Religious Zionism began as a minority Orthodox answer to a movement whose leadership was largely secular. The Mizrachi organisation, founded in 1902 under Rabbi Yitzchak Yaakov Reines, argued the practical case: settlement and statehood relieve Jewish distress and are permitted, without any messianic claim attached. A different reading came from Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, who understood the secular pioneers as unwitting instruments of a redemptive process, and from his son Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, whose teaching at Mercaz HaRav gave the reading a settlement programme after 1967 and shaped the Gush Emunim movement founded in 1974. Aviezer Ravitzky's study traces how the same texts sustain both the cautious and the messianic reading, and both remain live among religious Zionists. The atlas describes these positions and does not adjudicate between them or apply them to any present dispute.
Facts
Disputed
Standing as a Comparative CategoryUsed, but its validity as a comparative category is disputed 1 Aviezer Ravitzky's Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism (University of Chicago Press, 1996) traces both a messianic reading of Zionism and a non-messianic religious reading to the same body of rabbinic and Zionist texts, and shows through close textual and historical analysis that the messianic reading became dominant only after Israel's 1967 territorial gains, not from the movement's religious Zionist origins. The atlas records the disagreement without endorsing either reading or applying it to any present question. Origins
Held ByThe characteristic posture of Modern Orthodox Judaism since Samson Raphael Hirsch and, in America, Joseph B. Soloveitchik, reading the State of Israel in positive religious terms. 1 Status
Status Within the TraditionThe teaching of one school or lineage within the tradition 1Tradition: Modern Orthodox Judaism Learn More
Torah and National Return Joined
Religious Zionism organized as a distinct current within the wider Zionist movement through the Mizrachi movement, founded in 1902 by Rabbi Isaac Jacob Reines, which held that religious observance and Jewish national return were compatible and mutually reinforcing commitments rather than the rivals many contemporaries on both sides assumed them to be.
Mizrachi operated within the World Zionist Organization's institutions alongside the movement's secular currents, a practical alliance built on a shared national goal even where religious and secular Zionists differed sharply on the place of Jewish law in the future national life they were organizing toward. The clearest and most theologically influential development within religious Zionism came from Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Mandatory Palestine, who argued that the secular pioneers building the pre-state Jewish community, whatever their own irreligious self understanding, were nonetheless instruments of a divinely directed process of national and spiritual redemption, a theological reading that gave secular Zionist activity itself religious significance within a specifically religious Zionist framework.
Three Documented Readings
Scholarship on religious Zionism, notably Aviezer Ravitzky's study of messianism and Zionism within Jewish religious radicalism, distinguishes several positions this atlas records as documented camps rather than a single settled reading. A practical, non-messianic current, associated with much of Mizrachi and the pre-state religious Zionist public, supported Jewish return and self-government as a practical and religious good without necessarily reading contemporary events as messianic in a theological sense. A redemptive current, developed from Rav Kook's theology and carried forward institutionally by the yeshiva he founded and the circles associated with it, reads the unfolding return in explicitly messianic terms, as a stage in a divinely directed process of redemption.
A further, more activist current within the redemptive reading emphasizes settlement activity specifically as a religious duty flowing from this theology, a position this atlas records as one documented current within religious Zionism rather than as the whole of the movement, and without adjudicating the contested legal or political questions that activity raises in the present day, which fall outside what this record undertakes to settle.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Its foundational thinker: he read secular Zionist rebuilding as the beginning of redemption, and his Mercaz HaRav yeshiva became the movement's seedbed.
Belongs to Tradition
Religious Zionism, reading the State of Israel in positive religious terms, has been the characteristic Modern Orthodox posture since Samson Raphael Hirsch and, in America, Joseph B. Soloveitchik.
Related To
Sources
1. Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism
Aviezer Ravitzky, University of Chicago Press, 1996
Abraham Isaac Kook: The Lights of Penitence, The Moral Principles, Lights of Holiness, Essays, Letters, and Poems
Abraham Isaac Kook, translated by Ben Zion Bokser, Paulist Press (Classics of Western Spirituality), 1978
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