A History of the End of the World

end-times coincided with the emergence of modern political Zionism in the mid–nineteenth century. The Zionist movement was motivated by political rather than religious impulses; the Zionists sought to rescue Jewish men, women, and children from the dangers of anti-Semitism in Europe, and they believed that Jewish statehood was essential to Jewish survival. Indeed, the Zionist movement in Russia and eastern Europe was rooted in the thoroughly secular doctrines of socialism and nationalism rather than the pious yearning of the Jewish people for a return to Zion in the days of the Messiah. Thus, for example, Theodor Herzl (1860–1904), a highly assimilated Jewish journalist from Vienna who came to be seen as the father of modern Zionism, was perfectly willing to accept Argentina or Uganda as the site of a Jewish homeland if the biblical land of Israel was unavailable.

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.”⁸²

Here we are reminded of a striking difference between the apocalyptic ideas of Judaism and Christianity. 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”⁸³—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.”⁸⁴

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.⁸⁵

“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.”⁸⁶

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.⁸⁷

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.”⁸⁸

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 1918.⁸⁹

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 Christianity 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.”⁹⁰

“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.”⁹¹

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.”⁹²

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