British Ceylon and the Aliyah
The members of the Ceylon Civil Service (CCS), formed in 1801 to administer the crown colony of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), served as regional administrators, tax collectors and judges, all rolled into one. Until 1875, the CCS, only employed Britons; and for many years thereafter, very few Sri Lankans served in it. The Britons it employed tended to belong to the gentry — although it did open up to “outsiders’ such as Leonard Woolf, later.
In 1839, Edward Ledwich Osbaldeston Mitford, scion of a northern English gentry family — at 32, an experienced officer in Britain’s foreign service — set out from Brussels, intending to travel overland to Ceylon to join the CCS. Austen Henry Layard, ten years Mitford’s junior, accompanied him. Layard’s father, Henry Peter Layard served in the CCS, and do did his cousin, Charles Peter Layard, who became the first Mayor of Colombo, the capital of British Ceylon.
Six months into their journey, they visited Jerusalem, where they stayed at the spare house of the consul, William Tanner Young — Britain opened its vice-consulate the previous year. At that time, very few Jewish people lived in Palestine. Mitford described the population of Jerusalem as “an extraordinary mixture of Arabs, Greeks, Turks, Jews, and monks and pilgrims from all parts of Europe.” This absence of Jews, for rather complex reasons, posed a problem for the British Foreign Office (FO).
The Great Game
The Levant loomed large in the eyes of the FO, ever since Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt in 1798, threatening the British position in India — Britain’s most valuable possession. In 1840, P & O began mail and passenger services between Britain and India, with land crossing of Egypt. This increased the importance of Egypt, allied then to France. Palestine — then part of the Ottoman Empire (or Turkey) — being adjacent to Egypt, became significant to the British Empire.
In the early 19th century, Russia began expanding southward into the Caucasus and Central Asia. In response, the British began playing the “Great Game”, to keep Russia at a safe distance from India’s borders.
Along with its southward expansion, Russia posed as “protector” of the Orthodox Christian minority in the Ottoman Empire. France safeguarded the Roman Catholic cause. Britain, as a Protestant country, joined Prussia in establishing a joint Protestant Bishopric in Jerusalem, appointing Michael Alexander (a former Rabbi) as Bishop. However, it found few Protestants to defend in the Levant.
The FO hit upon “protecting” Jewish people in Palestine. Unfortunately, the Jewish population (only 40,000 out of 300,000) in Palestine remained too small, so the British government stood to gain by increasing it. From the late 18th century, several British Christians and Jews promoted European Jewish settlements in Palestine, with little success.
Anthony Ashley-Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, although he considered Jews to be “a stiff-necked, dark-hearted people, and sunk in moral degradation”, presented a plan for settling them in Palestine, to his relative, the British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerstone. The latter got the British Ambassador in the Ottoman Capital, Constantinople “to urge… the Turkish government to hold out every just encouragement to the Jews of Europe to return to Palestine,” and established the Jerusalem vice-consulate, the first modern diplomatic mission in that city.
Road Map
In Jerusalem, Layard fell in love with the Middle East, parting for a short while from Mitford, to explore Jordan and southern Syria. He may actually have been reconnoitring the ground situation for the British government — his later career as a politician and diplomat made this a distinct possibility. After re-joining Mitford at Aleppo, he accompanied him no further than Hamadan, in Iran, which the two of them reached over a year after leaving Britain. Layard began exploring the area, and became famous for excavating the ancient Assyrian cities of Nimrud and Nineveh.
Meanwhile, Mitford continued the 7,000-mile (11,000-km) horseback journey to his destination, and a long and successful CCS career. He and his CCS connections, especially the Layard family, constituted a strong force advocating the FO’s Levantine policy.
In 1845, Mitford wrote An appeal in Behalf of the Jewish Nation in Connection with the British Policy in the Levant, laying out a road map for establishing of a British-protected Jewish state in Palestine, and deporting the indigenous Palestinian population. The Jewish colony “would retrieve our affairs in the Levant and place us in a commanding position… at the same time that it would place the management of our steam communications entirely in our hands.” Mitford, effectively, charted the policy Britain followed up to 1948.
Mitford repeated his message indirectly in his 1866 novel, “An Arab’s Pledge” — essentially a fictional account of some of the material in his “Appeal” — in which he outlined apparent Arab perfidy against Jews in Morocco. In 1884, he published the story of his overland journey to Ceylon, A Land March from England to Ceylon, in which he repeated his message over six pages, including the passage “I trust the time is not far distant when the protecting banner of England shall wave from the battlements of Zion over the restored race of Israel…”
Party
In December 1850, Mitford may have attended a banquet, hosted by Sir Anthony Oliphant, the Chief Justice of Ceylon to honour the recently-appointed Governor of Ceylon Sir George William Anderson, in Colombo’s fashionable Colpetty residential area. The guests, the cream of the British establishment in the island, included a visiting politician, Edward Frederick Leveson-Gower.
His son, Laurence Oliphant also attended the banquet. An audacious soul, as a boy the younger Oliphant circumnavigated the island, climbed dangerous mountains, and hunted elephants. He went to England for schooling, returning to become his father’s secretary and an apprentice lawyer.
A party in honour of the visiting Prime Minister of Nepal, Jung Bahadur Rana — in Colombo on his way back from a successful embassy to Europe — followed dinner. During the soirée, Jung Bahadur invited Laurence Oliphant and Leveson-Gower to Nepal.
A week later, young Oliphant joined Jung Bahadur, sailing to Calcutta (now Kolkota) and continuing to Nepal’s capital, Katmandu. The next year, he published A Journey to Katmandu, which established his fame as an author and traveller; enhanced by travelling to Russia and writing The Russian Shores of the Black Sea. He served as Lord Elgin’s secretary during the Second Opium War, during which he corresponded with Layard, then Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs.
Crimea and after
In 1853, the geo-political struggle over Palestine ignited war. The Ottoman Sultan granted control over Christian places of worship in the Holy Land, hitherto held by the Greek Orthodox Church, to France and the Roman Catholic Church. Russia responded by demanding a protectorate over all Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire.
The British establishment bolstered the resolve of the bellicose Ottoman Sultan Abdülmecid I. Liberal scholars such as Layard, now a member of parliament, added their invective against the Orthodox Church and its Russian backers. The Sultan declared war on Russia, and in 1854, Britain and France intervened on Turkey’s side, invading the Crimea.
The Crimean War, and the events leading up to it, underscored the importance of Palestine to Britain. The British consul in Jerusalem, James Finn, sent the FO a proposal “to persuade Jews in a large body to settle here as agriculturists on the soil.’’ the Society for the Promotion of Jewish Agricultural Labour in the Holy Land already funded training schools for Jewish farmers. Members of the society included Charles Peter Layard’s brother, Captain Henry Lewis Layard, a “Ceylon merchant”; and Bishop Thomas Goodwin Hatchard, whose family published Mitford’s books, and who married the daughter of Bishop Michael Alexander.
In 1862, the future King Edward VII visited Palestine, the first British Prince to do so in nearly 500 years, indicating Britain’s Levantine interest. Three years later, James Finn’s activities led to the formation of the Palestine Exploration Fund — a quasi-military organisation, which mapped the area and gathered intelligence. A founder-member, Layard pushed the focus of the Fund’s research towards a specifically Jewish history.
Meanwhile, Laurence Oliphant started a group called Christian Lovers of Zion, to lay the basis for Jewish immigration to Palestine, and attempting to persuade Jewish organisations promoting migration to America, to switch their focus to Palestine.
Disraeli and Oliphant
Benjamin Disraeli, a close friend of Layard’s maternal relatives, recognised the importance of the newly-opened Suez Canal and, on becoming prime minister in 1874, began interfering in Egypt. In 1877, he appointed Layard as Ambassador to Constantinople, to strengthen Britain’s position in the Levant, just as war broke out between Russia and the Ottoman empire. Despite covert British support, Turkey lost the war and Layard warned that an Ottoman collapse would enable Russia and France to penetrate the region.
At this point, Oliphant proposed to the FO that Jews from Eastern Europe be settled in Ottoman Palestine, to serve as a buttress against the Russians. He pointed out that the Sultan would not be well-disposed towards penniless refugees, Christian or Muslim, whereas wealthy Jews, such as the Rothschilds would support a restoration of the Biblical homeland. In January 1879, armed with recommendations from Disraeli, the FO and the French Foreign Ministry, Oliphant went to Constantinople, to negotiate with the Ottomans. Layard backed Oliphant’s efforts to persuade the Sultan to support the creation of a Jewish colony, which proved unsuccessful.
After going to Palestine to examine available opportunities, he sent a report back to the FO, which he expanded upon in 1880 in The Land of Gilead. In it, he set out proposals for the settlement of Jews in the region and for its economic and political growth, advocating industrial and agricultural development of the area; providing maps, complete with proposed railway lines. “The inclusion of the Dead Sea,” he wrote, “within [the Zionist state’s] limits would furnish a vast source of wealth, by the exploitation of its chemical and mineral deposits… The Dead Sea is a mine of unexplored wealth, which only needs the application of capital and enterprise to make it a most lucrative property.”
Aliyah
In 1882 Oliphant moved to Haifa with his wife Alice, establishing a semi-religious community and funding the purchase of land for Jewish settlements in Galilee. His live-in secretary, Naftali Herz Imber wrote the poem Tikvateinu, which formed the basis of the Zionist anthem Hativka.
Hitherto, there had been scattered Jewish settlement schemes, most of which turned out not to be viable. Oliphant first put forward a practical proposal for sustained Jewish immigration to Palestine. Not only did he advocate railways, he mapped out and surveyed the route, and purchased land for a railway terminus in Haifa.
As Oliphant settled in Haifa, the First Aliyah, or migration of Jews to Palestine, began — fuelled by an upsurge of anti-Semitic pogroms in Russia. Oliphant helped revolutionise the funding for this settlement.
Following the British takeover of Palestine in 1918, the Zionists, followed Oliphant’s blueprint successfully, the British supplying the railways; continuing to this day (with Israeli transport infrastructure).
In 1930, yet another member of the Layard family, Charles Peter Layard’s grandson Herbert Dowbiggin, the Inspector General of the Ceylon Police, went to Palestine as a one-man commission to look into police organisation. He recommended that
“Police should be deployed so no important Jewish settlement or group of Jewish farms was without a detachment of Jewish guards with access to sealed armouries. Each colony should be provided with a telephone and the whole road network improved to give police greater mobility.”
With this, the participation of British Ceylon civil servants and their connections in the affairs of Palestine ended. They made a vital contribution to enabling the Aliyah. However, the modern Israeli state only honours Oliphant — with “Rehov Oliphant” (“Oliphant Street”) in Carmel.
