ABSTRACT
The theological tensity that characterised the London Jews’ Society throughout its first two decades was fairly unique among the voluntary associations of the so-called “religious world” of early nineteenth-century Britain. Interestingly, the London Jews’ Society was initially less concerned about the general anti-evangelicalism of high church critics than the more pointed charges that it harboured “foolish and utopian expectations” of Jewish conversion. The eschatological sensibility gleaned from George Stanley Faber was effectively translated into an imperial idiom by the East India Company chaplain, Claudius Buchanan, another pervasive influence on the London Jews’ Society’s early proceedings. The expressly premillennial eschatology which emerged from within the ranks of the London Jews’ Society bore the unmistakable stamp of these ecclesiastical pressures. There was little at first blush that distinguished the London Society for the Promoting of Christianity amongst the Jews markedly from the numerous other organs of missionary outreach and philanthropic engagement that comprised the “religious world” of early nineteenth-century evangelicalism.
