gideon elazar

The Chinese Christian Back to Jerusalem movement has attracted significant attention in the past two decades. With an original goal of sending out 100,000 Chinese missionaries to destinations throughout Asia, the movement appears to express the vitality and dynamism of reform era Chinese Christianity. In this article I examine the movement's development and its close correspondence to Chinese state geopolitical ambitions to reshape 21 st century globalization through the One Belt One Road Initiative. I discuss the movement development and impact following the recent tightening of religious policy in China and the Covid-19 pandemic. While the BTJ may be seen as a Christian expression of the PRC's self-confidence and nationalism it is also reflective of reform era individuality, often including deep criticism of contemporary Chinese society.

Christian Zionism is a Protestant theology rooted in nineteenth-century Britain, advocating the return of Jews to the land of Israel as the fulfilment of God’s will and plan for the salvation of humanity. This article deals with the unique theology of the Christian Zionist group Hayovel, an organization dedicated to bringing Christian volunteers for agricultural work in the Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Based on fieldwork conducted among Hayovel volunteers, this article offers an analysis of Hayovel’s theology of rootedness and faith in the religious significance of the land. In contrast to mainstream Evangelical Christianity, Hayovel emphasizes the importance of sacred space and attempts to construct an experience of concrete holiness through agricultural work and touring the region’s Biblical sites. Hayovel’s activity is described here as the construction and cultivation of the Israel as a spatial and spiritual core and as a place of potential refuge and as a reaction to t...

This article deals with the convergence of ethnicity and faith in the context of Christian Yunnan. Contemporary Evangelical missionaries working in Yunnan encourage the preservation of ethnic markers while attempting to create a form of ‘pristine faith’: a religiosity that severely limits the role of ethnicity in the construction of identity, emphasizing instead individualism and globalism—processes that may be beneficial for the Chinese state. My discussion here revolves around the distinction made by many Evangelical Christians in China between ‘true’ faith, based on an individual experience of salvation and rebirth, and ‘nominal’ faith, a traditional understanding of religion as an identity that is acquired at birth. Thus, minority Christians whose ancestors converted en masse prior to the 1949 revolution and retain a distinctly ethnic form of religiosity are often labelled ‘nominal’ by contemporary missionaries and converts. In contrast, the latter represent a faith that stems f...

In an attempt to emulate early modern missionaries to Yunnan who engaged in the invention of writing systems for various ethnic groups, contemporary evangelical missionaries in Yunnan have become heavily involved in the realm of linguistics, focused on the preservation of endangered languages. While such activity may potentially be perceived as a challenge to the state-Chinese linguistic hegemony, I argue that the presence of missionary linguists is acceptable to the Chinese authorities as it does not threaten the paramount position of Putonghua but rather serves to integrate minority people into the state system. In addition, based on interviews conducted with a missionary working to produce texts for Kunming’s Buoyi population in their language, I aim to demonstrate how missionary linguists attempt to remold local culture by attempting to reconstruct ethnic identity around a language core. The article is based on fieldwork conducted in Yunnan in 2009–2010 and 2012.

In 2001, the county of Zhongdian in Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan province, was renamed Shangrila, after the monastery described in James Hilton’s 1933 novel, Lost Horizon, and in allusion to the mythical Tibetan kingdom of Shambhala. Thereafter, work began on constructing the region as an easily accessible showcase for Tibetan culture. Based on fieldwork conducted in the Shangrila Thangka Academy, this article deals with the production and commodification of Tibetan Thangka scrolls. The multiple narratives presented in this article, in parallel and sometimes contradictory ways, center around authenticity—ranging from the preservation of Tibetan culture to the propagation of Tibetan Buddhism—and function as a cultural critique of Chinese society in the reform era.

In 1991 Daniel J. Elazar published the book Two Peoples… One Land, calling for a federal solution to the Israeli‒Palestinian conflict. The idea seems to have been discredited by the Oslo process, which raised hopes that the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea would finally be divided between two independent nation states. With these hopes largely dashed, this article seeks to re-examine Elazar’s federal idea: the establishment of a single political entity divided into two provinces or states to incorporate both Jewish and Palestinian nations. While the federal solution could potentially face many obstacles, it would enable Israelis and Palestinians to place less emphasis on the drawing of borders and would avoid the traumatic and potentially violent ordeal of evicting entire populations from their homes. Moreover, federal solutions would allow both peoples to conduct their social, religious and cultural life autonomously while sharing political power at the feder...

This article examines the relationship between Evangelical Christian Zionists and West Bank Jewish settlers and its implications to the Jewish-Christian boundary. Significant contact with Christian Zionists has sparked a fierce debate among rabbinical leaders in the settlements, with some working to radically redefine the Christian-Jewish boundary and others attempting to maintain it in its traditional form. Thus, while some view the shifting of boundaries as a mark of the messianic era, others perceive it as a serious threat that must be opposed. Based on fieldwork conducted among rabbis and Christian Zionist volunteers, we attempt to demonstrate the ways in which Jewish theology is negotiated regarding the definition of monotheism, approaches to Christian missionary motives and the involvement of non-Jews in the Zionist project. Such negotiation of religious boundaries reflects the larger story of religion in the global age, a time in which boundaries are challenged and borderland...

This article deals with the convergence of ethnicity and faith in the context of Christian Yunnan. Contemporary Evangelical missionaries working in Yunnan encourage the preservation of ethnic markers while attempting to create a form of "pristine faith": a religiosity that severely limits the role of ethnicity in identity construction, rather emphasizing individualism and globalism, process that may be beneficial for the Chinese state. My discussion here revolves around the distinction made by many Evangelical Christians in China between "true" faith, based on an individual experience of salvation and rebirth, and "nominal" faith-a traditional understanding of religion as an identity acquired at birth. Thus, minority Christians whose ancestors converted en-masse prior to the 1949 revolution and retain a distinctly ethnic form of religiosity, are often labeled "nominal" by contemporary missionaries and converts. In contrast, the missionaries themselves as well as more recent converts, represent a faith that stems from personal experience and belong to a global and trans-national community, transcending the narrow limits of ethnic culture. The information presented in this article is based on 15 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Southwest China, among foreign missionaries and local minority and Han Christians 1. Since the beginning of the reform era, Evangelical Christianity in China has experienced a significant resurgence and the emergence of a large foreign missionary community. This trend is particularly pronounced in the Province of Yunnan, where missionaries met with considerable success among ethnic minorities prior to the 1949 revolution. As a result, several ethnic groups living in Yunnan, such as the Lisu, Miao, Jingpo and Lahu contain significant numbers of Protestant Christians. Indeed, the mass conversions of ethnic groups in the Chinese Southwestern 1 This article will be published in Modern Asian Studies in 2018.

Three years before the signing of the Oslo Accords, my father, Daniel J. Elazar, published the book “Two Peoples One Land”, calling for a federal solution to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Elazar 1991). However, shortly afterwards with the signing of the Oslo accords, federal solutions seemed largely obsolete. It looked as if the land between the Jordan and the sea would finally be divided between two independent nation states. Yet, twenty two years after Oslo, the prospect of division is as distant as ever. In fact, since the 1930’s, numerous failed attempts have been made to divide the land along a line agreed upon by all of its inhabitants. It is becoming increasingly clear that the paradigm of territorial division is deeply flawed and essentially unfeasible.
This paper is an attempt to reexamine Elazar’s idea of one land: the establishment of a single political entity divided into two provinces or states to incorporate both Jewish and Palestinian nations. While the implementation of a federal solution could potentially face many obstacles, it would enable Israelis and Palestinians to place less emphasis on the drawing of borders and would avoid the traumatic and potentially violent ordeal of evicting entire populations from their homes. Moreover, federal solutions would allow both peoples to conduct their social, religious and cultural life autonomously while sharing political power at the federal level. Most importantly, working towards a federal solution would require both peoples to abandon ideas of separation and recognize our shared fate – living together in a single geographic unit.

The Tomb of the Patriarchs in the divided city Hebron is a major site of pilgrimage for all three monotheistic religions, a space of contention and an epicenter of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This article examines the mobility of pilgrims and tourists of various religious traditions within and around the site and their efforts to construct and deconstruct overlapping and often conflicting narratives of sacred space. Thus, foreign Moslem pilgrims from the Middle East and South Asia are motivated by their wish to pray within the site, viewing the political reality of division as an uncomfortable barrier to the experience of sacredness. In contrast, Christian, mostly Protestant tourists, occupy a liminal position expressed and sometimes overcome through the bodily practice of performance of several varieties. Finally, Palestinian solidarity groups attempt to deconstruct Hebron's sacred geography, by focusing solely on the city's violent and contested present as a site of immobility and emptiness.

Since the beginning of the reform era, China has witnessed a resurgence of a large variety of religious practice. Much of the growth of the church can be ascribed to the efforts of indigenous Chinese churches. However, the dissemination of Christianity is also being promoted by a non-Chinese, primarily Western missionary community. Missionary presence is particularly considerable in the peripheral province of Yunnan, in the far southwestern corner of China. Missionaries were active in Yunnan before the 1949 revolution, where they had some considerable success with a number of minority peoples. Despite the illegality of proselytizing in today’s China, foreign Christian workers are largely tolerated in Yunnan province. Both foreign and Chinese Missionaries working among minority people in Yunnan are faced with the challenge of dealing with a wide variety of religious and cultural and ethnic traditions among potential converts. In this paper I wish to discuss the ways both missionaries and converts deal with the issue of religious diversity and syncretism, both on the theological and on the practical level. Through a discussion of a number of points of contention, such as burial rites and participation in ethnic festivals I attempt to demonstrate the way contemporary Christians struggle to reconcile local religious traditions with their new found faith. The observations made here are based on 15 months of anthropological fieldwork conducted in Yunnan in 2009-10 and interviews made during a follow up visit in 2012.