I began this study with a firm prejudice against the missionaries to Jews, even though I had long been aware of their concern for the Jewish people and of their involvement in rescue efforts during the Nazi period. Gradually, however, I found myself becoming more and more sympathetic with them, particularly as I forced myself to record--but largely refrain from commenting upon, much less arguing with--the theological history of the International Missionary Council's Committee on the Christian Approach to the Jews (IMCCAJ). I determined not to allow my disagreement with basic premises of the missionaries' theology to overshadow the significant contribution they made, and could continue to make, to the Church's relation to the Jewish people.

There is an advantage in writing the story of a particular social and theological phenomenon, such as the Committee on the Christian Approach to the Jews, when one is intimately familiar with what came afterward. I became part of that "afterward" almost two decades following the translation of the Committee on the Christian Approach to the Jews into the Committee on the Church and the Jewish People. In my nine years (1979-1988) with the World Council of Churches as Secretary of what by that time was called the Consultation on the Church and the Jewish People, I found I had inherited a missionary legacy with which I was often uncomfortable but of which I knew very little. The daily pressure of what some of the missionaries had called the "two-fold task" (though at the time I was unaware they had so identified it)--interpreting the World Council of Churches to the international Jewish community and interpreting the Jewish community to the World Council of Churches--allowed little time to research the background of the responsibility at hand.

There is also a disadvantage in knowing what came afterward. It is the temptation to judge the people and movements one is examining, in my case the missionaries to Jews, by theological norms that were not their own, thereby failing to discern how their theology changed over the course of time and how much one's own theology owes to those who came before. The reader must judge the extent to which I have yielded to temptation.

Even before I assumed a position with the Centre for the Study of Judaism and Jewish/Christian Relations at the Selly Oak Colleges, the Centre's director, Rabbi Dr. Norman Solomon, urged me to undertake the further graduate work that eventually led to this study of the IMCCAJ, and it is only as a result of his encouragement and the time he allowed me away from my duties at the Centre, that the project could come to completion.

Dr. William Weiler, of Lindsey Wilson College, as well as Dr. Solomon, read portions of the typescript and made helpful comments, for which I am grateful. The basic research was done at the Library of the World Council of Churches in Geneva, where Mr. Pierre Beffa, the Library's director, and his staff graciously allowed me access to the immaculately catalogued archives of the International Missionary Council. Closer to home, the resources of the Central Library of the Selly Oak Colleges provided invaluable material, not least of which was its collection of News Sheet, the periodical of the IMCCAJ, which the Library's director, Mrs. Meline Nielsen, kindly allowed me to peruse in my own home.

Special thanks are due to Mrs. Ruth Weyl, who loaned me the precious original annotated typescript of W. W. Simpson's unfinished Personalised History of Jewish-Christian Relations, and to Dr. Paul Joyce of the Theology Department of the University of Birmingham for constant advice and counsel. And to my wife, Brigitte Freudenberg, I can never be sufficiently grateful, not only for the kind of proofreading that only a non-native speaker of English can provide, but for her tremendous knowledge of European, particularly German, twentieth-century history that allowed me to avoid mistakes I otherwise would have made unbeknownst.

I have attempted to avoid as many abbreviations as possible, but a few were required to facilitate the flow of thought. These are: IMCCAJ (International Missionary Council's Committee on the Christian Approach to the Jews), IRM (International Review of Missions), WCC (World Council of Churches), IMC (International Missionary Council), CCJP (Committee on the Church and the Jewish People) and USA (United States of America).

Finally, some notes about style and word usage:

(1) Spelling and punctuation within quoted material, even when it is slightly unusual, is strictly faithful to that of the source. Otherwise, United States conventions are utilized.

(2) Bibliographical information in footnotes has been kept to the minimum in order not to clutter the pages unnecessarily. Complete data may easily be located in the Bibliography.

(3) The terms "Jewish mission," "Jewish missionary societies," "Jewish missionaries," etc. commonly were used by the missionaries to indicate Christian missions directed toward Jews. Despite the grammatical indication to the contrary, I have chosen to use them in the same way because the alternatives would have involved more complicated constructions.

(4) Except in direct quotations, where an author's usage is retained, the spelling, "antisemitism,"--one word, without capitalization or hyphen--is used consistently throughout these pages. In a letter to me, Göte Hedenquist, former IMCCAJ director, noted that "In Sweden we have the term 'antisemitism' as the expression for hate against the Jews, as it also means in Germany and most European countries, while 'anti-Semitism' includes all Semitic peoples and individuals, as Arabs, etc." English, unlike German, which capitalizes all nouns (der Antisemitismus), uses capitalization for respect or emphasis. In French one could be antisémitique.