506 A History of Judaism
of Gur (the Yiddish name for Góra Kalwaria) said of him that ‘his love for
Zion knows no limits, and [therefore] he says that the impure is pure, and
welcomes it’ – and the meanings Kook ascribed to traditional philosoph-
ical and kabbalistic concepts were often radically novel. His thought was
so deliberately innovative that he could also have been discussed in the
previous chapter as an example, alongside J. B. Soloveitchik (p. 487), of
counter-reform. But the central notion of his thought, that the divine
intervention in history required to bring about the messianic age could be
hastened by Jewish settlement in the land of Israel, had been prefigured
over the previous century by religious Zionists in eastern and central
Europe, of whom only a few, like Shmuel Mohilever of Białystok (see
Chapter 16), had taken practical action in this direction. Zvi Hirsch
Kalischer had argued for the restoration of sacrifices in a rebuilt Temple
in the land of Israel, from his base as a communal rabbi for fifty years in
a large Jewish community in a part of western Poland annexed by Prus-
sia. Yehudah Alkalai, rabbi of a small Sephardi community near Belgrade
in the mid- nineteenth century, had put forward practical plans for encour-
aging the productive economy of settlers in the land of Israel, not least by
reviving the notion of the biblical tithe so that one- tenth of the income of
each Jew should help to pay for the rebuilding of the land. Alkalai was
spurred on originally by kabbalistic speculation that the year 1840 would
witness the arrival of the Messiah, but, when this did not happen, he
became convinced that Jews were required to take action. Up to 1840 it
had been possible to hope for deliverance simply through divine grace.
But now deliverance depended on the teshuva (‘return’ or ‘repentance’) of
Israel, which for Alkalai meant return to the land. He himself spent the
last four years before his death in 1878 in the land of Israel.^13
Messianic hope was thus intrinsic to Zionism as it manifested itself
among haredim, and tension arose most around the question of how
much to cooperate with non- religious Jews in the building of a secular
Jewish state which would serve a higher religious purpose in due course.
Most religious Zionists in the twentieth century lived outside the haredi
world. The religious Mizrahi movement, formed in Vilna in 1902 but
already establishing schools in Palestine combining secular studies with
religious education by 1909, and the political party and workers’ organ-
ization HaPoel HaMizrahi (‘The Mizrahi Worker’), which existed
alongside it in Palestine from 1922 to promote Torah and labour, placed
the Zionist endeavour at the centre of its ideology and worked with
secular Jews from the start. It was from former members of its youth
movement, Bnei Akiva, that in 1974 emerged the most extreme form of