Bible and Sword (33 page)

Though Daniel and the consumptive Mordecai remain mock figures, George Eliot was in earnest. She developed the idea that was to play a role in Balfour’s thinking,
^*
of the necessity of requiting a moral debt owed to the Jews. She was disgusted, she wrote to Harriet Beecher Stowe, to find educated people who “hardly know that Christ was a Jew” or who suppose that he spoke Greek. “A whole Christian
is three-quarters a Jew,” she says in the novel. But she finds little recognition of the debt among average Englishmen, who regard Judaism as “a sort of eccentric fossilized form … something (no matter exactly what) that ought to have been entirely otherwise.” She deliberately chose the theme of
Daniel Deronda
in a conscientious effort to improve the status of Jews vis-à-vis the English; and in a later article, “The Modern Hep Hep,” she hits upon the essential fact that only nationhood will solve the problem of the dispersion. The world needs “Some new Ezras, some modern Maccabees, who will know how to use all favoring outward conditions, how to triumph over the indifference of their fellows and the scorn of their foes and will steadfastly set their faces toward making their people once more one among nations.”

In 1862 the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, made a tour of the Holy Land, the first heir to the British throne to set foot in Palestine since the crusade of Edward I in 1270. He came in the same year that Moses Hess proclaimed that “the hour had struck” for the revival of the Jewish nation. The two events were of course totally unconnected, but they are evidence that history was propelling the convergence of the Exiles and the Intermediary Power. Edward’s tour, which included a visit to the Mosque at Hebron, where the Patriarchs’ tombs had been taken over as a Moslem holy place, broke the barrier against Christians’ entering the sanctuaries and “may be said to have opened the whole of Syria to Christian research.” These are the words of the prospectus issued by the Palestine Exploration Fund, which, founded three years after the Prince’s tour, opened the Holy Land both to modern archaeology and to modern mapping and surveying.

Nothing could be more typically English than the dualism of the work of the Palestine Exploration Fund—undertaken for the sake of Biblical research, it was carried out by army officers designated by the War Office. Colonel Conder, the most notable of the field workers, was said to have contributed more to knowledge of the Bible than anyone since Tyndale translated it; his maps meanwhile were published by Army Ordnance — maps used by General Allenby, the victor of Jerusalem in 1918. Here are Bible and Sword working together unmistakably. In fact, Colonel
Conder is a sort of epitome of British experience in Palestine, always a double thing composed of Biblical nostalgia and imperial thrust. It was like a print of a twice-exposed negative — two pictures discernible but impossible to separate.

Inevitably the Palestine Exploration Fund field workers, as over years of search and excavation they gradually uncovered the true shape of Palestine’s highly civilized past, became themselves caught up in the prospects for the country’s future. Conder concluded rightly that little effort toward the revival of Palestine could be expected from the local Jews, who were “still bound by the iron chain of Talmudic law, a people … whose veneration for the past appears to preclude the possibility of progress or improvement in the present.” The urge and the man power would come from the Jews of Eastern Europe; if they could survive under the czars, he said, they could survive and prosper under the Sultan. His companion officer, Sir Charles Warren, veteran of many Exploration Fund expeditions, went further and proposed that Palestine be developed by the East India Company with “the avowed intention of gradually introducing the Jews pure and simple who would eventually occupy and govern the country.” He called his book
The Land of Promise
and maintained that with good government and increased commerce the population could increase tenfold, and “yet there is room.” Productiveness of the land, he predicted, “will increase in proportion to the labor bestowed upon the soil, until a population of fifteen million may be accommodated there.” Warren’s book appeared in 1875, while George Eliot was writing
Daniel Deronda
and in Vienna the
Ha-Shahar
group were calling for the rebirth of their nation.

But the mainspring of England’s interest was still Biblical, though in a very different form from Shaftesbury’s; indeed, in direct opposition to it. “Saucy rationalism” had by now triumphed over Evangelicalism, but to the accompaniment of such furious controversy as made the Bible a
fighting document and the Holy Land an arena as embattled as the Roman forum. The champions of rationalism, determined to prove the Bible as history, went charging out to the Holy Land both literally and figuratively, to uncover the necessary evidence. Since they rejected the Bible as revelation and therefore as infallible, they rejected prophecy, too; but the basis for the restoration of Israel was not carried away by this new wave, for in the course of their investigations into the past they rediscovered the Jews as a people and as a nation. An early herald of the Higher Criticism was the Reverend Henry Hart Milman’s
History of the Jews
(not, be it noted, history of the Hebrews or Israelites or “God’s ancient people”), and the howl that arose when he was found to have called Abraham a sheik was stupendous. Milman died as Dean of St. Paul’s, famous and respected, but when his book first appeared in 1829 it was regarded almost as a national insult.

The recovered factual history of the Jews, Milman held, was not sacred ground, exempt from scientific treatment because of its connection with divine revelation: on the contrary, it was “part of the world’s history.” The functions that the Jews have performed, he said, in the progress of human development and civilization “are so important, so enduring” that it becomes the duty of the Christian historian to investigate their history as the only safe way to attain the highest religious truth. The ancient Hebrews were human beings, spoke with human voices, heard with human ears, and in short (to lead the reader at full tilt into the famous sentence) “Abraham, excepting in his worship and intercourse with the one true God, was a nomad sheik.” And hard upon that, another blow: the parting of the waters of the Red Sea was no more a miracle than the storm that came up in the Channel to destroy the Spanish Armada at precisely the right moment.

Coleridge, in the same vein, had discovered Jesus to be a “platonic philosopher.” Fresh from his studies in Göttingen, where historical criticism of the Bible was marching
sternly on with the heavy tread of German scholarship, he pronounced worship of Biblical infallibility to be “if possible still more extravagant than that of papal infallibility.” Through his essays and table talk he immensely stimulated the new spirit of investigation. Churchmen began to worry, and when in 1832 the First Reform Bill marked the triumph of Liberalism they became thoroughly frightened. A Liberal climate was not considered healthy for ecclesiastical authority. In response, the Oxford movement was launched in 1833 in a desperate effort to strengthen, by a renewed emphasis on faith, the defenses of revealed religion against the onrushing forces of rationalism. Keble preached his famous Assize sermon, and in the same year he and Newman and Pusey issued the first of the
Tracts for the Times
. What passion and erudition were poured out over such vexed questions as the authorship of the Pentateuch, the validity of the Book of Daniel, the moral attitude to be adopted toward the all too human behavior of David at his worst or Jacob at his most conniving! Newman regarded anyone who raised such questions as a heretic; Keble decided that only very wicked persons could engage in inquiries that undermined the divinity of Scripture; Pusey even went to Germany to study the historical method, the better to combat it, and on being appointed Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford gave nine lectures a week to teach divinity students a full idiomatic knowledge of the language of the Old Testament for the better understanding of God’s word.

But in the long run it was all of no use. The Tractarians were essentially reactionary,
against
rather than for the times, and the times prevailed over the Tracts. Newman’s surrender to Catholicism in 1845 (followed by Manning’s) was the logical outcome. Infallible authority was to him necessary for faith, and when the Bible no longer possessed it Rome became the only refuge. Keble and Pusey struggled on, striving to keep adherents of the Oxford movement from following Newman over the edge. Even as
late as 1860 two of the seven authors of
Essays and Reviews
, the famous counterblast of the rationalists, were actually tried for heresy. Their acquittal by the Privy Council in 1864, after years of fuming and fulminating on all sides, marked the doom of the old order—of the authority that had reigned with the Puritans, was revived by the Evangelicals, and uttered its swan song in the Oxford movement.

Now the rationalists galloped with the bit in their teeth, and their road led to Palestine and to a new understanding of Judaism as the human source of Christianity. Dean Stanley, the leading liberal theologian of his age, began his course in Church history at Oxford with “the call of Abraham.” Inevitably he sought out the spot itself, and after a two-year tour of the Holy Land he published his
Sinai and Palestine
(1857). Palestine, he wrote, was the “scene of the most important events in the history of mankind.” Here the word of God came directly to the Jewish people, and here alone could be studied the surroundings that formed the character “of the most remarkable nation which has appeared on earth.” Here where the traveler recognizes the wild broom of the desert as the shrub under which Elijah slept, where he stands on Pisgah and sees the view that Moses saw, where at every hand he finds the local features that “have become the household imagery of Christendom,” here indeed are to be found the evidences that prove the flesh-and-blood reality of the Bible.

Dean Stanley returned to Palestine as chaplain and guide to Prince Edward during the royal tour in 1862. His passion for historic origins was rewarded when permission was at last arranged for the party to visit the Tomb of the Patriarchs at Hebron, which no European had entered since 1187. “There was a deep groan from the attendants when the shrine of Abraham was opened, redoubled at the shrine of Jacob and Joseph.
^*
You may imagine my feelings
when I thrust my arm down as far as I could reach into the rocky vault, and when I knelt down to ascertain how far the tomb of Abraham was part of the native mountain.” The Prince, on being thanked by Stanley for making the visit possible, replied: “Well, high station, you see, has, after all, some merits.”

Three years later Stanley’s
History of the Jewish Church
explored and further uncovered the Jewish roots of Christianity; and the subject was pursued by W. R. Smith, who wrote the article on the Bible for the famous ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, of which he was the editor. He expanded the historical method in his books
The Old Testament in the Jewish Church
and
The Prophets of Israel
. Meantime Dean Stanley’s friend and Oxford colleague, the great Jowett, one of the contributors to
Essays and Reviews
, was also presenting the Jewish prophets as our civilization’s “schoolmasters.” “They taught men the true nature of God, that he was a God of love as well as of justice, the Father as well as the judge of mankind.” We owe our intellectual framework to the Greek philosophers, said Jowett, and our moral feelings to the Jewish prophets.

If this sounds like Matthew Arnold, the likeness is not accidental. He too was a professor (of poetry) at Oxford in the exciting sixties; and here, with Jowett, Regius Professor of Greek, on his left and Pusey, Regius Professor of Hebrew, on his right and the air crackling with the feud between the two champions, it is no wonder that Arnold developed his thesis stated in “Hebraism and Hellenism,” the “two points between which our world turns.” He brought to the surface a conscious recognition of the Hebraic content in English culture and followed Milman and Stanley in treating Christianity as “modified Hebraism.” All of Victorian England’s religious obsession and the intellectual battle that it provoked are contained in Arnold’s books that followed one another rapidly in the next five years:
St. Paul and Protestantism, Literature and Dogma
(which he subtitled
An Essay towards a Better
Apprehension of the Bible);
and lastly
God and the Bible
, in rebuttal to critics of the previous book.

There was heard, too, the loud voice of that passionate apostle of rationalism, Lecky, whose hatred of dogmatic theology led him to admire all its victims, especially the Jews. Writing of the Inquisition, he says: “Certainly the heroism of every other creed fades into insignificance before this martyr people, who for thirteen centuries confronted all the evils that the fiercest fanaticism could devise, enduring the infliction of the most hideous sufferings rather than abandon their faith.… Persecution came to the Jewish nation in its most horrible forms … but above all this the genius of that wonderful people rose supreme.” Lecky’s prose rises to heights of enthusiasm as he portrays the Jews pursuing the path of knowledge, keeping alive the torch of Greek Learning through the Arabic conquest till it could be relit in Europe, while the intellect of Christendom was “grovelling in the darkness of besotted ignorance” and occupied with “juggling miracles and lying relics.” There was nothing palely “objective” about the great nineteenth-century historians; when they espoused a point of view they pulled no punches.