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.