Zionists Admit: All Jews were originally against Zionism

If a Satmar or Neturei Karta publication tells you that all Jews in past centuries were opposed to Zionism, and that Zionism flies in the face of what Jews everywhere always believed, you might shrug it off as propaganda. When you find that statement in a Zionist publication, you pay more attention.

“The Return to Zion,” published in 1974, is a small book in the series called “Popular History of Jewish Civilization,” compiled by Aryeh Rubinstein and under the general editorship of Raphael Posner. In Chapter 1, the book describes what it calls the predecessors of political Zionism: the Jews who mourned the Jerusalem for 1,900 years, Rabbi Yehuda Halevi and the Ramban who strove to live in the Holy Land, and various movements to settle the land, such as Judah Hasid in 1700, the students of the Baal Shem Tov in 1764 and the students of the Vilna Gaon in 1808. Then come the following paragraphs:

It must be emphasized, however, that not only those Jews who yearned and prayed for the return to Zion while they remained in the diaspora, but even those who settled in Eretz Yisrael, were in basic agreement that the redemption of the Jewish people would come in G-d’s own time, and that there was little that man could do actively to hasten the process. Indeed, according to one school of thought, it was actually impudent of man to try to do so; “Dechikat HaKetz,” forcing the culmination, was therefore held by some religious authorities to be forbidden.

It was thus not really unexpected that Rabbi Judah Alkalai (1798-1878), was denounced for introducing in a number of pamphlets written in the 1840s and 1850s the daring concept that redemption is primarily in the hands of man himself.Alkalai, who was born in Sarajevo and brought up in Jerusalem, argued that the settlement of Eretz Yisrael was the primary solution to the Jewish problem in Europe. He urged the introduction of a tithe for financing settlement, the attainment of international recognition of a Jewish Eretz Yisrael, and the revival of the Hebrew language and of Jewish agriculture. Though his efforts achieved few results, Alkalai is clearly a precursor of modern Zionism.

The idea that salvation would be brought about by human endeavor was also stressed by Zvi Hirsch Kalischer (1795-1874), a German rabbinic scholar of Polish origin. Kalischer’s urge to gather supporters for the return to Eretz Yisrael was reinforced by the various national movements then active in Europe. Pointing to the Italian Risorgimento and to the struggles of the Poles and Hungarians to achieve independence, Kalischer chastened his fellow Jews for being the only people without such aspirations. Redemption, he maintained, would come in two stages: the natural one consisting of the return to Eretz Yisrael and labor, particularly agricultural, in the country, and the supernatural one to follow. The first stage would invigorate the Yishuv, the Jewish community of Eretz Yisrael, and put it on healthy economic foundation instead of its being dependent on donations from abroad, Chaluka. Kalischer found himself not only disputing, like Alkalai, with rabbis who objected to his ideas on religious grounds, but even with the rabbis of Eretz Yisrael, who argued that conditions in the country, particularly the unstable security situation, were not yet ripe for beginning agricultural settlement.

Of course, Rabbi Kalischer did not advocate a Jewish state, only agricultural settlement, as we’ve written elsewhere.