CHAPTER EIGHT

THE JEWISH CONNECTION

Missions at home and abroad were transnational affairs, conducted in the beliefthat the gradual conversion of the peoples of the earth, and especially ofthejewish people, would prepare the way for the Second Advent. Evangelical endeavours to meet the physical and spiritual necds of pcop1e uprooted and cast aside by the growing power of the industrial machine must be considered within that eschatological con• text. The shift within British evangelicalism from the late 1820s from a postmillennial to a premillennial perspective on the events surround• ing the end of human history was paralleled by the growth of interest in and the role of the in the plan of salvation. The foremost Scottish authority on biblical prophecies was Alexander Keith (1791-1880). He believed in the literal fulfilment of God's promises for and accompanied Robert Murray McCheyne and Andrew Bonar on their expedition through to Palestine in 1839. Bonar's and McCheyne's interest in Jewish missions may weil have been awakened by Andrew Thomson of St George's, Edin• burgh, who, as editor of the Edinburgh Christian Instructor (established in 181 0) published articles on the Society and its Scottish aux• iliaries. Thomson tried at one time to persuade the Duke of Welling• ton to 'restore' thejews to Pa1estine. The Scotjohn Wi1son, friend of the German missionary in lndia Hermann Mögling, believed that Bombay, with its large number of Jewish merchants living under British rule, would be an ideal p1ace to begin labouring amongjews. 1 The rapid growth of Jewish missionary enthusiasm and apocalyptic excitement in Scotland preceeded a religious reviva1 that McCheyne believed was God's gift to the Scots for their outreach to His chosen people. The General Assemb1y of the Church of Scotland decided in May 1842 to send missionaries to London and Pesth to work among thejewish populations in those cities. Nearly all these would, after the Disruption of 1843 and the foundation of the Free Church of Scot-

1 Don Chambers, 'Prelude to the last things: the Church of Scotland's mission to thejews', in: Scottish Church History Society's Records, Volume XIX, 1975, Part I, 45,52- 3. 196 CHAPTER EIGHT land, choose to enter the service of the latter denomination. Carl Schwarz, for example, conducted mission work among the Jews of Berlin with a great deal of success until the revolution of 1848, when the liberal reforms encouraged many Jews to return to their tradi• tional Judaic practice. Hermann Stern of Württemberg, a convert working from 1846 for the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel among the J ews, found the revolution had a similar impact on his work among the Jews of Frankfurt am Main. In the early 1840s, however, the mood in the British Isles was buoyant. 'All who have paid any attention to the history of modern Judaism', wrote the Times on 17 August 1840, 'know, that especially in recent years, the minds of Jews have been earnestly directed to• wards Palestine, and that in anticipation of a reconstruction of the Jewish state many are prepared to avail themselves of the facilities which events may afford to return to the land of their fathers. It is not Jews only who anticipate this result; Christians are becoming equally impressed with the conviction, are endeavouring to create facilities and to remove obstructions, and are intently watehing these coming events whose shadows are believed to be now passing over the politi• cal horizon'. A group of English gentlemen, the editorial continued, had issued questionnaires to Jews to 'ascertain their real feelings and expectations' and had sent reports on the topic to all the Protestant monarchs ofEurope. The proposed restoration ofthejews, the resto• ration of the Jewish polity, became, in the 1840s, a 'new element of the Eastern question'. Evangelical support for various projects in Palestine can only be understood against the background of premillennial fervour in Britain and Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century. Napoleon fired evangelical and Jewish imaginations. The French Revolution and Napoleon's exploits had created in the minds ofmany,Jews and Christians alike, an apocalyptic scenario. 2 Richard Brothers had cal• culated that the millennium would begin on 19 November 1795 and that the return of the Jews, by which he meant the British Israelites, would take place in 1798. William Tozer's Scriptural and Hieroglyphic

2 Martin Buher, Gag und Magog, Frankfurt a.M. 1957; Sarnuel H. Cross, 'The earliest allusion in Slavic Iiterature to the "Revelations" of Pseudo-Methodius', in: Speculum. A Journal of Medieval Studies, Valurne IV, No. 3, July 1929, 331 n. 3; E.P. Thornpson, 77ze making of the English working class, Harrnondsworth 1991, 420; Dwight \Vilson, Armageddon now! 77ze premillenarian response to Russia and Israel since 1917, Grand Rapids 1977, 20-2; Ronald R. Nelson, 'Apocalyptic Speculation and the French Revolution', in: Euangelical Qyarterly, Valurne 43, 1981, 194-206; Mayir Verete, 'The Restoration ofthejews in English Protestant Thought 1790-1840', in: Middle Eastern Studies, Valurne 8, Nurnber 1,January 1972, 45 (footnote 19).