Jonathan Kirsch - A History of the End of the World

Joachim of Fiore, author of a tract frankly titled Against the Jews, insists that the Jewish people will follow the Antichrist until the end of days, when a few of them will convert to Christianity at the last possible moment. The same idea was carried forward into Protestant theology by Martin Luther. If the Jews accept Jesus Christ, Luther allows in a tract of his own titled Against the Jews and Their Lies, “we will be glad to forgive them,” but if not, “we should not tolerate and suffer them.” 78

Apocalyptic legend and lore imagined that the Jewish people would return to the land of Israel at the end of days—but only with deadly consequences. For example, a text titled Christ and Antichrist, which dates back to the third century, insists that the Antichrist will rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, call back the Jewish people from their places of exile, and then commence a new persecution of Christians that will end only “when Christ, heralded by Elijah and John the Baptist, comes again in glory.” 79As the author of Revelation suggests, the blood of the defeated Jewish army of the Antichrist will rise to the height of a horse’s bridle in the streets of Jerusalem.

A much brighter picture was painted by the apocalyptic preachers of the New World. Increase Mather predicted in The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation Explained and Applied (1669) that the Jewish people would be “brought into their own land again” and that, once they returned to the site of ancient Israel, they would convert to Christianity and become “the most glorious nation in the world.” 80One Presbyterian minister actually undertook to build dock houses and wharves in New Haven as a place of embarkation for the Jewish emigrants: “The return of the Jews to their own land,” he declared in 1800, “is certain.”

But, like the Rapture, the repatriation of the Jewish people took on a new degree of power and authority in the teachings of John Darby. He came away from his study of the Hebrew Bible with a new idea about the role of the Jewish people in the end-times, a notion that has been called one of the “most distinctive and controversial features” of his doctrine. 81To sum up Darby’s elaborate theory, he taught that God has devised one fate for the Jewish people and a different fate for the Christian church—but the two phases of the divine plan for the end of the world are interrelated, and so the final salvation of Christians depends on the destiny that God has assigned to the Jewish people.

Since Darby was convinced that all biblical prophecy must be fulfilled, including the prophecies in the Hebrew Bible that were addressed to the Israelites, he concluded that God will keep his promise to restore the land of Israel to the Chosen People and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem before bringing the world to an end. Indeed, the gathering of the Jewish people in their ancient homeland in Palestine came to be seen as both a sign and a necessary precondition of the Second Coming, the defeat of Satan, and the creation of the New Heaven and the New Earth. Thus did the Jewish people come to play an unwitting but decisive role in the end-times as imagined so vividly by the apocalyptic true believers in America.

By a fateful coincidence, the divine plan for the Jewish people in Darby’s scenario of the 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.