Sejarah Zionisme, 1600-1918/Volume 1/Bab 21

CHAPTER XXI.

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:—

“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.”

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