8. Zionism and the Return to Palestine was a “Dead Idea” by the 19th Century.

In the late 1800’s only one percent of Jews were Zionists. That means 99% thought it was an absurd idea. To be banished to the margins of civilization was only anti-Semitism on steroids.

{Footnotes are at the end of each section.  I suggest opening on two tabs, and following the notes as you read.}  About 7,000 words without the footnotes.  Please remember, this library publishes books, not articles.

There is a Biblical prophecy that we say ALL Jewish people Yearned for.  But without British colonialism, there would be NO Israel today.  This article will demonstrate that.

Based on the narratives written in the Bible, the Jewish people were under the iron thumb of Rabbinical Law for centuries.  But during the European Enlightenment Reform Judaism began to flourish everywhere that political liberalism became well established, and at times they even helped bring it about. In the Netherlands, Britain, France, and especially Germany, newly established religious communities tried to adapt Jewish practices and tactics to the spirit of enlightenment that had been spread by the French Revolution. Everything in the Jewish tradition that was perceived as counterintuitive, was modified and imbued with new substance and new expression.  So, the Jewish people were liberated from Rabbinical Law, and were no longer a monolithic culture.

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Whatever people say, or whatever others say about them, PEOPLE VOTE WITH THEIR FEET, (their true expression is with their actions).

The return to Jerusalem, the centuries old focal point of the Jewish faith remained off limits to Jews, from the 4th century by Roman proclamation. The situation did not improve much - after the triumph of Christianity throughout the Roman empire. Now, Jerusalem became a sanctified Christian city with many churches, and it was not until the arrival of the armies of Islam in the early seventh century that Jews were finally allowed to freely enter and reside in their ancient holy city. 

Conspicuous then was the absence of any hostility on the part of the “Ishmaelites”—the local Muslims—toward the Jewish travelers. Travelers’ letters are filled with expressions of appreciation for the local population who, unlike the Christians in Europe, did not regard Judaism as an inferior, contemptible religion.15 These accounts reveal nothing that prevented Jews from exploring the Holy Land, and little that prevented them from settling there. The Land received them well, even if it seemed to consist only of barren desert; it always remained the land of milk and honey. Because in the final analysis, the biblical texts remained much more important than what the travelers saw with their own eyes.

At the height of the Crusader settlement process, Christian settlers in the city numbered 30,000, whereas the total Crusader population never exceeded 120,000. The majority of the working population—between a quarter-million and a half-million people—remained Muslim, with a Byzantine Christian minority. Despite great efforts, combined with the logistical assistance periodically brought over from Europe, Palestine was never truly Christianized. During the thirteen hundred years preceding the second half of the twentieth century, it remained overwhelmingly a Muslim region.34

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Very few Jewish pilgrims set out to the Holy Land between the twelfth (12^th) century and the end of the eighteenth-century CE, by comparison to the tens of thousands of Christian pilgrims who made the trip during the same period. Although by this time there were certainly fewer Jews than Christians in the world, the degree to which the Land of Israel did NOT attract the “original children of Israel” is nonetheless astounding. Despite Zionist historiography’s efforts over many years to collect every shred of evidence reflecting the Jews’ concrete connection to their “homeland,” it achieved only minimal success in this endeavor.

In the mid eighteenth century, just before the nationalist shock waves that would transform the cultural and political morphology of Europe, fewer than five thousand (5,000) Jews lived in Palestine—most in Jerusalem—compared with a total population of more than 250,000 Christians and Muslims.67 During the same period, there were approximately two and a half million Jews living around the world, primarily in Eastern Europe. The small number of Palestinian Jews, including all immigrants and pilgrims who resided in the country for one reason or another, reflects more effectively than any written text, the nature of the Jewish religion’s tie to the Holy Land up to that time. (non-existent)

One hundred years later Historical-Geographical Studies in the Settlement of Eretz Israel, Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1987, 5–6 (in Hebrew), writes: At the beginning of the 1870s, just before the onset of Zionist colonization, the overall population of the region totaled 380,000, with Jews accounting for 18,000.

From Lord Arthur James Balfour, Memorandum, August 11, 1919, “For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the formality of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country . . . Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder and import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.

This letter made no pretense of reflecting the current demographic power relations in Palestine. At the time, the country was home to nearly 700,000 Arabs—the “non-Jewish communities in Palestine”— and 60,000 Jews (in comparison, the Jewish population of Britain itself numbered nearly 250,000).74 But even this small minority in Palestine was not Zionist, and was certainly not yet a unified “people.” It encompassed many devoutly religious Jews who recoiled from the idea of establishing a modern state that purported to be Jewish but whose values would desecrate the Holy Land.  

This data had no impact on Britain’s position, which was aimed at encouraging colonization under its auspices, and perhaps also at relieving itself of some of the Jews who had managed to enter the British Isles despite the restrictions.

Despite the hardships Jews faced in Europe, and despite being a religious minority in frequently oppressive societies that were controlled by foreign religion, Jews, just like their neighbors, felt strong ties to their everyday lives in their countries of birth, where they had lived for generations.

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On March 26, 1917, the soldiers of the British Commonwealth invaded Palestine for the first time in an attempt at conquest. Although the offensive failed, a few battalions gained control of the southern city of Beersheba, capital of the Negev; the road to Jerusalem was breached, and the fate of the Palestinians was sealed. It was during this period, between the conquest of the southern city and the surrender of Jerusalem without a battle on December 9, 1917, that Balfour sent Rothschild his famous letter, which annulled the Sykes-Picot Agreement in both theory and practice, providing the British with hegemonic perspective by means of their benevolent gift to the “Jewish people.”77

The Balfour letter had less impact on the establishment of Zionism than did Balfour’s harsh immigration restrictions in 1905.

In 1917, Lord Lloyd George, Lord Arthur Balfour, Lord Alfred Milner, Lord Robert Cecil, Sir Winston Churchill, and many other British statesmen were convinced that the restoration of the Jews to Palestine would earn the British a safe imperial foothold there until the end/days and possibly even later, in the event that the Evangelicals proved to be incorrect.

But when the first Jewish settlers began to trickle into Palestine in the early 1880s as a result of the vicious pogroms in Russia, the idea of colonization found new supporters in Britain. Until that point, Shaftesbury’s Christian millenarian hallucinations and Montefiore’s Jewish religious dreams had been hollow, owing to the lack of human subjects to carry them out. British, French, German, and Italian Jewry were all engaged in cultural integration into their home countries and regarded as intolerable the notion of sending Jews off to “the land of their ancestors”—pushing them into the margins of the civilized world. But now, new circumstances had created the first possible basis for the fulfillment of the vision.

The onset of the pogroms in 1881, which continued in waves until 1905, sparked the mass immigration of Jews westward. According to some estimates, two and a half million Jews left the Russian empire by the end of the First World War. The immigrants arrived in the countries of Central and Western Europe and even reached the Americas. The rise in Judeophobia in some of the receiving countries was directly related to this large population movement, which was also responsible for the early colonization of Palestine, the emergence of the Zionist idea in force, and the birth of the Zionist movement.

Between 1881 and 1905, Britain was the destination of more than a hundred thousand “Eastern” Jews, with more on the way. In this context, a royal commission was established in 1902 to address the phenomenon of unchecked immigration. The Jewish establishment in Britain, headed by the Baron Nathan Mayer Rothschild, expressed concern about the new situation and sought to prevent injury to the current resident British Jewish community. Despite Rothschild’s initial hesitations, Theodor Herzl was also invited to testify before the committee and to present his ideas regarding the settlement of Jews outside of Europe.

No one should be overly surprised by this demographic situation. Although settlement in Palestine presented economic difficulties, the main reason for the lack of immigrant settlers was much more banal: during the first half of the twentieth century, most of the world’s Jews and their progeny— whether ultraorthodox, liberal, or Reform, whether social democratic Bundists, socialists, or anarchists—did not regard Palestine as their land. In contrast to the mythos embedded in the State of Israel’s Declaration of Independence in 1949, they did not strive “in every successive generation to reestablish themselves in their ancient homeland.” They did not even regard it as an appropriate place to “return” to when that option was presented to them, on a Protestant colonial golden platter. At the end of the day, it was the cruel and horrifying blows sustained by the Jews of Europe, and the decision of “enlightened” nations to close their borders to the recipients of those blows, that resulted in the establishment of the State of Israel.

On October 22, 1902, Herzl, (a 1 % Zionist), proposed moving Jews to Cyprus or to El-Arish in the Sinai Peninsula, in order to relieve Britain of the threat of massive immigration. Both locations were close enough to Palestine so that it would be possible to expand toward it or move to it at some point in the future.

On April 24, 1903, Chamberlain made a counteroffer: Uganda, a region that now belongs to modern-day Kenya but at the time was a colony in need of settlers. It could be given to the Chosen-People free of charge. Herzl clearly understood that the proposal by the Foreign Office created a precedent, not necessarily of Zionist ownership over Palestine, but rather of the Jews’ right to a territory of their own. By the time the Uganda plan was proposed, the charismatic Lord Balfour had already become Britain’s new prime minister. He supported Chamberlain’s semi-Zionist plan, due in part to its being consistent with his own intention to enact a draconian law against foreign immigration.

Balfour’s policy in 1905 marked a turning point in the attitude of Britain, and perhaps of Western Europe as a whole, toward foreigners. While Britain was forcing its way into every possible corner of the earth without being invited to do so, it changed from being a liberal country that granted protection to refugees; to being a territory that was almost completely impenetrable to foreigners, even if they were being persecuted. During the age of imperialism, population movements were supposed to proceed only in one direction: from the center -> outward.

Nevertheless, at least between 1917 and 1922, the declaration of British policy regarding a Jewish national home and the encouragement of British authorities still failed to convince Yiddish speakers—not to mention British Jews—to immigrate en-masse to their “historic homeland.”81   By the end of the five-year honeymoon between Christian and Jewish Zionism, approximately thirty thousand (30,000) Zionists had arrived in British-ruled Palestine. As long as the United States permitted relatively open immigration, hundreds of thousands of Eastern European displaced persons continued to descend upon its shores. They steadfastly refused to relocate to the Middle Eastern territory that Palmerston, Shaftesbury, Balfour, and other Christian lords had been assigning them since the mid-nineteenth century.

The US Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act,72 contributed to the establishment of the State of Israel no less than the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and perhaps even more so.

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A mere two years had elapsed since the end of the epic massacre of European Jewry, 1947, and tens of thousands of refugees who were refused permission to immigrate were still living in temporary camps, mostly in Germany (the author of this book, Shlomo Sand, was born and spent the first few years of his life in one such camp). His parents probably would have chosen the US or the UK as their destination.  But the Western countries found it convenient to get rid of the Jewish refugees by channeling them to the Middle East. This was the hour of opportunity for Stagnant Zionism. Despite the brutal anti-Jewish persecution that characterized the period, only half a million immigrants had arrived in Palestine between 1924, when the United States all but closed its gates to immigration, and 1947, when the number of Jews in Mandatory Palestine reached approximately 630,000. At the same time, the country’s Arab population totaled more than one and a quarter million.

Footnotes from above:

Note 15 See Avraham Yaari (ed.), Letters from the Land of Israel, Ramat Gan: Masada, 1971, 18–20 (in Hebrew).

Note 34 This basic demographic reality did not prevent Israeli Crusader historian Joshua Prawer from referring to the region during this period as “our Land.” See, for example, his book The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, Jerusalem: Bialik, 1947, 4 (in Hebrew). In this spirit, his later book The Crusaders: A Colonial Society, Jerusalem: Bialik, 1985 (in Hebrew), has no separate chapter on the Muslim inhabitants but does have a large chapter on “the Jewish community” during that period (250–329).

Note 67 John James Moscrop, Measuring Jerusalem: The Palestine Exploration Fund and British Interests in the Holy Land, London: Leicester University Press, 1999. In 1870, a similar fund was set up in the United States (96). The British demonstrated a greater interest in the plants and birds of Palestine than in its Arab inhabitants. For example, see The Land of Israel: A Journal of Travels in Palestine by English zoologist and clergyman Henry Baker Tristram, who also worked closely with the Fund (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1882).

Note 74 According to the British census of 1922, Palestine had a population of 754,549, including 79,293 Jews. See Harry Charles Luke and Edward Keith-Roach (eds.), The Handbook of Palestine, London: Macmillan, 1922, 33.

Note 77 For a good survey of the diverse academic literature relating to the British foreign secretary’s letter, see Avi Shlaim, “The Balfour Declaration and its Consequences,” in his Israel and Palestine: Reappraisal, Revisions, Refutations, London: Verso, 2009, 3–24. See also John Rose, The Myths of Zionism, London: Pluto Press, 2004, 118–29.

Note 81 Many members of the British Jewish community were bitterly opposed to the Balfour Declaration. Figures such as the Secretary of State for India Sir Edwin Montagu; Claude Montefiore, grandnephew of the well-known philanthropist and founder of Liberal Judaism in Britain; and even Lucien Wolf, from the Anglo-Jewish Association, publicly voiced their criticism of the Zionist idea. See Stuart Cohen, “Religious Motives and Motifs in Anglo-Jewish Opposition to Political Zionism, 1895– 1920,” in Shmuel Almog, Jehuda Reinharz, and Anita Shapira (eds.), Zionism and Religion, Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1998, 159–174

Now from another book:

Eitan Bar-Yosef

Christian Zionism and the Victorian Culture

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 the sympathetic, educated—and, on that question, intelligent—hearts.”¹

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.² Indeed, following the insights of Zionist historians from as early as 1917, and particularly Nahum Sokolow’s History of Zionism (1919), it has become common-place to see the Balfour Declaration as the culmination of a rich tradition of Christian Zionism in British culture:³ 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 First World 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.⁴

The 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 philo-semitism, what Lloyd George has called “natural sympathy” and “admiration.”

Please note: Christian Zionists in Britain were not promoting Judaism.  The plan was that once in Palestine, ALL JEWS WOULD CONVERT TO CHRISTIANITY.  If they didn’t convert, they would rot in the seventh HELL.  (And how would they be expedited to that Hell?)

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, British 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. That 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

[Here I deleted 2,400 words on the background of Shaftesbury’s dream of restoring Jews to Palestine.  The Victorian consensus at the time was that reading serious possibilities into Biblical myths was lunacy, or in the least fringe ideas.  It also discusses the impact that George Elliot’s book “Daniel Deronda” (1876) had on its readers for Deronda’s plan of recreating a national center for the Jews, (in the book). While the missionary conversion of the Jews to Christianity was considered a legitimate cause, still within the safe boundaries of the Victorian consensus, their restoration to Palestine was not.]

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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 in Britain. 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 “The 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.”³⁹ 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.  (Some British even thought they were Hebrew, the lost tribes of Israel.)

What is particularly significant, however, is how the imperial language could double for the millenarian, cover it up, and 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. Diary—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, even without believing their destiny, not believing the prophecies.  And it seems he will yet do more. But though the motive be kind, it is not sound enough. I am forced to argue politically, financially, and commercially; these considerations strike him at home; he weeps not like his Master over Jerusalem, nor prays that now, at last, she may put on her beautiful garments.⁴⁰

Zionist historiography has attributed great significance to the relationship between the Foreign Secretary and his stepson-in-law Shaftesbury. Palmerston’s embracing of the cause, and his correspondence with Ponsonby, the British ambassador at the Porte, have been analyzed at length.⁴¹ 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.”⁴²

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.”⁴³ 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, and 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 populating the wastage(?) of those depopulated regions.” There was no reference to the Scriptures or to God or to the Second Advent.⁴⁴

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.”⁴⁵ 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 connection extensive.”⁴⁶

These 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 favor the good opinion of numerous and powerful classes in this country [. . .].”⁴⁷ 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, and commercially,” but it was actually the secret millenarian desire that he also found 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, as an official British policy, albeit shortly.⁴⁸ 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 1841.⁴⁹ The 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.

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. The 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. The 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 pre-millenarians 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 [. . .]. The main artery is Palestine. From thence it is that all good must flow.”⁶⁰ 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. The 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. The Holy Land could well have been a glittering gem in Britain’s imperial crown; but it was certainly not the jewel. Responsible pre-millenarians 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.”⁶¹ The 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 efforts, 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.”⁶² 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.

This 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.⁶³ Schemes like these, however, were rare; and while several German, American, and Swedish colonies were already established in Palestine in the second half of the century, there was no parallel British undertaking.⁶⁴ 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 pre-millenarians were certainly troubled by this. Hollingsworth’s categorical claim—“We cannot possess the coasts of Syria ourselves. The Jews alone have the right”—resting on the Scriptural promise alone.⁶⁵ Others struggled to produce more empirical explanations. The 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 intense heat.⁶⁶ 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.”⁶⁷

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. The 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.⁶⁸ The 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.⁶⁹ “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.” The Jews must “recollect the genius of their 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.”⁷⁰

This 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.⁷³ 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 Labor 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.⁷⁴ (I deleted the story of Mary Seddon, too much detail), 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 and madness, 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. The emergence of Jewish political Zionism in the 1880s redrew the eccentric-mainstream 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.⁷⁵ 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, “if there had been no Zionists in those days, the British would have had to invent them.”⁷⁶

Jewish Zionism, with its millenarian-colonial vocabulary, was clearly indebted to Christian Zionism. As Gideon Shimoni has noted, the explicit conversion agenda merely urged Jews to devise their own restoration plans.⁷⁷ And yet, it is perhaps not insignificant that Lloyd George described himself as a convert to Zionism, a “proselyte” of Dr. Weizmann’s;⁷⁸ 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.⁷⁹ George Eliot’s contribution, (1876) in this respect, should not be underestimated: by rephrasing the traditional pre-millenarian 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 (character in her book) 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 pre-millenarians 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.

This 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;”⁸⁰ 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.”⁸¹

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,⁸² a slippage which blurs the difference between active effort 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. The 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.

I repeat: WITHOUT BRITISH COLONIALISM, THERE WOULD BE NO ISRAEL TODAY.  So many researchers point to defects in the “Jewish character”, those toxic ideas of separatism and superiority preserved in Biblical texts, (that Jews wholeheartedly imbibe).  I acknowledge that toxic ideas are in the Bible, but I doubt that a whole Jewish population is infected by them.  They are also in the Christian Bible.  Are the Christians infected by them?  (By the superiority – YES).

While there are excruciatingly toxic ideas that are evident today, I will comment on their implementation in a later article.

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NOTES

1. David Lloyd George, “Afterward” to Philip Guedalla, Napoleon and Palestine (London, 1925), pp. 47–9.

2. See, for example, William D. Rubinstein and Hilary L. Rubinstein, Philo-semitism: Admiration and Support in the English Speaking World for Jews (London, 1999), pp. 144–5, 167–8.

3. “Christian Zionism” is employed here to denote ideas concerning the restoration of the Jews to Palestine, as articulated by non-Jews.

4. See, among numerous others, A.M. Hyamson, British Projects for the Restoration of the Jews (Leeds, 1917); Herbert Sidebotham, England and Palestine: Essays Towards the Restoration of the Jewish State (London, 1918); Nahum Sokolow, History of Zionism 1600–1918, 2 vols. (London, 1919); Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour (New York, 1956, 1984); Franz Kobler, The Vision Was here: A History of the British Movement for the Restoration of the Jews to Palestine (London, 1956); Norman Bentwich and John M. Shaftesbury, “Forerunners of Zionism in the Victorian Era,” in John M. Shaftesbury (ed.), Remember the Days: Essays on Anglo-Jewish History Presented to Cecil Roth (London, 1966), pp. 207–39; Ronald Sanders, he High Walls of Jerusalem: A History of the Balfour Declaration and the Birth of the British Mandate for Palestine (New York, 1983), esp. pp. 3–18; Lawrence J. Epstein, Zion’s Call: Christian Contributions to the Origins and Development of Israel (Lanham, 1984); Michael J. Pragai, Faith and Fulfilment: Christians and the Return to the Promised Land (London, 1985); Isaiah Friedman (ed.), From Precursors of Zionism to Herzl (New York, 1987); Michael Polowetzky, Jerusalem Recovered (Westport, Conn, 1995); Paul Charles Merkley, The Politics of Christian Zionism, 1891–1948 (London, 1998). For an anti-Zionist interpretation that merely reproduces the argument see Regina Sherif, Non-Jewish Zionism: Its Roots in Western History (London, 1983). For a useful critique, despite the fact it makes no reference to the nineteenth century, see Nabil I. Matar, ‘Protestantism, Palestine, and Partisan Scholarship’, Journal of Palestine Studies 18, no. 1 (1989), pp. 52–70.

5. Georgina Meinertzhagen, From Ploughshare to Parliament: A Short Memoir of the Potters of Tadcaster (London, 1908), pp. 191, 200, 223; Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship (1926; 2ⁿd ed. London, 1946), p. 11; he Diary of Beatrice Webb, ed. Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, Vol. 1 (London, 1982), pp. 305–6.

6. Edwin Hodder, he Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, KG, 3 vols. (London, 1886), iii.139. Anthony Ashley Cooper did not hold the title Shaftesbury until 1851; for the sake of convenience, however, he will be referred to as such throughout this essay.

7. See Mel Scult, Millennial Expectations and Jewish Liberties : A Study of the Efforts to Convert the Jews in Britain up to the Mid Nineteenth Century (Leiden, 1978); Mayir Vereté, “The Restoration of the Jews in English Protestant Thought 1790–1840,” in From Palmerston to Balfour (London, 1992), esp. pp. 92–101.

8. Hodder, Shaftesbury, ii.477.

9. [Shaftesbury], “State and Prospect of the Jews,” Quarterly Review, 63, 1839, p. 166.

10. Cited in Jonathan Frankel, he Damascus Affair: “Ritual Murder,” Politics and the Jews in 1840 (Cambridge, 1997), p. 303.

11. Frankel, Damascus Affair, pp. 302–10; Isaiah Friedman, The Question of Palestine; British-Jewish-Arab Relations 1914–1918 (2ⁿd ed. New Brunswick, 1992), pp. xi–xxvii.

12. Geoffrey B.A.M. Finlayson, The Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, 1801–1885 (London, 1981), pp. 22, 600.

13. Shaftesbury’s diary, 3 September 1840, cited in Frankel, he Damascus Affair, p. 308. 14. Shaftesbury’s diary, 24 August 1840, cited in Hodder, Shaftesbury, i. 311.

15. OED. “Fanatic” was still employed at this period to denote both “mad person” and “religious maniac.”

16. Roy Porter, ‘The Rage of Party: A Glorious Revolution in English Psychiatry’, Medical History, 27, no. 1, January 1983, p. 39. Also see Andrew Scull, he Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain 1700–1900 (New Haven, 1993), pp. 176–7.

17. Cited in George Rosen, ‘Enthusiasm: “a dark lanthorn of the spirit”’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 42, no. 5, September–October 1968, p. 400.

18. Allan Ingram (ed.), Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century: A Reader (Liverpool, 1998), p. 180.

19. Nathaniel Bingham, Observations on the Religious Delusions of Insane Persons, and on the Practicality, Safety, and Expediency of Imparting to them Christian Instruction. . . . (London, 1841), pp. 117–8.

20. Ernest Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800–1930 (Chicago, 1970), p. 11.

21. Cited in Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity (Durham, 1995), pp. 18, 21–2.

22. See Rev. W.J. Conybeare, “Church Parties,” Essays Ecclesiastical and Social; Reprinted, with Additions, from the Edinburgh Review (London, 1855), pp. 94, 74, 100. On the growing split between “moderate” and “extreme” evangelicalism see Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865 (Oxford, 1988), esp. pp. 10–19.

23. Rock, 19 January 1877, p. 40.

24. Leonard Stein, he Balfour Declaration (London, 1961), p. 15.

25. Edward Swaine, Objections to the Doctrine of Israeli’s Future Restoration to Palestine, National Pre-eminence, etc. (2ⁿd ed. London, 1850), p. viii.

26. D.W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London, 1989), pp. 81–2.

27. Le Roy Edwin Froom, he Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers; The Historical Development of Prophetic Interpretation (Washington, 1946), esp. iii. 415–532; Sandeen, Roots of Fundamentalism, pp. 3–41.

28. Patrick Fairbairn, The Interpretation of Prophecy (2ⁿd ed. 1865; repr. London, 1964), p. vii.

29. W.T. Gidney, The History of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews, from 1809 to 1908 (London, 1908), p. 35.

30. Clyde Binfield, “Jews in Evangelical Dissent: he British Society, the Herschell Connection and the Pre-millenarian Thread,” in Prophecy and Eschatology, ed. Michael Wilks (Oxford, 1994), pp. 233–4, 239.

31. Rev. John Dunlop (ed.), Memories of Gospel Triumphs Among the Jews During the Victorian Era (London, 1894), p. 305.

32. Binfield, “Jews in Evangelical Dissent,” p. 239.

33. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876), ed. Graham Handley (Oxford, 1988), p. 688. 34. Jewish Intelligence, December 1876, p. 297.

35. Ragussis, Figures of Conversion, p. 290.

36. Rpt. in David Carroll (ed.), George Eliot: he Critical Heritage (London, 1971), p. 377.

37. Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York, 1992), 61, 66. Also see Nancy Henry, George Eliot and Empire (Cambridge, 2002), esp. ch. 4.

38. Gillian Beer, George Eliot (Brighton, 1986), p. 227.

39. The Final Exodus; or, The Restoration to Palestine of the Lost Tribes (London, 1854), p. 14.

40. Shaftesbury’s diary, 1 August 1840, cited in Hodder, Shaftesbury, i.310–1.

41. Cf. Friedman, he Question of Palestine, p. xx–xxv.

42. Tuchman, Bible and Sword, pp. xv, 176.

43. [Shaftesbury], “State and Prospect of the Jews,” p. 191.

44. Hodder, Shaftesbury, i.314.

45. Friedman, The Question of Palestine , p. xxvi.

46. Cited in Charles Webster, he Foreign Policy of Palmerston, 1830–1841 , 2 vols. (London, 1951), ii.762.

47. Palmerston to Ponsonby, 24 November 1840, cited in Frankel, Damascus Affair, p. 310.

48. Although at no time did Palmerston ever suggest that Palestine be detached from the Ottoman empire. See Frankel, Damascus Affair, p. 310.

49. Friedman, he Question of Palestine, p.xxv; Tuchman, Bible and Sword, pp. 201–2.

50. Edward Mitford is an exemplary case. A British colonial administrator in Ceylon, Mitford is often considered a sober Christian Zionist, whose restorationist vision fused humanitarian and geo-political considerations [cf. Rubinstein and Rubinstein, Philo-semitism, pp. 155–6]. Typically, Mitford begins by claiming that the “direct religious question is avoided as much as possible.” Immediately afterwards, however, he declares: “It is that Great Britain may have the privilege of being the instrument of God’s providence towards the Jewish nation, which has partly influenced the prepares of the following plan.” See E.L. Mitford, An Appeal on Behalf of the Jewish Nation, in Connection with British Policy in the Levant (London, 1845), pp. 3–4. Colonel Charles Henry Churchill, too, is often considered a “pure” geo-political restorationist. However, on his fusion of the political and the sacred see Christopher Sykes, Two Studies in Virtue (London, 1953), p. 152n. Charles Warren, whose work for the PEF informed his restoration plans in The Land of Promise; or, Turkey’s Guarantee (London, 1875), was an active member of the millenarian Syrian and Palestine Colonization Society (discussed below). Cf. the Gentleman’s Magazine (August 1876), p. 165.

51. See Menachen Kedem, ‘The Endeavors of George Gawler to Establish Jewish Colonies in Eretz Israel’, Cathedra, 33, October 1984, pp. 93–106 [Hebrew].

52. Rubinstein and Rubinstein, Philo-semitism, p. 153. The authors are no doubt correct to claim that Gawler’s plan “appears to have had no conversionist sting in its tail.” Nevertheless, as they themselves note (p. 133), by the mid-1840s it had become a commonplace among many pre-millenarians to expect restoration before conversion.

53. George Gawler, Syria, and Its Near Prospects; the Substance of an Address Delivered in the Young Men’s Christian Association Lecture Room, Derby, on Tuesday, 25th January, 1853 (London, 1853), pp. 16, 19, 49.

54. C.W.N., George Gawler, K.H., 52ⁿd Light Infantry. A Life Sketch, Compiled Under the Direction of His Daughter (London, 1900), pp. 22, 47, 56, 58.

55. Margaret Oliphant, Memoir of the Life of Laurence Oliphant and of Alice Oliphant, his Wife (Edinburgh, 1892), pp. 285, 286.

56. Laurence Oliphant, The Land of Gilead (Edinburgh, 1880), pp. xxxii–iii.

57. Margaret Oliphant, Laurence Oliphant, p. 287.

58. Anne Taylor, Laurence Oliphant 1829–1888 (Oxford, 1982), p. 191.

59. Margaret Oliphant, Laurence Oliphant, p. 287.

60. Samuel Alexander Bradshaw, The Trumpet Voice; Modus Operandi in Political, Social, and Moral Forecast Concerning the East: Based on Authoritative Bible Testimony (London, 1884), p. 9.

61. Henry Edwards, The Colonization of Palestine (London, 1846), pp. 11, 10.

62. Rev. A.G.H. Hollingsworth, The Holy Land Restored; or, An Examination of the Prophetic Evidence for the Restitution of Palestine to the Jews (London, 1849), p. 248.

63. See, for example, Sir William Hillary, Suggestions for the Christian Occupation of the Holy Land . . . (London, 1841); Yussif Howad, Palestine, a New Field for Emigration (London, 1868).

64. Ruth Kark, “Millenarianism and Agricultural Settlement in the Holy Land in the Nineteenth-Century,” Journal of Historical Geography, 9, 1983, pp. 47–62. For a superb account of the American Colony see Milette Shamir, “‘Our Jerusalem’: Americans in the Holy Land and Protestant Narratives of National Entitlement,” American Quarterly, 55, no. 1 2003, pp. 29–60.

65. Hollingsworth, Holy Land Restored, p. 248.

66. James Neil, Palestine Re-peopled, or, Scattered Israel’s Gathering a Sign of the Times (3rd ed. London, 1877), pp. 34–5.

67. Edwards, Colonization of Palestine, p. 10.

68. On the British-Israelite movement see John Wilson, he History and Organization of British Israelism: Some Aspects of the Religious and Political Correlates of Changing Social Order (University of Oxford, D.Phil. dissertation, 1966). Also see his ‘British Israelism: the Ideological Restraints on Sect Organization’, in Bryan R. Wilson (ed.), Patterns of Sectarianism: Organization and Ideology in Social and Religious Movements (London, 1967), pp. 345–76.

69. he Banner of Israel, 3 January 1877, p. 4.

70. Nation’s Glory Leader (originally Leading the Nation to Glory), (19 January 1876), p. 402. 71. On John Gawler see Galya Yardeny-Agmon, ‘John Gawler and his 1874 plan for the Colonization of Palestine’, Ha Tzionut, 1 (1970), pp. 84–120 [in Hebrew].

72. Jewish Chronicle, 31 December 1875, p. 637.

73. Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London, 1995), pp. 82–9.

74. Richard Meinertzhagen, Middle East Diary, 1917–1956 (London, 1959), p. 1.

75. In Britain, where Evangelicalism was in constant decline from the late nineteenth century onward, prophecy became increasingly peripheral. In the Unites States, on the other hand, the process was reversed: whereas in the first half of the nineteenth century, pre-millenarian movements “divorced themselves from the center of religious life” or simply assigned no role for the Jews, it was the rise of Jewish Zionism in the 1880s that signaled the emergence of Christian Zionism as a dominant force in twentieth-century Protestant culture. See Yaakov Ariel, On behalf of Israel: American Fundamentalist Attitudes toward Jews, Judaism, and Zionism, 1865–1945 (Brooklyn, 1991), p. 9; idem, Evangelizing the Chosen People: Mission to the Jews in America, 1880–2000 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000), pp. 9–13. According to Ronald Stockton, Christian Zionism in America today is very much a “mainstream cultural theme linked to American self-identity and to perception of America as a moral community. It is definitely not the pathological perspective of an extremist fringe, as sometimes portrayed by its detractors”. See Ronald R. Stockton, “Christian Zionism: Prophecy and Public Opinion,” The Middle East Journal, 41, no 2, 1987, p. 253.

76. Vereté, “the Balfour Declaration and its Makers,” in Palmerston, p. 4.

77. Gideon Shimoni, he Zionist Ideology (Hanover, 1995), pp. 61–4.

78. Lloyd George, “Afterward,” p. 49.

79. See Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness (Ithaca, 1985), pp. 150–62.

80. Lloyd George, “Afterward,” p. 48.

81. Edmund Gosse, Father and Son (1907; London, 1972), p. 36.

82. [Like Napoleon in 1799] “We also made an appeal to your great people” (Lloyd George, “Afterward,” p. 47); “So that, therefore, when the question was put to us [. . .] the appeal came to sympathetic and educated—and, on that question, intelligent—hearts” (p. 48).

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