The Gathering of Israel

Chapter 4—Literalist Foreign Policy

The British Literalists—strong among the Anglican Evangelicals and in various Nonconformist churches—were not about to abandon their hopes of converting Jews and sending them to Palestine to meet their Messiah, especially not around 1840, when the current British policy of offering protection to Jews living in Palestine raised great expectations among the premillennialists. Indeed, Literalist influence was unofficially helping to shape that policy. An ardent Literalist, Lord Ashley (later the Earl of Shaftesbury), was stepson-in-law and confidant of Lord Palmerston, the British foreign secretary. Ashley had private hopes of bringing about, through British action, the restoration of Israel to Palestine in preparation for the Second Advent. In 1840 he prodded Palmerston, by adducing political reasons, into seeking international backing for Jewish migration to Palestine, while he confided to his diary his own very different motives, which were distinctly religious: GI 3.6

Dined with Palmerston. After dinner left alone with him. Propounded my scheme, which seemed to strike his fancy .... Palmerston has already been chosen by God to be an instrument of good to His ancient people; to do homage, as it were, to their inheritance, and to recognize their rights without believing their destiny .... I am forced to argue politically, financially, commercially; these considerations strike him home; he weeps not like his Master over Jerusalem, nor prays that now, at last, she may put on her beautiful garments. ¹

Ashley’s influence was likewise behind the establishment of a consulate in Jerusalem in 1838, also the creating of an Anglican bishopric there in 1841 and the appointment to it of a Jewish Christian bishop. On October 16, 1841, he wrote in his diary: “Where would the Sultan’s permission [to build the bishop’s church] have been without Palmerston’s vigour in consequence of my repeated and earnest representations?” ² GI 3.7

But Ashley’s dream of a British-sponsored and treaty-protected Jewish migration to Palestine did not materialize. The four-power treaty of 1840 ignored the matter. Even the Jews themselves showed little interest; more than half a century passed before Zionism arose. GI 3.8

Nevertheless, 20th-century British policy in the Middle East owed something to the prophetic interpretation of the Literalists of the 1830s and 1840s. GI 4.1

As one recent writer has put it: GI 4.2

Lord Shaftesbury’s adventure marks the point when events began leading logically toward the [Palestine] Mandate....

Palmerston[’s Middle Eastern policies] mark the beginning of official British intervention on behalf of the “Jewish nation” and of its resettlement in Palestine....

Ashley had not labored in vain.... All these events centering in the Holy Land [including “the visionary prospects aroused by the Evangelical craze for conversion of the Jews and the Jerusalem bishopric”] combined to create almost a proprietary feeling about Palestine. The idea of a British annex there through the medium of a British-sponsored restoration of Israel began to appeal to other minds than Ashley’s. ³