Christian Zionism in the United Kingdom is a Christian ideology that sees the return of the Jews to Israel as a fulfilment of scriptural prophecy. Supporters of Christian Zionism believe that the existence of the Jewish State can and should be supported on theological grounds.
Christian Zionism preceded Zionism amongst both secular and rabbinic Jews, [2] and much of the initiative for this came from within the United Kingdom. [3] [4] Expectations of a national return of the Jews to their homeland, often called Restorationism, were widely held amongst the Puritans, also heralding greater tolerance and the gradual readmission of Jews to England. [5] [6]
In effect, Zionism stood at the cradle of the resettlement of Jews to England. [6]
17th century Congregationalists like John Owen, [7] and Baptists like John Gill, [8] and John Rippon, some 18th century Methodists [9] and 19th century preachers like C H Spurgeon, [10] Presbyterians like Samuel Rutherford, [11] Horatius [12] and Andrew Bonar, [13] and Robert Murray M'Chyene, [14] and many Anglicans including Bishop J C Ryle [15] and Charles Simeon held similar views. Simeon wrote in 1820, 'the Jews at large, and the generality of Christians also, believe that the dispersed of Israel will one day be restored to their own land' [16]
The meaning of our text, as opened up by the context, is most evidently, if words mean anything, first, that there shall be a political restoration of the Jews to their own land and to their own nationality. C H Spurgeon in 1864, 32 years before Herzl's Der Judenstaat, [10]
Jewish Christians like Joseph Frey, who founded the London Society for the Jews, Joseph Woolf, and two theologians Ridley Herschell and Philip Hirschfeld formed an important link between the earlier Restorationism of German Lutheran pietists and British evangelicals, and played a large part in galvanizing widespread evangelical support in the UK. [4] Herschell founded the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Among the Jews (now known as the Christian Witness to Israel) and the Evangelical Alliance in 1845. [17] In 1840, G. W. Pieritz, another Jewish missionary for the London Society played an important role in exposing the Damascus blood libels to the British public in The Times. [18] Erasmus Calman was a Latvian Jewish Christian, resident in Jerusalem from 1833, who in 1840 also lobbied vigorously for Jewish settlement in Palestine. [4]
Early political momentum from the 1790s to encourage and facilitate a Jewish return to Israel was doctrinally post millennial in character, being based on Puritan teaching. [4] [5] Influential premillennial teachers like James Frere, James Haldane Stewart and Edward Irving in the 1820s and 30s spurred a shift in widely held opinion, with equal advocacy for the restoration. [4] [19] The close associates Edward Bickersteth and Lord Shaftesbury were prominent premillennial proponents of Restoration, though Bickersteth did not publicly come to this view of the millennium until 1835, and both held differently nuanced views but jointly considered a return to the land would precede the receipt of spiritual life. [4]
Perhaps the greater paradox was that Victorian England's leading Christian Zionist had been encouraged and confirmed in his restorationist views by Jewish converts who were far more zealous in the Zionist cause than most of their fellow Jews. On Lord Shaftesbury, Donald Lewis, Professor Church History, Regent College, Vancouver. [4]
Shaftesbury repeatedly lobbied Lord Palmerston for moves to stimulate Jewish return to the Middle East, primarily by the appointment of a British Consul in Jerusalem in 1838. He also pressed for the building of Christ Church, the first place of Reformed worship in Jerusalem despite Ottoman and local opposition and the consecration in 1841 of a Jewish joint Anglican and Prussian Bishop in Jerusalem. [4] [20] Shaftesbury's labours paved the way for the Balfour Declaration. [4] [21]
William Hechler, an Anglican minister has been described as, 'not only the first, but the most constant and the most indefatigable of Herzl’s followers'. [1] Due to his German court connections, Hechler initially introduced Herzl to the Grand Duke of Baden, and through him hoped to present early Zionist proposals to Kaiser Wilhelm II, [22] prompting one historian to suggest that with less German suspicion, the Zionist cause might instead have been brought to birth through its own initiative. [3]
Christian Zionists like John Henry Patterson [23] and Orde Wingate [24] played crucial roles in the initiation and development of the Haganah, sometimes despite British Government opposition.
Some proponents of Christian Zionism believe that Israel must belong to the Jewish people as one of the prerequisites for the return of Jesus to earth. [3] [25] This eschatology has been criticized by Stephen Sizer. [26] He and Christian Zionist David Pawson have publicly debated the issue. [27]
In 2007, the Israeli English-language newspaper The Jerusalem Post , reported on the Jerusalem Summit Europe conference held in London, describing it as an attempt "to stem the tide of rising Islamic fundamentalism" and of moral relativism. [28] [29] According to the paper, the goal was to "rekindle the faded force of Christian Zionism in the United Kingdom." [30]
Exploits Ministry is one of the London organizations which promotes Christian Zionism. [31]
Other organisations are Christian Friends of Israel, UK, the Church's Ministry Among Jewish People (The Israel Trust of the Anglican Church), Intercessors for Britain (IFB), Prayer for Israel (PFI), Derek Prince Ministries, Christians United for Israel UK, [32] Beit Yeshua, North East Messianic Fellowship, Bridges of Peace, C L Ministries, Evangelical Sisterhood of Mary, Hatikvah Film Trust, International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, UK, Messianic (Christian) Educational Trust, Paul Heyman International Ministries, Revelation TV, the Israel Britain Evangelistic Association and Christian Zionists for Israel UK.
Zionism is a nationalist movement that emerged in the 19th century to enable the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine, a region roughly corresponding to the Land of Israel in Jewish tradition. Following the establishment of the modern state of Israel, Zionism became an ideology that supports "the development and protection of the State of Israel".
A homeland for the Jewish people is an idea rooted in Jewish history, religion, and culture. The Jewish aspiration to return to Zion, generally associated with divine redemption, has suffused Jewish religious thought since the destruction of the First Temple and the Babylonian exile.
Christian Zionism is an ideology that, in a Christian context, espouses the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land. Likewise, it holds that the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 was in accordance with Bible prophecy: that the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty in the Levant — the eschatological "Gathering of Israel" — is a prerequisite for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. The term began to be used in the mid-20th century, in place of Christian restorationism, as proponents of the ideology rallied behind Zionists in support of a Jewish national homeland.
The World Zionist Organization, or WZO, is a non-governmental organization that promotes Zionism. It was founded as the Zionist Organization at the initiative of Theodor Herzl at the First Zionist Congress, which took place in August 1897 in Basel, Switzerland. The goals of the Zionist movement were set out in the Basel Program.
Bank Leumi is an Israeli bank. It was founded on February 27, 1902, in Jaffa as the Anglo Palestine Company as subsidiary of the Jewish Colonial Trust Limited formed before in London by members of the Zionist movement to promote the industry, construction, agriculture, and infrastructure of the land hoped to ultimately become Israel. Today, Bank Leumi is Israel's largest bank, with overseas offices in Luxembourg, US, Switzerland, the UK, Mexico, Uruguay, Romania, Jersey, and China.
Nahum ben Joseph Samuel Sokolow was a Zionist leader, author, translator, and a pioneer of Hebrew journalism.
William Eugene Blackstone was an American evangelist and Christian Zionist. He was the author of the Blackstone Memorial of 1891, a petition which called upon America to actively return the Holy Land to the Jewish people. Blackstone was influenced by Dwight Lyman Moody, James H. Brookes, and John Nelson Darby. He is remembered as the author of the Blackstone Memorial.
The Old New Land is a utopian novel published in German by Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, in 1902. It was published six years after Herzl's political pamphlet, Der Judenstaat and expanded on Herzl's vision for a Jewish return to the Land of Israel, which helped Altneuland become one of Zionism's establishing texts. It was translated into Yiddish by Israel Isidor Elyashev, and into Hebrew by Nahum Sokolow as Tel Aviv, a name then adopted for the newly founded city.
David Wolffsohn was a Lithuanian-Jewish businessman, prominent early Zionist and second president of the Zionist Organization (ZO).
Theodor Herzl was an Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist and political activist who was the father of modern political Zionism. Herzl formed the Zionist Organization and promoted Jewish immigration to Palestine in an effort to form a Jewish state.
The First Zionist Congress was the inaugural congress of the Zionist Organization (ZO) held in the Stadtcasino Basel in the city of Basel on August 29–31, 1897. Two hundred and eight delegates and 26 press correspondents attended the event. It was convened and chaired by Theodor Herzl, the founder of the modern Zionism movement. The Congress formulated a Zionist platform, known as the Basel program, and founded the Zionist Organization. It also adopted the Hatikvah as its anthem.
Jacob de Haas was a British-born Jewish journalist and an early leader of the Zionist movement in the United States.
As an organized nationalist movement, Zionism is generally considered to have been founded by Theodor Herzl in 1897. However, the history of Zionism began earlier and is intertwined with Jewish history and Judaism. The organizations of Hovevei Zion, held as the forerunners of modern Zionist ideals, were responsible for the creation of 20 Jewish towns in Palestine between 1870 and 1897.
L. J. Greenberg, born Leopold Jacob Greenberg (1861–1931), was a British journalist. He had become an energetic propagandist of the new Zionism in England by the Third Zionist Congress in 1899, at which he and Jacob de Haas were elected as members of the ZO's Propaganda Committee. His frequent dialectical debates were conducted as editor of The Jewish Chronicle, the leading paper in Britain for the Jewish community. Greenberg called for decency and humanity towards World Jewry.
The Church's Ministry Among Jewish People (CMJ) is an Anglican missionary society founded in 1809.
Joseph Salvador (1796–1873) was a scholar from a Sephardi Jewish family in the south of France. Salvador was born in Montpellier. His family had fled to Southern France from Spain in the 15th century in the wake of the Spanish Inquisition where they acculturated to life in France. Salvador's mother was a Roman Catholic. At his personal request, he was buried in the Protestant cemetery of Le Vigan, near Montpellier.
The common definition of Zionism was principally the endorsement of the Jewish people to return to their homeland, secondarily the claim that due to a lack of self-determination, this territory must be re-established as a Jewish state. Zionism was produced by various philosophers representing different approaches concerning the objective and path that Zionism should follow.
William Henry Hechler was an English Restorationist Anglican clergyman; eschatological writer; crusader against antisemitism; promoter of Zionism; and aide, counselor, friend and legitimiser of Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism.
Samuel Pineles was a philanthropist and Religious Zionist activist. He was the driving force behind the 1881 Romanian Zionist meeting in Focșani. He was the president and secretary of the Central Committee to Settle the Land of Israel and Syria and was active in Hovevei Zion in Romania.
Paul Goodman (1875–1949) was a British Zionist. He served in multiple positions in the London movement and wrote for multiple Jewish and Zionist publications.
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