"a movement, largely among Gentile Christians, supporting the right of the Jewish people to return to the Promised Land which has, of course, happened right before our eyes during this century"

Annals of Christian Zionism: De Witt Talmage

by Hugh Fitzgerald - March 2003

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.

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

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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. Jewish philanthropists, such as Moses Montefiore and Lord Rothschild and Baron Hirsch, bought land, often at inflated prices, in order to allow Jews to settle. Such land buying continued all through the period of the Mandate. Of course, there were also those who came just because Jerusalem was an important site not only for the pious, but also for all who presumed to be acquainted with the centers of their own civilization. It became a favored destination, so favored that, by 1855, the leading American writer on travel, Bayard Taylor, could describe Jerusalem as becoming as much a part of the American Grand Tour as "Rome or Naples."

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Such adversaries as Pat Buchanan, Gore Vidal, Louis Farrakhan, Ramsey Clark, and Noam Chomsky would be deeply contemptuous of, and likely dismiss, as "primitive religiosity," the very idea of Christian Zionism.

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Secondly, once these travelers arrived, they could confirm for themselves what only the occasional European traveler from earlier times, Volney in the 18th century, and Chateaubriand and Lamartine, early in the 19th, had reported: that the Holy Land, over many centuries of Moslem rule, had fallen into a state of ruination and desolation. The soil was unfertile and virtually untillable, although in Biblical times it had supported millions; the forests had disappeared. The countryside was racked by Bedouin marauders, who lived largely by such raids. There were also a few mournful and squalid villages. The total population of Palestine at mid-19th century was estimated at between 50,000 and 100,000. Only Jerusalem attained to the size of a town, with about 40,000 inhabitants at mid-19th century, though it too was in a wretched state. Half were Jews, the other half consisted of dozens of discrete communities: Armenians and Arabs (both Sunni and Shi'a), Ethiopian Copts, Egyptian Copts, Chechens, Circassians, Samaritans, Turcomans, Franciscan monks and nuns of various orders from Italy, France, and Spain, German Lutherans, American Protestant missionaries, Syrian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, and many others. Outside of Jerusalem, everyone brought back the same report: desolation, emptiness, mournfulness. This dismal state of the land made clear to visitors (the reporters of their day) that the Ottomans were not much interested in this ill-considered backwater of their empire, which provided them with so little in revenue.

Visitors who came and saw the desolation reacted in one of two ways. Mark Twain visited Palestine in 1867: "Desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds -- a silent mournful expanse. A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action. We reached Tabor safely. We never saw a human being on the whole route. There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country." No wonder Twain concluded that "Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies. Palestine is desolate and unlovely. Palestine is no more of this workday world. It is sacred to poetry and tradition, it is dreamland."

But exactly one hundred years after he visited, the Israeli Defense Forces would manage to enter and retake, to the benefit of those who wished to visit or worship there, the Old City of Jerusalem, and to reunite Jerusalem within a Jewish sovereignty that had already been in existence for twenty years, had reclaimed the soil and reforested the land, built a modern economy, gathered in as many persecuted and stateless Jews, especially the survivors of Hitler and the Arab countries, as it could, and re-established a Jewish commonwealth in their ancient homeland.

In nineteenth-century England, Christian Zionism had attracted the influential and important. In the American experience, the ancient Israelites were present even before Jews arrived, in Nieuw Amsterdam, in 1654. The early settlers, both the Pilgrims of Plymouth and the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, so closely identified with the history and religion of the ancient Israelites that they considered themselves, in a sense, those very Israelites. They brought with them in their intellectual baggage much that was, through the Old Testament, Hebraic. They had an intimate knowledge of the writings, history, moral teachings, and even the very names and manner of expression, of the ancient Israelites. Matthew Arnold once described Hebraism and Hellenism as the two poles of Western civilization. America has been most inclined to the first, Europe to the second. It is not a necessary, nor a sufficient condition, to have such knowledge to feel keenly the necessity, the justice of the rebirth, after 2000 years, of the Jewish commonwealth in the Land of Israel. But it helps.

And it is those who are most indifferent to the Old Testament, and to the Israelites of old, who so often seem least sympathetic, even hostile, to descendants of those Israelites, and to modern Israel. Such adversaries as Pat Buchanan, Gore Vidal, Louis Farrakhan, Ramsey Clark, and Noam Chomsky would be deeply contemptuous of, and likely dismiss, as "primitive religiosity," the very idea of Christian Zionism. So would many others, for whom the poetry and history of the ancient Israelites, as well as the passion and tragedy of post-Biblical, post-exilic Jewish history, seem to have been missed entirely. If one were to suggest that the wellsprings of Western civilization are fed partly through currents that originate in Judea, Samaria, and the Galilee, a statement which no serious student of the West would, in the past, ever have denied, these people, as they jaywalk obliviously through the history of the West, would flatly deny; quite a few would even deny, as well, the existence of this "Western civilization."

But the Old Testament heritage is expressed everywhere in American life, in toponyms and on old tombstones, in the very rhythms of American literature, in the sermons and songs and speeches that employ Hebraic parallelisms, a rhetorical device transmitted intact by careful translators, from Wycliff and Tyndale and those who gave us the King James version. The Old Testament influence, in manner, is apparent most obviously in Whitman; in matter it is everywhere, from early Michael Wigglesworth to late Robert Frost; in the writings of our statesmen; in sermons, from the Mathers through later day evangelicals; in songs, from church hymns and Negro spirituals to Delta blues and modern gospel music. The titles alone express the Old Testament stories that have not lost their enduring significance in American life: Let My People Go, Exodus, the Battle of Jericho, the land of Goshen, Roll Jordan Roll, Moses in the Bulrushes, Joseph and his Brothers, Daniel in the Lion's Den.

The most memorable utterances of American presidents have almost always included recognizable Biblical phrases. When George Washington sent his famous letter about religious liberty to the Jews of the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island on August 17, 1790, he assured them that the United States would be a place "where every man can sit under his vine and fig-tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid." The words were borrowed from Micah 4:4 ("They shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig-tree") and came to his mind as easily as we, today, may remember an advertising jingle or a retort by Ralph Kramden or Homer Simpson.

This source of rhetorical strength was on display this past February when the Columbia shuttle blew up. Had it not been an American but a French shuttle that had blown up, and were Jacques Chirac having to give such a speech, he might well have used the fact that there were seven astronauts, and evoked an image of the Pleiades first named in pagan antiquity. The American President, at a solemn national ceremony that began and ended with Biblical Hebrew, did things differently. He took his text from Isaiah 40:26, which led to a seamless transition from mingled wonder and awe at the heavenly hosts brought forth by the Creator, to consolation for the earthly loss of the crew: "In the words of the prophet Isaiah, 'Lift your eyes and look to the heavens. Who created all these? He who brings out the starry hosts one by one and calls them each by name. Because of his great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing.' The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today. The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth, yet we can pray that all are safely home."

The Pleiades would have been brittle, classical, and cold as the night sky. The invocation of Isaiah, and the Bible, was exactly right. It commanded beliefeven from the non-believer.

The third development that encouraged Christian Zionism were the visits of so many clergymen along with other visitors to the Holy Land. Some saw the desolation, and wept; some saw it, and also saw possibilities. The best-known clergy who visited in this period include the English Anglican Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, who wrote two books based on his travels to the Holy Land, Sinai and Palestine and Sermons in the East, the latter based on a trip he took there in 1862 when he accompanied the Prince of Wales. The American W. M. Thompson decided to settle, in order to write his study of the Biblical sites he had carefully tracked down and described in the two fat volumes of The Land and the Book.

In the 1880s, the Reverend De Witt Talmage arrived. He was the most famous Protestant preacher of his day and his church, the Brooklyn Tabernacle, the most famous church in America. He began to take notes for his Twenty-Five Sermons on the Holy Land, published in 1890. Here is an excerpt:

"Montefiore, the philanthropist, and Rothschild, the banker, and others of the large-hearted have paid the passage to Palestine for many of the Israelites, and set apart lands for their culture; and it is only a beginning of the fulfillment of Divine prophecy, when these people shall take possession of the Holy Land. The road from Joppa to Jerusalem, and all the roads leading to Nazareth and Galilee, we saw lined with processions of Jews, going to the sacred places, either on holy pilgrimage, or as settlers. All the fingers of Providence nowadays are point-ing toward that resumption of Palestine by the Israelites.

"I do not take it that the prospered Israelites of other lands are to go there. They would be foolish to leave their prosperities in our American cities, where they are among our best citizens, and cross two seas to begin life over again in a strange land. But the outrages heaped upon them in Russia, and the insults offered them in Germany, will soon quadruple and centuple the procession of Israelites from Russia to Palestine. Jewish colonization societies in England and Russia are gathering money for the transportation of the Israelites to Palestine, and for the purchase for them of lands and farming implements, and so many desire to go that it is decided by lot as to which families shall go first. They were God's chosen people at the first, and he has promised to bring them back to their home, and there is no power in one thousand or five thousand years to make God forget his promises.

"Those who are prospered in other lands will do well to stay where they are, but let the Israelites, who are depreciated, and attacked, and persecuted, turn their faces towards the rising sun of their deliverance. God will gather in that distant land those of that race who have been maltreated, and he will blast with the lightnings of his omnipotence those lands, which have been the instruments of annoyance and harm to that Jewish race, to which belonged Abraham, and David, and Joshua, and Baron Hirsch, and Montefiore, and Paul the Apostle, and Mary the Virgin, and Jesus Christ the Lord."

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The myth of the "Arab Revolt" lives on in Arab belief and that coffee-table movie, Lawrence of Arabia.

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One need not be a Christian, a Jew, or a believer at all, to be moved and to want to assent to the words used by President Bush about the dead astronauts; it is the same with this passage from Reverend De Witt Talmage. Having reported earlier the barrenness and desolation that Twain and so many others had described, he yet was heartened by the sight of seeing all the roads he passed "lined with processions of Jews" who were there on "holy pilgrimage, or as settlers." He could see, feelingly, the horrors of what had happened over the centuries, and was happening still to the "Jewish race," whose members were "depreciated, and attacked, and persecuted." He foresaw, and not as some prophecy for a millennium hence, but as something soon to be made reality, that members of that tribe would return, that "God will gather them in that distant land."

Later, after the Balfour Declaration (which Lord Balfour always regarded as the most important achievement of his career), and the Mandate for Palestine, created in order to further the goal of a Jewish state, Christian Zionists discovered that other Englishmen, particularly those in the Colonial and Foreign Offices, and in the administration of Mandatory Palestine itself, were distinctly unsympathetic to the Jews, with many displaying outright anti-Semitism. Most seemed more intent on undoing, rather than furthering, the promises Great Britain had made in accepting the Mandate. Chamberlain, while he was appeasing Hitler, had been equally busy appeasing the Arabs, for as he famously put it, "If we must offend the Jews or the Arabs, let it be the Jews."

But there were also those with a keen sense of the duty to redress a great injustice, as well as a sympathy rooted in the Bible, who remained steadfast supporters of the Zionists. John Henry Patterson, who helped train the Jewish Legion during World War I, was aware of the vital Jewish contribution to the war effort, above all in dangerous intelligence work (as with the Nili spy network, whose members when discovered were tortured and killed). The British themselves knew perfectly well that the Jewish contribution during World War I far surpassed the negligible efforts of a few hundred horsemen under Feisal, who aside from harrying the Hejaz Railway had no discernible effect. Yet this "Arab Revolt" became, under the myth-making T. E. Lawrence (his mythomania was early revealed by his insistence that, while at university, he had read "50,000 books"), an exaggerated tale that was then believed by Lawrence's Arabs themselves. It was only when such historians as Richard Aldington and Elie Kedourie went to work in the diplomatic archives and military records that the true story came out; the myth of the "Arab Revolt" lives on in Arab belief and that coffee-table movie, Lawrence of Arabia, of David Lean. Colonel Patterson, however, did not forget the contributions of the Jewish Legion, or of the Jewish intelligence operations.

The same kind of double standard prevailed in World War II. During the war, over 100,000 Jews of Palestine volunteered to serve in the war effort. Many also volunteered for the most dangerous missions, in the Libyan Desert to the west, in Damascus to the north, in the oilfields of Mosul to the east -- missions from which no one was expected to return. The British handed out weapons to the Jews of Palestine, because it knew they could be counted on. Meanwhile, Egyptians including Anwar Sadat were caught and imprisoned for pro-Nazi activities, a pro-Nazi regime was established in Iraq, and the leader of the local Arabs in Palestine, the Mufti, spent the war years in Berlin, where he did all he could to aid Adolf Hitler. Yet, after the war, the British military seized the rifles it had allowed the Jews to possess (while still training the Arab armies in Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq), and forgot not only what the Mandate was about, but what had just been their wartime experience with Arabs, and with Jews.

Sometimes what changed a man into a Zionist was, finally, what he saw with his own eyes. In 1920, with Allenby's forces in Palestine, but the Mandate not yet established, another British officer, Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, became outraged when he learned that certain British officers had encouraged Arab attacks on the Jews in the Old City, and not only had they ordered Jewish forces out of the city before the pre-arranged pogrom, but then prevented those forces from rescuing their co-religionists once the violence had begun. Until then Meinertzhagen had shared the conventional, natural, in-the-atmosphere genteel anti-Semitism of his milieu, but when he saw this happen, he was outraged, and protested all the way to London. He was then expelled from Palestine. He became a sympathizer with the Zionists from that moment. In the subsequent three decades that he spent in the Middle East, outside of Palestine, everything he saw of the Arabs only deepened his Zionist sympathies.

Perhaps the most celebrated Christian Zionist in Mandatory Palestine was Captain Orde Wingate, a devout Christian who in the 1930s had volunteered to help train Jewish self-defense forces so that they might protect their settlements from incessant Arab terrorist attacks. Captain Wingate later went on to help the Ethiopians against Mussolini, and later still, during the war, he organized the famous "Chindits" or Wingate's Raiders, guerrillas who harried the Japanese up and down the jungles of Burma; Wingate died there; his remains are buried at Arlington National Cemetery, along with those of the Americans who died with him.

In London, such figures as Josiah Wedgewood and Julian Amery protested all through the 1930s against the behavior of the British Mandatory administration and the British government. But there was one more Christian Zionist who was also capable of making himself heard. This was Winston Churchill. Despite the fact that it was he who, for reasons of state, had allowed all of eastern Palestine to be amputated from the Mandatory territories in 1921 and given as a gift to the Emir Abdullah for incorporation into Transjordan, Churchill always sympathized with Zionism, and he did not contemplate any further encroachment on the promises made, or any further diminution in the tiny territory promised to the Jews.

When the White Paper of 1939 was announced, which limited Jewish immigration into Palestine to 15,000 Jews a year for five years, after which an Arab veto could end it altogether, Churchill thundered in Parliament that this was the ultimate "betrayal" of "the dream." His Zionism was a reflection of his being a keen and close student of history. He knew the Jewish contribution, then and continuing, to the West. He knew the post-exilic history of the Jews. Because of his knowledge of history, he knew that the achievements of the West, over several millennia, were formidable. He had a sense of what Islam was about. And he was helped, of course, by having had the leisure to think, to read, to study, to travel, and the supreme self-confidence not to accept received ideas, even if he was alone in that refusal. That is why he, almost alone among political leaders in the 1930s, took Hitler's measure.

More than 50 years after the establishment of the state of Israel, that country remains the most famous but clearly not the only intended victim among the Infidels. A central tenet of Islam uncompromisingly divides the world between Muslims and Infidels, the Dar al-Islam and the Dar al-Harb. An infidel state, no matter what its dimensions, cannot be tolerated within the Dar al-Islam. The only excuse for not attacking such a state is if it is overwhelmingly powerful; in that case, the doctrine of daruri, or necessity, may be invoked to justify inaction on the battlefield.

The instrument for pushing back Dar al-Harb and enlarging Dar al-Islam, until Islam covers the globe, is the Jihad. It seemed under the Ottoman caliphate, save for some outbreaks such as the revolt of the Mahdi in the Sudan, and the Jihad declared in Morocco and elsewhere in North Africa, that the concept might have somehow disappeared. Infidels forgot about it. But that quiescence was misinterpreted; it simply reflected an inability by Muslims to mount an effective Jihad, rather than a change in attitude or tenets of Islam. The Infidel world was at every point, too strong and well armed.

But when Arab Muslim states acquired, through unearned oil wealth, the wherewithal to pursue Jihad, in its many dimensions, they did so. They bought hundreds of billions of dollars in armaments. They built mosques everywhere, including within the Infidel lands, to spread Islam, and madrassas, which multiplied the numbers of willing Jihadis, especially in such countries as Pakistan where such training made graduates unfit for anything but Jihad. Other weapons of Jihad included economic warfare (boycotts, bribery of diplomats and government officials), propaganda (which in Western Europe is running circles around American information efforts, helping to exploit any strains in the Western alliance), and finally, through migration to the Dar al-harb, to subvert, convert, and essentially win through demography what cannot be won through combat or terrorism. In the Moluccas, in the Moro Islands, in East Timor, in Bali, in Kashmir and Pakistan and India, in northern Nigeria and the Ivory Coast, and deep within the infidel lands of Western Europe and North America, evidence of the Jihad is ubiquitous.

This battle is not a "clash of civilizations." That phrase implies a kind of longstanding reciprocal hostility between all sorts of groups (do Buddhists war on Chris- tians? Do Hindus kill Jews? Do Sikhs want to take over Japan, or France?) In fact, the only world-wide clash is that being conducted by the Jihadis of Islam against all others. Nor can one call this a "war of the West (or of America) on Islam." If it were that, the West would not have protected, at great cost, the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo. Nor would it so trustingly have allowed the entry of tens of millions of Muslim immigrants. It is only now, in order to achieve a modicum of security, that Infidel states and peoples are beginning to realize they must halt Muslim immigration, and even, in such places as Italy and France, possibly reverse it.

Meanwhile, a small army of apologists, both Muslim and non-Muslim, attempts to convince Infidels that Jihad does not mean what it clearly means, that if only certain matters are settled to Muslim satisfaction there will be no further threat, and that Islam itself has always shown "peace" and "tolerance" toward other faiths. This can be believed, but only if one ignores the teachings of the Koran and the hadith, as well as overlooking what more than 1300 years of history teaches us, about Muslim attitudes toward, and treatment of, infidels.

Yet Muslim spokesmen have even found some Christian and Jewish clergy willing to uncritically accept, and transmit to their trusting congregants, the most sanitized and misleading versions of Muslim teachings. Muslims are only too happy to exploit such "useful idiots"; from their point of view, it is far better to have Christians and Jews in positions of religious authority echo, and thereby validate, such remarks as "we all worship the same God" or "all religions are the same" or "we respect you, and ask only that you respect us" and others of that ilk -- deceptive, treacly, and untrue.

Whatever their faults and imperfections, Infidel societies are far more relaxed, tolerant, various, open to the interplay of intelligence, reason, imagination, in conditions of maximum freedom, than has ever been possible under Islam, and indeed, than is even conceivable in Islam. Those Infidels in the Western world who exploit their clerical collars, or their possession of a pulpit, to deceive their congregations, are not only silly, but sinister. Were he alive today, De Witt Talmage would not be among them.

Hugh Fitzgerald is a lecturer on the manipulation of language for political ends.

Source: Americans for A Safe Israel - Outpost Magazine, March 2003

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