Religious Zionism

Before the very word "Zionism" was coined by Nathan Birnbaum in 1890, two rabbis had already formulated, on religious grounds, the idea of an organized return of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel. Rabbi Yehudah Alkalaï (1798-1878) and Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer (1795-1874), precursors of the modern Zionist movement, advocated from a religious perspective for settlement in the Land of Israel.

The figure of Kalischer is particularly foundational. He, Moses Hess, and Rabbi Yehuda Alkalaï are considered the "precursors of Zionism"; Kalischer's work, Derishat Zion (Lyck, 1862), promoted the idea of Jewish colonization in Eretz Israël. Born in Toruń, in present-day Poland, Kalischer (1795-1874) was crowned the quintessential "precursor of Zionism." His singularity lies in having articulated his vision within the very categories of halakhic and messianic tradition. For him, redemption would not come all at once through miraculous intervention; it would be initiated by a "natural," human stage — the work of the land, the organization of communities, material restoration — which would prepare the way for full and complete redemption. It is in this sense that one must understand the profound intersection here between the traditional Memory of messianic expectation and a concrete historical project.

The first public tribute to Kalischer was paid in 1919 at the initiative of the Chief Rabbi of Palestine Abraham Kook — who formally held this position from 1921 with the creation of the British Mandate —, the second half a century later, in 1969. Kook's gesture toward his predecessor sufficiently speaks to the filiation that religious Zionism wished to recognize between these early intuitions and its own rise.

Alkalaï, for his part, developed his ideas from Sarajevo, where he served as rabbi, and was among the first to demand the restoration of Hebrew as the living language of the people. His thought, nourished by Kabbalah and a literal reading of the prophets, converged with Kalischer's on the essential point: redemption calls for preparatory human initiative, and the return to the land is a commandment, not passive waiting.

The contribution of the precursors was thus twofold: theological, in legitimizing the return as a religious act; and practical, in encouraging the first settlement efforts. Their audacity consisted in reinterpreting messianic expectation not as resigned passivity, but as a call to action. Without them, the institutional religious Zionism of the twentieth century would have had neither language nor legitimacy to express itself.

When Theodor Herzl convened the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, the movement he federated was predominantly secular, even indifferent to religious matters. Jews faithful to tradition risked finding themselves sidelined from a national enterprise that concerned them directly. It was to avert this risk that a religious current organized itself within the Zionist Organization itself.

By founding Mizrahi in 1902, Rabbi Yitzchak Yaakov Reines ensured that religious Jews would play a vital role in the return of the people to their Land and at every stage of the national renaissance that would follow. The founding took place in a specific framework: Reines convened the founding congress in Vilna on March 4 and 5, 1902, which established the national-religious organization within the Zionist Organization; on the suggestion of Rabbi Abraham Slutzky, the organization was called Mizrahi.

The name itself condenses the program. "Mizrahi" is a term forged from the letters of the Hebrew words merkaz ruhani — "spiritual center." The movement intended to inscribe at the heart of the national project the spiritual dimension, so that the renaissance of the people would not be reduced to a political and economic matter, but remain animated by the Torah. Mizrahi was a religious Zionist movement whose purpose was expressed in its motto: "The Land of Israel for the people of Israel according to the Torah of Israel."

From an institutional point of view, Mizrahi constitutes the matrix of the entire subsequent religious Zionist galaxy. Founded in 1902 by Yitzchak Yaacov Reines, it had at most four deputies in the first Knesset elections in 1949, gave rise to the Bnei Akiva youth movement, split from the United Religious Front and then merged back into it before the whole converged toward the National Religious Party. Reines, out of pragmatism, defended a conception of Zionism above all as a refuge and work of national salvation for a persecuted people — a position sometimes more moderate, on the messianic level, than that of other contemporary religious thinkers. It was this political and educational structuring — synagogues, schools, youth movements — that ensured the current its duration and influence.

If the Mizrahi provided religious Zionism with its institutional framework, it is to Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook that it owes its speculative and mystical depth. The rabbi Abraham Isaac Hacohen Kook (HaRaAYaH, 1865-1935) was the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of the Land of Israel; he is regarded as one of the most original and influential Jewish religious thinkers of the twentieth century, and as one of the fathers of religious Zionism.

Kook's originality lies in the way he fused registers ordinarily kept separate. His thought is characterized by an unusual combination of halakha and aggadah, Kabbalah and philosophy, and by a harmonious vision of reality. For Rabbi Kook, the creation of the State of Israel was to be a sign that the unity of the world was working in depth; he envisioned Zionism as the actualization of a "monotheistic politics," with a union of the spiritual and the temporal. A large part of his work addresses public questions such as Zionism and the return to the Land of Israel, and it is on this basis that he accomplished the most audacious theological feat of the movement: to interpret the Jewish national movement, despite being largely secular and sometimes openly antireligious, as an instrument of Providence.

A mystic by temperament, Kook saw Jewish national renewal as part of the divine plan designed to strengthen faith against the rising tide of heresy. For him, repentance, to be achieved through the Torah, could restore the unity of man with the divine. Thus, the secular pioneers who drained the swamps and built the villages without observing the commandments were unknowingly accomplishing sacred work: they were the laborers of an ongoing redemption. Kook held that holiness could be expressed even through those who denied it, and that the return to the land was itself the beginning of a reconciliation between the people and their vocation.

This vision conferred singular religious dignity on the Zionist project, but it also carried within it a messianic charge which, after the rabbi's death, was to take on more militant forms. Some contemporary analysts thus dispute the characterization of Kook as the "beacon of religious Zionism" and debate the degree of messianism that his heirs drew from it, even speaking—not without polemics—of a "father of militant messianic Zionism." Rabbi Kook himself, a man of tolerance and synthesis, cannot be held responsible for all subsequent readings of his work; but none contests that his metaphysics of redemption provided the language in which religious Zionism now expresses its relationship to history.

Religious Zionist ideology cannot be measured solely by its founding texts and political institutions; it must also be measured by its men and women in the field, those who left Eastern Europe to build, with their own hands, a religious Jewish presence in Eretz Israël. It is the history of this pioneering current that this chapter traces.

The original Mizrahi, predominantly bourgeois and urban, was rapidly supplemented by a workers' wing. The Hapoel HaMizrahi, founded in 1921-1922, sought to reconcile fidelity to the Torah with the ideals of labor, the cooperative, and a return to the land, giving rise to a network of religious kibbutzim and mochavim. The motto "Torah va-Avoda" — "Torah and labor" — summed up this ideal of a pious life rooted in agricultural toil and national effort. On the organizational level, Cairn and Wikipedia attest that in 1922, the Hapoel Hamizrahi broke with the middle class and the rightist parent organization Hamizrahi to move closer to an ideology known as Torah ve-Avoda, combining Judaism and pioneering achievement.

Among the founders of this workers' wing stands out a figure whose archives have only recently been located with certainty: Natan Neta Gardi (Gorodetzky), born July 10, 1901 in Mir (today in Belarus) and died May 2, 1980 in Petah Tikva [Gardi Archives, Zerah Warhaftig Institute, Bar-Ilan University]. From 1919 onward, Gardi was the sole religious halouts in Joseph Trumpeldor's Hehalouts movement, then one of the founders of the Hapoel HaMizrahi in Eretz Israël during the establishment of the structure in 1921-1922. His trajectory illustrates the creative tension inherent in the current: how to be fully a pioneer — that is, to accept the harshness of land clearing, collective life, the socializing ideal of the Jewish labor movement — while refusing to sacrifice observance to the national project?

After his death, his personal archives were entrusted by his family to the Institute for the Study of Religious Zionism Zerah Warhaftig, at Bar-Ilan University (Ramat Gan), then directed by Dr. Yossef Avneri [Gardi Archives, Zerah Warhaftig Institute, Bar-Ilan University]. The location of this collection is a valuable contribution to scholarship: the personal archives of a founder of the Hapoel HaMizrahi will make it possible to illuminate, from within, the formation of this workers' branch of religious Zionism — its debates, its correspondence, its daily choices in the field.

The youth movement Bnei Akiva, emerging from this same milieu, became one of the principal vectors for transmitting religious Zionism to new generations, training cadres for the army, agriculture, and communal life. On the political level, the convergence of the current's components resulted, in 1956, in the creation of the National Religious Party (Mafdal), long a pivot of Israeli government coalitions and guardian of religious interests within a state whose institutions remained in part secular. The educational and political network of religious Zionism — synagogues, yeshivot, schools, youth movements, kibbutzim — explains its resilience: an ideology without institutions evaporates, whereas this one succeeded in equipping itself with an apparatus capable of perpetuating it.

Religious Zionism was not only conceived in yeshivot or on the lands of the pioneers: it was structured, generation after generation, through an educational network without equivalent in modern Judaism. This network is one of the most solid explanations for the durability and influence of the current.

The movement developed its own educational institutions at all levels: a network of national religious schools (Mamlakhti-dati) integrated into the Israeli public system, which today educate several hundred thousand pupils, training citizens who are both practicing believers and fully engaged in the life of the nation. This model, distinct from both state secular education and the ultra-Orthodox (haredi) network, enabled religious Zionism to reproduce itself sociologically while remaining engaged with national institutions.

At the apex of this educational pyramid stand the yeshivot, the most emblematic of which is the yeshiva Merkaz HaRav, founded by rav Abraham Isaac Kook in Jerusalem. A place of formation for the thinkers and rabbis of the current, Merkaz HaRav played a considerable intellectual role, particularly in the dissemination of the teachings of rav Zvi Yehuda Kook, son of the founder and master of a generation of activists. It is chiefly from this yeshiva that the ideology of Goush Emounim emerged, which will be examined in the following chapter.

In parallel, the yeshivot hesder constitute an innovation specific to religious Zionism: they combine in-depth Talmudic study with military service, on an alternating model. This arrangement shaped a religious elite fully engaged in the defense of the State, distinct from both the secular world and the haredi world, which largely maintained its distance from the army. Yeshivot hesder are today numerous throughout Israel and maintain close ties with settler communities in the West Bank as well as with mixed cities on the coast.

This educational network is inseparable from the Bnei Akiva youth movement, founded in Jerusalem in 1929 and which became one of the most important Jewish youth organizations in the world. Bnei Akiva trained generations of young people in the spirit of "Torah va-Avoda," combining religious practice and active Zionist commitment, and supplied the movement with its military, agricultural and political cadres. Without this network of interlocking institutions — school, yeshiva, youth movement, party — religious Zionism would never have been able to establish itself as such a durable social force.

The Six-Day War of June 1967, by placing the Old City of Jerusalem, the West Bank—the biblical Judea-Samaria—and other territories under Israeli control, was experienced by a faction of religious Zionism as an event of quasi-prophetic order. Where classical Mizrahi Zionism had primarily sought refuge and national normalization, a new generation, nourished by the messianic teaching of rav Zvi Yehuda Kook—son of rav Abraham Isaac Kook and master of the yeshiva Merkaz HaRav—discerned in it a manifest acceleration of redemption. The return to the holy sites of ancient Judaism seemed to confirm, in history itself, the metaphysics inherited from the father.

From this ferment was born, in 1974, the movement Gush Emunim ("Bloc of the Faith"), which made the establishment of Jewish settlements in the conquered territories an imperative both national and religious. For its activists, populating the Promised Land in its entirety—Eretz Israël ha-shelema, the "Whole Land of Israel"—was not a political option but a commandment, an active participation in the divine work. This voluntarism transformed religious Zionism: from a moderate partner in coalitions, it became the spearhead of a territorial and ideological cause of great intensity.

This mutation marks the intersection—sometimes the tension—between received tradition and actual history. The messianic reading of 1967 belongs to a theological hermeneutics, not to a fact established by the archive; it remains an interpretation. Contemporary analysts moreover underscore the internal divisions of the movement and warn against a drift. A new generation of religious Zionists was emerging from the yeshivot of the movement, influenced by rav Zvi Yehuda Kook who explained to his students that the State was merely the instrument that God had chosen to accomplish redemption. Some observers warn of the peril that would threaten Israel if religious Zionism persisted in the path of militant majoritarianism and what was judged an excessive messianism.

Contemporary religious Zionism is therefore not monolithic: it oscillates between a messianic and nationalist wing, and more moderate currents, liberal or committed to coexistence, which also claim the heritage of rav Kook. The reading that rav Zvi Yehuda Kook gave of his father's work is itself the object of serious historiographical debate. A man of the importance of the elder rav Kook was long marginalized in the official history of the labor Zionism in power from 1948 to 1977, which evacuated everything that opposed its own version of the origins; his full rehabilitation belongs to recent decades.

At the beginning of the 21st century, religious Zionism is no longer one current among others: it has become a structuring component of Israeli society, whose influence far exceeds its demographic weight. Its followers are overrepresented in the army, particularly in combat units and the officer corps, in education, in the judiciary and in political life. The synthesis of the knitted kippah and the military uniform has become one of the visible symbols of this militant integration into the State.

The movement has nevertheless experienced fractures and recompositions. The fragmentation of the National Religious Party gave rise to new formations, some of them more radical, which carried the cause of the "Whole Land of Israel" to the heart of national debate. International organizations stemming from this current continue to play a federating role; the worldwide Mizrahi movement, for example, celebrated in 2022 the 120th anniversary of its founding — centering this anniversary on reflection: it is difficult to imagine today's Israel without the beating heart of Mizrahi and religious Zionism, many of whose accomplishments are now taken for granted.

The movement also maintains institutional links with academic circles. The Zerah Warhaftig Institute for the Study of Religious Zionism, at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, constitutes the main research center devoted to this current in Israel. It is there that the personal archives of Natan Neta Gardi are preserved, among others, handed over by his family after his death in 1980 [Gardi Archives, Zerah Warhaftig Institute, Bar-Ilan University]. The preservation of such personal collections — those of pioneers, activists, founders of kibbutzim or political leaders — is a matter of collective Memory for a movement whose history has long been transmitted more through oral tradition and institutional networks than through systematic archival documentation.

The evaluation of the contemporary influence of religious Zionism remains a subject of debate. For its supporters, it saved the national idea from total secularization and kept alive the spiritual dimension of return. For its critics, its messianic fringe would have contributed to hardening the territorial conflict and weakening the cohesion of a pluralist society. Between these readings, the historian observes at least one incontestable fact: this current, born from the intuition of a few precursors in the 19th century, has become a determining actor in the History of Israel, which no serious analysis of the contemporary State can overlook.

Rabbi Yehudah Alkalaï (1798–1878) — Pioneer figure of proto-Zionist thought, born in Sarajevo, Alkalaï served as rabbi in Serbia and developed, drawing from a prophetic and Kabbalistic reading, the idea that the redemption of Israel required preparatory human initiative. He was among the first to demand the restoration of Hebrew as a living national language. His writings, notably Shema Yisrael (1834) and Minchat Yehudah (1843), made him one of the recognized precursors of religious Zionism.

Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer (1795–1874) — Born in Toruń, he is the author of Derishat Zion (Lyck, 1862), a foundational treatise that articulates in halakhic and messianic terms the necessity of Jewish colonization in Eretz Israël. Kalischer maintained that redemption would be accomplished in stages, the first being of a natural and human order. Considered alongside Alkalaï and Moses Hess as one of the "precursors of Zionism," he was honored posthumously by Rav Abraham Isaac Kook in 1919.

Rabbi Yitzchak Yaakov Reines (1839–1915) — Founder of the Mizrahi movement, which he created in Vilna on March 4 and 5, 1902, Reines defended a pragmatic vision of Zionism, first as an instrument of national salvation for a persecuted people. A recognized thinker and Talmudist, he imprinted upon Mizrahi its founding motto — "The Land of Israel for the People of Israel according to the Torah of Israel" — and traced the institutional contours of religious Zionism for decades to come.

Rav Abraham Isaac Hacohen Kook (HaRaAYaH, 1865–1935) — First Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of the Land of Israel and dominant intellectual figure of religious Zionism, Kook was the author of a speculative synthesis blending halakha, Kabbalah and philosophy. He interpreted the secular Jewish national movement as an unconscious instrument of divine Providence and founded the yeshiva Merkaz HaRav in Jerusalem, the intellectual center of the movement. His vast and often mystical work remains the theological reference point of religious Zionism.

Rav Zvi Yehuda Kook (1891–1982) — Son and intellectual continuator of Rav Abraham Isaac Kook, he directed the yeshiva Merkaz HaRav after his father's death and formed several generations of rabbis and activists. His reading of the Six-Day War of 1967 as a providential sign of the advancement of redemption was decisive in the emergence of Gush Emunim. His teaching, more directly political than that of his father, durably oriented the messianic-nationalist wing of the movement.

Natan Neta Gardi (Gorodetzky, 1901–1980) — Born July 10, 1901 in Mir (Byelorussia) and died May 2, 1980 in Petah Tikva, from 1919 he was the sole religious halouts within Joseph Trumpeldor's Hehalouts movement, then one of the founders of Hapoel HaMizrahi in the Land of Israel at the creation of the structure in 1921-1922. His trajectory embodies the ideal of "Torah va-Avoda" at its most demanding degree. After his death, his personal archives were handed over by his family to the Institute for the Study of Religious Zionism Zerah Warhaftig at Bar-Ilan University (Ramat Gan), constituting a collection of primary importance for the history of the pioneering religious movement [Gardi Archives, Zerah Warhaftig Institute, Bar-Ilan University].

Zerah Warhaftig (1906–2002) — Jurist and political figure born in Poland, Warhaftig was one of the major figures of religious Zionism in the twentieth century. Signatory of Israel's Declaration of Independence in 1948, he served as minister of religious affairs of the Hebrew State and was one of the great organizers of the National Religious Party. The Institute for the Study of Religious Zionism at Bar-Ilan University bears his name, testifying to the importance of his action for the memory of the movement.

The history of religious Zionism is that of an improbable and fruitful reconciliation between two loyalties. From the intuitions of Kalischer and Alkalaï, who dared to think of return as a human work preparing divine redemption, to the institutionalization by Reines and the Mizrahi in 1902, then to the great spiritual synthesis of Rav Kook, the current constantly sought to hold together Torah and land, prayer and labor, messianic expectation and political action. The 1967 war reactivated its eschatological charge and gave rise, with Gush Emunim, to a militant phase whose effects still work upon Israeli society.

Beyond theological and political debates, the history of religious Zionism is also that of concrete pioneers — men like Natan Neta Gardi, who left the cities of Eastern Europe to put into practice, on the ground, the ideal of "Torah and labor." These anonymous or little-known founders, whose archives are only beginning to be gathered and studied, belong to the deep history of the movement as much as its great thinkers. The location of the Gardi archives at the Zerah Warhaftig Institute of Bar-Ilan University recalls that the writing of this history is not closed.

What remains, at the end of this journey, is the fruitfulness of an idea: that the return of the Jewish people to their land can be read not as a betrayal of tradition, but as its fulfillment. This idea, contested yesterday by a large part of the Orthodox world and discussed today even within its own ranks, has nevertheless shaped lasting institutions, formed generations, and deeply marked the physiognomy of the State of Israel. Religious Zionism remains, in this respect, one of the most active laboratories in which contemporary Judaism tests its relationship to history, sovereignty, and hope.