1656. Crossroads of Destiny: Christian Millenarians, Jewish Survival, and the Land of Israel

JEWISH MOMENTS IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL

1656.
Crossroads of Destiny: 

Christian Millenarians, Jewish Survival, and the Land of Israel

In 1656–57, R. Nathan Shapira, emissary of Jerusalem’s beleaguered Ashkenazic community, secured unprecedented gifts from Dutch and English Millenarian Protestants after Jewish donors faltered. Their funds redeemed communal debts and strengthened the Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel. More consequentially, they anchored a precedent that entwined Christian philo-Semitism with the Jewish permanence in the Land of Israel.

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In the 1650s, life for Jerusalem’s Ashkenazi Jewish community stood on the precipice. Under Ottoman rule, they struggled with mounting debts to local Muslim creditors, which threatened both their communal institutions and their very presence in the Holy City. To avert disaster, the community turned to an age-old solution: sending a trusted emissary abroad to rally financial support from fellow Jews.

R. Nathan Shapiro (d.1666), a scholarly rabbi born in Kraków and at the time Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of Jerusalem, was dispatched to Europe on this desperate mission. But things did not go well. Eastern Europe, the traditional wellspring of Ashkenazi charity, was devastated by wars, including the Chmielnicki Uprising starting in 1648 and the massacres of Jewish communities it led to. Appeals to Amsterdam’s wealthy Spanish and Portuguese Jews yielded polite but meager responses. The Sephardic leadership explained that their charitable funds were reserved for their own, and the gates of support seemed to be closed.

Circumstances, however, unfolded unexpectedly. In Amsterdam and London, R. Shapira encountered Protestants of a peculiar kind: Millenarian Christians who believed the return of Jews to the Land of Israel was essential to the second coming of their messiah, according to their reading of biblical prophecy.

Leaders such as Petrus Serrarius (1600-1669), a rather wealthy Dutch theologian, and John Dury (1598-1680), a leading Scotch Calvinist minister, listened to R. Shapira’s account of Jerusalem’s distress. For these Protestants, supporting Jews in their ancient homeland had a spiritual urgency. They saw themselves as divine instruments ushering in the biblical end of times. Through their personal networks, they raised a fund far exceeding what local Jews had given to clear Jerusalem’s debts.

John Dury documented this interfaith act of generosity in a pamphlet eager to highlight what he saw as spiritual progress, the supposed softening of Jewish attitudes toward Christian teachings. Yet historians agree that these claims reflected more of Dury’s wishful thinking than any real change. R. Shapira’s own writings were, if anything, consistently and forcefully opposed to Christian theology.

As news of the Christian donations reached Jerusalem, Jewish legal authorities faced a dilemma. Could the community accept money from Protestant Christians with their distinct Trinitarian beliefs? Might these donors, as some suggested, be secret Jews or conversos, whose families had long ago converted to Christianity under Spanish and Portuguese pressures? Was accepting the money tantamount to endorsing agendas foreign and antagonistic to Jewish values?

The issue was only exacerbated by some letters sent at the time by the Protestant Christian addressed to the leaders of the Jews of Jerusalem, making clear the motivation for their contributions. They regarded the desperate plight of the Jews, especially in the Land of Israel, as a sign of the imminent second coming of their messiah and deemed the survival of the Jews and their eventual conversion as central to its occurrence.

The decisive answer came from R. Yaakov Chagiz (1620–1674), one of Jerusalem’s leading rabbis. In a carefully worded responsum to a question on this subject asked several years after the events, he ruled that when the survival of Jerusalem’s Jewish community was at stake, such money could and should be used to pay off the community’s life-threatening debts. Drawing from traditional Jewish legal sources, R. Chagiz reminded his readers that charity may be accepted from non-Jews “for the sake of peace,” especially in times of peril. He wrote that reluctance was a luxury the community could not afford.

Interestingly, he also ruled that there was no reason to suspect the donors were conversos; in fact, if they were, it would only complicate matters, since the rules for accepting money from Gentiles are less stringent than those for accepting money from apostates.

Regardless, these two contributions are the first known instances of Christian groups being led by their religious beliefs to actively support the Jewish settlements in the Land of Israel financially. They marked the emergence of a complex and now global relationship between Christian philanthropy and support for the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel.