On November 2, 2017, it will be 100 years since Lord Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, issued the famous Balfour Declaration. Balfour was a Christian Zionist and looked with great sympathy upon Jewish aspirations and Zionism, which simply put is the Jewish people’s national liberation movement. Put in Biblical terms, it is the return from exile of the Jews to Zion – to that very special land promised by God to the first Jew, Abraham, and through his descendants, Isaac and Jacob, to the Jewish people forever.
The Hebrew Scriptures equate Zion with the holiest city in Judaism, Israel’s capital of Jerusalem. You can read numerous references in the Bible and the Psalms to the word Zion, such as in Psalm 135:21, II Samuel 5:7 and Isaiah 24:23. The Biblical yearning of the Jews to return to their ancestral homeland is mirrored in the modern political usage of the term Zionism, first employed in 1890 by the Jewish author and poet, Nathan Birnbaum.
Theodore Herzl, an assimilated Jewish journalist from Vienna, became the father of modern Zionism in the late nineteenth century. He had been so moved by the hopelessness of the lives of the Jews in Europe, that he helped create the political movement calling for the return of the Jews to their ancient homeland, which resulted finally in the rebirth and reconstitution of Israel in 1948. Herzl himself wrote in 1898. “One thing is to me certain, high above any doubt: the movement will continue. I know not when I shall die, but Zionism will never die.”
Herzl died young, his heart unable to withstand his feverish restlessness and the enormous strain he placed upon it. But this article deals with the Christians who found within their faith the Biblical signposts, which showed them the imperative need to support the return of the Jews to ancient Zion and the Land of Israel. Who were some of these Christians and what did they find in the Scriptures that moved them so profoundly?
Perhaps the first Christians to reject the belief – found among the majority of Catholics and Protestants – that the Church is the “new Israel” and that Christians are the “new Jews” occurred some 500 years ago as a result of the printing of the King James Version of the Bible. They realized that such an old and pernicious belief held by the Church was the fuel that fed the fires of the Catholic Inquisition and of the massacres of Jewish populations throughout much of Europe during the Crusades. That idea is known today primarily as “Replacement Theology” and is employed chiefly as a weapon against the reconstitution of the Jewish State of Israel in its ancestral and Biblical homeland.
In about 1560, Henry Finch, an Englishman who was a jurist, legal writer, member of the British Parliament and Hebraist, encouraged the Jews in Europe to assert their claim to the Promised Land. He spoke and wrote in Hebrew but could not speak to Jews directly for they had been driven out of England in 1290 by Edward I, after the barons and the kings had repeatedly exploited, impoverished and massacred them. It was not until 1657 that they were to return during the time of Oliver Cromwell, who himself was moved to support the rights of the Jews to live again in England and to return to Zion.
Finch was moved by the words of the Jewish prophet Isaiah, and particularly by Chapter 43:4-7 in which the Lord God of Israel declares that he will “bring back His people from the East, the West, the North and the South.” Henry Finch was thus one of the early Christian Zionists. Many Christians have been moved to embrace the return of the Jews to Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, by what the Jewish prophet Jeremiah wrote in chapter 31:10-12. “Hear the Word of the Lord, O ye nations. Declare it and say, He that scattered Israel will gather him: therefore, they shall come and sing again in the heights of Zion.”
In 1910, a young British Army officer with the unlikely name, Richard Meinertzhagen, was dining with the British Consul in Odessa when a pogrom broke out in the streets outside. Meinertzhagen watched with growing but impotent rage as Jewish shops and businesses erupted in flames and Jewish men, women and children were hunted down, beaten, murdered and left to lie in the gutter while the police stood by and watched. He wrote in his journal, “I am deeply moved by these terrible deeds and have resolved that whenever or where I can help the Jews, I shall do so to the best of my ability.”
Young Richard Meinertzhagen became a lifelong Zionist and, though a nominal Christian, wrote that he was much influenced by the “Divine Promise that the Holy Land will forever remain Israel’s inheritance.” Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen went on to become a great fighter for the Zionist cause at a time when senior members of the British Government, such as Foreign Secretary, Lord Arthur Balfour, and Prime Minister, Lloyd George, were devoted Christian Zionists.
