The Evolution of Political Football In Jerusalem

Related: Political Intrigue In The Holy Land Two Centuries Ago.

An excerpt from, “Promised Lands: The British and the Ottoman Middle East” by Jonathan Parry, Princeton University Press, 2022, Pg. 262 – 64:

The establishment of a Protestant millet gave the American missionaries a small number of congregations throughout the empire, and a chance to preach without obstruction. However, it also underlined that any future conversions would be strictly voluntary. Each millet was able to complain if its members were subjected to aggressive proselytism, and the Orthodox and Latin ones were all very capable of protecting themselves. So there were few converts from those communities, and Protestantism made little headway in practice in the years before the Crimean War.

The strategic problems of the Church of England in the East were shown by the very limited success of the Jerusalem bishopric. For a start, the bishop was given no powers in the Protestant millet, which was structured as a lay body—as the embassy, the Americans, and the Porte all demanded. A new bishop, Samuel Gobat, was appointed in 1845, and quickly engendered renewed suspicion among the other Christian sects. As a Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionary with a twenty-year-long interest in proselytising among indigenous Christians, Gobat turned the bishopric in that direction, and away from the LJS’s focus on the Jews. He argued that the social conditions for large-scale Jewish immigration were lacking, set his face against creating dependent pauper converts, and suggested that God would pursue restoration in his own time.

This produced a major rift with the new British consul in Jerusalem, James Finn, and his wife Elizabeth, who were prominent members of the LJS. The row between them continued for over a decade and was fought out in the sectarian British evangelical press, damaging them both. The small British community in Jerusalem became riven by “mutual most childish jealousies,” as Holman Hunt put it. But though this weakened Gobat’s base, he was as unrestrained in his enthusiasm for making conversions among the Greek Orthodox rayas as Bishop Alexander had been among the Jews. He claimed that the restrictions on such activity were only Aberdeen’s personal interpretation of the foundation agreement, and no reflection of the king of Prussia’s vision. He wanted to exploit local lay Greek Orthodox dissatisfaction with their priests, and started a school for one such seeding community at Nablus. Naturally, the Orthodox leaders protested; they got the school broken up in 1851, while a Roman Catholic crowd attacked another one at Nazareth in early 1852. Then local Greeks stormed the mission house at Nablus in November 1853 and drove out the Protestant converts. This indicated the local power of the Orthodox and Catholic communities. In 1853, by contrast, the congregation of the Protestant church at Jerusalem numbered thirty-four English adults, twenty-one Prussians, thirty-two converted Jews, and twenty Arab communicants.

While Gobat pushed without much success in one direction, Finn took British policy in Palestine in a different one, back towards protecting the Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. Russia had insisted on claiming them in 1839, largely because of suspicion at the creation of a British consulate at Jerusalem. However, they were never a priority; from 1847, Russia started to identify much more vigorously with Orthodox Church activity at Jerusalem instead. The Ashkenazi Jews who came to Palestine from Russian territory usually had only a twelve-month pilgrim’s passport, which their government was reluctant to renew. Those who disobeyed pressure to return were in danger of being declared stateless, but as they were not rayas they could not expect protection by the local (Sephardi) millet. In 1848, Bazili willingly took up Finn’s suggestion that Russian Jews in this situation could be placed under British protection if they refused to return to Russia. This outcome was agreed by the two governments, on condition that the British would accept only those who had a letter of dismissal from the Jewish rabbi Bardaki, the Russian wakil. By November 1849, three hundred families had come over, so that the British were protecting a considerable proportion of the population in Safed and Tiberias. The discussions did not go smoothly, because some in Barkadi’s party regarded the arrangement as a plot by the Finns to facilitate Jewish conversions. Palmerston had to warn Finn not to use his position to sway their religious opinions, but he also attributed these complaints to a desire by Bardaki’s followers to continue the “arbitrary and oppressive authority” that he had exercised over the Jews while under Russian protection. With Britain’s assistance, a long-standing dispute over tax demands on the Russian Jews at Safed whose houses had been destroyed in the 1837 earthquake was settled in their favour. Finn intervened in Hebron in 1852 to try to defend the protected Jews from oppressive taxation by the local Arab leader. He and his associate John Meshullam, himself a converted Jew, both employed Jewish paupers on agricultural projects; this led to more allegations by the rabbis in 1853 that he was trying to bribe them to convert. After the Crimean War, Finn came to regard his struggle to moderate the power of the rabbis’ tribunals over protected Jews as a personal crusade, leading to a very strong rebuke from the Foreign Office in 1861. 

Gobat’s behaviour, meanwhile, was condemned by a group of Anglo-Catholic clergymen in Britain who were trying to promote dialogue and eventual union between Anglicanism and Orthodoxy—a cause which they felt he was ruining. Led by John Mason Neale, who had published a two-volume history of the patriarchate of Alexandria in 1847, they complained to the archbishop of Canterbury twice, in 1850 and in 1853. By 1853, they were also clearly trying to dampen rampant press Russophobia. The Church hierarchy defended Gobat, somewhat half-heartedly, but the question of relations with other Churches—Lutheran or Orthodox—had clearly become very contentious within Anglicanism, mainly owing to the divisive impact of the Oxford Movement.

Gobat blamed the British government for failing to support the interests of Protestantism in the region. In 1847, he complained to Rose that Britain’s error “has been to consider the inhabitants of Syria as a nation, whilst there is no nationality, but only sects. This the French and Russians understand very well, and they both have their parties or sects.” The anti-British rhetoric of Gobat—who was, after all, a Swiss with close cultural ties to Prussia—made for an ever-more glacial relationship with the patriotic Finn, especially during the Crimean War.

Gobat was of course right that Britain was not behaving like France and Russia: Palestine was witnessing increasing rivalry between Catholic and Orthodox religious missions. As early as 1844, Consul Young had noted that France and Russia had decided to assume “the Characters of Protectors of the Native Churches,” and that Britain needed to keep out of this battle. The Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem had previously been based at Constantinople, but in 1845, Cyril II was elected by the monks of Jerusalem and moved there. He developed a strategy to reinvigorate the local Greek clergy and improve their spiritual effectiveness among their Arab coreligionists. Two years later, the papacy appointed Giuseppe Valerga Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, and he became the first resident Catholic bishop there since the Crusades.