A new Jewish History Hub, linked to the JHSE in Cambridge

Dear Members,

I am delighted to report that last Tuesday, 27 February 2025, I chaired the inaugural meeting of the Jewish History that JHSE has developed with a group of Cambridge scholars.

We were delighted to have Christopher Clark, Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge, spoke on 'Jews and he End of Time'. One of the organisers, Yossef Malka, has prepared a summary of the lecture which I post below.

The meeting attracted members of the universities at all career stages as well as many of those interested in Jewish History from Cambridge and its surroundings. There was enthusiasm among the 40 participants, including academics from seven Faculties, who hoped that the initiative may flourish. The organising group will meet in March to plan futrure events and the resulting details will be shared with JHSE members.

Wishing you a good week,

Your President, Miri Rubin

Jewish Historical Society of Cambridge: Christopher Clark on “The Jews and the End of Days”, Trinity College, 18 February 2025

By Yossef Malka (Cambridge University)

Professor Clark began his lecture by recounting his arrival at Freie Universität Berlin as a young graduate student in the 1980s. Graffiti on the walls of its seminar rooms such as “Polizei = SS” made for an apocalyptic environment in which to begin his study of the Pietist missions to the Jews that had emerged from Halle during the eighteenth century.

Ranging from eighteenth-century Halle, where Pietists had founded the Institutum Judaicum to train missionaries, to twentieth-century Prague, where the SS built a museum of objects belonging to the race they had hoped to extinguish, Professor Clark discussed the shifting emotional terrain of expectation and disappointment that gave rise to two intertwined eschatological traditions.

The Pietist tradition held ambivalent views regarding the Jews. To Philipp Jakob Spener (1635-1705) and his adherents at the Institutum Judaicum, the redemption of the church could only come about through the redemption of the Jews. Jewish recalcitrance stemmed not simply from their theological error, but also from the failure of contemporary Christianity to reform itself. In Spener’s circular logic, Christian improvement required Jewish conversion, which simultaneously required better Christians. The Puritan Henry Finch (1558-1625) went further, heralding a messianic future in which Jews would again be sovereign.

Pietist missionary efforts only ever found success among the poorest Jews. Its funding declined in the face of both a new enlightenment culture riveted by Moses Mendelssohn and the increased social mobility of German Jewry during the age of emancipation. German eschatology nevertheless survived Mendelssohn: Frederick William III of Prussia had made missionary efforts central to his “Christian State,” and Jewish emancipation was condemned by prominent jurists such Freidrich Julius Stahl.

By the late nineteenth century, the appeal of eschatological promises remained overpowering, but its logic was hard to square with a rapidly secularizing world. The logic of Spenner was inverted. Jews were still responsible for the eschaton, only now their stubbornness served not to encourage Christian betterment but to actively bring about a secular end-of-days. Spenner’s saying that “Jews are our salvation,” became Treitschke’s “Juden sind unser Unglück.”

The tirades of frustrated nineteenth-century German evangelists against “modern,” “empty” Judaism found echoes in Hitler’s eschatology. This self-styled “prophet” secularized the eschaton (the end of times), but his vision of redemption still revolved around the supersession of the Jews. The end of days would come about not by divine intervention and Jewish conversion, but by the this-worldly disempowerment of those whose redemption was once thought to herald God’s redemption of the world: the Jews.

Professor Clark concluded by suggesting that the “magnetic field” of eschatology is still latent in contemporary antisemitism, which becomes even more potent by submerging its religious underpinnings. The lecture was followed by questions from members of the English, Classics, Divinity, History, Philosophy, Asian and Middle East Studies, and Music faculties.