200 years ago, newspapers were mocking the business of converting Jews. The business is still open.

A Vermont newspaper, the National Standard, published this on June 13, 1826 — two hundred years ago this month:

A late London paper says: The society for the conversion of the Jews annually spend about $14,000. Many knowing Israelites, however, contrive to turn the pious zeal of the society to good account, by obtaining sums of money for their expenses whilst under a course of conversion, which having gained they relapse into their former heresies.

The Jews—The conversion of a Jew costs the society in London an average sum of about one thousand pounds; and about one half of the converted return to the "error of their ways" as soon as converting-money is no longer to be had. The makeing of a half Christian out of a full Jew would render twenty poor and honest Christian families comfortable for a whole year. How is it that persons can thus abuse the charities of society by so wasting money which the merciful contribute?

The two figures contradict each other — $14,000 a year in one item, a thousand pounds per convert in the next — because these were polemical numbers passed from paper to paper rather than anything audited. The arithmetic behind the mockery, however, was sound, as the society's own published reports would confirm over the following decades.

Throughout the 19th century there was a concerted effort by many Christians to "save" the Jews. The most famous example was the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews, founded in 1809 with backing from evangelical luminaries including William Wilberforce. Its driving force was Joseph Frey, a Jewish convert from Germany who tirelessly tried to find other Jews to join him.

The Jewish community fought against these efforts fiercely and ostracized any converts, which meant that conversion carried enormous real costs — expulsion from family, community and livelihood. The London Society's answer was financial: it offered converts stipends, housing and training to overcome community pressure. The predictable result was a class of professional converts, who pretended to convert for the money, left when the money ran dry, and in some cases traveled to other cities in Europe to repeat the process with the next missionary society. The society was paying Jews to become Christians, and some Jews concluded that Christian charity of that sort was a business opportunity. By 1826 the relapse rate was a standing joke in the London press, and the joke crossed the Atlantic through the exchange papers into venues as remote as Middlebury, Vermont.

Frey crossed the Atlantic too. He arrived in New York in 1816, after a scandal pushed him out of London, and set about building an American version of the enterprise. The result was the American Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Jews, chartered in 1820 — the founders wanted to call it a society for evangelizing the Jews, but the New York legislature balked at incorporating an openly proselytizing body, so the name was softened to "meliorating." Its first president was Elias Boudinot, the former president of the Continental Congress, and its donor rolls drew on the Protestant establishment of the entire eastern seaboard. Frey  must have been very charismatic to raise such large sums of money both sides of the ocean but that charisma never translated to his intended Jewish audience.

The American incentive structure was different from London's: instead of stipends, they tried land. The ASMCJ bought a large tract in Westchester County, New York, to serve as a farm colony for converted European Jews who had been expelled from their communities. The farm was a spectacular failure — it consumed enormous sums while attracting almost nobody, and the few converted Jews placed on it refused to follow the society's regulations and soon abandoned it. And it was reported in the media in the same month of June 1826, in the same newspaper.

On June 6, 1826, the National Standard reprinted a New York account of the ASMCJ's fourth anniversary meeting, and the report reads like a corporate collapse in miniature. The society had spent "seven or eight thousand dollars" in a single year on what its own annual report called a "Utopian scheme of colonization"; the few Jews placed on the farm "refused to conform to the regulations, and soon abandoned it." A member rose to declare the annual report "a spurious document." A faction had exploited a constitutional loophole — pay five dollars, become a voting director — to pack the meeting, and after hours of parliamentary warfare the society rejected its own annual report and elected a board "decidedly hostile to the colonizing project." The suspicion in the room was that money was being misused, and this time the suspects were members of the society rather than the Jews.

So within a single week in June 1826, American newspaper readers learned that the cash-incentive model in London produced mercenaries and that the land-incentive model in New York produced an empty farm and an internal revolt. Both versions of the scheme, built by the same man, were public jokes simultaneously — which might lead a reasonable observer to expect the donors to stop donating.

They did the opposite. The London Society remained lavishly funded for the rest of the century; newspaper accounts of its meetings, anniversaries and appeals appear continuously through the 1800s. By 1900 its annual income was £46,338 — roughly thirty times the budget the 1826 satirists found scandalous — supporting 199 workers at 52 mission stations around the world, including clergy, physicians, teachers and apothecaries. Against that century of expenditure, the society's own cumulative count stood at about 5,000 baptisms, about 50 a year, of whom an unknown number were Jews taking advantage of the system. The donors had read the same mockery we see in the Vermont newspaper, kept giving for another seventy-five years, and the conversion arithmetic never improved.

It never stopped, either. The London Society survives today as the Church's Ministry Among Jewish People (CMJ), one of the Church of England's official mission agencies, with branches in England, the United States and Israel — where it owns Christ Church inside Jerusalem's Old City and runs a school in its former mission hospital. The organization's entry in the UK Charity Commission register, number 1153457, still lists "The London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews" as its previous name, and still records its charitable object in language Frey would recognize: "the advancement of Christianity amongst Jewish people."

The "knowing Israelites" of 1826 took the blame for gaming an incentive they had no part in designing, and the societies that designed it took two more centuries of donations. The merciful, as the National Standard termed them, are still contributing to the goal of converting Jews.

---

Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)