Early Voices for Return to the Land
A portrait of Rabbi Zevi Hirsch Kalischer.
After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD and the cataclysmic defeat of the Bar Kochba Revolt in 135 AD, the surviving rabbis, descendants of the Pharisees, began developing a new form of Rabbinic Judaism which centered around the synagogue instead of the temple, replacing the Levitical sacrifices with prayer, the study of Torah and Talmud, and good deeds. Jews were forbidden from entering Jerusalem for more than one-hundred years, and although yearnings for Zion and Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel) were still prominent in Jewish liturgy and writing, their reality became more and more removed as the centuries passed. Although a small Jewish community returned to the City of David in the third century and remained throughout the Middle Ages, it was relatively tiny compared to the vast majority of Jews in Diaspora throughout Asia, Europe and the Americas. Nonetheless, observant Jews continued to pray for the coming of a messiah, a return to the Land, and for the building of the Third Temple.
By the nineteenth century, Judaism had undergone significant changes in the West after the Enlightenment, branching apart into more theologically liberal (Reformed) and Orthodox streams. Reformed Judaism generally abandoned the hope of a literal Messiah, a physical return to the Land of Israel, or a resumption of the sacrifices on the Temple Mount. Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews continued to believe for a realistic fulfillment of these things, although it was generally believed that the coming of the Messiah would precede the regathering of the Jewish people to their homeland. Calls to reestablish the ancient homeland prior to Messiah’s arrival were considered premature, even heretical. Then came the Damascus Affair of 1840 – the first truly global incident of Antisemitism – followed by an unending series of pogroms in the Pale of Settlement where millions of Jews lived along the western flank of the Russian Empire. Prominent voices arose from among the ranks of the rabbis in Europe with a new message: The Jewish people should not wait for Messiah's arrival before returning to the Land. Rather, it was incumbent on them to return to the Land first, in order to usher in the Messianic Age.
One such early voice for Jewish return was Rabbi Judah ben Solomon Hai Alkalai. Born in Sarajevo, Bosnia in 1798 during the rule of the Turkish sultans, Alkalai moved to Jerusalem at a young age, where he studied for the rabbinate. He returned to Europe as a rabbi in Croatia, where he taught Hebrew and wrote two books encouraging return to the Land as a precondition of Israel’s salvation. His books were highly controversial at the time and were rejected by a majority of his fellow Orthodox rabbis. But the Damascus Affair only reinforced Alkalai’s conviction that the survival of Judaism in exile was untenable, and that a Jewish awakening for a return to Zion was imminent. He travelled Europe in the 1850’s and 60’s, founding organizations and publishing a Hebrew-language book entitled Goral Ladonai, “A Lot for the Lord,” before finally emigrating back to the Promised Land where he established a society for Jewish settlement. Alkalai’s efforts proved mostly unfruitful during his lifetime, although today he is credited as one of the forerunners of the Zionist movement, or proto-Zionism.
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While touring Europe, Rabbi Alkalai met with another like-minded rabbi who was also heralding the call for a Jewish return to the Land. Rabbi Yehuda Bibas was born in Gibraltar, a descendant of Jewish communities who had fled to North Africa from the relentless persecution of Jewish communities in Spain. Rabbi Bibas’ message to the Jews of Europe was even more assertive than Alkalai’s in calling for a general Jewish emmigration back to Israel for the purpose of overthrowing the waning Turkish Ottoman authorities and establishing a Jewish state. Predictably, his message fell on mostly deaf ears, except for one pair of ears that belonged to Sir Moses Haim Montefiore, a wealthy banker and financier, and son of an Italian-Jewish family in England. Rabbi Bibas and Sir Moses became close friends and partners after the Damascus Affair, during which the latter donated large sums of money to the preservation and development of Jewish communities across the Levant (modern Syria, Jordan and Israel). Montefiore was enraptured by the Promised Land, travelling there seven times throughout his life, and was inspired by Bibas’ teachings. In 1860, he built the first modern, permanent Jewish settlement in Jerusalem, just outside the walls of the Old City. It was officially an almshouse named Mishkenot Sha’ananim, or “Dwelling of Peace.” The structure has survived riots and wars to become the modern-day home of the Jerusalem Music Center, as a well as a convention center and lodging for artists, musicians and authors of international acclaim. For his part, Rabbi Bibas emigrated to the Land in 1852, where he led a rabbinical school in the port city of Jaffa. He later moved to Hebron, where he established an extensive Jewish library in the city of the Patriarchs.
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A third prominent proto-Zionist was Zevi Hirsch Kalischer. Beginning as a rabbi in modern-day Torun, Poland, Kalischer met with the same opposition and discouragement from fellow Orthodox rabbis as his contemporaries Alkalai and Bibas for his message of a Jewish return to the Land. Like Alkalai, he also published a Hebrew-language book entitled Derishat Zion. Widely circulated in Eastern Europe, the book promoted the establishment of Jewish agricultural communities in Eretz Yisrael, for which Kalischer toured Germany in the 1860’s to secure funding and support from Jewish leaders. Soon afterwards, he established the Central Committee for Settlement in Eretz Israel in Berlin, and also co-founded the Mikve Yisrael Agricultural School in 1870. At Mikve Yisrael, future migrants were taught the necessary skills to establish agricultural communities in the Land, including the cooperative defense of those communities against those who might seek their harm. Rabbi Kalischer’s school of teaching became of the forerunner of the kibbutzim, or collective farming communities that arose in Israel in the following decades. To this day, Zevi Hirsch Kalischer is honored in the naming of Tirat Tzevi, a religious kibbutz in the Bet She’an Valley in Israel.
