To tell the story of David Baron (1855-1926) we should first take a journey to a farm in Russia owned by an orthodox Jew. The youngest of his seven children was one of those rare, unspoiled young men. The boy’s parents and companions thought that if anyone qualified for Abraham’s bosom, that boy would. He was not mean, he loved his family, studied Hebrew and the Talmud, said prayers and worked hard for his father.
Then a near death experience made him stare closely at the issue of life, and death, and what comes after death. During vacation time, he was out in the field helping his father’s farm laborers when he fell in front of some unmanageable horses and a wheel of the cart they were pulling passed over him. His pummeled, inert body was carried home to his despairing parents, who called in a medical doctor. The boy regained consciousness just in time to hear the doctor, who was standing by his bedside, tell the parents that he had little hope of recovering. That night he asked his pious mother, “Dear mother, I am afraid I am dying. What will become of me? Where am I going?”
As her hand touched his worried forehead, she wept. “My dear child, you have been such a good boy, and should you die, you will go to heaven.”
That boy knew differently. The question, “How can a man be just with God?” haunted him. He knew his Bible too well. Psalm 51:5, Genesis 6:5 and 8:21, and Jeremiah 17:9 showed him only the “blackness of darkness” in his own heart. “Oh! no, mother, I have not been good, and if my getting to heaven depends on my own goodness I shall never get there.” The boy survived the night, in fact he eventually passed his three-score and ten allotment. He survived, but his self-righteousness did not recover.
David Baron had seen himself as he was.
Though he had met Christians, he never even saw a New Testament until in adulthood. As a boy, he was taught to recite Deuteronomy 7:26 whenever he passed by a Christian church building, “Thou shalt utterly abhor it, thou shalt utterly detest it; for it is a cursed thing.” The only name he knew for the Lord Jesus Christ was the name Tooleh (crucified), a person who taught his followers to serve idols and persecute the Jews, whom the Talmudists styled as “the greatest sinner in Israel” and the epitome of the false prophet that Moses warned of in Deuteronomy 13. It is almost impossible for a Gentile to understand how deeply stained with prejudice the Jews were toward Christianity, and especially any Jew who believed in Jesus Christ.
For any Jew to believe in the One that the nation of Israel had branded an imposter seemed an impossibility. Then he met a Jew and a Gentile, who were both true followers of Jesus of Nazareth. Unlike many of his fellows, David did not openly ridicule and curse them when they spoke to him about Someone they called their “Saviour” and spoke as though they knew God in a personal way, calling Him their Father. As they debated Bible passages, the description they gave David was quite different from what he had heard about Tooleh. The exchanges continued until one night the Christian ended a conversation with David by saying, “As for me, I tell you honestly, as in the sight of God, that I never knew what true happiness was until I found it in Christ.”
Strange! Happiness in Christ? However cleverly David argued to block the Christian’s proof that Jesus is the Messiah, he could not overcome the fact that the Christian had something which made him happy.
Through some difficult reversals, David migrated from his father’s farm in Russia to Hull, England, where he was given a New Testament. There he discovered the answer to his longing for a Temple, a Priest, and a Lamb–all those things of which Judaism was bankrupt. In his apartment, with his New Testament, he got down on his knees and prayed, “O, my God, if Thou canst not save me in any other condition but faith in Jesus, be pleased to give me that faith, and help me to love that most precious Name which I have so long hated and despised.”
Fanny Kingsford was born in 1849 near Dover, England. As an adolescent, she was fascinated with the Jews, perhaps through her personal study of the Bible. She went on to study Hebrew under a rabbi at Dover.
Anxious that the Jews of the town should have the gospel put before them by one of their own brethren, converted to Christ, she wrote the Mildmay Mission to the Jews asking if they could send a suitable man. Andrew Bonar and Adolf Saphir were both strong supporters of the Mildmay Mission. As a young convert, David Baron was then involved with the mission and therefore was sent to Dover. David, then 28 years old, stayed in the Kingsford home while he conducted evangelistic meetings in the area and also ministered the Word in Christian congregations on Sundays. David was busy, but not too busy to notice his kind, intelligent and zealous hostess. God had prepared for him a true helpmeet.
Fanny was an enthusiast, sharing David’s burden for the Jews. She shared his intellectual interests and his intellectual attitude. She was the trusted co-worker, secretary, and confidant who edited and prepared for press David’s many books and pamphlets. Of this skilled linguist and writer, David said, “Without her I would not have done it–for she is the crown of my earthly life.” Though not exactly robust herself, she was the one who tended to David’s delicate health. He was frequently ill. None of this hindered her ministry of hospitality out of their London home, or from going with David on annual missionary trips into Eastern Europe and the countries of the Middle East. These excursions took them into the squalor of the ghettos of Budapest, Prague, Kronstadt, and Cracow.
A second co-laborer of David’s was Adolph Saphir’s brother-in-law, C. A. Schoenberger. While Baron was the calm, deliberate, cautious Bible teacher, brother Schoenberger was the flaming torch that would ignite his hearers’ hearts. When these two Jews knit together in their work in 1893, their friends all wondered, “How long can this last?”
It lasted. Baron assembled a band of co-laborers, working out of a building in London where they did their editorial work, as well as maintaining contact with missionaries abroad who worked among the Jews. They also conducted regular open-air meetings, standing outside the front door. On occasion more than a hundred gathered–but not always in the most polite mood. A favorite prank of the hecklers was to throw a bag of flour in the preacher’s face. James Hirsch Lewis, would stand there, preaching on, with his face and beard smothered in white powder.
Herman Newmark testified, “As I used to stroll along the Whitechapel Road on an evening in my childhood, I would pass a group of Jews listening to Mr. Lewis as he preached the gospel, but in the ignorance of unbelief I would say to whoever was my companion, “Look at that traitor! He’s doing it for money! I suppose he used to earn thirty shillings a week as a tailor, and now they are paying him #10 a week to be a Christian–let us walk past!”
After coming to Christ, Newmark found Mr. Lewis at a prayer meeting. Holding out his hand, he said, “How are you, brother?”
Lewis answered, “I do not know you.”
“Ah, but I know you! I often used to pass you when you were preaching at this doorway, and I hated you like poison, but now we are brothers in Christ.”
The elderly Lewis replied, “You are not the first one who has borne similar testimony to me.”
When the Zionist Congress began in a rented casino in Basle, Switzerland, David attended. Timing his continental tours to include the annual conference in his itinerary each year, as a reporter David obtained a permit to sit in with the delegates. He personally knew Theodor Herzl, the visionary and chairman of the congress. At one conference, a delegate stood and began to vent his spleen on Christian Jewish missionaries. Herzl’s response was to quietly leave the rostrum and come down and seat himself by the side of Mr. Baron and a few of his fellow missionaries.
Such a stronghold of Judaism naturally seemed impervious to the gospel of Christ. But the eyes of faith read a different story. Years before, in Budapest, Hungary, Scottish missionaries working through the Free Church of Scotland Jewish Mission met for prayer meetings in the Hotel Frohner. They prayed and God worked. Adolph Saphir’s parents and Dr. Alfred Edersheim were saved. Other notable Christian Jews in Europe were Professor Franz Delitsch, who translated the New Testament into Hebrew (this was a must have for evangelizing the orthodox). Joseph Rabinovich was another Christian Jew who spoke and wrote powerfully in the south of Russia. But few conversions shook Judaism like that of Rabbi Lichtenstein of Tapio-Szele, Hungary, who had been a district rabbi for forty years. Schoenberger and Baron published Lichtenstein’s writings widely, and did all they could to encourage the aged man. The greatest encouragement was the visit they made to Lichtenstein’s oldest son, a brilliant physician, who was on his deathbed. Holding the dying man’s hands, they had the joy of leading him to the same Jesus that the aged rabbi had found.
Brother Baron was strictly non-sectarian, so much so that he took precautions not to start some new division in the Church. For instance, when asked about baptizing converts, Baron sighted the saying of Paul in 1 Corinthians, that Christ sent him not to baptize. Baron thought it was wise to send new believers to existing scriptural congregations where they would be baptized. He feared the danger of starting up a new denomination that catered to believing Jews.
In 1910, Baron wrote, “In these seventeen years, though we have no church, or sect, or party at our back, though no one in the world has been personally asked by us for one pound, nor has a penny been spent in advertising for funds…a sum of about #50,000 (including #9,000 for the building of the Mission House) has been sent in absolutely spontaneous gifts by those whose hearts God Himself has touched in answer to prayer all over the world.
“From the first, and all along, we have depended only and entirely for the supply of all the temporal as well as for the spiritual needs of the Mission, upon the living God. We have no ‘auxiliaries,’ or ‘associations,’ or collections, or any visible resources whatever to rely upon–we have never spent a penny in advertising for funds. We send about no appeals, nor have we sought to press ourselves, or the important work which God has committed into our hands, on the attention of the Christian public.
“I record this to the glory of God, and as a testimony to those who read, that God always justifies and honors the trust we put in Him; and that if it is He who entrusts us with any task for the glory of Christ and the extension of His Kingdom, He will assuredly in His own way supply the means for its accomplishment.
“I need not repeat that the path of faith is not free from trial. There are times of testing and heart searchings; seasons when we are permitted to be brought down to the very dust in the sense of need and the failure of all human help; yet if our hearts be fixed on God, if we are only certain that it is He who has called us to this service–if we are ready, if need be, to suffer want, and to be misjudged rather than go down to Egypt for help, or fly to the ‘chariots and horses’ of worldly ways and methods–He will assuredly show us in the end that we have still to do with the Living God of Abraham and of Israel–the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who never withholds any good thing from them that walk uprightly.”
From London, David sent gifts to workers in Northern Africa, Germany, Poland, Romania, Austria, Russia, and Israel. Many of these labored among the poverty stricken. He would drily say, “There are two miracles in the work of God: one is, how the money comes, and the other is how it goes!”
David Baron came down with pneumonia and died in 1926. Fanny continued the work until three months before her death in 1931.
Stuart Holden said that David Baron was the most Christlike man he had ever met. As he said goodbye he was apt to add, “You can never be too great an imitator of Jesus.”
David Baron’s books include:
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The Visions and Prophecies of Zechariah
The Shepherd of Israel
The Servant of Jehovah
Anglo-Israelism Examined
The History of Israel