You credit me with more knowledge than I have, because I had never heard of the Niagara Prophecy Conference of the 1870's, and I have practically no knowledge of Protestant views on Jews/Israel going back to the sixteenth century.
I have read some of Martin Luther's opinion of Jews ("base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth" ). Of course he was far, far from the only one who wrote and preached like that in the 16th century: he was a fiery, intemperate polemicist. But there were many,both Catholic and Protestant, who slandered Jews in his day, as well as for centuries before and after. It's shameful, just shameful.
Classical, magisterial Protestantism is of course highly anti-Semitic (and has moved from that to liberalism today). But other than Episcopalianism, most American Protestantism is of the radical, post-magisterial variety. And this form of Protestantism has been predicting a Jewish return to Israel since at least the seventeenth century (I apologize if I said "sixteenth" earlier).
Radical Protestantism is of course "the American religion" in that it holds that America was intended by G-d to be the land where "true biblical chrstianity" was to be restored after "the great apostasy" (ie, the rise of historical, liturgical chrstianity). The early Puritans saw themselves as a sort of (lehavdil!) "New Israel" and this land as their "Canaan." Furthermore the Hebrew Bible was held to be the pure and true liturgical worship as opposed to the ceremonial of historical chrstianity, which can't even be found in the "new testament." This is what I have been referring to as "Biblical sentimentalism"--a pull towards the Jewish liturgy and ceremony as the true Divine coin of which liturgical chrstian worship was the counterfeit. This does not mean that orthodox Puritanism believed in "two covenants" or denied supersessionism, it explains their interest in the Hebrew language.
It was outside mainstream orthodoxy that chrstian Zionism would emerge in the seventeenth century. Increase Mather for one wrote a book predicting the national restoration of the Jews to Canaan (unfortunately rejected by his son Cotton) and even Sir Isaac Newton (heterodox that he was) believed much the same thing. This budding need for national Israel to be restored to fill the vacancy which historical chrstianity was deemed unworthy to fill really began blooming in the nineteenth century and perhaps reached its first apogee in the Niagara Bible Conferences. I once read a scholarly book entitled Zionism within Early American Fundamentalism 1878-1918 which I recommend to you, but I doubt very seriously if you could ever find it anywhere.
What most people don't understand today is that back then, not only chrstian Zionism, but Fundamentalism itself, was not an ethno-cultural reference referring to "inbred trailer dwelling white trash." Early Fundamentalism began in large and respectable urban churches in the North (the South with its legacy of racism and polygenistic apologias for the same was not quite friendly to literalism originally). "Fundamentalism" meant a belief in "fundamentals." What is sectarian about that? What is "stupid" about that? What is "hateful" or "bigoted" about that? These fundamentals were in fact the historical beliefs of chrstians (or at least Protestants) until liberalism came in and took over in the churches which Fundamentalists (or at least proto-Fundamentalists) had built. It was moreover considered "ecumenical;" by stressing "fundamentals" rather than particulars, people from a wide variety of Protestant traditions could cooperate. Of course the perception is the exact opposite today.
Parenthetically, this is why I have such a thin skin when "conservatives" or "religious people" adopt the vocabulary of Hollywood sodomites and start ranting about "Bobble-toters," "snake handlers," "brain-dead bibliolators," "Cletuses," or "bigots." And yes, Catholics on FR have used all these terms.
Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately in the ultimate sense in which G-d sees things) Fundamentalism lost to liberalism in the mainstream churches in which it began and was driven to its last refuge in the rural folk-Protestantism of the American Bible Belt (a religious tradition which no one studies or even tries to understand, since it is considered too "ignorant" and "naive" to be worthy of such study). Thus today a "Fundamentalist" is a poor, rural, white Southern racist. But that is the connotation, not the denotation.
Before closing on this topic, I wish to note that Zionism's right wing opponents (the "Judaeo-Masonic-Bolshevik" people) have often used Fundamentalist Zionism's respectable mainstream origins as "proof" that it was created by "the Conspiracy" and should be expunged from chrstianity as the alien infection it is. The John Birch Society used to ("unofficially") promote a book entitled The Rapture Cult (full text available online) that made this very claim. The most "notorious" of all the chrstian Zionists was Cyrus Scofield, editor of the "Scofield Reference Bible." The original publisher of this book was Oxford University Press, which to the Birchers and their kin, is "proof" that the Rockefellers and the Illuminati were behind the whole thing. And there are any number of Catholic sites online which are quite anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist and which blame all the trouble in the Middle East on "chrstian Zionism." I used to be an e-mail correspondent with Robert Sungenis. I rejoiced at his creationism (though he doesn't interpret the Biblical chronologies literally) and even his geocentrism. But then he went nuts and became a raving Jew-hater, to such an extent that he accuses every critic of having Jewish ancestors.
I'm going to stop now. For whatever reason, I've been having connection problems all week. I've been constantly going off line and even now my download speed is under 1.00 (I'm going to have to call my ISP tomorrow). I'm assuming that it's because of all the rainfall and flash flooding we've been having the past couple weeks (phone lines are after all in the ground), but I'm hoping things will be restored soon. I wish I didn't have to personally call and complain to get this problem looked at.
Thank you again for everything. I hope this posts.