Stephen K.

Batalden
History Department
Arizona State University

Ebenezer Hendersons Window

on the Jewish Communities of South Russia in the 1820s
Often referred to as the Great Missionary Awakening or evangelical revival,1 the late
eighteenth-century rise of Christian evangelicalism drove the extensive missionary, tractarian, and Bible
society activity that blossomed in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. A key center of this
awakening was in Scotland where the evangelical impulse, like the non-conformist challenge to the
Church of England, yielded a secessionist or independency movement that challenged the hegemony of
the established Church of Scotland. Among the foremost figures arising out of this evangelical
independency movement in Scotland was the missionary and biblical scholar Ebenezer Henderson
(1784-1858). Henderson figured prominently in the early years of the British and Foreign Bible Society,
contributing to major translation projects in Scandinavia, Iceland, and Russia.2 His years in Russia,
including his extensive travels through much of the Russian heartland, Ukraine, and the Caucasus, are
well documented both in the papers of the British and Foreign Bible Society and in Hendersons own
published account.3 Ironically, one of the issues that most animated Ebenezer Hendersonnamely,
Hebraic Bible translation and the Jewish question in Russiahas been largely omitted from the
secondary accounts of his life and work in Eurasia. This paper is intended to clarify how, in the course
of his travels in the south of Russia in the 1820s, this evangelical Scot framed the Jewish question in
nineteenth-century Russia. Not only did Henderson lay the groundwork for what became a popular and
defining philo-Semitic conversionist policy toward Jews in Russia, but in so doing he generated an
evangelical Christian response to modern Judaism that has remained deeply embedded within the
discourse of the Anglo-American religious right, including those who today circle around the American
White House.
Born into an evangelical Scottish family, Henderson was drawn to the kind of itinerant
tabernacle revivalist ministry that rested behind early Scottish Congregationalism. Under the influence
of the Haldane brothers, prominent tabernacle movement leaders who had broken with the Church of
Scotland, the young Henderson in 1803 entered the Edinburgh theological seminary founded by Robert
Haldane for training itinerant revivalist preachers and missionaries.4 Henderson excelled in the study of
foreign languages, and was invited in 1805 to accompany his fellow Scot and Haldane seminary
1
On terminology for this evangelicalism, see the work of David W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History
from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989); also Deryck W. Lovegrove, Established Church, Sectarian People:
Itinerancy and the Transformation of English Dissent, 1780-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
2
On Henderson, see the unpublished dissertation of James Hendrix Glassman, Ebenezer Henderson (1784-1858): Missionary,
Traveler, Biblical Scholar (His Life and Work in the North of Europe, with Special Reference to the Great Missionary Awakening),
University of Edinburgh, 1957. The Glassman work has been supplemented by the studies of Felix lafsson on Hendersons periods in
Iceland, Ebenezer Henderson og Hi! slenska Biblufelag (Rejkjavk: Hi Biblufelag, 1992); and in Denmark, Ebenezer Henderson: Bibel
Selskabets Stifter (Copenhagen: Danske Bibelselskab, 1989). Drawing upon the papers of Ebenezer Henderson, some of which are no
longer extant, his daughter Thulia Susannah Henderson also gathered and edited materials for a biographical study, Memoir of the Rev. E.
Henderson, D.D., Ph.D., including his labours in Denmark, Iceland, Russia, etc., etc. (London: Knight & Son, 1859).
3
In addition to the biographical literature, this account draws upon the archive of the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS)
now located in the Cambridge University Library, as well as Hendersons own published work. For the on-line guide to BFBS collections,
see <http://janus.lib.cam.ac.uk/db/node.xsp?id=EAD%2FGBR%2F0374%2FBFBS%2FA>. The full title of Hendersons travel account is
Biblical Researches and Travels in Russia: including a Tour of the Crimea, and the Passage of the Caucasus: With Observations on the
State of the Rabbinical and Karaite Jews, and the Mohammedan and Pagan Tribes, Inhabiting the Southern Provinces of the Russian
Empire (London: James Nisbet, 1826).
4
R. F. Calder, Robert Haldanes Theological Seminary, Congregational Historical Society Transactions, XIII: 1 (September
1937), 59-63, cont. on p. 53. Henderson studied under John Aikman and William Stephens in a two-year seminary program that featured
formal study of Greek and Hebrew. French and Latin were also available in a curriculum that trained some three hundred potential
preachers and missionaries over the nine-year life of the institution. The Haldane seminary lasted only to 1808, but was quickly followed
by Greville Ewings Glasgow Theological Academy (est. 1811), and ultimately the Scottish Congregational College of Edinburgh.

alumnus John Paterson to a proposed Scottish mission in Tranquebar, India. Their journey took them
first to Denmark where they intended to link up with the Danish mission of William Carey, the noted
Baptist missionary to Serampore, India. Once in Denmark, the two Scots, Paterson and Henderson,
discovered that the East India Company no longer was accrediting missionaries to India. With the
approval of their Edinburgh supporters, Henderson and Paterson decided to remain in Denmark, where
Henderson continued his work with languages. At the same time he preached at a local seamens
mission in Elsinore (and later in Gottenburgh, Sweden), began translation of religious tracts and biblical
texts, and launched his work with the development of local Bible society chapters. Henderson remained
in Scandinavia for more than eleven years until the end of 1816, returning again for brief periods in
1817 and 1818. It was during these years in Scandinavia that Henderson also traveled extensively in
Iceland where he founded chapters of the Icelandic Bible Society and oversaw distribution of the earliest
BFBS editions of modern Icelandic scripture.5
During these years in Scandinavia, the two Scots also communicated regularly with British and
Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) personnel in London, especially BFBS Foreign Secretary Karl Friedrich
A. Steinkopf, regarding the scope of biblical work in northern Europe, including projected translation
efforts in Finland and the Baltic provinces. In one such typical communication of October 1810,
Henderson and Paterson wrote to express their sense of the need to do something for Russia:
We are convinced with you of the vast importance and the necessity of doing something for Russia on
an extensive scale, but the development of future events must show when and how this shall come to
pass. We hold ourselves ready for the service when the Lord sees meet to employ us. In the meantime,
let us all bear Russia in mind at the throne of Grace.6
In 1811, having secured Tsar Alexander Is blessing for preparation of a new edition of the Bible in
Finnish and the establishment of a Finnish Bible SocietyFinland having been incorporated into the
Russian Empire in 1809BFBS leaders sought to extend Bible society operations into the heartland of
Russia, using as their argument the need for scripture on the part of non-Russian peoples of the empire.
In the fateful month of June 1812, as Napoleonic armies bore down upon Russia, Steinkopf joined
Paterson and Henderson for a week of meetings in Helsinki to lay concrete plans for Bible society work
in Russia. John Paterson was selected to lead the initial effort in the early fall of 1812. With the way
soon paved by support from Aleksandr N. Golitsyn, the tsars close confidant and head of the dual
ministry (a post that combined the ministry of education and ober-prokurors position in the Holy
Synod), a formal tsarist decree established the Russian Bible Society (Rossiiskoe bibleiskoe
obshchestvo) in December 1812. The first meeting of the society followed shortly thereafter at the home
of Aleksandr Golitsyn himself in January 1813.7
Hendersons travel to Russia came four years later at the very end of 1816, by which time the
Russian Bible Society (RBS) had not only developed innovative stereotype printing operations, but had
also secured precedent-setting authority for publication of a new Russian translation of the Bible. The
immediate occasion for Hendersons travel to Russia was the need to assist the ailing John Paterson
whose ambitious publishing enterprise in Petersburg had led to such a dramatic expansion of RBS
5
Hendersons popular account of his travels in Iceland, where he is still regarded as a significant figure in the modern European
discovery of Iceland, was published in 1818. See, Iceland; or the Journal of a Residence in that Island, during the Years 1814 and
1815: Containing Observations on the Natural Phenomena, History, Literature, and Antiquities of the Island; and the Religion, Character,
Manners, and Customs of its Inhabitants, 2 vols. in 1 (Edinburgh: Oliphant, Waugh and Innes, 1818). A second edition of Iceland was
published in London, 1819. An abridged version of the second edition was published in Boston in 1831. On Henderson in Iceland, see
lafssons Ebenezer Henderson og Hi! slenska Biblufelag.
6
John Paterson and Ebenezer Henderson to Karl Steinkopf, Gottenburgh, October 15, 1810, BFBS Home Correspondence
Inwards, Box 9: Foreign Agents John Paterson, Ebenezer Henderson, Robert Pinkerton, Henry Leeves.
7
For the chronology of the founding of the Russian Bible Society from the arrival of John Paterson in Russia in August 1812 to
the first session of the Russian Bible Society in January 1813, see John Patersons published memoir, The Book for Every Land:
Reminiscences of Labour and Adventure in the Work of Bible Circulation in the North of Europe and in Russia (London: John Snow,
1858), pp. 164-193. On the Russian Bible Society, more generally, see the standard work of A. N. Pypin, "Rossiiskoe bibleiskoe
obshchestvo," in his Religioznyia dvizheniia pri Aleksandre I, vol. I of III: Izsledovaniia i stat'i po epokhe Aleksandra I, with introduction
and notes by N. K. Piksanov (Petrograd: Izdatel'stvo "OGNI," 1916). The Pypin work was first published in Vestnik Evropy in 1868. The
finest one-volume study on the Russian Bible Society in English is still the unpublished dissertation of Judith Cohen Zacek, "The Russian
Bible Society, 1812-1826," Columbia University, 1964.

operations. The RBS printing establishment, with its sixteen presses, modern stereotype printing and
binding operations, and newly outfitted premises alongside the Imperial Summer Gardens in Petersburg,
generated a major revolution in the technology of Russian printing.8 From 1817 until the Russian Bible
Societys closure in 1825, Henderson would serve on the RBSs publications committee, reviewing
translations and editions published by the Society in more than a dozen languages of the empire.
Hendersons travel to Russia was conditioned by more than the immediate need to help his
friend John Paterson at the flourishing Bible Society enterprise in Petersburg. What also drove his
interest in Eurasia was a longstanding missionary agenda focused primarily upon two of the most
significant non-Christian communities in the south of Russianamely, the Jewish world of right-bank
Ukraine and the Crimea, and the Muslim Turkic world of the steppe frontier and Caucasian borderlands.
While this paper addresses primarily Hendersons window onto the Jewish communities of Ukraine and
the Crimea, it was significant that, in planning for the eleven-month journey that Henderson and
Paterson undertook in 1821-22, even greater attention was paid to the Muslim world where, in
Astrakhan, Henderson intended to set up his own residence to oversee future Bible Society operations in
Turkic Eurasia.
There was ample precedent for Hendersons missionary interests in the Muslim Turkic world.
By the second decade of the nineteenth century, Scottish missionaries dotted the Eurasian frontier,
including the Scottish Missionary Societys settlement at Karass on the northern slopes of the Caucasus
Mountains and a second Scottish mission in the Volga delta city of Astrakhan on the north coast of the
Caspian Sea. Both of these missions had been preparing Turkic translations of scripture well before
Hendersons arrival in Russia. The Scottish missionary William Glen in Astrakhan particularly
impressed upon Henderson the strategic centrality of Astrakhan for oversight of Turkic, Persian, and
Armenian translation projects already under way and in prospect.9 Shortly after his arrival in Russia
Henderson turned down the offer of the London Missionary Society to post him to its Siberian
mission.10 Instead, by late 1817, Henderson had prepared with the blessing of the BFBS a
comprehensive plan for location of a Bible Society center in Astrakhan, arguing that only St. Petersburg
rivaled Astrakhan in its potential importance for biblical work in Eurasia:
Next to the Russian Bible Society in St. Petersburg, the Auxiliary Bible Society at Astrachan possesses
from its local situation the strongest claims on the consideration and support of the Parent Institution
[the RBS]. It may be regarded as the grand Key not only to the nations professing Christianity, who
inhabit the countries between the Caspian and Black Seas, but also to some millions of Mohammedans
and a great proportion of the pagan population of Central Asia. From Astrachan as a centre Biblical
exertions may be extended to the following countries and tribes . . ..11
Hendersons memorial identified nine different countries/peoples that might be best served from
Astrakhannamely, 1) the mountain tribes of the Caucasus (in whose number he included the
Abkhazians, the Circassians, the Ossetians, the Ingush, and the Lesgians); 2) Georgia (in which he
added Mingrelia, Gurial, and Immeretta); 3) Armenia; 4) Kurdistan (from an outpost in Diarbekir he
expected the effort in Kurdistan to connect with other efforts in Basra and Baghdad); 5) Persia; 6) the
Tatar tribes (in which group he separately identified the Crimean, Kuman, Kazan, Orenburg, Kirgizian,
and Siberian Tatars); 7) Independent Tatary (in which region he includes the Turkestans,
Turkomans, Uzbeks, Bucharians [whom he saw as a gateway to Tibet], and Karamans); 8) the
8
S. K. Batalden, "Printing the Bible in the Reign of Alexander I: Toward a Reinterpretation of the Russian Bible Society," in
Geoffrey A. Hosking, ed., Church, Nation and State in Russia and Ukraine (London: Macmillan and University of London School of
Slavonic and East European Studies, "Studies in Russia and East Europe," 1991), 65-78.
9
In October 1817, the Reverend William Glen had written to Ebenezer Henderson from Astrakhan imploring Henderson to
consider the needs in the South. Glen wrote, I know of no quarter on the face of the Globe where you might be more usefully employed
than here . . . Astrachan itself is perhaps the most eligible spot in Christendom for circulating the Scriptures extensively among the
Mohammedan tribes. . .. (Glen to Henderson, 29 October 1817, in BFBS Foreign Correspondence Books, #9, pp. 491-492).
10
Hendersons letters of 16 March 1817 and 8 and 24 April 1817 to the BFBS, although no longer extant, are quoted in the BFBS
Minutes of the Committee, vol. 8 (2 June 1817), pp. 265-266. In the letters Henderson asks that the BFBS Committee do him the justice
to believe that his design of proceeding to Irkutzk, in Siberia, was purely from a connection that he might thereby be made instrumental in
promoting the end of this Institution to an extent which he did not conceive it possible for him to do in any other situation.
11
Memorial of the Reverend Dr. Henderson, St. Petersburg, 30 December 1817 (Presented 12 January 1818 to the Printing
Subcommittee of the Russian Bible Society), copied in BFBS Foreign Correspondence Books, No. 9, pp. 488-490.

Kalmuks; and 9) Tibet. In short, Astrakhan was for Henderson the critical gateway to the Eurasian
steppe, the Caucasus, and the Middle East.
When he subsequently arrived in Astrakhan in 1821, Henderson reconfirmed this special focus
of his attention:
It was with feelings of no ordinary interest that the author entered the gates of Astrachan. For nearly
three years his attention had been directed to that town, as the centre of an important sphere of Biblical
operations; his furniture and library had been forwarded from St. Petersburgh the preceding summer,
and commodious rooms in the Mission-house had been kindly allotted for his residence. He was,
therefore, naturally anxious to turn his temporary stay in the place to the best possible account, by
investigating the state and character of its inhabitants, and the facilities which might be presented for the
attainment of his object, by the connections established between them and the inhabitants of different
parts of Asia.12
Henderson had committed himself to Astrakhan as the logical center for Bible Society outreach along a
Eurasian frontier that in his mind extended beyond the Turkic borderlands to the Caucasus and
Transcaucasia (including Georgia and Armenia), and to the Middle East (Kurdistan and Persia) as well.
His training for work with Turkic dialects of the region was reflected not only in his published travels in
Russia (which describes his conversations with local Turkic-speaking population of the region), but also
in his correspondence with BFBS officials in London wherein he analyzed both published and
unpublished Turkic translations of scripture.13 The irony in this focus upon Astrakhan and Turkic
translation is that no sooner had Henderson arrived in the immediate region than he was drawn into a
conflict that ultimately led not only to the curtailment of further travel on the Russian frontier, but also
to the abandoning of his plans for resettlement in Astrakhan, and, indeed, to the very severance of his
own and John Patersons formal ties with the British and Foreign Bible Society.
The circumstances leading to this rupture with the BFBS were tied to the British Societys
official publication and circulation of modern Turkic biblical translation. Despite the strenuous
objections registered by Ebenezer Henderson to BFBS involvement with a Turkic New Testament
translated centuries earlier by a certain Ali Bey, BFBS officers in London informed Henderson and
Paterson during their travels in the Caucasus that the decision had been taken to fund and circulate under
BFBS auspices the Paris edition of Ali Beys Turkish New Testament.14 In Hendersons view, the Ali
Bey text had incorporated pompous high-sounding phrases, circumlocutory forms, abundant errors,
and a profusion of Arabic and Persic words, none of which was compatible with the needs of modern
Turkic biblical translation.15
At the time, there were at least three sets of Tatar/Turkic scriptural texts known to Henderson on
the Russian frontier.16 There was in the first instance the 1813 New Testament translated and published
by the Karass missionary, Rev. Henry Brunton.17 The language of the Brunton translation was
12

Henderson, Biblical Researches and Travels in Russia, 420.

Henderson, Biblical Researches and Travels in Russia, 421-428. See also the correspondence of Ebenezer Henderson to the
BFBS Foreign Secretary in BFBS Foreign Correspondence Books, Nos. 6 and 9 (1817).
14
The charges of Henderson and Paterson are set forth fully in their extended letter to BFBS secretaries mailed from Mozdok on
1 December 1821 (O.S.), John Paterson and Ebenezer Henderson to the Revs. Owen, Hughes, and Steinkopf, BFBS Foreign
Correspondence Inwards, 1822, Box 1, leaf 21. The Ali Bey translation was a seventeenth-century Ottoman text produced by a kidnapped
Polish slave, Albertus Bobovius, who was educated at the Ottoman sultans court (adopting the name Ali Bey upon conversion to Islam),
where he developed remarkable linguistic skills leading to appointment as the first dragoman or chief translator at the Ottoman Porte.
According to Darlow and Moule, Bobovius (Ali Bey) completed in 1666 an entire translation of the Bible into Ottoman Turkish, using a
French Protestant edition as a base text. See T. H. Darlow and H. F. Moule, comps., Historical Catalogue of the Printed Editions of Holy
Scripture in the Library of the British and Foreign Bible Society. Vol. II: Languages Other Than English. Part 3: Ora to Zulu (London:
1903; reprint, NY: Kraus Reprint,1963). Darlow and Moule (hereinafter DM) identify the BFBS Ali Bey translation as having been
published in Paris in 1819 (DM 9453), with a subsequent addition of errata no doubt responding in part to the criticisms of Ebenezer
Henderson.
15
The detailed allegations may be found in the published tracts issued by Ebenezer Henderson, An Appeal to the British and
Foreign Bible Society on the Turkish New Testament (London: Rivingtons, 1824) and The Turkish New Testament Incapable of Defence,
and the True Principles of Biblical Translation Vindicated; in Answer to Professor Lees Remarks, etc. (London: Rivingtons, 1825). See
also, Henderson, Biblical Researches and Travels in Russia, 427-428.
16
See the discussion of Turkic texts in Hendersons Biblical Researches and Travels in Russia, 421-428.
17
DM9438 identifies the Brunton New Testament in Nogai Tatar published in Karass in 1813 in Arabic orthography.
13

identified as Nogai Tatar. Henderson however called the language generically Tatar-Turkish
because its purist Turkish forms (largely untarnished by Arabic and Persian loan words) remained
generally intelligible to a wide range of local Tatars of the south, despite its variance from any one
specific spoken Tatar dialect.
Second, Charles Fraser, a missionary at the Scottish station in Astrakhan, prepared an 1820 revision of
the Brunton New Testament. That 1820 edition was published in Astrakhan at the expense of the
Russian Bible Society.18 Fraser sought to revise the Brunton text in such a way as to bring it into closer
conformity with the spoken Turkic language of the population living around Orenburgthus, the socalled Orenburg Tatar New Testament.
Finally, in addition to the Brunton and Fraser Tatar New Testament texts, there was a third effort
to render scripture into a Tatar dialect. This was largely the work of John Dickson of the Karass
mission, who after the death of Henry Brunton sought, at the request of John Paterson and the Russian
Bible Society, to prepare an Old Testament translation conforming to Bruntons New Testament. At
least two editions of Dicksons Psalter were published in Astrakhan (1815 and 1818). His translation of
Genesis was printed in 1819, and a translated edition of GenesisJudges 4: 14 followed in 1825. The
Old Testament translations drew heavily upon a Turkic edition of the Hebrew Bible used by Karaite
Jews in the Crimea. Dickson modified the Karaite text as he proceeded. His goal was ultimately to
prepare a complete edition of a Tatar-Turkish Bible, adding his Karaite-based Old Testament
translations to modified New Testament editions based upon the Brunton and Fraser texts. Dicksons
modifications of the existing New Testament Tatar texts reflected his use of the Paris edition of Ali
Beys Turkish New Testament, a work that, though flawed in Hendersons eyes, could still be used for
scholarly purposes. Although Dickson completed translations of other Old Testament books, the full
Dickson Tatar-Turkish Bible project remained unfinished at the time the Astrakhan mission was closed
in 1825.19
From the perspective of Ebenezer Henderson, the BFBS decision to circulate the Ali Bey
Turkish New Testament constituted an affront to the disciplined efforts of Scottish missionaries in
Astrakhan and Karass who had pioneered important Tatar missionary translations of biblical texts.
Equally troublesome were the personal implications of this decision. In accepting the Ali Bey New
Testament over the objections of Henderson, the BFBS Committee in London had bowed to the wishes
of Robert Pinkerton, a BFBS agent in central Europe who was well traveled in the Ottoman Middle
East, but who was not a linguist. From Hendersons perspective, Pinkerton failed to appreciate the
subtleties of Tatar biblical translation, and if Pinkerton were to take charge of Tatar-Turkish translations
for the BFBS, there would be no point in Hendersons intended move to Astrakhan. Confounded by
Pinkertons intervention with the BFBS Committee in London and angered over the BFBS decision to
publish and circulate the Ali Bey New Testament, Henderson and Paterson formally resigned from all
connections with the BFBS. Returning to St. Petersburg without having completed their planned travel
to Armenia and Persia, the two sojourners petitioned successfully to be placed directly under the
employment of the Russian Bible Society and its president, Aleksandr Golitsyn.
Despite the more positive tone struck in his published Biblical Researches and Travels, Hendersons
sojourn in the south had ended miserably. He had narrowly escaped death from repeated bouts of ague
during his travels, he had failed once again, as in his earlier intended travel to India in 1805, to establish
a mission for himself in Asia, and he had been forced to abandon his longstanding ties with the British
and Foreign Bible Society. Although Hendersons intended mission to the Mohammedan and pagan
tribes on the Eurasian frontier was abortive, the window that his travels opened onto the modern Jewish

18

DM9425, published in Astrakhan in 1820 in the Arabic orthography. DM confusingly refer to this as an edition in Kyrgyz

Tatar.

19
All Dicksons translations were published in Arabic orthography in Astrakhan. The 1815 Psalter is DM9439. The 1818 new
edition of the Psalter is DM9441. The 1819 edition of Genesis is DM9406. The 1825 translation of Genesis-Judges (4:14) is DM 9443.
Dicksons revised New Testament, published in 1825, is DM 9444. Dicksons access to the Karaite Turkic translation of the Hebrew Bible
was owing to the purchase of a Karaite text by Robert Pinkerton. That text was transmitted to the St. Petersburg offices of the Russian
Bible Society, which then sent it back to Astrakhan for use by Dickson. See Hendersons description of the four-volume Karaite
manuscript that he viewed in Astrakhan (Biblical Researches and Travels, 331-339).

world would continue to color his subsequent writings and activity, and would contribute to the
fundamental framing of the Jewish question in nineteenth-century Russia.
As in the case of Hendersons interest in Turkic Eurasia, his focus upon the Jewish world of
Ukraine and the Crimea significantly antedated his travels in the region. Missions to the Jews had been
at the center of attention back in Hendersons seminary days in Edinburgh, when the missionary organ
of the church independency movement in Scotland, The Missionary Magazine, regularly ran articles
devoted to conversion of the Jews.20 Hendersons mastery of Hebrew and his work with Old
Testament/Hebrew Bible translation also served to connect him with centers of Jewish enlightenment in
northern Europe. Writing from Elsinore, Denmark, in 1806, Henderson noted the multitude of Jews
here for whom he held out the hope that they are not so averse to hearken to what Christians have to
say respecting the messiah.21 One of the parishioners in Hendersons English chapel in Gottenburgh,
Sweden, Johann Christian Moritz, was a converted Jew who later became a missionary to the Jews in
Russia from 1817 to 1825, functioning under the authority of the London Society for Promoting
Christianity Amongst the Jews (LSPCAJ, est. 1809). Although Henderson would later break with the
LSPCJ over its specifically Anglican identification, his preoccupation with conversion of the Jews was
firmly in place by the time he traveled to St. Petersburg at the end of 1816. Once in St. Petersburg,
Henderson collaborated closely with the foremost Russian Hebraic scholar of the day, Gerasim
Petrovich Pavskii, who assisted him in preparing a revised translation of the Hebrew New Testament.
Pavskiis subsequent Russian translation of the Psalter from the Hebrew Masoretic text marked a major
turning point in modern Russian biblical translation.22
The travels of Henderson and Paterson in Ukraine and the Crimea took them to numerous
traditional Jewish communities in the Pale of Settlement, as well as to two significant centers of the
Jewish Karaim--one in Lutsk, the other Djufut-Kal, Crimea. Following their departure from Kiev, the
journey, according to the Henderson account, took them through the Pale of Settlement on a route that
went first to Zhitomir and then on to Ostrog, with diversions to Dubno and Lutsk, and finally south via
several towns to Kamenetsk-Podolskii. Before reaching the Crimea they ventured into Bessarabia and
several towns along the northern Black Sea coast. From the Crimea they traveled onward to Astrakhan
and then southward into the Caucasus. Throughout the journey, they met with local chapters of the
Russian Bible Society. Henderson had made prior arrangements for the local chapters to be sent copies
of the Hebrew New Testament, which he then distributed during his frequent encounters with local
Jewish rabbis and community leaders. From the Crimea onward, via Astrakhan to the Caucasus
Mountains, the Bible society travelers were accompanied by Scottish missionaries who had arranged in
advance to meet up with their countrymen.
While Hendersons ethnography and demography of the Pale are not without interesthe
recorded, for example, Jewish population figures, numbers of synagogues, etc., for the major cities of
the region, including Zhitomir, Dubno, Lutsk, and Kamenets-Podolskthe abundant detail and
interesting asides were, in the end, far less revealing than was the specific attention to religious life
within the Pale itself.23 Hendersons treatment of these variant Jewish communities on the southern
frontier was marked by an overarching ambivalence toward Jewish religious practice in the region. On
the one hand, in describing the traditional rabbinical practices of Jewish communities of the Pale,
including Hassidim, Habadim, and Zoharites, Henderson expressed a level of contempt that was
dismissive in the extreme and unmistakably anti-Semitic. Yet, on the other, he described the practices
20
The Missionary Magazine (Edinburgh, 1796-1813) was superseded from 1813 onwards by The Evangelical Magazine and
Missionary Chronicle.
21
Extract of a Letter from Mr. Henderson (Elsineur, June 17, 1806), The Missionary Magazine, vol. XI, no. 123 (August
1806), 343-344.
22
On Pavskiis translation efforts, see S. K. Batalden, Gerasim Pavskii's Clandestine Old Testament: The Politics of NineteenthCentury Russian Biblical Translation, Church History, vol. 57, no. 4 (1988), pp. 486-498. The Pavskii Old Testament translations
constituted the pivotal textus primus of the Russian Old Testament. On Hendersons collaboration with Pavskii, see Henderson Bishop
Frederick Mnter (St. Petersburg Copenhagen, 20 September 1822 O.S.), Royal Library of Copenhagen, Ny Kgl. Samling, Fol. 1698.
In the letter sent to Copenhagen, Henderson lauds the Russian archpriest, noting that the Psalms have been translated by the Rev. Dr.
Paffsky of the Kazan Church in this city, a liberal and enlightened clergyman who has also furnished his countrymen with a Hebrew
Grammar in their own language.
23
Henderson, Biblical Researches and Travels in Russia, 196-245; 306-339. The pagination corresponds to four chapters within
the Henderson account devoted to Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement and within the Karaite communities of Lutsk and Djufut-Kal.

of Karaite Jews in the most laudatory language, reserving for them terms of approbation that paralleled
expressions he typically used elsewhere for pious Christian faithful.
Thus, in describing negatively the rabbinical Jewish communities of Russian Poland, he spoke of
that singular, degraded, and miserable people. Estimating a total Jewish population of almost two
million in the lands of the former Polish Commonwealththe Pale of Settlementhe wrote of Jews as
swarming in every direction; and in the provinces recently incorporated in the empire, their rapid
increase is the subject no less of alarm than surprise to the other inhabitants.24 Employing physical
terms that today call to mind racist, orientalist stereotypes cited by Edward Said in his work on western
depictions of the Middle East, Henderson objectified the Jewish other in terms that were clearly antiSemitic:
The Polish Jew is generally of a pale and sallow complexion, the features small, and the hair, which is
mostly black, is suffered to hang in ringlets over the shoulders. A fine beard, covering the chin, finishes
the oriental character of the Jewish physiognomy. But few of the Jews enjoy a robust and healthy
constitution; an evil resulting from a combination of physical and moral causes, such as early marriage,
innutritious food, the filthiness of their domestic habits, and the perpetual mental anxiety, which is so
strikingly depicted in their countenance, and forms the most onerous part of the curse of the Almighty to
which they are subject in their dispersion. Their breath is absolutely intolerable; and the offensive odour
of their apartments is such, that I have more than once been obliged to break off interesting discussions
with their Rabbins, in order to obtain a fresh supply of rarefied air.25
While peasant housing in rural Russia, as in western Europe, may not always have been at levels of
cleanliness prescribed by urban, middle-class evangelicals, one senses from Hendersons outbursts more
than a little ethnocentrism, compounded perhaps by his own personal discomfort with garlic.
From such physical descriptions Hendersons account deteriorated into a series of
generalizations that sought to bolster his wider point about the degraded condition of Russian Jews.
Accordingly, Henderson would have us believe that, having been forced to marry too early, the young
Jewish bride is commonly subject to the incestuous designs of her father-in-law.26 Similarly, Jews are
awfully addicted to incontinency.27 Few of the Jews learn any trade, we learn, but then that is
subsequently modified by Hendersons explanation that their habits of illicit and unrighteous trade are
proverbial. Henderson elaborated:
No means are regarded as sinful that promise to secure the acquirement of money; cheating, lying,
stealing, and even murder, if the persons on whom they are practiced be not Jews, are hallowed by the
sanctions of the Rabbins. They make a point of stealing from a Christian, whenever they have the
smallest prospect of escaping with impunity. Nor is this pilfering disposition confined to the more abject
and wretched part of the community; the well-dressed Jew is not unfrequently a thief in disguise
flattering himself with the hope, that his superior appearance will make him pass without suspicion.28
The reference here to murder hallowed by the sanctions of the Rabbins was the closest Henderson
came to approaching the matter of ritual murder or blood libel. While the travel account contains
numerous stereotypes, Henderson typically steered clear of such notorious claims as that of blood libel,
even at times employing the passive voice (it is asserted that) when addressing potentially
controversial issues with which he had no personal familiarity, as in the case of the claim of incestuous
ties between fathers and daughters-in-law.
In the end, Henderson reserved his greatest assault for what he labeled the most absurd
superstitions owing to the Jews unbounded credence to the doctrines of . . . impostors.29 What
Henderson sought to address in this case was what he called the Jewish two-fold law, the written law
of Moses and the traditional or oral law associated with Talmudic learning. It was particularly for the
24

Henderson, Biblical Researches and Travels in Russia, 220-221.

Henderson, Biblical Researches and Travels in Russia, 222-223.
26
Henderson, Biblical Researches and Travels in Russia, 224.
27
Henderson, Biblical Researches and Travels in Russia, 229.
28
Henderson, Biblical Researches and Travels in Russia, 224, 229.
29
Henderson, Biblical Researches and Travels in Russia, 227,228ff.
25

traditions of the Talmud, including the mystical interpretations of the Kabala, that Henderson saved his
strongest diatribe. The amulet, the talisman, and the occult science of Kabalistic hidden scriptural
interpretation were signs for Henderson that Russian Talmudists were analogous to the Pharisees at
the time of Christ.30 He summarized:
Dupes of the most absurd superstitions, and destitute of those principles, which alone are able to curb
human depravity, the Jews are naturally abandoned to the perpetuation of crimes, the turpitude and
demerit of which are modified or palliated by rabbinical sophistries, and the powerful impulse of
cupidity and pride.31
Yet, curiously, the same Henderson whose anti-Semitic vitriol was visited upon the traditional
rabbinical Jews of the Pale could write in the same travel account of the remarkable virtues of the
Jewish Karaim and their settlements in Lutsk and at Djufut-Kal. How was that possible? What was it
about the Karaite Jews that so attracted the evangelical Scot? Karaites of the Crimea and of right-bank
Ukraine were those Jews who had been partially assimilated into Ottoman, Turkic culture, adopting a
Turkic Jagaltai dialect into which they also translated the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament. What
attracted Henderson was not just their Turkic languagehis ability to handle both Hebrew and Turkic
languages had opened up unusual channels of communication during his travelsbut that
communication held for both the traditional rabbinical communities and the Karaim. Nor was he
attracted simply by the unique beauty of the Karaite setting on the Crimea, a description that is among
the more interesting parts of the travelogue. Rather, what appealed to Henderson was the unique fidelity
that Karaite Jews exhibited toward scripture. Their rejection of Talmudic traditionsone of the
defining features of the Karaite communitiesand their adherence to the letter of the Mosaic law was
exactly the kind of principled position that an evangelical Scot could appreciate. As Henderson
confirmed, One of their distinguishing tenets is known to have been their strict adherence to the letter
of the law, to the entire exclusion of traditionary [i.e., Talmudic] interpretation.32
While recent scholarship on the Karaites has tended to dismiss the notion current in Hendersons
day and in his Biblical Researches and Travels in Russia that the Karaim were descended from the
biblical Sadducees, the Karaite fidelity to the letter of the law continued to be reflected in the early
nineteenth century both in ritual observances and in their own sense of historical tradition.33 Henderson
noted, for example, the difference in the way in which traditional rabbinical communities of the Pale and
alternative Karaite communities interpreted such scriptural passages as that of Exodus 31: 3, which
reads, Ye shall kindle no fire throughout your habitations on the Sabbath day. Henderson noted that
in traditional rabbinical communities of the Pale during the night of the Jewish Sabbath, every traveler
must be struck to find it completely illuminated by the profusion of candles that are burning in the
houses . . . all of which have been lighted a few minutes before Sabbath commenced. On the contrary,
he noted:
In the houses of the Karaim . . . you will neither see a candle nor fire from sunset on Friday evening till
the same time the evening following. They eat nothing but cold meat during the whole of this period.
The only instance of evasion on their part that I have heard of, is their leaning over the window to light
and smoke their pipes; but my information was from a Rabbinist, and is therefore to be suspected.34
Hendersons juxtaposition of Rabbinist or traditionary Jews of the Pale with Karaites was sharply
drawn in the examples he laced throughout the account. For Henderson and his Bible Society audience,
the Karaite fidelity to scripture was altogether laudatory. Thus, he did not seek to portray the Karaites as

30
31

Henderson, Biblical Researches and Travels in Russia, 233.

Henderson, Biblical Researches and Travels in Russia, 228.

32

Henderson, Biblical Researches and Travels in Russia, 315-316.

On the Karaites, see Iulii Gessen, Pravovoe polozhenie Karaimov v Rossii, in Karaimy, Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia, vol. IX
(Spb: Brokgauz-Efron, b.d.), 291-298; also Jo. H. & L.N., Karaites, Encyclopedia Judaica, vol. 10 (Jerusalem, 197?), 761-781; and Leon
Nemoy, Karaites, Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. by Mircea Eliade, vol. 8 (NY: MacMillan, 1987), 254-259.
34
Henderson, Biblical Researches and Travels in Russia, 321.
33

zealous or rabidly cult-like in their views. Indeed, he found the Karaite rabbis to be remarkably
moderate in their scripturalist views. Commenting on this point, Henderson cautioned:
The reader will greatly err, however, if he supposes that, in their zeal for the exclusive authority of the
Scriptures, the Karaites carry their enmity to the Talmud and other Jewish writings so far as never to
consult them, or have them in their possession. This is by no means the case. On our visit to the
principal Rabbi in Djufut Kal, we found some of the ponderous volumes in his library; and the answer
he gave to our expression of surprise was singularly characteristic of the moderation and good sense of
the sect in general: We do not admit that the Talmud has any binding authority over our consciences,
and there are many things in it which we cannot approve; but should we, on this account, reject what is
good in it, and not avail ourselves of such statements as are consonant with the text of Scripture?35
No doubt as a result of the Karaites scripturalist position, Henderson found other aspects of their local
culture similarly appealing. Thus, we learn that the Karaites are free of superstitions found among the
Jews in general, including the power of talismans. Even the morals of Karaites, Henderson assured
his readers, were better because of their liberation from the clutches of Talmudic superstition. As he
noted:
The standard and tone of morals which their general deportment exhibits is quite of a different stamp
from those of the Rabbinists. In their persons they are tidy; their domestic discipline and arrangements
are correct and exemplary; and their dealings with others are characterized by probity and integrity. . . .
I never yet heard any person speak ill of them, except he was a bigoted adherent of the Talmud.36
[Were they also free from the problems of incontinency?!] Hendersons fulsome description of the
Karaim continued to be used by historians well into the nineteenth century, who credited Henderson
with the finest single first-person account of Karaite worship in Ukraine.37
To address the superstitions of traditional Jewish communities of the Pale and at the same time
to encourage the opening toward enlightenment reflected in the Karaites, Henderson proposed a plan for
Christian missions to the Jews that included four key components.38 First of all, Henderson believed that
missionaries to the Jews needed to be uniquely prepared linguistically, mastering both rabbinical
Hebrew and everyday Yiddish. Second, he believed such missionaries needed to be fully conversant
with the most important traditional Jewish rabbinical commentators, whom he identified as Abraham
Ibn-Ezra (1089-1164), Isaac Abrabanel (1437-1508), David Kimhi (1160-ca.1235), and Salmon ben
Jeroham (tenth century).39 It was necessary, he argued, that Jews be reasoned with on their own
principles. Third, Henderson thought that effective missionizing among the Jews would require a
stationary presence, or permanent mission station, not simply occasional itinerant preaching. Finally,
referring specifically to the model of the Moravian settlements, he thought the only effective plan would
entail the institution of an asylum, by which he meant a large enough residential mission station to
include local settlement of Jewish population who would be instructed in the professions and trades. Not
only would such professional training help to defray the expense of the station, but the idea would be
ultimately to make prospective converts professionally qualified and self-supporting. On this last point,
Henderson elaborated a plan similar to that of the experimental industrial textile town of New Lanark
that David Dale and his son-in-law Robert Owen had developed in Hendersons native Scotland:
With this Institution should be connected the cultivation of those branches of agricultural labour which
might be found necessary for supplying its domestic wants, and those of such as live in the immediate
neighborhood. As at least a couple of Missionaries would constantly reside at such an asylum, beside
enjoying the privileges connected with the celebration of weekly worship, all the members of the
establishment would assemble for morning and evening devotions; and in the school attached to it
35
36

Henderson, Biblical Researches and Travels in Russia, 320.

Henderson, Biblical Researches and Travels in Russia, 322-323.

37

See, for example, William Harris Rule, History of the Karaite Jews (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1870), 173-199.
Henderson, Biblical Researches and Travels in Russia, 238-245.
39
For bio-bibliographical information on these commentators, see the respective entries in the Encyclopedia Judaica (Jerusalem:
Keter Publishing House, 1972).
38

would be different departments according to the different ages and degrees of proficiency in the
scholars. 40
While the language of asylum is particularly jarring, it reflected Hendersons concern for
institutionalized mission stations that could isolate and convert Jews, a practice followed elsewhere by
Scottish missionaries in Karass in the early nineteenth century.
In the years that followed his travels in Russia and closure of the Russian Bible Society,
Henderson returned to England to pursue a career as a seminary professor for the Congregational
Church, but he continued to focus attention upon missions to the Jews. Displeased by the ineffectiveness
and high churchly character of the Church of Englands London Society for Promoting Christianity
Amongst the Jews (LSPCAJ), Henderson was among the founders and first secretaries of a rival British
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Amongst the Jews (BPGAJ). The BPGAJ was founded in
1842 as an alternative, evangelical missionary organization appealing to evangelicals outside the Church
of England. In a lecture delivered on the occasion of the founding of the BPGAJ, it was clear that
Hendersons views on Jewish conversion had evolved in the period since he was in the Russian Empire.
Having moved beyond the pragmatic issues involved with establishment of mission stations in the Pale
of Settlement, Henderson by the 1840s was reinterpreting Old Testament prophecy with the claim that it
foretold how Jewish conversion would be coupled with the return of Jews to Palestine, all as part of a
divine millennial plan for the end of times. In his 1843 lecture On the Conversion of the Jews given to
mark the opening of the British Society for Propagation of the Gospel Amongst the Jews, Henderson
summarized his interpretation of how Jewish conversion would be related to restoration:
If now we inquire, what opinion we are to hold respecting the order of the connexion between their
conversion and their restoration, there can, I conceive, be no doubt that, as to the great body of the
nation, the former will precede the latter. . . . Thus in Jeremiah 31: 9, it is predicted: They shall come
with weeping, and with supplications will I lead them;language evidently descriptive of the
penitential sorrow and devotional exercises with which they shall proceed from the places of their
dispersion.41
An earlier 1840 commentary on the Old Testament book of Isaiah had already anticipated this evolving
Henderson position linking Jewish conversion with their restoration to Palestine and millennialist
prophecy:
On one point, it is necessary specially to bespeak the indulgent consideration of my readersthe
position which I have taken respecting the future restoration of the Jews to Palestine. That such a
restoration is taught in Scriptures I had been accustomed to regard as more than questionable,
howsoever firmly I believed in their future conversion to the faith of Jesus. On examining, however, the
different prophecies of the Old Testament, which treat of a return of that people, I have had the
conviction forced upon my mind, that while the greater number decidedly apply to the restoration which
took place on the capture of Babylon by Cyrus, there are others which cannot, without violence, be thus
applied; but which being upon any just principle of interpretation, equally incapable of application to the
affairs of the Gentile church must be referred to events yet future in Jewish history. . . . Not the most
distant allusion is made throughout these chapters [the last six chapters of Isaiah] to any circumstances
connected with the deliverance from Babylon; while, on the other hand, they contain a distinct
recognition of various things belonging to the New Dispensation. . . . As to the degree of temporal
prosperity promised to them [the Jews], it appears to have special respect to the long-continued
circumstances of adversity in which they have lived; and may perhaps, after all, differ but little from that
40
Henderson, Biblical Researches and Travels in Russia, 245. On New Lanark and its similar enclosed model, see Ian
Donnachie and George Hewitt, Historic New Lanark: The Dale and Owen Industrial Community Since 1785 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1993).
41
On the Conversion of the Jews, in Lectures on the Conversion of the Jews by Ministers of Different Denominations;
Published under the Sanction of the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Among the Jews (London: W. Aylott, 1843), 101-137
(passage cited is from p. 134). Throughout the lecture Henderson employs the same language used in the Biblical Researches and Travels
in Russia regarding the absurd fables of the Talmud and the superstitions of traditional rabbinical Judaism, viewing favorably in this
regard the critical contributions of Moses Mendelssohn to that debate.

10

which will be enjoyed by the members of the Divine kingdom generally during the happy period of the
Millennium.42
In short, on the Jewish question in early nineteenth-century Russia, Hendersons position had combined
the views of an observant traveler and biblical scholar with advocacy of mission asylums for Jews of the
Pale of Settlement. Ultimately, he would become a millennialist writer on Old Testament prophecy
linking the conversion of Jews with their restoration in Palestine and the second coming of Christ. As a
traveling scholar, he had combined ethnographic and demographic description with a dichotomous
labeling of degraded (Talmudic) and enlightened (Karaite) Russian Jews. As a philo-Semitic
conversionist claiming concern for Jews, he offered an agenda for missionizing Jews with a millennialist
call for the restoration of Jews to Palestine in preparation for the second coming of Christ.
Henderson had opened a complicated and invariably disturbing western window onto the Jewish
question in nineteenth-century Russia. It is a picture that at the same time begs at least three larger
questions regarding the origins and legacy of Hendersons views. In the first instance, it is clear both
from the memoir and Hendersons earlier engagement with the Jewish question that Henderson did not
bring to Russia a blank slate in evaluating the condition of East European Jewry. What was it that
informed Hendersons account of Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement? It is clear from Biblical
Research and Travels in Russia that Henderson had read western literature on Jewish customs. This
was particularly seen in the influence upon Henderson of Johann Andreas Eisenmenger (1654-1704),
whose classic work on Jewish beliefs and customs, Entdecktes Judenthum (Judaism Unmasked),
published posthumously in Berlin in 1710, was cited by Henderson.43 The Entdecktes Judenthum
(Judaism Unmasked), translated into several European languages, including English, was no doubt the
most influential work of its kind, capturing a wide audience of western scholars and lay readership.
What Eisenmenger did was to take complicated Talmudic, rabbinical traditions that had evolved over
hundreds of years, and dissect them as though they were a set of proof texts. In doing so he drew upon
the most extreme elements of Judaic oral tradition and interpreted these elements as normative. For
example, if Eisenmenger found in the Talmud an expression that a Gentile who studies the Torah
deserves death, he might explain this as a literal Jewish requirement of a death penalty, even though in
Talmudic usage such language would invariably be figurative, reflecting far more innocent intent.
As Jacob Katz, the historian of Judaism, has noted in his analysis of Eisenmengers work, Entdecktes
Judenthum reads like a parody of both the legal and homiletical literature. It was not that Eisenmenger
was forging his sources or fabricating examples. There was rather a kernel of truth in what he wrote.
Jews, after all, lived in what Katz calls a world of legendary or mythical concepts, and of ethical
duality, following different standards of morality in their internal and external relationships, and they
dreamed with imaginative speculation about the future.44 But, as Katz has noted so well, the same kind
of evidence could be martialed with respect to Christian traditions. Would it not have been possible to
write a comparable Entdecktes Christenthum (Christianity Unmasked), drawing upon proof texts from
medieval canon law?
The point here is that Eisenmengers parody from the early eighteenth century found a ready audience
within an evangelical awakening wherein the account of Talmudic superstition and degradation could
serve to validate and energize Christian missions to the Jews. It was in just such a context that
Henderson came to draw upon the Eisenmenger account, discovering not unsurprisingly fresh evidence
in the Jewish world of Ukraine for the absurd superstitions and degradation already well defined for a
western audience. Even Hendersons dichotomy between traditional Talmudic, rabbinical Judaism and
the Karaim was foreshadowed in the Eisenmenger account.
42
Ebenezer Henderson, The Book of the Prophet Isaiah, translated from the original Hebrew: with a Commentary, Critical,
Philological, and Exegetical: To which is prefixed an Introductory Dissertation on the Life and Times of the Prophet; the Character of His
Style; the Authenticity and Integrity of the Book; and the Principles of Prophetical Interpretation (London: Hamilton, Adams, and Co.,
1840), vi-viii.
43
Henderson cites Eisenmengers work in his own memoir, Biblical Researches and Travels in Russia, 323. For the early
English edition of Eisenmengers work, see [enter British Library citation] .
44
Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700-1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 1322 (quotations from pp. 20-21).

11

There is much in Hendersons Biblical Researches and Travels in Russia that separates it from
the Eisenmenger parody. Henderson frequently identified with the plight of Jews living in the Pale,
urging education and sympathizing with instances of blatant lawlessness, as in the case of his account of
how Jewish residents of Odessa suffered at the hands of angry Greek residents following the funeral for
the Constantinople Greek Patriarch killed in 1821 at the onset of the Greek liberation war.45
Nevertheless, Hendersons underlying message of Talmudic superstition and degraded Jewish
communities in the Pale drew heavily upon a well-established tradition of anti-Jewish writings, preeminently seen in Johann Eisenmengers Entdecktes Judenthum. While the sources informing
Hendersons account point to a well-established anti-Jewish literature in the west, such anti-Jewish and
anti-Semitic Russian publicistic writing is largely a product of the nineteenth century. Was there
nevertheless an audience for Hendersons work in Russia? Because Hendersons Biblical Researches
and Travels came at the early stage of Russian framing of the Jewish question, it is particularly
interesting to examine the reception of Hendersons account in the period following its publication in
the 1820s. While Hendersons travelogue found its audience largely in Britain, his analysis of Jewish
settlement in the Pale and his work with the Hebrew Bible curiously intersected with three quite
different streams of writing on the Jewish question in nineteenth-century Russia.
In the first instance, Hendersons account presaged a generation of British mission to the Jews in
Russian Poland. While Nicholas I closed the door to western missions in other parts of the Russian
Empire, he allowed missionaries to the Jews to remain in Russian Poland, where by 1832 there were as
many as eight working for the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews. The center
of these activities was in Warsaw, with a secondary mission station in Lublin. In 1826, there was
founded in Warsaw a Refuge for Future Neophytes, an institution closely embodying Hendersons
notion of asylum. That refuge contained its own full press and bindery. According to Iulii Gessen,
between 1822 and 1854, when the British mission was closed at the time of the Crimean War, 361 Jews
were baptized. Several of the Jewish apostates subsequently returned to their former Jewish faith.46
A second legacy of Hendersons window onto the Jewish question in Russia was the remarkable
development of Hebraic studies in Petersburg that Henderson helped to foster. Mainly this support of
Russian Hebraic studies took the form of Hendersons personal collaboration with the Kazan Cathedral
Archpriest Gerasim Petrovich Pavskii, who served as tutor to the tsarevich Aleksandr Nikolaevich and
as Hebrew professor at the St. Petersburg Theological Academy. Not only did Henderson sit with
Pavskii on the publications committee of the Russian Bible Society, but he also collaborated with him
on publication of a revised Hebrew New Testament and reviewed Pavskiis translation of the Psalter
into Russian. Their collaboration launched a pattern of Hebraic scholarship that, in sharp contrast to
most prior Slavonic Old Testament textology, gave priority to the use of a Hebrew base text in Russian
Old Testament translation. This textological tradition, specifically the pattern of translation beginning
with Pavskiis translations from the Hebrew Masoretic text, rather than the Greek Septuagint, rests
behind all subsequent modern Russian translations, including the Old Testament of the authorized
sinodalnyi perevod.47 It was not coincidental that out of this rich tradition of Petersburg Hebraic
scholarship ultimately came the most effective and comprehensive public challenge to the charge of
blood libel in nineteenth-century Russia.48
Finally, Hendersons window onto the Jewish communities of south Russia contributed to the public
debate over the Jewish question in Nicolaevan Russia. Specifically, it was Hendersons depiction of
backward Talmudic superstitions that came to be addressed in two radically different agendas put
forward by Russian ministerial officials to address the reform of Jewish education. The first of these is
45

Henderson, Biblical Researches and Travels in Russia, 274.

46

Iu. Gessen, Angliiskie missionery v Rossii, Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia, vol. II, 491-494. For a more generous British
perspective on the mission, see the biographical account of the Rev. Alexander McCaul prepared by his son. The Rev. Alexander McCaul
was head of the London Societys mission in Warsaw from 1823 to 1830 (Joseph B. McCaul, A Memorial Sketch of the Rev. Alexander
McCaul, D.D., Rector of St. Magnus, and Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament Exegesis, Kings College, London [London: Rivington,
1863]).
47
Batalden, Gerasim Pavskii's Clandestine Old Testament, 495-498.
48
S. K. Batalden, ANineteenth-Century Russian Biblical Translation and the Jewish Question,@ in Kirchen im Kontext
unterschiedlicher Kulturen, ed. by K. C. Felmy, F. von Lilienfeld, et al. (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991), 577-587.

12

the well-documented position of Sergei S. Uvarov, Minister of Education (National Enlightenment) in

the reign of Nicholas I. Uvarov, who has been judged by some to have used educational reform as a
cover for converting Jews to Christianity, proposed a series of far-reaching changes in Jewish education
in the 1830s and 1840s designed to liberate Jewish learning from the exclusive preserve of reactionary
and obscurantist Talmudist teachers. In 1841, Uvarov set forth his views on Jewish education in a report
On the transformation of the Jews, and Opinion on this Subject Abroad.49 Far from a mere
conversionist agenda, Uvarov recognized from western writing that the self-interest of rabbis and their
prejudices posed major obstacles to Jewish enlightenment. Accepting the anti-Talmudist language of
Henderson and comparable western writers, Uvarov called for reforms in the curriculum of Jewish
schools that would mirror those already in place elsewhere in the Empire. His new Jewish school
would involve study of the Bible, and the ethical and moral teachings of Judaism, while at the same time
seeking to counteract the negative influence of the Talmud. The proposals of Uvarov, while they may
have served to advance his own civilizing mission (which he obviously found most compatible with
Christianity), were also corresponding to reforms being recommended by leading maskilim reformers.
What Uvarov was essentially proposing was a series of enlightenment reforms to counteract the
obscurantism and backwardness documented in Hendersons depiction of rabbinical Judaism in the Pale.
Not all Russian bureaucrats were prepared to address the Jewish question with such a civilizing or
enlightening intent. Instead, the same documented accounts of Talmudic superstition and backwardness
that would lead Uvarov and Count Kiselev to propose educational reform led other Russian bureaucrats
to write conspiratorial anti-Semitic diatribes and urge more repressive measures. These writings, which
also derive some of their language and spirit from western pejorative depictions such as those of
Henderson and Eisenmenger, are set forth in the paper of Anne Fredrickson. There is, thus, a strange
and ironical twist to this western window onto Jewish communities of the Pale. Negative western
perceptions of Talmudic obscurantism yielded at one and the same time widely disparate Russian
responses ranging from positive enlightenment measures for Jewish educational reform to
institutionalized western missions directed toward Jews, and, ultimately, to anti-Semitic, fear-mongering
diatribes and claims of blood libelcharges that, in a subsequent generation, brought a vicious cycle of
repression, Russification, and pogrom.
By way of epilogue, I believe there is yet another legacy of Hendersons window onto modern Judaism
that continues to be played out in our midst todaynamely, the impact of his millennialism on
contemporary perceptions of Jews and of Israel within the Christian religious right. Today, there are
millions of Hendersons like-minded followers who have staked out a philo-Semitic and pro-Israeli
position that sees the restoration of Palestine to the Jews to be part of a prophetic, divine plan that
anticipates a new dispensation, or a millennial second coming of Christ. Underlying such views is an
interpretation of prophecy first offered by Henderson and others of his generation that the conversion of
Jews and their restoration to Palestine were critical antecedents to events that would lead inexorably to a
millennial second coming of Christ.50
The power of this millennialist message today can be seen in the extraordinary popularity of the writers
Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins whose novels are, with the exception of the Harry Potter novels, the
bestselling works of fiction today.51 Their books have sold 35 million copies in the United States and
Canada, 50 million if one includes the childrens versions. Although these works are classified as
religious fiction and are therefore, like car maintenance manuals, never cited on bestseller lists, they
49
Sbornik postanovlenii po Ministerstvu narodnago prosveshcheniia, vol. 2, sec. 2 (Spb., 1876), 227-243. There have been a
number of western reevaluations of the views of S. S. Uvarov in the past thirty years. See, especially, James Flynn, S. S. Uvarovs
Liberal Years, Jahrbcher fr Geschichte Osteuropas 20 (1972), 48-91; and Cynthia H. Whittaker, Count S. S. Uvarov: Conservatism
and National Enlightenment in Pre-Reform Russia, Ph. D. Dissertation, Indiana University, 1971. But, the finest effort to address
Uvarovs stand on the Jewish question is that of Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society
in Russia, 1825-1855 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1983), esp. 62-69. It is from Stanislawski that I first identified
Uvarovs 1841 report, and the complementary 1840 report of Count Pavel Kiselev, On the Ordering of the Jewish Nation in Russia,
published as Istoricheskie soobshcheniia, in Voskhod, 1901, ch. 4: 29-40; and ch. 5: 3-9.
50
In his later writings on the prophetic books of the Old Testament, Henderson fits into the mainstream of millennialist writers so
effectively summarized in W. H. Oliver, Prophets and Millennialists: The Uses of Biblical Prophecy in England from the 1790s to the
1840s (New Zealand: Auckland University Press and Oxford University Press, 1978).
51
The account that follows is taken from the essay by Paul Valley, The Eve of Destruction, The Independent on Sunday: Talk
of the Town (London, England), 7 September 2003, 16-23.

13

build upon a uniquely modern millennialist point of departure. The first of the eleven volumes already
published, entitled Left Behind, opens with passengers vanishing on board a transatlantic Boeing 747.
All over the world the same thing is happening: husbands wake to find only their wives nightgowns in
their beds, pregnant women watch their stomachs fall flat as their unborn fetuses disappear. Across the
globe millions go missing. What has happened is called the Rapture. Coined by a narrow sect of
Protestant evangelicals to describe a literalist reading of New Testament texts about the time when
Christ will return to mark the end of the world, the Rapture leaves behind not just atheists, but also most
Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, and nearly everyone else. These unhappy malefactors face
seven years of catastrophes (the Tribulation) presided over by the anti-Christ (typically, the secretarygeneral of the United Nations). Those who are reading the Left Behind books see the novels not as
fiction, but as tomorrows newspapers.
The point here is that such apocalyptic, millennialist thinking also can have profound implications for
current American foreign policy and domestic politics. Readers of LaHaye and Jenkins believe that the
Second Coming will take place in the generation that immediately follows the restoration of Palestine to
the Jews. They back Israeli government policy without question, fervently supporting Israels
sovereignty over the West Bank because of Gods granting of the Holy Land to the biblical patriarchs.
They urge Israelis to resist negotiating land for peace and instead, maintain the policy of building
settlements and incorporating the Occupied Territories within the state of Israel. The result of this belief
is to be seen in the commitment of evangelical leaders whose support for Israel remains at the top of
their agenda. With powerful allies in high places within the current Bush administration, these
evangelical leaders have a significant and potentially growing impact upon issues of policy as, for
example, when 100,000 Christian fundamentalists sent angry e-mails last year at the time President
Bush demanded Israeli tank withdrawal from the West Bank.
What are we to make of this philo-Semitism, its popularity among contemporary Christian
conservatives, and its remarkable access to current circles of power in the West? The historian
Christopher Clark, writing on Protestant missions to the Jews in nineteenth-century Prussia, captured
what is a deeper and more tragic irony, namely that the missionaries were responding to the same sense
of crisis that animated their anti-Semitic counterpartsthe strain of rapid industrialization, modernity,
and the fear of the drift away from Christian values. Thus the same animus that could lead some to
issue diatribes of fear and repression could lead others to carve out a new apocalyptic eschatology. Clark
writes:
It was not Christian anti-Judaism, but rather the philo-Semitic tradition of eschatological hope that
linked the anti-Semitism of the missionaries with their Christian belief. . . . Missionary philo-Semitism
and nineteenth-century anti-Semitism were animated by the same inner logic. Axiomatic to both was the
assumption that the collective destiny of Jews and that of Christians were inseparably bound up.52
Similarly, today, the readers of Left Behind create an eschatology in which the fate of Israel and that of
millennialist Christians are inseparably bound together. When the president of the United States and
those closest to him identify with such millennialist currents, there is reason for concern.
In fairness to figures of the Great Awakening, such as Ebenezer Henderson, their philo-Semitic concern
for enlightenment and conversion of Jews was distinct from the fear-mongering anti-Semitic rhetoric of
a Vladimir Dal or an Ivan Kostomarov, and their legacy is therefore far more complicated. But, while
they rejected the more overtly anti-Semitic language of their day, including the charge of blood libel,
they ultimately invented an eschatology that instrumentalized the Jewish other. Therein rests the truth
of Ernst Blochs comment that a philo-Semite is an anti-Semite who loves Jews.53

52

Christopher M. Clark, The Politics of Conversion: Missionary Protestantism and the Jews in Prussia, 1728-1941 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1995).
53
Internally quoted in Clark, 281 (from E. Bloch, Die sogenannte Judenfrage, in Literarische Aufstze, vol. IX [Frankfurt,
1965], 552).

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