Panel: MESSIANIC AFTERTHOUGHTS: THE LINGERING OF AN IDEA



990_2.6 - WAITING FOR THE MESSIAH: TRENDS OF CHRISTIAN PHILO-SEMITISM IN THE 17TH CENTURY

AUTHORS:
Giardini M. (Independent Scholar ~ Ferrara ~ Italy)
Text:
The paper explores some common features in the thought of several seventeenth-century Christian authors who developed a distinctly philo-Semitic perspective, integrating into their theological frameworks certain characteristically Jewish motifs concerning the restoration of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel at the time of the Messiah. A considerable number of these authors belonged to chiliastic circles in close contact with Menasseh ben Israel, the Sephardic polymath known for his efforts to secure the readmission of Jews to England under Oliver Cromwell. The figures examined include John Dury, Michel Serrarius, Paul Felgenhauer, the Portuguese Jesuit António Vieira, and, indirectly, Isaac La Peyrère. The paper addresses four main themes: first, the expectation of a Jewish return to the Holy Land and the restoration of their kingdom, understood in connection with their eventual conversion to Christianity, as a central element of eschatological hope; second, particularly in Protestant contexts, the reform of the Church as a necessary precondition for Jewish conversion to "true" Christianity, itself requiring a fundamental change in Christian attitudes toward the Jews (from persecution, humiliation, and despise to benevolent acceptance); third, the identification of the Jewish Messiah with the Second Advent of Christ, and the shared failure — on both the Jewish and Christian sides — to recognize this equivalence; fourth, the link between the Jewish return to Palestine and the conquest of the Holy Land by a universal Christian monarch, and the implicit connection between Jewish messianic expectations and Christian eschatological motifs derived from earlier crusading traditions.