ENGLAND AND THE JEWS IN THE EAST
Damascus and Rhodes, 1840――The anti-Jewish accusations――Jewish
opinion in England and France――Two views――The persecutions and
the Zionist idea――The difficulties of a Jewish initiative――Sir
W. R. W. Wilde.
AT that time an occurrence of a grave character troubled the Jews
in the East. The Jews resident at Damascus and Rhodes were subjected
in 1840 to cruel persecution on the false and atrocious charge that
they used human blood in the celebration of the Passover. On the 7th
February a Catholic Priest named Father Thomas suddenly disappeared
from the quarter of Damascus where he resided. As he had last been
seen near the shop of a Jewish barber, the latter was seized and
examined, and finally subjected to torture. In his agony he accused
several of the principal Jews of having put Father Thomas to death.
Many of the Jews were immediately thrown into prison, and the most
revolting barbarities were inflicted upon them to induce them to
confess. An appeal was made to Mehemet Ali, the _Pasha_ of Egypt, to
put a stop to these horrors, and he issued peremptory instructions to
that effect, ordering that the matter should be investigated before
a tribunal composed of the European consuls specially delegated for
that purpose. At a later period of the year, the Jews of Rhodes were
accused of having abducted a Greek boy for the purpose of murdering
him, and using his blood at the Passover, but after a trial and a long
investigation the charge was pronounced to be false. In this case also
great barbarities had been inflicted, and the Porte, in order to show
its sense of the injustice done to the Jews, deposed the _Pasha_ of
Rhodes.
These events awakened _Israel_ from a long stupor. They stirred up
Jewish public opinion all over the world, and especially in England
and France. Like all persecutions, they served to accentuate Jewish
solidarity. The first thing to do was to save the innocent martyrs;
next to this immediate necessity the question arose how to prevent
similar attacks on Jewish life, and on the honour of Judaism. It
was necessary to raise a powerful protest against these abominable
accusations, to make representations to the Governments to protect
and to assist the oppressed Jews.
Up to this point Jewish leaders of all shades of opinion travelled
the same road. It was only at this stage that commonplace charity and
political foresight had to part company. To the former it seemed easy
to surmount all difficulties and all objections instantly by a few
plausible generalities, which to such minds were invested with the
force of axiomatic truth, and to question which they would regard
as useless. Persecution, it was said, is a temporary phenomenon, and
consequently the defence should be temporary. But is the persecution
of the Jews really only temporary? Are not all these outrages and
accusations links in one chain? Are they not, to a certain extent,
the consequences of the precarious and untenable position of a people
without a land? Short-sighted philanthropists, harassed by no doubts
of this kind, asserted as facts what they knew in reality to be only
probabilities. There is no doubt as to their perfect good faith,
nor should any wilful misrepresentation be attributed to them. They
had seized on one part of the truth, namely, that justice should
be applied to the Jews. With regard to questions of nationality and
territory they had no experience. They knew little of the conditions
of the countries where the Jewish masses lived; the psychology of the
non-Jewish masses in those countries was unknown to them.
But history was against their superficial optimism, and in the minds
of really thinking people grave doubts arose whether the future of
the Jewish people could be secured by haphazard defence and immediate
relief. It would be idle for the optimists to treat anxieties
of this kind as if they were heresies. They were not reactionary
aspirations; nor were they the pretensions of ignorant spirits to
be wise beyond the limits of man’s wisdom. They were in reality the
logical consequences of experience and observation. They reveal a true
conception of the Jewish problem, which is belittled and watered down
by commonplace optimism.
The Damascus affair, like similar events before and after it,
stimulated Zionist aspirations, not because Zionism is merely a reflex
of persecution, but because persecution reveals to the Jew his real
situation, which, during the short intervals of peace, he does not
clearly understand or is inclined to overlook.
Though far from being the real cause――the real cause is the whole of
Jewish history――the sufferings of the Jews have always been a stimulus
to Jewish national feeling. The Mortara case in 1860 gave rise to the
Alliance Israélite Universelle, the persecutions which began in 1882
to the movement of the “Lovers of _Zion_,” and the Dreyfus affair
in 1894 to Herzl’s pamphlet _The Jewish State_, 1896, which heralded
modern Zionism. In the same way the Damascus and Rhodes affairs were
the immediate cause of Montefiore’s journeys, the representations
to Mehemet Ali about both the innocent martyrs and the establishment
of Jewish colonies in Palestine, and the societies in England for
the support of Palestinian colonization. A number of Jews in several
countries, and especially in England, began to ask themselves: What
will be the end of all these sufferings? The reply was: Two things are
necessary:――
(1) The protection of Great Britain for the Jews in the East.
(2) The colonization of Palestine.
Public opinion had now taken a different turn; and, what is more
important, the character of the difficulties and objections generally
raised had become wholly different. People began to inquire about the
Jews themselves: would they or would they not be inclined to form a
new society for the colonization of Palestine? A greater disposition
to follow up this kind of discussion had developed. The political
sense of the day required definition, argument, and proof, where
religion had been content to appeal merely to the instinct of
reverence, and to put the whole matter on the plane of devotional
feeling or exalted imagination.
Would the Jews go to Palestine?
In the nature of things it could not often happen that a nation
would undergo rapidly any great, although at the same time peaceful
and salutary change. A nation may, indeed, develop almost in a day.
Empires have evaporated in fury or exploded in passion. But then
such violent changes have usually been vicious and destructive. An
utterly demoralized people will abandon itself in a moment to a dream
of ambition, turn its ploughshares into swords, and break from its
borders to conquer the world. A new field for cupidity or pleasure,
the discovery of a continent, the sudden acquisition of a fertile
territory or a mine of wealth, has ere now turned an ancient and
noble race into a rabble of adventurers. But it is very rare, almost
unparalleled, for a _peaceful_ people to find a new opening all at
once. There was doubt, then, about the Jewish desire for redemption.
Side by side with their attachment to the land of their birth, the
sense of a long-lost home lies deep in the hearts of the Jewish masses,
and they are drawn towards it by a longing expressed in heartfelt
songs and prayers, in wishes and in hopes, not in rebellious efforts.
But could the Jews by themselves, as a whole nation, or as scattered
and divided masses, as a defenceless and persecuted minority, take
up the realization of their cherished hope? Although it was an
international political scheme, leading Jews would have to raise their
voices and start the work if they wished to see its accomplishment.
Sir William Robert Wills Wilde (1815‒1876) wrote:――¹
¹ Narrative of a Voyage to ... the Shores of the Mediterranean,
including a visit to ... Palestine, etc. Dublin, 1840, vol.
ii., _pp._ 358‒363.
“This extraordinary people, the favoured of the Lord, the descendants
of the patriarchs and prophets, and the aristocracy of the earth, are
to be seen in _Jerusalem_ to greater advantage, and under an aspect
and in a character totally different from that which they present in
any other place on the face of the globe. In other countries the very
name of Jew has associated with it cunning, deceit, usury, traffic
and often wealth. But here, in addition to the usual degradation and
purchased suffering of a despised, stricken, outcast race, they bend
under extreme poverty, and wear the aspect of a weeping and a mourning
people; lamenting over their fallen greatness as a nation, and over
the prostrate grandeur of their once proud city. Here the usurer
is turned into the pilgrim, the merchant into the priest, and the
inexorable creditor into the weeping suppliant....” “It is curious,
... to read the indications of fond attachment of the Jew to the very
air and soil, scattered about in Jewish writings; ... ‘The air of the
land of _Israel_,’ says one, ‘makes a man wise’; another writes, ‘he
who walks four cubits in the land of _Israel_ is sure of being a son
of the life to come.’ The great Wise Men are wont to kiss the borders
of the Holy Land, to _embrace its ruins_, and roll themselves in its
dust.”¹
¹ The German Jewish weekly, _Der Orient_ (Leipzig, 1840, N 16),
mentions “a Christian divine, Rev. William Filson Marsh
(1775‒1864), who wrote to the then Chief _Rabbi_ in London,
the Rev. Solomon Hershell (1761‒1842), about the necessity
of a Jewish state in Palestine.”
The following extracts are taken from _Der Orient_, a German newspaper.
They seem to betoken a movement among continental Jews in relation to
the late crisis in Syria:――
“We have a country, the inheritance of our fathers, finer, more
fruitful, better situated for commerce, than many of the most
celebrated portions of the globe. Environed by the deep-delled Taurus,
the lovely shores of the Euphrates, the lofty steppes of Arabia
and of rocky _Sinai_, our country extends along the shores of the
Mediterranean, crowned by the towering cedars of _The Lebanon_, the
source of a hundred rivulets and brooks, which spread fruitfulness
over shady dales.... A glorious land! situate at the farthest
extremity of the sea which connects three-quarters of the globe, over
which the Phœnicians ... sent their numerous fleets to the shores of
Albion, near to both the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf; ... the central
country of the commerce between the east and the west. Every country
has its peculiarity; every people their own nature.... No people of
the earth have lived so true to their calling from the first as we
have done.
“The Arab has maintained his language and his original country; on the
Nile, in the deserts, as far as _Sinai_, and beyond _Jordan_, he feeds
his flocks. In the elevated plains of Asia Minor the Turkoman has
conquered for himself a second country, the birthplace of the Osman;
but Palestine and Syria are populated. For centuries the battlefield
between the sons of Altai and of the Arabian wilderness, the
inhabitants of the West and the half-nomadic Persians, none have been
able to establish themselves and maintain their nationality: no nation
can claim the name of Syrian. A chaotic mixture of all tribes and
tongues, remnants of migrations from north and south, they disturb one
another in the possession of the glorious land where our fathers for
so many centuries emptied the cup of joy and woe, and where every clod
is drenched with the blood of our heroes when their bodies were buried
under the ruins of _Jerusalem_....”¹
¹ _The Times_, Thursday, December 24, 1840, _p._ 4.
Illustration: _Painted by G. Richmond. R.A.D.C.L._
_Engraved by T. L. Atkinson_
_Sir_ MOSES MONTEFIORE, _Bart._, _F.R.S._
_From a mezzotint engraving (proof before all letters)
lent by Israel Solomons_