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Authors: Lawrence Kaplan

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8
Jewish Fundamentalism
Arthur Hertzberg
The discussion of fundamentalism begins, all too often, with the simplistic notion that literal believers in the sacred scriptures of their faith are political activists. Some are, and some are not. Such division is clearly present among Jewish fundamentalists in their relationship to the major new political fact of Jewish history in the twentieth century, the creation of the State of Israel. One group continues to believe that human effort to restore the Jews to the Holy Land, especially under the aegis of secular nationalists, is a rebellion against the will of God. They are, indeed, "active" in politics, but their activism is the effort to avoid any show of allegiance to the State of Israel. A newer group of fundamentalists accepts the existence of the State of Israel. They regard its creation as a stage in the great, divinely ordained drama of the redemption of the Jewish people from exile.
Such religious and political figures are entirely different from the older fundamentalists. The two groups are divided by more than argument about the correct interpretation of certain texts in Scripture. The older fundamentalists believe that politics belongs permanently to the Gentiles; the newer fundamentalists are "armed prophets," fighting the war of the Lord in this immediate world of politics and power.
 
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The ideological split between passive and activist fundamentalists appeared at the very beginnings of modern Zionism, during the first stirrings in the 1830s toward a revival of the Jewish nation in the Holy Land. Two rabbis, Yehudah Alkalai and Zvi Hirsh Kalisher, reacted to nationalism all around them, in Greece, Hungary, and Germany, by suggesting that the time had come for the oldest of all nationstheir ownto return to the Promised Land. Both of these rabbis knew very well the Talmudic texts in which the Jewish people had supposedly promised God Himself that they would not rebel against His decree, to send them into exile, by "ascending [to the Land] as a wall." Jews would not simply try to return en masse; they would wait for the grace of God. This basic promise of fundamentalist passivity had to be finessed, and Alkalai and Kalisher found a way, in the Kabbalah. They quoted the assertion of the mystics that God Himself can be moved by "stirrings below" to act in ways that He had not intended, or, at very least, to move quickly toward goalssuch as the redemption of the Jewish peoplewhich He had promised for the unknowable future. These ''stirrings below" would move heaven; they would represent the ''beginning of the redemption," which God would complete.
Alkalai and Kalisher were the progenitors of "religious Zionism." They made it possible for some Orthodox believers to join with unbelievers to redeem the Land. The overwhelming majority of old believers in the nineteenth and into the twentieth century rejected Zionism, and all of modernity. The Enlightenment and the revolutions in America and France, and eventually in almost all of Europe, were irrelevant, as irrelevant as the appearance of Christianity and the fall of the Roman Empire had been in previous centuries. The basic history of the Jews, so these fundamentalists believed, revolved about only two themes, exile and redemption, and both had been ordained by God. The basic relations of Jews were not with the powers, or movements, of this world.
The fundamentalists had split in the eighteenth century between the Hassidim, who were adherents of charismatic leaders, and the Mitnagdim, who asserted that the essence of Judaism was obedience to the Law. But there was very little difference between these two contending groups in their reaction to Zionist endeavors. To this day,
 
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the majority of the Hassidim and the Mitnagdim refuse to recognize the State of Israel. The secular nationalists, who continue to be the major force in Israel, are beyond the pale, but so are the "armed prophets." Indeed, in theory and even, most often, in political practice, the older fundamentalists find it easier to deal with the secular Zionists than with the "armed prophets." Not all of the secular Zionists insist that the State of Israel is the ultimate realization of Judaism, or of the meaning of Jewish history. Some (such as the late Gershom Scholem) hold the view that the creation of Israel was a necessary, rational solution to the needs of Jews in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but that this political effort was no substitute for the messianic, redemptive drama. Some of the older fundamentalists can, de facto, come to terms with such Zionists, but the "armed prophets" were, and are, essentially more troublesome. They have asserted that they know what time it was on the clock of redemption. Even worse, they insisted that the Zionist effort, at least in their version, is realizing the redemption, soon.
The battle between the fundamentalists and the "religious Zionists"the spiritual descendants of Alkalai and Kalisher, was waged in various forms for very nearly a century. At first, the ideological issue was of secondary importance, for neither group of fundamentalistsnot even the "religious Zionists"believed that the redemption was imminent. Never mind that Theodore Herzl had confided to his diary in 1897, at the opening of the first World Zionist Congress, the prediction that there would be a Jewish state in fifty years. Most Zionists were not that boldly visionary. Therefore many secularists waited for the gradual conquest of the Land, "one cow and one dunam" at a time; others thought that historic cataclysms such as the First World War provided opportunities for revolutionary and transforming political acts. The "religious Zionists" were thus free to believe that at some unspecified moment, as men and women built settlements, God would intervenebut not just yet.
A new, transformingand ultimately threateningmotif was introduced in the first two decades of the twentieth century by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook. He would become, in 1921, the first chief rabbi of the Jewish community in Palestine as it was formally constituted by the Zionists under the British Mandate. Kook was a religious

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