Hugh Schonfield - Paperback

by Owen Power (Author), Richard S. Harvey (Foreword by)

With this book, Owen Power offers the first full-length intellectual history of the thinker Hugh Schonfield (1901-1988). Power contextualises Schonfield and his work in the spheres of Jewish ideology and Messianic Jewish politics as a means to explain the complicated nature of Messianic Jewish identity. There are many problems in making sense of the varied claims made about the Jewishness of Jewish Believers in Jesus--as there is a striking lack of agreement as to their Jewish status among halakhic authorities--and there is no real consensus among Messianic Jews themselves in answering the question, "Who is a (Messianic) Jew?" On the other hand, the attitude of many Jewish commentators regarding Messianic Jews is that they are traitors and apostates pretending to be Jews--Christian missionaries hell-bent on enticing Jews from their communities to the welcoming embrace of the Church. Normative Jewish opinion tends to treat Jewish Believers in Jesus as a monolithic group and thus fails to recognise the wide range of groups and individuals who claim to be Messianic Jews, even if there is among them little consensus as to what such a label means. Schonfield's case both reinforces such convictions and problematizes them.

Author Biography

Owen Power worked for many years in London as a training manager delivering skills training to people who were long-term unemployed with additional support needs. He served as a diversity & equality advisor on a number of government social projects and produced an audio information cassette on safer sex and HIV awareness for people without sight for World AIDS Day 1992. In 2001, Power decided upon a career change and he started studying at the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Manchester. His first book, Hugh Schonfield, is based on his dissertation. Power is currently researching his second book with the working title--Jewish Believers in Jesus: Christians Masquerading as Jews?