4 American Protestant Zionism and Pilgrimage Narratives

In the minds of American Protestants in the middle of the nineteenth century, Palestine was a static, Eastern, and oriental image. I will show how Zionism helped to transform it into a creatively based new political-prophetic mythology bearing Christian millennial hopes during the final half of the nineteenth century. For American Protestants, new ideas fostered by Dispensationalism meant that the settlement of Palestine by the Jews would hasten the millennium and act as a harbinger of the end times and the return of Christ. New Protestant perspectives on the Jews found in pilgrimage narratives contributed to the transformation of the ideal from Ottoman Palestine to Jewish homeland. Conservative Protestants forged a new alliance: they began to collaborate with Zionist Jews in a common goal: the colonization of the Holy Land by Jews residing in the West. Protestants sought to hasten Christ’s return through the fulfillment of biblical prophecy of the end times that would be signaled by the return of the Jews to Palestine. Pilgrimage narrative authors witnessed and reported widespread poverty and suffering, a plight that for many writers provided sad evidence of a “curse” of Christ-killing upon the Holy Land, and even upon the Jewish people.

Arguably, Judaism has always looked towards Palestine as a Promised Land [1] and has spoken in terms of a “return,” either literal or figurative, throughout history.[2] Hostile social attitudes (anti-Semitism) and campaigns in Europe combined with the climate of colonial expansionism made the young Zionist movement increasingly viable and attractive to Jews.[3] At the same time as new images of Palestine emerge, there is accompanying discussion of the role of Jews in history. Political “advocacy” in Protestant Pilgrim narratives, however, must be placed alongside the conundrum of the mention of biblical prophecies condemning the Holy Land and/or the Jews for killing or rejecting Christ in narratives. While regarding the Holy Land and Jews as blighted for rejecting Christ, Protestants were nevertheless swayed by an interpretation of Palestine in which the Jews would play a critical role in the future of Christianity. A diverse array of Protestants, including, for example, Clorinda Minor, W. E. Blackstone, Arno Gabelein, John Haynes Holmes, and Harry Emerson Fosdick, became activists for Zionism among their American Protestant readers and audiences. In addition, prophetic conferences and Bible institutes helped to popularize programs that would help provide for the swift resettlement of Jews in Palestine after the turn of the century.

THE ORIGINS OF MODERN PROTESTANT ZIONISM

Arguably, Zionism was the response of nineteenth-century Jewish youth to the anti-Semitism that had been prevalent in Western society for centuries, and a few key leaders helped to make the movement, which was centered in Vienna, a focal point for politics in the 1880s and 1890s. The new ideas were quickly disseminated in America through universities and the popular press. Viennese Theodore Herzl (1860–1904) was a man that many consider the father of Zionism, a man who for many conservative Christians “wore the mien of a prophet” and organized the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897.[4] Other key Jewish organizers were Max Nordau (1849–1923) and Martin Buber (1878–1965). While the Haskala or “Enlightenment” movement of the late eighteenth century had urged Jews to assimilate,[5] this was ultimately unsuccessful because “the Jews were regarded as a strange tribe, a horde of deicides whose aim was by propaganda to infuse their spirit into the Christian peoples and in addition to obtain possession of great wealth.”[6] Yet Jews effectively bridged the cultural chasm between communities through shared Scriptures—they organized themselves and joined Christian millennarians who had an interest in a Jewish return to Palestine through Zionism.

The organizers of the first Zionist Congress wanted to gain the support of Jewish masses and win a war of words against the liberal elite that still tirelessly advocated cultural assimilation.[7] The Zionists were successful and set up the World Zionist Organization in Vienna with Herzl as president. Opposed only by a handful of liberals, “the intensity of the debate suggested the charismatic appeal of Zionism” for many.[8] Herzl preached that “if you will it, it is no dream.”[9] With Zionism, suddenly Jews from Europe and America were united in a common cause and were supported by many established Christians. Herzl’s international campaign made him a “renowned international prophet and diplomat in America.”[10] In New York, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise carried the momentum forward, finding many followers among the Eastern Jewish poor. Herzl said that “the character of a people may be ruined by charity.”[11] Hence, Jews should sieze the opportunity to fashion new opportunities in Palestine. Herzl wrote in his book, The Jewish State, that “the anti-Semites will become our most loyal friends, the anti-Semite nations will become our allies.”[12]

Clorinda Minor, an American Millerite of limited means who went on pilgrimage to Palestine in 1850, became an early pioneer of the idea of agricultural renewal as a path towards aiding the plight of Jews in Palestine, keeping in mind her ideal of cooperating with God to complete the outward preparatory work for Israel’s return. “Her role within the eschatological drama was solely to restore the Land so the people of Israel, and through them the Gentiles, could return under God’s direction.”[13] She imagined a mutually profitable enterprise at a farm called Alta outside of Bethlehem that would develop Palestine for future settlement while alleviating the severe poverty among the Jews. While visiting Hebron, she was visited by Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebeccah, and Leah in a dream. They looked upon her and “Ishmael’s seed” and said “thrice welcome, children of another fold, thrice welcome home! . . . I drank in the sense of their rejoicing at the glory now soon to be fulfilled!”[14] After Minor, many would attempt to plant agricultural settlements and colonies in Palestine.

After 1892 Baron Rothschild, a wealthy English Jew remembered as “the Benefactor,”[15] became an entrepreneur of a Jewish experimental farming empire in Palestine. He successfully introduced innovations in agriculture while implanting a “caste of white settlers in Palestine parasitically dependent on hired fellahin labor.”[16] He laid the groundwork for the later masses of American Jewish immigration. Driven by a “kind of delirium,” Edmund Rothschild forged “a cadre of Spartan, pious, self-reliant yeoman cultivators amidst the dunes and rubbles” of Palestine.[17] An American Protestant pilgrim in 1903, however, detracted from the idealism of the venture when he proclaimed the farms a complete “failure.”[18] According to Protestant pilgrim Curtis, since Rothschild gave each Jewish refugee an ample home and a daily allowance, they had no incentive to work. Curtis observed that many were “indolent, indifferent, neglectful, and mischievous . . . they remained in their villages trading jack-knives and engaging in other petty mercantile transactions and theological disputes, and hired Arabs to do work for them.”[19]

By 1900, many of the relocated Jewish workers had drifted away, while others, “loafers,” were seen “promenading, standing around in groups, gossiping with each other.”[20] Curtis concluded that “Baron Rothschild overdid himself and pampered his colonists too much,” or that in essence, he “pauperized” them.[21] Some resettled Jews “occupied their time abusing the management,” while others reportedly stated that “there are too many Jews in Palestine already.”[22] The grand dream of Zionism evidenced by Rothschild’s settlements appeared a bit ridiculous to Curtis, a notable Chicago journalist. He found the million-dollar philanthropic scheme a catastrophe. The Rothschild plan of twenty agricultural colonies, however, looked brilliant on paper and sounded highly progressive to donors in the West, who created funds in an ongoing fashion to continue the resettlement work. Zionism was an idealistic plan that may have looked better on paper than in real life during the 1890s.

In 1915 Chaim Weitzman met with Lord Sykes (MP and government advisor on the Middle East) promising assistance from all Jews in the Middle East. On the other hand T. E. Lawrence, the British officer renowned for his liaison role during the Arab Revolt against the Turks from 1916 to 1918, was pro-British and pro-Arab and wrote to Sykes against the Zionist plan to buy up Palestine. By 1919, however, the battle over minds had already been won. Arthur Balfour assured Lord Rothschild in a letter that the Jews were increasingly being seen as a cohesive political entity able to exert their weight collectively.[23]

The political agenda of the Zionists pushed forward after the turn of the century, and Theodor Herzl stepped up to this task with a brilliant sense of tactics. Once an elite secularist, Herzl had had a utopian perspective on the future of society during his youth. Yet his own experience of vicious anti-Semitism, particularly the Dreyfus Affair of 1894, led him to reject socialist solutions. In 1896 he published Judenstaat, advocating resettlement.[24] Herzl originally regarded Jews in general with distaste, as being physically and mentally restricted due to what he called the “crossbreeding” of the ghettos. He abandoned hope of assimilation when he noted that anti-Semitism threatened all Jews including the elite, himself included.[25] Employing romantic and feudal values, Herzl advocated Zionism under the rubric of offended aristocratic honor.[26] Originally Herzl had rejected the idea of gradual progress. He wanted to communicate directly with the Pope to organize a mass conversion of Jews to Roman Catholicism in exchange for help against anti-Semitism. When this was unsuccessful, Herzl converted to the Zionist cause.

Like Herzl, many wondered what to do about the “Jewish problem.” At the end of the nineteenth century, anti-Semites often attacked all Jews, regardless of their position on assimilation. The American depression of the 1870s caused lasting conflict and misery on a scale never seen before in the United States and Jewish immigrants were often attacked.[27] In May 1892 in Berlin, for example, three hundred thousand copies of a flier entitled “Talmud-Auszug” were spread across the city, fanning the flames of hatred. One excerpt demonstrates their bitter anger:

The Talmud is the spawn of the Jewish brain, it has become a curse to the nation, a curse that can never be gotten rid of. . . . The horrible, abysmal hatred for all non-Jews, especially Christians, speaks from this work of the devil, it shows the cowardice, the mistrust, and shamelessness of Judaism, its revolting arrogance, haughtiness, its chosenness, and it declares behaviors, which every other creature with a human countenance brands as a crime.[28]

Anti-Semites worsened what was already becoming an unbearable situation, in particular by reviving the ancient charges of ritual murder, the subversion of Christian society, and deicide. During the years 1904–1907, some writers began to assert that Jews had no place in modern society since they refused to assimilate. Jews were “people who flit through life like shadows, who feel nothing for the country they live in, who despise their host nation as impure creatures, who feel nothing for the country they live in, who detest the language, morals and customs, and everything that is holy to these nations.”[29] Some feared the subversion of Christian society. In many cases, Jews were seen as people outside the social fabric, failures at the assimilation that was seen as so critical to public life. In 1894, Bernard Lazare wrote that “at the bottom of the anti-Semitism of our own days . . . are the fear of, and hatred for, the stranger.”[30] In response to anti-Semitic accusations, Herzl wrote in 1896, “We have sincerely tried everywhere to merge with the national communities in which we live, seeking only to preserve the faith of our fathers. It is not permitted to us.”[31]

In response to the cultural crisis posed by overcrowded ghettos and rising anti-Semitism, and failure of assimilation in nationalizing Western countries, leaders such as Herzl abandoned their liberal hopes for assimilation. Herzl once proclaimed, “A man who invents a terrible explosive does more for peace than a thousand mild apostles.”[32] Farming settlements in Palestine were an escape hatch from the boiling political pot. Zionism seemed the perfect solution. Herzl became an imposing political presence during the 1890s and was often called “Führer,” “Heil,” and “Lord Israel.” Seeking a new Jewish society with an authoritarian structure, he later advocated a “democratic monarchy” for Palestine.[33] For Herzl and his Zionist followers, Palestine was symbolically empty, and he did not consider a particular role for native Palestinians other than as hired labor.

While Dreyfus was eventually cleared of charges, the trial and its aftermath led to a massive split in French society, with supporters of Jews on one side and detractors on the other.[34] The political base for the young Zionist movement was clearly defined. By the turn of the century, only a few elite, liberal, assimilated European Jews opposed Herzl, and he applied these double pincers to his dwindling Jewish detractors: the anti-Semitic elite cultural leaders on the one hand, and the ghettoes and Eastern European Jewry on the other.[35] Therefore, those opposing Herzl were under attack from both ends of the social spectrum. Herzl successfully appealed to Baron Rothschild,[36] who subsequently gave Zionism significant financial support. In constant contact, New York rabbis quickly disseminated the movement in America.

As stated above, the young Zionist movement was remarkable in that it appealed to Jews in both Europe and America since both had teeming ghettos and anti-Semitism. In the American context, Jewish communities were seldom singled out for particular persecution, but rather were lumped together with other “foreigners,” as the “scapegoat for a vast variety of curses that many Americans would be rid of: city dwellers, peddlers, bankers, non-Protestants, non–Anglo-Saxons, anarchists, freethinkers, etc.”[37] The ubiquitous idea of nation that ultimately fed into fascism in the West was a racial one.[38] The American context was only slightly less inhospitable than the European one, though, because Jews were thought of as only one of many undesirable groups, rather than as a unique “menace,” as in Europe. At one point, a shocking proposal was even made to resettle Jews residing in the West to Uganda.[39] Yet Zionism had already become popular in Africa—new Christian Zionist congregations with a messianic and millennial emphasis were already to be found in Liberia, the Ivory Coast, and the Congo.[40] It seems that everywhere there was discussion of the resettlement of the Jews to Palestine in light of Christian prophecy.

To some Zionist American historians a unique interpretation of the shared Old Testament Bible became central. Israel became the “3rd commonwealth during the last decades of the nineteenth century—with the first and second being Joshua’s invasion of Canaan, and the second the culmination of the Maccabean state.”[41] Rather than a bitter expulsion, Zionism was a fulfillment of biblical history and prophecy. Zionist historians look to David Ben Gurion (1886–1973) and his claim that “we were drawing ever closer to the source and historic root of our nationhood and to the spiritual legacy of the biblical period.”[42] Ben Gurion, having settled in Palestine in a 1906 agricultural colony, was considered the “father of the nation.” Zionist settlers promoted a sense of direct continuity with the biblical past, an idea that many American Protestants also liked. In fact, the Bible seemed to justify Jewish domination in the Holy Land. In the Old Testament, Israelites were commanded by God to possess the land and to annihilate all of its inhabitants,[43] claiming it for their own. In some passages, no woman or child should be spared, and all the riches were the reward for the military campaigns. Under a rubric of continuity, the Old Testament, or the particularly holy and crucial Torah[44] for Jews, itself mandated the possession of Palestine by any means necessary. In fact, the word “Palestine” is often thought of as merely a degradation of the ancient term “philistine,” making the biblical link perhaps even more prominent for those who sought to use a biblical warrant to claim the land exclusively for Jewish settlers.

As I have shown, the decline of liberal politics advocating Jewish assimilation, the failure of integration, urban poverty and unrest, along with American and European anti-Semitism only fueled early fires of pan-Jewish Zionism from 1880 to 1900. The early movement also advocated violence but later focused on resettlement. Jews were roundly criticized for not properly assimilating into modern societies, for being disloyal to their host countries, and even for Christ-killing and ritual murder in some situations. Jewish leaders such as Herzl thus abandoned assimilationist programs and advocated the resettlement of Jews in Palestine, an idea that became increasingly popular among Protestants because of millennial hopes. Millennial movements during the nineteenth century provided fertile soil for the seeds of Zionism.

THE PROTESTANT BATTLE OVER MILLENNIALISM, PROPHECY, AND THE JEWS

Protestants picked up Zionist ideals with great interest. They were introduced to the idea of resettlement during the 1870s and 1880s and came to relatively widespread assent to Zionism during the 1890s, a pattern that mirrors the Jewish experience. By the first decades of the twentieth century, political Zionism had taken over as a dominant force. By the close of World War I, Zionism was nearly unchallenged among the theologically conservative, but it also had advocates in the liberal camp, including both Philip Schaff and Henry Van Dyke. Even so, a small handful of liberals advocating assimilation fought against this prophetic vision.

Background

The expectation that Jews would return to Palestine has been a “persistent motif in Christian history.”[45] Furthermore, the idea of reading about, studying, and imagining the Orient was nothing new in nineteenth-century America.[46] For example, William Brewster carried a travel narrative with him on the Mayflower advocating the colonization of the Orient. Academic institutions in New England such as Harvard always stressed the importance of Oriental familiarity.[47] The expectation once found only in the halls of academia became a popular movement at the end of the nineteenth century.

The East was also a topic in New England pulpits. Puritan theology was fascinated with Hebrew lore, and Puritans saw themselves as latter-day Israelites in the wilderness. Yet Zion was also sometimes a sublimation during the nineteenth century, divorced from this-worldly reality, as in African American Christianity. Mormons also speak of a Zion that is purely transcendent.[48] For still many others the idea of the Jews returning to Palestine called to mind their American affinities with pioneer life and religious zeal.

Elias Boudinot (1740–1821), a congressman from New Jersey, wrote A Star in the West, a book that looked toward the restoration of the Jews to Palestine.[49] But the most important popularizer of the restoration idea was John Nelson Darby (1800–1882). Although he was English, he traveled and spoke extensively in the United States. Darby was the dominant personality in the Plymouth Brethren, an American movement that emphasized biblical prophecy and the second coming of Christ. They also argued for literal rather than spiritual readings of the word “Israel” and regarded many Old Testament promises as yet unfulfilled.[50] Dispensationalism is the idea that human history is divided up into dispensations, or epochs, each of which has a covenant plan from God, wholly based upon a ‘literal’ reading of the Bible.[51] By the time of Darby’s death in 1882, his Dispensationalist teachings were well-established, and ideas of restoration exploded in popularity along with the premillennialist framework.[52] The return of the Jews to Palestine was a part of the Dispensationalist prophecy. Yet during the 1880s and 1890s, mainline liberal postmillennialists fought against the premillennialists (such as Dwight Moody and Ira Sankey) in Bible conferences over the role of Palestine in Christian millennialism. Postmillennialism had been widely accepted among American Protestants during the middle of the nineteenth century, but by the turn of the century it would become the minority view, eclipsed by Dispensationalism and Zionism. According to James Moorhead,

The postmillennialist hermeneutic was profoundly ambiguous. It wanted to treat the hope of the Apocalypse partly as a figurative truth and partly as literal. Against the premillenarians, for example, postmillennialists fought verse by verse, insisting that prophecy had a spiritual rather than carnal fulfillment. Prophecies of a political kingdom for the Jews were types of Christianity’s religious influence.[53]

Liberal mainstream postmillennialists sought progress for a “kingdom without end” that de-emphasized supernaturalism, while extolling the virtues of constant optimistic kingdom-building activity, while, on the other side, masses of Protestants were entranced by a more pessimistic premillennialist schemework into which Zionism fit neatly. Dispensationalism held that they lived in dangerous, tumultuous “end times.” All Protestants were encouraged to view events in the Middle East through an apocalyptic lens. Yet, liberals hesitated and opted for a symbolic interpretation of end-time prophecies, choosing not to replicate the mistake of those first-century Christians who erroneously assumed that Christ would return during their lifetimes.[54] The acceptance of Zionism among American Protestants varied from group to group in its ease and scope, but it succeeded overall in becoming an influential ideology among many by World War I.

Fundamentalists, Moody, and Zionism

As stated above, the early Fundamentalist movement rejected symbolic interpretations in favor of literal ones, so that the biblical term “Israel” became synonymous with “modern Jews and geographical Palestine.” For example, the first large gathering of Fundamentalists in 1878 emphasized a literal restoration of contemporary Jews to Palestine, claiming that Jews would be “gathered back” to “Israel” in their unconverted state at the end times.[55] They asserted that the signs of the events of the end times were already taking place. Israel had to be Palestine and the Jews, not the Christian church, as was previously the accepted practice among liberal contemporaries. For conservative groups such as early Fundamentalists, “Israel” could only mean modern Jews.[56]

The influential, popular American evangelist, Dwight L. Moody (1837–1899), whose “rough-hewn sermons with homely anecdotes”[57] were well received by the public, both mirrored and helped to shape American attitudes towards Palestine and the Jews. As premillennialist sentiment that anticipated darker end times increased throughout the United States, there was a clear impact upon Moody. While Moody did not constantly seek signs, he stopped all evangelizing among Jews before the turn of the century, because he came to agree that all Jews would be geographically restored to Palestine in an unconverted state at the end time.[58] The Jews would bring about the return of Christ by playing a unique role in the drama of salvation history.

Moody agreed with other conservatives regarding the link between biblical prophecy of the end times and modern Jews—the idea that when the Jews returned to Israel, Christ would come again. Like others, however, he at times contradicted himself, claiming on the one hand that Jews were the “sinning sons of Israel” who “stubbornly persisted” in disobeying God because they did not receive Christ, while on the other hand claiming to have profound respect for Jews, saying, “Isn’t every Jew a monument of God’s word?” Later he adopted a policy urging converted Jews to remain Jewish in practice, i.e., not to “gentilize but to remain Jews who believe in Christ.”[59]

James H. Brookes

Another influential American writer who helped to popularize Zionism among Christians was James H. Brookes, a Presbyterian pastor in St. Louis, who wrote the periodical The Truth or Testimony for Christ from 1875 to 1897. It has been called “the granddaddy of early Fundamentalist periodicals.”[60] A central discussion point was the idea that Christians appeal to every curse against Israel as an argument in favor of the divine origin of the Bible as evidenced by history, while appropriating to themselves every promise of forgiveness, restoration, and happiness. Going against liberal trends that spiritualized Bible interpretations, Brookes popularized the belief in “imminent return”[61] (of the Jews to Palestine), founding and leading the influential Niagara Bible Conference from 1875–1900. Brookes’s appeals for the resettlement of the Jews in Palestine therefore reached a significant American audience. In addition, Brookes counted C. I. Scofield, editor of the premillennial Dispensationalist Scofield Reference Bible (1909), as his parishioner.[62] The Scofield Reference Bible included in its footnotes literal interpretations of prophecies regarding the restoration of the Jews as well as broad support for Zionist ideals[63] and reached a broad Protestant audience. Ironically, for many Protestants, the new footnotes in the Bible were often regarded as nearly equal to Scripture. Thus those familiar with the Scofield Reference Bible may have given applied prophecies to modern Jews more often than others did.

By the turn of the century, the Zionist political movement had become closely linked with conservative evangelical Christianity. By World War I, however, Zionism had gained even wider support among progressives eager to solve American social problems. In addition, the conservative “millenarians grew more aggressive . . . the ideal of a constantly improving world in which presently peace would reign, had been shattered.”[64] The war to end all wars had nearly destroyed optimism about human progress. Yet, still fighting for gradual optimistic improvement, Shirley Jackson Case called these Zionist evangelical opponents of liberal progress “the premillennialist menace.” He argued that the kingdom would be ushered in by persuasion rather than by force. He also held that Zionist premillennialists represent a delusional mindset that tries to “resuscitate ancient millenarianism with its primitive world view.”[65] In reply to this charge, conservative Zionist premillennialists argued that liberals made “an inconsistent attempt to unite modern spirituality with the primitive view.”[66] While the theological battles raged on, however, broader public opinion had definitively shifted in favor of Zionism.

The Battle over Prophecy

If sheer numbers determined the outcome, the conservatives won a smashing victory of persuasion regarding Palestine, prophecy, and restoration. Many regarded with suspicion the “Secular Great Awakening” of late nineteenth-century Protestant liberals. Further, many Christians liked the appealing connection that premillennialists made between current events and biblical prophecy because it helped to give meaning to events that could otherwise be confusing.

Not all Evangelicals were premillennialists before 1875, but by the 1880s many had changed their minds. Israel and the Church were two distinct peoples of God, and God had a distinct plan for Israel (read, “modern Jews”) in Palestine.[67] In the years before World War I, Zionism grew widespread and popular among Evangelicals, who then retroactively regarded the movement they’d created together with Jews such as Herzl as the historical fulfillment of biblical prophecy. Jewish and Christian Zionists often collaborated closely[68] because they shared a common goal of restoration of modern Jews to Zion.

The emphasis upon the fulfillment of prophecy, combined with the belief that the term “Israel” in the Bible was a direct reference to modern Jews, helped to discourage the idea of a Christian Holy Land in Palestine. The rhetoric of conquer was arguably much less central to the New Testament. Yet, from the fourth to the seventh centuries, Christians had viewed Jerusalem as their own uniquely Christian city, as did those who fought there during the Crusades.[69] For nineteenth-century Christians, however, Palestine was Christian in a spiritual sense only, but a homeland for Jews in a literal sense if one read biblical prophecy correctly.[70]

The push to resettle Jews in Palestine was not necessarily a spiritual solution to a spiritual problem. It also helped to rid American and European cities of immigrants often thought to be “undesirable.” Whether non-Jews opted for Jewish relocation to a far-off land as an expression of affinity or of disdain is difficult to tell, as every shade of feeling is present. Much later in the 1930s the Nazi party in Germany exhibited similar ambivalence regarding the Zionist movement, at times expressing strong support for it and at other times preventing Jewish emigration to Palestine.[71] The social context is also one in which schemes for the resettlement of American blacks to Africa were occasionally proposed and the inhabitants of the city (many of whom were Jewish) were thought to represent a blight or social problem.

In addition, the newly popular premillennialist framework included an anti-Semitic prophecy that the Jewish state will be led by the Antichrist, a sinister yet famous Jew. A reign of terror would leave only one-third of Jews alive, and at the beginning of the millennium Jesus would be ruler of the world and all Jews would convert to Christianity, abandoning rabbinical Judaism forever.[72] By the end of the nineteenth century, such beliefs had become widely accepted by evangelical Christians. In the premillennialist scheme, the Jewish nation was a pawn, a means to a Christian end. Though making strange bedfellows, the link between conservative Christians and Zionist Jews strengthened and exerted great influence upon public opinion. The link between the politics and the eschatology is clearly found in the ideal of the “return” of the Jews to Palestine as a harbinger of the second coming of Christ.

W. E. Blackstone

One Protestant Zionist worthy of note was W. E. Blackstone (1841–1935), a Methodist associate of Moody’s, and a successful businessman. His bestselling book Jesus is Coming was first published in 1878 and went through multiple editions. A runaway success, approximately seven hundred thousand copies of the book were printed, and it was translated into thirty-one languages.[73] It was “the most popular dispensationalist tract in the world,” and it loudly supported the imminent return of the Jews to Palestine.[74]

The publication of Jesus is Coming was only the beginning of Blackstone’s Zionist political activity. In 1891, he petitioned President Benjamin Harrison requesting the relocation of persecuted Russian Jews to Palestine and the creation of a pan-Jewish homeland. This petition predates the first Zionist Congress by six years and anticipates the rise of organized political Zionism in Europe. It was signed by 413 prominent Americans including J. P. Morgan (1837–1913), John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937), and William McKinley (1843–1901). In constant close contact with leaders of the Jewish community, Blackstone organized a Christian-Jewish conference in 1890 on the topic of the Jewish return to Palestine. Many of Blackstone’s earlier writings bear a striking resemblance to Herzl’s later, well-known Zionist proposal.

By 1916 Blackstone had decades of successful activism behind him. That year he wrote the “Zionist Memorial to President Woodrow Wilson,” cosigned by leaders of mainline Protestant denominations, as well as heads of state. A rabbi popularized the story that in 1917 during a private conversation with President Wilson regarding the Blackstone Memorial, Wilson exclaimed, “To think that I, the son of a manse, could restore the Jews to Palestine!”[75]

Central to Blackstone’s popular view of Jews and Palestine was the idea of a “curse” over the Holy Land and the Chosen People of God. In Jesus is Coming, Blackstone affirms that Jews are God’s people and are “still beloved and dear to God.” At times, however, he contradicts himself and lapses into anti-Semitism: “in the first Restoration, because of their blindness, and hard, stony hearts, they rejected and killed Jesus. But in the future Restoration they shall repent of all this, and have clean hearts.”[76] While the curse of Christ-killing and rejecting Christ still hangs over them, according to Blackstone, in the future Jews will have the opportunity to redeem their race. The redemption, however, will not come without a price. The guilt of innocent blood was upon the Jewish people and “there is an awful time of trouble awaiting her [Israel or the Jews].”[77] Blackstone wanted to bring Jews to Jerusalem for their “ultimate exclusion from the Christian millennium.”[78]

Blackstone traveled to Jerusalem and concluded that it must return to Jewish rather than Christian hands, because it was “so long trodden down by the Gentiles.” For Blackstone, Christianity and Judaism were inseparable. He wrote, “A Virgin Jewess was the mother of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Jesus was a Jew, and all the light and joy of his salvation has come to us through Israel.”[79] Further, Blackstone held that Jews were superior to all other races, and, given a free chance, Jews would “outstrip all competitors and rise to leadership in every nation.”[80] Currently under bondage to heathen in the ghettos of the West, Jews should be given the Holy Land that had previously been denied to them because of the curse of deicide. The favor of God notwithstanding, Blackstone claimed that the Jews continued to reap punishment for their rejection of Christ. So convinced was Blackstone of the truth of his assertions that he housed a cache of his tracts in Palestine so that Jews could read it and convert during the imminent “time of Jacob’s trouble” that he anticipated.

Although contradictory to modern eyes, Blackstone’s writings won the support of his contemporaries, including signers and readers of his 1890 petition and 1916 Memorial, many of whom held positions of power both inside and outside of Protestant Churches. Because the assimilation of the Jews had failed, Blackstone’s plan to resettle Jews in Palestine in keeping with prophecy was immensely popular and exerted significant influence upon public thinking.

Arno C. Gaebelein

Another Christian Zionist of note was Arno C. Gaebelein (1861–1945), a turn-of-the-century missionary to urban American Jews who taught himself both Yiddish and Hebrew, composed evangelical tracts, established the “Hope of Israel” mission in the New York ghettos, and wrote a book entitled The History of the Scofield Reference Bible. He offered physical relief to Jewish families, a few of whom responded to his religious call or converted to conservative Protestantism. Ultimately he wanted to amalgamate belief in Christ with Judaism, and he believed along with premillennialists that the future of Jews held both destruction and glory.

Gaebelein edited a journal entitled Our Hope that held a critical place in the Fundamentalist movement [81] by influencing many who knew little about Jews and Judaism. In this respect, Gaebelein’s mission was one of education and enlightenment to Christian churches, not to “the Jew.”[82] In his journal, Gaebelein explained Jewish colonization societies such as Choveve Zion, Benai Zion, and Shove Zion and charted their progress in light of the Christian faith. Gaebelein read Jewish periodicals and passed on information to his Christian audience, so that in 1895 he was engulfed with demands for speaking engagements and sought after as an expert on modern Jews and Palestine.

An excerpt from Our Hope in 1896 demonstrates how Gaebelein introduced and popularized the idea of Jewish return in the United States:

It shows the great interest awakened on the question in our day. Only a few short years ago an earnest discussion of this subject would have been practically impossible except among close students of prophecy. The general intelligent public both Jewish and Christian, would have declined to entertain the mere thought as a wild dream. Dr. Herzl . . . has succeeded in getting it before the minds of the public.[83]

Gaebelein used his journal to publicize Zionism and considered himself a “Christian Zionist” like Blackstone. By 1896, he congratulated himself, Dr. Theodore Herzl of Vienna, and the movement for its great success in achieving a widespread, curious, and in many cases affirming, public. For Christian Zionists such as Gabelein, there was an inseparable, organic, and prophetic connection between Judaism and Christianity that was ordained by God and plainly shown in the Bible.

Nonevangelical or Liberal “Christian Zionists”

While mainline Christians, particularly liberals, comprised a much later generation of Christian Zionists, there were a few early supporters of Jewish restoration, such as Episcopal Professor Philip Schaff, a forerunner among liberals. Liberal Christians did not, however, act as organizers and facilitators before the turn of the century, because bitter theological battles were being fought over the role of the Bible and the Jews in Christian millennialism.

Popular travel author and mystic Laurence Oliphant (1829–1888) wrote during the early 1880s that Palestine was a favorable home for the Jews because “Christian fanaticism in Eastern Europe is far more bitter than Moslem; and indeed the position of Jews in Turkey is relatively favored.”[84] The idea of settling Jews in Palestine, while “often urged on sentimental or scriptural grounds,” was a “practical and commonsense solution” that would preclude future difficulties with Jews. Oliphant wrote that Zionism is a “theological chimera” for Christians, but that Christians should avoid prejudice purely on that basis. Oliphant did not want mainline Christians to favor Zionism simply because “a large section of the Christian community” advocated it. Instead, Christians should look at Zionism with fresh eyes as an “important political and strategic question.”[85] Towards the end of his life, Oliphant founded a small religious community in Palestine dedicated to purifying relations between the sexes while he continued to write and speak in favor of Jewish “resettlement” in Palestine.

Like other liberal Protestant thinkers during the first part of the twentieth century, Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) identified Zionism as a progressive solution to the problems of urban Jews.[86] Others who were likeminded included Presbyterian Edwin Sherman Wallace, U.S. Consul to Jerusalem from 1893–1898;[87] John Haynes Holmes (1879–1964), Unitarian pacifist and social reformer; and social gospel affiliate, and Walter Clay Lowdermilk (1888–1974), soil scientist, geologist, and Palestine conservation leader. Thought to be a creative alternative to cynicism, Zionism offered liberals an avenue for social reform. For example, Holmes, interested in the “social question,”[88] wrote that “the Zionist cause must succeed” after his tour of Palestine.

One unique figure, Warder Cresson, left his American family and farm in the spring of 1844, emigrated to the Holy Land, and converted from Christianity to Judaism, authoring a pamphlet entitled The Key of David in 1852.[89] He argued that the Scriptures had only been fulfilled spiritually thus far, and that “Jerusalem is to be transformed to conform to biblical promises” in reality.[90] He established Jewish agricultural settlements and urged wide-scale Christian conversion to Judaism.

These few examples of Christian Zionists and activists—from Fundamentalists to Unitarians—show how captivating the idea of Zionism was to many Protestants. It did not follow, however, that the Zionism adopted by Protestants supported the Jews wholeheartedly. Instead, at times it provided convenient relief for social problems, and fit neatly into a Christian millennial framework in which the Jews were prominent players who would usher in the foretold end times by fulfilling prophecy. The following section will show how many American Pilgrim Protestants, both conservative and liberal, thought that the Holy Land and the Jewish people lived under a divine curse. Their narratives on the subject provide an important piece in the larger puzzle of how American opinion regarded Palestine and Zionism.

JEWS, PALESTINE, AND THE CURSE

While on pilgrimage, many Protestants commented in their popular travel narratives on the small, impoverished, Jewish population, and then reflected upon scriptural texts pronouncing curses against them. The idea of a general curse may have helped American Protestants to understand the abject misery of the local inhabitants. Most became convinced that Palestine was desolate not because it had been badly ruled for centuries, but because it had lost God’s favor. As mentioned above, groups of Protestants on pilgrimage read Scripture out loud as well as individually. Whenever possible, they would read a particular Scripture passage relating to a specific location. As a result, Scripture passages including curses were read at sites of ruins or neglected villages, affording an opportunity to reflect upon the truth of the prophecies. At Capernaum, Jesus said, “Woe unto you, Korazin. Woe to you, Bethsaida.”[91] Some carried this a step further, concluding that not just a few towns, but the whole land had been afflicted by a general curse for killing Christ and the prophets. Still others concluded that all Jews and Palestine labored under the same curse. Whichever the reasoning, the curse of deicide or the result of prophetic blight was a central theme. Sometimes this curse was even used to explain negative historical events.

As early as 1822, the pioneering missionary Pliny Fisk held that the physical land was cursed because most of the residents were enemies of the faith.[92] Fisk wrote in 1823 that “we felt as though Jerusalem were a place accursed of God, and given over to iniquity.”[93] Jews, Turks, Greeks, and Armenians all contributed to the state of affairs in which Fisk later wrote, “the wrath of God burns hot against Jerusalem.”[94] The idea of a curse was nearly ubiquitous among nineteenth-century Protestant pilgrims to Palestine. In 1850, the normally optimistic pilgrim Clorinda Minor remarked while visiting the Jordan River that “here I considered the curse that still rests on the fair heritage of Jacob. The fountains and wells have failed, the wells have been filled with stones and lost, the sky is like brass, and the earth has become like ashes.”[95] Similarly during the 1850s, William Prime reflected on well-known Bible verses, saying that “wild rocks were everywhere, ragged and fierce in their utter barrenness, and hill and valley were alike apparently cursed with the curse of God.”[96] Pilgrims did not always speak in general terms—in many cases they mentioned specific verses and cities. For example, when Frances Willard saw a woman with her eyes scooped out by leprosy, she wrote of Jerusalem, “a city shrunken within its walls—ever so much empty space—fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy,[97]‘Zion shall never be plowed as a field.’”[98] When Willard visited Tyre, she wrote of the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy regarding the place, quoting, “Tyre, thou shalt never be any more.”[99] Neglect in Palestine showed the truth of biblical prophecy as well as the cost of disobedience.

During the 1870s, politician William Seward (1801–1872) wrote that God deserted Palestine because its inhabitants rejected Christ and because of its stubbornness: “Long before the fall of Jerusalem the ‘star of the empire’ had begun to move westward. It is likely to move in the same direction until it returns to the point in the heavens whence it took its departure.”[100] A common view, civilization or the star, a symbol of Christ’s rule, had moved westward, presumably to Greece, then to Rome, until it rested above America. For Philip Schaff, Palestine was both loved and deserted by God. Reflecting upon this paradox, he wrote that Jerusalem was “the most holy, and the most unholy place on earth.”[101]

Traveling in the 1880s, Matilde Serao reflected upon what had happened to Palestine because the Jews rejected Christ and Jesus cursed various towns and their inhabitants. Palestine was the home of all that rejected Jesus:

This high city [Jerusalem], perched above ravines and lying among the debris of the centuries, might, it seemed, be the abode not of men and women and children, but the dwelling place of ruthless emotions such as Pride and Arrogance and Hate. As I sat down for a long while looking down on Jerusalem, I thought to myself: that is undoubtedly the place that crucified Jesus Christ. Like an echo to my thought came a terrible reply: “and it would probably do so again.”[102]

Jerusalem seemed haunted to some Protestant pilgrimage authors, inhabited by people having rejected God, as though it was their destiny as they lived under a curse. Jerusalem’s past became its future. Serao later seemed to hear the “Voice” of Jesus:

Strange that the greatest event in the history of Mankind should have occurred on this bare plateau; stranger still, perhaps that Jerusalem should still wear her historic air of intolerance. I seemed to hear a Voice in the pulse of the air and the Voice said: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets.”[103]

Jerusalem was surrounded by drama and retribution. The city that kills God’s messengers, at times for American Protestants it was a blighted, cursed place, uniquely rebellious for many pilgrimage authors. It was intolerant, the natural home of stubborn people who turn their faces against God.

For these writers, the idea that prophecy was being fulfilled seemed to explain the barrenness of Palestine and the poverty of its inhabitants while it also provided a way to interpret the stranger phenomena of the Holy Land. What people realistically expected from Bible illustrations was tempered by tragic sights and tinted with a sense of curse. When Dwight Moody traveled to Palestine, he thought the “mean condition of Palestine” was “in accord with prophecy.” In addition, when seeing some red poppies on the east Temple wall in Jerusalem, he said, “Look there! Drops of blood, a symbol for the blood shed for sin! It seems as though the ground itself is testifying for Christ against the unbelief of the city.”[104] For many Christians the idea of the prophetic curse on the land may have simply helped to explain the general misery.

In 1902, Maltbie D. Babcock noted that the lack of civilization in Jericho was a sign that prophecy was fulfilled. He wrote that “Jericho has fulfilled every prophecy in its degeneracy and degradation, being only a collection of hovels and Bedouin tents, and only a sign or two left that ever a city stood here.”[105] Presumably, the lack of a modern flourishing town was a sign that God was actively displeased with its poverty-stricken inhabitants. In 1903, notable Chicago journalist William Eleroy Curtis wrote that the curse upon Palestine was the fault of the people of Israel and their unfaithfulness. According to Curtis, the Bible prophesies that God will “cut off Israel out of the land that I have given it.”[106] Further, “the evidences of the fulfillment of prophecy appear everywhere in Palestine with striking force and are incontestable.”[107]

A 1906 English Protestant pilgrim, Elizabeth Butler wrote, “We visited the wailing place of the Jews. Strange and pathetic sight, these weird men, women, and children weeping and moaning with their faces against the gigantic stones of the wall.”[108] Deserted by God, Jews mourned their sad fate. In contrast, American Protestants who lived in a society characterized by the quest for prosperity, thrift, and maximum use of time[109] regarded themselves as marked by God’s clear blessing and favor. The doctrine of Manifest Destiny and the ideas of social Darwinism placed American success and wealth at the apex of human achievement.

The descriptions of curse were sometimes dramatic. One pilgrim traveling in 1910 wrote of the sadness Jesus must have felt as he cursed the city of Jerusalem. Because Jesus was so compassionate to humanity in general, it must have grieved him to heap doom upon Jerusalem: “It was over this city [Jerusalem] that the great Sympathiser of humanity wept as He foresaw its doom, crying in the words of the tenderist anguish: ‘O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, though killest the prophets and stonest them that are sent unto thee.’”[110] But this verse merely predicts the downfall of Jerusalem; it does not curse the city or its inhabitants. It is of note that many American pilgrimage writers believed there was a general, overriding curse.

After the turn of the century, modern farming colonies supported by the Rothschilds were in place, as well as a new railway that connected Jerusalem with the coast, and a modest economic upswing occurred due to the burgeoning travel industry. These were all factors that lent a sense of hope. In addition, Palestinians were beginning to be influenced in a positive way by Western technologies. But some pilgrims still recalled God’s curse while looking towards an eschatological future and imagined a millennial role for the Holy Land. Pronouncements of doom were intended to bolster historicity while adding a dramatic and tragic sense of place:

Truly the situation of Mount Zion, where the temple stood, is beautiful, but now desolate. The sad prediction of Christ is fulfilled: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent to thee . . . behold, your house is left unto you desolate.”[111]

The general poverty and disarray offered a sensible interpretation for these verses, and even when conditions improved, Palestine still lacked what was taken for granted in Western countries. Phillips Brooks noted in 1915 that in Samaria countless columns lay in ruins and the population was tortured by swarms of fleas, so that “the prophecy seems strangely fulfilled.”[112] How else might one explain the sheer misery of the inhabitants? Mark Twain was one of the first Americans to observe the countryside during the 1860s:

As we rode into Magdala not a soul was visible. But the ring of the horses’ hoofs roused the stupid population, and they all came trooping out—old men and old women, boys and girls, the blind, the crazy, and the crippled, all in ragged, soiled and scanty raiment, and all abject beggars by nature, instinct, and education. How the vermin-tortured vagabonds did swarm! How they showed their scars and sores, and piteously pointed to their maimed and crooked limbs, and begged with their pleading eyes for charity! . . . As we paid the bucksheesh out to sore-eyed children and brown, buxom girls with repulsively tattooed lips and chins, we filed through the town and by many an exquisite fresco, till we came to a bramble infested inclosure and a Roman-looking ruin which had been the veritable dwelling of St. Mary Magdalene, the friend and follower of Jesus. The guide believed it, and so did I.[113]

Twain also noted that most of the children were hungry and had untreated eye infections. Flies swarmed on eyes that were seldom washed, and a significant number of people were blind by adulthood. The plight of the locals may have caused Protestants to seek a way to comprehend it, and perhaps they recalled biblical prophecy as a way to understand the suffering.

Traveling in 1918 at the beginning of the British Mandate period, one prominent “camera crusader” and acquaintance of Teddy Roosevelt (to whom the book is written in the form of a letter) wrote that he and General Allenby read Isaiah together in light of current events. According to Elmendorf, the two agreed that “the prophesied desolation had come upon the Land.”[114]

Harry Emerson Fosdick continued this literary tradition into the early 1920s, but connected it to the lives of contemporary Arabs. One small story reveals a confirmation of fulfilled prophecy that Protestants also found sadly uncanny:

As we turned to go, dropping backsheesh into the hand of a tattooed Bedouin woman who sat lonely among the ruins in sight of her tattered tents, the mist, which all the morning had hung thick among the hills, condensed into a sudden driving rain, and we left the forsaken jumble of stones [ruins] with the Master’s words oppressively meaningful: “Woe unto thee, Chorazin.”[115]

In just the same way at times the land was called the “fifth gospel” to provide a direct link to the biblical past, the fulfillment of a prophetic curse also created a link to the past that bolstered the biblical nature of the land and the historical truth of the Bible.

The prophetic curse was thought to take different forms. For some, the curse was upon the Arabs, because they lived in the barren, desolate land. For others, the curse was upon the Jews, many of whom would nevertheless be saved during the end times. Millennial-minded Protestants could thus imbue Palestine and the Jews with multiple meanings and offer meaning to readers seeking to understand the “fifth gospel” and changes in contemporary history.