scarcely half a century old, and Palestine still had a large
Jewish population. None the less Bar Cochba based his right
to lead the Jewish revolt on Messianic claims, and throughout
the Roman Empire the Jews responded with enthusiasm to his
call. Three centuries later Moses of Crete attempted to repeat
Bar Cochba's experiment, with the same results. In the 8th
century, when the Jews of the West were sufficiently remote
from the days of their political independence to have developed
an exclusively spiritual conception of their national identity,
the Messianic claims of a Syrian Jew named Serene shook the
whole of Jewry, and even among the Jews of Spain there was no
hestitation as to whether they had a right to force the hands of
Providence. It was the same with another pseudo-Messiah
named Abu-Isa Obadia, who unfurled the national banner in
Persia some thirty years later.
During the middle ages, though the racial character of the Jews was being transformed by their Ghetto seclusion, the national yearning suffered no relaxation. If it expressed itself exclusively in literature, it was not on that account undergoing a process of idealization. (Cf. Abrahams's Jewish Life in the Middle Ages, pp. 24-25.) The truth is that it could not have expressed itself differently. There could have been no abandonment of national hopes in a practical sense, unless the prospect of entering the national life of the peoples among whom they dwelt had presented itself as an alternative. Of this there was not the remotest sign. The absence of militant Zionism during this period is to be accounted for partly by the want of conspicuous pseudo-Messiahs, and partly by the terror of persecution. Unlike the modern Greeks, the medieval Jews could expect no sympathy from their neighbours in an agitation for the recovery of their country. One may imagine what the Crusaders would have thought of an international Jewish conspiracy to recapture Jerusalem. In the 15th century the aversion from political action, even had it been possible, must have been strengthened by the fact that the Grand Signer was the only friend the Jews had in the world. The nationalist spirit of the medieval Jews is sufficiently reflected in their liturgy, and especially in the works of the poet, Jehuda Halevi. It is impossible to read his beautiful Zionide without feeling that had he lived another twenty years he would have gladly played towards the pseudo-Messiah David Alroy (circa 1160) the part that Akiba played towards Bar Cochba.
The strength of the nationalist feeling was practically tested in the 16th century, when a Jewish impostor, David Reubeni (circa 1530), and his disciple, Solomon Molcho (1501-1532), came forward as would-be liberators of their people. Throughout Spain, Italy and Turkey they were received with enthusiasm by the bulk of their brethren. In the following century the influence of the Christian Millenarians gave a fresh impulse to the national idea. Owing to the frenzy of persecution and the apocalyptic teachings of the Chiliasts, it now appeared in a more mystical form, but a practical bias was not wanting. Menasseh ben Israel (1604-1657) co-operated with English Millenarians to procure the resettlement of the Jews in England as a preliminary to their national return to Palestine, and he regarded his marriage with a scion of the Davidic family of Abarbanel as justifying the hope that the new Messiah might be found among his offspring. The increasing dispersion of the Marranos or crypto-Jews of Spain and Portugal through the Inquisition, and the persecution of the Jews in Poland, deepened the Jewish sense of homelessness the while the Millenarians encouraged their Zionist dreams. The Hebraic and Judeophil tendencies of the Puritan revolution in England still further stirred the prevailing unrest, and some Jewish rabbis are said to have visited England in order to ascertain by genealogical investigations whether a Davidic descent could be ascribed to Oliver Cromwell. It only wanted a leader to produce a national movement on a formidable scale. In 1666 this leader presented himself at Smyrna, in the person of a Jew named Sabbatai Zevi (1626-1676), who proclaimed himself the Messiah. The news spread like wildfire, and despite the opposition of some of the leading rabbis, the Jews everywhere prepared for the journey to Palestine. Not alone was this the case with the poor Jews of Lithuania and Germany, but also with well-to-do communities like those of Venice, Leghorn and Avignon, and with the great Jewish merchants and bankers of Hamburg, Amsterdam and London. Throughout Europe the nationalist excitement was intense. Even the downfall and apostasy of Sabbatai were powerless to stop it. Among the wealthier Jews it partially subsided, but the great bulk of the people refused for a whole century to be disillusionized. A Messianic frenzy seized upon them. Encouraged on the one hand by Christian Millenarians like Pierre Jurien, Oligér Pauli, and Johannes Speeth, pandered to by Sabbataic impostors like Cardoso, Bonafoux, Mordecai of Eisenstadt, Jacob Querido, Judah Chassid, Nehemiah Chayon and Jacob Franks, and maddened by fresh oppressions, they became fanaticized to the verge of demoralization.
The reaction arrived in 1778 in the shape of the Mendelssohnian movement. The growth of religious toleration, the attempted emancipation of the English Jews in 1753, and the sane Judeophilism of men like Lessing and Dohm, showed that at length the dawn of the only possible alternative to nationalism was at hand. Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) sought to prepare his brethren for their new life as citizens of the lands in which they dwelt, by emphasizing the spiritual side of Judaism and the necessity of Occidental culture. His efforts were successful. The narrow nationalist spirit everywhere yielded before the hope or the progress of local political emancipation. In 1806 the Jewish Sanhedrin convened by Napoleon virtually repudiated the nationalist tradition. The new Judaism, however, had not entirely destroyed it. It had only reconstructed it on a wider and more sober foundation. Mendelssohnian culture, by promoting the study of Jewish history, gave a fresh impulse to the racial consciousness of the Jews. The older nationalism had been founded on traditions so remote as to be almost mythical; the new race consciousness was fed by a glorious martyr history, which ran side by side with the histories of the newly adopted nationalities of the Jews, and was not unworthy of the companionship. From this race consciousness came a fresh interest in the Holy Land. It was an ideal rather than a politico-nationalist interest—a desire to preserve and cherish the great monument of the departed national glories. It took the practical form of projects for improving the circumstances of the local Jews by means of schools, and for reviving something of the old social condition of Judea by the establishment of agricultural colonies. In this work Sir Moses Montefiore, the Rothschild family, and the Alliance Israélite Universelle were conspicuous. More or less passively, however, the older nationalism still lived on—especially in lands where Jews were persecuted—and it became strengthened by the revived race consciousness and the new interest in the Holy Land. Christian Millenarians also helped to keep it alive. Lord Ashley, afterwards Lord Shaftesbury, Colonel Gawler, Mr Walter Cresson, the United States consul at Jerusalem, Mr James Finn, the British consul, Mr Laurence Oliphant and many others organized and supported schemes for the benefit of the Jews of the Holy Land on avowedly Restoration grounds. Another vivifying element was the reopening of the Eastern Question and the championship of oppressed nationalities in the East by the Western Powers. In England political writers were found to urge the re-establishment of a Jewish state under British protection as a means of assuring the overland route to India (Hollingsworth, Jews in Palestine, 1852). Lord Palmerston was not unaffected by this idea (Finn, Stirring Times, vol. i. pp. 106-112), and both Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury supported Mr Laurence Oliphant in his negotiations with the Porte for a concession which was to pave the way to an autonomous Jewish state in the Holy Land. In 1854 a London Jew attempted to float a company “for the purpose of enabling the descendants of Israel to obtain and cultivate the Land of Promise” (Hebrew Observer, 12th April). In 1876 the publication of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda gave to the Jewish nationalist spirit the strongest stimulus it had experienced since the appearance of Sabbatai Zevi.
