[¹] Critical Disquisitions on the Eighteenth Chapter of Isaiah, in A Letter to Edward King, Esq., F.R.S.A.S. By Samuel, Lord Bishop of Rochester, F.R.S.A.S. London: ... M.DCC.XCIX. (4to. v. + 109 pp. [B. M.])
This declaration must have made a profound impression. It was the declaration of a man who was, as a contemporary biographer says, “an ornament to the Senate, an honour to the Church of England, and one of the first characters of the age in which he lived.”
In some tracts written at the beginning of the nineteenth century a semi-political note is already sounded, as, for instance, in the tract A Call to the Christians and the Hebrews, by Theætetus (Appendix xxxvii). This call did not find an immediate response; nevertheless, the political idea of the Restoration of Israel reappeared at various epochs in England as well as in the other English-speaking countries and elsewhere.
The various efforts to establish autonomous Jewish Colonies in America during the early history of that country are not strictly Zionism, but are not without interest from the Zionist point of view. “Under the authority of the Dutch West India Company.... In 1652, a tract of land ... was granted in the island of Curaçao to Joseph Nunez da Fonseca, and others, to found a colony of Jews in that island ... but it was not successful....”[¹]
[¹] The Settlement of the Jews in North America. By Charles P. Daly, LL.D. ... New York ... 1893. p. 9.
About 1654 a project was formed for a settlement in Surinam, then a British colony, with Jewish fugitives from Brazil. The scheme is referred to as “Privileges Granted to the People of the Hebrew Nation that are to goe to the Wilde Cust” (Egerton MSS., vol. 2395, No. 8. [B. M.]).
A grant was made by the French West India Company to David Nasi, a Portuguese Jew, in 1659, by a charter which authorized him to found a Jewish colony in Cayenne.
Some of the later projects are even more interesting. About the year 1749 Marshal de Saxe[¹] contemplated erecting a Jewish state in South America of which he would be King. “... We have only meagre accounts of this scheme; I am unable even to say whether he had abandoned it prior to his death....”[²]
[¹] Hermann-Maurice (1696–1750) [Moritz von Sachsen], Comte de Saxe, Marshal of France, was the illegitimate son of Friedrich August (1670–1733) the First, Elector of Saxony (1694–1733), who reigned over Poland (1697–1733) as August the Second [the Strong]; and Maria Aurora (1668–1728) Gräfin von Königsmark. His father’s legitimate son (1696–1763), who succeeded to both dignities as Friedrich August the Second, Elector of Saxony, and as August the Third, King of Poland (1733–1763), was the father of Maria Josepha, the wife of the Dauphin Louis (1729–1765), and mother of that unfortunate Monarch, Louis XVI. [♦](1774–1792) of France.
[♦] “(1774–1792)” should be “(1754–1792)”