Search Results (25)

This article examines Rabbi Moshe Avigdor Amiel’s concept of “Torah and Work” (Torah va’avoda) as a central tenet of Religious Zionism. Rabbi Amiel, a prominent ideologue of the Mizrahi movement who served as Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv (1936–1945), viewed the integration of spirituality and materiality as representing complete Judaism. Using Hegelian dialectics, Amiel explained his approach: the thesis (spirit) and antithesis (matter) unite to form a synthesis (complete Judaism). He argued that exile transformed Jewish identity from a multidimensional biblical identity to a one-dimensional rabbinical identity focused solely on spirituality. Religious Zionism aimed to restore Judaism to its original completeness. Amiel criticized both ultraorthodox Jews who embraced only the spiritual aspect (Torah) and secular Jews who embraced only the material aspect (work), asserting that only “the complete matter, not half the matter” represents authentic Judaism. He boldly claimed that partial perspectives constitute idolatry. The article explores Amiel’s position on “Hebrew labor”, which he viewed as a national commandment without limitation, contrary to the ultraorthodox view that restricted it to charity considerations. His relationship with labor movements and socialism is also examined—he identified commonalities between Judaism and socialism while highlighting fundamental differences. In 1938, Rabbi Amiel established “Hayishuv Hahadash”, Israel’s first yeshiva high school combining religious and secular studies, as a practical manifestation of his vision of complete Judaism integrating Torah and work. Amiel’s critical stance toward various groups—including Religious Zionism, ultraorthodoxy, and secular Zionism—stemmed from his commitment to revitalizing biblical Jewish identity that harmoniously combines Torah study and productive labor. Full article

The architecture of Jerusalem has for centuries been defined by its being a space sacred to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The end of World War I marked the beginning of British Mandatory rule, which lasted until 1948. During this period, Jerusalem witnessed a proliferation of architectural projects that repositioned religion within modern typologies representing the city’s communities. This research investigates four such buildings: the British Rockefeller Museum, the Palestinian Palace Hotel, the American YMCA Building, which functioned as a community center and hostel, and the new Zionist Executive Building. The integration of religious elements into these edifices is examined using the concept of inter-religious engagement and by applying the theory of purification and hybridization. The research demonstrates that British and American Christians, Zionist Jews, and Muslim Palestinians, used different strategies to produce inter-religious engagement—either intentionally or because of British-dictated political constructs. British and American Christians embedded religious elements within modern typologies to reflect peaceful co-existence, while Zionist Jews and Muslim Palestinians used them to construct national identity. Although conceived as “purely” secular, these modern typologies were hybridized by the integration of religious spaces or emblems, revealing further dimensions to our understanding and assessment of 20th-century urban secular architecture and its intersection with religions. Full article

A typology presents ideal concrete types, and probing their personality and character enables the creation of general patterns. The study of the personality thus grants access to the depth of an idea not only in abstract terms but also in its function as a guide to, and a source of, an ethos. Furthermore, the personality construct plays a significant role in the understanding of historical processes because many events are ascribed or tied to the centrality of a specific individual. The study of typology is especially linked to Eduard Spranger (1882–1963), who claimed that ideal types convey conscious structures. In his view, we can impart significance to actions and behaviors only in relation to the agent’s set of values. In his writings, Spranger presented six ideal types. What is the meaning of a typology when discussing a movement such as religious Zionism? In this article, I attempt to trace an ideological portrait of two types that, in my estimate, created through their personality and their endeavor the ideological pattern that has accompanied religious Zionism and the religious-Zionist idea throughout this movement’s existence. I set up these two thinkers and entrepreneurs as pure types, even though no such types exist in reality. I present the pure types as founded on dominant features although, again, well aware that there are no pure features in the concrete world. Besides describing the characteristic features of the two types, I will argue that the interaction between the patterns they established facilitates understanding of several historical events. These patterns at times continue one another but, mainly, they confront one another. To illustrate their course, I will relate to two historical episodes where these personality patterns come forth, one that took place a few years after R. Reines’ death and the other about fifty years later or more, whose implications are felt up to this day. Full article

This paper analyzes redemptive narratives constructed by Mashhadi Jewish immigrants through oral histories, memoirs, and life stories collected across generations. It examines how conceptions of religion, community, and family shaped their meaning-making around migration challenges. The first case study examines Malka Aharonoff’s lamentation reconstructed from religious redemption across generations into a Zionist narrative. The second analyzes Esther Amini’s published memoir, which reconciles her story with that of her immigrant parents through narrative, demonstrating its role across generations with gender as the focal point. The later cases of Aharon Namdar and Mehran Bassal present individual oral histories, capturing major migration waves from Iran, playing out the differing import and expression given to Zionism and to religion by different immigrants. The study explores how selective appropriation and cultural translation occurred between generations. It sheds light on ideological and cultural frameworks underlying immigrant perspective. By comparing narratives emphasizing collective redemption versus individual experiences, it offers insights into identity formation and the role of memory in immigrant communities dispersing over time. By demonstrating narrative’s therapeutic role in processing dislocation across generations, the study sheds light on cultural transmission and identity formation within dispersed immigrant communities. It offers a fresh perspective on their migration experiences. Full article

The journey of Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras and his stay in Florence at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has been celebrated as an event that decisively shaped the course of European humanism. The later return of Enlightenment humanism to Ottoman lands in the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries can be described as the return of Chrysoloras. This return is generally known in a fragmentary form as a regional phenomenon: the story of Greek, Arab, Turkish and Jewish nationalisms and of the Ottoman reforms. It is also framed historically as the evolution from a traditional and theological society to new forms of epistemic, literary, civic and national communities, while often leaving aside failures and later contradictory transformations. The present essay offers an integrative study of modern humanism in late Ottoman and post-Ottoman contexts. The migration of Enlightenment humanism to the Middle East raised a wide range of expectations, projecting a new national or imperial organization within a harmonious diplomatic relationship with Christian Europe and the Americas. Yet, the more the revivalist and reformist projects evolved, the more they involved ethnic and religious conflicts and colonial intervention. This article illuminates the rise and fall of humanism in Middle Eastern contexts. Full article

How did an Arab Jew read the Quran against the backdrop of contradictory ideologies and the rise of key movements, including nationalism, colonialism, and Zionism, in Mandate Palestine? Approaching Isaac Yahuda as an Arab Jew challenges the binary opposition between Arabs and Jews in Zionist discourse, a linkage perceived as inconceivable, and on the other hand, that linkage is asserted, contested, and tested in the context of nationalism. This article also challenges the advancement of Jewish singularity and superiority by exploring how Jewish writers interacted with the Islamic scripture in Mandatory Palestine rather than dismissing it. This article examines Hebrew interpretation of various passages from the Quran that produced an understanding of the Quran that advanced Zionist ideals, including the nationalization of contested religious sites and the consolidation of the indigeneity of Jews in the East. Isaac Yahuda’s Hebrew commentary on the Quran challenged his Arab Jewishness in such a divisive nationalist atmosphere in Mandate Palestine. His hybrid background and dynamic connections with both Jews and Arabs enabled him to navigate these turbulent times by invoking the Quran, demonstrating respect for it, and at the same time challenging the understanding of his contemporary Muslims while utilizing German Jewish scholarship on the origins of Islam. Full article

German and Central European Jews shaped many primary Jewish responses to modernity. The religious renewal, or the alleged “Jewish Renaissance” among German Jews in the first decades of the 20th century, offers a radical encounter with tradition as part of Jewish modernism. In this paper, I aim to examine a group of revolutionary young intellectual anarchists, striving for a new religious excitement free of the traditional binding part of established religions. In various forms, religiosity became the only possible way of radical political thinking, a kind of antinomian liberation theology. In the absence of traditional communal ties of orthodox praxis and systematic theological speculation, these political intellectuals turn to historical discourse as their leading theological super-structure. Their critique of modernism was merged into a nostalgic rethinking of pre-modern religious forms and cultural patterns. The Zionists among them contributed much to the ammunition of the sacred covenant of Land, Blood, disrespect toward any form of legal normativity, and solid messianic expectation. This fatal combination is responsible for many disturbing elements in the contemporary Israeli public sphere. Full article

This article seeks to examine R. Dr. Isaiah Aviad’s outlook with regard to the Land of Israel, worldly labor, and redemption, as reflected in his teachings. R. Dr. Isaiah Aviad (Oskar Wolfsberg) (1893–1957) was born in Germany. He was one of religious Zionism’s main thinkers. He was a pediatrician, and since the establishment of Israel served as an Israeli diplomat in Scandinavia and Switzerland. R. Aviad thought that religious Zionism is the complete Judaism, that which combines Torah and labor, spirit, and matter—multi-dimensional. In addition, R. Aviad believed in natural redemption and human effort, linking the redemption to the Land of Israel and to cultivation of the earth. He thought that human activism—i.e., redeeming the soil of the Land of Israel and cultivating it, is a religious precept that will bring about the redemption. Full article

This article reexamines Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook’s (1865–1935) approach to Zionism, by proposing a reading of Kook’s Zionism through the lens of the Lebensphilosophie (The Philosophy of Life) of the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941). I show that we can clarify Kook’s view of freedom, the self and creativity and its essential connection to Zionism, therefore, proposing a new understanding of the meaning that Jewish nationalism assumes in Kook’s thought, thanks to the application of the model of freedom and creativity developed by Bergson to Kook’s writings. Especially for Kook, I show that Jewish nationalism is seen as a means for the Jewish People to return to their true self and through this connection attain true freedom. Only when a nation realizes its freedom by a return to its own original self, it can be creative. This is how I explain the connection that Kook draws between a return to the Land of Israel and the ability of Israel as a people to finally be able to be creative. Finally, I argue that this understanding of nationalism adds a new layer to the essential place that the territory assumes in Kook’s thought. A State of Israel outside its original land can attain the goal of autonomous self-governance but lacks the ability to inspire the reconnection of the nation to its own original self. The Jewish People as a collective cannot connect to their authentic self away from the Land of Israel, consequently, the Land of Israel is the only place in which they can be truly free. Full article

In this article, I seek to reveal the theological sources of the Israeli high school yeshivas designated “Torah U’melakha” (Torah and labor). High school yeshivas are schools for 9th–12th grade boys that offer religious studies in the first half of the day and secular studies, i.e., science and languages, in the second half. These schools serve mainly religious Zionist and modern orthodox society. Torah U’melakha yeshivas are high school yeshivas that are unique for combining vocational studies in the curriculum, such that graduates acquire a trade and can serve in the army and join the labor force in their field of expertise. Over the years, some of the Torah U’melakha yeshivas were subsequently closed and others changed their nature from vocational to technological. However, the educational trend toward “Torah and labor” has not disappeared. Vocational education, which became technological as well, has been assimilated in nearly all high school yeshivas, which, to a great degree, made the Torah U’melakha yeshivas redundant. The ideological and theological value of engaging in “Torah and work” became embedded in the pedagogic consciousness of religious Zionism and is continuing to infuse the many high school yeshivas in Israel and elsewhere. Full article

In the public discourse and the research literature, the signifier “religious-Zionism” is usually viewed as denoting a specific group located midway between secular and ultra-Orthodox Jews. This location does not turn religious-Zionism into a residual category including whoever is not part of the two others. Quite the contrary. Religious-Zionism used to be a group with unique characteristics, including values and a normative fullness of its own. I argue in this article that, at present, the category “religious-Zionism” no longer signifies a specific group due to a series of centrifugal processes affecting it. Its ethos, myth, textual web, and authority principle have collapsed and the signifier reflects no more than a political and rabbinic discourse attempting to control the breakdown. Full article

The current article has several aims. First, it seeks to underscore the importance of Hugo Bergman’s and Gershom Scholem’s late critiques of Zionism, and to argue that they should be understood as politico-theological commentaries on the Israeli political reality in which they lived. Second, it argues for the relevance of approaching these critiques through the theoretical prism of political theology. Third, it aims to chart the overlaps and differences between the Bergmanesque and Scholemian theological interpretations of Zionism by charting their common premises and differences. I argue that the former derive from their shared view of Zionism as a religious project, and the latter derive from their arrival at polar conclusions: Bergman seeking a positive potential; Scholem identifying a destructive potential. Hence, their political theologies of Zionism are understood as a “dialectic of feeling”. Full article

Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalisher’s messianic innovations asserted the centrality of a renewal of offerings on the altar to the creation of a linear path to redemption. Despite the common convention, his ideas were not disregarded by his peers and followers. In fact, while his ideas did not predetermine the rabbinic discourse, halakhic questions concerning the rebuilding of the Temple and its laws became quite popular and common. Surprisingly, lay figures, as well as several Talmudic scholars, kept this messianic idea alive. Indeed, from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, such figures published numerous works calling for concrete efforts to rebuild the Temple and renew the offerings. These findings shed light on the renewed religious Zionist interest in this method of reconnecting with God and promoting the final redemption, which is neither new, nor does it deviate from known and publicly articulated ideas. Full article

In the last decades Religious Zionism moved from the margins to the center of Israeli society and politics. Members of this sector (RZS) are located today in top positions in Israeli politics, businesses, and among professional elites, academia, and the military, gaining growing influence over the national decision-making processes and policies. No wonder, then, that public opinion polls indicate that the members of the RZS are the most satisfied and optimistic in Israel today. The fact that the RZS is positioned mostly on one side of the political spectrum (Right), the tight interrelations within this sector and its widening periphery have further increased its national impact. It is argued here that this is a critical development in Israeli politics as this sector’s members, and in particular those voting for the RZS parties, show relatively low commitment to core democratic values together with a clear preference for the Jewish aspect over the democratic aspect of the state of Israel. Furthermore, whereas in the past the RZS was politically represented by one main party (with some splinter groups coming and going), in the 2021 elections two parties (Yamina and the Religious Zionist Party (RZP)) collided head-on. For the first time each of these parties, the first more modernist and the second more fundamentalist, claimed to be the only authentic representative of this sector. The competition between them intensified when the election results showed that each of the two had gained the same number of seats in the Knesset, with the leader of Yamina unexpectedly becoming the new Israeli prime minister. It is argued here that the future balance of power between these two parties and their respective constituencies will determine the future of the RZS as a whole—whether it will establish itself as a pivotal actor in Israeli politics or remain at the margins. Full article

This article proposes a reassessment of the development of Ḥaredism, that is, the application of strict, maximalist, commandment-oriented Judaism to increasingly large lay publics, in light of confessionalization processes in Europe. Whereas historiographical and sociological convention locates the sources of Ḥaredism within the development of 19th century orthodox Jewish responses to the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), Reform, and secular Zionism, this article argues that Ḥaredi structures and practices preceded these movements, and, in some cases, influenced their development. The basis for the priority of Ḥaredi identities to Jewish secular identities is rooted in the social disciplining and religious engineering of Jewish societies in the early modern era, until just before the Haskalah, and beyond. This disciplining was predicated on the imposition of religious, social, and ascetic education systems on growing segments of the population. Ḥaredism as a concept and as a phenomenon emerged in 16th century Safed (Ottoman Palestine); there, previous Jewish ascetic patterns were reworked, reorganized and structured under the aegis of the print era, and became a basis for mass, super-regional education. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Ḥaredi religiosity steadily percolated through European Jewish societies by means of works of personal ethic and conduct that were written, printed, and reprinted many times, in Hebrew and Yiddish, through works that enumerate the commandments, and through popular works that make the Jewish halakhic code, Shulḥan Arukh, accessible to the masses by abridging or reworking it. Starting in the early 19th century, with the mediation of the Ḥasidic and Lithuanian religious movements, this process massively penetrated broad strata of society. Full article