The Heralds of Zionism as Theological Revolutionaries

In historiographical research, there is an approach that perceives the ideologues who preceded the Hovevei Zion movement (1881) and the Zionist movement (1896) as “heralds of Zionism”. These ideologues operated, or at least proposed the idea of the Jews’ return to the Land of Israel and establishment a political entity in the Land, beginning from the 1860s. The researchers are divided, however, on the identification of the heralds. Some locate them even earlier, in the 17th century, while others deny their very existence. This article wishes to claim that the heralds of Zionism were Orthodox rabbis, such as R. Kalisher, R. Alkalai, R. Friedland, R. Guttmacher, R. Bibas, and R. Natonek, who operated in the early half of the 19th century and transformed the Jewish theology that advocated a passive-spiritual-Divine redemption into an active-practical-natural redemption. For this purpose, it is necessary to immigrate to the Land of Israel and cultivate the land. They contended that once the People of Israel would do so, the redemption would arrive.

Judaism and Providence

According to central principles of Judaism, God interacts with the world. But how much does God interact with the world? Theological views on offer range from God’s particular providence over everything to particular providence in the land of Israel only. We defend an idealist view: reality is fundamentally mental, existing in God’s mind. Accordingly, God has his providential “fingers” on everything.

Turning to Jerusalem from the Exile

Until modern, liberal Jews revised it, the consciousness of living in diaspora, in exile from the ideal Jewish life in the Land of Israel, permeated Jewish liturgy. This trope only intensified as the exile grew longer. The prayers, some recited multiple times a day, shaped Jewish diaspora identity into one yearning for its ancient home. The various forms of modern Judaism have negotiated this heritage, with some revising the prayers, either to express positive understandings of the diaspora or to integrate the new realities of Jewish life in the land of Israel. At the other end of the spectrum, others have considered the diaspora and exile to persist so long as they live in the pre-messianic world, even if geographically in the land itself.

“A Land for a People, Not a People for a Land”

Territorialist ideology emerged together with Zionist ideology. From the moment Leon Pinsker wrote in his Auto-Emancipation that “the goal of our present endeavors must be not the Holy Land, but a land of our own,” there were those in Jewish society who clung to the idea of “a land of our own” and wanted to set up some independent autonomous entity outside of the Land of Israel. This chapter traces territorial ideology from its ideational beginnings in the 1880s, through its conversion into an organized ideology and a political force in the Jewish world of the early twentieth century to its decline in the 1950s.

The Concept of Diaspora in Rabbinic Sources

The rabbinic diaspora in the Persianite and Sasanian empires of the second through seventh century CE provided the context for the production of one the great monuments of the culture of Jewish learning, the Babylonian Talmud. As the originary compilation of the rabbinic movement, the Mishnah (second century ce), on the other hand, appears as a text that was not only produced in the “land of Israel,” but also remained tethered to the land in its vision. This chapter discusses the dynamics of cultural mobility that enabled the rabbinic movement to transplant its traditions of learning to the geographic diaspora of what the rabbis referred to as Bavel (Babylonia). It traces some specific rhetorical strategies and, more generally, the consciousness that allowed the rabbis to transform Jewish dispersion into diaspora.