Palestine in London

“Palestine in London”. “Hebrew Scribe”. Photo Haines, 1907.

From the Reformations of the sixteenth century onwards, the notion that Britain, as a righteous Protestant nation, was a “new Jerusalem”, a “new Israel”, was extremely influential, and many felt a particular affinity for the “Holy Land”. The Palestine Exhibitions organized by the London Society for Promoting Christianity in numerous British cities, towns and villages from 1891 onwards were enormously popular well into the interwar period and still on the road in the 1950s. Samuel Schor (1859–1933), the long-standing principal organizer, was a so-called Hebrew Christian, born in Jerusalem to recent Jewish converts to Anglicanism, and an ordained Anglican priest. Like many Hebrew Christians, he believed that only those intimately familiar with the Holy Land could genuinely understand the Bible. The Hebrew Christians would help Western Christianity regain the orientation it had lost because it lacked this familiarity. Schor was also a passionate Christian Zionist. He assumed that the second coming of Christ was imminent but could happen only if the Jews first returned to their homeland and converted to Christianity. More than 350,000 visitors attended the exhibition at the Royal Agricultural Hall in Islington (North London) in June 1907, generating a handsome profit of £12,011.