History of the Jews (67 page)

But all these Zionist ideas—and there were many others-envisaged some kind of settlement in or around Jerusalem. Even Mordecai Noah eventually came round to the view that his idealized Jewish community should be nearer the banks of the Jordan than the Niagara. Jews had periodically drifted to Palestine in small numbers. But not even Alkalai had actually set up a colony. Yet without an initial process of colonization, how could a new Zion, religious or secular or both, emerge? Once Jews thought of colonization, they tended to turn to Britain. She was the great colonizing power of the nineteenth century. She was well on her way to acquiring a quarter of the earth’s surface. Moreover, Britain was peculiarly receptive to Jewish idealism, especially of the Zionist variety. As we have seen, her great Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, had actively supported a modest resettlement of Palestine. Her great Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, had looked even further. His novel
Alroy
describes its hero’s quest to
restore Jerusalem to the Jews. The theme recurs in his more substantial Jewish novel
Tancred
. Of course Disraeli could be dismissed as a romantic and highly imaginative Sephardi, who in fact pursued a pragmatic career in British politics. But Disraeli was quite capable of realizing his cloud-capped visions. In India he turned a commercial company into a glittering empire. He usually kept his practical Zionist schemes to himself, but they were there. In 1851 he took a stroll through Lord Carrington’s park at High Wycombe with his colleague Lord Stanley. Stanley noted in his journal:

 

The day was cold; but although usually very sensitive to influence of weather, he seemed to forget the thermometer in the earnestness with which, halting to enforce his views the better, and standing by the side of a plantation, he explained the details of his plan. [Palestine], he said, had ample natural capabilities: all it wanted was labour, and protection for the labourer: the ownership of the soil might be bought from Turkey: money would be forthcoming: the Rothschilds and leading Hebrew capitalists would all help: the Turkish Empire was falling into ruin: the Turkish govt. would do anything for money: all that was necessary was to establish colonies, with rights over the soil, and security from ill-treatment. The question of nationality might wait until these had taken hold. He added that these ideas were extensively entertained among the [Jewish] nation. A man who would carry them out would be the next Messiah, a true Saviour of his people.

 

Stanley added: ‘Though I have many times since seen him under the influence of irritation or pleasurable excitement, this is the only instance in which he ever appeared to me to show signs of any higher emotion.’
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Disraeli may have reverted to this idea on his death-bed. There is a tradition that he died muttering to himself in Hebrew.
¹³²

In his Jewish and Zionist sympathies Disraeli was not merely reflecting his racial origins; he was also part of the English philosemitic tradition. English writers in particular, brought up on the King James Bible, had a profound interest in the Jewish past, often accompanied by a strong sympathy for their present predicament. Byron’s
Hebrew Melodies
was an instance. There was, of course, the constant temptation to present Jews in fiction as unpleasant or anti-social archetypes. Charles Dickens succumbed to this in
Oliver Twist
(serialized 1837-8), where the evil Fagin is crudely labelled ‘Jew’, though his Jewish characteristics are not obvious. There was a lot of Jewish crime in London, especially among the poor Ashkenazi community. Jews were among the first of those transported to Australia; when the system ceased in 1852 at least 1,000 Jews had taken part in it. Among them was Isaac (‘Ikey’) Solomons, known as
‘the Prince of Fences’.
¹³³
Dickens was supposed to have based Fagin on him. But Dickens hotly resented claims that
Oliver Twist
was anti-Semitic. Almost as if to refute them, in
Our Mutual Friend
(serialized 1864-5), he portrayed one of his most saintly characters, Mr Riah, ‘the gentle Jew in whose race gratitude is deep’.

Sometimes it is not clear whether a Jew is intended in a fictional character. Jews were often associated, in Victorian times, with dingy red hair, and some of the more repellent characters possess this attribute: Uriah Heep in
David Copperfield
, for example; or the Rev. Obadiah Slope in Anthony Trollope’s
Barchester Towers
. Trollope has sometimes been criticized for portraying bad Jews. He certainly disliked Disraeli (who figures as Mr Daubeney in his political novels). But then so did many other people, including Dickens and Thackeray, not necessarily for racial reasons; and Disraeli returned the compliment, caricaturing both Dickens and Thackeray in his last novel,
Endymion
(1881). Trollope wrote a vast number of novels and portrayed innumerable foreigners (he was the most widely travelled of the nineteenth-century novelists) but a careful reading does not suggest a pattern of prejudice against Jews. Madame Max Goesler, who figures in various of his political novels, is a woman of the highest honour. Anton Trendellsohn, in
Nina Balataka
(1865), is another of Trollope’s sympathetic Jews. Even Auguste Melmotte, the larger-than-life financial villain of
The Way We Live Now
(1875), is not actually described as Jewish. Trollope’s point was that his origins were obscure. But he was evidently based on Albert Grant, born Abraham Gotheimer in Dublin in 1831, the son of a pedlar. This man became
MP
for Kidderminster, developed Leicester Square, was general manager of the Credit Foncier and Credit Mobilier of London, and floated fraudulent companies, dying a pauper in 1899.
¹³⁴

The Melmotte case was important, however, because it coincided with a watershed in attitudes to Jews. Until the 1870s, educated people in Britain tended to be philosemitic. But during the decade, which was marked by a general economic downturn and many individual financial disasters, there was a subtle change. From the mid-1870s, Jews were associated in many minds with large-scale City manipulation. The same change of mood was observable on the Continent, especially in France, Germany and Austria. But there it was merely an intensification of existing anti-Semitic feelings. In Britain it was new. It distressed the philosemites and inspired some of them to consider ways of tackling what they, too, now recognized as the ‘Jewish problem’. One such was the archaeologist Sir Charles Warren, one of the first to excavate the Temple Wall of Jerusalem. In 1875, the same
year Melmotte made his appearance, Warren published
The Land of Promise: or, Turkey’s Guarantee
. Largely with British help, the number of Jews in the Holy Land had slowly risen, passing the 10,000-mark in the 1840s. Warren now proposed, rather on Disraelian lines, that a British chartered company should be created to colonize Palestine (in return for taking on part of Turkey’s national debt), ‘with the avowed intention of gradually introducing the Jew, pure and simple, who is eventually to occupy and govern this country’. In Warren’s view large-scale finance and systematic and scientific development could eventually enable the country to support fifteen million people.

In the spring of the same year, Warren’s voice was joined by a far more influential one in
Blackwood’s
, which began serialization of George Eliot’s novel
Daniel Deronda
. This book is little read now and was accounted an artistic failure even at the time. But in terms of its practical effects it was probably the most influential novel of the nineteenth century. It was another important piece of the Zionist jigsaw puzzle fitted into place. George Eliot had been passionately interested in the Jews ever since, aged seventeen, she read Josephus. She was immensely learned in Biblical commentary and criticism. She translated Strauss’s
Das Leben Jesu
and Spinoza. Anti-Semitic jokes revolted her. She could not decide whether Christian hostility to Jews was ‘more impious or more stupid’. In 1866 she met a learned Jew, Emmanuel Deutsch, a book-cataloguer in the British Museum, who had just published a famous article in the
Quarterly Review
, introducing the Talmud to Christian readers and seeking to build a bridge between the two religions. He gave her lessons in Hebrew. In 1869 he visited Palestine and became a fervent Zionist. ‘The East!’ he wrote from Jerusalem, ‘all my wild yearnings fulfilled at last!’
¹³⁵
Deutsch died of cancer, but George Eliot visited him frequently during his illness and was captured by his enthusiasm. In the early 1870s she began an immense course of reading and visits to synagogues with a view to creating a Jewish novel. She felt, she wrote, ‘the urge to treat Jews with such sympathy and understanding as my nature and knowledge could attain to…towards the Hebrews we western people who have been reared in Christianity have a peculiar debt and, whether we acknowledge it or not, a peculiar thoroughness of fellowship in religious or moral sentiment’.
¹³⁶

The writing and serialization of the novel, completed in 1876, were a tremendous emotional experience for her. She finished it ‘with tears in my eyes’. The mentor of the book, the Zionist ideologue, is Mordecai, the dying scholar, based on Deutsch, ‘a man steeped in poverty and
obscurity, weakened by disease, consciously within the shadow of advancing death, but living an intense life in an invisible past and future’. Through the lips of Deutsch-Mordecai, George Eliot voiced her Zionist hopes: ‘The world will gain as Israel gains. For there will be a community in the van of the East which carries the culture and sympathies of every great nation in its bosom; there will be a land set for a halting-place of enmities, a neutral ground for the East as Belgium is for the West.’ This famous passage later acquired tragic ironies for the generation of 1914 and still more for our own; but at the time it voiced a sentiment universal among philosemitic intellectuals that rebuilding Zion would pacify and civilize a barbarous area. The sentiment also demanded a Messiah-figure, as in
Tancred
. George Eliot supplied him in the hero of the novel, Daniel Deronda, who is designated by Mordecai. At the end of the story Daniel marries Mirah and prepares to go to the East to restore ‘a political existence to my people, making them a nation again, giving them a national centre, such as the English have, though they too are scattered over the face of the globe’.

George Eliot’s sales were worldwide and immense. Of all the nineteenth-century novelists, she was the one most respected by intellectuals, on the Continent and in North America as well as in Britain. To all of them, and especially to hundreds of thousands of assimilated Jews, the story presented, for the first time, the possibility of a return to Zion. One of the very few who did not read it was Disraeli. Asked if he had done so, he replied: ‘When I want to read a novel, I write one.’ But all the rest did. In New York, it exhilarated the young Emma Lazarus. In his article on ‘Zionism’ in the famous eleventh edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
(1911), Lucien Wolf was to write that the novel ‘gave the Jewish national spirit the strongest stimulus it had experienced since the appearance of Shabbetai Zevi’.
¹³⁷
The book was particularly widely read in political circles. To the generation of Arthur Balfour, who first met George Eliot in 1877, the year after publication, it was their introduction to the Jewish issue.
¹³⁸
But what everyone wanted to know was: who would be the real Daniel Deronda? When would he emerge? It was, indeed, like waiting for the Messiah.

The real Daniel Deronda emerged on 5 January 1895, in the freezing cold courtyard of the École Militaire in Paris. The occasion was the public degradation of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the only Jew serving on the French army general staff, who had been accused, tried and convicted—on what subsequently emerged to be fabricated evidence—of handing secrets to the Germans. Watching the ceremony, one of the
few journalists allowed to attend, was Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), the Paris correspondent of the Vienna liberal daily,
Neue Freie Presse
. Two weeks before he had attended the courtroom and heard Dreyfus pronounced guilty. Now he stood by as Dreyfus was brought before General Darras, who shouted: ‘Alfred Dreyfus, you are unworthy to bear arms. In the name of the French people we degrade you!’ Immediately, in a loud voice, Dreyfus shouted: ‘Soldiers! An innocent man is being degraded! Soldiers! An innocent is dishonoured! Long live France—long live the Army!’ A senior non-commissioned officer cut off Dreyfus’ badges and buttons. He took out his sword and broke it across his knee. The prisoner was marched round the courtyard, still shouting that he was innocent. An immense and excited crowd, waiting outside, heard his cries and began to whistle and chant slogans. When Herzl left the building, it was beginning to scream ‘Death to Dreyfus! Death to the Jews!’
¹³⁹
Less than six months later, Herzl had completed the draft of the book which would set in motion modern Zionism,
Der Judenstaat
.

The Dreyfus case and the conversion of Herzl to Zionism both testify to significant developments in Jewish history. They are two more pieces of the jigsaw and both must be examined in detail. In the first place, the Dreyfus affair, and the dark emotions it revealed, brought to a decisive end an epoch of illusion in which assimilated western Jews had optimistically assumed that the process of their acceptance in European society was well under way and would shortly be completed. In 1871 Graetz had concluded the eleventh and final volume of his
History of the Jewish People
almost on a note of triumph: ‘Happier than any of my predecessors, I may conclude my history with the joyous feeling that in the civilized world the Jewish tribe has found at last not only justice and freedom but also a certain recognition. It now finally has unlimited freedom to develop its talents not due to mercy, but as a right acquired through thousandfold suffering.’