one who held to a Jewish restoration is Gerard of Borgo San
Donnino (around 1255). He taught that some Jews would be blessed as Jews in the
end time and would return to their ancient homeland.18 John of Rupescissa (ca. 1310–1366) could most
likely be viewed as a Christian Zionist. “For him the converted Jews would
become God’s new imperial nation and Jerusalem would be completely rebuilt to
become the center of the purified faith. For proof he drew on a literal exposition
of the Old Testament prophecies which until then had been read by Christian
exegetes to apply either to the time of the incarnation or to the heavenly
Jerusalem in the beyond.”19
it was out of the English Puritan movement that this belief
sprung. “Starting with the Puritan ascendancy,” notes Tuchman, “the movement
among the English for the return of the Jews to Palestine began.”32 Why the
Puritan? Puritans were not just dissenters, they were a Protestant sect that
valued the Old Testament to an unprecedented degree in their day.
One of the first Englishman to put forth the view that the
Jews should be restored to the land of Israel was a scholar who had taken two
degrees from Cambridge named Francis Kett. In 1585 he had published a book
entitled The Glorious and Beautiful Garland of Mans Glorification Containing
the Godly Misterie of Heavenly Jerusalem (one of the shorter titles of the
day). While his book primarily dealt with other matters, Kett did have a
section in which he mentioned “the notion of Jewish national return to
Palestine.”
As the 1600s arrived, a flurry of books advocating Jewish
restoration to their land began to appear. Thomas Draxe released in 1608 The
Worldes Resurrection: On the general calling of the Jews, A familiar Commentary
upon the eleventh Chapter of Saint Paul to the Romaines, according to the sense
of Scripture. Draxe argued for Israel’s restoration based upon his Calvinism
and Covenant Theology.38
Two great giants of their era were Thomas Brightman
(1552–1607), (likely a Postmillennialist) and Premillennialist Joseph Mede
(1586–1638) who both wrote boldly of a future restoration of Israel.
Brightman’s work, Revelation of the Revelation appeared in 1609 and told “how
the Jews will return from the areas North and East of Palestine to Jerusalem
and how the Holy Land and the Jewish Christian church will become the centre of
a Christian world.”39 Brightman wrote:
“What, shall they return to Jerusalem again? There is nothing more certain; the
prophets do everywhere confirm it.”40
Joseph Mede’s contribution was released in 1627 in Latin42
and in 1642 in English as The Key of the Revelation. 43 The father of English
premillennialism was also an ardent advocate of Jewish restoration to their
homeland. Following Mede in many ways, Thomas Goodwin (1600–1680) also saw the
Jews one day returning to Israel. In An Exposition of the Book of Revelation
(1639), he taught that the Jews would be converted to Christ by 1656.44
Momentum was certainly building toward widespread acceptance of English belief
in Jewish restoration, but a few bumps in the road still lay ahead. Giles
Fletcher (1549–1611), a fellow at King’s College, Cambridge and Queen
Elizabeth’s ambassador to Russia wrote a work advocating Restorationism.
Fletcher’s book, Israel Redux: or the Restauration of Israel; or the
Restauration of Israel exhibited in two short treatises (shortened title) was
published posthumously by the Puritan divine Samuel Lee in 1677.45 Fletcher
cites a letter in his book from 1606 as he argues for the return of the Jews to
their land.46 Fletcher repeatedly taught the “certainty of their return in
God’s due time.”47 A key proponent for Israel’s future restoration was Henry
Finch (1558-1625) who wrote a seminal work on the subject in 1621, called The
World’s Resurrection or The Calling of the Jewes. A Present to Judah and the
Children of Israel that Ioyned with Him, and to Ioseph (that valiant tribe of
Ephraim) and all the House of Israel that Ioyned with Him. 48 Finch, at the
time of the publication of his book was a member of Parliament and the most
highly respected legal scholars in England at the time…Finch taught that the
biblical “passages which speak of a return of these people to their own land,
their conquest of enemies and their rule of the nations are to be taken
literally, not allegorically as of the Church.”51 King James of England was
offended by Finch’s statement that all nations would become subservient to
national Israel at the time of her restoration.52 Finch and his publisher were
quickly arrested when his book was released by the High Commissioner (a
creation of King James), and examined.53 Finch was striped of his status and
possessions and then died a few years latter. “The doctrine of the restoration
of the Jews continued to be expounded in England, evolving according to the
insight of each exponent, and finally playing a role in Christian Zionistic
activities in the latter part of the nineteenth and in the first of the
twentieth centuries.”54 Many Puritans of the seventeenth century taught the
restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land.55 One of the greatest Puritan
theologians in England was John Owen (1616–1683) who wrote, “The Jews shall be
gathered from all parts of the earth where they are scattered, and brought home
into their homeland.”56
There were a number of Restorationists in Holland during the
time of the Puritan movement. Isaac de la Peyrere (1594–1676), who served as
the French Ambassador to Denmark, “wrote a book wherein he argued for a
restoration of the Jews to Israel without conversion to Christianity.”59 In
1655, Paul Felgenhauever, wrote Good News for Israel in which he taught that
there would be the “permanent return of the Jews to their own country eternally
bestowed upon them by God through the unqualified promise to Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob.”60 The Dane, Holger Paulli (1644–1714) “believed wholeheartedly in the
Jewish Return to the Holy Land, as a condition for the Second Coming.”61 He
even “lobbied the kings of Denmark, England, and France to go and conquer
Palestine from the Ottomans in order that the Jews could regain their
nation.”62 Frenchman, Marquis de Langallerie (1656–1717), schemed with the
Turkish Ambassador in the Hague on a plan defeat the Pope and trade the papal empire
for a return of the Jews to the Holy Land. Langallerie was arrested in Hamburg,
tried and convicted of high treason and died in prison a year later.63 Other
European Restorationists of the era include: Isaac Vossius, Hugo Grotius,
Gerhard John Vossius, David Blondel, Vasover Powel, Joseph Eyre, Edward
Whitaker, and Charles Jerran.64 The mid-1600s witnessed “the sudden explosion
of millenarian publications,”65 which predisposed the British to also consider
the future fate of the Jews in the holy land. James Saddington lists the
following seventeenth century English individuals as holding to Restorationist
views: John Milton, John Bunyan, Roger Williams, John Sadler and Oliver
Cromwell.66 “The doctrine of the restoration of the Jews continued to be expounded
in England, evolving according to the insight of each exponent,” concludes
Ehle, “and finally playing a role in Christian Zionistic activities in the
latter part of the nineteenth and in the first of the twentieth centuries.”67
Perhaps the most influential of the early Puritan ministers
in New England was John Cotton, who, following the postmillennialism of
Brightman held to the restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land.68 According to
Ehle, in addition to John Cotton (1584–1652), early Restorationists included:
John Davenport (1597–1670), William Hooke (1601–1678), John Eliot (1604–1690),
Samuel Willard (1640–1707), and Samuel Sewall (1652–1730).69 Ephraim Huit, a
Cambridge trained early minister in Windsor, Connecticut believed that the Jews
would be regathered to their homeland in 1650.70 One of the standout advocates
of the restoration doctrine was Increase Mather (1639–1723), the son of Richard
and father of Cotton. Increase Mather wrote over 100 books in his life and was
a president of Harvard. His first work was The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation,
which went through about a half dozen revisions during his life.71 His support
of the national restoration of Israel to her land in the future was typical of
American Colonial Puritans and was generally widespread.
President John Quincy Adams expressed his desire that “the
Jews again [were] in Judea, an independent Nation, . . . once restored to an
independent government and no longer persecuted.”74 President Abraham Lincoln
in a meeting with Canadian Christian Zionist, Henry W. Monk, in 1863 said,
“Restoring the Jews to their homeland is a noble dream shared by many
Americans. He (the Jewish chiropodist of the President) has so many times ‘put
me on my feet’ that I would have no objection to giving his countrymen a ‘leg
up’.”75
The wave of premillennialism is what produced in Britain a
crop of Christian Zionists that led to political activism which culminated in
the Balfour Declaration. Anthony Ashley Cooper (1801–1885), later Lord
Shaftesbury…“Oh, pray for the peace of Jerusalem” were the words engraved on a
ring that he always wore on his right hand.84 Since Lord Shaftesbury believed
that the Jews would return to their homeland in conjunction with the second
advent, he “never had a shadow of a doubt that the Jews were to return to their
own land. . . . It was his daily prayer, his daily hope.”85 In 1840, Shaftsbury
was known for coining a slogan that he would often repeat throughout his life,
that the Jews were “a country without nation for a nation without a country.”86
Shaftesbury greatest contribution to the Restoration movement was his attempt
to accomplish something in the political realm in order to provoke England to
develop a policy in favor of returning the Jews to their homeland. He succeeded
in influencing England to adopt that policy, but England failed, at that time
to influence the Turks. In 1838, in an article in the Quarterly Review,
Shaftsbury put forth the view that Palestine could become a British colony of
Jews that “could provide Britain with cotton, silk, herbs, and olive oil.”87
Next, Shaftsbury “lobbied Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary, using
political, financial and economic arguments to convince him to help the Jews
return to Palestine. And Palmerston did so. What was originally the religious
beliefs of Christian Zionists became official British policy (for political
interests) in Palestine and the Middle East by the 1840s.”
While British foreign secretary in 1840, Henry John Temple
Palmerston (1784–1865) wrote the following letter to his ambassador at
Constantinople in his attempt to advocate on behalf of the Jews: There exists
at the present time among the Jews dispersed over Europe, a strong notion that
the time is approaching when their nation is to return to Palestine. . . . It
would be of manifest importance to the Sultan to encourage the Jews to return
and to settle in Palestine because the wealth which they would bring with them
would increase the resources of the Sultan’s dominions; and the Jewish people,
if returning under the sanction and protection and at the invitation of the
Sultan, would be a check upon any future evil designs of Mehemet Ali or his
successor. . . . I have to instruct Your Excellency strongly to recommend [the
Turkish government] to hold out every just encouragement to the Jews of Europe
to return to Palestine.
One time governor of Australia, Colonel George Gawler
(1796–1869) was one of the most zealous and influential Restorationist, next to
Shaftsbury, in the 1840s.93 “Colonel Gawler was a senior commander at the
Battle of Waterloo.”94 When he returned to England in 1841 he became a strong
advocate of Jewish settlements in the land of Palestine. Gawler’s
Restorationism, like most of his day, was sparked by his religious convictions,
but he argued for Jewish return to their land upon geopolitical grounds. Gawler
stated the following: [England] urgently needs the shortest and safest lines of
communication. . . . Egypt and Syria stand in intimate connection. A foreign
hostile power mighty in either would soon endanger British trade . . . and it
is now for England to set her hand to the renovation of Syria through the only
people whose energies will be extensively and permanently in the work—the real
children of the soil, the sons of Israel.95 Working with Sir Moses Montefiore
(a British Jew) Gawler provided an agricultural strategy for Jewish
resettlement of the Holy Land. One of these Montefiore-Gawler projects resulted
in “the planting of an orange grove near Jaffa, still existent today and known
as Tel Aviv’s ‘Montefiore Quarter.’”96 Charles Henry Churchill (1814–1877), an
ancestor of Winston Churchill, was a British military officer stationed in
Damascus in 1840. “He was a Christian Zionist and he supported the Jews against
the non-Zionist Christians of Damascus.”97 It was through his efforts that he
helped acquit the Jews accused of the infamous charge of blood libel. Col.
Churchill was honored a banquet hosted by a grateful Jewish community where he
spoke of the “hour of liberation of Israel . . . that was approaching, when the
Jewish Nation would once again take its place among the powers of the world.”98
In a letter to Jewish philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore (1784–1885), dated
June 14, 1841, Churchill said, I cannot conceal from you my most anxious desire
to see your countrymen endeavor once more to resume their existence as a
people. I consider the object to be perfectly obtainable. But two things are
indispensably necessary: Firstly that the Jews themselves will take up the
matter, universally and unanimously. Secondly that the European powers will aid
them in their views.99
Laurence Oliphant (1829–1888) was an evangelical “British
Protestant, an officer in the British Foreign Service, a writer, world-traveler
and an unofficial diplomat.”103 Oliphant was passionate about the Jewish
Restoration to their land that came from his intense religious convictions,
which “he tried to conceal them behind arguments based on strategy and
politics.”104 In 1880 he published a book, The Land of Gilead, “proposing Jewish
resettlement, under Turkish sovereignty and British protection, of Palestine
east of the Jordan.”105 Even then, he foresaw the agricultural potential and
the possibilities of developing the resources of the Dead Sea.
A German Lutheran, C. F. Zimpel, who “described himself as
Doctor et Philosopiae, member of the Grand Ducal Saxon Society for Mineralogy
and Geognosy at Jena,” published pamphlets in the mid-1800s entitled
“Israelites in Jerusalem” and “Appeal to all Christendom, as well as to the
Jews, for the Liberation of Jerusalem.”123
Frenchman, Charles-Joseph Prince de Ligne (1735–1814)
advocated Jewish Restorationism. He called upon the Christians of Europe to
lobby the Turkish Sultan so that the Jews could return to their homeland. De
Ligne’s appeal was used by Napoleon in his efforts to establish a Jewish
homeland in Palestine. “Among those French Restorationists were theologians and
authors, but also, increasingly, politicians.”125 Some of them included Ernest
Laharanne, Alexandre Dumas, and Jean-Henri Dunant (1828–1910), who was also the
rounder of the International Red Cross.126 Restoration proposals were put forth
by a number of Europeans in the nineteenth century. A Swiss theologian named
Samuel Louis Gaussen who wrote a book advocating a Jewish return to their land
in 1844.127 Italian, Benedetto Musolino (1809–1885) wrote a book, after a visit
to the Holy Land, in which he argued “that the restoration of the Jews would
allow European culture into the Middle East.”
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