The Maccabaean

TO the pious Jew, Palestine used to mean the place where he chose to die. Like Judah ha-Levi, he looked forward with yearning to ending his days in the Holy Land. All his life he cherished the desire to go to Jerusalem, to wail at the Western Wall, to visit the scenes of Israel’s former glory, and then to die in the land hallowed by so many precious associations. It is only within the last fifty years that a new vision has come—the realization that Palestine is not merely a land for the Jew to die in, but a home for him to live for. These fifty years have seen Palestine win back the promise of her early fertility, and have shown that her regeneration must come about primarily through the establishment of agricultural colonies. Strangely enough, one of the first Americans to feel that the restoration of the Jews to Palestine and the rehabilitation of the country were both within the realms of practical possibility was a proselyte to Judaism. His name. was Warder Cresson, and he himself says that when he went to Jerusalem, he left everything near and dear to him on earth, and “left them in the pursuit of Truth, and for the sake of Truth alone.” Candor forces us to admit that he was a religious fanatic—nevertheless the story of his life has a decided interest for us.

Warder Cresson was born in Philadelphia on July 13, 1798, and came of an old-established family. His people were Quakers, and he himself had been reared in that faith. Early in life he became interested in religious questions and when only a little over thirty, he published a pamphlet called, “Babylon the Great is Falling! The Morning Star, or Light from on High!” In this work he severely criticized the Quakers for their extravagance and for their abandonment of the precepts of their religion, and exhorted them to lead a better life. Finding that the Quaker rites no longer appealed to him, he joined one creed after another, and each seemed to him the true religion—for the time being. Thus between 1830 and 1840 he was successively an adherent of the Shaker, the Millerite, the Mormonite and the Campbellite movements. Toward the latter end of this period he met Isaac Leeser, that redoubtable champion of conservative Judaism and fiery advocate of his faith. Leeser took an interest in Cresson, and sympathized with his religious doubts and struggles. On the other hand, the personality of Leeser, his sincerity, his absolute conviction of the truths of Judaism, made a powerful appeal to Cresson. He became more and more engrossed in Judaism, and soon dropped his other forms of belief. But he felt that he would never get to the heart of his new faith till he lived in the place of its origin, and stronger and stronger became his desire to go to the Holy Land. Finally, in May, 1844, through the efforts of his friend, Dr. Birkey, he was commissioned United States Consul at Jerusalem. He was, by the way, the first to be so commissioned, but according to Dr. Herbert Friedenwald, no dispatches from him are on file in the Department of State.

A journey to Jerusalem was no light undertaking at that time. At best it was a long and wearisome trip; often it was a hazardous one. Jerusalem itself was none too comfortable a city, and for Cresson the situation was bound

to be somewhat difficult. He no longer cared to associate with Gentiles; yet since he was not a Jew and had no traditions which would bind him to the Jews, he would indeed be looked at by them somewhat with mistrust. His determination, however, was undaunted, and he set out for the Holy Land, imbued with the desire to live a Jewish life in the Jewish land. He left a wife and six children in the United States, and an excellent farm with every comfort. He was going to the unknown, but he went buoyed up by faith.

Arrived at Jerusalem, he identified himself with the Sephardic community there, and lived the life of the pious Oriental Jew. Travelers without number have borne witness to the unspeakable squalor and filth of the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem at this period. Yet here lived Cresson, a man who by all accounts was used not merely to cleanness and tidiness in his daily surroundings, but to a life of fineness, almost of luxury. His whole being was so rapt in the ecstasy of his new faith that he may never have noticed the dirt at his feet because his eyes were fixed on the shining vision of God.

Of a truth history repeats itself, and the pitiable condition of the Palestine Jews today is a repetition of their situation in Warder Cresson’s time. Want and scarcity were everywhere; food prices were soaring, water was almost impossible to obtain. Starvation was staring the Jews in the face. The missionaries sent out by the London Society for Evangelizing the Jews were not blind to the opportunity offered by this combination of circumstances, and were ready and eager to give the destitute Jews food and education and money in return for conversion. The temptation was terrible, yet few succumbed. Almost all the travelers of the period agree on this point, and are at one with Harriet Martineau in stigmatizing the work of the missionaries among the Jews as a “religious luxury” which the English permitted themselves. Cresson’s zeal for his new faith was stirred against these missionaries equipped, as he says, “to pervert Jews.” Wrathfully he tells of the dispensary under the auspices of the mission where Jews were instructed in the tenets of Christianity under the guise of free medical treatment. He speaks scornfully too, of the Church where the Episcopal service was conducted in Hebrew in order to attract the Jews. In his letters and articles which “The Occident” published, Cresson gives a melancholy picture of the destitution of the Jews and asserts that conversions occurred because of the poverty of the converts, and not because of their convictions. He protests warmly against the insidious attacks of the mission upon the Jews, and insists that Israelites the world over must unite for the regeneration of Palestine.