But it was not only Hasidim who undertook messianic aliyot at this time. R. Elijah of Vilna, the “Vilna Gaon,” also set off for Palestine, but his attempt did not succeed, and upon arriving in Holland he was forced to turn back.¹¹⁴ From his son’s writings we learn that the Gaon had intended to compose in the land of Israel a “new Shulhan Aruch”:

The Gaon’s desire to compose a standard, unifying halachic code in the land of Israel was an echo of R. Joseph Karo’s immensely influential halachic efforts more than two hundred years earlier—efforts that had clear messianic overtones: A grand unification of Jewish law was widely seen as a first step in the reestablishment of the Sanhedrin, and therefore could serve as a catalyst in the redemptive process.

For a number of reasons, Jewish messianic activity in Palestine declined towards the end of the eighteenth century. The economic restrictions the Ottoman authorities and the local Muslim establishment imposed upon the Jews in Jerusalem, violent persecutions by the local Arab population, and bitter controversies within the Jewish leadership led to a severe deterioration of Jewish life in the land of Israel. A significant number of Jews left Palestine; those who remained suffered harsh poverty. Nevertheless, the Jewish community continued to hold together, enjoying a rich spiritual life alongside its economic hardship. The Tora was studied by some three thousand Jews who continued to live in Jerusalem; the rabbis preached on Sabbaths and festivals and wrote halachic responsa. The presses of Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire published the output of this intellectual center—dozens of books of commentary, homiletics, halacha, and Kabala. The Jewish community in Palestine maintained contact with the communities of the diaspora, which provided them, whenever possible, with economic and diplomatic support. As the eighteenth century drew to a close, Jewish life in Palestine, fueled largely by a messianic devotion to the land of Israel that was shared not only by the members of the yishuv but also by their brethren abroad, continued despite difficult conditions, laying the groundwork for the great influx of Jewish immigrants that was soon to come.

 

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a great many Jews took part in the movement known as the Haskala, or Jewish Enlightenment. Among the movement’s goals was to enable the Jews to assimilate into European society and culture, which necessarily would mean abandoning their traditional expectations of imminent national and political redemption in the Holy Land. But despite the efforts of the maskilim, a large portion of the Jewish world continued to believe in the centrality of the land of Israel.¹¹⁶ In the years leading up to 1840 (5600), messianic fervor again spread throughout traditional Jewry in the West and East and inspired a mass movement of aliya. In strictly numerical terms, this movement was more successful than all those which had preceded it: Over the ensuing decades, tens of thousands of Jews arrived in Palestine, radically changing the demography of the Jewish community there; by the time the first of the Zionist immigrants began arriving towards the end of the nineteenth century, the land of Israel was already host to its largest and most vibrant Jewish community in many centuries.

The textual source behind much of the messianic ferment in the nineteenth century was R. Dosa’s prediction in the Talmud, according to which the messianic age would begin in the last four hundred years of the sixth millennium—that is, starting around 1840.¹¹⁷ A statement in the Zohar lent support to this belief:

A great many sources of the early nineteenth century cite the Zohar’s prediction. Thus, R. Yaakov Tzvi Yalish of Dinov writes: “In the Zohar there are several different times suggested for the end of days, and the last of them is the year six hundred of the sixth millennium, and it seems that later than this it will not tarry. Thus we find that when 5,600 years have been completed, everything will be clarified, and our righteous Messiah will come.”¹¹⁹

Until recently, historians did not attribute real importance to these mystical texts, and saw no connection between them and the awakening of widespread messianic activism. Sources uncovered in recent years have revised these evaluations, demonstrating that faith in the Messiah’s coming in 1840 was responsible for the aliya of thousands of people. Thousands of letters in the archive of the Officers and Administrators of Amsterdam, from officials who maintained close contact with the leadership of the Jewish community in Palestine, provide ample evidence of the messianic sentiment that prevailed. In one letter, dated 1831, R. Tzvi Hirsch Lehren, head of that organization, writes:

Diaries of the Anglican missionaries who were active among the Jews in Palestine and throughout the world during that time also mention this sentiment. Missionary reports from Russia in 1812 state that between 1809 and 1811, hundreds of Jewish families immigrated to Palestine. When asked the purpose of their journey, these Jews replied that they “hope that the words of the prophets will soon be realized, that God will gather his dispersed people from all corners of the earth…. [They] therefore wish to see the appearance of the Messiah in the land of Israel.”¹²¹

Among the olim of this period, the disciples of the Vilna Gaon particularly stand out. Together with their families, they numbered about five hundred souls; but their organization, their ideological motivation, and their standing as Tora scholars of the first rank lent them a degree of influence far beyond their numbers. This group adopted an ideology of “natural redemption” that translated the messianic faith into practical activity. In this spirit, the Gaon’s disciples sought to advance the redemption by rebuilding Jerusalem. Their involvement in rebuilding the ruins of the “Court of the Ashkenazim,” a complex of buildings where the Ashkenazi community lived, worked, and studied, was to them a realization of the call to build the “earthly Jerusalem”—a condition for the redemption. In 1820, R. Menahem Mendel of Shklov, a disciple of the Gaon, wrote from Jerusalem to donors in Europe, describing the building of the courtyard as the beginning of redemption:

The documents of the Gaon’s disciples echo this same sentiment some twenty years later, when the group finally received the long-awaited permission to rebuild the ruin: “And now our horn is raised up to the Eternal our God, to honor and establish our Temple, and to build synagogues on the holy mountain of Jerusalem…. This is a good sign of the beginning of redemption….”¹²³ Once they had received permission to build, the Gaon’s disciples initiated changes in the Jerusalemite order of prayer, including the removal of the verse “Arise, shake off the dust, arise” from the Friday night liturgical poem Lecha Dodi—since, in their mind, the divine Presence had already risen from the dust.¹²⁴