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]
An expectation of Jewish restoration among Christians is rooted in 17th-century English Puritan thought.[6][2] Contemporary Israeli historian Anita Shapira suggests that England's Zionist Evangelical Protestants "passed this notion on to Jewish circles" around the 1840s,[7] while Jewish nationalism in the early 19th century was largely met with hostility from British Jews.[8]
Christian pro-Zionist ideals emerged among the Puritans in the 16th and 17th centuries.[6] 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][9][10] Polling and academic research have suggested a trend of widespread distrust among Jews towards the motives of Evangelical Protestants, who have been promoting support for the State of Israel and evangelizing the Jews at the same time.[1][11]
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
was invoked but never defined (see the help page).In their thought physical Israel continued to have a place in God's plan of salvation, due to His covenantal faithfulness. Consequently, probably beginning with Thomas Brightman, many Puritans expected that the Jews would return to their old geographical habitat in the Middle East. Later Puritans, like Samuel Rutherford, Joseph Mede, and Robert Maton, expected reconciliation of Israel with Christ and the flourishing of the Church after Christ's return.
[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.
lewis
was invoked but never defined (see the help page).