Christian Zionism in the United Kingdom

Christian Zionism in the United Kingdom is a Christian ideology that sees the return of the Jews to Israel as a fulfilment of scriptural prophecy. Supporters of Christian Zionism believe that the existence of the Jewish State can and should be supported on theological grounds.

Christian Zionism preceded Zionism amongst both secular and rabbinic Jews, and much of the initiative for this came from within the United Kingdom. Expectations of a national return of the Jews to their homeland, often called Restorationism, were widely held amongst the Puritans. The early Methodists, Congregationalists like John Owen, Baptists like John Gill,John Rippon, C H Spurgeon, Presbyterians like Samuel Rutherford,Horatius and Andrew Bonar, and Robert Murray M'Chyene, and many Anglicans including Bishop J C Ryle and Charles Simeon held similar views. Simeon wrote in 1820, 'the Jews at large, and the generality of Christians also, believe that the dispersed of Israel will one day be restored to their own land'

C H Spurgeon in 1864, 32 years before Herzl's Der Judenstadt,

Jewish Christians like Joseph Frey, who founded the London Society for the Jews, Joseph Woolf, and two theologians Ridley Herschell and Philip Hirschfeld formed an important link between the earlier Restorationism of German Lutheran pietists and British evangelicals, and played a large part in galvanizing widespread evangelical support in the UK. In 1840, G. W. Pieritz, another Jewish missionary for the London Society played an important role in exposing the Damascus blood libels to the British public in The Times. Erasmus Calman was a Latvian Jewish Christian, resident in Jerusalem from 1833, who in 1840 also lobbied vigorously for Jewish settlement in Palestine.

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