Zeal for Zion:
Christians, Jews, and the Idea of the Promised Land, by Shalom Goldman
University of North
Carolina Press, 384 pages, $35
Shalom Goldman, author of "Zeal for Zion: Christians,
Jews, and the Idea of the Promised Land," could almost be called a New
Historian, but he forgoes the iconoclasm of writers like Tom Segev and Benny
Morris. His main focus is on Christian Zionism -- the belief among Christians
that the Jews have a religious claim to the Holy Land. In short, Goldman, a
professor of Hebrew and Middle Eastern studies at Emory University, says that
"Jewish Zionism would not have succeeded without the help of Christian Zionism."
Zionism, he writes, was the "Jewish implementation of an idea that had
been developing in Christian circles for more than 300 years."
Lest this come as a surprise, Goldman points out that as
early as the 12th century, Italian Christian mystic and monastic Joachim of
Fiore began reading the Book of Revelation literally, breaking with the
tradition of interpreting it as a metaphor. The Jews, he was convinced, would
convert after the Christian churches reunited; in the meantime, the Jews would
return to Zion, setting the conditions for Jesus' millennial reign. Four
centuries later, during the Reformation, the early Protestants stressed the
primacy of Scripture, including the Hebrew Bible. Some gave it a more literal
reading than even rabbinic Judaism did, essentially agreeing with Joachim's
interpretation. This disputed the traditional Roman Catholic view that the Jews
were no longer God's heirs, and thus were condemned to eternal exile.
This literal interpretation of Revelation gained pace with
the birth of Evangelicalism in the 18th century and fundamentalist Christianity
in the 20th; these movements envisioned the conversion of the Jews to
Christianity. As Goldman puts it: "Between the early seventeenth and late
nineteenth centuries a number of English and American Protestant thinkers
advocated the return of the Jews to Zion. With few exceptions, this advocacy
was linked to millennialist expectations that Jewish return was a necessary
step in the unfolding of the Second Coming."
Herzl and Hechler
Goldman illustrates his thesis with what he calls "six
narratives" -- relationships between representatives of Christian and
Jewish Zionism. One of these is the friendship between Theodor Herzl and
Reverend William Hechler, the chaplain at the British Embassy in Vienna who
gained the founder of modern Zionism a meeting with Kaiser Wilhelm in 1898.
Another is the alliance between British adventurer Laurence Oliphant and Jewish
poet Naphtali Herz Imber, who wrote the text for "Hatikva."
"The Oliphant-Imber relationship is a small example of
a larger trend," Goldman writes. "In many ways this unlikely
encounter would serve as a model for later Christian-Jewish partnerships in
support of Zionism." Indeed, Oliphant's 1880 book "The Land of Gilead"
offered a detailed plan for a Jewish colony east of the Jordan; Nahum Sokolow
quickly translated it into Hebrew. The Sokolow version contained Oliphant's
Hebrew-language map, replete with biblical sites that "presaged British
Mandate-period Jewish identification of places of the Bible." Such
"settlement plans, advanced most often by Christians, were drafts of
blueprints for the Jewish state-in-the-making" that inspired Herzl,
Goldman writes. To this end, nearly two decades before Herzl, Oliphant made
contacts with the Ottoman Empire, but the Turks, spooked by British expansion
in the region, turned down his request to have Jews settle in Palestine.
Oliphant is one of a clutch of largely unsung heroes Goldman
says might serve as a model, but it's not entirely clear he shows the mechanism
whereby "Jewish Zionism would not have succeeded without the help of
Christian Zionism." As he admits, Herzl's talks with the kaiser did not
yield any direct political benefit. Also, Goldman doesn't give enough space to
certain Christians who were particularly helpful, like British foreign minister
Arthur Balfour. Goldman makes a more limited and palatable argument when he
contends that "Christian advocacy helped pave the way for the birth of
Jewish political Zionism."
This can be seen in the case of Hechler, the Anglican
chaplain who had been present at Herzl's deathbed and at most Zionist
congresses until 1931. On March 14, 1896, Hechler showed up unannounced at
Herzl's apartment in Vienna, whose Jewish community was cool, if not hostile,
to Zionism. Herzl was suspicious of this man who wanted the Jews to return to
Zion and convert to Christianity, until the reverend mentioned he had once
tutored the grand duke of Baden, the head of the southwest German state.
Hechler tapped his connections and a month later the two men were in Karlsruhe
for a conversation with the duke. Two years after that, Herzl received a
one-hour audience with the kaiser, though Wilhelm was unable to convince the
Turks to allow a German-sponsored Jewish colony in Palestine.
Most interestingly, Goldman makes clear that flirting with
evangelical Christians to help the Jews was not a practice limited to our time,
when American evangelicals can be counted on to help fund aliyah, visit Israel
during hard times and support U.S. policies they consider pro-Israel.
"Here, too," he writes, "the Herzl- Hechler
dialogue presages the subsequent century of Jewish Zionist-Christian Zionist
relations. Christians focused on the Jewish role in the End Time; Jews focused
on establishing and maintaining the Jewish state." Goldman doesn't say
whether this strategy is a good one, though it would be hard to criticize Herzl
for exploiting a contact that won him an audience with the kaiser. It also
might be hard to criticize anyone pursuing such a strategy today. Goldman
quotes a 2005 survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in
which 35 percent of Americans "say that Israel is part of the fulfillment
of biblical prophecy about the second coming of Jesus." In any case, if
Israeli cooperation with the religious right increases, political scientists
might look back on the likes of Oliphant and Hechler the way Sovietologists
looked back at the 19th-century populist and socialist parties that, in
hindsight, came to be seen as precursors to the Bolsheviks.
Overlooked friends of
Zion
Goldman, however, sometimes deals too harshly with the
Zionist historiographical canon. He complains that most of the literature
assigns Christian Zionism a secondary role, but some of these works do at least
set the stage for arguments like those Goldman puts forth. Many books on Israel
or Zionism include British prime minister David Lloyd George's famous remark
that the biblical names in Palestine were more familiar to him than those on
the Western front during World War I. Howard Sachar's "A History of
Israel" notes that Balfour, too, "had been nurtured on the Old
Testament." In the foreign minister's case, "a genuine vein of
Zionist mysticism unquestionably strengthened commitment to the Jewish national
home," writes Sachar. "Others in the cabinet may have been animated
by even more complex motives -- for example, Protestant millennialism."
These British leaders really were staunch believers in
Christianity, as was C.P. Scott, the editor of the Manchester Guardian -- who,
as noted by Walter Laqueur in "The History of Zionism," was won over
to the cause by Chaim Weizmann. Scott, who once had wanted to become a
Unitarian minister, "was attracted by the passionate religion of Zionism,
its deep sense of continuity." It was Scott who, during World War I,
suggested that Weizmann meet with Lloyd George.
The Weizmann-Scott link would have made for another useful
narrative, especially since Weizmann's diplomatic role in the Zionist movement
after Herzl's death was unparalleled. On the other hand, though Goldman's
accounts of overlooked friends of Zion such as Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis
Borges and Robert Graves -- the three make up one chapter -- may prove
fascinating reading for fans of these writers, they are peripheral to the
central issue of the mechanism of Zionism. All told, the value of "Zeal for
Zion" lies in bringing together the overlooked Christian Zionists into a
single volume.
Goldman makes further valuable contributions in the chapters
that describe the Jews' improving relations with the Catholic Church and their
closer ties with the American evangelical movement. The main unsung Catholic
hero is French philosopher Jacques Maritain, who by 1939 had stopped
criticizing Jews for spurning Jesus to claim that to "be hated by the
world is their glory, as it is also the glory of Christians who live by
faith." In 1948, Maritain wrote that "Israel is the Jesus among
nations, and the Jewish diaspora within Europe is one long Via Dolorosa."
These sentiments found expression in the 1965 Vatican II reforms, which
absolved the Jews of blame for Jesus' death. As Goldman tells us, referring to
the popes who presided over the Second Vatican Council, "John XXIII
directly acknowledged Maritain's influence, as did John XXIII's successor, Paul
VI, who was Maritain's friend and student."
Goldman, meanwhile, takes us through the first visit by a
pope to Israel, in 1964, when, to Jerusalem's chagrin, intra- Christian
reconciliation was the focus. He moves on to John Paul II's visit to Rome's
Great Synagogue in 1986, when the pope called the Jews the church's "beloved
elder brothers." This led to diplomatic relations between Israel and the
Vatican in 1993 and the pope's visit here in 2000, when, as Ashkenazi chief
rabbi Israel Meir Lau put it, John Paul gave his "stamp of approval to the
Israeli authority over its eternal capital."
But as relations improved with the Catholic world, ties with
evangelical Protestants became too close for many Jews, Christians and others.
In the Protestant world, dispensationalism gathered pace -- the belief that a
third "dispensation," or period, will follow the eras of the Hebrew
Bible and New Testament, in which Jews return to the Holy Land and embrace
Jesus as part of the fight between good and evil at the Battle of Armageddon.
As Goldman notes, dispensationalist churches have donated large sums of money
to Israeli organizations seeking to gain full Israeli control over the Temple
Mount. In the book "The Late Great Planet Earth," published a few
years after the 1967 Six- Day War, dispensationalist Hal Lindsey predicted that
"the Jews had unwittingly further set up the stage for their final hour of
trial and conversion." He wrote that "the dispute to trigger the war
of Armageddon will arise between Arabs and Israelis over the Temple Mount and
Old Jerusalem."
The dispensationalist movement gained ground in the United
States in the 20th century, and after the Likud party came to power in 1977, it
was not unusual to see televangelists like Jerry Falwell hobnobbing with
Israel's leaders. Falwell cheered on the efforts of groups like Gush Emunim to
settle in the West Bank. Pastor John Hagee, the man who had glibly written that
the "shot that killed Yitzhak Rabin launched Bible prophecy onto the fast
track," gave a keynote address at the 2007 annual meeting of the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee.
Again, readers will have to go elsewhere if they want a
detailed analysis on the wisdom of keeping such company, although Goldman lays
the groundwork when he says that Gush Emunim's version of religious Zionism
marks the "rejection of Jewish humanism and universalism and thus
expresses a bitter antagonism to the universalist strain in earlier forms of
Zionist discourse."
Steven Silber is an editor at Haaretz English Edition.
Haaretz Books, February 2010,
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