‘By Whom Shall She Arise? For She Is Small’: The Wales-Israel Tradition in the Edwardian Period

Abstract

Welsh culture has been strongly marked by a long tradition of identification and sympathy with Jews, an identification that arose in part out of the emphatically Old Testament focus of the several Nonconformist denominations that made up the bulk of Welsh religious affiliation into the twentieth century, and in part out of a belief in liberty of conscience, which was an important component of dissenting denominational belief. From the seventeenth century until the twentieth, this identification with Jews was often expressed in terms of an identification of the Welsh as the Biblical Jews, and it included an identity of the geography of Wales with that of Palestine and subsequently Israel, the construction of Welsh linguistic descent from Hebrew, and the construction of ethnic descent from the Biblical Gomer.1 In the Edwardian period, this identification with notional, Biblical Jews shifted to a political identification with historical Jews, as the rise of Zionism coincided with the rise of Welsh cultural nationalism and the Welsh cultural renaissance. As a religious motif, however, it also continued to inform the literature into the late twentieth century. In Sacred Place, Chosen People, Dorian Llywelyn names this folkloric substratum ‘the Wales-Israel tradition’ and claims that it is ‘the most resonant bourdon in Welsh history’.2