ABSTRACT
These words from Pia Desideria, Spener’s most influential tract and one of the foundational texts of German Pietism, take us straight to the heart of the subject matter of this chapter: the relationship between Pietism – at least in its SpenerianHallean variant – and the Jews.2 The chapter begins by analyzing the place of the Jews in Spener’s distinctive eschatology. I then explore the Jewish-missionary ideology that evolved within Hallean Pietism in the first half of the eighteenth century, focusing in particular on the work of the Institutum Judaicum, an organization dedicated to the Pietist evangelization of Jews. This is followed by some reflections on how Pietist understandings of the Jews and their place in the Christian future were elaborated and refigured within the north German Protestant tradition. The chapter closes with a speculative attempt to situate these interactions within the broader, transatlantic Protestant world encompassed by the essays in this book.
