4 - David Woolf Marks, ‘God Protects our Fatherland’, 7 October 1857, London

Summary

AFTER the final defeat of Napoleon and the termination of hostilities with America in the War of 1812, Britain enjoyed close to four decades free of significant military conflict. This hiatus ended with the country's entry into the Crimean War between Russia and Turkey in the spring of 1854. The Crown ordained another day of fast and humiliation on 26 April, and the Jewish Chron - icle carried reports of the sermons delivered by Jewish preachers for several weeks thereafter. Eager to bolster support for Britain's intervention on the side of Turkey, Jewish spokesmen were able to appeal to an argument with special reson ance for their listeners. As one of them put it, ‘the Sultan of Turkey had caught the sympathizing spirit of the age, … he had bestowed liberty upon our heretofore persecuted brethren’. By contrast, the tsar of Russia (Nicholas I) was known as ‘the modern Pharaoh’. Jewish sympathies thus comfortably coincided with British policy. Abraham Pereira Mendes of the Birmingham Hebrew Congregation described the composition of the enemy's military forces as a fulfilment of biblical apocalyptic prophecy. Gog, he asserted, clearly refers to Russia, the gag, ‘roof ‘, or uppermost part of the then known world. Rosh, Meshekh, and Tuval, the other geographical terms in Ezekiel 38 and 39, refer to Russia Proper, Muscovy, and Tobolsky. Thus the prophecy, in mentioning various nations, could only be applied to Russia, ‘in whose camp Fins from the frigid north stand ranged by Poles from the genial plains of central Europe, while Sclaves and Cossack hordes from the southern steppes assemble beside Tartar bands from Asia’. The portent of ‘a great shaking in the land of Israel’ was therefore a matter of deep concern.

Among the Crimean War sermons extensively cited by the Jewish Chronicle was one by David Woolf Marks, one of the most impressive leaders of British Jewry in the nineteenth century. Born in 1811, he lived to the age of 98 and was active until the very last years of his life. He served for some sixty years as ‘minister’ of the West London Synagogue of British Jews, the flagship of Reform Judaism in England, and his personal stature was a significant force in guiding the synagogue and the movement during periods of fierce attack by the Orthodox establishment.