We keep telling ourselves and anyone who will listen that Judaism and Zionism are somehow the same thing.  However, a century ago that was by no means intuitively obvious, as tens of thousands of Jews were sure that Herzl’s proposal to create a Jewish state was a bad idea.  Many Western European and American Jews, struggling toward emancipation and integration into their environments, did not identify with the claim that the Jews were a nation entitled to their own nation-state, and feared that that claim would undermine their efforts at integration.  And in Eastern Europe (and America) the members of the Jewish Socialist Bund similarly pursued a universalistic vision of redemption – an egalitarian socialist utopia in which the Jews would be able to maintain their cultural autonomy (in Yiddish), anywhere.  But perhaps the largest sector of the Jewish population who opposed Zionism were the masses of Orthodox Jews who saw the attempt to redeem the nation by creating a Jewish state in the land of Israel as a blasphemous usurpation of God’s prerogative.  The Talmudic texts are clear: we are not to try to “force the end” or even to calculate when it might occur.  We are to wait patiently, do the mitzvot, and pray for God to forgive our sins and “renew our days as of old” when God is ready.

However, given the misery of Russian Jewry at the turn of the century, it was hard to resist the attraction of escape and empowerment.  While most Orthodox Jews remained firm in their rejection of Zionism, two........

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