Proto-Zionism

Proto-Zionism (or Forerunner of Zionism; Hebrew: מְבַשְרֵי הציונות, pronounced: Mevasrei ha-Tzionut) is a concept in historiography describing Jewish thinkers active during the second half of the 19th century who were deeply affected by the idea of modern nationalism spreading in Europe at that time. They sought to establish a Jewish homeland in the Land of Israel. The central activity of these men took place between the years 1860 and 1874, before the establishment of practical Zionism (1881) and political Zionism (1896). It is for this reason that they are called precursors of Zionism or proto-Zionists.

While the 17th century raised the overall idea, among Jews and non-Jews, of "restoring the Jews to Israel naturally by settlement and political action," the ultimate goal was not yet clearly defined. These ideas did not unite people to action and relied on the national project and the State (the Jewish nation).

This group of men considered to be proto-Zionists includes Yehuda Bibas (1789–1852), Judah Alkalai (1798–1878), Zvi Hirsch Kalischer (1795–1874), philosopher Moses Hess (1812–1875) and Moses Montefiore (1784–1885).

Background

Muhammad Ali seized power of Ottoman Egypt in 1805 following a civil war between the reigning Mamluks and Ottomans. Muhammad Ali dreamed of a new Egypt rising from the ashes of Ottoman decline: "I am well aware that the (Ottoman) Empire is heading by the day toward destruction... On its ruins I will build a vast kingdom... up to the Euphrates and the Tigris". He envisioned the Levant as the bread basket of Egypt, supplying Egypt with agricultural production and conscripts for their wars against the Ottomans. Most of the Muslim Arab peasantry in Palestine turned against Ibrahim Pasha, Ali's eldest son and successor, as his constant demands for conscript soldiers came to be seen as a death sentence leading to the 1834 Peasants' revolt in Palestine. This was the backdrop against which proto-Zionism developed as more Jews started immigrating to the region under Ibrahim Pasha's rule. After the Ottomans regained control of the Levant in the Oriental Crisis of 1840, the legal structures of land ownership underwent significant reform as part of the Tanzimat era, beginning with the Land Code of 1858. Once based on cultivation, land ownership was now based on title and register, paving the way for later land purchases by Zionists.

History

The forerunners of Zionism, rather than being causally connected to the later development of Zionism, are thinkers and activists who expressed some notion of Jewish national consciousness or advocated for the migration of Jews to Palestine. These attempts were not continuous as national movements typically are.

The medieval Jewish Torah scholar Maimonides advocated a re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel in a lengthy preface to his 13 principles of faith. He wrote that Jewish national independence would come about through natural means and argued for political activism to bring it about. Likewise, the medieval Jewish philosopher Judah HaLevi also espoused Proto-Zionist ideas, writing that only in the Land of Israel could Jews be truly secure.

According to Ben-Zion Dinur, the aliyah of Judah HeHasid and his group in 1700 inaugurated a new era during which processes such as encouraging productivity, the revival of the Hebrew language and national aspirations developed. Nahum Sokolow described proto-Zionists as anyone who wished to renew the Jewish community in the Land of Israel, or who wrote about the Jewish problem, starting from the 17th century. This broad definition included such figures as Moses Montefiore, Adolphe Crémieux, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and Sabbatai Zevi. Nathan Michael Gerber also traced the forerunners of Zionism back to the 17th century.

According to Arie Morgenstern, the Vilna Gaon of Lithuania, Elijah ben Solomon Zalman (1720–1797), promoted a teaching from the Zohar (book of Jewish mysticism) citing the prediction that "the gates of wisdom above and the founts of wisdom below will open" would happen after the start of the 6th century of the 6th millennium i.e. after the year 5600 of the Jewish calendar (1839–1840 AD). Many understood this to imply the coming of the Messiah at that time. This early wave of Jewish migration to the Holy Land began in 1808 and crested in 1840. Although the Messiah did not appear, the Ottoman government took control of Palestine from the Egyptians in 1840, and its recently established rights for all Ottoman citizens—regardless of religion—was thus extended to the non-Muslim populations of Palestine, including the Jewish people there. The right to purchase and own land was a particularly significant, if less noticed, milepost in the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land.

19th century

Moses Montefiore, c. 1868–1869

In the nineteenth century, there were a number of initiatives to create Jewish colonies or homelands in various places outside Palestine. Jewish settlements were proposed for establishment in the upper Mississippi region by W.D. Robinson in 1819. Moral but not practical efforts were made in Prague by Abraham Benisch and Moritz Steinschneider to organise a Jewish emigration in 1835. In the United States, Mordecai Manuel Noah attempted to establish a Jewish refuge opposite Buffalo, New York, on Grand Isle, 1825. These early Jewish nation building efforts failed.

The idea of returning to Palestine was rejected by the conferences of rabbis held in that epoch. Individual efforts supported the emigration of groups of Jews to Palestine, pre-Zionist Aliyah, even before the First Zionist Congress in 1897, the year considered as the start of practical Zionism. Moses Montefiore, who is viewed as a proto-Zionist, established a colony for Jews in Palestine. In 1854, his friend Judah Touro bequeathed money to fund Jewish residential settlement in Palestine. Laurence Oliphant failed in a like attempt to bring to Palestine the Jewish proletariat of Poland, Lithuania, Romania, and the Turkish Empire (1879 and 1882).

Judah Alkalai

Zvi Hirsch Kalischer

Moses Hess

The most notable proto-Zionists were rabbis such as Judah ben Solomon Hai Alkalai and Zvi Hirsch Kalischer. Their idea of Jews as a collective was strongly tied to religious notions distinct from the secular movement referred to as Zionism that developed at the end of the century. Jacob Katz argues that it is possible to point to three specific individuals as the "forerunners of Zionism": Rabbi Solomon Hai Alkalai, Rabbi Kalischer, and philosopher Moses Hess. Although other people acted in various forms, it is the actions of this triad that left their imprint on the Hovevei Zion. Samuel Leib Zitron cited Rabbi Alkalai as the pioneer of modern political Zionism.

Katz further argues that the Rabbis Alkalai and Kalisher changed their religious worldview, abandoning the "Basics of non-realistic perception of traditional Messianic views". He also explains that during their actions as forerunners of Zionism there "was not on the agenda an issue of lack of rights to Jews or social discrimination" and thus the modern idea of Jewish nationalism was not a success in the years they operated. From the late 1870s until the eve of World War I, with growing economic plight of Eastern European Jews and the rising wave of anti-Semitism, two and a half million Jews left Eastern Europe; only a small percentage of them emigrated to Israel.

Moses Hess, a former associate of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, is regarded as the first modern Jewish nationalist, advocated for the establishment of an independent Jewish state in pursuit of the economic and social normalization of the Jewish people. Hess believed that emancipation alone was not a sufficient solution to the problems faced by European Jewry. In 1862, he wrote Rome and Jerusalem. The Last National Question calling for the Jews to create a socialist state in Palestine as a means of settling the Jewish question. Also in 1862, German Orthodox Rabbi Kalischer published his tractate Derishat Zion, arguing that the salvation of the Jews, promised by the Prophets, can come about only by self-help. In 1882, after the Odessa pogrom, Judah Leib Pinsker published the pamphlet Auto-Emancipation (self-emancipation), arguing that Jews could only be truly free in their own country and analysing the persistent tendency of Europeans to regard Jews as aliens:

"Since the Jew is nowhere at home, nowhere regarded as a native, he remains an alien everywhere. That he himself and his ancestors as well are born in the country does not alter this fact in the least... to the living the Jew is a corpse, to the native a foreigner, to the homesteader a vagrant, to the proprietary a beggar, to the poor an exploiter and a millionaire, to the patriot a man without a country, for all a hated rival."

Citron and Samuel Ettinger, who argued that even if preceded by the movement of Hovevei Zion were different personalities who tackled the Jewish problem, the few acts that they were at hand to do did not leave an impression for generations, did not affect anything on the Zionist movement, and thus there is no person that could be called "harbinger of Zionism".

Notable proto-Zionists

• The Vilna Gaon (1720–1797) was one of the chief promoters of the idea that the passage from the Zohar mentioned above indicated that the Messiah would return in 1840. Groups of his followers ("Perushim") started to arrive in the Holy Land in 1808.
• Judah Bibas was a Gibraltar-born Rabbi, who served as the Chief Rabbi of Corfu. Bibas visited Jewish communities all over Europe, and encouraged Jews to make Aliyah to Palestine.
• Moses Hess was influenced by the idea of modern nationalism and in 1862 published Rome and Jerusalem. Hess, who was secular and a former revolutionary socialist, rediscovered the cultural and political origins of Judaism, all in order to draw out ideas for the modern Jewish national movement.
• Yehuda Alkalai was a Sephardi rabbi from the Balkans and a student of Rabbi Yehuda Bibas who was infused with Christian ideas about the end of redemption and deeply influenced by the political success of Adolphe Crémieux and Moses Montefiore, as well as the Damascus affair.
• Zvi Hirsch Kalischer was a German of Polish origin who believed that the emancipation – the granting of equal rights to Jews, at least practically - was part of the process of redemption.
• John Adams was an American president who advocated for a Jewish state in Palestine.
• Napoleon I aimed to create a Jewish state in Palestine during his war in Egypt.
• Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, sent Orson Hyde to Jerusalem to consecrate the region for "the gathering of Judah's scattered remnants" in 1841. In his dedication, Hyde called for the restoration of the Davidic monarchy and to "constitute her people a distinct nation and government."
• Emma Lazarus was an American Jewish poet who called in 1882 for a repatriation of the Jews into Palestine.
• George Eliot was an English novelist who wrote in 1876 the novel Daniel Deronda which expressed proto-Zionist ideas.
• Some scholars describe Baruch Spinoza as a proto-Zionist.

See also

• History of Zionism
• Pre-Modern Aliyah
• Return to Zion
• Yom HaAliyah
• Benedetto Musolino

References

Works cited

• Ben-Ami, Shlomo (11 July 2021). "When Napoleon Was About to Declare a Jewish State in Palestine". Haaretz. Retrieved 22 February 2024.
• Bushman, Richard L.; Woodworth, Jed (2005). Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (1st ed.). New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978-1-4000-4270-8.
• Cesarani, David (1982). "The birth of English Zionism (Books and Writers)". Jewish Quarterly. 30 (3). Jewish Literary Trust (Taylor & Francis): 59–61. doi:10.1080/0449010X.1982.10704913.
• Diamond, James A. (28 April 2020). "Maimonides and Medinat Yisrael". Jewish Review of Books. Archived from the original on 1 September 2022. Retrieved 1 November 2022.
• Dieckhoff, Alain (2003). The Invention of a Nation: Zionist Thought and the Making of Modern Israel. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-12766-0.
• Dudman, Helga (1982). Street People (1st ed.). The Jerusalem Post/Carta. ISBN 978-965-220-039-6.
• Isseroff, Ami (2006). "Biographies - Yehuda Alkalai (Akalay)". Zionism and Israel. Archived from the original on 4 November 2022.
• Katz, Jacob (1 January 1968). "The Jewish National Movement: A Sociological Analysis". Cahiers d'Histoire Mondiale. Journal of World History. Cuadernos de Historia Mundial. 11 (1): 267–283.
• Katz, Jacob (1996). "Forerunners of Zionism". In Reinharz, Jehuda; Shapira, Anita (eds.). Essential Papers on Zionism. New York: NYU Press. pp. 33–45. ISBN 978-0304335848.
• Kimmerling, Baruch; Migdal, Joel S. (2003). The Palestinian People: A History. Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674011298.
• Lebovic, Matt (27 August 2019). "200 years ago, John Adams promoted a Jewish state in the Holy Land". The Times of Israel. Archived from the original on 27 August 2019. Retrieved 7 April 2025.
• Morgenstern, Arie (2006). Hastening Redemption: Messianism and the Resettlement of the Land of Israel. Translated by Linsider, Joel A. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0195305784.
• Novak, David (2015). "Was Spinoza the First Zionist?". Zionism and Judaism: A New Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 23–47. doi:10.1017/CBO9781316163719.004. ISBN 978-1-107-09995-1. Retrieved 2025-01-19.
• Pasachoff, Naomi E.; Littman, Robert J. (2005). A Concise History of the Jewish People. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-0-7425-4366-9. Archived from the original on 19 February 2017. Retrieved 19 February 2016.
• Penslar, Derek J. (2023). Zionism: An Emotional State. Rutgers University Press. ISBN 978-0-8135-7611-4.
• Pinsker, Leon (1882). "Autoemancipation". www.mideastweb.org. Archived from the original on 1 March 2026. Retrieved 21 January 2009.
• Sela, Avraham (2002). Continuum Political Encyclopedia of the Middle East. Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 978-0-8264-1413-7.
• Shimoni, Gideon (1995). The Zionist Ideology. Brandeis University Press. ISBN 0-87451-703-6.
•  Singer, Isidore; Schloessinger, Max (1901–1906). "Zvi Hirsch Kalischer". In Singer, Isidore; et al. (eds.). The Jewish Encyclopedia. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. pp. 421–422. Archived from the original on 8 January 2025.
• Smith, Charles D. (2001). Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (4th ed.). Bedford/St. Martin's. ISBN 978-0-312-20828-8.
• Smith, Steven B. (2016). "Chapter 5. What Kind of Jew Was Spinoza?". Modernity and Its Discontents: Making and Unmaking the Bourgeois from Machiavelli to Bellow. Yale University Press. pp. 88–108. doi:10.12987/9780300220988-006. ISBN 978-0-300-22098-8. Retrieved 20 January 2025.<
• Strauss, Leo (1981). "Progress or Return? The Contemporary Crisis in Western Civilization". Modern Judaism. 1 (1): 17–45. doi:10.1093/mj/1.1.17. ISSN 0276-1114. JSTOR 1396371.
• Yovel, Yirmiyahu (1992). Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Marrano of Reason. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-02078-5.