H. Eugene and Lillian Youngs Lehman Series

Missions to the Jews in America, 1880 - 2000

Yaakov Ariel

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780807860533
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie juive

With this book, Yaakov Ariel offers the first comprehensive history of Protestant evangelization of Jews in America to the present day. Based on unprecedented research in missionary archives as well as Jewish writings, the book analyzes the theology and activities of both the missions and the converts and describes the reactions of the Jewish community, which in turn helped to shape the evangelical activity directed toward it. Ariel delineates three successive waves of evangelism, the first directed toward poor Jewish immigrants, the second toward American-born Jews trying to assimilate, and the third toward Jewish baby boomers influenced by the counterculture of the Vietnam War era. After World War II, the missionary impulse became almost exclusively the realm of conservative evangelicals, as the more liberal segments of American Christianity took the path of interfaith dialogue. As Ariel shows, these missionary efforts have profoundly influenced Christian-Jewish relations. Jews have seen the missionary movement as a continuation of attempts to delegitimize Judaism and to do away with Jews through assimilation or annihilation. But to conservative evangelical Christians, who support the State of Israel, evangelizing Jews is a manifestation of goodwill toward them.

Part I: The Rise of the Movement to Evangelize the Jews, 1880–1920

Chapter 1: Eschatology and Mission

In the 1890s, an unusual religious group convened on the Lower East Side of New York: immigrant Jews who had accepted the Christian faith yet continued to retain Jewish rites and customs. Established by Methodist missionaries, the “Hope of Israel” mission aimed at propagating the Christian gospel among the Jews, while promoting the idea that Jewish converts should not abandon their cultural and religious heritage. This attempt to create a congregation of Jewish converts to Christianity was one manifestation of a larger movement that came to evangelize the Jews in America at that time. It advocated a premillennialist messianic theology and emphasized the central role of the Jews in the divine program for the End Times. The messianic belief shaped the character of the missionary movement, its rhetoric, symbols, the publications it produced, and its appeals to supporters as well as to potential converts.

The movement to evangelize the Jews in America had its precedent in Europe. European pietists had established missions to the Jews in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which served as early models and inspiration for future Protestant evangelization enterprises. The early nineteenth century saw a dramatic rise in attempts to convert Jews in Britain, which was witnessing a strong evangelical and premillennialist resurgence, including hope for the national rejuvenation of the Jews.¹

Missions to the Jews began in America in the early years of the nineteenth century.² But although Jewish leaders reacted with anger and alarm to the attempts to evangelize their people, only one missionary enterprise, the American Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Jews, lasted long enough to receive much visibility in the Protestant community.³ Prior to the 1880s, evangelizing the Jews was not a high priority for American Protestants, especially when compared with the support they gave this work from that time onward; nor do early-nineteenth-century evangelization efforts compare to work carried out in Britain during the earlier parts of the nineteenth century.⁴ During an era labeled “a century of missions,” in which American Protestants spent much energy, personnel, and resources bringing the gospel to the unchurched, both at home and abroad, the realm of Jewish missions was relatively neglected. Unlike in Britain, where there was an ardent interest in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century in converting the Jews, American Protestants lacked the necessary motivation, namely, an intensive messianic, premillennialist hope that viewed the Jews as the chosen people and emphasized the role of the Jews in God’s plans for the End Times.

There were groups in America in the earlier parts of the nineteenth century that advocated the idea of the Second Coming of Jesus to earth, such as the Millerites and the Mormons. These groups, however, were ostracized by mainstream American Protestants.⁵ The Millerites, who stirred an unprecedented movement of messianic expectation in America in the 1830s and early 1840s, assigned no particular role in their messianic scheme to the Jews.⁶ The belief in the Second Coming of Jesus and his reign on earth for a thousand years began capturing the hearts of members of major Protestant churches in America only in the decades after the Civil War, when a new messianic belief known as dispensationalism was accepted by millions of American Protestants.

Dispensationalism was crystallized in Britain in the 1830s by John Darby and the group he led, the Plymouth Brethren.⁷ For Darby and his disciples, the Jews were historical Israel and the object of the biblical prophecies about the restored Davidic kingdom in the Land of Israel. According to the dispensationalist messianic hope, the Jews will return to their land “in unbelief,” that is, without having accepted Jesus as their Savior, and will establish a sovereign state there. The actual apocalyptic events will begin with the “rapture of the church,” when the true believers will be raptured from earth, meet Jesus in the air, and stay with him there for seven years (according to some variations, three and a half years). The earth will undergo a period of turmoil known as the “Great Tribulation.” This will include a series of natural disasters: earthquakes, floods, and plagues as well as social and political unrest, including wars, revolutions, and a series of invasions of the Land of Israel. Eventually, about two-thirds of humanity will perish.⁸ For the Jews, that tumultuous period will be the “Time of Jacob’s Trouble” (Jeremiah 30:7). Antichrist, a Jewish ruler and an impostor of the Messiah, will reestablish the Temple, reinstate sacrifices, and inflict a reign of terror. During this reign the Jews will gradually recognize Jesus as their Savior and will receive him gladly when he comes to earth with his saints, the true believers, crushing Antichrist and establishing his righteous kingdom. During the messianic period the Jews will be restored to their position as the chosen people and will serve as Christ’s lieutenants—the administrators and evangelists of the millennial era.

This messianic belief gained ground in the last decades of the nineteenth century among members of evangelical Protestant churches in America, such as Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dispensationalism became an important component of the worldview of the conservative camp within American Protestantism. It meshed well with the fundamentalist view, which criticized the prevailing cultural trend in society, and offered an alternative philosophy of history to the liberal postmillennialist notions that prevailed in American Christianity at the time.⁹ In contrast to the liberal belief that human beings could work toward the building of a better, even perfect, world, dispensationalists insisted that only divine intervention—the appearance of the Messiah—could remedy the problems of the human race. The growing prominence of the messianic belief among conservative Protestants was demonstrated by the popularity of dispensationalist premillennialist literature. Books advocating the messianic belief, such as James H. Brookes’s Maranatha, were sold by the hundreds of thousands. Brookes, a Presbyterian minister from St. Louis, first published his book in 1874. In the following decades, the book appeared in numerous editions, becoming a best-seller. Maranatha elaborated on the role of the Jewish people in the events of the End Times and in the millennial kingdom. Like other advocates of the belief in the Second Coming of Christ and the centrality of the Jewish people for the advancement of the messianic age, Brookes strongly supported missions to the Jews. Another popular publication that enhanced the spread of the dispensationalist belief and the idea that the Jews were God’s chosen nation was The Scofield Reference Bible. Published in 1909, the book sold a few million copies and helped strengthen the bond between fundamentalism and the dispensationalist school of messianic faith.

Dispensationalism had a decisive influence on the way the American evangelical Protestant community viewed the Jewish people. The 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s witnessed the beginning of a keen interest of members of this camp in the Jews, whom they saw as the chosen people, destined to play a dominant role in God’s plans for humanity. Since the 1870s, almost all popular books intended to promote the dispensationalist premillennialist creed have emphasized the role of the Jews in the advancement of the messianic age.¹⁰ The interest premillennialist evangelicals took in the Jewish people manifested itself in initiatives intended to advance the return of the Jews to the Land of Israel, a prerequisite, from a dispensationalist point of view, to the arrival of the Messiah.¹¹ One such outstanding example was that of William Blackstone, founder of the Chicago Hebrew Mission. In 1891, Blackstone organized a petition to the president of the United States, Benjamin Harrison, urging him to take steps in the international arena to secure the return of Palestine to the Jews.¹²

The more usual vehicle through which Protestants influenced by the premillennialist belief expressed their interest in the Jews was, however, the mission. The missionary impetus proved extremely strong. In the 1870s there was almost no missionary activity aimed specifically at converting Jews, but by the outbreak of World War I America could claim a large and vivid network aimed at evangelizing the Jews, which included dozens of missionary posts and hundreds of missionaries.¹³ Missions operated in virtually all Jewish communities with a few thousand Jews or more. Some cities, such as Chicago or Philadelphia, could claim a number of mission houses. New York had more than a dozen. The scope of the missionary involvement was large and represented a wide spectrum of conservative Protestantism in America, including missions sponsored by denominational bodies such as the Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Lutherans, as well as a number of interdenominational efforts, such as the Chicago Hebrew Mission, and independent missionary enterprises.¹⁴

The majority of Protestants in America at the turn of the century were not premillennialists. Yet dispensationalist premillennialists were very influential in setting the missionary agenda of Protestantism in America, and even denominations that on the whole could not be described as premillennialist aided the cause of propagating Christianity among the Jews.¹⁵ Liberal members of mainline Protestant churches usually did not put the same emphasis on evangelizing the Jewish people. In later years many among the liberals would come to doubt the legitimacy of evangelizing the Jews altogether. Yet at the turn of the century premillennialists could still muster support from nonconservative and nonpremillennialist Protestants for their goal of missionizing the Jews.

The same years that saw the growing impetus to evangelize the Jews in America also saw large streams of Jewish immigrants coming to America from eastern Europe. The missions directed much of their effort to evangelizing the new immigrants. This has made some historians speculate that the missions’ aim was actually the absorption of the immigrants into American Protestant society and culture.¹⁶ Such an interpretation, however, shows insufficient awareness of the missions’ ideology and character. It would not explain the outburst of desire to evangelize the Jews in early-nineteenth-century Britain, where there was a very small Jewish population and no significant immigration into the country. Nor does it explain the complete failure of Americans in the decades prior to 1880, which witnessed the large Jewish emigration from Germany, to establish a large and durable missionary network. The difference between the two periods lies unmistakably in the rise of dispensationalism as a vital force in American religious life in the post–Civil War era, its impact on the evangelical community, and the new interest it inspired in the Jews and the prospect of their conversion to Christianity. The missions’ extensive publications—books, journals, tracts, biblical exegeses, and prophetic expositions—clearly delineate their motivations. It is undeniably true, however, that the missions during that period were institutions operating among the newly arrived immigrants who were taking their first steps into American society.

The rise of the movement to evangelize the Jews in America also coincided with the rise of Zionism, the Jewish national movement that aimed at rebuilding Palestine as a Jewish center. The missionary community, like American dispensationalists in general, took a great deal of interest in the developments among the Jewish people. As believers in the imminent Second Coming of Jesus, missionaries, like other dispensationalists, were fascinated and encouraged by the Jewish national revival that began in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The missions’ journals paid special attention to the emergence of the Zionist movement and the new Jewish settlements in Palestine.¹⁷ Such developments were interpreted as “signs of the times” (based on Matthew 16:3), which indicated that the present era was ending and the eschatological drama was beginning to unfold.¹⁸ They were seen as proof that the premillennialists’ biblical exegesis on which the missions were built ideologically were correct and that prophecy was being fulfilled. These signs encouraged the missionaries, who felt that they were working to evangelize a nation that was in the process of recovering its position as God’s chosen people and that had a great future before it. No cause could be more worthy. When World War I took place, many evangelists interpreted it as a watershed event. The unprecedented magnitude of the war and the killing and destruction it brought with it caused believers in the Second Coming of Christ to speculate that the war—with all its horrors—was part of a divine purpose and the arrival of the Messiah was at hand.¹⁹ Similarly, they saw the Balfour Declaration and the British takeover of Palestine as clear indications that the current era was ending and the events of the End Times were to begin very soon.²⁰ Such developments validated, in dispensationalist premillennialist eyes, their interpretation of Scriptures and history. Leaders in the movement to evangelize the Jews were particularly enthusiastic and saw the prospect of the Jewish conversion to Christianity as nearer than ever before.²¹ Their attitude served to solidify and intensify the missionary impetus.

Perhaps not surprisingly, missionaries to the Jews were among the major propagators of the dispensationalist premillennialist belief. William Blackstone, founder of the Chicago Hebrew Mission, for example, was the author of the premillennialist best-seller Jesus Is Coming (1878) as well as other books and pamphlets that promoted belief in the imminent return of Jesus.²² The Jews and their role in God’s redemptive plans occupied a major place in his writings.²³ Arno C. Gaebelein, the founder of the Hope of Israel mission in New York, also published many books that enjoyed great popularity. Like Blackstone, he too promoted the dispensationalist belief and put special emphasis on the role the Jews were to play in the End Times.²⁴ Gaebelein became one of the major fundamentalist leaders in America in the 1900s to 1930s and the mission’s journal, Our Hope, one of the important organs of the fledgling fundamentalist movement.

Missionaries to the Jews played a dominant role in the Bible and prophecy conferences, which took place in America between the 1870s and 1910s and served as a meeting ground for American fundamentalist theologians and leaders and as a means to promote their ideas. In these gatherings, missionaries as well as other prominent figures in the conservative evangelical camp expressed their opinion that the Jews were still to be considered God’s chosen people and were destined to occupy a central place in the coming kingdom.²⁵ They called on the evangelical community to look favorably on the Jews, stressing the importance of evangelization work among them.²⁶ In their addresses and writings, missionaries maintained that lack of support for Jewish evangelization indicated indifference, ingratitude, and even malice toward Jesus’ nation.²⁷ Well aware of anti-Jewish prejudices, missionaries emphasized the importance of the Jews in God’s plans for humanity.²⁸ They condemned anti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Evangelizing the Chosen People Missions to the Jews in America, 1880–2000
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: The Rise of the Movement to Evangelize the Jews, 1880–1920
• Part II: Years of Quiet Growth, 1920–1965
• Part III: The Coming of Age, 1965–2000
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index