These were the pioneers. The full tide of Holy Land exploration, of field geographers and historians “proving” the Bible, of earnest tourists intent on following “in the footsteps of the Lord,” did not break over Palestine until after 1840. In the meantime Napoleon’s expedition had had other results. The return of Europeans to a battleground in the Middle East caused an eruption in the affairs of that region that has not yet subsided. Brewing ever since Napoleon’s departure, it exploded in 1830 in a fullfledged European crisis over the Eastern Question that kept the powers in turmoil for ten years, brought England and France to the very hair’s breadth edge of war, and restored the East to life in the popular imagination as it had not been since the Crusades.
Central figure of the crisis was Mehemet Ali, the first memorable Moslem since Saladin, the extraordinary Albanian freebooter who made himself ruler of Egypt and pretender to the Caliphate, and single-handed almost broke up the Turkish Empire a hundred years before its time. His career engages us less because it shook up the capitals of Europe than because it pulled Britain permanently into the Middle East and provided the opportunity for the first English effort—artificial though it was—to replant the Jewish nation in Palestine. Lord Shaftesbury’s experiment in premature Zionism belongs to the next chapter, but it can only be presented against the background of the political and strategic circumstances of the Mehemet Ali episode.
Essentially the issue was who would be the “occupier of the road to India,” as Lord Palmerston put it. Mehemet, having risen from nowhere to become a vassal more powerful than his sovereign, was ready to throw off the Sultan’s suzerainty and declare himself independent ruler of a new Moslem state covering Egypt, Syria, and Arabia. Ever-hungry Russia was aching for the opportunity to support Turkey against this presumptuous challenge, in the course of which she could conveniently establish a protectorate over the Porte and enclose the Dardanelles in her own embrace. Ambitious France, still yearning after Napoleon’s dream of Eastern dominion, was equally eager to establish a protectorate over Mehemet by supporting this Eastern Napoleon who was about to make good the conquest their own vanished hero had missed. Britain, who wanted neither Russia nor France, still less Mehemet, to gain influence in or control of this vital region, was bent on stopping all three. A weak and aging and therefore malleable Ottoman was still a better occupier of the road to India than an independent French-oriented “active Arabian sovereign,” again to use Palmerston’s words.
Curiously enough, had it not been for the British, Mehemet’s career might have been cut short almost before it had begun. In 1798, as a regimental commander of bashi-bazouks fighting against Napoleon in Egypt, he was driven into the sea in the Battle of the Nile and only rescued from drowning by a dory put out from the ship of Sir Sidney Smith, the future victor of Acre. Forty years later Mehemet’s own dream of empire was smashed under the guns of another British admiral at Acre. But, to go back for a moment to his early career, we find Mehemet emerging as Egypt’s strong man out of the chaos left by Napoleon’s retreat. By 1805 he had become pasha of Egypt, and he went on to extend his personal rule over the Sudan and Arabia, including the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. By 1830 he was ready, with an army and a fleet trained by French officers, to challenge his overlord the Sultan. In his path the blood-sated soil of Palestine once more became a battlefield.
On November 1, 1831 the Egyptian army crossed the frontiers of Syria, met the Egyptian fleet under the command of Mehemet’s son Ibrahim at Jaffa, and at once advanced to lay siege to the inevitable Acre. This time Acre fell. Ibrahim, having taken Gaza and Jerusalem as well, swept forward to take Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Aleppo. By the summer of 1833 he was master of all Syria and pressing against the gateway to Constantinople. In a panic the Sultan turned to Britain for help, offering an offensive and defensive alliance, but Palmerston, who at this stage contemplated the possibility of Mehemet’s becoming a British protégé, held back. In his last agony the Sultan, as a drowning man might clutch at a boa constrictor, accepted the help of his long-loathed enemy the Czar. Russian troops, poised for this moment, were on tiptoe at the Turkish border, and in no time a Russian army was blocking Ibrahim’s path to Constantinople, Russian advisers appeared at court, Russian officers strutted in the streets, Russian engineers manned the fortifications along the Straits. “It is manifest,” wrote home Lord Ponsonby, the British ambassador in Constantinople, “that the Porte stands in the relation of vassal to the Russian government.” Worse than that, what deal had the Turks made about the Straits? Lord Ponsonby and the French ambassador, it is told, each went to his window on arising, “the one at six in the morning, the other at six in the afternoon,” prepared to see without surprise that long-dreaded sight of the Russian fleet anchored under their eyes in the Bosporus. And the dread was not an empty one, for Russia, as the price of her help, had extracted from Turkey the famous Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi, which provided in a secret clause that, on demand by Russia, Turkey would close the Dardanelles to all other warships.
Palmerston’s chagrin was immense, and he now agreed with Ponsonby that it was “wholly erroneous” to think that “Russia could act with moderation in these matters or cease for one moment to aim at the subjugation of Turkey.” To stem the Russian advance became the overriding concern—the same problem that was to bring on the Crimean War twenty years later and still today brings nightmares to diplomatic pillows in the Middle East. Britain now bent every nerve to replace Russian intervention with a united front of the Powers that would settle the Turco-Egyptian crisis by joint action and at all costs prevent further opportunities for private raids. Mehemet was temporarily halted, but in 1838 he started in again; a Turkish army that came against him in Syria was wiped out, the Turkish fleet surrendered to him at Alexandria, and the old sultan promptly died of shame in Constantinople. France resounded with the glories of the pasha, and it looked indeed as if he would soon be master of an empire equal to Saladin’s, with the tricolor flying in his van. Fortunately the Czar, who despised above all men that bourgeois gentilhomme, Louis Philippe, with his dangerous democratic ideas, was willing to go to any lengths to frustrate him, especially to any that would widen the breach between England and France. Therefore he fell in with Palmerston’s plan for joint action, along with Prussia and Austria, even if it meant giving up his private privileges in the Straits. And so in London, while the French King and Thiers were noisily championing Mehemet’s demands on the new boy sultan, the four powers quietly signed an agreement to unite in support of Turkey and compel Mehemet to content himself with Egypt and the administration of southern Syria for his lifetime. On the announcement of these terms France, bursting with outraged honor, was on the point of declaring war when Syria rose in revolt against the tyrannical Ibrahim. In support of the revolt a British fleet materialized out of the fog, bombarded and took Beirut, sent ashore a storming party commanded by Sir Charles Napier to capture ancient Sidon, and then sailed southward to turn its guns on that most calamitous fortress in history, St. Jean d’Acre. Ibrahim was defeated without a siege; whereupon his father’s almost consummated empire collapsed like a house of cards. “Napier forever!” crowed Palmerston, and a colleague found him “very merry” with sundry jokes about Beyrouth and Acre and confident that the French King and Thiers “are beat and there is an end of the matter.”
So it proved. Despite all Thiers’ raging Louis Philippe, as Palmerston had gambled, was not prepared to go to war for an Eastern goal that kept eluding France like a mirage. He acquiesced in restoring Syria and Arabia to the Porte and in confining the aged Mehemet, who was soon to lapse into insanity and death, to the hereditary pashalik of Egypt under Turkish sovereignty. On these terms the whole crisis was resolved in a new five-power treaty, to which France was now a party, signed at London in July 1841. For the time being the Turkish Empire was preserved, tattered but intact, from the claws of the gathering eagles. It was triumph unalloyed for Palmerston, and for Britain the opening of a road that was to le
ad to Suez and, eventually, Jerusalem.
*Soon to be. In 1799 Bonaparte was still a general of the Directory.
*The original of this Proclamation has never been found. Its wording remained unknown until a manuscript copy in German translation came to light in 1940 in the archives of a Viennese family with rabbinical connections tracing back to Napoleon’s entourage in the East. Until then only the fact of the Proclamation was known through two dispatches concerning it that appeared in May of 1799 in Le Moniteur, the official organ of the French Directory.
CHAPTER X
LORD SHAFTESBURY’S VISION:
An Anglican Israel
Lord Palmerston, in the midst of his manipulations to prevent a sudden coming apart of the Ottoman Empire, wrote a letter to his ambassador at Constantinople about the Jews. “There exists at the present time among the Jews dispersed over Europe, a strong notion that the time is approaching when their nation is to return to Palestine.… It would be of manifest importance to the Sultan to encourage the Jews to return and to settle in Palestine because the wealth which they would bring with them would increase the resources of the Sultan’s dominions; and the Jewish people, if returning under the sanction and protection and at the invitation of the Sultan, would be a check upon any future evil designs of Mehemet Ali or his successor.… I have to instruct Your Excellency strongly to recommend [the Turkish government] to hold out every just encouragement to the Jews of Europe to return to Palestine.”
As the Foreign Secretary saw it the Jews, given a landed interest in their ancient homeland, would act as a prop at the center of the sprawling, collapsing structure that was the Turkish Empire and would, for their own sakes, lend all their considerable effort to keep the structure standing; and this, as we have seen, was the object of British policy.
Palmerston’s letter was dated August II, 1840. On August 17 the Times published a leader on a plan “to plant the Jewish people in the land of their fathers,” which, it said, was now under “serious political consideration.” It commended the efforts of Lord Ashley (later Lord Shaftesbury), author of the plan, as “practical and statesmanlike” and quoted a canvass he was making of Jewish opinion designed to find out how they felt about a return to the Holy Land, how soon they would be ready to go back, and whether Jews “of station and property” would join in the return and invest their capital in the land if the Porte could be induced to assure them law and justice and safety to person and estate and if their rights and privileges were “secured to them under the protection of a European power.”
There was no doubt as to the identity of the European power the Times had in mind. The article created a sensation. “The newspapers teem with documents about the Jews,” recorded Lord Ashley in his diary twelve days later, “What a chaos of schemes and disputes is on the horizon.… What violence, what hatred, what combination, what discussion. What a stir of every passion and every feeling in men’s hearts!”
Obviously neither Palmerston nor the Times had come up with the same idea within a week of each other by pure chance. Each had been led to it, pushed, persuaded, wheedled, and argued into it, by Anthony Ashley Cooper, seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, the most influential nonpolitical figure, excepting Darwin, of the Victorian age. His motives were religious, the Foreign Secretary’s imperial. Shaftesbury represented the Bible, Palmerston, so to speak, the sword. The time was 1840; Syria, at once Holy Land and geographical crux of rival pathways of empire, was the place. Here Shaftesbury envisaged an Anglican Israel restored by Protestant England, at one stroke confounding popery, fulfilling prophecy, redeeming mankind. Palmerston would have been content to confound the French and redeem the Turk.
It was said of Lord Shaftesbury that he had “the purest, palest, stateliest exterior of any man in Westminster.” His cold and classic face always called forth comparison to a marble bust. Every separate dark lock of hair, said one acquaintance, seemed to curl from a sense of duty. Yet this impeccable peer was in reality a compassionate, deeply religious man who based his life on literal acceptance of the Bible. The Bible, he said, “is ‘God’s word written’ from the very first syllable down to the very last and from the last back to the first.… Nothing but Scripture can interpret Scripture. I should reject it if announced to me by man. I accept it, believe it, bless it, as announced in Holy Writ … and like the Israelites, I bow the head and worship.”
This was what made him a philanthropist: the Bible enjoined him to be exactly that—to love his fellow man. Born into the ruling aristocracy, related by marriage to the two great Whig prime ministers of his time, sought after by both parties for cabinet office, which he consistently refused in order to remain above party for the sake of his welfare work, Lord Shaftesbury was the personification of noblesse oblige. He really believed he was his brother’s keeper—especially the wretchedest brother’s. He really believed that his endowments of rank, ability, and influence obligated him to help the underprivileged. He really believed that the charity and love preached by the gospels was the sum total of all man needed to know or practice, and he practiced them. To say that he was a friend and benefactor of the poor is to use one of those overfamiliar phrases that will pass under a reader’s eyes unnoticed. Yet Lord Shaftesbury was literally and exactly what the phrase says: a doer-of-good to the poor, to thieves, to lunatics, to cripples; to children, chained at five years old to coal carts underground, to wizened “climbing boys” squeezed into soot-filled chimneys, to all humans who existed in the half-starved, ragged, sick, shivering sixteen-hour-a-day squalor that was the life of the laboring class in those happily unregulated days. It was Lord Shaftesbury who forced through Parliament the Ten Hours Bill (the Factory Act), credited with staving off revolution in the industrial counties, as well as the Mines Act, the Lunacy Act, and the Lodging House Act, which Dickens called the finest piece of legislation ever enacted in England up to that time.
What has all this to do with Palestine? it will be asked. The point is that Lord Shaftesbury’s zeal for “God’s ancient people,” as he always styled the Jews, was the outcome of this same entire acceptance of the Bible that had made him a philanthropist. He worked just as hard to restore the Jews to Palestine as he did to pass the Ten Hours Bill, though not one in ten who ever heard of Lord Shaftesbury is aware of it, famous men being generally remembered for their successes rather than their failures. But, despite all his zeal on the Jews’ behalf, it is doubtful if Lord Shaftesbury ever thought of them as a people with their own language and traditions, their own Torah and law and spiritual guides honored through a hundred generations. To him, as to all the Israel-for-prophecy’s-sake school, the Jews were simply the instrument through which Biblical prophecy could be fulfilled. They were not a people, but a mass Error that must be brought to a belief in Christ in order that the whole chain reaction leading to the Second Coming and the redemption of mankind might be set in motion.
Belief in the Second Advent, Lord Shaftesbury told his chosen biographer, Edwin Hodder, “has always been a moving principle in my life, for I see everything going on in the world subordinate to this great event.” And privately he wrote: “Why do we not pray for it every time we hear a clock strike?” Since, according to prophetic Scripture, the return of the Jews was indispensable to this great event, Lord Shaftesbury, says Hodder, “never had a shadow of a doubt that the Jews were to return to their own land.… It was his daily prayer, his daily hope. ‘Oh, pray for the peace of Jerusalem!’ were the words engraven on the ring he always wore on his right hand.”
Like all men in the grip of an intense belief, Lord Shaftesbury felt the touch of the Almighty on his shoulder, a commandment to work personally for the “great event.” In company with other great Victorians he never doubted that human instrumentality could bring about Divine purposes. This was a principle as yet unacceptable to the Jews. Not until they came to perceive, beginning in the 1860’s, that they would have to act as their own Messiah did the return to Israel actually become realizable and ultimately realiz
ed. Previously the Christians had been in more of a hurry to hasten the coming of their Messiah, either because they felt more in need of salvation or because the fatalism born of an old exile had not laid its deadening hand on them.
The urgency was felt again in England at the time of the Evangelical Revival. For now the pendulum had swung back again, after the Hellenic interlude of the eighteenth century, to the moral earnestness of another Hebraic period. Eighteenth-century skepticism had given way to Victorian piety; eighteenth-century rationalism was again surrendering to Revelation. And as the inevitable accompaniment of the return to Hebraism we find Lord Shaftesbury espousing the restoration of Israel in almost the same terms as the Cartwrights and the Puritan extremists. This was not because Hebraism in Matthew Arnold’s sense had anything to do with modern Jews, but because it was an ethos inherited from the Old Testament. And whenever Christians returned to the authority of the Old Testament they found it prophesying the return of its people to Jerusalem and felt themselves duty-bound to assist the prophecy.
Bible and Sword: England and Palestine From the Bronze Age to Balfour Page 19