Christian Zionism and Victorian Culture

Abstract

IN ADDRESSING THE MEMBERS OF THE Jewish Historical Society of England in 1925, David Lloyd George spoke candidly about the origins of the Balfour Declaration. It was undoubtedly inspired by natural sympathy, admiration, and also by the fact that, as you must remember, we had been trained even more in Hebrew history than in the history of our own country. Lloyd George explained: On five days a week in the day school, and on Sunday in our Sunday schools, we were thoroughly versed in the history of the Hebrews [. . .]. We had all that in our minds, so that the appeal came to sympathetic and educated-and, on that question, intelligent-hearts.I This is a well-known passage, often cited by historians who evoke Lloyd George's pious Nonconformist education not only to explain his own role in Britain's embracing of the Zionist cause during the First World War, but also as an illustration for a much broader cultural claim.2 Indeed, following the insights of Zionist historians from as early as 1917, and particularly Nahum Sokolow's History ofZionism (1919), it has become commonplace to see the Balfour Declaration as the culmination of a rich tradition of Christian Zionism in British culture:3 a tradition which emerged in the seventeenth century, slumbered in the eighteenth, and re-emerged, with a vengeance, in the nineteenth. Even scholars who have emphasized the immediate political objectives that generated the Declaration-the hope that an appeal to American Jewry would enhance the American involvement in the War, or that a Bolshevik revolution would be averted by reaching the Russian Jewish proletariat-even they have frequently pointed to the wider religious impetus behind the Declaration.4 The argument, essentially, has been twofold; first, that an impressive gallery of Victorian individuals and institutions promoted, sometimes vigorously, the Jewish colonization of Palestine; and secondly, that these eminent Christian Zionists were men and women of their time, and that