Ignatz Lichtenstein

Who was Ignatz Lichtenstein?

Ignatz Lichtenstein was a Hungarian Orthodox rabbi who wrote "pamphlets advocating conversion to Christianity while still officiating as a Rabbi." Though he refused to be baptized into the Christian faith his whole life, he ultimately resigned his rabbinate in 1892. A biography of him appeared in the Methodist Episcopal missionary magazine The Gospel in All Lands in 1894. The Jewish historian Gotthard Deutsch, an editor of the Jewish Encyclopedia, in an essay published 3 February 1916, mentions him in the course of refuting a claim by the Chief Rabbi of London that no rabbi had ever become a convert to Christianity. Followers of Messianic Judaism, considered by most Christians and Jews to be a form of Christianity, later mention him as an example of a turn of the 19th century "Jewish believer in Jesus." Speaking of his first contact with the gospel, he said: "I looked for thorns and gathered roses."