Some scholars would agree with the opinion expressed by historian Evyatar Friesel in a 2006 essay titled ‘‘Zionism and Jewish Nationalism’’:
‘‘The author is aware of the historical interest in certain non-Jewish quarters, especially in nineteenth-century England, toward the restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land. An examination—admittedly not systematic enough—regarding the relationship between these ideas and the emergence of Zionism suggests only a very marginal and indirect influence.’’
Other scholars, myself among them, have found a more direct and powerful connection between Christian Zionism and Jewish Zionism. As historian of ideas Richard Popkin noted in the early 1990s, ‘‘Much of Zionism has its roots in Christian rather than Jewish doctrine.’’
Among those doctrines is the tendency in the Protestant churches to read biblical narrative and prophecy in a more literal and historical manner than had been the tradition in either Rabbinic Judaism or in the Orthodox or Catholic Churches. Equally relevant is the millennialist trend in Protestant history. By the mid-twentieth century, three centuries of Christian enthusiasm for a return of the Jews to their land created an atmosphere in the West in which previously inchoate and unrealizable Jewish aspirations for a revived national home could take shape and find direction.
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In the United States, The Fundamentals, a series of essays published between 1910 and 1915 by conservative evangelical theologians, emphasized the necessity to believe in the literal truth of scripture. This helped reify the relationship between the Jews of the present and the Israelites of old. In the view of many in the Christian West, Palestine was understood to be ‘‘empty,’’ and this emptiness should be filled by Jews, the descendants of the land’s ancient biblical inhabitants. The phrase ‘‘a land without a people for a people without a land’’ conveyed this view in a very concise and pithy manner. The idea was first promoted by Christians.
In 1853 Lord Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley-Cooper) wrote that Palestine was ‘‘a country without a nation’’ in search of ‘‘a nation without a country.’’ He made this observation during the Crimean War, when the continued viability of the Ottoman Empire came into question. With the weakening of the Ottoman Empire, continued Turkish rule in Palestine came into question. In Shaftesbury’s view, first expressed two decades before the Crimean War, Christians needed to support a Jewish restoration so as to prepare the stage for the Second Coming. As Shaftesbury was a friend and relative of Henry John Temple Palmerston, the British foreign minister, his views had considerable weight. Palmerston opened a British consulate in Jerusalem in 1838. Two years later, Shaftesbury wrote that ‘‘Palmerston has already been chosen by God to be an instrument of good to His ancient people.’’ A half century later, the phrase ‘‘a land without a people for a people without a land’’ was popularized by Anglo-Jewish novelist Israel Zangwill.
From Zangwill’s writings the phrase, translated into many languages, became a mainstay of Zionist polemics. The phrase was utilized in a number of ways, some more sophisticated than others. While some advocates of Zionism used it to imply that Palestine was empty of people, that suggestion was contradicted by the reports of many Western visitors. The phrase was most pointedly used to claim that the Arabs of Palestine had no distinct Palestinian identity. They were ‘‘Arabs,’’ not a cohesive national group. That Palestine was not ‘‘empty’’ (in either the demographic or political sense) soon became clear to some Jewish observers. This was ruefully acknowledged in the telegram sent home by two rabbis from Vienna who visited Palestine in 1898, the year after the First Zionist Congress: ‘‘The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.’’
More explicit Jewish warnings about the presence of the Arabs of Palestine were offered by the Zionist philosopher Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginzburg) and his disciple Isaac Epstein. In his Hebrew-language essay ‘‘The Truth from the Land of Israel,’’ Ginzburg wrote that ‘‘we tend to believe that Palestine is nowadays almost completely deserted, an uncultivated wilderness, and anyone can come there and buy as much land as his heart desires. But in reality this is not the case. It is difficult to find anywhere in the country Arab land which lies fallow.’’ Isaac Epstein, in a 1907 article in the Hebrew-language periodical Hashiloah, called the Arab presence in Palestine ‘‘The Hidden Question.’’ Epstein had settled in Palestine in 1886. After twenty years in Palestine he warned his fellow Zionists that they would have to confront a painful reality: ‘‘There resides in our treasured land an entire people which has clung to it for hundreds of years... the Arab, like all other men, is strongly attached to his homeland.’’
But Epstein’s project was not to assign blame. He wrote, ‘‘The Zionists’ lack of attention to an issue so basic to their settlement is not intentional; it went unnoticed because they were not familiar with the country and its inhabitants, and furthermore, had no national or political awareness.’’ Now that Zionist settlement had grown (in the twenty-five years preceding his 1907 essay), Epstein called on the movement to ‘‘distance itself from every deed tainted with plunder... When we come to our homeland, we must uproot all thoughts of conquest or appropriation. Our motto must be: Live and let live! Let us not cause harm to any nation, and certainly not to a numerous people, whose enmity is very dangerous.’’
These expressions of concern for the future of Jewish-Arab relations did not have much resonance at the time, either among Jews or among Christians. Jewish Zionists were for the most part refugees from persecution who were engaged in building the infrastructure of a future state. Few of them paid attention to the claims of the majority population. Christian Zionists, whose motivations were more theological than practical, did not address the ‘‘Arab Question.’’ For the more politically and religiously conservative among these Christians, the Arabs were the interlopers in Palestine, even if they were Christian Arabs. They had no part to play in God’s plan for the Holy Land and should therefore be encouraged to emigrate. The perception that Palestine belonged to the Jewish people outweighed the reality of an Arab presence. At the beginning of the twentieth century less than 10 percent of Palestine’s population was Jewish, but many Christians, especially in the United States, thought of it as a Jewish land.
Tags: arab, christian century, christian zionism, holy land, israel, jewish independence, jewish state, nazis, palestine, reinhold niebuhr, second coming, truman
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