A photograph of Rabbi Zevi Hirsch Kalischer.
“Thus says the Lord God: This is Jerusalem. I have set her in the center of the nations, with countries round-about her.” - Ezekiel 5:5
This is part one of the new FAI Publishing series Center of Nations which examines the history of the modern State of Israel in the midst of an increasingly hostile world.
DiasporA, Divergence, and Damascus
After the destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70 and the subsequent defeat of the Jewish Bar Kochba Revolt in AD 135, the surviving rabbis, descendants of the more-moderate wing of the Pharisees, began developing a new form of Rabbinic Judaism. It would center around the synagogue instead of the temple and replace the priestly sacrifices with prayer. It emphasized the study of the Torah, the Talmud, and good deeds.[1] The Romans forbade the Jews from entering Jerusalem for more than one-hundred years, and although yearnings for Zion and Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel) were still prominent in Jewish liturgy and writing, their reality became more and more removed as the centuries passed. Although a small Jewish community returned to the City of David in the third century and remained throughout the Middle Ages, it was relatively tiny compared to the vast majority of Jews in Diaspora throughout Asia, Europe and the Americas. Nonetheless, observant Jews continued to pray daily for the coming of Messiah, a return to the Land, and for the building of a Third Temple.
A famous panel from the Arch of Titus in Rome depicting the parade of looted Second Temple treasures in AD 70.
By the nineteenth century, Judaism had undergone significant changes in the West after the Enlightenment, branching apart into more theologically liberal (Reformed) and Orthodox streams. Reformed Judaism generally abandoned the hope of a literal Messiah, a physical return to the Land of Israel, or a resumption of the sacrifices on the Temple Mount. Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews [2] continued to believe for a realistic fulfillment of these things, although it was generally believed that the coming of the Messiah would precede the regathering of the Jewish people to their homeland. Calls to reestablish the ancient homeland prior to Messiah’s arrival were considered premature, even heretical.
This began to change after the first truly global incident of Antisemitism: The Damascus Affair of 1840. The affair began with the disappearance of an Italian friar, Father Tomasso da Cammangiano, and his Muslim servant Ibrahim Amāra. Although the friar was known for his shady business dealings, it was rumored that he had disappeared in the city’s Jewish Quarter.
In 1840, Syria was technically part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, but was practically under the control of Muhammad Ali, an Arab general and governor of Egypt who had rebelled against his Turkish lords and taken control of most Arab lands in the Middle East and North Africa to create a vast fiefdom of his own. During his enlightened rule, Ali allowed the French consulate to act as representatives and protectors of Syria’s Catholic population. Under the direction of the French consol in Damascus, a series of extremely questionable interviews were conducted by the Egyptian and French authorities, leading to the accusation that the friar and his Muslim servant were murdered by four prominent Jewish rabbis in Damascus in the home of a wealthy Jewish family so that their blood could be used to bake matzah bread. It was a millennia-old Jewish blood libel which was about to get a modern facelift with much more far-reaching consequences.
Drawing of the alleged ritual murder in the Damascus Affair, from an Arabic book published at the time, depicting a Muslim boy being bled and murdered by sadistic Jewish rabbis. The volume pictured is titled “The Talmud.”
A collection of bones was found in the sewer of the Jewish Quarter were reported to belong to Father Tomasso and his servant. The guilt of Damascus’ Jews in the murder of Cammangiano and Ibrahim was declared beyond a doubt according to the French consol. Sixty-three Jewish children were kidnapped by the Egyptian authorities in order to pressure their mothers into divulging information. Other contemporary European witnesses in Damascus reported that between 70 and 300 other Jewish “witnesses” and “suspects” were arrested and tortured for up to 72 hours at a time to extract confessions. Four of the main Jewish suspects in the case were tortured to death, and a local synagogue was looted by a Christian and Muslim mob, its Torah scroll burned in the street.
Word of the affair spread far beyond the typical range of Medieval blood libels, as printed newspapers carried the news throughout the Middle East, into Europe, and even the United States. Pleas for intervention arose from Jewish communities around the world to their various governments. In Egypt, Ali was made aware of the incident and ordered that all prisoners and child captives be released, but the accusation of blood libel was not rescinded. The Baron Rothschild, a wealthy Jewish banker and member of the British parliament, ran the story of the affair in the English press, prompting outrage from both Jews and non-Jews alike across the Western world, and prompting a delegation of prominent Jewish leaders in Europe, including another wealthy Jewish banker in Britan, Sir Moses Montefiore, to travel to Egypt and meet personally with Muhammad Ali, and then to Constantinople to meet with Ottoman authorities. The charges were dropped, and all remaining suspects were exonerated.[4]
Although the Damascus Affair ended with the exoneration of its Jewish victims, it nonetheless alerted Jews around the world that they were still not safe in the Diaspora, even in a modern, enlightened age. This was further underscored by an ongoing series of pogroms in Eastern Europe, where millions of Jews were forced to live by the Russian Empire in the so-called “Pale of Settlement.” Prominent voices arose from among the ranks of the rabbis in Europe with a new message: The Jewish people should not wait for Messiah's arrival before returning to the Land. Rather, it was incumbent on them to return to the Land first, in order to usher in the Messianic Age.
Three Voices for Change
A photograph of Moses Montefiore in the Jewish History Museum, London.
Rabbi Yehuda Bibas was born in Gibraltar in North Africa in 1789, where a Jewish community had fled from relentless persecution in Portugal and Spain.[3] After receiving an advanced education in Italy, he became leader of a yeshiva (Jewish religious school) in Gibraltar before travelling to London in 1810 to meet prominent Jewish leaders in politics and finance, including Sir Moses Montefiore. In 1839-40, right before the outbreak of the Damascus Affair, Bibas’ encouraged the Jews of Europe to return to the Promised Land in a general emigration later known as an aliyah, believing that the weakening of the Ottoman Empire would allow for the establishment of a sovereign Jewish state.[4] Bibas and Montefiore partnered throughout the following decades, including for Montefiore’s effort to end the Damascus Affair in his meeting with Muhammad Ali in Egypt. The wealthy Jewish financier also donated large sums of money to the preservation and development of Jewish communities across the Levant (modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel) at the time. Inspired by Bibas, Montefiore was enraptured by the Promised Land, travelling there seven times throughout his life. In 1860, he built the first modern, permanent Jewish settlement in Jerusalem, just outside the walls of the Old City. It was officially an almshouse named Mishkenot Sha’ananim, or “Dwellings of Peace.” The structure has survived riots and wars to become the modern-day home of the Jerusalem Music Center, as a well as a convention center and lodging for artists, musicians and authors of international acclaim. For his part, Rabbi Bibas emigrated to the Land in 1852, where he led a rabbinical school in the port city of Jaffa. He later moved to Hebron, where he established an extensive Jewish library in the City of the Patriarchs.
Rabbi Yehuda Alkalai with his wife Esther (Viena, 1874)
Although Bibas’ message encouraging aliyah moved prominent secular Jewish leaders in Europe such as Montefiore, it was still dismissed by the majority of religious Jewish leaders as premature. One exception was Rabbi Judah ben Solomon Hai Alkalai, who met Bibas during the latter’s tour of Europe. Born in Sarajevo, Bosnia in 1798 during the rule of the Turkish sultans, Alkalai moved to Jerusalem at a young age, where he studied for the rabbinate. He returned to Europe as a rabbi in Croatia, where he taught Hebrew and wrote two books encouraging Jews to return to the Land as a precondition of Israel’s salvation, the opposite teaching of his predecessors. His books were highly controversial at the time and were rejected by a majority of his fellow Orthodox rabbis. But the Damascus Affair only reinforced Alkalai’s conviction that the survival of Judaism in exile was untenable, and that a Jewish awakening for a return to Zion was imminent. He travelled Europe in the 1850’s and 60’s, founding organizations and publishing a Hebrew-language book entitled Goral L’Adonai, “A Lot for the Lord,” before finally emigrating back to the Promised Land where he established a society for Jewish settlement. Like Bibas, Alkalai’s efforts proved mostly unfruitful among the wider European Jewish community during his lifetime, although today, both men are credited as forerunners of the Zionist movement, or proto-Zionism.
The title page of Rabbi Kalischer’s famous proto-Zionist work Derishat Tzion.
A third prominent proto-Zionist was Zevi Hirsch Kalischer. Beginning as a rabbi in modern-day Torun, Poland, Kalischer met with the same opposition and discouragement from fellow Orthodox rabbis for his encouragement to Jews to return to the Promised Land. Like Alkalai, he also published a Hebrew-language book entitled Derishat Tzion, or “Seeking the Wellbeing of Zion.” Widely circulated in Eastern Europe, the book promoted the establishment of Jewish agricultural communities in Eretz Yisrael, for which Kalischer toured Germany in the 1860’s to secure funding and support from Jewish leaders. Soon afterwards, he established the Central Committee for Settlement in Eretz Israel in Berlin, and also co-founded the Mikve Yisrael Agricultural School in 1870 near the site of the modern Israeli city of Tel Aviv, the first modern, secular Jewish school of higher learning in the Promised Land. At Mikve Yisrael, future Jewish migrants were taught the necessary skills to establish agricultural communities in the Land, including the cooperative defense of those communities against those who might seek their harm. Rabbi Kalischer’s school of teaching became of the forerunner of the kibbutzim, or collective farming communities that arose in the Land in the decades that followed. To this day, Zevi Hirsch Kalischer is honored in the naming of Tirat Tzevi, a religious kibbutz in the Bet She’an Valley in Israel.
None of these rabbis lived to see the establishment of a sovereign Jewish homeland. Nonetheless, their writings and activities in the Land laid a foundation for future generations to build upon, and it wouldn’t be long before that foundation was needed to meet the first waves of large-scale Jewish immigration to the Promised Land.
Gabe Caligiuri is the editor of THE WIRE, as well as an occasional contributor to other FAI digital content on the subjects of history and geopolitics as they relate to the Great Commission. Gabe and his family live in California.
Endnotes:
[1] The Torah, or teaching, is the Hebrew name for the Book of Moses. When the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek in the second century BC, the Torah was split into five books with Greek names: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. However, Hebrew-language Torah scrolls continue to be used in Rabbinical Jewish worship to this day.
The Talmud is an Aramaic-language collection of rabbinic interpretations of the Torah. It contains two parts: The Mishnah (or repetition) is a record of the rabbinic “oral tradition” which had been well formed by the first century AD and were often referenced in the New Testament gospels. They were written down by famous second and third century rabbis such as Akiva ben Yosef and Judah ha-Nasi. The second part of the Talmud is further commentary by various rabbis in the early medieval centuries which followed, contrasting two main schools of rabbinic thought, known as the Gemara (or completion). Two versions of the Gemara were developed in the Holy Land and in the Jewish community of Babylon and compiled together with the Mishnah, known collectively as the Jerusalem and Babylonian talmuds, respectively.
[2] Ultra-orthodox Jews are often referred to by their Hebrew name, Haredi, or haredim, used in the Book of Isaiah to describe those who “tremble” at the Word of God. There are various sub-groups of Haredi Jews who have different theological nuances, but most ascribe to a literal interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures and a strict adherence to the full-time study of and practice of Talmudic traditions.
[3] Muslim Spain became the center of European Judaism in the Middle Ages, and Sephardic Jews, as they came to be known, developed their own language (a mixture of Hebrew and Spanish) and customs. Then the Spanish Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella united the fractured European houses of Spain and overthrew the remaining Muslim kingdom of Granada in 1492. That same year, the royal couple sent Christopher Colombus on his famous journey to the New World, and also expelled all of the Jews from Spain who were not willing to convert to Catholicism, in an effort to make Spain an exclusively Catholic kingdom. Most Sephardi Jews resettled in North African territories, not to be confused with Mizrahi Jews, who were descended from Jewish exiles that had lived in the Muslim nations of the Middle East and North Africa since the expulsions of the Roman Jewish wars in AD 70 and 135.
[4] For a more expanded teaching on the Damascus Affair of 1840, see this episode of Sam Aronow’s series on Jewish history on YouTube: The Damascus Affair (1840) - YouTube