menial as well as romantic. Second, he advocated settling the entire Land of
Israel – not only the most fertile areas of Galilee, but also the Negev Desert.
For this reason, the university named for him is called Ben-Gurion
University of the Negev.
All told, 30,000 Jews came to the Land of Israel during the Second
Aliyah, many if not most consciously motivated by labor Zionism. Although
70 percent eventually returned to Europe, those who remained created the
institutions that shaped settlement and the state: the kibbutz and the
Sachnut (Jewish agency). The key year during the Second Aliyah was 1909,
which witnessed the creation of a kibbutz movement that united the indi-
vidual collective settlements; and the founding of a new city on the outskirts
of Jaffa: Tel Aviv.
The common thread between the varieties of Zionism was their secular
demeanor. Yet there was one brand of Zionism, religious Zionism, that found
a way to synthesize religious practice with Zionist aims. Religious Zionism
originated in a controversy that took place in 1888 between secular Zionist
settlers and the rabbinate of the Old Yishuv. That year was the first sabbatical
year – when, according to biblical tradition, the land of Israel was to lie fallow
- but there were secularists farming the land. When the rabbis asked the set-
tlers to refrain from agriculture for a year, the secular settlers refused, on the
grounds that to cease expansion on a brand new settlement was tantamount
to total collapse; in addition, the settlers refused the rabbis’ offer of sharing
for the year in the Haluka system.
In response, with no authority over the secular Zionist settlers, the rabbis
began writing to rabbis in the diaspora asking them to appeal to the settlers
or to their supporters abroad. The rabbis in the diaspora divided over whether
or not the settlers should observe the sabbatical year. For those who con-
demned the religious indifference and intransigence of the settlers, this event
crystallized their religious worldview, leading to the emergence of a form of
religious orthodoxy within Russian Jewry. From this point on, an increas-
ingly politicized Orthodoxy would engage Zionism and other secular Jewish
currents at their own game, publishing an Orthodox Jewish newspaper and
forming an Orthodox political party: Agudat Israel (the Party of Israel).
By contrast, those rabbis who supported the settlers were among the first
to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable dictates of Jewish tradition with sec-
ular Zionist aims. In 1902, this mentality crystallized in the creation of
Mizrachi, the religious Zionist movement. This name was chosen as a double
entendre. Mizrachi (literally, eastern or eastward) is an allusion to the advent of
the Messiah, who traditionally is said to arrive from the east. In addition,
Mizrachi was a contraction of merkaz ruhani(spiritual center). Not to be con-
fused with Gordon’s secular spirituality through labor, Mizrachi believed that
the rebuilt Land of Israel, even if rebuilt by secularists as a secular state, was
an indispensable element of Jewish rejuvenation.
Anti-Semitism and Jewish responses, 1870–1914 195