"The establishment of the state 'Israel' adds a political dimension to the Christian approach to the Jews and threatens to complicate anti-semitism with political fears and enmities." With this sentence the Amsterdam Assembly began a short 3-paragraph addition to its Report on "The Christian Approach to the Jews" that expressed the delegates' bewilderment and frustration at the entrance onto the world scene of politically empowered Jewry. Even so, it was carefully worded to reflect the cautious, but theologically responsible, opinion of those in the churches who were concerned for the conversion of Jews. In order to understand those three paragraphs it is necessary to examine the context from which the Jewish missionaries at Amsterdam spoke.

Background: The Early Debate

The Zionist movement, which culminated in the creation of the State of Israel, had been a concern of the missionaries, though not often of very high priority, at least from the time of the Budapest/Warsaw conferences. Alfred E. Garvie, who was present in 1927, wrote that "The most violent discussion at the conference in Budapest was on Zionism. What some speakers regarded as God's will for His people, laying an obligation on the British government to be His agent, as was Cyrus, others regarded as a temptation of Satan to divert the Jewish community from its spiritual mission into political ambitions." Unfortunately, the Budapest/Warsaw report, which includes the Findings and texts of major papers but is not minutes of the proceedings, gives no indication of the Zionism debate.

After the Budapest/Warsaw conferences of 1927 but before the IMCCAJ had been constituted, John Conning, discussing "Religion and Irreligion in Israel," quoted Arthur Rupkin as saying that Zionism was "the last desperate stand of the Jews against annihilation." Conning then went on to say:

The hopes of Jewish leaders are not being realized. The Balfour Declaration, as interpreted by the British government, affords no basis for the aspiration of political Zionism, while the active opposition of the present Arab and Christian population of Palestine--five times greater than that of the Jews--postpones indefinitely the realization of Zionist dreams. The gradual shifting of the Jewish aim from political to cultural Zionism presents an ideal more likely to be attained within a reasonable period, but there is not the slightest prospect that that culture will be of the sort that will revitalize and sustain the languishing orthodox Jewries of the World.

In the same issue of the International Review of Missions in which Conning's article appeared, Dr. W. Ten Boom of the Netherlands, who wrote immediately prior to the Williamstown meeting of the International Missionary Council that formally created the IMCCAJ, claimed that "Zionism as it now appears in history is a typical phenomenon of Western Europe, and seems to repudiate any connexion with the Gospel....It seems to me that an opportunity for missionaries will arise, as never before, when Zionism in its present form is overthrown, because Christ alone can give the real basis to Zionist activity and vitality."

Ten Boom thought that the fundamental error of Zionism was that it was naturalistic, in which respect it "agrees with modern anti-Semitism, from which it resulted and of which it is an apparent reflex." Somewhat of an expert on modern antisemitism (he had written a dissertation on Die Entstehung des modernen Rassenantisemitismus), Ten Boom found its roots in the "eruption of naturalism" that followed the French revolution: "Spiritual things were then dethroned and all spiritual realities were deduced from material elements. Positivism made its triumphal entrance in the scientific world, socialism in the economic world, and nationalism in the political world. The spiritual attitude of each of these movements lies in its unspirituality."

Zionism, then, was "nothing else than modern naturalism transplanted to the Holy Land....Herzl learned his new methods in Paris in the Dreyfus affair of 1895. Here he found a school of nationalism which gave him his new idea for his own life and people. Apparently he thought it a method which Jews could practise also and even to greater advantage than the French. At that moment the new Zionism was born." But Europe has "a better gift for Zionism than this awful naturalism; it is the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the King of the Jews, not only as a gift for the future in the form of Biblical promises, while the present holds nothing better than inquisition or pogrom, a closed ghetto door or meaningless words about human rights."

In 1929-30 Ten Boom could see Zionism as a more or less natural consequence of historical and social events and could assume that it would not last. Surely Jews themselves would realize that the age-old dream, "Next year in Jerusalem," was a cultural and spiritual dream, not a political one. As Jews came to that inevitable conclusion, the opportunities for Christian missionaries would be immense. Three years later, however, Otto von Harling pushed the analysis a bit further. "Zionism," he wrote, "must be mentioned as a modern form of Jewish 'irreligion,' which yet contains a large element of messianic hope. Under the influence of the nationalist movement among different peoples in the last fifty years, the nation has become an idol and nationalism a substitute for religion. And as orthodox Judaism sees apostasy in faith in Christ, so Zionism sees in it treason to the Jewish nation." Consequently von Harling perceived Zionism itself, not its collapse, to be a missionary opportunity:

Now it should not be difficult to make clear to Zionists that it is a mistake to think that belief in Christ denotes treason and threatens the destruction of the Jewish people, since it is in reality the fulfilment of the promise of Israel and the path to Israel's renewal of life. And in regard to religion it is in fact among Zionists that are found those unprejudiced minds which, because they would like to reknit the threads of Jewish history where it has been rent, seize on the problem of Christ and are not afraid, in the light of the history of Israel's relations to Christ, to undertake a scrutiny of it.

It can also be traced more or less to the influence of Zionism that recently men of weight and leadership in Judaism have begun to look for a religious revival and to take Christ into account, even indeed claiming Him to a certain extent for Judaism (as, e.g., Buber, Constantin Brunner, Claude Montefiore and others).

He was, however, not sanguine about what he had discerned. "This Judaism," he warned, "is all the more dangerous just because it unites with true piety and great spiritual power a recognition of Christ, divesting Him of His majesty as Saviour and degrading Him in majorem Judoeorum gloriam to one of the great Jewish race leaders. It feels in a strong enough position here to wage war against Christianity." Zionism was a nationalistic ideology that was Christianity's rival for the souls of Jews.

Conrad Hoffmann took a somewhat different stance. He, too, saw a connection between antisemitism and Zionism but instead of viewing it as a threat he descried a question and a challenge. "Hitler's anti-Semitism," he wrote in 1934,

has revived in world Jewry a new sense of racial and national solidarity. One is conscious of a veritable renaissance of Jewishness. Jews everywhere have united in measures to relieve their persecuted compatriots in Germany and to combat the menace of anti-Semitism there and elsewhere. By this humanitarian service they are being reunited in intimate fellowship. And in the process they are discovering their national and racial identity, hitherto almost forgotten....

In this revival of Jewishness we see the effects of discrimination and persecution in strengthening racial consciousness and loyalty where tolerance, modernizing and secularism had weakened if not entirely sublimated them. Zionism, too, has become boldly nationalist.....

As this rebirth of Jewishness progresses, an ever-increasing conflict of interests goes on in the soul of Jewry. It is the conflict between the religious as opposed to the racial and national emphasis in Jewishness. Recent developments have greatly sharpened and intensified this issue. On the whole the trend is decidedly in favour of the racial and national emphasis rather than the religious. Religion, as some one has said, seems no longer to be the Leitmotif of Jewish life.

This situation, Hoffmann believed, required Jews to make a difficult decision: "The Jew must choose between preservation of his racial and national identity which will involve persecution, and assimilation which implies his possible disappearance as a Jew. All events and circumstances, so far as world Jewry is concerned, are focusing around this central issue. Shall Jewry become a nation with a national home somewhere, or shall Jewry disappear in humanity, like salt in a solution, no longer existent as Jewry, but permeating all mankind with Jewish spirit and influence?"

His judgment was that "those who are engaged in the Christian approach to the Jew must not only consider this basic issue but must also come to definite conclusions as to the answer."

In 1934 it was still possible to believe that assimilation by Jews into European, particularly German, society might remove the threat of persecution. Nevertheless, Hoffmann linked the survival of world Jewry with its becoming "a nation with a national home somewhere." And he linked the disappearance of Jewry as such with assimilation. He was certainly correct to urge his fellow missionaries to take this matter seriously and, further, to come to definite conclusions about it.

The Zionism discussion continued in the pages of the International Review of Missions. Alfred Garvie wrote in 1941 that, "While one can understand and sympathize with the desire of many Jews to return to the land of their fathers...it does not seem to me to be the duty of the Christian Church to favour and to support Zionism as a political purpose. An exclusively Jewish State in Palestine is in existing conditions impracticable. The restoration of the Jewish people as a politically independent nation is no necessary condition of the fulfilment of God's purpose in Christ, as erring interpreters of misunderstood prophesy assert, nor is it in the best interests of Jews themselves."

But by 1943, when it already had become clear that the objective of Zionism was more than just of a "homeland," Conrad Hoffmann feared that "the creation of a Jewish State...would create a geographical ghetto. If we cannot solve the problem of the Jew within a nation, are we likely to solve it by creating a Jewish nation within the society of nations?"

Though there were differences about the character of Zionism and the degree to which it was a threat or opportunity for the gospel, the missionaries at the beginning of the Nazi era were agreed that it represented the ascendancy of the "racial" and nationalistic element in the Jewish people to the detriment of the religious. As Hans Kosmala wrote in 1935, Zionism was "a political movement in Judaism which has directly and indirectly influenced the religious movements....The growing emphasis on nationalism which was abroad in Europe in the nineteenth century and the recrudescence of anti-Semitism raised new hopes and stimulated new plans for a national restoration of the Jewish people, for some place of their own where they could live their own life without the handicap of a hostile environment."

As the Nazi persecution intensified, more and more Jews sought such a place and "Palestine appeals to the Jews increasingly as the one hope of refuge from persecution." And, thus, "The strategic importance of Palestine as a centre for missionary work after the war is generally recognized."

Be that as it may, the Jewish missionaries were no more positively excited about the Zionist movement than were a sizable number of, usually Reform, Jews themselves. "The majority of the world's Jews," wrote Ernest Mung in an excerpt from Commentary that was reprinted in News Sheet, "either unable or unwilling to go to Palestine, will have to realize that the time has come to fight political nationalism uncompromisingly and on principle, inside Jewish life, as well as outside....By now it should be obvious even to eyes of the most blind that in fighting nationalism wherever they see it, Jews will serve not only the interests of mankind at large, but their own best interests as well."

Background: The Basle Resolution

Hence, when the IMCCAJ convened for its first big meeting following the war, the issue of Zionism was not only still on the agenda, it was front and center. The Zionist movement was on the verge of accomplishing the goal toward which it had been traveling since Theodor Herzl's First Zionist Congress in 1898: the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. The IMCCAJ dealt with Zionism at its 1947 Basle conference, therefore, because it was a present reality, even though for most of the previous years Zionism largely had been dismissed as an unrealistic manifestation of non-religious nationalism.

The work of Basle's Commission on the Church and Zionism had on hand, not only the reflections on the subject that had been published and discussed at earlier meetings, but they heard an extraordinary address by the host of the gathering, the Rev. Robert Brunner, director of the Swiss Friends of Israel Missionary Society (Verein der Freunde Israels).

Brunner began his address by noting that there was no agreement, even among missionaries, about the Zionist movement. And he added that at that very moment some people who earlier had been favorably disposed probably were having second thoughts because of Jewish terrorist acts committed in British-mandate Palestine. Moreover, though there had always been friends and foes of Zionism among Christians (as among Jews), the Church itself had rarely concerned itself about it. And even Christian theologians had ignored what he felt should be of utmost concern to theology. As a consequence, church members were largely ignorant about the "Christian faith's thought or attitude to Zionism."

But Christians should realize, he argued, that the "Christian Church had every reason to be vitally concerned with Zionism from its very inception and to acquaint itself with all the implications involved in the movement. In Zionism the church should have seen a symptom of a disease within her own body politic as well as within the Christians nations, and should have taken heed and warning therefrom. For without anti-Semitism, there would be no Zionism....Whatever position the church may take to Zionism, she must ever realize that she helped to create it, in so far as she failed to strive adequately to combat and to overcome Anti-Semitism."

Following this introduction, which laid responsibility for Zionism on the church more than on Jews, Brunner organized his remarks under three principal headings: political, humanitarian, and theological.

1) He began by reviewing the options before the United Nations (which five months later would resolve on a partition of the British mandate between Jewish and Arab states). Church people, he said, "simply must take intelligent cognizance of this most difficult and seemingly insoluble political issue. We must do this not in the belief of being able to point the way to a solution, but rather that we may be able to speak intelligently and with full recognition of all the very grave political implications which are involved." Indeed, he wished that the "Jewish missionary enterprise...like the Church, might be truly awakened.

What was required for the missionary enterprise to be truly awakened was some self-criticism, a rare commodity:

As far as I have been able to discover the nature of the work, the theology and the preaching to the Jews which hitherto have characterized our societies, they have it seems to me, been well nigh exclusively limited to the attempt to reveal the Gospel and the way of salvation to the individual Jew. No one will deny that this is and ever must be an essential function of our ministry. But it is only one function. It should always have been and must be also our function to concern ourselves with the political status of the different Jewish populations in the world as well as with World Jewry as an entity. Quite apart from missionary motivation we should have done this as fellow men who are politically responsible. With justice some accuse our ministry as a soul-trapping service, because we have concentrated on the individual Jew without adequate regard of our responsibility to the Jewish people as a whole. We who are engaged in Jewish missionary work, have more reason than others, to give serious thought to Zionism; we dare not evade it on the plea that it concerns politics. Undoubtedly our work would be much simpler were it not complicated by the Zionist idea; but it would not necessarily be better. We should not complain if our work is made more difficult.

This claim for missionary attention to the Jewish people (without, of course, losing sight of the individual Jew) was the first such in any meeting of the IMCCAJ and certainly was part of the cause for the difficulty the ensuing Zionism resolution faced. But there was more.

2) A humanitarian reason also existed for missionary response to Zionism. "May I be frank and say to you as friends," Brunner continued,

that actually Palestine can absorb more Jews; how many I will not attempt to say....Thousands of uprooted Jews two years after the end of the war, still live in camps. The survivors of European Jewry live today in Europe largely as homeless and unwanted folk in spite of the Allies' victory. So too those who are returning and who survived as refugees abroad, wait in vain for restitution and rehabilitation. Here and there we find new anti-Semitism astir. But none of these are able or permitted to leave. Where may they go?...Such human injustice demands Christian action. We all know this. But is it enough merely to be aware of it? Must we not speak out boldly?

This question of whether or not it is our duty to speak out on behalf of the Jewish people, and therefore also on behalf of their immigration to Palestine, should be a concern of all of us. Or where shall they go? To South Africa perhaps? Where is there room and welcome for them? Shall the terrorist acts in Palestine go on indefinitely and become the cause of new anti-Semitism everywhere? The fact that Zionism has come under stress of circumstances a relief movement, which might bring relief to 100,000 of homeless unwanted Jews--if one provided the opportunity or gave the permission--this fact compels the Christian Church, but very especially the Jewish missionary enterprise, to inescapable and urgent consideration of the whole movement, above all to take a definite stand with reference to it.

Here Brunner touched on an issue that was profoundly on the heart of his missionary colleagues--refugee relief. But to link the refugee issue with what amounted to a call in support of Zionism was more than the meeting as a whole could stomach, despite his, also discomfiting, assurance that "the Church will need, nonetheless, to explore the Bible and what it may have to say with regard to this perplexing issue of Zionism....The Church has hitherto been most remiss here....What few expressions of opinion have been made, can claim to be little more than subjective interpretation of specific Bible passages."

3) Brunner's third consideration followed close on the conclusion of the second. In his theological discussion of Zionism, he noted that the Jewish people demand, through Zionism, the same rights and privileges granted to other smaller nations in Europe and then outlined two ways of understanding this Zionist claim to the Land.

The first was simply historical reality. Jews were expelled from Palestine more than 1000 years before--longer than their occupation of the Land ever had been-- and therefore they had "no historical right or claim...though there may be a meta-historical right."

The second, which Brunner thought the Zionists preferred, was that God himself gave the Land to the Jewish people and that, therefore, they had a divinely-given right to it. God "expelled them from Palestine, but nonetheless promised to re-assemble Israel in the land at some future time. We thus come to the prophets of the old Covenant. As Christians we are thereby confronted by the question as to whether or not the Jews, after their rejection of Jesus Christ, have any right to appeal to a Biblical promise of God, or have they, with their rejection of Christ, forfeited that right? Or again have the promises of God as a result been transferred from the Jews according to the flesh, to the Christians according to the spirit--namely the gentile and Hebrew-Christians?"

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