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“For Zion's Sake I Will Not Rest”: The London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews and its Nineteenth-Century Missionary Periodicals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 May 2013

Agnieszka Jagodzińska
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Extract

Since the Evangelical Revival triggered a new wave of British millenarian expectations and aroused religiously motivated interest in Jews, various religious bodies and individuals envisioned the necessity of Jews' conversion, stimulating countless and restless efforts to evangelize “God's chosen people.” These efforts, organized within the framework of the vast British missionary enterprise, soon became “nothing short of a national project,” to cite Michael Ragussis. This project, dubbed by its critics as “the English madness,” expressed itself in activity of various societies, and missions, in a wide flow of literature and in constantly recurring public debates. The London Society for Promoting Christianity among Jews (abbreviated from here to the London Society or the Society), was probably its most important outcome. Established as a separate missionary enterprise in 1809, it was the oldest and the largest society in field of nineteenth-century British “Jewish missions.” It sent missionaries not only to the Jewish communities in British colonial spaces, but also far beyond. The efforts of the Society to convert Jews are well reflected in its numerous missionary periodicals whose function, form, and language I wish to discuss here.

Type
Forum
Information
Church History , Volume 82 , Issue 2 , June 2013 , pp. 381 - 387
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2013 

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References

60 Ragussis, Michael, Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” & English National Identity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), back cover, 1, 16–17Google Scholar.

61 The Society was active through the whole nineteenth century, which is the chronological framework in this article. In the early twentieth century it adopted a new name—Church's Ministry among the Jews. It still operates today as Church's Ministry among Jewish People (www.cmj.org.uk).

62 Mary Ruth Hiller reminds us “that between 1824 and 1900 close to seventy-five percent of the articles and stories published in monthlies and quarterlies were anonymous or pseudonymous; undoubtedly the figure would be much higher if weeklies were included” (“The Identification of Authors: The Great Victorian Enigma,” in Victorian Periodicals: A Guide to Research, eds. Don Vann, J. and Van Arsdel, Rosemary T. [New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1978], 124Google Scholar).

63 Gidney, William Thomas, The History of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews: From 1809 to 1908 (London: London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews, 1908), 40Google Scholar.

64 The British Union Catalogue of Periodicals, based solely on the holdings of the British Museum (1864–54), gives imprecise information on the dates of publication of the Jewish Records: [18??]-54[?]. See, Stewart, James D., et al. , eds., British Union Catalogue of Periodicals: A Record of the Periodicals of the World, From the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day, in British Libraries, vol. 2 (London: Butterworths Scientific Publications, 1956), 595Google Scholar. This information can be verified by the holdings belonging to the CMJ archive stored at the Bodleian Libraries. The collection there contains issues published—with gaps—between 1818–1884.

65 Gidney, The History of the London Society, 57.

66 CMJ e. 45: “Jubilee Hymns,” (a supplement in) Jewish Intelligence 24, no. 6 (1858), 1Google Scholar. Here I quote only the first of 21 stanzas.

67 For more on the historical and ethnographical value of missionary reports published in periodicals, see Jagodzińksa, Agnieszka: “‘English Missionaries’ Look at Polish Jews: The Value and Limitations of Missionary Reports,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 27, Jews in the Kingdom of Poland, 1815–1914, eds. Dynner, Glenn et al. (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2014)Google Scholar.

68 Altholz, Josef L., The Religious Press in Britain, 1700–1900 (New York: Greenwod, 1989), 20–21Google Scholar.

69 On occasion the Society's periodicals published correspondence from Jews, who responded to them in a polemical tone, but it is hard to describe them as their “readers.”

70 Apart from the London Society for Promoting Christianity among Jews, many other “Jewish missions” emerged in Great Britain in the nineteenth century, and their number grew particularly in its last quarter. For more on this diversity, see Thompson, Albert Edward, A Century of Jewish Missions (Chicago: Fleming H. Revell, 2009), 93–117Google Scholar.

71 Gidney, The History of the London Society, 497–498.

72 Apart from a few earlier titles, we can observe that missionary periodicals for women became popular in Britain during the 1870s and 1880s. Compare some selected titles at Missionary Periodicals Database, Yale University Divinity School Library, http://divdl.library.yale.edu/missionperiodicals/Results.aspx?search=true&key=Female.

For more about gender and British periodicals, see Palmegiano, E. M., Women and British Periodicals, 1832–1867: A Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1976), xi–liiiGoogle Scholar; Fraser, Hilary et al. , Gender and the Victorian Periodicals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Ledbetter, Kathryn, British Victorian Women's Periodicals: Beauty, Civilization, and Poetry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

73 Cox, Jeffrey, The British Missionary Enterprise since 1700 (New York: Routledge, 2010), 107Google Scholar.

74 Ibid., 107–113.

75 Dixon, Diana, “Magazines for Children,” in Victorian Periodicals: A Guide to Research, vol. 2, eds. Don Vann, J. and Van Arsdel, Rosemary T. (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1989), 91Google Scholar.

76 CMJ f.12: [The Editor], “To Our Readers,” The Jewish Advocate for the Young 10, no. 1 (1854), 4Google Scholar.