“We have sincerely tried everywhere to merge with the national communities in which we live,” Theodor Herzl wrote in 1896. “It is not permitted to us.” One year later, the First Zionist Congress convened in Basel, Switzerland.
Much Talmudic discussion and lore emerge from this idea. These are the rabbis who tell of meeting the Messiah sitting among the lepers at the gates of Rome, or the Messiah leading the people back to Zion on a white donkey. (They were also pragmatic, advising that if someone is told of the arrival of the Messiah while in the midst of planting a tree, they should first finish the planting and then go to greet the Messiah.) By the Middle Ages, it was widely believed that the Messiah would, when he arrived, redeem the Jewish people, restore their homeland in the Land of Israel, and unify humanity in an era of peace. Messianism has often come under attack within Judaism: first because of various false messiahs through the ages, such as Shabbetai Tzvi in the 17th century and, more recently, with the devotion among large swaths of the Haredi movement, to the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. For many Jews, this veers too close to Christianity; even for those who stop short of that accusation, these demonstrations of fidelity to individual, human figures still serve as a warning about the dangers of messianic thinking. Yet for most of Jewish history, messianism has been an accepted part of Jewish belief. Maimonides, who included belief in the Messiah as one of the core articles of Jewish faith, famously also held that the more signifi- cant aspect of the messianic era was neither the person who would bring it about nor a universal acceptance of their significance, but rather the return to Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel. Mai- monides made a point of minimizing the apocalyptic upheavals that
the prophets foretold, such as Isaiah’s proclamation that the wolf shall lie with the lamb, or that the messiah will resurrect the dead. These prophesies of global peace and eternal life for all Jews are not to be taken literally, according to him: they are just parables. The messianic era, he wrote, will retain a global natural political order. Others vehemently disagreed with Maimonides’ naturalistic approach, understanding the Messiah to be a unique figure who would be universally recognized and lead the world to peace and an understanding of Jewish monotheism. A century after Maimonides, Nachmanides claimed that not only would the Messiah resurrect the dead but all of those who were resurrected would go on to live eternally in this world—which was now the world to come. This line of thinking persists in some segments of the Jewish community to this day: many Chabad sources, for example, recount the Talmudic teaching that when the Messiah arrives all synagogues and hous- es of study, past and present, will be uprooted and transplanted to Israel, and that resurrection will involve the dead rolling through the earth to the Land of Israel, where they will then be made alive again. In the 19th century, Jewish thinking on these matters diversified. Following the emancipation of German Jewry, and in a newly intel- lectual age that emphasized humanity’s capacity to develop itself rather than relying on God, Reform Judaism held that messianism was an ancient myth for which there was no longer any use. Today, Reform and other newer denominations of Judaism can be broadly seen as believing in a redeemed era rather than in a redeemer.
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