Zionism – The integral component of Jewish identity that Jews are historically pressured to shed

This is an original manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Israel Affairs on April 29, 2020.

To cite this article: Alyza D. Lewin (2020): Zionism – The integral component of Jewish Identity that Jews are historically pressured to shed, Israel Affairs, DOI: 10.1080/13537121.202.1754577

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An LDB blog summarizing this article is available here. Excerpts from that summary below:

The Jews’ historical case for a claim to Israel cannot be time-stamped by the founding of the modern state in 1948, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, or the First Zionist Conference in 1897. These are modern political moments—meaningful, weighty—but none of which fully capture the inherent religious, ancestral, and ethnic connection of the People of Israel to the Land of Israel. The claim to Israel begins with firmly establishing that Zionism, the yearning and determination of Jews to return to and re-establish their Jewish homeland in the Land of Israel, is an ancient, integral component of Jewish identity. That Zionism is not political, but as old as Abraham and the Bible, and sustained through millennia.

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Judaism is both a religion and ethnicity, and central to both of those components is Zionism. Consequently, for centuries Jewish prayers have been conducted facing Jerusalem and included pleas for the return to and the rebuilding of Zion. This Zionism has served as connective tissue bonding the Jewish people together across a widespread and long Diaspora.

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Lewin identifies six distinct periods of Aliya—literally “ascent” and the term for Jewish return to Israel—relying on historian Arie Morgenstern’s research, published in “Dispersion and the Longing for Zion, 1240-1840.” The Crusader period saw the “Aliya of the 300 Rabbis,” in which Jews from France, England, North Africa, and Egypt were inspired to move back to Israel by a letter prophesizing the imminent arrival of the Messiah. This was followed by a wave of aliyah in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with Jews responding to widespread violence targeting the Jewish hubs of Europe with a hopeful turn toward to Israel. With tens of thousands of Jews murdered and whole communities expelled, some Jewish leaders prompted their followers to follow them to Holy Land. The expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 and the conquering of Israel by the Ottomans, who subsequently lifted prohibitions on Jewish immigration, further inspired and facilitated Jewish return to their homeland. Many of these olim (immigrants) settled in the northern Israel town of Safed, which flourished into a spiritual center of the Jewish world, thriving for two centuries and producing some of the greatest rabbinic luminaries.

Aliyah became so popular in this period that the Vatican actually banned the use of Italian ports and ships for ferrying Jews to Israel. This process—heightened Jewish immigration to Israel, followed by government action to stymie their return—can be tracked throughout history, through the Enlightenment period until the British refusal to allow entry to Jews fleeing the Holocaust. Similarly, while the early seventeenth century saw rapid growth and development in Jerusalem, “children from the four corners of the earth fluttered like birds in their eagerness to settle in Jerusalem”—as one contemporary observer wrote—this Jerusalem renaissance came to a sudden and bitter end when the city came under the control of the Turkish Farukh family. The family persecuted the cities many thousands of Jews, imposing onerous taxes as to make it impossible for Jewish life to continue in the city. The community would not be revived until a century later.

In the post-Farukh period, waves of Jews, primarily from the Ottoman Empire and Italy, were again moving in droves to Israel, settling in Jerusalem and Tiberias. In the eighteenth century, eight new yeshivot were established in Israel, many synagogues were either renovated or built in this city centers, and hasidic leaders emigrated in large numbers. The next century saw hundreds of families and Talmudic students from Russia arriving in Israel.

Throughout these periods, the returned Jews would seek to reestablish ancient semicha, the process by which new Rabbis are ordained; locate the ten lost tribes of Israel, whose deportation from Israel to some unknown location by the Assyrian king is related in the Bible; and revive the Sanhedrin, the Jewish court system. The Jews arrived in hopes of already being in the Holy Land upon the coming of the Messiah, and of hastening that process by beginning the project of the in-gathering of the exiles by returning to and settling the land.

This long history of the Jewish messianic movements and the waves of Aliya since at least the thirteenth century that Lewin outlines counters any notion of Jewish “colonialism.” The story of a Jewish presence in Israel is one that is constant and pervasive, bookended by the ancient Biblical sovereign Judeans and the modern Israelis. The Zionism that has animated the Jewish people for centuries is the deep religious, spiritual, historical and ethnic belief that (a) all Jews—including the Ten Lost Tribes—are part of a Jewish nation dispersed around the globe; (b) the Jewish nation will one day return to Zion and re-establish a Jewish homeland there; and (c) Jews can hasten the coming of the Messiah, the ultimate redemption and the restored Jewish homeland by re-establishing the Jewish legal framework that applied before the Jews were forced into exile.