The England of Lord Shaftesbury’s generation was almost as Bible-conscious as the England of Cromwell. The religious climate had warmed up considerably since the casual days when Pitt held cabinet meetings on Sunday. (A Shaftesbury would as soon have failed to keep the Sabbath as would an orthodox Rabbi.) During the eighteenth century the old religious fervor of the Puritans flickered only among the Nonconformists. After the shock of the “atheistic” French Revolution it came back to the Established Church, warming its cold hearths, infusing a new piety into its fox-hunting, place-hunting complacency. This was the Evangelical Revival that now began to take hold on the propertied class, who, frightened by what was happening in France, were anxiously mending their fences, spiritual as well as political. To escape rationalism’s horrid daughter, revolution, they were only too willing to be enfolded in the anti-intellectual embrace of Evangelicalism, even if it demanded faith and good works and a willing suspension of disbelief. Churchgoing, preaching, absolute belief in the Bible became fashionable again. Trevelyan quotes a passage from the Annual Register of 1798: “It was a wonder to the lower orders throughout all parts of England, to see the avenues to the churches filled with carriages. This novel appearance prompted the simple country people to enquire what was the matter.”
The matter was neo-Puritanism, and once again England was to choke on an overdose of holiness. The Evangelicals, like the Puritans, have inspired ridicule by their fervor, their sense of mission, their preaching, Sabbath-worship, and bibliolatry. A wit has said of the Puritans’ struggle with the Crown that one side was wrong but romantic, the other right but repulsive, and we tend to think of the Evangelicals in the same light. A lot of ridicule has stuck to the reputation of Lord Shaftesbury, the archetype as well as the acknowledged lay leader of the Evangelical party. It hurts the economic historians, the Marxians and Fabians, to admit that the Ten Hours Bill, the basic piece of nineteenth-century labor legislation, came down from the top, out of a private nobleman’s private feelings about the Gospel, or that abolition of the slave trade was achieved not through the operation of some “law” of profit and loss, but purely as the result of the new humanitarianism of the Evangelicals. But take a historian who is not riding the economic hobbyhorse and you will find him concluding, like Halévy, that it is impossible to overestimate the influence of the Evangelicals on their time. Granted that they were not thinkers, not reasonable or graceful or elegant; granted that, including Lord Shaftesbury, they were in some ways rather silly. Yet they were the mainspring of early Victorian England, and their effect remained long after their heyday was over. Even the opponents of religion in the nineteenth century were religious. Throughout the prolonged battle between faith and science, between the defenders of the Bible as Revelation and the discoverers of the Bible as history, which convulsed the Victorian age, splitting families and friends as sharply as any physical civil war, both sides shared equally the seriousness and high moral purpose inherited from the Puritans. There was nothing lax or latitudinarian about either.
In our day it has become almost impossible to appreciate justly the role of religion in past political, social, and economic history. We cannot do it because we have not got it. Religion is not part of our lives; not, that is, comparably to its part in pretwentieth-century lives. But the twentieth century is the child of the nineteenth, and if England in the twentieth century undertook the restoration of Israel to Palestine, it was because the nineteenth was by and large religiously motivated. Trevelyan chose as the four popular heroes of the age Shaftesbury himself, Gladstone, General Gordon, and Dr. Livingstone, because all of them regarded life as a religious exercise. Strachey, whether he admits it or not, chose his four Eminent Victorians, Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold, and General Gordon, for the same reason. Both Gladstone and Manning had Evangelical beginnings, and though one ended High Church and the other Roman Church, both acknowledged Shaftesbury’s inspiration. Manning, in fact, named him the representative figure of the age.
“I am an Evangelical of the Evangelicals,” proclaimed Lord Shaftesbury, and, as the name implies, his was a missionary movement. It was bound and determined to bring everyone else to acceptance of the same faith, to a share in the same salvation—especially the Jews.
For the Jews were the hinge. Without them there could be no Second Advent. They were the middle member of the Evangelical’s unbreakable syllogism. Biblical prophecy = Israel converted and restored = Second Advent. Of course, if rationalism, which cuts the prophetical connection between New Testament and Old, leaving only a historical connection, is allowed to crack the syllogism, the whole thing falls apart. Therefore rationalism must be held at bay. This Lord Shaftesbury understood well enough. “God give me and mine grace,” he prayed, to stem “the awful advance of saucy rationalism.” Thirty-odd years later he still had no use for the new “science” that men were trying to put on a par with God. Especially he disliked apologists for the Bible who attempted to reconcile it with science. A diary entry of 1871 says: “Revelation is addressed to the heart and not to the intellect. God cares little comparatively for man’s intellect; He cares greatly for man’s heart. Two mites of faith and love are of infinitely higher value to Him than a whole treasury of thought and knowledge. Satan reigns in the intellect; God in the heart of man.”
This remarkable passage expresses the core of the dominant religious philosophy in the first half of the Victorian epoch. It explains how it was possible for the Evangelicals to waste so much energy and good will on the delusion of converting the Jews. More intellect and less soul would have shown the project to be of doubtful success; but, as Shaftesbury would have said, to admit doubt was to admit Satan’s foot inside the door. And so they did not doubt. On the contrary, Charles Simeon, clerical leader of the Evangelical party, regarded conversion of the Jews, according to his biographer, “as perhaps the warmest interest of his life.”
Of all the gospel societies spawned around the turn of the century, the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews was for many years the most popular. Its list of noble patrons glittered like a court circular (including one Sir Oswald Mosley, vice-president of the Society in 1850). Its cornerstone for chapel and school buildings was laid in 1813 by the Duke of Kent, brother of the King and the father of Queen Victoria. It was considered by Basil Woodd, the great Evangelical educator, as his “favorite institution” among the swarm of groups that claimed his membership. Its prestige threatened to overshadow even that of the Church Missionary Society, whose preachers were compelled to take as their text, “Is He the God of the Jews Only?”
The Jews’ Society, as it was familiarly called, was to become the chief rostrum from which Lord Shaftesbury and his fellow enthusiasts pursued their darling object; establishment of an Anglican Bishopric in Jerusalem and restoration of an Anglican Israel on the soil of Palestine. Founded in 1808 in an upsurge of evangelical enthusiasm that produced the British and Foreign Bible Society, the Religious Tract Society, the Church Missionary Society, and many others, the Jews’ Society set about its avowed purpose with a series of “demonstration sermons” every Wednesday and Sunday evening, designed to prove Jesus as the Jews’ Messiah. A church was leased from the French Protestants and renamed the Jews’ Chapel. A free school was established in the hope that Jewish families might be sufficiently attracted by the offer of free education to send their children. Within three years the school could boast nearly four hundred pupils, of whom, however, only the most uncharitably inquisitive would pause to note that fewer than a fifth were Jews.
After five years of existence the Society had a list of some two thousand contributors, whose names fill fifty pages of small type and whose donations ranged from a few shillings to one hundred pounds. It had acquired its own real estate, a square renamed “Palestine Place,” in which the Chapel, schools, and Hebrew College for Missionaries were erected. It published its own monthly periodical, Jewish Intelligence. By 1822 its reputation was such that the annual me
eting was held at Mansion House with the Lord Mayor officiating. By 1841 the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and twenty-three bishops, or “nearly all the Episcopal bench,” were added to the list of patrons, as well as one duke and assorted marquises, earls, viscounts, reverends, and right honorables. By 1850 the Society had seventy-eight missionaries employed in thirty-two branch offices from London to Jerusalem and an expenditure of twenty-six thousand pounds.
In the Society’s annual reports, from which these proud and happy facts are taken, the only modest claim is the number of converts; sometimes this is shyly omitted altogether. In 1839, after thirty years of operation, the Society had collected a total of two hundred and seven adult converts in London, or an average of six or seven a year. For its foreign missions it could report, for example, from Bagdad: Jewish population, 10,000, three missionaries, two converts. Or from Smyrna, Jewish population 1,500, no converts, mission closed. The Society was a success, of course, but not at the receiving end. However, that did not matter. Its beneficent sponsors continued to propagate Christianity among the Jews, intent on St. Paul’s dictum that the Church would be forever incomplete without them and unaware that this was a prospect of very little concern to the Jews.
Indeed, it is quite striking how optimistic the Society’s workers were in a task in which the greatest of all missionaries had conspicuously failed. They constantly quote Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews in justification of their work, but they never seem to have questioned why his own people denied him the success he later had among the Gentiles, or to ask themselves why the Jews, after 1800 years of none too happy association with Christianity, should find the Society’s arguments any more convincing than they had Paul’s. Yet their sincerity and serious purpose were unmistakable. The Reverend Alexander MacCaul, executive head of the Society’s missionary work and professor of Hebrew at King’s College, London, was not only the greatest Hebrew scholar of his day in England, but also a man who had lived and worked among the Jews of Russia and Poland and knew Judaism at first hand, a rare distinction. Lewis Way, a wealthy barrister who devoted his fortune to the Jews’ Society and is credited with “the first great impulse given in the Jewish cause,” burned with an equal conviction of the benefit to the whole world that would be conferred by the ultimate success of his work.
Way came to the Jews’ Society in a manner typical of the exalted antirational spirit of the Evangelicals. According to the legend retold at every annual meeting (though later disputed) he had admired a magnificent stand of oaks during a day’s ride from Exmouth to Exeter, and was told by a companion that a former owner of the property, one Jane Parminter, had given orders in her will that it was never to be cut down till the Jews should be restored to Palestine. Struck by this quaint notion, Mr. Way went home to reread his Bible and came so under the thrall of prophecy that he gave up the law, studied divinity, took orders, donated thirteen thousand pounds to bring the Jews’ Society out of debt, and thereafter remained for twenty years its principal financial backer. He financed publication of the Bible in Yiddish and of the Church of England Liturgy in Hebrew and visited both the Russian Czar and the King of Prussia to obtain their official influence in behalf of the Society’s work.
It was while Way was collecting a library of Hebrew literature that he became acquainted with MacCaul, then a student of Hebrew at Trinity College, Dublin, and persuaded him that conversion of the Jews represented “the highest good of the Jewish people and through them of the whole world.” To the disgust of the Dublin dons, who had high hopes of this brilliant young scholar, MacCaul deserted the University to go to Warsaw as a missionary to the Jews. On the voyage out, his daughter tells in her memoirs, he read Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews thirteen times, and such was his determination to become proficient in Hebrew script that in the accumulated spare hours of his lifetime he wrote out the whole of the Pentateuch eight times in longhand. It is hardly to be wondered at that his daughter, who was born in Warsaw, learned Hebrew at three, at four could read the Bible and speak German and Yiddish, and at twelve taught Hebrew in the Mission school at “Palestine Place.”
Back in London in 1831, MacCaul was appointed president of the Society’s College of Missionaries and took an active part in making the condition of the Jewish people known to the English, who, says his daughter, “knew very little about it and cared less.” Still straining to convince the reluctant beneficiaries of his mission, MacCaul published a weekly tract, called The Old Paths, expounding the thesis that Christianity remained the logical outcome of the faith of Moses, whereas medieval rabbinical writings had departed from the true Mosaic law. Mrs. Finn, his daughter, recalls the excited conferences in her father’s study on Saturday afternoons, when Jewish gentlemen came to discuss religious matters while she, aged eight, and her younger brother listened at a crack in the door. This young lady, who later made her home in Jerusalem for eighteen years as wife of the British consul there and worked with her husband to reopen the Holy Land to “its lawful owners, the Hebrew nation,” was to be a living link between Shaftesbury and Balfour. At fifteen she had copied out Shaftesbury’s historic letter to Palmerston proposing England as sponsor of the Jews’ return, on “cream laid foolscap with gilt edges,” as a gift for her father. She died in 1921 at the age of ninety-six, having lived to see Britain assume the Palestine Mandate.
It is impossible not to admire the learning, devotion, and good will of men such as MacCaul and Shaftesbury. The latter, after he became president of the Jews’ Society in 1848, attended every annual meeting for thirty-seven years until his death and even took lessons in Hebrew from his friend “Rabbi MacCaul.” Yet one is left with an impression of the immense disproportion of earnest endeavor to minuscule results. The impressive edifice was built on sand and, so far as “promoting Christianity among the Jews” was concerned, was dedicated to a goal no more substantial than a drifting mirage in the desert.
There were critics of the Society who voiced their doubts from the beginning. In its annual report for 1810 the Society admits to having been ridiculed for “foolish and Utopian expectations” and to being open to the charge of “enthusiasm.” In fact, on one occasion membership in the Society was offered as evidence of insanity in a case brought before the Lunacy Commission in 1863. “Are you aware, My Lord, that she subscribes to the Society for Conversion of the Jews?” “Indeed,” replied the Chairman, none other than Lord Shaftesbury, “are you aware that I am president of that Society?”
Such critics held that, if the Jews were to be converted, it could only be by a miracle, some stroke of divine intervention such as delivered them from Pharaoh, and that human efforts to anticipate this were presumptuous (incidentally the same objection as that urged by orthodox Jews). So much time and money, growled the critics, were better spent in the service of the Christian Church than in hankering after the Jews. Angriest of all was a Reverend Henry Handley Norris, who in 1825 published an entire book reviling the Society and all its works through six hundred and ninety pages of furious invective. This gentleman, known as the “Bishop-maker,” happened also to be chaplain to Shaftesbury’s estranged father, the sixth Earl, a harsh old autocrat—a fact that may possibly have initiated the son’s warm adoption of the opposite point of view.
In answering these attacks the Society’s defenders repeatedly urged the duty of making good the long wrong done to “God’s ancient people.” They had convinced themselves that converting Jews to Christianity somehow represented an act of retribution for Christianity’s persecution of them. An unacknowledged sense of guilt for ill requiting the gift of the Gospel was certainly a factor. The Society’s centennial historian, Reverend W. T. Gidney, for example, discusses all the historical references to Joseph of Arimathea or to one or more of the apostles’ having preached the gospel in Britain, and insists that, since the original message of salvation came from a “Hebrew Christian,” Britain out of gratitude if nothing else should return the gift of Christianity to the Hebrews of today.
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sp; The Society had, in fact, a double task. It had to convince Jews of “the errors and absurdities of their present mistaken opinions,” and it had to convince suspicious Christians that the Jews, though admittedly a stiff-necked, dark-hearted people, sunk in moral degradation, obduracy, and ignorance of Gospel, were not only worthy of salvation but also vital to Christianity’s hope of salvation. This they accomplished by a kind of inversion that enables the missionary mind to transcend logic. Paul had said: “As concerning the Gospel they are enemies for your sakes; but as touching the election, they are beloved for the father’s sakes.” The old forgotten fact that Jesus’ message was addressed to his “kinsmen according to the flesh” became the basic text of the Evangelical preachers. Charles Simeon, in a sermon in 1818, startled his hearers with the reminder that “it is a Jew who is at this moment interceding for us at the right hand of God.” For His sake they should regard the Jews as “the most interesting of all people and, under God, the greatest benefactors of the human race.” Similarly at the Society’s jubilee celebration in 1858 Canon Edward Hoare congratulated the members as being “those who love the Jewish nation, and, above all, Christians who love the Jewish King.”
Actually it was not love for the Jewish nation, but concern for the Christian soul, that moved all these good and earnest people. They were interested only in giving to the Jews the gift of Christianity, which the Jews did not want; civil emancipation, which the Jews did want, they consistently opposed. During the first half of the nineteenth century the Emancipation Bill, permitting Jews to enter Parliament without taking the usual oath “on the true faith of a Christian,” was debated many times before its final enactment in 1858, and each time found Lord Shaftesbury speaking against it on the ground that waiver of the oath was a violation of religious principles. It was not the Evangelicals with their love for “God’s ancient people” who favored admitting the Jews to full citizenship on equal terms, but the less pious Liberals. It was Lord Macaulay arguing from history, not Lord Shaftesbury arguing from prophecy, who made that eloquent speech for Emancipation which recalled that when Britain was “as savage as New Guinea … the Jews had their fenced cities and cedar palaces, their splendid Temple, their schools of learning”; and if they are now reduced to low circumstances, “shall we not rather consider it as a matter of shame and remorse to ourselves?” (Parenthetically it should be added that Shaftesbury accepted Emancipation gracefully when it was ultimately voted by both Houses and promptly proposed Sir Moses Montefiore for a peerage. “It would be a glorious day for the House of Lords,” he wrote to Gladstone, “when that grand old Hebrew were enrolled on the lists of the hereditary legislators of England,” a view in which the Lords did not concur. Shaftesbury was unconventional as always.)
Bible and Sword: England and Palestine From the Bronze Age to Balfour Page 20