A History of the End of the World (30 page)

The most ardent enemies of early Zionism, in fact, were the Jewish true believers who insisted that the Jewish people will be restored to their homeland only when God, in his own good time, finally sends the Messiah to bring them there. To be sure, a few highly observant Jews had always made their way to Palestine, long a provincial backwater of the Ottoman empire, to spend their last years in prayer and to be buried in holy ground when they died. But the audacious idea of Jews betaking themselves en masse to the Holy Land to pioneer a modern and sovereign Jewish state was regarded by pious Jews as apostasy and blasphemy—the sin of “forcing the end.” For that reason, Zionism was regarded by the most observant Jews as “the ultimate heresy.”
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Here we are reminded of a striking difference between the apocalyptic ideas of Judaism and Christian ity. The defeat of the Bar Kochba revolt by the Roman overlords of Judea in the second century, as we have already seen, cooled the messianic expectations of the Jewish people. By sharp contrast to the promise of Jesus Christ in the book of Revelation—“Surely I come quickly”
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—one of the thirteen articles of Jewish faith as framed by Maimonides acknowledges that the Messiah is
not
coming anytime soon: “I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah, and though he may tarry, I will wait daily for his coming.”
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The catastrophic consequences of “forcing the end” were symbolized in Jewish history by the unhappy example of the messianic pretender called Shabbatai Zevi (1626–1676). Starting in 1666, Shabbatai Zevi played on the hopes of the Jewish people by suggesting that he was, in fact, the long-awaited but long-tarrying Messiah who would deliver them from their persecution and oppression. And, rather like the Millerites in America two centuries later, the most ardent followers of Shabbatai Zevi abandoned their houses, shops, and farms all over Europe in the perfect faith that he would “carry them on a cloud to Jerusalem” at any moment.
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“The day of revenge is in my heart, and the year of redemption hath arrived,” announced Shabbatai Zevi, striking a bloodthirsty note that will not be unfamiliar to readers of Revelation. “Soon will I avenge you and comfort you.”
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Shabbatai Zevi set himself up in a mansion outside of Constantinople, a Jewish pilgrimage site that soon outdrew the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, and his provocative claims caught the attention of the Ottoman authorities. Not unlike Pontius Pilate, who regarded the messianic claims of Jesus of Nazareth as a political threat to the Roman Empire, the Grand Sultan was unsettled by the prospect of Shabbatai Zevi reigning as a king in a province of the Ottoman empire. The would-be Messiah was arrested, hung with chains, and offered a choice between conversion to Islam or death—and he broke the hearts of his Jewish followers by choosing to convert rather than die. After the public apostasy of Shabbatai Zevi, anyone who seemed to be “forcing the end” was regarded with skepticism and even contempt in Jewish traditions.

The Christian true believers, by contrast, were instructed by their apocalyptic doctrine that the repatriation of the Jewish people, by whatever means necessary, was one sure sign of the coming of the Messiah. For them, of course, it was the
second
coming of the Messiah as prophesied in the book of Revelation, and he was known by the Christian equivalent of the word Messiah: “Christ.” And so, as it happened, some of the earliest efforts of the secular and even antireligious Zionists to reclaim the land of Israel for the Jewish people were carefully monitored in Christian apocalyptic circles in America.

Christian newspapers and magazines in America reported with interest and enthusiasm on the publication of
The Jewish State,
Herzl’s manifesto of political Zionism; the flare-up of anti-Semitic incidents in Russia and France; and the planting of the first Jewish colonies and kibbutzim on the soil of Palestine. Christian correspondents were present in Basel for the Zionist Congress in 1898, and they “often speculated about when the Jewish immigrants would start contemplating the construction of a new temple in Jerusalem”—a notion that would have shocked and scandalized any religious Jew and one that would never have occurred to the Jewish socialists and nationalists.
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Some Christian Zionists, in fact, were already hard at work on the project of Jewish nation building long in advance of their Jewish counterparts. William Eugene Blackstone (1841–1935), a real-estate developer who turned to apocalyptic preaching, was so convinced that the Jews must return to Zion in order to bring the Second Coming that he set himself the task of making it a matter of American foreign policy. Blackstone secured the signatures of more than four hundred prominent American politicians and moguls on a petition that called on President Benjamin Harrison to champion the cause of a Jewish homeland. On March 5, 1891—five years before Herzl composed
The Jewish State
and six years before he convened the first Zionist Congress—Blackstone delivered his petition to the White House.

“Why not give Palestine back to them again?” implored Blackstone. “Let us now restore to them the land of which they were so cruelly despoiled by our Roman ancestors.”
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Blackstone, in a sense, was more Zionist than the founder of modern Zionism. When Herzl openly entertained the pragmatic notion that a Jewish colony in British East Africa would suffice so long as Palestine remained out of reach, Blackstone boldly sent him a copy of the Hebrew Bible in which he had carefully marked—“in typical premillennialist fashion,” as Timothy Weber points out—the specific lines of biblical text that had convinced Darby and his followers that the restoration of the Jews to Palestine was both a divine promise and a divine mandate. For his efforts, Blackstone himself was acclaimed as a “Father of Zionism” at a Jewish conference in Philadelphia in 1918.
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Still, Blackstone was more forthright than many other Christian supporters of Zionism in revealing the theological basis of his commitment to a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Like Joachim of Fiore and Martin Luther and Increase Mather, Darby taught—and Blackstone believed—that the Jews who returned to the land of Israel were destined to suffer and die during the reign of the Antichrist and to burn in hell for the rest of eternity. Only the Jews who converted to Christian ity before it was too late, they insisted, would be restored to life in the New Jerusalem.

At a mass meeting of Zionists in Los Angeles in 1918, for example, Blackstone once again proclaimed himself to be “an ardent advocate of Zionism”—and yet he also revealed his belief that any Jew who embraces
only
Zionism is treading on a path that “leads through unequaled sorrows.” The better path, he insisted, “is to become a true Christian, accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior, which brings not only forgiveness and regeneration, but insures escape from the unequaled time of tribulation which is coming upon all the earth.”
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“Oh, my Jewish friends, which of these paths shall be yours?” he witnessed to an audience that must have been amazed at his frank words. “Study this wonderful Word of God, and see how plainly God Himself has revealed Israel’s pathway unto the perfect day.”
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Witnessing to the poor benighted souls who were not yet believers was regarded as a crucial mission in the culture war that was fought under the banner of fundamentalism. That’s what Dwight Moody meant when he quoted God’s instructions: “Moody, save all you can.” And that’s what motivated William Blackstone to join in founding one of several Christian missionary societies whose goal was the conversion of the Jewish immigrants who arrived in America in great numbers in the late nineteenth century. Surely, they were convinced, the end-times will be hastened by calling the Jewish people to Jesus Christ.

One such effort was the so-called Hope of Israel Mission, whose principal missionary, Arno C. Gabelein (1861–1945), started preaching on Saturdays in the Jewish neighborhood on the Lower East Side in New York City. Gabelein, a Methodist immigrant from Germany, studied both Yiddish and Hebrew so that he could answer the rabbis who came out to defend their faith. “In fact, he acquired such an expertise in the Talmud and other rabbinic literature and spoke such flawless Yiddish,” reports Timothy Weber, “that he often had a difficult time convincing many in his audiences that he was not a Jew trying to ‘pass’ as a gentile.”
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But the Jews turned out to be a hard sell. When students from the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago ventured into a Jewish neighborhood to sermonize, for example, they succeeded only in attracting an angry mob that covered them with “an avalanche of watermelon rinds, banana peelings, overripe tomatoes, and other edible fruit.”
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Some missionaries adopted a kind of protective coloration, referring only to “the Messiah” and never to its Greek-derived equivalent, “Christ.” And one earnest missionary found out for himself why it was unwise to start canvassing a Jewish tenement from the ground up. By the time he reached the top floor, the apartment dwellers on the lower floors had read the literature he was handing out and greeted him on the way back down with curses and insults, hot soup, and rotten vegetables.

“Thus I learned that the next time I went into a tenement house,” the young man explained, “I must start on the top floor and work down.”
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For some Christian fundamentalists, the resistance of the Jewish people to their efforts at conversion was seen as a sign of something wicked.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
a crude anti-Semitic forgery that imagines a satanic Jewish conspiracy at work in the world, was read with credulity in certain Christian circles in the early years of the twentieth century, and Arno Gabelein openly praised Henry Ford for publishing the
Protocols
in his newspaper. Indeed, the notion of a secret cabal of Jewish malefactors was perfectly plausible to many readers of Revelation: “Premillennial eschatology is, after all, a conspiracy theory of cosmic proportions,” explains Weber.
⁹⁵

To their credit, many other fundamentalists were moved to denounce those of their fellow Christians who engaged in acts or expressions of anti-Semitism. Thus, for example, James M. Gray, a minister with the Moody Bible Institute, condemned anti-Semitism as “one of the most despicable, brutal and dangerous forms of racial hatred and antagonism known to mankind.” At the same time, however, he frankly acknowledged that his religious convictions instructed him to regard the Jews as doomed: “It is true that Jehovah has awfully cursed Israel for her sins, and His curse rests upon her today,” Gray declared. “But it is one thing for God to curse her and another thing for us to do so.”
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Then, too, some frustrated missionaries were encouraged by what they read in the book of Revelation to take a kind of smug satisfaction in the fate of those who resisted conversion, Jews and Christians alike. The author of Revelation, as we have seen, burns with resentment toward the “lukewarm” Christians who prefer the good life to what he sees as the righteous life, and he seems to take pleasure in imagining the revenge that God will take on anyone who does not share his faith. And the same gloating can be seen in latter-day readers of Revelation, too. Thus, for example, a revivalist preacher writing in 1918 insisted that God will literally chortle with delight over the suffering of everyone who has not been “raptured” to heaven before the end-times.

“Often had these left-behind ones been warned, but in vain,” wrote the preacher. “Servants of God had faithfully set before them their imperative need of fleeing from the wrath to come only to be laughed at for their pains. And now the tables will be turned. God will laugh at them, laugh at their calamity and mock at their fear.”
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To be sure, the God of Israel is famously depicted as a jealous and wrathful deity in certain horrific passages of the Hebrew Bible. “Vengeance will I wreak on my foes,” promises God in the book of Deuteronomy. “I will make my arrows drunk with blood as my sword devours flesh.”
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But here we see exactly how God is transformed in the new readings of Revelation from judge, king, and warrior into a cackling killer who takes pleasure in avenging himself on the men, women, and children whom he created in the first place.

A
t the same time that Christian fundamentalists were seeking to save Jewish souls, they were also engaged in a bitter struggle with some of their fellow Christians over the right way to read the book of Revelation. The same debate that had divided Christians in late antiquity—whether to read Revelation “spiritually” or “carnally”—was now setting traditionalists against modernists in the opening years of the twentieth century.

Revelation, according to one Christian commentator writing in 1907, was “a ‘queer bird’ hatched from ‘visions of the impossible,’” and he insisted that a majority of modern Christians had abandoned the whole apocalyptic enterprise in favor of “saner and more spiritual conceptions.” Other critics resorted to the old argument that the book of Revelation tempted Christians to engage in the error of “Judaizing” the biblical text: “A product of ‘highly imaginative Jewish thought,’” as James H. Moorhead sums up the argument, “apocalypticism seduced the early Christian community for a time but was never consistent with the basic thrust of the church’s message.”
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Against the overheated doomsday scenario of the premillennialists, the Christian progressives advocated what came to be characterized as postmillennialism—that is, the notion that the second coming of Jesus Christ will take place only
after
the world is perfected by human effort. Advocates of the Social Gospel, for example, believed that “the kingdom of God would come as Christians joined others of goodwill in supporting labor unions, battling child labor, campaigning for laws to protect factory workers and immigrant slum dwellers, and otherwise joining the struggle for social justice in urban-industrial America.”
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In a real sense, they were engaged in precisely the kind of spiritual reading of Revelation that Augustine had recommended: “The Kingdom of God is always coming,” writes Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) in
A Theology for the Social Gospel
(1917).
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