A New Model of Christian Interaction with the Jews

The turn of the eighteenth century saw the rise of a new movement in the landscape of Western Christianity and Christian-Jewish relations – German Pietism, which provided an alternative means for Protestants to relate to Jews.1 The Halle Pietists thus became one of the important movements in the Protestant world, and their pioneering mission, the Institutum Judaicum, influenced other groups of Pietists in Central and Northern Europe, as well as English-speaking evangelicals, making a lasting impression on the Protestant scene, modifying, and at times transforming, prevailing attitudes towards the Jews. An exploration of the agenda of this movement, then, may unveil a rich picture of this highly complicated relationship.

however,carried Luther'stheological and practical positions afew steps further. In his earlycareer as areformer, Luther held hopes for the conversion of the Jews to Christianity,but stopped short of establishing amission or formulating specific means of approaching them. Pietists institutionalized and systematized the agenda outlined by the young reformer.But,unlikeL uther,who was disappointed that the Jews did not join his new Protestant church en masse, Pietists, and later on, evangelical missionaries, accepted thatmost Jews werenot interestedin converting to Christianity.Content to convert onlyalimited number of Jews, Pietists set their sights on thosei ndividuals who weret hus inclined.
Pietist agendas weres trongly shaped by the ideas of Philip Jacob Spener (1635 -1705), foundero fH alle Pietism. In his PiaD esideria,the most influential work of German Pietism, Spenerp romoted an alternative attitude towards the Jews.³ There, the Pietist thinker expressedappreciation for the longstanding Jewish rejection of Christianity.H eb lamed Christian societies for mistreatingt he Jews, and called upon his readerst os how good will towards them. Promoting am essianic outlook, Spener, and the Halle Pietists whom he inspired, as well as an umber of other Pietist groups that followed them, werec onvinced that the Jews would again playadecisive role in the events thatw ould lead to the materialization of the Kingdom of God on earth.
Although Pietism developedm ostlyi nL utheran lands, the Reformed (often labelled 'Calvinist')wing of the Reformation influenced Pietist positions towards the Jews.⁴ Reformers of that school, such as Martin Bucer (1491-1551), John Calvin (1509Calvin ( -1564, and Theodore Beza (1519 -1605), took with utters eriousness the messagesc onveyedi nt he Hebrew Bible, includingt he idea that their communitiesw erei nc ovenant with God.⁵ UnlikeL uther,w ho believed that the place of the Jewish people in history,a sa ne ntity distinct from Christianity, had come to an end, Calvin held that while God was angry with Jews as individuals, Jews might stillb er edeemed as an ation.⁶ Reformed thinkers in England, Holland, France, and Switzerland, as well as in thosep arts of the New World whereReformed theologygainedground, expressed hope for the Jews' prospect of national restoration and conversion to Christianity.⁷ Pietism found parallels and support in Reformed communities,includingthe Puritan movement that developedi nE ngland and New England.⁸ ManyP ietists and Puritans viewed the Jews as heirso fh istorical Israel, and focused on the prospect of the return of the Jews to the HolyL and and their conversion to Christianity.⁹ Puritans and Pietistsadhering to aChristian messianic faith insisted that the biblical references to Israel, Judah, Zion, and Jerusalem should be read literally, and thatt he Old Testament prophecies about the rejuvenation of Israel werem eant for the (Grand Rapids,MI: Baker Books, 2003) Jews.¹⁰ With this ideological backdrop, these Christians were keen to seek out Jews for interaction.
Pietists' faith in the imminent return of Jesus to earth rendered their work among Jews pivotal to the unfoldingoft heir notion of the divine plan for salvation. They sought to educateChristians about the messianic role of the Jews and to instruct the latter as to what was, from the Pietist point of view,theirtrue historical mission. In their eyes, Jews werepoised to return to the HolyLand to prepare the ground for Jesus' return and the eventual establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth. This theme became acentral topos in Pietist literature intended for dissemination among Jews.¹¹ Other Protestant missions to the Jews that emergedi nt he wake of the Halle Pietist mission, such as the London Society for PromotingC hristianitya mong the Jews, adopted or produced similar literature. ¹²

The HalleP ietists and the Evangelization of the Jews
If the Jewishp eople weret asked with as pecial mission in God'sp lans for the messianic times, they merited time and resources:a ss uch, manyP ietist groups prioritized their evangelization. Wishing to approach Jews effectively,P ietists equipped their evangelists with knowledge of Jews, Judaism, and Jewishculture. Eighteenth-centuryG erman Protestants took an increasingi nterest in the Jews, their language, culture, and beliefs, as well as theireconomic and civicstatus.¹³ Halle offered an excellent infrastructure for training and supporting informed missionaries. Among other opportunities, the university,w hich Spener and other Pietists had established in that city,o ffered ar angeo fc ourses in Jewish languages, includingH ebrew,A ramaic, and Yiddish. In time,t he University of Halle became an important center of research and teaching on Semitic languages, and Biblical and Near Eastern studies. Moreover,the town possessed printing presses thatp ublished booksi nt hose languages. Headed by Johann Heinrich Callenberg( 1694-1760), the new mission started at the University of Halle, whereC allenbergb egan teachingc ourses for prospective missionaries in 1724, four years before the official foundingd ate of the mission. The Pietist leader would hold ad ual position as au niversityi nstructor and head of the mission. Callenbergw as in charge of the production of bookst hat enhancede xtensive missionary fieldwork that aimed to reach Jews in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as in otherp arts of the Jewish world.¹⁴ The Institutey ielded an impressive legacy: the comprehensive studyofJ ewish traditions, customs,and languages, as well as aproliferation of texts on and for Jews. It helpedshape dozens of other missions, includinginBritain, Scandinavia, Holland, America,E astern Europe and Palestine. Manyoft hese missions emulated the Halle-mission tacticsa nd produced similar publications.¹⁵ The novelty of this approach merits am oment of appreciation. Traditional Christian theologyand popularopinion had long perceivedthe Jews as apeople frozen in time, practicing auniformand static tradition. Little attention had ever been paid to the actual customs of the Jews, includingt heir synagogue rites, home-based rituals, religious paraphernalia, and rites of passage. Interest would arise mostlywhen rumors spread of Jewish disrespect in texts and prayers towards Christianity.¹⁶ Likewise, Christians had previouslyt aken scant notice of the diversity of Judaism and the differing ethnicg roups and languages of the Jews. In addition to the study of the Jews, their languages and cultures, the In-stitutumJ udaicum took upon itself to carry out itinerant visitsa nd discussions with thousands of Jews in dozens of different locales in Central and Eastern Europe. Institute missionaries would regularlyd ispatch reports on routine life in the Jewishc ommunities they visited.¹⁷ Those representativeso ft he Institute acted as ethnographers,t ouringJ ewish communities and recording theiri mpressions.¹⁸ The Halle Pietists' trademark was to enter Jewishs paces,i ncludings ynagogues, privateh omes, and markets, and engagei nc onversations with individuals and groups,s oliciting their opinions and eliciting theire verydayc oncerns.¹⁹ Among other discoveries, Pietists found rampant poverty among Jews, ar eality that stood in stark contrast to the prevailing stereotypes about them held by contemporary Christians. The rise of Pietism and the earlya ctivity of the Institutum Judaicum took place during the heydayof'court Jews,' ah andful of entrepreneurial Jews who served as aides, advisorsa nd managers to local rulers, includingM oses Benjamin Wulff (1661-1729), who acted as the lieutenant of the Duke of Anhalt-Dessau, in whose territory the Halle Pietists operated. The Pietist missionaries soon discovered, however,that the Jewishm asses weref ar removed from court life. In fact, most Jews livedi nd eprivation in comparison to Christian burghers,with no access to higher education, the professions,the military,orother economic opportunities.²⁰ Jewishh istorians have givens omewhat short shrift to protective attitudes evinced by German Protestants, such as Pietist activists, towards Jews.²¹ Pietists have even been portrayeda sh ostile towards them.²² However,while not shying away from criticism of Jews, Pietists defended them against what they considered unfair condemnations, such as blood libels, which weres tillp revalent in Central and Eastern Europe. Moreover,t hey advocated improvingt he civil and economic conditions of the Jews. Pietists and, later, evangelical missionaries, would militate against harassment of Jews all around the world, claiming good will towardst he Jews as aC hristian virtue, and condemningp hysical and legal attacks against them. While expressing sympathy with Jews and protecting them in the public arena, Pietist methods of evangelism did not share twenty-first century standards of tolerance towards other people'sfaiths. Moving from one Jewish community to the next,m issionaries used aggressive tacticsa nd did not hesitatet o make provocative statements.I nt hat manner,i tinerant evangelists engaged Jews in debateso nt he appropriate manner of readingJ ewish sacred texts, and discussed with them whether the Messiah had alreadyc ome once before or not.T here was certainlya n' exchange' between Pietists and Jews, but hardly in anyc ontemporarys ense of interfaith dialogue.
Pietist missionaries also did not always present themselvesa sw hat they were. Thed iaries of two studiosi, the itinerant missionaries GeorgW idmann (1693 -1753) and Johann Andreas Manitius (1707-1758), reveal that, relying on their remarkable knowledge of Jewish languages, culture, and teachings,s ometimes the missionaries werea blet oc onceal theirC hristian identities.²³ In the Widmann and Manitius cases, the Jews suspected that the visitors might not have been Jewish, but weren evertheless curious and therefore gave them the benefit of the doubt. Some wanted to learn more about the Pietist movement, and an umber of young Jews contemplatedc onversion.
Pietist evangelists, as well as evangelical missionaries who came on the scene in the Anglo-Saxon world of the nineteenth century,w erec ertain that their versions of Protestantism would be palatable to the Jews. It was, they believed, apurist,fullyreformed Protestantism, which Jews should be able to relate to more easilyt han other forms of Christianity.B yt he eighteenth century,t he Protestant Old Testament had come to resemble the Jewish Tanakh. Protestants mostlyprinted their bibles without the Apocrypha, thoseparts of the RomanOld Testament thatthe Jews had not canonized, such as the books of Judith and the Maccabees.²⁴ This process, in which the Pietists playedacrucial role, would provevital to the messagesofthe Pietist missions. When approaching Jews, Pietist missionaries and their successors pointed to chapters and verses in the Hebrew Bible as abasis for theological discussions. Pietists and, later,evangelicals who engaged in missionizing Jews, presented their church environments,l iturgies, and ministry as non-offensive to Jewish sensibilities, suiting Jewishs tyles and concepts. Their houses of worship weree mptyo fi conography; they did  Bochinger, "Dialoge," 514-8.  Luther removedanumber of texts from the canon and placed them under the rubric of Apocrypha, included in the Bible, but not carryingacanonical status. not perform the rite of the Eucharist,a nd their ministers,c onducting services without vestments and preachinga bout biblical passages, weren ot priests. ²⁵ While sharing asimilar corpus of sacred scriptures with the Jews, Pietist missionaries werec ertain that theirs was the correct mannero fr eadingt he Bible. ForPietists, their version of the Christian faith, which emphasized regeneration, would lead to salvation and eternal life, while Judaism lacked the ability to offer spiritual guidelinesa nd eternal salvation. Despite their ardent desire to interact with Jews, from the Pietists' point of view,s uch meetingst ook place between non-equals.²⁶ They alone possessed the correct understanding of God'sp lans for human history,a nd it wastheir mission to share it with Jews. While Pietists, like manyPuritans and Reformed thinkers,and later on evangelicalones, developed hopes for the revival of the Jews in arestored Davidic kingdom, they agreed with the traditionalC hristian understanding that observanceo ft he commandments was purposeless after the sacrifice of Jesuso nt he cross.O nlyf aith in Jesusc ould redeem the Jews.²⁷ Rather expectedly, Jews did not always welcome encounters with Pietist studiosi. Jewishl eaders experiencedP ietist overtures as intrusive,aviolation of their integritya sp eople upholdingt heir ancestral faith.²⁸ Often, however,t he missionaries could relyo ni ndividual Jews -particularlyy oung ones -to lend an ear.Intheir distance from majority-Christian groups,Pietists had greater emotional accesst oJ ews thant heir more established Christian brethren. Most Jews liveda tt hat time among Catholic, Uniate, or OrthodoxC hristians, with the patterns of immigration giving growingpreference to Protestant lands, whereprevi-ouslyJ ews had been forbidden to settle. Jews often related to Christian authorities as alien, but some of them felt thatt he Pietists wered ifferent,f riendlier and more well-meaning.
While Jewish leaders considered missionaries athreat,they could not always grasp the ideas thatmotivated the Pietists and evangelicals to take an interest in While promotingthe idea of the Jews' centrality in God'splans and developing protective attitudes towards them, Pietists often held stereotypical images of Jews as apeople. Contemporary historians who have examined Pietist and early evangelical views of Jews have sometimes been taken aback by these beliefs.³¹ Yets uch sentimentso ught to be analyzedw ithin the context of their time and place, which often held opinions of Jews that had been percolating in European societies for centuries.C onsidering the Jews as God'sf irst -albeit temporarily cast-aside -nation, Pietists related to the Jews with more goodwill thanm any other Christians of the period.³² Concurrent with the Halle Pietists' activities, some non-Pietist German writers, such as Johann Andreas Eisenmenger (1654-1704), wrotev ery different tracts, conveying outright hostility towardst he Jews.³³ Naturally, one finds variation in Pietist attitudes towardsJews. Wuerttem-bergP ietists related to them in ad ifferent wayt han Halle Pietists did. Some WuerttembergP ietists were not eschatologicallyo riented and did not envision aspecial role for the Jews in history.Still, for the most part,Pietist missionaries held to eschatological hopes and considered the Jews as pecial people, even if they did not always express positive views about Jewish ways.Although communicated in very different political, cultural, and ecclesiastical settings, the attitudes of nineteenth-century English-speaking evangelical missionaries resembled thoseo fe ighteenth-century Pietists, ar esemblancet hat was evidenti n their literature.³⁴

Literaturef or and about Jews
The Pietist mission produced books for Jews as prospectivec onverts. Likewise, the missionaries disseminated literature intended to increase knowledge of Judaism and Jews among Christian audiencesa nd interested laypersons.³⁵ The leaders of the Institutum Judaicum wished to present Jewish life, culture, and languages in am annert hat would stir up sympathya nd support.P ietist missions in continental Europe and evangelical missions would adopt,a dapt,a nd increase the volume of publicationsa nd readers of such tracks.³⁶ These books and instruction manuals pointed to an acute interest on the part of Pietistsi n the Jews and their culture, and aw ish to engagew ith and influencet hem.³⁷ The publications also allowed missionaries to give expression to their literary ambitions, includingi nt he realms of translation and editing,d emonstrating their knowledge of Jewish languages and texts.³⁸ In the eighteenth century,Yiddish (or rather Western Yiddish, as it is called today) was still the languageo ft he German Jews, and hence ap owerful tool in the missionary endeavors of the German Pietists.³⁹ The Institute'sp ublications included amanualfor the studyofYiddish (1733)and aYiddish-German lexicon (1736).⁴⁰ Christians had written similar manuals before, mostlyt oa ssist mer- chants who wished to trade with Jews. This, however,was the first time such a publication had been designed to convert Jews,⁴¹ and was the precursor of several Protestant manuals,mostlyPietist and evangelical, promotingknowledge of Jewishl anguages and cultures.R emarkably, the University of Halle, established in 1698, was the first to offer courses on Yiddish in its curriculum. By the same token, evangelicali nstitutions would become the first schools in the Englishspeakingw orld to teach Yiddish. Secular or liberali nstitutions of higher learning,i ncludingJ ewishs chools, would introduce Yiddish to their curricula only in the later decades of the twentieth century.⁴² The Institutep ublished ad iverse selection of books in Western Yiddish, rangingfrom translations of booksfrom the Bible and the New Testamenttopolemical tracts and Christian catechisms.⁴³ Manyoft he writingsi ntended for the Jews wereo np rophetic themes. Pietists, and evangelicalm issionaries who followed in theirf ootsteps,c onsidered the messianic hope to be am eetingp oint between Pietist convictions and Jewishyearningsf or the realization of the messianic times. From this common ground, Pietists set out to convince Jews that the Messiah had alreadycome once before and was about to return.⁴⁴ Pietists, and in the nineteenth centurye vangelical missions, thus tried to bring Jews to accept the truth of the Gospelb yu tilizing Old Testament texts,which Jews knew and respected, and which pointed, so Protestants believed, to the appearance and ministry of Jesus.⁴⁵ Pietists peppered theirarguments with rabbinical idiomsinorder to heighten theirc redibility in Jewish eyes.A tt he same time,theyr epudiatedt he Talmud as an unacceptable authority. In this respect, Pietists followed thet raditional, mainline,Christianunderstanding of theJewishOralLaw.TheyconsideredJewstobein need of Christianity fort heirs elf-fulfillmenta sh uman beings anda sJ ews, and sawJ ewsw ho adoptedP ietist Protestant Christianity as true Christiansa sw ell as 'fulfilled' Jews,athemethatlater Pietistand evangelicalmissionariesand con- With one sixteenth-century exception: Elias Schadäus (c. 1541-1593), was also the first to explicitlypromotethe usage of Yiddish as part of a 'friendly' missionary approach. See his Mysterium, Das ist GeheimnisS .P auli Röm. am II. Vonb ekehrungd er Juden (Straßburg: s.n., 1592), esp. in the introduction. On earlym odern Yiddish manuals intended for Christian merchants and businessmen, see Elyada, AGoy Who SpeaksY iddish, Ch. 5.  Ariel, Evangelizingt he Chosen People, 93 -100.  On the missionaryt ranslationso fb iblical texts into Yiddish, see AyaE lyada'sa rticle in the present volume.  Miktavahavahelkol asire ha-tiqwah ha-meyuhalim an ale bene goles Yisroel di oyf di geule vartn ihertslikherl ibshaft geshribn.  Arno C. Gaebelein,T he Prophet Daniel (New York: London and New York: Marshall Bros, 1905). vertswould further pursue.Theywerewilling to utilizerabbinicalwisdomtoachieve that goal.A tleast on some level, they treatedthe office of therabbinate and thoseholding thetitle with respect. They quoted rabbis when doingsosuitedtheir line of thought, andt ookp ride in rabbis whoc onverted to Christianity,h ighlightingtheir rabbinical credentials. At times, themissionspromotedviews that correspondedtothe ideasofJewishthinkers of theirtime. In hisworkonthe mission's writings,i ncluding thoseo fH alle convert Immanuel Frommann,E lliotW olfson hasalerted us to similarities betweenthese andthe writingsofeighteenth-century Sabbateans. Thet oweringJ ewishr abbinicalf igure, Jonathan Eibeschütz (1690 -1764), fore xample,s uggested al oosening of theb oundariesbetween Christianity andJ udaism in his Ve-avo HayomE l-haAyin.⁴⁶

From the Institutum Judaicumt oE vangelicals
The Institutum Judaicum inspired Pietists in other German locales.⁴⁷ Societies in Switzerland, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway followed suite, creating their own missionary organizations,w hich adopted similar theologies, texts, and modes of operation.⁴⁸ While the Halle Pietists directed much of their attention to the Jewish populations in Central and Eastern Europe, youngerPietist and evangelical missions in the nineteenth century carried out manyo ft heiro perations in Western Europe and North America. If previouslyt here weren ot large communities of Jews in thosea reas,m atters now began to change. The rise of new missions in the New World paralleled patterns of Jewish migration. Pietist, and later evangelical missions, targeted these cohorts.
Pietism had an otable effect on the evangelical missions that sprung up in English-speaking countries at the beginning of the nineteenth century.L ikeP ietists, evangelical Christians have emphasized the centrality of the Christian sacred scriptures,both the Old and New Testaments, and propagated amore literal readingofthe Bible. And, similar to Pietists, manyevangelical Christians adhere to am essianic faith, which has oftenassumedthe restoration of Israel to its ancestrall and.⁴⁹ Finally, similar to Pietists, evangelicals found mission an effec-tive avenue of approach to the Jews.⁵⁰ Evangelical missions further systematized and globalized the existing Pietist missionary networks.Evangelical groups that came after the Pietists built store-front missionary centers, which included reading roomsa nd book stores. Much of their literature was in Yiddish, the native languageo fm ost Jews, both in Eastern Europe and among immigrants to the New World, and in addition to books, they printed journals and distributed flyers. Missions recruited Yiddish-speaking evangelists, and at timesi ncluded the teachingofYiddish in training courses.Inthat,too, they followed the Institute's example, attemptingt or each Jews in theiro wn languages, and utilizing Jewish texts,h opes, and imagery.⁵¹ As impressive as the Halle Pietist literaryventures were, evangelical missionaries would challenget hem, seeing an eed to replace earlyP ietist literature. While the Halle translations were more than adequate in the eighteenth century, evangelical missionaries in the nineteenth century, and even more so in the twentieth, found them unsatisfactory.⁵² By the time evangelicals werep reparing tracts and copies of the sacred scriptures for the Yiddish-reading audience, the Yiddish that the Institutum Judaicum labored with, namelyW estern Yiddish, was in rapid decline.I nt he earlyn ineteenth century,German,D utch, Alsatian, and Swiss Jews abandoned theirY iddish in favoro fH ighG erman, or Dutch, or French. Eastern Yiddish thriveda mong East European Jews who, by the end of the nineteenth century, established new,o ften secular,v enues of creativity in that language. These creative outletsi ncluded journals and belles-lettres,political and ideological tracts, as well as alivelytheatrical scene. With Eastern European Yiddish alive and well, the gapbetween it and the by-now defunct Yiddish of eighteenth-centuryCentral and Western European Jews grew even greater.Despite the exquisite quality of the eighteenth-century translations and the knowledge of Jewishtexts thatthey conveyed, they seemed archaic to latergenerations of Yiddish-reading missionaries and potential converts, who felt that disseminating these earlym issionary tracts was counterproductive.⁵³ So, while the literary initiativeso ft he Institutum Judaicum served as am odel for dozens of missions that came after it,its actual publications werelater castaside. It is perhaps symbolic of the shifting map of Pietist and evangelical missionary hubs that the most comprehensive collection of materialsfrom the Institutum Judaicum is currently housedi nt he Library of Congress in Washington, DC.⁵⁴

Conclusion
Pietistsr epresented an ew development in the realmo fP rotestant interactions with the Jews. While some Pietist opinions on Judaism and Jews followed older Christian paradigms,the attitudes as awhole wereinnovative,ifnot revolutionary.P roposinganon-supercessionist understandingo ft he Jews and their role in history,Pietists have mostlyperceivedthe Jews as apeople carryingaspecial mission. They werew illing to invest heavilyi ns haring with Jews the Pietist readingofthe scriptures and messianic vision for the End-Times -regardless of the number of converts they could recruit. While they considered their version of Christianityt ob es uperior to the Jewishf aith, they were also protective of Jews and argued for improvement in the Christian treatment of Jewishminorities. Pietists, and manye vangelicals whom they influenced by their example, encouraged borderline Christian-Jewish expressions, resulting in individuals, communities and literaturest hat bridge the two faiths.
Evangelicals have expandedv arious ideas and attitudes that made their debut with the Pietists. Frommann'sv ision of blurringt he boundaries between Christianitya nd Judaism found heirsi ne vangelical writers and leaders such as Arno Gaebelein (1861-1945) and Ernest Ströter (1846-1922, Germanswho labored in Germanya nd the United States in the late nineteenth century.B yt he turn of the twentieth century,a ttempts at creatingb orderline bodies of faith and culturet hat transformed older divisions between Judaism and Christianity had become more normative among evangelicals, resulting in hybrid communities that soughttocombine the two traditions. Anew,postmodern spirit of inclusivity and choice allowed for the rise of Hebrew Christians,Messianic Jews, and JewishB elievers in Jesus, groups that attempt to meld Jewish identity and rites with Christian evangelical tenets of faith. This phenomenon traces its roots directlyt ot he theology, agenda, and literature of Pietists and evangelicals.  Naomi Seidman, "AGift for the Jewish People: Henry Einspruch'sDer Bris Khadoshe, Poetics Today3 5( 2014): 303 -23.