Two Providential Nations

Let us ponder the Blackstone Memorial, one of the most fascinating occasions in the history of the American relationship with Zionism and one almost entirely forgotten today. It was drawn up in 1891 by William Blackstone, a prominent evangelical minister, and personally presented in the White House to President Benjamin Harrison. The petition proclaimed, several years before the epiphany of Theodor Herzl, that the world powers should seek to alleviate the suffering of Jews by restoring them to the Holy Land: “Why shall not the powers which under the treaty of Berlin, in 1878, gave Bulgaria to the Bulgarians and Servia to the Servians now give Palestine back to the Jews? These provinces, as well as Roumania, Montenegro and Greece, were wrested from the Turks and given to their natural owners. Does not Palestine as rightly belong to the Jews?”

The memorial’s signatories were not merely men of the cloth; among the 400 who appended their appellations to the document included the speaker of the House of the Representatives and the Supreme Court of the United States. And yet, while prominent Gentile politicians, jurists, and businessman readily signed, Blackstone attempted in vain to convince one of America’s most prominent Reform rabbis to join him. Emil G. Hirsch summarily informed Blackstone that he no longer embraced the biblical promise of Israel’s return to the Holy Land: “We, the modern Jews, say that we do not wish to be restored to Palestine.”

The tale of the Blackstone Memorial is one of many fascinating stories in Walter Russell Mead’s sweeping new work, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People. For Mead, it highlights how, long before modern Israel came into existence, the fate of the Holy Land and the Jewish people was a subject of enormous interest, fascination, and speculation for Americans, and how this is still reflected in the American-Israel relationship today: