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>> 171 10 Evangelicals and the Birth of the Jewish State While evangelical activists and leaders noted the plight of Jews in Europe under the Nazi and communist regimes, they also followed the growth of the Jewish community in the Land of Israel with interest and satisfaction. Their reaction on the whole could be described as supportive , yet apprehensive. They were happy to see the birth of a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine, yet they wished the new country had a different cultural and religious agenda. A number of evangelical missionaries and writers visited Palestine during the 1930s and 1940s, watching closely the developments among the Jewish community there and sending home enthusiastic reports of what they saw. The immigration of hundreds of thousands of Jews to the country; the building of new neighborhoods, towns, and villages; the cultivation of hundreds of thousands of acres of land; the establishment of cultural and educational enterprises; and the growth of a Hebrew culture there—all filled evangelicals with excitement .1 These, they believed, were “signs of the time,” indications that the current era was ending and that the arrival of the Messiah was imminent. The evangelical response to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 was, on the whole, one of moral support. Evangelical journals had published sympathetic articles about the intensified Jewish struggle for a Jewish state, and American statesmen with conservative evangelical leanings had supported this agenda in the political and diplomatic struggles that preceded the birth of Israel. However, at this time no particular pro-Zionist evangelical lobby developed, and evangelicals as a group did not raise their voices in favor of American support for the Jewish state.2 In the late 1940s, conservative evangelicalism was 172 > 173 expectations.4 The mass emigration of Jews to Israel in the late 1940s and 1950s from many parts of the world, including Asian, African, and East European countries, was one cause for encouragement. In evangelical opinion, this was a significant development, one that had been prophesied in the Bible, and a clear indication that the present era was terminating and that the events of the end of the age were beginning to occur. However, some evangelical apprehension persisted. Israel retained the Ottoman millet system, according to which one’s civic identity and status were defined by one’s ethnic and religious background, regardless of one’s personal convictions. Religious and ethnic identities were recorded at birth or upon immigration and appeared on identity cards that Israelis were required to carry at all times. The categories were very definite, and Jewish converts who immigrated to Israel at times could not register as Jews. The new state allowed missions to pursue their work and guaranteed freedom of worship. But evangelical missionaries in Israel concluded that they were not competing in an open market of religion and that the system as a whole, while not restricting their activities, did not offer them the kind of freedom of religion that America possessed. Likewise, the Israeli national ethos, which in the early years of the state was Zionist, mostly secular, and semisocialist, did not work in favor of evangelical presence and activity. Like missions in America from the 1880s to the 1920s, evangelicals had no problem reaching needy Jews, most of them new immigrants from Middle Eastern, North African, or eastern European nations. However, in spite of an extensive missionary infrastructure and aggressive efforts, from the 1940s to the 1960s, evangelicals failed to reach members of the Israeli elite. Frustrated over their disadvantage, a number of missionary leaders sought to change the relationship in Israel between church and state and create a society based on the American model. One such visionary was Robert Lindsey, leader of the Southern Baptist community in Israel at the time. A scholar of the New Testament and a missionary, Lindsey left his mark on evangelical-Jewish relations in Israel. While translating the Gospels into modern Hebrew, Lindsey had come to believe that the Synoptic Gospels were originally written 174 > 175 no political power, it influenced Hebrew poetry and Israeli art, introducing pseudo-Canaanite motifs. Some claimed that followers of the group had practiced what would later be known as neopagan rites, although it is doubtful that such practices really took place.5 This did not deter Lindsey from establishing close connections with Canaanite ideologues and activists, including Yonatan Ratosh. He hired Zvi Rin, brother of the Canaanite leader, to do translations into Hebrew of books produced by the Baptist publishing house...

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