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>> 111 6 Instructing Christians and Jews Evangelical Missions to the Jews Since the eighteenth century, missions to the Jews have occupied a central place in the agenda of evangelical Christians. Their meaning for evangelicals has gone far beyond trying to turn individual Jews into confessing Christians, though this aspect of missionary work has certainly been important. Propagating Christianity among the Jews has meant teaching that people about their true role and purpose in history. Missionaries concluded that only a handful of Jews in the current generation would be “saved” but that many others would learn about God’s plans for humanity and what to expect when the Rapture took place and the events of the end times unfolded. Those righteous Jews who would read or listen to the missionary messages would recognize the events as correlating with the predictions they had read or heard and would accept Jesus as their savior. These would include first and foremost the 144,000 Jews who would become evangelists and spread the Christian message during the Great Tribulation. Missionaries to the Jews also believed it was important to instruct Christians as to the role of the Jews in God’s plans. This part of their work aimed to increase support in the Christian community for the idea of the Jews as a special people and the need to evangelize them. For most missionary groups the two aims, instructing Jews and Christians, were inseparable. Evangelical activists such as the Earl of Shaftsbury in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century and Arno Gaebelein in America at the turn of the twentieth century were advocates of the premillennialist faith, leaders in the realm of missions to the Jews, and proponents of Jewish restoration to Palestine, as well as leading spokespersons of 112 > 113 over to London part of the Institutum Judaicum’s library and translated and reproduced a number of the pietists’ tracts, thus creating a direct link between the two ventures. In its scope of activities, the Society was one of the larger and betterbudgeted missionary groups of the nineteenth century. By the turn of the twentieth century, two hundred full-time paid missionaries operated in fifty-two posts around the globe, with missionary wives and volunteers aiding in the Society’s efforts.3 By that time, twenty-seven British denominations and interdenominational groups established missionary societies aiming at laboring among Jews. While often enjoying support from nonevangelical bodies, those missions were organized, directed, and run by messianically oriented evangelical Protestants. Many of them also promoted the idea of the Jewish return to Palestine as a prerequisite to the unfolding of the messianic age and combined the two agendas in their messages. Protestant churches, which were not necessarily messianically oriented , often created special departments for missionizing the Jews or sponsored semiautonomous missionary enterprises that were evangelical in character, preached a premillennialist theology, and promoted a belief in the centrality of the Jews in God’s plans for humanity. A number of groups and individuals cooperated in creating interdenominational missionary organizations, such as the Chicago Hebrew Mission. Missionaries to the Jews professionalized their vocation, published and translated tracts, organized conferences, and established schools to train missionaries to the Jews. Each mission carried unique features, but as a whole missions also created a movement. As a rule, missions held similar perceptions of the Jews and the moral and spiritual state of that people in the past, present, and the future, as well as of the obligations of the Christian Protestant community toward the Jews, and there was therefore much similarity in the messages, literature, and modes of operation. Attempts at creating missions to the Jews in America started in the early nineteenth century but did not enjoy the same success as in Britain . Mainstream American Protestants lacked, at that time, the most important incentive to invest energy and resources in evangelizing Jews, 114 > 115 the evangelization of the Jews as part of a larger program: preparing the Jewish people for their historical role in helping to usher in a new era. Alongside cooperation, there was competition over the resources and support of the Protestant community.4 The success of missions depended on their ability to adapt themselves to the changing face of both the Jewish communities they were trying to reach and the Protestant supporters who sponsored the missions. Until the 1920s, the missions directed much of their messages and activities toward poor and needy Jewish immigrants and their children in working-class neighborhoods. The missionary enterprises utilized...

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