ABSTRACT

Rabbi Bar-Ilan (his original last name was Berlin) was a leading authority in religious Zionism. He was born in the Russian town of Volozhin (now in Belarus). His father was the well-known Talmudist Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin (1816–1893), who was called Netziv, and served as the dean of the renowned Volozhin Yeshiva. Meir also studied at this yeshiva until his father's death. Then he deepened his studies at the yeshivas in Telz, Brisk (Brest) and Novogrudok (Novardok), where he was taught by his maternal grandfather, Rabbi Yehiel Michel Epstein (1829–1908). After he received rabbinic ordination in 1902, he travelled to Germany, where he became acquainted with more modern streams of Orthodox Judaism. He also began attending the University of Berlin at this time. In 1905, he joined the Zionist Mizrachi movement, and was appointed its secretary in 1911. He then further rose through the ranks of Mizrachi and in 1915 was named the president of the US Mizrachi; accordingly, he moved to the United States. In 1925 he became a member of the Committee of Directors of the Jewish National Fund, which dealt with the financing and restoration of the Jewish homeland in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. In 1926, Rabbi Bar-Ilan settled in Jerusalem, where he served as a president of the World Mizrachi Center and as a representative of the organization in Zionist and settling institutions, including the secret defence committee. In the years 1929–1931 he was a member of the Zionist Executive Committee. In 1937 he was a leading opponent of the Peel Plan for the partition of Palestine, and in 1939, he similarly opposed the British government's White Paper which greatly restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine on the eve of the Second World War. Bar-Ilan subsequently advocated civil disobedience and Jewish non-cooperation with the British administration. After the establishment of the State of Israel, he founded a committee of scholars whose task was to examine the legal issues of the new state in the light of Jewish law. He was also the initiator of a religious-political formation called the National Front, which was a group of religious parties which constituted a single religious-political platform in the first election to the Knesset. Rabbi Bar-Ilan was also the editor of the Zionist newspapers Ha-Ivri (‘The Hebrew’, 1910–1921) and Ha-Tzofe (‘The Visionary’, 1938–1949). In 1947 he initiated and organized the publication of the Encyclopedia of the Talmud. He also founded an institution for the release of a new complete edition of the Talmud. After his death in 1949, the following year, the US Mizrachi opened a religious university in Ramat Gan (near Tel Aviv), which was named in his honour.