A Dream Deferred

From the book manuscript in its current state:

The earliest Mormon missionaries to the Near East dreamed of a Latter-day Saint presence in the Holy Land, something more than a few scattered elders and something larger than the graves of a few faithful Saints. They envisioned a Latter-day Saint colony in Pales­tine. Ferdinand F. Hintze, the first president of the Turkish Mission, wrote to his wife as early as 1889 that he was trying to get a colony started somewhere near Jerusalem. Such a colony, he felt, would serve as a base from which the message of the gospel could go forth. Living together, the Saints would find strength in numbers and would be less prone to fall away through sheer isolation not only from the center of the Church but from one another. Further­more, it would allow the Saints to become temporally independent as they gained greater understanding of the practical arts and sci­ences, much as the Saints in Utah were building their own com­monwealth in the semiarid lands of the American West. Near Eastern missionaries had seen what the industry and discipline of the German colonists had been able to accomplish in Haifa. Could the Saints not do even better, blessed as they were by the compan­ionship of the Holy Ghost?

In 1873, President George A. Smith had reported much the same feeling after his visit to Palestine. “I was often asked,” he recalled to an audience of Saints assembled in the new Tabernacle at Salt Lake City, “if we were going to settle in Palestine. I replied that we were not, but I could take a thousand `Mormons,’ go up the Jordan, put in a dam to take out the water, and irrigate several thousand acres.”[1] Although President Smith died in 1875, it appears that his confidence about the abilities of the Latter-day Saints to deal with the difficult terrain of Palestine was shared by his brethren. At any rate, when the idea of a Mormon colony in the Holy Land was presented to the leaders of the Church, they were positively inclined toward it. They even saw the possibility of send­ing colonists from the American Zion to Jerusalem to put their col­onizing skills to work in that land. Late in 1897, the First Presidency called Elder Anthon H. Lund of the Council of the Twelve to accompany Brother Hintze on a tour of the region to see if land for a Latter-day Saint colony could be secured. Suitable land was indeed found in the Jezreel Valley along the banks of the Kis­hon River. Unfortunately, the Church was in precarious financial health in 1898 and simply had no money with which to pursue the project. The dream had to be deferred. (This was the financial cri­sis that led to President Lorenzo Snow’s famous revelation on tith­ing, received in the tabernacle at St. George.)

[1] Journal of Discourses 16:100.