The first Englishmen to promote the readmission of the Jews were radical Puritans who believed that the Millennium would be realized in the not too distant future and that Protestant England had an active role to play in its realization. The idea that moved them to call for the return of the Jews-- the belief that the national conversion of the Jews (and, in some versions, their return to the Holy Land) had to precede any final scheme of redemption --was not unique to English Puritanism nor to the seventeenth century. It had its roots in the apocalyptic millenarianism of the early Church Fathers and was widely diffused in apocalyptically inclined circles throughout northern Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In France, for example, the Jansenists rejected the orthodox Catholic position that the biblical prophecies regarding Israel's future blessedness referred to Christians, believing rather that God had assigned the Jews an important role in the final days. The Abbé Grégoire, the great clerical champion of Jewish emancipation at the time of the Revolution, was much influenced by these Jansenist views.

The Swiss theologian Johann Caspar Lavater's well-known attempt to convert Moses Mendelssohn in 1769 was rooted in the belief that the conversion of the Jews was tied up with the thousand-year reign of Jesus and the Saints at the end of time. The conversion of the chief representative of enlightened Jewry was to set an example to other Jews and speed up the process of the general conversion of the Jewish people.1 In England, religious sentiments such as these acquired an influence and a power they lacked elsewhere, largely because they were associated with the revolutionary demands for a new religious and social order that arose during the Civil War years. They partook of the tremendous release of popular energy that followed the breakdown of social and judicial restraints in the 1640s and continued to influence attitudes toward Anglo-Jewry up through the early nineteenth century (although with the passage of time the impact of these sentiments tended to decline, as, indeed, did the impact of most religious beliefs).


The Jews of Georgian England, 1714-1830: Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society.
Todd M. Endelman - author. Publisher: Jewish Publication Society. Place of Publication: Philadelphia. Publication Year: 1979. Page Number: 51.