In the seventeenth century, in England, a remarkable number of small religious
movements began adopting demonstratively Jewish ritual practices. They were
labelled by their contemporaries as Judaizers. Why did this happen? Was it an
excrescence of over-exuberant biblicism? Was it a by-product of the Protestant
apocalyptic tradition? Was it a response to the changing status of the Jews in Europe?
In Jewish Christians in Puritan England, Aidan Cottrell-Boyce argues that Puritan
Judaizing was in fact an expression of another aspect of the Puritan experience: the
need to be recognized as a 'singular, ' positively distinctive, and Godly minority.