Bible and Sword (24 page)

No more absolute contrast to Burckhardt could be imagined than Byron, who in the same years came romping through the Levant with Hobhouse and went home to make himself famous—and the East fashionable—with
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
in 1812 and
The Giaour
in 1813. A chance by-product of Byron’s trip was the reopening of Petra, ancient capital of Biblical Edom, to modern archaeology. Once a flourishing city, the crossroads of all the caravan commerce from the Persian Gulf to the Levant, Petra had been abandoned for hundreds of years. William Bankes, a Trinity College friend of Byron’s, probably inspired by his friend’s adventures, started off for the East in 1812 with letters of introduction from Byron. Perhaps the tales of a lost city, perhaps some rumors of Burckhardt’s entrance into Petra, not as yet known in England, determined him to find Petra for himself. On a second voyage in 1816 he brought with him two English naval officers, Captains Irby and Mangles, and despite the most determined non-co-operation of Turkish officials, from the sultan, the pasha of Damascus, and the governor of Jerusalem, who refused to give safe-conducts, down to the lowliest guide and camel driver, who warned of savage Bedouins eager for the blood of Franks to use as medicine for their women, the English party set out on their own, “resolved to trust to their numbers and force.” Through a narrow canyon, overgrown with thickets of tamarisk and wild fig, they pushed and hacked a path to one of the great capitals of the ancient world, now empty in vine-covered marble solitude. Temples, tombs, and palaces echoed only to the eagles’ scream, saw only the sudden silent flight of owls; but thereafter Arabia Petraea yielded up its treasures.

These were the pioneers. The full tide of Holy Land exploration,
of field geographers and historians “proving” the Bible, of earnest tourists intent on following “in the footsteps of the Lord,” did not break over Palestine until after 1840. In the meantime Napoleon’s expedition had had other results. The return of Europeans to a battleground in the Middle East caused an eruption in the affairs of that region that has not yet subsided. Brewing ever since Napoleon’s departure, it exploded in 1830 in a fullfledged European crisis over the Eastern Question that kept the powers in turmoil for ten years, brought England and France to the very hair’s breadth edge of war, and restored the East to life in the popular imagination as it had not been since the Crusades.

Central figure of the crisis was Mehemet Ali, the first memorable Moslem since Saladin, the extraordinary Albanian freebooter who made himself ruler of Egypt and pretender to the Caliphate, and single-handed almost broke up the Turkish Empire a hundred years before its time. His career engages us less because it shook up the capitals of Europe than because it pulled Britain permanently into the Middle East and provided the opportunity for the first English effort—artificial though it was—to replant the Jewish nation in Palestine. Lord Shaftesbury’s experiment in premature Zionism belongs to the next chapter, but it can only be presented against the background of the political and strategic circumstances of the Mehemet Ali episode.

Essentially the issue was who would be the “occupier of the road to India,” as Lord Palmerston put it. Mehemet, having risen from nowhere to become a vassal more powerful than his sovereign, was ready to throw off the Sultan’s suzerainty and declare himself independent ruler of a new Moslem state covering Egypt, Syria, and Arabia. Ever-hungry Russia was aching for the opportunity to support Turkey against this presumptuous challenge, in the course of which she could conveniently establish a protectorate over the Porte and enclose the Dardanelles in her own embrace. Ambitious France, still yearning after Napoleon’s
dream of Eastern dominion, was equally eager to establish a protectorate over Mehemet by supporting this Eastern Napoleon who was about to make good the conquest their own vanished hero had missed. Britain, who wanted neither Russia nor France, still less Mehemet, to gain influence in or control of this vital region, was bent on stopping all three. A weak and aging and therefore malleable Ottoman was still a better occupier of the road to India than an independent French-oriented “active Arabian sovereign,” again to use Palmerston’s words.

Curiously enough, had it not been for the British, Mehemet’s career might have been cut short almost before it had begun. In 1798, as a regimental commander of bashi-bazouks fighting against Napoleon in Egypt, he was driven into the sea in the Battle of the Nile and only rescued from drowning by a dory put out from the ship of Sir Sidney Smith, the future victor of Acre. Forty years later Mehemet’s own dream of empire was smashed under the guns of another British admiral at Acre. But, to go back for a moment to his early career, we find Mehemet emerging as Egypt’s strong man out of the chaos left by Napoleon’s retreat. By 1805 he had become pasha of Egypt, and he went on to extend his personal rule over the Sudan and Arabia, including the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. By 1830 he was ready, with an army and a fleet trained by French officers, to challenge his overlord the Sultan. In his path the blood-sated soil of Palestine once more became a battlefield.

On November 1, 1831 the Egyptian army crossed the frontiers of Syria, met the Egyptian fleet under the command of Mehemet’s son Ibrahim at Jaffa, and at once advanced to lay siege to the inevitable Acre. This time Acre fell. Ibrahim, having taken Gaza and Jerusalem as well, swept forward to take Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Aleppo. By the summer of 1833 he was master of all Syria and pressing against the gateway to Constantinople. In a panic the Sultan turned to Britain for help, offering an
offensive and defensive alliance, but Palmerston, who at this stage contemplated the possibility of Mehemet’s becoming a British protégé, held back. In his last agony the Sultan, as a drowning man might clutch at a boa constrictor, accepted the help of his long-loathed enemy the Czar. Russian troops, poised for this moment, were on tiptoe at the Turkish border, and in no time a Russian army was blocking Ibrahim’s path to Constantinople, Russian advisers appeared at court, Russian officers strutted in the streets, Russian engineers manned the fortifications along the Straits. “It is manifest,” wrote home Lord Ponsonby, the British ambassador in Constantinople, “that the Porte stands in the relation of vassal to the Russian government.” Worse than that, what deal had the Turks made about the Straits? Lord Ponsonby and the French ambassador, it is told, each went to his window on arising, “the one at six in the morning, the other at six in the afternoon,” prepared to see without surprise that long-dreaded sight of the Russian fleet anchored under their eyes in the Bosporus. And the dread was not an empty one, for Russia, as the price of her help, had extracted from Turkey the famous Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi, which provided in a secret clause that, on demand by Russia, Turkey would close the Dardanelles to all other warships.

Palmerston’s chagrin was immense, and he now agreed with Ponsonby that it was “wholly erroneous” to think that “Russia could act with moderation in these matters or cease for one moment to aim at the subjugation of Turkey.” To stem the Russian advance became the overriding concern—the same problem that was to bring on the Crimean War twenty years later and still today brings nightmares to diplomatic pillows in the Middle East. Britain now bent every nerve to replace Russian intervention with a united front of the Powers that would settle the Turco-Egyptian crisis by joint action and at all costs prevent further opportunities for private raids. Mehemet was temporarily halted, but in 1838 he started in again; a Turkish
army that came against him in Syria was wiped out, the Turkish fleet surrendered to him at Alexandria, and the old sultan promptly died of shame in Constantinople. France resounded with the glories of the pasha, and it looked indeed as if he would soon be master of an empire equal to Saladin’s, with the tricolor flying in his van. Fortunately the Czar, who despised above all men that bourgeois gentilhomme, Louis Philippe, with his dangerous democratic ideas, was willing to go to any lengths to frustrate him, especially to any that would widen the breach between England and France. Therefore he fell in with Palmerston’s plan for joint action, along with Prussia and Austria, even if it meant giving up his private privileges in the Straits. And so in London, while the French King and Thiers were noisily championing Mehemet’s demands on the new boy sultan, the four powers quietly signed an agreement to unite in support of Turkey and compel Mehemet to content himself with Egypt and the administration of southern Syria for his lifetime. On the announcement of these terms France, bursting with outraged honor, was on the point of declaring war when Syria rose in revolt against the tyrannical Ibrahim. In support of the revolt a British fleet materialized out of the fog, bombarded and took Beirut, sent ashore a storming party commanded by Sir Charles Napier to capture ancient Sidon, and then sailed southward to turn its guns on that most calamitous fortress in history, St. Jean d’Acre. Ibrahim was defeated without a siege; whereupon his father’s almost consummated empire collapsed like a house of cards. “Napier forever!” crowed Palmerston, and a colleague found him “very merry” with sundry jokes about Beyrouth and Acre and confident that the French King and Thiers “are beat and there is an end of the matter.”

So it proved. Despite all Thiers’ raging Louis Philippe, as Palmerston had gambled, was not prepared to go to war for an Eastern goal that kept eluding France like a mirage. He acquiesced in restoring Syria and Arabia to the Porte
and in confining the aged Mehemet, who was soon to lapse into insanity and death, to the hereditary pashalik of Egypt under Turkish sovereignty. On these terms the whole crisis was resolved in a new five-power treaty, to which France was now a party, signed at London in July 1841. For the time being the Turkish Empire was preserved, tattered but intact, from the claws of the gathering eagles. It was triumph unalloyed for Palmerston, and for Britain the opening of a road that was to lead to Suez and, eventually, Jerusalem.

Lord Palmerston, in the midst of his manipulations to prevent a sudden coming apart of the Ottoman Empire, wrote a letter to his ambassador at Constantinople about the Jews. “There exists at the present time among the Jews dispersed over Europe, a strong notion that the time is approaching when their nation is to return to Palestine.… It would be of manifest importance to the Sultan to encourage the Jews to return and to settle in Palestine because the wealth which they would bring with them would increase the resources of the Sultan’s dominions; and the Jewish people, if returning under the sanction and protection and at the invitation of the Sultan, would be a check upon any future evil designs of Mehemet Ali or his successor.… I have to instruct Your Excellency strongly to recommend [the Turkish government] to hold out every just encouragement to the Jews of Europe to return to Palestine.”

As the Foreign Secretary saw it the Jews, given a landed interest in their ancient homeland, would act as a prop at the center of the sprawling, collapsing structure that was the Turkish Empire and would, for their own sakes, lend all their considerable effort to keep the structure standing; and this, as we have seen, was the object of British policy.

Palmerston’s letter was dated August II, 1840. On August
17 the
Times
published a leader on a plan “to plant the Jewish people in the land of their fathers,” which, it said, was now under “serious political consideration.” It commended the efforts of Lord Ashley (later Lord Shaftesbury), author of the plan, as “practical and statesmanlike” and quoted a canvass he was making of Jewish opinion designed to find out how they felt about a return to the Holy Land, how soon they would be ready to go back, and whether Jews “of station and property” would join in the return and invest their capital in the land if the Porte could be induced to assure them law and justice and safety to person and estate and if their rights and privileges were “secured to them under the protection of a European power.”

There was no doubt as to the identity of the European power the
Times
had in mind. The article created a sensation. “The newspapers teem with documents about the Jews,” recorded Lord Ashley in his diary twelve days later, “What a chaos of schemes and disputes is on the horizon.… What violence, what hatred, what combination, what discussion. What a stir of every passion and every feeling in men’s hearts!”

Obviously neither Palmerston nor the
Times
had come up with the same idea within a week of each other by pure chance. Each had been led to it, pushed, persuaded, wheedled, and argued into it, by Anthony Ashley Cooper, seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, the most influential nonpolitical figure, excepting Darwin, of the Victorian age. His motives were religious, the Foreign Secretary’s imperial. Shaftesbury represented the Bible, Palmerston, so to speak, the sword. The time was 1840; Syria, at once Holy Land and geographical crux of rival pathways of empire, was the place. Here Shaftesbury envisaged an Anglican Israel restored by Protestant England, at one stroke confounding popery, fulfilling prophecy, redeeming mankind. Palmerston would have been content to confound the French and redeem the Turk.

It was said of Lord Shaftesbury that he had “the purest, palest, stateliest exterior of any man in Westminster.” His cold and classic face always called forth comparison to a marble bust. Every separate dark lock of hair, said one acquaintance, seemed to curl from a sense of duty. Yet this impeccable peer was in reality a compassionate, deeply religious man who based his life on literal acceptance of the Bible. The Bible, he said, “is ‘God’s word written’ from the very first syllable down to the very last and from the last back to the first.… Nothing but Scripture can interpret Scripture. I should reject it if announced to me by man. I accept it, believe it, bless it, as announced in Holy Writ … and like the Israelites, I bow the head and worship.”