Some Jewish Witnesses For Christ

About the book

Aaron Bernstein assembles lives of people of Jewish origin who became Christians, emphasizing religious activity alongside contributions to scholarship and other fields. The introduction sets out his missionary purpose and lists the reference works, memoirs, and institutional histories from which the entries were compiled. Produced in connection with the centenary of the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews, the volume treats conversion as evidence for a Christian theological argument. That organizing conviction is essential to understanding its selection and language. The preface also acknowledges uneven source reliability and the possibility of error. The book is therefore most usefully approached as a historical record of how a particular missionary community represented conversion, achievement, and religious belonging, with individual claims requiring independent assessment.

• Conversion narratives
• Religious identity
• Missionary historiography

Why read it

Its declared sources and institutional purpose make it useful for studying the construction of religious biography as well as the lives it records.

English edition printed at the Operative Jewish Converts' Institution, London, 1909