ORIGINS OF ZIONISM
During the Reformation in England, Zionism grew out of the belief that the Anglo-Saxons migrated from one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel
This is the Final Part of my PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS series and we begin where we left off in PART 7. The Sanhedrin / Pharisees / Pagan Rome’s ultimate plan was the creation of Zionism. Zionism is the thought that the Jews still represent the ‘Chosen People’ of the Bible and that they need to return to their Holy Land in Palestine / Israel. What’s interesting is that Jesus declared to the Israelites they no longer represent the Kingdom of God:
“Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof.”
- Matthew 21:43
What God was building in the Old Testament was ‘Spiritual Israel’, which would eventually be spread amongst the nations after Jesus Christ and the New Testament. So what is this modern day obsession with the ‘Physical Israel’ we see today?
The Israel we see today is the representation of Zionism and the tribes of Israel, who no longer hold the Kingdom of God. Remember ‘Spiritual Israel’ resides within Christians so the physical Israel is a massive facade that only has one purpose: to deceive the nations of the world.
Christians have superseded the nation of Israel and assumed the role as God's covenanted people, thus the New Covenant through Jesus Christ has superseded or replaced the Mosaic covenant exclusive to Jews.
The Bible says:
"In speaking of 'a new covenant' he has made the first one obsolete."
- Hebrews 8:13
The physical construction of the 3rd Temple in Israel has been an obsession to the non-believers of Jesus because it will trick many people into thinking the Jews are still the Chosen People on Earth. The cabal want many Christians to believe the Second Coming of Jesus Christ will occur during the events of the building of 3rd Solomon’s Temple. This subconsciously gives Christians a desire for Zionism.
In Romans, it describes how circumcision, a process specific to the Israelites, no longer matters because of Jesus Christ. This excerpt from Romans shows that Gentiles can be grafted into ‘Spiritual Israel’ by becoming a follower of Jesus Christ:
“For circumcision verily profiteth, if thou keep the law: but if thou be a breaker of the law, thy circumcision is made uncircumcision.
Therefore if the uncircumcision keep the righteousness of the law, shall not his uncircumcision be counted for circumcision?
And shall not uncircumcision which is by nature, if it fulfil the law, judge thee, who by the letter and circumcision dost transgress the law?
For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision, which is outward in the flesh:
But he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God.”
- Romans 2:25-29
So how could the cabal convince Christians that the Jews are still the chosen people in the Bible? Well they would have to influence many Christian denominations into thinking that Zionism is of extreme importance.
One group of Christians who believe this are known as Dispensationalists who maintain beliefs in premillennialism. They believe in a future restoration of national Israel, and a rapture of the Church that will happen before the Second Coming, generally seen as happening before a period of tribulation.
Many Evangelical Christians believe that New Testament prophecies associated with the Jewish Temple were not completely fulfilled during the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 and that these prophecies refer to a future temple. This view is a core part of dispensationalism, an interpretative framework of the Bible that stresses biblical literalism and asserts that the Jews remain God's chosen people.
Here are the Modern Day Christian Denominations that believe is this zionistic philosophy:
Christian Zionism is an ideology that, in a Christian context, espouses the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land. Likewise, it holds that the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 was in accordance with Bible prophecy: 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.
For a better understanding of how these Christian Groups formed lets go back in history to where the idea of Zionism can first be seen.
The Pro-Israel Puritans
Since the inception of Christianity, Jews have been trying to convince the world they are still the Chosen People on Earth. Prior to the Reformation, it was unanimously agreed that Christians were the Chosen People of the Bible, due to the New Covenant. So what the Jews needed to do was convince the rest of the world they were still the Chosen People of the world so they came up with a plan after the Black Death and during the Renaissance.
The Renaissance was responsible for the creation of Humanists. Humanists were responsible for the Jewish influence into Christianity (Jews as a the Chosen People) and every secret society known to man. The founder of the Rosicrucians, John Dee, was influenced by the Renaissance / Humanistic ideals. The Humanists had many Kabbalah elements to it as well.
What’s very interesting is that John Dee and Francis Bacon were agents for Queen Elizabeth who was crucial for the spread of Protestantism. As you will see Israel and the ten tribes of Israel became an obsession within the elite of England.
Christian Kabbalist / Humanist, Pico della Mirandola describes the cabal’s plan for the Reformation:
“If they agree with us anywhere, we shall order the Hebrews to stand by the ancient traditions of their fathers; if anywhere they disagree, then drawn up in Catholic legions we shall make an attack upon them. In short, whatever we detect foreign to the truth of the Gospels we shall refute to the extent of our power, while whatever we find holy and true we shall bear off from the synagogue, as from a wrongful possessor, to ourselves, the legitimate Israelites.”
- Heptaplus, Proem to 3rd exposition
Advocacy of the restoration of Palestine as a national homeland for the Jews was first heard among self-identified Christian groups in the 1580s following the Protestant Reformation. The first wave of Protestant leaders, including Martin Luther and John Calvin, did not mention any views which included a return of the Jews to Palestine.
Martin Luther had hoped that the Jews would convert to his brand of Christianity once he had broken with the Catholic Church, but later he harshly denounced Jews. Like the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church, Luther and Calvin saw the Christian Church as being the "spiritual Israel. Since Jesus Christ, the covenant with God has been with faithful Christians exclusively as the "people of God", with no special privileges or role based on ancestral descent.
All these forces came together during the Reformation. Good and bad can be seen from the Reformation because many Christians found a renewed interest in the Holy Book but this was also the moment in time that saw start of Christian Zionism. It just happened to spawn from the area where the Knights Templar were last know to reside after they became disbanded in 1312 — England.
Around 1550 AD, while Edward VI of England was the Tudor child-monarch of England, a Calvinist-leaning church formed and ruled. Continental Protestants Martin Bucer (humanist) and Peter Martyr Vermigli (humanist) included in their writings an important role for the Jews, converted to Christianity, in the end times.
A number of English Puritans and Presbyterians spent some time in Geneva in the 1560s under Calvin's successor Theodore Beza and developed a translation of the Bible called the Geneva Bible. It contained footnotes in reference to the Book of Romans, specifically claiming that the Jews would be converted to Christianity in the end times and re-orientating attention to Palestine as a central theatre.
This view came to be taken up strongly by English Puritans such as:
Francis Kett (Anglican)
Edmund Bunny (Anglican)
Thomas Draxe (Anglican)
Thomas Brightman and Joseph Mede - They both ‘interpreted’ Revelations and found that the Jews needed to return to Palestine/Israel.
William Perkins (Calvinist)
Richard Sibbes (Anglican)
Lowland Scots Presbyterians (such as George Gillespie, Robert Baillie and Samuel Rutherford)
Continental Protestants (such as Oliger Paulli, Isaac Vossius, Hugo Grotius, Gerhard Vossius and David Blondel)
The French Huguenot M. le Loyer's The Ten Lost Tribes, published in 1590, provided one of the earliest expressions of the belief that the Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Scandinavian, Germanic, and associated peoples are the direct descendants of the Old Testament Israelites. Anglo-Israelism has also been attributed to King James VI and I, who believed he was the King of Israel.
These Pro-Israel Puritans executed Charles I of England and gained complete state power, establishing the Commonwealth of England between 1649 and 1660. The Philo-Semitic millennialist undercurrent came to have a direct influence on politics. A number of Cromwell's close advisors, such as John Dury, John Sadler and Hugh Peter, came into contact with Dutch-based Jews such as Menasseh ben Israel and advocated Jewish resettlement in England (they had been banned from the country since the 13th century).
John Sadler, Cromwell's secretary, argued that the British were one of the Lost Tribes of Israel in his pamphlet The Rights of the Kingdom (1649) and thus kindred to the Jews, initiating British Israelism. Other Puritans such as Jeremiah Burroughs, Peter Bulkley, John Fenwicke and John Cotton, some of whom lived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, saw Jewish re-entry to England as a step on the path to their eventual return to Palestine.
Johanna and Ebenezer Cartwright, two Baptists who had spent time in Amsterdam, held the same view and issued the original petition to Thomas Fairfax's Council of War in January 1649 for Jewish readmission:
"This Nation of England, with the inhabitants of the Netherlands, shall be the first and the readiest to transport Israel's sons and daughters on their ships to the land promised to their forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob for an everlasting inheritance.”
Their de facto toleration in England was informally achieved by 1655 to 1656 and was not rolled back after the Restoration.
A prominent French-born figure Isaac La Peyrère, who was a Huguenot Calvinist, but came from a Portuguese New Christian (converted Sephardic Jewish) family was also a significant 17th century progenitor. La Peyrère in his millennialist work Du rappel des juifs (1643) wrote about a Jewish return to Palestine, predicted the building of the Third Temple and Jerusalem playing the most powerful role in world governance: all working towards the Second Coming.
Other Continental Protestant millennialists enthused by La Peyrère's theories were the Germans Abraham von Franckenberg (a student of the Kabbalah) and Paul Felgenhauer. Menasseh Ben Israel himself would author The Hope of Israel in 1652. Petrus Serrarius was the main supporter among Protestants in Amsterdam of the message that Sabbatai Zevi was the Messiah, as proclaimed by Nathan of Gaza.
The Enlightenment
Although removed from power in England itself, the millennialist Puritans who had moved to North America continued to have a deeper cultural legacy in society. As well as John Cotton, Increase Mather, one of the early Presidents of Harvard University was a strong proponent of the restoration of the Jews to Palestine.
Some important 17th-century philosophers acted as a bridge between the millennialist sectarians of their day and the approaching Age of the Enlightenment with its scientific revolution. Some of these philosophers were Sir Isaac Newton and Baruch Spinoza who held views associated with premillennial restorationists.
Newton especially, who held Radical Reformation views in terms of religion and also dabbled in the occult (including the Kabbalah) predicted a Jewish return to Palestine, with the rebuilding of Jerusalem in the late 19th century and the erection of the Third Temple in the 20th or 21st century, leading to the end of the world no later than 2060.
During the Age of Enlightenment, humanistic ideas resurfaced, this time further from religion and classical literature. Science and intellectualism advanced, and humanists argued that rationality could replace deism as the means with which to understand the world.
In 1717, the United Grand Lodge of England, the governing Masonic lodge for the majority of Freemasons, was created. This coincides with a religious underground that was slowly growing from the 1730s, which would eventually spout a second wave of Protestant Zionism and with it the birth of Evangelical Protestantism.`
This was precipitated in Germany by Philipp Spener's Pietism, a mystical and often millennialist take on Lutheranism, which prophesied the "conversion of the Jews and the fall of the Papacy as the prelude of the triumph of the Church."
In 1762, Charles Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, wrote:
“We know, it must be done,
For God hath spoke the word,
All Israel shall their Saviour own,
To their first state restor’d:
Re-built by his command,
Jerusalem shall rise,
Her temple on Moriah stand
Again, and touch the skies.”
By 1771, the Evangelical minister, John Eyre, founder of the Evangelical Magazine and among the original members of the London Missionary Society was promoting a more developed version of these views with his Observations upon Prophecies Relating to the Restoration of the Jews.
By the end of the 18th century, in the aftermath of the French Revolution the National Assembly said on December 1789 that non-Catholics were eligible for all civil and military positions. The Revolutionary government in France made a play for the allegiance of Jews, in competition with Britain.
During the Egypt–Syria campaign of the French Revolutionary Wars, Napolean Bonaparte invited:
"all the Jews of Asia and Africa to gather under his flag in order to re-establish the ancient Jerusalem."
In British America and then the United States during the 18th century, Ezra Stiles, president of Yale University was a supporter of Jewish restoration and befriended Rabbi Raphael Chaim Yitzchak Karigal of Hebron in 1773 during his visit to the United States.
Every Founding Father of the United States was a known Freemason, which means they all wanted to see the building of the 3rd Solomon’s Temple and the return of the Jewish people to Palenstine.
In 1818, the 2nd President of the United States, John Adams, wrote:
"I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation"
… and believed that they would gradually become Unitarian Christians.
Most early-19th-century British Restorationists, like Charles Simeon, were postmillennial in eschatology. With the rise of James Frere, James Haldane Stewart and Edward Irving a major shift in the 1820s towards premillennialism occurred, with a similar focus on advocacy for the restoration of the Jews to Israel.
In 1831 the Ottomans were driven from Greater Syria (including Palestine) by an expansionist Egypt, in the First Turko-Egyptian War. Although Britain forced Muhammad Ali to withdraw to Egypt, the Levant was left for a brief time without a government. The ongoing weakness of the Ottoman Empire made some in the west consider the potential of a Jewish state in the Holy Land. A number of important figures within the British government advocated such a plan, including Charles Henry Churchill, part of the very influential British Churchill Family.
Charles’s descendant Winston Churchill, who was the British Prime Minister during WWII, endorsed Restoration because he recognized that Jews fleeing Russian pogroms required a refuge, and preferred Palestine for sentimental reasons.
In 1844, George Bush, a professor of Hebrew at New York University and the cousin of an ancestor of the Presidents Bush, published a book titled The Valley of Vision; or, The Dry Bones of Israel Revived.
In it he denounced:
"the thralldom and oppression which has so long ground them (the Jews) to the dust,"
and called for:
"elevating the Jews to a rank of honorable repute among the nations of the earth"
… by allowing the Jews to restore the land of Israel where the bulk would be converted to Christianity.
This, according to Bush, would benefit not only the Jews, but all of mankind, forming a "link of communication" between humanity and God:
"It will blaze in notoriety .... It will flash a splendid demonstration upon all kindreds and tongues of the truth."
Herman Melville expressed the idea in a poem:
the Hebrew seers announce in time
the return of Judah to her prime;
Some Christians deemed it then at hand
Here was an object. Up and On.
With seed and tillage help renew –
Help reinstate the Holy Land- Clarel; A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land
The dispensationalist theology of John Nelson Darby is often claimed to be a significant awakener of American Christian Zionism. He first distinguished the hopes of the Jews and that of the church and gentiles in a series of 11 evening lectures in Geneva in 1840.
The Establishment of Zionism
An important, though often neglected, figure in British support of the restoration of the Jews was William Hechler (1845–1931), an English clergyman of German descent who was Chaplain of the British Embassy in Vienna and became a close friend of Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism in Israel.
Hechler was instrumental in aiding Herzl through his diplomatic activities was is called the founder of modern Christian Zionism. When it came to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Herzl's death, it was noted by the editors of the English-language memorial volume that William Hechler would prove "not only the first, but the most constant and the most influential of Herzl’s followers".
On 2 November 1917, UK Home Secretary Arthur Balfour sent a letter to Lord Walter Rothschild. This letter, which would come to be known as the Balfour Declaration, famously stated that:
"His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people."
As noted by Philip Alexander:
"A crucial ingredient in Balfour's Zionism [may have been] his Christian belief or, to put it a little more subtly, his Christian formation. The most persuasive advocate of this thesis is the Canadian historian Donald Lewis in his 2010 monograph, The Origins of Christian Zionism, but it has been espoused by a number of other scholars as well."
In the decades leading up to the establishment of Israel in 1948, the most prominent and politically active American Christian supporters of Zionism were liberal and mainline Protestants whose support for the movement was often unrelated to their interpretation of the Bible.
These Christian supporters of Zionism viewed Palestine as a needed safe haven for Jews who were fleeing from intensifying persecution in Europe and they frequently believed that their support of the movement was part of a broader effort at interfaith rapprochement.
The Pro-Palestine Federation, a Christian pro-Zionist organization which was founded in 1930, called for the promotion of “goodwill and esteem between Jews and non-Jews” and it also called for the British government to adhere to the terms of its Mandate for Palestine, which pledged support for the establishment of a Jewish national home.
During these years, premillennialism (including its dispensationalist variety) grew in popularity among conservative American Protestants. Many premillennialists viewed the Zionist movement as at least a partial fulfillment of biblical prophecy or they viewed it as a modern fulfillment of God's covenantal promises to the Jewish people. In the 1930s, Southern Baptist missionary Jacob Gartenhaus, himself a convert from Judaism, argued that:
“Zionism is going to win whether anybody likes it or not...To oppose it is to oppose God’s plan.”
In the decades since the establishment of Israel, and especially since the 1967 Six-Day War, the most prominent American Christian supporters of Israel have come from the evangelical wing of American Protestantism.
American evangelicalism itself underwent significant changes in the years surrounding Israel's birth, as a "new" evangelicalism led by figures like Billy Graham and Martin Luther King who emerged from Protestantism and came to cultural prominence. It was among these new evangelicals that the contemporary movement that most commonly associated with the term "Christian Zionism" originated.
Most important to the development of Christian Zionism as a movement, though, was the fact that American evangelical leaders began to build relationships with American and Israeli Jews and they also began to build institutional connections with Jewish organizations and the Israeli government itself.
Examples of Protestant leaders who combined political conservatism with Christian Zionism are Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, leading figures on the Christian Right in the 1980s and 1990s.
In 1981, Falwell said:
"To stand against Israel is to stand against God. We believe that history and scripture prove that God deals with nations in relation to how they deal with Israel.”
The government of Israel has given official encouragement to Christian Zionism, allowing the establishment of the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem in 1980. The embassy has raised funds to help finance Jewish immigration to Israel from the former Soviet Union, and has assisted Zionist groups in establishing Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
The Third International Christian Zionist Congress, held in Jerusalem in February 1996, issued a proclamation which said:
“God the Father, Almighty, chose the ancient nation and people of Israel, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to reveal His plan of redemption for the world. They remain elect of God, and without the Jewish nation His redemptive purposes for the world will not be completed.
Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah and has promised to return to Jerusalem, to Israel and to the world.
It is reprehensible that generations of Jewish peoples have been killed and persecuted in the name of our Lord, and we challenge the Church to repent of any sins of commission or omission against them.
The modern Ingathering of the Jewish People to Eretz Israel and the rebirth of the nation of Israel are in fulfilment of biblical prophecies, as written in both Old and New Testaments.
Christian believers are instructed by Scripture to acknowledge the Hebraic roots of their faith and to actively assist and participate in the plan of God for the Ingathering of the Jewish People and the Restoration of the nation of Israel in our day.”
Popular interest in Christian Zionism was given a boost around the year 2000 in the form of the Left Behind novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. The novels are built around the prophetic role of Israel in the apocalyptic end times.
A 2017 LifeWay poll conducted in United States found that 80% of evangelical Christians believed that the creation of Israel in 1948 was a fulfillment of biblical prophecy that would bring about Christ's return and more than 50% of Evangelical Christians believed that they support Israel because it is important for fulfilling the prophecy.
In 2016, the Pew Research Center found that 77 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump; in 2020, that number jumped to 84 percent. President Trump's long record of being a champion of Jewish Americans and the Jewish state of Israel is unparalleled. President Trump fulfilled a key campaign promise in 2018, when he moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
Here is an example of the mindset of modern day evangelicals:
Greg Locke, an American non-denominational evangelical Pastor told his audience that he hopes that Israel will blow up the Dome of the Rock, rebuild the 3rd Solomon Temple so the Second Coming of Jesus can begin. He is also a major supporter of Donald Trump.
When people think of Zionism, they think of the major liberal News Agencies that encompass the Mainstream Media or the Zionists in charge of the Hollywood Propaganda machine or the Zionists that run most of the major corporations on Earth or the Zionists that own both the Democrat and Republican political parties but many people don’t realize that have penetrated DEEP within Christian organizations.
wow...how interesting. I was raised catholic and educated in private catholic schools from kindergarten thru Jesuit University. I was never taught about the "holocaust" , never taught that "6 million jews" were singled out in Ww2. After graduating from nursing school I started working in Jewish teaching hospital in SF in the late '60's. That's where I heard the story that prevails today but I never believed it. Thank you for this stellar research in this history. I have always known that the formation of a jewish "state" in already inhabited Palestine was a complete TRAVESTY and seems to have caused all the trouble in the world since the year i was born in the late 40's. I pray this 75 year wrong is about to be righted.
Yet another excellent post mate!
In fact, Zionism is a form of mind control. Protocols of the Elders of Zion were envisioned as such and they obviously had huge success. Check my latest stack ;)