Étrangement si l’on consulte la Page Wikipedia sur l’Histoire du sionisme, abstraction faite du (des) sionisme(s) religieux, espérance messianique à la marge, « le sionisme (moderne) naît vers 1880 » . On s’étonnera de cette émergence qui fait l’impasse sur quelques événements majeurs qui le précèdent, comme « L’Affaire de Damas » en 1840 !
 
Alors même les Pages anglaises nous montrent en long et en large que les idées sionistes étaient largement promues et actives en arrière-plan depuis le début du XIX°, et que le sionisme chrétien non seulement précède le sionisme mais le stimule ardemment ...

Christian Zionism in the United Kingdom

Jewish Christians like Joseph Frey, who founded he London Society for the Jews, Joseph Woolf, and two theologians Ridley Herschell and Philip Hirschfeld formed an important link between the earlier Restorationism of German Lutheran pietists and British evangelicals, and played a large part in galvinising widespread evangelical support in the UK.[4] In 1840, G. W.

Pieritz, another Jewish missionary for the London Society played an important role in exposing the Damascus blood libels to the British public in The Times.[16] Erasmus Calman was a Latvian Jewish Christian, resident in Jerusalem from 1833, who in 1840 also lobbied vigorously for Jewish settlement in Palestine.[4]

Early political momentum from the 1790s to encourage and facilitate a Jewish return to Israel was doctrinally post millennial in character, being based on Puritan teaching.[5][4] Influential premillennial teachers like James Frere, James Haldane Stewart and Edward Irving in the 1820s and 30s spurred a shift in widely held opinion, with equal advocacy for the restoration.[4][17] The close associates Edward Bickersteth and Lord Shaftesbury were prominent premillennial proponents of Restoration, though Bickersteth did not publicly come to this view of the millennium until 1835, and both held differently nuanced views but jointly considered a return to the land would precede the receipt of spiritual life.[4]

« Perhaps the greater paradox was that Victorian England’s leading Christian Zionist had been encouraged and confirmed in his restorationist views by Jewish converts who were far more zealous in the Zionist cause than most of their fellow Jews. »
On Lord Shaftesbury, Donald Lewis, Professor Church History, Regent College, Vancouver.[4]
 
Shaftesbury repeatedly lobbied Lord Palmerston for moves to stimulate Jewish return to the Middle East, primarily by the appointment of a British Consul in Jerusalem in 1838. He also pressed for the building of Christ Church, the first place of Reformed worship in Jerusalem despite Ottoman and local opposition and the consecration in 1841 of a Jewish joint Anglican and Prussian Bishop in Jerusalem.[18][4] Shaftesbury’s labours paved the way for the Balfour Declaration.[4][19]