Jerusalem by Merav Mack & Benjamin Balint

Author:Merav Mack & Benjamin Balint [Mack, Merav & Balint, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300245219
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Past Imperfect, Future Messianic: The American Colonists

The archivist and curator Rachel Lev welcomed us into the serene and spacious ground-floor apartment in the Palm House of the American Colony Hotel in which Valentine Vester, matriarch of the American Colony, lived until her death in 2008. Lev had invited us to examine the Colony’s exceptionally rich archives, which paint a portrait of a group of ardent believers who from their Jerusalem perch witnessed the death throes of the Ottoman Empire, the arrival of the British in 1917, and the upheavals that would remake the Middle East. She brought down albums that documented the 1915 locust plague, the battles between the Turkish and the British armies, the 1927 earthquake, and the 1929 Arab riots, as well as hand-painted idyllic pastoral scenes of shepherd boys with wooden flutes and girls with clay pitchers. The archives, and how they got there, offer a window into the long-standing American Christian preoccupation with envisioning Jerusalem.

On departing Spain for his great expedition, Christopher Columbus wrote to his royal benefactors, “I propose to Your Majesties that all the profit derived from this enterprise be used for the recovery of Jerusalem.” Early Americans, on the other hand, envisioned themselves as building a new Jerusalem—“a city on a hill.” William Bradford, the first governor of the Plymouth Colony, stepped off the Mayflower and declared, “Come let us declare in Zion the word of God.”18

The ideal of Jerusalem would prove fruitful, at least as a rhetorical flourish, through the Protestant Social Gospel movement, which peaked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “Here, if anywhere,” Washington Gladden, one of the movement’s early leaders, proclaimed in 1890, “is to rise that city of God, the New Jerusalem, whose glories are to fill the earth.” In an ongoing gesture of self-definition, hundreds of towns across the American continent would be named Jerusalem, Salem, or Zion, and a number of nineteenth-century American public figures (Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman) and writers (Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson) would make the pilgrimage to the original city.19

Nineteenth-century Christian Restorationists in both America and Britain, on the other hand, ardently wished to restore the Jews to Jerusalem. On a visit to the Ben-Zvi Institute, we learned that its library contains the diaries and letters of James Finn, a nineteenth-century British Consul in Jerusalem and member of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews. The head librarian showed us a remarkable letter from 1857 in which Finn recommends to the earl of Caledon that Jewish farmers immigrate to Jerusalem to work the land.

In 1881 a group of messianic Christians from Chicago arrived at the city, where they planned to await Jesus’s imminent return. Not one brought a guidebook. Instead, they brought Bibles. They called themselves Overcomers, for their attitude toward sin. Soon joined by two groups of Swedish settlers led by Olof Henrik Larsson, the Overcomers set up a utopian commune, known as the American Colony, with cows and pigs and chickens and a bakery—and a hostel for pilgrims.

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