Azure • WINTER 5762 / 2002
Dispersion and the
Longing for Zion,
1240-1840
Arie Morgenstern
It has become increasingly accepted in recent years that
Zionism is a
strictly modern nationalist movement, born just over a
century ago, with
the revolutionary aim of restoring Jewish sovereignty in the
land of
Israel. And indeed, Zionism was revolutionary in many ways:
It rebelled
against a tradition that in large part accepted the exile,
and it attempted
to bring to the Jewish people some of the nationalist ideas
that were
animating European civilization in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth
centuries. But Zionist leaders always stressed that their
movement had deep
historical roots, and that it drew its vitality from forces
that had shaped
the Jewish consciousness over thousands of years. One such
force was the
Jewish faith in a national redemption—the belief that the
Jews would
ultimately return to the homeland from which they had been
uprooted.
This tension, between the modern and the traditional aspects
of Zionism,
has given rise to a contentious debate among scholars in
Israel and
elsewhere over the question of how the Zionist movement
should be
described. Was it basically a modern phenomenon, an
imitation of the other
nationalist movements of nineteenth-century Europe? If so,
then its
continuous reference to the traditional roots of Jewish
nationalism was in
reality a kind of facade, a bid to create an "imaginary
community" by
selling a revisionist collective memory as if it had been
part of the
Jewish historical consciousness all along. Or is it possible
to accept the
claim of the early Zionists, that at the heart of their
movement stood far
more ancient hopes—and that what ultimately drove the most
remarkable
national revival of modernity was an age-old messianic
dream?
For many years, it was the latter belief that prevailed
among historians of
Zionism. Its leading proponent was Benzion Dinur, a central
figure in what
became known as the Jerusalem school of Jewish history.
Dinur, a historian
at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who was also Israel’s
minister of
education from 1951 to 1955, understood the relationship
between the Jewish
people and the land of Israel to be a basic element of
Jewish
consciousness, and believed that messianic longing had
played a decisive
role in aliyot, or waves of Jewish immigration to the land
of Israel,
throughout history. For Dinur, the driving force behind the
aliyot of the
medieval and early modern periods was the “messianic ferment”
that cropped
up in Jewish communities from time to time, precipitating
widespread
efforts to predict the exact date the messianic era would
begin; the
appearance of charismatic leaders in various Jewish
communities, who were
seen as heralding the end of days; and, most notably,
efforts to organize
groups of Jews who would go to live in the land of Israel in
order to
hasten the redemption. “These two phenomena,” wrote Dinur, “messianic
ferment and movements of immigration to the land of Israel,
are among the
basic phenomena of Jewish history throughout the
generations….”1
Animated by this perspective, Dinur and his colleagues
succeeded in
uncovering much of the lineage of Jewish nationalism.
Against the commonly
held belief that Zionist activism was a rejoinder to the “passivity”
of
traditional Judaism, scholars of the Jerusalem school
stressed the dynamic
and activist quality of the messianic impulse in Jewish
history. In every
generation, it was shown, there were a great many Jews,
including communal
and spiritual leaders, who were not content with passively
hoping for
divine intervention, and who instead took action aimed at
bringing it
about. Of the means at their disposal, aliya was often seen
as the most
potent way to bring the redemption: For centuries, despite
the danger and
hardship involved in making the trip to Palestine, Jews from
all over the
diaspora continuously attempted to reestablish the presence
and even
sovereignty of the Jews in the land of Israel—efforts that
stemmed from a
longing for Zion that had suffused the prayers and practices
of Jews around
the world. In Dinur’s view, the Zionist awakening was not
motivated
primarily by modern European ideas, but by this same
longing, which flowed
from the deep springs of Jewish historical consciousness.
In recent years, however, this view of Jewish history has
been subjected to
relentless criticism. Dinur and his colleagues have been
accused of
allowing their Zionist ideology to inflate the importance
they attributed
to the land of Israel as a part of the Jewish consciousness,
and as a goal
for practical action. One of the most prominent critics of
Dinur’s approach
is Jacob Barnai of Haifa University. In his study on
nationalism and the
land of Israel, Historiography and Nationalism (1995),
Barnai argues that
Dinur’s belief in the centrality of aliya cannot be
reconciled with the
fact that Jews did not succeed in establishing an
uninterrupted presence in
Palestine. Moreover, those who did come were hardly the
elites of the
Jewish people whom Dinur had depicted—and therefore could
not be said to
reflect anything essential regarding the Jewish experience
in exile. “The
definition of the yishuv as the elite of the Jewish people…
was not subject
to a clear analysis and definition in [Dinur’s] thought, and
contradicts
what we know about the land of Israel at different times as
the place where
precisely the ‘lower’ elements of Jewish society were
concentrated.”2
The historian Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has made a wider claim in
his critique
of Dinur and his colleagues, arguing that Zionist
historiography erred in
offering a portrayal of Jewish attitudes towards the land of
Israel as
being consistent and uniform. According to Raz-Krakotzkin, a
distinction
should be drawn between positive and even fervent Jewish
attitudes towards
redemption, on the one hand, and the minimal effect these
attitudes had in
encouraging a return to the land of Israel, on the other.3
In building his
case, he relies on Elhanan Reiner’s study of aliyot in the
Middle Ages,
which depicted Jewish immigration to Palestine as having
been inspired far
more by Christian pilgrimages than by any Jewish messianic
belief.4
Raz-Krakotzkin argues that the time has come to “reappropriate”
the
discussion of the Jewish relationship to the land of Israel
and to remove
it from its Zionist “framing narrative”; he sees Reiner’s
study as setting
a new course for historians, who will no longer be
constrained by what he
calls the “principle of return” that characterizes the
classic Zionist
narrative.5 According to this view, the Jewish conception of
redemption
related to the land of Israel only in abstract terms, as a
spiritualized
goal to be reached in a far-off time, whereas the classic
Zionist assertion
that Jews consistently and actively sought out the physical
Palestine is
simply wishful thinking.
Of course, this debate among scholars is of far more than
academic
interest. Scholars such as Raz-Krakotzkin, as well as the
sociologists Uri
Ram and David Myers, have placed the criticism of the
Jerusalem school at
the center of a broader critique of the Zionist movement
itself.6 These
scholars take it as self-evident that Zionism rewrote Jewish
historical
memory, exaggerating the importance of the land of Israel in
order to give
its adherents the “false consciousness” needed to realize
its colonialist
goals. This critique of the Jerusalem school has been
central to a larger
effort in recent years to assail the foundations of the
Zionist movement,
and it is on the basis of these criticisms that some
Israelis have in
recent times come to question Zionism’s founding beliefs,
including the
very justice of the enterprise. If it turns out that their
criticisms are
firmly based in the historical record, the implications may
be far-reaching
indeed.
Today, however, the evidence exists to resolve this
historical
debate—evidence that was available in only limited measure
to Dinur and his
colleagues, and that has largely been ignored by recent
critics of the
traditional Zionist historiography. Indeed, with the opening
of archives in
the former Soviet Union, and in the wake of archival
discoveries in Western
and Central Europe and in Israel, much that was a matter of
speculation can
now be addressed on the basis of well-documented sources.
On the basis of this evidence, it seems that Dinur was
largely correct in
his understanding of the centrality of the land of Israel
and aliyot in the
centuries preceding Zionism, while his critics erred. The
work of scholars
such as Joseph Hacker, Yisrael Yuval, Binyamin Ze’ev Kedar,
David Tamar,
Elhanan Reiner, and Avraham David, as well as my own
research, indicates
clearly that the land of Israel served as a focus not only
of spiritual
longing for the Jews in the exile, but also of continual
organized aliyot
from all over the diaspora. These efforts brought thousands
of Jews,
including many important scholars and leaders, to settle in
Palestine
throughout the six centuries that preceded the appearance of
Zionism.
Indeed, from the time of the Crusades until the nineteenth
century, Jewish
life was infused with a sense of messianic anticipation,
which found
expression, among other things, in aliya. This messianic
anticipation was
focused on specific dates, which were endowed with mystical
significance.
Starting with the year 5000 on the Jewish calendar (1240
c.e.), the
beginning of each new century signaled for many the
possibility of
redemption, leading large groups of Jews to make the journey
to Palestine
as a necessary step in bringing it about. Some of these
aliyot were unknown
to us until recently; in other cases, recent research has
added substantial
detail to the historical record. The picture which emerges
is one of a
clear, recurrent trend of immigration to the land of Israel,
which was by
no means limited to the “lower” elements of society but took
with it Jews
from all walks of life. Indeed, in many cases, some of the
outstanding
Jewish figures of their day led the way. Although the number
of Jews who
succeeded in making the voyage and settling in Palestine
never constituted
more than a small portion of world Jewry, these messianic
aliyot were of
enduring significance, partly because of the renown of those
who took part,
partly because of their regular appearance over the
centuries, and partly
because of the variety of diaspora communities which
participated. The
messianic impulse which spawned these waves of immigration,
and the belief
in the centrality of the land of Israel upon which they
depended, were in
no way marginal to the Jewish tradition, but in fact became
an axis of
Jewish spiritual life. Indeed, the story of aliya from the
thirteenth to
the nineteenth centuries illustrates the depth and force of
the Jewish
people’s connection to its ancestral homeland, a connection
that was
carried into the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
when modern
Zionism found a new way of giving it voice.
II
The key to understanding the recurrence of pre-Zionist
aliyot is to be
found in the intense messianic ferment that began to grip
the Jewish people
in the first half of the thirteenth century. This was
expressed not only in
spiritual revivals in many communities, but also, on a
deeper level, in
changes in the theological and mystical doctrines upon which
Jewish
messianism was based. These were to have a decisive
influence on messianic
awakenings throughout the sixth millennium of the Jewish
calendar
(beginning in 1240 c.e.), charging this period with hopes of
imminent
redemption, and prompting regular movements of immigration
aimed at
bringing it about.
These powerful drives were largely a product of the
traditional Jewish view
of human history, which is based on an analogy from the
story of creation
as presented in the book of Genesis. In this view, each “day”
of creation
is seen as corresponding to one thousand years of human
history, a parallel
which the rabbis of the Talmud derived from a verse in
Psalms: “For a
thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is
past.”7 Since
God created the world in six days, they concluded, human
history will span
six thousand years. This period was divided into three ages,
each lasting
two thousand years.8 During the first two thousand years,
described in the
first eleven chapters of Genesis, man had no knowledge of
God, and
corruption and licentiousness reigned. During the second
period, the “age
of Tora” that is likewise described in the Bible, the
Israelites received
the divine revelation and took upon themselves the belief in
God and the
yoke of his laws. This period came to an end when the chosen
people, who
had not been true to their faith and had not carried out God’s
commandments, suffered the destruction of their Temple and
were exiled from
their land.9
Since shortly after the beginning of the exile, human
history has been in
its third age, whose characteristics are discussed
extensively in the
Talmud, midrash, and kabalistic literature. According to
this tradition,
this is the “age of the Messiah,” during which all that was
damaged during
the second age will be “repaired” in preparation for the
final redemption
of the world. It is during this period that God will fulfill
his promise of
ending the exile, allowing the Jewish people to return to
the land of their
fathers and rebuild the independent Jewish kingdom “as in
days of old.”10
However, at the time when this “third age” was actually
dawning (it
formally began in the year 240 c.e.),11 it was difficult to
identify the
signs of the “age of the Messiah” in the real world—a
difficulty that did
not go unnoticed by the talmudic sages. They were also well
aware of the
vagueness of the date when redemption was supposed to take
place, as the
Bible had provided only hints. The rabbis’ difficulty with
these problems
was exemplified in their effort to interpret the prophet
Isaiah’s ambiguous
statement regarding the time of redemption: “I am the
Eternal; in its time
I will hasten it.”12 In considering this verse, the rabbis
asked whether
the redemption would come at a fixed time, or would depend
on the
repentance of the Jewish people.13 “R. Alexander, son of R.
Yehoshua ben
Levi, said: It is written, ‘in its time,’ but it is also
written, ‘I will
hasten it.’ [How so?] If they are worthy, ‘I will hasten it.’
If not, [the
redemption will come] ‘in its time.’” According to this
interpretation, the
date of the redemption is fixed and predetermined; yet if
Israel repents,
God will hasten its realization.14 In other words, even in
the third age,
the Messiah would not come automatically; rather, the time
of his coming
would depend on the behavior of the Jewish people. The same
talmudic
discussion quotes the opinion of R. Dosa, that the delay may
extend well
into the sixth millennium, up to four hundred years before
the end of
history (that is, until the year 1840).15 R. Eliezer’s view
is even more
pessimistic, suggesting that it may last until forty years
before the end
(2200).16
With the passage of centuries, the idea of a
two-thousand-year-long “age of
the Messiah” disappeared from the Jewish sources. Instead,
the medieval
rabbis tended to divide the third age into two smaller
periods: A thousand
years of “exile” in the fifth millennium (240-1240) and a
thousand years of
“redemption” in the sixth millennium (1240-2240).17 As the
fifth millennium
drew to a close, expectations grew throughout the Jewish
world, sharpened
by the difficulties of exile in the medieval period. The
longing for
redemption became a powerful motivating force—overcoming,
for example, the
belief in the talmudic parable stating that God had imposed “three
oaths,”
of which one was a commitment not to retake the land of
Israel by force.18
One of the first thinkers who rejected the strictures of the
“three oaths”
was R. Judah Halevi (1075-1141), who asserted that mass
immigration to the
land of Israel was the necessary first step towards
redemption. This
attitude is found both in his poems of exile and redemption
and in his
major philosophical treatise, the Kuzari. In the latter, for
example, he
offers his interpretation of a passage from Psalms: “You
will surely arise
and take pity on Zion, for it is time to be gracious to her;
the appointed
time has come. Your servants take delight in its stones, and
cherish its
dust.”19 According to Halevi, the first verse relates to the
ultimate goal,
while the second adds a precondition: “This means that
Jerusalem can only
be rebuilt when Israel yearns for it to such an extent that
they embrace
her stones and dust.”20 Halevi’s words present a kind of
messianic
activism, one which resurfaced in Jewish thought throughout
the sixth
millennium, according to which Jews must be prepared to take
action to
rebuild Zion. Passive yearning for redemption must give way
to action, and
in particular aliya.
The sense that the coming sixth millennium would bring with
it the
messianic era prompted many kabalists to intensify their
efforts at
“calculating the end.” The mystical literature composed
during this period
is filled with eschatological calculations of one sort or
another, many of
which are based on astrology, the alphanumerical system of
gematria, or
acrostic interpretations of apocalyptic verses in the Bible
such as those
in the book of Daniel.21 Even a rationalist like Maimonides,
whose approach
towards the redemption was largely naturalistic, took part
in these
efforts. In his Epistle to Yemen, written in 1169, he cites
approvingly
what was probably his own messianic calculation with regard
to the end of
the fifth millennium, which, in his opinion, would witness
the return of
prophecy to Israel: “But I have a wondrous tradition…,” he
wrote, “that
prophecy will return to Israel in the year 4972 [1212]. And
there is no
doubt that the restoration of prophecy in Israel is one of
the signs of the
Messiah… and this is the truest of the ‘ends’ that have been
told to us.”22
Such “certified” predictions seemed to legitimize abrogation
of the “three
oaths,” and to give sanction to practices aimed at bringing
the Messiah,
which were collectively referred to as “forcing the end.”
While these
efforts became a constant feature of Jewish life, dramatic
events such as
wars, revolutions, expulsions, religious persecutions, and
natural
disasters intensified them. Jews tended to view such
upheavals through an
eschatological lens, as manifestations of divine providence
that would
bring about the cosmic “repair,” a change in the nature of
the world, and
ultimately the redemption of Israel.
Most of these apocalyptic speculations had little impact on
Jewish history,
and their memory is preserved only in recondite manuscripts.
However, those
calculations which pointed to the turn of each century of
the sixth
millennium had a more lasting effect.23 The Zohar, a book
that was widely
believed to have been written with divine inspiration,
mentions several of
these dates explicitly. Six dates in particular receive the
most widespread
attention in the mystical and homiletic literature of the
medieval
period—and it was these dates which resulted in intense
messianic activity
as they approached, including waves of aliya: (i) The year
1240 (5000 on
the Hebrew calendar); (ii) the period leading up to 1440
(5200); (iii) the
period between 1540 and 1575 (5300-5335); (iv) the period
leading up to
1640 (5400); (v) the period between 1740 and 1781
(5500-5541); and (vi) the
years before and after 1840 (5600), which the Zohar fixes as
the final date
of the redemption. The political, social, and economic
conditions in and
around Palestine had an important role in determining the
scope and success
of each aliya; however, in almost every century its
occurrence correlates
directly with a messianic awakening. In these movements, as
we shall see in
the coming sections, the central motivation was both
spiritual and
nationalistic in nature: The longing of the Jewish people to
return to the
land of their fathers, and in so doing to hasten the coming
of the Messiah.
III
The messianic aliya that preceded the year 1240 took place
in the wake of
the collapse of the Crusader kingdom in Palestine and the
subsequent
improvement of the situation of the Jews there. In 1187 the
Muslims
reconquered Jerusalem, and the new rulers not only allowed
Jews to settle
in Jerusalem, which had been forbidden during the Crusader
period, but even
encouraged them to do so. In 1216, fewer than thirty years
before the
beginning of the sixth millennium on the Hebrew calendar,
the poet Judah
al-Harizi visited Jerusalem, and described the change in the
status of the
Jews:
God is zealous
for his name and has had mercy for his people.… In
the year 4950 of
the creation [1190], God awakened the spirit of
the king of
Ishmael, and he and all of his army went up from
Egypt and laid
siege to Jerusalem, and God delivered it into his
hands…. And he
bid a proclamation be made throughout the city…
saying: Speak
unto the heart of Jerusalem, that whoever from the
seed of Ephraim
wishes may go unto it….24
The Jews understood the Crusader defeat as a fulfillment of
the divine
promise that the land of Israel would not tolerate foreign
conquerors, and
that the struggle for the land between Christians and
Muslims would
ultimately pave the way for the Jews’ “return to Zion.” The
new Muslim
rulers were seen to be playing their part in the process.
Against this background we can understand a prediction
dating from that
time, which appeared in a letter sent to the Jews of Egypt,
which was
discovered among the findings of the Cairo Geniza in the
nineteenth
century. The letter cites a new “prophecy” according to
which a series of
messianic events—including the ingathering of the exiles,
the coming of the
Messiah, and the establishment of the kingdom of Israel—would
begin some
fourteen years before the end of the fifth millennium: “Letters
have come
from France… [saying] that there has arisen among them a
prophet… who has
said that in the year 4986 [1226] the great ingathering will
begin, and our
master Elijah, of blessed memory, will come.… And in the
year 4993 [1233]
the Messiah, son of David, will come… and kingship will
return to the house
of Jerusalem.” On the basis of this prophecy, the author
decided to move to
Palestine and take an active part in the ingathering.25
The belief that the redemption would begin at this time prompted
Jews from
many lands to move to Palestine.26 By 1211, groups of
immigrants were
already arriving, including a large number of the leading
Tora scholars of
France, England, North Africa, and Egypt. This movement,
which historians
refer to as the “aliya of the three hundred rabbis,” was
unusual in both
size and composition. It included several key figures of the
French school
of the Tosafists, such as R. Samson of Schantz, one of the
leading scholars
in France, whose talmudic commentaries are studied in
yeshivot to this day;
and R. Jonathan Hacohen of Lunel, one of the outstanding
scholars in
Provence and a follower of Maimonides.
The messianic impulse behind this movement comes through
clearly in an
anonymous pamphlet written at the time, which was uncovered
by the
historian Yisrael Yuval. According to its author, the time
for the coming
of the Messiah had already arrived, “for the fifth
millennium will not end
until the King Messiah has come.” The author calls upon the
Jews of the
diaspora to go to the land of Israel, in order to prepare
the Jewish
settlement that would greet the Messiah.
Let no one say
that the King Messiah will be revealed in an
impure land… and
let no one make the mistake of saying that he
will be revealed
in the land of Israel among the gentiles.
Rather, the
matter is clear: In the land of Israel there will be
Tora scholars
and pious men of good deeds from the four corners
of the earth, a
handful from every city and every family, and
then the King
Messiah will be revealed among them.27
The author insists that the messianic era will come as the
result of a
critical mass of aliya and the creation of an infrastructure
of Jewish
settlements in the land of Israel. The next stage in the
redemption will
involve a great awakening, including a mass immigration to
the Holy Land—a
mighty host of Jews which, under the leadership of the
messianic king, will
smite the resident gentiles and expel them from the land. By
Yuval’s
estimate, preparations for this multi-staged messianic
movement were meant
to begin about thirty years before the end of the fifth
millennium, or
around 1210—at just about the time of the “aliya of the
three hundred
rabbis.” As he describes it, this messianic idea was a
product of growing
messianic expectations, which were amplified in the wake of
the Crusades.28
The efforts of Christians to wrest the Holy Land from the
Muslims appear to
have raised hopes in certain Jewish communities that they
might follow in
the footsteps of the Crusaders and organize their own sort
of crusade,
laying the groundwork for the establishment of the messianic
kingdom.29
Over time, this led to other daring ideas: In 1256, some
Jewish writers
were still meditating on radical measures, such as offering
sacrifices on
the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, to help bring about the
redemption. The
traveler R. Estori Hafarhi described this in the early
fourteenth century,
relating that R. Yehiel of Paris, one of the central figures
among the
French sages of the previous century, “said that one should
go up to
Jerusalem—and this was during the seventeenth year of the
sixth
millennium—and that one should offer sacrifices at this
time.”30
We know little about the fate of the three hundred rabbis
and the community
they established. Some settled in Jerusalem, but when the
city again fell
into the hands of the Crusaders in 1229, the majority of the
immigrants and
their families apparently were forced to move to the city of
Acre. The
bloody battles that took place in the area, and the shifts
from Muslim rule
to Crusader rule and back again, wore down the Jewish
communities of
Palestine and were, apparently, a major factor in preventing
them from
taking root in the country. Jerusalem’s Jewish population
withered and was
not to flourish again for many years. Finally, after Acre
fell into Muslim
hands in 1291, the large Jewish community of that city,
where the yeshiva
of R. Yehiel of Paris had been established, was destroyed.
Evidently, the failure of the “aliya of the three hundred
rabbis” and their
descendants’ return to Europe left their mark on the Jewish
people, who did
not make another similar effort for some time.31
Nevertheless, this
movement stood as a model for future messianic aliyot:
Unlike the
pilgrimage of isolated individuals that had preceded it,
this was an
organized effort, spearheaded by a large group of communal
leaders and Tora
scholars from all over the diaspora. As we will see, this
activist model
marked the beginning of a new age in the history of the land
of Israel,
beginning a trend that was to repeat itself with increasing
intensity in
later centuries.
IV
Though we know nothing of messianic efforts to move Jews to
the land of
Israel around the date 1340 (5100 on the Jewish calendar),
there is ample
evidence that in the years leading up to the start of the
next century, in
1440 (5200), intense messianic ferment culminated in a mass
movement of
aliya that lasted for decades, involving Jews from North
Africa, Spain,
France, Italy, and the German lands. As in similar cases
where radical
changes in the status of the Jews prompted messianic
activity, the
awakening that took place around 1440 followed a severe
crisis in
Jewish-Christian relations throughout Europe. Spain, a
country in which the
Jews had hoped to prosper, became the scene of waves of
violent persecution
for nearly fourteen years, beginning in 1391. A similar fate
befell the
Jews of Central Europe during this period: In 1389 the Jews
of Prague
suffered a pogrom; in 1391 the Jews were driven out of
France; and in 1421
Austria expelled its Jews. During the years 1415-1431, a
bloody war took
place between a reformist religious group, the Hussites, and
the Catholic
Church in Bohemia. The Jews found themselves caught in the
middle,
suffering the depredations of the Catholic armies while the
latter were
pursuing their “crusade” against the Hussite heretics.
These grim events nourished hopes for redemption, and
messianic
calculations of various sorts flourished in the literature
of the period.32
One of the most prominent devotees of calculations of this
sort was R.
Yom-Tov Lipmann Mulhausen, a leading rabbi in Central Europe
and the dayan
(chief rabbinic judge) of Prague, who was not only a leading
halachic
authority but also a respected theologian and mystic. His
calculations
fixed the date of the redemption for the year 1410 (5170),
and again, later
on, for the year 1430 (5190).33 Indications of messianic
ferment at the
time can also be found in the writings of R. Hasdai Crescas,
one of the
eminent Jewish philosophers of the Middle Ages. He recounts
a prophetic
revelation that took place in 1393, according to which the
redemption would
take place in the year 1396 (5156, the numerical value of
the Hebrew word
“Zion”). Crescas goes on to cite a testimony from Jerusalem,
also of a
prophetic character, which tells of a divine command
directing the Muslims
to transfer their rule over Jerusalem to the Jews. According
to this
testimony, a voice emerged from the site of the Temple and addressed
the
Muslims, calling to them, “Leave my house, and let my sons
enter!” and the
Muslims were filled with fear. Another story from Jerusalem
told of three
elders who appeared before one of the Muslim leaders of the
city and said
to him: “We are of the children of Israel. Now, go and tell
the Ishmaelites
to leave this place, for the time of their end has come.”34
Testimonies of this type, like the widespread messianic
calculations of
that period, reflect a strong messianic sentiment. Alongside
the reports of
miraculous events, they also contain a clear political
element: While some
testimonies portrayed Muslim rule as the essential obstacle
to the
redemption, others cited it as the factor that would permit
the Jews to
return to their own soil, and even to rebuild the Temple
under the aegis of
the Mameluke regimes. Crescas himself, for instance, raised
this
possibility as early as 1406: “In the final analysis…
perhaps the king of
Egypt who now rules in the land of Israel would allow the
Jews in the
extremities of his kingdom to go up and build the Temple, on
condition that
they dwell under his rule….”35 In light of this expectation,
it is not
surprising that Jews of the time portrayed the Ottomans’
capture of
Constantinople, the capital of eastern Christianity, which
took place in
1453, as heralding the redemption. This change in the world
order—Christianity’s defeat at the hands of Islam—gave the
Jews reason to
hope for the victory of the true religion, Judaism, over
these two leading
competitors.
At about the same time, persistent rumors that the ten lost
Israelite
tribes had been discovered—an event that tradition
considered a clear sign
of the redemption—added fuel to the messianic fire. These
rumors, which
spread in 1404 and again in 1430, were precipitated by the
new geographical
discoveries that resulted from the voyages of explorers to
China and India.
Various interpretations of these discoveries captured the
Jews’
imagination. For example, rumors that the lost kingdom of
the ten tribes
had been discovered somewhere in distant Asia, on the Indian
subcontinent,
in a place where the nations of the world did not rule, made
a powerful
impression, and led to speculation about the possibility of
reuniting all
the world’s Jews.36
But the most explicit expression of messianic awakening
during this period
was a mass movement of aliya embracing thousands of Jews
from Spain, Italy,
North Africa, and Egypt. We find evidence of this movement
in a
contemporary edition of an anonymous historical text that
had first
appeared two centuries earlier, in 1240, and was recopied in
Rome in 1429,
discussing the “aliya of the three hundred rabbis.”37 After
quoting the
original text, the copyist added an aside concerning the
events of his day:
“And now many people have awakened, and have decided to go
to the land of
Israel, and many think that we are close to the coming of
the redeemer,
seeing that the nations of the world weigh heavily upon
Israel.”38
In this movement, the Jews of Spain, among whom messianic
visions and
calculations were particularly widespread, played a central
role.39 The
historian Binyamin Ze’ev Kedar has discovered an account of
a Jewish voyage
from Spain to the port of Jaffa in the early fifteenth
century: “Old and
young, women and youths and infants, they went up to
Jerusalem and there
built [houses]….” Kedar goes on to quote a contemporary
witness, the
learned Christian Thomas Gascoigne: “The Jews who are
gathered there from
various lands believe that they shall in the future be
victorious over the
Saracens, the pagans, and the Christians. And after the
golden Jerusalem
and the Temple of the Lord are built, they say that their
messiah, that is,
the Antichrist, will come to Jerusalem to his holy
sanctuary.”40
We can also judge the scope of the Spanish movement of Jews
to Palestine
from the opposition that it elicited within some Spanish
Jewish
communities, whose leaders occasionally took exception to
what was viewed
as a violation of the “three oaths.” Such opposition
appears, for example,
in a letter that the Jews of Saragossa wrote to the
community of Castile,
in which they complain about the exodus of a large number of
Jews from
Spain to Palestine: “For God has created a new thing in the
land: People of
little quality and large numbers have set out, their
children and families
with them, infants and women, saying: Let us go to the land,
unto its
length and breadth, until we come to the mountain of the
house of the
Eternal, to the house of the God of Jacob.…”41 The authors
call for
bringing the movement to an immediate end, out of a fear
that all of Jewry
will suffer because of it: “We have come to beseech you,
distinguished Tora
scholars, that you take all possible measures to turn back
al l those who
are going in this way, and let each man return to his tent
in peace, and
let them not hasten the end.”42 It is important to note in
this regard that
the Saragossans’ denigration of the quality of the olim did
not at all
correspond to the reality. Joseph Hacker, who has studied
the immigration
from Spain, has demonstrated that it included not only “people
of little
quality” but also serious scholars who engaged in halachic
discussion about
aliya, and wrote passionate letters on the subject. Several
of them went on
to become leaders of the Jewish community of Jerusalem.43
Another large diaspora community, that of Italy, also
experienced a
messianic awakening at the time, as we learn from the case
of R. Elijah of
Ferrara, a leading rabbi who arrived in Palestine in 1435
and left an
account of his journey. R. Elijah appears to have taken this
trip in order
to verify rumors that had reached Italy in 1419 about the
discovery of the
ten lost tribes.44 His journey prompted many other Jews from
the Italian
communities to leave for Palestine to take part in the
imminent redemption.
The movement was substantial enough that the Italian
authorities took
action to stem it. In 1428, a papal order was issued
prohibiting sea
captains from carrying Jews to Palestine. Soon afterward,
the Venetian
government forbade the use of their city’s port for this
purpose, while
Sicily issued a similar prohibition in 1455.45
The Vatican’s concern about the growing strength of the
Jewish settlement
in Palestine was not without grounds. In 1427, for instance,
the Jews of
Jerusalem attempted to wrest control of the Tomb of David on
Mount Zion
from the members of the Franciscan order who held it, and to
acquire
ownership of the site from the Muslim authorities. As a
result of the
subsequent dispute, the Franciscans were removed from the
holy site, but
the Jews of Jerusalem also lost their hold on it. The
audacity of
Jerusalem’s Jews, which elicited the anger of the Church
against them, was
certainly fueled by the messianic euphoria which had come to
characterize
Jewish life at the time. The Jews were energized not only in
their bid for
Mount Zion, but also in their success in expanding the area
of their
residence into a new quarter of the city: The “Street of the
Jews’
Synagogue,” today known as the Jewish Quarter of the Old
City. Jews
purchased extensive property in this area, as a Christian
traveler reports
in 1421.46 The confidence of the Jews during this period led
them to build
a synagogue on the Street of the Jews—despite the strict
prohibition in
Omarite law against building new synagogues under the rule
of Islam. A
document from 1425, discovered recently in the archive of
the Islamic court
in Jerusalem, indicates that in exchange for payment, the
authorities
accepted a Jewish claim that a synagogue had already existed
on the site in
ancient times, and that it could therefore be left in Jewish
hands.47
The assertiveness among the Jews of Jerusalem also stemmed
from a major
demographic boost they received from immigrants who had
arrived in
anticipation of 1440. One source from this period depicts
worshippers in
Jerusalem on the festival of Shavuot. According to the
report, the
community was overwhelmed with pilgrims and local Jews; the
author was
deeply moved by the display of devotion, which he describes
as a miraculous
sign of the approaching redemption: “At the time there
gathered there on
the festival of Shavuot more than three hundred celebrants,
all of whom
came in and could be seated comfortably, for it [Jerusalem]
still retains
its sanctity, and this is a sign of the third redemption.”48
Another
testimony mentions that at this time there were as many as
five hundred
Jews residing permanently in Jerusalem; a later source
places the number at
1,200.49
But the boom of the Jewish community in Jerusalem did not
last long. A
heavy increase in taxation forced many members of the
community to sell
their property in order to pay off debts.50 The erosion of
the economic
power of the Jews played into the hands of their Muslim
rivals in the city.
After the Mameluke sultan and his court in Cairo rejected
the demand of the
Waqf to tear down the synagogue on the Street of the Jews,
Muslim fanatics
took matters into their own hands, destroying it in 1474. If
not for the
protection of the government in Egypt, they would have
expelled all the
Jews from the city as well. These and other events led to a
waning of the
Jews’ hopes for imminent redemption.
Nonetheless, the aliya leading up to the year 1440 played an
important role
in setting the stage for future efforts to settle the land
of Israel. Most
importantly, it was much larger and more diverse than the “aliya
of the
three hundred rabbis” that preceded it, and included both
ordinary Jews and
intellectual elites. In this respect, it laid the foundation
for the great
messianic ingathering that was to take place during the
first half of the
next century.
V
Of all the messianic aliyot of the sixth millennium, the one
that took
place in the years leading up to 1540 (5300 in the Jewish
calendar) is the
best known, because of its formative impact on the
development of Judaism
and the Jewish world. During this period, a new wave of
immigration
sustained a material and spiritual flowering such as the
Jewish community
in Palestine had not enjoyed since the period of the Mishna.
This
relatively brief heyday, centering on the northern town of
Safed, gave rise
to some of the most important intellectual achievements of
Jewish
history—of which the most enduring were the Shulhan Aruch
and Beit Yosef of
R. Joseph Karo, which today remain two of the pillars of the
Jewish legal
tradition; and the kabalistic teachings of R. Isaac Luria,
which
revolutionized Jewish mysticism and later formed part of the
doctrinal
basis of Hasidism.
Not surprisingly, this revival came in the wake of one of
the most
traumatic events in Jewish history. In 1492, after a century
of
persecution, the vast Jewish community of Spain was
expelled. Messianic
thought of the period was strongly influenced by this
catastrophe:
According to many rabbis at the time, the scope and severity
of the
persecutions were indicators of a divine hand behind them,
aimed at
spurring the Jewish people to realize the “return to Zion”
and bring about
the redemption. One of the leaders of Spanish Jewry, the
noted Bible
commentator R. Isaac Abravanel, found a proof in the book of
Isaiah: “I
will say to the north, Give; and to the south, Do not
withhold; bring my
sons from afar, and my daughters from the ends of the earth.”51
Abravanel
interpreted this passage to mean that the expulsion from
Spain was an act
of God meant to push the Jews towards Zion:
And in the year
5252 [1492], the Eternal roused the spirit of the
kings of Spain
to expel from their land all of the Jews, some
three hundred
thousand souls, in such a manner that all of them
would leave… and
all of them would pass before the land of
Israel, not only
the Jews but also the Conversos [i.e., Jews who
had converted to
Christianity under the Spanish persecutions]…
and in this way
they would gather upon the holy soil.52
After the trauma of expulsion at the hands of the Christian
rulers of
Spain, the Jews viewed the Ottomans’ conquest of Palestine
in 1517 as a
significant turn for the better. The Ottoman government’s
sympathetic
attitude towards Jewish immigration raised messianic
anticipations further,
as did the religious upheavals in Christendom which
accompanied the advent
of Protestantism. In the words of the kabalist R. Abraham
Halevi, who
headed the Sephardi yeshiva in Jerusalem, “And now, there
have recently
arrived in Jerusalem faithful Jews from the lands of
Ashkenaz and Bohemia…
who tell of the man… named Martin Luther… who began in the
year 5284 [1524]
to reject the creed of the uncircumcised and to show them
that their
fathers had inherited a lie.”53
At the same time, messianic longing found expression in the
feverish
efforts of David Reuveni and Solomon Molcho in Italy and
Portugal. These
two figures created a new model of Jewish leadership,
characterized by a
combination of messianic and political activism. Reuveni,
who claimed to be
a member of the lost tribe of Reuben and the king of a
portion of the ten
lost tribes, went so far as to visit Pope Clement VII and
urge that he
advise the king of Portugal to form a military alliance
between the
Christians and the Jews to wage war against the Muslims and
wrest the Holy
Land from Turkish rule. Reuveni’s diplomatic efforts grew,
in part, out of
messianic calculations that placed redemption in the year
1540.54 Reuveni’s
colleague, Solomon Molcho, was born into a Converso family
and rose to the
position of secretary of the Portuguese royal council. When
Reuveni came to
the Portuguese royal court in 1525, he convinced Molcho to
return to
Judaism—a decision which forced Molcho to flee to Salonika, where
he met R.
Joseph Karo and became deeply involved in esoteric studies
and mystical
rites aimed at bringing about the redemption. He believed
that at the end
of days, “all the secrets of the Tora which have been hidden
from us due to
our sins will be revealed, and then the teachings, laws, and
testimonies,
whose divine secrets we do not apprehend today, will be
interpreted for
us.”55 According to the scholar of mysticism Moshe Idel,
Molcho saw 1540 as
the date of the restoration of the Davidic dynasty: “The
year 5300 will
complete the appointed number of days, and over it will rule
the house of
David.”56 Reuveni’s and Molcho’s activity came to an end in
Regensburg in
the summer of 1532, when they were arrested by Carl V,
emperor of the Holy
Roman Empire and king of Spain and Germany. Molcho, the
former Converso,
was taken to Mantua, in Italy, where he was burned at the
stake, while
Reuveni was exiled to Spain, where his story, as far as we
know, comes to
an end.
As the year 5300 drew near, the messianic ferment
intensified. R. Abraham
Halevi, who immigrated to Jerusalem at that time, expressed
this sentiment
in describing what he considered to be clear signs of the
coming
redemption. He notes the troubles that have befallen the
Jewish people in
exile, and the special prayers that are recited in Jerusalem
to arouse the
mercies of heaven and bring the redemption; most
importantly, he writes of
the divine response to these prayers, in the form of a fire
which he
describes as having come down from heaven and damaged the
Church of the
Holy Sepulchre.57 Further testimony appears in a letter that
students from
the yeshiva in Jerusalem sent to Italy in 1521, in which
they describe
vigils held in the city on Mondays and Thursdays for the
recital of special
prayers requesting divine intervention to hasten the
redemption.58 The
authors of the letter also interpreted certain unusual
events as a sign of
divine response to their prayers:
And on the day
that we arranged the vigil, that night the sleep
of the King of
the World was disturbed, and he showed us a sign
of redemption,
and the Eternal thundered in the heavens, and his
voice was heard
from on high, and there was a driving rain and a
great wind that
broke up mountains and smashed rocks. And this
was on the
eleventh day of the omer, when rain in Jerusalem is a
miracle, for
rain does not fall there in the summer days, but
only during the
rainy season between Succot and Passover… and
this was nothing
if not a sign of redemption.59
In the last few years leading up to 1540, the movement to
bring Jews to the
land of Israel, which encompassed thousands of families,
intensified. Jews
from Poland and Lithuania took part, in addition to those
who came from
Western Europe in the wake of the expulsions. In 1539 the
land registry of
Horodno (Grodno) records the sale of homes by Jews who
intended to go to
Palestine. About the same time, Lithuanian King Zygmunt I
sought to verify
rumors that the Jews were taking with them to Palestine Christian
children
whom they had circumcised.60 The historian Yitzhak Shefer
attributes the
messianic sentiment underlying this aliya from Central
Europe to the
appearance of Solomon Molcho in Prague and his meeting with
Emperor Carl
V.61 Messianic enthusiasm may also have prompted R. Jacob
Pollack, the
rabbi from Prague and Krakow who is credited with having
founded the world
of Eastern European yeshivot and pioneering the method of
talmudic study
known as pilpul, to move to Jerusalem in 1530.62
The great majority of those who moved to Palestine at this
time settled in
the Galilee, particularly in Safed. The choice of this small
town in the
hills west of the Sea of Galilee had to do with a tradition
that the
Messiah would first make himself known in the Galilee,63 and
also with the
fact that neither Muslims nor Christians had a religious
center there.
Moreover, the income that could be gained from the local
textile industry
added a further incentive to settle there.64 The local
authorities even
commissioned some of the newly arrived merchants and
businessmen to handle
the collection of taxes and other state income, or to act as
leaseholders
in different areas. Safed and the Galilee were rapidly
transformed into a
flourishing economic center, which exported fruits and
grain, sheep and
wool, and woven goods. Merchandise was shipped abroad via
the ports of
Acre, Haifa, Beirut, Sidon, and Tripoli. A contemporary
source describes
the dramatic change that occurred in Safed within just ten
years of the
arrival of the first wave of Jewish immigrants: “Whoever saw
Safed ten
years ago, and sees it today, will find it remarkable,
because more and
more Jews are coming all the time, and the clothing industry
grows daily….
Any man or woman who works in wool at any labor can earn his
living
comfortably.”65
Safed’s prosperity and the growth of its Jewish community
were matched by
the spiritual flowering that resulted from the arrival of a
learned elite,
which included such prominent scholars and kabalists as R.
Jacob Berab, R.
Joseph Karo, R. Solomon Alkabetz, and their followers. This
vanguard added
to the messianic spirit of the time, and sought to take an
active role in
bringing about the redemption. Within a very short time, the
Safed
community had transformed the city into one of the greatest
spiritual
centers of world Jewry since the redaction of the Talmud.
The period of Safed’s intellectual renaissance began in
1524, with the
arrival of R. Jacob Berab, one of the leading Spanish
scholars of his
generation. Berab, a man of great boldness and energy,
sought to reinstate
the ancient practice of rabbinic ordination known as
semicha, and through
this to enable the reestablishment of the ancient Jewish
legislative-judicial body, the Sanhedrin. These efforts were
of a plainly
messianic character. The reestablishment of the Sanhedrin
was universally
accepted as a major step in the messianic process, since it
represented the
most concrete expression of Jewish sovereignty in the land
of Israel;
however, a requirement for membership in the Sanhedrin was
ordination by
semicha, which had been handed down through the generations
of rabbinic
leaders until around the fifth century c.e., at which time
the chain of
transmission was broken, and the tradition was lost. Berab’s
efforts to
reinstate semicha were thus aimed at eventually
reestablishing Judaism’s
sovereign legislative house, in preparation for the
messianic era.66 In
1538, in the presence of twenty-five of the greatest rabbis
in Safed, Berab
was ordained—creating the first link in what was meant to be
a renewed
chain of ordination. But the leading rabbi of Jerusalem, R.
Levi ibn Habib,
objected that the ordination did not satisfy one of the
conditions
stipulated by Maimonides without which the semicha could not
be
reinstated—namely, the agreement of all the sages in the
land of Israel—and
as a result had no halachic validity. The controversy
between the two sides
grew increasingly heated, to the point that Berab’s
opponents apparently
reported on him to the authorities for disloyalty. Fearing
imprisonment,
Berab was forced to flee the country—but not before he had
hurriedly
ordained four of the great scholars of the generation living
in the city,
including R. Joseph Karo.
Following Berab’s departure, Karo assumed leadership of the
community in
Safed. Karo was born in Portugal; because of the
persecutions and expulsion
there he emigrated, together with many other refugees, to
Egypt, which was
part of the Ottoman Empire. In 1536 he came to Palestine
along with a group
of kabalists headed by R. Solomon Alkabetz, and settled in
Safed. The
kabalists had an explicitly mystical motivation for moving
to Palestine:
Alkabetz had preached a sermon on Shavuot night, the eve of
the group’s
aliya, in which he described how a magid, an emissary from
God, had urged
Karo to lead his disciples to the land of Israel because it
was a time of
grace: “Fortunate are you, my sons,” the magid told him. “Return
to your
studies and do not interrupt them for even a moment, and
ascend to the land
of Israel, for not all times are equally [propitious]….
Therefore make
haste and go up… for it has already been said, ‘the time of
reaping the
fruits has come,’ and not all times are the same.”67
Alkabetz, the third outstanding figure in the spiritual
leadership of
Safed, introduced special prayer customs and composed works
of Kabala and
many religious poems, which were suffused with a yearning
for redemption
(one of his best-known poems, Lecha Dodi, “Come, My Beloved,”
became part
of the Sabbath Eve service throughout the Jewish world). In
one of his
prayers, Alkabetz calls upon the Almighty to redeem the
Jewish people,
arguing that by going up to the land of their fathers, he
and his
colleagues had proven their devotion and were worthy of
divine assistance:
And now their
spirit has led them to go up to Mount Zion, the
Mountain of the
Eternal, to please its stones and to reestablish
the dust of its
ruins; they all are gathered and come unto you;
they have put
their lives in their own hands, setting their path
upon the sea.
They were lighter than eagles, stronger than lions,
to go up and to
worship before you upon this land. And they
abandoned their
property and their houses of pleasure, silver and
gold were of no
account to them, to come to the land. And the
land is
abandoned, ruined and desolate before them, and its
inhabitants are
gentiles who rule over it, and they are wicked
and sinful. And
every day your servants are beaten, and your
servants go up
to it. Shall not the Eternal remember and save us
from these
things? Have you had contempt for them, is your soul
disgusted by
such a nation?68
Another major religious figure who left his imprint on Safed
was R. Isaac
Luria, also known as the “Ari.” Luria was born in Jerusalem
and attended
the yeshiva of R. Betzalel Ashkenazi in Cairo, where he
studied the Zohar.
By his account, the prophet Elijah appeared to him and
commanded him to go
back to the land of Israel in order to attain the highest
holiness, an
understanding of the divine wisdom, and a knowledge of the
secrets of the
Tora. Inspired by this revelation, he returned to Palestine
and settled
with his disciples in Safed, where he played an unparalleled
role in the
development of Jewish mysticism. His doctrines concerning
creation and
redemption, and the kabalistic school that formed around
them, were crucial
not only for the development of Kabala in subsequent
generations, but also
in the emergence of the Hasidic movement in the eighteenth
century.
The Messiah did not materialize in 1540, but this did not
discourage those
who had built their vision of the future around that date. A
number of
mystics tried to resurrect messianic hopes by pushing the
date back to 5335
(1575), based on their reading of a verse in the book of
Daniel.69 However,
the messianic anticipations for the later date paled in
comparison to those
that had preceded the year 5300. An aborted plan to rebuild
the city of
Tiberias raised hopes among Italian Jews during this
intermediary period
(according to several midrashic traditions, the first step
in the process
of redemption is to take place there),70 but these were
quickly dashed and
did not trigger any serious movement of aliya.71 Luria died
three years
before the second date posited for redemption, in 1572, at
the age of 38;
and Karo’s death followed in 1575—the very year that he had
hoped to see
the Messiah.
As the messianic ferment subsided, Safed itself declined.
One main cause
was the severe economic crisis that struck the country and
damaged most of
the city’s wool industry. Government authorities also grew
more hostile to
the Jews, and in 1576 even attempted to expel about one
thousand Jewish
families from Palestine to Cyprus. Religious persecution of
the Jews of
Safed—on the pretext that they had built synagogues without
permission—brought an end to the community. R. Moses
Alsheich’s
lamentation, modeled on the book of Lamentations, which Jews
read every
year on Tisha B’av, depicts the end of this crucial chapter
in the history
of Jewish settlement in Palestine: “And who is the man who
has seen the
city, which has been called the acme of beauty, the joy of
all the world, a
great city of scholars and scribes…? How has its blossom
been plundered
like a wilderness…. Many are its enemies and those who
destroy it.”72
VI
Despite these crises in the Jewish community in Palestine
towards the end
of the sixteenth century, and especially in Safed, a new
movement of
immigration to the land of Israel started up only a few
decades later. This
time, the messianic ferment was based on a passage from the
Zohar, which
concluded that in the year 5408 (1648), the dead would be
resurrected, an
event which the tradition describes as one of the later
stages in the
process of redemption.73 In the words of the Zohar:
In the sixth
millennium, in the 408th year, all those who dwell
in the dust will
rise…. And the verse calls them “the children of
Heth,” because
they shall arise in the year 408,74 as it is
written, “In
this jubilee year each of you shall return to his
property.” And
when “this” is completed, which is 5,408,75 each
man will return
to his property, to his soul, which is his
property and his
inheritance.76
Dozens of leading rabbinic sages and their families came to
Palestine in
the years before 1648. Most of them were kabalists of the
school of R.
Moses Cordovero and R. Isaac Luria, who believed that by
studying and
disseminating esoteric doctrines they were fulfilling one of
the important
conditions for the coming of the Messiah. These included R.
Abraham Azulai
from Morocco, author of the important kabalistic treatise
Hesed Le’avraham;
R. Jacob Tzemah from Portugal, who edited the writings of R.
Haim Vital,
the renowned disciple of Luria; and R. Nathan Shapira of
Krakow, author of
the well-known work Tuv Ha’aretz which deals with the
sanctity of the Holy
Land according to the Kabala.
But perhaps the most illustrious figure who came to
Palestine at this time
was R. Isaiah Horowitz, author of Shnei Luhot Habrit and
known as the
“Shelah,” after the acronym of the title of this work.
Around 1620,
Horowitz, who had served as chief rabbi in Dubno, Ostraha,
Frankfurt am
Main, and Prague, decided to move to Palestine. Prior to
that, Horowitz had
argued strenuously for the existence of a natural link
between settling the
land and the coming of the redemption, and it upset him
deeply that the
masses of Jews did not go to the land of Israel. “For my
heart burned
continually,” he wrote, “when I saw the children of Israel
building houses
like princely fortresses, making permanent homes in this
world in an impure
land… which seems, heaven forbid, as if they were turning
their minds away
from the redemption.”77 Horowitz saw his own aliya as a
necessary step in
bringing about the redemption that was expected with the
turn of the fifth
century of the millennium.78
Horowitz arrived early in 1622, staying for a short time in
Safed. From
there he went to Jerusalem, where he made his home. He had
several reasons
for relocating to Jerusalem, the most important of which was
his belief
that Israel’s historic capital, and not Safed, would come
first in the
process of redemption, and he wanted to focus his efforts on
rebuilding it:
“Our rabbis also said… ‘I will not come to the Jerusalem
above until I come
to the Jerusalem below.’ The simple meaning of this is that
the Jerusalem
below is the Jerusalem that is here, in the land, whose
rebuilding we
anticipate speedily in our days.…”79 The growth of the
Jewish community in
the city during that period, driven by an influx of
immigrants from various
countries, also encouraged the move. In a letter he wrote
while still in
Safed, he observed: “For, thank God, it has become crowded
in Jerusalem.
For the Ashkenazi community in Jerusalem is already twice
that of Safed;
may it be speedily rebuilt in our days, for e very day it
increases…. Also
the Sephardim in Jerusalem increase greatly, to literally
hundreds [of
families].” Horowitz particularly praised the quality of the
aliya, noting
that “the Ashkenazi community includes quite a few important
people, great
scholars of the Tora.” This being the case, he cherished the
hope that the
number of immigrants would swell further in the wake of his
own arrival:
“And in a short time, God willing, we will hear that the
Ashkenazi
community has become inspiring in its grandeur, for I know
that, praise
God, many will come there and wish to attach themselves to
me.”80
The enthusiasm Horowitz expressed over his expected move to
Jerusalem did
not subside after he settled in the city. In a letter from
Jerusalem, which
was recently uncovered by Avraham David, he again asserts
that the city has
changed profoundly, emphasizing its sanctity no less than
the great
improvement in the physical conditions that he found
there.81 Whereas the
praise in his earlier letter had been based on hearsay, now
he extols
Jerusalem on the basis of direct experience, and even
compares its scope to
that of the major cities of Eastern Europe: “And know… that
it is a large
city like Krakow, and every day large buildings are added to
it and it is
filled with people, whether of the nations of the world
without number or
limit, or of the children of Israel.”82 The rapid growth
convinced Horowitz
that the time of the Messiah was drawing close. “We consider
all this a
sign of the approaching redemption quickly in our days,
amen,” he wrote.
“Every day we see the ingathering of the exiles. Day by day
they come.
Wander about the courtyards of Jerusalem: All of them,
praise God, are
filled with Jews, may their Rock and Redeemer protect them,
and with houses
of study and schools filled with small children.”83
Horowitz’s attempts to discover the manuscripts of R. Isaac
Luria also
reflected his messianic enthusiasm. He was convinced that
the works
attributed to Luria that were circulating in the diaspora
were not
authentic, since Luria’s disciple, R. Haim Vital, had
forbidden his
master’s writings to be copied or removed from the land of
Israel. In one
of his letters, Horowitz mentions that when he arrived in
Damascus on his
way to Palestine, local Jews allowed him to inspect the
writings of Vital.
He expressed the hope that after arriving in Jerusalem he
would continue to
study the Lurianic Kabala from Palestinian manuscripts,
identify and
confirm the authenticity of its mystical doctrines, and
succeed in
annulling the ban on their dissemination and publication:
For I desire and
yearn for this wisdom. And there are many great
sages here, and
all of them have the treatises of his [Vital’s]
disciples that
have become widespread. And we have found and seen
that they differ
regarding many matters…. But we hope to the
Eternal that the
time may come when the holy book of that godly
man [Luria] will
be revealed, for there is a time and season to
every purpose.
And if God sees our merit as I have hoped, then
surely the vow
will be nullified, that is, the earlier ban.… And
we are certain
that with God’s mercies we shall quickly merit it,
and the secret
things will be revealed to us….84
Horowitz’s quest to uncover Luria’s original manuscripts was
not motivated
by intellectual curiosity alone. Vital had taught that the
discovery of
Luria’s true, original writings would be a sign of the
coming of the
Messiah: “In these generations it is a commandment and a
great joy before
the Holy One that this wisdom be revealed, for by its merit
the Messiah
shall come.”85 The hope expressed by Horowitz—”But we hope
to the Eternal
that the time may come when the holy book of that godly man
will be
revealed, for there is a time and season to every purpose”—indicates
his
faith that the dissemination of Luria’s true teaching would
assure the
redemption.86
Horowitz’s impassioned letters reflect the pervasive
messianic ferment in
the Jewish community of Palestine in the years before 1640
(5400). But, as
at many times in the history of the Jews in the land of
Israel, this period
of success came to an end. In 1625, Jerusalem came under the
control of the
Ibn Farukh family. The family, which had purchased control
over the city
from the Ottoman government, saw themselves as free to
oppress the city’s
inhabitants and embitter the lives of anyone too poor to pay
a sufficient
levy. Most of all they targeted the city’s Jews, who were
politically
powerless and could be exploited by taking the financial
support they
received from the diaspora.87 Within a two-year period, from
1625 to the
end of 1627, the position of the Jewish community in
Jerusalem was
completely undermined. The governor, Muhammed ibn Farukh,
persecuted the
Jews of the whole country, issued various edicts against
them, restricted
their numbers arbitrarily, and extorted enormous sums of
money.88 When they
were unable to pay their debts, they were summarily jailed
and tortured.
The new regime destroyed the Jews’ sacred objects; placed
their synagogues
in lien against debts and shut them down;89 interrupted
their prayer
services; desecrated their Tora scrolls, tearing and
stealing them to make
clothing and bags; closed their religious courts and
dispersed the judges;
and shut down Jewish schools and sent the children away.
Many Jews starved.
Those with means fled far from the reach of Muhammed ibn
Farukh. Among the
refugees was Horowitz, who succeeded in escaping to Safed.
Of the 2,500 to
3,000 Jews who lived in Jerusalem in 1624, on the eve of Ibn
Farukh’s rise
to power, only a few hundred remained by the end of his rule
in 1627.90
Nevertheless, the messianic excitement that had
characterized the period
prior to Ibn Farukh did not dissipate. The Christian
traveler Eugene Roger,
who visited Palestine between 1629 and 1634, was witness to
persistent
efforts by the Jews to greet the Messiah. Roger recounts two
occasions on
which he saw more than two thousand Jews awaiting the coming
of the
Messiah—on Shavuot of the year 1630, and again in 1633: “The
gathering of
the Jews took place in the city of Safed in the Galilee,
because they
think, as several of their rabbis have taught them, that in
this city of
Safed the Messiah whom they await will come.”91 A mood of
optimism also
suffuses an anonymous testimony of the time, entitled The
Ruins of
Jerusalem, printed in Venice in 1631, which describes the
persecution of
the Jews of Jerusalem, with all its horrors, as having been
temporary in
nature. The author expresses the hope that the Jews of the
land of Israel
will again prosper as in the past, as befitting the age of
the “footsteps
of the Messiah.” He thus begins his survey with a
description of the
settlement of the Jews in Jerusalem that preceded the
arrival of the Ibn
Farukh regime: “And the city of our God was settled by
members of our
people, more than it had been since the day that Israel was
exiled from its
land, for from day to day more Jews came to dwell there.…
And many of them
bought fields and houses and rebuilt the ruins, and old men
and women
settled in the streets of Jerusalem, and the streets of the
city were
filled with little boys and girls.”92 Further on, the author
rejects the
complaints of the Jews who remained in Jerusalem and
regretted that they
had not fled. He argues that with the passing of the danger,
it is crucial
to remain strong, to act so as to realize the hopes for
redemption, and to
settle the land of Israel, and especially Jerusalem:
For from the day
the Temple was destroyed, did God not take an
oath—and he will
not go back on it—that he will not enter the
heavenly
Jerusalem until he enters the earthly Jerusalem? And
before the
coming of Ibn Farukh, children from the four corners
of the earth
fluttered like birds in their eagerness to settle in
Jerusalem. And
to us, this was an evident sign of the beginning
of the
ingathering of the exiles…. All the more so, now that God
has remembered
his people and his land and expelled before our
eyes the enemy
Ibn Farukh; they hover like an eagle, and the
children will
return to their borders.93
According to the author of The Ruins of Jerusalem, the
sufferings endured
by the Jews during the two years under Ibn Farukh’s rule
were essentially
“birth pangs of the Messiah” that served to purge Israel of
its sins before
the redemption: “Reason suggests that God is testing us like
one who smelts
and purifies… [in order] to cleanse us and whiten us in the
purifying fire
that has passed over us, that he may relieve us of these
birth pangs of the
Messiah.”94
But instead of the long-awaited redemption, 1648 [5408], the
very year
cited by the Zohar as heralding the resurrection of the
dead, brought with
it one of the worst tragedies in the history of the Jewish
people. In the
course of an uprising against the Polish government,
Cossacks under the
leadership of Bogdan Chmielnicki killed tens of thousands of
Jews. They
sowed ruin and desolation, destroying about three hundred
Jewish
communities. One of the great rabbinic figures of that time,
R. Shabtai
Hacohen (also known as the “Shach,” after his major halachic
commentary,
Siftei Kohen), expressed the widespread bitterness among the
Jews: “In the
year 5408, which I had thought would reflect the verse ‘Thus
shall Aaron
come into the holy place,’ to the innermost sanctum, instead
my harp was
turned to mourning and my joy to anguish.”95 The chronicler
R. Joseph
Sambari similarly writes: “And in the year 5408… the Eternal’s
anger flared
up against his people… for they thought that it would be a
year of
redemption, in ‘this ’ year, as is written in the Zohar… ‘In
the year of
“the sons of Heth”’; and now it is turned into thistles.”96
(The numerical
values for “thus,” “this,” “Heth,” and “thistles” in the
foregoing all add
up to 5,408 or 408.)97
But despite the disillusionment brought about by tragedy
where there had
been hope for redemption, the Jewish longing for the Messiah
did not take
long to resurface. A new messianic fervor came to the fore
less than twenty
years later, focused on the renowned false messiah Shabtai
Tzvi. Despite
his peculiar behavior, which was later explained by some
scholars as
manifestations of mental illness,98 his messianic claims
fell on eager
ears. After an extended tour through various Jewish
communities and a brief
stay in Palestine, his proclamation in 1665 that he was the
Messiah met
with substantial support among rabbis and kabalists, which
increased in
subsequent months as the messianic fever spread. His
pronouncements caused
great excitement among the masses, who were instilled with a
renewed belief
in imminent redemption. His followers began to take up
ascetic practices
and to engage in mystical acts of repentance (tikunei
teshuva); some of
them sold their property, packed their belongings, and made
ready to move
to Palestine. Certain communities even attempted, with the
help of their
wealthy members, to rent ships that would carry them en
masse to the Holy
Land. In 1666, the new movement came to a sudden end, when
Shabtai Tzvi
converted to Islam under threat from the sultan.
Unlike other messianic movements among the Jews,
Sabbateanism did not see
aliya as a precondition for redemption, since the Messiah
himself had
ostensibly been revealed already. Moreover, Sabbatean
messianism distanced
itself from political, earthly activism, focusing instead on
spiritual-mystical activity directed heavenward.99
Nevertheless, it did not
take long before a new messianic movement arose, bringing
many hundreds of
Jews to Palestine in a new mass aliya. At the center of this
movement was
the itinerant preacher R. Judah Hasid and his circle, who
went to Palestine
from Europe in 1700 with the aim of bringing about the
redemption.100 It is
known that a number of Shabtai Tzvi’s followers, believing
that their
messiah would have a second coming in the year 1706, took
part in the
movement surrounding R. Judah.101 Several scholars have even
attributed
Sabbatean tendencies to the movement as a whole.102 However,
there is no
indication that R. Judah himself, or the majority of those
who came with
him, were Sabbateans.103 Either way, at some point after
1706 passed
without Shabtai Tzvi’s having revealed himself a second
time, hopes for
imminent redemption subsided.
VII
In the aftermath of the Sabbatean apostasy, messianic
expectations began to
focus on the next likely date for the redemption: The year
1740, or 5500 on
the Jewish calendar.104 Indeed, the crisis occasioned by the
appearance and
downfall of a false messiah did not detract from the force
of the next
awakening. Though they were approaching the five hundredth
year of the
sixth millennium without the footsteps of the Messiah being
heard, the
spirits of those Jews who longed for redemption remained
unbroken. Now
their hopes were pinned on a theory of messianic history
that had emerged
in the early eighteenth century, according to which the
sixth millennium
was to be divided into halves. The first five hundred years,
from 1240 to
1740, was the period of “night,” symbolizing the darkness of
exile; the
second half-millennium, beginning with 1740, would be the
period of “day,”
during which the redemption would occur.105
One of the most influential advocates of this view was the
Italian kabalist
R. Immanuel Hai Ricchi, better known as the author of
Mishnat Hasidim, who
in the eighteenth century was considered the most
authoritative interpreter
of Luria’s kabalistic works. Rather than pointing to one
specific year as
the time for redemption, Ricchi spread his estimate over
forty years, from
1740 (5500) until the middle of 1781 (5541), a prediction
which became
widely accepted among Eastern European Jewry.106 The
acceptance of this
understanding of the coming of the messianic period may have
had something
to do with the events in Eastern Europe during the second
half of the
eighteenth century. In 1768, Jews in the Ukraine suffered
persecutions; in
the years 1768-1774, Russia fought and won a war with the
Ottoman Empire;
and in 1772 Poland was partitioned. In the eyes of many
Jews, these events
had eschatological significance and were interpreted as
signs of the
Messiah’s approach onto the stage of world history.
Recently discovered historical sources from the period
indicate that the
messianic expectations that preceded the year 1740 sparked a
mass
immigration to Palestine lasting many years. These
immigrants, whose
numbers reached several thousand within a decade, arrived in
Palestine from
all over the diaspora, and particularly from within the
Ottoman Empire and
Italy. They settled mostly in Tiberias and Jerusalem, two
cities that the
talmudic tradition had singled out for a central role in the
redemption.
The year 1740 indeed brought good news to the Jewish
settlement in
Tiberias. At that time, the Ottoman authorities invited the
renowned
kabalist R. Haim Abulafia, the rabbi of Izmir, to come to
Palestine and
rebuild Tiberias, which had lain desolate for some time. The
Ottoman
authorities wanted the city rebuilt for economic reasons,
but the Jews
considered Abulafia’s mission a sign of the approaching
fulfillment of
their messianic hopes. Abulafia personally encouraged these
hopes,
according to the rare testimony of an Arab of Tiberias, who
reports that
Abulafia “told the Jews who lived there that the Messiah
would soon
come.”107
At the same time, the Jews of Jerusalem also enjoyed a
resurgence. The
Jewish immigrants significantly boosted their numbers,
prompting complaints
from their neighbors: “[The Muslims] stood like a wall when
they saw that
[the Jews] were a great host, and that they added dwelling
places in the
courtyards of Jerusalem, and they took counsel together,
saying, ‘Behold
the people of the children of Israel are too numerous to
count, and there
are ten thousand Jewish men.’”108 Sources indicate that the
stream of
immigrants arriving in the city during this period increased
the demand for
housing and drove up food prices dramatically. The
impressive growth of the
community was also reflected in its spiritual and
educational needs: Within
a short time, eight new yeshivot were founded; synagogues
were repaired and
expanded, and new ones were built.109
Among the immigrants during this period were several
spiritual leaders of
the first rank. Particularly notable were R. Moses Haim
Luzzatto, renowned
author of Mesilat Yesharim; the kabalist R. Haim ben Atar,
author of Or
Hahayim, one of the central mystical texts in Jewish
tradition;110 R.
Elazar Rokeah, chief rabbi of Brody and Amsterdam; R.
Gershon of Kutow; as
well as R. Gedaliah Hayun and R. Shalom Sharabi (known as
Rashash), who
served as heads of the Kabala-oriented Beth-El Yeshiva in
Jerusalem. A
Hasidic tradition, which until recently could not be
documented, refers to
attempts by the founder of Hasidism, R. Israel Ba’al Shem
Tov, to move to
Palestine at this time. According to this tradition, the Ba’al
Shem Tov
sought to meet with R. Haim ben Atar in the land of Israel,
so that
together they might bring about the redemption through a
joint mystical
effort. Evidence recently uncovered by Adam Teller confirms
this tradition:
It seems that during a visit he paid in 1733 to a wealthy
Jewish family in
Slutsk, the Ba’al Shem Tov asked for financial support for
his intended
move to the Holy Land.111
And indeed, a number of the Ba’al Shem Tov’s closest friends
and disciples
in fact undertook the move between the years 1740-1781. The
largest group
of these Hasidic immigrants, numbering about three hundred
and led by R.
Menahem Mendel of Vitebsk (a disciple of R. Dov Baer of
Mezrich, the “Magid
of Mezrich”), arrived in Palestine in 1777, four years
before the end of
the messianic period outlined by R. Immanuel Hai Ricchi.
Opinions are
divided regarding the motivation for the aliya of the
disciples of the
Ba’al Shem Tov—which included a significant number of simple
Jews who
attached themselves to the group during the course of their
travels. Some
scholars have suggested that perhaps it was the hostility of
the Mitnagdim
in Lithuania which compelled them to flee; others have
claimed that the
Hasidim wanted to achieve sanctification and mystical
elevation, or to set
up a new center for the Hasidic movement in Israel.112
However, from a
contemporary source which I recently discovered in an
archive in St.
Petersburg, we may be able to conclude that this great
Hasidic aliya was
endowed with a messianic purpose. This source quotes a
Karaite who had
spoken with the immigrants shortly before their arrival:
May it be
remembered by the later generations what happened in
the year 5537
[1777], how a rumor came about that the Messiah son
of David had
come. Then the rabbis living abroad began to go up
to the city of
Jerusalem, may it speedily be rebuilt…. And the
reason they
believed that the Messiah son of David had come was
that at that
time the evil nation of Moscow [Russia], that bitter
people, a people
whose language has not been heard, stretched its
hand over the
entire world, so that there was no place left that
was not caught
in war. And they thought that this was the time of
the end of days,
as promised by the prophets.113
This testimony helps to confirm Benzion Dinur’s speculation
that the
movement of the Ba’al Shem Tov’s disciples was of a
messianic nature; it
reveals that at the beginning of Hasidism, a significant
portion of its
leadership wished to bring the redemption closer by moving
to the land of
Israel.
But it was not only Hasidim who undertook messianic aliyot
at this time. R.
Elijah of Vilna, the “Vilna Gaon,” also set off for
Palestine, but his
attempt did not succeed, and upon arriving in Holland he was
forced to turn
back.114 From his son’s writings we learn that the Gaon had
intended to
compose in the land of Israel a “new Shulhan Aruch”:
Two things I
heard from his holy and pure mouth, to which his
Creator did not
consent, and which he did not do. Towards his old
age I asked him
many times why he did not complete his journey to
the Holy Land,
and he did not answer me…. And he also promised me
that he would
make [a collection of] halachic rulings from the
Arba’a Turim
[upon which Karo’s Shulhan Aruch was based], using
decisive
reasoning to write the one opinion that was correct in
his wise eyes,
with strong and powerful proofs that could not be
rejected.115
The Gaon’s desire to compose a standard, unifying halachic
code in the land
of Israel was an echo of R. Joseph Karo’s immensely
influential halachic
efforts more than two hundred years earlier—efforts that had
clear
messianic overtones: A grand unification of Jewish law was
widely seen as a
first step in the reestablishment of the Sanhedrin, and
therefore could
serve as a catalyst in the redemptive process.
For a number of reasons, Jewish messianic activity in
Palestine declined
towards the end of the eighteenth century. The economic
restrictions the
Ottoman authorities and the local Muslim establishment
imposed upon the
Jews in Jerusalem, violent persecutions by the local Arab
population, and
bitter controversies within the Jewish leadership led to a
severe
deterioration of Jewish life in the land of Israel. A
significant number of
Jews left Palestine; those who remained suffered harsh
poverty.
Nevertheless, the Jewish community continued to hold
together, enjoying a
rich spiritual life alongside its economic hardship. The
Tora was studied
by some three thousand Jews who continued to live in
Jerusalem; the rabbis
preached on Sabbaths and festivals and wrote halachic
responsa. The presses
of Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire published the
output of this
intellectual center—dozens of books of commentary,
homiletics, halacha, and
Kabala. The Jewish community in Palestine maintained contact
with the
communities of the diaspora, which provided them, whenever
possible, with
economic and diplomatic support. As the eighteenth century
drew to a close,
Jewish life in Palestine, fueled largely by a messianic
devotion to the
land of Israel that was shared not only by the members of
the yishuv but
also by their brethren abroad, continued despite difficult
conditions,
laying the groundwork for the great influx of Jewish
immigrants that was
soon to come.
VIII
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a
great many Jews
took part in the movement known as the Haskala, or Jewish
Enlightenment.
Among the movement’s goals was to enable the Jews to
assimilate into
European society and culture, which necessarily would mean
abandoning their
traditional expectations of imminent national and political
redemption in
the Holy Land. But despite the efforts of the maskilim, a
large portion of
the Jewish world continued to believe in the centrality of
the land of
Israel.116 In the years leading up to 1840 (5600), messianic
fervor again
spread throughout traditional Jewry in the West and East and
inspired a
mass movement of aliya. In strictly numerical terms, this
movement was more
successful than all those which had preceded it: Over the
ensuing decades,
tens of thousands of Jews arrived in Palestine, radically
changing the
demography of the Jewish community there; by the time the
first of the
Zionist immigrants began arriving towards the end of the
nineteenth
century, the land of Israel was already host to its largest
and most
vibrant Jewish community in many centuries.
The textual source behind much of the messianic ferment in
the nineteenth
century was R. Dosa’s prediction in the Talmud, according to
which the
messianic age would begin in the last four hundred years of
the sixth
millennium—that is, starting around 1840.117 A statement in
the Zohar lent
support to this belief:
When the sixth
millennium comes, in the six hundredth year of the
sixth
millennium, the gates of wisdom shall be opened above, and
founts of wisdom
below…. And the Holy One shall raise up the
congregation of
Israel from the dust of exile, and remember
it.118
A great many sources of the early nineteenth century cite
the Zohar’s
prediction. Thus, R. Yaakov Tzvi Yalish of Dinov writes: “In
the Zohar
there are several different times suggested for the end of
days, and the
last of them is the year six hundred of the sixth
millennium, and it seems
that later than this it will not tarry. Thus we find that
when 5,600 years
have been completed, everything will be clarified, and our
righteous
Messiah will come.”119
Until recently, historians did not attribute real importance
to these
mystical texts, and saw no connection between them and the
awakening of
widespread messianic activism. Sources uncovered in recent
years have
revised these evaluations, demonstrating that faith in the
Messiah’s coming
in 1840 was responsible for the aliya of thousands of
people. Thousands of
letters in the archive of the Officers and Administrators of
Amsterdam,
from officials who maintained close contact with the
leadership of the
Jewish community in Palestine, provide ample evidence of the
messianic
sentiment that prevailed. In one letter, dated 1831, R. Tzvi
Hirsch Lehren,
head of that organization, writes:
But the simple
and imminent salvation for which we have longed is
the coming of
our Messiah, and we shall express our hope to the
Holy One that
salvation is not far off. Many pious people have
said that it
will be no later than the year 5600, may it come
upon us for the
good.120
Diaries of the Anglican missionaries who were active among
the Jews in
Palestine and throughout the world during that time also
mention this
sentiment. Missionary reports from Russia in 1812 state that
between 1809
and 1811, hundreds of Jewish families immigrated to
Palestine. When asked
the purpose of their journey, these Jews replied that they “hope
that the
words of the prophets will soon be realized, that God will
gather his
dispersed people from all corners of the earth…. [They] therefore
wish to
see the appearance of the Messiah in the land of Israel.”121
Among the olim of this period, the disciples of the Vilna
Gaon particularly
stand out. Together with their families, they numbered about
five hundred
souls; but their organization, their ideological motivation,
and their
standing as Tora scholars of the first rank lent them a
degree of influence
far beyond their numbers. This group adopted an ideology of “natural
redemption” that translated the messianic faith into
practical activity. In
this spirit, the Gaon’s disciples sought to advance the
redemption by
rebuilding Jerusalem. Their involvement in rebuilding the
ruins of the
“Court of the Ashkenazim,” a complex of buildings where the
Ashkenazi
community lived, worked, and studied, was to them a
realization of the call
to build the “earthly Jerusalem”—a condition for the
redemption. In 1820,
R. Menahem Mendel of Shklov, a disciple of the Gaon, wrote
from Jerusalem
to donors in Europe, describing the building of the
courtyard as the
beginning of redemption:
And you should
understand fully that the lowly situation of our
group in
general, and regarding the ruin in particular, which we
needed to…
redeem from the hands of cruel foreigners…. And we
rely upon
responsive people like yourselves, who pursue
righteousness…
to greet our words with rejoicing, for, thank God,
in our day we
are witnessing the beginning of the redemption….122
The documents of the Gaon’s disciples echo this same
sentiment some twenty
years later, when the group finally received the
long-awaited permission to
rebuild the ruin: “And now our horn is raised up to the
Eternal our God, to
honor and establish our Temple, and to build synagogues on
the holy
mountain of Jerusalem…. This is a good sign of the beginning
of
redemption….”123 Once they had received permission to build,
the Gaon’s
disciples initiated changes in the Jerusalemite order of
prayer, including
the removal of the verse “Arise, shake off the dust, arise”
from the Friday
night liturgical poem Lecha Dodi—since, in their mind, the
divine Presence
had already risen from the dust.124
Some members of this group sought to further the redemption
by reinstating
the Sanhedrin, and the institution of semicha upon which it
depended. To
this end, they were forced to contend with the halachic
problems that had
led to the failure of the previous attempt, hundreds of
years earlier in
Safed. In particular, they had to deal with Maimonides’
ruling that once
the chain of ordination had been broken, its renewal
required the agreement
of all the sages in the land of Israel. To circumvent this
objection, R.
Israel of Shklov, the leader of the Gaon’s disciples in
Safed, sent an
emissary to the deserts of Yemen in order to locate the ten
lost tribes;
according to tradition, the tribes still preserved the
institution of
semicha, and might be enlisted to renew the ancient
ordination for the
Jewish world. In a letter carried by the envoy, R. Israel
wrote to the ten
tribes as follows: “It is a well-known principle… that
before our righteous
Messiah may come, there needs to be a great court of
ordained judges…. In
your mercy for all of the people of the Eternal, please
choose several of
your ordained sages, and please come to the land of Israel,
the inheritance
of our fathers, and let them ordain the great scholars so
that there may be
an ordained court in the land of Israel, upon which the
beginning of the
redemption depends.”125
The disciples of the Gaon also purchased agricultural lands
in order to
carry out those commandments of the Tora that were
applicable only in the
land of Israel. They believed that the flourishing of the
harvest would
serve as proof of God’s renewed love for his people, as per
a well-known
talmudic interpretation of a verse in Ezekiel: “‘But you, O
mountains of
Israel, shall shoot forth your branches, and yield your
fruit to my people
Israel’—there is no better sign of the End than this.”126 R.
Haim ben Tuvia
Katz, who had been a leading rabbi in Vilna, gave voice to
this belief in
1810, when he wrote from Safed: “Regarding the matter of the
contributions
that were sent for the fulfillment of the commandments
dependent upon the
land, we have already purchased lands in accordance with the
view of my
dear friend, the true great and pious one, our teacher R.
Haim of Volozhin…
and it seems that we shall yet buy lands that shall become
available
according to the time and place….”127 The immense
significance that the
Jews in Palestine attributed to agriculture also emerges
from a letter sent
by the leaders of the community in Jerusalem—both Sephardim
and
Ashkenazim—to the philanthropist Moses Montefiore in 1839,
when they
learned of his intention to purchase lands for rural Jewish
settlement:
And his mercies
were aroused and his pure heart offered to
establish
pillars and stands… by giving them a hold in the holy
soil, the soil
of Israel, to plow and sow and reap in joy…. And
all of us take
this thing upon ourselves with love…. We await and
anticipate the
divine salvation through Moses, the faithful one
of his house, to
say when he shall begin this beginning of the
redemption.128
In 1836, R. Tzvi Hirsch Kalischer proposed an even more
far-reaching
project to Baron Anshel Rothschild: The latter would
purchase the Temple
Mount from the Egyptian ruler Muhammed Ali, in order to
renew the
sacrificial service. In a letter to the baron, Kalischer
writes:
And particularly
at a time like this, when the province of the
land of Israel
is not under the rule of a powerful regime as it
was in former
times… he may well sell you the city of Jerusalem
and its
surroundings. From this too there will spring forth a
horn of
salvation, if we have the power and authority to seek the
place of the
altar and to offer acceptable burnt offerings to the
God of Eternity,
and from this may Judah be delivered in an
eternal
deliverance.129
Kalischer’s idea was explicitly messianic; like R. Yehiel of
Paris six
centuries earlier, he planned, by the renewal of sacrifices
at the Temple
Mount, to quicken the redemption and to hasten the coming of
the
Messiah.130
The messianic expectations of the Jews of Palestine were
sorely tested,
however, by the tragic events that they faced in the years
leading up to
1840. The plagues that raged throughout the region, the
earthquake of 1837
that killed more than two thousand Jews in the Galilee, and
particularly
the systematic attacks by the Muslim authorities and the
local Arab
population, threatened to make Jewish existence there
intolerable.
Anti-Jewish violence reached its height during the rebellion
of the Arab
farm workers that broke out in 1834 against the rule of
Muhammed Ali. In
the course of these riots, the rebels also attacked the Jews
living in
major cities. Over a period of several weeks, they rampaged
against the
Jews of Safed, looting their property, destroying their
homes, desecrating
their synagogues and study houses, and raping, beating, and
in many cases
killing Jews. R. Shmuel Heller of Safed reported:
For forty days, day after day, from the
Sunday following Shavuot,
all of the
people of our holy city, men, women, and children,
have been like
refuse upon the field. Hungry, thirsty, naked,
barefoot,
wandering to and fro in fear and confusion like lambs
led to the
slaughter…. They [the Arab marauders] removed all the
Tora scrolls and
thrust them contemptuously to the ground, and
they ravished
the daughters of Israel—woe to the ears that hear
it—and the great
study house they burned to its foundations…. And
the entire city
was destroyed and laid ruin, they did not leave a
single wall
whole; they dug and sought treasures, and the city
stood ruined and
desolate without a single person….131
These events took a heavy toll in lives on the Jews in
Palestine, causing
many to leave. But in spite of it all, most Jews did not
leave Palestine.
Those who stayed enjoyed the protection and active support
of Jewish groups
and institutions throughout the world, as well as the aid of
such
philanthropists as Moses Montefiore and the Rothschild
family; and,
especially, the protection of the representatives of
European powers,
including the consuls in the coastal cities of Syria, Egypt,
and Palestine,
who protected the Jewish settlement and demanded
compensation from the
authorities for the damage caused by the 1834 riots. In many
ways, Jews in
the land of Israel were less vulnerable than in earlier
periods.
Even the failure of the Messiah to appear in 1840 had only a
minor impact
on the lot of the Jewish community in Palestine, though it
was accompanied
by a period of crisis and a brief decline in the spirit of
the Jews living
there. Most importantly, the flow of Jewish immigrants did
not stop, as the
successes of the messianic aliya of the first half of the
nineteenth
century laid the groundwork for a large wave of Jewish
immigrants in the
following decades, most of whom came due to other,
non-messianic motives:
Most were pious, traditional Jews who sought refuge from the
influences of
the Haskala, the Emancipation, and the Reform movement,
which at that time
were spreading throughout Europe. As a result of this
continuing wave of
immigration, the number of Jews in Palestine increased
dramatically: By the
1870s, the Jewish population in Jerusalem was already
greater than that of
the Muslims and Christians combined. For the first time
since the
destruction of the Temple, Jews formed a majority in the
city.132
And indeed, from a broader perspective, the Jewish community
in Palestine
advanced a great deal during the course of the nineteenth
century. If early
in the century the number of Jews there stood at a few
thousand and their
situation was anything but stable, by the second half of the
century tens
of thousands of Jews lived in Jerusalem alone, and they
enjoyed the
political and economic protection of representatives of the
great powers,
as well as support from Jewish communities in the diaspora.
These
developments allowed the continuation of settlement in
distinctly
agricultural areas as well, and facilitated the immigrations
of tens of
thousands of additional Jews during the 1880s—the “First
Aliya,” which
opened an entirely new chapter in the history of Jewish
settlement in the
land of Israel.
IX
Until the appearance of Zionism, it is difficult to find
more conclusive
evidence for a deep, abiding historical connection between
the Jewish
people and the land of Israel than the messianic aliyot of
the sixth
millennium. Over a period lasting more than six centuries,
the traditional
longing of the Jews for their homeland found concrete
expression in
repeated efforts to realize the dream of return. From the
practical
viewpoint, these messianic waves of immigration, which began
early in the
thirteenth century, represented a quantum leap in scope and
energy above
the efforts of individuals and groups who had gone to
Palestine previously.
First, they were more communal in nature, numbering hundreds
and at times
even thousands. Second, the aliyot drew on Jewish
communities from
different countries, rather than the more localized efforts
that had
characterized earlier pilgrimages. Third, they comprised
Jews of all
classes: Alongside the common folk, they included communal
leaders and Tora
scholars of the first magnitude. One can only imagine the
effect that the
relocation of such central figures in the Jewish world to
the land of
Israel had on the diaspora communities they left behind.
Even if the
majority of Jews did not dare to make the journey, there can
be no doubt
that the departure of so many of their luminaries to the
Holy Land, and in
a context of messianic hope, left a profound impression.
Fourth, the messianic aliyot of the sixth millennium were
characterized by
a spiritual and ethical vigor the likes of which had not
been seen before.
The new immigrants were called upon to repent, to develop
their character,
and to act according to a strict moral code. In some of
these movements,
the demand for character improvement attended the mystical
activity of
kabalists or other individuals who took it upon themselves
to catalyze the
messianic redemption. Among the concrete projects for
hastening the
redemption, one finds attempts to find the ten lost tribes,
to renew the
ancient rabbinic ordination (semicha) and the institution of
the Sanhedrin,
to summarize the halacha so that a uniform code would be
accepted by all of
Israel, to uncover the “secrets of Tora” and hidden
kabalistic writings,
and even to renew the sacrificial service of the Temple in
Jerusalem.
The activism of the messianic immigrant movements also
demonstrates that
long before the advent of modern Zionism, Jews did not limit
themselves to
spiritual yearning and symbolic remembrance of the land of
Israel. Inspired
by messianic anticipation, many Jews regarded a return to
the Promised Land
as a practical goal. True, the overwhelming majority of Jews
did not go to
Palestine. Considering the numerous hardships entailed by
such a journey,
the uncertainty of arriving in peace, finding a livelihood,
and dwelling
securely in the land, this is hardly surprising.
Nonetheless, during the
sixth millennium, the land of Israel was no longer an
abstract,
inaccessible ideal; no longer only a subject of dreams,
whose name was
mentioned mainly in prayers. It was a real place, absorbing
waves of Jewish
immigrants from many countries, sustaining a full-fledged
Jewish community
that preserved its unique identity throughout the
generations.
Of course, there were major, substantive differences between
the messianic
aliyot and the Zionist awakening which followed. The
nationalist ideology
which revived the Jewish people in the late-nineteenth and
twentieth
centuries was indeed modern in many ways, not the least of
which was its
rejection of the traditionalist worldview that had
characterized the
messianic movements. Nevertheless, the deep longing for
their ancestral
homeland and the profound faith in the possibility of
national redemption,
which ultimately drove the waves of Jewish immigration to
Palestine in the
sixth millennium, were also at the heart of the Zionist
return. The
widespread belief in the Jewish right to the land of Israel,
the Zionist
vision of the spiritual and physical redemption of the land,
and the
immense efforts of so many Jews to turn the dream into
reality, could never
have taken root without these prior beliefs. In this sense
at least, one
may see the period of messianic immigration to the land of
Israel and the
Zionist revolution as milestones on the same historical
path, different
chapters in an ongoing national story.
Arie Morgenstern is a Senior Fellow at The Shalem Center in
Jerusalem.
Notes
1. Benzion Dinur, “The Messianic Fermentation and
Immigration to the Land
of Israel from the Crusades until the Black Death, and Their
Ideological
Roots,” in Benzion Dinur, Historical Writings (Jerusalem:
Mosad Bialik,
1975), vol. ii, p. 238. [Hebrew]
2. Jacob Barnai, Historiography and Nationalism: Trends in
the Research of
Palestine and Its Jewish Population, 634-1881 (Jerusalem:
Magnes, 1995), p.
39. [Hebrew]
3. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, The Nationalist Portrayal of the
Exile, Zionist
Historiography, and Medieval Jewry, doctoral dissertation,
Tel Aviv
University, 1996, p. 331. [Hebrew]
4. Elhanan Reiner, Pilgrims and Pilgrimage to the Land of
Israel,
1099-1517, doctoral dissertation, Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, 1988.
[Hebrew]
5. Raz-Krakotzkin, Nationalist Portrayal, pp. 333-334.
6. See David N. Myers, Reinventing the Jewish Past: European
Jewish
Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History (New York:
Oxford, 1995);
Uri Ram, “Zionist Historiography and the Invention of Modern
Jewish
Nationhood: The Case of Benzion Dinur,” History and Memory
7:1 (1995), pp.
91-124. For a critique of Dinur that does not tend towards a
critique of
Zionism as a whole, see Jacob Katz, Jewish Nationalism:
Essays and Studies
(Jerusalem: Zionist Library, 1979), pp. 230-238. [Hebrew]
7. Psalms 90:4.
8. ”It was taught in the school of Eliyahu: The world will
exist for six
thousand years: Two thousand years of chaos; two thousand
years of Tora;
two thousand years of the age of the Messiah.” Sanhedrin
97a.
9. The destruction of the Temple took place around the year
68 c.e., which
was close to the end of the fourth millennium of Creation,
in the year
3828.
10. See Joseph Dan, Apocalypse Then and Now (Tel Aviv: Yedi’ot
Aharonot,
2000), pp. 49-68. [Hebrew]
11. The Jewish year begins in the fall; therefore every
Jewish year
overlaps two years of the Christian calendar, and vice
versa. For
simplicity’s sake, however, Christian years in this article
are identified
with the Jewish year with which they overlap for nine out of
twelve months,
that is, from January through September.
12. Isaiah 60:22.
13. Reference is made in the book of Daniel to three
enigmatic dates for
the end of days, which are not conditional upon repentance.
Even Daniel
himself, according to his own words, did not understand what
they were. The
three periods are expressed in obscure language: “Time,
times, and half a
time,” “1,090 days,” and “1,335 days.” Daniel 12:1-13. The
assumption
throughout is that the end of days will come at a fixed
time, without room
for human influence.
14. Sanhedrin 97a. We will not enter here into the details
of the debate
cited in the Talmud, but it is worth noting that according
to the rabbis,
when the patriarch Jacob wished to reveal to his sons the
time of the end
of days, this referred to the end that would come about “in
its time.”
15. Sanhedrin 97a. This approach also appears in Zohar,
Bereshit 117.
16. Sanhedrin 97a.
17. Genesis Rabbati, a midrashic collection compiled at the
beginning of
the sixth century, states: “The entire subjugation is during
the fifth
millennium, and during its course, morning will come for
Israel, when they
shall be redeemed.” Hanoch Albeck, ed., Genesis Rabbati
(Jerusalem:
Mekitzei Nirdamim, 1940), p. 16. [Hebrew] R. Judah Barceloni
likewise
states that “we are to be speedily redeemed at the end of
the fifth
millennium; thus has it been conveyed at all times to
Israel.” See his
commentary in J.Z. Halberstamm, ed., Sefer Yetzira (Berlin,
1895), p. 239.
[Hebrew] Among the earlier practitioners of messianic
calculations, some
placed the time of the redemption well before the sixth
millennium; they
argued that since the destruction of the land and of the
Temple occurred in
the year 3828 [68 c.e.], the current era would end one
thousand years
later, in 4828 [1068 c.e.], at which time the age of
redemption would
commence. But generally speaking, practitioners of messianic
calculation
identified the sixth millennium as the time of the
redemption.
18. The source of these prohibitions is found in the Song of
Songs, where
the formula “I adjure you, O maidens of Jerusalem…” is
repeated with minor
variations. Cf. Ketubot 111a.
19. Psalms 102:14-15.
20. Judah Halevi, The Kuzari: An Argument for the Faith of
Israel, trans.
Hartwig Hirschfeld (New York: Schocken, 1964), 5:27, p. 295.
21. The book of Daniel posits the dates for the end of days
in relation to
some unidentified starting point. In every generation there
were attempts
to decipher the apocalyptic dates with reference to various
events in
Jewish history, such as the Exodus, the entrance into the
land of Israel,
the building of the First and Second Temples, and the
Babylonian exile.
22. Maimonides, Epistles of Maimonides, ed. Yitzhak Shilat
(Jerusalem:
Ma’aliyot, 1987), vol. i, p. 153. [Hebrew] The Epistle to
Yemen was
composed about 1172.
23. Arie Morgenstern, Mysticism and Messianism (Jerusalem:
Ma’or, 1999), p.
305. [Hebrew]
24. Avraham Ya’ari, Travels in the Land of Israel (Tel Aviv:
Gazit, 1946),
p. 67. [Hebrew]
25. Aaron Ze’ev Aescoly, Jewish Messianic Movements
(Jerusalem: Bialik,
1988), p. 188. [Hebrew]
26. Yisrael Yuval, “Between Political Messianism and Utopian
Messianism in
the Middle Ages,” in S.N. Eisenstadt and M. Lissak, eds.,
Zionism and the
Return to History (Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, 1999), p.
84 n. 10.
[Hebrew]
27. Yuval, “Political Messianism,” pp. 85-86. A short
passage from this
manuscript is quoted in another anonymous travel journal of
around the same
time, Totza’ot Eretz Yisrael. See Ya’ari, Travels, p. 98.
28. Regarding the expectations of redemption, see Maimonides’
calculation
for the renewal of prophecy in 1212, mentioned above. On the
reaction to
the Crusades, see Yuval, “Political Messianism,” p. 87.
29. Parallel to the messianic activism that found expression
in the “aliya
of the three hundred rabbis,” the opposite tendency, a
lowering of the
profile of messianic expectations, could also be found among
the Jews of
Central Europe. Unlike the Jews of France, the latter were
worried about
the possibility of a Christian backlash to any Jewish
messianic ferment,
and tended to be resistant towards any activity aimed at
bringing the
redemption closer. The spiritual leaders of this community
focused their
efforts on mass repentance, and refrained from expressing
their messianic
hopes. Concerns about persecution were exacerbated by the
Mongol invasion
that was menacing Europe at the time. Christians identified
the Mongols
with the ten tribes, and subjected the Jews to reprisals as “partners”
of
the invaders. R. Moses of Coucy, author of Sefer Mitzvot
Gadol, conducted a
campaign for repentance in 1236, four years before the
decisive Hebrew date
of 5000. According to him, Jews were to refrain from any
efforts of a
political nature to hasten the coming of the Messiah. The
only activity
capable of bringing the redemption in his view was mass
repentance. Yuval,
“Political Messianism,” p. 87.
30. Estori Hafarhi, Kaftor Vaferah (Berlin: Julii
Sittenfeld, 1852), p. 15.
See Reiner, Pilgrims and Pilgrimage, p. 79; and cf. Yisrael
Ta-Shema, “Land
of Israel Studies,” Shalem 1 (1974), pp. 82-84. [Hebrew];
Arie Morgenstern,
Redemption through Return: The Vilna Gaon’s Disciples in the
Land of Israel
(Jerusalem: Ma’or, 1997), pp. 182-185. [Hebrew]
31. Avraham Grossman, “A Letter of Vision and Rebuke from
Fourteenth-Century Ashkenaz,” Katedra 4 (1977), pp. 190-195.
32. And indeed, a series of messianic calculations from
around the year
1440 deals with the different stages of the anticipated
redemption: The
beginning of the ingathering of exiles, the discovery of the
ten lost
tribes, the return of prophecy, the restoration of the
Sanhedrin, the
appearance of the Messiah, and the building of the Temple.
The calculations
closest to the year 1440 are based on astrological
calculations of the
“system of the stars,” and are directed towards the years
1444 (5204 in the
Hebrew calendar) and 1464 (5224), and towards the year equal
to the
numerical value of the Hebrew word for “the end” (haketz),
which came out
to 5190 on the Hebrew calendar, or 1430 c.e. Earlier
calculations from this
period were based on similar methods of notarikon and
gematria. One of
them, drawing on the verse in Habakkuk 2:3, “for still the
vision awaits
its time,” was understood as referring to the year 1391
(5151). See Joseph
Hacker, “The Aliyot and Attitudes Towards the Land of Israel
Among Spanish
Jews, 1391-1492,” Katedra 36 (1985), p. 22 n. 83.
33. About 1400, Mulhausen stated: “And many among the
multitude agree that
the coming of the Messiah and the building of the Temple
will be no later
than the year 170 of the sixth millennium [1410].” See
Yom-Tov Lipmann
Mulhausen, Sefer Hanitzahon (Jerusalem: Dinur, 1984), par.
335, p. 187.
34. Aescoly, Jewish Messianic Movements, p. 223.
35. I.F. Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain (Tel
Aviv: Am Oved,
1965), p. 320. [Hebrew] Based upon Crescas’ Or Hashem, part
iii, 8:2.
36. Avraham Gross, “The Ten Tribes and the Kingdom of
Prester John: Rumors
and Investigations Before and After the Expulsion from
Spain,” Pe’amim 48
(1991), pp. 5-38.
37. The primary source is the Darmstadt manuscript. See
Yisrael Yuval, Two
Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians
(Tel Aviv: Am
Oved, 2000), p. 276 n. 27. [Hebrew] By contrast, the
manuscript copied in
1429 was the Rome manuscript, cited by Reiner, Pilgrims and
Pilgrimage, p.
115 n. 232. My thanks to Yisrael Yuval, who allowed me to
compare the
manuscript in his possession with the Rome manuscript and to
discover that
the section beginning “And now many people have awakened…”
appears only in
the latter.
38. Reiner, Pilgrims and Pilgrimage, pp. 114-115 n. 232.
39. Baer, History of the Jews, pp. 318-319.
40. Binyamin Ze’ev Kedar, “Notes on the History of the Jews
of Palestine in
the Middle Ages,” Tarbitz 42 (1973), pp. 413-416. Kedar
ignores the
connection between the messianic expectations expressed here
and the aliyot
originating in various countries. As a result, he does not
see in
messianism a motivation for aliya, and can only wonder why
the latter took
place at all, just when the situation of the Jews in Spain
was improving,
while the situation in Palestine had worsened.
41. Benzion Dinur, “The Emigration from Spain to the Land of
Israel After
the Decree of 1391,” Tzion 32 (1967), p. 162.
42. Dinur, “Emigration,” p. 163.
43. According to one testimony of the time, “And now, of
late, people have
come, great sages and elders together with their disciples…
and have
continued to settle and to increase the study of Tora far
more.” Quoted in
Hacker, “Aliyot and Attitudes,” p. 28 n. 107.
44. Joseph Hacker, “R. Elijah of Massa Lombarda in
Jerusalem,” Tzion 50
(1985), pp. 253-256.
45. Moshe Schulwas quotes historical sources indicating that
the
inhabitants of Malta captured Jews who were on their way to
Palestine. See
Moshe Schulwas, “On the Immigration of German Jews to
Palestine in the
Fifteenth Century,” Tzion 3 (1938), pp. 86-87.
46. Elhanan Reiner, “‘For Do Not Jerusalem and Zion Stand
Apart?’: The
Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem in the Post-Crusade Period
(Thirteenth to
Fifteenth Centuries),” in Yossi Ben-Artzi, Israel Bartal,
and Elhanan
Reiner, eds., A View of His Homeland: Studies in Geography
and History in
Honor of Yehoshua Ben-Aryeh (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2000), pp.
314-315.
[Hebrew] The discovery that the Jewish settlement in the
center of the Old
City dates only from the beginning of the fifteenth century
is consistent
with Reiner’s conclusion that the Nahmanides Synagogue was
near Mount Zion,
where the Jewish neighborhood was located after the Crusader
period, and
not as the folk tradition has it, near the Court of the
Ashkenazim. See
Reiner, “The Jewish Quarter,” pp. 277-279.
47. Reiner, “The Jewish Quarter,” p. 306 n. 106. Around
1452, the Jews of
Jerusalem were compelled to give money to the rulers of the
city, and the
community was forced to sell much of its land. Three hundred
Tora scrolls,
ancient books, and precious ritual objects that had been
brought to the
country by the immigrants around the year 1440 were also
sold. These
findings suggest an aliya of wealthy people during this
period. See Avraham
Ya’ari, ed., Letters from the Land of Israel (Ramat Gan:
Masada, 1971), pp.
129-130. [Hebrew]
48. Hacker, “Aliyot and Attitudes,” p. 12.
49. Hacker, “Aliyot and Attitudes,” p. 32.
50. Michael Ish Shalom, In the Shadow of Foreign Rule: The
History of the
Jews in the Land of Israel (Tel Aviv: Karni, 1975), p. 312.
[Hebrew]
51. Isaiah 43:6.
52. Abravanel’s commentary on Isaiah 43:6.
53. Aescoly, Jewish Messianic Movements, p. 331. R. Abraham
ben Eliezer
Halevi wrote several works of a messianic character and
engaged in
messianic calculations concerning the Jewish year 5300.
According to Moshe
Idel, there is no connection between his messianic
calculations and the
expulsion from Spain, as his interest in the problem of the
end of days had
already begun in his youth, that is, before the expulsion.
Moshe Idel,
introduction to Aescoly, Jewish Messianic Movements, pp.
24-26. Messianic
calculations thus were not prompted by historical events
alone; these
events only heightened the mystics’ faith in an imminent
redemption.
54. Idel, introduction, pp. 24-34.
55. Moshe Idel, “Solomon Molcho as Magician,” Sefunot 18
(1985), p. 215.
56. Moshe Idel, introduction to Aaron Ze’ev Aescoly, The
Story of David
Hareuveni (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1993), p. 33. [Hebrew]
57. According to R. Abraham Halevi, “The things said in the
midrash of the
Zohar about the great troubles and destruction that will
herald the time of
the Messiah are very frightening…. Only repentance annuls
everything. And
in regard to the instructions about the year of visitation,
which is the
year 5284 [1524], it is fitting that every man take to heart
the great
wonder that was done in Jerusalem…. For when, gentlemen, the
sages gathered
together and set vigils… to plead for mercy for themselves
and their
brethren in the exile… when they said, ‘And a redeemer shall
come to
Zion’—at that moment fire descended from heaven upon the
abomination in
Jerusalem, and made it into a great ruin, and this was a
sign and symbol of
the redemption.” See Aescoly, Jewish Messianic Movements, p.
329.
58. Ya’ari, Letters, p. 165.
59. Ya’ari, Letters, p. 165. To emphasize that God acts in
order to hasten
the redemption, the authors open with a literary allusion to
a passage in
the book of Esther that they consider an instance of divine
intervention
for the sake of the Jews: “On that night the sleep of the
king was
disturbed” (Esther 6:1; according to rabbinic
interpretation, the “king”
referred to is God).
60. Dov Rabin, “The History of the Jews in Grodno,” in
Encyclopedia of the
Jewish Diaspora (Jerusalem: Encyclopedia of the Jewish
Diaspora, 1977),
vol. ix, p. 43. [Hebrew]
61. Ignacy Schipper, Polish-Lithuanian Jews in Palestine
(Wieden: Moriah,
1917), p. 10. [Polish]
62. Tuvia Preschel, “R. Jacob Pollack’s Aliya to Jerusalem,”
in Shaul
Israeli, Norman Lamm, and Yitzhak Raphael, eds., Jubilee
Volume in Honor of
Our Teacher Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (Jerusalem: Mosad
Harav Kook,
1984), vol. ii, pp. 1124-1129. [Hebrew]
63. Thus, according to the Zohar: “In 66 the King Messiah
will be revealed
in the land of the Galilee.” Zohar, Vayera 478.
64. Many of the immigrants from Spain who came to Safed had
been weavers
and dyers. They saw Safed, located near water sources in the
Galilee, as a
suitable place to continue in their professions, as it was
relatively close
to their contacts in the Salonikan clothing trade and was
safer than other
places in Palestine, including Jerusalem. The Ottoman army
protected the
city from attacks by the surrounding Bedouin tribes, and in
1549 the
authorities added to the city’s security by building a wall
around it.
65. Ya’ari, Letters, p. 184.
66. Apart from R. Jacob Berab’s principal reasons for
renewing the semicha,
restoring the Sanhedrin was meant to solve a practical
halachic problem
that fell within the jurisdiction of the Sanhedrin alone.
The inhabitants
of Safed included a number of forced converts from Spain and
Portugal, who
wished to atone for their past as Conversos. This atonement
could be
accomplished only by administering the punishment of lashes,
which the
Sanhedrin alone could dispense.
67. R. Isaiah Horowitz, Shnei Luhot Habrit (Haifa: Mechon
Yad Rama, 1992),
vol. 2, pp. 250-251. [Hebrew] The verse cited is Song of
Songs 2:12.
68. R.J. Zwi Werblowsky, “R. Solomon Halevi Alkabetz’s Tikun
Tefilot,”
Sefunot 6 (1962), pp. 152-155.
69. They based their calculations mainly on a verse in the
book of Daniel
that alludes to the time of the end of days: “Fortunate is
he who waits and
reaches 1,335 days” (Daniel 12:11); and on the talmudic
statement
attributing messianic significance to the notarikon of Jacob’s
blessing to
his sons: “The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the
ruler’s staff
from between his feet, until Shiloh comes, and the homage of
the peoples be
his” (Genesis 49:10). According to the messianic
calculations, these two
sources point towards the 335th year of the sixth millennium—the
numerical
value of “Shiloh.” On messianic expectations for the year
1575 (5335), see
David Tamar, “The Messianic Expectations in Italy for the
Year 1575,”
Sefunot 2 (1958), pp. 61-85.
70. According to the tradition, the order of redemption will
parallel in
reverse the order of exile. Hence, since on the eve of the
destruction of
the Temple the Sanhedrin was removed from its place there,
and subsequently
reconvened at various locations until it reached its final
seat in
Tiberias, the redemption is destined to begin in Tiberias.
From there, it
will progressively expand until it reaches Jerusalem and the
Temple is
rebuilt: “And we have a tradition that it shall first return
in Tiberias,
and from there they shall be relocated to the Temple.”
Maimonides, Mishneh
Tora, Laws of Sanhedrin 14:12.
71. Tamar, “Messianic Expectations,” pp. 63-65.
72. Mordechai Pachter, From Safed’s Hidden Treasures
(Jerusalem: Zalman
Shazar, 1994), pp. 103-105. [Hebrew] Cf. Uriel Hed, “Turkish
Documents from
Ottoman Archives Concerning Safed Jews in the Sixteenth
Century,” Mehkerei
Eretz Yisrael 2 (1955), pp. 169, 174-175.
73. Later sources repeat this prediction. Thus, for example,
the kabalist
R. Naftali Bachrach, author of Emek Hamelech, stated that in
1647 Ishmael’s
rights over the land of Israel, which he had enjoyed for
observing the
commandment of circumcision, would come to an end. From this
point on, the
rights of the Jewish people would be acknowledged, and would
be realized by
the Messiah at the end of days: “And even today we await
God, and he shall
pour his spirit upon us from above… and the land of Israel
will be taken
from the Ishmaelites, as it is written, ‘I will multiply him
exceedingly…
and I will make him a great nation,’ which [referring to the
word asimenu,
‘I will make him’] is numerically equivalent to 407. That
is, until that
time of ‘I will make him,’ he [Ishmael] will be a great
nation. And he
shall be paid for the merit of the commandment of
circumcision… and in the
year 5408 [1648], the Messiah will take the kingship from
him…. And this is
the secret of ‘This [zot] is my resting place forever’
[Psalms 132:14].”
See Naftali Bachrach, Emek Hamelech (Amsterdam: Immanuel
Benvenisti, 1648),
p. 33b; and regarding the year 5408, see ibid., pp. 68a,
79c.
74. The numerical value of the word “Heth” is 408.
75. The word for “this” is hazot, of which the numerical
value is 5,408.
76. Zohar, Toldot 139. The passage is found in the earliest
manuscript of
the Zohar, from the fourteenth century. See Gershom Scholem,
Sabbatai Sevi:
The Mystical Messiah 1626-1676 (Princeton: Princeton, 1973),
p. 88. The
verses quoted in the above passage are Genesis 23:3 and
Leviticus 25:13.
77. Horowitz, Shnei Luhot Habrit, 65, vol. 2, pp. 478-479.
78. Horowitz, Shnei Luhot Habrit, 261, vol. 1, p. 86. It is
surprising that
scholars of Horowitz have not at all noticed this source and
do not
attribute messianic significance to his aliya.
79. Horowitz, Shnei Luhot Habrit, 291, vol. 1, p. 97. It
follows from this
that Horowitz wrote these words when he was already living
in Jerusalem.
80. Ya’ari, Letters, p. 216. We do not have exact figures
for the Sephardi
population of Jerusalem, but in his letter Horowitz mentions
that in
Jerusalem there were more than five hundred “important
Sephardi
householders, and every day their number grows, thank God.”
If Horowitz is
referring only to wealthy family heads, then one is speaking
here of at
least 2,000 members of the Sephardi elite, apart from the
numerous poor
people from this community who lived in Jerusalem. Regarding
the Ashkenazi
population, no figures exist. Ya’ari, Letters, p. 220.
81. Horowitz sent this letter to his wife’s relative, R.
Shmuel ben
Meshullam Feibusch, chief rabbi of the Krakow community. An
important
discussion of this letter was related at a lecture by the
historian Avraham
David at Bar-Ilan University on December 31, 2000; the
lecture is soon to
be published. My thanks to David for allowing me to use his
article prior
to publication. In this paper, David does not deal with the
connection
between messianic expectations for the year 5408 and
Horowitz’s aliya.
82. Avraham David, “R. Isaiah Horowitz’s Letter from
Jerusalem After the
Year 5538,” unpublished. [Hebrew]
83. David, “Horowitz’s Letter.”
84. See David, “Horowitz’s Letter.” This section of the full
letter was
published in its day by Joseph Solomon Delmedigo of Candia
in the
introduction to his book Novlot Hochma (1631).
85. See R. Haim Vital, Etz Hayim (Jerusalem, 1973),
introduction to Sha’ar
Hahakdamot.
86. According to Jacob Elbaum and Elliot Wolfson, the main
reason for
Horowitz’s aliya was his wish to study the teachings of
Lurianic Kabala
more deeply, without the limitations that were placed on its
study outside
of the land of Israel. See Jacob Elbaum, “The Land of Israel
in Isaiah
Horowitz’s Shnei Luhot Habrit,” in Aviezer Ravitzky, ed.,
The Land of
Israel in Modern Jewish Thought (Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak
Ben-Tzvi, 1998), p.
94; cf. Elliot R. Wolfson, “The Influence of Luria on the
Shelah,”
Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 10, 1992, p. 430.
However, it seems
that this activity too was directed towards a messianic
purpose: The
realization of the redemption in the year 5400, which
Horowitz wished to
ensure by uncovering Luria’s writings.
87. The amount of money extracted from the Jews by the local
rulers during
the period of Ottoman rule was unparalleled in any other
place of Jewish
settlement during that period. R. Samuel de Ozida wrote: “What
we have in
our day is that of all the places under the rule of the
king… there is no
country in which there are so many taxes and levies on the
Jews as in the
land of Israel, and particularly Jerusalem. And if money
were not being
sent from all over the diaspora to pay off the taxes and
levies, the Jews
would be unable to live there because of the abundance of
taxes.” R. Samuel
de Ozida, Lehem Dim’a (Venice: Daniel Zenitti, 1600),
commentary on
Lamentations 1:1.
88. Presumably, the rapid growth of the Jewish population in
Jerusalem
after 1620 upset the Muslims. Eventually they restricted the
number of
Jewish inhabitants in the city, and to this end even ordered
the expulsion
from Jerusalem of Jews who were already living there. “What
the rulers
demanded of the inhabitants of Jerusalem was that whoever
had come to live
there during the past three years should leave. And they
again [later] said
that whoever had come during the past ten years [should
leave].” Eliezer
Rivlin, ed., The Ruins of Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Salomon,
1928), p. 45.
[Hebrew] According to the author of The Ruins of Jerusalem,
the Muslims’
fear of the return of the Jews to Jerusalem was one of the
main reasons for
the persecution and expulsion of the Jews of the city: “When
a man rose
against us who gathered together empty and impudent people…
and they took
counsel together to cut off the name of Israel from the holy
city…. When
they saw the ingathering of the exiles of our brethren from
East and West,
from North and South, going up to Jerusalem…” Rivlin, Ruins,
p. 49.
89. Among other things, they denounced the Jews for
violating the
prohibition against building synagogues. In return for not
razing the
synagogues, the Muslims demanded ever higher “penalties” to
be paid by the
Jewish community. Rivlin, Ruins, p. 51.
90. Rivlin, Ruins, p. 14.
91. See Michael Ish Shalom, Christian Travels in the Holy
Land (Tel Aviv:
Am Oved, 1979), pp. 333, 341. [Hebrew]
92. Minna Rozen, ed., The Ruins of Jerusalem (Tel Aviv: Tel
Aviv
University, 1981), p. 87. [Hebrew] The quotations are a
combination of
verses of consolation from Jeremiah 32:15 and Zechariah 8:5.
93. Rozen, Ruins, pp. 81-82.
94. Rozen, Ruins, pp. 82-83.
95. Simon Bernfeld, The Book of Tears (Berlin: Eshkol,
1925), vol. iii, p.
140. [Hebrew] The verse cited is Leviticus 16:3.
96. Avraham Neubauer, Seder Hahachamim Vekorot Hayamim
(Oxford: Clarendon,
1888), p. 149. On the expectations for the year 5400, see
also Joseph
Hacker, “Despair of the Redemption and Messianic Hopes in
the Writings of
R. Solomon Halevi of Salonika,” Tarbitz 39 (1970), pp.
195-213.
97. The word for “thus” is zot; for “thorns,” dardar. Both
have a numerical
value of 408, as does “Heth.” The word for “this,” hazot,
can be readily
understood as having a value of 5,408.
98. Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, pp. 103-198.
99. Yehuda Liebes, “Sabbatean Messianism,” Pe’amim 40
(1989), pp. 4-20.
100. Benzion Dinur attributed great importance to this
aliya, because in
his opinion it marked the beginning of the period of “realistic”
aliyot,
which constituted the basis for the new Jewish presence in the
land of
Israel. See Dinur, Historical Writings, vol. i, pp. 19-68.
101. Meir Benayahu, “The ‘Holy Brotherhood’ of R. Judah
Hasid and Their
Settlement in Jerusalem,” Sefunot 3-4 (1959-1960), pp.
131-182.
102. In the wake of Shabtai Tzvi’s conversion to Islam, some
of his
followers developed the idea that his apostasy was meant to
elevate the
“holy sparks” within Islam, as only the descent of the
Messiah himself to
the “shells” would be able to lift up the “sparks.” After
the Messiah had
fulfilled this purpose he would be revealed again, forty
years after his
conversion; that is, in the year 1706.
103. The disciples of R. Elijah of Vilna, the “Vilna Gaon,”
who came up to
Jerusalem a century later, refer in their writing in a very
positive way to
R. Judah Hasid, using extraordinary terms of honor. The
disciples of the
Gaon were aware of the fact that some of the immigrants
during this period
were Sabbateans. See “The Appointments of Emissaries from
the Ashkenazic
Community in Jerusalem for the Building of the Hurvah from
1837,” in Pinhas
Ben-Tzvi Grayevski, ed., From the Archives of Jerusalem
(Jerusalem: Tzion,
1930), vol. 2. [Hebrew]
104. It may be that R. Judah’s circle of immigrants to
Palestine had seen
5500 as the date of redemption from the outset, and not only
retrospectively. Even such a confirmed Sabbatean as Gedaliah
Hayun stated
that: “You shall surely know that our rabbis said, ‘All the
day he
laments’—that the Exile was the entire fifth millennium. And
when we come
to the sixth millennium, the first five hundred years are
called night… and
the latter five hundred years are called day… and the
redemption is the
morning.” See Zalman Shazar, The Messianic Hope for the Year
5500
(Jerusalem: Magnes, 1970), p. 29 [Hebrew]; Shazar cites
Nehemiah Hayun,
Divrei Nehemia 9a. I will discuss this issue at greater
length elsewhere,
on the basis of new documents that I have uncovered in the
archive of the
community of Livorno, in Italy.
105. R. Haim ben Atar, Or Hahayim, commentary on Leviticus
6:2.
106. Immanuel Hai Ricchi writes concerning this: “According
to the words of
R. Shimon bar Yohai [the putative author of the Zohar], in
5541 and
two-thirds, the mountain of the house of the Eternal will
have been
established.” See Immanuel Hai Ricchi, Yosher Levav
(Amsterdam, 1742), p.
37b. The composition of the manuscript itself was completed
in Aram-Zovah,
in modern Syria, in 1737.
107. Morgenstern, Mysticism and Messianism, p. 64 n. 76.
108. Morgenstern, Mysticism and Messianism, p. 39.
109. Jewish officials of Istanbul wrote in a letter early in
5501 (late
1740): “Praise to his great name, several benches have been
added and
several new yeshivot established in the holy city; such a
thing has not
been since the day of the exile from the land…. Everyone is
ascending to
the land of Israel, and the multitude of the people has been
the reason for
the doubling and redoubling of the expenses. Due to the
large numbers of
homes in the holy city, whose like has not been since the
day of the exile
from the land… sustenance has become expensive in the holy
city….”
Morgenstern: Mysticism and Messianism, p. 40 nn. 8-9.
110. In Jerusalem in 1742, R. Haim ben Atar established
Yeshivat Kneset
Yisrael, whose students engaged in, among other things, the
study of
esoteric teachings and mystical practices.
111. Adam Teller, “The Tradition from Slutsk Concerning the
Early Days of
the Ba’al Shem Tov,” in David Assaf, Joseph Dan, and
Immanuel Etkes, eds.,
Studies in Hasidism (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1999), pp.
15-38. [Hebrew]
112. Morgenstern, Mysticism and Messianism, p. 180. On the
messianic
motivations for aliya and mystical activity of R. Yehiel
Michel “Magid” of
Zloczow, on Shavuot 5537 [1777], see Mor Altshuler, R.
Meshullam Feibusch
Heller and His Place in Early Hasidism, doctoral
dissertation, Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, 1994. [Hebrew] Cf. also Arie
Morgenstern, “An
Attempt to Hasten the Redemption,” Jewish Action 58:1
(1997), pp. 38-44.
113. Morgenstern, Mysticism and Messianism, p. 182.
114. Morgenstern, Mysticism and Messianism, pp. 263-274.
115. Introduction of R. Elijah’s sons to Shulhan Aruch: Orah
Hayim (Shklov,
1803); cf. Morgenstern, Mysticism and Messianism, pp.
275-306.
116. Arie Morgenstern, Messianism and the Settlement of the
Land of Israel
(Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben-Tzvi, 1985). [Hebrew]
117. Sanhedrin 99a. Cf. Morgenstern, Messianism, p. 38.
118. Zohar, Vayera 445-449, and Sulam ad loc.
119. Morgenstern, Messianism, p. 55 n. 92.
120. Morgenstern, Messianism, p. 58 n. 104.
121. Morgenstern, Messianism, p. 75 n. 39, and pp. 66-83.
122. The letter is in the archive of Manfred Lehmann of New
York. I am
grateful to the family for permission to publish this
excerpt.
123. Morgenstern, Messianism, p. 133.
124. Morgenstern, Messianism, pp. 156-159. In kabalistic
terminology, “the
rising of the divine Presence from the dust” refers to
activity of
messianic preparation and is symbolic of the redemption.
125. Ya’ari, Letters, pp. 353-354. See also Arie
Morgenstern, “Messianic
Concepts and Settlement in the Land of Israel,” in Marc
Saperstein, ed.,
Essential Papers on Messianic Movements and Personalities in
Jewish History
(New York: New York University, 1992), pp. 433-455; and Arie
Morgenstern,
“Symposium: Messianic Concepts and Settlement in the Land of
Israel,” in
Richard I. Cohen, ed., Vision and Conflict in the Holy Land
(Jerusalem: Yad
Yitzhak Ben-Tzvi, 1985), pp. 141-189.
126. Sanhedrin 98a. The verse cited is Ezekiel 36:8.
127. Ya’ari, Letters, p. 341.
128. Morgenstern, Messianism, p. 193 n. 179.
129. Yisrael Klausner, Zionist Writings of Rabbi Kalischer
(Jerusalem:
Mosad Harav Kook, 1947), p. 13. [Hebrew] Cf. Morgenstern,
Redemption
through Return, pp. 182-185.
130. Jacob Katz, “The Historical Image of R. Tzvi Hirsch
Kalischer,” Shivat
Tzion 2-3 (1951-1952), p. 28; cf. Morgenstern, Redemption
through Return,
pp. 182-185.
131. Tzvi Karagila, “R. Samuel ben R. Israel Peretz Heller
Describes the
Sack of Safed, 1834,” Katedra 27 (1983), pp. 112-114.
132. Yehoshua Ben-Aryeh, A City Reflected in Time: Jerusalem
in the
Nineteenth Century (Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben-Tzvi, 1977),
vol. i, p. 395.
[Hebrew]
Copyright © 2002 The Shalem Center. All rights reserved.
Opinions expressed
herein are those of
the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of
The Shalem Center or Azure.
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