Religious Zionism

Religious Zionism constitutes one of the most singular and most fruitful currents of modern Judaism. It is defined by the conjunction of two fidelities that many, at the dawn of the nineteenth century, held to be hardly reconcilable: fidelity to the Torah, to its commandments and to its messianic horizon on the one hand, and the modern national aspiration for the return of the Jewish people to the land of Israel on the other. The sensibility of Religious Zionism sees in the State of Israel not only a practical necessity for the Jewish people, but also a reality charged with religious meaning. Where a significant part of the Orthodox world saw in the Zionist enterprise an attempt to "force God's hand"—an illegitimate intervention in the divine plan of history—Religious Zionism proposed the opposite reading: the return to Zion itself participates in the redemptive work.

This synthesis was not self-evident. Traditional rabbinic Judaism had, for centuries, associated the collective return to the Holy Land with the coming of the Messiah and with a purely divine initiative. To make the return a human task—organized, political—presupposed a considerable theological shift. It is this shift that precursors such as Yehuda Alkalaï and Zvi Hirsch Kalischer began in the mid-nineteenth century, that the Mizrahi movement institutionalized from 1902 onward, and that Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook carried to its highest spiritual expression. The present work retraces this trajectory—from the intuitions of isolated precursors to the current that, to this day, profoundly marks the society, the politics, and the geography of the State of Israel.

Before the very word "Zionism" was coined by Nathan Birnbaum in 1890, two rabbis had already formulated, on religious foundations, 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), forerunners of the modern Zionist movement, argued from a religious perspective for settlement in the Land of Israel.

The figure of Kalischer is particularly defining. He, Moses Hess, and Rabbi Yehuda Alkalaï are regarded as the "forerunners of Zionism"; Kalischer's work, Derishat Zion (Lyck, 1862), promoted the idea of Jewish settlement in Eretz Israel. Kalischer (1795-1874), best known for his proto-national thought and his advocacy of settlement in the Land of Israel in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, was crowned the "forerunner of Zionism" par excellence. Kalischer's singularity lies in the fact that he articulated his vision within the very categories of the halakhic and messianic tradition. For him, redemption would not occur all at once through a miraculous intervention; it would begin with a "natural," human stage—the working of the land, the organization of communities, material restoration—that would prepare the way for full and complete redemption. It is in this sense that one must understand the profound intersection, here, between traditional Memory (messianic expectation) and a concrete historical project.

Born in Toruń, in present-day Poland, Kalischer was long recognized as a founding figure. The first public tribute was paid to him in 1919 at the initiative of the Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Abraham Kook—who formally held that office from 1921 with the creation of the British Mandate—and the second half a century later, in 1969. This gesture by Kook toward his predecessor speaks clearly of the filiation that religious Zionism sought to acknowledge between these early intuitions and its own rise.

The contribution of the forerunners was thus twofold: theological, in legitimizing the return as a religious act; and practical, in encouraging the first settlement efforts. Their boldness lay in reinterpreting messianic expectation not as resigned passivity, but as a call to action.

When Theodor Herzl convened the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, the movement he was uniting was largely secular, even indifferent to religious questions. Jews faithful to tradition risked finding themselves excluded from a national enterprise that nonetheless concerned them first and foremost. It was to ward off this risk that a religious current organized itself within the Zionist Organization itself.

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

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

From an institutional standpoint, the Mizrahi constitutes the matrix of the entire later religious Zionist galaxy. Founded in 1902 by Yitzchak Yaakov Reines, the Mizrahi's ideology was religious Zionism; it had at most four members of parliament (1949), gave rise to the Bnei Akiva youth movement, split from the United Religious Front and then merged within the United Religious Front and the National Religious Party. Reines, out of pragmatism, defended a conception of Zionism above all as a refuge and a work of national salvation for a persecuted people — a position sometimes more moderate, on the messianic plane, than that of other contemporary religious thinkers. It was this political and educational structuring — synagogues, schools, youth movements — that secured the current's durability and influence.

If the Mizrahi gave religious Zionism its institutional framework, it owes its speculative and mystical depth to Rav Abraham Isaac Kook. 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 apart. His thought is characterized by an unusual combination of halakha and aggadah, Kabbalah and philosophy, and by a harmonious vision of reality; much of his work addresses public questions such as Zionism and the return to the Land of Israel. It was on this basis that he could accomplish the movement's boldest theological feat: interpreting the Jewish national movement, though largely secular and at times openly anti-religious, as an instrument of Providence.

A mystic by temperament, Kook saw the Jewish national revival as part of the divine plan meant to strengthen faith against the rising tide of heresy; for him, repentance, to be attained through the Torah, can restore the unity of man with the divine. Thus the secular pioneers, who drained the marshes and built the villages without observing the commandments, were unknowingly carrying out a sacred work: they were the laborers of a redemption in progress. Kook held that holiness could express itself even through those who denied it, and that the return to the land was itself the beginning of a reconciliation between the people and its calling.

This vision conferred upon the Zionist project a singular religious dignity, but it also bore within it a messianic charge that was, after the rav's death, to take on more militant forms. Some contemporary analysts thus contest the description of Kook as a "beacon of religious Zionism" and debate the degree of messianism his heirs drew from it, going so far as to speak — not without controversy — of a "father of militant messianic Zionism." Rav Kook himself, a man of tolerance and synthesis, cannot be held responsible for all the later readings of his work; but no one disputes that his metaphysics of redemption provided the language in which religious Zionism would henceforth express its relation to history.

Religious Zionism did not merely conceive of itself: it organized, and it was through its institutions that it left a lasting mark on the Yishuv and then on the State of Israel. The original Mizrahi, predominantly bourgeois and urban, was soon complemented by a labor wing. HaPoel HaMizrahi, founded in 1922, sought to reconcile fidelity to the Torah with the ideals of labor, the cooperative, and the return to the land, giving rise to a network of religious kibbutzim and moshavim. The motto "Torah va-Avoda" — "Torah and labor" — summed up this ideal of a pious life rooted in agricultural toil and national effort.

The youth movement Bnei Akiva, arising from this current, became one of the principal vehicles for transmitting Religious Zionism to new generations, training cadres for the army, agriculture, and communal life. On the political level, the convergence of the movement's components led, in 1956, to the creation of the National Religious Party (Mafdal), long a pivot of Israeli governing coalitions and a guardian of religious interests within a State whose institutions remained in part secular. Holding at most four seats in 1949, the Mizrahi gave rise to the Bnei Akiva youth movement and took part in the dynamic that led to the United Religious Front and then to the National Religious Party.

The current also developed its own educational institutions: a network of state religious schools (Mamlakhti-dati) integrated into the public system, yeshivot, and above all the hesder yeshivot, which combine advanced Talmudic study with military service. These institutions shaped a religious elite fully engaged in the life of the nation, distinct both from the secular world and from the ultra-Orthodox (haredi) world, which for its part largely kept its distance from the State. The educational and political web of Religious Zionism explains its resilience: an ideology without institutions evaporates, whereas this one was able to equip itself with an apparatus capable of perpetuating it.

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

From this fervor was born, in 1974, the Gush Emunim movement (« Bloc of the Faithful »), which made the establishment of Jewish settlements in the conquered territories an imperative at once national and religious. For its activists, populating the Promised Land in its entirety — Eretz Israel 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 — at times 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. Some observers caution about the peril that would threaten Israel should religious Zionism persist on the path of a militant majoritarianism and a messianism deemed excessive. Contemporary religious Zionism is therefore not monolithic: it oscillates between a messianic and nationalist wing, and more moderate, liberal currents, or ones attached to coexistence, which likewise claim the legacy of Rav Kook.

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 imprint far exceeds its demographic weight. Its adherents 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 reconfigurations. The fragmentation of the National Religious Party gave rise to new formations, some of which, more radical, carried the cause of the "Whole Land of Israel" to the heart of the national debate. The international organizations stemming from the current continue to play a unifying role; the worldwide Mizrahi movement, for example, celebrated in 2022 the 120th anniversary of its founding. It is difficult to imagine today's Israel without the beating heart of Mizrahi and religious Zionism; many of its achievements are now taken for granted.

The assessment of this influence remains a matter of debate, which is why this chapter falls more under the "probable" than the "established." For its supporters, religious Zionism saved the national idea from total secularization and kept alive the spiritual dimension of the return. For its critics, its messianic fringe is said to have contributed to hardening the territorial conflict and to weakening the cohesion of a pluralistic 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.

The history of religious Zionism is that of an improbable and fertile reconciliation between two fidelities. From the intuitions of Kalischer and Alkalaï, who dared to conceive the return as a human endeavour preparing divine redemption, to its institutionalisation by Reines and the Mizrahi in 1902, and then to the great spiritual synthesis of Rav Kook, the movement has constantly sought to hold together the Torah and the land, prayer and labour, messianic expectation and political action. The war of 1967 reactivated its eschatological charge and gave rise, with Goush Emounim, to a militant phase whose effects still work upon Israeli society.

What remains, at the end of this journey, is the fecundity of an idea: that the return of the Jewish people to its land may be read not as a betrayal of tradition, but as its fulfilment. This idea, contested yesterday by a large part of the Orthodox world and debated today even within its own ranks, has nevertheless shaped lasting institutions, formed generations and profoundly marked the character 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, to sovereignty and to hope.