5
The political culture of the United States was shaped by an unusual period in world history. The Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815 and it would be a hundred years before another major war would engulf Europe. During much of that century, economic and social progress appeared to be transforming the world. The Industrial Revolution, the railroad, and the telegraph meant that the generation between 1815 and 1848 saw more change, and more dramatic change, than any previous generation in history.
For many Europeans and North Americans, this was one of the most optimistic eras our suffering species has known. The human condition was improving on every side. Major great power war began to look like a thing of the past. Slavery came under greater and greater pressure, and with Russia abolishing serfdom and the United States abolishing slavery in the 1860s it appeared that one of humanity’s oldest scourges was fading away. Many felt that the intoxicating vision of the Enlightenment, that human reason could unlock the secrets of nature and that this knowledge could lead humanity to a golden age of affluence and peace, was being realized on every side. It was against this backdrop that Americans would develop a set of ideas about their national destiny and the role of the Jews in the modern world that, in darker times to come, would continue to influence American attitudes toward both the challenges of the twentieth century as a whole and the emergence of a Jewish state.
The early nineteenth century augured well for the Jews.[1] The Enlightenment created a new kind of public opinion and political consensus within which Jewish citizens could reasonably hope to be integrated into West European societies as free and equal citizens. The walls of the ghettos came down, and like the Herzl family in Budapest and Vienna,[2] Jews in many countries were able to participate in the economic and political life of their societies in a new way. European culture was profoundly changed as the creative talents of this once excluded people entered the mainstream.
In the nineteenth century, individual Jews played a much smaller role in the development of American thought, business, and the arts than was the case across most of Europe. Until the 1840s, there were very few Jews in the United States.[3] The failure of the 1848 revolutions in Germany combined with the economic stresses of the Industrial Revolution led to large numbers of German-speaking Jews coming to the United States before the Civil War.[4] A second and much larger wave of Jewish immigration began after 1881 as pogroms and antisemitic legislation spread across the vast Russian Empire following the assassination of the liberal Alexander II and the succession of his reactionary son Alexander III.[5] A sprinkling of American Jews entered public life before the Civil War, but it would be another generation before significant numbers of them joined the country’s business, political, cultural, and intellectual leadership.[6] The United States was a country where the Jewish presence was smaller and less influential than in most of Europe, but it was in the American republic that an ideology would develop that, in due course, would prepare the American people to welcome and support the emergence of a Jewish state in the Holy Land.
American Ideas
Americans don’t like to think of themselves as an ideological people, but in spite of the intellectual and cultural diversity found in the United States, many Americans share a set of convictions and ideas that mark them off from much of the rest of the world. It is perhaps less of a national creed than a set of national memes; for most of us this is less a set of abstract ideas than an array of mental habits, cultural predispositions, and unspoken assumptions that inform our approach to world events.
The foundations of this approach were laid down in the colonial era, then during the first century of American independence the political culture coalesced around the beliefs and assumptions that still influence us today. During those years, Americans worked out a series of ideas about the direction of world history and America’s role in the historical process that reflected both the religious ideas of an increasingly individualistic American Protestantism and the individualistic and liberal ethos of British and American political life. Combined with the radical egalitarianism of the American frontier, this cultural inheritance, contested and challenged though it is, remains the most profound influence on the way contemporary Americans think about their society and its place in the world.
Just as American culture in the colonial era developed in ways that tended to weaken the grip of antisemitism on the American mind, the ideological constructions of the nineteenth century would bend the arc of American development in ways that predisposed public opinion toward a unique approach to the place of the Jewish people in the modern world. One consequence of that approach would be to privilege pro-Zionist political activism as a way in which American Jews could simultaneously act on behalf of a specifically Jewish cause and further their integration into the heart of American life. Indeed, many twentieth-century Jewish leaders in the United States would regret the degree to which American ideology often made Zionism virtually the only question on which Jewish activists could look to American public opinion for support.
The emerging American ideology was not constructed by Jews or built with Jews particularly in mind. The Americans of the first one hundred years after the Declaration of Independence, with only a tiny Jewish minority scattered across the country, were interested above all in the experiment in democratic governance they were conducting, and in interpreting its meaning and purpose in the history of the world. For our purposes it is useful to note that four basic propositions have widely influenced the way Americans think about their country and its world role:
· Free institutions and free markets, correctly understood and securely established, will over time deliver enough happiness and prosperity to enough people to change the arc of history, not only in the United States but throughout the world.
· This coming transformation of the world is the culmination and capstone of all that has gone before; it is the fulfillment of humanity’s deepest hopes and fondest desires.
· The rise of such a country at such a time of world history indicates that providence has chosen Americans to play a leading role in the annals of the human race.
· Americans have a duty not only to themselves but to the whole human race to preserve and perfect their system at home, and to assist the global spread of these principles of civil and economic freedom.
Not everyone in the United States subscribed to these ideas in the nineteenth century any more than they do today. Even among the substantial majority who do accept these ideas, there are differences over what these ideas mean or how they should be applied. Franklin Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge had very different ideas about how much regulation free markets required, but they both believed that American capitalism offered a path to prosperity for the whole human race.
However much contentiousness exists within this ideology, and however many people in the United States present and past have dissented from it altogether, these national ideas are deeply ingrained in our popular and political culture. A political candidate unwilling or unable to believe, or at least to assert with apparently heartfelt sincerity, that freedom is a gift that God has given to America and that the sacred gift of freedom needs to be shared with the rest of the world is unlikely to prosper at the polls.
This standard optimistic American ideology rests uneasily with the nation’s Christian roots. In both its Catholic and Protestant forms, Christianity has usually taken a skeptical view about the possibility that human effort would create any kind of heaven on earth. “My kingdom is not of this world,” Jesus told Pontius Pilate, but it was in this world that the hopeful heirs of the Enlightenment looked to build a new paradise. Christianity in its various forms became the dominant religious faith of the American people; Americanism in its various forms became the dominant civic faith of the country. Both faiths contained elements that would make the United States a largely pro-Zionist country in the twentieth century.
Destiny Manifest
Americans came to their ideas about America’s role in the historical drama through a process of observation and reflection. The world of the late eighteenth century and of the nineteenth appeared to be moving in ways that made faith in an age of progress through the global spread of American values look like the most natural and obvious truth in the world.
Part of the inheritance the first Americans brought with them from Britain was a belief that God was acting through British and American history to reshape the world. From the standpoint of the Founding Fathers, three centuries of rapid change had taken the English-speaking world from an abyss of poverty, ignorance, and superstition to a greater height of philosophical insight, civil virtue, and material prosperity than the ancient world had ever known.[7] The cobwebs of the Middle Ages had been swept away. Humanity had woken from its sleep and for the first time in 1,500 years stood erect and unblinking in the clear light of day.
There had been three stages in the work of regeneration. The Renaissance saw the scholars and humanists of Europe recover the knowledge of the ancients and begin to sift out the pure philosophy and political thought of Greece and Republican Rome from the medieval detritus, as they thought, of monkish superstition and papist deception. This was more than a mix of artistic innovation and literary criticism; it was a recovery of the free spirit of antiquity. Arguments from authority were no longer enough. One had to proceed by means of open, rational debate and, as the new sciences took hold, on the basis of solid evidence.
This initial step led to the second great movement that the American Founders and their contemporaries believed had remade the world: the Reformation. For most of them, the Reformation was the religious dimension of the Renaissance: just as the Renaissance swept aside the cobwebs of medieval tradition and monasticism to regain the free spirit of rational enquiry that characterized the golden ages of Greece and Rome, the Reformation in religion swept aside the corruption and contrivance of the Middle Ages to place Christian believers once more in the clear light of faith. The Protestant Reformers believed that they were uncovering the pure and uncorrupted Christian doctrine and practice as they existed in the golden age of Jesus and the first apostles.
The third stage as the Anglo-Americans saw it was the discovery of the principles of the open society. The “ordered liberty” on which both Britain and America prided themselves involved limited government, private initiative, and the principles of political economy as expounded by Adam Smith. The common law, representative institutions, the jury system, the rights of property, and the rights of man: these were, the English-speaking world of the day believed, the keys to both liberty and wealth.[8] With the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in Great Britain and, Americans insisted, the American Revolution of 1776, the true principles of civil government had at last been found.
By the eighteenth century, the Anglo-Americans believed that it was their privilege and destiny to go further and higher than the ancients.[9] After more than a thousand years in which European scholars lived in the shadow of the glorious classical past, the scientists and mathematicians of the eighteenth century were conscious of surpassing the ancients. Aristotle knew nothing of calculus; Newton’s theories were as far beyond the ken of the philosophers and mathematicians of antiquity as the microscopes and telescopes of the new age were beyond anything the ancients possessed. The discovery of the circulation of the blood, the advances in chemistry, the knowledge of the civilizations of the East, and the settlement of the New World: by 1800 it could no longer be doubted that a new era in history was at hand.[10]
The intellectual and political excitement of this moment in history spread throughout the centers of European and Atlantic enterprise and thought, but the English-speaking world had its own special perspective on the age of Enlightenment. For the Anglophones on both sides of the Atlantic, the modern age was also a story of the rise of British power in world politics as well as of rising liberty and prosperity at home. The history of the modern world began for the English-speaking world with the dizzying sixteenth-century victory of Sir Francis Drake and his cohorts over the Spanish Armada. That story went on to feature the defeat of Louis XIV by the Duke of Marlborough in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and concluded magnificently with the defeat of Napoleon by the Duke of Wellington in 1815. Three times the might of great European empires strove to extinguish, as the British saw it, the light of liberty and true religion, and three times the assaults were rejected.
For Americans, their own triumph over the mother country in the Revolution, and the rapid growth that followed, were signs of America’s unique blessing and destiny. They saw an open continent before them, felt the growing power of their nation, tallied the rapid growth of population in the census, and believed that the wind of history was in their sails. They were the spear tip of humanity’s rise, the pioneers of liberty, the leaders of humanity’s advance into a new world of justice, freedom, and hope.
Thoughtful people increasingly believed that a radically new day had dawned. The events of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars electrified the citizens of the English-speaking world. Napoleon was the greatest conqueror since Alexander the Great, and under the hammer of his armies, ancient institutions fell apart. The pope was temporarily cast down from power and the Holy Roman Empire fell even as the arrogant monarchs of Europe’s reigning dynasties fled the Revolution. The Napoleonic Code ended feudalism in half of Europe; Napoleon’s armies occupied the Pyramids and stormed across the Holy Land.
The American belief that history was moving to a glorious climax was the manifestation in American culture of one of the most important defining phenomena of the modern and postmodern eras. Humanity had always speculated on the meaning of life and the end of the world, but until modern times, the end of history had been a mythological rather than a political concept. Before the Enlightenment popularized the hope that the progress of science and education could transform the human condition and usher in a new and utopian stage of world history—without poverty, oppression, bigotry, despotism, or war—human beings generally thought that only some form of divine intervention could fundamentally alter the conditions of human existence. Jews hoped for the Messiah, Christians awaited the Second Coming. Other religions had visions of the end of days, of a final judgment, of the burning away of the imperfections of the world, or some other grand climax to the pageant of human history. But these were supernatural visions of a supernatural intervention. The idea that the day-to-day activities of human beings could dramatically change the human condition was something new.
This “historicization of the eschaton,” the transfer of speculation about the end of history and/or the end of the world from the realm of theology and myth to the realm of practical politics, is one of the greatest differences between human culture and self-awareness in our times and in the premodern era. In the twenty-first century it is a commonplace observation that human action or inaction can and indeed probably will bring about the kind of total change in the human condition that Silicon Valley savants like Ray Kurzweil refer to as the “Singularity.” Some of the possible transformations fill us with anxiety: a nuclear holocaust, a climate change catastrophe, the invention of an artificial intelligence that turns on its creators to create a post-human world. Others fill us with hope: the elimination of poverty, the indefinite extension of the human lifespan, the conquest of war, the prospect of a just and fair world system. But whether one looks at benign or more frightening scenarios, human beings all over the world today understand that the historical and political processes we see unfolding around us can bring the human story to a triumphant conclusion or to an ignominious end. We can build a utopian world order, or we can wipe ourselves out. At a time when the president of the United States and other world leaders can launch nuclear strikes that would end human life, it is painfully clear that human beings have seized powers that our ancestors believed could only be wielded by gods.
America’s history as an independent country more or less coincides with the period in which the end of the world seemed to move from the realm of myth to the realm of politics, and the history of American political thought has been profoundly affected by the emergence of the change. The consciousness of growing American power and of the likelihood that the United States would play a major role in world history was already a heady draught; that Americans imbibed this intoxicating beverage at exactly the moment when world history began to enter what appeared to be a decisive and climactic stage was headier still. Americans believed, as many still believe, that their country had a messianic vocation to transform the world.
Americans who thought that their country was playing a critical role in the unfolding of the divine plan for the culmination of world history would naturally follow Jewish affairs with unusual interest. Traditional Protestant theology had assigned a central role to the Jewish people in the events of the last days. Now that American opinion believed that the United States also had been called to the center stage for this last act, the destinies of the two people seemed linked. Any sign of a Jewish return to their ancestral home would, in this electric atmosphere, appeal to the American imagination. The perceived connection between America’s future, the fate of the world, and the future of the Jewish people already influenced American thought in the first half of the nineteenth century; over time, the influence of these ideas would grow in line with the growth of American power, the developing crisis of the Jewish people, and the crisis of a world civilization that, increasingly, seemed to have acquired more power than it knew how to control.
The defeat of Napoleonic France opened the gates of an unprecedented era of progress. As Europe enjoyed its most peaceful century in almost two thousand years, the Industrial Revolution took the scientific and economic achievements of the post-Renaissance world into overdrive. Industrial manufacturing, the railroad, and the telegraph brought on the most rapid-fire and consequential changes in the known history of the world. For the English-speaking world, and especially for Americans, who felt they were on the cutting edge politically as well as economically, it was an era of almost inconceivable and intoxicating triumph and produced an overwhelming sense of vindication. The principles of political and economic liberty at the foundation of the American way of life were transforming the world in a way nothing else ever had.
Americans looked around the world and it appeared that the countries that adopted American principles (Protestant Christianity and the “ordered liberty” of democratic constitutional government) flourished, while those without them fell further behind with every passing year. The Protestant powers of Northern Europe were growing compared to the Catholic ones. The more liberal countries (including France after 1830 and, by comparison with Austria, Prussia after 1848) were gaining power while the dictatorships and feudal monarchies were visibly growing weaker. Christian Europe as a whole was gaining in wealth and influence compared to the rest of the world, and the Ottoman Empire, the great Islamic power that had once terrified all of Europe, was sinking in a mire of backwardness and ruin.
Meanwhile, even as they celebrated the triumph of their principles worldwide (not enough Americans had read Hegel to call this the end of history yet), Americans saw that the great revolution still had some distance to go even in the United States. The nineteenth century saw the emergence of the first modern nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) with an agenda for social change. Movements against slavery, for women’s rights, for free public schools, for the education of the deaf and the blind, for vegetarianism, for the end of debtors’ prisons, for prohibition, for prison reform, for the end of child labor, for the improvement of conditions in mental asylums, and many other causes both wacky and wise sprang up in the western world. Sometimes these movements focused on changes that were needed at home. Increasingly, though, the nineteenth century was also an era of international campaigns for human rights in foreign lands.
One of the first of those campaigns was the movement in support of Greek independence. Nineteenth-century education was heavily classical and biblical in its inspiration; most educated people were familiar with Greek literature and philosophy. To classically educated Europeans and Americans, the state of the Greek nation in the early nineteenth century was both shocking and sad. Under the increasingly decadent rule of a backward Ottoman Empire, most Greeks were poor, uneducated, and entangled in an ugly feudal system. The classical cities of Athens and Sparta had declined into mere villages; the countryside was desperately poor and centuries of overexploitation and overgrazing had destroyed the fertility and even the beauty of the countryside so gloriously painted and praised by the classical poets.
It seemed to many progressive-minded people in the West and especially in the English-speaking world that the time had come for the redemption and restoration of the Greeks. The Ottoman Empire was visibly losing its grip and seemed to stand for everything that the English-speaking world believed was on the way out: un-Christian, oppressive, economically backward. The Greeks, on the other hand, were a great people fallen on hard times. Let them get free of the Ottoman yoke and reestablish their country under democratic laws and sound business principles and the glories of the classical age would return.
Not for the last time, the modern Greeks and the liberal West would disappoint one another. The deeply Orthodox Greeks of the nineteenth century were often less interested in democracy and the glories of pagan Athens than they were in restoring the lost glories of the Byzantine Empire. Nevertheless, the Greek War for Independence became a great cause célèbre throughout the Atlantic world, complete with fundraisers, petitions for military intervention, human rights groups organizing to protest against Turkish atrocities, and celebrity spokesmen like the great British poet Lord Byron, who died in Greece while volunteering to help the revolution. American liberals, including Samuel Gridley Howe, the future abolitionist and husband to Julia Ward Howe, also volunteered.[11] If the Greek state that resulted from these wars never fulfilled the hopes of its western midwives, its ultimately successful war of independence appeared to point the way toward a new kind of political action in the West: public support for progressive struggles could pressure governments to act in ways that advanced the cause of liberty and progress.
Just as the causes of the Uighurs and the Palestinians engage the sympathy and attention of many people interested in human rights today, in the nineteenth century the struggles of underdog national movements were a source of constant concern for the emerging world of progress-minded NGOs and individuals. The struggles of the Poles, whose country had been partitioned among the Austrian, Prussian, and Russian empires in what was seen as the archetypal example of cynical realpolitik by despotic rulers, were followed with great sympathy and attention. The Hungarian revolt against Austrian rule after the revolutions of 1848 led to some of the biggest demonstrations in American history,[12] with prominent politicians and civic leaders promoting U.S. intervention in the resulting war.
The struggle that had the deepest sympathy in the Atlantic world was the struggle for Italian unification. The Italians, like the Greeks, were one of the famous peoples of the ancient world. Roman history and literature were even more familiar to educated Anglo-Americans than the Greek classics. The Founding Fathers relied heavily on Roman history and Roman ideas as they thought through the problem of how to build a stable republic after they got rid of George III. The post-1815 map of Italy was a cynical carve-up of the peninsula by dynasts and intriguers, and the wretched state of the Italian people—poor, superstitious, oppressed—created intense sympathy and interest in the Anglo-American world for the Italian cause. A dashing and mediagenic group of gallant protesters opposed the ugly despotisms of the restored Bourbons and Habsburgs, and were imprisoned in ghastly fortresses and jails. Artists like Verdi challenged the limits of strict censorship. The pope still ruled the Papal States, badly for the most part, and the papacy followed its geopolitical interests in siding with the antiliberal autocracies of the day.
Anger at human rights abuses across Italy, fury at the misrule and oppression of bigoted popes, sympathy for a people seen as struggling to regain the nobility and honor of their classical forebears all combined to put the Italian struggle front and center in the liberal and progressive agitation of the day. The villains were ugly and stupid, the heroes dashing, and the struggle for freedom in Italy, which only ended when the French troops defending the pope in Rome were withdrawn during the crisis of the Franco-Prussian War, kept Europe enthralled for two generations.
American sympathy for Italian liberty, combined with the hatred of many Americans for what they saw as papist tyranny in both religion and politics, was so intense and so political that the U.S. Navy came to the aid of refugees from the collapsing Roman republic when the revolution of 1848 failed.[13] British concern was equally keen; William Gladstone’s 1851 published letters recounting the atrocities of the hated Ferdinand II, King of the Two Sicilies—his rule, wrote Gladstone, was “the negation of God erected into a system of government”—helped make Gladstone’s career.[14]
The Classical Nations Motif and American Proto-Zionism
There was, of course, a third ancient people that survived from antiquity into modern times—even more degraded and oppressed, most westerners thought, than the Italians and Greeks. Like the Greeks and the Romans, the Jews had a glorious past. Liberal opinion in the nineteenth century saw the Jews, like the Greeks and Italians, as an example of a once great people fallen on hard times. For many liberals, the extension of that sympathy to the Jews was a logical step.
In both Britain and the United States, a combination of Christian and liberal ideas gave the concept of a restored Jewish commonwealth in the lands of the Bible great appeal. Many of the reform movements of the day, like the abolitionist movement, were made up of devoutly religious evangelicals and less devout, even secular, liberals. The Jewish cause could bring them together; biblical prophecy and liberal sentiment pointed in the same direction.
For Americans, there was another angle. In the ancient world, as Americans saw it, the Greeks, Romans, and Hebrews had been much like Americans of the nineteenth century. They were mostly agrarian people, nations of family-owned farms. They had free institutions and their societies were grounded in virtue. But corruption, urbanization, and monarchy had wreaked their ugly work; in time, all three of the ancient peoples fell from their virtue and freedom into slavery, superstition, and oppression.
But now the sun was coming out from behind the clouds. Light from the West was illuminating the blighted landscapes of the East. As the classical peoples returned to their own core principles, the same principles on which American life was based, those nations would recover their freedom and dignity. As they rose from poverty and oppression, the whole world would realize that it was American principles that brought these changes about, and the renewal of the world would gain ground as others followed these examples.
The eastern landscapes, by the way, were literally blighted. In ancient times the Greek, Roman, and Hebrew homelands had been hailed by their inhabitants as rich, prosperous, and beautiful. The records of that beauty in the Bible and in the works of the classical poets remained part of the literary heritage of the educated world, but as the railway and the steamship made travel more practical for larger numbers of people, and as the development of photography allowed stay-at-homes to learn more about the outside world, there was a shock. Much of the ancient world had become a wasteland. Rome was a disease-ridden swamp; each summer malaria rose from the marshes to thin the poor and ignorant population. Greece was mostly barren and poor. The Holy Land, once flowing with milk and honey, impressed travelers as a dreary, stony waste.[15] A redemption of the ancient peoples would lead to the redemption of the land, many believed.
As the nineteenth century progressed, and the Greek and Italian independence movements advanced, the possibility of a restored Jewish commonwealth also began to gleam on the horizon. It wasn’t just Bible-thumping preachers deciphering the Delphic prophecies of the holy books who saw the possibility of a new Jewish state emerging in the lands of the Bible. Liberals with no interest in literal interpretations of scripture also saw the obstacles in the path of a Jewish restoration beginning to melt.
The visible decline of the Ottoman Empire and more generally of the Islamic world before the rising power of the West was the key. After centuries of expansion, the Ottoman wave had crested at Vienna in 1683.[16] Since then the tide had receded. Napoleon had conquered Egypt easily and it took British intervention to defeat the French there.[17] It was evident that the balance of power between the Christian and Muslim worlds had dramatically changed.
As the technological and industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century swept ahead, the gap between the Ottomans and the other European powers perceptibly widened. More and more observers came to believe that the whole tottering Ottoman structure was doomed to fall. Out of that crash, it was clear that many new states would emerge. Most of the European states would be Christian as the Balkan nations and the Armenians shook free of Ottoman rule. But in the ensuing chaos, surely there would be opportunities for Jews to return to their homeland.
For many years Great Britain rather than the United States was the political center of Restorationism in the English-speaking world. By 1838, the Restorationists were influential enough to persuade the British government to appoint a vice-consul to the then obscure and impoverished settlement of Jerusalem with a special mission to protect the Jewish inhabitants of the Holy Land against the depredations and oppressions of Ottoman rule.[18] The 7th Earl of Shaftesbury played an important role in the Christian Zionist tradition that produced Herzl’s friend William Hechler; through much of the nineteenth century he lobbied to see the establishment of a Jewish colony in Palestine under the protection of the British Crown.[19]
Shaftesbury, an evangelical who was active in a host of Victorian movements for social reform, saw the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine primarily as a religious rather than as an imperial project.[20] But he knew it would be most productive to present the project to Lord Palmerston and other British leaders in terms of power politics.[21] With the British increasingly focused on the importance of the eastern Mediterranean, Shaftesbury argued that a colony of pro-British Jews in the Holy Land would help stabilize the region and protect British interests. Others argued that a Jewish presence in Palestine would protect the approaches of the future route of the Suez Canal.[22]
The British government had been interested in strategic questions in the Middle East since the late eighteenth century, when Turkish weakness and Russian power began to cause dangerous shifts in the balance of the great powers.[23] As the Ottoman “Sick Man of Europe” weakened throughout the century, Britain would get drawn further in. The decline of the Ottoman Empire was slow, and it took longer for Palestine to fall into British hands than Shaftesbury or his contemporaries imagined it would. But the ideas Shaftesbury espoused and the strategic idea he had inspired in Palmerston would leave a legacy to future generations of British politicians, while the popular enthusiasm such an idea commanded among low church Britons would play a role during the last great upsurge of imperialism in the early twentieth century.
In the United States, Restorationism was influential from the early years of the republic. “I could find it in my heart to wish that you had been at the head of a hundred thousand Israelites,” wrote John Adams to a Jewish friend, “making a conquest of that country and restoring your nation to the dominion of it.”[24]
For a handful of Americans, it was not enough to bemoan the ruined state of Palestine and dream of the restoration of the Jews. A sermon preached by Rev. John McDonald in Albany in 1814 was republished in pamphlet form and caused a considerable stir in religious circles. Citing the prophecies in Isaiah 18, Reverend McDonald argued that the United States was divinely appointed to bring the restoration about. Among those sympathetic to McDonald’s message of American activism in the service of the Jewish restoration, some felt called to convert the Jews to Christianity as the first step in reestablishing a Jewish state.[25] Hoping to convert local Jews, the first American missionaries arrived in Jerusalem in the early 1820s. Discouraged by their reception, the missionaries shifted base to the predominantly Christian city of Smyrna. Subsequent missionaries began the educational and medical work that would have enormous consequences for the future of the region.[26]
Other Americans felt called by God to begin the restoration immediately. During the nineteenth century there were three separate attempts of Americans to establish settlements in the Holy Land.[27] The hope was that either by attracting Jews directly into agriculture or by setting an example of successful farming, the Americans could induce the Jews to establish flourishing agricultural settlements that would form the base of a new Jewish community. All the American efforts failed miserably, leaving the picturesque and refreshing American Colony Hotel as their most lasting legacy in Jerusalem today.
What was missing from these efforts was a Jewish national movement. Many Americans, without much experience of actual Jews, believed (wrongly) that the Jews of the day were consumed with longing for an end to exile. Reading Jewish experience primarily through the lens of the scriptures, Americans assumed that the Jews of Russia, Turkey, Iraq, and other countries were as homesick for Palestine as their ancestors had been during the first exile in Babylon. Americans looked at the rising national consciousness of the other peoples of the region and believed that the awakening of a Jewish national movement was only a question of time.
Just as William Hechler saw Herzl’s pamphlet as the fulfillment of his own prediction of a divinely inspired Jewish movement to return to Palestine, many non-Jewish Americans felt that the Zionist awakening vindicated their beliefs about the direction of world history. They confidently looked forward to further developments in this unlikeliest of national movements: they expected that Jews would begin to return to Zion, that they would engage in farming there and establish a democratic society. When that happened, they predicted, Jews would stand proud, free, and strong in a land of their own, just as liberation from the Ottomans would launch the Greeks on a new and glorious career, and the overthrow of the pope and the Austrians would set Italy free.
Enlightened opinion in the Anglo-American world held that the perceived inadequacies and deformations in the Jewish national character (stereotypically seen at that time to be physically timorous, untrustworthy, underhanded, and acquisitive) were neither the consequence of Jewish religion nor of Jewish blood. Rather, they were the fault of bad institutions and bad living conditions. Forced to live in cities rather than in the healthy countryside, relegated to a handful of trades and professions and excluded from responsible positions in governance, Jews were seen to have developed many of the characteristics which antisemites disliked about them. Give them their own homeland, said the Restorationists, and these negative characteristics would disappear.[28]
This was a convenient position to hold. One could simultaneously dislike individual Jews and exclude them from one’s social life while distancing oneself from conventional antisemitism and supporting greater political and economic emancipation for Jews at home—and for restoration as the grand solution to the problem of the Jews. It was also a convenient position for Jews trying to make their way in the Anglo-Saxon world. If the Jews could build a state of their own, said Benjamin Disraeli, the Jewish-born British statesman who rose to become one of the country’s most important prime ministers, they would be more like the English: attached to conservative values and deeply rooted in the land. In Israel, Jews would be manly and self-confident, the sort of people English Christians would like and admire. In identifying himself, however fancifully, with a Zionist movement that did not yet exist, Disraeli was able to reduce the perceived distance between himself and the landowning Tory squires on whom his political prospects would depend. He was the first, but by no means the last, political figure in the English-speaking world whose political standing among gentiles would benefit significantly from embracing the Zionist cause.
The Palestine Fixation
Nineteenth-century Americans were fascinated by the lands of the Bible. Improvements in travel and political concessions extorted from the Ottoman authorities made it possible for a handful of intrepid travelers to visit that hallowed soil in the 1840s and 1850s. After the Civil War, the development of steamships and the end of a period of political instability in Palestine opened the gates to much more extensive American travel.[29] On the last day of his life, Abraham Lincoln discussed with Mary Todd Lincoln his hopes to visit the Holy Land after his second term. Ulysses Grant visited Palestine on his world tour following his presidency.[30] The young Theodore Roosevelt visited Palestine as a teenager.[31] Following his visit to Palestine, Herman Melville wrote Clarel, an almost unreadable epic poem about the love between a literary American and the daughter of a Jerusalem rabbi. Mark Twain’s literary account of his visit helped make him a household name.[32] Lew Wallace, a Civil War general who served briefly as the U.S. minister (ambassador) to the Ottoman Empire, wrote the best-selling novel Ben-Hur.[33] After Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the best-selling book in the post–Civil War United States appears to have been an illustrated book of Holy Land travels by William M. Thomson (The Land and the Book, 1859). Chautauqua, the upstate New York institute whose conferences and lecture series became famous throughout the country, featured a scale model of the Holy Land on its grounds.[34]
Beyond the conventional travel destinations of Western Europe and the British Isles no spot on earth held a fascination for Americans greater than Palestine. Students and theologians pored painfully over the maps in their Bibles, tracing the movements of the ancient prophets and patriarchs across the sacred landscape. Lecturers could—and did—make an excellent living taking colored transparencies of Palestinian scenes from town to town across the United States.
Yet to American eyes, the land that the Bible famously described as “flowing with milk and honey” appeared bone dry and deserted in the nineteenth century, and its handful of inhabitants, Arabs and Jews, seemed deeply wretched and prey to disease and poverty. Mark Twain, in one of his popular travel columns, wrote: “From Abraham’s time till now, Palestine has been peopled only with ignorant, degraded, lazy, unwashed loafers and savages.”[35] For Twain (and for many Americans), the Holy Land was wasted on its current inhabitants, whose poor stewardship had turned the land of King Solomon and King David into, as Twain quipped, “the most hopeless, dreary, heartbroken piece of territory out[side] of Arizona.”[36]
With their vision of the land shaped by the biblical stories, Americans found evidence of a biblical curse on both the people and the land. Travel accounts almost invariably looked forward to a future time when the Jews would return and the land would bloom once again—as prophesied in the holy books.[37] Twain mentioned this “long-prophecied assembling of the Jews in Palestine”[38] but was skeptical about the willingness of the Jews to move to such a barren place.
In any case, many people in the Anglo-American world had a vision of the future of the Holy Land by the 1880s.[39] As the Ottoman Empire continued to weaken, it would lose the power to block Jewish settlement in Palestine. Jews around the world, Restorationists imagined, would be stirred with a longing to return to the home from which their ancestors had been ejected two thousand years previously. From dozens of countries, they would spontaneously return, embrace farming and democracy, and make the deserts bloom. A desolate land would grow fertile; a weak people would become strong; a nation despised and rejected would become proud and free.
Additionally, Americans expected that the newly restored Israel would have a special relationship with the United States.[40] The restoration of the Jews would involve their adoption of the principles of American life as they built a democratic and capitalist state. The new, Americanized Jewish commonwealth would be proof positive that the American way was the way to happiness and success, bringing wealth and power to even the weakest and most despised of the world’s peoples.
Once a Zionist movement formed among Jews and its leaders began to seek support among American gentiles, they were pushing on an open door. Many non-Jewish Americans did not see the Zionist movement as an attempt to impose a special Jewish agenda on the United States; rather, they saw it as an encouraging sign that at long last the Jews were climbing on an American bandwagon. The result, they were confident, would be the restoration of the Jews and the Americanization of the world.
Progress and the Jews
There was another element to the association between American values and the Jewish people. The march of liberal democracy was at the center of European politics in the optimistic atmosphere of the time. The great powers were divided between the liberal West and the reactionary East. Britain was the chief of the liberal powers and Russia the champion of reaction. There were free countries like the U.S., the U.K., and France (intermittently and sort of), and there were absolute monarchies like the Austrian, Russian, and Ottoman empires. The multinational empires, and the equally absolute petty principalities in Italy and Germany, opposed the cause of human freedom and opposed religious freedom. Protestants, for example, suffered discrimination and in some cases persecution in countries including Portugal, Spain, and the Papal States. The despotic rulers of these states were horrified by the French Revolution and by the Napoleonic Wars. Led by the Russian tsar and the Austrian emperor, the conservative European states instituted tough censorship laws, imposed dramatic restrictions on academic freedom (sometimes allowing only religious orders to staff universities), and did their best to hold the line against any form of representative government.[41]
The reactionary powers were predictable. Their rulers were usually committed to the theory of absolute rule. The legitimate emperor, king, prince, or archduke had a divine right to rule, and the people should be content with whatever constitution and limited rights he conceded them. The reactionary powers closely censored the press, used secret police agents and networks of domestic spies, and viewed religions other than that of the ruler with great suspicion. Where many different ethnic and religious groups lived under one imperial lord, as in the Austrian, Russian, and Ottoman empires, the rulers and their agents fought against the poison of nationalism, sensing that it was a deadly threat to the unity of their dominions.[42]
The progressives were also recognizable from country to country. Among them were heroic nationalists, daring journalists, victims of religious persecution, and idealistic young noblemen who followed the hallowed example of the Marquis de Lafayette to enlist in the cause of freedom. British and American newspapers and books recounted their exploits and the public followed their fortunes with sympathy and interest. At a time when most people did not yet realize what deadly forces nationalisms with their conflicting historical and geographical claims would awaken in due course, all nationalists seemed to be engaged in a common struggle against the despots. To be a nationalist was to be a democrat.[43] Nationalists everywhere wanted elected assemblies, confident that with a free press and free votes, their causes would triumph.
The evil reactionary powers organized themselves into a series of alliances with an overt antidemocratic agenda. Austria and Russia, two religious autocracies, worked together to crush democratic, nationalist movements within their territory and as far afield as Spain. The Austrians also supported despotic rulers throughout Italy and worked to protect papal rule in the Papal States around Rome. Americans felt at this time a great sense that the forces of darkness and evil were strong and determined, and that while the arc of history bent toward freedom and justice in the long run, it could sometimes use a helping hand.
One of the clear distinctions between the advanced, liberal, and progressive societies of the day and the authoritarian, backward-looking, and repressive societies was that almost universally the Jews were better off under liberal governments than under reactionary ones.[44] Liberal governments gave Jews civil and political rights. They could teach in universities, study for the professions, vote, and otherwise do everything that other citizens could do. Reactionary governments almost always kept their Jews under tight control. (Austrian chancellor Prince Metternich was an honorable exception.) The more backward the government, the more repressed were the Jews. Americans began to do something then that many still do today, using the way foreign cultures and regimes treated Jews to measure their degree of enlightenment and civilization.
Many of the Americans who looked askance at foreign mobs chasing Jews through the streets had no desire to see Jews in their own neighborhoods and social clubs. Even so, they saw zealous, conspiracy-spouting, and systemic antisemitism whether as mob violence or as government action as both a moral shortcoming and as a sign of civilizational backwardness. This was particularly the case when it came to Russia. Russian pogroms and restrictions against Jews helped create a climate of contempt in the United States for Russian backwardness and autocracy that still affects U.S.-Russian relations.[45]
The association of Jewish repression with absolute monarchy was a natural and logical one. The despotisms of the Old World were in most cases run by conservative, inquisitorial regimes that, desperately casting about for ideological legitimacy for absolute monarchical rule in a world where such policies seemed increasingly outdated, relied more and more on the authority of the Catholic or, in the Russian case, Orthodox Church. The Roman Catholic Church, which had been persecuted and proscribed under the French Revolution and which had lost vast landholdings in the era of upheaval, was happy to respond, and after the fall of Napoleon the Church for the most part blessed the return of the ancien régime. As they circled the wagons against the forces of democracy and modernity, princes and prelates tried to re-create the ideal of the Christendom of the Middle Ages. The state was a family, the prince was the father of the people, dissent was the work of the devil, and clerics sprinkled holy water over the edifice of tyranny restored. Such a political enterprise had no more place for the Jews than medieval Christianity. A prince relying on the Church to unify and pacify his dominions wouldn’t want Jewish university professors, journal editors, or even poets to disturb the purity and tranquility of the realm.
There was another similarity between the medieval order and the reactionary post-1815 European movement: the neo-medievalists had as much trouble with economics as their predecessors.[46] The Industrial Revolution turned Europe upside down in the generation after Napoleon fell. No matter how conservative governments were in religion and politics, their dominions were being revolutionized by the new industries of the day. New social classes were emerging, financial markets were gaining importance, and society was changing in ways that made it progressively harder for monarchs to go on ruling in the traditional way. Just as their medieval predecessors hated and feared the Jews, who, they thought, were in league with dark economic forces that undermined the structure of their society, so the princes and autocrats of the day saw the Jews as a source of economic as well as social and cultural danger.
For Jews (and for many other people who were frozen out by the traditional social and economic structures) the changing economic opportunities of the nineteenth century were heaven-sent. Merchants and traders could invest in new technologies and industries and build new fortunes in the new economy. New businesses and new professions sprang up that were open to talent, even as the aristocracy continued to dominate military and diplomatic life.
The increased internationalization of the investment economy seemed to favor the Jews. In London, Amsterdam, Paris, and other cities Jews were part of a rising new world of international banking. Like other capitalists in this dynamic and competitive era they looked to extend their operations through the rest of Europe. Economically and technologically backward countries to the east and south of the heartlands of the Industrial Revolution needed to borrow money, import technology, and accept increasing inroads by foreign firms. That such investment, humiliating and destabilizing under any circumstances and often representing a challenge to the economic dominance of the traditional aristocracy, sometimes appeared under Jewish auspices only exacerbated the perceived need of these governments to fight Jewish influence. It was as if the international financial system exported Jewish emancipation from the West to the East, and many who opposed the inroads of capitalist modernity into their societies would develop elaborate conspiracy theories about Jews, Freemasons, and perceived other enemies of traditional society.
But if the medieval governments and their nineteenth-century emulators tried to hold Jews down, they often also didn’t have much room for Protestants and liberals. The ideas of non-Jewish thinkers like Tom Paine were as destabilizing and dangerous as anything Jews might do. Indeed, one of the reasons the reactionaries feared Jews at home is they saw them as likely conduits for subversive liberal ideas from abroad.
Those who hated liberalism and who persecuted Jews and freethinkers, who censored the press and banned pro-democracy publications generally, also hated the United States and saw its democratic experiment as a danger to their own way of life. Aristocratic contempt of the transatlantic republic ran strong after 1815. It was no secret that most of Europe’s crowned heads and their servants hoped that the United States would fail.[47] A reactionary clergy and intellectual class in these countries lambasted the follies and sins of what they claimed was an anti-Christian and dangerous social experiment. When Pius IX, whose brief flirtation with liberal ideas ended abruptly after the Roman people rose against papal rule, set out to combat the evil ideology of liberal democracy, his notorious antiliberal encyclical The Syllabus of Errors read like a direct attack on everything Americans believed.
At a time when America as much as Great Britain was seen as a Protestant nation (as well as a mercantile, trading nation), French reactionary journalist Alphonse Toussenel would write that “behind the Protestants there is always Jewish power.” As a growing group of scholars including Ian Buruma, Michele Battini, Avishai Margalit, Andrei Markovits, and Philippe Roger have pointed out, from the reactionary period in the beginning of the nineteenth century onward, a nexus of prejudice against capitalism, Anglo-American culture, and the Jews was emerging in continental Europe. It would have its full flowering in the 1920s–1940s, not only in Germany but in France as well, and its influence can still be felt today.[48]
The association of liberal ideas and belief in human freedom with sympathy for the Jews was seen inside the United States and Britain as well as on the continent of Europe. In Britain, it was the liberal nonconformists and free trade advocates who wanted to tear down the last remaining barriers to full Jewish participation in British political and intellectual life. The socially conservative Anglicans and Tories were largely against it. One George William Finch-Hatton, 10th Earl of Winchilsea and 5th Earl of Nottingham, “violently opposed almost every liberal measure which was brought forward” during his tenure in the House of Lords, opposed the parliamentary reform of 1832 and both Jewish and Catholic emancipation. He went so far in his opposition to the Catholic Emancipation Act that he fought a duel with the Duke of Wellington while the latter was prime minister.[49]
The pattern was crystal clear. The people in Britain who supported democracy and wanted Britain to become more like America wanted British Jews to have full civil rights in Britain as they did in the United States. Those who wanted to preserve the remaining barriers (Jews could not take seats in Parliament or receive Oxford or Cambridge university degrees until after the American Civil War)[50] were often the same people who loathed American democracy, who mocked American ideas and values, and who fought the extension of American-style reforms as they tried to defend the privileges of the British aristocracy at home.
America was seen as the archetypal country of the democratic and modernizing revolution. In much of Europe, the Jews were seen as a prime beneficiary of and mover in that revolution. Those who hated and feared that revolution, hated and feared both the United States and the Jews. As the nineteenth century wore on, the vision of America and Britain as Jew-ridden plutocratic powers bent on imposing a heartless social system of naked greed on the rest of the world, destroying all civilized and social values in the lust for lucre that bound the calculating Yankee to the homeless Jew, gained ground. The anti-Dreyfusards in France were largely anti-American and antiliberal as well as antisemitic.[51]
For both liberals and reactionaries, attitudes toward the Jews were a “tell.” Someone who favored full and open Jewish participation in the political and cultural life of the day was likely to be a liberal who favored capitalism, wanted to dismantle the remaining power of aristocracies and monarchies, wanted governments based on popular vote, and favored religious liberty and the free press. People who held these views were almost inevitably pro-American, and saw the country, in spite of its flaws and shortcomings, as a repository of the hopes of mankind.
People who opposed the emergence of the Jews into the wider society tended to be opponents of liberalism, capitalism, and democracy, and also saw the growth of power and influence of the United States as a dangerous thing. The identification of Protestant Anglo-American capitalism with Jewish power is significantly older than the Zionist movement, and the perception that America is a pro-Jewish power antedates significant Jewish immigration to the United States.[52]
The association of liberal values, market capitalism, American democracy, and freedom for the Jews made historical sense. A liberal world order opens doors to Jewish participation that a reactionary world keeps tightly closed. Even before it became a superpower on the global stage, America was clearly a liberal power whose success would entail the reconstruction of the world on liberal lines. American intellectuals saw those around the world who agreed with it as allies in the war against ignorance and tyranny. They saw their opponents as narrow-minded reactionaries who hated the entire liberal program in politics and economics. They weren’t always wrong.