We like to say that Messianic Judaism is a modern movement with an ancient past, and that’s true.
In the centuries before the modern Messianic Jewish congregational movement began, however, isolated rabbis scattered across the world individually came to faith in Yeshua while retaining their Jewish identity and practice. We call these forbears “luminaries,” and as we scour history for them, the number we find continues to grow.
Today’s Messianic Jewish followers of Yeshua have been encouraged and strengthened through the discovery of documents that reconstruct the history of Messianic Judaism from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and Enlightenment into the modern era. Much of this documentation consists only of manuscripts and written material, but for more recent followers of Yeshua—living after the mid-1800s—this documentation also includes photographs.
Hacham Ephraim Ben-Yosef Elkaim (ל״ז), of blessed memory, was a rabbi and dayan (judge) in Old Yishuv Tiberias. Hacham is a Hebrew title meaning “sage.” Most of what we know of him comes to us from an article titled “A Tiberias Rabbi,” written by Henry Chaim-Yechiel Einspruch.
Einspruch was a yeshiva student and the son of a Sanzer Chasid but walked away from Jewish observance before meeting Hacham Ephraim. As a teenager, he cast aside Jewish practice in favor of political activism on behalf of socialism and workers’ unions. He returned to faith and spirituality of a sort within a Lutheran church but never to Jewish observance. However, his article on the subject of Hacham Ephraim praises the life of a Jew who never left his faith, his people, or his practice.
The Elkaim family is Sephardic with deep roots in Spain and North Africa. According to Ephraim’s own testimony, members of this family authored Torah commentaries and sat on rabbinic courts from Israel to Morocco. The family continues to produce Torah scholars. It is quite probable that these include Hacham Ephraim’s descendants, who were taken by force along with their mother and separated from the rabbi sometime after 1892.
At the age of thirty-six, Ephraim was teaching children in his yeshiva when a Gentile came to the window and greeted him in competent Hebrew. His name was William Ewing, and Einspruch was there to witness this first fateful meeting. Ewing wanted someone to speak Hebrew with, and Hacham Ephraim was willing. They were the same age. They were both leaders in religious communities. Unsurprisingly, their conversations turned to messianic topics and prophetic writings. The issues raised by Ewing could not have presented new problems for the rabbi; instead, they would have highlighted prominent ideas within the kabbalistic and spiritually rich
Sephardic tradition.
The Missionary Hospital
Until he met Ewing, Hacham Ephraim had avoided contact with Christians, whom he saw as spiritually and morally corrupt. Ewing was an ordained minister employed by the Scottish Missionary Hospital in Tiberias. Before meeting Ewing, Hacham Ephraim had been opposed to Jews seeking treatment at this facility. He reprimanded any Jew interacting with Christians and forbade family members from doing so, even for medical purposes.
The historical records kept by the hospital were written by charmed and patronizing Europeans enchanted with biblical lands and exotic peoples. They describe Chasidim with flowing white beards and sidelocks, Jewish girls wanting to pray Psalms for staff members, and bright yeshiva students reading the New Testament for the first time.
According to accounts from the mission, young Jewish men spent their days convalescing in the hospital learning Torah in their beds but their nights poring over Yiddish and Hebrew translations of the Christian Bible. Some patients even supposedly confessed hidden messianic beliefs.
Hacham Ephraim had wanted none of it. He hated the mission. The friendship that developed between him and Ewing was, therefore, an unlikely one. Hacham Ephraim was surprised by the quality of his friend and, at some point, began to believe Yeshua’s messianic claims.
A Slow Transformation
Jewish texts insist that the Temple’s destruction and the Jewish people’s subsequent exile resulted from “baseless hatred” among the Jewish people. Yeshua was Jewish. Great rabbinic thinkers argued against the church that Yeshua and his students had been faithful and observant Jews. Hacham Ephraim would have been familiar with these texts. A prime example is found in the writings of the fourteenth-century Sephardic rabbi Rashbatz, who argued this point—and who remains a powerful voice among rabbinic thinkers even today.
Hacham Ephraim simply could not continue to justify his hatred of Yeshua. He consulted rabbis greater than himself but received unimpressive, canned responses. His associates became suspicious as a result and began to surveil him. Ephraim, meanwhile, realized that he had been guilty of baseless hatred of a Jew and perhaps even the King of the Jews.
Suspicion of Hacham Ephraim grew to the point that his wife was questioned by members of the beit din (rabbinic court). Einspruch says that Hacham Ephraim was subsequently separated from his family, spirited away from Tiberias, and brought to a colony in the Hula Valley of Israel called Yesud HaMa’ala, which at that time was a malaria-infested moshava (agricultural colony) set up on partially drained swamp lands. The rabbi worked fields and sent money home to his wife and children until he was eventually allowed to leave.
True to Judaism
Hacham Ephraim was convinced Yeshua was the Messiah but refused to be baptized into a church or even enter a church building. Hundreds of thousands of Jews had made the mistake of being baptized under the church’s authority in the Spanish Inquisition. These Jews were then forced to assimilate and hide any observance of Jewish law, for the church sought to hunt down and uproot any baptized Jew who continued to live according to his or her unique calling.
Hacham Ephraim remained faithful to the Torah. He immersed as a student of Mashiach on Shavu’ot of 1899 in the private home of an Arab named Bolus Haddad. In Jewish thought, the Festival of Shavu’ot, besides being the anniversary of the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai, marks the death and the birth of King David. On this day, Hacham Ephraim intended to lay down his life and take up the life of Messiah.
Priests and ministers crowded around the rabbi-disciple, each hoping to co-opt the man for their respective denominations. He refused. The devout rabbi had no intention of joining a new religion. Hacham Ephraim did not take a Christian name. Instead, he took a yoke of divine kindness and mercy.
Consequences
According to Einspruch, Hacham Ephraim’s wife was the daughter of the head rabbi of Tiberias, the Hacham Bashi. At that time, the Hacham Bashi was Hacham Machlouf Eldaoudi. The Eldaoudis were a rabbinic dynasty from Spain and Morocco said to be descended from the family of King David. If Ephraim’s wife was indeed from this noble dynasty, it explains why his choice to follow Yeshua was such an enormous scandal. Members of the community hurled insults toward Hacham Ephraim. They spat at him. They beat him with miserable fists and feet. They forced Hacham Ephraim to issue a bill of divorce to his beloved wife. His children were taken from him.
Hacham Ephraim relocated to Jerusalem and found work as a day laborer. Former students, now holding rabbinic positions in the Holy City, saw their beloved rabbi and teacher digging in the dirt. They begged him to return. He would be forgiven. They would forget anything had ever happened if he would forget Yeshua and be their teacher once again. However, he couldn’t unsee what he had seen in the life and teaching of Yeshua, and he was willing to be humiliated if need be.
The rabbi later worked in construction on property owned by the Schneller Syrian Orphanage. Buildings constructed by the Protestant Schneller family during this time now house a Beis Yaakov girls’ school and boys’ yeshiva at the edge of the Bucharan neighborhood.
Hacham Ephraim found further work in a tile factory. He spent time with believers on HaNevi’im Street and in a rented storefront reading room on Jaffa. Hacham Ephraim reportedly often spent Motzei Shabbat (the close of the Sabbath) in conversation with other Haredim about the identity of Messiah.
Authorities tried to persuade the rabbi with violence, but when that failed, they attempted to bring him back with bribery and long conversations in the office of the chief rabbi. Hacham Ephraim argued from both Jewish law and tradition that Yeshua was and remains the Messiah. Some were convinced by what he was saying and organized clandestine meetings within the city.
Jewish Belief in Yeshua
Hacham Ephraim was not the only Jewish follower of Yeshua in Jerusalem at that time. At least one opponent of this Messianic undercurrent later admitted that he had been harboring messianic thoughts about Yeshua even while challenging the movement. Contrary to popular belief, it is not uncommon for a Jew to believe that Yeshua is the Messiah. According to some estimates, some 600,000 Jewish believers are in the United States alone. However, the vast majority are living as Gentile Christians. Some do not even realize that they are Jewish. The church does not need additional efforts to persuade Jews about Jesus. Hundreds of thousands have been persuaded. Where are they? They have assimilated into the church, losing their Jewish identity, and abandoning their unique calling.
Instead, Jewish believers must become disciples, as Scripture obligates them, but remain Jews! Christians and those in the Messianic community must encourage Jewish believers to look at the example set by Hacham Ephraim and others like him. If God-fearing Christians were to focus just some of their Jewish outreach efforts inward and support Jewish observance for Jews within the church, the world would see the fulfillment of prophecy. The Jewish people will be saved the same way Yeshua’s first disciples were saved—as observant members of the congregation of Israel.
