Promised lands and chosen peoples
By Khaled Diab
Protestants are the chosen people and Western Europe and America their Promised Lands, according to Israelism and Christian Zionism.
Thursday 3 July 2014
Israelis and Jews have it all wrong, apparently. The Promised Land is not where they think. It's actually a few thousand kilometres to the northwest in the Netherlands and Belgium.
In fact, the Low Countries have the dual honour of being both paradise on Earth and the place where many of the Bible's most prominent celebrities did their thing, at least according to Johannes Goropius Becanus (1519-1572).
This Renaissance polymath was not only a physician to the royals, he was also an amateur linguist. According to his bizarre theories, the Garden of Eden was actually located in Antwerp, and Adam and Eve spoke the Antwerp dialect of Dutch.
His proof? The etymology of their names. According to Becanus, Adam apparently derived from the Dutch compound Haat-Dam (Dam-Against-Hate) and Eve is Eeuw-Vat (The-Eternal-Barrel). He similarly “discovered” origins for Cane, Abel, Noah and other biblical figures. Becanus believed that these etymologies were self-evident; after all, he was convinced that Dutch was the oldest language in the world (Duits, i.e. De Oudst, or The Oldest).
He also theorised that Antwerp was founded by the descendants of Noah, though how they located this low-lying town – only 7.5 meters above sea level – after the reported deluge is unclear.
Though he did have admirers, Becanus and his theories were ridiculed even during his lifetime. His contemporary, Dutch religious leader and historian Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609) scoffed: “I have never read such nonsense.” He derided Becanus as the man who “was not ashamed to criticise Moses for drawing etymologies from Hebrew rather than Dutch.”
The lost tribe of… the Dutch
While creating his alternative mythology, Becanus is also credited with debunking the popular myth at the time that Hebrew was the mother of all languages.
He is also recognised as having taken the first steps on the road to discovering the Indo-European roots of many languages. “Both with respect to his methods and ideas … Becanus can be considered a pioneer of comparative language studies,” says Kees Dekker, a professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
Besides, Becanus' ideas didn't sound as absurd back in his own time as they do today. Adriaan van der Schrieck (1560-1621), another Flemish language researcher, reportedly claimed that “the Netherlanders with the Gauls and Germans together in the earliest times were called Celts, who are come out of the Hebrews.”
According to Dutch Israelites, the Dutch were one of the lost tribes of Israel, namely the Zebulun. After all, one of the children of Zebulun was called Helon, who gave his name to Holland.
Some outlying Dutch fundamentalists still believe this, as this video purports to prove.
Biblical megalomania
Not to be outdone, across the North Sea the British soon developed their own variation, called British Israelism. The first to espouse a link between the British and the Israelites was an English Puritan by the name of John Sadler (1615-1674), Oliver Cromwell's private secretary.
The ideas he set in motion proved amazingly enduring, enjoying their heyday in the late 19th and early 20th century, when the “sun never set” on the British empire. A sign of its cult popularity was the creation of the British-Israel World Federation in 1919, whose members included royalty, nobility and leading politicians.
In the interbellum years between the two world wars, the jingoism that British-Israelism promoted set alarm bells ringing among advocates of a more peaceful world order. “It must be said quite clearly that British-Israel turns the Bible into a handbook of national megalomania,” wrote theologian and scholar CT Dimont in 1933, “and that it is a determined foe to the League of Nations and all efforts for world peace.”
It wasn't just nationalism, but colonialism too. In both Britain and the Netherlands, the rise of Israelism and the myth of descent from the lost tribes coincided with the construction of the two countries' vast empires. This was no coincidence, some historians assert.
“This myth is a vital feature of colonial discourse throughout the long period of European overseas empires,” wrote the British historian Tudor Parfitt in The Lost Tribes of Israel: The History of a Myth.
This link is perhaps most apparent in the conquest and settlement of what became the United States. “From the first landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in Massachusetts, they called it the New Jerusalem and the City Upon the Hill,” says Arnon Gutfeld, professor of American history at Israel's Max Stern Academic College. “So the theme of America being the world's last and best hope was from the first settlement.”
The very imagery of these religious refugees and colonists as “pilgrims” is connected with the imagery of the New Testament, namely the Book of Hebrews' reference to the “strangers and pilgrims on the Earth”.
Moreover, the Puritans may not have regarded themselves as a lost tribe, but they certainly saw themselves as the natural successors of the Israelites as “God's chosen people”, some of whom were even carried off into captivity.
“For centuries, the American imagination has been steeped in the Hebrew scriptures,” wrote Walter Russell Mead, a professor of foreign affairs and a conservative commentator. “Colonial preachers and pamphleteers over and over again described the United States as a new Canaan.”
This also included prominent writers, such as Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick. “We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people — the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world,” he wrote in his fifth novel,White-Jacket.
And the Americas, in Melville's view, were the Promised Land of the Anglo-Saxons. “We are the pioneers of the world; the advance-guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path in the New World that is ours,” he wrote, reflecting the then-common sense of manifest destiny, translating into the mass displacement and slaughter of the native American population.
Seeing themselves as the new chosen people, Americans felt a certain affinity with their Jewish predecessors. “One of the many consequences of this presumed kinship is that many Americans think it is both right and proper for one chosen people to support another,” observes Mead. “The United States' adoption of the role of protector of Israel and friend of the Jews is a way of legitimising its own status as a country called to a unique destiny by God.”
But mixed in with the presumed kinship, there is also contempt. “There were Americans who saw Jews positively and others who saw them as Christ killers,” notes Gutfeld.
Yet others had missionary positions. “In the 19th century, some saw [the Jews] as lost sheep who had lost touch with God,” Gutfield adds, noting that these Christians wanted to help the Jews “for one reason only so that they would embrace Protestantism”.
And then there was millennialism, some of which carried strong anti-Semitic tones. “These wanted Israel to be strong because the prophesies say that when Israel is strong, it'll go to war with the rest of the world and be destroyed, harkening the second coming of Christ,” describes Gutfeld.
These variegate Protestant movements on both sides of the Atlantic in favor of Jewish settlement in the Holy Land were known as Restorationists and are now referred to as Christian Zionists.
In fact, Christian Zionism as a political movement predates its Jewish counterpart, and influenced it.
For example, a full two decades before Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, the 1878 Niagara Bible Conference professed that “the Lord Jesus will come in person to introduce the millennial age, when Israel shall be restored to their own land”.
But it wasn't just religious. Like today, Western powers saw strategic advantage to a Jewish state in the Middle East. The earliest proponent of this secular motivation was reformist politician and philanthropist Lord Ashley, who was also the president of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews, who saw a strategic opportunity for Britain as the Ottoman Empire faltered.
“The soil and climate of Palestine are singularly adapted to the growth of produce required for the exigencies of Great Britain,” he wrote.
Lord Ashley may have even been the first to coin the prototype of a famous phrase regarding Palestine and the Jews. “These vast and fertile regions [Greater Syria] will soon be without a ruler,” he said. “There is a country without a nation; and God now in his wisdom and mercy, directs us to a nation without a country.”
And efforts to create this Jewish state did not actually start with Theodor Herzl. Some 14 years before Herzl tried to deliver his letter to the Ottoman Sultan, another man had attempted the very same thing.
Though William Hechler, failed in his mission, this Anglican clergyman of German-British extraction who was born in India authored a treatise, in 1884, entitled The Restoration of the Jews to Palestine. Herzl's more famous Der Judenstaat appeared a dozen years later.
Starting a pattern that would become common in future decades, secular Jewish Herzl pragmatically joined forces with prophetic Christian Hechler. “Hechler declares my movement to be a ‘Biblical' one, even though I proceed rationally in all points,” Herzl complained to his diary. But he overcame his reservations because “I must put myself into direct and publicly known relations with a responsible or non-responsible rule – that is, with a minister of state or a prince. Then the Jews will believe in me and follow me.”
And Hechler delivered the goods, helping Herzl to gain access to the German ruling elite, including Kaiser Wilhelm II. “Without Hechler's intercession and support, Herzl may have simply remained an obscure, eccentric Viennese journalist,” said Jerry Klinger, the president of the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation, who had discovered the English-German clergyman's unmarked and forgotten grave in London. “The course of Zionism, and possibly the very founding of the modern state of Israel, may not have been successful.”
