ABSTRACT
The rabbis of the Old Jerusalem Yishuv were not unaware of the dilemmas involved, nor were they automatically hostile to the New Yishuv's interests. In the meantime, the New Yishuv settlers, despairing of help at home, had taken another tack; they turned to several universally respected rabbis in Europe for the necessary dispensation. Although the favorable decree they thus obtained was never endorsed officially by the Jerusalem rabbis, there was little the latter could do to undermine its halakhic legitimacy. In 1890, the year after the sabbatical, the Old Yishuv moderates found an opportunity to repair relations with the New Yishuv when a group of high-ranking Hovevei Tzion leaders from Russia, led by the ultraorthodox Rabbi Shmuel Mohilever, came to Palestine on a fact-finding mission. The lost war over the sabbatical year and the "peace pact of 1890" marked the last effective stand of the Old Yishuv against the coming tide of modernization and secular nationalism.
