Christian Zionism and English National Identity, 1600–1850 (Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World) 1st ed. 2018 Edition by Andrew Crome (Palgrave MacMillan)

This book makes an important contribution to the study of Protestant “philosemitism” and the religious sources of English national identity. Crome begins with a hermeneutical revolution: the new “Judeo-centric” reading of the Bible that flourished in seventeenth-century Britain and put the restoration of the Jews at the centre of end-times speculation. Here he finds the origins of Christian Zionism, but also a new conception of the nation. England (or Britain) was conceived not as the new Israel (displacing old Israel), but rather as a nation that found its raison d’etre in supporting the Jews and their restoration to Palestine. Crome shows how this idea informed the debates around Jewish readmission in 1655, the “Jew Bill” of 1753, and the Jerusalem bishopric controversy of 1840-41. His study is essential reading for students of millenarianism, Judaism, and religious nationalism.his book explores why English Christians, from the early modern period onwards, believed that their nation had a special mission to restore the Jews to Palestine. It examines English support for Jewish restoration from the Whitehall Conference in 1655 through to public debates on the Jerusalem Bishopric in 1841. Rather than claiming to replace Israel as God’s “elect nation”, England was “chosen” to have a special, but inferior, relationship with the Jews. Believing that God “blessed those who bless” the Jewish people, this national role allowed England to atone for ill-treatment of Jews, read the confusing pathways of providence, and guarantee the nation’s survival until Christ’s return. This book analyses this mode of national identity construction and its implications for understanding Christian views of Jews, the self, and “the other”. It offers a new understanding of national election, and of the relationship between apocalyptic prophecy and political action.   

Christian Zionism and English National Identity is an important addition to the literature on Christian-Jewish relations, political theology, and the influence of the Bible on Western history. Moving fluently between primary sources and recent scholarship, Crome shows how concepts of chosenness and election were deployed to give a divine mission to English Protestants without claiming an eschatology reserved for the Jews. Working in a sensitive field, Crome is notably respectful of both historical actors and contemporary interlocutors. This book will interest and provoke readers in a range of disciplines and makes an important, provocative, powerful contribution to the extensive work on English national identity, Christian (particularly Protestant) attitudes toward Jews, the idea of chosen nations, and prophecy and biblical interpretation from the early seventeenth century into the mid nineteenth-century.