Americans in Zion

Perhaps some have suspected that I regard Zionism as less than an unmixed blessing for American foreign policy. I have thought, though, that the enthusiasm of some American Protestant groups for Israel was a recent development. No so. It turns out that long before any significant number of Jews thought about taking back Palestine, Protestant evangelicals were before them.

We could blame George Bush, or rather, the Reverend George Bush. He wrote the book on the subject, it seems: The Valley of Vision; The Dry Bones of Israel Revived to be specific. Not either of those Presidents George Bush, to be sure, but rather a somewhat remote ancestor, a Professor of Hebrew at NYU before the genetic line rotted through inbreeding and too much coke. Bush's 1844 treatise was somewhat definitive, but it wasn't quite the start either.

Freed from Rome's New Testament exclusiveness by Martin Luther and Gutenberg, Protestants had started reading the Old Testament. The Restorationist idea - the idea that Palestine should be restored to the Jews - had taken firm root in America quite early. The first American missionaries set out to the Middle East in the 1820's, earning the martyrdom they desired.

Their mission was two-fold: convert the inhabitants to Christianity and restore Israel in order to prepare for the return of the Messiah. The subsequent years saw larger flocks of missionaries who succeeded in establishing numerous schools in the Ottoman Empire, but recruiting few converts. Those they did convert were almost all already Christian - mostly Eastern Orthodox. Jews and Muslims showed no interest in salvation Protestant style, possibly because apostasy was punishable by death by the Muslims and Jews were heavily dependent on their own economic networks - or maybe because Protestantism didn't look like all that much fun, regardless.

Nor were European Jews or the then tiny community of American Jews interested in the project. Even when a few Jews, like the American poet Emma Lazarus, tried promoting Zionism, they were met with indifference. Jewish leaders of the day noted that a Jewish State would cause all Jews to be suspected of being a fifth column, and thereby untrustworthy as citizens. Jews were still subject to plenty of discrimination in the US, but they had benefitted greatly from political, economic, and legal equality and didn't want to jeapordize it.

Thus Zionism remained a Protestant project, and a hopelessly unsuccessful one at that, until near the end of the Nineteenth Century, when further convulsions in Europe would awaken Jewish interest.

All of the above has been cribbed from Michael B. Oren's great book, America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present. More about the book and its story later.