Recalling a period of intense internal tensions for Scottish Presbyterians during the 1840s, Robert Rainy and John McKenzie reflected on a rare moment of common-feeling from the 1840 General Assembly some thirty years later. Having recently returned from Palestine, the young Dundee minister Robert Murray M’Cheyne’s ‘youthful face beamed with love’ as he delivered a memorable speech sharing the encounters he and other missionaries experienced in the Holy Land when investigating the current state of the Jewish people. His ‘soft yearning voice thrilled’ with ‘the vivid feeling of compassion given to himself by seeing the dry bones’ of the house of Israel. Such love for the Jewish people, felt the authors, was powerful and impressive; capable of breaking through the divisions of 1840 to establish a brief moment of unity and shared Christian purpose.Footnote 1
The question of how to describe such love is not straightforward, however. Studies of Christian views of Jews have often described such cases as examples of philosemitism, a teaching of love or esteem for the Jewish people sometimes set in diametric opposition to antisemitism.Footnote 2 Although such a clear-cut distinction can be helpful shorthand, it breaks down upon closer examination. Both terms are relative neologisms (coined only in the late nineteenth century), and neither is without major definitional problems.Footnote 3 This article therefore argues for moving beyond these categories, instead advocating an approach to understanding historical relationships between the faiths through the lens of the history of emotions. Rather than asking what constitutes ‘real love’ from Christians to Jews, we should examine how ‘love’ was understood in the specific religious, social and historical contexts in which it was advocated. This can produce more perceptive approaches, deepening historians’ understandings of how one faith group could perceive and feel towards another. While the focus here will be on Christian attitudes to Jews, the same methodology could also be applied to Jewish views on Christians, and in a range of arenas of encounter between different traditions.
Missionary texts, which have been recognised as fruitful sources for historians of emotion,Footnote 4 offer particular opportunities to conduct this sort of analysis. To demonstrate this in practice, this article focuses on an important but under-studied case through examining the official account of the mission M’Cheyne spoke about at the 1840 Assembly. This Narrative of the Church‘s 1839 ‘Mission of Enquiry to the Jews’ was a firsthand account written by M’Cheyne and Andrew A. Bonar, published in 1842.Footnote 5
The Narrative provided an emotional model for Scottish Christians in which love for Jewish people became a mark of community membership. This helped build a stronger emotional identity that was particularly necessary in the face of political and ecclesiastical disruption that threatened to fatally split the national Church. This identity will be explored through contextualising the Narrative’s use of emotion within the emerging travel literature on Palestine in the period, examining the multiple levels of emotional engagement between the missionaries and Jews they encountered, and the way in which the text strove to construct a shared emotional community of love for Jews amongst Scottish Christians. As Mark Gilfillan has noted, attitudes of the Scottish Churches to Jews have generally been overlooked, and examining the emotional community constructed by self-proclaimed ‘lovers’ of Jewish people adds to understanding of this area.Footnote 6 In broader terms, it also helps us to see what ‘love’ for Jews was expected to look like in practice, deepening our understanding of what Christians understood by the term. In doing so, this article therefore seeks to contribute to understandings of wider religious and emotional history, as well as the history of Scottish attitudes to non-Christian faith groups.
Defining philosemitism
On a broad level, philosemitism refers to those who hold the Jewish people in special esteem or respect, ‘a resolutely distinct people, with distinctively admirable characteristics’.Footnote 7 Particularly in the history of Christian interactions with Jews, this has often been taken further towards the etymological roots of the term, as a distinct ‘love’ in direct opposition to antisemitism or persecution. Yet what this might look like in practice is complicated. Does love necessitate appreciation of Jewish culture, ethnicity or faith? Does it suppose some form of active support, and if so in what way, particularly given that Jewish identity and interests are not themselves uniform?Footnote 8 A consistent criticism of purported philosemitism has therefore been that it lacks interest in real Jewish needs or desires, instead ‘loving’ Jewish people in order to advance existing non-Jewish interests.Footnote 9 Jews could be focused upon to assuage national or religious guilt,Footnote 10 provide ‘evidence’ of God’s working in world historyFootnote 11 or even used by enlightenment thinkers to demonstrate the irrationality of religion in its legacy of Christian persecution.Footnote 12 Bernardini and Lucci go so far as arguing that this ‘love’ is ‘not a matter of philo-semitism; it is rather a matter of philo-statism’.Footnote 13
A further problem is presented by issues around faith. Gertrude Himmelfarb has argued that ‘for some Christians – Evangelicals, most notably – philosemitism goes beyond recognition to reverence or adulation, [into] something very like “love”’.Footnote 14 At the same time many of these purported philosemites actively attempted to convert Jewish people to Christianity. Following Barbara Tuchman’s lead,Footnote 15 some commentators have viewed a conversionist hope among Christian philosemites as a coded desire for the eradication of Jews; imagining a world ‘in which Jews have ceased to exist as Jewish people’.Footnote 16 Yet as Sutcliffe and Karp have pointed out, it is important that historians of philosemitism recognise that conversionism did not necessarily equate to a desire for Jewish erasure. As they note, millenarian philosemitism often ‘envisaged a religious transformation that would Judaize Christianity as least as much as it would Christianize Jews’.Footnote 17 Such cultural, national and (to some extent) religious distinction of Jewish people, even after their conversion, was a conversionist hallmark in the nineteenth century.Footnote 18 Indeed, it is unsurprising that Evangelicals expressed ‘love’ through a hope for Jewish conversion to Christianity. As Rubenstein and Rubenstein recognise, ‘according to the conversionists’ own lights, theirs was the ultimate act of kindness towards Jews’.Footnote 19 Of course it is equally true that this was not experienced as ‘loving’ by the majority of Jewish people. As with Christian mission in general, multiple ideas could overlap for Christians: ‘genuine concern’ might merge, for example, with ‘rampant triumphalism and imperialism’.Footnote 20 While viewing self-proclaimed philosemites as involved in a ‘largely … self-interested and xenophobic enterprise’Footnote 21 is therefore overly reductionistic, neither is a shift to viewing support for Jewish causes as entirely altruistic justified.Footnote 22 As David Feldman warns, applying ‘a single term – whether, “ambivalence”, “antisemitism”, or “philosemitism” – can flatten the contingent relations of power carried within this uneven history’.Footnote 23
To deepen approaches to discussion of Christian ‘love’ towards Jewish people an understanding of the particular places and times it emerged is necessary; ‘how defense, love and admiration of Jews and Judaism take shape within specific discursive contexts’.Footnote 24 Recent scholarship on the topic has therefore aimed to provide this greater contextual detail. David Wertheim has rejected references to ‘philosemitism’ in favour of looking at the myriad ways in which Jews might act as ‘legitimation’ for both religious and political schemes.Footnote 25 Adam Sutcliffe adopts a similar position, focusing on how Jews and non-Jews have engaged in speculation as to a unique Jewish mission or purpose in the world, an idea linked back to scriptural ideas of covenant. Understanding of the historical development of these views therefore acts as a way of examining what it has meant to live as a distinctive group within a multicultural society.Footnote 26
These studies emphasise that it is more important to pay attention to the specific historical backgrounds to supposedly ‘philosemitic’ behaviour rather than establishing transhistorical definitions of what should or should not be included in the term.Footnote 27 A further fruitful way into deepening understandings of what ‘love’ for Jewish people meant in practice is to look at the meaning of ‘love’ in the particular historical contexts we examine – what did it signify to communities or individuals, and how was it experienced in personal or communal piety? In other words, how might ‘love’ towards Jewish people be manifested in a particular context so as to build a sense of emotional community and personal belonging? What sequences of emotions were looked for in order to testify to membership of this community?
This approach, drawing from the history of emotions, has the advantage of moving beyond definitional arguments on philosemitism to instead ask why and how different historical actors understood their ‘love’ for Jewish people. One religious community’s definition of love, after all, does not have to be accepted as such by others. As Sara Ahmed has argued, ‘love’ is a contested category, claimed as the basis for action by a range of groups with vastly different aims and ideologies. ‘Love’ can be cited as the motivation for caring for refugees and migrants, but also as inspiration by Fascist and far-right groups in their dislike for those perceived as other, a facet of their ‘love’ for racial and cultural purity.Footnote 28 Debates on the attitudes of purported philosemites therefore often turn on a very modern understanding of ‘love’ – the idea that for the emotion to be genuine it must be obligation-free and lack any hint of self-interest. I follow Edelstein in noting that a total lack of self-interest in personal relationships is close to a reductio ad absurdum: ‘one cannot argue that gaining an advantage from a friendship nullifies that friendship’.Footnote 29 As Barbara Rosenwein has recently pointed out, this ‘unselfish’ image of love is just one view within the Western tradition, which even today is not shared by all emotional communities.Footnote 30 So David Ruderman, examining missionary and Hebraist Alexander McCaul’s relationship with Jews in nineteenth-century England, hints towards the complexities of this by characterising what McCaul saw as his love of his subjects as a form of academic respect which left him free to savagely attack rabbinic Judaism.Footnote 31 While this form of ‘love’ may not fit with modern understandings of the emotion, this does not mean that the feelings described by the term were not genuine and powerful for those experiencing them.Footnote 32 Neither, of course, should it ignore the very real offence or distress such attitudes could cause to Jews.
The 1839 ‘Mission of enquiry’
The origin of the 1839 mission followed the Evangelical party securing a majority in the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly for the first time in 1834, after more than a century of control by the moderates. At the time the Church was caught up in escalating internal conflicts over the role of patrons ‘imposing’ ministers on unwilling congregations. The Evangelicals generally opposed such imposition, while the moderates supported the status quo. This dispute fed into wider concerns over Church-State relations and the spiritual independence of the Church, ultimately causing clashes with legal and political authorities in the 1840s, and the subsequent ‘Disruption’ that led a third of ministers and a half of parishioners to form the Free Church of Scotland in 1843.
Along with escalating these tensions, the rise of the Evangelical party led to an immediate increase in church missionary involvement.Footnote 33 In 1838 a series of overtures (petitions) were presented to the Assembly on the subject of Jewish evangelism. After a concerted campaign, the appeal was unanimously supported.Footnote 34 A committee of eighty-seven members was appointed to collect information about Jewish communities and suggestions for how the Church should proceed, with an Evangelical majority amongst the clergy membership.Footnote 35 Along with surveying parish ministers on current attitudes towards Jewish people in May 1839, they sent a mission of enquiry to explore the state of Jewry in Europe and the Holy Land and assess potential sites for mission. This was the brainchild of Robert S. Candlish (1806–73), the minister of St George’s, Edinburgh, a leading Evangelical, and key figure in the most zealous ‘wild party’ opposing the rights of patrons.Footnote 36 The original delegation was to include the accomplished linguist Alexander Black (1789–1864), then professor of divinity at Marischal College, Aberdeen, and layman Robert Wodrow in recognition of his campaigning for Jewish mission. With the latter withdrawing due to ill health, he was replaced by the minister of St Cyrus Alexander Keith (1792–1880), author of the popular Evidence of the truth of the Christian religion, derived from the literal fulfilment of prophecy, published in 1828.Footnote 37 They were joined by two younger men: the minister of St Peter’s, Dundee, Robert Murray M’Cheyne (1813–43), and his friend and minister of Collace in Perthshire, Andrew A. Bonar (1810–92), formerly Candlish’s missionary at Edinburgh and a strong advocate of Jewish mission.Footnote 38 The two had been students together in the Scottish capital where they were part of an ‘Exegetical Society’ of young Evangelicals that met on Saturday mornings to discuss theological issues, including the Jews’ role in prophecy.Footnote 39 This interest in Jewish mission continued after their ordination, with M’Cheyne praying for Jewish conversion for an hour each morning during his time ministering in Dundee.Footnote 40
The deputation sailed from Dover on 11 April, travelling through France, Italy, Malta and on to Alexandria. Taking a cross-desert route in order to avoid quarantine regulations, they finally arrived in Jerusalem on 7 June. After Keith and Black left in early July due to poor health, Bonar and M’Cheyne continued through Galilee with the missionary (and Jewish convert) Erasmus Scott Calman now accompanying them.Footnote 41 They returned via Constantinople, Moldavia, Austrian Poland and Prussia in order to assess Jewish communities there, arriving back in Scotland in November. They deplored the treatment Jewish communities endured, particularly in Catholic territories, while also condemning what they saw as the degraded nature of many of these communities’ religious practice. At times the missionaries prayed in Hebrew and bought Jewish religious paraphernalia, leading observers to presume that the Scots themselves were Jews.Footnote 42
During the journey readers of the Church’s official Home and Foreign Missionary Record (popularly referred to as the Mission Record)Footnote 43 had followed the missionaries through occasional letters. On their return M’Cheyne and Bonar were immediately tasked with sharing their findings at public meetings. Subsequently, they penned the popular Narrative, an account of the journey and discussion of Jewish communities in Europe and the Levant stretching to more than 700 pages, published in 1842.Footnote 44 The first edition quickly sold out and met with a positive reception, both in Britain and the United States, remaining in print into the 1870s.Footnote 45 The work was clearly aimed at generating interest in Jewish mission, part of which was modelling the emotional responses Christians should have towards Jewish people.
Emotional effects of the mission
The Narrative was part of a developing tradition of nineteenth-century travel writing. Both authors had been heavily influenced by Romanticism in their formative years (including Edward Irving’s preaching), and Bonar’s presentation of M’Cheyne when he edited his friend’s Remains was as ‘a typical Romantic hero’ in his sensitivity, attraction to Greek nationalism and poetic interests.Footnote 46 Many Scots were already familiar with the Holy Land through their biblical education, holding it (in the words of Evangelical newspaper The Witness) in ‘a well-nigh superstitious reverence’.Footnote 47 A number of accounts of oriental trips were on the Scottish market by 1842, although many were reissues of eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century works such as Volney’s Travels through Syria and Palestine (1787) and Giovanni Mariti’s Travels through Cyprus, Palestine and Syria (1791).Footnote 48
Knowledge of existing travel narratives complicates attempts to track emotional responses in later travelogues. As Gabriel Polley noted, the emotional states described in the most influential publications ‘defined how Western Protestants thought and acted in Palestine for generations’.Footnote 49 Conversely, this is what makes the Narrative important to examine. Polley has identified the US missionary Edward Robinson’s Researches in Palestine (1841) as the formative text in the developing Palestine tradition. Indeed, the Narrative directly referenced the American’s publication, and Bonar and M’Cheyne met him to discuss his expedition in Berlin on their return journey.Footnote 50 Yet Robinson’s Researches was published only nine months prior to the Narrative,Footnote 51 and had not as yet achieved the cultural importance Polley notes. Both Researches and the Narrative were published before the genre’s popularity exploded in the later 1840s and 1850s.Footnote 52 This places the texts as contemporaries helping to move the genre beyond the predominantly eighteenth-century travels cited in previous works, and crucial in establishing new emotional paradigms.
The generation of patterns of feeling in these texts provides a valuable way into the historically constructed emotional communities that they built. While emotional reactions may have been scripted in certain contexts or locations, it was these very expectations and anticipated sequences of emotions that helped emotional communities develop, consequently shaping readers’ response to representations of Palestine, and encounters with contemporary Jewish people.Footnote 53 The concern here is not whether the reported feelings actually matched those experienced at the time of travel for the writers (an unanswerable question), but how emotional norms were moulded. While the Narrative’s promotional aims raise questions about it as a record of authentic emotion, it is useful precisely because it illustrates how the Church believed people should feel about Jews.Footnote 54 Reading about Palestine and plans for converting Jews could have a direct impact on how encounters with Scottish Jews were experienced. As the Presbyterian Review noted in 1838, such meetings were akin to travelling to the Holy Land: ‘We cannot help feeling, on such occasions, just as probably we would do were our eyes to gaze upon the dome of the false prophet, glittering in the rays of the setting sun, on the spot where the glory of God used to rest between the cherubim.’Footnote 55
The travelogues therefore attempted to model emotional states that readers were expected to feel, both as they read the biblical text and in any subsequent encounters with Jewish people (or Jewish causes). It was vital that this emotion was channelled to the correct end. The Scottish Evangelical leader Thomas Chalmers condemned those who ‘melt in all the luxury of emotion’ at Byron’s Hebrew melodies and its romantic evocation of Palestine. True emotion should instead be stirred by meditation on Scripture and its promises. Reader responses should always develop from this.Footnote 56 This emotional journey was to play a key role not only for readers’ personal faith, but also for the Church of Scotland more widely.
The experience of meeting Jews was therefore to lead the Scottish ministers (and by extension readers) on a transformative emotional journey. This was a mission ‘not of curiosity, but of love’.Footnote 57 As the convenor of the Church’s Jewish Committee, Stevenson MacGill, made clear, the aim of preachers discussing Jews was to make ‘them at once objects of profound interest and tender compassion’.Footnote 58 These emotional elements were commented upon by the Narrative’s reviewers. The Bible Repertory and Princeton Review concluded that ‘we have certainly never perused a work of this kind which from beginning to end was so imbued with affectionate piety. The excellent authors, throughout their pilgrimage, seem to have beheld every object, with hearts subjected to an extraordinary spiritual unction’.Footnote 59 Charlotte Tonna’s review in the Christian Lady’s Magazine commented upon ‘the deep respectful tenderness towards the seed of Abraham’ from the ministers.Footnote 60
The underlying assumptions of the Narrative were built on established interpretations of biblical prophecy. This claimed that the Jewish people had been punished for rejecting Christ through exile from their homeland, as the Hebrew prophets had warned would result from sin and covenant-breaking. However, the same Scriptures also contained promises of the Jews’ return to God (read as a conversion to Protestantism), an event that would signal the start of a time of fruitfulness for missions to all peoples. Many Evangelicals, including the ministers travelling to Palestine in 1839, also believed that the Jewish people would be regathered and restored to Palestine as a nation.Footnote 61 This provided the essential background to the emotional sequences suggested in the text. First, encounters with the Levantine landscape or Jewish communities should lead to a heightened emotional engagement with Scripture through the ‘proofs’ of prophecy they provided. Second, the contrast between the present misery of Jews and their past glory should generate pity and sympathy towards them, combined with an active horror or even disgust at their current religious practices. Finally, this should lead to hope on the basis that as Scripture had accurately predicted their desolation, so it also foretold their future blessing. In turn, this should generate financial and practical support for encouraging Jewish evangelism as a distinctive aim of Church of Scotland practice. Elements of this were familiar from general missionary fund-raising (appeals for Christian sympathy for those missionised being a standard trope drawn from wider humanitarian appeals),Footnote 62 but a layer of emotional complexity was added in the case of Jews. Unlike the ‘heathen’, Jews had both once known God’s blessing and also had the Hebrew Bible in common with Christians. The ‘heathen’ had never had the Word to reject; the Jewish people, paradoxically, were uniquely blessed for being its source, and uniquely cursed in their rejection of it. Scots, or at least readers in Edinburgh and Glasgow, also had active and relatively recently formed Jewish communities in their cities.Footnote 63 While other missionised groups were at a geographical as well as spiritual distance, Jews were simultaneously both a foreign and a home mission field.Footnote 64
This model of ‘love’ therefore incorporated a range of different emotional states working on several temporal levels. An encounter with Jewish people should lead believers to experience gratitude (for the past), sympathy (in the present) motivated by horror, joy occasioned by this sympathy (in the fulfilment of prophecies of judgement against Israel), and finally greater joy in the promise of the future consummation of those prophecies’ currently unfulfilled aspects. The aim of this emotional sequence was to result in practical action – namely, unity within the Church of Scotland and planning and fund-raising for mission. As the missionaries informed Polish Jews, ‘true Christians in Scotland and England loved the Jews, and Messiah enjoined us to bear a special love to them’.Footnote 65
The delegation repeatedly described the sharing of love as their explicit aim. In an Alexandrian synagogue they told worshippers ‘we had come from Scotland out of love to their souls’,Footnote 66 a statement that reappeared throughout their journey.Footnote 67 Jews were shown responding positively to such affirmations, in the missionaries’ eyes at least (of course, it must be recognised that the missionaries’ reports and perceptions of these reactions do not necessarily reflect how their interlocutors actually felt). On a ship from Valetta to Alexandria they befriended Jewish pilgrims, who told the Scots that ‘“We are brethren”’.Footnote 68 In letters home M’Cheyne wrote that in Livorno the whole Jewish quarter was ‘moved … they are at a loss to explain this friendly mission to Israel’.Footnote 69 Likewise, Christian love appeared to the Jews in Jerusalem as ‘very striking’, convincing them of the reality of the Scots’ faith in distinction to Catholicism and Orthodoxy.Footnote 70 In Siret in Austrian Poland the missionaries were mistaken for co-religionists by Jews; when Calman explained that they were Christians ‘they started back, and with an air of doubt and fear said, “And do you still love the Jews?”. He replied, “Yes, indeed, I love the Jews still with all my heart”’.Footnote 71 It is noteworthy that the missionaries saw their own emotional responses to Jews as the reason for their mistaken religious identification, rather than attributing it to their outward appearance or behaviour which might lead an observer to that conclusion.Footnote 72
The love the work promoted was based at its roots on existing affective connections with the Bible. At one level the Narrative represented a journey in which time collapsed in onto itself. It aimed to connect a series of emotional experiences starting with the authors of Scripture, passing onto the missionaries and finally allowing readers to share the combined experiences and emotions of both. Entering the Holy Land was moving into a world in which past, present and future were experienced simultaneously, as evidence of existing fulfilment proved that which was yet to come. In many ways, this can be labelled as allochronism, ‘whereby travel in space was equated with a travel back in time, or better to an arrested, ancient time’,Footnote 73 although it should also be emphasised that the writers never lost sight of the contemporary political and social challenges of the nineteenth century for Jewish people they met. For readers of the Narrative an additional layer of complexity was added by Keith’s presence. His Evidences had already provided precisely this proof at second hand: ‘The Researches of Travellers in Palestine have been so abundant, and the prophecies thereby verified are so numerous and distinct, that no labour is requisite for elucidating their truth, but to examine and compare the predictions and the events; and the literal prophecies need no other interpretation than the literal facts.’Footnote 74 Now Keith himself became one of these travellers, directly experiencing the fulfilments he had previously alluded to. In a sense, the Narrative represented a physical reworking of his previous intellectual labour; a chance for the author to directly enter his own work.
This collapsing of time also meant that a special sense of space developed. The missionaries held that it was ‘not in the power of the place itself, however sacred, to enlighten and refresh a sinner’s soul’, instead emphasising the importance of connection to Christ through the Spirit.Footnote 75 Yet in practice the Scots treated the Holy Land as particularly spiritually nourishing. Their emotional responses generated a sense of what John Wright termed ‘geopiety’, in which particular geographic features, spaces or events trigger ‘emotional, or thoughtful, emotional piety’.Footnote 76 In spite of their own theological predilections, the land generated heightened affective responses experienced as increased closeness to God. Thus: ‘We prayed together, feeling that the land was fitted to make us ask much, for from these heavens the Holy Spirit had descended on many a prophet and many a saint.’Footnote 77 As was the case with Scottish painter David Roberts in the 1840s, a direct physical experience of the natural terrain was important.Footnote 78 This was repeatedly contrasted with the false sacrality of Catholic and Orthodox spaces, which generated emotional responses at the other extreme. The holiest sites in Bethlehem were dark ‘grottos … cave[s] … cavern[s]’. When leaving behind Bethlehem’s ‘sacred’ sites they juxtaposed these to ‘the fields and valleys around Bethlehem … we were assured that among these David had often wandered with his flock, and in some of these the shepherds had heard the voice that brought the tidings of a Saviour born’.Footnote 79 The Presbyterian Review noted with approval that the Narrative ‘dwells on those fields and cities, mountains and lakes … which … possess the solemn consecration of remaining exactly as they were’.Footnote 80
As Marten argues, these viewpoints incorporated more than just geopiety, as the term refers only to a sense of reverence and devotion for a place. Here, it extended to the people in the land, eschatology and support for the missionaries’ view of the divine economy.Footnote 81 This can be further expanded by reincorporating the centrality of emotional engagement that Wright’s initial definition of geopiety emphasised. Views of the land could not be separated from those of Scripture, Jews or eschatology, and each of these was also related closely to emotion.
This emotional connection began with the missionaries’ existing affective memories of the Bible. As the Presbyterian Review noted, the Narrative’s authors had a ‘concordance-like command of Scripture, and an eager alertness to detect any rock or tree, any place or custom, in which a word of Scripture lingered’.Footnote 82 Another review identified over 900 separate scriptural references in the work.Footnote 83 As M’Cheyne wrote in a personal letter from Jerusalem, ‘Our progress in the land has been full of deepest interest – every hill & town leading us to our Bibles & calling up the remembrances of Patriarchs & Judges & Apostles who are now in glory.’Footnote 84 The authors felt as if they were vicariously experiencing the events of the Hebrew Bible, replaying the emotion of reading the texts on a new embodied level. This was sometimes taken to extremes, with their experiences representing a form of semiotic arousal in which even mundane occurrences became heavily loaded with prophetic meaning and emotional weight.Footnote 85 So the act of raising a tent in the desert led them to recall the ‘lengthening of the cords’ and ‘strengthening the stakes’ (Isaiah lii.20), God’s vow to ‘loosen the cords’ for Job (xxx.11) and the promise to make Judah like a ‘tent peg’ in Zechariah x.4. Above all of this, they were reminded that God promised that Israel would dwell in Jerusalem as a ‘tabernacle that shall not be taken down’ (Isa. xxxiii.20). More than simply recollections of biblical trivia, this experience therefore became an entryway for them into several texts, pointing to both past and future. The eventual emotional outcome of this experience was a reflection on the future blessings that would come upon the Jews, and consequently a greater love towards them. So the ‘melancholy’ generated by the ‘labyrinth of thorns and briery plants’ near Jenin led them to prophecy: ‘Isaiah 32.13. again came to mind, and the remembrance was soothing, for as certainly as the curse has been fulfilled so shall the blessing.’Footnote 86
The flipside of this, following Keith’s existing assertions, was that Palestine also served as proof of the prophecies of judgement against the Jewish people for their rejection of Jesus. Its supposed barrenness was evidence of the veracity of Scripture. The ruins of ancient Gaza showed ‘that not one word had fallen to the ground’.Footnote 87 As M’Cheyne wrote to Dundee: ‘“Your house is left unto you desolate.” That word was upon every tongue. Almost every approach in Jerusalem gives you this desolate feeling.’Footnote 88 On Mount Zion they gathered barley stalks to bring home as material evidence of the fulfilment of Micah iii.12 (‘shall Zion for your sake be ploughed as a field’).Footnote 89 Such evidence had an important role in convincing congregations in Scotland of the veracity of prophecy and served as a useful prop in talks.Footnote 90 At times, it encouraged extreme emotional reactions amongst hearers, a helpful reminder of the importance of material culture in Evangelical emotional communities.Footnote 91
Palestine’s desolation was therefore simultaneously disturbing and comforting: ‘We felt a secret joy in beholding the deserted terraces and fields overrun with thorns, for when we saw the word of threatening so clearly and literally fulfilled, our unbelief was reproved, and we were taught to expect without a shadow of doubt, that the promised blessing would be as full and sure.’Footnote 92 This explains the ‘correct’ emotional sequence laid out in the Narrative on viewing the land: outward sadness at desolation, followed by an inward delight motivated by the fulfilment of prophecy. Yet in recognising the ‘secret’ nature of this, they showed an awareness that this emotion was only appropriate if expressed internally rather than outwardly displayed towards living Jews.
This form of geopiety has been noted before, for example in Bar-Yosef’s identification of Jerusalem in the earlier 1830s as focusing readers on both the glories of the past city as a witness to God’s glory, and the blessings of its future.Footnote 93 The major development in the Narrative was its intertextual connections with Keith’s earlier work, already well-known to Scottish readers. For the travellers, their mission became an interactive version of his Evidences. Biblical text, Keith’s book and the physical image of the land became symbiotically linked in a cascading chain of evidence. The reader familiar with Evidences would now see the literal outworking of the author’s earlier claim that the land ‘is the precise likeness delineated by the pencil of prophecy’.Footnote 94 There, such assertions relied on second-hand accounts. Now, they included direct testimony by Keith himself and other ministers of unquestionable quality. This added a further layer to his defence of prophecy, and by extension, the inspiration of the biblical text itself.Footnote 95 As Marten noted, this referred not only to the land but also to the people who lived in it. In Keith’s words this was ‘a sympathetic feeling between this bereaved country and banished people’, and a ‘refusal’ to bless other occupiers with the same fruitfulness it had given to the ancient Jews.Footnote 96
The situation of the Jewish people therefore mirrored that of the land: ‘Their wretched condition in the city where their fathers ruled loudly calls for sympathy.’Footnote 97 On the one hand, their suffering was distressing. At Smyrna the missionaries recorded their disgust at random attacks on Jews and attempts to frame them for crimes. Conversely, such treatment proved a further happy confirmation of Scripture’s fulfilment.Footnote 98 Readers were encouraged to enter this sympathetic understanding through comparing the barrenness of Palestine to that of the Jewish communities. As James Whyte told those attending a Glasgow lecture on the Jews: ‘they are like melancholy ruins of some blighted tower, whose fragments remain to show the might of the hand that smote it’.Footnote 99 For the missionaries this reduction to ‘fragments’ was an emotional impoverishment marked by constant sadness. Their encounters with Jewish people on their journey towards Jerusalem were such that they had not ‘seen any marks of joy in the land … In all parts of it, they [Jews] have an aspect of timidity and rooted sorrow’.Footnote 100 In Jerusalem itself they ‘were much impressed with the melancholy aspect of the Jews’.Footnote 101 They were less impressed with their religiosity, which although ‘sincere, anxious, [and] devout’, was based on ‘going about to establish their own righteousness’.Footnote 102 Such religious efforts, they believed, could produce only misery. The sight of Jews crying out for God’s deliverance in the synagogue of Safed left the Scots ‘deeply affected … it was the saddest and most solemn view of them that we had yet obtained’.Footnote 103
Their experiences in Jerusalem and its vicinities thus operated as an amplifier for the emotional intensity of their interests in the Jews. Already deep feelings were magnified to a new level by their surroundings.Footnote 104 This was clear from the description of their time in the city, as they prayed that they may ‘never lose the intense compassion toward Israel, which these few days spent in Jerusalem awakened; and never rest till all the faithful of the church of our fathers have the same flame kindled in their hearts!’Footnote 105 They expressed frustration that their own emotional state was so much colder than that of Jesus in their failure to openly weep over the city.Footnote 106
While the love modelled by the missionaries must sympathise, it also stressed the importance of challenging customs deemed to be unbiblical. While sympathetic to Jews as victims of antisemitism and unjust restrictions, at other times the missionaries expressed their interest in Jewish wellbeing in visible distaste towards religious practices they disapproved of. This sometimes extended into disgust. Geography had a major impact on this. In Palestine, Jews were simple and earnest and their worship was to generate deep pity as they experienced extreme, but to the Scots’ eyes flawed, emotional reactions:
They read with all their might; then cried aloud … Some clapped their hands, others clasped both hands together, and wrung them as in an agony of distress, till they should obtain their request. A few beat upon their breasts … None seemed happy; even when all was over, none bore the cheerful look of men who had ground to believe that their prayers had been accepted. Many had the very look of misery, and almost of despair.Footnote 107
As the Scots made clear, these reactions were all the more noteworthy as they appeared to be standard sabbath practice, and not related to a particular festival.
In Eastern Europe the ministers experienced very different emotions. The similarities between ‘Popery’ and ‘Rabbinism’ were frequently drawn, as was common amongst Protestants in the period.Footnote 108 While pity still dominanted, it was combined with active horror and disgust at the form of worship they encountered. Due to the timing of their journey, the ministers travelled through Eastern Europe during several major festivals. Whereas they had no doubts that the strong emotions witnessed in Palestinian Jewry were genuine, the intense emotional gestures and rending of garments in Iași at the Day of Atonement were viewed as theatrical, given the high spirits quickly displayed at the end of the service as worshippers crowded into taverns.Footnote 109 At Lviv, Jewish weeping at an old woman’s funeral was criticised: ‘their tears and lamentations were only feigned, for at one time they appeared very lugubrious, then, all of a sudden, they stopped and began to scold, or appeared utterly careless’.Footnote 110
Such ‘carelessness’ could justify the missionaries’ paternalism. Visiting a Hasidic synagogue celebrating Simchat Torah in Austrian Poland they condemned enthusiastic and emotive dancing, infantalising their subjects: ‘A religious service more silly or childish could scarcely be imagined. We were again reminded of the sure word of prophecy, “I will give children to be their princes, and babes shall rule over them.”’Footnote 111 It may seem surprising that the ministers, who knew the Jewish festivals well, would be so critical of emotional responses to mournful occasions such as Yom Kippur or exuberant joy on Simchat Torah. Yet their criticism centred not on the emotions themselves, but on the theatricality of their expression and their temporary nature. Such behaviour was associated with Catholic excess rather than polite Protestant restraint. Indeed, it mirrored similar emotional concerns expressed by Jewish reformers in Britain at the time around ‘respectable’ decorum at religious services.Footnote 112
The missionaries’ responses demonstrate a particular form of paternalism. Barclay has emphasised the way in which Scottish concepts of communal love in the eighteenth century were shaped by the parent-child relationship as an expression of caritas. Footnote 113 The paternalism of the missionaries, and their infantilisation of Jewish belief and practice,Footnote 114 meant that existing concepts of caritas were well suited to Scottish Evangelical social and mission practices in the nineteenth century. This was the model of paternal love in social reform that Thomas Chalmers hoped would transform Scottish society.Footnote 115 Claire McLisky points out that missionary paternalism might appear to complicate notions of love in the clash between sharing God’s equal love for all people and the hierarchical position presumed by paternalism. Yet, as she notes, this was rarely perceived to be an issue by missionaries.Footnote 116 For Scots in particular, the existing incorporation of paternalism into a concept of caritas reduced this tension. Love to Jewish people could fit into this model particularly well, for while Scots could place themselves in the parental position, at other times they could also inhabit that of the child receiving the Scriptures from the ‘elder’ people.Footnote 117
The descriptions of missionaries’ emotional responses aimed to inform readers’ own emotions in a way that was not possible when reading abstract accounts of Jewish mission. Considering these responses suggests that this was successful for at least some readers. As a letter to M’Cheyne from one of his congregation noted before his departure, they would ‘be often wandering with you in imagination … and picturing to our minds your feelings of emotion when viewing Mount Calvary etc. etc’.Footnote 118 That this was the aim of the Narrative was clear from the missionaries’ report to the General Assembly on their return. Invoking the ‘law in our nature, according to which the sight of the object calls forth, in the most vivid manner, the emotion of the heart’, they spoke of how they returned ‘with hearts kindled into a flame of holy compassion by the actual sight of the dry bones of Israel’.Footnote 119 Their objective now was to ensure that the Church of Scotland’s parishioners would share in this affective relationship to Judaism, a work they had already in part achieved through extensive public meetings discussing their trip.Footnote 120 Their report was thus self-consciously styled as an attempt to craft an emotional community around Jewish evangelisation:
Could we but carry our fathers and brethren, and the Christian people of Scotland, through the scenes we have witnessed,– could we communicate the feelings with which we beheld the Jew praying beside the ruined wall of the Temple in Jerusalem, or the feelings with which we witnessed the extravagant devotion in the synagogues of Galilee, or the feelings with which we walked through the streets of Brody, where scarcely any but the bearded sons of Abraham are to be seen;– above all, could we make known, as vividly as we have seen, the thousand ways in which they go about to establish their own righteousness – praying to the dead, making pilgrimage to Jerusalem, wearing the phylacteries, killing the chipora [kapporot],Footnote 121 or dancing with the law – we are quite sure that there would be but one thrill of sympathetic interest felt throughout the whole Church; and one fervent effectual prayer would arise from all the praying families in Scotland – ‘Oh that the salvation of Israel were come out of Zion!’Footnote 122
That the Narrative fulfilled precisely this role is important. It encouraged not just its readers’ knowledge about Jews, but brought them into a shared emotional community through vicarious experience of the missionaries’ travels. Its modelling of what Christian love for Jews should look like helped communicate the emotional sequences readers were expected to experience.
Such emotions could also have an important devotional impact upon congregations. This is vividly demonstrated in Bonar’s ‘frequent’ recollection of a talk at Kelso in which he showed the barley from Mount Zion as proof of the faithfulness of God to his promises. The following day:
an old woman sent for him, and, as soon as he entered her house, she held up her hands and exclaimed, ‘Oh, those ears of barley! those [sic] ears of barley!’ He asked her what she meant, and she said she had just thought when he was speaking the night before that if God kept His word about ears of barley, would He not keep it about the salvation of a soul? And all her doubts fled.Footnote 123
This attempt to forge a sense of emotional community must be understood against the context of ongoing difficulties within the Church of Scotland. At a time of growing fear within the Church itself over the likelihood of a split, the construction of new ways to foster co-feeling with other Evangelicals was vital. As the emotions of the ministers had been amplified by being in the land, so the Narrative’s readers could expect their Church’s emotions and effectiveness to be amplified through Jewish mission. Eschatological hopes tied the conversion of the Jews to the conversion of the world. Combined with the biblical promise to bless those who blessed Abraham’s people (Genesis xii.3), this eschatological hope and emotional engagement could be further fuelled by the fact that revival had broken out in Kilsyth and Dundee as the ministers engaged in their travels, a connection Bonar and M’Cheyne were quick to point out.Footnote 124 This also helps to explain why Jewish evangelism became one of the Church’s five key schemes, alongside education, church extension, colonial and Indian mission. That giving to the Jews’ scheme outstripped all but the Indian in the years prior to the Disruption is a particularly notable demonstration of the enthusiasm and motivation it bred.Footnote 125 As the Glasgow minister John Lorimer noted in his appeal for Jewish mission, ‘shall not our love of country and of the church of Christ, concur with our love of ourselves and of our families, in seeking the Divine protection and blessing, by showin [sic] kindness to the house of Israel? Oh, how easy is it for God to befriend and bless us for their sake!’Footnote 126
Such appeals to self- and national interest might appear to confirm the suspicions of philosemitism’s critics, who charge that the ‘love’ Christians displayed towards Jews in this period was both functionalist and self-motivated. However, it is important here to consider the existing Scottish debates and context on the role of self-interest in moral action. In his influential work on morality and political economy, Thomas Chalmers had argued that self-interest was the basis of any moral society. Viewing the individual as an inescapably social creature, self-interest would guarantee mutual support and respect for others in society in order to ensure the maximum flourishing of one’s own personal welfare. Indeed, God had ordained political economy to operate in this way to rightly direct moral energies.Footnote 127 In Chalmers’ words, ‘the social and the selfish affections, instead of being as they too often are inversely, might under a virtuous regimen be directly proportional to each other. At all events the way to advance or magnify the one, is not surely to weaken or abridge the other’.Footnote 128 For those Evangelicals who followed Chalmers, then, love for Jews and love for the Church moved in tandem, with self-interest used by God to help secure moral action.
That such emotional communities did develop is highlighted by reports following Bonar and M’Cheyne’s popular presentations about their travels. So they recalled ‘the aged, patriarchal-looking men of our Scottish peasantry, seated often on the pulpit-stairs, that they might hear of “the seed of Abraham, God’s friend,” – the nation for whose ingathering their godly sires used fervently to pray, as they dropt a tear over the narrative of their miseries’.Footnote 129 This was no doubt an idealisation, yet it is clear that such emotional responses were present at times.Footnote 130 A later example, at Candlish’s ordination of Daniel Edward as a missionary to Hungarian Jews in March 1841, illustrates this in practice. On seeing the missionary departing to take the word to Israel, the congregation of St George’s Church ‘were moved with sensations of no ordinary kind – with mingled feelings of shame, and wonder, and gratitude, and hope’.Footnote 131
Philosemitism and ‘love’
This article has suggested that the concern with defining philosemitism by judging the genuineness of purported love shown to Jewish people is to approach the question from the wrong angle. More interesting, and more helpful to both historians and those working on contemporary interfaith relationships, is the question of what love meant in particular contexts and how this was experienced by both those who advocated it, and its oftentimes unwilling recipients. It is no surprise that a missionary and a rabbi would have very different views of Evangelical ‘love’. Yet to understand the emotions that encouraged Christian missions to Jews it is important to appreciate the way in which Christians were encouraged to experience and show this love, and what it meant to their own communities of feeling. Significantly, although outside the scope of this article, such an approach could also be usefully applied to how Jewish emotional communities adapted and responded in reaction to such ‘love’. Indeed, it is important to remember that what passed as ‘love’ within one faith community did not necessarily appear loving to another. To recognise an emotion as a genuine expression of ‘love’ within one faith community is to comment on historical understandings of emotion; it is not the same thing as suggesting that it was a constructive emotion in building interfaith relations. Such ‘love’ certainly failed to appear loving to many of those targeted by the missionaries.
The Narrative and surrounding sermons and press reports show a concerted attempt to build a system of shared feeling towards Jews among Church of Scotland adherents. In some ways this was linked to existing feelings Scots were expected to have towards mission in general in building on established networks of sympathy and pity towards the ‘heathen’. However, the Jewish aspect emphasised the special nature of the claims Christians’ ‘older brethren’ had upon them. The love these Christians felt was fundamentally linked to verification of their own experience of reading Scripture, expectations of prophecy and the desire to build a stronger and more unified Evangelical community within the Church. Attempts to promote love of Jewish people therefore cannot be understood outside of the immediate context of the ongoing ruptures between moderates and Evangelicals, fostering an emphasis on building strong emotional communities that would be needed to sustain the Free Church at the coming Disruption. This reflection in turn raises questions that might be fruitfully asked of subsequent Scottish interest in Jews – particularly the patterns of Jewish mission developed by both the Free Church and Church of Scotland post-Disruption and the rise of home missions to Jews at the end of the nineteenth century. Exploring how (and why) ‘love’ was fashioned in these contexts would highlight both continuities and changes in Scottish attitudes to Jews and mission more generally. A similar approach would also prove helpful in examining Jewish mission efforts in other national contexts such as England, Ireland and the United States.
Such a focus on how love was experienced and what it meant in each community, the wider religious and political context in which such emotion developed, and way in which leaders promoted it, will deepen our analysis of the ways in which Christian and Jewish communities engaged with one another. This perspective is important not only in an historical sense, but when thinking about more recent manifestations of ‘philosemitism’, particularly in the context of contemporary Evangelical Christian Zionism. Critics have often pointed to this purported philosemitism as self-interested politics in disguise, or an attempt to hide antisemitic attitudes. However, in some cases, beliefs are more nuanced than this, and remain emotionally important to individuals on a personal faith level.Footnote 132 When a recent study reveals that ‘gut feeling’ is behind much Evangelical ‘love’ of Jewish people in the contemporary United States, it becomes important to ask precisely what that feeling entails and how it builds community.Footnote 133 Combined with recent research on Zionism that has empasised the dominance of emotion, and particularly love, in forming Zionist commitments among Jews since the 1880s, it also offers potential to shine a new light on Jewish-Christian relations.Footnote 134 Such an approach will say more about faith communities, whether historical or contemporary, than a return to binary examinations of the reality (or otherwise) of ‘love’ expressed towards others.
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