ABSTRACT
Beginning with the conversion of Sabbatai Zvi to Islam, this chapter traces the rabbinic rejection of concepts of imminent messianic redemption and salvation from the eighteenth century’s early modernism to the rise of Zionism. Among others, the rabbinic criticism of Jews moving to “the Holy Land”, voiced by Isaiah Levi Horowitz, Jonathan Eybeschutz, and Jacob Emden, expressed the common fear that the fulfillment of the commands of the Torah was impossible in the land. In accord with them, the great enlightenment scholar, Moses Mendelssohn, deeply opposed the claim of Christian theologians that Jews had another national heritage than the German, by arguing that the Talmud forbad even thinking of a return to Palestine. Reform Judaism, dominant in Germany, followed Mendelssohn in rejecting the Zionist project and was in agreement with traditional Judaism in its rejection of Jewish nationalism. It supported, rather, a Judaism faithful to the Torah. The notion that the holy scriptures completely replaced the land, in fact, led to a widespread rabbinic rejection of convening the First Zionist Congress of 1897. This article was first published in S. Sand, “Judaism’s Response to the Invention of the Holy Land”, in idem, The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland (London: Verso 2012/2014): 178–196.
