You Can Have the Verse
A viral video says American support for Israel was invented in 1909 by a preacher with a forgery charge. Even if that were true, it would explain nothing about why I care.
The video arrived the way these things do, which is to say I did not go looking for it and it found me anyway. It is called “The Cult Around Israel No One Wants to Talk About,” it runs thirty-two minutes, it has 307,000 views and 5,945 comments, and it is narrated by a YouTuber named Olivia Swing, who describes herself as a California refugee living in Tennessee.
Its argument, which I want to state fairly because I am going to spend a while disagreeing with it, is this. American evangelical support for Israel rests on a single verse, Genesis 12:3, the one about blessing those who bless thee. That verse was reinterpreted for modern American Christians by Cyrus Ingerson Scofield, whom she describes as a convicted forger, in a study Bible published in 1909. Scofield was funded by Zionist money. The underlying theology was invented from nothing in the 1830s by an Irish preacher named John Nelson Darby. Remove all of that and the whole structure of American support for Israel has no foundation, because it never had one to begin with.
Then, in the last ninety seconds, she quotes Revelation 3:9, about those of the synagogue of Satan who say they are Jews and are not, but lie, and asks her audience who exactly those people might be. And then she says thanks for watching.
I will get to that. But I want to start somewhere else, because the corrections have been made, competently, by people who enjoy making them more than I do, and because the thing that actually interests me about this video is not that it is wrong. It is what it assumes.
The corrections, briskly
Scofield was not convicted of anything. He was a genuinely disreputable man, and I have no interest in defending him: he deserted his wife and children, he drank, he resigned as U.S. Attorney for Kansas after about six months under a cloud involving railroad money, and he later claimed a divinity doctorate he did not hold. He was arrested on forgery charges. The charges were dropped. No record of a conviction exists, a fact you can verify on the Wikipedia page, which is not maintained by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, though I understand this year that is no longer the safe assumption it once was.
The Zionist funding did not happen. The entire story, in every version now circulating, traces to one biographer, Joseph Canfield, writing in 1988, sixty-seven years after Scofield died. Canfield noticed that Scofield joined a New York social club in 1900 where the Jewish lawyer Samuel Untermyer was a member, that club membership required a proposer and a seconder, and concluded, in his own published words, “we assume.” The club kept its books. They still exist. Scofield was proposed by Horatio Fraser and seconded by John Elderkin, neither of whom was Untermyer and neither of whom was Jewish. There is no letter, telegram, diary entry or speech in which either man mentions the other.
The people who actually paid are listed by name on pages 49 and 50 of a 1943 book written by the study Bible’s own consulting editor. A real estate man, a department store owner, a St. Louis miller, a printer of stock exchange reports, and an oil executive. Five Protestant businessmen, which is an awkward roster for a theory about Jewish money.
Untermyer, meanwhile, did not become a significant Zionist figure until the 1920s, taking over Keren Hayesod in 1921, which was the year Scofield died and roughly forty years after Scofield’s theology had already set. The story requires him to have been steering an agenda two decades before he had one, which is the sort of thing that happens frequently in conspiracy theories and infrequently in life.
And the eighteen centuries in which no Christian supposedly believed any of this contain, at minimum, Henry Finch publishing a book on Jewish restoration in 1621, Joseph Mede and Thomas Brightman arguing similar things, Increase Mather preaching it in Massachusetts, Milton putting it in Paradise Regained in 1671, the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews opening in 1809, and Lord Shaftesbury lobbying the Foreign Office in the 1830s and 40s while not being a dispensationalist at all. (Dispensationalism, since the word is going to keep coming up: the framework that divides history into distinct eras of God’s dealings with humanity and keeps Israel and the church on separate tracks within it. It is where the end-times timeline most people associate with American evangelicals comes from, and systematizing it is the one thing Darby genuinely did do.) Also Napoleon, in 1799, inviting Jews to reclaim Palestine, at a point when Darby had not been born.
Darby himself, incidentally, thought Christians should stay out of politics entirely. The Plymouth Brethren withdrew from public life on principle. As the architect of a scheme to give the British Empire religious cover in the Middle East, he is a strange pick.
Fine. Done. If you want that argument conducted at length, with the election committee named and the chain of custody traced from Canfield in 1988 through a pseudonymous 1999 mailing list post through Michael Collins Piper adding the Rothschilds in 2004 through Ian Carroll saying it on Joe Rogan in March 2025, it is all in the Scofield Files and I recommend it.
What I want to know is something different. Not who paid Scofield, but rather whether the thing he wrote was true.
Nobody seems to have checked
Here is Scofield’s note on Genesis 12:3, the one this whole video is about. He told his readers that history had gone badly for nations that persecuted Jews and well for nations that protected them. His phrasing: “it has invariably fared ill with the people who have persecuted the Jew.” Invariably. And the future, he said, would demonstrate this even more remarkably.
Swing spends thirty-two minutes on who financed that sentence. She never once asks whether it is actually accurate.
It is not. It is not even close, and it fails in both directions, which is worse than failing in one.
Spain expelled its Jews in 1492 and then had the best century in its history. Cortés in 1519, Pizarro in 1532, the silver of Potosà from 1545, Lepanto in 1571. The period has a name. It is called the Golden Age. The decline that gets attributed to the expulsion shows up in the 1640s, which is a hundred and fifty years later, and which historians attribute to silver inflation and permanent war and an agricultural base that could not support an empire. Rome destroyed the Second Temple in 70 and the Western Empire lasted another four centuries while the Eastern one lasted until 1453. England expelled its Jews in 1290 and spent the next several centuries assembling the largest empire in human history.
Now the other direction, which is the part I find harder to write.
Poland was the refuge. The Statute of Kalisz in 1264, Casimir the Great, the Council of Four Lands and two centuries of something close to Jewish self-government. Jews read the country’s name as two Hebrew words, po lin, here you shall lodge, which is not a thing you do about a place you expect to leave. Poland was partitioned three times, erased from the map for 123 years, and under German occupation became the ground the death camps were built on. The Dutch took in the Sephardim that Spain expelled and gave them freedoms available nowhere else in Europe, which is why Amsterdam got called the Jerusalem of the West, and in the Holocaust roughly three quarters of Dutch Jews were murdered, the highest proportion in Western Europe. Denmark ferried its Jews to Sweden in fishing boats and spent five years under occupation. Bulgaria refused to deport the 48,000 Jews of Bulgaria proper and then handed over some 11,000 from the territories it occupied in Thrace and Macedonia, almost none of whom survived, which is its own problem for anyone trying to keep a tidy ledger of who blessed and who cursed.
So the rule does not hold. What it has instead is the property of never being able to fail, since every country eventually has a bad century, and any bad century can be assigned retroactively to whatever that country did to its Jews, while the countries that sheltered Jews and then suffered anyway simply do not come up. This is not a pattern discovered in history. It is a filter applied to history by someone who already knows which answer he wants.
There is a modest version that survives, and I will grant it: societies that expel a skilled minority tend to damage themselves in the process. Spain lost merchants and physicians and trade networks. Germany drove out Einstein and Meitner and Szilard and Bethe and discovered in 1945 what that had cost. Open societies outperform closed ones. This is a perfectly good argument and it requires no supernatural accounting whatsoever, and it is not what Scofield wrote.
Now run his version backwards, which nobody in this discourse ever seems to do. If God visibly rewards nations that bless Jews and visibly punishes nations that curse them, then what is a reader supposed to make of Jewish history? Two thousand years of expulsions and massacres. The traditional Christian answer to that question was Augustine’s, and it was that Jews survive in a scattered and degraded condition precisely as evidence of what happens to a people who rejected Christ. Slay them not, but let them wander. A verse read as a system of rewards and punishments is barely distinguishable from a verse read as a verdict on us, and the same tradition has historically been comfortable reading it both ways depending on the century.
Which is the actual problem with Scofield’s note, and it has nothing to do with who paid for it.
Rented
I have been writing about philosemitism for a while now, and the thing I keep circling is that support offered on the basis of expected returns is support you do not own.
If you bless the Jews because Genesis 12:3 promises the blessing comes back around to you, then you are in a transaction, and transactions get reviewed. Somebody eventually runs the numbers. Somebody eventually decides the returns are not showing up. And at that point the same verse, read the same literalist way, is available to explain that the problem was never the arrangement but the counterparty. This is not hypothetical. It is roughly what a chunk of the American online right has spent the past two years doing in public.
Swing’s video is not the beginning of that process. It is somewhere in the middle of it. And what makes it effective is that she is telling a real audience something they have already half concluded, then handing them a story in which their change of heart is not a change of heart at all but the discovery of a fraud committed against them.
That is the appeal. Not the documents. The absolution. You were not wrong. You were deceived, as a child, by a man with a forgery charge, working for people who were not what they said they were.
I want to be precise about why this matters more than the factual errors. The true history absolves nobody. Darby was a sincere Anglo-Irish separatist. Scofield was a sloppy autodidact with five Protestant businessmen underwriting him. The doctrine spread because it was emotionally satisfying and extremely well marketed. If that is the story, then anyone who believed it and now doesn’t is simply a person who changed their mind, which is a thing adults do and take responsibility for. The false version converts that into a crime with a perpetrator. Which is precisely why “convicted forger” survived four decades of retelling and “proposed by Horatio Fraser, seconded by John Elderkin” never made it out of the club minutes.
What she does to Yael Eckstein
The most interesting sequence in the video, and the one that tells you the most about how it is built, is what she does with ‘Til Kingdom Come, Maya Zinshtein’s documentary about the evangelical-Israeli alliance.
Swing describes it as an Israeli-produced documentary and says the Israelis who made it knew exactly what they were capturing. They did. It is a critical film and its argument runs roughly opposite to hers, which does not stop her mining it for footage.
She shows you Boyd Bingham IV telling children in Middlesboro, Kentucky that the Jews are better than all of us, and then conceding on camera that this is where the indoctrination starts. Accurate, and damning, and in the film.
What is also in the film, and does not appear in her video, is Boyd’s father. Asked whether his work with Israel is hypocritical, Pastor William Bingham III answers by addressing Jews directly, and the Boston Globe review quotes him: you blind, stupid Jewish people, can’t you see. Followed by a passage about how Christians will go through the Tribulation, get their tail busted, get humbled, and then admit the crazy preacher in Kentucky was right all along.
She had both clips. She used the one where a Kentucky preacher says Jews are superior and not the one where his father calls Jews blind and stupid, because the first supports a story about Christians being manipulated by Jews and the second supports a story about Christians who love Israel very much and hold actual living Jews in theological contempt. The second is a considerably more accurate description of that church, and it is useless to her.
And then there is Yael Eckstein, of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, saying on camera that hearing Jesus threaded through Old Testament teaching registers as a trigger for her as a Jew. That it is a paradox. That if you follow it five steps further it gets complicated, which is why she does not follow it.
Swing presents this as evidence of a cult keeping a secret.
Sit with that for a second, because it is genuinely remarkable. A Jewish woman tells a documentary crew, on the record, in a film that everyone she does business with was going to watch, that this partnership makes her uncomfortable, that she and her partners fundamentally disagree about the most important thing, and that she deliberately declines to follow the disagreement to its conclusion. That is a person saying the awkward part out loud. It is the opposite of concealment. And it gets read as proof of concealment, because in the logic of the video there is no Jewish statement that could count as candour.
The question Swing insists nobody in the movement will answer, which is why Jews would partner with evangelicals whose theology they reject, has in fact been argued in public in Jewish communities for forty years. Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein was mocked and dismissed by Israelis when he founded the Fellowship in 1983. There are Orthodox objections to taking money from people who want us converted at the end of days, secular objections about where the money ends up, and a permanent low-grade American Jewish argument about the entire arrangement. Read the Forward. Read Haaretz. Read, for that matter, the archives of this website, where people have been fighting about it since roughly 2005.
We are not withholding an answer. We have several, they contradict each other, and we publish them all0.
The part that is not a debate
Now the last ninety seconds, which is what the video is for.
She quotes John 8:44, where Jesus tells his opponents their father is the devil. Then Revelation 3:9, the synagogue of Satan, those who say they are Jews and are not, but lie. Then she asks who those people might be. Then she thanks you for watching.
She does not answer. That is the technique and it is not subtle once you have seen it a few times. You build thirty minutes of momentum, you deliver the question, and you let the comment section supply the part you did not say, which means you are responsible for none of it and it gets said anyway.
So let me supply it, since she would not.
The claim that today’s Jews are not really Jews, that we are impostors occupying a stolen identity, is the founding doctrine of Christian Identity, the American theological movement that produced the Aryan Nations. Its popular form is the Khazar hypothesis, which holds that Ashkenazi Jews descend from a medieval Turkic people who converted rather than from the Middle East. Doron Behar and twenty-eight co-authors settled this in 2013 using genome-wide data from 1,774 samples across 106 populations, with deliberately heavy sampling in the Caucasus precisely because earlier work had been thin there and critics had a fair complaint about it. No detectable Khazar contribution. The one paper that found otherwise used Armenians and Georgians as proxies for Khazar descendants, which is approximately like using Norwegians as proxies for Mongols.
I could also mention that there is nothing Turkic in Yiddish, which is a German dialect carrying Hebrew and Aramaic and Slavic, and nothing Turkic in Ashkenazi liturgy or law or food. A population that converted en masse in the Caucasus and then constructed a Rhineland German vernacular and a Palestinian Jewish legal tradition from scratch would be the most accomplished forgers in human history, and whatever else we have been accused of, nobody has ever called us subtle.
But here is what I actually want to say about that closing question, and it is the reason I am not going to be even slightly ambivalent about this video.
That premise is required by at least four movements that agree on nothing else. Christian Identity needs Jews to be fake so that the covenant can belong to Anglo-Saxons. Certain Black Hebrew Israelite groups need the identical premise so the lineage transfers elsewhere. The Nation of Islam has run its own version for decades. And the hardest edge of pro-Palestinian argument needs it too, because if Ashkenazi Jews are European converts with no ancestral tie to the region then the question of indigenous connection simply evaporates and the whole thing becomes uncomplicated colonialism. Shlomo Sand built an academic career on a gentler version and was taken seriously in rooms that would not have let a Christian Identity pamphlet through the door.
Four destinations, mutually exclusive, one shared requirement. Which is why the claim keeps coming back no matter how thoroughly it gets disproved. Nobody reasoned their way to it. Four different constituencies need it to be true, so each time it is refuted there are four separate reasons to start saying it again.
Asking that question without answering it hands the premise to all four of them simultaneously. A viewer arriving from the anti-Zionist left and a viewer arriving from the Aryan Nations both leave with what they came for. That is not a stylistic failure or an unfortunate framing. That is what an unanswered question is for, and it is the only part of this video that required any craft.
I do not think this is debate-worthy and I am not going to pretend otherwise for the sake of appearing balanced. There is a serious Christian argument against Christian Zionism, several in fact, made by Munther Isaac and by Palestinian Christian writers and by Reformed theologians who think dispensationalism is bad exegesis. I disagree with a good deal of it. None of those people have ever needed the Rothschilds, and I suspect most of them would find the last ninety seconds of this video appalling.
Which brings me to the assumption underneath all of it, and the reason I wanted to write about this at all.
Swing’s video takes for granted that if you can account for evangelical support for Israel, you have accounted for support for Israel. Remove Scofield, remove the verse, remove the 1830s, and the thing collapses, because there is nothing else holding it up.
I am not the person she is talking to. I am also, as it happens, exactly the person her argument fails on.
I have written before about being an Israel-adjacent diaspora Jew of the least dramatic possible kind. I grew up in Manhattan. I live in Toronto. I have no Israeli family beyond a few distant relations. I am, by heritage, an Eastern-Europe-to-North-America Ashkenazi Jew of the sort that fills entire neighbourhoods of both cities. I am secular. I have never had a religious feeling about the Holy Land in my life and would not know how to start.
And I have a connection to Israel anyway, which I have spent a fair amount of column space trying to explain, mostly to other Jews who find it puzzling or embarrassing or both.
The explanation has nothing to do with prophecy. It is this. My more recent ancestors were Jews in nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe, living ordinary lives, and then that entire civilization was destroyed. Not reduced. Not diminished. Destroyed, over about fifty years, by pogroms and then by Nazism and then by the arithmetic of who was left. Unlike essentially every other white-looking North American, I cannot go back to the old country and find the relatives who stayed. The towns are there. The people are not.
What I noticed, the first time I spent real time in Israel as an adult, was how much of that vanished world is alive there. Not exclusively, and not to the exclusion of Mizrahi or Sephardi culture, and yes I am aware there are internal power struggles about exactly this, and no this is not the column for unpacking them. But the food and the humour and the arguing style that my Brooklyn-born grandmother would have recognized instantly as Jewish are all functioning, in a hot climate nothing like the one they came from, and there is a reason for that, and the reason is where the survivors went.
So my attachment, such as it is, is not to a nation-state as an idea. It is to the fact that the closest continuation of the civilization my family came from is currently located there, populated by living Jews rather than by memorial plaques. I am more interested in where Jewish life is happening than in where it used to happen. Israel has this over Poland.
You can disagree with all of that. Plenty of Jews do, loudly, and I am not going to relitigate the decentring argument here because it’s boring.
My point is narrower and it is this. Nowhere in that account does Cyrus Scofield appear. Nor Darby, nor Untermyer, nor Oxford University Press, nor a study Bible, nor Genesis 12:3 in any translation. My grandmother did not consult a nineteenth century American footnote. Neither did Leon Pinsker, an Odessa physician who watched the pogroms of 1881 and wrote Auto-Emancipation the following year, an argument that is entirely about emancipation having failed and contains no prophecy whatsoever. Neither did Herzl, an assimilated Viennese journalist who was prepared in 1903 to discuss Uganda. Neither did Ben-Gurion, a socialist atheist. Neither did the Second Aliyah kibbutzniks, who were Marxists and thought religion was a relic, and who left after the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 in which a mob killed forty-nine Jews and destroyed around 1,300 homes over two days while the police watched.
By 1909, when the Scofield Reference Bible went to press, the Zionist movement had held eleven congresses, founded a bank and a land fund, adopted a flag and an anthem, absorbed two waves of immigration and built a city. Most Orthodox rabbinic authorities of the period were against the whole project on the grounds that human beings had no business forcing the redemption, which is its own interesting fight and also not one Scofield had any part in.
So you can have the verse. Take it. Read v’nivrechu as a passive if you like, or as the reflexive that most Jewish translation prefers, in which all the families of the earth bless themselves by Abraham, which Rashi glosses as a father saying to his son, may you be like him. It is a promise that a man’s name will outlive him. It was never doing the work Swing thinks it was doing, and if every evangelical in America stopped believing it tomorrow, the reasons I have given above would be exactly where they were yesterday.
What I cannot quite get past is that in thirty-two minutes about why Jews have a country, the possibility that Jews might have had reasons of our own never comes up. Not to be refuted. Not to be dismissed. It simply does not occur to her that there is anything to account for beyond an American footnote, because in the story she is telling we are not the sort of people who have reasons. We are the sort of people who have influence.
I am aware that pointing this out changes nothing about the 307,000 views. I am aware that a certain kind of reader will take the fact that I bothered as evidence of something. I have made my peace with that.
But I would still like to know, and I mean this as an actual open question rather than a rhetorical one, what she imagines was going on in Odessa in 1882? Or… does it really matter what this lying, ignorant bitch thinks?
Sources and further reading
- The Scofield-Untermyer claim traced to its origin, including the Lotos Club membership records: Scofield Files, and its 2025 spread from Ian Carroll to Candace Owens
- Arno C. Gaebelein, The History of the Scofield Reference Bible (1943), pp. 49-50, naming the actual backers: PDF
- Ernest R. Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism (University of Chicago Press, 1970), on Lyman Stewart’s contribution
- D. Jean Rushing, “From Confederate Deserter to Decorated Veteran Bible Scholar,” East Tennessee State University thesis, 2011
- Christian restorationism before 1900: CDAMM
- Behar et al., “No Evidence from Genome-Wide Data of a Khazar Origin for the Ashkenazi Jews,” Human Biology 85(6), 2013: PDF
- ‘Til Kingdom Come (Maya Zinshtein, 2019), reviewed in the Boston Globe and the Forward
- On the FARA filings the video is right about, which are real and worth reading: Responsible Statecraft on the church geofencing campaign, TIME on Brad Parscale’s registration, JTA on the influencer program, and the Quincy Institute‘s full report. The budget behind all of it was announced publicly in December 2024, nine months before the filings the video finds suspicious, and I think it was a bad idea competently disclosed rather than a secret competently kept
- Young evangelical support for Israel, 69% in 2018 down to 33.6% by spring 2021: Inbari and Bumin, reported in the Times of Israel
