1841-1935 William E. Blackstone

William E. Blackstone (1841-1935) was born in New York and reared in an evangelical Methodist home., After the Civil War Blackstone settled in Oak Park, Illinois, and established himself as a successful businessman and lay evangelist to the Chicago business community. He became a dispensationalist and a close friend of D. L. Moody.

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1878 Blackstone and Jesus is Coming

In 1878 Blackstone published Jesus Is Coming, which went through three editions, was translated into 42 languages, and was dispensationalism's first bestseller in America. In the late 1880s, Blackstone visited new Jewish settlements in the Holy Land and returned to Chicago committed to helping the restoration of the Jews.

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1881 The American Colony

In 1881 Horatio and Anna Spafford and sixteen others established the American Colony in the Muslim quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem to watch at close hand the restoration of the Jews and the second coming of Jesus. The Spaffordites held all property in common. When hundreds of penniless Jews from Yemen arrived in Jerusalem in 1882, the colony considered them part of the ten lost tribes and a clear sign of prophetic fulfillments, so they provided them with food, shelter and other support. American evangelists like Blackstone and Moody came to visit them. For over fifty years the colony survived as a religious community, but subsequent generations lost their zeal and turned the colony into a business concern. By the 1930s, the colony identified more with the needs of the indigenous Arabs.

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1890 Conference of Christians and Jews

In 1890 Blackstone organized the first conference of Christians and Jews in Chicago and used the occasion to push for a new Jewish state. Most participants, including the Jews, were not interested. Undeterred, in 1891 Blackstone drew up a petition advocating the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. In short order, he collected 413 signatures from leading Americans, including the chief justice of the Supreme Court, the speaker of the House, the mayors of Chicago, New York, and Boston, and business leaders such as Cyrus McCormick, John D. Rockefeller, and J. Pierpont Morgan. Blackstone forwarded the memorial to President Benjamin Harrison, who ignored it, and later he sent others to Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

In spite of his ongoing efforts to convert Jews to Christ, he became good friends with Zionist leaders and regularly sent them the results of his prophetic study. In 1918, at a Zionist conference in Philadelphia, organizers hailed Blackstone as a "Father of Zionism"; and in 1956, on the seventy-fifth anniversary of his memorial to President Harrison, the citizens of Israel dedicated a forest in his honor.

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