This shiur traces “Proto-Zionism” — the religious and ideological roots of Jewish return to the Land of Israel that predate Theodore Herzl’s political Zionism by over a century. It moves from the broader European nationalist backdrop (Enlightenment thought, Herder, Napoleon, the unifications of Germany and Italy) into the Jewish story: the Vilna Gaon and his disciples’ 1808 aliyah, the Chasidic aliyah of Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk, and the practical-religious arguments of Rabbis Bibas, Alkalai, and Kalischer, through Montefiore, Mordecai Manuel Noah’s “Ararat” proposal, Moses Hess, and finally Pinsker’s Auto-Emancipation and Chibat Tzion.
