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Modern Judaism 26.1 (2006) 74-100



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An Unexpected Alliance:

Christian Zionism and Its Historical Significance

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

In 1840, the leader of the evangelical party in Britain, Lord Ashley Cooper, the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, petitioned the British foreign minister, requesting that Britain initiate the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.1 Fifty years later, an American evangelist, William Blackstone, organized a petition to the president of the United States, urging him to convene an international conference that would decide to grant Palestine to the Jews. Shaftesbury and Blackstone, whose attempts to create a Jewish state in Palestine antedated the rise of political Zionism, were among the more well-known proto-Zionists in the English-speaking world. A large number of clergymen, writers, businessmen, and politicians supported, and at times labored actively for, the restoration of the Jews to Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish state. Motivated by a biblical messianic faith and the belief that a Jewish commonwealth in the Land of Israel was a necessary stage in the preparation of the way for the return of Jesus of Nazareth to earth, Christian Zionists have, at times, been more enthusiastic than Jews over the prospect of a Jewish state. When Jews launched the Zionist movement, Christian protagonists offered support. Christian political backing accompanied the birth of the State of Israel and its history ever since, gaining special momentum after the Six-Day War in 1967.

Christian Messianism and Zionism

The messianic hope, which has served as the incentive for the rise of Christian Zionism, draws on a long Christian messianic tradition.2 In its early generations, Christianity was a messianic faith, its followers expecting the imminent return of Jesus of Nazareth to establish the kingdom of God on earth.3 Since the turning of Christianity into the dominant religion in the Mediterranean world in the fourth and fifth centuries, the predominant Christian trends became amillennial, expecting the return of Jesus in a remote future and interpreting [End Page 74] biblical passages with messianic overtones as allegorical. According to that view, the church has replaced Jesus on earth and has a mission to instruct its followers and ensure their salvation. However, millennial groups, which expected the return of Jesus to earth, came about during the Middle Ages, drawing on messianic passages in biblical tracts, such as Daniel and the Revelations of John, and predicting the imminent end of the world-as-we-know-it.4

A burst of apocalyptic expectations came about in the wake of the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century.5 Reading the Old Testament in a new manner, a number of the messianic groups expected the Jews to play an important role in the imminent events of the End Times. The English Revolution in the mid–seventeenth century also stirred the messianic imagination and gave rise to premillennialist groups that took interest in the Jewish people and the prospect of their return to Palestine. Messianic hopes played a part in the deliberations on the return of the Jews to England in the 1650s.6 Likewise, premillennialist Christians in Britain and Holland followed with interest the Jewish messianic movement stirred by Shabbatai Zvi in the mid–seventeenth century, hoping that it would bring about the return of the Jews to Palestine.7

The roots and early beginnings of Christian Zionism can be tracked to the seventeenth-century Protestant messianic groups. It was already at this stage that one could notice characteristics of Christian interest in the Jewish return to Palestine. Such Christians tended to read their sacred scriptures in a more literal manner. In contrast to other branches of Christianity, they saw the Jews as continuers of the biblical sons of Israel, heirs to the covenant between God and Abraham, and the object of biblical prophecies about a restored Davidic kingdom in the Land of Israel. In their messianic scenarios, the return of the Jews to Palestine was the first step in the advancement of the messianic timetable. Such Christians often envisioned the Jews and their role in...

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