United Conversionist Activities Among the Jews in Great Britain 1795-1815: Pan-Evangelicalism and the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews

Abstract

This paper is concerned with examining the British pan-evangelical impulse of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries from the perspective of a little known but very important organization called the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews. The London Society, as it was better known, was a product of the same general missionary impulse that brought into being its better known sister organizations such as the London Missionary Society, the Religious Tract Society and the British and Foreign Bible Society. Like the Missionary Society out of which it evolved in 1809, the London Society was a missionary organization dedicated to evangelizing the world. It differed from the Missionary Society only in emphasis, suggesting that the Jews rather than the heathen would first be converted to Christian principles.