agricultural colony "in the northern and more fertile half of Palestine" and enlisted the approval of Prime Minister Disraeli, a supporter of Zionism; Foreign Minister Salisbury, the Prince of Wales; and the novelist George Eliot. Oliphant, credentialed by the British government, set sail in 1879 to investigate conditions for establishing a Jewish agricultural settlement in Palestine. Oliphant would later come to see Jewish agricultural settlements as a means of alleviating Jewish suffering in Eastern Europe. In May 1879, Oliphant was in Constantinople petitioning the Sublime Porte for permission to establish a Jewish agricultural colony in the Holy Land and settling large numbers of Jews there (this was prior to the first wave of Jewish settlement by Zionists in 1882). He did not see it as an impossible task in view of the large numbers of Christian believers in the United States and England who supported that plan. With financial support from Christadelphians and others in Britain, Oliphant amassed sufficient funding to purchase land and settle Jewish refugees in the Galilee. While awaiting an appointment with the Sublime Porte, Oliphant traveled to Romania to discuss his proposed agricultural settlements with the Jewish communities there. The long-awaited meeting with the Sublime Porte finally took place in April 1880, and was a complete failure; Oliphant and his plan were dismissed. In the opinion of Henry Layard, British Ambassador to the Sublime Porte at the time of Oliphant's visit, the effort failed because Oliphant spoke about how the return of the Jews to Palestine would bring the second coming of Jesus – language and ideas that the Sultan found uncongenial. When a wave of pogroms swept the Russian Empire in 1881, most notably the Kiev pogrom, charitable funds were raised in London under the aegis of the Mansion House Committee, a group created for the purpose. When the committee announced that the funds would be used to help the Jewish refugees resettle in America, Oliphant published an article in The Times on February 15, 1881 asserting that Jews who chose to settle in Palestine would have their religion safeguarded; his article met with such enthusiasm among Polish and Russian Jews that the Mansion House Committee appointed him commissioner to Galicia. Oliphant and his wife, Alice, who had reunited in 1882, traveled to Vienna and Galicia, meeting with representatives of Eastern Jews and promising that "as soon as your Christian sympathizers in England are convinced