Lion-Eater of Judah

“Never since the days of Judas Maccabaeus had such sights and sounds been seen and heard in a military camp,” wrote Colonel John Patterson in his 1916 memoir With the Zionists in Gallipoli. If Judas had visited this “great camp with the tents of the Children of Israel,” Patterson went on:

He would have heard the Hebrew tongue spoken on all sides, and seen a host of Sons of Judah drilling to the same words of command he used to those gallant soldiers who fought the Romans: he would have heard the plaintive soul-stirring music of the Maccabean hymn chanted by the men as they marched through the camps. Although it was only a mule corps, yet it was (potentially) a fighting unit and of this the men were all very proud.

As Natan Slifkin recounts in his recently published The Lions of Zion, the Irish-born British soldier was, like the Maccabees he so admired, a fighter of both animals and men. More importantly, as commander of the Zion Mule Corps in World War I and later the 38th battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, which came to be known as the Jewish Legion, he, like those hearty Hasmoneans, helped revive the Jewish national project.

Patterson’s early-career adventures earned him not one but four Hollywood adaptations. In 1898, he killed two man-eating lions that had been chomping their way through a railway construction project in British East Africa. As he would recall years later:

I have never experienced anything more nerve-shaking than to hear the deep roars of these dreadful monsters growing nearer and nearer, and to know that some one or other of us was doomed to be their victim before morning dawned. . . . Shouts would then pass from camp to camp “Beware, brothers, the devil is coming,” but the warning cries would prove of no avail; and sooner or later agonizing shrieks would break the silence, and another man would be missing from roll call next morning.

Hollywood couldn’t resist. Bwana Devil, a 1952 United Artists production, was the first color film made in 3D. Four decades later, in the late 90’s, there was the Man-eaters of Tsavo, a documentary based on Patterson’s memoir by the same name. In a fictionalized version released around the same time, Val Kilmer played the adventurer in Paramount’s Ghost and the Darkness. More recently, the Yellowstone prequel series 1923 featured a character, Spencer Dutton, inspired by the courageous colonel.

On another African excursion in 1908, Patterson brought along a young couple, Audley and Ethel Blyth. When Audley died of a mysterious gunshot wound, Patterson was suspected, by Winston Churchill among others, of having killed him in the midst of an affair with Ethel. The scandal was one of the inspirations for Ernest Hemingway’s masterpiece “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”

Nonetheless, Patterson’s published account of his African adventures earned him worldwide admirers. Teddy Roosevelt was a fan, and Patterson stayed in the White House on his first trip to the US.

With the outbreak of World War I, the Turks joined the Germans and attacked Egypt, at the time a British protectorate. Patterson, an avid reader of the Bible, leapt at the chance to aid the British war effort in the Middle East. In 1915, he found himself commanding a supply unit of Jewish soldiers eager to help England defeat the Turks. Some members of the Zion Mule Corps had already settled in Ottoman Palestine. Among Patterson’s reports was a tall, slim, one-armed Russian Jew named Joseph Trumpeldor, who had once served in in Czar Nicholas’s army as a Jewish officer—probably the only Jewish officer. Trumpeldor had lost his left arm during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905.

As the British paper the Jewish Chronicle recounted, “The formation of the Zion Mule Corps – a Jewish Legion composed almost entirely of Palestine refugees – marks an event in the history of the Jews as well as in that of England.” Describing the soldiers under his command, Patterson’s biographer Denis Brian wrote that “besides Hebrew, the men spoke twelve other languages . . . He partly solved the problem by having them drilled and trained in a colorful and occasionally comical mixture of English, Yiddish, and Hebrew.”

Churchill, though sympathetic to the Zionist cause, thought Patterson was crazy for taking the job, believing that the Jews were too stubborn and fragmented. The British commander at Gallipoli, General Sir Ian Hamilton, on the other hand, was an advocate, writing: “It is a purely Jewish unit (except for Patterson and a few other officers). As far as I know, this is the first time in the Christian era that such a thing has happened. They have shown great courage taking supplies up to the line under heavy fire.”

Toward the war’s end, as Lawrence of Arabia was leading an Arab force against the Turks, Patterson of Palestine was leading his Jewish force. He would recall:

Again and again I witnessed these gallant men of Zion going to their death singing joyously. They said they were glad to die for England because she had promised to help them rebuild their old homeland.

After the Allies’ withdrawal from Gallipoli, the unit was disbanded on March 26, 1916. Brian notes that the “last gruesome task had to be completed, to save their mules from lingering and painful deaths,” after their bruising war effort. “The men in charge slashed the animals’ throats.” But with the war continuing, the fighters kept in touch. They campaigned for a Jewish Legion to become a fixture of the British armed forces.

Meanwhile, at a celebratory dinner following the November 1917 Balfour Declaration, Patterson joined the revelers at the home of Chaim Weizmann, who, like Vladamir Jabotinsky, believed that the prospect of a Jewish Legion supporting Britain had played a vital role in obtaining the Balfour Declaration.

On February 4, 1918, permission was granted by the mayor of London for around five hundred members to march through the city’s streets before they headed out to battle. And battle they did. Patterson and Jabotinsky, the former recalled, “worked together, fought together, and stood four square together, facing all kinds of troubles during those long trying years. Never could one have a better comrade or a truer friend than Vladimir Jabotinsky.”

Excitement had also drawn potential recruits from across the pond. That same February,after Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis obtained permission, England opened a military recruiting headquarters at 280 Broadway in New York and local Jews were eager to enlist. A month later, Batya Albert from Brownsville volunteered, but was rejected. So was Golda Myerson in Milwaukee because there was no women’s battalion. Batya pivoted. She asked to serve as a nurse with the 39th battalion. However, she refused to wear the emblem of the Red Cross since she was an Orthodox Jew. She instead formed a Jewish counterpart to the organization, to be called the Red Mogen David with a red Star of David as its symbol. David Ben-Gurion successfully enlisted. He headed off to England after a military parade down Fifth Avenue.

When the war was at last over, 6,000 Jewish legionnaires were in British-controlled Palestine. They were reorganized into the “Judean Regiment.” Their insignia was a menorah and the Hebrew word Kadima (forward).

Despite his heroism during WWI, Colonel Patterson was not promoted, probably because of his support for the Zionist cause. After retiring from the army in 1920, he remained an avid supporter of Jabotinsky, and joined him in combatting the anti-Jewish, pro-Arab bias of many British politicians and bureaucrats (Patterson was also the godfather and namesake of a young Israeli boy: Yonatan Netanyahu). Two decades later, he joined Jabotinsky for a mass rally at New York’s Manhattan Center, on June 19, 1940, where Jabotinsky spoke of his dream of a Jewish army of over one hundred thousand men from all over the world, fighting under British command. At the rally, Patterson declared: “If I were a Jew, nothing would give me greater pleasure than to show the German criminals that the Jews of today are capable of fighting just as their forefathers were, when in seven years of bitter warfare they shook the mighty Roman Empire to its very foundations.”

“It is possible, if not likely, that but for Patterson, Israel might never have survived,” Brian writes:

The success of his Zion Mule Corps led to the creation of the Jewish Legion in World War I and the Jewish Infantry Brigade in World War II. The latter’s battle-trained soldiers formed the nucleus of a fighting force able to defend the embryonic State of Israel against five armies. And they, in turn, helped to create Israel’s modern army and military tradition.

As Teddy Roosevelt, who knew a thing or two about rough riding, wrote to Patterson, “To have the sons of Israel smite Ammon on the hip and thigh under your leadership is something worthwhile.”

Patterson died in his sleep on June 18, 1947, in his home in La Jolla, California, where he and his wife spent their final years. He witnessed the Allied victory over the Nazis but just missed the founding of the State of Israel in November of that year. The old lion hunter, one might say, had served as the little spark of light from which a miraculous revival would soon burst into flame.