On 3rd February 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated over the Western seaboard of the United States, scattering debris across a vast region stretching from California to Texas. The combination of a design flaw and an unfortunate set of circumstances on launch led to the shuttle over-heating on re-entry until the final, inevitable explosion. For some observers, however, this explanation did not get at the root cause of the disaster. The Columbia exploded, claimed Christian Zionist William Koenig , to demonstrate God’s anger at the United States’ recent treatment of Israel. According to Koenig, God blessed or cursed gentile nations for the way they treated the Jews and the Jewish state. As President George W. Bush’s government had favoured policies that sought peace with Palestinian terrorists and the removal of Jews from land which was theirs by divine right, so God had shown his displeasure by striking American pride. The fact that early media reports mentioned debris found in Palestine, Texas, was a clear sign that the Lord was trying to get America’s attention.
Koenig based his reasoning on the promise made to Abraham in Genesis 12:3, where God told Abraham that he would be father of a great nation. This implied that those who blessed Abraham would be blessed, and those who cursed him would be cursed in turn. For Koenig this provided a straightforward way of understanding God’s providential purposes in history. Individuals, and more particularly nations, could expect either the blessings or curses promised to them depending on their treatment of Abraham’s descendants. Not only the Columbia disaster, but events as diverse as 9/11, the 7/7 bombings in London, Hurricane Katrina, and the destruction of George H.W. Bush’s holiday home, could all be attributed to the way in which the United States interacted with Israel.1 Yet while Koenig’s approach may raise eyebrows, it was by no means novel. Some applied the same providential lens to view events in London three hundred and fifty years earlier. Contemplating the causes of the civil wars of the previous decade, Edward Nicholas suggested in 1651 that they were divine punishment for the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290.2 As Oliver Cromwell planned his foreign policy, and how he would relate to the Jews, the Baptist leader Thomas Collier similarly warned that “God hath a special eye over [the Jews]… and will take vengance [sic] to the full on all the nations that have afflicted them”.3 If England cared about their future, he argued, then the nation should begin to consider the ways in which they might be able to bless the Jewish people.
Both Koenig and Collier expressed the same idea. The person who cared about their nation cared about what happened to the Jews. Although they were clearly writing in very different contexts, with very different political concerns, both writers focused their concerns about the future of their nation upon the Jewish people. The “destinies” of their homelands, be it Cromwellian England or George W. Bush’s USA, were fundamentally linked to the way in which the ruling elites treated the Jews and their claims to Palestine. These are not isolated examples. Projects to restore the Jews to their ancient homeland, whether expressed as eschatological hopes, utopian schemes, or in practical political terms, have consistently served as means of national identity construction. This book examines these links, and the way in which they were used to construct national identity in England from 1600–1850. In doing so, it aims to highlight how eschatology has affected ideas of national identity, political policy, and interactions between Christians and Jews over three centuries. It suggests a model of national identity formation fuelled by prophecy, oriented towards the fulfilment of national mission. Yet this is not a straightforward story of national election. Neither Collier nor Koenig viewed their respective countries as the elect nation. Instead, they embraced a form of secondary election, in which they understood national identity primarily in relation to their nation’s service to the Jewish people. This type of national identity employed a form of othering in which identity developed by comparison with an outside group. Where theories of national identity often presume that othering involves a negative view of such a group, in this case they viewed the “other” positively. In fact, the Jews when restored would be superior to the nation aiding them, and would return to their place as God’s first nation. This phenomenon is therefore a form of “chosen” rather than “elect” nationhood, as the nation fulfils its designated eschatological role but does not replace Israel as God’s sole elect nation. As such, this model complicates the way in which historians think about prophecy and national election.
1 Chosen Nationhood and Providential Thinking
The concept of “elect” nationhood has played an important role in the way in which studies have examined the development of national identity. As historians have taken the importance of religion in intellectual life increasingly seriously, so awareness of the position of Old Testament Israel as a prototypical nation has come to the fore. Examining the way in which the Bible served to build ideas of nationhood, some historians have ventured beyond suggesting that Israel served as an example for national identity formation, to claim that particular nations believed themselves to have replaced Israel as “elect”. This idea is rooted in the concept of supersessionism. As God rejected Israel for their refusal of Christ’s messiahship, so the church represented the ultimate fulfilment of their mission. The church was therefore the “true Israel”, inheriting, and in the process spiritualising, the promises of the Hebrew prophets.4 The idea of “elect nationhood” took this a stage further, arguing that God worked through nations in the new dispensation in the same way that he worked through national Israel in the Hebrew Bible. This presumed that, as God had done with national Israel, he had chosen a particular nation, set them apart from others, and ordered them to be a light to the world: “a single people having a unique sense of their identity as a people set apart from all others by a peculiar destiny”.5 Adrian Hastings has found this tendency in historians stretching back as far as the work of the Venerable Bede.6
The importance of this idea has been repeatedly emphasised in studies of national identity, especially those that have focused on the centrality of religion in forging ideas of nationhood. Perry Miller’s famous thesis that New England settlers in the 1620s viewed themselves as an exemplar nation, repeating Israel’s exodus and becoming “a city on a hill”, has been at the centre of studies of the development of American national identity.7 The concept of election has also influenced examinations of Englishness. William Haller’s argument that John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments helped to forge an Elizabethan concept of England as a new Israel has had a significant impact on both early modern history and studies of national identity more generally, including Liah Greenfeld’s controversial work identifying early modern England as the birthplace of nationalism.8 Although dismissive of both Greenfeld’s thesis and the role of religion in forging national identity, Krishan Kumar has suggested that the English belief that they had a specially chosen role in spreading civilisation and Christianity helped to drive the British imperial project.9 For many historians, these ideas represented a de facto replacement of Israel by England or the United States. These nations saw themselves as “destined to continue the work of ancient Israel”10; as “having taken the place of God’s first elect people, the Jews”.11 They were “repeating the history of biblical Israel, but with the possibility of getting it ‘right’”.12 At its most extreme, this reading has suggested that in settings such as seventeenth-century New England scripture was “not history… Israel was the true name of the place where [the settlers] lived, and they were Israelites”.13 Anthony D. Smith therefore argued that national election necessitated a firm rejection of Jews as those who had abandoned their divine duty. Election was seen “as a reward for receiving the true faith rejected by the Jews, [and] they were therefore required to supplant the Jews as the chosen people”.14
As Israel was unique in the old dispensation, so God could have only one elect nation in the new. This has led to speculation on what might happen when two nations claiming to be “elect” come across one another. Clifford Longley has suggested that because “election” presumes a single chosen entity a clash is likely to occur.15 Acsah Guibbory has argued that this sort of clash emerged in seventeenth-century England, where Stuart kings viewed themselves as the chosen successors of Solomon. This led to both negative views of Jews as those who falsely claimed the biblical promises for themselves, and to further issues when Jews later attempted to gain readmission to England.16 Historians have identified a similar dynamic in early Quakerism. For example, Claire Jowett argued that Margaret Fell’s early support for Jewish readmission to England evaporated as she realised that Jews would continue to claim that they remained the true Israel, instead of acknowledging that Quakers now fulfilled that role.17 In a more contemporary setting, Bruce Cauthen suggests that conflicting visions of their own elect roles had a negative impact on official relations between France and the United States in the twenty-first century.18
These sorts of clashes would be inevitable if elect nation thinking necessitated a total rejection of all other nations as inferior rivals to the title of God’s chosen people. Yet internationalism and cooperation have often been a part of conceptions of national chosenness. As Anthony D. Smith has argued, national election looks both inward and outward. Smith proposed two primary modes of national election: covenant and missional. The first appropriates the model of biblical covenant. The nation, or a representative group, enter into an agreement with God to be his special people. God guarantees this by promising power or land, but also by warning that those who enter the covenant must be collectively holy—if a covenant people fall into disobedience, they will be punished and lose their covenant blessings.19 Where the covenantal model primarily looks inwards and concentrates on the righteousness of the chosen people, the missional model lo...