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For these and other reasons, historians are right to understand Joseph Smith’s project as an effort to Christianize the Hebrew Bible. Like the Puritans that McClay invokes, Latter-day Saints looked to biblical Israel to explain their traumas to themselves. Consistently the church’s economic and political separatism and later its devotion to polygamy alarmed and alienated Protestant Americans, as did the Mormons’ conviction that God had ordained land in Jackson County, Missouri as the site of the New Jerusalem, dedicated to the faithful. As more and more church members settled in Jackson County tensions with their neighbors escalated and led to a spiral of violence that would ultimately drive the church first to Illinois and then to the Utah Territory.

https://mosaicmagazine.com/response/history-ideas/2020/07/the-complicated-relationship-between-mormons-and-jews/