Jewish Zionism, which, for nearly two millennia, had been confined to the longing of many for a return to the Land of Israel, began to be discussed seriously by such Jewish figures as Pinsker, Nordau, and Herzl in the late 19th century. But there already existed in Europe Christian Zionists who, recognizing the continuing plight of Jews as a stateless people and, in many cases, inspired by the Old Testament, began to discuss and promote the idea of a Jewish return to Zion.

In her riveting study, Bible and Sword, the historian Barbara Tuchman traced the origins of Christian Zionism in England, from the earliest days to its full flourishing in late Victorian England. It was there that Christian Zionists won the earliest converts, including such powerful spokesmen as the writers George Eliot (Daniel Deronda), Laurance Oliphant, and the lesser-known Charlotte Elizabeth (Judea Capta), important statesmen such as Lord Salisbury and Lord Shaftesbury, and military men such as Colonel Churchill, all of whom were inspired by a vision based on Biblical history that led them to investigate the possibilities of making that vision real. Through speeches and writing, they promoted the restoration of a Jewish commonwealth in what, since Roman times, had been known to Western Christendom as the Holy Land or Palestine, a forsaken place divided under Moslem rule into various Ottoman administrative units, or vilayets.

Those who had grown up with the history of the ancient Israelites did not accept the notion that the post-exilic dispersion of the Jews and their wretchedness and persecution were divinely-ordained punishment. They were more likely to agree that Jews should be allowed to return to the Land of Israel. By the end of the 19th century, not a few in England were ready to agree with Sir George Adam Smith, author of The Historical Geography of the Holy Land, when he wrote, in 1891: "The principle of nationality requires their [the Ottoman Turks'] dispossession. Nor is there any indigenous civilization in Palestine that could take the place of the Turkish except that of the Jews who have given to Palestine everything it has ever had of value to the world."

Christian Zionism was formally expressed in the Balfour Declaration. After the Allied victory in World War I, and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Great Britain was entrusted with the League of Nations' Mandate for Palestine, and it undertook solemn commitments both to "facilitate Jewish immigration" and to "encourage close Jewish settlement on the land, " in order to create a Jewish National Home leading, inexorably, to a Jewish state.

That international commitment owed much to the general principles of Wilsonian self-determination; not only a Jewish state, but an Arab state, an Armenian state, and a Kurdish state, were all contemplated in the immediate post-war period. (The Kurds never got a state: the free state of Armenia came into existence 70 years later; the Arabs, as of this writing, have 22 states). But in the case of Mandatory Palestine there was something deeper -- an understanding, among the great men at Versailles, including Clemenceau, Jan Christiaan Smuts, and Lloyd George, that Western civilization could not be understood, would not have existed, without that little sliver populated by the ancient Israelites, and that of all the historic injustices done, the greatest was that which resulted in the forced exile and statelessness of the Jews, their lands appropriated in turn by so many different rulers and peoples: Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Turks. The Palestine Mandate, in other words, was an undertaking prompted by a desire to redress the greatest historical injustice committed within, and by members of, Western civilization.

Tuchman's study explores the roots of sympathy in English society for Zionism, based both on identification with the ancient Israelites, and indignation at the condition in which many Jews, especially in the German lands and those of the Russian Empire, were forced to live. But neither identification nor sympathy was enough. There also had to be the real possibility of a Jewish return to the Land of Israel. As long as there was a mighty Ottoman Empire, this could not be contemplated. Three things happened, one after the other, that helped to encourage Christian Zionism.

The Palestine Mandate was prompted by a desire to redress the greatest historical injustice committed within, and by members of, Western civilization.

First, since Napoleon's entry into Egypt in 1797, the Middle East had opened up to European and American travelers, pilgrims, and missionaries. Jews had never left the Land of Israel; there was, one should remember, a continuous Jewish presence in Jerusalem, Hebron, and Safed, three of the four holy cities of Judaism. Christians, too, had gone on pilgrimages to the Holy Land and some had stayed, even before the nineteenth century.

But now, with European power and therefore protection, they could come in greater numbers. Property in Jerusalem was bought up by various institutions: the Russian Orthodox Church, the Armenian Church, the Coptic Church, the Franciscan friars, all had holdings.

March 2003               - 3 -               Outpost