CHAPTER XXI.
ENGLAND AND THE JEWS IN THE EAST
Damascus and Rhodes, 1840—The anti-Jewish accusations—Jewish opinion in England and France—Two views—The persecutions and the Zionist idea—The difficulties of a Jewish initiative—Sir W. R. W. Wilde.
At that time an occurrence of a grave character troubled the Jews in the East. The Jews resident at Damascus and Rhodes were subjected in 1840 to cruel persecution on the false and atrocious charge that they used human blood in the celebration of the Passover. On the 7th February a Catholic Priest named Father Thomas suddenly disappeared from the quarter of Damascus where he resided. As he had last been seen near the shop of a Jewish barber, the latter was seized and examined, and finally subjected to torture. In his agony he accused several of the principal Jews of having put Father Thomas to death. Many of the Jews were immediately thrown into prison, and the most revolting barbarities were inflicted upon them to induce them to confess. An appeal was made to Mehemet Ali, the Pasha of Egypt, to put a stop to these horrors, and he issued peremptory instructions to that effect, ordering that the matter should be investigated before a tribunal composed of the European consuls specially delegated for that purpose. At a later period of the year, the Jews of Rhodes were accused of having abducted a Greek boy for the purpose of murdering him, and using his blood at the Passover, but after a trial and a long investigation the charge was pronounced to be false. In this case also great barbarities had been inflicted, and the Porte, in order to show its sense of the injustice done to the Jews, deposed the Pasha of Rhodes.
These events awakened Israel from a long stupor. They stirred up Jewish public opinion all over the world, and especially in England and France. Like all persecutions, they served to accentuate Jewish solidarity. The first thing to do was to save the innocent martyrs; next to this immediate necessity the question arose how to prevent similar attacks on Jewish life, and on the honour of Judaism. It was necessary to raise a powerful protest against these abominable accusations, to make representations to the Governments to protect and to assist the oppressed Jews.
Up to this point Jewish leaders of all shades of opinion travelled the same road. It was only at this stage that commonplace charity and political foresight had to part company. To the former it seemed easy to surmount all difficulties and all objections instantly by a few plausible generalities, which to such minds were invested with the force of axiomatic truth, and to question which they would regard as useless. Persecution, it was said, is a temporary phenomenon, and consequently the defence should be temporary. But is the persecution of the Jews really only temporary? Are not all these outrages and accusations links in one chain? Are they not, to a certain extent, the consequences of the precarious and untenable position of a people without a land? Short-sighted philanthropists, harassed by no doubts of this kind, asserted as facts what they knew in reality to be only probabilities. There is no doubt as to their perfect good faith, nor should any wilful misrepresentation be attributed to them. They had seized on one part of the truth, namely, that justice should be applied to the Jews. With regard to questions of nationality and territory they had no experience. They knew little of the conditions of the countries where the Jewish masses lived; the psychology of the non-Jewish masses in those countries was unknown to them.
But history was against their superficial optimism, and in the minds of really thinking people grave doubts arose whether the future of the Jewish people could be secured by haphazard defence and immediate relief. It would be idle for the optimists to treat anxieties of this kind as if they were heresies. They were not reactionary aspirations; nor were they the pretensions of ignorant spirits to be wise beyond the limits of man’s wisdom. They were in reality the logical consequences of experience and observation. They reveal a true conception of the Jewish problem, which is belittled and watered down by commonplace optimism.
The Damascus affair, like similar events before and after it, stimulated Zionist aspirations, not because Zionism is merely a reflex of persecution, but because persecution reveals to the Jew his real situation, which, during the short intervals of peace, he does not clearly understand or is inclined to overlook.
Though far from being the real cause—the real cause is the whole of Jewish history—the sufferings of the Jews have always been a stimulus to Jewish national feeling. The Mortara case in 1860 gave rise to the Alliance Israélite Universelle, the persecutions which began in 1882 to the movement of the “Lovers of Zion,” and the Dreyfus affair in 1894 to Herzl’s pamphlet The Jewish State, 1896, which heralded modern Zionism. In the same way the Damascus and Rhodes affairs were the immediate cause of Montefiore’s journeys, the representations to Mehemet Ali about both the innocent martyrs and the establishment of Jewish colonies in Palestine, and the societies in England for the support of Palestinian colonization. A number of Jews in several countries, and especially in England, began to ask themselves: What will be the end of all these sufferings? The reply was: Two things are necessary:—
(1) The protection of Great Britain for the Jews in the East.
(2) The colonization of Palestine.