OLIPHANT, Laurence.

First edition of this work, dedicated to HRH The Princess Christian, thanking her for supporting 'the author's efforts to promote Jewish colonisation in Palestine'.

Laurence Oliphant (1829-1888) was a Member of Parliament, a South African-born British author, traveller, diplomat, British intelligence agent, Christian mystic and a Christian Zionist. Around 1878 Oliphant, caught up in a wave of Western concern that Russia intended to conquer the Middle East, devised his 'Plan for Gilead' under which Britain was to develop a Jewish agricultural colony 'in the northern and more fertile half of Palestine'. Oliphant enlisted the approval of Prime Minister Disraeli, who was a supporter of the Zionist idea; Foreign Minister Salisbury, the Prince of Wales and the novelist George Eliot were also among the supporters of the initiative. Large numbers of Christian believers in the United States and England also supported that plan. Oliphant set sail in 1879 to investigate the conditions establishing his Jewish agricultural settlement. With financial support from the Christadelphians (a restorationist and millenarian Christian group believing in biblical unitarianism) and others in Britain, Oliphant amassed sufficient funding to purchase land and settle Jewish refugees in the Galilee region (northern Israel).
Oliphant would later come to see Jewish agricultural settlements as a means of alleviating Jewish suffering in Eastern Europe.