Edward Mitford could never have imagined the extraordinary transformation of the desert wilderness through which he was travelling on horseback with his friend Henry Layard.

The year was 1840 and the British diplomat was outlining his thoughts and plans for regathering the Jews to their ancient land, for which he is said to have had the ‘ear’ of then Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston.

He had personally witnessed terrible persecution of Jews while serving as British Consul in Morocco including that of a Jewess who refused to convert to Islam having her throat cut. And he was determined to do something about it.

“We British are in a good position to help them,” he told his companion, as revealed in an obscure book written by his great-great grandson in 2017. “I have been thinking much over the last few years of these people, the Jews, to whom we Christians owe so much yet seem to care for so little… in fact, it seems that often we Christians have been more of an enemy than a friend… and that can’t be right; that’s not what I see when I read the Bible.”¹

In effectively prefiguring the 1917 Balfour Declaration promising to facilitate their return to their ancestral home, Mitford subsequently proposed a two-point plan to the British Government in the 1850s: The re-establishment of the Jewish nation in Palestine (as it was then known), protected by Great Britain, and for Britain’s withdrawal when the new nation was of sufficient maturity.

His plans just happened to coincide with those of the emerging London Jews Society (later to be known as the Church’s Ministry among Jewish people) who had just achieved the impossible by building (with permission) a Protestant church in the then Muslim-ruled Holy Land.

The Christ Church compound, in Jerusalem’s Old City, doubled as a chapel for the British Consul, but was essentially the base from which CMJ would reach out in love to the Jewish people (without forgetting the Arabs) with the gospel of Christ they had first shared with us Gentiles.

Edward Mitford, Lord Palmerston and other politicians including Lord Shaftesbury were greatly influenced by leading evangelical preachers like Charles Spurgeon, J C Ryle and Charles Simeon who were convinced that the Jews would be re-gathered to Palestine from the four corners of the earth, just as the biblical prophets had foretold.

But they would also be given a new heart (see Ezekiel 36:24-26, Jeremiah 31:31-33), indicating a growing acceptance of the Messiah they had once nationally rejected.

International politics and biblical prophecy were working together in tandem towards the achievement of God’s great plan for his chosen people. The desert would blossom, and an ancient nation would be re-born to lead the world in many fields including technology, agriculture and military might.

Edward would surely not have recognised it, and yet it was his dream. However, it was just as well he never lived to see the disgrace heaped upon his aristocratic family by two of the Mitford sisters whose embrace of rank antisemitism served the very opposite purpose to that proposed by their godly ancestor. Diana Mitford married British Fascist leader Oswald Mosley and her sister Unity befriended Hitler no less, as viewers of the absorbing TV series Outrageous will be aware.²

Helpfully, Winston Churchill’s character appears in the series, warning: “The very devil himself will seem charming and reasonable to begin with.”

Unlike aristocracy, the Christian faith cannot be inherited. Though we are strongly urged to pass it on to the next generation, accepting or rejecting the gift of life on offer from our heavenly Father remains an individual choice.

As the Pharisee Nicodemus discovered from Jesus, we need to be born again if we are to enter our own personal relationship with God. It can never be second-hand; we must own it for ourselves, committing our way to the Lord and inviting him to take up residence in our heart and life.

Those rebellious sisters had besmirched their family name by befriending the Nazis (and thus cursing the Jews) but, in an earlier era, Edward’s heart had reached out to the sons and daughters of Abraham with a positive plan of incalculable proportions.

Each new generation is offered the stark alternatives of choosing life or death – the way of the Lord which is life and health and peace, or the path of rebellion which leads to ultimate death and destruction. The safest place in the world is to be at peace with God and in his perfect will!

1. I am greatly indebted for this insight into Mitford family history to my friend Steve Maltz who has included it in his stirring novel The Chandelier Maker, published by Saffron Planet, exploring possible solutions to the Middle East conflict. He quotes from Hugh Mitford Raymond’s Palestine as it was (Mitford Literary Society, 2017) and British Policy in the Middle East and the Creation of Israel (2015). ↩︎
2. A six-part series screened by U&Drama ↩︎

Charles Gardner is author of Israel the Chosen, available from Amazon; Peace in Jerusalem, available from olivepresspublisher.com; To the Jew First, A Nation Reborn, and King of the Jews, all available from Christian Publications International.