The third critique on Zionism in its early days [the late 19th century] came from the ultra-Orthodox Jewish establishment. To this day, many ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities vehemently oppose Zionism, although they are much smaller than they were in the late nineteenth century and some of them moved to Israel and are now part of its political system. Nonetheless, as in the past, they constitute yet another non-Zionist way of being Jewish. When Zionism made its first appearance in Europe, many traditional rabbis in fact forbade their followers from having anything to do with Zionist activists. They viewed Zionism as meddling with God’s will to retain the Jews in exile until the coming of the Messiah. They totally rejected the idea that Jews should do all they can to end the “Exile.” Instead, they had to wait for God’s word on this and in the meantime practice the traditional way of life. While individuals were allowed to visit and study in Palestine as pilgrims, this was not to be interpreted as permission for a mass movement. The great Hasidic German Rabbi of Dzikover summed up this approach bitterly when he said that Zionism asks him to replace centuries of Jewish wisdom and law for a rag, soil, and a song (i.e. a flag, a land, and an anthem).⁶

Not all the leading rabbis opposed Zionism however. There was a small group of quite famous authoritative figures, such as the rabbis al-Qalay, Gutmacher, and Qalisher, who endorsed the Zionist program. They were a small minority but in hindsight they were an important group as they laid the foundation for the national religious wing of Zionism. Their religious acrobatics were quite impressive. In Israeli historiography they are called the “Fathers of the Religious Zionism.” Religious Zionism is a very important movement in contemporary Israel, as the ideological home of the messianic settler movement, Gush Emunim, which colonized the West Bank and the Gaza Strip from 1967 onwards. These rabbis not only called on Jews to leave Europe but also asserted that it was a religious duty, not just a nationalist one, for Jews to colonize Palestine through the cultivation of its land (not surprisingly the natives of the land do not feature in their writings). They claimed that such an act would not be meddling with God’s will; on the contrary, it would fulfill the prophecies of the Prophets and advance the full redemption of the Jewish people and the coming of the Messiah.⁷

Most of the leading lights in Orthodox Judaism rejected this plan and interpretation. They had another axe to grind with Zionism. The new movement not only wished to colonize Palestine; it also hoped to secularize the Jewish people, to invent the “new Jew” in antithesis to the religious Orthodox Jews of Europe. This culminated in the image of a new European Jew who could no longer live in Europe, because of its anti-Semitism, but had to live as a European outside the continent. Thus, like many movements during this period, Zionism redefined itself in national terms—but it was radically different because it chose a new land for this conversion. The Orthodox Jew was ridiculed by the Zionists and was viewed as someone who could only be redeemed through hard work in Palestine. This transformation is beautifully described in Herzl’s futuristic utopian novel, Altnueland, which tells the story of a German tourist expedition arriving in the Jewish state long after it had been established.8 Before arriving in Palestine, one of the tourists had run into a young Orthodox Jewish beggar—he comes across him again in Palestine, now secular, educated, and extremely rich and content.

The role of the Bible within Jewish life offered one further clear difference between Judaism and Zionism. In the pre-Zionist Jewish world, the Bible was not taught as a singular text that carried any political or even national connotation in the various Jewish educational centers in either Europe or the Arab world. The leading rabbis treated the political history contained in the Bible, and the idea of Jewish sovereignty over the land of Israel, as marginal topics in their spiritual world of learning. They were much more concerned, as indeed Judaism in general was, with the holy writings focusing on the relationship between believers, and in particular on their relations with God.

From “The Lovers of Zion” in 1882 to the Zionist leaders on the eve of World War I, who appealed to Britain to support the Jewish claim for Palestine, reference to the Bible was quite common. In pursuit of their own interests, Zionist leaders fundamentally challenged the traditional biblical interpretations. The Lovers of Zion, for instance, read the Bible as the story of a Jewish nation born on the land of Palestine as an oppressed people under the yoke of a Canaanite regime. The latter exiled the Jewish people to Egypt, until they returned to the land and liberated it under Joshua’s leadership. The traditional interpretation, in contrast, focuses on Abraham and his family as a group of people discovering a monotheistic god rather than a nation and a homeland. Most readers will be familiar with this conventional narrative of the Abrahamites discovering God and through trials and tribulations finding themselves in Egypt⁹—hardly a story of an oppressed nation engaged in a liberation struggle. However, the latter was the preferred Zionist interpretation, which still holds water in Israel today.

One of the most intriguing uses of the Bible in Zionism is that practiced by the socialist wing of the movement. The fusion of socialism with Zionism began in earnest after Herzl’s death in 1904, as the various socialist factions became the leading parties in the World Zionist movement and on the ground in Palestine. For the socialists, as one of them said, the Bible provided “the myth for our right over the land.”10 It was in the Bible that they read stories about Hebrew farmers, shepherds, kings, and wars, which they appropriated as describing the ancient golden era of their nation’s birth. Returning to the land meant coming back to become farmers, shepherds, and kings. Thus, they found themselves faced with a challenging paradox, for they wanted both to secularize Jewish life and to use the Bible as a justification for colonizing Palestine. In other words, though they did not believe in God, He had nonetheless promised them Palestine.

[…]

Despite the historical evidence that the Jews who lived in eighteenth-century Palestine rejected the notion of a Jewish state, as did the Orthodox Jews in the late nineteenth century, this was rejected out of hand in the twentieth century.