Bible and Sword (23 page)

The future of Palestine, which was to see the restoration of Israel, was being played out during the long period of the Powers’ strategic involvement in Turkey’s affairs. They hovered at the frontiers like jealous heirs waiting for a rich uncle to breathe his last. “Wheresoever the carcase is there will the eagles be gathered together.” But the Turkish carcass obstinately continued to breathe, without, however, altogether deterring the hungry eagles from nibbling at its extremities.

When England first realized the strategic necessity of being top eagle in the Middle East she was reacting to the ambitions of Russia under Catherine the Great. Catherine, having given Turkey a beating in one of those confused sets of wars that the wilful monarchs of the eighteenth century were constantly engaging in, was determined to possess herself of a piece of Turkish territory known to diplomatic historians as the “Oczakoff district,” thus totally obscuring its sense to modern readers until, with the aid of an atlas, they discover that Oczakoff was Odessa and that what Catherine was driving at was a warm-water port on the Black Sea. Pitt, who may or may not have been England’s greatest statesman, but whose career was a single-minded devotion to steering England clear of Continental wars, and who felt the same regard for Catherine that Western statesmen feel today for her successor in the Kremlin, was passionately determined that she should not get it. He risked war and his personal career on an ultimatum demanding that Catherine disgorge the Black Sea port. He failed because popular opinion was not with him, and though he twisted a vote of confidence out of Parliament it was clear that they did not want to go to war for “a far away place about which we know nothing,” as
Neville Chamberlain once said about Czechoslovakia. Pitt was forced to back down and allow Catherine to keep Odessa, but the rule he formulated at this time of resisting at any cost any encroachment on the territories under Turkish rule became the fixed focus of British policy on the Eastern Question thereafter.

Most Englishmen did not like it, because of their distaste for what Burke called “this wasteful and disgusting empire.” But it was a choice between supporting Turkish misrule and allowing rivals to close in on Britain’s road to India. Pitt called the choice, although until that time the English had preferred almost anybody to the Turk. In an earlier Russo-Turkish war in 1770 Pitt’s father, the Earl of Chatham, had written to a colleague: “Your lordship well knows I am quite a Russ. I trust the Ottoman will pull down the House of Bourbon in its fall.” But in the next decade, with the loss of the American colonies, the whole direction of British imperialism was changed, turned eastward to concentrate on India and the lands along the road thereto. From then on Britain committed herself to keeping her way clear through the Middle East by supporting Ottoman “integrity” against whatever Czars or Napoleons might try to break in. In 1799, when France invaded the East, Pitt promptly concluded a secret treaty with the Porte guaranteeing the integrity of Turkish dominions for eight years. And that explains how British soldiers came to be fighting at Acre on the coast of Palestine in the year 1799.

It also brings us back to “the hope of Israel,” for who, of all people, should suddenly declare himself the sponsor of a restored temporal kingdom of the Jews but General Bonaparte! Among all the other records set by this astonishing man is the little-known fact that he was the first head of state
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to propose the restoration of a Jewish state in Palestine. Of course, it was a self-serving gesture only, and totally empty of religious significance. Bonaparte
cared nothing for the Bible or prophecy, for Judaism or Christianity. As a nonbeliever, he found all religions alike, and he would as soon have declared himself a Mohammedan—and in fact did when he landed in Egypt—if it served his purpose. His proclamation to the Jews, whom he addressed as “the rightful heirs of Palestine,” was, to begin with, simply a military stratagem like his previous call to the Arabs to rise against their Turkish overlords. But in all his proclamations Bonaparte could never resist the overtones of glory, and he expanded his call to the Jews into a promise to restore the ancient kingdom of Jerusalem. This was pure play-acting. “Israelites, arise!” he proclaimed. “Ye exiled, arise! Hasten! Now is the moment, which may not return for thousands of years, to claim the restoration of civic rights among the population of the universe which have shamefully been withheld from you for thousands of years, to claim your political existence as a nation among nations, and the unlimited natural right to worship Jehovah in accordance with your faith, publicly and most probably forever.” He called on them to flock to his colors and offered them the “warranty and support” of the French nation to regain their patrimony and “to remain master of it and maintain it against all comers.
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Given the circumstances of Bonaparte’s impossible venture in Syria, the proclamation was a meaningless gesture, as artificial as any heroic strutting on the stage. Yet it set a pattern that was to unroll to a no less heroic but quite real climax in our time when Israel finally did become again “a nation among nations.” For after Napoleon it became axiomatic that whenever the powers fell to fighting
in the Middle East someone would propose the restoration of Israel, and equally axiomatic that the someone would be indulging himself in a happy dream not only of acquiring thereby a sphere of influence over a vital strategic area, but also of drawing to his own side all the supposed wealth and influence of world Jewry. Political effort on behalf of the Jews was never exerted except as a by-product of other nations’ quarrels, as when the British assumed the Palestine Mandate in the twentieth century. But one cannot deny Napoleon credit for the idea.

He came to it from an old French dream of acquiring dominion over the Levant. As long ago as 1671 Louis XIV had been seriously interested in the advice of Leibnitz, who, hoping to divert him from aggression against Germany, told him to reconstruct the ancient canal connecting the Mediterranean with the Red Sea across the isthmus of Suez. “It is in Egypt that the real blow is to be struck,” wrote Leibnitz. “There you will find the true commercial route to India … there you will secure the eternal dominion of France in the Levant.” In trade the French did in fact become paramount in the Levant, while the British neglected it to concentrate rather on trade with India by the Cape route. But in the next century the French too had acquired dominions and ambitions in India, which came to a head-on collision and finally defeat in the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) with England. In that struggle Choiseul planned for France to gain control of Egypt and Arabia, to cut through a canal to the Red Sea, to win “spheres of influence” over Syria, Mesopotamia, and Persia, and thus to wipe out the British in India. And so a generation later it was Bonaparte’s turn.

But he dreamed with a difference—a flamboyant dream of himself as a second Alexander re-creating Alexander’s empire from Egypt to the Indus or perhaps even to the Ganges. He saw Egypt as the vantage point from which England could be destroyed, “et
que Dieu en soit benit.”
He would cut through a new Suez Canal that would transform
the Mediterranean into a French lake and channel all the commerce of the Indies and the Levant into French hands. Europe was too narrow; only in the East with its vastness, its riches, its teeming populations was real empire to be won. The East was ever the field of glory where the epic, the imperishable reputations had been made. It was not commerce or riches or even power that Napoleon craved: it was immortality, the immortality of Alexander and Caesar. “Everything here passes away; my glory is already declining,” he said to his faithful reporter, Bourienne. He was not quite thirty at the time. “This little corner of Europe is too small to supply it. We must go to the East. All the great men of the world have there acquired their celebrity.”

And so at thirty, the same age as Alexander’s, he set out for Egypt, conquered Cairo, and, even as his fleet was destroyed by Nelson in the Battle of the Nile, turned his back on that verdict and pushed on in the massive pretense that he could still conquer Syria, then Turkey, Persia, and India, and at last return to Europe with a new empire at his back to become master of the world. In February 1799 he took El Arish in the Sinai peninsula between Egypt and Palestine, invaded Palestine a few days later, captured Jaffa on March 7, and reached the walls of Acre on March 18. “The fate of the East is in the fort of Acre,” he said. Once Acre was in his hands he would march on to Damascus, Aleppo, and Constantinople. “Then I will overthrow the Turkish empire and found a great new empire in the East which will preserve my place in posterity.” He never got over that vision. Twenty years later as he sat amid the rocks of St. Helena dictating his memoirs he repeated: “Acre once taken … I would have reached Constantinople and the Indies. I would have changed the face of the world.”

It was with these grandiose prospects crowding his mind that Bonaparte, encamped at Ramleh, 25 miles from Jerusalem, issued his proclamation to the Jews. What more fitting than that the man of destiny should re-establish the
throne of David by a stroke of his pen, or rather a wave of his sword? The appeal of the time, the place, and the circumstances was irresistible. And the circumstances were such that Bonaparte may really have believed that he was about to enter Jerusalem.

His siege of Acre had bogged down against the fierce defense of the Mamelukes, supported by a British naval squadron under the command of Sir Sidney Smith. But on April 16 Bonaparte had won a great victory at Mount Tabor, utterly routing a Turkish army that had come down from Damascus to the relief of Acre. At once he saw Acre surrendering, all of Palestine falling into his hands, and a triumphal entrance into Jerusalem. So confident was he that he allowed an official dispatch to be sent to Paris dated April 17, the day after Mount Tabor (it was to appear in
Le Moniteur
of May 22), stating:
“Bonaparte a fait publier une proclamation dans laquelle il invite tous les Juifs de l’Asie et de l’Afrique à venir se ranger sous ses drapeaux pour l’etablir l’ancienne Jerusalem
.” Moreover the actual Proclamation, dated April 19, was issued as if from “Headquarters in Jerusalem,” where he must have expected to be by that day. But Bonaparte was never to set foot in Jerusalem, or even in Acre. For, with his eyes fixed ahead on glory and immortality, he tripped up on what was right under his feet—the British guns of Sir Sidney Smith. “That man made me miss my destiny,” he said in curt and bitter summary when it was all over. For Acre refused to fall, and at the end of another month of siege Smith, mustering every available sailor from the gunboats, stormed ashore, pike in hand as Richard had stormed ashore at Jaffa six hundred years before. The French army, decimated by disease, starvation, and all the ills that had plagued their predecessors under Philip IV, was routed, and on May 20 Bonaparte acknowledged defeat and turned back with the pitiable, straggling remnant of his army the way he had come. The dream was over, the empire un-attained. It was Napoleon’s first and bitterest defeat, and
even at the height of later triumphs he could not forget it.
“J’ai manqué à ma fortune à St. Jean d’Acre
,” his brother Lucien heard the Emperor murmur in regret in the moment of victory at Austerlitz.

Perhaps in the bitterness of retreat he tore up the original document of his grandiloquent promise to the Jews, and no doubt subsequent measures taken to cover up the episode were due to reluctance to be reminded of the whole humiliating adventure. But the Eastern expedition was to have important results. It aroused widespread interest in the East, productive of some valuable feats of exploration as well as of much romantic poetizing. The Rosetta stone, key to translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics, was found by one of the corps of scientists, engineers, and scholars that Napoleon had brought along to make the blueprints of empire in the wake of his armies. In 1803 Ulrich Seetzen went to Syria to spend two years learning the speech and manners of the Arabs so that he could travel as a native for four years more throughout Palestine and Sinai, down to Cairo, and even across the Red Sea to Mecca disguised as a pilgrim. Seetzen’s remarkable researches exist only in scattered letters in German periodicals or in unpublished manuscripts moldering in German museums, save for excerpts in English translation published as A
Brief Account of the Countries Adjoining Lake Tiberias, the Jordan and the Dead Sea
in London in 1813. But Chateaubriand, dashing through in 1806, produced a best seller in his
Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem
, which also was translated and widely read in English.

In 1810 Lady Hester Stanhope, niece and long-time secretary of William Pitt, in grief at her uncle’s death, left England forever to take up her fabled residence in the mountains of Lebanon. “I cannot tell why it should be,” wrote one who knew her, “but there is a longing for the East very commonly felt by proud-hearted people when goaded by sorrow.” This remark of Kinglake’s distills the romantic notoriety Lady Hester shed upon the East in that
romantic era. Like a prophetess she lived in the mystic seclusion of a private kingdom, which dwindled from palaces and gardens guarded by a thousand slaves to the impoverished solitude in which she died, after thirty years of waiting with her sacred white mule to accompany the Messiah through the gates of Jerusalem. Every visitor to the East of sufficient prominence to gain an introduction would as soon have missed calling on Lady Hester as seeing the pyramids.

The Palestine Association had already been founded in London in 1804 with the purpose of promoting exploration and researches in the Holy Land, but because of the hazardousness of travel in the country at the time little was accomplished. The Association petered out in a merger with the Royal Geographic Society in 1834 but, as will appear, it was to re-emerge with aplomb in the Palestine Exploration Fund of later years. The Palestine Association did, however, have to its credit the publication of Seetzen’s letters, which in turn inspired the journey of the most remarkable of the early nineteenth-century explorers, John Lewis Burckhardt. Like Seetzen he spent years in the East equipping himself to pass as a native, his ultimate purpose being to pass himself off as a Bedouin in order to explore central Africa on behalf of the African Society. He died before he could do this, but in the course of his preparations he spent six years wandering through Syria and Arabia and even succeeded in entering Mecca, so successful was his disguise and so minute his knowledge of the Koran and of native manners. His daily jottings and diary were posthumously published in 1822 as
Travels in Syria and the Holy Land
and
Travels in Arabia
. Here in the notes of this solitary, indefatigable figure, walking along the dusty roads, sleeping in Arab villages, following a goatherd to find the stones of some ruined temple, is the material of the true field archaeologist. His book has no consecutive plan; facts on Arab customs and character, on current crops and ancient artifacts, tracings of rock inscriptions,
architectural plans plotted from ruins, geographical and geologic findings are all jumbled together. But one constant theme—the relevance of each day’s journey, each fallen pillar and abandoned well, to some incident of the Bible—holds the whole together.