The Political Influence of the British-Israel Movement in the Nineteenth Century
I cannot agree with all of the conclusions of British Israel doctrines, for the most part because none of the people known to us today as Jews can legitimately claim to be descended from any tribe of Israel. Please see my paper, A Concise Explanation of the Creation of the Jewish People, at Christogenea. Another great problem with British Israel doctrine is that it has idiotically refused to accept the German and other related peoples as having come from the same stock. These false doctrines crept into British Israel from the days of the treacherous infiltrator, Edward Hines, whose propaganda was created in order to make England's wars with Germany palatable. The Jews have controlled British Israel ever since, and for that reason the movement has sadly become a farce. - William Finck
The Political Influence of the British-Israel Movement in the Nineteenth Century
Richard Simpson, Victorian Studies
30th September, 2002.
Introduction
On 9th December 1917, Jerusalem fell to the British and in an interview with the Evening Standard, in 1920, Max Nordau, cofounder of the Zionist Movement, in 1897, held ‘we thought that the Messiah would be an individual, but I feel now as if it were a collective entity, and that its name might be the British Nation’.1This one statement vindicated just under 80 years of campaigning for the British-Israel movement, not an Anglo-Jewish organisation as one might expect but a movement that believed the British were the “chosen race”, not the Jews and believed the return to Palestine of the British and Jews together would bring about the Second Coming. Despite the plethora of primary documentation, very little has been written on the role of this movement in the nineteenth century. Throughout Anglo-Zionist literature and biographies of great Victorian statesmen there is little or no mention of this movement, which according to the Jewish Encyclopedia (1901) had over 2 million adherents. Despite an extensive press and books, they didn’t quite make it into mainstream politics as an organisation, However, some of their members were very influential and included some of the Royal Family. From their literal interpretation of Hebrew scripture within an predominantly Anglican umbrella, they certainly thought they knew where the country was going so perhaps that took away their incentive for power. What I have tried to do in this long essay is to assess from a snapshot of 19th century British-Israel publications how they reacted to and tried to influence the political world. How they manipulated biblical prophecy into a “we told you so” result, how British-Israel attempted to show that the writings and addresses of public men bore undersigned testimony to the contentions of their movement offering ‘blind’ evidence and how, strangely, after 80 years of campaigning they were very nearly proved right.
This story from Geoffrey Chaucer's 
The Prologue to the Prioress’s Tale
Please click here for our mailing list sign-up page.
