eccentric offspring” or “exaggeration” of the old Evangelical school, “sometimes called the Puritan, sometimes, from its chief organ, the Recordite party.” It was this “Recordite extravagance,” Conybeare stormed, which was “most directly guilty of driving half-educated men into Atheism.”
Enthusiastic, extravagant, exaggerated, eccentric, fanatic, manic, mad: all these were categories of difference which banished pious Evangelicals to the cultural perimeter. Th e Society’s rivals were not offering a medical diagnosis; religious fanatics were not simply locked in an asylum (though some, like Mary Seddon, were). However, as fanatics—located somewhere on the scale between harmless eccentrics and unfortunate lunatics—they were placed outside the boundaries of the acceptable, the proper, the sayable.
Th is does not claim that the restorationist-millenarian discourse was invisible or inaudible. Far from it: the nineteenth century saw a continuous overflow of books, pamphlets and sermons all obsessed with prophetical calculations concerning the exact date and course of the Jewish restoration to Palestine, tirelessly citing Orientalist clichés from travel accounts to prove their point: the land is barren, empty, awaiting cultivation. References to these restoration plans were sometimes made in the leading newspapers and periodicals, though very often in a mocking tone, exactly the tone so dreaded by Shaftesbury. In January 1877, for example, the Morning Post discussed rumors that the crisis concerning the Ottoman Empire might be solved by the colonization of Jews in Palestine. “It may be desirable from a romantic point of view to re-establish Palestine,” the Morning Post wrote, but it was unkind of the Jews to ruin England by leaving all at once. Besides,
we venture to put it to the Jews, would it be prudent to do so? Would it be good speculation? Is there anything to be done with Tyre or Sidon nowadays, or is Jericho a place with a great commercial future before it? […] Then what about the language of the returned exiles? How would they communicate with each other? And are such terms as “charter-party,” “bill of landing,” “policy of insurance,” &c., capable of being translated into the language of the prophets? […] How would bargains be made, leases entered into, and stocks quoted in the market of the New Jerusalem?
The ultra-Evangelical magazine, The Rock, which cited this piece, was appalled: “enough of this blasphemous persiflage, which we should have hesitated to quote had we not deemed it right that our readers should know what sort of aliment is prepared for the readers of ‘fashionable papers’.” As articles like this make clear, speculations concerning the Jewish restoration certainly made their way to the “fashionable papers;” nevertheless, they were very often presented as no more than curiosities or entertaining anecdotes.
I do not wish, in other words, to claim that Christian Zionist ideas were not in circulation. Nor am I suggesting that the advocates of millenarian ideas were not venerable citizens. In his seminal work on the origins of the Balfour Declaration, Leonard Stein has claimed that most of them were little known, “and their voices did not carry far.” This does not seem to be the case at all: as one anti-restorationist reluctantly acknowledged, the doctrine of Israel’s literal restoration to Palestine is “favoured by some of the wisest, most learned, and best men in the Church of Christ.” Indeed, the first half of the nineteenth century saw an increasingly visible section of the more respectable social strata involved in institutionalized pre-millenarian activities, promoting practical preparation for the Second Advent. Among these were the London Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews (1809), nondenominational at first, but wholly Anglican after 1815; the Society for the Investigation of Prophecy (1826); the Albury Park Conferences (1826-30), organized by Henry Drummond, and his journal, The Morning Watch (1829-33); the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Among the Jews (1842), interdenominational, but supported mostly by Dissent; the Scottish Quarterly Journal of Prophecy (1849-73), and a range of other publications. The organizers of these societies, conferences and publications were drawn mostly from the more prosperous sector of the middle class. Many of those “who have been carried away by this false spirit of interpretation,” it was claimed in 1864, “are not ignorant enthusiasts, but belong in considerable numbers to the respectable and educated classes of society.”
Zionist historiography, then, seems correct in its assertion that Christian Zionist ideas were in constant circulation throughout the nineteenth century, and that many of those who circulated these ideas belonged to the social elite. The crucial point, however, is that despite their central social position, and despite the fact that these views enjoyed such wide visibility, Christian Zionism did not exist—at least up to the 1880s—within the cultural, religious or political mainstream. Of course, the “mainstream” was not (and is not) monolithic: as a set of hegemonic trends it was (and is) continuously open to negotiation, as different groups sought to interpret, challenge or redefine prevalent cultural and theological conceptions. Still, while some of the beliefs and practices associated with Evangelicalism became part and parcel of Victorian culture, Christian Zionism did not. Th e numerous charges of fanaticism, the derision and the mockery could be said to reflect the contest between competing parties over the definition of and inclusion in the mainstream; but nothing testifies more to their liminal position within Victorian culture than the Christian Zionists’ selfawareness of this liminality; their own understanding of what cannot, or should not, be articulated openly.
This is why Shaftesbury was so distressed by the discussion in the Times of his restoration plan. Similarly, this is why the leaders of the London Jews Society were impelled to deny the restorationist expectation which was, after all, the raison d’être of the Society. As early as 1810, the Society announced that a “charge of enthusiasm has been made by some persons concerning the views of the Society; and it has been asserted that your Committee are influenced by foolish and Utopian expectations.” The Committee admitted they
are aroused to exertion by the signs of the times. Nevertheless, they are not determined to any measures which they adopt by visionary and uncertain calculations. They wish to distinguish between the restoration of Israel to their own country, and the conversion of Israel to Christianity. If nothing peculiar appeared in the aspect of the times—if neither Jews nor Christians believed in the future restoration of Israel—if no exposition of prophecy had awakened attention or excited expectation in men’s minds—if it were possible to place things as they stood many centuries ago—still your Committee would urge the importance and propriety of establishing a Jewish mission.
It was just the same with the British Society for the Propagation of the Bible Among the Jews. At first reading, its jubilee volume—Memories of Gospel Triumphs Among the Jews During the Victorian Era (1892)—appears harmless and cool; it is only by a close and careful reading that one can discover, like Clyde Binfield has done, the “surprisingly hidden thread which had none the less to be part of the warp and woof of any Jewish-Christian missionary enterprise: that ‘darkest mystery of prophecy,’ millennialism, and especially pre-millennialism.” This was not a mainstream Nonconformist preoccupation in the 1890s, or even in the 1840s. “It had, however, been a stronger preoccupation than their subsequent historiography has made out,” precisely because the millenarian theme was painstakingly avoided. The first editorial of the Society’s journal, the Jewish Herald, informed its readers in 1846 that all questions of prophecy, strategy, and chronology, all matters about the restoration and conversion of the Jews, were to be treated as open questions. Thomas Raffles, a Liverpool Congregational preacher, was certainly conforming to the official line when he asserted in 1848 that the Society “simply seeks the conversion of the Jew, as you would seek the conversion of any other man […]. It proposes no expedition to Palestine, nor colonization society for the Holy Land. All these things it eschews, as a Society, leaving them to men’s private judgements and personal and individual interpretations and opinions.” As Binfield explains, “they preferred to leave prophecy to fend for itself, aware that the nuances of their stance would be evident to close students of form without alarming chance subscribers or casually interested hearers.”
Th e Societies’ ardent denials suggest that while the missionary conversion of the Jews was considered a legitimate cause, still within the safe boundaries of the Victorian consensus, their restoration to Palestine was not. Little wonder, then, that the premillenarians who were thrilled by the publication of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876)—which famously ends with Deronda’s plan of “restoring a political existence to my people”—were nevertheless disturbed by the unique nature of Eliot’s restorationist vision. Th e Jewish Intelligence, organ of the of the London Jews Society, wrote for example that Daniel Deronda showed “how wide-spread and popular such an expectation of a restored land and polity has become. But the Christian, zealous for the honor of his Lord, will observe with some misgiving that Christian truth forms no element in these glowing anticipations.” These misgivings were well justified, for the novel’s plot is nothing less than a grand subversion of the premillenarian model of restoration and conversion: centering around a protagonist who “converts” from Christianity to Judaism, the novel is concerned first and foremost with the Jewish, not Christian, interpretation of prophecy.
If Eliot’s bold critique of the conventional prophetical plot was immediately recognized by her premillenarian readers, it was simply lost on her mainstream reviewers. As far as the “center” was concerned—the literary reviews, the national and provincial press—the restorationist plot was treated skeptically, sometimes even sarcastically. Th is reaction was shared by the religious press as well, which, with no premillenarian creed, had no particular reason to indulge in Mordecai’s reveries. Respect for Eliot was immense, but it was precisely with her reputation in mind that critics pondered over her eccentric decision to retreat to a sub-culture which seemed so distant from the central, “middle,” English world of her previous novel, Middlemarch. As the Saturday Review stated, “the fact is that the reader never—or so rarely as not to affect his general posture of mind—feels at home. Th e author is ever driving at something foreign to his habits of thought.” Looking from Balfour backwards, Eliot appears as the most insightful Christian Zionist of all. Nevertheless, discarded by premillenarians and mainstream critics alike, years would pass before her vision—both political and literary—would gain the reputation it deserved.
To be sure, Deronda’s plan of recreating a national center for the Jews must be read in context. In the Question of Palestine, Edward Said has discussed “the way Zionism is presented in the novel” as if Eliot was alluding to an already organized political movement or even a crystallized ethos; he later writes explicitly, “Eliot’s account of Zionism in Daniel Deronda was intended as a sort of assenting Gentile response to prevalent Jewish Zionist currents.” Of course, in 1874, when Eliot was writing her novel (set in the mid-1860s) there was no “prevalent Jewish-Zionist current.” Far from producing an “assenting Gentile response” to an established cause, it seems that Eliot was in fact attempting the opposite: it was precisely the lack of such a current that she was relying on. As Gillian Beer has argued, the Zionist plot enables Eliot to reinforce the analogy between Gwendolen and Deronda at the end of the novel: “Gwendolen escapes the marriage market. Deronda escapes British culture and British manhood, though his success in his Zionist endeavour would have seemed far less certain for the first readers (and the author) than it may do now. He, like Gwendolen, is left in an uncertain edge of possibility.”
Bible and Sword Revisited
Having depicted the Jewish restoration to Palestine as a central millenarian preoccupation, it is now necessary to explore the uneasy relationship between the millenarian and the imperial. After all, many Christian Zionists, whose interest in the Jewish restoration was essentially doctrinal, were quick to point out that it was in Britain’s strategic interest to see Palestine, the gateway to the East, in the friendly hands of the Jews. Napoleon’s failed Mediterranean campaign of 1798-9—and Britain’s growing involvement in the Holy Land—gave this question a new sense of urgency. “Britain! rejoice!” exclaimed the anonymous author of Th e Final Exodus (1854): “it is for you to lead back to their beautiful land the long-dispersed members of Judah’s neglected race, and by planting in their native country a colony of whose attachment to its protectors there could be no doubt, to thrust another obstacle in the path of the threatened invader.” In arguments like these it was virtually impossible to separate millenarian and strategic considerations, because the existence of Britain’s empire was seen a priori as a sign of divine election.
What is particularly significant, however, is how the imperial language could double for the millenarian, cover it up, contain it. Note how Shaftesbury, in 1840, tried to persuade Palmerston to adopt his plan for the colonization of Palestine by the Jews:
August 1.—Dined with Palmerston. After dinner left alone with him. Propounded my scheme, which seemed to strike his fancy; he asked some questions, and readily promised to consider it. How singular is the order of Providence! Singular, that is if estimated by man’s ways! Palmerston has already been chosen by God to be an instrument of good to His ancient people; to do homage, as it were, to their inheritance, and to recognize their rights without believing their destiny. And it seems he will yet do more. But though the motive be kind, it is not sound. I am forced to argue politically, financially, commercially; these considerations strike him home; he weeps not like his Master over Jerusalem, nor prays that now, at last, she may put on her beautiful garments […].
Zionist historiography has attributed great significance to the relationship between the Foreign Secretary and his stepson-in-law. Palmerston’s embracing of the cause, and his correspondence with Ponsonby, the British ambassador at the Porte, have been analyzed in length. According to Barbara Tuchman, Shaftesbury’s 1840 restoration plan “marks the point when events began leading logically toward the Mandate.” The two men, in their different motives, capture the double impetus behind Christian Zionism: in Tuchman’s’ notable phrase, Shaftesbury’s “motives were religious, the Foreign Secretary’s imperial. Shaftesbury represented the Bible, Palmerston, so to speak, the sword.”
This is a catchy, but somewhat unfortunate, phrase, because by separating the two motives, and attributing them, typologically almost, to the two men, it oversimplifies the complex affinity between the religious and the imperial. Shaftesbury himself, despite some reservations, believed that Britain’s imperial standing was the reward for fulfilling its role in the Divine promise. In his essay in the Quarterly Review, for example, he noted that “No sooner had England given shelter to the Jews, under Cromwell and Charles, than she started forward in a commercial career of unrivalled and uninterrupted prosperity.” Pre-millenarians scanned newspapers and travel accounts for indications of “signs of the times;” reports on political events were to be decoded, restored to their original Biblical phrasing. Indeed, what is in fact so intriguing is the way in which the sword and the Bible were interchangeable. According to Shaftesbury, he was forced to argue “politically, financially, commercially” because this was the only motivation which Palmerston was attuned to. But Shaftesbury himself, as we have seen, was determined to avoid the millenarian vocabulary because it threatened to bring about that dreaded “charge of fanaticism.” Subsequently, Shaftesbury’s plan of Jewish resettlement in Palestine, submitted to Palmerston on 25 September 1840, merely pointed out that the resettling of Jews in Palestine was “the cheapest and safest mode of supplying the wastes of those depopulated regions.” There was no reference to the Scriptures or to God or to the Second Advent.
By strictly employing the political/strategic vocabulary, Shaftesbury could rephrase his “fanatic” aspiration and reinvent himself as an ambitious statesman. His straight face has certainly convinced some historians. Isaiah Friedman, for example, writes: “Whatever might have been Ashley’s private views on the conversion of Jews to Christianity, not a trace of them can be found in his official memorandum of September 1840. […] Solving the Syrian Question concerned him, not the conversion of Jews.” In taking the memorandum at face-value, Friedman conspicuously subordinates Shaftesbury’s “private views” to the official tone.
Palmerston himself knew better. In accepting Shaftesbury’s plan, his objective, as always, was to preserve Ottoman integrity, but he was well aware of the secret millenarian subtext—of his own role as God’s “instrument”—and he was determined to employ it for his own domestic purposes. “Pray don’t lose sight of my recommendation to the Porte, to invite the Jews to return to Palestine,” he wrote to the British ambassador in Constantinople on 4 September: “You can have no idea how much such a measure would tend to interest in the Sultan’s cause all the religious party in this country, and their influence is great and their connexion extensive.” Th ese issues “excite a very deep interest in the minds of a large number of persons in the United Kingdom and the Sultan would enlist in his favour the good opinion of numerous and powerful classes in this country […].” Palmerston here demonstrates his attentiveness to the affinity between the political center-stage and the religious fringe; he forced his stepson-in-law to argue “politically, financially, commercially,” but it was actually the secret millenarian desire that he found so valuable. His assessment of the extraordinary power of the restorationist lobby may have been farfetched. Nevertheless, this merely reinforces my argument: despite its social and political power, the Evangelical lobby could not employ the millenarian vocabulary in the open.
Shaftesbury’s plan marked the first moment in which the Jewish colonization of Palestine was pursued, albeit shortly, as an official British policy. Its swift disappearance from the political agenda could be accounted for by an array of developments, international and domestic; and the millenarian watchmen soon turned their attention to the establishment of the Jerusalem Bishopric in 1841. Th e fact that it was only during the First World War that Zionist plans were again embraced as an official British policy (and even then, in very different circumstances), suggests that it was only Shaftesbury’s unique position and personality which enabled him to transcend the demarcation between the millenarian fringe and the political mainstream. In general, however, the restoration plans that emerged in the aftermath of the Middle-Eastern crisis of 1840-1, in wake of the Crimean war, during the Eastern Question crisis of 1875-8 and at least until the early 1880s, continued to follow the same cultural pattern: flourishing only in the political and religious perimeter, and often provoking the accustomed charges of eccentricity, fanaticism and even madness.
Some plans, of course, were saner than others: but these, too, often hid a censored millenarian motive. Consider, for example, George Gawler, the disgraced governor of South Australia, forced to return to England after a notable mismanagement of the colony’s affairs. Gawler published his first restoration plan in 1845, Tranquilization 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. Building on his own colonial experience, Gawler’s tone was indeed as sober and sensible as Shaftesbury’s memorandum to Palmerston. However, that “Gawler was evidently not a millenarian” hardly seems the case. His second restoration plan, published in 1853, maintained that due to its Phoenician origins, Britain was undoubtedly the “Daughter of Tyre,” the “Tarshish” that was destined to restore Israel to its land; its millenarian fervor is unmistakable. Perhaps the clearest sign of this is Gawler’s biography (1900), “compiled under the direction of his daughter.” It mentioned his Evangelical “Conversion” in 1818, and his tour of the Holy Land in 1849, when he was invited to accompany Montefi ore, but there was no reference whatsoever to his Zionist plans. Instead, the text hinted somewhat darkly, that his recall from Australia “came as a great blow to him—a blow, which, it may be safely said, he never got over.” In exile in Southsea, “It was now not state affairs which absorbed his attention, but some more obscure enterprises, religious and philanthropic.” As late as 1900, Gawler’s Zionist preoccupation was apparently an embarrassment.
A repressed millenarian subtext also appears in the work of another eminent Christian Zionist, Laurence Oliphant, who advanced his colonization plans in the 1880s. Oliphant’s biographer, the author Margaret Oliphant (no relation), noted his “somewhat cynical reference to the higher religio-romantic motives, which would give it popularity, he imagined, and secure it pecuniary success. […] He did not pretend that any desire to fulfil prophecy was at the bottom of the scheme, and had not, so far as I am aware, any enthusiasm for the Jews.” “It is somewhat unfortunate that so important a political and strategical question as the future of Palestine should be inseparably connected in the public mind with a favourite religious theory,” Oliphant complained in Th e Land of Gilead (1880), adding, “so far as my own efforts are concerned, they have no connection whatever with any popular religious theory upon the subject.”
Still, Mrs. Oliphant herself believed “that he had really more interest than he gave himself credit for even in the religious view of the question.” A later biographer, Anne Taylor, has argued that “like Shaftesbury, he felt it was essential at first to disguise this element in his scheme from all but a few. He knew very well that it was distasteful to many people, and not least to the Jews themselves. And so, like Shaftesbury, he emphasized the political, strategic, and commercial aspect of this scheme and mentioned the prophecy, if at all, only to deny his belief in it.” Th at Oliphant’s parents were both fervent Evangelicals is perhaps irrelevant, but there was the familiar touch of possible derangement. During the months that led to his interest in the “Eastern project,” Oliphant was “at a loose end’.” Separated from his wife by order of Thomas Lake Harris, the American prophet whose cult Oliphant joined in 1867, “there was perhaps no part of his life in which his mind was less sure and at peace.” All in all, Oliphant’s Zionist plan, like his involvement in Harris’s cult, his mysticism and automatic writing, were seen as part of his celebrated eccentricity. “He had come, he says, to think that the world at large was a ‘lunatic asylum’,” wrote Leslie Stephen in the DNB, “a common opinion among persons not themselves conspicuous for sanity.” It was perhaps a “sign of the times”—that favorite pre-millenarians shibboleth—that the author of the satirical novel Piccadilly, a sort of pre-fin-de-siécle decadent, could embody the entire cultural spectrum himself, both fringe and center, suppressing the prophetic secret not from the other pre-millenarians but from himself. Be that as it may; the fact that the same fears and hopes that haunted Shaftesbury and Palmerston in 1840 still preoccupied Oliphant in 1880 suggests that the cultural currency of the Jewish restoration to Palestine did not change significantly in the forty years that separated them.
A Petty Passage to India
All this begs the question: could not—and indeed, did not—the idea of the Jewish colonization of Palestine function as a completely imperial question, free from any millenarian, or even religious, association?
It seems that it could not. Without its eschatological backbone, resting, as it were, on a purely imperial basis, the strategic logic behind the Jewish colonization of Palestine seemed flawed and insufficient. Th e imperial vocabulary could perhaps eclipse the millenarian madness, render it respectable, but the eclipse was never full; and the Christian Zionists themselves were the first to sense this.
Their first challenge was defining Palestine’s position within Britain’s imperial ideological, commercial and political setting. Th e purchase of the Suez Canal shares in 1875, the annexation of Cyprus in 1878, and the occupation of Egypt in 1882, both reflected and enhanced the strategic significance of the area. But the question of “significance” was always open to interpretation. As far as the premillenarians were concerned, Palestine’s religious and historical weight, especially in relation to the apocalyptic scenario, was paramount. “We must look to the end,” wrote the Rev. Samuel Bradshaw in 1884: “Egypt is but the beginning […]. Th e main artery is Palestine. From thence it is that all good must flow.” But this seemed to contradict the conventional wisdom—the mainstream interpretation—that Empire was first and foremost about India. Cyprus, Egypt and Palestine were all significant, but only because they safeguarded the Suez Canal; and the Canal was important, but only because it provided the shortest and cheapest route to India. Th e mapping project carried out by the Palestine Exploration Fund (est. 1865) demonstrates that the British Government recognized Palestine’s strategic importance from as early as the 1860s. Nevertheless, it was only much later, during the First World War, that it became necessary to secure Palestine under direct British control.
Consequently, there was a notable discrepancy between Palestine’s pivotal importance in the millenarian design, and between its somewhat petty imperial role as a passage to India. Th e Holy Land could well have been a glittering gem in Britain’s imperial crown; but it was certainly not the jewel. Responsible premillenarians struggled to resolve this incongruity. As Henry Edwards admitted in his 1846 colonization plan, the greatest service Palestine could offer was “as a sort of half-way resting place, toward our Indian territories,” “forming a bulwark against the progress of Russia, invited by the weakness of Turkey.” Th e Rev. A.G.H. Hollingsworth employed the exact same phrase to denote not only the military, but the spiritual objective as well: “Palestine is our half-way resting place, in the transmission of our religious thoughts, our imperial intentions, and our missionary eff orts, whilst we sit at home and plan the evangelization of India, and the farthest East. We want such a place now. We shall need it still more every year.” In terms of its imperial value, the Promised Land had to be presented not as an end to itself, but merely as the means of attaining an altogether greater promise.
Th is raised a second problem. If the only consideration was imperial, not religious, why was it necessary to encourage the migration of Jewish colonizers, especially as the Jews showed little inclination to migrate? Would it not prove more advantageous to colonize Palestine with British citizens? In fact, alongside plans for Jewish restoration, there was a parallel trend of projects envisioning the British colonization of Palestine. Schemes like these, however, were rare; and while several German, American, and Swedish colonies were established in Palestine in the second half of the century, there was no parallel British undertaking. The fact that Palestine was never seriously considered as a destination for British emigration merely highlighted the anomaly of a British colonization project which involved non-British citizens. The premillenarians were certainly troubled by this. Hollingsworth’s categorical claim—“We cannot possess the coasts of Syria ourselves. Th e Jew alone has a right”—rested on the Scriptural promise alone. Others struggled to produce more empirical explanations. Th e Rev. James Neil listed “a variety of reasons why emigration to Palestine by English people cannot possibly be undertaken with any hope of success, in the same way as emigration to the United States or to a British colony.” Among these were their lack of familiarity with Eastern customs and the heat. It seemed that only the Jews could function as a civilizing force, and yet endure the sun. Henry Edwards envisioned the migration of a select group of British capitalists, “six gentlemen only waiting the sanction of Government to go out with fifty thousand pounds each.” However, the “settlers, who would soon feel constrained to join them, would be Jews, who can live and thrive almost anywhere, upon anything.”
While some accounts sought to present the sons of Israel as a civilizing force, others simply sought to present the civilizing force—Britain—as sons of Israel. Th e British-Israelites, who began to prosper in the 1870s, believed that Israel and Judah were to be restored together: the Jews were Judah, and the British, as the descendants of the ten lost tribes who migrated to the West, were Israel. Th e Israelites were exiled from their land long before the preaching of Christ and hence, unlike their Judean brothers, took no part in the persecution of the Messiah. The British nation, then, was the rightful owner of the land; the Jews’ birthright was seen as a necessary evil. Rather than signifying the Philosemitic tradition, this form of Christian Zionism corresponded with a strong anti-Semitic impulse. The colonization of Palestine was seen as a way of cleansing Europe from its Jewish population; Jews who would remain in the West rather than migrating to Palestine, would live in terrible poverty. “The house of Judah can return not one moment before the house of Israel, and when the two houses return together, they do so as joint heirs,” wrote “Philo-Israel” in the British-Israelite organ, Nation’s Glory Leader. Commenting on a Jewish Chronicle editorial which called England to secure Palestine for the Jews, “Philo-Israel” advised his brothers of the house of Judah to “dismiss all idea of England being a mere stop-gap—as agent to put the house in order for the Jew till he is ready and strong enough to hold his own.” Th e Jews must “recollect the genius of this race—wherever the Briton plants his foot he stops. He seizes, but never relinquishes his hold … He prevails with God and man; and once in Palestine, on whatever plea, there he will remain as a permanent occupant.”
Newspaper articles were followed by more practical measures. In 1874, Th e British Israelites sponsored the Syrian and Palestine Colonization Society, led by George Gawler’s son, John, Keeper of the Crown Jewels at the Tower of London and a devoted British-Israelite. Th e Society’s object, Gawler explained, “is one which must prove of the greatest benefit to mankind, and to England in particular, viz., to initiate a fund to promote the colonization of Palestine by persons of good character (especially Jews). If it will open a good field for immigration; and if it will improve the revenues of Turkey and help her to pay some of the interest of her bonds; it furnishes sufficient grounds for an appeal to Englishmen.” Gawler’s insistence on a joint, Jewish-British colonization of Palestine reflected a sincere effort to correlate the millenarian vision with the normative imperial ethos. Paradoxically, it was precisely the attempt to render the restoration plan all the more acceptable, that distanced the British-Israelites from the cultural and political mainstream.
Th is paradox was typical of the movement as a whole. On the one hand, perhaps more than any other sub-culture considered in this essay, the British-Israelites were unmistakably located on the fringe of Victorian culture. At the same time, their imperial commitment not only made the British-Israelites the most ardent supports of the colonization of Palestine in the nineteenth century, but also gave them a fashionable, cutting-edge allure. So, while the movement was considered bizarre even by its pre-millenarian peers, it was very much attuned to the political and cultural mainstream. Rather than being defined clinically, the British-Israelites’ distance from the center should be defined semantically, as the distance between the literal and the metaphorical: the difference between the assertion that Britain’s imperial success was a sign of providential election and the conviction that this prosperity made Britain the literal Israel; the difference between Matthew Arnold’s celebrated analysis in Culture and Anarchy (1869) concerning the Hebraic origins of English culture, and between the assertion that the English were actually, literally, the Hebrews. It was precisely this distance between a flexible, metaphorical interpretation of Biblical imagery and a more literal-minded one which marked the distance between the cultural center and its margins.
Back to Balfour
In 1917, as chief intelligence officer to the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, Richard Meinertzhagen played a vital role in the British conquest of Jerusalem. Later, as chief political officer in Palestine and military adviser to the Colonial Office, he helped nurture the Jewish colonization of the Holy Land. In the 1930s, his uncle, Lord Passfield (Sidney Webb), served as Colonial Secretary in the Labour government which struggled to redefine Britain’s policy towards what was undoubtedly a Jewish state in the making. A devoted Zionist, Meinertzhagen tells us that he often thought of his great-grandmother, Mary Seddon; of her mission to restore the Jews, single-handedly, to the Holy Land; and of her long years in the lunatic asylum. What can we make, then, of the fact that in just two generations, the idea of restoring the Jews to the Holy Land shifted from the sphere of prophecy into the sphere of practical politics?
On one level, this illustrates how social and political changes redefine the cultural demarcations on which categories of difference rely. Th e emergence of Jewish political Zionism in the 1880s redrew the eccentricmainstream division (which Shaftesbury was able to transcend in the 1840s, but only thanks to his unique social and familial position). Restoration plans, which had long been considered mad fantasies, suddenly attained an unprecedented air of political practicality. When, during the First World War, the need to control Palestine directly had become imperative, the Zionist movement became a natural ally. As Mayir Vereté has written, “had there been no Zionists in those days the British would have had to invent them.”
Jewish Zionism, with its millenarian-colonial vocabulary, was clearly indebted to Christian Zionism. As Gideon Shimoni has noted, the explicit conversionist agenda merely urged Jews to devise their own restoration plans. And yet, it is perhaps not insignificant that Lloyd George described himself as a convert to Zionism, a “proselyte” of Dr. Weizmann’s; after all, Jewish Zionism was in many ways constructed as the opposite of Christian Zionism. In Max Nordau’s influential formulation, Zionism—far from signifying eccentricity or delusion—was in fact necessary as a cure to the Jewish madness, so characteristic of Diaspora life. George Eliot’s contribution, in this respect, should not be underestimated: by rephrasing the traditional premillenarian scheme and shifting the Zionist paradigm from the theological to the nationalistic spheres, she anticipated a process which would characterize the Jewish Zionist movement as a whole. So, if Daniel Deronda did have a substantial political impact it was by affecting its Jewish, not Christian, readers; we could say that Christian Zionism did generate the Balfour Declaration in the sense, at least, that it helped shape the emergence of Jewish Zionism.
And yet, the Zionist historiographical claim had always been much broader. As the title of Sokolow’s study suggests—History of Zionism 1600-1918—he was reading the Balfour Declaration backwards; taking the cataclysmic importance of the Declaration for granted, Sokolow sought to trace a tradition respectable enough, hegemonic, coherent and consistent enough, to correspond with what was to follow (and it is typical that Sokolow made virtually no mention of the Christian-Zionist conversionist agenda: while premillenarians were swift to highlight the conversion and suppress the restoration, Zionists were happy to highlight the restoration and suppress the conversion). Consequently, he over-glorified what was essentially a peripheral phenomenon, certainly in the nineteenth century. By tracing an English Zionist tradition which was not only 300-years old, but was virtually synonymous with Jewish Zionism, Sokolow was perhaps trying to dignify the calculated strategic interest that stood at the heart of Britain’s wartime pro-Zionist policy: back in 1840, Shaftesbury used the imperial to render the millenarian more respectable; Zionist historiography, in contrast, has been using the millenarian to render the imperial more respectable.
Th is brings us back to Lloyd George’s Biblical education. By reminiscing over the Sunday-school classes, Lloyd George, too, was perhaps trying to uplift what was essentially a strategic decision. By this I do not mean to question the genuineness of his interpretation or to claim that the Balfour Declaration did not have powerful religious overtones; no doubt Lloyd George’s unique Nonconformist Biblicalism did play a significant role in his pro-Zionist views. However, this impulse should be read in its proper context and not projected, anachronistically, to the mid-nineteenth-century. It was one thing to recite “great passages from the prophets and the Psalms,” as Lloyd George did, absorb and make it part “of the best in the Gentile character;” but it was quite another thing to expect the literal realization of prophecy, to pray daily—like the young Edmund Gosse, son of a fundamentalist Plymouth Brother—for “the restitution of Jerusalem to the Jews.”
Lloyd George’s “natural sympathy,” in other words, was no more and no less than natural sympathy: not an initiative but a reaction. It is telling that Lloyd George began his address in 1925 with a British appeal to the Jews, but quickly found himself talking about the Jewish appeal to the British, a slippage which blurs the difference between active eff ort and a “natural sympathy;” between proposing the Jewish colonization of Palestine at a time when the Jews still showed little inclination for a mass-migration to the land of their fathers, and between supporting an appeal from the Jewish Zionist Congress. Th e idea of Jewish restoration was inviting, both ethically and aesthetically; it presented the end of the Wandering Jew’s saga and provided a sense of closure; but it was not what Victorian Christian Zionism was really about.