ABSTRACT
The term 'Messiah' is an adaptation of the Hebrew HaMashiah, a term frequently used in Scripture. In rabbinic literature, there is frequent speculation about the Days of the Messiah. In their descriptions of the messianic age, the rabbis stressed that the Days of the Messiah will be totally unlike the present world. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Jewish community continued to anticipate the coming of the Messiah despite his failure to appear in 1348 and 1403 as predicted. These centuries witnessed the production of messianic treatises, and various scholars speculated about the year of his arrival. In the nineteenth century Reform Jews tended to interpret the new liberation in the Western world as the first step towards the realization of the messianic dream. For these reformers messianic redemption was understood in this-worldly terms.
