Christian Zionism

Christian Zionism is a political and religious ideology that, in a Christian context, espouses the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land.^[1] Likewise, it holds that the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 was in accordance with biblical prophecies transmitted through the Old Testament: that the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty in the Levant—the eschatological "Gathering of Israel"—is a prerequisite for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.^[1]^[2]^[3] The term began to be used in the mid-20th century, in place of Christian restorationism, as proponents of the ideology rallied behind Zionists in support of a Jewish national homeland.^[1]^[4]^[5]

Advocacy on the part of Christians for a Jewish restoration grew after the Protestant Reformation, and is rooted in 17th-century English Puritanism.^[2] Contemporary Israeli historian Anita Shapira suggests that England's Zionist Evangelical Protestants "passed this notion on to Jewish circles" around the 1840s,^[6] while Jewish nationalism in the early 19th century was largely met with hostility from British Jews.^[7]

Christian pro-Zionist ideals have generally been common among Protestant Christians since the Reformation. While supporting a mass Jewish return to the Land of Israel, Christian Zionism asserts a parallel idea that the returnees ought to be encouraged to reject Judaism and adopt Christianity as a means of fulfilling biblical prophecies.^[1]^[8]^[9]^[10]^[11] Polling and academic research have suggested a trend of widespread distrust among Jews towards the motives of Evangelical Protestants, which have been promoting support for the State of Israel and evangelizing the Jews at the same time.^[1]^[12]

^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e Ben Barka, Mokhtar (December 2012). "The New Christian Right's relations with Israel and with the American Jews: the mid-1970s onward". e-Rea. 10 (1). Aix-en-Provence and Marseille: Centre pour l'Édition Électronique Ouverte on behalf of Aix-Marseille University. doi:10.4000/erea.2753. ISSN 1638-1718. S2CID 191364375.
^ ^a ^b Sharif, Regina (1983). Non-Jewish Zionism: Its Roots in Western History (translated in Arabic by Ahmad Abdullah Abdul Aziz (1985)). London, UK: Zed Books. ISBN 978-0-86232-151-2. Archived from the original on July 1, 2019. Retrieved July 1, 2019. The Zionist idea itself has its organic roots deep within the European imperialist movement. [...] England of the seventeenth century was, in Carlyle's own words, an England of 'awful devout Puritanism'. [Note: Thomas Carlyle, Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches (Boston, 1884), 1:32] Puritanism meant the invasion of Hebraism as transmitted through the Old Testament, but distorted by the effort to apply the ethics, laws and manners of the Old Testament Hebrew people, a people that lived in the Middle East more than two thousand years earlier, to post-Renaissance England. [Note: In the words of Matthew Arnold, 'Puritanism was a revival of the Hebraic spirit in reaction to the Hellenic spirit that had animated the immediately preceding period of the Renaissance.' See Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (London, 1869), chap. 4] [...] Palestine had up until then been remembered as the Christian Holy Land, unfortunately lost to Islam. But in seventeenth century England it came to be regarded as the homeland of the Jews, whose return to Palestine was, according to Old Testament prophecies, inevitable for the coming of the Second Advent of Christ. · Samman, Khaldoun (2015). "The Anti-Semitic Gaze and the Making of the New Jew". Clash of Modernities: The Making and Unmaking of the New Jew, Turk, and Arab and the Islamist Challenge. Abingdon, Oxon, New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 49–92. ISBN 978-1-317-26235-0. Long before the arrival of Theodor Herzl and other prominent Jewish nationalists, as Regina Sharif has so persuasively argued, there had already existed a significant non-Jewish Zionist movement within Europe. [...] [W]hen an influential U.S. evangelist named William E. Blackstone learned upon his visit to Palestine in 1889 that Herzl had been considering Uganda and Argentina as possible sites for the Jewish homeland [...] [i]mmediately, he sent Herzl a Bible, 'marking every passage which referred to Palestine, with instructions that it alone was to be the site of the Jewish State.'
^ Cite error: The named reference weber was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^ Christian Perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, p. 131, Wesley Haddon Brown, Peter F. Penner, 2008, 11, "Western Restorationism and Christian Zionism: Germany as a Case Study
^ Proceedings of the World Congress of Jewish Studies: World Union of Jewish Studies, 1993
^ Shapira, Anita (2014). Israel: A History (illustrated, reprint). The Schusterman Series in Israel Studies. Translated by Berris, Anthony. Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press. p. 15. ISBN 978-1-61168-618-0. [T]he idea of the Jews returning to their ancient homeland as the first step to world redemption seems to have originated among a specific group of evangelical English Protestants that flourished in England in the 1840s; they passed this notion on to Jewish circles.
^ Friedman, Isaiah (1992) [1991]. The Question of Palestine: British-Jewish-Arab Relations, 1914–1918 (reprint). Armenian Research Center collection. Judaica history. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. p. 458. ISBN 978-0-88738-214-7.
^ Cite error: The named reference lewis was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^ Hillel Halkin (January 2007). "Power, Faith, and Fantasy by Michael B. Oren". Commentary magazine. Retrieved 1 November 2013.
^ Boyer, Paul S., When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.
^ Berlet, Chip, and Nikhil Aziz. "Culture, Religion, Apocalypse, and Middle East Foreign Policy," IRC Right Web, Silver City, NM: Interhemispheric Resource Center, 2003, online Archived 2011-06-14 at the Wayback Machine
^ Stephen Spector, Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of American Christian Zionism, Oxford University Press 2009 ISBN 978-0-195-36802-4 p.vii: "The alliance that many born-again Christians offer to Israel and the Jewish people is astonishing to many Jews. Bible-believing Christians are the last people whom Jews expect to love, defend, and even idealize them. Polls have shown just how much the Jewish community distrusts them. In 2004, when asked to give a 'thermometer rating' of their feelings towards groups of people... Jews gave evangelicals a frigid average rating of twenty-four degrees. More than one-third of them (37%) rated evangelicals at zero!"

[e-Rea_2012-1] Ben Barka, Mokhtar (December 2012). "The New Christian Right's relations with Israel and with the American Jews: the mid-1970s onward". e-Rea. 10 (1). Aix-en-Provence and Marseille: Centre pour l'Édition Électronique Ouverte on behalf of Aix-Marseille University. doi:10.4000/erea.2753. ISSN 1638-1718. S2CID 191364375.

[sharif-2] Sharif, Regina (1983). Non-Jewish Zionism: Its Roots in Western History (translated in Arabic by Ahmad Abdullah Abdul Aziz (1985)). London, UK: Zed Books. ISBN 978-0-86232-151-2. Archived from the original on July 1, 2019. Retrieved July 1, 2019. The Zionist idea itself has its organic roots deep within the European imperialist movement. [...] England of the seventeenth century was, in Carlyle's own words, an England of 'awful devout Puritanism'. [Note: Thomas Carlyle, Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches (Boston, 1884), 1:32] Puritanism meant the invasion of Hebraism as transmitted through the Old Testament, but distorted by the effort to apply the ethics, laws and manners of the Old Testament Hebrew people, a people that lived in the Middle East more than two thousand years earlier, to post-Renaissance England. [Note: In the words of Matthew Arnold, 'Puritanism was a revival of the Hebraic spirit in reaction to the Hellenic spirit that had animated the immediately preceding period of the Renaissance.' See Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (London, 1869), chap. 4] [...] Palestine had up until then been remembered as the Christian Holy Land, unfortunately lost to Islam. But in seventeenth century England it came to be regarded as the homeland of the Jews, whose return to Palestine was, according to Old Testament prophecies, inevitable for the coming of the Second Advent of Christ. · Samman, Khaldoun (2015). "The Anti-Semitic Gaze and the Making of the New Jew". Clash of Modernities: The Making and Unmaking of the New Jew, Turk, and Arab and the Islamist Challenge. Abingdon, Oxon, New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 49–92. ISBN 978-1-317-26235-0. Long before the arrival of Theodor Herzl and other prominent Jewish nationalists, as Regina Sharif has so persuasively argued, there had already existed a significant non-Jewish Zionist movement within Europe. [...] [W]hen an influential U.S. evangelist named William E. Blackstone learned upon his visit to Palestine in 1889 that Herzl had been considering Uganda and Argentina as possible sites for the Jewish homeland [...] [i]mmediately, he sent Herzl a Bible, 'marking every passage which referred to Palestine, with instructions that it alone was to be the site of the Jewish State.'

[weber-3] Cite error: The named reference weber was invoked but never defined (see the help page).

[4] Christian Perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, p. 131, Wesley Haddon Brown, Peter F. Penner, 2008, 11, "Western Restorationism and Christian Zionism: Germany as a Case Study

[5] Proceedings of the World Congress of Jewish Studies: World Union of Jewish Studies, 1993

[shapira-6] Shapira, Anita (2014). Israel: A History (illustrated, reprint). The Schusterman Series in Israel Studies. Translated by Berris, Anthony. Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press. p. 15. ISBN 978-1-61168-618-0. [T]he idea of the Jews returning to their ancient homeland as the first step to world redemption seems to have originated among a specific group of evangelical English Protestants that flourished in England in the 1840s; they passed this notion on to Jewish circles.

[friedman-7] Friedman, Isaiah (1992) [1991]. The Question of Palestine: British-Jewish-Arab Relations, 1914–1918 (reprint). Armenian Research Center collection. Judaica history. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. p. 458. ISBN 978-0-88738-214-7.

[lewis-8] Cite error: The named reference lewis was invoked but never defined (see the help page).

[com-mag-9] Hillel Halkin (January 2007). "Power, Faith, and Fantasy by Michael B. Oren". Commentary magazine. Retrieved 1 November 2013.

[10] Boyer, Paul S., When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

[11] Berlet, Chip, and Nikhil Aziz. "Culture, Religion, Apocalypse, and Middle East Foreign Policy," IRC Right Web, Silver City, NM: Interhemispheric Resource Center, 2003, online Archived 2011-06-14 at the Wayback Machine

[12] Stephen Spector, Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of American Christian Zionism, Oxford University Press 2009 ISBN 978-0-195-36802-4 p.vii: "The alliance that many born-again Christians offer to Israel and the Jewish people is astonishing to many Jews. Bible-believing Christians are the last people whom Jews expect to love, defend, and even idealize them. Polls have shown just how much the Jewish community distrusts them. In 2004, when asked to give a 'thermometer rating' of their feelings towards groups of people... Jews gave evangelicals a frigid average rating of twenty-four degrees. More than one-third of them (37%) rated evangelicals at zero!"

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