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Although missions to the Jews in America began early in the nineteenth century—indeed, Jonathan Sarna has argued that many of the characteristic institutions of American Judaism emerged during the middle decades of the century directly in response to Christian proselytizing—it wasn't until the 1880s and 1890s that such efforts began to be conducted on a large scale. Between 1880 and 1919, by Ariel's count, the number of organizations devoted to evangelizing Jews increased from one to forty-five.
From the time of its founding in the 1880s, Moody Bible Institute was particularly active in promoting missions to Jews, attracting Jewish converts who sought training to more effectively reach their own people as well as others preparing for Jewish evangelization. In 1923, Moody established a department expressly for this purpose. "Although the program in Jewish studies had the pragmatic purpose of training missionaries to the Jews," Ariel writes,
and although the Jewish religion was not studied from an intrinsically Jewish perspective, the fact that the Moody Bible Institute offered a special program in Jewish studies in its curriculum was in some ways remarkable. It was certainly unique among Christian institutions of higher education in America at the time. Ironically, it was a conservative institute that was the first to introduce a course of Jewish studies rather than a liberal one.
What inspired the sudden, enthusiastic interest in Jewish conversion? Ariel's answer is unequivocal: premillennial dispensationalism. John Nelson Darby's urgent eschatology pushed British Christians to evangelize Jews, and when dispensationalism took hold in the United States, American evangelicals started witnessing to Jews with a vigor that put their transatlantic counterparts to shame. Their zeal was fueled by a new understanding of Jews' unique place in salvation history. In the Darbyite scheme, Jews would rebuild a political state in Palestine before the Second Coming, and Jews would be primed to embrace Jesus when he finally returned. The widely used Scofield Reference Bible and popular works such as James Brookes's 1874 bestseller Maranatha spelled out "the role of the Jewish people in the events of the End Times and in the millennial kingdom."
Zionism bolstered dispensationalists' confidence that the eschaton was at hand, and that Jews—and Jewish evangelism—would play a key role in ushering in the kingdom of God. Missionaries saw the Jewish resettlement of Palestine as proof that "they were working to evangelize a nation that was in the process of recovering its position as God's chosen people. … No cause could be more worthy." The Balfour Declaration was added assurance that "the current era was ending and the events of the End Times were to begin very soon." The creation of the state of Israel in 1948, not surprisingly, was heralded as only the most dramatic in a long series of signs of the times. By mid-century, Ariel shows, evangelicals were pouring unprecedented amounts of time and money into the evangelization of Jews.
But even as conservative evangelical support for evangelistic efforts grew, mainliners had begun to criticize Jewish missions. Beginning in the 1920s, Reinhold Niebuhr "pioneered an approach that accepted the legitimacy of a separate Jewish existence outside the church and the idea that Jews, holding a valid religious tradition of their own, did not have to convert." Taking their cues from Niebuhr, theologians like Paul Van Buren and Franklin Littell "recognized the merits of rabbinical Judaism as a rich religious tradition. … [and insisted] that there was no need for Jews to turn to Christianity." Some mainliners eschewed Jewish evangelism on theological grounds: Jews already know the God of Israel, so they don't need saving. Others argued that friendly interfaith relations are more important than evangelism. By 1970, mainliners were almost unanimously opposed to Jewish missions.
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