Part VII
At the end of the 19th century, Palestine was a small area far from the heart of Europe but governed by the consulates of Britain, the United States, France, Prussia, Sardinia, Austria, Spain and Russia, notes historian Isaiah Friedman. Increased immigration from Europe by Ashkenazic Jews changed Muslim-Jewish relations as European powers intervened to protect their citizens from Turkish or Arab persecution under capitulation agreements negotiated with the Ottoman Empire.
The consul’s extraterritorial rights, explains Ruth Kark, a professor of geography at the Hebrew University, meant that he had ultimate power over the assets and lives of the nationals residing within the territorial boundaries of his command. Each consulate even had its own prison room. In turn, the capitulation agreements permitted the Great Powers to increase their political presence in Palestine and “institutionalize” their missionary work, according to historian Yosef Gorney. The protection reluctantly won the Jews respect from the Arabs, while also stirring resentment against them.
According to Friedman, in the early 1850s there were 5,000 Ashkenazim under the protection of foreign consuls: 3,000 by Austria, 1,000 by the British, and the rest were registered with the American, Prussian, Dutch and Russian consulates. By championing the rights of foreign Jews and endorsing Jewish resettlement in Palestine, the British established and expanded their consulate in Palestine, which they hoped to use to counter Russia’s expanding influence in the Levant.
The British also took a special interest in the welfare of the Jews, declared Albert Montefiore Hyamson, chief immigration officer in the British Mandate of Palestine. He quoted The Times of London that declared this concern was because “…no people on the face of the earth has been so little understood and so grossly misinterpreted as the Jewish … A new era is, however, commencing.”
Until war broke out in 1914, the British consulate in Jerusalem served as the place where every Jew in Palestine, no matter their nationality, could receive advice and protection, Hyamson confirmed. When William T. Young began his work as vice-consul in 1838, his first dispatch instructed him to protect the Jews in Palestine and report on their present condition.
Protestant missionaries in Palestine, also protected by the British, made common cause with the Jews as they were passionate believers in the “restoration of the Jews” to the Holy Land, asserts historian Alexander Schölch. Restoration gained worldwide interest in the 19th century as Protestants from around the world initiated projects to bring Jews to Palestine. Rather than convert the Jews, they sought to repatriate them to Palestine, which they believed would hasten the return of the Messiah. This movement further strengthened the bond between the British and Palestine.
According to David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, the creation of the Jewish state began with the founding of Mikveh Israel in 1870, when Alliance Israelite Universelle, the French philanthropic organization, established the first agricultural training school for Jewish youth and an elementary research center outside Jaffa. The Zionists, Gorny said, needed to establish a Jewish majority in the country and create a separate Jewish national community secured by economic, political, social and even military protection or the movement would lose its raison d’être. The experience of Jews in the Diaspora had long exposed the inherent danger of being a permanent minority.
During the years leading up to 1840, messianic fervor played a role in inspiring a mass movement of tens of thousands of traditional Jews from Europe to Palestine, drastically altering the demography of the Jewish community there, historian Aryeh Morgenstern points out. When the first Zionists began arriving at the end of the 19th century, “the land of Israel was already the host to its largest and most vibrant Jewish community” than there had been in many centuries.
Followers of the Vilna Gaon, Morgenstern said, purchased land in Palestine in order to fulfill the religious commandments relating to the land of Israel through cultivation. Developing the land would be a sure sign of God’s love for his people, according to the Talmudic interpretation (Sanhedrin 98a) of the verse in Ezekiel (36:8): “But you, O mountains of Israel, shall shoot forth your branches, and yield your fruit to my people Israel—there is no better sign than this.”
Palestinian Jewry ascribed enormous importance to agriculture, Morgenstern said, as can be seen in a letter sent by the Sephardic and Ashkenazic leaders in 1839 to Moses Montefiore, the English philanthropist, after learning that he wanted to buy land for rural Jewish colonies. “…We await and anticipate the divine salvation through Moses, the faithful one of his house, to say when he shall begin this beginning of the redemption,” it read.
Three years earlier Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Kalischer asked Baron Anshel Rothschild to buy the Temple Mount from the ruler of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, so the Jews could begin the sacrificial service once again. Restoring sacrifices on the Temple Mount, Rabbi Kalischer believed, would accelerate the redemption and the coming of the Messiah. In the letter the rabbi noted:
“And particularly at a time like this when the province of the land of Israel is not under the rule of a powerful regime as it was in former times … he may well sell you the city of Jerusalem and its surroundings. From this, too, there will spring forth a horn of salvation, if we have the power and authority to seek the place of the altar and to offer acceptable burnt offerings to the God of Eternity, and from this may Judah be delivered in an eternal deliverance.”
The Jews in Palestine also sought to rebuild “earthly Jerusalem” by restoring the ruins of the “Court of the Ashkenazim,” where Jews lived, prayed, studied and conducted business, Morgenstern adds. Donors in Europe were approached for funds, but it took 20 years before they received permission to begin rebuilding. There were also attempts to reinstate the Sanhedrin, a prerequisite for reinstituting semicha. As in Safed hundreds of years before, they encountered the same religious issues that doomed the earlier effort.
The Jews faced continuous assaults by local Arabs and Muslim authorities that made life unbearable for them, Morgenstern explains. In 1834, when Arab farm workers revolted against the regime of Muhammad Ali, Jews were attacked in the major cities. In Safed, they stole Jewish property, destroyed homes and defiled synagogues. Some Jews were raped, beaten and murdered. A report by Rabbi Shumel Heller of Safed assessed the tragedy that ensued:
“For forty days, day after day, from the Sunday following Shavuot, all of the people of our holy city, men, women, and children have been like refuse upon the field. Hungry, thirsty, naked, barefoot, wandering to and fro in fear and confusion like lambs led to the slaughter. … They [the Arab marauders] removed all the Torah scrolls and thrust them contemptuously to ground, and they ravished the daughters of Israel—woe to the ears that hear it—and the great study they burned to its foundations. …And the entire city was destroyed and laid ruin, they did not leave a single wall whole; they dug and sought treasures, and the city stood ruined and desolate without a single person…”
Although many Jews left Palestine under such difficult conditions, Morgenstern said, the majority remained—aided by Moses Montefiore, the Rothschild family and other Jewish philanthropic institutions. Jews were often protected by Jewish organizations in the Diaspora and by European nations, whose consuls in the region insisted that the Jews be reimbursed for the losses they sustained in the riots of 1834. Jews were less exposed than in previous times, enabling continued settlement of the land and the subsequent waves of immigration beginning in the 1880s.
Dr. Alex Grobman, a Hebrew University-trained historian, is senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society and a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.
