ABSTRACT
The vulnerability of Jews to the most brutal forms of anti-Semitism together with the Haredi Jews' passivity and submissiveness while waiting for the Messiah began to worry a number of rabbinical authorities and secular Jews, especially during and after the experiences of the Holocaust. At this time, one of the main answers to this aspect of Jewish tradition was religious Zionism in the spirit of the teachings of Rabbi Kook the Elder and, later, Rabbi Kook the Younger (see the chapter about them). For some religious Jews, however, this response was inadequate. They thus began to work on their own extreme interpretation (or rather misinterpretation) of Judaism. Their considerably distorted concept of Judaism eventually got their organizations on lists of banned terrorist organizations, just as a similar blacklisting happened to a number of radical Islamist movements in the second half of the twentieth century.
