This is Zachary Foster’s response to a tweet from Emily Schrader that said, “I’m not sure why this needs to be said, but we don’t need non-Jews to be lecturing Jews about what Zionism is or isn’t.” Foster is a Jewish-American historian of Palestine who received his PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton in 2017.

Of course, Christians don’t need to be lecturing Jews about anything. We have our own intramural issues – and Christian Zionism is a big one that heavily influences conservative and liberal followers of Jesus.

Zionism was initially a Christian phenomenon before it was a Jewish phenomenon.

→ Anthony Cooper (Lord Shaftesbury) (1801-1885) published a tract in 1838 claiming that Jewish “restoration” in Palestine would benefit Great Britain’s geopolitical position and would hasten the second coming of Jesus.

→ Charles Henry Churchill (1807-1867) proposed a plan for establishing a Jewish state in Palestine in the 1840s as British Consul in Damascus.

→ James Finn (1806-1872), British Consul in Jerusalem, member of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews, bought land in the 1850s in the Palestinian village of Artas for the purpose of employing destitute Jews there.

→ James Bicheno’s (1880) “The restoration of the Jews, the crisis of all nations”: purpose to “stir up public attention to the prophecies which relate to the restoration of this singular people in the latter days.”

→ William Hechler an Anglican clergyman in 1884 wrote “The Restoration of the Jews to Palestine” in which he argued that Jewish settlement in Palestine was a precondition for the return of Jesus.

Maybe the more sensible question is, why did Jews hijack the idea of Zionism from non-Jews?

Sources: Ilan Pappe, Lobbying for Zionism; Masalha, The Zionist Bible