Colonel George Gawler (1795-1865), a British soldier who served as governor of South Australia, 1838-41, was, as is well-known, a Christian Zionist. He wrote The Tranquillization of Syria and the East (1845) and in 1849 visited the Holy Land. With the Bohemian-born Anglo-Jewish scholar and editor Dr Abraham Benisch (1811-78) and others, he founded, in 1852, the Association for Promoting Jewish Settlement in Palestine. This body aimed at establishing a self-administering Jewish agricultural colony between the sacred cities of Safed and Tiberias, with cattle, sheep, horses, seeds, cuttings of useful vegetation, boats, fishing nets and building materials funded by public subscription. They hoped that the colony would eventually spread out to incorporate neighbouring lands, with "well-regulated rights of export at Acre and Haifa". In seeking public support, they remarked that “whilst Palestine has such significance in the eyes of the Christians, with how much greater interest must it be regarded by the Jew? … towards it he yet gravitates as to his natural centre”.
In 1853 Gawler's lecture in the English Midlands town of Derby regarding the Association's vision was printed as a pamphlet, heartily recommended in an editorial in the local newspaper, the Derbyshire Advertiser (22 April 1853): "The great subject which is its theme must have interest alike for Jew and Gentile; for the politician and the student of prophecy; and demands at the present day ... attentive consideration. Commencing with some striking remarks on the past history of Syria, Colonel Gawler exhibits, in forcible and graphic language, the destinies of the country in the immediate future."
The paper printed extracts from the pamphlet that showed what Jews had already achieved in their ancient homeland, and how their return to Zion was beneficial not only to themselves but to Great Britain.
Thus, first, a letter from a happy and enthusiastic agriculturalist, written in the summer of 1852:
"This year we had delightful latter rain at the end of April and beginning of May, a thing unknown for years before. Some there are who believe Palestine to be an accursed land, incapable of producing any crop but stones and salt and sulphur. Let them come and see two crops a year produced by the poorest land we have. Let them behold quince trees groaning under the burden of 400 quinces, each one larger than the largest apples of England; vines with a hundred bunches of grapes, each bunch three feet long, each grape three-and-a-quarter inches in circumference; a citron tree bearing 510 ibs. weight of fruit; half-grown broad beans ... the pod thirteen inches long, and six clustering stems from each plant: Indian corn, eleven feet high, on ground from which, four weeks before, a similar crop had been taken; water melons, twenty, thirty, and forty pounds weight."
Thus, secondly, Colonel Gawler on the dovetailing of Jewish and British interests:
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
Elder of Ziyon
