§6. Montefiore, Shaftesbury, and Mordecai Noah
In 1827 the famous centenarian Sir Moses Montefiore paid the first of his seven pilgrimages to Palestine. His wife's diary pictures the ruin and abject misery produced by tyranny and misrule, but ends with a note of hope for the 'return to Zion with songs'. The conquest of Syria by Mehemet Ali in 1832 caused Jew and Gentile to turn their thoughts to Palestine. Many Jews flocked thither, and we are told of 30,000 Polish Jews who petitioned Tsar Nicholas to he allowed 'to proceed to Palestine in a body and await there during three years the coming of the Messiah'. Before 1840 there were supposed to be forty thousand Jews settled, especially in the four 'holy' cities. Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias, mostly poor and dependent on their richer brethren in Europe for support. In 1838 Sir Moses paid his second visit with the special object of submitting to Mehemet Ali a scheme for Jewish colonization in Syria. During this journey he investigated the prospects of local agriculture.[1] After nine years, Mehemet Ali was ousted from Syria, which was restored to the Porte, largely owing to the armed intervention of Great Britain.
Already in 1838, Lord Shaftesbury[2] was 'anxious about the hopes and destinies of the Jewish people. Everything seems ripe for their return to Palestine.' He prepared a memorandum for the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, suggesting their settlement there under the guarantee of the Great Powers. These views he elaborated in an anonymous article in the Quarterly Review for January 1830. Palmerston was not unfriendly, but there was no Jewish organization capable of handling so big a matter, and so the ambitious project was whittled down to the official protection by England of Jews in the East. And yet this concession has proved by no means insignificant, for it is the logical precursor of Mr. Balfour’s Declaration of November 1917.
The American Mordecai Noah had been reluctantly obliged to abandon his scheme for the constitution of a Jewish colony in the State of New York, and had gravitated towards Palestine. He agreed with a 'continental Jew' who in 1844 wrote to the Voice of Jacob, 'We would willingly emigrate, we would go to America, to Texas, but most willingly to Palestine under English protection’.
Noah had become a warm advocate of the restoration of Israel to Palestine when in October 1844 he delivered an eloquent address in New York, in which he urged his countrymen that it was the duty of Christians to help the Jews to regain the land of their fathers. The Spectator in 1845 (quoted in the Voice of Jacob of August 1, 1845) supports the scheme in the following terms:
The enterprise which seems to be laying strong hold of the imaginations of a large portion of the European Jews appears at first sight feasible enough. The population of Syria has been reduced to a tithe of what the country could easily support; whole districts are uninhabited. With the permission of the Ottoman Government, the Jews wishing to colonize in Palestine could easily find lands. The old constitutional mode of government and taxation in Turkey favours the formation of a number of agricultural settlements. The Divan declares how much tribute each village or district has to pay, leaving the principal inhabitants to apportion the contribution of each individual and holding them responsible for the whole. The same parties exercise the internal police of their community, subject to the surveillance of the higher authorities. The institutions of the Ottoman Empire would afford the Jewish colonists large scope of local self-government. Were a number of Jewish agricultural settlements established at moderate distances from each other, the superior intelligence, industry, and wealth of their members would lend them importance and their numbers and union deter alien tribes from aggression. Secure themselves, they would as it were inoculate the population of Syria with steady industrious habits. The Ottoman Government would be a gainer every way, were it to invite the immigration of such colonists by granting them considerable immunities. At present it cannot preserve order in Syria; that Pashalie costs money instead of yielding tribute. The Jews would form the nucleus of an industrious, orderly population, consisting of men who have been trained to live as citizens—who know the value of domestic peace assured by laws—and are not likely to become the tools of ambitious Pashas aspiring to independence. In the present temper of the Jews, a large body of immigrants might apparently be attracted to Palestine, were the Ottoman Government to enter into a definite contract with them and induce England—or a Committee of European Powers—to become guarantees for its observance.
The British public was intensely sympathetic to the idea of Palestine for the Jews. The Times of March 9, 1840, reported an earlier memorandum to the Powers suggesting the restoration of the Jews to Palestine. The Times of August 26 printed this memorandum in full, together with encouraging replies from most of the sovereigns addressed. It also contained a letter by 'An English Christian' appealing to the British people to buy Palestine for the Jews.
Henry Hawkes, on the occasion of the Chief Rabbi Herschel's death in 1842, preached a sermon on the Position of the Jews, 'speaking comfortably to Jerusalem' and claiming for them equal rights of citizenship.
The time is ripe: no ungenerous policy, no exclusive irreligion can stand against you. There is a moral power, accumulated, ever more accumulating, that will work with you in the bosom of our own Christian nation, philanthropists the most mighty in divine energies. Let not our past injustice discourage you; we are ready for better things: work with us to their accomplishment.[3]
Herschel himself had figured in 1838 in Henry Innes's 'Letter to the friends in Scotland of God's ancient people the Jews, including a correspondence with Dr. Herschel the Chief Rabbi of the Jewish Synagogues in London'. Innes believed in 'Israel's return from his dispersions', but imagined that conversion to Christianity was the condition precedent.
In 1844 a clergyman named Crybbalt convened a meeting in the Hanover Square Rooms for the formation of the "British and Foreign Society for promoting the Restoration of the Jewish Nation to Palestine"; another clergyman, named Bradshaw, in A Tract for the Times, asked Parliament to grant four millions if the churches collected one million for such restoration. Next year E. L. Mitford, of the Ceylon Civil Service, in 'An Appeal on behalf of the Jewish nation, in connexion with British Policy in the Levant', asked for their re-establishment in Palestine 'as a protected state, under the guardianship of Great Britain', with a view to 'their final establishment as an independent state'. In 1845 Colonel George Gawler, founder and second Governor of South Australia, advised 'the foundation of the most important colony that the world will perhaps ever witness' in his 'Tranquillization of Syria and the East. Observations and Practical Suggestions in furtherance of the Establishment of Jewish Colonies in Palestine: the most sober and sensible remedy for the miseries of Asiatic Turkey'. In 1849 he accompanied Montefiore to Palestine, and in 1853 renewed his proposals that Jewish settlements there should be promoted by England, which 'does most urgently need the shortest and safest lines of communications.... Egypt and Syria stand in intimate connexion. A foreign hostile power mighty in either would soon endanger British trade.'[4]
- ↑ The Appendix to Lady Montetiore's Notes from a Journal (London. 1844) contains Extracts from Reports, Letters, and Addresses on Agriculture in the Holy Land presented to Sir Moses during his sojourn there.
- ↑ Hodder's Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, i. 310, quoted by N. Sokolov in his work, The History of Zionism (2 vols, 1919.).
- ↑ Position of the Jews. A Sermon, by Henry Hawkes (London, 1843).
- ↑ Some of these facts are condensed from Sokolov's History of Zionism, and A. M. Hyamson's British Projects for the Restoration of Jews to Palestine, published in the twenty-sixth publication of the American Jewish Historical Society (1918).