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PDF FormatSome members of this group sought to further the redemption by reinstating the Sanhedrin, and the institution of semicha upon which it depended. To this end, they were forced to contend with the halachic problems that had led to the failure of the previous attempt, hundreds of years earlier in Safed. In particular, they had to deal with Maimonides’ ruling that once the chain of ordination had been broken, its renewal required the agreement of all the sages in the land of Israel. To circumvent this objection, R. Israel of Shklov, the leader of the Gaon’s disciples in Safed, sent an emissary to the deserts of Yemen in order to locate the ten lost tribes; according to tradition, the tribes still preserved the institution of semicha, and might be enlisted to renew the ancient ordination for the Jewish world. In a letter carried by the envoy, R. Israel wrote to the ten tribes as follows: “It is a well-known principle… that before our righteous Messiah may come, there needs to be a great court of ordained judges…. In your mercy for all of the people of the Eternal, please choose several of your ordained sages, and please come to the land of Israel, the inheritance of our fathers, and let them ordain the great scholars so that there may be an ordained court in the land of Israel, upon which the beginning of the redemption depends.”125
The disciples of the Gaon also purchased agricultural lands in order to carry out those commandments of the Tora that were applicable only in the land of Israel. They believed that the flourishing of the harvest would serve as proof of God’s renewed love for his people, as per a well-known talmudic interpretation of a verse in Ezekiel: “‘But you, O mountains of Israel, shall shoot forth your branches, and yield your fruit to my people Israel’—there is no better sign of the End than this.”126 R. Haim ben Tuvia Katz, who had been a leading rabbi in Vilna, gave voice to this belief in 1810, when he wrote from Safed: “Regarding the matter of the contributions that were sent for the fulfillment of the commandments dependent upon the land, we have already purchased lands in accordance with the view of my dear friend, the true great and pious one, our teacher R. Haim of Volozhin… and it seems that we shall yet buy lands that shall become available according to the time and place….”127 The immense significance that the Jews in Palestine attributed to agriculture also emerges from a letter sent by the leaders of the community in Jerusalem—both Sephardim and Ashkenazim—to the philanthropist Moses Montefiore in 1839, when they learned of his intention to purchase lands for rural Jewish settlement:
And his mercies were aroused and his pure heart offered to establish pillars and stands… by giving them a hold in the holy soil, the soil of Israel, to plow and sow and reap in joy…. And all of us take this thing upon ourselves with love…. We await and anticipate the divine salvation through Moses, the faithful one of his house, to say when he shall begin this beginning of the redemption.128
In 1836, R. Tzvi Hirsch Kalischer proposed an even more far-reaching project to Baron Anshel Rothschild: The latter would purchase the Temple Mount from the Egyptian ruler Muhammed Ali, in order to renew the sacrificial service. In a letter to the baron, Kalischer writes:
And particularly at a time like this, when the province of the land of Israel is not under the rule of a powerful regime as it was in former times… he may well sell you the city of Jerusalem and its surroundings. From this too there will spring forth a horn of salvation, if we have the power and authority to seek the place of the altar and to offer acceptable burnt offerings to the God of Eternity, and from this may Judah be delivered in an eternal deliverance.129
Kalischer’s idea was explicitly messianic; like R. Yehiel of Paris six centuries earlier, he planned, by the renewal of sacrifices at the Temple Mount, to quicken the redemption and to hasten the coming of the Messiah.130
The messianic expectations of the Jews of Palestine were sorely tested, however, by the tragic events that they faced in the years leading up to 1840. The plagues that raged throughout the region, the earthquake of 1837 that killed more than two thousand Jews in the Galilee, and particularly the systematic attacks by the Muslim authorities and the local Arab population, threatened to make Jewish existence there intolerable. Anti-Jewish violence reached its height during the rebellion of the Arab farm workers that broke out in 1834 against the rule of Muhammed Ali. In the course of these riots, the rebels also attacked the Jews living in major cities. Over a period of several weeks, theyrampaged against the Jews of Safed, looting their property, destroying their homes, desecrating their synagogues and study houses, and raping, beating, and in many cases killing Jews. R. Shmuel Heller of Safed reported:
For forty days, day after day, from the Sunday following Shavuot, all of the people of our holy city, men, women, and children, have been like refuse upon the field. Hungry, thirsty, naked, barefoot, wandering to and fro in fear and confusion like lambs led to the slaughter…. They [the Arab marauders] removed all the Tora scrolls and thrust them contemptuously to the ground, and they ravished the daughters of Israel—woe to the ears that hear it—and the great study house they burned to its foundations…. And the entire city was destroyed and laid ruin, they did not leave a single wall whole; they dug and sought treasures, and the city stood ruined and desolate without a single person….131
These events took a heavy toll in lives on the Jews in Palestine, causing many to leave. But in spite of it all, most Jews did not leave Palestine. Those who stayed enjoyed the protection and active support of Jewish groups and institutions throughout the world, as well as the aid of such philanthropists as Moses Montefiore and the Rothschild family; and, especially, the protection of the representatives of European powers, including the consuls in the coastal cities of Syria, Egypt, and Palestine, who protected the Jewish settlement and demanded compensation from the authorities for the damage caused by the 1834 riots. In many ways, Jews in the land of Israel were less vulnerable than in earlier periods.
Even the failure of the Messiah to appear in 1840 had only a minor impact on the lot of the Jewish community in Palestine, though it was accompanied by a period of crisis and a brief decline in the spirit of the Jews living there. Most importantly, the flow of Jewish immigrants did not stop, as the successes of the messianic aliya of the first half of the nineteenth century laid the groundwork for a large wave of Jewish immigrants in the following decades, most of whom came due to other, non-messianic motives: Most were pious, traditional Jews who sought refuge from the influences of the Haskala, the Emancipation, and the Reform movement, which at that time were spreading throughout Europe. As a result of this continuing wave of immigration,the number of Jews in Palestineincreased dramatically: By the 1870s, the Jewish population in Jerusalem was already greater than that of the Muslims and Christians combined. For the first time since the destruction of the Temple, Jews formed a majority in the city.132
And indeed, from a broader perspective, the Jewish community in Palestine advanced a great deal during the course of the nineteenth century. If early in the century the number of Jews there stood at a few thousand and their situation was anything but stable, by the second half of the century tens of thousands of Jews lived in Jerusalem alone, and they enjoyed the political and economic protection of representatives of the great powers, as well as support from Jewish communities in the diaspora. These developments allowed the continuation of settlement in distinctly agricultural areas as well, and facilitated the immigrations of tens of thousands of additional Jews during the 1880s—the “First Aliya,” which opened an entirely new chapter in the history of Jewish settlement in the land of Israel.
