BOOK EXCERPT: Part three of four
People crammed into the pews and peered through the mullioned windows of Boston's Old South Church. They had long anticipated this day, October 31, 1819, convinced that it inaugurated a new era, a new world, perhaps.
Their murmurs, converging into a drone, might have presaged the arrival of some august theologian. Yet, when the doors opened, neither a reverend nor even a deacon strode down the aisle, but two unassuming preachers, both aged 25. The crowd fell silent as one of them, short, broad-nosed, and bespectacled, stepped up to the pulpit. His name was Levi Parsons, and the topic of his sermon was not the Gospel, not the Resurrection, but the Jews.
"They who taught us the way to salvation were Jews," Parsons began. They had faithfully preserved the Bible, had worked, suffered and died defending "our" religion, he attested. "Our God was their God. Our heaven is their heaven."
Most crucially, Parsons recalled, they had provided humanity with its Savior. "Yes, brethren, he who now intercedes for you before the throne of God is a Jew!" To show their gratitude for the Jews' munificence, he concluded, Christians must strive to restore that people to sovereignty in its ancestral and biblical home.
Parsons explained how the Jews had been living for 18 centuries in political limbo, homeless, and shorn of independence. The time had now arrived, however, to redress that inequity.
"Admit," he said, "there still exists in the breast of every Jew an unconquerable desire to inhabit the land which was given to the Fathers; a desire, which even a conversion to Christianity does not eradicate." That land was Palestine, once splendorous but now not an independent state nor even a distinct province, but a sparsely inhabited Turkish backwater waiting for its rightful owners to regain it. And reclaim it they would, Parsons ventured. Were the Ottoman occupation of Palestine to vanish, "nothing but a miracle would prevent their [the Jews'] immediate return."
Parsons was not advocating conquest, of course -- even after its victory in the Barbary Wars, America was in no position to fight the Ottomans -- but rather a program of peaceful persuasion. Christian missionaries would journey to the Middle East, to the "consecrated walls" of Jerusalem, and there perform deeds of such spectacular righteousness that the Jews would be enticed to return home and "receive Him" -- that is, Jesus. The emergence of a Messianic Jewish polity in Palestine would fulfill the conditions necessary for the Second Coming, Parsons affirmed. Consequently, not only the Jews but Muslims and even the misguided Eastern Christians would bask in the sacred light. The millennial age of peace and spiritual solidarity would commence and the Ottoman Empire -- indeed all empires -- would bow before the sovereignty of Christ. "Every eye is fixed on Jerusalem."
The congregation received these tidings openly, raptly, and waited with mounting frisson as the next man rose to preach. This was Pliny Fisk, taller and more presentable than Parsons and less loquacious. He, too, spoke of the need to work wonders in the Holy Land, to help bring about redemption, whatever the hazards involved. "And now, behold, I go bound in the spirit unto Jerusalem," he proclaimed, and the parishioners burst into tears.
Viewed from a 21st-century perspective, Fisk, Parsons, and the people who lauded them might seem radical in their beliefs and peripheral to American society. The contention that they alone could save the Jews, Muslims, and other Middle Eastern peoples would surely sound naive, if not arrogant, to many Americans today. After all, why should the descendants of ancient civilizations and the inheritors of some of history's most venerated traditions embrace the faith of these alien upstarts, emissaries of a Protestant sect less than 300 years old and a country scarcely more than 50?
These Americans, however, were anything but marginal. The doctrines of the Methodists, Presbyterians and Congregationalists commanded massive followings in the United States, transcending all barriers of class, education and gender. Among the missionaries and their supporters were farmers and merchants, doctors and artisans, the minimally educated and graduates of the country's finest colleges, women and men. Deeply imbued with American ideals of individualism, civic virtue and patriotism, they viewed themselves as the direct inheritors of the Revolutionary tradition. In that same Old South Church 45 years earlier, the Sons of Liberty had gathered before marching out in Native American garb to dump British tea into Boston harbor.
Enthusiasm for the crusade proposed by Fisk and Parsons gripped not only long-settled Americans but also more recent immigrants. Nor was the excitement confined to Boston or even to the so-called Bible belt of New England. Embarking on a countrywide tour to solicit donations for their journey, the young preachers would be welcomed by congregations throughout the South and in frontier chapels west of the Alleghenies. "The spirit of missions is beginning to command the influence and wealth of the American churches," Parsons rejoiced.
Common to all of these communities was the conviction that America had a divinely assigned role to act as a "light unto nations," and to strive for global peace. "They went determined to lift mankind to a higher and better plane of living," the historian Oliver Elsbree wrote of Fisk, Parsons, and the thousands of young women and men destined to follow them. "They sought to take the best America then had to offer to the heathen world." The missionaries had the unique quality of being both guileless and patronizing, haughty and unaffected, yet thoroughly well- intentioned at the same time. Their arrogance was essentially benign.
The parishioners left Old South Church, to the peals of a bell forged by Paul Revere, with their thoughts far from New England. They were thinking of a distant corner of the Ottoman Empire and of the monumental events soon to unfold there. Levi Parsons and Pliny Fisk, meanwhile, travelled to Washington, D.C., where Secretary of State John Quincy Adams supplied them with letters vouching for their probity. Thus equipped, the young preachers were ready to become the first American missionaries to the Middle East, those lands where, they believed, "great transactions" had shaped the destiny "of all ages and all nations for time and eternity."
- - -
The fascination that many American Protestants displayed toward the Jews did not stem from any extensive contact with them -- some 4,000 Jews lived in the United States at that time, roughly .04% of the total population -- nor did it derive from a desire to befriend them personally. Indeed, some early evangelical writing contained comments that would certainly sound anti-Semitic today, including their insistence that all Jews ultimately be baptized. Yet whatever feelings they bore them as fellow citizens were distinct from the affection with which the evangelists held the Jews as their cousins in faith and as the agents of future redemption. By expediting the fulfillment of God's promises to repatriate the Jews to their homeland, Christians could re-create the conditions of Jewish sovereignty that existed in Jesus' time and so set the stage for his reappearance. This was the concept of "restorationism," and its impact was immense. Christian theology had once portrayed the Jews' loss of sovereignty as punishment for their rejection of Christ's first coming, but the evangelists now saw the revival of Jewish statehood as a prerequisite for His second visitation on earth.
Restorationism was neither new nor unique to American Protestantism. Evocations of the idea can be found in Sir Henry Finch's 1621 treatise, The World's Great Restauration, or, The Calling of the Jews, as well as in the poems of John Milton and the philosophy of John Locke.
En route to the New World, the Puritans took the concept with them to Holland, where they petitioned the Dutch government to "transport Izraell's sons and daughters to the Land promised their forefathers for an everlasting Inheritance." Colonial American theologians such as John Cotton, the leading minister of Massachusetts Bay, and Increase Mather, Harvard's first president, called for the destruction of the Ottoman Empire to make way for the Jews' return.
By the Second Awakening, the dream of reinstating Jewish rule in the Holy Land was fast becoming doctrine. Ezra Stiles of Yale forecast that "the return of the 12 tribes to the Holy Land" would spark an outburst of spiritual energy sufficient "to convert a world." Another New Haven cleric, David Austin, took this prediction literally and spent his life's savings building docks, inns, and warehouses in preparation for the Jews' departure. "When that empire falls the Jews will begin to be restored [to Palestine] and Christ will take to himself his power and reign," proclaimed Asa McFarland, a Massachusetts Presbyterian, in 1808.
Restorationist fervor, it must be noted, arose without any thought for the physical existence, much less the political or religious desires, of the thousands of Arabs then living in Palestine. Rather than focus on faceless populations, Americans preferred to concentrate on the momentous Middle Eastern events -- Napoleon's penetration of Egypt and the defeat of the Barbary pirates -- which seemed to portend Palestine's liberation. Once the "weak and imbecile" Ottomans were ousted, an 1816 issue of the Niles' Weekly Register speculated, the Jews would swiftly make the deserts "blossom like a rose," and Jerusalem would again "rival the cities of the world for beauty, splendor and wealth." The Continental Congress president Elias Boudinot, a founder of the American Bible Society, predicted that "the mighty power of God" would soon summon the Jews from exile and repatriate them "to their beloved land of Palestine." More ardently still, John Adams envisioned "a hundred thousand Israelites [as] well disciplined as the French army" marching into Palestine and conquering it.
- Excerpted with permission from Michael B. Oren's Power, Faith, and Fantasy, published by W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.,2007 by Sike, Inc.
