Why modern Zionism succeeded after centuries of failed attempts

In 1525, a dark-skinned man in a white robe entered the court of the Portuguese king, John III, carrying a letter of recommendation from Pope Clement VII, with whom he had recently met. He needed interpreters as he spoke only Hebrew and Arabic, and he claimed to come from a Jewish kingdom in the east, where his brother was the ruler over 300,000 Israelites. He negotiated with the king on assembling a joint Jewish-Christian army to conquer the Holy Land from the Ottomans, who had seized the land just a few years earlier.

Was he a fraud? Was he crazy? Or was there truth to his claims? The most plausible explanation is that he came from an area in India or Afghanistan where Jews were fairly numerous and powerful and enjoyed autonomy, and that he greatly exaggerated his wealth and power. His plan did not end well, as the Portuguese king eventually dismissed his ideas and handed him over to the Spanish Inquisition.

Whether David Reuveni was a visionary, a fraud, or something in between, his story reminds us that Jewish dreams of returning to Zion did not begin with Theodor Herzl. The Modern Zionist movement was unique, not for its aspirations, but for its success. The longing for Zion never disappeared, nor did the attempts to reclaim the land. In 586 BC, the Psalmist wrote, “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.” (Psalm 137:1) About 1,500 years later, a Jewish poet, Yehuda haLevi, living under the Golden Age of Jewish thriving life in Muslim Spain, also wrote, “My heart is in the east, and I in the uttermost west.” He did eventually move to Israel, and most scholars believe he reached Jerusalem shortly before he passed away in 1141.

Throughout the centuries after Bar Kochba and before Herzl – roughly from 132 AD to 1897 – this longing for Zion was expressed in different ways. Unlike the Christians, the Jews always believed they would one day be physically restored to Israel. Their only question was whether they should wait for God, or if they were expected to do something about it. In this article, I want to explore those who tried to do something about it.

After the humiliating defeat of the Bar Kochba Revolt in 132 AD, the first attempts at Jewish restoration simply tried more of the same: armed revolt against the Romans. Shortly after Rome turned to Christianity, anti-Jewish laws went into effect, and it prompted an armed Jewish rebellion in the Galilee between 351-352 AD, led by Isaac of Sepphoris. They conquered Tiberias and ruled a part of Galilee before the Romans crushed them. Just a decade later, however, a pagan emperor, Julian, came to power and attempted to rebuild the Jewish temple in 363 AD – not so much out of love for the Jews, but out of hostility toward Christians. That project failed. According to contemporary accounts, earthquakes and mysterious fires halted the project.

In the 7th century, it happened again. In 614, Jewish forces under Nehemiah ben Hushiel joined the Persian conquest of Jerusalem against the Byzantines and briefly believed the restoration had begun. This was perhaps the closest Jews came to rebuilding the Temple before modern times, and I wrote an entire separate article about it here. But the Persians soon changed course and abandoned their Jewish allies. This was the last serious attempt to retake Israel by the sword.

But it wasn’t the last attempt. Just the last serious one. There was also David Alroy in the 12th century, who lived in Kurdistan and claimed to be the Messiah. During the Caliphate’s wars against the Crusaders, he called upon the Jews of Mosul and Baghdad to follow him to retake Jerusalem. It did not end well for him either.

As the medieval era arrived, with the Muslims and the Crusades, the scroll replaced the sword. Jewish longing for Israel began taking the form of prayer and contemplation, partly because the demographics changed dramatically during the era and partly because taking up the sword was akin to suicide.

It is in this context that we see Yehuda haLevi’s yearning for Jerusalem – which eventually led him there shortly before his death in 1141 – and also the famous aliyah of the 300 rabbis in 1209-1211. These were the 300 top Rabbinic scholars of their time, known as the Tosafists, and they uprooted their comfortable lives in France, Germany, and England for the spiritual fulfillment of living in Israel. They built synagogues and houses of study until the Crusaders expelled them in 1229.

A few decades later, the famous Rabbi Nachmanides arrived in 1267, having been forced to leave Barcelona, Spain, for winning a public debate against Christianity. He was over 70 years old at the time, and he reported that there were exactly two Jews living in Jerusalem. Nevertheless, he established a synagogue, which is active in the Old City of Jerusalem to this day.

These medieval arrivals to Jerusalem were less about reestablishing Jewish sovereignty and more about giving physical expression to the longing for Zion, believing God would one day restore Jewish sovereignty over the land. It was about keeping the flickering flame of Jewish presence in Israel alive until that day. In a sense, they succeeded. The continuous Jewish presence in the land, however small, became one of the foundations upon which modern Zionism later built.

But as the centuries went by, some Jews expressed this yearning for Zion in a more practical way. Armed conflict didn’t work, and quiet contemplation was doomed to merely stay as a driven leaf on a stormy sea. But what if one could turn to the mighty empires and ask for their assistance in securing Jewish autonomy or sovereignty, similar to what Ezra and Nehemiah had done during Biblical times under the Persians? It was in this context that Reuveni arrived in 1525 to convince the Pope and the Portuguese king to help him retake the Holy Land.

Reuveni’s attempt didn’t fare very well, but a few decades after him, there was a much more successful attempt – the Jewish autonomy in Tiberias under Doña Gracia Mendes Nasi and her nephew Don Yosef Nasi. Inspired by the economic and Jewish spiritual success of nearby Safed, these extremely wealthy Jews convinced Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent to establish an autonomous Jewish sanctuary in the largely ruined city of Tiberias in 1558. Gracia and Yosef had managed to flee from the Inquisition with their immense capital intact, and seeing that Safed housed over 1,000 Jewish families – many having fled from the Inquisition – they started to act. They rebuilt the walls of Tiberias in 1564, planted mulberry trees to rival Venice’s silk monopoly, and Don Yosef was appointed “Lord of Tiberias” with administrative and judicial autonomy. They actively encouraged Jews fleeing European persecution to settle in Tiberias.

Is this Zionism? The term would not be coined for another three centuries, but the parallels are striking. Wealthy Jews encouraging immigration, rebuilding a city in the Land of Israel, creating Jewish autonomy, and hoping to provide a refuge for persecuted Jews all sound remarkably familiar. And it was achieved under the sultan who also rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem – the same walls of the Old City still standing today.

The project flourished for a time, but because it depended entirely on Ottoman patronage, it gradually faded after political circumstances changed.

About a century later, the famous false messiah, Shabtai Zvi, promised a miraculous redemption and Jewish rule over Jerusalem. His movement swept through Jewish communities across the world from the Netherlands to India, and had its spiritual center in Gaza, before collapsing when he converted to Islam under Ottoman pressure.

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, Jewish attempts to return to Zion often took one of two forms: messianic movements that ended in disappointment, or quiet scholarly migrations devoted to prayer and study – or a combination of the two. I think Rabbi Judah HeHasid leading his followers to Jerusalem in the year 1700 might have been a combination. He led about 1,500 Jews from Europe to Jerusalem, and the journey was disastrous. Many died along the way; Judah himself died shortly after arrival, and his followers accumulated debts they could not repay. Their synagogue, later known as the Hurva, was eventually destroyed and the community dispersed.

Almost a century later, beginning in 1808, disciples of the famous Vilna Gaon Rabbi arranged a large, similar aliyah to Israel, but this time more organized, and only after their rabbi had passed away. They first settled mainly in Safed, but later played a central role in rebuilding Jerusalem’s Ashkenazi community. They spent decades in negotiations with the Ottoman rulers for permission to rebuild the Hurva Synagogue, which was eventually granted (it was destroyed again in 1948 but has now been rebuilt for a third time). Some say that these are early Zionists, but the truth is that they were far from it. They saw Israel as a large monastery, and they were entirely dependent on the “chaluka” – money donated by Jews in Europe to sustain them. The early Zionists despised this arrangement and the way it made them dependent on Europe. Not because it was money from wealthy Jews – the Zionists themselves relied heavily on the Rothschilds and fundraising in Europe and America – but because it was a welfare system intended to keep the Jews in perpetual poverty and dependency.

Figures such as Sir Moses Montefiore also encouraged a more practical Jewish presence in the land through agricultural projects, philanthropy, and new Jewish neighborhoods outside Jerusalem’s walls.

Lest you think Jewish longing for Zion only occurred in Europe, we also have a tragic case of an overzealous rabbi from Ethiopia: Abba Mahari. In 1862, he led a mass migration of thousands of people toward Jerusalem – with no practical plans at all. They walked all the way to the Red Sea, and to their great surprise, it didn’t part. Stranded and exhausted, many died from starvation, and the remnants had to find their way back to their villages in Ethiopia. Twenty years later, a similar attempt by 200 Yemenite Jews fared better. They settled in Jerusalem, mostly in Silwan, and were moved by the same zeal and expectation that the arrival of the Messiah was imminent. A few months after their arrival, the large influx of Jews from Russia, known as the first Zionist Aliyah of 1882, began.

It was around the same time, in the 1840s and 60s, that rabbis such as Judah Alkalai and Zvi Hirsch Kalischer began arguing that Jews should purchase land, settle Israel, and begin rebuilding national life themselves. Longing for Zion was starting to become a practical program. Events like the Damascus Affair blood libel in 1841, and harsh persecutions in Russia, convinced them that Jewish passivity was no longer enough.

And it was against the backdrop of all this that Theodor Herzl appeared. Secular, enlightened, not pushed by religious fervor or messianic expectations, but by sheer 19th-century nationalism and self-preservation. He didn’t invent Zionism, but he transformed it into a movement.

In a curious twist of history, the aforementioned Rabbi Alkalai had served as the rabbi of Herzl’s family synagogue in Zemun. Herzl himself was secular and probably never read Alkalai’s writings, yet he arrived at remarkably similar conclusions. The ideas that would later reshape Jewish history had been circulating around his family long before he was born.

The difference was that Herzl lived in an age of newspapers, congresses, railways, and international politics. For the first time, Jewish longing for Zion could become a mass movement.

In some ways, Herzl was not as different from Don Yosef Nasi as we might imagine. Neither necessarily envisioned the fully independent nation-state that eventually emerged in 1948. Had Herzl secured Jewish autonomy in the Land of Israel under Ottoman protection, he might well have accepted it. The difference was not so much the dream itself as the historical moment in which it was pursued.

At roughly the same moment, Christian Restorationism and Jewish Zionism finally discovered one another. Christian supporters, such as William Hechler, brought political connections and influence, while Jewish Zionists supplied the movement and the people. This partnership would become an important factor in Zionism’s later success.

Modern Zionism was unique not because its aspirations were new, but because so many historical forces suddenly converged. Jewish longing, practical settlement, proto-Zionist rabbis, Christian Restorationism, modern nationalism, and great-power politics all arrived at the same place at the same time.

The religious longing for Zion would have remained only a longing without the practical political Zionism of Herzl. Yet Herzl’s movement would never have succeeded without centuries of Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel. Neither stream was sufficient on its own. Modern Zionism emerged when they finally met.

The clearest proof that Zionism was about more than simply finding a safe refuge came in 1903. After a wave of horrific pogroms in Russia, the British government offered the Zionist movement a territory in East Africa, commonly known as the Uganda Plan. On paper, it seemed sensible. It promised safety and land. Yet it nearly tore the movement apart.

Ironically, the strongest opposition came from the Russian Jews who stood to benefit most. If Zionism had merely been a search for shelter, Uganda would have solved the problem. But after centuries of prayers facing Jerusalem, pilgrimages to Jerusalem, failed revolts for Jerusalem, settlement projects in Jerusalem, and dreams of rebuilding Jerusalem, Zionism without Zion was meaningless. The proposal was rejected.

Herzl did not invent Zionism. He inherited it. For nearly two millennia, Jews had tried to return to Zion through revolt, pilgrimage, settlement, diplomacy, Messianic movements, and religious renewal.

The miracle of modern Zionism is not that Jews wanted to return home. They always did. The miracle is that this time they succeeded.